Phase Shift (24 page)

That was when my brain threatened to
explode.

I glanced at the next date on the handset,
but could not seem to focus finely enough to read it.

Roswell.

The first Gaian encounter.

After all of the press, all of the
conspiracy chatter, all of the television shows and movies and
documentaries and debunking, blacked-out declassified documents and
supposed alien autopsies, the government spinning the folk lore
into weather balloons and stealth prototypes and secrecy, and what
it all boiled down to was nothing more than some Joe Blow pilot who
just happened to find the proverbial shift-bubble
needle-in-the-haystack. It's actually comical, when you think about
it, how a missing plane spawned an entire counterculture of
mistrust in the government.

I scrolled through the file again. There was
so much more. The other dates Reyes gave me pointed to a number of
nuclear tests or nuclear disasters in the early half of the
twentieth century. Little did German scientists Hahn and Strassman
know when they discovered nuclear fission in the 1930s, that they
were setting a series of events into motion which would end in
Cataclysm—the destruction of not one world, but two,
simultaneously. I wonder, if they knew, would it have mattered?

That cinched it for me. Reyes was right—our
world was tied to theirs. Not just sisters but conjoined twins. How
else could an earthquake occur on both worlds at roughly the same
time and in exactly the same place? How else could the date of a
major atmospheric change such as a preponderance of phase shift
bubbles pinpoint the exact date of atomic explosions?

When I’m done explaining, Palmer looks at me
eager to hear more, brown eyes sparkling in the moonlight. I’m
spent, I mean, really spent—mind, body and spirit. I want nothing
more than to crawl under the covers and flake. But I can’t. There’s
more, so much more. What I know so far about Gaia is only the tip
of the iceberg. And what I’ve told Palmer barely scratches the
surface.

The cadence of the rain drumming on the
umbrella overhead becomes more urgent. Rivulets of water begin to
flow from the umbrella's spoke-tips. "I have something to show
you," I tell him when there is a lull in the conversation. They say
confession is good for the soul. And though the story I’ve been
researching is not technically mine to tell, I need to slough it
off nevertheless.

I toss the cotton candy blanket into the
bathroom tub on my way to the office. When Palmer joins me, I’m
still shuffling through papers on my desk looking for a hand
rendering of one of Reyes’s maps. "According to Reyes there's a
spot on Gaia that's been declared kind of a no man's land, to be
avoided at all times," I say.

"Compasses go wild, planes and ships pass
through it, never to be seen again."

"Sounds like the Bermuda Triangle," he
offers.

I look up at him. "You don't know the half
of it" I say. At last, I find the map and pass it to him.

"The pencil map is what Reyes gave me on the
handset,” I explain. The blue represents the same part of the world
on Earth." I wait for him to examine the map. "It is the Bermuda
Triangle," I say. "Can you believe it? Palmer, they have a Bermuda
Triangle, only they believe it's like a region of permanent phase
shifting, like a hole in the fabric of space-time on their planet.
For all they know, things disappearing there are swallowed up into
another dimension—"

"Like a portal to Earth?"

"Maybe. Or maybe the act of being drawn into
the shift bubble wrecks the craft and spits it back out to the sea,
and because everyone's afraid to go there, no one ever finds the
remains," I say. "Reyes claims every eleven years there's an
increase in the frequency of random phase shift reports."

"Okay," he says. He stretches out the last
syllable, making it into a question.

"I did a search on the Internet. Sunspot
activity occurs in eleven year cycles. I checked the Telesat Canada
web page. They have hard evidence to support that sunspots wax and
wane in eleven year cycles."

"Could be a coincidence," he says, shifting
positions in his chair.

He’s right. It could still be a coincidence.
Time was I would have believed that. Time was I would have fought
anyone who told me differently. But now that I’ve seen it for
myself? I’d bet dollars to donuts there is nothing coincidental
about it. "Except that peak years of solar flare and sunspot
activity on Earth correlate to peak years of random phase shift
occurrences on Gaia," I tell him.

