by Scott Mackay
He drove through the night, and Nevada revealed its many sides to him. But mainly it was just the road he stared at, the heat-blasted asphalt showing up nearly white in his headlights, with the flick of the yellow dividing stripes, one after the other, overpowering and hypnotic. It made him think how narrow his own universe was compared to the one the Builders must inhabit.
He must have dozed, because the next thing he knew, his truck rumbled over the gravel shoulder and in a heart-jolting awakening he swerved to avoid the ditch. He swung the car back to the road, his eyes wide, then braked, only to realize that the sky was getting brighter, and that all the strange white clouds had finally cleared.
He wasn’t sure what this meant. According to theoretical models, the sky was supposed to be awash in steaming clouds until the end. It wasn’t supposed to get clear. He glanced to the left. Did they have it wrong, then? Because the sky was now clear, and he could see a long way. He saw telephone poles rising one after the other along the superstraight desert highway. He saw sagebrush. Low brown mountains collared the desert on either side. The sky was blue, a clear amethyst of gemlike intensity.
He tried his radio, but static blocked his signal.
Then the sun came up.
When he saw the sun, he knew the world was doomed, that he wasn’t looking into the face of the sun but into the face of death. The star took up half the sky and was an angry red disk of fiery vortexes, shooting flares, and mushroom clouds. He saw sun-spots, like sinkholes into oblivion. Storied old Sol seemed to writhe with a feverish infection. Yet for being so big, it wasn’t as bright as usual, and cast a dim scarlet glow over the land. He swallowed. He perspired. It was rare for him to feel a fear so big. It left him shaken.
During the final stretch, he thought the sun was looking at him, judging him, condemning him for the murder of his children. Its awful sanguine eye penetrated to the root of his being.
He heard Haydn sometimes whispering in his ear from the other side of the Moon, and wished he could be with his adjunct in all that immense lunar silence and peaceful isolation because he needed a quiet, dark place to think.
The heat got so bad the asphalt grew gummy. He looked at the thermometer on his truck’s ceiling and saw that the temperature had topped fifty-five Celsius. Even though his air-conditioning was working full blast, it hardly alleviated the miserable heat inside the cab. The desert around him looked like a photographic negative, and he knew that the strange light coming through this new amethyst atmosphere must be distorting the spectral qualities of the landscape.
When he came to his spread in the desert, with the large silver flagpole and Old Glory drooping in the windless day out front, he didn’t turn up the long, dusty drive, with its sporadic one-inch gravel glowing like lava chunks in the light of the ungodly sun. He stopped on the shoulder and prepared himself to do what he had to do. He thought he might see jets come from Peterson, or at least see traced against the aquamarine depth the usual loose fabric of contrails. And he was certain he would hear the soul-lifting song of afterburners. But it was as if Peterson had ceased to exist. The only flying thing anywhere was a vulture picking at roadkill. The feasting bird staggered away when it finally saw him and, as if overwhelmed by the heat, fell in the dirt, then struggled into a sorry and somnambulant flight that took it over the ridge.
Once he got his nerve ready, he drove up to the flagpole and got out of his truck. The heat took his breath away—like stepping into a sauna after rolling in snow. He coughed a few times, the heat was so bad. He walked to the flagpole and touched it. He couldn’t leave his fingers there more than a few seconds before the metal became too scorching.
He grabbed the guide ropes and lowered the flag. It was a sad moment. He never thought he would lower the American flag in his own front yard. Once the flag was down, he untied it from its guide ropes and folded it in appropriate military fashion until it was nothing but a triangle of white stars on a blue ground. He shoved the neat packet under his arm and walked back to his truck.
And still, he couldn’t get it out of his mind, those particles around Dr. Conrad, existing and nonexisting.
He drove the rest of the way to his house.
When he tried the water from the kitchen sink, nothing came out. So he got some bottled water from under the sink and drank.
