“Clark Namast!” My wife’s voice is full of tears.
Dear God, what have I done? I catch Anna’s sweet face peering around the doorway. That angel face, looking at Mara, then at me, disbelieving.
I can’t stop her, can’t catch her as she runs away from me. Anguish has a strength all its own.
Alone in the classroom, I feel her hand on my arm and I look up to find Sheila’s shining grey eyes.
“I want to help you prove your theory,” she says. “I want to die again.”
I slam down my book. “No way.”
“I haven’t forgotten what it’s like.”
Her words stop me, quiet me. I turn to her.
She seems small suddenly, vulnerable, like a child. “Most people forget.” She smiles. “It’s different than you think.”
I look away, a lump in my throat.
Once again, I feel her hand. “It isn’t heaven.”
I feel sick. Now there is doubt.
“Help me do it.”
I shove her hand away. “I can’t.” I catch her gaze. “I won’t.”
“What are you afraid of?” Her gaze has hardened. “Don’t you want to know what it’s really like?”
I jump up and sprint out, papers flying in my wake. I am suddenly, inexplicably, terrified of her.
That night the lights go out sixteen times. My cell phone drops four calls. Seven severe electrical surges fry my TV and DVD player despite the fact that outside, the stars shine. There are no tempests. No sunspots.
Then I get a call from Edric Lind University Hospital.
“She left a note,” a doctor tells me. “And your phone number.”
I find out that Sheila took fourteen of her Lithium pills, enough to send her into acute renal failure, though doctors were still able to flush her kidneys and save her life.
But I can’t face her. Not this time. I turn from the doctor and walk away, realizing at last that I don’t really want to know after all.
I return to my office at the University and destroy my research, shredding, deleting, feeling the paper tearing in my adrenaline-drenched hands, all the while recalling a dog lost in space.
Then I see her face in a dream. Anna’s dancing brown eyes and her sweet smile. Those dimpled arms poised to embrace me. I awaken with an anguish so bone-deep it chokes me, Sheila’s disheartening words flashing through my mind: It isn’t heaven.
Then what is it?
She is asleep when I get there, as I stand at the foot of her hospital bed.
Then she opens her eyes, smiles. “That was me.”
“Huh?”
“Sorry about your TV.”
My breath catches.
“I was trying to tell you no one dies.”
I cover my face; I can’t let her see me cry.
“I was myself. Pure energy. Electricity. Light. Power. I was with you and I was at the farthest corner of the Universe at the same time. There is no light speed after death. No vast space to traverse.” She makes a gesture. “It’s all right here.”
I swallow a lump, my heart pounding. “What’d you mean when you said it isn’t heaven?”
“Heaven’s too oversimplified. This can’t be defined—or quantified. Everything’s here and now. There’s no time. No space. It’s as though every dimension is unified.” She smiles. “It’s the answer to the horizon problem.”
I nod, drifting. “Death’s dimension…” Something I’ve never considered in my theories or calculations.
“And life’s dimension,” she adds. “There’s a reason there isn’t a unified theory. We’ve never considered the possibility that there was more than one force acting on the point of origin during the big bang.”
“A conception?”
She smiles, nods. “Two Gods.”
As I offered up Anna’s genetic profile as proof, Sheila confirmed what I already knew; that we are all pieces of a whole, the living fractals of an astonishing Union.
I can’t stop the flood of memories. The rush into the woods, Anna’s footprints through the mud, my strangled voice calling her name. We find her hanging from a tree branch, one of my neckties cinched so tightly around her neck that I cannot find a grip to loosen it.
And then Mara’s heart-wrenching screams: “You did this. You killed her. I hate you I hate you I hate you…” Fists on my chest, blows to my heart. Tears on my shirt. A spirit unraveling.
I close my eyes. I can think no more.
“This is your shot,” I tell Sheila. “I want you to present our theories at the upcoming Astronomy Conference in Paris.”
