But that's all confusion for several days from this moment, after those working on the problem have had time to acclimate to the size of this mystery. Right now is another story. Right now Bell and his colleagues are still absorbing the impact.
The first colleague to reach Bell is Connie Aldrin No Relation, those last two words a nigh-permanent part of her last name, on this world where she has come to build a future. She touches faceplate to faceplate, so muffled sound can pass from one helmet to the other without benefit of broadcast, and asks the big question for the first time.
"How did he do it?"
* * * *
By the time Bell was finished, I'd asked for and been given another shot of druhz.
Part of me could already feel that his warning had been accurate. What I'd heard had changed me. Wherever I went from here, whatever career I built, whatever relationships I forged, would all lead to me living in a cramped habitat like Bell's, alone, the secret clutched to my breast like a beloved child who needed to be protected. I might not end up here for decades. He hadn't. But this was where I was going, someday, and though I should have been horrified by the realization, I also felt a certain odd kind of wonder as well, as if the prospect might not be all that bad.
I said, “This is about those aliens you said your people were in contact with. That ... what were their names? Minnie and Earl.”
He shook his head. “We still don't know for a fact what Minnie and Earl were, or whether ‘alien’ was a fair label for them ... but yes, they were our first line of inquiry. After all, they had some capabilities echoing those Destry had demonstrated. But it ultimately didn't make sense. After all, they'd never been hostile to us: quite the contrary. They were a welcome and even beloved presence. Lending their talents to a threat like Destry was well out of character for them.”
I said, “You don't know what their agenda was.”
“No, we don't. Not really. But we knew them. They were good neighbors. It may be a little hard to accept if you weren't there, with us, but the hard part wasn't so much believing that they could have given Destry a little technological assistance surviving vacuum, as accepting that Minnie would have had anything whatsoever to do with encouraging him to run around naked.” There was genuine affection in his eyes. “That old girl had some proper ideas. Trust me, I only mentioned Minnie and Earl so you'd know that we were already a little accustomed to unusual conundrums in those days. We always considered their involvement unlikely, and when they confirmed that they didn't have the slightest idea how Destry had done what he'd done, we heaved a communal sigh of relief and looked elsewhere.
“So we next considered the possibility that Destry's brain or body had undergone a spontaneous beneficial mutation, perhaps in reaction to the poisons he'd absorbed. But that didn't work either. None of the colleagues who'd metabolized and recovered from smaller doses exhibited any anomalies at all, and the many experts who looked at the body reported that it was, organically at least, cell by cell the same machine it had always been.
“There have been volumes, all highly classified, written on this stuff, but I'll bring you to the bottom line. Once the brain boys eliminated all the other theories, including one that blamed me personally for somehow setting up the greatest fraud in the history of the space program, we were left us with only one possibility, the one I've already prepared you for: the likelihood that Destry survived vacuum because he was too fried to care that surviving in vacuum was a problem. Somehow, he was able to breathe because he thought he was able to breathe."
It had been a while since I'd last blinked. I blinked too many times now by way of compensation and said, “But that makes no sense. He wouldn't be the first crazy person to drown or suffocate. And if it comes to that, crazy doesn't have to enter into belief. You could remove all the oxygen from your air mixture and I'd lose consciousness and die still believing that I was breathing fine.”
“True,” said Bell, radiating sheer approval at my gift for spotting the obvious objections. “So there had to be more to it, some special way of believing in the unbelievable. Some way Destry found by accident.
“One of the earliest scientists working on the problem explained it to me this way. Imagine a vault door twenty miles wide. Imagine everything you could possibly want in one great big pile on the other side. Imagine there's only one keyhole. Imagine that while you do have the key, you can only approach the vault blindfolded, from a position that virtually guarantees you cannot find the lock by proceeding in a straight line. Further imagine that you will be given only one try to fit your key into the lock, without scraping the sides ... and that the fit will have to be perfect.
“Pretty long odds, right? But it's worse than that. The keyhole is drilled into that lock at a pretty goddamned strange angle, and will only admit the key if you match that angle precisely. It's not an altitude you're likely to guess. In fact, it's at an angle you're guaranteed not to guess, if you go by prior experience and rational thinking. Your only real chance is to somehow turn off everything you've ever learned or intuited and just go for a totally random approach—which is damned near impossible, given that everything you do is informed by your personal experience. The only consolation you have is the knowledge that if you do somehow manage to find that keyhole, you will be able to mark it for yourself, so you can later find it at will.
“Along comes Destry. His mind has turned to pudding. He's lost all possible barriers between the real and subjective. He's no longer self-censoring. He's thinking random nonsense, and when he takes a random leap at the wall, he defeats the odds, finds the lock, and succeeds in turning the key, probably without even knowing what a remarkable thing he's just done.
“He might not even be the first. History's full of unlikely stories about crazy people and visionaries performing acts best described as miracles. Some of those stories are bullshit. Maybe even most of them. Or all. We're talking about an unusual phenomenon, and bullshit's a downright common one.
