by Mike Ashley
With a gesture, he pushed my words aside. Then with an even quieter voice, he said, “I doubt that the Castle is alien, Craig. At least not alien in the ways most people envision it.”
“What do you know?” I pressed. “And why aren’t you sharing your inspirations with these other children?”
“I’m not government, and I’m certainly not military,” Peck told me. “And sure, I am a prick. I’ve got two ex-wives that will say the same thing. But that doesn’t mean I lack ideals, or that I lack limits. When something huge comes my way – like the A-bomb came to Oppenheimer – I feel morally obligated to ask myself, ‘What is the right thing to do?’”
“Okay,” I said. “And what makes the Castle so awful?”
Peck’s mouth opened, but no words wandered out.
“And why the miserable act today?” I gave my question several moments to work at him, and then I saw an obvious answer. “The big boys are trying to take you out of the game, aren’t they? You can’t give them the answers they want, and they’re threatening to steal away your precious bauble.”
His old pride bubbled again. “And who’d replace me? You?”
I let his insult slide.
“But they are threatening to cut my powers and rein me in.”
“So you found a new A-bomb?” I asked.
Then he shrank down again, and with a tight sorrowful voice, Peck said, “I wish it was a bomb. A world-killing weapon. Because then I would know exactly what to do next.”
I was thirteen when Donnie’s father remarried. The lucky woman was younger than him – young enough that their union just missed becoming a scandal – and the newlyweds lived down the block from an outraged teenager. By then, my sister was lost to her mysterious, money-grubbing cult. By then, my parents were emotional wrecks, and the kindest words about religion in our household were cranky statements about people being certified idiots, eating any lie so long as it made them feel less miserable.
A few days after turning fourteen, I saw a cheap cardboard sign planted on Donnie’s yard. “IT’S A BOY,” I read.
The birth was no surprise, since the young wife had been showing for what seemed like half a year. But even today, I can recall my gut-wrenching horror when I heard that the infant child had been named Donald and that my dead friend’s bedroom had been transformed into Donald’s nursery.
For a couple of years, I managed to avoid that house and its insane inhabitants. My habit was to walk or ride my bike in inconvenient directions, and if I saw one or more Warner in public, I used every trick to escape notice.
Looking back, I’m appalled at my behavior.
Really, they made a sweet, silly couple. Donnie’s father was angular middle-aged man with a tidy, somewhat drab face that seemed grateful for every good thing in his life. He had survived the death of his first family, and now he was working hard to convey a sense of peace. To a glowering adolescent, he looked altogether too happy. His laughter was cheap. He made too much of a show of loving his young wife, holding her hand or keeping a long arm over her pudgy little shoulder, kissing her on the ears whenever I saw them at the grocery store or in the park. And she seemed like any happy, fertile mother, pregnant twice again before I could finally abandon the old neighborhood.
Once I was in college, I would come home for only a few weeks in summer and a few days around Christmas. On a snowy afternoon in December, I drove in from the inconvenient direction, according to my habit, and while getting out of my car I noticed a new sign propped up in Donnie’s front yard.
“FOR SALE,” I read, at least three times.
“Oh, the Warner’s are divorcing,” my mother explained. Then she quickly added, “It’s Polly’s doing. Not his.”
“Polly?” I asked, momentarily uncertain who that was.
“Her. The second wife.” Mom laughed at my ignorance. “He can’t let go, Polly says. And she’s sick of it. He’s always praying to his dead family, and he won’t let Tom be called Tom – ”
“And who’s Tom?”
“The boy. Donald Thomas.”
The gossip had a good rich flavor in the mouth. But another question begged to be asked. “How do you know what he does and what she wants?”
“Oh, Polly’s one of our best friends,” my mother reported.
Then my father, who was standing in the wings, burst in to report, “She’s coming to dinner, by the way. With the kids.” Slapping me on the back, he added, “You know, she’s been asking about you, Craig.”
I was outraged, but trapped.
“What does she want to know about me?” I muttered.
“Nothing special,” Mom assured. Then she dropped plates into my hands, telling me, “Set the table now. Seven spots, okay?”
It didn’t escape my notice that the famous Polly wasn’t many years older than my vanished sister. And it didn’t take long to realize that she was nothing like what I had assumed her to be. She didn’t pray before dinner, and she didn’t once mention God or Christ as a personal friend. Her missing husband was discussed – in code, if the kids were present, and if they were downstairs tearing apart the basement, she was more open about their ongoing problems.
“I knew it was dangerous, foolish, silly,” Polly confessed, looking in my general direction even when she was speaking to my parents. “I should have run away when he insisted that we live inside his house.”
I couldn’t agree more.
“He always says that he’s happy and at peace. But really, he’s barely begun grieving. Regardless what he says and God says, he still a miserable mess.”
I wanted to escape, but I couldn’t dream up any useful excuse. So I sat in the living room with a thirtyish woman – pudgy and plain, but with bright sensible eyes and a knowing voice that I found oddly appealing.
I finally asked, “So are you Christian?”
Both of my parents smiled in a sly fashion.
