Untitled

and on rare occasions there are five, the fifth a very old mortal man, but there are almost
always three. Two of you narrows it down anyway, quite a lot, makes it easier, but it’s
not what I’d expected, not what was most likely.”
“You know who we are, of course,” Marla said. “And I think we know what you are.
The Possible Witch, yes?”
“I stand at the center of things,” she said. “Though I don’t just stand. I orbit, I oscillate,
I vibrate. Every possible world passes through my sight. Some are more possible than
others. Sometimes I’m dead. Mostly, these days, I’m dead. That’s why it took me so
long to find you. There are so many possible worlds, and locking in on one in particular
is hard, when I exist in so few of them now. But here I am. And it’s the two of you
who’ve come, and it’s now, at this particular time, that you’ve come. Which means
you’re not trying to undo damage, but prevent it.”
Marla nodded. “We need to stop Mutex. We need to know where he’ll be tomorrow,
when I’ll be in a position to stop him.” Assuming Ch’ang Hao came through with the
snake anyway. Ch’ang Hao was clearly the fourth one that the Possible Witch had
mentioned, but she had no idea who the “very old mortal man” was. Probably a
potential ally who’d died before Marla even met him.
“But you don’t want to know if you’ll stop him?” The witch’s inhuman eyes glittered.
“Of course I do, if you know that,” Marla said.
“Too close to call,” she said promptly. “I see just as many paths one way as the other.
Everything branches, you know. Every decision, every option. The universe doesn’t
make choices. It does everything, even very unlikely things, somewhere. There are some
unlikely places in the universe. In this branch, in this world, it could go either way. You
might win, you might lose. Doesn’t much matter, really. Lose here, win somewhere
else. So why worry? That’s what I tell everyone who comes to see me, which is lots of
people, when you take into account all the different worlds.”
“It matters to me,” Marla said firmly. Many-worlds theory was as irrelevant to her as
Dalton’s prattling about the world being a computer simulation. Maybe it was true—
standing here, she had to believe that many-worlds theory was true, that a new universe
budded for every decision that was made, from the atomic level on up. But she lived in
one world, and that was what mattered. Anything else was irrelevant for any purpose
apart from after-dinner philosophizing.
“Yes, I know. Narrow is the vision.” The witch was grumpy, Marla thought, but that
was reasonable, since she was mostly dead. “I can’t tell you anything for sure. The
present is finite-but-vast, the future finite-but-even-more-vast. The future is approaching
the infinite, actually, almost, if that statement has any relevance, which is arguable.
Still, I can narrow it down, narrow to the marrow, yes, I can. There are two of you.
Finch is dead? Umbaldo? Dalton?”
Marla nodded.
“Narrowing down,” the witch muttered. “Bethany?”