Night Soul and Other Stories (23 page)

How science liaisons at the World Council announced new funding to prove the link between at-large Shimmer-invasors and actual brain change. The alarmed, now prospering mother-author of the story her child had told her called the doctor upon being visited in her kitchen one late, dark afternoon by, she was certain, the notorious exile-teacher. From that person’s hands came light, in her words the clear message, “It comes
from
you, not
to
you.” The mother went gladly into custody. Upon being interrogated she said she’d never had one of these experiences and would not know one if she
had
had. She went on record, as an author, in urging the repopulation of the crater country.

The weather vehicle slowed its descent. Descending evidently toward the center of the crater as the World Council monitor confidently predicted, more like an entire field sector or even Tropo-pause than a plottable object traversing such space, beginning to wait again as if it would take everything in its vicinity with it. Its meteorological inflatable inflated at an altitude of five miles and, slowly coming down on a dark, late afternoon, visible when I looked up at a plane far distant though seemingly next to the weather vehicle, I could have sworn my love was contemplating that plane wherever she was; and at that moment without benefit of instruments I became aware of a change in the weather vehicle’s course or angle less of position than of nature or a mode of evolution. Was it not descending now toward us?

Soon flanked round the clock by aircraft, it would land square in the middle of our modest nation, the World Council monitor predicted. This time the prediction was right, and the meteorological vehicle came to rest amid dust-storms from assisting aircraft at a point a How geometer found to be dead-center of our country. It was wrapped almost instantly by World Council advisors and flown from the scene. Competing Hows demanded to know why WC had picked one lab over others to evaluate the contents of the vehicle. Secrecy we could have predicted would end in confusion.

Tensor tests continued apace, and many Transitionals were on such a sharp and happy Alert High that world niacin-supply controls came under scrutiny. Other testees seemed too self-contained to respond to a classified new death-therapy exploring waste-disposal but also aiming to discredit the exile-teacher’s Death-hard-to-prove remark. Tensors could only isolate, not measure, Shimmer relationship in, say, some knee-joint, eye, hand, or inner duct. When delicate amputations failed to “corral” shimmers that the instruments and operational tensors had shown to be there, How labs again pursued Shimmers as fleeting functions of barrier event. The great crater had become almost instantly ancient in its own private time and venerable, standing out in a line of cliffs deep-mapping what atlases had shown for a thousand years.

We knew in our bones that a fallout sample is worth little without real people on the spot, their organisms protected only by their openness. This view was held by Hows to be a result of Shimmer-contamination. But the Council thought to take advantage of the spreading enthusiasm to venture into the crater. Seeing through the emptiness of that place to resources in ourselves, some of us as if we were Transitionals as we imagined they ought to feel, thought of exploring at least the sheer walls. Such élan was ascribed to Transitionals said now to desire relocation in our former neighbor nation, that the World Council hung fire on the project.

Some new resource at large went unspecified, but the WC’s preferred lab now reported on what had been aboard the meteorological inflatable upon touchdown. No Shimmers, no records, and only a few scraps of graph read-out singed as by the vanished stylus itself: but a section of an organism; a soft half-doughnut of seemingly brain still transmitting: musicking its perhaps simple signals to itself like nutriment. The hind-brain of the hybridized reptile! labs chorused coast to coast. An “unchewed slice” of male-female cerebellum maintaining its balance through a crisis, argued another. Authorized Hows classed the half-doughnut a potential contaminant, we were told.

A blue and gold substance as if mining itself had worked its way to the surface near the foundations of the first major dwelling complex we had begun; then this vein sometimes extended outward, like a spoke, surfacing gradually, yet in fact inward toward where the weather vehicle had touched down. Metal clay, earth flesh—was it food for a new species or the start of one? The substance had some milky fume belying its strength, but its fine, easy coming gave us hour by hour, day by day, ideas of its use which were like refinements released by an ore.

I told my child it was not the end of the world. No surprise, said my child.

Was the crater a resource? The cliffs grew translucent, mauve, dark green, orange before the sunset and the dawn as if to impart that color to the coming change of light. Along the escarpments scans had discerned a self-mining substance. WC advisers declared it a danger. It was here, from my point of view, when we wanted it; and we went about our work. I have said “here” meaning “there.” We would hear How labs a thousand miles off clamoring that the cells discovered in the vehicle must be tested before they worked some more terrible completion. Voices reported near the vehicle and near the cliffs would perhaps be subject to tensor tests as of a new faith possessed possibly of an energy-conserving, waste-dissolving secret “covered” by its claim that that original nation’s self-immolating bomb had contained itself by communal will, which formula compensated its citizens for the loss of former life and limb by giving them those Shimmer relations so seminal that to seal the border of their energy-splitting blast that awesome night was second nature and like the five-finger exercise of what I had heard called (with a capital G) Grace. Hardly my view. WC followed the logic of all this out and announced a competition among How labs for solution to the “problem” doubtless geomorphic and metallurgical arising in our new crater country.

