“Look at it closely and tell me what you see.”
It’s not really the time for this kind of game. Thomas’ face stares back at him from the metal. Not knowing what to reply, he starts, “Well, I see my face…”
Emma moves closer to him. Now the metal reflects both of their faces, side by side, its curved surface distorting them somewhat.
“I see myself as well.”
He laughs, a little embarrassed.
“Don’t you think that’s normal?”
She backs up until his reflection disappears.
She starts again, “But even like this, I still see myself.”
Wondering where she is going with this, he looks at her again, searching the depths of the metal mirror in vain.
“I only see myself, though.”
She turns away abruptly, sighing in despair, vaguely agitated. “That’s the problem. Dinner will be ready when you are.”
Perplexed, he looks at the piece of shiny metal for a moment, then throws it away.
In the living room, after dinner, she tells him that she would prefer to read alone, that evening. In more than one way, that’s fine for him. He has decided to go to bed early this evening. His leg still pains him and he still feels very tired. As he wishes her good night, he glances at the screen of the reader. She’s chosen Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll. No doubt about it, it’s another message.
He wakes when Emma comes into the bedroom. He’s only slept for a few hours, but he feels rested, almost soothed. His leg is noticeably less painful. His daughter takes off her clothes, then starts to brush her hair slowly, looking at herself in the mirror at the foot of her cot. There’s just enough light for him to be able to make out her face in the mirror. Her eyes are shining slightly… Too much, maybe. Tears…?
Mirror… Mirror…
The word turns, collides with others that have been floating for two days in Thomas’ head. You mirror, me reflection. The unique, the same reflection. Reflection, mirror. Different but alike. So much alike! Suddenly the shadows inside clear. Light pierces its way through his mind, albeit with difficulty. He sees images now, memories. The cry of a baby as it stops a finger from pressing against a trigger. “Would you have really killed yourself? Me, too…” For him, for her, for both of them, life has no meaning except in relationship with the loved one, in relationship with others. Alone, Thomas could never have survived here. He could not have survived without a real reason to survive. They’re alike, the two of them. Emma is like him. Suddenly, he truly feels his daughter’s fear, her anguish. They’re the same as his. He understands the reason and the profound meaning of her actions, her words. He understands the true meaning of her request.
Of course, fear, another fear, immediately leaps up within him in response. He can’t! Not a second time. Yes, but this time, she’s the one making the request. It’s her request and hers alone. It’s not a fantasy. Or if it is, at least it’s hers. She wants this. On her own. She has the right to choose, the right to take her chances. And Thomas does not have the right to oppose her just because of centuries of moral conditioning and social rules that no longer have any place here and now. She’s grown up, possibly more so than he is. And she’s conscious. She knows what she wants. And he does not have the right to impose anything on her.
He does not have the right to choose for her.
He continues to hesitate for a long time, then walks over to her, silent, in the dark. Until his image is reflected in the mirror.
“Now, I see myself, too,” he murmurs.
At the sound of his voice, the appearance of his reflection, she jumps. She whirls around, eyes wet — so it was tears then — and lost, with an acknowledging smile.
“Papa!”
She throws herself on his neck, hugs him very tightly to her, and in that embrace he feels all of the anguish, the infinite fear of solitude. He waits for a moment for the flow to wane and ebb, then unknots Emma’s arms and takes her by the shoulders.
“It really won’t be easy for me, you know… At the start, in any case… And often there will be three of us involved here. In my head, at least… Sorry…”
“I know, I know. It won’t be easy for me, either… At the start, in any case… I don’t know, in fact. But I can’t… I mean, alone, I would be…”
“I know, I know…”
He places his finger on Emma’s lips. They look at each other for a long time, as if for the first time and, in a certain respect, it is the first time. Then she whispers, “Come.”
The blistering sun of the dry season gently fades between the waves of the sandy hills. Clouds of dust fly up to their peaks and then fall back into the valleys. Emma looks away from the red moon and back, once again, to the new star that has appeared long before the others, every evening, for a week now. Emma has been watching it grow in the dusk for the last half hour.