He went outside, stood in the middle of his yard, and faced Peterson. By this time, the sun was a lot higher, didn’t seem to ooze with the same gelatinous gush of ugly red light, and in fact he could look right into it, squinting, and see that it wasn’t really the sun at all, but a big hole into emptiness, just like Alpha Vehicle. Existence. Nonexistence. And the choice between the two. How could he have been so blind all his life to miss something so simple?
He put the flag on the ground, still folded, and gave Old Glory a salute. But as he gave the flag the crispest salute he had ever mustered, the thrumming in his ears got really bad, and he had to gather all his strength to clamp down on it. Then he realized it wasn’t thrumming at all. It was a jet coming out of Peterson. He watched it approach. The jet was like a chapter from a life he had once lived but which he could hardly remember anymore. Yet it filled him with a nostalgic joy, an old soldier remembering old battlefields, and he realized that this was the moment.
He lay down on the ground, using the folded flag as a pillow. The jet flew over him, low to the ground, spooking a jackrabbit from behind some sagebrush. He put his gun in his mouth. He watched the jet pass by, then pulled the trigger.
35
Lesha moved aside the Venetian blinds in Cam’s hospital room and looked across Jefferson Street to Patterson Park. The sun was in the south. The strange turquoise sky made the entire city look emerald, and the sun glowed with a redness that scared her. What puzzled her was the unexpected absence of clouds. In a world that was 70 percent water, the atmosphere should have been as violent and unstable as the inside of a teakettle approaching a boil. But it was remarkably calm, with only a few cirrus wisps on the horizon.
An hour later, as Cam continued to flicker in and out of existence, President Langdon called her on her cell.
‘‘Has there been any change?’’
She hesitated. ‘‘They’ve had a palliative physician come in to assess him. After the MI three days ago, they don’t think he’s going to recover.’’
‘‘That bad?’’
‘‘Dr. Ochoa did further scans. The light inside his head is fading and he got a better fix on some of the key structures. It seems he’s suffered a small stroke as well. Dr. Ochoa doesn’t think he’s going to live. The strain of the presumed contact is killing him.’’
At the other end of the line he heard the president sigh. ‘‘Keep him alive, Lesha. Keep him going. Because I have good news.’’
‘‘You do?’’
‘‘You’ve seen the change in the sky?’’
‘‘Yes. Why is it so aquamarine?’’
‘‘Put simply, it’s a field.’’
‘‘A field?’’
‘‘The sun’s radiation isn’t penetrating anymore. Bombardment levels are back to normal. Blunt has launched a probe. It’s sending back surprising data. A sphere has encircled the Earth. There’s a magnetic component. This is helping keep out the radiation.’’
She divided the slats of the Venetian blinds again with her fingers, and a bar of orange light fell across her face. ‘‘What about the sun?’’
‘‘The hydrogen drain has slowed significantly.’’
‘‘But we’re still heading toward a red giant?’’
‘‘It would appear so. Dr. Pratt now predicts Christmas, so at least we have some time. Dr. Conrad is doing something right, so keep him alive as long as you can.’’
But as she got off the phone, she thought that this was easier said than done.
The sun traced its path through the sky, and occasionally, during the course of the day, Lesha walked to the window to have a look. By noon, it had become a more homogenous color and didn’t
appear so angry. By three, it had regained some of its customary golden hue. But by sunset, it had grown large again, and perhaps through an optical effect of the new atmospheric shield, looked more malevolent than ever, seething, foaming like a star gone rabid. She was glad when it finally set.
At that point, she left Cam for a while. She ate some military rations in a special area set up for staff. Then she went outside.
The temperature had dropped. It was still hot—as hot as the hottest day in equatorial Africa—but at least it was in a normal range, not verging on the unlivable. Mid-forties perhaps? An odd smell hung in the air, like chlorine and electricity mixed, as if the Builders’ field juggled the subatomic particles of the atmosphere.
