Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  Exactly a year ago, in fact.

  Conroy Berkenshaw, 2145 – 2176, was not to be confused with Conroy Vandemar, 2145 – 2192. It was a bit of a point of amusement, not to mention commentary, that his father and Roon’s father had the same name. They had, moreover, been born in the same year – but that was where the similarities ended. Well, aside from their social status, of course.

  The so-called Atonement Dead were an exclusive generational demographic defined by the year of their deaths rather than the year of their births. Even those who’d had nothing to do with the Atonement had suffered something of a ‘tarred with the same brush’ fate simply for dying in 2176. If you’d died in 2176, you were reasonably assured of a legacy involving cautious queries like oh, did he die in the…? and did he … say anything before he…? It was unfortunate for the next of kin of the eighty-million-odd perfectly innocent people59 who had died in ’76 without first making a small apology speech and then being mysteriously rendered brain-dead, but it was a cultural phenomenon.

  This little bit of social unfairness didn’t apply to Harlon, however. His father had been bad, his grandfather had been worse, they had both made Atonement speeches within minutes of one another and died in comas less than a month later, and that was why Harlon had been able to fly into Perth International Airport in a private jet two nights ago. And he’d spent his entire adult life trying to perform an atonement of his own, even if his attempt was unlikely to ever achieve proper noun status.

  Roon straightened as he approached, then turned and gave him a smile when he stepped over the final little obstacle of insulation piping. As invariably happened when she smiled, Harlon felt his knees weaken. Before meeting Roon Vandemar – a meeting he had dared to arrange only after admiring her academic publications and contributions to technology from afar for almost a year – he had always thought that expression was corny romantic hyperbole. The worst of trashy romantic fiction. He’d never suspected it could be an actual physical malady, a sort of tingling numbness that made him stumble over his own feet and want to sit down, abruptly and cross-legged, right there on the floor of this amazing woman’s workshop.

  “Hi,” he said. Cottonmouth, tongue-tying, hoarseness and the quavers were all also genuine physiological issues that he faced on a regular basis in these and precisely no other circumstances, ever. But it had been a year, and he was more or less resigned to the fact that this was a permanent state of affairs.

  Roon smiled again, and turned back to her work. She had her usual collection of apparatus, computers and half-assembled machinery on the counter in front of her … and, for some reason, a large jagged piece of what looked like granite. It was just sitting there, a chunk about thirty centimetres on a side, slightly dirt-crusted, with no diodes or cables or measuring devices attached to it anywhere.

  “What’s that?” he was unable to prevent himself from asking, like an imbecile. She gave him a sidelong glance. “It’s a rock, isn’t it?” he replied to himself, and laughed at her grin. Roon smiled readily – more readily, he liked to think, for him than she did for most other people – but her grins were rarer. “Have to get up pretty early in the morning to fool me,” he remarked. Roon rolled her eyes admiringly, and nodded. He looked elsewhere on the table, and pointed. “How are the triple-state recycling catalysts coming along?”

  Roon tilted a hand back and forth, then hoisted a cautious thumb. Harlon raised his eyebrows, and Roon nodded.

  They stood together in silence for a few minutes then, while Roon went back to feeding impossibly complex equations – many of which were written in her own unique mathematical language that she’d programmed into the computer as a teenager – into an interface. Occasionally she would reach over and rearrange metal pins on a simulation model, but he couldn’t have said what it was for. Even more occasionally, she’d lean over the other way and brush him with intentional affection. Further shaking and feebleness of the large tendons ensued, like something in his brain was short circuiting with every touch. He wondered, idly, if that was why it was called a stroke.

  Harlon, despite this affliction, was entirely content with the lack of conversation and felt no need to fill the emptiness with words. It was simply not possible to have a long-term relationship with Roon if you were uncomfortable with long silences. After a little while, a sensor on the wall developed a small green light in its centre, and Roon seemed satisfied with this result. She switched off the interface and nodded.

  “Hey, I noticed on my way in that they’re doing some pretty big renovations in the old south wing of the building,” Harlon said, although this too was transcendently stupid because it was her house and of course she knew what the builders were doing there. “What are you working on?”

