Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 116

by Neil Clarke

  “Or that she was your father’s wife,” I said.

  “Because she wasn’t.” That brought a big, impressively testy laugh. “Not when I knew her, she wasn’t. They weren’t.”

  Staff psychologists had suggested strategies, but I was in charge of this little side operation. And that’s all it was. The highest technologies available were scouring the world, searching for a person who vanished decades ago. The Sagacities were convinced that AIs and algorithms would answer every mystery, but until then, they gave me enough authority to speak to one old man.

  I threw a recorded feed into the air. We watched Maddy on that cosmopolitan world. She was sitting in what might be a cafe, smoking a root or stick while sipping what looked like milk. This was the video released last night, in an effort to get people looking into drawers and attics. PinPoint was ready to pay fortunes for any item related to this suddenly famous lady, and that included the recollections of some very old people sitting happy on healing beds.

  I didn’t mention money.

  The old man was nodding at the image, or at his own thoughts.

  “She eventually talks,” I said.

  “I’ve heard the voice.”

  “Is it her voice?”

  He shrugged. “You remember how people sounded a lifetime ago?”

  “If they were important to me, yes.”

  Maddy crushed out the half-finished smoke while telling her companion something very casual. Unless it was the most important phrase ever uttered. Who knew? Sitting at her table was a small golden creature built more from light than flesh. What wasn’t a mouth answered with a similarly impenetrable phrase, and the two mismatched entities did nothing after that but sit quietly.

  She would melt away in a few minutes. But PinPoint was keeping that piece of the story secret, at least for the time being.

  The recording looped back to the arbitrary beginning.

  We watched it all over again, and one or several Sagacities watched us. I felt them wishing for something more substantial than two old farts sitting in a hospital room.

  I was just as impatient as they were.

  The increasingly young Walter noticed my feet dancing, and like any man with ten thousand years ahead of him, he said, “Relax, kid.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “All right then. So what are you doing here?”

  “I came to ask for your permission,” I said.

  “To do what?”

  “Search your belongings. We want to hunt for anything that Madeline might have left in your family’s care.”

  “Like some old painting,” Walter said.

  “Do you remember anything like that?”

  He shrugged, that one gesture dangling possibilities. But even as my hopes rose, he said, “You’re welcome to look. Yeah, I give you my permission. But there’s nothing to find.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Everything was thrown after our parents died. Which was decades ago, and hell, I doubt there was anything to find in the first place.”

  A thought struck me.

  He saw something in my face. A flash of excitement, maybe.

  So I stiffened my mouth, saying, “Well, that’s disappointing.”

  “Yeah, it is too bad,” he said. Sarcastically. Obviously, he didn’t care one way or another.

  A final topic needed to be mentioned. “You didn’t throw out your memories,” I ventured.

  He shrugged, saying, “I’ll tell you who Madeline was. To me, she was this person who hung around us at Christmas. That’s all. And in those days, believe me, Santa Claus was more real to me than she ever was.”

  But that didn’t prove his ignorance. I cut the Maddy feed and then offered questions. My questions and others suggested by experts, each meant to trigger a rich trickle of details. But the increasingly young Walter surrendered nothing but vague recollections of plastic toys and Christmas hams and words said in public, with little kids watching.

  The interrogation ended.

  Like Maddy and her golden friend, we sat together, saying nothing.

  Walter finally broke the silence. “So when do we launch our starships?”

  “We’re building stardrives right now,” I lied. “Fifty of them in a new factory on the back side of the moon.”

  “Okay then,” he said.

  I stood and thanked him for his trouble, and I left him.

  The first time.

  Standing in the hallway, I endured one brief chat with brilliant people who didn’t see any more potential in Mr. Fitzgerald.

  “In another few weeks,” the top Sagacity suggested. “Rejuvenated minds have sharper memories, all in all.”

  “But I’m done for now,” I said.

  “Sure.” Then he was gone, probably chasing another useless thread.

  I’m not the brightest creature. But I appreciate how the world works and what it takes to gain an advantage. I severed every electronic connection between myself and PinPoint, and then my second visit began. With a loud knock, I strode back into the room. “Actually, Walter. Sir. There’s another memory I want to talk about.”

  The man was tired of me. That much showed.

  “Years ago, you and your sister met a cousin for lunch. My mother, as it happens, and she said a few things that you hadn’t heard before.”

  That earned a gruff, “Yeah?”

  “Well, from I was told, that lunch was followed by some sort of meeting with your lying parents.”

  The face suddenly looked old, and exposed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just as I guessed.”

