by John Barnes
“Good-looking or conceited?”
“Yes.”
She tickled me, so I had to try to tickle back, but she broke and ran. When I finally caught her belt after two blocks of mad pursuit, she said, “Truce!”
“Typical diplomat. Now she wants a truce.”
“Did you skip that part in training, Giraut, or were you just a little slow?”
I kissed her, long and slowly and tenderly. “All right,” I said, “I’m sorry I got so serious.”
She pressed her face to my chest. “No, don’t be. Can we be serious for just a second? Did you ever worry about the fact that some forms of UT are hereditary?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t know Mother was UT till after I was typed so I could wear Raimbaut’s psypyx, the second time. So I already knew I was G-8.”
She sighed. “Tomorrow while you’re recording, I’ll be recorded. My first new psypyx since they developed typing. And I’m going to pay extra and get typed, too. I know it’s expensive, I know they can do it just as well after I’m dead, I know it doesn’t make any difference while I’m alive, but I want to settle the question.”
“As you wish, midons.”
“I love the way you say midons. I love being called that.”
She took my hand again. We stood just where the street began a steep dive to the front door of our rented house by the waterfront. No words, just her hand in mine. A few diamond stars shone in their ruby settings, out over Totzmare, and the waves out beyond the black rooftops glinted like dark blood.
At the steps to the house, I said, “You know, he doesn’t say anything about it, but I think Dad is just as sad as Mother is about her being UT. They had agreed decades before he died that the survivor would record-and-restart so they’d stay the same age.”
“That’s a lot of love, to decide to try to share another lifetime.”
“It probably warped me permanently that my parents were the two most in-love people I have ever known.”
“I’m getting tested tomorrow,” she said. “Not just recorded. Tested too. For sure.”
“All right.”
Her grip on my hand tightened. “Giraut?”
“Midons?”
“One of my sisters, and my mother, are UT. I’m really scared.”
7
In my earlier days I had not been a morning person. Something about the artistic temperament, whether it is a preference for the sort of drama that looks best in chiaroscuro, a fear of excess sanity and stability from too much sleep, or a passion to be unemployable in any regular job, drives the developing artist away from the morning and into the night. But in the morning, the poseurs and hangers-on and bohemians are still passed out, the light is clearer, the brain is empty of slights and errands, hormones are as in balance as they will ever be, and everybody—most of all one’s own nervous system—shuts up.
This morning was one of the best. I had a solid group of longtime studio musicians, and though some of them could certainly drink and talk and stay up late, they all cared more about the music in themselves than about their being in music.
I had really only intended this first day to be one of introducing the new stuff, but people got it quickly, and the afternoon turned into a long, happy jam session, the sort of day that made me wonder why I had ever been a spy (except of course that without the OSP’s funding and promotion of my career, no one off Wilson would ever have heard of me).
All the instrumentalists were my age or so, trained traditionally rather than via the new implant methods; I liked knowing that their skills had developed individually, out of nothing, rather than been copied and sampled and reshaped, though honestly I couldn’t hear any difference.
I had little choice about the vocalists; young voices are better for the kinds of harmonies I wanted to do, and no one much under the experiential age of thirty-five had trained by any other way than “practicing-in” direct-to-brain downloads.
I was surprised at how well Occitan musicians connected to the Ix Cycle, but at the lunch break I learned that we had three Ixists among the musicians. One of them was our cellist, Azalais de Mont-Belh, an iron-haired strong-featured woman with a knack for making just the joke that would break tension but not concentration. She seemed strangely familiar, but I didn’t quite want to ask if she was someone I had forgotten, so when she sat down next to me at lunch break, I talked with her, instead, about why Occitan musicians had converted to Ixism in such large numbers.
“Well,” she said, “my answer might be that it was true, but an explanation for a nonbeliever might be that many of us are very attracted to Ix’s commands from his first teaching sermon. Conquer only within, sacrifice the people within that you chose not to be. Exclude nothing, bring all things in. Cease the pretense of belief. Allow what is true for you now to retreat into memory. Those are commands that come very naturally to an artist.”
The commands she was reciting were not exactly the words as I had first heard them, in a tiny dark room in the heart of a great stone pyramid that was now part of a thick cap of black glass covering a mountaintop where a city had stood, on a nolonger-inhabited planet whose atmosphere was probably reverting to the same foul chemical soup it had been before terraforming. I was the only living witness to what had been said in that dark little room on Briand, and I had no desire to stir up trouble by contradicting the people who thought it mattered.
“You can see,” she went on, “how those commands sound to the artist. They’re what we always do, if we’re any good—they’re what I do in my own composing.”
Ix had been trying to plant pacifism, tolerance, and philosophic realism in a culture that needed them desperately; as far as I knew he’d never had a moment’s interest in the arts, and almost all the bas-relief of hieroglyphic poetry that covered every surface of Yaxkintulum had been either copied from old Maya texts, or generated by aintellects.
I realized Azalais was staring at me strangely. “You did hear him speak those words?”
I was distracted by the way she was playing with her hands, rolling them around each other like seals in an orgy. Who did that remind me of? Well, later—“I heard him speak words very like them.”
