Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

Colvin shrugged, finished his vodka. “I don’t know.”

  In Viet Nam—not “Nam” or “in-country”—a place Colvin still wanted to think of as a place rather than a condition, he had flown. Already an expert on shaped charges and propellants, Colvin was being flown out to Bong Son Valley near the coast to see why a shipment of standard C-4 plastic explosive was not detonating for an ARVN unit when the Jesus nut came off their Huey and the helicopter fell, rotorless, 280 feet into the jungle, tore through almost a hundred feet of thick vegetation, and came to a stop, upside down, in vines ten feet above the ground. The pilot had been neatly impaled by a limb that smashed up through the floor of the Huey. The co-pilot’s skull had smashed through the windshield. The gunner was thrown out, breaking his neck and back, and died the next day. Colvin walked away with a sprained ankle.

  Colvin looked down as they crossed Nantucket. He estimated their altitude at eighteen thousand feet and climbing steadily. Their cruising altitude, he knew, was to be thirty-two thousand feet. Much lower than forty-six thousand, especially lacking the vertical thrust vector, but so much depended upon surface area.

  When Colvin was a boy in the 1950’s, he saw a photograph in the “old” National Enquirer of a woman who had jumped off the Empire State Building and landed on the roof of a car. Her legs were crossed almost casually at the ankles; there was a hole in the toe of one of her nylon stockings. The roof of the car was flattened, folded inward, almost like a large goosedown mattress, molding itself to the weight of a sleeping person. The woman’s head looked as if it were sunk deep in a soft pillow.

  Colvin tapped at his calculator. A woman stepping off the Empire State Building would fall for almost fourteen seconds before hitting the street. Someone falling in a metal box from 46,000 feet would fall for two minutes and forty-five seconds before hitting the water.

  What did she think about? What did they think about?

  Most popular songs and rock videos are about three minutes long, thought Colvin. It is a good length of time; not so long one gets bored, long enough to tell a complete story.

  “We’re damned glad you’re with us,” Bill Montgomery said again.

  “Goddammit,” Bill Montgomery had whispered to Colvin outside the company teleconference room twenty-seven months earlier, “are you with us or against us on this?”

  A teleconference was much like a séance. The group sat in semi-darkened rooms hundreds or thousands of miles apart and communed with voices which came from nowhere.

  “Well, that’s the weather situation here,” came the voice from KSC. “What’s it to be?”

  “We’ve seen your telefaxed stuff,” said the voice from Marshall, “but still don’t understand why we should consider scrubbing based on an anomaly that small. You assured us that this stuff was so fail-safe that you could kick it around the block if you wanted to.”

  Phil McGuire, the chief engineer on Colvin’s project team, squirmed in his seat and spoke too loudly. The four-wire teleconference phones had speakers near each chair and could pick up the softest tones. “You don’t understand, do you?” McGuire almost shouted. “It’s the combination of these cold temperatures and the likelihood of electrical activity in that cloud layer that causes the problems. In the past five flights there’ve been three transient events in the leads that run from SRB linear shaped charges to the Range Safety command antennas …”

  “Transient events,” said the voice from KSC, “but within flight certification parameters?”

  “Well … yes,” said McGuire. He sounded close to tears. “But it’s within parameters because we keep signing wavers and rewriting the goddamn parameters. We just don’t know why the C-12B shaped range safety charges on the SRBs and ET record a transient current flow when no enable functions have been transmitted. Roger thinks maybe the LSC enable leads or the C-12 compound itself can accidentally allow the static discharge to simulate a command signal … Oh, hell, tell them, Roger.”

  “Mr. Colvin?” came the voice from Marshall.

  Colvin cleared his throat. “That’s what we’ve been watching for some time. Preliminary data suggests that temperatures below 28 degrees Fahrenheit allow the zinc oxide residue in the C-12B stacks to conduct a false signal … if there’s enough static discharge … theoretically …”

  “But no solid database on this yet?” said the voice from Marshall.

  “No,” said Colvin.

