Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

The notorious teacher, with whom I had corresponded and become attuned, said she knew what they meant; asked if she was propagating some new immortality, she said she did not believe in life after death. Admitting death was hard to prove, she was accused of such influence upon these many other, far-flung self-styled exiles that, to my alarm and even, I think, my child’s, she was further removed to a top-secret job at a remote mountain station whence nonetheless were now said to emanate a range of curious reports. Doublings it sometimes seemed. Like the dubious radiation-immune man-woman said to be replacing the reptile in the now again descending meteorological vehicle. Or my friend herself being that passenger. It might have been merely a religious era supplanting the pervasive emptiness wrongly inferred in the spread of SHED from the original blast. Yet the long-awaited data on Shimmer-function life at the ceiling of the original blast now half-neglected in the flurry of interest in these personality breakthroughs so rich yet, in their spread, so alarming, consolidated the thought of the How spokesmen to embrace the imaginative complexity of science so disquieting that they began to mention global personality malfunction. The force that modifies the thing becomes the thing itself, it was said.

An infra-scanner wrote a sonata for experimental lasar and unison mass-chorus. It was based on the identity of the schoolchild’s legendary doodle and the steady forms of occupant blood-signal transmitted from the descending vehicle. These patterns in turn matched one of the Shimmer configurations. Thus, doubts were reawakened as to whether the unilateral blast had really been contained.

One bio-hawk heard in the sonata not the Mass Mind the World Council warned of, but beam-mass equation in the solo laser that argued new particle uses for non-nuclear conflict once called “conventional.” Old line How funding accelerated the quest to isolate and capture a Shimmer-function, and in a few labs this acceleration caused time itself to narrow and condense a billion times more swiftly than a New Zealand canyon over unthinkable centuries. The particle geologist reported that the counter-crater inside him receded yet opened larger. He had found better terms for the post-blast sadness anyway, but when he told these terms, he was accused of being in touch with the doubly exiled teacher, who he then said he sensed was dead, though I, who loved her, knew she was not. His new names for the post-blast sadness had come to him during a dream of overflight: he was above the vanished nation which was visible as scaleless clusters of cities in the night. Hows, now in a race against time itself, bypassed such terms of his as “threshold” and “the alien New” to extract from his term “tension” a revived essence of “tensor.” This was a device to measure the invasors causing the so-called sadness that was really straight-out depression according to the World Council and chemically treatable though socially intolerable.

Among the global sadness group, if group it was, a new spirit arose overnight. In one region it was a power to cooperate in reshaping community economics so that people without a job or home, say, were seen as having blindly or unjustly given those things away to others who themselves were now possessed of too much, a risk signaled in awful dreams, queer pique at family members, and a need to show off by giving everything away. Cadres of us in our modest nation began somehow to build a land we could understand. On one small continent noted for its autobiographical literature and its undersea sports, people began to move more slowly and were filmed by news services. They were in the grip of a force called Transitional (after our new world citizens-without-a-country) which sought to be at rest. In one extreme northern country, original sadness people stopped wearing heavy clothing out of doors, and no single How answers such as Changing One’s Life or Muscle Memory Re-education covered every case of this. How Shimmer sensors were picking up nothing anywhere, and the World Council found more funding to develop a still finer sensor. Transitional People from the vanished nation were chosen from all over the world to be Tensor-tested. A news organ reported the blast frontier now “shorn of Shimmer forces.”

How science liaisons at the World Council announced new funding to prove the link between at-large Shimmer-invasors and actual brain change. The alarmed, now prospering mother-author of the story her child had told her called the doctor upon being visited in her kitchen one late, dark afternoon by, she was certain, the notorious exile-teacher. From that person’s hands came light, in her words the clear message, “It comes from you, not to you.” The mother went gladly into custody. Upon being interrogated she said she’d never had one of these experiences and would not know one if she had had. She went on record, as an author, in urging the repopulation of the crater country.

The weather vehicle slowed its descent. Descending evidently toward the center of the crater as the World Council monitor confidently predicted, more like an entire field sector or even Tropo-pause than a plottable object traversing such space, beginning to wait again as if it would take everything in its vicinity with it. Its meteorological inflatable inflated at an altitude of five miles and, slowly coming down on a dark, late afternoon, visible when I looked up at a plane far distant though seemingly next to the weather vehicle, I could have sworn my love was contemplating that plane wherever she was; and at that moment without benefit of instruments I became aware of a change in the weather vehicle’s course or angle less of position than of nature or a mode of evolution. Was it not descending now toward us?

Soon flanked round the clock by aircraft, it would land square in the middle of our modest nation, the World Council monitor predicted. This time the prediction was right, and the meteorological vehicle came to rest amid dust-storms from assisting aircraft at a point a How geometer found to be dead-center of our country. It was wrapped almost instantly by World Council advisors and flown from the scene. Competing Hows demanded to know why WC had picked one lab over others to evaluate the contents of the vehicle. Secrecy we could have predicted would end in confusion.

Tensor tests continued apace, and many Transitionals were on such a sharp and happy Alert High that world niacin-supply controls came under scrutiny. Other testees seemed too self-contained to respond to a classified new death-therapy exploring waste-disposal but also aiming to discredit the exile-teacher’s Death-hard-to-prove remark. Tensors could only isolate, not measure, Shimmer relationship in, say, some knee-joint, eye, hand, or inner duct. When delicate amputations failed to “corral” shimmers that the instruments and operational tensors had shown to be there, How labs again pursued Shimmers as fleeting functions of barrier event. The great crater had become almost instantly ancient in its own private time and venerable, standing out in a line of cliffs deep-mapping what atlases had shown for a thousand years.

We knew in our bones that a fallout sample is worth little without real people on the spot, their organisms protected only by their openness. This view was held by Hows to be a result of Shimmer-contamination. But the Council thought to take advantage of the spreading enthusiasm to venture into the crater. Seeing through the emptiness of that place to resources in ourselves, some of us as if we were Transitionals as we imagined they ought to feel, thought of exploring at least the sheer walls. Such élan was ascribed to Transitionals said now to desire relocation in our former neighbor nation, that the World Council hung fire on the project.