The Universe of Things Read online

  She thought she was abrupt, but thankfully Aymon didn’t seem to care. He seemed content with his own thoughts, his own daydreams, whatever was happening to him… She knew she should find the Ladies’ Room, splash her face, recover her poise. Instead, on a whim, she walked by the stream. The tender grass that had never been mown was starred with secret flowers. She knelt and dug into it with her fingers. The dirt itself was jeweled complexity, shimmering and edgy with endless life. The deeper you looked the more you saw. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere tiny knowing eyes looked back at you…

  Something gleaming on the ground attracted her attention. She followed the gleam and found a golden corpse, lying as if annealed into the earth, the limbs and trunk sealed together and shining, shining: the face half-hidden by polished waves of hair. Now she had found a dead body; no wonder the forest had felt spooky. She bent for a closer look, knowing she must touch nothing, because this was a murder mystery and she would destroy the evidence. But the golden corpse sat up, the glimmering girl fled, leaving only a forest boulder; and Viola had never seen her face. Even stone is alive; stone is the mineral matrix of all life. It was the queen, she thought.

  “That was the queen —” croaked the frog.

  He must have followed her from the terrace. Did he really have a tiny yellow Disneyfied crown perched on his head? Could that happen? He winked at her and began to dance, hopping from one webbed, splay-toed foot to the other, singing the chorus of his French folksong, English in Viola’s head:

  Oh yes, my little home!

  I would prefer it,

  For you and me, for you and me

  For you and me, for you and me

  To the pa-lace of a king!

  This time she went with the feeling. She jumped into his arms, the frog grabbed her and held her tight. He became man-sized and outrageously, unamphibianly male. They were swimming in the millpool now, and a wanton, winged companion — great-eyed, androgynous and slender — hovered over them, making its wishes plain. Viola and the frog kissed and parted, Viola passed happily to the other partner. They went zooming away, over the shining surface of the water, their wings shivering in delight, hooked up en soixante-neuf, she’d never had an orgasm like it, excitement, innocence, and delight such as she hadn’t known since, since, since forever —

  Life is wonderful.

  “You have very old-fashioned minds,” confided the gardienne, as she handed over several exquisitely wrapped packages in a delightful raw raffia bag. “May I ask where are you from?”

  “From the USA,” confessed Viola, knowing this was not always a good answer in Europe. She had raided the store. The taste of eglantine tea was still on her lips: she hoped she’d remembered to buy a box of those relaxing tisanes, she was a little hazy about the last few minutes —

  “Ah!” said the gardienne, dipping her round black head, as if this explained everything (although, Viola thought, in fact the little nun was completely mystified, something lost in translation again). “Many thanks for your visit. Please come again.”

  They followed the flashes Aymon had cut in tree bark, back to the “last known position,” without any trouble. Maybe their eyes were better accustomed to the veil of green now, or maybe there’d been a touch of needless panic earlier. They spotted the gun-metal Aston Martin immediately, parked in that clearing, no more than a couple hundred yards away.

  “You see,” said Aymon. “We were never lost.”

  Viola stood on one foot and then the other, to shake scraps of leaf mould and bark out of her sandals. “We’d better hurry. There’s going to be a thunderstorm, I can feel it.”

  Aymon took his best guesses at the route out, using the compass on the dash (there was still nothing but grey fuzz on their GPS). Eventually they saw an ochre-washed cottage standing by the track, though as yet no tire marks, no vehicles, no signage, no human activity. Aymon pulled up and jumped out, eagerly. “Civilization! C’mon, you’re the linguist, you do the talking —”

  But the forest grew right up to the stained, derelict walls, swamping what had been a little railed yard. “I don’t think so, Ay.”

  The cottage had been walled up. The bricked door and boarded windows stared at the intruders, somehow stirring inexpressible emotions… “There’s a plaque on the wall,” said Aymon.

  Viola kept her distance, nervous as wild animal. “It’s an old forester’s house,” he reported. “It’s been fitted out as a bat refuge, a kind of memorial thing; wait there’s more, think I can find out where we are.”

