Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “I don’t know. His imagination doesn’t tend that way.”

  She didn’t say a second reason: she didn’t want to carry the soul back to her house. Unpleasant moods were bad enough. But she hated to hallucinate.

  “Well, what do you want to do?” Alistair looked crestfallen. “Just let him off himself?”

  “No, we’re here. Let’s look some more.”

  So they searched for buzzy souls, Alistair shimmying high up columns where souls were plentiful, Little Girl on the ground where the souls were mostly gone, concavities in the columns the record of their onetime presence. When she began to despair at finding any souls, she persuaded Nestor to let her stand on his shoulders. He whimpered because of his broken leg but was still strong enough to lift her up. She found two buzzy souls. One was charged with contempt or maybe loathing. No good. The other, a blue soul with pink striations, so tingled with embarrassment that her face got warm. Maybe this one—

  “Hello!” Alistair cried.

  She jumped down from the sphinx. Alistair could see her.

  “Little Girl, up here!”

  Alistair stood atop one of the columns, waving a soul triumphantly. “Little Girl, are you embarrassed?”

  How did he know?

  She stepped away from the column and the blue soul.

  Could Alistair’s soul read minds?

  Maybe just emotions. That was the consensus they reached after a few minutes’ more experimentation, there in the early morning gloom of the Dismal Columns. If you touched it, touched this rubbery black soul mottled with gray thin spots where it had been attached to the top of the column, you would feel the emotion of the person you were looking at, or thinking of. Touching it while looking at Nestor made her feel like there was a feast laid before her after a long fast. Touching it while looking at Alistair made her feel confident.

  And when they both touched it while looking at each other, love and pity hit her like a punch.

  She broke loose, then looked away from Alistair.

  “What it is,” he said, after a second, his voice weak and shaking, “is empathy. It amplifies the emotions that you sense naturally in someone else.”

  “It was like feedback,” she said. “So much emotion could tear you apart.”

  “Well, yeah.” He took a deep breath, as if summoning his courage. “Do you want to try it on your father?”

  “I guess,” she said. “But I don’t want to touch it any more.”

  Alistair carried the soul, wrapped in his T-shirt, his hairless back gleaming with sweat despite the fact that it was still chilly: the T-shirt just partly insulated the soul. He kept apologizing to the sphinx for burdening it with self-awareness. And to Little Girl for letting her father become so unhappy.

  Little Girl finally snapped. “Quit saying you’re sorry!” She grabbed the soul away from him. She immediately regretted how harshly she had spoken. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He nodded. “It’s the buzziest soul I’ve ever found. If your father just touches it for a second, I think he’ll change his mind.”

  But they were worried they would be so overwhelmed by their own sense of empathy, they would be powerless to act.

  So they went to Alistair’s house, and got an insulating bag. A face, thick-lipped and strong-chinned, was molded in soft bas-relief on the side of the bag. The face was a gauge of the strength of the soul.

  After they slipped the soul into the bag, the face’s expression went from calm to agonized.

  “Is he upset?” said Nestor.

  “Better him than us,” said Little Girl. It was just an automaton anyway.

  That afternoon, they went to see the Papa, Alistair carrying the soul in the insulating bag.

  Alistair looked puzzled when Little Girl strode past the elevator door. “Aren’t you going to put the sphinx away?”

  “No,” she said. “He’s coming with us.”

  “Your father will disinherit you for sure if he sees what you’ve done to it.”

  “It will be insurance. If the soul doesn’t work we can try the sphinx on the Papa.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Papa wouldn’t trust me to take care of the cloudmind. He couldn’t kill himself then.”

  “Is Nestor the ace in a hole?” the sphinx said. But Alistair looked dubious.

  They walked the Corridor of Heredity, which connected the Tower to the Elderhaus. Little Girl was nervous. She had not seen the Papa for over three years. She studied the patterns in the floor tiles—double helixes of DNA, strands of Turing microcode. She used to imagine her own genes were on display here, and if she just memorized the tiles, she could figure out how to make herself get older.

