Challenging Destiny #24: August 2007

by Crystalline Sphere Authors

  "Excuse me?"

  The visitor pointed at the Banteay Srey picture. “Can't find."

  She had a high-pitched child's voice, very sharp, demanding. “What do you mean?"

  "I see. I imagine. But can't find.” She chastised the photo with a slap. “So doesn't exist."

  Imaging, Mark described it once. We learnt how to do it together, even though it broke my heart to help him do something that would take him away from me. Close your eyes, he told me. Pick out a detail of the place you want to be—the detail that makes it all come together. Focus on that detail, see how the light changes its surface, then follow the light back, see how it falls on everything around that detail, how everything relates to the detail. And you'll be there. We did that with the photos—the albums I used to flick through with him as a child, telling him stories. But with the change, it was Mark who was telling me the stories, visiting the places he saw and coming back to me, full of excitement at everything he'd experienced.

  The image doesn't have to be perfect—a detail wrong here or there doesn't trip up a jaunt. This new universe we live in is kinder, more user-friendly to the visitors and will find them a close fit, like a well-intentioned dating agency. You can change around the furniture and still jaunt back to the same room.

  But find a detail that buggers any chance of a close fit—well, that's a different story.

  "Oh, it exists,” I told her. “Well, almost."

  "Almost?” the visitor repeated and looked closer. “Details not right."

  "That's right."

  "Shadows go the wrong way."

  "I'd have said the flying saucer in the top left-hand corner is the give-away, but yes, I didn't get the shadows right. I was still getting used to Photoshop."

  She stared at me in bafflement. “A piece of software you could use to manipulate photographic images digitally,” I explained to her patiently. “You know—software? Computers?"

  "Know computers. No need to patronize."

  "Then stop talking like a child and use sentences when you talk to me. I'm not a visitor. Or a ghost. Or whatever you call yourselves."

  "We call ourselves humans. Same as you call yourselves."

  We must have glared at each other for a good ten seconds in silence. That would have been a good point for her to leave, but no, she wasn't going anywhere. “Did you go there?"

  "Banteay Srey? Once. What about it?"

  "New places are so—rare. Describe it."

  "Why? I took this way back."

  "Places like this don't change much. Tell me."

  That would have been a good point for me to leave, but no, it seemed I wasn't going anywhere either. I'm still not sure why, but I guess it's not often someone asks me to tell one of my stories. So I looked at the picture on the wall, then I closed my eyes and looked at the picture in my head.

  "There was a square, surrounded by tropical trees. Across the square, there were two lines of stone stumps, remains of pillars leading up to a gateway. That was all that was left—just this gateway, carved from pink stone. The top was crowned with sculptures like the leaves of the trees, three huge leaves like the feathers of a mythical bird. Just below the feathers, I could make out figures in relief. Lines of human dancers with the heads of elephants, their trunks waving in the air, dancing around a Buddha figure, arms and legs almost reaching out of the stone. I remember that Buddha looking straight at me, asking me to dance."

  She smiled, then closed her eyes and her face crinkled up with the concentration. Within two minutes, she was gone.

  You're welcome, I thought.

  A minute later, she came back. “Thank you,” she said. “My name's Chang."

  "Abigail,” I blurted out, not meaning to.

  And she was gone again.

  * * * *

  March 6

  Sal doesn't waste time. He even had his foot on the frame so I couldn't close the door.

  "Just to let you know, next Tuesday at 6. You promised."

  "Hello, Sal. I know I promised. Anything else?"

  "There's homework. Written."

  "Come on, Sal. Who writes anything down anymore? So—what's the Memory Circle doing this time?"

  "Where you were. When it happened."

  I nearly winced. I'm sure Sal noticed, but he didn't say. “Oh, and I'm doing a run to Parchers Crossing on the 18th."

  "I could do with some wallpaper before then."

  "You're not the only one with errands."

  "Dozens of them. Rattling through my larder every night—"

  "OK, OK. I'll see what I can do."

  He stood on the doorstep for a while longer. “Yes?"

