Perdigon

by Tom Caldwell

  “How old were you?” Jacob asked, although he could guess from his extant knowledge of Ezra’s romantic history. He was just embroidering the fantasy. “Twenty?”

  “Twenty-one. She was telling me about other guys she’d been with, because…because that’s what I asked about,” Ezra said, laughing at himself again. He was working Jacob over unceasingly through all this, with his long clever fingers. “Talking about unbuttoning a guy’s jeans with her teeth, rolling the condom on with her mouth, and I was like…could I do that if I practiced? Like a straight guy thinks, you know. So I practiced.”

  “Was it a cucumber?” Jacob teased him.

  “A zucchini. You’re good.” Ezra pulled his boxers a tiny bit lower to brush his lips over Jacob’s thigh. “This is how well I know that dick. I know I can tell you this story—and it’s the unsexiest story I know—and you’re still gonna beg me.”

  “I don’t know if that’s confirmed yet.”

  “You’re gonna ask me. You’ll say please.”

  Jacob shook his head, smiling. “Be that as it may. Stop dragging it out.”

  “Dragging what out?”

  “The story, don’t be impertinent. And I’ll tell you when you can put your mouth on me but not a second before, all right? Behave yourself. What about the zucchini?”

  Ezra’s mouth was technically not touching him, as any judge would agree, but Jacob could feel the humid warmth of his breath. “So. I was trying to teach myself the rolling-it-on-with-your-mouth trick. In the spirit of scientific inquiry. Like, is this a thing? Can it happen? Is it just a sexy urban legend? Gotta bust the myths. One second into the experiment,” said Ezra, his lips almost brushing Jacob’s skin, “startled by hearing Mum on the stairs, I inhaled the condom.”

  “Oh, Ezra.”

  “Yup.”

  “Were you okay?”

  “Radiology said it went down the esophagus, not the trachea. I was fine. It was the dumbest thing that had ever happened to me. The dumbest, gayest thing. I had to reconsider my whole life.”

  “So that swallowed condom put you directly on a path to my door, you’re saying.”

  “I mean I don’t believe in fate, but.”

  Jacob was still trying to win this little game, trying not to laugh, although he never succeeded. “Well, I’m not aroused at all by this story. I don’t know why you think that’d get to me.”

  “You love it.”

  “I do not, sir. I bid you good day.”

  Despite his anxieties, Ezra was stubborn and wilful, and in daily life he didn’t like to be refused. With Jacob, though, the conflict delighted him. Instantly he was up from his subservient position, grabbing Jacob by his coat lapels and pulling him down, hands on his shoulders. It had taken time for Ezra to learn that he had this kind of freedom, and he used to prefer the most explicit instructions from Jacob, careful as a minuet.

  “Ask me. Ask for it.”

  Jacob moaned a little, yearning. “Babe, c’mon…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just touch me, just touch me, please,” whispered Jacob, a flood of surrender.

  Ezra brought him back up with a touch, a virtuoso knocking his bow against the strings. This was what Jacob loved: when Ezra had the time and the space to get to know a subject, he learned every cubic millimeter of it. Once, he’d been a confused college dropout swallowing condoms due to an overactive startle reflex, and now he’d learned how to make Jacob weak in the knees.

  Jacob had taught him.

  “My boy,” Jacob whispered aimlessly, pressed back against the side of the truck with his hands in Ezra’s hair. Ezra’s mobile, expressive mouth and chapped, bitten lips. “My boy.”

  Outside the open doors of the truck, the aurora seemed to make a sound, which wasn’t the wind. Like radio static, maybe, or something rustling in dry leaves, a whisper raising the hairs on the back of your neck. Neither close nor distant, crackling in the cold air. The frogs were singing in the marshes.

  Loose-limbed and sweaty, Jacob was working Ezra over with sensible tenderness, which was secretly the way Ezra loved to be touched. Fearlessly, without surprise or hesitation, and with patient expertise, as if Jacob were an electrician working on some dangerous piece of wiring.

  —Am I ever…

  —What?

  —Like, too much. For you. Too much for you.

