“Why?” he gasped, throat raw.
“They are to be always with the vans.”
“Uh-huh. Check the others.”
She hurried away. Clay got down on his knees, feeling the lip of the van’s undercarriage. The ground seemed to heave with inner heat, dry and rasping, the pulse of the planet. He finished one side of the van and crawled under, feeling along the rear axle. He heard a distant plaintive cry, as eerie and forlorn as the call of a bird lost in fog.
“Clayji? None in the others.”
His hand touched a small slick box high up on the axle. He plucked it from its magnetic grip and rolled out from under.
“If we drive toward the mine,” she said, “we can perhaps find others.”
“Others, hell. Most likely we’ll run into devotees.”
“Well, I—”
Figures in the trees. Flitting, silent, quick.
“Get in.”
“But—”
He pushed her in and tried to start the van. Running shapes in the field. He got the engine started on the third try and gunned it. They growled away. Something hard shattered the back window into a spiderweb, but then Clay swerved several times and nothing more hit them.
After a few minutes his heart-thumps slowed, and he turned on the headlights to make out the road. The curves were sandy and he did not want to get stuck. He stamped on the gas.
Suddenly great washes of amber light streamed across the sky, pale lances cutting the clouds. “My God, what’s happening?”
“It is more than weather.”
Her calm, abstracted voice made him glance across the seat. “No kidding.”
“No earthquake could have collateral effects of this order.”
He saw by the dashboard lights that she wore a lapis lazuli necklace. He had felt it when she came to him, and now its deep blues seemed like the only note of color in the deepening folds of night.
“It must be something far more profound.”
“What?”
The road now arrowed straight through a tangled terrain of warped trees and oddly shaped boulders. Something rattled against the windshield like hail, but Clay could see nothing.
“We have always argued, some of us, that the central dictate of quantum mechanics is the interconnected nature of the observer and the observed.”
The precise, detached lecturer style again drew his eyes to her. Shadowed, her face gave away no secrets.
“We always filter the world,” she said with dreamy momentum, “and yet are linked to it. How much of what we see is in fact taught us, by our bodies, or by the consensus reality that society trains us to see, even before we can speak for ourselves?”
“Look, that sky isn’t some problem with my eyes. It’s real. Hear that?” Something big and soft had struck the door of the van, rocking it.
“And we here have finished the program of materialistic science, have we not? We flattered the West by taking it seriously. As did the devotees.”
Clay grinned despite himself. It was hard to feel flattered when you were fleeing for your life.
Mrs. Buli stretched lazily, as though relaxing into the clasp of the moist night. “So we have proven the passing nature of matter. What fresh forces does that bring into play?”
“Huh!” Clay spat back angrily. “Look here, we just sent word out, reported the result. How—”
“So that by now millions, perhaps billions of people know that the very stones that support them must pass.”
“So what? Just some theoretical point about subnuclear physics, how’s that going to—”
“Who is to say? What avatar? The point is that we were believed. Certain knowledge, universally correlated, surely has some impact—”
The van lurched. Suddenly they jounced and slammed along the smooth roadway. A bright plume of sparks shot up behind them, brimming firefly yellow in the night.
“Axle’s busted!” Clay cried. He got the van stopped. In the sudden silence, it registered that the motor had gone dead.
They climbed out. Insects buzzed and hummed in the hazy gloom.
The roadway was still straight and sure, but on all sides great blobs of iridescent water swelled up from the ground, making colossal drops. The trembling half-spheres wobbled in the frayed moonlight. Silently, softly, the bulbs began to detach from the foggy ground and gently loft upward. Feathery luminescent clouds above gathered on swift winds that sheared their edges. These billowing, luxuriant banks snagged the huge teardrop shapes as they plunged skyward.
“I … I don’t…”
Mrs. Buli turned and embraced him. Her moist mouth opened a redolent interior continent to him, teeming and blackly bountiful, and he had to resist falling inward, a tumbling silvery bubble in a dark chasm.
“The category of perfect roundness is fading,” she said calmly.
Clay looked at the van. The wheels had become ellipses. At each revolution they had slammed the axles into the roadway, leaving behind long scratches of rough tar.
He took a step.
She said, “Since we can walk, the principle of pivot and lever, of muscles pulling bones, survives.”
“How … this doesn’t…”
“But do our bodies depend on roundness? I wonder.” She carefully lay down on the blacktop.
The road straightened precisely, like joints in an aged spine popping as they realigned.
Angles cut their spaces razor-sharp, like axioms from Euclid.
Clouds merged, forming copious tinkling hexagons.
“It is good to see that some features remain. Perhaps these are indeed the underlying Platonic beauties.”
“What?” Clay cried.
“The undying forms,” Mrs. Buli said abstractly. “Perhaps that one Western idea was correct after all.”
Clay desperately grasped the van. He jerked his arm back when the metal skin began flexing and reshaping itself.
