The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “What’s on the Web that’s so wonderful?” Catherine demanded, her own anger flaring. “Drugs and porn and advertising. Nothing but commercialism and materialism—”

  “Talk!” Jason waved his hands. “Conversation! Information! My friends are online!”

  “You need to make friends here,” she said. “We live in Missouri now.”

  “I don’t need to make friends here! I’ve already got friends! And the second I can get back to them, I will!”

  She looked at him from across the table. The anger faded from her expression. She looked at him sadly.

  “You can’t go back to California,” she said. “You know why.”

  “I know, all right,” Jason said.

  Concern filled her eyes. “If you go back to California,” she said, “you’ll die.” Jason looked at the framed photograph of Queen Nepher-Ankh-Hotep that sat on the side table between two sprays of Aunt Lucy’s irises. The Egyptian queen looked back at him with serene kohl-rimmed eyes.

  “So I hear,” he said.

  * * *

  Back in 1975, an Oregon housewife named Jennifer McCullum was informed by a vision that in a previous life she had been Queen of Egypt. So benevolent and spiritual had been her reign that she had since been incarnated many times, always with her consciousness located on a higher celestial plane than most of the other people stuck on this metaphysical backwater, the earth. Subsequent visions instructed the reincarnated monarch in spiritual techniques which she subsequently taught to her disciples. According to her own account, around the same time as the “Nepher-Ankh-Hotep Revelations,” as they were subsequently called, McCullum also began to experience another series of visions terrifying in their violence and destruction: communities ravaged by earthquake and fire, flood and tidal wave. These visions were first experienced in black-and-white, like an old newsreel, but by 1989 McCullum was receiving in full color. Eventually, with the aid of a disembodied Atlantean spirit guide named Louise, McCullum was able to piece together the narrative thread of her visions.

  In the near future, McCullum reported, a series of natural disasters would strike North America. California would be leveled by earthquakes and would then drop into the sea. Other bits of the American continent were also doomed, either by quake, submergence, tornadoes, volcanoes, or “poisonous vibrations.” Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic, and Lemuria from the Pacific, causing tidal waves that would wash most coastal cities out to sea.

  Few places on earth would be safe from this apocalypse.

  Among them, the former Queen of Egypt asserted, were several states in the American heartland, among them Missouri. Positive vibrations emanating from the Memphis Pyramid would exert a spiritually calming influence on the surrounding countryside.

  Which was why Catherine Adams moved herself and her son Jason to Cabells Mound, where her Aunt Lucy, recently widowed, needed someone to help out in her greenhouse business. And which was why city boy Jason, skilled at urban pastimes like inline skating and speeding packets of data along the Information Superhighway, found himself among the watery cotton fields of the Swampeast.

  “Have you ever thought,” Jason said, “that Queen Pharaoh Nepher-Whatsis is just plain crazy!”

  “How can you say that?” Catherine asked. “She’s only trying to help people. She wants to save our lives. Nepher-Ankh-Hotep means ‘Gift of a Beautiful Life.’ She is the most actualized being I have ever met.”

  Actualized. There was that word again. Every time he listened to his mother talk about metaphysics, she’d use a term like actualized or negative thoughtform or color vibration, and Jason’s brain would simply shut down. It was as if his understanding had run smack into a linguistic wall. What did these words mean, anyway?

  They meant whatever his mother wanted them to mean. They all meant, You have to stay here and like it.

  “And it’s not just Nepher-Ankh-Hotep,” Catherine said. “Lots of people have received catastrophe revelations. They all agree that California is going to be destroyed.”

  “So Colin’s going to be killed? And Aunt Charmian. And Abie?” He looked at her. “Dad is going to be killed?”

  His mother gazed at him sadly. “It’s not up to me. It’s karma. California has so much negative karma that it can’t survive, and it’s going to be wiped out for the same reason Atlantis was destroyed. But we can always hope that our friends will survive, the way the people from Atlantis survived and went to Mexico and Egypt. But if they do die, it’s because they chose it, they chose this incarnation in order to experience California’s destruction.”

  Jason could feel his brain “de-focusing under this onslaught—he couldn’t understand why people, or even disembodied spirits, would choose to experience mass destruction, why they’d line up to get annihilated like people paying for the earthquake ride at Universal Studios—but he gathered his energies and made the attempt.

  “What’s wrong with California’s karma, anyhow?” he asked. “And how can a whole state have karma anyway? And why,” warming to the subject, “is Missouri’s karma supposed to be all that great? They had slavery here. And all those Cherokee died just north of here on the Trail of Tears.” The Trail of Tears had been the subject of a field trip the previous month.

  It had rained.

  Jason, stuck in an alien land, in lousy weather, and far from his spiritual home, had taken the Cherokee experience very much to heart.

  “I am trying to save your life,” Catherine said.

  “I’ll take my chances in L.A.! My karma can’t suck that badly!”

  “We were talking,” Catherine said, narrowing her eyes, “about the Internet. I don’t want you spending all your time online—I want you to restrict yourself to an hour a day.”

  Jason was aghast. “An hour!”

