Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Kitty Sue—”

  “Nothing,” a cop says to me, in a lone I recognize as intentional reassurance. “The lady must have been mistaken. There aren’t any tracks anywhere, and in that soft mud, there would have to be.”

  “But Ah saw—”

  “No tracks, ma’am,” the cop says in the same reassuring tone, but Kitty Sue is not listening. She is not even there. A faint bluish shimmer, and Kitty Sue Cunningham—pink dress, Georgia drawl, dyed blond hair, reasons for the mating habits of flies—has vanished.

  Another faint shimmer a second later, and she is back. “—might have been the Wozniak boy, he’s breakin’ his poor mother’s heart with his shenanigans, but that’s all because—”

  The cop’s eyes slide toward mine. I see the shock on his face; but the next moment it, too, is gone, locked behind a stony blank cop look—Make something of it, buddy—that gives him a jawline like an erection.

  “—stealin’ money from his daddy’s wallet, and doin’ it more than once, Ah was told, because—”

  “Just because,” I say—loudly, angrily, pointlessly, and with fear. Neither of them answers, and I walk away, trembling a little. I don’t look back but go straight home, where I find Emily in tears: While she was out at the shopping mall, our house had been burglarized.

  “They said it was random,” I say to Emily as we prepare for bed Both of us are exhausted from talking to the police, soothing the kids, notifying the insurance people, listing the stolen possessions. Who knows exactly what the stolen possessions are? Months from now we will discover things missing that we had forgotten we owned.

  “Random, Emily. Not personal. They probably didn’t know us, or anything about us. You shouldn’t take it personally. It happens.”

  Emily looks up, shimmers, and is gone.

  In a moment she is back, yanking her slip over her head and flinging it into an open drawer. I stand completely still, unable to speak. Perhaps I hallucinated about Kitty Sue Cunningham; perhaps I am hallucinating now. Terrible thoughts chase themselves through my head; Cerebral arteriosclerosis. Alzheimer’s disease. Brain tumors.

  Emily, in bra and panties, begins a frenzied straightening of the jars and tubes on her dresser. “The burglars took my mother’s silver candlesticks, because they are worth four hundred fifty-eight dollars with silver at current market prices. He didn’t know my mother because she died in 1978 and never visited us in Hickory Village because we hadn’t moved here yet. He does need the money because he’s the only child of a single-parent female-headed household with an average taxable income of only six thousand four hundred thirty-two dollars, and he dropped out of high school ten months ago because—”

  “Stop it!” I shout, and seize her by the shoulders. She twists savagely away from me, and we face each other at arm’s length, Emily panting hard and I shaking with a primordial fury I no longer care to control. I recognize that there is some elemental abyss here, some deep lack in her that I have always despised. Almost I could strike her.

  Emily glares at me with hatred.

  The moment spins out, frozen, unbearable. Then Emily breaks, putting her hands over her face and starting to sob.

  “I want things to make sense. I just want things to make sense . . .”

  And the naiveté of this, the sheer lost longing, fills me with a rush of pity. I take her in my arms. Pity, exasperation—and, unaccountably, desire. Her breasts through the lacy bra are soft against my chest, her breath silky against my face. The whole moment has taken one of those unpredictable turns into sweetness, into grace. There is a profound mystery in the circle of yellow lamplight on-the floor, in-the random movements of the air, in the improbable longings of the fragile and sweet-limbed body in my arms. Emily I press her closer.

  “No,” Emily says. Carefully she detaches herself, turns her back, and yanks a flannel nightdress over herself, bra and all. She crawls into bed and lies on the far edge, facing away from me. I do not understand. She does not explain.

  The next day it all happens.

  Kip is not on the train. I enter Jefferson Tower, get on the elevator, press the button for the eighth floor. When the door opens, I am on the sixteenth.