  “And you did sign the Critically One waiver certifying flight readiness on the last three flights?”

  “Yes,” said Colvin.

  “Well,” said the voice from KSC, “we’ve heard from the engineers at Beaunet-HCS, what do you say we have recommendations from management there?”

  Bill Montgomery had called a five-minute break and the management team met in the hall. “Goddammit, Roger, are you with us or against us on this one?”

  Colvin had looked away.

  “I’m serious,” snapped Montgomery. “The LCS division has brought this company 215 million dollars in profit this year, and your work has been an important part of that success, Roger. Now you seem ready to flush that away on some goddamn transient telemetry readings that don’t mean anything when compared to the work we’ve done as a team. There’s a vice-presidency opening in a few months, Roger. Don’t screw your chances by losing your head like that hysteric McGuire.”

  “Ready?” said the voice from KSC when five minutes had passed.

  “Go,” said Vice-President Bill Montgomery.

  “Go,” said Vice-President Larry Miller.

  “Go,” said Vice-President Steve Cahill.

  “Go,” said Project Manager Tom Weiscott.

  “Go,” said Project Manager Roger Colvin.

  “Fine,” said KSC. “I’ll pass along the recommendation. Sorry you gentlemen won’t be here to watch the liftoff tomorrow.”

  Colvin turned his head as Bill Montgomery called from his side of the cabin, “Hey, I think I see Long Island.”

  “Bill,” said Colvin, “how much did the company make this year on the C-12B redesign?”

  Montgomery took a drink and stretched his legs in the roomy interior of the Gulfstream. “About four hundred million, I think, Rog. Why?”

  “And did the Agency ever seriously consider going to someone else after … after?”

  “Shit,” said Tom Weiscott, “where else could they go? We got them by the short hairs. They thought about it for a few months and then came crawling back. You’re the best designer of shaped range safety devices and solid hypergolics in the country, Rog.”

  Colvin nodded, worked with his calculator a minute and closed his eyes.

  The steel bar clamped down across his lap and the car he rode in clanked higher and higher. The air grew thin and cold, the screech of wheel on rail dwindling into a thin scream as the rollercoaster lumbered above the six mile mark.

  In case of loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will descend from the ceiling. Please fasten them securely over your mouth and nose and breath normally.

  Colvin peeked ahead, up the terrible incline of the rollercoaster, sensing the summit of the climb and the emptiness beyond.

  The tiny air tank-and-mask combinations were called PEAPs—Personal Egress Air Packs. PEAPs from four of the five crew-members were recovered from the ocean bottom. All had been activated. Two minutes and forty-five seconds of each five-minute air supply had been used up.

  Colvin watched the summit of the rollercoaster’s first hill arrive.

  There was a raw metallic noise and a lurch as the rollercoaster went over the top and off the rails. People in the cars behind Colvin screamed and kept on screaming.

  Colvin lurched forward and grabbed the restraining bar as the rollercoaster plummeted into nine miles of nothingness. He opened his eyes. A single glimpse out the Gulfstream window told him that the thin lines of shaped charges he had placed there had removed all of the port wing cleanly, surgically. The tumble rate suggested that enough of a stub of the starboard wing was left t
o provide the surface area needed to keep the terminal velocity a little lower than maximum. Two minutes and forty-five seconds, plus or minus four seconds.

  Colvin reached for his calculator but it had flown free in the cabin, colliding with hurtling bottles, glasses, cushions, and bodies that had not been securely strapped in. The screaming was very loud.

  Two minutes and forty-five seconds. Time to think of many things. And perhaps, just perhaps, after two and a half years of no sleep without dreams, perhaps it would be time enough for a short nap with no dreams at all.

  Colvin closed his eyes.

  Introduction to

  “Carrion Comfort”

  Some of you reading this may know that “Carrion Comfort” the story has since led to Carrion Comfort the massive novel.

  I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with short stories or novellas that evolve into novels. It makes me wonder—“Was the story incomplete?” or “Is the novel a mere stretching of the shorter piece?”

  In this case, I’m in a position to answer.

