Night Soul and Other Stories (22 page)

The mysterious atmospheric repellence in the Great Vacancy abated for some persons, not all. Now and then an overflight succeeded. Staring down upon the memory of our neighbor nation, a particle geologist reported that the crater down there had found some counter-crater in him. He was instantly scanned for feedback symptoms. Some step missing, he was asked if this crater had been in him before blast night. Maybe long before, maybe not, he said. Was he prone to an overproduction of future-predictive cells believed in though rarely isolated? On his return he was found to be more complex than measurably sad.

Whats urged Hows of all nations to let the event go, and get on with the job of living in a world free of thermonuclear threat and take the quantum jumps toward a polis free of national sovereignty. Yet quantum jumps are either-or and/or both-and, not some imagined rush to simple mastery. Needing to know how that nation had brought off its own disarmament, were not Hows thinking in a circle that would take them right back into some race for the technological lead? New exponential How mockups research actually saw How research itself as an ongoing chain reaction with no end in sight. The
money
was there, was the thing; and so was the desire, we seemed to be “seeing the ball well.” Surely some energy breakthrough was at hand, possibly feedback, in the technical and organic sense, of that perhaps not after all so self-contained explosion.

A super-inflatable device operated by a forgotten animal after a long communications blackout at an altitude of about seventy miles weighed in with data dating back to blast night. The upper reach of the blast had coincided almost exactly with this level of the troposphere. There, we have long left the frigid minus 200 degrees of the ionosphere floor to rise rapidly toward the high temperatures of that layer’s eighty-five-mile range. Yet, astoundingly, the heat increase recorded of blast night at just the other side of blast’s upper limit was absolutely normal for ionospheric gradation. Had the animal-operated meteorological inflatable been just beyond the blast’s upper margin, or on it? What about
within
it? jibed one maverick What.

For two things had happened: Shimmer Theory research had found on the monitor records for the top of the blast a quasi-emotional agitation in the SHED super-forces which here imaged-out not as mega-
heat
but as handfuls of
light
networking and veer-bending among one another so that for the first time light bent back through other light, which gave to these grid-warps some self-correcting aim intelligent as AI but less clear and more surprising; the other thing that happened was that, with the return of normal void to this already legendary airspace, the animal-operated inflatable began unbidden to descend.

What evidence was there of mega-heat elsewhere in the blast area on blast night? Heat had been assumed by my people because of the blast’s overwhelming glare. Shock waves after all had not penetrated the blast barrier, but the instruments inferred levels of heat; and now, in the absence of sure signs, heat itself came into question.

How research raced toward concepts of heatless incineration by light.

Leading Whats sensed that we had all over again the dynamics of the arms race without its content.

One How lab detected changes in SHED forces. They swirled and plotted some personal dance-like system no longer apparently reciprocals of barrier-function. Some SHEDs infra-flickered in the outer zone. But SHED forces were thinning out. One small swarm or “relationship” of SHEDs that had been observed faring forth across the frontier, easing back, faring forth, after a week suddenly burst and vanished. Hows claimed that as post-blast barrier faded, at least for some of the population, so must Shimmer function.

But one of my people argued that “containment” or barrier-formation capability in SHED forces might be decaying toward low-grade detonation. This shunted us, and competing labs, in a hurry back to waste compaction, which How thought had always held that “it” all basically came down to. Whats asked, Had there
been
any waste? Other Hows, too.

As the animal-operated meteorological device made its ultra-slow descent (though now commanded to do what it was already doing), debate arose (as it will about matters of fact) regarding what animal was
in
the inflatable. No Transitional came forward to say. Logs like strings of opaque code in the blast night monitor digitals were said to show that the project had placed aboard its craft an ancient, friendly reptile hybridized to bear its young alive yet post-fertile and of a peculiar maturity that had profiled it for this assignment.

No, said another group of project people known for the high humor of their problem-solving: “it” was an even more highly classified crypto-
human
“experiment,” a man-woman who had accidentally proved immune to lethal radioactive leakage at a fruit-and-vegetable processing plant. This, it was now pointed out, had been along the perimeter of the region where the exiled teacher, my child’s and, I will add, now almost mine, so belabored by her bosses but also indirectly the World Council, whose constitutional say in loco-national schooling remained a gray area, had thrown fresh light on the widespread sadness which itself was now changing. Blood signals from the meteorological vehicle’s occupant became an unknown code that yet seemed not alien.

How researchers formed a secret project group.

The inflatable device, inflating, had slowed its descent despite commands not to. One afternoon a schoolchild’s doodle reproduced exactly one of the Shimmer configurations that How labs had kept under wraps even from each other, and beneath the gifted doodle the label LOOMS must refer to a story which now appeared in print a thousand miles away the next day. Upon which its author had to admit her child had told it to her at breakfast.

It was of a type of planet called a “plagnet” where everyone had myriad beings inside them called Lumes; and if you understood this, you might live it by sharing some of those Lumes; and so, on that plagnet, people stopped wanting to be other people instead of themselves. Which the mother in question said she had never imagined
her
child
could
want.

Who was this mother? At a historic moment when unexpected developments daily crept up on us from behind like quantum alternatives which might yet be both/and, this story was more than itself. For, through code-homonym LOOMS / LUMES and the mother’s admission that her daughter confessed to “bees in her bonnet” when she had woken that morning of the story, a chain-link appeared, it was reported, with the Shimmer configuration doodle torn from the school notebook of that other child a thousand miles away.

For the World Council authorities, disturbed by a How hypothesis that a pattern of blood signals monitored from the descending vehicle’s occupant matched exactly the classified SHED “relationship” which the school notebook’s doodle had reproduced, now traced it to the suspect teacher-exile, who herself had recently announced that the widespread sadness needed to be redefined.

