Senses Three and Six

by David Brin

  Now, stop that. Don’t think about the service! What’s gotten into you, anyway?

  I’m tired of yelling at myself. What a rotten day.

  I turn to talk to Elise… Now, what’s she got that look on her face for? What is it, amazement? Hope? Fear?

  Oh, boy. What I just said.

  Think… Father… I never mentioned my father before, though she used to try to draw me out about my past.

  And the Institute! And music, my childhood… the piano.

  There is a haze in front of me, a barrier of palpable grief. It hangs like a portcullis, cutting off escape. By touch I grab up the beer and swallow to hide the turmoil on my face. Think. Think.

  The band’s name she’ll bleep out. Probably thinks it’s dirty. Must recoup the rest. How? Make the Institute… “the Institution”?… A place for delinquents? Father could become “Father Murphy,” a kindly priest…

  I can envision my old man grinning at me now. “See?” he’d say. “See how hard it is to maintain a good lie?”

  I put the beer down without looking at her. “I’m going for a walk. Get some air. Tell Joey I’ll be right back, okay?”

  I can see out the corner of my eye that she nods. I try to walk straight on my way out the door.

  …Her eyes were gray… When she laughed it felt like my chest was a kite and I’d light up into the sky… Parmin introduced us—I never knew a woman like her could exist…

  “Go,” he said.

  “But Parmin, Janie has her own work to do, and my team is expecting those B-1 and Trident parts to be integrated into the ships …”

  “No. Your deputies can take over for a time, while the two of you go for a honeymoon. Am I not the expert? Have I not been watching your species for twenty of your generations? I will not have two of my department heads distracted later, while things are approaching completion.

  “Go, Brad. Look into each other’s eyes, make love, get a baby started. The child will be born on a new world …”

  I rest my head against the cool, damp bricks. Around back of the Yankee Dollar, near the garbage cans, I try to keep from crying out loud.

  The pain is hot. A searing, almost hormonal rejection, as if my body were trying to throw off a revolting insertion… a transplanted organ, or an alien idea. The agony is dull and sweaty, with a faint delusional quality, and the rejected organ, I realize, is my own mind.

  My hands grope against the wall. Fingers dig into the recessed lines of mortar that surround each of the bricks, my anchors. The texture is hard, yet crumbly. Little fragments break off under my fingernails.

  The gritty coolness crackles against my brow as I roll it against the masonry… feeling the solidity of the building.

  It is comforting, that solidity. Good heavy brick. Bound by steel rods and thick goops of cement that permeate and bond—to hold up the roof. To stand. It’s comforting to think about bricks.

  Think about bricks.

  Bricks are hard because the constituent molecules are bound. They all hold together and gravity is defied. Randomness, too, is held off. Chaos is stopped so long as the molecules don’t leave their assigned places.

  And they can’t do that. The vibrational energy they’d need would be too high. No way over that barrier, except if they all decided to tunnel. And brick molecules can’t all decide to tunnel at once, can they? Without someone to tell them to?

  My fingers claw harder into the gritty mortar and a layer of skin scrapes away painfully. Don’t tunnel, I cry silently to the molecules. Don’t. Stay here and be content as a brick. A simple honorable brick among bricks, which holds up roofs and keeps the cold wind off people …

  I plead desperately… and somehow I sense agreement. At least the wall doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In a momentary shiver, the fit is over. I’m left standing here feeling drained and a bit silly, with a dusty brow and filthy hands. I let the latter drop and turn to rest my back against the wall with a sigh.

  It is a damp evening. Faint tendrils of fog creep across the twenty yards of parking lot between me and the far fence. The fog curls past like the fingers of an old blind woman—touching lightly the corner wall, the parked cars, the overflowing garbage cans—and moving on.

  I start to cringe as a vaporous flagellum drifts along the wall to brush me. Don’t. It’s only fog. That’s all. Just fog.

  I used to like fog. It always smelled good. Lots of negative ions, I suppose. Still, here next to the garbage cans the stench must be pretty bad. I wish I could tell.