  “One hour per day. That’s all.” There was a grim finality in Catherine’s tone. “And I want you to make some effort to make friends here.”

  “I don’t want to know anyone here!”

  “There are good people here. You shouldn’t look down at them just because they don’t live in the city. You should get to know them.”

  “How?” Jason waved his hands. “How do I meet these good people?”

  “You can stop radiating hostility all the time, for one thing.”

  “I don’t radiate hostility!” Jason shouted.

  “You certainly do. You glare at everyone as if they were going to attack you. If you met them halfway—”

  “I am not interested! I am not interested at all! One minute after I’m eighteen, I’m out of here!” Jason bolted from the dinner table, stormed up the stairs to his study, slammed the door, and turned the skeleton key that locked it.

  His mother’s voice came up from below. “You better not be online!”

  Jason paced the room, feeling like a trapped animal. His life was one prison after another. He was a minor, completely dependent on other people. He was in an alien country, walled off by the levee, with nothing but soaked cotton fields to look at. His school, with its red brick, concrete, and windows protected by steel mesh, even looked like a prison.

  And now he was in a prison cell, on the second floor of his house.

  And the worse thing about this cell, he realized, was that he had turned the key on himself. He had to get out of here somehow.

  As he paced, his eye lighted on the telephone, and he stopped in his tracks.

  Ah, he thought. Dad.

  “Well,” Jason said, “I’m bummed. I sort of had a fight with Mom.”

  “Have you apologized?” said Frank Adams.

  This was not the initial response that Jason had hoped for. “Let me tell you what it was about,” he said.

  “Okay.” Frank sounded agreeable enough, but over the phone connection Jason could hear his father’s pen scratching. The pen was a Mont Blanc, and had a very distinctive sound, one loud enough to hear over a good phone connection. Frank was working late at the office, which was normal, and Jason had called him t
here.

  “Mom says I have to restrict my Internet access to one hour per day. But the Internet is where all my friends hang out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well,” Jason said, “that’s it.”

  “That’s what the whole fight was about?”

  “There was a lot more about karma, and how yours sucks so bad you’re going to get washed out to sea along with my friends, but keeping me offline is what it all came down to.”

  “Uh-huh.” There was a pause while the pen scratched some more. Then the pen stopped, and Frank Adams’s voice brightened, as if he decided he may as well pay attention, “It wasn’t about your grades or anything?” he asked.

  “No. My grades are up.” The Cabells Mound school was less demanding than the academy he’d been attending in California. Also far more boring—but that, he’d discovered, applied to the Swampeast generally and not just to school.

  “So if it’s not interfering with your schoolwork, why is she restricting your Internet access?” Jason’s dad was very concerned with grades and education, not for themselves exactly, but because they led to success later on. Frank was big on hard work, dedication, and the rewards the two would bring. Jason’s mom, by contrast, thought of this goal-oriented behavior as “worshiping false, non-integrative values.”

  “She wants me to spend more time doing stuff here. But there’s nothing to do here, so—”

  “She wants you to try to make friends in Missouri.”

  Jason could not understand how his parents knew these things about each other. Were they telepathic or something?

  “Well, yeah,” Jason said. “But there’s, like, no point to it. Because the second I’m eighteen, I’m checking out of this burg.”

  “You’ve got a few years till then,” his father pointed out.

  “But I’m going to be spending as much time in L.A. as I can between now and then.”

  “Jason.” His father’s voice was weary. “Where are you going to be spending most of your time between now and your graduation?”

  Jason glared out the window and realized he was trapped. “Here,” he said. “In Missouri.”

  “So isn’t it, therefore, a good idea to get to know some people where you live? Maybe date a few girls, even?”

  Jason never liked it when his father started using words like therefore. It meant he was doing his whole lawyer thing, like he was talking to a witness or something. It was as bad as when his mother talked about negative thoughtforms.

  “I don’t mind making new friends,” he said. “But I want to keep the ones I’ve got, too, and I can’t do that unless I stay in touch with them.”

  “I will speak to your mother about your Internet privileges, then. But I won’t do it for another week or ten days, because I want you to soften her up between now and then, okay? Try to make an effort? Take someone home? Play a game of baseball? Something?”

  Jason glared at his reflection in the blank computer screen. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  “Good.”

  Jason made a grotesque face into the computer screen. Snarled, bared his canines, made his eyes wide. His distorted reflection grimaced back at him like a creature out of a horror film. “I was wondering,” Jason began, “if I could come and stay with you after you and Una get back from China.” Jason heard a page turn over the phone, and then heard his father’s pen scratching again. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Frank said. “I’m going to be working sixteen-hour days to catch up on the work I’ve missed. I wouldn’t really have a chance to spend time with you. It wouldn’t be fair to Una to have to spend all her time looking after you.”

  “I wouldn’t bother her. I can just hang with my friends.”

  “You’ll still be able to visit in August, like we planned.”

  “I could house-sit for you, while you’re gone.”

  Frank’s pen went scratch, scratch. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t want to leave you alone in the city all that time. What if you got into trouble?”

