A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  “I’d be happy to do that!”

  “And then I’ll be happy to cook you a meal.”

  “Sorry it was just TV dinners,” Milly said, as Sam cleared the table in her apartment. “I can hardly fry myself an egg for breakfast, sitting in this rolling prison.” She frowned at letting the resentment out. She had promised herself never to mention the wheelchair, never to bring up anything having to do with her disability.

  “That’s actually better than I usually do for myself. I eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I miss some meals entirely. I’m not very domestically organized, but I’m right on top of my classes. You can’t give the students any excuses.” He could sense that Milly was straining to present herself favorably to him and was glad of it, even if he couldn’t imagine why. Of course, she could be just as lonely as he was. She could also need a friend to help her in practical matters, like shopping. He would do whatever she wanted, just to keep seeing her. “Would you like to get out of the wheelchair, just for a little while? Can you sit on the sofa?”

  “Watch this,” Milly said, rolling to the sofa and locking the wheelchair. She launched herself to the sofa but the wheelchair skidded backward too much. She fell on the floor before Sam could reach her. “For my next trick.” She held her arms up for Sam to take hold of. Her embarrassment and feelings of failure were more than canceled by the physical contact with Sam. She almost hugged him. “I’m still pretty new at this paraplegic stuff. I used to have a nurse to help me but the insurance company got stingy. Are you going to sit down next to me?”

  Sam sat a few inches away from Milly, close enough to smell her perfume, close enough that he could imagine she was not repelled by him, that she wanted him to be there. “Are you making any headway on your thesis?”

  “Oh, let’s don’t talk about that! What is it that you don’t like about black holes?”

  “Gravity. Oops!” Milly tilted against him.

  “Sorry.” Not sorry, she thought, righting herself. “It’s a little tricky balancing myself on a dead butt without armrests. I’m not trying to get fresh. Gravity is the main ingredient of a black hole, I guess.” Milly didn’t want to fall back into her old way of dealing with the opposite sex which - upon long introspection while in the hospital - she realized was too much influenced by the popular media and her own low regard for most of the boys and men she had known. Sam was far different from her concept of the typical American male. “Gravity is also my main nemesis. Curse Newton!”

  Sam laughed politely and Milly’s sour-but-not-serious expression changed into a small grin. He was still surprised Milly had invited him into her life - if he wasn’t misinterpreting her attitude toward him. He was sweating every word he said to her, trying not to spoil everything. “Classical physics was a real struggle for me. That was when I was getting my degree in mechanical engineering. But I took an elective course in astronomy, one thing led to another, and then I had to get serious about gravity. The masses of stars and the things gravity makes them do to play out their lives, that’s astrophysics, and on to cosmology. I still haven’t educated myself well enough in the math and theory to be able to see where I could make a contribution.”

  “But you must know something to make you feel there’s something wrong with Newton and Einstein.” Milly wanted to believe Sam was more than the stereotypical Asian college graduate, all rote learning and blindly career-driven. She knew that wasn’t a fair generalization and she was somewhat perplexed that she had such high hopes for Sam, as though too much was riding on his intellectual prowess. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to push you to make me think you’re a genius. But I am impressed that you also play the piano. I wish I was not so one-dimensional. I wanted to be a race car driver but I guess we can rule that out now.”

  Sam laughed again. “Thanks, that takes some of the pressure off me, like I needed to cut down the gods of physics to make you like me.”

  Milly laughed. It was the first time since before the accident that paralyzed her that she laughed purely in pleasure. She knew Sam liked her. She knew she had a chance for… what? Whatever! “So, your dad and my dad were both in the Korean War. We have something in common.”

  “Papa wasn’t in the war long,” Sam said. “I was born in Seattle in 1951. Neither of them has ever told me how they got to America but I have to believe they got here by way of hell. Where did you get that scar on your forehead? It looks new to me.”