  Jefferson Tower has fourteen floors. I have never seen this place before. The elevator faces a bank of copiers and telecommunications equipment, as in my building, but the signs above them are sheer gibberish: HY-CAFK OIG TYH MB K. Only the “16” on the lighted elevator panel makes sense. Music fills the air, a woman singing softly in gibberish. Out of sight, around a corner, someone laughs, and a sudden nauseating smell, strong enough to make my stomach lurch, wafts from that direction. The light is a soft purple. I stand frozen, until the elevator doors close and the elevator descends. It opens on the eighth floor. Helen, her back to me, is fiddling with the Xerox copier.

  I let the doors close again, ride to street level, and leave the building. Some part of my mind notes that I am not trembling. not even when I insert coins into the newspaper vendor and buy a morning edition I cannot quite make myself read on the deserted train. At the Hickory Hill station, however, among the familiar wooden platform and red-painted metal railing and late-blooming fall wildflowers in straggling clumps, I open the paper.

  STRANGE RADIO BROADCASTS MYSTIFY CITY

  MASS DELUSIONS SUSPECTED IN JPL.CO

  GT & BHO + P SAYS “NEVER AGAIN”

  A woman, expensively dressed in linen and mink, walks by me. She is ta king to herself with intense, preoccupied concentration. “—can’t go along with it because of previous commitments, and that came about because—”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. She sounds like Helen, like Kilty Sue, like Lara Kashinsky. Like Emily. When I open my eyes, Kip Lowry is standing on the station platform in front of me, looking as if he has not slept for days. Wordlessly he puts a hand on my shoulder, a gesture I normally dislike from anyone but Emily, and drags me into the Depot.

  I have lost all power to resist.

  Inside, we sit at the long bar, which at this hour—ten thirty-two a.m.—is empty of all but a dour bartender polishing glasses. Kip orders a double scotch, downs it with a single snap of his wrist, then orders another. Perversely, the cheap theatricality of this deepens my dazed numbness. We sit for several minutes in complete silence.

  Eventually Kip looks around him and says hollowly, “Low information content.”

  “What?”

  “This bar. Dark paneling, stools and booths, mirror over the bar—all predictable. The greater the predictability, the less the new information. This bar is a boring information system.”

  I say carefully, “I hadn’t thought of it as an information system.”

  “It is. Everything is.” He drinks off the second double scotch, motions for a third, and then gives a bark of laughter. “Everything. All of it out there.”

  “Kip,” I say, but only because I cannot stop myself, “just what is going on out . . . out there?”

  “What Lara predicted.”

  “What Lara predicted?”

  “She warned them,” he says, and I am appalled to hear under the strain in his another, unmistakable note: dramatic satisfaction. “Them. Us. At the institute. Of course nobody believed her, except me. Then nobody believed either of us: a female defected Russki and a second-rate researcher.”

  “Believe what?” I say, and wonder if I am humoring him or believing him myself. Suddenly, without reason, I know that Kip has been fired from his institute. Today, yesterday, or the day before. There has been a scene, one of Kip’s messy dramas, and he is making me part of the third act. I want no part of that, after all the rest of it, and I am rising to leave when Kip says, “See this glass?”

  I don’t answer.

  “This glass is an information system. The molecules in the ice cube are in one state, the molecules in the scotch in a very different state. Entropy in this glass is low Sit down, John.”

  “I don’t want to hear about entropy in that glass!”

  “Yes, you do,”
he says, with utter conviction. “That glass is what happened to you out there.”

  I lower myself onto the barstool.

  “This glass has low entropy, or, to put it another way. the information system has a high degree of order. You know which is the ice and which is the scotch, and where the molecules of each are located, at least roughly.” He stirs the scotch with a red plastic swizzle stick. “See—there’s only a few places the ice can go. Or—in terms of information theory—there are only a few possible messages. High order, low entropy, limited possible states.”

  Why do I sit and listen? “Kip—”

  “But even now, even as we speak, it changes!” Kip shouts. The bartender gives us a startled glance. Kip drops his voice, shoves his face close to mine, and says in a stage whisper, “Watch—don’t miss it—keep your eyes peeled every second! Entropy increases!”

