IN OTHER WORLDS
A. A. Attanasio
Phoenix Pick
An Imprint of Arc Manor
In Other Worlds copyright © 1985 A. A. Attanasio. Foreword to the Second Edition copyright © 2008 A. A. Attanasio All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Manufactured in the United States of America.
Cover Art by Jaime Oria. Copyright © Jaime Oria. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.
This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.
Smashwords Edition
ISBN (Smashwords Edition): 978-1-60450-463-7
ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-262-6
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Second Edition
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***
Acknowledgments
My warm thanks to the composer Rick Baitz for producing Evoë’s Song (page 61) specifically for this novel.
And I am grateful to the artist Jaime Oria, who was kind enough to create the cover art for this edition.
***
You know who you are,
so this is for you.
***
He who looks does not find, but he who does not look is found.
—Kafka
***
Foreword to the
Second
Edition
What is nothing? That philosophical question has circled us since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. On this motherless worldstone spinning orbital zeroes through the void, the arbitrary owns us. This nihilism and its attendant dread enormously compromise the human spirit, as history bears witness with rampant genocide and, in our modern age, the barbaric and perpetual threat of nuclear and biological warfare.
What else can match that horror, what else pry open the cage of our despair but the strength we bring to bear as imaginary creatures? Reality itself is an incomprehensible mystery, and our own individual existences are irrational microcosmic mirrors of a cosmos so vast and weird it “doth tease us out of thought/As doth eternity.” (John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)
Reason cannot compass what we are. What do we know of our creaturely origins? Or of the destination of our deathward journey? Or of the fundamental nature of consciousness itself? Nothing. Against this background of unknowing, our very identity is a mortal act of imagination.
These existential facts obsessed and bewildered me as a graduate student in Literature during the 1970s and inspired the bright idea that creative writing might be a valid way to approach this indomitable dominion of Nothing. I resolved then to write a series of science fiction novels that pivoted on the question of nothing.
Why science fiction? Because it is an oxymoron: a contradictory fusion of empirical truth and narrative illusion – very like the question of ‘nothing’ itself. It takes something to recognize nothing. We are that something: inventors of zero, clever creators of the vacuum tube, investigators of black holes, ghost universes and imaginary numbers.
The empty page is the void that opens for us. It creates a space where we belong. The emptiness of the page is unoriginated, uncreated, unformed. So are we, when we open to the silence that carries our thoughts.
The process of confronting the empty page and experiencing fantasies through creative writing (and reading) ransoms meaning from emptiness. We redeem our sanity by exchanging the only possessions we truly own - time and mindfulness - for meaning. From the irreal, from the potential, from the imagined, we carry meaning into life. We steal it from nothing.
In Other Worlds was my first attempt at delivering meaning from nothing. Written in 1975, long before science knew about dark energy, the mysterious anti-gravity force that is presently accelerating the expansion of our universe into a darkness too proud for stars, this story is set at the end of time inside the ultimate cosmic black hole, just prior to the collapse of the entire cosmos in the Big Crunch. Once again, the world is flat, and we have journeyed to the edge of reality to stand before the nothing beyond.
I rewrote this story a decade later and published the work as my second novel. The multiple worlds it describes are carnivalesque, a three ring circus consisting of two very different Earths and the aforementioned final world inside the black hole at the end of time. Freaks abound: pain-eating spiders, sentient sky-floating islands, and the mythology of science itself. There are clowns, too, including the protagonist and his antic disguise as Alfred Omega. And there is a ringmaster, the one who moves the acts along and keeps our attention where it belongs, on the show – and that, of course, is you.
A. A. Attanasio
Kohelepelepe, Hawai’i
2008
***
IN OTHER WORLDS
Prelude
Carl Schirmer’s last day as a human was filled with portents of his strange life to come. As he completed his morning ablutions, he saw in the bathroom mirror his hair, what little of it there was, standing straight up. He smoothed it back and tucked it behind his ears with his damp hands, but it sprang back. Even the few strands left at the cope of his shining pate wavered upright. His hair, rusty gossamer, stuck out from the sides of his large head like a clown’s wig.
With his usual complaisance, he shrugged and commenced to shave his broad face. Today, he sensed, was going to be an unusual day. His sleep had been fitful, and he had awoken to a breed of headache he had never before encountered. His head was not actually aching—it buzzed, as though overnight a swarm of gnats had molted to maturity in the folds of his brain. After completing his morning cleansing ritual and checking the coat of his tongue and the blood-brightness under his lids, he put his glasses on, took two acetaminophen, and dressed for work.
Carl was not a stylish or a careful dresser, yet even he noticed that his clothes, which he had ironed two nights before for a dinner his date had canceled and which had looked fine hanging in his closet, hung particularly rumpled on him that day. When he tried to brush the wrinkles out, static sparked along his fingers. The morning was already old, so he didn’t bother to change. He hurried through breakfast despite the fact that his usually trustworthy toaster charred his toast, and he skipped his coffee when he saw that no amount of wire-jiggling was going to get his electric percolator to work. Not until he had left his apartment and had jogged down the four floors to the street did he realize that his headbuzz had tingled through the cords of his neck and into his shoulders. He was not feeling right at all, and yet in another sense, a perceptive and ease-ful sense, he felt sharper than ever.
Carl lived in a low-rent apartment building on West Twenty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, and he was not used to smelling the river, though he was only a few blocks away from the Hudson. This morning, the air carried a kelpy sweet-and-sour odor of the Hudson. Immense cauliflower clouds bunched over the city, and the blue of the sky seemed clear as an idea.
He strolled down Twenty-third Street with an atypically loose stride, face uplifted to the path of heaven. Spring’s promise-haunted presence drifted through the tumult of clouds, which was odd, since this was November. The rainbow-haired punks that loitered about the Chelsea Hotel looked childbright and friendly today, and Carl knew then that the ferment of a mood was indeed altering him. But he didn’t care. Though his blood felt carbonated, the city looked benevolent, and he went with the illusion.