She is so very happy. Her heart pounds wildly, about to burst. She closes her eyes. She remembers a face, a voice, a beloved presence. Tender, gentle embraces. And, silently, from the depths of her heart, from the core of her being, she thanks the one who now lies behind the house, beside her mother. She feels a tug on her pants leg. She bends down and takes Nadine into her arms. Nadine, her daughter, her love, her reason for living and hoping for eight years now. Her father fought for a long time. And he was still there to see her born and grow for a few months. No, Emma did not die in childbirth. And Thomas was finally able to forgive himself for Nancy. He departed, unworried, at peace, almost happy.
“That’s not a star, is it, Mommy?”
The little girl’s eyes are full of curiosity and excitement, almost marvel. Emma kisses her on the forehead and gently caresses her red hair with a hand callused by everyday work.
“You’re right, sweetheart. It’s not a star. It’s a house, a large flying house bringing lots of people to us.”
“People? Other people?”
The green eyes grow so huge they fill the tiny oval face raised to the sky.
“Living beings, yes. Conscious people, like you and me. People who talk, walk, sing, cry and laugh…”
“Like us?”
This almost unconceivable mystery plunges the child into an amazed astonishment. Emma looks back at the star, which has gradually been transforming into a tiny brilliant sphere over the past few minutes.
“Yes, Nadine,” she finally replies, dreamily. “Like us. People to talk with, people to live with. People to love.”
They both fall silent and, holding each other closely, they follow the sphere as it descends slowly toward them, as night falls over their world.
Omphalos
by Pat Forde
“Fault-lines are best observed by those who, instead of peering down from above, stand at the bottom and look up.”
— John Le Carré
“The house at the end of the road.”
That’s what the voice in Audrey’s earphone murmured as she turned her car onto Hoag Head Place. The voice belonged to a member of the Security Division team tracking her every move over the Darwin-to-Boston satlink, accompanying Audrey virtually, advising her wisely, guiding her into the eye of an oncoming media storm. “We’re told you can’t miss it,” the voice added.
“Got that right,” Audrey replied.
Hoag Head Place was a cul-de-sac of private estates in old Boston, and the house at the end stood out on a bluff overlooking the Charles River, the ‘head’ in Hoag Head. No house had been built on that bluff in all the years of Boston’s life-span, not until Kevin Dunbar, VR marketing magnate, convinced other Hoag Head estate-owners that he could end the aggravating late-night lovers-laning by walling off the Head for good. Audrey had read about the foofaraw over the house’s construction in the Herald; later there were admiring pieces about the architectural style, which gave the
mansion’s river-facing side the appearance of folding itself partway over the bluff. From the roadside, however, Dunbar’s house appeared perched on the edge of a void.
The house at the end of the world, that’s what it looked like to Audrey. Two pinnacled towers shouldered up from the far side of the roof, so that the house seemed hunched forward, on the verge of a great fall. Much like the man hiding inside…
Kevin Dunbar had just been accused of a DUTT crime involving something called “the al-Khafji Simulation”, which purportedly led to thousands of deaths way back in Gulf War I. So Dunbar was destined to fall from his perch today. And birds of prey from every corner of the media were already on their way.
Audrey drove past the house and around the cul-de-sac’s circle, and parked in front of a neighbour’s high-fenced estate. Hopping out, she walked back toward Dunbar’s end-lot, taking long-legged strides, her long black hair tucked and tied into a conservative bun, her armour of confidence tempered by the pressure, the anticipation in the pit of her stomach. Audrey was two days shy of her thirty-third birthday, and had never faced a meeting like this before.
“He’s now on a landline, second floor,” whispered the voice in her ear, verifying Dunbar was still inside his mansion. Unfortunately, the retired titan-of-industry wasn’t answering any calls or emails — and the house’s huge Net-footprint had privacy firewalls as high as mountain ranges, to keep Dunbar from being disturbed by any but the most intimate friends.
