Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  You shrug your shoulders, taking your time closing the next-to-last cage and moving on to the last one. He persists in trying to coax you out of your shell. This makes three times this week that he’s stayed at the lab as long as you. And this time it’s going to be harder to get rid of him.

  “I wouldn’t know anybody…” And you barely think to add, “…and I’m not dressed for it.”

  “You’ll be fine. And Richard and I will be there. You won’t get to know anybody if you keep thinking that way.”

  He leans against the wall near the last cage, his arms folded. You can smell his cologne — he always wears cologne — hints of vetiver, orange, and musk. “Dr. Verbrugge,” he speaks more softly, gently, “I know what you’re going through. It was the same for me when I first came here, about ten years ago. Losing everything and starting again from scratch somewhere else. It’s easier when we let other people help us.”

  Yes, you checked his file, just like all the others, at a time when you didn’t know who he would be (a photo that was really not a good likeness, quite a bit younger, with a beard and long hair). The Balkans and their atrocities, another one of those “Never Again’s” that has been repeated since, in a dozen other places — routine. Seventeen years old, Jorge Dayar, with his grandmother and his younger brother, both in very bad shape; they did not survive exile. So what? He works at Cryovital now.

  “I’ve never been very sociable,” you say, closing the last cage. “Some people are like that, you know. They’d rather be left alone.”

  “Exactly what I was saying ten years ago, Dr. Verbrugge. Come on, be honest with me. You’ve been here for what, two months? What do you do for fun?”

  You shrug your shoulders and recite a string of truths that he will not know are also lies: “I watch TV, do sports.” You read, and you regularly check the news on TV and on the net, to know how far things have gone in this world so you won’t be surprised before you’re ready to leave; and the sports you practice at home, shielded from prying ears and eyes, or at least you assume you are — why would they have put your apartment under surveillance? — consist of all the various martial arts you’ve learned over the years; you never know when they might come in handy.

  “Movies? Theatre? Museums?” He shakes his head disapprovingly at your successive negative responses: “Dr. Verbrugge, have you even looked around the city a little?”

  “What for?” you’re tempted to reply. Except for the east-west route to go from your pretty little condo in the east to the Technocity, in the old port, where Cryovital is located, what would be the use of touring a city you already know, or of which you know several versions that are so similar? As long as you could do it on foot, during the fall and the beginning of winter, you never varied your route to work: St. Catherine or Maisonneuve from Montcalm, and then south towards the Technocity. Never along the river, by the “scenic route” of the old converted port facilities. You don’t give a damn about the scenic route. In the Cryovital cafeteria, on the fifth floor of the building, you always turn your back to the bay windows, which face northeast. They’ve told you that it’s a shame, stressing the splendid view there is from there, when the weather is nice, you can even see the Olympic Stadium with its sloping tower and its little hat at the top where the tourists go to snap pictures of the panorama below! You told them you’re acrophobic. You don’t give a damn about the pretty sights, guided tours of the city. You’re not here as a tourist!

  But there’s really no polite way to turn down Jorge’s invitation. Too bad. You have to maintain his good will. And after all, sooner or later, you’ll have to begin.

  You don’t take his car: Branchet doesn’t live far from Cryovital, “and I know you like to walk.” And winter. Never knew winter before beginning the Voyages. In fact, not before the third transition. Or was it the fourth? Anyway, now it’s always winter. Maybe, just once, the Bridge will be far away, at one of the poles of the world, the Arctic or the Antarctic. It would be logical, wouldn’t it? A kind of logic, anyway. You’d like to see nothing but ice floes. No room for human frailty. The cold, the ice, clean, clear, honest, simple. The girls in the lab were horrified when you said that. They can’t know. You hate heat, humidity, stickiness, compromise. You didn’t phrase it that way, of course.

  Not very cold this evening. A beautiful, mild December night. Light but persistent snow has been falling since late afternoon, blanketing the filth of the urban winter, a sparkling diamond powder on the sidewalks where no one has passed for a while. At first, you say nothing. You’ve never known how to walk beside someone, you’re never able to keep the right distance: from time to time your arms, your hands brush.

  Then he starts talking. He doesn’t ask you questions about yourself, not yet. He talks to you about the Branchets, the people who will be there, and about himself, to establish a rapport, to win you over.

  “…I’ve known Richard since I arrived in Canada. He got me hired at Cryovital. He was my thesis supervisor at McGill. He retired to go into private business just when I was finishing my doctorate.”

  “On absolute zero.”

  He chuckled. “And heat absorbers. Yeah. The fabrication of vacuum, sort of. A … weighty subject.”

  “Your choice?”

  He’s not laughing anymore. “Yes. I told myself there wasn’t much chance of there being military spin-offs. At worst, in space — but with the angle I was taking, that was pretty remote.”

  You provoke him, just to see. “You don’t like the military? You wouldn’t be here if the U.N. didn’t have armies.”

  You see a little muscle twitch in his jaw.

  “I don’t owe anything to the U.N. We were living in Srebrenitza. Our parents had sent us to my grandmother’s, my brother and me, before the city was besieged.”

