King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

  “Like me? I’d say he looks more like Gollum.”

  “Here, take him.”

  Dylan took the bundle in his arms. Feelings competed inside of him. He felt happy, of course. He’d begotten a son. A clean, pink, anatomically correct son.

  And yet he felt guilty too. Having grown up bombarded with cautionary tales and harrowing facts about Earth’s imminent overpopulation,17 he couldn’t help but notice, knee-jerkily—or maybe just jerkily—that what he’d begotten was another son; and did you need two sons really? And then there were all the practical concerns. How many insipid papers would he have to grade to fund this kid’s education? Those little fingers, though: they were pretty sweet. Already Dylan Jr. was holding out one pinky like some tea-drinking aristocrat. Maybe this kid could be a better version of him someday? Dylan’s father had never given him much advice or dispensed much wisdom. He seemed to think words were just words and you had to learn through trials. The Buddha said something like that too, as Dylan recalled. Dylan, however, thought words could be pretty important—he taught literature after all—and he intended to give his children millions of the best ones he could come up with. His own life had not gone as he had hoped, but he would do everything in his power to ensure that theirs would.

  17_____________

  Indeed, it was by and large the threat of food shortages, peak oil, and other depleted resources, coupled with the sense of wonder engendered in all but the most hard-hearted Americans by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series on PBS in 1980, that had led to the terraforming projects on Mars and Io that began in the early eighties—still very much works in progress—and, more successfully, to the search for habitable exoplanets, of which, at last count, some 4,696 had been identified, and, thanks to the refinement of QT in the mid-90s, 78 successfully settled. Overpopulation, it turned out, was not a major concern throughout the galaxy. Thousands of Super Earths had been probed and found to house at least some form of life. Most, like New Taiwan, were found to have given rise to life forms remarkably like Homo sapiens, but unlike humans, none had been subjected to so ruthless a process of natural selection that their reproductive instincts trumped their ecological ones. They had DNA, but for whatever reason—as yet undiscovered—it just didn’t seem to be as mean or shortsighted as the Terran variety. They were adept, in other words, at striking an equilibrium with their environment—humans, not so much. It probably didn’t hurt that, while many of these civilizations had some form of religion, most seemed to recognize their systems of belief for the psychocosmological metaphors they perforce were.

  • • •

  Dylan began his two weeks of paternity leave. Erin stayed at the hospital for a couple of days, and he and the kids went to stay with her and the new baby much of the time. Arthur was great with his new brother. Already he enjoyed holding him and petting his bald head. Poor Tavi, though, had a new distance in her eyes. She seemed to understand, with peculiar clarity, that she’d been usurped, that she was no longer the baby in the family but destined to be lost in that gray middle between her two siblings. At least she was the only girl, special in that sense, but it was clear she resented Mommy for holding this new baby and giving it suck, so instead of going to her, she cleaved, rather touchingly, to Daddy, who for lack of other viable candidates became her new best friend. Barely three years old and her paradise was already lost. Join the club.

  Back at home, Dylan bathed the kids, put them to bed, and then set to work on Junior’s sleeping quarters in what would no longer be his office. He and Erin had been so busy that they’d hardly done any nesting in advance; fortunately the shed was filled with hand-me-downs. Dylan even let Arthur and Tavi decorate the walls with markers. Arthur drew spaceships and dinosaurs. Tavi worked in a rather more abstract mode, rendering varicolored plasmoids and blobules.

