by Apex Authors
She shook her head, never taking her gaze away from mine. “No, I want to sleep next to you. I don't want to fuck or anything like that, I just want to fall asleep feeling safe.” And then she kissed me full on the mouth; not a quick, we're-just-friends kiss, but one with deeper affection behind it.
"I figured you'd never work up the nerve,” she said, starting back toward her register. “And, yes, I've known how you feel about me for a while now. It's mutual."
My heart should have soared, but I was suddenly terrified that I wouldn't be able to keep her safe from ... whatever it was that was happening.
#
Theirs was a dying world, one that lay far too close to the place where the expanding universe began to contract. For this reason, all of their efforts were directed toward finding another place where their race might be able to sustain itself and, eventually, prosper. It was a time both exciting and frightening to young pupils, and the pupil C'haill-ol-i knew that his destiny lay in the fulfillment of this most important task.
As time passed, C'haill-ol-i achieved high status; not yet a Seeker, but already a Sentient, and he created a Device to search for other life among other stars in other galaxies, unseen but known. The Device passed through the LayerSpace Plane and back as it was programmed, but in the messages it sent were uneven waves that emerged as streaks of clashing colors, mud-gray splotches, even a black spray that swelled and shrank, appeared and vanished. With regret, the Seekers who were C'haill-ol-i's teachers Wished it Undone. The fountain of multihued lights that recorded the Device's existence dimmed and faded. The messages ceased. A second Device, this one much altered by C'haill-ol-i, was dispatched but did not send any messages after its passage through the LayerSpace Plane; instead, a column of blackness marred the fountain of lights. This black column did not waver, nor did it grow—it shifted; first here, then there, moving from point to point without traversing the space between. The black column persisted despite all the Seekers’ efforts to remove it; even after a Seeker Wished it Undone, the column of darkness continued to lash within the fountain of lights.
Seekers were appointed to examine the work, test the equations, study the methods; they could find no flaw, yet the fountain of many colors remained disfigured and hideous, marred by darkness that had become the darkness of ignorance, and then the shadow of fear. “We cannot find the Device,” said one Seeker at the review hearing, in a voice composed of the complex mathematical equations that were the core of their language. “Once it passed through LayerSpace, it was lost to us. We know it still exists somewhere. We know it is seriously flawed, perhaps fatally flawed. It will pass out of the galaxy eventually, and until it does, it poses a problem, perhaps even a threat, to any life form it locates. It does not respond to the self-destruct command. It is beyond our ability to stop it or to correct it. We have tried to no avail."
The Seekers gazed at the marred fountain of light, a pale, sad flicker here and there the only visible reaction among them.
"Sentient C'haill-ol-i,” the Seeker of Seekers said, “the pursuit of knowledge is to our race the highest order of intelligence, second only to love and respect for intelligence itself. You have brought dishonor to this pursuit, and a threat to life. However; in doing so, you have also alerted us to the dangers of unknown hazards that lie beyond LayerSpace. We thought ourselves ready to travel among the stars in search of Absolute Unitary Being, but find instead that we must be resigned to roam no farther than the reaches of our own star system until we have solved the problems your Device has revealed. This knowledge is most precious to us, for we now know that our race is doomed to die here, so we must now concern ourselves with preserving our knowledge and casting it to the stars in hopes some worthy race will discover and interpret its meanings. But there still remains the matter of your failure.
"Because the good you have brought to your own race is overshadowed by the evil that you may have brought to other life forms, it is the decision of this review panel that you must complete the project you have begun. Until the lights of the Device fade, you will monitor them, for however long the Device continues to exist."
C'haill-ol-i's own lights dimmed and flickered. “May I,” he asked in a low voice, “continue to work on the Device in order to try to solve this mystery?"
"Yes, Sentient C'haill-ol-i. That is the only task you will have for as long as we continue to exist."
