Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  “ ’At farm been buggering around the pond?”

  “Growl exclaim fuck-fuck yup! Sheep-shagger.”

  “If it’s been at our lambs—”

  “Nawwwwrr. Buggrit.”

  “So whassup?”

  “Grrrr, Maddie yap-yap farmtalk! Sheep-shagger.”

  “Maddie’s been talking to it?”

  “Grrr yes-yes!”

  “Oh, shit. Do you remember when she did her last backup?”

  The dog coughed fragrant blue smoke. “Tank thump-thump full cow moo beef clone.”

  “Yeah, I think so, too. Better muck it out tomorrow. Just in case.”

  “Yurrrrrp.” But while Joe was wondering whether this was agreement or just a canine eructation a lean paw stole out of the kennel mouth and yanked the hookah back inside. The resulting slobbering noises and clouds of aromatic blue smoke left Joe feeling a little queasy: so he went inside.

  The next morning, over breakfast, Maddie was even quieter than usual. Almost meditative.

  “Bob said you’d been talking to that farm,” Joe commented over his eggs.

  “Bob—” Maddie’s expression was unreadable. “Bloody dog.” She lifted the Rayburn’s hot plate lid and peered at the toast browning underneath. “Talks too much.”

  “Did you?”

  “Ayup.” She turned the toast and put the lid back down on it.

  “Said much?”

  “It’s a farm.” She looked out the window. “Not a fuckin’ worry in the world ’cept making its launch window for Jupiter.”

  “It—”

  “Him. Her. They.” Maddie sat down heavily in the other kitchen chair. “It’s a collective. Usedta be six people. Old, young, whatever, they’s decided ter go to Jupiter. One of ’em was telling me how it happened. How she’d been living like an accountant in Bradford, had a nervous breakdown. Wanted out. Self-sufficiency.” For a moment her expression turned bleak. “Felt herself growing older but not bigger, if you follow.”

  “So how’s turning into a bioborg an improvement?” Joe grunted, forking up the last of his scrambled eggs.

  “They’re still separate people: bodies are overrated, anyway. Think of the advantages: not growing older, being able to go places and survive anything, never being on your own, not bein’ trapped—” Maddie sniffed. “Fuckin’ toast’s on fire!”

  Smoke began to trickle out from under the hot plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.

  “Bugger,” she remarked.

  “You feel trapped?” Joe asked. Again? He wondered.

  Maddie grunted evasively. “Not your fault, love. Just life.”

  “Life.” Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. “Life!”

  “Horizon’s closing in,” she said quietly. “Need a change of horizons.”

  “Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven’t I?” said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away. “Got a shipment of fertilizer coming in.”

  In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and surreptitiously EMPing every police ’bot on the farm into the silicon afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it ran up the gadgets he’d ordered—a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with its own oxygen supply.

  Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed. She didn’t seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign. Joe kept his questions to himself.

  It took another five days for the smallholding’s power field to concentrate enough juice to begin fueling up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-Net in the most deniable and surreptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chitchat. He’d half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn’t say anything—just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she’d taken to holing up.

  Finally, the tank was filled. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armor, picked up his weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.

  The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a green skirt that reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping willow; children had played here, pretending to explore the wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental control cameras.

  That had been long ago. Today the woods really were wild. No kids, no picnicking city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket trolley of Precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shorted out. The bones of the technological epoch, poking from the treacherous surface of a fossil mud bath. And around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.

  Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles were matte black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up all the available light: a network of taproots and fuzzy black grasslike stuff covered the ground densely around them. Joe’s breath wheezed noisily in his ears, and he sweated into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colorless smoking liquid at the roots of each ballistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him uneasy. As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one thing he’d been able to think of that was guaranteed to kill the trees stone dead without igniting them. After all, they had cores that were basically made of gun cotton—highly explosive, liable to go off if you subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chainsaw. The tree he’d hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall sideways, and Joe stepped round it, efficiently squirting at the remaining roots. Right into the path of a distraught farm.

  “My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my trees, my trees!” Eye stalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. “Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!”

  “Back off,” said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter and fumbling for his air gun.

  The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across angry blue irises. “How dare you?” demanded the farm. “My treasured seedlings!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. “Think I’d let you burn my holding when tha’ rocket launched? Stay the fuck away,” he added as a tentacle began to extend from the farm’s back.