  —No. You’re exactly enough.

  Maybe that was just pillow-talk; maybe they really were too much for each other. Sometimes it felt like that. But Jacob had promised himself that whatever happened, he wouldn’t be the one who ran away. Not from this. Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds. Jacob had put that line in his wedding vows.

  (Ezra seemingly took no notice, but two years later quoted it back to him, unprompted, on an anniversary card.)

  Afterward, lying with his head in Jacob’s lap, Ezra disappeared mentally for a few minutes, watching the lights but not seeing them. His breathing was steady, without that factory-piston hiss that came with the seizures.

  At last he blinked and said, “I’ve read about that noise, the crackle in the sky.”

  “Is it the aurora? Or is something down here causing it?”

  “Something up there. There’s…” Ezra made one of his gestures at the invisible, his hands describing the shape of something no one else could see. “A layer of trapped heat in the atmosphere. Like a lid. Negative charge below, positive charge above. The geomagnetic storm of the aurora breaks through the lid and releases the charge. Crackle. Like static.”

  “Mm.” Jacob was trying to remember all this so that he could tell the kids when they saw it. Ezra would have loved to ramble on about space weather and physics to his audience of half-interested grade schoolers, but he wasn’t always around. Or aware. “Ezra?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are we gonna be okay?”

  It was a question that Ezra answered for a living and he had every right (and perhaps every reason) to refuse to answer, as Jacob knew. The future was complicated, and trying to alter it was a heavy responsibility. Ezra often preferred silence, and for a moment it seemed like that was all the answer he would give. But then he nodded, turning his head in towards Jacob’s hand, seeking his touch. “Yeah. Yes. I think so. I’ll tell you more in the morning.”

  Chapter 3

  Made to Serve the Master

  In the beginning, Ezra used to work for Bija. As a coder. Boring. He was happy just to have a job at all—college had wrecked his fragile mental equilibrium, and after dropping out, he’d spent six months back home in Butler Territory before venturing out west again to Portland. Determined to achieve his Lilliputian goals: a job, a shared apartment, paying his debts on time, the name-brand laundry detergent. Earth was probably the wrong place for him, so he was researching the cheaper colonies, without enthusiasm. Nephele and Leucothea were expensive. Anacreon was full of right-wing lunatics. Phrixus was ugly. Nothing appealed.

  On his last day at work, he was trying to open a tub of coleslaw in the cafeteria at Bija HQ. Ezra was always the only one in a given group of people who liked coleslaw, so he had two donated tubs of it on his tray, both ensconced in unbreachable plastic containers with non-intuitive lids. An arrow was imprinted in the plastic, its direction obscure. Up? Outward? Suppose he turned it—did it point left?

  He could sense that he was about to have a vinegary accident; no need for a Nostradamus on that question. But he was also hungry, and had ten minutes left to eat, so something had to give. He was working at the plastic lid with his fork, carefully, when his phone vibrated in his pocket. A spurt of vinegar into his lap.

  Ezra gave up and checked his phone. A text from…uh-oh.

  Hi Ezra, could you come upstairs for a quick chat with Magnus? About your music app. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.

  “My ass I’m not,” he mumbled to himself while thumbing out a subservient reply, accepting the AI’s suggested wording. Be there right away, thanks.

  Upstairs
. Twelve floors up. Ezra spent the elevator ride attempting to preview the near future, but couldn’t get a fix on it. Not enough control of the stimulus. All he had instead was anxiety, the least accurate form of precognition.

  I’m fired, I’m fired, I have to go back to Butler…

  Ezra used to have a Lego castle as a kid, which was never dismantled: he kept adding to it, like the Winchester widow, more and more towers and dungeons and keeps, until it no longer fit in his bedroom. His parents helped him move it in pieces to the screened back porch, where its plastic bricks gradually began to fade in the sun. Ezra periodically lost interest in it, but every time he got back to work on the place, his father would make a flag out of Post-Its and attach it to the dowel flagpole out front: “The king has returned from his travels abroad, time to fly the banners…”

  Bija’s HQ was similarly festive when Magnus Vollan came back to Earth to inhabit his own castle. Temple of Magnus. Big streetsweeper droids cruised the streets of the campus, better food trucks appeared at lunchtime, long-dead office plants and dirty mugs disappeared from desks. A cleaner bot was humming importantly down the hall ahead of Ezra, and when he reached his destination, it spun around and beeped, offended, before turning to vacuum up behind him.

