Chaos Mode

CHAPTER 3—CRUSH

AS she spoke, focusing her thoughts, sharing her memory-experience with the others via Seqiro’s telepathy and with Burgess via her hand on his contact knob, Colene pictured herself as she had been barely seven months before, at school’s Spring Break. Oklahoma, America, Earth: a world and a lifetime away!

Only three months before that time, during the Christmas holiday, she had gone innocently on a date with a boy she had not known well enough, and gotten herself educated in an adult fashion by four of them. She had learned way too much about alcohol and sex, and finished the night thoroughly sick of both. She hadn’t told her folks, but the boys had talked, so that her reputation was sliding. Thirteen years old, in the eighth grade, and already she was a known slut, at least among those who kept track. She was still trying to sort out her feelings on the matter, uncertain whether to shut the whole thing out of her awareness forever, or to commit suicide. As time passed, she was coming to favor both courses. At such time as she figured out suitable means to accomplish them.

However, the teachers knew nothing about it, and no one was about to tell them. The best teacher was a completely ignorant teacher, with respect to real concerns. That made it easy to get along in class. Colene was adept at the art of conforming in nonessential ways, so as to conceal the essentials from irrelevant eyes.

On another plane of her existence, she had normal feelings. Her romantic life was abysmal, and not just because of her reputation. Nothing was as gawky and unwholesome as an eighth-grade boy, and the ninth graders weren’t much better, and she was not about to trust a high school boy again. But Amos Forell was another matter. He was her science teacher, marvelously handsome, authoritative and mature, and he knew everything. Maybe he could tell her whether hypnotism could enable a person to seal off part of her mind. Maybe he could tell her of the most convenient, painless, sanitary way to die. More important, maybe he would.

The more she thought about it, the better she liked the notion of asking him. But she couldn’t just blurt it out. She would have to be indirect. How could she get herself into a situation in which she could get the information she wanted, without arousing his suspicion? Because even the nice teachers were part of the administrative conspiracy, bound to blab anything private they learned, causing endless mischief.

Somewhere along the way, as she considered Forell, he became Amos in her mind, and she realized that she had a crush on him. This was girlishly foolish, of course; he was a married man, and distressingly straight. There were stories about certain male teachers who gave better grades to physically mature girls who sat up front in short skirts, especially if they forgot to keep their knees together, but Amos was clean. Either he had no interest, or he was highly disciplined. This was known, because one especially well-developed girl had an absolute flair for stupidity in science, and she had put on a show that should have melted his horn-rims. He had merely murmured in her ear, as he returned her F paper, that perhaps she would be more comfortable in slacks. She had turned on him her loveliest do-what-you-will-with-me wide-eyed stare. Prompted by that, he had explained that perhaps the drafty air-conditioning was distracting her from her classwork. So much for seduction; he had noticed her exposure and demonstrated his immunity. That earned him points.

Of course that didn’t stop the girls from trying. Some who didn’t need better grades considered it a challenge. Amos never missed a beat; he was the perfect science teacher, ardent about the wonders of his subject, and his grades showed no sign of deviance. No one could figure it out. Was he a closet gay? Then how to account for his wife and two children? Exactly what was his game?

Then Colene deciphered it: he was a contrarian! He scored by pretending not to notice. That way, not only was he technically innocent, he got more and deeper glimpses than would ever otherwise have been offered. What a scheme! He was smart about more than science. She liked that. So she didn’t blab his secret. In fact, maybe that secret was what had tipped her into her typical teen crush. It would pass in about two months—they always did—but it added urgency to her quest. She had to get a chance to ask him her questions while she remained smitten, because the experience would be so much more meaningful then.

Then her opportunity came: Spring Break. Students could get spot bonus points by coming in on one of the off days to help the teachers clean up, so she signed up for work on the science lab. She was in luck: no one else signed. She was alone with Amos for four solid hours. He would even have to drive her home, after; it was part of the deal, because the school didn’t want to get sued for putting innocent students out on the street when the crossing guards weren’t on duty, and maybe fostering an accident. The administration didn’t care if it lost a student, of course, but lawsuits were expensive.