Smooth glistening forms began to emerge from the rough, coarse earth. Above the riotous, heaving land the moon was now a brassy cube. Across its face played enormous black cracks like mad lightning.
Somewhere far away his wife and daughter were in this, too. G’bye, Daddy. It’s been real.
Quietly the land began to rain upward. Globs dripped toward the pewter, filmy continent swarming freshly above. Eons measured out the evaporation of ancient sluggish seas.
His throat struggled against torpid air. “Is … Brahma…?”
“Awakening?” came her hollow voice, like an echo from a distant gorge.
“What happens … to … us?”
His words diffracted away from him. He could now see acoustic waves, wedges of compressed, mute atoms crowding in the exuberant air. Luxuriant, inexhaustible riches burst from beneath the ceramic certainties he had known.
“Come.” Her voice seeped through the churning ruby air.
Centuries melted between them as he turned. A being he recognized without conscious thought spun in liquid air.
Femina, she was now, and she drifted on the new wafting currents. He and she were made of shifting geometric elements, molecular units of shape and firm thrust. A wan joy spread through him.
Time that was no time did not pass, and he and she and the impacted forces between them were pinned to the forever moment that cascaded through them, all of them, the billions of atomized elements that made them, all, forever.
A HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
Kim Stanley Robinson
Here’s a story that lives up to its title, a bleak and powerful story that not only takes a searing look back at the twentieth century, but which may leave you nervously wondering what the next century holds in store.…
Kim Stanley Robinson sold his first story in 1976, and quickly established himself as one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers of his generation. His story “Black Air” won the World Fantasy Award in 1984, and his novella “The Blind Geometer” won the Nebula Award in 1987. His excellent novel The Wi
ld Shore was published in 1984 as the first title in the resurrected Ace Special line. Other Robinson books include the novels Icehenge, The Memory of Whiteness, A Short, Sharp Shock, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge, and the landmark collections The Planet on the Table and Escape from Kathmandu. His most recent book is a new collection, Remaking History. Upcoming is a trilogy of novels set on a future Mars. Robinson and his family are back in their native California again, in Davis, after several years of exile in Switzerland and Washington, D.C.
If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?
—Virginia Woolf
Daily doses of bright light markedly improve the mood of people suffering from depression, so every day at eight in the evening Frank Churchill went to the clinic on Park Avenue, and sat for three hours in a room illuminated with sixteen hundred watts of white light. This was not exactly like having the sun in the room, but it was bright, about the same as if sixteen bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. In this case the bulbs were probably long tubes, and they were hidden behind a sheet of white plastic, so it was the whole ceiling that glowed.
He sat at a table and doodled with a purple pen on a pad of pink paper. And then it was eleven and he was out on the windy streets, blinking as traffic lights swam in the gloom. He walked home to a hotel room in the west Eighties. He would return to the clinic at five the next morning for a predawn treatment, but now it was time to sleep. He looked forward to that. He’d been on the treatment for three weeks, and he was tired. Though the treatment did seem to be working—as far as he could tell; improvement was supposed to average twenty percent a week, and he wasn’t sure what that would feel like.
In his room the answering machine was blinking. There was a message from his agent, asking him to call immediately. It was now nearly midnight, but he pushbuttoned the number and his agent answered on the first ring.
“You have DSPS,” Frank said to him.
“What? What?”
“Delayed sleep phase syndrome. I know how to get rid of it.”
“Frank! Look, Frank, I’ve got a good offer for you.”
“Do you have a lot of lights on?”
“What? Oh, yeah, say, how’s that going?”
“I’m probably sixty percent better.”
“Good, good. Keep at it. Listen, I’ve got something should help you a hundred percent. A publisher in London wants you to go over there and write a book on the twentieth century.”
“What kind of book?”
“Your usual thing, Frank, but this time putting together the big picture. Reflecting on all the rest of your books, so to speak. They want to bring it out in time for the turn of the century, and go oversize, use lots of illustrations, big print run—”
“A coffee table book?”
“People’ll want it on their coffee tables, sure, but it’s not—”
“I don’t want to write a coffee table book.”
“Frank—”
“What do they want, ten thousand words?”
“They want thirty thousand words, Frank. And they’ll pay a hundred thousand pound advance.”
That gave him pause.
“Why so much?”
“They’re new to publishing, they come from computers and this is the kind of numbers they’re used to. It’s a different scale.”
“That’s for sure. I still don’t want to do it.”
“Frank, come on, you’re the one for this! The only successor to Barbara Tuchman!” That was a blurb found on paperback editions of his work. “They want you in particular—I mean, Churchill on the twentieth century, ha ha. It’s a natural.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“Come on, Frank. You could use the money, I thought you were having trouble with the payments—”
“Yeah yeah.” Time for a different tack. “I’ll think it over.”
“They’re in a hurry, Frank.”
“I thought you said turn of the century!”