“But given what we know, it's also not that much of a stretch to wonder whether one or two of those crazy sons of bitches did on Earth what Destry, with his own fried brain, managed to accomplish on the Moon. Maybe one or two of those nutbags who made persuasive claims to be prophets or deities were just schizophrenics who, like him, had guessed right. Maybe one or two of them found the key, the way of thinking, which allowed consciousness to trump time, distance, conventional physics, life and death.
“And maybe we could too.
“All we knew for a fact was that Destry had.
“If so, the only possible way to claim that gift for humanity was to fund what can only be called an Inner Space program, where people were trained to give up the objective in favor of the subjective. Those Innernauts, for lack of a better phrase, had to lock themselves up someplace without other distracting influences, without other people around to tell them they were being stupid, and think. With no guarantee of success, and no advantage except the knowledge that a crazy person found that keyhole before them.
“All you really need, he said, “is a regular supply of people who won't mind giving up the end of their lives to become Schroedinger Cats.
“Now think.
“Who the hell else are you gonna find to do such a job, except for people who have already spent their lives locked up in tin cans in order to explore the universe? And how are you going to get even them to do it until they're so old that it's the last form of exploration they have left?
“I can only tell you this. It took twenty years of nonstop concentration before one of us found the way. Another five before he managed to impart what he knew to another. Another five before the number of people reaching the threshold exceeded one per year. Five after that, and some of us were zipping back and forth on a whim. None of us are yet at the stage where we can do it consistently, which is why I always wear a moonsuit if I step out my airlock door. And we're still debating safe ways of introducing what we know to humanity at large. But I can say this. Just
because I rarely use that airlock ... it doesn't mean that I never leave. Via space or time.”
What followed was not complete silence. The habitat still hummed from the operation of the systems that made life here possible for creatures like myself still handicapped by insufficient skill at dealing with the impossible.
He stood and said, “You'll always be welcome here, Jessie James. I like you, and as long as I still need to come back here on a regular basis this old homestead will be a much more accommodating place if it saw regular visits from a lady as bright and as charming as yourself. But you're still young—way too young to waste years sitting on your ass trying to find your way to the same path I've found. So, no, I'm afraid I'm never going to give you any lessons. When the time comes, if it's what you want, you're going to have to find your own way.
“But I do see potential in you.
“And I do think you've earned one free ride.
“There are people I want you to meet.”
He extended his hand.
After a moment, I took it.
* * * *
Many years later—I won't say how many—the Lunar Authority announced Malcolm Bell's death. They said that he'd been cremated, as per his own instructions, and scattered throughout the solar system, with some of him added to the atmosphere of soil of each of worlds where humanity had established a foothold. Supposedly a final portion was placed aboard one of the unmanned probes we were still firing into the outer dark, a gesture that allowed commentators the easy observation that he belonged to the stars now. It had been so many years since the gunfight, by then, that the most common reaction was surprise that he'd still been alive at all.
Most of the articles said that he'd been living quietly in his Farside habitat, thinking thoughts that could only be known to him. They said he'd cut himself off from all human contact, save for occasional visits from his physician and from a now middle-aged woman named Jessie James, who his will described as a personal assistant. He left sufficient funds for the maintenance of his habitat, which would be held in trust until the day she could move in herself, at some point in her late old age.
As Bell said that first day, bullshit remains a constant in the universe.
If Bell really died that day, if he was really cremated, the visitors who show up at my front door from time to time wouldn't be asking about his whereabouts, or the means he'd used to travel there. They wouldn't ask, every time, whether I'd seen him or whether he and his fellow travelers had ever sent back any useful information. For what it's worth, I did see Malcolm Bell at least four more times after his supposed cremation, and hope to see him again, though like him I respect the path the luckless Ken Destry forged and won't share it with anybody who thinks it can or should be learned by simply asking.
All I know is that when the news hit the media, I was doing a routine audit of a certain lunar amusement park, on premises. I immediately announced that I was taking the rest of the day off, put the books away, and began to wander throughout the grounds, passing the laughing children and thundering coasters and the concessions selling the usual variety of food designed to rot your teeth and expand your waistline.
I didn't know what I felt. Not grief, certainly. I'd expected this news for some time. And not inevitability. I had a husband and a daughter and friends and a career, and though there were still years to go before I'd have to make up my mind for sure, I was still telling myself, in those days, that I wouldn't ever follow where Malcolm Bell had led. But then why did I keep thinking about it?
I was still wondering by the time I found myself sitting on a park bench opposite the habitat the park had built for its two cloned polar bears. They were popular attractions, and they were more than earning their keep today, with a show of ursine exuberance that amounted to hours spent repeatedly climbing to their habitat's highest point and launching themselves into the open air only to splash down into their lagoon. Each belly flop was like a thunderclap, each splash an explosion. I wasn't the only park visitor so delighted that I parked myself at a good vantage point and watched, happy just to witness the simple animal joy they took in being alive.
