Gravity Power

The Door to Andromeda, Ch. 25

Norman called a couple of weeks later. We had just finished supper and were cleaning up in the kitchen. During the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Mom was routinely busy with phone calls in the evening. After her appearance at the school board meeting, there were half-formed plans in the works, a whole army of concerned parents to speak to, apparently money to be raised for something, only Mom and her allies knew exactly what. In order to get things put away, rinsed, stacked in the dishwasher, and done, she recruited me to help. Myra, with her foot-dragging and sighs, was worse than useless and Dad was down in the basement before the table was cleared.

I was taking the silverware out of the sink and arranging it in the receptacles on the lower rack of the dishwasher, forks with forks, spoons with spoons. Mom, with her gloved hands in hot water, checked to make sure the knives were placed with blades upright so the food residue would be fully swished, scalded, and washed down the drain. The twins were standing in front of the open refrigerator, arguing about where the salad dressing, the butter, and the milk belonged.

“Less talk and more work,” Mom said over her shoulder.

“Bobbie’s putting the pickles in the crisper. They don’t go there.”

“Paulie’s trying to boss me. Make her sweep the floor.”

“Finish clearing the table and just put things away. I’ll organize the refrigerator later. If I have time. See if you can work without making a lot of noise.”

That’s when the phone rang. Mom moved reflexively to snatch the receiver off the wall, but after briefly attempting to pull her soapy gloves off, she told me to get it.

“Gately residence,” I said, knowing that Mom was listening expectantly.

“I think this is a good night for you to come over,” Norman said in a hoarse voice. “My ex and her husband are at some black tie affair and Carson is actually home for a change. I’ll meet you there.” He gave me the address and hung up before giving me a chance to respond.

When I turned and replaced the phone on the hook, Mom was waiting for an explanation.

“Um.” My instinct was to lie. It seemed important to keep Norman sealed off from the rest of my life. “I’m going over to Angelo’s house for a few minutes … We’re in the same algebra class … We’ve got a test next week.”

Myra said I could borrow her car, but she dangled the keys out of reach and made me lunge for them. After I climbed into her cramped Pinto, I fumbled around in the glove compartment, digging through the used tissues, lipstick tubes, pantyhose, crossword puzzle books, soda can rings, discarded two-dollar watches, and naked troll dolls to unearth a map of the greater Denver area. I matched the address with the layout of Cherry Hills and, after several wrong turns, found the house I was looking for.

The grounds covered a full quarter of the neighborhood block. Norman was waiting for me at the edge of the semicircle driveway, wearing a familiar-looking tweed jacket, hands firmly wedged in his pockets. When I brought the car to a stop and stepped out into the bone-tingling air, he nodded to me and then inclined his head to the left, indicating that we wouldn’t be going in through the front door. He began to lead me along a flagstone walkway bordered by the crusty remains of the Thanksgiving snow. He stopped for a moment to glance over his shoulder at the portico that framed the entrance to the house.

“Pretty swell, huh? Her husband’s one of those guys who move money all day long from one bank to another. He plays on an amateur rugby team. Smokes a pipe, like Art. Five years younger than Clarisse, my ex. I can’t even imagine what’s it’s like to be that young anymore. Come on.”

Walking on, we rounded a corner of the house and crossed a terraced garden full of leafless bushes and dwarf evergreens, until we reached a non-descript door at the edge of the patio that surrounded the empty swimming pool.

“Servants’ quarters,” he commented as he opened the door with a key. “My son insists on having his own way to come and go.”

We entered a room lit by one lamp, otherwise dim and colorless. Nothing graced the walls, not even a calendar, not even a pinup; there was no furniture except a vast Early American dresser with scuff-marked legs, an unmade bed, and a card table. A green trunk stood on its side against the wall; on top of it a battery-powered television set, a coffee pot, a can of Folgers, a half-empty bag of Ruffles, and a jar of pickled peppers were crowded together. Not far from it sat a wastebasket lined with a grocery bag, full of Twinkie wrappers and beer bottles. A large man in an undersized T-shirt sat at the card table, facing a chessboard. He didn’t look up as we came in.

“Who’s winning?” Norman asked him in a deadpan voice.