  Laughter feels dry and artificial, yet I laugh. Here I am, suffering something akin to a psychotic break, and I’m worried about my damned sense of smell!

  Parmin spoke so slowly toward the end, but cheerfully in spite of the pain.

  “…The machines I have shown you how to build will do their part. My former masters, those who hold your world in secret quarantine, will be taken by surprise. They believe you will be incapable of any such constructs for hundreds of your years. You are all to be congratulated for making them so quietly and so well.

  “Using these machines will be another matter entirely, however. These devices must be talked to. They must be coaxed. Their operators must deal with them on a plane that is at the meeting of physics and metaphysics—at the juncture of mathematics and meditation.

  “That is why I selected men such as you, Brad. You fly jet aircraft, to be sure. But more importantly, you fly the same way you play the piano. All of our pilots must learn to play their ships, for persuading them to tunnel between the stars will require the same empathy as the pianist, who coaxes hammer strokes on metal wires to tunnel glory into a human brain.”

  My driver’s license says I am Charles L. Magun. For well over a year I’ve repaired motorcycles for a living, and brought in a few extra bucks on the side keeping kids from wrecking themselves too badly in places like the Yankee. I have a live-in girlfriend who’s been to college, I guess, but is no threat. She’s quiet and nice to have around. I have some redneck pals who I bike and lift weights with and everyone calls me Chuck.

  But I remember forging Chuck’s birth certificate almost two years ago. I set him up as a role, I recall, someone They’d never find because They were looking for somebody else. I remember diving into Chuck and burning everything that came before, old habits, old ways, and most of all the old memories.

  Until tonight, that is.

  Okay, let’s be rational about this. What are the possibilities?

  One is that I’m crazy. I really am Charles L. Magun, and all that shit about having once upon a time played the piano, done calculus, piloted jet planes, piloted… other things… that’s all a crock of madman’s dreams.

  It’s amazing. For the first time in two years I can actually stand here and dispassionately remember doing some of those things. Some of them. Stuff not directly associated with the breakout. They seem so vivid. I can set up a hyperdimensional integral in my head, for instance. Could Chuck do that?

  But I also remember, from long ago when I was a boy, those weird old men who used to come to the Institute bugging Dad and the other profs, to try to get someone to listen to their ideas for perpetual motion machines and the like. Their fantasies seemed sophisticated and correct to Them, too, didn’t they?

  The irony isn’t lost on me—using a memory of the Institute to demonstrate that it’s possible for me to falsely remember learning calculus.

  Droll.

  All right, perhaps I did construct Chuck. Maybe I was someone like who I think I was. But maybe everything that I’m currently afraid of is a fantasy. Maybe I simply went crazy some years back.

  Look at me, spending an entire evening in a nonstop internal monologue, describing everything I think and feel as it happens, and every whimper and moan is out of some goddamn psychodrama, I swear. Like this paranoid delusion of vengeful creatures I call Them…

  Oh, something terrible must have happened to me two years ago or so. But might it be something more mundane, like an accident?
Or a murder? Maybe I created a terrifying and romantic fantasy to cover memories of the real trauma… something of this Earth, hidden under a bizarre mask of science fiction.

  No one I know has even heard of the Cabal, or the Arks, or Canaan, or even a fiery crash on a mountainside just a hundred miles from here. I remember we Broke Out a bit early because elections were coming and the old administration was sure to lose. We thought the new crowd would be sure to blow the whistle. But not a word of any “secret project under the Tennessee hills” has ever hit the press. There wouldn’t be any point in secrecy any longer, but there’s been no word.

  When you get right down to it, the story I remember is pretty damn preposterous.

  A cool breeze is blowing now. The last drifts of fog fall away in tatters, fleeing into the gloom just past the streetlamps. The wind feels fresh on my face.

  A third possibility is that I didn’t make any of it up. I’m the hunted last survivor of a secret plot against a powerful outsider civilization, and my enemies will stop at nothing to catch me.

