Short Story: From Above By Robert Reed

Perhaps this story was inspired by the hackberry tree in Robert Reed's front yard. Perhaps not. Regardless, it's probably a safe bet to say that very few people with trees in their yards could have made the imaginative leaps this story makes. Take a look and see—

From Above

By Robert Reed

Cub Scouts went into the little wood to practice their survival skills, but that excuse was soon forgotten. One boy thought it would be fun, really fun, to chop down a tree. And not just a little tree, either. An old hackberry seemed as good a victim as any, and he convinced the others to slip home to find axes and other tools. The mayhem commenced soon after that, and for nearly twenty minutes the air sang with the ringing of metal against living wood. The tree was pretty well girdled and doomed, but they were a long way from dropping it. Work stopped long enough to consider options. “My dad's got this huge fat chain saw,” one boy reported. Here was a dangerous and very exciting escalation of the destruction. Just mentioning the saw was enough to make most of the boys shiver and smile to themselves, imagining the roar of the engine and the big tree toppling, perhaps pulling down the neighboring trees with it.

Manny was the exception. He was younger, and smaller, and by most measures, quite a bit smarter than the others. He was the only boy who knew that the tree was a hackberry, and that by cutting its phloem, they had insured its death. When others imagined the splendid shattering of wood and a mastering of their universe, he thought of tiny animals losing their lives and homes. He saw sunlight pouring onto this still-shady ground, the world thrown into a new order. But what could he do? The eleven-year-olds looked like giants, powerful and sure, and even on the best days, it took all of Manny's creativity and charm to survive in their world. He couldn't change what was happening. His only hope was that it was almost time to go home, which is why Manny was glancing at his watch when he heard a very clear, very close voice saying, “You stupid stupid stupid sacks of water."

Every other face lifted, surprise bleeding into rage. Then the biggest boy—their self-appointed leader—glared at Manny. “What the hell did you call me?"

“Nothing,” the nine-year-old squeaked. “It wasn't me—"

“You mindless hunk of flotsam."

“Then who's talking?” another boy asked.

Who indeed?

“Hey, what's that?” a third boy called out.

Floating behind Manny, almost invisible in the hackberry's shadow, was a balloon. Or was it? The object seemed to be about the size and height of a man's head. But it was shiny and perfectly round, and even in the gloom, every boy could see himself reflected in its face.

“It's a balloon,” the biggest boy said.

Hardly.

“How come it isn't moving?” another Cub Scout asked.

Their leader scrunched his face into a skeptical frown. “It's tied down somehow. We just can't see the string."

“Why didn't we notice till now?” asked Manny.

Then he answered his own question. “Because it just got here. That's why."

The boys fanned out, surrounding the mysterious object. Nobody saw string, yet the object hung perfectly motionless in the dark air, and after a minute of silence, the voice screamed at them again, crying out, “Tyranny."

“What's that?” one boy asked.

“Your circumstance,” the ball said.

“My what?"

Manny listened to the voice, but it didn't sound like anyone at all. Not a man or woman, or anybody he knew.

Again, the object said, “Tyranny."

“What are you?” the biggest boy demanded.

“What are you, little man?” A harsh laugh washed over them. “You live as slaves, and you don't even know it. Your society is small and stupid, and you can't even imagine the wonders and freedoms that could be yours."

“Shut up!” their leader cried out.

“Who's doing the talking?” another asked.

“Nobody's talking,” the big boy proclaimed. “It's just some stupid machine, or something."

“You're an ignorant, pathetic civilization—"

“Shut up!"

“And you are slaves."

“All right!” With that, their leader grabbed up the largest axe and approached the mirrored sphere. When he was within arm's reach, he paused for a moment, considering options. Like any natural bully, he found it best to throw out a threat to begin with. “If you don't shut up, I'll have to break you. Got it?"

There was a pause. Then they were informed, “You are nothing but three-dimensional specks, constricted and suffocating."

The boy hesitated. For the first time in his life, he turned to Manny, asking for help. “What's it talking about?"

