Other Worlds Than These (collection)

3000

Hakira enjoyed coasting the streets of Manhattan. The old rusted-out building frames seemed like the skeleton of some ancient leviathan that beached and died, but he could hear the voices and horns and growling machinery of crowded streets and smell the exhaust and cooking oil, even if all that he saw beneath him were the tops of the trees that had grown up in the long-vanished streets. With a world as uncrowded as this one, there was no reason to dismantle the ruins, or clear the trees. It could remain as a monument, for the amusement of the occasional visitor.

There were plenty of places in the world that were still crowded. As always, most people enjoyed or at least needed human company, and even recluses usually wanted people close enough to reach from time to time. Satellites and landlines still linked the world together, and ports were busy with travel and commerce of the lighter sort, like bringing out-of-season fruits and vegetables to consumers who preferred not to travel to where the food was fresh. But as the year 3000 was about to pass away, there were places like this that made the planet Earth seem almost empty, as if humanity had moved on.

In fact, there were probably far more human beings alive than anyone had ever imagined might be possible. No human had ever left the solar system, and only a handful lived anywhere but Earth. One of the Earths, anyway—one of the angles of Earth. In the past five hundred years, millions had passed through benders to colonize versions of Earth where humanity had never evolved, and now a world seemed full with only a billion people or so.

Of the trillions of people that were known to exist, the one that Hakira was going to see lived in a two-hundred-year-old house perched on the southern coast of this island, where in ancient times artillery had been placed to command the harbor. Back when the Atlantic reached this far inland. Back when invaders had to come by ship.

Hakira set his flivver down in the meadow where the homing signal indicated, switched off the engine, and slipped out into the bracing air of a summer morning only a few miles from the face of the nearest glacier. He was expected—there was no challenge from the security system, and lights showed him the path to follow through the shadowy woods.

Because his host was something of a show-off, a pair of sabertooth tigers were soon padding along beside him. They might have been computer simulations, but knowing Moshe’s reputation, they were probably genetic back-forms, very expensive and undoubtedly chipped up to keep them from behaving aggressively except, perhaps, on command. And Moshe had no reason to wish Hakira ill. They were, after all, kindred spirits.

The path suddenly opened up onto a meadow, and after only a few steps he realized that the meadow was the roof of a house, for here and there steep-pitched skylights rose above the grass and flowers. And now, with a turn, the path took him down a curving ramp along the face of the butte overlooking the Hudson plain. And now he stood before a door.

It opened.

A beaming Moshe stood before him, dressed in, of all things, a kimono. “Come in, Hakira! You certainly took your time!”

“We set our appointment by the calendar, not the clock.”

“Whenever you arrive is a good time. I merely noted that my security system showed you taking the grand tour on the way.”

“Manhattan. A sad place, like a sweet dream you can never return to.”

“A poet’s soul, that’s what you have.”

“I’ve never been accused of that, before.”

“Only because you’re Japanese,” said Moshe.

They sat down before an open fire that seemed real, but gave off no smoke. Heat it had, however, so that Hakira felt a little scorched when he leaned forward. “There are Japanese poets.”

“I know. But is that what anyone thinks of, when they think of the wandering Japanese?”

Hakira smiled. “But you do have money.”

“Not from money-changing,” said Moshe. “And what I don’t have, which you also don’t have, is a home.”

Hakira looked around at the luxurious parlor. “I suppose that technically this is a cave.”

“A homeland,” said Moshe. “For nine and a half centuries, my friend, your people have been able to go almost anywhere in the world but one, an archipelago of islands once called Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu—”

Hakira, suddenly overcome by emotion, raised his hand to stop the cruel list. “I know that your people, too, have been driven from their homeland—”

“Repeatedly,” said Moshe.

“I hope you will forgive me, sir, but it is impossible to imagine yearning for a desert beside a dead sea the way one yearns for the lush islands strangled for nearly a thousand years by the Chinese dragon.”

“Dry or wet, flat or mountainous, the home to which you are forbidden to return is beautiful in dreams.”

“Who has the soul of a poet now?”

“Your organization will fail, you know.”

“I know nothing of the kind, sir.”

“It will fail. China will never relent, because to do so would be to admit wrongdoing, and that they cannot do. To them you are the interlopers. The toothless Peace Council can issue as many edicts as it likes, but the Chinese will continue to bar those of known Japanese ancestry from even visiting the islands. And they will use as their excuse the perfectly valid argument that if you want so much to see Japan, you have only to bend yourself to a different slant. There is bound to be some angle where your tourist dollars will be welcome.”

“No,” said Hakira. “Those other angles are not this world.”

“And yet they are.”

“And yet they are not.”

“Well, now, there is our dilemma. Either we will do business or we will not, and it all hinges on that question. What is it about that archipelago that you want. Is it the land itself? You can already visit that very land—and we are told that because of inanimate incoherency it is the same land, no matter what angle you dwell in. Or is your desire really not simply to go there, but to go there in defiance of the Chinese? Is it hate, then, that drives you?”