  “Carrion Comfort” the story stands alone as my inquiry into the psychology of absolute power corrupting absolutely. Carrion Comfort the novel—all half-million words of it—is my once and final exploration of the effect of such absolute power on people who refuse to be victims of it.

  The story included here deserves, I believe, to continue to exist … and to be read … for its own merit, not only because it was the seed crystal to a larger solution, but because it is the pure thing. Undistilled.

  This is the Scotch without the water or ice.

  This is the Borgia potion without the antidote.

  Drink deep.

  Enjoy.

  Carrion Comfort

  Nina was going to take credit for the death of the Beatle, John. I thought that was in very bad taste. She had her scrapbook laid out on my mahogany coffee table, newspaper clippings neatly arranged in chronological order, the bald statements of death recording all of her Feedings. Nina Drayton’s smile was as radiant as ever, but her pale-blue eyes showed no hint of warmth.

  “We should wait for Willi,” I said.

  “Of course, Melanie. You’re right, as always. How silly of me. I know the rules.” Nina stood and began walking around the room, idly touching the furnishings or exclaiming softly over a ceramic statuette or piece of needlepoint. This part of the house had once been the conservatory, but now I used it as my sewing room. Green plants still caught the morning light. The light made it a warm, cozy place in the daytime, but now that winter had come the room was too chilly to use at night. Nor did I like the sense of darkness closing in against all those panes of glass.

  “I love this house,” said Nina. She turned and smiled at me. “I can’t tell you how much I look forward to coming back to Charleston. We should hold all of our reunions here.”

  I knew how much Nina loathed this city and this house.

  “Willi would be hurt,” I said. “You know how he likes to show off his place in Beverly Hills—and his new girlfriends.”

  “And boyfriends,” Nina said, laughing. Of all the changes and darkenings in Nina, her laugh has been least affected. It was still the husky but childish laugh that I had first heard so long ago. It had drawn me to her then—one lonely, adolescent girl responding to the warmth of another like a moth to a flame. Now it served only to chill me and put me even more on my guard. Enough moths had been drawn to Nina’s flame over the many decades.

  “I’ll send for tea,” I said.

  Mr. Thorne brought the tea in my best Wedgwood china. Nina and I sat in the slowly moving squares of sunlight and spoke softly of nothing important: mutually ignorant comments on the economy, references to books that the other had not gotten around to reading, and sympathetic murmurs about the low class of persons one meets while flying these days. Someone peering in from the garden might have thought he was seeing an aging but attractive niece visiting her favorite aunt. (I drew the line at suggesting that anyone would mistake us for mother and daughter.) People usually consider me a well-dressed if not stylish person. Heaven knows I have paid enough to have the wool skirts and silk blouses mailed from Scotland and France. But next to Nina I’ve always felt dowdy.

  This day she wore an elegant, light-blue dress that must have cost several thousand dollars if I had identified the designer correctly. The color made her complexion seem even more perfect than usual and brought out the blue of her eyes. Her hair had gone as gray as mine, but somehow she managed to get away with wearing it long and tied back with a single barrette. It looked youthful and chic on Nina and made me feel that my short, artificial curls were glowing with a blue rinse.

  Few would suspect that I was four years younger than Nina. Time had been kind to her. And she had Fed more often.

  She set down her cup and saucer and moved aimlessly around the room again. It was not like Nina to show such signs of nervousness. She stopped in front of the glass display case. Her gaze passed over the Hummels and the pewter pieces and then stopped in surprise.

  “Good heavens, Melanie. A pistol! What an odd place to put an old pistol.”

  “It’s an heirloom,” I said. “A Colt Peacemaker from right after the War Between the States. Quite expensive. And you’re right, it is a silly place to keep it. But it’s the only case I have in the house with a lock on it and Mrs. Hodges often brings her grandchildren when she visits—”

  “You mean it’s loaded?”

  “No, of course not,” I lied. “But children should not play with such things …” I trailed off lamely. Nina nodded but did not bother to conceal the condescension in her smile. She went to look out the south window into the garden.

