Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  He had piled the paper scraps beside the money and now he went through them again. The lettering looked like it ought to be familiar but it just barely wasn’t, like something seen through wavy glass. The only numbers were on the scrap that he had read. They were hand-written and strung together to form one long chain. The next numbers in the sequence were 144233 but Lázaro didn’t know why he knew that. It felt like how it felt when old garbage came up from the back of his brain, stuff he’d rather not have, from a life that he couldn’t remember. He pushed the paper around with his forefinger. Too many numbers to be a passkey. Maybe some form of ID or an account number. He could pay for time on public access and search, but he wouldn’t get anything useful—although he didn’t know why he knew that.

  He pondered this as he heated a tin of soup. This being the first day of his current riches, he had determined to stretch it out as long as he could before he fell, as he knew he inevitably would, into the delirium of the Curve. It bothered him that the number sequence wasn’t just gibberish, it bothered him that he couldn’t let it go. He pushed the numbers out of his head and thought about the plastic Antonio had palmed but wouldn’t use. Plastic was trash, but it caused trouble. Antonio knew what to do with it; by now the plastic was probably out-system somewhere, making mischief in places that Antonio and Lázaro and even the drunk kid had never been.

  The soup was pretty good. He dunked the heel of a bread loaf into it and counted out the bills again. One one two three five eight one three … maybe the numbers didn’t mean anything alone but pointed to something else. Like, maybe, the next numbers in the sequence. Or pointed to a pattern. Images grew into his consciousness, patterns starting and growing and turning on themselves to the rhythm of almost but not quite 1.618 from the zero square where you started to the one square to the two square to the three square to the five square to the eight square and on and on through the matrices of the Continuum, each square turning into itself to the next square in a dance folding and doubling until you reach, you reach, you reach …

  Damn, Lázaro thought. He grabbed up the paper scraps and threw them onto the stove and turned the burner on. It cycled from black to orange to white. The papers whooshed to flame and disappeared into grey ash. Lázaro returned to the table, grabbed another hunk of stale bread, and slammed it into the soup. Drops of broth scattered over the table, balling up in the accumulated dust.

  Screw all of it. He’d spend the money on the biggest, loudest, longest drunk anybody in the Curve had ever had. Yeah. As soon as he cooped out a bit so he’d be fresh and ready for action. He could start at Papa Carlisle’s and work his way up one side of the Curve and down the other and end up at Papa’s again but upstairs this time. Or he could start upstairs at Papa’s and snag him a honey and have some company up and down the Curve. Yeah. Yeah, that.

  He pushed the soup bowl aside, where it settled against a growing collection of crusted plates and crawling green food wrappers, and stumbled into his cot. Tomorrow. Early. Up one side and down the other. That would make all this damned clarity go away.

  Domes, bubbles, and arcs

  First, the Port dome’s not really a dome, it’s an annulus but everybody calls it a “dome,” so what the hell. The top’s open and the sides only come up about a thousand meters because the designers figured that was enough—but of course it wasn’t. So the ships go in and the ships come out, and the gas and garbage spills into the Port and down the outsides, too, like this thick crap soup. The Port dome’s about half a klick thick and inside are offices and subways and hotels and all the stuff you need to run a good respectable Port, but it isn’t enough space. It never is. You’d think they could’ve figured that out, but they never do.

  So after the Port dome went up they built this lean-to partial dome that tilts up against the Port dome like a crescent cupping a bigger arc: the Curve. It was supposed to be just warehouses and megas, not living space, so they didn’t attach it to the Port dome very well and now the Curve pulls away from the Port dome a little more every year, and a little more gas and garbage falls into the Curve, but nobody seems to give a damn.

  Northside, there’s the Bubbles with the residentials and parks and stores and crap like that. Inside the Port dome there’s a whole separate dome called the Island that was management and politics before the plague came. You can forget about all that. This story isn’t about the Bubbles or the Island or the plague, it’s just about Lázaro and Antonio and the Curve. Oh yeah, and it’s about Jane, too, a little bit.