  For the first week or so after Erin and Junior’s return, Dylan felt quite happy. He forbade himself to do, or even think about, anything related to work, and focused on enjoying the company of his kin. He and the kids prepared meals for Mommy. They played vintage Terran board games, painted one another’s faces, and watched all the Toy Story films, the third of which choked Dylan up beyond all reason. They played hopscotch and flew a kite in the New Taiwanese wind. And they got to know their new family member. Dylan Junior’s face seemed to change by the minute, and while Dylan still thought he looked pretty much like Gollum, he was beginning to see what Erin meant: Junior did take after him in some respects, more obviously than he did his mother anyway. It was mainly the eyes. They were Dylan’s eyes, really, just popped into a smaller skull. He had not quite realized before how a gene is a gene is a gene. It made for quite an affinity, and one night while the other two kids were sleeping, Dylan cradled the baby in his arms and walked him outside to the deck to peer at the stars. He told him, unabashedly, how he loved him and—screw overpopulation, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate in all directions anyway—he was glad to have him join them. Then he waxed philosophical and possibly nutty and asked the kid what it had been like in the womb. What was it like when that first spark of mental life kicked in? What was it like before that? How far back could he go? Was there anything important back there that his old man had forgotten? He looked out at the Milky Way, showed his son the pale evening star their species had once been trapped around. All those worlds, and yet—he spared his son now and kept his thoughts to himself—was there nothing truly strange out there? Nothing so exotic and marvelous that it would stymie our human frames of reference, mock our languages, confound our metaphors?

  Because that was the thing about being young, wasn’t it? Everything was still new? Dylan sometimes briefed his students on one of the more interesting tidbits he’d picked up in graduate school: The Russian formalist poet Viktor Shlovsky identified ostranenie—usually translated as “defamiliarization,” though literally “strange-making”—as the basic function of art. “Habituation,” Shlovsky wrote, “devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.… Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” His students usually gave him blank stares when he recited this, so he’d translate it for them: “Art exists to make you babies again.”

  “Why would we want to be babies again? Isn’t education about getting us to stop being babies?”

  “In part, yes, but it’s also to get you to see things, really see them, as if for the first time. We could never hurt one another if only we learned to look with new eyes.”

  “But aren’t babies like naturally really selfish? Don’t you have to teach a baby to be nice?”

  They were right, of course. He was romanticizing. He had this tendency.

  And there was this too: If you checked your omni, you’d find that nearly every combination of five or fewer words that you could think of, however nonsensical, had been documented countless times. The English language itself, one might say, was dying through overuse and becoming one big meta-cliché. Dylan consoled himself with a quote he’d once read from a twentieth-century Earthling scientist: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” How the unvanquished youth in him hoped it was so!

  This was as close as Dylan ever got to praying anymore, and it ended, as per some prayers, with gratitude: he thanked the Universe, whatever that might mean, for this beautiful, healthy baby boy who had his eyes.

  PART TWO

  STRANGE-MAKER

  Paternity leave wasn’t all so wonderful. Dylan was sleeping fitfully—which was to be expected, what with the new infant. And even if there had been no infant, the fact was, despite his best efforts, he was fundamentally bad at vacationing. Forbidding himself to work inevitably resulted in the accumulation of anxiety. He worried about everything he should be doing, and that anxiety steadily built up steam until on the tenth day it found sufficient cause to explode: he’d taken the last of the Cochler
in several days ago, and damn it to hell if his ears weren’t still ringing loud as ever. He scheduled a visit with Dr. Cohen for that very afternoon.

  “To be frank with you,” she told Dylan, eyes squinty with concern, “I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s really been no change at all?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “See, that’s so strange. Ordinarily the Cochlerin should have done most of its work by the fourth or fifth day. I have teenagers who come in here newly deafened every couple of weeks. Do you know that since hair cell regeneration went live, concerts have gotten up to thirty percent louder?”

  “That’s interesting,” Dylan replied, though really he was much more interested in how he was going to get this goddamned ringing to stop.

  “So what do you say we do that hearing test after all?”

  Dylan grudgingly accepted. He already knew what they were going to find: he was growing old.

  He went in the sound booth, pressed buttons when he heard beeps, and repeated after Dr. Cohen words like “baseball,” “hot dog,” and “ansible.”

  “Okay, you’re all done,” she said.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all she wrote.”

  “Well?”

  “I hate to tell you this, Mr. Green, but—”

  “Give it to me. I’m ready for it.”

  “Your hearing is perfectly normal.”

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me loud and clear. I have an audiogram here to prove it.”

  “Really? Normal?”

  “Really normal.”

  “So what does that mean then with regard to the ringing?”

