Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

I could have made the whole trip in one day, but that would have been too long and too grueling for my tastes. I had a vague idea about stopping somewhere around Toledo for the night, which would give me a moderate first day and an easy second one. With lots of solo time on my hands, I “read” half a book on the car’s CD player.

Eventually, saturation set in and I switched it off as I pulled into a rest area somewhere on the Ohio Turnpike. Something must have been gradually gnawing its way up out of my subconscious, because when I returned to the car after a visit to the facilities and a stroll around the grounds, I found myself reaching for the trunk key instead of the ignition. I opened one of my bags and pulled out the Baranovian address list Sam had made.

Bryan’s address, as my subconscious must have already noted, was an apartment somewhere in northwestern Ohio. I didn’t recognize the name of the town, but a check of the map showed that it wasn’t that far out of my way.

Two exits later, I left the Turnpike, threading my way through vast expanses of tall corn and soybeans on a neat lattice of arrow-straight roads.

It was almost dark when I got there—late enough that common sense said I should nail down a room before I did anything else. But then, common sense wouldn’t have advised this detour in the first place. So I went directly to Bryan’s address, near the edge of a sleepy little college town.

His apartment was the attic of an old house on a quiet tree-lined street still slick from the afternoon’s showers. The whole house was dark, except that I thought I could see a faint flickering light through a dormer window near the back upstairs. I sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking. Then I walked across the street and up Bryan’s outside stairway.

Paint was peeling from the door. I knocked.

No answer. I knocked again. “Bryan?” I called softly, not wishing to attract attention from neighbors.

Still no answer. There was glass in the door, and I couldn’t lean out far enough from the steep stairs to see in the window. But there was definitely light in there, flickering and changing color.

I knocked still again and began trying to think up a story to get the landlord to let me in. Hell, how would I even find out who the landlord was?

Did I have time to waste trying? I had no concrete reason to believe Bryan was in danger, but the way he’d been acting, who could tell what was going on? And I felt vaguely responsible. It was clear that, if it was possible to bring suit against science fiction writers for malpractice, he would have come after me.

I fell back on the obvious and got lucky. The door was unlocked.

Carelessness? Or did he want me—or somebody—to find it that way?

The room tasted weird. I know how that sounds, but I stood in the dark and felt the hair on my scalp rise. The flickering I’d seen came from a computer in one corner, its screen filled with a screen saver like none I’d ever seen. It made me think of those pictures of the star nursery that the Hubble sent back a couple of years ago, but animated, suggesting the way those colorful gas clouds might look if you were traveling through them. I felt oddly light, as if I’d lost weight. It might have been a hypnotic effect induced by the screen saver. At least, that’s what I thought. What I told myself.

I switched on the room light, a bare bulb in the ceiling, but the giddy sensation that I could have bounded around the room didn’t go away.

It looked abandoned. A narrow bed stood unmade in one corner. I saw no other furniture except a rickety chair in front of the computer, which, with the lights on, was a perfectly ordinary Macintosh desktop. I wondered why it had been left on.

The room whispered clearly that its occupant had left in a hurry and wasn’t coming back. Like most young bachelors, he hadn’t dusted all that often, and he hadn’t cleaned up after he removed the few things he’d taken with him. A couple of clean rectangles on the floor, with rows of dust bunnies along the baseboard behind them, indicated there had been other furnishings.

One other item caught my eye: a picture on the far wall. Except it wasn’t a picture but a full-fledged three-dimensional landscape. It was hardly surprising that a Baranovian would decorate with science fiction art, but even from here, this was the most spectacular portrait of an unearthly landscape I had ever seen. To begin with, I didn’t understand the technology that allowed me literally to look into it.

Three crystal towers of varying heights and slightly different aspect rose against a background of pink and blue mountains. The towers gleamed in double sunlight. In the foreground, a broad river rolled through purple forest. Something I couldn’t quite make out soared above the water on giant butterfly wings.

When I tried to reach into it, I discovered the holograph effect was an illusion. It had a flat surface.

I shivered. Who are you, Bryan?

A photo and a computer.

Not a photo, I reminded myself.

I sat down at the computer, clicked the mouse, and the screen saver dissolved to several rows of unfamiliar symbols. It was no script I knew, and I can recognize a lot of scripts even if I can’t read them.

I tried changing it to every font in the menu, but all I got was gibberish. I went through the other menus, and among the desk accessories I found two unfamiliar icons with labels that used the same characters. I tried one of them and got nothing. But the other—.

The chair was on rollers and I pushed back and almost fell off.

YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU CONFUSE GOOD WILL WITH ANALYSIS, EMOTION WITH VIRTUE. IT IS BOTH YOUR STRENGTH AND YOUR WEAKNESS.

What the hell was he talking about? Did he mean me?

I could see into the kitchen, where two pots had been left atop a battered range. Somewhere outside, a garage door banged down.

GOOD INTENTIONS DON’T COUNT FOR MUCH, JAKE. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO GET IT RIGHT.

I’D HOPED FOR A SOLUTION. INSTEAD, I SUSPECT YOU’VE INHERITED A PROBLEM.

I stared at it, trying to understand. What problem had I inherited? What were we talking about?

SORRY.

It ended there.

I saved the document, printed a copy, and exited from word processing. When the menu appeared onscreen, I turned off the room lights and went to stand by the window, looking out. The sky had cleared behind the storms.

My first thought was: It was a hoax. In fact, that’s the answer I’d prefer. It’s the answer I can sleep with. But I know it’s not so. I knew it wasn’t so the moment I shut down the computer, and felt my weight flow back. Forty pounds or so.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what kind of problem he’d handed me. I guess he’d intended it as a gift. Or maybe it was just to prove he had a sense of humor. I disconnected the computer, carried it outside, and put it in my trunk.

Poor Bryan.

I wish him well, wherever he is and whatever he might choose to do. I know so little about just what kind of fix he was in or what kind of pressure he was under. I don’t know how directly the Seminar applied to it. But I do know that, for him, it wasn’t a game—and that he was looking to us for help we couldn’t quite give.

I’m more conscious of the presence of Mars in the night sky than I used to be. While I’m writing this, it’s visible through my window, over Kegan’s tool shed.