by Robert Reed
She sits on the floor and looks out her window, up at the sky. Like all Ghosts, Olivia cares about her home more than does any flesh-on-blood person. It’s because of the way AIs work. It’s the way they build the images and smells and so on—like someone might build a brick wall, layer upon layer. Home is where you focus your greatest energies. Home is where you want rugs to be the ruggiest and the sky to be the truest and the stinks of last night’s fish should linger an honest long time. Home is the center, the modest essential hub, where you can sometimes forget that you have died and possibly lost your soul. She touches herself.
With a practiced efficiency, she starts to manipulate her illusionary glands, working hard, hunting that instant when pleasure will radiate out of her loins and momentarily sweep away all the ordinary crap, and the sadness, and so on.
And on.
“…Steward.”
15
When you’re poor and alive you tend to suffer. When you’re poor and a Ghost you envy those who can suffer. The poorest Ghosts I know live in a state called Gray-time. Very sad. Very, very sad. They spend most of their time watching World-Net. It’s colorful and loud and all. The next best thing to do is sleep. They don’t have the money to build a complete home around them. So they cheat. They get a single AI to serve them. When they look up, the AI builds them a ceiling. Down and it manufactures a floor. Move and they get a seat below them, kind of mushy feeling but reasonable. Of course they can’t do too much too fast. A single AI hasn’t got the capacity for that luxury. Whirl around and they see nothing. And I mean nothing. Eat too fast and the mushy-tasting gruel seems to dissolve. Or so they say. The very poorest of them are forever on the brink of true sensory deprivation. Think of waking up from a deep sleep and finding your hands numbed and your vision blurred and every sound too flat and simple. You know? Think of trying to live like that day after day. A Ghost at that level has two choices. He can go into a voluntary coma, everything shut down until some future benefactor might bring him out of it. Or insanity and death. The permanent shutdown. My choice if I were choosing, I don’t mind confessing to you…
Sure, I know people in Gray-time. And comas.
A girl named Wisp? Formerly Zebulina? Yeah, I know her. A real sad case. I used to give her some money now and again, out of pity, just so she could build a boring little room for a day. I gave it up, though. I couldn’t stand her suffering when she had to go back to Gray-time. It tore both of us up, so I quit…
—excerpt from an interview with a Ghost, the Magician’s private file
It’s after they make love in the early morning hours that Steward hears himself starting to tell the story, his body too tired to move and his brain too much awake to think of sleeping yet. Some urge born out of sheer runaway love makes him want to explain the whole story to Chiffon. “This is why I can’t take you to Yellowknife, darling.” She has never asked about Chaz, of course. She’s never inquired about the reasons that pushed him out of the Freestates, and he appreciates her good sense or the lack of curiosity. It means that what he gives out now is given on his own terms, and only when he is ready. He guesses that she’s startled to hear it, but she clings to him and listens without interjecting, letting him set the pace and the tone and never making him feel guilty or beyond blame.
Several sad times in the past he has tried explaining himself to others. To lovers and to friends. What was the worst was having to endure their defenses of his actions. That’s what really hurt. Nothing damns quite so much as someone telling you that you’re not to blame, how could you have known, and so on. And you know better. After all, he thinks, they didn’t live through it twenty-five years ago. They aren’t the ones who saw it to the end and who have halfway forgotten it today. Which is true. Steward goes days without thinking about it. If anything, he feels a nagging guilt for having mended over time. He does. But can they understand? No. No, they have to warn him to quit suffering for the imagined crime. They don’t even understand the basic terms of his telling the story. He doesn’t want or need their comfort. He simply wants to reveal the linchpin of his life. Nothing more.
He almost enjoys telling it to Chiffon. At least the early going. Flowers don’t know about the Freestates, and that’s fine. He can explain Shadows for the first time. She has no preconceived notions, no nonsense, and so all she will know is the truth.