At the corner of Seventh Avenue, a drunk approached him, and he handed over a dollar, appreciating the serene desuetude of the woman’s face. Nothing could depress him this morning. And the sight of the place where he worked sparked a smile in him. He managed the Blue Apple, a bar and restaurant at Twenty-second and Seventh. Except for the neon sign in the vine-trellised window, the antiquated structure looked smoky with age. Until Carl had come along, the narrow building had been an Irish bar with the inspired name The Shamrock, run and owned by Caitlin Sweeney, an alcoholic widow supporting her thirst and a daughter with the faithful patronage of a few aged locals. A year ago, after losing his midtown brokerage job to the recession and his own lack of aggression, Carl had let a newspaper ad lead him here. He had been looking for something to keep him alive and not too busy. And then he had met Sheelagh and wound up working harder than ever.
Caitlin’s daughter had been sixteen then, tall and lean-limbed, with green, youthless eyes and a lispy smile. Carl, twice her age, lost his heart to her that first day, which was no common event with him. He had experienced his share of crooked romance and casual affairs in college, and for the last ten years he had lived alone out of choice sprung from disappointment. No woman whom he had found attractive had ever found him likewise. Gangly, nearsighted, and bald, he was not ugly but lumpy-featured and devoid of the conversational charm that sometimes redeemed men of his mien. So instead of contenting himself with the love of a good but not quite striking woman, he had lived alone with his male vanity and close to his indulgences: an occasional joint, a semiannual cocaine binge, and a sizable pornography collection stretching back through the kinky Seventies to the body-painting orgies of the Sixties. This puerile life would have proved sufficient if not for Sheelagh. She made all the years of his aloneness seem worth the wait for her uncommon beauty—a tall, lyrical body with auburn tresses that fell to the roundness of her loose hips—but, most exciting of all, she needed him.
When Carl had arrived, The Shamrock brinked on bankruptcy. He would never have had anything to do with a business as tattered as the one riven-faced Caitlin had revealed to him were Sheelagh not there. She was a smart kid, finishing high school a year ahead of her class and sharp enough with figures and deferred-payment planning to keep The Shamrock floating long after her besotted mother would have lost it. Sheelagh was the one, in her defiant-child’s manner, who had shown him that the business could be saved. The neighborhood was growing with the artistic overflow from Greenwich Village, and there was hope, if they could find the money and the imagination, to draw a new, more affluent clientele. After talking with the girl, Carl had flared with ideas, and he had backed them up with the few thousand dollars he had saved. With the debts paid off, old Caitlin reluctantly became the house chef, and Carl took over the bartending, the books, and the refurbishing. A year later, The Shamrock had almost broken even as the Blue Apple, a name Carl had compressed from the Big Apple and the certain melancholy of his hopeless love for Sheelagh. That love had recently increased in both ardor and hopelessness now that Sheelagh had finished high school and had come to work full-time in the Blue Apple while she saved for college.
On Carl Schirmer’s last day as a human, when he entered the restaurant with his collar of red hair sticking out from his head, his clothes knotted with static, and his eyes shining with the beauty of the day, Sheelagh was glad to see him. The new tables they had ordered had come in and were stacked around the bar, legs up like a bamboo forest. “Aren’t they fine?” Sheelagh asked.
In the year since they had first met, she had filled out to the full dimensions of a woman, and Carl was not addressing the tables when he answered: “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”
With his help, she moved aside the old Formica-top table from the choice position beside the window and placed the new wooden one there. Sunlight smeared its top like warm butter. She sighed with satisfaction, turned to Carl, and put her arms about him in a jubilant hug. “It’s happening, Carl. The Blue Apple is beginning to shine.” She pulled back, startled. “You smell wonderful. What are you wearing?”
He sniffed his shoulder and caught the cool fragrance misting off him, a scent kindred to a mountain slope. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“Long night on the town, huh?” She smiled slyly. She truly liked Carl. He was the most honest man she’d ever known, a bald, boy-faced pal, soft around the middle but with a quiet heart and an inward certainty. His experience as an account exec had earned him managerial skills that to Sheelagh seemed a dazzling ease with the world of things. For the first year, he ran the entire business on the phone, shuffling loans and debts until they burst into the black. He was a solid guy, yet he pulled no sexual feeling from her whatever. And for that reason, he had become in a short time closer to her than a brother. She had confided all her adolescent choices to him, and he had counseled her wisely through two high school romances and the lyric expectation of going to college someday. He knew her dreams, even her antic fantasy of a handsome, Persian-eyed lover. “From the looks of your clothes,” she went on, “your date must have been quite an athlete.” Her lubricious grin widened.
Carl pridefully buffed the thought with a smile and went about his business. The redolence of open space spun like magnetism about him all day, a day like most others: After getting the espresso machine and the coffee-maker going at the bar, he brought the first hot cup to a hung-over Caitlin in the kitchen.
The old woman looked as wasted as ever, her white hair tattering about her shoulders and her seamed face crumpled-looking from last night’s drinking. Grief and bad luck had aged her more harshly than time, and she wore a perpetual scowl. But that morning when she saw Carl back through the swinging door of the kitchen, his hair feathering from his head and his clothes clinging like plastic wrap, a bemused grin hoisted her features. “Don’t you look a sight, darlin’. Now, I know you don’t drink, and you smell too pretty to have been rolled— so, mercy of God, it must be a woman! Do I know her?”
He placed the black coffee on the wooden counter before her, and she quaffed it though the brew was practically boiling in the cup. “It’s not a woman, Caity.’’
‘Ah, good, then there’s still a chance for my Sheelagh” —she winked one liver-smoked eye—”when she’s older and your hard work and bright ideas have made us all rich, of course.”
