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VII.
It Never Happened Before
“Based on the data available, we are 98% confident that the temperature will return to normal parameters within the next four to six weeks.” Simon, the head of the scientific staff addressed the President with a confident nod.
“That’s a relief.” The POTUS waved his hand to indicate that he didn’t need to review the slides. Simon was taken aback, deflated, as he had had to pull strings to get the electricity allotted to run his computer continuously to prepare the presentation. He’d heard POTUS was a “big picture guy,” so he’d not expected him to read the report stacked neatly in front of him, even though he’d printed it using some of their precious remaining printer ink, on a quarter ream of their dwindling supply of paper. But what on earth did the man have to do that was so important he couldn’t take time to assess the evidence that the temperature anomaly they were experiencing was temporary?
And there was no doubt it was temporary. The p values varied from .01 to .001 for the data; virtual scientific certainty.
Simon set his disappointment aside. Overall, he’d been feeling valued and trusted. He was relieved when he’d been admitted to the compound; so many others had been turned away. But he knew that the best hope for America and for the world lay with the leadership here, in this very place. He might not agree with everything the leaders said and did, but Simon was nothing if not loyal to the nation, the last superpower left standing.
He smiled at his own sappiness, but the smile twisted into a sad moue. The word in his thoughts came in Candice’s musical voice. Candice, always a skeptic, calling him “sappy,” accusing him of being näive and trusting in his patriotism. After surviving the disorder of the early days, Candice had died with a broken neck in a stupid, freak accident: a fall down a fight of stairs at home. He still couldn’t believe she was gone.
Simon wrapped his coat tighter around himself and dropped his precious computer into its leather bag with a little puff of antibiotic powder. He gasped when the cold of the courtyard hit his nose, but stopped anyway to look at the narrow pond.
The black swan was still there, floating peacefully on the surface. Where had this unlikely creature come from? How had it found this pond, and how had it known that this pond, sitting atop the septic field deep underground, wouldn’t freeze, unlike all the other standing water within five hundred miles, now turned to ice?
The bird cocked its head and regarded Simon, then decided he was no threat and glided serenely away.
Crazy. Here it was, May, and everything was still enrobed in ice and snow, a fairyland that had lost its enchantment months ago.
August. Cold. Ice.
Simon had re-run the computations with the last bit of power he was allowed before the compound’s power plant went dark. “Reserving the remainder for emergencies,” they said.
But it was obvious that there was no more reserve. Food was down to the nutrient pastes in the survival supply kits stored in the farthest sub-basements. Everything wood had long since been burned.
The numbers all said that the weather would break. It had to break. And once it did, everything would be fine.
He crunched his way through the crusted snow to the trench that served as a latrine, now there was no power to pump water to the toilets. It wasn’t all that bad, though; the cold kept it from reeking. He stopped to look at the pond, as usual.
Something different had happened, a break in the unrelenting sameness of cold days. The gorgeous and enchanting black swan was today a bedraggled mass of grimy, fibrous feathers stretched inertly on the pond, its legs twisted grotesquely where its feet had frozen into the ice, feathers strewn about it on the icy granules, showing where it had beaten its wings in a futile attempt to escape its fate.
Simon went on to the latrine and urinated. The act reminded him to gather uncontaminated snow from some distance away before he crawled into his bed in his room. The room was surrounded with extra blankets he’d scavenged from neighbors and compatriots whose demise had preceded his—his death, which he could no longer pretend was anything but imminent.
The room was dark—a series of tents within tents actually, blankets overlying blankets with airspaces in between, supported with coat hangers and metal frames from furnishings long since burnt. An adult sofa fort, but deadly serious instead of a plaything.
It was stifling inside, but the temperature was warmer than freezing. The metal trash can he filled with clean snow would slowly absorb the tiny bit of body heat that kept the interior livable. This way, he could hydrate his own interior, and keep living another day.
How many days since he’d seen or heard another person? He had a suspicion he was the last person left alive in the entire world. Though it had been kept secret, he thought he knew the exact day when POTUS had died, because of the mood of doom and dread that had settled on the few staff who still moved around.
But he was beyond caring about that now. The heat within his body radiated through his clothes and passed out of his nose with every breath, warming the inner core of his home. The water in the metal can transmuted from solid to liquid with agonizing slowness.
The next layer outside the inner core got ever so slightly warmer. He wanted to find a way to reverse the entropy, to make the transmitter into an attractor. But it was an abstract kind of desire.
He realized that all his desires were abstract in the end. The thought comforted him, and a vague, pallid smile touched his lips.
At that moment, the warmth within him burst forth. Miraculously, he wasn’t cold. In fact, he felt the room grow warmer! He didn’t know what was happening. He would check in a moment—surely he could figure it out—but for now, he was uncomfortably hot. He pushed his hood away from his face and unzipped his coat, luxuriating in the glow he felt, like a hot toddy exploding on the surface of the sun. He bent forward and worked the laces on his boots, grinning feverishly.
He would go out in the courtyard and find that pond melted. Why, he would take a swim with that black swan!
