The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  Gail has removed her suit to sunbathe and falls asleep. Jeremy is almost asleep with his head on her thigh when he becomes suddenly and totally aware of the clean-sweat scent of her skin, and of the fine film of moisture glistening along the soft groove inches from his face where the curve of her thigh meets her groin. He turns over, rests his elbows on the blanket, and looks up beyond the compressed hillocks of her pale breasts at the undercurve of her chin, at the suggestion of dark stipple under her arms, and at the corona of light the sun is making around her hair.

  Gail begins to stir, to question his movement, but he restrains her with the palm of his hand against her stomach. Her eyelids flutter and then stay closed. Jeremy shifts position, lifts himself and then lowers himself so he is lying between her legs, parts her thighs with his hands, and lowers his face to the sun-moistened warmth of her. Thinking of a line she had shared with him years before from a John Updike novel, he imagines a kitten learning to lap milk.

  Moments later she pulls him higher, her hands and breathing rapid against him. Their lovemaking is more violent than any that has come before and the sharing of it goes beyond passion and mindtouch. Later, after Jeremy has lain alongside her with his head on her shoulder, their breathing slowing finally, their heartbeats receding so that they can hear the surf again, he fumbles for a towel and brushes away the sweat and traces of sand from her skin.

  “Gail,” he whispers finally, just as they are both ready to drop off to sleep in the shade of the dune grass, “I have to tell you something.” But even as he speaks he feels the remnant of his last mindshield tighten and curl in a reflex protective action. The secret of the variocele has been hidden too deeply for too long to be surrendered so easily. He struggles for the words, or the thoughts, but neither come. “Gail, I … oh, Jesus, kiddo … I don’t know how …”

  She turns on her side and touches his cheek. The variocele? The fact that you didn’t tell me? I know, Jerry.

  The shock is like a physical blow to him. “You know?” ???? When? How long?

  She closes her eyes and he sees the moisture in the lashes. That last night I was sick. While you were sleeping. I knew there was … something … I’d known it for a long time. But the secret of it hurt you for so long that I had to know before …

  Jeremy begins shaking as if from illness. After a moment he does not try to hide the shaking, but clutches at the blanket until it passes. Gail touches the back of his head. It’s all right.

  “No!” He cries out the syllable. “No … you don’t understand … I knew about this.…”

  Gail nods, her cheek almost touching his. Her whisper mixes with the wind in the dune grass. “Yes. But do you know why you never told me? Why you had to create a mindshield like a tumor in your own mind to hide it?”

  Jeremy shudders. Ashamed.

  No, not ashamed, corrects Gail. Frightened.

  He opens his eyes to look at her. Their faces are only inches apart. Frightened? No, I …

  Frightened, sends Gail. There is no judgment in her voice, only forgiveness. Terrified.

  Of what? But even as he forms the thought he grips the blanket again as the sensation of sliding, of falling, rolls across him.

  Gail closes her eyes again and shows him what had been hidden from him within the tight tumor of his secret.

  Fear of deformity. The baby might not be normal. Fear of having a retarded child. Fear of having a child who would never share their mindtouch and would always be a stranger in their midst. Fear of having a child with the ability who would be driven insane by their adult thoughts crashing into his or her newborn consciousness.

  Fear of having a normal child who would destroy the perfect balance of his relationship with Gail.

  Fear of sharing her with a baby.

  Fear of losing her.

  Fear of losing himself.

  The shaking begins again and this time clutching the blanket and the beach sand does not save him. He feels on the verge of being swept away by riptides of shame and terror. Gail puts her arm around him and holds him until it passes.

  Gail, my darling, I am so sorry. So sorry.

  Her mindtouch reaches beyond his mind to someplace deeper. I know. I know.

  They fall asleep there in the shadows of the dunes, with Gernisavien stalking grasshoppers and the wind rising in the high grass. Jeremy dreams then, and his dreams mix freely with Gail’s, and in neither, for the first time, is there even the hint of pain.

