Pernicious Romance

Pernicious Romance

By Robert Reed

Case Study:

Tenured professors are allowed to purchase season tickets, though they are relegated to some famously poor locations. BB and his wife had seats high in the southwestern portion of the stadium. These were fit people but far from young, They left for the restrooms before the first half ended, and they were slowly climbing the steps when the stadium fell into darkness. Probably neither noticed the helmet and golf cart stopping in the middle of the field. BB does recall his wife hesitating in the gloom avove him. He speaks affectionately about touching her back, trying to reassure her with his presence, and then came the flash that transported him to another world where he lived and loved fore three alien days – long days which would translate to perhaps two weeks by the human count, he estimates.

To an accomplished physicist, that alternate world appeared perfectly credible.

Twenty-three minutes after the blast, BB woke to fund himself lying on top of his wife. To his horror, he realized that she had fallen hard, driven in part by his own body. Her forhead sharp struck the edge of a concrete step. BB tended to the bloody wound as best he could, and then this man in his late seventies tried to lift his wife, and failed, before screaming as loudly as he could, begging for anyone’s help.

Pernicious Romance. Photo by Elena

Sitting nearby were ù brother and sister, alert and conversing with one campus police officer. All three came to the rescue, and despite his own head wound, the brother carried the dying woman across other bodies and out into the nearest parking lot. But the medical personnel were esewhere, luicd or otherwise, and this spouse of fifty-eight years died in the back of a useless ambulance.

BB’s subsequent depression was prolongedd and useful.

Two months after the funeral, he began working on an explanation for his wife’s murder and the transforamtion of so many innocent lifes. Thos efforts let to a series of dense, harshly reasoned papers that have mostly gone unpublished. But the professional indifference hasn’t jept his conclusions from being shared by others, both within his field and far beyond.

BB clamis that what happened isn’t possible. Not according to natural laws, and according to any compilation of wild hypotheses.

Impossibility is itself a clue, says BB.

He has written nothing about his fictional love affaire, but alie world is a different subject. Throughly rendered, complete with estimates of size and mass, apparent history and harsh climate, he argues that the world was to intricate and perfect for even an expert to dream up. That means that his vision had to be the work of another mind, a much more competent and relentless mind. According to the old professor, each of us exists inside the dreams of someone greater, and what happened on that October evening was an accident, a sorry mistake.

The universe is a cosmic fiction.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.