The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (80 page)

Larry’s voice issued from somewhere other than his exploding larynx. It seemed to be coming from a long distance away, like a radio tuned to a distant galaxy. He said, “What happened to your hair, Alex?”

I ran a hand over my head. “It’s been a while, Larry. I got old.”

“How long?” asked that eerie voice.

“Nearly twenty-five years.”

Larry looked around him and made those strange noises again. “Delahaye . . .”

“All dead,” I said. “Delahaye, Warren, Chen, Bright, Morley. The whole team. You and I are the only survivors.”

Larry looked at his hands; it was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face, but he made a noise that might, if one were psychotic enough, be mistaken for a laugh. “I don’t seem to have survived very well, Alex.” He looked at me.
“You
seem to be doing all right, though.”

I shrugged. “As I said, we still don’t know exactly what happened.”

Larry emitted that awful laugh again. “My god,” he said, “it’s like something from a Marvel comic. You think maybe I’ve become a superhero, Alex?”

“That’s an . . . unusual way of looking at it,” I allowed warily.

Larry sighed. “You’d think I’d get X-ray vision or something. Not . . .” he waved his not-quite-hands at me, “. . .
this.”

“Larry,” I said, “you need help.”

Larry laughed. “Oh? You
think?
Jesus, Alex.” He started to pace back and forth. Then he stopped. “Where was I? Before?”

“Afghanistan. We think you were just trying to find your way back here.”

Larry shook his head, which was an awful thing to watch. “No. Before that. There was . . . everything was the wrong . . .
shape
. . .”

I took a step forward and said, “Larry . . .”

“And before that . . . I was
here,
and we were having this conversation . . .”

“It’s just
déjà vu,”
I told him. “It’s hardly the worst of your worries.”

Larry straightened up and his body seemed to gain coherence. “Alex,” he said, “how many times have we done this before?”

I shook my head. “Too fucking many,” I said, and I plunged my hands into the seething exploding mass of Larry Day’s body and pulled us both back into Hell.

I still wasn’t sure why I went back after escaping the second time. Maybe I just wanted to know what had happened to me and there was no way to find out on my own. Maybe I was afraid that if I spent too long
there
I would forget what it was like to be human.

The general and his three friends were unavailable. I later discovered that they had been in hospital ever since they saw what I turned the table into; one of them never recovered. In their place, I was assigned two more generals – one from the Air Force and one from the Army – and an admiral, and a team of eager young scientists, all looked after by quiet, efficient people from the CIA and the NSA.

I was questioned, over and over and over again, and the answers I was able to give them wouldn’t have covered the back of a postage stamp. One of the scientists asked me, “What’s it like there? How many dimensions does it have?” and all I could tell him was, “Not enough. Too many. I don’t know.”

We were unprepared. We knew too little, and that was why he nearly got me that first time. I knew that Point Zero was like a beacon
there,
a great solid negative tornado, and one of the few useful pieces of advice I was able to contribute was to keep a watch on the SCC for any manifestations. I went back to our old house in Sioux Crossing to wait, because I
knew.
I knew he was looking for a landmark, a reference point, because that was what
I
had done. When the manifestations began, I was bustled in great secrecy to the Site, and I saw him appear for the first time. Heard him speak for the first time. Thought, not for the last time,
Of course. It had to be Larry.

He was confused, frightened, angry, but he recovered quickly. I told him what had happened – what we understood, anyway – and he seemed to pull his exploding form together a little. He looked about him and said,
This must be what God feels like,
and my blood ran cold. And then I felt him try to take me apart and remake me, the way I had remade the table.

I did the first thing that crossed my mind. I grabbed him and went back
there
with him, and I let him go and came back
here.

The second time he came back, it was the same thing. A few random manifestations, some baffling but relatively minor destruction. Then he found his way to Point Zero, confused, amnesiac. But he came to the same conclusion.
This must be what God feels like.
And I had to take him back
there.

And again. And again. And again.

I walked an unimaginable distance. It took me an impossible length of time. Nothing here meant anything or made any sense, but there were structures, colossal things that were almost too small to see: the remains of Professor Delahaye and the other victims of The Accident. There were also the remains of a specially-trained SEAL team, sent in here by the President—not the present one but her predecessor – when he thought he could create a group of all-American superheroes. I, and pretty much every scientist involved in investigating The Accident, argued against that, but when the President says jump you just ask what altitude he wants, so the SEALs remain. There is no life or death
there,
only existence, so Professor Delahaye and the others exist in a Schroedinger not-quite-state, trying to make sense of what and where they are. If they ever succeed, I’m going to be busy.

The scientists call this “Calabi-Yau space”, or, if they’re trying to be particularly mysterious, “The Manifold”. Which it may or may not be, nobody knows. The String Theorists, overwhelmed with joy at having eyewitness evidence of another space, named it, even though I could give them little in the way of confirmatory testimony. Calabi-Yau space exists a tiny fraction of a nanometre away from what I used to think of as “normal” space, but it would take more than the total energy output of the entire universe to force a single photon between them.