Azalais nodded thoughtfully; she had been waiting for a profound thought while I tried to remember who I knew who moved her hands like that. Clearly I was still expected to say something. But Ix had been a practical politician trying to create a grassroots movement to get his people out of an impasse generations in the making. I did not believe that he had held any intention of offering spiritual advice to an artist of another culture fifteen stanyears in his future. “I think he would say his commands were meant to be useful to those who listened.”
That seemed to please her very much. Perhaps Ix might have approved.
We worked late; I chose to walk the two kilometers home, to clear my mind and get mentally away from work.
I had concentrated so much on my memories of Yaxkintulum, with its welding arc point of a sun, angular scribble of inscription-covered walls around broad echoing plazas, ferocious gravity and heat, and deep indigo sky, that I was refreshed by the harmonious classic curves of Noupeitau, under low glowing pink nimbus, with a gentle drizzle falling. I drank in every moist molecule.
Soggy from that walk, I stripped off my clothes into the chamberlain’s hamper, told it to clean and press them, put on a robe, and went upstairs.
The sight of Paxa curled on the bed, hugging her knees to her chest, could not have hurt more if she had been dead.
I sat down next to her, my back just touching hers, and brushed her cheek with my fingers. “You’re UT?”
She stayed rigid. “Yes.”
I rested one hand lightly on her neck, palm pressing just enough to let her know I was there, fingers stroking her jaw through her soft gold-blonde hair. The last daylight stole away from the high windows far above the bed. The noise of the street segued from people going home, into a late-tea and visiting-with-family lull, and then into the noisy chaos of pe
ople going out for cabaret and late supper.
I sat beside Paxa, or held her, or just kept a hand on her shoulder or back, shifting position now and then. Sometimes she would squeeze my hand, or pull it around to rub her face on it. Darkness wrapped us.
She was holding my left hand tightly in both of hers. It had been playing all day and was tired and sore, but I didn’t protest.
I felt her soft moist exhalation against my palm and fingertips. “I’ve already sent Margaret my resignation from the OSP, with a note explaining why. No more avoidable danger for me, and I was never a ‘brain’ agent—all I’m good at is kicking down doors, blowing things up, and jumping off roofs.” She squeezed my hand. “I’m going to miss you so.”
“We don’t have to—”
“Are you going to leave the OSP, Giraut? I can’t imagine that. And I can’t stay in it. My things are already packed, and I’ll be springing back to Hedonia in just a few hours.
“When I get there, I’ll be going into accelerated grieving; I’m not going to spend four stanyears being depressed, the way I did after Piranesi died. I don’t have the time to spend. But I will keep my new psypyx; whenever they can revive me, even if it’s not till the end of next century, I want to remember my time with you.” She looked up at me; in the dark I could not make out her expression. “Now, we are both naked, and I think we should make love, and cuddle and reminisce, before I go. After that I think it will only be harder if we com each other or write. Promise me something?”
“Anything, midons.”
“Promise me you’ll praise the household robots and aintellects often, and not punish them harshly, especially not for honest mistakes. They’re all so afraid to be left alone with you.”
I opened my mouth to object and she grabbed my head and kissed me. I decided that I had promised.
Three hours later, Paxa’s soft cheek brushed against mine, her scented hair gliding over my bare shoulder. She kissed me, firmly, and walked into the gray glow.
The springer field turned off; I stood facing a black metal plate on the wall.
On my way back to bed, I asked my personal-manager aintellect to notify the musicians that tomorrow’s sessions were canceled, and made sure I thanked it.
The bed still smelled of Paxa. I told the robots to change the bed and clean everything. I thanked them, too. Perhaps this could just become a meaningless habit.
I ordered coffee in the bathroom, showered, shaved, and dressed. I would take a brisk walk through the sleeping city, to the studio, and throw myself into the absorbing job of mixing and arranging.
The com chimed and announced that Margaret wanted to talk with me. “I’ll take it in the main room,” I said, trotting down the stairs. “Uh, thank you.”
My ex-wife’s face, several times life-size, waited for me on one wall.
“Margaret.”
“Giraut, I had to know if you were all right.”
“As all right as I can—” For some reason, I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I was drenching my face with tears. Really, I hadn’t thought … I just needed to ask Margaret for a moment to compose myself, that was it. I rubbed my face hard with the heels of my hands and looked up at the screen.
Margaret had hung up.
The bedroom springer whistled—override emergency entry; someone outside the house had taken command of it. I had lunged halfway across the room toward my nearest weapons cache before I heard Margaret heaving and gagging. Noble intentions had not excused her from springer sickness.
I grabbed two towels from the rack in the bathroom and went up. She accepted a towel and scoured at her face as I mopped mine.
After another deep breath, she hugged me. “Rank hath its privilege,” she said. “I was worried about you and I decided that it was worth the taxpayers paying very-short-notice prices, for enough energy to melt a small mountain, so I could spring here.”
“There’s not much you can do,” I said. “She’s gone. And I have to admit her reasons make sense.”