  EYES I DARE NOT MEET IN

  Jeremy walks in the orchard in the cool of the evening and tries to talk to God.

  “Robby?” He whispers, but the word seems loud in the twilight silence. Robby? Are you there?

  The last light has left the hillside to the east and the sky is cloudless. Color leaks out of the world until everything solid assumes a shade of gray. Jeremy pauses, glances back at the farmhouse where Gail is visible making dinner in the lantern-lit kitchen. He can feel her gentle mindtouch; she is listening.

  Robby? Can you hear me? Let’s talk.

  There is a sudden flutter of sparrows in the barn and Jeremy jumps. He smiles, shakes his head, grabs a lower limb of a cherry tree, and leans onto it, his chin on the back of his hands. It is getting dark down by the stream and he can see the fireflies blinking against black. All this is from our memories? Our view of the world?

  Silence except for insect sounds and the slight murmur of the creek. Overhead, the first stars are coming out between the dark geometries of tree branches.

  “Robby,” Jeremy says aloud, “if you want to talk to us, we would welcome the company.” That is only partially true, but Jeremy does not try to hide the part that denies it. Nor does he deny the deep question that lies under all of their other thoughts like an earthquake fault: What does one do when the God of one’s Creation is dying?

  Jeremy stands in the orchard until it is full dark, leaning on the branch, watching the stars emerge, and waiting for the voice that does not come. Finally Gail calls him in and he walks back up the hill to dinner.

  “I think,” says Gail as they are finishing their coffee, “that I know why Jacob killed himself.”

  Jeremy sets his own cup down carefully and gives her his full attention, waiting for the surge of her thoughts to coalesce into language.

  “I think it has something to do with that conversation he and I had the night we had dinner at Durgan Park,” says Gail. “The night after he did the MRI scans on us.”

  Jeremy remembers the dinner and much of the conversation, but he checks his memories with Gail’s.

  Jaunting, she sends.

  “Jaunting? What’s that?”

  You remember that Jacob and I talked about The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester?

  Jeremy shakes his head even as he shares her memory of it. A sci-fi novel?

  Science fiction, Gail corrects him automatically.

  He is trying to remember. Yeah, I sort of remember. You and he were both sci-fi fans, it turns out. But what does “jaunting” have to do with anything … it was a sort of a “Beam me up, Scotty” teleportation thing, wasn’t it?

  Gail carries some dishes to the sink and rinses them. She leans back against the counter and crosses her arms. “No,” she says, her voice carrying the slight defensive tone she always uses when discussing science fiction or religion, “it wasn’t ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ It was a story about a man who learned to teleport all by himself.…”

  By “teleport” you mean zap instantaneously from place to place, right, kiddo? Well, you have to know that that’s as impossible as anything in the—

  “Yes, yes,” says Gail, ignoring him. “Bester called the personal teleportation jaunting … but Jacob and I weren’t talking about jaunting really, just how the writer had people learn how to do it.”

  Jeremy settles back and sips his coffee. Okay. I’m listening.

  “Well, I think the idea was that they had a lab out on some asteroid or somewhere, and some scientists were trying to find out if pe
ople could jaunt. It turns out that they couldn’t.…”

  Hey, great, sends Jeremy, adding the image of a Cheshire cat’s grin, let’s put the science back in science fiction, huh?

  “Shut up, Jerry. Anyway, the experiments weren’t succeeding, but then there was a fire or some sort of disaster in a closed section of a lab, and this one technician or whatever just teleported right out … jaunted to a safe place.”

  Don’t we wish that life were that simple. He tries to shield the memories of him clambering up a frozen corpse while Miz Morgan approached with the dogs and a shotgun.

  Gail is concentrating. “No, the idea was that a lot of people had the jaunting ability, but only one person in a thousand could use it, and that was when his or her life was in absolute jeopardy. So the scientists set up these experiments.…”

  Jeremy glimpses the experiments. Jesus wept. They put loaded pistols to the subjects’ heads and squeezed the trigger, after letting them know that jaunting is the only way they can escape? The National Academy of Sciences might have something to say about that methodology, kiddo.