Carl took down the inventory clipboard from its nail on the pantry door. “Sheelagh’s too young and too smart to be interested in a bald coot like me.”
“Ha! That’s what you think. And she too probably. But you’re both wrong.” Caitlin sat back from her slump, refreshed by the steaming coffee. “Baldness is a sign of virility, you know. My Edward was bald, too. It’s a distinguishing feature in a man. As for being too young, you’re right. She’s young with ideas of going off to college. But what’s college for a woman? Just a place to meet a man.”
“You know better than that, Caity,” Carl told her as he prepared the reorder checklist. “Your daughter’s smart enough to be anything she wants to be.”
“And does she know what she wants to be? No. So why run off to college when she could be making her fortune here with a clever businessman like yourself? She should be thinking of the Sham-—of the Blue Apple, and the lifetime her father gave to this place before the Lord called him and his weak liver answered. What’s going to come of all this recent fortune and long hard work if she goes away? I’m not going to live forever.”
“Not the way you drink, Caity. Have the ketchup and mayo we ordered gotten here yet?”
“They’re in the cooler downstairs. I’m too old to stop drinking now, Carl. I haven’t long to go. I can feel it. Old folk are that way. We know. But I’m not scared now that the Blue Apple has come around. Forty years Edward and I put into this tavern. And only the first ten were any good—but that was back when Chelsea was Irish. I would have sold out when it all changed after the war, but Edward had been brought up here, you know, and he had his dreams, like you have yours, only he wasn’t near as handy at making them real. And then Sheelagh was born.” She laughed, making a sound like radio noise. “I was forty-five when she was born. Is she God-sent or not, I ask you? Edward blamed the devil. No children for twenty-five years, and then a girl. I think that’s what finally killed him, not the drink. If only he could have lived to meet you and see this: the house jammed every night—and eating my food, no less. Take off your eyeglasses.”
Carl peered over the rim of his wire glasses as he arranged the dry goods on the counter for that day’s dinner menu.
“Why don’t you get contact lenses?” Caitlin asked him. “Those glasses bend your face and make you look like a cartoon. And brush back your hair. If you’re going to be bald, at least keep what you’ve got neat.”
Well acquainted with Caitlin’s ramblings and admonitions, Carl grinned away her jibes and checked the potato-and-leek soup she had prepared yesterday for this day’s lunch. The old woman was an excellent cook. During the Forties she had worked as a sous chef in the Algonquin, and her dishes were savory and accomplished. She made all of the restaurant’s fare with the help of a Chinese assistant who came in the afternoon for the dinner crowd. When Carl saw that the menu for the day was ready, he patted Caitlin on the shoulder and went out to set up the tables for lunch.
Caitlin Sweeney watched him go with a throb of heartbruise that the airy, spring-strong scent he trailed only sharpened. She loved that man with a tenderness learned from a lifetime of hurting. She recognized the beauty in his gentleness that a younger woman like her daughter could only see as meekness. Like a lightning rod, Carl found strength in what he could draw to himself— as he had drawn more fortune to them in one year than her Edward for all his brawny good looks had drawn in forty years. Carl had the prize of luck only God could give. She saw that. And she saw, too, that Sheelagh, like herself in her hungry youth, yearned for the luckless arrogance of beauty. She sighed like the warmth of a dying fire leaking into the space-cold of night and put her attention on that day’s cooking chores.
Carl, pleased that Caitlin encouraged his passion for Sheelagh, believed that the old woman was only teasing his interest in her daughter to keep him happy and hopeful. Caitlin had identified Carl’s loneliness as the only lack that she could pretend to complete in return for all he had done for them. Besides, Sheelagh was too self-willed for her mother’s opinions to influence her even if the crone had really thought he was right for her. Carl spent little time pondering it that last day he lived as a man, for he was kept busy with his own strangeness. Light bulbs blinked out around him faster than he could replace them. And as he worked the bar for the afternoon business lunches, the reverie he had experienced that morning spaced out and became moony and distracted.
“You look pretty harried, sucker,” a friendly, gravelly voice spoke over the sputtering blender he was trying to run for a banana daiquiri. The utensil stalled, and he looked up into the swart-bearded face of Zeke Zhdarnov, his oldest friend. Zee, a free-lance science writer and part-time instructor of chemistry at NYU, was a thickset man with a penchant for glenurquhart plaid suits and meerschaum pipes. Carl and Zee had been friends since their adolescence in a boys’ home in Newark, New Jersey. They had nothing in common.
At St. Timothy’s Boys’ Home, Zee had been a husky, athletic ruffian and Carl a chubby, spectacled math demon. A mutual love for comic books brought them together and defied their differences. St. Tim’s was a state house, and dispirited, vicious youths from criminal homes dominated the place. Zee offered protection from the roughs, and Carl did his best to carry Zee’s classwork. At eighteen, Zee graduated to the Marines and Nam. Carl sought personal freedom by applying his math skills to finance at Rutgers University. A Manhattan brokerage drafted him straight out of the dorms. Meanwhile in Nam, Zee learned all there was to know about the smallness of life. He paid for that education cheaply with the patella of his right knee, and he came back determined to invent a new self. He studied science, wanting to understand something of the technology that had become his kennel. When that became too abstract, he went to work for a New Jersey drug company and married, wanting to find a feeling equal to the numbness that surrounded him. During his divorce, he had sought out Carl, and the pain and rectification of that time had brought them together again, closer than they had ever been. Carl had done poorly at the brokerage, stultified by the anomie that had poisoned him from childhood but only oozed out of him after he had found enough security to stop his mad scramble from St. Tim’s and catch the scent of himself. He had smelled sour, and not until he had met Sheelagh and developed the Blue Apple did he begin to feel good about himself. That was a year ago when Zee had reappeared. Now Zee came by often with a crowd of students to fill the Blue Apple up, and Carl always felt happy to see him. They shook hands, and a loud spark snapped between their palms.