  “You damned—”

  “Yes, indeed. As are we all. Entropy in this glass is increasing. The ice is melting. Soon you won’t be able to tell which is scotch and which is ice, All the molecules will be mixed. You won’t be able to predict where any single one is. There will be low order, high entropy, an infinite number of possible states. That’s what Lara says the Russians are doing.”

  Despite myself. I look at Kip’s glass and think of vodka. “What’s what the Russians are doing?”

  “Information theory. The whole world is an information system; a glass of booze, DNA. Sandy’s angry little mind.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Increase the amount of disorder, you increase the number of the possible arrangements of the parts. Thirty minutes from now, those scotch molecules could be anywhere in the system, Lara says it was a sort of skunkswork project, blue-skying it, way apart from their official scientific establishment. They might not have even tried it if the last grain harvest hadn’t been such a bust. But it’s working, isn’t it?”

  Kip makes a vague gesture toward the door. “They’re revving up the flow of chaotic information, artificially increasing it exponentially, and so increasing both the entropy and the number of possible states for the whole planetary system.”

  “How would you increase the flow of chaotic infer—” I say, and think suddenly of all the high-speed computers in the world—the communications satellites, data links, phone lines, banking networks, electromagnetic broadcasts. Kip is watching me.

  “Exactly,” he says softly—too softly. I see once again that some theatrical part of him is enjoying this.

  “That’s all insane, Kip. Just theory. What goes on in the real world . . . there are physical laws. Rules.”

  Kip smiles slyly. “Ah, but Lara says they are not mutating just the information. They’re mutating the rules by which ‘molecules’ of information act on each other.”

  “But that can’t be possible. To change the rules?”

  “Rules are just more information, differently coded. That code, too, can become entropic. That’s what cancer is: a DNA code that has managed to gain in entropy, and so in the number of possible states it can produce.”

  “But—”

  “Stop saying ‘but’. There’s a complexity barrier—Von Neumann proved the equations for that.”

  “But—”

  Kip picks up my glass—untouched—and pours it into his. Liquid overflows and begins to meander in rivulets along the polished surface of the bar.

  “Too much individual information. The old system can’t contain it. Complexity is a decisive property. Above some critical level, too much information—even high-possibility random information—becomes explosive. You get an exponential leap in the number of possible states. Lara says the Other Side probably wants a different state. This one is slow economic suicide for them.”

  The longer Kip talks, the more of what he says makes a weird, distorted sense, just out of grasp, like an object at the bottom of a shallow but murky pond. One second you think you know it’s a tire iron, a perfectly familiar object—except that no tire iron was ever bent in that peculiar way. But then, was Kip’s abstruse theory any more bent than what had happened in the Jefferson Tower elevator?

  Some objection, some half-remembered piece of learning, surfaces in my mind. “Wait.” I say. and hear the triumph in my own voice, as earlier it had sounded in Kip’s: the perverse triumph of proving a connection wrong. “Wait, no—things don’t always tend toward entropy. There’s biological life and evolution; Living beings tend to become more orderly, not more random!”

  “The complexity barrier,” Kip says. His mercurial theatrics have faded by now, and he sits in quiet gloom. “Vertebrates passed it. But you’re right—when they did, another force entered the information system—a drive to create order, connections, meaning. And that’s why I’m scared shitless.”

  I am confused all over again. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” He starts drawing meaningless pictures in the spilled scotch: a flower, a house, a long-tailed squiggle that might have been a sperm. “Who knows? That drive for meaning isn’t random, isn’t entropic, isn’t high possibility. It seeks the probable. If I write a letter that starts ‘Dear Sadny’—spelled S-a-d-n-y—the brain will read it S-a-n-d-y. At least, some brains would. Not everyone’s. Some types of mind just like order. Some search compulsively for connections. Some don’t.”

  I think of Kip’s messy life, his hysterical nights. He has sketched a woman in the scotch; she has long hair. Lara, I remember, has long hair, which she wears in a neat twist.

  “Fuck it,” he says suddenly, violently.

  I say, “I don’t believe any of this.”