“No, I reject both interpretations,” said Hakira. “I care nothing for the Chinese. And now that you put the question in these terms, I realize that I myself have not thought clearly enough, for while I speak of the beautiful land of the rising sun, in fact what I yearn for is the Japanese nation, on those islands, unmolested by any other, governing ourselves as we have from the beginning of our existence as a people.”

“Ah,” said Moshe. “Now I see that we perhaps can do business. For it may be possible to grant you your heart’s desire.”

“Me and all the people of the Kotoshi.”

“Ah, the eternally optimistic Kotoshi. It means ‘this year,’ doesn’t it? As in, ‘this year we return’?”

“As your people say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’”

“A Japan where only the Japanese have ruled for all these past thousand years. In a world where the Japanese are not rootless wanderers, legendary toymakers-for-hire, but rather are a nation among the nations of the world, and one of the greatest of them. Is that not the home you wish to return to?”

“Yes,” said Hakira.

“But that Japan does not exist in this world, not even now, when the Chinese no longer need even half the land of the original Han China. So you do not want the Japan of this world at all, do you? The Japan you want is a fantasy, a dream.”

“A hope.”

“A wish.”

“A plan.”

“And it hasn’t occurred to you that in all the angles of the world, there might not be such a Japan?”

“It isn’t like the huge library in that story, where it is believed that among all the books containing all the combinations of all the letters that could fit in all those pages, there is bound to be a book that tells the true history of all the world. There are many angles, yes, but our ability to differentiate them is not infinite, and in many of them life never evolved and so the air is not breathable. It is an experiment not lightly undertaken.”

“Oh, of course. To find a world so nearly like our own that a nation called Japan—or, I suppose, Nippon—exists at all, where a language like Japanese is even spoken—you do speak Japanese yourself, don’t you?”

“My parents spoke nothing else at home until I was five and had to enter school.”

“Yes, well, to find such a world would be a miracle.”

“And to search for it would be a fool’s errand.”

“And yet it has been searched for.”

Hakira waited. Moshe did not go on.

“Has it been found?”

“What would it be worth to you, if it had?”

2024—Angle Θ

“You’re a scientist,” said Leonard. “This is beneath you.”

“I have continuous video,” said Bêto. “With a mechanical clock in it, so you can see the flow of time. The chair moves.”

“There is nothing you can do that hasn’t been faked by somebody, sometime.”

“But why would I fake it? To publish this is the end of my career.”

“Exactly my point, Bêto. You are a geologist, of all things. Geologists don’t have poltergeists.”

“Stay with me, Leonard. Watch this.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s immediate. Sometimes it takes days.”

“I don’t have days.”

“Play cards with me. As we used to in Faculdade. Look at the chair first, though. Nothing attached to it. A normal chair in every way.”

“You sound like a magician on the stage.”

“But it is normal.”

“So it seems.”

“Seems? All right, don’t trust me. You move it. Put it where you want.”

“All right. Upside down?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“On top of the door?”

“I don’t care.”

“And we play cards?”

“You deal.”

2090

It is the problem of memory. We have mapped the entire brain. We can track the activity of every neuron, of every synapse. We have analyzed the chemical contents of the cells. We can find, in the living brain, without surgery, exactly where each muscle is controlled, where perceptions are rooted. We can even stimulate the brain to track and recall memory. But that is all. We cannot account for how memory is stored, and we cannot find where.

I know that in your textbooks in secondary school and perhaps in your early undergraduate classes you have read that memory was the first problem solved, but that was a misunderstanding. We discovered that after mapping a particular memory, if that exact portion of the brain was destroyed—and this was in the early days, with clumsy equipment that killed thousands of cells at a time, an incredibly wasteful procedure and potentially devastating to the subject—if that exact spot was destroyed, the memory was not lost. It could resurface somewhere else.

So for many years we believed that memory was stored holographically, small portions in many places, so that losing a bit of a memory here or there did not cause the entire sequence to be lost. This, however, was chimerical, for as our research became more and more precise, we discovered that the brain is not infinite, and such a wasteful system of memory storage would use up the entire brain before a child reached the age of three. Because, you see no memory is lost. Some memories are hard to recover, and people often lose track of their memories, but it is not a problem of storage, it is a problem of retrieval.

Portions of the network break down, so tracks cannot be followed. Or the routing is such that you cannot link from memory A to memory X without passing through memories of such power that you are distracted from the attempt to retrieve. But, given time—or hyper-stimulation of related memory tracks—all memories can be retrieved. All. Every moment of your life.

We cannot recover more than your perceptions and the sense you made of them at the time, but that does not change the fact that we can recover every moment of your childhood, every moment of this class. And we can recover every conscious thought, though not the un-conscious streaming thought behind it. It is all stored…somewhere. The brain is merely the retrieval mechanism.

This has led some observers to conclude that there is, in fact, a mind, or even a soul—a nonphysical portion of the human being, existing outside of measurable space. But if that is so, it is beyond the reach of science. I, however, am a scientist, and with my colleagues—some of whom once sat in the very chairs where you are sitting—I have labored long and hard to find an explanation that is, in fact, physical. Some have criticized this effort because it shows that my faith in the nonexistence of the immaterial is so blind that I refuse to believe even the material evidence of immateriality. Don’t laugh, it is a valid question. But my answer is that we cannot validly prove the immateriality of the mind by the sheer fact of our inability to detect the material of which it is made.

