The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  What the fuck what the hell what is it what are you doing what Marta are you Marta Plášilová?

  He dropped the cigarette he was smoking and it tumbled endlessly toward the floor, curving, trailing smoke—smoke and reimposed smoke until it hung like a gray knot in the air, with a tiny red center, throwing sparks.

  Marta twisted the tuning knob on the radio very slightly, and the world came into focus; the cigarette fell.

  “Look around,” Marta told him.

  The U Mlhy was still. Smoke hung in the air. Smoke hung in the air anddid not move . The waiter was frozen in the middle of wiping the bar. An overturned glass of beer was caught in the midst of sloshing. There was a buzzing monotone note that was a single moment of conversation and noise, a single note of dissonance.

  “It’s just you and I,” Marta said. “For as long as we want to be together.”

  The CalTech engineer that Peter trusted told him that as near as he could figure, the device created an interference pattern across possible worlds generated within a specific chunk of space-time. It caused those worlds to fill in on top of one another instead of radiating off to wherever such things go.

  “You could tune into the immediate future, and make it cancel out itself,” said Peter. “The radio made a little bubble around itself, andinside that bubble, you wereoutside of the time and space the rest of us have to live in. Until the batteries wore down.”

  “And were the batteries in or out of our common time?” I asked him.

  He smiled, shook his head. “That was what the Czechs couldn’t figure out. It was like the batteriesflickered . So the radio eventually ran down. Marta found all that out. Marta found out everything, and told me.”

  She did it for all the women from Hradec Králové who weren’tnomenklatura . All the useful and talented people without connection or power who always seemed to be the ones doing the sacrificing for the progress of the state.

  “Think of how they will use this if they solve the battery problem,” she said. “They’ll have a thousand years in the blink of an eye. Generations of people working for men like . . . for men like the ones I work for.”

  “Her eyes were dark and burning when she told me this,” Peter said. “We were in this sad little safe apartment over in Nové Butovice that we used to meet in. It was up on the tenth floor of a crumbling-down panelak. The only thing you could see out the window was more panelaks.

  “That was the day when she first kissed me. She justjumped me. She’d been so distraught and worried about what would happen to her parents if she got caught, and I was trying to be something like a brother to her. I never even saw the passion, and then it was completelythere . It was everything that she was. That we were. That’s the way she was. She wouldn’t chance doing anything unless it mattered completely.”

  “I have to fight them,” Marta had said to Peter as they became lovers. “I have to do this because I know what it is like to have a life that you live and to have another life that you want with all your heart.”

  1988

  Nothing ever got fixed in Prague, and what got done was done badly back then. Chunks of old building cornices fell on pedestrians and timber scaffolding was erected to shield the sidewalks. The trams creaked and flashed through the streets as they’d done since before the Second World War, wearing the steel rails down a bit more with each passage. There was no such thing as progress. Panelak skyscraper cities of cheap concrete were caving in and falling apart fifteen years after being built.Times were difficult and the stores were empty. Peter and Marta loved one another amid the decay.

  “Once a week or so, she would use her clearance to get into the room where they kept the radio. She’d just turn it on and walk out with it, right under the guards’ noses. She had all the keys. And she’d meet me, usually in Nové Butovice. We’d both get into the radio’s field.”

  The radio didn’t actually form a bubble. The shape was more like a three-dimensional waveform—it stretched out farther in some directions than others, depending on how the vacuum tubes were configured at the time. When the radio was “tuned out,” occurrences would pile up on top of each other, like they did when Marta first showed Peter the radio. It was like a black hole’s event horizon—only it would be crossed as soon as the radio operator turned the knob to get “in tune.” The act of tuning seemed to carry through, to get completed in all possible worlds. So far, nobody had tried to take his hand off the knob in midturn.

  The Czechs were working on making bigger radios that were not portable but that could create a field larger than a room. They’d only managed to make one other. It was enormous—it took up two stories at the Škoda plant—but it only gave them about double the containment space. There were theories that two radios used in unison might exponentially strengthen the signal—maybe even create a wavy pattern as big as a city. But nobody had any idea what would really happen when two radios were nested together.

  “Marta became very different when we made love in the radio’s field,” Peter said. “So did I. I hadn’t let myself have too many feelings for a long time. I don’t know if I ever had very many to begin with. But now we were two spies who were in a place that was totally secure, completely safe for that moment—and that moment could last for hours.

  “I’ll never forget that little pallet bed in the Nové Butovice panelak. It wasn’t much more than a piece of foam rubber with some sheets on it. That white pallet with her pale skin against it and her dark hair—she wore her hair cropped short, like a boy’s. Every time she was with me it could be the last, and we came to each other desperately. I’ve never felt like anything mattered so much to me because it mattered so much to her.

  “We did our spook business too, of course. She’d tell me what she’d learned. And then I’d give her the duplicate recharged batteries, and she would go. She’d be back five seconds after she left. That was how long it took for me to come inside radio time with her and then to leave her there after we were done.”

