Such questions were idle. I had more than enough to occupy my mind.
Returning to the chair that had suddenly become my observation deck to the universe, I dropped into it and cast my mind out, beyond the Earth.
* * * *
June 19
Haven’t slept for two days now. I can’t fend off the impressions flooding in on me long enough to lose consciousness.
I find I almost don’t want to.
Where can I begin to tell what’s happened in the last two days?
Start with this Earth, perhaps.
My perception of this globe we inhabit is no longer that of a featureless blob. I can now distinguish variations in its mass down to the smaller mountain ranges. Undersea ones are as visible as those on the surface. The topography of this globe—to a certain scale—is now always present in my mind.
Closer to home, I can sense snaller masses for miles around. My house and its contents are a ghostly schematic. Passing people and cars on the street wander in and out of focus. Nearby cities are concentrations of weight.
All of this stimuli might be manageable, in terms of organizing them in my mind, were it not for the simultaneous flood of data from the rest of the universe.
I am swamped with the weight of our cosmos.
I can now perceive every object of sizeable mass in our solar system. Asteroids of a certain size, moons, the very rings around planets. Speaking of planets—I can now confirm that there is indeed a tenth one. Its gravity perturbs my altered vision as surely as it does the orbit of Neptune. I can sense the dark mass swimming at the end of its long, long sun-tether, not quite as far out as the Oort Cloud.
Some of the topography of our own moon is also visible to me.
If this is all a hallucination, it is incredibly detailed and consistent.
My mind no longer stops at the limits of our solar system, however.
For the past forty-eight hours, I have probed and pushed and almost inadvertantly strengthened my new senses, until I can now pick up signals from lightyears away.
They say there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
I swear I can sense each one.
Oh, not all are individuals. The signals pile up and interfere constructively and destructively with each other, merging, losing their individuality. Still, I believe that somewhere in the welter of the gravitons flooding in on my retinas and stimulating my brain are representatives of every kind of sun.
Pulsars, white dwarfs, black holes, neutron stars, binary systems, cepheid variables, giants off the main sequence—all are tugging at my perceptions, every minute, fron every direction, below my feet as well as above.
The tugging. The awful pulling—that’s what makes this new sense so devastatingly demanding. Vision has never really been characterized—at least to me—by any notion of weight or compulsion, despite the metaphor of being “pulled” by a sight. But this alteration to my eyes has left me with an awful awareness of how we are daily impinged on by gravity.
Of course, objectively speaking, nothing has changed. All my life, this rain of gravity has been pouring down on me, without my taking any notice of it. But now, the ability to “see” it has made me hypersensitive to it.
I feel as if my whole body is being drawn by a team of competing horses in a thousand different directions, as if the universe is attempting to rend me atom from atom. The worst kind of migraine that fades in and out.
I know this is all psychological.
Still, I can’t make it go away.
I don’t know what to do. One minute, holding my head and fighting back tears of pain, I’m praying that as the chiltonium decays, the effect will disappear. The next minute, headache fading, I’m enraptured by the vision of the universe held together by innumerable skeins of gravitons.
Since there’s nothing I can do to rid myself of the talent, I suppose I must utilize it to the fullest.
I will try to see if I can extend my new vision beyond our galaxy.
* * * *
June 20
No luck yet. I am confident that there are gravitic signals from other galaxies hidden in the mix that I just have not learned yet to separate out. Will keep trying.
Later. Completely exhausted, I managed to drop off for a spell. Woke again to the phone, but couldn’t summon up the energy to get out of bed and answer it. Must have been Karla or Mark. I hope they don’t come over to interfere. I feel I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.
Suppose I really should eat something....
* * * *
June 23
It happened today.
I feel like the monk in that ancient woodout, sticking his head through the earthly sphere and glimpsing the hidden machinery of the cosmos.
I can now see other galaxies as compact smudges of gravity. Am able to make out the groupings and supergroupings that they form, patterns of abstract splendor, forming luminous bubbles in the foamy universe, which is revealed to be more vacancy than substance.
I believe the objects I detect at the extreme edge of my sensitivity are quasars, those dwellers at the edge of the cosmos, sixteen billion lightyears away.
I feel like a juggler, holding aloft the entire revolving universe in my mind.
I forced myself to eat something after the triumph, in order to go on.
There’s something more, you see. Something I haven’t quite gotten a handle on yet. It appears to be a kind of modulated pulse of gravity, emanating from a distinct direction.
I have to concentrate on this...
* * * *
June 24
Someone knocking on my door. I told them to go away. Afraid now my powers will disappear before I solve this last mystery...
* * * *
June 25
Convinced I have the answer to the origin of the modulated pulse.
It’s an artifact of intelligence.
Some civilization much further advanced than ours is communicating with its peers elsewhere, employing artificial gravity waves.
This signal is all I concentrate on now.
The more I study it, the more I seem to—understand it. I appear to be apprehending it on some cellular level.
What the message is, I cannot put into words.
But my headaches are gone.
* * * *
June 26
Immense biological changes going on within me. The signal is promoting them, I’m certain. Wish I could see a mirror. Haven’t eaten or had anything to drink in three days, but feel fine. Delusion of a dying man? Can’t be sure of anything anymore.
