Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  Bremen felt no surprise. His equilibrium remained as they approached the tall old building. The saggy barn they had used as a garage was also there. The driveway still needed new gravel, but now it went nowhere, for there was no highway at the end of it. A hundred yards of rusted wire fence that used to border the road now terminated in the high grass.

  Gail stepped up on the front porch and peered in the window. Bremen felt like a trespasser or a weekend house browser who had found a home that might or might not still be lived in. Habit brought them around to the back door. Gail gingerly opened the outer screen door and jumped a bit as the hinge squeaked.

  “Sorry,” Bremen said. “I know I promised to oil that.”

  It was cool inside and dark. The rooms were as they had left them. Bremen poked his head into his study long enough to see his papers still lying on the oak desk and a long-forgotten transform still chalked on the blackboard. Upstairs, afternoon sunlight was falling from the skylight he had wrestled to install that distant September. Gail went from room to room, making small noises of appreciation, more often just touching things gently. The bedroom was as orderly as ever, with the blue blanket pulled tight and tucked under the mattress and her grandmother’s patchwork quilt folded across the foot of the bed.

  They fell asleep on the cool sheets. Occasionally a wisp of breeze would billow the curtains. Gail mumbled in her sleep, reaching out to touch him frequently. When Bremen awoke, it was almost dark, that late, lingering twilight of early summer.

  There was a sound downstairs.

  He lay without moving for a long while. The air was thick and still, the silence tangible. Then came another sound.

  Bremen left the bed without waking Gail. She was curled on her side with one hand lifted to her cheek, the pillow moist against her lips. Bremen walked barefoot down the wooden stairs. He slipped into his study and carefully opened the lower-right-hand drawer. It was there under the empty folders he had laid atop it. He removed the rags from the drawer.

  The .38 Smith and Wesson smelled of oil and looked as new as it had the day his brother-in-law had given it to him. Bremen checked the chambers. The bullets lay fat and heavy, like eggs in a nest. The roughened grip was firm in his hand, the metal cool. Bremen smiled ruefully at the absurdity of what he was doing, but kept the weapon in his hand when the kitchen screen door slammed again.

  He made no sound as he stepped from the hallway to the kitchen door. It was very dim, but his eyes had adapted. From where he stood he could make out the pale white phantom of the refrigerator. Its recycling pump chunked on while he stood there. Holding the revolver down at his side, Bremen stepped onto the cool tile of the kitchen floor.

  The movement startled him, and the gun rose an inch or so before he relaxed. Gernisavien, the tough-minded little calico, crossed the floor to brush against his legs, paced back to the refrigerator, looked up at him meaningfully, then crossed back to brush against him. Bremen kneeled to rub her neck absently. The pistol looked idiotic in his clenched hand. He loosened his grip.

  The moon was rising by the time they had a late dinner. The steaks had come from the freezer in the basement, the ice-cold beers from the refrigerator, and there had been several bags of charcoal left in the garage. They sat out back near the old pump while the steaks sizzled on the grill. Gernisavien had been well fed earlier but crouched expectantly at the foot of one of the big, old wooden lawn chairs.

  Both of them had slipped into clothes—Bremen into his favorite pair of cotton slacks and his light blue workshirt and Gail into the loose, white cotton dress she often wore on trips. The sounds were the same they had heard from this backyard so many times before: crickets, night birds from the orchard, the variations of frog sounds from the distant stream, an occasional flutter of sparrows in the outbuildings.

  Bremen served the steaks on paper plates. Their knives made crisscross patterns on the white. They had just the steaks and a simple salad from the garden, fresh radishes and onions on the side.

  Even with the three-quarter moon rising, the stars were incredibly clear. Bremen remembered the night they had lain out in the hammock and waited for Skylab to float across the sky like a windblown ember. He realized that the stars were even clearer tonight because there were no reflected lights from Philadelphia or the tollway to dim their glory.

  Gail sat back before the meal was finished. Where are we, Jerry? The mindtouch was gentle. It did not bring on the blinding headaches.

