An Unusual Angle

by Greg Egan

  —Well if you can hear me do something! Move the hemisphere in and out. Make it vibrate or something! Please!

  I send out a stream of closely spaced viewpoints, moving rapidly. The hemisphere stays still at about a kilometre. I think at myself:

  —Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s dead, and the hemisphere will stay there forever now. Maybe he’s angry because of all those threats …

  I finally sleep, dream of myself in a dome-shaped birdcage.

  I wake and tell myself:

  —What does it matter, anyway? Why should I need to send a viewpoint further than one kilometre? I’m not restricted in any other way at all, I can still walk around, travel anywhere in the world. I should just forget all about it. If it’s a natural limit to my powers, then I shouldn’t worry … perhaps the extension to one kilometre was triggered somehow by my feeling of stretching the hemisphere when I asked for room to breathe.

  I always believe my own arguments no matter how silly and illogical they are.

  —If it’s to do with some other telepath, then I’ve done all I can in trying to communicate, and I should just try to forget about it, and if he ever decides to contact me, I’ll know about it soon enough. Surely if he’s powerful enough to do this, then he would have no trouble communicating anytime.

  I find myself a dull lecturer, so I tell myself to shut up.

  The trouble with any specific situation is that it has specific qualities. I have no trouble with the idea of a problem. I wouldn’t even mind an actual problem, so long as there was nothing about it. I find attributes aesthetically irritating.

  And my perception of the hemisphere’s existence will not go away. I cannot forget that it’s there. When I close my eyes I can see it as an enormous white dome like an observatory building. Which is where I get the picture when my eyes are closed, because there is a slit and a telescope poking out. Which means that I am not even semi-seeing the real hemisphere when I close my eyes, but my damned annoying mind has to go and search my memory for something that I have seen to remind me of the hemisphere.

  Downright devious.

  I try to distract myself. I light matches and zoom in on them. I film the sun peeping out from behind leaves and buildings and shining off car windscreens and glasses of water.

  And that sort of thing.

  I crash aeroplanes in the back yard, catching the rich oranges of the exploding fuel tanks. I bomb satellites and space ships and planets with atomic warheads. I blow up ancient gelignite in old mine shafts. I follow a hair-raising fight between the Hero and the Bad Guy armed with an oxyacetylene torch.

  And that sort of thing. To distract myself.

  My eyes get sore in bright lights, so I stop.

  All the time there is the nagging knowledge that everywhere I go I am at the centre of an invisible hemisphere a kilometre in radius. There is no way out. Unless I dig out.

  And why not? Just ring up an earthmoving company and ask them to dig a tunnel through the ground from me to a point one kilometre away. So I can send a viewpoint through it to the free space beyond the hemisphere.

  I could never afford that. Nobody can say I’m made of money.

  —You’re made of money. Made of money!

  says the red-eared rabbit scurrying across the back yard.

  —Wait!

  I call out to him.

  —Do you know about the hemisphere?

  I yell.

  Too late. He has jumped into a burrow.

  A burrow!

  I quickly create a viewpoint and send it down the hole after him.

  The tunnel is dark and damp and the sand is falling in trickles all around. I close my eyes and look only through the viewpoint, pushing away the smothering sensation which comes from rushing through a tunnel far too narrow to ever accommodate my body. I light magnesium flares along the way because the sunlight has almost vanished behind a curve in the burrow.

  I move faster and faster. Occasionally I catch up with the rabbit, who turns, looks at the viewpoint (which is, of course, like all other viewpoints, invisible) and says:

  —Stop following me! Stop it I say! I’ll have you arrested!

  Then he runs faster and I lose sight of him.

  The burrow is sloped and curved and twisted now, and the deeper I get the harder it is to move the viewpoint, as if the air is getting thicker, turning into treacle.

  Cliché

  Not now, please.

  But there is no sudden cut-off. I am not sure, but I think the viewpoint has passed the kilometre limit. Which would mean that the hemisphere does not exist underground.

