Mash Up

by Gardner Dozois

  She is Sandra Garcia; she is just as young as I thought. She runs an investigative blog out of Brooklyn, so she’s come a couple of hours by solar train to get here, and then either hired a share-car or found a rideshare out to my father’s house. One of the advantages of living where I live is that it’s expensive for people to get to you—unless they already have the money to maintain a private vehicle. So she’s smart enough to know I’d never consent to a remote interview, and bold enough to hope that a pretty woman showing up at my door might have the edge in getting me to talk.

  “Mr. Jacobin, you probably know why I’m here.” Wrong-footed or not, she’s not a coward. She glances at Marna and holds out a hand again, although there’s a little tremble in the gesture this time. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t think we’ve met.”

  Marna smiles. She’s a privacy hardliner, and keeps herself off Facewreck and the paparazzi sites with lawyer letters she’s endlessly qualified to write. “Marna,” she says, and takes Ms. Garcia’s hand. It’s a cool, professional handshake. I know what it feels like, because Marna gave me one just like it the day we met. “I’m Mr. Jacobin’s counsel.”

  Give Ms. Garcia this—she takes it without a flinch. She nods politely, says “a pleasure,” and turns back to me. “I was hoping I could interview you for my feed.”

  “You’re not feeding now?”

  “That would be illegal without permission,” she says. “If you agree, we’ll start, and I’ll allow a thirty-second delay and recall.”

  Pain, grief, shellshock are retreating in the practiced businessman’s mindset that my father pounded into me. “A word of advice, Ms. Garcia?”

  She leans forward.

  “Don’t offer the concessions until people ask for them. Please flash Marna the contract. She’ll look it over, and then we can have a chat.”

  Ms. Garcia blinks, her face stilling for a moment as she checks what I said for the trap. Her mouth is half-open; she was ready to argue her case.

  I kill my feeds, my inbox notifications. This deserves my full attention.

  “I’ll offer you an exclusive, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, we’ve walked around back and the ducks have come running—or waddling—to greet us. It’s not actually affection; they’re hoping to be fed. My father’s gardener—my gardener—Olivia is down in the vegetable patch tending the tomatoes, which explains why she didn’t notice the journalist hanging around the front steps. The mower is leaned up against one of the yellowing legacy evergreens—trees my father fought to keep alive, but even he couldn’t make a temperate conifer endure the new normal—blades freshly sharpened and shining, but Olivia hasn’t started the grass yet. There’s an acre and a half of lawn back here; keeping it mowed is job security at its finest. The hedge roses around the borders are wilting. We can pay to exceed our graywater ration, and my father often did—a form of conspicuous consumption. From the sidelong glance Marna shoots me, she’s wondering what I’m going to do about those roses now that they’re my problem. Her neck curves like a sculpture. I’d swallow my tongue for permission to lay my palm against it.

  Some of them are over two hundred years old, planted by my father’s mother. It seems a shame to destroy them—and a shame to keep pouring resources down the hole of their non-adaption. Marna doesn’t feel my ambivalence about the whole thing. Maybe I should just let her rip them out, and then hate her for it.

  That would be my father’s solution… would probably have been my father’s solution.

  You’re supposed to bring a woman roses when you court her. I wonder how Marna would react to the uprooted corpses of five hundred rose trees that have endured since the twentieth century.

  Marna leads Ms. Garcia over to the table under the ponderosa lemon dominating the yard, flanked and supported by fat-trunked fan palms. Its branches hang heavy with fruit the size of footballs. Garcia gives it a quick visual scan; she’s got to be filtering its cultivar and approximate age for her feed. My father planted it just around the time New England really started warming up, about when Bridgeport was inundated. It’s older than all three of us put together, and it required serious protection during the wild years of the climate swing.

  Camilly has noticed I’m home. She brings out the kitchen scraps for the ducks and asks if I’d like refreshment for Ms. Marna and the other guest. The ducks recognize the bucket and respond by pushing and shoving around my feet. They’re small, black. They have uneven white bands around their necks. Jade-green iridescence shimmers across their feathers when the sun strikes them.