She was careful about it: she wore a skirt that came down well below her knees, and a blouse that was fully opaque, and no makeup or fancy hairdo. She was there to get the work done, and she looked exactly the part. Two could play the contrarian game; she would make her impression on him by seeming not to be trying. Her skirt and blouse, though decorous, were quite well fitted, and much depended on the positions a girl had to assume in order to clean under counters or to pick up lab equipment. She didn’t have as much body as she could have wished for, but the decorous clothing helped there, accenting implication rather than exposure. She was innocuous and naïvely attractive, she hoped.

And she did work. She made a point of throwing herself into it, doing the best job she could. When there was something to be moved, she tackled it immediately, so that if it was heavy he had to jump to help before she strained some innocent little bone or tendon. Even so, she managed to work into some legitimate heaving of bosom with the effort of the work. She had tied her hair back, but soon it worked its way loose and flopped around her face exactly as she had intended. She was the epitome of the enthusiastic, hardworking, guileless, innocently sexy, sweet little girl.

What did she get for her effort? Not what she had hoped. Amos was a creature of his profession, and he loved his subject. He maintained a constant monologue about the things they were handling, as if it were just another class. He never seemed to look at her; she was nothing next to Science. She was a mere audience for his true passion.

So as they cleaned and put away the astronomy charts she suffered through an extemporaneous lecture on the nature of the universe, and how fascinating it was to see the cracks developing in the Big Bang theory. “I was an advocate of the Steady State theory,” he said—god only knew what that was, and she knew better than to inquire. “There was such an elegance to it, both mathematically and philosophically. But as our observations improved, we discovered that the universe conformed to the Big Bang theory, seeming to be a monstrous explosion of matter and energy perhaps fifteen billion years ago. The question became whether it was open or closed—that is, whether it would expand forever, or whether there was enough matter to enable gravity eventually to halt its expansion and draw it back together. I supported the closed model, but it seemed that there was not enough matter in the universe to achieve closure. However, then came the indications of dark matter—”

Colene found herself getting interested despite herself. She had heard of dark matter. It appealed to her sense of the morbid: the idea that the universe was dominated by unseen force. That there was no way to detect the great majority of the matter that existed, except for its gravitational effect. She wished she could invent a telescope that could see dark matter. Maybe it would form the shape of giant animals in space, chasing one another. Maybe Earth and the Solar System and the Milky Way Galaxy were all just fuzz on the tip of a hair growing from a wart on the nose of a Dark Matter Monster.

“So it seems there is enough matter to close the universe,” Amos concluded with satisfaction. “We can’t see it, but we do know it’s there, and that’s what counts.” He glanced at her. “Am I boring you?”

“Never,” she said immediately. Indeed he wasn’t, because she was helping him roll the big astronomy charts so they could be fitted into their casings, and in the process their heads got almost close enough for a kiss. She was developing this fantasy of him glancing up, meeting her gaze, so close to his face, losing control and pressing his lips to hers and then being terribly apologetic and embarrassed and out of sorts until she had to calm him by kissing him again. ‘But it’s wrong’ he would protest. ‘You’re only a student and I’m a married man.’ And she would say ‘There is no wrong in love,’ and smile, and kiss him once more. ‘But an eighth-grade girl—’ ‘That’s all right, Amos; I’ve had experience.’

That popped her out of it. Indeed she had had experience—of exactly the wrong kind. She could never be innocent again. She was unclean, unvirginal, undesirable. Damn those freaks! They had left her a mere shell of appearance with the core debased, like an oak tree with a rotten heart. Her thrill of first love had been gutted before it flowered. Seduce Amos? If he knew her nature, he would be disgusted.

They moved on to the meteorology charts, and Amos was off again, discoursing avidly about the patterns of weather across the world. He smiled briefly as he remarked on the ignorance of students who supposed that meteorology was the study of meteors. Then on to seasonal patterns, and the significance of El Nino, which was a global effect.

