Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Page 6

  The background on Methusaleh suggested he had countless people to assist him down through the decades. Still strong, still planning, his goals intact, the man might assume that his work continued. Like Thoreau, who knew his ideas extended beyond the walls, he wouldn't think of himself as locked up. Further, Jimmy saw the exercise, the silence, as preparation: He was waiting for a chance. To do what?

  He read on.

  I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

  Jimmy looked about his own room. Dimmed, it felt smaller than the room on the viewscreen—smaller, even, from one moment to the next.

  He left the room, went along the corridor past Weston's office, waved at the security camera by the front doors, and when the doors opened onto the front walk and the resting desert beyond the fence, he felt that at last he could take in breath. He stepped out of the building's shadow into the day's mild heat. Face toward the blank sky, he shut his eyes and turned sunward. Taking in another breath, he felt the sun's warmth enter him. Heat entering his nostrils, pink light all he saw, a necessary and expanding silence entered his cells, the vast sky finding a home in his body.

  This lasted until the guard at the main gate, fifty meters off, sneezed dryly, the sound whipping across the distance and ringing metallically from the cement walls at Jimmy's back. He returned to his body and felt ready for another attempt at reaching the old man.

  In the observation room, he found the prisoner gone. After an unsettling moment, he went to the security station. Quarles turned from the wide windows. "They told me you'd stepped out," he said.

  "Needed some air," Jimmy said. Outside, Methusaleh stood at the hub of a wheel of four men and two dogs. He drifted to his knees like an object falling in low gravity. His head slowly pitched earthward.

  Quarles cleared his throat. "In about an hour we're playing some ball. Sound good? Two on two." "Thanks. I think... I think I need to stay focused." "You change your mind, just show up. You think he's secretly exercising right now? Is that some kind of exercise where you put your head on the ground? He's not standing on his head."

  Jimmy's own head still felt full of the warm, expansive space beyond the prison. Vaguely, not trying, not even willing it, he reached toward the old man, maintaining the idea of the passageway but not opening it just yet.

  Quarles said, "I read about guys in Vietnam, prisoners of war? One guy had a Bible smuggled in and he committed to memory the entire book of Luke. Whole thing. Then he passed the Bible to somebody else and spent the next two years of prison reciting the book back to himself. This other guy memorized the names of all the prisoners in the compound and went through them in alphabetical order every night. Said he'd been trained to do that. And... and he'd reconstruct the seating charts from his classes from every school year. Maybe our guy does the same kind of thing."

  Jimmy grinned at Quarles, who let one eyebrow nicker up. All the reading Methusaleh must have done. Jimmy imagined his tremendous library, books of every kind; he saw a hand pull a hard-bound book from a high shelf. A mind like his, what might he have committed to memory? His head might be thick with the words of others, providing comfort and encouragement, insight and wisdom. Or images, pictures of the sea depths, roiling with strange fish. The blade-like peaks of mountains. The surface of Mars.

  Why had anyone thought these walls could hold him? He could be anywhere he wished.

  Radically free, he thought. Here but elsewhere. Pieces of the passageway.

  Late afternoon, Jimmy shut his eyes, set aside the physical attributes of his room, and entered the common space he'd already built. The passageway awaited him. He conjured up the prisoner in silhouette, seated and motionless. Jimmy entered the passageway and advanced, telling the prisoner everything he knew of him, probing for connection. When he inhaled, he inhaled their shared experience. Exhaling, he breathed out the words and images that belonged to the man himself, the keys to his character.

  A great challenge was to bring no expectations to the process; otherwise, like someone desperately at prayer, Jimmy might hear what he wanted to hear, constructing for himself a voice from the other side of the typically uncrossable barrier from self to self.

  The passageway faintly echoed. The mind of the other man whispered back. This was good. Jimmy only listened, hoping to catch a tone of assent on the other side, notes of acceptance, openness—an agreement that Methusaleh would never consciously know had been struck.