  I wriggle my unburned hand into the glove Camilly tucked into the bucket handle, hook that handle awkwardly over my wrist so it doesn’t press bandages against tender flesh, and start broadcasting the scraps. Ducks pile over one another, webbed feet pedaling. I feel the unwilling smile curve the corners of my mouth.

  They were a boyhood project, and my father never liked them—though he liked the eggs well enough. It was more political than personal for him, raising some of our food here. A way of saying we weren’t nouveau riche, we didn’t need to perform as consumers by letting other people grow everything we ate. It was a kind of conspicuous consumption via refusing to participate in conspicuous consumption, as it were. I never quite figured out how it meshed with roses, but as a wise person once said, the mystery is not that human beings don’t make sense, it’s that they ever do anything non-contradictory at all.

  “Cayugas,” Ms. Garcia says on my right. She must have skinned them, unless she has some weird reason to know a lot about ducks.

  “A heritage breed,” I confirm. “They started off in upstate New York. I like them because they’re quiet. As ducks go. And pretty.”

  “As ducks go.”

  When I glance at her, there’s a sparkle. More than I anticipated. I match her smile. A dim red light flickers in a corner of her iris. “Are we recording?”

  “Is this a photo op?”

  “Oh, definitely. I keep ducks around for ops with the journalists I strongly discourage from coming to my home.”

  “Touché.” No rancor. “Are they good layers?”

  “Supposed to be very tasty, too, but I’m too sentimental to eat acquaintances.”

  Marna is watching from a few feet off, outside of Ms. Garcia’s pickup range. “You’d never have made it as a farmer.”

  “Or a cutthroat venture capitalist,” I agree. “I’ve the privilege of living off the legacy of someone else’s ruthlessness.”

  If it took her aback, she finds her feet again and presses on. “Tell me about your father.”

  “My father is deceased. I’ve been in the hospital since the… explosion.” Behind Ms. Garcia, Marna lifts her chin in warning, like a restive mare. But I can’t make myself say accident.

  Fuel cells just don’t explode like that.

  When Garcia is gone, I’ll put Marna on the police. I was interviewed in the hospital, but I want to be kept apprised of the state of the investigation, and cops are like anybody else. You get exactly as much attention and consideration as you ride them for—until you don’t want it, and then they’re over you like butter on toast.

  “I’d rather talk about his life than his death.” Garcia has a nervous tic of miming pushing hair off her face, even when it’s all tied back sleekly. She says, “That surprises you.”

  “It’s not every day the world loses one of the elect. It’s not every day—”

  I pause. She waits. So much of the art of the successful interview lies in an inviting silence. She could be good at her job someday…

  But maybe I’ve gotten lost in my own chain of thought again. Or maybe I’m just pretending. I don’t re-emerge until she clears her throat and says gently, “Congratulations.”

  It puts my head back. The ducks scatter as my body jerks, then reconvene at my feet. They’re still skirting Garcia. The pail is almost empty. “I’m sorry?”

  “On your inheritance. On… being out of your father’s
shadow. Were you distracted by your feed?”

  Does she think I’m checking the stock ticker? The headlines? Texting with a lover?

  “Just my thoughts.” Is she really going to take the interview confrontational this quickly?

  She says, “Can you tell the ducks apart?”

  I huff through my nose and toss more scraps. “Inevitable, I suppose.”

  “The death?”

  “The congratulations. Thank you, of course. And of course I am relieved.”

  “You were about to say?”

  Hide the frown. You’re recording. Marna is chewing her lower lip, but letting me play my game.

  I don’t look any older than Ms. Garcia. But unlike her, I’m at least a little older than I look. “I was about to say… ‘It’s not every day the world loses a Jacobin.’ But then I thought we might be better off if it did.”

  She tries to hide the eye stutter as she triple-checks to make sure she got that on media. When she looks back, I’ve managed to arrange my lips in a tolerant smile.

  She says, “I’m sorry if my congratulations were out of line.”

