The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  When he got back to his bunkhouse at sunset, the phone was ringing.

  Bremen crawled into bed, turned his face to the rough wall, and let it ring. After several minutes the noise stopped.

  Bremen covered his ears with the palms of his hands, but the mindnoise continued like a great, white wind from nowhere. After it grew dark and the insect sounds from down by the stream and up by the cold house began in earnest, Bremen rolled over, half expecting the phone to ring again.

  It was silent. Next to it, oddly luminescent in a sliver of moonlight through the shutters, the skull watched him from its place on the plank table. Bremen did not remember carrying it in.

  It was somewhere closer to midnight than dawn when the phone did ring. Bremen studied it a moment, only half-awake, thinking for a confused second that it was the skull that was calling him.

  He padded across rough boards in bare feet. “Hello?”

  “Come up to the house,” whispered Miz Morgan. In the background Bremen could hear a muffled stereo sounding like voices singing in dry cisterns. “Come up to the house now,” she said.

  Bremen put down the phone and went out the door and up through the moonlight toward the sound of baying hounds.

  EYES

  Jeremy and Gail love each other with a passion that sometimes frightens them both.

  Jeremy once suggests to her that their relationship is like one of the plutonium pellets imploded out at Lawrence Livermore Labs by a hundred lasers on a spherical shell firing inward simultaneously, driving the plutonium molecules closer and closer together until there is no more room between discrete atoms and the pellet first implodes and then explodes in hydrogen fusion. In theory, he says. Sustained fusion hasn’t actually been achieved, he says.

  Gail suggests that he might find a more romantic metaphor.

  But later, when thinking about it, she sees the accuracy of the comparison. Their love might have been a volatile, unstable thing without their ability, dying after a short half-life, but the ultimate sharing of mindtouch and the “driving inward” of a thousand experiences shared daily has imploded their passion into a fiery intensity rarely found outside the cores of stars.

  There are countless challenges to that closeness: the human urge for privacy that each of them must compromise to such a great extent, the balance of Gail’s emotional, artistic, intuitive personality with Jeremy’s stable, sometimes plodding outlook on things, and the friction of knowing too much about the person one loves.

  Jeremy sees a beautiful young woman on the campus one spring day—she is bending over to lift some books when a breeze tugs and lifts her skirt—and that single, sharp erotic instant is as tangible to Gail four hours later as the lingering smell of perfume or a smudge of lipstick on a collar would have been to another wife.

  They joke about it. But they do not joke when Gail forms a brief but obsessive attraction to a poet named Timothy the following winter. She tries to exorcise the feelings, or at least block them behind the small remnants of mindshield still left between her and Jeremy, but her emotional indiscretion might as well be a neon sign in a dark room. Jeremy senses it immediately and cannot hide his own feelings—hurt mostly, a certain morbid fascination secondly. For over a month the brief and rapidly fading attraction Gail has for the poet lies between her husband and her like a cold sword blade in the night.

  Gail’s freedom with her emotions may well have saved Jeremy’s sanity—he says as much sometimes—but at other times the surges of feeling distract him from his teaching, his thinking, his work. Gail apologizes, but Jeremy still feels like he is a small boat on the turbulent sea of Gail’s strong emotions.

  Not able to retrieve poetry from his own memory, Jeremy searches Gail’s thoughts for images to describe her. He finds them frequently.

  When she dies, it is one of those borrowed images that he shares silently as he spreads her ashes in the orchard by the stream. It is from a poem by Theodore Roethke:

  I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

  And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

  And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,

  And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

  A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

  Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

  The shade sang with her;

  The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,

  And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

  Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,

  Even a father could not find her:

  Scraping her cheek against straw,

  Stirring the clearest water.

  My sparrow, you are not here,

  Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.

  The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

  Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

  If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

  My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

  Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love.…

  Jacob Goldmann’s neural research sends Jeremy into realms of mathematics that he would otherwise have explored cursorily, if at all, and which now, during these last months before Gail’s illness begins, fill and change his life.

  Chaos math and fractals.

  As with most modern mathematicians, Jeremy has dabbled in nonlinear mathematics; as with most modern mathematicians, he prefers the classical, linear mode. The murky field of chaos mathematics, less than two decades old as a serious discipline, had seemed tentative and strangely sterile to Jeremy before the interpretation of Goldmann’s holographic data sent him plunging into the realms and study of chaos. Fractals had been those clever things applied mathematicians had used for their computer graphics—the brief scene in one of those Star Trek films Gail had dragged him to, occasional illustrations in Scientific American or in Mathematical Intelligencer.

  Now he dreams chaos math and fractals.

  Schrödinger wave equations and Fourier analyses of human holographic thought models had led him into this forest of chaos and now Jeremy finds that he is comfortable in these woods. For the first time in his life and career, Jeremy craves computer time: he finally brings a powerful CD-ROM-boosted 486 PC into the sanctum sanctorum of his study at home and begins petitioning for time on the university’s mainframe. It is not enough.

