Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  when did you leave us

  to this solitary pirouette on the head of a spindle,

  a waltz of one hundred years,

  feet twitching like Father’s eldest hunting hound,

  fingers burning into straw, into gold:

  we were the gifts given,

  gaily wrapped packages in reversible paper

  readied for this one or that one.

  (You always said

  twelve strokes weren’t really enough

  but what prince ever believed that?)

  4. Ever After

  Beyond the glass coffin

  beyond the glass hill

  beyond the glass slipper:

  only you and I,

  a shadowy duet of parsimony and elegance.

  How the creeping sundial does sweep us!

  despite raggedy clothes, shoe-loss

  and devious step-parents,

  into the arms

  of a tidy, anticipated future.

  And there we dance, covered

  in feathers and furbelows, bells and bobbles,

  our hands given, as foreordained

  to an endless parade

  of velvet knickerbockered golden-crowned youths,

  the unfolding of an infinite paper princeling chain.

  5. The End

  Time is the mother of invention

  and the sister of theft.

  It is the glass globe of hand-spun conjurings

  on the end of the spindle-shaft,

  dancing in the shadow of the long hand,

  twirling in the lee of the short hand.

  Here, each dance has the fractal precision of chaos,

  whether prince or prisoner, scullery maid or princess,

  each part contains the pattern of the whole:

  wish and desire

  and eventually

  (if you wish)

  (if you desire)

  (if you dare)

  even truth.

  The Writing on the Wall

  by Steve Stanton

  The man in the light cube haunted David Wilson again this morning, this fateful morning, this first morning of the rest of his life. Anna had asked him for a divorce the night before. The man in the light cube always came back at the turning points of his life, a memory so vivid and powerful that it seemed like a recurring event, a memory etched indelibly in the chemical lattice of his mind — the simple reason for his existence.

  “Why do you want a divorce?” he had asked with the transparent innocence of the undefiled. David had arrived home late from work, having spent the evening arguing with a colleague about the effect of temperature variation on the decay of subatomic particles.

  Anna had looked at him with new wonder, sighed with exasperation and shook her head, which had the desired effect of making him feel weak and vaguely vulnerable, a man obviously out of touch with reality. She had done something with her hair, he noted; it was cropped short and layered in a funky mop-top, tinted a fiery auburn. He was sure she had been a brunette the last time he’d seen her.

  “David, honey,” she said, “we haven’t had dinner together in months. Our sex life is little more than archaeological evidence. We have no money, no time and no common interests.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.”

  She had laughed then. “Busy? You’re not busy. You’re possessed.”

  “Possessed,” he echoed, not daring for an inflection of query.

  “By that stupid man in that stupid time machine,” she sputtered.

  He nodded. “So it’s that again, is it?”

  “Yes, David, it’s that again. I have a lawyer this time and I’ve signed a lease on an apartment.”

  “Can’t we have a talk with the pastor first?”

  “Pastor Edward? You haven’t spoken two words to him in ten years. Some of the new people at church think I’m single.”

  “I’m just getting so close on the Equation,” he offered, regretting the words as they died on his lips.

  Her cold stare burned through his retinas into his very soul. “You’re forty years old, David. There is more to life than the Equation. You had a traumatic experience as a child — everybody knows that — but you’ve got to move on sometime. For heaven’s sake, don’t mathematicians ever grow up?”

  The man in the light cube had appeared only once in physical form, for a period of several minutes when eight-year-old David was playing in his suburban bedroom with crayons and picture books. The light cube was no taller than a telephone booth, of ethereal structure and without mechanical artifice, the colour a cool blue with cascading prismatic irregularities. The man inside was David himself — an ancient, wise and powerful David from a fantastic future. The child’s eyes flashed quickly from fear to recognition, then darted down in dutiful abeyance. He carefully picked up a permanent red marker, moved to the blank wall behind him, and began transcribing a river of scientific data in complex numerical notation.

  His mother had not been impressed when she found him alone later in a trancelike, dreamlike state of hyperactivity.

  “David, how many times has your father told you not to write on the walls in your room? He’s going to be very angry when he gets home.” She clutched at herself. “It’s so cold in here. It’s freezing. What is this, mathematics? What are you doing?”

  Mathematics, that was it, the key to the universe. The boy smiled at the realization, as his life’s goal came into sure focus.

  “The man in the light cube told me to do it,” he explained to his mother with confidence.

  Within a week, David was in therapy and the bedroom walls had been repainted. Standard testing earned him ‘gifted’ status, and he was fast-tracked at school and given a special tutor after hours. More rigorous testing labelled him borderline child prodigy in abstract brain function, a stigma his parents wisely decided to leave in the file folder at the psychiatrist’s office. They had enough trouble at home with David’s older brother, Richard, who was taking drugs and listening to rock and roll.

