MARCH 2015
ruEsn
Suzann^
Palmer^
-^ Kathleen Bartholomew & Kage Baker Gregory Norman Bossert Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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Asimov’s is famous for captivating stories and richly rewarding tales by some of today’s 6est-fin(nvn S(F writers. Whether they’re a jazz musician on a starship, the spirit of H.L. Mencken tangling with a twenty-first century medium, or the new personality of a wayward teenager trying to stake a claim on a body that is and sort of isn’t hers, they must all find their way in uncharted territory. Join them on their journey. Turn the electronic page and enter a future!
MARCH ED15
Vol. 39 No. 3 (Whole Number 470) Next Issue on Sale March 17, 2015
Cover Art by Paul Youll for “Tuesdays”
Mo VELLA
Mo VELLA
68 Inhuman Garbage Kristine Kathryn Rusch
M O VELETTES
88 Pareidolia Kathleen Bartholomew & Kage Baker
46 Twelve and Tag Gregory Norman Bossert
Short Storied
13 Tuesdays Suzanne Palmer
40 Military Secrets Kit Reed
68 Holding the Ghosts Gwendolyn Clare
Poetry
39 Red Shift Barbara Duffey
45 The Fates Rebel Ruth Berman
67 Prince/Glass Jane Yolen
Departivieimts
3 Editorial: Translation Enigmas Sheila Williams
6 Reflections: Lost in Translation II . . . Robert Silverberg
18 On the Net: Curation, Please! James Patrick Kelly
61 Next Issue
107 On Books Paul Di Filippo
118 The SF Conventional Calendar Erwin S. Strauss
I have been intrigued by the conun- drum of how to puzzle out alien lan- guages ever since reading H. Beam Piper’s 1957 short story, “Omnilin- gual,” as a teenager. Piper famously imagined that we could use the Periodi- cal Table as a common Rosetta Stone to decode the language left behind by an- cient Martians. The Listeners by James Gunn, a 1972 novel that is another fa- vorite from my teens, was about how we would decipher messages received via Arecibo Observatory’s radio telescopes in Puerto Rico. Jim’s great insight was that aliens might use images instead of words to communicate with us over electromag- netic waves. Ruth Nestvold’s 2003 novel- la, “Looking Through Lace,” speculates that an alien culture might employ a mechanism like tatting for their written language. In all these tales, the key to understanding the alien language is just a little bit outside our comfort zone. All these methods derive from our shared experiences as human beings. We may not understand fictional aliens’ commu- nication system until we reach the end of their story, but once we get there, the answers seem pretty obvious. Much as I’d like to believe that all humanity needs to do is pack a universal transla- tor when negotiating with aliens. I’m pretty sure that won’t really be the case.
This summer, I was struck by just how difficult the reahty might be while visiting Bletchley Park, the home of Britain’s Gov- ernment Code and Cypher School during the Second World War. I’ve long been fas- cinated by Germany’s Enigma Machine and the Bombe, a machine developed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman (which improved on the pre-war Polish Bomba) to decode the Enigma messages as quickly as possible. According to the Bletchley Park Guidebook, “the standard
three-rotor Enigma was capable of being set to 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 possi- ble combinations The settings were . . .
different for the Army Air Force, Navy, and Secret Service, and most were changed daily.” In Demystifying the Bombe, Demont Turing writes, “A success- ful run of a Bombe machine could reduce these large numbers to around a million possible settings in about twenty min- utes.” The Bombe was to a large extent a machine of “drums, which mimic the ro- tors in the Enigmas’s scrambler unit” and cables that connected to mock Enigmas. Although all 211 Bombes were destroyed after the war, one can now see a recreat- ed version of the noisy machine in action at Bletchley Park.
Yet, despite all the drums and the ca- bles and the math and logic that went into the Bombe’s creation, the codes were ultimately broken by very human “cribs.” The machine looked for standard saluta- tions, common phrases like “nothing to report,” or numbers written in full. The cribs made it possible for the Bombe to test for an Enigma machine’s rotors’ starting position.
Neither the Bombe nor the human codebreakers who applied further decod- ing techniques to convert encoded mes- sages into plain German could have got- ten very far without these cribs. Much like Piper’s use of the Periodical Table, it was a shared knowledge — this time fa- miliarity with the Latin alphabet, an un- derstanding of German, and an aware- ness of common word choices — that made deciphering possible.
On the other hand, even without the use of Enigma machines to encode mes- sages, the lack of a shared knowledge made the Navajo code talkers work un- breakable in WW2’s Pacific theater. Ac- cording to the New York Times June 5,
3
2014, obituary for Chester Nez — the last of the original Navajo code talkers — the code “used two layers of encryption. The first layer was the Navajo language it- self, known to be understood by only a handful of non-Navajos, none of them Japanese.” The code talkers also encrypt- ed the alphabet by substituting Navajo words for Latin letters and “created a glossary of hundreds of words used in battlefield communication. While some were simply Navajo translations of their English counterparts, many others were poetic circumlocutions.”
The Times provided translations of some of these “poetic circumlocutions.” Terms like “ne-he-mah” (“our mother”) for “America,” “lo-tso” (“whale”) for “bat- tleship,” “besh-lo” (“iron fish”) for “subma- rine,” and “ca-lo” (“shark”) for “destroyer” made perfect sense to me. With the right information, the Japanese would have understood these word choices, too.
I find it hard to believe that any alien method of communication will be as easy to decode as Navajo or as accessible as German idioms. If the occasion finally presents itself, there will probably be no shared experiences. Extraterrestrials may converse in infrared or in pheromones, or in something we haven’t even thought of They might transmit their language at the speed of hght or at the glacial pace of Roger Zelazny’s “Great Slow Kings.” They may perceive us, or we them, as akin to mayflies or Sequoias.
That doesn’t mean we should give up all hope of communicating with the alien. And it certainly doesn’t mean that au- thors should stop writing SF about alien languages. Science fiction illuminates hu- man cultures from the past, the present, and the future, and sometimes it does so by looking at all manner of alien civiliza- tions. Often, when we explore the alien, we get closer to an understanding of our- selves. And if we understand the human race, perhaps we actually will have a bet- ter shot at communicating with ETs when they finally show up. Plus, the entire en- deavor is fim. After all, who hasn’t enjoyed that feeling of frisson once they come to understand Damon Knight’s famous “To Serve Man” is about a cookbook. O
4
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nbout fifteen years ago I did a column headed “Lost in Translation,” in which I discussed some of the problems of converting one language to another, noting, among other things, that if doing so is such a hard task on one small plan- et, how plausible is it going to be that we will ever develop handy translating de- vices that will let us communicate with the inhabitants of alien worlds? Since then I’ve had some further thoughts on the subject of translation, and here is a se- quel to that first column, with some quo- tations from the original text in case you don’t happen to have the April 1999 issue of this magazine handy at the moment.
You can forget about that translating gizmo for alien languages. The ingenious writer who called himself Murray Lein- ster was, I think, the first to dream one of these things up, in his classic 1945 story “First Contact,” and it’s been a standard part of SF furniture ever since. (“‘We’ve hooked up some machinery,’ said Tommy, ‘that amounts to a mechanical transla- tor.’” After some plausible-sounding engi- neering talk about frequency modulation and short-wave beams. Tommy goes on to tell his captain, ‘We agreed on arbitrary symbols for objects, sir, and worked out relationships and verbs and so on with diagrams and pictures. We’ve a couple of thousand words that have mutual mean- ings. We set up an analyzer to sort out their short-wave groups, which we feed into a decoding machine. And then the coding end of the machine picks out recordings to make the wave groups we want to send back. When you’re ready to talk to the skipper of the other ship, sir, I think we’re ready”)
But actually creating such a device would be easier said than done. It would take a very special kind of skill to be able to analyze the sounds of a previously
unknown alien language and make any sort of sense out of them; and the sense it might make is unlikely to be very sensi- ble sense. Consider Kim Stanley Robin- son’s 1990 story “The Translator,” which pokes lethal fun at the whole translating- machine concept: a hapless Earthman meeting with two alien species at once has one group tell him things like “War- like viciously now descendant fat food flame death” while the other comes through the translating gadget with sounds that can be translated, the ma- chine says, as “1. Fish market. 2. Fish har- vest. 3. Sunspots visible from a depth of 10 meters below the surface of the ocean on a calm day. 4. Traditional festival. 5. Astro- logical configuration in galactic core.”
It happens that my own work, like that of most well-known modern science fic- tion writers, is routinely translated into fifteen or twenty foreign languages: in- variably French and German and Italian, often Spanish and Portuguese, and on and on, through Polish, Czech, Hungari- an, Bulgarian, Russian, Hebrew, and the various Scandinavian languages, to the occasional Thai, Korean, and Greek edi- tion. Now, my style is reasonably straight- forward and lucid; but I often wonder how closely the translated versions resemble what I’ve written.
Some of it must be pretty close. I’ve met many of my translators, and they speak English easily and well. They also are of- ten willing to question me by mail or even telephone about words or passages in my books that they find obscure.
Even so, problems inevitably arise. I of- ten wonder whether my foreign editions resemble in anything more than general outline the ones that I wrote. I can hardly expect the characteristic flavor of my style to be carried over into Bulgarian or Turk- ish or Czech; but what if small distortions
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of meaning have crept in progressively, chapter by chapter, accumulating until, by the midway point, the story itself is in- comprehensible? How could I tell? I am able to make myself understood fairly well in Italian and can manage, slowly, to cope with written French, but I don’t pretend to be fluent in either language, and Bulgari- an, Turkish, and Czech are beyond me en- tirely, so I have no way of judging the com- petence of a translation. Sometimes, when a new edition of one of my books is pub- lished, the overseas publisher tells me that it is being translated anew, because the earlier translation was badly done — but that’s generally the first knowledge I have of that.
Translations pose all sorts of odd prob- lems. Recently I’ve been reading a lot of the Maigret detective stories by the great Belgian novelist Georges Simenon. I’ve never been much of a detective-story fan, but Maigret is an interesting character, and Simenon’s Maigret books provide a charming, moody portrait of low-life
Paris of the 1930s and 1940s that I find very appealing. So when I heard that Penguin Books was going to reissue the whole lengthy Maigret series in shiny new translations, I picked up the first of the new series, Pietr the Latvian, and read it right away.
The new translation turned out to be too shiny, though. Pietr the Latvian was first published in 1930; but very quickly I came upon references to “body language,” “money-launderer,” and “gourmet meals.” Professional killers were spoken of as “hit-men.” A gangster was described as the “capo” of a major crime ring. And a sleazy scheme was called a “scam.”
All of these seemed anachronistic to me. “Body language,” I was sure, was a phrase that went back only to the 1960s. Likewise “capo,” a Mafia term, popular- ized by fairly recent American crime nov- els and movies. A gourmet, in France, is someone who has fine tastes in food; in modern American English, the term has become an adjective applied to the food
Reflections: Lost in Translation II
7
March 2015
itself, as in “gourmet meals.” “Hit-man” is surely a phrase that came into our lan- guage in the last fifty years or so. Like- wise “scam” and “money-launderer.” All of these, having come into use in English decades after publication of the original book, jolted me out of the illusion that I wanted the book to create. Simenon, of course, wrote in French, so the question is one of appropriate equivalence for the terms he used. Since Pietr the Latvian was written more than eighty-five years ago and is set in the world of that time, it seemed jarring to me to encounter these modern locutions in the translation. I checked an earlier translation, one that Penguin had published in 1963 as Mai- gret and the Enigmatic Lett. Indeed, the “gourmet meal” was simply a “delicious” meal. “Hit-men” were referred to only as “killers.” That “capo” was merely the “leader” of the gang. “Body language” was “gestures.” The gang’s “money-launderer” was merely its “treasurer.”
I’m not sure the translator can be fault- ed for introducing these terms, which to me are anachronistic but to a reader whose grounding in our language doesn’t happen to go back seventy-some years, as mine does, are perfectly untroublesome usage. The translator’s job is to make the translated work understood by the read- er. Everybody knows what a hit-man is, or a scam, and few Americans are bothered by the use of “gourmet” as an adjective. If the translator had slipped references to cell phones or iPads into the text, or had had Maigret’s police lab use Photoshop on a picture, those would, of course, have been unacceptable transgressions. But in this case the only reader offended was one who was aware that certain phrases used were era-inappropriate for this book. It’s a delicate issue.
A recent translation of the Histories of Herodotus makes that chronicler of 2,500 years ago use the phrase “power-bro- kers,” where earlier translators spoke of “men who held power” or “leading men.” The lotus-eaters of North Africa “munch” the plant, but Herodotus simply said they “eat” it. And so forth. Sometimes a
8
translator goes too far out of the way to make a book comfortable for modern readers.
On the other hand, some translations can be incomprehensible if they follow the text too literally. Consider the adjec- tive “cool,” which nowadays is a term of approval. “She’s really cool” can mean that a woman is highly attractive-but so can “She’s really hot,” semantically the direct opposite of the term. What is the translator to do? (Especially when “cool,” in an earlier sense of the word, can be taken to mean “indifferent,” “remote,” “chilly.”) And in his book. Experiences in Translation, Umberto Eco, the author of that fine medieval mystery story The Name of the Rose, cites a passage from one of his books in which the characters go for a drive and glimpse “boundless horizons beyond the hedge.” That is a reference to a nineteenth-century poem by Giacomo Leopardi, in which “beyond the hedge” is a metaphorical way of indi- cating an infinite vista. Most literate Italians know the poem, but hardly any- one else does; and so the English trans- lator of the novel changed the line to read, “We glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darien . . .” The reference now is to Keats’ sonnet. On First Looking into Chap- man’s Homer (“Silent, upon a peak in Darien . . .”) He has provided, not a liter- al translation of Eco’s line, but a literary equivalent; but he did so with Eco’s ap- proval: “I told my various translators that neither the hedge nor the allusion to Leopardi was important, but I insisted that a literary clue be kept at all costs.” Arguments could be made on both sides here. Eco’s translator manages to convey the meaning, what Eco calls the “deep” sense of his story, while rewriting his ac- tual text, and Eco was pleased with the result. The Simenon translator main- tained the “deep” meaning also, but at the cost of offending a reader who want- ed what he was reading to preserve the flavor of the era in which the book had been written and in which it was set.
And then we have the case of the trans- lator who vastly rewrites the original and
Robert Silverberg
Asimov's
produces something that, while far from an accimate rendering, has literary value of its own. The classic example is Sir Thomas Urquhart’s joyous, exuberant seventeenth-century translation of Fran- cois Rabelais’ sixteenth-century Gargan- tua and Pantagruel — a translation that is half again as long as the original! As though Rabelais’ text were not rich enough, Urquhart uses it as the takeoff point for a wildly fantastic expansion — as in Chapter 25 of Book I, where a string of twenty-eight insults becomes forty with the addition of such purely English epi- thets as “slabberdegullion druggels” and “doddipol joltheads.” In Chapter 13 of Book III, a catalog of nature’s noises dis- turbing the peace of a reclusive philoso- pher is amplified beyond “the baying of dogs” and “the yelping of wolves” to in- clude dozens more: “the buzzing of drom- edaries,” “the frantling of peacocks,” “the snuttering of monkeys,” and on and on and on. Is it a literal translation of Ra- belais? Certainly not. Is it faithful to the spirit of his great work? Yes, indeed. Urquhart has produced something that is Rabelaisian without exactly being
Rabelais, a work that has given immense pleasure to many readers for three and a half centuries.
I seem to occupy all sides of this dis- cussion on the art of translation. The anachronistic bits of contemporary ter- minology in the translation of Simenon’s 1930 novel bother me. The vast expan- sion of Rabelais’ text by Urquhart gets my enthusiastic applause. And Umberto Eco offers his approval of the substitu- tion of a reference to an English poem for an Italian one in the translation of his own novel.
The purpose of a translation is to make a text available to readers who otherwise would have no access to it — a virtuous goal, one that has enriched the lives of all literate persons. But there appears to be no one criterion by which the merit of any particular translation can be judged. Some translations work, some don’t, and the reasons are different in each case. I suppose we should simply be grateful that it is possible to convey the approxi- mate meaning of words of one language in another, and let it go at that. O
Reflections: Lost in Translation
9
CURATION, PLEASE!
gatekeepers
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. I took two years of Latin in high school and it’s been eons since I’ve made use of what little I remember of those drowsy afternoons in Miss Grant’s class. The quotation above is usu- ally attributed to the first century Ro- man satirist Juvenal <new criterion, com / articles.cfm / Lessons- from- Juvenal- 1755>. Literally translated it means “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Over time it has come to point at the problem of overreaching power. Who will check those we put in positions of author- ity? Who keeps an eye on the cops? The President of the United States? For that matter, who is looking over Sheila Williams’s shoulder?
Wait, our Sheila Williams?
Recall that Sheila is a member of the class of guardians we in the writing biz like to call editors (from the Latin edi- tus, past participle of edere, to put forth, according to the Oxford English Dictio- nary). Some liken editors to gatekeepers who guard the entrance to the Promised Land of Publication. I prefer to think of Sheila as a curator of the seemingly end- less flood of manuscripts submitted to this magazine, selecting those few she deems best for your reading pleasure. (Cu- rator, the OED tells us, derives from the Latin curator: overseer, guardian, agent.). Now, Sheila will be the first to tell you that there are wonderful stories that just do not appeal to her. Thus, if there is a check on the power of any one editor/gate- keeper, it is that there are other editors with different tastes editing many other publications. All of them are eager to see great stories in their inboxes and to pub- lish as many of them as they can. And, as
we learned in several previous install- ments, see here <asimovs. com 1 2013 _03 1 onthenet.shtml> and here <asimovs .com 1201 3_1 0-11! onthenet. shtml> and here <asimovs.com / 2013_12 ! onthenet. shtml>, what gives most editors the greatest pleasure is finding new talent.
And yet, there are those who once as- pired to sell their stories to one of the genre’s many magazines who have given up in the mistaken belief that SF pub- lishing is a closed shop. They believe that editors like Sheila or Trevor Quachri over at Analog <analogsfcom> or Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld <clarkesworld magazine.com> or John Joseph Adams at Lightspeed <lightspeedmagazine.com> have their own coteries of writers, so break- ing in is pretty much impossible. This is so not true! Try checking out the webpage of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer <writertopia.com I awards / Campbell> for proof Neverthe- less, some are leaving traditional publish- ing to join the revolution in self-publish- ing. There are certainly other reasons to self-publish besides the size of your stack of rejection slips. But are they enough to forsake traditional publishing altogether?
indie
If you are looking for a definitive an- swer, look elsewhere. The topsy-turvy landscape of contemporary publishing leaves me dizzy and not a little nau- seous. But here are five things I think I know about the new self-publishing.
1) The term self-publication is inaccu- rate and has unfortunate connotations. This is not your grandpa’s vanity pub- lishing. Many who follow this path like to call themselves indie authors or in- dies. This invites confusion with the ro- bust small press <en.wikipedia.org/
10
wiki / Small _press> or indie publishing sector of the business, so some sorting out needs to happen. Note that being an indie author does not necessarily mean you eschew all contact with traditional publishing.
2) Self-publishing can be a powerful tool for good in the right hands. It gives indies total control over the means of pro- duction of their content . . . er . . . stories. Corporate interests still dominate the means of distribution, but for the time be- ing, the deal being offered by the likes of Kindle Direct Publishing <kdp. amazon.com> and NOOK Press <nook press. com> and Kobo Writing Life <kobo.com ! writinglife> is very attractive indeed.
3) With the barriers to digital publica- tion falling, responsibility for the quality of the work rests entirely on the indie author. I see this as a mixed blessing. Ei- ther an indie must pay for the services she needs to transform a manuscript into a professional-quality ebook, or she must acquire the necessary skills to per- form those services for herself. Either way, indie writers must budget for an ex- pense of time or money or both. It is bad for everyone when anyone peddles shod- dy goods. This reality takes some of the shine off the distribution deal. Neverthe- less, the indie writer is her own boss in a way that no traditional writer is.
4) Promotional acumen is the survival skill for all writers. Traditional publish- ing does a great job of making books and zines but a mediocre job of selling them. Diffident writers who rely on their tradi- tional publishers to promote the work are usually disappointed. Smart indies waste no time scrupling about whether to promote their own stories; they know they have to get it done or the work will be swept away in the terrifying flood of books and stories that spill from every distribution channel.
