THE WOMAN UNDER THE WORLD

by Steven Utley

Steven Utley’s Silurian tales, launched in Asimov’s in 1993, now number almost three dozen and have also appeared or are about to appear in F&SF, Analog, the UK-based Postscripts, Sci Fiction, Revolution Science Fiction, the online edition of Cosmos Magazine (based Down Under), and Peter Crowther’s We Think, Therefore We Are anthology, forthcoming from DAW Books. The author also has an anthology that he co-edited with Michael Bishop, Passing for Human, that has just come out from PS Publishing.

The pod splits open with a hiss, and the glowing being steps out, looks about itself in confusion, takes it cannot say how long to understand what it is seeing, though it could not have said why what it sees is all so puzzling. It finds itself at one end of a chamber hewn from solid rock and braced with timbers. Behind it, the pod lies against the wall like a smashed tomato. Ahead, at the angle of a bend, it makes out the shapes of a large television screen and a battery of monitoring devices, including a television camera mounted on a tripod. Behind this array is a metal door. As vision continues to improve, a man’s face appears on the television screen. His mouth moves, the glowing being knows the man is speaking, but nothing can be heard. It wants, and tries, to say, What the hell’s going on here? Where the hell am I? but cannot be certain that it succeeds in uttering even the most inarticulate sounds. No, wait, the man on the screen flinches—response. So it has done something, not sure what, but something. The man looks offscreen and shakes his head. Then another face, a woman’s, crowds into view and she, too, speaks soundlessly. The glowing being takes a step forward, and the expressions on both faces onscreen become alarmed. The man gestures unmistakably, stop, move back, stay back. The glowing being steps backward and notices a wide yellow and black stripe painted across the floor, just in front of its (are those my?) toes. The stripe’s meaning is clear: This Far And No Farther. It looks at the television screen and nods, and now it realizes that the screen, the monitoring devices, and the metal door are reflected in a large mirror set in the angle of an L-shaped chamber. The real articles are at the far end of the other arm of the L, or perhaps even reflected through a series of mirrors set in the corners of a tremendous series of L-shaped chambers. The image of mirrors stretching toward infinity is dizzying. The glowing being staggers to the left, extends a hand to steady itself against the wall, sees or feels or in any event is aware of fingers burning into the rock like poking soft cheese. Draws back and astonishedly regards four smoking holes in the wall. Its gaze gradually travels up and across the wall, to dull gray metal housings mounted high, like wasps’ nests. Pipes of the same metal extend from these housings along the juncture of wall and ceiling, around the bend of the L, through all the bends of the Ls, and disappear into sockets set above the metal door. More monitoring devices, it decides, shielded with lead, shielded cables. An abandoned mine or an unfinished section of some supersecret subterranean military complex buried deep inside some mountain. Yes. It’s all starting to make sense, finally. Look at the screen, at the man and the woman. The man seems to be pleading. For what? Logically, for calm and patience. Be calm, be patient. Whatever the hell this is all about, we’re working on it. Yes. That’s probably it. The man nods back, and then his face and the woman’s collapse into a white dot at the center of the screen. The glowing being stands at its end of the chamber, on its own side of the yellow and black stripe And No Farther, and waits for it knows not how long.

Then the woman reappears onscreen and says, “Sorry about the accommodations,” and the glowing being realizes without surprise, I can hear now. “We’re preparing a facility for you. It’ll be more comfortable. And safer. Safer for everybody. Meanwhile, this is the best we could do on short notice.”

I know you, thinks the glowing woman (by now the glowing being has determined that much about itself, she is in fact a woman), and she says, “Micol” (for she has finally recognized Micol), “Micol,” and, yes, unsurprisingly, that is her voice, “Micol, what—”

Micol flinches at the sound of her name, adjusts something at her end, announces, “That’s better.” She makes an elaborate business of examining the console at that end and avoiding eye contact at this end. She says, “You understand that it’ll be best if you stay behind the yellow line there, don’t you? We, uh, we don’t want you frying the electronic equipment.”

“Micol, what am I am doing here? Where is here? What happened?”

“We’re trying to find out. Believe me.” Micol’s lips compress for a moment. “But this is so—you just have to be patient. Try and be patient. Please.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“There was an accident. No, I mean an incident.”