But Manny couldn't be sure. Before he could summon any answer, the sphere added, “You are nothing nothing nothing but savage little sacks of very stupid water."

With both hands, the boy swung the axe.

Moments later, every boy but one was sprinting out of the woods. Even Manny ran. Even when he heard the wailing of the injured boy—one of the Scouts with whom he was almost friendly—he kept running for home. Manny had never felt more like a coward, and he was ashamed. The head of the shattered axe had spun past his nose, somehow missing him—for which he was thankful—and like most shameful little cowards, he told himself that from here on he would live a good decent life, if only he could just please get home now in one piece.

As it happened, one of the great minds on Earth—at least on that particular day—was sitting in a nearby living room, enduring the company of his frail but still demanding mother.

Jonah Klast was an accomplished painter and a published poet, a concert pianist and one of the world's leading experts in trilobites. But his real fame came in those exceptionally narrow realms of string theory, cosmology, and the meanings of the universe. He was young-faced and rather handsome at thirty-one years old—part Vietnamese, part German—and to most of the world, he could be an insufferably arrogant prick. But not with his mother. Sitting on the long, soft sofa, speaking with an unusually quiet voice, he listed all of his accomplishments and the honors accrued since his last visit. This was their pattern, bearable if not pleasant. She would listen to his boasts, and then he would run out of things to say. Then they would sit for a few uncomfortable moments, saying nothing until the old woman gave a shrug and jabbed him with a needle or two.

“What about the MacArthur?” she asked.

It was a reliable needle. Jonah barely flinched, remarking, “I wouldn't know, Mother. They don't tell you if you're under consideration."

“Unlike the Nobel,” she snapped.

He had been nominated, yes. On two occasions. Which was a good deal more than most of the world could claim.

“They don't appreciate you,” she had to tell him. She was a tiny Vietnamese woman, pretty as a girl but now quite fat and plain. “And you don't appreciate yourself enough, either,” she always told him. “That's your trouble. That and letting others steal your work."

The old woman was a conniving, cold, and manipulative taskmaster who had dragged and pushed her only child to an incredible level of accomplishment. Jonah was a prince in his world, but like most people, he found patterns formed in childhood were almost impossible to escape. This was Mother, and she would always be Mother, and even with his full intellect engaged, Jonah still wished for a little trace of praise from her.

“What's that noise?” she blurted.

A siren was sounding, followed by several more sirens.

The wailing grew louder, and his mother responded by climbing to her feet, shuffling to the window. “Maybe somebody's house is burning down,” she said.

Jonah knew that this visit was a mistake. But his flight home wasn't until this evening, which meant another few hours enduring this annual crap-sandwich. In a moment or two, he would excuse himself to the bathroom, and he would sort through the bottles in his mother's medicine cabinet. Another minor expertise: He would hunt for conflicting prescriptions, and when necessary, he would contact his mother's various doctors, suggesting new treatments when he wasn't dressing them down for being less than good stewards of her health.

“I hope it's the Carmichaels’ house,” the old woman proclaimed. “I'd like to see that shack burn flat."

A wide picture window looked out over a brief backyard. Beyond the chain-link fence was a weedy pasture with a long dense stand of trees gathered around an open storm sewer. The whisper of a road wound down through the grass and stopped short of the trees. A fire truck and ambulance went down as far as they dared, and then paramedics shuffled into the woods. People seem to have emerged from every other house in the neighborhood. Several boys were standing together, talking at the same time while pointing downhill, excitedly telling their story to a fireman who didn't seem to be listening.

“I wonder what's happening,” Mom said.

Jonah didn't have to be the brightest man in the world to see his opening. “Maybe I should go have a look,” he offered.

“Get answers,” she told him.

As he was walking out the back door, she added, “Tell them who you are, Jonah. Throw your name around!"

The paramedics brought up the injured boy even before they stopped his bleeding. Manny was standing close to his parents, but not too close. Silently, he watched his friend being carried past. The gash was high on the right leg, deep and gruesome—messier than anything that Manny had ever seen. But the boy wasn't half as upset by the wound as he was about whatever he had been hearing during the last several minutes. “I'm not stupid,” he cried out, at least twice. “That thing's telling stupid-shit lies.” Then he looked straight at Manny, and with a small, tight voice added, “And I didn't cheat on that test. I was just looking. I didn't take your stupid answers."

