by Robert Reed
“What do you think it means, darling?” Pete was watching his wife, smiling slyly. “You’re the skeptic. Are you at least impressed?”
Mrs. Pete nodded, grinned. “A little bit.”
“Just a little?”
“I’m like the scientists. No final opinions, please.”
Then Cornell thought, What if Mom came home now? Wouldn’t that be perfect? He could practically see her, dressed in a shiny waterproof suit and smiling at them…and his eyes closed of their own volition, the caffeine no match for a long day and a longer night. He was dreaming, asleep in an instant and seeing his mother in the dreams. He was running toward her, pressing between the astonished Petes; and she knelt and kissed him, wet lips smiling and saying, “Here I am! I’m home, and with a message. Welcome to the neighborhood.” She said it again and again. “Welcome, welcome. We’re glad to have you as neighbors, and a thousand times welcome.”
Cornell slept and woke, then slept again, hearing slivers of conversation. Voices from the TV mixed with the adults behind him, their identities a jumble. Dad sounded like a mathematician talking about a new geometry, the earth and space all tucked together into some kind of bizarre hypersphere. Then came a biologist who sounded like Pete, the deep voice mixed with thunder; and he told how life should riddle the cosmos, born on earthlike worlds and strange worlds and perhaps inside the giant warm clouds of interstellar gas and dust. It was astonishing to him that life was hard to find—the universe should be one endless jungle—
—and now Cornell dreamt of jungles with strange wet skies, swirling clouds of stars giving way to twin suns. There was a sudden heat, intense and suffocating. He woke with a start, the TV playing but nobody in the room. Sunshine poured through the windows; he was baking in a bright rectangle. Where was everyone? For a sleepy instant, Cornell wondered if the aliens had come and abducted everyone but him. What if they had? He rose and searched the empty house, through the bedrooms and back into the kitchen, pausing at the basement door and hearing just the quiet burning of the water heater. Then he noticed figures in the front yard. Dad? He peered through streaked glass, seeing his father and the Petes. And a fourth person, too, her back to him; and of course it was Mom. Twelve-year-olds spend an inordinate energy looking for what is fair, and this was fair. Fair was Pam Novak returning home, unharmed and happy. That’s why Cornell ran. He flung open the front door and hit the screen door hard enough to break its latch. Everyone turned to look, startled but still smiling; and for an instant, for no better reason than wanting, Cornell saw his mother standing there.
Then he realized it wasn’t her. It was Mrs. Underhill standing on the shaggy lawn, looking tired like everyone else, and joyous. And Dad, barely noticing the damaged door, called out, “The sun’s up, Cornell!”
The boy felt foolish, starting to blush.
“If you didn’t know better,” Dad continued, “you’d think the world was back to normal. You almost could.”
No aliens arrived on the world’s doorstep, inviting themselves inside for coffee. Nor did any radio messages fall from the new sky. One persistent rumor was that everyone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had received the same eerie phone call, an otherworldly voice saying, “Your rent is due.” That led to some nervous moments—what kind of rent do they need?—then the discovery of teenage boys with speed-dial machines. And for weeks and weeks, pundits joked that if Tulsa was the first place they contacted, then they weren’t particularly smart, were they?
Scientists worked without sleep, slurries of coffee and pills helping them invent tests and then wrestle with the results. No, they determined, the universe hadn’t truly vanished. Its starlight and X-rays and gravity waves were just more difficult to see, mashed together at the center of the everted earth, their cold gray glow resembling a god’s night-light. An amorphous glow scrubbed of information, it turned out. Yet from orbit, from the space station and elsewhere, everything seemed ordinary. Planets and stars moved according to old-fashioned plans. The only change was the earth’s albedo, its brightness diminished by a few percentage points. Measurements on top of measurements proved that this missing light matched what people saw overhead, almost to the photon; and the jittery, overdosed scientists could at least find a crazy sensibility to the circumstance. That implied rules; and like twelve-year-old boys, scientists took enormous stock in things like rules and fair play.