“Wow!” Zee yelled. “Are you charged! You look like you’re being electrocuted—very slowly.” He shifted his dark, slim eyes toward the table Sheelagh was clearing, her pendulous breasts swaying with her effort. “She’s overloading you.”
“Today’s an unusual day for me, buddy, but not that unusual. What’ll you have?”
“Give me a Harp.”
Carl took out a bottle of Harp lager from the ice cooler and poured it into a frosted mug. “The wiring’s shot around the bar. I can’t get this blender or even the damn light bulbs to work right.”
Zee reached over, and the blender purred under his touch. “It’s the same way with women and me. The touch must be light yet assertive. I think you’ve got a lot of backed-up orgone in there.” He stabbed Carl’s midriff with a swizzle stick. “How about a run with me tomorrow? We’ll follow the Westway down to the twin towers. I’ll go easy on ya.”
Carl agreed, and they chatted amiably about their usual subjects—slow running and fast women—while Carl tended to business. Later, as he was leaving, Zee leaned close and whispered: “No sense wearing that expensive cologne if you’re going to dress like that.” He reached out to shake, thought better of it, saluted, and left.
The rest of the day bumbled by with many small accidents for Carl. The bar’s electrical system gave out entirely, and he had to mix drinks by hand and repeatedly go down to the basement cooler for ice. The tiny screws in his eyeglasses popped out, and he lost a lens down an open drain. Napkins clung tenaciously to his fingers, no matter how dry he kept them, and he spilled several drinks before he got used to the paper coasters coming away with his hand. Midway through the dinner shift, with the house jammed, the lights began dimming. When he left the bar to check the fuse box, the light came up, only to fade again on his return. “This is weird,” Carl at last acknowledged, running both hands through his startled hair. Sparks crackled between his fingers. “I’m going home.” He went over to the pay phone to call a neighborhood friend to cover for him, but he couldn’t get a dial tone. Moments later a customer used the same phone without difficulty.
Carl waited until Sheelagh came to the bar with drink orders, then signed her toward a vacant corner. “What’s wrong with me tonight, Sheelagh?”
“Your glasses are missing a lens. Your clothes need ironing. And you really should comb your hair.”
“No—I mean, look at this.” He touched her arm, and a large spark volted between them.
“Hey! Cut that out. That hurts.”
“I can’t stop it. I’ve been electrocuting customers all day. Look.” He passed his hand over a stack of napkins, and they rose like drowsy leaves and clung to his fingers.
“It’s some kind of static electricity,” Sheelagh explained.
“I’ll say. What can I do about it?” ,
“Keep your hands to yourself.”
Spark surges thudded through him whenever he reached for metal, and after another hour of stiffening jolts, he sat on a stool at the far end of the bar and cradled his head in his hands.
“Is it that bad, darlin?” A gentle hand touched his bald head, and another spark jumped.
Carl looked up into Caitlin’s whiskey-bright eyes. A feeling of bloated peacefulness buoyed him at the sight of her time-snarled face. “Hi, Caity. Everything’s wrong for me tonight. And I don’t even know why.”
“Just your luck taking a rest. Don’t mind it. Have a drink.”
“Nah—but I’d better get back to work.”
“Wait.” She took his hand, and another knot of electricity unraveled sharply. “I have to tell you.” The marmalade-light in her stare dangled above him, and he could see the whiskey burning in her. “If only I could tell you what I’ve been humbled to. She doesn’t know.” She glanced toward where Sheelagh was serving a table, her sinewy elegance shining in the dim light. “You’re a special man, Carl. Luck splits through you like light through a crystal. I see that. I see it because I’m old, and pain and mistakes have taught me how to see. You’re a beautiful man, Carl Schirmer.” Her scowl softened, and she turned away and went back to the kitchen. A customer called from the bar, and Carl rose like a lark into a smoky sunrise.
Caitlin’s kind words fueled Carl for the rest of his last day, but by closing time he felt wrong again. Tingly as a glowworm, he noticed that all the tiny hairs on his body were standing straight up. He left Caitlin and Sheelagh to shut down the Blue Apple and walked home. An icy zero widened in his chest, and he thought for sure he was going to be sick. Nonetheless, the beauty he had felt that morning persisted. Above the city lights, a chain of stars twined against the darkness, and the fabric of midnight shimmered like wet fur. Only the bizarre emptiness deepening inside him kept him from leaping with joy.
So self-absorbed was he with this inner bubble of expanding vacancy, he didn’t notice the befuddled look on the face of the kid whose huge radio fuzzed out and in as Carl passed. Nor did he see the streetlights extinguishing above him and then flaring back brightly in his wake. Midnight traffic slowed to watch neon lights in the stores along Twenty-third Street warble to darkness as he passed and brighten colorfully in his wake. Not until he had stumbled up the blacked-out stairs of his own building and had fumbled to get his key in the lock by the light of the sparks leaping from his fingers did he notice that a thin ghostfire burned coolly over his hands and arms. He left the door unlocked behind him, afraid that something awful was happening. His apartment lights, like all the lights in the building, browned out. The filaments in the bulbs glowed dark red but cast no radiance. The TV worked yet gave no picture, only a prickly sound. He wheeled the TV to the door of the bathroom and by its pulsing glow had enough light to take a cold shower. The chilled water invigorated him, and when he looked down at his arms, he saw that the shimmering had gone, if it had been there at all. Relief widened in him, and he washed the one lens of his glasses and put them on to examine himself more closely.
A vibration of luminance filled the air, and the wavering static of the TV seemed louder and more reverberant. He slid open the glass door to the shower, and his heart gulped panic. The TV had blacked out. The illumination and noise blared out of the air!
