Seasons Between Us

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Henry!” she called. Silence. “Where are you?” He appeared, finally, just when she was about to go in search of him. “What kept you? Here, take these. I shouldn’t have to ask.” She handed him her shoes and her satchel with the evening’s work. “Satchel to my study and shoes clean for morning, Henry. If you can manage it.” He raised his bowed head with a flash from his yellow-tinged brown eyes. “I see you failed to cut the grass, despite my specific orders.”

  “Saturday, Ma’am.”

  “What?” It was Lesedi’s turn to be startled. “Today is Thursday.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Market Day. Monday, wash day. Tuesday, ironing and dusting. Wednesday . . .”

  “What are you babbling about, Henry. Have your wits gone soft?”

  “Saturday is outdoors work. I cut the grass then.”

  “I say when you do things, Henry. The grass needs doing. Now. Go and do it.”

  He lowered his eyes in a supposed expression of humility, but his shoulders were stiff, rebellious. For a moment she thought he would disobey. Then, slowly, he shuffled off toward the garden, setting her satchel and shoes down on a table by the entrance.

  “Verswarende!” She scooped them up and carried them to her room herself. Henry needed taking in hand, like a dog that had become accustomed to climbing onto beds and sofas and had to be taught its place on the floor.

  She found Jeremy in his study, staring at a pile of papers in front of him, fingers drumming.

  “Are you working on something, my love?” she asked, glad to see him engaged. So often she found him staring at something only he could see.

  He looked startled for a moment, then smiled, shaking his head. “No. No, just . . . thinking.” He brightened, leaning forward. “And you? What about your day?”

  “My day! Oh, ho.” She threw up her hands. “It takes a deal of effort to keep the Head’s lacky out from under my feet.” She paced. “I do not trust that Englishman. Not at all. Always peering, poking, wanting to know about ‘applications’ of the research. And Jeremy, Jeremy, the research! At last, no longer imaginings projected onto the brick walls of my cell, eidetic tricks to fix them in my brain, but true, mathematical crunching and, my darling, it works!”

  Jeremy smiled, admiring, encouraging, silent.

  She knelt in front of him, her knees complaining only a little. In lowered voice, she said, “Time, space­—I have found the key.”

  “That’s good?” Jeremy asked.

  “Jeremy, darling one, if the next cycle of experiments works, it opens up the possibility of manipulating time and space, even, theoretically, opening gateways into alternate worlds, or alternate versions of this one, at the very least. Imagine it, Jeremy.”

  He leaned forward, seizing her hands. “I know! I know! I’ve seen one of those worlds.”

  She sat back on her heels. “It’s theoretical, Jeremy. You couldn’t . . .” She checked herself as his face fell. She seized his hands. “What have you seen, dear? Tell me all about it.”

  “A world where all are free. No slaves. Equality among all peoples.”

  Gently, she cradled his cheek in her palm. “People are not equal, my dear one. How can they be? Slaves, lowly workers, the uneducated.”

  “Yes,” he insisted. “I have seen it, as real as you. Machines doing menial tasks slaves do here. Computers so small they fit in the palm of your hand. Everything so advanced—as if freedom had released all of our potential. Our human potential.”

  “Jeremy,” she hesitated. “The theory only postulates other realities; it hardly predicts something so . . . specific. You mustn’t think that—”

  He seized her hands. “It means everything to me. I want this to be. I know it can be. I have seen it, Lesedi. Seen it!”

  She squeezed his hands, folded them in his lap, and rose. She had a fair idea how this idea had got planted in his head. “Jeremy, you’ve let Henry run amok. He’s verging on rebellious.”

  “Who?” Jeremy frowned at her in confusion. Worse and worse.

  “Our head slave, Henry. Jeremy, you—”

  His expression cleared. “Oh. Roli.” He chuckled. “Rolihlahla, in fact. But I confess I find that a bit difficult to get my tongue around. He’s all right with Roli.”

