The Coming of the Quantum Cats

27 August 1983

8:40 P.M. Mrs. Nyla Christophe Bowquist

They kicked me out of my pretty suite in the hotel. Even Slavi couldn't prevent it, because the whole top part of the hotel was taken over by the President and her staff when the White House was occupied; but he made the manager give me a room on the fifth floor. It was all right. There was a bed for me, and a bed for Amy. She didn't mind listening to me practice, and there certainly was no other reason in the world why either of us needed privacy. Not for my dear Dom's visits, because Dom wasn't around. Not even for my phone calls from my husband in Chicago, because there were very few of those. Not even Ferdie could get through the clogged lines to Washington most of the time.

That was a mercy, because I still had not made any sensible decision about what to say to Ferdie.

I hadn't made very many sensible decisions of any kind, it seemed to me. Staying in a war zone wasn't sensible in the first place. Effectively I was trapped. The airport was in enemy hands, so were all the bridges over the Potomac, so might be almost any road leading out of the capital, because the troops of the other guys were turning up in at least patrol strength almost anywhere. By the time I had finished dithering about whether to catch the next flight to Rochester, there wasn't any next flight to Rochester, and there were firecracker sounds from all over the city that were scary.

The radio said the gunfire wasn't serious. I didn't agree. When I looked out the window and saw the smoke from Anacostia, or the top chopped off the Washington Monument because those other guys had thought our guys had an artillery spotter up there, it looked serious enough for me.

So when jock McClenty knocked on my door I opened it scared.

I didn't expect good news. I couldn't imagine where good news might come from, that mean and rainy Saturday night. When I saw Dom's assistant, with the Secret Service man standing beside him, my first guess was that we were all being arrested. "Mrs. Bowquist," said jock, "it's the senator. He's back. He's right here in the hotel, and he sent us to bring you to him."

Well, that was it. I cried. Buckets. I don't know why, exactly, I guess most likely because I had been storing up tears unshed for so many different reasons that any nudge would spill them over the top. Out of my eyes they came. I was still crying when we got to the penthouse, although it took quite a long time-we had to go clear down to the lobby, pass through city police at one checkpoint and Secret Service people at another before we got into an elevator in a different bank.

Sniffling into the fifth or sixth Kleenex the Secret Service man had given me (how nicely they train those people!), I got out and looked around. It was a suite that made my old suite look like a peasant hut in Cambodia. Duplex. Ankle-deep. carpeting. Cathedral-style windows in a salon with fifteen-foot ceilings. The first person I saw was Jackie Kennedy, standing by a window and talking to somebody, and the second person I saw was the somebody himself.

It was Dom DeSota.

"Dom!" I yelled, and hurled myself at him, still sniffling.

It was Dom, all right, but he didn't hug me as Dom would have, he didn't say what Dom would have said to me, he didn't even smell like Dom. He smelled of pipe tobacco and a wholly different brand of aftershave, and most of all he did what Dom would never have done.

He pushed me away.

He did it gently—even kindly—but he pushed me away all the same; and so I wasn't in the least surprised when Jackie put her hand on my arm and said, "Nyla, dear? It's the wrong one."

Well, that was all right, as it turned out, because the right one was there too. He was halfway up the circular stair that went to the President's private quarters on the level above, but when he saw me he came whooping and leaping down and I got my hug after all. He didn't say anything at first. He just held me. I held him back, meaning it—meaning it so much that if Marilyn and Ferdie themselves had been there, cameramen on one side of them and their divorce lawyers on the other, I wouldn't have given up one squeeze or one moment. Then he loosened his arms a little, and looked at me, and kissed me; and then he said, "Oh, love!"—glancing back at the stairs.

At the top of them the President's appointments secretary was standing, tapping his foot. "Go ahead, Dom," I said, understanding. "I'll be here when you get back."

So then he was gone again, and Jackie was trying to explain what was going on on one side of me, and jock McClenty was doing the same on the other, and I finally got them both to understand that what I wanted more than explanations was a chance to freshen up a little. And a minute later they led me through a bedroom that must have been designed for the Shah of Iran—mirrors on the ceiling and, good heavens, a real Picasso on the wall—into a bathroom that had a washstand with golden knobs.

It was a good thing I had a chance to put myself together, because when I came out of the czar's bathroom into the Shah's bedroom I discovered that it had been turned into a sort of holding pen for all of us.

