by Greg Bear
Paulsen-Fuchs nodded without really comprehending and leaned back in the chair with his cup. “It was difficult getting here,” he said. “More even than I expected.”
“The rules have changed,” Gogarty said.
“That seems to be the consensus. But why, and hi what fashion?”
“You look tired,” Gogarty said. “Tonight, let’s just relax, enjoy the warmth, not stretch our minds beyond reading the letter a few more times.”
Paulsen-Fuchs nodded and laid his head back, closing his eyes. “Yes,” he murmured. “Much harder than I thought”
The snow had stopped by sunrise. Daylight returned the fields and banks to unassuming whiteness. The black snow clouds had dissipated into harmless-looking gray puffs gliding on the westward wind. Paulsen-Fuchs awoke to the smell of toast and fresh coffee. He lifted himself up on his elbows and rubbed his tousled hair. The couch had served well; he felt rested, if travel-grimed.
“How about hot water for a shower?” Gogarty asked.
“Wonderful.”
“Shower-room is a bit cold, but wear these slippers, stay on the wood slats, and it shouldn’t be too awful.”
Feeling much refreshed, and certainly more alert—the shower-room had been very cold—Paulsen-Fuchs sat down to breakfast. “Your hospitality is remarkable,” he said, chewing toast and cream cheese liberally slathered with marmalade. “I feel most guilty for the way you were treated in Germany.”
Gogarty pursed his lips and waved the admission away. “Think nothing of it Strain on everyone, I’m sure.”
“What does the letter say this morning?”
“Read for yourself.”
Paulsen-Fuchs opened the dazzling sheet of white and ran his fingers along the sharply defined letters.
Dear Paul and Sean, Sean has the answer. Stretching of the theory, observation too intense. Black hole of thought. Like he said. Theory fits, universe is shaped. Not other way. Too much theory, too little flexibility. More coming. Big changes.
Bernard
“Remarkable,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. The same piece of whatever-it-is?”
“As far as I can tell, the very same.”
“What does he mean this time?”
“I think he’s confirming my work, though he isn’t being very clear. If, that is, the note reads the same way to you as it does to me. You’ll have to record what you’ve read for us to be sure.”
Paulsen-Fuchs wrote down the words on a sheet of paper and handed them to Gogarty.
The physicist nodded. “Much more explicit this time.” He put down the paper and poured Gogarty more coffee. “Very evocative. He seems to be confirming what I said last year that the universe really has no underpinnings, that when a good hypothesis comes along, one that explains the prior events, the underpinnings shape themselves to accommodate and a powerful theory is born.”
“Then there is no ultimate reality?”
“Apparently not Bad hypotheses, those that don’t fit what happens on our level, are rejected by the universe. Good ones, powerful ones, are incorporated.”
“That seems most confusing for the theoretician.”
Gogarty nodded. “But it lets me explain what’s happening to our planet”
“Oh?”
“The universe doesn’t stay the same forever. A theory that works can determine reality for only so long, and then the universe must ring a few changes.”
“Upset the apple cart, so we do not become complacent?”
“Yes indeed. But reality can’t be observed to change. It has to change at some level not being fixed by an observation. So when our noocytes observed anything and everything to the smallest possible level, the universe was unable to flex, to reshape itself. A kind of strain built up. They realized they could no longer conduct themselves in the macro-scale world, so they…well, I’m not at all sure what they did. But when they departed, the strain was suddenly released and caused a snap. Things are out of kilter now. The change was too abrupt, so the world has been shifted unevenly. The result—a universe that is inconsistent with itself, at least in our local vicinity. We get burning snow, unreliable machines, a gentle kind of chaos. And it may be gentle because—” He shrugged. “More cracked pottery, I’m afraid.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Because they’re trying to save as many of us as they can, for something later.”
“The ‘Big Changes.’”
“Yes.”
Paulsen-Fuchs regarded Gogarty steadily, then shook his head. “I am too old,” he said. “You know, being hi England has reminded me of the war. This is what England must have been like during the…you called it the ‘Blitz.’ And what Germany became toward the end of the war.”
“Under siege,” Gogarty said.
“Yes. But we humans are very delicately balanced, chemically. You think the noocytes are trying to keep mortality rates down?”
Gogarty shrugged again and reached for the letter. “I’ve read this thing a thousand times, hoping there would be some clue to that question. Nothing. Not a hint.” He sighed. “I can’t even hazard a guess.”
Paulsen-Fuchs finished his toast “I had a dream last night, rather vivid,” he said. “In that dream, I was asked how many handshakes I was from someone who lived in North America. Is that meaningful, do you suppose?”
“Ignore nothing,” Gogarty said. “That’s my motto.”
“What does the letter say now? You read.”
Gogarty opened the paper and carefully recorded the message. “Pretty much the same,” he said. “Wait-one word added. ‘Big changes soon.’”
They went for a walk in the intermittent sunshine, boots crunching and squeaking in the snow, compressing it to ice. The air was bitterly cold but the wind was slight. “Is there hope that it will all flex back, return to normal?” Paulsen-Fuchs asked.
