Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  The best you could say about the idea of the Protectorate was that it was obsessively detailed: by the time Carson reached college each of its species had its own elaborate history as well as a somewhat rudimentary philosophy to match. He kept his major undeclared for as long as he could: he was a decent student in the history classes he took, and equally decent in the low-level chemistry and physics courses he signed up for to fulfill requirements. But he couldn’t decide which way to jump: science promised better job prospects after graduation, while the humanities courses had the greater share of women, a benefit not to be underestimated.

  In the spring semester of his sophomore year, he took a creative writing class as an elective from a guy who’d only started teaching there a year ago. He insisted that students refer to him by his first name, Corey. “I want you guys to just feel loose and free and experimental and unpretentious,” he said on the first day. “No fake Hawthornes up in here! No, like, Raymond Carvers!” Carson could not have been more excited. This was a guy who didn’t have a prejudice about which tales were worth telling and which were not. At last those notebooks would have a use beyond solitary pleasure: the world within them was realized well enough by now to support a few short stories. He envisioned a linked cycle to begin with, something like Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and saw a future in which Volume Four of the Saga of the Grand Protectorate reached the top of the best-seller list, the first three volumes having staked out more or less permanent positions a few slots below.

  But as the semester progressed, Carson began to suspect that Corey’s protestations of literary tolerance were not backed up by his true beliefs. He wasn’t too hot on workshopping—“true genius isn’t the result of a committee,” he said a couple of times—but he’d pick a different story out of the submissions each week and photocopy it for the class so that he could tell them what he thought was good about it. Six weeks in he still hadn’t gotten around to Carson’s work, though Carson was pretty sure that in terms of pure quality he was miles ahead of everybody else in the class. The other students were just turning in wish-fulfillment fantasies! Lynn, who was attending college on a golf scholarship, wrote a story about a woman in the LPGA who was on the green of the eighteenth hole and attempting to make a game-winning putt; eventually she cleared her mind of all distractions (her family, who didn’t think her career was worthwhile; her boyfriend, who wanted her to spend less time on the links and more with him) and sank the ball. Anne, the secretary of the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, had a story about Jane, an objectively gorgeous woman who attends her first fraternity party; a handsome senior hits on her but she turns him down because he’s just trying to carve another notch on his bedpost, and she feels good about herself in church the next day.

  It was all so on the nose. Meanwhile the short stories that Carson was turning in, which he was planning to polish up at the end of the semester to send out to science-fiction magazines, were being returned with no comments save an irritatingly noncommittal “B+/A-” at the top of the front page. Occasionally there would be a single exclamation like “Crazy!!” along with it, but none of the comments on style or character or plotting that the other students seemed to be getting. He was not naive enough to imagine that his writing was perfect—if anything, the wishy-washy grading said otherwise. There was nothing for it but to go to Corey’s office hours.

  “Carson, my man, come in, come in, pull up a chair, have a seat,” Corey said when Carson knocked on his door. The office was a tiny room, and Corey kept it dim: a single lamp on the desk lit the professor’s face from below, giving him the unintentional appearance of an interrogator. Behind him hung a poster of Jimi Hendrix in tie-dyed tones, smoke blooming from between the guitarist’s parted lips. Next to that was a blowup of a black-and-white photo of Miles Davis in what looked like a glittering gold tank top, cradling his trumpet with his eyes closed as if in meditation.

  “I guess I’m wondering what you think of my writing,” Carson said. “Other than, you know, A-minus, B-plus.”

  “Well!” Corey said. “I’m glad you came in. I was hoping you’d come in on your own at some point, actually—I would have extended the invitation myself for you to come to my office hours, but when you write See me at the top of a paper, students come in thinking they’re doing something disastrously wrong! Ha-ha.

  “Anyway…this is some crazy stuff you’re writing here! Really, really out there. No one else in the class is doing anything like this. Like, that one story, about these people who live on the planet Europa—”

  “Europa’s a moon.”

  “Yeah! They live on Europa, and they’ve been gene-tweaked—”

  “Gene-spliced.”

  “Gene-spliced! It turns out that like thousands of years ago their ancestors were gene-spliced with turtles, so they can grow their own body armor for combat. That is an idea I would not have thought of!”

  “Thank you,” said Carson.

  “Okay!” said Corey.

  They sat there quietly for a moment, the professor looking at Carson and Carson looking over the professor’s shoulder at heavy-lidded Hendrix. “Okay!” Corey said again, a little more loudly, making Carson jump in his seat. “Before we move on to the next part of this conversation, the critique, as it were, we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: we need to look at that elephant and say, okay, I see you, now move on over there out of the way. Here we are in this room, you and me, and it is hard to escape the fact of our races. It is hard to avoid the fact that American history has granted my race certain advantages that it has not bestowed on yours. And I’m aware that I have this ‘invisible knapsack,’ so to speak, that grants me certain social privileges. But please understand that I’m aware of the unequal power dynamic between us, I can examine my privilege, I’ve got that awareness, and I’ll do whatever I can to mitigate it.