“Well, one or the other, something’s wrong with this picture. I’m supposed to be—the last thing I remember is the jump station, the tech counting down. What happened?”

“The chief’ll tell you about it when he gets here.”

“But where is here?”

But Micol doesn’t answer the question, and the chief, when he comes onscreen, looks haggard and frightened, with eyes sunk in bruised-looking flesh. He says, “I’m going to make this as simple as I know how. I told you in the first briefing that the spacetime anomaly is essentially where Point A and Point B happen to come together. But, more exactly, they approach each other. They’re separate points and always remain separate points no matter how closely they approach each other. There’s always going to be an infinitesimal gap between them, possibly less than a Planck unit, right down at the level of quantum foam. But, still, a gap. Till now, objects, animals, people’ve all gone through without mishap. But we think Point A and Point B somehow got out of alignment on this particular occasion—when Phyllis Lewis tried to go through. Because of the misalignment, she didn’t go through.”

The glowing woman says, “Why are you referring to me in the third person?”

“Listen carefully. Phyllis Lewis didn’t go through, she’s safe, no need to worry about her, but something else did go through. Whenever something goes through the spacetime anomaly, it produces a sort of echo, you might even call it a ghost. After-images, except that they aren’t images, really, but electromagnetic shadows. Whatever goes through creates a sort of template, and for the briefest instant afterward there’s something left. Sort of a free-standing, highly localized anomaly in its own right. In this case, it’s been given definition by the idea of Phyllis Lewis. It thinks it is Phyllis Lewis.”

“Well,” says the glowing woman, in a flash of Phyllis Lewis’ inimitable humor, “isn’t that a kick in the teeth!”

By now the glowing woman has determined that she is myself, Phyllis Lewis, some approximation thereof. No: I am, I was, I am this person. I know everything she knew, remember everything she remembered.

I remember being shown one of the biological specimens the robot probe had brought back through the spacetime anomaly, remember looking at it blankly, asking, What is it? “Look at it,” I was told. I am looking at it, I said, it looks like enough sushi for a family of six. “Look at it, Phyl!” I’m a tech, I protest, not a marine biologist. “Oh, come on, Phyl, think back to your books about prehistoric times. Here’s a marine arthropod with a trifurcation running the length of the body, cephalon, thorax, pygidium—” The tone of voice compelled me to look at the creature more carefully. Then, of course, I realized what it was and even why I hadn’t recognized it: it wasn’t the kind of thing you expected to see in fresh condition. I said, incredulously, Jeez, it looks like a trilobite. “Yeah.” But they all went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago. “Yeah.” But—! “Yeah.”

I remember being asked to join an advance team that would go through the spacetime anomaly, to the world that lay at the other end or on the other side or wherever, whatever it was.