  Aymon knew that there was a village called Boucq around here. He’d never nailed the genealogy (people who check out their family legends generally find things they wish they didn’t know); but he believed the Bocks had come from there, long ago. And here was the name itself, on this Bat Refuge plaque, but strangely, it was the English spelling…

  “Let’s get back on the road. I don’t need to know about bats.”

  “Did you find out where we are?”

  “No. We’ll find out by driving, we have to hit a real road soon.”

  She sighed, concluding that his ability to read French had betrayed him: better not press the point. They returned to the car. Aymon punched the button, at last (always reluctant to give up the freedom of the open-top). The roof performed its slick, robotic maneuver, and they looked at each other, sealed and safe. Soon after that, the GPS screen came back to life.

  “Now do we know where we are?”

  “Never in doubt,” said Aymon.

  Almost immediately they reached a junction, and they were back in the world of traffic, of powerlines, of isolated farms and miles of corn; and the sky finally opened. But Viola felt — maybe it was the sudden attack of the rain — as if the country had changed, as if she had to start “being in France” all over again, in a much less confident key. She remembered her purchases, and couldn’t think what she’d done with them. Nothing in her purse. Where was that pretty raffia bag? Her arms ached with emptiness.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing…really.”

  He kept his eyes on the streaming grey road. “Honey? Did you notice anything strange about that place we found?”

  She’d have denied everything, doubting her sanity and/or the eglantine tea, but the tremor in his voice convinced her to speak. “I’m not sure. Tricks of the light, maybe. Or things I can’t explain.”

  “Did you see the girl in black, the gardienne, turn into a water bird?”

  “I didn’t see that. Did you see the transparent girl in the stream?”

  “No. But I saw those tall pink flowers, the rushes, come alive, and turn into, er, people. What happened to you? After you followed that dragonfly?”

  “Damselfly.” Viola shook her head, realizing with a shock that she wanted to tell him all about it, but not right now, not in a moving car. “I don’t want to say, not yet. Aymon, what happened to us, where have we been?”

  “You mean what did we take?” he countered, with a tight grin.

  The windscreen wipers fought with pounding grey battalions.

  “I don’t believe that. Oh, I know we took the eglantine tea, but we were in another world before that. You know it. You and that tiny frog, the way you were, you were communing with each other. Aymon, we should compare notes. We should do it right now, before we lose our nerve, before we stop believing.”

  The rain was so hard he could see nothing but the starred red tail-lights of the truck ahead of him. The two lane road was narrow, crowded, no chance to overtake. Aymon’s heart was racing, better maintain the speed of the traffic, but it felt too fast, almost uncontrollable —

  Viola pressed her hand to her mouth. “In another world, my God. I’ve heard of a story like this, Ay, it’s famous… Two English women were visiting Versailles, in the nineteen twenties, no, earlier. They had a strange experience and published it. They called it ‘An Adventure.’ They believed they’d been through a timeslip, back to August 10, 1792. They’d visited the Petit Tr
ianon in the days of Marie Antoinette, and seen the queen herself —”

  “It wasn’t Marie-Antoinette.” Aymon gripped the wheel fiercely. “The Queen of that forest was not Marie-Antoinette.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. The account the authors of ‘An Adventure’ published didn’t check out. It’s famous as a hoax. But I think they’d added stuff, because something incredible had happened to them, and they, they wanted people to believe. That’s why we have to get this straight, you and I, now. Pull over, next chance you get —”

  “Did you see the animal images on those boards come alive? As if they were getting directly into your brain, and looking back at you?”

  “No, but I…something like that. Did you see the singing frog?”

  “I’ve got a better idea. I’m going to find somewhere to pull over, a quiet spot, maybe a bar tabac. We’re going to call Piper, right now, tell her the whole thing, have her record it.”

  Bette Piper was Aymon’s long time personal assistant, a very smart woman whom they both trusted implicitly.

  “Yeah, yeah! Great idea, let’s do it!”