When I say "all of us," I don't just mean "all of us." I mean more "all" and more "us" than I had ever meant before in my life. My Dom was back—the President had kicked him out for some private confabulation with a couple of generals—and Dom and I were, of course, the big "us" in my life. But there were three of him. If you counted in the one whose face we'd seen on the TV, there were four.

And there were two of me.

I had had a lot of trouble accepting the fact that there was more than one of the man I loved, but, boy, I didn't know what trouble was until I had to face up to the other one of me. It reminded me of the time, two or three years before, when Ferdie and I had gone off for a weekend in the Wisconsin Dells to try to save our marriage. I took my spayed Siamese cat, Panther, to stay with Amy in her little apartment, along with her spayed female calico, Poo-Bear, It wasn't a happy meeting. The first thing Poo-Bear did was leap up on top of a knickknack shelf, knocking half of Amy's carved wooden animals on the floor, and the first thing Panther did was dive under a bookcase. They didn't hiss or growl or spit. They just stared at each other across the room, all the time I was there-though Amy told me later that within half an hour they were licking each other.

It was a lot like that with me and this other Nyla, although I saw no chance at all that we would ever be licking each other. She sat in one corner, looking at me and occasionally whispering to the man next to her, who looked seven feet tall and half that much wide. Nasty-looking bit of business, he was. I sat on a Queen Anne loveseat with Dom, my Dom, holding my hand and my head on his shoulder, while Dom tried to tell me what things, what amazing things, he had been doing since I saw him last. And the two of us, that Nyla and me-Nyla, stared at each other and couldn't stop.

Although I studied her more closely than I had ever inspected any other woman, I didn't notice that she had no thumbs until Dom whispered to me about it. That wasn't the only difference. The expression on her face was different from any I believed I had ever worn—cynical? Wry? Maybe even envious? All the same, she was me.

I was very, very grateful for Dom's arm around me.

With all that going on, it wasn't surprising that I didn't notice the other odd thing. The fact that there were three Doms in the room was bad enough; the presence of another Nyla than me was worse. But we weren't the only duplicates. When I finally took my eyes off the other Nyla long enough to pay attention to the others, I saw that the Kennedys were talking to two of what looked like my old friend Lavrenti Djugashvili, and they were looking at me.

"Shto eta, Lavi?" I called across the room, impartially to both of them. They both looked baffled.

Dom laughed and tightened his arm around me. "They're not the ambassador," he said. "He's out at the airport, welcoming some Russian scientists that are coming in to meet with us."

"Oh, lord," I said, laughing because it was better than crying, "are there two of everybody?"

"Not just two," he said somberly. "An infinity, I'm afraid. But of me and you, there's only one me and one you that matter, and we're together. Let's keep it that way."

So then there were suddenly two more of "us" in the room, although the new two were only imaginary. They were very clear to me, all the same, Marilyn on one side of us, Ferdie on the other, and the expressions on their faces were full of anger and hurt and accusation.

It was fortunate that they were only imaginary, at least at that moment, however real they would be later on. I closed my mind to them. "If that's a proposal," I said, "I accept. I don't want us ever to be apart again—not counting when I have to go on tour, I mean."

"And not counting election campaigns," he said, grinning. "I promise."

It is astonishing how easily you can make a promise that you will not be allowed to keep.

Still, there were the real Marilyn and the real Ferdie, and we owed them at least a little discretion until we told them what was going on. In spite of everything—in spite of all the weirdness that was happening, not to mention the fact that my country was being invaded right outside the hotel window—I could still worry about propriety. Especially when I noticed jack Kennedy studying us appraisingly out of the corner of his eye while he talked to Lavi's doubles.

I flushed and sat up. I didn't push Dom's arm away, but I moved a little bit outside of it. Dom came to the same realization I did at that same moment. I felt him lean away.

Then he came back to where our bodies were touching, and the arm was on my shoulders again. Proudly. Almost defiantly. Oh, hell, I thought, we're past the point of being discreet. If our affair had ever been a secret, our secret was no secret any more.

