Infinite Dreams, Page 2

  There was a board of inquiry where Roger testified that his men could not possibly have made such an elementary error and, after demonstrating his own remarkable talent, suggested that it had been either a faulty round or an improper correction by the captain. The board was impressed and the captain couldn’t testify, so the matter was dropped.

  After a few months Michael could say a few words and his body seemed to have adjusted to being fed and emptied through various tubes. So they flew him from Japan to Walter Reed, where a number of men experienced in such things would try to make some sort of rational creature out of him again.

  Roger’s esteem was now very high with the rest of the artillery battery, and especially with his own crew. He could have dumped the whole mess into their laps, but instead had taken on the board of inquiry by himself.

  Michael was blind in his right eye, but with his left he could distinguish complementary colors and tell a circle from a square. The psychiatrists could tell because his pupil would dilate slightly at the change, even though the light intensity was kept constant.

  A company of NVA regulars took Roger’s fire base by surprise and, in the middle of the furious hand-to-hand battle, Roger saw two enemy sappers slip into the bunker that was used to store ammunition for the big guns. The bunker also contained Roger’s notebook, and the prospect of losing eight months’ worth of closely reasoned mathematical theorizing drove Roger to take his bayonet, run across a field of blistering fire, dive in the bunker and kill the two sappers before they could set off their charge. In the process, he absorbed a rifle bullet in the calf and a pistol wound in his left tricep. A visiting major who was cowering in a nearby bunker saw the whole thing, and Roger got a medical discharge, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a fifty percent disability pension. The wounds were reasonably healed in six months, but the pension didn’t stop.

  Michael had learned to say “mama” again, but his mother wasn’t sure he could recognize her during her visits, which became less and less frequent as cancer spread through her body. On 9 June 1967, she died of the cervical cancer that had been discovered exactly one year before. Nobody told Michael.

  On 9 June 1967, Roger had finished his first semester at the University of Chicago and was sitting in the parlor of the head of the mathematics department, drinking tea and discussing the paper that Roger had prepared, extending his new system of algebraic morphology. The department head had made Roger his protégé, and they spent many afternoons like this, the youth’s fresh insight cross-pollinating the professor’s great experience.

  By May of 1970, Michael had learned to respond to his name by lifting his left forefinger.

  Roger graduated summa cum laude on 30 May 1970 and, out of dozens of offers, took an assistantship at the California Institute of Technology.

  Against his physician’s instructions, Mr. Kidd went on a skiing expedition to the Swiss Alps. On an easy slope his ski hit an exposed root and, rolling comfortably with the fall, Michael’s father struck a half-concealed rock which fractured his spine. It was June of 1973 and he would never ski again, would never walk again.

  At that same instant on the other side of the world, Roger sat down after a brilliant defense of his doctoral thesis, a startling redefinition of Peano’s Axiom. The thesis was approved unanimously.

  On Michael’s birthday, 12 April 1975, his father, acting through a bank of telephones beside his motorized bed, liquidated ninety percent of the family’s assets and set up a tax-sheltered trust to care for his only child. Then he took ten potent pain-killers with his breakfast orange juice and another twenty with sips of water and he found out that dying that way wasn’t as pleasant as he thought it would be.

  It was also Roger’s thirty-second birthday, and he celebrated it quietly at home in the company of his new wife, a former student of his, twelve years his junior, who was dazzled by his genius. She could switch effortlessly from doting Hausfrau to randy mistress to conscientious secretary and Roger knew love for the first time in his life. He was also the youngest assistant professor on the mathematics faculty of CalTech.

  On 4 January 1980, Michael stopped responding to his name. The inflation safeguards on his trust fund were eroding with time and he was moved out of the exclusive private clinic to a small room in San Francisco General.

  The same day, due to his phenomenal record of publications and the personal charisma that fascinated students and faculty alike, Roger was promoted to be the youngest full professor in the history of the mathematics department. His unfashionably long hair and full beard covered his ludicrous ears and “extreme ugliness of face,” and people who knew the history of science were affectionately comparing him to Steinmetz.

