Perdigon

by Tom Caldwell

  The operators dealt out the Zener cards, facedown, then turned them up one by one. Each had a simple ideogram: circle, square, star, waves, cross. “Which one is next?”

  Ezra didn’t hesitate, or even look up. “Waves.”

  “Correct. Which one is next?”

  “Cross.”

  “Correct. Which one is next?”

  “Circle.”

  “Correct. Which one is next?”

  It went on and on, a full brace of forty questions, but it was over soon: Ezra never struggled, and he never missed. Not a single one.

  But this didn’t prove precognition, necessarily. Remote viewing, maybe, an ability to see each card even when they were facedown in a shuffled deck. For the next round of tests, Ezra named the symbol first and then waited while a machine shuffled the deck three times.

  The machine whirred, and Ezra slid back in his chair, angling his chin up at the ceiling. Off-camera, Jacob’s voice: “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. Bored.”

  So that had been Ezra’s only comment on making history, at the time: fine, bored. Jacob knew better—that performance of elaborate unconcern was Ezra at his most flamboyant. He wasn’t even nervous, Jacob had said later to Roshan. That wasn’t guessing, it wasn’t luck. He knew.

  Roshan and Liz Murdoch were there in the archival footage too, and the camera did a dramatic Ken Burns pan across a photograph from one to the other. “But there were more changes in store for Taltos…”

  The camera lingered on Murdoch’s face; she was eyeing the lens coldly over one shoulder as she worked, her hair tied up in a messy dark bun, wrist deep in cables and clusters. The earliest model was known as Lilith, the presenter intoned. But today, we know the first true machine intelligence as Ahriman, the product of Liz Murdoch’s unique vision. Under Roshan Tehrani’s leadership, Ahriman Technologies is poised to take over the market from competitors like Bija’s Lumen device system. But the revolution started here at Taltos, where innovation is second nature—

  A scuffle in the hall. The doors of the projection room banged open, fluorescent light flooding in. It was Ezra, out of breath, lanyard askew, feet skidding on the tiles. “Jacob—Jesus fucking Christ, thank God—”

  Jacob’s stomach dropped. “Ezra, are you—”

  “No.” Ezra was drenched with sweat, chalky. He grabbed a fistful of Jacob’s shirt and pulled, trying to haul him out of his seat. “We have to go—you too,” he said to Shruti, looking like he’d forgotten her name. “Everyone has to go. Come on, come on, pull the fucking—no, shit, not the fire alarm. Everyone will try to go outside if we pull the fire alarm and that’ll make it worse—”

  “What’s going on, what’s happening?”

  “Now, please, now.” Ezra’s voice cracked, and his eyes were leaking tears. Despite his pallor, he was radiating heat, his fist still balled in Jacob’s shirt, pulling him toward the door. He grabbed Shruti’s hand too, forgetting his usual aversion to touching strangers skin-to-skin. “Everybody, right the fuck now, everybody goes to the basement.”

  Jacob reached the door and although he still didn’t know what was happening, suddenly he understood. The corridor was full of children. Ten or twelve kids from the day program were gathered in the hall. It’s the end of the world. This time, the prophecy was for real. They had to go underground.

  At the emergency stairwell, Ezra slammed his palms impatiently on the wall, yelling at the Lumen. “You can fucking notify people now, Magnus, you piece of shit—mass announcement, every room, no exceptions, interrupt all projections, streams, and broadcasts. Message: everyone get to the basement. Now. I don’t care what you’re doing, go.”

  The message echoed through the hallways and the other rooms, delivered in real time, in Ezra’s own crazed and breathless voice. Magnus’s voice spoke above it: “Just a reminder. Taltos Headquarters basement levels are not intended for—”

  “Don’t you give me any fire code bullshit right now. Loop announcement. Jacob, please go, please go as far down as you can get,” Ezra begged him. “Kids, follow Jacob, he’s…tall, you can…go, just go.”

  “What about you?” Jacob wasn’t letting go of Ezra, trying to physically drag him towards the stairwell. The Lumen’s announcement was echoing through the halls and he could hear the rising murmur of a frightened crowd. Someone pulled the fire alarm. Great. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be down there in a minute.”

