Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

Two young punks came at us from out of the row of trees, each brandishing a two-by-four. I couldn’t make out their faces in the darkness, but it was clear we were going to be attacked when one of them said, “Holy shit! It’s Professor Marchuk!” They turned and hightailed it into the night.

My heart was pounding, and Heather looked scared to death as we continued cautiously along. One drunken guy lying in the grass waved a knife at us and called out in slurred voice, “Come here, asshole! I’ll cut your balls off!”

There was no way to make it the ten kilometers to my home on foot with Heather in high heels, and there was too much broken glass now for her to continue to go shoeless. But looming ahead to the south was the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, now just a few hundred meters away.

We pushed forward, but if there was rioting in the Exchange District, there was rioting in The Forks, as well; I could hear a roar coming from that direction, and flames were licking up from just about exactly where I’d taken Kayla to dinner not that long ago.

Heather and I hurried along. We passed close to two guys involved in a knife fight—reminding me of that night all those years ago, except—

Except that night was just my imagination; this one was real—and so much worse. There was a scream from behind us as we pushed ahead, followed by someone growling, “That’ll teach you!”

Finally, we made it to the long, roofless, stone tunnel leading to the museum’s entrance. I pulled out my phone and scrolled until I found the number for the security desk, which I’d called occasionally in the past for after-hours access.

“CMHR Security,” said a man’s voice.

“Hello. This is James Marchuk. I’m on the Board of—”

“Oh, hi, Dr. Marchuk. This is Abdul.”

“Abdul, thank God! I’m just outside the main entrance to the museum; it’s crazy out here. Can you let me and my sister in?”

“Oh, my, yes—two secs,” he said, clicking off. We waited anxiously; it was more like two minutes than two seconds, and felt like two hours. At last, Abdul opened the farthest left of the four glass doors, and Heather and I scurried inside; the guard locked the door immediately behind us. “We’ve got three calls in to WPS for support,” Abdul said. “They’re trashing the grounds on the south side. The Gandhi statue has been toppled. It won’t be safe to leave again tonight.”

“God,” said Heather, shaking.

“Let me take you guys upstairs,” Abdul said. “At least there are couches you can sleep on.” We nodded, and he led us down the stone corridor and past the giant wall panels proclaiming in English and French, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” But the interior lighting was off, and I could only make the words out because I already knew what they said.

Much of the museum’s shell was made of glass, so when the sun came up the next morning, the building was filled with light. I hadn’t been aware of actually falling asleep, but I must have at some point because it was the brightness that woke me. I staggered out of the curator’s office I’d been sleeping in and went to find Heather.

She was standing at a railing, looking down at the alabaster-clad bridges crisscrossing the museum’s cavernous interior. I’d stood here before, also looking down, and the spectacle always reminded me of the scene in Forbidden Planet in which Dr. Morbius shows his visitors the twenty-mile-deep cubic interior of the dead-and-buried Krell city on Altair IV. Morbius’s words from that classic film popped into my head. The heights they had reached! But then, seemingly on the threshold of some supreme accomplishment which was to have crowned their entire history this all-but-divine race perished in a single night…

“Hey,” I said, joining my sister staring into the abyss. “You all right?”

“I guess.”

“Let’s see if we can get back to my place, okay?” I tried to make a joke of it. “It was bad enough being out there last night; wait till the school buses full of kids on field trips arrive here.”

“School’s out for the summer,” she said, her tone flat.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess it is.” And that’s when I turned around, looked out through the great curving glass, and saw the plumes of black smoke against the blood-red dawn.

It was a shocking bus trip back to my home. I was used to other passengers chatting with friends or having their heads bent down, thumb-typing on their phones, but everyone was looking out the streaked, dusty windows. Many people, including Heather, had mouths agape; the pedestrians I saw were likewise looking shell-shocked.

Of course, most of the damage was superficial: smashed windows, torn-down fences, obscene graffiti; there was only so much mayhem people who’d arrived unprepared could cause. Still, it was distressing to see, and the CJOB app said there had been eleven fatalities—one of which was almost certainly from the knife fight Heather and I had passed—and thirty more people were in hospital.

I’d called Kayla from the museum to let her know I was all right, but we only spoke briefly. She hadn’t been aware of the riots here; we arranged to Skype this evening.

The bus let us off at the far side of the strip mall from my condo building. We walked through its parking lot, past my building’s outdoor pool, into my lobby, and headed up. My unit had two washrooms but only one shower; we both desperately needed to clean up, but I let Heather go first. While she showered, I went out on the balcony and looked out at the river implacably rolling along. About fifty meters upriver from me, near one of the picnic tables, a couple of guys were fishing.

My thoughts turned to Saskatoon, but only partially to Kayla; yes, I missed her enormously and certainly could use her hugs after last night. But I was also thinking about CLS, and wondering if there was any possible way to get my sister down on Victoria’s beamline so I could know for sure whether Heather really was a Q1.

I ran through memories of our childhood together: times she’d made me laugh, times she’d made me cry, times when I’d been worried about her—and times when it seemed she’d genuinely been worried about me. Could she have just been going through the motions? Granted, I’d had no particular psychological acumen as a child or teenager, but surely now, in retrospect, it should be obvious one way or the other.

We had been very different in high school. She’d hung around with the popular crowd, doing all the things popular kids did, drinking and smoking and cutting classes. And she certainly followed fashion trends, and to this day I can recite the lyrics of every Spice Girls song, having heard her play their damn albums over and over again. Me, I’d refused to wear blue jeans—I didn’t own a pair until I was thirty—or T-shirts with any kind of advertising on them, and I’d listened mostly to the great sci-fi movie soundtracks of John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. Granted, she had gotten good marks in school—sometimes better than my own—but, then again, taking in input and mindlessly spitting out output was precisely what p-zeds were presumably adept at.

I was startled by the sound of the screen door behind me sliding open. Heather had changed into clean clothes. “Your turn,” she said.

I nodded and headed inside. It felt good to get all that grime and sweat off me, and, afterward, I grabbed a quick shave, then headed into my bedroom, which was just past the little guest room Heather was using, and put on fresh clothing. My one pair of blue jeans was hanging in my closet. I did wear them sometimes when I taught in the summer, but I stopped myself as I reached for them and instead took down a pair of beige slacks.