SHIVA by James Killus Copyright 1989 Appears in FULL SPECTRUM II from Bantam, Doubleday, Dell I destroyed another universe today. Probably more than one, actually. One is an irreduceable minimum, according to the quantum transfer functions. I am incapable of calculating the maximum likelihood destruction coefficient. The metric is reduced, is all. What does that mean? What does it matter? Seen one universe, seen them all. This is how I do it. After I've spent a certain amount of time rattling around the house, pretending that I'm going to go out today, trying to pick up the clutter, but never doing anything but shift it around, since to really clean house would require throwing something away, something that reminds me of Dorothy. . . Well, anyway, after a suitable period of time, I go down into the basement. And I stare at it for a while. The sub-quantum toroid. Sometimes it seems to shimmer, but maybe that's just the basement light. Or maybe it's some reaction to its activation in one of the other universes that it resides in. No matter. After a while longer I turn on the power. Then the toroid glows for real. It's only a plasma effect, but it's theatrical. I open the hatch and climb inside. It's bigger inside than out. That's a little joke, really. It is impossible to describe how much bigger it is inside than out. Inside the toroid, probabilities are mapped into a non-euclidean spatial metric. The instance between two universes which differ by only a single quantum event is too small to measure. Distances which humans can travel amount to differences that matter to us, macroscopic events. That seems fair. If anything is really fair, that is. Multiply zero by infinity. No answer. Or every answer. Inside it's seamless gray and every direction is uphill. There are bumps and hillocks and in some directions steep cliffs. Time is a spatial dimension in here as well. Professor Jameson and I once calculated that a three-mile climb up one of the cliffs could actually put one about a picosecond back in the past. The other directions lead to other realities. Might-have-beens. Not everything you could want or imagine, since we can imagine things that are not at all possible. But a lot, nevertheless. Somewhere off in the distance Kennedy, Hendrix, and Lennon are still alive. Somewhere there's an American continent where everyone speaks French, somewhere the Indians aren't named Indians because the Europeans never arrived, having died in some nameless doom. Somewhere the Earth is inhabited by beings with organic molecules optically reversed from ours. Somewhere there is no Earth at all. But I can't get to any of those. My travels are constrained by the dimensions of the quantum toroid and the energy requirements of lateral transfer. I can freely move anywhere within the light cone of the initial construction of the toroid, all possible realities generated within the last twelve years. Anything else, well, I might as well try to go to the moon on a bicycle. Any energy expended in the toroid shrinks the metric. I walk for about ten minutes, not in a straight line. I've been in most of the straight-line realities, I think. The path used determines what reality one exits into. I'm only about five hundred meters from my beginning point when I reach down and pull up on the door lever for an exit. The floor drops away and I squirm my way out of the toroid. I haven't made much noise, but it's enough. I only have to wait a couple of minutes before he comes down to investigate. They are always a bit shocked to see me. That's only proper. What would you do if you went down to investigate a basement noise and found yourself there already? But he's quick on the uptake. "What are you doing here?" he demands. Sometimes I say nothing and climb back into the toroid. His presence here is proof of another failure. Sometimes I say something about it being a mistake (though that is not true) and leave quickly. But tonight I am lonely. Tonight I feel the need to talk. A voice comes down from upstairs. It is Dorothy. His Dorothy. "Is everything all right, dear?" He looks at me carefully. I shrug. He calls out to her, "Yes, you go on up to bed. I just realized something that needed fixing down here. I'll be up in a little while." She says all right and the upstairs door closes. He is still looking at me. I say, "You probably want an explanation."He nods and says, "Yes. Theodore and I agreed that the toroid should not be used. We weren't sure of the possible physical interpretations of the equations and some of the possibilities looked risky." Strange. He calls Professor Jameson by his first name. I used to do that too, I realize. He was my father-in-law, after all. I must have stopped thinking of him that way after-- I say, " You deserve an explanation, but I can't really explain. You won't understand, not really." He says, " Try me." I say, " One becomes less