Then came a wizard, a twenty-five-year-old Russian already notorious in the small world of mathematics. He guaranteed himself everlasting fame and the Nobel prize with a string of hurried calculations. He began with an assumption: Life is common. Not just now, he argued, but always. He pictured a universe where intelligence and self-awareness bubbled up everywhere. How would life act, surrounded by stars and black holes, dust clouds and quasars? How could it remake its surroundings? Not in a year or ten million years, but in billions of persistent years…how might life redecorate its quarters…?
Cold baryonic matter can be sculpted, he decided. With elegant symbols and guile, he proved that space-time could be bent, normally invisible dimensions coming into play, and the result was a universe filled with delicate, closely packed structures. Where did they get the baryonic matter? From planets and dust, at first. But later whole suns could be dismantled, cooled and transformed into useful elements. And perhaps dark matter would be rebuilt as well. Instead of vacuum punctuated with little wild suns, the universe would be orderly and crowded, each new world existing somewhere among all the structure. There were all sorts of potentials, wrote the Russian. Meters and miles no longer applied. The human mind was, at best, badly equipped to picture the geometry. Which was sad. “Evolution hasn’t made us ready for this new order,” he confessed, “and the beauty escapes us. I’m the best, and all I can see is the fringe of it. All I smell is an intoxicating hint of what is.”
So what did these fringes and hints show him?
The earth was many things, he wrote. It was a sphere in space, like always, and an everted sphere in a different space. Plus it had other shapes, each more complicated than the last. When the sky was darkness and stars, the earth “saw” a carefully structured rain of photons and charged particles. But remember, nobody has ever actually seen a star. People saw a few photons, a representative sample supplied at little cost. There might be very few stars, the Russian argued. Or more likely, artificial ones meant to give light and life to myriad worlds at the same time. It would be an efficient system, and safe. Only the cold bodies were real—planets and asteroids, moons and dust motes—all of them stacked into fancy hyperdimensional walls.
“But why the sudden change?” people asked. “Why change the sky now?”
The Russian didn’t know the trigger, not knowing the exact machinery. It could be anything, though he liked the idea of watchful aliens. They must have decided mankind was ready for the challenge. And it wasn’t as if the stars were lost, he added, giving a big smile. People still could travel into space, above the fifty-mile transition, and see the old universe. The projected universe. “Think of that sky being like a photograph in your living room. A photograph of a forest, say. A lovely wild place that doesn’t exist any longer, but you keep it as a reminder. That’s what our old sky was. A picture on the wall. A view of the wilderness.”
But a few years later, accepting his Nobel, the Russian proposed one possible trigger for the Change. What if it was a human mind? What if a single earthly brain had reached the point where it could understand and appreciate this new order, and that mind was the trigger? His mind, in other words. What if the aliens saw him as being worthy, and the whole Change was for his education and his glory?
Despite the ego, people admired him.
And the ego blossomed, even long after the man’s talent was gone. Even years after his last published paper, after three ugly public marriages and a squandered fortune…that old Russian was convinced that he was solely responsible for the Change, and he told it to anyone who would listen. He told it to barflies down in Key West, and
one particularly beefy barfly said, “That’s bullshit, and shut up.” But the Russian wouldn’t quiet himself. The two men ended up trading blows, and that special perfect precious brain struck the floor, blood vessels breaking and the Nobel laureate never regaining consciousness.
It was an important funeral, but friendless. The networks sent cameras and reporters, and colleagues gave terse eulogies. “Think of it,” said one old physicist “A few days of jotting down symbols and relationships, and the poor man spent the rest of his life being proud. He described a universe full of life, some of it more gifted than any of us, and he was proud. We’re like children who discover the color blue or the joy of love, and by what right do we feel pride?” A long pause, then with a pained voice, he said, “And think of this. Maybe he was our finest mind, yet he lacked the wit and wisdom to live his own life well. Given everything, he won nothing. How sad. How apt. How wickedly true.”