  “Crashed my Mustang on the DC beltway last year.” Milly tried real hard not to say too much or say it the wrong way. She deserved to be crippled, and was lucky she wasn’t dead. “I was in a coma for three days. I hope it knocked some sense into me. I’m still trying to find out if I kept all my math marbles.”

  “I’ve heard that you’re a good teacher. There are plenty of instructors around here but not many teachers. Of course, that might not be a compliment if you see the undergrads as the enemy, like many of my fellow postdocs.”

  “I’ll take it as a compliment, Sam! Thank you! It could be that I was not so sympathetic toward my students before the accident.”

  “I had a friend in high school - George - who was hurt in a car wreck, lost one of his legs, spent some time in a wheelchair until he got a prosthetic. He became a better student after that, after he got through feeling sorry for himself. I like to think I helped him. It was a friendship that helped me.”

  “Another connection we have.” Milly absently placed her hand on top of his, where it rested on his thigh. She felt him twitch in surprise but keep his hand under hers. “I didn’t mean to…” She started to apologize, then saw the distracted look on his face. Even as he sat there thinking, Sam turned his hand over under hers, making her raise her hand, then he took her hand by letting his fingers move between hers, lacing their hands together. And still he thought, oblivious to their hands, hands that wanted to be together. She was content to sit beside Sam and enjoy this simple pleasure. She could study his face without him noticing. She liked what she saw, she liked it very much: a kind and thoughtful face, with a mind behind it that thought hard. “What is it, Sam?”

  Sam opened his eyes, or maybe his eyes were already open, just not seeing anything. He saw he was holding Milly’s hand. He was shocked and embarrassed and tried to turn loose, but she wouldn’t relax her grip. “I’m sorry.” He lifted their hands to indicate his indiscretion.

  “Tell me what you were thinking. You looked intense.”

  “Connections. You said we had connections. I think we are all connected, everyone and everything in the universe.”

  “Of course we are. By gravity.”

  “Not exactly gravity. Also by starlight, but not exactly light. Light pushes. Gravity pulls. But we are connected, even to the farthest quasar. They are somehow the same - starlight and gravity - but where does the push and pull come from?”

  “Light pushes?” Milly quickly realized what Sam meant. “Oh, like the little glass bulb with the black and white vanes that spin when light is shone on them.”

  “And like the radio signal that pushes into the antenna of your radio.”

  “But light is information, gravity is… gravity. How can they be the same?”

  “There has to be something, some thing, that is common to both, that carries both.” Sam pounded their locked hands on his thigh as emphasis. “Everything is information, all matter, all forces, all motion. And it’s all connected.”

  “Space itself is the connection,” Milly suggested.

  “But space has no shape, no geometry, no aether. It’s nothing! To say it’s warped so that gravity and light can bend this way and that, to me that’s too much magic. Of course our very existence is like magic but we have to accept that. We don’t have to accept that every piece of the universe below the ceiling of magic is also explained by magic. Why bother to do science if all we can discover about reality can only be described by formulas and numbers? I see the universe with the eyes of an engineer, almost to the limit of the old idea of t
he clockwork universe. Maybe there aren’t any gears or levers making everything move, but there must be strings that are pulled, even if we can’t see them, even if they have some properties we must temporarily label as magic.”

  “Like magnetic lines of force?” Milly suggested.

  “Exactly! Did you ever do the experiment in school where you sprinkled iron powder on a piece of paper with a bar magnet under it? You could very easily imagine those lines of force from the way the iron formed those curving patterns. They would come out one end of the magnet and go around and into the other end, north to south or south to north. I always wondered if we could ever know if they moved in one direction or the other, like electricity does.”

  Sam stopped talking again. Milly watched some idea transfix him and make him squeeze her hand so hard it hurt. She had to lean against him again and fight the pressure of his fingers holding hers to get his attention. “Tell me what you think!”

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that someone must have thought of this before. It seems so obvious. The magnetic lines of force have to be actual lines of something. And they loop around and through the metal. That makes them circuits, closed circuits, like electric circuits. And that suggests they may carry a signal or a vibration or a quantity of energy - a quantum of something that amounts to an agent of force. They are quantum circuits. And they are the clue and the model for everything else.”

