David Brin: Senses Three and Six

“ That is why I selected men such as you, Brad. You fly jet aircraft, to be sure. But more importantly, you fly the same way you play the piano. All of our pilots must learn to play their ships, for persuading them to tunnel between the stars will require the same empathy as the pianist, who coaxes hammer strokes on metal wires to tunnel glory into a human brain .”

My driver’s license says I am Charles L. Magun. For well over a year I’ve repaired motorcycles for a living, and brought in a few extra bucks on the side keeping kids from wrecking themselves too badly in places like the Yankee. I have a live-in girlfriend who’s been to college, I guess, but is no threat. She’s quiet and nice to have around. I have some redneck pals who I bike and lift weights with and everyone calls me Chuck.

But I remember forging Chuck’s birth certificate almost two years ago. I set him up as a role, I recall, someone They’d never find because They were looking for somebody else. I remember diving into Chuck and burning everything that came before, old habits, old ways, and most of all the old memories.

Until tonight, that is.

Okay, let’s be rational about this. What are the possibilities?

One is that I’m crazy. I really am Charles L. Magun, and all that shit about having once upon a time played the piano, done calculus, piloted jet planes, piloted… other things… that’s all a crock of madman’s dreams.

It’s amazing. For the first time in two years I can actually stand here and dispassionately remember doing some of those things. Some of them. Stuff not directly associated with the breakout. They seem so vivid. I can set up a hyperdimensional integral in my head, for instance. Could Chuck do that?

But I also remember, from long ago when I was a boy, those weird old men who used to come to the Institute bugging Dad and the other profs, to try to get someone to listen to their ideas for perpetual motion machines and the like. Their fantasies seemed sophisticated and correct to Them , too, didn’t they?

The irony isn’t lost on me—using a memory of the Institute to demonstrate that it’s possible for me to falsely remember learning calculus.

Droll.

All right, perhaps I did construct Chuck. Maybe I was someone like who I think I was. But maybe everything that I’m currently afraid of is a fantasy. Maybe I simply went crazy some years back.

Look at me, spending an entire evening in a nonstop internal monologue, describing everything I think and feel as it happens, and every whimper and moan is out of some goddamn psychodrama, I swear. Like this paranoid delusion of vengeful creatures I call Them …

Oh, something terrible must have happened to me two years ago or so. But might it be something more mundane, like an accident? Or a murder? Maybe I created a terrifying and romantic fantasy to cover memories of the real trauma… something of this Earth, hidden under a bizarre mask of science fiction.

No one I know has even heard of the Cabal, or the Arks, or Canaan, or even a fiery crash on a mountainside just a hundred miles from here. I remember we Broke Out a bit early because elections were coming and the old administration was sure to lose. We thought the new crowd would be sure to blow the whistle. But not a word of any “secret project under the Tennessee hills” has ever hit the press. There wouldn’t be any point in secrecy any longer, but there’s been no word.

When you get right down to it, the story I remember is pretty damn preposterous.

A cool breeze is blowing now. The last drifts of fog fall away in tatters, fleeing into the gloom just past the streetlamps. The wind feels fresh on my face.

A third possibility is that I didn’t make any of it up. I’m the hunted last survivor of a secret plot against a powerful outsider civilization, and my enemies will stop at nothing to catch me.

Hmmm. I never put it quite that way before. The next question, I now see, is obvious.

So what?

A smile? Is that what my answer is? A smile?

Yeah. So what? I want to shout. Who cares if they catch me? All they can do is kill me!

Why, in god’s name, have I been making myself so miserable?

Wow.

All right, then. Chuck is a little bit overdone. Hiding as a macho motorcycle repairman is smart, sure. But Chuck doesn’t have to belch in disgust every time a snatch of classical music comes on over the radio. He doesn’t have to watch motorcross on the TV or make snide remarks every time Elise makes a pathetic little attempt at philosophizing.

Amazing I didn’t think of this before. All I have left to lose is my worthless life. Small potatoes. Maybe I really can ease up a bit. Why didn’t I think of this before?

The clouds part and suddenly there is the moon. It is beautiful, like an opal in the night. I can play subjective tricks with it, make it small, a pearl held up at arm’s length, or go zooming in with my imagination, filling the sky with craters and tnaria much as… much as it might look from the portal of a ship.

I can see the Lunar Appenines, trace one of the ridges all the way to a little valley that twists and turns and dives into rocky depth. I can follow that cleft to the lip of a cave, a cave where there’s buried…

Where there’s buried…

No !

I refuse! Uh-uh! No fair.

I’ve done enough this evening, now leave me alone! I’ve agreed to be more reasonable, to let myself relax a bit and enjoy what’s left of my life. But you can’t make me remember, Brad. I won’t do it!

Chuck hunches his shoulders and shoves his hands into his pockets. He shakes his head vigorously and walks toward the sound of drums and guitars, toward the door to the Yankee Dollar.

Imagine a blockade… a quarantine .

The stars are as numerous as specks of pollen blowing across a prairie. Life blossoms everywhere, and yet the glimmer of intelligence is rare .

Imagine an ancient civilization that cherishes the openness, the emptiness. They are reflective and refined—and selfish. They do not want space filled with clamorous young neighbors .

Imagine that one day a new species emerges, bright, curious, vigorous. The Old Ones set up a blockade as they have done in the past. With a severe kindness the fact of the quarantine is kept secret from the newcomers. A merciful discretion .

But now, imagine a traitor, an Old One who disagrees with Policy… And imagine a few precocious natives …

The set is over. A slow song plays over the FM and Elise waits at our table, moving her lips to the words of the song. I watch her as I walk along the dim bar and motion for Joey to give me a fresh beer.

Every so often, when I let her, Elise sings to me. Softly, holding my head on her lap and running her hands through my thinning hair, she croons her gentle country melodies and helps me sleep.

Right now her eyes are focused out beyond the bandstand somewhere. I suppose she’s just staring out into space, but there’s something in her expression… She does that sometimes. When she’s puttering with her plants and I’m trying to adjust a jammed sprocket, suddenly she’ll stop and look intently at nothing. At times like that I worry that she might actually be thinking.

Then she snaps out of it and makes some reassuringly benign remark about a stupid woman who wanted to buy azaleas out of season.

She is nervous, though she’s calmed down considerably lately. I don’t know where the nervousness comes from and I’ve avoided thinking about it. There was a time when I could have tried… but Chuck doesn’t know anything about psychology. He thinks it’s bullshit.