  “My crop,” it moaned quietly. “My exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for Baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn’t fucked up! Who set you up to this? Rat Lady?” It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle atop its leg cluster.

  So Joe shot it.

  Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyzes skeletal muscles, the kind over which human nervous systems typically exert conscious control. Etorph
ine is an insanely strong opiate—twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against the etorphine—but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a blue whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time.

  It shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a Syrette raised. “Why?” it asked plaintively in a voice that almost made him wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. “We could have gone together!”

  “Together?” he asked. Already the eye stalks were drooping; the great lungs wheezed effortfully as it struggled to frame a reply.

  “I was going to ask you,” said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a thud like a baby earthquake. “Oh, Joe, if only—”

  “Joe? Maddie?” he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping the tranquilizer gun.

  A mouth appeared in the farm’s front, slurred words at him from familiar seeming lips, words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from the farm. Passing the first dead tree, he dropped the nitrogen tank: then an impulse he couldn’t articulate made him turn and run, back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm, pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his arms, he found it was already dead.

  “Bugger,” said Joe, and he stood up, shaking his head. “Bugger.” He keyed his walkie-talkie: “Bob, come in, Bob!”

  “Rrrrowl?”

  “Momma’s had another breakdown. Is the tank clean, like I asked?”

  “Yap!”

  “Okay. I got ’er backup tapes in t’office safe. Let’s get t’ tank warmed up for ’er an’ then shift t’ tractor down ’ere to muck out this mess.”

  That autumn, the weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of Armitage End.

  Terry McGarry is a copy editor and Irish musician from New York City, with an honors degree in English from Princeton (where she wrote her graduating thesis on dystopian science fiction) and fifteen years logged in the editorial department of The New Yorker magazine. Her novels Illumination and The Binder’s Road are available now, with a third, Triad, forthcoming. More than forty of her short stories have appeared in genre publications, from Amazing Stories to Realms of Fantasy, and her SF poetry is collected in the award-winning chapbook Imprinting.

  SWIFTWATER

  Terry McGarry

  Outside a house of old age and loss, John Jasper watched his client, an unmemorable young woman, disappear on foot into the gaslit night. Hovering before him, like retinal burn, was her senile grandmother’s expression: the brief return of comprehension to the watery eyes, the seamed lips trembling as he gave her back her wedding day, her daughter’s birth. For ten years he’d saved them for her, and now disbursed them weekly. History in escrow; awed joy the dividend.

  The client had asked him to find things hidden in her grandmother’s decaying mind: the location of a passbook, a safe-deposit key. “I can’t retrieve what’s gone,” he’d told her. “I can’t go in and reconstruct data.” The tech term was lost on her, and he realized: Of course. She’s only what, twenty-three? She was a baby when it happened. She doesn’t remember what it was like before.

  // We’re standing next to a water fountain, boxes all around us, breaking down the office. Larry took a twelve-story header last week. “At least the techies can translate their skills, once things calm down,” I say bitterly. My coworker still hasn’t accepted the crisis at all, still believes it’s going to go away. “Code monkeys like us … I don’t know, buddy …”//

  A displacement of air, a sigh of pressure brakes, returned him blinking to the present.

  The nursing home was off the beaten track; the street was quiet at this hour. There wasn’t so much as the squeak of a commuter pedbike. When he felt the presence of the man behind him, when he felt the circular insistence of the gun barrel through his onesuit, when he saw the dark-windowed ricksha at the curb like a cruising predator, it was like a memory: a memory of how he hadn’t been wary, how he hadn’t paid attention, how he’d let a client’s past distract him for the seconds required to take him unawares.

  “Get in the ricky, please, Mr. Jasper.”

  The glow of the gaslamps looked stark and unfamiliar, as if he were remembering the Victorian childhood of someone immensely old.

  “Don’t kill me,” he said. Not a random mugging, or he’d already be bleeding on the street, remembering the blow, the hands groping his pockets. The man knew his name. “Whatever it is you think I have stored in my head, you can reason with me about it, okay?”

  Donna and Joey were waiting for him at home. They were supposed to talk some more about saving Joey’s memories now, to return sweet childhood to him later. It would be an invasion, Jasper had said; he didn’t want to know that much about his son; doctors don’t operate on their own kids … but Donna saw it as a priceless, unique gift. And Joey wanted it.