Suppose she got involved in moving a heavy prop, and it snagged on her blouse, and tore it open, and Amos saw her bra? No, scratch that; she simply didn’t yet have enough bra-filler. So suppose she had to sit on the floor, spread-legged, to wrestle something into place, and he was helping her, and he got a really close look up under her skirt, and—no, scratch that too; he was immune to bare thighs. He had demonstrated that for years.

So how could she get his attention? There was only one way: by engaging his intellect. That was after all his most appealing feature. So she would have to start really paying attention, and maybe arrange to say something that made him realize that she wasn’t just another anonymous classroom face, she was a person with a mind. His first love was obviously science, and so hers would have to be too. Meanwhile she hummed “Why Was I Born Too Late?” to herself as she worked.

Now they were working on assorted fossils of sea creatures. They were inherently dull, even loathsome, being like squished bugs. “Ah, the trilobites,” Amos said with satisfaction. “Perhaps the success story of the Paleozoic era. Isn’t this a beauty!” He held up a fossil of what looked like the granddaddy of multi-legged under-the-rock creepers. “This phylum of arthropods didn’t disappear until the extinction that ended the era. That means they endured for close to two hundred and fifty million years. The dinosaurs were pikers. Of course then the dinosaurs faced their own extinction at the end of the Mesozoic, ushering in the Age of Mammals, misnomer which that is.”

Colene was getting interested again. Extinctions were wholesale dyings, and she had been pondering death increasingly, since the rape. Was it a way out?

But she wasn’t quite ready to bring up the subject of death yet. She preferred to come at it obliquely, so that he never caught on to her real interest in it. So she addressed a secondary curiosity. “The Age of Mammals is a misnomer?” Misnomer was one of those four-bit words teachers liked to use; it meant that the name was wrong. One of the ways to nail down a good grade was to spot such words early, and get them right.

“Of course,” he said happily. “The arthropods remain the most diverse and prolific phylum today, with about eighty percent of all species.”

“Ick!” Colene said, dismayed. “You mean spiders and flies and beetles?”

“And the crustaceans,” he agreed. “But even if you limit it to the chordates, even to the vertebrates, the fishes are the most diverse in the sea, and the birds on land. We might as well call it the Age of Aves.”

Now to slide in slantwise to the subject of death. “And it was the reptiles, until that last big extinction. What killed them?”

He smiled. He really seemed to appreciate her interest. Probably it was rare for any student ever to evince interest if there wasn’t a grade on the line. “That remains a matter of conjecture. Actually that wasn’t the greatest of the extinctions. The one at the end of the Paleozoic was, with about ninety-six per cent of all species disappearing. Possibly the one at the end of the Precambrian era, five hundred and seventy million years ago, was worse, but we can’t know because the fossil record is insufficient. There did seem to be multi-celled life forms then, none of which survived; life had to rediscover that after the extinction. That ushered in the Cambrian explosion.”

“Explosion? Somebody set off a bomb?” She smiled to show that she wasn’t really that dumb, just in case he should forget. Also, it was an excellent excuse to smile at him.

He returned the smile, and she felt like melting. “Figurative, Colene. New species appeared so suddenly that it seems like an explosive radiation. Most didn’t survive, but for a while there was an unparalleled diversity of types. We learn that from the Burgess Shale. There were more fundamentally different types of creature then than now, perhaps. We think it was because the seas of the world were empty of multi-cellular life, so there was for a time completely free diversification. Then the process of selection took hold, and many promising species were winnowed out. It’s too bad; there were some really intriguing varieties, like none known ever since.”

“You mean like BEMs—bug-eyed monsters?”

“Yes, though most of these were small compared to the monsters of today. Many were a fraction of an inch long. But strange. Here, look at Marrella.” He brought out a picture.

Colene looked. It was a weird bug with long horns extending across its back and sides, and too many legs to count, and two different sets of feeler-antenna reaching out in front. “Yuck! That’s the ugliest centipede I ever saw!”

