The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  Her hands free again, Shepherd gathered the sides of her ripped nightgown together over her bruised buttocks. “We must report Isaiah's death to the authorities. It was an accident. He came out here in the middle of the night—perhaps he heard a noise—and he stumbled and fell on the pitchfork. No lies. He did hear a noise; he did stumble."

  “But what will we do?” one of the other women asked.

  Shepherd looked at all the empty faces gathered around her, all the women who only a few hours before had had all their questions answered. Now they were looking for somebody to take Isaiah's place, someone to lead them to the Promised Land, and they were not looking at Janet. They were looking at her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  October 13, 2000

  William S. Landis

  Another grain of sand fell from the thin neck of the beaker onto the pile below. Landis had timed it. A grain fell every ten seconds on the average, but none of them, except by chance, was average if he timed it to the fraction of a second. Each was a fraction of a second under or a fraction over, and he could not predict which would drop sooner or later. But a fraction of a second—what did it matter?

  Another grain of sand fell onto the pile

  The pile below was more significant. It rested on a plastic dish one and a half inches in diameter. By now some 30,000 grains had fallen upon it, and the pile was about an inch high and filled the plastic dish completely. The new grain impacted on top of the pile without disturbing it.

  Landis watched, almost hypnotized, for the grain that would precipitate an avalanche. The beaker revolved once a second, a few grain of sand trickled down its long, slightly inclined neck, and every ten seconds one fell onto the slowly growing pile. But when would the pile cascade?

  Another grain of sand fell.

  “What we're talking about here,” Carl Grohe said, “is chaos theory. Some phenomena are unpredictable."

  Landis looked at the tank of fluid beneath him. “Like what?"

  “Floods, forest fires, earthquakes, novas, the stock market. Well, maybe not the stock market, at least according to some experts."

  Another grain of sand fell.

  The conversation seemed detached from the real world. The laboratory in which it was being conducted was the customary cluttered, untidy mess of most scientific workplaces, so different from the usual filmed version with its focus on the central apparatus and meaningful icons. The walls were concrete blocks painted pale green, defining a room about thirty feet square. The floor was bare concrete stained here and there by old experiments and scuff marks. A metal door led to an exterior hallway, and a double door on the opposite wall, to an outside dock. Discarded experiments stood in other parts of the room or were pushed against a wall, undismantled but cannibalized for parts. Some, perhaps, still continued in operation.

  Another grain of sand.

  But here in the center of the room, Landis was watching sand pile up on a plastic dish and he was sitting in a breakaway chair above a tank of water. At least he assumed it was water. He hoped it was water. Because when the inevitable avalanche occurred, it would carry some extra grains over the edge, a computer would record the pile's weight, and the experiment would begin again. Except that when the pile cascaded, the chair would release Landis into the tank.

  “If you can't predict it, what's the use of experiments like this one?” Landis asked.

  Another grain of sand.

  “The more we find out,” Grohe said, “the closer we can come to predicting even chaotic behavior."

  “Isn't that a basic contradiction?"

  “There may be order even within chaos, what scientists in this field have come to call ‘flicker noise.’ About 1987 a physicist named Per Bak described it as ‘self-organized criticality'—systems that don't settle down to a stable configuration but push themselves to the verge of instability."

  Another grain.

  “And when do you predict the next instability will occur and I will find myself in that tank below me?"

  “Soon. Very soon. Are you getting nervous?"

  “It's the waiting. After all, it's only water. Isn't it?"

  “Of course. I wouldn't endanger a science reporter and noted author. I wouldn't put acid or knives in there unless I were some kind of mad scientist. But there is, of course, instability in people, too."

  Another grain.

  Landis had not wanted to attend the fortuneteller's performance, but Carrie had seemed really keen on it. He would have agreed immediately, but he had experienced an odd reluctance to be part of that kind of gathering, the creeping of the skin that he scoffed at in others, including Carrie, and one that he found himself unwilling to mention, unwilling even to think about.

  He hadn't liked not wanting to analyze situations.

  “I know you don't really believe in soothsayers,” he had said. He had stumbled over the word “sooth,” because it meant “truth,” of which he was sure this fortuneteller had none.

  “Of course not,” Carrie had said; “it's just an entertainment, and kind of popular these days. But I wish you wouldn't call it that."

  “Augury?” he had ventured, knowing it would be worse.

  “No."

  “Prophecy then."

  “Not that either."

  “What then?"

  “Foreknowledge, maybe. But I like the word ‘precognition.’”

  Landis had seen the direction of the conversation. “Precognition. To know before. Like prediction. To say before. Then you do believe in it."

  “No, no. Only—"

  “Yes?"

  “There is something to be explained. Dreams. Feelings. Premonitions. I know what you're going to say—to warn before. I mean I don't believe in predictions, but even you must admit that occasionally people get flashes of insight and things happen just like their visions."

