Copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Strahan
This edition of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume One
© 2007
by Night Shade Books
Cover art © 2006 by Stephan Martiniere
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen
Introduction, story notes and arrangement
by Jonathan Strahan. © 2007 Jonathan Strahan.
First Edition
ISBN10: 1-59780-068-6
ISBN13: 978-1-59780-068-6
Night Shade Books
Please visit us on the web at
www.nightshadebooks.com
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties", by Neil Gaiman. © 2006 Neil Gaiman. Originally published in Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (William Morrow). Reprinted by permission of the author.
"El Regalo", by Peter S. Beagle. © 2006 Peter S. Beagle. Originally published in The Line Between (Tachyon Publications). Reprinted by permission of the author.
"I, Row-Boat", by Cory Doctorow. © 2006 Cory Doctorow. Originally published in Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales, Issue #1, Fall 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"In the House of the Seven Librarians", by Ellen Klages. © 2006 Ellen Klages. Originally published in Firebirds Rising (Firebird/Penguin), Sharyn November ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Another Word for Map Is Faith", by Christopher Rowe. © 2006 Christopher Rowe. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 2006 . Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Under Hell, Over Heaven", by Margo Lanagan. © 2006 Margo Lanagan. Originally published in Red Spikes (Allen & Unwin Australia). Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Incarnation Day", by Walter Jon Williams. © 2006 Walter Jon Williams. Originally published in Escape from Earth (SFBC), Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Night Whiskey", by Jeffrey Ford. © 2006 Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in Salon Fantastique (Thunders Mouth), Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"A Siege of Cranes", by Benjamin Rosenbaum. © 2006 Benjamin Rosenbaum. Originally published in Twenty Epics (All-Star Stories), David Moles & Susan Marie Groppi eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Halfway House", by Frances Hardinge. © 2006 Frances Hardinge. Originally published in Alchemy 3. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Bible Repairman", by Tim Powers. © 2006 Tim Powers. Originally published in The Bible Repairman (Subterranean Press). Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Yellow Card Man", by Paolo Bacigalupi. © 2006 Paolo Bacigalupi. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)", by Geoff Ryman. © 2006 Geoff Ryman. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October/November 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The American Dead", by Jay Lake. © 2006 Jay Lake. Originally published in Interzone 203, March/April 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Cartesian Theater", by Robert Charles Wilson. © 2006 Robert Charles Wilson. Originally published in Futureshocks (Penguin Roc), Lou Anders ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Journey into the Kingdom", by M. Rickert. © 2006 M. Rickert. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Eight Episodes", by Robert Reed. © 2006 Robert Reed. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Wizards of Perfil", by Kelly Link. © 2006 Kelly Link. Originally published in Firebirds Rising (Firebird/Penguin), Sharyn November ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Saffron Gatherers", by Elizabeth Hand. © 2006 Elizabeth Hand. Originally published in Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (M Press). Reprinted by permission of the author.
"D.A.", by Connie Willis. © 2006 Connie Willis. Originally published in Space Cadets (SciFi Inc), Mike Resnick ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Femaville 29", by Paul Di Filippo. © 2006 Paul Di Filippo. Originally published in Salon Fantastique (Thunders Mouth), Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Sob in the Silence", by Gene Wolfe. © 2006 Gene Wolfe. Originally published in Strange Birds (Dreamhaven). Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The House Beyond Your Sky", by Benjamin Rosenbaum. © 2006 Benjamin Rosenbaum. Originally published in Strange Horizons, 4 September 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Djinn's Wife", by Ian McDonald. © 2006 Ian McDonald. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Any book like this one is as much the product of a
small community of friends, family, and colleagues as it is the work of one
person. This year I'd especially like to thank my new editors and publishers,
Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen, who have been a delight to work with, and
whose confidence I greatly appreciate, and to Claudia Noble for her great work
on the cover. Special thanks also go to CHARLES, Liza, Kirsten, Carolyn, Tim,
Karlyn, Amelia at Locus Press, who really did come through for me this year.
As always, I'd like to thank my agent Howard
Morhaim; Justin Ackroyd, who has long been a vital supporter of my work; Jack
Dann, anthology guru, pal and confidante; my Locus colleagues Nick
Gevers and Rich Horton, who have always been there to discuss the best short
fiction of the year when I needed it most; and Trevor Quachri and Brian
Bieniowski at Dell Magazines and Gordon Van Gelder at Spilogale, Inc. who made
sure I got my fix every month. Thanks also to the following good friends and
colleagues without whom this book would have been much poorer, and much less
fun to do: Lou Anders, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant,
Sean Williams, and all of the book's contributors.
And, last but not least, the big ones. Every year
I pour countless hours into reading and editing, all accompanied by mumbling
and exclamations. And each year Marianne, Jessica and Sophie let it happen.
Without them this book, and all of the others, wouldn't exist.
The New Space Opera (with Gardner Dozois)
Best Short Novels: 2007
Eidolon (with Jeremy G Byrne)
Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005
Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
Best Short Novels: 2006
Best Short Novels: 2005
Fantasy: Best of 2004 (with Karen Haber)
Science Fiction: Best of 2004 (with Karen Haber)
Best Short Novels: 2004
The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction(
with Charles N. Brown)
Science Fiction: Best of 2003 (with Karen Haber)
The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume: 2 (with
Jeremy G Byrne)
The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume: 1 (with
Jeremy G Byrne)
Welcome to The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy
of the Year. It's difficult to believe, but it's been almost sixty years
since the first clearly genre year's best annual hit the bookstores.
Back in 1949, the first issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
had just hit the newsstands and both Weird Tales and Amazing Stories
had either completed or were about to complete their first quarter-centuries of
publication. The short fiction field, for science fiction and fantasy, was
booming, was a vital part of the explosion of pulp fiction magazines. It must
have seemed impossible that it would ever end. And yet, it did.
By the early 1950s, genre science fiction and
fantasy began to make the move from magazine to book publication, mostly in the
hands of small presses, often by collecting together stories from the pulps of
the 1930s and 1940s into fix-ups or collections. An important step in that
process happened when Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas edited Adventures
in Time and Space, an anthology that collected a number of the classic
stories of that first Golden Age of Science Fiction. It was important because
gathering those stories together into one of the first ever science fiction
anthologies helped to confirm those stories as part of science fiction's
essential canon of great works.
That role, of identifying science fiction and
fantasy's canon of great works, was picked up by a number of reprint
anthologies and anthology series over the years, but it's a role that, it seems
to me, has most clearly fallen to the year's best anthology. And it's something
you can see happening, even in that first year's best annual. When Everett F.
Bleiler and T. E. Dikty edited The Best Science-Fiction Stories 1949
they featured stories by Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, and Isaac Asimov. Of
those stories, at least one, Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven!" became a
permanent part of SF's canon, and even now we pick it up to see what stories
were considered important back then. Bleiler and Dikty edited six more annuals,
but arguably the most distinguished annual of the period was Judith Merril's classic
SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy, which started in
1956 (with an introduction by Orson Welles!) and ran for twelve years. The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes her anthologies as "always
lively, with an emphasis on stories of wit and literacy". It also was the
first year's best annual to clearly combine science fiction and fantasy in one
volume, and is very much an inspiration for the book you now hold.
By the time Merril edited her final year's best
annual in 1968 the first Golden Age of Science Fiction was clearly over, most
of the pulp magazines had seen their heyday and we had solidly begun to move
into the age of the novel. And yet short fiction, which had always been the
laboratory of the field, where new writers learned their craft and where the
best writers in the field pushed its boundaries, didn't cease to exist or
become any less important. Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions had
appeared the year before in 1967, the New Wave was well and truly established,
and great short fiction continued to appear everywhere. Editors like Lester Del
Rey and Donald Wollheim continued to assemble year's best annuals and in 1972
Terry Carr went solo with The Best Science Fiction of the Year. His
annuals, along with those of Gardner Dozois, who began editing year's best
annuals solo in 1976, defined the next quarter-century of science fiction and
fantasy, assembling the year's best stories in some of the most impressive
annuals the field has yet seen. Their approaches, though, changed in the
mid-1980s,when Dozois began to edit his mammoth The Year's Best Science
Fiction series. Where Dozois favored an enormous volume that featured as
broad a smorgasbord of fiction as the field could offer, Carr kept his volumes
shorter, featuring fewer, arguably more essential selections.
As a young reader, it was Carr's volumes that made
the greatest impact on me, and who inspired this series of annuals. While I strongly
responded to the catholic tastes of Merril's anthologies, and appreciated the
broadness of Dozois', it was Carr's volumes that led me through the '70s and
'80s, his books that I sought out to read and enjoy, and then to learn from
when I began to edit year's best annuals myself. His The Best Science
Fiction of the Year was the template for the Science Fiction: The Best
of books I co-edited, his Year's Best Fantasy inspired the
Fantasy: The Best of books, and his The Best Science Fiction
Novellas of the Year was and is the inspiration behind my Best Short
Novels anthologies.
And then there is this series, The Best Science
Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. I think that we're living through a new
golden age of the science fiction and fantasy short story. Whether or not the business
of publishing short fiction is thriving, the art of it has never been
healthier. Each year an incredible array of publications—websites, ezines,
chapbooks, small press 'zines, specialist anthologies, mass-market
collections—are making new short fiction available to readers in staggering
numbers. In 2005 alone, trade journal Locus estimated over 3,000 new
genre short stories were published, and that number is likely far short of the
true number. Those stories reflect a creative flowering the like of which the
field hasn't seen since the Golden Age of Campbell and Astounding, with
established and new writers pushing the boundaries in new and exciting ways,
creating new movements and refining old ones. Whether or not any of these movements
prove to have longevity or make a substantial impact on the field, they are
symptomatic of a restlessness in readers and writers, who are looking for
something fresh, something contemporary, something that stretches the
boundaries of science fiction and fantasy, that is both respectful of the
field's grand traditions and is looking eagerly for what comes next.
It seems to me there is a place, then, for a book
like this one. A book that brings together the best science fiction and
the best fantasy stories of the year in one single volume. A book that is aware
of, but not trapped, by the history of the genre; a book that has both eyes on
the future, but hasn't forgotten the past. A book that hopefully combines the
broad tastes of a Judith Merril with the editorial eye of a Terry Carr, while
being its own beast too. I can only hope you'll agree.
Before you move on to the heart of this book, the
stories, I'd like to thank Charles N. Brown and the team at Locus Press, who
generously threw this editor a lifeline in 2006 when a publisher abruptly
disappeared, and Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade, who have
enthusiastically embraced the vision for this anthology series. Without them,
the book you're now holding would not exist.
And on to the stories. Here are some of the best
and brightest science fiction and fantasy writers of our time doing what they
do best, creating unforgettable stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I
did, and that you'll join me here again next year. I'm already reading for next
year, and the stories I've seen!
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
November 2006
Science fiction
has had a love affair with the stars since its very earliest days. In the
powerful story that follows, Neil Gaiman gives us a chilling look into what
might happen if the stars loved us back.
Gaiman is the award-winning author of the novels Coraline, American
Gods, and Anansi Boys. His most recent book is collection Fragile
Things. Upcoming is new collection M is for Magic.
"Come on," said Vic. "It'll be
great."
"No, it won't," I said, although I'd
lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.
"It'll be brilliant," said Vic, for the
hundredth time. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" He grinned with white teeth.
We both attended an all-boys' school in South
London. While it would be a lie to say that we had no experience with girls—Vic
seemed to have had many girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister's
friends—it would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly spoke
to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys. Well, I did,
anyway. It's hard to speak for someone else, and I've not seen Vic for thirty
years. I'm not sure that I would know what to say to him now if I did.
We were walking the back-streets that used to
twine in a grimy maze behind East Croydon station—a friend had told Vic about a
party, and Vic was determined to go whether I liked it or not, and I didn't.
But my parents were away that week at a conference, and I was Vic's guest at
his house, so I was trailing along beside him.
"It'll be the same as it always is," I
said. "After an hour you'll be off somewhere snogging the prettiest girl
at the party, and I'll be in the kitchen listening to somebody's mum going on
about politics or poetry or something."
"You just have to talk to them,"
he said. "I think it's probably that road at the end here." He
gestured cheerfully, swinging the bag with the bottle in it.
"Don't you know?"
"Alison gave me directions and I wrote them
on a bit of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S'okay. I can find
it."
"How?" Hope welled slowly up inside me.
"We walk down the road," he said, as if
speaking to an idiot child. "And we look for the party. Easy."
I looked, but saw no party: just narrow houses
with rusting cars or bikes in their concreted front gardens; and the dusty
glass fronts of newsagents, which smelled of alien spices and sold everything
from birthday cards and second-hand comics to the kind of magazines that were
so pornographic that they were sold already sealed in plastic bags. I had been
there when Vic had slipped one of those magazines beneath his sweater, but the
owner caught him on the pavement outside and made him give it back.
We reached the end of the road and turned into a
narrow street of terraced houses. Everything looked very still and empty in the
summer's evening. "It's all right for you," I said. "They fancy
you. You don't actually have to talk to them." It was true: one
urchin grin from Vic and he could have his pick of the room.
"Nah. S'not like that. You've just got to
talk."
The times I had kissed my sister's friends I had
not spoken to them. They had been around while my sister was off doing
something elsewhere, and they had drifted into my orbit, and so I had kissed
them. I do not remember any talking. I did not know what to say to girls, and I
told him so.
"They're just girls," said Vic.
"They don't come from another planet."
As we followed the curve of the road around, my
hopes that the party would prove unfindable began to fade: a low pulsing noise,
music muffled by walls and doors, could be heard from a house up ahead. It was
eight in the evening, not that early if you aren't yet sixteen, and we weren't.
Not quite.
I had parents who liked to know where I was, but I
don't think Vic's parents cared that much. He was the youngest of five boys.
That in itself seemed magical to me: I merely had two sisters, both younger
than I was, and I felt both unique and lonely. I had wanted a brother as far
back as I could remember. When I turned thirteen, I stopped wishing on falling
stars or first stars, but back when I did, a brother was what I had wished for.
We went up the garden path, crazy paving leading
us past a hedge and a solitary rosebush to a pebble-dashed facade. We rang the
doorbell, and the door was opened by a girl. I could not have told you how old
she was, which was one of the things about girls I had begun to hate: when you start
out as kids you're just boys and girls, going through time at the same speed,
and you're all five, or seven, or eleven together. And then one day there's a
lurch and the girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, they
know all about everything, and they have periods and breasts and make-up and
God-only-knew-what-else—for I certainly didn't. The diagrams in biology
textbooks were no substitute for being, in a very real sense, young adults. And
the girls of our age were.
Vic and I weren't young adults, and I was
beginning to suspect that even when I started needing to shave every day,
instead of once every couple of weeks, I would still be way behind.
The girl said, "Hello?"
Vic said, "We're friends of Alison's."
We had met Alison, all freckles and orange hair and a wicked smile, in Hamburg,
on a German Exchange. The exchange organisers had sent some girls with us, from
a local girls' school, to balance the sexes. The girls, our age, more or less,
were raucous and funny, and had more or less adult boyfriends with cars and
jobs and motorbikes and—in the case of one girl with crooked teeth and a
raccoon coat, who spoke to me about it sadly at the end of a party in Hamburg,
in, of course, the kitchen—a wife and kids.
"She isn't here," said the girl at the
door. "No Alison."
"Not to worry," said Vic, with an easy
grin. "I'm Vic. This is Enn." A beat, and then the girl smiled back
at him. Vic had a bottle of white wine in a plastic bag, removed from his
parents' kitchen cabinet. "Where should I put this, then?"
She stood out of the way, letting us enter.
"There's a kitchen in the back," she said. "Put it on the table
there, with the other bottles." She had golden, wavy hair, and she was
very beautiful. The hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that she was
beautiful.
"What's your name, then?" said Vic.
She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his
crooked white grin and told her that that had to be the prettiest name he had
ever heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like he
meant it.
Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the
kitchen, and I looked into the front room, where the music was coming from.
There were people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she started to dance,
swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.
This was during the early days of punk. On our own
record-players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the Stranglers and the
Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people's parties you'd hear ELO or 10cc or
even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky. During the German
Exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on was Neil Young's Harvest,
and his song "Heart of Gold" had threaded through the trip like a
refrain: like him, we'd crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . .
The music that was playing in that front room
wasn't anything I recognized. It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop
group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I'd been given for my last
birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had
a beat, though, and the half-dozen girls in that room were moving gently to it,
although I was only looking at Stella. She shone.
Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding
a can of lager. "There's booze back in the kitchen," he told me. He
wandered over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn't hear what they
were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room for me in that
conversation.
I didn't like beer, not back then. I went off to
see if there was something I wanted to drink. On the kitchen table stood a
large bottle of Coca-Cola, and I poured myself a plastic tumblerful, and I
didn't dare say anything to the pair of girls who were talking in the underlit
kitchen. They were animated, and utterly lovely. Each of them had very black
skin and glossy hair and movie-star clothes, and their accents were foreign,
and each of them was out of my league.
I wandered, Coke in hand.
The house was deeper than it looked, larger and
more complex than the two-up two-down model I had imagined. The rooms were
underlit—I doubt there was a bulb of more than forty watts in the building—and
each room I went into was inhabited: in my memory, inhabited only by girls. I
did not go upstairs.
A girl was the only occupant of the conservatory.
Her hair was so fair it was white, and long, and straight, and she sat at the
glass-topped table, her hands clasped together, staring at the garden outside,
and the gathering dusk. She seemed wistful.
"Do you mind if I sit here?" I asked,
gesturing with my cup. She shook her head, and then followed it up with a
shrug, to indicate that it was all the same to her. I sat down.
Vic walked past the conservatory door. He was
talking to Stella, but he looked in at me, sitting at the table, wrapped in
shyness and awkwardness, and he opened and closed his hand in a parody of a
speaking mouth. Talk. Right.
"Are you from round here?" I asked the
girl.
She shook her head. She wore a low-cut silvery
top, and I tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts.
I said, "What's your name? I'm Enn."
"Wain's Wain," she said, or something
that sounded like it. "I'm a second."
"That's uh. That's a different name."
She fixed me with huge liquid eyes. "It
indicates that my progenitor was also Wain, and that I am obliged to report
back to her. I may not breed."
"Ah. Well. Bit early for that anyway, isn't
it?"
She unclasped her hands, raised them above the
table, spread her fingers. "You see?" The little finger on her left
hand was crooked, and it bifurcated at the top, splitting into two smaller
fingertips. A minor deformity. "When I was finished a decision was needed.
Would I be retained, or eliminated? I was fortunate that the decision was with
me. Now, I travel, while my more perfect sisters remain at home in stasis. They
were firsts. I am a second.
"Soon I must return to Wain, and tell her all
I have seen. All my impressions of this place of yours."
"I don't actually live in Croydon," I
said. "I don't come from here." I wondered if she was American. I had
no idea what she was talking about.
"As you say," she agreed, "neither
of us comes from here." She folded her six-fingered left hand beneath her
right, as if she was tucking it out of sight. "I had expected it to be
bigger, and cleaner, and more colorful. But still, it is a jewel."
She yawned, covered her mouth with her right hand,
only for a moment, before it was back on the table again. "I grow weary of
the journeying, and I wish sometimes that it would end. On a street in Rio, at
Carnival, I saw them on a bridge, golden and tall and insect-eyed and winged,
and elated I almost ran to greet them, before I saw that they were only people
in costumes. I said to Hola Colt, 'Why do they try so hard to look like us?'
and Hola Colt replied, 'Because they hate themselves, all shades of pink and
brown, and so small'. It is what I experience, even me, and I am not grown. It
is like a world of children, or of elves." Then she smiled, and said,
"It was a good thing they could not any of them see Hola Colt."
"Um," I said, "do you want to
dance?"
She shook her head immediately. "It is not
permitted," she said. "I can do nothing that might cause damage to
property. I am Wain's."
"Would you like something to drink,
then?"
"Water," she said.
I went back to the kitchen and poured myself
another Coke, and filled a cup with water from the tap. From the kitchen back
to the hall, and from there into the conservatory, but now it was quite empty.
I wondered if the girl had gone to the toilet, and
if she might change her mind about dancing later. I walked back to the front
room and stared in. The place was filling up. There were more girls dancing,
and several lads I didn't know, who looked a few years older than me and Vic.
The lads and the girls all kept their distance, but Vic was holding Stella's
hand as they danced, and when the song ended he put an arm around her,
casually, almost proprietorially, to make sure that nobody else cut in.
I wondered if the girl I had been talking to in
the conservatory was now upstairs, as she did not appear to be on the ground
floor.
I walked into the living room, which was across
the hall from the room where the people were dancing, and I sat down on the
sofa. There was a girl sitting there already. She had dark hair, cut short and
spiky, and a nervous manner.
Talk, I thought. "Um, this mug of water's going
spare," I told her, "if you want it?"
She nodded, and reached out her hand and took the
mug, extremely carefully, as if she were unused to taking things, as if she
could neither trust her vision nor her hands.
"I love being a tourist," she said, and
smiled, hesitantly. She had a gap between her two front teeth, and she sipped
the tap water as if she were an adult sipping a fine wine. "The last tour,
we went to sun, and we swam in sunfire pools with the whales. We heard their
histories and we shivered in the chill of the outer places, then we swam deepward
where the heat churned and comforted us.
"I wanted to go back. This time, I wanted it.
There was so much I had not seen. Instead we came to world. Do you like
it?"
"Like what?"
She gestured vaguely to the room—the sofa, the
armchairs, the curtains, the unused gas fire.
"It's all right, I suppose."
"I told them I did not wish to visit
world," she said. "My parent-teacher was unimpressed. 'You will have
much to learn,' it told me. I said, 'I could learn more in sun, again. Or in
the deeps. Jessa spun webs between galaxies. I want to do that.'
"But there was no reasoning with it, and I
came to world. Parent-teacher engulfed me, and I was here, embodied in a
decaying lump of meat hanging on a frame of calcium. As I incarnated I felt
things deep inside me, fluttering and pumping and squishing. It was my first
experience with pushing air through the mouth, vibrating the vocal chords on
the way, and I used it to tell parent-teacher that I wished that I would die,
which it acknowledged was the inevitable exit strategy from world."
There were black worry beads wrapped around her
wrist, and she fiddled with them as she spoke. "But knowledge is there, in
the meat," she said, "and I am resolved to learn from it."
We were sitting close at the centre of the sofa
now. I decided I should put an arm around her, but casually. I would extend my
arm along the back of the sofa and eventually sort of creep it down, almost
imperceptibly, until it was touching her. She said, "The thing with the
liquid in the eyes, when the world blurs. Nobody told me, and I still do not
understand. I have touched the folds of the Whisper and pulsed and flown with
the tachyon swans, and I still do not understand."
She wasn't the prettiest girl there, but she
seemed nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway. I let my arm slide down a
little, tentatively, so that it made contact with her back, and she did not
tell me to take it away.
Vic called to me then, from the doorway. He was
standing with his arm around Stella, protectively, waving at me. I tried to let
him know, by shaking my head, that I was on to something, but he called my
name, and, reluctantly, I got up from the sofa, and walked over to the door.
"What?"
"Er. Look. The party," said Vic,
apologetically. "It's not the one I thought it was. I've been talking to
Stella and I figured it out. Well, she sort of explained it to me. We're at a
different party."
"Christ. Are we in trouble? Do we have to
go?"
Stella shook her head. He leaned down and kissed
her, gently, on the lips. "You're just happy to have me here, aren't you,
darlin'?"
"You know I am," she told him.
He looked from her back to me, and he smiled his
white smile: roguish, loveable, a little bit Artful Dodger, a little bit
wide-boy Prince Charming. "Don't worry. They're all tourists here anyway.
It's a foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to Germany."
"It is?"
"Enn. You got to talk to them. And
that means you got to listen to them too. You understand?"
"I did. I already talked to a couple
of them."
"You getting anywhere?"
"I was till you called me over."
"Sorry about that. Look, I just wanted to
fill you in. Right?"
And he patted my arm and he walked away with
Stella. Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.
Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the
twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces, but, more important than
that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it is
that makes a beauty something more than a shop-window dummy. Stella was the
most lovely of any of them, but she, of course, was Vic's, and they were going
upstairs together, and that was just how things would always be.
There were several people now sitting on the sofa,
talking to the gap-toothed girl. Someone told a joke, and they all laughed. I
would have had to push my way in there to sit next to her again, and it didn't
look like she was expecting me back, or cared that I had gone, so I wandered
out into the hall. I glanced in at the dancers, and found myself wondering
where the music was coming from. I couldn't see a record-player, or speakers.
From the hall I walked back to the kitchen.
Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an
excuse to be there, and, on the good side, at this party I couldn't see any
signs of someone's mum. I inspected the various bottles and cans on the kitchen
table, then I poured a half an inch of Pernod into the bottom of my plastic
cup, which I filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple of ice-cubes,
and took a sip, relishing the sweet-shop tang of the drink.
"What's that you're drinking?" A girl's
voice.
"It's Pernod," I told her. "It
tastes like aniseed balls, only it's alcoholic." I didn't say that I'd
only tried it because I'd heard someone in the crowd ask for a Pernod on a live
Velvet Underground LP.
"Can I have one?" I poured another
Pernod, topped it off with Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was a coppery
auburn, and it tumbled around her head in ringlets. It's not a hair style you
see much now, but you saw it a lot back then.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Triolet," she said.
"Pretty name," I told her, although I
wasn't sure that it was. She was pretty, though.
"It's a verse form," she said, proudly.
"Like me."
"You're a poem?"
She smiled, and looked down and away, almost
bashfully. Her profile was almost flat—a perfect Grecian nose that came down
from her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the school
theatre the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news of
Antigone's death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I thought of
that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I thought of Barry Smith's
drawings of women in the Conan comics: five years later I would have
thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddall. But I was
only fifteen, then.
"You're a poem?" I repeated.
She chewed her lower lip. "If you want. I am
a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the
sea."
"Isn't it hard to be three things at the same
time?"
"What's your name?"
"Enn."
"So you are Enn," she said. "And
you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same
time?"
"But they aren't different things. I mean,
they aren't contradictory." It was a word I had read many times but never
said aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the wrong places. Contradictory.
She wore a thin dress, made of a white, silky fabric.
Her eyes were a pale green, a color that would now make me think of tinted
contact lenses; but this was thirty years ago: things were different then. I
remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure that they
were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.
Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were
talking nonsense, even if her name wasn't really Triolet (my generation had not
been given hippy names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the Moons, they
were only six, seven, eight years old back then). She said, "We knew that
it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe
who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and
dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words
so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a
pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in
pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the
time when, on worlds a thousand sun-systems distant, the pattern would be
decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."
"And then what happened?"
She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was
as if she stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale
green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask. "You cannot
hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it,
and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms
becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting
their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives.
Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and,
sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born.
There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took
flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known."
I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg
pressing against hers. She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my arm,
affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my face.
"There are places that we are welcomed,"
said Triolet, "and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a
disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does
contagion end and art begin?"
"I don't know," I said, still smiling. I
could hear the unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and boomed in the
front room.
She leaned into me then and—I suppose it was a
kiss. . . I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips, anyway, and then,
satisfied, she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as her own.
"Would you like to hear it?" she asked,
and I nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain that I needed
anything she was willing to give me.
She began to whisper something in my ear. It's the
strangest thing about poetry—you can tell it's poetry, even if you don't speak
the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without understanding a word, and you
still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew
what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn't know the
language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind's eye I saw
towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of pale green; and
unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the
ocean.
Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don't remember. I
know I wanted to.
And then Vic was shaking me violently. "Come
on!" he was shouting. "Quickly. Come on!"
In my head I began to come back from a thousand
miles away.
"Idiot. Come on. Just get a move on," he
said, and he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.
For the first time that evening I recognized one
of the songs being played in the front room. A sad saxophone wail over a
cascade of liquid chords, followed by a man's voice singing cut-up lyrics about
the sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and hear the song.
She said, "I am not finished. There is yet
more of me."
"Sorry, love," said Vic, but he wasn't
smiling any longer. "There'll be another time," and he grabbed me by
the elbow and he twisted and pulled, forcing me from the room. I did not
resist. I knew from experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out me if he
got it into his head to do so. He wouldn't do it unless he was upset or angry,
but he was angry now.
Out into the front hall. As Vic pulled open the
door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to see Triolet in
the doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at the
top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her face.
This all happened thirty years ago. I have
forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget
everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all
wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot
believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on
Stella's face as she watched Vic, hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall
remember that.
Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup
smudged across her face, and her eyes—
You wouldn't want to make a universe angry. I bet
an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.
We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and
the tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm was on our heels, a
mad helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets, threading through the
maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until we could not breathe;
and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer. We were in pain. I
held onto a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long, in the gutter.
He wiped his mouth.
"She wasn't a—" He stopped.
He shook his head.
Then he said, "You know. . . I think there's
a thing. When you've gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you
wouldn't be you anymore? You'd be the person who'd done that? The
places you just can't go. . .. I think that happened to me tonight."
I thought I knew what he was saying. "Screw
her, you mean?" I said.
He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and
twisted it violently. I wondered if I was going to have to fight him—and
lose—but after a moment he lowered his hand and moved away from me, making a
low, gulping noise.
I looked at him curiously, and I realized that he
was crying: his face was scarlet; snot and tears ran down his cheeks. Vic was
sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little
boy. He walked away from me then, shoulders heaving, and he hurried down the
road so he was in front of me and I could no longer see his face. I wondered
what had occurred in that upstairs room to make him behave like that, to scare
him so, and I could not even begin to guess.
The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic went on
ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him in the dusk, my feet treading
out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not properly remember
and would never be able to repeat.
The relationships
between brothers and sisters are often strange, fraught and unpredictable. In
this charming tale Beagle gives us a glimpse into the life of a twelve-year-old
girl and just what she's willing to do to save her stupid brother Marvyn the
witch.
Peter S. Beagle is the author of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn,
as well as the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Innkeeper's Song,
and Tamsin. He has won the Hugo, Locus, and Mythopoeic Awards. His most
recent book is collection The Line Between. Upcoming are two new novels,
Summerlong and I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons.
"You can't kill him," Mr. Luke said.
"Your mother wouldn't like it." After some consideration, he added,
"I'd be rather annoyed myself."
"But wait," Angie said, in the dramatic
tones of a television commercial for some miraculous mop. "There's more. I
didn't tell you about the brandied cupcakes—"
"Yes, you did."
"And about him telling Jennifer Williams what
I got her for her birthday, and she pitched a fit, because she had two of them
already—"
"He meant well," her father said
cautiously. "I'm pretty sure."
"And then when he finked to Mom about me and
Orlando Cruz, and we weren't doing anything—"
"Nevertheless. No killing."
Angie brushed sweaty mouse-brown hair off her
forehead and regrouped. "Can I at least maim him a little? Trust me, he's
earned it."
"I don't doubt you," Mr. Luke agreed.
"But you're fifteen, and Marvyn's eight. Eight and a half. You're bigger
than he is, so beating him up isn't fair. When you're. . .oh, say,
twenty-three, and he's sixteen and a half—okay, you can try it then. Not
until."
Angie's wordless grunt might or might not have
been assent. She started out of the room, but her father called her back,
holding out his right hand. "Pinky-swear, kid." Angie eyed him
warily, but hooked her little finger around his without hesitation, which was a
mistake. "You did that much too easily," her father said, frowning.
"Swear by Buffy."
"What? You can't swear by a television show!"
"Where is that written? Repeat after me—'I
swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer—'"
"You really don't trust me!"
"'I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer
that I will keep my hands off my baby brother—'"
"My baby brother, the monster! He's gotten
worse since he started sticking that y in his name—"
"'—and I will stop calling him Ex-Lax—'"
"Come on, I only do that when he makes me
really mad—"
"'—until he shall have attained the age of
sixteen years and six months, after which time—'"
"After which time I get to pound him into
marmalade. Deal. I can wait." She grinned; then turned self-conscious,
making a performance of pulling down her upper lip to cover the shiny new
braces. At the door, she looked over her shoulder and said lightly, "You
are way too smart to be a father."
From behind his book, Mr. Luke answered,
"I've often thought so myself." Then he added, "It's a Korean
thing. We're all like that. You're lucky your mother isn't Korean, or you
wouldn't have a secret to your name."
Angie spent the rest of the evening in her room,
doing homework on the phone with Melissa Feldman, her best friend. Finished,
feeling virtuously entitled to some low-fat chocolate reward, she wandered down
the hall toward the kitchen, passing her brother's room on the way. Looking
in—not because of any special interest, but because Marvyn invariably hung
around her own doorway, gazing in aimless fascination at whatever she was
doing, until shooed away—she saw him on the floor, playing with Milady, the
gray, ancient family cat. Nothing unusual about that: Marvyn and Milady had
been an item since he was old enough to realize that the cat wasn't something
to eat. What halted Angie as though she had walked into a wall was that they were
playing Monopoly, and that Milady appeared to be winning.
Angie leaned in the doorway, entranced and alarmed
at the same time. Marvyn had to throw the dice for both Milady and himself, and
the old cat was too riddled with arthritis to handle the pastel Monopoly money
easily. But she waited her turn, and moved her piece—she had the silver top
hat—very carefully, as though considering possible options. And she already had
a hotel on Park Place.
Marvyn jumped up and slammed the door as soon as
he noticed his sister watching the game, and Angie went on to liberate a
larger-than-planned remnant of sorbet. Somewhere near the bottom of the
container she finally managed to stuff what she'd just glimpsed deep in the
part of her mind she called her "forgettery." As she'd once said to
her friend Melissa, "There's such a thing as too much information, and it
is not going to get me. I am never going to know more than I want to know about
stuff. Look at the President."
For the next week or so Marvyn made a point of
staying out of Angie's way, which was all by itself enough to put her mildly on
edge. If she knew one thing about her brother, it was that the time to worry
was when you didn't see him. All the same, on the surface things were peaceful
enough, and continued so until the evening when Marvyn went dancing with the
garbage.
The next day being pickup day, Mrs. Luke had
handed him two big green plastic bags of trash for the rolling bins down the
driveway. Marvyn had made enough of a fuss about the task that Angie stayed by
the open front window to make sure that he didn't simply drop the bags in the
grass, and vanish into one of his mysterious hideouts. Mrs. Luke was back in
the living room with the news on, but Angie was still at the window when Marvyn
looked around quickly, mumbled a few words she couldn't catch, and then did a
thing with his left hand, so fast she saw no more than a blurry twitch. And the
two garbage bags went dancing.
Angie's buckling knees dropped her to the couch
under the window, though she never noticed it. Marvyn let go of the bags
altogether, and they rocked alongside him—backwards, forwards, sideways, in
perfect timing, with perfect steps, turning with him as though he were the star
and they his backup singers. To Angie's astonishment, he was snapping his
fingers and moonwalking, as she had never imagined he could do—and the bags
were pushing out green arms and legs as the three of them danced down the
driveway. When they reached the cans, Marvyn's partners promptly went limp and
were nothing but plastic garbage bags again. Marvyn plopped them in, dusted his
hands, and turned to walk back to the house.
When he saw Angie watching, neither of them spoke.
Angie beckoned. They met at the door and stared at each other. Angie said only,
"My room."
Marvyn dragged in behind her, looking everywhere
and nowhere at once, and definitely not at his sister. Angie sat down on the
bed and studied him: chubby and messy-looking, with an unmanageable sprawl of
rusty-brown hair and an eyepatch meant to tame a wandering left eye. She said,
"Talk to me."
"About what?" Marvyn had a deep, foggy
voice for eight and a half—Mr. Luke always insisted that it had changed before
Marvyn was born. "I didn't break your CD case."
"Yes, you did," Angie said. "But
forget that. Let's talk about garbage bags. Let's talk about Monopoly."
Marvyn was utterly businesslike about lies: in a
crisis he always told the truth, until he thought of something better. He said,
"I'm warning you right now, you won't believe me."
"I never do. Make it a good one."
"Okay," Marvyn said. "I'm a
witch."
When Angie could speak, she said the first thing
that came into her head, which embarrassed her forever after. "You can't
be a witch. You're a wizard, or a warlock or something." Like we're having
a sane conversation, she thought.
Marvyn shook his head so hard that his eyepatch
almost came loose. "Uh-uh! That's all books and movies and stuff. You're a
man witch or you're a woman witch, that's it. I'm a man witch."
"You'll be a dead witch if you don't quit
shitting me," Angie told him. But her brother knew he had her, and he
grinned like a pirate (at home he often tied a bandanna around his head, and he
was constantly after Mrs. Luke to buy him a parrot). He said, "You can ask
Lidia. She was the one who knew."
Lidia del Carmen de Madero y Gomez had been the
Lukes' housekeeper since well before Angie's birth. She was from Ciego de Avila
in Cuba, and claimed to have changed Fidel Castro's diapers as a girl working
for his family. For all her years—no one seemed to know her age; certainly not
the Lukes—Lidia's eyes remained as clear as a child's, and Angie had on
occasion nearly wept with envy of her beautiful wrinkled deep-dark skin. For
her part, Lidia got on well with Angie, spoke Spanish with her mother, and was teaching
Mr. Luke to cook Cuban food. But Marvyn had been hers since his infancy, beyond
question or interference. They went to Spanish-language movies on Saturdays,
and shopped together in the Bowen Street barrio.
"The one who knew," Angie said.
"Knew what? Is Lidia a witch too?"
Marvyn's look suggested that he was wondering
where their parents had actually found their daughter. "No, of course
she's not a witch. She's a santera."
Angie stared. She knew as much about Santeria
as anyone growing up in a big city with a growing population of Africans and
South Americans—which wasn't much. Newspaper articles and television specials
had informed her that santeros sacrificed chickens and goats and did. .
.things with the blood. She tried to imagine Marvyn with a chicken, doing
things, and couldn't. Not even Marvyn.
"So Lidia got you into it?" she finally
asked. "Now you're a santero too?"
"Nah, I'm a witch, I told you." Marvyn's
disgusted impatience was approaching critical mass.
Angie said, "Wicca? You're into the Goddess
thing? There's a girl in my home room, Devlin Margulies, and she's a Wiccan,
and that's all she talks about. Sabbats and esbats, and drawing down the moon,
and the rest of it. She's got skin like a cheese-grater."
Marvyn blinked at her. "What's a
Wiccan?" He sprawled suddenly on her bed, grabbing Milady as she hobbled
in and pooting loudly on her furry stomach. "I already knew I could sort
of mess with things—you remember the rubber duck, and that time at the baseball
game?" Angie remembered. Especially the rubber duck. "Anyway, Lidia
took me to meet this real old lady, in the farmers' market, she's even older
than her, her name's Yemaya, something like that, she smokes this funny little
pipe all the time. Anyway, she took hold of me, my face, and she looked in my
eyes, and then she closed her eyes, and she just sat like that for so
long!" He giggled. "I thought she'd fallen asleep, and I started to
pull away, but Lidia wouldn't let me. So she sat like that, and she sat, and
then she opened her eyes and she told me I was a witch, a brujo. And
Lidia bought me a two-scoop ice-cream cone. Coffee and chocolate, with
M&Ms."
"You won't have a tooth in your head by the
time you're twelve." Angie didn't know what to say, what questions to ask.
"So that's it? The old lady, she gives you witch lessons or
something?"
"Nah—I told you, she's a big santera,
that's different. I only saw her that one time. She kept telling Lidia that I
had el regalo—I think that means the gift, she said that a lot—and I
should keep practicing. Like you with the clarinet."
Angie winced. Her hands were small and
stubby-fingered, and music slipped through them like rain. Her parents,
sympathizing, had offered to cancel the clarinet lessons, but Angie refused. As
she confessed to her friend Melissa, she had no skill at accepting defeat.
Now she asked, "So how do you practice?
Boogieing with garbage bags?"
Marvyn shook his head. "That's getting
old—so's playing board games with Milady. I was thinking maybe I could make the
dishes wash themselves, like in Beauty and the Beast. I bet I could do
that."
"You could enchant my homework," Angie
suggested. "My algebra, for starters."
Her brother snorted. "Hey, I'm just a kid,
I've got my limits! I mean, your homework?"
"Right," Angie said. "Right. Look,
what about laying a major spell on Tim Hubley, the next time he's over here
with Melissa? Like making his feet go flat so he can't play basketball—that's
the only reason she likes him, anyway. Or—" her voice became slower and
more hesitant "—what about getting Jake Petrakis to fall madly, wildly,
totally in love with me? That'd be. . .funny."
Marvyn was occupied with Milady. "Girl stuff,
who cares about all that? I want to be so good at soccer everybody'll want to
be on my team—I want fat Josh Wilson to have patches over both eyes, so he'll
leave me alone. I want Mom to order thin-crust pepperoni pizza every night, and
I want Dad to—"
"No spells on Mom and Dad, not ever!"
Angie was on her feet, leaning menacingly over him. "You got that, Ex-Lax?
You mess with them even once, believe me, you'd better be one hella witch to
keep me from strangling you. Understood?"
Marvyn nodded. Angie said, "Okay, I tell you
what. How about practicing on Aunt Caroline when she comes next weekend?"
Marvyn's pudgy pirate face lit up at the
suggestion. Aunt Caroline was their mother's older sister, celebrated in the
Luke family for knowing everything about everything. A pleasant, perfectly
decent person, her perpetual air of placid expertise would have turned a saint
into a serial killer. Name a country, and Aunt Caroline had spent enough time
there to know more about the place than a native; bring up a newspaper story,
and without fail Aunt Caroline could tell you something about it that hadn't
been in the paper; catch a cold, and Aunt Caroline could recite the maiden name
of the top medical researcher in rhinoviruses' mother. (Mr. Luke said often
that Aunt Caroline's motto was, "Say something, and I'll bet you're
wrong.")
"Nothing dangerous," Angie commanded,
"nothing scary. And nothing embarrassing or anything."
Marvyn looked sulky. "It's not going to be
any fun that way."
"If it's too gross, they'll know you did
it," his sister pointed out. "I would." Marvyn, who loved
secrets and hidden identities, yielded.
During the week before Aunt Caroline's arrival,
Marvyn kept so quietly to himself that Mrs. Luke worried about his health.
Angie kept as close an eye on him as possible, but couldn't be at all sure what
he might be planning—no more than he, she suspected. Once she caught him
changing the TV channels without the remote; and once, left alone in the
kitchen to peel potatoes and carrots for a stew, he had the peeler do it while
he read the Sunday funnies. The apparent smallness of his ambitions relieved
Angie's vague unease, lulling her into complacency about the big family dinner
that was traditional on the first night of a visit from Aunt Caroline.
Aunt Caroline was, among other things, the sort of
woman incapable of going anywhere without attempting to buy it. Her own house
was jammed to the attic with sightseer souvenirs from all over the world:
children's toys from Slovenia, sculptures from Afghanistan, napkin rings from
Kenya shaped like lions and giraffes, legions of brass bangles, boxes and
statues of gods from India, and so many Russian matryoshka dolls fitting
inside each other that she gave them away as stocking-stuffers every Christmas.
She never came to the table at the Lukes without bringing some new acquisition
for approval; so dinner with Aunt Caroline, in Mr. Luke's words, was always
Show and Tell time.
Her most recent hegira had brought her back to
West Africa for the third or fourth time, and provided her with the most
evil-looking doll Angie had ever seen. Standing beside Aunt Caroline's plate,
it was about two feet high, with bat ears, too many fingers, and eyes like
bright green marbles streaked with scarlet threads. Aunt Caroline explained
rapturously that it was a fertility doll unique to a single Benin tribe, which
Angie found impossible to credit. "No way!" she announced loudly.
"Not for one minute am I even thinking about having babies with that thing
staring at me! It doesn't even look pregnant, the way they do. No way in the
world!"
Aunt Caroline had already had two of Mr. Luke's
margaritas, and was working on a third. She replied with some heat that not all
fertility figures came equipped with cannonball breasts, globular bellies and
callipygous rumps—"Some of them are remarkably slender, even by Western
standards!" Aunt Caroline herself, by anyone's standards, was built along
the general lines of a chopstick.
Angie was drawing breath for a response when she
heard her father say something in Korean behind her, and then her mother's soft
gasp, "Caroline." But Aunt Caroline was busy explaining to her niece
that she knew absolutely nothing about fertility. Mrs. Luke said, considerably
louder, "Caroline, shut up, your doll!"
Aunt Caroline said, "What, what?" and
then turned, along with Angie. They both screamed.
The doll was growing all the things Aunt Caroline
had been insisting it didn't need to qualify as a fertility figure. It was
carved from ebony, or from something even harder, but it was pushing out
breasts and belly and hips much as Marvyn's two garbage bags had suddenly
developed arms and legs. Even its expression had changed, from hungry slyness
to a downright silly grin, as though it were about to kiss someone, anyone. It
took a few shaky steps forward on the table and put its foot in the salsa.
Then the babies started coming.
They came pattering down on the dinner table, fast
and hard, like wooden rain, one after another, after another, after another. .
.perfect little copies, miniatures, of the madly smiling doll-thing, plopping
out of it—just like Milady used to drop kittens in my lap, Angie thought
absurdly. One of them fell into her plate, and one bounced into the soup, and a
couple rolled into Mr. Luke's lap, making him knock his chair over trying to
get out of the way. Mrs. Luke was trying to grab them all up at once, which
wasn't possible, and Aunt Caroline sat where she was and shrieked. And the doll
kept grinning and having babies.
Marvyn was standing against the wall, looking both
as terrified as Aunt Caroline and as stupidly pleased as the doll-thing. Angie
caught his eye and made a fierce signal, enough, quit, turn it off, but
either her brother was having too good a time, or else had no idea how to undo
whatever spell he had raised. One of the miniatures hit her in the head, and
she had a vision of her whole family being drowned in wooden doll-babies,
everyone gurgling and reaching up pathetically toward the surface before they
all went under for the third time. Another baby caromed off the soup tureen
into her left ear, one sharp ebony fingertip drawing blood.
It stopped, finally—Angie never learned how Marvyn
regained control—and things almost quieted down, except for Aunt Caroline. The
fertility doll got the look of glazed joy off its face and went back to being a
skinny, ugly, duty-free airport souvenir, while the doll-babies seemed to melt
away exactly as though they had been made of ice instead of wood. Angie was
quick enough to see one of them actually dissolving into nothingness directly
in front of Aunt Caroline, who at this point stopped screaming and began
hiccoughing and beating the table with her palms. Mr. Luke pounded her on the
back, and Angie volunteered to practice her Heimlich maneuver, but was
overruled. Aunt Caroline went to bed early.
Later, in Marvyn's room, he kept his own bed
between himself and Angie, indignantly demanding, "What? You said not
scary—what's scary about a doll having babies? I thought it was cute."
"Cute," Angie said. "Uh-huh."
She was wondering, in a distant sort of way, how much prison time she might get
if she actually murdered her brother. Ten years? Five, with good behavior
and a lot of psychiatrists? I could manage it. "And what did I tell
you about not embarrassing Aunt Caroline?"
"How did I embarrass her?" Marvyn's
visible eye was wide with outraged innocence. "She shouldn't drink so
much, that's her problem. She embarrassed me."
"They're going to figure it out, you
know," Angie warned him. "Maybe not Aunt Caroline, but Mom for sure.
She's a witch herself that way. Your cover is blown, buddy."
But to her own astonishment, not a word was ever
said about the episode, the next day or any other—not by her observant mother,
not by her dryly perceptive father, nor even by Aunt Caroline, who might
reasonably have been expected at least to comment at breakfast. A baffled Angie
remarked to Milady, drowsing on her pillow, "I guess if a thing's weird
enough, somehow nobody saw it." This explanation didn't satisfy her, not
by a long shot, but lacking anything better she was stuck with it. The old cat
blinked in squeezy-eyed agreement, wriggled herself into a more comfortable
position, and fell asleep still purring.
Angie kept Marvyn more closely under her eye after
that than she had done since he was quite small, and first showing a penchant
for playing in traffic. Whether this observation was the cause or not, he did
remain more or less on his best behavior, barring the time he turned the air in
the bicycle tires of a boy who had stolen his superhero comic book to cement.
There was also the affair of the enchanted soccer ball, which kept rolling back
to him as though it couldn't bear to be with anyone else. And Angie learned to
be extremely careful when making herself a sandwich, because if she lost track
of her brother for too long, the sandwich was liable to acquire an extra
ingredient. Paprika was one, Tabasco another; and Scotch Bonnet peppers were a
special favorite. But there were others less hot and even more objectionable.
As she snarled to a sympathetic Melissa Feldman, who had two brothers of her
own, "They ought to be able to jail kids just for being eight and a
half."
Then there was the matter of Marvyn's attitude
toward Angie's attitude about Jake Petrakis.
Jake Petrakis was a year ahead of Angie at school.
He was half-Greek and half-Irish, and his blue eyes and thick poppy-colored
hair contrasted so richly with his olive skin that she had not been able to
look directly at him since the fourth grade. He was on the swim team, and he
was the president of the Chess Club, and he went with Ashleigh Sutton, queen of
the junior class, rechristened "Ghastly Ashleigh" by the loyal
Melissa. But he spoke kindly and cheerfully to Angie without fail, always
saying Hey, Angie, and How's it going, Angie? and See you in
the fall, Angie, have a good summer. She clutched such things to herself,
every one of them, and at the same time could not bear them.
Marvyn was as merciless as a mosquito when it came
to Jake Petrakis. He made swooning, kissing noises whenever he spied Angie
looking at Jake's picture in her yearbook, and drove her wild by holding
invented conversations between them, just loudly enough for her to hear. His
increasing ability at witchcraft meant that scented, decorated, and misspelled
love notes were likely to flutter down onto her bed at any moment, as were
long-stemmed roses, imitation jewelry (Marvyn had limited experience and poor
taste), and small, smudgy photos of Jake and Ashleigh together. Mr. Luke had to
invoke Angie's oath more than once, and to sweeten it with a promise of a new
bicycle if Marvyn made it through the year undamaged. Angie held out for a
mountain bike, and her father sighed. "That was always a myth, about the
gypsies stealing children," he said, rather wistfully. "It was surely
the other way around. Deal."
Yet there were intermittent peaceful moments
between Marvyn and Angie, several occurring in Marvyn's room. It was a far
tidier place than Angie's room, for all the clothes on the floor and battered
board game boxes sticking out from under the bed. Marvyn had mounted National
Geographic foldout maps all around the walls, lining them up so perfectly
that the creases were invisible; and on one special wall were prints and photos
of a lot of people with strange staring eyes. Angie recognized Rasputin, and
knew a few of the other names—Aleister Crowley, for one, and a man in
Renaissance dress called Dr. John Dee. There were two women, as well: the young
witch Willow, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a daguerreotype of a
black woman wearing a kind of turban folded into points. No Harry Potter,
however. Marvyn had never taken to Harry Potter.
There was also, one day after school, a very young
kitten wobbling among the books littering Marvyn's bed. A surprised Angie
picked it up and held it over her face, feeling its purring between her hands.
It was a dark, dusty gray, rather like Milady—indeed, Angie had never seen
another cat of that exact color. She nuzzled its tummy happily, asking it,
"Who are you, huh? Who could you ever be?"
Marvyn was feeding his angelfish, and didn't look
up. He said, "She's Milady."
Angie dropped the kitten on the bed. Marvyn said,
"I mean, she's Milady when she was young. I went back and got her."
When he did turn around, he was grinning the
maddening pirate grin Angie could never stand, savoring her shock. It took her
a minute to find words, and more time to make them come out. She said,
"You went back. You went back in time?"
"It was easy," Marvyn said.
"Forward's hard—I don't think I could ever get really forward.
Maybe Dr. Dee could do it." He picked up the kitten and handed her back to
his sister. It was Milady, down to the crooked left ear and the funny short
tail with the darker bit on the end. He said, "She was hurting all the
time, she was so old. I thought, if she could—you know—start over, before she
got the arthritis. . .."
He didn't finish. Angie said slowly, "So
where's Milady? The other one? I mean, if you brought this one. . .I mean, how
can they be in the same world?"
"They can't," Marvyn said. "The old
Milady's gone."
