"Mr. Scalpel!" Vavash stood halfway down the stairs, one hand clutching the railing tightly, the other shading her eyes as she tried to catch sight of me amid the clutter.
"You've been hiding your light under a bushel, madam," I called to her.
She turned towards me and snapped, "Get out of my things." There were perhaps fifty metres between us; her voice sounded thin and shrill.
"I can't imagine why you've been keeping your best work down here in the dark," I continued. "Of course, it's blatant birth imagery, but why should that bother you? Humans have been expressing their feelings about pregnancy and childbirth since Adam had Eve. There's nothing to be ashamed of." I picked up a bulb-shaped basket made of bright ribbon woven on a wicker framework, and held it high enough for Vavash to watch me examining it. Through the vulva-shaped opening at the top, I could see an effusion of stylized flowers made of colored felt: cheerful, bubbly happiness embodied in fabric with love and spirit. "You know that this makes the rest of the work here look like bot-work."
"Leave that alone!" Vavash cried.
"Why should I?"
She glared at me with a hatred clear enough to see even at that distance. "You have the sensitivity of a thug!"
"That's it exactly," I snapped back. "Every critic is a thug, and we work for that merciless godfather called the Spirit of Art. A long time ago, old Art loaned you a wheelbarrel full of talent, didn't he, lady? But recent-like it seems you ain't been keepin' up the payments. So Art sent the Scalpel-man to chat wit' youse an' have a look-see how to get you back on the program."
"You're ridiculous!"
"If necessary," I answered drily. Vavash was still up on the stairs, bending over awkwardly in an effort to see me under the glaring lights. Her feet seemed cemented to the step. I said, "Why don't you come down here where we can talk about this more comfortably?"
"You come up here."
"Now why would a grown woman be afraid to come into a well-lit basement?" I asked conversationally. I turned my back on her and began walking toward the area that was still dark.
"Mr. Scalpel!"
"Is she afraid of mice?" I went on. "No, no mice in your standard Straight-From-The-Package terraformed ecology. Dust? No, regulation dome air filters make sure all dust is hypoallergenic. Things that go bump in the night? No, that's just childish, and there've never been children on Crèche, have there?"
"Mr. Scalpel…"
The flash of another bank of lights, and there before me slept a herd of stasis chests…row upon row of glimmery mirrory cylinders, laid out with the care of a graveyard. The chests were less than half the normal adult size. In front of each chest was mounted a machine-lettered card. I walked among them in slow wonderment, picking up a card here and there to read: Samandha Sunrise, April 23, 2168. Jubilo De Fliz, June 12, 2169. Tomas Vincent-Vavash, October 3, 2165.
"So," said Vavash softly, "now you know."
She had approached silently, and stood now among her artworks, her body limp, her face old.
"I don't know anything," I answered. "Are they dead?"
"They were alive when they were put in," she said distantly. "That means they're alive now, correct? Time doesn't pass in stasis. Not a fraction of a second. Not even over all the years…"
"They've been in stasis for sixty years?" I asked in disbelief.
"Some. We kept having them…no medical supplies, you know, no birth control or abortion. We'd try celibacy, but it got so lonely sometimes…"
"You just kept dropping foals and merrily putting them up in stasis?"
"Oh, it's very easy to be self-righteous, isn't it?" she said angrily. "Imagine yourself in our place. Imagine yourself with a world entirely to yourself, and being free, absolutely free, to follow your Art as you choose. No Philistines to question the value of what you're doing, no political system that feels threatened by your activities, no mundane responsibilities to weigh you down.
"And then the children come. In no time, you're up to your ankles in diapers and demands for your attention twenty-five hours a day…no time to work, not even a decent night's rest, the incessant crying…and finally, one night when you're groggy with lack of sleep, and desperate for anything to make it stop, you think of the stasis chests that you have by the hundreds, and it's like an answer to a prayer to tuck the baby away for the night. Just for a few hours of peace and quiet. And the baby isn't harmed—doesn't even know that it was…shut off. And you take to doing it every night—you get a good sleep, you rationalize that the child will benefit from it too, you'll be more relaxed and attentive. And in the middle of the afternoon when you decide you want to get a bit of work done without interruption…after a while, you tell yourself it's all right, the baby's fine, if you take it out of stasis for an hour a day, that's enough. You can play with it happily, make that little bit of time, everything's fine…even if you miss a day once in a while when you're busy, when the work's going well. If you have a life of your own, you know you'll be a better mother….
"And you miss a day and a week and a month, and every time you think about it, you're filled with the most sickening dread, the most sickening paralyzing dread…you try to put it out of your mind but you can't, you want to make it right again but you can't, you tell yourself how simple it would be to plunge in and fix it, but you're just so paralyzed with the dread, you can't face it, you want it just to go away, and you scream at a bot to get the chest out of your sight, get it out, get it out…
"And when another baby's on the way, and you swear on everything you hold sacred that you will be good to this one, that you'll never make the same mistake, that you'll be so much stronger…I had five children, Mr. Scalpel." She waved at the silent chests. "They're all out there. Sometimes I have nightmares that I lost count, that I really had six. Or seven. I don't know why that terrifies me. Losing count. What would be the difference? But the thought is so…chilling…I don't know why.