She saw stars for the first time since August. And then the Moon came up half-full, and it looked more gold than silver. The alien field magnified the Moon as if through a telephoto lens—craters, ejecta patterns, and mountains were visible to the naked eye. She thought of the nuclear blast at Gettysburg. Thought of Lamar Bruxner, and of his assistant, Laborde. She thought of Johnsie Dunlap, and tried not to feel sad—ultimately the nurse practitioner had been a hapless victim in an intergalactic miscommunication.
As she went back into the hospital, her cell phone rang once more.
This time it was Oren Fye. ‘‘Did you do something?’’
‘‘Like what?’’
‘‘Are you with him?’’
‘‘No, I’m downstairs.’’
‘‘You’d better go up.’’
As she hurried to the elevator, Fye explained. ‘‘There’s been a massive read. A bit like the Worldwide Crash. But not as disruptive.’’
‘‘And you’re sure it came from the Builders?’’
‘‘We’ve traced its origin to the Moon, and they’re the only ones up there right now.’’
‘‘What are they after this time?’’
‘‘Every reference, every mention, every possible hit or permutation of a hit on Dr. Conrad.’’
‘‘Just Dr. Conrad?’’
‘‘And everything that tangentially relates to Dr. Conrad. Particularly his work on hyperdimensionality.’’
She grew hopeful. This massive read was like the stirring of fresh weather, and boded well.
When she finally reached his room on the fifth floor, Cam’s eyes were open, and as she came in, he was staring at her; but there was something not right about his eyes, an opaqueness, like the eyes of some deep-sea creature. This made her nervous. Was it actually Cam looking at her? Or was this . . . this thing . . . a Builder?
She checked the heart monitor and saw that the subtle and dangerous symptoms of arrhythmia, present since that fateful day aboard the Tecumseh, had disappeared, and that what was on the scope was a normal heartbeat. His respirations, for so long erratic, had stabilized, and his pulse was down to a normal resting rate of seventy-two per minute. His temperature, spiking, then dropping in the most whimsical fashion for the last several days, graded in at a sturdy thirty-seven Celsius.
Lesha’s heart swelled. Cam continued to stare as if he’d been transformed in some way. Serene. In possession of himself. He lifted his hand, inviting her touch, and she laid her fingers in his palm.
Dr. Ochoa arrived a few hours later. He had porters move Cam into a special room. He did more scans. And introduced chemical tags into his brain to better monitor electrical activity. He launched a microscopic nanogenic probe that followed his mind’s many corridors, simply to calculate distance.
At the end of it all, he broke it down for Lesha. The president’s face hung on a waferscreen, patched through for conference purposes.
‘‘We were able to better visualize the structures of his brain this time, Mr. President,’’ said Ochoa. ‘‘The nanogenic probe continues to indicate an inverse spatial relationship, and has reported traveling distances of up to ninety-five astronomical units. As for the chemical tags, they show his synapses firing at the deepest levels of his communicative centers, which would seem to indicate he’s talking to somebody.’’
‘‘What about this stroke he seems to have had, Dr. Ochoa?’’ asked the president. ‘‘I just the read the report on that now.’’
Dr. Ochoa hesitated. He looked first at Lesha, then at the president, then at the scans. ‘‘The site of the cerebral vascular accident has been isolated and disconnected from the rest of his brain. Not by me. By them. Other parts of his brain are picking up the slack for this damaged part. It’s nearly as if the Builders have quarantined this area of his brain. They’ve introduced millions of nanogens into the damaged area but so far they’re in a state of stasis. I’m seeing the same thing in the damaged areas around his heart, nanogens ready to go. I don’t know what they’re going to do. I think we should be prepared either way. Because either way, it’s out of our hands now.’’
36
That the Builders should be fighting a war with someone astonished Cam. Were they fighting with these others, then? he wondered.
Renate got up from the table and walked to the observation window. She stood next to it, and usually, when a live, warm human being was next to that window, steam appeared on its surface. But Renate left no steam. Nor did she cast a reflection.