  Joey had no virtual interface modules to record his experiences or link him into the schoolroom of the world. For Joey, other planets—commonplace destinations in John Jasper’s youth—were a fantasy, the stars forever out of reach. Jasper would bequeath him memories as anecdotes, boring stories of the old days, the legacy of any ordinary father to his boy.

  The weapon moved to his neck, steel on skin.

  “Now, Mr. Jasper.”

  He raised his hands away from his sides and complied. The runner pulled away as soon as the guy with the gun closed the door.

  He couldn’t keep the memories separate from his own.

  He knew whose were whose; he didn’t—couldn’t—deliver for one client another’s college graduation, or give the second the first’s wedding night. He knew which ones weren’t his. He wasn’t losing his mind. Yet.

  But all of them were part of him: currents of memory in a river of time.

  Before the Crash, he’d been an anthropologist, his talent useful in gathering primary-source material. Since the Crash, a vim-starved populace craved his mental storage facilities. ESP had become big business, as people accepted the absence of tech and turned inward to the powerful vistas of the human mind. Meatware was at a premium. But he remained freelance—joined no esper guilds, sold his soul to no company. And he wasn’t telepathic. All he could do was remember, if you remembered it for him first. And then he could play it back for you.

  Or tell someone else.

  That was the rub.

  He sat back, obedient, in the ricky, and the metal O withdrew from his neck, leaving a numb imprint. Okay, he thought, this is okay, I can talk to these people, we can work out an arrangement—

  The goon next to him shifted, and before he could turn, there was a sharp jab in the middle of the O, and in a rush of anesthesia that he thought might be his death coming to meet him was a glyph of anonymous past:

  //an undulating cylindrical river, we are inside a river, this is what it looks like from the inside, silver and molten ice, light and silver shadow, the most beautiful thing I have ever imagined, didn’t think I could feel anything the way other people felt but this thing is a feeling, I am having a real live feeling, and I think it must be joy this swelling of my heart the tears in my eyes the ache in my belly how does anyone bear this feeling, this joy//

  He woke in a white-plastered room with one door, no windows, two slatted wooden chairs. His chair swayed, joints loose. In the other chair, hands folded patiently, was a Filipina.

  He waited for the threats, the explanation, the executioner. She didn’t say anything. He broke the ice before he got so scared he couldn’t talk. “I know you can’t tell me what you think I remember, because if I don’t remember it, the cat would be out of the bag, right? But I do not know why I’m here.”

  In a soft contralto, she said, “Malcolm Kiernan.”

  // In C-and-C, waiting for a report of the Kip Thorne to come back from the monitoring station. Three more minutes till Jupiter gets the hell ou
t of the signal’s way. Beth Atherton’s a spaz, but she’s the best damn pilot there is… .//

  // Two fingers of booze left in the bottle. There must be a faster way to die. A rippling form: someone come to grovel at my famous feet, “Oh Mr. Kiernan could I have your autograph it doesn’t matter that there won’t be any more hyperspace missions ever it doesn’t matter that the Crash destroyed your life you’re still tops in my book—” But no, not a sycophant, not someone come to torture me about my drowned goddamn past… .//

  He blinked, pressed his fingers to his temples, found himself sober again, found himself him again, and saw the same woman sitting before him. “You’re the one who approached him,” he said, “about trying to—”

  // The pain of bloody knuckles, a ragged hole in ancient, crumbling drywall. God damn it! How much goddamn sport do the goddamn gods get at my expense? Bring me back from the brink, give me purpose, then throw a death sentence in my face, a goddamn disease, after everything I’ve been through to be betrayed by my own goddamn cells!//

  He was toppling. He grabbed the bottom of the chair.

  “He lied to me. He told me he had been diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome, that his heavy drinking after the Crash had caught up with him.”

  He said this as if it were the woman’s fault. She smiled at him without warmth.

  “Why didn’t you realize it when he originally gave you the memory you just experienced?” she asked mildly.

  He didn’t know. He probably hadn’t thought about it. Businessmen, powerful men—he didn’t like them. A disease is a disease; he didn’t examine it to be sure what disease it was.

  “So you’re trying to refit the prototype hyperdrive ship, the one Kiernan worked on before the Crash.” He tried for the same conversational tone she was using, but his voice shook. “He knew he was going to die before your project was completed, and so he trained his successors to be able to finish it for him. But maybe there was something …” He cleared his throat to push the fear down. “Kiernan slipped me some information you need, didn’t he?”