The two boys sat beside each other at school. Manny had been pushed ahead two grades, but he was still and always would be the smartest kid in class.

His injured friend sobbed, screaming for his mother

Manny's folks went over to comfort the scared woman.

Quietly, the firemen and paramedics spoke among themselves, every eye on the trees.

The police arrived finally. Two male officers climbed out of the first cruiser, and after a few words with the ranking fireman, they marched through the grass and out of sight. Then a second cruiser pulled up. A woman officer spoke to the wounded boy and his mother, and then as the ambulance pulled away, she asked the firemen, “Where are these other boys?"

Manny instinctively drifted back among the growing crowd.

The officer knelt before the largest Cub Scout. “What did you see down there, son?"

“A machine,” his father reported, one hand thrown protectively across his child's shoulder. “Some kind of weird-ass machine—"

“What did you see?” she repeated, staring only at the boy.

The bully fought back a sob, and with grim pleasure announced, “I hit it. Hit it hard."

“And the ax handle broke?"

“But I really smacked the bastard first. Whatever it is."

The male officers reemerged from the trees now. They seemed to be walking easily enough, nothing to worry about and few people paying attention to them. Then a murmur passed through the crowd, and everybody began to watch. One officer was leading. The other man followed several strides behind, his nose bleeding and one eye halfway swollen shut. With a low, furious voice, he said, “Screw you,” every so often. “Asshole,” he called up to his partner. “Screw you."

The leading officer wiped at his eyes before reaching the policewoman.

She rose and said, “What?"

“Nothing."

“What happened?"

The first man looked back over his shoulder. “It's between him and me. And it's done now."

“Like hell,” his partner muttered.

“Get yourself cleaned up,” she advised the bleeding man. Then she turned to the crowd, using a tight loud voice to ask, “Can anybody tell me anything about this object? Does anyone have any ideas—?"

A man stepped forward.

Manny hadn't noticed him before now. They were standing near each other, but he seemed to be just a stranger among the neighbors. Except that now, looking up at the face, a vague familiarity began to tug at Manny. He had seen this man somewhere. Did he live nearby? No, he didn't. Maybe he was a teacher. Which wasn't right either, and the boy was very curious now, his thoughts reaching farther and farther out into the world.

The stranger announced, “I'd like to speak to the witnesses, if I could."

“And you are?"

“Dr. Jonah Klast,” he said.

Now Manny remembered. An old woman named Klast lived beside the pasture, and her son was supposedly a big somebody in California or Los Alamos or someplace wonderful like that. And suddenly Manny found the clear memory of watching the news one evening—it must have been a year ago—and a scientist with that face had talked about research he was doing into gravity and why that force was so spectacularly weak.

“I'm a physicist,” the man was explaining. “I'm not sure, but this phenomenon ... from what I hear ... it may well be something that I can help you with...."

“Fine,” the policewoman said. Then she turned to the officer who wasn't bleeding, telling him, “Help this man, if you can."

The physicist asked, “What did you see?"

The officer had a grim, low voice and a red face and big hands that kept closing up into fists, every knuckle scraped by beating his partner's cheeks and nose. He said, “Just a ball, this big. Head-high. Silver-like. Just hanging there."

“What does the ball do?"

“Nothing,” the officer grunted.

“Did you walk behind it?"

“Yeah. Well, he did."

“Your partner, you mean?"

The face grew even redder.

“It looks the same on every side?"

The officer didn't answer.

“What happened down there?” the physicist inquired.

“It talks to you."

Manny blurted those words. Trying to hear everything, he found himself standing beside the two men, and with the same breath, he added, “It calls you a stupid three-dimensional speck. Stuff like that."

The physicist stared at the ground for a moment. He seemed puzzled, and he looked as if he very much enjoyed being that way. He was confused and intrigued and smart in the face, and with nothing about this situation sensible or ordinary, he looked almost joyful. “Is that what it said to you?” he asked the officer. “The object called you a three-dimensional speck?"