I am happy to tell you that we have received word that the journal Mind—and we would not have settled for anything less than the premiere journal in the field—has accepted our article dealing with our findings. By no means does this constitute an answer. But it moves the field of inquiry and reopens the possibility, at least, of a material answer to the question of memory. For we have found that when neurons are accessed for memory, there are many kinds of activity in the cell. The biochemical, of course, has been very hard to decode, but other researchers have accounted for all the chemical reactions within the cell, and we have found nothing new in that area. Nor is memory electrochemical, for that is merely how raw commands of the coarsest sort are passed from neuron to neuron—rather like the difference between using a spray can as opposed to painting with a monofilament brush.

Our research, of course, began in the submolecular realm, trying to find out if in some way the brain cells were able to make changes in the atom, in the arrangement of protons and neutrons, or some information somehow encoded in the behavior of electrons. This proved, alas, to be a dead end as well.

But the invention of the muonoscope has changed everything for us. Because at last we had a nondestructive means of scanning the exact state of muons through infinitesimal passages of time, we were able to find some astonishing correlations between memory and the barely detectable muon states of slant and yaw. Yaw, as you know, is the constant—the yaw of a muon cannot change during the existence of the muon. Slant also seemed to be a constant, and in the materials which had previously been examined by physicists, that was indeed the case.

However, in our studies of brain activity during forced memory retrieval, we have found a consistent pattern of slant alteration within the nuclei of atoms in individual brain cells. Because the head must be held utterly still for the muonoscope to function, we could only work with terminally ill patients who volunteered for the study and were willing to die in the laboratory instead of with their families, spending the last moments of their lives with their heads opened up and their brains partially disassembled. It was painless but nevertheless emotionally disturbing to contemplate, and so I must salute the courage and sacrifice of our subjects, whose names are all listed in our article as co-authors of the study. And I believe that our study has now taken us as far as biology can go, given the present equipment. The next move is in the hands of physicists.

Ah, yes. What we found. You see? I became side-tracked by my thought of our brave collaborators, because I remembered their memories which meant remembering who they were and what it cost them to…and I am being distracted again. What we found was: During the moment of memory retrieval, when the neuron was stimulated and went into the standard memory-retrieval state, there is a moment—a moment so brief that until fifteen years ago we had no computer that could have detected it, let alone measured its duration—when all the muons in all the protons of all the atoms in all the memory-specific RNA molecules in the nucleus of the one neuron—and no others!—change their slant.

More specifically, they seem, according to the muonoscope, to wink out of existence for that brief moment, and then return to existence with a new pattern of slants—yes, varying slants, impossible as we have been told that was—which exist for a period of time perhaps a thousand times longer than the temporary indetectability, though this is still a span of time briefer than a millionth of a picosecond, and during the brief existence of this anomalous slant-state, which we call the “angle,” the neuron goes through the spasm of activity that causes the entire brain to respond in all the ways that we have long recognized as the recovery of memory.

In short, it seems that the pertinent muons change their slant to a new angle, and in that angle they are encoded with a snapshot of the brain-state that will cause the subject to remember. They return to detectability in the process of rebounding to their original slant, but for the brief period before they have completed that rebound, the pattern of memory is reported, via biochemical and then electrochemical changes, to the brain as a whole.

There are those who will resent this discovery because it seems to turn the mind or soul into a mere physical phenomenon, but this is not so. In fact, if anything our discovery enhances our knowledge of the utterly unique majesty of life. For as far as we know, it is only in the living brain of organisms that the very slant of the muons within atoms can be changed. The brain thus opens tiny doorways into other universes, stores memories there, and retrieves them at will.

Yes, I mean other universes. The first thing that the muonoscope showed us was the utter emptiness of muons. There are even theorists who believe that there are no particles, only attributes of regions of space, and theoretically there is no reason why the same point in space cannot be occupied by an infinite number of muons, as long as they have different slants and, perhaps, yaws. For theoretical reasons that I do not have the mathematics to understand, I am told that while coterminous muons of the same yaw but different slants could impinge upon and influence each other, coterminous muons of different yaw could never have any causal relationship. And there could also be an infinite series of infinite series of universes whose muons are not coterminous with the muons of our universe, and they, too, are permanently undetectable and incapable of influencing our universe.

But if the theory is correct—and I believe our research proves that it is—it is possible to pass information from one slant of this physical universe to another. And since, by this same theory, all material reality is, in fact, merely information, it is even possible that we might be able to pass objects from one such universe to another. But now we are in the realm of fantasy, and I have spent as much time on this happy announcement as I dare. You are, after all, students, and my job is to pass certain information from my brain to yours, which does not, I’m afraid, involve mere millionths of a picosecond.

2024—Angle Φ

“I can’t stand it, I can’t. I won’t live here another day, another hour.”

“But it never harms us, and we can’t afford to move.”