5) Vanishingly few writers of any per- suasion, indie or traditional, earn a living wage. Just as for every mega-success like George R.R. Martin <georgerrmartin. com> there are thousands of aspiring, lightly published and traditionally pub- lished midlist writers who struggle to
On the Net: Curation, Please!
make the rent, the vast majority of in- dies will never see even a tenth of phe- nom Hugh Howey’s <hughhowey.com> yearly take-home. Having typed that, it’s clear that we need to rethink what it means to be a professional writer in light of the indie phenomenon. For in- stance, if you sell three stories to Asi- mov’s, the Science Fiction Writers of America will welcome you as an SF pro. Depending on the length of those stories, you might have earned between one thousand and fifteen hundred dollars. If you are knocking down three to four thou- sand dollars, year after year, selling your novels and stories on Amazon, you are making more than many of the “profes- sionals” in SFWA.
Self-publishing is a tool that a writer can use or not as a career strategy. Many traditionally published authors are using this distribution channel to give their backlist a new life across a variety of dig- ital platforms. I’ve had some success my- self as a self-publisher. It’s time to end the useless either/or debate between self and traditional publishing and embrace the change that is happening all around us.
curation
Now we’ve settled that, let’s consider the challenge the new self-publishing has created for readers. That would be you, in case you’re wondering. How do you, the literary consumer, find the best stories? Entrenched interests in tradi- tional publishing would say, no problem. Just look for the stories that real editors have culled from their slush piles — ^your only guarantee of quality. Meanwhile, some indies would argue that stories that pass unmediated from author to reader are likely to be less constrained by commercial considerations and thus more audacious in style and content. These are both specious arguments, in my opinion. Yes, I happen to believe that the top stories in Asimov’s are as good as science fiction gets, but there are many talented writers who have washed their hands of the traditional marketplace. Be- sides, in all things artistic. Sturgeon’s Law <jessesword.com/sf/view / 328> holds true. (Tired of defending science
1 1
fiction against literary t3rpes who claimed that 90 percent of genre fiction was crap, Theodore Sturgeon <theodoresturgeon trust. com> riposted, “But 90 percent of everything is crap.”)
In an ideal world, where we were all immortal and lived in a post-scarcity utopia, there would he time enough for us to sample all new stories personally. But until that happy day arrives, we have to rely on curators to read and make recom- mendations for us. Sheila curates her submissions, and this magazine is the re- sult. But after our editor has done her bit, other curators stand ready to help. Lo- cus <locusmag.com> has a staff of three astute short fiction reviewers, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, and Lois Tilton, who will point you toward some great reads. The controversial Dave Truesdale over- sees an impressive staff at Tangent On- line <tangentonline.com>, while solo re- viewers Mark Watson at Best SF <bestsf. net> and Sam Tomaino at SF Revu <sfrevu.com> are reliable guides. Then there are the Best of the Year anthologies, currently three. The Year’s Best Sci- ence Fiction <us.macmillan.com/ books / 9781250046215> is edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year’s Best Sci- ence Fiction & Fantasy <prime-books. com! shop / print-books / the-years-best- science-fiction-fantasy-2014-edited-by-rich -horton> is edited by Rich Horton, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year <solarisbooks.com / titles / title jdetails / the_best_science_fiction_and_ fantasy _of_the_y ear _volume_eight> is edited by Jonathan Strahan. And if that’s not enough curating for you, consider browsing the shortlists of the three major genre awards, the Hugo <thehugo awards. org>, the Nebula <sfwa.org/ nebula-awards>, and the Locus <locus- mag.com/SFAwards / Db / Locus. html> awards. (And while we’re talking cura- tion, a big shout out to Mark Kelly, who created and maintains the invaluable Science Fiction Awards Database <sfadb.com>. Mark tracks winners and nominees of over a hundred different awards; you’d be hard pressed to find a
more comprehensive reading list!)
* *
exit
The indies in the audience will have noticed by now that the list above is all about curation of traditional publishing. Who is curating the self-publishers?
And the answer is nobody I trust — yet. Excuse me if I am not swayed by the promotional efforts of savvy indie au- thors. You might get me to look at your page with an insightful blog post or a cool book trailer, but my reading time is way too limited to pick up your story without some kind of recommendation.
Customer reviews? According to BrightLocal.com, 79% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations <search engineland.com / 20 13-study -79-of- consumers-trust-online-reviews-as-much- as-personal-recommendations-164565>. I am not one of those consumers. Why? Click The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy <nytimes.com / 2012 / 08 / 26 / business / book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a- demand-for-online-raves. html Ipagewanted =all&_r=l&>, which details a literary entrepreneur’s efforts to start his review- for-pay business. Experts estimate that as many as one third of all customer re- views may be fake.
Neither am I impressed by Amazon Best Sellers Rank. It’s probably just me, but most best sellers on traditional pub- lishing lists leave me cold.
So here’s my modest proposal for self- publishing: we need some curation. I would love to see traditional publishing curators take an interest, and I believe we will see self-published stories rou- tinely up for awards and in Year’s Best volumes before too much longer. But un- til that happens, maybe the indie writer community should steer some of its pro- motional savvy toward creating its own curation infrastructure. Yes, I know the flaws of curation; after all, I’ve read Ju- venal! Independent reviewers are not al- ways dependable, and Best of Anything editors make subjective judgments, and awards are often flawed. There is, in fact, no perfect way to guard the guardians.
But without some kind of guidance, I just don’t know where to start reading my indie colleagues! O
James Patrick Kelly
12
TUESDAYS
Suzanne Palmer
Back while she was in college, Suzanne worked many odd jobs to make ends meet, from cashier at a fast-food Chinese restaurant to perforated paper edge-remover to overnight convenience-store clerk. There is something about the slow, grinding hours before dawn that draws out the most interest- ing (and sometimes most alarming) people, and there are endless stories to be found if you're brave or desperate or lucky enough to be out among them.
3:36 A.M.: Kent / Paulson
I he police cruiser is just another set of headlights in the slow stream moving across the flat, featureless dark of an invisible highway, until it peels off from the shifting pack, growing brighter and larger as it leaves I-IO for the dusty off-ramp that serves the diner, an out-of-business gas station, and a vast unmarked waste- land of jackrabbit shit.
Even before it rolls to a gravel-crunching stop just at the edge of the bright neon light, the ambivalence of the two officers within is apparent. No flashing lights or sirens, no leaping out with guns drawn to confront the confrontable. Nor are they re- sponding to a done-deal tragedy, another faceless out-of-stater whose attention has been slowly worn down by the monotony of the night road until their car unexpect- edly intersects with one of the road’s few, but surprisingly hittable, utility poles. There are no bodies, no official phone calls to be made. And at least — or perhaps at most — here there is coffee in plentiful and strong supply.
Officer Kent (young, not yet jaded, still thinking about criminals with anticipa- tion) and Officer Paulson (older, less pleased about overnight shifts, the polyester content in the new uniform shirts, and the aging of his knees) get out of their cruis- er, one on each side, and stand there looking over the parking lot, seeking advance warning on what waits inside:
•One tractor- trailer.
•A blue pickup that belongs to one of the diner’s waitresses.
•A white Saab.
•A silver Honda sedan.
“Divide and conquer?” Kent asks.
“Just the basics, then we’re out. This should take one cup of coffee at the most,” Paulson answers, before his eyes find the black luxury tour bus parked off in the
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shadows. It is undecorated except for a crucifix, on which is suspended a pair of men’s briefs, painted on the rear. “Make that two cups.”
“Do you think we should take notes?”
Paulson laughs, and it still has some warmth in it where bitterness has not eroded it away. “You sure should, ’cause I’m going to make you type the report anyway.”
3:42 A.M.: Mason
I es. Officer, I was the one who called,” the man says. “I must have panicked.”
Kent is sitting across from the man, one elbow on the cracked formica tabletop, pen poised and waiting for him to say something worthwhile. For his part, the man is thinking he’s not sure he can, not at this hour, not way out in this godforsaken dump in the middle of nowhere with nothing for company but the intermittent hum of traffic. They both know with fair certainty what is going through each oth- er’s minds.
‘You seem fairly levelheaded now, Mr. . . .” Kent checks his notes so far. “Mr. Ma- son. Can you explain what happened?”
Mason sighs, putting his hands over his face and rubbing at his eyes, wishing he were sound asleep somewhere other than here. “I stopped off to use the restroom and get some coffee and a donut, for the road, when that lady started screaming.” He points at the tall brunette leaning against the counter, her faux animal-print coat pulled tight around her, talking to Paulson.
3:44 A.M.: Woods
I he tall brunette is thinking: I can see you, you jerk in your khaki pants and bald spot and little business tie pointing at me as you talk to the other cop, eyeing me like I’m trash, like this is somehow my doing.
“And that was one ‘r,’ two ‘t’s?” Paulson asks.
“Lo-RETT-Ah,” she says, making each syllable a stab in the air between them. “Ain’t that many different ways to spell it. Loretta Woods. Got it?” Her hands flutter near the pockets on her coat, that spastic body language of a smoker momentarily thwarted. Just my luck, she thinks, I only peeled the Hello My Name Is sticker off my shirt a few hours ago. If I’d known I was going to be interrogated, I could have kept it on.
3:44 A.M.: Thompson
L-illy dries her hands on her apron, puts the newly cleaned pot up under the busi- ness end of the coffee maker, and having already set up the filter and grounds, starts it brewing. She can see there’s going to be demand.
3:44 A.M.: Mason
5
he was out in the parking lot, and a bunch of us ran out to see what was
wrong.”
“And this was . . . ?” Kent taps his watch.
“Around three,” Mason says. “I don’t know exactly. Maybe a little before that.”
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“Who else went out?”
“That guy,” Mason says, pointing again, this time at a man with a beer gut so large Kent wondered he didn’t have to travel with a wheelbarrow to get himself around. Stains on his shirt, dirty jeans, baseball cap with the name of some other diner on it. The man hovered near the woman who’d screamed, who seemed to be giving Paul- son attitude.
Truck driver, Kent thinks of the man, and the woman: Hooker. He’s still new enough that that snap judgment seems unkind.
2:09 A.M.: Woods
I he white Saab pulls into the diner parking lot. The place had been a pinprick of light on the horizon, steadily growing closer, until it seemed like some sort of beck- oning star. Now that she is here, she notes the dust-scored chrome, the 24-Hours sign in cheap neon, the interior a light blue that looks like it dates back to the fifties and has lived hard every year on its way to the present. She puts her face in her hands and cries in heaving, soundless sobs, the gentle ticking of her engine filling the hot night air, as she thinks in slowly tightening circles about the pervasive disappoint- ment that is her life.
She hasn’t decided if she’s going in yet, or just leaving, or where she’ll go, when the headlights appear behind her. She looks up through bleary eyes to see a giant black bus pull into the lot and park beside the diner. The bus is nearly as large as the little bright building, as if maybe next the diner itself could drive off and leave the bus in its place. The idea makes her smile. Wiping at her eyes, she checks her face in the mirror, does her best to hide the remnants of the breakdown written there, and de- cides that, at the very least, she should go into the diner for a pee.
3:47 A.M.: Mason
I was heading for Las Cruces hoping to find a motel,” Mason says, grateful for the officer’s question and a chance to refocus his thoughts. “My mother’s in a home in Pecos, and my brother called me to tell me she’d fallen and maybe broken a hip. I’m hoping to get there sometime later tomorrow — today, I guess. My brother’s a good guy, but he — ”
“Let’s go back to the events here,” Kent interrupts.
Mason takes a deep breath, thinks now about how he never did get his coffee. “She screamed, we ran out,” he says. “They were looking up at the sky. So I looked up too, and there it was.”
3:45 A.M.: Woods
^Jhe’s thinking, he still keeps looking over here. He saw it too — but I bet he’ll lie. Peo- ple like him don’t want anything to rock their cozy little world.
Bet he says it was a helicopter.
“So tell me again, why did you go outside?” Paulson asks.
“Went out for a smoke,” Loretta says. “Get some fresh air. You know?”
‘You went by yourself?”
She shakes her head. “No. I was with Carl.”
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3:58 A.M.: Fredricks
1 1 was un-fucking-believable,” the truck driver says for the fifth time in a row. Doesn’t matter, he thinks, it was. “When that woman started screeching like it was the end of the world, I figured that rock-band guy was grabbing her ass or some- thing, you know? But then I get out there, and it’s like. Holy shit! Big fucking thing, right here. Right here! Bet you guys wish you coulda seen it!”
“Can you describe it, Mr. Fredricks?” Paulson asks.
3:48 A.M.: Mason
‘r
L_an you describe it?” Kent asks.
“Not really. It was really big. I mean, big.”
3:42 A.M.: Greene
Carl doesn’t notice the police cruiser at first, thinks it must not have been running its lights when it arrived. It’s only as he’s standing out by the front of the bus, talking to the driver about routes and traffic and times that he can see the officers clearly through the giant plate glass that makes up the entire front facade of the diner, talk- ing to customers.
“Shit,” he says.
He goes back into the bus, rousts a few groggy-eyed roadies, and points them em- phatically toward the bus’s small bathroom. AJ is sound asleep, doesn’t wake up to fairly insistent — almost violent — attempts to disturb him, so at last Carl just rolls him over, pats him down, and as soon as the roadies are done he goes into the bath- room and flushes down ever3rthing he found that he knows is bad, and some stuff he just plain doesn’t know what it is.
The roadies aren’t happy with him, but he thinks, fuck them. His job is to get them to the next gig, alive and not in jail, and everyone knows it.
Carl is ready by the time Paulson knocks on the bus door.
2:38 A.M.: Mason
He’s gripping the steering wheel of his Honda so hard there’s sweat under his fin- gers, thinking about his mother, wishing he was there already, not trusting Ed to do or say the right thing, stay on top of things, make sure Mom had what she needed.
He wishes he knew how bad the fall was. What if .. . ?
He pounds on the steering wheel with one hand, furious to the point of rage, rage at himself, for letting that thought sneak in there. Not: What if Mother is dead? but the damnable If Mother is already dead, I won’t have to sit with her and watch her die.
Oncoming headlights seem off until he realizes he’s drifted across the line. Jerk- ing the wheel back onto his own side of the road, his heart pounds in his chest. I need a break, he thinks, and then he sees up ahead a lone light not moving, not a car.
Please oh please, he thinks, let it be somewhere open, where there are people.
* * *
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3:59 A.M.: Fredricks
I here weren’t blinky lights, like in the movies,” Fredricks says, “but it was big. Really fucking big.”
Paulson holds up his pad so the truck driver can see he’s already written down “BIG,” and underlined it twice. “I’ve got ‘big,’” he says. “Can you describe anything else about it, sir?”
12:01 A.M.: Thompson
Uarb barely mumbles a goodbye on her way out, Linda already gone minutes ahead of her. Lilly is alone in the diner now except for Frank in the back, who is al- ready sound asleep in his small office, bicycle in the doorway, feet up on his desk, pa- pers spread across his wide chest as if somehow he can absorb the news. If it gets busy, she can wake him up to help her cook, but it won’t get busy, never does, not un- til the distant early dregs of dawn begin to seep up over the far horizon.
The jukebox winds down into its own slumber, its final song played and no one feeding it more quarters. Lilly likes the sounds of the diner at night, doesn’t miss the relentless, repetitive, muffled beat of the jukebox. There’s plenty of pie left. Coffee is low, so she dumps out the last bit, boiled down nearly to tar, and carefully rinses out the glass carafe. Setting it upside-down to dry beside the sink, she gets a new filter out, a packet of pre-measured grounds, to wait on the counter beside her until head- lights appear, if they do, and turn toward her. Then she’ll have the coffee fresh, which is the only way it should ever be.
She looks up at the clock, and the free truck-parts-company calendar beside it. It’s Tuesday. Eventually she won’t be alone.
2:25 A.M.: Fredricks
He’s tired, sick of the road, sick of the junk food wrappers cluttering the seat be- side him. He doesn’t realize how thirsty he is, for something hot and bitter and full of caffeine, until he sees the diner in the distance up ahead. He’s been here before: a quiet place, good coffee, no hassles.
He slows his rig, pulls off when the ramp finally appears out of the night ahead of him. At the diner he parks it facing out again, looking back at the endless road — some sort of perpetual penance for his sins — and hops down from the cab. His legs are stiff, aching, but he walks his rig, checks it over, checks the rear doors to make sure they’re secure, throws a chock under a tire before he tucks in his shirt and heads into the diner for a brief respite from the drone of the asphalt.
3:48 A.M.: Mason
1 1 made noise, like ... I don’t know. Like pebbles rolling down a hill, maybe, a whole avalanche of pebbles, except musical. It was hard to hear, because that woman wouldn’t stop screaming,” Mason adds. “It wasn’t there for very long, and then it was just gone, like in a blink. I know we’re not that far off from White Sands, so I figure it’s something of theirs. Better them than Roswell, right? Was that what it was?”
Tuesdays 1 7
March 2015
“I can’t answer that, sir.”
3:46 A.M.: Woods
Who’s Carl?”
“The guy from the bus.”
“Oh,” Paulson says. “We’ll be talking to him too.”
As if what, he’s gonna say no, he didn’t go out for a smoke with me? The woman thinks. This is such a crock of shit. 1 bet if I hadn’t worn this stupid old coat, no one here’d be eyeballing me like I’m something filthy that crawled up out of a hole in the ground. I should have thrown it out years ago, but noooo, I had to hang onto it for the goddamned reunion. She just wants to get out of the thing, put it in the first Salva- tion Army bin she passes so she’ll never have to look at it in her closet again, never be reminded of how she’s wasted the last twenty-five years.
She’s passed wanting a smoke a long time ago, and now just wants a drink, or two, or five. “Are we done yet?” she asks.
“Can you describe what you saw?”
4:01 A.M.: Fredricks
■ t made a sound,” the trucker says. “Like if you was humming the national an- them or something, but while chewing on ice cubes. That make any sense?”
“Fm sure I have no opinion, sir,” Paulson says, though that’s not even slightly true. “Was there anything else?”
“It took off real fast, just like that.” Fredricks snaps his fingers. “Didn’t land. Wouldn’t that have been a hoot, a bunch of fucking aliens coming down for pie? But they didn’t. I always wanted to see an alien. Did I mention how big the damned thing was?”
3:50 A.M.: Mason
I he Roswell crack, that was a joke. I don’t believe in that kind of thing, of course. Can I get some more coffee now?”
4:02 A.M.: Fredricks
I aulson closes his notebook, takes a deep breath. “I think we’ve got everything we can from you, Mr. Fredricks. I think you can go.”
“If you don’t think you need me. . . .”
“Fm sure.”
“Well, okay then. You got my name and number, right? You’ll call if you have ques- tions? Or if you catch ’em or something or the Air Force shoots them down and they crash? I want to know if they’re gonna crash, because that thing was big.”
“We’ll do our best, sir,” Paulson says.
Fredricks adjusts his cap, shakes the officer’s hand, and walks out. He can feel the eyes of the woman and the little nerdy guy who called 911 on his back, but when he glances over his shoulder the officers are looking at each other. Glad to see the last of me, he thinks. Good. Aliens in the sky or not. I’ve got fourteen of ’em fresh over the
Suzanne Palmer
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border from Juarez in the back of my truck waiting to get to Tucson, and last thing I need is to get held up so long the police get bored enough to search my trailer.
He looks up at the sky, though, as he pulls the chock out from hehind his tire and climhs up into his cab. Damnedest thing. The officer he’d talked to is just knocking on the door of the tour bus as he pulls out of the gravel parking lot and picks up speed to merge back onto the highway, more on his mind than he’d expected from a simple pit stop in the middle of nowhere.
4:06 A.M.: Greene
“n
Ufficer,” The man says, holding the bus door open but not moving out of the way.
“Are you Carl?” Paulson asks.
“I am.”
“Are you the driver?”
“I’m the manager.”
“Manager of?”
“The band.” At his look of incomprehension, Carl gestures back into the bus. “Ac- tual Jesus and the Water- Walkers,” he says. “Have you heard of us?”
Paulson makes a face, realizes he is making a face, and does his best to stop. “Yeah, I have. What are you doing out here?”
“Stopped for a few hours so our driver could catch a nap,” Carl says. “We tend to pull off in out of the way places where we won’t be so noticeable. Fans, you know. Some of them can be a little crazy.”
“My son,” Paulson says, carefully, ‘Torought home a DVD of some of yoim videos once.”
“It’s just business, you understand? Controversy sells. It’s not — ”
“. . . Carl?” Someone calls groggily from the back. Paulson sees Carl wince, and waits with some curiosity as the caller stumbles forward toward the door.
4:07 A.M.: Greene / “Actual Jesus”
J stumbles toward the door, his blood-red knee-length shirt and the brocade vest on top of it both gaping wide open. No pants. No underwear. He pats his chest where his pocket would have been if his shirt had been buttoned. “Have you seen . . . ?”
He stops and stares at the officer, frozen in place if you don’t count swaying and twitching, his bloodshot eyes with their teeny tiny pupils wide open.