  “Now. That dirty business is out of the way. This science-fiction stuff, it’s okay. But I really feel like you could be tapping a richer vein here. There is an American rage that is your birthright, handed down to you from many generations! That’s your history! And if you were to let a little bit of that out on the page instead of, you know, keeping it bottled up, I think that you would find your work to be much richer as a result. But this stuff—and I’m going to be frank here, and I apologize for that in advance—it’s thin gruel. This is denying your birthright. Is this the best you can do? I don’t think it is!”

  It was about then that Carson figured that going into a science major would involve dealing with a lot less day-to-day bullshit. The message was clear: that while the work of Corey’s white students would be taken at face value, whatever Carson turned in was doomed to be read through the lens of his race. If the story was not explicitly about race, then the tale would instead be of his reluctance to speak on the one subject that, surely, must occupy all his waking thoughts.

  The fact of the matter was that Carson did tend to avoid talking about race: not because he was afraid to confront certain nebulously defined truths about himself, but because he found the subject to be excruciatingly uninteresting. He felt that race was not a characteristic that was a part of his identity, but one that was projected upon him by the gaze of others who looked on him; as such it was ephemeral, there and gone as soon as the gaze was broken. And yet other people, most other people, seemed not to think that way at all: they seemed to insist that race was a thing as real as flesh.

  A career doing science would be a way around all that. No one would look at a published scientific article and comment with a sorrowful shake of the head about its author’s reluctance to confront issues of identity. The author would merely relay the results obtained from the data; the data, which knew neither race nor gender nor any other demographic, would be free to speak for itself. A community that thought in that way would be a good one to join. They’d understand what really mattered. What a relief that would be, to gain entry to a place filled with those in love with fact and not belief.

&nb
sp; Carson declared a physics major near the end of his sophomore year. He continued to submit more Tales of the Grand Protectorate to his creative writing professor, who gave him the same vaguely noncommittal grades in return, refusing to discuss his work with the rest of the class (though, years later, when he dug those stories out and reread them, Carson wondered whether that might not have been a tender mercy). But something of the pleasure of writing those stories had been taken away.

  His final grade in the class was a B+. On his final paper, a thirty-page epic about the formation and subsequent fracturing of the alliance between the Protectorate members that inhabited Jupiter’s four largest moons, the professor wrote, “I really liked having you in my class. I know you’ll do good things eventually!” Carson never wrote another word of fiction again.

  And so Carson had one of the qualities that would go on to help him thrive as a young physicist: a willingness to spend as much time in the lab as possible, away from people. If he did not have the monomaniacal love of science that seemed to be typical of the most successful in the field, he did have a love for the company of the people he thought of as his own, and for being alone when the lab cleared out late at night. He rarely, if ever, thought about the fact that black physicists were so uncommon, or why that might be; he could go to a three-day conference and easily not notice that he was the only African American in attendance. As a professional you learned to focus only on what was interesting. Here was a place where one was judged on the quality of one’s ideas, not on irrelevant social externalities.

  But Carson could not live every second of his life out among scientists. In particular, there was this one guy who sometimes manned the security desk at the entrance to the Merrill lab who really got under his skin. His name was Spivey. The guards worked in pairs that were constantly being changed up according to some apparently randomized schedule, and most of the time, when Spivey was with that Brazilian woman, or that guy with the buzz cut who had the gone-to-seed build of an ex-military man, then he’d leave Carson alone. But when that other guy Terence was there, then Spivey would have himself a grand old time, heckling Carson as he entered the building and went into the lab. “Hey! Hey, Carlton! Why don’t you come over here and talk to us a second! I don’t bite. In such a hurry! You guys are building a time machine in there, right? I’d think the point of that is so you don’t have to be in a hurry. Fine—get on in there, Carlton.”

  Just race, race, race, all the time with this guy. And whenever Spivey shouted at him like that Carson felt a certain unwelcome pressure to behave in a certain way, as Spivey thought a black person should, or shouldn’t, in order to be judged “authentic,” whatever that might mean. It was bad enough to have a white person try to press those obligations on you, but to have a black person do it was even worse. The whole idea was so depressing.

  And yet Spivey got to him, even though Carson kept his interactions with him down to a curt hello at the most. The man’s voice got into Carson’s head, and during times that should have been tranquil—doing science; spending time with Kathryn—it spoke up, and needled him, and ruined everything.

