Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

For two things had happened: Shimmer Theory research had found on the monitor records for the top of the blast a quasi-emotional agitation in the SHED super-forces which here imaged-out not as mega- heat but as handfuls of light networking and veer-bending among one another so that for the first time light bent back through other light, which gave to these grid-warps some self-correcting aim intelligent as AI but less clear and more surprising; the other thing that happened was that, with the return of normal void to this already legendary airspace, the animal-operated inflatable began unbidden to descend.

What evidence was there of mega-heat elsewhere in the blast area on blast night? Heat had been assumed by my people because of the blast’s overwhelming glare. Shock waves after all had not penetrated the blast barrier, but the instruments inferred levels of heat; and now, in the absence of sure signs, heat itself came into question.

How research raced toward concepts of heatless incineration by light.

Leading Whats sensed that we had all over again the dynamics of the arms race without its content.

One How lab detected changes in SHED forces. They swirled and plotted some personal dance-like system no longer apparently reciprocals of barrier-function. Some SHEDs infra-flickered in the outer zone. But SHED forces were thinning out. One small swarm or “relationship” of SHEDs that had been observed faring forth across the frontier, easing back, faring forth, after a week suddenly burst and vanished. Hows claimed that as post-blast barrier faded, at least for some of the population, so must Shimmer function.

But one of my people argued that “containment” or barrier-formation capability in SHED forces might be decaying toward low-grade detonation. This shunted us, and competing labs, in a hurry back to waste compaction, which How thought had always held that “it” all basically came down to. Whats asked, Had there been any waste? Other Hows, too.

As the animal-operated meteorological device made its ultra-slow descent (though now commanded to do what it was already doing), debate arose (as it will about matters of fact) regarding what animal was in the inflatable. No Transitional came forward to say. Logs like strings of opaque code in the blast night monitor digitals were said to show that the project had placed aboard its craft an ancient, friendly reptile hybridized to bear its young alive yet post-fertile and of a peculiar maturity that had profiled it for this assignment.

No, said another group of project people known for the high humor of their problem-solving: “it” was an even more highly classified crypto- human “experiment,” a man-woman who had accidentally proved immune to lethal radioactive leakage at a fruit-and-vegetable processing plant. This, it was now pointed out, had been along the perimeter of the region where the exiled teacher, my child’s and, I will add, now almost mine, so belabored by her bosses but also indirectly the World Council, whose constitutional say in loco-national schooling remained a gray area, had thrown fresh light on the widespread sadness which itself was now changing. Blood signals from the meteorological vehicle’s occupant became an unknown code that yet seemed not alien.

How researchers formed a secret project group.

The inflatable device, inflating, had slowed its descent despite commands not to. One afternoon a schoolchild’s doodle reproduced exactly one of the Shimmer configurations that How labs had kept under wraps even from each other, and beneath the gifted doodle the label LOOMS must refer to a story which now appeared in print a thousand miles away the next day. Upon which its author had to admit her child had told it to her at breakfast.

It was of a type of planet called a “plagnet” where everyone had myriad beings inside them called Lumes; and if you understood this, you might live it by sharing some of those Lumes; and so, on that plagnet, people stopped wanting to be other people instead of themselves. Which the mother in question said she had never imagined her child could want.

Who was this mother? At a historic moment when unexpected developments daily crept up on us from behind like quantum alternatives which might yet be both/and, this story was more than itself. For, through code-homonym LOOMS / LUMES and the mother’s admission that her daughter confessed to “bees in her bonnet” when she had woken that morning of the story, a chain-link appeared, it was reported, with the Shimmer configuration doodle torn from the school notebook of that other child a thousand miles away.

For the World Council authorities, disturbed by a How hypothesis that a pattern of blood signals monitored from the descending vehicle’s occupant matched exactly the classified SHED “relationship” which the school notebook’s doodle had reproduced, now traced it to the suspect teacher-exile, who herself had recently announced that the widespread sadness needed to be redefined.

She got a message to me. Visit soon. While tending her bees on a fruit-and-vegetable farm overlooked by a hill on which was a church built entirely of stained glass, she had found the bees’ patterns of affection and general neighboring an exact repeat of new “brain-beans” (she called them) multiplying their light inside her so she was now able not just to receive things miles off but even to give light to what she contemplated, in broad daylight and in the dark. Also, her hands had on them often now a light like honey.

How Ologists proved she had been infected with grandiose themes by the luminosity of old magnesium blues used in the local glass, when in fact as I knew she had internalized them with the help of ancient metal-clay templates in each of us. Others thought her far from harmless, for she occupied a famous exile; and lately, among members of the worldwide Sadness group, there now arose more than a story, as if it were long known: a woman with blue hair, golden fingers, and beautiful webbed feet had been sent to the lone center of her land because she had a new offspring whenever she wanted, and could have one with wings and grass for fur one week and the next week full-grown twins with original sounds glowing from their skin that many people could hear, and a month later a new child that could be alone happily. And the woman had all the world in her like sun and strangely didn’t need company there where she had been put in the lonely center of that land. Another strain of this featured a man , and he had fine earthen feet and soft, porcupine-shaped hair and hands that changed color, and he too definitely gave birth. And in one faraway school six teenagers who fell asleep during bio-chem class woke with a cry and found that they had all dreamed this tale told by a woman who, though they had never seen her, proved to be my famed exile, who in the dream taught that the story-person was sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, never both at once.

Not recently heard from, the once distinguished particle geologist with a crater in him turned to the harvesting of stained-glass minerals. Some How scientists became Whats overnight and claimed that the interesting work was now interdisciplinary. My own attachment to the great event, the loss of that neighbor nation, I one day saw confusingly and not clearly but chokingly, was like when I lost the mother of my child and heard her voice for months as on an interdisciplinary telephone or as only a function of my own deafness, and was glad I had spoken to her so often before she died.

For a week the meteorological inflatable stopped descending, and the World Council put out word that the vehicle had been commanded to pause for a period of re-entry observation. Ordinary citizens hundreds of miles apart were saying they felt now happily exiled —alone, yet self-contained, able to speak foreign languages and perceive what they didn’t need to talk about.