concept of “different realities” in our world is easy to accept in the sense that Markham experiences it in contrasting California with England in 1998 (Chapter 15). The concept is still not difficult when applied to an individual. Gordon works at trying to identify “the real Penny” in view of different facets of her personality that seem irreconcilable to him: her right-wing politics, her absorption in the arts, her casual sexual sophistication (Chapter 19). Most readers of science fiction won’t be surprised by the fact that Timescape’s two beautifully detailed worlds seem equally real, though its 1962 world is “fact” (true to our history) and its 1998 world is “fiction” (imaginative projection). It should be only a step, then, to the reader’s acceptance of a third reality, the 1974 of the final chapter. It’s a dizzying step, since this is not our historical 1974, but if we don’t blink at the idea of two Anglo-Saxon cultures seen as different worlds, if apparently irreconcilable characteristics in the same person seem quite ordinary, and if even the apparently different orders of reality of history and fiction appear equivalent, why should we balk at a scientific conception of distinct but equivalent realities?
The concept of subuniverses or microuniverses is couched in scientific terms and mirrored in the narration of characters’ personal stories, most notably Gordon Bernstein’s. There is a gap in his story between 1963 and the concluding chapter in 1974. The early part of the chapter contains a couple of references to Penny, including the information that they married in 1964. We know that Gordon is expecting “the wife” to join him, but when she appears, she turns out to be someone else entirely: Marsha, of whom we know nothing. The reader wonders, is this an indication of an alternate reality—like the one in which JFK survives? But no; Gordon and Penny have simply divorced, and he has married Marsha—a kind of alternate reality in human terms. Penny’s attractions were always clear, and the reader may have hoped that she and Gordon would live happily ever after, but in fact Gordon was frequently on edge around her. Now he is revitalized by Marsha’s exuberance; he relishes her humor, basks in her loyalty. We are bound to ask why Benford springs this new pairing and the dissolution of the old on us so suddenly. Friction between Gordon and Penny continued, we are told, so they were divorced. Of Marsha, Benford says only: “a year later he met Marsha Gould from the Bronx. Marsha, short and dusky, and some inevitable paradigm had come home.” This inevitable paradigm, Gordon’s own subuniverse, the New York Jewish world to which he and Marsha both belong, to which Penny is alien. There is nothing wrong or unreal about Penny; she just is not part of Gordon’s world.
The subjectivity of human truths, and the consequent degree of choice in determining one’s reality, is clear in the characters’ lives. In the end, Gordon gives up on life with Penny and chooses life with Marsha. In the end, John Renfrew stops struggling with cosmic time and the secrets of the universe and goes home to his family. Not in despair: his equipment has picked up a tachyonic message from the year 2349, which gives him some hope for a future. Dedicated scientist though he is, under great stress he chooses his subuniverse, his domestic reality, over the reality of the awesome and mysterious vastness of the universe.
Most interesting of all is the “ending” of Greg Markham’s story. He has no time for a final selection of a personal subuniverse as he is killed suddenly in a plane crash caused by the 1998 environmental disaster. However, he reappears as a younger self in the alternate 1974 of the final chapter, a self that is not destined to die in the plane crash. Markham’s double fate reinforces the concept of multiple realities—scientific rather than subjective ones. His death in 1998 occurs precisely at the moment when he makes the metaphysical leap beyond current physics theory to multiple universes. He is pondering the mathematical equations that describe tachyons in spacetime as a probability wave in quantum mechanical terms. The paradox is expressed as a standing wave pattern; the question is how to resolve it. What collapses the wave function into some particular physical state? In quantum mechanics the probability of one or another state is known, but precisely what determines the actual state of a particle is not. “The old quantum theorists, from Heisenberg and