Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods Read Online Free PDF Page B

Plains.
    The news stations loved it, the horses peeking out of the container, sniffing the air. You’ve seen the videos, I know. They take one tentative step, look around, and then gallop full speed into the open, as if they know they have a whole continent to fill with babies. The spyeye sizzles to catch up, as they run for miles across the open plains. A beautiful sight.
    The first successful transfer of living things between universes. I figured humans would be next.
    We had a vet on call around the clock. But we needn’t have worried. The horses were as happy as could be and birthed a foal the next spring. And another one the year after. Concerns of inbreeding were unfounded; the mustangs had clean genomes, no recessives.
    In a decade there were fifty in the herd. By the end of the century there were thousands of horses across North America, in hundreds of herds. A few years after that, the first horse was domesticated by Native Americans.
    We’d brought them maize and horses. I guess we could have dropped rifles in if we had the power to spare, but they would have used them as clubs. We’d done all we could do. If they didn’t fend off the Europeans and the Chinese now . . . well, then they deserved to lose.

    This time we kept tabs on Asia and Europe, but they seemed to be following the same path as they had in our world. Meanwhile in the Americas, empires rose and fell, population burgeoned, technology came and went, and sometimes stuck. The printing press, steam engines, tall sailing ships.
    And then in 1000 CE, instead of waiting for the Europeans to discover them, our North Americans discovered Europe, in a single tall ship that plied the Atlantic in sixty-five days, landing in Bournemouth, England. We cheered and celebrated late into the night at the lab. Dr. Elk had a bottle of champagne which we drank in defiance of University rules; even Kyle had a drink.
    Tipsy, I guided Beth back to my apartment and began removing her pantaloons and poofy shirt.
    “No, Ryan,” she said, as my mouth took her left nipple.
    “Beth.”
    “No. I can’t. Don’t.”
    “You seemed interested enough in whoever you were with on spring break,” I said, regretting it.
    “That’s none of your fucking business!” She pulled her shirt across her chest and fell back onto the couch.
    “I know. Sorry. We never made a commitment, and I’ve just assumed —”
    “Listen, Ryan. I like you. But we can’t have sex.”
    “I have an implant,” I said. “We can’t get pregnant.”
    “I’m not worried about that!”
    “Then what?”
    She looked away, rubbed her face. “I was wild in high school, Ryan. I dated a lot of men. Older men. Men with many past lovers.”
    “Are you still seeing one of them?” I asked, confused.
    “No! Don’t you get it? I can’t —”
    She pulled on her shirt, dug for her pants on the floor.
    “Beth.” I took her hand, but she shook loose.
    Then she was out the door, and gone. I’m slow sometimes, but then I got it. I remembered the tremors in her hands, the palsy in her arm. She had Forschek’s Syndrome. “Oh, shit,” I muttered. And I almost chased after her, and said we could use a condom, that it didn’t matter, but at the same time I knew it did, that she could be days, weeks, or months away from the nerve-degeneration as the prions made there way from her sex organs, up her central nervous system to her brain.
    It wasn’t okay.
    *
    The next day, the entire class met in the MWD lab, and watched as we moved the hole up the line, three months at a time after the trans-Atlantic trip. Beth wasn’t there, and it bothered me enough that I almost ran the spyeye into the rigging of the North American’s ship.
    After trading with the locals and provisioning, the ship turned around and headed back across the Atlantic, but not before taking a few of the English with them.
    “Translators,” Dr. Elk said. “The first step toward understanding. This is most excellent.”
    We watched the ship