  “He’s all right. . . . Jeremy, what is this Roli-whatever nonsense? He’s a slave. His name is Henry.”

  Jeremy’s gaze on her was gentle. “His slave name is Henry, darling. His true name, the one given to him at birth, is Rolihlahla. He prefers it.”

  “He prefers. A slave prefers! A slave does not prefer. Jeremy. You’ve let this reform business get completely out of hand. We actually have them doing calculations in the lab, albeit in a separate room, but, groote hemele! Slaves? Doing master work?”

  “Doing work of which they are capable,” Jeremy remonstrated. “They are people, Lesedi. Surely you would sympathize with their plight.”

  She stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “You were a prisoner. You were required to do forced labour, at the whim of the overseers.”

  Lesedi’s arms felt heavy, hanging at her sides. Energy surged within her chest and gut. Words rushed to the surface, choking on each other in her throat. He compared her, Professor Lesedi van Dyck, to a slave? To Henry? Twelve years in prison for the crime of standing up for her right to manage her own research, to refuse to have it suborned to the evil will of their totalitarian government, and he compared that to the abject resignation of an inferior menial? Who was he? What had become of her Jeremy? All those years she survived torture, fought for her sanity and psychological integrity, and he consorted with slaves, a slave, with Henry. Henry.

  Henry had done this, rebellious, sly, underhanded schurk.

  “I will sell that one to the mines,” she muttered. Turning her back on Jeremy’s alarmed face, she retreated to her study. Work. She would work. Then she would think about this, this appalling travesty.

  The central problem was the nature of space. Was it empty or was it full or was it both simultaneously? One could imagine empty space but immediately, it filled with something. Lesedi had taken to calling the particles that popped into existence—there were more than one—condensates. Quarks and anti-quarks flashing into and out of existence, a kind of quantum field to match those that Maxwell and Faraday had described for electro-magnetism. Without empty space, the ruptures her calculations predicted could not come into being. But if two sufficiently heavy particles, say, two gold nuclei, could be smashed together at high enough energies . . .

  As soon as she thought it, she saw how it could be done. She would need the synchrotron housed in the basement of the lab, or, maybe later, the new larger particle accelerator in the mountains. She hunched over her desk, writing notes, formulae, as the light outside the window began to fade.

  She may have heard the dinner gong; she couldn’t be sure. Sometime later, Henry’s soft voice penetrated the door to her sanctum. “Master Jeremy awaits you at dinner, Madam.”

  She strode across the room and flung the door open. “You. You will be gone as soon as I can find a buyer for you. Until then, you will stay away from the Master.”

  Henry staggered back, as if she’d physically struck him. His mahogany skin greyed and his nostrils flared. “I know what you are doing in that lab. The government man does not know. But I do.”

  She turned on him. “You. You know nothing about anything.”

  He trembled, shoulders hunched, and arms crossed protectively across his body, but he met her gaze. “I know. You think this government is soft. They are waiting, like hyenas watching an old buffalo. They will drag you down and tear you apart while you bleat.”

  Struck dumb, by his insolence as much as by his expression of her worst fears, she could do nothing but stare at him.

  “You will destroy him. You will destroy every
thing, with that quantum gravity science of yours.”

  Astonished, she said, “How do you know about this? Who has told you? Answer me, at once!”

  He looked evasive, eyes glancing down and away, but then he raised them again, shining with fierce brown light. “While you were gone, I wrote his letters to you, in the last years. I deciphered that code, and I put what he wanted to say to you into the code. Then you came back. But again, you are gone, all day, all day. While you are gone, at that lab where you play with our lives, I wash him. I dress him. I calm him when he grows angry or sad. I listen to him, and I bring him back to this world when he wanders too far into that other. No, I did not get the grass cut. I was keeping Master Jeremy safe. As I kept him safe, when you were in prison, fighting against the world. I kept him happy.”

