Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The flare! The solar flare!” And then, “What are you talking about?”

  “Cixin’s missing. He ran away.”

  “Shit!” And then, very rapidly, “Listen, Ben, another solar flare’s been detected, a huge one, I mean really huge. Word just came down from the Hinode. It’s bigger than the 1859 superflare and that one—just listen. There’s an associated proton storm and nobody knows exactly when it will hit but the one in 2005 accelerated to almost a third of light speed. Best estimate is twenty minutes. There’s going to be fires and power outages and communication disruptions but also proton storms that have biological consequences to living tissue that—you can’t go down to the beach to look for him now!”

  “I’ve already been. He’s not there.”

  “Then where—”

  “I don’t know!” Ben shouted. “But I’ve got to look!”

  “Where?” she asked, and her practicality only enraged him more.

  “I don’t know! But he’s out there alone and if there are fires—” The phone went dead.

  He stood holding it, this dead and useless piece of technology, listening to the sirens start outside and mount to a frenzied wail. Where could Cixin have gone? Ben knew no place else to look, no place else that Cixin ever went. Although he had liked that V-R arcade Ben had once taken him to . . .

  He tore out of the apartment, raced down the stairs, and stopped, frozen.

  In the bright sunlight, lights were going out. Traffic lights, the neon window sign at Rosella’s Café. They sparked in a glowing electrical arc and went dead. Smoke poured from the windows of a gas station a block over. People stopped, stared, and turned to their cell phones. Ben saw their faces when they realized the cells were all dead.

  The sirens grew louder, then all at once stopped.

  “What is it?” a young Hispanic woman asked him, clutching his arm. She wore shorts and a green halter top and she wheeled a pram with a fat, gurgling baby.

  Ben shook off her hand. “A solar flare, get inside and stay away from windows and appliances!” She let out a great cry of horrified non-understanding but he was already gone, running the several blocks to the V-R arcade.

  It took him ten minutes. Cixin wasn’t there. The doors yawned crazily open, and a machines in one of the cubicles had shorted and begun to burn.

  The city couldn’t survive this. The country couldn’t survive this. Panic, no communications, fires, the grid gone . . . and the radiation of a proton storm. Ten more minutes.

  He found a corner of the arcade farthest from the booths, near the refreshment counter, and crawled under the largest table. It wouldn’t help, of course, and it didn’t make him feel better. But it was all he could do: wait for the beginning of the end under a wooden picnic table whose underside was stuck with wads of gum from children that might or might not be alive by tomorrow.

  Eleven: Cixin

  Cixin.

  “I’m here,” he said aloud, to the empty pizza boxes in the Dumpster. That was kind of funny because the voices didn’t speak out loud; they didn’t really have words at all. Just a feeling inside his head, and the feeling was him, Cixin. And then a picture:

  The whole world, out in space, but covered with such a big gray fog that he couldn’t even see the planet. But Cixin knew it was under the fog, and knew too that the voices hadn’t known it. Not before. But now they did, because they knew Cixin was here. He was them and they were him and both were everything. It was all the way it should be, and he was calm and safe—he would always be safe now.

  Hi, he said and it might have been out loud or not, it was all the same thing.

  Twelve: Ben

  No other V-R booth shorted and caught fire, although the first one was still smoking. Ben crawled out from under the table. He’d been there half an hour—how long did a proton storm last? He had no idea.

  In his pocket, his cell rang.

  Ben pulled it out and stared at it incredulously. How . . . After a moment he had the wits to answer.

  “Ben! Are you all right?”

  Renata. “Yes. No. I don’t know, I didn’t find Cixin . . . How come this thing works?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded bewildered. “Mine came on, so I called you . . . Some communications are back. Not where the grid is out or the satellites destroyed, of course, but the radio stations that didn’t get hit are coming through clear now and—it isn’t possible!”

  For the first and only time ever, he heard hysteria in her voice. In Renata’s voice. “The solar radiation. It . . . it isn’t reaching Earth anymore.”

  “It missed us?”

