Quantum Night

by Robert J. Sawyer

  I didn’t hear anything untoward in my own neighborhood that night, and so I wasn’t aware until I turned on the TV that rioting was going on again in downtown Winnipeg as well as in Saskatoon, and, as I saw unfolding on the screen, in Vancouver and Edmonton and Toronto and Montreal, too. Although in some of the footage you could see people making halfhearted attempts to pretend this was still about hockey—wearing jerseys, brandishing sticks like clubs—it was clear, to me at least, that for the most part it was just looting coupled with mayhem for the sake of mayhem. The current catalyst happened to have been a hockey game; in San Francisco in 2019, new traffic ordinances; in Ferguson in 2015, the anniversary of an unconscionable jury verdict; in Knoxville in 2010, college football coach Lane Kiffin defecting to a rival team. The spark didn’t matter; a similar conflagration could ignite anytime anywhere.

  Of course, there were times when it had gone the other way. In a single week in 2015—the first week of summer, as it happened—the US Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right, and the Confederate flag started coming down across the South as Amazon, eBay, Sears, and Walmart all stopped selling merchandise depicting it. Facebook was a sea of rainbows and high-fives. People who’d been hoping and praying for those very things said they couldn’t believe how quickly the tide had turned. That time, the light side of the Force had caught the wave; tonight, sadly, it was the dark side.

  I saw Prime Minister Nenshi urging calm, and interviews with various mayors and chiefs of police exhorting people to stay indoors. Even the US channels were covering the Toronto riots, which looked to be running all along Yonge Street from Harbourfront to Bloor; it was an hour later there, meaning it had ticked past midnight, so that, as a commentator observed, this was technically the third day of rioting in Canada.

  Eventually, I got up off the couch, taking my popcorn bag, a few unpopped kernels still rattling around in it, to the kitchen, and tossing it in the trash. And then slowly, sadly, I headed off to bed, hoping against hope that at some point soon reason would prevail.

  33

  THE mayor of Winnipeg urged people to remain indoors the next night. No official curfew had been imposed, but I did stay in, watching TV news and surfing on my tablet.

  By now, the violence was overwhelming local police everywhere. Canadian Forces personnel had been deployed to aid with riot control and to protect provincial legislatures as well as Parliament Hill in Ottawa; that city, as well as Calgary, had erupted in violence on this third night. The only thing that seemed to be keeping it from being a total coast-to-coast bloodbath was that so few Canadians owned handguns or automatic weapons. Still, the death count was into three figures here in Winnipeg, where it had all begun, and it was at least a dozen in every other city that had rioting.

  Fox News was gleeful in its reporting: “All eyes are on Socialist Canada and its Muslim prime minister,” said Sean Hannity, “wondering what he will do to quell the unrest up there.”

  Coverage of the continuing attacks on undocumented immigrants in Texas was all but absent on Fox, although MSNBC reported that the vigilantism was spreading, with three people turning up dead near Las Cruces, New Mexico, and two south of Phoenix, Arizona, states that had nothing like the McCharles Act in place.

  Meanwhile, the body of another dead Indigenous woman had been found here in Winnipeg, and two more in northern Manitoba; also, two Cree men near Thompson had been killed by white teenagers in a drive-by shooting as they walked along the side of a road.

  Boko Haram was still running amuck in Nigeria, and statistics released today showed that over 8,000 Jews left France for Israel in 2019. “You can smell it in the air,” said a Parisian rabbi. “A pogrom is coming here, mark my words.”

  —

  Thursday, I had a departmental meeting after my classes ended, but that was done by three. I got in my white Mazda and began the long drive to Saskatoon, a large coffee in my cupholder and a twenty-pack of Timbits on the passenger seat. Once out of the city, I didn’t turn on the radio; I didn’t put on an audiobook; I just drove in silence, particularly enjoying the times when the highway was empty and I could fool myself that I was all alone in the universe and nothing bad was happening anywhere.