“Not that, no."

“Did it say you were stupid?"

“Maybe,” the voice growled.

“So that's why you beat the shit out of your partner. Is that it?"

“None of your business."

“Probably not,” the physicist agreed. Then he actually laughed, turning to Manny. “Is that really what it told you? You're a three-dimensional speck?"

“And a stupid sack of water,” Manny said.

“I see.” A broad smile filled Klast's boyish face. Then he turned back to the officer one last time, offering, “The object said something to you. Didn't it? It must have told you something that you didn't want to know. Is that it?"

The officer forced his fists to open.

“What would make a trained officer attack his partner?” Jonah asked the question, and then he pointed at one of the fists, asking, “Does that wedding band have anything to do with this story?"

There was no ring on the officer's hand. But Manny saw a faint streak where a ring had been, probably until just a few moments ago.

“You know, we are three-dimensional specks,” Jonah remarked. “And we are stupid sacks of water, too."

“I'm not saying anything to you,” the officer warned.

“Just tell me this much: When your wife and partner sleep together—is it in the past? Or does it happen sometime in the future?"

“If it already happened,” the officer rumbled, “I wouldn't have used my hands. I'd have shot the s.o.b. dead!"

Much was obvious.

Jonah continued interviewing the witnesses. The mysterious phenomenon had told a paramedic that three different people died because of his blunders, and a fireman learned that he had an inoperable brain tumor, and everybody had heard their existence minimized. The Earth was a simple world full of blind souls and idiots, and there was no God, and humans couldn't be more inconsequential.

Jonah absorbed this news with an easy humor. More police were arriving, including a ranking captain. Talk to him? No, he decided. He returned to the woman officer, since he had already given his credentials to her and won a certain small trust.

“I need to see the object,” he reported.

She snorted, glancing at the captain. “No way."

“Do you know what it is?"

“You do?” she snapped back at him.

“Pretty much.” What was obvious to Jonah would remain opaque and bizarre to everybody else. But he tried to explain it, telling her, “This phenomenon is from a higher dimension. To it, we look like dots on a flat membrane."

“Is that so?"

“Picture yourself looking at a membrane where flat dots live,” he began. “Now imagine pushing your finger through it. What do the dots see? They see a two-dimensional ring instead of a three-dimensional structure of skin and bone."

The woman looked utterly baffled.

But the boy who had been shadowing him—a smallish kid with blond-white hair and wide green eyes—seemed to understand what he was talking about. “You mean like in Flatland,” he offered.

“You know the book?” Jonah asked.

“Yes, sir. I read it twice."

This was only getting better and better. Jonah kept laughing, despite everyone else's worry and gloom. To the boy, he said, “Time."

“Yes, sir."

“To an entity from a five-dimensional realm ... if it looked down at little us ... it wouldn't just see us today, but it would be able to gaze back into our past and look ahead to our entire future too...."

“I guess I've heard that,” the boy remarked.

Again, Jonah told the woman officer, “I need to speak with the object."

Pointblank, she said, “No."

“You don't understand...."

“We aren't sure what we're dealing with here,” she snapped.

“I am sure."

“Maybe with the science,” she conceded. “Yeah, maybe you're right, and this is somebody's finger. But that finger's saying some awful things, from what I can tell."

Jonah considered options. If he started walking through the grass, they would almost surely stop him. If he ran, he might beat the police to the site, but he wouldn't have enough time to accomplish anything worthwhile. And how long would the phenomenon remain here? There was no telling, so time was critical. What he needed was to get down into those woods without anybody being aware of it. Meanwhile, the police would cordon off the area and sit back, waiting for government officials to come in and drag things out even further.

If he could get in there now, he would have plenty of time alone with it.

“All right,” he told the officer. “I'll just stand back here and wait."

“Not here,” she said. Then to the entire crowd, she said, “Folks. For your own safety, we need you to go back to your homes, or at least back up to the street. The situation is entirely under control, but we need to bring in equipment and people."

