by Tom Caldwell
“That’s really good,” said Jacob, a little more at ease. “You’re doing so well. I’ll give you some words, okay? You know the drill. Peppercorn, eggshell, risotto.”
“Sounds gross. God, I’m gross,” Ezra mumbled, trying to sit up on one elbow and failing.
“Shh, stay put for a minute. I’ll help you find a place to lie down soon. And you’re not gross. You look handsome as ever from where I’m sitting.”
“I pissed myself, Jacob.”
“That wasn’t your fault, though. You should have told me you were feeling it coming on,” Jacob said, reaching out to brush his fingers over Ezra’s jawline. “I could tell something was off, but I thought you were just tired and upset.”
“I was.”
“Then we both got caught off-guard, I guess. What are the words I gave you?”
“Peppercorn. Eggshell. Risotto.” The right answer, but Ezra was looking at some empty space to the left of Jacob’s shoulder. His big clear eyes were dull, like a fish in the seafood section, staring at a foreign world. “I saw Roshan.”
“In the vision? Doing what?”
Ezra was reacting to questions very slowly, like a newscaster on a satellite delay. “Cooking,” he said finally. “Soup or something.”
“Soup?”
“Lentils.”
A complete non sequitur, but that was normal enough for Ezra. Jacob smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Roshan cook, that’s funny. I don’t know if he’s any good at it. Was that all?”
“No. But the rest I can’t talk about,” Ezra said, closing his eyes. “I need to go back.”
“Back where?”
“Under. Inside.”
Jacob took a second or two to figure out what that meant. “Absolutely not. Ezra, no, look at me, this is not a good time to risk your brain like that. We can deal with the visions as they come but do not overclock that tech—”
“We won’t survive if I don’t.”
“We haven’t even heard back from Rome yet. Or Hannah.”
“The ansible’s notifs are going off in an empty room in the dark. Nobody’s there. Hannah’s not the one who comes for us. Jacob.” Ezra tried to sit up again, and this time he managed it. “There’s a future where we make it through alive. Tell the kids, tell them I said that, but I have to see more. I have to go look for it.”
Not up for discussion, then. Jacob knew it would be useless to plead or demand; Ezra was rarely swayed by sentiment, or even by self-preservation. Jacob even loved that stubbornness, when it wasn’t pointed in his direction. “We’ll talk about it later,” he whispered, mouth dry. “Give me your arm, c’mon. Let’s go find a place to sleep.”
Chapter 5
The Light That Will Cease to Fail
They piled into the sacristy that night and slept on glorious piles of clean laundry, which Shruti found in a cart in a back hallway. Soft flannel sheets and thin institutional blankets. The laundry room itself was in service, once they threw the switch to use emergency solar power. Everyone went to sleep in albs from the vestment closet while the washer churned their own clothes clean. Like a cast of Christmas pageant angels, minus the tinsel haloes.
Hours later (what would be morning on Earth), Ezra awoke from his usual dense thicket of premonitory dreams to hear a chiming sound from the rear of the abbey church. It was often hard to tell if he was awake or asleep, and the neurologist used to tell him to stay in the habit of “testing reality”: checking clock displays, flipping light-switches on and off, reading book titles. That kind of information was unstable in dreams, changing when he looked away from it, so he had to watch for objects that didn’t behave logically.
But he still heard the chiming, a simple little music-box melody, and he got up to follow it. The wind whistled through the hole in the roof, spatters of grey rain blowing in; the carpets and altar-cloths smelled mildewed, a familiar Perdigon smell. Something sounded like it was churning, far off, but when Ezra paused to listen, he realised that the vast crater in the land had changed the voice of the wind.
When Ezra woke up enough to realise that the chiming was the ansible, he hurried to the back of the church, stumbling over the hem of his alb. Text was scrolling across the ansible screen.
