Reality School: In the Entropy Zone.

by Jeffrey A. Carver.

As we walk through the entropic boundary, I expect to feel...I don't know what...some startling physical sensation. Instead, it's more like walking into the shadow of a towering building. A draft of cooler air pa.s.ses through my blouse.

Then everything changes...

Looking back, it seems almost impossible to believe. Reality School, from matriculation to retirement, was supposed to fill seven of my best years--years of learning and challenge, and perhaps even occasionally danger. The time I actually spent cannot be measured; it was a time in which the world almost changed beyond recognition--and I changed into something, someone, I hardly know.

For my first day at school, my parents had gotten us up at dawn and piled me and my older sister into our ancient station wagon, Woodie. We drove for a long time, before turning into the entrance to the school. I remember this clearly, even though I was a girl only six and a half at the time. My parents told me later that I'd complained so much about the length of the trip that they very nearly turned around and drove me back home. They wouldn't have, of course; they knew how important the reality school was--not just to us, but to the whole world. Why else would they have put me through all that testing, and cried when I was accepted?

I remember this, too: my complaints vanished the instant we pa.s.sed through the reality school's continuum-bubble. A great shock wave hit the hood of the car and flashed past the windows in rainbow colors, and suddenly everything around us changed. Everything--including Woodie. Our station wagon was transformed from a sagging road-barge into a s.h.i.+ning fuselage, powered by glowing fusion thrusters and floating on a magnetic cus.h.i.+on. I screamed with joy and amazement, deafening my mom and dad.

Marie was screaming just as loudly. At the same moment, the school grounds changed from scorched desert gra.s.s to a fairyland setting of whipped cream lawns, cotton candy trees, and gingerbread buildings.

I hopped up and down with delight.

It was all window-dressing, of course--not just for the kids, but for the parents, who were preparing to leave their children with a school that few of them could really hope to understand. The parents believed in the school's mission, or they wouldn't have been there; but it probably helped to have the special effects to ease the transition. The effects had little to do with the real function of the school, of course, but it would take us a while to understand that.

Daddy drove up to the parking area, where a centaur with an armband directed him to a s.p.a.ce that looked as if it had been saved just for us. We all piled out, Daddy warning me not to touch the fusion thrusters, whose glow was slowly fading to chrome silver. We had a good laugh, walking around our gleaming s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p-car. Then a team of whinnying ponies drew up, pulling a cart for my bags. We loaded the cart and headed into the administration building.

I have no memory of registration, but I vividly recall the "reality-view" posters that glowed in the walls, and the clots of strange kids gathered around gawking at them. The posters looked like moving holograms, and at first I thought they were just pictures made by artists. It turned out they were actual images of reality-threads that "shapers," as graduates of the school were called, had encountered and safely sealed off from our timeline. Marie and I gaped at a world where everyone lived in clouds, where the whole world seemed to be clouds, and nothing looked quite solid, including the people. "Wow," I said, feeling the kind of thrill that I got from my favorite stories.

Then we turned to an image filled with stalact.i.tes and stalagmites that flickered and slowly changed color as if under a black light. That one stumped us, until an older boy stepped up and explained that it was microscopic metal crystals: a world where everything was solid-state, and all life took the form of electrons and photons. Phew, I thought. Why bother?

The boy, though, seemed to actually like the idea, the way I'd liked the clouds. He grinned, and told me his name was Ashok. And I began to wonder if kids like him were about to become my friends.

It was only a little later, at the dorm, that Mom and Dad and Marie had to say good-bye to me. I flashed from giddy pleasure to tears, and starting bawling, "I don't want to stay! I don't want to! I want to go home!"

"Alexandra, we've been planning this a long time," my dad started to say, all rationally. Only he couldn't get it out; he started crying, too, and turned away so I wouldn't see. You'd think it would have been Mom crying, but she was the one who tried to calm me down, "Honey, the tests said you were one in a million.

