“Yes,” I said. “If you both agree that I can file a report to the Agency on the matter.”
“Most assuredly,” Spare14 said. “I understand.”
“Nothing would stop you, anyway,” Ari said.
Spare14 dug into the briefcase again and brought out a black carrier bag, made of Kevlar or some similar material. He slid the examination book inside, then secured the zippered flap with a small combination lock.
“Here you are.” Spare14 passed the bag across the table to Ari. “Do be careful with it.”
“Of course.” Ari managed to keep from looking my way. “I’ll give your offer serious consideration.”
“And my dear O’Grady.” Spare14 leaned toward me with a smile I can only call unctuous. “I do hope you’ll give your agency a good report of our meeting? As I said, I’m quite willing to travel if necessary to lay our proposal before its directors.”
“I’ll pass everything along,” I said. “Not a problem.”
We shook hands all round, and the meeting ended. Spare14 returned to his bench in the sunshine. As we walked
away, I glanced back to see him taking a bag the size of a throw pillow out of his briefcase. Birds flew down and squirrels came running to flock around his feet as he began scattering popcorn. I began to wonder if the briefcase came from the same workshop as the TARDIS. It seemed a lot bigger on the inside than on the out.
Ari and I headed across the lawn toward the general area of our car.
“So you decided to join the unit?” I said.
“I’ll sit the exam at least. I’m too sodding curious not to. It’s all your fault, you know. You’ve infected me with a taste for this sort of information.”
“This sort—”
“Deviant world levels.” Ari sighed with brief melancholy. “Part of the exam seems to deal with those. But the really important bits are the units on inter-world law and procedures. It’s a good thing I have some leave accrued. Holiday time, you know. I’ll put in for it so I can study.”
“Then there’s a lot of data in that cram book.”
“It’s quite thick, yes.”
“It sounds like my kind of intel.”
He turned his head and scowled at me. “It’s got a security restriction. You don’t have clearance.”
“I figured that. Why else the lock?”
He smiled.
“Look,” I said, “we, and I mean us personally, have had visitors from deviant worlds, first the apparition and then that guy who tried to break into our flat. Every bit of data I can gather about deviant world levels is important. I have need to know, Ari.”
“I can run your request by Spare14. That’s all I can do.”
“Judging from the things he said just now, he’ll turn any requests down until the Agency’s officially linked up with TWIXT. That’ll take months once the bureaucrats get involved.”
“Sorry. There’s nothing I can do about that.”
Ari and his damned procedures! We left the lawn and turned down the narrow side road where we’d left the car.
“Those intruders from other worlds.” I tried again. “They’re Chaos threats.”
“Yes.”
“Stopping Chaos threats is my job. I can’t do it without more information about this deviant—”
“No, I won’t let you read the sodding book.”
I knew better than to try giving him a direct order. I did what I usually do when I feel baffled: I got mad.
“Then I’ll just have to wheedle it out of you.” I kept my voice calm. “You might think of a few things you’d like. Things we haven’t tried yet.”
At first Ari merely looked puzzled. I sensed his Qi level spark upward when he realized what sort of “things” I meant.
“Nola, don’t,” he snapped.
“Don’t what?”
“Make my life miserable by trying to wheedle access to the sodding book.”
“You could just give in now.”
“No! I don’t care if you’re the bureau head. You don’t have the clearance to read it.”
So that’s it, I thought. He’d hated asking my permission to take the TWIXT exam so much that he was reasserting control. All right, O’Grady, I asked myself. Are you going to let him get away with this?
Aloud, I said nothing more until we reached the Saturn. I settled in to the passenger seat, Ari behind the wheel. He held the carrier bag upright between his ankles while he buckled on his seat belt, then picked it up and set it on his lap. I considered tactics. It was just possible that I could read the combination from his mind if I could catch him when he was opening it, but I was willing to bet he’d never open it in front of me. He noticed me staring at the bag.
“I’m going to keep this at the gym,” he said. “I have a secure locker there.”
He’d left me no alternative but treachery. I spent a moment pondering just what his most intense sexual fantasy might be. I had plenty of hints from the various activities we’d already sampled. The more I pondered, the more obvious it seemed.