  Lesedi felt a tearing turn in her gut, as if she’d discovered a fatal error in a long piece of mathematics, some flaw that tore the whole delicate construct apart.

  “Henry . . .”

  “My mother named me Rolihlahla. That is the name I will use when I am free, as Master Jeremy has promised.”

  They were standing thus, face to face, as Jeremy’s frail figure drifted into view at the top of the stairs. His mouth was loose, and his eyes frightened as he looked from one to the other. Lesedi saw now what she would not see before.

  She nodded once. “I come to dinner.”

  She took Jeremy’s arm, then paused, waiting until Henry—Rolihlahla—took his other. They descended the broad staircase together.

  Jeremy stood in the doorway of Lesedi’s study. It was not a place he normally went, as she left him to his own inner sanctum. But this evening, he remembered the papers he’d kept hidden under a loose floorboard in the garden shed, the papers he’d meant to give her on her return months ago. A simple bundle of a few dozen sheets, wrapped in waxed paper and tied with a blue ribbon, now faded to grey. Everything fades to grey, he thought, even the things we most dearly love. He tapped lightly on the door frame with his other hand, his fingers marking the same rhythm that had been haunting him for nearly a year. He heard himself humming a few slow notes.

  Lesedi looked up from her work, shaking her head slightly, as if, like him, she sometimes needed time to come back to this moment. To this place. “What is that?”

  “I’m not sure. A hymn maybe, from when I was a boy. It seems so familiar, but I can’t recall the words.”

  “I don’t know it,” she said. “But I meant that bundle.”

  Jeremy held it out to her, wanting her to simply take it without need for explanation. His wife did not stir from her desk. “Those papers. From before they took you.”

  “My papers? You were to have burned them. If the government knew, even now, they would take me again.” She stood up suddenly, her chair tipping to the floor, like a door slamming. Her eyes widened at the proffered gift as if the grey ribbon had transformed into a puff adder.

  “I know. I meant to do it. You’ll see, some of the pages are even scorched. But they were all I had of you, the only link between the life before and the life after. In that first year, when they wouldn’t let us even write, I wasn’t sure you were still alive, I was glad to have them.” The words, long suppressed, poured out of him. “I read them through, time and again, though I don’t pretend to understand much of what they contained, the math not at all. But it was like having you with me, your spirit filling my empty spaces.”

  Lesedi said nothing but took the bundle from his hands, tugging away the ribbon and letting it fall to the floor. Her fingers stoked the pages, lingering over the promised scorch marks.

  “This is why they arrested me,” she said to him as if he didn’t already know every detail of her arrest, the show trial that followed, and the constant badgering of government agents, seeking some clue to her breakthrough ideas. Some traitor in the lab—like her doughy Southwood now—had learned enough to know the possibilities. That had been enough to take her from him, been enough to nearly destroy them.

  He could not, would not let them destroy her work as well. “I grasped enough to know that what you were doing is more important than the ambitions of some petty dictator. More than the ambitions of any dictator, any government across this benighted world. What you were doing—what I hope and pray you are doing again—can change the world.”

  “More like destroy it.” Lesedi put the papers on the desk and laid one hand protectively over them.

  “But is what you wrote possible? Are there other worlds, other universes, lying next to ours, like membranes, almost, but never touching? And if they did touch could we move between them, could we even merge one into the other?”

  “Theoretically, yes, yes, but practically, that is different. The probabilities make the outcome entirely uncertain, unpredictable. Jeremy, even if it were practicable, the energy required is non-trivial to say the least, and the results . . . well, it’d be like throwing a dice with thousands, maybe millions of sides. One can’t know what will turn up.”

  “A pity you can’t weight the dice,” Jeremy said, “like that fellow we encountered on the ship during our honeymoon.”