Now, you go show them how you can do this! It's so important--"

No no no I don't care...!

That was when the school's departure routine kicked in. My dorm room suddenly blossomed out into a beautiful little sun porch, where some of my favorite characters--Peter Rabbit and Eeyore and Maxine the bunny and Berlioz the bear were all having tea together, and one after another, they beckoned me to join them. That broke the cycle of tears, for the moment; it was enough to make me let my parents go.

And from then on, life was never to be the same...not even in the ways we'd expected.

I am utterly alone--in a steaming jungle. Animals shriek in the distance. Where has everyone gone?

"Rober-r-r-ta?" I cry, s.h.i.+vering. "Lisa? Danny?" I stumble back the way I came, searching for them. But where the entropic boundary stretched a moment ago, a jungle now goes on forever.

I teeter on the edge of panic. If I'm to find my world again, I can only plunge ahead. I have a job to do.

An adult's job, even if I am only six and a half. I have already grown beyond my calendar age.

But I seem to have forgotten what exactly I am supposed to do.

Lisa Hoopner, my roommate, became my best friend right from day one. She was just a few months older than me, and one of the things I liked about her was her laugh, which was a kind of whoop that came out at the funniest times. Another thing I liked was her Bahhston accent. We didn't talk with accents in California, I said; and every time I said it, she gave a whoop and talked to me in a bubbling upbeat voice that was supposed to sound like people from around here. I didn't think it sounded much like me, but it made me laugh anyway.

Lisa and I were both pretty homesick, but it helped having each other to be friends with. For one thing, we both liked Berlioz and Maxine, and we both thought Mr. Playstead, the head teacher, was nice but kind of stuffy, and we both liked Mrs. Randolph because she made us laugh, and we both thought the cafeteria was awesomely yucky. Once we'd agreed on all that, everything else seemed pretty minor. Oh, and we both liked Danny Hutton, a boy from Iowa who we could tell was putting on a brave front, even though he was obviously even more homesick than we were.

Most of the kids were pretty nice. We had a lot of counseling sessions, some by ourselves, and some in groups where we talked about the things that we liked, and the things that scared us. That helped us get to know each other, I guess. I understand now that they'd selected us not just for our imaginations, but for a certain sociability and a certain toughness of mind, not that I would have put it that way then. They didn't want any wild-eyed or selfish individualists getting hold of the reins of reality. It was risky enough with the people they did choose.

The teachers had lots of activities to help us get to know each other--games and stories and plays. But the main activity was learning to shape reality.

In the beginning we shaped storybook landscapes and scenes. Try to imagine a roomful of six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds bubbling with imagination, perched under strange helmets of silver and gla.s.s, with visions of stories taking form right before their eyes. (None of our creations were permanent, of course-- and they were strictly confined within the s.h.i.+elded training rooms. But if a leakage had occurred, the continuum- barriers around the school grounds would have kept anything we did from reaching the world outside.) We learned right away that our mind's eye views of such magic places as Oz, Middle Earth, Peter Rabbit's forest, and Barsoom differed wildly from one another. Sometimes that caused arguments, which we were supposed to settle among ourselves. But other times we just had fun building one vision upon another, castle upon cloud upon ocean upon desert--until our landscapes grew into something that was as much us as it was the stories that had inspired us. We were learning to create. Later, we would learn to choose realities from the crazy chaos that the universe offered up to us. But in those days, we were consumed with building.

We were also learning to share...

One day Lisa and I worked together on a special play cottage made of clouds. It was delicate, puffy, and ethereal--and it had lightning bolts flas.h.i.+ng across the doorways, and only Lisa and I could make the lightning go away to let us in. Even so, we made sure the point got across by patrolling the area in our helmets, telling everyone else to stay out. Mr. Playstead came upon us and planted himself in my path with a scowl. "Alexandra," he said sternly, "this s.p.a.ce is for everyone, not just for people who appoint themselves queen for a day."