#
The boy who had been set on fire did not die; to everyone's amazement, his body sustained only first-degree burns. He would be hospitalized for a week or so, but he would be fine. His name was Eugene Oberfield. The boy with whom he'd had the fight, Vincent Martin, had still not been located by the time the 11:00 p.m. news began.
Claire and I sat next to each other on the sofa, holding hands and watching the newscast, hoping for something that would help us make sense of everything.
The television screen showed a tearful little girl, her teacher kneeling by her side with an arm around her shoulder. The little girl was talking to a reporter: “...an’ then Vincent, he was all bloody and crying, he ... he looked up at Gene and his eyes ... Vincent's eyes ... they were red, I swear it, they were red, an’ then Gene, his ... his shirt started to burn an’ the next thing he was all on fire and there was so much noise in my head, it hurt so much...."
Claire picked up the remote and muted the sound after that. “I'm sorry, I can't stand to hear how scared she was—hell, she is probably still scared. All those kids are going to have nightmares about this for the rest of their lives."
Every witness—most of them children—had described something that could only be classified as spontaneous combustion. The local news had spoken with a handful of so-called “experts,” all of whom offered different explanations for how this could have occurred. None of them sounded as if they believed their own words.
"Why do you suppose your friend hasn't called back yet?” said Claire.
I checked the time. “It's only 8:20 in California. He's probably just now checking his personal e-mail."
Once we'd gotten to my house, I'd copied the equations from the page and scanned them into my computer as a jpeg file and sent it to Derek Trial, a friend of mine from college who now taught physics at UCLA. I'd tried to be blasé in my explanation, telling him it was something one of my students had found in an old textbook, and if he had the time, I'd appreciate him letting me know what the hell it all meant so I could put the student's curiosity—and my own—to rest. I'd given him my phone number and told him I'd be up very late, so he shouldn't hesitate to call. I was starting to worry that maybe I'd been too blasé about it and he'd figured it was nothing that needed his immediate attention.
Claire scooted closer to me, slipping her arm through mine and resting her head on my shoulder. She'd showered and changed into a pair of my pajamas, which were far too big for her and made her look ten times as beautiful. “Thanks for letting me stay tonight."
"You're welcome,” I said, kissing the top of her head. She surprised me by turning her face up to mine and giving me a deep, passionate kiss, her tongue slipping briefly into my mouth.
"You're a pretty good kisser,” she said after that.
"I practice a lot when I'm alone."
And for the first time in hours, she laughed, genuinely laughed. “Oh, God, you're a Woody Allen fan, too! Love and Death, right?"
"Right."
She put her head back on my shoulder. “I'm so glad I know you."
"Tell me that the first time you have to help me with my back brace."
"You wear one of those?"
"Not all the time, but every once in a while I have a bad patch and it's the only thing that helps. That, and a lot of Percocet."
"How did you hurt yourself, anyway?"
I told her about the accident, about the months in bed, and about my blackboard sky.
"Do you still have it?"
I nodded. “It's in my bedroom closet. It still has what's left of my guardian angel in the bottom right-hand
corner. I never erased it. I have to touch him up every so often—glow-in-the-dark chalk doesn't last forever."
"Nothing does,” she said, looking back at the television. “Do you think Vincent wrote that himself? Do you think he knew what was going to happen before it did? That he was going to hurt that other boy just by looking at him?"
A slight chill went through me. “I can't help but think of what Sherlock Holmes said. I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something like, ‘When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains—"
"—however improbable, must be the truth,'” said Claire. “Oh, God—you're a Conan Doyle reader, too!"
"Guilty as charged, my dear Watson."
"I'm feeling a little better now."
"Good.” I turned to kiss her again. Just as our lips met, my cell phone began ringing.
Claire's entire body went rigid. “Oh, boy—I bet I know who that is."
I gave her a quick kiss. “Here's where we find out something ... I hope."
"Your lips to God's ear."
