by Cody Sisco
Samuel looked at Karine while she was speaking, appearing to listen, but Victor couldn’t tell what, if anything, the Man from Nightmareland was feeling.
Victor swallowed and addressed Samuel while gripping the data egg in his pocket. “We’re not going to duplicate what was done in SeCa. We want a fairer system. One that isn’t built on fear.”
Samuel blankly looked at Victor, the same way he’d looked at Karine—not blankly like being in the midst of a resonant episode. This was a strange, matte-dull kind of empty. Like a pigeon watching a person who didn’t have any breadcrumbs—detached and uninterested.
“You understand what I’m saying?” Victor asked.
“Yes, Victor. I understand.” His voice was flat and soft, making the hair on Victor’s arms stand up.
Had Victor sounded like that when he was on Personil? A robot’s voice held more emotion.
Victor stood, looming over the nothing-there man on the couch. “People are afraid of you. You know that?”
Samuel blinked, looked at Karine, and then said to Victor, “I understand. I caused many g-go—I caused many deaths a long time ago.”
The way Samuel stuttered gave Victor pause. Had he wanted to use a different word?
Ghosts?
Victor felt an intense need to provoke Samuel, to crack his calm facade. He said, “I understand. You thought you were helping ghosts cross over.”
Samuel sat very still, almost a statue, though Victor might have seen a twitch move across his face.
“I did,” Samuel said with conviction, without a hint of regret about the people he’d murdered.
Victor smacked Samuel in the face, knocking him onto his side.
“Victor!” Karine jumped to her feet. She ran to the door and called to the security detail, “Get in here!”
Samuel lay on his side on the couch and slowly raised himself. There was no rage, no resentment on his face. Victor wondered, not for the first time, what was going through the man’s head, what could go though a mind neutered by Personil, the way Victor himself had been before he’d broken free.
Victor’s hand gripped the data egg hard, straining the muscles in his wrist. He relaxed. Forget it, he told himself, Samuel’s mind is mush. Whatever signal the data egg is supposed to recognize is too weak, too attenuated. Neither the data egg nor the Cogitron Exelus was going to get what Victor needed from Samuel while he was like this.
Victor moved to the door.
“Where are you going?” Karine asked. The two security staff blocking his way looked at her questioningly. “It’s all right. Please wait outside.”
They stepped out of the room with mechanical efficiency. Victor wondered exactly what they’d been told about him, what limits to his freedom Karine and Circe had imposed.
Samuel sat, staring forward. He might as well have been a statue.
“Look at him,” Victor said. “He’s useless like this.”
“You need to be patient.”
“He’s a lump. There’s nothing going on in there. Not really. Not while he’s on Personil.”
“Come now,” Karine said. “You led a full life on Personil.”
“I lived in a bubble on Personil, and you know it. If you really want to understand mirror resonance syndrome, you need to alter his treatment.”
“Laws, protect us from the consequences,” Karine said as Victor left the room.
***
Alone, Samuel Miller blinked in the silent room. He looked out the window. A breeze pushed tree branches to and fro. There were guards around him all day. They slept next door after locking him in at sundown. The windows had special locks. The balcony outside was wrapped by a transplastic bubble. He was sealed in. He’d be trapped and might burn to death if there was a fire. There was no use to dying like that, he reminded himself.
Crossing over. It had been so long since he’d thought about it. Why had he forgotten?
Samuel looked out the window, noticing stone buildings and a wide stretch of water that curved around them. He wasn’t in SeCa anymore, and this wasn’t a facility or a ranch. He was in the Louisiana Territories.
There were no other Broken Mirrors.
Except… someone had just visited him. Karine LaTour and the other one. Victor Eastmore. He was a Broken Mirror. He remembered his full name now; he hadn’t when she’d mentioned it earlier. Victor Eastmore. Age four. The bright one who attended kindergarten even though he was younger than the other students. Victor hadn’t been on the list—Samuel had never seen his primal.
Primals. How could he have forgotten? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one.
He looked around for a pen and paper.
He would start a new list.
PART THREE
18
A delicate tea leaf that trembled in the breeze
drowns in my teacup, boiled and limp,
as I stare at my garden. My fingers itch.
Tomorrow I’ll plant beans.
—Ming Pearl’s Now Blossom (1973)
16 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
A couple days later, at his request, Pearl met Victor in Pond Park under the shade of a jacaranda tree. Pink and lavender flames blossomed above them.
“Let’s go out on the water,” Pearl said.
Victor selected a gondola that looked well-maintained. Its black-lacquered hull bore a high-gloss finish. Inside, red paint was smoothly applied without any nicks or worn-away edges.
“You thought I’d want this Asian one?” she asked, then winked and climbed carefully aboard the gondola while he steadied it.
Victor stepped in, bracing himself with the long pole and shifting his feet to a wide stance. He pushed them away from the dock and poled the bottom of the lake every few seconds to propel them toward the canals.
“I want you to help me get Samuel Miller off Personil,” he said when they cleared Triton’s Deep Crossing and began heading up the Grand Canal. “I need a way to reach him when he’s unmedicated.”