Palmer’s stomach rumbles. Instead of
continuing to play Devil's Advocate with me, he claps his hands and
rubs them together. "Care for pizza?" he asks. "I'm hungry." He
gets up and walks toward the kitchen before I can respond.

I’m not ready to let the argument go yet. No
sooner has Palmer turned the corner on his way to the kitchen than
I’m up and calling his name. "Wait," I beg, "there's more."

"Pizza's cold and I'm hungry." He opens the
white and orange box promising thirty minutes or the delivery is
free and peels himself a slice. He takes a bite, rests it on the
counter, and then hands a slice to me. "I want to talk about this
with you," I plead, "I need to talk about this."

Pizza is the ultimate soul food. It has the
power to heal all wounds from the inside out. Our mutual fondness
for pizza was a commonality Palmer and I realized we shared early
in our relationship, probably before it could even be classified as
a relationship. And though we can never agree on the Perfect Pizza
Topping, our willingness to experiment from pie to pie and where
and when we consume it, has helped invigorate our relationship.

I look at the slice in his hand, worried
that my mouth isn’t salivating at the prospect.

Palmer shrugs and sets the slice down atop
the pizza box. "I don't know what to tell you, Moll.” He takes a
huge bite. “The planets are linked,” he says through it. “ I get
that—"

"Did you know that shortly after Chernobyl,
Gaia suffered their largest and most devastating episode of phase
shifting ever? Over the continent that roughly coincides with the
former USSR?" I pick a meatball from my slice and roll it around
between my fingers. It’s room temperature. I pop it into my mouth
and chew on it a while, hoping it’ll get the stomach juices
flowing. Palmer takes another bite, drops his slice beside mine and
grabs a cold pop from the fridge. He offers me the first can, but I
shake my head.

"The only thing I can liken it to is Ground
Zero on 9-11. A sizeable chunk of a prefecture building was whisked
away. In its absence, most of the building—a high rise, fifteen
stories—collapsed. The missing piece shifted back moments later but
the damage had already been done. It happened on a weekday, late in
the morning. Almost a thousand fatalities in total."

Palmer looks at me and lets me speak. I
swallow the meatball and I’m deeply regretful. I don’t know if I
can keep it down. "Survivors caught in the part of the building
that shifted were later plagued with a mysterious illness. The way
Reyes describes it, it sounds a lot like radiation poisoning, like
when they shifted they were exposed to the radiation cloud formed
by the meltdown. Almost thirty of the survivors later died due to
complications from the unknown illness." I wipe away a surprise
tear streaming down my face. Palmer looks at what's left of the
slice in his hand, opens the box and tosses it in.

I hand him a piece of folded newspaper, a
page taken from a supermarket tabloid. He unfolds it, smoothes the
creases and skims. The article is about a farmer who witnessed the
corner of a large building materialize in his wheat field. When he
looks up from the paper, I say, "Do you see? This kind of thing
happens all the time. Just because no-one's around to hear the tree
falling in the forest, doesn't mean there's no sound.

"And what about the Gaian religion I told
you about? The people who call themselves Religious Enthusiasts?
Relens? They all have this crescent-shaped mark near a major
artery. That female prefect, Trozai? She asked me to investigate it
here, the crescent moon. And I found a connection."

"If you look hard enough for anything,
you'll find it. You know that's why the conspiracy theorists have
gained such a wide audience lately. You know even the most diverse
of data can be skewed to prove the most obscure point—"

I don’t appreciate he’s taken up another
round of Devil’s Advocate. I shake my head. "Just listen to me,
okay? The crescent moon? Turns out, it's an attribute of Luna and
Selene, transferred to Diana later in history—"

"I'm sorry, Moll, but I don't see the
significance—"

"Selene? Moon goddess?"

He shakes his head and looks confused.

"Theran Prefecture resides on the continent
corresponding to North America. They call it 'Selene'."

"Molly—" he pleads with me.

"There has to be something more at work here
than coincidence, Palmer, there has to be," I repeat, as if saying
it again will make it so. "God, Palmer, don't you see? We can burn
our garbage, compost, recycle, play with hybrid cars, use wind and
water instead of nuclear power, but when it comes down to it, none
of it matters." I throw myself back into my chair. "We always
talked about helping to make this world greener for our children,
our grandchildren and their children, but when you look at
something like this, there's really nothing any one person can do
that's going to matter."