  Damn her. It said volumes about Nina that she did not recognize that pistol.

  On the day he was killed, Charles Edgar Larchmont had been my beau for precisely five months and two days. There had been no formal announcement, but we were to be married. Those five months had been a microcosm of the era itself—naive, flirtatious, formal to the point of preciosity, and romantic. Most of all, romantic. Romantic in the worst sense of the word: dedicated to saccharine or insipid ideals that only an adolescent—or an adolescent society—would strive to maintain. We were children playing with loaded weapons.

  Nina, she was Nina Hawkins then, had her own beau—a tall, awkward, but well-meaning Englishman named Roger Harrison. Mr. Harrison had met Nina in London a year earlier, during the first stages of the Hawkins’ Grand Tour. Declaring himself smitten—another absurdity of those times—the tall Englishman had followed her from one European capital to another until, after being firmly reprimanded by Nina’s father (an unimaginative little milliner who was constantly on the defensive about his doubtful social status), Harrison returned to London to “settle his affairs.” Some months later he showed up in New York just as Nina was being packed off to her aunt’s home in Charleston in order to terminate yet another flirtation. Still undaunted, the clumsy Englishman followed her south, ever mindful of the protocols and restrictions of the day.

  We were a gay group. The day after I met Nina at Cousin Celia’s June ball, the four of us were taking a hired boat up the Cooper River for a picnic on Daniel Island. Roger Harrison, serious and solemn on every topic, was a perfect foil for Charles’s irreverent sense of humor. Nor did Roger seem to mind the good-natured jesting, since he was soon joining in the laughter with his peculiar haw-haw-haw.

  Nina loved it all. Both gentlemen showered attention on her, and although Charles never failed to show the primacy of his affection for me, it was understood by all that Nina Hawkins was one of those young women who invariably becomes the center of male gallantry and attention in any gathering. Nor were the social strata of Charleston blind to the combined charm of our foursome. For two months of that now-distant summer, no party was complete, no excursion adequately planned, and no occasion considered a success unless we four merry pranksters were invited and had chosen to attend. Our happy dominance of the youthful social scene was so pr
onounced that Cousins Celia and Loraine wheedled their parents into leaving two weeks early for their annual August sojourn in Maine.

  I am not sure when Nina and I came up with the idea of the duel. Perhaps it was during one of the long, hot nights when the other “slept over”—creeping into the other’s bed, whispering and giggling, stifling our laughter when the rustling of starched uniforms betrayed the presence of our colored maids moving through the darkened halls. In any case, the idea was the natural outgrowth of the romantic pretensions of the time. The picture of Charles and Roger actually dueling over some abstract point of honor relating to us thrilled both of us in a physical way that I recognize now as a simple form of sexual titillation.

  It would have been harmless except for our Ability. We had been so successful in our manipulation of male behavior—a manipulation that was both expected and encouraged in those days—that neither of us had yet suspected that there was anything beyond the ordinary in the way we could translate our whims into other people’s actions. The field of parapsychology did not exist then; or rather, it existed only in the rappings with whispered fantasies and knockings of parlor-game séances. At any rate, we amused ourselves for several weeks, and then one of us—or perhaps both of us—used the Ability to translate the fantasy into reality.

  In a sense, it was our first Feeding.

  I do not remember the purported cause of the quarrel, perhaps some deliberate misinterpretation of one of Charles’s jokes. I cannot recall who Charles and Roger arranged to have serve as seconds on that illegal outing. I do remember the hurt and confused expression on Roger Harrison’s face during those few days. It was a caricature of ponderous dullness, the confusion of a man who finds himself in a situation not of his making and from which he cannot escape. I remember Charles and his mercurial swings of mood—the bouts of humor, periods of black anger, and the tears and kisses the night before the duel.

  I remember with great clarity the beauty of that morning. Mists were floating up from the river and diffusing the rays of the rising sun as we rode out to the dueling field. I remember Nina reaching over and squeezing my hand with an impetuous excitement that was communicated through my body like an electric shock.