concerned with risks when one has little to lose." He seems about ready to say speak again, but I say, " Remember Mrs. Feldman?" Whatever he was about to say, he does not say it. He remembers. Mrs. Feldman was the aunt of someone I knew in college (someone we knew, we used to be the same person, not so many months ago). A gloomy and depressing woman. She had lost all of her immediate family in World War II, some to the Nazis, some to the Russian labor camps, some to the last Polish pogrom after the end of the war. She came to the United States, made a new life for herself, only to lose her husband and two children in a fire that also destroyed her house and left her destitute. She still had scars on her arms and back from the fire, still had a tattoo from the Nazis. So Mrs. Feldman carried her gloom around like a personal climate that we could never change, merely endure. Some of us tried to change her, to cheer her up or draw her out, but it was useless. She was not interested in consolation or commiseration. Certainly not from us. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she could have overcome that much grief twice. Maybe she shouldn't have inflicted her attitude on the rest of the world. But my feeling at the time was that none of us had lived through enough to give us the right to judge, to give advice, to tell her how to think or feel. Maybe she was a hero just for living, for not pulling the plug. I glance toward the upstairs. "My Dorothy is dead," I say. His face clouds. The full enormity cannot sink in, but enough does for pity, for the standard condolences. "I'm sorry, " he says, as if to a stranger. "How . . . ?" "It was an unlikely accident, " I tell him. "Driving in the rain, a drunk driver from the other direction jumped the divider. I have only found four other realities where it occurred. In two of them we both died." He thinks for a moment. "But why are you doing this? Why use the toroid? You can't bring her back." In that moment I hate the bastard, because he has what I've lost and because he doesn't understand, can't understand. I want to kill him, to strangle away his smug condescension. Instead I say, "I'm looking for a reality where I died and Dorothy survived." I can tell that I have shocked him. He begins "But you can't--" then he stops. He says, "If Dorothy died . . ." It sinks in a bit more, but not enough, never enough. Dorothy was Theodore Jameson's daughter. She had been the only woman I ever loved. The only woman I ever wanted. And she was dead. My Dorothy dead. Of all the uncountable numbers, why was mine the one to die? How was I supposed to go on living as if living mattered? When there was a chance that she still lived somewhere, and needed me? Or so I tell myself. "I have to keep looking," I tell him. "I have no choice."I turn to the toroid. It glows again, waiting my reentry. Rosinante, my quantum-mechanical steed. "But wait, " he says. "You have used it many times. What does it mean? The metric shrinks, how does that change the world?" "Who can say?" I tell him. The pity I see in his eyes grows too great to bear. "The workings of God are strange and subtle. I think that in this case, nothing of any real note is lost. Each person contains his own universe, you see." "That sounds like solipsism," he says. "Or insanity." "Perhaps, " I tell him. "Or just remorse. I wish we had stayed at home that night." I climb into the toroid and pull it shut behind me. The trip home is always easy, downhill all the way. I leave the toroid drained and depleted. It is always thus. In some other universe I clutch my wife with all the love that I so seldom show her, because a ghost has shown me the brevity of life. In yet another world I pull together the pieces of my life and set out to try to make whatever I can, in spite of the tragedy that has come to me. In still another place I am dead, unable to live with the guilt, because in that world, I was the drunken driver and her death is on my hands. In another universe I told my other self the plain and simple truth, that the sub-quantum toroid changes time and possibility into energy and distance, that shrinking the metric merely means that time spent chasing might-have-beens is time not used in creating your own future. The topography within the toroid changes and in this way are universes destroyed. But I did not tell him these things. That would be too much human contact. That would interfere with my own and only fate. I take my death in piecework, each day another little suicide. I conspire with the past and present to murder the future and each moment not lived leaves it's futures unborn, destroyed. So I will shrink my private metric one futile day after another. I will grow old this way, I think. Perhaps I already have. It's all just a matter of viewpoint, actually. Just a lonely old man, mad with grief, spends all his time talking to himself.