by Steven Brust
“To be in the Salt? Nah, I hate politics.”
“For me to find Celeste.”
“I thought you wanted her out of the way.”
“I do.” His face left no doubt about the depth of that desire. More than dragons.
“Enough to break rules?” I asked.
“We have very few.”
“Did you kill Celeste?”
Nothing moved. In the poison-blue of his beautiful eyes, I saw Desire roll onto her back.
“Stubbing Incrementalists is not against the rules,” he said. “We don’t like to do it, but we have before, and we can again.”
“See?” I said. “More things I haven’t remembered about us.”
“We have to protect against dementia and chemical imbalance to keep inadvertent falsehoods out of the Garden. Man knows of the world what his senses tell him, but our senses are interpreted through our material brains, and a sick brain can bring bad information. Paranoids can record dangers that aren’t real. Brain injuries alter personalities. We are not charioteers to spur forward or rein back the brute beasts we ride upon.” He pulled my chair closer, touched his fingertips to my cheek, and smoothed my hair back from my temple. He leaned in toward it. I spun the chair toward the armrest he’d released and jumped to my feet.
“More tea, Chiron?” I asked from back at the desk.
He stood and carried his cup to me. Maybe he wanted the tea. Maybe I was looking particularly Sabinian. I was as tall as his shoulder.
“So Phil has introduced you to what happens when our temples touch,” Oskar mused. “Has he told you what can happen when Incrementalists make love?”
“No, why would he?”
“He might think you’d appreciate the warning. He wants you, you know.”
“I know he was in love with Celeste,” I said, but I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling.
“Now you remember her?”
“I remember people talking about her.”
“Phil was in love with Celeste for a long, long time.”
“Sounds like it was a rocky relationship,” I said. I poured another cup of tea, forgetting the milk.
“All Celeste’s relationships were,” Oskar said. “But Phil never saw that. He lost his objectivity. It’s possible you have lost yours as well.” He reached across me and took the creamer by its slim handle.
“Phil knows Celeste meddled with him,” I said.
“Celeste was subtle.” Oskar poured a thin stream of milk into his empty cup. “It suited her for Phil to adore her. It kept him timid. Love does that, you know.” He lifted the teapot as he poured, drawing a long curve of the steaming stuff so the smell filled the space between us. “Not at first, of course. At first love makes us wild. Reckless.” The sugar tongs looked like tweezers between his fingers, but he wielded them like a surgeon. “In the first throes of love, we leave homes and jobs, abandon lives and cities.” He stirred the cup, looking into it thoughtfully. “But later, after the flames of love burn down to embers, love tempers us.” He handed the cup to me. “Love domesticates us until we fear the feral passion we remember.” He pressed me tenderly into my chair and leaned on the edge of my desk. “So we corral our love with rules and ethics. We pen love in, clip its wings, and castrate it to keep it safe from itself. Tame, and moderate.”
I looked at him over my teacup. “So what, love no one? Is that the wisdom of your accumulated years? Play the lone wolf?”
He dropped a finger sandwich, whole, into his mouth. “Wolves are family creatures, but they don’t tolerate a challenge. I would not be welcomed in the Salt, even if your personality’s dominance over Celeste’s were strictly to form. As it is, they may dispute your spike, argue it was a broken stub, or that Phil was too involved to choose a suitable recruit. He doubled the genome with you, after all, and you’re not integrating. And people were loyal to Celeste.” He drained his teacup. “Do you know who you need most, Ren?”
“Santa?”
“You need Celeste. You need enough of her to prove she’s still around, just not the dominant personality any longer. You need to demonstrate you got a viable spike. I can help.”
Oskar leaned across me and took the teacup from my hand. He touched a button on the iPad, and Leonard Cohen’s voice lapped over my shoulders. Oskar straightened and held his beautiful, empty hands out to me.
I picked up my teacup, sipped and returned it with unshaking hands. “You know, Santa brought me Barbie’s Dream House that year, and it wasn’t the same at all.”