  There was nobody to give the tests, but if somebody had they would have found that on 12 April 1983, Michael’s iris would no longer respond to the difference between a circle and a square.

  On his fortieth birthday, Roger had the satisfaction of hearing that his book, Modern Algebra Redefined, was sold out in its fifth printing and was considered required reading for almost every mathematics graduate student in the country.

  Seventeen June 1985 and Michael stopped breathing; a red light blinked on the attendant’s board and he administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until they rolled in an electronic respirator and installed him. Since he wasn’t on the floor reserved for respiratory disease, the respirator was plugged into a regular socket instead of the special fail-safe line.

  Roger was on top of the world. He had been offered the chairmanship of the mathematics department of Penn State, and said he would accept as soon as he finished teaching his summer post-doctoral seminar on algebraic morphology.

  The hottest day of the year was 19 August 1985. At 2:45:20 p.m. the air conditioners were just drawing too much power and somewhere in Central Valley a bank of bus bars glowed cherry red and exploded in a shower of molten copper.

  All the lights on the floor and on the attendant’s board went out, the electronic respirator stopped, and while the attendant was frantically buzzing for assistance, 2:45:25 to be exact, Michael Tobias Kidd passed away.

  The lights in the seminar room dimmed and blinked out. Roger got up to open the Venetian blinds, whipped off his glasses in a characteristic gesture and was framing an acerbic comment when, at 2:45:25, he felt a slight tingling in his head as a blood vessel ruptured and quite painlessly he went to join his brother.

  Anniversary Project

  This story was a real problem child. Harry Harrison asked me to do a story for an anthology of science fiction set one million years in the future. I ran home and wrote the first three pages of “Anniversary Project,” and then stopped dead. Started again, stopped again.

  After a half-dozen tries I was all the way up to four pages, and I really liked those four pages, but I had to stop wasting time on it. I wrote Harry and told him to go on without me.

  Several years later I came across the fragment and it was immediately obvious what was wrong with it. Painfully obvious, and so was the solution.

  I had taken as a basic premise that “people” a million years in the future would have evolved into something totally alien, and I’d done too good a job; they were the most convincing aliens I’d ever invented. But they did lack certain interesting attributes: love, hate, fear, birth, death, sex, appetites, politics. About all they had was slight differences of opinion regarding ontology. Pretty dry stuff.

  Yet I thought I was onto something. Most aliens in science fiction aren’t truly alien, and that’s not because science fiction writers lack imagination, but because the purpose of an alien in a story is usually to provide a meaningful distortion of human nature. My purpose was not nearly so elevated; my aliens were there as unwitting vehicles for absurdist humor. All the story needed was a couple of bewildered humans, to serve as foils for alien nature. Once I saw that, the story practically wrote itself.

  In the process of writing itself, the story generated two dreadful puns. I’m not responsible.
r />   His name is Three-phasing and he is bald and wrinkled, slightly over one meter tall, large-eyed, toothless and all bones and skin, sagging pale skin shot through with traceries of delicate blue and red. He is considered very beautiful but most of his beauty is in his hands and is due to his extreme youth. He is over two hundred years old and is learning how to talk. He has become reasonably fluent in sixty-three languages, all dead ones, and has only ten to go.

  The book he is reading is a facsimile of an early edition of Goethe’s Faust. The nervous angular Fraktur letters goose-step across pages of paper-thin platinum.

  The Faust had been printed electrolytically and, with several thousand similarly worthwhile books, sealed in an argon-filled chamber and carefully lost, in 2012 A.D.; a very wealthy man’s legacy to the distant future.

