"What’s up?" he asked.
"Aquarium’s in trouble," the girl said.
"Environmental unit crapped out," the boy agreed. He’d head off to the university after they got home. Where did time go?
"Well, plug in the replacement," the father said. They both looked shamefaced. "We forgot to pack one," the girl said.
"Oh, dear," the mother said.
"Without an environmental unit, everything’ll die." By the way the boy looked at the father, it was somehow his fault.
"I like the critters in there. I really like them." The girl sounded heartbroken.
"I don’t know what to tell you." The father knew damn well it wasn’t his fault.
The girl pointed toward the sea that seemed to stretch forever. "Could we… give them a chance, anyway? Not just watch them die?"
"It’s against the rules," the father said doubtfully.
"Please!" the kids chorused.
"I’ll never tell," the mother added. "Who’s to know?" "Well…" He thought a minute, then shrugged. "Okay- go ahead. But keep your mouths shut after we get home, you hear?"
"You’re the greatest, Dad!" the boy said. He and the girl ran back toward the ship.
Jack Conway fired up his Mac and started the Power-Point presentation. A projector put one weird creature after another up on the big screen. "This is a trilobite-an early arthropod. Some of you probably recognize it," Jack told his class. "This is Selkirkia, a priapulid worm. It lived in the mud, as they still do…This is Aysheia, a lobopod. Looks something like a worm and something like a bug, doesn’t it?.. Hallucigenia- great name-is probably another lobopod, with protective spines… Canadia is an annelid, related to earthworms… And this little fishy thing with eyestalks or antennae or whatever they are is Pikaia, an early chordate- -somebody from our own phylum."
He paused. "Nobody quite knows why there was such an explosion of metazoan body plans at the beginning of the Cambrian, 543 million years ago. Some of the more interesting theories include…"
HE WOKE IN DARKNESS
I don’t quite know what you’d call this story. Dark fantasy? Horror? Something in there. Not a place I seem to go very often, but I did this time. The other line that occurs to me is from Marlow: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.
It shouldn’t have ended this way. He knew that, though he couldn’t say how or why. He couldn’t even say what this way was, not for sure. He just knew it was wrong. He’d always understood about right and wrong, as far back as he could remember.
How far back was that? Why, it was… as far as it was. He didn’t know exactly how far. That seemed wrong, too, but he couldn’t say why.
Darkness lay heavily on him, unpierced, unpierceable. It wasn’t the dark of night, nor even the dark of a closed and shuttered room at midnight. No light had ever come here. No light ever would, or could. Not the darkness of a mineshaft. The darkness of… the tomb?
Realizing he must be dead made a lot of things fall together. A lot, but not enough. As far back as he could remember… He couldn’t remember dying, dammit. Absurdly, that made him angry. Something so important in a man’s life, you’d think he would remember it. But he didn’t, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.
He would have laughed, there in the darkness, if only he could. He hadn’t expected Afterwards to be like this. He didn’t know how he’d expected it to be, but not like this. Again, though, what could he do about it?
I can remember. I can try to remember, anyways. Again, he would have laughed if he could. Why the hell not? I’ve got all the time in the world.
Light. An explosion of light. Afternoon sunshine blasting through the dirty, streaky windshield of the beat-up old Ford station wagon bouncing west down Highway 16 toward Philadelphia.
A bigger explosion of light inside his mind. A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. He knew it like… like a man knows his name, that’s how. That time without light, without self? A dream, he told himself. Must have been a dream.
Those were his hands on the wheel, pink and square and hard from years of labor in the fields. He was only twenty-seven, but he’d already done a lifetime’s worth of hard work. It felt like a long lifetime’s worth, too.
He took one hand off the wheel for a second to run it through his brown hair, already falling back at the temples. Had he dozed for a second while he was driving? He didn’t think so, but what else could it have been? Lucky he didn’t drive the wagon off the road into the cotton fields, into the red dirt.
They would love that. They would laugh their asses off. Well, they weren’t going to get the chance.
Sweat ran down his face. His clothes felt welded to him. The air was thick with water, damn near thick enough to slice. The start of summer in Mississippi. It would stay like this for months.
He had the window open to give himself a breeze. It didn’t help much. When it got this hot and sticky, nothing helped much. He ran his hand through his hair again, to try to keep it out of his eyes.
"You all right, Cecil?" That was Muhammad Shabazz. Along with Tariq Abdul-Rashid, he crouched down in the back seat. The two young Black Muslims didn’t want the law, or what passed for the law in Mississippi in 1964, spotting them. They’d come down from the North to give the oppressed and disenfranchised whites in the state a helping hand, and the powers that be hated them worse than anybody.
"I’m okay," Cecil Price answered. I’m okay now, he thought. I know who I am. Hell, I know that I am. He shook his head. That moment of lightless namelessness was fading, and a good thing, too.
"We get to Meridian, everything’ll be fine," Muhammad Shabazz said.
"Sure," Cecil said. "Sure." The night before, the locals had torched a white church over by Longdale. He’d taken the Northern blacks over there to do what they could for the congregation. Now…
Now they had to get through Neshoba County. They had to get past Philadelphia. They had to run the gauntlet of lawmen who hated white people and Black Knights of Voodoo who hated whites even more-and of lawmen who were Black Knights of Voodoo and hated whites most of all. And they had to do it in the Racial Alliance for Complete Equality’s beat-up station wagon. If RACE’s old blue Ford wasn’t the best-known car in eastern Mississippi, Price was damned if he knew another one that would be.
Of course, he might be damned any which way. So might the two idealistic young Negroes who’d come down from New York and Ohio to give his downtrodden race a hand. If the law spotted this much too spottable car…
Cecil Price wished he hadn’t had that thought right then, in the instant before he saw the flashing red light in his rear-view mirror, in the instant before he heard the siren’s scream. Panic stabbed at him. "What do I do?" he said hoarsely. He wanted to floor the gas pedal. He wanted to, but he didn’t. The main thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that the old wagon couldn’t break sixty unless you flung it off a cliff.
"Pull over." Muhammad Shabazz’s voice was calm. "Don’t let ‘em get us for evading arrest or any real charge. We haven’t done anything wrong, so they can’t do anything to us."
"You sure of that, man?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid sounded nervous.
"This is all about the rule of law," Muhammad Shabazz said patiently. "For us, for them, for everybody."
He respected the rule of law. It meant more to him than anything else. Cecil Price could only hope it meant something to the man in the car with the light and the siren. He could hope so, yeah. Could he believe it? That was a different story.
But Price didn’t see that he had any choice here. He pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as he brought the blue Ford to a stop. Pebbles rattled against the car’s underpanels. Red dust swirled up around it.