Black Pockets

by George Zebrowski

  Not then.

  Thirty years passed.

  My parents died.

  Our systems began to fail. We managed to have a few children, none of them mine. The name, the face, the look became my wife after years of drifting toward me. Her father died, and her mother did not stand between us when she moved in with me in my now larger quarters.

  We looked at the small star that was the sun, and wondered if they would ever come out to find us. Surely they knew how to count, and could see how many rocks had not come back.

  “They wanted to lose us,” Father said, utterly convinced of it to the very day he died.

  Changes began to show on the viewer, suggesting that our orbit was decaying, but we had no way to measure how quickly. I was glad that my parents were not alive to see the coming end.

  12

  Finally, our fellow human beings came out from their bright and guilty world to see what was left of us among what they had come to call the Rocks. They told us that our orbit was changing, but it would be decades before the rock was drawn into the dark planet.

  The Earth that sent us off was no more. A century of conflict and dying had passed for them. A century of climate warming had redrawn the coastlines of all the continents. Whole nations had disappeared. A boiling world weather had destroyed cities. New diseases had reduced the population to less than four billion. A world choking in its own wastes had been forced to stop its crimes against the future, to live more modestly. A century-long storm of regret and change had passed across a world I had never known, sweeping away the fossil-era criminals.

  The irony, as I learned later, was that all the tools that would have prevented the tragedies of this period had existed well in advance, but had been held back by the profiteers. By the third decade of the twenty-first century it was already too late to do anything except slow the global weather catastrophe. The slowing got underway only by mid-century.

  I was taken to Earth, along with a few hundred survivors, in what was their year 2152. Many of our oldest refused to go. They were dying quickly by this time, their minds too dimmed to want more life; they were done with Earth and old wounds. Some did go, and they were surprised by the bio-skills and mind-opening programs that changed them.

  Our bodies were made younger. Strange, helping minds passed through ours, educating us as we would have been had we grown up on Earth. They ministered to our bodies. I was told I had a long, long life still ahead of me.

  You must remember, if you are to understand us, how ignorant we were of human history. All that we knew, all that could be given to us while we were growing up, flowed from the minds of the oldest, but their knowledge was general, often vague and wrong. We grew up unable to visualize stars, planets, and moons, much less the planet that had captured us and prevented our return. What I have told you is lit by later knowledge. I cannot begin to suggest to you the pitiable state of our minds, of my mind, at any of the early moments of my story. Go read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, a novel which spoke to me so many years later, and in a way the author could not possibly have imagined. My father had known the book, but had been unable to convey it from memory. I read it with his eyes.

  We had grown up in a lighted cave, and when we looked out for the first time, we at first saw only a larger cave, with distant lights. Even the planet that had captured us was nothing to the naked eye. The viewer enhancements helped our vision, but not our understanding. We had to learn how to see.

  After that discovery, we still hoped to be visited, to be counted lost and then found. It wasn’t that far to Earth, when we learned the yardsticks, not even much of a single light-year. I was well past a grown man by then, as were my friends. My education could not progress beyond what I could remember my father and mother telling me, and the few notes my father had written down. It was a poor record, mostly, filled with flashes of insight, when I compare it to what I know today.

  We went to Earth, were given new health and perspectives. Earth knew a lot about who we were, who we had been, and that was knowledge we needed.

  It was a gift of clarity, to know plainly that there were those who had tried to make the Rocks into a graveyard of exiles.

  We learned the confused details of why our fathers and mothers had been imprisoned, and why it had been done in this way: mostly because it had been convenient and practical.

  My father had said, “It was terrible to live knowing that our own didn’t want us anywhere near them, and didn’t care what happened to us after we were gone.” He had smiled in his usual way and added, “If we ever get back to ask them why they did this to us, I’ll bet the new people will say they don’t know why...”

  I stood on the outside of a planet, on something truly big, beneath the daylight of a sun that filled me up but could not be looked at directly.

  I saw the silver meadows of the Moon.

  But at night the stars were still there in a bigger cave and I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that we were all inside something even bigger, and that limited our knowledge, and there was no one from outside to come and tell us the truth.

  And then, when the six of us—Pierre, Chen, Johnny, Abasi, and Juan—got together, along with at least a hundred others, we decided to return to our Rock.

  Happily, my wife found me again after a long separation on Earth, and also wanted to return.

  She took my hand and kissed me, then said, “Love is much more than the making of reproducing pairs.”

  So much that had thrown us apart was now gone. We saw each other plainly, even heroically, and there was no keeping us away from each other and our beginnings.

  We were all of us very different people when we met again, in the big halfway community that had been made for us on Earth, and from which we were filtering out into new lives. Thinking about that halfway community on Earth, I see a gathering of the twice awakened.

  No one tried to stop us from going home. Other Rocks had been visited, and were reorganizing. Something strange and new was happening, and we yearned to join it.