  But, once again, the illusion was shattered as a pair of high beams lanced through the darkness at me from behind.

  I was doing a hundred klicks, but the guy behind me was closing. There was no one coming this way, though, so he had plenty of room to pass if he wanted to on the left, and I moved toward the shoulder to give him even more space.

  The gap between us was narrowing. I hated assholes who didn’t dim their lights in circumstances like this, but his were like a pair of supernovae. He was maybe fifty meters behind me.

  Twenty.

  Ten.

  And then, suddenly, he was right beside me, but—

  —but he wasn’t passing me. He was pacing me, staying next to my car. I looked out, but my own night vision had been shot by his headlamps, and in the dim interior of his car, all I could make out were two silhouetted figures. I decided to ease up on the accelerator so my car would fall back, but when I did that, he copied me, and—

  Fuck!

  His passenger-side door scraped against my driver-side one. I tried to give him more room, moving fully onto the shoulder, but he kept slamming into my side, pushing me farther and farther to the right.

  I hit the brakes, meaning his next attempt to push me off the road caused him to cut in front of me instead. He spun sideways, I skidded forward, and we collided, both of us pinwheeling into the adjacent field.

  My airbag deployed, trapping me long enough that by the time it deflated one of the guys was out and had smashed my driver’s side window and opened the door. I felt myself being hauled out, the dome light in my car letting me at last see their faces—two kids, maybe eighteen or twenty, one in a jean jacket, the other in a leather one.

  The man in leather was off to the side; I think he’d been the driver. He pointed at me, and said, “Finish him.”

  And that’s when I realized the guy in denim was brandishing a length of metal pipe about as long as his forearm. I was in the gap between the two cars but jumped on the hood, pivoted on my ass, and took off into the field adjacent to the road, a flat expanse that went on to the dark horizon; I’d be more than content if they watched me run away for three days.

  “Get him!” shouted the driver—the guy, quite literally, in the driver’s seat; probably a psychopath, with a p-zed stooge who would follow his every command.

  I ran as fast as I could, which, with epinephrine coursing through me, was pretty damn fast—not that there was anywhere to go, but I hoped the guy would give up after a bit, and—

  Jesus Fucking Christ!

  My left foot went into a prairie dog’s burrow, and I pitched forward, smashing my face into hard, dry earth. Jean-jacket quickly caught up and loomed over me, the metal pipe raised high above his head.

  I rolled on my back and lashed out with my legs, ensnaring my attacker’s right ankle, and even though the terrain was flat, I succeeded in pulling him off balance and he fell. I scrambled to my feet and, smashing one shoe down on his wrist, managed to wrestle the pipe from him, and—

  And there was no one around, no one to help, no farmhouse, no anything. I thought the guy, seeing I had his weapon, would scurry away and leave me to catch my breath, but he didn’t. Leather-jacket had more—some!—sense, and had gotten back into their car and was now speeding off, but this guy was implacable; he had his orders, and he was going to carry them out. I was holding the pipe in both hands, the way a slugger would grip a baseball bat, but the guy pulled out a switchblade and continued to come at me, so I took off again across the field—but it was inevitable that he’d catch up; he was younger and had longer legs.

  My heart was pounding, my lungs aching. Like Menno, I thought of myself as a p
acifist—but a pacifist need not be a passivist.

  And so I stopped running.

  Turned.

  Planted my feet firmly on the ground.

  Raised the lead pipe—like Moonwatcher raising the thigh bone—and brought it down, down, down onto Jean-jacket’s head.

  The sound I’d avoided all those decades ago when I’d spared Ronny Handler—the sound I’d always assumed would be a loud cracking, like the one my mother’s porcelain vase had made when I’d accidentally knocked it to the floor—turned out to actually be a dull thud, as if I’d hit a tree stump with an ax handle.

  But regardless of the acoustics, the visual effect was . . .

  Yes.

  The visual, in the moonlight, was satisfying.