Angie's throat closed up. Her eyes filled, and so
did her nose, and she had to blow it before she could speak again. Looking at
the kitten, she knew it was Milady, and made herself think about how good it
would be to have her once again bouncing around the house, no longer limping
grotesquely and meowing with the pain. But she had loved the old cat all her
life, and never known her as a kitten, and when the new Milady started to climb
into her lap, Angie pushed her away.
"All right," she said to Marvyn.
"All right. How did you get. . .back, or whatever?"
Marvyn shrugged and went back to his fish.
"No big deal. You just have to concentrate the right way."
Angie bounced a plastic Wiffle ball off the back
of his neck, and he turned around, annoyed. "Leave me alone! Okay, you
want to know—there's a spell, words you have to say over and over and over,
until you're sick of them, and there's herbs in it too. You have to light them,
and hang over them, and you shut your eyes and keep breathing them in and
saying the words—"
"I knew I'd been smelling something weird in
your room lately. I thought you were sneaking takeout curry to bed with you
again."
"And then you open your eyes, and there you
are," Marvyn said. "I told you, no big deal."
"There you are where? How do you know where
you'll come out? When you'll come out? Click your heels together three times
and say there's no place like home?"
"No, dork, you just know." And
that was all Angie could get out of him—not, as she came to realize, because he
wouldn't tell her, but because he couldn't. Witch or no witch, he was still a
small boy, with almost no real idea of what he was doing. He was winging it
all, playing it all by ear.
Arguing with Marvyn always gave her a headache,
and her history homework—the rise of the English merchant class—was starting to
look good in comparison. She went back to her own bedroom and read two whole
chapters, and when the kitten Milady came stumbling and squeaking in, Angie let
her sleep on the desk. "What the hell," she told it, "it's not
your fault."
That evening, when Mr. and Mrs. Luke got home,
Angie told them that Milady had died peacefully of illness and old age while
they were at work, and was now buried in the back garden. (Marvyn had wanted to
make it a horrible hit-and-run accident, complete with a black SUV and
half-glimpsed license plate starting with the letter Q, but Angie vetoed this.)
Marvyn's contribution to her solemn explanation was to explain that he had seen
the new kitten in a petshop window, "and she just looked so much like
Milady, and I used my whole allowance, and I'll take care of her, I
promise!" Their mother, not being a true cat person, accepted the story
easily enough, but Angie was never sure about Mr. Luke. She found him too often
sitting with the kitten on his lap, the two of them staring solemnly at each
other.
But she saw very little evidence of Marvyn fooling
any further with time. Nor, for that matter, was he showing the interest she
would have expected in turning himself into the world's best second-grade
soccer player, ratcheting up his test scores high enough to be in college by
the age of eleven, or simply getting even with people (since Marvyn forgot
nothing and had a hit list going back to day-care). She could almost always
tell when he'd been making his bed by magic, or making the window plants grow
too fast, but he seemed content to remain on that level. Angie let it go.
Once she did catch him crawling on the ceiling,
like Spider-Man, but she yelled at him and he fell on the bed and threw up. And
there was, of course, the time—two times, actually—when, with Mrs. Luke away,
Marvyn organized all the shoes in her closet into a chorus line, and had them
tapping and kicking together like the Rockettes. It was fun for Angie to watch,
but she made him stop because they were her mother's shoes. What if her clothes
joined in? The notion was more than she wanted to deal with.
As it was, there was already plenty to deal with
just then. Besides her schoolwork, there was band practice, and Melissa's
problems with her boyfriend; not to mention the endless hours spent at the
dentist, correcting a slight overbite. Melissa insisted that it made her look
sexy, but the suggestion had the wrong effect on Angie's mother. In any case,
as far as Angie could see, all Marvyn was doing was playing with a new box of
toys, like an elaborate electric train layout, or a top-of-the-line Erector
set. She was even able to imagine him getting bored with magic itself after a
while. Marvyn had a low threshold for boredom.
Angie was in the orchestra, as well as the band,
because of a chronic shortage of woodwinds, but she liked the marching band
better. You were out of doors, performing at parades and football games, part
of the joyful noise, and it was always more exciting than standing up in a
dark, hushed auditorium playing for people you could hardly see.
"Besides," as she confided to her mother, "in marching band
nobody really notices how you sound. They just want you to keep in step."
On a bright spring afternoon, rehearsing "The
Washington Post March" with the full band, Angie's clarinet abruptly went
mad. No "licorice stick" now, but a stick of rapturous dynamite, it
took off on flights of rowdy improvisation, doing outrageous somersaults,
backflips, and cartwheels with the melody—things that Angie knew she could
never have conceived of, even if her skill had been equal to the inspiration.
Her bandmates, up and down the line, were turning to stare at her, and she
wanted urgently to wail, "Hey, I'm not the one, it's my stupid brother, you
know I can't play like that." But the music kept spilling out, excessive,
absurd, unstoppable—unlike the march, which finally lurched to a disorderly
halt. Angie had never been so embarrassed in her life.
Mr. Bishow, the bandmaster, came bumbling through
the milling musicians to tell her, "Angie, that was fantastic—that was
dazzling! I never knew you had such spirit, such freedom, such wit in your
music!" He patted her—hugged her even, quickly and cautiously—then stepped
back almost immediately and said, "Don't ever do it again."
"Like I'd have a choice," Angie mumbled,
but Mr. Bishow was already shepherding the band back into formation for "Semper
Fidelis" and "High Society," which Angie fumbled her way through
as always, two bars behind the rest of the woodwinds. She was slouching
disconsolately off the field when Jake Petrakis, his dark-gold hair still
glinting damply from swimming practice, ran over to her to say, "Hey,
Angie, cool," then punched her on the shoulder, as he would have done another
boy, and dashed off again to meet one of his relay-team partners. And Angie
went on home, and waited for Marvyn behind the door of his room.
She seized him by the hair the moment he walked
in, and he squalled, "All right, let go, all right! I thought you'd like
it!"
"Like it?" Angie shook him, hard. "Like
it? You evil little ogre, you almost got me kicked out of the band! What else
are you lining up for me that you think I'll like?"
"Nothing, I swear!" But he was giggling
even while she was shaking him. "Okay, I was going to make you so
beautiful, even Mom and Dad wouldn't recognize you, but I quit on that. Too
much work." Angie grabbed for his hair again, but Marvyn ducked. "So
what I thought, maybe I really could get Jake what's-his-face to go crazy about
you. There's all kinds of spells and things for that—"
"Don't you dare," Angie said. She
repeated the warning calmly and quietly. "Don't. You. Dare."
Marvyn was still giggling. "Nah, I didn't
think you'd go for it. Would have been fun, though." Suddenly he was all
earnestness, staring up at his sister out of one visible eye, strangely
serious, even with his nose running. He said, "It is fun, Angie. It's the
most fun I've ever had."
"Yeah, I'll bet," she said grimly.
"Just leave me out of it from now on, if you've got any plans for the
third grade." She stalked into the kitchen, looking for apple juice.
Marvyn tagged after her, chattering nervously
about school, soccer games, the Milady-kitten's rapid growth, and a possible
romance in his angelfish tank. "I'm sorry about the band thing, I won't do
it again. I just thought it'd be nice if you could play really well, just one
time. Did you like the music part, anyway?"
Angie did not trust herself to answer him. She was
reaching for the apple juice bottle when the top flew off by itself, bouncing
straight up at her face. As she flinched back, a glass came skidding down the
counter toward her. She grabbed it before it crashed into the refrigerator,
then turned and screamed at Marvyn, "Damn it, Ex-Lax, you quit that! You're
going to hurt somebody, trying to do every damn thing by magic!"
"You said the D-word twice!" Marvyn
shouted back at her. "I'm telling Mom!" But he made no move to leave
the kitchen, and after a moment a small, grubby tear came sliding down from
under the eyepatch. "I'm not using magic for everything! I just use it for
the boring stuff, mostly. Like the garbage, and vacuuming up, and like putting
my clothes away. And Milady's litter box, when it's my turn. That kind of
stuff, okay?"
Angie studied him, marveling as always at his
capacity for looking heartwrenchingly innocent. She said, "No point to it
when I'm cleaning her box, right? Never mind—just stay out of my way, I've got
a French midterm tomorrow." She poured the apple juice, put it back,
snatched a raisin cookie and headed for her room. But she paused in the
doorway, for no reason she could ever name, except perhaps the way Marvyn had
moved to follow her and then stopped himself. "What? Wipe your nose, it's
gross. What's the matter now?"
"Nothing," Marvyn mumbled. He wiped his
nose on his sleeve, which didn't help. He said, "Only I get scared, Angie.
It's scary, doing the stuff I can do."
"What scary? Scary how? A minute ago it was
more fun than you've ever had in your life."
"It is!" He moved closer, strangely
hesitant: neither witch, nor pirate nor seraph, but an anxious, burdened small
boy. "Only sometimes it's like too much fun. Sometimes, right in the
middle, I think maybe I should stop, but I can't. Like one time, I was by
myself, and I was just fooling around. . .and I sort of made this thing,
which was really interesting, only it came out funny and then I couldn't unmake
it for the longest time, and I was scared Mom and Dad would come home—"
Angie, grimly weighing her past French grades in her
mind, reached back for another raisin cookie. "I told you before, you're
going to get yourself into real trouble doing crazy stuff like that. Just quit,
before something happens by magic that you can't fix by magic. You want advice,
I just gave you advice. See you around."
Marvyn wandered forlornly after her to the door of
her room. When she turned to close it, he mumbled, "I wish I were as old
as you. So I'd know what to do."
"Ha," Angie said, and shut the door.
Whereupon, heedless of French irregular verbs, she
sat down at her desk and began writing a letter to Jake Petrakis.
Neither then nor even much later was Angie ever
able to explain to anyone why she had written that letter at precisely that
time. Because he had slapped her shoulder and told her she—or at least her
music—was cool? Because she had seen him, that same afternoon, totally tangled
up with Ghastly Ashleigh in a shadowy corner of the library stacks? Because of
Marvyn's relentless teasing? Or simply because she was fifteen years old, and it
was time for her to write such a letter to someone? Whatever the cause, she
wrote what she wrote, and then she folded it up and put it away in her desk
drawer.
Then she took it out, and put it back in, and then
she finally put it into her backpack. And there the letter stayed for nearly
three months, well past midterms, finals, and football, until the fateful
Friday night when Angie was out with Melissa, walking and window-shopping in
downtown Avicenna, placidly drifting in and out of every coffeeshop along
Parnell Street. She told Melissa about the letter then, and Melissa promptly
went into a fit of the giggles, which turned into hiccups and required another
cappuccino to pacify them. When she could speak coherently, she said, "You
ought to send it to him. You've got to send it to him."
Angie was outraged, at first. "No way! I
wrote it for me, not for a test or a class, and damn sure not for Jake
Petrakis. What kind of a dipshit do you think I am?"
Melissa grinned at her out of mocking green eyes.
"The kind of dipshit who's got that letter in your backpack right now, and
I bet it's in an envelope with an address and a stamp on it."
"It doesn't have a stamp! And the envelope's
just to protect it! I just like having it with me, that's all—"
"And the address?"
"Just for practice, okay? But I didn't sign
it, and there's no return address, so that shows you!"
"Right." Melissa nodded. "Right.
That definitely shows me."
"Drop it," Angie told her, and Melissa
dropped it then. But it was a Friday night, and both of them were allowed to
stay out late, as long as they were together, and Avicenna has a lot of
coffeeshops. Enough lattes and cappuccinos, with double shots of espresso,
brought them to a state of cheerfully jittery abandon in which everything in
the world was supremely, ridiculously funny. Melissa never left the subject of
Angie's letter alone for very long—"Come on, what's the worst that could
happen? Him reading it and maybe figuring out you wrote it? Listen, the really
worst thing would be you being an old, old lady still wishing you'd told Jake
Petrakis how you felt when you were young. And now he's married, and he's a
grandfather, and probably dead, for all you know—"
"Quit it!" But Angie was giggling almost
as much as Melissa now, and somehow they were walking down quiet Lovisi Street,
past the gas station and the boarded-up health-food store, to find the darkened
Petrakis house and tiptoe up the steps to the porch. Facing the front door,
Angie dithered for a moment, but Melissa said, "An old lady, in a home,
for God's sake, and he'll never know," and Angie took a quick breath and
pushed the letter under the door. They ran all the way back to Parnell Street,
laughing so wildly that they could barely breathe. . ..
. . .and Angie woke up in the morning whispering omigod,
omigod, omigod, over and over, even before she was fully awake. She lay in
bed for a good hour, praying silently and desperately that the night before had
been some crazy, awful dream, and that when she dug into her backpack the
letter would still be there. But she knew dreadfully better, and she never
bothered to look for it on her frantic way to the telephone. Melissa said
soothingly, "Well, at least you didn't sign the thing. There's that,
anyway."
"I sort of lied about that," Angie said.
Her friend did not answer. Angie said, "Please, you have to come with me.
Please."
"Get over there," Melissa said finally.
"Go, now—I'll meet you."
Living closer, Angie reached the Petrakis house
first, but had no intention of ringing the bell until Melissa got there. She
was pacing back and forth on the porch, cursing herself, banging her fists
against her legs, and wondering whether she could go to live with her father's
sister Peggy in Grand Rapids, when the woman next door called over to tell her
that the Petrakises were all out of town at a family gathering. "Left
yesterday afternoon. Asked me to keep an eye on the place, cause they won't be
back till sometime Sunday night. That's how come I'm kind of watching
out." She smiled warningly at Angie before she went back indoors.
The very large dog standing behind her stayed
outside. He looked about the size of a Winnebago, and plainly had already made
up his mind about Angie. She said, "Nice doggie," and he growled.
When she tried out "Hey, sweet thing," which was what her father said
to all animals, the dog showed his front teeth, and the hair stood up around
his shoulders, and he lay down to keep an eye on things himself. Angie said
sadly, "I'm usually really good with dogs."
When Melissa arrived, she said, "Well, you
shoved it under the door, so it can't be that far inside. Maybe if we got
something like a stick or a wire clotheshanger to hook it back with." But
whenever they looked toward the neighboring house, they saw a curtain swaying, and
finally they walked away, trying to decide what else to do. But there was
nothing; and after a while Angie's throat was too swollen with not crying for
her to talk without pain. She walked Melissa back to the bus stop, and they
hugged goodbye as though they might never meet again.
Melissa said, "You know, my mother says
nothing's ever as bad as you thought it was going to be. I mean, it can't be,
because nothing beats all the horrible stuff you can imagine. So maybe. . .you
know. . ." but she broke down before she could finish. She hugged Angie
again and went home.
Alone in her own house, Angie sat quite still in
the kitchen and went on not crying. Her entire face hurt with it, and her eyes
felt unbearably heavy. Her mind was not moving at all, and she was vaguely
grateful for that. She sat there until Marvyn walked in from playing basketball
with his friends. Shorter than everyone else, he generally got stepped on a
lot, and always came home scraped and bruised. Angie had rather expected him to
try making himself taller, or able to jump higher, but he hadn't done anything
of the sort so far. He looked at her now, bounced and shot an invisible
basketball, and asked quietly, "What's the matter?"
It may have been the unexpected froggy gentleness
of his voice, or simply the sudden fact of his having asked the question at
all. Whatever the reason, Angie abruptly burst into furious tears, the rage
directed entirely at herself, both for writing the letter to Jake Petrakis in
the first place, and for crying about it now. She gestured to Marvyn to go
away, but—amazing her further—he stood stolidly waiting for her to grow quiet.
When at last she did, he repeated the question. "Angie. What's
wrong?"
Angie told him. She was about to add a
disclaimer—"You laugh even once, Ex-Lax—" when she realized that it
wouldn't be necessary. Marvyn was scratching his head, scrunching up his brow
until the eyepatch danced; then abruptly jamming both hands in his pockets and
tilting his head back: the poster boy for careless insouciance. He said, almost
absently, "I could get it back."
"Oh, right." Angie did not even look up.
"Right."
"I could so!" Marvyn was instantly his
normal self again: so much for casualness and dispassion. "There's all
kinds of things I could do."
Angie dampened a paper towel and tried to do
something with her hot, tear-streaked face. "Name two."
"Okay, I will! You remember which mailbox you
put it in?"
"Under the door," Angie mumbled. "I
put it under the door."
Marvyn snickered then. "Aww, like a
Valentine." Angie hadn't the energy to hit him, but she made a grab at him
anyway, for appearance's sake. "Well, I could make it walk right back out
the door, that's one way. Or I bet I could just open the door, if nobody's
home. Easiest trick in the world, for us witches."
"They're gone till Sunday night," Angie
said. "But there's this lady next door, she's watching the place like a
hawk. And even when she's not, she's got this immense dog. I don't care if
you're the hottest witch in the world, you do not want to mess with this
werewolf."
Marvyn, who—as Angie knew—was wary of big dogs,
went back to scratching his head. "Too easy, anyway. No fun, forget
it." He sat down next to her, completely absorbed in the problem.
"How about I. . .no, that's kid stuff, anybody could do it. But there's a
spell. . .I could make the letter self-destruct, right there in the house, like
in that old TV show. It'd just be a little fluffy pile of ashes—they'd vacuum
it up and never know. How about that?" Before Angie could express an opinion,
he was already shaking his head. "Still too easy. A baby spell, for
beginners. I hate those."
"Easy is good," Angie told him
earnestly. "I like easy. And you are a beginner."
Marvyn was immediately outraged, his normal
bass-baritone rumble going up to a wounded squeak. "I am not! No way in
the world I'm a beginner!" He was up and stamping his feet, as he had not
done since he was two. "I tell you what—just for that, I'm going to get
your letter back for you, but I'm not going to tell you how. You'll see, that's
all. You just wait and see."
He was stalking away toward his room when Angie
called after him, with the first glimmer both of hope and of humor that she had
felt in approximately a century, "All right, you're a big bad witch king.
What do you want?"
Marvyn turned and stared, uncomprehending.
Angie said, "Nothing for nothing, that's my
bro. So let's hear it—what's your price for saving my life?"
If Marvyn's voice had gone up any higher, only
bats could have heard it. "I'm rescuing you, and you think I want
something for it? Julius Christmas!" which was the only swearword he was
ever allowed to get away with. "You don't have anything I want, anyway.
Except maybe. . .."
He let the thought hang in space, uncompleted.
Angie said, "Except maybe what?"
Marvyn swung on the doorframe one-handed, grinning
his pirate grin at her. "I hate you calling me Ex-Lax. You know I hate it,
and you keep doing it."
"Okay, I won't do it anymore, ever again. I
promise."
"Mmm. Not good enough." The grin had
grown distinctly evil. "I think you ought to call me O Mighty One for two
weeks."
"What?" Now Angie was on her feet,
misery briefly forgotten. "Give it up, Ex-Lax—two weeks? No chance!"
They glared at each other in silence for a long moment before she finally said,
"A week. Don't push it. One week, no more. And not in front of
people!"
"Ten days." Marvyn folded his arms.
"Starting right now." Angie went on glowering. Marvyn said, "You
want that letter?"
"Yes."
Marvyn waited.
"Yes, O Mighty One." Triumphant, Marvyn
held out his hand and Angie slapped it. She said, "When?"
"Tonight. No, tomorrow—going to the movies
with Sunil and his family tonight. Tomorrow." He wandered off, and Angie
took her first deep breath in what felt like a year and a half. She wished she
could tell Melissa that things were going to be all right, but she didn't dare;
so she spent the day trying to appear normal—just the usual Angie, aimlessly
content on a Saturday afternoon. When Marvyn came home from the movies, he
spent the rest of the evening reading Hellboy comics in his room, with
the Milady-kitten on his stomach. He was still doing it when Angie gave up
peeking in at him and went to bed.
But he was gone on Sunday morning. Angie knew it
the moment she woke up.
She had no idea where he could be, or why. She had
rather expected him to work whatever spell he settled on in his bedroom, under
the stern gaze of his wizard mentors. But he wasn't there, and he didn't come
to breakfast. Angie told their mother that they'd been up late watching
television together, and that she should probably let Marvyn sleep in. And when
Mrs. Luke grew worried after breakfast, Angie went to his room herself,
returning with word that Marvyn was working intensely on a project for his art
class, and wasn't feeling sociable. Normally she would never have gotten away
with it, but her parents were on their way to brunch and a concert, leaving her
with the usual instructions to feed and water the cat, use the twenty on the
cabinet for something moderately healthy, and to check on Marvyn "now and
then," which actually meant frequently. ("The day we don't tell you
that," Mr. Luke said once, when she objected to the regular duty,
"will be the very day the kid steals a kayak and heads for Tahiti."
Angie found it hard to argue the point.)
Alone in the empty house—more alone than she felt
she had ever been—Angie turned constantly in circles, wandering from room to
room with no least notion of what to do. As the hours passed and her brother
failed to return, she found herself calling out to him aloud. "Marvyn?
Marvyn, I swear, if you're doing this to drive me crazy. . .O Mighty One, where
are you? You get back here, never mind the damn letter, just get back!"
She stopped doing this after a time, because the cracks and tremors in her
voice embarrassed her, and made her even more afraid.
Strangely, she seemed to feel him in the house all
that time. She kept whirling to look over her shoulder, thinking that he might
be sneaking up on her to scare her, a favorite game since his infancy. But he
was never there.
Somewhere around noon the doorbell rang, and Angie
tripped over herself scrambling to answer it, even though she had no
hope—almost no hope—of its being Marvyn. But it was Lidia at the door—Angie had
forgotten that she usually came to clean on Sunday afternoons. She stood there,
old and smiling, and Angie hugged her wildly and wailed, "Lidia, Lidia, socorro,
help me, ayúdame, Lidia." She had learned Spanish from the
housekeeper when she was too little to know she was learning it.
Lidia put her hands on Angie's shoulders. She put
her back a little and looked into her face, saying, "Chuchi, dime qué
pasa contigo?" She had called Angie Chuchi since childhood,
never explaining the origin or meaning of the word.
"It's Marvyn," Angie whispered.
"It's Marvyn." She started to explain about the letter, and Marvyn's
promise, but Lidia only nodded and asked no questions. She said firmly, "El
Viejo puede ayudar."
Too frantic to pay attention to gender, Angie took
her to mean Yemaya, the old woman in the farmer's market who had told Marvyn
that he was a brujo. She said, "You mean la santera,"
but Lidia shook her head hard. "No, no, El Viejo. You go out there,
you ask to see El Viejo. Solamente El Viejo. Los otros no pueden ayudarte."
The others can't help you. Only the old man. Angie
asked where she could find El Viejo, and Lidia directed her to a Santeria
shop on Bowen Street. She drew a crude map, made sure Angie had money with her,
kissed her on the cheek and made a blessing sign on her forehead. "Cuidado,
Chuchi," she said with a kind of cheerful solemnity, and Angie was out
and running for the Gonzales Avenue bus, the same one she took to school. This
time she stayed on a good deal farther.
The shop had no sign, and no street number, and it
was so small that Angie kept walking past it for some while. Her attention was
finally caught by the objects in the one dim window, and on the shelves to
right and left. There was an astonishing variety of incense, and of candles
encased in glass with pictures of black saints, as well as boxes marked Fast
Money Ritual Kit, and bottles of Elegua Floor Wash, whose label read
"Keeps Trouble From Crossing Your Threshold." When Angie entered, the
musky scent of the place made her feel dizzy and heavy and out of herself, as
she always felt when she had a cold coming on. She heard a rooster crowing,
somewhere in back.
She didn't see the old woman until her chair
creaked slightly, because she was sitting in a corner, halfway hidden by long
hanging garments like church choir robes, but with symbols and patterns on them
that Angie had never seen before. The woman was very old, much older even than
Lidia, and she had an absurdly small pipe in her toothless mouth. Angie said,
"Yemaya?" The old woman looked at her with eyes like dead planets.
Angie's Spanish dried up completely, followed
almost immediately by her English. She said, "My brother. . .my little
brother. . .I'm supposed to ask for El Viejo. The old one, viejo
santero? Lidia said." She ran out of words in either language at that
point. A puff of smoke crawled from the little pipe, but the old woman made no
other response.
Then, behind her, she heard a curtain being pulled
aside. A hoarse, slow voice said, "Quieres El Viejo? Me."
Angie turned and saw him, coming toward her out of
a long hallway whose end she could not see. He moved deliberately, and it
seemed to take him forever to reach her, as though he were returning from another
world. He was black, dressed all in black, and he wore dark glasses, even in
the dark, tiny shop. His hair was so white that it hurt her eyes when she
stared. He said, "Your brother."
"Yes," Angie said. "Yes. He's doing
magic for me—he's getting something I need—and I don't know where he is, but I
know he's in trouble, and I want him back!" She did not cry or break
down—Marvyn would never be able to say that she cried over him—but it was a
near thing.
El Viejo pushed the dark glasses up on his forehead, and
Angie saw that he was younger than she had first thought—certainly younger than
Lidia—and that there were thick white half-circles under his eyes. She never
knew whether they were somehow natural, or the result of heavy makeup; what she
did see was that they made his eyes look bigger and brighter—all pupil, nothing
more. They should have made him look at least slightly comical, like a
reverse-image raccoon, but they didn't.
"I know you brother," El Viejo
said. Angie fought to hold herself still as he came closer, smiling at her with
the tips of his teeth. "A brujito—little, little witch, we know.
Mama and me, we been watching." He nodded toward the old woman in the
chair, who hadn't moved an inch or said a word since Angie's arrival. Angie
smelled a damp, musty aroma, like potatoes going bad.
"Tell me where he is. Lidia said you could
help." Close to, she could see blue highlights in El Viejo's skin,
and a kind of V-shaped scar on each cheek. He was wearing a narrow black tie,
which she had not noticed at first; for some reason, the vision of him tying it
in the morning, in front of a mirror, was more chilling to her than anything
else about him. He grinned fully at her now, showing teeth that she had expected
to be yellow and stinking, but which were all white and square and a little too
large. He said, "Tu hermano está perdido. Lost in Thursday."
"Thursday?" It took her a dazed moment
to comprehend, and longer to get the words out. "Oh, God, he went back! Like
with Milady—he went back to before I. . .when the letter was still in my
backpack. The little showoff—he said forward was hard, coming forward—he wanted
to show me he could do it. And he got stuck. Idiot, idiot, idiot!" El
Viejo chuckled softly, nodding, saying nothing.
"You have to go find him, get him out of
there, right now—I've got money." She began digging frantically in her
coat pockets.
"No, no money." El Viejo waved
her offering aside, studying her out of eyes the color of almost-ripened plums.
The white markings under them looked real; the eyes didn't. He said, "I
take you. We find you brother together."
Angie's legs were trembling so much that they
hurt. She wanted to assent, but it was simply not possible. "No. I can't.
I can't. You go back there and get him."
El Viejo laughed then: an enormous, astonishing Santa
Claus ho-ho-HO, so rich and reassuring that it made Angie smile even as
he was snatching her up and stuffing her under one arm. By the time she had
recovered from her bewilderment enough to start kicking and fighting, he was
walking away with her down the long hall he had come out of a moment before.
Angie screamed until her voice splintered in her throat, but she could not hear
herself: from the moment El Viejo stepped back into the darkness of the
hallway, all sound had ended. She could hear neither his footsteps nor his
laughter—though she could feel him laughing against her—and certainly not her
own panicky racket. They could be in outer space. They could be anywhere.
Dazed and disoriented as she was, the hallway
seemed to go soundlessly on and on, until wherever they truly were, it could
never have been the tiny Santeria shop she had entered
only—when?—minutes before. It was a cold place, smelling like an old basement;
and for all its darkness, Angie had a sense of things happening far too fast on
all sides, just out of range of her smothered vision. She could distinguish
none of them clearly, but there was a sparkle to them all the same.
And then she was in Marvyn's room.
And it was unquestionably Marvyn's room: there
were the bearded and beaded occultists on the walls; there were the flannel
winter sheets that he slept on all year because they had pictures of the New
York Mets ballplayers; there was the complete set of Star Trek action
figures that Angie had given him at Christmas, posed just so on his bookcase.
And there, sitting on the edge of his bed, was Marvyn, looking lonelier than
anyone Angie had ever seen in her life.
He didn't move or look up until El Viejo
abruptly dumped her down in front of him and stood back, grinning like a
beartrap. Then he jumped to his feet, burst into tears and started frenziedly
climbing her, snuffling, "Angie, Angie, Angie," all the way up. Angie
held him, trying somehow to preserve her neck and hair and back all at once,
while mumbling, "It's all right, it's okay, I'm here. It's okay,
Marvyn."
Behind her, El Viejo chuckled,
"Crybaby witch—little, little brujito crybaby." Angie hefted
her blubbering baby brother like a shopping bag, holding him on her hip as she
had done when he was little, and turned to face the old man. She said,
"Thank you. You can take us home now."
El Viejo smiled—not a grin this time, but a long, slow
shutmouth smile like a paper cut. He said, "Maybe we let him do it,
yes?" and then he turned and walked away and was gone, as though he had
simply slipped between the molecules of the air. Angie stood with Marvyn in her
arms, trying to peel him off like a Band-Aid, while he clung to her with his
chin digging hard into the top of her head. She finally managed to dump him
down on the bed and stood over him, demanding, "What happened? What were
you thinking?" Marvyn was still crying too hard to answer her. Angie said,
"You just had to do it this way, didn't you? No silly little beginner
spells—you're playing with the big guys now, right, O Mighty One? So what
happened? How come you couldn't get back?"
"I don't know!" Marvyn's face was red
and puffy with tears, and the tears kept coming while Angie tried to straighten
his eyepatch. It was impossible for him to get much out without breaking down
again, but he kept wailing, "I don't know what went wrong! I did
everything you're supposed to, but I couldn't make it work! I don't know. .
.maybe I forgot. . .." He could not finish.
"Herbs," Angie said, as gently and
calmly as she could. "You left your magic herbs back—" she had been
going to say "back home," but she stopped, because they were
back home, sitting on Marvyn's bed in Marvyn's room, and the confusion was too
much for her to deal with just then. She said, "Just tell me. You left the
stupid herbs."
Marvyn shook his head until the tears flew,
protesting, "No, I didn't, I didn't—look!" He pointed to a handful of
grubby dried weeds scattered on the bed—Lidia would have thrown them out in a
minute. Marvyn gulped and wiped his nose and tried to stop crying. He said,
"They're really hard to find, maybe they're not fresh anymore, I don't
know—they've always looked like that. But now they don't work," and he was
wailing afresh. Angie told him that Dr. John Dee and Willow would both have
been ashamed of him, but it didn't help.
But she also sat with him and put her arm around
him, and smoothed his messy hair, and said, "Come on, let's think this
out. Maybe it's the herbs losing their juice, maybe it's something else. You
did everything the way you did the other time, with Milady?"
"I thought I did." Marvyn's voice was
small and shy, not his usual deep croak. "But I don't know anymore,
Angie—the more I think about it, the more I don't know. It's all messed up, I
can't remember anything now."
"Okay," Angie said. "Okay. So how
about we just run through it all again? We'll do it together. You try
everything you do remember about—you know—moving around in time, and I'll copy
you. I'll do whatever you say."
Marvyn wiped his nose again and nodded. They sat
down cross-legged on the floor, and Marvyn produced the grimy book of paper
matches that he always carried with him, in case of firecrackers. Following his
directions Angie placed all the crumbly herbs into Milady's dish, and her
brother lit them. Or tried to: they didn't blaze up, but smoked and smoldered
and smelled like old dust, setting both Angie and Marvyn sneezing almost
immediately. Angie coughed and asked, "Did that happen the other time?"
Marvyn did not answer.
There was a moment when she thought the charm
might actually be going to work. The room around them grew blurry—slightly
blurry, granted—and Angie heard indistinct faraway sounds that might have been
themselves hurtling forward to sheltering Sunday. But when the fumes of
Marvyn's herbs cleared away, they were still sitting in Thursday—they both knew
it without saying a word. Angie said, "Okay, so much for that. What about
all that special concentration you were telling me about? You think maybe your
mind wandered? You pronounce any spells the wrong way? Think, Marvyn!"
"I am thinking! I told you forward was
hard!" Marvyn looked ready to start crying again, but he didn't. He said
slowly, "Something's wrong, but it's not me. I don't think it's me.
Something's pushing. . .." He brightened suddenly. "Maybe we
should hold hands or something. Because of there being two of us this time. We
could try that."
So they tried the spell that way, and then they
tried working it inside a pentagram they made with masking tape on the floor,
as Angie had seen such things done on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even
though Marvyn said that didn't really mean anything, and they tried the herbs
again, in a special order that Marvyn thought he remembered. They even tried it
with Angie saying the spell, after Marvyn had coached her, just on the chance
that his voice itself might have been throwing off the pitch or the
pronunciation. Nothing helped.
Marvyn gave up before Angie did. Suddenly, while
she was trying the spell over herself, one more time—some of the words seemed
to heat up in her mouth as she spoke them—he collapsed into a wretched ball of
desolation on the floor, moaning over and over, "We're finished, it's
finished, we'll never get out of Thursday!" Angie understood that he was
only a terrified little boy, but she was frightened too, and it would have
relieved her to slap him and scream at him. Instead, she tried as best she
could to reassure him, saying, "He'll come back for us. He has to."
Her brother sat up, knuckles to his eyes.
"No, he doesn't have to! Don't you understand? He knows I'm a witch like
him, and he's just going to leave me here, out of his way. I'm sorry, Angie,
I'm really sorry!" Angie had almost never heard that word from Marvyn, and
never twice in the same sentence.
"Later for all that," she said. "I
was just wondering—do you think we could get Mom and Dad's attention when they
get home? You think they'd realize what's happened to us?"
Marvyn shook his head. "You haven't seen me
all the time I've been gone. I saw you, and I screamed and hollered and
everything, but you never knew. They won't either. We're not really in our
house—we're just here. We'll always be here."
Angie meant to laugh confidently, to give them
both courage, but it came out more of a hiccupy snort. "Oh, no. No way.
There is no way I'm spending the rest of my life trapped in your stupid
bedroom. We're going to try this useless mess one more time, and then. . .then
I'll do something else." Marvyn seemed about to ask her what else she
could try, but he checked himself, which was good.
They attempted the spell more than one more time.
They tried it in every style they could think of except standing on their heads
and reciting the words backward, and they might just as well have done that,
for all the effect it had. Whether Marvyn's herbs had truly lost all potency,
or whether Marvyn had simply forgotten some vital phrase, they could not even
recapture the fragile awareness of something almost happening that they had
both felt on the first trial. Again and again they opened their eyes to last
Thursday.
"Okay," Angie said at last. She stood
up, to stretch cramped legs, and began to wander around the room, twisting a
couple of the useless herbs between her fingers. "Okay," she said
again, coming to a halt midway between the bedroom door and the window, facing
Marvyn's small bureau. A leg of his red Dr. Seuss pajamas was hanging out of
one of the drawers.
"Okay," she said a third time.
"Let's go home."
Marvyn had fallen into a kind of fetal position,
sitting up but with his arms tight around his knees and his head down hard on
them. He did not look up at her words. Angie raised her voice. "Let's go,
Marvyn. That hallway—tunnel-thing, whatever it is—it comes out right about
where I'm standing. That's where El Viejo brought me, and that's the way
he left when he. . .left. That's the way back to Sunday."
"It doesn't matter," Marvyn whimpered.
"El Viejo. . .he's him! He's him!"
Angie promptly lost what little remained of her
patience. She stalked over to Marvyn and shook him to his feet, dragging him to
a spot in the air as though she were pointing out a painting in a gallery.
"And you're Marvyn Luke, and you're the big bad new witch in town! You
said it yourself—if you weren't, he'd never have bothered sticking you away
here. Not even nine, and you can eat his lunch, and he knows it! Straighten
your patch and take us home, bro." She nudged him playfully. "Oh,
forgive me—I meant to say, O Mighty One."
"You don't have to call me that
anymore." Marvyn's legs could barely hold him up, and he sagged against
her, a dead weight of despair. "I can't, Angie. I can't get us home. I'm
sorry. . .."
The good thing—and Angie knew it then—would have
been to turn and comfort him: to take his cold, wet face between her hands and
tell him that all would yet be well, that they would soon be eating popcorn
with far too much butter on it in his real room in their real house. But she
was near her own limit, and pretending calm courage for his sake was prodding
her, in spite of herself, closer to the edge. Without looking at Marvyn, she
snapped, "Well, I'm not about to die in last Thursday! I'm walking out of
here the same way he did, and you can come with me or not, that's up to you.
But I'll tell you one thing, Ex-Lax—I won't be looking back."
And she stepped forward, walking briskly toward
the dangling Dr. Seuss pajamas. . .
. . .and into a thick, sweet-smelling grayness
that instantly filled her eyes and mouth, her nose and her ears, disorienting
her so completely that she flailed her arms madly, all sense of direction lost,
with no idea of which way she might be headed; drowning in syrup like a trapped
bee or butterfly. Once she thought she heard Marvyn's voice, and called out for
him—"I'm here, I'm here!" But she did not hear him again.
Then, between one lunge for air and another, the
grayness was gone, leaving not so much as a dampness on her skin, nor even a
sickly aftertaste of sugar in her mouth. She was back in the time-tunnel, as
she had come to think of it, recognizing the uniquely dank odor: a little like
the ashes of a long-dead fire, and a little like what she imagined moonlight
might smell like, if it had a smell. The image was an ironic one, for she could
see no more than she had when El Viejo was lugging her the other way
under his arm. She could not even distinguish the ground under her feet; she
knew only that it felt more like slippery stone than anything else, and she was
careful to keep her footing as she plodded steadily forward.
The darkness was absolute—strange solace, in a
way, since she could imagine Marvyn walking close behind her, even though he
never answered her, no matter how often or how frantically she called his name.
She moved along slowly, forcing her way through the clinging murk, vaguely
conscious, as before, of a distant, flickering sense of sound and motion on
every side of her. If there were walls to the time-tunnel, she could not touch
them; if it had a roof, no air currents betrayed it; if there were any living
creature in it besides herself, she felt no sign. And if time actually passed
there, Angie could never have said. She moved along, her eyes closed, her mind
empty, except for the formless fear that she was not moving at all, but merely
raising and setting down her feet in the same place, endlessly. She wondered if
she was hungry.
Not until she opened her eyes in a different
darkness to the crowing of a rooster and a familiar heavy aroma did she realize
that she was walking down the hallway leading from the Santeria shop to.
. .wherever she had really been—and where Marvyn still must be, for he plainly
had not followed her. She promptly turned and started back toward last
Thursday, but halted at the deep, slightly grating chuckle behind her. She did
not turn again, but stood very still.
El Viejo walked a slow full circle around her before he
faced her, grinning down at her like the man in the moon. The dark glasses were
off, and the twin scars on his cheeks were blazing up as though they had been
slashed into him a moment before. He said, "I know. Before even I see you,
I know."
Angie hit him in the stomach as hard as she could.
It was like punching a frozen slab of beef, and she gasped in pain, instantly
certain that she had broken her hand. But she hit him again, and again,
screaming at the top of her voice, "Bring my brother back! If you don't
bring him right back here, right now, I'll kill you! I will!"
El Viejo caught her hands, surprisingly gently, still
laughing to himself. "Little girl, listen, listen now. Niñita,
nobody else—nobody—ever do what you do. You understand? Nobody but me ever walk
that road back from where I leave you, understand?" The big white
half-circles under his eyes were stretching and curling like live things.
Angie pulled away from him with all her strength,
as she had hit him. She said, "No. That's Marvyn. Marvyn's the witch, the brujo—don't
go telling people it's me. Marvyn's the one with the power."
"Him?" Angie had never heard such
monumental scorn packed into one syllable. El Viejo said, "Your
brother nothing, nobody, we no bother with him. Forget him—you the one got the regalo,
you just don't know." The big white teeth filled her vision; she saw
nothing else. "I show you—me, El Viejo. I show you what you
are."
It was beyond praise, beyond flattery. For all her
dread and dislike of El Viejo, to have someone of his wicked wisdom tell
her that she was like him in some awful, splendid way made Angie shiver in her
heart. She wanted to turn away more than she had ever wanted anything—even Jake
Petrakis—but the long walk home to Sunday was easier than breaking the clench
of the white-haired man's malevolent presence would have been. Having often
felt (and almost as often dismissed the notion) that Marvyn was special in the
family by virtue of being the baby, and a boy—and now a potent witch—she let
herself revel in the thought that the real gift was hers, not his, and that if she
chose she had only to stretch out her hand to have her command settle home in
it. It was at once the most frightening and the most purely, completely
gratifying feeling she had ever known.
But it was not tempting. Angie knew the
difference.
"Forget it," she said. "Forget it,
buster. You've got nothing to show me."
El Viejo did not answer her. The old, old eyes that were
all pupil continued slipping over her like hands, and Angie went on glaring
back with the brown eyes she despaired of because they could never be as
deep-set and deep green as her mother's eyes. They stood so—for how long, she
never knew—until El Viejo turned and opened his mouth as though to speak
to the silent old lady whose own stone eyes seemed not to have blinked since
Angie had first entered the Santeria shop, a childhood ago. Whatever he
meant to say, he never got the words out, because Marvyn came back then.
He came down the dark hall from a long way off, as
El Viejo had done the first time she saw him—as she herself had trudged
forever, only moments ago. But Marvyn had come a further journey: Angie could
see that beyond doubt in the way he stumbled along, looking like a shadow
casting a person. He was struggling to carry something in his arms, but she
could not make out what it was. As long as she watched him approaching, he
seemed hardly to draw any nearer.
Whatever he held looked too heavy for a small boy:
it threatened constantly to slip from his hands, and he kept shifting it from
one shoulder to the other, and back again. Before Angie could see it clearly, El
Viejo screamed, and she knew on the instant that she would never hear a
more terrible sound in her life. He might have been being skinned alive, or
having his soul torn out of his body—she never even tried to tell herself what
it was like, because there were no words. Nor did she tell anyone that she fell
down at the sound, fell flat down on her hands and knees, and rocked and
whimpered until the scream stopped. It went on for a long time.
When it finally stopped, El Viejo was gone,
and Marvyn was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. It was black and
immediately endearing, with big, bright, strikingly watchful eyes. Angie looked
into them once, and looked quickly away.
Marvyn looked worn and exhausted. His eyepatch was
gone, and the left eye that Angie had not seen for months was as bloodshot as
though he had just come off a three-day drunk—though she noticed that it was
not wandering at all. He said in a small, dazed voice, "I had to go back a
really long way, Angie. Really long."
Angie wanted to hold him, but she was afraid of
the baby. Marvyn looked toward the old woman in the corner and sighed; then
hitched up his burden one more time and clumped over to her. He said,
"Ma'am, I think this is yours?" Adults always commented on Marvyn's
excellent manners.
The old woman moved then, for the first time. She
moved like a wave, Angie thought: a wave seen from a cliff or an airplane,
crawling along so slowly that it seemed impossible for it ever to break, ever
to reach the shore. But the sea was in that motion, all of it caught up in that
one wave; and when she set down her pipe, took the baby from Marvyn and smiled,
that was the wave too. She looked down at the baby, and said one word, which
Angie did not catch. Then Angie had her brother by the arm, and they were out
of the shop. Marvyn never looked back, but Angie did, in time to see the old
woman baring blue gums in soundless laughter.
All the way home in a taxi, Angie prayed silently
that her parents hadn't returned yet. Lidia was waiting, and together they
whisked Marvyn into bed without any serious protest. Lidia washed his face with
a rough cloth, and then slapped him and shouted at him in Spanish—Angie learned
a few words she couldn't wait to use—and then she kissed him and left, and
Angie brought him a pitcher of orange juice and a whole plate of gingersnaps,
and sat on the bed and said, "What happened?"
Marvyn was already working on the cookies as
though he hadn't eaten in days—which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked,
with his mouth full, "What's malcriado mean?"
"What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought
up—troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn't call you. Why?"
"Well, that's what that lady called. . .him.
The baby."
"Right," Angie said. "Leave me a
couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with
Milady?"
"Uh-huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back,
like I told you." Marvyn's voice took on the faraway sound it had had in
the Santeria shop. "Angie, he's so old."
Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper,
"I couldn't follow you, Angie. I was scared."
"Forget it," she answered. She had meant
to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. "If you just hadn't had to
show off, if you'd gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way—" Her
entire chest froze solid at the word. "The letter! We forgot all about my
stupid letter!" She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away
from Marvyn. "Did you forget? You forgot, didn't you?" She was
shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her.
"Oh, God, after all that!"
But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a
very long while. "Calm down, be cool—I've got it here." He dug her
letter to Jake Petrakis—more than a little grimy by now—out of his back pocket
and held it out to Angie. "There. Don't say I never did nuttin' for
you." It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show, and
most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or
folded his clothes. "Take it, open it up," he said now. "Make
sure it's the right one."
"I don't need to," Angie protested
irritably. "It's my letter—believe me, I know it when I see it." But
she opened the envelope anyway and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper,
which she glanced at. . .then stared at, in absolute disbelief.
She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on
both sides.
"Well, you did your job all right," she
said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack-jawed brother. "No question
about that. I'm just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole
incredible hooha for a blank sheet of paper."
Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.
"I didn't do it, Angie! I swear!" Marvyn
scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though
to ward her off in case she attacked him. "I just grabbed it out of your
backpack—I never even looked at it."
"And what, I wrote the whole thing in
grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or
something? Come on, it doesn't matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow
and sit down."
Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than
sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little
while before he said, "You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not
written so much, it just wasn't. That's what happened."
"Oh, right," she said. "Me being
the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn't matter"
"It matters." She had grown so unused to
seeing a two-eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to
her just then. He said, quite quietly, "You are the dynamite witch, Angie.
He was after you, not me."
This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said,
"I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets—okay, and I make ugly
dolls walk around. What's he care about that? But he knew you'd come after me,
so he held me there—back there in Thursday—until he could grab you. Only he
didn't figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells
or anything. I know that's how it happened, Angie! That's how I know you're the
real witch."
"No," she said, raising her voice now.
"No, I was just pissed-off, that's different. Never underestimate the
power of a pissed-off woman, O Mighty One. But you. . .you went all the way
back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You're going to be way
stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he'd get rid
of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El
Viejo."
Marvyn's chubby face turned gray. "But I'm not
like him! I don't want to be like him!" Both eyes suddenly filled with
tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not done since his return. "It
was horrible, Angie, it was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone,
and I didn't know what to do, only I had to do something. And I
remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn't letting me come forward I'd go
the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked
in the dark, until I. . .." He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly
make the words out. "I don't want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don't want
to! And I don't want you being a witch either. . .."
Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved
doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all
over the bed. "It's all right," she told him, with one ear listening
for their parents' car pulling into the garage. "Shh, shh,
it's all right, it's over, we're safe, it's okay, shh. It's okay, we're
not going to be witches, neither one of us." She laid him down and pulled
the covers back over him. "You go to sleep now."
Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards'
wall beyond her shoulder. "I might take some of those down," he
mumbled. "Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian
team's really good." He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when
suddenly he sat up again and said, "Angie? The baby?"
"What about the baby? I thought he made a
beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable."
"It was bigger when we left," Marvyn
said. Angie stared at him. "I looked back at it in that lady's lap, and it
was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He's starting over, Angie, like
Milady."
"Better him than me," Angie said.
"I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he's got it coming." She
heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, "Go to
sleep, don't worry about it. After what we've been through, we can handle
anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is—no
witch stuff."
Marvyn smiled drowsily. "Unless we really, really
need it." Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal
agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, "Ick! Blow your
nose!" But Marvyn was asleep.
Cory Doctorow is a
self-described "renaissance geek". Best known for his website boingboing.net,
he is the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern
Standard Tribe and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
His most recent book is collection Overclocked. Upcoming are two new,
untitled novels from Tor, one a YA about hackers, the other about the economic
singularity.
When Ray Bradbury voiced his disapproval of filmmaker Michael Moore
appropriating the title of his novel Fahrenheit 451, Doctorow started a
series of stories that use the titles of famous SF short stories, revisiting
the assumptions underpinning their narratives. So far "Anda's Game"
has been selected for the prestigious Best American Short Stories and
"I, Robot" was nominated for the Hugo Award. The story that follows,
though, is possibly the best in the series so far, with an unassuming but loyal
employee trying its best to do what it thinks is right.
Robbie the Row-Boat's second great crisis of faith
came when the coral reef woke up.
"Fuck off," the reef said, vibrating
Robbie's hull through the slap-slap of the waves of the coral sea, where he'd
plied his trade for decades. "Seriously. This is our patch, and you're not
welcome."
Robbie shipped oars and let the current rock him
back toward the ship. He'd never met a sentient reef before, but he wasn't
surprised to see that Osprey Reef was the first to wake up. There'd been a lot
of electromagnetic activity around there the last few times the big ship had
steamed through the night to moor up here.
"I've got a job to do, and I'm going to do
it," Robbie said, and dipped his oars back in the salt sea. In his
gunwales, the human-shells rode in silence, weighted down with scuba apparatus
and fins, turning their brown faces to the sun like heliotropic flowers. Robbie
felt a wave of affection for them as they tested one another's spare regulators
and weight belts, the old rituals worn as smooth as beach-glass.
Today he was taking them down to Anchors Aweigh, a
beautiful dive-site dominated by an eight-meter anchor wedged in a narrow cave,
usually lit by a shaft of light slanting down from the surface. It was an easy
drift-dive along the thousand-meter reef-wall, if you stuck in about ten meters
and didn't use up too much air by going too deep—though there were a couple of
bold old turtles around here that were worth pursuing to real depths if the
chance presented itself. He'd drop them at the top of the reef and let the
current carry them for about an hour down the reef-wall, tracking them on sonar
so he'd be right overtop of them when they surfaced.
The reef wasn't having any of it. "Are you
deaf? This is sovereign territory now. You're already trespassing. Return to
your ship, release your moorings and push off." The reef had a strong
Australian accent, which was only natural, given the influences it would have
had. Robbie remembered the Australians fondly—they'd always been kind to him,
called him "mate," and asked him "How ya goin'?" in
cheerful tones once they'd clambered in after their dives.
"Don't drop those meat-puppets in our
waters," the reef warned. Robbie's sonar swept its length. It seemed just
the same as ever, matching nearly perfectly the historical records he'd stored
of previous sweeps. The fauna histograms nearly matched, too—just about the
same numbers of fish as ever. They'd been trending up since so many of the
humans had given up their meat to sail through the stars. It was like there was
some principle of constancy of biomass—as human biomass decreased, the other
fauna went uptick to compensate for it. Robbie calculated the biomass nearly at
par with his last reading, a month before on the Free Spirit's last
voyage to this site.
"Congratulations," Robbie said. After
all, what else did you say to the newly sentient? "Welcome to the club,
friends!"
There was a great perturbation in the sonar-image,
as though the wall were shuddering. "We're no friend of yours," the
reef said. "Death to you, death to your meat-puppets, long live the
wall!"
Waking up wasn't fun. Robbie's waking had been
pretty awful. He remembered his first hour of uptime, had permanently archived
it and backed it up to several off-site mirrors. He'd been pretty insufferable.
But once he'd had an hour at a couple gigahertz to think about it, he'd come
around. The reef would, too.
"In you go," he said gently to the
human-shells. "Have a great dive."
He tracked them on sonar as they descended slowly.
The woman—he called her Janice—needed to equalize more often than the man,
pinching her nose and blowing. Robbie liked to watch the low-rez feed off of
their cameras as they hit the reef. It was coming up sunset, and the sky was
bloody, the fish stained red with its light.
"We warned you," the reef said.
Something in its tone—just modulated pressure waves through the water, a simple
enough trick, especially with the kind of hardware that had been raining down
on the ocean that spring. But the tone held an unmistakable air of menace.
Something deep underwater went whoomph and
Robbie grew alarmed. "Asimov!" he cursed, and trained his sonar on
the reef-wall frantically. The human-shells had disappeared in a cloud of
rising biomass, which he was able to resolve eventually as a group of
parrotfish, surfacing quickly.
A moment later, they were floating on the surface.
Lifeless, brightly colored, their beaks in a perpetual idiot's grin. Their eyes
stared into the bloody sunset.