As they neared a bridge, sheriff’s officers surrounded a woman who stood at the railing, laughing and looking down. Her face had a sheen of sweat. Her mouth stretched in an ecstatic smile, blood tricking from her lips. The noises coming from her sounded sexual. A stimhead, it looked like.
A juggler standing a few paces away held up one of his balls toward the police. “She stole my ball and tried to cram it in her mouth.”
Between cackles and sexual moans, the woman squealed, “I want to eat until I’m full. I’ll swallow the world!”
An officer approached the woman, restraints held up in one hand. “We’ll feed you everything if you put these on.”
Their boat slid past the bridge and left the scene behind. After a long moment of silence, Pearl said, “Do you believe in Emergence, Victor?”
Victor shrugged, knowing Pearl would take him on a winding journey before getting to the point. He shifted the pole to an opposite grip, turned the gondola ninety degrees to the left, and moved them toward a side canal that headed south through the main shopping area. The boat traffic moved slowly, but there was less current here, and up ahead more canals branched off to quieter parts of the islands.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It depends how you define it, I guess.”
Emergence was a popular dinner table topic, and probably had been for the last sixty years. It happened to be the best way Victor knew to reveal whether people believed in logic and science or not. Emergence could mean one hundred different things to ten different people. For some, it was a period of time that began after the end of the Great Asian War when Europe became a global superpower. Others had a more religious interpretation, believing that the weakening of the old religions of the Middle East created space for new beliefs and organizations to grow. In North America, it was was a political philosophy that was characterized by decentralized decision-making and ad hoc collaboration.
Victor thought, and science supported his view, that
Emergence meant seemingly separate and distinct phenomena spontaneously combining and adding up to more than the sum of their parts, like the way his brain cells became overexcited and produced MRS symptoms, including blankness.
They reached an intersection where the canals branching off narrowed and traffic became one way. The pole he held was longer than this canal was wide. He moved them forward carefully, slowly, listening to the sounds of splashing water echoing off the narrow stone canyon.
He glanced back at Pearl, who sat upright with her chin raised, blinking at him through large round lenses the color of morning urine.
She said, “I believe Emergence is the unfolding process of time moving forward. Seeds of the past bloom, turn into flowers: our future. Emergence is the present moment, always becoming, forever being, itself existing whole and eternal. Emergence is now. Cause and effect are illusions. We look to the past for hints of what may be, and we imagine the future as the result of our actions today. Emergence is the truth behind this veil of lies, seeking to be free. We must open our minds to perceive it.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Victor said glibly.
Pearl laughed, a gutsy gust of mirth. She was a wholehearted believer in Emergence—an eternal now, the great truth behind the world’s illusions—and, as he considered this, his concept of her began to sour. She didn’t want to help him get what he wanted. She had her own agenda. The walls of the canal closed in. He looked behind, wondering if they could back out, but another gondola followed, one of the town’s gondoliers in a stupid tricornered hat was pushing a middle-aged couple forward. Both passengers had white hair, mixed-brown skin, and flowing synthsilk jumpsuits. They looked happy, as if they’d never heard of Emergence.
“Here’s the plain talk, which I know you like,” she said. “Don’t worry so much about the past that it blinds you to what’s happening now. Let the truth emerge.”
“I worry about the past because it’s a threat,” he said. “Granfa Jeff was murdered. The people he said I should trust—you, Ozie, and Tosh—aren’t really helping me. You keep saying ‘shush’ and ‘later,’ but I don’t have time. I need to get the data egg open, and to do that I need to convince Auntie that getting Samuel off Personil is safe. How can I do that if you won’t tell me what you know?”
“It didn’t work before,” Pearl said in a hard, flat voice. “We tried other medications. There were complications.” She stared at the bottom of the boat.
“You mean Dario Sanchez?” Victor asked.
Pearl looked up at him, shocked.
“Lisabella, the MeshNews agent, said he killed himself. Why haven’t I heard of him before?”
Pearl’s hands, which had been fidgeting in her lap, gripped the gondola seat. “Everyone panicked. Before then, MRS research had been a public affair. After Dario killed himself, everyone was afraid that the madness was spreading, like it was an infection. People started to riot, the worst of it in the Asian slums, thanks to a false story about Dario being half Filipino. MeshNews started censoring everything, which probably caused greater alarm. Mía started talking about euthanasia, which caused the medical staff to walk out, and I…” Pearl leveled a hard gaze at Victor. “I found enough sedative to knock down a horse. Was prepping the syringe while Samuel was in one of his blankouts. Jefferson found me, convinced me not to do it. But I was this close.” Pearl pressed her palms together, almost in prayer. “Since that time, the story of MRS in SeCa has been a carefully crafted tale without the inconvenience of facts and truth.”
Victor jammed his pole into the mud at the bottom of the canal, stopping their progress. “You didn’t try again to kill him?”
“I try not to regret my failure. I didn’t have the will. I resigned, started my little shop of herbs, kept in touch with Jefferson over the years.”
The gondolier behind them yelled to clear the way. Victor ignored him. “What’s going to happen when Samuel goes off Personil?” he asked. “Will your herbs keep him in check, like they did me?”