Travel between dimensions appears to be, however, more like judo than karate, more a manipulation of force than a direct application of it. Somehow, Delahaye’s final shot manipulated those forces in just the wrong way, pitching everything within a radius of five metres into a terrible emptiness and leaving behind Point Zero, a pulsing, open wound between the worlds, a point that
won’t be imaged.
Someone once told me that the odds of The Accident happening at all were billions and billions to one against. Like going into every casino on The Strip in Vegas and playing every slot machine and winning the jackpot on all of them, all in one evening. But here’s the thing about odds and probability. You can talk about them as much as you want, do all the fancy math, but in the end there’s only either/or. That’s all that matters. Either you win all the jackpots on The Strip, or you don’t. Either it will happen, or it won’t. It did, and here I am. And here, somewhere, is Larry Day.

Existing in Calabi-Yau space, being able to step between dimensions, being able to use the insight this gives you to manipulate the “real” world, really
is
like being a god. Unfortunately, it’s like being one of the gods H.P. Lovecraft used to write about, immense and unfathomable and entirely without human scruple. So far, the human race is lucky that Larry seems unable to quite get the knack of godhood. None of us can work out why I acclimatized to it so easily, or why it’s still so difficult for Larry, why returning him
there
screws him up all over again while I can cross back and forth at will, without harm. Larry was one of the biggest brains humanity ever produced, and he can’t get the hang of The Manifold, while I, the world’s most prosaic man, as my ex-wife liked to remind me, took it more or less in my stride. All I can tell them is that every time we meet – and we’ve done this particular little pantomime fifty-two times so far – he seems to recover more quickly. One day he’s going to come out of it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I won’t be able to take him back
there.
I’ll have to fight him
here,
and it’ll be like nothing Stan Lee ever imagined. Either/or. Either the world will survive, or it won’t.

Larry is not a nice man. He was a great man, before The Accident, and I liked him a lot, until I found out about him and my wife. But he’s not a nice man. Of all the people in the world you’d want to get bitten by the radioactive spider, he’d probably come close to the bottom of the list.

And the wonderful, extravagant cosmic joke of it is that Larry is not even the nightmare scenario. The nightmare scenario is that Delahaye and Chen and Morley and the SEAL team and all the animals who got onto the Site despite the billion-dollar-per-annum containment operation somehow drop into a rest state at once, and find their way
here.
If that happens, it’ll make the Twilight of the Gods look like a quiet morning in a roadside diner. I plan to be somewhere else on that day. I’m happy enough to present the appearance of humanity for the moment, but I don’t owe these people anything.

Eventually, I came across a room. Although this wasn’t a room in the sense that anyone
here
would recognize. It was all distributed planes of stress and knots of mass, open on all sides, too huge to measure. I stepped into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.

Nobody screamed. Nobody ran away. They were expecting me, of course, and I had learned long ago how to clothe myself before I came
here.
People hate it when naked men appear out of nowhere in the Situation Room at the White House. Someone brought me coffee. The coffee here was always excellent.

“Mr. Dolan,” said the President.

“Madam President,” I said. I sipped my coffee. “He’s recovering more quickly.”

“We noticed,” said one of the scientists, a man named Sierpinski. “The others?”

“I saw some of them. They’re still aestivating. I’m not sure I should be checking them out; won’t observing them collapse them into one state or the other?”

Sierpinski shrugged.
We don’t know.
Maybe we should make that our company song.

“You look tired,” said the President.

“I look how I want to look,” I snapped, and regretted it. She was not an unkind person, and I
was
tired. And anyway, it was ridiculous. Why would a godlike transdimensional superhero want to look like a tubby balding middle-aged man? If I wanted, I could look like Lady Gaga or Robert Downey, Jr., or an enormous crystal eagle, but what I
really
want is to be ordinary again, and that, of all things, I cannot do.

I looked up at the expectant faces, all of them waiting to hear how I had saved the world again.

“Do you think I could have a sandwich?” I asked.

WHAT WE FOUND

Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to
New Worlds,
but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in
Interzone
with his brilliant novella “The Unconquered Country”, that he first attracted any serious attention. “The Unconquered Country”, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version,
The Unconquered Country: A Life History.
His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his short fiction appearing frequently in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
and his novel
The Child Garden: A Low Comedy
winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; his later novel
Air
also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include
The Warrior Who Carried Life,
the critically acclaimed mainstream novel
Was, Coming of Enkidu, The King’s Last Song, Lust,
and the underground cult classic
253,
the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of
www.ryman.com
, and which in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in
Unconquered Countries.
His most recent works are the anthology
When It Changed,
the novel
The Film-makers of Mars,
and the collection
Paradise Tales: and Other Stories.