  Jimmy relaxed more deeply. The passageway became a place of surpassing comfort. Everything felt welcoming.

  Then the light at the far end snapped out, and Jimmy came blinking and dry-mouthed from his altered state.

  He didn't know why the assay had ended, but his control had certainly slipped. The prisoner sat just as before. Jimmy rose. Later, Jimmy would probe farther. He knew—with a confidence he had never felt before, not during his training nor his time in Iraq—that a bond was established, that all would be well, that right would triumph and the truth would be revealed.

  Evening, and the prisoner, so cunning, thought Jimmy, a man rich in talents and knowledge, once a powerful and secretive force upon the earth, slept. Not long afterward, the lights in the cell automatically switched off. Jimmy, who had learned some tricks from the manual—an unmarked binder stuffed in one of the wall cabinets— switched on the night vision, rendering everything in the next room a grainy green.

  He zoomed in on the prisoner's back, the man having settled securely into the mattress. For all his cleverness and capabilities, his mind at rest would be defenseless.

  The space between them, Jimmy's cautious construct, welcomed Jimmy back. He stood before the screen, hands splayed in open air, eyes shut. He felt forward along the gray passage.

  At some point, he became aware of his hands at his sides, his head slumped down. More tired than he had realized, he must have fallen asleep. That would not do.

  In the dark room, he banged his hip against the long table when he turned for bed. Yes, he was too tired to properly do his job.

  Twice that night, he awoke startled from dreams.

  Mouth stuffed with dirt, he twisted through the earth. He felt no panic, though unaware that he was dreaming. This would be his life from now on. There should have been no light, yet his eyes could see the solid rock parting for him as he shifted. He knew he wasn't alone. Others were coming.

  He woke with a gummy tongue, tasting bitter stone. He remembered putting a rock in his mouth as a child, hiding a piece of mica from a friend's collection, then spitting it back out.

  The second dream—and this he knew to be a dream—placed him in the old man's cell. Seated on a chair, arms bound behind him, perhaps by chains, he stared at the yellow wall, knowing he was watched from the other side—not only by Methusaleh himself, but by a crowd. Obscurely, he saw them, smoky images beyond the barrier, tier upon tier of silent witnesses. How ashamed he felt. He cried in an unaccustomed way, mouth severely downturned, cheeks sore from salt. When he woke, he touched his face and found it dry.

  He swore aloud. Above the door hung an old-style analog clock, its white face faintly lambent. Three in the morning. He needed more sleep.

  He dreamed and did not wake, turned in his sleep, then dreamed again.

  Morning came obscurely, Jimmy waking in the dark, uncertain where he was. Even after he sat up, saw the outline of objects by the clock's spectral glow, and determined his whereabouts, he felt bereft of a context. Not waiting to come fully to himself, he left the room for the bathroom in his quarters.

  Splashing water on his face, he remained unresolved, as if he'd not completely solidified from some half-immaterial state. He glanced into his own eyes. He sensed that, prior to waking, he had glancingly seen some insight just before it vanished around a corner. It left him unable to meet hi
s own eyes. Looking aside, he brushed his teeth, washclothed his pits and privates, then left the bathroom to change into fresh clothes, all still stuffed in his duffel, his final tan shirt wrinkled. He frowned at the shirt, but put it on, eager to get back to the passageway. An answer would be waiting there.

  No matter the physical position he assumed, the prisoner appeared, shortly after every meal, to nap. After breakfast, cross-legged, he sat facing away from Jimmy. Now relatively adept with the technology, Jimmy placed his palm on the screen, waited till a green image of his palm glowed beneath his hand, then dragged his hand to spin the image, stopping when he reached the view from the opposite side of the room. Shuteyed, the prisoner's head dipped lower with each moment. Now was the time to work with him. Unhurried, Jimmy pulled the wheeled chair before the screen.