  Lesedi tilted her face up to him, laughing at the memory. “What a rogue! He might as well have had a die with only sixes on every side.” Her smile faded and her eyes grew unfocussed, no longer looking into his eyes but growing distant, as if seeing other worlds, the way he sometimes did. If he could imagine it, she could realize it, of that he was sure.

  “Perhaps . . . no. No, it is too dangerous. If the government knew, they would try to weaponize it. And, suppose I could accomplish this thing, it could well destroy everything we know as real.”

  “Not everyone would think that was a bad thing.”

  Her stricken look cut into him, but he knew from years of operating the machinery of government that sometimes you had to completely break a thing before you could see a way to fix it. And her hand still rested on those papers; she had not asked him again to see them burnt.

  Jeremy turned to leave Lesedi to her work.

  “Oh,” he said. “I’ve remembered a bit of that song. Something ‘will lead us home.’ Perhaps you will find what that something is.”

  Lesedi paced indecisively up and down the dark back corridor where the Institute had assigned rooms for the slaves who undertook the onerous calculations of quantum electrodynamics and the translation of theories into precise formulae for testing, tasks still better done by human brains. Jeremy’s faith was touching, she supposed, but he’d no idea of the complexities involved. The problem of maintaining emptiness, even for the briefest of intervals, was the most subtle, elusive and multi-faceted one she’d ever tackled. She had divided it into segments, assigning each to a different team and never discussing one team’s results with another. It was an unwieldy methodology and the results reflected its flaws, but she was afraid to let anyone know the true scope of what she was trying to achieve, at least until she herself understood it better.

  There were few enough at the institute who could follow her reasoning. Fewer yet with sufficient understanding to devise the mathematics needed to test her intuitions. Of those few, whom could she trust to keep shtum about it until they knew for sure what they were dealing with?

  She trusted no one. That was a conundrum. How could she trust any of those who’d remained and advanced the military applications for her work in particle physics when she had been hounded, tortured, and imprisoned for refusing to do so? How could she be sure the new, young scientists were untainted?

  In her wakeful nights, she’d gone around and around with it. She needed good minds to help her collate and coordinate the puzzle pieces into a coherent whole, and she needed them to be discreet. And so, she paced outside the slave calculators’ work room, hesitating at its swinging door each time she passed it, yet never entering.

  The work coming from this room was excel
lent, with one calculator in particular, Calc 23, showing flashes of sheer, intuitive brilliance. Calc 23 was a slave. Lesedi should be pleased at that. It solved her concern about discretion, because slaves could go nowhere and talk to no one without express permission from their masters. So, it was logical. Use the calculators to test her theories.

  But. Slaves? Doing the work of free people? As intellectual equals? Or, if she admitted it, as intellectual superiors?

  Yes, she had reached détente with Henry, Rolihlahla, she corrected herself. And snorted. The slave who preferred . . . anything. Still, she saw how crucial Rolihlahla was to Jeremy’s equilibrium, and to the equilibrium of their home life, indeed. He had shown himself to be something more than dutiful and loyal. He had shown himself to be fierce and loving and extraordinarily insightful. He had wrung respect from her, against all her prejudices. Still, his remained a domestic role. He was no scientist. But the calculators—this was a leap across the socio-cultural chasm between enslaved and free that confounded her.

  Damn. Was she a person of intellect, or nothing more than a product of her conditioning? Jeremy himself had pointed out the absurdity of her position. But it was how she felt. Slaves were slaves.

  But.

  Lesedi wanted to meet Calculator 23. She wanted to know if this room held the members of the team that would move the coordinated problem forward, without tipping off her colleagues, and especially the head and his toady, Archibald Southwood. Her conditioning also made her hate Englishmen, who had so devastated her beloved home in South Africa.

  She pushed open the door.

  It did not take long for Lesedi’s reliance on slave calculators to cause comment. Archibald Southwood oiled up to her at a post-work sherry party and probed her about what could require so much calculation.

  “Oh, crunching, crunching, you know how it is, Archie,” she said. He hated being called Archie.