Reporters from the local stations interviewed Dad during the first week. He was the UFO expert, and his views seemed appropriate. One reporter thought it would be interesting to interview his neighbors, asking most of them what they thought about having a visionary in their midst.
“Oh, he’s brilliant,” chirped Mrs. Underhill. “A deep thinker, that’s Nathan.”
Mr. Tucker was less effusive. “Yeah, he knows stuff. But look at that lawn. You think maybe he could cut the grass once in a blue moon?”
Mr. Lynn called Dad, “Perceptive. Even mystical.”
His blond girlfriend, soon to be his fiancée, squinted at the camera lens and said, “He’s cute, sort of. I think.”
“I’ve known Nathan for years,” said Pete, “and he’s a sincere, curious individual. I admire him more than I can tell you. I don’t always follow what he’s saying, but I sure admire him.”
Mrs. Pete merely said, “He means well,” with something disapproving about the narrowed eyes.
Cornell was last. The reporter pushed her microphone into his face, asking, “What can you tell me about your dad?” What could he say? Summing him up in a phrase seemed ridiculous, even stupid. But he tried, clearing his throat and hearing himself saying:
“He’s the best father ever.”
Pete’s testimony led the piece, then Dad spoke about the goodness of the unseen aliens. Cornell’s blurb was tacked on at the end. Nobody else made the cut, which caused grumbling. Then the piece went across CNN, one of hundreds of stories done in those crazy weeks.
And Cornell found himself feeling guilty. The best father ever? How could he make such a claim? Who could ever actually measure such a thing?
He couldn’t, obviously.
No one had that kind of power.
There was a nightly party for the first weeks, informal and quickly routine. People would gather at the island after dinner, the sun dropping behind distant farmland and the new sky emerging in its glory. What had been astonishing was now merely interesting. Merely natural. Yet people pestered Dad with questions, devouring his speculations about aliens and their unseen worlds. The old man loved it. He talked himself hoarse, recounting every famous sighting; and Cornell found himself growing bored, a little bit. One evening, getting ready for bed, he asked, “Why don’t you tell them about Mom? Tomorrow night, could you?”
The man took a breath and held it, then said, “Oh, I think not.”
Why not?
“First, we don’t know when she’ll come home. Why involve them in our wait? And secondly, I think what you really want is pity. Don’t you?”
He hadn’t considered it, but yes, maybe somewhat. Their neighbors’ pity would be nice, he thought. But later, lying awake in bed, Cornell discovered another reason. He considered all the happiness in the world, and he felt left out. He felt cheated. Turning on his side, staring at the round red faces of Mars, he experienced a sudden bilious anger verging on rage. It frightened him, and it made him feel alive; and for half the night he couldn’t relax enough to even pretend sleep.
Rumors mentioned secret talks in Maryland and the Yucatan, and the pope had been seen strolling through the Vatican with angelic creatures. Every kind of story made the rounds. Euphoria was infectious. And Cornell felt a surge of anticipation with each story, then despair when it turned out to be pure fantasy.
It sickened him, all these changes of mood.
He finally found the courage to ask Dad, “Where is she?” They were in the basement, Dad fiddling with a piece of machinery. Cornell had practiced this moment for some time, his questions clear and his resolve cool. “Why don’t they let her go now? What good does it do, keeping her?”
Dad set down a tiny screwdriver, acting as if it were fragile.
“Why don’t they?”
“I don’t know,” the old man allowed, almost nodding and the pink tip of his tongue licking his dry lips. “But I’m assuming …we have to assume…they have splendid reasons, even if we can’t appreciate them.”
Cornell didn’t want to talk about things he didn’t understand. “So why don’t they explain why? Can’t they?”
Dad shrugged, saying, “I guess not. I’m sorry.”
“That Russian? He says the universe is full of worlds, and the aliens are practically next door.”
“I know the theory,” Dad assured him.