  Roon gave him another unreadable sidelong glance, a smile, and put her palms together piously.

  “A chapel?” he said, incredulous. “Really? For what?”

  Her smile widened, she rolled her eyes at him roguishly, curled her interlocked hands around one another and batted her eyelids.

  This time, Harlon laughed. “Whoa now,” he said, “it’s only been a year,” he eyed her seriously. “A year to the day, actually. Did you remember?”

  Still smiling, Roon reached across the counter and lifted the rock, one-handed. Holding it at the top like a basketball mid-bounce, a stone that size, at such an awkward angle, Harlon didn’t think he’d be able to lift it.

  Underneath, on a little scrap of notepaper, she’d written:

  365

  “Well played,” he congratulated her, as she set the rock back down. Her hand brushed up his arm, and he winced. “Careful,” he warned, then saw her surprised look. “Oh yeah, and I got that…”

  She drew back his sleeve to reveal the still-tender tattoo on the side of his wrist. It was a jumbled series of squares, like a chessboard that had been dropped on its side and broken into pieces.

  Roon actually laughed, a soft chuckle through her nose, and looked at him questioningly again.

  “Yep – just like we talked about last time,” he said, although as always, this was a somewhat whimsical figure of speech where Roon was involved. They’d talked … in their own way. “It’s a hexabyte encoding mag-tattoo,” he confirmed as she studied it, “encoded with Oræl Rides to War, as performed by Valerna Mazzik. You need a hexy music reader to play it, though, and they stopped making them in 2120. I’ve tried it on my mother’s old antique player, though, and it actually works.”

  Roon shook her head and released him. But only for a moment. She slid her left hand up his side, then crouched and swept her right hand down past his hip.

  As effortlessly as she’d lifted the rock from the workbench she straightened, hefted Harlon in her arms, and carried him out of the garage.

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS,

  MY BUTLER GAVE TO ME

  First Day was technically a Christmas celebration, although it was marketed as multi-denominational – and although, this year, it fell on Halloween. It wasn’t as if, as Ariel liked to remind everyone, Christian holidays hadn’t been cheerfully happening on top of older celebrations for centuries.

  “It’s a matter of practicality more than appropriation,” she said as part of this year’s reboot of the old debate. As also befitted the First Day customs of Tumblehedge, she and her sisters were helping Jarvis set the table before dinner. Gifts, traditionally, came after that. If you could call something so transparently materialistic ‘traditional’ in any sense. “It’s not like the old fertility rituals were pulling their weight anyway.”

  “Quite so, Ms. Vandemar – one might say the fertility rituals have achieved their purpose rather too effectively,” Jarvis replied, “and perhaps it is for the best that they were phased out in favour of good wholesome commercialism,” Ariel could always count on Jarvis to inject a useful helping of sarcasm.

  “Exactly,” Ariel said. “And the winter solstice is great and all, except the world is spherical and it’s the middle of damn summe
r down on this side, so what are we even doing?”

  “What indeed,” Jarvis responded.

  “It’s spherical right now,” Ash said. “Perhaps we should keep the whole seasonal bloodletting thing in the back pocket for when the world goes back to being flat. We are sort of going to be in charge of the whole religious aspect, right?”

  “That’s my point,” Ariel argued. “We need to start thinking about these things. Does summer and winter happen in different parts of a flat world at the same time, or is it all one season? And how does it even happen? Are there even seasons, or is it just sort of … perma-spring?”

  “This probably isn’t something we need to worry about at this point,” Ash suggested.

  “If you, in your infinite and eternal Pinian wisdom, could perhaps stop commercial holidays from happening earlier and earlier every year and bleeding into one another,” Aunt Agñasta said, “it would be appreciated by us brief mortals.”

  “Consider it done, Auntie Ag,” Ariel assured her grandly, and pretended to write something on her hand as flamboyantly as possible with an invisible quill pen. “Holidays … same … time … avoid … bleeding,” she paused, then twirled her hand some more. “Unnecessary … bleeding,” she amended.

  “Thank you, dear,” Aunt Agñasta said.

