I told him in rambling terms about Elaine and what had happened the previous night. That I knew Klein and Margaritte were having troubles, but that his news was an utter shock. He clucked sympathetically and tried to look interested.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We may want to talk to you some more, but that can wait. Why don’t you get some rest now.’
The cop helped me inside and guided me to the living room sofa where I collapsed. He closed the front door softly as he left and I fell quickly and deeply asleep.
Neither of us thought to check the blinking light on the answerphone.
Our answering machine is an old model — it works well enough that I never saw any reason to buy a fancier one — but it only gives you sixty seconds to leave a message.
‘I’ve been running the equations for days, Steve, but they won’t converge. The iterations will go on for ever now.
‘I was grading exams the other day, you know? The first-year class. A girl wrote out elaborate calculations for a problem that didn’t require it, a problem with a simple answer. In the end she just put a big “X” through it all and gave up. I saw it as sous rature and gave her full credit.
‘It’s coming now, Steve. Almost here. I thought I should warn you. We’re at the base of the S-curve, but the explosion will happen soon. The numbers don’t. didn’t lie.
‘I put her under erasure. Margaritte. I thought it was for the best. The only thing I wish. ’
Sixty seconds.
I remember Klein once told me about something called luminiferous aether. It was an early, discarded notion in physics, like spontaneous generation or phlogiston. Aether was supposed to be the medium which filled all unoccupied space and was the mechanism for transmission of magnetic and electrical forces. Klein said that there had been some promising work verifying its existence and the idea was catching on until Einstein disproved it all with relativity. Klein always repeated the same thing when the topic of relativity came up.
‘Hell of an idea,’ he would say.
Elaine came home from the hospital after a week. We talked about the baby and about Klein and Margaritte. She cried a lot and told me she understood if I didn’t want to stay with her now, but I just told her to hush and held her tight. I didn’t let her hear the phone message, nor did I voice my suspicions, but after a while she pieced it together herself.
The curve is on the rise: Klein’s explosion has started to detonate and the world has begun to change. It’s hard to keep up with because it’s hard to know what’s real, what you can count on to remain solid, consistent from day to day.
The world doesn’t meet at right angles any more. All the assumptions that we’ve depended on for so long have crawled out of the rotten woodwork of our lives. The old formulae don’t add up and the new ones are still a mystery. I know it’s what Klein suspected, but I’m also sure that it’s less awful than he feared. It is certain that he overreacted; living sous rature is still better than dying under it.
Like bugs or fish that spend their lives in the darkness, this sudden flash of bold light has sent all of us scurrying in turbulent new directions. It’s scary, but it’s sort of interesting, too. At times it’s even wondrous. God knows, it’s chaotic, but not without its own subtleties of order.
Mostly, it’s a hell of an idea.
Jay Russell’s contribution to Dark Terrors 2, ‘Lily’s Whisper’, was one of two stories from that volume selected by Ellen Datlow for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Tenth Annual Collection. His third novel, Burning Bright, a sequel to Celestial Dogs, was recently published in Britain, while American and French editions of Celestial Dogs and his other novel, Blood, are also scheduled over the next year. ‘“Sous Rature” is the piece of fiction that probably comes most directly from my years in academia,’ recalls Russell. ‘Although I was not in either a scientific discipline or a literature department (it probably shows), I did spend more than my fair share of time immersed in the kind of loopy “post-” theory which figures in the story. In fact, I once seriously intended to write a scholarly essay about cyberpunk and call it “The Prosthetic Aesthetic”. Thanks to whatever gods there be, I never got around to it.’
Spanky’s Back In Town
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
‘Can’t we go any faster?’ Dmitry turned around in the seat, punching at the driver’s fur-clad back. Behind him one of the wolves had almost caught up with the rear-runners of the sleigh and was snapping at the end of his flapping scarf.
‘This is new snow over old,’ the driver shouted. ‘The tracks have hardened and will turn us over.’
The horses were terrified, their heads twisting, their eyes rolling back in fear of the baying creatures behind the sleigh. Scarcely daring to look, Dmitry counted seven — now eight — of the wolves, swarming so close that he could feel their hot breath on the icy rushing air. He glanced down at the terrified child in his arms and pulled the bearskin more tightly around her deathly pale face.
‘We’ll never make it in time,’ cried Yusupov, ‘it will be dark before we reach Pokrovskoye.’
They could see the black outline of the town on the horizon, but already the sun was dropping below the tops of the trees. The sleigh clattered and crunched its way across deep-frozen cart tracks, swaying perilously, the wolves howling close behind, falling over each other in their efforts to keep up. One of the largest, a fearsome yellow-eyed beast the size of a Great Dane, suddenly threw itself forward and seized Dmitry’s scarf-end in its jaws. The wool pulled tight, choking him as he clawed at his throat. Yusupov yanked it away from his brother’s neck and pulled hard, feeling the weight of the animal on the other end. ‘See, Dmitry,’ he cried, ‘look in the eyes of our pursuer now!’
He released the scarf sharply and the creature fell back, tumbling over itself. But it had his scent, and would follow the sleigh into the darkness until its jaws were filled. Dmitry cradled the infant in his arms, protecting her from buffets as the sleigh hammered over a ridge of ice. They had taken her hostage to effect their escape from the private apartments of Rasputin himself, but now they no longer had need of her. After all, the casket was now in their possession, and its value was beyond calculation. He knew that Yusupov was thinking the same thing. Behind them, the wolves were becoming braver, jumping at the rear of the sledge, trying to gain a hold with their forepaws. Thick ribbons of spittle fell along the crimson velvet plush of the seat-back as the animals yelped and barked in frustrated relay.
‘They will not stop until they feed,’ he shouted. ‘We must use the child. She slows us down.’
‘But she is innocent!’
‘If we fail in our mission, many thousands of innocents will perish.’
‘Then do it and be damned!’
Dmitry slipped the wild-eyed girl from the bear-fur. In one scooping motion he raised her above his head, then threw her over the end of the sleigh. She had only just begun to scream as the wolves imploded over her, seizing her limbs in their muscular jaws. The two young Bolsheviks watched for a moment as the animals swarmed around their meal, the sleigh briefly forgotten. The child’s cries were quickly lost beneath the angry snarling of the feed. A sudden splash of blood darkened the evening snow. The driver huddled tighter over his reins, determined not to bear witness to such events. The next time he dared to look back, all he could see was a distant dark stain against the endless whiteness, and the sated wolves slinking away with their heads bowed between their shoulders, ashamed of their own appetites.