Ken Grimwood (21 page)

"Wait a minute," Jeff interrupted, "what's 'Showscan'?"

Pamela gave him a look of surprise, which contained a touch of wounded pride. "You haven't seen
Continuum
?"

He shrugged apologetically. "It never showed in Redding."

"No; in this area, it played only in San Francisco and Sacramento. We had to specially adapt all the theaters."

"Why?"

"The Showscan process produces incredibly realistic images on a movie screen, but to get that effect you need special projection equipment. You know the basic principle of how motion pictures work, right? Twenty-four frames, twenty-four still pictures a second … As one image begins to fade on the retina, the next appears, creating an impression of fluid, unbroken movement. Persistence of vision, it's called. Actually, there are forty-eight frames a second, because each of the images is repeated once, to help fool the eye. But of course it's not really the eye that's being tricked, it's the brain. Even though we think we're seeing uninterrupted motion on the screen, at some deeper, unconscious level we're aware of the stops and starts. That's one of the reasons video tape has a sharper, 'realer' look than film; it's recorded at thirty frames per second, so there are fewer gaps.

"Well, Showscan takes that process a step further. It's shot at a full sixty frames a second, with no redundant frames. Trumbull used EEGs to monitor the brain waves of people watching film shot and projected at various rates, and that's where the responses peaked. It appears that the visual cortex is programmed to perceive reality at that particular speed, in sixty bursts of visual input each second. So Showscan is like a direct conduit to the brain. It's not 3-D; the effect is more subtle than that. The images seem to strike deep chords of recognition; they somehow resonate with authenticity.

"So, anyway, we shot the whole movie in Showscan, including all the computer-generated mandalas and Mandelbrot sets and other effects that the Whitneys and their team came up with. We filmed most of it at Pinewood Studios in London. The actors were all talented unknowns, mainly from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I didn't want any star's ego or presence to overshadow the theme of the film, its … message."

She finished her coffee, stared at the bottom of the heavy brown mug. "
Continuum
opened on June eleventh, worldwide. And it was a total failure."

Jeff frowned. "How do you mean that?"

"Just the way I said it. The movie flopped. It did good business for about a month, and then fell off to nothing. The critics hated it. So did the audiences. Word of mouth was even worse than the reviews, and they were bad enough. 'Leftover sixties mysticism' pretty much summed up the general reaction.

'Muddled,"incoherent,' and 'pretentious' were thrown in there a lot, too. The only reason most people went to see it at all was for the novelty value of the Showscan process and for the computer graphics.

Those went over well, but they were just about the only things anybody liked about the film."

There was a long, awkward silence. "I'm sorry," Jeff said finally. Pamela laughed bitterly. "Funny, isn't it? You refused to have anything more to do with me because you were concerned about the potentially dangerous impact this film might have, the global changes it might set in motion … and the world ended up ignoring it, treating it like a stale joke."

"What went wrong?" he asked with gentleness.

"Part of it was the timing: the 'Me Generation,' discos, cocaine, all that. Nobody wanted any more lectures about the oneness of the universe and the eternal chain of being. They'd had enough of that in the sixties; now all they wanted to do was party. But it was mainly my fault. The critics were right. It was a bad movie. It was too abstract, too esoteric; there was no plot, there were no real characters, no one for an audience to identify with. It was purely a philosophical exercise, a self-indulgent 'message picture,'

with no meat to it. People stayed away in droves, and I can't blame them."

"You're being kind of hard on yourself, aren't you?"

She turned her empty mug around in her hands, kept her eyes down. "Just facing facts. It was a painful lesson to learn, but I've grown to accept it. Both of us have had to accept a lot. Had to lose a lot."

"I know how much it meant to you, how much you believed in what you were doing. I respect that, even if I disagreed with your methods."

She looked at him, her green eyes softer than he'd ever seen them. "Thank you. That means a lot to me."

Jeff stood up, took his parka from the hook by the door. "Get your coat on," he told her. "I want to show you something."

They stood in fresh snow at the top of the hill where he'd been clearing out the irrigation system the week before he first saw
Starsea.
The Pit River was clogged with ice now, not salmon, and the trees on Buck Mountain were heavy with their burden of white. In the distance, the majestic conic symmetry of Mount Shasta rose up to meet the clear November sky.