Oskar enveloped one of my wrists. “But you played with it the day after Christmas, didn’t you?” He pulled me to standing.
“Yes,” I said.
He carried my hand to his shoulder. “I don’t want to see Celeste when I look at you,” he said.
“You want in the Salt.”
“I do.” He took my other hand in his. “And I want you in the Incrementalists.” He rested his fingers on my waist. “And I think you want that too. You must have had something really big in mind to take the spike as quickly as you did.”
I nodded.
“I like big,” he said, and actually blushed when I raised my eyebrows at him. It was adorable.
“I know you’ve been you for a couple of hundred years,” I told him. “And I know you’ve wanted something big for that long, maybe longer. But it wouldn’t have hurt you to want someone in all that time as well.”
His blush deepened. “I’ve had lovers.”
“Not the same thing,” I said. I reached up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, like the oversize little brother he suddenly seemed. “I gotta go,” I said.
“I’ll wait for you, Ren.”
“Yeah, but my boss won’t.”
“I could make sure he would.” His sweet smile flashed a wolf’s teeth at me.
“I could too,” I reminded him. “But I’d rather just do what I promised.”
“Because Santa won’t bring anything nice to wicked children who break their word?”
“Or who kill people and make it look like suicide.”
“Santa doesn’t bring anything to anyone.”
“Harsh,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight when they gather Salt.”
“Oh, do you think so?”
“I promise.”
Phil
In the early ’60s, I played a lot of Texas road games. After the first time the game was hijacked, I started carrying a gun in my pocket. I never used it, even the second time we were hijacked, but during those times it reassured me to have it there. My hand twitched, going for that pocket from fifty years ago.
Jimmy said, “I’ve learned, Irina, not to play your games before I know the rules. I don’t believe you’re just trying to get a rise out of Phil, and I don’t believe you’re just playing head games with me. So, what is it?”
“Maybe,” she said, “I actually mean it.”
“Bullshit,” said Jimmy. “We call it stubbing, but the police call it murder.”
“We’ve meddled with police before. And juries, if it comes to that.”
“You can’t be that stupid.”
“Not stupid. Scared.”
“Of Celeste?”
“Of Oskar.”
“Christ.” Jimmy looked at me. “How high have you gone so far?”
I was at 17,711, but it wasn’t working. I said, “I have no interest in stubbing you, Irina. But if there was a way to kill you, I’d do it.”
She sniffed. “If that were possible,” she said, “none of us would be around by now. So, I take it you want to find a different solution?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then do it,” she snapped. “Come up with something. Celeste stubbed herself, which is entirely out of character. Oskar is stepping in the Salt, without the mediating influence of Celeste. Meanwhile, the nemones are on the brink of either destroying themselves—and us—or creating a world where forty thousand years’ worth of problems might actually get solved. Theirs and ours. And this is when we lose
the most stable voice in Salt and replace her with the most unstable. And—”
“Oskar,” I said, “is not unstable.”
“He’s drunk the Kool-Aid. That makes him unstable.”
“Unless he’s right.”
“Do you think he’s right?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“Will you gamble humanity’s future on it?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “I didn’t think so. So there we are, and if that weren’t enough, we have a big, fat alpha-lock in the Garden. How many times in the last forty thousand years has that happened? Four times?”
“Twice,” said Jimmy quietly.
“Good luck convincing me that’s coincidence. So, yes, Phil. If we can solve this by stubbing Ren, then that’s what we do. You’ll be miserable for a hundred years, and hate me for a thousand, and I can deal with both of those consequences, unless you can find a better idea.”
She finally ran down, and no one said anything.
My cell phone rang. I answered it, and Ray said he was at the airport. I suggested he take a cab over, and he said he would.
Part of me wondered if Irina would still be alive when he got here.