  “No! I mean, yes, apparently . . . before the Hinode burned out, it—that’s the Japanese spacecraft designed especially to monitor the sun, I told you about it—the data shows—the coronal mass ejection—”

  “Renata, you’re not making sense.” Perversely, her panic steadied him. “Where are you?”

  “I’m home. I have a radio. I’m not—it isn’t—”

  “Stay there. I’ll get to you somehow. How much of the city is on fire?”

  “Not enough!” she cried, which made no sense. “Did you find Cixin?”

  “No.” He’d told her that already. Pain scorched his heart. “Stay where you are. I’ll call the cops about Cixin and then come.”

  “You won’t get through to the police,” she said, her voice still high with that un-Renata-like hysteria.

  “I know,” he said.

  It took him over an hour to walk to her place. He kept trying the cops on his cell until the battery went dead. He skirted fires, looting, police cars, crying people in knots on the sidewalk, but Renata was right: This was not enough damage compared to what he had seen starting in the first few minutes of the solar storm. What the fuck had happened?

  “It was deflected,” Renata said when he finally got to her apartment. She’d calmed down. The power was off but bright sunlight poured into the window; the battery-powered radio was turned to the federal emergency station; beside the radio lay a gun that Ben had no idea Renata even owned. He stared at the gun while she said, “Cixin?”

  “Still no idea.”

  She locked the door and put her arms around him. “You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s nothing, a fuss with some homeless guy that—what does the radio say?”

  “Not much.” She let him go and turned the volume lower. “The satellites are mostly knocked out, but not all because a few were in high orbit nightside and didn’t get here until it . . . stopped.”

  “What stopped?”

  “All of it,” she said simply. “The radiation, including the proton storm, just curved around the Van Allen Belt and was deflected off into space.”

  He was no physicist. “That’s good, right? Isn’t that what the Van Allen is supposed to do? Only . . . only why did the radiation start for a while and then stop?”

  “Bingo.” Abruptly she sat down hard on the sofa. Ben joined her, surprised at how much his legs hurt. “What happened can’t happen, Ben. Radiation just doesn’t deflect that way by itself. And the magnetic fields contained in the coronal mass ejection were not only really intense, they were in direct opposition with Earth’s magnetic field. We should have take a hit like . . . like nothing ever before. Far, far worse than the superstorm of 1859. And we didn’t. In fact, protons should still be entering the atmosphere. And they aren’t.”

  He tried to understand, despite the anxiety swamping him for Cixin. “Why isn’t that all happening?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Well, what does the radio say?”

  She flung out her hands. “Unknown quantum forces. Angels. Aliens. God. Secret government shields. Don’t you understand . . . nobody knows. This just can’t be happening.”

  But it was. Ben said wearily, “Where do you think I should look next for Cixin?”

  They found him two days later. It took that long for basic city services to begin to resum
e and for anyone to approach the Dumpster. Cixin was catatonic, dehydrated, bitten by rats. He was taken to the overburdened hospital. Ben was called when a nurse discovered Cixin’s name and phone number sewn into the waistband of his jeans—Renata’s idea. He found Cixin rigid on a gurney parked in a hallway jammed with more patients. He had an IV, a catheter, and multiple bandages. His eyes were empty.

  Ben put the inhibitor on Cixin’s tongue. Slowly Cixin woke up, his dark eyes over sunken cheeks turning reproachful. Ben yelled for a doctor, but no one came.

  “Cixin.”

  “They . . . didn’t . . . know,” he croaked.

  “It’s okay, buddy, I’m here now, it’s okay . . . Who didn’t know what?”

  But painfully Cixin turned his face to the wall and would say no more.

  The staff wanted to do a psych evaluation. Ben argued. They turned stubborn. Eventually he said they could get a court order if they wanted to but for right now he was taking his boy home as soon as the treatment for dehydration was completed. The harassed hospital official said several harsh things and promised legal action. A day later Ben signed out Cixin AMA, against medical advice, and drove him home through streets returning to normal much faster than anyone had thought possible.