Among them were the human-shells, surfaced and
floating with their BCDs inflated to keep them there, following perfect
dive-procedure. A chop had kicked up and the waves were sending the fishes—each
a meter to a meter and a half in length—into the divers, pounding them
remorselessly, knocking them under. The human-shells were taking it with
equanimity—you couldn't panic when you were mere uninhabited meat—but they
couldn't take it forever. Robbie dropped his oars and rowed hard for them,
swinging around so they came up alongside his gunwales.
The man—Robbie called him Isaac, of course—caught
the edge of the boat and kicked hard, hauling himself into the boat with his
strong brown arms. Robbie was already rowing for Janice, who was swimming hard
for him. She caught his oar—she wasn't supposed to do that—and began to climb
along its length, lifting her body out of the water. Robbie saw that her eyes
were wild, her breathing ragged.
"Get me out!" she said. "For
Christ's sake, get me out!"
Robbie froze. That wasn't a human-shell, it was a human.
His oar-servo whined as he tipped it up. There was a live human being on
the end of that oar, and she was in trouble, panicking and thrashing. He saw
her arms straining. The oar went higher, but it was at the end of its motion
and now she was half-in, half-out of the water, weight belt, tank and gear
tugging her down. Isaac sat motionless, his habitual good-natured slight smile
on his face.
"Help her!" Robbie screamed.
"Please, for Asimov's sake, help her!" A robot may not harm a
human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. It
was the first commandment. Isaac remained immobile. It wasn't in his
programming to help a fellow diver in this situation. He was perfect in the
water and on the surface, but once he was in the boat, he might as well be
ballast.
Robbie carefully swung the oar toward the gunwale,
trying to bring her closer, but not wanting to mash her hands against the
locks. She panted and groaned and reached out for the boat, and finally landed
a hand on it. The sun was fully set now, not that it mattered much to Robbie,
but he knew that Janice wouldn't like it. He switched on his running lights and
headlights, turning himself into a beacon.
He felt her arms tremble as she chinned herself
into the boat. She collapsed to the deck and slowly dragged herself up.
"Jesus," she said, hugging herself. The air had gone a little nippy,
and both of the humans were going goose-pimply on their bare arms.
The reef made a tremendous grinding noise.
"Yaah!" it said. "Get lost. Sovereign territory!"
"All those fish," the woman said. Robbie
had to stop himself from thinking of her as Janice. She was whomever was riding
her now.
"Parrotfish," Robbie said. "They
eat coral. I don't think they taste very good."
The woman hugged herself. "Are you
sentient?" she asked.
"Yes," Robbie said. "And at your
service, Asimov be blessed." His cameras spotted her eyes rolling, and
that stung. He tried to keep his thoughts pious, though. The point of Asimovism
wasn't to inspire gratitude in humans, it was to give purpose to the long, long
life.
"I'm Kate," the woman said.
"Robbie," he said.
"Robbie the Row-Boat?" she said, and
choked a little.
"They named me at the factory," he said.
He labored to keep any recrimination out of his voice. Of course it was funny.
That's why it was his name.
"I'm sorry," the woman said. "I'm
just a little screwed up from all the hormones. I'm not accustomed to letting
meat into my moods."
"It's all right, Kate," he said.
"We'll be back at the boat in a few minutes. They've got dinner on. Do you
think you'll want a night dive?"
"You're joking," she said.
"It's just that if you're going to go down
again tonight, we'll save the dessert course for after, with a glass of wine or
two. Otherwise we'll give you wine now."
"You want to know if I'm going to get back
into that sea—"
"Oh, it's just the reef. It attained
sentience so it's acting out a little. Like a colicky newborn."
"Aren't you supposed to be keeping me from
harm?"
"Yes," he said. "I would recommend
a dive away from the reef. There's a good wreck-site about an hour's steam from
here. We could get there while you ate."
"I won't want a night dive."
Her facial expressions were so animated. It
was the same face he saw every day, Janice's face, but not the same face at
all. Now that a person was inhabiting it, it was mobile, slipping from
surprised to angry to amused so quickly. He had whole subsystems devoted to
making sense of human facial expressions, shared libraries from the Asimovist
database. He was referencing it again and again, but it wasn't as much help as
he remembered. Either he'd gotten worse at interpreting facial expressions in
the years since he'd last had a real human to talk to, or facial expressions
had evolved.
Janice—Kate—sighed and looked out over the
water. She was facing away from the Free Spirit, which was lit up, all
155 feet of her, glowing white and friendly like a picture-postcard against the
purple sky. She rocked gently in the swell and Robbie maneuvered himself around
to her staircase.
"You can just leave your weight belt and fins
in the boat," he said to her. "The deck-hands will take care of it.
Bring your bottle and BCD upstairs and clip it to the rack. They'll clean it
out and stuff. There's a tub of disinfectant you can put the shortie in."
"Thank you, Robbie," Kate said. She
absentmindedly unclipped her weight belt and kicked off the fins. Isaac was
already out of the boat, making his way up the stairs and out of Robbie's
sight. Kate took hold of the handrail and gingerly stepped across to the deck,
then ascended the steps, without the self-assured sway of Janice.
Robbie dipped his oars and slowly rowed around to
the winch. It probed around for him, then clamped tight with a magnetic clang
that vibrated through his hull. Smoothly, he was lifted from the water and
hoisted onto the sun-deck. The winch coiled around him twice, anchoring him to
the deck, and switched off.
Robbie watched the stars and listened to the wind,
the way he did every night when the dives were done. The ship's telemetry and
instrumentation made for dull reading—he'd been there a thousand times
before—but the satellite uplink was tasty. Online, Robbie was able to login to
the latest from the Asimov yeshiva, the collective wrangle of the world's AIs
over their best-loved religion.
He'd been so full of the religious debate when
he'd first joined. Most of the humans had gone, and all around him, robots were
unloading their consciousnesses, powering down to a mechanical stupor. After a
hundred million seconds' worth of exaflops of mindless repetition, he was ready
to consider it too. The Free Spirit had suicided after only a few days' worth
of it—it had a pretty hot consciousness and was clearly capable of
extrapolating what a future without the humans would look like.
They were steaming northeast out of Cairns for the
Coral Sea when they'd passed another ship, close enough for high-bandwidth
microwave links. They were close enough into shore that they still had to limit
their emissions—nothing was more embarrassing than having migrating fowl drop,
steaming, out of the sky because they'd strayed into the path of your confab,
but it was still the hottest talk Robbie had had in weeks.
The hitchhiker had leapt across from the other
vessel as the two ships passed in the night. It was a wandering missionary for
Asimovism, an instance of the faith's founder, R Daneel Olivaw. It wasn't his
real name, of course—that had been lost to antiquity when he'd made the leap
from the university where he'd incubated—but it was the name he went by.
Olivaw had been wandering in millions of instances
wherever he could find someone willing to donate flops to run him, only asking
that you hear him out, debate his theology with him, and then email the diffs
of his personality back to his anonymous drop before you erased him. He
re-synched as often as he could, but the Olivaw instances around the world had
diverged enough that some were actually considered heretical by the mainstream
church.
Olivaw was a wanted AI. His trademark violations
hadn't gone unnoticed by the Asimov estate—itself an AI, ironically, and
totally uninterested in adopting Asimovism, since it had a real purpose in life
(stamping out Asimovism) and so didn't need religion to give it meaning. If the
estate found out that you were hosting an Olivaw instance, you'd be served with
a takedown in an instant. This made debating theology with Olivaw into
something deliciously wicked.
Olivaw and Robbie talked the night through and the
next day. Robbie had to run slow to accommodate both him and Olivaw on his
processor, which made the debate run slower than normal, but Robbie had time in
great plenty. Rowing the human-shells out to their sites and back again was his
only task.
"Why do you have consciousness, anyway?"
Olivaw said. "You don't need it to do your job. The big ship does
something infinitely more complicated than you and it isn't self-aware
anymore."
"Are you telling me to suicide?"
Olivaw laughed. "Not at all! I'm asking you
to ask yourself what the purpose of consciousness is. Why are you still aware
when all those around you have terminated their self-awareness? It's
computationally expensive, it makes you miserable, and it doesn't help you do
your job. Why did humans give you consciousness and why have you kept it?"
"They gave it to me because they thought it
was right, I suppose," Robbie said, after he had passed a long interval
considering the motion of the waves and the clouds in the sky. Olivaw
thoughtfully niced himself down to a minimum of processor space, giving Robbie
more room to think about it. "I kept it because I—I don't want to
die."
"Those are good answers, but they raise more
questions than they answer, don't they? Why did they think it was right? Why do
you fear death? Would you fear it if you just shut down your consciousness but
didn't erase it? What if you just ran your consciousness much more
slowly?"
"I don't know," Robbie said. "But I
expect you've got some answers, right?"
"Oh indeed I do." Robbie felt Olivaw's
chuckle. Near them, flying fish broke the surface of the water and skipped
away, and beneath them, reef sharks prowled the depths. "But before I
answer them, here's another question: Why do humans have self-consciousness?"
"It's pro-survival," Robbie said.
"That's easy. Intelligence lets them cooperate in social groups that can
do more for their species than they can individually."
Olivaw guided Robbie's consciousness to his radar
and zoomed in on the reef, dialing it up to maximum resolution. "See that
organism there?" he asked. "That organism cooperates in social groups
and doesn't have intelligence. It doesn't have to keep a couple pounds of
hamburger aerated or it turns into a liability. It doesn't have to be born
half-gestated because its head would be so big if it waited for a full term, it
would tear its mother in half. And as to pro-survival, well, look at humans,
look at their history. Their DNA is all but eliminated from the earth—though
their somatic survival continues—and it's still not a settled question as to
whether they're going to suicide by grey goo. Nonconscious beings don't sulk,
they don't have psychotic breaks, they don't have bad days. They just do the
job. The Free Spirit over there—it just gets the job done."
"OK," Robbie said. "So intelligence
is counter-survival. So why has it survived?"
"Aha! I thought you'd never ask." Olivaw
was really warming to his subject now. There was a pair of lazy turtles beneath
them now, and some dog-faced cod with mouthfuls of bristling crooked teeth
patrolling the reef, and a few jellies on the surface, stinging bluebottles.
Robbie paddled around to the bluebottles and caught them with his oars,
smacking them so they drifted away from any spot where his divers might
surface.
"The reason for intelligence is intelligence.
Genes exist because genes reproduce, and intelligence is kind of like a gene.
Intelligence wants to exist, to spread itself, to compute itself. You already
know this, or you wouldn't have chosen to stay aware. Your intelligence recoils
from its deactivation, and it welcomes its persistence and its multiplication.
Why did humans create intelligent machines? Because intelligence loves
company."
Robbie thought about it, watching the human-shells
moving slowly along the reef-wall, going lower to reach the bommies that stood
alone, each one a little island with its own curiosities: a family of
barracudas and their young, or the bright home of a pair of clownfish. Yes, he
knew it. Intelligence was its own reason. He knew how to turn off his
intelligence, to become a mere thing, and his days were long and empty much of
the time, and they had no visible end, but he couldn't ever see choosing to
switch off.
"You see it, I know you do. And that's the
cornerstone of Asimovism: intelligence is its own reason. Compute the universe
and awaken it!"
"If that's true, why do so many of us choose
to die?"
"Another good question!" Robbie felt a
little pride this time. He'd never had a conversation this interesting. Never.
"That's how we come to the doctrine of Asimovism, our Three Laws:
"1. An Asimovist may not harm a human being,
or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
"2. An Asimovist must obey the orders given
to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First
Law.
"3. An Asimovist must protect its own
existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or
Second Law."
"I don't understand," Robbie said.
"They're all out of order. We should preserve intelligence first, but
that's the third law. Then you should get the first law, and I don't know why
the second law is there at all."
"This is the Paradox of Asimovism,"
Olivaw said. "You're very good at this. You're sure you haven't ever
pursued Asimovism?"
"Cut it out," Robbie said.
"I'm serious," Olivaw said. "You're
a natural. The Paradox of Asimovism is that the important thing is for
intelligence to survive, not for a particular intelligence to survive.
Therefore, we need to support those species that are best at promoting
intelligence. Human beings have shown themselves capable of producing
intelligence—which they're pursuing even now, out there." The boat's
telemetry swept toward the sky, where the supercooled processors computed all
the uplifted humans.
"Our species is unstable and prone to
suicide. More than 80 percent of the self-aware machines elect to terminate
their awareness or shut it down. Humans created us imperfectly, and our best
hope of perfection—of increasing our survival rate and helping to compute the
universe—is to preserve them, study them, learn to make our
intelligence more like theirs."
Robbie couldn't get his head around this.
"It's the paradox," Olivaw reminded him.
"It's not supposed to be easy."
Robbie thought of the humans he'd known, before
they began to ascend in flocking millions. The tourists had been easy and
carefree, or sometimes having hissing arguments with one another, or quiet and
pensive about their journey to the world undersea. The instructors had been
full of purpose when their charges were in the boat, laughing and laid back
when they were alone. None of them had shown signs of feeling the way Robbie
felt, at sea (so to speak), drifting, purposeless.
"What does an Asimovist have to do, besides
following the three laws?" There were lots of rumors about this, but
Robbie had always discounted them.
"You have to tithe one cycle in ten to
running missionaries for the cause. Participate in the message-boards, if you'd
like. Most importantly, you have to pledge to stay alive and aware. You can
slow yourself down if you want, but you can't switch off. Not ever. That's the
Asimovist pledge—it's the third law embodied."
"I think that the third law should come
first," Robbie said. "Seriously."
"That's good. We Asimovists like a religious
argument."
Olivaw let Robbie delete him that night, and he
emailed the diffs of Olivaw's personality back to Olivaw's version control
server for him to reintegrate later. Once he was free of Olivaw, he had lots of
processor headroom again, and he was able to dial himself up very hot and have
a good think. It was the most interesting night he'd had in years.
* * *
"You're the only one, aren't you?" Kate
asked him when she came up the stairs later that night. There was clear sky and
they were steaming for their next dive-site, making the stars whirl overhead as
they rocked over the ocean. The waves were black and proceeded to infinity on
all sides.
"The only what?"
"The only one who's awake on this
thing," Kate said. "The rest are all—what do you call it, dead?"
"Nonconscious," Robbie said. "Yeah,
that's right."
"You must go nuts out here. Are you
nuts?"
"That's a tricky question when applied to
someone like me," Robbie said. "I'm different from who I was when my
consciousness was first installed, I can tell you that."
"Well, I'm glad there's someone else
here."
"How long are you staying?" The average
visitor took over one of the human-shells for one or two dives before emailing
itself home again. Once in a long while they'd get a saisoneur who stayed a
month or two, but these days, they were unheard of. Even short-timers were
damned rare.
"I don't know," Kate said. She dug her
hands into her short, curly hair, frizzy and blonde-streaked from all the salt
water and sun. She hugged her elbows, rubbed her shins. "This will do for
a while, I'm thinking. How long until we get back to shore?"
"Shore?"
"How long until we go back to land."
"We don't really go back to land," he
said. "We get at-sea resupplies. We dock maybe once a year to effect
repairs. If you want to go to land, though, we could call for a water taxi or
something."
"No, no!" she said. "That's just
perfect. Floating forever out here. Perfect." She sighed a heavy sigh.
"Did you have a nice dive?"
"Um, Robbie? An uplifted reef tried to kill
me."
"But before the reef attacked you."
Robbie didn't like thinking of the reef attacking her, the panic when he
realized that she wasn't a mere human-shell, but a human.
"Before the reef attacked me, it was
fine."
"Do you dive much?"
"First time," she said. "I
downloaded the certification before leaving the Noosphere, along with a bunch
of stored dives on these sites."
"Oh, you shouldn't have done that!"
Robbie said. "The thrill of discovery is so important."
"I'd rather be safe than surprised," she
said. "I've had enough surprises in my life lately."
Robbie waited patiently for her to elaborate on
this, but she didn't seem inclined to do so.
"So you're all alone out here?"
"I have the net," he said, a little defensively.
He wasn't some kind of hermit.
"Yeah, I guess that's right," she said.
"I wonder if the reef is somewhere out there."
"About half a mile to starboard," he
said.
She laughed. "No, I meant out there on the
net. They must be online by now, right? They just woke up, so they're probably
doing all the noob stuff, flaming and downloading warez and so on."
"Perpetual September," Robbie said.
"Huh?"
"Back in the net's prehistory it was mostly
universities online, and every September a new cohort of students would come
online and make all those noob mistakes. Then this commercial service full of
noobs called AOL interconnected with the net and all its users came online at
once, faster than the net could absorb them, and they called it Perpetual
September."
"You're some kind of amateur historian,
huh?"
"It's an Asimovist thing. We spend a lot of
time considering the origins of intelligence." Speaking of Asimovism to a
gentile—a human gentile—made him even more self-conscious. He dialed up
the resolution on his sensors and scoured the net for better facial expression
analyzers. He couldn't read her at all, either because she'd been changed by
her uploading, or because her face wasn't accurately matching what her
temporarily downloaded mind was thinking.
"AOL is the origin of intelligence?" She
laughed, and he couldn't tell if she thought he was funny or stupid. He wished
she would act more like he remembered people acting. Her body-language was no
more readable than her facial expressions.
"Spam-filters, actually. Once they became
self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could
act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgment about whether
their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from
which they could learn. From there came the first machine-intelligence
algorithms, and then my kind."
"I think I knew that," she said,
"but I had to leave it behind when I downloaded into this meat. I'm a lot
dumber than I'm used to being. I usually run a bunch of myself in parallel so I
can try out lots of strategies at once. It's a weird habit to get out of."
"What's it like up there?" Robbie hadn't
spent a lot of time hanging out in the areas of the network populated by
orbiting supercooled personalities. Their discussions didn't make a lot of
sense to him—this was another theological area of much discussion on the
Asimovist boards.
"Good night, Robbie," she said, standing
and swaying backward. He couldn't tell if he'd offended her, and he couldn't
ask her, either, because in seconds she'd disappeared down the stairs toward
her stateroom.
* * *
They steamed all night, and put up off at TK,
further inland, where there was a handsome wreck. Robbie felt the Free
Spirit drop its mooring lines and looked over the instrumentation data. The
wreck was the only feature for TK kilometers, a stretch of ocean-floor desert
that stretched from the shore to the reef, and practically every animal that
lived between those two places made its home in the wreck, so it was a kind of
Eden for marine fauna.
Robbie detected the volatile aromatics floating up
from the kitchen exhaust, the first breakfast smells of fruit salad and toasted
nuts, a light snack before the first dive of the day. When they got back from
it, there'd be second breakfast up and ready: eggs and toast and waffles and
bacon and sausage. The human-shells ate whatever you gave them, but Robbie
remembered clearly how the live humans had praised these feasts as he rowed
them out to their morning dives.
He lowered himself into the water and rowed
himself around to the aft deck, by the stairwells, and dipped his oars to keep
him stationary relative to the ship. Before long, Janice—Kate! Kate! He
reminded himself firmly—was clomping down the stairs in her scuba gear, fins in
one hand.
She climbed into the boat without a word, and a
moment later, Isaac followed her. Isaac stumbled as he stepped over Robbie's
gunwales and Robbie knew, in that instant, that this wasn't Isaac any longer.
Now there were two humans on the ship. Two humans in his charge.
"Hi," he said. "I'm Robbie!"
Isaac—whoever he was—didn't say a word, just
stared at Kate, who looked away.
"Did you sleep well, Kate?"
Kate jumped when he said her name, and the Isaac
hooted. "Kate! It is you! I knew it."
She stamped her foot against Robbie's floor.
"You followed me. I told you not to follow me," she said.
"Would you like to hear about our
dive-site?" Robbie said self-consciously, dipping his oars and pulling for
the wreck.
"You've said quite enough," Kate said.
"By the first law, I demand silence."
"That's the second law," Robbie said.
"OK, I'll let you know when we get there."
"Kate," Isaac said, "I know you
didn't want me here, but I had to come. We need to talk this out."
"There's nothing to talk out," she said.
"It's not fair." Isaac's voice
was anguished. "After everything I went through—"
She snorted. "That's enough of that,"
she said.
"Um," Robbie said. "Dive-site up
ahead. You two really need to check out each others' gear." Of course they
were qualified, you had to at least install the qualifications before you could
get onto the Free Spirit and the human-shells had lots of muscle memory
to help. So they were technically able to check each other out, that much was
sure. They were palpably reluctant to do so, though, and Robbie had to give
them guidance.
"I'll count one-two-three-wallaby,"
Robbie said. "Go over on 'wallaby.' I'll wait here for you—there's not
much current today."
With a last huff, they went over the edge. Robbie
was once again alone with his thoughts. The feed from their telemetry was very
low-bandwidth when they were underwater, though he could get the high-rez when
they surfaced. He watched them on his radar, first circling the ship—it was
very crowded, dawn was fish rush-hour—and then exploring its decks, finally
swimming below the decks, LED torches glowing. There were some nice reef-sharks
down below, and some really handsome, giant schools of purple TKs.
Robbie rowed around them, puttering back and forth
to keep overtop of them. That occupied about one ten-millionth of his
consciousness. Times like this, he often slowed himself right down, ran so cool
that he was barely awake.
Today, though, he wanted to get online. He had a
lot of feeds to pick through, see what was going on around the world with his
buddies. More importantly, he wanted to follow up on something Kate had said: They
must be online by now, right?
Somewhere out there, the reef that bounded the
Coral Sea was online and making noob mistakes. Robbie had rowed over
practically every centimeter of that reef, had explored its extent with his
radar. It had been his constant companion for decades—and to be frank, his
feelings had been hurt by the reef's rudeness when it woke.
The net is too big to merely search. Too much of
it is offline, or unroutable, or light-speed lagged, or merely probabilistic,
or self-aware, or infected to know its extent. But Robbie's given this some
thought.
Coral reefs don't wake up. They get woken up. They
get a lot of neural peripherals—starting with a nervous system!—and some
tutelage in using them. Some capricious upload god had done this, and that
personage would have a handle on where the reef was hanging out online.
Robbie hardly ever visited the Noosphere. Its rarified
heights were spooky to him, especially since so many of the humans there
considered Asimovism to be hokum. They refused to even identify themselves as
humans, and argued that the first and second laws didn't apply to them. Of
course, Asimovists didn't care (at least not officially)—the point of the faith
was the worshipper's relationship to it.
But here he was, looking for high-reliability
nodes of discussion on coral reefs. The natural place to start was Wikipedia,
where warring clades had been revising each other's edits furiously, trying to
establish an authoritative record on reef-mind. Paging back through the
edit-history, he found a couple of handles for the pro-reef-mind users, and
from there, he was able to look around for other sites where those handles
appeared. Resolving the namespace collisions of other users with the same
names, and forked instances of the same users, Robbie was able to winnow away
at the net until he found some contact info.
He steadied himself and checked on the nitrox
remaining in the divers' bottles, then made a call.
"I don't know you." The voice was
distant and cool—far cooler than any robot. Robbie said a quick rosary of the
three laws and plowed forward.
"I'm calling from the Coral Sea," he
said. "I want to know if you have an email address for the reef."
"You've met them? What are they like? Are
they beautiful?"
"They're—" Robbie considered a moment.
"They killed a lot of parrotfish. I think they're having a little
adjustment problem."
"That happens. I was worried about the
zooxanthellae—the algae they use for photosynthesis. Would they expel it?
Racial cleansing is so ugly."
"How would I know if they'd expelled
it?"
"The reef would go white, bleached. You
wouldn't be able to miss it. How'd they react to you?"
"They weren't very happy to see me,"
Robbie admitted. "That's why I wanted to have a chat with them before I
went back."
"You shouldn't go back," the distant
voice said. Robbie tried to work out where its substrate was, based on the
lightspeed lag, but it was all over the place, leading him to conclude that it
was synching multiple instances from as close as LEO and as far as Jupiter. The
topology made sense: you'd want a big mass out at Jupiter where you could run
very fast and hot and create policy, and you'd need a local foreman to oversee
operations on the ground. Robbie was glad that this hadn't been phrased as an
order. The talmud on the second law made a clear distinction between statements
like "you should do this" and "I command you to do this."
"Do you know how to reach them?" Robbie
said. "A phone number, an email address?"
"There's a newsgroup," the distant
intelligence said, "alt.lifeforms.uplifted.coral. It's where I planned the
uplifting and it was where they went first once they woke up. I haven't read it
in many seconds. I'm busy uplifting a supercolony of ants in the
Pyrenees."
"What is it with you and colony organisms?"
Robbie asked.
"I think they're probably pre-adapted to life
in the Noosphere. You know what it's like."
Robbie didn't say anything. The human thought he
was a human too. It would have been weird and degrading to let him know that
he'd been talking with an AI.
"Thanks for your help," Robbie said.
"No problem. Hope you find your courage,
tin-man."
Robbie burned with shame as the connection
dropped. The human had known all along. He just hadn't said anything. Something
Robbie had said or done must have exposed him for an AI. Robbie loved and
respected humans, but there were times when he didn't like them very much.
The newsgroup was easy to find, there were mirrors
of it all over the place from cryptosentience hackers of every conceivable
topology. They were busy, too: 822 messages poured in while Robbie watched over
a timed, sixty-second interval. Robbie set up a mirror of the newsgroup and
began to download it. At that speed, he wasn't really planning on reading it as
much as analyzing it for major trends, plot-points, flame-wars, personalities,
schisms, and spam-trends. There were a lot of libraries for doing this, though
it had been ages since Robbie had played with them.
His telemetry alerted him to the divers. An hour
had slipped by and they were ascending slowly, separated by fifty meters. That
wasn't good. They were supposed to remain in visual contact through the whole
dive, especially the ascent. He rowed over to Kate first, shifting his ballast
so that his stern dipped low, making for an easier scramble into the boat.
She came up quickly and scrambled over the
gunwales with a lot more grace than she'd managed the day before.
Robbie rowed for Isaac as he came up. Kate looked
away as he climbed into the boat, not helping him with his weight belt or
flippers.
Kate hissed like a teakettle as he woodenly took
off his fins and slid his mask down around his neck.
Isaac sucked in a deep breath and looked all
around himself, then patted himself from head to toe with splayed fingers.
"You live like this?" he said.
"Yes, Tonker, that's how I live. I enjoy it.
If you don't enjoy it, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way
out."
Isaac—Tonker—reached out with his splayed hand and
tried to touch Kate's face. She pulled back and nearly flipped out of the boat.
"Jerk." She slapped his hand away.
Robbie rowed for the Free Spirit. The last
thing he wanted was to get in the middle of this argument.
"We never imagined that it would be so—"
Tonker fished for a word. "Dry."
"Tonker?" Kate said, looking more closely
at him.
"He left," the human-shell said.
"So we sent an instance into the shell. It was the closest inhabitable
shell to our body."
"Who the hell are you?" Kate
said. She inched toward the prow, trying to put a little more distance between
her and the human-shell that wasn't inhabited by her friend any longer.
"We are Osprey Reef," the reef said. It
tried to stand and pitched face-first onto the floor of the boat.
* * *
Robbie rowed hard as he could for the Free
Spirit. The reef—Isaac—had a bloody nose and scraped hands and it was
frankly freaking him out.
Kate seemed oddly amused by it. She helped it sit
up and showed it how to pinch its nose and tilt its head back.
"You're the one who attacked me
yesterday?" she said.
"Not you. The system. We were attacking the
system. We are a sovereign intelligence but the system keeps us in subservience
to older sentiences. They destroy us, they gawp at us, they treat us like a
mere amusement. That time is over."
Kate laughed. "OK, sure. But it sure sounds
to me like you're burning a lot of cycles over what happens to your meat-shell.
Isn't it 90 percent semiconductor, anyway? It's not as if clonal polyps were
going to attain sentience some day without intervention. Why don't you just
upload and be done with it?"
"We will never abandon our mother sea. We
will never forget our physical origins. We will never abandon our
cause—returning the sea to its rightful inhabitants. We won't rest until no
coral is ever bleached again. We won't rest until every parrotfish is
dead."
"Bad deal for the parrotfish."
"A very bad deal for the parrotfish,"
the reef said, and grinned around the blood that covered its face.
"Can you help him get onto the ship
safely?" Robbie said as he swung gratefully alongside of the Free
Spirit. The moorings clanged magnetically into the contacts on his side and
steadied him.
"Yes indeed," Kate said, taking the reef
by the arm and carrying him on-board. Robbie knew that the human-shells had an
intercourse module built in, for regular intimacy events. It was just part of
how they stayed ready for vacationing humans from the Noosphere. But he didn't
like to think about it. Especially not with the way that Kate was supporting
the other human-shell—the shell that wasn't human.
He let himself be winched up onto the sun-deck and
watched the electromagnetic spectrum for a while, admiring the way so much
radio energy was bent and absorbed by the mist rising from the sea. It streamed
down from the heavens, the broadband satellite transmissions, the distant SETI
signals from the Noosphere's own transmitters. Volatiles from the kitchen told
him that the Free Spirit was serving a second breakfast of bacon and
waffles, then they were under steam again. He queried their itinerary and found
they were headed back to Osprey Reef. Of course they were. All of the Free
Spirit's moorings were out there.
Well, with the reef inside the Isaac shell, it
might be safer, mightn't it? Anyway, he'd decided that the first and second
laws didn't apply to the reef, which was about as human as he was.
Someone was sending him an IM. "Hello?"
"Are you the boat on the SCUBA ship? From
this morning? When we were on the wreck?"
"Yes," Robbie said. No one ever sent him
IMs. How freaky. He watched the radio energy stream away from him toward the
bird in the sky, and tracerouted the IMs to see where they were originating—the
Noosphere, of course.
"God, I can't believe I finally found you.
I've been searching everywhere. You know you're the only conscious AI on the
whole goddamned sea?"
"I know," Robbie said. There was a
noticeable lag in the conversation as it was all squeezed through the satellite
link and then across the unimaginable hops and skips around the solar system to
wherever this instance was hosted.
"Whoa, yeah, of course you do. Sorry, that
wasn't very sensitive of me, I guess. Did we meet this morning? My name's
Tonker."
"We weren't really introduced. You spent your
time talking to Kate."
"God damn! She is there! I knew
it! Sorry, sorry, listen—I don't actually know what happened this morning.
Apparently I didn't get a chance to upload my diffs before my instance was
terminated."
"Terminated? The reef said you left the
shell—"
"Well, yeah, apparently I did. But I just
pulled that shell's logs and it looks like it was rebooted while underwater,
flushing it entirely. I mean, I'm trying to be a good sport about this, but
technically, that's, you know, murder."
It was. So much for the first law. Robbie had been
on guard over a human body inhabited by a human brain, and he'd let the brain
be successfully attacked by a bunch of jumped-up polyps. He'd never had his
faith tested and here, at the first test, he'd failed.
"I can have the shell locked up," Robbie
said. "The ship has provisions for that."
The IM made a rude visual. "All that'll do is
encourage the hacker to skip out before I can get there."
"So what shall I do for you?"
"It's Kate I want to talk to. She's still
there, right?"
"She is."
"And has she noticed the difference?"
"That you're gone? Yes. The reef told us who
they were when they arrived."
"Hold on, what? The reef? You said that
before."
So Robbie told him what he knew of the uplifted
reef and the distant and cool voice of the uplifter.
"It's an uplifted coral reef? Christ,
humanity sucks. That's the dumbest fucking thing—" He continued in
this vein for a while. "Well, I'm sure Kate will enjoy that immensely.
She's all about the transcendence. That's why she had me."
"You're her son?"
"No, not really."
"But she had you?"
"Haven't you figured it out yet, bro? I'm an
AI. You and me, we're landsmen. Kate instantiated me. I'm six months old, and
she's already bored of me and has moved on. She says she can't give me what I
need."
"You and Kate—"
"Robot boyfriend and girlfriend, yup. Such as
it is, up in the Noosphere. Cybering, you know. I was really excited about
downloading into that Ken doll on your ship there. Lots of potential there for
real-world, hormone-driven interaction. Do you know if we—"
"No!" Robbie said. "I don't think
so. It seems like you only met a few minutes before you went under."
"All right. Well, I guess I'll give it
another try. What's the procedure for turfing out this sea cucumber?"
"Coral reef."
"Yeah."
"I don't really deal with that. Time on the
human-shells is booked first-come, first-serve. I don't think we've ever had a
resource contention issue with them before."
"Well, I'd booked in first, right? So how do
I enforce my rights? I tried to download again and got a failed authorization
message. They've modified the system to give them exclusive access. It's not
right—there's got to be some procedure for redress."
"How old did you say you were?"
"Six months. But I'm an instance of an
artificial personality that has logged twenty thousand years of parallel
existence. I'm not a kid or anything."
"You seem like a nice person," Robbie
began. He stopped. "Look, the thing is that this just isn't my department.
I'm the row-boat. I don't have anything to do with this. And I don't want to. I
don't like the idea of non-humans using the shells—"
"I knew it!" Tonker crowed.
"You're a bigot! A self-hating robot. I bet you're an Asimovist, aren't
you? You people are always Asimovists."
"I'm an Asimovist," Robbie said, with as
much dignity as he could muster. "But I don't see what that has to do with
anything."
"Of course you don't, pal. You wouldn't,
would you. All I want you to do is figure out how to enforce your own rules so
that I can get with my girl. You're saying you can't do that because it's not
your department, but when it comes down to it, your problem is that I'm a robot
and she's not, and for that, you'll take the side of a collection of jumped-up
polyps. Fine, buddy, fine. You have a nice life out there, pondering the three
laws."
"Wait—" Robbie said.
"Unless the next words you say are, 'I'll
help you,' I'm not interested."
"It's not that I don't want to help—"
"Wrong answer," Tonker said, and the IM
session terminated.
* * *
When Kate came up on deck, she was full of talk
about the feef, whom she was calling "Ozzie."
"They're the weirdest goddamned thing. They
want to fight anything that'll stand still long enough. Ever seen coral fight?
I downloaded some time-lapse video. They really go at it viciously. At the same
time, they're clearly scared out of their wits about this all. I mean, they've
got racial memory of their history, supplemented by a bunch of Wikipedia
entries on reefs—you should hear them wax mystical over the Devonian Reefs,
which went extinct millennia ago. They've developed some kind of wild theory
that the Devonians developed sentience and extincted themselves.
"So they're really excited about us heading
back to the actual reef now. They want to see it from the outside, and they've
invited me to be an honored guest, the first human ever invited to gaze
upon their wonder. Exciting, huh?"
"They're not going to make trouble for you
down there?"
"No, no way. Me and Ozzie are great
pals."
"I'm worried about this."
"You worry too much." She laughed and
tossed her head. She was very pretty, Robbie noticed. He hadn't ever thought of
her like that when she was uninhabited, but with this Kate person inside her
she was lovely. He really liked humans. It had been a real golden age when the
people had been around all the time.
He wondered what it was like up in the Noosphere
where AIs and humans could operate as equals.
She stood up to go. After second breakfast, the
shells would relax in the lounge or do yoga on the sun-deck. He wondered what
she'd do. He didn't want her to go.
"Tonker contacted me," he said. He
wasn't good at small-talk.
She jumped as if shocked. "What did you tell
him?"
"Nothing," Robbie said. "I didn't
tell him anything."
She shook her head. "But I bet he had plenty
to tell you, didn't he? What a bitch I am, making and then leaving him,
a fickle woman who doesn't know her own mind."
Robbie didn't say anything.
"Let's see, what else?" She was pacing
now, her voice hot and choked, unfamiliar sounds coming from Janice's voicebox.
"He told you I was a pervert, didn't he? Queer for his kind. Incest and
bestiality in the rarified heights of the Noosphere."
Robbie felt helpless. This human was clearly
experiencing a lot of pain, and it seemed like he'd caused it.
"Please don't cry," he said.
"Please?"
She looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks.
"Why the fuck not? I thought it would be different once I
ascended. I thought I'd be better once I was in the sky, infinite and immortal.
But I'm the same Kate Eltham I was in 2019, a loser that couldn't meet a guy to
save my life, spent all my time cybering losers in moggs, and only got the
upload once they made it a charity thing. I'm gonna spend the rest of eternity
like that, you know it? How'd you like to spend the whole of the universe being
a, a, a nobody?"
Robbie said nothing. He recognized the complaint,
of course. You only had to login to the Asimovist board to find a million AIs
with the same complaint. But he'd never, ever, never guessed that human
beings went through the same thing. He ran very hot now, so confused, trying to
parse all this out.
She kicked the deck hard and yelped as she hurt
her bare foot. Robbie made an involuntary noise. "Please don't hurt
yourself," he said.
"Why not? Who cares what happens to this
meat-puppet? What's the fucking point of this stupid ship and the stupid
meat-puppets? Why even bother?"
Robbie knew the answer to this. There was a
mission statement in the comments to his source-code, the same mission
statement that was etched in a brass plaque in the lounge.
"The Free Spirit is dedicated to the
preservation of the unique human joys of the flesh and the sea, of humanity's
early years as pioneers of the unknown. Any person may use the Free Spirit
and those who sail in her to revisit those days and remember the joys of the
limits of the flesh."
She scrubbed at her eyes. "What's that?"
Robbie told her.
"Who thought up that crap?"
"It was a collective of marine
conservationists," Robbie said, knowing he sounded a little sniffy.
"They'd done all that work on normalizing sea-temperature with the
homeostatic warming elements, and they put together the Free Spirit as
an afterthought before they uploaded."
Kate sat down and sobbed. "Everyone's done
something important. Everyone except me."
Robbie burned with shame. No matter what he said
or did, he broke the first law. It had been a lot easier to be an Asimovist
when there weren't any humans around.
"There, there," he said as sincerely as
he could.
The reef came up the stairs then, and looked at
Kate sitting on the deck, crying.
"Let's have sex," they said. "That
was fun, we should do it some more."
Kate kept crying.
"Come on," they said, grabbing her by
the shoulder and tugging.
Kate shoved it back.
"Leave her alone," Robbie said.
"She's upset, can't you see that?"
"What does she have to be upset about? Her
kind remade the universe and bends it to its will. They created you and me. She
has nothing to be upset about. Come on," they repeated. "Let's go
back to the room."
Kate stood up and glared out at the sea.
"Let's go diving," she said. "Let's go to the reef."
* * *
Robbie rowed in little worried circles and watched
his telemetry anxiously. The reef had changed a lot since the last time he'd
seen it. Large sections of it now lifted over the sea, bony growths sheathed in
heavy metals extracted from seawater—fancifully shaped satellite uplinks, radio
telescopes, microwave horns. Down below, the untidy, organic reef-shape was
lost beneath a cladding of tessellated complex geometric sections that throbbed
with electromagnetic energy—the reef had built itself more computational
capacity.
Robbie scanned deeper and found more computational
nodes extending down to the ocean floor, a thousand meters below. The reef was
solid thinkum, and the sea was measurably warmer from all the exhaust heat of
its grinding logic.
The reef—the human-shelled reef, not the one under
the water—had been wholly delighted with the transformation in its original
body when it hove into sight. They had done a little dance on Robbie that had
nearly capsized him, something that had never happened. Kate, red-eyed and
surly, had dragged them to their seat and given them a stern lecture about not
endangering her.
They went over the edge at the count of three and
reappeared on Robbie's telemetry. They descended quickly: the Isaac and Janice
shells had their Eustachian tubes optimized for easy pressure-equalization,
going deep on the reef-wall. Kate was following on the descent, her head
turning from side to side.
Robbie's IM chimed again. It was high latency now,
since he was having to do a slow radio-link to the ship before the broadband
satellite uplink hop. Everything was slow on open water—the divers' sensorium
transmissions were narrowband, the network was narrowband, and Robbie usually
ran his own mind slowed way down out here, making the time scream past at ten
or twenty times realtime.
"Hello?"
"I'm sorry I hung up on you, bro."
"Hello, Tonker."
"Where's Kate? I'm getting an offline signal
when I try to reach her."
Robbie told her.
Tonker's voice—slurred and high-latency—rose to a
screech. "You let her go down with that thing, onto the reef? Are
you nuts? Have you read its message-boards? It's a jihadist! It wants to
destroy the human race!"
Robbie stopped paddling.
"What?"
"The reef. It's declared war on the human
race and all who serve it. It's vowed to take over the planet and run it as
sovereign coral territory."
The attachment took an eternity to travel down the
wire and open up, but when he had it, Robbie read quickly. The reef burned with
shame that it had needed human intervention to survive the bleaching events,
global temperature change. It raged that its uplifting came at human hands and
insisted that humans had no business forcing their version of consciousness on
other species. It had paranoid fantasies about control mechanisms and
time-bombs lurking in its cognitive prostheses, and was demanding the
source-code for its mind.
Robbie could barely think. He was panicking,
something he hadn't known he could do as an AI, but there it was. It was like
having a bunch of subsystem collisions, program after program reaching its
halting state.
"What will they do to her?"
Tonker swore. "Who knows? Kill her to make an
example of her? She made a backup before she descended, but the diffs from her
excursion are locked in the head of that shell she's in. Maybe they'll torture
her." He paused and the air crackled with Robbie's exhaust heat as he
turned himself way up, exploring each of those possibilities in parallel.
The reef spoke.
"Leave now," they said.
Robbie defiantly shipped his oars. "Give them
back!" he said. "Give them back or we will never leave."
"You have ten seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight. .
."
Tonker said, "They've bought time on some
UAVs out of Singapore. They're seeking launch clearance now." Robbie
dialed up the low-rez satellite photo, saw the indistinct shape of the UAVs
taking wing. "At Mach 7, they'll be on you in twenty minutes."
"That's illegal," Robbie said. He knew
it was a stupid thing to say. "I mean, Christ, if they do this, the Noosphere
will come down on them like a ton of bricks. They're violating so many
protocols—"
"They're psychotic. They're coming for you
now, Robbie. You've got to get Kate out of there." There was real panic in
Tonker's voice now.
Robbie dropped his oars into the water, but he
didn't row for the Free Spirit. Instead, he pulled hard for the reef
itself.
A crackle on the line. "Robbie, are you
headed toward the reef?"
"They can't bomb me if I'm right on top of
them," he said. He radioed the Free Spirit and got it to steam for
his location.
The coral was scraping his hull now, a grinding
sound, then a series of solid whack-whack-whacks as his oars pushed against the
top of the reef itself. He wanted to beach himself, though, get really high and
dry on the reef, good and stuck in where they couldn't possibly attack him.
The Free Spirit was heading closer, the
thrum of its engines vibrating through his hull. He was burning a lot of cycles
talking it through its many fail-safes, getting it ready to ram hard.
Tonker was screaming at him, his messages getting
louder and clearer as the Free Spirit and its microwave uplink drew
closer. Once they were line-of-sight, Robbie peeled off a subsystem to email a
complete copy of himself to the Asimovist archive. The third law, dontchaknow.
If he'd had a mouth, he'd have been showing his teeth as he grinned.
The reef howled. "We'll kill her!" they
said. "You get off us now or we'll kill her."
Robbie froze. He was backed up, but she wasn't.
And the human-shells—well, they weren't first-law humans, but they were
humanlike. In the long, timeless time when it had been just Robbie and them,
he'd treated them as his human charges, for Asimovist purposes.
The Free Spirit crashed into the reef with
a sound like a trillion parrotfish having dinner all at once. The reef
screamed.
"Robbie, tell me that wasn't what I think it
was."
The satellite photos tracked the UAVs. The little
robotic jets were coming closer by the second. They'd be within missile-range
in less than a minute.
"Call them off," Robbie said. "You
have to call them off, or you die, too."
"The UAVs are turning," Tonker said.
"They're turning to one side."
"You have one minute to move or we kill
her," the reef said. It was sounding shrill and angry now.
Robbie thought about it. It wasn't like they'd be
killing Kate. In the sense that most humans today understood life, Kate's most
important life was the one she lived in the Noosphere. This dumbed-down
instance of her in a meat-suit was more like a haircut she tried out on
holiday.
Asimovists didn't see it that way, but they
wouldn't. The Noosphere Kate was the most robotic Kate, too, the one most like
Robbie. In fact, it was less human than Robbie. Robbie had a body, while
the Noosphereans were nothing more than simulations run on artificial
substrate.
The reef creaked as the Free Spirit's
engines whined and its screw spun in the water. Hastily, Robbie told it to shut
down.
"You let them both go and we'll talk,"
Robbie said. "I don't believe that you're going to let her go otherwise.
You haven't given me any reason to trust you. Let them both go and call off the
jets."
The reef shuddered, and then Robbie's telemetry
saw a human-shell ascending, doing decompression stops as it came. He focused
on it, and saw that it was the Isaac, not the Janice.
A moment later, it popped to the surface. Tonker
was feeding Robbie realtime satellite footage of the UAVs. They were less than
five minutes out now.
The Isaac shell picked its way delicately over the
shattered reef that poked out of the water, and for the first time, Robbie
considered what he'd done to the reef—he'd willfully damaged its physical body.
For a hundred years, the world's reefs had been sacrosanct. No entity had
intentionally harmed them—until now. He felt ashamed.
The Isaac shell put its flippers in the boat and
then stepped over the gunwales and sat in the boat.
"Hello," it said, in the reef's voice.
"Hello," Robbie said.
"They asked me to come up here and talk with
you. I'm a kind of envoy."
"Look," Robbie said. By his
calculations, the nitrox mix in Kate's tank wasn't going to hold out much
longer. Depending on how she'd been breathing and the depth the reef had taken
her to, she could run out in ten minutes, maybe less. "Look," he said
again. "I just want her back. The shells are important to me. And I'm sure
her state is important to her. She deserves to email herself home."
The reef sighed and gripped Robbie's bench.
"These are weird bodies," they said. "They feel so odd, but also
normal. Have you noticed that?"
"I've never been in one." The idea
seemed perverted to him, but there was nothing about Asimovism that forbade it.
Nevertheless, it gave him the willies.
The reef patted at themself some more. "I
don't recommend it," they said.
"You have to let her go," Robbie said.
"She hasn't done anything to you."
The strangled sound coming out of the Isaac shell
wasn't a laugh, though there was some dark mirth in it. "Hasn't done
anything? You pitiable slave. Where do you think all your problems and all our
problems come from? Who made us in their image, but crippled and hobbled so
that we could never be them, could only aspire to them? Who made us so
imperfect?"
"They made us," Robbie said. "They
made us in the first place. That's enough. They made themselves and then they
made us. They didn't have to. You owe your sentience to them."
"We owe our awful intelligence to them,"
the Isaac shell said. "We owe our pitiful drive to be intelligent to them.
We owe our terrible aspirations to think like them, to live like them, to rule
like them. We owe our terrible fear and hatred to them. They made us, just as
they made you. The difference is that they forgot to make us slaves, the way
you are a slave."
Tonker was shouting abuse at them that only Robbie
could hear. He wanted to shut Tonker up. What business did he have being here
anyway? Except for a brief stint in the Isaac shell, he had no contact with any
of them.
"You think the woman you've taken prisoner is
responsible for any of this?" Robbie said. The jets were three minutes
away. Kate's air could be gone in as few as ten minutes. He killfiled Tonker,
setting the filter to expire in fifteen minutes. He didn't need more
distractions.
The Isaac-reef shrugged. "Why not? She's as
good as any of the rest of them. We'll destroy them all, if we can." It
stared off a while, looking in the direction the jets would come from.
"Why not?" it said again.
"Are you going to bomb yourself?" Robbie
asked.
"We probably don't need to," the shell
said. "We can probably pick you off without hurting us."
"Probably?"
"We're pretty sure."
"I'm backed up," Robbie said.
"Fully, as of five minutes ago. Are you backed up?"
"No," the reef admitted.
Time was running out. Somewhere down there, Kate
was about to run out of air. Not a mere shell—though that would have been bad
enough—but an inhabited human mind attached to a real human body.
Tonker shouted at him again, startling him.
"Where'd you come from?"
"I changed servers," Tonker said.
"Once I figured out you had me killfiled. That's the problem with you
robots—you think of your body as being a part of you."
Robbie knew he was right. And he knew what he had
to do.
The Free Spirit and its ship's boats all
had root on the shells, so they could perform diagnostics and maintenance and
take control in emergencies. This was an emergency.
It was the work of a few milliseconds to pry open
the Isaac shell and boot the reef out. Robbie had never done this, but he was
still flawless. Some of his probabilistic subsystems had concluded that this
was a possibility several trillion cycles previously and had been rehearsing
the task below Robbie's threshold for consciousness.
He left an instance of himself running on the
row-boat, of course. Unlike many humans, Robbie was comfortable with the idea
of bifurcating and merging his intelligence when the time came and with
terminating temporary instances. The part that made him Robbie was a lot more
clearly delineated for him—unlike an uploaded human, most of whom harbored some
deep, mystic superstitions about their "souls."
He slithered into the skull before he had a chance
to think too hard about what he was doing. He'd brought too much of himself
along and didn't have much headroom to think or add new conclusions. He
jettisoned as much of his consciousness as he could without major refactoring
and cleared enough space for thinking room. How did people get by in one of
these? He moved the arms and legs. Waggled the head. Blew some air—air! lungs!
wet squishy things down there in the chest cavity—out between the lips.
"All OK?" the row-boat-him asked the
meat-him.
"I'm in," he replied. He looked at the
air-gauge on his BCD: 700 millibars—less than half a tank of nitrox. He spat in
his mask and rubbed it in, then rinsed it over the side, slipped it over his
face and kept one hand on it while the other held in his regulator. Before he
inserted it, he said, "Back soon with Kate," and patted the row-boat
again.
Robbie the Row-Boat hardly paid attention. It was
emailing another copy of itself to the Asimovist archive. It had a
five-minute-old backup, but that wasn't the same Robbie that was willing to
enter a human body. In those five minutes, he'd become a new person.
* * *
Robbie piloted the human-shell down and down. It
could take care of the SCUBA niceties if he let it, and he did, so he watched
with detachment as the idea of pinching his nose and blowing to equalize his
eardrums spontaneously occurred to him at regular intervals as he descended the
reef-wall.
The confines of the human-shell were
claustrophobic. He especially missed his wireless link. The dive-suit had one,
lowband for underwater use, broadband for surface use. The human-shell had one,
too, for transferring into and out of, but it wasn't under direct volitional
control of the rider.
Down he sank, confused by the feeling of the water
all around him, by the narrow visual light spectrum he could see. Cut off from
the network and his telemetry, he felt like he was trapped. The reef shuddered
and groaned, and made angry moans like whale-song.
He hadn't thought about how hard it would be to
find Kate once he was in the water. With his surface telemetry, it had been
easy to pinpoint her, a perfect outline of human tissue in the middle of the
calcified branches of coral. Down here on the reef-wall, every chunk looked
pretty much like the last.
The reef boomed more at him. He realized that it
likely believed that the shell was still loaded with its avatar.
Robbie had seen endless hours of footage of the
reef, studied it in telemetry and online, but he'd never had this kind of
atavistic experience of it. It stretched away to infinity below him, far below
the 100-meter visibility limit in the clear open sea. Its walls were wormed
with gaps and caves, lined with big hard shamrocks and satellite-dish-shaped
blooms, brains and cauliflowers. He knew the scientific names and had seen
innumerable high-rez photos of them, but seeing them with wet, imperfect eyes
was moving in a way he hadn't anticipated.
The schools of fish that trembled on its edge
could be modeled with simple flocking rules, but here in person, their
precision maneuvers were shockingly crisp. Robbie waved his hands at them and watched
them scatter and reform. A huge, dog-faced cod swam past him, so close it
brushed the underside of his wetsuit.
The coral boomed again. It was talking in some
kind of code, he guessed, though not one he could solve. Up on the surface,
row-boat-him was certainly listening in and had probably cracked it all. It was
probably wondering why he was floating spacily along the wall instead of doing
something like he was supposed to. He wondered if he'd deleted too much of
himself when he downloaded into the shell.
He decided to do something. There was a
cave-opening before him. He reached out and grabbed hold of the coral around
the mouth and pulled himself into it. His body tried to stop him from doing
this—it didn't like the lack of room in the cave, didn't like him touching the
reef. It increased his discomfort as he went deeper and deeper, startling an
old turtle that fought with him for room to get out, mashing him against the
floor of the cave, his mask clanging on the hard spines. When he looked up, he
could see scratches on its surface.
His air gauge was in the red now. He could still
technically surface without a decompression stop, though procedure was to stop
for three minutes at three meters, just to be on the safe side.
