So far, and no farther— No farther—
He looked up at me from the far side of the desk. Sweat was streaming down his face and his light shirt was clinging to his skin. That sallow cadaverous look was gone from him entirely. He looked transfigured, aflame, throbbing with life: more alive than anyone I had ever seen, or so it seemed to me in that moment. There was a Faustian fire in his look, a world-swallowing urgency. Magellan must have looked that way sometimes, or Newton, or Galileo. And then in a moment more it was gone, and all I saw before me was a miserable scrawny boy, shrunken, feeble, pitifully frail.
I went to talk to a physicist I knew, a friend of Timothy’s father who did advanced research at the university. I said nothing about Timothy to him.
“What’s a quantum well?” I asked him.
He looked puzzled. “Where’d you hear of those?”
“Someone I know. But I couldn’t follow much of what he was saying.”
“Extremely small switching device,” he said. “Experimental, maybe five, ten years away. Less if we’re very lucky. The idea is that you use two different semiconductive materials in a single crystal lattice, a superlattice, something like a three-dimensional checkerboard. Electrons tunneling between squares could be made to perform digital operations at tremendous speeds.”
“And how small would this thing be, compared with the sort of transistors they have on chips now?”
“It would be down in the nanometer range,” he told me. “That’s a billionth of a meter. Smaller than a virus. Getting right down there close to the theoretical limits for semiconductivity. Any smaller and you’ll be measuring things in angstroms.”
“Angstroms?”
“One ten-billionth of a meter. We measure the diameter of atoms in angstrom units.”
“Ah,” I said. “All right. Can I ask you something else?”
He looked amused, patient, tolerant.
“Does anyone know much about what an electron looks like?”
“Looks like?”
“Its physical appearance. I mean, has any sort of work been done on examining them, maybe even photographing them—”
“You know about the Uncertainty Principle?” he asked.
“Well—not much, really—”
“Electrons are very damned tiny. They’ve got a mass of—ah—about nine times ten to the minus twenty-eighth grams. We need light in order to see, in any sense of the word. We see by receiving light radiated by an object, or by hitting it with light and getting a reflection. The smallest unit of light we can use, which is the photon, has such a long wavelength that it would completely hide an electron from view, so to speak. And we can’t use radiation of shorter wavelength—gammas, let’s say, or x-rays—for making our measurements, either, because the shorter the wavelength the greater the energy, and so a gamma ray would simply kick any electron we were going to inspect to hell and gone. So we can’t “see” electrons. The very act of determining their position imparts new velocity to them, which alters their position. The best we can do by way of examining electrons is make an enlightened guess, a probabilistic determination, of where they are and how fast they’re moving. In a very rough way that’s what we mean by the Uncertainty Principle.”
“You mean, in order to look an electron in the eye, you’d virtually have to be the size of an electron yourself? Or even smaller?”
He gave me a strange look. “I suppose that question makes sense,” he said. “And I suppose I could answer yes to it. But what the hell are we talking about, now?”
I dreamed again that night: a feverish, disjointed dream of gigantic grotesque creatures shining with a fluorescent glow against a sky blacker than any night. They had claws, tentacles, eyes by the dozens. Their swollen asymmetrical bodies were bristling with thick red hairs. Some were clad in thick armor, others were equipped with ugly shining spikes that jutted in rows of ten or twenty from their quivering skins. They were pursuing me through the airless void. Wherever I ran there were more of them, crowding close. Behind them I saw the walls of the cosmos beginning to shiver and flow. The sky itself was dancing. Color was breaking through the blackness: eddying bands of every hue at once, interwoven like great chains. I ran, and I ran, and I ran, but there were monsters on every side, and no escape.
Timothy missed an appointment. For some days now he had been growing more distant, often simply sitting silently, staring at me for the whole hour out of some hermetic sphere of unapproachability. That struck me as nothing more than predictable passive-aggressive resistance, but when he failed to show up at all I was startled: such blatant rebellion wasn’t his expectable mode. Some new therapeutic strategies seemed in order: more direct intervention, with me playing the role of a gruff, loving older brother, or perhaps family therapy, or some meetings with his teachers and even classmates. Despite his recent aloofness I still felt I could get to him in time. But this business of skipping appointments was unacceptable. I phoned his mother the next day, only to learn that he was in the hospital; and after my last patient of the morning I drove across town to see him. The attending physician, a chunky-faced resident, turned frosty when I told him that I was Timothy’s therapist, that I had been treating him for anorexia. I didn’t need to be telepathic to know that he was thinking, You didn’t do much of a job with him, did you? “His parents are with him now,” he told me. “Let me find out if they want you to go in. It looks pretty bad.”
Actually they were all there, parents, step-parents, the various children by the various second marriages. Timothy seemed to be no more than a waxen doll. They had brought him books, tapes, even a lap-top computer, but everything was pushed to the corners of the bed. The shrunken figure in the middle barely raised the level of the coverlet a few inches. They had him on an IV unit and a whole webwork of other lines and cables ran to him from the array of medical machines surrounding him. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be staring into some other world, perhaps that same world of rampaging bacteria and quivering molecules that had haunted my sleep a few nights before. He seemed perhaps to be smiling.