“I did, but there’s going to be a lot of this kind of book then, and they want to beat the rush. Set the standard and then keep it in print for a few years. It’ll be great.”
“It’ll be remaindered within a year. Remaindered before it even comes out, if I know coffee table books.”
His agent sighed. “Come on, Frank. You can use the money. As for the book, it’ll be as good as you make it, right? You’ve been working on this stuff your whole career, and here’s your chance to sum up. And you’ve got a lot of readers, people will listen to you.” Concern made him shrill: “Don’t let what’s happened get you so down that you miss an opportunity like this! Work is the best cure for depression anyway. And this is your chance to influence how we think about what’s happened!”
“With a coffee table book?”
“God damn it, don’t think of it that way!”
“How should I think of it.”
His agent took a deep breath, let it out, spoke very slowly. “Think of it as a hundred thousand pounds, Frank.”
His agent did not understand.
* * *
Nevertheless, the next morning as he sat under the bright white ceiling, doodling with a green pen on yellow paper, he decided to go to England. He didn’t want to sit in that room anymore; it scared him, because he suspected it might not be working. He was not sixty percent better. And he didn’t want to shift to drug therapy. They had found nothing wrong with his brain, no physical problems at all, and though that meant little, it did make him resistant to the idea of drugs. He had his reasons and he wanted his feelings!
The light room technician thought that this attitude was a good sign in itself. “Your serotonin level is normal, right? So it’s not that bad. Besides London’s a lot farther north than New York, so you’ll pick up the light you lose here. And if you need more you can always head north again, right?”
* * *
He called Charles and Rya Dowland to ask if he could stay with them. It turned out they were leaving for Florida the next day, but they invited him to stay anyway; they liked having their flat occupied while they were gone. Frank had done that before, he still had the key on his key-ring. “Thanks,” he said. It would be better this way, actually. He didn’t feel like talking.
So he packed his backpack, including camping gear with the clothes, and the next morning flew to London. It was strange how one traveled these days: he got into a moving chamber outside his hotel, then shifted from one chamber to the next for several hours, only stepping outdoors again when he emerged from the Camden tube station, some hundred yards from Charles and Rya’s flat.
The ghost of his old pleasure brushed him as he crossed Camden High Street and walked by the cinema, listening to London’s voices. This had been his method for years: come to London, stay with Charles and Rya until he found digs, do his research and writing at the British Museum, visit the used bookstores at Charing Cross, spend the evenings at Charles and Rya’s, watching TV and talking. It had been that way for four books, over the course of twenty years.
The flat was located above a butcher shop. Every wall in it was covered with stuffed bookshelves, and there were shelves nailed up over the toilet, the bath, and the head of the guest bed. In the unlikely event of an earthquake the guest would be buried in a hundred histories of London.
Frank threw his pack on the guest bed and went past the English poets downstairs. The living room was nearly filled by a table stacked with papers and books. The side street below was an open-air produce market, and he could hear the voices of the vendors as they packed up for the day. The sun hadn’t set, though it was past nine; these late May days were already long. It was almost like still being in therapy.
He went downstairs and bought vegetables and rice, then went back up and cooked them. The kitchen windows were the color of sunset, and the little flat glowed, evoking its owners so strongly that it was almost as if they were there. Suddenly he wished they were.
* * *
In the morning he woke to the dull thump thump thump of frozen slabs of meat being rendered by an axe. He went downstairs and ate cereal while leafing through the Guardian, then took the tube to Tottenham Court Road and walked to the British Museum.
Because of The Belle Epoque he had already done his research on the prewar period, but writing in the British Library was a ritual he didn’t want to break; it made him part of a tradition, back to Marx and beyond. He showed his still-valid reader’s ticket to a librarian and then found an empty seat in his usual row; in fact he had written much of Entre Deux Guerres in that very carrel, under the frontal lobes of the great skull dome. He opened a notebook and stared at the page. Slowly he wrote, 1900 to 1914. Then he stared at the page.
His earlier book had tended to focus on the sumptuous excesses of the prewar European ruling class, as a young and clearly leftist reviewer in the Guardian had rather sharply pointed out. To the extent that he had delved into the causes of the Great War, he had subscribed to the usual theory; that it had been the result of rising nationalism, diplomatic brinksmanship, and several deceptive precedents in the previous two decades. The Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the two Balkan wars had all remained localized and non-catastrophic; and there had been several “incidents,” the Moroccan affair and the like, that had brought the two great alliances to the brink, but not toppled them over. So when Austria-Hungary made impossible demands to Serbia after the assassination of Ferdinand, no one could have known that the situation would domino into the trenches and their slaughter.
History as accident. Well, no doubt there was a lot of truth in that. But now he found himself thinking of the crowds in the streets of all the major cities, cheering the news of the war’s outbreak; of the disappearance of pacifism, which had seemed such a force; of, in short, the apparently unanimous support for war among the prosperous citizens of the European powers. Support for a war that had no real reason to be!
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 46