She turned around. ‘‘The nature of our enemy is as vast and complex as we are ourselves, and can only be accurately described using a numerical language not even Earth’s most gifted mathematicians can understand. Since such is the case, I’ll sum it up metaphorically. As you call us the Builders, so we call our other half the Wreckers. But to call them Wreckers doesn’t tell the whole story. As I said, they are negation, the minus sign to our plus sign, the off to our on, the zero to our one. At these sophisticated levels your math breaks down and becomes so complicated as to be impenetrable. These two basic forces were formed in the negatively curved space-time that existed in the nonexistence that prevailed before the big bang. Together the Builders and the Wreckers comprise the engine of the universe. And we fight each other. Or don’t necessarily fight each other but are in constant conflict with each other. The Milky Way is a new battleground for us, which is why you haven’t discovered our interactions until now. Entire star systems form the hinterland to feed our positive-negative interactions, and such would have been the fate of your own star system if you hadn’t poked your eyes like twin periscopes above the biological milieu of your planet. We saw you looking. The black marble among white ones, as you put it.’’
Cam considered for a long while, then asked, ‘‘So we’re worth saving?’’
Renate shifted, looked out the observation window. ‘‘Sometimes we choose stars, and there are planets around these stars, and there is life on these planets. Planets, stars, what you see with your telescopes are all part of the plane we ourselves call hypodimensional space, the first through fourth dimensions. Those creatures born at the omega end of the dimensional continuum can never occupy its higher reaches. It would be like asking a fish to live on dry land. Sometimes in order to create, we must destroy. This was the prevailing policy with the star you call Sol. But your demonstration near planet beta changed that policy. It has now been determined that the preservation of you and your people will add to the balance against the negative outflow of the Wreckers.’’
This sounded sinister to Cam. ‘‘Must we be your allies, then?’’
Renate seemed surprised by the question. She turned to him. ‘‘Human, you delight me. You play chess on several boards at once.’’
‘‘You’re powerful.’’
‘‘But we are good. If the Wreckers had come . . .’’
‘‘Will they ever come?’’
‘‘It’s hard to predict the binary flux of the universe.’’
‘‘You can’t predict the future?’’
Renate sighed. ‘‘You’ve got a long way to go before you understand the true nature of past, present, and future. Suffice it to say that in this backwater here, I think you’ll be safe for a long period to come. We’ve put a screen around plane
t omicron. We’ve reversed the hydrogen bleed in your sun. At the end of ninety-two planetary rotations your sun will again be a main-sequence G-class star. You’ll be safe. You personally will be restored. And your life will go on—in its present mode.’’ She looked back out the observation window one more time. ‘‘As for the Wreckers, only the future will tell.’’
37
When Renate finally released him, he felt as though he were falling through a wide tract of outer space, with stars everywhere. But then he had the notion of a ceiling above. At the same time, he felt more comfortable. He could breathe easier. His heart beat in its regular fashion. The ceiling turned out to be a hospital room ceiling.
He slept a long time. And dreamed. Of his father. His mother. And of Lesha. These dreams were of a healing nature, and his mind, so long tightly wound because of the impending red giant, felt a peace similar to what he had felt inside Alpha Vehicle.
When his hospital room finally came into view a second time, Lesha was sitting in a chair next to him, her head bowed, her eyes closed, wearing a lab coat she had borrowed from somewhere. After so many days of scorching heat, she seemed cold.
The Venetian blinds were open. He looked out the window. He saw blue sky, and sunlight slanting down in its old yellow fashion.
Lesha lifted her head, opened her eyes, and looked at him. It took her a moment to come out of her doze, but when she did, she leaned forward, her body seemingly released by a tight spring, and peered at him, surprised by something.
‘‘Cam?’’
‘‘Are we back?’’
She didn’t seem to know what to make of his question, but in the context of everything he had just experienced, these three words made the most sense to Cam.