  But so many twists and turns, it’s hard to judge.

  I am tempted to try to move the viewpoint straight up, to get it out of the tunnel and into the open. But I have never been able to make a viewpoint move through the ground—for some reason there must be a path of air between me and it at all times, even if it is not in line-of-sight. The treacle-type attenuation is probably tied up with the damping effect of solid ground. There is still a path through air to the viewpoint, thanks to the tunnel, but with every metre further along, and every twist, that path becomes longer and more warped.

  Maybe one day I’ll have a formula for all this.

  Then I reach a fork in the tunnel and I have no idea which way to turn. I stop, depressed, then inspiration arrives:

  I make the viewpoint yell (believe me, it’s not easy):

  —Nobody can say I can’t make up my mind!

  —You can’t make up your mind!

  comes the indignant retort … from both branches of the tunnel.

  Grrr.

  I toss a mental coin and choose the right-hand branch of the fork, pushing forward as fast as I can. With a high-power searchbeam, and a very strong telephoto, I catch a glimpse of half of the rabbit. Literally. At the fork he must have split symmetrically down the middle, one half taking each tunnel. Incredibly, he remains balanced. Squinting, I can make out veins and arteries, and even the bisected heart, all pushing blood into nowhere and drawing it back from the same place.

  Then the two branches meet again, and, spectacularly, the two halves arrive at the junction simultaneously, and the rabbit is again whole.

  That shot is probably priceless! Not that I’ll ever be able to show it to anybody but myself.

  I seem to be invigorated by the anarchic impossibility of what has just happened, and from somewhere I draw strength to push the viewpoint onwards faster and faster. Absurdly, I am panting. What is absurd?

  The tunnel slopes deeper and deeper, but my curiosity and euphoric adventuresomeness make the viscosity vanish. I am gaining on the rabbit.

  Suddenly he stops, with a deceleration that must have been a hundred g at least. From a recess in the side of the tunnel he pulls out a machine gun and opens fire on the viewpoint and its accompanying searchlight.

  They are of course untouched, as they are nonmaterial extensions of my imagination.

  The rabbit is now flustered and upset. The viewpoint is ahead of him now, staying a few metres in front of him as he runs through the tunnel.

  Crash! The viewpoint hits something solid. An elevator door. I quickly swing it behind the rabbit as he runs up to the door, presses the UP button. The doors swing open, and by incredible luck they are the doors to the elevator itself, not to the shaft, which means the shaft is open to the tunnel, which means I can follow the elevator up.

  As it rises rapidly, I push the viewpoint into the centre of the shaft and then send it straight up (try doing that with a Steadicam). I can see sunlight around the sides of the elevator, meaning it does not fit the shaft tightly, again assuring me an air passage.

  When it reaches ground level, the elevator does not stop. With the velocity given to it by the massive linear induction motor of the shaft, the elevator slides upwards into the hot afternoon air, as if moving within an invisible guiding cylinder. When it reaches the top of its path and is just about to begin falling, there is a brilliant eruption of flame whi
ch is soon a dwindling point of light, and then nothing.

  I have no doubt: it reached escape velocity.

  I look around with the viewpoint, recognise the landscape, and it is confirmed. It is about ten kilometres away.

  The treacle feeling returns, strengthens, and I know what is happening. The tunnel is caving in. There is nothing I can do. The link with the viewpoint will be severed, and it will be lost, outside the hemisphere.

  I screw my eyes up until I can see only shifting red and violet patterns, and then I feel the treacle effect of the cave-in swallow my image from the viewpoint.

  Then I relax my eyes, expecting only darkness.

  AND I CAN STILL SEE THROUGH THE VIEWPOINT.

  THE HEMISPHERE IS GONE!

  Jubilantly I create a dozen viewpoints and send them rushing out in all directions. One kilometre. Two kilometres. Ten, twenty kilometres, and only at about twenty-five does the treacle-like feeling begin. There is no sudden snatch.