* * * *
June 27
Couldn’t move now if I wished to. Luckily, recorder is by the bed, and voiceactivated.
* * * *
June 28
No diminishment in my perceptual powers, although the chiltonium should be exhausted by now. Understand the signal completely, but cannot put it into human speech.
* * * *
June 29
The people behind the signal are talking to me down the line of gravitons, calling me to them. They’re incredibly ancient, yet we’re somehow related, as I know from their ability to subvert my biological programming. Their motives are incomprehensible, neither good nor evil. Above all that. Felt an overwhelming urge to heed their invitation. How could I go back to my old life anyway?
* * * *
June 30
Won~t be able to talk much longer. Have decided to take their invitation, and fall down the well of stars. These people are masters of the universal attractive force. They assure me that my new body—with its altered integument and organs—will respond to their pull, and be able to survive the trip. Goodbye Mark. Karla, goodbye.
Gravity calls.
ANY MAJOR DUDE
Taylor’s room was costing him twenty thousand pesetas a day. A few years ago, the civil authorities had closed down the building as unfit for human habitation. Only minimal repairs had been made since.
The room boasted
a single window that opened onto a sooty brick airshaft, a tall dark box full of smells and sounds, capped with a square of blue Spanish sky. Into Taylor’s room from this central well, dotted with other windows, drifted odors of oily foreign cooking.
Hotplates were prohibited in theory by the management, and, yes, the fat hotel-owner had agreed, there was a possibility of starting a fire, but really, Señor, what can we do? We agree it is dangerous, but most of these people are too poor to eat in restaurants, having spent all of their money on a promised passage across the Strait. Ah, Señor, everyone wishes to cross to Africa, and we are just helping. Were we younger ourselves...
Helping yourself get rich, you old hypocrite, thought Taylor, but said nothing at the time.
Filtering in through Taylor’s window along with the Mediterranean scents were snatches of music and conversation, and tepid, torpid breezes that idly ruffled the dirty white gauze curtains, like an old woman sorting remnants of fabric at a sale.
Taylor lay half in shadow on the narrow bed with bad springs. He rested on his side, facing the peeling, papered wall, wearing the rumpled linen suit he had been too abstracted to shed. At some point in the past the plaster had cracked, splitting the mottled wallpaper and erupting in a line of chalky lava. It reminded Taylor of the white calcareous strata beneath the Channel, so perfect for tunnelling. How was the work going now? he wondered. Did anyone rniss him? Did anyone puzzle over why he had left so precipitously, with the job so near completion? Did anyone care...?
It was very hot in Algeciras that July. So hot, so enervating, that it affected Taylor’s thinking. He found that unless he continually reminded himself of his goals, his mind would wander, he would forget what he had to do next. Not that there was much he could do, of course, except to wait.
He hadn’t been like that a week ago, when he had arrived fresh in the swarming port town, on the trail of his runaway wife. Then, he had been all fire and determination. Everything had been clear and uncomplicated as vacuum, his course laid out simply before him.
He would cross the border, cross the sea, to Maxwell’s Land. He would find Aubrey. He would ask her if she intended to come home. If she agreed, well and good. (Although how they would travel home, return through the global interdict, he had no idea.) If she said no, he would kill her. Then he would kill Holt. It was as simple as that.
Now, however, after seven days of delay, seven days of brain-broiling heat which even the advent of night could not annul, things no longer seemed so simple. There seemed to be a lag between every action he took and its consequences. Hysteresis was the technical term, he dimly remembered. (Always the engineer, Taylor, even when you were numb or hurt or raving mad. How fucking pitiful.) Or else the proper order of his actions seemed muzzy and doubtful. (For this latter effect, there was unfortunately no convenient scientific term.)
Perhaps he would kill Holt first. The entire affair was, after all, his fault. He was responsible for the whole mess, both in Taylor’s personal life, and on an international scale. Surely his death would be a good thing, and might perhaps send Aubrey back into Taylor’s arms without even the necessity of asking.
On the other hand, was he even sure any longer that he wanted Aubrey back? Perhaps she and Holt deserved each other, the damn traitors. Perhaps he would kill Aubrey and Holt together, without a word...
No, that wasn’t right. He was not a man who sought idle revenge. He would not have abandoned a job he deemed important, travelled all this hot and dusty way, along with hundreds of thousands of other pilgrims and emigrants, just to achieve that entropic end. It was Aubrey he wanted, alive and sweetly tangible and his once more, not the nebulous and twisted satisfaction of seeing her dead. And Holt. Even he could live. Yes, Taylor would let him live. True, he had done wrong. But Taylor could understand what had driven him: a love of elegant solutions, a lifelong affair with the muse of physical precision and grace. After all, he and Taylor were simpatico, both engineers, albeit at different ends of the spectrum.
Up from the airshaft, preternaturally clear in an unusual moment when competitive noises were missing, floated a string of Spanish vocal and musical non sequiturs, as someone tuned across the radio band. Unctuous ads, flamenco guitars, the unmistakable transcultural inanities of a soap opera... Finally the unknown dial-twiddler settled on a station playing some ubiquitous old American rock. In utter disbelief, Taylor listened as half-forgotten lyrics tumbled over his windowsill.
