The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (112 page)

“I see. Thank you for your time, Ms Chernov.”

In the hall, Geraci said to Tara, “Ballet. Police work sure isn’t what it used to be. You did good, Washington.”

“Thank you. What now?”

“Now we find out what resident has a romantic interest in Anna Chernov. It’s not Erdmann, but it’s somebody.”

So Anna had hesitated slightly when Tara asked if any resident had a special interest in her! Tara glowed inwardly as she followed Geraci down the hall. Without looking at her, he said, “Just don’t let it go to your head.”

She said dryly, “Not a chance.”

“Good. A cop interested in
ballet
. . . Jesus H. Christ.”

The ship grew agitated. Across many cubic light-years between the stars, space-time itself warped in dangerous ways. The new entity was growing in strength – and it was so far away yet!

It was not supposed to occur this way.

If the ship had become aware earlier of this new entity, this could have happened correctly, in accord with the laws of evolution. All things evolved – stars, galaxies, consciousness. If the ship had realized earlier that anywhere in this galactic backwater had existed the potential for a new entity, the ship would have been there to guide, to shape, to ease the transition. But it hadn’t realized. There had been none of the usual signs.

They were happening now, however. Images, as yet dim and one-way, were reaching the ship. More critically, power was being drawn from it, power that the birthing entity had no idea how to channel. Faster, the ship must go faster . . .

It could not, not without damaging space-time irretrievably. Space-time could only reconfigure so much, so often. And meanwhile —

The half-formed thing so far away stirred, struggled, howled in fear.

NINE

Henry Erdmann was scared.

He could barely admit his fright to himself, let alone show it to the circle of people jammed into his small apartment on Saturday morning. They sat in a solemn circle, occupying his sofa and armchair and kitchen chairs and other chairs dragged from other apartments. Evelyn Krenchnoted’s chair crowded uncomfortably close to Henry’s right side, her perfume sickly sweet. She had curled her hair into tiny grey sausages. Stan Dzarkis and Erin Bass, who could still manage it, sat on the floor. The folds of Erin’s yellow print skirt seemed to Henry the only colour amid the ashen faces. Twenty people, and maybe there were more in the building who were afflicted. Henry had called the ones he knew of, who had called the ones they knew of. Missing were Anna Chernov, still in the Infirmary, and Al Cosmano, who had refused to attend.

They all looked at him, waiting to begin.

“I think we all know why we’re here,” Henry said, and immediately a sense of unreality took him. He didn’t understand at all why he was here. The words of Michael Faraday, inscribed on the physics building at UCLA, leapt into his mind: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true.” The words seemed a mockery. What had been happening to Henry, to all of them, did not feel wonderful and was “true” in no sense he understood, although he was going to do his damnedest to relate it to physics in the only way that hours of pondering had suggested to him. Anything else – anything less – was unthinkable.

He continued, “Things have occurred to all of us, and a good first step is to see if we have indeed had the same experiences.”
Collect data
. “So I’ll go first. On five separate occasions I have felt some force seize my mind and body, as if a surge of energy was going through me, some sort of neurological shock. On one occasion it was painful, on the others not painful but very tiring. Has anyone else felt that?”

Immediately a clamour, which Henry stilled by raising his arm. “Can we start with a show of hands? Anybody else had that experience? Everybody. Okay, let’s go around the circle, introducing yourself as we go, starting on my left. Please be as explicit as possible, but only descriptions at this point. No interpretations.”

“Damned teacher,” someone muttered, but Henry didn’t see who and didn’t care. His heart had speeded up, and he felt that his ears had somehow expanded around his hearing aid, so as not to miss even a syllable. He had deliberately not mentioned the times of his “seizures”, or outside events concurrent with them, so as not to contaminate whatever information would be offered by the others.

“I’m John Kluge, from 4J.” He was a heavy, round-faced man with a completely bald head and a pleasant voice used to making itself heard. High-school teacher, Henry guessed. History or math, plus coaching some sort of sports team. “It’s pretty much like Henry here said, except I only felt the ‘energy’ four times. The first was around seven-thirty on Tuesday night. The second time woke me Wednesday night at eleven-forty-two. I noted the time on my bedside clock. The third time I didn’t note the time because I was vomiting after that food poisoning we all got on Thursday, but it was just before the vomiting started, sometime in mid-afternoon. That time the energy surge started near my heart, and I thought it was a heart attack. The last time was yesterday at eleven-forty-fve a.m., and in addition to the energy, I had a . . . well, a sort of —” He looked embarrassed.

