The White-Hole Situation

The Reddick Minority

"Is it possible?" September asked, her image settling down beside Roddy's campfire by the side of a clear blue lake just before yet another glorious sunset. "Can the I.B.U. have feelings?"

"I personally don't believe it does," Roddy said, poking at the blazing logs with a stick, "but whether or not it can, that's an interesting question."

"I'm sensing anxiety," she said.

"From where?" he asked, turning towards her. "It's not like the I.B.U. is a thing in a place, if you know what I mean. It's a massively decentralized, distributed system, redundant to an extreme, replicated and synchronized and backed up as continuously as the laws of quanta allow. So where would this anxiety be located?"

"I hear it," she said, "and I feel it in the spaces when I don't but should be hearing it." She sighed.

"I know that doesn't sound right."

"I never doubted your senses," Roddy said, and then added, "well, sometimes, like now, but usually not," and he laughed. September was thoughtful and staring at the flames.

"In the same way that fire wants to burn," she said. "Fire is also not a thing in a place, not really. but can't you see it? There's wood that's burning right now, and wood that is going to burn soon, and the flames are licking around the future while devouring the present. That's what I mean. It has will, volition in the sense of forward motion, determination, direction."

"Destiny," Roddy added, following her lead. "All things being equal, the wood that would burn will burn."

"And the fire fulfill its desire," she nodded.

"That's a long way from home," Gerard spoke suddenly. Neither had noticed the old man's appearance, across the campfire, squatting in the twilight.

"What's a long way?" September asked, studying the old man's wrinkled face. He seemed older now, somehow a lot older than before, and smaller too.

"Fire wanting to burn," he chuckled. "Next thing you know you'll be saying the moon wants to be made of cheese."

"Ha ha," Roddy said without inflection. He'd been done with his father for ages already. Why the old man kept popping up in his life was a mystery he'd long lost interest in resolving. He figured the I.B.U. just liked playing this joke on him, as if to mock his loose intention to discover its limits, to find the end of its miraculous rainbow.

"Wherever you go, there you are," he said to the old man, who only snorted in reply.

"What do you want?" September asked Gerard. He looked surprised and squirmed a moment in his posture.

"Nothing," he said. "What do I want? What is it to want? What could I possibly want?"

"Maybe you don't know," September told him. "But that doesn't mean it isn't there. I'm beginning to wonder who you really are."

"Gerard Stern's the name, hanging around forever's the game," the old man perked up. "Born in the winter of 2420, nigh on a hunnert and five years ago now, near the body of water known as Lake Heuristic in the middle of the Great Plains of Eastern Asia. There I was raised by two porcupines known as my parents, for their prickliness you understand, until I was fourteen and given over to the management of that great institution, the summer camp. That summer camp lasted many summers in the end, during which I learned all there was to learn about survival in the tropics, how to swim, how to nap, how to drink and how to get laid. The offspring came a lot later on though."

"Did we ask for your nonsense story?" Roddy said.

"She's beginning to wonder who I really am," Gerard said in his defense.

"Who you really are now," September said, "because as we all now, you died in the winter of 2505, when your ship, the Meladron, was blasted out of the space by the Reddick Minority. You and your entire crew, Commander Stern, were blown to bits by their quasar beams."

"History is bunk," Gerard said. "It may have been the winter of 2505 when you all heard about it, but as you know, time is relative, and my ship was twenty three point seven light years from this paltry little orb, so who the hell knows when it really was. There never was such a time."

"Star date 182,947.2 is when it happened," Roddy said. "We do know what time it was. They showed me on the certificate."

"About 20,000 star dates ago," September calculated roughly, "and where have you been all this time?"

"I never left," Gerard told them. "I've been right here the whole time."

"No," Roddy said. "I think she means, where are you when you're not pestering me. You can't be bothering mom, or is there a place where all you deceased folk sit around annoying each other?"

"If there is," Gerard smiled, "no one's told me about it."

"Computer," September said, "where is Gerard when he's not with Roddy?"

"When am I not with you?" Gerard said.