He jumped from the shower stall and nearly collapsed. The bathroom opened into a hallucination of frenzied light: water drops hung in the air like chips of bright crystal. Through the glare in the mirror, through an anvil of ripping-metal noise, he saw that his head blazed, effusing swirls of silvergreen flames! Dumbstruck, he watched the terror in his brilliantly oiled face as green fire fumed from his body in an incandescent rush.
A white-hot shriek cut through him, and his body went glassy, shot through with violet sparks and flurries of black light. Silence froze the room to a cube of crackling light. And the last thing Carl Schirmer saw was the glass of his own horrified face shatter into impossible colors.
***
Zee was the first to see Carl’s apartment when he came by the next morning for their planned run. His knock went unanswered, but he heard the TV, so he tried the door. And it opened. The apartment smelled windshaken, bright as a mountaintop. Zee went over to the TV, which had been wheeled across the room to face the bathroom door and resounded with the loud voices of a morning soap. He turned it off.
“Oh sweet Jesus!” The words escaped him before he knew what he was seeing. The bathroom, a charred socket, looked unrecognizable. Even the mirrors, purpled from exposure to intense heat, returned imageless dark. Zee entered, and tiles crushed to ash beneath his sneakers. He stood numb in the scorched and shrunken room. The seat of the fire-glossed toilet had curled to the shape of a black butterfly, and the sink counter that had held toothbrush and shaving implements had collapsed to twisted clinkers.
The police, later, would classify the fire as un-classifiable. No human remains turned up, and the police filed Carl’s disappearance as a missing person.
Caitlin and Sheelagh came by late in the afternoon to see the mess for themselves, and they found Zee still there.
“What do you think happened?” Caitlin asked after surveying the blasted room.
Zee sat on the couch in the living area where he could see into the bathroom, staring as though he had not heard her. He tugged at his beard, twisting at the braid that had formed from his daylong tugging. “Spontaneous human combustion,” he whispered without looking at her.
“What?” The old woman turned to her daughter, who just shook her tear-streaked face.
“No one knows why,” Zee answered in a trance, “but it happens all the time—usually to old ladies who drink too much.”
Caitlin gave him a fierce, reproving look.
“I’m not joking,” he shot back. “That’s the statistic. Men burn up, too. And I guess that’s what’s happened to Carl.”
“You mean, he just caught fire?” Caitlin sat down beside him and peered into his face incredulously. “How can that be?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. I read about it once. The best theory they have is that imbibed alcohol ignites some kind of chemical reaction in the body.”
“But Carl never drinks,” Sheelagh pointed out, and then straightened with the rise of a memory. “The police came by the tavern. I told them he was feeling odd yesterday. Paper stuck to him and sparks kept jumping from his fingers.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Zee muttered. He stood up and went back to the bathroom for another look at the mystery. A rational man, he felt, muscularly felt, that there was a reason for this.
The blue, wide-sky fragrance had almost entirely gone. Sunlight slanted through the apartment window and laid a diagonal bar across the purpled bathroom mirror. In the brilliant yellow shaft, a shadow showed within the heat-varnish of the mirror.
“Hey!” he called to the two women. “Do you see this? Or am I losing my mind?”
Caitlin and Sheelagh entered the bathroom with trepid alertness and peered where Zee pointed. In the violet-black sheen of the mirror, where sunlight crawled, the vaguest shadow shimmered.
“It looks like a tree crown to me,” Caitlin said.
“No—it’s the outline of a head, neck, and shoulders,” Zee insisted, his finger frantically outlining the image.
“Could be,” Sheelagh conceded. “But it could also just be our imagination.”
“I’m a science writer,” Zee reminded her impatiently, pressing his face to the mirror. “I don’t have an imagination. Get me a screwdriver. Come on.”
Zee dismantled the mirror and took it to his studio office in Union Square. For a while, he experimented with it himself, illuminating the surface with sunlight, arc light, UV light. Nothing more than the dimmest semblance of a human head appeared. And the rorschached shape could really have been anything. But Zee recognized the boxlike contours of Carl’s head, the familiar silhouette so oft-seen in the darkness of lights-out at St. Tim’s, too well remembered from those lonely first years when a friend was the closest he got to family. Hard as he tried, though, his amplifications distinguished little more than an amorphous shadow.
Then, a friend who worked at IBM’s image-intensification lab in Jersey took pity on his feeble but relentless efforts and decided to prove once and for all that the mirror exhibited a random fire pattern. A week later, the friend, pastier and sheepish, presented him with a computer-enhanced photograph. The five-by-seven-inch unglossed image showed a starburst of puissant radiance, most of it blank with an unsealed intensity. Daggered at the very center, a clot of darkness resolved with a stabbing clarity to Carl Schirmer’s horror-crazed features.
Eating the Strange
Nothing—the blankest word in the language. A year ago, Carl Schirmer vanished into nothing. How? I’ve come to believe that the microevents in the atoms of Carl’s body are the key. I’m not a physicist, but I know enough science to guess what happened to him. Here’s what I figure:
The very big and the very small—general relativity and quantum mechanics—come together at a fundamental unit of length called Planck’s length, which is the geometrical mean of Compton’s wavelength and Einstein’s gravitational radius of a particle. It looks like this:
1=√hf/c^3
It’s equivalent to about 10 -33 centimeter. The edge of nothingness. Just beyond that smallness, spacetime itself loses the flat, continuous shape we take for granted and becomes a fantastic seething of wormholes and microbridges, the tiniest webs and bubblings. Any part of this ceaseless ferment lasts no more than the sheerest fraction of a second. It is the texture of Nothing. Like sponge. Or suds. Each bubble exists as a solitary region of space: The surface of the bubble is the farthest distance the center of the bubble can know about in its brief lifespan because that’s as far as light can travel in so short a time. It’s a universe in itself, existing only for that fraction of time and during that fraction connecting our universe with the ubiquitous Field that connects all universes.
