The first thing Rayna saw when she awoke in the hospital was the full size holovision stage in the center of the ward. She couldn’t very well miss it. The figures on the stage seemed to be talking directly to her.
“Miss Kingman!” a plump, middle-aged nurse with a kind face greeted as she approached Rayna’s bed. “We’re so glad to have you back with us!”
“How long have I...?”
“It’s been six days, Miss Kingman.” The nurse checked the readings on a biomonitor next to the bed and tapped in a notation that would be recorded on Rayna’s medical chart for future reference. “Your parents will be furious with us for sending them away now that you’re finally awake. But we just didn’t know when you’d be coming around. Doctor finally got them to go home around 10 o’clock last night. They’ve been practically camping out in the waiting room since you were brought in from the park.”
Rayna nodded at the nurse dully and inhaled the scent of hospital disinfectant.
“You seem to be fine, Miss Kingman. Fortunately, the zapper beams didn’t get you when you passed out. There was no indication that anything fell on you, either. Do you remember being hit by anything?”
“Well, no, I....”
The nurse screwed her face into a puzzled frown.
“Is something wrong?” Rayna asked.
“Oh—no.” the nurse answered quickly. “We’ve just been wondering what put you into that coma in the first place. Your bioreadings have all been basically normal, and there was no indication of any head trauma. Some unusual brain activity for a little while, but everything’s been completely normal for the last 11 hours.”
A sudden movement drew Rayna’s attention back to the holovision stage.
“...and he will be brought before a court martial to answer for his deeds,” a heavy-jowled, silver-haired man in the uniform of a retired Merchant Fleet admiral was saying.
“What’s that all about?” Rayna asked the nurse, who continued to monitor the bioreadings.
“Hmmm? Oh, that. It’s Ethan Rensselaer. They arrested him last night.” She stepped back and clucked to herself. “Ethan Rensselaer a traitor! And I was going to vote for him for senator! Guess you never really know about people.” She shook her head and resumed checking bioreadings. “The whole thing was so bizarre, anyhow. I mean, the way everything just stopped all of a sudden.”
The blood froze in Rayna’s veins.
“Turns out Rensselaer was involved in some kind of plot to start a war with the colonies. Rensselaer and some ex-Merchant Fleet officer. I can’t remember his name. They found him dead in a hotel room across from the park. The other guy, I mean, not Rensselaer. A zapper got him right through the window, they say.”
The nurse’s expression turned hard. “Got just what he deserved, far as I’m concerned. We had 123 casualties right here from the Roberts Park attack, including everybody on this ward.”
Rayna shifted her body for a better look at her fellow patients, about a dozen of them in beds arranged, horseshoe-like, around the holovision stage.
“Only 19 deaths, thank God,” the nurse continued, “but altogether, over 10,000 people dead or hurt badly enough to be hospitalized. And all from just a few minutes of shooting.”
Rayna waited expectantly as the nurse adjusted various tubes and connections, but apparently the time for explanations was over. “Doctor will be in to see you later. If you need anything, just press this button.”
Rayna watched the receding, white-clad figure for a moment, then glanced back toward the holovision stage. She wasn’t prepared for what she saw. There, speaking calmly before the holovision audience, was an obviously fit Derek Marsden.
Rayna’s gasp had been one of surprise, but her next breath was one of exultant relief. Tears welled up in her eyes and eased their way down her cheeks as Derek filled in some of the details of the past few days: Like Derek, Althea had survived attack. Then, with the cooperation of the colonial CDN’s Juan Laguna, they had been able to reestablish authentic communications with the colonies, using an experimental hyperwave system. Good thing, too, because the colonies also had been receiving faked messages calculated to stir up hostilities. A little longer, and Tauber’s effort to provoke a war might well have succeeded.
As the holovision broadcast turned to other matters, Rayna looked in vain for a tissue, finally drying her eyes on a corner of the sheet that covered her. The HV sounds were an unheeded cushion of protective background noise. Her mind urged her body to relax, but the harder she tried, the more her muscles resisted the effort.
Come on! She knew now that Althea and Derek were safe. Tauber’s would-be war and all his Operation Strong Man plans were as dead as he was. Everything seems to have turned out all right. So what am I worried about?
Despite herself, she stiffened even more at the unspoken question. She knew precisely what she was worried about. She had suspected it from the moment the nurse mentioned her “unusual brain activity,” knew it with absolute certainty from the first reference to the mysteriously sudden cessation of zapper fire.