  "One last thing. We're not at Mona's anymore."

  "Why?"

  "Ceiling collapsed. Roof timbers rotted right through. They just missed her in the bedroom."

  Pity. “Poor Mona. So where will you be then?"

  "Abi?"

  "No way."

  "We can't use my place because of the fire."

  "I'm not having Mona and those bitches in here."

  "And I'll see about moving the trip up to Parchers Crossing by a few days."

  He drives a hard bargain.

  "One time only. And I mean my coming along to the Memory Circle."

  "Oh, I'm sure we'll convince you to stay. History is as important as food and water to communities like Cray Point—"

  "Is that the phone ringing?"

  "A phone hasn't rung here in twenty years, Abi."

  "I've got good hearing."

  It was meant to be an insult, but Sal just smiled, knowing he'd won. “See you the 12th. And don't forget your homework."

  * * * *

  March 7

  Mark's home! When was the last time—the turn of the year?

  He liked the book I got him. I'd found it in a weekend condo during a scavenger trip in Craytown—one of the later apartment blocks where wealthy New Yorkers used to enjoy their long summer weekends, but now the sea wind just crusts the paneless window frames with salt. On the second floor, I came across the treasure trove—the cupboards had been ransacked, but no one had touched the books. Tough decision deciding what to take with me. I thought about British Country Homes From The Air, but couldn't bear the idea of Mark jaunting a half mile above the ground. OK, you don't hear about people jaunting inside objects—this new universe seems happy enough to displace a little air and find you some room. Where you can, arrive high, take a quick look down, pick your spot and jaunt down safely. I'm sure Mark can do that fine—but I'm his mother and I'm not going to encourage any risk-taking.

  So I took an Ansel Adams instead. That was a find—those views of Yosemite can't have changed in the century since Adams had photographed them. Mark drank up the images. He sat on the edge of his bed, turning the pages slowly, committing the pictures to memory. He barely noticed the soup I left him, or how much I wanted to hug him (I wouldn't, of course, visitors never touch people—and I can understand why, a lot of us didn't react well to the visitors at first, and I guess it's just second nature for them to avoid bodily contact now).

  When he'd gone right through the book, I remembered my homework and asked Mark about the change. He tried to find the words for a minute, nervously jaunting from chair to bedside faster and faster, so for a while I had two sons. Finally, he just smiled apologetically and jaunted away.

  He didn't touch his soup. But Chang came today as well—I'm sure visitors can smell free food a thousand miles off.

  I didn't offer. I had my back turned to scrape the wallpaper and she just took the soup. But she eyed it suspiciously. “Think it's poisoned?"

  "Not used to hot food.” Her hands shivered around the ceramic bowl, enjoying the luxury of the warmth. “You have electricity?"

  "I've got a generator for a little power, but I use a woodstove for cooking. A genuine Aga, needed Sal's pick-up to drag it cross town from the old Stone Creek restaurant. Not that you'll be seeing much of it. But you can help yourself to the weeds ou
t back."

  She wasn't listening, just wolfing the soup down quickly—they do everything quickly. “You're changing the wallpaper."

  "Thought it was time to do something about home security."

  "I'll still get in."

  Just try it. I scraped louder.

  "Aren't you going to ask?"

  "No,” I told her.

  "About the temple? It was amazing."

  "You went? You actually went?” Stupidly, my heart went off like a hysterical alarm clock. I wanted to be rid of this creature, but I couldn't help myself. “What's it like now?"

  She curled up on my couch, flipping through the Ansel Adams, using the blanket there to cover her bony shoulders. They look so underfed, and for one insane moment, I thought about fetching her some bread. Sure, and when word gets around, all those thousands of lips licking, I'll get to think about how underfed that huge army of visitors crushing the rest of my Jet Stars looks.

  She clapped her hands, chuckled, one side of the room to the other, as if my whole front room was delighted. “Stone and feather rustling together. Old laughter and song. Yes! Yes! I filled up and downloaded to Batchu receiver, and she downloaded to Batchu tribe, and at Sixteenth Fest, Batchu copied Faster and sub-Faster tribes. No Chinese whispers. Digital perfect. Everyone came, staggered arrivals through the night, a waterfall of tribes. And we saw elephants over the gateway! Receivers understood and laid down Batchu and Faster grooves. And we danced with Buddha!"