I was stunned, and suddenly ashamed. I didn't know quite what he meant by "queen for a day," but I knew we were supposed to share our creations with everyone, and not keep them to ourselves. I felt my face get hot as I looked at Lisa. Mr. Playstead hadn't said anything to her yet. She looked away guiltily. I knew we were both in for a special counseling session later, after Mr. Playstead reported this.

I was ready to let the cottage dissolve back into a cloud of smoke, taking me with it. But Lisa was quicker. She caught Tommy Harte's eye, and with a look invited him into the cottage. When Mr.

Playstead saw that, he nodded approvingly. Lisa cheered up right away. Before I knew what was happening, she'd opened the cottage into a big pavillion and told everyone to come in. I stood there, burning with humiliation, as Mr. Playstead watched Lisa being so generous.

I stalked away, refusing to look at her. Finally, I sat down in a far corner of the room to make shapings by myself. The only trouble was, no ideas came. Nothing at all. I was getting madder by the minute. I heard Lisa come up behind me, and I glanced her way sullenly, ready to say something nasty.

"Meow."

She was holding a pair of little grey tiger kittens, offering one to me. I glowered. But I took one of the kittens anyway, and after Lisa had gone back to play, I hugged it carefully. It purred and strutted in my lap, and as I petted it, I began to feel better.

When the counselor asked me about it later (in my regular session--Mr. Playstead didn't send me in for a special visit, after all), I told her that I knew I shouldn't have done that with the private cottage-making, and I wouldn't do it again. She peered at me through her big, wide gla.s.ses and said, "You mean you've learned something about not being selfish?"

I shrugged, uncomfortable under her stare. "I guess so."

Dr. Shelby nodded carefully. "Have you forgiven Lisa for being quicker, and cleverer about changing what she was doing when you both got caught?"

The question surprised me. I didn't think Lisa had been caught. But yes, the kitten had helped me forgive her.

I nodded.

"You know, it's a pretty tall order to learn not to think just of yourself," Dr. Shelby observed. "But this thing between you and Lisa could be a valuable lesson. If the time ever comes when you have to reach deep inside yourself for strength, deeper than you think you can reach, I hope it will help you to remember this."

I stared back at her in alarm. Although she said it nicely, I could feel the weight of seriousness behind her words. Anything that would make me remember this in a good way, I thought, was something I didn't want to face. But I didn't say that; I just nodded.

Dr. Shelby peered at me. The light glinted off her gla.s.ses as she looked at the clock and said our session was over.

I walk, alone and lonely, through the pellucid green light of the jungle. After a time, I step through a hedge...and my surroundings change utterly, to a world of astonis.h.i.+ng precipices and ravines, illumined by lightning flashes. Another reality, joined to mine like a soap bubble? Or is this my world, after entropy has ravaged it like a marauding beast?

With a s.h.i.+ver, I back away from a terrifying precipice. "Where have you all gone?" I whisper to my missing friends. "What am I supposed to do here, all alone?" Even as I ask, I know the answer: Find the reality-thread that belongs to us, and bring it back to our world.

There is no one here--just a few winged creatures, soaring off the cliffs, pterodactyllike. Still, I feel--I cannot say how--that Lisa is out there, not in this place of cliffs and ravines, maybe, but somewhere, across some gulf that I cannot even see. I cry out to her in a tiny voice, barely a whisper.

I struggle to think. It is not just the world gone mad; it is me, too. I am no longer the person I was, not a six-year-old girl, or even a twelve-year-old. I look down at my lanky, bony body and flex my leathery wings. What have I turned into?

I peer down into a ravine. Lights twinkle in the darkness below. Cities? I feel a surge of hope. Perhaps down there are people, some connection...

I launch myself from the cliff.