  “It’s tough to say exactly, except that the problem seems to be not with your cochlear hair cells as would typically be the case.”

  “So where is it then?”

  “We’ll have to run some tests, but it could be in your auditory nerve or beyond.”

  “Beyond?”

  “Your brain, Mr. Green.”

  “I see. So I don’t have any hearing damage, but I might have brain damage?”

  “I can’t say anything with any certainty at this point, Mr. Green, but I’d like to do a functional MRI if that’s okay with you.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. She got the fMRI helmet out of its case and fitted it to his head. She read the results from her omni. “Hmm.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “None that I can see. None whatsoever. I’m not a specialist, but this is telling me everything’s tip-top.”

  “So where does that leave us?” he asked. “I assure you I’m not just crying wolf here. My ears are really screaming.”

  “I have no cause to doubt that, Mr. Green. The next indication here would be for me to refer you to a psychiatrist. There might be a psychosomatic component to your condition. Do you have an inordinate amount of stress in your life, would you say?”

  “Define ‘inordinate.’”

  She smiled. “All right then, if it’s agreeable to you, I’m going to refer you to Dr. Minus Fudge. MD in psychiatry from Stanford. He’s wonderful, and right next door.”

  Dylan nodded his assent.

  “Don’t worry,” she assured him. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  He thanked her for her concern and left the office feeling even shittier than before. She’d been so confident last time in telling him his condition was curable that he had expected another course of Cochlerin at most, a stronger dosage perhaps. He had not expected any talk of brain damage, let alone neurosis. Could that be right? Was he doing this to himself? The ringing certainly seemed to be as objectively real as a fever or a broken bone. When he’d first noticed it, he’d even asked Erin if she didn’t hear it too. He’d tried countless times to wish it away, talk it down, reason with it, berate it, cajole it, but it didn’t seem to interact with the stuff of thought at all. But maybe that’s what it’s like to lose one’s mind? Surely madmen don’t will themselves mad. They lose control, become unhinged. Fuck. It felt like the beginning of the end, like he had embarked on that downward slope that would lead him through senility and decrepitude to bodily death and the ultimate indignity of oblivion.

  He dropped by the drugstore downstairs and got the diaper batteries Erin had requested.18 He wasn’t ready to go home yet, so he went in the coffee shop next door. Dylan had actually come to prefer poxna to coffee, but it was nice to be in an American-style coffee house again. It was not unlike the one in the Borders he’d worked at several lifetimes ago. He ordered an espresso con panna and taught the barista how to make it. It was at once anticlimactic and altogether wonderful to have that particular combination of chemicals on his tongue again. He took a seat. The place was filled with native students mainly. Right next to him a rather lovely native male sat sipping his coffee and crocheting with carbon nanotube bundles. Dylan could hardly stop himself from staring until the creature caught him looking and changed his position. Dylan reminded himself that the thing had a penis anyway. He blinked on his omni, pretended he had something to do, and then realized that maybe he did. “Project a QWERTY keyboard on this table,” he instructed under his breath. It had become trendy of late to use a more ergonomic keyboard configuration like Colemak or Capewell, but Dylan was an old dog.

  18_____________

  Electro-plasmic waste-disintegrating diapers were one of the more eagerly adopted technological imports for Terrans in recent years; the Tau Ceti System had been using them for the equivalent of almost ten thousand Earth years already.

  The keyboard appeared. Dylan began to type.

  Dear Ashley,

  I’m sorry to be so late in the reply. I wonder if you’d like to have lunch with me at the Inner Harbor this Saturday at noon?

  – Dylan Greenyears

  He hadn’t known he was going to do this until he did it, but then he hadn’t known he was losing his mind either. If cum was befogging his thoughts, well then so be it—the fog was life too. And much as he believed in the sanctity of marriage, he did not, it turned out, believe in it at the expense of the sanctity of his life itself, which somehow had a whole new urgency to it.