  Bremen took a sip of Budweiser. “What’s wrong with just being home, kiddo?”

  There’s nothing wrong with being home. But where are we?

  Bremen concentrated on turning a radish in his fingers. It had tasted salty, sharp, and cool.

  What is this place? Gail looked toward the dark line of trees at the edge of the orchard. Fireflies winked against the blackness.

  Gail, what is the last thing you can remember?

  “I remember dying.” The words hit Bremen squarely in the solar plexus. For a moment he could not speak or frame his thoughts.

  Gail went on. “We’ve never believed in an afterlife, Jerry.” Hypocritical fundamentalist parents. Mother’s drunken sessions of weeping over the Bible. “I mean … I don’t … How can we be …”

  “No,” said Bremen, putting his dish on the arm of the chair and leaning forward. “There may be an explanation.”

  Where to begin? The lost years, Florida, the hot streets of the city, the day school for retarded blind children. Gail’s eyes widened as she looked directly at this period of his life. She sensed his mindshield, but did not press to see the things he withheld. Robby. A moment’s contact. Perhaps playing a record. Falling.

  He paused to take a long swallow of beer. Insects chorused. The house glowed pale in the moonlight.

  Where are we, Jerry?

  “What do you remember about awakening here, Gail?”

  They had already shared images, but trying to put them into words sharpened the memories. “Darkness,” she said. “Then a soft light. Rocking. Being rocked. Holding and being held. Walking. Finding you.”

  Bremen nodded. He lifted the last piece of steak and savored the burnt charcoal taste of it. It’s obvious we’re with Robby. He shared images for which there were no adequate words. Waterfalls of touch. Entire landscapes of scent. A movement of power in the dark.

  With Robby, Gail’s thought echoed. ????????? In his mind. “How?”

  The cat had jumped into his lap. He stroked it idly and set it down. Gernisavien immediately raised her tail and turned her back on him. “You’ve read a lot of stories about telepaths. Have you ever read a completely satisfying explanation of how telepathy works? Why some people have it and others don’t? Why some people’s thoughts are loud as bullhorns and others’ almost imperceptible?”

  Gail paused to think. The cat allowed herself to be rubbed behind the ears. “Well, there was a really good book—no, that only came close to describing what it felt like. No. They usually describe it as some sort of radio or TV broadcast. You know that, Jerry. We’ve talked about it enough.”

  “Yeah,” Bremen said. Despite himself, he was already trying to describe it to Gail. His mindtouch interfered with the words. Images cascaded like printouts from an overworked terminal. Endless Schrödinger curves, their plots speaking in a language purer than speech. The collapse of probability curves in binomial progression.

  “Talk,” Gail said. He marveled that after all the years of sharing his thoughts she still did not always see through his eyes.

  “Do you remember my last grant project?” he asked.

  “The wavefront stuff,” she said.

  “Yeah. Do you remember what it was about?”

  “Holograms. You showed me Goldmann’s work at the university,” she said. She seemed a soft, white blur in the dim light. “I didn’t understand most of it, and I got sick shortly after that.”

  “It was based on holographic research,” Bremen interrupted quickly, “but Goldmann’s research grou
p was working up an analog of human consciousness … of thought.”

  “What does that have to do with … with this?” Gail asked. Her hand made a graceful movement that encompassed the yard, the night, and the bright bowl of stars above them.

  “It might help,” Bremen said. “The old theories of mental activity didn’t explain things like stroke effects, generalized learning, and memory function, not to mention the act of thinking itself.”

  “And Goldmann’s theory does?”

  “It’s not really a theory yet, Gail. It was a new approach, using both recent work with holograms and a line of analysis developed in the Thirties by a Russian mathematician. That’s where I was called in. It was pretty simple, really. Goldmann’s group was doing all sorts of complicated EEG studies and scans. I’d take their data, do a Fourier analysis of them, and then plug it all into various modifications of Schrödinger’s wave equation to see whether it worked as a standing wave.”

