by Neil Clarke
Still left behind.
About the Author
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. Her 2016 forthcoming work includes Hearts of Tabat (novel, WordFire Press) and Neither Here Nor Here (collection, Hydra House). She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
The Universal Museum of Sagacity
Robert Reed
Walter Fitzgerald was a rising force in the insurance industry, living in faraway Boston when he met a lovely Bohemian girl named Madeline Furst. The one-week courtship led to a wedding officiated by an Episcopal priest, and the couple settled into an apartment near Beacon Hill. Maddy was my mother’s aunt, but only briefly. That adventure ended after a year, and besides tax records and snapshots, very little survives from those days. After that, Walter returned home to the Midwest, married a local girl, and had two children. Those were my mother’s cousins, and odd as it might sound, they knew Maddy. In a fashion. She was the very pretty lady who flew in for the holidays. But only when they were little, and for one reason or many reasons, their parents neglected to explain the woman’s significance.
Which is a story unto itself.
Mom was a decade older than her cousins, and she also didn’t know about “the Boston wife.” What she saw at the Christmas parties was a cosmopolitan lady whose life revolved around art. Maddy was said to be a genius with paint and with words, and there was considerable travel, complete with cocktails and cigarettes. It was hard to decide which part of that biography Mom found most appealing. But later, when she was told about the family secret wearing high heels, she had to marvel at the woman’s capacity to sit beside her ex-husband’s wife, the two of them happily discussing nothing, not a touch of jealousy on display.
Christmas meant cameras, and I was eleven when I came across three of the surviving photographs.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
Nobody can answer that question. Not about themselves, much less other people.
And that was true a thousand times over for Maddy.
I was sitting on the living room floor, and Mom was across the room from me. But it was easy to guess which face among the dozens of faces caught my interest.
“Oh, that’s my Uncle Walter’s first wife.”
The time stamp on the white border claimed this was March of 1965. But that’s just the date when the film was developed. Those album pages were dedicated to Christmas in 1964. Some of the subjects were smiling for history, others ignored the camera. Then there was the lady who was posing and not posing. Who was smiling politely but a little fiercely. Her bent elbow was cradled in the free hand, a cigarette riding between two fingers. Even a boy who didn’t know much could spot the face that didn’t belong, and I mentioned that impression to my mother.
“She’s different,” I said, or something along those lines.
Mom heartily agreed, and joining me, she shared a fresher piece of the saga. Her cousins lived elsewhere, but she met them for lunch last year, both of them home for a visit. The topic of Maddy came up, and trying to deliver a compliment, my mother applauded their mother for being so gracious and good. And why was that? Because she allowed Walter’s first bride to join in their celebrations.
Guess where this story leads.
Yes, this was unexpected news. It was practically a thunderbolt, unanticipated and leaving everybody off-balance.
Yes, the cousins remembered the pretty lady. But Miss Furst was just a family friend. Nothing more. How could my mother get the story so wrong? Except she wasn’t wrong. My grandmother, Walter’s sister, had shared the history. But that admission happened years ago, and it wasn’t supposed to remain a secret. Not once the children were grown, and why didn’t anybody ever tell them?
Lunch ended with embarrassment, confusion, and a lot of anger trying to find any worthy target. The Fitzgeralds held an emergency family meeting. Mom didn’t witness any of that, but it was easy to imagine the conversations. Difficult questions led to belated confessions. “Except really, where’s the scandal?” she asked me. As if I were the jury, one eleven-year-old boy. Mom didn’t intentionally ruin anyone’s secret, and she refused to accept any blame. Every parent had the obligation to tell their children the truth, and since nobody else did their job, she did it for them. And really, the whole incident made her cackle, replaying the shock in the faces of those forever-younger cousins.
That was the first time I heard the story. But that day was just as important because of something I learned about myself: I had the capacity to become infatuated with a faded black-and-white photograph. Sure, Maddy was beautiful in the usual ways, looking at me from thirty-five years in the past. Her cigarette was ominous and sinful, and thus wonderful, and I imagined the moments after that picture was taken, smoke blowing out of that pretty smart, and very angular face. She had dark hair cut short and a small mouth, the chin pointed and eyes that held nothing but mystery. And making her even more astonishing was the ex-husband. Walter was a prematurely old man, bald and heavy, sitting passively beside Wife Number Two. Who was a pretty gal in her own right, I should add. Which was why later, as I began to understand people, I realized Walter must have had quite a lot to offer the pretty ladies of that other long-lost century.
But at that moment, I was just a kid sitting in our living room, struggling to make sense of faces and mysteries that keep their secrets even today.
Mom stopped talking at last.
What was she telling me?
No matter. I asked, “So where is she?”
“My aunt?”
“Yeah.” I was bracing for a fresh photograph of an old lady, smoked out and drunk out and spent.
But no, Mom gave me the one answer guaranteed to make this apparition even more real. “Maddy died,” she said calmly, but not sadly.
I noticed that tone.
“In Turkey, in Istanbul,” was her follow up detail.