  Jane

  The next morning he wasn’t drunk or hung over—which was kind of too bad because it meant he could see okay. Papa Carlisle’s crowded up against an edge of the Curve, next to where the port dome came down into the dirt and under where the arc of the Curve dome lay up against the bigger dome but not quite, so weather crept in. Today there was bright, sunny weather falling through the dome joins, and that was too bad too because Papa Carlisle’s didn’t do well in sunny weather. It shabbied up all the scales and feathers.

  Lázaro came through the front shimmer. Papa was up already, wearing a face ferocious in its cheerfulness—until he saw Lázaro and the cheerfulness fell away, as did the extravagant moustache. Papa turned back to its card game and turned her sweet, sexy face into the usual mirror.

  “Hey,” Lázaro said, his feelings hurt. “I got scratch.”

  Papa turned back to him. The flat mirror face grew one eyebrow, which rose into an arch. “Yes?” Papa said. “Where did you find money, you useless junk-diver? Were you relieving inebriated personages of their superfluity of cash?” Papa hadn’t grown a mouth, so the words came out of the air behind it.

  Lázaro squirmed. “Not me,” he said, clinging to the half-truth. “Look, I got scratch and I wanna spend it, maybe with, with, who you got today you can rent to me? Not too shaggy,” he added with haste. “I don’t want be seen with no skant.”

  Papa waved this away. “Today I am honored by the presence of Mistress Anastasia of the Fourteen Mysteries, the lovely and talented Stephen Comelightly, and—” Papa paused. “And we can call her Jane.”

  “Jane,” Lázaro breathed. “Jane.”

  The mirror grew lips, which smiled and shouted, “Jane, darling. Descend.”

  “Wait,” Lázaro said, panicked. “I ain’t got that much scratch, I mean, I gotta save. I ain’t paid up my rent and—”

  And by then it was too late, because a brand-new Jane was there and smiling at him as though she knew that he did so have that much scratch and that she scared him pale and that it didn’t matter because, after all, she was Jane and they had been married for twenty years and he still loved her like fury, even though he couldn’t quite remember anything else about her. But Jane did that to you, had always done that even way back when he was a—was a—was a what? He almost had it for a minute before it pixilated and was gone, leaving just Jane.

  “Children,” Papa said, smoothing a moustache that grew somewhere under her tilted eyebrow and beside his still-smiling lips. “Go.”

  They went.

  You dance a box

  By noon he found himself telling her all about it. They sat over a plate of spaghetti with meatballs in the back room at Giancarlo’s, sharing a fork and a beer and a glass of wine which mostly Jane drank, and he told her about Antonio and the rude drunk Academy asshole and the money and—

  “… three five eight one three two one three four,” he whispered.

  Jane’s pretty eyes went wide. “The Fibonacci sequence,” she said, and he nodded because of course that is what it was. “A space grid?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. Yeah.” Lázaro looked at her. “Jane? Why do I know that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, touching his hand. “I just met you this morning, remember? But that’s what it is, yeah? I mean, launch’s zero and you follow the numbers until somehow you’re off into the Continuum, zero one one two three five eight thirteen twenty-one … don’t need to be a space jock to know that.”

&nb
sp; “I ain’t just no space jock,” he muttered. She touched his hand again.

  “Of course you’re not, Lázaro. Of course not.”

  That’s when Antonio came in, waving his flash and wearing his foxleather jacket over his shoulders, in that suave way he had. Lázaro waved at him. Antonio looked over the bar along the side wall and the tables in front of it, already crowded with tourists and spacers and a couple townies come to the Curve for rough trade along with their lunch. He had that lazy picking-and-choosing look on his face. Lázaro waved harder and for a moment it looked like Antonio was gonna ignore him—before he saw Jane and came over like she was reeling him in.

  Antonio got all smoothly and snakely and put his ass down on the bench beside Jane so she had to scootch over, but she was smiling because that’s what Jane was: a whore, and whores give people what people want. Lázaro didn’t mind.