“I was,” she said. Then with her own buoyant grin, she said, “Maybe I still am. But I hope not. And I know for a fact that I’ve never been half the believer my husband is.”
“That must piss him off,” I offered.
She nodded and sighed, and with some satisfaction, she said, “In so many ways.” Then she stared at me, and out of nowhere, she asked, “You knew Donnie well. Didn’t you?”
Hardly at all, I could have said. And that would have felt like an honest answer: I knew him years ago, and we weren’t close for very long. But instead of that, I admitted, “He was a friend,” and dipped my head.
“By far, he was my husband’s favorite,” she mentioned. “My own son is a pale shadow next to his Donnie. Just wait until we reach heaven, I’ve been told. Then we’ll meet him and understand what a saint that boy was. And is.”
I felt sick and tired, and under everything else, furious.
Polly studied me for a long moment. Then she took the trouble to touch me on my hand, saying, “It was difficult for you. Of course.”
“Not really,” I lied.
“Do you believe you’ll see Donnie in heaven?”
I laughed bitterly. Then in a crisp fashion, I described my journey to his bedroom and his father’s praying beside me.
My parents hadn’t heard that story, and they were predictably outraged.
But Polly absorbed my news without surprise. She knew the man better than any of us, and that was in his character. After I was done telling my story, she leaned in closer, asking, “Do you believe that you will see your friend again?”
Until that moment, I didn’t even suspect that I wanted to see Donnie. But I did, desperately. All at once I was sobbing like a little kid, and the wise young mother threw her arms around me, hugging me while my parents sat apart from us, stunned by their boy’s secret grief.
And that was the moment, after too many delays, when I finally began the slow business of getting over Donnie.
Lights were burning up ahead. As we approached the brilliance, I saw two physicists wearing spacesuits, hunkering over a
bizarre piece of apparatus. The object looked like a box bristling with senseless holes and random black wires. Naturally I assumed it was one of the Castle’s mysterious machines, but then one of the physicists cursed and threw a punch at the plastic housing.
“Careful,” Peck remarked.
In the hard vacuum, it was impossible to tell a voice’s direction. Both men first looked down the long passageway, and then they turned together, seeing us bearing down on them.
Again, Peck told them, “Be careful.”
The less-angry researcher stood up straight and named the apparatus – a nonsensical string of syllables, as far as I could make out. I had no clue what the marvelous device was supposed to do, but according to the fellow’s testimony, it wasn’t working. Everything checked out fine, but for some damnable reason, they couldn’t even do a calibration run.
“Keep at it,” was Peck’s advice.
The two men nodded, and suddenly they noticed me trailing behind.
“I want Craig’s input on something,” Peck offered, explaining nothing. “We’re going to be at Gamma for a while. I want you to try everything before you give up here. Understand?”
We bounce-walked past before either man could respond, the lamps on our helmets casting a single bobbing light.
“Some of our equipment works fine inside the Castle. Which is damned fortunate.” My companion had switched to a private, heavily scrambled frequency, holding a steady pace. There was a slight downward tilt to the gray-white hallway, but the footing was reliable. He skipped along, telling me, “I suppose the Castle could be tinkering selectively, screwing up sensors that might tell us something useful.”
“Does the Castle think?” I asked.
“Probably not.” Peck slowed a little and turned his shoulders to look back at me, his lamp making me blink. “Somebody else does the thinking. That’s my current hypothesis.”
“Who’s that ‘somebody’?”
“I’m not naming names,” he said.
“Sure.”
“But what we’ve been seeing here can be explained, at least to a degree.” He turned forward again, bouncing along even faster. “That box of widgets they’re kicking? It studies forces that operate across fantastically tiny distances. Our guess of the moment is that one or more hidden dimensions have been expanded inside the Castle. Or twisted down to where we can see it, maybe. How gravity operates here is going to give us a good clue, if they can collect meaningful data.”
“And what do the new dimensions mean?”
“Well, for one thing . . . they could explain the incredible strength of this place. If the Castle extends far out into the multi-verse – into realms we normally can’t see or interact with – then our normal forces might bleed off in harmless directions. These walls could weather the worst abuse humans are capable of producing. Maybe.”
“But who could build such a thing?”
The passageway had reached an abrupt end, a human-built door standing in our way. Peck punched at an oversized keypad with the fat fingers of his glove, and the airlock’s outer door pulled opened. We stepped into the vacuum beyond, and again he offered up a code. The door closed and air began pouring in from some hidden reservoir. We stood as close as shy dancers, and once again, I asked, “Who could manage this kind of work? Do you have candidates?”
Peck looked straight ahead. “Oh yeah.”
I kept quiet.
The outside air stopped whistling. As soon as I had a green light, I pulled off my helmet, hanging it beside my new friend’s helmet. Then we stepped into a surprisingly large chamber – the biggest space I had enjoyed since arriving on the moon. Permanent lights came to life as we moved. The air was dry and a little too warm, but clean. Near the airlock was a small hill of supplies – food and bottled water, computer pads and paper pads, plus several top-grade digital cameras, each wearing a label that said, “MALFUNCTIONED”. At the far end of the room was a portable thorium reactor, tucked inside a sleeve of regolith concrete and ready to power any job. And in the room’s center, maybe twenty lunar strides away from me, was an object that could have been a machine, unless it was a piece of sculpture. Or it was neither, of course.