…at the Regina Coeli on Sunday, Pope Patrick called for an end to corporate practices of indentured servitude on colonial planets, citing the concerns of Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891…
The Vatican News service. Ezra scrolled up and down, but could only find more of the same. “No, no,” he mumbled, hitting enter a few times, typing in anything that he thought might get attention: HELP and SOS and MAYDAY and DISASTER. But the news blurbs kept coming. “No, are you kidding me, are you fucking kidding me? What the fuck—”
“Ezra?” Jacob was in the doorway. He always looked rough when he was running on a scant few hours’ sleep; his deep-set eyes looked haunted and shadowy. “What’s wrong, did they not answer?”
“They’re—transmitting the goddamn headlines, Jacob, I can’t get through to a human being here,” Ezra could hear the hysterical tremolo in his own voice. “God—I miss Murdoch, she’d probably figure out how to hack this thing…”
“She is gifted with hardware,” Jacob said, bending over the machine beside Ezra, peering at the screen. “Even if this isn’t the kind of networking problem she’s used to. —Ohhh, I see,” he murmured to himself after a moment. “The brothers weren’t using this to communicate with the Father Abbot anymore, so that’s why it was moved from the chapter-house, which is where they would’ve had meetings. They probably used to send the minutes to Rome, just as a bureaucratic thing, until satellite comms improved in the ’80s. So they stowed the ansible in here, with the plaque, and—presumably—they asked the Father Abbot to transmit the news service. This way they can check the headlines before Mass.”
Ezra was out of patience with Benedictines at the moment. “What the fuck do they need to do that for?”
“Things to pray for. Like right there, ceasefire in Minneapolis, they’d mention that sort of thing,” said Jacob, pointing at one of the headlines with a shrug. “And for communiques that they actually wanted to send to Earth, I’m sure they’d would’ve used newer technology.”
“Newer tech that just got fried by an EMP, sure.”
Jacob sighed. “Well. That’s…unfortunate. But we still might get some attention if we keep transmitting,” he said, his tone making it sound like a question. “Like I said last night, the Abbot’s ansible is probably still around his offices somewhere. Maybe nobody looks at it very often, but…”
“But if we really blow up his phone, he might answer?” Ezra was typing fart over and over, idly, to no response.
“It’s not as though we’re busy. One of the kids could do it, even. Etienne hasn’t been up to doing a lot of chores yet,” Jacob suggested.
Etienne, Océane’s younger brother, was eleven. They were Haitian immigrants to Perdigon, a tight-knit family, and Etienne was so heartbroken that he had collapsed into mutism. Most of the kids were holding themselves together with shock and dissociation, but Etienne had crumpled completely.
“It hits them all differently,” Ezra said. He was out of his depth, completely incompetent to handle tragedies like these. “Maybe he could manage that, just typing a few words every ten minutes or so. Yeah.”
He typed please answer us into the ansible. Enter. Enter. Enter.
No response.
Later, Ezra was sitting outside on the causeway, looking out at the flat landscape of the marsh. Where the water was open it was calm as black glass, reflecting the auroras in the twilit sky. In the distance, at the margins of the wetlands, Perdigon’s virgin forests had been decimated by the blast, massive primordial trees uprooted and knocked down. A forest in ruins, like a razed city. It seemed especially cruel that humanity had, once again, destroyed so many other kinds of life along with itself. Ezra didn’t know the names of all the animals that would have lived in those forests; f
ew humans had ever set foot there, just intrepid xenobiologists in their NBC suits, counting the trees and naming the beetles. Yet hundreds and thousands of little creatures had lost their nests, Ezra was thinking. Or their dens, or their hives. The saplings had survived, green and soft enough to be bent down to the ground without breaking.
He was roused out of a staring spell by Shruti’s voice.
“You know how to catch frogs?”
She was wearing hip waders and holding something that Ezra would have thought was a garden implement, a sort of pitchfork with a narrower head. A net, a closed bucket, and a massive halogen flashlight.
“No,” Ezra said, staring. “I, um…don’t know how to catch frogs.”
“Okay, so you’re holding the light.”
“What?”
She thrust the heavy flashlight at him and he took it. “Extra waders in the bucket, take them. When we find a big frog, shine the light in his face. He’ll be hypnotised and won’t see me gigging him.”
“What?” Ezra said again, but he took the waders out of the bucket and sat down to pull them on. “Why are we hunting frogs, what do we need frogs for?”
