by Tom Caldwell
Newer ansibles were almost as sleek as a tablet, but this one was an old model, thick as a heavy book, with a small manual keyboard and a blank white screen.
Chewing on his lip, Ezra ran his fingers over the sides of the machine until he found the power button. Chirp. “It works, it still works, holy shit…”
“Oh my God.” Jacob sagged forward, letting his head rest on his folded elbow over the back of the pew, in a flood of relief that he could barely let himself feel. “Oh my God. Okay. There’s a character limit so it might take a few messages, but—”
“Who am I talking to, what do I even call this guy? We don’t know his name.”
“Right Reverend Abbot or Father Abbot, either is correct in this format.”
“Got it.” Ezra picked out a message slowly on the small keyboard, a fine tremor in his hands.
URGENT Right Reverend Abbot, cargoliner Handsome Lake exploded in orbit over Bonaventure 5 days ago. Falling wreckage destroyed entire settlement. 14 survivors, 11 are children. Please send help.
The letters remained on the screen for a moment, then melted away.
Nothing happened.
“Um, isn’t the point of this that it’s instant FTL communication?” said Ezra, clearly struggling not to freak out.
“Let me try…” Jacob bent over the ansible, scrolling back to Ezra’s message and hitting send again. For a moment he was baffled, but then when he understood, he let out a long exhale. “Oh dear.”
“What?”
“It’s the middle of the night in Rome.”
On Perdigon, which had neither day nor night, nobody paid much attention to the clock if they weren’t working. The day started when you woke up and went on until you were tired. Jacob had been doing his best to keep everybody on a schedule, because the kids needed it and because Ezra’s glitchy brain got erratic without regular sleep. But still, it was easy to forget that Earth was different.
“I’m gonna strangle someone. Maybe myself.” Ezra hit send a few more times, spitefully, but then paced away to the other end of the chapel. “So we wait until morning. What if the Abbot Primate doesn’t even have his ansible anymore? What if he—what if he had a big ol’ garage sale in 2089 and—and somebody bought it for their dumb kid’s science project, and the thing’s in pieces now? In a dump somewhere in Italy?”
“Well,” said Jacob, trying to dredge up some positivity, “if that were true, I’d get an error message. It’d say, ‘no paired device.’ This thing seems to work, it’s transmitting normally. Nobody’s answering, that’s all. And there’s an obvious reason for that. So maybe don’t get too upset about it right now?”
“Sorry. Yeah, sorry, babe, I’m not helping.” Ezra ran a hand back through his hair, which was flattened and sweaty after the long bike ride. “But when morning comes, the Abbot’s gonna walk into the office with his coffee and he’ll see the message right away. Right?”
“If it’s in his office then yes, most likely.”
“What if it’s not? What if he’s got his ansible in a museum case too?”
“He probably wouldn’t, because his wouldn’t be an object of historical interest.” Jacob was watching Ezra pace up and down the aisle. “But even if it’s in a display somewhere, people would hear the message alert going off and they’d investigate. Museum patrons, security, maintenance staff.”
“You’re right,” said Ezra, although his hand kept clenching convulsively into a fist. “You’re totally right. Absolutely. We’ll be talking to someone in Rome by morning. Really talking, not…fuckin’…screeching into the void. That’s great. We’re doing great.”
“Really, I think we kind of are. We’re here, aren’t we? —Ez, come sit down,” said Jacob. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine.” Ezra returned to the ansible and plucked out another message: does God extract day-labour, light deny’d? we’ll post again in the morning, sorry. “No, you know what, I need to go get my head together.”
“Go where?”
“I dunno. Outside.”
Normally, Jacob would have let him go, but right now he was in the mood for some screeching into the void himself. “Can it wait, babe?”
“For what, what are we doing?”
“Just…I think it’d be good if you talked to the kids about some stuff,” Jacob said, and it came out more tentatively than he wanted it to. His therapist (gone now, like everyone else) used to tell him to stand up to Ezra. He’s not going anywhere. He loves you. Tell him what you need. “Like about the bodies.”