“Shadows are made when you’re young. Five years old, usually.” He uses both hands to cup her firm bare bottom, squeezing once and relishing the spring. “Chaz became my Shadow because we were blood relatives. Cousins. Relatives make good Shadows, you see, because there are a billion years of natural selection telling them to look out for each other’s shared genes.”
She says nothing, eyes wide and no judgments behind them.
“That’s what makes a good Shadow. Looking out for the other. The willingness to help and to sacrifice for him or for her.” He wonders if a Flower has anything like a family. Either all Flowers are part of the same extended family, or they have none. He sees no middle ground. “Chaz looked like me, I suppose. He had my build and people told us we could be brothers.” He pauses, then says, “I was half a year older.”
She purrs into his curly reddish chest hair.
“We trained together, going to school together and sitting side by side, and when we went home it was to the same lodge and the same room and a bed with room enough for four full-grown men, and every morning we’d wake up nestled beside one another like twin spoons.” He pauses. He warns Chiffon, “We weren’t perfect friends. I don’t want you thinking we never fought over toys. We were children, after all. And little warriors. And there’s a saying in Yellowknife, ‘You get your first scars from your Shadow.’” He tells her, “That’s the way it was with us.”
Lifting a hand, he opens it to the moonlight and sees the faint regular marks made in the meat between the thumb and forefinger—tooth marks left by a young boy’s jaw, the scar itself enlarged by the growing hand.
“School is the same everywhere,” he claims. “Anywhere in the System, you go to school to learn how to quit being a child. Whether it’s Yellowknife or Brulé or Quito. At least with people that’s true. You know? For Chaz and me it meant learning how to lay out an ambush and spy on a watchful foe, and how to suffer and survive and hopefully win out in the end.” He brings down his hand and explains, “A Shadow makes you tough. A Shadow shares your circumstances and cries with you in the night, and he is there in the morning when the Elders, knowing what the world will require of us, choose hands to wire up and torture before breakfast. You aren’t just suffering for yourself, you see. You’re suffering for him. For Chaz. You do it so you can someday help defend him from pain, or worse. And he does the same for you.” Steward breathes and asks, “How do I sound?”
“Sound?”
“Bitter? Angry? What?”
She kisses one of his broad nipples, the tip of her tongue leaving a cool patch of saliva.
“People think I should be furious. They think of their own childhoods, adding misery to everything, and they think a sane person should hate the Elders for what happened to them.” He says, “It’s got to sound pretty incredible to you. A Flower. There’s nothing like it in your world. I mean, Dirk didn’t expect you to tolerate what he did to you. Did he? Of course not. And out of the trillions of people on every world, only a few hundred thousand are born on this path. Plus the immigrants.” He pauses. He says, “Immigrants.” He says, “A dozen or two go to the Freestates every year. No more. And maybe one of them persists through everything. It’s that hard to do.”
“But you’re not bitter,” she says.
“How could I be? By the time I was ten I was immune to pain. You know? In the classes, among all my peers and Chaz too, I was the very best at the heart of what everyone wanted to become. It was nothing conscious on my part. Believe me. Maybe it was something fundamental in my wiring. I can’t say what it was. But when I was twelve or thirteen my teachers took to drawing lots among
themselves to see who was going to fight me in class on a given day. The loser had to do it. You see?” He sighs and says, “I can tell you something. It does no teacher any good to be beaten by a boy a tenth his age.”
There is no pride in his voice.
Steward gazes up at the ceiling, squinting now. “Poor Chaz. We used to draw the hardest assignments in school because of me. We patrolled the roughest terrain. We fought two and three teams at a time. And sometimes we went against boys who were nearly full-grown.” He explains, “Chaz had trouble keeping up with me. We had the same build, like I said. The same bones and muscles. But there was something different inside it all. You know? And it meant that he didn’t do as well when we fought. I had to protect him at times. I had to suffer in order to save him. Of course the Elders said it was good. I learned to help those in need, and Chaz got to learn from my example. And poor Chaz, to his credit, never blamed me for being too good at these things.” He says, “My cousin had character. In a lot of ways, he had volumes more character than me.”