The man didn’t bother to reply.

“My son,” Norman said to me. “He has occasional bouts of deafness.”

“Hah,” the man said. “Such a joker.”

“This is Carson Brodkey, my offspring,” he said to me. “Carson … will you at least turn around?”

Norman’s son took a drink from a bottle of Schlitz. “You’re seeing my best side already.”

“Looks like I’ll have to find some chairs somewhere,” Norman said.

“I’ll come with you,” I said quickly.

“No need. Stay and get acquainted. I’ll be right back.”

After Norman left the room, I remained where I was, standing behind Carson, who seemed unperturbed by the fact that I was looking over his shoulder. He took another drink from the bottle and then finally, after apparently excruciating deliberation, moved a bishop three spaces forward and to the right. Then he turned the chessboard around and began studying the pieces from the other side.

A moment later, he placed an index finger on the tip of a pawn but didn’t move it. “You’re the Boy Wonder my dad’s been talking about, huh?” he said, still not turning around to see me.

I was incapable of carrying on a conversation with the back of someone’s head, so I walked halfway around the table until I was finally facing him, more or less. I saw the resemblance to Norman right away, mostly in the brow and ears. Judging from the length of his torso, though, he was taller, and his bulk was oddly distributed. He had narrow shoulders, well-defined breasts, a hollow-looking gut, and a billowing waist. I had been led to believe that he was under thirty, but his hair was already thinning out on top.

“My name is Terry,” I said, as he continued to stare at the board, fingering the pawn.

“I know, I know,” he said, mildly disgusted. “Terry Gately. Terry Gately. Awkward-sounding name. You should think about changing it.”

Norman was just re-entering the room, carrying two high-backed chairs upside down by the legs, and he caught that last remark. “You should talk about names.” Turning to me, he said, “His mother named him. For Carson City, Nevada. She has a thing about state capitals.”

“Apparently Olympia and Helena were out of the running,” Carson said.

“I voted for Austin,” Norman said, “but she doesn’t have any use for Texans.”

“I have grandparents in Texas,” I said, for no reason that I could think of.

“No need to be offended,” Norman said, setting the chairs down. “I don’t share Clarisse’s prejudices. I don’t think Carson does, either.”

Carson shrugged. “Why should Boy Wonder care?” He slid the pawn he had been fingering one space forward, then turned the board around again. “I’ll say this for Texas, though. Last time I was there, you could still get Jax beer. Brewed in New Orleans, the only civilized city in the Western Hemisphere.”

“You got anything against Coors?”

“Nothing. Except that it finished second to horse piss at the State Fair.”

Norman pointed to the bottle on the card table. “I see you’re not too good for that stuff. Why don’t you offer my friend a bottle?”

“I don’t drink beer,” I said.

“Not yet, anyway” Norman said. “How old are you again?”

“He’s a minor,” Carson said. “I won’t contribute to his delinquency.”

Carson still hadn’t looked at either one of us. At the moment, he was holding the white queen over the board, twiddling it in the air as he pondered a move.

“Maybe you could explain what you’re doing,” Norman said, with a touch of exasperation. “Terry probably thinks you’re a lunatic.”

Carson glanced at me for the first time, wrinkling his nose in a way that made him look like an overgrown rabbit. “I think he can figure it out. He doesn’t look unusually stupid.”

“Well, maybe you could explain it to me again.”

He set his queen back in its place again and sighed. He stared at the board for a moment as if, after having looked away once, he had to relearn the placement of every piece. “It’s a very simple concept. Playing white, then black, then white, then black forces me to constantly occupy new states of mind. I have to outsmart myself on each turn. To make the right move, I have to escape each prior state of mind. It’s a way of training myself to inhabit the minds of multiple characters.”

“So you’re still thinking about writing,” Norman suggested.

“Why not?”

“But you haven’t written anything in years.”

Carson picked up the queen again and set it down in the space vacated by the queen’s bishop. He took another drink from the bottle of Schlitz, then turned the board around again. He stared at it cross-eyed, then shook his head. “How little you know.”

“So you have written something? Do you care if I see it?”

Carson smiled vaguely. “First of all,” he said, suddenly glaring at his father, “you don’t really want to read anything I’ve written. You never did.”