  Hmmm. I never put it quite that way before. The next question, I now see, is obvious.

  So what?

  A smile? Is that what my answer is? A smile?

  Yeah. So what? I want to shout. Who cares if they catch me? All they can do is kill me!

  Why, in god’s name, have I been making myself so miserable?

  Wow.

  All right, then. Chuck is a little bit overdone. Hiding as a macho motorcycle repairman is smart, sure. But Chuck doesn’t have to belch in disgust every time a snatch of classical music comes on over the radio. He doesn’t have to watch motorcross on the TV or make snide remarks every time Elise makes a pathetic little attempt at philosophizing.

  Amazing I didn’t think of this before. All I have left to lose is my worthless life. Small potatoes. Maybe I really can ease up a bit. Why didn’t I think of this before?

  The clouds part and suddenly there is the moon. It is beautiful, like an opal in the night. I can play subjective tricks with it, make it small, a pearl held up at arm’s length, or go zooming in with my imagination, filling the sky with craters and tnaria much as… much as it might look from the portal of a ship.

  I can see the Lunar Appenines, trace one of the ridges all the way to a little valley that twists and turns and dives into rocky depth. I can follow that cleft to the lip of a cave, a cave where there’s buried…

  Where there’s buried…

  No!

  I refuse! Uh-uh! No fair.

  I’ve done enough this evening, now leave me alone! I’ve agreed to be more reasonable, to let myself relax a bit and enjoy what’s left of my life. But you can’t make me remember, Brad. I won’t do it!

  Chuck hunches his shoulders and shoves his hands into his pockets. He shakes his head vigorously and walks toward the sound of drums and guitars, toward the door to the Yankee Dollar.

  Imagine a blockade… a quarantine.

  The stars are as numerous as specks of pollen blowing across a prairie. Life blossoms everywhere, and yet the glimmer of intelligence is rare.

  Imagine an ancient civilization that cherishes the openness, the emptiness. They are reflective and refined—and selfish. They do not want space filled with clamorous young neighbors.

  Imagine that one day a new species emerges, bright, curious, vigorous. The Old Ones set up a blockade as they have done in the past. With a severe kindness the fact of the quarantine is kept secret from the newcomers. A merciful discretion.

  But now, imagine a traitor, an Old One who disagrees with Policy… And imagine a few precocious natives…

  The set is over. A slow song plays over the FM and Elise waits at our table, moving her lips to the words of the song. I watch her as I walk along the dim bar and motion for Joey to give me a fresh beer.

  Every so often, when I let her, Elise sings to me. Softly, holding my head on her lap and running her hands through my thinning hair, she croons her gentle country melodies and helps me sleep.

  Right now her eyes are focused out beyond the bandstand somewhere. I suppose she’s just staring out into space, but there’s something in her expression… She does that sometimes. When she’s puttering with her plants and I’m trying to adjust a jammed sprocket, suddenly she’ll stop and look intently at nothing. At times like that I worry that she might actually be thinking.

  Then she snaps out of it and makes some reassuringly benign remark about a stupid woman who wanted to buy azaleas out of season.

  She is nervous, though she’s calmed down considerably lately. I don’t know where the nervousness comes from and I’ve avoided thinking about it. There was a time when I could have tried… but Chuck doesn’t know anything about psychology. He thinks it’s bullshit.

  Hell, I give her strength and stability and loving and a good deal more. It’s a fair trade.

  Gray eyes, her eyes, laughing at me over her bright silver flute, making me grin and stumble over the chords—my fingers made schoolboy clumsy by the lightness of my heart…

  Gray eyes—cool ivory keys and a silvery flute…

  Duet…

  As I approach the table she looks up and smiles shyly. “Did you have a nice walk?”

  “Yeah, it was fine.”

  There are questions in her brown eyes. No denying I did act unusual, earlier. But now I realize that I don’t have to explain anything. Give it a rest and in a few days or weeks I’ll start giving in a little to her curiosity. Chuck will explain a little. Minor stuff. No hurry.