Alec Zorne’s book explained some of it: Genetic mutations in certain individuals had given them psychic abilities that were generally unrecognized in homo sapiens. “The next step in the evolution of humanity,” Zorne had called it. But Zorne didn’t have to live with it.
She wondered if her grandfather ever felt this way as he quietly went about shaping reality—the only reality Rayna had ever known. Yes, indeed, she was Al Frederick’s granddaughter. She shivered.
It was clear that she was responsible for stopping the zapper attacks. While that result certainly pleased her, the power was terrifying. What else has changed? I was out for six days! What was my unconscious doing all that time? She remembered Al’s tale (an old television program, he’d said) of a man whose psychic energy was released and channeled by his uncontrolled emotions, with devastating results. Is that going to happen to me? Do I really know myself well enough to be sure about the kind of reality my unconscious might create?
“Knowledge is the principal enemy of fear.”
How many times had she repeated the adage to her students? Often enough for them to complete the phrase by rote as soon as she uttered the first two words. Now she had to apply it. Somehow, she would have to make sense of what had happened and come to terms with what that would mean for her future. It was a challenge. The technical details of Zorne’s research were hard to follow, and she was no physicist.
Keith could help. With his physics background, he would.... She cut off the thought that had quickly started to turn her stomach into Mount Vesuvius and forced herself back into a more analytical frame of mind.
Although she may have initiated the process, the end of the zapper attacks wasn’t all her doing. Keith had made that much clear. No one person could provide the amount of psychic energy necessary to influence reality. What her grandfather—and now she—had done was to act as a catalyst for other people who had the same basic value system (what Zorne called a “reality matrix”).
It all had something to do with harmonic vibrations, Rayna recalled. Just as plucking one string on a guitar can cause other strings to vibrate, the oscillations associated with psychic activity set up harmonic vibrations. When the harmonics are strong enough, a new branch of reality splits off.
Rayna gave her head a slight shake. Keith had tried to explain Zorne’s theories several times, but her interest then had been cool and indirect, prompted by a desire to know about Al Frederick and his role (if any) in shaping history. It was different now. Now her interest was intensely personal. If Rayna Kingman was to survive in this new reality, she realized, she had to understand. And so, she probed deeply into her memory, struggling to remember everything Keith had ever said about reality-matrix physics.
“According to Zorne,” Keith had told her, “there is an infinite number of alternative realities.”
“You mean, like parallel universes, other dimensions, that sort of thing?”
“Not other dimensions, exactly. Parallel timelines. Other branches of reality. The theory goes all the way back to the 1950s, when some physicists were trying to explain quantum mechanics. They call the concept the Many Worlds Interpretation. I’m oversimplifying, but the idea is that every flip of a coin, for example, results not in either heads or tails but in both—heads in one branch of reality and tails in another. According to the theory, these branches of reality are completely inaccessible to each other, so that for all practical purposes, we know only our own reality. But that doesn’t make the other branches any less real. I guess you could say that reality matrix physics expands on the Many Worlds Interpretation.”
“How’s that?”
“Zorne says that a surge of psychic energy triggered by conflict with a strong reality matrix—what he called a “psycho-affective spike”—can split reality in the same way that the flip of a coin does. Of course, since we can only experience one branch of reality at a time, a psychically induced split looks like a change in the reality we’re living in. Like when John Martin Roberts was shot.”
Rayna massaged her temples and gently deflected a murmur of concern from the patient in the bed to her right. Think! What happens to the people who don’t have special psychic powers but who have compatible reality matrices? She frowned in concentration and probed her memory. Keith had said something about it. Something about a polarizing effect. Yes! That was it! The strength of the harmonic psychic vibrations in a mind net are directly related to the strength of a person’s emotional commitment to various aspects of his or her reality matrix. The stronger the emotional link, the larger the amplitude of what Zorne called “reality matrix waves.”
“Once a psycho-affective spike splits reality,” Keith had explained, “the associated reality matrix acts like a sort of polarizer, so that people with strong enough compatible matrices are carried along into the new branch of reality.”
That means people who don’t have psychic power themselves still have some control over what kind of reality they live in, Rayna thought.
“Only if they feel strongly about it,” she remembered Keith’s insisting. “People who don’t care—really care—about the kind of universe they live in, just have to take what they get. They have no influence at all. The polarizing effect apparently doesn’t screen out conflicting reality matrix waves if they’re of low amplitude.”
