Michael Sullivan - Hollow World

“Disorienting.”

“I can believe that.” Sol bobbed her head.

“The whole trip was really just a blur for me. Kinda felt sick afterward. I wouldn’t suggest it.”

Sol smiled at him. No wrinkles at all, but Ellis thought she had old eyes. After his visit to the ISP he imagined they weren’t original, but maybe there was truth to the adage about eyes being windows to the soul.

“Is the future everything you’d hoped for?”

Ellis laughed, and she laughed with him. “No,” he said. “I can honestly say I never expected this.”

All the windows of Sol’s home were covered by sheer curtains. That might have added to the homey feel. Ellis’s mother had done the same thing. What caught his eye was how they moved. The curtains rippled and billowed as if in an intermittent breeze wafting past an open sash. Occasionally they split apart, and Ellis could see flowers in a window box: violets, azalea, and chrysanthemums—old-fashioned flowers.

“I’ll bet you didn’t. I heard about your campaign to get a woman, and it sounds like you’re getting your wish granted.”

“Really?”

“That’s the rumor. I’d advise against it, but I suppose you know more about women than I do. Were you married?”

“Yeah. Almost thirty-five years.”

“Not very long. Did something happen?”

Ellis was surprised, until he remembered whom he was talking to. “How old are you?”

“See, if you were to ask a woman that, legend has it you’d get slapped.” Sol remained silent, showing a little coy smile. Just when he was certain she wouldn’t answer, she asked, “When were you born?”

“May 5th, 1956.”

“Let’s put it this way…” Sol tapped her lower lip. “You’re four hundred and four years older than me.”

Ellis started working it out. Sol was 1,718 years old—nearly two thousand years herself—only she hadn’t skipped any of it. She was a Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner comedy routine come to life.

“You look shocked. You come in here with this crazy story of flying through time on a set of plastic boxes, and you’re looking at me funny because I can still remember when people had sex? How you making out with that, anyway? I’m guessing you might be experiencing some withdrawal.” Sol gestured at the books. “I read, you know. So few do these days. I like the old paper books, as you can tell. Hard to get. Most of the things I have were antiques when I was born. The books I created from patterns I put together myself and based on the few genuine relics. So little survived the Great Tempest. Everyone relies on holos and grams. That’s the one thing my mother gave me that I appreciate. She taught me to read. Sex is in almost all the books. Men especially have a need for it—a failing sometimes. A lot of the books call it a natural drive. I don’t know if I buy that. Can it be a natural drive if you can choose not to? Eating is a natural drive, but I can’t abstain from it.”

Sol scanned her bookshelves, and so did Ellis. She had a fine collection. Plenty of history books, which must be like photo albums for her. One was titled The Age of Storms , another The Empty Holo . Most of the titles and authors he didn’t know and guessed the books had been written in the intervening millennia, but he did spot Dickens, Poe, Dante, Cervantes, Austen, Hemingway, and Kafka. Ellis smiled when he saw Orwell, Jules Verne, and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land . He also noted King, Patterson, Steel, Roberts, and was particularly pleased to see Michael Connelly—a title he’d never seen before. And there were at least twelve books with the name of Sol as the author. These appeared to be a variety of fiction, memoirs, and history texts. “In books it seems as though men need a woman, physically. Is that true? Are you dying ?”

Ellis smiled. “We’ve already determined that I was married for over thirty years. I’m used to it.”

He didn’t think she’d get the jest, but Sol burst out laughing so hard she nearly spilled her tea.

“Oh, I do like you, Mr. Rogers.”

“I like you too, Sol. Sol…” He repeated the name thoughtfully.

“It’s another word for sun ,” she said.

“And a Martian day,” he added.

“And an abbreviation for solution .”

“And an acronym for shit outta luck .”

This made Sol laugh. “I never heard that one. It’s nice to talk to someone more my age.”

“People in Hollow World pick their names, don’t they?”

“Yes. Everyone takes the Gaunt Winslow Evaluation Nascence, a sort of aptitude test developed by Wacine Gaunt and Albert Winslow that seeks to predict which endeavors will provide a person maximum happiness. Many people denounce the GWEN as ineffective, but everyone takes it, even if only out of curiosity. At that age most people pick a direction and choose a name that reflects their decision. In the early days, the test produced a printout that provided the answers in a series of three letters, and people adopted these abbreviations as their names. The tradition stuck. Silly, I suppose—as most traditions tend to be—but no different from when people were called Carpenter, Miller, Taylor, Potter, or Smith—and it helps skip the obligatory: So what do you do?”

“Thought so. I noticed a few. Pol seems short for politician, and Geo is obvious, but a few, like Cha, are baffling.”

“Physician, right?”

“Yes.”

“Usually it’s Hip, Par, Doc, or Wat, but some pick Cha, which is short for Charaka , a famous Indian physician born around 300 BC and referred to as the Father of Medicine.”

“And Sol?”

She smiled. “I’ll leave that for you to decide, but I can tell you this…they retired the name. I’m the only Sol.”

He smiled back. “Okay, I’ll give you that one.” He sipped his tea, and a question popped into his head, a question that had circled him the night before as he fell asleep amid the M&M’S and camping gear. “What’s the point?”

“The point?” Sol gazed at him, not so much confused as intrigued. She didn’t look any older than a college coed, but he wondered if Sol’s age isolated her just the same. Did her way of thinking, her interest in books and old things, make others shun her? Think of her as cute but out of touch? Did she appreciate company as much as a homebound grandmother?

Ellis nodded. “What’s the point to life? I never really thought of it too much before I traveled through time. I did it not only to look for a cure to a terminal illness, but also to escape my life, which as it turned out, didn’t work. But now that I’m here I think about it. Do you know what a parallax is? It’s an astronomy term. You can’t tell much about something looking at it from one point. You have no depth, no reference. If you move and look at it from a different angle, you can determine distance and such. Traveling through time is like that. I saw how things were, and, after shifting ahead, I see how they are and…I don’t know. I thought I’d be able to understand more about the why part of life, but I don’t. You’ve lived through it all, had a lot more time to reflect.”

Sol looked empathetic, soft eyes blinking at him. “I think that’s one of those questions everyone has to find the answer to for themselves.”

“Had a feeling you were going to say that. Everyone always does.”

“But…”

“There’s a but?”

She nodded and looked down at her cup. “I can tell you what I found for myself. When you’ve lived through as much as I have, you understand that the old Buddhists were right in a way. Everything comes and goes. Nothing is forever. Not even God. My mother called Him eternal, but Jesus and His dad turned out to be a fad like all the others. At least that’s how I saw it when I was just a girl of one thousand—my rebellious stage.” She winked at him. “God was just a superstitious holdover from when we thought fire was magic. But it’s been centuries, and still people seek something. I can see it in their eyes, hear it when they talk. They don’t call it God anymore, but I think it’s the same thing. A natural drive like wanting food, water, and sex.” She smiled.