Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

There is no subterfuge in this, I assure you. We are setting up an environment in which you can live and think. We are installing three phones. The white phone is general, municipal; with it you can call any number in the city. It is monitored. The beige phone is your hotline to me or to the scientists of our committee—we have at our disposal here experts in various fields. The red phone is a direct line to the president; it was installed at the request of his office.

In your apartment is a television set that carries the public programs of Davabel, but on channel 33 you can watch a program that has been created especially for you: tapes using the images of actors and statisticians who are no longer among the living. This channel gives the results of our research, hypotheses concerning your activity—as much as was done in the DS but honestly this time, without censorship. Obviously we can dictate nothing to you, but we ask that you watch only channel 33 to minimize the effect of the epidemic.

The final matter is the business of the murders. The criminals seem to have become heroes. Sergeant Kurys and Olsen managed to pull an infantry carrier from the flames. [They were saving their asses, Gavein thought.] Both are in serious condition. The rest of the suspects perished in the fire. The wish here is to give these men medals. You understand: the honor of the army, morale. The prosecutor in any case will come and question you and all witnesses.

The television downstairs, for Miss Patricks, will receive only the public programming.

Sincerely yours, and in the hope that you will join us in our effort to lift this bizarre curse that is afflicting Davabel.

How am I supposed to solve the mystery? Gavein thought. At the DS they brought together the best brains of Davabel; they studied me, analyzed me, kept me there for three weeks—and nothing. They ended up bombing ruins. I certainly have no privileged insight into the effect. If I hit on an answer, it would be by dumb luck. The man in the street could do as well.

He folded the letter back, four ways.

And what do I end up bombing, if I find no answer? he thought with a bitter smile. They must all be stepping damned gingerly if their own chief resorts to private letters—unless this whole thing has been orchestrated.

He could move anywhere, live anywhere, linked as he was to the government by both phone and television.

“What ugly furniture,” Ra Mahleiné commented. “Tasteless, and the colors don’t even match, though it obviously cost them plenty.”

It looked as if someone had bought the most expensive pieces possible, indiscriminately, at the nearest furniture store.

A strange evening followed, the first spent in a furnished room in—he couldn’t remember how long. It was also the first time they had been together in three weeks. The television played loud till late at night, but no one looked at it. Ra Mahleiné, sitting on the sofa, knitted as before, carefully counting loops. Monotonous work, but she liked it. It kept her mind off all the things that had happened.

Lorraine stared vacantly at the screen. Though she had been heavily sedated, she couldn’t sleep. It was better to have her in sight.

Gavein made himself comfortable in his armchair.

Maybe I can at least solve the mystery of Wilcox, he thought, reaching for Nest of Worlds . What could the man have found in this book?

As he opened it, he felt a pleasant current flowing into him, through his fingers, from the little mosaic tiles on the cover. He loved books, particularly the kind that were bound with such care and affection by the printer.

After Wilcox’s suicide, Zef had read the book. Then, when Zef was murdered, Ra Mahleiné found it among his things. She had not parted from it since. To protect it from a possible search by the police, she sewed a special pocket for it inside her pillow. Every night she placed the book there.

Between the pages were a few index cards containing notes made by Zef. The cards were dated. The handwriting was small and hardly legible.

Gavein opened to the title page.

First, a few words of explanation. Look in another copy of this book, then in another. You will find that the text of each differs. This is the rule.

By now you have read many books, but did it ever occur to you that, in every book, you were reading something that was not what others read? We speak here not of words, not of a certain quantity of black ink pressed into a sheet of paper, but of everything else: the sense, the content. When you open a book, its characters come to life: they talk, fight, love, eat. But when you close the book, what happens to them? Does their time stand in place, in the place where you left off, or does their existence continue in some insubstantial way, devoid of anything that matters? The world that forms in your imagination, is it like the world that forms in the mind of another reader? Does the world of the book exist independently of its readers, or does it come into being thanks only to them? Whichever answer you give will be correct.

It depends on you alone whether you become the Significant Reader of this book, causing what happens in it to happen genuinely. The events that unfold before the Reader are as real as the Reader’s own existence. More: a world made real, regardless of its degree of nestedness, creates a whole with every other nested world. In many respects these worlds are surprisingly similar to one another (and to yours). That is their characteristic.

This world is divided into nine Lands. Their names are: Lamieh, Tahian, Mougarrie, Tolz, Schpiez, Buhl, Gorah, Dozya, and Abil. At one time, supposedly, the Ocean surrounded them on all sides, but even the earliest chronicles say nothing of an ocean or of its drying out. Today the plateau of each Land is separated from the others by the deep trough of an evaporated sea. The Lands are oases in which life is made possible by spring water. The depressions that lie between are all desert. After fifteen years and two hundred days every person must traverse the desert to reach the next Land. The desert places limits on the living together of people of different ages. The solution seems simple: if your wife is younger by six months, you may think you can have her take a six-month-longer route, so that at the place you rejoin her you will both be the same age. But in a nested world it does not work this way, though roads of common time do exist. Taking the same route from Mougarrie to Tolz, a caravan can travel several days or several weeks. No one knows how much time has passed, then, in Tolz and how much in Mougarrie.

The black fog claims some caravans. A caravan with a higher number, even if its vehicles keep to the path at every point, cannot reach its destination before a caravan with a lower number. Therefore, if the second caravan arrives and the first has not, then the first has perished.

Transportation by plane is possible only above the regions of the plateaus; no copter that ever ventured over the desert, piloted by daredevils, either returned or reached its destination. Even above the Lands, unnecessary flight is avoided, because a strong wind or an error in navigation can send a craft off a plateau.