Prayers to Broken Stones (8 page)

She paused in the light. Moved forward again. Bremen’s eyes dropped to her strong thighs, and he watched as her legs parted and closed with the heart-stopping intimacy of the unobserved. She was much closer now, and Bremen could make out the delicate shadows along her fine ribcage, the pale, pink circles of areolae, and the spreading bruise along the inside of one arm.

Bremen stepped out into the light. She stopped, arms rising across her upper body in a second’s instinctive movement, then moved toward him quickly. She opened her arms to him. He was filled with the clean scent of her hair. Skin slid across skin. Their hands moved across muscle, skin, the familiar terrain of vertebrae. Both were sobbing, speaking incoherently. Bremen dropped to one knee
and buried his face between her breasts. She bent slightly and cradled his head with her fingers. Not for a second did they relax the pressure binding them together.

“Why did you leave me?” he muttered against her skin. “Why did you go away?”

Gail said nothing. Her tears fell into his hair and her hands tightened against his back. Wordlessly she kneeled with him in the high grass.

Together they passed out of the forest just as the morning mists were burning away. In the early light the grass-covered hills gave the impression of being part of a tanned, velvety human torso, which they could reach out and touch.

They spoke softly, occasionally intertwining fingers. Each had discovered that to attempt telepathic contact meant inviting the blinding headaches that had plagued both of them at first. So they talked. And they touched. And twice before the day was over, they made love in the high, soft grass with only the golden eye of the sun looking down on them.

Late in the afternoon they crossed a rise and looked past a small orchard at a vertical glare of white.

“It’s the farm!” cried Gail, with wonder in her voice. “How can that be?”

Bremen felt no surprise. His equilibrium remained as they approached the tall old building. The saggy barn they had used as a garage was also there. The driveway still needed new gravel, but now it went nowhere, for there was no highway at the end of it. A hundred yards of rusted wire fence that used to border the road now terminated in the high grass.

Gail stepped up on the front porch and peered in the window. Bremen felt like a trespasser or a weekend house browser who had found a home that might or might not still be lived in. Habit brought them around to the back door. Gail gingerly opened the outer screen door and jumped a bit as the hinge squeaked.

“Sorry,” Bremen said. “I know I promised to oil that.”

It was cool inside and dark. The rooms were as they
had left them. Bremen poked his head into his study long enough to see his papers still lying on the oak desk and a long-forgotten transform still chalked on the blackboard. Upstairs, afternoon sunlight was falling from the skylight he had wrestled to install that distant September. Gail went from room to room, making small noises of appreciation, more often just touching things gently. The bedroom was as orderly as ever, with the blue blanket pulled tight and tucked under the mattress and her grandmother’s patchwork quilt folded across the foot of the bed.

They fell asleep on the cool sheets. Occasionally a wisp of breeze would billow the curtains. Gail mumbled in her sleep, reaching out to touch him frequently. When Bremen awoke, it was almost dark, that late, lingering twilight of early summer.

There was a sound downstairs.

He lay without moving for a long while. The air was thick and still, the silence tangible. Then came another sound.

Bremen left the bed without waking Gail. She was curled on her side with one hand lifted to her cheek, the pillow moist against her lips. Bremen walked barefoot down the wooden stairs. He slipped into his study and carefully opened the lower-right-hand drawer. It was there under the empty folders he had laid atop it. He removed the rags from the drawer.

The .38 Smith and Wesson smelled of oil and looked as new as it had the day his brother-in-law had given it to him. Bremen checked the chambers. The bullets lay fat and heavy, like eggs in a nest. The roughened grip was firm in his hand, the metal cool. Bremen smiled ruefully at the absurdity of what he was doing, but kept the weapon in his hand when the kitchen screen door slammed again.

He made no sound as he stepped from the hallway to the kitchen door. It was very dim, but his eyes had adapted. From where he stood he could make out the pale white phantom of the refrigerator. Its recycling pump chunked on while he stood there. Holding the revolver down at his side, Bremen stepped onto the cool tile of the kitchen floor.