NINE
We Can Do Better
Ren
I got in the elevator fervently visualizing Oskar standing by my desk, alone in my room, eating the last two sandwiches and letting himself out, but when I looked back down the hall, it was a uniform row of closed doors. I thought about marching back and throwing him out, but I was already late to meet Liam, so when the elevator doors slid open, I got in.
The mirrors on the four walls showed multiples of me, and it felt entirely too apt, an infinite regression of me’s, only not identical. Different since Phil drove the flaming stake between my eyes. Different since I found my Garden, with its sucking mud and swallowing reeds. Different since Phil kissed me, and I wanted him to, even if maybe it wasn’t me he wanted. Different again since Oskar tried to seduce or threaten or meddle with me, I still wasn’t sure which or in what combination. And it might have been different like Nana got in the end with husband, son and grandson all refracting in my little brother’s face if the elevator hadn’t stopped and opened up the real world of fake trees and artificial coins in synthetic slots.
Liam looked just as lifelike in the café, mercifully seated at a non-booth table, which was spread with what looked to be one of everything on the menu.
“Orgy?” I asked, seating myself opposite.
“Peace offering. I feel like crap about keeping you stranded here all weekend.”
“For crap thou art, and unto crap shalt thou return.” I gave Liam my brightest smile.
“Want tea, Ren?”
“Thanks, Kendra.”
Kendra gave Liam a long, sideways look.
“Kendra, this is my boss, Liam, from Phoenix.”
“Hi, Liam from Phoenix.” Kendra gave me a wink that shrugged away her suspicions I was two-timing Phil. I was still curious about that story after all.
“So you’ve been making friends?” Liam observed.
“Well, you did abandon me out here. What’s a girl to do?”
Liam assessed me with the squinty eyes of lurid curiosity.
“You’ve made a special friend,” he guessed.
“I didn’t,” I said without glancing up from my nibble feast.
“Then you’re pregnant.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but you’re glowing, and I’ve never seen anyone actually do that before. Emma just threw up.”
“I’m not glowing.”
“Yeah, you kind of are. I like it. It suits you. You met someone.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, you’re way too cheery for a sales meeting. Glum up, kiddo. Who is this guy?”
“Just a guy.”
“Oh, dear. A Vegas guy? Renee, this is serious. Worse than musicians.”
“You have no idea,” I said. “And on your head be it.”
He laughed and moved plates around to accommodate the eleven-by-seventeen booklet of documentation we would leave with Jorge after the pitch.
“Talk me through this one more time,” he said.
The book started by introducing a cast of archetypal RMMD patients, and even though I’d okayed the artwork myself, every one of the models looked wrong. The man we’d cast as the Doctor bore no resemblance to Jorge. The Patient was female, yes, but entirely too young and curvy to put him in mind of his aging and increasingly forgetful mother.
We went through the book, me explaining our ham-fisted attempts at persuading Jorge to spend extra time and more money than he’d planned on features he hadn’t asked for. But his own research had been clear. If RMMD was going to tailor a remote medical monitoring device to the growing population of Alzheimer’s patients, this was what doctors and patients wanted. Like the standard RMMD, it reported vital signs to medical staff and family members, but it added cognitive metrics to allow for the assessment of lucidity. And our proposal included the creation of an externalized memory component, with GPS-driven alerts, icons customizable with family photos, and meticulously designed auditory prompts. RMMD’s research into memory and music had made me cry twice while reading, and yet audio was nowhere in the project scope.
Audio would cost more and take longer, but every justification I’d built into the book looked to me like a blunted, blind stab at meddling. We’d made a pitch book of blatant manipulation. And Jorge would know that. He’d come to the meeting expecting us to try and nudge him into spending more money and taking more time to make a beautiful, streamlined, light-weight device that would save time, money and lives over the next five years, but cost him his quarterly goals now. Wherever he was, he was already working on the counterarguments.
Liam loved it, but the ants of shame were crawling on my arms. “We can do better, Liam.”
“No, this is great!”
“I can improve on it. A lot. I know I can. Give me a week to redo the book. Let’s show Jorge that we’re willing to do exactly what we’re asking him to. Sacrifice a deadline to quality. Eat the extra expense to do it right.”
