Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Welcome,” he said. “Welcome on this dark day.” The blaze enveloping him appeared designed to give the lie to his words, to set its brightness against the darkness of the times. He was dressed simply, in black T-shirt over black jeans, and looked to Quichotte oddly unimpressive with his slicked-back black hair and doctored smile, a B-list actor in an A-list part, a spear carrier whom events had thrust into the spotlight at the center of the stage. Awwal Sant reinvented as Evel Cent. He didn’t seem like the man to command the closing scenes of the drama. Yet here he was. There was nobody else. It was his show.

“Are you well?” he asked Salma. “We heard you almost…”

“Yes,” Salma answered. “But I decided to make a thrilling recovery and daredevil-drive across America in a matter of hours, defying Mad Max gangs and universe-eating black holes en route instead. That was option B.”

“I’m delighted, of course,” said Dr. Evel. “We all are, my dear.”

“Can nothing be done to reverse the decay?” Salma asked, changing the subject, and Quichotte saw that she was still in the grip of the optimistic fantasy that some scientific wand could be waved and things would go back to being as they had been before.

Evel Cent laughed, a weak little laugh, and then said I-told-you-so. “I am the last Cassandra of the human story,” he said. “I prophesied and nobody believed, and this time it’s not only Troy that will burn, but Sparta and Ithaca and all the Achaeans too.” Such self-aggrandizing talk, Quichotte thought, was pointless in the moment of crisis, when only action counted, and insisting on having been right was just narcissism. “I’m afraid nothing can be done,” Cent went on. “We are in the last moments, and I fear the hordes at the gates will not be saved.”

“Have you been sending people through?” Salma asked. “The NEXT terminal, is it working fine? How many people have gone through the gateway to the neighbor Earth? Do you have any contact with the other side?”

“Can we speak privately?” Evel Cent took her by the elbow and began leading her away from Quichotte, but she reached out and took the old man by the hand.

“My friend and I have made a long, dangerous, and tiring journey,” she said. “I’d like him to hear what you have to say.”

Then they entered one of the small areas of darkness, a glass door was shut behind them, and they were enclosed in a soundproofed space. “The truth is,” Evel Cent said, “that when I came on your show I perhaps exaggerated our situation for dramatic effect.”

“The dog,” Salma wanted to know. “Schrödinger. Is he safe?”

“I’m sorry.”

“He died?”

“I’m sorry. I made up the dog.”

“In plain English, then, you’ve got nothing,” Quichotte said. “Which, I’m assuming, is why you’re still here with the rest of us mortals, getting ready to face the music.”

“Is that right, Evel?” Salma asked. “NEXT doesn’t work?”

“It works,” Evel Cent said. “It will work. Everything about this is so radical, so post-Einsteinian, we’re having to make up the physics as we go along. The match to the neighbor Earth location has to be exact to an alarming number of decimal points. It’s just a question of getting a couple of equations to balance.”

“So it doesn’t work,” Salma said.

“There’s a story about Sir Isaac Newton,” Evel Cent told her. “He announced the theory of gravity before he’d done the math. He just knew he was right. And then he had a deadline, because he had to go down to London from Cambridge and deliver a lecture on the fully worked-out theory in front of an audience of his peers, and he worked day and night, and got the math right in time.”

“Was his deadline the end of the world?” Quichotte inquired.

“We will meet the deadline,” said Evel Cent. “In the coming hours.”

“I’d like to see the portal,” Salma said. “Will you bring us to where it is? Unless of course it’s at this stage still just a hole in your head.”

Evel Cent stiffened. “This way,” he said.

QUICHOTTE HAD IMAGINED SOMETHING out of a silent movie, some kind of Art Deco altar surrounded by crackling arcs of electricity, some sort of giant jukebox that played human beings instead of records. Circles of shining voltage would rotate around the person to be transported, moving up and down, crossing one another, down and up, until suddenly, accompanied by a reverberating clash of cymbals and a bright flash of light, the human figure would disappear.

The reality was banal. An empty room with bare walls, a glass window in one wall through which a control room filled with technology could be seen; more like a sound recording studio than an Expressionist fantasy. And at the far end of the empty room, a simple door. That was the Mayflower, the place where the dimensions joined, where the neighbor Earth rubbed up against this one. Just open the door and walk through. From one room into another. As simple as that.

Except that there was a bad connection.

Evel Cent explained. They had reliably established a number of things about the other reality: atmospheric composition, gravitational force, mean temperatures, all well within the range of what was tolerable. The balance of gases in the air was very close to our Earth’s, the g-force identical or near-identical to our own, and the climate was Earthlike. The only remaining issue was the fog.

Fog?

It had proved impossible to get a clear image of the other-Earth. It, or that part of it to which they had made a successful connection, was enveloped in a thick fog which they had been unable wholly to penetrate. CentCorp scientists had used their most sophisticated tools, looking through the NEXT connection at infrared and ultraviolet frequencies, using state-of-the-art radio imaging performed by their own alterations of the cameras mounted on space telescopes. Computer analyses of these tests indicated, with a high degree of certainty, that the place connected to was an enclosed interior space, either a domestic residence or a private office (though these notions of usage, Earth-centric as they were, the product of our own ideas about how space was used, were necessarily hypothetical). The nature and number of possible occupants was unclear.

“How great is the risk?” Quichotte asked.

“Once we have stabilized the connection,” Evel Cent told him, “which I’m hearing we will have successfully achieved momentarily, we evaluate the physical risk as low. But it must be said: travelers will arrive in an utterly alien world, not knowing the language or customs, having no wealth or assets to use, and will be at the mercy of the beings they encounter, and reliant on their own resourcefulness and wit to survive. As far as disease and illness, we can neither be certain of what infections our travelers may fall prey to, or indeed of what germs they may carry that may be harmful to their new hosts. First contact is not a sure thing.”

“So if we go, we go as refugees,” Quichotte said. “Pilgrims setting foot for the first time upon a new world, hoping the indigenous population will teach us how to survive there.”

“I’m wondering,” Salma said. “If others follow us, will they come as conquerors?”

The three of them were alone in the room with the door. Through the glass window, Quichotte could see the beginning of a commotion in the control room. Evel Cent cupped a hand around his earpiece, listened, and his face grew grim. “I have good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is, the connection has been stabilized, so the NEXT gateway is open.”

“And the bad news?” Quichotte said.

“The deterioration outside has accelerated,” Evel Cent said. “The void phenomenon is spreading rapidly. We can’t know when it will, when it may, burst upon us.”