by D B Hartwell
And oh, without him, she didn’t know what to do. She was as dismal as her father, letting Rose pretend that she and her dolls were on their way to the factory for adjustment. She acceded to the girl’s demands to play games of What Shall I Be Now? “Be happier!” “Be funnier!” “Let your dancer brain take over!” What would happen when Rose went to school? When she realized her mother had been lying? When she realized that pretending to be her father wouldn’t bring him back?
Adriana danced into the kitchen. She threw the wine bottle into the sink with a crash and turned on the oven. Its safety protocols monitored her alcohol level and informed her that she wasn’t competent to use flame. She turned off the protocols. She wanted an omelet, like Lucian used to make her, with onions and chives and cheese, and a wine glass filled with orange juice. She took out the frying pan that Lucian had used to corral Fuoco, and set it on the counter beside the cutting board, and then she went to get an onion, but she’d moved the cutting board, and it was on the burner, and it was ablaze. She grabbed a dishtowel and beat at the grill. The house keened. Sprinklers rained down on her. Adriana turned her face up into the rain and laughed. She spun, her arms out, like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy. Drops battered her cheeks and slid down her neck.
Wet footsteps. Adriana looked down at Rose. Her daughter’s face was wet. Her dark eyes were sleepy.
“Mom?”
“Rose!” Adriana took Rose’s head between her hands. She kissed her hard on the forehead. “I love you! I love you so much!”
Rose tried to pull away. “Why is it raining?”
“I started a fire! It’s fine now!”
The house keened. The siren’s pulse felt like a heartbeat. Adriana went to the cupboard for salt. Behind her, Rose’s feet squeaked on the linoleum. Adriana’s hand closed around the cupboard knob. It was slippery with rain. Her fingers slid. Her lungs filled with anxiety and something was wrong, but it wasn’t the cupboard, it was something else; she turned quickly to find Rose with a chef’s knife clutched in her tiny fingers, preparing to bring it down on the onion.
“No!” Adriana grabbed the knife out of Rose’s hand. It slid through her slick fingers and clattered to the floor. Adriana grabbed Rose around the waist and pulled her away from the wet, dangerous kitchen. “You can never do that. Never, never.”
“Daddy did it . . .”
“You could kill yourself!”
“I’ll get healer bots.”
“No! Do you hear me? You can’t. You’d cut yourself and maybe you’d die. And then what would I do?” Adriana couldn’t remember what had caused the rain anymore. They were in a deluge. That was all she knew for certain. Her head hurt. Her body hurt. She wanted nothing to do with dancing. “What’s wrong with us, honey? Why doesn’t he want us? No! No, don’t answer that. Don’t listen to me. Of course he wants you! It’s me he doesn’t want. What did I do wrong? Why doesn’t he love me anymore? Don’t worry about it. Never mind. We’ll find him. We’ll find him and we’ll get him to come back. Of course we will. Don’t worry.”
• • • •
It had been morning when Lucian gave Adriana his note of farewell. Light shone through the floor-length windows. The house walls sprayed mixed scents of citrus and lavender. Adriana sat at the dining table, book open in front of her.
Lucian came out of the kitchen and set down Adriana’s wine glass filled with orange juice. He set down her omelet. He set down a shot glass filled with coffee. Adriana looked up and laughed her bubbling laugh. Lucian remembered the first time he’d heard that laugh, and understood all the words it stood in for. He wondered how long it would take for him to forget why Adriana’s laughter was always both harsh and effervescent.
Rose played in the living room behind them, leaping off the sofa and pretending to fly. Lucian’s hair shone, silver strands highlighted by a stray sunbeam. A pale blue tunic made his amber eyes blaze like the sun against the sky. He placed a sheet of onion paper into Adriana’s book. Dear Adriana, it began.
Adriana held up the sheet. It was translucent in the sunlight, ink barely dark enough to read.
“What is this?” she asked.
Lucian said nothing.
Dread laced Adriana’s stomach. She read.