“But a lovely unique arthropod,” he said. “Some eighty percent of the fossils found in the Burgess Shale were of this creature, so it was highly successful in its time. As you can see, it is also quite sophisticated in physical detail, not clumsy or primitive as we might have expected. Note that it is biramous.”

“It’s what?” This time he had lost her, but she forgave him that.

“Let me explain,” he said, almost radiating pleasure at the prospect. “The term means that each leg is divided. One part may be used for walking, in the way we consider normal. The other may be a gill.” He grabbed a pencil and made a sketch. “Each segment thus has two appendages, and each appendage has two parts.”

“That looks almost like a little man with wings,” she remarked.

“A cute analogy. Early arthropods tended to be this way. But those upper ones are gills. So you might say that Marrella breathed with its legs.”

She laughed, not even having to force it. “What a weird way to do it!”

“But many species lost their biramous features, and became uniramous,” he said. “Just one part to each leg, as is the case with us. I sometimes wonder what a modern biramous creature would be like, if it had evolved and come onto land with the rest of us. Of course we’ll never know, but it’s an amusing fantasy.”

“Yeah. Maybe even triramous, or quadriramous.”

He shook his head. “Three or four divisions to each appendage? I really don’t know what a creature would do with such a structure. I suspect it would be unwieldy.”

“Yeah. Fancy two of them trying to make love. He gets his trirames tangled up with her birames.”

This time he laughed. “What an image! But I doubt that they copulated in any such manner. The arthropods are more apt to do it tail-to-tail.”

Almost before she knew it, she had spoken words she shouldn’t have. “No rapes among them?”

He glanced sharply at her. “What is your interest in such a subject?”

“Oh, nothing,” she lied quickly, flustered. “Just foolish curiosity.” She hoped she wasn’t blushing.

He shrugged. “Rape is known among animals, and in some species it’s the rule. One has only to watch the way of a rooster with hens in a barnyard to appreciate that. But normally copulation is voluntary on both sides, except that pheromones can make it involuntary. So perhaps it’s a matter of opinion.”

Colene looked at another picture, not really interested in it, but hoping to guide the subject safely away from the danger zone. “What’s this—a cutaway view of the interior of a BEM airliner?”

He had to smile again. “That is Sarotrocercus, a tiny Burgess Shale arthropod. It swam on its back, and those ‘airplane seats’ are its gill branches, which we suspect it used for swimming. So if you are amused by legs used for breathing, now you can be further amused by gills used for swimming. These creatures had their own ways. But if you want to see real novelty, let me show you some of the others.” He sorted through the pictures. “Here is Wiwaxia. What does it look like to you?”

“A spiked barbarian helmet,” she replied promptly, “And here is Anomalocaris, a huge Cambrian predator, over a foot long.” He paused, but Colene did not laugh; she knew that these creatures were small. “It probably swam in the fashion of a manta ray, undulating through the water, a fearsome sight. Note the vicious feeding appendages, and the circular mouth orifice. It probably acted like a nutcracker, crushing the bodies of its prey.”

Colene was getting into it again. “That’s related to the lobsters?”

“Not at all. It’s no arthropod; it’s in a phylum of its own. Nothing like it exists today. One of the abiding curiosities of the panorama of life shown by the Burgess Shale is that the most successful creatures of that time disappeared without trace, while comparatively minor lines like the chordates survived to prosper. The chordates, of course, were the ones who later gave rise to the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. So the mystery is not so much what caused the extinctions—meteor strikes and global changes of weather can account for them—but why certain obscure species survived. I have pondered that often.”

Colene hadn’t thought of it that way. “You mean it wasn’t survival of the fittest? I mean, mammals made it through because they’re better adapted than the reptiles, even the big dinosaurs, being warm-blooded and all. It wasn’t that way back in the Cambrian?”

“It wasn’t that way with the dinosaurs either,” he said. “They may have been warm-bodied too, and there is every indication that they would have carried on to this day if it hadn’t been for a stroke of bad luck. The climate was changing, true, and species of reptiles were declining—but other species were maintaining their vigor. When the meteor came, it was their ill fortune to be large.”