She got a message to me. Visit soon. While tending her bees on a fruit-and-vegetable farm overlooked by a hill on which was a church built entirely of stained glass, she had found the bees’ patterns of affection and general neighboring an exact repeat of new “brain-beans” (she called them) multiplying their light inside her so she was now able not just to receive things miles off but even to give light
to
what she contemplated, in broad daylight
and
in the dark. Also, her hands had on them often now a light like honey.

How Ologists proved she had been infected with grandiose themes by the luminosity of old magnesium blues used in the local glass, when in fact as I knew she had internalized them with the help of ancient metal-clay templates in each of us. Others thought her far from harmless, for she occupied a famous exile; and lately, among members of the worldwide Sadness group, there now arose more than a story, as if it were long known: a woman with blue hair, golden fingers, and beautiful webbed feet had been sent to the lone center of her land because she had a new offspring whenever she wanted, and could have one with wings and grass for fur one week and the next week full-grown twins with original sounds glowing from their skin that many people could hear, and a month later a new child that could be alone happily. And the woman had all the world in her like sun and strangely didn’t need company there where she had been put in the lonely center of that land. Another strain of this featured a
man
, and he had fine earthen feet and soft, porcupine-shaped hair and hands that changed color, and he too definitely gave birth. And in one faraway school six teenagers who fell asleep during bio-chem class woke with a cry and found that they had all dreamed this tale told by a woman who, though they had never seen her, proved to be my famed exile, who in the dream taught that the story-person was sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, never both at once.

Not recently heard from, the once distinguished particle geologist with a crater in him turned to the harvesting of stained-glass minerals. Some How scientists became Whats overnight and claimed that the interesting work was now interdisciplinary. My own attachment to the great event, the loss of that neighbor nation, I one day saw confusingly and not clearly but chokingly, was like when I lost the mother of my child and heard her voice for months as on an interdisciplinary telephone or as only a function of my own deafness, and was glad I had spoken to her so often before she died.

For a week the meteorological inflatable stopped descending, and the World Council put out word that the vehicle had been commanded to pause for a period of re-entry observation. Ordinary citizens hundreds of miles apart were saying they felt now happily
exiled
—alone, yet self-contained, able to speak foreign languages and perceive what they didn’t need to talk about.

The notorious teacher, with whom I had corresponded and become attuned, said she knew what they meant; asked if she was propagating some new immortality, she said she did not believe in life after death. Admitting death was hard to prove, she was accused of such influence upon these many other, far-flung self-styled exiles that, to my alarm and even, I think, my child’s, she was further removed to a top-secret job at a remote mountain station whence nonetheless were now said to emanate a range of curious reports. Doublings it sometimes seemed. Like the dubious radiation-immune man-woman said to be replacing the reptile in the now again descending meteorological vehicle. Or my friend herself being that passenger. It might have been merely a religious era supplanting the pervasive emptiness wrongly inferred in the spread of SHED from the original blast. Yet the long-awaited data on Shimmer-function life at the ceiling of the original blast now half-neglected in the flurry of interest in these personality breakthroughs so rich yet, in their spread, so alarming, consolidated the thought of the How spokesmen to embrace the imaginative complexity of science so disquieting that they began to mention global personality malfunction. The force that modifies the thing becomes the thing itself, it was said.

An infra-scanner wrote a sonata for experimental lasar and unison mass-chorus. It was based on the identity of the schoolchild’s legendary doodle and the steady forms of occupant blood-signal transmitted from the descending vehicle. These patterns in turn matched one of the Shimmer configurations. Thus, doubts were reawakened as to whether the unilateral blast
had
really been contained.

One bio-hawk heard in the sonata not the Mass Mind the World Council warned of, but beam-mass equation in the solo laser that argued new particle uses for non-nuclear conflict once called “conventional.” Old line How funding accelerated the quest to isolate and capture a Shimmer-function, and in a few labs this acceleration caused time itself to narrow and condense a billion times more swiftly than a New Zealand canyon over unthinkable centuries. The particle geologist reported that the counter-crater inside him receded yet opened larger. He had found better terms for the post-blast sadness anyway, but when he told these terms, he was accused of being in touch with the doubly exiled teacher, who he then said he sensed was dead, though I, who loved her, knew she was not. His new names for the post-blast sadness had come to him during a dream of overflight: he was above the vanished nation which was visible as scaleless clusters of cities in the night. Hows, now in a race against time itself, bypassed such terms of his as “threshold” and “the alien New” to extract from his term “tension” a revived essence of “tensor.” This was a device to measure the invasors causing the so-called sadness that was really straight-out depression according to the World Council and chemically treatable though socially intolerable.

Among the global sadness group, if group it was, a new spirit arose overnight. In one region it was a power to cooperate in reshaping community economics so that people without a job or home, say, were seen as having blindly or unjustly given those things away to others who themselves were now possessed of too much, a risk signaled in awful dreams, queer pique at family members, and a need to show off by giving everything away. Cadres of us in our modest nation began somehow to build a land we could understand. On one small continent noted for its autobiographical literature and its undersea sports, people began to move more slowly and were filmed by news services. They were in the grip of a force called Transitional (after our new world citizens-without-a-country) which sought to be at rest. In one extreme northern country, original sadness people stopped wearing heavy clothing out of doors, and no single How answers such as Changing One’s Life or Muscle Memory Re-education covered every case of this. How Shimmer sensors were picking up nothing anywhere, and the World Council found more funding to develop a still finer sensor. Transitional People from the vanished nation were chosen from all over the world to be Tensor-tested. A news organ reported the blast frontier now “shorn of Shimmer forces.”