In War Times (41 page)
Authors: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Tags: #Fiction, #Alternative History, #Science Fiction, #General
“Atomic satori,” Hadntz mused.
“In the land of American sushi,” responded Bette.
Sam didn’t know what to say. He just imagined, as he sat in the Vietnamese coffee shop up the mountain from Waikiki, that he was back with Wink and Charlie Parker, rearranging time with the tool of tone, leaving swing and living, quite briefly, in a future no one knew was happening until it was long past.
“My daughter,” Hadntz added, standing up, “is only in this time. It is the only time possible for her and for her children.”
“Can we—” Bette stood at the same time Hadntz did, reaching for her, but she was out of the shop by then, walking downhill with a fast, long stride, melting into a crowd of students changing classes.
“Jasmine,” said Bette, staring down the street.
“What?”
“She was wearing jasmine perfume.”
Midway
A
FEW DAYS
later, Sam’s intercom crackled. His secretary, Lelani, said, “Will you take a call from a Mr. Winklemeyer?…Sir, there is no need to use profanity—” Sam picked up the receiver and pressed the flashing button with foreboding. Wink would reconnect him to a past and a future which was, he realized, the silver-lined cloud of which Bing Crosby sang.
His voice, when he picked up the phone was unsteady.
“Wink?” The trans-Pacific cable hissed. “Dance! How’re things in alohaland?”
Midway Island is a part of the Midway Atoll, which lies about 1,100 miles northwest of Honolulu. I believe it was so named as the midpoint of an enterprise, either the seaplane airline or the cable crossing.
The interval between Kauai and Midway is dotted with a series of atolls—Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Lisianski—all with Polynesian names as well. Beyond Midway, there are others—all continuations of the Hawaiian chain, created as a tectonic plate moved over a volcanic hot spot, ending at Kure.
Picture an island about a mile and a half long and about a half-mile wide at its widest point, triangular and twenty-three feet in elevation at the highest point, which you need to know to respond to a tidal wave alarm. The long runway overruns the island at each end, as does the short runway, at a right angle to the long runway. The atoll itself is roughly circular, ten miles in diameter, making the lagoon a ten-mile circular shallow lake. There is a Coast Guard station on the far side of the lagoon. (Where do the Coast Guard personnel go for leave? Beautiful downtown Midway, of course!)
On the eastern side of Midway is an island called, aptly, Eastern Island. Eastern is a desert island, very little vegetation, several small buildings erected for various forgotten projects.
On the other hand, thousands of people have lived on Midway; about four thousand when I visited. At that time Midway was a vital cog in the DEW line. A long-range, highly instrumented plane would take off every hour and fly about a twelve-hour mission to watch for hostile rocket launches. As far as Midway was concerned, though, the handwriting was on the wall. At the time of my visit in 1961 the rumor went around like lightning that the Alaska DEW line radar station called the Midway flight control tower to ask the type of plane that was clearing the runway so they could adjust their radar software! The Alaska facility was taking over.
On his trip to Midway, Sam carried, in the grip containing his clothes and toiletries, a small amount of HD4, and thought about how he and Wink had flown over this same territory in August 1945.
But he also wondered, as he idly watched the empty sea below, whether he was actually recalling a past that had really existed, or someone else’s past, the past of another Sam Dance, injected like a brilliant transparent slide into a carousel to infuse the reflections in his brain like a justifying skein, an interpretation of atoms which he arranged into cause and effect when there was none, when it was just a trick of his brain, the way that it arranged an imagined, dwelt-in, drenching dimension called time.
What was the cloud in Wink’s silver-lined world?
This
reality, perhaps, this place where the dark side of man held sway. Perhaps
here
gave weight to
there
. Perhaps Niels Bohr was right, with his theory of nonlocality, and both places instantly knew each other, were invented by each other, were informed by each other, so that whatever lay in between—time/distance—was as nothing. Perhaps if they were steered toward each other both would vanish in the collision and create a new sun. They would both return to the elements, and the stars would dream new worlds, the cosmos would reinvent consciousness. Perhaps this happened constantly, and he was always being newly created; perhaps unimaginable eons informed each instant, though his brain did not register it as such.
However, in the timestream in which he found himself, Sam was allowed two weeks to complete his inspections and reports.