  “But what is it, an earthquake, nukes, what?”

  “Yeah, just pretend one of those,” Ezra said, jerking away although he was moving unsteadily, listing to one side. “I have to get something.”

  “Ezra, no,” Jacob said, wild now, seeing what kind of grief was about to befall him. “If you go, I’ll never see you again—”

  “No. I don’t die this way.” It was an icy, distant confidence that possessed Ezra sometimes, before which Jacob felt accidental and insignificant, and it wasn’t the last he wanted to see of his husband. But somewhere in the welter of panic, Jacob still felt relieved.

  Because now he could see that the big joke was over. This was the punchline. There was no comfort and there was no happy ending, not for him, and once again, Jacob Roth was running for his life. Happiness and safety were rare, and perishable, and he’d simply run out of time. Everything was back to normal.

  He let go of Ezra and began a headcount of the kids as they went past him, down the staircase. He knew their names, because there weren’t that many at this time of year. Most were still attending Urban V. There were eleven children, and Shruti, who was only nineteen. They were more important than Ezra, and they were much, much more important than Jacob.

  Three minutes later, hurrying down a cement corridor in Taltos’ underground parking lot, everyone felt the impact.

  The first rumble and shudder made Jacob think of minor earthquakes back in California, but thirty seconds later there was another one and it was bigger, not smaller.

  Hundreds of car alarms went off, the cars bouncing and skittering on their tires, shaken around like toys. Jacob and the kids were behind a cement barrier, and he was huddled against the wall with his arms around everyone he could reach, braced for it. “Everyone curl up in a ball like this, protect your heads, that’s good…”

  Somewhere close by he could hear the crashing of concrete falling apart. Screaming. If the structure wouldn’t hold then they’d die, plain and simple. Buried alive.

  The alarms were blaring, but the planet was still. The youngest kid was wailing, lodged somewhere under Jacob’s left armpit, but the others were waiting speechless for whatever was coming next. Someone had wet their pants; Jacob didn’t blame them.

  Ten feet above them, he heard the metal door bang open on the upper ramp, and then there was the familiar sound of Ezra’s stride. “Jacob!”

  “Here.” Jacob could hardly make himself heard above the car alarms, his throat dry and thick.

  Seconds later, there was a roar above-ground like a train passing close, and the ringing of glass shattering all over the compound.

  Ezra crawled to shelter with the kids under Jacob’s arms, all of them curled tight in this cement crevice of the parking garage. The lights flickered, and every car alarm went dead.

  “Ezra,” Jacob murmured in the close space, “what’s happening?”

  “A heavyweight cargoliner,” Ezra said. He swallowed. “Called the Handsome Lake. Crashed twenty miles from here, in the middle of West Bonaventure. There’s nothing left. Of anything.”

  He sounded nauseated, and Jacob felt it too. One of the older kids asked, “Shouldn’t we go somewhere?”

  Ezra answered first. “No. Don’t move.”

  “We have to get these kids to their parents,” said Jacob.

  “The tunnels are two minutes from caving in,” Ezra said flatly. “Some of them already have. They weren’t built to these specs. No survivors above this level. Anyone who’s not in the garage right now, you won’t see them.”

&nbs
p; “Ezra,” Jacob whispered. It was rare to get him to coat these pronouncements with even the smallest amount of tact. And Jacob knew that the only way you got through a disaster like this was with a little benign delusion. Or a lot of it. “Everyone’s going to be okay. We will be. Right?”

  Ezra licked his lips. He’d been crying, although Jacob could only tell from the sound of his breath. “Yeah. Of course we will. Of course.”

  Chapter 2

  Midrash

  No one could say much, the first night.

  There was no heat in the parking garage. Jacob, Ezra and the kids were bundled up in other people’s coats, just like the kids in the Narnia books. Jacob recounted the Narnia books for the kids from his own scrambled recollections, changing the parts he didn’t like. He could never have turned Queen Susan the Gentle away from Aslan’s Country.

  Every car in the parking lot was jolted from its original position and many of the windows were shattered, so Jacob and Ezra had crawled across the crumpled metal hoods and roofs to look for backseat treasure: coats, food, useful junk, crowbars and ice scrapers, maps, food, food, food.

