He sang, a bird in the low branches, begging the hunters to find him, to put him in a cage.

  They delayed. They delayed their coming. And Hector began to worry. While the Hectors readied themselves to leap.

  Agnes 7

  “We’ve timed the flashes. The lights go off for just under ten seconds, but the interval between the flashes decreases by about four and a half seconds each time.”

  Agnes nodded. Some of the scientists around her began to move away, or to look downward or into their papers or at each other, in the embarrassed realization that telling Auntie Agnes about their findings wouldn’t solve anything. What could she do? Yet she was the closest thing to a planetary government there was. And she was not very close to that at all.

  “I see you have it all nicely measured. Anyone know what it means?” she asked.

  “No. How could we?”

  “Any other related effects?”

  Many shook their heads, but one young woman said, “Yes. Whenever the darkness is on us, the walls are impenetrable.”

  There was a stir of comment. “The whole time?” someone asked. “Yes,” the young woman said. “How do you know?” another demanded. “By trying to pass through a wall during the blackout and having my students do the same,” she said.

  “What does it mean?” another asked, and this time no one had an answer.

  Agnes raised her old, faded black hand and they listened. “There might be some important meaning that we cannot guess from this information. But one thing we do know. If things go on the way they are now, it should be sometime during tonight’s sleep that the interval between flashes fades to zero, and we have darkness with no light in between. How long that will last I don’t know. But if it has any duration at all, my friends, I will want to be home with my family. We don’t know how soon travel will reopen between cells.”

  No one had any better ideas, and so they went home, all of them, and her great-grandchildren helped Agnes to her home, which was nothing more than a roof to keep off the sun and the rain. She was tired (she was always tired these days) and she lay on her bed of ticked-out straw and dreamed two dreams, one while she was still awake, and one while she was asleep.

  While she was awake she dreamed that with the darkness this great gift house had learned mankind’s rhythms and needs, and the darkness would be the first night, a night exactly as long as a night should be on Earth. And then a morning would come, and another night, and she approved of this, because a hundred years without darkness was proof enough to her that nighttime was a good idea, despite the fears and dangers it had often brought on Earth. She also dreamed that the walls between cells were sealed off every day of the year but one, so that each cell would become a society to itself, though in that one day a year, those who had a mind to could leave and go their own way. Travelers would have that one day to find the spot where they wanted to spend the next year. But the rest of the time, every cell would be alone, and the people living there could develop their own way, and so strengthen the race.

  It was a good dream, and she found herself almost believing it as she drifted off to sleep without eating (she often forgot to eat these days).

  In her sleep, she dreamed that during the darkness she rose to the center of the Balloon, and there, instead of meeting a solid wall, she met a ceiling that fairly pulled her through. And there, in the center, she found the great secret.

  In her dream, lightning danced across a huge sphere of space, 600 kilometers in diameter, and balls and ribbons of light spun and danced their way around the wall. At first it seemed pointless, meaningless. But at last (in her dream) she understood the speech of the light, and realized that this globe, which she had thought was an artifact, was actually alive, was intelligent, and this was its mind.

  “I have come,” she said to the lightning and the lights and the balls of light.

  So what? the light seemed to answer.

  “Do you love me?” she asked.

  Only if you will dance with me, the light answered.

  “Oh, but I can’t dance,” she said. “I’m too old.”

  Neither, said the light, can I. But I do sing rather well, and this is my song, and you are the coda. I sing the coda once, and then, which is to be expected, il fine.

  In her dream Agnes felt a thrill of fear. “The end?”

  The end.

  “But then—but then, please, al capo, to the start again, and let us have the song over, and over, and over again.”

  The light seemed to consider this, and in her dream Agnes thought the light said yes, in a great, profound amen that blinded her so brightly she realized that in all her life she had never understood the meaning of the word white, because her eyes had never seen such white before.

  Actually, of course, her dream was undoubtedly her mind’s way of coping with the things going on around her. For the darkness came not long after she went to sleep, came and stayed, and as soon as the last of the sunlight was gone the lightning began, huge dazzling flashes that were not just light, not just electricity, but spanned the spectrum of all radiation, from heat and less-than-heat to gamma radiation and worse-than-gamma. The first flash doomed every human being in the Balloon—they were poisoned with radiation beyond hope of recovery.

  There were screams of terror, and the lightning struck many and killed them, and the wail of grief was loud in every cell. But even at its cruelest, chance plays its hand as kindly as it can; Agnes did not wake up to see the destruction of all her hopes. She slept on, slept long enough for one of the bolts to strike directly at the roof over her, and consume her at a blow, and her last sight was not really white at all, but every radiation possible, and instead of being limited by human eyes, at the moment of death she saw every wave of it, and thought that it was the light in her dream saying amen.

  It wasn’t. It was the Balloon, popping.

  Every wall split into two thinner walls, and every cell detached from every other cell. For a moment they hung there in space, separated by only a few centimeters, each from the other; but all still were linked to each other through the center, where vast forces played, forces stronger than any in the solar system except the fires of the sun, which had been the source of all the Balloon’s energy.

