Solaris Rising (6 page)

I was resting my arm on the windowsill. As I looked at it, the hairs on my forearm began to stir slowly and stand up.

This time, it was a General opposite me, and I was sitting down. To one side of the General were two middle-aged men in suits; on the other side was a youngish man with thinning hair and an eager expression.

“You tasered me and drugged me,” I told them. “That wasn’t very friendly.”

“We apologise for that, Mr Dolan,” said one of the middle-aged men. “We couldn’t risk you…
leaving
again. Put yourself in our position.”

I held up my hands. I was wearing manacles. The manacles were connected to a generator behind my chair; if I looked as if I was going to do something outrageous – or if I even sneezed a bit forcefully – the manacles would deliver a shock strong enough to stun me. I knew this because they’d demonstrated the process to me when I came round from the sedative.

“I would
love
to put myself in your position,” I said. “So long as you could put yourself in mine.”

“It’s only a precaution, Mr Dolan,” said the other middle-aged man. “Until we can be sure you won’t leave us again.”

I looked at the manacles. From a certain point of view, they didn’t go round my wrists at all. I lowered my hands and folded them in my lap. “Professor Delahaye,” I said.

“We don’t know,” said the youngish man. “We don’t dare go into the control room. We sent in bomb disposal robots with remote cameras and there’s… something there, but no bodies, nothing alive.”

“
Something
?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We don’t know. The cameras won’t image it. It’s just a dead point in the middle of the room. Can you remember what happened?”

I was busy attacking Larry Day for having an affair with my wife
. “They were doing the last shot of the series,” I said. “Delahaye counted down and then there was…” I looked at them. “Sorry. I
won’t
image
it.”

“Did anything seem out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

Yes, I’d just found out Larry Day was having an affair with my wife.
“No, everything seemed normal. But I’m not a physicist, I’m a journalist.”

“Where do you…
go
?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere.
Anywhere
.”

The four men exchanged glances. One of the middle-aged men said, “We think there may be another survivor.”

I leaned forward.

“A day after your first, um,
appearance
there was an incident in Cairo,” he went on. “Half the city centre was destroyed. There’s no footage of what happened, but some of the survivors say they saw a
djinn
walking through the city, a human figure that walked through buildings and wrecked them.”

A terrible thought occurred to me. “That might have been me.”

The other middle-aged man shook his head. “We don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“Because it happened again yesterday in Nevada. While you were unconscious here. A small town called Spicerville was totally destroyed. Eight hundred people dead.”

“We’re calling it an explosion in a railcar full of chemicals,” the General said. “The Egyptians say theirs was a meteorite strike. But we think it’s… someone like you.”

“Whatever happened at the SCC, it changed you,” said the younger man, with what I thought was admirable understatement. “We think it changed this other person too, whoever they are. But where you seem to have found a way to… cope with your… situation, the other person has not.”

“I haven’t found a way to
cope
at all,” I told them. I looked at the table between us. It was a rather cheap-looking conference table, the kind of thing the government bought in huge amounts from cut-rate office supply stores. It seemed that I had never looked at things properly before; now I could see how the table was constructed, from the subatomic level upward.

“Obviously this… person is dangerous,” one of the middle-aged men said. “Any help you could give us would be very much appreciated.”

I sighed. I took the table to pieces and put it back together in a shape that I found rather pleasing. Nobody else in the room found it pleasing at all, though, judging by the way they all jumped up and ran screaming for the door. I slipped away from the manacles and went back
there
.

I went outside and stood in front of the building with my hands in my pockets. About seven hours ago I had been sitting in a briefing room in a White House basement with the President and about a dozen NSA and CIA staffers, watching a video.

The video had been taken by a Predator drone flying over Afghanistan. It was the spearpoint of a long-running operation to kill a Taliban warlord codenamed WATERSHED, who had been tracked down to a compound in Helmand. It was the usual combat video, not black and white but that weird mixture of shades of grey. The landscape tipped and dipped as the Predator’s operator, thousands of miles away in the continental United States, steered the drone in on its target. Then a scatter of buildings popped up over a hill and the drone launched its missile, and as it did a human figure came walking around the corner of one of the buildings. The cross-hairs of the drone’s camera danced around the centre of the screen for a few moments, then the building puffed smoke in all directions and disappeared.

And moments later, unaffected, seemingly not even having noticed the explosion, the figure calmly walked out of the smoke and carried on its way.

“Well,” the President had said, when the video was over, “either the war in Afghanistan just took a
very
strange turn, or we’re going to need your services, Mr Dolan.”

I looked into the sky. The Moon was low down on the horizon and everything was bathed in a strange directionless silvery light that cast strange shadows from the buildings. There was an electrical
expectancy
in the air, a smell of ozone and burnt sugar, a breeze that blew from nowhere, and then he was there, standing a few yards from me, looking about him and making strange noises. I sighed.

“Larry,” I called.

Larry looked round, saw me, and said, “Jesus, Alex. What the hell happened?”

Larry didn’t remember the Accident, which was good. And he didn’t remember what came after, which was even better. But he was surprisingly adaptable, and I couldn’t afford to relax, even for a moment.

I walked over and stood looking at him. He looked like part of a comic strip illustration of a man blowing up. Here he was in Frame One, a solid, whole human being. Here he was, at the end of the strip, nothing more than a widely-distributed scattering of bone and meat and other tissue. And here he was, three or four frames in, the explosion just getting going, his body flying apart. And that was Larry, a man impossibly caught in the middle of detonating. His body looked repugnant and absurd all at the same time, an animated human-shaped cloud of meat and blood, about twice normal size.

“There was an accident,” I said. “Something happened during the last shot, we still don’t know exactly what.”

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 Schrödinger 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.