"I used to dream about that mountain," Jeff told her. "Dream it had something of great import to tell me, an explanation for all I'd been through."

"It looks … unreal," she murmured. "Sacred, even. I can understand a vision like that coming to dominate your dreams."

"The Indians around here did consider it holy. Not just because it's a volcano; some of the other Cascade peaks have been more active, made more of an immediate impact on the environment. But none of them ever had the same allure Shasta did."

"And still does," Pamela whispered, staring at the silent mountain. "There's a … power there. I can feel it."

Jeff nodded, his eyes fixed, like hers, on the far-off stately slopes. "There's a cult—white, not Indian—that still worships the mountain. They think it has something to do with Jesus, with resurrection.

Others believe there are aliens, or some ancient offshoot race of humans, living in the magma tunnels beneath it. Strange, crazy stuff; Mount Shasta seems to inspire that kind of thinking, somehow."

The wind gusted colder, and Pamela shivered. Reflexively, Jeff put his arm around her shoulders, drew her to his warmth.

"At one time or another," he said, "I've imagined just about every possible explanation, no matter how bizarre, for what's been happening to me—to us. Time warps, black holes, God gone berserk … I mentioned the people who think Mount Shasta is populated by aliens; well, I once had myself convinced this was all some sort of experiment being conducted by an extraterrestrial race. The same idea must have occurred to you once or twice; I could see elements of it in
Starsea.
And maybe that's the truth—maybe we're the sentient rats who have to find our way out of this maze. Or maybe there's a nuclear holocaust at the end of 1988, and the collective psychic will of all the men and women who have ever lived has chosen this way to keep it from spelling an absolute end to humanity. I don't know.

"And that's the point: I
can't
know, and I've finally grown to accept my inability to understand it, or to change it."

"That doesn't mean you can't keep wondering," she said, her face close to his.

"Of course not, and I do. I wonder about it constantly. But I'm no longer consumed by that quest for answers, haven't been for a long time. Our dilemma, extraordinary though it is, is essentially no different than that faced by everyone who's ever walked this earth: We're here, and we don't know why. We can philosophize all we want, pursue the key to that secret along a thousand different paths, and we'll never be any closer to unlocking it.

"We've been granted an incomparable gift, Pamela; a gift of life, of awareness and potential greater than anyone has ever known before. Why can't we just accept it for what it is?"

"Someone—Plato, I think—once said, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' "

"True. But a life too closely scrutinized will lead to madness, if not suicide."

She looked down at their footprints in the otherwise-pristine snow. "Or simply failure," she said quietly.

"You haven't failed. You made an attempt to draw the world together, and in the process you've created magnificent works of art. The effort, the creation—those acts stand on their own."

"Until I die again, perhaps. Until the next replay. Then it all vanishes."

Jeff shook his head, his arm tightly around her shoulders. "Only the products of your work will disappear. The struggle, the devotion you put into your endeavors … That's where the value truly lies, and will remain: within you."

Her eyes filled with tears. "So much loss, though, so much pain; the children … "

"All life includes loss. It's taken me many, many years to learn to deal with that, and I don't expect I'll ever be fully resigned to it. But that doesn't mean we have to turn away from the world, or stop striving for the best that we can do and be. We owe that much to ourselves, at least, and we deserve whatever measure of good may come of it."

He kissed her tear-streaked cheeks, then kissed her lightly on the lips. To the west, a pair of hawks circled slowly in the sky above Devil's Canyon.

"Have you ever been soaring?" Jeff asked.

"You mean in a sailplane, a glider? No. No, I never have."

He put both arms around her waist, hugged her close. "We will," he whispered into the softness of her tawny hair. "We'll soar together."

Past Revelstoke, the train sped alongside great, somber glaciers as it began its climb into the Rockies.

Thick forests of red cedar and hemlock covered the surrounding hillsides, and around one bend a field of heather trapped between two glaciers suddenly came into view. The pink and purple flowers rippled, shimmered in the soft spring breeze, their ephemeral beauty a quiet rebuke to the impassive walls of ice enclosing them.