  “Jerry, I don’t see how this helps.”

  “Goddamn it, Gail, it did work. Human thought can be described as a standing wavefront. Sort of a superhologram. Or, maybe more precisely, a hologram containing a few million smaller holograms.”

  Gail was leaning forward. Even in the darkness Bremen could make out the frown lines of attention that appeared whenever he spoke to her of his work. Her voice came very softly. “Where does that leave the mind, Jerry … the brain?”

  It was his turn to frown slightly. “I guess the best answer is that the Greeks and the religious nuts were right to separate the two,” he said. “The brain could be viewed as kind of a … well, electrochemical generator and interferometer all in one. But the mind … ah, the mind is something a lot more beautiful than that lump of gray matter.” He was thinking in terms of equations, sine waves dancing to Schrödinger’s elegant tune.

  “So there is a soul that can survive death?” Gail asked. Her voice had taken on the slightly defensive, slightly querulous tone that always entered in when she discussed religious ideas.

  “Hell, no,” said Bremen. He was a little irritated at having to think in words once again. “If Goldmann was right and the personality is a complex wavefront, sort of a series of low-energy holograms interpreting reality, then the personality certainly couldn’t survive brain death. The template would be destroyed as well as the holographic generator.”

  “So where does that leave us?” Gail’s voice was almost inaudible.

  Bremen leaned forward and took her hand. It was cold. “Don’t you see why I got interested in this whole line of research? I thought it might offer a way of describing our … uh … ability.”

  Gail moved over and sat next to him in the broad, wooden chair. His arm went around her, and he could feel the cool skin of her upper arm. Suddenly a meteorite lanced from the zenith to the south, leaving the briefest of retinal echoes.

  “And?” Gail’s voice was very soft.

  “It’s simple enough,” said Bremen. “When you visualize human thought as a series of standing wavefronts creating interference patterns that can be stored and propagated in holographic analogs, it begins to make sense.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It does. It means that for some reason our minds are resonant not only to wave patterns that we initiate but to transforms that others generate.”

  “Yes,” said Gail, excited now, gripping his hand tightly. “Remember when we shared impressions of the talent just after we met? We both decided that it would be impossible to explain mindtouch to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. It would be like describing colors to a blind person …” She halted and looked around her.

  “Okay,” said Bremen. “Robby. When I contacted him, I tapped into a closed system. The poor kid had almost no data to use in constructing a model of the real world. What little information he did have was mostly painful. So for sixteen years he had happily gone about building his own universe. My mistake was in underestimating, hell, never even thinking about, the power he might have in that world. He grabbed me, Gail. And with me, you.”

  The wind came up a bit and moved the leaves of the orchard. The soft rustling had a sad, end-of-summer sound to it.

  “All right,” she said after a while, “that explains how you got here. How about me? Am I a figment of your imagination, Jerry?”

  Bremen felt her shiver. Her skin was like ice. He took her hand and roughly rubbed some warmth back into it. “Come on, Gail, think. You weren’t just a memory to me. For over six years we were essentially one person with two bodies. That’s why when … that’s why I went a little crazy, tried to shut my mind down completely for a couple of years. You were in my mind. But my ego sense, or whatever the hell keeps us sane and separate from the babble of all those minds, kept telling me that it was only the memory of you. You were a figment of my imagination … the way we all are. Jesus, we were both dead until a blind, deaf, retarded kid, a goddamn vegetable, ripped us out of one world and offered us another one in its place.”

  They sat for a minute. It was Gail who broke the silence. “But how can it seem so real?”

  Bremen stirred and accidentally knocked his paper plate off the arm of the chair. Gernisavien jumped to one side and stared reproachfully at them. Gail nudged the cat’s fur with the toe of her sandal. Bremen squeezed his beer can until it dented in, popped back out.

  “You remember Chuck Gilpen, the guy who dragged me to that party in Drexel Hill? The last I heard he was working with the Fundamental Physics Group out at the Lawrence Berkely Labs.”