  In the presence of scenery, people look down more than we look up. I’ve noticed this. Whether the peak behind them is going to be climbed or not, we want to see the world beneath us in all of its wonder, and it doesn’t matter if that world is total fiction. I studied the valley and the individual pines and what was meant to look like a condor working rising columns of dry crisp summer air. “We call them overlooks,” I said quietly. “Not underlooks. Which means something about us, I suspect.”

  “Excuse me,” my companion said. “What are you telling me?”

  Nothing, so far.

  “Again, thanks for helping with our funding,” she said.

  “Glad to do it,” I said.

  A weak laugh. “Which makes you our patron, I suppose.”

  Not a bad title, and I laughed.

  One hand lifted. Consciously or not, she drew a question mark in the air between us.

  She wanted to know the reason for this meeting.

  “I’ve been studying your work,” I confessed. “Not with PinPoint, no. But the stuff you did before we hired you.”

  She offered a guarded smile.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever understand your art, and it makes me breathless, trying to appreciate it.”

  “That’s the oddest compliment,” she said.

  Then my next guest walked out of the pines. He was two minutes early, which bode well for the future. Odd statements from an accountant had lured him here, and while neither of them knew it, the accountant mattered more to them than anyone else in their life.

  “I wanted to thank you person,” said my artist friend. “That’s why I came. But I do have quite a lot of work.”

  “Stay,” I insisted.

  She glanced at the little man, dislodging the impressive beginnings of his biography.

  “I have to talk to him, but it won’t take long. And don’t worry. I’m going to help you again. So much so that you won’t be able to thank me, not in a thousand lives.”

  Curiosity fixed her feet to the fake ground.

  Approaching the top Sagacity, I said, “Thanks for taking the trouble.”

  “I’m barely here,” he warned.

  Sure. This was a diluted avatar, most of his genius focused on a world of unanswered problems.

  “I found Maddy,” I said.

  His presence didn’t grow. The technology didn’t work that way, and so no, I couldn’t fee
l his soul shutting down every distraction but me. What I saw was the clear gaze of steel-blue eyes, and a tight small voice say, “You have.”

  Not a question. Just a pair of doubtful words.

  “Have you found her yet? No?” I glanced at the artist, and when my companion followed my gaze, I said, “I discovered fire. Did you know that?”

  “What?”

  “I was four, and I decided to cook dinner for my family. With a microwave and Ramen noodles and celery stalks. I put the food on the carousel and programmed the machine to run for twenty minutes, on high, and the fire was impressive.”

  “What you’re telling me? That you’re crazy?”

  “No, I’m admitting that I didn’t discover fire. How could I? And I certainly wasn’t the first entity to tame it. And I didn’t figure out gravity or spacetime or the evolution of life, and neither did you. Other people did those things before us, and before people were scampering about, a multitude of other creatures and worlds made the same discoveries, endlessly and often feeling like they were the holy first.”

  The man looked down the mountainside.

  “It bothers you, I think. A little bit, a lot. You and the others in the Sagacities. You possess these enormous gifts and the key of the universe is resting in your hands. All you have to do is learn how to turn the key inside the lock. But be honest now. In your life, what discovery have you made that no other organism in the universe has made? What principle have you identified first? And what relationship should be named after you? Nothing and nothing and nothing. Those are the only honest answers.”

  I could hear him breathing, steady and deep.

  “Of course you can be the wizard who opens up the universe for humanity,” I said. “Which will be a great accomplishment. No doubts there. But doesn’t it bother you that when you look at these trillion trillion feeds, you see just the one human face? Someone already out there, and she isn’t like you at all. Is she?”

  “But we have three faces now,” he told me.

  “Working at the Museum of Sagacity. Am I right?”

  The nod was followed by a quiet, “They seem to be, yes.”

  “I have an idea where to find Maddy,” I said. “How you utilize my insight . . . well, I don’t know that. But if I help you, then I’m owed quite a lot of consideration for whatever comes next.”

  “Consideration,” he said.

  Before I could respond, he said, “You want to go visit your aunt.”

  I shrugged. “I do want to walk on another world. Any world. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.” Pointing to the lady standing beside the fictional cliff, I said, “She should go. Artists as accomplished as her, and more so. They should be the first people to step out into the universe. And if they want me riding along with them, fine. And they can invite you too. But they matter a lot more than either of us.”

  “Either of us,” he repeated angrily.

  “You and me,” I said. “We’re just the competent people who put the numbers where they belonged from the beginning.”

  In the end, Maddy wasn’t especially interesting. Lovely, yes. And talking to her gave me a vivid connection to the dead in my own family. But even when we sat together, discussing important matters, much of my left-behind head was busily absorbing the sights sounds and stinks of a wondrous place, a world full of life that had nothing better to do than shamble and dance its way past my place at the table.