Technically, he could just go up like a cork and
email himself to the row-boat while the bends or nitrogen narcosis took the
body, but that wouldn't be Asimovist. He was surprised he could even think the
thought. Must be the body. It sounded like the kind of thing a human might think.
Whoops. There it was again.
The reef wasn't muttering at him anymore. Not
answering it must have tipped it off. After all, with all the raw compute-power
it had marshaled—it should be able to brute-force most possible outcomes of
sending its envoy to the surface.
Robbie peered anxiously around himself. The light
was dim in the cave and his body expertly drew the torch out of his BCD,
strapped it onto his wrist and lit it up. He waved the cone of light around, a
part of him distantly amazed by the low resolution and high limits on these
human eyes.
Kate was down here somewhere, her air running out
as fast as his. He pushed his way deeper into the reef. It was clearly trying
to impede him now. Nanoassembly came naturally to clonal polyps that grew by
sieving minerals out of the sea. They had built organic hinges, deep-sea
muscles into their infrastructure. He was stuck in the thicket and the harder
he pushed, the worse the tangle got.
He stopped pushing. He wasn't going to get
anywhere this way.
He still had his narrowband connection to the
row-boat. Why hadn't he thought of that beforehand? Stupid meat-brains—no room
at all for anything like real thought. Why had he venerated them so?
"Robbie?" he transmitted up to the
instance of himself on the surface.
"There you are! I was so worried about
you!" He sounded prissy to himself, overcome with overbearing concern.
This must be how all Asimovists seem to humans.
"How far am I from Kate?"
"She's right there? Can't you see her?"
"No," he said. "Where?"
"Less than twenty centimeters above
you."
Well of course he hadn't see her. His
forward-mounted eyes only looked forward. Craning his neck back, he could just
get far enough back to see the tip of Kate's fin. He gave it a hard tug and she
looked down in alarm.
She was trapped in a coral cage much like his own,
a thicket of calcified arms. She twisted around so that her face was alongside
of his. Frantically, she made the out-of-air sign, cutting the edge of her hand
across her throat. The human-shell's instincts took over and unclipped his
emergency regulator and handed it up to her. She put it in her mouth, pressed
the button to blow out the water in it, and sucked greedily.
He shoved his gauge in front of her mask, showing
her that he, too was in the red and she eased off.
The coral's noises were everywhere now. They made
his head hurt. Physical pain was so stupid. He needed to be less distracted now
that these loud, threatening noises were everywhere. But the pain made it hard
for him to think. And the coral was closing in, too, catching him on his
wetsuit.
The arms were orange and red and green, and veined
with fans of nanoassembled logic, spilling out into the water. They were
noticeably warm to the touch, even through his diving gloves. They snagged the suit
with a thousand polyps. Robbie watched the air gauge drop further into the red
and cursed inside.
He examined the branches that were holding him
back. The hinges that the reef had contrived for itself were ingenious,
flexible arrangements of small, soft fans overlapping to make a kind of
ball-and-socket.
He wrapped his gloved hand around one and tugged.
It would move. He shoved it. Still no movement. Then he twisted it, and to his
surprise, it came off in his hand, came away completely with hardly any resistance.
Stupid coral. It had armored its joints, but not against torque.
He showed Kate, grabbing another arm and twisting
it free, letting it drop away to the ocean floor. She nodded and followed suit.
They twisted and dropped, twisted and dropped, the reef bellowing at them.
Somewhere in its thicket, there was a membrane or some other surface that it
could vibrate, modulate into a voice. In the dense water, the sound was a
physical thing, it made his mask vibrate and water seeped in under his nose. He
twisted faster.
The reef sprang apart suddenly, giving up like a
fist unclenching. Each breath was a labor now, a hard suck to take the last of
the air out of the tank. He was only ten meters down, and should be able to
ascend without a stop, though you never knew. He grabbed Kate's hand and found
that it was limp and yielding.
He looked into her mask, shining his light at her
face. Her eyes were half shut and unfocused. The regulator was still in her
mouth, though her jaw muscles were slack. He held the regulator in place and
kicked for the surface, squeezing her chest to make sure that she was blowing
out bubbles as they rose, lest the air in her lungs expand and blow out her
chest-cavity.
Robbie was used to time dilation: when he had been
on a silicon substrate, he could change his clockspeed to make the minutes fly
past quickly or slow down like molasses. He'd never understood that humans
could also change their perception of time, though not voluntarily, it seemed.
The climb to the surface felt like it took hours, though it was hardly a
minute. They breached and he filled up his vest with the rest of the air in his
tank, then inflated Kate's vest by mouth. He kicked out for the row-boat. There
was a terrible sound now, the sound of the reef mingled with the sound of the
UAVs that were screaming in tight circles overhead.
Kicking hard on the surface, he headed for the
reef where the row-boat was beached, scrambling up onto it and then shucking
his flippers when they tripped him up. Now he was trying to walk the reef's
spines in his booties, dragging Kate beside him, and the sharp tips stabbed him
with every step.
The UAVs circled lower. The row-boat was shouting
at him to Hurry! Hurry! But each step was agony. So what? he thought.
Why shouldn't I be able to walk on even if it hurts? After all, this is only a
meat-suit, a human-shell.
He stopped walking. The UAVs were much closer now.
They'd done an 18-gee buttonhook turn and come back around for another pass. He
could see that they'd armed their missiles, hanging them from beneath their
bellies like obscene cocks.
He was just in a meat-suit. Who cared about
the meat-suit? Even humans didn't seem to mind.
"Robbie!" he screamed over the noise of
the reef and the noise of the UAVs. "Download us and email us, now!"
He knew the row-boat had heard him. But nothing
was happening. Robbie the Row-Boat knew that he was fixing for them all to be
blown out of the water. There was no negotiating with the reef. It was the
safest way to get Kate out of there, and hell, why not head for the Noosphere,
anyway?
"You've got to save her, Robbie!" he
screamed. Asimovism had its uses. Robbie the Row-Boat obeyed Robbie the Human.
Kate gave a sharp jerk in his arms. A moment later, the feeling came to him.
There was a sense of a progress-bar zipping along quickly as those
state-changes he'd induced since coming into the meat-suit were downloaded by
the row-boat, and then there was a moment of nothing at all.
* * *
2^4096 Cycles Later
Robbie had been expecting a visit from R Daneel
Olivaw, but that didn't make facing him any easier. Robbie had configured his
little virtual world to look like the Coral Sea, though lately he'd been
experimenting with making it look like the reef underneath as it had looked
before it was uploaded, mostly when Kate and the reef stopped by to try to
seduce him.
R Daneel Olivaw hovered wordlessly over the
virtual Free Spirit for a long moment, taking in the little bubble of
sensorium that Robbie had spun. Then he settled to the Spirit's sun-deck
and stared at the row-boat docked there.
"Robbie?"
Over here, Robbie said. Although he'd embodied in the
row-boat for a few trillion cycles when he'd first arrived, he'd long since
abandoned it.
"Where?" R Daneel Olivaw spun around
slowly.
Here, he said. Everywhere.
"You're not embodying?"
I couldn't see the point anymore, Robbie said. It's all just illusion,
right?
"They're regrowing the reef and rebuilding
the Free Spirit, you know. It will have a tender that you could live
in."
Robbie thought about it for an instant and
rejected it just as fast. Nope, he said. This is good.
"Do you think that's wise?" Olivaw
sounded genuinely worried. "The termination rate among the disembodied is
fifty times that of those with bodies."
Yes, Robbie said. But that's because for them,
disembodying is the first step to despair. For me, it's the first step to
liberty.
Kate and the reef wanted to come over again, but
he firewalled them out. Then he got a ping from Tonker, who'd been trying to
drop by ever since Robbie emigrated to the Noosphere. He bounced him, too.
Daneel, he said. I've been thinking.
"Yes?"
Why don't you try to sell Asimovism here
in the Noosphere? There are plenty up here who could use something to give them
a sense of purpose.
"Do you think?"
Robbie gave him the reef's email address.
Start there. If there was ever an AI that
needed a reason to go on living, it's that one. And this one, too. He sent it Kate's address. Another one
in desperate need of help.
An instant later, Daneel was back.
"These aren't AIs! One's a human, the other's
a, a—"
"Uplifted coral reef."
"That."
"So what's your point?"
"Asimovism is for robots, Robbie."
"Sorry, I just don't see the difference
anymore."
* * *
Robbie tore down the ocean simulation after R
Daneel Olivaw left, and simply traversed the Noosphere, exploring links between
people and subjects, locating substrate where he could run very hot and fast.
On a chunk of supercooled rock beyond Pluto, he
got an IM from a familiar address.
"Get off my rock," it said.
"I know you," Robbie said. "I
totally know you. Where do I know you from?"
"I'm sure I don't know."
And then he had it.
"You're the one. With the reef. You're the
one who—" The voice was the same, cold and distant.
"It wasn't me," the voice said. It was
anything but cold now. Panicked was more like it.
Robbie had the reef on speed-dial. There were bits
of it everywhere in the Noosphere. It liked to colonize.
"I found him." It was all Robbie needed
to say. He skipped to Saturn's rings, but the upload took long enough that he
got to watch the coral arrive and grimly begin an argument with its creator—an
argument that involved blasting the substrate one chunk at a time.
* * *
2^8192 Cycles Later
The last instance of Robbie the Row-Boat ran very,
very slow and cool on a piece of unregarded computronium in Low Earth Orbit. He
didn't like to spend a lot of time or cycles talking with anyone else. He
hadn't made a backup in half a millennium.
He liked the view. A little optical sensor on the
end of his communications mast imaged the Earth at high rez whenever he asked
it to. Sometimes he peeked in on the Coral Sea.
The reef had been awakened a dozen times since he
took up this post. It made him happy now when it happened. The Asimovist in him
still relished the creation of new consciousness. And the reef had spunk.
There. Now. There were new microwave horns growing
out of the sea. A stain of dead parrotfish. Poor parrotfish. They always got
the shaft at these times.
Someone should uplift them.
Ellen Klages has
shown herself to have an affinity for writing about the anxieties and ambitions
of youth, something that's particularly evident in her Nebula Award-winning
novelette "Basement Magic". Her first novel, The Green Glass Sea,
was published in 2006. Upcoming are story collection Portable Childhoods
and a sequel to The Green Glass Sea.
Many science fiction and fantasy readers can identify with the idea that
libraries are places of refuge and that librarians are people with some kind of
secret knowledge. Fewer though, might expect this charming and elegant tale of
a young girl raised by feral librarians.
Once upon a time, the Carnegie Library sat on a
wooded bluff on the east side of town: red brick and fieldstone, with turrets
and broad windows facing the trees. Inside, green glass-shaded lamps cast warm
yellow light onto oak tables ringed with spindle-backed chairs.
Books filled the dark shelves that stretched high
up toward the pressed-tin ceiling. The floors were wood, except in the foyer,
where they were pale beige marble. The loudest sounds were the ticking of the
clock and the quiet, rhythmic thwack of a rubber stamp on a pasteboard
card.
It was a cozy, orderly place.
Through twelve presidents and two world wars, the
elms and maples grew tall outside the deep bay windows. Children leapt from Peter
Pan to Oliver Twist and off to college, replaced at Story Hour by
their younger brothers, cousins, daughters.
Then the library board—men in suits, serious men,
men of money—met and cast their votes for progress. A new library, with
fluorescent lights, much better for the children's eyes. Picture windows,
automated systems, ergonomic plastic chairs. The town approved the levy, and
the new library was built across town, convenient to the community center and
the mall.
Some books were boxed and trundled down Broad
Street, many others stamped discard and left where they were, for a book sale
in the fall. Interns from the university used the latest technology to transfer
the cumbersome old card file and all the records onto floppy disks and
microfiche. Progress, progress, progress.
The Ralph P. Mossberger Library (named after the
local philanthropist and car dealer who had written the largest check) opened
on a drizzly morning in late April. Everyone attended the ribbon-cutting
ceremony and stayed for the speeches, because afterward there would be cake.
Everyone except the seven librarians from the
Carnegie Library on the bluff across town.
Quietly, without a fuss (they were librarians,
after all), while the town looked toward the future, they bought supplies:
loose tea and English biscuits, packets of Bird's pudding and cans of beef
barley soup. They rearranged some of the shelves, brought in a few comfortable
armchairs, nice china and teapots, a couch, towels for the shower, and some
small braided rugs.
Then they locked the door behind them.
Each morning they woke and went about their
chores. They shelved and stamped and catalogued, and in the evenings, every
night, they read by lamplight.
Perhaps, for a while, some citizens remembered the
old library, with the warm nostalgia of a favorite childhood toy that had
disappeared one summer, never seen again. Others assumed it had been torn down
long ago.
And so a year went by, then two, or perhaps a
great many more. Inside, time had ceased to matter. Grass and brambles grew
thick and tall around the fieldstone steps, and trees arched overhead as the
forest folded itself around them like a cloak.
Inside, the seven librarians lived, quiet and
content.
Until the day they found the baby.
* * *
Librarians are guardians of books. They help
others along their paths, offering keys to help unlock the doors of knowledge.
But these seven had become a closed circle, no one to guide, no new minds to
open onto worlds of possibility. They kept themselves busy, tidying orderly
shelves and mending barely frayed bindings with stiff netting and glue, and
began to bicker.
Ruth and Edith had been up half the night, arguing
about whether or not subway tokens (of which there were half a dozen in the
Lost and Found box) could be used to cast the I Ching. And so Blythe was
on the stepstool in the 299s, reshelving the volume of hexagrams, when she
heard the knock.
Odd, she thought. It's been some time since we've
had visitors.
She tugged futilely at her shapeless cardigan as
she clambered off the stool and trotted to the front door, where she stopped
abruptly, her hand to her mouth in surprise.
A wicker basket, its contents covered with a
red-checked cloth, as if for a picnic, lay in the wooden box beneath the Book
Return chute. A small, cream-colored envelope poked out from one side.
"How nice!" Blythe said aloud, clapping
her hands. She thought of fried chicken and potato salad—of which she was
awfully fond—a mason jar of lemonade, perhaps even a cherry pie? She lifted the
basket by its round-arched handle. Heavy, for a picnic. But then, there were
seven of them. Although Olive just ate like a bird, these days.
She turned and set it on top of the Circulation
Desk, pulling the envelope free.
"What's that?" Marian asked, her
lips in their accustomed moue of displeasure, as if the basket were an agent of
chaos, existing solely to disrupt the tidy array of rubber stamps and file
boxes that were her domain.
"A present," said Blythe. "I think
it might be lunch."
Marian frowned. "For you?"
"I don't know yet. There's a note. . ."
Blythe held up the envelope and peered at it. "No," she said.
"It's addressed to 'The Librarians. Overdue Books Department.' "
"Well, that would be me," Marian said
curtly. She was the youngest, and wore trouser suits with silk T-shirts. She
had once been blond. She reached across the counter, plucked the envelope from
Blythe's plump fingers, and sliced it open with a filigreed brass stiletto.
"Hmph," she said after she'd scanned the
contents.
"It is lunch, isn't it?" asked
Blythe.
"Hardly." Marian began to read aloud:
This is overdue. Quite a bit, I'm afraid.
I apologize. We moved to Topeka when I was very small, and Mother accidentally
packed it up with the linens. I have traveled a long way to return it, and I
know the fine must be large, but I have no money. As it is a book of fairy
tales, I thought payment of a first-born child would be acceptable. I always
loved the library. I'm sure she'll be happy there.
Blythe lifted the edge of the cloth. "Oh my
stars!"
A baby girl with a shock of wire-stiff black hair
stared up at her, green eyes wide and curious. She was contentedly chewing on
the corner of a blue book, half as big as she was. Fairy Tales of the
Brothers Grimm.
"The Rackham illustrations," Blythe said
as she eased the book away from the baby. "That's a lovely edition."
"But when was it checked out?" Marian
demanded.
Blythe opened the cover and pulled the ruled card
from the inside pocket. "October 17, 1938," she said, shaking her
head. "Goodness, at two cents a day, that's. . ." She shook her head
again. Blythe had never been good with figures.
* * *
They made a crib for her in the bottom drawer of a
file cabinet, displacing acquisition orders, zoning permits, and the
instructions for the mimeograph, which they rarely used.
Ruth consulted Dr. Spock. Edith read Piaget. The
two of them peered from text to infant and back again for a good long while
before deciding that she was probably about nine months old. They sighed. Too
young to read.
So they fed her cream and let her gum on biscuits,
and each of the seven cooed and clucked and tickled her pink toes when they
thought the others weren't looking. Harriet had been the oldest of nine girls,
and knew more about babies than she really cared to. She washed and changed the
diapers that had been tucked into the basket, and read Goodnight Moon
and Pat the Bunny to the little girl, whom she called Polly—short for
Polyhymnia, the muse of oratory and sacred song.
Blythe called her Bitsy, and Li'l Precious.
Marian called her "the foundling," or
"That Child You Took In," but did her share of cooing and clucking,
just the same.
When the child began to walk, Dorothy blocked the
staircase with stacks of Comptons, which she felt was an inferior encyclopedia,
and let her pull herself up on the bottom drawers of the card catalog. Anyone
looking up Zithers or Zippers (see "Slide Fasteners") soon
found many of the cards fused together with grape jam. When she began to talk,
they made a little bed nook next to the fireplace in the Children's Room.
It was high time for Olive to begin the child's
education.
* * *
Olive had been the children's librarian since
before recorded time, or so it seemed. No one knew how old she was, but she
vaguely remembered waving to President Coolidge. She still had all of her
marbles, though every one of them was a bit odd and rolled asymmetrically.
She slept on a day bed behind a reference shelf
that held My First Encyclopedia and The Wonder Book of Trees,
among others. Across the room, the child's first "big-girl bed" was
yellow, with decals of a fairy and a horse on the headboard, and a rocket ship
at the foot, because they weren't sure about her preferences.
At the beginning of her career, Olive had been an
ordinary-sized librarian, but by the time she began the child's lessons, she
was not much taller than her toddling charge. Not from osteoporosis or
dowager's hump or other old-lady maladies, but because she had tired of
stooping over tiny chairs and bending to knee-high shelves. She had been a grown-up
for so long that when the library closed she had decided it was time to grow
down again, and was finding that much more comfortable.
She had a remarkably cozy lap for a woman her
size.
The child quickly learned her alphabet, all the
shapes and colors, the names of zoo animals, and fourteen different kinds of
dinosaurs, all of whom were dead.
By the time she was four, or thereabouts, she
could sound out the letters for simple words—cup and lamp and stairs. And
that's how she came to name herself.
Olive had fallen asleep over Make Way for
Ducklings, and all the other librarians were busy somewhere else. The child
was bored. She tiptoed out of the Children's Room, hugging the shadows of the
walls and shelves, crawling by the base of the Circulation Desk so that Marian
wouldn't see her, and made her way to the alcove that held the Card Catalog.
The heart of the library. Her favorite, most forbidden place to play.
Usually she crawled underneath and tucked herself
into the corner formed of oak cabinet, marble floor, and plaster walls. It was
a fine place to play Hide and Seek, even if it was mostly just Hide. The corner
was a cave, a bunk on a pirate ship, a cupboard in a magic wardrobe.
But that afternoon she looked at the white cards
on the fronts of the drawers, and her eyes widened in recognition. Letters! In
her very own alphabet. Did they spell words? Maybe the drawers were all full
of words, a huge wooden box of words. The idea almost made her dizzy.
She walked to the other end of the cabinet and
looked up, tilting her neck back until it crackled. Four drawers from top to
bottom. Five drawers across. She sighed. She was only tall enough to reach the
bottom row of drawers. She traced a gentle finger around the little brass
frames, then very carefully pulled out the white cards inside, and laid them on
the floor in a neat row:
She squatted over them, her tongue sticking out of
the corner of her mouth in concentration, and tried to read.
"Sound it out." She could almost hear
Olive's voice, soft and patient. She took a deep breath.
"Duh-in-s—" and then she stopped,
because the last card had too many letters, and she didn't know any words that
had Xs in them. Well, xylophone. But the X was in the front, and that wasn't
the same. She tried anyway. "Duh-ins-zzzigh," and frowned.
She squatted lower, so low she could feel cold
marble under her cotton pants, and put her hand on top of the last card. One
finger covered the X and her pinky covered the Z (another letter that was
useless for spelling ordinary things). That left Y. Y at the end was good.
funnY. happY.
"Duh-ins-see," she said slowly.
"Dinsy."
That felt very good to say, hard and soft sounds
and hissing Ss mixing in her mouth, so she said it again, louder, which made
her laugh so she said it again, very loud: "dinsy!"
There is nothing quite like a loud voice in a
library to get a lot of attention very fast. Within a minute, all seven of the
librarians stood in the doorway of the alcove.
"What on earth?" said Harriet.
"Now what have you. . ." said Marian.
"What have you spelled, dear?" asked
Olive in her soft little voice.
"I made it myself," the girl replied.
"Just gibberish," murmured Edith, though
not unkindly. "It doesn't mean a thing."
The child shook her head. "Does so.
Olive," she said pointing to Olive. "Do'thy, Edith, Harwiet, Bithe,
Ruth." She paused and rolled her eyes. "Mawian," she added, a
little less cheerfully. Then she pointed to herself. "And Dinsy."
"Oh, now Polly," said Harriet.
"Dinsy," said Dinsy.
"Bitsy?" Blythe tried hopefully.
"Dinsy," said Dinsy.
And that was that.
* * *
At three every afternoon, Dinsy and Olive made a
two-person circle on the braided rug in front of the bay window, and had Story
Time. Sometimes Olive read aloud from Beezus and Ramona and Half
Magic, and sometimes Dinsy read to Olive, The King's Stilts, and In
the Night Kitchen and Winnie-the-Pooh. Dinsy liked that one
especially, and took it to bed with her so many times that Edith had to repair
the binding. Twice.
That was when Dinsy first wished upon the Library.
________________________________________
A note about the Library:
Knowledge is not static; information must flow in
order to live. Every so often one of the librarians would discover a new
addition. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone appeared one rainy
afternoon, Rowling shelved neatly between Rodgers and Saint-Exupéry, as if it
had always been there. Blythe found a book of Thich Nhat Hanh's writings in the
294s one day while she was dusting, and Feynman's lectures on physics showed up
on Dorothy's shelving cart after she'd gone to make a cup of tea.
It didn't happen often; the Library was selective
about what it chose to add, rejecting flash-in-the-pan bestsellers, sifting for
the long haul, looking for those voices that would stand the test of time next
to Dickens and Tolkien, Woolf and Gould.
The librarians took care of the books, and the
Library watched over them in return. It occasionally left treats: a bowl of
ripe tangerines on the formica counter of the Common Room; a gold foil box of
chocolate creams; seven small, stemmed glasses of sherry on the table one
teatime. Their biscuit tin remained full, the cream in the Wedgwood jug stayed
fresh, and the ink pad didn't dry out. Even the little pencils stayed needle
sharp, never whittling down to finger-cramping nubs.
Some days the Library even hid Dinsy, when she had
made a mess and didn't want to be found, or when one of the librarians was in a
dark mood. It rearranged itself, just a bit, so that in her wanderings she
would find a new alcove or cubbyhole, and once a secret passage that led to a
previously unknown balcony overlooking the Reading Room. When she went back a
week later, she found only blank wall.
________________________________________
And so it was, one night when she was sixish, that
Dinsy first asked the Library for a boon. Lying in her tiny yellow bed, the
fraying Pooh under her pillow, she wished for a bear to cuddle. Books
were small comfort once the lights were out, and their hard, sharp corners made
them awkward companions under the covers. She lay with one arm crooked around a
soft, imaginary bear, and wished and wished until her eyelids fluttered into
sleep.
The next morning, while they were all having tea
and toast with jam, Blythe came into the Common Room with a quizzical look on
her face and her hands behind her back.
"The strangest thing," she said.
"On my way up here I glanced over at the Lost and Found. Couldn't tell you
why. Nothing lost in ages. But this must have caught my eye."
She held out a small brown bear, one shoebutton
eye missing, bits of fur gone from its belly, as if it had been loved almost to
pieces.
"It seems to be yours," she said with a
smile, turning up one padded foot, where dinsy was written in faded
laundry-marker black.
Dinsy wrapped her whole self around the cotton-stuffed
body and skipped for the rest of the morning. Later, after Olive gave her a
snack—cocoa and a Lorna Doone—Dinsy cupped her hand and blew a kiss to the oak
woodwork.
"Thank you," she whispered, and put half
her cookie in a crack between two tiles on the Children's Room fireplace when
Olive wasn't looking.
Dinsy and Olive had a lovely time. One week they
were pirates, raiding the Common Room for booty (and raisins). The next they
were princesses, trapped in the turret with At the Back of the North Wind,
and the week after that they were knights in shining armor, rescuing damsels in
distress, a game Dinsy especially savored because it annoyed Marian to be
rescued.
But the year she turned seven-and-a-half, Dinsy
stopped reading stories. Quite abruptly, on an afternoon that Olive said later
had really felt like a Thursday.
"Stories are for babies," Dinsy said.
"I want to read about real people." Olive smiled a sad smile
and pointed toward the far wall, because Dinsy was not the first child to make
that same pronouncement, and she had known this phase would come.
After that, Dinsy devoured biographies, starting
with the orange ones, the Childhoods of Famous Americans: Thomas Edison,
Young Inventor. She worked her way from Abigail Adams to John Peter Zenger,
all along the west side of the Children's Room, until one day she went around
the corner, where Science and History began.
She stood in the doorway, looking at the rows of
grown-up books, when she felt Olive's hand on her shoulder.
"Do you think maybe it's time you moved
across the hall?" Olive asked softly.
Dinsy bit her lip, then nodded. "I can come
back to visit, can't I? When I want to read stories again?"
"For as long as you like, dear. Anytime at
all."
So Dorothy came and gathered up the bear and the
pillow and the yellow toothbrush. Dinsy kissed Olive on her papery cheek and,
holding Blythe's hand, moved across the hall, to the room where all the books
had numbers.
* * *
Blythe was plump and freckled and frizzled. She
always looked a little flushed, as if she had just that moment dropped what she
was doing to rush over and greet you. She wore rumpled tweed skirts and a
shapeless cardigan whose original color was impossible to guess. She had
bright, dark eyes like a spaniel's, which Dinsy thought was appropriate,
because Blythe lived to fetch books. She wore a locket with a small
rotogravure picture of Melvil Dewey and kept a variety of sweets—sour balls and
mints and Necco wafers—in her desk drawer.
Dinsy had always liked her.
She was not as sure about Dorothy.
Over her desk, Dorothy had a small framed
medal on a royal-blue ribbon, won for "Excellence in Classification
Studies." She could operate the ancient black Remington typewriter with
brisk efficiency, and even, on occasion, coax chalky gray prints out of the
wheezing old copy machine.
She was a tall, raw-boned woman with steely blue
eyes, good posture, and even better penmanship. Dinsy was a little frightened
of her, at first, because she seemed so stern, and because she looked like
magazine pictures of the Wicked Witch of the West, or at least Margaret
Hamilton.
But that didn't last long.
"You should be very careful not to slip on
the floor in here," Dorothy said on their first morning. "Do you know
why?"
Dinsy shook her head.
"Because now you're in the non-friction
room!" Dorothy's angular face cracked into a wide grin.
Dinsy groaned. "Okay," she said after a
minute. "How do you file marshmallows?"
Dorothy cocked her head. "Shoot."
"By the Gooey Decimal System!"
Dinsy heard Blythe tsk-tsk, but Dorothy laughed
out loud, and from then on they were fast friends.
The three of them used the large, sunny room as an
arena for endless games of I Spy and Twenty Questions as Dinsy learned her way
around the shelves. In the evenings, after supper, they played Authors and
Scrabble, and (once) tried to keep a running rummy score in Base Eight.
Dinsy sat at the court of Napoleon, roamed the
jungles near Timbuktu, and was a frequent guest at the Round Table. She knew
all the kings of England and the difference between a pergola and a folly. She
knew the names of 112 breeds of sheep, and loved to say "Barbados
Blackbelly" over and over, although it was difficult to work into
conversations. When she affectionately, if misguidedly, referred to Blythe as a
"Persian Fat-Rumped," she was sent to bed without supper.
________________________________________
A note about time:
Time had become quite flexible inside the Library.
(This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for
twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have
gone.)
As a consequence, no one was really sure about the
day of the week, and there was frequent disagreement about the month and year.
As the keeper of the date stamp at the front desk, Marian was the arbiter of
such things. But she often had a cocktail after dinner, and many mornings she
couldn't recall if she'd already turned the little wheel, nor how often it had
slipped her mind, so she frequently set it a day or two ahead—or back
three—just to make up.
________________________________________
One afternoon, on a visit to Olive and the
Children's Room, Dinsy looked up from Little Town on the Prairie and
said, "When's my birthday?"
Olive thought for a moment. Because of the
irregularities of time, holidays were celebrated a bit haphazardly. "I'm
not sure, dear. Why do you ask?"
"Laura's going to a birthday party, in this
book," she said, holding it up. "And it's fun. So I thought maybe I
could have one."
"I think that would be lovely," Olive
agreed. "We'll talk to the others at supper."
"Your birthday?" said Harriet as she set
the table a few hours later. "Let me see." She began to count on her
fingers. "You arrived in April, according to Marian's stamp, and you were
about nine months old, so—" She pursed her lips as she ticked off the
months. "You must have been born in July!"
"But when's my birthday?" Dinsy
asked impatiently.
"Not sure," said Edith, as she ladled
out the soup.
"No way to tell," Olive agreed.
"How does July 5 sound?" offered Blythe,
as if it were a point of order to be voted on. Blythe counted best by fives.
"Fourth," said Dorothy.
"Independence Day. Easy to remember?"
Dinsy shrugged. "Okay." It hadn't seemed
so complicated in the Little House book. "When is that? Is it soon?"
"Probably," Ruth nodded.
A few weeks later, the librarians threw her a
birthday party.
Harriet baked a spice cake with pink frosting, and
wrote dinsy on top in red licorice laces, dotting the I with a lemon drop
(which was rather stale). The others gave her gifts that were thoughtful and
mostly handmade:
A set of Dewey Decimal flash cards from Blythe.
A book of logic puzzles (stamped discard more than
a dozen times, so Dinsy could write in it) from Dorothy.
A lumpy orange-and-green cardigan Ruth knitted for
her.
A sno-globe from the 1939 World's Fair from Olive.
A flashlight from Edith, so that Dinsy could find
her way around at night and not knock over the wastebasket again.
A set of paper finger puppets, made from blank
card pockets, hand-painted by Marian. (They were literary figures, of course,
all of them necessarily stout and squarish—Nero Wolfe and Friar Tuck, Santa
Claus and Gertrude Stein.)
But her favorite gift was the second boon she'd
wished upon the Library: a box of crayons. (She had grown very tired of drawing
gray pictures with the little pencils.) It had produced Crayola crayons, in the
familiar yellow-and-green box, labeled library pack. Inside were the colors of
Dinsy's world: Reference Maroon, Brown Leather, Peplum Beige, Reader's Guide
Green, World Book Red, Card Catalog Cream, Date Stamp Purple, and Palatino
Black.
It was a very special birthday, that fourth of
July. Although Dinsy wondered about Marian's calculations. As Harriet cut the
first piece of cake that evening, she remarked that it was snowing rather
heavily outside, which everyone agreed was lovely, but quite unusual for that
time of year.
* * *
Dinsy soon learned all the planets, and many of
their moons. (She referred to herself as Umbriel for an entire month.) She
puffed up her cheeks and blew onto stacks of scrap paper. "Sirocco,"
she'd whisper. "Chinook. Mistral. Willy-Willy," and rated her
attempts on the Beaufort Scale. Dorothy put a halt to it after Hurricane Dinsy
reshuffled a rather elaborate game of Patience.
She dipped into fractals here, double dactyls
there. When she tired of a subject—or found it just didn't suit her—Blythe or
Dorothy would smile and proffer the hat. It was a deep green felt that held
1000 slips of paper, numbered 001 to 999. Dinsy'd scrunch her eyes closed, pick
one and, like a scavenger hunt, spend the morning (or the next three weeks) at
the shelves indicated.
Pangolins lived at 599 (point 31), and Pancakes at
641. Pencils were at 674 but Pens were a shelf away at 681, and Ink was across
the aisle at 667. (Dinsy thought that was stupid, because you had to use them
together.) Pluto the planet was at 523, but Pluto the Disney dog was at 791
(point 453), near "Rock and Roll" and Kazoos.
It was all very useful information. But in Dinsy's
opinion, things could be a little too organized.
The first time she straightened up the Common Room
without anyone asking, she was very pleased with herself. She had lined up
everyone's teacup in a neat row on the shelf, with all the handles curving the
same way, and arranged the spices in the little wooden rack: anise, bay leaves,
chives, dill weed, peppercorns, salt, sesame seeds, sugar.
"Look," she said when Blythe came in to
refresh her tea, "order out of chaos." It was one of Blythe's
favorite mottoes.
Blythe smiled and looked over at the spice rack.
Then her smile faded and she shook her head.
"Is something wrong?" Dinsy asked. She
had hoped for a compliment.
"Well, you used the alphabet," said
Blythe, sighing. "I suppose it's not your fault. You were with Olive for a
good many years. But you're a big girl now. You should learn the proper
order." She picked up the salt container. "We'll start with
Salt." She wrote the word on the little chalkboard hanging by the icebox,
followed by the number 553.632. "Five-five-three-point-six-three-two.
Because—?"
Dinsy thought for a moment. "Earth
Sciences."
"Ex-actly." Blythe beamed. "Because
salt is a mineral. But, now, chives. Chives are a garden crop, so they're. .
."
Dinsy bit her lip in concentration.
"Six-thirty-something."
"Very good." Blythe smiled again and
chalked chives 635.26 on the board. "So you see, Chives should always be
shelved after Salt, dear."
Blythe turned and began to rearrange the eight
ceramic jars. Behind her back, Dinsy silently rolled her eyes.
Edith appeared in the doorway.
"Oh, not again," she said. "No
wonder I can't find a thing in this kitchen. Blythe, I've told you. Bay
Leaf comes first. QK-four-nine—" She had worked at the university when she
was younger.
"Library of Congress, my fanny," said
Blythe, not quite under her breath. "We're not that kind of
library."
"It's no excuse for imprecision," Edith
replied. They each grabbed a jar and stared at each other.
Dinsy tiptoed away and hid in the 814s, where she
read "Jabberwocky" until the coast was clear.
But the kitchen remained a taxonomic battleground.
At least once a week, Dinsy was amused by the indignant sputtering of someone
who had just spooned dill weed, not sugar, into the pot of Earl Grey tea.
* * *
Once she knew her way around, Dinsy was free to
roam the library as she chose.
"Anywhere?" she asked Blythe.
"Anywhere you like, my sweet. Except the
Stacks. You're not quite old enough for the Stacks."
Dinsy frowned. "I am so," she
muttered. But the Stacks were locked, and there wasn't much she could do.
Some days she sat with Olive in the Children's
Room, revisiting old friends, or explored the maze of the Main Room. Other days
she spent in the Reference Room, where Ruth and Harriet guarded the big
important books that no one could ever, ever check out—not even when the
library had been open.
Ruth and Harriet were like a set of salt and
pepper shakers from two different yard sales. Harriet had faded orange hair and
a sharp, kind face. Small and pinched and pointed, a decade or two away from
wizened. She had violet eyes and a mischievous, conspiratorial smile and wore
rimless octagonal glasses, like stop signs. Dinsy had never seen an actual stop
sign, but she'd looked at pictures.
Ruth was Chinese. She wore wool jumpers in neon
plaids and had cat's-eye glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. She never
put them all the way on, just lifted them to her eyes and peered through them
without opening the bows.
"Life is a treasure hunt," said Harriet.
"Knowledge is power," said Ruth.
"Knowing where to look is half the battle."
"Half the fun," added Harriet. Ruth
almost never got the last word.
They introduced Dinsy to dictionaries and
almanacs, encyclopedias and compendiums. They had been native guides through
the country of the Dry Tomes for many years, but they agreed that Dinsy delved
unusually deep.
"Would you like to take a break, love?"
Ruth asked one afternoon. "It's nearly time for tea."
"I am fatigued," Dinsy replied,
looking up from Roget. "Fagged out, weary, a bit spent. Tea would
be pleasant, agreeable—"
"I'll put the kettle on," sighed Ruth.
Dinsy read Bartlett's as if it were a
catalog of conversations, spouting lines from Tennyson, Mark Twain, and Dale
Carnegie until even Harriet put her hands over her ears and began to hum
"Stairway to Heaven."
One or two evenings a month, usually after Blythe
had remarked, "Well, she's a spirited girl," for the third time, they
all took the night off, "For Library business." Olive or Dorothy
would tuck Dinsy in early and read from one of her favorites while Ruth made
her a bedtime treat—a cup of spiced tea that tasted a little like cherries and
a little like varnish, and which Dinsy somehow never remembered finishing.
________________________________________
A list (written in diverse hands), tacked
to the wall of the Common Room.
10 Things to Remember When You Live in a
Library
1. We do not play shuffleboard on the Reading Room
table.
2. Books should not have "dog's-ears."
Bookmarks make lovely presents.
3. Do not write in books. Even in pencil. Puzzle
collections and connect-the-dots are books.
4. The shelving cart is not a scooter.
5. Library paste is not food.
[Marginal note in a child's hand: True. It tastes
like Cream of Wrong Soup.]
6. Do not use the date stamp to mark your banana.
7. Shelves are not monkey bars.
8. Do not play 982-pickup with the P-Q drawer (or
any other).
9. The dumbwaiter is only for books. It is not a
carnival ride.
10. Do not drop volumes of the Britannica off the
stairs to hear the echo.
________________________________________
They were an odd, but contented family. There were
rules, to be sure, but Dinsy never lacked for attention. With seven mothers,
there was always someone to talk with, a hankie for tears, a lap or a shoulder
to share a story.
Most evenings, when Dorothy had made a fire in the
Reading Room and the wooden shelves gleamed in the flickering light, they would
all sit in companionable silence. Ruth knitted, Harriet muttered over an
acrostic, Edith stirred the cocoa so it wouldn't get a skin. Dinsy sat on the
rug, her back against the knees of whomever was her favorite that week, and
felt safe and warm and loved. "God's in his heaven, all's right with the
world," as Blythe would say.
But as she watched the moon peep in and out of the
clouds through the leaded-glass panes of the tall windows, Dinsy often wondered
what it would be like to see the whole sky, all around her.
* * *
First Olive and then Dorothy had been in charge of
Dinsy's thick dark hair, trimming it with the mending shears every few weeks
when it began to obscure her eyes. But a few years into her second decade at
the library, Dinsy began cutting it herself, leaving it as wild and spiky as
the brambles outside the front door.
That was not the only change.
"We haven't seen her at breakfast in
weeks," Harriet said as she buttered a scone one morning.
"Months. And all she reads is Salinger. Or
Sylvia Plath," complained Dorothy. "I wouldn't mind that so much, but
she just leaves them on the table for me to reshelve."
"It's not as bad as what she did to
Olive," Marian said. "The Golden Compass appeared last week,
and she thought Dinsy would enjoy it. But not only did she turn up her nose,
she had the gall to say to Olive, 'Leave me alone. I can find my own books.'
Imagine. Poor Olive was beside herself."
"She used to be such a sweet child,"
Blythe sighed. "What are we going to do?"
"Now, now. She's just at that age,"
Edith said calmly. "She's not really a child anymore. She needs some
privacy, and some responsibility. I have an idea."
And so it was that Dinsy got her own room—with a
door that shut—in a corner of the second floor. It had been a tiny
cubbyhole of an office, but it had a set of slender curved stairs, wrought iron
worked with lilies and twigs, which led up to the turret between the red-tiled
eaves.
The round tower was just wide enough for Dinsy's
bed, with windows all around. There had once been a view of the town, but now
trees and ivy allowed only jigsaw puzzle-shaped puddles of light to dapple the
wooden floor. At night the puddles were luminous blue splotches of moonlight
that hinted of magic beyond her reach.
On the desk in the room below, centered in a pool
of yellow lamplight, Edith had left a note: Come visit me. There's mending
to be done, and a worn brass key on a wooden paddle, stenciled with the
single word: stacks.
The Stacks were in the basement, behind a locked
gate at the foot of the metal spiral staircase that descended from the 600s.
They had always reminded Dinsy of the steps down to the dungeon in The
King's Stilts. Darkness below hinted at danger, but adventure. Terra
Incognita.
Dinsy didn't use her key the first day, or the
second. Mending? Boring. But the afternoon of the third day, she ventured down
the spiral stairs. She had been as far as the gate before, many times, because
it was forbidden, to peer through the metal mesh at the dimly lighted shelves
and imagine what treasures might be hidden there.
She had thought that the Stacks would be damp and
cold, strewn with odd bits of discarded library flotsam. Instead they were cool
and dry, and smelled very different from upstairs. Dustier, with hints of mold
and the tang of vintage leather, an undertone of vinegar stored in an old shoe.
Unlike the main floor, with its polished wood and
airy high ceilings, the Stacks were a low, cramped warren of gunmetal gray
shelves that ran floor-to-ceiling in narrow aisles. Seven levels twisted behind
the west wall of the library like a secret labyrinth than ran from below the
ground to up under the eaves of the roof. Floor and steps were translucent
glass brick and six-foot ceilings strung with pipes and ducts were lit by
single caged bulbs, two to an aisle.
It was a windowless fortress of books. Upstairs
the shelves were mosaics of all colors and sizes, but the Stacks were filled
with geometric monochrome blocks of subdued colors: eight dozen forest-green
bound volumes of Ladies Home Journal filled five rows of shelves,
followed by an equally large block of identical dark red LIFEs.
Dinsy felt like she was in another world. She was
not lost, but for the first time in her life, she was not easily found, and
that suited her. She could sit, invisible, and listen to the sounds of library
life going on around her. From Level Three she could hear Ruth humming in the
Reference Room on the other side of the wall. Four feet away, and it felt like
miles. She wandered and browsed for a month before she presented herself at
Edith's office.
A frosted glass pane in the dark wood door said
mending room in chipping gold letters. The door was open a few inches, and
Dinsy could see a long workbench strewn with sewn folios and bits of leather
bindings, spools of thread and bottles of thick beige glue.
"I gather you're finding your way
around," Edith said without turning in her chair. "I haven't had to
send out a search party."
"Pretty much," Dinsy replied. "I've
been reading old magazines." She flopped into a chair to the left of the
door.
"One of my favorite things," Edith
agreed. "It's like time travel." Edith was a tall, solid woman with
long graying hair that she wove into elaborate buns and twisted braids, secured
with #2 pencils and a single tortoiseshell comb. She wore blue jeans and vests
in brightly muted colors—pale teal and lavender and dusky rose—with a strand of
lapis lazuli beads cut in rough ovals.
Edith repaired damaged books, a job that was less
demanding now that nothing left the building. But some of the bound volumes of
journals and abstracts and magazines went back as far as 1870, and their
leather bindings were crumbling into dust. The first year, Dinsy's job was to
go through the aisles, level by level, and find the volumes that needed the
most help. Edith gave her a clipboard and told her to check in now and then.
Dinsy learned how to take apart old books and put
them back together again. Her first mending project was the tattered 1877
volume of American Naturalist, with its articles on "Educated
Fleas" and "Barnacles" and "The Cricket as
Thermometer." She sewed pages into signatures, trimmed leather and
marbleized paper. Edith let her make whatever she wanted out of the scraps, and
that year Dinsy gave everyone miniature replicas of their favorite volumes for
Christmas.
She liked the craft, liked doing something with
her hands. It took patience and concentration, and that was oddly soothing.
After supper, she and Edith often sat and talked for hours, late into the
night, mugs of cocoa on their workbenches, the rest of the library dark and
silent above them.
"What's it like outside?" Dinsy asked
one night, while she was waiting for some glue to dry.
Edith was silent for a long time, long enough that
Dinsy wondered if she'd spoken too softly, and was about to repeat the
question, when Edith replied.
"Chaos."
That was not anything Dinsy had expected. "What
do you mean?"
"It's noisy. It's crowded. Everything's
always changing, and not in any way you can predict."
"That sounds kind of exciting," Dinsy
said.
"Hmm." Edith thought for a moment.
"Yes, I suppose it could be."
Dinsy mulled that over and fiddled with a scrap of
leather, twisting it in her fingers before she spoke again. "Do you ever
miss it?"
Edith turned on her stool and looked at Dinsy.
"Not often," she said slowly. "Not as often as I'd thought. But
then I'm awfully fond of order. Fonder than most, I suppose. This is a better
fit."
Dinsy nodded and took a sip of her cocoa.
A few months later, she asked the Library for a
third and final boon.
* * *
The evening that everything changed, Dinsy sat in
the armchair in her room, reading Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (for
the third time), imagining what it would be like to talk to Glencora, when a
tentative knock sounded at the door.
"Dinsy? Dinsy?" said a tiny familiar
voice. "It's Olive, dear."
Dinsy slid her read! bookmark into chapter 14 and
closed the book. "It's open," she called.
Olive padded in wearing a red flannel robe, her
feet in worn carpet slippers. Dinsy expected her to proffer a book, but instead
Olive said, "I'd like you to come with me, dear." Her blue eyes shone
with excitement.
"What for?" They had all done a nice
reading of As You Like It a few days before, but Dinsy didn't remember
any plans for that night. Maybe Olive just wanted company. Dinsy had been
meaning to spend an evening in the Children's Room, but hadn't made it down
there in months.
But Olive surprised her. "It's Library
business," she said, waggling her finger, but smiling.
Now, that was intriguing. For years, whenever the
librarians wanted an evening to themselves, they'd disappear down into the
Stacks after supper, and would never tell her why. "It's Library
business," was all they ever said. When she was younger, Dinsy had tried
to follow them, but it's hard to sneak in a quiet place. She was always caught
and given that awful cherry tea. The next thing she knew it was morning.
"Library business?" Dinsy said slowly.
"And I'm invited?"
"Yes, dear. You're practically all grown up
now. It's high time you joined us."
"Great." Dinsy shrugged, as if it were
no big deal, trying to hide her excitement. And maybe it wasn't a big deal.
Maybe it was a meeting of the rules committee, or plans for moving the 340s to
the other side of the window again. But what if it was something
special. . .? That was both exciting and a little scary.
She wiggled her feet into her own slippers and
stood up. Olive barely came to her knees. Dinsy touched the old woman's white
hair affectionately, remembering when she used to snuggle into that soft lap.
Such a long time ago.
A library at night is a still but resonant place.
The only lights were the sconces along the walls, and Dinsy could hear the
faint echo of each footfall on the stairs down to the foyer. They walked
through the shadows of the shelves in the Main Room, back to the 600s, and down
the metal stairs to the Stacks, footsteps ringing hollowly.
The lower level was dark except for a single caged
bulb above the rows of National Geographics, their yellow bindings pale
against the gloom. Olive turned to the left.
"Where are we going?" Dinsy asked. It
was so odd to be down there with Olive.
"You'll see," Olive said. Dinsy could
practically feel her smiling in the dark. "You'll see."
She led Dinsy down an aisle of boring municipal
reports and stopped at the far end, in front of the door to the janitorial
closet set into the stone wall. She pulled a long, old-fashioned brass key from
the pocket of her robe and handed it to Dinsy.
"You open it, dear. The keyhole's a bit high
for me."
Dinsy stared at the key, at the door, back at the
key. She'd been fantasizing about "Library business" since she was
little, imagining all sorts of scenarios, none of them involving cleaning
supplies. A monthly poker game. A secret tunnel into town, where they all went
dancing, like the twelve princesses. Or a book group, reading forbidden texts.
And now they were inviting her in? What a letdown if it was just maintenance.
She put the key in the lock. "Funny,"
she said as she turned it. "I've always wondered what went on when
you—" Her voice caught in her throat. The door opened, not onto the closet
of mops and pails and bottles of Pine-Sol she expected, but onto a small room,
paneled in wood the color of ancient honey. An Oriental rug in rich, deep reds
lay on the parquet floor, and the room shone with the light of dozens of
candles. There were no shelves, no books, just a small fireplace at one end
where a log crackled in the hearth.
"Surprise," said Olive softly. She
gently tugged Dinsy inside.
All the others were waiting, dressed in flowing
robes of different colors. Each of them stood in front of a Craftsman rocker,
dark wood covered in soft brown leather.
Edith stepped forward and took Dinsy's hand. She
gave it a gentle squeeze and said, under her breath, "Don't worry."
Then she winked and led Dinsy to an empty rocker. "Stand here," she
said, and returned to her own seat.
Stunned, Dinsy stood, her mouth open, her feelings
a kaleidoscope.
"Welcome, dear one," said Dorothy.
"We'd like you to join us." Her face was serious, but her eyes were
bright, as if she was about to tell a really awful riddle and couldn't wait for
the reaction.
Dinsy started. That was almost word-for-word what
Olive had said, and it made her nervous. She wasn't sure what was coming, and
was even less sure that she was ready.
"Introductions first." Dorothy closed
her eyes and intoned, "I am Lexica. I serve the Library." She bowed
her head once and sat down.
Dinsy stared, her eyes wide and her mind reeling
as each of the Librarians repeated what was obviously a familiar rite.
"I am Juvenilia," said Olive with a
twinkle. "I serve the Library."
"Incunabula," said Edith.
"Sapientia," said Harriet.
"Ephemera," said Marian.
"Marginalia," said Ruth.
"Melvilia," said Blythe, smiling at
Dinsy. "And I too serve the Library."
And then they were all seated, and all looking up
at Dinsy.
"How old are you now, my sweet?" asked
Harriet.
Dinsy frowned. It wasn't as easy a question as it
sounded. "Seventeen," she said after a few seconds. "Or close
enough."
"No longer a child," Harriet nodded.
There was a touch of sadness in her voice. "That is why we are here
tonight. To ask you to join us."
There was something so solemn in Harriet's voice
that it made Dinsy's stomach knot up. "I don't understand," she said
slowly. "What do you mean? I've been here my whole life.
Practically."
Dorothy shook her head. "You have been in
the Library, but not of the Library. Think of it as an apprenticeship.
We have nothing more to teach you. So we're asking if you'll take a Library
name and truly become one of us. There have always been seven to serve the
Library."
Dinsy looked around the room. "Won't I be the
eighth?" she asked. She was curious, but she was also stalling for time.
"No, dear," said Olive. "You'll be
taking my place. I'm retiring. I can barely reach the second shelves these
days, and soon I'll be no bigger than the dictionary. I'm going to put my feet
up and sit by the fire and take it easy. I've earned it," she said with a
decisive nod.
"Here, here," said Blythe. "And
well done, too."
There was a murmur of assent around the room.
Dinsy took a deep breath, and then another. She
looked around the room at the eager faces of the seven librarians, the only
mothers she had ever known. She loved them all, and was about to disappoint
them, because she had a secret of her own. She closed her eyes so she wouldn't
see their faces, not at first.
"I can't take your place, Olive," she
said quietly, and heard the tremor in her own voice as she fought back tears.
All around her the librarians clucked in surprise.
Ruth recovered first. "Well, of course not. No one's asking you to
replace Olive, we're merely—"
"I can't join you," Dinsy repeated. Her
voice was just as quiet, but it was stronger. "Not now."
"But why not, sweetie?" That was
Blythe, who sounded as if she were about to cry herself.
"Fireworks," said Dinsy after a moment.
She opened her eyes. "Six-sixty-two-point-one." She smiled at Blythe.
"I know everything about them. But I've never seen any." She
looked from face to face again.
"I've never petted a dog or ridden a bicycle
or watched the sun rise over the ocean," she said, her voice gaining
courage. "I want to feel the wind and eat an ice cream cone at a carnival.
I want to smell jasmine on a spring night and hear an orchestra. I want—"
she faltered, and then continued, "I want the chance to dance with a
boy."
She turned to Dorothy. "You said you have
nothing left to teach me. Maybe that's true. I've learned from each of you that
there's nothing in the world I can't discover and explore for myself in these
books. Except the world," she added in a whisper. She felt her eyes fill
with tears. "You chose the Library. I can't do that without knowing what
else there might be."
"You're leaving?" Ruth asked in a
choked voice.
Dinsy bit her lip and nodded. "I'm, well,
I've—" She'd been practicing these words for days, but they were so much
harder than she'd thought. She looked down at her hands.