‘You’ll have to pardon him,” Carl says, smoothly. “It’s been a long night on the road and he hasn’t had much sleep.”
“Not much sleep,” AJ echoes.
“He’s going back to bed now,” Carl says.
“Going back to bed now,” AJ says, and takes a step backward, stumbling against a seat.
“And he’s going to put his fucking pants back on,” Carl adds, with emphasis.
AJ flashes his manager the middle finger, then another to Paulson for good luck, takes another step backward and falls over.
“Why don’t I come out and talk?” Carl says.
“That seems for the best, sir,” Paulson says.
3:49 A.M.: Woods
I
don’t know what I saw,” Loretta says. She’s too tired, doesn’t want to go straight
Tuesdays
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from the middle-aged nobody in the zebra-stripe coat and too much makeup to the crazy woman who thinks she saw a UFO. No one else was going to be dumb enough to tell the truth, not to friends or family, much less to two bored police officers who probably got the night shift by being dirty cops.
She glances over at the guy who called the police in the first place, the officer he was talking to now done with him and moved on to the trucker, the too-skinny wait- ress with her cheap bleach-job hair in a fra3dng ponytail pouring him coffee, smiling, as if she could possibly care about anything in this isolated hellhole.
No one tells the truth, she thinks.
“It was probably a helicopter,” she says at last. “A really big helicopter. Can I leave now?”
4:09 A.M.: Greene
Carl steps out into the muggy night air and lets the bus door shut behind him.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Paulson asks. He’s thinking about warrants, thinking about his name in the papers, thinking about how much time the bus occu- pants have already had to make sure he wouldn’t find an3d.hing.
“As I said, we stopped here to let the driver catch some zees. I went in to get coffee for the crew, then I went back into the diner to talk to the woman in the zebra coat. At first I thought she was . . . well, you know. It’s been a long tour. But she wasn’t, and we had a nice talk, and we both wanted a smoke, so we stepped out. Talked for a bit, then there was this weird sound and we both looked up and there it was.”
“What, sir?”
“The UFO.”
“Ms. Woods expressed the opinion that it was a helicopter.”
Carl laughs and shakes his head. “Yeah, I can believe that.”
“That it was a helicopter?”
“Oh, no, just that she’d say that.”
“And had you been drinking, prior to this incident?”
He laughs again. “I have six rock musicians, an equal number of groupies, four roadies, and a fucking tattooed squirrel monkey up on that bus,” he says, “and it’s my responsibility to keep them all together and able to put on a show. I don’t do any- thing stronger than coffee while I’m on tour. The moment this tour’s over, though, you can bet your ass I’m going to drink until I’m lying flat on the floor and halluci- nating UFOs ever3rwhere I look. But tonight, it was the real deal.”
“Can you describe what it looked like?”
“It was big.”
The officer sighs. “Other than big.”
“It made a sound,” Carl says.
“Can you describe it?”
“Ever put a harmonica in a blender?”
“No.”
“Then no, I can’t describe it,” he says. “Will that be all?”
In the absence of probable cause, it is.
4:28 A.M.: Kent
“P
t-xcuse me, Miss?” Kent has come back in, after watching Paulson talk to the bus people for a while, and feeling left out and bored.
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Lilly has a damp cloth out and is cleaning the table where Kent had talked to Ma- son, who had finally slunk out of here not long after the trucker. “Name’s Lilly,” she says. “Three Ls, not all consecutive. Busy night tonight.”
“Did you see anything?”
“The space ship.” She picks up the salt shaker, twists the cap off, takes out a wadded up NutraSweet packet that someone had stuck in there sometime earlier, probably on Linda’s shift.
“Did you go outside?”
“Naw, I could see it from the window,” she says.
“Can you describe it at all?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s black. Hard to say how big it is because it’s really big and in the dark you can’t tell exactly how far up it is, but I’d say it’s at least three or four hundred feet in diameter. No lights, although it does glow just a little bit, if that makes any sense. I figure it’s probably just hot, maybe from going up and down through the atmosphere.”
He stands, holding his pad, and blinks at her.
“I read,” she adds, recognizing his expression. “Not much else to do out here. Usu- ally dead at this time and I always get the overnight shifts because I’m the youngest. And I don’t complain because I like them.”
“Anjdhing else notable about it?” Kent manages to ask.
“It makes sounds. Hard to describe,” she says. “You have kids?”
“Me? No,” he said.
“Married?”
“. . . No.”
“Handsome guy like you? Now that’s a shame.”
“I have a nephew.”
“He have any of those musical stuffed toys, you know the ones that sing?”
‘Yeah.”
“Ever run one through a dryer?”
“No.”
“Well, try it. That’s what the space ship soimds hke. Kind of” She finishes cleaning the table and fetches a broom. He has to keep stepping out of the way as she sweeps, and he gets the feehng she’s deliberately making him have to dance around away from the broom.
“How is it,” he asks, finally, “that you didn’t go outside, and yet you can describe it better than everyone else?”
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Officer Kent—”
“No, your first name.”
Kent doesn’t think he should answer, but after a pause, he does. “Matt,” he says.
“Well, Matt,” Lilly says. “I get bored here all by myself at night. If you want to come back next Tuesday and sit for a bit and chat. I’d be happy to explain all about it.”
“I don’t think I’m on duty next Tuesday.”
She smiles. “It’s okay, come on by an3rway. Free coffee. Two a.m. Is it a date?”
“Uh ... I don’t . . .” he starts to say. She’s cute, but she sees UFOs, he thinks. “I’d like to, but I don’t think it’d he appropriate.”
“Shame,” Lilly says. She sweeps some crumbs off the counter, checks the coffee pot, puts on some more decaf Then she pours him a cup, sets it in front of him, watches him trying to decide if he should drink it. Finally he picks it up, blows at the steam, takes a tentative sip.
“’Cause the UFO comes by here every week at the same time,” she says suddenly, and he spits coffee all down his own shirt.
She smiles, and thinks, Tuesdays are looking up. O
Tuesdays 21
PAREIDOLIA
Kathleen Bartholomew & Koge Baker
Kathleen Bartholomew is the sister of the late Kage Baker, author of The Company series and numerous short stories appearing in Asimov's. With Kage, she grew up in Hollywood, California, and she was Kage's chauffeuse through all her adventures. Kage left Kathleen tons of notes, story ideas, and forty years of conversations about her stories— as well as a geas to complete the stories and keep them coming. Kathleen has so far finished a novel. The Ladies of Nell Cwynne: On Land and at Sea (Subteranen Press) and a short story for a posthumous collection In The Company of Thieves (Tachyon Publications). She also writes a blog, at doctorzeus.co, centered on Kage, life with and without her, and writing. "Pareidolia" revisits a character who was introduced in Kage Baker's first story, "Noble Mold" {Asimov's, October/November 1997).
It’s amazing, the little details that get remembered by mortals in their histories. Most of the time, mortals are so busy rewriting the past for their own benefit that it’s a miracle anything gets remembered at all. Then some weird little fact will show up millennia later, stubbornly imbedded in the latest scholarly fairytale, and ruin somebody’s career.
Sorting this kind of thing out is my job. I work for Dr. Zeus Incorporated, a secret ca- bal of scientists and businessmen based in the twenty-third century. They invented time travel, you see, and one of the first results was the realization that literal tons of money could be had by looting the past for lost goodies. The second result, though, was a panic that somehow the past would get changed and they’d reverse-engineer them- selves out of existence. So, they took on the responsibility of seeing that history more or less happened the way it should. Or at least the way it was recorded.
In order to follow both these agendas, they developed immortality via cyborged op- eratives; operatives who would walk through time at the normal rate but neither age nor die. Time’s therefore full of immortal Company operatives babysitting priceless objects through the ages. Most are Preservers, who save stuff: lost manuscripts, ex- tinct animals, legendary inventions. Facilitators, like me, handle those tricky jobs that help history stay on track: advising kings, founding schools of philosophy, pre- venting (or assuring) assassinations. . . . We all survive, trundling along like dung
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beetles, rolling treasures uphill with us to the future. Also plastering over the cracks of tragic losses and damn fool mistakes, so that the future Company, Dr. Zeus, can eventually profit from the restoration of Mozart’s Requiem or the Amir tiger. We make sure, when we have to, that history — the right history — happens.
Because, I gotta tell you, most people really work at obliterating what came before them. Mortals will casually eat entire species. Emperors want history to start with them, but even ordinary men will alter history to their own prejudices. There’s al- ways some busybody with a quill pen and a grudge ready to slander or deify the past.
It’s not usually one of us, though. We’re experts on low profiles. In fact, there’s a whole department of the Company whose job it is to make sure the right obscure fac- toids get forgotten or remembered on time, so we’re usually in there pitching for the “lost books of histories” team. You wouldn’t believe where Mary Queen of Scots’ cas- ket letters ended up; though if you think about the description of her secretary Riccio . . . naw, I’m kidding on that one, just to show you how it can be done. I wasn’t Riccio.
But I was Imhotep. And in the late twentieth century, a lady named Betty Rhodes spent a lot of time exercising the loose screw in her brain, tr3dng to convince people that Imhotep and Joseph — the Bible guy with the many-colored coat, you know, the one sold into slavery by his brothers. T3qjical mortals! — were one and the same person. All based on a tiny reference in an ancient scroll that said Imhotep’s real name was Joseph. . . .
I can’t remember who I told that. Maybe my wife; even immortal Facilitators for Dr. Zeus, Inc. don’t recall ever3d,hing they say to their wives in the dark. I’m as prone to mumble something stupid while falling asleep as the next guy. I had a list of titles as long as your arm: Chancellor of the King of Egypt, Doctor, First In Line after the King of Upper Egypt, Administrator of the Great Palace, Hereditary Nobleman, High Priest of Heliopolis, Builder, Chief Carpenter, Head of the Royal Shipyards, Overseer of All Stoneworks, Chief Sculptor. Et cetera. And what gets remembered? That one night I told the wife. Honey, call me Joseph. Well, hey, I’m only human. Or was.
Besides, that was a minor lapse that never caused any real harm — a lot of crazier things got published in the late 1900s. No, what really came back to bite my butt was the damned engineering standards I gave to the Pharaoh Djoser.
Heliopolis 2630 B.C.E. (approx.)
I here aren’t any uniform standards, O Pharaoh,” I told Djoser. “Even the master masons are working off old tables their grandfathers drew up, or some invented ‘trade secret’ that no one else can interpret an3rway. They’re tr3dng to build your tomb based on the length of Cousin Kasekh’s forearm!”
“Oim people have a great and proper reverence for the past,” said Djoser. He soimd- ed amused, even though he’d just been complaining about his newest statue — the one where his neck looked as long as his own arm, and made him pin-headed to boot. “They would rather use the proven wisdom of their ancestors than try something new.”
“Well, we need a better reference system, somehow, O Son of the Sun. At least if you want a tomb that looks better than a termite mound. And it would be nice if your statues resembled one another, too.”
I figured the statues would win him over. No one wants their portraits to leave the audience wondering what species the subject belonged to — and for the Pharaoh, the accuracy of his immortality was vital.
Djoser turned to look at me.
“We need a revelation, then, O Vase Builder in Chief,” he said. “Can you provide me one?”
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“Not I, Lord; but the gods will surely reveal something,” I said piously. When he called me Vase Builder, it meant he was getting pissed. “I suggest I sleep at the con- struction site tonight, and see what the gods tell me in my dreams.”
Djoser had known me long enough by now to tell that my “divine revelations” could be tailored to the needs of the throne with amazing specificity. Whether he thought I was a gifted prophet or just a gifted scam artist, I never knew — it made no difference. Maybe he really thought the gods were just hanging around waiting to pour solutions to his problems into my head.
“See it done, then.” He deliberated a minute and added, “And inquire of the gods if they can reveal some rules about art, as well. Especially concerning proportions. The heads keep falling off.”
I assured Pharaoh I would do so, and went off rubbing my hands together in glee. This was why I was there and then, working through an entire mortal lifetime to en- sure the proper solutions to Classical Egypt’s building problems.
This was one of the bigger revelations I was assigned to impart to the Third Dy- nasty— the engineering standards that would let them build the pyramids, begin- ning with the Step P3T'amid for Djoser himself
I’d even be able to add that labyrinth he’d been nagging me for.
So I hurried home and played with the kids while my wife packed me a dinner basket and a bedroll. A night picnic and a good sleep under the stars, and the statutes of government-sanctioned art could be firmly planted. And they’d keep Egyptian art and engineering on track for the next three thousand years. With a brief hiatus during Akhenaten’s reign, of course. The sun worshipper went off on that short-lived experiment in monotheism and naturalistic art . . . but I’d be long gone by then, and my revealed truths of engineering would survive even him.
See, humans have a natural tendency toward pareidolia. That’s seeing images — especially faces — in random patterns. It’s why little kids draw houses with two win- dows on either side of a door, like a face. It’s why babies will smile at a mask with seven or eight eyes but not at a mask with none: their brains are hardwired to ex- pect Mommy to have at least two. It’s all a recognition pattern that runs around in the fusiform g3Tus and the parahippocampal gyrus. Conversely, you can make the brain see faces, and in fact interact with them, if you stimulate those same gjud. Ex- amination of Egyptian art had showed the Company that, after a certain point, it was all designed to do just that. It’s why the ancients reported that the gods came down off the walls and walked and talked in the old temples. But the Company couldn’t find a place or time where the mathematical formulae were discovered, and they wanted to make sure the job got done — because a lot of the goodies they want- ed to collect in the future depended on it.
It’s one of their biggest corporate paranoias — the horrible suspicion that they’re now responsible for making sure history actually happens. . . .
The Company was going to great lengths to ensure that. And I did the job spectacu- larly well, if I say so myself Heads stopped falling off royal statues and royal artists, and succeeding pyramids went up and stayed up. History was once more assured.
I packed my ceremonial kit myself — braziers, incense, pen and ink and blank pa- pyrus— ^with which to record the proclamations of the gods on waking. At the bottom of it all was the “revelation” all prepared, complete with spurious divine seals and cartouches that would delight Djoser. That scroll would include the first rules and formulae for industrial government art. It had everything from reminders on how to calculate angles, to the perfect balance between the width of someone’s eyebrows and the thickness of their lower lip.
With this in hand, Egyptian engineers would amaze the world. Egyptian priests would amaze their congregations. Egyptian artists would produce generations of
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statues as alike as stamped cookies. And Egyptian gods would see into men’s souls and walk beside them in the temple compounds. It had all been worked out to per- fection by social psychiatrists and ad men in the Company’s employ.
And someone due to be born in the twenty-third century would be able to indulge their hobby of Pharaonic art, and give Dr. Zeus the throne of the Twin Lands as pay- ment for this carefully faked but genuinely ancient scroll.
Man, I love it when the threads all twist together!
By the time I left Imhotep’s life behind, the “new art” and the engineering were a rip-roaring success. I stuck around long enough to make sure the Egyptians made the leap successfully from the Step P3T'amid — ^which was basically just four or five mastaba tombs stacked on top of one another — to the more classic model — which was still a stack of mastabas, only with the gaps filled in.
The Pharaohs’ statues were looking even more alike than the inbred Royal House. I went off to nudge the Sumerians into their assimilation by the Akkadians.
For the next twenty-five hundred years or so I wandered the Fertile Crescent. Mortals were inventing all sorts of weird governments and religions; my job was to make sure the right lunatics got into power. Most of it was pretty good — urban living was getting easier and easier to come by, and I’m a city boy at heart. Never mind that I was born in a cave in the Pyrenees; when I met indoor plumbing and wine shops, it was love at first sight.
Work as a Facilitator keeps you moving: things like getting grants and licenses for the Preservers posing as Hyperborean tourists who wanted to excavate Uhaid sites. (No easy trick when you’re dealing with clay tablets and cuneiform.) Advising the odd king, turning the glass blowers and goldsmiths on to the latest one-thousand- year-old technology imported from Memphis ... I think I personally spread cotter pins and faience through the Fertile Crescent, you know?
I worked my way north and east around the Mediterranean, did several stints in Rome as a soldier or a priest. Being in the Legions wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Be- ing a priest of Cybele was much worse — just because you can grow ’em back doesn’t make dispensing with your testicles any more fun. But politics and religion are mainstays for Facilitators. I like to think it’s because we have more of a sense of hu- mor than the harder-wired Preservers.
The Company kept me busy, slotting me into the new Mediterranean societies just as Christianity began finding its feet among the civilized peoples of the world. Then when Rome began to fail, I started back down around the Golden Horn, headed for the next hotbed of Western Civilization: Constantinople.
Constantinople, 535 C.E.
^Jixth-century Constantinople was a pretty nice place to work.
As a Facilitator Class Operative for Dr. Zeus Inc., I’ve spent more time than I’d like on the front lines of power. That’s a dangerous place. But I’ve got broader ethics pa- rameters than a basic Preserver, plus some native, ah, flexibility, I guess you’d call it — basically. I’m a sneaky guy. And I need that edge, because on the edge is where I do my best work.
Christianity was having its growing pains, of course. I’d been working in the Gre- co-Roman mummy trade in Egypt, socking away the last of the embalmed gentry for Dr. Zeus as the Coptic Christians took more and more control of the mortuary
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business — I was glad to get out of there before Islam arose in the next century and started eliminating the smaller Christian sects.
An3rway, nowhere did Christian sects cause so much uproar as in Constantinople! God’s own gangsters. Crazy, too — the place was pretty much an open-air asylum for schisms, heresies, and the ever-popular wild-eyed prophet trade. Mix in the effect of being the Eastern Roman Empire, a melting pot of anybody who even had a melting point, and — ^well, the Golden Horn was a cornucopia for the Company. We had a huge staff there, operatives called in from all over the Middle East for the action.
The place was paradise for Company Preservers, of course, as Emperor Justinian ramped up his building and civic improvement programs. There were so many new buildings, that old gossip Procopius wrote an entire book called Buildings of Justinian, complaining about the high costs of government projects. There were about a dozen Preservers for every building, too, because Constantinople was one big grab bag.
I was running a freight service and a safe house, providing a base and guidance for my share of the projects going on. As the Preservers got their happy little ob- sessed hands around whatever Byzantine specialties turned them on, I shipped ’em out to wherever the Company had picked to hide said specialty until needed. I put it all in the safest keeping going, safe until that golden moment in Future Time when whoever had agreed to pay a fortune for it got around to being born. And since I packed along as much olive oil and cotton and saffron and honey and hashish as the mules could carry, the whole operation paid for itself The Doctor really likes it when a Facilitator can make his base profitable on a local level.
I didn’t even have to pick the destinations for what I shipped out, it all came pre- addressed. I had a score of good mules, a team of fake Levantine muleteers (all Se- curity techs, enjoying running around being unshaven tough guys in the big city) and a positive budget balance with the Company accountants.
Now, that’s Facilitating.
Things began to get hinky in 532, during the Nika Riots — it was always the racing clubs, the Blues or the Greens, behind crap like that; the sports cartels in the city were even worse than in Rome. Justinian had almost caved to their demands, or at least whatever their demands would have been. Those guys weren’t too coherent at the best of times, and they were really only rioting because someone had tossed some twenty nummi coins into a crowd at the Hippodrome and yelled, “Bugger the Greens and Justinian too!”
Half the city burned, along with the basilica of Hagia Sophia, before Justinian sent in the Imperial guards and some hastily deputized Blues and took the rioters down. But then he started rebuilding the city, so everyone was reasonably happy again. It ended up as good press for him and his empress, Theodora. Especially when they an- nounced they were rebuilding Hagia Sophia. For the third time.
Justinian indulged himself by hiring a couple of guys whose expertise was not in architecture or art — but mathematics. They drew up plans for a building made of stone, tile, glass and metal — advertised as noncombustible, which was a big selling point. Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles were the men of the hour, and the whole city was fascinated by the beautiful skeleton rising from the ashes of the old Sophia. When Anthemius died in 534, Isidore didn’t even slow down. And when the stonemasons and sculptors and painters and mosaic-makers and fancy carpenters started in — well, it looked like a Golden Age was beginning on the Golden Horn.
But the Nika Riots were a reminder for us Operatives. Change was coming, bad change. Our Preservers were happy enough, scurr3dng around grabbing crumbs like art-obsessed ants, but they knew what was on the way. We all knew. The Plague of Justinian was due in just ten years. The Black Death would start its long reign over Europe.
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Still — ^you know how it is. Everyone very carefully didn’t dwell on it. I mean, we can’t die, and we knew the plague was on the way, and we knew we had time to leave. In the long run, it had nothing to do with most of us.
In the meantime, I shipped out a lot of mules’ worth of models and rough sketches and real Byzantine masterpieces replaced with durafoam copies in the middle of the night by anxious Preservers. Even with our pilfering, Hagia Sophia was turning out to be one of the loveliest buildings in the world.
