Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I said it's nothing!” he shouted at her. “Nothing at all! Now just leave me the hell alone!”

  * * * *

  TEN

  Carrie stood in the ladies’ room off the lobby, pulling herself together. She was not going to cry. Even if Dr. Erdmann had never spoken to her like that before, even if ever since Jim's death she had felt as if she might shatter, even if ... everything, she was not going to cry. It would be ridiculous. She was a professional—well, a professional aide anyway—and Henry Erdmann was an old man. Old people were irritable sometimes. This whole incident meant nothing.

  Except that she knew it did. She had stood outside Dr. Erdmann's door for a long time as people slipped out, smiling at her vaguely, and Evelyn Krenchnoted babbled on inside. The unprecedented meeting had first piqued her curiosity—Henry Erdmann, hosting a party at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning? Then, as she realized what Evelyn was saying, disbelief took Carrie. Evelyn meant ... Evelyn thought ... and even Dr. Erdmann believed that “something” had been happening, something weird and unexplainable and supernatural, at the moment that Evelyn was under the MRI ... Henry!

  But Jake DiBella had been upset by Evelyn's scans.

  The door of the ladies’ opened and the first of the Saturday visitors entered, a middle-aged woman and a sulky teenage girl. “Honestly, Hannah,” the woman said, “it's only an hour out of your precious day and it won't kill you to sit with your grandmother and concentrate on someone else besides yourself for a change. If you'd just—”

  Carrie went to DiBella's office. He was there, working at his desk. No sign of her picture, cushion, coffee cup; she couldn't help her inevitable, stupid pang. He didn't want them. Or her. Another failure.

  “Dr. DiBella—”

  “ ‘Jake.’ Remember?” And then, “Carrie, what is it?”

  “I just came from Dr. Erdmann's apartment. They were having a meeting, about twenty people, all of them who've felt these ‘seizures’ or whatever they are, all at the same time. Like the one you captured on Evelyn's MRI scan.”

  He stared at her. “What do you mean, ‘at the same time'?”

  “Just what I said.” She marveled at her own tone—none of her shakiness showed. “They said that at the exact same time that Evelyn was showing all that weird activity under the MRI, each of them was feeling it, too, only not so strong. And it was the exact same time that Anna Chernov's necklace was being stolen. And they all saw the necklace in their minds.” Only—hadn't Mr. Donovan said that the necklace looked different from what Evelyn said? Confusion took Carrie.

  Jake looked down at whatever he was writing, back at Carrie, down again at his notes. He came around the desk and closed his office door. Taking her arm, he sat her gently in the visitor's chair, unadorned by her cushion. Despite herself, she felt a tingle where his hand touched her.

  “Dr. Erdmann was involved in this? Tell me again. Slowly, Carrie. Don't leave anything out.”

  * * * *

  Evelyn Krenchnoted made her way to Gina Martinelli's apartment on Five. Really, Henry had been unbearably rude—to that poor young girl, to everybody at the meeting, and especially to Evelyn herself. He hadn't comforted her when that awful Donovan man called her a liar, he hadn't put his hand on hers again, he'd just yelled and yelled—and just when things between them had been going so well!

  Evelyn needed to talk to Gina. Not that Gina had been any help at the meeting, not with all that praying. Gina was really a lot smarter than she looked, she'd been a part-time tax preparer once, but hardly anybody knew it because Gina never opened her mouth except to pray. Not that there was anything wrong with praying, of course! Evelyn certainly believed in God. But you had to help Him along a little if you really wanted something. You couldn't expect the Lord to do everything.

  Evelyn had even curled her hair for Henry.

  “Gina? Sweetie? Can I come in?”

  “You're already in,” Gina said. She had to speak loudly because she had Frank Sinatra on the record player. Gina loved Frank Sinatra. For once she wasn't reading her Bible, which Evelyn thought was a good sign. She lowered her bulk onto Gina's sofa.

  “So what did you think of that meeting?” Evelyn said. She was looking forward to a good two-three hours of rehashing, sympathy, and gossip. It would make her feel a lot better. Less creepy. Less afraid.