“It’s dangerous to assume that,” Pearl said, frowning in a way that wrinkled her face and made her look old and tired. “You were young when you started medication and therapy. You never had the type of break with reality that he did.”
Victor poled the boat forward, navigating in silence until he could pull alongside a quay and allow the boat behind them to pass. When they were alone, he asked, “Exactly what did Granfa Jeff want you to do with me?”
Pearl took off her glasses and rubbed them with the tip of her neckerchief. “Jefferson asked me to help you come off Personil and manage your symptoms. He thought your example—an Eastmore living an upstanding life despite being a Class Three—could change the political climate in SeCa. He also wanted me and Ozie to help you work with Samuel Miller to fix him and use his recovery to overcome stigma against people with MRS. He believed that reform of the Classification Commission in SeCa was vital and it had to precede research for a cure. He was adamant about that, though I never understood why. We were all supposed to work toward that goal in Carmichael. It was an impossible task and doomed to failure, but I owed it to him to try.
“Now we find ourselves here instead. I will help you. The present unfolds as it must.”
19
The key to business success is vision. You have to have a clear destination in mind and knowledge of the path to get there. Of course, there will be twists and turns, and you might be assailed by bandits along the way. It takes fortitude and foresight to walk through the dark forest of an uncertain future, but the mountaintop awaits.
—Circe Eastmore’s Race to the Top (1991)
16 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
Victor returned to work, distracted by everything Pearl had said, unable to focus on his vidscreen. An hour passed, then his Handy 1000 chimed. Auntie Circe had finally agreed to chat. Could he meet in ten minutes at the bottom of Cemetery Hill?
He rushed outside. The heat was a blanket smothering everything. Walking along the east side of the Petit Canal, he felt trapped between the sun high above and the bulk of rock and dirt looming to his right. He passed Pond Park and reached the cemetery, where large trees provided delicious cooling shade. Sweat stains spread along his chest and back. He wiped his wet brow.
Circe was waiting at the cemetery’s entrance overshadowed by one of the stone pillars holding up a massive wrought-iron gate. When she saw him, she waved, tapped the silver bracelet on her wrist—a fashionable MeshBit she’d likely picked up in a trendy European tech boutique—and started up the trail. He hustled to catch up.
They skirted the high cemetery wall. Its crenellations were topped by gargoyles with large goofy eyes that made them appear childlike and innocent, almost cherubic, if he ignored their finger-length teeth. The wall provided a cool strip of shade lush with grass and jumping bugs.
Victor walked in the shade a meter or so behind his aunt, knowing that she wouldn’t slacken her pace for him and that she preferred exercise to talking. She never indulged in the languid let’s-chat-and-stroll relaxation that both Granfa and Granma had liked. Circe always chased the next idea, trying to get ahead in a world that had the habit of running amok, and Victor admired her for it.
When they left the cemetery behind, the trail baked in the full glare of the sun. Red dirt was hot as embers, and pale stones poked out like the unsettled bones of an ancient civilization. The trail switched back and forth across the slope, rising higher with each turn, sometimes with views of town to the west or sometimes looking out at the highway to the north and, beyond it, the sweeping arc of the dam holding back the waters of Lake Ouachita. More rarely they glimpsed the Caddo mud flats to the south.
Sulfur tingled in Victor’s nostrils. For a moment, he worried a resonant episode was on its way. Exercise could trigger one, though rarely. Over the long term, physical activity was good for Victor, especially hiking over rough ground, which provided varying physical and mental stimulus. He’d been told physical ina
ctivity was to be avoided, as were repetitive activities like treadmill running.
The sulfur blew with the wind, and he nearly smacked himself in the head for forgetting the hot springs. The hills and valleys to the east of town were geothermal hotspots. Springs, pools, and geysers of mineral-rich water could be found throughout the Caddo lands, including on Cemetery Hill. He sniffed then wrinkled his nose. New Venice was lucky the winds were usually blowing east.
The peak was marked by a circle of boulders. Circe walked to the center, touched her palms to her head, and then raised them. Victor didn’t ask what she was doing, and she didn’t bother to explain. They both knew he preferred the real world to her fantasies and whatever religious expression she chose to explore this week.
“Water?” She unstrapped a bottle that hung from her belt and held it out to him. He took it and drank thirstily.
“Your parents asked me to speak with you about the restructuring of rights for the Eastmore holdings. Father left us with a tangled mess. Some of it looks deliberately obfuscated—”
She stopped when she glanced at Victor. He could feel his shoulders tensed around his ears and his hands clenching and unclenching. “Here,” she said, leading him to a rock in the shade of a stand of trees and gesturing for him to sit. “Try to relax.”
He nodded and repeated the owl mantra. The wise owl listens. The wise owl does not flinch at every creaking branch. The wise owl stays cool.
“I’m not going to candy-coat it for you, Victor. Part of you maturing is realizing that we play the cards we’re dealt and there’s no asking for a reshuffle. There’s no hiding from the truth. Father messed things up. We have to unfuck our finances, to put it bluntly. There will be some paperwork for you to sign.”
“That’s fine. I don’t really care about all that.”
“Good. Stretch?”