  The skull denting, the scalp splitting, and blood pouring out . . .

  I staggered for a moment—but not as much as the guy in front of me did. He swayed back and forth, and then, like the Twin Towers coming down, collapsed vertically into a heap. I spun on my heel and ran toward my car.

  —

  Of course, I called it in. The RCMP arrived first, and then the EMTs, who pronounced the guy dead at the scene. The officers were sympathetic, but they had me follow them in my car into Regina. I wasn’t charged with anything, and so they let me go to a hotel instead of staying in a holding cell, and by the time all the paperwork was done the next morning, it was close to ten. I continued on the last couple of hours to Saskatoon—but, it became apparent that the damage to my car was worse than I’d thought; I barely made it there, and, after calling my insurance company, I took the car to a body shop for repairs.

  I wanted to go straight to the Canadian Light Source, but as much as I couldn’t wait to see Kayla, she had to make a living. Instead, I took a cab to her place, and, using the spare key I still had, let myself in, took a quick shower, went to her bedroom, and collapsed.

  I was awoken by the sound of the front door opening, and, looking at Kayla’s nightstand clock, I saw I’d slept for almost three hours.

  “Sweetheart?” I called out.

  “Yes, honey?” And then a giggle. It was Ryan, not her mom.

  “Ryan?” I said.

  “And Rebekkah,” came her grandmother’s voice.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” I called back.

  I quickly dressed and headed downstairs. Ryan rushed over and gave me a hug, which I sorely needed. But when we disengaged, she looked at me with horror. “What happened to you?”

  My hand went to my bruised cheek. I’m all in favor of telling kids the truth—there’s no Santa Claus; your parents leave the money under the pillow when you lose a tooth; babies come from sex; when you die, that’s it, there’s nothing more—but deciding whether to say “Mommy’s boyfriend just killed a man” was above my pay grade; I’d let Kayla make the call on what her daughter should know. “I was in a car accident,” I said, which at least wasn’t wholly untrue.

  “Wow,” Ryan said. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes,” I said, and that was certainly the truth.

  “I gotta go pee,” Ryan announced, which was just as well; I needed a minute—or a lifetime—to pull myself together. I exchanged a few remarks with Rebekkah, then she left, and I went to the kitchen. There was a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge; I poured two glasses and took them over to the dining room with its bookcases. Ryan joined me when she was done in the washroom. “How was day camp?” I asked.

  “Good.” She looked at me and scrunched up her mouth, thinking.

  “What?” I said.

  “Can I ask you a question, Jiminy?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you going to marry Mommy?”

  “We haven’t talked about it.”

  “But are you?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know.”

  She looked down at the floor. “Oh.”

  “We’ll just have to see how things go, okay?”

  She nodded, then, looking up at me again: “Have you been married before?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  I lifted my hands slightly. “She left me.”

  “Why?”

  “We disagreed about what we wanted.”

  “Oh. What did you want?”

  “The greatest good for the greatest number.”

  “And what’s the greatest number?”

  I thought about that, long and hard, thought about this wonderful young lady, thought about my boy Virgil, thought about everything, and, at last I drew Ryan into another warm hug. “Two-point-nine.”

  34

  THE next morning, Kayla entered the office she shared with Victoria, who today was wearing a black turtleneck and black leather pants; the combo probably wouldn’t work on anyone else, but she rocked it. Vic was staring intently at an image on a forty-inch monitor.

  “What’s that?” asked Kayla, standing behind her and bending over to have a look.

  “The scan I made of Ross on the beamline,” replied Victoria.

  Kayla put a hand on Vic’s shoulder. “When I want to creep on an ex, I look at their Facebook wall or OKCupid profile.”

  “It’s not that,” said Vic. She pointed at one part of the display. “See here? That’s the spike showing he’s got one electron in superposition—making him a Q1, a p-zed.”

  “Yes.”

  “But look here,” said Vic. She pointed at a serpentine line high up on the Y-axis, which was marked with a logarithmic scale.