She blinks and offers a shy smile.
“We got to be twenty. I was older and I was stronger, so I went through the adulthood rites first. And the Elders made certain that I worked for the honor. Day after day they milked me of my will and my strength and my sense of right. They tested me under every condition. They made me face hard decisions under impossible circumstances. Which way to move? Which direction to attack, and when? And whom do I help and how much do I help them? If so many Yellowknives are scattered across a battlefield, for instance, all of them ready to break under the pain…what? Which of them do I save first? And how? And which come last? And why? And can I do the entire process without hesitations or doubts?”
“You’re such a hero.” She gives a girlish laugh. “I bet you made it look easy.”
He says, “Heroism I don’t know. Believe me.”
She almost speaks, almost says, “I don’t,” and then has the precious good sense to offer nothing.
Again he scoops up her firm upturned rump, squeezing, with the tips of his fingers sliding into the gap—into the close humid place always perfumed on Flowers—and she gives an easy slow roll with her hips, his groin responding with a faint tingling sensation. She is watching him. She says nothing. But in her face he can see the question being poised:
“Where is Chaz now?”
The tingling subsides.
He won’t answer. This is his pace, his tone, and so he goes on with his story without having missed a beat. He describes some of his rites. He compares his experiences with the lesser ones Chaz faced. The Elders were easier on his Shadow. He has no doubts. They couldn’t have treated him the same and hoped for Chaz to retain his spirit. No way. “And the Elders are pragmatic at their core. They have to be. If Chaz had been some immigrant from the south they would have pushed him past his limits. That’s one reason that so few immigrants come to the Freestates and thrive. But Chaz was family. One of us. And he wasn’t even a bad warrior, you see. He only suffered by contrast.”
He paints a vivid living picture of the mock battles, laying emphasis on the craziness of war. The coincidences. The accidents. The inspired moments. The terror scarcely concealed. “We were warriors together then. Chaz and me. And I’ll tell you something else about what that means.” He says, “If you understand Shadows and go to a village of strangers, and if they have Shadows, too, you can tell at a glance who is a Shadow to whom. By the time you’re a marginal adult, odd as it sounds, your Shadow moves like you move and is aware of you at all times. It’s second nature. You don’t even have to glance his way or her way to know your Shadow’s feelings. Hungry? Sleepy? What? He is that much a part of you. And of course he has the same vantage point relative to you. Sometimes he knows what you’re thinking before you do. Believe me.”
She chimes, “I do.”
He says, “War.” He says, “Those old tribes that roamed this country before there was any Brulé, before industry or agriculture…those old aboriginal tribes honored the warriors who had merely touched the living enemy. They became the models for the Freestates. As much as possible, they formalized the rules of war to where it was a free-flowing ritual. A kind of unbridled pageant. Do you see?” He pauses, then confesses, “I never would have talked this way when I was twenty and twenty-five. I was standing too close to everything. You know? More than two decades removed from something can sure make a person clinical. Rituals. A pageant. When I was in Yellowknife nothing seemed like a game. I was at the center of Creation, and the stakes were the loftiest possible. Yes, it was a war.”
She blinks and waits.
“We fought the usual battles. Chaz and I would be on patrol on the boundaries of Yellowknife, keeping watch on our various enemies, and sometimes—war being war—we spied on our allies too. Most of the battles were him and me running into a pair on a similar patrol. Rude little things, they were. Pain guns and a lot of hand-to-hand stuff. In the dark. During rainstorms. Not much pageantry in the final tally.”
He says, “I don’t know when it started. I should have known, like I said…Shadows being Shadows…but I don’t.” He waits, saying nothing with the greatest care.
She looks at him, then asks, “What started?”
He blinks and eases himself down into the sheets, the big hands tracing curves and curls on her bare back. “Sweet Chaz,” he says.