“I bet you own a pair of handcuffs,” I said. “Maybe a couple of them. You are a cop, after all.”
“Yes, I do.” He glanced my way. “Why?”
“I bet you’ve got a pair that would fit me.”
I smiled at him, merely smiled, that is. I kept my own Qi under control for fairness’ sake, but I felt his Qi level spike.
“Nola, stop it!”
“Stop what? I’m merely thinking out loud. If there are sections in that book that give TWIXT codes, secret stuff like that, I would never read those. You could tape them shut. I only want the background material.”
He growled and stared out the windshield.
“Handcuffs and those black stockings you like so much,” I went on.
“Let’s just go home.”
“Is that a yes?”
“No!” He turned the key in the ignition with a macho flick of his wrist.
As we drove home, I stayed alert, watched the road, scanned the sidewalk, kept my eyes moving, but I saw no false images and nothing else abnormal or dangerous. Well, nothing, that is, if you don’t count the effects of Ari’s driving style, which produced a lot of blaring horns and obscene gestures from the other drivers on the road.
We survived to make it home. Ari settled on the couch with his laptop. I went into the bedroom and took off the sweater, the shirt, my athleisure shoes, and my healthful and utterly non-sexy white cotton socks. That left me wearing a black lace bra and jeans. When I came back to the living room, I noticed that he’d attached the Hebrew keyboard to his laptop and tucked the carrier bag underneath. I stayed standing, just beside the entrance to the hallway with my back against the side wall of the room.
“You don’t need to worry about me taking that bag from you,” I said. “It won’t do me any good without the combination.”
“Yes. That’s why there’s a lock.” He punched a couple of keys, then looked up. “I’m thinking of going to the gym. I can’t do my weights routine here. Run scans, will you? I don’t want to leave you alone if it’s not safe.”
“Okay. I’ll just be in the bedroom. After I run the scans, I’ll go through my underwear drawer.”
He said nothing, but I saw his jaw tighten.
“When you came back from Israel,” I went on, “I bought some new things that you haven’t seen yet, a black lace garter belt and stockings. They’d look good with this bra and the handcuffs.”
Ari winced. I felt the Qi begin to flow between us. He hit a few more keys. The laptop shut down.
“I’m going to the gym,” he said. “I need to get out of here. If you’re not safe, it’s your own sodding fault.”
“Why?” I leaned back against the wall and hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my jeans. This time I let Qi flow out toward him along with the smile. His face turned pink.
“Nola, stop it! I’m not going to give you the combination, and that’s that.”
“Okay. Then take the book out of the bag and just give me that.”
He set the laptop down on the coffee table, put the carrier bag beside it, and stood up. I let the stalemate hold while I scanned the Qi he was inadvertently releasing: a steady overflow with no hint of his irrational rage. He was annoyed, but he had good reason to be. What did come through was raw desire.
“I suppose,” Ari said, “that if I don’t let you read the sodding book, I’ll end up sleeping on the couch.”
“What? Of course not. I’d never do that to you. I’m only bargaining with—well, let’s call it refinements.” I gave him my best heavy-lidded smile. “Like the handcuffs and the black garter belt. With the stockings. Fishnets instead of lace if you prefer.”
“This is utterly unfair of you, and I’m not going along with it.” He took a couple of steps toward the hallway, which meant toward me. “I’m going to get my workout clothes out of the dryer and leave.”
I had one last weapon. It was my least favorite playtime activity, but damned if I was going to let him keep that book away from me.
“Yes, you should go. I’m being a bad girl.” I looked modestly down though I kept him in view through my eyelashes. “I deserve a spanking.”
Ari cracked. He walked over, caught me by the shoulders, and kissed me. I laid my hands flat on his chest.
“Just take the book out of the bag,” I said. “First.”
“But you won’t read the TWIXT code section?”
“I promise. Why would I want to?”
“Right.” He kissed me again. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“I can.” I rubbed up against him. “It’s obvious how much you want to. I’ve been a very bad girl.”
