Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

I looked at Menno, a little reflection of me staring back from his opaque glasses. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly macho guy, and, of course, there was nothing funny about breast cancer, but, still, men were strange when it came to that part of their anatomy, and a stabbing is a way more interesting story to tell, but—

No, no, I would have been here in Winnipeg on—what date had Sandy Cheung said? February something…

February nineteenth. Monday, February nineteenth. First business day during Reading Week—or, as some of my less-academically-minded friends called it, Ski Week, the time each year during which Canadian universities had no classes so students could catch up on their work. Yes, if I’d needed a tumor removed, I might well have arranged to have had it done when I could be back in Calgary with my family. Jesus.

I looked again at Menno. “You fucked me up.”

“I’m so, so sorry. I really was trying to help.”

I leaned against the office door, thinking. “The inner-voice stuff—or, more to the point, the lack of inner-voice stuff: did you publish about that?”

Menno shook his head. “Like I said, all our research was classified. And when Dom moved to the States, well, it was his project, really.”

“You’d made a major breakthrough—philosopher’s zombies exist!—and you kept quiet about it all these years?”

“I had to,” Menno replied. “I’m a Mennonite.”

“Yes?” I said. “So the idea of people without inner lives contradicted your religious beliefs?”

“What? No, no. I mean, yes, I suppose so—where’s the soul, and all that? But that’s not what I’m talking about. Mennonites are pacifists. I couldn’t tell the DoD what we’d found. God, can you imagine what they’d have done if they knew? Talk about cannon fodder! They could use our technique to identify which soldiers would make the best mindless little drones. I had to bury the research as much as I could.”

That took me aback. “You think p-zeds are blindly obedient?”

“I know so—because until I messed up your amygdala, you yourself were. I was stunned when Dom managed to talk you into continuing with our experiments; I’d figured you’d never want to see us again. But a guy in a lab coat asks you to do something, and, boom!, yes, sir; as you wish, sir; no problem, sir. Philosopher’s zombies aren’t leaders; they’re followers. They don’t want anything themselves. Bob Altemeyer was probably identifying p-zeds, as you call them, with his research here on authoritarian followers, and Stanley Milgram almost certainly was identifying them back in 1961 with his obedience-to-authority experiments. Of course a p-zed will shock someone just because they’re told to do so; they have no inner voice arguing against it. Thank God, eventually yours came back.”

“So no harm, no foul, right? It all worked out in the end? You robbed me of half a year of my life!”

I expected some sort of protest; no matter how accurate the charge, most people reflexively defend themselves. But Menno just sat there quietly for a long moment, and then, slowly, deliberately, he removed his glasses, set them on his desk, and he looked at me.

With his dead glass eyes.

“I felt terrible about what happened to you, Jim. You have no idea how much it tore me up. And, as a psychologist, I know all about the indicators, the signs—the preternatural calmness that comes over a person when the decision has been made. And when I made my decision, I recognized it for precisely what it was, but nonetheless, it seemed the thing to do.”

His eyes always faced straight forward; he was incapable of a sidelong glance. And he was looking at me, or at least facing me, and although he blinked at the normal rate, his aim never wavered. Even though I knew he couldn’t see a thing through those glass spheres, it was more unnerving than even the psychopathic stare.

“You think it was easy, living with what we’d done? What I’d done?” He shook his head, blind gaze swinging like twin searchlights. “It tortured me. I couldn’t sleep; couldn’t—you know.” He paused. “I drove out to Dauphin one night—a long drive, a mostly empty highway. There were trees at the side of the road, which is what I’d expected, but it was frustrating as hell—just saplings, young elms. I wanted something massive, something I was sure wouldn’t snap in two. And then, there it was—a whole stand of them. I took aim at one in the middle, and I floored it. And, well…” He waved a hand in a circular motion in front of his face. “This.” He shrugged a little. “It wasn’t the outcome I was looking for, and it’s been a bitch, let me tell you, all these years, being blind.” The glassy spheres faced me once more, and I looked at them for as long as I could. “I can’t make up for what I did, Jim, but recognize that, in some measure at least, I’ve paid for it.”

I was still in a daze from Menno’s revelations when the taxi dropped me at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The design was supposed to suggest dove’s wings surrounding a glass spire that rose a hundred meters into the sky, but to me it looked like God had crammed a Bundt cake down around a traffic cone.

I was running late, and Kayla had already checked out of her room at the nearby Inn at The Forks; she’d texted me to say she’d headed on in to the reception. I hustled over to the entrance, giving my ritual nod to the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the way.

The reception was being held in the Garden of Contemplation, which was in the vast lobby adjacent to the reflecting pool. It was bordered by re-creations of the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway, commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Most of the men were in suits and ties, but I was dressed more casually; Kayla and I planned to make it all the way to Saskatoon tonight, and I wanted to be comfortable for the drive.

I looked around but didn’t see any sign of Kayla. But I did see Nick Smith, a partner in an accounting firm that was helping to sponsor the lecture series. He had a golfer’s tan that was close to a sunburn and was chatting with someone I didn’t know: a handsome black man of about thirty-five. As I drifted by, the man was saying, “I don’t even know how to put this, but—”

Nick caught sight of me, and he leaned out of the conversation long enough to pull me in. “Oh, Jim, let me introduce you to someone. Jim Marchuk, this is Darius Clark. Jim’s on the board here.” Darius was standing in a military at-ease posture, with hands clasped behind his back. As Nick turned back to face him, he adopted the same pose.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Darius is giving a lecture here tomorrow,” Nick said.

“Well, not exactly,” Darius said. He had a bit of a Southern drawl. “I’m accompanying my partner. She’s the one giving the talk.”

“Ah,” I said.

“But I was just saying to Mr. Smith here—”

“Please, call me Nick.”

Darius smiled at that. “I was just saying to Nick, I’m visiting from Washington—DC, that is. Latisha and I live there.”

“I love that city,” I said.

“No,” said Darius affably, “you love the Mall and maybe a few streets on either side. The city itself is pretty crappy.”

“Oh.”

“I only moved there to be with Latisha. She works for the DoJ, the Department of Justice. Anyway, my point is this. Y’all are having this wonderful reception for us here, and earlier today, we went to lunch at the offices of Nick’s firm.”

“Nice,” I said.

“It was. And I don’t just mean the food. I never had bison before, but…”