“What?”
“One day he just ran away.”
“Did he?”
“Scared to tears and finally couldn’t take it.” He tastes his own dry mouth and thinks water would taste good, cool and letting it spill down his face and chest. That’s the way to drink water, he thinks. Let the entire body feel a share of the wealth.
“Did something happen? Did something go wrong?”
He shrugs. “Not particularly. We were waiting in ambush. A patrol of four was coming down a cut in the forest. We would have taken them—I could have taken them myself—but then he broke and vanished. He was frightened, simple and plain.”
“And you were surprised?”
He says, “I don’t know when it started. At least I can’t remember knowing. But by then? No. No, I wasn’t all that surprised. He was my Shadow. From the time we were five years old, cowering in that bed in the night, I pretty well understood that there was trouble coming.” He shifts his shoulders and wraps both long legs around her legs, running his hands through her buttery hair. He says, “I retreated too. Duty is clear in that situation. My Shadow needed my encouragement. My enemies could wait until tomorrow.”
Chiffon takes a little breath. Then she presses on him, rising up out of his grasp. It isn’t that she seems uneasy, he thinks, but he has to wonder what is happening inside her head. She looks as if she is paying close attention, yet something about her is saying, “Flee! Flee!”
“Another day, another circumstance, and Chaz ran again,” Steward tells her. “It happened more and more, and then it happened always. Every day and night. Every instance where we might end up in a fight.” He can only remember parts of it. Twenty years ago, almost without thinking, he could have recalled every incident and described every tear, his poor sad Shadow begging him not to make this attack and not to tell anyone else what was happening. Never. Chaz couldn’t stand the idea of being labeled a coward. In the Freestate hierarchy nothing else is so low. Steward explains this fact to Chiffon. He confesses a certain sense of guilt. “I was the one who led our attacks, after all. I was the one who pushed him too far.” Something in his voice is changing now. He notices a difficulty with some of the words and with keeping his breath. And look at him sweat! Chiffon is kneeling on the bed between his legs, her hands running up and down his thighs, and now she uses the corner of a sheet to wipe her hands dry, looking at his face and wondering:
“What did you do?”
“The worst thing possible.” His ears are ringing. His mouth is full of sand. “I did what Chaz wanted me to do. Exactly. I told no one and kept his secret, and he promised
that he was getting better. He was going to conquer his fears. And I fought our battles for us. Alone. A somewhat heroic act until you see why I did it.”
“Why?”
He smiles grimly. “Ego. Pride. Vanity.”
“I don’t see—”
“I was my generation’s best warrior. I was full of a crazy pride because I knew it,” and he halfway wishes that she would strike him for his sins. “My Shadow was useless. Fine. The people who could have helped him—or better, forgiven him—were kept in the dark. All right. But in spite of all my good intentions, my heroic aspirations, the brunt of it all is that I got to face and defeat our enemies by myself. And that was an enormous satisfaction. Enormous! I was young, you see, and utterly proud, and the rest of it happened because I was having too much fun and success to think clearly.” He pauses, then says, “It had to happen eventually. Can you guess what?”
She can’t.
He says, “We went into an enormous battle. There were several hundred warriors on two sides of a field, and the winners received an important prize. Money. Equipment. I can’t recall just what, but it was ample.” He halfway laughs, shaking his head. He says, “I do remember thinking that Chaz would survive if he kept with the main body of warriors, buttressed by their flesh and their example. Who knows? Maybe he would even come out stronger for the experience. At least I hoped so. But because I had done so well fighting at close range, and because the Elders believed it was both of us who did the fighting, they decided to send Chaz and me into a nearby redwood grove. We led a little party. We were supposed to flank the enemy or take a beating for trying. And there was an ambush, of course, and we were trapped and taking heavy fire. Very heavy fire. And I can remember the exact instant when everyone on both sides, friends and enemies too, saw my Shadow Chaz stand and run away at full speed and drop into a ditch out of reach.”