I answered the phone. Before I'd even finished saying hello, Derek was practically shouting at me.
"Bull-shit a student of yours found this in an old textbook, Mr. 6th-Grade Science Teacher."
"Great to hear your voice again, as well."
"Sorry, Pat. I didn't mean to raise my voice, but—do you have any idea what this is?"
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"It wasn't an actual question, I was—aw, fuck what I was trying to be. You were always faster with funny comebacks than me."
"Well, I had to practice something between ballet auditions."
"Pat, please—where did you get this?"
"I found it in an old book at a used bookstore. The paper it was written on was pretty old, as well, but it seemed interesting and I figured you were the man to go to."
"The book and paper might have been old, but..."
I felt my back tensing—never a good thing. My back stays tense for too long, it's hello-medieval-torture-brace time. “But what? C'mon, Derek."
"Okay. At first I thought it was just a random assortment of basic sound-wave equations—I mean, the business where the propagation constant b becomes imaginary, and the mode decays rapidly instead of propagating without loss, so the 00-th mode has a cutoff frequency of zero, pretty basic stuff, but the more I examined the patterns—what is it?"
"Uh, nothing, sorry—I took a drink and it went down the wrong way.” Which was the best lie I could come up with to explain the sudden gasp I'd released. Derek had used the exact same words as Vincent had written in the story. “Please, go on."
"Have you ever heard the term ‘entrainment'?"
"No."
He was talking in a rapid, deadly cadence now. “It's been proven that externally-imposed sound vibrations can have a profound influence on human physiology. Say you're sitting in your kitchen trying to balance your checkbook and you begin to notice that your shoulders are hunched up and your back is tighter than normal. Suddenly the refrigerator snaps off and you heave a sigh of relief. Your shoulders drop, your back loosens up, and your whole breathing pattern changes. What do you think just happened? Certain biological rhythms have unconsciously “entrained” themselves to the 60 cycle hum of the refrigerator's motor. External sound vibrations temporarily altered your physiological makeup."
"Okay...?"
"The basic theory of entrainment has been applied in Cymatics and proven to be successful. Sound and vibrational waves can be used to heal the human body."
I was getting dizzy. “That still doesn't tell me what all this means. What the hell did I find?"
"It's a theoretical equation set for the organic production of a very powerful torsional wave. You know what I'm talking about, right?"
"Galloping Gertie,” I replied, looking at Claire with my best I-need-a-little-privacy-but-it's-nothing-personal look, then standing up and walking a few feet away. My legs were wobbly and my back was starting to hurt like hell. “The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, right?"
"You got it. There's no way to test this equation without going back to Hans Jenny's research and cross-referencing its equations with these, and even then you'd probably have to go back to the work in early Cymatics, but ... Jesus, Pat! Even the idea..."
"Tell me one thing, will you?"
"If I can—this is really freaky stuff."
"If—and I mean if—this was more than theoretical, what would we be talking about?"
After a long moment of silence where I swear I could hear his brain cells crashing into one another and creating sparks, Derek said, “We'd be talking about something that would be able to organically employ Cymatics and entrainment to force anyone or anything in its focus to vibrate at its natural frequency and achieve resonance."
"In simpler words...?"
His voice was thin and tense. “You'd have a human being whose sheer will could affect and alter—if not outright destroy—the standing vibrational waves that hold all matter in place."
#
The second Device emerged from the LayerSpace Plane in the star system of a primary with five satellites. One by one it orbited the satellites until it found life. When it completed its examination of the new place, it left behind a trail of destruction, death, and madness. Sentient C'haill-ol-i prayed to the intelligence that ruled all Absolute Unitary Being to destroy it, but the fountain of many lights remained undiminished; the blackness at its heart continued. It had become something evil.
C'haill-ol-i's people launched a life-ship into LayerSpace, one containing records of all their knowledge, all their art, science, philosophy, everything that had made them as they were.