  The Department of Defense went to work on three tubes that Marta got out for them, and pretty soon Peter knew they were the real McCoy, that Marta wasn’t running some convoluted operation on him. But the DOD techies couldn’t go any further. There was something that Czech glassmakers were doing, something that the defense engineers couldn’t duplicate. They couldn’t make a working radio.

  Things began to fall apart. The East was going down, and somebody in the KGB wanted very much for the battery problem to be solved. If it could be, the inevitable might be forestalled, the system saved. And then it finally dawned on that somebody that he had all the time in the world. All he had to do was put his engineers into the second, big radio’s field. They could work on smaller devices until the big one’s batteries wore down. Then they could quickly put in a fresh set and drop back out of time to work some more. The work could progress at a miraculous pace! Why not?

  There was the worry about the “nesting problem” of having a separate radio within a radio field. There was the one theory of exponential strengthening. And there was the theory that the two radios would cancel one another out—and cancel out all the futures within the scope of either. And there was the fact that nobody had any goddamn idea what would actually happen when they tried the experiment.

  But these were not exactly the children of high officials who would be at risk, after all. And besides, they were only Czechs and not Russians.

  All that would be necessary was good security: a rotating shift of guards, and a political officer who was familiar with the project to oversee them. This political officer would be the one to turn the knob, to tune them in. It should be someone proven, but expendable. Marta Plášilová drew the assignment.

  “I remember the day she told me about this,” Peter said. “We were lying naked on the pallet. I offered her the chance to get out of there, to come to the West.

  “‘And what would I do there in America?’ she asked me. ‘Surf in California?’

  “‘Why not?�
�� I said. ‘There are places in the world that are not so gloomy.’

  “She just shook her head. ‘But I am gloomy,’ she said. She pouted and I kissed her bunched-up lips and cradled her in my arms. ‘I don’t want to take my gloom to a strange, bright place. I want Praha to become a bright place and I will lose my gloom with her.’

  “‘It is bright now,’ I said to her. ‘Here in this part of Praha.’

  “‘Yes, here with you, my love. This is enough happiness for me.’

  “‘A moment? Less than a moment?’

  “‘It will have to do.’

  “But I drew her to me and I held her and we made love again. Not yet, I thought. The gloom can wait awhile. Not yet.”

  Peter and I had been drinking red wine when he told me of this. He dipped his fingertips in the wine and rubbed one finger lightly about the rim of his glass. The glass was crystal, and it sang a single pure note.

  “Did I tell you? She smelled like rain. Whenever we were together like that, she always smelled like rain.”

  Marta did not defect. There was never really any chance that she would. She went ahead with the radio experiment.

  “We planned it all out very carefully. She had me believing that we could pull off the ultimate spook trick and subvert the entire project. Some of the engineers and glassmakers were already Marta’s agents—they’d given us good intelligence—and some of them had strong potential for becoming agents. Nearly all of them had a grudge against the state that Marta had ferreted out. Given time, Marta told me, she could get some hold on all of them. She could have, probably.

  “I thought that she would age a year or so, and then she would be in control inside the radio, and I would get to see her again. See her in practically no time. She had me believing. She was a hell of an operative. But I think she knew from the start that this was a typical project of the Czechoslovakian government.”

  On the night when they turned on a radio inside another radio’s field, Peter was at the U Mlhy. It was a different pub back then—no foreigners except for the occasional spy. He sat in his usual corner.

  “I looked at my watch. I wore one back then. I counted the time. And then, everythinglurched . The worldfolded and unfolded, like a giant had stepped on reality and crushed it down for a second, and then everything had sprung back up out of the distortion when the giant took its foot off.

  “I remember this drunk next to me staring at his glass of liquor and saying, ‘Bad belorovka. Very bad belorovka.’ But it wasn’t the belorovka. I knew what it was. Something fucked up. Something went really, really wrong.”

  Nothing ever got fixed in Prague, and what got done was done badly back then. There was no such thing as progress.

  The Future

  Everyone who knew how to make the tubes vanished in the experiment. Peter dug as deeply as he could into the matter without completely exposing himself. Nobody had ever been able to duplicate the tubes, in the East or West.He still has contacts that will tell him of any developments. There have been none.

  Then 1989 came and the rot finally got into the Eastern Bloc’s skeleton and all the eternal monuments to the inevitable dialectic crumbled and collapsed like so many panelaks that had reached the age of fifteen. A playwright dissident became president, and nobody got shot, at least in Prague.

  Peter quit the CIA. He moved into a place in Dejvice, into Václav Havel’s old neighborhood. He started an export business, using some of the glassworks connections he’d made following up on how the vacuum tubes might have been produced. Eventually, he’d come to specialize in Bohemian crystal. And then he moved into more exotic goods that paid extremely well and were questionably legal. He didn’t seem to care.

  This was when the legend began to grow. Peter Eastaboga could get anything for you, and nobody could intimidate him. He didn’t take foolish chances, but there was something about him . . . you knew he had a craziness that you didn’t want to fuck with.