  There was a dreary familiarity to the scene: Cixin asleep in his room, Ben and Renata with drinks in the living room, talking about him. How many times in the last few months had they done this? How many more to come?

  Renata had just come from the small bedroom. She’d asked to talk to Cixin alone. “He won’t tell you anything,” Ben had warned, but she’d gone in anyway. Now she sat, pale and purse-lipped, on Ben’s sofa, holding her drink as if it were an alien object.

  “Did he tell you anything?” Ben said tiredly. He stood by the window, facing her.

  “Yes. No. Just what he told you—‘They didn’t know’ and ‘Let me go back.’ Plus one other thing.”

  “What?” Jealousy, perverse and ridiculous, prodded him: Cixin had talked more freely to her than to him.

  “He said there was a big explosion, a long time ago.”

  “A big explosion?”

  “A long time ago.”

  That hardly seemed useful. Ben said, “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t.”

  Renata hesitated. “Ben . . . do you remember when we met? At Grogan’s?”

  “Yes, of course—why wouldn’t I? Why bring that up now?”

  “I was correcting papers, remember? My students were supposed to answer questions about Wheeler’s two-slit experiments.”

  Ben stared at her. She was very pale and her expression was strange, both hesitant and wide-eyed, completely unlike Renata. “I remember,” he said. “So?”

  “The original 1927 two-slit experiment showed that a photon could be seen as both a wave and a particle that—”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence,” Ben snapped, and wondered at whom his nasty tone was aimed. He tried again. “Of course I know that. And your students were writing about Wheeler’s demonstration that observation determines the outcome of which one a photon registers as.”

  “The presence or absence of observation also determines the results of a whole slew of other physics experiments,” she said. “All right, you know all that. But why?”

  “Feynman’s probability wave equations—”

  “Explain exactly nothing! They describe the phenomenon, they quantify it, but they don’t explain why observation, which essentially means human consciousness, should be so woven into the very fabric of the universe at its most basic level. Until humans observe anything fundamental, in a very real sense it doesn’t exist. It’s only a smear of unresolved probability. So why does consciousness give form to the entire universe?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I don’t know either. But I think Cixin does.”

  Ben stared at her.

  Renata looked down at the drink in her hand. Her shoulders trembled. “The explosion Cixin said he saw in his mind—he said, ‘It made everything.’ I think he was talking about the Big Bang. I think he feels a presence of some kind when he’s in his catatonic state. That whatever genemods he has, they’ve somehow opened up parts of his mind that in the rest of us are closed.”

  Ben put his glass down carefully on the coffee table and sat beside her on the sofa. “Renata, he does feel a presence. He’s experiencing decreased blood flow in the posterior superior parietal lobes, which define body borders. He loses those borders when he goes into his trance. And very rapid firing in the tempoparietal region can lead to the sense of an ‘other’ or presence in the brain. Cixin’s consciousness gets caught in neural feedback loops in both those areas—which are, incidentally, the same areas of the brain that SPECT images highlight in Buddhist monks who are meditating. What Cixin feels is real to him—but that doesn’t make it real in the cosmos. Doesn’t make it a . . . a . . .”

  “Overmind,” she said. “Cosmic consciousness. I don’t know what to call it. But I think it’s there, and I think it’s woven into the universe at some deeply fundamental level, and I think Cixin was accidentally given a heightened ability to be in contact with it.”

  Ben said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything. Just think about it. I’m going home now, Ben. I can’t take anymore tonight.”

  Neither could he. He was flabbergasted, dismayed, even horrified by what she’d said. How could she believe such mystical bullshit? He didn’t know who she was anymore.

  It wasn’t until hours later that, unable to sleep, he realized that Renata also thought her “cosmic consciousness” had diverted the solar flare radiation away from Earth in order to protect Cixin.

  Thirteen: Cixin

  Cixin sat in his bedroom, cross-legged on the bed. His iPod lay beside him, but he wasn’t listening to it, hadn’t listened to it for the past week. Nor had he gone to school, played video games, or sent email to Xiao. He was just waiting.