  And the White Helmets — ah, no, they’re blue here — left the town, abandoning it to the butchers.

  “We got here by our own means, all three of us and…”

  He clenches his teeth again, then sighs: “No, I don’t particularly like the military.”

  “And Cryovital?”

  He seems a little surprised: “Cryogenic preservation of transplant organs? Purely medical applications, right?” He smiles a bit sadly: “Don’t take me for a complete idiot. I know very well that there’s no way of predicting how much of it will be used or misused. But a priori, I have nothing against the possibility of saving lives.” A slight pause, then: “Wasn’t that what you were working on with Brangden too?”

  He must think he’s softened you up enough with his confidences. You play along.

  “Yes…”

  He notices the hesitation in your voice, just as he is supposed to: “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But saving lives … you have to ask yourself which lives. Who benefits?”

  He says “Ah,” in a tone that indicates he has already thought about this too. And then adds: “At least the technology will be there. After that, it may be a political question.”

  “Exactly.”

  You walk in silence for a while. He starts talking again, softly: “I was thinking ‘health policy.’ We’re not in South Africa here.”

  You take a deep breath of cold air to keep yourself from answering back. But it’s okay, he’s providing the opening you were looking for. You add, as if reluctantly: “Private American interests also contacted Brangden. Very … discreetly. He was interested, in spite of all his public denials. That is why I decided to leave his team.” A hint of irony, ostensibly to mask excess emotion: “The … events speeded up the process.”

  Another silent pause, then he asks: “Lifeline?”

  He’s not stupid, that’s for sure. But no Egon ever has been.

  “No. A private benefactor. A very old private benefactor.”

  He shakes his head: “Helium cooling is an impro
vement, but as long as the crystallization problem hasn’t been solved, the whole thing is a scam!”

  “Of course…” And now, the hook. “…but we were starting to think about working with magnetic fields.”

  You don’t say any more, letting him follow the chain of inferences. He obviously used the process during his doctorate: molecules and crystals of a small quantity of magnetic salts maintained in a strong magnetic field, you interrupt the field, and molecules and crystals go out of alignment at random, giving off thermal energy to the surroundings and making lower temperatures possible.

  He arrives at the expected conclusion: “But with those intensities, the cancer hazards for humans…”

  “Yes, but maybe the cryo would be homogeneous. And the whole mythology of corpsicles is based on the idea that later, in the future, those problems will have been solved.”

  He makes a little irritated grunt. You continue by pretending to change the subject.

  “In short, this fellow, the old benefactor, contacted Brangden to offer him a bridge of gold.” You smile to yourself — you always find that expression amusing. And you hammer the point home in order to trigger his potential paranoia — something tells you you won’t have to hit very hard: “I don’t know how he got wind of what we were planning to do. We were very, very far from publishing. There must have been a mole in the lab.” Then, pretending to find the idea amusing: “Poor old guy! Maybe he has spies in all the labs that do this kind of research!” And finally you look gloomy again with a sigh: “Him, or somebody else.”

  He sighs too. You commune in silence for a moment in the minuscule rustling of the snow, advancing on the pure white carpet — no longer immaculate behind you, but the flakes continue to fall, more urgently now, and they will erase your tracks. Lots of outdoor Christmas decorations on this street, garlands of electric lights, Santa Clauses, and even, on one roof, a sleigh with reindeer. The recurring adjective in all the magazines is “enchanting,” but you find it all rather grotesque. Tawdry social reflexes reactivated on fixed dates by the market. The human animal is infinitely conditionable.

  “The cryo would be homogeneous,” he suddenly whispers. “The magnetic properties of the hemoglobin would help further with the cooling. And just for the organs, the irradiation exposure would be limited…”

  He’s not thinking about you anymore. Quite normal. His little brother would have survived, if he had been higher up the waiting list for heart transplants.

  I am in the compartment. I look at the buttons that control departure. Here, there are two. Red. Green. I hear his voice. Why do I still hear his voice? I shouldn’t be hearing his voice. There’s still time, Kathryn. I press a button. Green. The gas fills the compartment.

  “I’ll be frank with you, Kathryn. We don’t think you’re ready to leave.”

  In his desire to convince you, Tannden leans his long, thin face towards you, fingers intertwined on the desk as if to keep them from waving around. “We have only your interest at heart, you know that. And we know that once you’ve left, you’ll be completely on your own. And that’s just it. We would like to be sure you possess all the necessary resources.”

  You are very calm. It’s not as if you hadn’t expected it. “I got excellent marks on all the theoretical and practical courses. And I thought I had completed the training to the entire satisfaction of the supervisors, including for absolute memory. No one ever told me there were other requirements.”

  Tannden sighs. “There aren’t really in what we are thinking of. But…” He lays a hand on the file folder in front of him. “Doctor Farlane’s report notes persistent psychological problems, and…”

  You relax inside. Even Farlane couldn’t have recommended making you wait until the nightmares stopped; it’s a last stand, as they say: as a matter of form. You nod with a smile that is just indulgent enough — you know how to handle Tannden: he has “persistent psychological problems” himself. He has always doubted the validity of the whole undertaking — which is what got him his position, since that makes him careful in the selection of candidates; but this also makes him easy to manipulate, because this doubt sometimes contaminates the validity, the legitimacy, of his decisions.