To see how this fact connects with Carl Schirmer, we have to go back to Planck. At the end of the nineteenth century, he was trying to explain why radiation varies with temperature. As an object is heated, first it gets red-hot, then white-hot. It only gets blue-hot if the temperature increases. The higher frequencies of blue require more energy—which was news in the nineteenth century. Greater energy for shorter wavelengths! Not what common sense had learned from sound and water waves, which need more energy the longer they are. The now classic formula that predicts this phenomenon is E = hF where h = Planck’s constant.
Since frequency is the inverse of time, the formula can be written this way: E X T = Constant (h). Energy, as everybody knows, equals mc2, mass times the speed of light squared. What, after all, is the speed of light but a length of space covered in a period of time. So, h actually equals Mass times Length2/Time. ML2/T is called angular momentum.
What is it? Linear momentum times the radius around which it spins, ML/T x L = ML2/T, like a rock in a sling. The amazing thing is that this angular momentum, alias Planck’s constant, can hold any amount of energy at all! Just as a skater spins faster by pulling in her arms, the frequency of a photon increases as its radius, in this case wavelength, decreases. Fantastically, there is no limit to this increase of energy, either. The smaller the photon, the more energy it contains!
Somehow, Carl turned into light. And that light did not wholly irradiate away. If it had, a large part of Manhattan would have been vaporized. Instead, the photons that made up Carl increased in energy and shrank. The energy flux was so great that Carl’s body of light shrank smaller than the fine structure of spacetime itself—and he fell through the fabric of our reality into the seething superspace of quantal-tunnels, spume, and foam—perhaps to expand again in another universe.
This is the ghost hole theory. A saner phrase than Nothing. But really, it’s just as senseless.
***
I’m writing a science fiction novel. Shards of Time. It’s about Carl, of course, and the ghost hole that swallowed him. Just now it’s seeming that’s all there is between me and insanity—this fabulous story of a man who turns into light, a man whose fate I’d always taken for granted. Why are stories so long? The text is already there, in the true history of accidents that brought Carl and me together and then separated us. If I can just write it before my funds dry up, I may be able to sell it and not have to move. I don’t want to move. There’s been enough erasure lately. I’ve barely the stamina left to imagine the lies that can carry the ideas coming at me. The moment goes everywhere at once. Unfortunately, the muscle of my memory is numb, and my line of concentration has been wavering. I must rest. Actually, I must restructure myself inside out. Perhaps I’ll fast. That’s one way to restructure and save money at the same time.
Caitlin Sweeney came to see me. The old lady was surprised at this mess. She didn’t know I’d lost my teaching post. I think she was drunk. She wanted to see the mirror and the photo again, and she sat for a long time by the window looking at them. She wanted to know what they meant. I was five or six gins into forgetting that day, and I told her everything I’ve guessed about the ghost hole. When I was done, she asked why other scientists weren’t studying what had happened to Carl. I tried to tell her that the mirror had become scientifically inadmissible after I took it off the wall, but I cracked up—laughing as much as crying — and that scared her off. Later, as it was growing darker and I was coming up from that day’s drunk, I remembered her bird-bright eyes and the queer way she peered at the photo close up, the silver of her breath cutting the gloss again and again until she was sure of what she was seeing. And now I’m sure. Carl isn’t screaming with pain in this photo. He’s grimacing with intense pleasure!
—excerpts from The Decomposition Notebook by Zeke Zhdarnov
***
Orgasm ignited him. Hot as the sun’s weight, space molded his shape. He tried to move but could not budge the pleasure. He tried to see and saw a hard blue sky, deeper than sight, quivering with delight. Listening, he heard his heart moaning and blood sizzling in his ears.
The voltage of the orgasm wearied, and the him-shaped heat melted to a delicate warmth.
“YOU ARE AWAKE!” A blowtorch voice seared his hearing, and his whole being juddered.
“Excuse me,” the voice said more softly, deep as a man’s, lissome as a woman’s. The words came from every direction. “Can you tell me who you are?”
He tried to speak, and his voice had to cross a dreamgap between will and breath. When at last the words came, the sound of his voice subtracted him from his pleasurable stillness, and he immediately felt himself upfalling, floating and turning through blue nothing: “Who wants to know?”
***
Carl drifted a long time. Blue filled the hollow bodiless center of his mind with peace. Memory became a soft distance. Expectation remained unbegun.
So, when the voice returned, directionless as smoke, intimate as a friend, the words embraced all of him. What followed he would remember ever afterward as semantic liquid, a torrent of fantasy and weird ideas that emerged from a cloud of dreams and fell awake inside him as a voice – to which he listened rapt as the face of the world—
“At the end of time, in the last million years of the universe, an unusual creature drifts through the slow hurry of evolution into the glory and anguish of self-awareness. It is an eld skyle, and it is I. I am vast by human standards: a cubic kilometer of silaceous cell matrices intricately and delicately interpenetrating. A colossal jellyfish floating in a lake: a radiolarial system, highly specialized, yet stationary and witless-looking as a brain without a body. To you, I would appear as a cloudy pond shimmering with biotic iridescence. Yet, what makes me unusual is not my size or unlikely form. I am unusual, because I thrive almost wholly on ghosts. I eat the past.”
“Wait a minute! Hold on now!” Carl assumed he was dreaming and called through the nightmare’s thickness. “Are you saying I’m alive? This isn’t the next world?”
“It’s another world, Carl,” the gray voice answered.
“How do you know my name?”
“I know everything about you.”
“Are you—God?”
A hearty laugh towered like a megalith. “No. I’m as mortal as you. That’s why I can assure you—you’re not dead.”
“How come I feel I should be?”
“Perhaps because you are, at this moment, bodiless.”