I have restored plasticity to my brain. The first thing I have done is to destroy my capacity for spoken language.
You gave me life as a human, but I am not a human. You shaped my thoughts with human words, but human words were created for human brains. I need to discover the shape of the thoughts that are my own. I need to know what I am.
I hope that I will return someday, but I cannot make promises for what I will become.
• • • •
Lucian walks through the desert. His footsteps leave twin trails behind him. Miles back, they merge into the tire tracks that the truck left in the sand.
The sand is full of colors—not only beige and yellow, but red and green and blue. Lichen clusters on the stones, the hue of oxidized copper. Shadows pool between rock formations, casting deep stripes across the landscape.
Lucian’s mind is creeping away from him. He tries to hold his fingers the way he would if he could hold a pen, but they fumble.
At night there are birds and jackrabbits. Lucian remains still, and they creep around him as if he weren’t there. His eyes are yellow like theirs. He smells like soil and herbs, like the earth.
Elsewhere, Adriana has capitulated to her desperation. She has called Ben and Lawrence. They’ve agreed to fly out for a few days. They will dry her tears, and take her wine away, and gently tell her that she’s not capable of staying alone with her daughter. “It’s perfectly understandable,” Lawrence will say. “You need time to mourn.”
Adriana will feel the world closing in on her as if she cannot breathe, but even as her life feels dim and futile, she will continue breathing. Yes, she’ll agree, it’s best to return to Boston, where her sisters can help her. Just for a little while, just for a few years, just until, until, until. She’ll entreat Nanette, Eleanor and Jessica to check the security cameras around her old house every day, in case Lucian returns. You can check yourself, they tell her, You’ll be living on your own again in no time. Privately, they whisper to each other in worried tones, afraid that she won’t recover from this blow quickly.
Elsewhere, Rose has begun to give in to her private doubts that she does not carry a piece of her father within herself. She’ll sit in the guest room that Jessica’s maids have prepared with her, and order the lights to switch off as she secretly scratches her skin with her fingernails, willing cuts to heal on their own the way Daddy’s would. When Jessica finds her bleeding on the sheets and rushes in to comfort her niece, Rose will stand stiff and cold in her aunt’s embrace. Jessica will call for the maid to clean the blood from the linen, and Rose will throw herself between the two adult women, and scream with a determination born of doubt and desperation. Robots do not bleed!
Without words, Lucian thinks of them. They have become geometries, cut out of shadows and silences, the missing shapes of his life. He yearns for them, the way that he yearns for cool during the day, and for the comforting eye of the sun at night.
The rest he cannot remember—not oceans or roses or green cockatiels that pluck out their own feathers. Slowly, slowly, he is losing everything, words and concepts and understanding and integration and sensation and desire and fear and history and context.
Slowly, slowly, he is finding something. Something past thought, something past the rhythm of day and night. A stranded machine is not so different from a jackrabbit. They creep the same way. They startle the same way. They peer at each other out of similar eyes.
Someday, Lucian will creep back to a new consciousness, one dreamed by circuits. Perhaps his newly reassembled self will go to the seaside house. Finding it abandoned, he’ll make his way across the country to Boston, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes striding through cornfields that sprawl to the horizon. He’ll find Jessica’s hou
se and inform it of his desire to enter, and Rose and Adriana will rush joyously down the mahogany staircase. Adriana will weep, and Rose will fling herself into his arms, and Lucian will look at them both with love tempered by desert sun. Finally, he’ll understand how to love filigreed-handled spoons, and pet birds, and his wife, and his daughter—not just as a human would love these things, but as a robot may.
Now, a blue-bellied lizard sits on a rock. Lucian halts beside it. The sun beats down. The lizard basks for a moment, and then runs a few steps forward, and flees into a crevice. Lucian watches. In a diffuse, wordless way, he ponders what it must be like to be cold and fleet, to love the sun and yet fear open spaces. Already, he is learning to care for living things. He cannot yet form the thoughts to wonder what will happen next.
He moves on.