After a while, though, I focused on the habitat itself. Spacious enough to house the two bears in comfort, it was still not quite as voluminous as it was designed to look. The park had used various design tricks involving light and false perspective to make it look about half again as large. It evoked, without coming close to duplicating, the vast expanses of the Arctic these creatures had evolved to inhabit, a place that no longer existed and that would now kill them as surely as the vacuum outside the dome we used to house ourselves.
The least of the tricks was a mural painted on the crescent-shaped rear wall of the habitat, depicting ice floes and stark blue skies and aurorae and the distant forms of migrating seals. It was a marvelous work of art, that mural; the sculpted stones of the bear habitat seemed to melt into it without quite betraying the place where a false but tangible habitat merged with the backdrop one step further removed from reality.
The mural was meant for the pleasure of humans, not bears. No doubt the bears couldn't process its images in terms easily translated to the past of their moribund species. But as I sat there, in the warmth of the simulated spring day, I found myself wondering if the bears ever did register the natural home promised by that two-dimensional presentation, and if so whether they could ever be fooled by it; if they ever stared at the nonexistent seals nonexistent kilometers away, found the wall between them and that distant smorgasbord, and puzzled over how to get from here to there. Did they ever think it might be as simple as finding the right angle of approach? As rushing the wall with the right attitude?
Of course not.
They were bears, not philosophers.
But was it possible that it was only this very limitation that made them fail? That a polar bear with the twin gifts of imagination and the way of thinking poor Ken Destry had needed his madness to find, could believe itself past that mural into a place a polar bear would consider home?
It was possible for people. I knew it because I'd seen it. I'd been there.
The only question was whether I could dedicate myself to making the journey.
I won't pretend that I made up my mind that day. I didn't move into Malcolm Bell's old habitat for another thirty years, and I suffered more than my share of doubt and wavering resolve before then. I can only say that I still consider that day a tipping point.
The other worth talking about took place on the day we met, when he asked me to take his hand.
There was a world. It was not a bad world. The trees didn't look like trees and the mountains didn't resemble mountains and the sky certainly looked like no sky I'd ever seen, but it was all beautiful and benign, and there was something about the air that energized my lungs and made every ounce of me feel alive. There was a lake, with water pink and subtly perfumed but apparently safe for human consumption, as there were children splashing around it, their play shared by sleek big-eyed things that would remind me of seals if seals had opposable thumbs. A small semicircle of cottages surrounded a beach on one shore, each small, each unpretentious, each flying the flag of the Lunar Authority and in some cases the flag of one of Earth's antique countries as well.
On the day Malcolm Bell and I strolled down from the hills, not all of those cottages were occupied. The residents were traveling elsewhere. But this was home base, of sorts, and at least twenty people ranging from infancy to late middle age were in sight, recognizing Malcolm Bell and waving at him from the comfort of their respective front porches.
I looked at Bell, who seemed to have dropped thirty years since we left his habitat. His features were still lined and his hair still white, but his eyes were vibrant and filled with something I recognized as love for his neighbors. All of a sudden I felt shy, but I still managed to ask a question. “Are these all Farside hermits?”
Bell laughed out loud. “Most of them. Some found their way on their own. And a couple of othe
rs, like this one"—he said, as a figure from one of the nearer cottages hopped off his front porch to greet us—"we brought here because we figured they deserved it.”
The man walking toward us had one of the most heroic, bushy moustaches I've ever seen. His gait and his outstretched hand seemed friendly enough, but the warm welcome he conveyed didn't come anywhere near his eyes. From what Bell told me later, it never did.
Bell's earlier words, space or time, his later reference to consciousness trumping life and death, hit me again, and I went a little weak in the knees. Extending my hand, I managed a weak, “H-hello. I'm Jessie James.”
The stranger looked like he would like to laugh, but couldn't. If he was who I thought he was, he was incapable of it. It was just not in his emotional repertoire. “Really?”
Bell was having the time of his life. “No joke. It really is her name.”
The man with the walrus moustache took my hand.
By this time I was more certain than ever that this stranger was about to say he was Wyatt Earp. The real Wyatt Earp, plucked from time and history and even his own death to live a limitless future in the stars. Given what I'd been told that day and the other puzzle pieces I'd be putting together for years to come, it was certainly within the realm of possibility, if only because I wanted it to be and Bell knew how to turn want into have.
But that's not who this man was.
You see, Malcolm Bell might have become as famous as Wyatt Earp, and the canonization of his name might have echoed much of what happened to Wyatt Earp, but as a man he owed Wyatt Earp nothing. He had other debts to pay.
And I learned what debts when the man with the walrus moustache said, “Pleased to meet you, ma'am. I'm Ken Destry.”
Copyright © 2009 Adam-Troy Castro
This one's for Mitch Silverman, who insisted.
* * * *
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Minnie and Earl, mentioned briefly in this story, earlier took center stage in “Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl's” [June 2001].)
Analog SFF, April 2009 Page 7