me into the target zone but magic has a way of corrupting my confidence in what is real and what is not real. I walked through the open hatches of the airlock, down the short catwalk in the circuit tunnel, and finally to the target gap where there was a small round platform just below-and-before where the circuit tunnel continued onward. Standing there, I could almost feel the electrons begging to try to jump that gap, but I was not a scientist in this partition of my memory, and there was nothing more about this primitive gate to prime my imagination.
"I'm here," I said. The words were contained within my bubble helmet - what the golden spacesuit did with them I could not know - and they sounded anything but magical. But magical they were.
Constant appeared on the round target platform in the circuit gap, a black disk beneath her feet arriving with her. The long feathers on Constant's head spiked upward in shock as her large blue eyes perceived her new surroundings. Since it was darker in the gate than the image my golden spacesuit provided me, it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust and to pan around her dismal surroundings to find me. It was weird viewing her, maybe because of the unnatural way the spacesuit built the image for me. Constant was surprisingly beautiful, despite having two more knees and two more elbows than I was now accustomed to seeing. She was naked, of course, except for the gleaming golden iridescent feather-discs that covered her body. How many times had I stared into a mirror and never noticed how truly spectacular a Servant actually was? It was like I was seeing her from Milly's perspective and it was awesome.
Constant broke the spell. "Who are you?" she asked, her voice heavy with fear.
"You," I replied.
1-04 January 5, 1986CE
"Why the hell should I care?" she had said. "Why the hell do you care? The universe doesn't care; if it did, babies wouldn't die."
But why has she come this far with me? Babies wouldn't die? "God, you mean?" I asked. I wanted to ignore her rhetorical questions. We both cared, we both knew why. What was this about babies?
"Shut up about God! What does God have to do with this crap?"
"It's a miracle it works?" I assumed we were still talking about the same thing. "It's a miracle we haven't killed each other?"
She laughed. Was she amused? I could rarely tell. She was a miracle herself. She gave me the numbers. I would never understand how. She was a genius. She could be a bitch.
"It's a miracle because we're too ignorant to know how we hit the cosmic lottery!"
"Nevertheless," I said.
"Always-the-more!" she yelled.
"It would shut me up. It might even put us all out of our misery."
"Not gonna happen," she said. "I like misery. That's why I married you!"
Why? Really. Why did she marry me? "I'm going out," I announced. Getting out! Bugging out! Freaking out!
"Out where?"
"Out-out," I answered with forced composure. I hoped I was cool and inscrutable on the outside. I had probably erred in hiding my deepest emotions from my wife, and now it was too late to be honest. I did not know if I deserved to feel so angry. I did not want to know. The only anger I knew that was legitimate was the anger I aimed at myself.
"You know how?" she asked, skeptically. I nodded slowly, watching for some change in her that I would never see. "Fine! Enjoy yourself!"
= = =
I had those words stuck in my brain. The words made puffs of vapor as I shouted them to the cold morning air. Over the words and under my boots the snow squeaked as I repeatedly recited: "Out out fine enjoy yourself."
I was tired after the long walk: a frigid hike preceded by the stress of telling lies at security checkpoints and navigating dark tunnels. I never told lies and now I was lying too easily: the measure of how upset I was. I had not yet tamed my emotions. Milly had a magic ability to explode my hidden emotions. She could bring me to tears that I never showed her, tears of ecstasy, tears of rage. I never knew I could feel so much! Tears I had held back could now come forth and freeze on my cheeks. I blinked and blinked, smearing the raw winter light across my watery vision.
The sun was too bright. The light from other stars is not too old and is not too tired, merely reluctant and reddened and shifted through its own haze of dark circuits that push and pull and build reality. Space is not empty, it's filled with circuits and entities. The entities anchor their circuits. The circuits cross, reluctantly. The quantum differences vibrate the circuits. My brain is full of stateless quanta, reluctant thoughts, and crap. I was so self-absorbed I could not realize Milly was unhappy and that she could have a good reason for being unhappy.
Oblivious to it until the last second, I heard car tires crunching the snow at the edge of the street, right next to me.