Jonah looked at the boy, and he smiled, kneeling to put his face close to him. The boy was a little chunky and plain-faced, with big ears ready to catch any breeze. “What's your name, son?"

“Manny Carmichael."

“Manny,” he repeated with a fond sound. “You know a little something about what I'm talking about. Don't you?"

“I think so."

“This is a very important moment. Do you see that?"

“Yes, sir."

“These hyperdimensional phenomena don't appear just every day, now do they?"

“I guess not,” he squeaked.

“They don't,” Jonah promised. “In fact, if they ever have popped into existence before now, nobody would have had the capacity to truly understand them. Not in any substantial, meaningful way."

The boy seemed to halfway understand his little speech.

“Manny,” said Jonah. “This is what I do for a living. Really, I'm the best in the world at this kind of thinking. And right now, I'm probably at the height of my intellectual powers. Maybe this very day, I am."

“Really?” the boy muttered.

“This isn't a coincidence,” Jonah professed. “Somebody knows what they are doing. And what they're doing is interfacing with our world at that first critical moment when one of us is able to appreciate their full message. Whatever that happens to be."

Manny looked down at the trees.

“You live here, do you?"

The boy started to point up at the houses.

Jonah took the pointing hand inside his hand, and quietly, with a conspirator's glee, he said, “I need the fastest route to the site. You know this neighborhood. I bet you know those woods. Is there someway that we can get down there without being seen?"

“The ditch,” the boy blurted.

“Down in that draw, you mean?"

“From above,” Manny remarked. But he didn't try to point, this time. He fell into the spirit of things, saying, “I'll have to take you."

Jonah considered that for an instant. He didn't want company, but what if the kid wandered back here and warned the police about his presence?

“All right, Manny,” he said. “Let's go."

The man wasn't dressed for this kind of walking. His shirt tore on a fat thorn when they pushed through the brush alongside Jefferson Lane, and he stumbled on the bank going down into the ditch, his right knee plastered with mud and his soft tan shoes left caked and probably stained. But he didn't complain or even hesitate. Manny would offer directions, and Dr. Klast would launch himself through whatever obstruction or hazard was presenting itself. He was a very determined man. And he was a little bit scary. When they came to the pool where the snapping turtles lived—a dirty, deep expanse of brown water surrounded by steep ground and raspberries—Jonah paused to consider the possibilities, and after a half-moment, he asked, “What's the quickest way across?” He asked it as if he were a teacher and knew the right answer. Then he winked and calmly stepped out into the tainted and smelly warm water.

Manny wouldn't. He climbed up on the bank instead, taking his time. When he finally returned to the little stream, Jonah was too far ahead to be seen, but his course was easy to follow—a string of deep footprints left behind in the goo and trash, each already filled to the brim with the filthy water.

Where they should have turned up out of the ditch, the great physicist had kept on walking.

Which was understandable, Manny decided, trying to be charitable. The man might actually be what he said he was—the smartest person in the world—but he didn't know the landmarks, and he was awfully excited, and down in this narrow deep slash of earth and thrown-away concrete, distance had its way of playing tricks.

The boy paused for a few moments, wondering what to do.

If the man were a genius, he would turn back on his own. Manny decided as much. Pulling off his T-shirt, he hung it on an obvious branch, marking the spot, and he used hands and feet, climbing up to where the ground flattened and the trees got larger and a single doomed hackberry cast its deep shadow.

For an instant, he saw nothing.

The mysterious object must have vanished, he decided, and a surprising tickle of relief ran through him.

Then a voice called out, “So, you're back for more."

Manny crept closer.

“Thought-impoverished slime slides on the dimensionally impaired landscape.” The shiny ball hadn't moved or changed shape, but the changing angle of the sun had thrown even darker shadows across it. “Thought-impoverished slime pauses now, scared enough to shit its little britches."

Manny gasped and then whispered, “You can see me?"

“I see everything,” the voice replied. “You are an ugly little vista, and I can see the whole of you."

The boy felt cold, standing in the shade without a shirt.