  Her story came in stereo, her voice wrapped around me as she jaunted from the couch to the rug by the woodpile to the window seat and back to the couch. But I could still hear it in her voice, awe and surprise there should still be room for awe in the world. I could hardly believe it—growing up with this gift, and here she was discovering the joys of exploring for the first time. I wished I could have been there with the hundreds of them, dancing, jaunting in and out of each other's space as the receivers’ vocal beat-making got more and more frenzied.

  "And Delphine and I found an old drinks stall by the parking lot. Bottles of Pepsi! Funny taste—flat, different, but sweet. Orangeade-coloured wooden front, deep forest green canvas sagging over the bar. In the black-brown of the lacquered oak bar, so many overlapping hearts cut white in the wood, so many names carved over and over. Delphine kissed me. She cut our names and new hearts. Can you see it?"

  Wilson and I used to tell each other stories like this, though all of mine were made up. I think I told Chang, Yes, I could see it.

  Chang finished her bowl and I refilled it. Before she left, I asked her what she remembered of the change.

  "The change?"

  I listed on my fingers. “The Rapture. Le premier jour du fin. The day you woke up and realized you could jaunt."

  "Jaunt?"

  "Sorry—that's from an old Alfred Bester novel. I meant the day that you could suddenly teleport anywhere you could think of."

  Five, I'd guessed. Chang should be able to remember. But the visitors don't feel the same way about time as the rest of us and Chang put her fingers in a steeple against her forehead. She stopped jaunting as she tried to recall.

  "Grew up outside Shanghai,” she said after a while. “Three sisters worked in garment factory. Can't remember parents."

  She paused for a moment—their heads are so full of images, memory doesn't come easily to them. “I was the youngest and sat with the next youngest. She stitched jeans, I helped cut off loose threads. Always very hot, very noisy, but it was really noisy that day. Other girls were screaming. Sister left her machine and walked away to see. I watched her walking, ten feet away, fifteen feet away. Then she was back at her machine, twenty feet in an instant. Now she was screaming. And all around, a waterfall of bodies. Blurs. Drops of blood all over the floor. I crawled towards the wall, head down, not looking at anything until I got there. I saw the poster. The American girl in jeans smiling and behind her the street corner in San Francisco. I saw street names, the skyscraper—everything I needed, but didn't know it then. I shut my eyes. I opened them far away."

  A familiar story. A lot of inadvertent jaunting took place in those first few minutes when people didn't realize what they were doing. No one knows how many died in the panic of the first hour—we never got the chance to count.

  She put down the Ansel Adams. Thinking about Mark, I asked her, “You been to Yosemite?"

  Chang flipped through the pages to check she hadn't missed anything. “Is there food?” she asked dubiously.

  "Did you go to Banteay Srey for food?"

  She didn't answer, but I could tell the question bothered her.

  * * * *

  March 8

  The Craytown apartments really are a gold mine. Who were these people? All those visiting New Yorkers never used to come down here and spend their days reading. They came down and walked along the boardwalk, huddling in the arcades out of the wind and sneering at my friend Sally and I as we borrowed quarters off the boys and beat them at air hockey. OK, in time, I came to sneer at everyone as well and went off travelling, at least until I realized in Ho Chi Minh City that I wasn't throwing up because of the food but because of Mark. My first year out of America. My last year out of America. But if I did sneer at Cray Beach, it was because I'd damned well earned the right to sneer after munching through every wild-eyed book in the library and the Barnes & Noble at Parchers Crossing.

