Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “I didn’t do anything to you on purpose,” I said, forcing my voice not to shake. “And what I did do, what I can’t walk away from or force you to forgive me for, I did to keep you alive. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I made the choice I did.” The urge to tell him that he had been the one to suggest it was strong, but it wouldn’t change anything. He probably wouldn’t even believe me. He didn’t believe me now.

  “So why did you do it?” He sounded utterly miserable.

  Aw, hell. There was no way out of this. “Because you told me to.”

  Artie narrowed his eyes, taking a step closer to me. “I told you to mess with my memories and delete yourself from my life. I told you to do that.”

  “No, not exactly like that . . .” I could still see Artie the way he’d been in that moment, eyes shining, face an open book, standing in the white room of my mind, the equation howling around us. He’d loved me then. It had been one of the last moments when he’d loved me, and he was never going to love me again, and it broke the heart I didn’t have. “The equation the cuckoos use to move between dimensions was too big for me to control. It was going to consume me, and once it did, it was going to complete itself. I was going to go full Dark Phoenix.”

  He blinked and chuckled, apparently too surprised by the fact that the telepath who grew up in the modern media landscape would have heard of the X-Men to suppress his reaction. “Eat a sun, gotcha.”

  “Maybe,” I said, more solemnly. “I don’t think the equation would actually have pushed Earth’s sun into supernova, but it would certainly have devastated the planet, not just Iowa. You were the one who reminded me that the planet is where I keep everything I care about. My family and tomatoes and comic book stores and everything. It was very Crowley talking down Aziraphale before the apocalypse, and I was very impressed. Impressed enough to listen when you reminded me that SETI functions due to distributed computing.”

  “They use other processors to carry part of the load so that they don’t need storage facilities the size of New Mexico,” he said.

  “Exactly. The equation was winning because it was too big to fit inside my brain, but if I put it into all the minds around me and just kept hold of the pieces I needed to modify in order to change its function, I could handle it. I used the cuckoos as hard drives. Just slammed it in there and let it wipe them clean.” Except for Ingrid, who I had pumped the equation into like a weapon, and except for the kids, who had been innocent of their elders’ crimes and deserved to be protected. “But my brain is structured to hold things like this. I’m a telepath. I’m able to withstand certain strains, and every instar I’ve gone through has made me better at holding big, complicated equations like that one. I’m literally built for it. You’re not. Not even Mark—he’s a couple of instars behind me, development-wise. So when I pushed the pieces of the equation I still needed to offload into you, I tried to use the open spaces first, the places where your brain had storage capacity. And then, when that wasn’t enough, I wrapped up the core of your personality and moved it to the side where it wouldn’t be touched.” Saying it like that sounded so easy, like it had been one more thing on a carefully considered checklist, and not an act of desperation, performed in a panic. “And the equation just kept coming and coming and I was so scared, I was going to die or I was going to destroy the world, and either way I wasn’t going to be there for you anymore, and I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  I was crying. I wasn’t sure when that had started, and I wasn’t sure how to make it stop. Cuckoos cry just like humans, tears leaking from our eyes and snot running from our noses. We don’t get red eyes or faces, but that’s about the only upside I can see to the situation. I swiped ineffectively at my cheek with one hand and forced myself to keep going.

  “I didn’t want you to be sad that I was gone. If I could work the numbers fast enough to keep you alive, I didn’t want you to have to live with the fact that you couldn’t save me. And I was still shuffling things around as fast as they would go, I was still trying to run the numbers, and I guess my fear of dying and the fact that I was scared you were going to miss me too much to forgive yourself crashed together and made sure I got the worst parts of both. I didn’t die, and you don’t have to miss me.” One last gift from an equation that had to have felt itself being torn apart, twisted away from its original purpose. It had been made to do something terrible and wrong, but I had still perverted it in the basic sense of the word: I had refused to let it be what it wanted most to be, and it had been aware enough to take its revenge. “It erased me from your minds. I had everything you were in my hands, given willingly, and the equation took me away from you because it was the best way to punish me for killing it.”

  “Did you kill it?”

  “I think so. There are still fragments, trapped in the husked-out cuckoos, but if Mark’s right and I wiped the memory packets from the juvenile cuckoos, then it’s lost. We’d need . . .” How many cuckoos had been needed to serve as distributed storage for the pieces of the equation without being overwhelmed and dying horribly? How many cuckoos had been required to give me pieces of their minds to make their terrible creation whole and unleash it on the world where we’d all been born? That math was surprisingly easy. “We’d need at least two hundred cuckoos to have chosen staying on a doomed world over joining the ritual that would take them to a new one, and cuckoos are too self-interested to have made the choice to stay if they didn’t have to. I’d guess there might be a couple dozen, maybe, who weren’t able to get to Iowa fast enough, but that won’t be enough to resurrect it, or to fix what I destroyed. It’s dead.”

  “Good,” he said, with fierce, violent loathing. But for the first time, it wasn’t directed at me.