  He caught the admin assistant’s attention, apologetic. “Hi, I’m Ezra Barany, I just got a text from—”

  “Yes, Mr. Barany, go right in,” she said, giving him a toothpaste-commercial smile. “He’s expecting you.”

  She let him into the august space of Magnus Vollan’s office. It was like climbing into a big reptile terrarium, nothing but glass on every side and the unforgiving glare of the sun. Atmo controls were set cool, though. Ezra couldn’t blame his damp shirt on that.

  The room was empty, and the vertiginous views of the city made Ezra vaguely sick, so he sat down on one of the expensive black leather chairs in front of the desk.

  I’m fired, why isn’t he here yet, I’m fired, I have to go back to Butler and move back in with Mum and Dad, they don’t even have the finished basement anymore, I’ll be in the spare room of a retirement villa with two British expat professors, that’s fucking horrific…

  A side door slid open and Magnus Vollan strolled in, flanked by acolytes. Magnus was about medium handsome, in a conventional way: tall, blond, Scandinavian, forgettable. But the money helped. Dermatologists worked on his bad skin, personal trainers worked on his willowy body, cosmetic dentists applied their white tesserae to his smile. Whenever Ezra saw older pictures of Magnus in his youth, before his body had become a public project, the guy seemed more likeable. Homely, flat-footed, ambitious, endearing.

  “Ezra, thank you for taking some time out to come speak with me. Give us thirty minutes alone, please,” Magnus said to his entourage. They obeyed, and left the room. “Did someone offer you water? Anything to eat?”

  Ezra had risen from his seat like a good subject, and was trying to subtly wipe his clammy palms somewhere. He dreaded handshakes. Touching other people was a good way to get shocked with invasive visions of their worldlines. “Um, no, but I was just at lunch. Thank you.”

  Magnus didn’t offer a handshake right away, drifting over to a credenza by a pillar, where some decorative-looking food was set out. “Are you sure? Here we have…let’s see, cheese, these are small pastries—no? Water? Coffee?”

  Maybe he won’t shake hands. Score. Wait, is it bad to refuse this stuff? Am I supposed to say yes? Ezra decided that he was. “Uh, yeah, um, just water. Is good, thank you.”

  Magnus got a bottle of water out of the minifridge, some European brand that Ezra had never heard of. When he handed over the bottle (glass, slick with condensation, terrible choice for such an inept guest), he surprised Ezra not with a handshake but with an overfamiliar forearm grab.

  The vision hit Ezra hard, his ears ringing as if from a blow to the head. It offered no insight into anything: he saw a plastic bucket of cut flowers, and some ugly flat indigo carpeting scattered with pastry crumbs, maybe at a spaceport. Difficult to identify. Meaningless, but loud enough to drown out everything else.

  “Is that right?”

  “Sorry,” said Ezra, focusing on Magnus again in the present. “I missed that, sorry. Could you repeat the question?”

  “Your surname, is it pronounced like Barony?”

  “Closer to Brawny, actually.”

  “Interesting. You’re from Indianapolis?”

  That was a matter of some dispute. “I’m from Butler,” Ezra corrected him, trying not to fidget with the damp bottle of fizzy water. “Indianapolis claims the territory, but they haven’t taken it back from us yet.”

  “I see. Is it very violent?”

  Ezra didn’t know how to quantify that, so he said, “Sometimes. Not that often. I mean I’ve never been in…obviously, I guess…”

  “Good, good.” Magnus seemed to decide that this was enough small talk. “One of my very gifted executives spoke with you not long ago. Jake Ross, great kid. and he tells me that you’ve built an exciting music app in your spare time.”