Then the trip was at an end; he saw the three islands of Midway below. The runway, cleared of gooney birds, was short. When they were on the ground, the stewardess retrieved a plastic bag full of leis from an ice chest. “There aren’t any flowers on Midway,” she told him as they waited for the door to be opened. “Or any water, for that matter. It’s all shipped in by boat.”
A man in front of the small terminal waved wildly when he ducked out of the hatch of the plane. Sam hurried toward him.
Wink was heavier. His thin face had filled out. His bushy eyebrows were pale and his flat-topped hair was fading from red to gray. He wore shorts and an aloha shirt, unbuttoned and flapping in the wind.
His wide smile was the same, though. And so was the mischievous light in his eyes.
As he approached Sam shouted, “What the
hell
are you doing here?”
“It’s just the cosmos, man.” He slapped Sam on the back. “You know. Midway. Right now midway in the cosmos it’s time for a cold beer. He grabbed Sam’s grip and tossed it into the waiting jeep. “I see you brought your sax. Great. I borrowed a horn from the Navy band.”
They drove through a small military town, with its barracks, single houses, bowling alley, PX, and thousands of battered bikes. The Sand Bar was a faded wooden shack with a rusted metal roof, open to the lagoon shimmering in the late-afternoon sunlight. Nearby, a wooden pier stretched out into the lagoon, and children played on the beach.
The bartender liked jazz—Wink had checked this out earlier—and kept a steady stream of LP’s on the record player—the Modern Jazz Quartet, Miles Davis, Monk, Trane. “You want a goddamn hillbilly juke box, go to the Monkey Bar,” Sam heard him tell one irritated patron.
Sam could think of no finer or more perfect place for their reunion.
“It’s kind of like a space station, this habitable place in the middle of the ocean,” mused Wink, as the bartender set their first cold, foaming beers on the table. “The only survivable place in a vacuum desert. Midway. In the ocean, and in time.”
“Why can you call me? I can’t call you.”
“Things are different in…my timestream. I think I told you that we’re moving along at a fairly quick pace, in terms of research and development. With the right technology, I can convert the timestream information into a graph of sorts, and see the places where they intersect. But not very far into the future. So I—or my computer—averages out the possibility of contact within, say, the next twenty-four hours, and at that point, I make a try. The program is running constantly, and alerts me to these possibilities. I’ve tried to make contact many more times than it’s worked. There’s…static.”
Sam said, “But it seems as though there’s no gap. I flew from Honolulu into this kind of space. Is it the same for you?”
Wink nodded. “A completely smooth transition. It’s like making a travel reservation to St. Louis and then going there. Or walking across the room and arriving at the other side. I keep coming back to this: each human being is in his own world anyway. We intersect with our family, with whom we probably have the most contiguity and the most overlap of worlds, at least at first. But our meeting now really isn’t much different than the meetings of most people. We each see history and objects differently, from different perspectives, filtered through our own consciousness. It always appears to be seamless, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Look, a hundred years ago if you left home the only way you could communicate with those left behind was through letter delivery. Then the signal got more abstract, jumped to a new level: the telegraph. Finally we got voice transmission. Distances shrink. Now this other kind of ‘distance’ has shrunk.”
“Can you contact other timestreams?”
Wink shook his head. “I have an emotional connection to this one. Emotions are the key to consciousness. Emotions might be so baseline that we don’t even recognize them, like air, but they’re always there. I have no emotional connection to other timelines—or…think of them as patterns, endlessly emerging. You are embedded in a particular, ever-changing pattern, as am I. Occasionally, our patterns, being intimately related, merge.”
“Here’s another slant. Let’s say that our consciousness is not just in our brains, but in every cell of our bodies, and are, obviously, in constant communication with one another. Consciousness is a whole-organism phenomenon. All the cells in both of us went through a transition that put us into the same quantum state, but nonlocally. We’re both one photon, or one cell. We were made one particle, then went in different directions. But somehow, we’re still one particle, a single quantum state, separated by the medium we call spacetime. Shrodinger, in his
What is Life
? lectures—the ones that Hadntz quoted in her paper—said that cells are aperiodic crystals. Physically,
crystals
. But constantly fluctuating, unlike inorganic crystals. We’re a constantly changing orchestra of frequencies. And,” he smiled, “we seem to be a jazz frequency.”