“The chair is on top of the door, it could fall, it could hurt one of the children. Why is it doing this to us? What have we done to offend it?”

“We haven’t done anything, it’s just malicious, it’s just enjoying itself!”

“No, don’t make it angry!”

“I’m fed up! Stop this! Go away! Leave us alone!”

“What good is it to break the chair and smash the room!”

“No good. Nothing does any good. Go, get the children, take them out into the garden. I’ll call a taxi. We’ll go to your sister’s house.”

“They don’t have room.”

“For tonight they have room. Not another night in this evil place.”

3000

Hakira examined the contract, and it seemed simple enough. Passage for the entire membership of Kotoshi, if they assembled at their own expense. Free return for up to ten days, but only at the end of the ten days, as a single group. There would be no refund for those who returned. But all that seemed fair enough, especially since the price was not exorbitant.

“Of course this contract isn’t binding anyway,” said Hakira. “How could it be enforced? This whole passage is illegal.”

“Not in the target world, it isn’t,” said Moshe. “And that’s where it would have to be enforced, nu?”

“It’s not as if I can find a lawyer from that world to represent my interests now.”

“It makes no sense for me to have dissatisfied customers.”

“How do I know you won’t just strand us there?” said Hakira. “It might not even be a world with a breathable atmosphere—a lot of angles are still mostly hydrocarbon gas, with no free oxygen at all.”

“Didn’t I tell you? I go with you. In fact, I have to—I’m the one who brings you through.”

“Brings us? Don’t you just put us in a bender and—”

“Bender!” Moshe laughed. “Those primitive machines? No wonder the near worlds are never found—benders can’t make the fine distinctions that we make. No, I take you through. We go together.”

“What, we all join hands and…you’re serious. Why are you wasting my time with mumbo jumbo like this!”

“If it’s mumbo jumbo, then we’ll all hold hands and nothing will happen, and you’ll get your money back. Right?” Moshe spread his hands. “What do you have to lose!”

“It feels like a scam.”

“Then leave. You came to me, remember?”

“Because you got that group of Zionists through.”

“Exactly my point,” said Moshe. “I took them through. I came back, they didn’t—because they were absolutely satisfied. They’re in a world where Israel was never conquered by the surrounding Arab states so Jews still have their own Hebrew-speaking state. The same world, I might add, where Japan is still populated by self-governing Japanese.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch. Except that we use a different mechanism that is not approved by the government and so we have to do it under the table.”

“But why does the other world allow it?” asked Hakira. “Why do they let you bring people in?”

“This is a rescue,” said Moshe. “They bring you in as refugees from an unbearable reality. They bring you home. The government of Israel in that reality, as a matter of policy, declares that Jews have a right to return—even Jews from a different angle. And the government of Japan recently decided to offer the same privilege to you.”

“It’s still so hard to believe that anyone found a populated world that has Japanese at all.”

“Well, isn’t it obvious?” said Moshe. “Nobody found that world.”

“What do you mean?”

“That world found us.”

Hakira thought about it for a moment. “That’s why they don’t use benders, they have their own technology for reslanting from angle to angle.”

“Exactly right, except for your use of the word ‘they.’”

And now Hakira understood. “Not they. You. You’re not from this world. You’re one of them.”

“When we discovered your tragic world, I was sent to bring Jews home to Israel. And when we realized that the Japanese suffered a similar tragic loss, the decision was made to extend the offer to you. Hakira, bring your people home.”

2024—Angle Θ

“I told them I didn’t want to see you.”

“I know.”

“I was sitting there playing cards and suddenly I’m almost killed!”

“It never happened that way before. The chair usually just…slid. Or sometimes floated.”

“It was smashed to bits! I had a concussion, it’s taken ten stitches, I’ll have this scar on my face for the rest of my life!”

“But I didn’t do it, I didn’t know it would happen that way. How could I? There were no wires, you know that. You saw.”

“Nossa. Yes. I saw. But it’s not a ghost.”

“I never said it was. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. Everything else I think of sounds like fantasy. But then, telephones and satellite tv and movies and submarines once sounded like fantasy to anyone who thought of such ideas. And in this case, there’ve been stories of ghosts and hauntings and poltergeists since…since the beginning of time, I imagine. Only they’re rare. So rare that they don’t often happen to scientists.”

“In the history of the world, real scientists are rarer than poltergeists.”

“And if such things did happen to a scientist, how many of them might have done as you urged me to do—ignore it. Pretend it was a hallucination. Move to another place where such things don’t happen. And the scientists who refuse to blind their eyes to the evidence before them—what happens to them? I’ll tell you what happens, because I’ve found seven of them in the past two hundred years—which isn’t a lot, but these are the ones who published what happened to them. And in every case, they were immediately discredited as scientists. No one listened to them any more. Their careers were over. The ones who taught lost tenure at their universities. Three of them were committed to mental institutions. And not once did anyone else seriously investigate their claims. Except, of course, the people who are already considered to be completely bobo, the paranormalists, the regular batch of fakers and hucksters.”

“And the same thing will happen to you.”

