Travel between dimensions appears to be, however, more like judo than karate, more a manipulation of force than a direct application of it. Somehow, Delahaye’s final shot manipulated those forces in just the wrong way, pitching everything within a radius of five metres into a terrible emptiness and leaving behind Point Zero, a pulsing, open wound between the worlds, a point that
won’t be imaged
. Someone once told me that the odds of the Accident happening at all were billions and billions to one against. Like going into every casino on The Strip in Vegas and playing every slot machine and winning the jackpot on all of them, all in one evening. But here’s the thing about odds and probability. You can talk about them as much as you want, do all the fancy math, but in the end there’s only Either/Or. That’s all that matters. Either you win all the jackpots on The Strip, or you don’t. Either it will happen, or it won’t. It did, and here I am. And here, somewhere, is Larry Day.
Existing in Calabi-Yau space, being able to step between dimensions, being able to use the insight this gives you to manipulate the ‘real’ world, really
is
like being a god. Unfortunately, it’s like being one of the gods HP Lovecraft used to write about, immense and unfathomable and entirely without human scruple. So far, the human race is lucky that Larry seems unable to quite get the knack of godhood. None of us can work out why I acclimatised to it so easily, or why it’s still so difficult for Larry, why returning him
there
screws him up all over again while I can cross back and forth at will, without harm. Larry was one of the biggest brains humanity ever produced, and he can’t get the hang of The Manifold, while I, the world’s most prosaic man, as my ex-wife liked to remind me, took it more or less in my stride. All I can tell them is that every time we meet – and we’ve done this particular little pantomime fifty-two times so far – he seems to recover more quickly. One day he’s going to come out of it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I won’t be able to take him back
there
. I’ll have to fight him
here
, and it’ll be like nothing Stan Lee ever imagined. Either/Or. Either the world will survive, or it won’t.
Larry is not a nice man. He was a great man, before the Accident, and I liked him a lot, until I found out about him and my wife. But he’s not a nice man. Of all the people in the world you’d want to get bitten by the radioactive spider, he’d probably come close to the bottom of the list.
And the wonderful, extravagant cosmic joke of it is that Larry is not even the Nightmare Scenario. The Nightmare Scenario is that Delahaye and Chen and Morley and the SEAL team and all the animals who got onto the Site despite the billion-dollar-per-annum containment operation somehow drop into a rest state at once, and find their way
here
. If that happens, it’ll make the Twilight of the Gods look like a quiet morning in a roadside diner. I plan to be somewhere else on that day. I’m happy enough to present the appearance of humanity for the moment, but I don’t owe these people anything.
Eventually, I came across a room. Although this wasn’t a room in the sense that anyone
here
would recognise. It was all distributed planes of stress and knots of mass, open on all sides, too huge to measure. I stepped into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.
Nobody screamed. Nobody ran away. They were expecting me, of course, and I had learned long ago how to clothe myself before I came
here
. People hate it when naked men appear out of nowhere in the Situation Room at the White House. Someone brought me coffee. The coffee here was always excellent.
“Mr Dolan,” said the President.
“Madam President,” I said. I sipped my coffee. “He’s recovering more quickly.”
“We noticed,” said one of the scientists, a man named Sierpinski. “The others?”
“I saw some of them. They’re still aestivating. I’m not sure I should be checking them out; won’t observing them collapse them into one state or the other?”
Sierpinski shrugged.
We don’t know
. Maybe we should make that our company song.
“You look tired,” said the President.
“I look how I want to look,” I snapped, and regretted it. She was not an unkind person, and I
was
tired. And anyway, it was ridiculous. Why would a godlike transdimensional superhero want to look like a tubby, balding, middle-aged man? If I wanted, I could look like Lady Gaga or Robert Downey Jr., or an enormous crystal eagle, but what I
really
want is to be ordinary again, and that, of all things, I cannot do.
I looked up at the expectant faces, all of them waiting to hear how I had saved the world again.