“Thank God for that,” said Sam. “What’s your hard theory of why we can meet here?”
Wink grinned. “That’s easier. Zee and Kocab are here right now. Well, actually, they’re on that island across the lagoon. Kocab is stationed here, and Zee came in on a boat a few days ago. He’s in the Coast Guard. You saw how small this place is. I figured it was worth a try.”
The sun set. Artie Shaw’s classic “Begin the Beguine” wound sinuous enchantment through Wink’s reason-laden voice with nonrational, purposeless beauty. The world was this bamboo bar, mechanics and pilots and secretaries taking their ease in the tropical night as dark palm trees tossed with their peculiarly soothing frond-hiss in the salt wind that moved them.
Wink leaned forward and extracted his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it past an ID which looked mildly foreign, not quite right to Sam’s 1959 U.S. eyes, different fonts or something, and took what seemed to be a plain sheet of paper from one of the slits. “Ever heard of lysergic acid?”
“Didn’t Hadntz’s paper mention it?”
“Synthesized in 1938 by Sandoz Labs. Neglected, in…what shall we call it…our old shared world?”
“I guess we can just call it ours, before we got to yours and mine. Obviously where we are now is also ours. Why don’t you just give me a phone number that works this time?”
“It’s like I was saying. It’s like we’re both on journeys in which sometimes there are mountains or oceans that prevent us from communicating. The Pony Express guy has been shot off his horse. The telegraph signal is obscured by static and we just don’t know how to tune it in. Yet.”
“Maybe the static is information too.”
“It’s not easy for me, Sam. I’ve got at least two histories to keep straight.” He signaled for another beer. “Wait till I get old. That will really be fun.”
“So, do you ever see Hadntz?”
“Occasionally. But ever since she won the Nobel Prize, she’s been more difficult to—”
“For what?”
“Biochemistry.”
Suddenly Sam was the stranded one.
“To get back to your question,” Sam said, “I do know that they’re using lysergic acid in the CIA. Mainly, it’s used to disorient people, as an interrogation tool, to drive them crazy. It’s a new weapon for them to play with.”
Wink always could express irony with his fast quirk of a smile. “Of course it’s considered a weapon here. Everything they lay their hands on is a potential weapon. It definitely is quite powerful. A lot of people take officially sanctioned lysergic acid sabbaticals. They last two weeks, and in government you’re entitled to one—or some other kind of therapy-oriented colloquium—every three years. Generally, it functions as an empathy enhancement. That’s one of the blind spots in humans. Empathy is useful in various circumstances.”
“But contraindicated when you have limited resources and want to keep the other guy from getting them.”
“Right. It used to be more efficacious to beat the other guy’s brains out to keep your own family fed than to learn to communicate, to anticipate the other guy’s concerns. But now—” Wink shrugged. “It seems as if we need to come up with more creative solutions to supply and demand.”
“Like communism?”
“Communism is very crude. As it’s practiced here, all the control seems to come from the outside, the top, and not for altruistic reasons, or even to redistribute the wealth. It’s just a way to control people, not much different than National Socialism. No, this would be a free market affair, but everyone would have a level playing field. Universal volition—a realization that this alternative really does work better than others—would be a key factor, and that depends on universal literacy and universal access to information. You’d channel resources to parts of the world that live in ways we find hard to imagine, and die of diseases they don’t have to get. Remember where Hadntz described augmenting a genetic propensity toward altruism?”
Sam picked up the rough, soft paper, about the size of a business card. “Of course. That’s what it was all about, in the end.”
“This is one approach. Lysergic acid has an effect on the VMAT2 gene.”
“The what?”
“It’s a gene that regulates the dopamine level in the brain. It’s complex, but that’s the simple explanation. This stuff temporarily enhances the biochemistry of spiritualism—not religion, just a sense of being connected with the rest of life. In that sense, it’s crude—it gives experimental results that point to an avenue that is promising, in terms of Hadntz’s goals, but that needs refinement and study. You can’t take this all the time—you become nonfunctional. But the memory of the experience lingers, and people who take it have more empathy, overall, than those who don’t.”
