The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  “How can that be? The future is the future."

  “True. But it unfolds a piece at a time."

  “And what unfolded this one?"

  “Who can say? The visions come to me unbidden. I can neither turn them on nor turn them off. Often it is a little thing, as insignificant as a sneeze or a falling leaf. Perhaps it was your asking the question."

  “You mean that my asking when I would die destroyed the world?"

  “Perhaps. But maybe not. It is such a little thing."

  “No one had ever asked that question before?"

  “No one. I do not even ask it of myself. But now the question has been asked—and answered. For me as well as for you."

  Then he had understood why she had winced. Or maybe it was the vision of universal destruction rather than her own that disturbed her. But that was granting her honesty, and strange powers. Landis had shaken his head defiantly. “The world is sturdy, and the future is sturdier. There are billions of people and the momentum of the millennia, and one man—or one woman—weigh little against those."

  “We live in a world of Heisenberg uncertainty,” she had said, “and sometimes macroscopic differences can turn on small-scale events. Be careful what questions you ask, William S. Landis: You might get an answer."

  In the car going home, Carrie had said, “You wish you hadn't embarrassed yourself with Dame Nostra."

  “Who says that?"

  “It was all over the party. You had to argue with her. Who knows what she will think of you."

  And of Carrie, Landis said to himself. “What she would have thought if I had not spoken to her: nothing."

  “I don't think we ought to see each other for a while,” Carrie had said, as if she had read his mind. “If the world is going to end in a few months, I don't think I want to spend it with a skeptic."

  So, Landis thought, Dame Nostra's revelation had claimed its first convert and its first sacrifice.

  Another grain of sand fell onto the pile. The mound held, and Landis looked at Grohe, whose face held a look of bored anticipation. It was, no doubt, the look of someone who spends long hours watching inconsequential data accumulate while waiting for a sudden and unpredictable change of state. Not unlike the condition of the world as it awaited the millennium.

  Television had made much of Dame Nostra's performance, and newspapers had carried banner headlines, some of them breaking out their “end of the world” type, before they had all grown sheepish and followed Dame Nostra's prophecy with scientific rebuttals, and then with the customary indifference of yesterday's news as it had faded before the next scandal or the next revelation of corruption or stupidity. Carrie, though, had acted on her desire to cool their friendship, and Landis knew that even if she returned after the turn of the millennium, their relationship would never be the same. She could never admit her credulity, and he could never forget it.

  Another grain fell. It knocked a grain off the top of the pile. They bumped several more, and each of them bumped others until the avalanche of grains reached the edge of the dish and one fell off the edge.

  The motor cut off abruptly. The beaker stopped revolving. The grains of sand stopped falling. The chair lurched.

  And stopped.

  Landis looked down at the water just below and then at Grohe.

  “You don't think I would really dunk a reporter, do you?” Grohe said, grinning. “But you believed I would, didn't you? And that was as good."

  “Yes,” Landis said. “The joke's on me.” But he wasn't thinking about the experiment. He was thinking about chaos theory and about Dame Nostra. Perhaps his life had been changed by an event as inconsequential as attending a performance. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe the fate of the world did hang on an event as inconsequential as the fall of a grain of sand.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  October 24, 2000

  Paul Gentry

  Paul Gentry listened to his wife's breathing. The air came in slowly, softly, and after a long pause a gentle exhalation. During the pauses he had time to wonder if the end had come. In the silent moments he found himself wishing it were over and then feeling guilty that he should wish dead this one-time center of his existence, who had drifted to its periphery and now was drifting beyond the periphery of life itself. Was he wishing her gone for his own sake, so that he could get on unencumbered? Or was he only hoping for an end to her suffering, for her body to stop clinging to what was beyond retrieval?

  He was a realist about this, as he was about so much else, and he knew that the two wishes were knotted together inextricably. And he knew that her death would not end his guilt—he had not been a good or faithful husband. He had traveled whenever he could, he had sought his fame and passion elsewhere, and he would always know that he had cheated her of his commitment. His only comfort lay in the fact that he had never betrayed her at home. Everywhere they had lived he had been a model of domestic solicitude and fidelity. She had never known.