  The passageway pulsed with his heartbeat. Each beat moved him closer to the man at the other end. He saw him at rest, chin on chest. I know you, he told that still figure. Your secrets require your silence. Your silence is your integrity. I understand.

  You want to do what's right.

  The head came up. Small lights appeared in the face: the wetness of the man's eyes. They returned Jimmy's gaze, and it made him halt. He felt the words slip from his mouth and hands and clatter along the passageway like dropped tools.

  Jimmy blinked. There sat the prisoner, head down, unchanged.

  Jimmy struggled to move his tongue. Desperately thirsty, he drank all of one water bottle, wishing he had ice, feeling the start of a headache.

  Seeing himself as if from behind, he thought, You are patient and open. You listen before you judge. You want only to help.

  He had, it seemed, failed to control his imagination and, again, slipped. He would note this failure, reflect on it, rest, and, in the afternoon, try again

  .

  12. Spooky

  Lt. Col. Oblonski oversaw the program for "sensitives." Though a military man, he seemed to Jimmy like the sort who, when he left the service, would never look back. Built of sudden gestures, quick pivots on his heel, and abrupt shifts in volume, Oblonski gave the impression of an ill-contained elemental force. Not the type of soldier to be in charge of a unit—but it was understood that these were desperate times, that the lines had been redrawn, that the enemy was less visible than ever.

  They assembled each day in a large shed beyond the base's airfield. All that long winter, this meant humping through thick snow beyond all cleared walkways. Space heaters, their power cords snaking every which way, cluttered the classroom and training rooms like puzzled witnesses. The desks might have been a practical joke, relics from forty years back, each with the wooden top that swung up from beside the nubbly, colorful plastic chair. Discards from decent schools. Most of the team said the symbolism was intentional, that all of them, despite what they'd been told, were castoffs, removed to a marginal space, ignored by the rest of the base.

  Oblonski passed around an article on "spooky action at a distance." The piece was written for a general audience, making even the wilder speculations of physicists appear within everyone's mental grasp. Jimmy took away from it that paired particles could influence each other no matter their separation across time or space. It made him think of twins. And since time was only another dimension, it made him think, too, of whether your future self might tug you in its direction, ensuring your destiny.

  "You see?" said Oblonski. "The universe is wired this way. Quantum entanglement. Everything's connected."

  Lt. Connors, at around forty the oldest woman in the group, said, "Are you suggesting that our 'special abilities,' " she threw up lazy air quotes, "are operating at the quantum level?"

  "Isn't everything we do operating at the quantum level? Aren't we all just quantum events, circumstances, and accidents at the most minute level all operating together to make a unified being?" When Oblonski got worked up, as he often did, he walked among them and got in their faces. "How do so many disparate cells and chemicals and pathways operate together? Our consciousness creates probabilities out of nothingness. Across numerous unseen dimensions that fold regular space! This," he shouted, slapping his palms to his chest, "is all on the surface. Everything important is going on underneath, deep down, deep down. We can't grasp it. But we think you can do it."

  Connors lifted her head to nod but didn't complete the gesture, evidently concluding, as Jimmy had, that Oblonski hadn't quite made sense. And for all this talk of physics, Jimmy wondered if Connors thought of it, as he did, mystically. But she kept to herself, so they never discussed it.

  Taped outside the training rooms, a computer printout in fat letters, centered on a sideways sheet of paper, read ONLY CONNECT. The quote was attributed to E.M. Forster.

  "Who's E.M. Forster?" Connors asked, so disdainfully it sounded as though she thought the name was made up.

  "British writer," said Oblonski's sergeant major, tugging one unkempt gray eyebrow. "Early twentieth century. Homosexual." They all contemplated the sign as if it went on for paragraphs or required multiple rereadings.

  "I doubt this is what he had in mind," Jimmy said.

  "Who knows?" the sergeant said. "He wrote some strange things. Writers think wild thoughts. Don't they?"