“No. Because I have you as a witness.”

“What kind of witness am I? I was hit in the head. Do you understand? I was in the hospital, delirious, concussive, and I have the scar on my face to prove it. No one will believe me either. Some will even wonder if you didn’t beat me into agreeing to testify for you!”

“Ah, Leonard. God help me, but you’re right.”

“Call an exorcist.”

“I’m a scientist! I don’t want it to go away! I want to understand it!”

“So, Bêto, scientist, explain it to me. If it isn’t a ghost to be exorcised, what is it?”

“A parallel world. No, listen, listen to me! Maybe in the empty spaces between atoms, or even the empty spaces within atoms, there are other atoms we can’t detect most of the time. An infinite number of them, some very close to ours, some very far. And suppose that when you enclose a space, and somebody in one of those infinite parallel universes encloses the same space, it can cause just the slightest bit of material overlap.”

“You mean there’s something magic about boxes? Come on.”

“You asked for possibilities! But if the landforms are similar, then the places where towns are built would be similar, too. The confluence of rivers. Harbors. Good farmland. People in many universes would be building towns in the same places. Houses. All it takes is one room that overlaps, and suddenly you get echoes between worlds. You get a single chair that exists in both worlds at once.”

“What, somebody in our world goes and buys a chair and somebody in the other world happens to go and buy the same one on the same day?”

“No. I moved into the house, that chair was already there. Haunted houses are always old, aren’t they? Old furniture. It’s been there long enough, undisturbed, for the chair to have spilled a little and exist in both worlds. So…you take the chair and put it on top of the door, and the people in the other world come home and find the chair has been moved—maybe they even saw it move—and he’s fed up, he’s furious, he smashes the chair.”

“Ludicrous.”

“Well, something happened, and you have the scar to prove it.”

“And you have the chair fragments.”

“Well, no.”

“What! You threw them out?”

“My best guess is that they threw them out. Or else, I don’t know, when the chair lost its structure, the echo faded. Anyway, the pieces are gone.”

“No evidence. That clinches it. If you publish this I’ll deny it, Bêto.”

“No you won’t.”

“I will. I’ve already had my face damaged. I’m not going to let you shatter my career as well. Bêto, drop it!”

“I can’t! This is too important! Science can’t continue to refuse to look at this and find out what’s really going on!”

“Yes it can! Scientists regularly refuse to look at all kinds of things because it would be bad for their careers to see them! You know it’s true!”

“Yes. I know it’s true. Scientists can be blind. But not me. And not you either, Leonard. When I publish this, I know you’ll tell the truth.”

“If you publish this, I’ll know you’re crazy. So when people ask me, I’ll tell them the truth—that you’re crazy. The chair is gone now anyway. Chances are this will never happen again. In five years you’ll come to think of it as a weird hallucination.”

“A weird hallucination that left you scarred for life.”

“Go away, Bêto. Leave me alone.”

2186

“I call it the Angler, and using it is called Angling.”

“It looks expensive.”

“It is.”

“Too expensive to sell it as a toy.”

“It’s not for children anyway. Look, it’s expensive because it’s really high-tech, but that’s a plus, and the more popular it becomes, the more the per-unit cost will drop. We’ve studied the price point and we think we’re right on this.”

“OK, fine, what does it do.”

“I’ll show you. Put on this cap and—”

”I certainly will not! Not until you tell me what it does.”

“Sure, I understand, no problem. What it does is, it puts you into someone else’s head.”

“Oh, it’s just a Dreamer, those have been around for years, they had their vogue but—”

“No, not a Dreamer. True, we do use the old Dreamer technology as the playback system, because why reinvent the wheel? We were able to license it for a song, so why not? But the thing that makes this special is this—the recording system.”

“Recording?”

“You know about slantspace, right?”

“That’s all theoretical games.”

“Not really just theoretical. I mean, it’s well known that our brains store memory in slantspace, right?”

“Sure, yeah. I knew that.”

“Well, see, here’s the thing. There’s an infinite number of different universes that have a lot of their matter coterminous with ours—”

“Here it comes, engineer talk, we can’t sell engineering babble.”

“There are people in these other worlds. Like ghosts. They wander around, and their memories are stored in our world.”

“Where?”

“Just sitting there in the air. Just a collection of angles. Wherever their head is, in our world and a lot of other parallel worlds, they have their memories stored as a pattern of slants. Haven’t you had the experience of walking into a room and then suddenly you can’t remember why you came in?”

“I’m seventy years old, it happens all the time.”

“It has nothing to do with being seventy. It happened when you were young, too. Only you’re more susceptible now, because your own brain has so much memory stored that it’s constantly accessing other slants. And sometimes, your head space passes through the head space of someone else in another world, and poof, your thoughts are confused—jammed, really—by theirs.”

“My head just happens to pass through the space where the other guy’s head just happens to be?”

“In an infinite series of universes, there are a lot of them where people about your height might be walking around. What makes it so rare is that most of them are using patterns of slants so different that they barely impinge on ours at all. And you have to be accessing memory right at that moment, too. Anyway, that’s not what matters—that is coincidence. But you set up this recorder here at about the height of a human being and turn it on, and as long as you don’t put it, say, on the thirtieth floor or the bottom of a lake or something, within a day you’ll have this thing filled up.”

