Part IV
(Read earlier chapters.)
Michel LeClaire poured some more wine. He was a thin and wiry man, gray at the temples. Reuben had pegged the Frenchman for 50 when he arrived, but now, several hours and even more glasses of wine later, he seemed older.
LeClaire placed the bottle in the ice bucket bottoms up. Empty. It had been their third. Probably not a great idea after all that vodka, Reuben thought. Especially since Daphne was apparently planning that they would be walking back to Malacca -- the one they had come from -- after dinner.
"So that is all there is to tell," said LeClaire, "The time is very near. It draws close."
He lifted his glass in a quasi-toast.
“To the Stillness, mes amis. It is all that ever was, and all that shall be.”
Reuben didn't touch his glass. He had the walk back to Daphne’s world to consider, and he could see no advantage in trading one kind of headache for another. Michel’s story was a long one. It had not been easy, listening to it. But Reuben felt better knowing the truth, even if it had laid waste the festive evening.
Good food, better wine, and -- to top it off -- the end of the world.
Daphne, apparently stunned by what she had heard, looked at Michel with great sadness. Her eyes glistened with tears. Reuben couldn’t decide what was more surprising -- that she was capable of tears or that she wasn’t hiding them.
He wondered how she, of all people, could not know what Michel had told them.
"Isn’t there something that we’re supposed to do?" she asked.
Michel shrugged.
"That was our final delusion, cheri. I'm afraid there is nothing to be done. Your friend has arrived too late. If there ever was a possibility of doing something to help, it has passed.”
Reuben shook his head.
“I don’t get it. You people have known about this for a long time. And have been looking to do something about it. How could it suddenly be too late?”
Michel took a long sip from his wine.
“The changes are coming much more quickly now. For hundreds of years there was so little change. What we saw happening was so gradual. But it was the eye of the storm. Now we have the full maelstrom. And there is nothing we can do about it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Reuben.
“There are a good many things about which that could be said, I’m sure. But the point is simply this. It was commendable of you to come. But now you should go. There is nothing for you to do. The opportunity is lost.”
“I won’t accept that.”
Michel arched an eyebrow.
“Ah, indeed? Well, this must be the dogged Americanism that one hears so much about. You are demonstrating your ‘can-do’ spirit, n’est-ce pas?”
Michel produced a pack of cigarettes from his dinner jacket. He offered the pack to Daphne, who waved it away. Hen then offered it to Reuben, who ignored it.
“No,” Reuben said. “I’m just not ready to walk away based only on talk.”
Michel lit his cigarette, nodding.
“I see,” he said, puffing smoke directly into Reuben’s face. “Well, what then would satisfy?”
“Show me.”
“You don’t understand what you are asking. You are not prepared to face it.”
He took another long draw from his cigarette.
“Monsieur LeClaire, I would request that you not blow smoke in my face again. It’s considered quite rude where I’m from.”
After a time longer than Reuben would have credited Michel for being able to hold his breath, the Frenchman exhaled. The smoke went down and away at a safe angle.
“You’ll want to be careful,” Michel said after a moment, “that you don’t confuse the customs of your home with the laws of the universe.”
“Let’s just chalk it up to my dogged Americanism. Now if what you’re telling us is true, I’m going to have to face the circumstances you described sooner or later. Prepared or not. We all are.”
Michel nodded.
“That’s true. But I don’t see that any good can come from facing it before we have to.”
He turned to Daphne.
“What say you, cheri? Can you accept what I have told you and return home, or must you, too, be convinced?”
Daphne took a sip of her wine.
“Reuben, I’m sure Michel knows what he’s talking about. There’s very little chance that he’s going to be wrong about any of this.”
She took another sip.
“But on the other hand,” she continued. “Michel…I’m afraid that I’m with Reuben. We haven’t come all this way only to give up without having a look.”
“But the risk…”
“As Reuben said, the risk is a moot point. It’s only a matter of time.”
Michel shrugged.
“Since you insist, I will show you. But I cannot be held responsible.”
“For what?” Reuben asked.
“For what happens to you.”
Reuben looked to Daphne, who nodded.
“We’re responsible for what happens to us,” she said. “We prefer it that way.”
---
It was morning.
Reuben stood in front of LeClaire’s, impatiently waiting for the others. He had managed to down a little coffee, but buttered croissants didn’t appeal to him after the excessive libations the previous evening. He had slept fitfully on a tiny cot in a room behind the kitchen. He was sure that Daphne had fared better, as she had been invited to sleep at Michel’s house.
A sleek, blue sports car approached. Reuben wasn’t familiar with the make or model. The car parked at the curb in front of the restaurant. Daphne and Michel emerged from it.
“Good morning, Reuben,” said LeClaire. “Did you benefit from rest, or are you still insisting on this exercise in futility?”