  Viola felt twenty, thirty years younger. She felt as if something inside had shattered and been remade. She had a mission, a cause, this would be big, she had her own instincts, she could almost taste it. The natural world is alive, sexual, conscious, full of living spirits, I’ll write a book, a bestseller —

  “The nearest I can come,” she exclaimed, imagining the tv audience, trying out her lines on him, “to putting a name on what happened to us, is to say that we visited Fairyland. That’s not adequate, but it’s the word people have used, traditionally, for the dimension we entered: where, where every flower is conscious, and nature spirits inhabit insects, animals —”

  “Fairyland???” Aymon exploded, hands still locked on the wheel, eyes fixed on those blurred tail-lights. “What the fuck? You are shitting me, honey. That was a timeslip. That was my future we visited. That was the future. Shit, those notice boards: I can almost figure it. Information coded in light, direct to the cortex, and hijacking the processes of consciousness, that’s what causes that weird ‘everything is looking at me’ effect —”

  “SHUT UP!” shouted Viola. “Shut up, shut up. You and your codes!”

  He held the wheel, but inside he was shaking, reliving the moment when — spelling out that memorial plaque — he’d had the strangest conviction that if he read another word he’d discover the date of his own death. He knew he was right, oh God, he knew. But it was a crass error to shoot her down, far more important to get her to talk, get her experience on record: before vital clues to those unborn developments were lost —

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry, honey, calm down, didn’t mean to offend.”

  “Maybe we’re both right,” whispered Viola, marveling. “Maybe the future is a fairyland, and that’s what we have glimpsed —”

  A tiny voice in his ear brought Aymon up short. He gripped the wheel harder, his eyes bulging. He couldn’t make out what the voice was saying, but he could see a little figure squirming up out of the walnut fascia, a tiny face, incredibly malevolent, made of polished wood grain, a flayed body —

  “Think of the consequences!” it squeaked, waving its knobby little arms. “Where is your evidence? What did you bring back? Nothing! No one will believe you. You’ll be treated as cranks! You will be ridiculed!”

  Hordes more of them, a different variety, came pouring out of the strengthened glass and flew around their heads, jabbering urgently, flickering in and out of focus, liquid and abrasive.

  “They will say you have ingested illegal substances, your trusted assistant will report you to the authorities, you will be ruined!”

  Multicolored creatures whose bodies were ever-shifting crowns and chains came out of the door panels and the floor, and cried out, passionately —

  “We are not life; we were once life, deep in the ancient fern-forest time: we are naked chemicals, stripped and crucified now. Beware, beware, Viola! Our cousins in your brain have told us this: your happiness will vanish, if you betray your lovers.”

  “Don’t betray us! Don’t betray us! We never betrayed you! Cowards! Cowards!”

  The Egyptian Cotton fairies danced on Aymon’s shoulder, pleading to be heard, telling him how they had been forced to ruin their mother, the good earth, and after that shame, tortured into thread —

  “And think, if you are believed,” shouted the Parisian artisan leather spirits, crawling out of the sleek hide of Viola’s purse. “If your visit can be detected as changes in your brain chemistry? What then? By interfering, by trying to make it happen, you may destroy the very salvation that you have glimpsed, that you so desire, and it may never come to be —!”

  Viola had succumbed to hysterics. She was trying to open the passenger door, sobbing and batting at the glass-sprites.

  Never come to be, never come to be, hissed the whisper in Aymon’s ear, not a single voice but a varied choir: in fact the voices of the different materials confined in his pacemaker. He struggled to go on driving, though his heart was jumping like a jack-hammer, convinced, like his wife, that there was hope in flight… But the rain kept raining madly, the tail-lights were too close, and a party of young male deer, inspired by who knows what diablerie, decided to bolt across the road ahead of that truck, bounding from the forest margin.

  “Ay!” yelled Viola, terrified out of her panic attack —

  Aymon failed to apply the brakes, probably because he had already succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Viola, who had unclipped her seat belt whilst trying to escape, went through the windscreen, despite its toughness. She was technically alive when the Emergency Services arrived, but she never recovered consciousness and died on the way to the hospital.

