Zeitgeber
Page 4
And Sam still wanted to believe that she was right: that the world would be restored to order, soon enough, just so long as everyone kept their resolve and didn’t pander to a few ungrateful runners.
“Are you feeling any better?” he asked Emma, on the drive home.
She didn’t answer. He glanced at her; she was gazing out the passenger window. “Did you hear me?”
She said, “Will it make any difference what I say?”
That stung. “Do you think I don’t care about you?”
“I think you don’t listen. I told you what it’s like, before, but that didn’t change anything.”
There was nothing self-serving in her tone; just a chillingly wary disillusionment. Sam didn’t believe she was trying to manipulate him, spinning him stories out of some childish desire to break the shackles of bedtime. “Tell me again. Tell me how you feel, right now.”
Emma took a while to reply. “I feel like it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “As if someone woke me up and dragged me out of bed, and everyone around me wants to do daytime things, but it’s not the time for all that. And even if I wanted to join in … I can’t! I can’t just pretend and play along with them. I don’t have the energy.”
“So you’re tired?” Sam asked her. “Right now? As if it’s midnight?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Tired, but not sleepy. That makes it worse. Even if I lie down in bed, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. And I know that when I really want to be reading, or talking to my friends, or playing, the sun will go down and the lights will go out and I’ll fall asleep before I can finish my thoughts that I couldn’t even think before, in the daytime.”
“Okay. I think I understand now.” Sam’s insomnia messed him up, but it always went away in the end. To have your body going through the motions, day after day, while you were trapped inside, never able to bring yourself into synch, would be a kind of torture.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” he said.
Emma shrugged wearily. “So what now?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I’m not giving up; we’re going to fix this. Just let me find a way.”
11
Laura was the first hurdle; Sam couldn’t even think about backing away from the “cure” if he didn’t have her completely on board.
But Laura needed solid evidence; she’d convinced herself that Emma’s testimony alone could never prove anything. Sam was at a loss to imagine how he was meant to prove what none of the labs testing the zeitgeber had even noticed, with all of their expertise and equipment. Then again, they might have been instructed not to look too closely.
It came to him at night, as he stared at the digits of the bedside clock. The idea seemed so simple and right that he closed his eyes and let the afterimage fade, sinking into the darkness, before he could start questioning it. If there were obstacles, he could find them in his dreams.
When he woke, he hadn’t changed his mind. He waited until Laura emerged from the shower, and he explained the plan while she was dressing.
“It sort of makes sense,” she conceded reluctantly.
“That’s not good enough,” he pressed her. “Either you commit to this, or you tell me why you won’t. No going back on what it means after the fact.”
“I can choose the time? Without warning either of you?”
“Yes.” Sam wasn’t sure if she really believed he’d try to cheat and contrive the outcome, but he was happy to banish any opportunity for doubt.
Momentum was building on another front: the older ex-runners were beginning to disappear from his classes, taking their fate into their own hands. Sam wasn’t ready to join them yet, but he’d already had oblique enquiries from some of his ex-colleagues from the runners’ school. Just because they couldn’t use the same building didn’t mean it would be impossible to start again.
Laura bided her time, to the point where Sam began to wonder if she’d lost her nerve and decided to renege. But then, on the fourth night after they’d spoken, she shook him awake.
“You’ve covered the clock,” he observed, amused. She’d also taken his watch from the bedside table.
“That way, you can’t give her any secret signals.”
“Like Clever Hans?” Sam asked mockingly.
“What?”
“The horse that did arithmetic.”
“Don’t start. Are we going to do this?”
They walked together in the dark to Emma’s room, and Laura knelt beside the bed.
“Darling? Can you wake up for me, please?” She touched Emma’s arm and waited for her to respond.
“What is it?” Emma asked. Her voice was thick with sleep; she sounded like any child woken in the night. Sam’s confidence wavered. He’d committed to the experiment as much as Laura; if it failed, he’d have nothing left to argue.
Laura said, “I just want to know, can you tell me … what’s the time in your head?”
Sam felt the darkness tipping. If Emma really was still a runner, in some deep place untouched by the zeitgeber, she would still be on the old schedule. But if it was all a ruse, a bid for attention, she’d have long ago forgotten what she was meant to be feeling, at some unknown hour with no clock in sight.
“Ten past ten,” she replied. “In the morning. And I wish I could get up and go outside, but my legs won’t let me.”
Laura started weeping as she handed Sam his watch. The second row of digits she’d summoned from the app read 10:13 AM. “I’m sorry,” she told Emma. “I’m so sorry!”
Emma said, “It’s all right. But can I please stop taking the pills now?”
About the Author
Greg Egan published his first story in 1983, and followed it with more than a dozen novels, several short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction – mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes – that established him as one of the most important writers working in the field. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. Dichronauts is the first novel in a new science fiction universe. You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Greg Egan
Art copyright © 2019 by Sally Deng