  We’re struggling for control of the interview, now, and both of us are trying to look like we’re not doing it. I bite my lip against a giggle as I imagine a fist-fight in the cockpit. I wonder if she has developed the instincts yet to feel the weight and trajectory of the conversation, the way it has a life of its own. The fact that I mean to take it away from her.

  I find my dilettante pose and smirk. “Oh, no. There’s no need to lie about it. Isn’t everyone a little relieved when one of those superannuated fuckers kicks it? Sliiiiiiiiiides off this mortal, as it were? No matter how ugly that sliding is. Especially the kin, who can finally get down to the serious business of scrabbling over the inheritance without worrying that Grampa is going to outlive the moon. No. No… apologies are necessary.”

  “But you cared,” she says. “He was your father. He wasn’t just William Jacobin, filthy-rich elect, legendary investor behind the Maddox Process, founder of the geritocracy, notorious rich guy, impediment to your inheritance. He created you, didn’t he? Raised you? You knew the private man.”

  A little too well. “You have a way with words. Are you always this plainspoken, Ms. Garcia?”

  “You mean confrontational.”

  “I said what I meant.”

  “Usually people read a blog before they consent to the interview.”

  “That’s why you show up on doorsteps, huh?”

  She cracks first, face breaking in a smile. But she doesn’t look down. “Are you saying you didn’t have any warm regard for the old man?”

  “William Jacobin…” I sigh. “Everything was a trophy to my father. This house. Me. His money. Living forever. Assorted members of Congress and the occasional megastar. The car that killed him. It’s not that he didn’t care about things—but what he cared about was owning them.”

  “But you loved him anyway,” Garcia says, persistent.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “I loved my father. After a fashion.”

  A note of admiration keeps coming back into her voice as she talks about my father. Of course—she’s young, and although she thinks of herself as a hard-nosed investigator, it’s difficult for the young not to be swayed by power. It’s difficult for anyone not to be swayed by power. The young are just less likely to notice it happening.

  She’s not setting out to be a starfucker, this Sandra Garcia. But if she’s not careful, it’s an easy slide into hagiography and becoming a wholly owned subsidiary. Wealth has a gravity well.

  “A fashion?”

  “You’d think that archaic emotions like filial piety would have long since burned away in the fires of the old man’s unrelenting existence. His presence. His sheer unwillingness to die.” I can’t stop my gloved left hand, unburdened by bandages or the bucket, from making a brief, helpless gesture. I hope it’s effective. “But that’s not how it happens in real life, is it? The situation gets… complicated.”

  She’s all syrup and sympathy as she says, “His death was unexpected.”

  “No one ever expects to get blown up. Except for maybe soldiers in a war zone.”

  From the look on her face, her reblogs and uplinks must be going through the roof. I imagine the distraction of skyrocketing comments and pings. We’re going viral: Bereaved Son of Exploded Geriocrat Loses Shit at Pushy Interviewer.

  I hope she has an escalator clause with her advertisers.

  I toss another handful of scraps. Olivia quits hand-pollinating tomatoes—apparently this was all much easier before the bee colony collapse—and wanders over to collect her mower. The creak of the wheel carries through lazy insectdrone. Turning blades flash in the sun.

  Marna flashes me a quote from Garcia’s liveblog: There is a striking incongruity to this man—elect, immortal, wealthy, attended by servants in his gorgeous home—tossing filthy garbage to a gang of birds with his own hands.

  Funny. I never looked at myself that way.

  She makes me sound like my father.

  The ducks still throng around me, even though the bucket is empty. They avoid Garcia’s neighborhood, however. Garcia says, “The birds can tell us apart.”

  “Birds can,” I reply. “They recognize facial features.” I lead her back to the house, Marna still flanking, and turn away to rinse my hands and the bucket under a metered spigot. “What can I tell you about my father that you don’t already know, if you’ve done your research?”

  The ducks squabble over the scraps of sweet potato on the ground.