  David’s left eyeball began to wander soon after that, turning outward as though lost and looking for balance. The family doctor, kindly Dr. Saturn, told him he had ‘lazy-eye,’ a congenital problem that was, in his case, somewhat late in development. David’s own study revealed that it was the ‘evil-eye’ that had once been associated with shamans and occult seers in pre-industrial societies, a curse that was linked by legend to acts of healing and prophetic utterance.

  In this enlightened age, the condition was surgically corrected, and David wore a black plastic eye-patch for several months. At school he became widely known as the pirate genius and was shunned by all but the most foolhardy. Good grades and near-perfect memory carried him to matriculation years before his peer group, as he learned quietly the fine art of social dysfunction.

  “You’re home early,” he told Anna as she stumbled in the front foyer carrying a tower of empty cardboard boxes.

  She stopped and eyed him with suspicion. “Didn’t you go to work today?”

  “I thought you’d be proud of me,” he said with false petulance. He was wearing a rumpled grey sweatshirt and blue jeans. He had been moping around the house all day feeling sorry for himself.

  She ignored him. “I came home early to pack before you left the office,” she said as she barged past him toward the bedroom.

  He followed. “I think you’re being unfair,” he said to her back.

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “I know I let you down with the sex thing. I was never very good at it.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. This isn’t about sex.”

  “Are you having an affair?”

  Anna turned to face him, stern and s
lightly incredulous, arms akimbo. “I had the affair years ago, David. You missed it.”

  His viscera contracted as though a fist had landed. He dared not speak. He stared in shock at his wife.

  Anna softened at the look of fright on his face. “It was cheap and pointless,” she offered. “It was a mistake, I guess.” She opened a dresser drawer and began packing socks and underwear into a box.

  David recognized lingerie that had once enticed him and him alone, a valentine’s day present from a decade ago. A hard pain caught in his throat as his testicles sucked up into his abdomen. His wife was right, of course — he had ignored her for years. He was completely devoid of social grace and manners. He was completely self-absorbed and useless as a companion.

  She must have known his shortcomings before they were married. He tried to remember back that far, searching for something meaningful to say to her now. He watched her as she folded his memories into corrugated cardboard. He studied the taper of her shoulder and the fullness of her hips — she was still an attractive woman.

  “Why?” he whispered, wondering how he could ever win her back.

  A flash of anger lit up her face. “Don’t give me that hurt-little-boy look. I know you’ve done the same or worse. No red-blooded male could go that many years without having sex.” She slammed the top drawer shut and pulled out the next lower.

  “Years?”

  “C’mon, spit it out. This is your big chance. What secrets have you been hiding all this time?”

  David struggled with this new marital responsibility. Sexual gratification was not Anna’s issue. Illicit activity was what she wanted, to help justify her own sin. She wanted to share guilt with him, to share blame. She wanted absolution.

  “Well, I had an accident with a nurse,” he admitted shamefully.

  Anna’s eyes popped with possibilities. “A nurse? What, a prostitute?”

  “No, a real nurse … in a doctor’s office.”

  “Good heavens. What did she do?” She pulled a heap of clothes out and stuffed them in the next box, her movements jerky and electric, her body tense with adrenaline, with the promise of confrontation.

  “She was looking for polyps.”

  Anna froze and turned to face him, a beige blouse quivering in her trembling hands, her anxiety like animal skin stretched over a tympanum. “Polyps?”

  David felt his face heat up. “They’re like hemorrhoids.” He winced, feeling embarrassment welling up inside him, remembering the look of professional alarm on the nurse’s face as she quickly mopped up the evidence of his accident.

  Anna wiped saliva from her lips, her eyes wide. “You’re gay?” she asked.

  His brows crumpled forward. “No, of course not … I mean, I don’t think so.” He shrugged his shoulders back and wiggled his neck in an attempt to resume equilibrium.

  “That’s the best you can do?” she shouted. “After fifteen years of marriage? That’s your Big Affair? A proctological exam?”

  David stepped back at the force of her words. He rubbed his forehead, feeling like an idiot. He had never promised adultery. It certainly wasn’t in the marriage contract he had signed. How could things had gotten this bad, he wondered.

  “You’re an idiot, David,” she told him with finality.

  Time travel was simply impossible. Every classical theorist would agree to that. Einstein had ruled it out categorically, and the few contemporary theorists in the field were heretics, idiots or one-eyed pirates. The fact that David had seen his future self was thus somewhat problematic for a mathematical physicist at the prestigious University of Toronto, where, once degrees were handed out, papers published and acclaim granted, David found himself pining away in an obscure research department with minimal funding and a ‘bad-boy’ reputation that made him a public sideshow at official functions. The frank impossibility of time travel was further compounded by the generally accepted Kardian Space-Time Compendium, which inescapably tied travel through time with travel through space. With the Earth hurtling across the universe at 107,000 kilometres per hour, the logistics of re-entry were insurmountable to any known mechanics. Even if some miraculous method could be devised to propel an object to the speed of light and beyond, the time-dilation effect might put the traveller millions of years into the future upon his return. From a financial and budgetary standpoint alone, time-travel research was a lost cause.

