‘I don’t think you can.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t think you have time. Between, I mean, the bullet leaving the gun and reaching you?’
‘But it’s taking a long time.’
‘Ah! Well it seems that way.’
‘It’s not really taking a long time?’
‘How long does a bullet take to travel a few feet? In one realityline, I mean if we isolate just one — the one you were in a moment ago — it would take less than a second. A single realityline is a very narrow pipe you see: time gushes rapidly along it.’
‘But, then, I am going to die?’
‘You’re still talking to me,’ said Asterinov. ‘So, I doubt it. It’ll pass through your heart, yes. But it will slip between heartbeats, I’d say.’
‘Fuck!’ contributed Frenkel. He was wriggling with fury in his chair, although sluggishly.
I looked around once more. ‘It’s everybody except you, and me, and Frenkel.’ I observed. The bullet, now a ball of soot the size of a football, had intersected my chest. I could almost feel it. It was almost wholly spectral. It was both palpable and impalpable at the same time. It with either palpable, or impalpable, or else some third thing.
‘It is everybody save for us three,’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov agreed.
‘Why us three.’
‘Use your fucking noddle,’ barked Frenkel. ‘Use you fucking head.’
‘Asterinov — I must say I’m surprised to see you. Delighted, obviously, but surprised. I’d heard you were dead.’
‘Reports of my death,’ he beamed. ‘I forget how that one ends.’
‘But you haven’t aged. Perhaps you’re a ghost?’
‘No such thing. No such thing.’
‘I’m trying to get my head around this,’ I informed them.
The air around me was less atmosphere and more immersion, or preparation was of a multiple spectral shift, a shift of spectres, or spectra, an uncanny gloom. It was somewhat like the quality light takes on during an eclipse. The ghosts were now pale, and only some were loitering. Others were on the move, making their way towards the streets that led off the square. Or they weren’t moving. Either they were moving, or they weren’t moving, or it was some third thing.
‘You’re unaged because of them,’ I said to Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. By them I meant — well, you know whom I meant.
‘I am them, Konstantin Andreiovich.’
‘When you say the pipe is wider…’
‘One reality is a narrow pipe: but a bundle of forty thousand, give or take… that’s a broader pipe. Accumulate them altogether and the flow is… Ah, but, look! The bullet went through you, and no ill effects.’
I looked round. The bullet was now a beachball of smoke, or the ghost of one of those knots of tumbleweed that rolls along the street in a Western movie. Or, as I watched, a mere sphere of mist, expanding and disappearing.
‘I wasn’t shot?’
‘You were shot, in that realityline. But when you consolidate all forty thousand, given that you weren’t shot in the vast majority, then the average is…’ He seemed to lose interest in his explanation. His finger was in his beard.
‘You’re saying I was shot in the particular, but that on average I wasn’t shot?’
‘That’s a good way of putting it.’
‘I’m immune?’
‘The probability of you being killed, in this lamination, is very low.’
‘Lamination?’
He winced. ‘Not a very good way of putting it, I know. Do you know what quantum physics is?’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov asked me.
‘He knows shit,’ splurged Frenkel, from his wheelchair.
‘I know a little,’ I corrected.
‘Copenhagen fuck!’ Frenkel slurmed. ‘I wish we’d written that the aliens blew up Copenhagen, all those years ago. Fucking Copenhagen.’
‘A blameless town,’ I objected.
‘Blameless? Fucking quantum physics.’
‘Destroying Copenhagen would hardly alter the facts of the quantum universe,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov.
There was something disorienting happening in my inner ear. There was a faint dazzle, like solar glare over a camera’s convex glass eye, in my sense of the city. It was all happening at once. It wasn’t happening at all. It wasn’t happening at all, or it was all happening at once, or there was some other, third thing.
‘Every event that can happen more than one way,’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov was saying, ‘happens more than one way. You might think that would lead to a multiverse of near infinite complexity.’
‘I wouldn’t think anything of the sort, comrade,’ I said, mildly.
‘The reason it doesn’t,’ he went on, ‘is that many of these branching alternatives cancel one another out. Over the broader fan of possibilities, spreading into a complex delta-basin of alternate realities, probability creates reality gradients. Realities below a certain threshold are liable to evaporate altogether. Realities above a certain threshold can solidify in an absolute sense. It’s chance, you see, but also observation. That’s the Copenhagen part.’
‘Fucking Copenhagen,’ growled Frenkel.
‘And some consciousnesses are more gifted with that solidifying effectiveness than others.’
‘Dora fucking Norman,’ snapped Frenkel. ‘Fuck! Fucking fuck!’
But there is still a broad range of alternative realities co-existing. Universes in which you were blown up and died in Chernobyl — lots of them. The universe in which you survived is a tenuous one, in terms of probability. If the Norman woman had not perceived you as strongly as she did — does — then you’d have died there. And his beard danced and waggled as he spoke: all the long black lines extruded from those little hair-pits on his chin and cheeks and upper lip, all grown out and matted and packed together.
‘You’re very well informed,’ I said. ‘About my life.’
‘We have a good perspective upon it.’ He twirled fingers in his beard again. ‘You can see, our technology gives us access to this realm of — superposition.’
‘That’s the ground on which they’re fucking invading us!’ screeched Frenkel, slobber scattering. ‘This one! This ground! That’s why it’s so hard to, fucking, pin them down.’
I looked over at Frenkel. ‘You ought to calm yourself, Jan.’
‘That’s what I was trying to fucking tell you in that park in Kiev! Look up!’
I looked up. The sky was full of flying saucers, from horizon to horizon. There were alien spacecraft everywhere, and descending directly above our heads was a craft bigger than all the rest: the pupil of a colossal eye, the radial iris spokes of grey and dark green against a dark blue background, a shield-boss kilometres in diameter framing it. The air was shuddered by the thrum of its impossible engines. It might descend inexorably and crush central Moscow — I didn’t know. It was possible I could see clouds through the main body of the thing. I wasn’t sure.
‘[Good gracious,]’ I said, lapsing, for some reason, into English.
‘Fuck!’ yelled Frenkel, spit coming from his mouth in pearls. ‘Fuck! This is the ground they’re invading us over!’
‘This.’ I looked around. ‘It’s more than one reality, it’s the whole sheaf of possible realities?’
‘A good spread of them. As many as we can coalesce. And the bullet that passed through your chest — that’s a very weak reality, when diluted by all the rest. Very weak.’