Chapter 9 Elsewhere #3
“What do you mean?” asks Laurel. Her frustration is mounting—Nita may be the only person who can tell her what she wants to know—and suddenly she’s bartering, spilling details she knows she shouldn’t, telling Nita that Silas is gone and that she’s here to find him.
Nita looks stricken, but she doesn’t take the bait. “I said I’d keep her confidence.”
“Who cares? She isn’t here!”
“A promise is a promise,” Nita says, but she hesitates. “Let me take you to her workstation. You might find something useful there.”
—
Snow beats at the windows. They take an interior route to the science buildings, modular units connected by walkways. In Earth Sciences, people sit at computers under headphones. The carpeting is tired, the lighting fluorescent, and Laurel misses the galley with her whole body.
Nita leads her through a metal door. With its biosafety cabinets and workbenches, the lab could have been plucked from her universe. Laurel feels a modicum of comfort: here, at least, she knows what to expect.
Wheels squeal on linoleum. A man’s head pokes into the center aisle.
“Laurel and Nita.” His body follows on a rolling stool. “Why do I always feel like you’re up to no good?”
The man has square green glasses. His locs are tied back in a ponytail. Laurel is certain she’s seen him before—but where?
“Kwame still hasn’t forgiven us for beating him at shuffleboard,” Nita says.
“It’s like that, huh?” Crossing his arms, Kwame grins. “I’d propose a rematch if Laurel weren’t skipping out on us.”
Nita hops up on an empty bench. “It’s Saturday, Kwame. Why am I not surprised you’re the only one here?”
Kwame shrugs with one shoulder. “Can’t stay away. But I’m going. The Carp Shop is setting up mini golf.”
“You should say goodbye to Laurel,” Nita says. “This might be the last time you see her.”
Kwame sticks out his bottom lip. “We’ll be in touch about the project, obviously. But that won’t be the same as digging through rocks around here.”
Laurel decides on two rules of engagement: to express agreement, and to do so in as few words as possible.
“No,” she echoes.
Kwame stands to tidy his workspace. His purple clogs thunk as he walks to the door. At the sound, Laurel remembers where she saw Kwame’s look-alike: he was the geologist who presented on the fossil forest in the Dry Valleys.
“One last thing,” Kwame says. “Did you get those samples out?”
“Samples,” Laurel repeats. She chooses one of two possible options. “Yes.”
“You rock,” says Kwame. Nita groans. “I’ll be waiting in suspense.”
When the door closes behind him, Nita sighs loudly, and Laurel sinks to the floor.
“I hate lying,” she says.
“Well, you’d better get used to it,” says Nita. “Do you mind if I leave you to look around on your own? I’m supposed to meet Sam for a boondoggle. I’d cancel, but it’s the first time we’ve won the lottery.”
—
Hours later, Laurel walks back to the dorm. Half a day has passed since she saw Eli, and she’s eager to tell him what she learned. She finds him craned over a book.
“Where have you been?” he asks, stretching.
“Investigating,” she says. “The other me was a scientist here.”
She describes the events of that morning: how Nita showed up at the room, and why Laurel decided to be honest.
“What if she tells someone?” asks Eli.
“She won’t. She wouldn’t even explain why the other Laurel and Eli wanted to dive, which would be admirable, I guess, if it weren’t infuriating. But she did take me to the lab.”
It was easy to find the right bench. A garland of toadstools hung from the desk, and a sign bore her own name. Slung over the chair was a canvas tote bag. One side showed two cartoon mushrooms kissing. The other read: Get a Shroom.
In a cabinet above the desk, corked vials waited in rows. The samples inside seemed, at first glance, to be tiny silver rocks—but when Laurel lifted a vial to her face, they looked more like fossilized wood.
Most puzzling of all was a row of petri dishes. Laurel slid one under a microscope. It seemed to contain a combination of fossilized wood and fungi. The fungi appeared to be a wood decomposer, which confused her even more: having already decayed, the fossilized wood couldn’t break down any further.
Eli tilts his head. “At our McMurdo, didn’t someone find a fossil forest in the Dry Valleys?”
“Yeah,” says Laurel, wryly. “I catered the briefing.”
She tells him about meeting Kwame Two. Eli listens closely.
The force of his attention is flattering.
She can see why his colleagues love him, why graduate students vie to be his advisees.
Years ago, Laurel might have resented this glimpse of the person on campus.
Now she simply feels relieved that they’re able to work together.
If this is their relationship’s afterlife, it’s better than the one they had before.
“So both Kwames are geologists,” Eli says. “And they both study fossil forests.”
