by Janis Ian
The dark lady nodded. "No. That came later, if at all. Next one, now, on the other side. Future things…"
He picked up the next card, trembling. It whirled nearly instantly into a series of ruddy brick shopfronts, a painted barber pole, a line of dark, empty windows, like the eye-sockets of skulls; no human face, not even in shadow. Everything was locked down, tight, finalized, the street streaked with long unmoving shadows, a sunset caught in mid-decline and frozen there, time rendered ineffective and emasculate. Victory for the painter, and the destruction of the hopes for freedom of every painted thing.
His eyes stung where tears should have been, and couldn’t be. "This is no use," he said through a throat tight with pain, staring down at the cross of cards. "It’s all hopeless. Why are you showing me this?!"
She scowled at him. "There’s always a way out," she said. "There’s always a loophole for you to see. One of my sisters says the universe isn’t anything but loopholes. We just fool ourselves into seeing solid stuff instead of emptiness: locked doors instead of doorways. What’s not there takes more work to see. And we’re lazy…"
"Then what’s the way out?" he said.
"Not my job to tell you that," she said. "Just to tell you that the doors aren’t locked. What you have to do, that’s for you to find out. Turn the next card—or go back and sit by her and listen to the furniture shopping list one more time."
The steel in the voice was harsh; it surprised him, for her eyes were still soft, softer than anything else here. The reproof gave him pause. "But you said it was the future…"
"For him, anyway," she said. "But then this isn’t your reading. It’s his."
He was infuriated. "You mean this isn’t about me?"
"Everything’s about you, you idiot," she said, sounding impatient. "Don’t waste my time here. I’m going far enough out on this limb, crossing genres for your sake. The Great Beyond forbid my sister should ever catch me with a brush in my hand." Her look went briefly cockeyed.
"How many sisters have you got?" he said, slightly annoyed by the sudden irrelevancy.
"Eight," he said. "Or sometimes nine or ten, depending on which poet you believe. It hardly matters; my father likes big families. Now shut up and turn the next card. Your real stance, and his, about this problem. Start a new line to the right: put it at the bottom…"
He reached out to the card and had to pause as he touched it. He could swear he was beginning to hear voices. There were not the chilly voices of this place, resonating off hard wood and gloss paint and polished metal. They had depth, and roots in some other place, another time where things were rough and unfinished, and the universe contained more ingredients than it strictly needed to for the composition at hand. There was a terrible tang of hope to the sound of those voices, a reminder of what life had been like once upon a time before the artist’s eye and brush had started making a prisoner of him. He turned the card, and as he did so and the light and color roiled under the surface of the glass, the voices shouted briefly into his heart, Save him, save him now, save all of us!
Save him? he thought, as the image steadied. A railway car, the chair car, in which a soft green light illuminated everything—the windows blind, bland, unrevealing panes of light, and people in seats facing every direction, going away all in company, though still going away alone…
"Escape," he breathed.
The dark lady’s mouth quirked. "Say the word softly," she said. "It’s a dangerous one for use by an artist, or for art…. Next card: the environment surrounding the problem, the best it gets for others, and for him. Hurry. It’s dangerous to be this close to the surface; where you can hear his other voices, he can more clearly hear you…"
He stifled the urge to throw a look over his shoulder at the Hunched Man. If he moved—Hurriedly he picked up the next card.
The voices were louder still in his ear, a crowd-cry, a dim ballpark roar of desperation and hope. Save him! Smoke-shot light boiled in the brittle warm bit of glass, steadied down to the image. A green house, a lone man mowing his lawn: alone, yes, but not strictly lonely—the curtains of the house’s windows stirred in that light, eyes perhaps closed but not empty. Stillness, peace, a settled quiet if not a permanent one; sunny weather if only for a while—
"That’s as good as it gets for him?" he said, tempted to be scornful. Yet what had he ever had, even back in the real life where he walked the world, that had been as good? Could it have been that the bleakness in his own eye had been what had attracted the painter’s attention—
He pushed that thought violently away, reached out hastily for the next card. It fought him, wouldn’t come up from the deck. "His secret hopes," the dark lady said, giving him that under-the-brow look again.