For the first time in several minutes, I looked up from that photograph of a dead woman and a lost day.
“There was a car crash, Colin. In 1965.”
We were months away from a new century, and another forty years had to be crossed before that lie was revealed. But whatever my mother knew, and whatever she thought about secrets, it was best to keep that particular and very peculiar honesty out of my sight.
Born in 1988, my childhood was spent inside the soggy, slow days when the Internet was half-realized, when machines could only pretend to be smart and pretend to be our friends. For all of its noise and eager promise, science was accomplishing remarkably little. Fusion would always be twenty years in the future. Genetics were being manipulated, but only for disease-resistant wheat and prettier flowers. And the total invests into SETI were barely enough to run a few antennae watching the wrong parts of the universe.
I married a pretty lady of my own, though she wasn’t mysterious or Bohemian and she never pretended to be artistic. The most ordinary couple in the universe, we had children and what felt like a very durable family, and then everybody was grown, including two middle-aged people who looked at each other for the first time, realizing that our best possible future involved a polite divorce.
Single again, hungry for change, I found a new job in a different state. PinPoint was the tech beast that ate Google and Apple, and PinPoint saw talent enough to hire me. To outsiders, everything about my employer sounds spectacular. But honestly, nothing about me is exotic or special. We happen to be the world’s largest corporation, worth trillions and possessing a chokehold on genius and a hundred new markets. But the bigger any company is, the more it needs a corp of dull experts who manage the kibblebucks and bitcoins and dollars. Which is not to claim that I’m an accountant. Bookkeeping is better done by AIs, and by AIs, I mean the intellectual servants buried inside
my extended, effervescent nature. Which is the PinPoint system: A marvel of technology endlessly remaking humanity as well as this golden new world.
We aren’t the first company to tap into machine consciousness, but we have always been the pioneers who embraced machines hardest, and as a result, we delivered the most profound results: Fusion reactors pounded out like cookies; endless foodstuffs grown with bottled sunlight and air; prolonged lifespans; augmented intelligence; and the possibility of starships that could punch through the quantum nature of the universe—a universe proving to be both larger and quite a bit smaller than anyone had guessed.
Everything was becoming possible in these last years, or so it seemed. And I was in charge of the brilliant machines that expertly herded the pennies.
People always want to think they’re part of something special.
And usually, we are so wrong.
My mother had a talent for repetition. I don’t know how many times I heard the Maddy story. Not often enough, she believed. But there were ways to shake the story, making it into something fresh.
For instance. As a young man, good with numbers and a little wise about human nature, I proposed two possibilities. Obvious scenarios, and well worth sharing.
“Maddy needed money,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Why she came to Christmas. It was Walter’s way of giving her an allowance for the next year.”
“What? Like a divorce settlement?”
“Why not?”
“Because there wasn’t any alimony,” Mom said. “They parted on excellent terms, and she made her living from art.”
How many artists paid their rent, much less bought booze and plane tickets? But there was another possibility, sharp and obvious. “So they were still having sex,” I said. “A few days every year, and Walter paid her or he didn’t pay her.”
“Oh God no,” she said.
This was a burdensome time for my mother, her grown son pushing through a phase of blunt honesty. Which isn’t the same as truth telling. If you think about it.
“Or,” I said ominously.
Bristling, she asked, “Or what?”
“The two wives liked each other too. If you know what I mean.”
“Colin,” she said, preparing to say quite a lot more.
But no other words offered to help. And my mother turned and hurried out of the room.
Embarrassing lunches and bad afternoons: Every family suffers them. But eventually I decided there were boundaries worthy of respect, and I stopped making trouble. Which was when the Maddy stories returned to their traditional pattern, decade after decade, until my mother was living inside a tidy, very modern facility that catered to the dying.
“Istanbul,” she said. “Did I tell you about Istanbul?”
“Where your Aunt Maddy died,” I said.
“So I told you that part?”
“Once or twice.”
An odd, oversized grin emerged. “But I didn’t tell you the big secret, did I?”
“I don’t know, Mom. What’s the big secret?”
“The part Uncle Walter shared with me and nobody else.”
This felt new, or maybe I wasn’t paying attention earlier. “What did Walter tell you?” I asked, not quite sure where a secret would sit.
“My aunt was exceptionally creative,” Mom boasted.
I nodded. Waited.
“Madeline was.”
“Aunt Maddy. Yeah, you told me. She was some kind of artist.”
“A brilliant soul. That’s what was most special about her. It doesn’t show in those old pictures. But how could it? She was an incredible person, and none of us realized it at the time.”
Mentioning the name was enough for me to remember Maddy’s face. A divorced man in his later years, and I still cherished my odd infatuation for a black-and-white image. And there were the alluring possibilities of inventive marital arrangements between three long-dead people.
“I can’t say what was most incredible about the woman,” Mom continued. “And your uncle couldn’t explain it to me either.”