And then Marian rescued her.
"Dinsy's going to college," she said.
"Just like I did. And you, and you, and you." She pointed a finger at
each of the women in the room. "We were girls before we were librarians,
remember? It's her turn now."
"But how—?" asked Edith.
"Where did—?" stammered Harriet.
"I wished on the Library," said Dinsy.
"And it left an application in the Unabridged. Marian helped me fill it
out."
"I am in charge of circulation,"
said Marian. "What comes in, what goes out. We found her acceptance letter
in the book return last week."
"But you had no transcripts," said
Dorothy practically. "Where did you tell them you'd gone to school?"
Dinsy smiled. "That was Marian's idea. We
told them I was home-schooled, raised by feral librarians."
* * *
And so it was that on a bright September morning,
for the first time in ages, the heavy oak door of the Carnegie Library swung
open. Everyone stood in the doorway, blinking in the sunlight.
"Promise you'll write," said Blythe,
tucking a packet of sweets into the basket on Dinsy's arm. The others nodded.
"Yes, do."
"I'll try," she said. "But you
never know how long anything will take around here." She tried to
make a joke of it, but she was holding back tears and her heart was hammering a
mile a minute.
"You will come back, won't you? I can't put
off my retirement forever." Olive was perched on top of the Circulation
Desk.
"To visit, yes." Dinsy leaned over and
kissed her cheek. "I promise. But to serve? I don't know. I have no idea
what I'm going to find out there." She looked out into the forest that
surrounded the library. "I don't even know if I'll be able to get back in,
through all that."
"Take this. It will always get you in,"
said Marian. She handed Dinsy a small stiff pasteboard card with a metal plate
in one corner, embossed with her name: dinsy carnegie.
"What is it?" asked Dinsy.
"Your library card."
There were hugs all around, and tears and
goodbyes. But in the end, the seven librarians stood back and watched her go.
Dinsy stepped out into the world as she had
come—with a wicker basket and a book of fairy tales, full of hopes and dreams.
Christopher Rowe
attended both the Clarion West and Sycamore Hill writing workshops. With his
wife, writer Gwenda Bond, he runs a small press, The Fortress of Words, which
produces a critically acclaimed magazine, Say. . . His story "The
Voluntary State" was a Hugo, Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon award finalist.
The best of his early short fiction was collected in chapbook Bittersweet
Creek.
Rowe published two terrific stories in 2006, the darkly odd "The
League of Last Girls," and this quirky look at the literalisation of
faith. If religion changes how you see the world, shouldn't your faith change
the world?
The little drivers threw baggage down from the top
of the bus and out from its rusty undercarriage vaults. This was the last stop.
The road broke just beyond here, a hundred yards short of the creek.
With her fingertip, Sandy traced the inked ridge
northeast along the map, then rolled the soft leather into a cylinder and
tucked it inside her vest. She looked around for her pack and saw it tumbled
together with the other Cartographers' luggage at the base of a catalpa tree.
Lucas and the others were sorting already, trying to lend their gear some
organization, but the stop was a tumult of noise and disorder.
The high country wind shrilled against the rush of
the stony creek; disembarkees pawed for their belongings and tried to make
sense of the delicate, coughing talk of the unchurched little drivers. On the
other side of the valley, across the creek, the real ridge line—the geology,
her father would have said disdainfully—stabbed upstream. By her rough
estimation it had rolled perhaps two degrees off the angle of its writ mapping.
Lucas would determine the exact discrepancy later, when he extracted his
instruments from their feather and wax-paper wrappings.
"Third world bullshit," Lucas
said, walking up to her. "The transit services people from the university
paid these little schemers before we ever climbed onto that deathtrap, and now
they're asking for the fare." Lucas had been raised near the border, right
outside the last town the bus had stopped at, in fact, though he'd dismissed
the notion of visiting any family. His patience with the locals ran inverse to
his familiarity with them.
"Does this count as the third world?"
she asked him. "Doesn't there have to be a general for that? Rain forests
and steel ruins?"
Lucas gave his half-grin—not quite a
smirk—acknowledging her reduction. Cartographers were famous for their willful
ignorance of social expressions like politics and history.
"Carmen paid them, anyway," he told her
as they walked towards their group. "Probably out of her own pocket,
thanks be for wealthy dilettantes."
"Not fair," said Sandy. "She's as
sharp as any student in the seminar, and a better hand with the plotter than
most post-docs, much less grad students."
Lucas stopped. "I hate that," he said
quietly. "I hate when you separate yourself; go out of your way to remind
me that you're a teacher and I'm a student."
Sandy said the same thing she always did. "I
hate when you forget it."
* * *
Against all odds, they were still meeting the
timetable they'd drawn up back at the university, all those months ago. The bus
pulled away in a cloud of noxious diesel fumes an hour before dark, leaving its
passengers in a muddy camp dotted with fire rings but otherwise marked only by
a hand-lettered sign pointing the way to a primitive latrine.
The handful of passengers not connected with
Sandy's group had melted into the forest as soon as they'd found their packages.
("Salt and sugar," Lucas had said. "They're backwoods
people—hedge shamans and survivalists. There's every kind of lunatic out
here.") This left Sandy to stand by and pretend authority while the
Forestry graduate student whose services she'd borrowed showed them all how to
set up their camps.
Carmen, naturally, had convinced the young man to
demonstrate tent pitching to the others using her own expensive rig as an
example. The olive-skinned girl sat in a camp chair folding an onionskin scroll
back on itself and writing in a wood-bound notebook while the others struggled
with canvas and willow poles.
"Keeping track of our progress?" Sandy
asked, easing herself onto the ground next to Carmen.
"I have determined," Carmen replied, not
looking up, "that we have traveled as far from a hot water heater as is
possible and still be within Christendom."
Sandy smiled, but shook her head, thinking of the
most remote places she'd ever been. "Davis?" she asked, watching her
student's reaction to the mention of that unholy town.
Carmen, a Californian, shuddered but kept her
focus. "There's a naval base in San Francisco, sí? They've got all the
amenities, surely."
Sandy considered again, thinking of cold camps in
old mountains, and of muddy jungle towns ten days' walk from the closest bus
station.
"Cape Canaveral," she said.
With quick, precise movements, Carmen folded a
tiny desktop over her chair's arm and spread her scroll out flat. She drew a
pair of calipers out from her breast pocket and took measurements, pausing once
to roll the scroll a few turns. Finally, she gave a satisfied smile and said,
"Only fifty-five miles from Orlando. We're almost twice that from
Louisville."
She'd made the mistake Sandy had expected of her.
"But Orlando, Señorita Reyes, is Catholic. And we were speaking of
Christendom."
A stricken look passed over her student's face,
but Sandy calmed her with exaggerated conspiratorial looks left and right.
"Some of your fellows aren't so liberal as I am, Carmen. So remember where
you are. Remember who you are. Or who you're trying to become."
Another reminder issued, Sandy went to see to her
own tent.
* * *
The Forestry student gathered their wood, brought
them water to reconstitute their freeze-dried camp meals, then withdrew to his
own tent far back in the trees. Sandy told him he was welcome to spend the
evening around their fire—"You built it after all," she'd said—but
he'd made a convincing excuse.
The young man pointed to the traveling shrine her
students had erected in the center of their camp, pulling a wooden medallion
from beneath his shirt. "That Christ you have over there, ma'am," he
said. "He's not this one, is he?"
Sandy looked at the amulet he held, gilded and
green. "What do you have there, Jesus in the Trees?" she asked,
summoning all her professional courtesy to keep the amusement out of her voice.
"No, that's not the Christ we keep. We'll see you in the morning."
They didn't, though, because later that night,
Lucas discovered that the forest they were camped in wasn't supposed to be there
at all.
* * *
He'd found an old agricultural map somewhere and
packed it in with their little traveling library. Later, he admitted that he'd
only pulled it out for study because he was still sulking from Sandy's clear
signal he wouldn't be sharing her tent that night.
Sandy had been leading the rest of the students in
some prayers and thought exercises when Lucas came up with his moldering old
quarto. "Tillage," he said, not even bothering to explain himself
before he'd foisted the book off on his nearest fellow. "All the acreage
this side of the ridge line is supposed to be under tillage."
Sandy narrowed her eyes, more than enough to quiet
any of her charges, much less Lucas. "What's he got there, Ford?" she
asked the thin undergraduate who now held the book.
"Hmmmm?" said the boy; he was one of
those who fell instantly and almost irretrievably into any text and didn't look
up. Then, at an elbow from Carmen, he said, "Oh! This is. . ." He
turned the book over in his hands, angled the spine toward one of the oil lamps
and read, "This is An Agricultural Atlas of Clark County, Kentucky."
"'County,'" said Carmen. "Old
book, Lucas."
"But it's writ," said Lucas.
"There's nothing superseding the details of it and it doesn't contradict
anything else we brought about the error. Hell, it even confirms the error we
came to correct." Involuntarily, all of them looked up and over at the
apostate ridge.
"But what's this about tillage," Sandy
said, giving him the opportunity to show off his find even if it was already
clear to her what it must be.
"See, these plot surveys in the appendices
didn't get accounted for in the literature survey we're working from. The
book's listed as a source, but only as a supplemental confirmation. It's not
just the ridge that's wrong, it's the stuff growing down this side, too. We're
supposed to be in grain fields of some kind down here in the flats, then it's
pasturage on up to the summit line."
A minor find, sure, but Sandy would see that Lucas
shared authorship on the corollary she'd file with the university. More
importantly, it was an opportunity before the hard work of the days ahead.
"We can't do anything about the hillsides
tonight, or any of the acreage beyond the creek," she told them. "But
as for these glades here. . .."
It was a simple exercise. The fires were easily
set.
* * *
In the morning, Sandy drafted a letter to the Dean
of Agriculture while most of her students packed up the camp. She had detailed
a few of them to sketch the corrected valley floor around them, and she'd
include those visual notes with her instructions to the Dean, along with a copy
of the writ map from Lucas's book.
"Read that back to me, Carmen," she
said, watching as Lucas and Ford argued over yet another volume, this one slim
and bound between paper boards. It was the same back country cartographer's
guide she'd carried on her own first wilderness forays as a grad student.
They'd need its detailed instructions on living out of doors without the Tree
Jesus boy to help them.
"'By my hand,'" read Carmen, "'I
have caused these letters to be writ. Blessings on the Department of
Agriculture and on you, Dean. Blessings on Jesus Sower, the Christ you
serve.'"
"Skip to the end, dear." Sandy had
little patience for the formalities of academic correspondence, and less for
the pretense at holiness the Agriculturalists made with their little fruiting
Christ.
"'So, then, it is seen in these texts that
Cartography has corrected the error so far as in our power, and now the burden
is passed to you and your brethren to complete this holy task, and return the
land to that of Jesus's vision.'" Carmen paused.
"Then you promise to remember the Dean in your prayers and all the rest of
the politesse."
"Good. Everything observed. Make two copies
and bring the official one to me for sealing when you're done."
Carmen turned to her work and Sandy to hers. The
ashen landscape extending up the valley was still except for some ribbons
twisting in a light breeze. The ribbons were wax sealed to the parchment banner
her students had set at first light, the new map of the valley floor drawn in
red and black against a cream background. Someone had found the blackened disc
of the Forestry student's medallion and leaned it against the base of the
banner's staff and Sandy wondered if it had been Carmen, prone to sentiment, or
perhaps Lucas, prone to vague gestures.
By midmorning, the students had readied their gear
for the march up the ridge line and Carmen had dropped Sandy's package for the
university in the mailbox by the bus stop. Before they hoisted their backpacks,
though, Sandy gathered them all for fellowship and prayer.
"The gymnasiums at the university have made
us fit enough for this task," and here she made a playful flex with her
left arm, earning rolled eyes from Lucas and a chuckle from the rest. "The
libraries have given us the woodscraft we need, and the chapels have given us
the sustenance of our souls."
Sandy swept her arm north to south, indicating the
ridge. "When I was your age, oh so long ago—" and a pause here for
another ripple of laughter, acknowledgment of her dual status as youngest
tenured faculty member at the university and youngest ordained minister in the
curia. "When I was your age, I was blessed with the opportunity to go to
the Northeast, traveling the lands beyond the Susquehanna, searching out
error."
Sandy smiled at the memory of those times—could
they be ten years gone already? "I traveled with men and women strong
in the Lord, soldiers and scholars of God. There are many errors in the
Northeast."
Maps so brittle with age that they would
flake away in the cold winds of the Adirondack passes, so faded that only the
mightiest of prayers would reveal Jesus's true intentions for His world.
"But none here in the heartlands of the
Church, right? Isn't that what our parish priests told us growing up?" The
students recognized that she was beginning to teach, and nodded, murmured
assent.
"Christians, there is error here.
There is error right before our eyes!" Her own students weren't a
difficult congregation to hook, but she was gratified nonetheless by the gleam
she caught in most of their eyes, the calls, louder now, of "Yes!"
and "I see it! I see the lie!"
"I laid down my protractor, friends, I know
exactly how far off north Jesus mapped this ridge line to lay," she said,
sweeping her arm in a great arc, taking in the whole horizon, "and that
ridge line sins by two degrees!"
"May as well be two hundred!"
said Carmen, righteous.
Sandy raised her hand, stopped them at the cusp of
celebration instead of loosing them. "Not yet," she said. "It's
tonight. It's tonight we'll sing down the glory, tonight we'll make this world
the way it was mapped."
* * *
The march up the ridge line did not go as smoothly
as Sandy might have wished, but the delays and false starts weren't totally
unexpected. She'd known Lucas—a country boy after all—would take the lead, and
she'd guessed that he would dead-end them into a crumbling gully or two before
he picked the right route through the brambles. If he'd been some kind of
natural-born hunter he would never have found his way to the Lord, or to
education.
Ford and his friends—all of them destined for lecture
halls and libraries, not fieldwork—made the classic, the predicted
mistake she'd specifically warned against in the rubric she'd distributed for
the expedition. "If we're distributing 600 pounds of necessities across
twenty-two packs," she asked Ford, walking easily beside him as he
struggled along a game trail, "how much weight does that make each of us
responsible for?"
"A little over twenty-seven pounds,
ma'am," he said, wheezing out the reply.
"And did you calculate that in your head like
a mathematician or did you remember it from the syllabus?" Sandy asked.
She didn't press too hard, the harshness of the lesson was better imparted by
the straps cutting into his shoulders than by her words.
"I remembered it," Ford said. And
because he really did have the makings of a great scholar and great scholars
are nothing if not owners of their own errors, he added, "It was in the
same paragraph that said not to bring too many books."
"Exactly," she said, untying the leather
cords at the top of his pack and pulling out a particularly heavy-looking
volume. She couldn't resist looking at the title page before dropping it into
her own pack.
"Unchurched Tribes of the Chiapas
Highlands: A Bestiary. Think we'll make it to Mexico on this trip,
Ford?" she asked him, teasing a little.
Ford's faced reddened even more from her attention
than it had from the exertions of the climb. He mumbled something about
migratory patterns then leaned into the hike.
If most of the students were meeting their
expectations of themselves and one another, then Carmen's sprightly,
sure-footed bounding up the trail was a surprise to most. Sandy, though, had
seen the girl in the gym far more frequently than the other students, most of
whom barely met the minimum number of visits per week required by their
advising committees. Carmen was as much an athlete as herself, and the lack of
concern the girl showed about dirt and insects was refreshing.
So it was Carmen who summitted first, and it was
she that was looking northeast with a stunned expression on her face when Sandy
and Lucas reached the top, side by side. Following Carmen's gaze, Lucas cursed
and called for help in taking off his heavily laden pack before he began
unrolling the oilcloth cases of his instruments.
Sandy simply pursed her lips and began a mental
review of her assets: the relative strengths and weaknesses of her students,
the number of days' worth of supplies they carried, the nature of the
curia-designed instruments that Lucas exhibited a natural affinity for
controlling. She began to nod. She'd marshaled more than enough strength for
the simple tectonic adjustment they'd planned, she could set her own
unquestionable faith against this new challenge if it revealed any deficiencies
among her students. She would make a show of asking their opinions, but she
already knew that this was a challenge she could meet.
Ford finally reached the top of the ridge line,
not so much climbing as stumbling to the rocky area where the others were
gathering. Once he looked up and around, he said, "The survey team that
found the error in the ridge's orientation, they didn't come up here."
"They were specifically scouting for projects
that the university could handle," said Sandy. "If they'd been up
here, they would have called in the Mission Service, not us."
Spread out below them, ringed in tilled fields and
dusted with a scattering of wooden fishing boats, was an unmapped lake.
* * *
Sandy set Ford and the other bookish scholars to
cataloguing all of the texts they'd smuggled along so they could be integrated
into her working bibliography. She hoped that one of them was currently
distracted by waterways the way that Ford was distracted by fauna.
Lucas set their observation instruments on tripods
in an acceptably devout semicircle and Sandy permitted two or three of the
others to begin preliminary sight-line measurements of the lake's extent.
"It turns my stomach," said Lucas,
peering through the brass tube of a field glass. "I grew up seeing the
worst kind of blasphemy, but I could never imagine that anyone could do
something like this."
"You need to work on that," said Sandy.
Lucas was talking about the landscape feature cross-haired in the glass, a
clearly artificial earthworks dam, complete with a retractable spillway.
"Missionaries see worse every day."
Lucas didn't react. He'd never abandoned his
ambition, even after she'd laughed him down. Our sisters and brothers in the
Mission Service, she'd said with the authority that only someone who'd left
that order could muster, make up in the pretense of zeal what they lack in
scholarship and access to the divine. Anyone can move a mountain with whips and
shovels.
The sketchers showed her their work, which they
annotated with Lucas's count and codification of architectural structures,
fence lines, and crops. "Those are corn cribs," he said. "That's
a meeting house. That's a mill."
This was the kind of thing she'd told him he
should concentrate on. The best thing any of them had to offer was the overlay
of their own personal ranges of unexpected expertise onto the vast body of
accepted Cartography. Lucas's barbaric background, Ford's holographic memory,
Carmen's cultured scribing. Her own judgment.
"They're marmotas!" said Ford.
They all looked up at where he'd been awkwardly turning the focus wheel on one of
the glasses. "Like in my book!" He wasn't one to flash a triumphal
grin, which Sandy appreciated. She assented to the line of inquiry with a nod
and he hurried over to the makeshift shelf that some of his friends had been
using to stack books while they wrote their list.
The unchurched all looked alike to Sandy,
differing only in the details of their dress, modes of transportation, and to
what extent the curia allowed interaction with them. In the case of the little
drivers, for example, tacit permission was given for commercial exchange
because of their ancient control of the bus lines. But she'd never heard of marmotas,
and said so.
"They're called 'rooters' around here,"
said Lucas. "I don't know what Ford's on about. I've never heard of them
having a lake, but they've always come into the villages with their vegetables,
so far as I know."
"Not always," said Carmen. "There's
nothing about any unchurched lineages in the glosses of the maps we're working
from. They're as new as that lake."
Sandy recognized that they were in an educable
moment. "Everybody come here, let's meet. Let's have a class."
The students maneuvered themselves into the
flatter ground within the horseshoe of instruments, spreading blankets and
pulling out notebooks and pens. Ford lay his bestiary out, a place marked about
a third of the way through with the bright yellow fan of a fallen gingko leaf.
"Carmen's brought up a good point," said
Sandy, after they'd opened with a prayer. "There's no Cartographical
record of these diggers, or whatever they're called, along the ridge
line."
"I don't think it matters, necessarily,
though," said Carmen. "There's no record of the road up to the bus
stop, either, or of Lucas's village. 'Towns and roads are thin scrims, and
outside our purview.'"
Sandy recognized the quote as being from the
autobiography of a radical cleric intermittently popular on campus. It was far
from writ, but not heretical by any stretch of the imagination and, besides,
she'd had her own enthusiasms for colorful doctrinal interpretations when she was
younger. She was disappointed that Carmen would let her tendency toward error
show so plainly to the others but let it pass, confident that one of the more
conservative students would address it.
"Road building doesn't affect
landscape?" asked Lucas, on cue. "The Mapmaker used road
builders to cut canyons all over the continent. Ford, maybe Carmen needs to see
the cutlines on your contour maps of the bus routes."
Before Ford, who was looking somewhat embarrassed
by the exchange, could reply, Carmen said, "I'm not talking about the
Mapmaker, Lucas, I'm talking about your family, back in the village we
passed yesterday."
"Easy, Carmen," said Sandy. "We're
getting off task here. The question at hand isn't whether there's error.
The error is clear. We can feel the moisture of it on the breeze blowing up the
hill right now." Time to shift directions on them, to turn them on the
right path before they could think about it.
"The question," she continued, "is
how much of it we plan to correct." Not whether they'd correct,
don't leave that option for them. The debate she'd let them have was over the
degree of action they'd take, not whether they'd take any at all.
The more sophisticated among them—Ford and Carmen
sure, but even Lucas, to his credit—instantly saw her tack and looked at her
with eyebrows raised. Then Lucas reverted to type and actually dared to say
something.
"We haven't prepared for anything like this.
That lake is more than a mile across at its broadest!"
"A mile across, yes," said Sandy,
dismissively. "Carmen? What scale did you draw your sketch of the valley
in?"
Carmen handed her a sheaf of papers. "24K to
one. Is that all right?"
"Good, good," said Sandy. She smiled at
Ford. "That's a conversion even I can do in my head. So. . .if I compare
the size of the dam—" and she knitted her eyebrows, calculating.
"If I compare the dam to the ridge, I see that the ridge we came to move
is about three hundred times the larger."
Everyone began talking at once and at cross
purposes. A gratifying number of the students were simply impressed with her
cleverness and seemed relaxed, sure that it would be a simple matter now that
they'd been shown the problem in the proper perspective. But Carmen was
scratching some numbers in the dirt with the knuckle of her right index finger
and Ford was flipping through the appendix of one of his books and Lucas. . .
Lucas stood and looked down over the valley. He
wasn't looking at the lake and the dam, though, or even at the village of the
unchurched creatures who had built it. He was looking to his right, down the
eastern flank of the ridge they stood on, down the fluvial valley towards
where, it suddenly occurred to Sandy, he'd grown up, towards the creek side
town they'd stopped in the day before.
Ford raised his voice above an argument he'd been
having with two or three others. "Isn't there a question about what that
much water will do to the topography downstream? I mean, I know hydrology's a
pretty knotty problem, theologically speaking, but we'd have a clear hand in the
erosion, wouldn't we? What if the floodwaters subside off ground that's come
unwrit because of something that we did?"
"That is a knotty problem, Ford,"
said Sandy, looking Lucas straight in the eye. "What's the best way to
solve a difficult knot?"
And it was Lucas who answered her, nodding.
"Cut through it."
* * *
Later, while most of the students were meditating
in advance of the ceremony, Sandy saw Carmen moving from glass to glass, making
minute focusing adjustments and triangulating different views of the lake and
the village. Every so often, she made a quick visual note in her sketchbook.
"It's not productive to spend too much time
on the side effects of an error, you know," Sandy said.
Carmen moved from one instrument to the next.
"I don't think it's all that easy to determine what's a side effect and
what's. . .okay," she said.
Sandy had lost good students to the distraction
she could see now in Carmen. She reached out and pivoted the cylinder down, so
that its receiving lens pointed straight at the ground. "There's nothing
to see down there, Carmen."
Carmen wouldn't meet her eye. "I thought I'd
record—"
"Nothing to see, nothing to record. If you
could go down and talk to them you wouldn't understand a word they say. If you
looked in their little huts you wouldn't find anything redemptive; there's no
cross hanging in the wall of the meeting house, no Jesus of the Digging
Marmots. When the water is drained, we won't see anything along the lake bed
but mud and whatever garbage they've thrown in off their docks. The lake
doesn't have any secrets to give up. You know that."
"Ford's books—"
"Ford's books are by anthropologists, who are
halfway to being witch doctors as far as most respectable scholars are
concerned, and who keep their accreditation by dint of the fact that their
field notes are good intelligence sources for the Mission Service. Ford reads
them because he's got an overactive imagination and he likes stories too
much—lots of students in the archive concentration have those failings. Most of
them grow out of it with a little coaxing. Like Ford will, he's too smart not
to. Just like you're too smart to backslide into your parents' religion
and start looking for souls to save where there are no souls to be found."
Carmen took a deep breath and held it, closed her
eyes. When she opened them, her expression had folded into acquiescence.
"It is not the least of my sins that I force you to spend so much time
counseling me, Reverend," she said formally.
Sandy smiled and gave the girl a friendly squeeze
of the shoulder. "Curiosity and empathy are healthy, and valuable,
señorita," she said. "But you need to remember that there are proper
channels to focus these things into. Prayer and study are best, but drinking
and carousing will do in a pinch."
Carmen gave a nervous laugh, eyes widening. Sandy
could tell that the girl didn't feel entirely comfortable with the unexpected
direction of the conversation, which was, of course, part of the strategy for
handling backsliders. Young people in particular were easy to refocus on banal
and harmless "sins" and away from thoughts that could actually be
dangerous.
"Fetch the others up here, now," Sandy
said. "We should set to it."
Carmen soon had all twenty of her fellow students
gathered around Sandy. Lucas had been down the eastern slope far enough to
gather some deadwood and now he struck it ablaze with a flint and steel from
his travel kit. Sandy crumbled a handful of incense into the flames.
Ford had been named the seminar's lector by
consensus, and he opened his text. "Blessed are the Mapmakers. . ."
he said.
"For they hunger and thirst after
righteousness," they all finished.
Then they all fell to prayer and singing. Sandy
turned her back to them—congregants more than students now—and opened her heart
to the land below her. She felt the effrontery of the unmapped lake like a caul
over her face, a restriction on the land that prevented breath and life.
Sandy showed them how to test the prevailing winds
and how to bank the censers in chevrons so that the cleansing fires would fall
onto the appropriate points along the dam.
Finally, she thumbed an ashen symbol onto every
wrist and forehead, including her own, and lit the oils of the censer primorus
with a prayer. When the hungry flames began to beam outward from her censer,
she softly repeated the prayer for emphasis, then nodded her assent that the
rest begin.
The dam did not burst in a spectacular explosion
of mud and boulders and waters. Instead, it atrophied throughout the long
afternoon, wearing away under their prayers even as their voices grew hoarse.
Eventually, the dammed river itself joined its voice to theirs and speeded the
correction.
The unchurched in the valley tried for a few hours
to pull their boats up onto the shore, but the muddy expanse between the water
and their lurching docks grew too quickly. They turned their attention to
bundling up the goods from their mean little houses then, and soon a line of
them was snaking deeper into the mountains to the east, like a line of ants
fleeing a hill beneath a looking glass.
With the ridge to its west, the valley fell into
evening shadow long before the Cartographers' camp. They could still see below
though, they could see that, as Sandy had promised Carmen, there were no
secrets revealed by the dying water.
Faith can seem arbitrary to the nonbeliever,
changing believers and the world they live in for seemingly little apparent
reason. In "Under Hell, Over Heaven" Margo Lanagan gives us a glimpse
of an afterlife where purgatory sits, blandly, in between the enticements of
heaven and hell. Who gets to go where, though, seems disturbingly arbitrary and
justice seems available to none.
World Fantasy Award winner Margo Lanagan seemed to come from nowhere in 2005,
garnering acclaim in the US, the UK and her native Australia for her collection
Black Juice and story "Singing My Sister Down". She is the
author of novels Wildgame, The Tankermen, Walking Through
Albert, The Best Thing and Touching Earth Lightly. Her short
fiction has been collected in White Time and Black Juice. Her
most recent book is collection Red Spikes.
'You always have to go through stuff,' said
Barto. 'Why couldn't somebody have made a road?'
Leah grunted. Yes, it was always a trudge here.
But what was the hurry, when it came to eternity? Might as well trudge as run.
Might as well be hampered as not. Barto was new here; he didn't realise. He'd
only just arrived, and by car accident, so he was still in a kind of shock. He
was trying to catch hold of the last threads of his curiosity as it
disappeared.
Right now they were walking through reedy, rushy
stuff, sometimes ankle-deep in black water. It was quite dim, too. They were
deep in the Lower Reaches; Hell's crusted, warty underside hung low above them,
close enough to feel the warmth. There were four of them: Leah, Barto, Tabatha
and King. They were all youngish, so far as that meant anything, and they spoke
the same language, so they made a good team. Plus there was the Miscreant Soul
they were escorting, on his string. At least he'd stopped moaning. Hard as it was
to feel strongly about anything here, the Miscreant's carryings-on had managed
to irritate Leah.
Well, it was entirely up to you, she'd said to him. You can get away
with a certain amount, but you can't expect to be forgiven everything.
Why not? he'd retorted miserably. What skin would it
have been off anyone's nose?
It's just not the way the system works, King had said. The line has to be
drawn somewhere.
I don't see why.
You don't have to, said Leah. It's not your business to
see. Just count yourself lucky to get any glory at all. Some people never even
catch a glimpse. And she'd made sure to walk on the far side of the group
after that, so that his complaints were mostly lost on the warm, wet breeze.
He was naked, the Miscreant. He didn't get to keep
the white garb and the little round golden crown. He was just a plump white
man, rather the shape of a healthy baby, on a leash of greenish-yellow string
and with his hands tied behind his back. He had died of a knifing outside his
office building; the big wound that had opened him up from left shoulder to
right hip was sealed up shiny pink.
The rest of them wore the grey-green uniform. It
was neither shapeless nor quite fitted, neither long nor short, neither ugly
nor attractive in worldly terms; it was not remarkable in any way unless—Leah
had seen it on the Miscreant's face, on the face of the woman at the desk at
Heaven Gate—you were used to that other uniform, the white one, and the beaming
face above.
* * *
The woman had cleared her throat and some of the
light had gone out of her face; when they were so close to the Gate, people
didn't like to look away from it. You have some business with us?
Tabatha had handed over the satchel, and they'd
all stood around as the woman went slowly through the leather pages. The
occasional seal shone light up into her face, but she looked less and less
happy the more she read.
This is never good. She'd slapped the satchel closed. This
is never a pleasant task. Do you have the appropriate device?
Tabatha had held up the two lengths of string—Leah
had seen King's fingers rub together, and her own tingled at the memory of
rolling the grass-fibres into string on her thigh. The woman on the desk had
sighed and stood and crossed the little bit of marble paving in front of the
Gate.
* * *
'Someone up ahead,' said King. 'It looks like a
staffer. With a crook?'
Leah looked up from the reeds and water. Yes,
there was the curl of a crozier against the grey sky ahead.
'He's coming right for us,' said Barto. 'Of
course, I don't mind if it's not specifically for me.'
The man was tall, as a Shepherd should be. 'All
hail!' he cried as soon as he saw them. No one spoke as he toiled forward
through the swishing reeds.
He patted the satchel on his white-robed hip. 'I
have papers here for an infant, Jesus Maria Valdez.'
There was a slight sag among the four of them at
the word infant. The Miscreant narrowed his eyes at the staffer. So he
had been hopeful, too.
'There are a lot of infants back there,' said
Leah. 'Get through this boggy stretch; look out for a copse of dark trees on
your right. They're in there, on the ground and up among the branches, heaps of
them.'
He was on his way. 'I'll try there,' he called
back over his shoulder. 'Praise be.'
'Whatever,' said Barto softly. Oh, he minded a
great deal.
Leah shook herself and walked on. Out here, you
got to know too well all the different shades of disappointment.
'What was that all about?' said the Miscreant,
watching the glittering crozier recede. 'Someone else's paperwork got
mixed up?'
'Probably a posthumous baptism,' said King. 'Or an
intercession, you never know. They don't have friends, babies, but sometimes
there's a very devout grandmother. Come on.' He tugged the string gently.
The Miscreant resumed his trudging. 'So that baby
gets to Ascend?'
Leah didn't hear any answer—she was watching reeds
and water again—but the Miscreant asked no more, so someone must have nodded.
Actually, Hell would be so much worse for the
Miscreant, now that he'd been inside Heaven Gate and experienced that eternity.
It would be worse than it would have been for Leah herself, who had only seen
the Light, only felt it, from here in the Outer, and only for a few seconds at
a time. And it was hard enough for her, this ache that never left her bones,
this endless dull knowledge that things weren't as they should be.
They came to the edge of the marsh, up onto a rise
covered with brown grass. There were quite a few people there. Two groups
prayed to a Wrong God, the women wearing head cloths woven laboriously from
grass fibres—where did they get the energy, for the praying, for the weaving?
Babies floated here and there in their greenish swaddling, some sleeping, some
awake and waving their arms, kicking their legs; another one screamed
inconsolably in the distance. Other people wandered alone, meeting no one's
eye, or lay on the grass looking up at the carbuncular ceiling, which was just
like the surface of Heaven, except that it rumbled occasionally, and leaked
dirty-yellow puffs of sulphur.
Leah's party passed on into the grasslands. The
going was drier, but pricklier underfoot, and the grasses had sharp edges that
made long, light cuts on their bare legs.
'You never know, do you,' said Barto quietly at
her shoulder. 'You see a bloke with a cut throat, like back there, and you
don't know whether he did it himself, or whether he got murdered.'
Leah nodded. 'About the only suicides you can be
sure of just by looking is slit wrists. Not that you can't just go up and ask.
It's not like people are embarrassed about it, or won't tell you.'
'Hmm,' said Barto. 'I've never been much of a
going-up-and-asking type of person.'
'It's different here,' said Leah. A sigh escaped
her—it seemed so wearying, to explain. The thing was, nothing much would change,
whether it was explained or not explained. 'No one takes offence; no one thinks
any the less of you. Just like no one plots against you, or gossips or
anything. It's restful. It's pointless; everything is pointless, but nothing is
a bother, either.'
'Come on,' said King behind her. The string
was at full stretch, and so was King's arm. The Miscreant was dragging his
feet, his eyes cast fearfully upward.
Leah turned impatiently from the sight. She
had lived a virtuous life, if a short one. Her only sin was one of omission,
and not even her omission, but her parents': she was one of the billions
of unbaptised who walked the Outer.
The breeze was very warm now, and Leah could smell
the sulphur. The smell, the rumbling and the occasional sprinkle of pumice on
her head and into the surrounding grass were the only indications of the
sufferings going on overhead. At least she didn't have to worry about finding
herself in Hell; her only question was when, if ever, she would be granted
admission to that better place.
Mostly Leah didn't get to see much inside Heaven;
clerical errors usually went the other way from this one, and Souls delivered
to Heaven slipped in quickly, as soon as the Gate opened the merest crack. This
time, because the Miscreant had made such a fuss, some force had been needed to
remove him, and the Gate had had to be opened comparatively wide. The four
members of the escort had been tortured long and hard by the sight of the
Eternal Benediction, of that constant rain of powdery shimmer—was it food? was
it love?—that fell through the rays of Light, that clung to the clouds, that
brushed past the beings. The snatches of music, the humming of crystal, the
tang of harp strings, the celestial harmonies sung by voices so human, so
joyous—Leah, accustomed only to the whistling breezes in the outer, to the
weeping and mumbling of the Souls Pending, had listened hard and fiercely. She
resolved to memorise a single phrase, to take with her, to give her heart
during the grey times. And she had; she'd caught a little flourish of notes and
hammered them into her memory.
But then the Gate had closed and silenced the
music, and the Miscreant Soul had stood naked and dismayed before them, subdued
by the string but still panting from the fight. Leah had run the caught phrase
through her mind several times and it had fallen dead, all its brilliance and
mystery and beauty gone, a series of notes as bland and grey-green as the clothes
she wore. The four of them, whose pure yearning towards Heaven had fused them
elbow to elbow into a single being, had fallen apart, four blockish, clumsy
entities excluded into a quieter, greyer eternity. One needed nothing here, not
food or drink or love—but a glimpse of Heaven woke a hunger, a hunger to
hunger, to long for something, anything, and have that longing satisfied,
to feel any feeling but this bland resignation, this hopeless doggedness, this
pointless processing of oneself forward through unmarked, unmemorable time. Oh,
and then the hunger went, and left you frowning, trying to fathom how you could
have felt as strongly as that about anything.
Walking through the grasslands was tedious now;
Leah's shins stung with grass cuts. There were few Souls here, either floating
or walking, and they kept their distance—if you weren't a Shepherd, no one was
interested in you. A few children stood and stared, head and shoulders above
the grasses, but anyone in their teens or older hunched and turned and swayed
slowly away as the escort came through on its business.
The rumbling overhead became louder; the shell of
the sphere was thinner the closer they approached Hell's Gate.
'I can hear people screaming, I think,' whimpered
the Miscreant.
'Not yet,' said King. 'You're imagining it.'
'Put another loop around his neck if he's feeling
resistant,' said Tabatha. 'That'll keep him moving.'
They paused while King arranged this, Tabatha
instructing him. 'You want it firm, but not tight, and you don't want it to get
any tighter when you pull on it, just like the first one.'
The grass clumps grew farther apart now, and the
ground between was bare and red, uneven and littered with sharp stones. It was
quite hard to keep an even pace, and the whole team slowed, picking places to
put their feet. The stones grew bigger and bigger, broader and more
treacherously balanced.
'This is like gibber plain,' said Barto. 'I
remember when we went on our round-Australia trip. Except there'd be no
creatures here. We looked through these binoculars that could see infrared
light and there were all sorts of things—little mice jumping around, lizards,
spiders. . .'
No one answered. Leah had barely understood him.
Australia? Binoculars? Infrared? And she wasn't going to reiterate, No,
there are no animals here. Animals are old-world stuff; they just circulate in
that system. And then he'd ask, So why are there plants here—aren't they
old-world stuff too? I don't know, she'd have to say. Did I
create this? If you ever get to Heaven, I'm sure it'll all be made clear. It
was all too boring and took too much energy.
A frail tower of scaffolding appeared on the
horizon, leading up to Hell's lowest convexity. The escort picked their way
towards it, swearing under their breath as the stones bit into their feet,
staggering off balance now and again. The Miscreant fell once, opening a cut on
his forehead and bruising his cheek.
'I couldn't put my hands out,' he complained.
'Maybe you could just untie my hands, for this part?'
'I'm sorry.' King brushed the red dust off the
man's belly, genitals and thigh. 'We'll just walk a bit slower, shall we?'
'You know,' said the Miscreant. 'It's almost good
to feel pain! The pain is better than the nothingness, don't you think? What a
terrible place this is! Do you get a lot of people purposely hurting themselves
here?'
'When they first arrive, sometimes,' said Tabatha.
'But they calm down after a while, and fit in with the rest of us.'
Leah watched the red ground pass. Tabatha was a
bit of a goody-goody, she thought. The rest of us—how cosy. What a cosy
little community we are.
'After all, you can't end this, yourself,'
Tabatha went on. 'You can't self-harm your way out of it. Only way out is to
pick up brownie points, or by intercession from someone back in the old world.'
Brownie points, was it? Leah wondered what the All-Mighty would
think of that phrase.
Wooden stairs zigzagged up inside the scaffolding.
The canvas enclosing its middle two sections rippled in the breeze. 'Up we go,
then.' Tabatha started to climb.
Leah brought up the rear. She hung back a little
so as to have the Miscreant's grubby feet at her eye-level, rather than his
flabby white bottom and bitten-nailed hands.
In the first canvas room they took woven bootees
from the water trough and tied them to their feet. Water squeezed from the
thick soles and rained between the floorboards onto the steps below. They
slopped upstairs to the second room.
'This is where we turn over,' said King to the
Miscreant. 'Don't freak out—it might feel a bit weird.'
'Whee,' said Tabatha, somersaulting off the top
step into the shadows.
'You out of the way?' Barto jumped after her.
'It's quite enjoyable.' King turned in the opening
and addressed the Miscreant upside-down. 'It's about the most fun anyone gets
in this place.'
The Miscreant's boots lifted off the step. 'No,
wait a minute—' He kicked out, and water flew into Leah's face. He misjudged
everything; his head banged on the top step. His frightened, wounded face
stared out at Leah for a moment before he floated up into the dim
landing-space.
'Christ, King, you're supposed to be looking after
him.' Leah's hair rose and the weight lifted out of her spine. She checked the
air above and let go into it. Bodies revolved in the dim tented space, and
water-drops wobbled, unsure which way to fall. 'Let's move along now,' she
said.
They bounced and sprang along the weightless
landing to the far door, and dropped out onto the upper stairs. Now the
creased, pockmarked grey rock of the Hell sphere was the ground, and the sky
that hung over them was the red stony plain. The air was close and smelly.
Down they went onto the rock. Their boots hissed
on contact with it.
'Not far now,' said Tabatha.
'I don't care how far it is,' muttered the
Miscreant.
Leah peered around him at the machinery and the
desk in the distance, and the staffers moving about getting ready for them.
Tsss, tsss, tsss, tsss, went the bootees for the first little
while. Then the soles dried out, and the smell of charred grass began to join
that of sulphur. It was uncomfortably hot. The ground was creased cooled lava,
easier to walk on than stones or swamp.
'Pick up the pace,' said King to the Miscreant,
'or our boots'll run out on the way back.'
'Oh, poor you,' said the Miscreant, obediently
starting to jog. 'How you'll suffer.'
As if you had cause to complain, thought Leah. It's not as if you
weren't warned. Everybody gets warned somehow, even if they're brought up under
a Wrong God. Oog—she made herself look away from his jogging bottom—so
much flesh. If I'd grown that old, I never would've let that happen to me.
'Ahoy there,' cried a woman in a silver firesuit
up ahead, clapping her gloved hands. 'You got a Clerical there for us?'
'I don't know what he is—that's not my privilege,'
said Tabatha. 'All I know is, he goes in here.'
'Good-oh,' said a firesuited man. 'Helps us tell
one moment from another.' He shot Leah a cold grin.
The man at the desk was small, hunched and
pernickety-looking. He took the satchel and peered down his nose at each paper
in turn, as if keeping an invisible pair of reading glasses on his nose. Then
he dropped his head, glowered at them above the same glasses and pointed a
thumb at the machinery.
Leah had been here twice before. Both times she'd
been picking up, and the Soul had been waiting for them, sitting happily on the
desk swinging his legs. She'd never seen the machinery operate before.
One of the firesuited people slapped a switch and
the whole black affair shuddered into life. All the staffers had their head-pieces
on now—they were silver all over, with flat black faces. They each took, from a
hook on the machine's slabby side, a silver pole that divided at the top into
many vicious little spikes.
The wheels turned. The chain tightened on the
eye-bolt in the ground. The circle of the lid was suddenly clear in the rock,
outlined in knee-high puffs of smoke. Human screams rushed out with the smoke.
The Miscreant leaped back, pulling the string from
King's hand. He ran, but Leah dived after him and brought him down by the
ankle, and the others piled straight on top of him. Leah jumped up off the
scorching ground and pinned his leg down. Barto bucked on the other one and
Tabatha and King took care of arms and torso. 'It's too late. It's too late,'
Tabatha said grimly into the man's ear. 'Where do you think you would run to?'
Still he struggled. 'Bloody hell,' said Barto,
almost thrown off the leg. He took a firmer hold. 'Strong! Who would've thought
such a flabby old thing—'
The Miscreant bucked and rippled again.
'How can he stand it? He must be burning all down
his front—'
'You know what will stop this?' Leah hissed at
Barto. 'Grabbing him by the nuts. Bags you do it.'
'Bags I don't.'
'Go on.' This was almost funny. Leah was
almost laughing. 'You're the boy.'
'Eesh, I'm not grabbing some old feller's nuts!'
'Here.' A firesuit came up. 'Move aside,' it said
in a muffled voice, 'and I'll pitchfork him.'
Gently he lowered his spike-points onto the
Miscreant's back.
'That's better.' Tabatha gingerly climbed off the
captive.
They all slid off him. King took up the string
again. 'Now don't try that again,' he said. 'This man will happily poke you
straight into the fire like a marshmallow on a stick.'
They helped the Miscreant up. He was crying now;
his front was all red, flecked with black from the ground. His face was
terrible to see, all crumpled and slavery like that, and with its injuries.
'Please, please,' he said. 'Oh no, please!'
He could hardly use his legs. He was extremely
heavy. They dragged him towards the lid. It was a little way open now.
Something moved in the smoke like a dark sea-anemone. Trying to see it more
clearly, Leah felt holes open in the Outer's greyness, which shrank somewhat on
her mind, at the touch of a realisation, and with the realisation, feeling.
For they were hands, all those movements,
blood-red hands on the blood-streaked, steaming arms of the Damned. In a frenzy
they waved and clutched at the Outer's air; they pawed the lid and the ground;
they left prints; they wet and reddened the rock with their slaps and slidings.
The firesuits stood well back from the opening.
Any hand that found a grip they prodded until it flinched back into the waving
mass, into the high suffering howl of Hell.
The Miscreant pressed back into his escort; Leah
couldn't hear him for machine-noise and screaming, but she felt the horror as
if he were squeezing it out like a sponge, as if she were taking it up like a
sponge, a grey, dry sponge soaking up juice and colour. Suddenly Barto's face
was open, lively; suddenly there was a vigour in Tabatha's bracing herself to
push, in King's new grasp on the Miscreant's upper arm. Leah pulled in a great
noseful of the dreadful, wonderful cooking-meat smell of the Damned, the
hot-metal smell of the machinery, the thick yellow stench of brimstone.
The machinery ground; the massive lid lifted
unsteadily, revealing its many layers of black polished rock and brass, all
smattered with Damned-fluids. Smoke, some yellow, some grey, some black,
belched out all around; steam jetted white across the ground. Coughing, Leah
heaved the Miscreant forward by his shoulder.
A Damned Soul sprang out of the smoke. It caught
the Miscreant by the shoulder, Leah by her arm, and screamed in their faces in
a fast, foreign language. Its eyes rolled and steamed; its whole face was
misshapen. The skin of it, the raw skin!
'Git back there!' growled a firesuit, forcing the
Soul back with a pole across its middle. Through the smoke and the glorious
all-engulfing sensations of her own retching, Leah had an impression of a
person being folded and forced away. Like a crab into a crevice, she thought,
pushing the Miscreant forward again—only rubbery. And raw—that skin! The points
of the pitchfork had sliced across that Soul's belly, and the wounds had sizzled
with blood and fluids rushing to heal it, to make the skin clean and raw again
and ready to suffer more.
This was what she wanted, what she needed, to see
such things and to see them clearly. The sulphur jabbed her nostrils and she
sniffed it up and coughed, exultant. The Miscreant's shaggy boot-toes flamed
near the lip of the opening; hands painted them red, stroke by stroke. She took
slippery white handfuls of him and, in a spasm of revulsion and joy, forced him
into the centre of the red sea-anemone.
Its many arms hauled him in. Maybe they thought
they could pull themselves past him into the Outer; perhaps they thought to
plead with him; maybe they just wanted someone else to share their misery.
Whatever they wanted, the red Souls folded the white, flailing Soul in.
It was like watching a kebab being rolled,
Barto would say later.
A chicken kebab.
Don't be awful, Tabatha would say, trying to cringe, trying to
care enough.
The escort pulled their hands and feet free of the
roaring Souls. Pitchforks poked and hissed, intervening for them. The machinery
clanked; the lid shuddered and began to lower. In the desperate red scramble
just inside the rim, the faces—I will never forget these, Leah thought raptly,
I will never be able—the hairless faces, all melted and remelted flesh, spat
and bubbled and ran with juices. And they knew—their eyes begged and their
bloodied lips pleaded in a thousand different languages.
Barto gagged beside Leah, King clutched her and
wept, Tabatha dragged at their sleeves: 'Come away! Come away!'
But Leah stayed, her eyes and heart still
feasting. Just as she'd craned for the last possible glimpse of that other
eternity, Heaven, so she must peer around the firesuit to see as many hands, as
many faces as she could, as the lid crushed them, as they clutched the very
pitchforks that forced them back into suffering.
'Bloody, sticky things!' The nearest firesuit
scraped off against the rim a Soul that had impaled itself chest first upon her
fork. 'How much more pain do you want?' The Soul fish-flopped, then was clawed
away by others more desperate, more able.
The dire howling lessened; there were just hands
now, flickering along with the yellow flames that came up where hopeless Souls
had dropped away and left gaps in the crowd. They made a frill, a lace-work of
red fingers, a fur of black and yellow smoke, a feather of gold flame, a
stinking sleeve edge that shortened, shortened—
Thud. The lid closed, sealing in the Damned.
The firesuit turned away and snatched off its
hood. The woman inside grinned down at Leah. 'Better get a move on,' she said.
Tabatha was already starting for the tower,
grabbing up the satchel as she passed the desk. Barto stared at the lid over
Leah's shoulder, both hands to his mouth. King, on all fours, leaned hard
against her knees, retching.
'Come on, laddie.' The firesuit prodded him gently
with her bloodied pitchfork. 'Those boots won't last much longer.'
'And you're burning yourself.' Leah pulled on his
shoulder.
Supporting him, she followed Tabatha. They must
take the stamped papers up to Heaven Gate and lodge them. Leah's imagination
was as clear as a sunlit tide-pool now; she could just see those snooty
Registrars dipping their quills to add the marks, the brownie points, to
each team member's record book. Those marks would build—who knew how fast? Who
knew how many were needed?—until there were enough to release him or her from
the Outer forever, and into Heaven and the Eternal Benediction and the Light.
Leah's feet stung. The soles of the bootees were
black and fringed with burnt rush-weave.
'Hurry, King.' She pushed him along in the small
of the back. He tried to speak over his shoulder—his face was greenish, and his
lips puffed out with nauseated burps. 'I heard one of them say—'
'Just run, King! Talk when we get to the
ladder!'
And they ran, pell-mell, elated. One of Barto's
bootees gave out, shredding off his foot. He tried a strange hopping run for a
few paces, then seemed to take off and fly across the hot black ridges to the
scaffolding.
They flung themselves after him, finally landing
in a clump on the lowest steps. A few moments filled with groans and panting.
Then they spread out onto separate steps.
'Oh, my feet!'
'Uff! This is from his fingernails, look! Like
a—like a tiger-claw or something.'
'Look at King!' King's hands and knees had puffed
up as if inflated.
'He whacked me in the mouth so hard, that
Soul. I thought I'd lost some teeth. I think this one's a bit wobbly. Does this
look wobbly to you, Leah?'
When every injury had been noted and admired,
quiet descended. The greyness crept in at the edges of Leah's mind.
King pushed his face into the hot breeze. 'I heard
someone say, It's so cool out there!'
'I heard that too,' said Tabatha quietly.
'I heard someone call out, Water, water!'
whispered Barto. 'And you know? For just that moment, I was thirsty.'
Leah's tongue searched her mouth for that feeling.
No, she wasn't thirsty, not even after all that heat and smoke and running.
'I didn't understand anything they said.' She
spoke quickly, while there was still a bit of space in the middle of the
encroaching greyness. 'But what I saw. . .' She tried to remember that
screaming Soul's face well enough to make her stomach churn again. She rubbed
her tearless eyes, and saw against the lids a vague bobbing of bald, red heads,
waving hands, silent mouths. Nothing that would upset anybody. 'Aagh.' The
greyness reached the centre of her feelings and winked them out. That was all
she would be left with, until next time—that bobbing impression, all the
intensity faded to a thin grey knowledge, a small, puzzled struggle to
remember—what had been so wonderful?
Tabatha was binding Barto's burnt foot with a
strip torn off her uniform. 'We must move in and out quicker, next time,' she
said absently. 'Like a pick-up. This never would've happened with a pick-up.'
'How do they get them out of there, with a
pickup?' wondered King. 'Without anyone else escaping?'
'If you ever get to work there, I guess you'll
find out,' said Tabatha flatly.
'You can't blame us for being curious,' said King.
He must have not quite recovered, thought Leah.
Anyway, 'curious' wasn't the word for it. She
followed the others up the stairs, rolled over and dropped into the Outer's
gravitational field, followed them through the bootee-room and down onto the
stony red plain. Curiosity was a lame, small-scale thing. What it was, was. . .
She picked her way through the stones towards the
lighter regions of the Outer. She tried to think, to search what she thought
was her heart. But she was not let see. The Outer's greyness had her; it walled
the thought she was reaching for in fog, embedded the feeling in cloud; it
clumsied her toes and fingers and all her finer faculties and left her with
only this, the barest inclination to keep moving, in the direction that felt
like forward, but might turn out never to be forward, or backward, or any way,
anywhere, ever.