C'haill-ol-i continued to monitor the fountain of lights with the blackness of evil at its core. He knew exactly when the Device emerged from the LayerSpace Plane, and when it reentered, teasing him like a child playing a game. He could not know what it did in the intervals. He no longer saw the multihued lights; all he could see was the blackness, the evil.
C'haill-ol-i often gazed at the glowing heavens, with the three pathways of stars that looked like ribbons, and his own lights beat in harmony with the gently pulsing lights from above. Those nights his shame drove him to renew his efforts to find the evil he had launched, the ugliness he had injected into such beauty. Each time he knew the Device had emerged from LayerSpace he prayed that this time it would be destroyed. In charting the emergence of the Device from LayerSpace, he was also charting planetary systems, more than anyone had imagined, could imagine—no race could explore them all; one might as easily examine every grain of sand on an infinite beach.
But then something changed. The fountain of lights with the unquiet black column was glowing one second, then it flickered, dimmed, and faded. For one millisecond, contact with the Device had been established, only to be lost again. The Seekers turned to C'haill-ol-i for an explanation, only to find him gone, as well.
Now in LayerSpace himself, C'haill-ol-i flared with laughter. Folds, he thought; of course. Space did not fold by itself, one had to fold it; in the brief moment of contact, C'haill-ol-i had folded himself into the Device and brought with him all the knowledge of his race, as well as their genetic codes.
How little it had changed, he marveled, centered in the midst of the ever-rising, ever-falling torrent of light that ranged the spectrum of color. How beautiful it was. How could something this beautiful spread such darkness, such evil? C'haill-ol-i had done his work well, better than he had known. But he had not programmed the Device to be self-repairing, so how...?
He did not know, but the Device had that capability, as well as many others it had either learned, assimilated, or taught itself throughout its journeys. In the Device's sine-wave memories was a dead creature being probed by the photoscan, another creature that walked without grace through the darkness that was the core of its primitive heart, one weighted down with sadness as much as rage. This creature was alive, but tired ... and so alone...
&n
bsp; ...C'haill-ol-i touched the creature, and knew at once...
...The Device...
...The Device had been gathering its own knowledge, sampling genetics from other races, merging them with its own organic structure to create a new being, one descended from C'haill-ol-i's original Device yet very much its own. The evolved Device had learned to create organic life and instill that life with knowledge.
C'haill-ol-i looked beyond and found himself outside the Device, surveying the world it had been probing; a lovely planet, with clouds, seas, obviously with an intelligent life form. C'haill-ol-i knew he could fold space/time again, if he chose, and have enough time to explore the galaxy and still return to learn everything there was to know about this planet, but then the Device sputtered, and there was a mini-nova in C'haill-ol-i's mind, and he knew that the Device had proven itself superior to its creator, perhaps even equal to the Creator of Absolute Unitary Being (thought of as “God” by this new life form the Device had chosen); C'haill-ol-i was now forever trapped within the Device he had created.
And the Device was now in the hands of a human child, a small boy named Vincent, who was tired of being picked on, beaten up, mocked, hungry, and lonely, a boy who was so very, very angry at the world...
#
Slow down,” said Claire, cupping my face in her hands and kissing me hard on the mouth. “There, hold onto that for a moment, okay? I'm not going anywhere, I don't think you're crazy, and I know something's going on here that we can't explain to anyone else and not wind up in straightjackets. So—look at me, Patrick. There you go. Now, I was following you just fine until that tonsorial wave business or whatever—"
"Torsional wave,” I said. “It's a vibrational wave that's not only dispatched vertically, but twists in a wave-like manner, as well. Listen to me, Claire: ‘Galloping Gertie’ was a nickname given by engineers to the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge in Washington State in 1940. They called it that because of its frequent and unusual undulating movement. All bridges vibrate to some extent, but Gertie was unique; motorists who had to cross her every day often compared it trying to drive a car on a roller-coaster track.