Omega Sol

by Scott Mackay

  ‘‘Oren was saying the drain was showing periods of stabilization. That the Builders—’’

  ‘‘Not anymore. It’s back to previous levels.’’

  ‘‘So . . . how long?’’

  The president rubbed his chin. ‘‘Looked at one way, Dr. Weeks, we’ve already run out of time. People can’t go outside without special protective glasses now. If they do, the radiation will damage their eyes permanently. Then there’s the polar ice caps, heat stress in equatorial areas causing massive damage to large tracts of rain forest, an exponential increase in the number of hurricanes, and also in the number of cholera and diphtheria outbreaks. We have the disappearance of the cold trap and the shredding of the Van Allen belts . . . which brings me back to radiation. My scientific advisers tell me that a year of exposure at current levels will be fatal to most of us.’’

  ‘‘So how long . . . before the actual red giant event?’’ she asked, and her voice to her own ears sounded soft, and weak with fear.

  Langdon’s eyes widened in speculation. ‘‘Unfortunately, Dr. Pratt now detects factors that were previously absent. The initial stabilization we saw just after Dr. Conrad experienced his first Fade bought us some time, but now the rate of reaction is doubling every eight hours.’’

  ‘‘In other words?’’

  Langdon glanced at his waiting staff again. In a lower voice he said, ‘‘It could be any day now. And that’s why . . .’’ He leaned closer, and for a few seconds his president’s armor vanished. ‘‘That’s why it’s so important that you . . . as the woman who . . .’’

  She nodded. ‘‘I love him.’’

  ‘‘Exactly.’’

  33

  Cam was back at Gettysburg—he wasn’t sure how— and as he stared out the broad tower windows at the bleak lunar terrain, he saw that it was raining. Raining on the Moon, an impossibility, but perhaps now possible because of hyperdimensionality. It splashed on Bunker Hill and ran in rivulets. It cut channels and pooled at the bottom. He knew this couldn’t be. There was nothing but the usual black sky above. It reminded him of all Delilah’s rain in Navasota.

  He lifted his arm and looked at the back of his hand. It glowed. Not with electric radiance, but with the luminescent flesh tones of a Rembrandt portrait, highlighted because everything was so dark in the tower.

  The rain beat against the polycarbonate pressure glass. Lightning flashed and he saw for an instant dead bodies, blackened, and left partially skeletal by, he supposed, the nuclear blast that had happened here.

  In the next flash, he saw the bodies resurrected in their pressure suits, forming a column and walking around the far end of Bunker Hill.

  He turned from the windows and looked around the tower.

  He was in one of those dreams where he knew he was dreaming; yet at the same time the situation was a hundred times more vivid than any dream.

  He walked to the companionway that led to the hub below. At the top of the companionway, he looked down and saw Lamar Bruxner—a ghost— illuminated from within by the same Rembrandt light, pale silver verging on white gold, glimmering as if underwater. Bruxner looked like he existed outside of time. Outside of space. The chief of support flickered, then disappeared, and Cam was left with nothing but an empty corridor.

  ‘‘Hello?’’ he called.

  He got no answer.

  He descended the companionway and walked along corridor 9.

  He heard snippets of Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony in G Minor, two short and one long, a sigh a semi-tone apart—only the symphony didn’t progress the way it usually did, the way he remembered it when his father and mother had taken him to hear it performed by the Houston Symphony Orchestra many years ago. Rather, it concentrated on those sections that used the opening motif, developed one way or another through various harmonic modulations, leaving the subsidiary material untouched, as if the balancing phraseology was so much extraneous information. Two short and one long. A musical exhalation, filtered through an overlay of echoes, so that the fragmented symphony washed up onto his ears in a series of ones and twos.

  And interspersed with this fractured version of Mozart’s Fortieth was that other music, the hypnotizing compositional work of the Builders, the music he had become so familiar with. In breaking it down, he heard the two-to-one proportions in the Builders’ melody as well. And the bits and pieces of the Builders’ music seemed to work in counterpoint with the uncoupled phrases of Mozart’s symphony, so that he began to think that maybe Renate Tennant hadn’t been so far off base after all, and had actually succeeded in effecting a communicative bridge using Mozart’s music.