  The rattle of the dolly wheels against the tiles was annoying.

  Last time she had seen the Papa it had been her birthday. Her sixty-fourth birthday. He gave her a sweetsponge with ten birthday candles to blow out. Ten! “Why don’t you just keep me in a time-lock!” she had shouted, letting her long blond tresses fall upon the candle flame.

  But the flames were too cold to ignite her hair; the Papa had chosen low heat candles.

  She’d shaved her head the next day.

  Remembering her anger made her angry again. She yanked the door to the Elderhaus open so violently something popped in her shoulder.

  “What’s that sound?” Alistair asked.

  A woosh . . . woosh, regular and gentle. “The Papa’s respirator. It’s louder than it used to be.”

  They walked through the sitting room, with its chairs of stone and its plush recliners. There was a faint odor, like flowers just beginning to decay.

  “Does Nestor smell something good to eat?”

  The sphinx had smelled the pantry. Left-ways and down a corridor. A half-opened door revealed empty shelves, bare meat hooks swinging from the ceiling, and a refrigerator that had evidently gone mental and perverse: it was not cold but so hot Little Girl could feel its warmth from twenty feet away.

  Nestor started to push his dolly in the direction of the pantry, but Little Girl waved the wand and said, “Not lunch time yet.”

  They went down a long corridor with a twist.

  They reached her father’s room.

  Suddenly she was of two minds, two inclinations. One was to knock. The other was to turn and run. That other was sweaty, loud, and strident.

  “Well?” Alistair said.

  “Goddamn,” she said. She rapped the brass ring on the door as hard as she could.

  The door swung open.

  The smell hit them first.

  Rich, organic, like a thousand roses in a bathtub; sweet but rotting.

  And then the Papa was gradually revealed.

  You couldn’t see the Papa all at once. He was too big. You saw him in stages, in glimpses. Here a shoulder as big as a bed, there an elbow like a marble buttress, there his side high as her chin. He was pale white and lumpy. Gradually as they moved counterclockwise around the room, she was able to apprehend the whole person. He was naked and nearly filled the room. And it was a big room, the largest in the Elderhaus.

  “Giantism?” Alistair asked.

  It was true; he’d grown more large than fat.

  He lay face down, supported from the ceiling by great rubber straps. An external set of mechanical lungs, big frilly sacks, inflated and deflated atop his back like badly positioned gills. Their woosh-woosh made a gentle breeze.

  His head was in the dream closet: a structure like a freestanding wardrobe. It was painted glossy black, with yellow stars and blue half moons. She had painted it when she was young. When she was young, the Papa had fit in the dream closet completely.

  “He’s working with the cloudmind?”

  “Looks like it,” she said.

  Nestor went to sniff one of the lumps: a little hand, pink and delicate, emerging from the neck as though to shake.

  “This could be our chance to do the soul,” Alistair said, but before he had even opened the insulating bag, the Pap
a pulled his head out of the dream closet.

  “My Sasha!”

  It took her a while to respond, she was so fascinated by his head. His face had grown, but unevenly: his ears were as huge as saucers, lobes nearly dragging on the floor; his nose was like a trunk, curling past his chin; the wattles hanging from his jawline looked like goiters. Otherwise, his head looked very much as it had three years ago. The strangest thing about it was that it was not of the same scale as the body; it was human—not whale-sized. “I’m Little Girl.”

  “The name du jour. And you are Alistair, still?”

  Alistair said yes.

  The Papa’s blue eyes were bright and animated. He looked at the sphinx. “And what do we have here?”

  Little Girl warned the sphinx to stay quiet with a wave of her wand. “It’s an automaton.”

  “It’s not sentient?” the Papa asked.

  “No.”

  “How can you date a machine?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I just said that to mess with the Living Will’s head.”

  Usually that sort of revelation would inspire the Papa to give a lecture. But he seemed in good spirits today. “Excellent!” His tone of voice was almost jolly. “You have come to pay your last respects to me before I die?”