“Huh?” He had caught her by surprise. He was fairly good at that, which she liked.

“We have analyzed it every which way, and the main thing the survivors had in common, through the several extinctions, was their size. They were small. Perhaps they were able to hide in crevices, whether of the land or the sea, until the horror faded. But the big creatures could not hide, so they died. It may indeed be that simple.”

“Gee. Then if there’s another extinction, wiping us out, maybe the roaches will survive to rule the earth.”

“That,” he said seriously, “is no joke. They are even resistant to radiation, and highly adaptable to changing conditions, whether physical or chemical. The roaches are survivors.”

“Let’s look at more pictures,” Colene said wryly.

“Are you trying to distract me from the job at hand?” he asked, with mock severity.

“You don’t think I could actually be interested?”

He shook his head. “I always hope a student will be eager for knowledge. I am usually disappointed. Certainly you are interested in something, but I’m not sure it’s Cambrian fauna.”

Ouch! “Do I get a bonus grade for good work here?”

“Colene, you are already making A’s.”

“Well, I do have a couple of things I want to know. But I don’t know if I want to ask them.”

“Such as whether I really grade classroom legs?”

She paused, astonished. He knew about that story? “That, too,” she agreed.

“Will you promise not to tell?”

She crossed her forearms against her chest in a cute little-girl gesture. “Cross my heart.”

“I do appreciate what is shown, but I don’t grade by it. I never forget that I am a happily married man and that these are adolescents. I am just as glad I’m not teaching at the twelfth-grade level, however.”

He had given her a straight answer! He had admitted that he noticed. “I wish I hadn’t promised,” she said, making a lugubrious face.

“I was glad to see that you are more sensible,” he said. “You are properly dressed, and you are working well. It’s a real pleasure to have a bright student volunteer. If it is information you wish, I shall be happy to answer your questions to the best of my ability.”

There was her opening. But to ask, she would have to reveal her secret concerns, and she wasn’t sure she was ready.

Amos did not push her. That was one of the nice things about him. He was generally willing to live and let live. He displayed another picture. “What does this resemble?”

“A daisy on a Q-Tip?”

“Or a goblet on a thin stem. An inch long, in all. It is Dinomischus, a creature of another bygone phylum. See those two holes in the center of what you think of as the flower? Those are its mouth and anus.”

“Side by side!” she exclaimed, wrinkling her nose. “I’d hate to share its meals.”

“And here is the prize: the strangest creature of all. Hallucigenia.”

“You’re kidding! Nothing’s called that! Scientists are too stodgy.”

“Not always. This has seven pairs of stilt legs, and seven wormlike tentacles on top with tiny pincers. With what may be a bulbous head at one end, and a hollow tail at the other. How do you suppose it foraged?”

Colene squinted at it. “This is a phylum all to itself?”

“Surely so.”

“So there’s no guarantee that it operates any way close to the way we think it should?”

“None.”

“I don’t see how it could walk very well. No joints. It sure wouldn’t move very fast. And what would the tentacles catch, slow-motion?” She pondered. “You know, this thing just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, as a standalone creature. Could it be maybe part of some other creature, and the head’s not a head but the stump where it broke off?”

“Beautiful!” Amos exclaimed. He put his arm around her shoulders, hugging her. “In one brilliant intuitive flash you have caught up with contemporary conjecture! That’s exactly what has been speculated.”

“Gee,” she said, pleased.

Then he froze, realizing what he had done. He had touched a student! He quickly dropped his arm. “Oh, I’m sorry. I—”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got a crush on you anyway.” How delightfully similar that was to her fantasy!

“Oh, no! That was why you volunteered to work?”

“That, too,” she agreed, grinning. “May I tell?”

He realized that he had not transgressed. She had merely scored a point. “What, and ruin my reputation?”

She grew bold. “Aw, they wouldn’t believe me anyway. Will you touch me again if I promise not to tell?”

“Absolutely not.”

He was back in Teacher Mode. “Then I guess we’d better get the rest of the work done.”

