Hollow World

by Michael J. Sullivan

  Pol had obviously thought their meeting would make for a good promotional stunt, and was probably right, but Pol hadn’t stuck around to see the performance through. The Chief Councilor had other matters that day and, after introducing them, left Ellis and Sol alone. Although the visit was advertised, the crowds stayed away. Ellis wasn’t certain if Pol had anything to do with that, or if Sol herself commanded the sort of respect that meant unwanted guests would refrain from intruding on her privacy.

  They were in Sol’s home, a strange and cluttered collection of memorabilia from her long life, and Ellis felt it was the most normal home he’d visited so far. For one thing, there were books—actual paper books—and an old tablet computer. She had hats, and sunglasses, and pens. A dresser, a closet, a clock, and a coatrack with coats. Sol’s most beloved possession was mounted on the wall above a faux fireplace and was a photo of a real woman. Asian eyes wreathed in short black hair looked out from the silver frame.

  “That’s Network Azo,” Sol told him. “Savior of the world. People were always waiting on God back then. My mother was very religious and told me not to put stock in Azo, that she was just another person and would eventually break my heart. People always felt that way then. No faith at all in people, just in old stories and books.”

  A whistle erupted from the kitchen, and Sol held up a finger. “Tea!” she shouted and rushed off.

  Ellis watched her scurry out of the room in her flower-print dress, thinking how much like an old woman she acted and yet she still looked like she was twenty-five. Sol was in fact beautiful. Different from the others, with facial features not quite to the final stage, the real difference was that Sol had hair—hair she kept short and black.

  “How do you like your tea?” Sol called.

  “Really more of a coffee guy.”

  “Cream and honey it is then.”

  She returned with an old-fashioned silver tray and dainty porcelain cups that steamed. “Don’t you just love authentic tea? I mean steeped, not made. I shouldn’t say that in front of her, though.” Sol pointed at the portrait above the fireplace. “But I think even Azo would still appreciate the effort it takes to run hot water through leaves. She believed in hard work.”

  Sol took a sip and smacked her lips in a most undignified manner. “Ah…that’s the stuff.”

  She waited until Ellis tried his. The color of caramel, it tasted almost like a mocha latte.

  “Good, right?”

  He smiled.

  Sol looked back up at the picture. “She never did, you know. Net Azo never did disappoint me. My mother was wrong. My mother was always trying to find fault with others. Everyone used to do that. They hated the idea of heroes for some reason. Used to say they wanted them, but always sought to destroy any who tried. They hated the future too—which is what accounted for everyone being so disappointed, I think. When you expect tomorrow to be concrete, even if it isn’t, you feel it is because that’s somehow better than being wrong. But I never did. I knew Azo was a true hero. She was perfect. Abraham Lincoln freed the American slaves, but Network Azo freed everyone.”

  “You had a mother?” Ellis asked.

  He was looking down at the little beige cocker spaniel sleeping on the floor, its big ears splayed out like Dumbo. The animal showed gray around its muzzle and hadn’t moved during the entire visit. It only opened its eyes briefly when they had arrived. Perhaps Sol had the oldest dog too.

  “Uh-huh. Back when I was born we still had surrogate parents. The ISP provided the DNA pattern, but I was raised by Arvice Chen in the affluent Predat Sector. She wanted a daughter, but got me instead.”

  “No father?”

  Sol shook her head. “Marriage was an oddity by that time. People were all moving underground. It was a whole new world.”

  She took another sip, then set the cup back on the saucer, where it made a petite click. “Lots of changes were happening at the time. No one who has it good ever appreciates change, you know. Like my mother—she hated change. Hated having to leave the sky and go to an early grave, as she called it. I honestly don’t know why she volunteered to raise me. She certainly wasn’t a forward-thinking woman. Maybe she thought she could influence the future through me. She imagined the future would be worse than the past, some awful disaster. Most people did. And just to be fair—it did look that way. The Great Tempest had come, and millions of people were swept away. The Apocalypse, my mother had called it—ever heard of that?”