He paused.
VIII.
Walking the Planck
Her eye was a spike of fire. That was how Abiba gyred around her head, her thoughts swirling. Her mind flickered continually with photoelectric sparks, segueing from slow indigo to rapid-sweeping red grains that fell like hailstones into her thoughts, sleet peppering her until a hailstone or a boulder splashed into her mind. Then mucilaginous coherent arms uncoiled into a vision of somewhere new to go: straight down, forward ninety degrees, up ninety degrees, and returned to the point of impact. Then: straight down, forward ninety degrees, up ninety degrees, and somewhere out in space far away.
And what was the difference between the two? What, indeed…
Don’t look! If you look, Abiba dearest, the difference collapses like your face—like the eggshell bone of your skull when you raised your eyes to your lord and master’s gaze.
Her lord and master walked from house to house one dark night, caught in the light of fires inside that shone out of the doors. She knew he wasn’t disappearing, but she knew she couldn’t see him, and yet, something as large and substantial as a man (a fist), couldn’t actually vanish.
Her eyes couldn’t recognize faces any more, but it wasn’t difficult to deduce with whom she was speaking most of the time.
This, then, must be Lailleya, with the mole on her throat and the braids. “Madam Abiba, Captain Meala says she doesn’t know the number of ctenophores ready for use right now?”
Abiba nodded, a sleet spark from the idea of ctenophore, living, nonliving, electronic, biologic, occupying space and having mass but mutable, constantly mutating, unfixed until it interacted. The pristine clarity of music in each vibration, cascading and unfurling…
The fire above her eye demanded more sacrifice. She turned to her workbench to appease it, reaching for the paper and pencils and sand and rocks and strings and threads and wires.
Lailleya cleared her throat.
“Madam Abiba?” This was almost certain to still be Lailleya.
“Yes.”
“The answer to the captain’s question?”
Sparks suddenly collapsed into dust, and her hands both stilled. She turned her dagger towards the girl, and her eyes followed. “Did the captain ask a question? I heard none.”
She turned to the table again, but the idea was gone, a soap bubble by a rocky cliff on a windy day. She quashed the urge to reach for it. Human urges aren’t to be trusted. A tear trickled from the knife of fire, followed by another and another and another.
Lailleya was terrified by the wail that came from Abiba’s throat, and she ran up the steep ladderlike stairs to the deck above, fearing Meala’s wrath less than the abyss of Abiba’s outlandish sentience.
Some time later, Abiba is/was/will be cooing softly to a ctenophore cupped in her palm while probing it dexterously with her dead hand.
Meala came down the steps and said softly, “Abiba?”
“It’s like a miniature model of space and time,” Abiba explained earnestly. She smiled at Meala, realized it was Meala, and the part of her that recognized faces agreed and sent a weak affirmative, causing the ctenophore in her hand to form the characters that spelled Meala’s name. Abiba blinked, and a huge cascade of blue-green mangosteen-sized sparks vomited forth from the mollusk behind the spark that gave birth to the spike behind her eye.
“How many ctenophores are available for use by our landing party?”
Abiba nodded at the tank to her left. Her eyes took in the tank and delivered a number: 137. She knew intuitively the axiom of the twentieth-century American mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon: information is the measure of the number of possible alternatives for something. Obvious.
Meala waited a moment, then resignedly stepped over to the tank and began to count silently, moving her lips and pointing. She stopped and started over, trying vainly to keep the swimming creatures straight. Finally she decided just to estimate based on a small part of the volume.
Meala left to compose eleven squads of twelve in order to make sure each had a communication device based on the number, 132, she estimated were available. Her loose trousers swirled about her thighs and Abiba caught the swirl and blended it into the work she was doing backwards in time and around the 4D sphere in her paralyzed hand.
The ctenophore in her hand instantly expanded and took a million and fourteen years to form a long, flowing skirt that couldn’t be seen until 10-33 seconds ago.
Abiba laughed. She muttered, “Time is information we don’t have. Time is our ignorance.”
Abiba looked down at the skirt from a great height, a flat turquoise table like the ocean itself, and she descended slowly, discerning great wells and eddies and waves. She approached closer still, and the chop broke into microscopic foam. Closer still, and she stepped into the raiment she had made: coruscating webs traced a foamy chiffon around her. ½, 3/2, 5/2…the skirt extended forever, with no space to be in, because it was the space. Or was not the space—since for a garment to be anything it must refer (explicitly or implicitly) to another system, and there was no other.
She swirled in the skirt, and the skirt changed colors and brightnesses and timeframes. What was the skirt sewn from? Fields. Simple: the threads were spinfoam nets of quanta of quantum fields; the light of its color was formed by quanta of a field. This raiment is truly one-size-fits-all, as its size comprises nothing more (or less) than a field, which is also made of quanta; and time emerges from the processes of this same field.
It’s as nothing for Abiba to be wherever she wants whenever she wants. In fact, she’s already there, and was already then.
She is/was at Bilqis’s side and Bilqis does/did see her and will say, “Abiba? What are you doing here? Has the mission failed?”