  In 2012 A.D., Polaris had been the pole star. Men eventually got to Polaris and built a small city on a frosty planet there. By that time, they weren’t dating by prophets’ births any more, but it would have been around 4900 A.D. The pole star by then, because of precession of the equinoxes, was a dim thing once called Gamma Cephei. The celestial pole kept reeling around, past Deneb and Vega and through barren patches of sky around Hercules and Draco; a patient clock but not the slowest one of use, and when it came back to the region of Polaris, then 26,000 years had passed and men had come back from the stars, to stay, and the book-filled chamber had shifted 130 meters on the floor of the Pacific, had rolled into a shallow trench, and eventually was buried in an underwater landslide.

  The thirty-seventh time this slow clock ticked, men had moved the Pacific, not because they had to, and had found the chamber, opened it up, identified the books and carefully sealed them up again. Some things by then were more important to men than the accumulation of knowledge: in half of one more circle of the poles would come the millionth anniversary of the written word. They could wait a few millenia.

  As the anniversary, as nearly as they could reckon it, approached, they caused to be born two individuals: Nine-hover (nominally female) and Three-phasing (nominally male). Three-phasing was born to learn how to read and speak. He was the first human being to study these skills in more than a quarter of a million years.

  Three-phasing has read the first half of Faust forwards and, for amusement and exercise, is reading the second half backwards. He is singing as he reads, lisping.

  “Fain’ Looee w’mun … wif all’r die-mun ringf …” He has not put in his teeth because they make his gums hurt.

  Because he is a child of two hundred, he is polite when his father interrupts his reading and singing. His father’s “voice” is an arrangement of logic and aesthetic that appears in Three-phasing’s mind. The flavor is lost by translating into words:

  “Three-phasing my son-ly atavism of tooth and vocal cord,” sarcastically in the reverent mode, “Couldst tear thyself from objects of manifest symbol, and visit to share/help/learn, me?”

  “?” He responds, meaning “with/with/of what?”

  Withholding mode: “Concerning thee: past, future.”

  He shuts the book without marking his place. It would never occur to him to mark his place, since he remembers perfectly the page he stops on, as well as every word preceding, as well as every event, no matter how trivial, that he has observed from the precise age of one year. In this respect, at least, he is normal.

  He thinks the proper coordinates as he steps over the mover-transom, through a microsecond of black, and onto his father’s mover-transom, about four thousand kilometers away on a straight line through the crust and mantle of the earth.

  Ritual mode: “As ever, father.” The symbol he uses for “father” is purposefully wrong, chiding. Crude biological connotation.

  His father looks cadaverous and has in fact been dead twice. In the infant’s small-talk mode he asks “From crude babblings of what sort have I torn your interest?”

  “The tale called Faust, of a man so named, never satisfied with {symbol for slow but continuous accretion} of his knowledge and power; written in the language of Prussia.”

  “Also depended-ing on this strange word of immediacy, your Prussian language?”

  “As most, yes. The word of ‘to be’: sein. Very important illusion in this and related languages/cultures; that events happen at the ‘time’ of perception, infinitesimal midpoint between past and future.”

  “Convenient illusion but retarding.”

  “As we discussed 129 years ago, yes.” Three-phasing is impatient to get back to his reading, but adds:

  “You always stick up for them.”

  “I have great regard for what they accomplished with limited faculties and so short lives.” Stop beatin’ around the bush, Dad. Tempis fugit, eight to the bar. Did Mr. Handy Moves-dat-man-around-by-her-apron-strings, 20th-century American poet, intend cultural translation of Lysistrata? if so, inept. African were-beast legendry, yes.

  Withholding mode (coy): “Your father stood with Nine-hover all morning.”

  “,” broadcasts Three-phasing: well?

  “The machine functions, perhaps inadequately.”

  The young polyglot tries to radiate calm patience.

  “Details I perceive you want; the idea yet excites you. You can never have satisfaction with your knowledge, either. What happened-s to the man in your Prussian book?”

  “He lived-s one hundred years and died-s knowing that a man can never achieve true happiness, despite the appearance of success.”

  “For an infant, a reasonable perception.”