“Ask."

“Ask what?” the boy sputtered.

“Anything,” the voice promised.

“Okay.” He meant to think hard, coming up with some fat sweet question about huge matters. But without really intending it, Manny blurted, “Why are you here? This place, and now?"

“But you know why."

“No.” He shook his head. “I don't have any idea—"

“But I see that you know,” the voice interrupted. “And why should I bother to explain what is so fucking obvious?"

Manny took a moment. Then he carefully observed, “You're a rude shit."

Silence.

“And I don't trust you,” he continued.

Again, silence.

Manny stared at the scene for a long while. He was thinking, and he was watching himself thinking. It was as if he had two minds, one working at the problem while the other waited above, ready to help the first mind whenever it took a wrong turn.

“You could appear anywhere, anytime,” he muttered. “But you picked this moment, now. Here. He thinks you came for him, but if you can go anywhere, why didn't you...?"

Manny's voice fell away.

He looked at the girdled hackberry and the assorted tools left on the ground around it. The shattered handle of the ax was still there, and its bloodied head, and something about this scene made the boy's breath quicken and his belly hurt. Without knowing quite why, he turned around. His intention was to race back down to the ditch and grab his shirt, and then he would find Dr. Klast and lead him straight up to the field where the police could throw handcuffs on the both of them, please.

He managed only half a dozen steps, and then his new friend stepped into view, saying, “There you are."

“Hello,” Manny squeaked.

With a smile of relief, the physicist told him, “I got ahead of you, it seems. You should have called to me."

He handed over the T-shirt.

“That was smart of you,” the man purred.

Then he looked past Manny, and a wide boyish grin blossomed on his mud-streaked face.

“Hello,” he called out, stepping toward the apparition.

Which was when Manny heard the most horrible words imaginable. Quietly, almost fondly, the hyperdimensional creep said to the newcomer, “Finally. At long, long last. Someone a god might talk to. Hello!"

Mrs. Thomas Klast sat beside the picture window, watching the police and firemen standing about, doing absolutely nothing. It was a boring thing to watch, but there was nothing else for the moment. The all-news radio station had mentioned an industrial spill in the ditch, which would account for their presence. Her son had vanished along with the other gawkers. She could go outdoors and look for Jonah, of course. Wander about and call his name. But she had already twice opened her front door, and seeing her neighbors standing in a loose knot, she had backed away. She didn't like any of those people, and they scared her when she let them, which she wouldn't do now, and that was why she had returned to the window to sit in a favorite chair, watching the civil servants doing nothing to earn their pay.

Jonah must have used this spill as his excuse to escape. It wouldn't be the first time one of his little visits was abruptly brought to an end. Yes, he was a bright man. Even brilliant, though she would never admit as much to his face. But her son's flaws were as numerous as his strengths, and perhaps his worst flaw was an inability to confront truly stubborn problems. No, she didn't understand physics or mathematics, and except for the narrow prestige that these things offered, she didn't see the value in them. But she suspected, with reason, that Jonah's career would have been even more spectacular if he had tirelessly and fearlessly attacked the great conundrums of the universe.

He had his father's brilliance but too little of her ambition.

In the entire world, how many people had climbed half as far as she had managed to climb?

She never spoke about her own childhood. Not to her son, or anybody else. Vietnam was a place rooted in the deep past, and what happened there was gone now, and besides her dead husband, the only good thing that had come out of her youth was a fierce desire to achieve, defeating every opponent foolish enough to stand in her way.

What mother didn't love her son? Particularly when that son was born after so many childless years? But even then, love was tempered by a cold, clear vision of what was to come.

The old woman was thinking about what was to come when a figure appeared. He came walking out of the dangerous wood, and even at a distance, she recognized Jonah's shirt and his slender frame and the way that his arms swung at his side, as if helping him swim through the air.

A boy was following behind him.

What was her son doing down there? Thinking about toxic wastes bubbling on the ground, she felt a short-lived panic. Why wasn't he wearing a protective suit? And why would he even think of risking himself, if there was indeed some kind of spill?