They resumed the cleanup. But there was now a certain camaraderie between them. Colene had indeed gotten part of what she wanted: closeness and recognition. She found herself humming “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”

“What did you come here for, Colene?” he asked after a moment.

“Will you promise not to tell?”

He imitated her prior gesture, crossing his forearms over his chest. “Cross my sternum.”

“No, I mean really. No private reports, no nothing to nobody. No quiet activity for my own good. You just pretend you never heard it at all.”

He gave her an appraising glance. “It’s that serious?”

“Maybe.”

“I confess you have aroused my curiosity. I undertake to maintain complete confidence.”

That was adult for a promise of silence. He was a teacher, but she decided to trust him, this far. “I have two questions, but maybe they’ll get me in trouble.”

“As I said, I will answer to the best of my ability.”

“The first question is whether hypnotism would help me forget something I want to forget.”

“That perhaps depends on what you want to forget.” He paused, but she did not fill in the information. “Hypnotism resembles a state of intense concentration; in fact the brain waves of the two states may be indistinguishable. So my guess is that if it is anything of consequence, if concentration won’t do it, neither will hypnotism. Also, you might have to tell the hypnotist what it was you wanted to forget.”

“Scratch that, then. My second question is, what is the safest, cleanest, pleasantest way to die?”

He canted his head. “You are serious?”

“Yeh. Remember, you won’t tell.”

“I already regret that commitment. But before I answer, I must know one thing: are you thinking of someone else’s death, or your own?”

“Oh, I’m no killer!” she protested. “And not even suicidal, really, maybe. I just want to know, in case.”

“If I told you how to take your life, and you did it, I would not only be deeply disturbed by your loss, I would be accessory to the crime.”

He had a point. “Well, could you maybe just sort of point me in the direction of where I could find the answer, without anyone knowing?”

“I’m not sure. Colene, you’re a bright, seemingly well-balanced, and I must say pretty girl. If anything—” He paused again, but again she stonewalled it, making no response. “I might just mention that there’s a book in my desk, titled Final Exit, published by an organization called the Hemlock Society. You know the significance of hemlock?”

“It’s what they made that Greek philosopher drink.”

“Socrates. I believe that book is buried under some papers, and it would be a while before I missed it, if someone borrowed it. However, if anyone were to see a girl like you reading a book like that—”

“Discretion can be my middle name, when I choose.” They continued working, drawing near the end of the job. Amos, perhaps trying to restore some semblance of normalcy, resumed his discussion of paleontology. “The reclassification of the creatures found in the Burgess Shale forced a reinterpretation of evolutionary theory itself.

Originally discovered by Charles Walcott, perhaps the greatest paleontologist of his day, they were considered to be an oddity. He more or less shoehorned them into familiar classifications. This was because the standard model of evolution described early creatures as few and primitive, becoming more varied and complex as time progressed. Thus the greatest diversity and complexity of life should be today, with all prior ages less so. But there is more fundamental diversity of life forms in the Burgess Shale than in all the seas today—and we don’t even know what creatures weren’t recorded there. We conjecture that most of the creatures lived in shallow water at the base of a sea cliff, in the accumulated mud and sand there. Then that material abruptly slid off a lower cliff and sank into much deeper water, where there was no oxygen. That killed the creatures, and preserved them flattened but almost intact, their soft parts fossilized. It was a bad break for them, but a great break for us, because otherwise we would not have known that most of them existed. But they were from the earliest time of multi-cellular life, and therefore were supposed to be primitive. In fact they are extremely diversified and sophisticated. When these fossils were reclassified and correctly placed, it became apparent that they simply did not fit the standard pattern.” He paused. ”I don’t mean to lecture. Stop me, if—”

“No, I’m interested,” Colene said. “Now.” And she was, because the weird creatures had captured her fancy. She wanted to know more about them, and their significance. They were coming alive for her, in their fashion, there in that ancient mud.