“With what?”

“Up to twenty separate memory states. We could build it to hold a lot more, but it’s so easy to erase and replace that we figured twenty was enough and if people want more, we can sell peripherals, right? Anyway, you get these transitory brain states. Memories. And it’s the whole package, the complete mental state of another human being for one moment in time. Not a dream. Not fictionalized, you know? Those dreams, they were sketchy, haphazard, pretty meaningless. I mean, it’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, how cool is it to actually have to sit through them? But with the Angler, you catch the whole fish. You’ve got to put it on, though, to know why it’s going to sell.”

“And it’s nothing permanent.”

“Well, it’s permanent in the sense that you’ll remember it, and it’ll be a pretty strong memory. But you know, you’ll want to remember it so that’s a good thing. It doesn’t damage anything, though, and that’s all that matters. I can try it on one of your employees first, though, if you want. Or I’ll put it on myself.”

“No, I’ll do it. I’ll have to do it in the end before I’ll make the decision, so I might as well do it from the start. Put on the cap. And no, it’s not a toupee, if I were going to get a rug I’d choose a better one than this.”

“All right, a snug fit, but that’s why we made it elastic.”

“How long does it take?”

“Objective time, only a fraction of a second. Subjectively, of course, well, you tell us. Ready?”

“Sure. Give me a one, two, three, all right?”

“I’ll do one, two, three, and then flip it like four. OK?”

“Yeah yeah. Do it.”

“One. Two. Three.”

“Ah… aaah. Oh.”

“Give it a few seconds. Just relax. It’s pretty strong.”

“You didn’t… how could this… I…”

“It’s all right to cry. Don’t worry. First time, most people do.”

“I was just… She’s just… I was a woman.”

“Fifty-fifty chance.”

“I never knew how it felt to… This should be illegal.”

“Technically, it falls under the same laws as the Dreamer, so, you know, not for children and all that.”

“I don’t know if I’d ever want to use it again. It’s so strong.”

“Give yourself a few days to sort it out, and you’ll want it. You know you will.”

“Yes. No, don’t try to push any paperwork on me right now, I’m not an idiot. I’m not signing anything while my head’s so…but…tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. Let me sleep on it.”

“Of course. We couldn’t ask for anything more than that.”

“Have you shown this to anyone else?”

“You’re the biggest and the best. We came to you first.”

“We’re talking exclusive, right?”

“Well, as exclusive as our patents allow.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve patented every method we’ve thought of, but we think there are a lot of ways to record in slantspace. In fact, the real trouble is, the hardest thing is to design a record that doesn’t bend space on the other side. I mean, people’s heads won’t go through the recording field if the recorder itself is visible in their space! What I’m saying is, we’ll be exclusive until somebody finds another way to do it without infringing our patent. That’ll take years, of course, but…”

“How many years?”

“No faster than three, and probably longer. And we can tie them up in court longer still.”

“Look at me, I’m still shaking. Can you play me the same memory?”

“We could build a machine that would do that, but you won’t want to. The first time with each one is the best. Doing the same person twice can leave you a little…confused.”

“Bring me the paperwork tomorrow for an exclusive for five years. We’ll launch with enough product to drop that price point from the start.”

It took a month for the members of Kotoshi to assemble. Only a few decided not to go, and they took a vow of silence to protect those who were leaving They gathered at the southern tip of Manhattan, in the parlor of Moshe’s house. They had no belongings with them.

“It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of the technology we use,” Moshe explained. “Nothing that is not organically connected to your bodies can make the transition to the new slant. As when you were born, you will be naked when you arrive. That’s why wholesale colonization using this technology is impractical—no tools. Nor can you transfer any kind of wealth or art. You come empty-handed.”

“Is it cold there?”

“The climate is different,” said Moshe. “You’ll arrive on the southern tip of Manhattan, and it will be winter, but there are no glaciers closer than Greenland. Anyway, you’ll arrive indoors. I live in this house and use it for transition because there is a coterminous room in the other angle. Nothing to fret about.”

Hakira looked for the technology that would transfer them. Moshe had spoken of this room. Perhaps it was much larger than bender technology, and had been embedded in the walls of the room.

Yet if they could not bring anything with them that wasn’t part of their bodies, Moshe’s people must have built their machinery here instead of importing it. Yet if they hadn’t brought wealth, how had Moshe obtained the money to buy this house, let alone manufacture their slant-changing machinery? Interesting puzzles.

Of course, there were two obvious solutions. The first would be a disappointment, but it was the most predictable—that it was all fakery and Moshe would try to abscond with their money without having taken them anywhere at all. There was always the danger that part of the scam was killing those who were supposed to be transported so that there’d be no one left to complain. Foreseeing that, Hakira and the others were alert and prepared.