“What?” said Ezra, startled out of whatever mood he was working himself into. “Me? Why?”
“Because we didn’t have time yesterday, but it’s…I know we’re not their parents, but someone has to talk to them about it. About what they’re feeling.”
“Sure, but I’d make everything worse. My stupid stuttering mouth isn’t gonna help. You’re the one who’s good at stuff like that. Go ahead and talk to them, I’ll be back soon—”
“Ezra.” Jacob shifted position in the pew, the rack of hymnals digging into his knees. He was exhausted. “Can you please do this as a favour to me?”
“What—wait, are you okay?”
“I mean…according to the opinions of three magistrates in Bonaventure, I don’t have any legal family here anymore. Didn’t,” said Jacob. “I didn’t have. My foster parents left eight years ago to move to Phrixus, and I haven’t spoken with them since. So they weren’t caught by the crash. And I can’t say I was ever happy in Bonaventure, really. Not until we came back to build Taltos. But I look at all these kids who lost their parents, and…”
There was a flash of guilt over Ezra’s face—Jacob had learned to catch those flickers of emotion, which were usually far less guarded than the things Ezra ended up saying. “I didn’t want to—I’m an idiot, I should have asked you about it. About your mom, I mean. I thought that saying it would…I’m sorry, babe.”
Jacob crumpled at that because he knew what the end of that sentence had to have been: I thought that saying it would set you off. “No, don’t apologise, I’m so sorry—”
Ezra was awkwardly fumbling to put his arms around Jacob, all the angles askew since Jacob was still sitting down. “Hey, c’mon, shh. I’m not mad at you, babe, I’m just sorry. I should’ve known.”
“I know. I know. It’s fine.” Jacob was trying to gather his composure. He was often guilty of oversharing, but he usually didn’t speak directly about his mother’s suicide. She was an absence, a vacuum, empty like a cigarette burn in a photograph. Every death and every thought of death led him back, inevitably, to his mother. She had chosen death and now, to him, she was death’s ikon. “It’s fine but I think about her a lot and I can’t right now, I can’t.”
“Okay.” Ezra smoothed Jacob’s hair back from his forehead. “I’ll…okay. What should I tell them? Does it matter, do you just want me to distract them for awhile?”
Jacob took a long breath, rubbing the heel of his palm over his face. They were all dirty, washing with bottled water in the sink. “You should…well, you should explain to the littler ones about dying, about how people don’t come back. They might not be totally clear on that part, Laura and the younger boys. Reassure them that—I mean, they might have seen movies and think all kinds of weird things happen to people when they die.”
“Like Beetlejuice.”
“Exactly. Reassure them that this is not a Beetlejuice situation, just a very sad human experience. And tell them it’s okay to feel whatever they’re feeling, and that we’re doing everything in our power to keep them safe.”
“All right. I can handle that,” said Ezra, and it wasn’t completely convincing, but he sounded game to try, if it would make Jacob feel better. “Totally. Definitely. Are you gonna be okay?”
“I think I’m going to go cry in the bathroom, if that’s all right. I’d do it here, but sound carries.”
Ezra’s social skills were uneven, but he still understood this kind of necessary
privacy in a way that Jacob’s exes never had. “Of course, yeah. I’ll talk to them.”
Ezra failed at this job with remarkable speed.
“You know, one of the first things people ever did—when we first started to be human, and not just hominids—was to bury our dead,” he told the younger kids in the sacristy, hoping for inspiration to strike if he opened his mouth and rambled. Ezra was, in fact, the only person left on this planet who hadn’t lost his parents. Who were alive and well on Earth, not that he was close enough to them to care much. He had no siblings to wonder or worry about. He was a guest among the mourners.
But he was trying. “We started to bury them with their heads facing east, and we’d give them things we thought they might need,” he said. “Arrowheads and jewellery. Um, dead people don’t actually need anything. They’re not hungry or thirsty or bored or tired. That’s weird, right? But that’s the way it is. They don’t come back, not ever. Here in the abbey, it’s—you know, it’s sad to see dead people, but you shouldn’t be scared. Ghosts are only in stories, okay? Stories aren’t like real life.”