  Ellis nodded. “People said the same things in my day.”

  Sol smiled. “I like you, Mr. Rogers. You like my tea?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got good taste too.” She winked. “So, what’s it like traveling through time?”

  “Disorienting.”

  “I can believe that.” Sol bobbed her head.

  “The whole trip was really just a blur for me. Kinda felt sick afterward. I wouldn’t suggest it.”

  Sol smiled at him. No wrinkles at all, but Ellis thought she had old eyes. After his visit to the ISP he imagined they weren’t original, but maybe there was truth to the adage about eyes being windows to the soul.

  “Is the future everything you’d hoped for?”

  Ellis laughed, and she laughed with him. “No,” he said. “I can honestly say I never expected this.”

  All the windows of Sol’s home were covered by sheer curtains. That might have added to the homey feel. Ellis’s mother had done the same thing. What caught his eye was how they moved. The curtains rippled and billowed as if in an intermittent breeze wafting past an open sash. Occasionally they split apart, and Ellis could see flowers in a window box: violets, azalea, and chrysanthemums—old-fashioned flowers.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t. I heard about your campaign to get a woman, and it sounds like you’re getting your wish granted.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s the rumor. I’d advise against it, but I suppose you know more about women than I do. Were you married?”

  “Yeah. Almost thirty-five years.”

  “Not very long. Did something happen?”

  Ellis was surprised, until he remembered whom he was talking to. “How old are you?”

  “See, if you were to ask a woman that, legend has it you’d get slapped.” Sol remained silent, showing a little coy smile. Just when he was certain she wouldn’t answer, she asked, “When were you born?”

  “May 5th, 1956.”

  “Let’s put it this way…” Sol tapped her lower lip. “You’re four hundred and four years older than me.”

  Ellis started working it out. Sol was 1,718 years old—nearly two thousand years herself—only she hadn’t skipped any of it. She was a Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner comedy routine come to life.

  “You look shocked. You come in here with this crazy story of flying through time on a set of plastic boxes, and you’re looking at me funny because I can still remember when people had sex? How you making out with that, anyway? I’m guessing you might be experiencing some withdrawal.” Sol gestured at the books. “I read, you know. So few do these days. I like the old paper books, as you can tell. Hard to get. Most of the things I have were antiques when I was born. The books I created from patterns I put together myself and based on the few genuine relics. So little survived the Great Tempest. Everyone relies on holos and grams. That’s the one thing my mother gave me that I appreciate. She taught me to read. Sex is in almost all the books. Men especially have a need for it—a failing sometimes. A lot of the books call it a natural drive. I don’t know if I buy that. Can it be a natural drive if you can choose not to? Eating is a natural drive, but I can’t abstain from it.”

  Sol scanned her bookshelves, and so did Ellis. She had a fine collection. Plenty of history books, which must be like photo albums for her. One was titled The Age of Storms, another The Empty Holo. Most of the titles and authors he didn’t know and guessed the books had been written in the intervening millennia, but he did spot Dickens, Poe, Dante, Cervantes, Austen, H
emingway, and Kafka. Ellis smiled when he saw Orwell, Jules Verne, and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. He also noted King, Patterson, Steel, Roberts, and was particularly pleased to see Michael Connelly—a title he’d never seen before. And there were at least twelve books with the name of Sol as the author. These appeared to be a variety of fiction, memoirs, and history texts. “In books it seems as though men need a woman, physically. Is that true? Are you dying?”

  Ellis smiled. “We’ve already determined that I was married for over thirty years. I’m used to it.”

  He didn’t think she’d get the jest, but Sol burst out laughing so hard she nearly spilled her tea.

  “Oh, I do like you, Mr. Rogers.”

  “I like you too, Sol. Sol…” He repeated the name thoughtfully.

  “It’s another word for sun,” she said.

  “And a Martian day,” he added.