She nodded. “For what it’s worth, I agree with them, Giraut, I never got along with her nor she with me, but I never doubted her common sense. She was one reason why I didn’t worry about you as much as I otherwise would have.” She sighed and looked down at her clenched fists in her lap. “But although I’m more than willing to support you through this grief, I’m here for another reason too. There’s something I owe you, and if I don’t give it to you now, I’ll never have the nerve. I remember how betrayed you felt when you learned about the secrets Shan and I kept from you. I have kept one small secret, and now I can tell you, and I feel you have the right to say I was wrong to keep it secret.”
My blood froze. When we had been married, Shan had used Margaret’s affair with a politically unreliable coworker to spy on opposition groups on Briand, and of course neither of them had told me. Margaret knew me well enough to know that the mere mention of secrets, kept by her—or by my boss, which she was—would be terrifying. “Tell me.”
“I knew this day was coming,” Margaret said quietly, “for ten stanyears. Agents don’t know their mind-body type unless they ask for it and pay for it. But we always do; we have access and whenever an agent records a new psypyx, we type them. And we save a backup, concealed from the agent, of every psypyx recording. We started doing that when we lost Piranesi and Shan, both, permanently. So I knew she was UT, Giraut.”
I stared at her. “And you didn’t tell her?”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Well, of course,” I said, losing my temper. “She would never have spent the last fifteen stanyears with me, doing all this wild, dangerous OSP stuff.”
“And that would have been good? Would you really rather she hadn’t? Would she? You know she decided to keep the memory.”
“She has a name.”
“Yes, Paxa does. I’m sorry if I don’t say it often enough for you. Don’t avoid my question. Would you have been better off without her love and company? Would she have been better off sitting on the beach in Hedonia, playing very safe sports? Would you like to have missed each other, or do you wish that right now you were sitting down to a game of gin rummy with her? Tell me you’d rather have any of that happen, and go ahead and hate me if you want. But I couldn’t ask your permission, and I knew and had worked with both of you, so I picked the pathway I thought would give you both a chance for some happiness, which god knows you were both entitled to. So I kept my mouth shut about Paxa’s condition. That’s the secret I kept from you, hate me for it or not, and that’s why.”
I stared at Margaret. There are times when it’s impossible to argue with my ex-wife. “I—all right, it worked out. But you couldn’t know—no one could—that it would work out.”
Margaret shrugged but her eyes stayed locked with mine. “You have just defined what I hate about my job. But making decisions when I can’t know how they will come out—that is my job. I know you always thought I was jealous of her.” She got the kind of odd little smile people get at a funeral when they think of a funny story about the dead person. “All right. I was. Even though I knew how foolish that was. But I also knew you two were good for each other, and that was more important, so as long as Paxa wasn’t looking at her psypyx recordings, I figured that was a vote for not knowing—and I didn’t tell her, or anyone.”
“And you are telling me now because—”
She wavered, just a little. “Because now it cannot cost you the best thing in your life anymore. Because now that the secret is out, you’re entitled to know everything. Because you have a right to know, and to confront me and be angry about it, if you want. Here I am, scream at me and spit in my face if that’s what you feel like. But—all those stanyears ago, I thought you had a right to some happiness with Paxa. So, then. You did have those fifteen stanyears. One, I’m glad you had them. Two, I’m so glad you didn’t find out because Paxa got killed, because this way was bad enough. And three, whether or not you ever thank me, you’re welcome to those years
with Paxa.”
She got up and pulled out her crash card for the springer, to return to her office on Earth. Before she could, I said, “Thank you. You’re right.”
I had had fifteen stanyears of mostly joys, ending in one bitter grief; the grief could have come at any time, or could have waited longer, and would not have been easier, or harder, to bear if I had known it was coming.
And it did not make the joy less real. “Can you stay a little while?” I asked, afraid my voice might sound like a little boy’s.
Until dawn, one of the most powerful people in human space took several hours off to watch me pace and listen to me rant, sometimes to her, sometimes at her. When I finally ran down, she steered me back upstairs, told me to send notice to the musicians to extend their break indefinitely, authorized the OSP to pay them for their idle days, and said, “Now go to bed and stay there, and don’t set any alarms.” She was right, as she so often was, so I only argued for about five minutes, before accepting a final hug, tumbling into bed, and sleeping like a dead man.
It was dark again when I opened my eyes; Noupeitau had a réverbère law to keep most light focused downward, and the city’s narrow streets were purposely dim and shadowy. In a garret bedroom, with the windows another two meters above me, most of the light was Wilson’s very dim red version of starlight. I rose, dressed, showered, and finally looked at the time—three o’clock, two hours till dawn.
I could adjust later. Meanwhile, here I was, wide awake with a day of nothing to do. I fried two eggs, dropped them onto a slice of black bread, dumped a spicy tomato sauce over it, poured melted sharp cheddar onto that, and ate it over the sink. I followed up with a pear and two big mugs of strong black coffee while I sat and made notes for the mix and edit of the first day’s work—with luck I could spend all day doing that. Of all the things you can become addicted to after a personal disaster, work is the only one that won’t immediately make your life worse.