The police ran out to meet him and the boy.

Jonah and the police spoke, everyone watching the trees. Then several officers unholstered their weapons and went to look at whatever was there, and Jonah said some last words to the boy and shook his hand before trotting toward her back fence. His clothes were a mess, but his face was what frightened her. Even at a distance, she saw his strange wide smile, and after a moment the smile became a pained expression, and after another moment, the pain quickly turned into a fresh and even stranger smile.

Like a small wild boy, he jumped the back fence, and then he bolted into the house, screaming, “Paper. Pens. Where are they?"

“What—?"

“Where do you keep your pens, Mom?"

She pointed to a drawer under her phone.

Jonah took what he needed, and he sat at the dining room table, writing furiously, the rest of the world closed off from him now.

She recognized that mood. And despite her own mild curiosity and a pernicious need to be noticed, she left him alone and said nothing. Eventually the police came out of the woods and waved off the firemen. Then the pasture was empty, save for the same few boys who ran wild there on any normal day. The doorbell rang, and Mrs. Klast gave Jonah only a cursory glance before she climbed to her feet and looked through a window long enough to see a policewoman waiting on her porch.

“Yes?” she said.

The woman looked like a lesbian, but she had a pleasant voice. “May I speak to your son for a moment, ma'am?"

Mrs. Klast looked over her shoulder for a moment. “I'm sorry. He's in the bathroom right now,” she lied with casual, almost artful ease. “And I think he will be there for a very long time."

“No matter,” the officer said. “Just tell him that we've searched everywhere, and he's right. Whatever it was, it's gone now."

“It's gone now?"

“Thanks, ma'am. Good day."

Returning to the living room, she found Jonah finished with his work. He had filled perhaps a dozen sheets of legal paper with odd squiggles and cramped phrases. For the first time in years, she asked, “What is this stuff?"

Her son was staring at her.

“I don't understand,” she admitted. Then with an exasperated sigh, she asked, “What happened down in those trees?"

“Mother,” he began, “I'm going to win the Nobel Prize."

Instantly, she said, “I know that."

“Four years from now,” he added.

Which was an oddly specific guess. But she decided not to doubt him, nodding her head while saying, “That would be wonderful, yes."

Jonah rose, walking over to the wall where pictures of his father were on display. He picked up a small snapshot in a tired plastic frame, looking at the man when he was a captain in the Marine Corps. “It is amazing,” he began.

After a long silence, she asked, “What is amazing?"

“How a few words, chosen carefully, can wash away all of the great mysteries in the universe."

She had no idea what to say.

Jonah set down the picture and looked at his mother with a strange mixture of awe and horror, love and bleak amusement.

Because he was unsettling her, she asked, “When will you be going?"

He didn't answer.

“You should probably leave for the airport soon,” she said. “Just to make sure you aren't late for your flight."

“I can stay awhile longer,” said Jonah.

Then he asked, “Does your head hurt, Mom?"

“A little bit,” she mentioned. But she hadn't noticed the pain until now. “Why? Do I look like I'm in pain?"

“Not at all.” Then he did something remarkably strange. Jonah bent over and kissed her on the top of her aching head, his mildest little voice telling her, “I need to stay around a couple more days."

“Why?"

“To take care of things."

“What things?"

And then he was crying for no reason, and her final thought was that her son and best hope was descending into madness.

“What is this?"

“You tell me. What does it look like?"

“A dead tree,” she said warily.

“Well,” Manny declared. “That's as good an answer as any."

It was a summer evening, warm and exceptionally humid. Manny had just turned twenty, while his companion was nearly thirty—a pretty graduate student who worshipped the young savant. They had come to the city to tour the little house where he grew up, and after walking through its empty rooms and weed-choked yard, Manny insisted on crossing the old pasture, too. The woman was nervous, even though she knew there was no genuine danger. And she was excited, perhaps even honored, though at the same time she understood how a single point in space held no true significance, just as no moment in time could be worthy of any special distinction.

Time and space were the most trivial dimensions; that was the most basic lesson drawn from the Klast Model.