He caught my hands in his, spread them away from my body and pressed me back against the wall. When he kissed me, he was oozing so much Qi that I started to sweat.
“I’ll just go change into something cooler.” I pulled a hand free and ran my fingers through his hair, also sweaty. “Just bring the book with you when you come into the bedroom.”
“You’re going to read it right away?” He kissed the side of my neck. “I think not.”
“No, I’m going to put it somewhere for safe keeping, where you can’t get it back until I’m done with it.”
Ari let me go and returned to the coffee table. He twirled the combination lock, then opened the bag and slid the book out. I took it from him.
“There,” he said. “You hide it. I’ll fetch the handcuffs.” He smiled, tight-lipped and tiger-eyed. “And your hairbrush.”
Some while later, I got dressed and left him asleep in the bedroom. I took the cram book into the living room, fetched a notebook and a pen, and gingerly sat down on a soft sofa cushion to read through the relevant sections. True to my word, I skipped the chapters on TWIXT legal codes. Oh, all right, I did glance at them. They had nothing I needed, and besides, they looked hideously complex.
The pages of background proved to be invaluable. The material covered the formation of deviant worlds and hinted at travel between them. Although the book supplied a lot of details, the basic principle was simplicity itself. Forget all those sci-fi stories about killing Hitler and changing history. Worlds split and deviated not because of human actions—or the actions of any other intelligent species—
but by mathematically determined transformations inherent in the system of worlds. The multiverse turned out to be one huge fractal pattern, generating replicas and deviants of itself by its inherent nature.
The impetus or energy for this self-generation was still a mystery, according to the text. The astrophysicists on Spare14’s level tended to believe that “quantum fluctuation” or “foam” lay behind the deviations. Although the process could be expressed by enormously complex mathematical formulae, the book showed none of those. I guess the authors figured that mathematical geniuses wouldn’t want to join TWIXT.
A fractal pattern like the famous Mandelbrot Set only transforms along three axes: Vertical, Horizontal, and Time. In the multiverse, the transformations occur in Time and some unknown number of spatial dimensions. Like Numbersgrrl once told me, they shoot off in all directions. The process can generate splits at varying times in a level’s existence. Thus two “cousin worlds” might be strikingly similar if the one had recently been generated from the other, or conversely, surprisingly different if the split lay in the distant past.
The book used an elaborate analogy to explain these principles. It postulated cars of the same brand and model parked one above the other in a multilevel car park. Although the cars were identical when they left the factory, different owners used them for different journeys. They let individual kinds of junk pile up in the trunks and glove compartments as well. In some cases an owner might even have painted a car in some eccentric way. The result would be a set of cars that had most things in common while displaying significantly distinct features.
Gates between worlds would then be like elevators in the car park. No one could simply jump through the concrete floors that separated the nearly identical cars. A person desiring to move from Car A to Car B had to walk up the spiral ramps or take the direct elevator from floor to floor. The analogy broke down at that point because in the multiverse there are no ramps, and the elevators do not stop at every floor.
With time, cousin worlds move too far apart to “continue to share information,” as the cram book put it. I took that as meaning they could no longer be reached one from the other. Thus a world-walker could find only recently separated and thus somewhat similar worlds. The information stopped there with a couple of cryptic notes. Recruits had to pass the exam and become sworn agents before they learned how to travel from world to world. Luckily, I already had some information on that subject.
I was just putting my notes away in my computer desk when I heard Ari go into the bathroom. In a minute he came into the living room, yawning, stretching, grinning at me. He’d put on his jeans and a red 49ers T-shirt, both of which showed off his assets. He walked over, caught me by the waist, and kissed me. I laced my hands behind his neck and pulled him down for a second kiss.
“I hope I didn’t actually hurt you,” he said.
“You didn’t, no. You were surprisingly moderate with that hairbrush. Merciful, even.”
“Good, though mercy was certainly more than you deserved. Have you taken a look at the book yet?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m done with it. You can have it back.”
He pulled back to study my face. “Already?” He sounded strangely disappointed.
“Yeah. I learned in college how to speed read through that kind of material. Why? What’s wrong?”