She gazes at me, puzzled. “But don’t you want to—”
“This is yours. You made it happen.” I smile. “After the Conference, no one will care about your illness.” They are words I wish I could’ve told Anna.
I close my eyes as I sit at my desk. As I remember her sweet smile. I think of the random fractals that made her up, the same fractals that make up snowflakes, coastlines, and mountain ranges. I recall a night on a moonlit shore and I’m inspired. Two Gods. Maybe love existed long before space and time.
I think of a dog lost in space. A scientific breakthrough. Mankind’s step forward. And an unspoken loneliness. I need to find her, to tell her what Sheila told me—though I’m sure she already knows.
ARTIFACT
Peter Atwood
The hover bucked. Davis staggered. The propulsion fans roared. He swore.
He cut power to the fans and looked out the back window of the cabin. The towlines had gone slack and the skimmer tilted, half sunk in the viscous orange lake. “Shit,” he said.
Davis had been harvesting for twenty-five years. The lake was too thick for the mollusks to surface in the coldest months, and the summer winds whipped the lake’s sludge into a toxic foam, so harvesters like him made the most of the fall and spring.
He pulled his hood over his brow, leaving the mask dan-gling, tugged his gloves up over his sleeves and stepped out onto the rear deck. The hover floated, its impellers turning the lake into a pale orange ring around its air cushion, opaque like pulled taffy. The sun had tugged itself above the horizon, and the air stung his cheeks and eyes.
The skimmer was a basic design: a floating bin with a grilled front. When open, the grill angled down, forming a ramp that rode the mollusks up into its bin as the hover pulled it across the lake. He fired up the winch. The torque motor whined as it reeled in the skimmer. Something had fouled it badly.
Davis reached out with the gaff-pole to hook the skimmer. The backwash from the impellers blew up between the vessels, catching him in the face with fumes. He stepped down and ba-lanced his way around the skimmer’s rim.
The bin was half-full of sludge. He stirred the orange goop with the end of the gaff. Only a few flat mollusks had been collected so far. Then he saw it: black and round, a fat object, the size of a large buoy, almost submerged. Beads of orange slipped across it, leaving its surface pristine.
An hour after turning back, he saw the headland that marked the eastern end of the span. He had closed the grill, and now the skimmer tugged behind the hover like salvage. The propulsion fans thudded in an interference rhythm.
The radio beeped. Time for the call, he thought. He grabbed the headset from its hook.
“Thanks for doing the dishes,” Reeda said.
“No problem, hon.” Davis had started cleaning up in the kitchen at the onset of Reeda’s morning sickness. Nowadays, it seemed just as important to continue. “Did you sleep okay?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. How’s the lake?”
“I’m coming back early. What are you doing?”
“Laundry’s on. I’ll need to run the generator.”
“Could you have a look at the cold-house?” he said. He had forgotten to check it on his way out that morning. “Its cells probably need changing too.”
“Sure, I could use the walk,” she said.
“Great,” Davis said, uncertain. It was rare for Reeda to want to do something s
o active these days. “I’ll be back early afternoon,” he told her.
“See you then.” She clicked off.
He checked his heading and adjusted the fans. Ahead, a pack of skaters ran across the glistening orange swells, their long lizard tails leaving a fading mesh on the viscous surface.
Davis got his rig onto the wide flats of the shore, a safe distance from the lip of the lake, and deflated the hover’s cushions. Behind it, the skimmer was pitched to one side, its back right corner had scored a groove across the packed black sand.
He yanked open the skimmer’s chute and stepped back as the sludge drained. He reached in and scooped the ooze along with his gloved hand. When the bin was empty, he climbed up to get a look at the offending object. It sat tilted in a corner and looked like a fat, squashed, oversized child’s top. It was unmarked but obviously manufactured.
Goddamn Mirfac, he thought. I am going to sue their corporate ass.