There was a certain erotic quality about the flowers, Jeff thought: Their fragile, wind-blown caress against the unyielding glacier, their vibrant color so like a woman's lips, or …

He smiled at Pamela in the seat beside him, rested his hand on her bare knee and let his fingers slide beneath the hem of her skirt. Her cheeks flushed as he tenderly stroked her inner thigh; she glanced around the dome car to see if anyone was looking at them, but the eyes of the other passengers remained fixed on the passing spectacle outside the train.

Jeff's hand moved higher, touched moist silk. Pamela let out a tiny groan as he gently pressed her cleft, and she arched back against the leather seat. He slowly pulled his hand away, letting the tips of his fingers trail lightly down her leg.

"Want to take a walk?" he asked, and she nodded. He took her hand, led her out of the observation car and toward the rear of the train. Between the club car and the diner they paused, maintaining a precarious balance together as they stood and kissed on the swaying metal platform. The wind whipping through the open window was at least fifteen degrees cooler than when they'd left Vancouver that morning, and Pamela shivered in his arms. Their sleeping car was empty; everyone else, it seemed, had left to seek the panoramic vistas of the dome car or the diner. Once inside their double roommette, Jeff lowered one of the foldaway beds and Pamela reached to draw the windowshade closed. He stopped her, pulled her to him.

"Let's let the scenery inspire us," he said.

She resisted, teasing. "If we leave it open, we'll be part of the scenery ourselves."

"Nobody to watch us except a few birds and deer. I want to see you in the sunlight."

Pamela stepped back from him. Framed against the changing backdrop of snow-fed rivers and sheer glacial cliffs, she undid her blouse, slipped it offher arms. She plucked at the belt of her skirt, and the garment fell softly to the floor.

"Why aren't you looking at the scenery?" she asked with a smile.

"I am."

She slid off the rest, stood nude before the rugged wilderness rushing past outside. Jeff's eager gaze swept her body as he undressed, and then he moved to her, was joined with her, was pressing her urgently into the soft chair beside the open window as the afternoon sun flickered across their faces and the rumbling wheels on the tracks below rocked them with a steady rhythm.

The train took four days and nights to reach Montreal, and a week later they rode it back west again.

"What about the Middle Ages?" Pamela asked. "Imagine what that would have been like, the dreadful sameness of it, over and over."

"The Middle Ages weren't quite as totally dreary as most people assume. I still think a major war, and the years leading up to it, would have been far worse; picture always coming back to Germany in 1939."

"At least you could have left, gone to the U.S. and known you'd be safe."

"Not if you were Jewish. What if you were already in Auschwitz, say?"

It was their favorite topic this month: what the experience of replaying would have been like for someone in another historical period, how best to have dealt with a vastly different set of repeated world events and circumstances than those they knew so well.

Once the floodgates of conversation had been opened between them, it seemed there was no end of things to talk about: speculations, plans, memories … They had gone back over their own varied lives in detail, expanding on the brief personal histories they'd recounted to each other during that first wary meeting in Los Angeles in 1974. Jeff had told her all about the empty madness of his time with Sharla, the healing grace of his years alone in Montgomery Creek. She, in turn, had imparted a vivid sense of the dedication she had given to her medical career, her frustration at knowing she could never again put all that training to full use, and the subsequent creative exhilaration of making
Starsea.
A tall, bearded young black man roller-skated past them, deftly weaving his way along the crowded East Fifty-ninth Street sidewalk toward the entrance to Central Park. Giorgio Moroder's pulsating arrangement of Blondie's

"Call Me" blared from the big Panasonic radio he balanced on his shoulder, drowning out Pamela's reply to Jeff's hypothetical question about reliving the hell of Auschwitz.

They'd been in New York for six weeks, after more than a year of alternating their time between Jeff's cabin in northern California and Pamela's place in Topanga Canyon. Now that they were together, the isolation of the two retreats suited them even more. There was so much to catch up on, so many intensely private thoughts and emotions to be shared. But they hadn't withdrawn from the world, not totally. Jeff had begun dabbling in venture capital, backing small companies and products that apparently had been unable to obtain adequate funding in previous replays and whose success or failure he had no way of projecting. One desk-top toy, a Lucite cube with small magnets performing a slow-motion ballet in a suspension of clear viscous fluid, had already caught on in a big way, had been the Christmas 1979