The other possibility, though, was the one that made Hakira’s spine tingle. Theoretically, since slant-shifting had first been discovered as a natural function of the human brain, there was always the chance of non-mechanical transfer between angles. One of the main objections to this idea had always been that if it were possible, all the worlds should be getting constant visits from any that had learned how to transfer by mental power alone. The common answer to that was, How do you know they aren’t constantly visiting? Some even speculated that sightings of ghosts might well be of people coming or going. But Moshe’s warning about arriving nude would explain quite nicely why there hadn’t been more visits. It’s hard to be subtle about being nude in most human cultures.

“Do any of you,” asked Moshe, “have any embedded metal or plastic in your bodies? This includes fillings in your teeth, but would also include metal plates or silicon joint replacements, heart pacemakers, non-tissue breast implants, and, of course, eyeglasses. I can assure you that as quickly as possible, all these items will be replaced, except for pacemakers, of course, if you have a pacemaker you’re simply not going.”

“What happens if we do have some kind of implant?” asked one of the men.

“Nothing painful. No wound. It simply doesn’t go with you. It remains here. The effect on you is as if it simply disappeared. And, of course, the objects would remain here, hanging in the air, and then fall to the ground—or the chair, since most of you will be sitting. But to tell the truth, that’s the least of my problems—part of your fee goes to cleaning up this room, since the contents of your bowels also remain behind.”

Several people grimaced.

“As I said, you’ll never notice, except you might feel a bit lighter and more vigorous. It’s like having the perfect enema. And, no matter how nervous you are, you won’t need to urinate for some time. Well now, are we ready? Anyone want to step outside after all?”

No one left.

“Well, this couldn’t be simpler. You must join hands, bare hands, skin to skin. Connect tightly, the whole circle, no one left out.”

Hakira couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Hakira is laughing,” said Moshe, “because he mockingly suggested that maybe our method of transfer was some kind of mumbo jumbo involving all joining hands. Well, he was right. Only this happens to be mumbo jumbo that works.”

We’ll see, won’t we? thought Hakira.

In moments, all their hands were joined.

“Hold your hands up, so I can see,” said Moshe. “Good, good. All right. Absolute silence, please.”

“A moment first,” said Hakira. To the others, he said softly, “Nippon, this year.”

With fierce smiles or no expression at all, the others murmured in reply, “Fujiyama kotoshi.”

It was done. Hakira turned to Moshe and nodded.

They bowed their heads and made no sound, beyond the unavoidable sound of breathing. And an occasional sniffle—they had just come in from the cold.

One man coughed. Several people glared at him. Others simply closed their eyes, meditating their way to silence.

Hakira never took his eyes from Moshe, watching for some kind of signal to a hidden confederate, or perhaps for him to activate some machinery that might fill the room with poison gas. But… nothing.

Two minutes. Three. Four.

And then the room disappeared and a cold wind blew across forty naked bodies. They were in the open air inside a high fence, and around them in a circle stood men with swords.

Swords.

Everything was clear now.

“Well,” said Moshe cheerfully, letting go and stepping back to join the armed men. One of them had a long coat for him, which he put on and wrapped around himself. “The transfer worked just as I told you it would—you’re naked, there was no machinery involved, and don’t you feel vigorous?”

Neither Hakira nor any of the people of Kotoshi said a thing.

“I did lie about a few things,” said Moshe. “You see, we stumbled upon what you call ‘slanting’ at a much more primitive stage in our technological development than you. And wherever we went that wasn’t downright fatal, and that wasn’t already fully inhabited, there you were! Already overpopulating every world we could find! We had come upon the technique too late. So, we’ve come recruiting. If we’re to have a chance at defeating you and your kind so we have a decent chance of finding worlds to expand into, we need to learn how to use your technology. How to use your weapons, how to disable your power system, how to make your ordinary citizens helpless. Since our technology is far behind yours, and we couldn’t carry technology from world to world anyway, the way you can, this was our only choice.”

Still no one answered him.

“You are taking this very calmly—good. The previous group was full of complainers, arguing with us and complaining about the weather even though it’s much colder this time. That first group was very valuable—we’ve learned many medical breakthroughs from them, for instance, and many people are learning how to drive cars and how to use credit and even the theory behind computer programming. But you—well, I know it’s a racial stereotype, but not only are you Japanese every bit as educated as the Jews from the previous group, you tend to be educated in mathematics and technology instead of medicine, law, and scripture. So from you we hope to learn many valuable things that will prepare us to take over one of your colonies and use it as a springboard to future conquest. Isn’t it nice to know how valuable and important you are?”

One of the swordsmen let rip a string of sounds from another language. Moshe answered in the same language. “My friend comments that you seem to be taking this news extremely well.”

“Only a few points of clarification are needed,” said Hakira. “You are, in fact, planning to keep us as slaves?”

“Allies,” said Moshe. “Helpers. Teachers.”

“Not slaves. We are free to go, then? To return home if we wish?”

“No, I regret not.”

“Are we free not to cooperate with you?”

“You will find your lives are much more comfortable if you cooperate.”

“Will we be taught this mental method of transferring from angle to angle?”

Moshe laughed. “Please, you are too humorous.”

