Kathleen Goonan: Crescent City Rhapsody

Then Sally was there with a pill and a glass. “Scotch?” Zeb asked hopefully.

“Water,” she said sternly.

He swallowed it only because he knew it would take several hours to kick in. Several hours of ecstasy. He noticed Annie looking at him thoughtfully. “What’s up?” he managed, his head filled with images, which would translate, if he had a pencil in his hand, to equations that would express the projected periodicity of the signal. He thought, vaguely, that perhaps he should ask for one.

“I was thinking,” said Annie, looking startlingly like her mother at her age, with those clear blue eyes, that curly blond hair, “that right now a DNA-based drug is in the planning stages—”

“A nanodrug, right?” asked Zeb. Everything was prefaced by “nano” in her world. He usually tried not to make fun of Annie’s solemn belief in the coming power of nanotechnology, but sometimes that was difficult.

“Time to eat.” Sally herded them into the dining room.

“We have some serious matters to discuss,” said John as they sat down at the table. “What do you think of the blackout?”

Zeb was not in a cautious mood. “I think that it’s a deliberate manipulation of the electromagnetic field of the Earth by some intelligent entity.”

Brad looked at him. “Do you mean aliens? That’s what all the kids are saying.”

“I told you to stay inside. And don’t feed those dogs at the table,” said Sally.

“I’m not . I dropped it.”

“I’m sure Uncle Zeb meant no such thing,” said John, passing the mashed potatoes.

“He missed his pill,” said Sally.

“Now wait a minute,” said Zeb, getting irritated. He turned to Annie. “What do you think?”

“I think that it’s a good opportunity to stress the development of organic-based nanotech communications, at least for backup. I’m sure my friends would think so too—if the Internet was working better. I just got logged on again when you got here, but I got bumped right away.”

John shook his head, smiling faintly. “She and her friends see the world through a haze of nanotech.”

“What’s wrong with that?” demanded Annie. “Nearly free manufacturing! All you need is the raw materials and everything is assembled. No more factories. And no more poverty. That’s just the beginning.”

“You’re becoming a Marxist,” complained John.

Zeb was beginning to chafe. As he ate, the numbers and ratios began to fade, along with the urgency. He told himself it didn’t matter. He had the data. He could work it out the long way, the hard way, when he got back. And he could also recall it, though it was more difficult under the influence of his medication. The neurons simply didn’t fire in quite the same way. It made a difference. An important difference, he tried to remind himself.

“So everyone is saying that it’s a solar flare,” he said.

“Why do you have this other idea?” asked Annie.

“I have readout data from the antenna my students built up on Angel’s Rest. Remember when you saw it last summer, when they were working on it?”

Annie nodded. “Well, then, how or what do you think is causing this?”

“I really don’t know. I just know it doesn’t fit the profile for a solar event.”

None of them had any idea of how quickly things might change, thought Zeb. They’d had a scare, a small one. But it was over, apparently. Time to forget. Particularly if it was a natural, uncontrollable event. Solar pulses might come in waves, so they would be worried for a while, but that was all. Soon everything would be back up and running, where the damage wasn’t too serious. Some places might take months to get back on track, or longer, but it would all seem as if it was in the natural scheme of things.

Until the next pulse.

Talk turned to other matters. The pleasant clatter of silverware and crystal overtook his efforts to concentrate; Sally allowed Zeb a glass of wine and they grinned at each other.

“A toast,” he said. He looked around at all of them. “To—this.”

“To this,” they said, and Annie raised her water glass, and the dogs, sensing something, scrambled to their feet and watched. Zeb felt himself calming down. Shutting down, the other part of him said sarcastically.

Then the power went off again. John cursed and went outside to bring in more wood for the fireplace, and Sally lit candles.

“Time to go,” Zeb said. The dogs hurried to the door.

“You’re not staying the night?” asked Sally, surprised. “But—it’s snowing, and—”

“I’m fine,” he said, hugging her briefly. She always looked so harried. “Look, this isn’t a new event, or pulse, or whatever you want to call it. It just takes a long time for all the repairs to get done. There was one event in Canada years ago—a solar flare—that took months to clean up. But I want you to promise that if anything happens again, you’ll come to my place, all right? I’m not kidding—everything there is self-sufficient.” Suddenly filled with urgency, he kissed them all good-bye. He looked long at Brad and at Annie; they, more than anyone, would feel the eventual brunt of this.

But—maybe he was utterly, completely wrong.

He fervently hoped so.

The interstate was deserted. The mountains looked strangely primitive without house lights twinkling on the ridges. The radio was blank, but halfway home it flared to life and Zeb found WKBW, a clear-channel AM station broadcasting information about shelters in Buffalo, New York.

He was puzzled as he turned onto his long driveway by tire tracks half-filled with snow. Not his. Who in the world would have come to see him? A student, perhaps?

His headlights showed that whoever had been here had left. But the door stood partly open.

After a minute, he climbed down from his truck. The dogs rushed past him into the house. Then Pleiades came back and stood in the door, as if to say, Aren’t you coming too ? Admittedly, his dogs would most likely simply greet an intruder, although they could seem vicious enough at times.

He walked to the house, reached inside the door, turned on the light.

He was stunned. The floor was covered with books; a chair stood upside down; file cabinets had been dumped. He was angry. And puzzled. What could they have been after?

Then he noticed that the few sheets of printout containing data recorded before the phenomenon occurred were no longer on the table. He was sure he’d left them there.

Who knew that he even had them?

Some people at the party knew that he’d been going to the antenna last night, but he seriously doubted that any of them would have given it a second thought or understood the possible significance. Some of the ten students working on the project might have told others about it, but again, that was unlikely to stir up any interest.

He slowly went to his e-mail setup. It had a battery backup, and the Internet was evidently working, but he didn’t know what to say. Finally he just wrote: craig, any news?

After ten minutes, it bounced back. No such address.

He ran a search. It didn’t take long. The results were not entirely conclusive, considering the state of everything, but he was reasonably sure that the information was true.

Craig no longer existed online.

Just past Manassas, Zeb passed the umpteenth all-night church candle vigil he’d seen on his drive up the Shenandoah Valley to Fairfax, Virginia.

He’d listened to the radio all day. There was a lot of talk about the end of the world, sin, and the best way to go about imploring God to reconsider. Very occasionally, he’d hit on some mention of the Emergency Summit that was to begin tomorrow. Astoundingly, from Zeb’s perspective, official talk had changed from the solar flare explanation to “a previously undiscovered quasar,” with occasional mention of an electromagnetic pulse. Excited talk from newscasters, mostly; curiously little from anyone in authority. Sound bites from various heads of state asking for order and doling out calculated phrases of soothing comfort.