  “So you’re the one who found me,” she said.

  Not true. But it was safe to claim, “I was just the first to realize what kind of lie you were.”

  She acted more amused than impressed.

  “Tell me,” she insisted.

  “The best AIs on the Earth chased you,” I said. “Old photographs and a divorce decree were found, and rental contracts, old airline records. But nobody uncovered so much as a single doodle or piece of haiku with your name attached. Which is just about the damnedest thing. Great or not, every artist leaves behind a tangle of work.”

  That earned an interested grin and a long draw on some smoldering piece of lumber.

  “Of course maybe the Museum of Sagacity claimed your work along with you. But we recovered photographs from your childhood, from classmates and people you never knew. And in all of that, there isn’t so much as one snapshot of Maddy Furst’s work in the junior high art show. And why? Because you and your art were claimed long before that point. In fact, we think the Museum claimed you sometime just after your sixth birthday.”

  Whenever I spoke, she looked away. When I paused, she turned to stare hard at me.

  I didn’t like those eyes. Not nearly as much as I imagined I would.

  “You graduated from high school, moved to Boston, and then you married my great-uncle. But at the same time, you were living this transformative, go-anywhere life. Acting like any other person of the time, except your mind had been recast as an ageless, enduring glass. And that glass was encased inside the machine we found churning away some two hundred meters under your childhood bedroom. A machine that my bosses found and eventually deciphered, and now we’re punching them out on an assembly line. I’m the tenth person to get this honor, by the way. Telecommuting in the Infinity. Anywhere I want to go, I go. A cage of wet meat is built from local ingredients. That cage lasts as long as I want it to last. Then I’ll give a command and this carcass falls to water, absorbed in the black carpet that civilized places use to keep the mess at a minimum.”

  She puffed and glanced my way. “That’s all it took? I didn’t leave doodles, and you deciphered the rest?”

  “Hardly,” I said. I told her about my mother’s affections for the sophisticated older woman, and years later, the compliment delivered to her cousins. After that came the notorious meeting with parents who confessed just enough to a couple angry, disbelieving kids.

  “Walter and his second wife,” I said. “You told them everything, or enough. Didn’t you?”

  She shrugged, saying, “I fell apart on their kitchen floor. Then three minutes later, I rang their doorbell.”

  When she talked, I stared at the amazing world.

  How could you not?

  “The Universal Museum of Sagacity,” I said.

  “I was selected,” she said, her voice flat and a little hard. “I was six and nobody told my parents, because why would they? They came to my room at night, installed me in the Everywhere Chamber . . . ”

  “That’s the name?” I interrupted.

  “No, that’s just a miserably poor translation.”

  “And you’re still trapped there,” I said.

  Which made her laugh. One hand and then the other crushed the burning log, and she admitted, “In me, they see potential. And for the sake of honesty, let’s just admit that I often have some very strong doubts about ever accomplishing any shit that will mean anything in the end. To the universe, or even to me.”

  “True for us all,” I said.

  This time she stared at me when I spoke, and afterwards, quietly, she asked, “So what do you do for a living, Colin?”

  I confessed.

  “Well, you do remind me of my Walter,” she said. “He was passionate about numbers, and I bet you are too.”

  I never thought of it that way.

  “So yes, now humanity is free to roam the universe,” she said, breaking into a smug little laugh.

  No, I didn’t like her that much.

  “Who built the first Everywhere Chamber?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows,” Maddy said.

  I sat there for a few moments longer, wondering how this conversation would end.

  Then she said, “I guess I must have met her.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Your mom. When she was twelve or so, at the Christmas parties.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “But I don’t remember her. Sorry.”

  I looked at Maddy one last time. And then without another word, I made myself fall back into water and gas and all
those other simple ingredients that mean nothing without Us inside.

  About the Author

  Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

  Breathe

  Cassandra Khaw

  Breathe.

  The water is cold.

  Breathe.

  Lightless, the ocean is without dimension, only a blackness unyielding. There is no sound, no movement. Nothing but the percussion of ventricles in labor and the frayed rasp of your breath as you suck in stale, processed air.

  Breathe.

  Ah. There. You see it in the distance, a speckling of iridescence; indigo and motes of searing cyan, adrift on hoarfrost filaments no bigger than the width of a hair. Noctiluca Janus, the only color in this alien world and somehow, the only life.

  The theory of its biology is faultless; unicellular simplicity, self-devouring, self-sustaining, both predator and prey, alternatively cryptobiotic and savagely proliferative, a perfect answer to an imperfect world. But it is still bizarre to you that nothing else exists in tandem. Not even a divergent subspecies differentiated by a single genome. Nothing but this gasp of cold light in that endless dark.