"But…" She straightened up a bit. "Stasis is stasis, isn't it? The children are still fine. No harm done."
"No harm done!" I roared. "You stupid bitch! Don't you realize what's happened here?"
"The children haven't been hurt! When we're all dead and gone, someone will come down here, find them, and
"Do you think I care about a pack of puking papooses?" I shouted. "What have these tabulae rasae ever produced but drool and stool? The harm was done to your Art! You're so obsessed with your little secret here, so wrapped up in your own culpability…before you tied yourself in knots, you were capable of masterpieces like that rainbow tapestry. You could have produced a legacy a hundred times more important than Five-Or-Six-Or-Seven brats, but all you've given us is this facade of empty cradles and dolls and shit! At best, it's the product of plain old-fashioned guilt over abandoning your progeny. At worst, it's some shoddy con game to get pity you don't deserve. 'O woe, we're so devastated at being childless, see how poignant our Art is, buy it.' What crap!"
"All right," she replied angrily, "I know it's had an effect on my Art. Don't you think it's made me sick too? Don't you have any idea of how debilitating such a mess can be? Run away, lie about running away, cover up the lie…God! The feeling that there's no way out of a hopeless snarl…."
"What you have here," I said quietly, "is a Gordian knot." Which (for you culturally bereft swine who are only reading this column in the hope that I'll savage someone) was a knot from classical Greek history, a knot that was touted to be impossible to untie. "And," I went on, "the way to deal with such knots is always the same, isn't it?" I pulled out my scalpel.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, taking a step forward.
"Do you know why Art Critics exist?" I said. "Because every polite community needs barbarians who aren't afraid to cut what needs cutting." And before she could move to stop me, I plunged my blade into the silvery static surface of the nearest chest.
My intention, Respected Reader, was to
open the chest, reveal the child within, and force a Reunion-Slash-Confrontation. Alas, stasis dynamics do not seem to be so clear-cut. In the time that has passed since the events I relate, I have discussed stasis fields with many learned physicists, and while they are apt to hem and haw about the point, they will eventually confess that we know little more about said fields now than when we were first given the technology at the historic Coming-Out Party sponsored by our Chums-From-Beyond. We know that the fields will co-operatively
Fluid silver energy flowed up the blade like a mercury cobra on a rope, swallowing my hand with a blisteringly cold mouth. I jerked away fast and tried to let go of the knife, but the nerves and muscles seemed to have stopped talking to one another in the neighborhood of my wrist and the silver kept coming up my arm. A snowfall of ice crytals cracked out of clear air around me as the temperature plummeted; it occurred to me that molecules in complete stasis would naturally gauge in at zero degrees Kelvin. Another moment and the zone of cold reached the concrete floor, riming it with frost. The floor shivered once, then groaned open in a wide cleft that snaked out underneath the field of silvery chests. Chests trembled on the edge; one began to tip in.
I tried to call out to Vavash but my throat wouldn't work. Slowly, ice in my veins, I turned in her direction. She was coming towards me, but I couldn't tell if she was moving fast or slow. Suddenly something hissed behind my back and a fist of sulphurous steam punched its way of a fissure in the bedrock. Hot and cold met like two hands clapping together thunderously in preparation for a cyclonic arm wrestle. Then, just when things promised to get really interesting, something silver swept up over my eyes and
"Don't move, Mr. Scalpel," Vavash said, her face looming into view above me.
"What happened?" I croaked.
"While I was showing you around the basement at our retreat, there was a small tremor and a minor geyser broke through the floor. You were injured. I managed to surround you with a stasis field and bring you to the Med-Center here for treatment."
"I see. Was there much damage?" I asked carefully.
"Some minor works that had been sitting around for a long time fell into a crevice," she replied evenly.
I looked at her sharply. She met my gaze without flinching. The doctors murmured about tissue grafts. I asked, "Were all the works in that area destroyed?"
"Yes," she answered bluntly.
"You don't seem to be affected by the loss."
"Mr. Scalpel, when one is forced to confront one's feelings…it's been forty years since I stopped doing that kind of work. It was done by a different woman. I realized that I no longer had any feelings at all…for the works themselves. My anxieties were just residue that had been accumulating over the years. Now that the situation is resolved, I feel cleansed.
My mind was clearing a little from the adrenaline rush of the panic that for me was only a few seconds gone. I wondered how much real time had passed since the stasis field swallowed me. I wondered what had happened while I was silver-sleeping. I wondered if my abortive attempt at cutting open a chest had really killed all those children. "How do I know that all of the works fell into the crevice by accident?"