  She says, “I’m here for your words, your perspective. Not for facts. Facts are cheap.” She holds up a finger and the red gleam in the corner of her iris dies. “And my followers aren’t going to bother doing the research. That’s what I’m for.”

  She drops the finger, and we’re back on the record again. Lazy people—or busy people—have been keeping journalists employed since the business was invented.

  I say, “My father, William Jacobin, was two hundred and thirteen years old on the day of his death. Which was last Sunday. I assume you and your proxies and followers have heard the Jacobin name, which is why you’re here—or have linked it by now. Even if you hadn’t, a little simple math would tell you he was one of the first elect.”

  She’s young—so desperately young that she actually says, “What was his exemption?”

  I can’t let my smile look pitying. “The exemption laws hadn’t been passed yet. He got the Maddox Process as soon as it entered second-stage human trials, before laws could be passed limiting it. He made his money in pharma. So he was Noruco’s primary investor, and he… got in on the ground floor. So to speak.”

  “And were you a child of his youth?”

  I bet she knows the answer. But half of a good interview is seeing how people navigate questions you know the answers to. And her followers won’t know. Not unless they link it, or somebody like me—or her—tells them.

  The kitchen door opens beside us. I can see over Garcia’s shoulder the source of that grassy rustle of steady footsteps, the clink of a spoon against a glass. She does not turn.

  Camilly, now in her white company apron, sets a tray holding three sweating glasses of pale yellow liquid on the table under the lemon tree. At that sound, Garcia glances over.

  I say, “Actually, I’m a good deal younger.” I pause while Camilly withdraws, escaped brown curls sticking to the sweat at the nape of her neck. “Lemonade?”

  This is the second year we’ve had a commercial citrus crop in the northeast, now that the weather is settled enough. My father’s tree is a good deal older. Citrus doesn’t come cheap, especially since the failure of large-scale production in Florida and California—and the end of the era of inexpensive long-distance shipping. But we always had lemons, and there are limes and blood oranges and grapefruits growing in the conservatory behind the house.

  “Please,” she says. It’s hot. And her uplinks will want the experience. I imagine she
speaks from one part greed, one part dehydration, one part looking for ways to bond with her subject. Me, in this case, though I’ve watched journalists hone these tricks on my dad since the beginning of time.

  It’s a reason the best interviewers support the cost of going to meet their subjects. You learn a lot more about a person in person. I would bet Sandra Garcia travels more than most people, possibly even all around New England and the Mid-Atlantic.

  Her followers would want to smell the air—or a bottled facsimile of it—on their uplinks. They’d want to feel the virtual grass between their toes.

  If I hadn’t been my father’s son, I might be doing what Garcia is doing. If I hadn’t been my father’s son—

  —am I really just the old man come again? Caught a little bit younger this time, before the wrinkles and the aching joints set in? Of course we’re not really immortal, we elect—we get injured like anyone else—but the Maddox Process means our bodies repair themselves a hell of a lot better. Given time… our bodies can repair almost anything from failing cartilage to demyelinating neurons.

  We sit at the old painted iron picnic table beneath the tree, Marna on the far side of Ms. Garcia so as to be edited out of the pickups. The lemonade tastes fresh. Tart, sweet, complicated. Ice floats in it. It is cold enough to hurt my teeth.

  Camilly’s left a curl of rind in each glass to show that it’s the real thing, and to perfume the drink with oils. A little more of my father’s subtle brand of ostentation. As if Garcia would not have noticed that she’s sitting under a mature lemon tree.

  I catch myself trying to show her that I’m not my father, slowing down to savor the flavors and calories. Of course, in so doing I only ape him; William Jacobin, self-made man, would have considered it too revealing of his upbringing to squander food like some jumped-up petit bourgeoisie.

  He’d have kept Garcia waiting forever, though. I answer her hanging question as soon as I’ve swallowed. “No, William was already in middle age when the Maddox Process became available, but he’d frozen semen as a younger man and chose to go ahead with life extension immediately despite the reproductive side effects. His theory was that he could reproduce any time he liked. By the time he got around to it, the semen was no longer viable—and it didn’t matter.