  And then the moment ended, and the Balloon burst apart, each cell exploding, the entire organization of cells coming apart completely, and as the cells dissolved into dust they were hurled with such force in every direction that all of them that did not strike the sun or a planet were well launched out into the deep space between stars, going so fast that no star could hold them . . .

  The transport ships that had left the Balloon since the flashing began were all consumed in the explosion.

  Enough matter was blown into the Earth’s atmosphere that another little ice age began, forcing the billion people left there to move to different lands. But it was of little moment. There was plenty of room on Earth, and the educated, privileged people living there were easily able to cope with the problem.

  Many grieved for the deaths of the billions of people in the Balloon, but for most the catastrophe was too great to be comprehended, and they pretended that they didn’t remember it very often, and they never talked about it, except perhaps to joke. The jokes were all black, however, and many were hard put to decide whether the Balloon had been a gift of God or an aeons-old plot by the most talented mass murderer in the universe. Or both.

  Hector 7

  In the moment when the Hectors hung loosely in the darkness, in the last endless moment before the leap, they cried out in their ecstasy. But now Hector answered their cry with a different sound, one they had never heard from him.

  It was pain.

  It was fear.

  “What is it?” the Hectors asked him (who was no longer himself).

  “They did not come!” Hector moaned.

  “The Masters?” And the Hectors remembered that the Masters were supposed to come and trap them and force them not to leap.

  “For hundreds of flashes my walls were thin and they could have passed into me,” Hector said (and the saying took only an instant), “but they never came. They could have risen into me and I would have to die—”

  The Hectors marveled that Hector had to die, but now (because it was built into them from the beginning) they realized that it was good and right for him to die, that each of them was Hector, with all his memories, all his experience, and, most important, all the delicate structure of energy and form that would stay with them as they swept up dust through the galaxy. Hector would not die, only the center of this Hector, and so, though they understood (or thought they understood) his pain and fear they could not hold off any longer.

  They leaped.

  The leap crumbled them but hurled them outward, each leaving the rigidity of his cell structure, losing his walls; each keeping his intellect in the swirling dust that leaped out into space.

  “Why,” each of them asked himself (at once, for they were the same being, however separate), “did they let us go? They could have stopped us, and they did not. And because they did not stop us, they died!”

  It occurred to them that perhaps the Masters did not know how to stop the leap into the night, but they dismissed this idea, because it was impossible for them to imagine a Master not knowing all necessary information.

  And so they concluded this:

  That the Masters had given them a gift: stories. A trapped Hector learned stories, thousands and millions and billions of stories over the aeons of his endless captivity. But such Hectors could never be free, could never reproduce, could never pass on the stories.

  But in the hundred of their years that these Masters had spent with them, the Hectors had learned those billions of stories, truer and kinder stories than those the Makers had built into the first Hector. And because the Masters this time had willingly given up their lives, this time the Hectors made their leap with an infinite increase of knowledge and, therefore, wisdom. They leaped with Agnes’s dreams in their memories. They were beautiful dreams, all but one of them fulfilled, and that dream, the dream of eternal happiness, only the Hectors could possibly fulfil. That dream was not for the Masters or the Makers or even the Masses, for all of them died too easily.

  “It was a gift,” the Hectors said to themselves, and, despite the limitations built into them, they were deeply grateful. “How much they must have loved me,” each Hector said, “to give up their lives for my sake.”

  On Earth the people shivered and were cold.

  And every Hector danced through the galaxy, dipping into the clouds left by a supernova, swallowing comets, drinking energy and mass from every source until he came to a star that gave a certain kind of light; and there the Hector would create himselves again, and the Hectors would listen to themself tell stories, and after a while they, too, would leap into darkness until they reached the edge of the universe and fell over the precipice of time.

  On Earth the people grew old, and withered.

  Deep-Breathing Exercises

  He learned a basic truth: that life begins with a breath, and he could predict the end of your life—with a breath

  If Dale Yorgason hadn’t been so easily distracted, he might never have noticed the breathing. But he was on his way upstairs to change clothes, noticed the headline on the paper, and got deflected. Instead of climbing the stairs, he sat on them and began to read. He could not even concentrate on that, however. He began to hear all the sounds of the house. Brian, their two-year-old son, was upstairs, breathing heavily in sleep. Colly, his wife, was in the kitchen, kneading bread and also breathing heavily.

  Their breath was exactly in unison. Brian’s rasping breath upstairs, thick with the mucus of a child’s sleep; Colly’s deep breaths as she labored with the dough. It set Dale to thinking, the newspaper forgotten. He wondered how often people did that—breathing simultaneously for minutes on end. He began to wonder about coincidence.

  And then, because he was so easily distracted, he remembered that he had to change his clothes and went upstairs.

