Free Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons Page A

of your imagination, Jerry?”
    Bremen felt her shiver. Her skin was like ice. He took her hand and roughly rubbed some warmth back into it. “Come on, Gail,
think.
You weren’t just a memory to me. For over six years we were essentially one person withtwo bodies. That’s why when … that’s why I went a little crazy, tried to shut my mind down completely for a couple of years. You
were
in my mind. But my ego sense, or whatever the hell keeps us sane and separate from the babble of all those minds, kept telling me that it was only the
memory
of you. You were a figment of my imagination … the way we all are. Jesus, we were both dead until a blind, deaf, retarded kid, a goddamn vegetable, ripped us out of one world and offered us another one in its place.”
    They sat for a minute. It was Gail who broke the silence. “But how can it seem so real?”
    Bremen stirred and accidentally knocked his paper plate off the arm of the chair. Gernisavien jumped to one side and stared reproachfully at them. Gail nudged the cat’s fur with the toe of her sandal. Bremen squeezed his beer can until it dented in, popped back out.
    “You remember Chuck Gilpen, the guy who dragged me to that party in Drexel Hill? The last I heard he was working with the Fundamental Physics Group out at the Lawrence Berkely Labs.”
    “So?”
    “So for the past few years they’ve been hunting down all those smaller and smaller particles to get a hook on what’s real. And when they get a glimpse of reality on its most basic and pervasive level, you know what they get?” Bremen took one last swig from the beer can. “They get a series of equations that show standing wavefronts, not too different from the squiggles and jiggles Goldmann used to send me.”
    Gail took a deep breath, let it out. Her question was almost lost as the wind rose again and stirred the tree branches. “Where is Robby? When do we see
his
world?”
    “I don’t know,” Bremen replied. He was frowning without knowing it. “He seems to be allowing us to define what should be real. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he’s enjoying a peek at a new universe. Maybe he can’t do anything about it.”
    They sat still for a few more minutes. Gernisavien brushed up against them, irritated that they insisted on sitting out in the cold and dark. Bremen kept his mindshield raised sufficiently to keep from sharing the informationthat his sister had written a year ago to say that the little calico had been run over and killed in New York. Or that a family of Vietnamese had bought the farmhouse and had already added new rooms. Or that he had carried the .38 police special around for two years, waiting to use it on himself.
    “What do we do now, Jerry?”
    We go to bed.
Bremen took her hand and led her into their home.
    Bremen dreamed of fingernails across velvet, cold tile along one cheek, and wool blankets against sunburned skin. He watched with growing curiosity as two people made love on a golden hillside. He floated through a white room where white figures moved in a silence broken only by the heartbeat of a machine. He was swimming and could feel the tug of inexorable planetary forces in the pull of the riptide. He was just able to resist the deadly current by using all of his energy, but he could feel himself tiring, could feel the tide pulling him out to deeper water. Just as the waves closed over him he vented a final shout of despair and loss.
    He cried out his own name.
    He awoke with the shout still echoing in his mind. The details of the dream fractured and fled before he could grasp them. He sat up quickly in bed. Gail was gone.
    He had taken two steps toward the stairway before he heard her voice calling to him from the side yard. He returned to the window.
    She was dressed in a blue sundress and was waving her arms at him. By the time he was downstairs she had thrown half a dozen items into the picnic basket and was boiling water to make iced tea.
    “Come on, sleepyhead. I have