by Neil Clarke
“You misheard me. I’ve told you that.” She kept laughing, looking for a place to sit again. Except there were no chairs, just black plastic sacks jammed with sour food and Walmart-crap toys. So she leaned against the railing, saying, “Water.”
“Walter,” I said.
“ ‘I could use some water,’ I mentioned.”
“I heard Walter.”
Some stories never get old. We shared the laughter and I touched her on the cheek, my wife and the mother of two kids that I adored nearly as much as this bright, taciturn lady.
And just like that, she gave me the look.
We went inside, into that house that needed to be burned more than cleaned and sold. That big worn house with the wide porch and dark deep rooms, including the bedroom upstairs, hot then and hot now. But it didn’t slow us down any, neither time. And just like that, I felt like I was twenty again, screwing my English teacher, and her taking as much pleasure as any girl I would ever know.
Maybe other women are more passionate with their men.
I can’t say.
A bold and worldly fellow would have bedded a hundred women before giving up. But then again, I’m not that way.
We finished and dressed, and Gwen asked, “Should we rescue your parents?”
“Someday.”
Then we walked back out onto the porch, ready to resume our cleaning.
A pair of locals were strolling past. Older ladies, and I knew their faces if not either name. But they absolutely recognized us. One nudged the other, and then they looked away when we started offering our eyes.
It pissed me off, just enough.
I didn’t live here anymore. And I sure as hell wasn’t the twenty-year-old kid sleeping with his ex-teacher. Who was twenty-nine at the time, I could have pointed out to those fine ladies. Who was nine years my senior, do the math, and Gwen was a hundred times better than either of them were on their best days.
Maybe I would have shouted something like that.
But what was a bright day suddenly turned infinitely brighter, and every piece of machinery, car and generator and working radio, stopped working. And that scorching bright blue light turned into darkness just before the pulverized bits of enamel started raining down.
Funny the ideas that come to you.
We were wading through teeth and then the soft bony ash, and I was actually a little bit happy. Some incredible volcano had come to life nearby. That was my only working theory, regardless how crazy it sounded. And now the town was going to be destroyed, and we’d just been saved from that awful business of cleaning out the filthy old house.
Except of course pretty much everybody else in North America was suffering nearly as badly as we were.
It was two weeks before life began to look normal.
And another two weeks before our car was cobbled back together well enough to drive. The kids were in back. The radio was filled with news about the disaster and how President Gore was making new laws, keeping order over the mayhem. And that was the first time, a month after the nightmare began, when we heard the name Dr. Melanie Baxter.
I was driving.
Gwen cranked up the volume, listening to something about a paper written back in the 70s.
“The late Dr. Melanie Baxter,” the voice said.
Shouting, Gwen ordered me to pull over.
I already was.
We happened to be in a low spot not many miles from town. What had been several inches of ash and bone was being worked by the wind, stripped away in places and drifting deep in other places, accenting just how strange and awful the disaster had been. Experts were definite, certain, convinced. Judging by the DNA, these were human remains that had tumbled from the sky. A phenomenal mass of material, by any measure. And the blue flash was some sort of high-energy discharge, not predicted by anybody except a woman from a quarter century ago—a suddenly famous doctoral student who was killed while driving alone one night.
Drunk, Melanie had been.
They didn’t mention that fact, and/or that the fatal crash happened after a fight with my wife.
That’s why Gwen was crying now. I assumed. The memories of quite a lot were coming back. It sounds awful, but I have always been secretly glad that Gwen’s first love was utterly lost, and the shock and guilt of that car crash was what gave me everything that I enjoyed today.
I patted my wife’s little hand, accomplishing nothing.
“I remember that paper,” she muttered. “She told me . . . what did she tell me . . . ?”
I wished for a second blast of light, our car radio dying all over again.
“About spacetime,” she said. “About things bending until they break.”
And I’m thinking: “Isn’t that true for all of us?”
Here’s the joke:
“What’s the difference between poets and physicists?”
And the punchline:
“Poets get two more productive years than physicists get.”
Not true, of course. Yeats lasted for decades, if I remember. And bless his heart, Einstein kept trying. Although really, if you want to be honest, how many times can one person do the impossible?
Once is enough for most us.
Which is why poets and the rest of us usually give up so soon. Being smart, we know the odds, and why waste fifty years dancing with endless failure?
Now ask me why I drink.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “She’s washed up and hates herself and her failed genius and why wouldn’t she drink?”
Is that the true story?