  I AM FREE.

  No I’m not. Not until I can understand why the extra-terrestrial rabbit ever put the hemisphere around me in the first place. If indeed it was him. Stop that. It was.

  The elevator-rocket was magnificent! It had to be total mass-conversion, or something involving nuclear binding forces, because there was no room there for bulky chemical fuel tanks.

  Unless, like the cavity in my brain, it was a little bit crooked in the fourth dimension, and hence bigger inside than out.

  I bring all the viewpoints back, and cancel them. Then I develop and print all the shots, and run through them to see if I missed anything. Nobody can say I’m not thorough.

  Faster than sound, the tiny metal cylinder drops to earth, white-hot, melting rock for hundreds of metres where it hits. Then the hole it has drilled in the atmosphere collapses, with a thunderclap to end them all.

  Not impressed. What a cliché!

  Shut up!

  I turn the garden hose onto the cylinder, which must be made from an extraordinary substance. A few hundred gallons later, with the back yard like a tropical rain forest, the cylinder is cool enough to touch. I work open the tiny door with a fingernail (it’s so cute) and inside is a tape cassette.

  Another one of my psi facilities: I can hear magnetic sound tracks without a player, simply by placing them near my head and letting the sound equipment in my brain cavity sort it all out. A ‘computer’ untangles the distorted signal from a tape wound up on a reel or cassette hub.

  I put the cassette to my temple, wait a few moments (each moment being 2.07 seconds) for the computer-processing, then I hear the final sound:

  —You’re not thorough! You’re not thorough at all!

  Childishly, I drop the cassette on the ground and stamp on it. The mud makes a dreadful mess.

  It seems that the alien bunny has not yet lost interest entirely.

  The shots of the falling capsule are magnificent! A shaft of ionised air all the way from the upper atmosphere to the ground! That rabbit is certainly far better than me at creating special effects.

  And anytime I want something spectacular like that, all I have to do is …

  —Nobody can say I don’t like special effects!

  I scream at the top of my voice.

  A few metres from my feet, a closed rose-bud opens in slow motion. Inside is a tiny fragment of velvet, on which is embroidered in intricate lettering: YOU DON’T LIKE SPECIAL EFFECTS!

  Not quite what I was hoping for.

  What a letdown. I might have known it wouldn’t last.

  Chapter 10

  HEAT

  It is New Year’s Eve so I stay up and watch the seventh television screening of Singing in the Rain, which is alas interrupted near midnight for a five-minute summary of news film from the vanishing year, with a commentary that could only be ridiculous with such an enormous span of events shoved into such a short time. Things like: ‘There were lots of nasty wars’ (as the screen shows a tank assault from one of those nasty wars; he never mentions which one) and ‘But some happy times too’ (as the screen shows a hundred-year-old lady getting flowers on her birthday).

  When midnight finally arrives we see the cretinous commentator sip champagne.

  Why do they want to summarise and file away the year so very quickly?

  Administrative neatness. Not good to have it lying around too long. Best to tidy it up and put it in a drawer. Sense of clean-slate satisfaction. And they did it last year, so …

  Dunbar (a character in the book Catch-22 who didn’t make it into the film) tried to make his life (seem) longer by staring at the ceiling and generally being as bored as he could. I strongly disagree with the method. The more events I can pack into the shortest possible space of time, the longer I will live. I won’t bore anyone with the mathematical details, but if you even glance at the role played by experience-density (generally denoted by the Greek letter rho) in the integral form for subjective life-time, you’ll see what I mean.

  The next morning the paper lists the road deaths and acts of vandalism and rapes and murders.

  That day, as I watch more television (everybody’s decadent occasionally (besides, I watch only films intended for cinema)) I see a wonderful advertisement during which a man with a red nose and a party hat stands in a liquor store filled with streamers and says:

  —If you think the party’s over, then you’re wrong! Fresmark Cellars are just beginning their New Year Liquor Sale, and we’ve slashed most booze prices by fifteen per cent! Come to Fresmark Cellars, where the party never ends!