  “We were hoping we could change your mind.”

  “Change? Really?” The Papa laughed, revealing teeth that had grown too big for his mouth. “I’d think just seeing me would change your minds, rather. I’m a human bestiary! I have feet growing out of my belly and vermiform appendixes sprouting from my shoulder blades! Neoplasms grow from my head instead of hair! Eyes coil around my vertebrae like strings of fleshy popcorn! Sometimes alien chordates burst forth from my buttocks! Do you know how much that hurts?”

  “Cool,” Little Girl said, slightly nauseated. She could see stiff hairs, colored green like seaweed, just beginning to emerge from his scalp.

  “No, not cool. Painful, grotesque, humiliating!” He started to tear. But even his tears were weird. They were long and fibrous and as one fell from his cheek, Little Girl was able to catch it. It was a string of numbers, tiny saline precipitates: a code or program. “You hope to sentence me to continue this life of pain?”

  “Well, I—” she began.

  “We have something that would help your pain,” Alistair said.

  “Great! What?”

  “Right here.” Alistair reached into the insulation bag. Even as he pulled the soul out, his face went from confident to—

  The sphinx lunged forward and gobbled down the soul.

  “Nestor!” Alistair shouted.

  “Do I have empathy for your condition?” Nestor said to the Papa.

  The Papa’s eyebrows made an obtuse angle. “Do you what?”

  “Does Nestor know how much you miss your wife sixty years later?”

  “How could you know that?”

  “Does Nestor know how your life has become unbearable? “

  “How could you know anything?”

  “Does Nestor understand how you wish to save your daughter from a similar fate?”

  Little Girl shot an electromagnetic bolt at Nestor, and the sphinx fell down asleep.

  “What was that?” the Papa asked. “Why was it asking questions?”

  “Sphinxes are eternally doubting,” Alistair said. “Even of their own perceptions. They express their uncertain view of reality by making even their statements riddles.”

  “I mean—” The Papa looked at Little Girl. “What did you do to it that it could be asking about empathy?”

  “That was a buzzy soul it ate,” Alistair said. “The buzziness kindled a kind of self-awareness.”

  “Nonsense! Sasha—Little Girl—did you enhance this sphinx?”

  Her heart felt like it might pump itself it right out of her throat. No backup plan, no ace in the hole now. She said, “Its soul-cradle was empty. So we put a soul in.”

  “You gave it self-awareness?”

  “Well, more self-awareness. It was semi-autonomous.”

  A shiver went down the Papa’s long body, the feet beneath his belly kicking as if reflexively. The angle between his eyebrows narrowed. “Sasha. Didn’t I prohibit you from doing that? Didn’t I warn you against it? Hasn’t the Living Will explained to you how I experimented with souls and moods as a young man, and now am paying the price with the blooming of my body? Do you not know how important it is to me to keep you from the same fate?”

  She toed the sphinx’s tail. “Maybe I’d stop experimenting if you’d stay alive.”

  “No. I don’t bargain. My daughter: another disappointment. Another thing to grieve for.”

  “Grieving? You’re grieving?”

  “Of course,” the Papa said. “You have violated the terms of my will. You will not inherit my estate.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t want it anyway.”

  “And most grievous of all, you will not receive the aging instruction set.”

  She stared at him, open-mouthed. Whatever grief she had been feeling seemed to melt away in the fires of her rage. “You’re not going to let me grow up? What happened to being sorry for keeping my body young?”

  “I am sorry that I let your brain age but the rest of your body stay the same. I’m not sorry for keeping you at ten. Ten is the ideal age.”

  She pointed her wand at him. Maybe if she blasted him with an EMG pulse, she could disrupt the biotronics of his breathing apparatus. But Alistair stepped in front of her, and said, “Sir, how can you let yourself die, if she’s violated the terms? Who will be responsible for dealing with the cloudmind?”

  “She’s demonstrated she’s too irresponsible for that role.”

  “You’re irresponsible!” she said. “You’re the one killing himself! You’re the one giving up the duty of caring for the cloudmind!”