“Right,” Laurel says, “but here’s where things diverge. In our world, I wondered whether anyone had sampled the forest for spores. I wanted to ask Kwame, but I had to clean up. In this world, I think that the mycologist who sampled them was Laurel.”
Inside the Get a Shroom tote bag, there was a cherry ChapStick, a gold ring with four keys, and a Mead notebook. Except for a subtle slant, the handwriting was identical to hers.
Laurel shows Eli the pie chart on the first page. “These are earth’s atmospheric conditions. Seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen. Up to two percent is water vapor; the rest—less than one percent—is made up of chemicals like argon and carbon dioxide.”
The pie chart is followed by long lists of sample conditions, with varying levels of each element. Certain values have been starred: 30 percent oxygen, 69 percent nitrogen, and three times the planet’s current carbon dioxide.
“I think she wanted to test the plates in all of these conditions. The starred values are probably the ones that she thought were most promising. She combined those in a new pie chart.”
Below it, a note has been scratched:
55F
humidity 90%
Eli hums, a thinking sound. “Could she do these tests here, at the lab?”
“Not with any precision. McMurdo doesn’t have an atmospheric chamber. But guess what does?”
“The Rhizotron?”
Laurel nods. “I’m guessing that’s where she mailed the samples.
Even so, each set of conditions should undergo three trials, and each trial would take about a month.
If you multiply all of those variations, you wind up with over three thousand.
Even if you narrow it down to one thousand, the process would take over a year. ”
“And why did she mix fungi and fossils to begin with?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out. They had even been watered, as if she thought the fossils might…sprout.”
At her tone, Eli laughs. “Let it go for now. You’ve absorbed a lot today.”
“Probably so.” Laurel turns her attention to the book on Eli’s desk. “What’s that?”
He hands it to her. The title reads, Ghost Particle: The Search for a Left-Handed Neutrino.
“No way,” Laurel says.
On the cover is a picture of a curved, darkened observatory. The walls are lined with gold bulbs.
“Super-Kamiokande,” explains Eli. “It’s a neutrino detector in Japan—the most powerful one in the world.”
Laurel turns the book over. The other Eli gazes back from an author photo.
The rest of the back cover is taken up by a Duoverse diagram.
This one, though, is different from the version Eli drew in San Francisco: the antiuniverse is on the top, instead of the bottom, and the arrows move counterclockwise.
“You and he could be the same person,” she says. “So could the Kwames. And both Nitas are marine biologists.”
“You and Laurel Two are both mycologists.”
“At this point, I’m barely a mycologist. And even if I were still doing research, I studied electricity, not fossils.”
She feels oddly hollow. The alignment between Eli and his double only highlights the divergence of the Laurels. In that light, the decisions that led to Silas’s death—her decisions—seem even more misguided, proof that she took the wrong fork.
—
Friday morning dawns clear. From the window, Laurel can see a tangle of downed power lines, but the air is calm.
They plan to spend the day packing. While Eli is in the shower, Nita knocks.
“I brought provisions,” she says. “I figured you might still be avoiding the galley.”
She’s turned a bath caddy into a carrying tray. Inside is a thermos of coffee, a bowl filled with muffins, and sandwiches for lunch and dinner.
“Bless you,” says Laurel.
Nita smiles. “I’m on my way to see Sam; she’s flying out tomorrow, too. But I have one more thing for you.” She retrieves a notecard, folded in half. “This is from Louis. He’s starting to think you’re avoiding him, so I told him you have food poisoning.”
Laurel unfolds the card. Crooked capitals huddle in the center, as if for warmth.
What: last hurrah
Where: the softball field
When: midnight
—
They meet Nita under a streetlamp.
Eli extends a hand. “Well, this is very weird.”
“You know,” says Nita, shaking it, “I think I like you without the beard.”
McMurdo’s softball field skirts the Sound, less a diamond than an imprecise dirt triangle. In periwinkle twilight, Louis sits on the ground. Beside him are a pile of blankets, a container of Oreos, and a thermos with four cups.
“You came!” he says, clapping. “Are you feeling better?”
Nita nudges Laurel, who says, “Much.”
Louis considers them. “You do look a bit wobbly. If you want my opinion, it was the chili.”
The other three sit down. Wind rolls off the water. Laurel and Nita huddle under a blanket.
“Louis, my love,” Nita says, “why are we here?”
“For a tea party,” says Louis.
“We couldn’t have done it indoors?”
“I’m sick of indoors, aren’t you?” asks Louis, pouring tea from the thermos into cups. “I’ve started to loathe my bedroom. Ten years ago, you could put a headset on and find yourself in a cozy living room, with a fire and your boyfriend’s hologram.”