  He did not keep secrets from himself, however. His guilt would not deter him from his continuing pursuit of success and pleasure.

  Gentry listened to her uncertain respiration and looked at the face on the thin hospital pillow. It was a face that had grown old with him and now was beyond age, locked in a struggle that made irrelevant the frets of everyday existence. “Let go,” he said.

  He looked down at her body. Her arms lay motionless outside the sheet, folded down neatly once. Her left arm had been kissed by the Aesculapean snake that delivered potions intended to heal and others intended to magic away pain. The intravenous tube led past a valve to a dented plastic bag hanging from an arm at the head of the bed. He lifted his gaze from her face and the sterile hospital pillow. The walls were painted a neutral cream. To his left was a window admitting warm autumn sunlight, to his right a narrow lavatory and shower stall. All of it smelled of alcohol and strong soap and disinfectant, and the only sound, with the door closed, was the broken rhythm of his wife's breathing.

  Behind him was a television set on a bracket high on the wall where it could be watched from the bed by a wakeful patient, or from the adjacent armchair by the mobile ill. Gentry reached over his wife to the remote control hanging by a thick wire from the headboard, and clicked it on. As the set came to life, he flicked the channel to CNN.

  “...has reported what appears to be a supernova in the Canis Major constellation. Early observations are unable to determine the distance of the giant sun that has exploded. The first observations coincide with the location of the nearby star Sirius, but may have come from a star far beyond. In the unlikely event that Sirius has exploded in a nova, or even a supernova, the consequences would be serious, perhaps even fatal, for life on Earth. But the public should not be alarmed, astronomers say: Although Sirius is less than nine light years from Earth, the involvement of this brightest star in the night sky is remote, since Sirius is not the kind of star that scientists have expected to turn nova, much less supernova. So please stay tuned to this station for later information, as well as instant news about the world today."

  The report continued from Atlanta with occasional remotes from the Middle East, from the former Soviet states, from Latin America, and from the Far East, but Gentry was looking out the window where the sunlight was still benign. If Sirius had exploded 8.8 years ago, the light from that spectacular heavenly fireworks would now be arriving on Earth, and the gamma radiation and X-rays would be close behind. If that didn't finish off humanity, the cosmic debris would do so when it arrived in a few years. If it was Sirius.

  The door swung open and the day nurse came into the room. Her face was flushed and her steps were quick. Instead of going to her patient, she came directly to Gentry. “Dr. Gentry, have you heard the news?"

  “About the supernova?” Gentry asked. He had noticed her on the way to his wife's room; in fact, he had been attracted, as he always was, by youth and a clear complexion, in this instance suffused by a rosy glow beneath the skin that he always found irresistible. He
had stopped to ask unnecessary directions. In the process he had introduced himself and enjoyed the look of recognition that came into her eyes. Her name, he had noticed from the metal tag pinned to the white uniform just above her right breast, was “Sharon."

  “Is it serious?” she asked.

  “It might be,” he said. “The chances are still small, but if there is anything you have been putting off for a better time, it might be a good idea to consider it now."

  “Oh, Dr. Gentry,” she said. She seemed unable to go on.

  “The best thing about it,” Gentry said, “is that it won't matter to Angel.” He nodded toward his wife. “The end of Earth, the end of the universe—every day the universe ends for somebody."

  “Oh, Dr. Gentry,” she said again.

  No doubt she had handled many life-and-death situations for other people, he thought, but this cosmic crisis was beyond her capacity.

  Gentry stood up. As if it were an invitation she had been awaiting, she came into the protection of his arms. Even through his suit and her white nylon uniform, he felt the warmth and resilience of her body, so different from the chilly, nearly motionless figure of his wife only a few feet away. Sharon held him, he felt her shoulders and legs trembling, but over her blonde head he saw his wife open her eyes.