The movement startled him, and the gun rose an inch
or so before he relaxed. Gernisavien, the tough-minded little calico, crossed the floor to brush against his legs, paced back to the refrigerator, looked up at him meaningfully, then crossed back to brush against him. Bremen kneeled to rub her neck absently. The pistol looked idiotic in his clenched hand. He loosened his grip.

The moon was rising by the time they had a late dinner. The steaks had come from the freezer in the basement, the ice-cold beers from the refrigerator, and there had been several bags of charcoal left in the garage. They sat out back near the old pump while the steaks sizzled on the grill. Gernisavien had been well fed earlier but crouched expectantly at the foot of one of the big, old wooden lawn chairs.

Both of them had slipped into clothes—Bremen into his favorite pair of cotton slacks and his light blue workshirt and Gail into the loose, white cotton dress she often wore on trips. The sounds were the same they had heard from this backyard so many times before: crickets, night birds from the orchard, the variations of frog sounds from the distant stream, an occasional flutter of sparrows in the outbuildings.

Bremen served the steaks on paper plates. Their knives made crisscross patterns on the white. They had just the steaks and a simple salad from the garden, fresh radishes and onions on the side.

Even with the three-quarter moon rising, the stars were incredibly clear. Bremen remembered the night they had lain out in the hammock and waited for
Skylab
to float across the sky like a windblown ember. He realized that the stars were even clearer tonight because there were no reflected lights from Philadelphia or the tollway to dim their glory.

Gail sat back before the meal was finished.
Where are we, Jerry?
The mindtouch was gentle. It did not bring on the blinding headaches.

Bremen took a sip of Budweiser. “What’s wrong with just being home, kiddo?”

There’s nothing wrong with being home. But where are we?

Bremen concentrated on turning a radish in his fingers. It had tasted salty, sharp, and cool.

What is this place?
Gail looked toward the dark line of trees at the edge of the orchard. Fireflies winked against the blackness.

Gail, what is the last thing you can remember?

“I remember dying.” The words hit Bremen squarely in the solar plexus. For a moment he could not speak or frame his thoughts.

Gail went on. “We’ve never believed in an afterlife, Jerry.”
Hypocritical fundamentalist parents. Mother’s drunken sessions of weeping over the Bible.
“I mean … I don’t … How can we be …”

“No,” said Bremen, putting his dish on the arm of the chair and leaning forward. “There may be an explanation.”

Where to begin? The lost years, Florida, the hot streets of the city, the day school for retarded blind children.
Gail’s eyes widened as she looked directly at this period of his life. She sensed his mindshield, but did not press to see the things he withheld.
Robby. A moment’s contact. Perhaps playing a record. Falling.

He paused to take a long swallow of beer. Insects chorused. The house glowed pale in the moonlight.

Where are we, Jerry?

“What do you remember about awakening here, Gail?”

They had already shared images, but trying to put them into words sharpened the memories. “Darkness,” she said. “Then a soft light. Rocking.
Being rocked. Holding and being held.
Walking. Finding you.”

Bremen nodded. He lifted the last piece of steak and savored the burnt charcoal taste of it.
It’s obvious we’re with Robby.
He shared images for which there were no adequate words. Waterfalls of touch. Entire landscapes of scent. A movement of power in the dark.

With Robby,
Gail’s thought echoed.
????????? In his mind.
“How?”

The cat had jumped into his lap. He stroked it idly and set it down. Gernisavien immediately raised her tail and turned her back on him. “You’ve read a lot of stories
about telepaths. Have you ever read a completely satisfying explanation of how telepathy works? Why some people have it and others don’t? Why some people’s thoughts are loud as bullhorns and others’ almost imperceptible?”

Gail paused to think. The cat allowed herself to be rubbed behind the ears. “Well, there was a really good book—no, that only came close to describing what it
felt
like. No. They usually describe it as some sort of radio or TV broadcast.
You
know that, Jerry. We’ve talked about it enough.”