  They ate crackers, breath mints, bruised bananas, warm sandwiches, cheese slices in plastic. And they slept.

  On the second night, Jacob ran out of Narnian recollections. He switched to real medieval history, a subject he’d always enjoyed as a kid. He told them this story at bedtime:

  “Perdigon was a troubadour from medieval France. He was the son of a poor fisherman, but he had talent and he made a life for himself. He started out as a jongleur, a minstrel who sang and did tricks. People were easily entertained back then. Just like we are now, with everything…the way it is. So Perdigon got to travel all over Europe. Compared with the normal lives of peasants, it was probably a sweet gig. He composed and performed for kings in France and Spain, and the kings gave him land, fancy clothes, a steady income. Unfortunately, Perdigon got the idea that this meant he could dabble in politics. He started to speak against the Cathars—have you kids learned about the Cathars yet? Océane has, okay. It wasn’t very interesting, I won’t bore you. Perdigon supported the Albigensian Crusade, and he managed to get the count of Toulouse excommunicated. It was a risky move. He used his musical talent as a tool for propaganda, and publicly humiliated one of the kings who used to be his patron. In the end, though, Perdigon’s rich friends abandoned him—or they died in the Crusade he’d been rooting for. Perdigon was left to the mercy of his enemies. His house and lands were confiscated, and he lost everything.”

  Julie, who was eight years old, lifted her head from her pile of coats. “How’d he get a planet named after him, then?”

  “Well, the planets in this system were discovered using a Belgian telescope that was nicknamed TRAPPIST. I think it’s an acronym for something, but I don’t remember what it stood for. But Trappists are a kind of Cistercian, and Cistercians are a kind of Benedictine, so the planets in this system are all named after famous Benedictines,” said Jacob. “Hélinand, Lydgate, Odo. Bonaventure was a Benedictine Pope too, and so was Urban V. And Perdigon did become a Benedictine after he lost all his money. He went to the last nobleman he knew of who still thought kindly of him, and begged to be allowed to join a monastery. The nobleman had pity on Perdigon, and let him take refuge in a Cistercian abbey called Silvabela, where he lived out the rest of his days.”

  “Silvabela would be a nicer name for a planet,” said Océane, the oldest girl after Shruti.

  “It was shortlisted, I think, but then scholars said Silvabela never actually existed,” said Jacob. “Perdigon was a real person, though, and he really did become a Cistercian.”

  “Why’d they lie about it, then?”

  Jacob didn’t know the answer to that offhand, and he had to improvise. “I don’t think they saw it that way, whoever wrote the story down. I think they gave Perdigon’s monastery a nice name so that people would understand that…that it was a happy ending, for him,” he said. “Silvabela means ‘lovely forest.’ He got to go someplace that was quiet and beautiful, a peaceful place, where he could be alone with his music. And he didn’t have to please anybody else. Except God, I guess,” Jacob added, yawning. He was exhausted. “Who knows if he ever did. Anyway. Goodnight, kids. Sweet dreams.”

  Jacob had asked the kids what their parents used to do for them before bed, and now he was careful not to copy anyone’s special ritual exactly; he wanted the kids to feel cared for, but he didn’t want it to seem like a cruel mockery. Parents weren’t replaceable.

  Nothing was replaceable, really.

  But he kissed on the forehead those who once had bedtime kisses on the cheek, and patted the hands of those who used to have shoulder-pats. There were eleven configurations of this and Jacob remembered each one. It was important.

  Still, it didn’t satisfy him to have told such an incomplete, rambling story to the kids. They deserved whatever closure they could get these days.

  The next night he put Ezra in charge. “Tell them a fairy tale.”

  “I don’t know any fairy tales,” Ezra demurred.

  “Sure you do. The company’s named after one, tell them about the Taltos.”

  So on the third night, Ezra told the story:

  “Okay, well…the táltos was a kind of Hungarian shaman, before Christianity. They stuck around for awhile afterward. They would go into trances to heal the sick or to see the future. So. I had a lot of trouble naming the company and this was the best I could come up with—I actually kind of hate it,” Ezra admitted, paying no attention to his underwhelmed audience. “I don’t like giving people the idea that this is some kind of mystical ability.”