Or maybe . . . maybe there’s some sad tale at work. Emotional. Human. Nothing about mathematics or the deepest structure of our universe. That would help explain the old drunk, giving her that necessary human dimension. She had a love once, someone better than she deserved, but that woman left her for some sorry, ordinary reason, or worse, for no reason in particular. That’s a tale worthy of a poet, not a professor, and hearing it, people would feel sorry for me, explaining fifty years of failure under the light of pain.
Why does pain produce light?
That’s what I want to know.
We need a poet to explain this conundrum. Find a poet. Ask her, “Where’s the brilliance in misery?” Because I’ve known all kinds of hurt in life, too many to count, and even during the worst days, my pain has never shown me anything but hard cold blackness.
The blue light.
Yeah, that bastard was plenty bright.
Not that I saw it, of course. I was comfortably done with my day. And regardless what you think, even if I had seen the event, I wouldn’t have guessed the source. That kind of knowledge took data and huge calculations that we wouldn’t be able to make anywhere in the world, at least for another half year.
Sad to admit, I don’t possess superhuman talents ready to unleash.
In fact, let me tell you this: On her finest day, the finest scientist doesn’t know shit about almost everything. But that’s the fun of it. That’s why people want to be scientists. It’s the dose of adrenalin that comes when you feel as lost as can be.
Drunk, I happily slept through the blast and the first half hour of the emergency.
I might have slept until dead, but neighbors remembered me and broke down my front door, dragging me out into the ash before the whole building came down. I don’t know about where you lived, but we had nearly six feet of human remains dropping out of that black pain-rich sky, and half the local buildings were flattened, and I don’t know how many died.
Without power or any infrastructure, being a scientist was tough. But I managed to work. It was easy to see the bits of teeth, and there was the rumor that these were human remains. Someone in Atlanta or Stockholm figured that out early, and I don’t know where I heard it. But right there, that was an astonishment. One cremated human body yields about five pounds of tooth and crumbled bone. But the entire population of the world, women and men and fat children, won’t render up more than forty
billion pounds of nastiness. Which is nothing. Two million tons. That isn’t enough material to fill up an old strip mine in Wyoming.
A lot more than that fell on our heads.
For a full year, I lived in one refugee camp after another.
Honestly? I’ve never been happier. No drinking, mostly. And a lot of basic shit to get done. I’ve always been good at figuring out problems, and everybody in authority wanted help with the most basic water-food-shelter conundrums. Which makes me wonder: Is this what physicists did before we solved the universe? Did we just find new ways to clean old water and make plants grow in the graveyard?
The important people eventually found me in New Mexico. A team flew all the way from the provisional capital in Portland. They just wanted to talk. But nobody flies that far, not anymore, and certainly not because of the need to chat. Those visitors kept calling me, “Dr. Baxter,” and thanking me for my good work here and before. But I could see where they were heading, which is why I said, “Spacetime shattered on us. Didn’t it?”
There were five of them, but one man did most of the talking.
“Why do you believe that?” he asked, sounding like a cop.
“Nothing else explains it,” I said, stating the obvious. “The event took our entire planet, which is just one planet. But for an instant of an instant, we were linked with billions of other Earths.”
Everybody nodded in agreement.
Except for the man in charge. “Billions,” he repeated, acting as if he wasn’t happy with that estimate.
So I gave him my true numbers.
Then I said to them, “But you already know this. Plenty of others must have done the arithmetic.”
The man shrugged. Maybe yes, maybe no.
“Of course we’re not just talking about Earths,” I added. “What we’re talking about is our Earth fusing with one tiny piece of ten trillion other Earths. The same piece repeated infinitely. And judging by the evidence, I’d say that what fell on us was the remains of one person ground halfway to dust inside a cremulator.”
Nobody spoke.
Even my main interrogator knew to hold his thoughts inside.
So I added to my analysis, explaining, “If you find enough DNA, tracking down the dead person would be easy enough.”
Which was when the woman in back—the person who was really in charge of this vital, unthinkable mission—finally spoke out.
“Perhaps that already happened,” she said.
And I laughed, right up until I noticed fear inside those various stares.
“It’s someone from our world,” I guessed.
Eyes were focused on nobody but me.
So I made the obvious guess. “These are my ashes.”
Which was when the man laughed, saying, “That’s an arrogant attitude.”
And his boss said, “No. But according to records, back in college and for several years, you knew the lady in question.”
I rarely get to meet legends.
Despite a reputation for combativeness, this particular legend was nothing but pleasant. And even though we’d all heard stories about failing health and a lousy sense of dress, Dr. Baxter looked fit enough to run, and her clothes hadn’t been slept in more than one brief night.
We met her inside her office.
Surrounding us were a million miles of tubes and tunnels, superconductive magnets and enough energy to make the Earth jump.
That’s what she wanted to make happen.