“To eat, dumbass,” said Shruti, already wading into the swamp, letting herself down from the causeway as if into a swimming pool. “There’s good meat on the legs, we eat it all the time here. Everybody’s sick of ramen, and we found the monks’ fishing gear. There’s a smaller container in there, see it? Bring it and use it to catch jellies.”
“The white things?” Soft iridescent objects in the water, headless, wriggling. Ezra thought they couldn’t actually be jellyfish, since they looked denser, but they were invasive. All you had to do to catch them was submerge a bucket. “Those are edible?”
“I mean, they’re not good, but we eat them. Put ’em in a pot with some canned tomatoes and garlic, it’s almost like cod. Just if I can’t get any frogs,” said Shruti, but her jaw was set. “I can, though. C’mon.”
“Jacob can’t eat these.” They certainly weren’t kosher, and if Jacob didn’t want to use that excuse, Ezra planned to use it for him. There was no God, but if there were, He wouldn’t have wanted people to eat these things. “I can’t eat these, Shruti, these are…they’re alien un-fish.”
“What, like it’s alien because it’s from Perdigon? I was born here too, earthling,” Shruti said. “Am I an alien? Just help me catch the stupid frogs, Jesus.” She continued to swash forward through the marsh, a kind of motion that required some undignified waddling. “I wanted to apologise, but that’s not…like, I was mean. I wasn’t wrong, but I was mean.”
“Okay.” Ezra wasn’t that interested in apologies, but by now he was kind of curious to see a frog-gigging. The bottom of the marsh was soft, plush with waving beds of emerald-coloured weeds, muddy, sucking at their footsteps. “Thanks? I guess? I mean, I’m sorry too. I get it that people are fucked up, like a hundred percent, but…”
“But how dare we question you, right,” Shruti said dryly, waving him ahead of her while she bent over the rippling water with the spear. For it was in fact a spear—not a garden tool at all—and she was holding it like a Roman gladiator with a javelin. “Okay, there’s our little dude. Shine the light right in his face.”
“What—” Ezra didn’t even see what she was looking at, for a second, and then he did: a frog the size of a roasting chicken, crouched on a tussock of land, among weeds that stood shoulder-high. “Oh shit, no. No. That thing is Lovecraftian, Shruti, we’re not fuckin’ eating it.”
“Fine, don’t. But the rest of us will. Just keep the light steady.” She sloshed around to stalk the frog from behind, and then thrust the spear. Ezra couldn’t watch, turning his face up to look at the Perdigon perma-sunset instead. Nice clouds. Pretty light. Something heavy and rubbery landed in his bucket.
“Boom. Gotcha, Kermit. C’mon, keep moving…” Shruti waded deeper into the marsh, holding the spear higher under her arm. “You guys do this on Earth too, so don’t be a baby.”
“Earth is…a really big place,” said Ezra, who could still feel the frog struggling in the bucket. “They don’t do it where I come from.”
“Where’s that?”
Ezra stopped to shine the light on another obscenely large frog. “I’m from Butler. University-controlled territory in Indianapolis, I mean,” he said. A slow-rolling civil war had divided most American cities in the interior, and Indianapolis was no exception. “My parents were professors. Are, I mean. Emeritus. The megachurch militias took the ‘burbs and we had to wall off Butler-Tarkington and the campuses with sandbags, put up weapons checkpoints, the whole deal. Every couple of months some dumbshit frat boys would drive out into Jesus country to go fuck with them, drunk and screaming. Or the militias would come protest around the walls, like just…protesting our existence. People got hurt. A lot of people, actually, wow,” he added, thinking back over the numbers.
“Some Black-and-Tans shit.”
“Kinda, yeah.” Ezra held the light as steady as he could. “Me and my friend Marty—he used to work at Taltos with us, early on—he grew up there too. Some city cops went after us one day, because we were on the wrong side of a free speech barrier at a pro-choice protest. He got video, so the cops took his phone. I pulled him out of the way of this one cop because…like, the pig had his nightstick out and I knew that if Marty got hit, his chances of surviving weren’t too good.”