The house presented an equally private face to the road — in fact, it appeared to have its back turned to the road. Few windows were visible, and the front door was concealed behind a covered walkway that extended down to the driveway’s barred gates, where a gatehouse-entrance stood. To Audrey, the covered walkway looked like a ‘tail’ trailing from the hunched-over mansion’s rear.
“Be tough getting in there,” she told her collar-mike as she reached the reinforced gatehouse-door. A metal sign above the door blazoned:
NO SOLICITORS. VISITORS REQUIRE INVITATION.
“Probably won’t have contact with us once you’re inside,” a new voice warned her. Mitch Maisley, head of Security Division down in Darwin, Australia.
Audrey pressed the gatehouse buzzer a few times.
Waved at the camera gazing down at her from a post of the driveway gate.
Waited for a response from the wall-speaker.
A faint wooka-wooka-wooka sounded far overhead — a traffic-spotter or newsdrone was hovering in from the river, aiming its lenses at Hoag Head Place. Possessed by the feeling that she was at the epicentre of breaking news in the moments before it became news, Audrey looked back over her shoulder toward the tops of the curbside chestnut trees.
Toward the drone drifting into view in a patch of blue sky.
Toward the Boston Metro Police optics observing her from a lamppost.
Toward the satellite tracking her on behalf of Security Division.
Then turned back toward Kevin Dunbar, watching her through the driveway gate-camera. Audrey kept her finger pressed on the silent buzzer until a snap-crackle issued from a speaker in the gatehouse door.
“Yes, yes, what is it?”
“Name’s Audrey Zheng, Mister Dunbar. Need to talk to you on an urgent matter.”
A clank as the gatehouse door unlocked, popped an inch open.
“Okay, I’m in,” she murmured to the Darwin team, and Maisley got on to remind her:
“Don’t try to play him, Aud—”
The satlink cut off as she pushed through into the gatehouse. Alone now, in a box-like room facing a pane of one-way glass, the tremendous pressure Audrey was under surfacing as a fleeting pinch-me-I’m-in-a-movie feeling:
Ready for my close-up, Mister Dunbar.
A close-up was exactly what Audrey got. The gateroom’s side-wall lit up as she was scanned by the sort of invasive detectors that left Audrey feeling exposed, wishing she’d worn more layers. The sidewall shut off, an inner door opened, and a dark-featured man with a shock of thick white hair stepped through. Kevin Dunbar was in his mid-sixties, tall, trim, face flushed with fatigue, black eyes scrutinizing Audrey carefully.
“Who’s calling card are you?” he wanted to know.
Audrey delved into her purse. “As to that.” She produced an authorized ID-wedge.
Dunbar palmed the wedge without even a glance at it, began circling her, studying her. “Not a saleswoman,” he mused. “Not hard enough to be a Fed. Too well-dressed for press.” He checked his watch. “Far too timely to be a U.N. bureau-flunky.” Dunbar stopped in front of her, leaned confidentially closer. “Makes me wonder,” he said, “whether you represent someone with as much at stake as I have this morning.”
Audrey attempted to change tack. “Mister Dunbar—”
“Ah, I see, I see.” Raising his dark brows in an exaggerated show of enlightenment. “You’re here on behalf of…” He held her wedge up high without breaking eye contact, gave Audrey the smallest of smiles. “Immensity.”
This time she bowed her head in acquiescence, discouraged by Dunbar’s mood but prepared to play his game. “Our downtown office tried to contact you.”
“Help me out here, Miss Zheng.” Dunbar folded his arms across his chest. “Hague indicts me on a Dual-Use Technology Transgression, and in less than an hour who should show up at my door? A representative of the world’s one and only ‘crossover-institution’.”
Audrey raised both hands in a hold-it-right-there gesture.