  They say he tracked down an ex-KGB colonel and shot him dead in a dacha outside of Moscow. Some said it was over a drug deal, but others who were closer to Peter Eastaboga said it truly was because that man had had a hand in killing a woman Eastaboga loved.

  He traveled many places, but he returned to Prague. There were certain seasons, certain months of the year, when he was always to be found in the city.

  One night I stayed late at the U Mlhy, paying back the waiter for a football bet I’d made with him—American football, which, not surprisingly, the waiter knew better than I did. We were behind the bar, in the storeroom, and Peter perhaps thought I’d gone home already. I emerged from the back room to find him staring into a gorgeously formed goblet. In its center was one brilliant cut-glass chandelier crystal. He breathed smoke across the lip of the glass and a bit of it curled over and flowed down and around the crystal.

  He didn’t notice as I came up beside him, and watched the prism hues play across his face. He was speaking in a low, clear voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “How’s the reception? Can you hear me tonight—”

  And I looked into the glass myself, and I saw Marta Plášilová.

  I saw her as if she were a projection from the crystal into the smoke. Curved in body, as if she were an image on a little television set with vertical hold problems. Her tiny form was broken into facets, her flint eyes shining as she smiled and nodded. He was right. She seemed very dark and, at the same time, on fire.

  He took another drag off his cigarette, and that was when he noticed me. Without a word, he motioned me to sit down beside him. He continued to speak to her for a few moments. He told her about the rain and all the umbrellas without people to hold them that had been blowing down the streets when he’d gone to the Kotva Department Store at Námestí Republiky in the afternoon.

  “I thought of the pensioner ladies walking home without their umbrellas, all grumbling about how we need a good strong state again to keep the rain away.”

  Marta smiled, but she was fading, distorting in the smoke and light. She must have realized what was happening because she held out her hand. It almost seemed as if she touched the side of the glass. Peter reached down and touched his finger to the other side.

  And then she was gone.

  “You saw her?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “It only works with certain very old crystal,” he told me. “I can’t hear her. It’s like a window . . . into wherever she is. She can hear me, though. I’m sure of it. I’ve told her how things have changed. How Praha is getting brighter.”

  “How did you ever figure out how to . . . contact her?” I asked him.

  “Reflections,” he said. “Old spies notice reflections. It was how we tailed people, how we saw to make exchanges. You never lose the skill. It wasn’t long after the experiment when I first saw her. I would pass a window, and catch a glimpse of her. Distorted, spread out, and always moving away, flowing away like water on the glass. Always on gloomy days, with fog. But I knew it was her. I’d know Marta Plášilová anywhere. So I came up with the idea of using the best-made glass, the best in the world. And smoke to catch the image.”

  He smiled sadly, with a kind of pride. “It worked.You saw. Sometimes it works.”

  We walked out into the chill of early morning, and I pulled my long coat tight around me. It was October.

  “I only get good reception on certain days in certain months. I think that she’stuned out most of the time. I think she’s on the event horizon, where everything’s happening on top of itself. That radio field is wound into Prague. Woven into the city. It’s only here that I’ve ever seen her. But who knows? Whatever happened when they turned both radios on, it’s still going on. Like the field has flowed up into time in the same way that it shapes itself in space. But I can predict it now. I know those days when she can appear. I know them by heart.”

  “Do you think . . . she can get back? Into our time?”

  “I think that they accidentally solved the battery problem,” Pe
ter said. “I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”

  For some reason, I didn’t take the tram back to where I lived in Liben at Námestí Míru, but instead walked with him through the maze of tunnels under the National Museum and up to the top of Winceslas Square. We stood under the tail end of the statue of the old king’s horse and Peter lit a smoke. It was the last he had, and he crumpled the empty pack and put it back into his coat pocket.

  “There is also the distinct possibility that I’m completely crazy,” Peter said. He was speaking in Czech now. “But you saw her?”

  “I saw her.”

  “Do you suppose that you and I areboth crazy?”

  “I don’t know. It’s surely possible,” I said.

  The sky began to lighten behind us, and the castle glinted darkly on the western hill across the Vltava River.

  “I was good at my job, but I didn’t care about it.” Peter turned to gaze at the Castle; he did not look at me. “I loved her so much,” he said. “Do you think that a man can do one thing that matters, and that thing will be enough?”

  “Enough to start a legend?”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “No. You loved her. You love her still.”

  “I don’t know why she loved me.”

  “I think you had a very strong belief stored up and waiting. Maybe she knew she would need that belief someday.”

  “I thought I was insane, but I can’t stop looking into the crystal. There isn’t any reason to go back to sanity even if Iam crazy.”

  He finished his cigarette, dropped the stub to the concrete, and crushed it with the toe of his shoe.

  “You know, my friend from CalTech came over here. I showed him the crystal trick, and he couldn’t see a thing.”

  “No?”

  “I wonder how it is that you do? Who are you?”