  On the day of our return we learned that scientists from Earth had been here awhile, studying the wanderer that had captured our home. Some of them had taken up residence in our old barracks. They were pleasant, cooperative people, and a few of us began to help them with their work. They had adjusted our orbit, we learned, to a safer distance.

  Once again I stood at one end of my world, looking across the grasslands, forests, the lake and waterways swirling around the sun-plate. I breathed the familiar air, the memory of which had never left me. All the life-support systems had been restored, even improved. Aside from the need to make things livable for the scientific teams that came and went, I think there were people on Earth who knew that there would be returnees, and had acted with an awareness of the waiting possibilities.

  As I stood there, I saw the brave, physical beauty of the hollow, and realized that much of that beauty was inseparable from my memory of the history of its inhabitants, which did not make it any the less real.

  Earth’s history has also been a microcosm, as locked up as our rock. From what I now know, we may all be locked up in the microcosm we call the universe, inside a standing infinity of endless regions developing differently, as locked away from each other as each of us is in ourselves. That’s all there may be—an infinite series of adjoining microcosms. Some thinkers say there are no windows between them, some say there are. Others claim that the windows are dirty, and that we cannot cleanse them. And still others contend that each microcosm only imagines the windows into another realm, and perhaps even imagines that there are other microcosms; but the reality is only one.

  It occurred to me that I was drawn to these doubts because my life had been too much inside; lacking the experience of outsides and the sight of stars in my early years stunted my dreams of infinity. Perhaps so. Stuntings do happen. But as soon as it was possible for me to think of the universe as a unity, I imagined that we were all as inside again as we had bee
n inside our mothers. We apprehend more than we can say, or ever hope to say, rightly or wrongly.

  But I’m glad for the windows, for the way we can imagine outsides, both personal and cosmic. It’s a transcendent ability, or an illusion, to be able to imagine, and perhaps do what has been imagined, even if it fails to break us out from the prison of time.

  I’ll bet that the windows are real, and that infinities are in fact beckoning realities.

  In time we were visited by peoples from the other Rocks. I went to the first congress of survivors, and became the first president of our growing skylife confederation (yes, that was me, even if you don’t recall the name). Our confederation is loose. Lots of space between us. Resources for all. Knowledge to share. Room to disagree. A planetbound civilization, we now believe, courts suicide.

  At home, again, we’re learning more about how we can make use of the strange world at the center of our system. Something seems to be stirring on the surface of the dark planet. To leave when the confederation is beginning to grow would be to have everything taken away from us. Earth’s ground is not my ground and never will be. I am glad that the return failed as it did; but also that we were found again. It would have been too great a task to reinvent everything that Earth has finally returned to us.

  All of us who have visited Earth carry the memory of our terrible ignorance of humanity’s ragged march across history. But now, with teaching minds and other aids, along with our solidarity with the other survivors of the Rocks, our view of ourselves is changing.

  The Rocks had only needed better aims and resources to find a way of life. Now we have enough to fulfill our possibilities. Our first world had in it a better one—well, perhaps simply a different one— and we are the first to see that it was waiting to be born from us. The horrors of the past will be set aside, if not entirely forgiven, among the stars. Our deprivations gave us clarity. I started here, and now I see it anew. My new world knows me as much as I know it.

  Everyone’s first world is a microcosm. Then, with luck and a lot of knowledge, it opens, and microcosm builds upon microcosm, until we spy a unique and infinite nature. Reality is turned inside out and the familiar is made strange, because it was always strange.

  Home will go with us wherever we may go and whatever we may do, now that we plan to put engines on our habitats. They are that part of forever that will always be ours.

  Yet the more I learn and do, the more I still occasionally shudder at the ignorance, the terrible ignorance that was ours! All my father’s memory-racking could not have overcome it in me. Yet he always knew more than I did, much more than he could tell me. Much of it I will never know, as each day I feel the waiting inconceivabilities crowding around me, taunting me. When I first came to Earth, I naively imagined that with all they could do, with all they were doing to help me, they might even be able to raise my father from the dead.

  My father’s ashes are buried here, among his beloved lofty pines, from which we cut the battering ram that helped break me out of the little cave of our world. My mother is there in the ground with him. The dismay that flowed out of her in the time that I knew her is over. She had not wanted children in the Rock, but had not been able to prevent having me.

  That’s lookback logic, I know, but futures insist on making sense of pasts in ways that pasts cannot guess. The dead who buried us alive in the Rocks will never know what they gave us. Today they might regret it. They gave us something completely different than what they gave our parents. Maybe it is all one thing, past and future, except for the way we count changes through the whirling present. Lookback makes things very clear, very late. It’s the best we can do.

  I think the truth will stand it.

  Metaphysical Fears

  rise up when we ask the deepest questions...

  Interpose

  If Christ has not been raised,

  then our preaching is in vain

  and your faith is in vain.

  —Corinthians 15:14

  HIS UNWASHED CLOTHES WERE PASTED TO HIS lean body with warm sweat. As he moved slowly down the litter-strewn street, he thought of fresh blood running on green wood, refusing to mingle with the last droplets of sap. The noonday sun heated the layer of dust on the sidewalk. A gust of hot wind whirled it into his face. He tried to shield himself with his right hand, but the grit penetrated into his eyes, making them water.