  The Woodsman put away his axe. Many members of the commune preferred to cut and stack their fuel in winter, when the trees were sleeping, but he saw no harm in being open about these things. It was all regulated: they took nothing that the trees were not ready to discard. He stood beside his tool shed (which he had cultured himself, from living timber, a proud feat), scratching his chin and pondering. Those tourists now, where exactly had they got to?

  There were Centers all over the world, where anyone who wished could experience, in forest, in meadows, desert, savannah, or ocean, full communion with the woken world — or as much of that reality as they could stand. But foreign visitors who came to this oldest meeting place, the original Martigny Center of the Forest of the Queen, often had very mistaken ideas. There was no raw primeval innocence here, for the forest was not old at all. It had died and been reborn as often as France herself, and shared the character of the human culture of the region. The woken world here (a misnomer, for it was the human mind that had been woken, almost by chance, by the seductive “invention,” meant for entertainment, that had triggered a revolution) could be mischievous, bawdy, disruptive: a little dangerous to the unwary.

  Tourists who arrived in the flesh irritated the Woodsman. Why could they not be content with the virtual access, which was excellent? But he thought fondly of the American couple, for the sake of that remarkable grey steed of theirs; for the sake of a past that he remembered with the nostalgia of a survivor. Nowadays, the living world could compel human beings to deal with its peoples fairly and decently. Agreements had been made, laws had been drawn up, which humanity must respect. My God, yes, the human race had learned a hard lesson, when the change first came… But even now, in the peace after the ages-long conflict, there was bitterness, and one had to take care. It must be a challenge to keep a machine like that, from the old days, happy!

  And perilous.

  His own car had been drowsing in a hazel thicket. He led it out and checked its skirts for burrs and prickles (its wheels were rarely deployed; they weren’t very practical for this terrain) — as he studied the satellite views of the forest and its environs, which he habitually kept open at the back of his eyes when he was guarding these gates. The grey st
eed was nowhere to be seen. No mark of their passage anywhere. Perhaps they had given up trying to find the Center, and left the area while his attention was elsewhere.

  “After all,” he murmured, as he gave the little white car a gentle touch on the wheel, to guide it across the water meadows — where it tended to shy at the rise of a heron, or the curiosity of the cattle. “It was a very old map.”

  June 2007

  Total Internal Reflection

  For Kim Stanley Robinson

  They walk among us. They don’t look young; you’d place them around twenty-five to thirty. But the astonishing truth is that they are all (maybe half a million of them, world wide) over six hundred years old. They have been talking to journalists, appearing on our screens; they’ve convinced us that this is no hoax. But why have they decided to leave Earth? That was the question I most wanted to ask, when I was offered the chance to interview our own, local, Thames Valley immortal. Why quit now, just when they don’t need to hide anymore?

  I met Tamsin in the garden of her house in a quiet Middlesex village: a light-skinned, dark-haired woman of average height, dressed in the dateless human uniform of blue jeans and a white tee-shirt. She reminded me that I’d agreed not to make a live broadcast. I let her check the output setting on my eyesocket ConjurMac, and we got down to business. “So,” I said (never one to avoid the obvious), “How does it feel to be six hundred and fifty?” Tamsin laughed. “How old are you?” I am ninety-seven and I said so. “So why ask me? You’ll find out soon enough.” I put it to her that if I survived — and no longevity treatment can actually guarantee survival — it was a long time to wait for an answer. “When I first took Rem,” she said. “It was 2039 CE. It doesn’t seem long ago at all. Trust me: the years will fly.” Their perception of time is different from ours… I stared, transfixed, at the woman who had lived through the squalor of the Population Pulse, survived five “World Wars,” kept her impossible secret since the fifteenth century after the Prophet (Praise and Blessings of Allah Be Upon Him). If I hadn’t known, I would never have guessed. She looked so normal.