“Why aren’t they in heaven?” asked George, who was five, a shy kid with a soft, tiny voice.
Ezra wasn’t prepared for this question. “What?”
“They’re all…they’re lying on the ground,” George elaborated, reddening when everybody looked at him. “But they’re not in heaven.”
“Oh. Okay.” Shit. “Well, that’s actually the normal thing. When you die, your body kind of…stays where you left it. Some people—um, probably people like your parents—they, uh, they like to think that your mind goes somewhere when you die. Not your body! Just your mind. Like it peels off from your brain and goes off to another world. And heaven is…one possible place where your mind could go. Other people, uh, have different ideas.” Ezra was covered in flop-sweat. “Nobody knows for sure, I guess.”
“Not even you?” said Shruti, a little snidely. She was searching her bags for food, pulling out an accordion-folded chain of instant soup packets. “You knew this was coming.”
“It wasn’t…” Ezra said and trailed off. “I mean…whatever you imagine it’s like to see this stuff, um—it’s not like that.”
“Cool. That helps a lot, chief, you really sorted it all out for us.”
Jacob would have known how to defuse this, but Ezra couldn’t even stop himself from replying with the worst possible comeback: “Oh, so—so what, like this is my fault now?”
“I don’t know whose fault it is!” Shruti snapped. “Because the only person here who saw it coming won’t tell us—”
“Look, I’m not—it’s not like I have secret answers and I’m getting a charge out of not telling you,” Ezra interrupted. “As soon as I was sure of what I was seeing, I freaked out and tried to save everyone I could. But by then the impact was minutes away. I had eight minutes. Okay? You think that’s not weighing on me every single second?”
“Don’t you put this on us.”
“I’m not—Jesus Christ,” Ezra said, holding back a blast of temper, something that wasn’t about Shruti at all. “If you want to think that I could have saved this entire planet, if you think I had time to call the mayor of Bonaventure or something, but I thought it’d be neat to kill them all instead—”
“I didn’t say that, you tell me when I said that—” Shruti was looking as haggard as the rest of them, her hair half falling out of a hasty ponytail, but her dark eyes were burning. “I said you won’t tell us. How come? You think we can’t deal with it? Don’t we deserve to know?”
“I think that if I tell you then you—or Jacob, or somebody—you’re gonna tell me that I’m killing everyone’s hope and ruining morale and—and then I’m the bad guy and everyone’s trying to prove me wrong.”
“Oh, is that what we’re gonna do? You saw that too?”
“Wow, yeah, I’m so way off-base,” Ezra said sarcastically. “You’re definitely acting like you’re gonna be cool with this. Like you’re not gonna shoot the messenger.”
“No.” Shruti had distinctive hands, a bit like Jacob’s, with long thin fingers. When she pointed at Ezra it felt dangerous, like she could slice right through him. “I’m not a little kid and I don’t work for you. You’re not going to tell me what I will and won’t do. You won’t.”
It shut him up. The anger’s adrenaline rush was fleeting, subsiding into dread. The first threads of panic. “Guys, I don’t…come on.”
“Tell us what you saw,” Shruti demanded. “All of it. Just tell us.”
“I can’t.” Ezra was realising too late that he wasn’t just in a restless mood; something was wrong.
“Uh-huh. I bet you can if you try, Nostradamus. Let’s have it.”
Shruti’s brow-beating had worked—Ezra would have given in and told her, whether to be proven right or simply to end the argument, but he reached for words and couldn’t find them. His throat felt stiff, closed up, disconnected from his brain. The room looked like a copy of a photograph, two-dimensional, a cheap fake. It shivered like a reflection in a puddle.
“Hey,” he said, finally forcing a few words, but his voice sounded fake too, like someone doing a cruelly accurate Ezra Barany impression. “Hey, um, I’m not…I need—just a minute, just a few, not long. Until Jacob gets back.”
“Sure,” said Shruti, with the depthless contempt of the young. “Go do whatever, man.”