  David had tried to reduce his experience to what he knew for sure as a foundation on which to build new science. The man in the light cube had not traveled through time necessarily. He had merely appeared in the past, perhaps not even in corporeal form. He had certainly viewed the past and had attempted to modify it in some way by transmitting complex numerical data.

  Moreover, he had not been observed by anyone other than himself, his past self, and David took this to be significant. If the man in the light cube had chosen to impart scientific information to an earlier age, he would certainly have chosen someone important, someone knowledgeable, someone with the wherewithal to act on vital paradigms. He would not have chosen himself, an eight-year-old boy, unless he was forced to do so by the mathematical rule of law.

  The Hynes-Wilson Equation presupposed, largely for political legitimacy, that travel through space-time was mathematically impossible for living physical entities in the strictest sense. Quantum physics, however, had opened up a playground of ideas that did not rule out the possibility of observation apart from the space-time continuum. The Hynes-Wilson Equation was based on established theories and propositions related to ‘virtual particles,’ wave probabilities that collapse without quantum observation — matter and antimatter particles that appear at random and disappear without measurement. The Equation hypothesized that two separate but connected individuals, a past self and a future self, could witness the same quantum event, at the same point in space-time, simply because, mathematically, they had both always been there as a virtual wave probability.

  The extrapolative formulas further suggested that this process could be induced by increasing the speed of light in a small containment area to produce brief periods of ‘quantum temporal displacement’ in which visual and observational data could be exchanged. Tests of the Equation had been rigorous, and there were substantial theoretical problems being worked on by a team of researchers at U. of T., as well as students around the world on their own limited funding. A simple model of a light cube had been constructed with lasers and subatomic mirrors, but real progress had been slow and difficult. Published papers had been widely spaced and unheralded in academia.

  If the Hynes-Wilson Equation could be established without a doubt, then a new paradigm would hang on that cornerstone and grow as the data allowed, building an edifice of foundational and experimental theory that might change the world for the better — this was David’s ultimate goal. Then the commercial and recreational use of time travel would follow naturally as great minds around the world were harnessed to the new frontier. “For a greater cause,” was the motto of David’s research team — they weren’t just in it for the funding; they really wanted to change the nature of reality.

  Anna knocked at his office door with stiff formality, three knocks evenly spaced. He looked up grimly as she entered. They both knew why she was there.

  She placed the envelope on the desk in front of her husband, and pulled over a chair to sit opposite him. David looked at the plain manila package but didn’t open it. His wife was dressed in a grey business suit, quite severe. He hadn’t seen her in several weeks. She looked good.

  “So that’s it, then,” he said.

  “Do you have a lawyer yet?”

  He glanced away from her eyes. “Fred over at Nanotech recommended someone.” He was wearing a brown sport jacket with a black turtleneck, and he reached up to his chin and tucked a finger under the material, rubbing the day’s growth of stubble at his ne
ck.

  She nodded. “I don’t want this to be messy. It’s not like we have major assets to worry about. The whole thing is a little too clichéd for me already.”

  “Right. I know what you mean…” He swallowed and took his hand away from his throat. “I just never thought it would happen to us.”

  The timeworn statement hung between them for a few moments like a matrimonial archetype, to be contemplated only in retrospect and never fully understood.

  “What if you’re wrong, David? What if there is no possibility of time travel? How many more years will you waste?”

  He bristled at her charge. “I am not wasting years,” he stated evenly. “I know what I saw, Anna. We are making slow progress. If we do not break through, then the next generation will take up our cross.”

  “Well, the metaphor may be appropriate.”

  “You think I have a martyr complex?”

  Anna held up her left hand and turned her face askew. “I didn’t come here to argue. I know you have your grand vision.”

  “Why did you come here, Anna? Aren’t these things usually delivered by bicycle courier?”

  She shifted in her chair and rubbed her skirt down on her thighs. She tossed her short hair. “I came here to apologize.”

  David’s eyes widened, then one eyebrow wrinkled down in query.

  “For the things I said that day … the way I treated you … it was awful.”

  They both sighed together like breathless wind on a desert, remembering.

  “I handled it badly,” he offered. “I was never any good at interpersonal relations.”

  “Must you always be so self-effacing? You’re the most intelligent person I’ve ever met. You should have been charting bubble-net trajectories for CERN instead of chasing this ‘man in the light cube’… And you were great in bed. We had a good life together in those early years.” She looked away, closed her eyes. “But now I’m just excess baggage. You’ll be better off without the distraction.”

  David shook his head, feeling his comfortable life slipping away for the last time. “I think I love you, Anna.”