Then Phil the Sicilian turned up with a new assignment.
I should have known that the fairy-godmother phase couldn’t last — sooner or later, someone was bound to notice that old Joseph hadn’t had a crisis in a couple of decades, and put my name back on the fecal roster.
As a matter of fact, I was supervising the loading of segments of red granite pil- lars from Ba’albek, imported from Lebanon under Justinian’s orders for the church, when Phillip came to see me. Justinian had had them taken apart and shipped over in pieces like big checkers, the color of wet liver — ^you can see them in Hagia Sophia to this day, and you’ll notice the pieces don’t quite match. That’s because we liberated half a dozen for an Ephesian church up in 2275. It struck me as pretty funny at the time.
Serves me right for laughing at religion. It’s hard as hell to load a cylindrical object on to a curved mule back, and the mules don’t help any. We were having some seri- ous problems with geometry when one of my fake muleteers signaled from my com- pound gate.
Hey, Joseph — broadcast Martin — got a Facilitator here, name’s Phillip, got a mes- sage from Up Forward for you. (Image of a small brown man with an eye patch.)
Phillip? Phillip ofGela? Send him on back, Martin — I answered. I was surprised, but only a little — Phil was a Facilitator who usually requested courier duties, and he was based in Sicily; as close to a local postman as we’d get here in the heart of Byzantium. And as I was uneasily considering this, I caught the two of them on my automatic scan, coming in from the front courtyard.
Phillip was a little guy (Hell, we were all little guys. Except the Security mule- teers.) pretty much all one shade of caramel. The only thing of note about him was his heterochromia, which had originally gotten him recruited and rescued from the sacrificial pits of Ba’al. One eye was brown, the other was blue. In those days he usu- ally wore an eye patch over the blue eye, to avoid alarming the mortals; though when he needed to play sorcerer (as we all did, from time to time) just taking off the patch was enough to get him all the street cred he needed. Today he was wearing it, plain soft leather in one more shade of brown.
“Good to see you, Joseph,” he said, dropping his satchel on the ground. “The Bless- ing of the One on you and yours.”
“May the Three reward you,” I said automatically. That was Constantinople for you; the One or the Three and usually both. And usually a fight over it, too. “What have they sent you on this time?”
“Special orders for you, O favored son of small-time commerce,” he said, and reached out — we clasped arms. Roman-style, and he set his free hand on my brow and downloaded what he was carr3dng.
I hate doing that. “Ow, damn it,” I said. “How do I rate? Why not just send me my orders via credenza?”
The usual rush of details and images was already forcing its way out of my ter- tiary consciousness into my forebrain, with that wonderful feeling it always has of battery acid-laced bicarbonate of soda . . . and the first thing that cleared, I noted un- easily, was a big throbbing red PRIORITY SECURITY sign.
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“Not for the likes of me to know,” said Phil cheerfully. That confirmed the sinking feeling in my stomach. “I’m not supposed to know what you’re doing, so don’t tell me. I’m glad to be rid of it, though — that message got loaded in at Malta Base, and it’s been making my corpus callosum itch all the way across the Med.”
“My heart breaks for your damned corpus callosum,” I snarled at him. I kicked his satchel. “So there’s nothing important in there for me, huh?”
“Well, I may have a few bars of something dark and sweet. I came prepared as a bearer of bad news. Also, I need a bed for the night, and a ride in the direction of the Zagros range as soon as you can manage it,” he said.
My head was beginning to fizz now. So I sent him off with Martin to the guest quarters in the main house. Phil was making himself popular with all and sundry by handing out chocolate bars as he went. He wasn’t a bad guy, just glad it wasn’t his turn in the barrel. I’d have felt the same way.
“What now. Boss?” asked Ivar. He was sitting on the barrel of granite we couldn’t get on the mule.
I looked at it. It looked like a chunk of blood sausage, and maybe the bubbles in my brain kicked something into high gear.
“We need a hot dog bun,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Build a big basket cradle, tie that to the mule, and put the damned pillar in the basket,” I said.
I left the boys getting one of the resident Preservers to show them how to make a giant basket, and went off to let my new orders eat their way into my brain.
The best way to do that, in my experience, is to toss back a half-pint of chocolate milk and lie down for a while. This doesn’t work well with ass’s, goat’s, ewe’s, or mare’s milk — and believe me, I’ve tried ’em all — so I’d taken to making it with cold water, Aztec style, until dairy industry caught up with the Mideast.
I had to get the cacao from Company bases, of course. But one of the big advan- tages of Constantinople was the Spice Market — you could get things to flavor your pease porridge that Africa and Europe only used to color paint. I liked spikenard, personally; reminds me of the way root beer will taste. An3rway, I knocked some back and lay down to get the briefing.
A young man’s face cleared out of the general data cloud — sulky, wall-eyed, bad mustache — and the info beside it identified him as Nikephoros, an ikon painter. He lived here in Constantinople, working free-lance for Isidore of Melitus on Hagia Sophia. The Company wanted everything he’d produced on the assignment — any and all ikons he’d painted for use in the church. So, why was this Priority, and Secret? I’d shipped out literally tons of Byzantine art for the aesthetes and museums of the fu- ture; it was practically why I was here.
I went down to the next level. It wasn’t for their artistic value, apparently. The re- port said that, according to reports from the work site, this guy’s ikons were making people go crazy. I was to find out how and why, secure his whole oeuvre, and then make sure he couldn’t paint any more.
That made my stomach hurt again. I never like assignments that imply wet work, and they can’t be handed off to the Preservers. Their clean, specialized little brains would boil over . . . but, hey, the guy was a starving artist, right? That meant he was for sale.
I thought over what the local gossip mill was saying about Isidore’s artists. There were dozens of ikon makers working for Isidore, and the ones that worked in paint were the least well-paid. The really expensive stuff was being done in gold-backed mo- saic glass. Even the sculptors were getting the short end, since the Orthodox Church didn’t approve of any sculpture more three-dimensional than a 3/4 profile fresco.
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Anyway, this was Constantinople! I could bribe the guy to relocate and take up mural painting, or something.
Okay, message received, plan initiated, security guidelines adhered to, and I prob- ably wouldn’t have to have any of my muleteers whack a struggling religious artist. I finished off the xocolatl in my cup, and settled down for a nice, restorative nap.
Phil hung around for a few days while I got together a few mule loads of hashish and olive oil. Then I sent them all off with six of the boys to Goblecki Tepe to bury some relic he’d fetched from Malta. It’d be safe there for the next sixteen hundred years, he told me happily, and when it was found, it’d spark the beginnings of the Ephesian Movement.
“I’ll make sure they can pay for all that red granite you’re packing up, Joseph,” he assured me, and went off singing lewd rounds with the Security guys.
Happy days, yeah. I do have to admit, it was a lot more fun to salt future digs with Classical art in those days. You felt like you were making a real difference.
Meanwhile I had an ikon painter to rob and terrorize.
Other than wondering how Nikephoros had pissed off Dr. Zeus, it was a fairly straightforward assignment. The guy made something artistic, with a weird reputa- tion; we were sending stuff like that forward by the metric ton in those days. Maybe he’d welched on a prior deal with the Company — which was not only professional suicide, but often the real thing; Dr. Z. didn’t like its sources knowing about the Com- pany unless they were firmly under control.
There was nothing in the files, though. So I went hunting.
Nikephoros lived in one of the older, smaller streets off the Mese, more or less be- tween the Harbor of Elutherios and the Cow Palace. It was a poor neighborhood — not much of a sea view, but a real amazing smell of fish. And when the wind changed, you got the fragrant breeze from the Eorum Bovis. Smells of money, yeah, but not for the folks who lived down here where you could smell them.
I found his studio pretty easily. It was obviously an ex-pigeon coop built against the wall of an older house. Nobody answered hails at either door, and it just so hap- pened that the courtyard was actually a blind pocket of a place framed by ware- houses. It was easy to force the studio door and take a look inside.
It stank of stale pigeons, old eggs, and fresh turpentine, which is not one of the best smells of the exotic East. Except for the brushes in a cracked vase and several prepped wooden blanks for ikons, the place was a mess; he obviously worked in tem- pera and liked to gesture dramatically with a loaded brush. He might have beaten Pollack to the punch, if he hadn’t been fourteen hundred years out of synch with the world of art. . . .
There were three finished ikons in sight. Nikephoros was good, I guess — but I’m no judge. To me, all ikons look like evil cartoons: the long narrow faces, bisected by long narrow noses; the huge darkened eyes, the pinched, feminine mouths . . . you know, they looked a lot like some sort of anime characters with really bad depres- sion. But mortals have been crazy about them since they were first invented. And since Nikephoros was working for Isidore on Hagia Sophia, these mournful faces with their pointed chins and long hands posturing stiffly must be well-done evil car- toons, right?
They were still weird. But they sure as hell didn’t affect me at all adversely, and none of my scans showed anything more dangerous than that Nikephoros was maybe using cheap turpentine and elderly eggs in his tempera paint. No Cromes Ra- diation, no psychotropic fumes, no hypnotic spirals to amaze your friends. No urge to go crazy.
So how were these horse-faced saints driving people nuts?
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I took the three of them an3rway, wrapped up in a length of muslin I also stole from him. With the mess in there, he’d never notice. He might not notice the missing ikons.
They had no effect on the Security guys either.
I reported that I’d scored all the stock in the studio, but didn’t get anything more enlightening from the credenza but an “Acknowledged” blip. The next stop would have to be the work site itself, where hopefully Nikephoros hadn’t covered too much of the rising walls yet with his art.
I had no idea how I’d get them off if he had.
Next morning, I packed a wallet of salted figs and fresh mizithra cheese, and took a walk across the city to go gawk at Hagia Sophia.
My place was in the northeast of the city, near the base of the Fifth Hill, overlook- ing the Golden Horn. It was a pretty empty quarter then, but we were close to the Phanarion Gate in the Sea Wall, so my caravans could access the coast roads. There was a graveyard close by, which kept the passersby moving through quickly. And a graveyard is always handy for a quick stash. This one was going to be undisturbed until they built the Church of St. Mary of the Mongols on it, when it would then be- come the only church in Constantinople that never got converted to a mosque. That’s just the sort of place the Company looks for.
On the inside of the Sea Wall, though, it was a pretty straight walk down the east- ern edge of Constantinople toward the First Hill. Hagia Sophia was right there, west of the Acropolis and east of the Hippodrome. There was always a floating mob drift- ing around, and sidewalk superintendents could take in the show on the building site with no questions asked.
It was a chilly morning, with a steady wind coming off the Bosphorus. I’d added a round paludamentum cloak over my tunica before I left, and I wished I could have added leggings or trousers, too. But in fashionable circles, pants implied barbarism — and the mob that hung around the Hippodrome was as fashiionable as they came. Stu- pid, aggressive, and dumb as a box of rocks, like sports fans anywhere and anywhen, but fashionable. I didn’t want to draw any attention from the racing touts down there.
I needn’t have worried. No one could have cared less about one more short dark guy in plain clothes. Everyone was either waiting anxiously for the first day’s races, or strutting around to be seen themselves.
The damnedest things repeat through human culture, you know? All these guys’d flip out automatically if they thought someone was looking at them funny. “Looking at me funny” has always been a great way to get stomped. It was hard to keep a straight face, though, if you’d been educated in culture-yet-to-be: the sports factions in Constantinople all wore their hair cropped short in front and in long tails at the back. So I’d see these deadly serious guys in their Byzantine mullets, and the un- ending human comedy was just hilarious. You’ve got to keep looking on the enter- taining side of history, you know? Or this job will beat you down. . . .
Luckily, because of the Hippodrome crowd, there were always food and drink ven- dors down there. I got a cup of hot, spiced, sweetened wine — Constantinople was on a constant sugar high, they sweetened everything — and strolled over to the con- struction site.
They’d been at it for a couple of years. It was still a sea of mud with islands of ran- dom building materials, improvised straw matting paths between them (I saw the pile of red granite I’d pillaged for the Ephesians; still not being used), but the shape of the place was coming clear. That dome was gonna be a bitch . . . but at the moment, the workmen were all moving slowly, staring down at what would be the apse when it got a roof A crowd of workers, and lookie-loos like me, was gathered on that edge.
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They were all staring in and down. As I approached, I could see the guys in the back trying to leap up to peer over the shoulders in front of them. Just then, a weird choked howl broke out in the middle of the press, and everybody jumped back.
No one jumped further than me; I ended up on top of a stack of marble blocks. Down on the partially tiled floor, a guy in a porter’s rough tunic was writhing around bleeding.
I mean, he was fountaining blood. He was bleeding from his eyes, but mostly from his nose — the sort where a cranial artery pops and you bleed out through your nasal passages. As I stared, he gave another of those bubbling howls, convulsed a last time, and was still.
Scanning, I could note all his life processes terminating in that sloppy, piecemeal way mortals die. I always hate seeing that. This guy’s brain activity ran on for a few seconds after his heart stopped pumping, with an EEG that was definitely weird; a stroke? It read like he’d been hit by lightning, two different electrical patterns try- ing to take shape in microwaved brain tissue.
And standing there on the other side of the body was none other than wall-eyed young Nikephoros, with something square and flat wrapped up in his chlamys. His eyes were popping out of his head in opposite directions.
Another guy was coming at a dead run from inside the uncompleted apse — much better dressed, a dalmatica over a long chiton, and gilded leather shoes. He was car- rying a big battered scroll that had to be a blueprint, waving it over his head like a battle axe.
My new orders identified him as Isidore. They hadn’t mentioned his homicidal tendencies, though, so I was sort of surprised when he tried to brain poor Nikephoros with the scroll.
“What have you done now?” he shrieked. “Which one of them have you traduced to evil this time?”
He swung again. Nikephoris ducked desperately, duck-walked up the hem of his own cloak and went flat on his arse beside the dead man. The thing wrapped in his arms flew out and landed face up in front of the fascinated crowd.
And, I swear, they all screamed like little girls and took off! One minute they were as rapt as any bunch of loiterers who’s just seen an entertaining industrial acci- dent— the next they were leaping through the construction site like gazelles, trailed by oaths to the One and the Three. Half the workmen went with them, too.
I was still on my marble perch. I looked down — surprise, there was an ikon on the ground in front of me, which Isidore was avoiding like the coming plague. I could see the figure on it was holding a brick, had a bishop’s crown and one eye bleeding copi- ously— probably St. Spyridon, who’d lost his eye to persecution, and was the patron of workers in clay.
I couldn’t see how it had given the dead workman that brain-burn. But sure as five loaves and a pair of fishes, this was what the Company report was talking about.
With everybody left on the building site hovering around with eyes averted, no one was making any effort at picking up either the ikon or the stiff. I jumped down, slung off my paludamentum and covered the dead guy up. When I turned to the ikon, though, both Isidore and Nikephoros screeched like a pair of geese. So did some of the other workmen still hanging back around the beginnings of the apse.
Don’t look at it was the gist of their yelling. I turned and let everyone see me make a big deal about putting my hand over one eye, and then picked the thing up.
An ikon; big surprise. And yeah, it was Spyridon, with his gouged-out eye resting on top of his brick. It was pretty well done, too — better than the ones I’d stolen from Nikephoros’ studio. There was a complicated pattern on the edges of the Saint’s robe, and it was repeated in miniature in the pupils of both staring eyes — ^which certainly
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drew the gaze to them. It was a big fat blank as far as high weirdness was concerned, though: no radiation, no death rays shooting from either of Spyridon’s eyes. On im- pulse, I peeked through the fingers of my shielding hand.
I couldn’t exactly meet the saint’s split level gaze, but with both my eyes on both of his, I felt — a tingle. A funny S3mcopated ripple in my cerebellum, a kind of drumbeat sensation at the left side of my brain. . . .
Our brains are protected in ways a mortal’s brain couldn’t even begin to sustain — training, implants, augmentations; and in the case of an Operative as old I was (just over twenty thousand years old that spring, thank you very much) millennia of prac- tice in using an organ far removed from standard mortal issue. But best of all, our brains are enclosed in tiny, private Time Transcendence fields — each one of us is permanently a nanosecond out of synch with entropic time.
It’s meant to keep out things like rocks and axes. It also protects from less tangible forces. I could feel something trjdng to coax my alpha waves to change their rhythm, but it wasn’t working.
I looked up at my immediate audience and shrugged.
“It looks fine to me. Not even scratched, see?” and I held it out to Isidore.
He yelled and threw his hands over his face. Nikephoros — who couldn’t have looked straight at anything if his life depended on it — scrambled up and snatched the ikon away from me. Once it was stashed away in the folds of his chlamys again, both of them stood staring at me.
“Are you — all right?” asked Isidore cautiously. He used that universal tone of voice that always means they expect you to scream and fall down dead . . . but I couldn’t even feel that tingle now, not with the ikon hidden. “You must be wearing some charm to protect you from that poisonous thing’s Medusa-gaze!”
He expected it to kill people? Neat.
“I told you, Kupios, it’s only dangerous to evil men,” pleaded Nikephoros.
He turned the ikon to face himself and stared desperately at it. “See? Nothing hap- pens to me!”
I don’t know if Isidore was thinking about that wall-eyed stare, or had just had enough of the artist and his work. He sure wasn’t impressed it didn’t kill Nikephoros, though, and managed to land a good whack with his scroll on the back of Nikephoros’ head.
“It’s not our place to put art on the walls of the basilica that kills men!” he told Nikephoros. “The ikon of the Christ you painted has driven three men into fits, and Alexander the grouter is still seeing visions! Now this one has burst Georgios’ brains! Take that thing and get out of here — and don’t come back until you’re pre- pared to take the other one down and away with you as well!”
“But I only did what you told me to do — ” Nikephoros skipped back hastily as Isidore took aim at his head, and ran off for the street.
Isidore stood panting, glaring after Nikephoros until the kid had run out of view. Then he waved his arms at the workmen still left on site.
‘You! CjTius, Aemilian, come take this poor man’s body to his wife. The rest of you, get back to work!”
One of the men coming forward made to give me back my cloak, but I told him to keep it wrapped round the body — poor Mrs. Georgios was going to get a bad enough shock just seeing her hubby carried home dead, let alone bare and bloody. One of the other workers sidled up to Isidore.
“Um — Kupios, the other one is still up there in the comer,” he mumbled. He wmng his hands. “We’re afraid to go back over there — ^who knows if the ikon will decide one of us is a sinner?”
“You’re all sinners, not that the ikons can tell,” Isidore said in disgust. “That wretched Nikephoros has done something to them, something . . . it’s acheiropoieta ”
32 Kathleen Bartholomew & Kage Baker
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The word he used meant not made by hand, and he wasn’t talking about mass pro- duction. He meant magic, or as much of it as a devout mathematician in Constan- tinople was prepared to believe in. It meant the ikon had a quality, an inborn quality, that wasn’t the result of the work of man. Something divine, something dangerous. I gotta admit, I was inclined to agree with him.
“Kupios?” I stepped back into the fray. “I do have a charm that protects me. Let me remove this other ikon from your work, and I’ll return it to the artist. It’ll be an act of virtue, which all men need.”
Isidore’s face lit up, but he wasn’t going to look stupid in front of his men. “What charm, how does it work?” he demanded.
I pulled out the medal of Luke I was wearing in those days and showed him.
“Patron of painters. Might do it,” he allowed.
“Also,” I said on impulse, “I am blind in my left eye.”
If Isidore could tell any difference between my eyes, he had magic talents of his own. But he stared good and hard at each of them, and then nodded.
“On your own head be it,” he said and turned away.
So the workmen led me under the partially completed dome, where the niches that would hold lesser altars were going in. Up in the groin of one was a nicely done ikon of Christ of the Sacred Heart, holding up his hand in benediction. The guy with me point- ed the painting out while hiding from its line of sight behind a half-completed pillar.
I snagged a ladder and retrieved the ikon. Again, it was a better one than those I’d stolen the night before, but I was careful not to meet its gaze until I got down to the floor with it. A brief glimpse started up that syncopated feeling again on the left side of my skull, so I prudently held the Incarnate Lord facedown against my chest as I walked out.
There were looks of relief (and disappointment — the ikon’s last victim had been a heck of a show) and a weak cheer when I walked out. Isidore came up to meet me, a burlap sack in his hands.
“Here, here, put the thing out of sight!” he ordered. He squinched his eyes shut while I put the ikon in the bag, and then handed the whole thing to me with obvious relief I tucked it under my arm.
“Take it to that idiot Nikephoros,” he ordered, as we started walking to the street. He handed me a small leather bag. “And take this; there’s six solidii in there, for your act of faith, I insist.”
Now, that was a nice return for taking away something I needed to acquire any- way. I put it in my pouch with no argument
“What is your name, and your business?” he asked, walking me to the edge of the site. He really wanted to see the back of me and that ikon.