  I wiped at my cheeks again. “And back to what you asked me before, whether you really grew up mostly staying in your room or not, you did. Your parents started telling you to be careful around humans before I even met you, and by the time I came around, you knew that people sometimes liked you even when they didn’t want to, because of your pheromones. Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted taught you to be careful. They taught you to stay away from people. They taught Elsie, too; she just . . . didn’t listen.”

  “Elsie never listens,” said Artie, with a flicker of dark humor. “She likes it when people like her.”

  “You didn’t. Not if they were just liking your pheromones, and not you. You hated it when you made people like you—said it was forcing them to do something they didn’t want. By the time we were ten, you knew you didn’t want that.” But when we were ten, he’d been too young for his abilities to have reached their peak; he’d still been able to go out among humans without getting swarmed. Smiled at and occasionally bought ice cream by kindly grandparent types, but not swarmed. Lilu don’t have the protection of their pheromonal shields until they reach puberty; prior to that, they have to rely on their empathy, and the fact that most people find baby Lilu damned adorable. Artie hadn’t needed the lockdown until he was almost sixteen. That should have been plenty of time for him to form normal social bonds that could endure even after he’d been pulled out of public school for “distance learning.” Teenagers who want to keep seeing their friends are usually very good at finding ways to do so, even when the adults involved don’t want it to happen.

  I worried my lip briefly between my teeth. “I think . . . maybe . . . it was partially my fault. Not because it happens differently the way that I remember it, but because I was a factor for you in a way I wasn’t for Elsie.” He looked at me, thoughts radiating blank confusion. I took a deep breath. “When you were eleven, you got a Pac-Man frog.”

  “Trashcan, yes,” he said, tone dubious.

  “And he mostly liked to hang out in the moss in his tank or sleep in his water bowl when no one was handling him.” That frog had never really warmed to me because my body temperature was enough lower than a human’s to make me uninteresting. It�
��s tough, being a preteen girl with a crush on a boy and having even his pet frog reject your love.

  Or maybe the full sentence is “it’s tough, being a preteen girl.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Unless you gave him something to eat. As soon as there was food on offer, everything changed.” Artie had fed Trashcan giant Dubia roaches and thawed, previously frozen mice: Alex would never have allowed or tolerated live feeding, even if it had been a good idea with the colony around. No one had wanted him to get a taste for living rodents.

  Artie nodded, very slowly. “He would get active, he would strike, he would eat his meal and then be surly for hours, because even if he wasn’t hungry, there might be more food around.”

  “Exactly. Adding something new to the enclosure changed his behavior and changed the situation. I think I was maybe the mouse.”

  I could feel the confusion rolling off of him. I worried my lip again.

  “This might be easier if I just showed you, but I need to ask for your permission first.”

  “What show me, like, telepathically?” When I nodded, he laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Yeah, sure, show me. Why the hell not? You’ve already been rooting around inside my brain, and while you say you had permission then, I don’t remember it. May as well go another round.”

  “Thank you.” I let go of my wrist, allowing my arms to fall back to my sides, and ducked my chin, feeling the vitreous humor inside my eyes tingle as they lit up. “This won’t hurt,” I said, and reached.

  I was right.

  It didn’t hurt him.

  * * *

  Diving into the changed landscape of Artie’s mind was effortless. We’d been attuned to each other since childhood, locked into constant low-grade telepathic contact by handholding and naptimes and all the other little casual contacts inevitably initiated by children who enjoy each other’s company. I’d expected a little resistance, but I was still learning my new limits, and I slid into his thoughts as easily as a hot knife slides into butter.

  All around me were familiar events and experiences, and I was a gaping hole in every one of them. This close, I couldn’t help seeing what had been causing him so much pain, because some of these things didn’t make sense once you took me away. It wasn’t just the D&D game, although messing with Annie’s plans was bad enough, and she was probably going to hold that against me for the rest of time; it was family gatherings where I’d become overwhelmed by too many people thinking too many things and fled to the backyard, only for Artie to follow and comfort me; it was the family trip to Lowryland when we were seventeen, which he’d agreed to only after I promised to go wherever he went the whole time, even if it was back to the hotel. It was the time Annie had taken us all to Emerald City Comic-Con to confront a misbehaving siren, using my natural cuckoo cloaking capabilities to keep my incubus cousin safe in the crowds. It was everything. I’d flavored and informed everything.

  It would have been a sweet reminder of how much we’d always meant to each other, if not for the situation.

  I took another deep breath, centering and stabilizing myself in the shifting firmament of his mindscape, and froze the scene as I pulled his consciousness in my direction. There was a momentary pause, probably no longer than it took to blink, and he appeared beside me, looking exactly as he did in the “real” world, with the fun and recently discovered wrinkle that here, in a wholly mental world, I could read his face without pausing to interpret his thoughts, or questioning whether he was thinking “smile” as he actually frowned.

  He looked baffled. Not angry, which was a nice change, but utterly and completely out of his depth. He turned to look at me. “That’s my twelfth birthday,” he said, in an almost accusing tone. “No one wanted to come. My parents had to bribe my sister to get her to agree to sit down with the nerd.”