“I don’t think that’s a fair thing to say.” There was almost a note of pleading in Norman’s voice, which seemed unnatural to him. “What about that epic poem you wrote when you were in high school? The one about Timothy Leary? I read that.”

“You read some of it.”

“Well, give me some credit. I was proud that you took the trouble to do it at all. Even if it did sound a little stiff.”

Sitting in the high-backed chair with my hands under my thighs, shifting a little from side to side, I felt like an intruder. It almost seemed as if my presence, and whatever it was that I symbolized to the two of them, was simply one more reason for them to resent each other. For the moment all I could do was listen as I studied the odd contortions of Carson’s lips and the sleepless look in his eyes.

“You didn’t have time to read it,” Carson said. “You had to leave for Borneo, or Madagascar, or someplace like that. You had to inspect some arrowroot blossoms. You didn’t even take it with you.”

“It was your only copy. What if I lost it?”

“Huh.”

“You think I don’t care about your writing. But why do you think I brought Terry here to meet you? I thought the two of you might have some things to talk about.”

Carson fingered one of the black knights and suddenly moved it, pushing aside a white knight and setting the piece to the side of the board, where it joined a small company of pawns, white and black, and one black castle. “Here’s the thing you don’t get. You with your literal mind. I’m working all the time. I’ve got a screenplay going now, developing frame by frame … it’s generating itself here.” He waved in the general direction of his head. “The whole thing has to be ripe before I can commit myself to words.”

Turning the board around, he looked at Norman and began to pick up the bottle, then suddenly set it down again. “You see I’m creating a whole world now. Right now. When you’re inventing a new universe you can’t just start writing as if you knew where you were. The place has to be articulated, defined, it has to make its own space-time continuum.”

“A new universe. It’s that linoleum thing you were telling me about.”

“Lannalu, not linoleum.” Shaking his head, Carson turned his attention back to the pieces on the board. “One of the four royal houses of the Mazadrim.”

“The space opera.”

“Such a crude way to put it.” Carson picked up the beer bottle again, put it to his lips, tipped it slowly until it was nearly vertical, set it down and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “This is a multigenerational saga. I’m projecting a whole series of films about the Mazadrim, a hereditary dynasty ruling five solar systems. It’s loosely based on the mythology of William Blake. I’m actually starting to think in terms of television, a twelve-part miniseries, three episodes for each of the houses of Mazader.”

“Still … outer space. I got that right.”

Carson looked up, turning his eyes in no particular direction, looking both vacant and deeply preoccupied. “Control of the dynasty will be contested by four noble families: Haradorn, Bauschnag, Lannalu, and Tarn. Each house embodies its own sacred principle. Efficiency. Creativity. Passion. Willpower.” He raised four fingers in turn as he ticked off the four abstract words. “Each will achieve dominance in turn, under the leadership of its own princely avatar.” He picked up the bottle and swished the remaining liquid, then gulped it down and set the empty bottle back on the table, exactly on top of the ring that it had already made on the table top. “Which avatar will find the Invisible Orb and control the Amulet of Marfax, thus gaining the ability to speed up and slow down time? This will be the key to ultimate victory. The conflict is playing out in my subconscious at this very moment. The chess game is just the surface manifestation.”

When he stopped speaking, a very intense silence followed. I would have laughed if I hadn’t suddenly glanced at Norman, who was sitting up straight, appearing to take all of it seriously. Turning to me, he said, “That’s your thing, too, isn’t it? Science fiction?”

“Not really,” I said, turning red.

“That’s what you told Art, isn’t it?”

“I’ve written some science fiction. But I like realism, too.”

“Excuse me,” Carson said abruptly, giving us each an indignant look. “I never said this was science fiction. Science fiction is like … it’s like Star Trek.” He sniffed in disgust. “Like, let’s all wear pointed ears and pretend it’s the sixties again.”

“What’s wrong with Star Trek?” I asked, defending my younger self and those nights I Vulcanized with Angelo.

“Carson’s more of a Luke Skywalker fan,” Norman said.