Word came to us that at a buffet marking the progress of this competition, the WC accused us of unilaterally challenging the global federated union. A senior How said, “We have not yet disarmed,” and she was greeted with a thunder of applause of hands then disquietingly aware of having felt in their palms the senior How
think
the words,
We have not yet begun to fight
.

I have written this informal history of, I hope, my child as well as me: yet also of what became possible for me when I and my child joined the teacher at her mountain station and found a small group of grownups and children often easy to distinguish without being seen. The livelihood I found with the teacher, so different in her views from me, and with my child who, an instinctive astronomer, points out the constellations to me in broad daylight—the green freedom of our chores in short—has left time to put into these words, if not the formula, the materials covered by it as in a calculus that sums up increasingly smaller everyday things by an infinite process to reach a finite answer so you know where you are. At least some notes toward an understanding of what happened, the hopes arising, and the hope against hope—if that saying is ever clear—with which we stay here, determined to come down from the village one day in some time-frame, though remaining uncertain what is this human nature we possess.

Am I myself? Shimmer Theory I leave to others. It will come to me when it comes. Shimmers in my system, however, even my desire for this woman who beguiles me and my child, telling me
I
teach
her
(because somehow we need to thank and give credit for what may be more deeply and strangely ours from the first), show me night after night until I have brought them into day a future with my people and the new thoughts each day voiced and unvoiced of our colony: yet a future for myself, alternating like blinks, like particle with wave, risk with mere happiness, a pioneering exploration of the crater risky in the extreme, descending the very colors of the blast-bereft walls to the floor and what it promises and what it may cost.

It was a job—a lab coworker at his elbow at first, he at hers, drop by drop of cell solution a thrill for her it seemed every time. He came as a surprise hire the lab thought could help out with commercial applications, of all things. But it was him they wanted, genius or journeyman.

It was a job, the new job the man went to by choice in the very late-afternoon rush hour by bike, subway, bike. He took his bike on the subway thinking ahead, to what he did yesterday, the day before, and the day before that, and what he again would do today adjusting ring clamps on tissue baths mounted to steel support rods. His pride was the bind that somehow got absorbed in these underground motions of vehicle within vehicle enclosing him. A bike in the subway car. Spinning wheels at rest for six stops inside the clamorous song of the train. Tracking the tunnel forgetting what his new job was not.

Yet now the doors burst open and it was another bicycle, a woman bringing it aboard, parking it up against the steel pole, the straight handlebar of a fancy hybrid tipping the man’s bike on the other side of the pole while a girl and boy, lovers realizing this was their stop, struggled to get by the bikes as the doors tried to close. He heard the woman with the bike say, harshly, distinctly, “What is it? I look like someone you know?” It was nothing, he tried to say with a look. Though then, “Probably,” he said, thinking hell she didn’t know who she was talking to. To hear her speak, she was quite unafraid. Or it was where she was coming from, a woman almost haggard, almost beautiful. Irritable. Short with him. Not just your blunt city person in passing, and not passing but arrived like a coincidence.

“No brakes?” she bobbed her head at his old bike. The seat was covered in a faded supermarket bag furled with a rubber band around the post just below the clamp assembly. Did she betray a smile looking away at the crowded car? Probably not, this woman in her beret and little scarf. He waited for her eyes. “Messenger?” she said. Was she looking through the open window at the dark tunnel wall in motion now? Her bike perhaps suited her, but she was not quite a bicyclist.

At the far end a space had opened where a man lay half-curled across several seats. Lost soul, his smell stained the air. His knobby head scarred, you could see stitches in the scalp raised and blue. A soda bottle and a can rolled across the floor and back at serious angles. “Not even a messenger,” the woman said out of the side of her mouth. “I’m overqualified,” he said. “You?” she said. In a subway train running north, their bike spokes glistened and the angry tunnel was a slow-stroke piston cylinder falling south. The derelict at the far end of the car woke violently staggering up onto his feet. His pants were half down, something dropping from under his thread-bare overcoat. What was it that dropped, a piece of him? He kicked a bottle which hit someone, a hawk-eyed woman in a windbreaker. He’s looking about him as if he doesn’t recognize this place though he is a veteran of the line surely. And would you believe this fellow bike-person, this woman going on about your bike: “What do you call that?” she pointed.

“It’s an old Schwinn.”

“Yeah, does it have brakes? I noticed it,” she was contemptuous but more than that.

“You did?”

She had nothing to say, but then, “Where did you get it?” she added. She was subtly tired, preoccupied. Why did he think she didn’t know bikes? “Out of work?” she said then.

“I’m going to work right now.”