  “So?”

  “So for the past few years they’ve been hunting down all those smaller and smaller particles to get a hook on what’s real. And when they get a glimpse of reality on its most basic and pervasive level, you know what they get?” Bremen took one last swig from the beer can. “They get a series of equations that show standing wavefronts, not too different from the squiggles and jiggles Goldmann used to send me.”

  Gail took a deep breath, let it out. Her question was almost lost as the wind rose again and stirred the tree branches. “Where is Robby? When do we see his world?”

  “I don’t know,” Bremen replied. He was frowning without knowing it. “He seems to be allowing us to define what should be real. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he’s enjoying a peek at a new universe. Maybe he can’t do anything about it.”

  They sat still for a few more minutes. Gernisavien brushed up against them, irritated that they insisted on sitting out in the cold and dark. Bremen kept his mindshield raised sufficiently to keep from sharing the information that his sister had written a year ago to say that the little calico had been run over and killed in New York. Or that a family of Vietnamese had bought the farmhouse and had already added new rooms. Or that he had carried the .38 police special around for two years, waiting to use it on himself.

  “What do we do now, Jerry?”

  We go to bed. Bremen took her hand and led her into their home.

  Bremen dreamed of fingernails across velvet, cold tile along one cheek, and wool blankets against sunburned skin. He watched with growing curiosity as two people made love on a golden hillside. He floated through a white room where white figures moved in a silence broken only by the heartbeat of a machine. He was swimming and could feel the tug of inexorable planetary forces in the pull of the riptide. He was just able to resist the deadly current by using all of his energy, but he could feel himself tiring, could feel the tide pulling him out to deeper water. Just as the waves closed over him he vented a final shout of despair and loss.

  He cried out his own name.

  He awoke with the shout still echoing in his mind. The details of the dream fractured and fled before he could grasp them. He sat up quickly in bed. Gail was gone.

  He had taken two steps toward the stairway before he heard her voice calling to him from the side yard. He returned to the window.

  She was dressed in a blue sundress and was waving her arms at him. By the time he was downstairs she had thrown half a dozen i
tems into the picnic basket and was boiling water to make iced tea.

  “Come on, sleepyhead. I have a surprise for you!”

  “I’m not sure we need any more surprises,” Bremen mumbled.

  “This one we do,” she said, and she was upstairs, humming and thrashing around in the closet.

  She led them, Gernisavien following reluctantly, to a trail that led off in the same general direction as the highway that had once been in front of the house. It led up through pasture to the east and over the rise. They carried the picnic basket between them, Bremen repeatedly asking for clues, Gail repeatedly denying him any.

  They crossed the rise and looked down to where the path ended. Bremen dropped the basket into the grass. In the valley where the Pennsylvania Turnpike once had been was an ocean.

  “Holy shit!” Bremen exclaimed softly.

  It was not the Atlantic. At least not the New Jersey Atlantic that Bremen knew. The seacoast looked more like the area near Mendocino where he had taken Gail on their honeymoon. Far to the north and south stretched broad beaches and high cliffs. Tall breakers broke against black rock and white sand. Far out to sea, the gulls wheeled and pivoted.

  “Holy shit!” Bremen repeated.

  They picnicked on the beach. Gernisavien stayed behind to hunt insects in the dune grass. The air smelled of salt and sea and summer breezes. It seemed they had a thousand miles of shoreline to themselves.

  Gail stood and kicked off her dress. She was wearing a one-piece suit underneath. Bremen threw his head back and laughed. “Is that why you came back? To get a suit? Afraid the lifeguards would throw you out?”

  She kicked sand at him and ran to the water. Three strides in and she was swimming. Bremen could see from the way her shoulders hunched that the water was freezing.

  “Come on in!” she called, laughing. “The water’s fine!”

  He began walking toward her.

  The blast came from the sky, the earth, the sea. It knocked Bremen down and thrust Gail’s head underwater. She flailed and splashed to make the shallows, crawled gasping from the receding surf.