“Maybe it’s simple to go between worlds.”
“What’s your point, son?”
What was it? He paused, trying to calm himself. Then he explained, “She might be close. She’s always been close, not light-years away.”
“And why doesn’t she walk home?”
“Why not?”
Dad had a way of thinking with his entire body, with his face and posture and even the thoughtful curl of his fingers. Finally, with a pained tone, he replied, “She might not be allowed to come here.”
“Why not?” Anger made Cornell tremble. “The aliens are assholes, I think…!”
The old man didn’t approve of the language or its intent. Yet he wouldn’t let his own anger blossom, no, shaking his head and with the mildest of voices saying, “Now, now. You don’t mean that…”
Cornell hated that patience. He hated running up against it, bouncing off and nothing to show for the collision.
“You mustn’t hate them,” said Dad, almost whispering.
“I do.”
The thin face shook no, the mouth fused into a pale pink line.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to come back,” Cornell offered. “She likes it better there. Wherever it is.”
Dad sat back on his stool, appearing weak. Bloodless. Then he recovered enough poise to say, “I guess that’s possible. It isn’t hard to believe. A better place, and we have to respect her wishes, of course. Of course.”
Crazy talk. The old man muttered too softly to be understood, and Cornell retreated, defeated and angry because of it. He thought about nothing else for days, as if acid were eating his guts. The man was crazy…he saw it more and more…all that talk about beautiful places, places where he’d never been…
…places better than this ugly dump…
Easily.
They returned to the farm where they’d been on Change Day, as people called it now. This was late September. There weren’t any new disks to investigate, and sightings were down, despite huge interest and millions of night-watching eyes. That’s why Dad wanted to visit the farm and other old sites. Touch bases again, and all that.
“Did you call and warn them?” asked Pete. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, the perpetual whiskers longer and darker than in summer. “I bet they don’t know we’re coming, do they?”
“We’ll just drop by,” Dad confessed.
Cornell felt embarrassed and a little disgusted.
“We won’t bother anyone,” Dad added. A backward glance at Cornell. A wink and smile. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
But the woman at the front door didn’t like surprises. Three strangers were on her porch, and her eyes were round against a roun
d farmwife face. Cornell smelled cleansers. “Yes,” she said, “can I help you?” Dad explained their purpose while Cornell hung behind him and Pete. The dogs sniffed at his heels and butt. The German shepherd wagged its bristly tail, letting the fur on its neck rise. “I remember,” said the woman. “You came here a few months ago.”
Last month, thought Cornell.
“My husband’s in town,” she continued. “I’ll need to ask him, if you can wait.”
“The circle’s still there?” Dad asked the question in a polite but worried fashion. “Nothing’s happened to it, has it?”
“Oh, it’s there,” she allowed. “Nobody’s taken it.”
She made them wait on the porch while she made a phone call. Through the screen door, Cornell saw oak trim and dingy wallpaper and wooden stairs slumping after decades of hard use. Where was the boy? he wondered. Then the woman returned, telling them, “Okay, but be careful. The corn’s had a hard year.”
“We will be, ma’am.”
“Really, we haven’t seen anything unusual. Except for the sky, that is.” Then she gave a sly wink, laughing and shutting the old oak door with a solid thunk.
Like last time, the dogs shadowed them, trying to understand their equipment with their noses. Again Cornell carried the warming toolbox. Again Pete helped him measure the circle. Ragged yellow corn stalks stood around them, making dry dead sounds in the breeze. The circle had changed, cracking at its edges and slumping near its center. Maybe it had been built by aliens—creatures of supreme intelligence—but Cornell decided it looked unremarkable, even ugly. It wasn’t even good glass, dusty and hot, and what was he doing here? He wanted to be…where? No place came to mind. Then he thought: Wouldn’t it be something if this was nothing? If the circles were nothing but some alien’s shit?
“What’s funny?” Pete asked.
Cornell said, “Nothing,” with a mind-your-business tone.