Perdigon

by Tom Caldwell

  “Sir?”

  “This ability isn’t limited to Billboard charts, is it? You could predict other markets?”

  Ezra hated this question, because the answer was yes. “I don’t really want to.”

  “Very candid. But could you?” Magnus watched his face. “Yes. That’s the answer, isn’t it? I can tell. Yes.”

  “I really don’t want to.”

  “For a big enough salary, I’m sure you do want to. I can protect you from fraud charges, you know. Bija owns plenty of sovereign territory, no need to worry about legal issues. If you were to work for me. We would run a number of tests before making a formal offer, of course—please don’t take this discussion as a promise,” Magnus said formally. “But if you can do this with any degree of reliability? If you can predict numbers and not just vague impressions? Then I would love to hire you as my personal futurist and trendspotter. Then you could name your price.”

  Ezra leaned over to set his untouched bottle of water on the floor, since the end table was too far away. “That’s, um, that’s a great offer but I don’t want to waste any more of your time here…”

  “Ezra.” Magnus laughed and spread his hands. “Have you got some kind of objection to getting rich? What’s your problem? Is it a moral quandary? I have ethicists who’d be happy to talk with you, sort through your feelings on—”

  “No, no, really, I can’t.”

  “Don’t go yet. Please. Sit.” Magnus gestured at the chair. “Explain this to me, help me understand. Why can’t you do this? Why haven’t you done it before now?”

  Ezra sat, fidgeting with his watchband. “Um, I did it twice. Not the stock market—I took two trips to Vegas when I was in college. To pay for, well, for college. Both times I got asked to leave after about a hundred grand.”

  “That must have set you up nicely.”

  “I split it with my friend Marty, so we both covered our first two years. But after that no one would let me into a casino at all. I wouldn’t even get as far as the slot machines. I guess word got around. Someone in the industry must have doxed me. So, it wasn’t great as a long-term funding solution.”

  “Naturally. But if you were my futurist, you wouldn’t answer to anyone but me,” said Magnus. “Are you telling me you didn’t have fun? Making that kind of cash for no effort?”

  “Uh, it was a lot of work, actually,” said Ezra, more heated now. “I don’t just pull numbers out of my ass. That kind of precision takes incredible concentration, I got nosebleeds for a week—”

  Magnus hastened to smooth it over. “You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry to diminish your efforts. But still, it must have felt like an astounding success, yes? Why did you stop?”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Did you feel guilty?”

  “No. Sort of.”

  “How so?”

  Ezra took a long breath, and then said, “These abilities just…they don’t mix very well with our economic system.”

  “Do you mean you felt like you were cheating?”

  “It’s not a feeling, it is cheating. Casinos work on the assumption that nobody knows the future. Same with the stock market. That’s just a fact,” said Ezra. “And I don’t object to it out of love for the system. If I did what you’re asking me to do, Bija would treat the economy like—it would be like a fist through wet rice paper. Monopolies hurt consumers. People, in other words.”

  “We could use sustainable strategies. A conservative bid here, selling before the peak there. Maximising profit at every single step might have negative effects, but we don’t need to keep it dialled up that high.”

  “I don’t mean any offence, Mr. Vollan, but…” Ezra hesitated, trying to find a less inflammatory way of calling bullshit. “I’m sceptical.”

  “About?”

  “I just mean…like, if corporations were good at sustainability, we wouldn’t be trying to farm soybeans on colonies in the Kepler systems right now.”

  “Oh, you’re thinking of the bad old days, that’s not fair to me. But suppose I kept you out of the economic sphere,” said Magnus. “Maybe you wouldn’t predict the markets. But you could predict the effects of research. ‘Hey, this protein’s one to watch,’ or ‘this group looks good now but make sure to test for such-and-such.’ You could be a one-man longitudinal study. It would save Bija incredible amounts of time and money, and we’d be able to get the newest tech to the customer faster than ever.”

  That was a more tempting suggestion, but Ezra could sense danger there too. It still meant being Bija’s tool, and an uncomfortably valuable one at that. A valuable tool belonged in a locked cabinet.