  While Antonio sweet-talked Jane, some spacers at a table near the bar made big juhla, yelling and slamming mugs on the table where they flashed out, so the beer jumped into the air all on its lone. Lázaro liked it when they did that. He watched and finished off another beer himself. By now he was getting fuzzy around the edges and so was the world. One more and he’d be flying, so he ordered it and downed it and when he looked across the table he saw that Jane and Antonio had disappeared somewhere. Anything Jane made while away from Papa’s was hers and Lázaro didn’t begrudge her a little walking-around money. Besides, by then the flying was happening, the backwards and forwards inside his head matching the backwards and forwards inside his mind. All the comforting fuzziness came back like he lived in a world that he couldn’t just quite almost touch, but it was okay now because he was backwards and forwards and flying and he didn’t care.

  So he let himself fly over to the spacers’s table and took a chair and slid it up between a couple of them and waved his hand at the barkeep and waved at the table to order another round. The barkeep blinked and buzzed and the spacers looked at each other and moved over for him.

  Lázaro took a deep, happy breath. “Yo soy un Fibs,” he announced.

  “The hell,” said the spacer with captain’s bars, but she said it grinning. “No way you ain’t no Fibs, knocker.”

  “Te lo juro,” Lázaro said. The waitress floated a tray full of drinks over and everybody grabbed. Lázaro stuck a bunch of bills in the waitress’s navel, which went green. He liked doing that. “You start at zero and you dance a box,” he said with authority. “Then you dance a box, then you dance a box, then you dance a box until you’re solid gone. Whoof! Just like that!”

  The captain laughed. “You are so fulla shit,” she said. She lifted her drink to him. “Danke.”

  The table had finished drying itself by now, so Lázaro, who was about to illustrate by drawing boxes on the tabletop with beer, instead just ran his index finger in an imaginary square, joined to a square, joined to a square.

  “It’s the numbers,” he told them. “It’s the numbers and dancing, numbers to boxes to places to time to something, something I don’t remember … but I remember the numbers. Except,” he said, compelled by an engineered honesty, “I don’t know how to use it anymore, but I remember I did use it, but then I stop remembering it at all.”

  “Skitte,” one of the spacers said with cheerful contempt, and they all went back to yelling and drinking. The numbers fell out of Lázaro’s head and he was happy to sit with them, like he belonged at the table, like he was still a Fibs and the yelling and drinking were home somehow, except they weren’t.

  “Hey, Fibs, we’re dry,” one of the spacers shouted to him. Lázaro started to raise his arm, but somebody put a hand on his wrist and stopped him. He looked up and back at Antonio and Jane. Antonio always was kinda fast and here he was done and his hair combed back and bein’ his buddy. That Antonio didn’t miss a thing.

  Now he shook his head at the spacers. “I think my bro Laz has bought enough,” he said. “What you givin’ him in return, just you let him sit here? You think that’s some kinda big deal? You show some respect.”

  “Like hell,” the captain said, but she didn’t sound mad. “Your ponyboy says he’s a Fibs. Don’t take kindly to that, mockin’ the trade.”

  Antonio made a big sigh and put his head to one side, like he was exasperated. “First off, he ain’t my ponyboy, he’s my bro. And second, he was Fibs on Mi Fregado Suerte.”

  “Like hell,” the captain said again. “Emiliano Corazón’s ship? No way. That was one stand-up balls-on smugglin’ bastard. They caught him and scrapped the ship years ago.”

  “Laz,” Antonio said. “Show her your arm.” Lázaro started rolling up his right shirt-sleeve and Antonio cuffed him lightly on the side of his head. “The other one, cabron. With the writing on it.”

  Lázaro did and held his arm out so everyone could see the numbers and symbols under his skin. Once all that stuff had moved and had lights and color, but that was a long time ago and now it was just a washed-out kind of blue. The spacers crowded around to stare, then backed off and stared at his face instead.

  “Hell,” the captain said again, quieter. “What happened to him? He wasn’t like that when he was Fibs on the Suerte—not if he’s the one who navved Castle Peaks.”

  “There an’ back,” Antonio said. “Come on, Laz, let’s get goin’.”