  “Elsie was having a phase.” Fourteen-year-old girls don’t often want to attend their little brothers’ birthday parties. They want to hang out with kids their own age, reveling in the assumed maturity of being newly-minted high school students. She and Alex had both been feeling very grown-up and mature that year, and had wanted nothing to do with the “babies” of the family, even though Artie, Verity, and I were all only two years behind.

  “It still sucked,” he said, sullenly. “No guests. No surprises. Nothing.”

  “Can I show you how I remember it?” How it had really happened, unless my ability to rewrite memories extended to rewriting reality itself, which it didn’t. It couldn’t. If the equation had carried that much power, the cuckoos would have been able to move between worlds without destroying everything they left in their wake, and while they were selfish enough to ruin things just because they didn’t want them anymore, they were also smart enough to have wanted to preserve familiar worlds for them to plunder.

  Also, if I had rewritten reality, I’d have a heartbeat, and I wouldn’t be reading anybody’s mind. All I’d ever wanted was to be human, and no matter how much I sometimes hated myself, I would still have granted my own wish.

  Artie hesitated. The question scared him. So much of who he thought he was in this moment depended on a childhood of unloved isolation, of being the odd man out in a family of people who were addicted to connection—who sought it to such a degree that everyone who left to go out into the world and become an adult came back with new people they called family, new people they were so connected to that they wouldn’t dream of letting them go.

  “Yes,” he said finally.

  “Thank you.”

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, everything was different, and everything was the same.

  My excision from Artie’s memories hadn’t been precise, thankfully; if I’d been doing it on purpose, building him a new reality the way I had for the Covenant team that had discovered Dominic and Verity in New York, he wouldn’t have been left with a vague, nagging sense of loss, and so wouldn’t have been able to believe me when I said there was something missing. He would have been someone new, someone who didn’t need me. My own sloppiness was the only reason I might possibly be able to pull this off.

  Artie’s younger self was sitting at the dining room table, a chipped old oak thing that I was pretty sure Aunt Jane had rescued from the side of the road somewhere. Certainly, no one had ever paid for it. It was old without becoming antique, scarred, and marked up from decades of family dinners with a family that thought knives were tool, weapon, toy, and friendly companion, all at the same time. There was a large sheet cake at one end, next to a plate of cupcakes with surprisingly red frosting, like someone had gotten a little overenthusiastic with the strawberry flavoring.

  They weren’t strawberry. They never were at Artie’s parties, because he loved chocolate like a normal kid did, and I . . . didn’t.

  The doorbell rang and he was out of his seat, moving fast. Beside me in the present, in the mist of his own mind, Artie frowned.

  “I don’t remember any deliveries during the party.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve got it, Mom!” he yelled, as Aunt Jane appeared in the kitchen doorway, smiling the amused, indulgent smile of a mother watching her son excited about his first love. She was a beautiful woman. I’d only seen her from this angle in other people’s memories, as someone with such an expressive face. She looked a lot like her mother, something she probably wouldn’t have appreciated hearing. The relationship between Aunt Jane and Grandma Alice is famously strained, and she’s thrown Grandma out of the house a few times.

  “How are you showing me this? You weren’t there.”

  “Not yet, but this party was such a good time, and it was so nice to spend a day with you, that I got the memories from you and Uncle Ted and Aunt Jane years ago, and used them to build a recreation of what happened. I can’t do this with everything. This isn’t how I give your memories back, because I didn’t have room in my head for all of me and a
ll of you. But I got enough to make a full picture here.” I wasn’t telling him the full truth. The party had been fun, but lots of things had been fun, over the years, and I hadn’t collected the memories I’d need to make them into tableaus I could revisit. This party had been important. Maybe for both of us.

  The younger version of Artie reached the door and yanked it open, revealing me and Mom standing on the stoop. I was wearing what had been at the time my favorite blue dress, the one that almost matched the color of my eyes, and had an overstuffed backpack over one shoulder. Mom was holding a brightly-wrapped box with an enormous bow on top. She offered it to Artie, smiling the polite smile she had learned from the magazines, that I had learned from her.

  “Happy birthday, Arthur,” she said.

  “Thank you, Grandma,” he said, suddenly shy as he took the box. He couldn’t look directly at me, and watching him, I felt like my skin was two sizes too tight and there was no oxygen left in the world.

  This was the boy I’d deleted, the boy I’d wiped away with a careless choice during a crisis. This was the boy who had grown up to be the man who loved me. And except in memories like these, which were a little bit false because they were assembled from so many sources, I was never going to see him again.

  “I remember that box,” the real Artie said abruptly. “Grandma got me a chemistry set.”

  “And a mix-your-own-perfume kit,” I said. “I picked that out.”

  “No, I didn’t get that for my birthday; that’s a girl’s toy, and no one would have brought me that for my twelfth birthday.” He was starting to sound uneasy, like he wasn’t completely sure of what he was saying. “I don’t remember where I got that.”

  “But you do remember having it,” I pressed.

  “Yes, I used it all through high school. But it’s not because you bought it for me. It was probably something of Elsie’s that she got tired of when she started ordering from those weird little online boutique places.” He scrunched his face and shook his head, trying to deny the logic of what I was saying, because for him, it was barely any logic at all. He didn’t want it to be.