Katherine had prepared me for a black mystery, but the truth was, I felt disappointed. I’d imagined a rich velvety blackness that would swallow my gaze and threaten to engulf my soul. But instead, the machine was glossy, almost shiny – a complicated set of flat obsidian surfaces forming an odd doughnut surrounding a spherical object that looked large at a distance and quite small up close. Without sound, the ball hovered above the gray-white floor – a slight reddish cast to its blackness – and from every point of view, that strange ball occupied the same space in my eye.
If I pushed my face up against it, the ball would turn into a speck.
That was one of the early experiments performed by the polymath standing beside me. Against the wishes of colleagues and the General, Peck had said, “I want a closer look,” and clambered over the doughnut’s sides.
He was a brave soul; I’d grant him that.
“Nobody can see us here,” the brave soul reported, taking what seemed to be his usual position before one of the flat black surfaces. “They tried installing cameras. Thermal sensors and microphones. ‘Security tools’ they call them. But they never worked very long.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Absolutely. Since I’m the culprit who disabled each one of them.” Peck had unsealed and removed his glove, and now he set his bare palm against the doughnut’s shiny surface. A set of controls appeared. Suddenly I saw simple buttons and numbers and some kind of projection of what looked like a tiny point highlighted inside a much larger sphere.
“What made that happen?”
“Not my hand, if that’s what you’re asking.” A smile softened his normal intensity. “Other people touched this surface, plenty of times. But the key seems to be here.” He tapped his own forehead. “If you know enough, or at least if you make the right assumptions, the display is built for you. And it’s designed to perfectly match your knowledge as well as your limitations.”
I stared at his controls, a thousand questions begging to be asked.
“Suppose you can escape our four constrictive dimensions,” Peck began, anticipating my first query. “That’s what I was asking myself: from outside our space-time, wouldn’t everything be visible? The omniscient observer could examine every location in the universe, every instant in time.”
“You were thinking that?”
“I was considering the possibility,” he explained. “Sitting here, I was making various assumptions and calculations, trying to find the sense in this conundrum . . . and when I touched the surface, the controls appeared. Perfectly comprehensible to me, which is only reasonable since they match my brain’s expectations and its finite abilities.”
I glanced at the next empty surface on the obsidian doughnut.
“Think of Time,” Peck suggested. “And think of the Castle as if it exists outside of Time and our flat little neighborhood.”
With my bare hand, I touched what felt like cold glass.
Nothing appeared.
“You’re not quite there,” he remarked. Then after a moment’s consideration, he said, “Make a guess: who would want to build this contraption?”
“Martians.”
Peck shrugged his shoulders. “Do you want to know the plain truth, Craig? I can’t imagine any kind of alien that would go to this trouble. Not for human beings, they wouldn’t.”
“So who?”
He didn’t reply.
“How about God?” I asked.
“That’s what your ladyfriend believes. This is all God’s doing.”
My eyes instantly grew huge. “Don’t act surprised, Craig. After our conversation, the other day in the galley, I came here and did research. I wanted to understand you better, to see if I could trust you. I’ve been replaying your last several weeks, watching you and Katherine discussing me
– ”
“You looked into our bed?”
“If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I focused on faces and voices. Because frankly, I’ll tell you . . . I’m not eager to see either one of you naked.”
“You looked back in time?”
“Yes.”
“Goddamn,” I whispered.
He calmly waved my consternation aside, adding, “If there is a God, Craig, I cannot find Him. And believe me, I’ve been sitting here for days, searching. With this amazing tool, I’ve hunted up each of the old prophets. I’ve watched them preach and eat, screw and cheat, and I’ve seen all of them eventually die. And I’ll tell you this too: not one of them accomplished a single credible miracle. Not that I can find. They were ordinary men and extraordinary salesmen. They convinced other people to follow them, and after death, they did nothing but rot.”
That was exactly what I had always believed – what I had been taught since birth – yet a distinct disappointment arrived with that sorry news.
“If God lives,” Peck continued, “he’s even less likely to intrude in human lives than aliens would be. Which leaves us with one viable candidate, Craig. The only entity that truly cares about human beings. Which would have to be us.” He laughed, shaking his head slowly. “Only people care enough about people to make such an enormous investment.”
“Humans built this?” I whispered.
“Humans will build it. In some remote future, or in a parallel universe. Who can say for sure when?”
I felt numb.
“Think about it this way, Craig: to our future selves, Time is just another malleable dimension. Whatever their reasons, our descendants will build this amazing object, and they will set it where we won’t find it until we are ready.”
I shook my head. “Aren’t there some mighty paradoxes on the prowl?”
“You mean because if they sent it back through Time, that should the change the future and maybe destroy them in the process? No, Craig, that’s old-thinking about temporal matters. The universe is defined by quantum mechanics. Reality is constantly dividing into a multitude of pathways. As soon as their gift arrived here, from whenever and wherever that was, an entirely new history was created, separate from the existence our benefactors experienced.”