“Do you think I could have a sandwich?” I asked.
SWEET SPOTS
PAUL DI FILIPPO
Paul Di Filippo lives on Rhode Island and describes himself as a ‘Willy Nilly Buddhist,’ in that he adheres to the religion’s spiritual underpinning without necessarily following all its dictates. He also happens to be an extraordinary writer. Paul is the author of more than twenty novels, novellas and collections. He has won a BSFA Award and France’s
Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and has been a finalist twice for the Nebula Award and once for the Philip K. Dick Award.
“Officials were trying to determine on Monday how a man who walked through the wrong door on Sunday afternoon turned the busiest terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport into a human traffic jam on one of the busiest travel days of the year.”
–
James Barron,
‘Security Investigation Begins
at Newark Airport,’
The New York Times,
January 4, 2010
The way Arpad Stroll discovered his unique ability to identify and utilize universal sweet spots involved the unlikely confluence of his unrequited love for Veronica Kingslake, Mrs. Christelli’s physics class, the apelike antics of Willy Squidgeon, half a raisin bagel, an errant shaft of sunlight, a colored marker, a pair of cheap shoes, and a host of other unqualifiable factors, many of which were unknown to Arpad himself – at least on the conscious level.
Arpad’s desk in Mrs. Christelli’s class occupied the front row, and stood nearest the door. Thus the teen had, if he so chose, an unrestricted view of one of the corridors of Edward Lorenz High School through the wire-gridded glass panels of the classroom’s exit door.
Now, generally speaking, Arp enjoyed Mrs. Christelli’s physics lectures, and paid close attention. Science was cool, and offered a lot to occupy Arpad’s ingenious, busy mind.
But on this grey, changeable, mostly overcast day, his mind was elsewhere. He had absorbed this section on entropy already, reading the textbook at home. The concepts of thermodynamics, intriguing as they were, held no mysteries for him.
So, slumped in his seat, he was daydreaming about Veronica Kingslake – her long glossy blonde hair, her lush shape, her hypnotic, ass-switching walk, her light-hearted laughter – in short, all the assorted physical and temperamental characteristics which, conjoined into one exotic package, made her so alluring to Arp and to practically every other straight male at the school. How, Arp wondered, could he ever vault to the front of the pack of Veronica’s wannabe boyfriends—
At that very moment, as dumpling-shaped Mrs. Christelli lectured with her back to the class while scrawling equations on the whiteboard, Arp chanced to look to his right and spotted Veronica herself ambling down the corridor.
Arp straightened up magnetically, drawn to his beloved. If only he could escape this class and join her on whatever lone errand she pursued! Separated from the clique that normally accompanied Veronica everywhere, he might attain some new relationship with her that transcended mere indifferent tolerance.
But Mrs. Christelli handed out lavatory passes with a parsimony approaching zero tolerance, especially in these waning minutes of class. If he couldn’t escape within the next few seconds, all was lost.
What inspired Arp’s next move, he could not say, then or ever. There was no conscious thought, no deliberation or reasoned chain of logic. No calculating assessment of circumstances and possibilities and potentials. Whatever obscure engine of parsing and action that took command dwelled deep below even his subconscious, and transmitted its impulses directly to his muscles.
Arp turned his head back to the class and caught the eye of Willy Squidgeon, fidgeting and bored.
Willy was the class clown. It was a role he cherished and seemed positively born to. He resembled a good-natured, shaggy, red-haired Neanderthal with a face of malleable rubber. Once, Willy had legendarily climbed semi-naked to the top of the school’s cupola on a dare, substituting his boxer shorts for the state flag.
Arp made the silent archetypical suite of chimp gestures – armpit scrabbling with curved hands, pop-eyed duckface hooting – and that was all it took.
This shorthand semiotic challenge invariably provoked a vivid display of imitation Cheetah behavior from Willy. There was no possibility he would decline a performance if triggered. Even in the midst of memorial services for car-crash senior-prom fatalities, Willy would respond.