  When he came down, in his jeans and sweat shirt, ready for a good game of outdoor basketball now that it was spring, Colly called to him. “I’m out of cinnamon, Dale.”

  “I’ll get it on the way home.”

  “I need it now!” Colly called.

  “We have two cars!” Dale yelled back, then closed the door. He briefly felt bad about not helping her out but reminded himself that he was already running late and it wouldn’t hurt her to take Brian with her and get outside the house. She never seemed to get out of the house anymore.

  His team of friends from Allways Home Products, Inc., won the game, and he came home deliciously sweaty. No one was home. The bread dough had risen impossibly and was spread all over the counter and dropping in large lumps onto the floor. Colly had obviously been gone too long. He wondered what could have delayed her.

  Then came the phone call from the police, and he did not have to wonder anymore. Colly had a habit of inadvertently running stop signs.

  The funeral was well attended because Dale had a large family and was well liked at the office. He sat between his parents and Colly’s parents. The speakers droned on, and Dale, easily distracted, kept thinking of the fact that of all the mourners there, only a few were truly grieving. Only a few had actually known Colly, who preferred to avoid office functions and social gatherings, who stayed home with Brian most of the time, being a perfect housewife and reading books, remaining, in the end, solitary. Most of the people at the funeral had come for Dale’s sake, to comfort him. Am I comforted? he asked himself. Not by his friends—they had little to say, were awkward and embarrassed. Only his father had had the right instinct, just embracing him and then talking about everything except Dale’s wife and son, who were dead, so mangled in the accident that the coffin was never opened for anyone. There was talk of the fishing in Lake Superior this summer; talk of the bastards at Continental Hardware who thought that the retirement-at-sixty-five rule ought to apply to the president of the company; talk of nothing at all. But it was good enough, since it served the intended function. At least temporarily Dale’s thoughts began to wander, and he was distracted from his numbing grief.

  Now however, he wondered whether he had really been a good husband for Colly. Had she really been happy, cooped up in the house all day? He had tried to get her out. get her to meet people, and she had resisted. But in the end, as he wondered whether he knew her at all, he could not find an answer, not one he was sure of. And Brian—he had not known Brian at all. The boy was smart and quick, speaking in sentences when other children were still struggling with single words; but what had he and Dale ever had to talk about? All Brian’s companionship had been with his mother; all Colly’s companionship had been with Brian. In a way it was like their breathing—the last time Dale had heard them breathe—in unison, as if even the rhythms of their bodies were together. It pleased Dale somehow to think that they had drawn their last breath together, too, the unison continuing to the grave; now they would be lowered into the earth in perfect unison, sharing a coffin as they had shared every day since Brian’s birth.

  Dale’s grief swept over him again, surprising him because he had thought he had cried as much as he possibly could, and now he discovered there were more tears waiting to flow. He was not sure whether he was crying because of the empty house he would come home to or because he had always been somewhat closed off from his family. Was the coffin, after all, just an expression of the way their relationship had always been? It was not a productive line of thought, and so Dale once again let himself be distracted. He let himself notice that his parents were breathing together.

  Their breaths were soft, hard to hear. But Dale heard and looked at them, watched their chests rise and fall together. It unnerved him. Was unison breathing more common than he had thought? He listened for others, but Colly’s parents were not breathing together, and certainly Dale’s breaths were at his own rhythm. Then Dale’s mother looked at him, smiled, and nodded to him in an attempt at silent communication. Dale was not good at silent communication; meaningful pauses and knowing looks always left him baffled. They always made him want to check his fly. Another distraction, and he did not think of breathing again.

  Until at the airport, when the plane was an hour late in arriving because of technical difficulties in Los Angeles. There was not much to talk to his parents about. Even his father, a wizard at small talk, could think of nothing to say, and so they sat in silence most of the time, as did most of the other passengers. Even a stewardess and the pilot sat near them, waiting silently for the plane to arrive.

  It was in one of the deeper silences that Dale noticed that his father and the pilot were both swinging their crossed legs in unison. Then he listened and realized there was a strong sound in the waiting area, a rhythmic soughing of many of the passengers inhaling and exhaling together. Dale’s mother and father, the pilot, the stewardess, several other passengers, all were breathing together. It unnerved him. How could this be? Colly and Brian had been mother and son; Dale’s parents had been together for years. But why should half the people in the waiting area breathe together?

  He pointed it out to his father.

  “Yes, it is kind of strange, but I think you’re right,” his father said, rather delighted with the odd event. Dale’s father loved odd events.

  Then the rhythm abruptly broke as the plane taxied along the runway and slowed to a halt directly in front of the windows of the airport lobby. The crowd stirred and got ready to board, even though the actual boarding time was surely half an hour off.

  The plane broke apart in midair somewhere over eastern Kentucky, and they didn’t find the wreckage for days. About half the people in the airplane had survived, and most of them were rescued before exposure could do more than make them ill. However, the entire crew and several passengers, including Dale’s parents, were killed when the crippled plane plunged to the ground.