We grew up fast in the reality school, and not just fast, but differently from our sisters and brothers on the outside. I guess our parents knew that could happen, and thought it worth the risk. What we had to do was so dreadfully important, and it could only be done by people who started very, very young. People with plastic minds, who could learn to visualize (discern, they called it) different levels of reality without blocking out what they saw with denial. People with blazing imaginations, without the layers of preconceptions that adults have, who could be trained to pick out entropic changes at a distance, and visualize appropriate responses.

That's adult-talk. Sorry; what they needed was young people with unbridled hope. People like us.

We learned about this gradually, over time, absorbing our mission not so much through our heads as through our pores. When we graduated, it would be up to us to "maintain the order." Even now that sounds ponderous to me--almost pretentious. A few years ago, it would have been preposterous. But of course that was before the entropic rift opened, before the Earth became a place where reality "fluttered"

from day to day, and moment to moment.

The first time we got to see real shapers at work was, undoubtedly, the turning point when I really began to feel in my bones what we were doing. The teachers led us single-file into a s.h.i.+elded observation room that overlooked the actual Reality Shaping Center. This was where the best of us would work, after graduation. It was the only such center in America, one of three in the world. We were electrified with excitement, and whispered and hissed to each other while our teachers frowned over the group. I sat between Lisa and Roberta Kisnet, and we held each other's hands tightly, trying to keep from bursting with antic.i.p.ation.

The shapers were four or five years older than us, which seemed a lifetime. They wore silver helmets which, surprisingly, were smaller and simpler-looking than our training helmets. A few of them walked around, but mostly they stayed seated, their gloved hands waving in the air as they gestured and probed at whatever realities they were viewing in their closed universes.

They were not actually journeying in other realities, we were told--but viewing them through tiny windows opened in the continuum by the shaping amplifiers. They were watching for reality-threads that threatened to intrude upon our own...like radar watching for enemy airplanes.

We saw the other realities on monitors, along with the adult supervisors. About half the center was filled with consoles, where the supervisors coordinated everything that was happening here with the centers at CERN and Kyoto--a lot of frowning adults with headsets studying computer consoles. But the other side, where the shapers were working...wow.

We saw a dramatic episode almost right away. On one of the shapers' monitors, a strange scene came into focus: a mountain range melting under a big red sun. I stared open mouthed, as a teacher explained. It was our sun, diseased and swollen, devouring our Earth--in another reality. I sat frozen, not sure whether to be fascinated or terrified. We heard the voices of the supervisors calling additional shapers into the circuit, and explaining exactly what was wrong. "...We've got to calm that sun down, give us a nice cool breeze...that's it...and hold the mountains together with your hands...." And we saw the shapers stirring in their seats, turning to one another and working together with murmurs of agreement. We saw the mountains being held in place by ghostly, virtual hands--and we saw icy breaths cooling the sun.

I scarcely understood what I was seeing; but the image- crafting of three or four shapers, working in harmony, was pus.h.i.+ng away that dangerous reality-thread. There was something almost mystical, and very personal, about the shapers' joined struggle against the forces of entropy. The scientific staff didn't explain it that way; they talked of synergistic field- configurations and Lang-Lawrence contractions. But as far as the shapers were concerned, there was an enemy out there. And by creating their images in concert, they were able to defeat the enemy, or at least to push it back out of range.

Were they actually cooling that bloated sun in the other reality, changing what existed in another thread, or were they just weaving a spell to prevent the thread from intruding on our own? In a practical sense, it didn't matter. What mattered was that they were closing off the danger from our own world, keeping the enemy at bay however they could. It was like virtual reality--except that any one of those threads could have come swirling up out of the netherrealms of chaos to overwhelm our world, if the shapers had not been there with their fingers in the dike, manning the ramparts, battening down the hatches of reality.

I didn't know then that the really dramatic perils were the easiest to detect at a distance, and the easiest to defend against. Most of the dangers were more insidious--s.h.i.+fts in climate, or in ecological balances, or even changes in human history. The shapers often sensed a change--and then had to wait, like bloodhounds on leashes, while the supervisors conferred about what courses of action to follow, or even about which reality-thread was the right one. There, we learned, lay the subtlest perils to our world.