“I’m still insisting,” said Reuben. “What about you, Miss Wong?”
“Enough with the goddamn small talk,” said Daphne. “Let’s get going.”
The first ten or so steps back up the street were not too different from what Reuben had experienced on the journey there. The traveling arrangements were somewhat changed, however, with three of them making the trip. Daphne stood in the middle, holding an arm of each of the two men. Michel gave coordinates. Reuben disrupted the waveform.
It was in the vicinity of the tenth step that Reuben noticed the first anomaly. The red church, which featured prominently in so many variations of the city, appeared once again in the center of the town square. But it was different this time, much taller and broader than it had been in any other instance. With the next step, it grew even taller. It’s color changed, too, darkening to a garish purple.
But it wasn’t just the church that was changing. It seemed that the palette with which the entire landscape had been painted was being modified. The sky took on a brackish yellow hue. The surrounding buildings, which Reuben remembered from his walk the previous evening as being mostly white and gray, were now green and turquoise and, occasionally, vivid orange. The vehicles on the street assumed bulky and unlikely shapes, their wheels somehow not quite as round as they should be.
After another step, the church became even wider and impossibly tall. Reuben craned his neck back to find the top of it. It was the tallest building he had ever seen.
The other buildings began to recede in the wake of the growing church. They became smaller and fewer with each step.
A flock of oddly fishlike birds flew past.
Across the street, a little man was setting up a food stall in preparation for the morning’s trade. He was slicing what appeared to be an enormous turnip. Purple, gray, and green loaves of some unwholesome-looking material hung from a string above his head. There was something unsettling about the man’s appearance. His dimensions were wrong, somehow -- his hands too small, his head too big.
“It’s his hair,” Daphne, her voice trembling with disgust.
Reuben looked at the man’s hair. He couldn’t make out anything that unusual about it. It was dark and thinning, apparently held in place with some gel or ointment. Even so, it was flowing gently with the morning breeze.
Reuben watched for a moment longer before it occurred to him -- there was no breeze. The man’s hair was not moving in a single discernible direction. What he had taken for oiled clumps of hair were in fact individual strands, far thicker than they should be, and writhing.
Snakelike.
Reuben coughed. The air suddenly felt unbearably hot and oppressive. He fought back the impulse to gag. He swallowed hard and closed his eyes for a moment.
“I fear that it only gets worse from here, my friends,” said Michel. “Shall we not go back?”
Reuben cleared his throat.
“We’ll go on. Just give me a minute. I may have to throw up.”
“You are ill?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I overdid it a little last night.”
“We’ll stop here for a moment,” said Daphne, disentangling herself from the two men. “Come over here, Reuben. Into the shade.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Does your head hurt?”
Reuben nodded. He joined her in the shade of a tree, which somehow had too many branches, and fuzzy leaves that were long and white.
“What is this place?” Reuben asked.
“It is a world that has occurrence,” said Michel, “just as the world you came from has.”
“But it wasn’t supposed to?”
The Frenchman shrugged.
“That isn’t for us to say. There are many occurring worlds which have higher degrees of improbability than this one. Much higher. But even a few months ago, one would have had to walk for hours and hours before reaching one. Now it takes only a few steps.”
Reuben nodded.
“So the middle of the waveform is supposed to be where the most probable worlds are, and the edges are supposed to be less probable?”
“More or less,” said Daphne. “The waveform runs through the most probable region in the configuration space. Think of improbability as being altitude: sea level is highly likely, 100 feet above is less likely, 10,000 feet above is much less likely. The waveform has always been a river of occurrence running through a valley of probability in the configuration space.”
“So what’s happening now? The river is running uphill?”
Michel nodded.
“Even so. It is scaling the hills of improbability, giving occurrence to a good many things which otherwise never would have been.”
Reuben rubbed his head.
“So it isn’t really the end of the world, now, is it? There is no shadow. Everybody isn’t going to die. Things are just going to get weird.”
Michel looked up and seemed to study the sky for a moment. Then he turned and looked up and down the street.
“We shouldn’t remain here. Reuben, are you well enough to walk on?”
“Actually, I could use a drink of water.” He looked towards the food stall. “Do you suppose it would be safe?”
Michel sighed with disdain.
“Water from that place? To drink? I think not. In any event, we have no money to give him that he would accept. And I doubt we could make him understand anything we said.”
As though sensing that he was being talked about, the man at the food stall looked up. His eyes were too big or too black or…something. Reuben couldn’t figure out what the problem was. But there was something uncanny, even grotesque about the little man.
He stared at them for a long moment, apparently as puzzled by them as they were by him. Then he started back on his turnip.
“I’m sorry we didn’t think to bring any water, Reuben,” said Daphne. “But I think Michel is right. We should get out of here.”