“How much extra expense?”
“We need to reshoot all the Use Case scenario photos. And rewrite some of the copy. I can do it all myself, I just need time.”
“But he’s flying in tonight. We can’t just not show up for our own meeting.”
“Buy him a nice dinner,” I said. “Let him play poker. Tell him you need time to understand his needs and values. Stall.”
“Ren—” Something in the way he was trying to read my face reminded me of Phil, and the whole web of the Incrementalists lit up under my skin again. I took a deep breath and let it out, feeling just a taste of ocean air on my lips. I gave Liam a hint of a smile with a trace of worry in my brows. How had I learned to do that?
“You’re the boss, it’s your decision,” I said. You hired me because I’m good at this, remember? If you trust your own judgment, you should trust mine. It wasn’t meddling, but it also wasn’t how I would have played it a week ago. I would have still been explaining.
“Can you do the work from here? If Jorge doesn’t go for it, I want us ready to roll.”
“We’ll be ready whenever he is,” I said, and stood up to go.
“All right,” Liam grumbled. “But I want to meet this new guy of yours. He’s done something to you.”
I had to bite my lip the whole way out of the café to keep from laughing. Yes, Phil had done something to me. But so had Oskar and the Garden and Irina, and it buzzed and hummed and rattled me. And it made Liam and Jorge and Kendra feel far away and dull. I cared about RMMD. I still did, but I had bigger work waiting. And I had missed my new world as soon as I stepped outside it. But mostly I missed Phil, who centered it.
I wanted to follow the thread of him into the labyrinth of days, to discover each next turn with him, to watch the walls of our baffling history slip by under his fingers, and to fee
l those fingers on my skin.
I took the elevator back to my room. Oskar was gone, but except for his iPad, nothing else. Not even the sandwiches. I ate one wondering if my distrust of Oskar was residual Celeste blinding me to help I should heed. Was it stupid to trust Phil when he’d been ready to sacrifice me for Celeste? When he could love her that untamedly over that many years? Or was that the only reason I had for trusting him in the first place?
I rode the elevators and navigated the lobby to the taxi stand. I didn’t know what I’d find when I got to Phil’s, but I was going with my shampoo and my phone charger and my laptop, and I didn’t care how late the Incrementalists stayed and fought. I’d fight with them and outstay them until it was just the two of us.
Phil
If there’s anything we’re good at, it’s reading people; if there’s anyone we’re good at reading, it’s each other. Jimmy studied my face, then said, “Irina, let’s take a walk.”
She shrugged and said, “All right.”
I don’t think their walk took them far from the house, because about three-quarters of an hour later, when Ray knocked on the door, they were right behind him. Anyone else would have noticed that, perhaps, all was not well; Ray either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He said, “Where’s Oskar? He should be here.”
“He’ll be arriving shortly,” said Jimmy. “What have you learned?”
“What have you learned?” said Ray, his voice, as always, clipped and precise and almost without inflection. “You’re the grazing shaman. What did you find out that you haven’t seeded?”
I’d have taken the last bit as a reprimand, but Jimmy either knew Ray didn’t mean it that way, or didn’t care.
“This is the third time we’ve had an alpha-lock,” he said. “The first one was during the Dark Years, about six thousand years ago. The other was seven hundred years ago, more or less.”
“Causes and cures,” said Ray.
“Which would you like first, Ramon?”
Ray frowned, then scowled when he realized Jimmy was needling him. Jimmy said, “The second time was pure fluke. One in, I don’t know, millions. A pretty standard seed of a pretty standard piece of meddlework having to do with taxes for infrastructure in a small principality in India. The Focus changed his mind just as we were working, because a pretty girl asked him to; the Incrementalist considered the Why as he was seeding, and his Second turned out to be epileptic and had a temporal lobe seizure at that exact moment. The causal chain was short, the brain twisted it up, the Why became determinate.”