  “Well?” said Magnus. “You don’t like that either? What do you want to do with this talent of yours, then?”

  Good question.

  “Can I have a few days to think about it?” said Ezra.

  Magnus inclined his head. “Take three. I’ll call you.”

  Ezra went home to his apartment, and dismantled the Lumen system there. Poured a whole cup of coffee over the CPU. Accident, he told his roommates. Sorry. I’ll pay for repairs next week. During that week, he ate nothing but delivery and never ventured outside. He took no calls and returned no messages.

  When he was sure that he had managed to lose his own job through pure neglect, he called Jacob Roth.

  “I want to start a biotech company.”

  Chapter 4

  You Owe the Utmost Reverence to a Child

  Next morning on Perdigon, it was raining, which Jacob pointed out was actually a good thing. They were riding on the bike path parallel to the highway, which was navigable but scattered with ejecta and debris. Both the bike path and the road were built on a narrow causeway that stretched out over the marsh, connecting the Taltos campus with St. Columban’s Abbey and eventually with Bonaventure. The wind rattled the papery reeds and the rain sluiced down.

  Everyone was encased in heavy reinforced NBC suits, charcoal-impregnated felt with nylon shells that whistled in the cold. The respirator attached to the headgear was annoying to use, so they only pulled it up over their mouths when the air started to taste foul, sulphurous, stinging their lips. The kids were swimming in material—they’d got the suits from the maintenance room in the parking garage, right next to the bike locker, and all were sized for burly adults of various genders. Laura, who was four, was swathed in an adult NBC smock with the sleeves pinned behind her, as if in a straitjacket. (It was just easier, Ezra had said.) She rode tucked into a child carrier seat on the back of Jacob’s bike.

  The great thing about rain (or so Jacob was calling out over his shoulder to the kids) was that despite the company’s promises of clarity in wet climates, the goggles immediately would fog up. You couldn’t see anything but the next three feet of the road, and everything else was a random arrangement of grey droplets on a grey field. Pedalling in the rain was a misery of heavy, wet clothes and skidding tires, which were also a good thing because they kept you focused on the present. “So really, everything’s going great.”

  The kids didn’t believe him.

  What everyone was trying not to look at were the piles of wrecked cars that had been hurled all over the highway. There were bodies. When they passed big wrecks with multiple cars piled up on the road, they all braked to a squeaky halt, shearing the puddles, and the Bonaventure kids would say Rest Eternal.

  The colony had originally been a Catholic settlement, and the kids didn’t have to consult each other about the right thing to say; the oldest, Océane, led by example. Shruti stopped with them but didn’t cross herself, being Hindu, and Jacob and Ezra (both nominally Jewish) stood astride their bikes in silence.

  rest eternal grant unto them o lord

  and let light perpetual shine upon them

  may their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed

  through the mercy of god rest in peace

  Ezra had his mask shrugged up over his head, the most practical alternative to
doffing one’s cap, and he said to Jacob, “Is there like…is there a Jewish version of this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jacob. “I’d look it up if I could. I don’t remember much from Mom’s funeral.”

  Ezra hadn’t been to many Jewish funerals himself; his grandparents had died long before he was born, while his parents were still spry in their senescence. He’d attended funerals of friends and acquaintances, though, people killed in clashes with the townies and megachurch militias of Indianapolis. Bad memories. But not as bad as Jacob’s.

  Slumping forward, Ezra rested his forearms on the handlebars of his bike. “I wish it actually helped.”

  “Well, it’s good for them to have a procedure that they follow,” said Jacob. “Makes life a little more predictable.”

  “Million-dollar slogan for Taltos right there,” Ezra said with a snort, sliding back onto his saddle as the kids crossed themselves again and climbed back on their bikes.

  The crater’s lip was visible at the next rise in the road, where Bonaventure’s compound used to be. Like Taltos, they’d had a geodesic dome that was shattered now, nothing but a frail, twisted birdcage of steel at the crater’s edge. Jacob could smell the scorched-pork odour of burnt human remains on the wind. He pulled his NBC headpiece back on and let the hissing respirator block out the worst of the stench.