“I’ve navigated my whole life by the tower out of Bremi,” Davis had told Rass the night before. “Hell, I know the shape of every headland along this shore.”
“It’s not about that!” Rass said. “And you know it.”
Their conversation had been working toward this since the two friends had sat down with their tea. Rass sighed, and Davis followed his gaze to the sitting room where Reeda leaned over the coffee table, sketching.
“She’s designing her dream home,” he explained.
Rass said nothing.
Davis’ eyes returned to the kitchen, to the cupboards he had painted himself and the unmatched plates draining beside the sink. “She says she still lives in a bachelor’s shack.”
“Losing the baby hit her hard,” Rass said. He had said this often in the last months.
“I know,” Davis said, impatience creeping in. “But she won’t get over it obsessing over a house that’ll never get built!”
Rass cleared his throat, but Reeda made no sign she had heard.
“Toby saw two fliers over the lake last week,” Rass said. “They’ll be moving up the span next.”
The mollusks Rass and Davis harvested were sold for the blue-white ingots of antimony inside, a by-product of their digestion. Last year, the moon’s biggest processor had announced plans to mine the bottom of the lake instead of buying from the harvesters. Mirfac’s drones were a common sight now, surveying for antimony concentrations deposited on the lake bottom by decaying mollusks.
The harvesters in Bremi all talked about blocking the company, but no one really expected success. A lawyer had advised them to save the logs from their navigation systems. Laying claim to the patch where you harvested might let you sell your stake for an early retirement.
“Look, Rass, everyone knows my patch. Who’s going to dispute it? Not anyone from here to Bremi, least of all some shoe-wearing lawyer from Mirfac.”
Reeda came up to the table.
“Rass, would you like some meringues?” she offered. She went to the cupboard.
“Sure,” Rass said. He looked at Davis.
“Thanks, hon,” Davis said. Her short dark hair was growing out. She had always worn it long, and only now was she starting to look the way he remembered. He missed her. He missed the way she used to smile and tell him not to be so loud when he laughed. “Have a cup of tea,” he said.
She had laid the plate of sweets between them and shook her head.
Davis clambered into the bin and kicked the few flat grey mollusks out of the way. He needed to shift the object to right the skimmer. He squatted with a grunt and reached underneath, laying his hands flat against its underside. A tingling sensation danced across his palms. He pulled away. Spots floated in his vision. “God in hell!”
He looked at it again. It was featureless, smooth, black, but giving no reflection. He touched it. Starbursts danced across his eyes.
He stood again. The lights in his eyes—what had first appeared as fireworks—had resolved into geometries. He lay his palm against the black surface and closed his eyes. Circles, triangles, and rectangles—retinal negatives—ordered themselves, searching according to some logic. A pattern of circles and dots hit on a childish outline of a face: a loop enclosing two bright specks and an oval mouth. The mouth flattened and turned up its corners in a smile.
Startled, he lifted his hand and looked out to the lake. A wind was coming off it, and the horizon was pale grey. A squall was building, summer storm.
He squatted again, his suit pinching behind the knees, and positioned himself, wiggling his back against the metal wall of the bin. Reeda would have warned him against what he was about to do. In one sure motion, he got both hands behind it, leaned in, and shoved.
His whole body buzzed—his hands, his chest, his chin where it pressed the top of the object—a chemical feeling. Lights danced under his eyelids. The object was far heavier than it had any right to be. With one gasp, he scraped it across the skimmer’s bin. The tingling surged up his arms. The moment the skimmer righted, he let go and stepped back, panting.
He could still see the image that had written itself on his eyes. The childish face had gained detail, strings of light joining, curving, searching their way into a clear portrait of Reeda.
The wind tugged the steering as Davis drove the four-wheeled runabout across the black sand, the device stretch-cabled into the basket behind his seat. He steered past the long, squat cold-house where he stored his harvests, then turned and headed up the rocky crest that marked the limit of the flats. The runabout struggled, its servos whining until he crested. His home stood in the distance across his half-cleared rock-scrabbled lot.