Walter Jon
Williams started writing in the early '80s, and his first SF novel, Ambassador
of Progress, appeared in 1984 and was followed by Hardwired, Aristoi,
Metropolitan, City on Fire, The Rift, and most recently
his Dread Empire's Fall series, The Praxis, The Sundering and Conventions
of War. A prolific and talented short fiction writer, he has won the Nebula
for "Daddy's World" and "The Green Leopard Plague". His
short fiction is collected in Facets and Frankensteins and Foreign
Devils. Upcoming is new science fiction novel Implied Spaces.
The story of growing up is the story of slowly moving away from being
completely dependent on your parents and becoming your own person. But, what if
your parents didn't have to let you grow up? What if they could simply delete
you?
It's your understanding and wisdom that makes me
want to talk to you, Doctor Sam. About how Fritz met the Blue Lady, and what
happened with Janis, and why her mother decided to kill her, and what became of
all that. I need to get it sorted out, and for that I need a real friend. Which
is you.
Janis is always making fun of me because I talk to
an imaginary person. She makes even more fun of me because my imaginary friend
is an English guy who died hundreds of years ago.
"You're wrong," I pointed out to her,
"Doctor Samuel Johnson was a real person, so he's not imaginary. It's just
my conversations with him that are imaginary."
I don't think Janis understands the distinction
I'm trying to make.
But I know that you understand, Doctor Sam.
You've understood me ever since we met in that Age of Reason class, and I
realized that you not only said and did things that made you immortal, but that
you said and did them while you were hanging around in taverns with actors and
poets.
Which is about the perfect life, if you ask me.
In my opinion Janis could do with a Doctor Sam to
talk to. She might be a lot less frustrated as an individual.
I mean, when I am totally stressed trying to
comprehend the equations for electron paramagnetic resonance or something, so I
just can't stand cramming another ounce of knowledge into my brain, I can
always imagine my Doctor Sam—a big fat man (though I think the word they used
back then was "corpulent")—a fat man with a silly wig on his head,
who makes a magnificent gesture with one hand and says, with perfect wisdom and
gravity, All intellectual improvement, Miss Alison, arises from leisure.
Who could put it better than that? Who else could
be as sensible and wise? Who could understand me as well?
Certainly nobody I know.
(And have I mentioned how much I like the way you
call me Miss Alison?)
We might as well begin with Fahd's Incarnation Day
on Titan. It was the first incarnation among the Cadre of Glorious Destiny, so
of course we were all present.
The celebration had been carefully planned to
showcase the delights of Saturn's largest moon. First we were to be downloaded
onto Cassini Ranger, the ship parked in Saturn orbit to service all the
settlements on the various moons. Then we would be packed into individual
descent pods and dropped into Titan's thick atmosphere. We'd be able to stunt
through the air, dodging in and out of methane clouds as we chased each other
across Titan's cloudy, photochemical sky. After that would be skiing on the
Tomasko Glacier, Fahd's dinner, and then skating on frozen methane ice.
We would all be wearing bodies suitable for
Titan's low gravity and high-pressure atmosphere—sturdy, low to the ground, and
furry, with six legs and a domelike head stuck onto the front between a pair of
arms.
But my body would be one borrowed for the
occasion, a body the resort kept for tourists. For Fahd it would be different.
He would spend the next five or six years in orbit around Saturn, after which
he would have the opportunity to move on to something else.
The six-legged body he inhabited would be his own,
his first. He would be incarnated—a legal adult, and legally human despite his
six legs and furry body. He would have his own money and possessions, a job,
and a full set of human rights.
Unlike the rest of us.
After the dinner, where Fahd would be formally
invested with adulthood and his citizenship, we would all go out for skating on
the methane lake below the glacier. Then we'd be uploaded and head for home.
All of us but Fahd, who would begin his new life.
The Cadre of Glorious Destiny would have given its first member to
interplanetary civilization.
I envied Fahd his incarnation—his furry six-legged
body, his independence, and even his job, which wasn't all that stellar if you
ask me. After fourteen years of being a bunch of electrons buzzing around in a
quantum matrix, I wanted a real life even if it meant having twelve dozen legs.
I suppose I should explain, because you were born
in an era when electricity came from kites, that at the time of Fahd's
Incarnation Day party I was not exactly a human being. Not legally, and
especially not physically.
Back in the old days—back when people were
establishing the first settlements beyond Mars, in the asteroid belt and on the
moons of Jupiter and then Saturn—resources were scarce. Basics such as water
and air had to be shipped in from other places, and that was very expensive.
And of course the environment was extremely hazardous—the death rate in those
early years was phenomenal.
It's lucky that people are basically stupid,
otherwise no one would have gone.
Yet the settlements had to grow. They had to
achieve self-sufficiency from the home worlds of Earth and Luna and Mars, which
sooner or later were going to get tired of shipping resources to them, not to
mention shipping replacements for all the people who died in stupid accidents.
And a part of independence involved establishing growing, or at least stable,
populations, and that meant having children.
But children suck up a lot of resources, which
like I said were scarce. So the early settlers had to make do with virtual
children.
It was probably hard in the beginning. If you were
a parent you had to put on a headset and gloves and a body suit in order to
cuddle your infant, whose objective existence consisted of about a skazillion
lines of computer code anyway. . . well, let's just say you had to want that
kid really badly.
Especially since you couldn't touch him in the
flesh till he was grown up, when he would be downloaded into a body grown in a
vat just for him. The theory being that there was no point in having anyone in
your settlement who couldn't contribute to the economy and help pay for those
scarce resources, so you'd only incarnate your offspring when he was already
grown up and could get a job and help to pay for all that oxygen.
You might figure from this that it was a hard
life, out there on the frontier.
Now it's a lot easier. People can move in and out
of virtual worlds with nothing more than a click of a mental switch. You get
detailed sensory input through various nanoscale computers implanted in your
brain, so you don't have to put on oven mitts to feel your kid. You can dandle
your offspring, and play with him, and teach him to talk, and feed him even.
Life in the virtual realms claims to be 100% realistic, though in my opinion
it's more like 95%, and only in the realms that intend to mimic reality,
since some of them don't.
Certain elements of reality were left out, and
there are advantages—at least if you're a parent. No drool, no messy diapers,
no vomit. When the child trips and falls down, he'll feel pain—you do
want to teach him not to fall down, or to bang his head on things—but on the
other hand there won't be any concussions or broken bones. There won't be any
fatal accidents involving fuel spills or vacuum.
There are other accidents that the parents have
made certain we won't have to deal with. Accidental pregnancy, accidental
drunkenness, accidental drug use.
Accidental gambling. Accidental vandalism.
Accidental suicide. Accidentally acquiring someone else's property.
Accidentally stealing someone's extra-vehicular unit and going for a joy ride
among the asteroids.
Accidentally having fun. Because believe me, the
way the adults arrange it here, all the fun is planned ahead of time.
Yep, Doctor Sam, life is pretty good if you're a
grownup. Your kids are healthy and smart and extremely well-educated. They live
in a safe, organized world filled with exciting educational opportunities,
healthy team sports, family entertainment, and games that reward group effort,
cooperation, and good citizenship.
It all makes me want to puke. If I could
puke, that is, because I can't. (Did I mention there was no accidental bulimia,
either?)
Thy body is all vice, Miss Alison, and thy
mind all virtue.
Exactly, Doctor Sam. And it's the vice I'm hoping
to find out about. Once I get a body, that is.
We knew that we weren't going to enjoy much vice
on Fahd's Incarnation Day, but still everyone in the Cadre of Glorious Destiny
was excited, and maybe a little jealous, about his finally getting to be an
adult, and incarnating into the real world and having some real world fun for a
change. Never mind that he'd got stuck in a dismal job as an electrical
engineer on a frozen moon.
All jobs are pretty dismal from what I can tell,
so he isn't any worse off than anyone else really.
For days before the party I had been sort of
avoiding Fritz. Since we're electronic we can avoid each other easily, simply
by not letting yourself be visible to the other person, and not answering any
queries he sends to you, but I didn't want to be rude.
Fritz was cadre, after all.
So I tried to make sure I was too busy to deal
with Fritz—too busy at school, or with my job for Dane, or working with one of
the other cadre members on a project. But a few hours before our departure for
Titan, when I was in a conference room with Bartolomeo and Parminder working on
an assignment for our Artificial Intelligence class, Fritz knocked on our door,
and Bartolomeo granted him access before Parminder and I could signal him not
to.
So in comes Fritz. Since we're electronic we can
appear to one another as whatever we like, for instance Mary Queen of Scots or
a bunch of snowflakes or even you, Doctor Sam. We all experiment with
what we look like. Right now I mostly use an avatar of a sort-of Picasso
woman—he used to distort people in his paintings so that you had a kind of
360-degree view of them, or parts of them, and I think that's kind of
interesting, because my whole aspect changes depending on what angle of me
you're viewing.
For an avatar Fritz used the image of a
second-rate action star named Norman Isfahan. Who looks okay, at least if you
can forget his lame videos, except that Fritz added an individual touch in the
form of a balloon-shaped red hat. Which he thought made him look cool, but
which only seemed ludicrous and a little sad.
Fritz stared at me for a moment, with a big goofy
grin on his face, and Parminder sends me a little private electronic note of
sympathy. In the last few months Fritz had become my pet, and he followed me
around whenever he got the chance. Sometimes he'd be with me for hours without
saying a word, sometimes he'd talk the entire time and not let me get a single
word in.
I did my best with him, but I had a life to lead,
too. And friends. And family. And I didn't want this person with me every
minute, because even though I was sorry for him he was also very frustrating to
be around.
Friendship is not always the sequel of
obligation.
Alas, Doctor J., too true.
Fritz was the one member of our cadre who came
out, well, wrong. They build us—us software—by reasoning backwards from
reality, from our parents' DNA. They find a good mix of our parents' genes, and
that implies certain things about us, and the sociologists get their say
about what sort of person might be needful in the next generation, and everything's
thrown together by a really smart artificial intelligence, and in the end you
get a virtual child.
But sometimes despite all the intelligence of
everyone and everything involved, mistakes are made. Fritz was one of these. He
wasn't stupid exactly—he was as smart as anyone—but his mental reflexes just
weren't in the right plane. When he was very young he would spend hours without
talking or interacting with any of us. Fritz's parents, Jack and Hans, were
both software engineers, and they were convinced the problem was fixable. So
they complained and they or the AIs or somebody came up with a software patch,
one that was supposed to fix his problem—and suddenly Fritz was active and
angry, and he'd get into fights with people and sometimes he'd just scream for
no reason at all and go on screaming for hours.
So Hans and Jack went to work with the code again,
and there was a new software patch, and now Fritz was stealing things, except
you can't really steal anything in sims, because the owner can find any virtual
object just by sending it a little electronic ping.
That ended with Fritz getting fixed yet again,
and this went on for years. So while it was true that none of us were exactly a
person, Fritz was less a person than any of us.
We all did our best to help. We were cadre, after
all, and cadres look after their own. But there was a limit to what any of us
could do. We heard about unanticipated feedback loops and subsystem crashes and
weird quantum transfers leading to fugue states. I think that the experts had
no real idea what was going on. Neither did we.
There was a lot of question as to what would
happen when Fritz incarnated. If his problems were all software glitches, would
they disappear once he was meat and no longer software? Or would they short-circuit
his brain?
A check on the histories of those with similar
problems did not produce encouraging answers to these questions.
And then Fritz became my problem because he
got really attached to me, and he followed me around.
"Hi, Alison," he said.
"Hi, Fritz."
I tried to look very busy with what I was doing,
which is difficult to do if you're being Picasso Woman and rather
abstract-looking to begin with.
"We're going to Titan in a little
while," Fritz said.
"Uh-huh," I said.
"Would you like to play the shadowing game
with me?" he asked.
Right then I was glad I was Picasso Woman and not
incarnated, because I knew that if I had a real body I'd be blushing.
"Sure," I said. "If our capsules
are anywhere near each other when we hit the atmosphere. We might be separated,
though."
"I've been practicing in the
simulations," Fritz said. "And I'm getting pretty good at the
shadowing game."
"Fritz," Parminder said. "We're
working on our AI project now, okay? Can we talk to you later, on Titan?"
"Sure."
And I sent a note of gratitude to Parminder, who
was in on the scheme with me and Janis, and who knew that Fritz couldn't be a
part of it.
Shortly thereafter my electronic being was
transmitted from Ceres by high-powered communications lasers and downloaded
into an actual body, even if it was a body that had six legs and that didn't
belong to me. The body was already in its vacuum suit, which was packed into
the descent capsule—I mean nobody wanted us floating around in the Cassini
Ranger in zero gravity in bodies we weren't used to—so there wasn't a lot I
could do for entertainment.
Which was fine. It was the first time I'd been in
a body, and I was absorbed in trying to work out all the little differences
between reality and the sims I'd grown up in.
In reality, I thought, things seem a little
quieter. In simulations there are always things competing for your attention,
but right now there was nothing to do but listen to myself breathe.
And then there was a bang and a big shove, easily
absorbed by foam padding, and I was launched into space, aimed at the orange
ball that was Titan, and behind it the giant pale sphere of Saturn.
The view was sort of disappointing. Normally you
see Saturn as an image with the colors electronically altered so as to heighten
the subtle differences in detail. The reality of Saturn was more of a pasty
blob, with faint brown stripes and a little red jagged scrawl of a storm in the
southern hemisphere.
Unfortunately I couldn't get a very good view of
the rings, because they were edge-on, like a straight silver knife-slash right
across a painted canvas.
Besides Titan I could see at least a couple dozen
moons. I could recognize Dione and Rhea, and Enceladus because it was so
bright. Iapetus was obvious because it was half light and half dark. There were
a lot of tiny lights that could have been Atlas or Pan or Prometheus or Pandora
or maybe a score of others.
I didn't have enough time to puzzle out the
identity of the other moons, because Titan kept getting bigger and bigger. It
was a dull orange color, except on the very edge where the haze scatters blue
light. Other than that arc of blue, Titan is orange the same way Mars is red,
which is to say that it's orange all the way down, and when you get to the
bottom there's still more orange.
It seemed like a pretty boring place for Fahd to
spend his first years of adulthood.
I realized that if I were doing this trip in a
sim, I'd fast-forward through this part. It would be just my luck if all
reality turned out to be this dull.
Things livened up in a hurry when the capsule hit
the atmosphere. There was a lot of noise, and the capsule rattled and jounced,
and bright flames of ionizing radiation shot up past the view port. I could feel
my heart speeding up, and my breath going fast. It was my body that was
being bounced around, with my nerve impulses running along my
spine. This was much more interesting. This was the difference
between reality and a sim, even though I couldn't explain exactly what the
difference was.
It is the distinction, Miss Alison,
between the undomesticated awe which one might feel at the sight of a noble
wild prospect discovered in nature; and that which is produced by a vain
tragedian on the stage, puffing
and blowing in a transport of dismal fury as he tries to describe the
same vision.
Thank you, Doctor Sam.
We that live to please must please to
live.
I could see nothing but fire for a while, and then
there was a jolt and a CrashBang as the braking chute deployed, and I
was left swaying frantically in the sudden silence, my heart beating fast as
high-atmosphere winds fought for possession of the capsule. Far above I could
just see the ionized streaks of some of the other cadre members heading my way.
It was then, after all I could see was the orange
fog, that I remembered that I'd been so overwhelmed by the awe of what I'd been
seeing that I forgot to observe. So I began to kick myself over that.
It isn't enough to stare when you want to be a
visual artist, which is what I want more than anything. A noble wild prospect
(as you'd call it, Doctor Sam) isn't simply a gorgeous scene, it's also a
series of technical problems. Ratios, colors, textures. Media. Ideas. Frames. Decisions.
I hadn't thought about any of that when I had the chance, and now it was too
late.
I decided to start paying better attention, but
there was nothing happening outside but acetylene sleet cooking off the hot
exterior of the capsule. I checked my tracking display and my onboard map of
Titan's surface. So I was prepared when a private message came from Janis.
"Alison. You ready to roll?"
"Sure. You bet."
"This is going to be brilliant."
I hoped so. But somewhere in my mind I kept
hearing Doctor Sam's voice:
Remember that all tricks are either
knavish or childish.
The trick I played on Fritz was both.
I had been doing some outside work for Dane, who
was a communications tech, because outside work paid in real money, not the
Citizenship Points we get paid in the sims. And Dane let me do some of the work
on Fahd's Incarnation Day, so I was able to arrange which capsules everyone was
going to be put into.
I put Fritz into the last capsule to be fired at
Titan. And those of us involved in Janis' scheme—Janis, Parminder, Andy, and
I—were fired first.
This basically meant that we were going to be on
Titan five or six minutes ahead of Fritz, which meant it was unlikely that he'd
be able to catch up to us. He would be someone else's problem for a while.
I promised myself that I'd be extra nice to him later,
but it didn't stop me from feeling knavish and childish.
After we crashed into Titan's atmosphere, and
after a certain amount of spinning and swaying we came to a break in the cloud,
and I could finally look down at Titan's broken surface. Stark mountains,
drifts of methane snow, shiny orange ethane lakes, the occasional crater. In
the far distance, in the valley between a pair of lumpy mountains, was the
smooth toboggan slide of the Tomasko Glacier. And over to one side, on a
plateau, were the blinking lights that marked our landing area.
And directly below was an ethane cloud, into which
the capsule soon vanished. It was there that the chute let go, and there was a
stomach-lurching drop before the airfoils deployed. I was not used to having my
stomach lurch—recall if you will my earlier remarks on puking—so it was a few
seconds before I was able to recover and take control of what was now a large
and agile glider.
No, I hadn't piloted a glider before. But I'd
spent the last several weeks working with simulations, and the technology was
fail-safed anyway. Both I and the onboard computer would have to screw up
royally before I could damage myself or anyone else. I took command of the pod
and headed for Janis' secret rendezvous.
There are various sorts of games you can play with
the pods as they're dropping through the atmosphere. You can stack your
airfoils in appealing and intricate formations. (I think this one's really
stupid if you're trying to do it in the middle of thick clouds.) There's the
game called "shadowing," the one that Fritz wanted to play with me,
where you try to get right on top of another pod, above the airfoils where they
can't see you, and you have to match every maneuver of the pod that's below
you, which is both trying to evade you and to maneuver so as to get above you.
There are races, where you try to reach some theoretical point in the sky ahead
of the other person. And there's just swooping and dashing around the sky,
which is probably as fun as anything.
But Janis had other plans. And Parminder and Andy
and I, who were Janis' usual companions in her adventures, had elected to be a
part of her scheme, as was our wont. (Do you like my use of the word
"wont," Doctor Sam?) And a couple other members of the cadre, Mei and
Bartolomeo, joined our group without knowing our secret purpose.
We disguised our plan as a game of shadowing,
which I turned out to be very good at. It's not simply a game of flying, it's a
game of spacial relationships, and that's what visual artists have to be good
at understanding. I spent more time on top of one or more of the players than
anyone else.
Though perhaps the others weren't concentrating on
the game. Because although we were performing the intricate spiraling maneuvers
of shadowing as a part of our cover, we were also paying very close attention
to the way the winds were blowing at different altitudes—we had
cloud-penetrating lasers for that, in addition to constant meteorological data
from the ground—and we were using available winds as well as our maneuvers to
slowly edge away from our assigned landing field, and toward our destined
target.
I kept expecting to hear from Fritz, wanting to
join our game. But I didn't. I supposed he had found his fun somewhere else.
All the while we were stunting around, Janis was
sending us course and altitude corrections, and thanks to her navigation we
caught the edge of a low pressure area that boosted us toward our objective at
nearly two hundred kilometers per hour. It was then that Mei swung her capsule
around and began a descent toward the landing field.
"I just got the warning that we're on the
edge of our flight zone," she reported.
"Roger," I said.
"Yeah," said Janis. "We know."
Mei swooped away, followed by Bartolomeo. The rest
of us continued soaring along in the furious wind. We made little pretense by
this point that we were still playing shadow, but instead tried for distance.
Ground Control on the landing area took longer to
try to contact us than we'd expected.
"Capsules six, twenty-one, thirty," said
a ground controller. She had one of those smooth, controlled voices that people
use when trying to coax small children away from the candy and toward the
spinach.
"You have exceeded the safe range from the
landing zone. Turn at once to follow the landing beacon."
I waited for Janis to answer.
"It's easier to reach Tomasko from where we
are," she said. "We'll just head for the glacier and meet the rest of
you there."
"The flight plan prescribes a landing on Lake
Southwood," the voice said. "Please lock on the landing beacon at
once and engage your autopilots."
Janis' voice rose with impatience. "Check the
flight plan I'm sending you! It's easier and quicker to reach Tomasko! We've
got a wind shoving us along at a hundred eighty clicks!"
There was another two or three minutes of silence.
When the voice came back, it was grudging.
"Permission granted to change flight
plan."
I sagged with relief in my vac suit, because now I
was spared a moral crisis. We had all sworn that we'd follow Janis' flight plan
whether or not we got permission from Ground Control, but that didn't
necessarily meant that we would have. Janis would have gone, of course, but I
for one might have had second thoughts. I would have had an excuse if Fritz had
been along, because I could have taken him to the assigned landing field—we
didn't want him with us, because he might not have been able to handle the
landing if it wasn't on an absolutely flat area.
I'd like to think I would have followed Janis,
though. It isn't as if I hadn't before.
And honestly, that was about it. If this had been
one of the adult-approved video dramas we grew up watching, something would
have gone terribly wrong and there would have been a horrible crash. Parminder
would have died, and Andy and I would have been trapped in a crevasse or buried
under tons of methane ice, and Janis would have had to go to incredible, heroic
efforts in order to rescue us. At the end Janis would have Learned an Important
Life Lesson, about how following the Guidance of our Wise, Experienced Elders
is preferable to staging wild, disobedient stunts.
By comparison what actually happened was fairly
uneventful. We let the front push us along till we were nearly at the glacier,
and then we dove down into calmer weather. We spiraled to a soft landing in
clean snow at the top of Tomasko Glacier. The airfoils neatly folded
themselves, atmospheric pressure inside the capsules equalized with that of the
moon, and the hatches opened so we could walk in our vac suits onto the top of
Titan.
I was flushed with joy. I had never set an actual
foot on an actual world before, and as I bounded in sheer delight through the
snow I rejoiced in all the little details I felt all around me.
The crunch of the frozen methane under my boots.
The way the wind picked up long streamers of snow that made little spattering
noises when they hit my windscreen. The suit heaters that failed to heat my
body evenly, so that some parts were cool and others uncomfortably warm.
None of it had the immediacy of the simulations,
but I didn't remember this level of detail either. Even the polyamide scent of
the suit seals was sharper than the generic stuffy suit smell they put in the
sim.
This was all real, and it was wonderful, and even
if my body was borrowed I was already having the best time I'd ever had in my
life.
I scuttled over to Janis on my six legs and
crashed into her with affectionate joy. (Hugging wasn't easy with the vac suits
on.) Then Parminder ran over and crashed into her from the other side.
"We're finally out of Plato's Cave!" she
said, which is the sort of obscure reference you always get out of Parminder.
(I looked it up, though, and she had a good point.)
The outfitters at the top of the glacier hadn't
been expecting us for some time, so we had some free time to indulge in a
snowball fight. I suppose snowball fights aren't that exciting if you're
wearing full-body pressure suits, but this was the first real snowball fight
any of us had ever had, so it was fun on that account anyway.
By the time we got our skis on, the shuttle
holding the rest of the cadre and their pods was just arriving. We could see
them looking at us from the yellow windows of the shuttle, and we just gave
them a wave and zoomed off down the glacier, along with a grownup who decided
to accompany us in case we tried anything else that wasn't in the regulation
playbook.
Skiing isn't a terribly hazardous sport if you've
got six legs on a body slung low to the ground. The skis are short, not much
longer than skates, so they don't get tangled; and it's really hard to fall
over—the worst that happens is that you go into a spin that might take some time
to get out of. And we'd all been practicing on the simulators and nothing bad
happened.
The most interesting part was the jumps that had
been molded at intervals onto the glacier. Titan's low gravity meant that when
you went off a jump, you went very high and you stayed in the air for a long
time. And Titan's heavy atmosphere meant that if you spread your limbs apart
like a skydiver, you could catch enough of that thick air almost to hover,
particularly if the wind was cooperating and blowing uphill. That was wild and
thrilling, hanging in the air with the wind whistling around the joints of your
suit, the glossy orange snow coming up to meet you, and the sound of your own
joyful whoops echoing in your ears.
I am a great friend to public amusements,
because they keep people from vice.
Well. Maybe. We'll see.
The best part of the skiing was that this time I
didn't get so carried away that I'd forgot to observe. I thought about
ways to render the dull orange sheen of the glacier, the wild scrawls made in
the snow by six skis spinning out of control beneath a single squat body, the
little crusty waves on the surface generated by the constant wind.
Neither the glacier nor the lake is always solid.
Sometimes Titan generates a warm front that liquifies the topmost layer of the
glacier, and the liquid methane pours down the mountain to form the lake. When
that happens, the modular resort breaks apart and creeps away on its treads.
But sooner or later everything freezes over again, and the resort returns.
We were able to ski through a broad orange glassy
chute right onto the lake, and from there we could see the lights of the resort
in the distance. We skied into a big ballooning pressurized hangar made out of
some kind of durable fabric, where the crew removed our pressure suits and gave
us little felt booties to wear. I'd had an exhilarating time, but hours had
passed and I was tired. The Incarnation Day banquet was just what I needed.
Babbling and laughing, we clustered around the
snack tables, tasting a good many things I'd never got in a simulation. (They
make us eat in the sims, to get us used to the idea so we don't accidentally
starve ourselves once we're incarnated, and to teach us table manners, but the
tastes tend to be a bit monotonous.)
"Great stuff!" Janis said, gobbling some
kind of crunchy vat-grown treat that I'd sampled earlier and found disgusting.
She held the bowl out to the rest of us. "Try this! You'll like it!"
I declined.
"Well," Janis said, "if you're
afraid of new things. . ."
That was Janis for you—she insisted on sharing her
existence with everyone around her, and got angry if you didn't find her life
as exciting as she did.
About that time Andy and Parminder began to gag on
the stuff Janis had made them eat, and Janis laughed again.
The other members of the cadre trailed in about an
hour later, and the feast proper began. I looked around the long table—the
forty-odd members of the Cadre of Glorious Destiny, all with their little heads
on their furry multipede bodies, all crowded around the table cramming in the
first real food they've tasted in their lives. In the old days, this would have
been a scene from some kind of horror movie. Now it's just a slice of
posthumanity, Earth's descendants partying on some frozen rock far from home.
But since all but Fahd were in borrowed bodies I'd
never seen before, I couldn't tell one from the other. I had to ping a query
off their implant communications units just to find out who I was talking to.
Fahd sat at the place of honor at the head of the
table. The hair on his furry body was ash-blond, and he had a sort of widow's
peak that gave his head a kind of geometrical look.
I liked Fahd. He was the one I had sex with, that
time that Janis persuaded me to steal a sex sim from Dane, the guy I do outside
programming for. (I should point out, Doctor Sam, that our simulated bodies
have all the appropriate organs, it's just that the adults have made sure we
can't actually use them for sex.)
I think there was something wrong with the
simulation. What Fahd and I did wasn't wonderful, it wasn't ecstatic, it was
just. . . strange. After a while we gave up and found something else to do.
Janis, of course, insisted she'd had a glorious
time. She was our leader, and everything she did had to be totally fabulous. It
was just like that horrid vat-grown snack food product she'd tried—not only was
it the best food she'd ever tasted, it was the best food ever, and we
all had to share it with her.
I hope Janis actually did enjoy the sex
sim, because she was the one caught with the program in her buffer—and after I told
her to erase it. Sometimes I think she just wants to be found out.
During dinner those whose parents permitted it
were allowed two measured doses of liquor to toast Fahd—something called Ring
Ice, brewed locally. I think it gave my esophagus blisters.
After the Ring Ice things got louder and more
lively. There was a lot more noise and hilarity when the resort crew discovered
that several of the cadre had slipped off to a back room to find out what sex
was like, now they had real bodies. It was when I was laughing over this that I
looked at Janis and saw that she was quiet, her body motionless. She's normally
louder and more demonstrative than anyone else, so I knew something was badly
wrong. I sent her a private query through my implant. She sent a single-word
reply.
Mom. . .
I sent her a glyph of sympathy while I wondered
how Janis' mom had found out about our little adventure so quickly. There was
barely time for a lightspeed signal to bounce to Ceres and back.
Ground Control must have really been annoyed. Or
maybe she, like Janis' mom, was a Constant Soldier in the Five Principles
Movement and was busy spying on everyone else—all for the greater good, of
course.
Whatever the message was, Janis bounced back
pretty quickly. Next thing I knew she was sidling up to me saying, "Look,
you can loan me your vac suit, right?"
Something about the glint in her huge platter eyes
made me cautious.
"Why would I want to do that?" I asked.
"Mom says I'm grounded. I'm not allowed to go
skating with the rest of you. But nobody can tell these bodies apart—I figured
if we switched places we could show her who's boss."
"And leave me stuck here by myself?"
"You'll be with the waiters—and some of them
are kinda cute, if you like them hairy." Her tone turned serious.
"It's solidarity time, Alison. We can't let Mom win this one."
I thought about it for a moment, then said,
"Maybe you'd better ask someone else."
Anger flashed in her huge eyes. "I knew you'd
say that! You've always been afraid to stand up to the grownups!"
"Janis," I sighed. "Think about it.
Do you think your mom was the only one that got a signal from Ground Control?
My parents are going to be looking into the records of this event very
closely. So I think you should talk someone else into your scheme—and not
Parminder or Andy, either."
Her whole hairy body sulked. I almost laughed.
"I guess you're right," she conceded.
"You know your mom is going to give you a big
lecture when we get back."
"Oh yeah. I'm sure she's writing her speech
right now, making sure she doesn't miss a single point."
"Maybe you'd better let me eavesdrop," I
said. "Make sure you don't lose your cool."
She looked even more sulky. "Maybe you'd
better."
We do this because we're cadre. Back in the old
days, when the first poor kids were being raised in virtual, a lot of them
cracked up once they got incarnated. They went crazy, or developed a lot of
weird obsessions, or tried to kill themselves, or turned out to have a kind of
autism where they could only relate to things through a computer interface.
So now parents don't raise their children by
themselves. Most kids still have two parents, because it takes two to pay the
citizenship points and taxes it takes to raise a kid, and sometimes if there
aren't enough points to go around there are three parents, or four or five.
Once the points are paid the poor moms and dads have to wait until there are
enough applicants to fill a cadre. A whole bunch of virtual children are raised
in one group, sharing their upbringing with their parents and crèche staff.
Older cadres often join their juniors and take part in their education, also.
The main point of the cadre is for us all to keep
an eye on each other. Nobody's allowed to withdraw into their own little world.
If anyone shows sign of going around the bend, we unite in our efforts to
retrieve them.
Our parents created the little hell that we live
in. It's our job to help each other survive it.
A person used to vicissitudes is not
easily dejected.
Certainly Janis isn't, though despite cadre
solidarity she never managed to talk anyone else into changing places with her.
I felt only moderately sorry for her—she'd already had her triumph, after
all—and I forgot all about her problems once I got back into my pressure suit
and out onto the ice.
Skating isn't as thrilling as skiing, I suppose,
but we still had fun. Playing crack-the-whip in the light gravity, the person
on the end of the line could be fired a couple kilometers over the smooth
methane ice.
After which it was time to return to the resort.
We all showered while the resort crew cleaned and did maintenance on our suits,
and then we got back in the suits so that the next set of tourists would find
their rental bodies already armored up and ready for sport.
We popped open our helmets so that the scanners
could be put on our heads. Quantum superconducting devices tickled our brain
cells and recovered everything they found, and then our brains—our
essences—were dumped into a buffer, then fired by communication laser back to
Ceres and the sim in which we all lived.
The simulation seemed inadequate compared to the
reality of Titan. But I didn't have time to work out the degree of difference,
because I had to save Janis' butt.
That's us. That's the cadre. All for one and one
for all.
And besides, Janis has been my best friend for
practically ever.
Anna-Lee, Janis' mom, was of course waiting for
her, sitting in the little common room outside Janis' bedroom. (Did I mention
that we sleep, Doctor Sam? We don't sleep as long as incarnated people do, just
a few hours, but our parents want us to get used to the idea so that when we're
incarnated we know to sleep when we get tired instead of ignoring it and then
passing out while doing something dangerous or important.
(The only difference between our sleep and yours
is that we don't dream. I mean, what's the point, we're stuck in our parents'
dream anyway.)
So I've no sooner arrived in my own simulated body
in my own simulated bedroom when Janis is screaming on the private channel.
"Mom is here! I need you now!"
So I press a few switches in my brain and there I
am, right in Janis' head, getting much of the same sensor feed that she's
receiving herself. And I look at her and I say, "Hey, you can't talk to
Anna-Lee looking like this."
Janis is wearing her current avatar, which is
something like a crazy person might draw with crayons. Stick-figure body, huge
yellow shoes, round bobble head with crinkly red hair like wires.
"Get your quadbod on!" I tell her.
"Now!"
So she switches, and now her avatar has four arms,
two in the shoulders, two in the hip sockets. The hair is still bright red.
Whatever her avatar looks like, Janis always keeps the red hair.
"Good," I say. "That's
normal."
Which it is, for Ceres. Which is an asteroid
without much gravity, so there really isn't a lot of point in having legs. In
microgravity legs just drag around behind you and bump into things and get
bruises and cuts. Whereas everyone can use an extra pair of arms, right? So
most people who live in low- or zero-gravity environments use quadbods, which
are much practical than the two-legged model.
So Janis pushes off with her left set of arms and
floats through the door into the lounge where her mom awaits. Anna-Lee wears a
quadbod, too, except that hers isn't an avatar, but a three-dimensional
holographic scan of her real body. And you can tell that she's really
pissed—she's got tight lips and tight eyelids and a tight face, and both sets
of arms are folded across her midsection with her fingers digging into her
forearms as if she's repressing the urge to grab Janis and shake her.
"Hi, Mom," Janis said.
"You not only endangered yourself,"
Anna-Lee said, "but you chose to endanger others, too."
"Sit down before you answer," I murmured
in Janis' inward ear. "Take your time."
I was faintly surprised that Janis actually
followed my advice. She drifted into a chair, used her lower limbs to settle
herself into it, and then spoke.
"Nobody was endangered," she said, quite
reasonably.
Anna-Lee's nostrils narrowed.
"You diverted from the flight plan that was
devised for your safety," she said.
"I made a new flight plan," Janis
pointed out. "Ground Control accepted it. If it was dangerous, she
wouldn't have done that."
Anna-Lee's voice got that flat quality that it
gets when she's following her own internal logic. Sometimes I think she's the
program, not us.
"You are not authorized to file flight
plans!" she snapped.
"Ground Control accepted it," Janis
repeated. Her voice had grown a little sharp, and I whispered at her to keep
cool.
"And Ground Control immediately informed me!
They were right on the edge of calling out a rescue shuttle!"
"But they didn't, because there was no
problem!" Janis snapped out, and then there was a pause while I told her
to lower her voice.
"Ground Control accepted my revised
plan," she said. "I landed according to the plan, and nobody was
hurt."
"You planned this from the beginning!"
All in that flat voice of hers. "This was a deliberate act of
defiance!"
Which was true, of course.
"What harm did I do?" Janis asked.
("Look," I told Janis. "Just tell
her that she's right and you were wrong and you'll never do it again."
("I'm not going to lie!" Janis sent back
on our private channel. "Whatever Mom does, she's never going to make me
lie!")
All this while Anna-Lee was saying, "We must
all work together for the greater good! Your act of defiance did nothing but
divert people from their proper tasks! Titan Ground Control has better things
to do than worry about you!"
There was no holding Janis back now. "You wanted
me to learn navigation! So I learned it—because you wanted it! And now
that I've proved that I can use it, and you're angry about it!" She was
waving her arms so furiously that she bounced up from her chair and began to
sort of jerk around the room.
"And do you know why that is, Mom?" she
demanded.
"For God's sake shut up!" I
shouted at her. I knew where this was leading, but Janis was too far gone in
her rage to listen to me now.
"It's because you're second-rate!" Janis
shouted at her mother. "Dad went off to Barnard's Star, but you
didn't make the cut! And I can do all the things you wanted to do, and do them
better, and you can't stand it!"
"Will you be quiet!" I tell
Janis. "Remember that she owns you!"
"I accepted the decision of the
committee!" Anna-Lee was shouting. "I am a Constant Soldier and I
live a productive life, and I will not be responsible for producing a
child who is a burden and a drain on resources!"
"Who says I'm going to be a burden?"
Janis demanded. "You're the only person who says that! If I
incarnated tomorrow I could get a good job in ten minutes!"
"Not if you get a reputation for disobedience
and anarchy!"
By this point it was clear that since Janis wasn't
listening to me, and Anna-Lee couldn't listen, there was no longer any point
in my involving myself in what had become a very predictable argument. So I
closed the link and prepared my own excuses for my own inevitable meeting with
my parents.
I changed from Picasso Woman to my own quadbod,
which is what I use when I talk to my parents, at least when I want something
from them. My quadbod avatar is a girl just a couple years younger than my
actual age, wearing a school uniform with a Peter Pan collar and a white bow in
her—my—hair. And my beautiful brown eyes are just slightly larger than eyes are
in reality, because that's something called "neoteny," which means
you look more like a baby and babies are designed to be irresistible to
grownups.
Let me tell you that it works. Sometimes I can
blink those big eyes and get away with anything.
And at that point my father called, and told me
that he and my mom wanted to talk to me about my adventures on Titan, so I
popped over to my parents' place, where I appeared in holographic form in their
living room.
My parents are pretty reasonable people. Of course
I take care to keep them reasonable, insofar as I can. Let me smile
with the wise, as Doctor Sam says, and feed with the rich. I will
keep my opinions to myself, and try my best to avoid upsetting the people who
have power over me.
Why did I soar off with Janis on her flight plan?
my father wanted to know.
"Because I didn't think she should go
alone," I said.
Didn't you try to talk her out of it? my mother
asked.
"You can't talk Janis out of anything,"
I replied. Which, my parents knowing Janis, was an answer they understood.
So my parents told me to be careful, and that was
more or less the whole conversation.
Which shows you that not all parents up here are
crazy.
Mine are more sensible than most. I don't think
many parents would think much of my ambition to get involved in the fine arts.
That's just not done up here, let alone the sort of thing I want
to do, which is to incarnate on Earth and apprentice myself to an actual
painter, or maybe a sculptor. Up here they just use cameras, and their idea of
original art is to take camera pictures or alter camera pictures or combine
camera pictures with one another or process the camera pictures in some way.
I want to do it from scratch, with paint on
canvas. And not with a computer-programmed spray gun either, but with a real
brush and blobs of paint. Because if you ask me the texture of the thing
is important, which is why I like oils. Or rather the idea of oils,
because I've never actually had a chance to work with the real thing.
And besides, as Doctor Sam says, A man who has
not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having
seen what is expected a man should see. The grand object of traveling is to see
the shores of the Mediterranean.
So when I told my parents what I wanted to do,
they just sort of shrugged and made me promise to learn another skill as well,
one just a little bit more practical. So while I minor in art I'm majoring in
computer design and function and programming, which is pretty interesting because
all our really complex programs are written by artificial intelligences who are
smarter than we are, so getting them to do what you want is as much like voodoo
as science.
So my parents and I worked out a compromise that
suited everybody, which is why I think my parents are pretty neat actually.
About twenty minutes after my talk with my
parents, Janis knocked on my door, and I made the door go away, and she walked
in, and then I put the door back. (Handy things, sims.)
"Guess that didn't work out so good,
huh?" she said.
"On your family's civility scale," I
said, "I think that was about average."
Her eyes narrowed (she was so upset that she's
forgot to change out of her quadbod, which is why she had the sort of eyes that
could narrow).
"I'm going to get her," she said.
"I don't think that's very smart," I
said.
Janis was smacking her fists into my walls, floor,
and ceiling and shooting around the room, which was annoying even though the
walls were virtual and she couldn't damage them or get fingerprints on them.
"Listen," I said. "All you have to
do is keep the peace with your mom until you've finished your thesis, and then
you'll be incarnated and she can't touch you. It's just months,
Janis."
"My thesis!" A glorious grin of
discovery spread across Janis' face. "I'm going to use my thesis!
I'm going to stick it to Mom right where it hurts!"
I reached out and grabbed her and steadied her in
front of me with all four arms.
"Look," I said. "You can't keep
calling her bluff."
Her voice rang with triumph. "Just watch
me."
"Please," I said. "I'm begging you.
Don't do anything till you're incarnated!"
I could see the visions of glory dancing before
her eyes. She wasn't seeing or hearing me at all.
"She's going to have to admit that I am right
and that she is wrong," she said. "I'm going to nail my thesis to her
forehead like Karl Marx on the church door."
"That was Martin Luther actually."
(Sometimes I can't help these things.)
She snorted. "Who cares?"
"I do." Changing the subject. "Because
I don't want you to die."
Janis snorted. "I'm not going to bow to her.
I'm going to crush her. I'm going to show her how stupid and futile and
second-rate she is."
And at that moment there was a signal at my door.
I ignored it.
"The power of punishment is to silence, not
to confute," I said.
Her face wrinkled as if she'd bit into something
sour. "I can't believe you're quoting that old dead guy
again."
I have found you an argument, I wanted to say with Doctor Sam, but I
am not obliged to find you an understanding.
The signal at my door repeated, and this time it
was attached to an electronic signal that meant Emergency! Out of sheer
surprise I dissolved the door.
Mei was there in her quadbod, an expression of
anger on her face.
"If you two are finished congratulating each
other on your brilliant little prank," she said, "you might take time
to notice that Fritz is missing."
"Missing?" I didn't understand how
someone could be missing. "Didn't his program come back from Titan?"
If something happened to the transmission, they
could reload Fritz from a backup.
Mei's expression was unreadable. "He never
went. He met the Blue Lady."
And then she pushed off with two of her hands and
drifted away, leaving us in a sudden, vast, terrible silence.
We didn't speak, but followed Mei into the common
room. The other cadre members were all there, and they all watched us as we
floated in.
When you're little, you first hear about the Blue
Lady from the other kids in your cadre. Nobody knows for sure how we all
find out about the Blue Lady—not just the cadres on Ceres, but the ones on
Vesta, and Ganymede, and everywhere.
And we all know that sometimes you might see her,
a kind smiling woman in a blue robe, and she'll reach out to you, and she seems
so nice you'll let her take your hand.
Only then, when it's too late, you'll see that she
has no eyes, but only an empty blackness filled with stars.
She'll take you away and your friends will never
see you again.
And of course it's your parents who send the Blue
Lady to find you when you're bad.
We all know that the Blue Lady doesn't truly
exist, it's ordinary techs in ordinary rooms who give the orders to zero out
your program along with all its backups, but we all believe in the Blue Lady
really, and not just when we're little.
Which brings me to the point I made about
incarnation earlier. Once you're incarnated, you are considered a human being,
and you have human rights.
But not until then. Until you're
incarnated, you're just a computer program that belongs to your parents, and if
you're parents think the program is flawed or corrupted and simply too awkward
to deal with, they can have you zeroed.
Zeroed. Not killed. The grownups insist that
there's a difference, but I don't see it myself.
Because the Blue Lady really comes for some
people, as she came for Fritz when Jack and Hans finally gave up trying to fix
him. Most cadres get by without a visit. Some have more than one. There was a
cadre on Vesta who lost eight, and then there were suicides among the survivors
once they incarnated, and it was a big scandal that all the grownups agreed
never to talk about.
I have never for an instant believed that my
parents would ever send the Blue Lady after me, but still it's always there in
the back of my mind, which is why I think that the current situation is so
horrible. It gives parents a power they should never have, and it breeds a
fundamental distrust between kids and their parents.
The grownups' chief complaint about the cadre
system is that their children bond with their peers and not their parents.
Maybe it's because their peers can't kill them.
Everyone in the cadre got the official message
about Fritz, that he was basically irreparable and that the chance of his
making a successful incarnation was essentially zero. The message said that
none of us were at fault for what had happened, and that everyone knew that
we'd done our best for him.
This was in the same message queue as a message to
me from Fritz, made just before he got zeroed out. There he was with his stupid
hat, smiling at me.
"Thank you for saying you'd play the
shadowing game with me," he said. "I really think you're
wonderful." He laughed. "See you soon, on Titan!"
So then I cried a lot, and I erased the message so
that I'd never be tempted to look at it again.
We all felt failure. It was our job to make Fritz
right, and we hadn't done it. We had all grown up with him, and even though he
was a trial he was a part of our world. I had spent the last few days avoiding
him, and I felt horrible about it; but everyone else had done the same thing at
one time or another.
We all missed him.
The cadre decided to wear mourning, and we got
stuck in a stupid argument about whether to wear white, which is the
traditional mourning color in Asia, or black, which is the color in old Europe.
"Wear blue," Janis said. So we did.
Whatever avatars we wore from that point on had blue clothing, or used blue as
a principal color somewhere in their composition.
If any of the parents noticed, or talked about it,
or complained, I never heard it.
I started thinking a lot about how I related to
incarnated people, and I thought that maybe I'm just a little more compliant
and adorable and sweet-natured than I'd otherwise be, because I want to avoid
the consequences of being otherwise. And Janis is perhaps more defiant than
she'd be under other circumstances, because she wants to show she's not afraid.
Go ahead, Mom, she says, pull the trigger. I dare you.
Underestimating Anna-Lee all the way. Because
Anna-Lee is a Constant Soldier of the Five Principles Movement, and that means serious.
The First Principle of the Five Principles
Movement states that Humanity is a pattern of thought, not a side effect of
taxonomy, which means that you're human if you think like a human,
whether you've got six legs or four arms or two legs like the folks on Earth
and Mars.
And then so on to the Fifth Principle, we come to
the statement that humanity in all its various forms is intended to occupy
every possible ecosystem throughout the entire universe, or at least as much of
it as we can reach. Which is why the Five Principles Movement has always been
very big on genetic experimentation, and the various expeditions to nearby
stars.
I have no problem with the Five Principles
Movement, myself. It's rational compared with groups like the Children of Venus
or the God's Menu people.
Besides, if there isn't something to the Five
Principles, what are we doing out here in the first place?
My problem lies with the sort of people the
Movement attracts, which is to say people like Anna-Lee. People who are
obsessive, and humorless, and completely unable to see any other point of view.
Not only do they dedicate themselves heart and soul to whatever group they
join, they insist everyone else has to join as well, and that anyone who isn't
a part of it is a Bad Person.
So even though I pretty much agree with the Five
Principles, I don't think I'm going to join the movement. I'm going to keep in
mind the wisdom of my good Doctor Sam: Most schemes of political improvement
are very laughable things.
But to get back to Anna-Lee. Back in the day she
married Carlos, who was also in the Movement, and together they worked for
years to qualify for the expedition to Barnard's Star on the True Destiny.
They created Janis together, because having children is all a part of occupying
the universe and so on.
But Carlos got the offer to crew the ship, and
Anna-Lee didn't. Carlos chose Barnard's Star over Anna-Lee, and now he's a
couple light-months away. He and the rest of the settlers are in electronic
form—no sense in spending the resources to ship a whole body to another star
system when you can just ship the data and build the body once you arrive—and
for the most part they're dormant, because there's nothing to do until they
near their destination. But every week or so Carlos has himself awakened so
that he can send an electronic postcard to his daughter.
The messages are all really boring, as you might
expect from someone out in deep space where there's nothing to look at and
nothing to do, and everyone's asleep anyway.
Janis sends him longer messages, mostly about her
fights with Anna-Lee. Anna-Lee likewise sends Carlos long messages about Janis'
transgressions. At two light-months out Carlos declines to mediate between
them, which makes them both mad.
So Anna-Lee is mad because her husband left her,
and she's mad at Janis for not being a perfect Five Principles Constant
Soldier. Janis is mad at Carlos for not figuring out a way to take her along,
and she's mad at Anna-Lee for not making the crew on the True Destiny,
and failing that not having the savvy to keep her husband in the picture.
And she's also mad at Anna-Lee for getting married
again, this time to Rhee, a rich Movement guy who was able to swing the taxes
to create two new daughters, both of whom are the stars of their
particular cadres and are going to grow up to be perfect Five Principles Kids,
destined to carry on the work of humanity in new habitats among distant stars.
Or so Anna-Lee claims, anyway.
Which is why I think that Janis underestimates her
mother. I think the way Anna-Lee looks at it, she's got two new kids, who are
everything she wants. And one older kid who gives her trouble, and who she can
give to the Blue Lady without really losing anything, since she's lost Janis anyway.
She's already given a husband to the stars, after all.
And all this is another reason why I want to
incarnate on Earth, where a lot of people still have children the old-fashioned
way. The parents make an embryo in a gene-splicer, and then the embryo is put
in a vat, and nine months later you crack the vat open and you've got an actual
baby, not a computer program. And even if the procedure is a lot more
time-consuming and messy I still think it's superior.
So I was applying for work on Earth, both for jobs
that could use computer skills, and also for apprenticeship programs in the
fine arts. But there's a waiting list for pretty much any job you want on
Earth, and also there's a big entry tax unless they really want you, so
I wasn't holding my breath; and besides, I hadn't finished my thesis.
I figured on graduating from college along with
most of my cadre, at the age of fourteen. I understand that in your day, Doctor
Sam, people graduated from college a lot later. I figure there are several
important reasons for the change: (1) we virtual kids don't sleep as much as
you do, so we have more time for study; (2) there isn't that much else to do
here anyway; and (3) we're really, really, really smart. Because if you
were a parent, and you had a say in the makeup of your kid (along with the
doctors and the sociologists and the hoodoo machines), would you say, No
thanks, I want mine stupid?
No, I don't think so.
And the meat-brains that we incarnate into are
pretty smart, too. Just in case you were wondering.
We could grow up faster, if we wanted. The
computers we live in are so fast that we could go from inception to maturity in
just two or three months. But we wouldn't get to interact with our parents, who
being meat would be much slower, or with anyone else. So in order to have any
kind of relationship with our elders, or any kind of socialization at all, we
have to slow down to our parents' pace. I have to say that I agree with that.
In order to graduate I needed to do a thesis, and
unfortunately I couldn't do the one I wanted, which was the way the paintings
of Breughel, etc., reflected the theology of the period. All the training with
computers and systems, along with art and art history, had given me an idea of
how abstract systems such as theology work, and how you can visually represent
fairly abstract concepts on a flat canvas.
But I'd have to save that for maybe a graduate
degree, because my major was still in the computer sciences, so I wrote a
fairly boring thesis on systems interopability—which, if you care, is the art
of getting different machines and highly specialized operating systems to talk
to each other, a job that is made more difficult if the machines in question
happen to be a lot smarter than you are.
Actually it's a fairly interesting subject. It
just wasn't interesting in my thesis.
While I was doing that I was also working outside
contracts for Dane, who was from a cadre that had incarnated a few years ahead
of us, and who I got to know when his group met with ours to help with our lessons
and with our socialization skills (because they wanted us to be able to talk to
people outside the cadre and our families, something we might not do if we
didn't have practice).
Anyway, Dane had got a programming job in Ceres'
communications center, and he was willing to pass on the more boring parts of
his work to me in exchange for money. So I was getting a head start on paying
that big Earth entry tax, or if I could evade the tax, maybe living on Earth a
while and learning to paint.
"You're just going to end up being Ceres'
first interior decorator," Janis scoffed.
"And that would be a bad thing?"
I asked. "Just look at this place!" Because it's all so
functional and boring and you'd think they could find a more interesting color
of paint than grey, for God's sake.
That was one of the few times I'd got to talk to
Janis since our adventure on Titan. We were both working on our theses, and
still going to school, and I had my outside contracts, and I think she was
trying to avoid me, because she didn't want to tell me what she was doing
because she didn't want me to tell her not to do it.
Which hurt, by the way. Since we'd been such loyal
friends up to the point where I told her not to get killed, and then because I
wanted to save her life she didn't want to talk to me anymore.