  History, averred Oblonski, provided clarity. He meant to instill in them a commitment to a world made safe through more virtuous methods, methods that required an understanding of another person rather than animosity toward another person. The Inquisition used torture to ruin the body as a way to free the soul, but people would say anything to please their captors and end the pain. The Russians had tried operations that stripped emotion, pain, and will from humans, resulting in self-destructive beings incapable of human reason and self-control. The Chinese process of confession and reeducation created docile citizens no longer able to separate what they said from what they truly believed. In typical American interrogation and psyops techniques, interrogators peeled back a subject's defenses the way you stripped old wallpaper, the destination reached only once every protective surface encountered lay in heaped shreds at your feet. Only the data was important, never the person providing it.

  Oblonski assured his unit that their endeavors would be regarded by future generations as humane, nothing like what had come before. They would achieve their aims through understanding—and by helping their subjects find the right path.

  Perhaps, Oblonski allowed, the procedure violated the subject's privacy rights. Before such an argument could be made, however, it had to be proven that such a violation had even occurred—and so far, the procedure had drilled in empty wells.

  Oblonski proclaimed that the perfect, "clean" scenario afforded no view of the subject, only the knowledge that another human was on the other side of a wall, but even he had to admit that the procedure didn't seem to work that way. "Remote viewing" might have kept the Soviets busy for decades but had never produced credible intelligence.

  Comfortably seated in otherwise blank rooms, they practiced constructing conduits between themselves and a subject, usually an enlisted man who was told he was needed for a sleep study; this could be one-to-one or several-to-one, with either multiple sensitives targeting one person or one sensitive aiming to pick up something from a roomful of people. Sometimes two sensitives would try on each other, awake and aware, maximizing the possibilities just so they could see what a successful contact was like. Convinced that relaxation was crucial, Oblonski encouraged them to offer no resistance, to be open to one another, easing the way for the minds to interact. The room stank with the sweat of their rigor. Oblonski complained about it, told them to avoid tensing the muscles. Jimmy's jaws ached after every attempt.

  The level of success between each other was about what they had with the volunteers: glimmers, suspicions, a tickle, an impression. Twice during their training, Jimmy thought he had something more.

  They labored like people given the task of dismantling and reassembling a mechanism from another planet, with no clear sense of what tools they m
ight need or which, among the ones they already possessed, might prove to be of use. Oblonski came up with the "alien mechanism" analogy; he additionally compared their task to that of a newborn human learning to make sense of language and sight.

  "Problem being," he said, "that we evolved to do those tasks. Have humans evolved to tackle this one? You're going to tell us." Oblonski encouraged his charges, gave them ways to think about themselves and their gifts; however, though himself gifted in ways he alluded to but never discussed, he clearly had no experience treading into this particular and subtle territory.

  In the end, Jimmy was among the subset of four trainees who could at least claim that they had "connected." This dispirited group met for one final talk with Oblonski, who, more remote than usual, still insistent but now solemn, stood behind the black, laboratory-style table at the front of his classroom.

  "And keep this in mind," he had said in conclusion, leaning both elbows on the table, lowering his head till it nearly touched the surface, then extending his neck beyond the edge, as if he wanted to force this vital truth upon them. "The problem with any tunnel is, it goes... both... ways".

  13. What the Thunder Said

  The scent of ionized air drew him outdoors. Jimmy paced the blacktop by the car pool to see the source of the thunder. Cooler air, something in the sixties, blew at him from across the unthinkably blank stretch to the southeast. It would rain soon. Clouds as lightless as the ocean tumbled above Camp Perilous and out to the horizon. Thunder murmured, coughed, crashed. Fat drops struck the tarvia. Reluctantly, drawn to the inclement weather but not wanting to be caught in the open by lightning, Jimmy stepped backward to the door. The fresh air had felt good, and it felt good, too, to be exposed to some change in the weather, some direct indication that the world kept going in its varied ways outside the base, natural processes had not been completely displaced by clocks and video screens, and the world was not divisible into corridors and cells.