  Yes, everyone rolled their eyes about the rampant consumerism of the Days … and then everyone bought pocket-gifts for their loved ones on the First. It was, Ariel had to admit, a giant scam to which most of the world turned a blind eye for whatever reason. For her own part, of course, as glamourous face of First Day for at least three different cosmetics and clothing companies, her involvement was at once inexcusable and inescapable. She’d spent most of October flying around the world and doing her best, in between exhausting shoots and commercials and interviews and public appearances, to continue with the training and attempts to refocus her Pinian self as Gabriel had instructed. It hadn’t gone particularly well.

  She wondered if it was a special kind of sin if you disappointed an Archangel because you were too busy aiding in the commercialisation of Christmas in October.

  Unlike the Twelve Days of Christmas that historians and oversensitive purists insisted on, the multi-dom Twelve Days ended at Christmas. This year, First Day fell on Saturday October 31st, a tasteful twenty-four hours after Eid-al-Fitr and a tasteless no hours at all after Halloween. But this wasn’t entirely unusual and depended on the calendar and a lot of other arbitrary and probably market-related things, so everyone just went along with it and combined the celebrations.

  After First Day, the obligation to give gifts was lessened but not removed entirely. The Days then came every four days, up to Eleventh Day, after which – this year at least – there was a two-week break until Twelfth Day, which fell on Christmas Eve.

  The other main topic of conversation before First Day dinner, of course, was why extra places were not being set for what Aunt Agñasta primly referred to as “plus one” guests. Not even Roon, famously the only one of the sisters to have any applicable invitee, had managed to entice her Synfoss Baron boyfriend to Tumblehedge this year.

  “I keep hoping one of you will give me a cute boy or girl for First Day,” Ariel said, “and I keep being disappointed.”

  This discussion, aside from a few entertaining barbs from Jarvis and Aunt Agñasta, never really went anywhere. This, Ariel was silently certain, was because there was only one place it could go. And that was either Ash or herself asking why Aunt Agñasta and Jarvis hadn’t invited anyone, and then either herself or Ash responding that that was never going to happen because Silas Doncaster and Agñasta Mulqueen had eyes only for one another, and both would die before admitting it. And nobody was ready to see how that conversation would end.

  Ariel still remembered the First Day, ’97 or ’98 it had been, when she’d made a remark about clearing up the remains of the First Day dinner. Ash had sniggered, and the resultant chill in the air had just about allowed them to switch off the air-conditioning for the evening. No, nobody was quite ready to go there yet.

  After dinner, everyone exchanged gifts. Ariel, as was becoming traditional, handed out a variety of VIP treats she’d been lavished with on her recent travels. This included a fluffy dressing gown monogrammed with Ariel’s trademark A, which – again as a matter of tradition – she gave to Ash with the explanation “it could stand for Ashley” and Ash accepted with good grace because a dressing gown as expensive as a normal family car was a dressing gown as expensive as a normal family car. Pretending to ignore the disapproving look Aunt Agñasta was giving the two of them, Ariel also stage-whispered to Ash that there were a pair of Madagascar Commodore cigars tucked inside the folds of the gown, and that they should probably go into Ash’s humidor in the next day or so.

  Roon, as usual, handed out small things she had made while taking breaks from all the other things she was making. These were usually more sculpture than mechanics, things of wood and soapstone and glass, but often they had some electronic component of purely ornamental use. Sometimes, Ariel knew, Roon needed to make things that just did nothing.

  Then Jarvis handed out his own modest gifts. A small virtual-peripherals case for Aunt Agñasta, to take the place of the battered old one with the separated hinge that not even Roon could do anything but replace; a teardrop flower of glass for Ariel that he’d found at a market; an antique Biff Victoria60 electric toothbrush handle that he had incorporated into the handle of a soldering iron for Roon. And then he handed a cloth-wrapped object to Ash.

  “The builders found this under the floorboards in the old dining room,” he said, as Ash unwrapped the small, gleaming metal object.

  “It’s a lighter,” Ash said in surprise, turning the little box around and flicking open its lid.

