Refraction

by Christopher Hinz

  Aiden couldn’t have said how long he traveled. Minutes, hours, days – time itself became too abstract to measure. Eventually, however, the stream petered out. He halted at the spot where it ceased to exist.

  The region he was in offered no distinguishing features. The gray murk was the same here as elsewhere. He pondered the dilemma, concluded that the solution must relate to the abilities of the sixth quiver kid, Blue.

  Problem was, Rodrick Tyler was the one quiver kid he’d never met. Blue had perished in that London apartment building. Other than what Michael had mentioned about his attempts to penetrate the realm beyond the beasts, Aiden knew nothing about him.

  But maybe he knew enough. The realm beyond the beasts had to refer to the monsters in the shroud. He considered the problem through the lens of the rocket-system analogue. There was one component of his theoretical spacecraft not yet accounted for.

  A landing system.

  A memory surfaced from last week when he’d met with Marsdale at that café near Towson University. Aiden had been asking about the other quiver kids and Marsdale had recalled that as toddlers, Blue and Green tended to scrap, as if they had conflicting personalities.

  Aiden realized why those particular babies had fought. In terms of their abilities, Blue and Green were polar opposites. Grant Cho’s cleavings were an entryway into the shroud. Rodrick Tyler, even through the haze of his addiction, must have sensed that he too could create a cleaving. But his wouldn’t have led into the shroud but out of it.

  But out of it to where?

  Aiden had never consciously created a cleaving. But having it happen twice subliminally while he was awake provided a mental template.

  It was easier than anticipated. He brought the cleaving into existence by mere force of will.

  It looked exactly like the previous ones, a giant chocolate donut with a hole in the center. Although he feared what awaited him on the other side, he told himself it couldn’t be worse than the nightmarish beasts swarming here.

  Steeling himself, he dove through the hole. At the moment of passage, he found himself wondering what had happened to Michael and Jessie in those moments after they’d slammed into him and knocked him into the shroud.

  And then he crossed over and all such concerns became irrelevant.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  The first thing Aiden noticed was the gratifying tug of gravity pinning his boots to a luxurious carpet of white sand. He stood on a circular island no wider than the length of a school bus, a featureless clump within a turquoise ocean extending to the horizon. Above, pale golden skies devoid of a sun radiated ethereal light. The illumination evoked those first hazy moments of emerging from a pleasant dream. A fortifying breeze wafted air neither too hot nor too cold across his face, prompting him to breathe in great gulps, heavenly and cleansing.

  His arms felt strange. It took a moment to realize that the pain of his burns, never entirely vanquished by Rory’s pills, was gone. His other aches and bruises had vanished as well.

  “We’ve short-circuited your discomfort and fabricated agreeable surroundings,” Aiden heard himself say. “Best to limit distractions.”

  The words startled him. They came from his own mouth and sounded like his own voice. Problem was, he hadn’t uttered them. Someone or something was speaking through him.

  “We talk, you listen,” the mystery voice continued, shaping Aiden’s lips like a ventriloquist controlling a dummy. ”Then you talk, we listen. A fairly straightforward process, wouldn’t you say?”

  He clamped his mouth shut, trying to will it to stop. Having his vocal cords and facial muscles manipulated like this was incredibly intrusive and disorienting. But his efforts proved futile.

  “We realize how strange it must feel. Perhaps Invasion of the Body Snatchers anxieties are percolating in your mind. But rest assured, this is not that.”

  “Then what is this?” he whispered. The words were his own, or at least he thought they were.

  “Simply a form of communication dictated by circumstances. Knock knock.”

  “What?”

  “Knock knock.”

  Aiden shook his head, refusing to engage further.

  “Knock knock,” the voice repeated a third time, but with such intensity it felt as if his mouth was being violently wrenched open and snapped shut.

  “Stop that, all right! I’ll play along. Who’s there?”

  “First doctor.”

  “First doctor who?”

  “The actor William Hartnell. He played the role from 1963 to 1966.”

  Aiden felt himself smiling. He was confident the expression was his own.

  “Not a gut-buster, we’ll admit. But a little humor can often serve to quell distress and induce relaxation.”

  Aiden indeed felt himself beginning to accept the eccentric mode of conversation. It still felt weird but no longer quite as upsetting. Perhaps knock-knock jokes deserved greater respect.

  “You keep saying we,” he challenged. “There’s more than one of you?”

  “I am many people, places and things. Don’t worry about trying to figure it out. Einstein and Hawking would lose sleep attempting to deduce the physics.”

  “How is this happening? How are you inside my head?”

  “That’s complicated too. We can’t read your mind, at least not the direct stream of your forefront awareness. Mostly we pick up background material. Tempo and style of your thought patterns, subconscious tidbits from your memories, that sort of thing.”

  He experienced a sudden revelation. “You’re the voice from my green dreams, the one who spoke through Bobbie Pinsey.”

  “’Singularity beguiles, transcend the illusion.’ Those words served their ultimate purpose. They led you here.”

  “But why couldn’t you have just–”

  “I’m sure you have numerous questions. But there’s a limit to how long you can remain. Before your time runs out, we need to focus on getting you to understand the big picture.”