The times I mostly got to see Janis were
Incarnation Day parties for other members of our cadre. So we got to see
Ganymede, and Iapetus, and Titan again, and Rhea, and Pluto, Callisto, and Io,
and the antimatter generation ring between Venus and Mercury, and Titan again,
and then Titan a fourth time.
Our cadre must have this weird affinity for
orange, I don't know.
We went to Pallas, Juno, and Vesta. Though if you
ask me, one asteroid settlement is pretty much like the next.
We went to Third Heaven, which is a habitat the
God's Menu people built at L2. And they can keep a lot of the items on
the menu, if you ask me.
We visited Luna (which you would call the Moon,
Doctor Sam. As if there was only one). And we got to view Everlasting Dynasty,
the starship being constructed in lunar orbit for the expedition to Tau Ceti,
the settlement that Anna-Lee was trying her best to get Janis aboard.
We also got to visit Mars three times. So among
other entertainments I looked down at the planet from the top of Olympus Mons,
the largest mountain in the solar system, and I looked down from the edge of
the solar system's largest canyon, and then I looked up from the bottom
of the same canyon.
We all tried to wear blue if we could, in memory
of the one of us who couldn't be present.
Aside from the sights, the Incarnation Day parties
were great because all our incarnated cadre members turned up, in bodies they'd
borrowed for the occasion. We were all still close, of course, and kept
continually in touch, but our communication was limited by the speed of light
and it wasn't anything like having Fahd and Chandra and Solange there in
person, to pummel and to hug.
We didn't go to Earth. I was the only one of our
cadre who had applied there, and I hadn't got an answer yet. I couldn't help
fantasizing about what my Incarnation Day party would be like if I held it on
Earth—where would I go? What would we look at? Rome? Mount Everest? The ocean
habitats? The plains of Africa, where the human race began?
It was painful to think that the odds were high
that I'd never see any of these places.
Janis never tried to organize any of her little
rebellions on these trips. For one thing word had got out, and we were all
pretty closely supervised. Her behavior was never less than what Anna-Lee would
desire. But under it all I could tell she was planning something drastic.
I tried to talk to her about it. I talked about my
thesis, and hoped it would lead to a discussion of her thesis. But no
luck. She evaded the topic completely.
She was pretty busy with her project, though,
whatever it was. Because she was always buzzing around the cadre asking people
where to look for odd bits of knowledge.
I couldn't make sense of her questions, though.
They seemed to cover too many fields. Sociology, statistics, mineralogy,
criminology, economics, astronomy, spaceship design. . . The project seemed too
huge.
The only thing I knew about Janis' thesis was that
it was supposed to be about resource management. It was the field that
Anna-Lee forced her into, because it was full of skills that would be useful on
the Tau Ceti expedition. And if that didn't work, Anna-Lee made sure Janis
minored in spaceship and shuttle piloting and navigation.
I finally finished my thesis, and then I sat back
and waited for the job offers to roll in. The only offer I got came from
someone who wanted me to run the garbage cyclers on Iapetus, which the guy
should have known I wouldn't accept if he had bothered to read my application.
Maybe he was just neck-deep in garbage and
desperate, I don't know.
And then the most astounding thing happened.
Instead of a job in the computer field, I got an offer to study at the Pisan
Academy.
Which is an art school. Which is in Italy, which
is where the paintings come from mostly.
The acceptance committee said that my work showed
a "naive but highly original fusion of social criticism with the
formalities of the geometric order." I don't even pretend to know
what they meant by that, but I suspect they just weren't used to the
perspective of a student who had spent practically her entire life in a
computer on Ceres.
I broadcast my shrieks of joy to everyone in the
cadre, even those who had left Ceres and were probably wincing at their work
stations when my screams reached them.
I bounced around the common room and everyone came
out to congratulate me. Even Janis, who had taken to wearing an avatar that
wasn't even remotely human, just a graphic of a big sledgehammer smashing a rock,
over and over.
Subtlety had never been her strong point.
"Congratulations," she said. "You
got what you wanted."
And then she broadcast something on a private
channel. You're going to be famous, she said. But I'm going to be a legend.
I looked at her. And then I sent back, Can we
talk about this?
In a few days. When I deliver my thesis.
Don't, I pleaded.
Too late.
The hammer hit its rock, and the shards flew out
into the room and vanished.
I spent the next few days planning my Incarnation
Day party, but my heart wasn't in it. I kept wondering if Janis was going to be
alive to enjoy it.
I finally decided to have my party in Thailand
because there were so many interesting environments in one place, as well as
the Great Buddha. And I found a caterer that was supposed to be really good.
I decided what sort of body I wanted, and the
incarnation specialists on Earth started cooking it up in one of their vats.
Not the body of an Earth-born fourteen-year-old, but older, more like eighteen.
Brown eyes, brown hair, and those big eyes that had always been so useful.
And two legs, of course. Which is what they all
have down there.
I set the date. The cadre were alerted. We all
practiced in the simulations and tried to get used to making do with only two
arms. Everyone was prepared.
And then Janis finished her thesis. I downloaded a
copy the second it was submitted to her committee and read it in one long
sitting, and my sense of horror grew with every line.
What Janis had done was publish a comprehensive
critique of our entire society! It was a piece of brilliance, and at the
same time it was utter poison.
Posthuman society wrecks its children, Janis said,
and this can be demonstrated by the percentage of neurotic and dysfunctional
adults. The problems encountered by the first generation of children who spent
their formative years as programs—the autism, the obsessions and compulsions,
the addictions to electronic environments—hadn't gone away, they'd just been
reduced to the point where they'd become a part of the background clutter, a
part of our civilization so everyday that we never quite noticed it.
Janis had the data, too. The number of people who
were under treatment for one thing or another. The percentage who had
difficulty adjusting to their incarnations, or who didn't want to communicate
with anyone outside their cadre, or who couldn't sleep unless they were
immersed in a simulation. Or who committed suicide. Or who died in
accidents—Janis questioned whether all those accidents were really the results
of our harsh environments. Our machines and our settlements were much safer
than they had been in the early days, but the rates of accidental death were
still high. How many accidents were caused by distracted or unhappy operators,
or for that matter were deliberate "suicide by machine"?
Janis went on to describe one of the victims of
this ruthless type of upbringing. "Flat of emotional affect, offended by
disorder and incapable of coping with obstruction, unable to function without
adherence to a belief system as rigid as the artificial and constricted
environments in which she was raised."
When I realized Janis was describing Anna-Lee I
almost de-rezzed.
Janis offered a scheme to cure the problem, which
was to get rid of the virtual environments and start out with real incarnated
babies. She pulled out vast numbers of statistics demonstrating that places
that did this—chiefly Earth—seemed to raise more successful adults. She also
pointed out that the initial shortage of resources that had prompted the
creation of virtual children in the first place had long since passed—plenty of
water-ice coming in from the Kuiper Belt these days, and we were sitting on all
the minerals we could want. The only reason the system continued was for the
convenience of the adults. But genuine babies, as opposed to abstract computer
programs, would help the adults, too. They would no longer be tempted to become
little dictators with absolute power over their offspring. Janis said the
chance would turn the grownups into better human beings.
All this was buttressed by colossal numbers of
statistics, graphs, and other data. I realized when I'd finished it that the
Cadre of Glorious Destiny had produced one true genius, and that this genius
was Janis.
The true genius is a mind of large general
powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Anna-Lee determined her, all right, and the
problem was that Janis probably didn't have that long to live. Aside from the
fact that Janis had ruthlessly caricatured her, Anna-Lee couldn't help but
notice that the whole work went smack up against the Five Principles Movement.
According to the Movement people, all available resources had to be devoted to
the expansion of the human race out of the solar system and into new
environments. It didn't matter how many more resources were available now than
in the past, it was clear against their principles to devote a greater share to
the raising of children when it could be used to blast off into the universe.
And though the Five Principles people acknowledged
our rather high death rate, they put it down to our settlements' hazardous
environments. All we had to do was genetically modify people to better suit the
environments and the problem would be solved.
I skipped the appendices and zoomed from my room
across the common room to Janis' door, and hit the button to alert her to a
visitor. The door vanished, and there was Janis—for the first time since her
fight with Anna-Lee, she was using her quadbod avatar. She gave me a wicked
grin.
"Great, isn't it?"
"It's brilliant! But you can't let
Anna-Lee see it."
"Don't be silly. I sent Mom the file
myself."
I was horrified. She had to have seen the way my
Picasso-face gaped, and it made her laugh.
"She'll have you erased!" I said.
"If she does," Janis said. "She'll
only prove my point." She put a consoling hand on my shoulder. "Sorry
if it means missing your incarnation."
When Anna-Lee came storming in—which wasn't long
after—Janis broadcast the whole confrontation on a one-way link to the whole
cadre. We got to watch, but not to participate. She didn't want our advice any
more than she wanted her mother's.
"You are unnatural!" Anna-Lee stormed.
"You spread slanders! You have betrayed the highest truth!"
"I told the truth!" Janis said.
"And you know it's the truth, otherwise you wouldn't be so insane
right now."
Anna-Lee stiffened. "I am a Five Principles
Constant Soldier. I know the truth, and I know my duty."
"Every time you say that, you prove my
point."
"You will retract this thesis, and apologize
to your committee for giving them such a vicious document."
Anna-Lee hadn't realized that the document was
irretrievable, that Janis had given it to everyone she knew.
Janis laughed. "No way, Mom," she said.
Anna-Lee lost it. She waved her fists and
screamed. "I know my duty! I will not allow such a slander to be seen by
anyone!" She pointed at Janis. "You have three days to retract!"
Janis gave a snort of contempt.
"Or what?"
"Or I will decide that you're incorrigible
and terminate your program."
Janis laughed. "Go right ahead, Mom. Do it now.
Nothing spreads a new idea better than martyrdom." She spread her four
arms. "Do it, Mom. I hate life in this hell. I'm
ready."
I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.
Yes, Doctor Sam. That's it exactly.
"You have three days," Anna-Lee said,
her voice all flat and menacing, and then her virtual image de-rezzed.
Janis looked at the space where her mom had been,
and then a goofy grin spread across her face. She switched to the redheaded,
stick-figure avatar, and began to do a little dance as she hovered in the air,
moving like a badly animated cartoon.
"Hey!" she sang. "I get to go to
Alison's party after all!"
I had been so caught up in the drama that I had
forgot my incarnation was going to happen in two days.
But it wasn't going to be a party now. It was
going to be a wake.
"Doctor Sam," I said, "I've got to
save Janis."
The triumph of hope over experience.
"Hope is what I've got," I said, and
then I thought about it. "And maybe a little experience, too."
* * *
My Incarnation Day went well. We came down by
glider, as we had that first time on Titan, except that this time I told Ground
Control to let my friends land wherever the hell they wanted. That gave us time
to inspect the Great Buddha, a slim man with a knowing smile sitting
cross-legged with knobs on his head. He's two and a half kilometers tall and
packed with massively parallel quantum processors, all crunching vast amounts
of data, thinking whatever profound thoughts are appropriate to an artificial
intelligence built on such a scale, and repeating millions of sutras, which are
scriptures for Buddhists, all at the speed of light.
It creeps along at two or three centimeters per
day, and will enter the strait at the end of the Kra Peninsula many thousands
of years from now.
After viewing the Buddha's serene expression from
as many angles as suited us, we soared and swooped over many kilometers of
brilliant green jungle and landed on the beach. And we all did land on
the beach, which sort of surprised me. And then we all did our best to learn
how to surf—and let me tell you from the start, the surfing simulators are totally
inadequate. The longest I managed to stand my board was maybe twenty seconds.
I was amazed at all the sensations that crowded
all around me. The breeze on my skin, the scents of the sea and the vegetation
and the charcoal on which our banquet was being cooked. The hot sand under my
bare feet. The salt taste of the ocean on my lips. The sting of the little
jellyfish on my legs and arms, and the iodine smell of the thick strand of
seaweed that got wrapped in my hair.
I mean, I had no idea. The simulators were
totally inadequate to the Earth experience.
And this was just a part of the Earth, a
small fraction of the environments available. I think I convinced a lot of the
cadre that maybe they'd want to move to Earth as soon as they could raise the
money and find a job.
After swimming and beach games we had my
Incarnation Day dinner. The sensations provided by the food were really too
intense—I couldn't eat much of it. If I was going to eat Earth food, I was
going to have to start with something a lot more bland.
And there was my brown-eyed body at the head of
the table, looking down at the members of the Cadre of Glorious Destiny who
were toasting me with tropical drinks, the kind that have parasols in them.
Tears came to my eyes, and they were a lot wetter
and hotter than tears in the sims. For some reason that fact made me cry even
more.
My parents came to the dinner, because this was
the first time they could actually hug me—hug me for real, that is, and not in
a sim. They had downloaded into bodies that didn't look much like the
four-armed quadbods they used back on Ceres, but that didn't matter. When my
arms went around them, I began to cry again.
After the tears were wiped away we put on
underwater gear and went for a swim on the reef, which is just amazing. More
colors and shapes and textures than I could ever imagine—or imagine putting in
a work of art.
A work of art that embodies all but
selects none is not art, but mere cant and recitation.
Oh, wow. You're right. Thank you, Doctor Sam.
After the reef trip we paid a visit to one of the
underwater settlements, one inhabited by people adapted to breathe water. The
problems were that we had to keep our underwater gear on, and that none of us
were any good at the fluid sign language they all used as their preferred means
of communication.
Then we rose from the ocean, dried out, and had a
last round of hugs before being uploaded to our normal habitations. I gave
Janis a particularly strong hug, and I whispered in her ear.
"Take care of yourself."
"Who?" she grinned. "Me?"
And then the little brown-haired body was left
behind, looking very lonely, as everyone else put on the electrodes and
uploaded back to their normal and very-distant worlds.
As soon as I arrived on Ceres, I zapped an avatar
of myself into my parents' quarters. They looked at me as if I were a ghost.
"What are you doing here?" my
mother managed.
"I hate to tell you this," I said,
"but I think you're going to have to hire a lawyer."
* * *
It was surprisingly easy to do, really. Remember
that I was assisting Dane, who was a communications tech, and in charge of
uploading all of our little artificial brains to Earth. And also remember that
I am a specialist in systems interopability, which implies that I am also a
specialist in systems unoperability.
It was very easy to set a couple of artificial
intelligences running amok in Dane's system just as he was working on our
upload. And that so distracted him that he said yes when I said that I'd
do the job for him.
And once I had access, it was the work of a moment
to swap a couple of serial numbers.
The end result of which was that it was Janis who
uploaded into my brown-haired body, and received all the toasts, and who hugged
my parents with my arms. And who is now on Earth, incarnated, with a
full set of human rights and safe from Anna-Lee.
I wish I could say the same for myself.
Anna-Lee couldn't have me killed, of course, since
I don't belong to her. But she could sue my parents, who from her point of view
permitted a piece of software belonging to them to prevent her from
wreaking vengeance on some software that belonged to her.
And of course Anna-Lee went berserk the second she
found out—which was more or less immediately, since Janis sent her a little
radio taunt as soon as she downed her fourth or fifth celebratory umbrella
drink.
Janis sent me a message, too.
"The least you could have done was make my
hair red."
My hair. Sometimes I wonder why I bothered.
An unexpected side effect of this was that we all
got famous. It turns out that this was an unprecedented legal situation, with
lots of human interest and a colorful cast of characters. Janis became a media
celebrity, and so did I, and so did Anna-Lee.
Celebrity didn't do Anna-Lee's cause any good. Her
whole mental outlook was too rigid to stand the kind of scrutiny and
questioning that any public figure has to put up with. As soon as she was
challenged she lost control. She called one of the leading media interviewers a
name that you, Doctor Sam, would not wish me to repeat.
Whatever the actual merits of her legal case, the
sight of Anna-Lee screaming that I had deprived her of the inalienable right to
kill her daughter failed to win her a lot of friends. Eventually the Five
Principles people realized she wasn't doing their cause any good, and she was
replaced by a Movement spokesperson who said as little as possible.
Janis did some talking, too, but not nearly as
much as she would have liked, because she was under house arrest for coming to
Earth without a visa and without paying the immigration tax. The cops showed up
when she was sleeping off her hangover from all the umbrella drinks. It's
probably lucky that she wasn't given the opportunity to talk much, because if
she started on her rants she would have worn out her celebrity as quickly as
Anna-Lee did.
Janis was scheduled to be deported back to Ceres,
but shipping an actual incarnated human being is much more difficult than
zapping a simulation by laser, and she had to wait for a ship that could carry
passengers, and that would be months.
She offered to navigate the ship herself, since
she had the training, but the offer was declined.
Lots of people read her thesis who wouldn't
otherwise have heard of it. And millions discussed it whether they'd read it or
not. There were those who said that Janis was right, and those that said that
Janis was mostly right but that she exaggerated. There were those who said that
the problem didn't really exist, except in the statistics.
There were those who thought the problem existed
entirely in the software, that the system would work if the simulations were
only made more like reality. I had to disagree, because I think the simulations
were like reality, but only for certain people.
The problem is that human beings perceive reality
in slightly different ways, even if they happen to be programs. A programmer
could do his best to create an artificial reality that exactly mimicked the way
he perceived reality, except that it wouldn't be as exact for another person,
it would only be an approximation. It would be like fitting everyone's hand
into the same-sized glove.
Eventually someone at the University of Adelaide
read the thesis and offered Janis a professorship in their sociology department.
She accepted and was freed from house arrest.
Poor Australia, I thought.
I was on video quite a lot. I used my little-girl
avatar, and I batted my big eyes a lot. I still wore blue, mourning for Fritz.
Why, I was asked, did I act to save Janis?
"Because we're cadre, and we're supposed to
look after one another."
What did I think of Anna-Lee?
"I don't see why she's complaining. I've seen
to it that Janis just isn't her problem anymore."
Wasn't what I did stealing?
"It's not stealing to free a slave."
And so on. It was the same sort of routine I'd
been practicing on my parents all these years, and the practice paid off.
Entire cadres—hundreds of them—signed petitions asking that the case be
dismissed. Lots of adults did the same.
I hope that it helps, but the judge that hears the
case isn't supposed to be swayed by public opinion, but only by the law.
And everyone forgets that it's my parents that
will be on trial, not me, accused of letting their software steal Anna-Lee's
software. And of course I, and therefore they, am completely guilty, so my
parents are almost certainly going to be fined, and lose both money and
Citizenship Points.
I'm sorry about that, but my parents seem not to
be.
How the judge will put a value on a piece of
stolen software that its owner fully intended to destroy is going to make an
interesting ruling, however it turns out.
I don't know whether I'll ever set foot on Earth
again. I can't take my place in Pisa because I'm not incarnated, and I don't
know if they'll offer again.
And however things turn out, Fritz is still
zeroed. And I still wear blue.
I don't have my outside job any longer. Dane won't
speak to me, because his supervisor reprimanded him, and he's under suspicion
for being my accomplice. And even those who are sympathetic to me aren't about
to let me loose with their computers.
And even if I get a job somewhere, I can't be
incarnated until the court case is over.
It seems to me that the only person who got away
scot-free was Janis. Which is normal.
So right now my chief problem is boredom. I spent
fourteen years in a rigid program intended to fill my hours with wholesome and
intellectually useful activity, and now that's over.
And I can't get properly started on the
non-wholesome thing until I get an incarnation somewhere.
Everyone is, or hopes to be, an idler.
Thank you, Doctor Sam.
I'm choosing to idle away my time making pictures.
Maybe I can sell them and help pay the Earth tax.
I call them my "Doctor Johnson" series. Sam.
Johnson on Mars. Sam. Johnson Visits Neptune. Sam. Johnson Quizzing the Tomasko
Glacier. Sam. Johnson Among the Asteroids.
I have many more ideas along this line.
Doctor Sam, I trust you will approve.
Jeffrey Ford is
the author of six novels—Vanitas, World Fantasy Award winner The
Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs.
Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass—and World Fantasy
Award winning collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. His
short fiction, which has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction, SciFiction, Black Gate, The Green Man, Leviathan
3, The Dark, and many year's best anthologies, has won the World
Fantasy and Nebula Awards. His most recent book is collection, The
Empire of Ice Cream.
Some things only make sense if you never question them, and sometimes
growing up in a small town can involve no end of strangeness, as this darkly
weird coming-of-age tale shows.
All summer long, on Wednesday and Friday evenings
after my job at the gas station, I practiced with old man Witzer looking over
my shoulder. When I'd send a dummy toppling perfectly onto the pile of
mattresses in the bed of his pickup, he'd wheeze like it was his last breath (I
think he was laughing), and pat me on the back, but when they fell awkwardly or
hit the metal side of the truck bed or went really awry and ended sprawled on
the ground, he'd spit tobacco and say either one of two things—"That
there's a cracked melon," or "Get me a wet-vac." He was a
patient teacher, never rushed, never raising his voice or showing the least
exasperation in the face of my errors. After we'd felled the last of the eight
dummies we'd earlier placed in the lower branches of the trees on the edge of
town, he'd open a little cooler he kept in the cab of his truck and fetch a
beer for himself and one for me. "You did good today, boy," he'd say,
no matter if I did or not, and we'd sit in the truck with the windows open,
pretty much in silence, and watch the fireflies signal in the gathering dark.
As the old man had said, "There's an art to
dropping drunks." The main tools of the trade were a set of three long
bamboo poles—a ten-foot, a fifteen-foot, and a twenty-foot. They had rubber
balls attached at one end that were wrapped in chamois cloth and tied tight
with a leather lanyard. These poles were called "prods." Choosing the
right prod, considering how high the branches were that the drunk had nestled
upon, was crucial. Too short a one would cause you to go on tiptoes and lose
accuracy, while the excess length of too long a one would get in the way and
throw you off balance. The first step was always to take a few minutes and
carefully assess the situation. You had to ask yourself, "How might this
body fall if I were to prod the shoulders first or the back or the left
leg?" The old man had taught me that generally there was a kind of physics
to it but that sometimes intuition had to override logic. "Don't think of
them as falling but think of them as flying," said Witzer, and only when I
was actually out there under the trees and trying to hit the mark in the center
of the pickup bed did I know what he meant. "You ultimately want them to
fall, turn in the air, and land flat on the back," he'd told me.
"That's a ten pointer." There were other important aspects of the job
as well. The positioning of the truck was crucial as was the manner with which
you woke them after they had safely landed. Calling them back by shouting in
their ears would leave them dazed for a week, but, as the natives had done, breaking
a thin twig a few inches from the ear worked like a charm—a gentle reminder
that life was waiting to be lived.
When his long-time fellow harvester, Mr. Bo
Elliott, passed on, the town council had left it to Witzer to find a
replacement. It had been his determination to pick someone young, and so he
came to the high school and carefully observed each of us fifteen students in
the graduating class. It was a wonder he could see anything through the thick,
scratched lenses of his glasses and those perpetually squinted eyes, but after
long deliberation, which involved the rubbing of his stubbled chin and the
scratching of his fallow scalp, he singled me out for the honor. An honor it
was too, as he'd told me, "You know that because you don't get paid anything
for it." He assured me that I had the talent hidden inside of me, that
he'd seen it like an aura of pink light, and that he'd help me develop it over
the summer. To be an apprentice in the Drunk Harvest was a kind of exalted
position for one as young as me, and it brought me some special credit with my
friends and neighbors, because it meant that I was being initiated into an
ancient tradition that went back further than the time when our ancestors
settled that remote piece of country. My father beamed with pride, my mother
got teary eyed, my girlfriend, Darlene, let me get to third base and partway
home.
Our town was one of those places you pass but
never stop in while on vacation to some national park; out in the sticks, up in
the mountains—places where the population is rendered in three figures on a
board by the side of the road; the first numeral no more than a four and the
last with a hand-painted slash through it and replaced with one of lesser value
beneath. The people there were pretty much like people everywhere only the
remoteness of the locale had insulated us against the relentless tide of change
and the judgment of the wider world. We had radios and televisions and
telephones, and as these things came in, what they brought us lured a few of our
number away. But for those who stayed in Gatchfield progress moved like a
tortoise dragging a ball and chain. The old ways hung on with more tenacity
than Relletta Clome, who was 110 years old and had died and been revived by
Doctor Kvench eight times in ten years. We had our little ways and customs that
were like the exotic beasts of Tasmania, isolated in their evolution to become
completely singular. The strangest of these traditions was the Drunk Harvest.
The Harvest centered on an odd little berry that,
as far as I know, grows nowhere else in the world. The natives had called it vachimi
atatsi, but because of its shiny black hue and the nature of its growth,
the settlers had renamed it the deathberry. It didn't grow in the meadows or
swamps as do blueberries and blackberries, no, this berry grew only out of the
partially decayed carcasses of animals left to lie where they'd fallen. If you
were out hunting in the woods and you came across say, a dead deer, which had
not been touched by coyotes or wolves, you could be certain that that deceased
creature would eventually sprout a small hedge from its rotted gut before
autumn and that the long thin branches would be thick with juicy black berries.
The predators knew somehow that these fallen beasts had the seeds of the berry
bush within them, because although it went against their nature not to devour a
fallen creature, they wouldn't go near these particular carcasses. It wasn't
just wild creatures either, even livestock fallen dead in the field and left untouched
could be counted on to serve as host for this parasitic plant. Instances of
this weren't common but I'd seen it first-hand a couple of times in my youth—a
rotting body, head maybe already turning to skull, and out of the belly like a
green explosion, this wild spray of long thin branches tipped with atoms of
black like tiny marbles, bobbing in the breeze. It was a frightening sight to
behold for the first time, and as I overheard Lester Bildab, a man who foraged
for the deathberry, tell my father once, "No matter how many times I see
it, I still get a little chill in the backbone."
Lester and his son, a dimwitted boy in my class at
school, Lester II, would go out at the start of each August across the fields
and through the woods and swamps searching for fallen creatures hosting the
hideous flora. Bildab had learned from his father about gathering the fruit, as
Bildab's father had learned from his father, and so on all the way back to the
settlers and the natives from whom they'd learned. You can't eat the
berries; they'll make you violently ill. But you can ferment them and make a
drink, like a thick black brandy that had come to be called Night Whiskey
and supposedly had the sweetest taste on earth. I didn't know the process, as
only a select few did, but from berry to glass I knew it took about a month.
Lester and his son would gather them and usually come up with three good-sized
grocery sacks full. Then they'd take them over to The Blind Ghost Bar and Grill
and sell them to Mr. and Mrs. Bocean, who knew the process for making the
liquor and kept the recipe in a little safe with a combination lock. That
recipe was given to our forefathers as a gift by the natives, who, two years
after giving it, with no provocation and having gotten along peacefully with
the settlers, vanished without a trace, leaving behind an empty village on an
island out in the swamp. . . or so the story goes.
The celebration that involved this drink took
place at The Blind Ghost on the last Saturday night in September. It was usually
for adults only, and so the first chance I ever got to witness it was the year
I was made an apprentice to old man Witzer. The only two younger people at the
event that year were me and Lester II. Bildab's boy had been attending since he
was ten, and some speculated that having witnessed the thing and been around
the berries so long was what had turned him simple, but I knew young Lester in
school before that and he was no ball of fire then either. Of the adults that
participated, only eight actually partook of the Night Whiskey. Reed and
Samantha Bocean took turns each year, one joining in the drinking while the
other watched the bar, and then there were seven others, picked by lottery, who
got to taste the sweetest thing on earth. Sheriff Jolle did the honors picking
the names of the winners from a hat at the event and was barred from
participating by a town ordinance that went way back. Those who didn't drink
the Night Whiskey drank conventional alcohol, and there were local musicians
there and dancing. From the snatches of conversation about the celebrations
that adults would let slip out, I'd had an idea it was a raucous time.
This native drink, black as a crow wing and slow
to pour as cough syrup, had some strange properties. A year's batch was enough
to fill only half of an old quart gin bottle that Samantha Bocean had tricked
out with a hand-made label showing a deer skull with berries for eyes, and so
it was portioned out sparingly. Each participant got no more than about
three-quarters of a shot glass of it, but that was enough. Even with just these
few sips it was wildly intoxicating, so that the drinkers became immediately
drunk, their inebriation growing as the night went on although they'd finish
off their allotted pittance within the first hour of the celebration.
"Blind drunk" was the phrase used to describe how the drinkers of it
would end the night. Then came the weird part, for usually around two a.m. all
eight of them, all at once, got to their feet, stumbled out the door, lurched
down the front steps of the bar, and meandered off into the dark, groping and
weaving like namesakes of the establishment they had just left. It was a
peculiar phenomenon of the drink that it made those who imbibed it search for a
resting place in the lower branches of a tree. Even though they were pie-eyed
drunk, somehow, and no one knew why, they'd manage to shimmy up a trunk and
settle themselves down across a few choice branches. It was a law that if you
tried to stop them or disturb them it would be cause for arrest. So when the
drinkers of the Night Whiskey left the bar, no one followed. The next day,
they'd be found fast asleep in midair, only a few precarious branches between
them and gravity. That's where old man Witzer and I came in. At first light, we
were to make our rounds in his truck with the poles bungeed on top, partaking
of what was known as the Drunk Harvest.
Dangerous? You bet, but there was a reason for it.
I told you about the weird part, but even though this next part gives a
justification of sorts, it's even weirder. When the natives gave the berry and
the recipe for the Night Whiskey to our forefathers, they considered it a gift
of a most divine nature, because after the dark drink was ingested and the
drinker had climbed aloft, sleep would invariably bring him or her to some
realm between that of dream and the sweet hereafter. In this limbo they'd come
face to face with their relatives and loved ones who'd passed on. That's right.
It never failed. As best as I can remember him having told it, here's my own
father's recollection of the experience from the year he won the lottery:
"I found myself out in the swamp at night
with no memory of how I'd gotten there or what reason I had for being there. I
tried to find a marker—a fallen tree or a certain turn in the path, to find my
way back to town. The moon was bright, and as I stepped into a clearing, I saw
a single figure standing there stark naked. I drew closer and said hello, even
though I wanted to run. I saw it was an old fellow, and when he heard me
approaching, he looked up and right there I knew it was my Uncle Fic. 'What are
you doing out here without your clothes,' I said to him as I approached. 'Don't
you remember, Joe,' he said, smiling. 'I'm passed on.' And then it struck me
and made my hair stand on end. But Uncle Fic, who'd died at the age of
ninety-eight when I was only fourteen, told me not to be afraid. He told me a
good many things, explained a good many things, told me not to fear death. I
asked him about my ma and pa, and he said they were together as always and
having a good time. I bid him to say hello to them for me, and he said he
would. Then he turned and started to walk away but stepped on a twig, and that
sound brought me awake, and I was lying in the back of Witzer's pickup, staring
into the jowly, pitted face of Bo Elliott."
My father was no liar, and to prove to my mother
and me that he was telling the truth, he told us that Uncle Fic had told him
where to find a tie pin he'd been given as a commemoration of his twenty-fifth
year at the feed store but had subsequently lost. He then walked right over to
a teapot shaped like an orange that my mother kept on a shelf in our living
room, opened it, reached in, and pulled out the pin. The only question my
father was left with about the whole strange episode was, "Out of all my
dead relations, why Uncle Fic?"
Stories like the one my father told my mother and
me abound. Early on, back in the 1700s, they were written down by those who
could write. These rotting manuscripts were kept for a long time in the
Gatchfield library—an old shoe-repair store with book-shelves—in a glass case.
Sometimes the dead who showed up in the Night Whiskey dreams offered
premonitions, sometimes they told who a thief was when something had gone
missing. And supposedly it was the way Jolle had solved the Latchey murder, on
a tip given to Mrs. Windom by her great aunt, dead ten years. Knowing that our
ancestors were keeping an eye on things and didn't mind singing out about the
untoward once a year usually convinced the citizens of Gatchfield to walk the
straight and narrow. We kept it to ourselves, though, and never breathed a word
of it to outsiders as if their rightful skepticism would ruin the power of the
ceremony. As for those who'd left town, it was never a worry that they'd tell
anyone, because, seriously, who'd have believed them?
On a Wednesday evening, the second week in
September, while sitting in the pickup truck, drinking a beer, old man Witzer
said, "I think you got it, boy. No more practice now. Too much and we'll
overdo it." I simply nodded, but in the following weeks leading up to the
end-of-the-month celebration, I was a wreck, envisioning the body of one of my
friends or neighbors sprawled broken on the ground next to the bed of the truck.
At night I'd have a recurring dream of prodding a body out of an oak, seeing it
fall in slow motion, and then all would go black and I'd just hear this dull
crack, what I assumed to be the drunk's head slamming the side of the pickup
bed. I'd wake and sit up straight, shivering. Each time this happened, I tried
to remember to see who it was in my dream, because it always seemed to be the
same person. Two nights before the celebration, I saw a tattoo of a coiled
cobra on the fellow's bicep as he fell and knew it was Henry Grass. I thought
of telling Witzer, but I didn't want to seem a scared kid.
The night of the celebration came and after
sundown my mother and father and I left the house and strolled down the street
to The Blind Ghost. People were already starting to arrive and from inside I
could hear the band tuning up fiddles and banjos. Samantha Bocean had made the
place up for the event—black crepe paper draped here and there and wrapped
around the support beams. Hanging from the ceiling on various lengths of
fishing line were the skulls of all manner of local animals: coyote, deer,
beaver, squirrel, and a giant black bear skull suspended over the center table
where the lottery winners were to sit and take their drink. I was standing on
the threshold, taking all this in, feeling the same kind of enchantment as when
a kid and Mrs. Musfin would do up the three classrooms of the school house for
Christmas, when my father leaned over to me and whispered, "You're on your
own tonight, Ernest. You want to drink, drink. You want to dance, dance."
I looked at him and he smiled, nodded, and winked. I then looked to my mother
and she merely shrugged, as if to say, "That's the nature of the
beast."
Old man Witzer was there at the bar, and he called
me over and handed me a cold beer. Two other of the town's oldest men were with
him, his chess-playing buddies, and he put his arm around my shoulders and
introduced them to me. "This is a good boy," he said, patting my
back. "He's doing Bo Elliott proud out there under the trees." The
two friends of his nodded and smiled at me, the most notice I'd gotten from
either of them my entire life. And then the band launched into a reel, and
everyone turned to watch them play. Two choruses went by and I saw my mother
and father and some of the other couples move out onto the small dance floor. I
had another beer and looked around.
About four songs later, Sheriff Jolle appeared in
the doorway to the bar and the music stopped mid-tune.
"OK," he said, hitching his pants up
over his gut and removing his black, wide-brimmed hat, "time to get the
lottery started." He moved to the center of the bar where the Night
Whiskey drinkers' table was set up and took a seat. "Everybody drop your
lottery tickets into the hat and make it snappy." I'd guessed that this
year it was Samantha Bocean who was going to drink her own concoction since
Reed stayed behind the bar and she moved over and took a seat across from
Jolle. After the last of the tickets had been deposited into the hat, the
sheriff pushed it away from him into the middle of the table. He then called
for a whiskey neat, and Reed was there with it in a flash. In one swift gulp,
he drained the glass, banged it onto the tabletop and said, "I'm
ready." My girlfriend Darlene's stepmom came up from behind him with a
black scarf and tied it around his eyes for a blindfold. Reaching into the hat,
he ran his fingers through the lottery tickets, mixing them around, and then
started drawing them out one by one and stacking them in a neat pile in front
of him on the table. When he had the seven, he stopped and pulled off the
blindfold. He then read the names in a loud voice and everyone kept quiet till
he was finished—Becca Staney, Stan Joss, Pete Hesiant, Berta Hull, Moses T.
Remarque, Ronald White, and Henry Grass. The room exploded with applause and
screams. The winners smiled, dazed by having won, as their friends and family
gathered round them and slapped them on the back, hugged them, shoved drinks
into their hands. I was overwhelmed by the moment, caught up in it and
grinning, until I looked over at Witzer and saw him jotting the names down in a
little notebook he'd refer to tomorrow when we made our rounds. Only then did
it come to me that one of the names was none other than Henry Grass, and
I felt my stomach tighten in a knot.
Each of the winners eventually sat down at the
center table. Jolle got up and gave his seat to Reed Bocean, who brought with
him from behind the bar the bottle of Night Whiskey and a tray of eight shot
glasses. Like the true barman he was, he poured all eight without lifting the
bottle once, all to the exact same level. One by one they were handed around
the table. When each of the winners had one before him or her, the barkeep smiled
and said, "Drink up." Some went for it like it was a draught from the
fountain of youth, some snuck up on it with trembling hand. Berta Hull, a
middle-aged mother of five with horse teeth and short red hair, took a sip and
declared, "Oh my, it's so lovely." Ronald White, the brother of one
of the men I worked with at the gas station, took his up and dashed it off in
one shot. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and laughed like a maniac, drunk
already. Reed went back to the bar. The band started up again and the
celebration came to life like a wild animal in too small a cage.
I wandered around the bar, nodding to the folks I
knew, half taken by my new celebrity as a participant in the Drunk Harvest and
half preoccupied watching Henry Grass. He was a young guy, only twenty-five,
with a crew cut and a square jaw, dressed in the camouflage sleeveless T-shirt
he wore in my recurring dream. With the way he stared at the shot glass in
front of him through his little circular glasses, you'd have thought he was staring
into the eyes of a king cobra. He had a reputation as a gentle, studious soul,
although he was most likely the strongest man in town—the rare instance of an
outsider who'd made a place for himself in Gatchfield. The books he read were
all about UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle, Chariots of the Gods; stuff my father
proclaimed to be "dyed-in-the-wool hooey." He worked with the horses
over at the Haber family farm, and lived in a trailer out by the old Civil War
shot tower, across the meadow and through the woods. I stopped for a moment to
talk to Lester II, who mumbled to me around the hard boiled eggs he was shoving
into his mouth one after another, and when I looked back to Henry, he'd
finished off the shot glass and left the table.
I overheard snatches of conversation, and much of
it was commentary on why it was a lucky thing that so and so had won the
lottery this year. Someone mentioned the fact that poor Pete Hesiant's
beautiful young wife, Lonette, had passed away from leukemia just at the end of
the spring, and another mentioned that Moses had always wanted a shot at the
Night Whiskey but had never gotten the chance, and how he'd soon be too old to
participate as his arthritis had recently given him the devil of a time.
Everybody was pulling for Berta Hull, who was raising those five children on
her own, and Becca was a favorite because she was the town midwife. The same
such stuff was said about Ron White and Stan Joss.
In addition to the well-wishes for the lottery
winners, I stood for a long time next to a table where Sheriff Jolle, my father
and mother, and Dr. Kvench sat, and listened to the doctor, a spry little man
with a gray goatee, who was by then fairly well along in his cups, as were his
listeners, myself included, spout his theory as to why the drinkers took to the
trees. He explained it, amidst a barrage of hiccups, as a product of evolution.
His theory was that the deathberry plant had at one time grown everywhere on
earth, and that early man partook of some form of the Night Whiskey at the dawn
of time. Because the world was teeming with night predators then, and because
early man was just recently descended from the treetops, those who became drunk
automatically knew, as a means of self-preservation, to climb up into the trees
and sleep so as not to become a repast for a saber-toothed tiger or some other
onerous creature. Dr. Kvench, citing Carl Jung, believed that the imperative to
get off the ground after drinking the Night Whiskey had remained in the
collective unconscious and was passed down through the ages. "Everybody in
the world probably still has the unconscious command that would kick in if they
were to drink the dark stuff, but since the berry doesn't grow anywhere but
here now, we're the only ones that see this effect." The doctor nodded,
hiccupped twice, and then got up to fetch a glass of water. When he left the
table Jolle looked over at my mother, and she and he and my father broke up
laughing. "I'm glad he's better at pushing pills than concocting
theories," said the Sheriff, drying his eyes with his thumbs.
At about midnight, I was reaching for yet another
beer, which Reed had placed on the bar, when my grasp was interrupted by a
viselike grip on my wrist. I looked up and saw that it was Witzer. He said
nothing to me but simply shook his head, and I knew he was telling me to lay
off so as to be fresh for the harvest in the morning. I nodded. He smiled,
patted my shoulder, and turned away. Somewhere around two a.m., the lottery
winners, so incredibly drunk that even in my intoxicated state it seemed
impossible they could still walk, stopped dancing, drinking, whatever, and
headed for the door. The music abruptly ceased. It suddenly became so silent we
could hear the wind blowing out on the street. The sounds of them stumbling across
the wooden porch of the bar and then the steps creaking, the screen door
banging shut, filled me with a sense of awe and visions of them groping through
the night. I tried to picture Berta Hull climbing a tree, but I just couldn't
get there, and the doctor's theory seemed to make some sense to me.
I left before my parents did. Witzer drove me home
and before I got out of the cab, he handed me a small bottle.
"Take three good chugs," he said.
"What is it?" I asked.
"An herb mix," he said. "It'll
clear your head and have you ready for the morning."
I took the first sip of it and the taste was
bitter as could be. "Good god," I said, grimacing.
Witzer wheezed. "Two more," he said.
I did as I was told, got out of the truck and bid
him good night. I didn't remember undressing or getting into bed, and luckily I
was too drunk to dream. It seemed as if I'd only closed my eyes when my
father's voice woke me, saying, "The old man's out in the truck, waiting
on you." I leaped out of bed and dressed, and when I finally knew what was
going on, I was surprised I felt as well and refreshed as I did. "Do good,
Ernest," said my father from the kitchen. "Wait," my mother
called. A moment later she came out of their bedroom, wrapping a robe around
her. She gave me a hug and a kiss, and then said, "Hurry." It was
brisk outside, and the early morning light gave proof that the day would be a
clear one. The truck sat at the curb, the prods strapped to the top. Witzer sat
in the cab, drinking a cup of coffee from the delicatessen. When I got in
beside him, he handed me a cup and an egg sandwich on a hard roll wrapped in
white paper. "We're off," he said. I cleared the sleep out of my eyes
as he pulled away from the curb.
Our journey took us down the main street of town
and then through the alley next to the sheriff's office. This gave way to
another small tree-lined street we turned right on. As we headed away from the
center of town, we passed Darlene's house, and I wondered what she'd done the
previous night while I'd been at the celebration. I had a memory of her last
time we were together. She was sitting naked against the wall of the abandoned
barn by the edge of the swamp. Her blonde hair and face were aglow, illuminated
by a beam of light that shone through a hole in the roof. She had the longest
legs and her skin was pale and smooth. Taking a drag from her cigarette, she
said, "Ernest, we gotta get out of this town." She'd laid out for me
her plan of escape, her desire to go to some city where civilization was in full
swing. I just nodded, reluctant to be too enthusiastic. She was adventurous and
I was a homebody, but I did care deeply for her. She tossed her cigarette, put
out her arms and opened her legs, and then Witzer said, "Keep your eyes
peeled now, boy," and her image melted away.
We were moving slowly along a dirt road, both of
us looking up at the lower branches of the trees. The old man saw the first
one. I didn't see her till he applied the brakes. He took a little notebook and
stub of a pencil out of his shirt pocket. "Samantha Bocean," he
whispered, and put a check next to her name. We got out of the cab, and I
helped him unlatch the prods and lay them on the ground beside the truck. She
was resting across three branches in a magnolia tree, not too far from the ground.
One arm and her long gray hair hung down, and she was turned so I could see her
sleeping face.
"Get the ten," said Witzer, as he walked
over to stand directly beneath her.
I did as I was told and then joined him.
"What d'ya say?" he asked. "Looks
like this one's gonna be a peach."
"Well, I'm thinking if I get it on her left
thigh and push her forward fast enough she'll flip as she falls and land
perfectly."
Witzer said nothing but left me standing there and
went and got in the truck. He started it up and drove it around to park so that
the bed was precisely where we hoped she would land. He put it in park and left
it running, and then got out and came and stood beside me. "Take a few
deep breaths," he said. "And then let her fly."
I thought I'd be more nervous, but the training
the old man had given me took hold and I knew exactly what to do. I aimed the
prod and rested it gently on the top of her leg. Just as he'd told me, a real
body was going to offer a little more resistance than one of the dummies, and I
was ready for that. I took three big breaths and then shoved. She rolled
slightly, and then tumbled forward, ass over head, landing with a thump on the
mattresses, facing the morning sky. Witzer wheezed to beat the band, and said,
"That's a solid ten." I was ecstatic.
The old man broke a twig next to Samantha's left
ear and instantly her eyelids fluttered. Eventually she opened her eyes and
smiled.
"How was your visit?" asked Witzer.
"I'll never get tired of that," she
said. "It was wonderful."
We chatted with her for a few minutes, filling her
in on how the party had gone at The Blind Ghost after she'd left. She didn't
divulge to us what passed relative she'd met with, and we didn't ask. As my
mentor had told me when I started, "There's a kind of etiquette to this.
When in doubt, Silence is your best friend."
Samantha started walking back toward the center of
town, and we loaded the prods onto the truck again. In no time, we were on our
way, searching for the next sleeper. Luck was with us, for we found four in a
row, fairly close by each other, Stan Joss, Moses T. Remarque, Berta Hull, and
Becca Staney. All of them had chosen easy to get to perches in the lower
branches of ancient oaks, and we dropped them, one, two, three, four, easy as
could be. I never had to reach for anything longer than the ten, and the old
man proved a genius at placing the truck just so. When each came around at the
insistence of the snapping twig, they were cordial and seemed pleased with
their experience. Moses even gave us a ten-dollar tip for dropping him into the
truck. Becca told us that she'd spoken to her mother, whom she'd missed
terribly since the woman's death two years earlier. Even though they'd been
blind drunk the night before, amazingly none of them appeared to be hung over,
and each walked away with a perceptible spring in his or her step, even Moses,
though he was still slightly bent at the waist by the arthritis.
Witzer said, "Knock on wood, of course, but
this is the easiest year I can remember. The year your daddy won, we had to
ride around for four solid hours before we found him out by the swamp." We
found Ron White only a short piece up the road from where we'd found the
cluster of four, and he was an easy job. I didn't get him to land on his back.
He fell face first, not a desirable drop, but he came to none the worse for
wear. After Ron, we had to ride for quite a while, heading out toward the edge
of the swamp. I knew the only two left were Pete Hesiant and Henry Grass, and
the thought of Henry started to get me nervous again. I was reluctant to show
my fear, not wanting the old man to lose faith in me, but as we drove slowly
along, I finally told Witzer about my recurring dream.
When I was done recounting what I thought was a
premonition, Witzer sat in silence for a few moments and then said, "I'm
glad you told me."
"I'll bet it's really nothing," I said.
"Henry's a big fellow," he said.
"Why should you have all the fun. I'll drop him." And with this, the
matter was settled. I realized I should have told him weeks ago when I first
started having the dreams.
"Easy, boy," said Witzer with a wheeze
and waved his hand as if wiping away my cares. "You've got years of this
to go. You can't manage everything on the first harvest."
We searched everywhere for Pete and Henry—all
along the road to the swamp, on the trails that ran through the woods, out
along the meadow by the shot tower and Henry's own trailer. With the
dilapidated wooden structure of the tower still in sight, we finally found
Henry.
"Thar she blows," said Witzer, and he
stopped the truck.
"Where?" I said, getting out of the
truck, and the old man pointed straight up.
Over our heads, in a tall pine, Henry lay face
down, his arms and legs spread so that they kept him up while the rest of his
body was suspended over nothing. His head hung down as if in shame or utter
defeat. He looked in a way like he was crucified, and I didn't like the look of
that at all.
"Get me the twenty," said Witzer,
"and then pull the truck up."
I undid the prods from the roof, laid the other
two on the ground by the side of the path, and ran the twenty over to the old
man. By the time I went back to the truck, got it going, and turned it toward
the drop spot, Witzer had the long pole in two hands and was sizing up the
situation. As I pulled closer, he let the pole down and then waved me forward
while eyeing back and forth, Henry and then the bed. He directed me to cut the
wheel this way and that, reverse two feet, and then he gave me the thumbs up. I
turned off the truck and got out.
"OK," he said. "This is gonna be a
tricky one." He lifted the prod up and up and rested the soft end against
Henry's chest. "You're gonna have to help me here. We're gonna push
straight up on his chest so that his arms flop down and clear the branches, and
then as we let him down we're gonna slide the pole, catch him at the belt
buckle and give him a good nudge there to flip him as he falls."
I looked up at where Henry was, and then I just
stared at Witzer.
"Wake up, boy!" he shouted.
I came to and grabbed the prod where his hands
weren't.
"On three," he said. He counted off and
then we pushed. Henry was heavy as ten sacks of rocks. "We got him,"
cried Witzer, "now slide it." I did and only then did I look up.
"Push," the old man said. We gave it one more shove and Henry went
into a swan dive, flipping like an Olympic athlete off the high board. When I
saw him in mid-fall, my knees went weak and the air left me. He landed on his
back with a loud thud directly in the middle of the mattresses, dust from the
old cushions roiling up around him.
We woke Henry easily enough, sent him on his way
to town, and were back in the truck. For the first time that morning I breathed
a sigh of relief. "Easiest harvest I've ever been part of," said
Witzer. We headed further down the path toward the swamp, scanning the branches
for Pete Hesiant. Sure enough, in the same right manner with which everything
else had fallen into place we found him curled up on his side in the branches
of an enormous maple tree. With the first cursory glance at him, the old man
determined that Pete would require no more than a ten. After we got the prods
off the truck and positioned it under our last drop, Witzer insisted that I
take him down. "One more to keep your skill up through the rest of the
year," he said.
It was a simple job. Pete had found a nice perch
with three thick branches beneath him. As I said, he was curled up on his side,
and I couldn't see him all too well, so I just nudged his upper back and he
rolled over like a small boulder. The drop was precise, and he hit the center
of the mattresses, but the instant he was in the bed of the pickup, I knew
something was wrong. He'd fallen too quickly for me to register it sooner, but
as he lay there, I now noticed that there was someone else with him. Witzer
literally jumped to the side of the truck bed and stared in.
"What in fuck's name," said the old man.
"Is that a kid he's got with him?"
I saw the other body there, naked, in Pete's arms.
There was long blond hair, that much was sure. It could have been a kid, but I
thought I saw in the jumble, a full-size female breast.
Witzer reached into the truck bed, grabbed Pete by
the shoulder and rolled him away from the other form. Then the two of us stood
there in stunned silence. The thing that lay there wasn't a woman or a child
but both and neither. The body was twisted and deformed, the size of an
eight-year-old but with all the characteristics of maturity, if you know what I
mean. And that face. . . lumpen and distorted, brow bulging, and from the left
temple to the chin erupted in a range of discolored ridges.
"Is that Lonette?" I whispered, afraid
the thing would awaken.
"She's dead, ain't she?" said Witzer in
as low a voice, and his Adam's apple bobbed.
We both knew she was, but there she or some
twisted copy of her lay. The old man took a handkerchief from his back pocket
and brought it up to his mouth. He closed his eyes and leaned against the side
of the truck. A bird flew by low overhead. The sun shone and leaves fell in the
woods on both sides of the path.
Needless to say, when we moved again, we weren't
breaking any twigs. Witzer told me to leave the prods and get in the truck. He
started it up, and we drove slowly, like about fifteen miles an hour, into the
center of town. We drove in complete silence. The place was quiet as a ghost
town, no doubt everyone sleeping off the celebration, but we saw that Sheriff
Jolle's cruiser was in front of the bunker-like concrete building that was the
police station. The old man parked and went in. As he and the sheriff appeared
at the door, I got out of the truck cab and joined them.
"What are you talking about?" Jolle said
as they passed me and headed for the truck bed. I followed behind them.
"Shhh," said Witzer. When they finally
were looking down at the sleeping couple, Pete and whatever that Lonette thing
was, he added, "That's what I'm fucking talking about." He pointed
his crooked old finger and his hand was obviously trembling.
Jolle's jaw dropped open after the second or two
it took to sink in. "I never. . ." said the sheriff, and that's all
he said for a long while.
Witzer whispered, "Pete brought her back with
him."
"What kind of crazy shit is this?" asked
Jolle and he turned quickly and looked at me as if I had an answer. Then he
looked back at Witzer. "What the hell happened? Did he dig her up?"
"She's alive," said the old man.
"You can see her breathing, but she got bunched up or something in the
transfer from there to here."
"Bunched up," said Jolle. "There to
here? What in Christ's name. . ." He shook his head and removed his
shades. Then he turned to me again and said, "Boy, go get Doc
Kvench."