We beginning students were far more interested in the vivid dangers. To our satisfaction, before we left the center that day, we saw spidery aliens marching through the streets of St. Louis, enclosing buildings in strange coc.o.o.ns. As one, we felt a great, gasping pulse of fear before the aliens faded in a s.h.i.+mmer of heat--as a group of shapers focused their thoughts together and wove a web of protection that banished the aliens from our reality.

When our observation session was over, I could hardly move. I was trembling in my seat, and my fingers were white from clenching Lisa's hand so hard. I looked at Lisa and she looked wide-eyed back at me.

I had never in my life been so scared. Or so excited.

I soar, spiraling down into the darkness of the ravine, praying that the twinkling jewels below me are civilization. I am breathless with fear. What have I turned into, that I soar on leathery wings? Am I not still human?

"Yes, I am!" I cry, and with that, my wings are gone, and I am falling. The sparkling points below me are not cities but...stars. My heart pounds. I want to scream, but my breath will not leave my chest.

Is anyone else alive in the great void of stars wheeling around me? "Lisa?" I whisper. "Roberta? Danny?

Ashok?" For a heartstopping moment I see their faces in the stars, luminous faces. I imagine that they are calling out to me. But I am helpless to answer. There is a power blocking me, a darkness called Chaos. I imagine the entire population of the Earth, all of humanity, floating out there, calling to me.

I am supposed to save them.

Weightless, I fall...

We continued to spend a lot of time with the counselors, doing group exercises and letting off steam and trying to understand the meaning to us of what we were training for. But I don't think, really, that there was any way they could truly prepare us for a job that was, essentially, to hold the world in our hands.

Eventually the gravity of our teachers' words began to reverberate like ba.s.s drum beats--not so much in the cla.s.srooms as in our minds: "...the sorting of entropic realities demands the talents of children your age..."

"...must do what older people, even experts, can't..."

"...when adults try to focus through these windows, it turns to mud...adults resist...we're never sure, the layers of ambiguity are too great..."

"...as you learn to feel the difference between realities... must learn wisdom, yet through a lens of innocence..."

"...might last until you're thirteen...only one has worked past fourteen, by the calendar...."

By the calendar. We were already aware that we were growing older at an accelerated rate, our intellects and emotions veering ahead in an alarming, zigzag fas.h.i.+on. It all had to do with entropy.

I never really understood entropy, not the way the scientists talked about it. We learned about disorder, of course, and something called "the laws of thermodynamics," which were undergoing some late revision.

It might have been the work of theorists that had brought us to this plight in the first place. Not that they'd meant to; they were just fooling around with fusion implosions and micro-singularities, and trying to learn how to control entropic folds in s.p.a.ce-time...not on a world-wide scale, but on a quantum level, a subatomic level. What harm could there possibly be in that? But somehow there was harm in it; somehow they caused, or at least allowed entry to, the rift that put us where we are now.

Many of them denied that. It was entropic drift, they theorized--a natural phenomenon, swirling just below the apparent calm of our s.p.a.cetime continuum. It may have been chance that it intruded into our world when it did; and without the developments that made the shaping amplifiers possible, we would have been defenseless against it. But whether it was a natural phenomenon or an artificial one was irrelevant now. Either way, it threatened to destroy our world as we knew it. Not that it meant to; it wasn't living; it didn't know us, didn't care about us one way or another. It just followed the laws of physics. But the laws of physics changed, from one reality thread to the next.

What the shapers had to know was how to sort through the many possible realities that floated like tangled seaweed in the ocean of entropy, and how to follow the one strand that belonged to our timeline and our lives. Not just our lives personally, but the life of the world. The job of the shapers was to preserve reality, guided by the supervision staff, according to guidelines agreed upon by the joint policy committees...

"...what you will be doing is a privilege, and a responsibility. You will be honored for doing what no one else on Earth can do..."