Quantum Night

40

It would have been nice if, after Kayla had shared the truth of her transformation with me, we had been able to fall asleep holding each other, accepting that who we are now mattered more than who we’d been then. But a peaceful sleep was not to be: we were immediately interrupted by a tentative knocking on the bedroom door, followed by a plaintive voice calling, “Mommy?”

Kayla found the bedspread, which I knew to be sea green although it looked slate gray in the darkness, and pulled it up to cover both of us to our shoulders.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Kayla asked.

Ryan took that as leave to enter, and I heard the knob working and a small squeak from the hinges. She was revealed, sufficiently illuminated by light spilling through her own open bedroom door on the opposite side of the corridor that I could see her eyes go wide. Apparently whatever she’d assumed normally happened after she’d been tucked in for the night did not include me joining her mother naked in bed. But that shock was quickly set aside, and Ryan said, “I’m frightened by the noises.”

I could see on Kayla’s face that she was about to ask, “What noises?” But she checked herself: with doors open on both sides of the hallway now, she could hear them, too. Kayla’s bedroom faced the backyard; Ryan’s, the street—and it was from the street that the growing sounds of a raucous mob were coming.

Kayla got out of her bed—apparently this was a household where the parent was routinely seen naked by the child—and she quickly put on a robe and led Ryan from the room to investigate. That gave me a moment to retrieve my pants and shirt, strewn on the floor. I then hustled over to join them.

Kayla had wisely turned out the light in Ryan’s room by the time I got there. Up the street, under the sodium lamps, a knot of six or eight teenagers was moving along, hurtling rocks at windows. The riots here had previously been confined to the downtown core; this was the first I’d heard of them spreading to the suburbs. Of course, in a smallish city like Saskatoon, that wasn’t a particularly far journey—but still.

There was no phone in Ryan’s room, so Kayla nipped back across the hall to call the police from there. In the yellow light, Ryan moved closer to me and reached up and took my hand. The mob was passing a small hatchback parked by the side of the road. A crowbar rang against its side panel, and the horn started honking, one blast per second, an android’s heartbeat.

Kayla returned. “I tried three times,” she said. “Busy! Fucking 911 is busy.”

The mob rocked the hatchback, but it was too wide and squat for them to flip over, I guess, since they were soon moving forward, passing the house next to Kayla’s. We couldn’t see that building from this vantage point, but we could hear a booming male voice shouting from what I presumed was its open front door: “Get the hell away from here! Go on now! Get lost!”

That would not have been the tack I’d have taken, and indeed, it caused the seven teenagers—I’d managed to get a head count finally—to start moving onto his front lawn. Something caught my eye, and I looked for a second in the opposite direction. Another cluster of what must also be Q1s or Q2s was approaching—it was beginning to look like, by dumb geographic luck, Kayla’s house was where the two groups would meet, assuming the ones on her neighbor’s lawn didn’t tarry long there, and—

Boom! Boom, boom!

The glass in front of us reverberated. Ryan let go of my hand and clutched her ears. I’d thought Kayla’s next-door neighbor had opened fire from his stoop; the reports were echoing, their source difficult to locate. But after a second I realized that the guy who lived across the street from Kayla had come out into the night, brandishing what, to my untrained eye, looked like a hunting rifle.

I couldn’t see the results of the first two shots—but the third one had hit one of the teenagers, who was closer to the road, in the back, and he’d gone face-first into a lawn that this time of night must have been slick with dew.

The flock dispersed, the four I could see running—two heading down the street, two more going up, unthinkingly heading for the second mob.

Boom!

Another shot ruptured the night, and I saw a runner briefly splay all four limbs like a crippled starfish, then tumble forward to the asphalt. Kayla and Ryan had dropped below the windowsill, and they were scuttling out of the room, toward the relative safety of the back of the house. But I stood transfixed, stunned by it all. “Jim!” Kayla whisper-shouted. “Get down!”

I dropped to the floor just as the rifle erupted again. A second car alarm went off, a harsh counterpoint to the one already wailing. I kept hoping for the sound of sirens, too—police swooping in to serve and protect—but all we heard the rest of that long night was honking horns, breaking glass, gunshots, and screams.

The cacophony finally abated by dawn. Kayla’s bedroom faced east, and the sun bloodied the horizon early this time of year. Ryan had joined us in bed.

As we got up, Ryan announced emphatically that she didn’t want to go to day camp, which was good, actually: leaving here would have meant taking her by the dead bodies. A quick check out her bedroom window showed no sign of the cops or an ambulance having made it here yet; Kayla had finally gotten through to 911, but the harried operator had simply said the police would get there as soon as they could.

And although an email from Jeff Cutler reported that no bomb had actually been found at the Light Source, I didn’t want Kayla returning to it. In the end, we decided to simply hole up in the house. Kayla called to make sure her mom and brother were all right (they were), and she phoned Victoria, who was likewise fine; Vic lived in an apartment building and had looked down on the roiling violence in her own neighborhood from the comparative safety of her eighth-floor balcony. She didn’t have beamtime until late today, and so said she’d come on over and work with Kayla from here if the roads were passable.