  “And an abbreviation for solution.”

  “And an acronym for shit outta luck.”

  This made Sol laugh. “I never heard that one. It’s nice to talk to someone more my age.”

  “People in Hollow World pick their names, don’t they?”

  “Yes. Everyone takes the Gaunt Winslow Evaluation Nascence, a sort of aptitude test developed by Wacine Gaunt and Albert Winslow that seeks to predict which endeavors will provide a person maximum happiness. Many people denounce the GWEN as ineffective, but everyone takes it, even if only out of curiosity. At that age most people pick a direction and choose a name that reflects their decision. In the early days, the test produced a printout that provided the answers in a series of three letters, and people adopted these abbreviations as their names. The tradition stuck. Silly, I suppose—as most traditions tend to be—but no different from when people were called Carpenter, Miller, Taylor, Potter, or Smith—and it helps skip the obligatory: So what do you do?”

  “Thought so. I noticed a few. Pol seems short for politician, and Geo is obvious, but a few, like Cha, are baffling.”

  “Physician, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Usually it’s Hip, Par, Doc, or Wat, but some pick Cha, which is short for Charaka, a famous Indian physician born around 300 BC and referred to as the Father of Medicine.”

  “And Sol?”

  She smiled. “I’ll leave that for you to decide, but I can tell you this…they retired the name. I’m the only Sol.”

  He smiled back. “Okay, I’ll give you that one.” He sipped his tea, and a question popped into his head, a question that had circled him the night before as he fell asleep amid the M&M’S and camping gear. “What’s the point?”

  “The point?” Sol gazed at him, not so much confused as intrigued. She didn’t look any older than a college coed, but he wondered if Sol’s age isolated her just the same. Did her way of thinking, her interest in books and old things, make others shun her? Think of her as cute but out of touch? Did she appreciate company as much as a homebound grandmother?

  Ellis nodded. “What’s the point to life? I never really thought of it too much before I traveled through time. I did it not only to look for a cure to a terminal illness, but also to escape my life, which as it turned out, didn’t work. But now that I’m here I think about it. Do you know what a parallax is? It’s an astronomy term. You can’t tell much about something looking at it from one point. You have no depth, no reference. If you move and look at it from a different angle, you can determine distance and such. Traveling through time is like that. I saw how things were, and, after shifting ahead, I see how they are and…I don’t know. I thought I’d be able to understand more about the why part of life, but I don’t. You’ve lived through it all, had a lot more time to reflect.”

  Sol looked empathetic, soft eyes blinking at him. “I think that’s one of those questions everyone has to find the answer to for themselves.”

  “Had a feeling you were going to say that. Everyone always does.”

  “But…”

  “There’s a but?”

  She nodded and looked down at her cup. “I can tell you what I found for myself. When you’ve lived through as much as I have, you understand that the old Buddhists were right in a way. Everything comes and goes. Nothing is forever. Not even God. My mother called Him eternal, but Jesus and His dad turned out to be a fad like all the others. At least that’s how I saw it when I was just a girl of one thousand—my rebellious stage.” She winked at him. “God was just a superstitious holdover from when we thought fire was magic. But it’s been centuries, and still people seek something. I can see it in their eyes, hear it when they talk. They don’t call it God anymore, but I think it’s the same thing. A natural drive like wanting food, water, and sex.” She smiled.

  “Even after all the tinkering, the ISP got rid of sex, but we still have a natural longing to feel a connection with others. We’ve outgrown the concepts of magic and demons, but there remains a longing for something. The problem is, we can’t define it because the word God has become meaningless. It has the wrong definition. It means some all-powerful man who knows all and judges everyone, and I don’t think that God ever really was that, any more than lightning and thunder was Thor. We can still sense it, still feel it acting in our lives, and we yearn for it, knowing that somehow it has the answers we’ve always sought.”

  “So what is God then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Really? All that and you are going to leave me hanging? C’mon. You don’t strike me as the type to have lived this long and not have a theory, at least.”