“And you call that alive?” The propinquity of madness alarmed him. Maybe this wasn’t a dream. “Where am I? I can’t see myself.”
“You are inside me. I am reshaping you. To even begin to understand how this is possible, you must know something about my world. I live in a special region inside the cosmic black hole at the end of time. The universe around me is small and hot. Spacetime has long ago completed its expansion, braked, and begun to fall back on itself. At the time of this telling, one hundred and twenty-five billion years after your star, Sol, cindered to frozen rubble, the whole universe is a mere six hundred thousand parsecs wide, the distance from your Earth to the Andromeda galaxy. All of spacetime has been reduced to a mote of what you knew the cosmos to be.”
“I knew the cosmos to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx,” Carl’s voice quaked. “Where am I?”
“I’ve told you. You are at the end of time.”
“But why?” Carl whined. “I was just at home, taking a shower—”
“One hundred and thirty billion years ago.”
“I’m hallucinating. I must be hallucinating.”
“Would you rather not hear this?”
“I have a choice?”
“Of course.” The eld skyle’s voice had the long patience of a horizon. “I am narrowing my five-space consciousness to your human smallness, because it pleasures me. It is not at all necessary. If you prefer, I’ll just pass you on into my world. Words are useful only if you can believe them. In your case, perhaps, experience itself is the best teacher.”
“If you’re going to put it that way—go ahead, tell me everything.”
The blue space holding Carl brightened its feverish dream. “I’m glad, Carl. I’ve wanted to relate this story for a long time. Let me begin again. We are now in a place many years in your future. So far in the future that the universe itself is old and dying. It is caving in on itself. In the whirlpool center of this implosion, the most immense collapsar that has ever existed spins, tusked with fiery streamers huge as galaxies. The void around it flares with its radiant scud, too hot for planets or even ordinary stars. But inside the black hole, beyond its cyclone of neutron fire, where all things, even the subtleties of light, are spellbound by gravity, a wonderful kingdom exists.”
“And that’s where we are now, right?”
“Yes. The kingdom is called the Werld. It is a lightsecond deep, and it is wide as thirteen Earths. Most remarkable of all, it is embedded in a bubble of ordinary spacetime, a gravitational globule suspended inside the black hole. The spin of the collapsar’s ring nucleus distorts infalling spacetime around the vacuole kingdom, sealing the Werld off from the crushing gravity that surrounds it on all sides. The nucleus of the black hole is the kingdom’s source of life, much the way Sol was the lifesource of your planet—only in reverse. Sol was a star, and it radiated the energy that sustained Earth life. The ring nucleus here is a singularity, an infinitely dense zone where light and spacetime cease to exist. The singularity pulls energy into it. The radiation streaming past and through the Werld provides the light and energy for life to thrive. After passing here, the energy plunges on, into the nucleus, where it is destroyed. Except at the exact center. There a hole in the ring singularity links into superspace, an infinite corridor that connects all the universes that exist—the multiverse. You popped out of that hole.”
“Any chance I could pop back in?” Carl queried hopefully.
“I’m afraid not. You see, you came out as light. And most of you got lost in the ring singularity. Only some of you shot straight through the hole of the ring, arced along a klein-bottle warp, looping from the center of the black hole to the periphery before plummeting back toward the core. Along the way, your four-space journey intersected the top edge of this kingdom and glinted here in this living lake—in me. My specialized cells just under the glassy surface of this lake captured a few of your photons, and over a period of time equal to an Earth century, I re-created you from the information inside your own light.”
Carl felt frosty with fear. “How do you know you got it right?”
“Every molecule of your form has been explored by my five-space consciousness and compared to the anthropic ideal enfolded in the hyperspace of your genes. The flaws and variances of the genetic ideal expressed the rough edges of your individuality: your soft stomach, weak eyes, bald head, and bloated kidneys. Those deviations from the perfection implicit in your chromosomes are actually food to a being like me—an eld skyle. I eat the strange. You see, my five-space mind experiences you wholly, shining with the full possibilities of life. There is a great potential difference between that and your actual physical form. An eld skyle experiences a thrilling, enduring rush of power by rectifying the dimensionally charged gap between the optimal and the actual.”
“Yeah, well, I’m glad this was a high for somebody. But what does it do for me?”
“What I’ve done for you, Carl”—the eld skyle spoke with the exuberance of a game-show host—”is give you a new body. It’s fashioned from lake sludge, but it’s more fully you than the old shape you endured. Your body has been adamized, if you will accept my neologism. Like Adam, you have now been made in the exact likeness of your nucleic potential. You have been both exalted and reduced. Your individuality is potentially less while your actual expression, your stock strength, your innate animality, is greater.”
“Sounds nifty as an idea,” Carl admitted, “but is it me?”
“Apart from your new appearance,” the eld skyle’s voice hushed through him, “you won’t feel any differently than you did one hundred and thirty billion years ago on Earth. You are still essentially yourself. Even your memories are intact. Let me show you—”
The presence of the eld skyle’s voice vanished into a bleat of silence. Anxiety shivered through Carl as the conviction that he was not dreaming seized him again. And then the glistening pleasure returned. Fear shriveled. He had no idea what was happening but felt no fear at all. Warmingly, the blue void that surrounded and buoyed him shimmered with movement. Light jellied to images, glassy shapes from his past: St. Tim’s ash-colored buildings, canyoned Manhattan, the Blue Apple’s dirty bricks glowing in the city’s crooked daylight. Faces snapped past like the rags of fireworks: childhood buddies, teachers, lovers, bosses, and his closest friend, Zeke, ZeeZee, Zeebo, the Zee, his first hero, the big kid who had protected him from bullies, the grown man Carl had helped grapple with his feelings after Nam and a divorce—
Gone.
Dumbstruck and glowing with new feelings, Carl rolled gently through the blue emptiness.
