Tag: Many Worlds

The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley (Playboy, September 1959)1 opens with Mr Wayne passing a pile of rubble and coming to a tumbledown building at the end, The Store of the Worlds. Inside, Wayne meets the proprietor, Mr Tompkins, who can supposedly transport people (by means of the rusty hypodermic needle on the table, and “certain gadgets” in the back of the store) to the world of their deepest desires. Tomkins gives a “Many Worlds” explanation to Wayne:

“What happens then?” Mr. Wayne asked.
“Your mind, liberated from its body, is able to choose from the countless probability worlds which the earth casts off in every second of its existence.”
Grinning now, Tompkins sat up in his rocking chair and began to show signs of enthusiasm.
“Yes, my friend, though you might not have suspected it, from the moment this battered earth was born out of the sun’s fiery womb, it cast off its alternate-probability worlds. Worlds without end, emanating from events large and small; every Alexander and every amoeba creating worlds, just as ripples will spread in a pond no matter how big or how small the stone you throw. Doesn’t every object cast a shadow? Well, my friend, the earth itself is four-dimensional; therefore it casts three-dimensional shadows, solid reflections of itself, through every moment of its being. Millions, billions of earths! An infinity of earths! And your mind, liberated by me, will be able to select any of these worlds and live upon it for a while.”

The rest of this lengthy but absorbing setup goes on to cover the cost of the service, which is very high, and the health implications (a year in the world of desire costs ten years of the traveller’s life as there is a strain on the nervous system). Then, when Wayne asks if the transition can be made permanent, Tompkins says he is researching that possibility using the money he gets from selling the service.
Wayne eventually tells Tompkins that he needs to give it some thought, and the story cuts to his journey home to Long Island. There we see that Wayne has a wife called Janet, a son called Tommy, and a comfortable middle-class existence. Over the following days, and against the background of his work on Wall Street and a sailing trip with his son Tommy, Wayne thinks about Mr Tompkins, The Store of the Worlds, and the sort of world he might desire.
The final scene of the story cuts back to the store, where Wayne is waking up. Tompkins asks him if he is okay and whether or not he wants a refund. Wayne replies that the experience was quite satisfactory but, when Tompkins probes further, Wayne will only say that his world of desire was in the recent past.
The story closes with Wayne paying Tompkins for the trip with “a pair of army boots, a knife, two coils of copper wire, and three small cans of corned beef” before he leaves the store:

[Wayne] hurried down to the end of the lane of gray rubble. Beyond it, as far as he could see, lay flat fields of rubble, brown and gray and black. Those fields, stretching to every horizon, were made of the twisted corpses of buildings, the shattered remnants of trees and the fine white ash that once was human flesh and bone.

We realise that Wayne’s comfortable, unexceptional middle-class life with his wife and son was the world he desired, and that he is actually the survivor of a nuclear war. The few remaining paragraphs of the story hint at what this entails, and ends with Wayne resolving to get back to his shelter before the rats come out and he misses his potato ration.
The story’s ending is a gut punch, even if you guess what is coming before you get to the reveal (I figured out where it was going just before Wayne handed over the payment2).
A very good—and well-constructed—story,3 and one that makes you reflect that there are much worse options than living in modern day Western society, for all its failings.
**** (Very Good). 2,400 words. Story link.

1. This story was first published under the title The World of Heart’s Desire.

2. There are several clues before the reveal: the rubble strewn street, the dilapidated building, the rusty hypodermic, and the year Wayne spends thinking about whether or not to take the trip (the experience is described as a year long in the setup).