“He collapsed at school,” his mother whispered.
“In the computer lab, no less,” said his father, with a nervous ratcheting laugh. “He was last conscious about two hours ago, but he wasn’t talking coherently.”
“He wants to go inside his computer,” one of the little boys said. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?” He might have been seven.
“Timothy’s going to die, Timothy’s going to die,” chanted somebody’s daughter, about seven.
“Christopher! Bree! Shhh, both of you!” said about three of the various parents, all at once.
I said, “Has he started to respond to the IV?”
“They don’t think so. It’s not at all good,” his mother said. “He’s right on the edge. He lost three pounds this week. We thought he was eating, but he must have been sliding the food into his pocket, or something like that.” She shook her head. “You can’t be a policeman.”
Her eyes were cold. So were her husband’s, and even those of the step-parents. Telling me, This is your fault, we counted on you to make him stop starving himself. What could I say? You can only heal the ones you can reach. Timothy had been determined to keep himself beyond my grasp. Still, I felt the keenness of their reproachful anger, and it hurt.
“I’ve seen worse cases than this come back under medical treatment,” I told them. “They’ll build up his strength until he’s capable of talking with me again. And then I’m certain I’ll be able to lick this thing. I was just beginning to break through his defenses when—when he—”
Sure. It costs no more to give them a little optimism. I gave them what I could: experience with other cases of severe food deprivation, positive results following a severe crisis of this nature, et cetera, et cetera, the man of science dipping into his reservoir of experience. They all began to brighten as I spoke. They eve
n managed to convince themselves that a little color was coming into Timothy’s cheeks, that he was stirring, that he might soon be regaining consciousness as the machinery surrounding him pumped the nutrients into him that he had so conscientiously forbidden himself to have.
“Look,” this one said, or that one. “Look how he’s moving his hands! Look how he’s breathing. It’s better, isn’t it!”
I actually began to believe it myself.
But then I heard his dry thin voice echoing in the caverns of my mind. I can never get far enough. I have to be weightless in order to get there. Where I am now, it’s only a beginning. I need to lose all the rest.
I want to disappear.
That night, a third dream, vivid, precise, concrete. I was falling and running at the same time, my legs pistoning like those of a marathon runner in the twenty-sixth mile, while simultaneously I dropped in free fall through airless dark toward the silver-black surface of some distant world. And fell and fell and fell, in utter weightlessness, and hit the surface easily and kept on running, moving not forward but downward, the atoms of the ground parting for me as I ran. I became smaller as I descended, and smaller yet, and even smaller, until I was a mere phantom, a running ghost, the bodiless idea of myself. And still I went downward toward the dazzling heart of things, shorn now of all impediments of the flesh.
I phoned the hospital the next morning. Timothy had died a little after dawn.
Did I fail with him? Well, then, I failed. But I think no one could possibly have succeeded. He went where he wanted to go; and so great was the force of his will that any attempts at impeding him must have seemed to him like the mere buz0zings of insects, meaningless, insignificant.
So now his purpose is achieved. He has shed his useless husk. He has gone on, floating, running, descending: downward, inward, toward the core, where knowledge is absolute and uncertainty is unknown. He is running among the shining electrons, now. He is down there among the angstrom units at last.
Call Me Titan
Roger Zelazny jumped into the science fiction arena midway through the 1960s, scattering masterpieces right and left with joyous abandon: “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” This Immortal, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” The Dream Master, Lord of Light, and many, many more, all appearing within a few years of each other and gathering him wide acclaim and a shelf full of Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Something else that Roger gathered during those years was an assortment of friends who loved him greatly—for, though he was a shy man, he was a sweet and gracious one, and everyone who came in contact with him liked him on first meeting and liked him more and more as acquaintance deepened. I met Roger somewhere around 1966 and, like everybody else, I found him immediately congenial: we became close friends, visited each other frequently, exchanged bits of professional helpfulness. I found him a man of high good humor, warm good will, and great patience, as I learned when the inordinately punctual Robert Silverberg showed up an hour late for dinner with him two times running in consecutive years, for a different silly reason each time. (Both had something to do with the time-zone difference separating California and New Mexico.) It was a somber moment when I discovered in the autumn of 1994 that Roger was seriously ill, and a stunning one when I learned of his death from cancer the following June at the age of 58.
A memorial anthology soon was in the works, under the aegis of that master anthologist, Martin H. Greenberg. Marty called it Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny and rounded up a group of Roger’s friends to contribute stories. Mine was “Call Me Titan,” and in it I attempted to mimic not only Roger’s inimitable style but also some of his thematic concerns (the Mediterranean world, the ancient gods, the comic possibilities of the survival of those gods into our own day.) For the few days in January 1996 that it took me to do it I was able to masquerade in my own mind as Roger Zelazny, and for that reason it was an easy and enjoyable story to write—except for the ugly realization that would surface from time to time that the only reason I was writing it was as a memorial to my dead friend.