“A messenger working nights?” she said, lost for a moment, he thought. “I’m in materials,” he said, “materials
science
—” “I hate science,” the woman said. “—on a good day,” he finished.

“On that bike?” she said; “on a good day? I’m not long for this one.” Did she mean the day? She patted her handlebar. “You unloading it?” he said. She looked at him then, like she knew him and was momentarily surprised to. The train slowed in the tunnel abruptly, stupidly, and a standee’s heavy bag swung into him like a rock. The unreal stench coming this way, homeward-bound travelers leaned to let the derelict by. “I like my bike, it’s better than the bus,” he said.

“You work nights,” she said.

“Not every night.”

“You can have it,” she said, gesturing. “But what do you do to justify your existence?”

“We grow bone in a lab, that’s what we’re doing right now.”

The woman smiled, she looked away at what was coming. “You don’t do any such thing,” he heard her say. How could she say this? It sounded true. As if he didn’t know what he was doing.

It was a plumber’s canvas tool bag that had swung into him on the shoulder of a guy who looked like a plumber, wiry with a drink bottle in a paper bag. The woman told him to watch his bag. An old thought came to mind and was gone about subway-floor bottles and cans, things here below, here was the foul homeless vagrant streaming sweat with a face of different colors and you leaned to dodge his hand as the woman in the hooded old windbreaker snatched the plastic bottle off the floor and flung it into the man’s back. His hand brushing your shoulder reached for the pole, missed, grasping at the bike-woman, who had said something to the plumber with a little sting to it. The perhaps quite able hands of the homeless man in their ragged coat cuffs reach the woman, her suede coat, her preoccupations, and her fellow bicyclist swiped the black man away and the plumber recoiled from the touch. The woman had let go her bike. She was her face then, the sweet olive cheeks, and under the skin a fine pallor today that would pass. Was she unwell? “I have a list of things rolling around on the subway floor,” he said. “More things,” she said.

A teenage girl was sizing up the bike, and now she had a hand on its top tube. She caught you looking. What she knew, she knew, to the beat of her earphones, the fine asymmetry of the nose ring, could she be fifteen? They were in the station. The plumber shoved the black man stumbling onto the platform this lost soul wearing a safety-pinned coat and something happening with the skin, genetic. A child screamed, the homeless man had fallen on top of her, one shoe off, sockless, and the woman, forgetting her bike, was out there pulling at him. The teenage girl was rolling the woman’s bike off the car, people getting on. He let go his bike, What had happened? He got a couple of fingers on the rear rack of the fancy bike to hold it against the girl, who had backed and turned it, and a man in a blue MTA uniform materialized and was guiding the bike out onto the platform. And there was its owner, but waiting for what?

He righted his bike as it tipped off the pole, the doors tried to close too soon and came together and he understood that the woman had gotten off but not he, and had said something about her bike—was it his? The homeless man was being yanked to his feet, which was like being thrown down.

The doors jolted open again. “Your bike,” he called. She laughed over her shoulder. “Yours if you want it,” she had certainly said. Persistent, the teenage girl tried to cock her leg over it, a man’s-frame top tube, but the MTA man held the handlebar, looking around him. The Service Exit gate opens and a woman pushes a stroller through, the bike woman following her. Call again, catch her eye, the MTA supervisor rolls the bike through the open gate, and the woman beyond the turnstiles thanks him but looks back startled at the train as the car doors jerk closed.

He had raised his voice against this interference with him. He had looked her in the eye, the heck with her he liked his bike he was telling her. And was this woman traveling just one stop? Confronting a woman in a vest inside the change booth now, she pointed back at the platform while the MTA supervisor held her bike handlebar at the stem.

Up against the glass of the car doors the homeless man’s bare face now, the black forehead and maculate tan across the nose and cheek and some pink skin as well where pigment had spilled, he was pointing to you or the floor, stepping back as the train moved yet pointing at something, and what was the woman with the bike doing on the other side of the turnstiles? And did it matter who he was, going to work when others are going home?

An eccentric woman with news for you. In the lab ahead racks of 200-ml tissue baths. Ultra-thin films of silk that may dress our wounds. Elsewhere lattices of silk on which bone cells like to grow. A red-haired college student who had boarded the car at the other end looked hard at the four emptied seats and then, behind him, finding someone he knew, reached into his shoulder bag to find a book for her which she opened with delight, talking to him, her friend, the two of them thrilled to meet while, sitting next to her, the older woman in the hooded windbreaker craned to get a look at the book too. She was the one who had thrown the bottle. The red-haired student stepped away from something underfoot.

“Nice bike she had there,” the plumber looked at you personally, even professionally, at your hand feeling in your pocket for a pencil and pad.

“Not for her.”

“Thought I recognized her. What’s her name?” The plumber looked like one. He’d spent time crouched, adjusting, threading into confined and challenging spaces. The plumber didn’t like him. They didn’t like each other.