  Gail shakes her head. What Jacob and I were talking about, Jerry, was how certain things come only out of desperate situations like that. That’s when he began talking about probability waves and Everett trees, and I lost him. But I remember him saying that it would be like the ultimate two-slit experiment. That’s why I was interested in what you were talking about when we were going home on the train.… alternate realities and all.…

  Jeremy stands up so quickly that his chair clatters to the floor behind him. He does not notice. “My God, kiddo, Jacob didn’t just kill himself out of despair. He was trying to jaunt.”

  But you said that teleportation was impossible.

  “Not teleportation …” He begins pacing, rubbing his cheek. Then he fumbles through the junk drawer and comes up with a pen, sets the chair back up, draws it over next to Gail’s, and begins sketching on a napkin. “Remember this diagram? I showed it to you right after my first analysis of Jacob’s data.”

  Gail looks down at the doodle of a tree with its branchings and rebranchings. No, I … oh, yes, that parallel-world idea that some mathematician had. I told you that it was an old idea in science fiction.

  “These aren’t parallel worlds,” says Jeremy, still scribbling branches from branches, “they’re probability variantes that Hugh Everett worked out in the 1950s to give a more rational explanation of the Copenhagen interpretation. See, when you do the two-slit experiment and look at it Everett’s way without the quantum-mechanics paradoxes intact, all the separate elements of a superposition of states obey the wave equation with total indifference to the actuality of the other elements.…” He is scribbling equations next to the tree.

  Whoa! Wait. Slow down. Think words.

  Jeremy sets down the pen and rubs his cheek again. “Jacob used to write to me about his theory of reality branching.…”

  Like your probability-wave thing? That we’re all like surfers on a crest of the same wave because our brains break down the same wavefronts or something?

  “Yeah. That was my interpretation. It was the only theory that explained why all these different holographic wavefronts … all these different minds … saw pretty much the same reality. In other words I was interested in why we all saw the same particle or wave go through the same slit. But while I was interested in the micro, Jacob wanted to talk about the macro.…”

  Moses, Gandhi, Jesus, and Newton, offered Gail, sorting out his jumble of thoughts. Einstein and Freud and Buddha.

  “Yeah.” Jeremy is still scribbling equations on the napkin, but he is not paying attention to what he is writing. “Jacob thought that there were a few people in history—he called them ultimate perceptives—a few people whose new vision of physical laws, or moral laws, or whatever was so comprehensive and powerful that they essentially caused a paradigm shift for the entire human race.”

  But we know that paradigm shifts come with big, new ideas, Jerry.

  No, no, kiddo. Jacob didn’t think this was just a shift in perspective. He was convinced that a mind that could conceive of such a major shift in reality could literally change the universe … make physical laws change to match the new common perception.

  Gail frowns. “You mean Newtonian physics didn’t work before Newton? Or relativity before Einstein? Or real meditation before Buddha?”

  Something like that. The seeds were all there, but the total plan wasn’t in place until some great mind focused on it.… Jeremy abandons language as he begins seeing the math diagrams of it. Vague Attractors of Kolmogorov winding like incredibly complex fiber-optic cables, carrying their message of chaos while the small resonance-island nodes of classical quasi-periodic linear functions nestle like tiny seeds in the substance of uncollapsed probability.

  Gail understands. She moves to the table on unsteady legs and collapses into a chair. “Jacob … his obsession with the Holocaust … his family …”

  Jeremy touches her hand. “My guess was that he was trying to concentrate totally on a world in which the Holocaust never occurred. The pistol wasn’t just an instrument of death for him, it was the means by which he could force the experiment. It was a probability nexus … the ultimate act of observation in the two-slit experiment.”

  Gail’s hand curls around his. Did he … jaunt? Did he go to one of those other branches? Someplace where his family is still alive?