Gogarty shrugged. “I’d say yes, if all we were dealing with were natural forces. But Bernard’s notes aren’t very encouraging, are they?
“I am ignorant,” Gogarty said suddenly, exhaling a cloud of vapor. “How refreshing to say that. Ignorant. I am as subject to unknown forces as that tree.” He pointed to a bent and gnarled old pine on a bluff above the beach. “It’s a waiting game from here.”
“Then you did not invite me here so that we could seek solutions.”
“No, of course not.” Gogarty experimentally tapped a frozen puddle with his foot. The ice broke, but there was no water beneath. “It just seemed Bernard wanted us here, or at least together.”
“I came here hoping for answers.”
“Sorry.”
“No, that is not strictly true. I came here because I have no place in Germany now. Or anywhere else. I am an executive without a company, without a job. I am free for the first time in years, free to take risks.”
“And your family?”
“Like Bernard, I have shed various families over the years. Do you have a family?”
“Yes,” Gogarty said. “They were in Vermont, last year, visiting my wife’s parents.”
“I am sorry,” Paulsen-Fuchs said.
When they returned to the cabin, consuming more cups of hot coffee and laying a fresh fire in the grate, Bernard’s note read:
Dear Gogarty and Paul
Last message. Patience. How many handshakes an you from someone now gone? One handshake. Nothing is lost. This is the last day.
Bernard
They both read it Gogarty folded it and put it in a drawer for safe-keeping. An hour later, feeling a tingle of premonition, Paulsen-Fuchs opened the drawer to read the letter again.
It was not there.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
LONDON
Suzy leaned out of the window and took a deep breath of the cold air. She had never seen anything so beautiful, not even the glow of the East River when she had crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. The burning snow was simple, entrancing, an elegant coda announcing the end of a world gone mad. She was sure of that much. In the nine months sh
e had spent in London, in her small apartment paid for by the American Embassy, she had watched the city come to a shuddering, spasmodic halt. She had hidden away in her apartment, peering out the window, seeing fewer and fewer cars or lorries (such a fun word), more and more people walking, even as the bright snow deepened, and then—
Fewer people walking, more, she supposed, staying inside. An American consular official came to see her once a week. Her name was Laurie (not quite like the trucks) and sometimes she brought Yves, her fiancé, whose name was French but who was an American by birth.
Laurie always came, bringing Suzy her groceries, her children’s books and magazines, bringing news—what there was of it Laurie said the “airwaves” were becoming more and more difficult That meant nobody was getting much use out of their radios. Suzy still had hers, though it hadn’t worked since she dropped it while climbing on to the helicopter. It was cracked and didn’t even hiss but it was one of the only things that was hers.
She pulled back from the window and shut her eyes. It hurt every time she remembered what had happened. The sense of loss, standing in the middle of empty Manhattan, feeling foolish. The helicopter landing a couple of weeks later, and taking her back to the huge aircraft carrier off the coast…
Then they had sailed her across the ocean to England and found her an apartment—a flat—in London, a nice small place where she felt okay most of the time. And Laurie came and brought things Suzy needed.
But she hadn’t come today, and she never came after dark. The snow was very thick and very bright. Pretty.
Strangely, Suzy didn’t feel at all lonely.
She closed the window to shut out the cold air. Then she stood before the long mirror that hung on the inside of her wardrobe door and looked at the bright snowflakes melting and dimming in her hair. That made her smile.
She turned and looked into the dark wardrobe interior. The steam pipes rattled, just like at home. “Hello,” she said to the few clothes in the wardrobe. She pulled out a long dress she had worn to the American Ball six months ago. It was a wonderful emerald green and she looked very good in it.
She hadn’t worn it since, and that was a shame.
She stood by the radiator and took off her robe, then unzipped and unlatched the back and stepped into the dress. Gown, she corrected herself.
Didn’t one get to meet the queen only in a gown? That made sense.
She pulled it up over her shoulders and fitted her breasts into the cups sewn in. Then she zipped it up as high as she could and stood before the wardrobe again, turning back and forth, all but her face, smiling at herself.
She had been very popular at the embassy in the first few months. Everybody liked her. But they had stopped asking her over because the embassy was quite a distance away, and traffic was messier and messier.
Actually, Suzy thought as she looked at the pretty girl in the mirror, she wouldn’t mind dying right now.
It was so beautiful outside. Even the cold was beautiful. The cold felt differently than it used to in New York, and not because it was English cold. Cold everywhere felt differently, she imagined.
If she died, she could go up into the burning snow, higher into the dark clouds, dark as sleep. She could go looking for Mother and Cary and Kenneth and Howard. They probably weren’t in the clouds, but she knew they weren’t dead—
Suzy frowned. If they weren’t dead, then how could she find them by dying? She was so stupid. She hated being stupid. She had always hated it.
And yet—Mother had always told her that she was a wonderful person, and did as well as she could (though there was always better to aspire for). Suzy had grown up liking herself, liking others, and she didn’t really want to become somebody else, or something else just to—
She didn’t want to change just to be better. Though there was always better to aspire for.
It was very confused. Everything was changing. Dying would be changing. If she didn’t mind that, then—
The snow was making a sound outside. She listened at the window and heard a pleasant drone like bees in a field of flowers. A warm sound for a cold sight.