  “I replaced the wick and filled it with fuel,” Jarvis said, “otherwise it is untouched. It’s a Synfoss lighter, but an old one – it takes the old kerosene syrup. I took the liberty of picking up a small supply. A litre bottle should last you until approximately Judgement Day.”

  Ash flicked the lighter alight, stared at the flame, then closed it and turned it around again. “It could be a hundred years old,” she said. “When did a smoker last live in the south wing?”

  “I have no idea, Ms. Vandemar,” Jarvis said. “Certainly not since your grandfather Bartemys’s time.”

  “What do the letters mean?” she asked. “I.A.H.Y. Are they initials? A logo?”

  She passed the lighter to Ariel, who snapped it open. She smelled the faint mouldy-gingerbread smell of Synfoss kerosene, something she hadn’t smelled since she was a child – and only then in some of the old machinery they’d restored and reinstalled from the Black Boonie to the Werelemming.

  “I Always Hated You,” she pronounced, holding up the little brass-coloured box. “A parting gift from an embittered lover of grandad Bart’s. Ooh,” she went on enthusiastically as everyone started rolling their eyes, “there was a love triangle between grandad Bart, great uncle Cassius, and a woman of dubious–”

  “Ian Adam Hadrian Yuleqvist,” Roon said, reaching over and lifting the lighter from Ariel’s hand. “Read a book.”

  “Of course,” Jarvis slapped his forehead. “The main character of Red Tape, by Enrico Pasternaci. Yuleqvist has a lighter with his initials on it – a Zippo, I believe, similar to this one but an older model and filled with naphtha instead of syrup. He uses it to burn down the offices where he–”

  “You know what I hate about living with a bunch of book geeks?” Ariel said.

  Roon smiled. “Nothing.”

  There didn’t seem to be much to say after this extraordinary sequence of spoken words from Roon, so they all chuckled and then passed the lighter around, turned it over and over in their hands, studied the mysterious initials, and pondered silently the question of why a prop from a hundred-and-twenty-year-old book would be hidden under the floorboards in their family home.

  “One cannot light a cigar with a Synfoss li
ghter,” Aunt Agñasta surprised them all by saying after the thoughtful pause had run its course. “The smell of the chemicals spoils the tobacco.”

  Ariel, Roon, Jarvis and Ash exchanged shocked looks. While it was certainly strange, Roon would occasionally choose a moment she deemed appropriate to talk. Aunt Agñasta having anything but short, snippy words of dismissal and warning about Ash’s cigars, however, was simply … unprecedented.

  “That’s why you use the taper,” Ash recovered first, rummaged in the folds of her dressing gown and pulled out one of the Madagascar Commodores. She opened the metal cap, eased the fat, almost-black cigar out of its wood lining, and slid one of the curved strips of card-thin wood from the tube. “It’s not just a preservative,” she explained. “You can light it up with anything, really – then you use this to light the cigar.”

  “I prefer using a bill of entitlement or an expensive microprint,” Ariel confided.

  “Not the flames of burning national economies?” Ash added with a smile.

  Gabriel was in a bad mood when he arrived that night.

  “Happy First Day of Get the Hell Out of My Church,” he growled. “I got you these on the way here,” he held up a grocery bag with BUCKSAVERS witten on it.

  “Service counter breath mints,” Jarvis said mildly, opening the bag as Gabriel handed it to him. “Sir shouldn’t have.”

  “Oh wait, those are for me,” the Archangel muttered, and snagged the mints from Jarvis’s hand. “The five little packs of bite-size Zazzy-Os are for you. I’m not kidding, they’re the best candy humans have ever invented. You can’t get them in the Europes anymore.”

  Ariel and her sisters, as well as Aunt Agñasta and Jarvis, politely accepted the packets of inexpensive candy and dutifully opened them. Ariel at least found herself tasting the tart globules of ultra-refined sugar with a new appreciation. She still couldn’t have said what flavour they were supposed to be – the only clue on the wrapper was a blue man holding a roast chicken in his hands, but that meant less than nothing and the Zazzy-Os certainly weren’t chicken flavoured – but the idea that anyone, let alone an Archangel, thought they were the best candy ever made by the hands of human beings … well, that was compelling.