  “No,” whispers Jeremy. He touches his scribbled diagram with a shaking finger. “See, the branches never cross … there could be no way to go from one to the other. Electron A can never become Electron B, only ‘create’ the other. Jacob died.” Even as he feels the swirl of grief from Gail, he blocks it out as a new thought strikes him. For a moment the intensity of the idea is so powerful that it is like a mindshield between them.

  What? demands Gail.

  Jacob knew that, he sends, the thoughts coming almost too rapidly to formulate. He knew that he could not travel to a separate Everett-branch superpositional reality … a world where the Holocaust had never happened, say … but he could exist there.

  Gail shakes her head. ??????

  Jeremy grips her forearms. See, kiddo, he could exist there. If his concentration were total enough … all-encompassing … then in that microsecond before the bullet took out his mind, he could have brought the Everett counter-reality into existence. And that branch … Jeremy stabs at a random branch in his diagram. That branch could have him in it … and his family who died in the Holocaust … and all the millions of others.

  “And his daughter, Rebecca?” Gail says softly. “Or his second wife? They were part of his … of our reality because of the Holocaust.”

  Jeremy is dizzy. He goes to the sink for a glass of water. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “I just don’t know. But Jacob must have thought so.”

  Jerry, what kind of mind would it take to … what did you say? … encompass all of a counter-reality. Could any person really do that?

  He pauses. Knowing Gail’s resistance to religious metaphors, he still has to try to explain through one. Maybe that’s what the Garden of Gethsemane was about, kiddo. And maybe even the Garden of Eden.

  He does not feel the flash of anger with which Gail usually responds to a religious concept. He senses instead a great shifting in her thinking as she encounters a profound religious truth without the absurdities of religion getting in her way. For the first time in her life Gail shares some of her parents’ awe at the spiritual potential of the universe.

  Jerry, she shares in a mental whisper, the Garden of Eden fable … the important thing wasn’t the forbidden fruit, or the knowledge of sin it’s supposed to represent … it’s the Tree! The Tree of Life is precisely that … your probability tree … Jacob’s reality branches! Mother always used to quote Jesus saying ‘My Father’s house has many rooms.…’ Worlds without end.

  For a while they do not talk or share mindtouch. Each walks alone in his or her thoughts. Both
are sleepy, but neither wants to go to bed quite yet. They douse the lantern light and go out front to rock on the porch swing awhile, to listen to Gernisavien purring from her place on Gail’s lap, and to watch the stars burn above the hillside to the east.

  EYES I DARE NOT MEET IN DREAMS

  They take a picnic lunch to the shore the next day, bypassing Big Slide Mountain to descend to the beach north of their earlier spot. The sky is a flawless blue and it is very warm. Gernisavien had wakened from her midday nap to stare at them with sleepy, disinterested eyes and had shown not the slightest interest in accompanying them. They left her behind with a command to guard the house. The calico had blinked at their foolishness.

  After lunch Jeremy declares that he is going to follow his mother’s admonition to wait an hour before going into the water, but Gail laughs at him and runs into the surf. “It’s warm today!” she shouts from forty feet out. “Really.”

  “Uh-huh, sure,” calls Jeremy, but he does not want to doze now. He gets to his feet, steps out of his shorts, and begins walking toward her.

  NO!!!

  The blast roars from the sky, the earth, and the sea. It knocks Jeremy into the surf and thrusts Gail’s head underwater. She flails, splashes to make the shallows, and crawls gasping from the receding surf.

  NO!!!

  Jeremy staggers across the wet sand to Gail, lifts her, and holds her against the sudden violence. Wind roars around them and throws sand a hundred feet into the air. The sky twists, wrinkles like a tangled sheet on the line in a high wind, and changes from blue to lemon yellow to a deathly gray. Jeremy hangs on to Gail as they both fall to their knees while the sea rolls out in a giant slack tide and leaves dry, dead land where it recedes. The earth pitches and shifts around them. Lightning flashes along the horizon.