The tingling reached out to him. He felt it behind his ears as if he were clenching his jaws. His skull itched under the skin. Images visited him. He fought them, like a dream he couldn’t put aside. He saw the dials on his hover’s dash, the lake’s undulating horizon, a clattering of mollusks, their fan shapes tumbling into the cold-house’s hopper. It was an inventory of his daily life, sorting the pieces. An intelligence was behind it, voracious, collecting every scrap. He saw Reeda bringing him tea. Reeda sitting in the dark when he went to bed.
He parked the runabout at the house, hurried up the back steps, and released the memory he had been refusing to think, fighting to keep it safe. It was Reeda, exhaustion and joy written in her smile, beaming up at him with Sally in her arms. The saddest and happiest memory of his life. He sealed the door behind him and called Reeda’s name.
“I’m in here,” she answered.
She was in Sally’s room. He couldn’t help it. The utility closet opened off the back hall, and he stepped to it in his boots. He slid the plastic door open. Wet clothes were clumped unattended in the washing machine.
In the baby’s room, Reeda was sitting beside the empty crib.
“The laundry’s not done,” he said.
“I’m sorry, hon.”
“I guess you didn’t do the fuel cells either?”
“Please.”
His body filled the doorway, his hands on either jamb. Angry. “Reeda…”
“Not here, Davis.”
“Where else am I going to tell you? This is where you spend all your time.”
“Please, I said.” Her voice went quiet.
“I’m fucking tired…” he started, and then relented. His hands fell. “Get the laundry into the dryer. I won’t do everything.”
She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. Her eyes were red.
“Look. You can have the runabout tomorrow,” he said. “Go see your mom. I’m going to set the generators.”
Davis scrubbed down and changed out of his work clothes. In the utility closet, he switched the cells and started the generator. The laundry sat untouched in the washer. He put on a light suit, stepped out the back door and tightened its seals. The house’s filters had blown out last summer, and he hadn’t got them running again yet. If the season was over now, he’d have to get to that.
The back of the house faced away from the lake, a
cross the rocky plain. Windblown dust smudged the flat horizon. The runabout was parked where he had left it, next to a pile of prefab sections he had bought last winter for an addition he had yet to build. The black object was still cabled behind the runabout’s seat.
There was time before dinner, he decided. He was going to walk out to the cold-house. He descended the steps and followed the runabout’s worn tracks around the corner of the house.
When he and Reeda had been dating, she had always wanted a stroll after dinner. He had lived in town then, working one of the large harvesters that sailed from the pier. “There’s not that much to see in Bremi,”he’d tell her. After you walked the main road and the lake-edge, there wasn’t much else. The depot took up most of the shore, and with its cold-houses, hangers, and hovers, it was too industrial to be picturesque.
But Reeda was from Citadel and didn’t care. “I like walks,” she would say. “And you need to learn what I like.” It was kind of a joke.
Whenever anybody asked Davis and Reeda how they met, they always described their second date. On the phone, Davis had joked that he didn’t really know her yet, so at the coffee shop, she had pulled out a box of photos. Baby pictures, family holidays, photos from nursing college. “I want you to really know me,” she had explained.
He had loved that in her, her fearless openness.
Whenever Davis told the story, Reeda always brought up that the picture he liked best showed her in her high-school uniform. She had played on the slide-ball team, and in the picture her arms were around two teammates in blue shorts and jerseys with large blue numbers. Reeda was number fourteen. “That’s the picture he went for straight away,” she would tease. “The man cannot resist a girl with a bit of leg.”
At the cold-house, he checked the seals on the door and climbed to the roof to check the hopper’s seals as well. The wind whipped across the flats and burned his nostrils. He climbed down, rotated the cells in the generator, set the timer, and headed back.
Gusts scoured the ground, and the mounds of cleared rock reached toward him with late afternoon shadows.
The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine Page 33