  Jacob Goldmann says that he can get Jeremy’s chaos program run on one of the MIT Cray X-MPs, and Jeremy lies awake nights in anticipation. When the run is complete—forty-two minutes of computing time, a veritable eternity of a Cray’s precious time—the solutions are partial, incomplete, exhilarating, and terrifying in their potential. Jeremy realizes that they will need several Crays and more than one gifted programmer. “Give me three months,” says Jacob Goldmann.

  The scientist convinces someone in the Bush administration that his work on neural pathways and holographic memory function has relevance to the air force’s longstanding “virtual reality” improved-cockpit research, and within ten weeks he and Jeremy have their access to linked Crays and the programmers to prepare the data.

  The returns are coded in pure mathematics—even the diagrams are unreadable by anyone below the status of research mathematician—and Jeremy spends summer evenings in his study, comparing his own equations with the elegant Cray diagrams of Vague Attractors of Kolmogorov looking like dissected tube worms from the Mindanao Trench, but showing the same quasi-periodic interferometer patterns, chaos seas, and resonance islands that his own feeble math had predicted.

  Jeremy does Poincaré sections of probability waves crashing and collapsing, and the Cray machines—moving through fractaled regions that Jeremy never hopes to understand—return hard data by the bale and computer images that look like photographs of some distant water world where indigo seas are mottled with sea-horse-shaped islands of many colors and infinite topological complexity.

  Jeremy begins to unde
rstand. But just as it is coalescing for him … just as Jacob’s data and the Cray fractal images and the beautiful and terrible chaos equations on his chalkboard begin to converge … things in the “real” world begin to fall apart. First Jacob. Then Gail.

  It is three months after their first visit to the fertility clinic when Jeremy visits his own doctor for a periodic physical. Jeremy happens to mention the tests that Gail has been going through and their sadness at not having a child.

  “And they did just the one semen analysis?” asks Dr. Leman.

  “Mmmm?” says Jeremy, rebuttoning his shirt. “Oh, yeah … well, they suggested I come back for a couple more, but I’ve been really busy. Plus, the first one was pretty conclusive. No problem.”

  Dr. Leman nods, but he is frowning slightly. “Do you remember the sperm count?”

  Jeremy glances down, inexplicably embarrassed. “Uh … thirty-eight, I think. Yes.”

  “Thirty-eight million per milliliter?”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Leman nods again and makes a gesture. “Why don’t you keep your shirt off, Jerry? I’ll run another blood pressure test here.”

  “Was there a problem?”

  “No,” says Dr. Leman, adjusting the cuff. “Did they tell you at the fertility clinic that they like a count of forty million per milliliter with at least sixty percent of the sperm showing good movement with forward progression?”

  Jeremy hesitates. “I think so,” he says. “But they said it probably was a little below average because Gail and I … well, we hadn’t abstained quite the full five days before the tests and—”

  “And they told you to come in for some averaging tests, but told you that there almost certainly wasn’t anything for you to worry about, that the problem probably lay with Gail?”

  “Right.”

  “Lower your shorts, Jerry,” says Dr. Leman.

  Jeremy does so, feeling the slight embarrassment that men suffer as the doctor handles his scrotum.

  “Take your hand and pinch your nose and mouth shut,” orders Dr. Leman. “Yes, that’s right … no air getting through at all … now bear down as if you’re trying to have a bowel movement.”

  Jeremy starts to remove his hand to make a joke, but decides not to. He bears down.

  “Again,” says Dr. Leman.

  Jeremy winces at the pressure the doctor is exerting.

  “All right, relax. You can pull up your shorts.” The doctor goes to the counter, removes the plastic glove, drops it in the trash, and washes his hands.

  “What was all that about, John?”

  Leman turns slowly. “That was known as the Valsalva maneuver. Did you feel that pressure where I had my finger on the vein on either side of your testicles?”

  Jeremy smiles and nods. He had felt it, all right.

  “Well, by pressing down there, I could feel the flow of blood going through your veins … going the wrong way, Jerry.”

  “The wrong way?”

  Dr. Leman nods. “I’m fairly certain that you have varicose spermatic veins in both the left and right testicles. I’m surprised that they didn’t check for that at the fertility clinic.”

  Jeremy feels a wave of tension and clamminess wash over him. He thinks of all the embarrassing tests Gail has gone through in the past few weeks … all of the tests still awaiting her. He clears his throat. “Could these … these varicose veins … could they be hurting our chances for having a child?”

  Dr. Leman leans against the counter and folds his arms across his chest. “They could be the whole problem, Jerry. If it is a bilateral variocele, then that could very well be dropping the motility of the sperm, as well as the actual count.”

  “You mean the thirty-eight million at the clinic was an anomaly?”

  “Probably,” says the doctor. “And my bet is that the motility study was done poorly. I’d wager that less than ten percent of the sperm were moving properly.”

  Jeremy feels something like anger growing in him. “Why?”

  “A variocele—one of these varicose veins in your testicles—is a malfunction of one of the valves in the spermatic vein that causes the blood to flow backward from the kidneys and adrenals into the testicles themselves. That raises the temperature in the scrotum—”

  “Which lowers sperm production,” finishes Jeremy.