Dead men in the cloister walk and dead men in the courtyard. Shapeless in their black robes, they looked like they’d been dropped from a great height.
There were pills that didn’t work, so Ezra didn’t take them, sliding down to sit with his back against the wall. Jacob would have known the correct anatomical name for whatever room this was—the narthex, the transept, the apse, the ambulatory, the lady-chapel, the vestibule. He spoke the language around here. All Ezra could have said about this room was that the lights were off, the floor was cold, and that he wished it was further away from everything else in the world. Magnus Vollan’s voice wasn’t here now to gloat; monastery churches didn’t go in for AI assistants.
The truth was that it had been Ezra’s fault, if it had been anybody’s. He had seen, and he had panicked. The first night in the parking lot at Urban V, when he felt all those foreshortened futures, he should have gone deep and tried to understand it. He wasn’t a Cassandra figure, he was a Jonah: people believed in him, even when that was the last thing he wanted. They would have evacuated the town on his say-so, if he’d just been certain enough to demand it. Certainty came too late.
You could have stopped this, but you didn’t want to look crazy.
Ezra knew what was coming (of course he did) so he took off his sweater and folded it into a sloppy square, putting it under his cheek as he lay down on his side. Preparing for the seizure, hoping it wouldn’t leave him in too much pain afterward. Ideal outcome: no one would notice he was gone. No one would witness this. No more humiliation.
He didn’t even want Jacob there, really—let the guy have a break for once. But Jacob was always there anyway when Ezra woke up, acting like this didn’t bother him, doing more and more favours for Ezra that could never be repaid.
Ezra had been lying still for a few minutes, staring blankly at the ceiling—his expression, in another context, would have looked like boredom. Still blinking. Jacob’s hand was resting on his chest, just to be sure. In, out.
“Can you hear me?” Jacob murmured, Ezra’s hand in his. “Squeeze if you can hear…”
It was taking a long time. Jacob was kneeling beside Ezra in the vestibule while Shruti wrangled the kids in the nave. Keeping them busy. They were singing a French madrigal that they’d learned in school, something repetitive and circular.
Margot, labourez les vignes,
vignes, vignes, vignolet…
“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Ezra.”
No squeeze, but a slight, uncertain, purposeful movement. Ezra’s face was slicked with foamy, pink-streaked drool, so he mus
t have bitten his tongue. Jacob was kneeling in a wet spot, which couldn’t be helped; there was a pool of urine on the floor. Maybe they’d find a working laundry room somewhere in the abbey, he thought. That would be quite a luxury.
“Are you coming back? Squeeze my hand, Captain, c’mon—there, that’s it, good.”
This time Ezra did it, although with a grimace as though he resented being asked to do anything. Jacob reached down to wipe his face with a folded paper towel from the bathroom; it was unsolicited help, which Ezra didn’t like at this stage, but the sight of his husband’s blood always made Jacob’s stomach turn over. Even when it was nothing.
“Can you talk yet? A few more minutes?”
Sometimes Ezra came back and he was mostly okay—it took him a few minutes to be able to speak, but when he did, he made sense. This time he wasn’t connecting, his gaze sliding away from Jacob’s. He mumbled something, but it was slurred.
“What’s that, babe?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Work.”
“We’re not at work. Want to try again?”
“No.”
“Well, that was a rhetorical question, I’m sorry,” Jacob said. “I have to keep bothering you, but you can sleep soon. I promise. We left Taltos today. Do you remember where we went?”
A lengthy pause this time, but Jacob didn’t interrupt, because he could see that Ezra was trying to work it out. “To…we went…”
“Take your time.”
“To town. But only halfway.”
That wasn’t wrong—St. Columban’s was about halfway between Taltos and Bonaventure. Still a primitive answer, which was worrisome. “Good. What’s between work and town?”
“Church.”
“Okay, close enough. Can you name all the kids for me?”
“Océane and her brother…Etienne. The Valeiras, Raff and Mars. Um. Julie and Iona. Anouk. The little…um, there’s George, there’s…Will and Peter. And Laura. And Shruti’s not a kid.”