  Oh, Happy New Year!

  The temperature is very high. I would like to live in Switzerland, or perhaps Antarctica (although not, I think, John Carpenter’s). I remember watching a children’s television program when I was about three years old (I didn’t know any better then). It was some sort of animated fairy story—I can’t remember much of the plot. But there is one part I do remember. The hero of the story is wandering through a forest, parched, unable to find water. He picks an enormous orange from a tree, punches a hole in it with a stick, then uses a hollow plant stem as a straw to suck the delicious juice from the orange. And the words that the narrator used to describe it! Succulent nectar, cool, refreshing, thirst-quenching perfection!

  I went into the kitchen and tried it with a real orange, punching the hole with a pen and using a plastic straw. The juice wouldn’t come through unless I squeezed the orange, and when I did that, it spurted everywhere. The little I got in my mouth made it dry and sticky, and I was even thirstier than before.

  I have never in my life drunk anything even remotely close to the orange juice described in that fairy story. Which is very depressing. Hot weather makes me drink glass after glass of water until my stomach is swelling and bloated, but my mouth is still thirsty. As it must always be until I can find that forest, find that tree, find that orange …

  I try to cool myself by telepathy, but it does not work. The greatest thermodynamic achievement I ever managed was raising the boiling point of water by two degrees, and I can only do it on the 29th of December each year. Who knows why?

  I play myself skiing sequences from The Pink Panther: the only footage I have with snow in it. It was surely illegal for me to shoot it, but as I sat there in the cinema watching all that beautiful white fluffiness, which I knew I could never see first-hand without travelling a very long way, I couldn’t resist switching on my camera for just a few minutes. It’s the only time I’ve ever done it (well almost). And the evidence is well hidden.

  My equipment still functions excellently despite the heat; it is deep in my temperature-regulated brain. However, the rest of my body does not take things so well, and I find myself half-asleep eighty per cent of the day. The rest of the time it is too hot to sleep or do anything else, so I lie on my bed unable even to think.

  In short, I get little filming done.

  When finance permits, and a cinema screens something decent, I Go. Cinemas are air-conditioned. Unfortunately, buses are
not.

  The bus is very hot inside. The only windows that can be opened are high up and the effect is not exactly a breeze on my face. I sit on one of the seats facing forwards, close to the window, where I can look straight out of the window and I do not have to look at anyone on the bus.

  The bus jerks and screeches and rumbles as it makes the many-bended trip to the inner city. If it went in a straight line it would take ten minutes but it must cast a net through several suburbs to try and catch as many passengers as possible.

  So I sit and look out the window, not filming, seeing nothing because I am thinking about a computerised bus service. Each customer rings up the computer, states his correct position and his destination. The computer locates the bus which will best fit the journey he wants, and detours it to pick him up wherever he is. The efficiency of each bus’s route would increase as the number of buses increased, so many medium-sized buses would be used. With such a system, it wouldn’t be hard to ban cars, because the service provided would be nearly as good. Of course, the bans would have to be only partial ones, limited to private commuting in the metropolitan area. There would still have to be commercial vehicles, and …

  It will never happen, I realise as the bus brakes noisily at the terminus. Why not? No reason at all. It just won’t.

  I hate walking so I run down the street towards the cinema despite the heat. I am a few minutes before the advertised time which is of course much too early because there is so much crap on beforehand, but it’s hard to guess exactly how much crap there will be, so, to be safe, Just In Case, I always arrive around the advertised time.

  Ridiculously.

  I am very thirsty so I buy an ice-cold orange drink which is mainly sugar and is artificially coloured and flavoured, and costs six times the combined price of the ingredients, labour, transport, and refrigeration involved.

  Approximately.

  It is reasonable but it is not the perfect orange nectar that I will never find.

  The program begins with wallpaper music and badly scratched advertising slides, then wallpaper music and a cheery narrator and oversaturated-colour film advertisements.