  Two. One. Two. One.

  Not binary—not the zero, one—but a reflected representation, because who could hear the zero? So they used two and one instead.

  He came to the intersection of corridor 6. He peered down this hall to the common room. The music’s character changed, became more visceral, scraping, seemed to emanate from the common room, the timbre now shaped through the vowel sounds A, E, I, O, U, over and over.

  He reached the common room and he saw, speak of the devil, Renate Tennant, sitting at one of the tables.

  Instead of wearing her usual Defense Department greens, she was in white, and she glowed with the same vigorous but elusive Rembrandt light, and he couldn’t help remembering that in her second ‘‘send’’ to the Builders she had sent many examples of Rembrandt’s work. Though her hair was done up in the same conservative way, she appeared decades younger, and he knew he was looking at Dr. Tennant as she might have been at twenty-three or -four.

  She spoke to him in Cantonese. ‘‘Yes, I’m real. It’s me.’’ His ear immediately translated.

  He approached. ‘‘You’re younger.’’

  ‘‘They’ve represented me at my mean age.’’

  ‘‘Are you . . . alive?’’

  ‘‘I am. But not in the usual sense.’’

  He reached the table and sat down. When he spoke next, it was in French. ‘‘Pourquoi est-ce je suis ici?’’ Why am I here?

  She responded in French. ‘‘Ceci est un premier contact,Cam.’’ This is first contact. ‘‘Before, I coveted it. But now I’m part of it. And part of them.’’

  ‘‘Then I implore you, as their representative, stop the transformation of our sun.’’

  In Greek she said, ‘‘The transformation of your sun will be a transient episode for all of you. You will continue. Your atoms are indestructible and will last forever, as long as they remain in their hypodimensional state.’’

  ‘‘We wish to continue in our current state.’’

  ‘‘We realize this now.’’

  ‘‘We?’’

  Her next words were in English. ‘‘Your language is insufficient, and can’t possibly describe, even through the use of a place-marker pronoun, our precise nature.’’

  Cam tried to get his awe and wonder under control. ‘‘Why do you play this music all the time?’’

  Renate looked away. Out the big observation window, Cam saw the Sumter Module and Command Port, and it fluctuated between a destroyed version of itself and an intact one. ‘‘You hear the motif? The two and the one? We begin to see that you might understand. It represents the binary nature of the universe. We are existence. The others are nonexistence. These are the two fundamental choices in our universe. We are the will of the one choice, and they are the will of the other. We create, they destroy. Creation and destruction. It’s the anvil upon which everything is forged.’’

  Cam was immediately reminded of the creation-of-matter, destruction-of-matter virtual particle phenomenon in the Guarneri field, and his subsequent hypothesis of an existence-versus-nonexistence schematic for the universe. His eyes narrowed. But who were these others, then? For the moment, he pushed them from his mind and concentrated on the dangerous situation at hand.

  ‘‘Then if you’re existence, you know we want to exist.’’

  Renate turned to him. ‘‘You never die.’’

>   ‘‘We wish to continue to exist in our present mode.’’

  ‘‘It’s hard for us to make sense of hypo-dimensional existence, just as it’s difficult, I imagine, for you to imagine a . . . a habitat that occupies several different planes at the same time. We came to your solar system for the express purpose of utilizing your sun. But then emanating from this Moon, right down there in Shenandoah, we picked up a sudden flash, and this was Stradivari. So we came here, and we investigated, and while we inadvertently destroyed the field, we sensed in your mind—yes, your mind, Dr. Conrad—something that made us hesitate. Say you are a prospector. You are walking over the ground, and the ground is made up of base particulate of no striking interest. You dismiss the whole tract. But then you see something flash. You walk over and find a diamond. The diamond is big, and the diamond speaks in a language you can understand. Suddenly you look around at the drab patch with new interest.’’

  ‘‘So Guarneri . . .’’