The luxury of the suite wasn't limited to gold bathroom fixtures. There was a kitchen attached to the suite, and a hotel chef, sous-chef, and waiter attached to the kitchen. "Eat up," said Dom— my Dom. "It's all being paid for by the taxpayer." So we ate. I found I had a ravenous appetite. So did the paratime travelers. Apparently they hadn't been fed a lot lately, and they made up for it. And there was conversation too. I didn't take much active part in it, because I was busy listening, trying to make out just what was going on.

Dom did most of the explaining, and Jack Kennedy did most of the asking. "There's a million of these time-lines, Jack," Dom said. "No, not a million. A million million million, maybe. I think the right word is infinity."

"Remackable," said jack. "I had no idea." He was sitting across from us, holding Jackie's hand as Dom was holding mine. I wished that when we were their age we would be as loving, in spite of our rather bad and adulterous beginning. (But there were all those stories about Jack and heaven knew how many women, long ago, and their marriage seemed to have survived.)

"We can only reach fairly nearby ones," said Dom. "Dr. Dom here"—he nodded in a friendly way to the one I had flung myself at, who was dubiously nibbling at a platter of falafel—"knows more about it than I do."

The other Dom swallowed. "They're almost like yours and mine," he concurred, "but there are, of course, some differences. In the one that's invading you, Jerry Brown is the President of the United States."

"Jerry Brown!" said Jack. "That's the hardest thing of all to believe."

"But it's so." The other Dom lifted a forkful of the falafel and said, "This is pretty good. I'll have to see if I can find somebody to make it back home. That's another advantage of paratime, you see, learning different things that improve the quality of life."

"I can't say ours has improved a lot, Dawm," Jack said wryly. "Go on about the other time-lines."

"Well, there are a couple where Ronnie Reagan is President."

"Ronnie?"

"Yes, and in those lines Lyndon Johnson was President twenty years ago, and before that you were. Only—" He hesitated, as though it were hard to say it. "Only in that time you were assassinated in office, Senator. By a man named Lee Harvey Oswald."

Jacqueline either swallowed or gasped—the sound was somewhere in between. Jack glanced worriedly at her, then back at Dom. His expression was as divided as her sound. For the top half of his face his eyebrows were quirked with mild curiosity; but his jaw muscles were clenched. "Lee Harvey Oswald? Wait a minute-was it—yes, I remember, the guy who shot the governor of Texas?"

"The same one."

"Remackable," said Jack Kennedy. There didn't seem to be anything else for anyone to say. It was a conversation-stopper. Then Jack shook himself. "My poor wife," he said, smiling and patting Jackie's hand. "Do you know what kind of a widow she made, Dr. DeSota?"

"I, uh, don't remember exactly," that Dom said apologetically, and for some reason I didn't think he was telling the truth. Jack nodded absently. He thought the same, it was clear; but he was saved from having to ask questions by a major with gold braid dripping from his shoulders. He came into the room, fresh-shaved, hair neatly brushed, eyes as weary as any man's I have ever seen; he looked as though he hadn't slept for two or three nights running, and probably he had not.

"Senator DeSota?" he said tentatively, looking from one Dominic to another. "The President will see you now. All three of you, sir," he added. And Dom, my Dom, hugged me, kissed my cheek, and got up to leave me.

I sat down with the Kennedys. I suppose we talked. I'm not sure what we talked about, because my mind was too full of things. Including the other Nyla. Although we had discontinued our staring match, we had not lost interest. She was standing by the buffet table, dexterously if thumbless sly slicing bits of cheese for herself and her anthropoid companion. Although I didn't catch her eyes on me, I was sure that every time I looked toward her she had just looked away. I wasn't in any doubt about that impression, because I was doing the same for her. It almost seemed to me that she was more interested in me than I was in her, or anyway interested in me in a different way. Not just idle curiosity. Purposeful, although I couldn't imagine what the purpose was.

I decided that she and I needed to talk.

I didn't put the decision into practice, though, because just as I was making up my mind to go over to her, Lavrenti Djugashvili, the real one, came in, smiling, mopping his brow, gazing curiously at the other Nyla before coming over to me. "So very confusing!" he said, kissing my hand and then Jacqueline's. "Such a difficult day!"

"You brought your boys over?" Jack Kennedy asked.

"Oh, yes, of course, Zupchin and Merejkowsky, two brilliant physicists from Lenin Theoretical Studies Institute. Then I was advised my own presence no longer desired," he added wryly.

"Gave you a hard time, did she?" asked Senator Kennedy sympathetically.