  Dr. Leman nods. “The blood also carries a high concentration of toxic metabolic substances such as steroids, which further inhibit sperm production.”

  Jeremy stares at the wall where there is only a cheap Norman Rockwell print of a country doctor listening to a child’s heartbeat. Both the child and doctor are rosy-cheeked caricatures. “Can you fix a variocele?” he asks.

  “There’s an operation,” says Dr. Leman. “With men having sperm counts over ten million per milliliter … a category which you seem to qualify for … there’s usually a quite dramatic improvement. I think the figure’s around eighty-five or ninety percent. I’d have to look it up.”

  Jeremy moves his gaze from the Rockwell print and stares at his doctor. “Do you suggest someone who could do it?”

  Dr. Leman unfolds his arms and holds his palms six or eight inches apart in a molding gesture. “I think the best thing to do, Jerry, is to go back to the clinic, tell them our suspicion of bilateral varioceles, have them do the other sperm tests, and let them recommend a good man to do the surgery.” He glances down at the checklist on his clipboard. “We’ve drawn blood today, so I’ll alert the lab to do a hormone count—testosterone, of course, but also the follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone from the pituitary gland. My guess is that these will be low and that you’d be categorized as marginally fertile or subfertile.” He pats Jeremy on the back. “Harsh words, but good news, actually, because the prognosis after surgery for having children is very good. Much better than with most female fertility problems.”

  Dr. Leman hesitates and Jeremy reads the man’s hesitation to criticize colleagues, but eventually he says, “The problem is, Jerry, that so many of these fertility-clinic doctors know that in ninety percent of the cases the female’s system is at fault. They get out of the habit of looking at the man carefully once a sperm count is in. It’s sort of a professional myopia. But now that they know about the variocele …” He stops at the door, watching Jeremy button his shirt again. “Do you want me to call them about this?”

  Jeremy hesitates only a second. “No. I’ll tell them. They’ll probably call over for your records.”

  “Fine,” says Dr. Leman, ready to go on to his next patient. “Jan will get back to you with the results of the blood tests sometime tomorrow afternoon. We’ll have all that data ready to send over to the clinic when they ask for it.”

  Jeremy nods, pulls on his sport coat, and goes out through the waiting room and into the open air. Already, as he drives home, he is preparing his mindshield to bury the fact of the variocele. Only for a while, he tells himself as he makes the mindshield airtight and then covers it over with random thoughts and images like a trapper hiding the pit with leaves and branches. Only for a little while, until I think this out.

  He knows even while he works to forget what he has learned that he is lying.

  There Are No Eyes Here

  Bremen went up the hill in the dark, past the Jeep parked some yards from where he had left it, past the baying rottweilers in their pen—they were never left in their pen at night—and through the open door of the hacienda.

  The interior was dim but not dark; light came from a single brass candlestick lamp and spilled down the hallway from the direction of Miz Morgan’s bedroom. Bremen felt her presence, the warm rush of white noise rising like the volume turned higher on an untuned radio. It made him dizzy and a trifle nauseated. It also excited him. As if sleepwalking, Bremen moved across the silent room and down the hall. Outside, the dogs had ceased their wild barking.

  The lights in Miz Morgan’s bedroom were off except for a single twenty-five-watt bulb on a table lamp, and that was c
overed with some fabric that bled only a bit of pink light. Bremen stood in the doorway a moment, feeling his balance shift precariously as if he were on the edge of some deep, circular pit. Then he stepped forward and let himself fall into the rush of white noise.

  Her bed was a four-poster, canopied with a diaphanous gauze that caught the pink light with a silken web gleam. He could see her on the far side, the light bleeding past her, her body soft and visible under its own thin folds of open lace. “Come in,” she whispered.

  Bremen went in, setting his feet uncertainly as if his vision and balance were both impaired. He had started around the bed when Miz Morgan’s voice came again from the shadows. “No, stop there a second.”

  Bremen hesitated, confused, on the verge of awakening. Then he saw her motion—a parting of lacy bed curtains, a leaning forward toward a glass or low receptacle on the nightstand, a brief movement of hand and mouth and a quick retreat. The shadows of her face seemed rearranged.

  She wears dentures, he thought, feeling a pang of an emotion quite alien in his thoughts toward Miz Morgan. She’d forgotten to put them in.

  She beckoned him forward again with a movement more of wrist than fingers. Bremen moved around to the far side of the bed, his body throwing yet another shadow across the occupant there, and paused again, unable to move forward or back. The woman may have spoken again, but Bremen’s senses were filled with the white-hot roar of her mindnoise. It struck him like a torrent of blood-warm water flying from some hidden hydrant, disorienting him even more than he had been a second before.

  He reached for the bed curtains, but her long, strong fingers batted his hands away. She leaned forward on her elbows in a motion at once feline and feminine and moved her face close to his legs. As her shoulders parted the curtains Bremen realized that he could see her breasts clearly through the gaps in her gown but not her face, concealed as it was by shadows and the tumble of her hair.