  He had read Tannen: he knew that men and women used conversation for different purposes. She wanted to socialize; he wanted to report. But he hadn't been able to help himself. He was the supreme skeptic. “Just reconstructions after the fact, I suspect,” he had said mildly, trying not to attack her defenses; she would repel frontal assault. “The human mind's greatest talent is self-deception."

  “You're saying that I'm deceiving myself?” she said. She was reinforcing her position in spite of his caution.

  “Not you—you said you didn't believe it. But the people who do believe in it are ignoring the basic inconsistency of telling the future. Either the future is fixed, in which case it doesn't matter what you know about it, because you can't change it. Or it isn't fixed and there's nothing to read."

  “It's not either-or,” she said. “People still try to anticipate the future."

  “What's left is probability, which is what people like me—and the people who call themselves ‘futurists'—try to deal with. Learn enough about the present to make a reasonable guess about what is likely to happen."

  “Well, I've got tickets and I want us to go,” she had said firmly, “and anyway it ought to make good material for that book you're working on."

  He had had no answer to that. They had met after his return from space, and she was an attractive woman, intelligent and well read, interested in world events. Their friendship—he didn't want to jinx it by calling it a relationship—was still new, but it could develop, he thought. It could amount to something, this late in his life. So had gone along with as good a humor as he could muster. And that was how he had found himself in the middle of a packed audience in the largest auditorium in town.

  The decor was old-fashioned grandeur, red-velvet walls and red-velour seat cushions and crystal chandeliers, but the ambience was contemporary angst. For a moment, as they had sidled their way between clots of people, Landis had entertained the hope that many had come, as he had, as analysts of millennial folly, but the hush of anticipation soon had convinced him that he was surrounded by believers.

  The evening had begun calmly enough with the appearance on stage of Da
me Nostra, a regal woman in a long, floor-length black gown. She had stood for a moment, gazing out into the audience with dark, almost black eyes, silver hair framing her pale face so that it seemed as if her eyes were even larger and more penetrating. On the bare stage, against the dark backdrop, it had looked unnervingly as if her head were hanging unsupported in mid-air, and when she spoke, her low, dynamic tones, magnified magically so that they seemed to fill every corner of the auditorium, had vibrated the chandeliers and penetrated to the bone.

  She had launched her performance calmly, talking about the nature of precognition—like Carrie, she preferred pseudo-scientific resonances to those of the supernatural—and even had described, disarmingly, the paradoxes of foreknowledge to which Landis had referred. But then, like Carrie, she had cited anecdotes of precognition and paused dramatically after each revelation of its fulfillment before asking, “And how does science explain this apparent prescience?” And then, after another pause, she had answered, “Coincidence.” Eventually the audience had picked up the response with her, chanting “coincidence” in a compelling antiphony.

  If he had not been analyzing his own reactions, Landis might have joined in the chorus. As it was, he could not help but notice that Carrie's lips had begun to move and then that she was chanting with the others. She was, he had thought with dismay, farther into this phenomenon than he had imagined. He had been willing to go along with her curiosity about the supernatural, but he was not ready for her total immersion.

  He had missed the transition, but Dame Nostra had moved with apparent smoothness into a discussion of her own experiences with precognition, beginning with the incidents of a sensitive child and the growing realization that not everyone had these flashes of terrifying insight. At first she had tried to hide them, to avoid the unwelcome isolation such difference brought her and then to avoid the pain that her revelations almost invariably brought to others. But finally she had come to realize the insatiable hunger people had for knowledge of what was to come, and had begun telling some of them, who could handle reality, the truth.

  “Or sooth,” Dame Nostra had said. It was almost as if she had listened in on Landis's conversation with Carrie. “For ‘sooth’ means ‘truth,’ which is why the earlier sensitives, those who have my gift, or curse, were called ‘soothsayers,’ because they told the terrible truth."

  Others she had offered sybilline obscurities, penetrable if anyone wanted to figure them out, comforting if that was what they wanted. But this was the fateful year of the second millennium, and it was time to dismiss dissimulation. No more riddles. It was truth time.

  Truth time had begun with a few general predictions for the rest of the year, some startling in their specificity. Landis had jotted them down in the darkness, because an usher had made him check his recorder as they entered. He had hoped he could read his notes later. And then she had asked for questions from the audience.

  They had been the usual sorts of things: love, marriage, children, money, success, accomplishment.... Dame Nostra had fielded them all, some with names and dates. Landis had suspected confederates or a data bank whispering information into her ear as people gave their names and addresses. He had read dozens of exposés by stage magicians describing how such tricks were performed.

  And then he had found himself at the microphone, scarcely remembering how he had got there, trying to distance himself from the person who stood in front of the audience—and from Dame Nostra. He had heard himself saying, “What everyone wants to know—no matter what they ask—is when they will die. My name is William S. Landis. When will I die?"

  The words had hung in the air like the words written on the wall in the book of Daniel. An expression of something like pain had passed across Dame Nostra's face. “All want to know, but few ask for fear of the truth. For what good will it do them to learn that their days are numbered?"