Lavi shrugged. "I speak no evil of your President," he said, spreading his hands to show how fair-minded he was being, "but it is clear to me she does not like Communists, myself very much included."

The senator also demonstrated his fairness. "I don't speak much good of the lady myself," he said, "because she's in the wrong patty. All the same, she's got a lot on her mind, Lavi. They've captured her husband. They've taken over her White House. She doesn't want to be reasonable right now, and most of all she doesn't want to be the first American President since 1812 to have an enemy occupy her capital."

"Oh, yes, to be sure," Lavrenti agreed. "Especially since there is this new activity from the invaders He paused, looking at us. "You have not been informed? But even on the television the news is there for all to see! Surely there is such a device somewhere in this palatial apartment? Come, let us find it!"

There was indeed such a device, although it was hidden behind the doors of a carved mahogany breakfront, and, yes, there was plenty of news on it for us.

None of it was good.

We tuned in in the middle of live-action shots of hard fighting. It wasn't in some faraway land. It was only blocks away from us, at the far end of the Mall, all around the Capitol. Tanks and personnel carriers seemed to be coming from around the Supreme Court building, fanning out to take the Capitol in pincers from both sides. There were bodies there. The camera zoomed in to take a closer look at some of them, and I wished it hadn't. Cut to another shot, and we were looking at a file of tanks. Peculiar ones. I did not quite understand why they seemed peculiar until Lavi choked out something—it sounded angry and dirty, but I couldn't tell what, because it was in Russian. He switched to English to say, "Is a new weapon, Dominic!"

And then the proportions sorted themselves out. They were tanks, but they were tiny—not more than six or seven feet long, only knee-high off the ground, and each one with a great gun swinging from side to side over its body like the whip of a scorpion. "Have nothing like this in Soviets," Lavi said plaintively.

"We don't in this America, either," said Jack Kennedy. "Radio-controlled, I bet! Sweet Baby Jesus, look at that sucker shoot!" Because those cannon weren't for show, they were firing on the Capitol, and at each round great mushrooms of masonry and smoke popped out of the Capitol walls.

The scene changed. We were looking at NBC's war room, very much like the election-night headquarters they trotted out every year. Behind Tom Brokaw and John Chancellor was a wall-to-wall situation map of the District of Columbia, and they were explaining what had been happening.

They didn't have to say much. The pictures said it all. Nearly a quarter of the city was now shaded red—red for occupying forces— the area around the Capitol where we had just been looking, the White House, the Ellipse, and most of the space around the Washington Monument, a big section along the river, and spotty areas all over the District. And along most of the perimeters there were flashing red lights that signaled actual combat going on right now.

Brokaw was pointing to the Capitol. "The most recent breakthrough," he said, "began without warning just forty-five minutes ago at First Street and Constitution Avenue. Simultaneously fighting broke out at nearly every other point in the city where our troops face theirs." He named them, one by one, and then began a recap. "Incongruously," he said, "there has been constant telephone contact between the headquarters of the invaders, in the White House, and ours, at an undisclosed location somewhere within the District. It is known that the invaders have captured three Cabinet members and at least three-quarters of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and their immediate staffs, as well as several senators, congressmen, and other major figures of government. Ronald Reagan is himself a captive. All of the hostages, as our government has termed them, have been allowed to make taped voice messages that have been transmitted by telephone. Here is the voice of General Westmoreland—"

I had heard it. I didn't hear it again. I was looking at Nyla Christophe, and this time she was looking back at me. From the little Dom had whispered to me I had expected, I don't know, a kind of Gestapo agent combined with Mata Han. She didn't look like that. What she looked like was me. She was sitting on her hands, so I couldn't see them. What I could see was a woman of my age, my face, my body—well, no, perhaps she was six or eight pounds slimmer than I, but that certainly was not to her discredit—a woman whom I might have seen look back at me out of my mirror any morning. I knew that she had instilled fear. I had never done that, no, not to anyone at any time; I didn't think it was possible for me to cause physical fear in anyone, ever. But I had not grown up in a world that cut a young woman's thumbs off for shoplifting. She didn't speak to me, though there seemed to be nothing hostile in the way she studied my face. I didn't speak to her, either, though I was beginning to feel that if we did talk, if somewhere the two of us might somehow sit down together over a just-us-girls-together dinner (it would be mostly salads, with perhaps one small cocktail to make it festive), we might, in fact, get along very well.