  He chose Saturday for good reason: he happened to know there was some big K-12 conference in Minneapolis this weekend. He wasn’t scheduled to go, but a few of his colleagues were. He’d been invited to this sort of thing a few times in his early years at the school, but in the interim he’d earned a well-deserved reputation as a bona fide exile; unlike most of his Terran coworkers, he hadn’t returned to Earth even once since they’d come up here (Erin, by contrast, made it home once every two or three years), and until now he’d been thoroughly convinced he didn’t want to. He’d been so wounded by his home planet that he’d forsworn it altogether. But then he’d been wounded by this planet too, however gradually. Or maybe that was just the ineradicable memory of that other place intruding on this one—you can’t escape the fourth dimension by moving along any of the first three. Indeed, if there was anything to the old truism about time healing wounds, those that didn’t outright kill you anyway, then why was it depicted as an arrow? Why not an unfurling roll of gauze or some such thing? The IV drip of time?

  In any event, Dylan didn’t get what was so important about physically traveling to a conference now that the omni could bring it to you and/or you to it, but his colleagues relished any excuse to take a trip—and now he would too.

  • • •

  Back at home, he found Erin nursing Junior on the sofa and gave her the bad news: “Get this. Cindy called. She’s quote-unquote ‘highly recommending’ I go to this conference in Minneapolis this weekend.”

  “The Minneapolis? On Earth?”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “At the tail end of your paternity leave? Can I assume you told her no?”

  “Actually I told her I’d ch
eck with you and get back to her.”

  “She didn’t say you have to go, though, did she?”

  “No. She implied it, but fuck her. I’ll tell her I can’t. I’ll tell her you need me here. It’s just a job after all.”

  Erin looked up at the ceiling, face pinched with thinking.

  To be sure, it was more than just a job, and Dylan knew she thought so too. It was a symbol, or something. For their first nine years out here, he had taught English to the native population at a cram school, which was the gig he’d been recruited for. He liked the work less and less each year, but it allowed them to stay and paid his tuition while he worked at night toward finishing his BA from Temple via omni, and then his MA in Modernist and Postmodernist Literature from Yale, also via omni. He’d been crazy busy, but he’d wanted it that way; the last thing he needed was time to get sucked into the black hole of what-might-have-been. Erin, meanwhile, picked up a gig teaching human biology full-time at the American School. She made good money and enjoyed working with high school kids so much that she coached cross-country and choreographed the musicals too. When he finished his degree, Erin tapped her connections and got him a job in the English department at the school, and for a handful of years they’d enjoyed living on pretty much identical schedules: they’d wake up at the same time, eat breakfast, and roll to work together; they’d meet up for poxna breaks in the teachers’ lounge; and they’d roll home together. They were careful, though, to give each other ample space during the workday and made a point of eating lunch together no more than twice a week. Even when they did eat together, they generally stayed on campus, and not only because the cafeteria food was decent and cheap, but because on this alien world so far from home, however bathetically unstrange, there was something especially comforting about the American-high-schoolness of the American School—every bit as distinctive a quality as Irish-pubness or Starbucks-ness. They certainly hadn’t expected any resemblance to Cardinal O’Hara, the Catholic high school in Springfield, Pennsylvania, where they’d first met all those years ago in Jesus Christ Superstar. The American School had a lot more money than O’Hara ever had, so it was no surprise that the infrastructure was all-around swankier, but the effect of all those hopeful student voices—and worlds-weary faculty ones—echoing down the halls, combined with the adolescent reek of PE and cheap perfume, was as good as any time machine19 and transported the Greens on a daily basis to that other school on their home planet where’d they’d fallen so blithely and uncynically in love and planned their days around trips to each other’s lockers so that they could lock lips for all of twenty-five usually-pretty-halitotic-but-what-did-they-care seconds before they had to rejoin the hallway traffic and race the bell to remote classrooms where they would pass the time by tessellating their notebooks with “I ♥ DG” or “I ♥ EW” and lose themselves in daydreams of last weekend, or next weekend, or some weekend twenty years from now. Earth was the only world then, and they were the only lovers. That Dylan and Erin did indeed find themselves together two decades hence felt like a great triumph. They had weathered so much and now here they were, returned to the apex of some miraculous cycle and stealing kisses at school.