"What do you plan, then? A courtesy call on the boy's family?"
Ceren pinched herself just the once to verify that she wasn't dreaming, but she hadn't really thought so in the first place. Ceren addressed the person who was not there. "Haunting my dreams was bad enough. Are you going to talk to me while I'm awake too?"
"Someone needs to, but no. Your Gran said you would know when the time came, and this is how you know. It is time, Ceren. Put me on."
"Why?"
"So that you may achieve your heart's desire, of course."
Ceren closed her eyes briefly and then spoke to nothing again. "Very well."
The shelf was high. She needed a stool to stand on when she pulled down the long wrapped bundle that rested there. She barely glanced at it, but what she did see confirmed what she had long believed. In a moment the new skin was settling around her. She felt her legs lengthen, her small breasts swell and reshape as she surged up to fit the appearance she now wore.
As always, there was more to it than appearance. As with the Oaf, and the Soldier, and the Tinker, now she wore another person's memories. Only this time Ceren did not keep her own thoughts and memories tight and protected. She did not fight the new memories, as she tried to do with the Soldier. She took them as far as they would go, all the while she looked in the mirror.
She wasn't merely pretty. She had a face and form that would stop any man dead in his tracks. Ceren was now the reflection of the girl in the pond.
Didn't I tell you? The Girl sounded a bit smug. You know what life was like for me. What it can be for you. All you need do is take what you want.
Ceren nodded. "You're beyond beautiful. Was that why that man drowned you in the pond?"
She felt the laughter. She wondered if she was the one laughing, but the reflection looking back at her was sad and solemn. Her own reflection, somewhere hidden beneath a borrowed skin. So you've seen that as well. Some men will destroy what they cannot possess, and I chose poorly. What of it? Neither Kinan nor his brothers are like that.
"I know."
All you need do is show yourself to him as you are now, and he is yours.
Ceren shook her head. "No. I show your face to him and he is yours."
A frown now showing in the mirror that was none of Ceren. It is the same thing, and he is your heart's desire!
"No. I merely want him. I even think I like him. If there's more to the matter, then time alone will tell. You never understood my heart's desire. Maybe because it took me so long to understand it myself." She tapped the back of her neck three times. "Off with ye, done with ye!"
The skin split as it must, but it did not release her quickly or easily. The Girl was fighting her. Ceren thought she understood why. She pulled off one arm like a too-tight glove and then another, but the torso refused to budge.
"Does the servant question the mistress? Let me go."
You can't do it without me, without us! You're ugly, you're worthless. . . .
"Let me go," Ceren said calmly. "Or I'll cut you off." And just to show that she was serious, Ceren went to her herb box and took out the bronze razor. She had already started a new cut down the side when the skin finally relented. In a thrice Ceren had the Girl wrapped carefully back on her shelf.
The voice was still there, taunting her. You'll be back. You need me to gain your heart's desire. If it's not Kinan, then another! You're plain at best, hideous at worst. You'll never achieve it on your own.
Ceren almost giggled. "I didn't understand. All this time I thought the skins were tools and we the purpose. Now I know it's the other way around. I am the instrument, just as Gran was before me. You, the Oaf, the Tinker, the Soldier. . . . You who died ages ago, and yet still live through us. You are the purpose. We serve you."
You still do. And will.
"Why?"
Because only we can give you what you want.
Ceren shook hear head. "You still don't understand. You already have, at least in part."
What are you talking about?
"I've always felt like one living in a borrowed house, with borrowed strengths, borrowed skills, but I thought it was because of Gran. It wasn't. It was because of you."
Fool! The raiders will return or bandits or village boys too drunk to know who they're forcing! You will fall in love. A heavy tree will fall. You can't do this on your own. You need us.
"No," Ceren said. "I need to find out what belongs to me and what does not. You gave me that last part, but now I have to find the rest. That is my true heart's desire."
Ceren left the store-room and latched it behind her. Then, upon consideration, she slowly and painfully pushed her Gran's heavy worktable to block the door.