  He nodded, then wondered if they could understand gestures.

  “Ages ago, there were two fundamental realms of existence. For simplicity’s sake, let’s refer to them as Reality – the spacetime you normally occupy – and Elementary, which is our home and the place you are presently situated.

  “Back then, intelligent beings on both sides could cross in either direction with relative ease. But then the Corruption appeared, a vile phase of existence that was neither Reality nor Elementary. It imposed itself between our two realms, which meant that anyone making the crossing had to pass through it.”

  “The shroud,” he whispered. “Those grotesque monsters.”

  “The Corruption made it exceedingly difficult for we of Elementary to cross over to your side, and impossible for you of Reality to reach our side. That was a bad thing. Interaction between Reality and Elementary is necessary to keep both sides healthy and vibrant.”

  Aiden became aware of something. The island he stood on, originally the diameter of a school bus, was gradually shrinking. It was now closer to the length of a delivery van.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Diminishment has begun. We don’t have much time. Bear with me and try not to interrupt.”

  He nodded.

  “Balance needed to be reconstituted, a way found for omnidirectional crossing to be restored. With great effort we managed to send messengers from Elementary into Reality, programming them to seek out worlds where intelligent life existed or was likely to develop. One of these messengers landed on Earth some seventy thousand of your years ago.”

  “The quiver stone.”

  “A messenger that comes in contact with nascent intellects engenders the manifesting ability, but always in one of six different ways. That deliberate partitioning was done to attempt to inhibit any one individual from becoming too powerful and succumbing to megalomania. A single individual with enhanced capacities or resources too often craves superiority over fellow members of the species. That almo
st always proves detrimental to civilizations.”

  “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Aiden whispered. Considering what Michael had become – a maniac out to conquer the world – such partitioning seemed prudent.

  ”We hoped that by creating sextets, the six individuals would realize they needed to work together and combine their abilities in order to pass through the Corruption and cross over to our side.”

  Aiden became aware the island had contracted even further. It was now barely a car length in diameter. He couldn’t actually see it shrinking. The contraction seemed to be happening in a way his senses failed to register.

  “Unfortunately, no sextet from any intelligent species within Reality has displayed the level of cooperation necessary to reach Elementary. The individuals of every sextet – and there have been many – inevitably end up competing with one another in a bid to become all-powerful.”

  For the first time, Aiden sensed hesitation creep into the voice.

  “That fact may indicate an essential flaw in our understanding of Reality.”

  The island was now barely the length of a motorcycle and seemed to be shrinking at an alarming rate. What would happen when there was no place left for him to stand?

  “But that flaw also may produce an unanticipated solution, a way to restore the proper interaction between Reality and Elementary. The fact is, you, Aiden Manchester, are the first intelligence to make a successful crossing since the Corruption appeared.

  “No sextet has ever conceived an immaculate conception such as yourself. For reasons unknown and by methods inexplicable, the sextet on your world brought you into existence. Beyond that, nearly everything about your creation remains a mystery to us. All we know for certain is that you have the potential to become–”

  The island disappeared. There was no longer anything beneath Aiden’s feet supporting him.

  He fell.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  He could see and hear nothing. It felt as if his body was being squeezed through sets of rollers on some grotesque assembly line, flattened into impossibly thin two-dimensional wafers. Each trip through another set of the rollers elicited outpourings of emotion. He cycled through bouts of mad laughter and helpless weeping, and an array of other feelings resistant to characterization.

  Suddenly he was through the rollers and again in freefall, plunging downward. Feet first he dropped, his speed increasing at an alarming rate. Far below, another donut hole took shape. He was heading straight for it.

  Through the new cleaving he could see Michael and Jessie from high above. They were at the edge of the chateau porch where he’d left them, clawing and kicking and punching one another, trying to get the upper hand. Had their fight been transpiring during the entire time Aiden had been gone? It seemed unlikely. Time flowed at a different rate within the shroud and within Elementary. Maybe back here only a few moments had elapsed since he’d been hurtled into the cleaving.

  He reached the donut hole, plunged through it. He swung his legs to one side to spare Jessie a direct hit and braced for what he sensed would be a violent impact. Entering the cleaving somehow braked his fall. But he was still descending at a good clip when his boots plowed into Michael’s chest.

  It was a satisfying hit on many levels.

  Michael catapulted off the porch. His head cracked the railing and he landed on his back at the bottom of the steps. The collision threw Aiden sideways into Jessie. The two of them slammed the ground in a heap.

  Aiden got up. His left side felt a bit tender from the landing but the fall didn’t seem to have caused any other injuries. However, the pain from his burns and previous aches and bruises had returned.

  He craned his head skyward. The cleaving he’d fallen through was gone. Cloud cover had increased; the air had continued to cool and dampen. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The storm was close.

  Jessie scrambled to her feet, wide-eyed with surprise. “Where’d you go? What was that thing, that weird hole?”

  “Long story. What’s with the Halloween getup?”

  “All I could find to put on.”