“See the marks?” Her companion was fingering the dead wood. “See how the cuts work all the way around?"

She was staring past the tree.

“No,” he warned her. “Touch the wood. Here. Can you feel it?"

What was she supposed to notice?

“I helped kill this tree,” the young man confessed. “That's what I was doing right before the Voice spoke."

She had heard the story many times, from various sources. As an undergraduate, she attended a lecture where Doctor Klast himself spoke about that day's critical events: How he listened to the Voice and correctly interpreted what It said to him, and how that was followed by the death of his beloved mother. A few years later, Manny had told her his version of the story, although she couldn't remember him mentioning anything about killing a tree.

“It was a hackberry,” he said.

She was lousy about naming trees.

“They have rather big leaves,” he said, “and those leaves create plenty of deep shade."

Her fingertips danced across the long weathered gouges left behind by axes and rusty saws. But she kept staring down the slope, watching the faint whitish glimmer of what resembled a very simple wall—a milky smooth edifice that cut the Earth into a variety of pieces before reaching high into a twisted, utterly changed sky.

What might or might not be the sun would soon set.

“This is where it began,” he muttered.

But it didn't begin anywhere, at least not in any fashion that a human could understand. That was as useless as saying that the Earth was where it began, or the visible universe, or a specific point so many millimeters from her left index finger. All positions were inadequate, since everything important happens in dimensions that humans could only dimly grasp.

“It took me years...” he began.

Then his voice fell away, and he sighed.

Finally, she looked at him. Manny was crying, his arms pulled around his chest and his young face tilted forward. Quietly, almost too quietly to hear, he said, “For fun, we murdered a tree."

“You were a child—” she began.

“For fun, somebody killed the Earth,” he continued.

But that wasn't entirely true, either. Ninety percent of the planet was invisible, at least for the time being. The second Klast experiment had run wild, changing the local topology. Sure, that was true. But most calculations showed there were twelve or thirteen other pieces of the Earth, still intact but scattered across new realms, and each was alive, and perhaps in another ten generations, or a thousand, their descendents would learn how to reconnect the pieces.

“You shouldn't blame yourself,” she told him.

And she meant it.

“Really,” she whispered, setting her hands on his shoulders. “You didn't understand what they said to you. Klast did. And you couldn't do anything to stop any of this. I mean, whoever they were, they had all the power."

“Kids,” he muttered.

“Whatever they were,” she said, giving Manny a supportive hug. “They could see the perfect moment, and they had the perfect means—"

“I know all of that,” he snapped.

As if bitten, she backed away.

And then he was laughing, shaking his head. Really, he was a genius, and exceptionally strange, and sometimes his games made her feel crazy. Like when he stood with his back to the dead tree—a whitened trunk now, limbless and frail—and with a sweep of the hand, he said, “Look at this ground, would you? What do you see here?"

She stared at thorny brush and several young trees. But she didn't have a clue about their species names.

“My point is...” he began.

She waited for a moment and then asked, “What's your point?"

“This was bare ground before. And all this new growth ... everything living here ... it owes its existence to me ... !"

She nodded, hunting for words worth saying.

Finally, in exasperation, she repeated, “You were nine years old, Manny. And you aren't responsible for any of this!"

He looked at her, a strange little smile working its way into view. And then very quietly, with a voice that couldn't sound sadder, he said, “I'm not talking about trees anymore."

She began to speak, then hesitated.

“Knowing what you know ... about the universe and everything that's larger than the universe ... why couldn't I be to blame...?"

“Because that's just not possible,” she insisted.

“But it is possible,” he snapped. “I'm standing in the super-future, sticking my finger where it doesn't belong. With a motion, I can cut this world up into so many pieces, if I want ... and for good measure, I could reach inside the brain of a bitter old woman—a woman who never said a kind word to me or my family—and with the tiniest effort, I could rip open one of her essential arteries...."

The graduate student sobbed and took a clumsy step backward.

And Manny shook his head, staring at the ground as he confessed, “I'm not smart enough to know that ... not half smart enough to say that all of this isn't all because of me ... !"