The Hollow Man

No magic wand. No miracle worker. Only an absolute end to that mathematically perfect dance within. If there is anything else, Gail, my darling, you will have to help me find it.

Bremen dropped his mindshield.

The pain of a million aimless thoughts stabbed behind his eyes like the point of an ice pick. His mindshield rose automatically, as it had since he first knew he had the ability, so as to blunt the noise, ease the pain.

Bremen pushed down the barrier, and held it down when it tried to protect him. For the first time in his life Jeremy Bremen opened himself fully to the pain, to the world that inflicted it, and to the countless voices calling in their circles of isolation.

Gail. He called to her and the child, but he could not sense them, could not hear their voices as the great chorus struck him like a giant wind. To accept them he must accept all of them.

Bremen lifted the pistol, set the muzzle to his skull, and pulled back the hammer. There was little friction. His finger curled on the trigger.

All the circles of hell and desolation he had suffered.

All the petty meannesses, sordid urges, solitary vices, vicious thoughts. All the violence and betrayal and greed and self-centeredness.

Bremen let it flow through him and around him and out of him. He sought a single voice in the cacophony now rising around him until it threatened to fill the universe. The pain was beyond enduring, beyond believing.

And suddenly, through the avalanche of pain-noise, there came a whisper of the other voices, the voices that had been denied Bremen during his long descent through his psychic hell. These were the soft voices of reason and compassion, the encouraging voices of parents urging their children in their first steps, the hopeful voices of men and women of goodwill who—while far from being perfect human beings—spent each day trying to be a better person than nature and nurture may have designed them to be.

Even these soft voices carried their burden of pain: pain at the compromises life imposed, pain at the thoughts of their own mortality and the all-too-threatening mortality of their children, pain of suffering the arrogance of all the willing pain-givers such as those Bremen had encountered in his travels, and the final, ineluctable pain at the certainty of loss even in the midst of all the sustaining pleasures life offered.

But these soft voices—including Gail’s voice, Robby’s voice—gave Bremen some compass point in the darkness. He concentrated on hearing them even as they faded and were drowned by the cacophony of chaos and hurt around them.

Bremen realized again that to find the softer voices he would have to surrender himself totally to the painful cries for help. He would have to take it all in, absorb it all, swallow it like some razor-edged Communion wafer.

The muzzle of the pistol was a cool circle against his temple. His finger was taut against the curve of trigger.

The pain was beyond all imagining, beyond all experience. Bremen accepted it. He willed it. He took it into and through himself and opened himself wider to it.

Jeremy Bremen did not see the sun rise in front of him. His hearing dimmed to nothing. The messages of fear and fatigue from his body failed to register; the increasing pressure on the trigger became a distant, forgotten thing. He concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight. For that briefest of milliseconds he had the choice of wavefront or particle, the choice of which existence he would embrace. The world screamed at him in five billion pain-filled voices demanding to be heard, five billion lost children waiting to be held, and he opened himself wide enough to hold all of them.

Bremen squeezed the trigger.

For Thine Is Life Is For Thine Is The

From down the beach comes a young girl in a dark suit two seasons too small. She has been running along the edge of wet-packed sand, but now she pauses as the sun rises and breaks free of the sea.

Her attention is on the water as it teases the land with sliding strokes and then withdraws, and she moves closer to dance with the surf. Her sunburned legs carry her to the very edge of the world’s ocean and then back again in a silent but perfectly choreographed ballet.

Suddenly she is startled by the sound of a shot.

Suddenly she is startled by the …

Suddenly she is startled by the screaming of gulls. Distracted, she halts her dance, and the waves break over her ankles with the cold shock of triumph.

Above her the gulls dive, rise again, and wheel away to the west, their wings catching the flare of sunrise. The girl pirouettes to watch them as salt spray teases her hair and splashes her face. She squints, rubbing her eyes gently so as not to rub the salt in, and pauses to watch three figures emerge from the dunes up the beach. It looks as if the man and woman and the beautiful child between them have no suits on, but they are far enough away and her eyes are blurred enough from sea spray that the girl cannot tell for sure. She can see that they are holding hands.

The girl resumes her waltz with the sea, while behind her, squinting slightly in the clean, sharp light of morning, Jeremy, Gail, and Robby watch the sunrise through newly opened eyes.

About the Author

DAN SIMMONS’s first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award, his science fiction novel Hyperion received the Hugo, and the Horror Writers of America awarded him its highest honor for his novel Carrion Comfort. Simmons is also the author of Phases of Gravity, Hugo and Nebula Awards finalist The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man, and two collections of short fiction, Prayers to Broken Stones and Lovedeath. He lives in Colorado along the front range of the Rockies.