  “You don’t want to believe it. Too much of a comic book. Look at you—you’re red in, the face. You!”

  I say stiffly, “Do you think you can get home all right?”

  Kip throws back his head and laughs, a sound of such reckless amusement that I am shocked.

  “Christ, John, you’re priceless! Prissy to the end. Don’t you see it, even now? This is the end of this information system. Any hour now—”

  The bartender has been walking toward us, rag in hand and eyes disapprovingly on the mess Kip has made all over the bar. As we watch, the rag bursts into flames. The bartender yells and hurls it into the sink; the stainless steel begins to stain, then abruptly stops.

  “Different information systems operating there,” Kip says conversationally, and laughs again. I hit him on the arm, hard.

  “Stop it!”

  He grins at me. “Why, John, you man of few words, I never knew you cared.” His grin widens. “About anything.” Then he says, in a different voice, “In living things, the very complex system divides. Like with sexual reproduction.”

  And for some reason this statement—no less abstract than the rest of his crazed theory—makes sense. The pond drains away, and I see the tire iron nearly clear, only it’s not a tire iron but a dangerous club, covered now only by a passing wave, a watery shimmering—

  A shimmering—

  “Oh, my God.”

  “What now?” Kip says, still smiling.

  A different state of information. Some types of mind search compulsively for order. Black and white, with no gray.

  “You damn fool!” I shout. ‘All of you damn fools!” Kip rises from the bar stool, combative or concerned, I don’t care which. I am running out of the Depot, hitting the doorjamb with my shoulder as I hurl through.

  The doorjamb responds by turning from brown to yellow.

  All the four blocks home it is like that, Things happen as in dreams. Trees turn purple, shade through indigo to blue, return to green as information about the wavelength of light alters its coding. The sky is red. A parked car serenely floats two feet straight up, then drops. The air fills with staticky noise, weird chaotic droning that turns briefly into the theme from Handel’s Suite Number Five. It is hot and then freezing. I reach the street end of my driveway, which has begun to melt. One moment I am running, and the next I feel my legs and arms and heart pump as hard as ev
er, but I do not move. I am suspended. Time itself does not move, hangs suspended.

  The complexity barrier. This is the decisive passage, the crossing point.

  I am too late.

  I amxjjsbeg.

  v yp *c#1/4mm;p—

  Then the moment passes, and I am standing, dazed, in the middle of the new information state.

  The trees stand straight. The sky is blue. Parked cars are parked; the McMillans’ BMW has a ticket stuck under the wiper. A quiet breeze blows. At my feet, the green grass thrusts upward through cracks in the asphalt in its eternal bid to extend roots, reproduce itself, control my driveway. At the end of the driveway stand two houses.

  One is the familiar center-door Colonial I left this morning in hurried disorder: socks on the bathroom floor; an unanswered letter from my sister on the coffee table; no silver candlesticks because they have been burglarized; newspapers filled with airline disasters and stock market gains, multiple lottery winners and simultaneous earthquakes, random muggings and paragraphs of garbled gibberish. The letter from my sister was one I wasn’t going to answer. I never particularly liked my sister.

  The other house is a bluish shimmer, Colonial lines still in the process of fading in and out. Right now it is hard to see clearly, like a house under deep water. But I know perfectly well what will be inside: All the shopping lists will be written with explanatory clauses.

  Desperately I glance down the length of street. Number 54 stands alone; old Mr. Ashrider is a widower: Number 56 is a double shimmer; Elizabeth Hauser stays home with her and Ed’s small children. Number 58, double; Jane and Carl Romano recently reconciled. Number 60, not, the Griswolds are off vacationing in Jamaica. Number 62, double; Chuck Dugan has remarried.

  Anger seeps through me, but there is no time for anger. Already the blue shimmer of my second house is fading. I can’t remember—did Kip say that information states, like galaxies, all move farther away from each other?

  Shopping lists in dependent clauses. Burglars and infidelities with life histories. Answered letters. Sex talk that means exactly what it says, no more and no less. A low-possibility state with few shades of gray. Everything personal, connected.