  Why not?

  We talk about little things and spend a lot of time not talking at all. I check IDs and make sure nobody’s molesting anyone in the men’s room.

  The Boys are back on stage playing quiet songs, as I return from one of my rounds and find Elise talking to Alan Fowler at our table.

  Damn.

  Alan’s a nice, friendly grad student who’s much too bright for his own good. He met Chuck at a dirt-bike race and sort of adopted him and Elise. Chuck insults him all the time, calling him a useless egghead, but he never seems to get the hint.

  I come up behind Elise. She is very animated.

  “…not sure I understand what they hope to accomplish, Alan. You mean you could actually mine asteroids efficiently enough to make a profit selling refined metals back to Earth?”

  “That’s what the figures show, Lise.” Alan winks at me but Elise doesn’t notice.

  “You mean even after transportation costs are taken into account? Can you amortize costs over a reasonable period?”

  Chuck frowns. What is this? He doesn’t like hearing words like these from Elise. Who does she think she’s fooling?

  Alan grins. “Easily, Lise. Less than a decade, I’d guess. Of course, in the beginning it’ll be water for propellants well be after. But later? Well, imagine twenty years’ worldwide platinum production coming from just one small asteroid! Why, we could easily go back to the days of the sixties and seventies when there was so much of a surplus that liberal ideas could flower…”

  I can’t help snorting in disgust. Chuck votes redneck.

  The secret Ark Project was responsible for over half of the mysterious inflation that hit the nation in the late seventies… Big endeavors, pipelines, bombers, space shuttles, went through design change after design change, all attributed to poor planning.

  And yet the engineers involved were the very same who had brought the Apollo Program in ahead of schedule and under budget.

  How could such incompetence appear out of nowhere? Bungled, rebuilt nuclear power plants, reworked and retooled factories, new equipment wasted and tossed away.

  Nobody bothered to check what happened to the original parts… the “flawed” equipment that had to be replaced… no one knew but a few in the highest places that the leftovers were taken to a cavern in Tennessee. Pieces of experimental windmills and redesigned submarines, prototype bombers and cancelled shuttles, the bits all cleverly fitted together into… into great globes… into beauty an
d eventually.

  Sure, Alan, look to space for salvation from economic woes.

  The Project was responsible for most of the mysterious inflation that hit in the late seventies… A great nation’s wealth, thrown in secret down a rat hole.

  Dream on…

  Elise notices me and her words stumble to a stop. But she recovers quickly. She grabs my arm as I sit down beside her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Alan got accepted!” She tries to sound accusing but is too excited to make it stick.

  I shrug. The kid had only told me about his “good luck” this morning. Chuck had offered perfunctory congratulations but had better things to do than spend all day gushing over the young idiot’s long-range suicide plan.

  “Aw, come on, Lise.” Alan grins. “It’s only a preliminary acceptance. They’re going to put me through a wringer like boot camp and final exams put together. Probably the only result will be three months lost from my research, and a permanent empathy with my experimental rats!”

  “Don’t be silly!” Elise glances at me quickly and gives in to her natural instinct to touch his sleeve in encouragement. “You’ll make it all the way. Just think how proud we’ll all be to say we knew you when!”

  Alan laughs. “I’ll tell you what would help. What I really need is some coaching from the Zen master here.”

  He jerks his thumb in my direction.

  Elise takes a fraction of a second to check the expression on my face. To me it feels stony, numb. I’m irked by this need of hers to constantly worry about my reaction, even if she’s been doing it less lately.

  I’ve never abused her. So Chuck growls! So what! She can do or say anything she wants, for crissake!

  She laughs a bit nervously. “My bear, a Zen master? What do you mean, Alan?”

  Alan grins. “I mean that one of the reasons I hang around this big grump is because he’s the closest thing to a real guru I’ve ever met.” Alan looks at Elise. “Have you ever watched him while he’s fixing a bike?”