  He staggered to the open doorway of a deserted building and sat down on the doorsill. It was cooler here and he was grateful no one had found it before him.

  As his eyes cleared, he sat looking at the limbo of the street. A stream of dirty water was flowing in the gutter. A roach ran across the sidewalk in front of him, and a gust of wind swept the insect into the current which carried it away toward the drain on the corner.

  The spear entered his side, but only enough to jar him from his shock sleep, enough for him to feel that he was too high on the cross for it to reach his heart. The pain penetrated layers of memory, bridging more than these last twenty years of pavement, to a time before they had marooned him here, and sometimes dimly to a time still earlier. His eyes were heavy with blood and sweat; his face was benumbed. The wood groaned with his hanging weight. It was green and pliant and the nails were loose in the pulp. The ropes around his arm muscles had shrunk and were biting into his bones.

  The land was dark except for the thin ribbon of dawn on the horizon. Someone was struggling with a ladder on the ground. Soon hands were removing the nails from his palms and cutting the ropes from his arms. He felt himself lowered roughly and wrapped in a cold cloth.

  Voices. They were not speaking Aramaic, but he understood them. He heard their thoughts and the words which followed took on meaning. “It couldn’t be him, look at his face, not with that face, look at his face.”

  Another voice echoed, “That face, that face, faceface.”

  “So many hangermen strung up at this time, impossible to tell for sure, for sure.”

  “For sure impossible.”

  “Anyway he was a man like this one. We’ll have fun, fun with him as well, just as well.”

  A third voice shouting, “Hurry, hurry, the machine is swallowing power parked in time.” A laugh, a giggle. “Lots of power, gulping and waiting for us—where do we take him after we fix him?”

  “Shut up!” A voice with depth, commanding attention from the shallower cortex which mimed him. “See how afraid he is...”

  Other voices. “See how afraid, afraidafraid!”

  “We’ll see how afraid he is and take it from there.”

  “From there, from there, fromthere.”

  Earlier in the garden he had asked to be taken away from this place where they were planning his death. The saving of men was not a task for him. He had done enough in helping mutate the animals into men, and more in making sure that all the main groups remained isolated long enough to breed true; he had even worked with the others trying to imprint food and hygiene commands on the groups. He would leave it to others to set the examples for the development of a sane culture. The trouble with men seemed to lie in their excessive awe of nature and their own capacities, an impressionability which led them to be convinced only by powers and authorities beyond them, or by the force of the stronger ones among them. Reason was powerless unless allied with one of these. He was not going to die for these creatures, he had decided in the garden, but they had come and seized him while his attention was with communicating...

  “He’ll take some fixing,” the dominant voice said. “I wonder if he knows what’s happening?”

  Another voice was saying, “If it’s really him, then he knows. A that brotherly stuff—and from a wreck who crawled away after they cut him down, and all the nothings made up a story. When we cut him up, we’ll know for sure.” And he laughed.

  “Cut him up, cut him up, cuthimup!”

  Later he woke up on the floor of a small room. He saw their boots near him. They were looking at the open door where the world was a
n insubstantial mist, a maelstrom of time flowing by in wave after wave of probability moving outward from a hidden center which somewhere cast the infinite field of space and time and possibility. He felt the bandages on his body and the lack of pain. Time travel, he understood from their thoughts. How cunning and irrational they had become to make it work, a thing so dangerous, absurd, and impossible that no race in the galaxy had ever succeeded in making it work. And like the ones who had put him on the cross, they had come for him to soothe their own hatred and cruelty through pain in the name of pleasure. The beast’s brain was still served by technical cleverness, so many centuries hence.

  Suddenly with a great effort he lifted himself from the floor, and without standing up completely threw himself head first through the open portal, tumbling head over heels into the haze, hearing them screaming behind him as he floated away from the lighted cube. “We’ll get you!” they shouted as their light faded and their forms were carried into time....

  By 1935 he had been alone for twenty years, slowly learning what his disciples had done after his disappearance. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had lied, creating a fantastic legend. Their written words only served as a reminder of who he really was. The words that he read in the public library remembered everything for him.

  But he had not saved mankind, either in terms of the story or his own mission. His death was needed to complete the story, and his presence with the resources of his entire civilization, twenty centuries ago. He had not heard his people’s voice in a long time, an age since the time in the garden when the sun had hung in the trees like a blood-red orange.

  He took out his small bottle of cheap whiskey and gulped a swallow, grateful for the few lucid moments in which he knew himself, knew he was not the man the apostles and time had made him. The bottle slipped from his grasp and shattered on the pavement. He looked at the pieces, then bent his head and closed his eyes. The reality of his world, so filled with knowledge and the power over one’s life, was so distant, and his exile and suffering so near and unfulfilled. Silently he spoke the words, which would have freed him in the other time, but were ineffectual here.