  Carson’s love life was a little complicated right now. He was seeing Kathryn, whom he’d met, or re-met, at a party thrown by Rebecca, the widow (what a weird word for someone so young) of his former boss who’d died in a car accident. But he was also occasionally, or maybe not so occasionally, sleeping with he guessed was the phrase, sleeping with Alicia Merrill, the former post-doc who’d stepped into Philip Steiner’s place in the lab after his death. But that, the sleeping with, took place off the books, outside of time. That would be hard to explain to Kathryn. She would be unlikely to understand.

  Kathryn was confusing. Even someone like Carson, who was not the savviest at picking up signals, could see that she was into him. She never failed to slip her hand into his when they walked side by side down the street; she called him on the phone sometimes just to talk; mornings in bed she preferred to linger. But…well, it was hard for Carson to explain it, really, but Kathryn found race really interesting, to a point that was, well, a little weird.

  It was probably too strong a claim to say that Kathryn was racist: there was the obvious reason that that didn’t really make any sense, and after all, she was given to make unprompted statements like “I really feel we’ve reached a point where race doesn’t matter to people anymore.” But in the lab, or at a conference, no one would ever actually say that: they’d take it for granted, and get on with the science. And Kathryn had…well, a curiosity, about people not like herself. But there was nothing wrong with being curious, right? There was that time when she’d wanted to go to the Bridgewater mall for an afternoon of browsing followed by dinner at one of the swanky restaurants there. There was one store that seemed to deal exclusively in preppy college-boy gear—khaki slacks, and floppy baseball caps, and long-sleeve shirts in washed-out colors—and yet standing at the entrance were a pair of leggy mannequins who were dressed in slim-fitting jeans, black stilettos, and blood-red T-shirts featuring silk-screened images of a young Angela Davis, her name helpfully stenciled in block letters beneath her portrait. The mannequins each had their right arms extended, holding black-gloved fists in the air. Their eyes followed Carson and Kathryn as they passed by, and Carson could faintly hear the whirring of the motors that drove their cameras. “I wonder what it’s like to have a ’fro?” Kathryn said, looking at the mannequins’ shirts. “Like, this big thing on your head that grows out of it. I bet you have people coming up to you all the time to ask if they can touch your hair. You go to sleep and wake up and your hair’s got this crazy shape, I bet.” It wasn’t like she’d suggested that black women were ugly or stupid, was it? Just because she found race interesting in a way that Carson did not didn’t make her a racist, did it?

  Spivey, or at least the embodiment of doubt that had lodged itself in Carson’s mind and taken on Spivey’s voice, had different opinions. “Listen, Carlton. You have to understand something about white people. Not all of them, but a lot of them. A lot of white people love the twentieth century! They love it! And they are doing the best they can to tow the corpse of the twentieth century behind them into the twenty-first. Because they want to convince you that you are still in the twentieth century, when they were on top. And they will do every sly little tricky thing they can to get you to go backward in your mind, to back then.”

  But Carson was sure, or thought he was, that there was no malice in Kathryn; he was certain that what existed between them was some form of love, and that what they were engaged in was the mutual making of pleasant memories. She comes over to his place a couple of times a week now, and as they sit on the couch talking, she has an occasional impish habit of whipping off her top without warning, as a means of announcing that the time for conversation is over. She crosses her arms, grasps the hem of her shirt, and quickly lifts it over her head, but sometimes the neck of the shirt catches on the tip of her nose, and there she is, hands above her head, her face obscured save for a smile graced by a dimple on either side. She’s wearing a bra that Carson hasn’t seen before, and her lifted breasts invite themselves to be cupped by his hands. She shakes herself free of the shirt, tosses it to the floor, throws her arms around his neck, gently pulls at his earlobe with her teeth, and whispers: “Now then.” A memory like that will keep a man warm in a cold time.

  But then that doubting voice intrudes. “Aw, come on, Carlton, get out of here with that. You know what she’s thinking right now, ’cause you know she’s got that twentieth-century heart. You don’t have to shy away from the truth. You don’t have to be shy.” And the memory wilts.

  It wasn’t like what Carson was doing with Alicia was cheating, or anything like that. Sure, Kathryn didn’t know about it, and Carson was perhaps not telling her something that she would prefer not to know. Besides, it was hard to explain.

  The work that was going on in the Merrill lab was intense. And Alicia felt like they were really close to a major breakthrough. O
nce she’d taken over the lab she’d adopted Philip’s work habits, and she’d always been something of a workaholic to begin with. Carson had stepped up his time in the lab as well—sometimes he’d spend fourteen-hour days there—and so the two of them were there together a lot, batting ideas back and forth. Sometimes they’d get so deep into the work that they’d forget to eat: suddenly, one or the other would say “I’m starving,” and they’d head to a bar with a late-night pub menu, get a couple of beers and a plate of nachos, and head back to the lab for another hour or two. It was exciting, in the way that you hope science will be exciting when you enter the field, and it so rarely is.