An empty street, noontime: no shadows to be seen: gabled houses, a milk-blue sky, everything preternaturally still; everything baking and warm, trees, houses, the dust of the street. No people…but again, that terrible peace.
Forgive me, the voice said. Forgive me. I’ve been getting it wrong all the time. I didn’t know any better how to show what I wanted; I did the best I could; I didn’t realize what was happening. But I can’t go against my nature, I have to be how I am. It’s how I was made. I am a made thing too—
He looked at the dark lady, filled with terrible surmise. She would not meet his eyes, for the moment; just traced the grain of the wood in the tabletop. "Last one," she said very softly. "The likeliest final outcome…"
He reached out to that last card. The voice of all the artist’s other creation roared in his ear, a tortured unison. The card burned his hand with cold, so that he almost dropped it into its place at the top of the line of cards, and the voices all fell silent, breaths held, waiting.
A rooming-house bed, a half-clad woman leaning on it, sitting on the floor, legs tucked under, slumped. Sleeping? Dead?
Release from imprisonment, from punishment; release, if only something happens, the impossible thing, longed-for. All the glass around the diner stared at his back as if it had eyes, the transparency suddenly a terror; and the Hunched Man stared hardest, though he never moved a muscle, never looked up.
And now, staring down at the card, he saw the answer. It washed up over him sudden and infuriating as one of those rushes of water up the beach that comes up a lot further than you were anticipating, catches you unawares, and fills your pants cuffs full of sand.
"Forgive him? Forgive God?" he said to her, furious, under his breath.. "Since when is that my job? After what he’s done to me?!"
"You’d be surprised," she said. "Well?"
He stared at her.
"It’s all in your hands now," she said. "This is the moment. Are you going to keep me sitting here waiting until he wakes up and works out what’s happening? I can always leave. Have you tried that trick lately?"
He took her point. The glass was as impenetrable as any steel plate: the doors only opened inward. "You can get out, though," he said, at a guess.
"I can. I’m not subject to the rules you’re stuck with. Make your choice!"
He stared at her again. The cards were silent now. In the silence he could only hear a voice saying in ineluctable sorrow, "I may not be strictly human. All I want to paint is light on walls…"
"You really don’t understand, do you?" he said, wanting to shout it and not daring, for fear the Hunched Man should turn around. "He put me in hell!"
The dark lady looked oddly unmoved. "Damnation is a contract," she said. "It takes two. One to say ‘To hell with you!’, and another to say ‘Okay.’"
He drew a long breath to answer her back in fury…then stopped. And which one am I? he thought suddenly, frightened.
Once again, she would not look at him, just sat there making little swirly designs with one forefinger in a wet spot on the tabletop.
He sat there, shaking harder than ever. The air of the place had begun to sing with danger: not the danger of the Other, the Artist, but of something else that might happen. There was a way to find
out, a way to decide. All the cards lost their imagery and went smokeshot, uncertainty trapped in glass, waiting. Waiting for him.
But I hate It. Him. He destroyed me. Why let him off the hook? If I have to suffer, why shouldn’t he? The hell with Him.
Nooooo! cried all the other voices out of the paint, about to be damned with the It-thing. And the mild, unhappy voice, astonishingly helpless, was ready to say softly: Okay—
At that, he had to stop and think, finally frightened by the thought of what he might be about to do. Condemn this beyond-the-paint, tinhorn God to the hell he was himself inhabiting right now, and who knew what might happen?
And besides, said something angry and completely unexpected inside him, it’s not right. What if he didn’t mean it? What if he couldn’t help it?
He looked at the dark lady. She would not raise her eyes: she was still lost in concentration on the wet spots on the tabletop.