Setting fire to her Gran's cottage was the easy part. Watching it burn was harder. Listening to the four voices screaming in her head was hardest of all, but she bore it. She heard the pounding from inside as the flames rose, tried not to think of what supposedly had no volition, no independent action, and yet still pounded against a blocked door. Ceren led her sheep and her goat to a grassy spot a safe distance away, where they grazed in apparent indifference as the cottage and pen alike burned.
Her Gran had never taught Ceren any prayers. She tried to imagine what a prayer must be like, and she said that one as the voices in her head rose into a combined scream of anguish that she could not shut out.
"Go to your rest, and take your memories with you."
She didn't think the prayer would work. Some of the memories were hers now, and she knew that was never going to change. She wasn't sure she wanted it to.
The roof finally collapsed, and just for a moment Ceren thought she saw four columns of ash and smoke rise separately from the fire to spiral away into the sky before all blended in flame and smoke as the embers rained down.
Kinan found her sitting there, on the stump, as the cottage smoldered. He looked a little pale, but he came down the path at a trot and was only a little out breath when he reached her. "We saw the smoke. Ceren, are you all right?"
She wondered if he really wanted to know. She wondered if now was the time to find out. "I should ask you the same. You shouldn't be out of bed," Ceren said, not looking at him. "My home burned down," she said, finally stating the obvious. "Such things happen."
"I'm sorry," Kinan said. "But I'm glad you're all right. Have you lost everything?"
She considered the question for a moment. "Once I would have thought so. Now I think I have lost very little." She looked at him. "I'm going to need a place to stay, but where can I go? I have a goat and a sheep and my medicines. . . I have skills. I'm not ugly, and I'm not useless!" That last part came out in a bit of a rush, and Ceren blinked to keep tears at bay. She only partly succeeded.
Kinan smiled then, though he sounded puzzled. "Who ever said you were?"
Ceren considered that for a moment too. "Nobody."
Kinan just sighed and held out his hand. "You'll stay with us, of course. We'll find room. Let's go talk to Ma; we'll come back for your animals later."
Ceren hesitated. "A witch in your house? What will your father say?"
Kinan didn't even blink. "My father is a wise man. He may grumble or he may not, but in the end he'll say what Ma says, and that's why we're going to her first. We owe you. . . I owe you."
Ceren decided she didn't mind hearing those words so much. Coming from Kinan, they didn't sound like an accusation. Besides, Ceren understood debts. They could start there; Ceren didn't mind. Just so long as they could start somewhere. She took Kinan's offered hand and he helped her to rise.
Kinan then carried Ceren's medicine box as he escorted her, understanding or not, down the road in search of her heart's desire.
EX CATHEDRA
Tony Daniel
My children have been stolen.
You want to distance yourself. You want to blame time, you want to blame existence itself, because that would make it inevitable, determined. And then you could fall back on some Zen-like abstraction for
comfort, or that old chestnut from the apostle Paul about all things working together for those who believe in the Lord and are called according to his purposes. But you know there is no balm in the East or the West of Old Earth, no way of thinking that will make it right.
The children are gone.
And there is no way to report the crime. No crime, in principle. And so no possibility of Justice.
There's nobody to turn to when you wake up in the middle of the night and hear their crying, when you wander the house listening for them in the floorboard's creak, in the window curtain's rustle. You hear their whispers in these things, these phenomena, and sometimes a closing door reminds you of the gesture of your eldest son's hand reaching for a glass of milk, or a nightlight flickering on in the bathroom brings back a smile playing across your daughter's face.
She is dark-complexioned? Yes. Blue-eyes? You don't. Rebecca does.
A glimpse through a station portal to the out-spreading Milky Way. Your two-and-a-half-year-old son's innocent inquiry, his first real sentence: "How are you today, Dadda?"
I'm not doing so well. I can't remember you.
There are no children.
Can't be.
Must not be any children.
So the sounds and the glimpses are merely games you play with your mind.
You know this.