“Is this a global policy on your world, or are you representing only one government or perhaps a small group not responsible to any government?”

“There is one government on this world, and we represent its policy,” said Moshe. “It is only in the area of technology that we are not as advanced as you. We gave up tribes and nations thousands of years ago.”

Hakira looked around at the others in his group. “Any other questions? Have we settled everything?”

Of course it was just a legal formality. He knew perfectly well that they were now free to act. This was, in fact, almost the worst-case scenario. No clothing, no weapons, cold weather, surrounded. But that was why they trained for the worst case. At least there were no guns, and they were outdoors.

“Moshe, I arrest you and all the armed persons present in this compound and charge you with wrongful imprisonment, slavery, fraud, and—”

Moshe shook his head and gave a brief command to the swordsmen. At once they raised their weapons and advanced on Hakira’s group.

It took only moments for the nude Japanese to sidestep the swords, disarm the swordsmen, and leave them prostrate on the ground, their own swords now pointed at their throats. The Japanese who were not involved in that task quickly scoured the compound for more weapons and located the clumsy old-fashioned keys that would open the gate. Within moments they had run down and captured those guards who had been outside the gates. Not one got away. Only two had even attempted to fight. They were, as a result, dead.

To Moshe, Hakira said, “I now add the charge of assault and attempted murder.”

“You’ll never get back to your own world,” said Moshe.

“We each have the complete knowledge necessary to make our own bender out of whatever materials we find here. We are also quite prepared to take on any military force you send against us, or to flee, if necessary. Even if we have to travel, we have you. The real question is whether we will learn the secret of mental reslanting from you before or after we build a bender for ourselves. I can promise you considerable lenience from the courts if you cooperate.”

“Never.”

“Oh, well. Someone else will.”

“How did you know?” demanded Moshe.

“There is no world but ours with Japanese in it. Or Jews. None of the inhabited worlds have had cultures or languages or civilizations or histories that resembled each other in any way. We knew you were a con man, but we also knew the Zionists were gone without a trace. We also knew that someday we’d have to face people from another angle who had learned how to reslant themselves. We trained very carefully, and we followed you home.”

“Like stray mongrels,” said Moshe.

“Oh, and we do have to be told where the previous batch of slaves are being kept—the Zionists you kidnaped before.”

“They’ll all be killed,” said Moshe nastily.

“That would be such a shame for you,” said Hakira. He beckoned to one of his men, now armed with a sharp sword. In Japanese, he told his comrade that unfortunately, Moshe needed a demonstration of their relentless determination.

At once the sword flicked out and the tip of Moshe’s nose dropped to the ground. The sword flicked again, and now Moshe lost the tip of the longest finger of the hand that he had been raising to touch his maimed nose.

Hakira bent over and scooped up the nose and the fingertip. “I’d say that if we get back to our world within about three hours, surgeons will be able to put these back on with only the tiniest scar and very little loss of function. Or shall we delay longer, and sever more protruding body parts?”

“This is inhuman!” said Moshe.

“On the contrary,” said Hakira. “This is about as human as it gets.”

“Are the people of your angle so determined to control every world you find?”

“Not at all,” said Hakira. “We never interfered with any world that already had human life. You’re the ones who decided on war. And I must say I’m relieved that the general level of your technology turns out to be so low. And that wherever you go, you arrive naked.”

Moshe said nothing. His eyes glazed over.

Hakira murmured to his friend with the sword. The point of it quickly rested against the tender flesh just under Moshe’s jaw.

Moshe’s eyes grew quite alert.

“Don’t even think of slanting away from us,” said Hakira.

“I am the only one who speaks your language,” said Moshe. “You have to sleep sometime. I have to sleep sometime. How will you know whether I’m really asleep, or merely meditating before I transfer?”

“Take a thumb,” said Hakira. “And this time, let’s make him swallow it.”

Moshe gulped. “What sort of vengeance will you take against my people?”

“Apart from fair trials for the perpetrators of this conspiracy, we’ll establish an irresistible presence here, watch you very carefully, and conduct such trade as we think appropriate. You yourself will be judged according to your cooperation now. Come on, Moshe, save some time. Take me back to my world. A bender is already being set up at your house—the troops moved in the moment we disappeared. You know that it’s just a matter of time before they identify this angle and arrive in force no matter what you do.”

“I could take you anywhere,” said Moshe.

“And no doubt you’re threatening to take me to some world with unbreathable air because you’re willing to die for your cause. I understand that, I’m willing to die for mine. But if I’m not back here in ten minutes, my men will slaughter yours and begin the systematic destruction of your world. It’s our only defense, if you don’t cooperate. Believe me, the best way to save your world is by doing what I say.”

“Maybe I hate you more than I love my people,” said Moshe.

“What you love is our technology, Moshe, every bit of it. Come with me now and you’ll be the hero who brings all those wonderful toys home.”

“You’ll put my finger and nose back on?”

“In my world the year is 3001,” said Hakira. “We’ll put them on you wherever you want them, and give you spares just in case.”

“Let’s go,” said Moshe.

He took Hakira’s hand and closed his eyes.