Vavash smiled without warmth. "If you are going to play the part of Art's barbarian, Mr. Scalpel, I don't think you can afford to worry about such niceties. Neither swords nor palette knives can indulge in the luxury of a conscience. Or are you just a spoiled young dilettante who talks about devotion to Art but runs crying at the first little harshness?"
There was a bright fire in her eyes, a fire like none I'd ever seen before; but like all fires, it was terrible and awesome, powerful and pitiless.
Dear Reader, many before me have written about the first cave-dweller to tame fire; but none, I think, have considered the man who next entered the tribal cave and saw the blaze leaping wildly toward the ceiling. That man had to choose on behalf of the human race: whether to praise the Fire-Tamer's vision or denounce it as madness, whether to put the fire out or gaze at it in wonder. In the end, perhaps he could only run to his fellows and tell what he had seen.
Kent State Descending the Gravity Well: An Analysis of the Observer
According to the Kerr-Newman model of a rotating black hole, there is a region just outside the event horizon where certain space and time vectors switch properties with each other. This is just mathematics, you understand, merely a quirk of the formulas—physically, nothing changes wildly until you get inside the black hole itself, and then who cares what happens? Double-deluxe chocolate-chip cookies could spontaneously spring into being and it wouldn't matter to the universe outside. Reality may break down inside a black hole, but the effects never percolate back into our familiar space.
Just outside the black hole, however, if it's rotating, if the model is correct, there is a region called the ergosphere where certain vector fields describing the flow of space and time do a flip-flop. When I was trying to understand what this meant, I told myself that places became moments and moments became places.
Think of that. Places became moments. Moments became places.
Years and years ago, I did my master's thesis on black holes. In those days, I could have explained the math to you…but now I've forgotten it all. I look at the book containing my thesis and the only thing I remember is how hard it was to type all those equations. The meaning of the equations has dribbled out of my understanding a grain at a time, and now all I hold is this: just outside a spinning black hole, in a region called the ergosphere, places become moments and moments become places.
Think of that.
Kent State University entered the ergosphere at 12:24 P.M. on Monday, May 4, 1970. That was the moment the Ohio State National Guard opened fire on demonstrators protesting American involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia. Four students were killed; nine others were wounded.
Kent State ceased to be a place and became a moment. Like Hiroshima. Like Chernobyl. Kent State fell off the map and became thirteen seconds of gunfire on a warm spring day. And maybe it kept dropping down the gravity well, from the ergosphere straight into the black hole.
Here is an ugly truth: back in 1970, when I heard the news about the Kent State killings, I felt smug.
I was fifteen years old. I was Canadian. It pleased me in a spiteful way that the U.S. had so blatantly screwed up.
I was fifteen. I was self-righteous. I had never been to a funeral.
The vectors that flip-flop in the ergosphere indicate symmetries in the gravitational field. One vector is timelike; it indicates that the laws of gravity don't change over time. The other vector is space-like; it describes the rotational symmetry of the black hole.
These vectors are called Killing vectors. Really. They're named after a Professor Wilhelm K. J. Killing of the University of Münster. He gave his name to such geometrical objects in 1892, many decades before Kerr and Newman used them in their model of a rotating black hole.
Killing vectors.
May 4, 1990, was a Friday, but all the local newspapers saved their Kent State retrospectives for the weekend editions. I bought three papers that Saturday—the Globe & Mail for its book reviews, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record for local movie listings, and the Toronto Star for Doonesbury.
I didn't realize it was the twentieth anniversary of Kent State until I saw a commemorative article in the first paper I read. That article was written by a Ke
nt State journalism student who happened to be in the right place at the right time to get the greatest news story of his life. The reporter told about his day: the rumors that something bad had happened at the noon rally, his race to get his camera, his sneaking through bushes to reach the parking lot where the killings took place, many details about the aftermath…but strangely, the reporter omitted any information about the victims themselves. He didn't even give their names.
The article in the second paper talked about the effect of the killings on the American psyche. Was it really the turning point in the Vietnam War, the moment when public consciousness crossed some unerasable line? Or was it just another straw on the camel's bending back?
The victims weren't named in this article either. Just four dead students. Four dead in O-hi-o.
Kent State is about 270 kilometers from my living room. I've never been there; it feels like a very distant place.
My wife's parents live more than 450 kilometers away. We visit them several times a year.
It was only in the third paper that I found an actual list of who died. Four students, two women, two men:
Allison Krause
Jeff Miller
Sandy Lee Scheuer
Bill Schroeder
This was the only information given about the victims: just their names. The article in the third paper was about the backroom machinations that made sure no charges were successfully laid against the National Guard.
I sat in my living room, three thick newspapers on the floor around my chair, and I wondered why all three treated the victims as if they were irrelevant to the story. Certainly, the National Guard didn't specifically target those four students; the Guard could easily have killed four different people, or a dozen people, or none. But why should that matter? Randomness shouldn't mean irrelevance.
The papers bypassed the reality of the victims, their lives, the grief of their friends and family, as if those things had nothing to do with the "real" story.
Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection) Page 6