I took my child to school, went in to work as I always did, and I drew my own sketches from what instruments had recorded digitally along the perimeter during and after the blast. Not just a lab person but a participating father of a study group, I spoke up: How and What had somehow become alternative visions. Easy enough to say. A workman observed, “Process and Essence.” But when my child’s fourth-grade teacher agreed yet asked passionately if no matter How they’d pulled it off our vanished nation’s removal were not a What — the What was what mattered!
Which in turn, it came to her, asked a whole new How: How we could take advantage of the nuclear disarmament we had dreamed of (if this event wasn’t in fact beyond nuclear). She was a fine and strong and beautiful mentor for the young but she was asking for it, we thought.
Majority “Hows” kept to two central points. What had held the blast within the boundary of our fellow nation? And what system of waste disposal could have created this great vacancy — this void that for weeks actually pushed back currents of air and common particles of globally freewheeling dust and flesh and even repelled at some frequencies light as well, beamed, or in new, apparently thinking forms.
Minority “Whats” asked what new way we would think, free now of nuclear anxiety. But how had the people of that nation really thought? Had secret tests been tolerated even so much as they seemed to have been by their disarmament faction? And why so few exit-visa applications — somewhere between seventeen and eighteen hundred where there were so few restrictions anyhow, and when in the absence of unusual restrictions a healthy opposition had waxed so eloquent against arms development? The Hows jumped in here to ridicule the Whats on the visa question: why try to escape a thermonuclear event likely horizoning the entire globe? Unilateral disaster had been in the cards all along, Whats surprisingly concluded, so the anti’s would have had good reason to get out with their families, which mostly hadn’t happened.
Between me and my child’s teacher there came a thought. Well, she was a learner from the young. And their dreams, she said. Shimmer dreams, we were hearing. Future Shimmers in fact, promises lodging in you like both unknown insight and un-charted infection. The writing was on the wall and having originally chosen the civil service secondary school track which meant she had security, my child’s teacher must go where they told her. I made a friend of her. I loved her, I found. I would not own her. She was interested in my inclination to gather some of the Transitionals from the vanished nation and work with them, as in fact with some care I was already doing. Yet for dismissing the majority Hows and with them the riddle of this bold and heretofore inconceivable discrete holocaust, certain authorized persons suspected her both of starting a world movement against research and on the other hand of withholding information on the Shimmers along the boundary of the blast. And so it happened that she was given a much-sought-after administrative post in a distant sector known for its year-round fruits and vegetables and for the mineral from which was made a luminous stained glass of vivid and transparent color but little utility.
Films of the barrier force were aired worldwide and psychologists ascribed to its discovery a sadness which overtook many of us, Hows or Whats, though the World Council called it a low-level contagion emanating from a few of the especially uncommunicative Transitionals. Hard to define as a group across national, income, job, or age lines, these so much shared among themselves this sadness that it need hardly be voiced.
My child’s former teacher made much of it; she had become notorious. Those who had seen she was transferred to that remote region of endless produce and a population of hundreds of stained glass designers and their support cadres, waited for her to go too far. She had remarked that for her it was as if a raw gap at our heart where there had been some wonderful person must now in pain be either filled or narrowed and we could not tell which or how. She had gathered a group of children of all ages and they were studying Global Communication.
Three old friends of the transferred teacher not apparently in touch with her reported in themselves a heavy, hole-like place burning in the muscle interstices of the heart’s left ventricle usually occupied by phosphorus compounds. The burn did not hurt like a sore on a skinned knee or like normal chromosome damage in the urinary tract; it hurt more like a tiny interior lens magnifying perhaps sun at some point in the chest area. It was painful to describe. One of these friends told me I and our modest nation had turned up in his hands and feet, he was certain.
Hows or Whats, we found memorials being held somewhere on the globe every day. Thus we continued to feel the presence of our lost neighbor. The crown of its technology. Its generally calm polis. Its culture now ever with us in museums, concert domes, and conversations. All this grew compelling as if around some almost formulable belief. One reported child dreamed “up” (as the official phrase had it) a tale of refugee body-souls blasted so small they could not now be destroyed any more, nor resisted when they traveled out upon the globe finding space in each of us. Newspapers got hold of this, only then to retroactively erase from their pages a fiction that might spawn communal anxiety.
The mysterious atmospheric repellence in the Great Vacancy abated for some persons, not all. Now and then an overflight succeeded. Staring down upon the memory of our neighbor nation, a particle geologist reported that the crater down there had found some counter-crater in him. He was instantly scanned for feedback symptoms. Some step missing, he was asked if this crater had been in him before blast night. Maybe long before, maybe not, he said. Was he prone to an overproduction of future-predictive cells believed in though rarely isolated? On his return he was found to be more complex than measurably sad.
Whats urged Hows of all nations to let the event go, and get on with the job of living in a world free of thermonuclear threat and take the quantum jumps toward a polis free of national sovereignty. Yet quantum jumps are either-or and/or both-and, not some imagined rush to simple mastery. Needing to know how that nation had brought off its own disarmament, were not Hows thinking in a circle that would take them right back into some race for the technological lead? New exponential How mockups research actually saw How research itself as an ongoing chain reaction with no end in sight. The money was there, was the thing; and so was the desire, we seemed to be “seeing the ball well.” Surely some energy breakthrough was at hand, possibly feedback, in the technical and organic sense, of that perhaps not after all so self-contained explosion.
A super-inflatable device operated by a forgotten animal after a long communications blackout at an altitude of about seventy miles weighed in with data dating back to blast night. The upper reach of the blast had coincided almost exactly with this level of the troposphere. There, we have long left the frigid minus 200 degrees of the ionosphere floor to rise rapidly toward the high temperatures of that layer’s eighty-five-mile range. Yet, astoundingly, the heat increase recorded of blast night at just the other side of blast’s upper limit was absolutely normal for ionospheric gradation. Had the animal-operated meteorological inflatable been just beyond the blast’s upper margin, or on it? What about within it? jibed one maverick What.
For two things had happened: Shimmer Theory research had found on the monitor records for the top of the blast a quasi-emotional agitation in the SHED super-forces which here imaged-out not as mega-heat but as handfuls of light networking and veer-bending among one another so that for the first time light bent back through other light, which gave to these grid-warps some self-correcting aim intelligent as AI but less clear and more surprising; the other thing that happened was that, with the return of normal void to this already legendary airspace, the animal-operated inflatable began unbidden to descend.