It gradually became clear to me that she and I were not the only ones staring at each other. Lavi Djugashvili had got up to leave, and now he was hesitating. He was studying the two men named Larry Douglas. He whispered to Jack Kennedy, looked perplexed, shook his head, finally spoke up. "Mr. Douglas? May I have a word with you—with both of you, perhaps?"

"Why not?" said one of them—I had no way of telling which.

"I observe," said Lavi, "that we resemble each other very closely. Is it possible that we are related?"

One of the Larry Douglases laughed. "Hell, man, that's a chintzy way to put it. We are a hell of a lot related, you bet. We have the same two parents, and the same four grandparents."

"You mean Grandpa Joe," said the other one, nodding.

"I mean all of them," said the first one. "Grandpa Joe is only the famous one. He was pretty hot stuff eighty or ninety years ago— robbing banks in Siberia, outwitting the law, all that. He came to America when it got too hot for him in Russia and used some of his bank-robbery money to open a fabric wholesaling business in New York. He got pretty rich."

"Same with mine," cried the other one. "Did yours end the same way? Killed by some guy with an ice pick in his summer home in Ashokan?"

"It wasn't an ice pick, and it was winter, and it was in Hobe Sound," said the first one, "but, yes. They said it was political. He'd taken this money that was supposed to go to the Communist cause, you know. That your story, too, Ambassador?"

Lavi stared at them. Then he said heavily, "Up to a point, yes. Only my grandparents didn't leave Russia. Grandpa Joe stayed on, and he got to be pretty famous, under his party name of Stalin." He passed a hand over his face. "All this," he said, "is very disturbing. Please excuse me. I must in any case return to my embassy, but you two gentlemen . .. this situation . . . one would like to discuss—" He stopped and shook his head.

I could not help it. I stood up and put my arm around him. He was astonished. So was I. But he hugged me back, and we stood there for a moment. Then he released me, stepped back, kissed my hand, and said, "I must go—"

He stopped in the middle of the sentence, frowning.

I am sure I was frowning, too, because I heard what he heard. That inaudible distant exchange of gunfire was no longer either inaudible or distant, It came from the street just below.

Nobody was looking at me. I became aware that the whole room was looking at the staircase going up to the President's private quarters on the floor above. The Secret Service guards at the bottom were no longer standing around, watching us all for any sign of threat. They were moving around the great salon, ordering everybody to back up against the walls. As one came near he called, "I'm Jenner, Secret Service. The President is being evacuated."

"Evacuated!" snapped Senator Kennedy. "What's the problem, Jenner? Are we in danger?"

"Possibly so, sir. If you want to leave, you can go as soon as the President's clear. There's a way out through the underground garage. But stay put while her party is leaving. Please," he added, and then as an afterthought, "Sir."

And down the stairs came the President with her entourage. More Secret Service people, three of them women; some District Police with Captain Glenn leading them; the WAC liaison colonel carrying the nuclear-weapons codes; four or five staffers trying desperately to talk to the President even while she was walking down the stairs, one hand on the banister. And she was answering each one of them. I've never agreed with Nancy's politics, but she really looked presidential, even in retreat.

As soon as the President was in the elevator the remaining Secret Service man called something up to the upper-floor suite, and the people who had been with the President were allowed to come down. One big gaggle of them I recognized at once: Dom, in fact all three Doms, along with the two Russians, and a couple of other no-doubt scientists fresh from their meeting with the President.

They stopped almost at the bottom. I stopped too. There was a sudden mutter in the room, people catching their breath, making sounds of astonishment and concern. I didn't know what it was— exactly. I did think that suddenly there were fewer people coming down the Stairs than I thought there should have been, but I wasn't looking at them.

Then there was a sort of chill in the air and a—I guess you should call it a silence. The kind of ear-popping silence that you get in a jet when suddenly you adjust to a pressure change.

Then, "Pardon me," said a voice from behind me, a voice I knew very well, "but shouldn't you and I have a talk, Nyla?"

"Of course, Nyla," I said, and turned to look myself in the eye. She was smiling.

There was something about that smile that made me look down. She held her thumbless hands together, just at waist level, and peeking out from between them was the sharp, serrated blade of a knife from the buffet table, pointed at me.