A Hundred Thousand Worlds Read Online Free Page B

in which you didn’t. These splits happen a billion trillion times a day; each split creates a different timeline, a different universe. If you look backwards, you’ll see one path behind you. The path you’ve been walking the whole time. Your universe. But if you could hover up above the garden, you’d see billions and billions of paths running parallel to one another. The question is, what keeps them parallel to one another, what keeps them from intersecting? And what would happen if they did?’”
    “Mom?” he says. “Is that man my dad?”
    “No,” she says, “that man is Ian Campbell, a professor of theoretical physics from ten years in our future. But we don’t know that yet.” She can see he is disappointed by this, but she is careful, when telling these stories, to keep Ian Campbell and Bethany Frazer separate from Andrew Rhodes and Valerie Torrey. The former, after all, get a happier ending.
    “Right, then,” she says. “Agent Bethany Frazer busts into the lecture hall.” Alex always gets excited when Frazer makes her entrance. “‘Professor Campbell,’ she says, ‘your government would like a word with you.’”
    “Do they fall in love right away?” Alex asks.
    “How do you know they fall in love?” says Val. Alex rolls his eyes at her. It is tough to know what his rules for any given retelling are going to be. Generally, he will listen to one episode as if he’s never heard any that come after it, but sometimes he will consider them as a whole, inspecting eachepisode for possible errors in continuity. “They don’t fall in love right then,” she tells him. “They don’t even like each other at first. He’s arrogant and his head’s so caught up in spacetime and multiverses that sometimes he doesn’t see what’s right in front of him. And she’s stubborn and literal. And sometimes she doesn’t see what’s right in front of her, either.”
    “But they fall in love eventually,” he says.
    “Don’t get ahead of things,” she says. “Right now, there’s a case she needs to solve. The Statue of Liberty has disappeared, right in front of the eyes of a million New Yorkers. So Agent Frazer is taking Professor Campbell with her to Anomaly Division.”
    It had been Val who’d dropped out of the sky and Andrew who brought her in. Val had hardly settled into thinking of herself as a proper New Yorker when she’d gone in for the
Anomaly
audition. She was sharing an apartment she couldn’t afford, in the Lower East Side, with four other aspiring actresses. Of the five of them, Val had experienced the most artistic success with the least financial reward, having landed a number of serious roles in small theater productions.
    Val had landed in Los Angeles the day before the first read-through, her belongings creeping across the country in a Penske van. She’d lain awake on a bare mattress in a barren new apartment in Culver City, listening to the air conditioner buzz. Tired and disoriented, she showed up at the studio to find everyone frantic, for reasons she couldn’t determine. She stood in the doorway, afraid that if she stepped into the room she’d be trampled. Andrew strode—there was no other word for it—across the room and extended his hand.
    “You’re Valerie, right?” he said. She knew of him, mostly from her former roommates, who had told her about his current role as Herc Bronsnan on
Sands in the Hourglass,
but she’d never been around a television in the afternoon to actually see him. Her first impressions of him were of bigness and stillness. He blocked out the entire room with his height and breadth, but also served as a point of calm amid the bustle. She shook his hand,amazed at the smallness of her own hand inside it. “You done much television?” he asked.
    “No,” she said. “Theater mostly.”
    “How legitimate,” he said. She examined his face to see if this was meant to be a withering comment, but he retained a wide, good-natured smile. He took her