  Again she had seemed to pick a word from his mind—"numbered” from the meaning of “mene.” He had shaken his head. It could have been nothing but the topic and the Biblical echoes.

  “Are you sure you want to know, Mr. Landis?” she had asked.

  “Of course."

  Her eyes had seemed to look through him at something beyond, and when they had focused again on him she had the look of someone who had seen something unpleasant. “Your life will end on December 31 of this year,” she had said.

  Landis had stood at the microphone, frozen in place, not believing and yet shocked by her certainty, until someone had pushed him aside and asked the same question.

  “December 31, 2000,” she had said as if she was as surprised by the answer as the questioner, and again in answer to a third question and a fourth until the date seemed to be graven into a stone that hung around the neck of every person in the audience, around, indeed, the neck of the world.

  A gravestone.

  Carrie, it seemed, had not only obtained tickets to the performance but an invitation to the reception afterwards at the home of the wealthiest family in the city. It was an estate on the edge of town, approached by a long driveway winding through rolling lawns and sculpted trees and shrubs, and a valet service at the end of it. Landis had got out of his unchauffered car, smelling the clean air scented with grass clippings, and wondered again at Carrie's social standing. They had spent their evenings together at restaurants and theaters, the two of them.

  The hostess, a Mrs. Barclay Stone, had greeted them at the door and expressed recognition of his name when he introduced himself, though her handshake with Carrie had been perfunctory. “So, our famous local author and futurist,” she had said. “So glad you could make it, particularly after your question this evening. You and Dame Nostra should have a great deal in common."

  That was what ordinary people thought, Landis had realized, confusing speculative thinkers with the credulous and the con artists. But he also had known that Carrie had used his name and reputation through her network of contacts to obtain the invitation, and he had wondered what that portended. Of course, he had thought wryly, if he had been Dame Nostra, he wouldn't have had to wonder.

  The Barclay Stone house was built like a southern mansion; the veranda with supporting white pillars extended the whole width of the front. The entire first floor had been thrown open to the guests, with a bar in the living room on the right, a buffet laden with food—no cold cuts for the guests of the Barclay Stones—in the dining room on the left, and waiters threading their way among the guests with hors d'oeuvres and glasses of champagne.

  Just like in the movies, Landis had thought. The 18th-century English middle class had learned how to behave by reading novels; Americans received their social educations from film. “Is she a believer?” Landis had asked Carrie, nodding toward Mrs. Barclay Stone.

  “I'm sure I don't know what you mean,” Carrie had said stiffly.

  “Does she believe in the validity of precognition?” Landis had asked carefully. “Or is she entertaining Dame Nostra's guests as a social obligation to the community?"

  “I have no idea,” Carrie had said.

  Landis would have liked to have asked Mrs. Stone herself, but could think of no polite way to do it. He had wondered, however, what would lead the privileged to buy into the end of the world.

  Dame Nostra had not arrived yet, apparently, and Landis had spent an uneasy half hour conversing with people he did not know and with whom he had nothing to say. Carrie, on the other hand, wandered from his side and Landis saw her across the room in animated conversations.

  “Mr. Landis, sir,” a voice said behind him, and Landis had turned to find a young man at his elbow summoning him to an audience in the library, a room behind the living room that he had not yet investigated. He had known it was a library because the young man had told him so. It had walnut wainscoting halfway up the wall and a desk, but no shelves and no books. Half seated on the desk, with a glass of champagne in her hand, was Dame Nostra, talking to two men in tuxedos, one of whom, it had turned out, was Barclay Stone.
Dame Nostra had been brought in a rear door to avoid disturbing the other guests, he had been told, but he thought it was to save herself a barrage of meaningless social amenities. Instead, she had people brought to her one at a time.

  She had seemed much smaller up close than when she had dominated a stage, and from that stage an entire audience. But if anything she had been even more impressive. Her figure was slight and her face had seemed fragile, but her eyes had burned from it like the eyes of a tiger from ambush.

  “So, William S. Landis,” she had said, “we have much in common."

  There it had been again, a confusion of states of mind that Landis had found more terrifying from Dame Nostra than annoying.

  “Apparently,” he had said, deliberately misunderstanding, “we are both going to die on December 3l."

  “We both deal in futures,” she had said.

  “I cannot match your certainty."

  “You disapprove of certainty?"

  “I cannot believe in it."

  “And yet you came to the theater tonight."

  “It meant a great deal to my friend,” he had said, and then, recognizing the lack of civility, added, “but once I got there I was fascinated by your performance. And by the audience response. Many people would like to believe that somewhere there is certainty."

  “And you do not?"

  “I live with what is, not what I would like to believe."

  “You are such a materialist, William S. Landis,” she had said, “and on another occasion I might discuss with you your inconsistencies, your own willingness to believe in the immaterial, but for now let me ask what you would do if you had visions that came true time after time?"

  “No doubt I would feel differently,” he had said. “But why haven't you announced the end of the world before?"

  “This is the first time I have seen it,” she had said, and, as it had on the stage, a look of pain had briefly altered her expression.