“That’s not gonna do him any good,” the plumber kicked the lace-less shoe lying on its side on the floor, the sole coming loose from the upper.

“No?” was the quick reply.

He would talk about it a little at work, the woman with the bike.

She didn’t seem to want her bike, a high-end hybrid. Had she expected him to get off? Some city eccentric, though in the soft dark circles under her eyes, the brown and blue irises, experience lurked, and along the bones of her hands and around the mouth what she was made of, was it something there for a stranger? What had she seen? His bike. At his stop he would bear it downstairs from the platform, then upstairs to the street.

Speeding through the park the whirr of the wheels like wings, the late light, things in the air, a gossamer shine along a witch-hazel stem, a web, sparrows he had watched from the window of his bedroom. He saw the man sitting on a bench not as if he’d worked all day, not well-off looking at all, too old and yet not old enough to be doing whatever he was doing, And further along a woman he recognized reading the Classifieds. And then a bird’s yellow underside glimpsed, tail bobbing, Prairie Warbler upside down quickly foraging. But now a gray hint of smoke from leaves burning so close by that the boy rising suddenly from beside his friend’s experiment to dart in front of the man’s bike was part of the path itself, no time to brake, the bike wheel caught the kid’s ankle knocking it away. He heard the yelp, a curse, and did not stop, the boy had simply risen and darted into the path of the oncoming bike.

He asked his coworker at the lab why. She smiled, it was more of a smile not looking up from her work. “A boy,” she said. She commuted from an outlying area—“upstate” she called it—yet was early to work mornings and tonight had stayed late an hour. He thought he knew nothing about her but it wasn’t true. On his table under diagrams of insect anatomy and a couple of color snaps of orb-spinning spiders she had taken, he found some others produced by an electron microscope at a more specialized lab she called it, and from yet another lab copies of printout numbers he read at once showing stretches of gene code in silk material of unique strength containing certain other stretches lacking any genetic directions for the protein-making he and his coworker counted on. This was precisely where the unique elasticity came from, and at his previous job he had twice outwitted these intron gaps, he had a nose for them though he knew next to nothing about the orb-weaving spiders his coworker observed in her garden anchoring a dragline like a rock climber a safety rope.

Here he did his work. It was not him. On a collision course with a dozen commercial applications. Silk for tethering planes to a carrier. Body armor. Or practical scaffolding. He had been told they might soon be growing nerve cells for grafts. In the “dairy” in another building fierce ants, he was told, and a well-known golden spider were apparently milked to extract their silk, and he had a joke or two more bitter than his partner understood, who trusted his insight. Why exactly was spider silk sometimes stronger though less stretchable when milked against the spider’s will under anesthetic when we could just pull the stuff out? A sketchy thing to do even to an ant. Under CO2 was the animal asleep or just paralyzed? Meanwhile the silk lattice preoccupies his partner. How if we do our work right, later it biodegrades having done its job, leaving just bone. She listened to him and found occasion to ask about his work prior to this job. Chemistry on a monitor. Pattern at the root. Abstract. What could he tell her?

She was Dutch. “Will it be a good night?” she asked, the way she would ask if it would be a good day, when he sometimes worked days. He thought it would be. He had found himself speaking to her of the subway incident and she dismissed this woman who could say she hated science. “She doesn’t know anything. You have to do the work.” He said he thought the woman had been a little off, perhaps unwell. He wondered why she had thought he was out of work. “But it is true, you have been out of work, you know what that’s
like
,” said the woman at his side, and he thought that she was right as he sometimes thought there was probably very little work you could choose that was really worth it. “You were out of work, and then you have come here,” the woman was saying. A silk film is ready to come out of the tissue bath. They contemplated each other. “What you bring,” she said.

She was okay. He asked about her garden—though what did he mean, her at home, spider-silk draglines elastic with genes of genius?—and what was happening with the hives? It was polite of him. She had ordered two Russian queen bees that would be arriving in the mail, and again she suggested he come out for a visit one Saturday, bring his bike on the train. He must have had that bike a long time, she said. Ah, he had borrowed it, this at least thirty-five-year-old Schwinn one New Year’s Eve twenty something years ago where it had been left in the boisterous and cluttered basement hallway of the townhouse of the host—A New Year’s Eve party? she asked, her eyes alive—and he kept it till next day. Kept it? Oh my, she said, she caught a little intake of breath and was thinking about the story. It was the short form, he added. She left it at that. She must have only one bike up in Garrison, it occurred to him staring at photos supplied by her. Blowups of ants, puffy, monstrous, venerable showing among the folds the location of their spinning ducts. Another of a spider he didn’t know bringing the duct very close to the venom sac. Another, the ceramic gloss of a maroon and white, big-horned spider from Costa Rica, smaller than it looked, its spinning duct somewhat hidden. Spiders didn’t work well together. They ate each other.