  The abbey was close, and now they could all see that it was falling down. The square bell tower was still standing, sort of, but listing like a sinking ship. The main chapel seemed safe, if you weren’t going near the tower, but the refectory and the dormitories were nothing but piles of rubble around their load-bearing walls. The abbey’s farm of low-light solar panels had been tossed around in the field like a pile of broken ceiling tiles, but some of the roof-mounted panels were intact, so the ventilation systems ought to still be online.

  “Where’s the ansible?” Shruti asked Jacob as they were dismounting from the bikes. The rain was still lashing down, on the point of turning to wet snow. “The chapter-house is gone.”

  That was where an ansible would normally be, but the tech was old-fashioned by now. “They keep it in the museum at the back of the church.”

  “But it still works. Right?”

  “I don’t see why it wouldn’t. They don’t need satellite connections, and it only uses a tiny amount of battery power to backlight the screen. It can only connect with its paired device in Rome, because that’s how they work, but that should be enough.”

  “Nobody ever cares what happens to us out here,” Shruti said darkly, propping her bike against the twisted fence and helping George, the second-youngest, out of the child-seat. “We don’t belong to anybody. We’re not Earth citizens. We’re not making cash for anyone—you guys almost did, but we could barely keep the lights on sometimes. Farming garbage fish for pet food.”

  “We have investors but they’re…hands-off types,” said Jacob, holding Laura on his hip and making sure the other kids were steady on their feet. “Ennead might…”

  “Might just shrug and eat the loss,” Ezra supplied.

  “I don’t think Hannah’s like that. And Natalie wouldn’t let her.” Hannah Gwynn was CEO of Ennead Investments, and she’d always been dubious about Taltos. She’d only invested in them at the urging of Natalie Cope, her associate partner. Natalie believed in the tech, and more importantly, she liked Jacob and Ezra.

  “Well, Natalie won’t get to make that decision,” Ezra said, dragging his bike with him over the rough ground. Will toddled next to him with a tiny gloved fist wrapped in Ezra’s pant-leg. “Hannah’s going to look at the planet and see mass devastation. The scientific models would all tell her that everything on Perdigon was poorly constructed for seismic effects and huge air blasts. Hannah will guess mass casualties and she’ll be right. Major power plant smashed, no life support functions in the town, only a small generator still functional on the Taltos campus.” Ezra sounded like he was reading aloud from a report that the others couldn’t see. “Any reasonable person—and Hannah Gwynn is very reasonable—would look at that and assume no survivors. Or no survivors who could last long enough to be rescued.”

  “But she knows what you can do,” Jacob ventured. The path to the abbey church was sloppy with mud. “She must know that if there was any possibility of survival—”

  Ezra had seen something that morning that hadn’t made him happy, but he wouldn’t say what. It had put him in a pessimistic temper, at any rate. “Guys, like…okay. Look. I sent them—don’t get excited. I sent Hannah something right before the impact. That’s what I was doing when I told everyone to follow Jacob, I ran back to the office and texted her.”

  “Ezra—”

  “I said don’t get excited. I have no idea what she’s going to make of it, and even if she decides I’m not messing with her—and you know she doesn’t take me that seriously—she’ll want to investigate first. She won’t just send a ship on my say-so. All right? Period. It could take months.”

  Jacob respected Hannah, and he thought that Ezra did too. But he had to admit that this was probably the correct assessment. Taltos had been a promising but annoying investment, expensive and unsettling and slow to market. Ezra himself wasn’t always easy to understand or do business with, to put it mildly, and Hannah would be sensible to take an incoherent message from him with a grain of salt.

  “Well, still, Rome has networks of ships and colonies in this system already,” said Jacob hopefully. “Going to the Ignatius Mission on Nephele, or—the Oblates have Lacombe in Kepler-62. They’ll be able to move a lot faster to respond.”

  “That’d be nice,” said Ezra, prying the lock off the main doors.

  There were bodies inside—they could tell at once from the smell. Jacob sent the kids away from the doors, pulling his respirator back up, and Ezra followed.