“How strange,” she said. “Yes, how strange, how strange.” She began to sing the words but the song was silly and didn’t say what she was feeling, which was—
Accepting.
Perhaps it wasn’t the snow making the sound, but a wind. She wiped the condensation from the window and went back to the bed to turn out the light so she could see better. If the snow was blowing one way or another, then it was wind making the sound. It didn’t sound like wind.
Accepting, and lonely.
Where was Laurie? Where everybody was. Inside, staring out at the snow, just like her. But Laurie probably had Yves with her. It wasn’t good to be lonely on the—
she unexpectedly sobbed and gulped it back
yes, it was she could feel it
—the last night of the world.
“Whew,” she said, spreading the gown and sitting on one of the table chairs. She wiped her eyes. That had snuck up on her. She was just being crazy. Stupid, as always.
Not afraid, though.
Accepting.
The wardrobe door creaked and she turned to look at it, half expecting to see Narnia behind the clothes. (She had liked the apartment—the flat—right away, because of the wardrobe.)
It was snowing inside the wardrobe. Flecks of light moved over the clothes. She shivered and stood up slowly, straightened out her gown, and one step at a time approached the wardrobe. Confetti light played over the interior, the wood at the back, the clothes, even the hangers.
She pulled the door open wider and looked at herself in the mirror. Behind the glass, she was surrounded by bright bubbles of light, like millions of ginger ale sparkles.
Suzy leaned forward. The face in the mirror was not hers, exactly. She touched her lips, then reached up and met finger tips old, glassy—with the image.
The cold and glassy faded. The finger tips became warm.
Suzy backed away until she came up against the chair.
The image stepped out of the mirror, smiling at her.
Not just herself. Her mother, too. Her grandmother. And maybe great grandmother, and great-great. Mostly Suzy, but them, also. All in one. They smiled at her.
Suzy reached behind to zip the dress higher. The image held her arms open and she was mostly Suzy’s mother and Suzy ran forward and buried her face in her mother’s shoulder, against the green velvety strap of the gown. She didn’t cry.
“Let’s use the wardrobe,” she said, her voice muffled.
The image—more Suzy now—shook her head and took Suzy by the hand. Then Suzy remembered. When the transformed city had gone away, leaving her stranded-after she had refused to go with Cary and everybody else-she had felt twinned.
They had copied her. Xeroxed her.
Taken the copy with them, just in case.
And now they had brought her back to meet the original Suzy. The copy had changed, and changed wonderfully. She was all Suzy, and all her mother, and all the others individually, but together.
The image led Suzy toward the rear wall of the flat, away from the window. They stood up on the bed, smiling at each other.
Ready? the image asked silently.
Suzy looked back over her shoulder at the buzzing snow, then felt the warm, solid grip. How many handshakes from someone in America?
Why, no handshake at all.
“Are we going to be slow, where we’re going?” Suzy asked.
No, the image mouthed, entirely Suzy now. Suzy could see it in her eyes. Cary had been right. They fixed people.
“Good. I’m awful tired of being slow.”
The image held up her hand, and together they ripped away the wallpaper. It was easy. The wall just opened up and the paper just curled away.
There was snow beyond the wall, but not like the snow beyond the window. This snow was for more beautiful.
There must have been a million fl
akes for everyone alive. Everyone dancing together.
“We’re not going to use the wardrobe?” Suzy asked.
It doesn’t go where we’re going, the image said. Together, they hunkered down, get ready, get set—
And sprang from the bed, through the opening in the wall.
The building trembled, as if somewhere a big door had slammed. In the night, the burning flakes of snow danced their Brownian dance. The black clouds above became transparent, and Suzy saw all directions at once. It was a delightful and scary way to see.
The storm abated just before dawn. The earth was very quiet as the hemisphere of darkness passed away.
The day began fitfully, casting along gray-orange glow on the waveless ocean and still land. Concentric rings of light fled from the dimming sun.
Suzy looked a long ways outward. (She was so tiny, and yet she could see everywhere, see very big things!)
The inner planets cast long shadows through an enveloping haze. The outer planets wavered in their orbits, and then blossomed in kaleidoscopic splendor, extending cold luminous arms to welcome their prodigal moons home.
The Earth, for the space of along, trembling sigh, held together in the maelstrom. When its time came, the cities, towns and villages—the homes and huts and tents—were as empty as shed cocoons.
The Noosphere shook loose its wings. Where the wings touched, the stars themselves danced, celebrated, became burning flakes of snow.
INTERPHASE
THOUGHT UNIVERSE
Michael Bernard, nineteen and yet not, sat in the Klamshak opposite Olivia. Over their booth hung the weary blowfish and plastic lobster and cork floats, not very original.
She had just told him about the break-up of her engagement.
He looked down at the table, sensing a very different potential between them now. The way had been cleared.
“Good dinner,” Olivia said, folding her hands behind her plate, strewn with oyster shells and shrimp tails. Thank you. I was very glad when you called.”
“I just felt silly,” Bernard said. “I acted like a real ninny last time.”
“No. You were very gallant.”