Now he leaped to his feet, scrabbled atop his desk, and began to cavort noisily and exuberantly, with simian grace.
Everything else fell into place almost simultaneously.
Of course, the class went wild.
Mrs. Christelli turned away from the whiteboard, marker in hand, to chastise Willy.
At the back of the room, Ludmilla Duda instantly choked on the piece of bagel she was surreptitiously eating. Her frantic, panicky gasping for breath distracted the teacher’s reprimand, causing Mrs. Christelli to pivot uncertainly between harmless Willy and the direly choking girl.
The clouds outside parted just then in a perfectly configured slit, and a blazing hot beam of sunlight, made all the more dazzling by the circumambient gloom, drove down from the heavens to strike square upon Mrs. Christelli’s face. Momentarily blinded, the teacher shuffled awkwardly in place like a tango dancer encountering a banana skin while trying to partner a horse. One shoe of her cheap, overstressed pair of Payless pumps chose that moment to exhibit a structural weakness, and its heel snapped off.
The hefty Mrs. Christelli went down like a felled sequoia, but not before she launched the whiteboard marker in her hand directly at Arp.
The marker struck Arp weakly on the forehead, but without a moment’s surprise or hesitation he spontaneously clapped both hands to his left eye, bellowed wordlessly, and dashed from the room, yelling, “Nurse Miller, Nurse Miller, help!”
Out in the corridor Arp slowed, lowered his arms, tugged his T-shirt into place, tried to assume a look of nonchalance, and caught up with Veronica.
“Hi, Ron, what’s up?”
Veronica, in all her Abercrombie & Fitch finery, bestowed a look upon Arp which, under the most charitable interpretation, might be deemed one of charitably suppressed pity mingled with innate repugnance.
“Hey, Stroll. Going home early. Severe cramps and wicked PMS. See ya.”
This intimate datum so disconcerted Arp, engendering a wild welter of stunning mental visuals, that he ground to a halt, mouth open like the bell of a tuba, and let Veronica depart.
Opportunity blown.
But – opportunity at least initially secured.
The stunning reality of his providential escape from Mrs. Christelli’s class suddenly hit him.
How in hell had all that unlikely stuff come together so perfectly?
Jason Wardlaw, Arp’s best friend, enjoyed a curious pastime of his own invention, which he had dubbed “urbex skateboarding.” Disdaining professional skateparks as lame, and even turning up his nose at forbidden, police-patrolled municipal venues such as plazas, staircases and promenades, Jason would employ his battered Toy Machine Devil Cat deck only in ruined and abandoned industrial facilities, where dangling wires, cables and chains; rotting planks, detritus-laden floors and roofs; as well as teetering girders, ramps and towers offered the largest challenges to his art.
Luckily, living in Detroit afforded Jay innumerable such sites.
This afternoon, Arp was watching Jay shred inside the old Fisher Body Plant Number 21 at Piquette and St. Antoine. As Arp sipped his Orange Mango frappuccino amidst the somber decay, Jay executed some truly sick moves involving several fifty-five-gallon drums, a handtruck, a seventy-foot-long conveyer belt, and a stack of empty doorframes.
Observing his friend’s maneuvers, Arp, who had no skills whatsoever involving skateboards, became possessed of a curious yet adamant knowledge amounting to a certainty. If Jay were only to
twist
like so at this point, and
leap
like so at this other point, while
landing
just so at the finale, his generally dismal GPA would rise by some twenty-five per cent.
The absurd certitude of this unrequested intuition unsettled Arp, and recalled to him the weird sequence of events that had freed him from physics class yesterday. What could such sensations mean? Was he going crazy, having a brain meltdown? If his incitement of Willy had not led precisely to the desired yet utterly unforeseeable outcome, Arp would have been sure he was going nuts. He wished he could test this new skateboard-generated revelation by having Jay perform as he envisioned, and then wait till next report card. But the moment was already over, Jay having ground to a halt amidst a pile of metal shavings.