Taylor laughed without pleasure. “’Demon at your door...,’” he repeated into the blankets. Oh, yeah, the demons were at the door now, sure enough.
That song was over twenty-five years old. Steely Dan’s “Any Major Dude.” It had been old when that campus DJ had used it as his closing theme, when Taylor and Holt had both been in grad school together a decade ago. MIT, on the banks of the Charles. Studying and sailing, fireworks on frosty First Night, a fire in their guts, to be someone, to do something important. Taylor in macro-engineering, Holt in the barely nascent field of nanotechnology. Two divergent personalities, yet somehow fast friends. Given to endless bullshitting sessions, each man halfseriously defending his specialty as more vital than the other’s.
“All the really important work left is in the big projects, Des,” Taylor would tell his friend. “Orbital stations, a bridge across the Bering Strait, harvesting icebergs, mid-Atlantic islands—”
“Show-off stuff,” Desmond Holt would contend. “Megalomania, pure and simple. Old ideas writ large. The same impulse that leads flower-breeders to produce bigger and bigger blossoms with less and less scent. Distinct lack of imagination there, boy. No, Nick, the age of materials is over. You’ve got to face it some day. The real action in the future will be on the atomic and molecular levels, and ininformation theory.”
“You’ve been listening to Drexler and Fredkin again. Those guys’re crazy. Can you heat your house with information, or drive your car on it? You’re building castles in the clouds, buddy.”
“We’ll see. Time will tell. But I know one thing. Your kind of engineering promotes heavy social control.”
“And yours promotes chaos.”
“Fascist.”
“Anarchist.”
And, thought Taylor, recalling that archetypical conversation, a composite memory distilled out of so many, the cliché Holt had employed had, as clichés disconcertingly will, embodied truth.
Time had indeed told. With the passage of the last few years, there could be no doubt now as to who had been right about the relative importance of their work.
Taylor’s own projects had not been without results. But not on the scale of Holt’s.
Aubrey had been someone utterly foreign to their scene, a communications major from Emerson. Doing the unusual, drawn solely by the subject matter, they had seen her in a play—a stage-adaptation of Capek’s Absolute at Large; Aubrey had the role of Ellen—and been instantly smitten. Both had dated her, one had wed her.
Since then, Taylor had, off and on, harbored doubts about whether Aubrey hadn’t chosen arbitrarily between them, seeing little differences between their cognate manias, entranced merely by their common hard-edged vision. Now he feared he knew the bitter truth: that she had cast her lot with the one she thought stood the greatest chance of worldly success, and, upon a shift in fortunes, abandoned the downward-bound man for the one on the rise.
He didn’t really want to believe it about her, but it was the only explanation he could accept. Surely that other drivel contained in her goodbye letter was just a facade for her real motives .
Nick, she had written, I can’t accept feeling useless any more. Too many things are happening in the world right now. I need to take part. You think I should just kick back and enjoy the London theatre, the Paris stores, but I can’t. I need to feel useful, like I’m doing something to help humanity. It sounds corny, but I know you’ll understand. You share the same sentiments—or used to, until the projects became their own reason for existence. But since I’m no use und
er the Channel with you I’m going where I can make a difference.
The old song continued to filter in: “Any minor world that comes apart falls together again...”
Was that true? He doubted it. Two months now, and the shattering pain he had experienced upon returning from the worksite to their London flat to find that letter hadn’t diminished. It had taken him that long to pick up Aubrey’s trail. At first he believed she had gone back to America, perhaps to help in some relief effort or other, such as the rebuilding of Mexico City after the quake. When he couldn’t find any trace of her there, he turned in desperation to the list of self-exiled emigrants to Maxwell’s Land, printed by international edict in all major newspapers.
Searching backwards through the online London Times, not really expecting to encounter her name, he had been stunned to see it starkly confronting him in the pages for May 15.
Their anniversary. What a fine joke. Dear John, I’m going far away, where you’ll never find me ...
Don’t count on it, honey.
The music had ceased. The radio, powered off, was replaced by a baby’s cries. Taylor felt himself falling asleep. His brow was stippled with sweat. It trickled down through a week’s work of stubble. The bisecting line of light moved slowly over him, pulling back through the window, as the sun sank.
After he had lain wholly in shadow for some time, he awoke, hungry.
Narciso was waiting for him down in the shabby lobby of the crowded hotel.
Taylor smiled ruefully when he saw the boy. Narciso appeared to be the last beggar left in Algeciras, all the others having emigrated by one means or another. For some reason, out of all the gullible marks thronging the town, he had picked Taylor to fasten himself to. The man vacillated between suspecting that Narciso was either the stupidest or the smartest beggar out of all those “Hey Joes” who had once inhabited the community.
“You want some comida now, huh, Señor Nick? I bet you sick of my brother’s food, huh? He not such a good cook. But today, for special, I take you to a new place. Run by my own Tia Luisa.”
Taylor knew from a week’s experience that it was impossible to shake Narciso, so he mutely let the boy lead him out the door, to his relative’s restaurant.
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