  “Isn’t it?” said Shruti, sceptical. “Wasn’t that your point last week, when you were comparing yourself to Joan of Arc?”

  “I didn’t…look, that speech sucked, okay?” said Ezra, embarrassed. “Let me put it like this, I think at least some of the people we used to call mystics probably just had this neurological trait. Maybe including figures like the táltos. Especially because they were supposed to have minor birth defects or deformities, which tracks with the recent Oxford study on psionic latency,” he rambled on. “The táltos were born with teeth, or extra fingers or toes, or a caul.”

  “What’s a caul?” said Julie.

  “It’s an amniotic membrane. Some babies are born with it over their faces. Like a hood. People used to think it was spooky—they thought a lot of medical conditions were spooky. Like epilepsy, they used to call that the Sacred Disease, because they thought that when people had seizures it was because the god Apollo was talking to them. Hippocrates was one of the first—”

  “Tell them about Hippocrates instead,” said Jacob, who could tell that Ezra would have an easier time talking about science rather than fairy tales.

  “Okay, yeah. Hippocrates was a doctor in ancient Greece, he came from the island of Kos,” said Ezra, warming to his topic. “You older kids might have heard the term Hippocratic Oath, that comes from his school of medicine. All the doctors he taught had to swear an oath that they would never use their knowledge to hurt anybody else. First do no harm. And then there was some stuff about pessaries and kidney stones and abortions—the actual words of the oath are pretty outdated. Anyhow, Hippocrates was such a famous teacher that we don’t know if he even wrote all the books that have his name on them, because when ancient librarians found any kind of medical book they’d just say, ‘File it under H for Hippocrates!’ So this book on epilepsy, the Sacred Disease, might not have been his work. But we still call it Hippocratic. Whoever this doctor was, though, he really paid attention to the epileptic people he was studying. He noticed that kids would run to their mothers when they felt a seizure coming on, but adults would try to hide someplace alone. The traditional belief was that they knew Apollo was coming, but the Hippocratic doctor said the patients were just scared. Like, of course they were! It’s a scary condition! And it doesn’t help when people think you’re a freak. Or when they’re expecting magic a
nd prophecies from you, which—trust me, that’s just as bad. ‘Epilepsy doesn’t have anything to do with Apollo,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s not sacred, it’s just a disease.’”

  “What did he think caused it?” asked Raff.

  “Uh, he thought it was phlegm. So he was wrong too,” said Ezra. “But still, that’s a massive step forward. You gotta start somewhere.”

  “Well, then that’s the moral of the story, that works,” Jacob said, smiling. Ezra was trying. Willing to talk, engaging with the kids, once he let himself loosen up a little. Maybe he’d get better. “Goodnight, kids. Sweet dreams.”

  On the fourth night, Ezra had gone scavenging and Jacob was alone with the kids. They were all desperately hungry.

  Water was no problem—there were machines everywhere which Jacob nicknamed Miriam’s Wells, because one was never far away. You just had to push them over, a dangerous pursuit, but Jacob had been on the street as a teenager and knew the trick of it. He wouldn’t teach the kids, afraid that they might get crushed, but he trusted his own reflexes.

  “You’ve got each other for heat,” he told them. “Everybody stay close.”

  “I can’t sleep,” whispered the youngest, Laura.

  “Try having some more water, honey.” It would make her feel a little more full. “And just lie still. It’s good for your body to rest, even if you can’t sleep.”

  “Ezra’s not back yet.”

  “I know, sweetheart. But he will be.”

  Ezra was back in an hour, wild, with rain in his hair. Face flushed, he pressed cold palms to Jacob’s cheeks and kissed him. “I got outside,” he whispered, in the light of an employee’s emergency flashlight that they’d found in one of the abandoned cars. “Over the pile of rubble in the north tunnel, there’s a gap, you can squeeze through. We can, I mean. Anyone heavier than us would be fucked. I’ve never been so glad to be so scrawny. And then the stairs are clear, and you come out in the outdoor lot—more cars that we can loot. Half the buildings are down, just shells.”