“Name’s Josephus, Kupios. I have a caravan business over by the Fifth Hill,” I said.
“And are you a Chalcedonian?” he asked.
He didn’t mean the old country, he meant a Chalcedonian Christian. And since it was the sect that the Emperor Justinian currently favored, I assured him I was.
“For this favor, then, I will have your name etched under the doorjamb of that niche you cleared for us,” he said earnestly
Now that, given the custom of the country and the time, was a damned nice thing to do; better than the cash, to most men. I’d accrue all sorts of spiritual benefits un- til Hagia Sophia burned again, with my name there. If I’d actually been a Chal- cedonian Christian, at least. So I thanked him nicely, and went on my way.
The first curious bystander stepped into my path from behind a wine vendor’s cart before I got ten feet off the building site. The wide green vertical stripe on his cloak made his politics plain. So did his balloon sleeves and bushy beard — Mother Nature had already moved his hairline back to his ears for him, though.
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“Hey there, what’d you see? What you got in the bag, huh? “
“Is it one of the cursed ikons?” came a second eager voice from behind me. Other concerned bystanders chimed right in.
“Let’s see!”
“Make Cadmus look, he’s already cross-eyed!”
“Is that it in the bag?”
My proximity alarms were twitching like massed aneurysms in my vestibular sys- tem. A hand plucked at my shoulder, and I could feel the heat of the crowd coming up far too close behind me. . . .
I turned — slow, but with my elbows out, so neither of my new buddies could get a hand on the bag. Yeah, there was a good-sized group just beginning to seethe there in the street. I grinned at all of them, and held the bag out.
“Who’s brave and stupid?” I roared suddenly, and let the mouth of the bag flop open in a quick brief flash of red and gold.
Sure enough, that moved them! There were a few more girly screams, and it looked like the front men levitated about a yard backward. There was a decent crowd here now, and all of them wore some Green stripe or ribbon or stamped design on their cloaks. Crowded together as they were, they were basically a baby mob. But they were intrigued and nervous, and I had their full attention.
“All right, citizens, you saw that poor bugger die over there!” I waved my free arm down the street, where the late Georgios was being carried away in my bloodied cloak. “I don’t know what this thing does, but the esteemed Isidore is sending it back to its maker so no one else gets hurt. So just let me get on with my work, eh?”
“What makes you so special?” someone called (from well behind another by- stander, I noted).
I pulled out the medal of Luke again. “I’m under the protection of the Evangelist Luke.” I pitched my voice to carry to the back of the crowd. “And I’m blind in one eye. And my mother had me blessed at birth against any enchantment of vision. And I’m buying a drink for everybody here!”
I pulled out one of the solidii — gold ones, too; Isidore played fair — and tossed it to the wine vendor at the edge of the crowd. He plucked it out of the air, yelling with delight, and began calling out, “Wine! Red and white, honeyed or resined, first cup free!”
I walked away with great dignity and long strides as the crowd availed themselves of my generosity.
I had to get that second ikon, and I knew where Nikephoros lived. . . .
So there I was, striding along through the streets of Constantinople with revealed truth under my arm. And there was something ringing small, insistent alarms in the back of my mind. Not a hunch — this was the kind of neuron static only an Operative can feel, where some deeply buried security program has reached a conclusion your conscious mind missed, and is raising hell about it. Like a red light flashing in the corner of the screen, if that red light also made an annoying noise and smelled bad.
Near the Cow Palace I just couldn’t take it any more. The addition of the smells from massed cattle to the uproar at the back of my mind was starting to make me seriously sick to my stomach. I sat down on the edge of a tiny municipal fountain, opened the bag and took a good long look at the ikon.
It was a pretty standard Christos — one long hand raised to draw attention to the complicated gilt and crimson pattern on his chest. That looked like a medal from the Fredonian army, but it was obviously meant to be the Sacred Heart. There was a pat- tern painted all tiny in the figure’s sad black eyes, matching a complex ball of flame in Christ’s other hand, and I could feel the imbedded pattern trying to convince me that the heart and eyes of Christ were fixed on me from everywhere. . . .
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Yeah, this was definitely the source of my unease: the bells and whistles went frantic at the sight of it. That left-brain buzzing started up again, too. But there was nothing apparently insanity-producing, unless people had been losing their minds from the sheer persistence of the thing . . . but everyone else was a mortal. They weren’t hearing what I could hear — and they might well be seeing something my cy- borged eyes were filtering out. . . .
There are ways of turning our augmented sensorium down, to approximate mortal input. There’s seldom any use for it, and it actually counts as a minor hazard in most circumstances. However, every baby operative learns how to do it, from the older kids. Get enough children together, and they’ll generate stupid, dangerous games as naturally as sweat. Wandering around seeing ever3rthing in UV or out of focus or up- side down can be pretty funny when you’re eleven years old.
In this case, it might show me what the mortals were seeing.
I tried turning the UV and IR filters on and off: Nothing, although the colors changed interestingly. There was a very slight heat being generated — but it was the continuing decay of bad tempera paint, not radioactivity. The thing didn’t glow in any range of the spectrum.
Next I tried the focus. Sharpening — no good, no mortal could see that clearly. Fuzzing it out felt promising, though — the bubbling feeling kicked up a notch. And something was stirring waaay down in my memory . . . when I had my vision dialed down so far Christ looked like a Mondrian painting, a word suddenly burst into my immediate consciousness: bright red, wreathed in flames and cherubs and smelling of mushrooms and the mud of the Nile: PAREIDOLIS.
What the fuck? I wondered. And then it all came together and my unconscious stopped screwing around with euphemisms, and I remembered where I’d encoun- tered this before — the method of making a perfect image, to literally enthrall the viewer. To make them see patterns everywhere, especially patterns encoded in sculp- ture or paintings using the elements of mathematical proportions.
Djoser. Djoser and the damned formulae for perfect squares. And shoulders. And noses. And especially eyes.
That ball of multicolored fire in Christ’s hand; an aspect of his divinity? The Holy Ghost? Hell, maybe it was a magic mushroom. But the flames caught the eye of the beholder, and at once started to actually writhe; the pupils of his elongated eyes did the same thing, in their separate settings. And when I wrenched my own eyes away and looked out at the wall beside me — Christ’s face and burning eyes leaped out at me from every constellation of cracks in the plaster.
I looked down — yep, Christ again, his face forming in the swirls of dust in the street. Even the colors in his eyes showed, the repeating, twisting pattern of the flames. I could pick it out in the weave of my tunic hem. I could find it in the detail carving on the rim of the fountain bowl. I turned and looked over at the nearest cat- tle pen by the Forum Bovis.
The Son of Man and his psychedelic eyes were framed in every matted coat. Divine cowlicks!
There was no telling how Nikephoros had done it, not just from the ikons. I had to go find him and get the information out of him. If he’d somehow reinvented this, I’d have to wipe the memory out of his mind — ^which might take his skills at painting with it, but orders are orders, and it would be better than bashing his head in. But if he’d got- ten the formulae from somewhere else, I had to find them and confiscate them.
There are times and places when you want religious art to literally talk to people. Constantinople on the brink of bubonic plague probably wasn’t one of them.
I could feel it, the pattern recognition bug, trying to seize a permanent place in my brain. Pointless, of course, but it couldn’t know that. The whole damned trick was just
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based on the proportions of the ikon, steered by the colors and shapes Nikephoros had chosen. The ones he’d chosen for the Sacred Heart of Christ apparently sent you on a very bad trip.
I took off running for Nikephoros’ pigeon coop of wonders.
He was home. He’d just been thrown off the construction site, blamed for the death of a workman; where else would he be? In fact, I found him in his studio, sitting hunched on a bench and staring at a rectangular object swathed in burlap. He didn’t react when I came storming in.
“So, Nikephoros, what does that one do?” I asked him, and then stepped up to twitch the cloth off it.
“Don’t look at it!” he yelled — sounded authentically scared, too. I looked at him — then turned to take a good long look at the ikon.
Same effect as before, same effect as the image of Christ: but not compassionate. This felt more — aggressive. Spyridon was glaring outrage at the viewer. Not a happy martyr, apparently. I felt simultaneously guilty and paranoid about attack. My blood pressure wanted to rise, my adrenal glands were tr3dng to go into overdrive. Instant aneurysm! It’d be an easy thing for these reactions, superimposed on the natural rhythms of a mortal’s brain, to raise the blood pressure enough for a blood vessel to pop.
“Never mind, I can tell what it does. But it won’t hurt me, Nicky, so calm down.” I put my ikon on the shelf next to it. Yeah, the eyes of God and amorphous shapes of horror and guilt, all prying together at the armor of my mind. Lovecraft would have liked it: just before he flipped out.
I sat down next to Nikephoros. He was staring at me, obviously sure I was about to go bonkers right in front of him.
“It doesn’t affect me,” I told him again. “Or you, obviously. So why doesn’t it send you crazy?”
“I — I think I have a dispensation, because I painted them,” he said shakily. He looked at me — and, at the same time, the ikons.
“I don’t think so, Nicky. I think it’s because you’re incredibly wall-eyed,” I said. “Can you even see out of both eyes at the same time?”
He scowled. “No, but I can see out of both of them. Just not together. I just tilt my head. Look at those!” He pointed at the ikons. “They’re perfect! I can see just fine to paint!”
“Where’d you get the formulae?” I asked. “For the designs?”
He got a shifty look on his face. Ever seen someone like him look shifty? Very dis- turbing ... I could tell from his biometrics he was about to tell a great big whopping lie, so I stepped in with a suggestion first: for the good of his soul, as it were.
“It was from Isidore, wasn’t it? An old scroll, or some codex?” I took off the big bronze penannular pin I wore on my shoulder. “Don’t lie to me, now. Your mouth may say No, but your heart rate says Yes, yes. So does your brain activity. In fact, your whole metabolism is interesting, because the ikons are trying hard to screw up your mind, and I want to see why it doesn’t work on you.”
Yeah, I pretty much dropped character completely there, but it was clear I was go- ing to have to play some dirty tricks on Nikephoros’ memories anyway. I didn’t have time for my usual brilliant performance as a local.
“He gave me an old scroll. I did exactly what it said to do, too! It was full of math- ematics, and models of angles. I had to use measuring cords and map pins, but — they were perfect!” Nikephoros was sounding less frightened now, and more sure of him- self He was sure he’d been screwed over somehow, an3rway; and I really had to agree with him.
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“Why did he want you to do it that way?” I pulled apart the pin shaft on my brooch — now it had a bronze point on one end and a silver needle on the other. I took a little silver ball out of my belt pouch, too, and pushed the bronze point into a tiny dimple on the ball. “Did he tell you what would happen?”
“He said they’d be inspiring. He said no one could resist them. That was all,” Nikephoros said. “I could see they were good — the composition was perfect, I was proud of them! But then, when the other men saw them . . . they started to go mad, and Vasilikos died!”
“Just like Georgios. Tell me where the scroll is, Nicky.”
He started to cry, but pointed to the cabinet the ikons were sitting on. Poor bugger. I was going to be doing him a favor by erasing this crap in his mind. It might save his reputation, or even his life. In the meantime . . .
“You did feel something, though, Nicky, didn’t you?” I scanned him. The proof was there in his brain, a lot clearer than in my own, since his was an original model.
Even with his monocular vision, the program was tr3dng to insert itself The fusiform gyrus and the parahippocampal gyrus were both showing spikes of activity — they didn’t match, as they would in someone with normal vision, but they must have been giving him a hell of a headache.
“The ikons are tr3dng to set up a standing wave in your fusiform gyrus,” I told him. “They’re trying to set you up with some nice pareiodolic hallucinations. Visions. Faces in the patterns on the walls.”
“I don’t understand any of that,” he said, staring at me with his right eye. “But I don’t have any visions. Did I kill Vasilikos and Georgios?”
“No, you just did your job too well,” I said. “They had visions, and the visions wouldn’t stop, and some of them were pretty scary. Spyridon, for instance. Those guys died of fright, more or less, because of the way they saw the ikons.”
“I felt a little of that,” Nikephoros whispered. “I finished another one. The Empress Augusta Pulcheria. But I was afraid to show her to anyone.”
“Why, what does she do?”
Nikephoros actually blushed, and I was hit with such a wave of hormones that I was pretty sure I could guess what had happened.
“Overdid it on the ‘pulcheria,’ huh?”
He nodded miserably.
“Well, listen. I’m going to make you forget all this and feel a lot better,” I said. I slid an avuncular arm around his shaking shoulders, and the needle tip of my disguised hypodermic into his upper arm. The poor guy didn’t even flinch.
“Now, you just sit there and in a little while you’ll feel much calmer.”
Nikephoros nodded obediently and sat there waiting to forget. I got up and reached into the cabinet. Yep, there was a long wooden case in there. Sitting down again, I took out the scroll that it held and took a look.
It was in Greek script now, not the hierogl3rphs I’d used on the original. Most of the sketches were still recognizable, though — they’d probably been traced, to keep them as accurate as possible. The formulae for monolithic sculpture looked to be screwed up beyond all hope; but the ones for painting were just fine. Worse luck for Nikephoros and the gang.
“How are you feeling now?” I asked.
“I’m . . . tired. But my head doesn’t hurt anymore,” he said. “Who are you? How are you doing this? Why are you helping me?”
“I’m an angel, Nikephoros, an angel of the Lord. And you are an innocent man who doesn’t deserve to be cursed with this knowledge. Here, look at this.” I held the scroll open before him — ^he stared, rapt. “See all that? I want you to forget it. All of it. Just as easy as forgetting a dream. Close your eyes and never think of it again.”
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The drug I’d given him not only erased memories, it increased focus so you could tell the subject what to forget. The River Lethe has nothing on Dr. Zeus’s chemists. Nikephoros shut his eyes and let out a long peaceful sigh.
I caught his head as he started to fall over, and laid him down on the bench.
“You’ll sleep now, and not remember an3dhtng about how you painted the ikons,” I told him again. ‘You’ll only remember that an angel came and took the scroll, and told you . . . there are things mortal man was not meant to know. You can tell Isidore I said so. Tell him he can use ordinary ikons, and that Hagia Sophia will stand for a thousand years.”
“Will it?” asked Nikephoros sleepily.
I calculated a quick sum. “Yes, it really will. Longer, in fact.”
“All right.” And he smiled like a happy child, and went obediently to sleep.
I searched through his studio then, looking for ikons or scrolls. There were no oth- er instructions from the old days in Egypt, thank all the gods — ^but I found Augusta Pulcheria. I wrapped her securely and stacked her with the other two. He wasn’t kid- ding— the effect of the lady’s smile was absolutely amazing. Mona Lisa it was not. Nikephoros could have revolutionized pornography with this technique, if pornogra- phy had needed any help. . . .
There was a fourth prepared slab, but only an initial coat of gesso had gone on it so far. A note on a scrap of parchment informed me that Isidore was hoping for Tychicus of Chalcedon. I left it there — ^Nikephoros’ work would be harmless now. But I wrapped the other three up in a bundle with the scroll, and took them all away with me.
Nikephoros was still sleeping like a baby. And still smiling.
When I got back to my compound, I found the basket project in full swing in the courtyard. The Preserver who knew baskets — a very pretty girl named Perdita; she was a striking dark-eyed blonde, who’d been saved from tribal warfare in Dalma- tia— ^was obviously having a fine time teaching all my big, hairy Security techs how to weave wickerwork through the timber frames they’d built. It looked like it would work in time to get the caravan off by tomorrow.
“I think I’m gonna have a special package to add to that before you leave, boys,” I said as I passed through. “Perdita, honey, build one of those things with a lid, okay?”
A chorus of affirmatives followed me up the stairs to my own quarters. Morale was obviously high with the resident operatives. Maybe I should organize some more practical ethnic skills classes between the Security boys and the Preservers. . . .
Once locked in my office, I warmed up the credenza and was able to report a com- plete victory to the anon3Tnous clerk on the other end.
Query: No further complications'?
Me: None. All the affected ikons are in my possession, the source of the effect has been isolated and is also in my possession, and the painter has been drugged to forget the entire thing. There will be no more magic ikons here.
Query: What was the cause?
Me: A Greek translation of the old Egyptian mathematical formulae for perfect im- ages. Isidore had it. I have it now.
Query: How did Isidore get it?
Me: How the hell should I know? I haven’t seen the formula since I left it with the priests in Heliopolis twenty-five hundred years ago! What do you want done with all this stuff now?
Statement: Ship the scroll and all ikons to the warehouse in Venice, with Security escort. They will be processed from there.
Me: Acknowledged.
Statement: Blather blather squeeeal.
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And that was that — the transmission was over. No reaction, no comment, certain- ly no congratulations — but I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d carried out another cockeyed assignment successfully, ha ha. Tangible successes go a long way toward making this job bearable, in the long run. And it’s all in the long run for us.
Isidore went on with his church building, and Hagia Sophia was technically com- pleted in 537. Wouldn’t you know it, though — Isidore complained loudly about the loss of Nikephoros’ magic ikons once they were gone; the guy’s regular work just wasn’t as striking. Isidore conveniently overlooked the little problem with their striking observers literally dead. Typical upper management.
Isidore deserved whatever grief he got, in my opinion. And he was still living there when Justinian’s Plague finally broke out in 542, which was probably enough trou- ble for anyone.
Me, I got all my people out at least two years before the Plague started, and didn’t think about any of this for another fifteen hundred or so years.
Which turned out to be a mistake, but hey. I’m not a god. I just work for one. O
N
If it moves farther away; if it passes one quickly,
if it's massive and dilates time in its gravitational
well. I awake to the neighbor's radio, the emergency broadcast
system. Light lengthened to the end of the visible
whenever I went outside.
The radio played
“Soak Up the Sun.”
Everyone reddened and I
was left wondering if you were moving away and if
it would take a longer forever. I put on Miles
Davis, “Kind of Blue,” and I sing your mass away, worried
I wouldn't recognize an event horizon in time.
— Barbara Duffey
39
Kit Reed's most recent books are the collection The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (Wesleyan University Press), a Shirley Jackson nominee, and her novel. Son of Destruction (Severn House), both of which appeared in 2013. Where, her next novel, will be out this coming summer from Tor. The book owes something to this new story of loss and . . .
MILITARY
5ECRET5
Kit Reed
A^Aien the first bell rings, Mother Immaculata marches us outside for a special announcement. We have to line up on the playground according to size. While the taller kids file into rows behind us, we shuffle in place, wondering.
What is this, anyway? That “special,” attached to “announcement.” Will it be a sur- prise day off? Games instead of times tables or just ice cream at lunch? Maybe it’s a field trip, orange busses lined up to take us all to Water World? Or . . .
My gut stutters. The biggest thing.
Then Mother Immaculata says, “Everybody whose father isn’t dead, take one step forward,” and everybody in the front row steps forward but me.
God, don’t make me throw up.
She repeats the way nuns do, in case you didn’t get it. “Jessie, I said, everybody whose father isn’t dead. . . .” Then she drops her arm like a starter’s flag. Our whole long row marches off the playground and up the ramp into the gym. I can’t.
I have to stay where I am with the second row running up my heels. There are more kids lined up behind them, row after row, up to ninth grade. Even Mother Im- maculata is impatient, but I can’t move. She comes down on me so fast that her big fat rosary rattles. She grabs my shoulder, hard, and turns me around. “See that?”
It’s a square of red tape laid out on the tarmac next to the bleachers. “Yes, Stir.”
She gives me a push. “Into the box.”
He isn’t dead, I just don’t know where he is, okay'? ‘Yes, Stir.”
For a long time. I’m the only one in the box.
When I was nine, the doorbell rang in the night. I went rnnning down, but West- ern Union was gone. There was more in the telegram than she ever told, but I didn’t know. That night she said it was just Uncle Forrest, investment things, now go back to bed. She waited until morning to tell me anything at all.
I was eating my cornflakes in the sunshine when she began. The Navy thinks Daddy’s missing in action, she said. Don’t worry, eat your breakfast, it’s probably a mistake. I think she said, it says they just lost track of him, that’s all, but she never explained. Then she went back inside herself and slammed all the doors. Daddy was “missing,” she told me every time I asked; that’s all she said.
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* * *
I had to wait until she died to read the telegram. After the funeral I went through her things, which you do when your only mother dies. I found letters she wrote to the Navy Department in the same carton; carbon copies, neatly stored. When the Navy declared he was officially dead, she kept writing. She followed up on rumors, report- ed sightings, fresh details from shipmates who had made it home; for decades she numbered reasons to believe MISSING meant exactly that.
Lost means they will find him, right?
Right.
This is how kids think. It’s how I thought.
