Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer Read Free Book Online Page A

Pleiades.”
    “You and the stars,” he said, smiling; I’m secretary of the Winnipeg Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
    “Exactly, but it’s relevant, see? I was doing what I always do. Cold night, I’ve forgotten my mitts so my hands are shoved into my jacket pockets, toque pulled down over my ears, and I’m walking along looking up—not ahead of me, but up, finding the ecliptic, looking for planets, hoping to maybe see a meteor streak across the sky. Sure, I’d checked for traffic before crossing the street, but that’s all I did. I wasn’t looking to see what was happening on the other side. Oh, I probably registered that there were a couple of people there, but I wasn’t paying any damn attention to them. And so I crossed diagonally because I was heading in that direction, right? And when I got to the other side, suddenly this guy wheels around, and he’s got this pinched, narrow face and teeth that are sharp and pointy and all askew, and his eyes, man, his eyes are
wild.
Wide open, whites all around. And he shoves me with one hand, palm against my chest, and he snarls—really, it was a total snarl, his breath coming out in clouds—and says ‘What the fuck do you want?’
    “I look over at the other guy, and, Christ, he’s covered in blood. It seems black in the yellow light from the streetlamp, but that’s what it’s got to be, blood all over his nylon jacket. That guy’s been stabbed; I’ve walked into a drug deal gone bad. I stammer, ‘I’m just heading to the C-Train.’
    “But it’s no good. The guy is crazy or high or both, and he’s got a knife. The other guy takes the opportunity to try to get away: he starts running—staggering, really—onto the street. But he’s badly hurt, and I see now that he’d been standing in a puddle of his own blood, a puddle that’s freezing over.
    “But the guy with the knife is looking at me, not him, and he lungesat me. And I’m
me,
right? I don’t know jack about street fighting. I don’t know how to deflect a blow or anything like that. I feel the knife going in sideways, and I know, I just know, it’s going in between my ribs, just off the centerline of my chest. It doesn’t hurt—not yet—but it’s going deep.
    “And then it pierces my heart; I know that’s what’s happening. And he pulls the knife out and I stagger a half-pace backward, away from the road, clutching my chest, feeling the blood pouring out, and it’s hot, it’s like scalding hot compared to the chilled air, but it’s not ebbing and flowing, it’s not pumping. It’s just
draining
out onto the sidewalk. I fall backward, and I’m looking up at the sky, but it’s too bright here, the streetlamp is washing everything out, and I’m thinking,
God damn it, I wanted to see the stars.
    “And then—nothing. None of that tunnel bullshit, no bright light except the sodium one from the lamp; none of it. I’m just
gone.”
    Menno had switched to leaning forward, and about halfway through, he’d steepled his fingers in front of his wide face. They were still there. “And then what?” he said.
    “And then I was dead.”
    “For how long?”
    I shrugged. “No one knows. It can’t have been
too
long. Man, if the word ‘lucky’ can be applied to that sort of situation, I was lucky. I’d fallen right by that streetlamp, so I was in plain view, and it was bitterly cold. A medical student coming home from a different party stumbled upon me, called 911, plugged the hole in my torso, and did chest compressions until the ambulance got there.”
    “My God,” said Menno.
    “Yeah. But, given the timing, it has to be what’s affecting my memory.”
    Silence again, then, at last: “There was doubtless oxygen deprivation. You likely did suffer some brain damage, preventing the formation of long-term memories for a time.”
    “You’d think—but there should be more evidence of it. During my missing six months, if I wasn’t laying down new memories, I’d