Shruti hauled back and speared another frog, grabbing it by the leg and plopping it into the bucket. “So you saved him?”
“I made him duck at the right second, that’s all.” Exaggerating his ability to help meant accepting too much responsibility when he failed, and Ezra didn’t like that. “It was one of those nights when all the probabilities looked bad. So we spent the night in a cell together and got to talking. We’re still friends.”
“That’s good,” said Shruti. She parted some reeds, smiling when she found a chilled wild iris clinging to life in the cool weather, then sloshed onward to look for more frogs. “Jacob said you’ve always been able to see things.”
“I was about George’s age when it started. Five going on six.” Ezra was now resigned both to the frog-gigging and to telling Shruti what she wanted to know; he was waist-deep in greenish-brown water that was flickering with hundreds of white jellies, the singing of the smaller frogs a steady sonic backdrop. Mud sucked at the soles of his boots. No quick escapes here. “But back then I thought everyone could do it.”
“Yeah?” She pointed to the plentiful jellies in the water and snapped her fingers, though she was distracted by trying to spot another frog. “Get some of those little bastards, I wasn’t kidding. When did you know what you were seeing?”
“I don’t know.” Ezra dipped the plastic container into the marsh water, effortlessly pulling up some squirming jellies. What could they possibly taste like? The Taltos food services always played it safe with lab meat, avoiding the local wildlife. “I would talk about it, and my mother would just say, like, ‘oh, that’s quite an imagination you have.’” His parents were London-born climate-change emigrants, and he habitually slid into the accent when quoting them. “But nobody took me seriously for a long time. One morning I told them a car was going to explode in the street, and um, it did.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Car bombs aren’t that unusual in Indianapolis, but…there were a few incidents like that,” said Ezra. “Then there were a lot of tests, psych appointments, meds, hospitalisations, whatever.”
Shruti shook her head, a little more gently than usual. “That’s fucked up.”
That kind of well-meaning remark never did much for Ezra; it was so ritualised as to be meaningless. Usually he just pretended to be fine with what had happened. He’d picked that strategy up from Jacob over the years, and sometimes it helped. “They were interested in the science of how it all works, so…I can’t fault them for that. I would’ve been obsessed with figuring it out too, if I were the one with a quote-unquote psychic kid.”
“Sure, but it’s fucked up. How does it work, scientifically speaking?”
“…I don’t know. Yet,” said Ezra, aiming the light at the enormous frog, who was sitting in supreme indifference, gazing at the light with its strange horizontal pupils. “We were getting really close. I agreed—before I really knew what was happening, I signed an agreement to release my test results. I thought it’d help Taltos to have it confirmed by outside sources, but that…ended up being a really bad call. Bija was rushing to beat us to market. They have so much user data available that our predictive engines could use,” Ezra said, wading deeper behind Shruti. “I’m actually kind of…maybe a little scared of it.”
“How come?”
One of the frogs in Ezra’s bucket wasn’t properly dead yet, thrashing pitifully against the plastic. “Magnus Vollan offered me a contract, in the beginning. Ultimate job security. A ridiculous salary. Just to work for him and predict the markets. It would break Earth’s economy, and the colonies too. All down that whole chain of events, I don’t see anything but mass poverty and devastation. Corporate feudalism. The only way to counter that is to make precog tech extremely common. If all Vollan’s competitors are using the same tools, it equals out.”
“Like mutually assured destruction?”
“Yeah,” Ezra said. “Mirror in mirror. If everyone has this advantage, then no single competitor can use it for a runaway success. The playing field stays…not level, I guess, but it stays at the status quo.”
Shruti nodded. “Gotcha.”
“So we were trying to find a way to stimulate the same visions in normal people. I had an idea—which I can’t talk about,” Ezra interrupted himself, remembering just in time that apocalypse or not, Hannah and Natalie wouldn’t want him to blather too freely about their business plans. “Black box of copyright, no details. But our researchers say it’s possible. We just need a prototype that works but doesn’t cause weird side effects, and that’s…it’s taken a while.”