  Gentry had waited outside the domed assembly hall of Ariel Village. He had made his speech to the New Agers and he had no patience with the mysticism of the speakers that would follow. He had heard enough of spectral beings from Alpha Centauri speaking their cryptic wisdom in strangely clipped Irish accents from the lips of a middle-aged American, and spiritual entities who concerned themselves with humans even though they had no time in their reality. He had walked out of the hall as a bodiless creature of uncertain origins named Lazaris had said in a high, thin voice, “No. In a word, no. This is not the ending. This is the beginning."

  But Gentry believed in getting a check in his hand before he left the site. Knowing the poverty of many groups, especially the universities, he insisted on it, and Julie MacGregor, the founder of the village and the leader of this group, had promised to pay him immediately after the session.

  Anyway, this was a peaceful part of the world in which to spend a few moments at rest. He needed rest. He had been pushing himself hard all year; the millennial fever would cool down soon, and he would have to find another handle on catastrophe.

  Here in Baca, Colorado, the air had been clear and cool in this bright October before the end of the millennium. To the south, the land rose to Black Mesa in Oklahoma. Some 120 miles and 1600 feet in elevation to the west was Trinidad, and beyond that the gray parapet of the Rocky Mountains, and to the northwest Colorado Springs and 14,000 feet of Pikes Peak.

  Surrounded by the rusty high-plains desert and the great mountains that lifted from them, Gentry had pondered the western hubris that tried to enslave the eternal land to a human conceit about a few revolutions of the planet out of so many. In this spot, in the two centuries or so it had tried to shape the land, humanity had made little difference. “The earth abides,” he had muttered. And then his gaze had drifted to this green park carved out of the semi-desert, with its domed buildings sitting in it like toadstools, and above to a plume of smoke from the massive Four-Corners Power Plant not far away. “These ants may yet bring down the sky,” he had told himself. Even the desert that looked so permanent could be made to flower or to blow away; even the mountains that were the consequence of great continents colliding held within them the seeds of their own destruction.

  At that moment, as the swish of the assembly hall doors had disturbed his contemplation, Gentry had had a feeling of impermanence, as if massive forces were at work in the reaches of the planet beneath his feet.

  People had passed, chattering. Gentry had looked up, his mood shattered. Why should these foolish people be carefree when the world might be ending?

  Gentry had turned and made his way past the glass doors into the walkway that circled the arena. Tables lining the walkway offered cheap salvation: Viking runes, Tibetan bells, herbal teas, colored candles, solar energizers, occult books, pamphlets, tape recordings, computer programs, and, most of all, stones and crystals. Before his talk Gentry had fingered citrines, tourmalines, amethysts, topazes, rose and blue quartz, black onyxes, obsidian, and ordinary pebbles rounded by tumbling in Rocky Mountain streams. Gentry had seen some outside imbibing the sun's rays and others in bowls of water. The water, he had been told, was soaking up energy from the crystal. Gentry had even seen a crystal wand that could cure diseases of the mind and body. They had all been attractive enough, in their different ways, but he had felt no sympathetic vibrations, no healing or soothing powers.

  He had looked through the books as well: Natural ESP, Shambhala, Synchronicity, Cosmic Crystals, Crystal Healing, Perfect Symmetry, The Mayan Factor, Sympathetic Vibrations, Creative Thought Remedies, Animal Dreaming, Creative Visualization, Easy Death, The Unquiet Dead, The Case for Reincarnation—they went on and on through a series of books ghosted, literally, by a 35,000-year-old warrior who had once lived on Atlantis, and a series written by a live actress in which she related her discovery of the spirit world and found her way to recognition of herself, and everyone else, as God.

  Gentry had gone past them all, through the doors into the arena itself, where a man dressed in a khaki military shirt over a white shirt was addressing the assembled audience. His eyes were closed as if in communion with unseen spirits, and his arms were outstretched as if to embrace the universe. He looked a lot like a salesman praising the psychic benefits of his product.