All the telegram said. Mother told me the next day, was that they didn’t know where Daddy was. She finally got up and put on lipstick the day after: she said. Don’t worry, they’re out looking for him right now. I wrote the rest inside my head every day after that. His nice new submarine could be silent running, he’s out there, but it’s a military secret. He’ll come back and tell us all about it. Unless he’s on a desert island somewhere — accident at sea, he and his crew are stamping S.O.S. into the sand — unless they’re bobbing on life rafts because something hurt the sub. Living on fish and rainwater. People in books did that, and Americans in prison camps gave their name and rank and serial number and they never gave in. Skippers helped their men no matter what the guards tried on them, they worked together to escape. He and his crew could be tunneling out right now, crawling on their elbows through deep sand. If not, we would go in and rescue them as soon as we won the war.
Three weeks after we got the telegram, the mailman brought us letters from Dad- dy, and look. They were postmarked two days after Mrs. Simpson struggled up our front steps with her S3Tnpathy casserole. First proof
He’s still out there.
It was only Thursday, so I made peanut butter and jelly on sal tines and went to school.
When you’re little, missing in action means a lot of things; the one thing it doesn’t mean is dead.
They’re out there looking for him, right?
So I went into Sister Marcella’s room like always and sat in my same desk in the back, between Teeny Shail and Betsy Braswell. We ate on our same bench by the lunchroom window, and I didn’t talk about the telegram, so they didn’t have to know. See, officers’ children don’t cry. When he left for California I felt awful, but officers’ children don’t cry, not even when you can’t see. He’s counting on us to be brave. Be- sides, for all I knew they were finding him that very day, pulling him out of the wa- ter while I messed up long division or copied the names of the state capitals off the board. After the last bell I ran all the way home. It would be over and the kids would never even know.
Mother would come running out to tell me they made a mistake and we’d have waffles and cocoa to celebrate.
Instead it was big old Mrs. Simpson from across the street with a casserole; she was on our front porch, sniffling. She could hardly wait to say you poor thing, and she got upset because I wouldn’t cry with her and I didn’t let her inside. I had to take the casserole to make her go away. Mother was still in her room with the shades down. Don’t bother me. She didn’t come out for supper so when it got dark I had casserole and went to bed because tomorrow I had school.
Next day Sister Marcella popped out of the double front doors at St. Paul’s too fast.
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like she’d been l3dng in wait. She knelt down in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of me so I couldn’t get past. Kids started piling up behind. I guess she wanted to hug, but this dry cleaning smell came up from her habit along with other smells so I couldn’t. Her face kept sliding around. Oh, don’t! Sister Marcella, don’t cry. Thank God she didn’t. It was just an almost, which was good. Then she opened her mouth and words fell out. “Oh you poor child, you’ve lost your father,” like it was something I did.
Then she pinned a Miraculous Medal on my collar and told me to be brave, right out where everybody could see. Kids stared, all but the ones that wouldn’t look at me.
The Friday paper was on the bulletin board so it was the first thing everybody saw. His picture was up there on the front page. It didn’t make it true, but now every- body knew. I don’t know why it made me feel guilty. You just do.
I got through the rest of that year thinking, if one more kid in our school got the telegram, at least there would be two of us, but that year, nobody did. Hope made me savage. In fifth grade, I thought at least one transfer kid would come and I’d see it in his face. He’d walk into our classroom and we’d both know and I wouldn’t have to be the only one. I hated it. Other kids’ fathers got blown out of the sky or shot dead in combat all the time and our school would have a Mass for them, but we are not the same. When they tell your mother that he’s killed in action, at least you know.
Missing is still out there, no matter what they say.
You miss him every day. Even after you find the telegram she kept: AND PRE- SUMED DEAD you play out the possibilities. You think, one day he’ll walk through that door. You keep thinking it long after you look up and do the math. You’re the ex- act same age he was when he got lost. Older, then much older, but still . . . then you consider what time has done to him, what he looks like now and what he needs, but that’s okay. You won’t care what he looks like or how hard it is, when he walks in that door you’ll be glad. You spin out the years thinking, I will take care of him.
By the time Mother Immaculata was done that day there were three of us stand- ing in the red tape box, watching the ordinary people follow Mother Immaculata back into the building, row on row, leaving us exposed — two big kids from the middle school: this girl Dorcas and Bill, who’s tall as a tenth grader, and me.
At the top of the ramp Mother Immaculata sees the last row up the ramp and back into regular life inside. Then she turns and gives us a look. We shuffle, not exactly looking at each other, frightened and excited — You, too! — and ashamed because we’re both girls but we’re nothing alike, gaudy Dorcas with your uniform skirt rolled way up above your knees.
No. We are alike, we just didn’t know.
Mother Immaculata doesn’t say our names, but we can feel her eyes on us. We have our orders. “You wait.”
Either the tarmac grows or we shrink.
When the doors shut on the mother superior her building goes away, leaving us three alone on the playground. For reasons. There’s nothing in sight to remind us where we are, which town in what state, or even what country. There’s just us three eddying on the tarmac, and at the far end of the playground, a bus. Did that bus pull up while we were watching Mother Immaculata direct traffic away from us, or has it been out here the whole time?
It’s a grey steel cylinder with darkened windows, sleek as a bullet and all of a piece, everything tightly sealed until we’re close enough. Odd: it hasn’t moved. Nei- ther have we, but here it is. The doors pop open.
It’s for us.
We climb on board, in hopes.
The doors whish shut on our heels and the motor starts before we can make it up
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the steps, but you get used to that. When you’re a kid you can’t ask for explanations. You do as you’re told.
The inside of the bus is even darker than the steely shell. As we come up the steps Dorcas tries, “Hello?” Nobody speaks. We blunder down the aisle all pardon me, ex- cuse me, looking for seats. Nobody moves, even when Bill fake-loses his balance and bumps them so he can fake-apologize.
We go along in the dark, following beads of light in the floor to our seats in the very back row. It’s so dark in here that we can’t make out who the others are, only that they’re kids and they won’t talk to us. Whether they’re asleep or drugged or just pretending is never clear. We’ll never find out where these kids were or what they were doing when they got picked up or why they were picked up in the first place or why we’re all in here together, although I can guess. That’s okay, I think as we stum- ble into the back row, but I hate that that it took us forever to get here, and these are the last seats in the bus.
And that there are so many people in here. From the outside the bus doesn’t look that big, but there’s no bus driver to steer by, no teacher herding us, nobody to ask. When you grow up without explanations, you don’t ask. You keep doing what you have to do.
As if he is watching. In hopes.
Days go by, at least I think it’s been days. Food happens, I think, but I can’t know if it really does. Sometimes the bus fills with the smell of food, people farting, shifting in all the rows ahead of us, but the only ones I hear talking are Dorcas and Bill and me, and only a little bit. It’s questions, like why they won’t talk to us and when is the food, although we never get hungry. The bathrooms are right across the aisle from us, but nobody comes and I don’t have to go.
As we ride along we wonder, but we don’t really want to know. It’s enough to be running along ahead of the sad outcasts we were in the last place. Every few hours or days Bill or Dorcas will ask where this thing is going and we name places we used to live and places we want to see, just not the one we really care about, in part be- cause we don’t know exactly where that is. We don’t ask each other who we’re look- ing for because that’s too personal, but we all know why we’re here.
All the regular kids went back into the building that day, everybody but us. I think the war orphans left that place shortly after the telegram came to their house, un- less the service sent somebody to break the news. Poor kids, their fathers got killed, this won’t make it better but at least they know. And the rest? Ordinary, so they be- long at St. Paul’s. His job was essential to the war effort on the home front or he was too sick to serve; either way he didn’t have to go. Either he never went to war, or it ended and he came home, we don’t know.
I know that they made Dorcas and Bill and me wait in the red tape box because we don’t belong in that school.
There is no real place for us. Mother Immaculata thought one thing, but we know another. Not dead.
They just don’t know where he is, is all.
So here we are parked side by side by side in the back row of the bus, sitting here in the dark and it’s nothing we did, it’s who we are. Then the silence gets too heavy and we talk. Or I think we do.
Bill starts. “So where were all the kids whose fathers did get killed?”
“What?”
‘You know, back on the playground.”
It comes out of Dorcas in a wail. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
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I do. “They don’t go to our school.”
“Oh.”
Bill pushes: “Is that better or worse than this?”
Dorcas is quick. “Oh, it’s much worse.”
Not me: “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Change the subject, Jessie. Change it fast, hut don’t ask the next question. It’s too personal. Never ask us where we were when we got the telegram.
Don’t make us tell you what that was like.
I ask the question that it’s okay to ask. “Where did they say he was when it happened?”
“Chosin.” It comes out of Bill like a cough.
Dorcas whips her head around, all puzzled. “What’s that?”
“You don’t know?”
I think, but do not tell her. Different war.
Bill turns to me. ‘Yours?”
“Coral Sea.”
“Where was yours?”
Dorcas finally gets it. “Manila Bay.”
We all do. Bill stands up and yells at the backs of a hundred heads on the unmoved, unmoving bodies slouched in seats ahead of us because they got on the bus before we did. He yells loud enough to reach everybody in every row all the way to the front of the bus and Mother Immaculata and all those ordinary kids back at our old school.
Shouting, “Where did they tell you they lost him?”
And the answers come from every row, all the way to the front of the bus. When they do, it is stupendous.
“Tikrit,” and “Manassas,” “Da Nang,” “Belleau Woods,” “Benghazi,” “Agadir . . .”
The names of all the old wars and certain new ones and wars we haven’t heard of yet come out in a blast, cries that go on and on, as though whatever the nail is. Bill hit it on the head.
For the first time the bus stops.
Ahead of us, the others cough and shift in their seats, embarrassed. Reassembling themselves. There’s the confused stir of someone standing, way up there in the front of the bus, followed by the doors whishing open, the hush of footsteps stifled as the thoughtful person or people hurry down and out. Then the doors whish shut and clamp tight so we can shove off
In the hack row the three of us scramble to change places, shuffling ourselves like a deck of cards so we can take turns craning at the window, hut there’s nothing to see. It looks darker out there than it is in here. The bus is moving again, everything dark and everybody silent, sending the three of us back into our own heads where we sit, curled up tight around our hopes. The bus stops again, long enough for someone new to get out. It’s probably time for the third row to line up at the exit, hut at the next stop, no- body leaves. I don’t hear that gasp the doors make when they whish open, or the rush of somebody pounding down the steps, which is a puzzle. At least nobody gets on.
At the next stop so many people get off that I can’t count them and all my blood backs up in my head: Me next, me, me!
Dozens get off and nobody comes back. A good thing, I tell myself It could mean . . .
Oh, Jessie. Don’t.
But the next time we stop kids seem to get off in no particular order, from the front of the bus, the middle of the hus, anywhere in the hus; they scatter before the doors clamp shut on their heels while the rest of us ride on, and I begin to think . . .
I don’t want to think.
Bill says it. “We’re never getting off this fucking bus.”
If John Paul Jones had a wife and kids that he left behind to fight for whatever; if
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he never came back, they’re probably sitting up there in the dark somewhere near the front of our bus. Waiting. We aren’t all the same age, in fact we’re nothing alike. We are none of us the same person. What we are is people whose fathers got lost in some war, frozen at the age we were when we first heard. It won’t matter when this happened to us or which war, the only thing that matters is, lost can mean anything. No matter how long you live or what they tell you later, he’s still out there and — you mull the unfinished sentence as you run on, listening for the rest. O
They spin, measure, and cut the threads Athena weaves to fabric.
But they watched Penelope Unweave by night
The patterns she had woven in the day So that the loom never filled.
Since then, sometimes Clotho picks apart The twist of the thread And balls it up again To take its place in chaos On the spindle
Or Lachesis keeps losing count
Of how many times she's held and folded off
The length from shoulder to her fingertips.
Atropos has no recourse.
Cut thread is cut.
All Death can do to be without Her power of ending
Is to grab the spindle
By its sharp and stabbing end
And let the thorns grow up around the castle
Death lies sleeping, then.
Atropos dreams of lives Turning on the wheel.
— Ruth Berman
45
Greg Bosserfs most recent story in Asimov's, "Bloom" (December 2013), was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and his story "The Telling" won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Greg wrangles space- ships and superheroes at his day job at Industrial Light & Magic in the San Francisco. His sixth story for us was originally drafted at the 2010 Clarion Writer's Workshop; some of the inspiration came from mutual trust under pressure evident in his fellow students and instructors there, not to mention a few late nights of tall tales and emptied bottles. Nothing as wild or dangerous, though, as the crew of the Tethys and their game of . . .
TWELVE AND TAG
Gregory Norman Bossert
‘‘ T
. . . ■ welve and Tag,” we shouted, and Cheung added, “You two know it?”
Zandt lowered his brows and frowned.
Adra shook her head, looked around at us. She did that, searching faces for clues about what was expected of her. “You mean tee-ay-gee like T-complete Associative Gestalt? Crew’s got the sort of money for neural backup?” she asked.
Cheung said, “Not tech. It’s a bar game. A slam, a rap.”
Zandt’s brows lowered further over pale eyes.
“An improvised impression. And then you tell stories, the worst thing, stupidest thing, most painful thing you’ve ever done.”
“Or kindest,” added Nava, back from the bar with drinks balanced in both hands. And to our chorus of complaints, “That’s the way we do it — ”
“ — on Mars,” we shouted, the crew of the Tethys. All but Adra and Zandt. They weren’t really crew yet, not until this was done.
“This ain’t Mars,” Orit said, and bounced her head off the window behind her, lay- ers of clear composite and beyond it the flat flat beige of Europa, Jupiter’s fat belly propped on the horizon.
“Something we do,” Perelman rumbled.
“Breaks the ice,” Orit said, to groans. All we did was break the ice, down into the ocean that lay underneath Europa’s surface.
“It’s not just ice that breaks,” Cheung said, “doing what we do.” His fingers mimed something snapping. “It’s equipment, people, whole ships sometimes. Got to know each other.”
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“Gotta trust,” Nava said. She was harpoonist, which these days meant piloting a remote vehicle on a two-kilometer cable, and, as if to make up for that, ever3dhing about her was sharp. She gave Adra a sharp smile now, then flicked it at Zandt.
Adra was second-shift pilot, had been for two months. Lean and grey, swept-back eyes so dark they seemed opaque, or empty. This was her first shore leave with us; she’d come in mid-mission after her predecessor had lost an arm in a blowout.
Our assayer had just lost his nerve after that. That’s the position Zandt had recent- ly dropped into. Literally: he’d landed in-system that morning from who-knew-where, resume in hand, “ship = Tethys” scrawled in the margin. He hung over the table like Jupiter over the surface out the window, blond hair swept back onto broad shoulders, something in the hard lines of his face keeping him from easy handsomeness.
Adra and Zandt were already signed by the captain, but contracts could be re- voked or applicants left stranded if the crew decided against the hire. That’s why we were here.
We? The crew. Perelman was mate, solid, methodical, the wall between the captain and the rest. He left the running of things to Cheung, he’s navigator, and Yu, she’s main-shift pilot. Even the captain deferred to those two. Cheung, he was always in motion, always quick to find the right words. Yu was always still, always looking Out into the deep, yet somehow saw ever3d,hing anyway.
Orit was cook; that’s not a junior role, not on a ship that spends six months at a time under the ice. She was likely to be at the bottom of any trouble or atop another crewmember, but she always cleaned up her own messes.
Who else? Nava you already know. Patel was there, engineer, and most of the hands: Keita and Barb, Heighten and Sintra. We filled all the spots around the one long, battered table, driving the other patrons into the corners or up to the bar. It was all deep-ocean crew in this place. There were other bars for the spacers, admin- istrators, tourists, and if any of these wandered in here, they’d be driven out soon enough by the noise and the roughhousing and the smell that clung of Europa’s strange secret ocean.
That ocean was thick: with alien viruses, with complex hydrocarbons that trig- gered fatal autoimmune reactions, with larger creatures that fed on the sludge, and on each other, and on us. We scooped the sludge, trapped the creatures, sold the lot to brokers who sold in turn to the universities and corporations. The Outer System was one big boomtown, bigger than the whole damn Inner System by orders of magni- tude, by any metric.
“So we tell a story . . .” Adra said.
“Two stories,” Yu said, “one of them true, one of them false.”
“And then we go around the table and vote on which was the lie.”
“A bet?” Zandt said.
“A confirmation,” Cheung said.
Perelman nodded, rumbled agreement.
“Though if we guess right, you buy a round,” Orit added.
Cheung said, “I’ll go first, so you ^ow how it goes.” He laced his fingers together, closed his eyes, a beat, opened eyes and hands, took a breath. No Twelve and Tag for Cheung; the crew knew him too well. But if there had been, the tag would be “flight.” Fragile bones spread under his face like bird’s wings, bird’s eyes, too, black and al- ways flitting, fingers light and fast on the ship consoles, on the table here. Hard to imagine him anywhere but Out, doing anything but Nav, but he’d been a singer back on Earth. The crew knew his stories.
“Stupidest, then,” Cheung started. “I was with the captain out at Saturn, a dozen years ago. Ice mining in the Rings. I was young, thought I knew the ship, thought I
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knew the system. So, we found a vein heavy with tholins.” A fleeting glance up at Zandt, who gave a slow nod.
“Natural organics, worth their weight in the Outer System for hydroponics, indus- try,” Zandt said.
Cheung nodded back. “We didn’t have processing facilities onship. Ice mining, you just grab hold of a piece, push it out to a moon or a station. Tholins, they’re dark, easy to see in the ice. If we had pulled up to Titan station with a twenty tonne chunk of that, the market would have been ready for us. They’d set a price before we even docked, lose us 20 percent, maybe more. So I had the idea to cut across to the re- search station around Enceladus, process there, ship the tholins back to Titan in tanks, hit the market and get out before they knew the score.
“Enceladus was far side of Saturn so we cut across the Rings, close above the clouds, serious v, flung ourselves out the far side.
“We hit something over the B Ring that didn’t show on sensors, probably just a dense pocket of dust, but we were moving fast. All I knew was, one minute I was watching the monitors, green down the board, and then woosh half the ship was gone. Main drivers, cargo. Seven crew. Left us in a spin that I couldn’t kill with the thrusters I had left. Left us on a course that didn’t go anywhere except Out.”
Orit shivered, and Yu got that far-gone look she got, straight through the wall and into the deep.
“Long range corns were gone. All we could do was hope Enceladus picked up our beacon, had someone in-station fast enough to catch us. Four days of that spin. Spin wouldn’t let you eat, wouldn’t let you sleep for more than a few minutes before you’d wake up, convinced you were falling. All we could do was watch the view, Saturn, Rings, stars, Saturn, Rings, stars. The captain and I and the one remaining crewmem- ber: T’m not backed up. I’ll be lost,’ she kept saying, round and round, until we had to sedate her.
“Thing was, I was backed up. A full T.A.G. back on Earth, nothing to be scared of, nothing to lose. I wasn’t scared, I was furious. I hadn’t had an update since I’d gotten to the Outer System. If I died and they brought me back. I’d lose a year. I’d lose those four days spinning across the Rings. And I couldn’t stand the idea of losing that view.”
Cheung’s lips twitched, a quick humorless grin.
“We’ll always want more than the tech can give us. And stupid masquerading as clever; that’s the worst kind.”
Adra looked around the table, looking for a hint from the crew. Some eyes met hers, some looked up at the low ceiling, sheet steel and pitted with rust, or out through the plexi at Jupiter.
“If you’re a restored copy, how do you know all this?” she asked, like an accusation.
Cheung shrugged. “Enceladus Station had been tracking us the entire time, got a tug out in time to snare us. That’s how the captain and I got into under-ice work, stuck on Enceladus without a ship. But the oceans here on Europa were deeper.” He took a sip, swallowed, and started his second story.
“A triangle is the strongest shape. Fact. People have known it for a long time, though it took Fuller back in the twentieth century to explain how that fact unfolds across what we know.
“I was twenty. Grad school in Hong Kong. That was right after the referendum, the Second Independence, the first successful neural-nano backups, and HK was the heart of everything that was . . . ever3rthing. I was singing all night, stud3dng all day, drinking and drugging and dragging all night and day, no stop, no sleep. Had a boyfriend. Grant, kept me out of the worst of the trouble. Tall, always stooped over
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like he was looking for something he’d dropped. Couldn’t keep his glasses on straight. He was in the planetary navigation program with me, brilliant at it.”
Cheung turned his head, looked out across Orit and the window and the plains to Jupiter, a long quiet look for him.
“He was gentle in bed. Generous. Never minded my nights out, even though the nights were getting longer. Morning was our time. We’d tell each other that if we could ever afford to get T.A.G.ed, we’d just record one of those mornings and live in it forever.
