Megabride
Now, although in Merkouros’s native plane it would have been ethically out of the question for him to accept simultaneous assignments from both of two adversaries, the issue was not so clear in the fog and filthy air of this somewhat antithetical New York. He did not find it too difficult, in fact, to argue the point that here it might be advisable to accept the retainers offered by both Silver and Pompas. First of all, he was low in funds (given the outrageous rentals in Plane 7), but if he were paid by both, he would be able to function more efficiently in the interests of either. (Even both/either was an allowable logical construct here, he marveled.) In addition, he had to remind himself of his primary loyalty to his supervisor, the Police Commissioner of his native New York, from whom he had accepted the ongoing assignment of helping to track down interdimensional “jumpers” who wreaked havoc upon the very quantum fabric of the multiverse in their desperate and eventually futile efforts to evade the law of Plane 1. He had to maintain himself here by living “on the economy”—of Plane 7, that is—in order to keep himself from becoming the object of local suspicion and investigation and thus raising obstacles to his own efficiency. Although he still occasionally tried to promote interdimensional cooperation with the local police, they tended to regard him as a nut who could perform certain magic tricks (like disappearing), and he found that the image of “harmless nut” actually helped him attract more imaginative types of clients to the investigative agency he set up locally to support himself. It was an incredibly good deal, of course, since his Plane 1 salary was still paid to him (the currency would appear counterfeit in Plane 7), but his wife, whom he returned to visit at three-day intervals, spent most of it anyway and even demanded part of what he earned in Plane 7—until he convinced her that the bills were worthless in the absence of an interdimensional exchange agreement.
A further enticement to him to keep Pompas’s retainer was, of course, the opportunity the case might afford him to resume his “deactivated” relationship with C.K.’s soon-to-be-ex wife, the maddeningly attractive Ida Craig. And hadn’t he already learned all about both/and when he had taken on the first assignment from Pompas—to seek evidence of adultery against his wife? Tracking her at a distance proved agonizing, given the fantasies aroused by her beauty combined with his growing conviction of her even more exciting chastity, which he could logically assume of his own wife in Plane 1 but which contradicted all his prurient expectations of human perversity in Plane 7. So he devised, through a combination of ingenuity and dumb luck, a way to get to know her on an intimate personal level without her ever suspecting his real identity or the circumstance that had brought her to his awareness. One night when she was out he broke into her apartment in the normal way, jimmying the lock with a credit card, rather than resorting to his trump card, transvection, by which he could usually position himself at a place back in Plane 1 whose coordinates corresponded to those of the desired re-entry point in Plane 7, after which he could rematerialize inside any locked apartment, for example, without having passed through the door.
The apartment immediately struck him as familiar because he had fantasized for weeks about her lifestyle, daily surroundings, and even about her most intimate thoughts. Her furnishings were more functional than elegant, there were books everywhere (she perpetually took courses at Columbia in literature and anthropology), and the artwork on the walls tended toward the modernistic. Hanging in the living room was an Escher drawing that looked like a whirling town inside a splitting painting inside a funneling art gallery inside the same whorl of a town, and it would have driven him crazy if he had continued to stare at its impossible configurations. He passed into the room where she evidently studied and kept her papers. He was after some clue to her personal relationships that she might so far have managed to conceal even from eyes as sharp as his. It did not take him long to find precisely the sort of thing he had been hoping for. It sat exposed on her desk, to the right of her typewriter. It was a carbon of a letter placing a notice in the “Personals” section of The Village Voice. “...longs for many-leveled relationship … writer or artist …”
Very well. He’d look up her announcement in the Voice and respond as a writer—yes, a writer of extravagant fantasies—who devoted himself utterly to the depiction of many-leveled relationships, who wished to establish such a relationship in real life, and who at the moment was in the process of writing a novel about a detective from a parallel world, Remus Rook, who was stationed in the New York of Plane 7 to apprehend cross-dimensional criminals called “jumpers,” who etc. etc. ... In this way he succeeded in arranging a meeting with her, and she was so taken with the tales that poured out of his multidimensional imagination (actually a rather matter-of-fact recital of things that happened to him on the job) that he soon wound up in the bed pre-heated by his fantasies glued to the feverish body of this woman whose infidelity he managed to endure only at the price of bowing out of his arrangement with C.K. Pompas. On other grounds, too, he succeeded in hushing the dogs of conscience. The both/andry of this world would hardly be comprehensible to his straight-thinking wife, to whom he avoided telling too many tales of the ways of Plane 7. He, however, had decided that the ambiguities of this dimension ought not to be judged by the certainties of his own. Any contradiction on the moral plane between both/and and either/or was purely illusory. The very existence of the multiverse implied the toleration of irreconcilables, so that your modern interdimensional wayfarer did well to embrace the following metalogical proposition—BOTH both/and AND either/or—where either/or would continue to govern his behavior, but only back home. (Logically, therefore, he should have remained in the pay of C.K. Pompas, but the drag of an other-dimensional upbringing was not that easy to shake off all at once.)