“Or are you still calling it a ‘crowbar-institution’?” Dunbar began tossing out the hoariest slogans from Immensity’s early days. “‘A way to pry all mankind in a new direction.’ Or how about: ‘A big step toward the next step in human civilization.’” Giving her the smallest of grimaces, as though the old catch-phrases had a sour aftertaste. “Suppose it’s too late to pry me in a new direction, eh, Miss Zheng?”
If she said the wrong thing now, he’d toss her out on the street and that would be that… “Audrey will do,” she told him, then took a big gamble, folding her own arms and raising her chin a little as she said: “Going to stand out here scolding me all morning, Mister Dunbar? Wouldn’t you prefer to invite me in, hear what Immensity has to offer you?”
The distant wooka-wooka-wooka of the drone outside was suddenly drowned out by the loud ACK-ACK-ACK of a manned chopper fly-by.
“Kevin will do,” he suggested, waving her to follow as he stepped back through the inner door. Audrey ducked after Dunbar into the covered walkway, followed him up to the mansion itself, then stepped into a high-ceilinged foyer. Dunbar turned to her.
“I’ve lawyers on hold. Wait in the library, please.” Making a vague gesture toward the back of the ground floor, he disappeared upstairs.
Audrey wandered down a corridor in search of the library, passing through a set of rooms so sparsely furnished they echoed. A den with only a couch and coffee table facing a broad fireplace, nothing on the mantle but a box of matches, nothing on the table but some papers topped by a to-do list. Then a storeroom with only a solitary stack of boxes, a to-do list taped to the top box. Then a workshop with a few tools scattered along a back counter-top, a lonely sawhorse in the centre, nothing else.
And then an even emptier room, essentially a gallery of glass-framed holos hanging on the walls. Audrey slowed crossing this space, astonished by the power of the images. Disturbing, hauntingly intimate shots of people caught in the trauma of war, explosion, and destruction. War-journalist holos, some taken during the recent Xinjiang uprising, others taken during the Myanmar crisis, earlier conflicts. All similar in style. All taken by the same cameraman?
Taken by someone who’d surely risked his life to get them.
Pushing on through other near-empty rooms, noting no woman’s touch, but spotting more hand-printed to-do lists. A retired titan still had l
ots to do…
Audrey found the library on the river-side of the ground floor, where the mansion rambled down the slope of Hoag Head in a series of spectacular architectural switchbacks that she’d seen showcased in the papers. The first half-floor down from the ground was a single narrow room running the length of the house. It was crammed with shelves of books and datums, shelves arrayed in a dozen or so separate bays, each centred around a broad desk. Rampways at either end of the long room descended to the lower bluff floors, while the outer walls comprised a single wrap-around window with a breathtaking view of the river and the city of Cambridge on the far bank.
Stepping down into the library. Pinning it instantly as Dunbar’s primary living space in the house, his working office and private hang-out. Things looked cluttered here; personal items were scattered about on desks, in the recessed bays. An alcove adjacent to the steps she’d just come down held advertising awards, industry magazines with headlines from Dunbar’s illustrious career:
“Booting up Brands in Multiplayer Realms.”
“From Virtual to UberReal.”
“Simulating a new Spin on Spin.”
“The Mathematics of Spin.”
“The Meme-sequencing Machine” — that line captioned a Time cover showing a young, dashing, dark-haired Dunbar outside the headquarters of his cash-cow consulting firm. UberReal, the firm that made a cool billion by applying SOOPE theory to the tangled plotlines of million-plus player online Realms. Realm subscribers shunned mundane product placements, but responded to a clever contextual insertion. And UberReal could SOOPE =branding paths= out of interwoven plots, sequence the rebirth of real-world brands inside even the most far-out Realm meta-fantasies…
Hearing a clink of glassware, followed by a scrape of furniture being moved, Audrey began weaving through the labyrinth of shelves toward the source of the sound, following tracks worn by wheeled chairs into the carpeting, skirting desks with open books lying binding-up, passing notepads with hand-printed lists on side-tables and on chairs and in open desk-drawers.
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 32
