Extinction Point (50 page)

Rebecca had not wanted to leave her school and her friends. The other children liked her and, unlike most geniuses, she had the social graces to match her intelligence. She had spent many years being brilliant at not showing that she was brilliant. However, even at the age of ten she heard the call of something else: numbers, figures, formula.

Mathematics
.

While other kids watched
MTV
and read the umpteenth
Harry Potter,
she was watching
Nova
on her local
PBS
channel and reading
Sagan
and
Hawking,
devouring
anything by
Gian-Carlo Rota
and
Julian Barbour
.

She appreciated mathematics as others loved poetry: she could hear the
meter
in a constant, feel the
rhyme
in an integer, and sense the
prose
hidden in quantum foam. It combined to create a stunning sense of wonder in her, a wonder that never diminished. With the wonder came an awareness of something intangible, of something beneath mathematics something just outside intelligibility that, just as a molecule consisted of electrons, protons and neutrons, made mathematics something more. Gave to it a
rhythm
and a meaning.

To Rebecca, it was a sense of God.

No formula could express what she was experiencing. Like a woman who lived in a two dimensional world trying to grasp a third new dimension of reality, she did not possess the senses needed to interpret the undercurrent that she felt rippling through each and every equation. Its ineffableness at once frustrated, terrified and excited her.

And now, in this reconstituted world, here it was again, the same sense that something was at work behind the scenes of her life, an undercurrent pulling at her mind again, catching it in its tow and sweeping it out into a sea of uncertainty and mystery.

No. She did not believe that this was a miracle at all.

* * *

Twenty

If you didn't know the path was there, you could easily drive right past it. It was just a dirt track, not even a gravel road, which led through the forest to the lake. Simone had asked Jim several times to get the path paved, but he had steadfastly refused, he liked the fact that the place was off the beaten track - literally. Instead he had agreed to spread gravel the last hundred yards or so to the house so that they wouldn't track mud inside when the ground was wet.

As Jim turned off the main road and onto the rough dirt track that led to the lakeside cabin, he truly felt that he was leaving his everyday life behind. It was a boundary between work and relaxation, a living fence of birch and oak that separated him from reality.

Safe. Secluded.

Of course, Simone was not with him this time. She most likely had been dead for the past year or so since the
Slip
- the event had finally gained its own sobriquet as civilization had re-exerted its hold. She and lark were undoubtedly one of the estimated five million people who had lost their lives in the U.S. alone on that day.

As the days had passed with no word from his ex-wife or his daughter, Jim had volunteered for clean-up duty, in the hope that he might find some clue to whether Simone and Lark had survived. With each body that he pulled from the burned out shell of a vehicle, he wondered if it was maybe his Simone or his daughter.

It took eight months to clear the freeways and streets of Los Angeles, to remove the bodies from the cars and trucks and bury them in mass graves. It fell to the operators of the mobile cranes and heavy-lifters to clear the tin-can-corpses of the hundreds of thousands of vehicles from the roads and freeways.

The work had been soul destroying, painful, heartbreaking and horrible ... but ... it was also a test of fire for Jim; a bridge from the old reality to the new and Jim had made his way through it and come out the other side more complete than when he entered.

He pulled his truck in front of the log cabin, half expecting it to be occupied by some down and out or one of the many transients that the
Slip
had created in its wake.

Instead, he found it empty and just as he remembered it, sitting on the shores of Shadow Lake, the water lapping at the supports of the old wooden dock, their paddleboat bobbing languidly on the waters ebb and flow, just as it always had.

Surrounded by thick woods on all sides save for the lake, they had bought this colonial style log cabin within a year of getting married and escaped to its tranquility every chance they could.

After Lark's death, it had become his hide-away for a year. It was also his bar and his confessional, but mostly Jim liked to think of it as his
pupae
where he had entered as a broken, disheartened, self-hating child-killer and emerged as an almost-whole human and critically acknowledged novelist.

Right now, it was just somewhere to be.

Its creosote stained logs looked welcoming and familiar after all the disquiet and horror he had experienced in the months after the Slip. With the smell of sap and dry leaves redolent in the air, he pushed the key into the lock and opened the front door. Finally, he felt at ease

"Home," he said as he stepped over the threshold to the accompanying Brak-rak-rak of a woodpecker somewhere deep in the surrounding forest.

* * *

Dust sheets covered the furniture and the scent of undisturbed air hung heavy in every room. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed patiently.
Well, at least the electricity is on
, he thought as he carried his bags into the front room. Tomorrow, he'd need to take a trip down to the store and grab some supplies.

There is an odd emptiness to a house that has been vacant for a long period of time, an echoic air that goes far beyond the empty rooms and silence. It's temporal, as though the very walls have gone into hibernation, waiting for the owners to return but at the same time, all events that have ever taken place seem frozen and available, as though one could reach out and pluck a single experience from the stillness. Jim felt that melancholia now as he moved from room to room checking the lights and windows, making sure all were working and intact. The place had a stillness that seemed more appropriate for a church than a home.

"Welcome home," he said to himself.

And at that moment, the phone in the hallway began to ring, demanding his attention.

"Hello?" said Jim, into the phone’s receiver.

"
James Baston
?" a man's voice questioned.

"Who is this?"

At the other end of the phone line, the voice paused for a second before continuing. "
My name is Doctor Mitchell Lorentz, and I have an offer that, I hope, you will not want to refuse.
"

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