“Please go on, it’s important,” Henry said. He could hardly breathe.

“I don’t want to say a vision, but colours swirling through my mind, red and blue and white and somehow
hard
.”

“Anna Chernov’s necklace!” Evelyn shrieked, and the meeting fell apart.

Henry couldn’t stop the frantic babble. He would have risen but his walker was in the kitchen; there was no room in the crowded living room. He was grateful when Bob Donovan put two fingers in his mouth and gave a whistle that could have deafened war dogs. “Hey! Shut up or nobody’s gonna learn nothing!”

Everyone fell silent and glared resentfully at the stocky man in baggy chinos and cheap acrylic sweater. Donovan scowled and sat back down. Henry leapt into the quiet.

“Mr Donovan is right, we won’t learn anything useful this way. Let’s resume going around the circle, with no interruptions, please. Mrs Bass?”

Erin Bass described essentially the same events as John Kluge, without the Wednesday night incident but with the addition of the earlier, slight jar Henry had felt as he let Carrie into his apartment Tuesday before class. She described this as a “whisper in my mind”. The next sixteen people all repeated the same experiences on Thursday and Friday, although some seemed to not have felt the “energy” on Tuesday, and some not on Tuesday or Wednesday. Henry was the only one to feel all five instances. Throughout these recitations, Evelyn Krenchnoted several times rose slightly in her chair, like a geyser about to burst. Henry did
not
want her to interrupt. He put a restraining hand on her arm, which was a mistake as she immediately covered his hand with her own and squeezed affectionately.

When it was finally Evelyn’s turn, she said, “None of you had pain this last time like Henry did on Thursday – except me! I was having a medical MIT at the hospital and I was inside the machine and the pain was horrible! Horrible! And then” – she paused dramatically – “and then I saw Anna Chernov’s necklace right at the time it was being stolen! And so did all of you – that was the ‘hard colours’, John! Sapphires and rubies and diamonds!”

Pandemonium again. Henry, despite his growing fear, groaned inwardly. Why Evelyn Krenchnoted? Of all the unreliable witnesses . . .

“I saw it! I saw it!” Evelyn shrieked. Gina Martinelli had begun to pray in a loud voice. People jabbered to each other or sat silent, their faces gone white. A woman that Henry didn’t know reached with a shaking hand into her pocket and pulled out a pill bottle. Bob Donovan raised his fingers to his lips.

Before Donovan’s whistle could shatter their eardrums again, Erin Bass rose gracefully, clapped her hands, and cried surprisingly loudly, “Stop! We will get nowhere this way! Evelyn has the floor!”

Slowly the din subsided. Evelyn, who now seemed more excited than frightened by the implication of what she’d just said, launched into a long and incoherent description of her “MIT,” until Henry stopped her the only way he could think of, which was to take her hand. She squeezed it again, blushed, and said, “Yes, dear.”

Henry managed to get out, “Please. Everyone. There must be an explanation for all this.” But before he could begin it, Erin Bass turned from aide to saboteur.

“Yes, and I think we should go around the circle in the same order and offer those explanations. But
briefly
, before too many people get too tired. John?”

Kluge said, “It could be some sort of virus affecting the brain. Contagious. Or some pollutant in the building.”

Which causes every person to have the exact same hallucinations and a locked safe to open? Henry thought scornfully. The scorn steadied him. He needed steadying; every person in the room had mentioned feeling the Thursday-afternoon “energy” start in his or her heart, but no one except Henry knew that at that moment Jim Peltier was having an inexplicable heart attack as he battered Carrie.

Erin said, “What we see in this world is just
maya
, the illusion of permanence when in fact, all reality is in constant flux and change. What’s happening here is beyond the world of intellectual concepts and distinctions. We’re getting glimpses of the mutable nature of reality, the genuine undifferentiated ‘suchness’ that usually only comes with nirvana. The glimpses are imperfect, but for some reason our collective karma has afforded them to us.”

