“Then why did you mention it?”
“Mention what?”
“The other crisis, moral dilemma, problem of the heart.”
“To help you understand. Now that we might soon be back on Falkirk’s radar, we have to keep the key nearby at all times, in case we’re cornered or in some kind of jam. It’s the ultimate method of escape. But at the same time, I have to be sure you won’t ever take it and use it yourself.”
“Go off to some crazy world on my own? Why would I?”
“To find a version of your mother who will love you and come here to live with us.”
?
??I wouldn’t.” She bristled a little, even though she knew the bristling was calculated. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
“You’re far from stupid.”
“Besides, I never disobey you about anything important.”
“No, you don’t. And you wouldn’t mean to disobey. But ‘the heart is deceitful above all things.’”
She felt herself on the verge of tears, which made no sense, unless on some deep level, below her conscious awareness, she had hoped to do just what he warned her against—use the key, by herself, to find a mother she was meant to have—and now mourned the loss of that hope. To fend off the grief that threatened her and to defend her image as being mature beyond her years, she repeated his words with a slight note of mockery, though the sound of her voice dismayed her. “‘The heart is deceitful above all things.’ What’s that mean, anyway?”
“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”
She realized that he had, after all, gone totally adult on her and delivered a gentle lecture. In this case, it concerned something that she’d never thought about, but she knew what he said was true as soon as she heard it.
She also understood that the truth of his advice might not be enough to ensure that she followed it. She could have lived with the emptiness of being without a mother. Once the possibility of finding Michelle became real, however, the emptiness deteriorated into an ache that wanted relief.
Nevertheless, she would try hard to remember that the heart was deceitful. She would make every effort to be smart about the risk associated with the key to everything and respectful of Daddy’s counsel.
When she found herself staring at the device as it lay there on the table, she realized that her father was watching her, that she would promise never to use the key, that he would both believe her and doubt her, that she would be ashamed of the heart’s yearning she couldn’t repress, that he would be aware of her shame and know it was perhaps insufficient to ensure her obedience.
The relationship between a father and daughter was humongously complex, as delicate as it was strong, in some ways as unsettling as it was wonderful.
She could only dimly imagine how complicated, how demanding and fulfilling, would be their relationship when they were not just a family of two, but a family of three, intact.
32
When the owner of the house came home from work and found the dead thing in the upstairs hall, 911 had dispatched officers in answer to her call. The police had phoned John Falkirk, and he had relieved them of jurisdiction.
Constance Yardley, the homeowner, was a fifty-year-old English teacher. Falkirk didn’t like her. She was a throwback to a time when teachers had spines like drill sergeants. She taught in a private school where disciplinarians like her could still crack a kid’s knuckles with a ruler and openly berate a lazy student and even issue failing grades, yet be at no risk of losing her job. He left her in a book-lined study with two of his men. She seemed perceptive enough to understand that her guards were guys who’d grown up taking no shit from anyone and that she was well advised to speak to them in a soft, conciliatory voice.
Blood, brains, splinters of bone, and twists of hair spattered a portion of the upstairs hallway floor, a swath of one wall, and a small part of the ceiling. The bullet entered under the creature’s chin and exited through the high arc of the parietal bone.
Two agents waited at the head of the stairs, but Falkirk was alone with the corpse of the Bestpet. Such creatures were called Bestpets on six of the known worlds where science was more advanced than on Earth Prime and where a corporation, partly with government funding, harnessed the technology to create them. In three other timelines, Bestpets were called Geezenstacks.
Before Edwin Harkenbach had gone rogue, 187 Earths had been visited as part of Project Everett Highways, which was named after Hugh Everett III, the Princeton physicist who first posited the existence of parallel universes in 1957. In addition to Harkenbach, twenty-six men and women had voyaged across the multiverse during the first phase of the project, all of them anthropologists and biologists and their ilk, science types whom Falkirk used like tools but whom he found tedious. One died in an accident. Five were killed in violent encounters on gone-wrong worlds that crawled with hellish horrors. In Falkirk’s estimation, the discoveries they made were worth the lives of a thousand like them. Ten thousand.
They had all worn disguised body cams, so Falkirk had seen Bestpets like the one that had been killed here. The project’s video archives offered uncountable strange sights, some far more hideous than this bioengineered monstrosity, but also others that were exhilarating, inspiring.
The answers to all Earth Prime’s problems were to be found on the infinite other versions of the planet, along Everett Highways. Worlds existed on which civilization was less impressive than here on Prime, but there were others on which science and medicine were more advanced. By harvesting knowledge from the latter, pollution and pestilence and disease could be eliminated.
Better yet, anyone who recovered highly advanced science and technology from parallel timelines and brought it to this one would be richer than any king or oligarch in history.
There were also worlds where cultures and social structures and politics had developed along pathways never followed—in some cases, never even conceived—here on Prime. These alternatives offered ways to effect progressive change, to remake America into a more orderly and more industrious nation, especially when combined with behavior-altering drugs and biological mechanisms that had been developed in those many elsewheres.
Phase one of the project—exploration—should have led to phase two. Exploration would have continued, with new worlds being visited regularly, but the harvesting of valuable science and technology already discovered would also have been pursued.