Dan Simmons - The Hollow Man

Gail goes to the fridge, returns with a pitcher to refill his iced tea. “And you’ve put the radio together?”

“Goldmann has.” Jeremy grins. “And I’ve turned it on for him.”

“How do we read our own minds?” Gail asks softly.

Jeremy molds the air with his hands. His fingers flutter like the elusive wavefronts he describes. “The brain generates these superholograms that contain the full package … memory, personality, even wavefront processing packages so that we can interpret reality … and even while generating these wavefronts, the brain is also acting as interferometer, breaking down wavefronts into component pieces as we need them. ‘Reading’ our own minds.”

Gail’s hands are clenching and unclenching as she resists the impulse to bite her nails in excitement. “I think I see.…”

Jeremy grabs her hands. “You do see. This explains so much, Gail … why stroke victims can relearn using different parts of their minds, the terrible effects of Alzheimer’s, even why babies need to dream so much and old people don’t. You see, the personality wavefront in a baby has such a greater need to interpret reality in that holographic simulator.…”

Jeremy pauses. He has seen the flicker of pain that crossed Gail’s face at the mention of a baby. He squeezes her hands.

“Anyway,” he says, “you see how it explains the ability we have.”

She looks up, meeting his gaze. “I think I do, Jerry. But …”

He drains the last of his iced tea. “Perhaps we’re genetic mutations, kiddo, the way we’ve discussed in the past. But if so, we’re mutants whose brains do just what everyone else’s brains do … break down the superholograms to understandable patterns. Only our brains can interpret other people’s wavefront patterns as well as our own.”

Gail is nodding quickly now, seeing it. “That’s why we have this constant static of people’s thoughts … what you call neurobabble … isn’t it, Jerry? We’re constantly breaking down other people’s thought waves. What did you call the hologram thing that does that?”

“An interferometer.”

Gail smiles again. “So we were born with faulty interferometers.”

Jeremy lifts her hand and kisses her fingers. “Or overefficient ones.”

Gail walks to the window and looks out toward the barn, trying to absorb these things. Jeremy leaves her thoughts to her, raising his mindshield enough not to intrude. After a moment he says, “There’s one other thing, kiddo.”

She turns away from the window, holding her arms.

“The reason Chuck Gilpen had that research in the first place,” he says. “Do you remember that Chuck’s working with the Fundamental Physics Group out at Lawrence Berkeley Labs?”

Gail nods. “So?”

“So for the past few years they’ve been hunting down all those smaller and smaller particles and studying the properties that rule them to get a hook on what’s real. What’s really real. And when they get past the gluons and quarks and charm and color, and do get a glimpse of reality on its most basic and persuasive level, you know what they get?”

Gail shakes her head and hugs herself more tightly, seeing his answer even before he verbalizes it.

“They get a series of probability equations that show standing wavefronts,” he says softly, his own skin breaking out in goose bumps. “They get the same squiggles and jiggles that Goldmann gets when he looks beyond the brain and finds the mind.”

Gail’s voice is a whisper. “What does that mean , Jerry?”

Jeremy abandons his iced tea with its melting ice cubes and goes to the fridge to get a beer. He pops the top and drinks deeply, pausing to burp once. Beyond Gail, the late-afternoon light is painting the cherry trees beyond the barn in rich colors. Out there , he shares with Gail. And in our minds. Different … and the same. The universe as a standing wavefront, as fragile and improbable as a baby’s dreams .

He burps again and says aloud, “Beats the hell out of me, kiddo.”

On the third day, Bremen rose and went out into the light. There was a small dock behind the shack, little more than two boards on pilings really, and it was here that Bremen stood and blinked at the sunrise while birds made riotous sounds in the swamp behind him and fish rose to feed in the river in front of him.

On the first day he had been content to let Verge ferry him across the river and show him his fishing shack. The old man’s thoughts were a welcome change to Bremen’s exhausted mind: wordless thoughts, images without words, slow emotions without words, thoughts as rhythmic and soothing as the put-putting of the ancient outboard motor that propelled them across the slow-moving river.

The shack had been more than Bremen had expected for forty-two dollars a day; beyond the dock the little structure boasted a porch, a tiny living room with screened windows, one sprung couch, and a rocking chair, a small kitchen with a half-sized refrigerator—there was electricity!—the bulky oven and promised hot plate, and finally a narrow table with a faded oilcloth. There was also a bedroom not much larger than the built-in bed itself, its single window looking out on an honest-to-God outhouse. The shower and sink were makeshift things in an open alcove outside the back door. But the blankets and folded sheets were clean, the three electric lights in the shack worked, and Bremen collapsed onto the sprung couch with an emotion very close to elation at having found this place … if one can feel elation while feeling a sadness so profound that it bordered on vertigo.

Verge had come in and sat on the rocking chair. Remembering his manners, Bremen had gone through the grocery sacks, found the six-pack of beer that Norm Sr. had packed, and had offered one to Verge. The old man did not refuse, and Bremen basked in the warm glow of the old man’s wordless thoughts as they sat in the warm twilight and sipped their equally warm beers.

Later, after his guide had left, Bremen sat on the dock and fished. Not worrying about choice of bait or strength of line or what kind of fish he was going after, he had dangled his legs off the rough planks, listened to the swamp and river come alive with bullfrogs in the fading light, and caught more fish than he had ever dreamed of. Bremen knew that some were catfish from their whiskers, that several were longer, thinner, and tougher fighters, and that one actually looked like a rainbow trout, although he considered that unlikely … but he threw them all back. He had enough for three nights’ dinners and he needed no fish. It was the process of fishing that was therapeutic; it was fishing that lulled his mind into some vestige of peace after the madness of the preceding days and weeks.

Later on that first day’s night, sometime after it grew dark (Bremen did not consult his watch), he had gone into the shack, prepared a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich for dinner, washed it down with another beer, cleaned the dishes and then himself, and had gone to bed, to sleep for the first time in four days, and to sleep, without dreaming, for the first time in many weeks.

On the second day Bremen slept late and fished from the dock through the morning, caught nothing at all, and was as satisfied as he had been the night before. After an early lunch he had walked along the bank almost to a point where the river drained into the swamp, or vice versa … he could not tell, and fished for a few hours from a bank. Again, he threw back everything he caught, but he saw a snake swimming lazily between the half-submerged cypress and for the first time in his life was not afraid of the serpent.