“Listen,” Carson said stiffly, “I could have invented Star Wars myself and it would have been fifty times better. A galaxy far, far away … I’ve been hip to that forever. I knew all along that there were no real wonders left in this galaxy. Like that probe they landed on Mars. Viking One. Sending back pictures of nothing. All this excitement, so-called signs of life, rumors of a lost civilization, aliens dwelling in tunnels, then a big fat nothing. Once the pictures came back, no one cared because there was nothing to care about. The only way to create heroic stories is to create a new universe. No one had to tell me that.”

“I don’t think there’s anything so bad about this universe,” Norman said. “How do you know for sure what’s on Mars and what isn’t? Beside, Mars isn’t the whole solar system. Didn’t you say something about realism, Terry? Why can’t someone be a realist about outer space? Why does it all have to be about orbs and amulets? If you want to be a storyteller, you should make people open their eyes a little wider. Show them what they might find in the asteroid belt. Bring them the latest weather report from Neptune.”

“The weather on Neptune, what a …” Carson’s voice dissolved slowly into laughter.

“Sure,” Norman insisted. “The man on the street knows that he fits into something bigger. That’s why we’re still spending gazillions on space. If you’re a writer, your job is to fill in the blanks.”

“Beautiful,” Carson said. “That way we can just keep spending gazillions on pictures of nothing. Lovely idea.”

“Space isn’t all nothing,” Norman insisted. “If you don’t like this solar system, there are others. There are planets out there that people could actually live on.”

“Oh, God. You’re not talking about interstellar travel, are you?”

“What if I am?”

“If you want to be real about it … you know it would take decades or centuries. You’d have to send your astronauts out in cryogenic pods … What a bore. Or you could make up something like warp speed, and then you’re in the realm of fantasy anyway. Might as well make a new universe.”

“I don’t know …” Norman glanced at me. “What do you think, Terry? Couldn’t the journey be just as interesting as anything else?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said honestly. “I haven’t read any science fiction in a while.”

“Think about the energy you’d need,” Carson said. “For a journey that far … I mean if you’re going to maintain life, grow food, power communication systems, sanitation systems. It’s an incredible bore to think about it.”

“What about solar power?” Norman suggested.

“Radiation is a killer,” Carson said. “With solar deflectors in place, you wouldn’t have enough left over to power a toaster.”

“What about gravity power?”

“Gravity power?”

“Sure. I don’t know anything about it. I never went to college. But I know what happens if you drop a horse off a skyscraper. A million apples are falling from trees all around the world right now; they’d just hang there in the air if it weren’t for that force that brings them down. Where there’s force, there’s energy. Right?”

“But gravity … you know it isn’t really a force,” Carson said, speaking a little less certainly now. He stared straight ahead, tapping the tiny knob on the top of the white queen. “The force comes from the act of dragging the horse up the skyscraper.”

“But gravity releases the force,” Norman insisted. “Am I right about that?”

“O.K. But how are you going to generate gravity power in the middle of space? The biggest sources of gravity are the stars, but then you’ve got all that radiation to deal with. Like I said, a killer. The power you’d have use up to maintain deflectors would cancel out—”

“We’ll let Terry figure it out,” Norman said abruptly. He turned and leaned toward me. “What are you working on these days?”

In my mind I could see nothing but a sheaf of blank, college-ruled paper, with a couple of rough-drafted, folded sheets underneath, left over from that afternoon in August when I had tried to start something. I had kept it all on the top of my desk when the school year began, working on top of it or moving it aside, but I had finally shoved all the paper into a drawer. Still, in my mind at that moment it was sitting there on the desktop, in all of its white, unmarked glory, with perhaps the faint grooves of a few written sentences scored across the top sheet.

“I was writing something about a vacant house that my father and I went to.”

A smile curled up the edges of Carson’s lips. “A vacant house …,” he said.

“Hush,” Norman said, suddenly harsh. “You had your turn … What was it about the vacant house, Terry?”

I had to make an effort to remember. “Everything was … I don’t know, I guess it was the chaos. It was the mess that the people had left behind. I was trying to figure out what it meant.”

“Did you?”

“Yes and no,” I said.

Norman tipped his chair back and waited for me to say more. Carson was looking at me through bloodshot eyes, unnervingly curious.