  “We must honor prophets like Dr. Gentry, who came here to warn us about the end of the world,” he had said, “but let others worry about what that means to them. To us it means not an end but a beginning. We have lived before and we will live again. If not here on Earth then in another, better form. Perhaps as spirits refined by fire to a better understanding and an experience that defies description.

  “You are God. You are, each and every one of you, part of the Second Coming."

  The audience had responded with scattered upwellings of agreement like a fundamentalist congregation. But questions and dissent had emerged as well. A woman's voice had called out from somewhere in the audience, “What about the UFOs?"

  “No one with any access to the records and a mind that has not been closed to the evidence can doubt that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth and that they come from more advanced planets than ours to share their wisdom with us. We have only to look around us, at Stonehenge and the pyramids and the Mayan ruins and the ancient landing field at Nazca in Peru. Some of you have been contacted by aliens, or by the spirits of aliens, who have promised to take the faithful away in spaceships on the day the End arrives, that you will be saved not just in spirit but in body as well. I have no quarrel with that. Your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth."

  Gentry had been about to make his way to the platform, to expostulate with these simpletons, to burn away their foolish illusions with the cleansing flame of his end-of-the-world rhetoric, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “Dr. Gentry,” a young man's voice had said, “Julie wants to see you."

  “And I want to see her,” Gentry had said.

  The controlled anger in Gentry's voice had made the young man turn and look at him, but Gentry had not cared.

  Julie MacGregor's office was in the administrative toadstool—the New Agers were big on domes, because they said energy spiraled upward. A picture window behind the desk offered a mesmerizing view of the mountains along the horizon, perhaps even Pikes Peak on a clear day, and beyond the manmade oasis the ruddy semi-desert of southeastern Colorado. Just as dramatic were the office furnishings: a clear glass table top, uncluttered by papers or equipment, supported on exquisite pillars of what looked like rose quartz, and an executive chair behind it molded from lucite. In one corner of the office a spotlight was focused on an imposing chunk of amethyst held aloft almost i
nvisibly by a glass arm. In the other corner was a white-leather sofa with matching easy chair behind a coffee table whose top seemed to be a single slab of rose quartz.

  MacGregor had had her back to the door, looking at her million-dollar view, but she had turned when Gentry entered. As dramatic as the office was, it was only a setting for the woman who occupied it. She had worn a turquoise sweater, violet sweat-pants, and green ankle-high sneakers, and a sizable crystal had dangled from her neck. Although she was more than 65, her hair was still red and she still had the body of a dancer and the presence of an actress, and she had focused on Gentry the full impact of her green eyes and the certainty of her beliefs.

  She was one of the few beautiful women Gentry had met for whom he felt no desire, perhaps because he felt, instead, a vague sense of intimidation.

  “Ah, Dr. Gentry,” she had said, “I have your check.” She had held out a discreet business envelope. “And our thanks."

  He had taken a step forward to accept the envelope, taken it in his fingers, and hesitated. “Why do I feel used?” he had asked.

  “I'm sure I don't know, Dr. Gentry,” MacGregor had said, her eyes opening wider. “I sense the visceral emotions of your yellow chakra. That's good. That's even better than the sexual pulsations of your orange chakra. Let it out."

  “I feel,” he had said, his bass voice reverberating in the room with so much to reverberate against, “like the front man for a con game who doesn't know until too late that it's a con game. I scare your customers to death and your operation moves in to rescue them—for a price."

  “We offer them hope, Dr. Gentry, and a way to face the uncertainties of the future. What do you offer them?"

  “Reality."

  “Your truth is your truth—"

  “And my truth is my truth,” Gentry had finished. “I've heard that before. What does it mean?"

  “It means, Dr. Gentry, that we all see different parts of reality, or reality in different ways. You preach your reality—that the world is coming to an end, and there's nothing that anybody can do about it, unless, if the impersonal disasters of the universe don't kill us, your audiences are willing to do what most of them can never do, which is to change their ways of life. We offer them a way of coping with that reality—a view of a universe that is more benign, more human. And we can get them to change their lives."