  What if I didn’t? Jason wanted to respond. “Or I could fly to China and join you there,” he said instead. His father gave a sigh. Jason could hear the pen clatter on the desktop. “This is my first vacation in almost ten years,” Frank said. “I’m a partner now. It used to be that partners took it easy and waited for retirement, but that’s not how it works anymore. Partners work harder than anyone else.”

  “I know,” Jason said. He remembered the last vacation, ten years ago in Yosemite. He didn’t remember much about the park, he could only remember being sick to his stomach and throwing up a lot.

  “Una and I have never had much time alone together,” Frank said. “We’re going to be meeting her family, and that’s important.”

  And a step-kid, Jason thought, would just get in the way. Una, whom Frank had finally married a few months ago, was half Chinese. The Chinese part of the family was scattered all through Asia, and Frank and his new bride were going to travel to Shanghai, Guangzhong, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur, seeing the sights and meeting the relatives.

  Jason made another grotesque face into the computer screen.

  He did not dislike Una, who had made a determined effort to become his friend. But she troubled him. For one thing, she was young enough, and pretty enough, for him to view as desirable. That she sometimes figured in his fantasies made him uncomfortable. For another, her moving in with his dad made it that much less likely that Jason would himself be able to move in with Frank. And thirdly, she was monopolizing Frank’s first real vacation in a decade, and going to places Jason very much wanted to see.

  “I wouldn’t get in your way,” Jason said. “I’d just go off and, like, see stuff.” Frank’s pen kept scratching on. “You don’t do that in Asia,” he said. “Besides, we’re going to be spending most of our time with a lot of old people who don’t speak English, and you’d be bored.”

  “No way.”

  Frank sighed again. “Look,” he said. “We need this trip, okay? But we’ll go to Asia another time, and maybe you can come along then.”

  In another ten years maybe, Jason thought. He made a screaming face into the video monitor, mouth open in a hideous mask of anguish.

  “Okay,” he said. “But you’ll talk to Mom about the Internet, okay? Because if I can’t visit China, I want at least to visit their homepage.”

  “I’ll do that,” Frank said. His tone lightened. “By the way, I bought your birthday present today. It’s sitting right here in the office. I think you’re going to like it.”

  “I’ll look forward to seeing it,” Jason said. Perhaps the only benefit of the divorce had been that, in the years since, the size and expense of Jason’s presents had increased. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what it is.”

  “That would spoil the surprise.”

  Jason could hear his father’s pen scratching again, so he figured he might as well bring the conversation to an end. After he hung up, he sat in his chair and stared across the sodden cotton field to the line of trees on the distant northern horizon.

  No Shanghai, no Hong Kong, no Internet. No California till August.

  The Cabells Mound water tower stood beyond the line of trees, the setting sun gleaming red from its metal skin.

  Jason looked at the tower for a moment, then at the Edge Living poster on the wall, the extreme skater, armored like a medieval knight, poised on the edge of a gleaming brushed aluminum rail. He turned his eyes back to the water tower.

  Yes, he thought.

  If he couldn’t escape his fate, he could at least make a name for himself here.

  TWO

  By a gentleman just from Arkansas, by way of White river, we learn that the earthquake was violent in that quarter that in upwards of 500 places he observed coal and sand thrown up from fissures in the earth, that the waters raised in a swamp near the Cherokee village, so as to drown a Mr. Carrin who was travelling with his brother, the latter saved himsel
f on a log. —In other places the water fell, and in one instant it rose in a swamp near the St. Francis 25 or 30 feet; Strawberry a branch of Black river, an eminence about 1½ acres sunk down and formed a pond.

  St. Louis, February 22, 1812

  The ringing signal purred in Nick Ruford’s ear. He felt adrenaline shimmer through his body, kick his heart into a higher gear. He felt like a teenager calling a girl for the first time. It was Manon who answered. His nerves gave a little leap at the sound of her voice. Stupid, he thought. The divorce was two years ago. But he couldn’t help it. She still did that to him.

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”

  “Hey, yourself,” she said. There was always that sly smile in her contralto voice, and he could tell from her intonation, the warmth in her tone, exactly the expression on her face, the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes, the broad smile that exposed her white teeth and a little bit of pink upper gum. With the gum exposed like that it should not be an attractive smile, but somehow it was.

  “You finished with the move?” Manon asked.

  Nick looked around the room with its neatly stacked boxes under the eye of Nick’s father, who gazed in steely splendor from his portrait on the wall, and for whose spirit no stack of boxes would ever be neat enough. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m moved in. I just don’t have a place for everything yet.” Don’t have a place for myself yet, he thought. That’s the trouble.

  “Is it a nice apartment?”

  Nick looked out the window at the crowded sidewalk, the people hanging out on the streets. The windows were closed, and the air-conditioning unit in the window turned up high, so that Manon couldn’t hear the boom box rattling away from the front porch. “Well,” he said, “it’s urban, you know, but it isn’t squalid. And my building is nice.”

  And would be nicer. Once he finished wallpapering Arlette’s room, he could move her furniture in there, the mattress and frame that were now occupying most of the living room.