“I tried to imagine what was going on before we got to the house … There’s always been something about doors, what’s behind them. I can’t help wanting to open doors and find out what’s been going on when I wasn’t looking. I started writing it down, what I thought happened, but I didn’t get very far.”

Carson grunted. “What’s going on behind closed doors is that people are picking their noses. They’re clipping their nails. They’re fucking themselves.”

“At least Terry’s been doing something,” Norman snapped.

“A page, maybe two pages …”

“Wow,” Carson said in a withering voice.

“And how much have you written lately?” Norman asked angrily. “In the last five years. A paragraph? A sentence? Have you even written a grocery list?”

Carson gazed down at the chessboard on the table. He appeared to be working his mind back into the game he had been playing with himself. Instead of fingering one of the pieces on the board, though, he picked up the black castle sitting to the side. He tossed it up and caught it, tossed it up and caught it, and then with no warning he hurled it at Norman.

Norman dodged it with a simple turn of his head. Carson picked up one of the pawns next to the board and threw it. Norman batted it away with an open palm. He stood as Carson prepared to throw another pawn and when it came his way he snatched it out of the air. Then he threw it back.

Jerking out of the way of the flying piece, Carson tumbled backwards; he and the chair he was sitting in landed with a crash on the floor.

Norman rose, stepped forward and stood over the edge of the table, looking at his son with half-closed eyes. After the two of them had glared at each other for what seemed to me a painfully long time, Norman picked up the chessboard and tipped it, dropping the pieces on top of Carson.

“You’re drunk,” Norman said.

Carson sat up. “Pissed. Just pleasantly pissed.”

Moving to the side of the table, Norman reached his hand out to help Carson up, but Carson refused his father’s help. Instead, he pushed the fallen chair aside and backed his way across the floor, moving into a patch of white light, then pushed himself up. Standing, he was clearly half a foot taller than Norman. The two of them glanced at each other, but Carson quickly looked away, bending over to pick up the chair and set it upright.

“You started tanking up this afternoon,” Norman said. “Don’t try to tell me you didn’t. If you can’t hold your liquor, then lay off it. At least try not to start until the sun goes down.”

Carson looked down at the spilled pieces on the floor. He began picking them up one at a time, placing them carefully on the table.

“You spoiled my game.”

“Don’t worry,” Norman said thickly. “I’m sure you were winning. And losing.” He gestured to me. “We’ve taken up enough of my son’s time.”

Once we were outside again, I started to shiver uncontrollably. I had forgotten just how cold it was. Norman looked up into the night sky, at a ghost-white moon that was almost full.

“That’s the fifth one since I’ve been out here.”

“What?”

“Full moon. There was a full moon the first night after I got to Colorado. It’s now about two days shy of being full. Fifth one. I don’t think I’ll stick around to see the next one. I think Carson’s better off when I’m not around.”

I stood with my hands in the pockets of my coat, staring at the moon along with Norman. The longer I looked at it, the better I could make out the crags that covered its surface. Each crusted line, I realized, marked a precipice surrounding vast plains, the floors of the so-called seas, so called because we had no choice but to compare them with something we knew. It was a way of filling in the blanks, as Norman had said. The large swaths of whiteness that surrounded the seas covered a surface that was even more hidden because the powerful solar glare made it seem as if there was really nothing to see. With my unaided eyes, I thought, it would take an even greater leap of the imagination to fill that celestial darkness.

25: The Alien Vanguard

Schrödinger, the sixteenth planet in the direct path of the vessel, loomed brightly on the navigation screen. Orbit was eleven horels away, time enough for a close study of the planet’s capacious seas and scattered fragments of land. In the central analytics station, biologic engineers were estimating the likelihood of intelligent life, based on algorithms developed in the Katahdin laboratory. So far, the metrics had correctly indicated an absence of coordinated activity in the forty-eight inhabited worlds detected by the sphere in its long, zagging course.

The data gradually filtering out of Schrödinger suggested that none would be found here, either. The seas were warm enough to support infinite varieties of multi-celled organisms, equipped with propelling appendages, some as large as eels and salamanders. The sphere’s outer shield was encountering excess traces of radiation, possibly originating from electrical currents through which the ocean denizens engaged in crude forms of communication. They might signal to each other about the presence of food sources or warn each other away from predators. But there was nothing to suggest patterned signals that indicated a code.