  “Yes, I still have nightmares once in a while. Wouldn’t you if you were me?”

  He sighs without answering — what could he say? He has his own nightmares, you accessed his file: Voyagers lost, helpless, butchered, even though all Voyagers are “lost,” even though they are all “helpless” at least in the instants that follow their awakening, and even though there are some who are in fact butchered then or later, but he doesn’t know and will never know anything, he can never know anything, can’t do anything about it, he can only imagine it, and that is the stuff of his nightmares: his own helplessness. Too much of a Father Complex in these Centres — an occupational hazard, obviously. They can’t scatter their Voyagers on the winds of the universes without gnawing their fingernails. Unbearable loss of control, isn’t it? But that’s the way it is, and they know it very well and they’re going to let you go, because, in the end, in spite of all their profiles, all their questionnaires, all their tests and interviews, they can never be absolutely certain whether or not a candidate is ready.

  And because they don’t know either that you went through another Centre before arriving at theirs, that you’re on your second transition and not your first, and that your nightmares date back two universes.

  The officials in the first Centre (they were called “monitors” there, not “supervisors,” but it’s all the same) knew: you arrived there directly from Egon, inside their very own sphere — a rare occurrence, they told you later, but there were a few cases in their archives. No time for you to recover; you were in shock, you spilled everything right away. They may not have let you leave again, or not for a very, very long time, but you didn’t wait to find out. As soon as you understood what it was, this machine they called “the Bridge,” the cold transition that opens, for Voyagers, doors to other universes, as soon as you were able to slip into the departure room, you barricaded yourself in, you activated the sequence of processes, and you left. Absolutely not “ready” according to their criteria, nor even according to the criteria of this second Centre, which was less advanced in its handling of Voyagers and their preparation. But you managed not to get yourself killed, not to get lost searching for another Bridge in the new world you fell into — since they had guaranteed you there was always a Bridge, or its equivalent, or its possibility.

  And thus, because, on the strength of this experience he is unaware of, you exude a pleasant assurance in the face of his chronic uncertainty, and because he has no objective reason to refuse, Tannden sighs, opens his hands. But in order to delay his capitulation a little longer, he asks: “But why do you want to leave again so quickly? You’ve barely spent a year and a half with us.”

  Barely! You remain carefully impassive. You know what’s coming next. The tourist question.

  “Don’t you want to look around, explore? Aren’t you just a little curious?”

  You don’t shrug. You’re still smiling at him, the same slightly indulgent, slightly knowing smile. You could tell him that the more universes you put between you and your own, the better you’ll feel. But that would be a little too revealing. So you tell him what he will find plausible: “I would really prefer to go somewhere else.”

  You already guess that you will say this often.

  When you come out of Place Ville-Marie, you can tell by the sound that the evening traffic is still almost completely blocked on the four lanes of the Main. Rush hour is over though. As soon as you realized, as you headed home by your usual route, that the traffic wasn’t about to become unjammed, you got off the bus to take Maisonneuve, and escape — relatively, that street was beginning to clog up too — the stench of all that exhaust from idling engines; since the beginning of the day, the cit
y has been blanketed by a temperature inversion, and pollution levels are already high. And then, since you wanted to test the guy who is following you again, who got off the bus at the same time as you and several other passengers, you plunged into the underground labyrinth that snakes under downtown.

  Every once in a while, an impatient driver leans on his horn, and, like children in nurseries, who cry contagiously, this is followed by a brief chorus of honking, which ends just as abruptly. They must know what is going on though, in their mobile tin cans, from the radio. Neither a bombing or a police operation, in any case, or even an ordinary fire: you would have heard the fire sirens, the sound carries a long way in the city.

  A little curious nevertheless, you head down University Street to get closer to the Main. And then you understand. In spite of the bitter cold, a crowd has gathered in front of the CBC building, and spilled over onto the street. The domelights of the police cars guarding the building have been activated, and the police officers too — you can hear the megaphones ordering the crowd to disperse — but without any perceptible effect. You cross between cars to join the crowd. Your unshakeable tail won’t be surprised if you go and check it out, will he?

  On the big liquid crystal panel on the second floor, which normally at this time shows news images, the usual talking head is not in evidence, and the text streaming across the bottom of the screen has nothing to do with the usual hodgepodge of events and non-events, all smoothed over by the same elliptical phrases. Instead there is the huge — and maskless — face of the young leader of Tsunami, one of the Japanese terrorist groups that have been making waves lately. He is exhorting the enslaved populations of neocapitalist globalization to revolt, if not they will perish with their masters in an ocean of flame and blood, etc., etc. English audio, with French subtitles below, an impressive technical achievement. Apparently, according to the rather admiring comments exchanged between two teenage boys in front of you, Tsunami has managed to take over the entire satellite network. And has a good grip on it too, since it’s lasted for at least ten minutes and no one has been able to eject them yet, nice job, do you think they have Spanish subtitles, the boys wonder, for the west coast of the United States?