  But instead, Gina said, “There was a message on the machine when I got back here. Ray is coming next week.”

  Oh, God, Gina's son. Who was only after her money. Ray hadn't visited in over a year, and now that Gina had told him she was leaving everything to the daughter ... and there was a lot of everything to leave. Gina's late husband had made major money in construction.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Evelyn said, a little perfunctorily. Ordinarily she would have adored discussing Gina's anguish; for one thing, it made Evelyn glad she had never had kids. But now, with so much else going on—Henry and the attempted robbery and Evelyn's seizure and the strange comments at the meeting —

  Frank Sinatra sang about ants and rubber tree plants. Gina burst into tears.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Evelyn repeated, got up to put her arms around Gina, and resigned herself to hearing about Ray Martinelli's selfishness.

  * * * *

  Bob Donovan sat beside Anna Chernov's bed in the Infirmary. The man simply could not take a hint. She would either have to snub him outright or tell him in so many words to stop visiting her. Even the sight of him, squat and toad-faced and clumsy, made her shudder. Unfair, but there it was.

  She had danced with so many beautiful men.

  Which had been the best? Frederico, partnering her in La Valse—never had she been lifted so effortlessly. Jean, in Scotch Symphony, had been equally breathtaking, But the one she always returned to was Bennet. After she'd left the New York City Ballet for American Ballet Theater and her career had really taken off, they'd always danced together. Bennet, so dazzling as Albrecht in Giselle.... Guesting at a gala at the Paris Opera, they'd had seventeen curtain calls and—

  Her attention was reclaimed by something Bob Donovan said.

  “Could you repeat that, please, Bob?”

  “What? Old Henry's crackpot theory? Science gibberish!”

  “Nonetheless, would you repeat it?” She managed a smile.

  He responded to the smile with pathetic eagerness. “Okay, yeah, if you want. Erdmann said, lemme think...” He screwed up his already crevassed face in an effort to remember. Although she was being unkind again. He probably wasn't all that bad looking, among his own class. And was she any better? These days she couldn't bear to look in a mirror. And the sight of the ugly cast on her leg filled her with despair.

  “Erdmann said there was some experiments in physics, something with two slips, where people's consciences changed the path of some little ... particles ... by just thinking about them. Or maybe it was watching them. And that was the link between everybody who had so-called ‘energy’ at the same time. Group conscience. A new thing.”

  Consciousness, Anna translated. Group consciousness. Well, was that so strange? She had felt it more than once on stage, when a group of dancers had transcended what they were individually, had become a unity moving to the music in the creation of beauty. Such moments had, for her, taken the place of religion.

  Bob was going on now about what other people at the meeting had said, offering up ungrammatical accounts in a desperate bid to please her, but even as she recognized this, Anna had stopped listening. She thought instead about Bennet, with whom she'd had such fantastic chemistry on and off stage, Bennet lifting her in the grand pas de deux of Act II, rosin from the raked stage rising around her like an angelic cloud, herself soaring and almost flying...

  * * * *

  “Tell me again,” Jake said.

  “Again?” This was the third time! Not that Carrie really minded. She hadn't had his total attention—anybody's total attention—like this since Jim died. Not that she wanted Jim back.... She shuddered even as she went throu
gh it all again. By the end, she was belligerent.

  “Why? Are you saying you believe all this stuff about a group consciousness?”

  “No. Of course not. Not without confirmation ... but Erdmann is a scientist. What other data does he have that he isn't telling you?”

  “I don't know what you mean.” And she didn't; this conversation was beyond her. Photon detectors, double-slit experiments, observational pre-determination ... Her memory was good, but she knew she lacked the background to interpret the terms. Her own ignorance made her angry.

  “Henry had two other experiences of ‘energy’ when he was with you, you said. Were there others when he was away from you?”

  “How should I know? You better ask him!”

  “I will. I'll ask them all.”

  “It sounds stupid to me.” Immediately she was frightened by her own tone. But Jake just looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Well, it sounds stupid to me, too. But Henry is right about one thing—something is happening. There's hard data in the form of Evelyn's MRI, in the fact that the safe was opened without the lock being either tampered with or moved to the right combination—”

  “It did?”