  Milly could see the idea clearly and although she had no idea whether it was a useful model of reality, she was impressed and pleased that Sam found the inspiration for it in her presence.

  Section 023 In the Emerald City

  “It sounds familiar,” Daidaunkh said. “An Earthian song. Not English.”

  “Opera,” Rafael said. “Italian. Puccini.”

  “Madame Butterfly,” Fidelity said.

  Music was the only sound and the only clue that human beings might exist somewhere nearby. In the first instant the music had made Fidelity think they had been transported to a large corporate office building in a space city, although opera was an unusual choice for background music. Looking for the source of the music - which she never found - made Fidelity notice odd details in the bright light and saturated colors of their surroundings. Not much made sense as she surveyed the nearby surfaces, finally noticing the inert drabness of the circle of pavement from Earth beneath the pedicab. It was surrounded by the glow of the rest of the floor.

  Daidaunkh was leaning forward in his passenger seat, frowning with an effort to understand what he saw. Fidelity stood with Samson and Rafael by the pedicab, holding onto its metal frame. The four of them occupied the edge of the floor of a corridor. The corridor had no walls; that is, there seemed to be a gap and a fall-off beyond the edge, with structures standing at a short distance from each open side of the corridor. The floor was striped with subtle linear patterns that might define lanes along its length. The material seemed to conduct light and provide much of the illumination. High above it was an incandescent ceiling that had identical linear patterns. Not too far ahead of them something strange disrupted the flow of the glowing floor and ceiling and farther away behind them was a similar disruption. Fidelity left the pedicab to step over to the edge and peer downward. She gasped. The structure beside the corridor appeared to be floating in the air, completely separate from the corridor. It was a large red building several hundred meters in length and may have been the equivalent of four stories in height. Fidelity knelt down at the very edge to get a better perspective. Rafael brought Samson over and all three looked downward, then upward.

  “What do you see?” Daidaunkh demanded.

  “It goes on forever!” Rafael declared. “There are more of these walkways down there! And also above us! On and on! Let us move forward, to the end of this building! There is an opening there, perhaps a vista!”

  Fidelity replaced Samson on the driver’s seat of the pedicab and she and Rafael pulled it forward. The darker circle of Earth pavement disappeared behind them, leaving the street of light flawless.

  As they approached the end of the red building they began to understand what it was they were walking on. At the same time they were also becoming exposed to a growing vastness of distance and of structure and of variation. The corner of the red building brought them near an intersection of corridors. The shining surfaces met in an explosion of glowing pathways that twisted and curved in all the possible routes needed to provide transfer to all three dimensions of direction. As Fidelity traced the paths of the luminous ribbons, she saw the ceilings of the corridors also split into what must be pathway ribbons; so the ceilings were not ceilings. These were pairs of streets, city streets, streets of a huge space city. Not only did a pair of streets converge from right and left, but another pair of glowing walkways converged from above and from below. Ahead of them the broad ribbon of light that was their walkway or street began to split along its lane patterns into paths that curved left, right, up, down, offering routes that connected to the eleven other streets. It did not occur to Fidelity to wonder why there were six pairs of walkways because the open space at the complex junction gave such a distracting and disturbing view, a view that implied too much about the scope and scale of this alien place. It was probable this was not just a space city but a space country, and not just a space country but an entire world .

  “We are not in the Union,” Fidelity murmured.

  “Kansas,” Rafael said. “We are not in Kansas anymore.”

  As far as their eyes could see, the latticework of glowing streets defined giant cubic volumes in which everything floated. There was so much light and color and variation that it hardly seemed real. They could even discern vast green areas that might be vegetation winding through the cacophony of architecture and what appeared to be rivers of water that flowed with no visible containment, forming waterfalls that fell in any direction.

  “Stay here.”