“I was singing fade, it’d been an underground thing in Macau but suddenly HK was the right place, right time, and I was big. Advertising deals, guest spots on the telenovelas, corporate sponsorship from VanZ. I had company lawyers circling me like mad moons: sing here, be seen there, wear this, drink that, an endless supply of drugs, nano, people. Anything to keep me busy, anything to keep me there making money for them.
“So I got my own lawyer. Leslie. She was from Singapore. Tiny. Quiet. You’d be sit- ting in a room, forget she was there, and then she’d reach a hand out, touch your shoulder. Should have been a shock, but it was like . . .”
Cheung’s fingers fluttered downward.
“. . . rain falling, when you hadn’t realized you were hot and dry.
“Grant and Leslie, they started meeting evenings, talking, about me, mostly, and what I was in, and how to get me out of it. One day, Leslie was still there when I got home in the morning.
“Next five months . . .”
His hands settled to the table.
“The next five months were perfect. Leslie broke deals, made new ones; suddenly I was getting paid for singing, money in the bank. Grant even came to the clubs to see me sing. He’d never risked the crowd on his own. The two of them would find a table near the front, and afterward I’d sit down with them, with no desire for anything, anyone, anywhere else.”
Adra leaned in, whispered to Nava, “Is this ‘kindest thing’? Because he already took ‘stupid.’”
Nava put a finger to her lips. Cheung gave Adra a glance. His fingers danced around the edge of his mug.
“Five months,” he continued, “and then Grant and I had our degrees. Nav certified, from UHK, any ship in the System would take us on. But Grant was talking about a PhD, teaching at the university. I’d sing, he said, and Leslie would make enough money to support the three of us, enough to get us T.A.G.ed. Nano-neural backups had only hit the market a couple of years before, but the startups were booming in HK and suddenly you only had to be filthy rich to get T.A.G.ed. Those VanZ bill- boards were everywhere; beautiful people doing beautiful things and then the image would freeze with one word splashed across it: Forever. That was before the hack on the Great Basin longstore, no reason to doubt that ‘Forever.’”
“I didn’t sleep for two nights after our certifications came through from the univer- sity. I walked, mostly, around and around the block. The HK night is too bright for stars and ships and moons, but I’d spent five years learning to do navigation in my head. No matter how I did the math, the course just led around that block again. ‘Forever.’
“So I transferred all the money I had to a bank on Mars. Took a shuttle up to orbit the next morning. When I left them, they were still asleep, Leslie laid perfectly straight as always. Grant sprawled diagonal, their heads together on the pillow.
“Triangles. Too perfect. Too strong for me. I had to fly then, go Out, or never leave.”
He looked at Adra. “So, worst thing.”
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Adra said, “You’ve made it out this far, and Jupiter the sharp edge of things these days, and that’s the worst you’ve done? I don’t believe it. Regret for the view, I buy, but not for the leaving. The first story is the true one.” She looked around at the crew. Nava smiled, sharp teeth and narrow eyes.
Yu held her hands up, palms out. “We’ve heard his stories.”
Perelman said, “It’s your round, just the two of you.” And looked at Zandt.
Who bit his lip and looked at the table, where Cheung’s fingers had lit amongst the glasses. “You wouldn’t be the first to see the trap in neuro-nano memories,” he said, a deep voice, not Perelman’s rumble, higher pitched but full, like the pedal tone on an organ. “Wouldn’t be the first to hope the Out offered more. An3rway . . .” He looked up, caught Cheung’s gaze in his own. “This crew wouldn’t take you if you’d lost the captain a ship. First one’s the lie.”
Claps and stomps, and Patel slapped Zandt on the shoulder; might as well have slapped a stone. Adra’s face fell flat, not so much a frown as indifference.
“Truth,” Yu said. “The first story? That’s mine. I was the surviving crewmember. It was the navigator who lost it, though, terrified about being restored from backup and losing those years, that view. We didn’t sedate her; she took the drugs herself, all of them, two days before the tug caught us. Not that I wouldn’t have helped her if I’d known. She was more worried about losing her memories than about losing seven crew, the arrogant shit.” Yu was staring Out, straight through Adra, breathless, still. “Cap- tain and I were the only ones left then, three months on Enceladus, stumbling from bar to bar, still spinning, until we met Cheung and he took us down under the ice.”
Cheung’s fingers brushed the top of Yu’s hand, paused for a beat.
Yu took a breath then. “I was T.A.G.ed too,” she said. “Would have been glad to lose those months, get to rediscover the Outer system again, see those views again for the first time.” She shrugged, a millimeter motion against the ice out the window. “Missed that chance. My backup was at Great Basin. All gone now.”
Zandt pushed himself up from the table. His stick was leaning against the wall under the window; when he reached for it, it toppled away from him, clashed to the floor. Yu leaned down, picked it up, but Zandt had already turned to limp toward the toilet.
Cheung took the stick from Yu. It was proportioned to Zandt, long, thick, dark wood with a hint of grain. The head was massive, a dragon caught mid-snarl in stainless steel. Grit leaned across Adra, stuck her finger into the dragon’s mouth. “Shit!” she said, and sucked a drop of blood.
Nava laughed. “Always got to stick it into everything. Grit, don’t you?”
Grit leered around her mouthful of finger.
Cheung got up, set the stick by Zandt’s chair; it settled against the window edge with a thud. Cheung tapped Yu on the shoulder, and they went up to the bar.
“So. Adra,” Cheung said.
Adra looked back at him over the rim of her glass, drained it. “So,” she said, gave that same flat look to the rest of the crew.
“Twelve and Tag,” Perelman said, his checklist voice, and we sat up, quieted down. A round of looks, at each other and back to her.
Cheung said, “It goes like this. Someone throws out an adjective, someone match- es with a noun, starts with the same sound, or at least hits it somewhere. Six pairs, then someone sums it up with the tag, one word. It’s all about impressions.”
“Gotta be fast,” Nava said.
“Gotta be true,” Perelman grumbled. “Who’s first?”
Grit said, “I got it.” A pause, an arm up, fingers spread — look at me, that was Grit — and then she slapped the table and started it round:
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“Lank,”
Barb: “Leg, Tart,”
Sintra: “Tongue, Fast” (“yeah, you wish!”)
Patel: “Flat” (doubtful “huh” from Yu), “Trim,”
Nava: “Teat, Sharp” (“she always says ‘sharp’”)
Cheung: “Gash” (laughs, a whistle from Grit), “Sheer,”
Perelman: “Razor,”
And Yu tagged it with: “Lash.”
Adra followed the tag around the table, from face to face with that blank stare she got, as if trying to interpret some inexplicable foreign phrase, ended on Yu for a long while but Yu’s face gave her nothing but Yu’s own long look. Finally she shrugged, looked into Zandt’s heavy golden frown instead.
She said, “Before I came on the Tethys, I was pilot on the Laelaps out of Conamara. She’s not a hunter like Tethys, she’s a mapper, nine-tenths sonar systems and a sin- gle-shift crew, dull dull work. We were under the ice — ”
“No,” Cheung said.
Adra froze, lips pulled thin against the sibilant “ice,” chin tucked into her shoulder to face Cheung, who was sat next to her.
“No stories set under the ice,” Cheung said.
“Not a good idea to lie about what goes on under the ice, not in this bar,” Nava said, one eyebrow raised, one pointed nail flicking — ting — against her glass.
“And we already know the truth of it,” someone said softly.
Adra shut her eyes, rolled them under her lids, opened them again on Cheung.
“Telenovelas, huh?” she said. “A story about telenovelas, that okay? Or are there more rules you haven’t mentioned?”
The comers of Cheung’s lips quirked up.
“Sure,” Nava said.
“That’s fine,” Yu clarified.
“Telenovelas, then, and the worst thing I ever did.” Adra said. “Passing someone else’s weakness off as my own.
“I used to play piano. I started when I was two, so in the earliest memories I have now, I was already playing piano, and I was already good. A prodigy. There were many prodigies in Taipei, many piano prodigies, many little girl piano prodigies. We all performed in our little dresses with little bows in our hair, an endless chain of competitions, and when we weren’t performing, we were practicing, or taking lessons, or reviewing video of our last recital, while she took apart my pla3dng, note by note.”
Adra lifted her glass; it was empty. Yu filled it from her own bottle, local algae beer, pale green and bitter. Adra downed it and grimaced.
“My teacher, I mean. Cold-hearted bitch. Always pushing me, never satisfied. Not just about the playing, either, it was my posture, the way I walked across the stage, my clothing which I didn’t even fucking choose, but she complained about it an3rway. Not that she’d ever gotten an3rwhere with her playing, not since some award when she was in grade school.
“My father was a Russian diplomat; Mother was a translator. They were both rich, family money, though she had more. Father must have always felt a little . . . weak, because of that. Russian men, they’re supposed to be strong, in charge, head of the family. But it was her city, her culture, even her apartment; we lived in one of her family’s places, in Daan, took up two entire floors of the building.
“Maybe that’s why he started to beat me. I was something he could be in charge of Any excuse would do: an A-minus on a school paper, having one sock pulled higher
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than the other, getting caught watching telenovelas out of HK, the ones with the aw- ful pop music.”
Adra turned her flat stare on Cheung for a moment, blinked like she’d suddenly matched a memory.
“And I was such a damn good girl. I’d stand there and take it, and,” Adra paused, teeth tight, bobhed her head, “curtsy afterward. And go hack to my fucking lessons.”
Yu had refilled Adra’s glass. She took another swig, a high-tide line of green scum on her lip. “What is this crap?” But she drank again, wiped her mouth.
“Eight years of that, then, practice and punishment, from those first, earliest memories until the day I came up with my plan. I woke up one morning, the idea in my head. I felt so buzzed. First time I thought I understood what people meant when they said ‘happy’
“It was the telenovelas that gave me the idea. All that drama, every day a new dis- aster, another death, just because someone’s feelings were hurt. I watched them be- cause they were funny. I’d lay there and laugh at the foolish people slipping on the same emotional banana peel over and over again. But what I realized that night was that those shows weren’t just funny, they were true. That’s what people are really like. That’s how they manipulate each other, rip each other apart with their own weakness, like Father and Mother. I could do that.
“The next months were all flubbed notes and bad posture, forgotten homework and crying fits. But it didn’t work. I was getting more criticism, more beatings, not less. No matter how hard I studied the videos, no matter how much I practiced in front of the mirror, I couldn’t quite get that vulnerability that let you hook people, draw them in and spin them round.
“And then one of the ’novelas did a story arc on neuro-nano. The illegal kind, pi- rated memories. This character got addicted, started acting like she was someone else entirely. That’s what I needed.
“Money was no problem; I’d been hacking my parents’ accounts since I was eight. Turns out supply was no problem, either; the big HK corporations do their manufac- turing on Taiwan, just to piss off the mainland. The stuff leaked out onto the street. Literally, sometimes. The towns downwind of the plants got real strange, whole neighborhoods sharing the same strayed memory. Plenty of people willing to sell you a vial of someone else’s pitiful past, even if you were a kid in knee socks, as long as you could pay.
“Now I had every human failing at my fingertips, not faked but real, as real as memory.
“After that, there were no more beatings. Not for me. Punishments, yes, dinners de- nied, privileges suspended, and there was always the bamboo switch. But the real beat- ings, those stopped. It was like all those years, they hadn’t wanted perfection, they’d wanted weakness. The beatings stopped as soon as I started crying someone else’s tears.
“Stopped for me, that is, not for my mother. I’d hear them at night, the swish and smack and grunt, and see the bruises the next day, when a collar shifted or a sleeve rode up.
“When I was fourteen, I got a full scholarship to UHK, pilot program. A ship con- sole’s not much different from the piano, really. Applied for parental emancipation the same day, walked out the door with what I had on, left all those little dresses be- hind in the closet. Never went back, never saw them again.”
Adra stretched her shoulders back, cracked her neck, folded her arms.
“Never had any regrets, either, but I know that after I left. Mother would be there alone with Father, and the beatings would never stop. So . . . worst thing.”
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Crew was silent a beat. Yu and Cheung exchanged looks. Then Orit scraped her chair back. “Gotta pee.” And Patel followed, and Keita and Barb hit the bar for another round.
Orit had her mouth at Nava’s ear, whisper or tongue wasn’t clear from Nava’s sharp smile, and Deighton, mostly drunk, was asking Zandt something involved and disjointed about silicates. Perelman tapped the table, cleared his throat, a rumble like rocks falling, and said, “Adra. Second story.”
Adra had gotten something new from the bar, clear and steaming. She took a sip, frowned, said, “Most painful? That’s a difficult one. People let you down, and that never gets easier. But if I have to choose . . .
“I was flying shuttles, back and forth between the CSG, the Gentre Spatial Guyanais, and Laplace Station. Dumb work, dull work, but the sort of thing that looks right on your CV if you are shooting for an Outer System contract.”
A nod from Yu.
“I had a lover downside, another upside, and switched one or the other out every few months, but I never felt,” she stabbed a palm with a fingertip, “satiated. Like eating crisps when you’re hungry. You fill your belly, but not your need. The problem was, I wasn’t hungry, I was thirsty.”
She took another sip, waved the glass; the liquid swirled but didn’t spill.
“Maybe that’s not a good analogy. Point is, I was looking for the wrong thing. Wasn’t sex. That I can handle all on my own.”
Chuckles, a scornful snort from Keita. Orit said, “Gotta give me a chance.”
“It took Tanja to show me what it was I needed,” Adra continued, “and then Tanja took it back.”
“I met her on a trip upside. She was Nav, first year, on her way up to a contract doing freight runs out of Laplace. We had a spare seat in the cockpit, gave her a lift. Hit the bar, after, talked late, talked the whole shift through, so I had to do the downside run on no sleep. Before I left, she took my hand — she was a tiny thing, her fingers bare- ly wrapped around mine — and she pressed it against her face. Pressed it hard; when she let go, my fingers had left pale streaks from jaw to ear. T’ll be here, next time you’re upside,’ she said, and though she’d been smiling all night, she wasn’t smiling then.
“That next trip, those first shifts together, you don’t need to know the details. Here’s what it was like, by the end. Here’s what she took from me.
“I’d get to Laplace, go straight from the docking ring to meet her, some trendy bar or new-thing restaurant. I’d be in my flight overalls, and she’d always have on some perfect little dress, killer shoes, makeup so good it was invisible. How she maneu- vered low-g in those shoes, I never knew.
“We’d talk, catch up on the gossip; those low-earth orbit routes, everyone knows everyone.”
“Same out here,” said Nava, with her sharp-edged smile.
Adra gave her a flat look. “We’d eat and drink and talk for a couple of hours, and the whole time Tanja would be working it. She knew exactly when to cross her legs, or brush her hair back, or lean low to adjust the strap of her shoe. She could focus it like a laser. It was never someone local. But Laplace is a busy place, and there was always some random person in transit. Not really random, though. She’d pick the sort we both despised; the Earther businessman, sweaty and pink and trying to hide his low-g hard-on, or a rich bitch from one of the orbital colonies, with those stupid balloon implants inflated as far as they’d go. I’d watch her watch them, like she was slicing them into millimeter slabs for scanning. Sometimes she’d take a hit of nano, tweak herself to match their need — she had a bigger selection in that tiny purse than most dealers — but mostly she could hook them without that tweak. She’d catch their eye, look away. That was all it took. They’d sit down at our table, or she’d slip
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over to theirs, while I sat there unnoticed. She’d bought me this little switchblade in the Laplace gift shop; I’d carve little figures out of toothpicks, line them up like an audience to watch her work.
“At some point — there was never a signal, not that even I could tell — she’d just get up and walk out. The mark would sit there, waiting for her to return. If there was more than one of them, they’d joke about women and restrooms, or swap notes on her makeup. But after a while, they’d start to realize that she wasn’t coming back. You could see it, like their faces were hollowing out from the back; then they’d crack, and then they’d crumble. I sat and watched for that moment, when their faces fell away and all that was left was an empty, shallow shell.
“Tanja would be waiting for me at my apartment, dress and shoes in a heap by the door, head down over the console I’d bought her. In that half hour since she’d gotten back from the bar, she’d have already hacked their personal accounts. Just that one conversation she’d had with them, their name, their business, maybe a glance at their phone while they were at the bar, that was all it took for Tanja to hack their lives as thoroughly as she had hacked their so-called personalities.
“We didn’t steal from them, not money, an3rway. Sometimes we’d delete a couple of photos, or a mailbox folder, something they wouldn’t miss for months, then miss very, very much. Sometimes we’d copy a file or two; Tanja was growing some sort of crazy database of identities. And sometimes there was just nothing worth deleting and we’d add a file instead, so they’d know we’d been there, had seen everything they had and were.
“Sometimes we fucked, after; sometimes I’d tell her what a bad, bad girl she was and spank her; sometimes we just held each other. No matter what, though, after, I was full. Content. Finally, satisfied. Because what she did, the way she wrapped the marks up in their own emotions, laid their lives at my feet, showed them up as the empty shells they were, she did that for me.
“And then, one day, no signal, no tell, she just got up and walked. She’d been work- ing me all night. We did that sometimes, pretended we were strangers, all part of the game. It was hot in the bar, and she was sweaty, pushy, rude. I turned to order an- other round, and when I turned back, she was gone. Waited in the damn room all shift, stayed there right through my next scheduled trip, and the next. Got a demerit for that in my flight record. She left me there, cracked and crumbled. Just another mark.
“She took the console, the dress and shoes she was wearing that night, left every- thing else. I still have her crap in a storage locker on Laplace.
“Before I met her, I was always needing something, but I didn’t know what it was. After she left me, I knew what it was I needed. I just couldn’t have it.”
Adra looked around the table, ended on Cheung. “That’s pain.”
Orit said, “Second one’s the lie. You’re too lean to be a top, too strong.” She traced a finger down Adra’s arm. “Tops are weak.”
And Patel waggled battered fingers, echoed, “Second’s the lie.”
But Yu shook her head, small, economical motions, that was Yu, and said, “First one’s the lie. Her mother beat her, not her father, not the teacher. Beat the father, too, still does, if they’re both still alive.” Yu looked at Adra. “I know the t3rpe,” she said.
It went around the table, then, skipping Adra, six votes against the first, four against the second, until it came to Zandt.
Zandt stared ahead, off over Cheung’s shoulder, one long breath, two, then his head shifted, a huge effort to fight the inertia of that gaze, but it came aroimd, ground to a stop on Perelman.
“What’s the rule when both stories are lies?” Zandt asked.
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Perelman raised a brow, dropped the corner of his mouth to counter. That was the look he used when a diagnostic came up wrong, onship, or a sensor pinged, un- expectedly.
“You call ‘fault,’” Cheung answered.
Zandt swung that gaze over and down to the navigator. Cheung’s eyes flicked up into it, and away again.
“Fault, then,” Zandt said. “Both lies.”
“Makes it six to four against the first, then,” Nava said. She’d voted against the second. “We get it?”
Adra nodded, looked at Yu, looked into her glass. “It was Mother. She was my teacher. Beat my father, too, you got that right. He was weak, a fucking failure. Deserved it.”
She shoved back from the table. “My round. Someone help carry.”
A scrape and shuffle, some crew to the bar and some to the back, toilets and a stretching of legs gone stiff Orit and Nava drifted to a dark corner, Nava’s grin gleaming over Grit’s shoulder.
Perelman and Cheung looked across the table at Zandt. Yu was standing by the window, looking out, but head turned, listening.
“Where was the he?” Perelman asked.
“In the second story, he means,” Cheung explained, watching his own fingers trace the rim of a glass. “What was it you heard?”
Zandt turned his head, stared at a spot on Cheung’s chest. Finally, he said, “It was all false. Just a game to her. Stolen memories, appropriated emotions. Doesn’t mean it. Doesn’t feel it.”
Yu said, apparently to the window, “There are words for that. Sociopath is one.”
Perelman rumbled uncertainty. “A hard word, that.”
Yu said, “She’s still got those vials. Bootleg T.A.G. vectors. Hidden under a false bottom in her toiletries bag. The vials are labeled, things like ‘laughing,’ ‘kneecap,’ ‘bimbo,’ ‘uncertainty’ ‘play stupid.’ ”
“Should have come to me,” Perelman said, a frown more hurt than angry.
“I just found out this morning, when we were getting prepped for shore leave. She didn’t see me sitting there in the head. I can be quiet.”
Perelman grunted.
“She unzipped the bottom of her bag, picked through the vials like she was choos- ing a shirt to wear. Guess she didn’t find one that fit her mood; she finally put them all back. I figured out the false bottom while she was in the shower. One vial was al- most empty. It was labeled ‘trust.’ ”
“Trust her, or trust others?” Perelman asked. Yu was still looking out the window, so he turned to Cheung.