Who else in the world could have asked for permission to make the Earth jump?
I was the least important person in the room. A career lawyer, at the end of my days, I was part of a team trying to determine the liability of the latest experiment.
“We want to send a message to a tiny fraction of our neighboring Earths,” Dr. Baxter was saying.
Funny how easily you accept the amazing, particularly after reading a hundred briefings on the subject.
“We’ll use diamonds,” she said. “Tiny and very pure and marked in a variety of ways.”
“But you’re just sending a few grams of diamonds,” someone said.
I was listening and I wasn’t listening. There was a picture frame on the woman’s desk, faces and places changing while the debate unfolded.
“A few grams is all we can afford,” said Melanie Baxter. “The energy required is enormous enough as it is.”
“But how could anyone notice us?” our doubter had to ask.
“Because,” I interrupted. Surprising myself as much as the others.
Coaxing me with a small, grim smile, the genius said, “Please, continue.”
“We won’t be the only people sending diamonds,” I offered. “There’s an infinite number of Earths, and some infinite slice will run the same experiment at the same time.”
“But we’re sending diamonds to just one other Earth,” the doubter continued. “And if there are infinite targets . . . ”
“Randomized distributions,” said the genuine expert.
And the rest of us fell into a studious silence.
“Some Earths will receive two shares, some won’t get anything at all. But a few, a very few, are going to experience ten million shares. There’ll be a visible EM display in the sky, and then the diamond grit falls and gets collected and people who look similar to us or exactly like us are going to peer into their microscopes, finding delicate messages etched in languages that might or might resemble their own.”
It was a fun moment, watching every face become awestruck.
Even Melanie’s face.
Then I remembered another piece of the story.
“Time,” I blurted.
“What’s that?” the doubter asked.
“This is all going to be random in time too,” I offered. Then I looked at the woman behind the desk, wondering if I was totally wrong.
But I wasn’t, no.
“We’ve worked out the distribution curve,” she said. “Earths occupying our moment are the most likely targets, but the curve isn’t particularly steep. That’s why there’s one chance in about five trillion chances that our diamonds will end up several years before today. And there are equal odds that they’ll travel ahead in time instead.”
“And once in a great while, they get noticed,” I said.
“Sending messages back in time,” the doubter said, except he was sounding more intrigued by the moment. “How far back in time will we reach?”
“This is a distribution curve applied to infinities,” Melanie said. “When dealing with a trillion quadrillion zeros, things can turn fairly strange.”
To the best of our abilities, each of us wrestled with that notion.
And then the genius looked off at the ceiling, her heavy old face changing. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that she was suddenly sad enough to make me ache and happy enough to make me fly. That’s what I saw in that one face, and because of that stark show of emotion, everybody else grew uncomfortable.
Our leader decided it was time to leave.
Except for me. I lingered at the office door. A couple people said, “Walt,” but I ignored them. Then Melanie shut her eyes and sighed and opened her eyes, finding me watching the young face filling the picture frame on her desk.
“I knew your wife,” I said.
The next smile was brighter, fending off every misery.
“My condolences,” I said.
She said, “Thank you.”
Then after a moment, “How did you know Gwen?”
“She taught me about Shakespeare during high school.”
Melanie laughed and said, “Think of these odds.”
It was fun to see the coincidences, yes.
“She was a good teacher,” said the widow.
“Really good,” I agreed.
“Six months gone, and it feels like zero time has passed,” she confided. Then she suddenly rose, saying, “Funerals.”
“Excuse me?”
“Gwen’s ceremony didn’t
satisfy me,” Melanie confessed. “And I’ve been thinking about what else to do.”
I nodded.
The woman leaned against her desk, lost in endless thought.
Needing something to break the silence, I said, “Yeah, Gwen was an excellent teacher.”
The woman looked at me for the final time.
“Tell me about your class,” she said.
What came to mind was spellbinding, but I couldn’t share that. So instead, I smiled in a wistful way, saying, “A friend of mine was playing around and then spilled his desk in class. And she instantly helped him.”
Another nod, and the eyes dropped.
“No,” she said. “My Gwen would have kicked his ass for screwing around. And that’s the woman I loved.”
About the Author
Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).
Loving Grace
Erica L. Satifka
When Marybeth’s number comes up in the employment lottery, Chase goes with her to her orientation, but they won’t let him inside the operating theater.
Chase and Marybeth had watched the videos together on YouTube, though, so he knows what she’s in for. Two small holes are drilled at the temples. That’s where the wires go in. The intestines they put in a bucket for easy drainage. No muss, no fuss. All other parts are distributed around the cubicle, either hung on thick hooks or slid into drawers for safekeeping.