3. I’d definitely put this in a Best of Robert Sheckley collection, along with Specialist and Pilgrimage to Earth.

Billie the Kid by Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Billie the Kid by Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) is one of his “Moe Berg/Many Worlds” series, and opens off the coast of California on the Japanese submarine I-401. The boat is preparing to launch its three fighter bombers, one of which will nuke LA with Das Biest, a Nazi nuclear bomb rescued from Bergen in the last days of the Reich (there is no explanation given as to why the Germans did not use the bomb themselves).
After this brief opening section, the story switches to Billie “the Kid” Davis, a ninety-four year old woman who is telling her life story to a nurse in a care home. Billie tells of her childhood in Kirkwood (west of St Louis), love of baseball (there is an endless amount of tedious sports description in this part of the story), the girls’ Catholic school she attended, and how she learned to fly (this latter courtesy of her Dad’s job as an aircraft designer). However, after an idyllic childhood, there is a glider crash at her Dad’s company, and he resigns (it wasn’t his fault, but he sensed something might be wrong). The family move to Culver City.
The next part of the story sees Billie go for a trial with a professional baseball team, the Hollywood Stars, and she is hired as a player (their first female team member).1 After a couple of pages of Hollywood life, WWII finally arrives along with Eddie Bennett (this latter character, along with Moe Berg, are agents from another timeline). Billie has a crush on Eddie and so, when Eddie asks Billie to fly a B-25 on a special mission (to sink the Japanese sub), Billie readily agrees. At this point, we are now eleven thousand words into a nineteen thousand word long story.
The second part of the tale (spoiler) pivots from an overlong (and boring) baseball autobiography to a daft Marvel movie story, and sees a small super-competent group of individuals get airborne on a mission to sink the sub (the crew includes Billie, her father, Moe Berg, Eddie, and Hedy Lamarr—who has designed the frequency-agile radio-guided torpedo that they will be using). During this obviously successful mission (it is a Marvel movie remember, no-one gets hurt or killed), we have the ridiculous spectacle of Billie flying the B-25 medium bomber at wavetop height (this after a few hours of training), and dogfighting with, and shooting down, all three of the submarine’s fighter-bombers (partly with “wing-mounted” machine guns I’m not sure any version of the B-25 had, and certainly none of the common variants2). However, all this action doesn’t stop the nuke being dropped off the coast of LA—then (and I’m not sure exactly what happens here, presumably history changes) all effects of the blast disappear and Billie’s previously badly wounded dad is sitting next to her in the cockpit, unaffected.
The final part of the story has further Many Worlds hand-wavium (there is talk about how various timestreams affect each other earlier in the story, if I recall correctly), and sees Eddie in 2045 checking that the right person is President of the USA, that there is women’s sport, and that the “oligarchs were gone for now”. Then (the unaged) Eddie goes tripping through worlds and time to see the ninety-four year old Billie. A suitably sentimental ending is squeezed out.
Half tedium, half nonsense.
– (Awful). 19,750 words.3 Story link.

1. What is the point of showing a female character achieving an ahistorical breakthrough unless that society has also fundamentally changed, and you explain how it happened? This kind of pandering to the readership looks rather frivolous in light of developments since the story was written (i.e. a whole country of women sent back to the 14th Century by the Taliban).

2. The Wikipedia page for the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber—knock yourself out.
 
3. The story is listed as a novelette on the Asimov’s TOC.

Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) has an overly busy, data-dumpy, and not entirely clear beginning (an omen of what is to come in the rest of the story):

History gave the people of August little to look back on. Whenever a report came that one of them had been spreading their own version of it, one of us had to pay those storied steppes a visit.
The latest offender lived on one of the strewn fields left by a meteorite that came down centuries ago to give the place its name. Neighbors feared he had been in contact with visitors from alternate time strands, putting him in violation of laws enacted after the meteorite’s interlineal quality was discovered.
He stood a stone’s throw from his homestead, waving like a child as the inspector brought her flyer down. The vessel’s rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him, but he kept at it.
He had a meddler’s grin. It exposed his chipped tooth while failing to lift the bags under his eyes.
Even meddlers too young to have seen the August Meteorite come down had the grin—passed down through the same mutation that gave them immune cells most suited to Sanctuary 2’s biome.1

We subsequently learn that Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra has landed to interview a man called Timoh—who she refers to as a “meddler”—and to search the area for fragments of the August Meteorite, a substance that links different time-streams and allows people to travel between them. While Nu’Terra speaks to Timoh, her sweepers (“a canine-arachnoid hybrid”) search for fragments.
More background information comes into focus as the story progresses: Nu’Terra is the lackey of the totalitarian leader of Sanctuary 2, Forever Sovereign Cletus Nu’Dawn the Infinite, and, even after ninety years of his rule, interlopers from other timestreams still arrive with accounts of worlds where his invasion of Sanctuary 2 did not succeed.
The situation develops when (spoiler) one of Nu’Terra’s sweepers discover a half buried passenger capsule inside a disused rocket shed. She tells Timoh to dig it out. While this is happening, two identical twins, Suniwa and Caruwa, rush past her—so identical that Nu’Terra suspects one of them may be from another timeline.
When Nu’Terra subsequently interrogates Caruwa, she is told, after an enigmatic exchange, “not to run” and that “she is not completely across the bridge”. The story ends with Nu’Terra encountering her doppelganger in (I think) another timeline (and here the narrative changes from the third to first person, the doppelganger’s point of view). Then, in conclusion, we get a couple of pages of Many Worlds politics and intrigue.
This story has a couple of problems: first, the gimmick of meteorite splinters enabling travel between timelines is about as convincing as interdimensional travel by magic lamp; second, the political backstory adds a confusing and unnecessary level of complexity to the story (and in the last couple of pages descends pretty much into babble). All of this and more meant that I was, from the very first paragraph, constantly trying to work out what was going on.
* (Mediocre). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. I’d expect a more straightforward start to the story, unless you are one of those writers who has the talent to break the rules:


Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra landed her flyer near to Timoh’s homestead, in one of the strewn fields left by the August Meteorite centuries earlier. On her approach she had watched Timoh as he waved like a child, and keep at it, even as the rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him.
Now he stood there waiting with his characteristic meddlers’ grin. Despite this disarming demeanour, he had been reported by his neighbors for telling his own histories, something that suggested illegal contact with visitors from other timelines.
Nu’Terra was here to find out if this was the case.

Now, that’s pretty crap writing—but at least you know, after a couple of paragraphs, who the main characters are and where the story is going.