“Yeah,” Bremen said. Despite himself, he was already trying to describe it to Gail. His mindtouch interfered with the words. Images cascaded like printouts from an overworked terminal. Endless Schrödinger curves, their plots speaking in a language purer than speech. The collapse of probability curves in binomial progression.

“Talk,” Gail said. He marveled that after all the years of sharing his thoughts she still did not always see through his eyes.

“Do you remember my last grant project?” he asked.

“The wavefront stuff,” she said.

“Yeah. Do you remember what it was about?”

“Holograms. You showed me Goldmann’s work at the university,” she said. She seemed a soft, white blur in the dim light. “I didn’t understand most of it, and I got sick shortly after that.”

“It was based on holographic research,” Bremen interrupted quickly, “but Goldmann’s research group was working up an analog of human consciousness … of thought.”

“What does that have to do with … with
this?
” Gail asked. Her hand made a graceful movement that encompassed the yard, the night, and the bright bowl of stars above them.

“It might help,” Bremen said. “The old theories of mental activity didn’t explain things like stroke effects, generalized learning, and memory function, not to mention the act of thinking itself.”

“And Goldmann’s theory does?”

“It’s not really a theory yet, Gail. It was a new approach, using both recent work with holograms and a line
of analysis developed in the Thirties by a Russian mathematician. That’s where I was called in. It was pretty simple, really. Goldmann’s group was doing all sorts of complicated EEG studies and scans. I’d take their data, do a Fourier analysis of them, and then plug it all into various modifications of Schrödinger’s wave equation to see whether it worked as a standing wave.”

“Jerry, I don’t see how this helps.”

“Goddamn it, Gail, it
did
work. Human thought
can
be described as a standing wavefront. Sort of a superhologram. Or, maybe more precisely, a hologram containing a few million smaller holograms.”

Gail was leaning forward. Even in the darkness Bremen could make out the frown lines of attention that appeared whenever he spoke to her of his work. Her voice came very softly. “Where does that leave the mind, Jerry … the brain?”

It was his turn to frown slightly. “I guess the best answer is that the Greeks and the religious nuts were right to separate the two,” he said. “The brain could be viewed as kind of a … well, electrochemical generator and interferometer all in one. But the mind … ah, the
mind
is something a lot more beautiful than that lump of gray matter.” He was thinking in terms of equations, sine waves dancing to Schrödinger’s elegant tune.

“So there
is
a soul that can survive death?” Gail asked. Her voice had taken on the slightly defensive, slightly querulous tone that always entered in when she discussed religious ideas.

“Hell, no,” said Bremen. He was a little irritated at having to think in words once again. “If Goldmann was right and the personality is a complex wavefront, sort of a series of low-energy holograms interpreting reality, then the personality certainly couldn’t survive brain death. The template would be destroyed as well as the holographic generator.”

“So where does that leave us?” Gail’s voice was almost inaudible.

Bremen leaned forward and took her hand. It was cold. “Don’t you see why I got interested in this whole line
of research? I thought it might offer a way of describing our … uh … ability.”

Gail moved over and sat next to him in the broad, wooden chair. His arm went around her, and he could feel the cool skin of her upper arm. Suddenly a meteorite lanced from the zenith to the south, leaving the briefest of retinal echoes.

“And?” Gail’s voice was very soft.

“It’s simple enough,” said Bremen. “When you visualize human thought as a series of standing wavefronts creating interference patterns that can be stored and propagated in holographic analogs, it begins to make sense.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It
does.
It means that for some reason our minds are resonant not only to wave patterns that we initiate but to transforms that others generate.”

“Yes,” said Gail, excited now, gripping his hand tightly. “Remember when we shared impressions of the talent just after we met? We both decided that it would be impossible to explain mindtouch to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. It would be like describing colors to a blind person …” She halted and looked around her.

“Okay,” said Bremen. “Robby. When I contacted him, I tapped into a closed system. The poor kid had almost no data to use in constructing a model of the real world. What little information he did have was mostly painful. So for sixteen years he had happily gone about building his own universe. My mistake was in underestimating, hell, never even
thinking
about, the power he might have in that world. He grabbed me, Gail. And with me, you.”