  Aiden found it disturbing that, even without a mask, the devilish outfit seemed to suit her.

  They checked on Michael. He was alive but out cold. The back of his head was bloody from bouncing off the stair railing.

  “I couldn’t find the quiver stone anywhere,” Jessie said. “I checked the basement but I don’t think it’s down there.”

  Aiden explained about Michael having left the chateau for nearly two hours, presumably to hide the quiver after having given himself a second infusion. Jessie didn’t take the news well.

  “Where is it?” she demanded, grabbing Michael’s shoulders and shaking him. “Wake up, you son of a bitch!”

  “I don’t think he’d tell us even if he was conscious.”

  “Then I’ll beat it out of him!”

  Her face contorted and she pounded her fists against Michael’s chest. “Tell me, goddammit! Where is it?”

  What earlier had been mere yearning for another infusion seemed to have degenerated into desperate craving. Jessie looked like an addict in need of a fix.

  Aiden saw no reason to stop her. Attacking an unconscious man might get some of the rage out of her system before he broke the really bad news to her. Seeking a second infusion was a fool’s errand. Even if she found the quiver stone it would do her no good. She and Michael, and probably Grant as well, were driven by an erroneous belief.

  He couldn’t have said how he knew that. But he was certain it was true.

  The carnage instigated by Michael – the killing of Blue, the Tau Nine-One assault, Aiden’s torture, all the rest of it – was for naught. A second infusion would convey no new abilities. The sole purpose of quiver was to give the six of them an opportunity to work together, make the crossing into Elementary as a harmonious sextet. Cooperation, not competition. But in their cases, either consciously or unconsciously, they’d rejected that idea.

  Could such rejection, in some fantastic time-warping way, have been the impetus for the original appearance of the Corruption in the distant past? Were Reality-based concepts of the temporal – human concepts – fundamentally flawed?

  However intriguing such notions, and as much as he sensed an underlying validity, there were more important concerns at the moment. He returned his attention to Jessie. She continued to pound and shake Michael, as if her fury would somehow awaken him.

  Aiden wanted to tell her that she needed to find a way to transcend her anger. But now clearly wasn’t the time. She wasn’t ready to hear it.

  Perhaps she never would be.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Birdsboro was unseasonably cool this third Saturday in August, welcome conditions for Aiden’s late afternoon run. Dark clouds were churning to the west, however. A storm was blowing in.

  He sprinted along the shoulder of Route 724, went under the railroad bridge and hooked a right to access the Schuylkill River Trail. Heading west, he was soon enveloped by forest. The trees were mainly deciduous, unlike the Montana wilderness with its rich diversity of evergreens. These Pennsylvania forests would be swept into autumn soon, the leaves changing into vivid hues before their fall.

  It had been a relatively calm three months since the week, Aiden’s tag for those seven momentous days, from the Thursday morning when he’d learned of his father’s hidden safe to the following Wednesday evening at Michael’s chateau when he and Jessie had been arrested.

  The interrogations that followed had been intense: good cop/bad cop encounters with DOD and Homeland Security agents in unadorned rooms at several locations. Aiden had remained steadfast throughout the grillings, giving the interrogators an honest account of the week’s events, at least up to a point. His major digression from the truth – flat-out lies, actually – involved the manifestations and the supernatural-type events he’d witnessed or experienced.

  The interrogators apparently had learned about chunkies from questioning Jessie a
nd the others. He suspected that Maurice Pinsey had been the most talkative. But Aiden had admitted only to being a quiver kid, and denied possessing any extraordinary abilities.

  That hadn’t gone over well with the grim-faced men and women in those rooms, always on the other side of a table from him, on occasion looking like they wanted to leap across the gap and beat the crap out of him. But, other than the occasional mild slap or shove, they’d curbed their most aggressive instincts. No waterboarding, no truth serums. Most of their threats had been verbal and centered on Aiden being sent to prison for a very long time if he didn’t come clean. But considering everything he’d experienced over the course of the week, he’d been unafraid and hadn’t allowed them to intimidate him. And he’d eventually learned to counter their threats with a subtle one of his own.

  “I just want to put this entire incident behind me. The last thing any of us wants is a media circus.”

  None of the interrogators admitted it, but Aiden could tell they were uneasy whenever he uttered those words, the implication being that he’d go public if pushed. Officials at the highest levels of the government still considered quiver, with its cryptic properties and unknown potential, off limits. And although the experiment with the babies was far enough in the past so that political blowback wouldn’t unseat the current administration – per political expediency, predecessors would be blamed – public uproar about the experiment was not something any president, legislator, or Pentagon or Homeland Security official wanted to face.

  Of course, the government could elect to go full-blown nasty and make Aiden and others who knew too much disappear. He didn’t think they’d go that far, but to dissuade them from the notion he’d hinted that the whole story would automatically be released to the media should anything happen to him. His fearless attitude helped sell the bluff, and on the third day, release orders came down from on high, pending his signature on a top-secret nondisclosure agreement that swore him to secrecy about the attack and anything related to quiver. Since he had no intention of talking about those things anyway, the price of freedom had been bearable.