  “Oh.” Ezra had met Jacob Roth a month ago, an event with several known precursors and repercussions, but this was one he hadn’t foreseen. “What?”

  Magnus raised an eyebrow. “Should I repeat myself again?”

  “No, but…” Magnus couldn’t be interested in the app, of all things. Ezra wasn’t ready yet to switch into optimism mode. He had to keep assuming that he was about to lose his job. It’s a trick, don’t get cocky. “Right, yeah, it predicts how well a given pop song will chart, based on—”

  “Based on a number of factors that don’t interest me,” Magnus interrupted, swivelling his chair to the side so that he could cross his legs. “The algorithms seem very rudimentary. The nut I couldn’t crack was the predicted value widget.”

  “Oh yeah, um, I’m very proud of it.”

  “As you should be. It’s the only piece of the app that does what it’s meant to do. Tell me, the long alphanumeric string at the initialisation—it’s named Taltos in the code. You call it repeatedly. What does it mean?”

  “Uh…” Ezra wondered if he could ask for a lawyer. “I don’t…think I should say.”

  “Of course,” said Magnus, smiling. He held up his tablet. “But play a game with me. If I look at the code and I can guess—will you tell me if I’m right?”

  “I don’t—what do you think it means?”

  Magnus scrolled through the code on his tablet screen. “Well, it certainly looks like your widget is actually just invoking some mysterious database to produce its predictions. If I enter the name of a song, your widget checks this Taltos database, retrieves a number, and feeds that back to the app as the number of streaming plays the song will rack up in a month’s time.”

  Ezra didn’t think he could reasonably deny that. “Uh-huh.”

  “But that doesn’t answer anything. How does the database know what will happen next month? Is that data being processed with some different app on another server?”

  “I really don’t think that I should…like, I have to think of my IP here,” said Ezra, shifting in his seat.

  “So, I haven’t guessed correctly.” Magnus looked back down at the tablet. “May I have another?”

  “If you want.”

  Magnus raised his voice slightly. “Lumen, play us the number one hit on the Commonwealth pop charts. —Normally, you see, I don’t listen to hits,” he told Ezra, as the song began to play. “But I’ve been paying more attention, ever since I saw this app. It really works, you know. That’s the only reason you’re in this office. Last month it told me: ‘Fabulously Rich,’ by Katell. I listened to it then. It’s dancey, whatever. Two weeks go by, it’s everywhere. Three weeks go by, my feed is full of jokes about it. There’s a dance. Stupid fad. I went to a wedding this weekend, Ezra. The DJ played ‘Fabulously Rich,’ by Katell. Packed dancefloor.”

  Ezra didn’t care for dance hits himself, but he shrugged. “It’s not bad.”

  �
�This isn’t just good taste, though. It isn’t even luck. You named a number. One month ago, your widget said ‘Fabulously Rich’ by Katell would hit 396,400 daily plays by today. It did. This held for every single prediction the widget made.”

  Magnus paused, but Ezra didn’t know what to say. “Uh, that’s good?”

  “It’s a little more than good.” Magnus held up the tablet, where he’d pulled up the streaming charts. “How did it know that? What on earth is in that database of yours? Yes, fine, that’s a question, not a guess. Here’s my guess: this isn’t code at all. It’s witchcraft.”

  Here we go. “Jacob Roth told you that.”

  “I do not need Jacob Roth to tell me how to read a piece of code, Mr. Barany,” said Magnus, turning in his chair to face Ezra again. “But he did report that you claim to have psychic abilities.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I claim to?” Ezra considered denying it, then decided that would just get Jacob in trouble. “Sure, I guess.”

  “Then do you just populate this database with numbers that you plucked straight from the aether?”

  “It’s a little more involved than that, but…”

  “But?”

  Ezra caved. “But I don’t know how to make it work independent from…well, from me,” he admitted. “Like, if I kicked the bucket next week, the app would only work for about six weeks after that. Then it would run out of data.”

  “Thank you. That’s very helpful,” said Magnus, setting his tablet back down on his desk with a click. “Well, in that case I don’t think I’m interested in buying it. But I am interested in you.”