The stories in Lord of the Fantastic were supposed to be previously unpublished ones. Through an error somewhat akin to the time-zone slip-up that had made me late for dinner with Roger (and George R. R. Martin also) twice running, I sold the story to editor Gardner Dozois of Asimov’s Science Fiction, where it made its first appearance in the world in the February 1997 issue, many months ahead of the Greenberg anthology. I could do nothing but apologize. Luckily, Marty Greenberg, like Roger Zelazny, was a sweet, lovable, and patient man, and he forgave me for my malfeasance. Would that all my sins were so readily forgiven.
In Memoriam: RZ
“How did you get loose?” the woman who was Aphrodite asked me.
“It happened. Here I am.”
“Yes,” she said. “You. Of all of them, you. In this lovely place.” She waved at the shining sun-bright sea, the glittering white stripe of the beach, the whitewashed houses, the bare brown hills. A lovely place, yes, this isle of Mykonos. “And what are you going to do now?”
“What I was created to do,” I told her. “You know.”
She considered that. We were drinking ouzo on the rocks, on the hotel patio, beneath a hanging array of fishermen’s nets. After a moment she laughed, that irresistible tinkling laugh of hers, and clinked her glass against mine.
“Lots of luck,” she said.
That was Greece. Before that was Sicily, and the mountain, and the eruption. …
The mountain had trembled and shaken and belched, and the red streams of molten fire began to flow downward from the ashen top, and in the first ten minutes of the eruption six little towns around the slopes were wiped out. It happened just that fast. They shouldn’t have been there, but they were, and then they weren’t. Too bad for them. But it’s always a mistake to buy real estate on Mount Etna.
The lava was really rolling. It would reach the city of Catania in a couple of hours and take out its whole northeastern quarter, and all of Sicily would be in mourning the next day. Some eruption. The biggest of all time, on this island where big eruptions have been making the news since the dinosaur days.
As for me, I couldn’t be sure what was happening up there at the summit, not yet. I was still down deep, way down, three miles from sunlight.
But in my jail cell down there beneath the roots of the giant volcano that is called Mount Etna I could tell from the shaking and the noise and the heat that this one was something special. That the prophesied Hour of Liberation had come round at last for me, after five hundred centuries as the prisoner of Zeus.
I stretched and turned and rolled over, and sat up for the first time in fifty thousand years.
Nothing was pressing down on me.
Ugly limping Hephaestus, my jailer, had set up his forge right on top of me long ago, his heavy anvils on my back. And had merrily hammered bronze and iron all day and all night for all he was worth, that clomp-legged old master craftsman. Where was Hephaestus now? Where were his anvils?
Not on me. Not any longer.
That was good, that feeling of nothing pressing down.
I wriggled my shoulders. That took time. You have a lot of shoulders to wriggle, when you have a hundred heads, give or take three or four.
“Hephaestus?” I yelled, yelling it out of a hundred mouths at once. I felt the mountain shivering and convulsing above me, and I knew that my voice alone was enough to make great slabs of it fall off and go tumbling down, down, down.
No answer from Hephaestus. No clangor of his forge, either. He just wasn’t there any more.
I tried again, a different, greater name.
“Zeus?”
Silence.
“You hear me, Zeus?”
No reply.
“Where the hell are you? Where is everybody?”
All was silence, except for the hellish
roaring of the volcano.
Well, okay, don’t answer me. Slowly I got to my feet, extending myself to my full considerable height. The fabric of the mountain gave way for me. I have that little trick.
Another good feeling, that was, rising to an upright position. Do you know what it’s like, not being allowed to stand, not even once, for fifty thousand years? But of course you don’t, little ones. How could you?
One more try. “ZEUS???”
All my hundred voices crying his name at once, fortissimo fortissimo. A chorus of booming echoes. Every one of my heads had grown back, over the years. I was healed of all that Zeus had done to me. That was especially good, knowing that I was healed. Things had looked really bad, for a while.
Well, no sense just standing there and caterwauling, if nobody was going to answer me back. This was the Hour of Liberation, after all. I was free—my chains fallen magically away, my heads all sprouted again. Time to get out of here. I started to move.
Upward. Outward.
I moved up through the mountain’s bulk as though it was so much air. The rock was nothing to me. Unimpeded I rose past the coiling internal chambers through which the lava was racing up toward the summit vent, and came out into the sunlight, and clambered up the snow-kissed slopes of the mountain to the ash-choked summit itself, and stood there right in the very center of the eruption as the volcano puked its blazing guts out. I grinned a hundred big grins on my hundred faces, with hot fierce winds swirling like swords around my head and torrents of lava flowing down all around me. The view from up there was terrific. And what a fine feeling that was, just looking around at the world again after all that time underground.
There below me off to the east was the fish-swarming sea. Over there behind me, the serried tree-thickened hills. Above me, the fire-hearted sun.
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