Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“I don’t know.”

“Yes,” Menno said, “you do.”

I looked away from the blind man. “Twenty-something.”

“Twenty thousand dollars. Which charities?”

“Mostly ones combating third-world poverty.”

“Because?”

I shrugged a little. “Because they need the money more than I do. The utility it gives people in Africa is way greater than the utility it gives me, so I…”

“So you have to give it away, right?” Menno shook his head. “The world doesn’t need a hypocrite like me; it needs more people like you.”

“Menno…” I said, as if his name, the same as that of the founder of his religion, was an exoneration.

He was quiet for a time, then: “You said you needed someone to put on the—what did you call it? The beamline?”

“Well, yeah, but that person probably won’t survive.”

“Use me,” said Menno.

“What?”

“I’m old; use me.”

“That’s—wow, well, that’s… that’s very decent of you, but we need someone we can boost up two states. That means starting with a Q1.”

“Who, by definition, can’t give informed consent. But I can.”

“Yes. But you’re not a p-zed.”

Menno got up. “Follow me,” he commanded. I did so, and so did Pax; he led us back into his den. “It’s been years,” he said. “I’m not sure which of these cupboards they’re in, but…” He gestured his permission for me to open them, and I did so. The first was filled with piles of old tractor-feed computer printouts, and I told him that. “Try the next one,” he said.

I did—and there they were.

Two green hockey pucks.

“You kept them?” I asked.

“You said you needed a p-zed. Make me one.”

My heart was pounding. “But what if you don’t wake up?”

“Do what you did to Travis Huron. Use that gizmo…”

“The quantum tuning fork. But it doesn’t always work.”

“I’m willing to have you try.”

“Menno, for God’s sake, I can’t—”

He held up a hand. “Padawan, who taught you about the trolley problem? Look at me. I’m the fat guy—and there are seven billion people on the tracks who might well be killed if the Russians and Americans go to war.”

Menno and I had briefly considered flying to Saskatoon, but trying to figure out how to get Pax there—finding a doggy crate, and so on—would have taken as much time as flying would have saved, and so all three of us clambered into my Mazda. After we’d been on the highway for a couple of hours, Menno surprised me by saying, “It really is a boring landscape, isn’t it?”

So much had been turned upside down in my world of late, I don’t think I’d have been surprised if he’d pulled off his dark glasses to reveal a perfectly normal pair of functioning baby blues.

“It is,” I said, “but, um, how can you tell?”

“The road. It’s perfectly flat. We haven’t gone up or down a hill for ages.”

Pax was in the back seat. I’d let her ride with her head sticking out the rear window, a common pleasure for dogs whose owners could drive but a rare treat, apparently, for her. After a while, though, she’d stretched out, her head on my side of the car, which was where the sun was pouring in.

Since we were planning to do it all without stopping for a meal, and so I could avoid the stretch of highway on which I’d previously been attacked, we were taking the Yellowhead Highway, bypassing Regina. As we came to the sign marking the provincial border, I announced, “We’re leaving Manitoba.”

Menno nodded. “Did you hear about that American couple? They got hopelessly lost, see? So they pull into a gas station, and the husband goes inside. ‘Where are we?’ he asks the man behind the cash desk. ‘Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,’ the man replies. The husband leaves, and, as he re-enters the car, his wife says, ‘So? What did he say?’ ‘I don’t know,’ the husband replies. ‘He didn’t speak English.’”

It was worth a smile at best, but I figured the polite thing to do was to make an audible laugh, and I did so. Satisfied, Menno turned in his seat as much as his bulk would allow, and he leaned his head against a scrunched-up sweater he’d placed against the side window. Soon enough I heard the guttural wheeze of his snoring. As we sped along, I wondered if he closed his eyes when he slept or if they just stared out, unmoving.

One disadvantage of the Yellowhead was that amenities were few and far between. But, just when my bladder was about to go supernova, a rest stop presented itself. Menno and I took turns in the outhouse, and Pax relieved herself on the grass. When we were back on the road again, I broached a difficult subject. “You know who lives in Saskatoon now?”

“Kayla Huron,” Menno replied. “You told me.”

“Not just Kayla,” I said. “Her brother, too. Travis.”

Very softly: “Oh.”

“Kayla finally told him the truth: that he’d been a Q2, and that he’d been knocked down into a coma by an external force, and then she’d managed to bring him out of it as a Q3.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, and—oh, you’ll like this—when Kayla said he’d been a quantum psychopath, Travis replied, ‘Well, I always knew I was a little bit crazy.’”

“What?” said Menno. Then, getting it: “Oh! Clever lad.”

“He is—although not so much a lad anymore. But she didn’t tell him what had caused him to lose consciousness, not specifically.”

“Good, good.” A pause. “How is he doing?”

“Better every day. Still mostly uses a motorized wheelchair, but the physio is going well. He’s back on normal food, and his jaw muscles are getting stronger. Got to eat a steak for the first time last week. Even I was cheering.”

“Ah, well, I’m… I’m glad he’s making progress.”

“Yeah.” I let another kilometer roll by, then: “Look, I know what you said about the prisoner’s dilemma, but…”

“But there’s a good chance I’m going to meet my maker soon, isn’t there?”

“Well… yeah. And so, you know, I was wondering, would you like to see Travis?” And, as soon as that awkward sentence was out, I began to kick myself for saying “see” to the man I’d blinded.

But Menno nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, if he’s willing. The Christian thing to do is ask forgiveness, and this is my last chance for that, isn’t it?”

And so we pulled over again, and I called Rebekkah’s house. She answered, and greeted me warmly; there was nothing to indicate that her daughter had yet told her that she’d broken up with me. I explained to Rebekkah that I was on my way to Saskatoon, accompanied by someone who had known Travis back in 2000 and early 2001, and asked if it would be all right if we stopped in to say hello? She took the cordless handset to Travis, I explained what was happening to him, and his exact words were, “No shit? Warkentin? Yeah, sure. Bring him by.”

We still had a long drive ahead of us—and the time had come, the Warkentin said, to talk of many things. He filled me in on the details of the Lucidity experiments, and I told him even more about what Kayla and Victoria had discovered about the quantum states of consciousness. But every hour, at the top of the clock, I put on the CBC for five minutes. As we were entering Saskatoon, the female newsreader grimly shared this: “Open hostilities now exist between Russia and the United States. The Russian submarine Petrozavodsk, in Canadian waters in the Beaufort Sea north of Tuktoyaktuk, this afternoon reportedly torpedoed and sank a US Navy destroyer, the USS Paul Hamilton, which had a crew complement of two hundred and eighty…”