  Xiao—he would miss her. Ben had been very good to him, and so had Renata, but he knew he wouldn’t miss them. That was bad, maybe, but it was true.

  Maybe Xiao would come one day, too. After all, if the voices were everything, and they were him, then they should be Xiao, too, right? But Xiao couldn’t hear them. Ben couldn’t hear them. Renata couldn’t hear them. Only Cixin could, and probably not until tomorrow. And this time . . .

  The nurse hired to watch him while he was “sick” looked up from her magazine, smiled, and turned another page. Cixin didn’t hate her. He was surprised he didn’t hate her, but she couldn’t help being stupid. Anymore than Ben could help it, or Renata, or Xiao. They didn’t know.

  Cixin knew.

  And when he felt the calm steal over him, felt himself expand outward, he knew the voices would be early and that was so good!

  Cixin.

  Yes, he said, but only inside his mind, where the nurse couldn’t hear.

  Come.

  Yes, he thought, because that was right, that was where he belonged. With the voices. But there was something to do first.

  He made a picture in his mind, the same picture he’d seen once before, the whole Earth wrapped in a gray fog. He made the sun shining brightly, and a ray gun shooting from the sun to the Earth, the way Renata had described it to him. The picture said POW!! Like a video game. Then he made the ray gun go away.

  Yes, formed in his mind. We’ll watch over them.

  Cixin sighed happily. Then he became everything and went home, to where he knew, beyond any need to race around or yell at people or be fen noon nan hi, who he really was.

  He never heard the nurse cry out.

  Fourteen: Ben

  She came to him through the bright sunshine, hurrying down the cement path, her dirty blond curls hidden by a black hat. The black dress made her look out of place. This was Southern California; people wore black only for gala parties, not for funerals. But Renata, his numb and weary mind irrelevantly remembered, came originally from Ohio.
r />   Ben turned his back on her.

  She wasn’t fooled. Somehow she knew that he hadn’t turned away from not wanting her there, but from wanting her there too much. No one else stood beside the grave. Ben hadn’t told his family about Cixin’s death, and he’d discouraged his few friends from attending. And they, bewildered to learn only after the death that anti-social Ben had been adopting a child, nodded and murmured empty consolations. And then, of course, there were the sunspots. A second coronal mass ejection had occurred just yesterday, and everyone was jumpy.

  “Ben, I just heard and I’m so sorry,” Renata said. From her, the words didn’t sound so empty. Her eyes held tears, and the hand she put on his arm held a tenderness he badly needed but wouldn’t allow himself to take.

  “Thank you,” he said stiffly. If she even alluded to all that other nonsense . . . . And of course, being Renata, she did. “I know you loved him. And you did the best you could for him—I know that, too. But maybe he’s where he wanted to be.”

  “Can it, Renata.”

  “All right. Will you come have coffee with me now?”

  He looked down. So small a coffin. Two cemetery employees waited, trying not to look impatient, to lower the coffin into its hole, cover it up, and get back inside. To their eyes, this was a non-funeral: no mourners, no minister or priest or rabbi, only this one dour man reading from a book that wasn’t even holy.

  “Please,” Renata said. “You shouldn’t stay here, love.”

  He let himself be led away. Behind him the men began to work with feverish speed.

  “They’re afraid,” he said. “Idiots.”

  “Not everybody can understand science, Ben.” Then, shockingly, she laughed. He knew why, but she clapped one hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Forget it.”

  Not everybody could understand science, no. In Ben’s experience, almost nobody even tried. Half the population still equated evolution with the devil. But the president had made a speech on TV last night and another one this morning: The new solar flare presents no danger. There will be no repeat of last week’s crisis. The radiation is not reaching Earth. Wisely, she had not tried to say why the radiation was not reaching Earth. Nor why the astronauts on Hope of Heaven, the Chinese space shuttle, had not been fried in orbit. No danger was as far as the president could go. It was already like crossing into Wonderland.