Bob Donovan, next in the circle, said irritably, “That’s just crap. We all got some brain virus, like Kluge here said, and some junkie cracked the office safe. The cops are investigating it. We should all see a doctor, except they can’t never do anything to cure people anyway. And the people who had pain, Henry and Evelyn, they just got the disease worse.”

Most people around the circle echoed the brain-disease theory, some with helpless skepticism, some with evident relief at finding any sort of explanation. A woman said slowly, “It could be the start of Alzheimer’s.” A man shrugged and said, “As God wills.” Another just shook his head, his eyes averted.

Gina Martinelli said, “It is the will of God! These are the End Times, and we’re being given signs, if only we would listen! ‘Ye shalt have tribulations ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.’ Also —”

“It might be the will of God, Gina,” interrupted Evelyn, unable to restrain herself any longer, “but it’s mighty strange anyway! Why, I saw that necklace in my mind plain as day, and at just that moment it was being stolen from the safe! To my mind, that’s not God, and not the devil neither or the robbery would have been successful, you see what I mean? The devil knows what he’s doing. No, this was a message, all right, but from those who have gone before us. My Uncle Ned could see spirits all the time, they trusted him, I remember one time we all came down to breakfast and the cups had all been turned upside down when nobody was in the room and Uncle Ned, he said —”

Henry stopped listening. Ghosts. God. Eastern mysticism. Viruses. Alzheimer’s. Nothing that fit the facts, that adhered even vaguely to the laws of the universe. These people had the reasoning power of termites.

Evelyn went on for a while, but eventually even she noticed that her audience was inattentive, dispirited, or actually asleep. Irene Bromley snored softly in Henry’s leather armchair. Erin Bass said, “Henry?”

He looked at them hopelessly. He’d been going to describe the two-slit experiments on photons, to explain that once you added detectors to measure the paths of proton beams, the path became pre-determined, even if you switched on the detector
after
the particle had been fired. He’d planned on detailing how that astonishing series of experiments changed physics forever, putting the observer into basic measurements of reality. Consciousness was woven into the very fabric of the universe itself, and consciousness seemed to him the only way to link these incredibly disparate people and the incredible events that had happened to them.

Even to himself, this “explanation” sounded lame. How Teller or Feynman would have sneered at it! Still, although it was better than anything he’d heard here this morning, he hated to set it out in front of these irrational people, half ignoramuses and the other half nutcases. They would all just reject it, and what would be gained?

But he had called this meeting. And he had nothing else to offer.

Henry stumbled through his explanation, trying to make the physics as clear as possible. Most of the faces showed perfect incomprehension. He finished with, “I’m not saying there’s some sort of affecting of reality going on, through group consciousness.” But wasn’t that exactly what he
was
saying? “I don’t believe in telekinesis or any of that garbage. The truth is, I don’t know what’s happening. But something is.”

He felt a complete fool.

Bob Donovan snapped, “None of you know nothing. I been listening to all of you, and you haven’t even got the facts right. I
seen
Anna Chernov’s necklace. The cops showed it to me yesterday when they was asking me some questions. It don’t got no sapphires or rubies, and just one tiny diamond. You’re full of it, Evelyn, to think your seizure had anything to do with anything – and how do we know you even felt any pain at the ‘very second’ the safe was being cracked? All we got’s your word.”

“Are you saying I’m a liar?” Evelyn cried. “Henry, tell him!”

Tell him what? Startled, Henry just stared at her. John Kluge said harshly, “I don’t believe Henry Erdmann is lying about his pain,” and Evelyn turned from Donovan to Kluge.

“You mean you think I am? Who the hell do you think you are?”

Kluge started to tell her who he was: among other things, a former notary public. Other people began to argue. Evelyn started to cry, and Gina Martinelli prayed loudly. Erin Bass rose and slipped out the front door. Others followed. Those that remained disputed fiercely, the arguments growing more intense as they were unable to convince their neighbours of their own theories. Somewhere among the anger and contempt, Carrie Vesey appeared by Henry’s side, her pretty face creased with bewildered concern, her voice high and strained.