  Respectful chiding mode: “One hundred years makes-ed Faust a very old man, for a Dawn man.”

  “As I stand,” same mode, less respect, “yet an infant.” They trade silent symbols of laughter.

  After a polite tenth-second interval, Three-phasing uses the light interrogation mode: “The machine of Nine-hover …?”

  “It begins to work but so far not perfectly.” This is not news.

  Mild impatience: “As before, then, it brings back only rocks and earth and water and plants?”

  “Negative, beloved atavism.” Offhand: “This morning she caught two animals that look as man may once have looked.”

  “!” Strong impatience, “I go?”

  “.” His father ends the conversation just two seconds after it began.

  Three-phasing stops off to pick up his teeth, then goes directly to Nine-hover.

  A quick exchange of greeting-symbols and Nine-hover presents her prizes. “Thinking I have two different species,” she stands: uncertainty, query.

  Three-phasing is amused. “Negative, time-caster. The male and female took very dissimilar forms in the Dawn times.” He touches one of them. “The round organs, here, served-ing to feed infants, in the female.”

  The female screams.

  “She manipulates spoken symbols now,” observes Nine-hover.

  Before the woman has finished her startled yelp, Three-phasing explains: “Not manipulating concrete symbols; rather, she communicates in a way called ‘non-verbal,’ the use of such communication predating even speech.” Slipping into the pedantic mode: “My reading indicates that such a loud noise occurs either since she seems not in pain, then she must fear me or you or both of us.

  “Or the machine,” Nine-hover adds.

  Symbol for continuing. “We have no symbol for it but in Dawn days most humans observed ‘xenophobia,’ reacting to the strange with fear instead of delight. We stand as strange to them as they do to us, thus they register fear. In their era this attitude encouraged-s survival.

  “Our silence must seem strange to them, as well as our appearance and the speed with which we move. I will attempt to speak to them, so they will know they need not fear us.”

  Bob and Sarah Graham were having a desperately good time. It was September of 1951 and the papers were full of news about the brilliant landing of U.S. Marines at Inchon. Bob was a Marine private with two days left of the thirty days’ leave they had given him, between boot camp and dise
mbarkation for Korea. Sarah had been Mrs. Graham for three weeks.

  Sarah poured some more bourbon into her Coke. She wiped the sand off her thumb and stoppered the Coke bottle, then shook it gently. “What if you just don’t show up?” she said softly.

  Bob was staring out over the ocean and part of what Sarah said was lost in the crash of breakers rolling in. “What if I what?”

  “Don’t show up.” She took a swig and offered the bottle. “Just stay here with me. With us.” Sarah was sure she was pregnant. It was too early to tell, of course; her calendar was off but there could be other reasons.

  He gave the Coke back to her and sipped directly from the bourbon bottle. “I suppose they’d go on without me. And I’d still be in jail when they came back.”

  “Not if—”

  “Honey, don’t even talk like that. It’s a just cause.”

  She picked up a small shell and threw it toward the water.

  “Besides, you read the Examiner yesterday.”

  “I’m cold. Let’s go up.” She stood and stretched and delicately brushed sand away. Bob admired her long naked dancer’s body. He shook out the blanket and draped it over her shoulders.

  “It’ll all be over by the time I get there. We’ll push those bastards—”

  “Let’s not talk about Korea. Let’s not talk.”

  He put his arm around her and they started walking back toward the cabin. Halfway there, she stopped and enfolded the blanket around both of them, drawing him toward her. He always closed his eyes when they kissed, but she always kept hers open. She saw it: the air turning luminous, the seascape fading to be replaced by bare metal walls. The sand turns hard under her feet.

  At her sharp intake of breath, Bob opens his eyes. He sees a grotesque dwarf, eyes and skull too large, body small and wrinkled. They stare at one another for a fraction of a second. Then the dwarf spins around and speeds across the room to what looks like a black square painted on the floor. When he gets there, he disappears.