  Here the language became a mix of Greek and Latin, like Omega Sol, but he found he could untangle the hybrid syntax with surprising quickness. ‘‘Your own effort was enough to make us realize, or perhaps to shock us into believing, that alpha species on planet omicron in the system you call Sol was perhaps satisfactorily developed enough to save. Particularly when we discovered evidence of curved space-time and gravitational manipulation out by planet beta. I could describe what you have done in your own mathematical language, but we understand, as you do, that mathematical language reaches a point where it must adapt other, more poetic strategies. And so, when we saw your small example of anti-Ostrander space by planet beta, we knew that you were taking your first tiny steps toward . . . commutatio.’’ She seemed to consider the metaphorical worth of the word in its original Latin, and let it stand.

  Cam asked, ‘‘Is there any way you can help us?’’

  ‘‘You will be preserved. Is that not help enough?’’

  ‘‘Preserved how?’’

  ‘‘In your natural habitat.’’

  ‘‘So planet omicron. Earth.’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘And what about Omega Sol?’’

  She looked away. ‘‘Omega Sol will be stopped.’’

  ‘‘And what about all the millions of people who have already been killed in the Worldwide Crash and the August nuclear exchange?’’

  ‘‘They aren’t dead. They exist. Just in a different form. And a different time.’’

  ‘‘You can’t bring them back?’’

  Renate’s eyes narrowed as she continued to gaze out at the fluctuating SMCP. ‘‘No. They now serve the universe in their altered form. They are part of the overall balance. For we and the other are light and shadow, and we balance each other out. We and the other are yes and no. We and the other are black and white. Nothing balances something. Something balances nothing. We are positive and they are negative. We are existence and they nonexistence. Together we are force versus lack of force. We are a chaotic shifting of back and forth. This is the fundamental scheme of the universe. We are on, they are off. Together we are binary. We, who have done this to your sun, are of the first part. Together with the other part we are life and death. All those millions of dead you speak of must play their role in the balance of the universe. Just as those of you who remain, the living, must also play your role.’’

  ‘‘And what role is that?’’

  ‘‘Existence. Existence and nonexistence, you see. That’s all there is.’’

  ‘‘So you can’t bring back the dead?’’

  ‘‘Not in hypodimensionality.’’

  ‘‘But you will stop Omega Sol?’’

  ‘‘Omega Sol and its quick reversal are just a matter of manipulating matter and energy.’’

  ‘‘Why are you turning main-sequence stars into red giants in the first place? Why are you changing larger stars further afield into supernovae?’’

  ‘‘You’re a scientist. You can’t guess?’’

  ‘‘It doesn’t make much sense to me.’’

  ‘‘From where you stand, no, I imagine it wouldn’t. But when you get to what you would most probably term the thirteenth and fourteenth dimensions—and bear in mind that dimensions can’t be numbered this way because dimensionality is a continuum, a string, like on a Stradivarius violin, capable of microtonal glissandi—but when you get well beyond the dimensions where space and time have been left far behind, you begin to see that there is a fundamental dissonance as well as a harmony to the universe. Harmony and dissonance. You have no math to describe what I’m talking about. Here at the bottom of dimensionality, where you and your kind dwell, we heat stars to their end-stage sequences for the sake of producing elemental building blocks that help us address the dissonance, and to encourage harmony. When stars are heated to their end-stage sequences, they produce all kinds of heavier elements, everything from carbon and oxygen to lead and gold. These distilled particles help us fight our war.’’

  ‘‘War?’’ said Cam, and was so surprised by the notion it came out in a half dozen languages at once. ‘‘You’re fighting a war? With whom?’’

  34

  Pittman took his time getting home, meandering through the country over the next week and a half because he wanted to see it one last time—America, the greatest country on Earth.

  A kilometer outside Grand Island, Nebraska, he got out of his truck and threw up. He vomited blood. Radiation exposure, most probably from his surface excursion in Crater Cavalet, was at last catching up to him. It seemed a fitting end that he should be shredding into nonexistence like the Van Allen belts. On his hands and knees in the coarse gravel, he looked up at the sky, and it was white with a blanket of ruffled silver clouds. Over by a stream, he saw a dead coyote with flies buzzing around it. He finished throwing up and, pressing his hand against his truck’s front fender, struggled into a standing position.