  The church was dim and had no true windows, just antique panels of stained glass mounted on the walls. When Ezra flipped the light-switch they came to life, their colours vivid: Christ in red robes, the Virgin in blue, St. Patrick in green, golden haloes, grey-bearded prophets, resplendent angels holding armfuls of white lilies. Some panels had cracked under impact, but they would have all been blown to dust by the blast if the windows had been exposed to the elements.

  The monks hadn’t been so lucky. Twelve of them were huddled together in the lee of the altar, and a fine veil of snow was falling on their black robes from a hole in the roof. The carpet was soaked with blood. A massive piece of ejecta, steel from the Handsome Lake, had punched straight through a weather-weakened spot of the roof, and all had fallen in on the monks as they tried to take shelter.

  Jacob and Ezra dragged the bodies out to the cloister walk, one by one, and rolled up the bloody carpet. Neither of them could keep from whispering apologies to the dead men. We’re sorry, we’re so sorry, but you get it, right? Rest easy, we’re sorry…

  When it was finally safe to let the kids inside to warm up, Jacob took them to the sacristy, a little room off the sanctuary. It was almost untouched, like one of those houses in Pompeii where you could still see the lines of the knife in a loaf of bread. The closet overflowed with vestments in linen, silk, and satin; the air smelled of clean laundry, beeswax, pontifical incense, and boxes of cheap wine. Light streamed in faintly through a thick clerestory window covered in dust. It was quiet, and better still, it was a place where the kids would instinctively behave.

  “Okay, guys, settle down and take a few minutes,” said Jacob. “Don’t fight over the chairs, they’re for Océane and Raffael and Marcello and Etienne. And Shruti. Because they were pedalling and the rest of you were riding in the child seats, that’s why,” he added, heading off a protest. “They’re tired, so be nice. Ezra and I are going to check out the ansible.”

  At the rear of the church, past an oak partition, there was another, smaller chapel. It wasn’t in regular use and never had been, as far as Jacob could remember. Storage, really. Memorial plaques for forgotten benefactors hung here, an
d old altarpieces taken from demolished churches on Earth stood packed in insulated cardboard frames, leaning against the back wall. The colony used to have plans to put them in a new church, but it had never worked out. At the front was a kitschy and amateurish statue of St. Columban, carved from the wood of Perdigon native trees, which had a waxy texture and a bluish-green cast.

  But there, beside the broken pump organ, was the ansible. Practically sitting in a shaft of light like the Ark of the Covenant.

  A plaque next to it read:

  This device sent the first successful message from Perdigon to Earth: ‘Hearken, O my son, to the precepts of the master…’ (Rule of St. Benedict.) From 2067 to 2089, it was the only reliable connection between the Perdigon Benedictines and the Abbot Primate in Rome. Nicknamed Silvabela after the Cistercian monastery to which the French troubadour Perdigon fled in 1229, this ansible is truly a part of our Benedictine heritage.

  It was in a locked box.

  “What in the literal fuck,” Ezra muttered, rattling the lock on the Perspex case, which had a grid of wires embedded in it to strengthen the plastic. “Were kids sneaking in here to send the word fart to Rome over and over?”

  “Probably. They were definitely doing that when I was in school,” Jacob said, peering at Silvabela the ansible through the plastic. “Any time we got to go on a field trip to the abbey, somebody would run to the ansible when the teacher wasn’t looking. One kid sent the entire lyrics of a filthy schoolyard song before they dragged him away from the machine.”

  Ezra liked that story, snickering to himself as he cracked open the latch with the crowbar. “Worth it, I bet.”

  “He thought so. I couldn’t have done it. Teachers were the only adults who were ever nice to me, so I didn’t like to disappoint them,” said Jacob, sitting down in the back pew. “I would have stayed at school all day and all night, if they’d let me.”

  Ezra gave him a sympathetic grimace, because his school years hadn’t been any more pleasant, but the metal latch went flying when the crowbar jerked it loose. They both ducked, the metal went ping, and landed somewhere behind the chapel’s altar.