  Sol smiled. “I do have a theory.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  Sol shifted in her seat, straightening up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. “It’s not a currently popular idea.”

  “Why do I get the impression that isn’t a problem for you?”

  Sol grinned. “Did I mention I like you, Mr. Rogers?” She drained the last of her tea. “It isn’t a problem. That’s the benefit of being this old. You get very lonely, and are bored a lot, but you also really don’t give a sonic bleez what anyone else thinks about you.”

  “So, tell me. What is God?”

  “The future.”

  Ellis gave a puzzled face.

  “Humans have longed for many things, and when we put our heads together we have usually found them. Weak as mice we tamed a planet and traveled to others. We satisfied our needs for food and shelter easily enough. Then we fulfilled our dream for peace and defeated death. But one aspiration remains. We’ve never satisfied one of our most primal desires: our lust for God, our need for a spiritual side. We’ve never really gotten close. But what if that’s because it hasn’t been possible—until now? What if we were caterpillars having precognitive dreams of flying? What if we were seeing our own future—and that desperate longing manifested itself in this ethereal hunger, this unfathomable lust for more out of life? My mother always said that we each had a little bit of God inside. It’s the part that guides us and tells us to treat others well. I think that’s true. I think we are all protective containers keeping precious treasures inside, but we are also holding them prisoner, isolating them from each other.” Sol leaned forward over her teacup. “What if God is simply humanity joined?”

  “You’re talking about the Hive Project.”

  Sol didn’t reply; she only smiled and ran a finger around the lip of her empty cup.

  “My mother believed that heaven wasn’t really a place. It was merely the act of being one with God, and if you were, then you would know everything and never be frightened or angry or frustrated. You would experience eternal love. Everyone has an innate desire to be part of something greater than themselves, Mr. Rogers, and that’s what I think God is.”

  “Good news,” Pol said after stealing him from Sol’s home.

  Pol had popped into the middle of Sol’s living room. From the way Sol nearly dropped her cup, and the vicious look on her face, Ellis guessed forming unannounced portals in other people’s homes was considered imp
olite at best. Without so much as a hello to either of them, Pol waved him over, saying it was time to go.

  Normally Ellis was happy for the go sign from Pol. Despite the low-gravity floors in the art shows and museums, he was always exhausted by the end of a visit. Part of it was physical—the standing for hours felt more taxing than swinging a pickax—but what really took a toll was the need to be “up.” The feeling that he had to entertain the mobs that followed him was grueling. When Pol entered this time, though, it was different. Ellis was genuinely enjoying his visit with Sol. The tea was good, he liked the homeyness of the room, and he liked Sol. Each time she answered a question, five flooded in to replace it. More than that, she was comfortable—like Pax.

  “Dex and I were just at the ISP.” Pol spoke quickly once they were both back in Ellis’s room in Wegener. “Dex has the pattern and the processing equipment. Everything we need. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Pol was all grins, and Ellis wanted to join in, to be a part of the celebration, but his heart wasn’t there. Part of him was still back with Sol, still thinking about God. His deflated backpack was on the floor, empty. He’d never refilled it. Pol blathered on about the details of how he finagled the deal. While Pol talked, Ellis noticed one of the cans of Dinty Moore stew. The battered container sat upside down on the illuminated table next to the bed. He must have put it there the night before. He’d brought four, but had only put two in his pack when he’d left the time machine. Didn’t think he’d need more. Looking back, Ellis had only expected to be gone a few hours, but that can had been in his pack for more than five weeks. It looked just like its sister can and probably tasted the same.

  “I want to go see Pax,” Ellis said.

  Pol looked annoyed at having such a wonderful victory monologue interrupted. “We don’t know where Pax is.”

  “I want to go to Pax’s home. If Pax isn’t there, I’ll speak with Alva or Vin.”

  “Fine, but we still have one more appointment to make.”