Reuben nodded.
“I’ll be fine.”
They returned to the sidewalk and resumed their journey.
On the next step, the church grew again. Another step and it became taller still, its violet walls now brightening to a kind of neon pink. The top of the building was now completely out of sight.
“It’s impossible,” said Reuben.
Michel shook his head.
“No, my friend. Not impossible. Just highly improbable.”
“Or at least it used to be,” said Daphne.
Michel smiled.
“Even so, cheri.”
Reuben looked across the street. The stall and the little man were gone. The street was empty. The rest of the city had all but disappeared. A barren landscape emerged from behind what few structures remained. He turned around. There was now nothing blocking his view of the river where it emptied into the Straits of Malacca. The river was black, the seawater an unsettling mix of gray and yellow.
“We dare not go on from here,” said Michel.
Reuben felt his impatience rising.
“Wrong,” he said. “We dare.”
“It grows very dangerous, Reuben.”
“Yeah, well I don’t see it. There’s no one here to hurt us. What’s going to happen…are we going to start getting strange ourselves?”
“There is no one here because I have deliberately guided us in the direction of emptiness. We would not survive for long in a heavily populated version of this city. But now I am uncertain even of the composition of the air. We could be poisoned. We may be breathing poison now.”
Daphne took a deep breath.
“The river stinks. What else is new? We’re moving on.”
LeClaire sighed and muttered something in French.
They walked on. Two steps later, the last vestiges of the town of Malacca (other than the distended tower the church had grown into) disappeared. Only the street they were on remained, now nothing more than a slightly flattened plain. The land was barren, a desert -- no trees or grass -- just a few prickly weeds. The church was now a perfect cylinder, milky white in color. It stretched into the sky, but it no longer seemed to go on forever.
It went up 2,000 feet or so and then stopped.
And then, about another 500 feet higher, it started up again.
Reuben traced the church’s ascent. The pattern continued on as far as he could see -- dashes of tower punctuated by dots of open sky.
“It’s an optical illusion, right?” he said after a moment. “Or the product of some kind of advanced anti-gravitation technology?”
“Non,” Michel answered. “Pas de tout.”
“Well, then why doesn’t it just come crashing down?”
“Because this configuration is incomplete,” said Daphne.
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Reuben protested. “What’s missing? Gravity? We’re still standing here, aren’t we?”
“Yes we are, fortunately. And the air still clings to the ground, or we would be suffocating. This configuration has gravity. What it lacks is coherence.”
“So this is all just a…random configuration?”
Michel shook his head.
“Not random. All configurations have some imperfections. All have a few incoherencies. But these are usually found buried deep in the laws that govern the universes they occupy. In my world, and in yours, the incoherencies are never visible on a macro scale.”
“But here they are.”
Michel nodded curtly at the tower.
“Oui. Voila.”
“So this is a universe that used to be like ours. Or at least, more like ours. Its anomalies were subtle. Only now the waveform passes through this unlikely configuration. And it’s still moving further in that direction?”
Michel nodded.
“There was a time, I believe, when a configuration such as this would never have been removed from the Stillness. And yet here it is. Or should I say here we are, in it.”
“So it’s like you said last night. The waveform is off course somehow.”
“Yes.”
“And the other world…the one we needed to go to.”
“Is no longer accessible to us.”
“Has it also gone…incoherent?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps not. But you would have to pass through incoherence much greater than this, much greater than you could hope to survive, in order to get there.”
“I see. So we’re finished.”
Michel nodded.
“And everything that exists is going to be plunged into chaos. That’s the shadow that I keep sensing.”
“Not exactly,” said Michel. “The shadow that you have sensed is the outer bound of the configuration space. The waveform is passing through these incoherent configurations on a collision course with that outer bound.”
“But I don’t see how a collision can be imminent. If we’re this close to the boundary, weren’t we certain to hit it sooner or later, anyway?”
“Remember what I told you, Reuben,“ said Daphne. “The waveform is a spiral. It has approached the edge of the configuration space many times. But it has always curved away from it.”
“But not now.”
“No. We’re talking in geometric approximations, but think of it this way -- we’ve lost our arc.”
“So the spiral has become a straight line?”
Michel shrugged.
“As Daphne says, we are speaking very imprecisely. But that is the gist, yes.”
“And what happens when it hits the boundary?”
Daphne shook her head.
“Nobody really knows. Not for sure. But the best guess is no more waveform.
“The configuration space will be thrown into perfect and irretrievable stillness,” said Michel.
“I see,” said Reuben. “I get it now.”
He looked back up at the impossible tower, rising sporadically to seeming infinity.
“Everybody dies,” he said.
Posted by Phil at February 29, 2004 11:59 AM | TrackBack