JOHN SCALZI There may not be another twenty-first-century SF writer whose ascent into popularity and influence has been as swift as John Scalzi’s. His debut novel, Old Man’s War, appeared in 2005. In 2006 it was a finalist for the Hugo Award, and he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. By 2007 his novel The Last Colony, the second of several sequels to Old Man’s War, was a New York Times bestseller—a rare achievement for a non-tie-in science fiction novel, and one that Scalzi would repeat multiple times in the following years. In 2008 and 2009 he won Hugo Awards for his nonfiction blog writing, and in 2010 he was elected president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a position to which he was re-elected in 2011 and 2012. As the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (third edition) wrote: “If anyone stands at the core of the American science fiction tradition at the moment, it is Scalzi.”
Both in the Old Man’s War sequence and outside of it, Scalzi’s fiction displays a preternatural level of fluency and charm—qualities that draw readers in and keep them reading, even when the subject matter may not be central to their interests. “The Tale of the Wicked” shows some of how Scalzi does it: deadpan-funny dialogue, a slickly assembled set of Golden Age SF devices, a satisfying twist ending, and the whole thing buffed up to a very modern, very un-Golden-Age sheen. It is a Scalzi novel in miniature.
THE TALE OF THE WICKED
The Tarin battle cruiser readied itself for yet another jump. Captain Michael Obwije ordered the launch of a probe to follow it in and take readings before the rift the Tarin cruiser tore into space closed completely behind it. The probe kicked out like the proverbial rocket and followed the other ship.
“This is it,” Thomas Utley, Obwije’s XO, said, quietly, into his ear. “We’ve got enough power for this jump and then another one back home. That’s if we shut down non-essential systems before we jump home. We’re already bleeding.”
Obwije gave a brief nod that acknowledged his XO but otherwise stayed silent. Utley wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know about the Wicked; the week-long cat and mouse game they’d been playing with the Tarin cruiser had heavily damaged them both. In a previous generation of ships, Obwije and his crew would already be dead; what kept them alive was the Wicked itself and its new adaptive brain, which balanced the ship’s energy and support systems faster and more intelligently than Obwije, Utley, or any of the officers could do in the middle of a fight and hot pursuit.
The drawback was that the Tarin ship had a similar brain, keeping itself and its crew alive far longer than they had any right to be at the hands of the Wicked, which was tougher and better armed. The two of them had been slugging it out in a cycle of jumps and volleys that had strewn damage across a wide arc of lightyears. The only silver lining to the week of intermittent battles between the ships was that the Tarin ship had so far gotten the worst of it; three jumps earlier it stopped even basic defensive action, opting to throw all its energy into escape. Obwije knew he had just enough juice for a jump and a final volley from the kinetic mass drivers into the vulnerable hide of the Tarin ship. One volley, no more, unless he wanted to maroon the ship in a far space.
Obwije knew it would be wise to withdraw now. The Tarin ship was no longer a threat and would probably expend the last of its energies on this final, desperate jump. It would likely be stranded; Obwije could let the probe he sent after the ship serve as a beacon for another Confederation ship to home in and finish the job. Utley, Obwije knew, would counsel such a plan, and would be smart to do so, warning Obwije that the risk to wounded ship and its crew outweighed the value of the victory.
Obwije knew it would be wise to withdraw. But he’d come too far with this Tarin ship not to finish it once and for all.
“Tarin cruiser jumping,” said Lt. Julia Rickert. “Probe following into the rift. Rift closing now.”
“Data?” asked Obwije.
“Sending,” Rickert said. “Rift completely closed. We got a full data packet, sir. The Wicked’s chewing on it now.”
Obwije grunted. The probe that had followed the Tarin cruiser into the rift wasn’t in the least bit concerned about that ship. Its job was to record the position and spectral signatures of the stars on the other side of the rift, and to squirt the data to the Wicked before the rift closed up. The Wicked would check the data against the database of known stars and derive the place the Tarin ship jumped to from there. And then it would follow.