  Kayla nodded. “The background stuff.”

  “Exactly. The entanglement we’ve observed before.”

  “Right.”

  “And, so far, it’s never changed, right?”

  “Right,” said Kayla. “If it would do something, maybe we could figure out what it represented.”

  “Exactly—but look! It has changed, see? Right here.” Vic pointed at where the whole line jumped a small amount.

  “It increased,” said Kayla, surprised.

  “Exactly. It suddenly went up, and it stayed up.”

  “Huh.”

  “I ran a test on myself yesterday.” Vic did something with her mouse, and a split-screen display came up showing two graphs that looked almost identical. “Both of these are me.” Her triple-superposition Q3 status showed as three distinct spikes on each of the graphs. “But see?” She pointed first to the left-hand display, then the right. “The entanglement level at the top is up from my previous reading, too; that’s never happened before.”

  Kayla frowned. “Go back to Ross’s display.”

  More mouse movements, and the screen changed again.

  “You had Ross in here on Sunday the ninth?”

  “Yep. Jeff okayed it.”

  “Sure, no problem.” Kayla leaned in, looking at the times marked on the bottom of the graph. “And the entanglement level on his chart went up at 11:19 A.M.?”

  “And twenty-two seconds,” said Vic, pointing at the figure. “And it stayed up, right through to the end of the run I did with him.”

  “Wow,” said Kayla softly.

  “What?”

  “Do you know where I was then?”

  “A Sunday morning? Well, we can rule out High Mass.”

  “I was at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care.”

  “Oh, my God! Right! That’s the day you revived your brother!”

  “Jim recorded it on video. It’s in our Dropbox.” Kayla gestured for Vic to get up, and she took her place at the keyboard. Kayla opened a browser and banged away for a few moments until she had the shared folder on-screen—and discovered that Vic had her computer set to show large thumbnails; playing-card-sized images of Kayla and Jim making love popped up on the monitor.

  “Umm,” said Kayla.

  “NSFW,” said Vic, grinning from ear to ear. She reache
d over and took the mouse, using it to change the view to a plain directory listing, and then she stepped back and let Kayla find the file she was looking for. A couple of clicks later, and the video Jim had shot started playing.

  “My God . . .” said Vic, as Travis’s eyes opened for the first time in almost two decades.

  Kayla backed up to the precise moment at which Travis visibly regained consciousness. The little slider at the bottom of the screen showed they were one minute and forty-three seconds into the video. She then flipped back to the file listing, which showed the time at which Jim had begun making the recording, then did the math in her head: the creation-time stamp of the video file plus an additional one minute and forty-three seconds was . . . 11:19:25 A.M. She said the figure aloud.

  Vic let out a low whistle. “That’s really close . . .”

  “Too close to be a coincidence,” said Kayla. “And when I used the quantum tuning fork on him the second time—it didn’t work until I flipped it upside down—it was a few seconds before his eyes opened. So, the increase in entanglement you recorded here on Ross occurred at just about the moment Travis woke up. Want to bet that your own level increased at that exact moment, too?”

  “Meaning me, my ex-boyfriend, and your brother were—are—linked?” said Vic. “The three of us are quantally entangled? But why on Earth would that be the case? I mean, Travis and Ross have never even met.”

  “That’s an excellent point,” said Kayla, peering in puzzlement at the screen.

  —

  Kayla had invited Victoria over for dinner, and the four of us, including Ryan, were still sitting at the square table, although I’d pushed back so I could turn my chair sideways and cross my legs; tomorrow, we’d go to Rebekkah’s place to have dinner with her and Travis.

  The ladies had had pot roast while I’d picked my way through a ginormous salad. During dinner, Ryan had told us at length about how her day-camp counselor had tried to explain the awful goings-on. Although Ryan was still frightened, it sounded to my psychologist’s ear like the counselor had taken the right approach: not sugarcoating things, but not being alarmist, either.