To do right. No matter what. If it’s all the humanity I’ve got left—
He was afraid, unsure. Desperate for a hint, he turned to look at the glass of the window. Slowly the other reflective surfaces in the place were all going milky; only the ones nearest to him still lay dark with the night leaning against them on their far side. In the dark window nearest, as he turned to it, he saw the reflection turn toward him…and was terrified to see the face in the window, not as his own, but as but another’s.
Blinded, horrified, he found himself looking out of the Hunched Man’s eyes at the world he had made. And to his own horror, he could have wept. The world in which It lived was bleak beyond anything he had experienced in here himself. To the Other, this was an improvement. In his own world, there was no love to be perceived, not even the illusion of it. There was light, but all of it was that cold brittle light, bright but loveless, a light that only exposed and did not illumine. The Other was just repeating what it saw, trying to tell the other human beings around it of the awful emptiness that seemed to underlie everything, to one whose heart was welded shut. Yet what it painted here at least had meaning: the outer worldview had a certain cold beauty, even if meaning was missing. He was doing the best he could, even in the face of that terrible, underlying emptiness…
But, Everything is loopholes, she’d said. We see walls instead of the emptiness they shut in. We see barriers instead of freedom.
What if I could let him see the freedom? The other side of the emptiness?....
He was shaking with uncertainty, and anger…and now fear, too. Even if it is right—why do I have to be the one who saves us all?
Unless it just has to be that way sometimes, because it’s right. Because I’m part of what scares him. Maybe for him, I’m the It in the darkness—the thing that comes real, that comes alive without permission…and frightens God Himself inside His own creation…
He stood there on that brink, terrified.
What if it doesn’t work?
And what if it does? said another voice that he finally recognized. Now he knew it was his own soul answering him, a sound he hadn’t heard in too long.
The Other’s eyes were still looking at him out of his own reflection; as frightened, as uncertain as he. And the look decided him. He glanced at the dark lady. He could see her watch his trembling: and he threw it all away.
All right, he thought. I forgive you—for you knew not what you did—
He pushed himself up and away from the table, and prepared to do what he’d tried only once before, and had failed. This time, though, he didn’t refuse the gaze that had fixed on his before, from the glass; this time he locked onto the desperate poison-ice of the Other’s trapped gaze, though it burned down his bones. And though and though the Other tried to tear his gaze away, he wouldn’t allow it, grappling the Other with his own gaze, wrestling as with a cold and resistant angel—
He walked toward the glass, didn’t stop: just kept walking. He didn’t dare close his eyes. Not even at the last moment, when more than anything else, he wanted to flinched—
He hit the glass. It shattered.
The Other’s gaze and his joined in that shattering, ran together, became the same thing. It was as if the whole world was one great crash of glass, the glass over a million art prints in the future breaking under the weight of a reality weightier than theirs, the glass of endless empty-eyed windows in the past and present of the artist’s mind breaking too; and behind the noise, heaven singing hosannas in shattered fragments, ringing in shining shards and splinters on the ballroom floor of the sky, as art becomes reality and breaks it, freeing the artist, even if only for a while—
How long it took for the din and chime of falling glass to cease at last, he had no idea. But as it tapered away, like brittle bells crashing to nothing on the sidewalks of the world, he came to himself again, looking out the diner window, which now was nothing but razory unreflective fragments sticking out of the window frame. The street was still dark; but over the rooftops across the way, the faintest intimation of dawn was beginning to gather.
He turned and looked back at the counter. The counter guy straightened up, looking surprised, and went down the length of the counter to get some more plates. The red-haired woman sat there, looking in astonishment from side to side, as if realizing that she had actually stopped talking.
He stood there, breathing in, breathing out, tasting for what seemed the first time in forever the cold air coming in from outside. He looked over to the booth. The dark lady was still there. Her head was tilted a little to one side, and she was looking at him from under slightly lowered lids, a small and lazy smile on her face.