Whose fingers had pushed the clutter of mismatched bottles into a circle in the center of the table. “Trust the crew.” Cheung said. “Don’t have to be straight, under the ice. Don’t have to be all the way . . . human, not in the Outer System. Just have to fit. The crew will know.”
“Not all the way human,” Yu echoed. She’d spread her fingers against the plexi- glass as if she could hold the view in her hand. “The T.A.G. capture process uses viral systems based on Europan organisms. I’ve got that in me. Just having a backup at all, does that really leave us human?”
“More or less,” Cheung said. Perelman blinked in confusion. Yu laughed softly, looked over her shoulder at the chatter of glass on glass.
Zandt had retrieved his glass from Cheung’s circle — just tap water, he’d been drinking — and drained it. “Two years since the hack, since the Great Basin longstore was erased,” he said. “So where does that leave you?”
“Here,” Cheung said.
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We tumbled back to the table, red and raucous. Deighton had his shirt off, was wringing it out. “What goes down must come up,” Barb said, and Sintra added, “Man, he spewed.”
Patel was sent to the corner with a glass of ice water to break up Orit and Nava, who spluttered and laughed and joined Deighton in the shirt-wringing.
Perelman tapped the table again. “Zandt.”
Zandt was opposite Cheung and Adra, pinned between the window and the next table. Everyone shuffled their chairs, made him center.
“Twelve and Tag,” Orit said, “I got — ”
But Perelman rumbled right over her:
“Mass”
Sintra: “Moves, Thick”
Cheung: “Thigh, Sweet” (Orit and Nava elbow each other)
Barb: “Swung, Hung” (cheers)
Patel: “Head, Coil”
Nava: “Crown, Blunt” (a sharp look from Cheung)
Orit: “Brow”
And Adra, slumped in her chair, tagged it with: “Black.”
Zandt looked at her for a long time, his eyes skin hair all a flat tarnished gold in the Jupiter-light. The crew was caught in that heavy silence, all except Cheung’s fin- gers amongst the glasses.
“Don’t know if this is worst, stupidest, most painful. Not sure it matters.
“Something I do know. I’m an addict. Don’t use, haven’t for twelve years, still an addict. Dad was, too, alcohol for him. Made it himself, like most out there in the Free State. Southern African Republic, part of the old South Africa, and the Boer State be- fore that. Empty place.
“Had a sister, half-sister, Teeje, we called her. Teeje was five years younger, daugh- ter of my stepmother. My mother died bearing me.
“Teeje was tiny, dark, like my stepmother, Indian, but she got her blood from my father. The need. Nano, with her. I could never stand it. Machines in your brain, trac- ing out someone else’s memories. I wanted less to think about, not more.
“We’d found an outbuilding on the range, relay station for remote harvesters, made it our own, scavenged furniture, my music, Teeje’s console, my bioprinter with the latest drug and her hacked nano. She’d be laughing, not even looking, it seemed, but the needle would slip in true and her head would go back and her laughter go deep and wild.
“Mrs. Van Zandt, we tried to stay out of her way, much as Dad would allow that. Which wasn’t much. We lived in the main house, ate at the main table with them. ‘They’re mine,’ he’d tell his wife. We were his like the house was his, like the land and the folks who worked it and Mrs. bloody Van Zandt. Teeje and I, we were a little more his than the rest, though. He’d had us T.A.G.ed, when I was thirteen and Teeje was just seven.”
Nava interrupted with a snort. “Can’t back up a kid.” We groaned, and Orit punched her in the shoulder for bollixing the game. Nava did that sometimes, har- poonist reflexes. “It’s in the U.N. neural rights charter,” Nava grumbled.
But Cheung was shaking his head, an odd look on his face. “You can if you have enough money and the right connections. You can T.A.G. anyone you want, if you own the technology.”
Yu nodded her small slow nod. “Van Zandt. VanZ Inc.”
“Half the boats under the ice got a contract with VanZ,” Perelman said.
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Yu said, “VanZ is material science, nano, patents for smartcloth, adaptive armor. Weapons.” She looked at Cheung. “T.A.G. tech.”
Cheung was very still. “The Grand Basin longstore,” he said.
“Not a lot of rules in the Free State,” Zandt said. And when no one else interrupt- ed, he continued.
“Dad was the only Van Zandt. We were just Zandts. And he had us, body and soul, and the souls locked away at Grand Basin out of reach. ‘Forever.’
“Teeje was my sanity, all through those years. She was my soul. No matter how high she got, how out there, she was my center. Every moment we had away from the work, from my father, we were together. Out in our hideaway, out of our heads, out in one of those shared immersion games on her console. I’d just stagger around staring at the scenery and Teeje, she’d have hacked the environment, argyle skies and faces floating like clouds, staring back down at us like Dad did when we were little. Scare the crap out of the other players, she’d hack their accounts as well, put their own parents’ faces up there too, or whatever would shake them hardest. She could hack people like she hacked machines.
“One day, I was eighteen, I came in from a two-day trip out mending fences, and she was gone. She’d left everything. Left me a note. Not going to tell you what it said. Guess this isn’t ‘most painful’ I’m telling, because that was the most painful moment, then, and I am not yet done.
“‘I got her T.A.G.,’ Dad said. ‘Little bitch won’t last long out there, and if she goes underground I’ll have her declared dead. Then I restore a copy, and this copy I’ll take special care of’
“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t furious. I was too big to beat, by that time, so he took it out on Mira, that was Teeje’s mother. She left him, after that. We all did, eventually, steal our selves from him. Even if he had our souls.”
A pause, then. Grit leaned into Nava’s ear, but Nava stopped her with a hand, wrapped her arm around Grit’s shoulders to hold her still.
“I stuck there another year and a half, got my certificate in soil science from the technical school, turned that into a scholarship in Capetown, three year program in mining, turned that into a research grant from a Guter System mining consortium. A year of study on Luna, then a free ticket Out, dust the Earth off my feet and never look back.
“Because I knew that’s where Teeje would be. Out. She was always sure, always fearless, was what I thought. The way she could suck down other people’s memories, she’d be hungry for her own. And she’d studied. We were teleschooled, and those hours in the outbuilding while I was listening to tunes and drifting, she’d have her tablet on her lap, out of her head into someone else’s, but still studying. ‘Learning is just hacking my own brain,’ she’d say. ‘Easy’ It was, for her.
“So, all that time in Capetown and Chicago, catching up with my classes, I was try- ing to catch up with her. She’d be pilot, or nav, something like that, university pro- gram or military. Gnly a couple of dozen schools on Earth do that sort of training, should have been easy to find her. Wasn’t. I’d have figured she was dead, if it wasn’t for the messages every few months. The whole family got them, and copies to the T.A.G. Board and the Free State court, but they were always addressed to Dad. Each one signed with a notarized DNA hash, each one untraceable, each one just a single word: ‘alive.’”
Grit made a sound like a hiccup. Nava turned her head with a sharp look ready, saw Grit’s face and wrapped her other arm around her instead.
“I was on Laplace station, on my way back to Luna after a seminar in Chicago. Walked into a dark, crowded bar, smaller, tighter than this place here . . .”
Zandt looked at Yu’s shoulder, seeing something else.
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“We shouldn’t have been able to recognize each other. I was ten centimeters taller, wider, she was thinner, wouldn’t have seemed possible, her dark skin gone that dull space-tan and bruises under the makeup. But I saw her, soon as I walked in there, I knew her, she knew me.
“I’d been right about the Nav degree. Wrong about the course. She was training under a corporate contract, slogging through it the slow way like I was.
“I was also wrong about the sure and fearless. She was strong, yeah, but it was our father’s sort of strength, stubborn and thin. I’d quit the drugs when she’d left. Was no high without her. But she was still using, the new stuff coming out of Luna, syn- thetic memories, psychotic break in a bottle. I thought she’d be headed Out, but she was just going deeper in.
“She was using another way, too, using people, selling herself to afford the stuff She’d done tricks, she told me, to get through training, but she’d found a better way, got herself a sugar-momma up on Laplace, all the money she needed, a place to crash. A place to use. It’s stable, she said, it’s safe, it’s just like the outbuilding, back at home, and all it cost was bruises, a little blood. Just like back at home.
“Dad’s blood, didn’t just have the need in it, had the anger too. I shouted, called her a fool, called her his daughter, worst thing I knew how to say, told her she had to come with me, back to Luna, get clean. My company had open positions; always open positions for the Outer System. She’d come back to Luna with me, and then we’d go Out together.
“Stood there at the dock the next shift, sure I’d blown it, sure she wouldn’t come. But she did. No suitcase, just a purse full of memory sticks, wearing a little black dress and useless shoes.
“First month on Luna, I thought things were good. She was in a program, detox, had paper signed with my company for work in the Belt once we got certified, not my same division but we’d be seeing each other once a month or so. She spent all her money on a new console, on a crazy expensive intersystem network node, but I was making enough to cover rent and food for us both.
“Came home early one shift, she was passed out on her console, needle in her hand. Set her in the shower, got her conscious, shouted at her. Kept my hands down, felt proud of myself for that. She was just a wisp you’d snap like that, hadn’t been eating. I’d thought it’d been the detox but it was just the nano again.
“We shouted a while, and then we talked, and then we shouted again. ‘I’m using it,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m almost in.’ ‘What “in”?’ I said. ‘We’re going Out.’ ‘So go. Dad,” she said, and plugged into her console.
“Wasn’t going to be my dad. Wasn’t. So I put my hands in my pockets and I went.
“I found a place to crash by the shuttle port, food out of the vending machines and no booze, just a lot of thinking. Remembering those days in our hideaway back home. Remembering the sound of her laughter. Decided that’s what I’d tell her, that I didn’t own her, no one did. Tell her that all I wanted was to hear her laugh again, and any- thing else she did wasn’t my business.
“Even after I figured that out, I didn’t go back to the apartment, not right away. I went through what I was going to say, what she might say back, practiced until I was sure I could get it right, could handle anything she came back with without getting mad.
“It was almost three weeks later I went back to the apartment. April 7, 2084.”
Yu said something too quiet for us to hear.
“Of course she wasn’t there when I got back. Just her console. The display was flashing and I thought it might be a message for me. That’s what I told myself, any- way, to justify plugging in and scrolling back through the history buffer. When I re- alized what I was seeing, I pulled the console apart and fed it a handful at a time into the garbage disposal.”
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Silence. Yu and Cheung exchanged a long, sad look. And then Cheung explained it for the rest of us. “That’s the date of the hack on the Grand Basin longstore. Every T.A.G. in the system was scrambled beyond recovery.”
Adra fumbled amongst the bottles, found one with something left in it and downed it, leaned back again, hands in pockets.
“Station security called while I was still sweeping up the pieces. They’d found her outside an airlock, no suit, just that little dress, those shoes. She’d made it two, three steps. Out.”
Zandt straightened, a ponderous unfolding, his focus coming in from somewhere far to land straight across the table at Adra. “I booked a ticket back to Earth, to the Free State, but Dad was already dead by the time I got there. Massive stroke. Took that corporate contract then, been working Outer System ever since. Been searching again, too. Knew Teeje’s new name by then, made it easier to track where she’d been. Korteweg, Tanja Korteweg. Teeje had found a way Out that I couldn’t follow. Least I could do was track down her god forever damned sugar-momma from Laplace, the soulless sociopathic bitch who’d held the door open for her.”
Ever3d.hing hung. Yu stared at Adra. Nava held Grit. Cheung looked at Zandt and said “No.”
Adra pushed back, pulled her hands out of her pockets. A flash of something in the Jupiter-light.
Zandt stood. His chair tipped, clattered against the table behind. A blur of steel, a slap of wood on flesh as he flipped his cane, grabbed it by the end. The table scraped forward as he leaned into it; glasses tipped, cracked, crashed to the floor.
The cane went up and around and down, a second when it looked like those drag- on teeth would end up buried in Adra’s temple, but Cheung had seen it coming, raised a hand. Fingers cracked, flapped, didn’t stop the stick, no way to stop that stick. But he slowed it, and Adra shoved her long legs down and got a shoulder up. There was a wet smack of ligament displaced and skin torn, a hiss as if her breath had been forced out of her by the blow. She continued the motion, foot up on her chair, spiraling up and around. Her hip crunched glass as she came down across the table. There was a gleam as her fist connected with Zandt’s ear, a meaty scrunch, and then Adra half-slid, half-rolled off the table and to her feet.
Zandt stood for a second, not volition but inertia. Then he toppled forward into the ruin of the table. A short black hilt protruded from his ear, a finger’s width of steel switchblade.
A bottle hit the floor, rolled to a stop under the window.
Perelman was the only one still sitting. He looked at Adra, where she stood at the end of the table, arm hung limp at her side. “Leave,” he said, “before station security arrives.”
She stared at him, held up a bloody hand. “My arm, I need — ”
“ — to leave,” Perelman said. “Europa. Jupiter. Go Out or In, nothing for you here an3anore.”
“Stories have a way of getting around,” Nava said.
“It was self defense,” she said.
But Perelman shook his head. Adra looked at the crew, one at a time, still trying to figure us out, us humans.
Cheung, broken fingers cradled fluttering against his chest, explained, almost gently, ‘You’d need someone to testify on your behalf”
‘You’d need backup,” Grit said, with what was almost a laugh.
Adra looked toward the bar; no one there returned her gaze. She nodded, then, blinked down at the body. “Fucked up as his sister. Must run in the blood.”
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She turned toward the door, and didn’t look hack.
Nava picked slivers of glass off her shirt. “Gotta have words with the captain,” she said. “He missed something there, hiring those two. Sure didn’t want either of them on our crew.”
Yu tilted her head, her own small shrug, and said, “Captain trusts us to catch the deep stuff Why we’re here.”
Nods all around.
Looking down at Cheung’s shattered hand, Yu added, “Can’t catch everything, though. Sometimes you just have to get out of the way.”
Cheung grimaced, shook his head. “I’ve tried that before and it didn’t work. Any- way, she was crew, up until she pulled the knife.”
Orit spread her fingers out over the body and said, “Too bad he didn’t get to his second story.”
Perelman got to his feet, shook his head, rumbled, “He did.”
Nava said, “Stupidest, for sure.”
And Cheung tagged it: “Fault. They were both true.” O
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APRIL/MAY
ISSUE
ALSO
IN
APRIL/MAY
OUR
EXCITING
FEATURES
COMING
SOON
Our April/May 2015 double anniversary issue is another jam- packed edition of Asimov’s. Eugene Fischer’s cover story chroni- cles a pregnant reporter’s investigation of a mysterious illness that has the potential to cause massive society upheaval and which will certainly engender repercussions for “The New Mother.” We’ve managed to smush a second novella into the issue as well. Find out what the future holds for “The Children of Gal” in Allen IVI. Steele’s riveting conclusion to his Arkwright series.
we have quite a Philadelphian contingency: Michael Swanwick & Gregory Frost warn it’s best to “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters — H’ard and Andy Are Come to Town!”; Tom Purdom forecasts the future of the “Day Job”; and Fran Wilde shows us “How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post- Digital Age.” British author Liz Williams takes a look at the bride’s fate in “The Marriage of the Sea,” while Australian author Anna Tambour creates an otherworldly clash in “The Gun Between the Veryush and the Cloud Mothers.” Jay O’Connell weaves together “Willing Flesh”; new author Frank Smith finds that “The Sentry” is always on duty; Joe M. McDermott tells the poignant story of “Paul and His Son”; and Robert Reed takes stock of the Wow! signal in “What I Intend.”
Robert Silverberg’s Reflections column considers whether “Praising or Banning” is best; Norman Spinrad’s On Books examines “Schlock, Genre and Mainstream SF”; plus we’ll have an array of poetry and other features you’re sure to enjoy. Look for our April/May issue on sale at newsstands on March 17, 2015. Or subscribe to Asimov’s— \r\ paper format or in down- loadable varieties — by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We’re also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com’s Kindle and Kindle Fire, and BarnesandNobie.com’s Nook, as well as from magzter.com/magazines, Google Play, and Kobo’s digital newsstand!
new stories by Mary Robinette Kowal, Sarah Pinsker, Django Wexler, David Gerroid, Indrapramit Das, Sandra McDonaid, M. Bennardo, Henry Lien, Rudy Rucker, and many others!
HOLDINE THE GHDETS
Gwendolyn Clare
Gwendolyn Clare resides in North Carolina, where she tends a vegetable garden and a flock of backyard ducks. She has a PhD in mycology, which is useful for identifying wild mushrooms, but not for much else. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Clarkesworld, among others. Her fourth appearance in Asimov's is an unusual take on the "coming-of-age" story.
.^^bby was in control of the body the first time a glitch occurred. She was “home from college for the long weekend” — that’s what the imprinted memories showed, at least — and her mother was pouring dollops of blueberry pancake batter onto the siz- zling cast-iron griddle.
Her father had found an excuse to go into work on a Saturday morning, as he often did ever since Abby “went off to college.” She assumed this was her father’s strategy for coping with empty nest S3mdrome and tried not to feel hurt by his avoidance. Her interpretation wasn’t entirely incorrect, but of course she did not comprehend exact- ly how empty the nest was.
When Abby stopped living with them full time, the body stopped being Abby full time. Leasing the body was quite expensive, so this was the only logical decision. But Abby’s father could not reconcile himself to the idea that Abby only existed on the weekends when they rented the body, never mind that the techs would fabricate memories for her so that she believed she had experienced all the intervening days.
The body shouldn’t have known this. The body should only know what Abby knew.
“Do you want another one? We’ve still got some batter here.”
Abby looked up from the purple-and-amber swirls of blueberry juice and maple S3rrup she was prodding with her fork. “Um ... no thanks. Mom. I think I’m full.”
“I wish you wouldn’t worry about the freshman fifteen,” her mother fussed. “If any- thing, you look like you’ve lost a few pounds this semester.”
“Fm not your daughter, you know. I’m just carrying her ghost for a while.”
Abby’s mother went very still. “What did you just say?”
Abby frowned and rubbed her temples, though it did little to alleviate the dull throbbing of her nascent headache. “Sorry, Mom. I don’t know why I said that.”
The doctors were not pleased. Abby’s mother showed up at the facility, threaten- ing to file a formal complaint if they didn’t meet with her immediately. Words like “misrepresentation” and “breach of contract” were used.
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Dr. Sankaran brought Abby’s mother into a clean beige room with plush couches. Abby was not occupying the brain at that particular time, so the body could not re- spond to their arrival.
“Abby?” When she received no response, Abby’s mother turned to the doctor and snapped, “What exactly is going on here?”
“Mrs. Whitfield, you reported that Abby’s surrogate broke character, so I thought it would be informative to introduce you to the surrogate body. This,” he said with a gesture, “is Baby Martinez.”
The lips could not say hello, because Abby wasn’t there to move them.
Abby’s mother tentatively sat on the couch across from the body. She said, “They named her ‘Baby’?”
“That’s what they write on the birth certificate when the parents don’t supply a name. Pacilam-affected infants are immediately identifiable at birth, and doctors usu- ally discourage the parents from naming them. It’s not healthy to develop an emotion- al attachment to a child who will live her entire life in a state of profound catatonia.”
Abby’s mother stared at the body. The body stared at nothing in particular.
Dr. Sankaran sat beside Abby’s mother on the couch. “I know this might be dis- turbing, but I wanted you to see for yourself that Baby Martinez isn’t self-aware. It has no consciousness, no affect. It records no long-term memories. It isn’t a person, the way we understand personhood.”
Abby’s mother took the body’s hand, turned it palm up, and held it between her own two hands. The body wondered how Abby would respond if she were in control. Being empty, the body did nothing.
“It’s not that Baby Martinez won’t respond to you,” Dr. Sankaran said. “It’s that she can’t. For all intents and purposes, there is no Baby Martinez.”
Abby’s mother sighed and placed the body’s hand back in its lap. “Then tell me. Doctor: why did Abby call herself a ghost?”
Chantal buried her toes in the sand and listened to the waves rolling in. She and John had been talking about a vacation in the Bahamas for years, but there were al- ways obstacles — time, money, the kids, their respective careers. Now they were fi- nally here together, free to relax and reconnect, but Chantal couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
Some days, a veil of deja vu settled over her and stayed for hours, as if she’d lived every moment of the trip before. Other times, it felt as if there were traces of some- thing unfamiliar smudged across her thoughts.
Twice she almost ordered shellfish, and John had to remind her she was allergic.
One morning she sat up in bed, wide awake, as if the paling eastern sky spoke to her as loud as an alarm clock. She wasn’t usually an early riser. Moving quietly so as not to wake John, she padded across the pleasantly cool tiled floor of their villa and slid open the glass doors to let in the last of the nighttime cool. The smell of salt- water spray clung to the air, and a memory rose unbidden of skinny-dipping in the moonlight. Chantal couldn’t recall when she’d done that — maybe only in a