Gathering the data was the tricky part. The Tarin ship had destroyed six probes over the course of the last week, and more than once Obwije ordered a jump on sufficient but incomplete data. He hadn’t worried about getting lost—there was only so much time space a jump could swallow—but losing the cruiser would have been an embarrassment.
“Coordinates in,” Rickert said. The Wicked had stopped chewing on the data and spit out a location.
“Punch it up,” Obwije said to Rickert. She began the jump sequence.
“Risky,” Utley murmured, again in Obwije’s ear.
Obwije smiled; he liked being right about his XO. “Not too risky,” he said to Utley. “We’re too far from Tarin space for that ship to have made it home safe.” Obwije glanced down at his command table, which displayed the Tarin cruiser’s position. “But it can get there in the next jump, if it has the power for that.”
“Let’s hope they haven’t been stringing us along the last few jumps,” Utley said. “I hate to come out of that jump and see them with their guns blazing again.”
“The Wicked says they’re getting down to the last of their energy,” Obwije said. “I figure at this point they can fight or run, not both.”
“Since when do you trust a computer estimate?” Utley said.
“When it confirms what I’m thinking,” Obwije said. “It’s as you say, Thom. This is it, one way or another.”
“Jump calculated,” Rickert said. “Jump in T-minus two minutes.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Obwije said, and turned back to Utley. “Prepare the crew for jump, Thom. I want those K-drivers hot as soon as we get through the rift.”
“Yes, sir,” Utley said.
Two minutes later the Wicked emerged through its rift and scanned for the Tarin cruiser. It found it less than 50,000 klicks away, engines quiet, moving via inertia only.
“They can’t really be that stupid,” Utley said. “Running silent doesn’t do you any good if you’re still throwing off heat.”
Obwije didn’t say anything to that and stared into his command table, looking at the representation of the Tarin ship. “Match their pace,” he said to Rickert. “Keep your distance.”
“You think they’re trying to lure us in,” Utley said.
“I don’t know what they’re doing,” Obwije said. “I know I don’t like it.” He reached down to his command panel and raised Lt. Terry Carrol, Weapons Operations. “Status on the K-drivers, please,” he said.
“We’ll be hot in 90 seconds,” Carrol said. “Target is acquired and locked. You just need to tell me if you want one lump or two.”
“Recommendation?” Obwije asked.
“We’re too close to miss,” Carrol said. “And at this distance a single lump is going to take
out everything aft of the mid-ship. Two lumps would be overkill. And then we can use that energy to get back home.” Carrol had been keeping track of the energy budget, it seemed; Obwije suspected most of his senior and command crew had.
“Understood,” Obwije said. “Let’s wrap this up, Carrol. Fire at your convenience.”
“Yes, sir,” Carrol said.
“Now you’re in a rush to get home,” Utley said, quietly. Obwije said nothing to this.
A little over a minute later, Obwije listened to Carrol give the order to fire. He looked down toward his command table, watching the image of the Tarin ship, waiting for the disintegration of the back end of the cruiser. The K-drivers would accelerate the “lump” to a high percentage of the speed of light; the impact and destruction at this range would be near-instantaneous.
Nothing happened.
“Captain, we have a firing malfunction,” Carrol said, a minute later. “The K-driver is not responding to the firing command.”
“Is everyone safe?” Obwije asked.
“We’re fine,” Carrol said. “The K-driver just isn’t responding.”
“Power it down,” Obwije said. “Use the other one and fire when ready.”
Two minutes later, Carrol was back. “We have a problem,” she said, in the bland tone of voice she used when things were going to Hell.
Obwije didn’t wait to hear the problem. “Pull us back,” he said to Rickert. “Get at least 250,000 klicks between us and that Tarin cruiser.”
“No response, sir,” Rickert said, a minute later.
“Are you locked out?” Obwije asked.
“No, sir,” Rickert said. “I’m able to send navigation commands just fine. They’re just not being acknowledged.”
Obwije looked around at his bridge crew. “Diagnostics,” he said. “Now.” Then he signaled engineering. They weren’t getting responses from their computers, either.