He reaches for my hand across the table.
Okay, so a greener tomorrow is more my pipe dream than his. I’m the
one who insists we compost. I’m the one who's always on Palmer’s
back to recycle. I’m the one who insists we keep bricks in the
toilet tank to cut water consumption, sweat it out on the more
temperate summer days rather than run the A/C, use bins over
plastic bags when packing our groceries, and rely on public
transportation to and from work. But the bottom line is that no
matter what we do, if the greater public, including that on Gaia,
isn't following suit—cutting terraforming and deliberate phase
shifting all together—no amount of reducing, reusing, recycling or
retrofitting is going to do us any good.

Palmer holds my hand and rubs the knuckles
with his thumb. His eyes are shaded with his other hand, his elbow
rests on the table. We sit like that, me staring off into space,
Palmer’s unfocussed glare on the tabletop until he says, "There's
something else, isn't there? Something more you wanted to tell
me."

I want to tell him about Stanley, that he
came by today, that he took the artifacts with him. Instead I say,
"Did you know there are regular sightings of something like Bigfoot
and the Loch Ness Monster on Gaia? Can you imagine?"

"You know that's nothing more than
crypto-zoology, pseudo-science mythology, Moll," he points out.

"Right. But the only thing making it
pseudo-science rather than actual science is there's no real
evidence to support it. Don't you think sightings of identical
creatures on what are essentially two separate worlds constitutes
proof enough for their existence?"

The problem is scientists have been trying
to come to terms with these phenomena on Earth for centuries now.
UFOs are quite possibly weather balloons; the Bermuda Triangle an
area prone to erratic weather conditions; Sasquatch are either
surviving primates of the Gigantopithecus variety, or a hoax; and
Nessie, either a surviving plesiosaur, a plesiosaur descendant, or
also a hoax. But the chance that two separate worlds having (I'm
assuming) very little contact would report the very same
pseudo-scientific anomalies is decidedly unlikely. Talking to
Palmer about things like UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, Sasquatch, and
Nessie is usually futile. He listens to what I have to say, takes a
few pokes at it, and we end the conversation agreeing to disagree.
But this time I think things are finally starting to sink in.

We look at each other in silence for a
moment or two while I (once more) toy with the idea of telling him
about this afternoon’s impromptu meeting with Stanley, but I can’t
think of a way to go about it. How might I tell him I lost the
modulator without putting up much of a fight? That I may have
endangered the life of Stanley or someone else? That I handed over
any proof of the Magical Mystery Tour I might have had? That he
should brace himself because once Stanley releases his information
to the Media, our credibility as scientists would most probably be
in jeopardy?

I decide not to say anything, at least, not
for now.

"I guess until I speak with Reyes,” I
continue, “there's nothing more to do." I look at the pizza box
still on the table in front of us. "I'm sorry. I'm not really very
hungry right now." I touch his forearm. "The pizza was a good idea,
though. Really.

"I think I'm just going to turn in."

As I change into my pajamas, I hear Palmer
in the kitchen wrapping the pizza in Saran and putting it into the
fridge.

Motar Prefect sat at arm's length from Reyes
on a bench in the Prefecture Gardens. He reached deep into his
cloak and withdrew a small satchel, struggled briefly with the tie
on the satchel, and, once opened, began to strew its contents on
the grass at his feet.

Reyes suppressed a smile at the rustic-sweet
scent of the contents of Motar's satchel. Bread crumbs, various
cereals and grains, Helianthus seeds, groundnuts and Ribes rubram,
tossed with honey and butter and baked until toasted. It reminded
him of a simpler time in his mother's kitchen when he and his
siblings would assemble the mixture and salivate as the warmth of
toasted oats and moldered honey permeated the house. When the
mixture had cooled, Reyes and his siblings would break it into
gaming-cube-sized blocks, package it, and feed it to the animals
and birds which called the Prefecture home.