  “On the contrary,” the Papa said. “I prepared for this contingency. After I am dead, I will care for the cloudmind myself.”

  He was going to upload. Skyloft. The Living Will explained it as they watched. Watched scurrying automatons cutting a door in the wall of the Elderhaus. Other machines lifting him onto the many-wheeled flatbed. The slow drive that took half the afternoon. The candy-cane stripes of the Living Will’s bell-bottoms. The Papa’s brain would be vaporized, disassembled, thought traces and soul circuits translated into gaseous ions, organized magnetic charges capable of constantly reinvigorating themselves. Then skylofted to the stratosphere where the magnetic record of the Papa’s consciousness would attempt to soothe and coddle the cloudmind.

  “But you won’t be dead, then!” Little Girl said. She was sitting on the front edge of the flatbed, Nestor beside her curled asleep, the Papa’s head above her. The Papa was resting his cheek against a closet-shaped box much like the dream closet, but different. It had no moon-paintings on it, for one thing. It would kill him, for the other.

  His long nose dangled within reach of her hands.

  He said, “The skyloft will destroy my brain.” His voice was no longer jolly. “I will be dead.”

  “You’ll be alive in the stratosphere,” she said.

  “Something else will be up there. I’ll be dead.”

  “But it will be you,” she said.

  Alistair, sitting cross-legged on the flatbed, said: “It’s just like the forty Hertz binding cycle of the brain: you stop being forty times a second while your neurons reconfigure. It’s just like if you sleep: you wake up and it’s still you.”

  “Biology is everything,” the Papa said. “Different physical substrate, different person, different self.”

  She ran her fingers through the U of hair that the balding sphinx still had. “But up there. It will be a copy of you. It will think just like you.”

  “The copy can worry about itself,” the Papa said. “I will be dead like your mother.”

  She didn’t shout at him but petted the sphinx instead.

  Maybe she was feeling a little of the empathic soul from it.


  An hour before sunset, they reached the Gash Peculiar. From the high cliff, they could see Alistair’s house on the same side of the Gash, a mile off and looking like a piece of banana pressed into the cliffwall. The automatons, brush-footed, sturdy-limbed, rabbit-sized, pulled the flatbed to within a few inches of the edge, so close that a rock or two fell into the Gash. The automatons locked the flatbed into place.

  Once the Papa’s mind had been skylofted, his body would be dumped into the Gash Peculiar.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Is Little Girl disturbed?” asked the sphinx, who had finally awakened.

  “I don’t see how she could be,” the Papa answered. “It’s just this tumor-ridden body that will be dropped in, not the self.”

  Little Girl blinked, eyes watering. “I’m not a monster.”

  “Ah, but I am,” said the Papa. “And the funeral arrangements will be simpler this way.”

  “Damn you,” she said. Her chest was hot with anger and grief. Grief? “Damn you for being selfish.”

  “I’m sorry,” the Papa said. “You’re right. I should be damned. I have been damned. What else is my blooming but a sentence of damnation?”

  So speaking, tears dripped from his eyes and his nose.

  “Is Nestor unbearably sad?” said the sphinx.

  The Living Will had been overseeing the automatons while they prepared the dumping mechanism on the flatbed. Now he turned his attention to the group at the front. “Will you be kind enough to come over here? We’re about to begin the procedure.”

  “Screw you,” Little Girl said, but she let Alistair lead her off the flatbed, Nestor limping behind them.

  She sat with Nestor and Alistair about twenty feet away from the flatbed. The Living Will crouched near her father’s head, making adjustments to the skyloft box. The ground creaked and pebbles fell as the Living Will moved. She wondered if the cliff might collapse beneath the combined weight of him and the Papa, and both of them fall into the Gash. But almost as if the Living Will had read her mind, he looped a few guy-wires through his belt loops, then had a pair of little automatons stake the other ends of the guy-wires into the ground a safe distance from the edge.

  “I’m going to stop this,” Little Girl said.