  He looked around at the surrounding fields and discovered a farmhouse in the distance. He didn’t see any vehicles around the house. The house looked deserted. Abandoned. Empty. The red giant was upon them, and everybody was hiding.

  He tried not to brood on his children, but his mind relentlessly circled back. Becky, dead immediately, and Tom, succumbing a day later. He walked to the driver’s side and got in. And Sheila dead as well. He was the penultimate destroyer, a man who had murdered his own family.

  He took out his gun and stared at it—a black, precise, well-oiled weapon. He released the safety, made sure he had a round in the chamber, then stuck the barrel in his mouth. The metal tasted tangy. A sudden jerk of his finger and that would be it. He finally understood that war wasn’t the only answer. So simple. The single greatest principle any true warrior would have employed, but which he had failed to grasp, was to prevent war before having to fight one. In that respect, Dr. Conrad was a greater warrior than he.

  And now . . .

  Now it was too late.

  Now the world had gone beyond the tipping point.

  He took the gun out of his mouth and put the safety back on. Tears came to his eyes. He grieved for Becky and Tom. He grieved for Sheila. He even grieved for Haydn. He turned the ignition and the motor started. He put the car in gear and drove.

  He came to a windmill installation just outside Laramie, Wyoming. The big turbines, field after field, were turning; but when he came to the utility station, he saw no cars, no one in the grounds or the windows, and the big security gate left unlatched and banging against the fence in the wind. The sound of the gate against the chain-link fence was a lonely one. This was what it would be like when everybody finally died. They said neutron bombardment would mercifully kill all living things before the flames of the red giant came. For two or three days before the inferno, the world would be empty. A giant ghost town. And there would be a lot of unlatched gates banging in the wind.

  He continued west along Interstate 80 through Rock Springs and so toward the Nebraska-Utah border. He turned on his radio and got a station
out of Salt Lake City.

  There was a story on Dr. Cameron Conrad, how he was still comatose at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Doctors were baffled by his condition, and late last night he had survived a second heart attack. The announcer spoke of the flickering, reported that Dr. Lesha Weeks had been investigating the phenomenon, and had theorized about an ‘‘event horizon’’ surrounding Dr. Conrad, and how at the boundary of this event horizon, virtual and nonvirtual particles seemed to be at war with each other. They had a sound bite of Dr. Weeks speaking. ‘‘It seems that within the perimeters of this event horizon—and I use the term loosely—we see a conflict between particles that want to exist and don’t want to exist. I believe through this event horizon we’re getting a rare glimpse into how the universe operates on its speculated higher planes.’’

  Pittman wasn’t sure if he knew what the doctor was talking about. It was like she was asking him to see something that no one could ever describe in concrete terms. But he thought about existence and nonexistence, and how it seemed to reflect his yin-yang symbol at home, and it kept him preoccupied for a long time.

  As he reached the outskirts of Salt Lake City, he saw several large smoke plumes in the downtown core. He bypassed the city to the south, occasionally catching glimpses of these plumes. What had happened to the fire department? He counted seventeen conflagrations in all. With things getting bad, had the fire department simply gone AWOL?

  He saw three people walking along the freeway. They wore heavy long cloaks and big hats with broad rims—like so many others, they erroneously believed this kind of garb would protect them from the heavy radiation coming from the unfiltered sun, even though it had originally been advised simply for the fallout of the August nuclear exchange. They waved their arms. They wanted him to slow down. But he had nothing to give them, and when the tallest of the three lifted a piece of broken asphalt from the side of the road and hurled it at him, he sped up.

  He entered Nevada a short while later. It was like returning to a place he hated, but also a place he loved. He took 93 South at Wendover. As he drove through the desert, he again couldn’t help think about what Dr. Weeks had said, how there seemed to be a battle of particles around Dr. Conrad, ones that wanted to exist, and ones that didn’t.