It was odd, Rayna reflected. Her grandfather’s psychic powers had helped give life to the ideals and dreams he shared with other people. The process sounded much simpler than it was. The world didn’t just continue to fit Al Frederick’s ideal. According to his journal, many things continued to interfere with his Utopian visions. So he kept releasing new spikes of psychic energy.
Keith’s explanation had been more technical. “The initial reality matrix effect gets weaker as new decisions continue to split that branch of reality into more branches. Any of the new branches might include things that conflict with the original reality matrix. In your grandfather’s case, when the conflict became great enough, it would trigger a new release of psychic energy. It was a kind of automatic course correction, with conflicting reality matrix waves again screened out.”
She mulled it over for a few seconds. Conflicting waves are screened out. Before she could block it, the image of Keith Daniels, eyes twinkling impishly as he teased Rayna about her tennis game, tore through her protective wall of analytical thought. Other images followed rapidly. Keith sleeping peacefully beside her the morning after they first made love. Keith eagerly volunteering to join her in an effort to stop what turned out to be Tauber’s conspiracy. And, finally, Keith spouting the Operation Strong Man line, as if what began as merely a role for him to play had somehow taken him over. Along with the images came the question she’d been trying to suppress since her first inkling of what had happened: Had Keith been screened out of this new reality?
She leaned her head back on her pillow and studied the pseudowall generator tracks on the ceiling. “We won, Mr. Attorney,” she whispered through teeth clenched firmly against the surging emotions inside her. Trouble is, I don’t feel much like a winner. All I feel is empty.
A sudden silence enveloped the room, and she looked up to notice that the HV broadcast had been turned off.
“Show’s over for now,” the woman in the next bed said in response to Rayna’s inquiring glance. “More HV later. Time for visitors now.”
Rayna half expected to see her parents materialize at the ward entrance, her father looking concerned but coolly confident, her mother wearing a reassuring smile. She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together.
“Hey, lady,” an unexpected voice announced, “I’ve been waiting to see you for three days!”
Rayna’s eyes snapped open and her heart leaped. She tried to reach for the man on the crutches, but her body was frozen, and she almost forgot to breathe. Never shifting his eyes from her face, he sat down on her bed and took her hand in his. When she finally regained her ability to move, all she could do was silently squeeze his fingers.
“Thank God you’re all right, Ray,” he said at last. “You had me plenty worried.”
A thousand thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant, but the words she wanted to say remained stubbornly out of reach. “Keith,” she asked incongruously, “are you really here?”
He laughed, leaned forward and kissed her gently on the lips. “I’m definitely here,” he said. His expression turned serious as he added, “I—all of us—have you to thank for that, don’t we?”
Rayna lowered her eyes and jerked her head forward in an abrupt nod. Keith stroked her hair for a few seconds, then pressed a finger against her jaw, turning her head until their eyes met once more. A moment later, they were clinging to each other as if to a life raft, tubes trailing, unheeded, from Rayna’s right arm.
“I thought I’d lost you,” she murmured, her head resting against his shoulder.
He pulled back, grinned and flexed his right bicep.
“Who? Me? My only problem was getting mugged by a rebellious tree.”
So it was Keith I saw at the park! Rayna thought.
“Keith,” she said, “this... this... thing I’ve got.... I mean, this psychic power. It ruined my grandfather’s relationship with my grandmother. How do you—”
His kiss answered her question before she could ask it.
“Ray, if it weren’t for you, that falling log might have done me in instead of just sticking me with these crutches for a while. Come to think of it, I guess I was killed in some other branch of reality. Just like Tauber survived in some other branch.”
Rayna felt the blood drain from her face, and Keith quickly grabbed her hand. “It’s all right, Ray. This timeline is safe. You’ve seen to that. And as long as enough of us care about the kind of world we live in, it’ll stay that way. Don’t worry. We’re in this together.”
She studied his face for a long moment, then surveyed the beds around her. Park casualties, the nurse had told her. But not as many as there might have been. For the first time, her muscles relaxed, and she smiled—a big, glowing, soaring smile that came from deep inside.
“I’m not worried,” she said softly.
* * *
Dreamers and idealists have always had the power to change the world, but without the psychic booster that reality matrix physics explains, the road from dream to fruition was often indirect and hard to discern. Nevertheless, much of the “real world” that we so often take for granted began as someone’s dream. In the end, the best of “the real world” owes its existence to those who build castles in the air while the rest of us scramble to fashion our rough huts in the mud.
— Alec Zorne
Unpublished paper on reality matrix physics,
1972