  When Lázaro stood he staggered a little with all the beer, so Jane put his arm over her shoulders to help him walk. He waved goodbye to his new friends, but the captain caught up with them at the door.

  “Man, what happened to him?” she demanded. “I heard the Freddies found the ship, said some lyin’ skitte about a cargo and jumped the ship when they got aboard. Ditched Corazón out on some asteroid.”

  “Yeah,” Antonio said. By now they were out on the Curve and somehow it had gotten to be late afternoon so it was darker and the place looked a lot better. Giancarlo’s was almost in the middle and the Curve curved back on both sides until it disappeared behind the port dome’s arc. Lázaro smiled at Jane, who smiled back and put his hand on her boob.

  Antonio said, “Bastards don’t mind stealin’ when it’s them doin’ it, and don’t believe in capital punishment, but they sure as hell believe in gettin’ even.” There was a pause while he stared at the captain and she stared back at him, and something came up between them because she nodded and Antonio nodded, and Lázaro was happy that his friends were getting along, but the flying was going away and he wanted more.

  “Mira, Antonio,” he said, “quiero mas cerveza.”

  “Yeah, bro, just a minute.” Antonio kept staring at the captain.

  “The crew,” she said. She didn’t sound like she was flyin’ either anymore. “What happened to the crew?”

  Antonio put Lázaro’s free arm over his shoulders so Lázaro was bracketed by two people he cared about. The captain looked at his face and looked away again.

  “You know that stuff they make, brings back your memories? I mean, everything you want, all the time? Cleans out all the sticky junk in your brain like blasting sludge off an engine? That stuff?” The captain just looked at him. “Yeah, well, before they got to that they found a way to make the sludge. You’d think they ain’t got a use for that, brain-gunk, but they ain’t about to let nothin’ go they can squeeze some use outta it.”

  “The crew.”

  “The crew,” Antonio said, agreeing. “Laz’s brain, he’s got so much sludge in there he can’t remember nothin’. Sometimes something comes up, but he don’t know what it is half the time, an’ don’t know what to do about it.”

  Antonio took a deep breath. Lázaro’s hand had gone slack so Jane put her hand over his and cupped his fingers around her breast.

  “Last year he remembered a week of training, like it was yesterday. That’s gone. Right now all he can remember is good times, and he’s havin’ fun. Year from now, maybe two, he’ll forget how to breathe, or his heart’ll forget how to beat, and that’ll be that. ’Cause the Freddies, they don’t believe
in no death penalty. So they ain’t killin’ him, they just shot him up and chipped him and dumped him here.”

  “And you’re his jailer,” the captain said.

  “He don’t need no jailer,” Antonio said. “He’s chipped. There ain’t no way out of here.”

  With that, Antonio and Jane moved him down the street. Lázaro looked over his shoulder at the captain. He had told her something, important maybe, but he couldn’t remember what it was. After a moment he stopped trying to remember and waved goodbye. She just stared back.

  A halcyon interlude

  So anyway, Lázaro got to fly, but he didn’t get to spend a week doing it and didn’t get to spend any more of his scratch either, because Antonio took it away and said he’d give it back in pieces. For a little while this made Lázaro mad—before he forgot that he had the scratch at all and was just happy that Antonio gave him money when he wanted it. Jane went back to Papa’s, but sometimes Antonio let Lázaro buy her out for a couple hours, and they went up and down the Curve and had spaghetti at Giancarlo’s before she and Antonio went away to do some nookie-nookie, but they always came back. Papa Carlisle let Jane go out cheap on account of he knew Lázaro couldn’t fuck, but what she did when she was out with him, that wasn’t Papa’s business at all, so everyone was happy.

  So Lázaro’s finishing the spaghetti and finishing his beer, and this woman comes and sits across from him and says “Yo” like she knows him, and they talk garbage for a while before Antonio comes back alone and sees her and sits down.

  “I figured you’d be back,” he said. “Did some research?”

  “Ain’t much else to do, workin’ short hauls around this penjamo.” She put her beer down. “Corazón’s last run.”

  Antonio nodded.

  “Don’t know what he was runnin’, but rumor says he stood to make a killing from it.”