“We now conclude that evolution, instead of being a constantly expanding cone of diversity and complexity, is actually a process of explosive radiation and subsequent winnowing out. That is, a great many types of creatures appear early, trying every ecological niche, and then competition eliminates many of them, leaving relatively few major trunks. These may in turn radiate and be winnowed. the most surprising and uncomfortable message of the Burgess Shale is that this winnowing process appears to be largely random. The fittest, by any measure we conceive, do not necessarily prevail. The most successful creatures of the Cambrian period did not survive, while some of the least promising endured to form the greatest arrays of creatures in ensuing eras. How can we account for this? Only by saying either that we hardly understand the true criteria for long-term survival, or that they were lucky.”

“Lucky!”

He nodded. “It is true. We can not claim that mankind is the absolute summit of an inevitable evolution. Our dominance may have been the result of pure chance. The large extinctions, especially—our ancestors may just have happened to be in a spot that was shielded from the worst of the effects, so scraped through while less lucky species took the fatal brunt. If it were to be run through again, the chances are that our kind would never have arisen. It’s a humbling thought: that chance, more than anything else, accounts for us.”

That was an awesome thought. “Pure chance—and I might never have existed.”

“As we now see it. Some scientists object, of course. But the evidence of the Burgess Shale is persuasive.”

Colene thought about it: how she might so readily never have existed. The notion had tremendous appeal—and was simultaneously frightening. Was there after all any point at all to living?

Suddenly all her swirling thoughts, past and present, coalesced into unbearable grief. She burst into tears.

In a moment she found herself sitting in Amos’ office chair, and he was handing her tissues from a box so that she could mop her face. “I’m s-sorry,” she said, trying to get control. “It’s nothing you did, Mr. Forell. I just—I don’t know.”

“Call me Amos,” he said. “And don’t tell.”

She had to laugh through her tears. “Thanks, Amos. It’s just that nonexistence—it gets to me.”

“So I gather. Colene, it is evident that you have more on your mind than incidental chores. I have promised not to betray your secret, whatever it may be. I am beginning to suspect what it is, but I would rather have you tell me.”

“I was raped!” she blurted out. “I was such a fool! I went on a date with this high school boy, and I was sort of flattered he had asked me, and he took me to an apartment, and there were three others, and I had a drink, and then another, and I don’t know how many, and then—it disgusts me, so, but I can’t ever quite wash it out, and I don’t know what to do.” She mopped her face again.

“When?” he asked, and indeed he seemed unsurprised.

“Last Christmas. Three months ago. I guess I really asked for it, because—”

“Who?”

She snapped to. “I can’t tell you that, Amos! ‘Cause I know you’ll have to do something, and you promised—”

“I promised,” he agreed tightly. “I’m sorry I did, but I did. Very well, no names. You didn’t report it?”

“I didn’t know how. Besides, I was so ashamed. I mean, I walked right into it! I should have known—”

“Certainty is easy in retrospect,” he said firmly. “If we all could see ahead as readily as we do behind, we’d never make any mistakes. Consider yourself foolish if you ever walk into such a situation again. But not for your past judgment. You trusted your date to be honorable, and he betrayed that trust. The fault was his. It is obvious that he set you up for it, by getting you to the apartment, then by plying you with alcohol so as to muddle your judgment and resistance. Even then, he used force. You were the victim of a carefully laid trap. You have grounds for outrage, but not for shame. You didn’t ask for it; you were chosen for your naïveté. It happens to young girls, too often. They are even encouraged to blame themselves, as if they have sinned. So that they don’t report it.”

“You mean—it’s a regular thing? It happens to other girls?”

“It does. Because they are what they are: inexperienced trusting. I suspect that some of your classmates have erred similarly. I see the signs in them. But I must say you fooled me; I never suspected. You have remarkable poise in adversity, Colene.”

“Gee.” She was really flattered by his compliment. “So if you don’t want to turn them in, that’s your decision. I won’t push you, on that; it’s not an easy route. But don’t blame yourself to the point of becoming suicidal, when you were guilty only of innocence. I can’t tell you to feel good about it, but you have to understand that you were the victim, not the perpetrator, and that it is wrong to blame yourself.”