I’d known Kayla was the woman for me when I first saw that she had bookcases in her dining room. She also had books on the top of toilets—I’d once had to move volumes by Feynman, Bohr, Rutherford, and Penrose when I’d needed to take the top off the tank after her downstairs one didn’t flush properly. But, in addition to books everywhere, she also had TV monitors in each room. I tuned the one in the kitchen to the CBC News Network as Ryan and I busied ourselves making breakfast while Kayla had a shower. I wasn’t going to make bacon or eggs, but toast with jam, bananas (yay!), and yogurt would do the trick.

Apparently, yesterday President Carroway had been surreptitiously recorded on a cell phone giving a talk to business executives in Wyoming, and the footage had been posted on YouTube. The video showed Carroway standing at a podium but the upper-left corner of the image was cut off—I soon realized because the camera was partially hidden under a linen napkin. “Many of you here today,” Carroway intoned, “remember the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis. Our great nation held hostage by Muslim oil barons in the Middle East, the very lifeblood of our economy cut off at their caprice.”

There was an indignant murmur from the audience. Carroway went on: “Why, in 1974, because of them, your national government—loath then and loath now to intervene in states’ affairs—had to impose a national speed limit of just fifty-five miles per hour!”

The table got jostled by a waiter; Carroway shifted in the frame.

“We can never again let anyone put the brakes on America. And yet Canada still refuses to turn on the oil pipeline we so desperately need. That’s right, my fellow Americans: the new leadership in Ottawa, under the command of Naheed Kurban Nenshi, has already caved to so-called ‘First Nations’ Indians and rabid environmentalists.” Carroway shook his head. “You’d think green Canucks would be happy to see the tree line inching north—all the more trees for them to hug!”

The next story also featured the president. Yesterday, Carroway had actually given Nenshi a call, the gist of which the president discussed in a news conference. The angle and lighting were more flattering in this footage, and this podium bore the Presidential Seal.

“Mr. President,” called out a female journalist, “I understand rioting continues in cities and towns across Canada, as well as now in many places in Europe.”

“Yes, that’s right, I’m afraid,” said Carroway. “Obviously, civil unrest anywhere in the world is a concern, but when it’s occurring in our own backyard, we have to take special notice.”

Another reporter, this one male: “Have you spoken directly to Prime Minister Nenshi about it?”

“Yes, indeed. We spoke early this morning. The United States has offered every possible assistance, but the prime minister assured me that his small army and his local and national police—you know, the Mounties—were more than capable of containing the situation.”

A different male reporter: “This was your first official call to Canada’s Muslim prime minister since he was sworn in, wasn’t it?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did you speak to him about the issue of Libyan terrorists entering the US via Canada?”

“That topic didn’t come up, but I’m sure Mr. Nenshi knows it’s always at the top of my mind.”

Another woman: “Well, what other issues did you raise with the Canadian leader?”

Carroway frowned briefly. “Prime Minister Nenshi and I had a frank exchange of views. I emphasized the historic ties between our two great nations, but I also expressed to him our deep, heartfelt concern that his country’s record on the rights of the unborn is profoundly disturbing to us. Having finally gotten our own house in order, we can no longer turn a blind eye to the slaughtering of innocents elsewhere. Here in North America, Canada stands alone, a rogue state, on this issue. Our great neighbor to the south, Mexico, only allows abortion on very narrow grounds. Indeed, in all the New World—North, Central, and South America—only Canada, Communist Cuba, and the tiny nations of Guyana, French Guiana, and Uruguay offer unrestricted access to abortion.”

A male journalist: “Given the overturning of Roe v. Wade by our Supreme Court, are you concerned that American women will travel north to procure procedures that they can’t obtain here?”

Carroway nodded. “We’re certainly monitoring the situation—monitoring it very, very closely.”

Ryan had been watching me as much as she was watching the TV, and I guess she could tell by my body language that what was being said had disturbed me. “What does ‘monitoring the situation’ mean?” she asked.

I went to fetch the toast; it had apparently popped up a while ago but I’d been too preoccupied to notice. “I wish I knew, Ginger Ale.”

I changed channels—and Fox News, which I had my own TV set to skip over, came on. As soon as I saw what they were talking about, I muted the sound and silently read the closed captioning rather than exposing Ryan to it.

The Correction.

That’s what Fox kept referring to it as. Innocuous. A minor course change; just setting things right. A remedy, for God’s sake.

Sure, the other news channels had more accurate names for it, but Fox’s audience was the largest, and even those who wrote the network’s name as “Faux News,” an Internet meme for more than a decade now, had heard it called “The Correction” in clips on The Daily Show or on Facebook.

No one would ever know the exact death toll, but the extermination started by the McCharles Act—the law of the land in Texas, and it seemed the de facto law across most of the Southern states now—was rising rapidly. One estimate put it already at more than five thousand, with no end in sight, and many thought it was much, much higher; after all, those family members of victims—or of “correctees,” as Fox called them—who’d escaped being culled themselves weren’t likely to come forward to report a missing sibling or child.

The image switched to an elderly Latina woman, tears on sun-creased cheeks, looking out over the site of another mass killing, bodies strewn across parchment-colored dirt. I quickly turned off the set before Ryan looked up from her breakfast.