Walter wasn’t my uncle. But I didn’t dare stop her.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure about dates. But Maddy was noticed. In the early 1960s, I think. For one painting, for all of her poems. I don’t know the particulars. But they singled her out, and that’s why she was granted a very rare honor.”
“‘They singled her out,’” I repeated. Silly as hell, I imagined my dead great-aunt in Stockholm, wearing a robe and gold medal.
“Just once, Walter said, ‘Very, very few of us are noticed.’”
True words.
“Walter had this wonderful rough voice,” Mom said. “Very manly, very smart. ‘But my Maddy,’ he said. ‘She was one of the fortunate ones.’”
“Who noticed her?” I asked.
“Oh,” Mom said. Then with a conspirator’s laugh, she said, “I can’t tell you that, Colin. I promised not to.”
The woman was very old, very frail. And there were moments when I wondered if senility was in charge.
So I said, “Oh Mom.”
But she was lucid enough to hear the tone in my voice. Then she put her hand on my wrist, saying, “Think of something you would never believe. That’s what happened to your lovely Aunt Maddy.”
Old people are experts at shuffling through the past, and that’s one of the few blessings we are losing, living in this world increasingly free of illness and mortality.
My mother was dying. Every week brought medical wonders, but she was dying at a very particular pace. Another few days, another five years, and she would have been saved. But there had to be a funeral instead, shaking hands with surviving family and friends, and there was business involving Mom’s possessions. Except those final chores had to wait. One recent promotion had led to another, bigger promotion, and I had too many work responsibilities keeping me distracted and happy. It was half a year before I was inside an air conditioned locker, opening up boxes filled with more boxes, and waiting inside a shoebox were three photographs of Madeline Furst.
Two of the images weren’t particularly remarkable. Maddy was out of focus in one, badly lit the other. But I spent long moments with the image I remembered best, watching the woman stare back at me from that other century. And because it was so very easy, I fed those images into PinPoint’s in-house search engine, along with my narrow version of history.
Every visible photograph in the world was examined.
And all of the public records too.
Time barely passed before several thousand photographs were recovered, and with those images came a storyline that marched forwards until a spring day in 1965. In Istanbul. A British tourist took a snapshot of a street scene, and in the foreground, caught while sitting in a cafe, was an American lady doomed to die tomorrow in a car crash. Accounts of the accident were reported in newspapers as well as the police files, all translated into mid-21st Century American, and I read them while ten more minutes of superconductive labor revealed nothing else.
But the search engine asked the usual question: Should she continue pursuing images of the lady?
Magic spells are powerful, in part because they are so easy to unleash.
“Sure,” was my magic word, and having said that, I returned to sorting through my mother’s favorites and forgottens, certain in my mind that nothing more would come of this.
Lesser companies offer climbing walls where their people can embarrass one another while wrenching muscles.
Instead of walls, PinPoint maintains a private mountain. But it isn’t a respectable peak in Colorado or Central Asia. PinPoint doesn’t accept the ordinary. The mountain is a marvel of algorithms and sculpted data, all tended by our in-house art department, with the collaboration with staff geologists. Peacefully scenic on its lower slopes, the virtual edifice turns steep and beautifully angry. Any employee is free to enjoy the mountain whenever he or she wishes. Exercise is a priority at
PinPoint. Camaraderie with your fellow workers is another goal. The limits of lightspeed remain, but the new sub-mantle optic lines shave microseconds off transmissions. That’s why a member of the accounting department can drop onto a pine-shadowed trail, walking uphill for twenty minutes before reaching a favorite vantage point: Two kilometers above a winding river valley, and two kilometers below the blue ice and wreathing clouds worn by a nonexistent summit.
I’d recently turned sixty-seven but was being dialed back physiologically, with the goal of making myself forty again. Though it was possible to shoot younger, if you were that kind of man. I’d made the hike a hundred times, and my habit was to stop at the overview and lay two fingers against my wrist, relishing an increasingly youthful heart. But that day strangers distracted me. Three of them were perched at the cliff’s edge, the air directly above them warped to form a lens. Instead of counting heartbeats, I joined them. Which is encouraged. We were colleagues in the same great venture, after all. By rights, we should stand beside one another, regardless of station or status or every well-deserved pride.
“Too close,” one of the watchers said.
“He won’t make it,” another said hopefully.
“But he might,” the third warned. Then she lifted a slab of light, giving instructions to the algorithms responsible for the weather three kilometers above us.
The change wasn’t as abrupt as pushing a Kill button, but it might as well have been. Through the lens, I could make out a faceless human figure scrambling up snow-clad stone, using nothing but strength and fearlessness encased in gecko skin. The gentleman wasn’t a hundred meters below that fictional ground. Which is the mountain’s more impressive feature: Sierra PinPoint was designed to be unscalable, and what I stumbled across were three of the people who lost sleep worrying that some bold or lucky other would beat their baby.
The conjured storm came from nowhere, and the climber vanished behind gale-driven clouds.
“Fell,” one person said gratefully.
Nobody died, of course. Which was another reason to maintain a fake mountain over the real sort.