  “The detective told me, when he was asking questions yesterday. Also, I got the physician here to let me look at the lab results for everybody admitted to the infirmary Thursday afternoon. Professional courtesy. There was no food poisoning.”

  “There wasn't?” All at once Carrie felt scared.

  “No.” DiBella sat thinking for a long while. She scarcely dared breathe. Finally he said slowly, as if against his own will or better judgment—and that much she understood, anyway— “Carrie, have you ever heard of the principle of emergent complexity?”

  * * * *

  “I did everything for that boy,” Gina sobbed. “Just everything!”

  “Yes, you did,” said Evelyn, who thought Gina had done too much for Ray. Always lending him money after he lost each job, always letting him move back home and trash the place. What that kid had needed—and bad—was a good hiding, that's what.

  “Angela didn't turn out this way!”

  “No.” Gina's daughter was a sweetie. Go figure.

  “And now I just get it settled in my mind that he's out of my life, I come to grips with it, and he says he's flying back here to see ‘his old ma’ and he loves me! He'll just stir everything up again like he did when he got home from the Army, and when he divorced Judy, and when I had to find that lawyer for him in New York.... Evelyn, nobody, but nobody, can rip you up inside like your child!”

  “I know,” said Evelyn, who didn't. She went on making little clucking noises while Gina sobbed. A plane roared overhead, and Frank Sinatra sang about it having been a very good year when he was twenty-one.

  * * * *

  Bob Donovan took Anna's hand. Gently she pulled it away. The gentleness was for her, not him—she didn't want a scene. His touch repelled her. But oh, Bennet's touch ... or Frederico's.... Still, it was the dancing she missed. And now she would never dance again. She might, the doctors said, not even walk without a limp.

  Never dance. Never feel her legs spring into a ballotte or soar in the exuberance of a flick jete, back arched and arms thrown back, an arrow in ecstatic flight.

  * * * *

  “Carrie, have you ever heard of the principle of “'emergent complexity? ‘”

  “No.” Jake DiBella was going to make her feel dumb again. But he didn't mean to do that, and as long as she could sit here in his office with him, she would listen. Maybe he needed someone to listen. Maybe he needed her. And maybe he would say something that would help her make it all right with Dr. Erdmann.

  Jake licked his lips. His face was still paper white. “'Emergent complexity’ means that as an evolving organism grows more complex, it develops processes that wouldn't seem implied by the processes it had in simpler form. In other words, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Somewhere along the line, our primitive human ancestors developed self-awareness. Higher consciousness. That was a new thing in evolution.”

  Old knowledge stirred in Carrie's mind. “There was a pope—I was raised Catholic—some pope, one of the John-Pauls maybe, said there was a point where God infused a soul into an animal heritage. So evolution wasn't really anti-Catholic.”

  Jake seemed to be looking through her, at something only he could see. “Exactly. God or evolution or some guy named Fred—however it happened, consciousness did emerge. And if, now, the next step in complexity is emerging ... if that...”

  Carrie was angered, either by his line of thought or by his ignoring her; she wasn't sure which. She said sharply, “But why now? Why here?”

  Her question brought his gaze back to her. He took a long time to answer, while a plane droned overhead on the flight path out of the airport. Carrie held her breath.

  But all he said was, “I don't know.”

  * * * *

  Gina had worked herself up to such a pitch that she wasn't even praying. Ray, Ray, Ray—this wasn't what Evelyn wanted to talk about. But she had never seen Gina like this. All at once Gina cried passionately, drowning out Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” “I wish he weren't coming! I wish his plane would just go on to another city or something, just not land here! I don't want him here!”

  Never dance again. And the only love available from men like Bob Donovan.... No. No. Anna would rather be dead.

  * * * *

  “Well, I don't believe it!” Carrie said. “Emerging complexity—I just don't believe it's happening at St. Sebastian's!”

  “Neither do I,” said Jake. For the first time since she'd entered his office, he smiled at her.

  Outside the building, a boom sounded.