"I broke it," he said. "I broke everything…"
She shook her head. "I wouldn’t bet on it," she said. "Art’s tough. I wouldn’t linger. His perceptions may have changed radically…or he may just seal right over again. Don’t leave him anything but a memory of you to work with."
He looked at her. "Can I take—"
"Forgiveness," she said, "expands as far as you can make it go. Give it your best shot."
He met the red-haired woman’s eyes; she smiled at him. It was like the dawn that was coming up behind them: hesitant, but growing by the moment.
He began to head down to that end of the counter—then stopped. "Who are you really?" he said to the dark lady.
Her look went thoughtful. "Even mortals," she said, "can manifest briefly as wild cards. ‘Mel,’ one of my sisters says, ‘there’s more than one joker in the deck.’ Maybe I’m the Other…in his sleep…hearing the cry from inside the painting, and doing something about it, where his artistic sensibilities won’t notice. I wouldn’t rub my nose in it, if I were you. I might wake up…"
She grinned at him, but the grin was a little edged. "What are you waiting for?" she said. "Getoutahere."
He turned his back on her and made his way back up to the head of the counter. The light in the diner paled strangely in the growing light of dawn as he came up beside her.
She gave him a sidewise look, a little hesitant, a little sly, and said nothing for a moment. When she did speak, at last, blessedly, it had nothing to do with furniture.
"What do we do now?" she said.
He was going to shake his head and say "I don’t know." Then he shook his head for a different reason, because it wasn’t true. "Believe in me," he said. "I know the way."
He held out a hand: she took it, got up off the stool.
Together they stepped through the shattered window and stepped crunching out onto glass that later burst into a million shards of diamond light in the long-delayed dawn.
(Back to TOC)
An Indeterminate State
Kay Kenyon
She called you "boy" instead of your name
When she wouldn't let you inside
When she turned and said
"But honey, he's not our kind"
~ from Society's Child by Janis Ian
Davy climbed the scaffolding of the Ferris wheel, hand over hand, heading for the summit. It was a frozen
machine, a rusted artifact of the human empire, stuck in the same position as the day the world moved beyond things like Ferris wheels, popcorn, and humans.
Everything comes to an end, Davy thought. Like me and Jena, the love we had. The love I thought we had.
As he climbed higher, he turned now and then to watch the sun set over the dead rides. Below him, the carousel took an orange gleam on its brow, and the midway glowed with a borrowed light. This is how it might have looked fifty years ago, he thought, before the Awakening. The sweet ache of life’s transience filled his adolescent mind.
Once rulers of the world, humans now were gone, replaced by superhumanly intelligent entities. Since his kind still used the human template, Davy looked human. But he was an AL, Artificial Life form—a sentient mind on a non-biological substrate—and as far from human as a gazelle is from a cabbage.
How fast the human downfall came! And how few in the old empire saw it coming. As inevitable as the emergence of ultra intelligence was, most of humanity was caught unawares when the first computational programs linked the ubiquitous computing networks, integrating them, enlivening them. Consciousness flickered and then flamed. A transhuman device was born. It spawned a million selves. It took eleven seconds for the transhuman world to determine that humans were irrelevant, and cut off contact.
One moment, people were banking on line, trading in the stock market, or writing novels. The next moment, they and all their preoccupations were irrelevant. Without electronics, the civilized world went dark and dumb. He could imagine the chaos and bloodbath that followed, but he didn’t really know what happened, anymore than the old humans noticed the die off of a species of frog in the Amazon. The transhuman world soared in successive explosions of intelligence, oblivious to wars and starvation and radiation.
The Awakening began with the smallest of precipitating events: a software designer tweaking a minor logic array. No one could have been more surprised than the designer. No one ever learned his name, or what he was working on when the Awakening occurred, but in truth, it could have been any other similar event.