“You mean it?” It had never occurred to her that she might not be guilty.

“I mean it. Do what you must, but don’t accept the blame.”

“Gee,” she said again, feeling a deep relief. Then she lurched up and planted a kiss on his mouth.

She sank back onto the chair. Then she realized that he hadn’t dodged back, as he could have. He had accepted the kiss, pretending to be caught by surprise. He winked. “Promise not to tell.”

“Promise,” she agreed.

They closed up the lab, and he took her home. She felt a whole lot better. Only as she watched his car drive away did she realize that she had forgotten to borrow the death-book. But perhaps it didn’t matter. She no longer wanted to die.

Amos didn’t tell, and neither did Colene. They treated each other with almost complete indifference in class, both knowing how to keep a secret. She made an A in science the next semester, but knew she had earned it. Her crush faded, but she retained considerable respect for the man. He was a straight player.

Her suicidal inclination had been beaten back, but as her crush departed, her depression returned. She started scratching her wrists and watching the blood flow. So she hadn’t really accomplished anything by her encounter with Amos, but she didn’t regret it. As far as she knew, no student had ever kissed him. She probably held the record, as far as making an impression on him went. She liked him, and knew he liked her, and perhaps that was the thing that kept the balance slightly to the side of life instead of death.

In such manner she had come to appreciate the significance of the Burgess Shale—and now she was extremely glad of it. Because it enabled her to understand the nature of this new anchor reality they were in. Thank you, Amos, she thought.

When she was fourteen, at the depth of her depression, Darius had come from his other reality, looking for a woman to love and many. That had been Colene’s salvation, because there was nothing left for her in her own reality of contemporary Earth. Indeed, it turned out that he had come because she was one of the few people who could be taken from her reality without affecting it—because she was going to die soon anyway. She had loved him instantly, seeing in him a man like Amos, only more-so, and he had loved her—until he learned that she was not only underage by the standard of her culture, she was depressive. He needed a woman of age and full of joy. She had also doubted him, thinking that he was imagining his fabulous magical home reality. So they had parted—and realized that it was too late. All either wanted was the other.

So Darius had tried to repair things the hard way: by setting up a Virtual Mode, where there were no restrictions on what could be done in another reality. But the Virtual Mode was not a direct connection between their two worlds; it was a reality in itself, set as it were crosswise to the layered other realities. It was anchored in five realities, to keep it stable as a four-dimensional temporary entity. Darius had to walk across it to reach Colene’s anchor-reality, crossing other realities at intervals of ten feet, and everything could change with every invisible boundary. He had a long trek to undertake.

Colene, discovering the Virtual Mode from her own anchor, had set out to join him. She had found the traveling rife with danger. But she had also found Seqiro, the telepathic horse, who sought adventure and a girl to love.

Colene loved horses. It was a match made in heaven—or the Virtual Mode.

But when the two had finally met, they were trapped in one of the other anchor realities: the DoOon Mode, where the Emperor Ddwng had sought to use them to enter the Virtual Mode and conquer the other realities. They had barely escaped, and found themselves in the Julia Mode, with Nona as the new anchor person. Nona was everything that Colene wished to be: lovely, nice, full-breasted, magical, and of age. Both Darius and Seqiro liked her. So now Colene wanted to get man and horse rapidly across the Virtual Mode to Darius’ home reality, before either changed his mind about Colene.

“And that is where we stand at the moment,” Colene concluded. “We’ll be happy to take you along, Burgess. We’d be on our way right now, if that damned mind predator hadn’t zeroed in on me and forced me to get off the Virtual Mode. But it should lose interest in a few days, and then we’ll resume our trek. We’re ordinary folk, like you, just with different bodies and metabolism. By the time we get back on the Virtual Mode, we should know each other well enough to be a decent team, so we can handle whatever other surprises it has for us. I think we’ll get along just fine. Just don’t try to charm my horse and my man from me.”

Then, as an afterthought to Nona: “No offense, damsel.” Because Colene liked Nona too, and knew the woman did not wish to be the threat she was to Colene’s future.