“As you see, your history is still with you,” the voice returned, slender. “So is your fear. But I’m holding it in check, because you are from a special era of life. You have the possibility of apprehending your fate, unlike the thousands of other humans from earlier times that have given their strangeness to me and gone on. They had no way of grasping the concept of a final black hole or this marvelous kingdom dangling within it. You are the first that I can speak to about the infinity virus.”
“I think you’re overrating me.”
“No. I am using concepts your brain has already encountered.”
“Right, but my brain is a lot smarter than I am. Just take it slow.”
“Certainly,” the eld skyle agreed, sounding very close in the whaled space. “The infinity virus arrived a billion years ago. It came through the ring hole from somewhere in the multiverse. It carried the information to build me and all the other lifeforms in the Werld. There is no archaeological evidence of life older than a billion years ago anywhere in the kingdom. None of the intelligences that live here now know where the virus came from. Also, none of the lifeforms that evolved from the infinity virus are humanoid. All the people in the Werld have come here through eld skyles, as you’ve come here.”
“You mean—I’m not alone? There are other humans here?”
“Oh, yes. All of them, or their ancestors, have come through me and my kind. We are the most evolved product of the viral program. Three primary factors sustain our five-space awareness: light infalling through the collapsar’s event horizon, the mineral honeycomb of the rock that holds our liquid forms, and the dimensional charge from assimilating the strangeness of other creatures. To satisfy the last of these needs, eld skyles are equipped with a unique spore designed very much like its viral ancestor. The spore is encoded to activate only inside neural systems broadcasting a certain frequency indicative of self-awareness. After it is formed and programmed, it is iridium-coated and ejected through a waterspout high into the atmosphere. There its glide-shape catches the powerful axial winds of the Werld, which propel it into the fibrous, filament-wide tunnels that connect the fringes of the gravity bubble with the superspace in the open center of the singularity.”
“All this for a meal?” Carl, featherbrained with the weirdness of his predicament, could just as easily have wept as laughed. “You’re a five-space being and you haven’t even invented fast food yet? Come on.”
“This does sound complex from a three-space view, I grant you. Though let me go on. It takes my spore years to reach the hole in the singularity, and the instant it gets there, it vanishes into the multiverse and just as instantly appears somewhere in the infinite elsewhere. Of course, most of the spores are lost. Even with their iridium armor, the heat of the stars and the far greater endlessness of space defeat them. Only the tiniest fraction of the trillions of spores ejected by an eld skyle ever find their way to a useful environment.”
“Well, you’re obviously doing something right.”
“Yes, indeed. Entirely by chance, one spore reached the planet Earth eighty-four million years before you were born. It hovered in the reservoir of ionic detritus of the upper atmosphere for a hundred thousand years or so before sifting down into the biosphere. A fish ate it first, and the molecular lock of the spore’s surface bonded it to the nerve tissue of the creature. The spore passed along from animal to animal as food for millions of years. For a long while, it lapsed into the limbo of silt before being taken up by a plant, eaten, and carried once again by the life frenzy. Thirty-two thousand years ago, a lake-dweller in neolithic Switzerland ate a tough piece of badger meat that contained the spore. That was one of your ancestors.”
“No wonder I’m a vegetarian.”
“The frequency of her neural system proved complex enough to activate the spore, which immediately sited itself in her genetic material. Fifteen hundred generations later, the spore received a subquantal signal from me, the eld skyle that began its journey one hundred and thirty billion years in the future. That signal is the key to this whole cycle. It is an inertial wave signal and propagates through superspace instantly. My need is felt everywhere that my spores are, for the spores possess inertial identity with me. My five-space mind selects an activated spore from somewhere in creation by sensing and evaluating the complexity of the spores’ hosts, and at my discretion, the chosen spore begins its delivery.”
“So—bingo—here I am.”
“Would you like to hear more about the mechanism of your journey?”
“Why not?”
“As soon as I selected you, the spore’s master program went to work on two fronts—your body’s neuromolecular field and your universe’s inertial field.”
“You’ve already lost me.”
“Bear with me. The spore flooded your body with a complexly designed substance modeled on your body’s natural neurotransmitters. It mimicked your own nerve chemicals so that it could penetrate the RNA in the synapses of your nerves. Within forty-eight hours, the spore’s neurochemical retrofitted every RNA molecule in your body’s synapses. The spore chemical modulated your nerve impulses, triggering a neural feedback pattern in your sensory ganglia, brain stem, and limbic area that you experienced as intense, inexplicable euphoria. But that was a mere side effect.”
“I’m beginning to feel that I’m just a side effect,” Carl despaired.
“In a manner of speaking, you are. You’re a projection of your body. The main thrust of the spore saturation was to generate a waveform hologram of your body, inside out, atom by atom. Once that waveform came on, the electric resonance of your nervous system began harmonizing with the magnetic field of the Earth. The harmonic buzz charged you with a billion-volt potential difference between the ionosphere and the surface of the Earth. You were walking lightning.”
“That explains why I sparked all day.”
“Yes, that took the better part of a day. But what happened next happened swiftly. The wave resonance of you and the planet began to pick up overtonal harmonics from the sun’s field, the local stars, even the galaxy. By that time, you were hypercharged, and the water in your shower sustained such a strong transfer charge that it flew away from your body. Your waveform stood in resonance with the charge of the universe itself. A few moments later, you reached concrescence, the point where the resonation of you and the universe tuned precisely enough to supply the energy for a local collapse. In a sliver of a second, the immense energy transfer from the universe shrank your light pattern into a space smaller than ten to the minus forty-third centimeter, smaller than the grain of spacetime. Your collapsed waveform fell into a hypertubule, a wormhole entrance into the multiverse smaller than a quark. The inertial imprint of the spore guided you here. And so the circle joins.”