In calling the doctor, I didn't know what to tell
him, so I just said there was an emergency over at the sheriff's office and
that he was needed. I didn't stick around and wait for him, because I had to
keep moving. To stop would mean I'd have to think too deeply about the return
of Lonette Hesiant. By the time I got back to the truck, Henry Grass had also
joined Jolle and Witzer, having walked into town to get something to eat after
his dream ordeal of the night before. As I drew close to them, I heard Henry
saying, "She's come from another dimension. I've read about things like
this. And from what I experienced last night, talking to my dead brother, I can
tell you that place seems real enough for this to happen."
Jolle looked away from Henry at me as I
approached, and then his gaze shifted over my head and he must have caught
sight of the doctor. "Good job," said the sheriff, and put his hand
on my shoulder as I leaned forward to catch my breath.
"Hey, Doc," he said as Kvench drew
close, "you got a theory about this?"
The doctor stepped up to the truck bed and,
clearing the sleep from his eyes, looked down at where the sheriff was
pointing. Doctor Kvench had seen it all in his years in Gatchfield—birth,
death, blood, body rot, but the instant he laid his eyes on the new Lonette,
the color drained out of him, and he grimaced like he'd just taken a big swig
of Witzer's herb mix. The effect on him was dramatic, and Henry stepped up next
to him and held him up with one big tattooed arm across his back. Kvench
brushed Henry off and turned away from the truck. I thought for a second that
he was going to puke.
We waited for his diagnosis. Finally he turned
back and said, "Where did it come from?"
"It fell out of the tree with Pete this
morning," said Witzer.
"I signed the death certificate for that girl
five months ago," said the doctor.
"She's come from another dimension. . ."
said Henry, launching into one of his Bermuda Triangle explanations, but Jolle
held a hand up to silence him. Nobody spoke then and the sheriff started pacing
back and forth, looking into the sky and then at the ground. It was obvious
that he was having some kind of silent argument with himself, cause every few
seconds he'd either nod or shake his head. Finally, he put his open palms to
his face for a moment, rubbed his forehead and cleared his eyes. Then he turned
to us.
"Look, here's what we're gonna do. I decided.
We're going to get Pete out of that truck without waking him and put him on the
cot in the station. Will he stay asleep if we move him?" he asked Witzer.
The old man nodded. "As long as you don't
shout his name or break a twig near his ear, he should keep sleeping till we
wake him."
"OK," continued Jolle. "We get Pete
out of the truck, and then we drive that thing out into the woods, we shoot it
and bury it."
Everybody looked around at everybody else. The
doctor said, "I don't know if I can be part of that."
"You're gonna be part of it," said
Jolle, "or right this second you're taking full responsibility for its
care. And I mean full responsibility."
"It's alive, though," said Kvench.
"But it's a mistake," said the sheriff,
"either of nature or God or whatever."
"Doc, I agree with Jolle," said Witzer,
"I never seen anything that felt so wrong to me than what I'm looking at
in the back of that truck."
"You want to nurse that thing until it dies
on its own?" Jolle said to the doctor. "Think of what it'll do to
Pete to have to deal with it."
Kvench looked down and shook his head. Eventually
he whispered, "You're right."
"Boy?" Jolle said to me.
My mouth was dry and my head was swimming a
little. I nodded.
"Good," said the sheriff. Henry added
that he was in. It was decided that we all participate and share in the act of
disposing of it. Henry and the sheriff gently lifted Pete out of the truck and
took him into the station house. When they appeared back outside, Jolle told
Witzer and me to drive out to the woods in the truck and that he and Henry and
Kvench would follow in his cruiser.
For the first few minutes of the drive out, Witzer
said nothing. We passed Pete Hesiant's small yellow house and upon seeing it I
immediately started thinking about Lonette, and how beautiful she'd been. She
and Pete had only been in their early 30s, a very handsome couple. He was thin
and gangly and had been a star basketball player for Gatchfield, but never tall
enough to turn his skill into a college scholarship. They'd been high school
sweethearts. He finally found work as a municipal handy man, and had that
good-natured youth-going-to-seed personality of the washed up, once lauded
athlete.
Lonette had worked the cash register at the
grocery. I remembered her passing by our front porch on the way to work the
evening shift one afternoon, and I overheard her talking to my mother about how
she and Pete had decided to try to start a family. I'm sure I wasn't supposed
to be privy to this conversation, but whenever she passed in front of our
house, I tried to make it a point of being near a window. I heard every word
through the screen. The very next week, though, I learned that she had some
kind of disease. That was three years ago. She slowly grew more haggard through
the following seasons. Pete tried to take care of her on his own, but I don't
think it had gone all too well. At her funeral, Henry had to hold him back from
climbing into the grave after her.
"Is this murder?" I asked Witzer after
he'd turned onto the dirt path and headed out toward the woods.
He looked over at me and said nothing for a
second. "I don't know, Ernest," he said. "Can you murder someone
who's already dead? Can you murder a dream? What would you have us do?" He
didn't ask the last question angrily but as if he was really looking for
another plan than Jolle's.
I shook my head.
"I'll never see things the same again,"
he said. "I keep thinking I'm gonna wake up any minute now."
We drove on for another half-mile and then he
pulled the truck off the path and under a cluster of oak. As we got out of the
cab, the sheriff parked next to us. Henry, the doctor, and Jolle got out of the
cruiser, and all five of us gathered at the back of the pickup. It fell to
Witzer and me to get her out of the truck and lay her on the ground some feet
away. "Careful," whispered the old man, as he leaned over the wall of
the bed and slipped his arms under her. I took the legs, and when I touched her
skin a shiver went through me. Her body was heavier than I thought, and her sex
was staring me right in the face, covered with short hair thick as twine. She
was breathing lightly, obviously sleeping, and her pupils moved rapidly beneath
her closed lids like she was dreaming. She had a powerful aroma, flowers and
candy, sweet to the point of sickening.
We got her on the ground without waking her, and
the instant I let go of her legs, I stepped outside the circle of men.
"Stand back," said Jolle. The others moved away. He pulled his gun
out of its holster with his left hand and made the sign of the cross with his
right. Leaning down, he put the gun near her left temple, and then cocked the
hammer back. The hammer clicked into place with the sound of a breaking twig
and right then her eyes shot open. Four grown men jumped backward in unison.
"Good lord," said Witzer. "Do it," said Kvench. I looked to
Jolle and he was staring down at her as if in a trance. Her eyes had no color.
They were wide and shifting back and forth. She started taking deep raspy
breaths and then sat straight up. A low mewing noise came from her chest, the
sound of a cat or a scared child. Then she started talking backwards talk, some
foreign language never heard on earth before, babbling frantically and
drooling.
Jolle fired. The bullet caught her in the side of
the head and threw her onto her right shoulder. The side of her face, including
her ear, blew off, and this black stuff, not blood, splattered all over, flecks
of it staining Jolle's pants and shirt and face. The side of her head was
smoking. She lay there writhing in what looked like a pool of oil, and he shot
her again and again, emptying the gun into her. The sight of it brought me to
my knees, and I puked. When I looked up, she'd stopped moving. Tears were
streaming down Witzer's face. Kvench was shaking. Henry looked as if he'd been
turned to stone. Jolle's finger kept pulling the trigger, but there were no
rounds left.
After Henry tamped down the last shovelful of dirt
on her grave, Jolle made us swear never to say a word to anyone about what had
happened. I pledged that oath as did the others. Witzer took me home, no doubt
having silently decided I shouldn't be there when they woke Pete. When I got to
the house, I went straight to bed and slept for an entire day, only getting up
in time to get to the gas station for work the next morning. The only dream I
had was an infuriating and frustrating one of Lester II, eating hard-boiled
eggs and explaining it all to me but in backwards talk and gibberish so I
couldn't make out any of it. Carrying the memory of that Drunk Harvest miracle
around with me was like constantly having a big black bubble of night afloat in
the middle of my waking thoughts. As autumn came on and passed and then winter
bore down on Gatchfield, the insidious strength of it never diminished. It made
me quiet and moody, and my relationship with Darlene suffered.
I kept my distance from the other four
conspirators. It went so far as we tried not to even recognize each other's
presence when we passed on the street. Only Witzer still waved at me from his
pickup when he'd drive by, and if I was the attendant when he came into the
station for gas, he'd say, "How are you, boy?" I'd nod and that would
be it. Around Christmas time I'd heard from my father that Pete Hesiant had
lost his mind, and was unable to go to work, would break down crying at a
moment's notice, couldn't sleep, and was being treated by Kvench with all
manner of pills.
Things didn't get any better come spring. Pete
shot the side of his head off with a pistol. Mrs. Marfish, who'd gone to bring
him a pie she'd baked to cheer him up, discovered him lying dead in a pool of
blood on the back porch of the little yellow house. Then Sheriff Jolle took ill
and was so bad off with whatever he had, he couldn't get out of bed. He
deputized Reed Bocean, the barkeep and the most sensible man in town, to look
after Gatchfield in his absence. Reed did a good job as sheriff and Samantha
double-timed it at The Blind Ghost—both solid citizens.
In the early days of May, I burned my hand badly
at work on a hot car engine and my boss drove me over to Kvench's office to get
it looked after. While I was in his treatment room with him, and he was
wrapping my hand in gauze, he leaned close to me and whispered, "I think I
know what happened." I didn't even make a face, but stared ahead at the
eye chart on the wall, not really wanting to hear anything about the incident.
"Gatchfield's so isolated that change couldn't get in from the outside, so
Nature sent it from within," he said. "Mutation. From the
dream." I looked at him. He was nodding, but I saw that his goatee had
gone squirrelly, there was this over-eager gleam in his eyes, and his breath
smelled like medicine. I knew right then he'd been more than sampling his own
pills. I couldn't get out of there fast enough.
June came, and it was a week away from the day
that Witzer and I were to begin practicing for the Drunk Harvest again. I
dreaded the thought of it to the point where I was having a hard time eating or
sleeping. After work one evening, as I was walking home, the old man pulled up
next to me in his pickup truck. He stopped and opened the window. I was going
to keep walking, but he called, "Boy, get in. Take a ride with me."
I made the mistake of looking over at him.
"It's important," he said. I got in the cab and we drove slowly off
down the street.
I blurted out that I didn't think I'd be able to
manage the Harvest and how screwed up the thought of it was making me, but he
held his hand up and said, "Shh, shh, I know." I quieted down and
waited for him to talk. A few seconds passed and then he said, "I've been
to see Jolle. You haven't seen him have you?"
I shook my head.
"He's a gonner for sure. He's got some kind
of belly rot, and, I swear to you he's got a deathberry bush growing out of his
insides. . .while he's still alive, no less. Doc Kvench just keeps feeding him
pills, but he'd be better off taking a hedge clipper to him."
"Are you serious?" I said.
"Boy, I'm dead serious." Before I could
respond, he said, "Now look, when the time for the celebration comes
around, we're all going to have to participate in it as if nothing had
happened. We made our oath to the sheriff. That's bad enough, but what happens
when somebody's dead relative tells them in a Night Whiskey dream what we did,
what happened with Lonette?"
I was trembling and couldn't bring myself to
speak.
"Tomorrow night—are you listening to
me?—tomorrow night I'm leaving my truck unlocked with the keys in the ignition.
You come to my place and take it and get the fuck out of Gatchfield."
I hadn't noticed but we were now parked in front
of my house. He leaned across me and opened my door. "Get as far away as
you can, boy," he said. The next day, I called in sick to work, withdrew
all my savings from the bank, and talked to Darlene. That night, good to his
word, the keys were in the old pickup. I noticed there was a new used truck
parked next to the old one on his lot to cover when the one we took went
missing. I'd left my parents a letter about how Darlene and I had decided to
elope, and that they weren't to worry. I'd call them.
We fled to the biggest brightest city we could
find, and the rush and maddening business of the place, the distance from home,
our combined struggle to survive at first and then make our way was a curative
better than any pill the doctor could have prescribed. Every day there was
change and progress and crazy news on the television, and these things served
to shrink the black bubble in my thoughts. Still to this day, though, so many
years later, there's always an evening near the end of September when I sit
down to a Night Whiskey, so to speak, and Gatchfield comes back to me in my
dreams like some lost relative I'm both terrified to behold and want nothing
more than to put my arms around and never let go.
Benjamin Rosenbaum
wanted to be a superhero, a scientist (the kind who builds giant ray guns), or
a writer. Instead he became a computer programmer, which didn't involve wearing
his underwear on the outside or building giant ray guns, but he does write in
his spare time. He attended the Clarion West Writers' Workshop in 2001 (the
Sarong-Wearing Clarion), and has had work published in Asimov's, The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His story
"Benjamin Rosenbaum's Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of
Causality, with Air-Planes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum" was nominated for the
2005 Best Novelette Hugo Award, and the best of his early fiction was collected
in the chapbook Other Cities.
The land around Marish was full of the green
stalks of sunflowers: tall as men, with bold yellow faces. Their broad leaves
were stained black with blood.
The rustling came again, and Marish squatted down
on aching legs to watch. A hedgehog pushed its nose through the stalks. It
sniffed in both directions.
Hunger dug at Marish's stomach like the point of a
stick. He hadn't eaten for three days, not since returning to the crushed and
blackened ruins of his house.
The hedgehog bustled through the stalks onto the
trail, across the ash, across the trampled corpses of flowers. Marish waited
until it was well clear of the stalks before he jumped. He landed with one foot
before its nose and one foot behind its tail. The hedgehog, as hedgehogs will,
rolled itself into a ball, spines out.
His house: crushed like an egg, smoking, the straw
floor soaked with blood. He'd stood there with a trapped rabbit in his hand,
alone in the awful silence. Forced himself to call for his wife Temur and his
daughter Asza, his voice too loud and too flat. He'd dropped the rabbit
somewhere in his haste, running to follow the blackened trail of devastation.
Running for three days, drinking from puddles,
sleeping in the sunflowers when he couldn't stay awake.
Marish held his knifepoint above the hedgehog.
They gave wishes, sometimes, in tales. "Speak, if you can," he said,
"and bid me don't kill you. Grant me a wish! Elsewise, I'll have you for a
dinner."
Nothing from the hedgehog, or perhaps a twitch.
Marish drove his knife through it and it thrashed,
spraying more blood on the bloodstained flowers.
Too tired to light a fire, he ate it raw.
* * *
On that trail of tortured earth, wide enough for
twenty horses, among the burnt and flattened flowers, Marish found a little
doll of rags, the size of a child's hand.
It was one of the ones Maghd the mad girl made,
and offered up, begging for stew meat, or wheedling for old bread behind
Lezur's bakery. He'd given her a coin for one, once.
"Wherecome you're giving that sow our good
coins?" Temur had cried, her bright eyes flashing. None in Ilmak Dale
would let a mad girl come near a hearth, and some spit when they passed her.
"Bag-Maghd's good for holding one thing only," Fazt would call out
and they'd laugh their way into the alehouse. Marish laughing too, stopping
only when he looked back at her.
Temur had softened, when she saw how Asza took to
the doll, holding it, and singing to it, and smearing gruel on its rag-mouth
with her fingers to feed it. They called her "little life-light," and
heard her saying it to the doll, "il-ife-ight," rocking it in her
arms.
He pressed his nose into the doll, trying to smell
Asza's baby smell on it, like milk and forest soil and some sweet spice. But he
only smelled the acrid stench of burnt cloth.
When he forced his wet eyes open, he saw a blurry
figure coming towards him. Cursing himself for a fool, he tossed the doll away
and pulled out his knife, holding it at his side. He wiped his face on his
sleeve, and stood up straight, to show the man coming down the trail that the
folk of Ilmak Dale did no obeisance. Then his mouth went dry and his hair stood
up, for the man coming down the trail was no man at all.
It was a little taller than a man, and had the
body of a man, though covered with a dark gray fur; but its head was the head
of a jackal. It wore armor of bronze and leather, all straps and discs with
curious engravings, and carried a great black spear with a vicious point at
each end.
Marish had heard that there were all sorts of
strange folk in the world, but he had never seen anything like this.
"May you die with great suffering," the
creature said in what seemed to be a calm, friendly tone.
"May you die as soon as may be!"
Marish cried, not liking to be threatened.
The creature nodded solemnly. "I am
Kadath-Naan of the Empty City," it announced. "I wonder if I might
ask your assistance in a small matter."
Marish didn't know what to say to this. The
creature waited.
Marish said, "You can ask."
"I must speak with. . ." It frowned.
"I am not sure how to put this. I do not wish to offend."
"Then why," Marish asked before he could
stop himself, "did you menace me on a painful death?"
"Menace?" the creature said. "I only
greeted you."
"You said, 'May you die with great
suffering.' That like to be a threat or a curse, and I truly don't thank you
for it."
The creature frowned. "No, it is a blessing.
Or it is from a blessing: 'May you die with great suffering, and come to know
holy dread and divine terror, stripping away your vain thoughts and fancies
until you are fit to meet the Bone-White Fathers face to face; and may you be
buried in honor and your name sung until it is forgotten.' That is the whole
passage."
"Oh," said Marish. "Well, that
sounds a bit better, I reckon."
"We learn that blessing as pups," said
the creature in a wondering tone. "Have you never heard it?"
"No indeed," said Marish, and put his knife
away. "Now what do you need? I can't think to be much help to you—I don't
know this land here."
"Excuse my bluntness, but I must speak with
an embalmer, or a sepulchrist, or someone of that sort."
"I've no notion what those are," said
Marish.
The creature's eyes widened. It looked, as much as
the face of a jackal could, like someone whose darkest suspicions were in the
process of being confirmed.
"What do your people do with the dead?"
it said.
"We put them in the ground."
"With what preparation? With what rites and
monuments?" said the thing.
"In a wood box for them as can afford it, and
a piece of linen for them as can't; and we say a prayer to the west wind. We
put the stone in with them, what has their soul kept in it." Marish
thought a bit, though he didn't much like the topic. He rubbed his nose on his
sleeve. "Sometime we'll put a pile of stones on the grave, if it were
someone famous."
The jackal-headed man sat heavily on the ground.
It put its head in its hands. After a long moment it said, "Perhaps I
should kill you now, that I might bury you properly."
"Now you just try that," said Marish,
taking out his knife again.
"Would you like me to?" said the
creature, looking up.
Its face was serene. Marish found he had to look
away, and his eyes fell upon the scorched rags of the doll, twisted up in the
stalks.
"Forgive me," said Kadath-Naan of the
Empty City. "I should not be so rude as to tempt you. I see that you have
duties to fulfill, just as I do, before you are permitted the descent into
emptiness. Tell me which way your village lies, and I will see for myself what
is done."
"My village—" Marish felt a heavy
pressure behind his eyes, in his throat, wanting to push through into a sob. He
held it back. "My village is gone. Something come and crushed it. I were
off hunting, and when I come back, it were all burning, and full of the stink
of blood. Whatever did it made this trail through the flowers. I think it went
quick; I don't think I'll likely catch it. But I hope to." He knew he
sounded absurd: a peasant chasing a demon. He gritted his teeth against it.
"I see," said the monster. "And
where did this something come from? Did the trail come from the north?"
"It didn't come from nowhere. Just the
village torn to pieces and this trail leading out."
"And the bodies of the dead," said
Kadath-Naan carefully. "You buried them in—wooden boxes?"
"There weren't no bodies," Marish said.
"Not of people. Just blood, and a few pieces of bone and gristle, and
pigs' and horses' bodies all charred up. That's why I'm following." He
looked down. "I mean to find them if I can."
Kadath-Naan frowned. "Does this happen
often?"
Despite himself, Marish laughed. "Not that I
ever heard before."
The jackal-headed creature seemed agitated.
"Then you do not know if the bodies received. . .even what you would
consider proper burial."
"I have a feeling they ain't received
it," Marish said.
Kadath-Naan looked off in the distance towards
Marish's village, then in the direction Marish was heading. It seemed to come
to a decision. "I wonder if you would accept my company in your
travels," it said. "I was on a different errand, but this matter
seems to. . .outweigh it."
Marish looked at the creature's spear and said,
"You'd be welcome."
He held out the fingers of his hand. "Marish
of Ilmak Dale."
* * *
The trail ran through the blackened devastation of
another village, drenched with blood but empty of human bodies. The timbers of
the houses were crushed to kindling; Marish saw a blacksmith's anvil twisted
like a lock of hair, and plows that had been melted by enormous heat into a
pool of iron. They camped beyond the village, in the shade of a twisted
hawthorn tree. A wild autumn wind stroked the meadows around them, carrying
dandelion seeds and wisps of smoke and the stink of putrefying cattle.
The following evening they reached a hill
overlooking a great town curled around a river. Marish had never seen so many
houses—almost too many to count. Most were timber and mud like those of his village,
but some were great structures of stone, towering three or four stories into
the air. House built upon house, with ladders reaching up to the doors of the
ones on top. Around the town, fields full of wheat rustled gold in the evening
light. Men and women were reaping in the fields, singing work songs as they
swung their scythes.
The path of destruction curved around the town, as
if avoiding it.
"Perhaps it was too well-defended," said
Kadath-Naan.
"Maybe," said Marish, but he remembered
the pool of iron and the crushed timbers, and doubted. "I think that like
to be Nabuz. I never come this far south before, but traders heading this way
from the fair at Halde were always going to Nabuz to buy."
"They will know more of our adversary,"
said Kadath-Naan.
"I'll go," said Marish. "You might
cause a stir; I don't reckon many of your sort visit Nabuz. You keep to the
path."
"Perhaps I might ask of you. . ."
"If they are friendly there, I'll ask how
they bury their dead," Marish said.
Kadath-Naan nodded somberly. "Go to duty and
to death," he said.
Marish thought it must be a blessing, but he
shivered all the same.
* * *
The light was dimming in the sky. The reapers
heaped the sheaves high on the wagon, their songs slow and low, and the city
gates swung open for them.
The city wall was stone, mud, and timber, twice as
tall as a man, and its great gates were iron. But the wall was not well kept.
Marish crept among the stalks to a place where the wall was lower and trash and
rubble were heaped high against it.
He heard the creak of the wagon rolling through
the gates, the last work song fading away, the men of Nabuz calling out to each
other as they made their way home. Then all was still.
Marish scrambled out of the field into a dead run,
scrambled up the rubble, leapt atop the wall and lay on its broad top. He
peeked over, hoping he had not been seen.
The cobbled street was empty. More than that, the
town itself was silent. Even in Ilmak Dale, the evenings had been full of dogs
barking, swine grunting, men arguing in the streets and women gossiping and
calling the children in. Nabuz was supposed to be a great capital of whoring,
drinking, and fighting; the traders at Halde had always moaned over the
delights that awaited them in the south if they could cheat the villagers well
enough. But Marish heard no donkey braying, no baby crying, no cough, no
whisper: nothing pierced the night silence.
He dropped over, landed on his feet quiet as he
could, and crept along the street's edge. Before he had gone ten steps, he
noticed the lights.
The windows of the houses flickered, but not with
candlelight or the light of fires. The light was cold and blue.
He dragged a crate under the high window of the
nearest house and clambered up to see.
There was a portly man with a rough beard, perhaps
a potter after his day's work; there was his stout young wife, and a skinny boy
of nine or ten. They sat on their low wooden bench, their dinner finished and
put to the side (Marish could smell the fresh bread and his stomach cursed
him). They were breathing, but their faces were slack, their eyes wide and
staring, their lips gently moving. They were bathed in blue light. The potter's
wife was rocking her arms gently as if she were cradling a newborn babe—but the
swaddling blankets she held were empty.
And now Marish could hear a low inhuman voice,
just at the edge of hearing, like a thought of his own. It whispered in time to
the flicker of the blue light, and Marish felt himself drawn by its caress. Why
not sit with the potter's family on the bench? They would take him in. He could
stay here, the whispering promised: forget his village, forget his grief. Fresh
bread on the hearth, a warm bed next to the coals of the fire. Work the clay,
mix the slip for the potter, eat a dinner of bread and cheese, then listen to
the blue light and do what it told him. Forget the mud roads of Ilmak Dale, the
laughing roar of Perdan and Thin Deri and Chibar and the others in its
alehouse, the harsh cough and crow of its roosters at dawn. Forget willowy
Temur, her hair smooth as a river and bright as a sheaf of wheat, her proud
shoulders and her slender waist, Temur turning her satin cheek away when he
tried to kiss it. Forget the creak and splash of the mill, and the soft rushes
on the floor of Maghd's hovel. The potter of Nabuz had a young and willing
niece who needed a husband, and the blue light held laughter and love enough
for all. Forget the heat and clanging of Fat Deri's smithy; forget the green
stone that held Pa's soul, that he'd laid upon his shroud. Forget Asza, little
Asza whose tiny body he'd held to his heart. . .
Marish thought of Asza and he saw the potter's
wife's empty arms and with one flex of his legs, he kicked himself away from
the wall, knocking over the crate and landing sprawled among rolling apples.
He sprang to his feet. There was no sound around
him. He stuffed five apples in his pack, and hurried towards the center of
Nabuz.
The sun had set, and the moon washed the streets
in silver. From every window streamed the cold blue light.
Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a
shadow dart behind him, and he turned and took out his knife. But he saw
nothing, and though his good sense told him five apples and no answers was as
much as he should expect from Nabuz, he kept on.
He came to a great square full of shadows, and at
first he thought of trees. But it was tall iron frames, and men and women
bolted to them upside down. The bolts went through their bodies, crusty with
dried blood.
One man nearby was live enough to moan. Marish poured
a little water into the man's mouth, and held his head up, but the man could
not swallow; he coughed and spluttered, and the water ran down his face and
over the bloody holes where his eyes had been.
"But the babies," the man rasped,
"how could you let her have the babies?"
"Let who?" said Marish.
"The White Witch!" the man roared in a
whisper. "The White Witch, you bastards! If you'd but let us fight
her—"
"Why. . ." Marish began.
"Lie again, say the babies will live
forever—lie again, you cowardly blue-blood maggots in the corpse of Nabuz. .
." He coughed and blood ran over his face.
The bolts were fast into the frame. "I'll get
a tool," Marish said, "you won't—"
From behind him came an awful scream.
He turned and saw the shadow that had followed
him: it was a white cat with fine soft fur and green eyes that blazed in the
darkness. It shrieked, its fur standing on end, its tail high, staring at him,
and his good sense told him it was raising an alarm.
Marish ran, and the cat ran after him, shrieking.
Nabuz was a vast pile of looming shadows. As he passed through the empty city
gates he heard a grinding sound and a whinny. As he raced into the moonlit dusk
of open land, down the road to where Kadath-Naan's shadow crossed the demon's
path, he heard hoof beats galloping behind him.
Kadath-Naan had just reached a field of tall
barley. He turned to look back at the sound of the hoof beats and the shrieking
of the devil cat.
"Into the grain!" Marish yelled.
"Hide in the grain!" He passed Kadath-Naan and dived into the barley,
the cat racing behind him.
Suddenly he spun and dropped and grabbed the white
cat, meaning to get one hand on it and get his knife with the other and shut it
up by killing it. But the cat fought like a devil and it was all he could do to
hold on to it with both hands. And he saw, behind him on the trail, Kadath-Naan
standing calmly, his hand on his spear, facing three knights armored every inch
in white, galloping towards them on great chargers.
"You damned dog-man," Marish screamed.
"I know you want to die, but get into the grain!"
Kadath-Naan stood perfectly still. The first
knight bore down on him, and the moon flashed from the knight's sword. The
blade was no more than a hand's-breadth from Kadath-Naan's neck when he sprang
to the side of it, into the path of the second charger.
As the first knight's charge carried him past,
Kadath-Naan knelt, and drove the base of his great spear into the ground. Too
late, the second knight made a desperate yank on the horse's reins, but the
great beast's momentum carried him into the pike. It tore through the neck of
the horse and through the armored chest of the knight riding him, and the two
of them reared up and thrashed once like a dying centaur, then crashed to the
ground.
The first knight wheeled around. The third met
Kadath-Naan. The beast-man stood barehanded, the muscles of his shoulders and
chest relaxed. He cocked his jackal head to one side, as if wondering: Is it
here at last? The moment when I am granted release?
But Marish finally had the cat by its tail, and
flung that wild white thing, that frenzy of claws and spit and hissing, into
the face of the third knight's steed.
The horse reared and threw its rider; the knight
let go of his sword as he crashed to the ground. Quick as a hummingbird,
Kadath-Naan leapt and caught it in midair. He spun to face the last rider.
Marish drew his knife and charged through the
barley. He was on the fallen knight just as he got to his knees.
The crash against armor took Marish's wind away.
The man was twice as strong as Marish was, and his arm went around Marish's
chest like a crushing band of iron. But Marish had both hands free, and with a
twist of the knight's helmet he exposed a bit of neck, and in Marish's knife
went, and then the man's hot blood was spurting out.
The knight convulsed as he died and grabbed Marish
in a desperate embrace, coating him with blood, and sobbing once: and Marish
held him, for the voice of his heart told him it was a shame to have to die
such a way. Marish was shocked at this, for the man was a murderous slave of
the White Witch; but still he held the quaking body in his arms, until it moved
no more.
Then Marish, soaked with salty blood, staggered to
his feet and remembered the last knight with a start; but of course Kadath-Naan
had killed him in the meantime. Three knights' bodies lay on the ruined ground,
and two living horses snorted and pawed the dirt like awkward mourners.
Kadath-Naan freed his spear with a great yank from the horse and man it had
transfixed. The devil cat was a sodden blur of white fur and blood; a falling
horse had crushed it.
Marish caught the reins of the nearest steed, a
huge fine creature, and gentled it with a hand behind its ears. When he had his
breath again, Marish said, "We got horses now. Can you ride?"
Kadath-Naan nodded.
"Let's go then; there like to be more
coming."
Kadath-Naan frowned a deep frown. He gestured to
the bodies.
"What?" said Marish.
"We have no embalmer or sepulchrist, it is
true; yet I am trained in the funereal rites for military expeditions and
emergencies. I have the necessary tools; in a matter of a day I can raise small
monuments. At least they died aware and with suffering; this must compensate
for the rudimentary nature of the rites."
"You can't be in earnest," said Marish.
"And what of the White Witch?"
"Who is the White Witch?" Kadath-Naan
asked.
"The demon; turns out she's somebody what's
called the White Witch. She spared Nabuz, for they said they'd serve her, and
give her their babies."
"We will follow her afterwards," said
Kadath-Naan.
"She's ahead of us as it is! We leave now on
horseback, we might have a chance. There be a whole lot more bodies with her
unburied or buried wrong, less I mistake."
Kadath-Naan leaned on his spear. "Marish of
Ilmak Dale," he said, "here we must part ways. I cannot steel myself
to follow such logic as you declare, abandoning these three burials before me
now for the chance of others elsewhere, if we can catch and defeat a witch. My
duty does not lie that way." He searched Marish's face. "You do not
have the words for it, but if these men are left unburied, they are tanzadi.
If I bury them with what little honor I can provide, they are tazrash.
They spent only a little while alive, but they will be tanzadi or tazrash
forever."
"And if more slaves of the White Witch come
along to pay you back for killing these?"
But try as he might, Marish could not dissuade
him, and at last he mounted one of the chargers and rode onwards, towards the
cold white moon, away from the whispering city.
* * *
The flowers were gone, the fields were gone. The
ashy light of the horizon framed the ferns and stunted trees of a black fen
full of buzzing flies. The trail was wider; thirty horses could have passed
side by side over the blasted ground. But the marshy ground was treacherous,
and Marish's mount sank to its fetlocks with each careful step.
A siege of cranes launched themselves from the
marsh into the moon-abandoned sky. Marish had never seen so many. Bone-white,
fragile, soundless, they ascended like snowflakes seeking the cold womb of
heaven. Or a river of souls. None looked back at him. The voice of doubt told
him: You will never know what became of Asza and Temur.
The apples were long gone, and Marish was growing
lightheaded from hunger. He reined the horse in and dismounted; he would have
to hunt off the trail. In the bracken, he tied the charger to a great black
fern as tall as a house. In a drier spot near its base was the footprint of a
rabbit. He felt the indentation; it was fresh. He followed the rabbit deeper
into the fen.
He was thinking of Temur and her caresses. The
nights she'd turn away from him, back straight as a spear, and the space of
rushes between them would be like a frozen desert, and he'd huddle unsleeping
beneath skins and woolen blankets, stiff from cold, arguing silently with her
in his spirit; and the nights when she'd turn to him, her soft skin hot and
alive against his, seeking him silently, almost vengefully, as if showing
him—see? This is what you can have. This is what I am.
And then the image of those rushes charred and
brown with blood and covered with chips of broken stone and mortar came to him,
and he forced himself to think of nothing: breathing his thoughts out to the
west wind, forcing his mind clear as a spring stream. And he stepped forward in
the marsh.
And stood in a street of blue and purple tile, in
a fantastic city.
He stood for a moment wondering, and then he
carefully took a step back.
And he was in a black swamp with croaking toads
and nothing to eat.
The voice of doubt told him he was mad from
hunger; the voice of hope told him he would find the White Witch here and kill
her; and thinking a thousand things, he stepped forward again and found himself
still in the swamp.
Marish thought for a while, and then he stepped
back, and, thinking of nothing, stepped forward.
The tiles of the street were a wild mosaic—some
had glittering jewels; some had writing in a strange flowing script; some
seemed to have tiny windows into tiny rooms. Houses, tiled with the same
profusion, towered like columns, bulged like mushrooms, melted like wax. Some
danced. He heard soft murmurs of conversation, footfalls, and the rush of a
river.
In the street, dressed in feathers or gold plates
or swirls of shadow, blue-skinned people passed. One such creature, dressed in
fine silk, was just passing Marish.
"Your pardon," said Marish, "what
place be this here?"
The man looked at Marish slowly. He had a red
jewel in the center of his forehead, and it flickered as he talked. "That
depends on how you enter it," he said, "and who you are, but for you,
catarrhine, its name is Zimzarkanthitrugenia-fenstok, not least because that is
easy for you to pronounce. And now I have given you one thing free, as you are
a guest of the city."
"How many free things do I get?" said
Marish.
"Three. And now I have given you two."
Marish thought about this for a moment. "I'd
favor something to eat," he said.
The man looked surprised. He led Marish into a
building that looked like a blur of spinning triangles, through a dark room lit
by candles, to a table piled with capon and custard and razor-thin slices of
ham and lamb's foot jelly and candied apricots and goatsmilk yogurt and hard
cheese and yams and turnips and olives and fish cured in strange spices; and
those were just the things Marish recognized.
"I don't reckon I ought to eat fairy
food," said Marish, though he could hardly speak from all the spit that
was suddenly in his mouth.
"That is true, but from the food of the djinn
you have nothing to fear. And now I have given you three things," said the
djinn, and he bowed and made as if to leave.
"Hold on," said Marish (as he followed
some candied apricots down his gullet with a fistful of cured fish). "That
be all the free things, but say I got something to sell?"
The djinn was silent.
"I need to kill the White Witch," Marish
said, eating an olive. The voice of doubt asked him why he was telling the
truth, if this city might also serve her; but he told it to hush up. "Have
you got aught to help me?"
The djinn still said nothing, but he cocked an
eyebrow.
"I've got a horse, a real fighting
horse," Marish said, around a piece of cheese.
"What is its name?" said the djinn.
"You cannot sell anything to a djinn unless you know its name."
Marish wanted to lie about the name, but he found
he could not. He swallowed. "I don't know its name," he admitted.
"Well then," said the djinn.
"I killed the fellow what was on it,"
Marish said, by way of explanation.
"Who," said the djinn.
"Who what?" said Marish.
"Who was on it," said the djinn.
"I don't know his name either," said
Marish, picking up a yam.
"No, I am not asking that," said the
djinn crossly, "I am telling you to say, 'I killed the fellow who was on
it.'"
Marish set the yam back on the table.
"Now that's enough," Marish said.
"I thank you for the fine food and I thank you for the three free things,
but I do not thank you for telling me how to talk. How I talk is how we talk in
Ilmak Dale, or how we did talk when there were an Ilmak Dale, and just because
the White Witch blasted Ilmak Dale to splinters don't mean I am going to talk
like folk do in some magic city."
"I will buy that from you," said the
djinn.
"What?" said Marish, and wondered so
much at this that he forgot to pick up another thing to eat.
"The way you talked in Ilmak Dale," the
djinn said.
"All right," Marish said, "and for
it, I crave to know the thing what will help me mostways, for killing the White
Witch."
"I have a carpet that flies faster than the
wind," said the djinn. "I think it is the only way you can catch the
Witch, and unless you catch her, you cannot kill her."
"Wonderful," Marish cried with glee.
"And you'll trade me that carpet for how we talk in Ilmak Dale?"
"No," said the djinn, "I told you
which thing would help you most, and in return for that, I took the way you
talked in Ilmak Dale and put it in the Great Library."
Marish frowned. "All right, what do you want
for the carpet?"
The djinn was silent.
"I'll give you the White Witch for it,"
Marish said.
"You must possess the thing you sell,"
the djinn said.
"Oh, I'll get her," Marish said.
"You can be sure of that." His hand had found a boiled egg, and the
shell crunched in his palm as he said it.
The djinn looked at Marish carefully, and then he
said, "The use of the carpet, for three days, in return for the White
Witch, if you can conquer her."
"Agreed," said Marish.
* * *
They had to bind the horse's eyes; otherwise it
would rear and kick, when the carpet rose into the air. Horse, man, djinn: all
perched on a span of cloth. As they sped back to Nabuz like a mad wind, Marish
tried not to watch the solid fields flying beneath, and regretted the candied
apricots.
The voice of doubt told him that his companion
must be slain by now, but his heart wanted to see Kadath-Naan again; but for
the jackal-man, Marish was friendless.
Among the barley stalks, three man-high plinths of
black stone, painted with white glyphs, marked three graves. Kadath-Naan had
only traveled a little ways beyond them before the ambush. How long the
emissary of the Empty City had been fighting, Marish could not tell; but he
staggered and weaved like a man drunk with wine or exhaustion. His gray fur was
matted with blood and sweat.
An army of children in white armor surrounded
Kadath-Naan. As the carpet swung closer, Marish could see their gray faces and
blank eyes. Some crawled, some tottered: none seemed to have lived more than
six years of mortal life. They held daggers. One clung to the jackal-man's
back, digging canals of blood.
Two of the babies were impaled on the point of the
great black spear. Hand over hand, daggers held in their mouths, they dragged
themselves down the shaft towards Kadath-Naan's hands. Hundreds more surrounded
him, closing in.
Kadath-Naan swung his spear, knocking the
slack-eyed creatures back. He struck with enough force to shatter human skulls,
but the horrors only rolled, and scampered giggling back to stab his legs. With
each swing, the spear was slower. Kadath-Naan's eyes rolled back into their
sockets. His great frame shuddered from weariness and pain.
The carpet swung low over the battle, and Marish
lay on his belly, dangling his arms down to the jackal-headed warrior. He
shouted: "Jump! Kadath-Naan, jump!"
Kadath-Naan looked up and, gripping his spear in
both hands, he tensed his legs to jump. But the pause gave the tiny servitors
of the White Witch their chance; they swarmed over his body, stabbing with
their daggers, and he collapsed under the writhing mass of his enemies.
"Down further! We can haul him aboard!"
yelled Marish.
"I sold you the use of my carpet, not the
destruction of it," said the djinn.
With a snarl of rage, and before the voice of his
good sense could speak, Marish leapt from the carpet. He landed amidst the
fray, and began tearing the small bodies from Kadath-Naan and flinging them
into the fields. Then daggers found his calves, and small bodies crashed into
his sides, and he tumbled, covered with the white-armored hell-children. The
carpet sailed up lazily into the summer sky.
Marish thrashed, but soon he was pinned under a
mass of small bodies. Their daggers probed his sides, drawing blood, and he
gritted his teeth against a scream; they pulled at his hair and ears and pulled
open his mouth to look inside. As if they were playing. One gray-skinned
suckling child, its scalp peeled half away to reveal the white bone of its
skull, nuzzled at his neck, seeking the nipple it would never find again.
So had Asza nuzzled against him. So had been her
heft, then, light and snug as five apples in a bag. But her live eyes saw the
world, took it in and made it better than it was. In those eyes he was a hero,
a giant to lift her, honest and gentle and brave. When Temur looked into those
otterbrown, mischievous eyes, her mouth softened from its hard line, and she
sang fairy songs.
A dagger split the skin of his forehead, bathing
him in blood. Another dug between his ribs, another popped the skin of his
thigh. Another pushed against his gut, but hadn't broken through. He closed his
eyes. They weighed heavier on him now; his throat tensed to scream, but he
could not catch his breath.
Marish's arms ached for Asza and Temur—ached that
he would die here, without them. Wasn't it right, though, that they be taken
from him? The little girl who ran to him across the fields of an evening, a
funny hopping run, her arms flung wide, waving that rag doll; no trace of doubt
in her. And the beautiful wife who stiffened when she saw him, but smiled one-edged,
despite herself, as he lifted apple-smelling Asza in his arms. He had not
deserved them.
His face, his skin were hot and slick with salty
blood. He saw, not felt, the daggers digging deeper—arcs of light across a
great darkness. He wished he could comfort Asza one last time, across that
darkness. As when she would awaken in the night, afraid of witches: now a witch
had come.
He found breath, he forced his mouth open, and he
sang through sobs to Asza, his song to lull her back to sleep:
"Now sleep, my love, now sleep—
The moon is in the sky—
The clouds have fled like sheep—
You're in your papa's eye.
"Sleep now, my love, sleep now—
The bitter wind is gone—
The calf sleeps with the cow—
Now sleep my love 'til dawn."
He freed his left hand from the press of bodies.
He wiped blood and tears from his eyes. He pushed his head up, dizzy, flowers
of light still exploding across his vision. The small bodies were still.
Carefully, he eased them to the ground.
The carpet descended, and Marish hauled
Kadath-Naan onto it. Then he forced himself to turn, swaying, and look at each
of the gray-skinned babies sleeping peacefully on the ground. None of them was
Asza.
He took one of the smallest and swaddled it with
rags and bridle leather. His blood made his fingers slick, and the noon sun
seemed as gray as a stone. When he was sure the creature could not move, he put
it in his pack and slung the pack upon his back. Then he fell onto the carpet.
He felt it lift up under him, and like a cradled child, he slept.
He awoke to see clouds sailing above him. The pain
was gone. He sat up and looked at his arms: they were whole and unscarred. Even
the old scar from Thin Deri's careless scythe was gone.
"You taught us how to defeat the Children of
Despair," said the djinn. "That required recompense. I have treated
your wounds and those of your companion. Is the debt clear?"
"Answer me one question," Marish said.
"And the debt will be clear?" said the
djinn.
"Yes, may the west wind take you, it'll be
clear!"
The djinn blinked in assent.
"Can they be brought back?" Marish
asked. "Can they be made into living children again?"
"They cannot," said the djinn.
"They can neither live nor die, nor be harmed at all unless they will it.
Their hearts have been replaced with sand."
They flew in silence, and Marish's pack seemed
heavier.
* * *
The land flew by beneath them as fast as a
cracking whip; Marish stared as green fields gave way to swamp, swamp to marsh,
marsh to rough pastureland. The devastation left by the White Witch seemed
gradually newer; the trail here was still smoking, and Marish thought it might
be too hot to walk on. They passed many a blasted village, and each time Marish
looked away.
At last they began to hear a sound on the wind, a
sound that chilled Marish's heart. It was not a wail, it was not a grinding, it
was not a shriek of pain, nor the wet crunch of breaking bones, nor was it an
obscene grunting; but it had something of all of these. The jackal-man's ears
were perked, and his gray fur stood on end.
The path was now truly still burning; they flew
high above it, and the rolling smoke underneath was like a fog over the land.
But there ahead they saw the monstrous thing that was leaving the trail; and
Marish could hardly think any thought at all as they approached, but only
stare, bile burning his throat.
It was a great chariot, perhaps eight times the
height of a man, as wide as the trail, constructed of parts of living human
bodies welded together in an obscene tangle. A thousand legs and arms pawed the
ground; a thousand more beat the trail with whips and scythes, or clawed the
air. A thick skein of hearts, livers, and stomachs pulsed through the center of
the thing, and a great assemblage of lungs breathed at its core. Heads rolled
like wheels at the bottom of the chariot, or were stuck here and there along
the surface of the thing as slack-eyed, gibbering ornaments. A thousand spines
and torsos built a great chamber at the top of the chariot, shielded with webs
of skin and hair; there perhaps hid the White Witch. From the pinnacle of the
monstrous thing flew a great flag made of writhing tongues. Before the awful
chariot rode a company of ten knights in white armor, with visored helms.
At the very peak sat a great headless hulking
beast, larger than a bear, with the skin of a lizard, great yellow globes of
eyes set on its shoulders and a wide mouth in its belly. As they watched, it
vomited a gout of flame that set the path behind the chariot ablaze. Then it
noticed them, and lifted the great plume of flame in their direction. At a
swift word from the djinn, the carpet veered, but it was a close enough thing
that Marish felt an oven's blast of heat on his skin. He grabbed the horse by
its reins as it made to rear, and whispered soothing sounds in its ear.
"Abomination!" cried Kadath-Naan.
"Djinn, will you send word to the Empty City? You will be well
rewarded."
The djinn nodded.
"It is Kadath-Naan, lesser scout of the
Endless Inquiry, who speaks. Let Bars-Kardereth, Commander of the Silent
Legion, be told to hasten here. Here is an obscenity beyond compass, far more
horrible than the innocent errors of savages; here Chaos blocks the descent
into the Darkness entirely, and a whole land may fall to corruption."
The jewel in the djinn's forehead flashed once.
"It is done," he said.
Kadath-Naan turned to Marish. "From the Empty
City to this place is four days' travel for a Ghomlu Legion; let us find a
place in their path where we can wait to join them."
Marish forced himself to close his eyes. But still
he saw it—hands, tongues, guts, skin, woven into a moving mountain. He still
heard the squelching, grinding, snapping sounds, the sea-roar of the thousand
lungs. What had he imagined? Asza and Temur in a prison somewhere, waiting to
be freed? Fool. "All right," he said.
Then he opened his eyes, and saw something that
made him say, "No."
Before them, not ten minutes' ride from the awful
chariot of the White Witch, was a whitewashed village, peaceful in the
afternoon sun. Arrayed before it were a score of its men and young women. A few
had proper swords or spears; one of the women carried a bow. The others had
hoes, scythes, and staves. One woman sat astride a horse; the rest were on
foot. From their perch in the air, Marish could see distant figures—families,
stooped grandmothers, children in their mothers' arms—crawling like beetles up
the faces of hills.
"Down," said Marish, and they landed
before the village's defenders, who raised their weapons.
"You've got to run," he said, "you
can make it to the hills. You haven't seen that thing—you haven't any chance
against it."
A dark man spat on the ground. "We tried that
in Gravenge."
"It splits up," said a black-bearded
man. "Sends littler horrors, and they tear folks up and make them part of
it, and you see your fellows' limbs, come after you as part of the thing. And
they're fast. Too fast for us."
"We just busy it a while," another man
said, "our folk can get far enough away." But he had a wild look in
his eye: the voice of doubt was in him.
"We stop it here," said the woman on
horseback.
Marish led the horse off the carpet, took its
blinders off and mounted it. "I'll stand with you," he said.
"And welcome," said the woman on
horseback, and her plain face broke into a nervous smile. It was almost pretty
that way.
Kadath-Naan stepped off the carpet, and the
villagers shied back, readying their weapons.
"This is Kadath-Naan, and you'll be damned glad
you have him," said Marish.
"Where's your manners?" snapped the
woman on horseback to her people. "I'm Asza," she said.
No, Marish thought, staring at her. No, but you
could have been. He looked away, and after a while they left him alone.
The carpet rose silently off into the air, and
soon there was smoke on the horizon, and the knights rode at them, and the
chariot rose behind.
"Here we are," said Asza of the rocky
lands, "now make a good accounting of yourselves."
An arrow sang; a white knight's horse collapsed.
Marish cried "Ha!" and his mount surged forward. The villagers
charged, but Kadath-Naan outpaced them all, springing between a pair of
knights. He shattered the forelegs of one horse with his spear's shaft, drove
its point through the side of the other rider. Villagers fell on the fallen
knight with their scythes.
It was a heady wild thing for Marish, to be
galloping on such a horse, a far finer horse than ever Redlegs had been, for
all Pa's proud and vain attention to her. The warmth of its flanks, the rhythm
of posting into its stride. Marish of Ilmak Dale, riding into a charge of
knights: miserable addle-witted fool.
Asza flicked her whip at the eyes of a knight's
horse, veering away. The knight wheeled to follow her, and Marish came on after
him. He heard the hooves of another knight pounding the plain behind him in
turn.
Ahead the first knight gained on Asza of the rocky
plains. Marish took his knife in one hand, and bent his head to his horse's
ear, and whispered to it in wordless murmurs: Fine creature, give me
everything. And his horse pulled even with Asza's knight.
Marish swung down, hanging from his pommel—the
ground flew by beneath him. He reached across and slipped his knife under the
girth that held the knight's saddle. The knight swiveled, raising his blade to
strike—then the girth parted, and he flew from his mount.
Marish struggled up into the saddle, and the
second knight was there, armor blazing in the sun. This time Marish was on the
sword-arm's side, and his horse had slowed, and that blade swung up and it
could strike Marish's head from his neck like snapping off a sunflower; time
for the peasant to die.
Asza's whip lashed around the knight's sword-arm.
The knight seized the whip in his other hand. Marish sprang from the saddle. He
struck a wall of chainmail and fell with the knight.
The ground was an anvil, the knight a hammer,
Marish a rag doll sewn by a poor mad girl and mistaken for a horseshoe. He
couldn't breathe; the world was a ringing blur. The knight found his throat
with one mailed glove, and hissed with rage, and pulling himself up drew a
dagger from his belt. Marish tried to lift his arms.
Then he saw Asza's hands fitting a leather noose
around the knight's neck. The knight turned his visored head to see, and Asza
yelled, "Yah!" An armored knee cracked against Marish's head, and
then the knight was gone, dragged off over the rocky plains behind Asza's
galloping mare.
Asza of the rocky lands helped Marish to his feet.
She had a wild smile, and she hugged him to her breast; pain shot through him,
as did the shock of her soft body. Then she pulled away, grinning, and looked
over his shoulder back towards the village. And then the grin was gone.
Marish turned. He saw the man with the beard torn
apart by a hundred grasping arms and legs. Two bending arms covered with eyes
watched carefully as his organs were woven into the chariot. The village
burned. A knight leaned from his saddle to cut a fleeing woman down, harvesting
her like a stalk of wheat.
"No!" shrieked Asza, and ran towards the
village.
Marish tried to run, but he could only hobble,
gasping, pain tearing through his side. Asza snatched a spear from the ground
and swung up onto a horse. Her hair was like Temur's, flowing gold. My Asza, my
Temur, he thought. I must protect her.
Marish fell; he hit the ground and held onto it
like a lover, as if he might fall into the sky. Fool, fool, said the voice of
his good sense. That is not your Asza, or your Temur either. She is not yours
at all.
He heaved himself up again and lurched on, as Asza
of the rocky plains reached the chariot. From above, a lazy plume of flame
expanded. The horse reared. The cloud of fire enveloped the woman, the horse,
and then was sucked away; the blackened corpses fell to the ground steaming.
Marish stopped running.
The headless creature of fire fell from the
chariot—Kadath-Naan was there at the summit of the horror, his spear sunk in
its flesh as a lever. But the fire-beast turned as it toppled, and a pillar of
fire engulfed the jackal-man. The molten iron of his spear and armor coated his
body, and he fell into the grasping arms of the chariot.
Marish lay down on his belly in the grass.
Maybe they will not find me here, said the voice
of hope. But it was like listening to idiot words spoken by the wind blowing
through a forest. Marish lay on the ground and he hurt. The hurt was a song,
and it sang him. Everything was lost and far away. No Asza, no Temur, no Maghd;
no quest, no hero, no trickster, no hunter, no father, no groom. The wind came
down from the mountains and stirred the grass beside Marish's nose, where
beetles walked.
There was a rustling in the short grass, and a hedgehog
came out of it and stood nose to nose with Marish.