Abiba laughs/laughed and said/says “The mission’s more successful than you will ever know.” Abiba rises/descends and the skirt unfurls/rolls up tight and Bilqis’s jaw drops in astonishment; her eyes bulge, and she’s uncharacteristically speechless.
Abiba’s headache subsides momentarily.
Abiba rises/descends still further to the level that shows her an even finer but stronger vibration, for gravity’s affected less by matter than light, radio, and sound waves. At this level and era of compression, there’s no headache at all, no brightness, no sparks. Everything that’s happened/will happen is emanating from this very spot, erupting into spinfoam of spaceless quanta like a fire extinguisher she once saw used to try to put out a flaming car: mountains of textureless, weightless effervescence spraying wildly from a cylinder a tiny fraction of its volume. The car still burned, black smoke billowing, and people gathered to watch the spectacle, the owner wailing, distraught. This memory makes/made Abiba’s headache recur.
She is/was with Bilqis again. As every living thing, they have completely reformed themselves in order to remain themselves. It’s been forever and no time’s passed. “The warriors have assaulted the shore settlements and they have submitted, mind, soul, and body, in true Islam to the Queen of Heaven…”
The stabbing sensation of sparks behind her eye suddenly ramp up. She squints, but realizes that this makes her even more hideous than ever; she comes to her senses and raises her hands, still dripping quantum infinity, from her swirling fractal foam skirt.
She presses them to her face. She rounds her shoulders and begins to sob. How could she have forgotten that she’s a hopeless, unwanted piece of debris, mutilated and useless, a murderess, a widow; a childless, twisted, broken beast? Before the last of the foam melts away, she scoops the ctenophore from her pocket and raises it to her lips, murmuring a prayer for rescue.
She is/was with a school, a tribe, of ctenophores. They are patterns of gel and organic wire, spatters of Higgs Bosons like fireworks within the electron-stacked spines of their DNA. She is nothing if not expressed in this DNA, or one might say she is not expressed in this DNA if she is nothing. This comforts her.
The ctenophores murmurate through the Red Sea’s saline water, phosphatidal tidal organisms orgasmically fertilizing everything in their path. She ascends to the surface, and is/is not the five thousand closest (in space?) to her heart (she is heartless).
A man’s on the shore. He’s familiar to her, which marks him as dangerous, but she suppresses her panic. Her mantle undulates away from her face.
Li spies her in the sky, the clouds, the waves, and the shadows of the seaspray. He blinks and shakes his head, but she’s definitely there. With something that might be effort, she disregards the pain and forms waves of crude sound. She pauses—she has all the time that ever was and will be—to reflect that he may see what happens next as magic.
Neither Abiba nor Li is familiar with Clarke’s Third Law, though the deepest laws of physical nature are self-evidently obvious to Abiba, as they were two centuries ago to the blacksmith’s son, valet Michael Faraday—whom Abiba has never heard of.
“Come to Gabal Elba,” Abiba commands.
“I will,” Li says. “Where is it?”
Abiba takes hold of the Faraday lines between herself and Li and shakes them until he sees a vision of the high mountain, most sacred above the desert, home of Isis for ten thousand years, and Bilqis, her servant emissary enthroned upon it. Li moans as the sight floods into him, with no regard for who he thinks he is, no respect for who he imagines himself to be.
And how dare he imagine himself to be anyone!
How dare these men to think they are anything at all when they cannot make the simplest living thing from the frail, disposable hypodermics they call “bodies!”
She lets out a croaking shout: “Don’t defy the One, Li! Make your way to Gabal Elba and find your fate!” Her sudden rage brings her fully
into her body.
Li sits up in bed with a choking gasp. Not a dream! No, a dream. No, not a dream. We are going to Gabal Elba.
IX.
Just a Cotton Pickin’ Minute
Jacob’s body was lean and hard, muscles cut out in ways that seemed unattainable in his Uber-driving, community-college days. He was walking behind the big wagon today. He’d been conditioned by pulling the wagon, his hands callused. Today, he was off “mule” duty—his group’s turn to be rotated to the rear. Tomorrow he’d be in the group up front, the hardest job, since they had to stretch the thigh-thick ropes tight and overcome the first impossible inertia that held the wagon in its spot.
What they were pulling looked like a Conestoga wagon constructed for giants. The “prairie schooners” of the old western frontier were wooden wagons drawn by horses or mules, and covered by hoops of wood with canvas stretched over them. This was laid out the same way, but the wagon wheels were the height of an elephant. The canvas was stretched over full-circle welded metal hoops that Jacob could have walked through with another man his size astride his shoulders. The hoops were mounted on top of a gigantic open box. The box was full of their cargo: the same fluffy substance made of short white fibers, puffing the canvas cover out like a skier’s jacket.
Jacob’s feet were hard, hoof-like. He’d gone without shoes since the pair he’d been wearing when the machine sickness hit fell apart. That was two years ago and then some. His hands also were hardened, especially his fingertips, where the hulls of the cotton bolls had raked and gouged them.
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