  Fidelity jumped, twisted to see what stranger stood next to her and saw no one. She looked at Rafael. “Did you hear someone speak?” she asked. He shook his head. “Perhaps we should stay here.”

  “It is intimidating, isn’t it?” Rafael commented. “Where are all the people?”

  “Why stay here?” Daidaunkh asked.

  “I heard the voice again. It said to wait here.”

  They waited at the edge of the concourse by the glowing tangle of the intersection. Except for the sourceless music it was quiet and empty of life. With the maze of the junction ahead of them and the infinite view of floating buildings filling their eyes and minds, they were shocked by the sound of a distant human voice.

  “Ahoy, there.” They looked up and behind them to see a person approaching on the lower surface of the upper walkway, walking up-side-down on the almost-transparent surface. He seemed to move more rapidly than his gait would permit. When he had nearly reached them, he jumped downward, executed a graceful flip, and flew to a landing before them.

  “I am Percival.” The young man strode up to them and stared at them with troubled curiosity. “I think I’ve been summoned to your aid.” Fidelity started to introduce herself. He cut her off. “Don’t tell me your names! What can I do for you?”

  Percival spoke a version of English that to Fidelity’s ears wasn’t far removed from the Twenglish Samson spoke. When she might have time to ponder the implications, she didn’t know. It didn’t ease the turmoil of her thoughts that Percival was so bizarrely dressed. Her data augment identified it as a period costume from Earth history. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “You don’t know?” Percival looked even more disturbed, perhaps even frightened. He looked at the pedicab and the injured Daidaunkh. He seemed to struggle for the next thing to do or say. “You are not familiar with this deserted neighborhood? You are lost?”

  “We were on Earth just a few moments ago,” Fidelity replied. “I want to know what this world is and where it is.”

  “You were on Earth?” Percival seemed alarmed, although not incred
ulous.

  “Not much help,” Daidaunkh mumbled, giving the oddly dressed young man a frown.

  “I’m hungry,” Samson said.

  “Food,” Percival said, seizing on a way to resume functioning. “I have credit enough for food for all of you.” He returned Daidaunkh’s frown and apparently noted the Rhyan’s splinted arm and leg. “Medical treatment is another matter. Sometimes a hospital is generous. Or so I’ve been told. Which do you want first, food or doctoring?”

  “Food,” Samson said.

  “Doctoring,” Fidelity said.

  “I see the boy is an amputee,” Percival said, as though neither children nor his injury were so special. “Food first. It’s closer. Follow me over toward the middle. Mind you stay in my lane.”

  “Why are you wearing that funny costume?” Samson asked.

  “I just came from my performance in an opera. ‘The Marriage of Figaro.’ I wasn’t a lead singer. I’m more of an actor, but opera is important here.”

  Fidelity was sure Percival was struggling to maintain his composure, and he had not yet answered her questions. “What is this place called?”

  “Most of us call it the Big Ball.”

  “And where is it?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Even…”

  Percival obviously stopped himself from saying something more, and it was obviously fear that made him stop. Fidelity decided not to press him, although it had seemed the most important question she knew to ask. The feeling of the pavement under her feet as they pulled the pedicab across to the middle of the street silenced any other question she would ask at the moment. The street - the highway - was moving under them, pulling them along more and more rapidly.

  The bright pavement did not appear to be moving. Lane information appeared embedded just below the surface of the almost transparent street, yet no substantial layer of the pavement seemed to be in motion. Admiral Khalanov, Fidelity thought, would kill to get a chance to study this impossible mechanism. One couldn’t see where the motion began or stopped, and it increased so gradually as you walked toward the middle of the avenue that you couldn’t stumble due to the acceleration differential. The velocity of the bright pavement slowed as they quickly reached the intersection. Other lanes divided away toward the different converging walkways. Their lane dipped and swerved only slightly as it carried them through the maze of the intersection. The lane then rejoined the other lanes on the other side of the junction and accelerated toward the next distant intersection.