  I found a well-thumbed copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, which I haven't read in thirty years, and two Philip K Dicks I've never seen before. There were history books too, and I piled them on the kitchen table for Sal to come by sometime. Wilson would have enjoyed this. We would have sat on the veranda, reading passages out to each other, and then if there was a bottle of something nice still lying around, we'd have got drunk and had another of our delirious arguments over what caused the change. My theory was that parallel universes were colliding together and visitors were slipping between them through some kind of psychic rupture in the space-time thingy. Wilson insisted it was simply quantum entanglement gone amok in this universe. Sometimes though we wondered whether the Christian millenarians were right and God was sifting the wheat from the chaff, and then we'd argue which of us was which.

  I didn't realize how late it was getting. The light got dirtier and orangier against the beachfront window—though my hip was acting up, I decided to risk a twilight return home and watch the sunset. There was a group of visitors down on the beach—maybe enough for one of their tribe-lets. I wasn't sure if they were practicing one of their ceremonial dances or just enjoying the sensation of jaunting, but there was a ring of them, blurring as they jaunted into each other's footsteps, first one way, then the other, complex patterns that must have required incredible concentration and awareness to the sudden shifts of displaced air.

  How many of them were there? Fifteen down there. Five billion around the world—at least at the start. What was the ratio? Used to be a daft old Abigail for every five thousand of them. And in the early days, we really did feel outnumbered, forced into defending ourselves when the younger ones abandoned any ties with us and the older ones slowly forgot. But how many are there now? A billion? That many? They're starting to disappear. Maybe they've died and become real ghosts, like the shimmering figures below, shining with the promise of diamonds on an engagement ring.

  I watched them for an hour, thinking of Chang and the tribes at Banteay Srey, what it must be like to dance with them, to look at the horizon, and then the next horizon, and the one after that, and make myself my own engagement ring around the world. Jaunting like this—that was how Wilson and I used to have sex. Very gentle, but so fast that I couldn't bear to look at him, Wilson would steady himself above me and jaunt in and out, a butterfly inside of me. We did that right through our seven years together, from the morning my beautiful black South African professor found me in the dry ice rink off the motorway to the occasional visit he made towards the end.

  But why can't I go with you? Why didn't it happen to me?
/>
  Wilson laughed and filled my glass. So we can tell you our stories, Abigail.

  * * * *

  March 9

  Mark came back today! Twice in one week—twice in one month, that's a gold-star day.

  I didn't ask him why he'd come back so quickly. He took a slice of the bread, still hot from the oven, sat down at the kitchen and ate quietly. “Thanks, Mom,” he said. “Yosemite was really pretty."

  I didn't ask him about whether there was any food there. Chang's loss, I decided.

  I told Mark about the Memory Circle and asked him what he remembered of the day it happened.

  "You know what happened. You were there."

  "I know, but I just want to hear it."

  He concentrated hard, exactly the same look he'd had as a little boy. “In the bath."

  "I was giving you a bath. You always hated having baths."

  "I liked the sparkle on the water."

  "And it made you think of the sea."

  "Atlantic City. We used to go there every September."

  "That's right. We stayed with Sally, who was working as a croupier in Trumps. Sally took you out on the beach while I played the poker room."

  "The sea sparkled the same way."

  "And suddenly you were gone. Not in the bath."

  "I was scared. I was drowning. But it was shallow and I rubbed water from my eyes and saw the big hotels and the names on the sides."

  "And you wanted to go home. You remembered the bath."

  Yes. But not at first. Not until after I'd thought for one crazy moment he'd disappeared down the plughole, and I'd torn all over the house looking for him, and when I couldn't find him, I ran out into the street, back on Maine Street where we used to live. It wasn't until I'd run as far as the library that I realized that I wasn't the only one shouting and yelling and there were terrified naked people appearing and disappearing on the lawns on either side of me. But I came back to the house to phone the police and it was OK—I heard Mark crying, upstairs in the bath, home again.

  Like everyone else, there were a lot of horrible scenes in the first few days, until we realized what was happening, and the fact it wasn't happening to everyone. We all settled down after that. The President was on the television to tell us to stay calm and I thought, why not materialize inside everyone's house and tell them individually. Everyone took a deep breath and said, Just for now, let's go back to how it was, and let's think about this for a minute. This could be the start of a Golden Age.