I remember going to Port Aransas on the coast for a weekend getaway with my husband—”our last chance,” he called it, “for four hundred million years.” We had rented a beach condo and arrived late in the afternoon, just as a storm broke; the ferry got us across the shipping channel a beat or two ahead of driving rain, howling wind, lightning, and thunder. A thick smell of insecticide practically smacked us in the face when we opened the door. Our choices were to endure it or go huddle in the car; we chose to endure. The condo was furnished in Early Indifferent, everything shading back and forth between beige and blah, upholstery, carpet, walls, reproductions of two landscapes and one still life. It barely qualified as decor at all. We turned the fans on high in hopes of dissipating the smell and unpacked and made do while the storm blew itself out. The rain had stopped by dawn the following morning, and the overcast was breaking up. Although the fans had run all night long, the smell seemed undiminished in its potency; we tried opening all the doors and windows, but the insecticide smell finally drove us out of doors. Not that we really minded being out of doors. I proposed a walk on the beach; we could make our way around to the town when we got hungry. There were cacti and little yellow blossoms among the dune grass, and small lizards and a huge ant bed on the path itself. A bumblebee crossed in front of us, then an orange butterfly. We marveled, and I said, You don’t expect to find bugs at the beach, and my husband said easily, “The insecticide should’ve been enough of a clue.” We emerged from the dunes and held hands like teenagers as we walked along the beach. Where vehicles hadn’t packed it down the dark rain-dimpled sand looked as fine and crumbly as brown sugar. Shells and pieces of shells and tangles of orange-brown seaweed lay everywhere, gulls wheeled overhead, sandpipers ran through the foam. A small diving bird I couldn’t identify repeatedly plunged headfirst into the surf. Among the foraging wading birds was another I didn’t know, some kind of heron or crane, and I resolved privately to brush up on my shore birds. I also saw a darting sand-colored crab no bigger around than my thumbnail, the mouths of filter feeders’ dens, and a stranded Portuguese man-of-war. Nothing existed at this end of the island that wasn’t geared to the wants of tourists and the needs of those who catered to tourists, but across the channel on the mainland lay another world entirely, a landscape littered with petro-industrial hardware. Visible from the island, against a backdrop of cranes and oil storage tanks, an immense rig for offshore drilling operations lay on its side like some child Titan’s discarded toy. Out to sea, a long low ship glided like a phantom across the rim of the horizon, and I could just barely see two upright rigs. Come on, I said, there’s a little pagan ritual we must perform here. We kicked off our sandals and waded into the cool water up to our knees, stood feeling the wave action suck sand out from under our heels; he dipped his hand into the water, brushed his fingers across my face, and I ran my tongue over my lips and said, We’ve lived inland too long. I was excited, happy, and I felt I wanted, needed, to say more, perhaps something about the irresistible call of the sea, how the sea flavors our blood, but I felt too self-conscious. And then I noticed tears in his eyes. Darling, darling, I asked, what is it?

Curiously, though, as my sense of identity sharpens, my sense of being in a real place diminishes. In a dream strange things may happen in accordance with some strange or even indiscernible logic. You can accept a dream on its own terms up to a point beyond which an element of the dream becomes off-putting and you suddenly reject the dream. You remember that an important character in the dream is dead or that a certain activity or situation is simply impossible. And you awaken.

Then perhaps I am awakening. If I look away from the walls of my prison, they vanish, and the monitors, too, and everything else, and then when I look at them again they are there, but somehow less convincingly so.

I tell myself, Think this through now. Do you really believe that material things don’t exist if you aren’t looking directly at them? Or thinking about them? Perhaps the question needs to be inverted: Do you believe the things you are looking at and thinking about actually exist without reference to yourself ? The chief speaks of a ghost. How do you confine a ghost? How do you transport a ghost to a place of confinement—especially if it is supposedly bleeding lethal radiation and can burn holes in solid rock with its touch? How can you even have substance or occupy space? You’re supposed to be an electromagnetic pulse. Why even bother to construct a cage for a phenomenon as short-lived as an electromagnetic pulse? You’d fry electronic equipment. Is all of this, then, occurring only in my head, in my shadow of a head, that is, during an infinitesimal moment?

And now I recall a Durrell line read in college, “Are people continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features—the temporal flicker of old silent film?”

C’est fucking moi. You only think you were a person named Phyllis Lewis. You only think you have a body and organs. You only think you are, or at least were, human. But you are a ghost of a real human being, not even a real ghost at that. And there is no P.A. system here, no TV cameras or monitors, no prison deep inside the earth.

But part of me still wants to believe otherwise. It protests, How, then, do we communicate with—?

And then it catches itself up short. Of course: we don’t communicate with anybody. There is no them with whom to communicate. It’s just you and I. Talking to ourselves. Talking to myself. Existing for a timeless interval, but only as a side-effect or by-product of particle decay. And alone. Alone. Alone.

No. Not quite. My husband and I waded into the cool water up to our knees, and he dipped his hand into the water, brushed his fingers across my face, and I was happy, excited by the prospect of going through the anomaly but deeply satisfied to be standing knee-deep in water with my husband. And then I noticed tears in his eyes. Darling, darling, I asked, what is it? He almost sobbed. “Whoever says time travel won’t have its martyrs, just as space travel did? This anomaly business is so new and different and—weird. Who knows what could happen?” Nothing is going to happen to me, I said, I’m going to slip through and help set up a jump station on the other side, and then I’m coming right back. To you. To all this. Promise.

I have, for as long as I do have it, for either a nanosecond or an eon, everything Phyllis Lewis has. I have my memories.

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