  Carrie and Jake both looked toward the door. Carrie thought first of terrorism, a car bomb or something, because everybody thought first of terrorism these days. But terrorism at an assisted living facility was ridiculous. It was a gas main exploding, or a bus crash just outside, or...

  Henry Erdmann appeared in the open doorway to the office. He didn't have his walker with him. He sagged against the doorjamb, his sunken eyes huge and his mouth open. Before Carrie could leap up to help him and just before he slumped to the floor, he croaked, “Call the police. We just brought down a plane.”

  * * * *

  Anguish ripped through the ship. Not its own agony, but the Other's. No guidance, no leading, it was raging wild and undisciplined. If this went on, it might weaken the ship too much for the ship to ever help it.

  If this went on, the Other could damage spacetime itself.

  The ship could not let that happen.

  * * * *

  ELEVEN

  When Henry Erdmann collapsed, DiBella moved swiftly to the old man. Carrie stood frozen—stupid! Stupid! “Get the doctor,” Jake cried. And then, “Go, Carrie. He's alive.”

  She ran out of Jake's office, nearly tripping over the walker Henry had left in the hallway. He must have been coming to see Jake when it happened—when what happened? She raced to the lobby and the call phone, her mind so disordered that only as she shoved open the double doors did she realize that of course it would have been faster to hit Henry's panic button—Jake would do that—but Henry seldom wore his panic button, he—

  She stopped cold, staring.

  The lobby was full of screaming people, mostly visitors. Among them, old people lay fallen to the floor or slumped in wheelchairs. It was Saturday morning and on Saturday morning relatives arrived to take their mothers and grandfathers and great-grandmothers for brunch, for a drive, for a visit home ... Bundled in sweaters and jackets and shawls, the seniors had all collapsed like so many bundles of dropped laundry. St. Sebastian's nurses, aides, and even desk volunteers bent ineffectually over the victims.

  Fear roiled Carrie's stomach, but it also preternaturally heightened her perceptions.

  Mr. Aberstein, a St. Sebastian's resident even though he was only sixty-seven, stood unaffected by the el
evators. Mrs. Kelly sat alert in her wheelchair, her mouth a wide pink O. She was seventy-one. Mr. Schur...

  “Nurse! Come quick, please, it's Dr. Erdmann!” Carrie caught at the sleeve of a passing nurse in purple scrubs, but he shook her off and raced to an old woman lying on the floor. Everyone here was too busy to help Carrie. She ran back to Jake's office.

  Henry lay quietly on the floor. Jake had turned him face up and put a cushion—her cushion, Carrie thought numbly, the patchwork one she'd brought Jake—under Henry's feet. Henry wasn't wearing his panic button. She gasped, “No one can come, it's happened to all of them—”

  “All who?” Jake said sharply.

  She answered without thinking. “All of them over eighty. Is Henry—”

  “He's breathing normally. His color's good, and he's not clammy. I don't think he's in shock. He's just ... out. All of them over eighty?”

  “Yes. No. I don't know, I mean, about the age, but all the older ones in the lobby just collapsed and the younger residents seem fine.... Jake, what is it?”

  “I don't know. Carrie, do this now: Go to one of the common rooms and turn the TV to the local news channel. See if there's been a ... a plane crash—”

  He stopped. Both of them heard the sirens.

  * * * *

  Henry did not wake. All of Redborn Memorial Hospital's ambulances had gone to the crash site. The St. Sebastian's staff moved afflicted residents to the dining room, which looked like a very peaceful war hospital. The residents didn't wake, moan, or need emergency treatment with the exception of one woman who had broken a hip falling to the floor. She was sent over to Memorial. Monitors couldn't be spared from the Nursing floor, where nearly everyone had fallen into the coma, but a few spare monitors were carried down from the infirmary. They showed no anomalies in heart rate or blood pressure.

  Relatives summoned family doctors, sat by cots, screamed at St. Sebastian's staff, who kept repeating, “Redborn Memorial is aware of the situation and they'll get the St. Sebastian's residents over there as soon as they can. Please, sir, if you'd just—”

  Just be patient. Just believe that we're doing our best. Just be reassured by your mother's peaceful face. Just accept that we don't know any more than you do. Just leave me alone!