The orange star Ariadne suddenly appeared around the edge of the planet, blanking the navigation screen until the solar filters could be applied. A crescent-shaped archipelago of land fragments came into view, permitting a sustained geologic analysis. The chief engineer shook his head. No artificial structures could be detected, and the land masses were too small to permit an extensive course of evolution. The life forms that would develop on these islands would never progress beyond the amphibian stage. As the time of orbit approached, still no plant life had been detected, no fungi, no airborne life of any kind. An odd but familiar loneliness began to spread from crew member to crew member in the laboratory.

Less than an horel before the sphere reached its orbital distance above the shimmering seas and crimson clouds, a steady vibration began to shake the surface of the sphere, spreading along the inner corridors and through the waste tubes, until it was felt in the heart of the navigation hub. The vibrations took visible form as successive bands of gray light. In the same moment of time, at the analytics station, Bier Hab was transformed into beam of blue light, crossed by diagonal orange lines, fluctuating in the space that he had been occupying, until he gradually solidified again.

When the sensations and the waves of light both ceased at once, the crew members in the station glanced at each other in silence, then studied the monitors of their data receptors. No new information accounted for what they had just felt and seen. Looking up, they began comparing notes.

Dionos Zel cautiously crossed over and touched Bier Hab on the shoulder, felt the solid flesh under his friend’s nacron tunic.

“Where did you go?” Dionos Zel asked him with a carefully affected smile.

Bier Hab looked at all of the technicians at once, and at no one at all. He spoke slowly and deliberately:

“Welcome, travelers. Our sensors have detected your navigational program and we permit you to orbit freely. You must come no further. The minds of your friends have been taken from you for the duration of your stay for the purpose of analysis. Mind our wishes.”

On every corridor, in every station, in every nursery, Bier Hab’s message was recited word for word by one crew member, gazing unblinkingly at everyone and no one, speaking in the same slow, deliberate voice.

Each of the affected crew members was escorted to the surgical station; none of them resisted being taken into the quarantine pod, but once the stethoscope, or the blood pressure cuff, or the temperature probe was applied, each of the bodies gave off an electric shock that immobilized the attending technician for no less than five horels. The ship’s psychiatrists asked a battery of questions, and received no answer from any of the examinees except the slow, deliberate recital with which the alien presence had first announced itself through each selected crew member.

Meanwhile, the sphere maintained its course, completing five hundred orbits of Schrödinger over the next seven diels. In the energy reservoir, the team carried out its work of gravity transmutation under the unblinking eye of the crew chief, who recited calculations of the energy levels needed to reach five points on twelve different astral paths. On every level of the sphere, the crew worked, ate, slept, and sought recreation side by side with the unblinking bodies of their friends, cousins, and lovers. They gazed at the image of Schrödinger that appeared in the ceiling screens, looking at the seas and the tiny islands with new fascination and a touch of dread. Still no higher intelligence had been detected on the planet, but it was there, somewhere, and it was present among them.

On the eighth diel since the beginning of the orbit, the sphere began to enter its breakaway phase. Again it was shaken by vibrations, permeated by unreal light, and at that moment the assistant recreation counselor blinked her eyes, looked at each of her fellow nursery workers in turn and said, “Green light, tunnels, hives …”

“Where? Where?”

On the waste management deck, one of the apprentices blinked, closed his eyes tightly, blinked again, took a deep breath. He said, “Clusters of eyes, five, eight, twelve …”

“How many arms? How many legs? Did they make any sound?”

The crew of the analytics station waited as Bier Hab’s compartment remained closed. The sphere had followed its exit path for five horels before he finally emerged.

“Welcome back,” some of his friends said in tentative voices.

Unsmiling, unblinking, he said. “Relay the following coordinates to the navigator …”

The rest of the analytics crew glanced at each other in silence, while the body of Bier Hab waited in infinite patience. Finally, Dionos Zel recorded the data, and the unblinking crew member nodded to signify that it was done according to his instructions.

With not another word, not another motion, he dissolved in a wave of light, crossed again with bright diagonal stripes; disappearing completely, he was replaced only by empty space.