"Doctor Lee," the big Chevy Suburban said to me. How many African-American friends did I ever have? Maybe one, and I was about to lose him, he would be that pissed. He never called me Doctor Lee, even when Big Bird was within earshot.
"Agent Moses," I responded tiredly. I never called him that. His name was Karl. He sat in the front passenger seat of the Suburban with the window rolled down. The warm interior of the vehicle was inviting to my frosty ears and cold feet. I would be damned if I would get into that vehicle, even as cold and as tired as I was!
"You're five miles out from The Hole," Karl said, as though accusing me of endangering National Security. "How did you get out? Where were you going?"
I hated his tone of voice. Where was I going? Past tense: meaning I was now going nowhere. "To see if West Virginia was still here." I swept one arm around to include this little valley town in the forest, then let it drop. I would never explain how I got out of The Hole.
I used to be afraid of these guys, thinking they would arrest me if I made the smallest mistake contrary to their sense of duty. Escaping The Hole, I had imagined, would have been a death sentence. Everyone was too serious about the wrong things in The Hole. It had taken years to tamp down the fear in The Hole. It had taken me as long to make Karl and his men my only real friends, but I was now too angry to see the damage I may have done to a relationship that should never have developed.
"West Virginia is still here," Karl said, keeping his voice flat. "Get in. We're going back."
Normally I would have been quick to do anything Karl asked me to do, but not this morning. I was mentally impaired. Everything I thought and heard and said was warped by emotions which had not abated in my trek from The Hole. The answer to the greatest question from my imagination was within my grasp, and everyone - especially my wife - was pulling it away from me! They couldn't see what I saw. I saw a possibility that could fill the future with hope. Everyone else saw disaster.
"No!" I declared. "I'm not ready to go back!" My voice was a pitiful blend of resentment and guilt, modulated by tremors induced by the cold.
"Get in, Doctor Lee." Karl's voice contained a threat. It made me even angrier. I wanted to make him understand something - anything - about what was killing me with frustration!
I was wound up too tight. My spring broke. I pulled out Papa's old pistol, given to him by a GI from the K-War. I shot a hole in the front right tire of the Suburban. The BANG was deafening. After a moment I could hear a dog barking but there was no other response from West Virginia.
A distant railroad locomotive dopplered its warning whistle into my recovering ears, then began red-shifting away from my future. There are railroad tracks, with their quanta of trains, and the tracks connect the towns and the trains pull them together. Everything is connected, even the future. The future comes on tracks and it isn't tired or old - or expected, or wanted.
Karl pushed open his door, almost knocking the pistol from my hand. I pivoted to hold onto the pistol and stopped with it pointing to the right rear tire. I pulled the trigger. The Chevy listed heavily to starboard with two flat tires on that side.
I am still connected to those two bullets of information. Consequences. Their quantum pathways follow me the rest of my life, far from here. Yes, I was connected to t
hose bullets, but I was also released from somewhere else, throwing me far forward from what I once was.
Karl got out of the Suburban and stared at me with wide eyes of incredulity as he circled me. He stopped in front of me after one orbit. I grabbed my pistol with my other hand and offered it to Karl, holding it by the warm barrel. I was suddenly sane again and mortified at what I did. I had never lost my self-control in such a violent fashion. I was so deflated I couldn't even feel angry at myself, just miserably disappointed.
Karl looked up and down the quiet snowy residential street, ignoring the offer of my weapon. Nobody seemed interested in gunshots and even the dog had stopped barking. I put the gun away.
"We got a spare, don't we?" Karl asked Walt, who was sitting in the back seat.
Walt got out to check on the spare.
"Police!" Ed the driver notified Karl.
A pickup truck with police markings stopped about fifty yards away and the officer stayed in his vehicle and talked on his radio. I wondered why the officer didn't come over to us. He was waiting for backup, I surmised. I looked at Karl.
"You and I don't fit in very well around here," Karl said to me. "And Walt and Ed haven't had their coffee yet this morning so they look suspicious, too."
Walt extracted the spare and rolled it over to the curb. "I think it's flat," Walt said, stepping on the tire and showing its softness.
"Is