And so you take a shower, and you masturbate, or you don't, and you brush your teeth and get dressed, and you eat oatmeal or forgo breakfast altogether and slap on a patch, and you kiss your wife who is not your wife—
"'Morning, babe."
"Hello, Will."
"You feeling any better today? Any different?"
"No." She pauses, really considers. "No."
"I'm sorry. Do you want to go to the doctor again?"
"I don't think it's helping any." Rebecca, that is her name, shifts her weight from right foot to left. The white nightgown, nearly see-through, outlines her skinny form. Bony and sharp she is. She hasn't been eating and her abdominal muscles are starting to show. Which turns you on, even though they are a product of her wasting disease.
She's convinced she hears something, too. Voices.
But she doesn't know who they belong to.
You have to trust that she'll be all right today.
That your home will look after her.
You have work to do, after all.
And so you touch the pad by the door and download your day's supply of security keys and upgrades, and you tell your front door to take you to work, and you step through the transport screen—
—into another meeting.
This meeting is very important. As are they all. The project is enormous and complex, and you are in charge. More or less.
I am in charge.
Me.
We are building a monument to humanity. For humanity. For history and the future. It is to be a space for reflection and change. A place to honor the past and keep faith with what is to come. A space where the sacred and eternal meet with the individual, meet and merge. A church. A temple. A hollow statue you can go up in. A sacred grove where you can relax and feel utter safety. Complete relief from oppression of any kind.
The Cathedral of Justice.
This particular meeting on this particular morning is with a delegation of linguists from one of the older cache partitions. They have concerns about the cathedral's portico fresco for pre-colonial victims of click-tongue discrimination. (Pre-colonial Earth, that is, not Milky Way, which is a whole other ball of wax.) And right behind the language advocates is a joint cache-biologicals coalition, this one made up of left-handers who want a side chapel devoted to the alleviation of oppression by the eastern-sided. This is no problem in a general sense; it's the kind of thing we incorporate every day into our designs. The quandary comes from the fact that the coalition can't or won't decide which side of the cathedral is left and which is right. Because, in order to tell left from right, you need to know north from south or up from down. The cathedral has no spin. Spin leads to inequality.
In the cathedral, we don't put priorities on justice. Priority is another word for privilege, and in the cathedral, there can be no privileged position. Because that would be unjust.
Yet the left-handers feel slighted. That makes their problem my problem.
So I take the meeting.
Today, I've scheduled a consultant from the time-frame design league to hash it out with them. I've kept this hush-hush, because I'm already suspected of having a secret "eastern" agenda, and this will no doubt be seen by some as another dirty trick of the clockwise cabal. Mostly I just want them to decide on something, anything, before the final collapse of the galaxy. FGC is pretty much our big deadline. Although we have every hope of bringing the project in long before that, and under-budget.
Unfortunately, time-frame consultants tend to be patronizing, and the meeting leaves some bruised feelings, particularly within the cache. This isn't necessarily the consultant's fault. You get your personality written across a broad swath of stars, you can get a pretty big head without realizing it. Yet there's nothing the cache-bound hate more than a condescending lecture from one of their descendants. When you're dead, respect is about the only currency that means anything to you anymore. I hear that one of the big memory banks is planning to coin respect in quantized units and use it for a currency. You wonder if they will take this practice with them during the Great Migration, when all of the caches will be unzipped from archive and copied into the cathedral where there is room for near infinite expansion.
After this meeting, I retreat to my office.
Since I'm the boss, I have a corner with a window—as much as a giant space station has a corner. We're surrounded by nebulae clouds here at the galactic core, so the view is not the greatest, but I've had false color filters installed and, if I want, I can turn off the overhead lamps and read by the light of the Milky Way. Pretty cool. Somewhere out there past the clouds is Earth, our ancestral home. They say the light reaching us here from the sun, the real sun, started out in about 1872.
But it never got here, of course. Sunlight and earthlight have been missing from our galaxy for the past 200 years, since the days of the Clean Sweep, the great human project prior to the cathedral. After the invention of the portals, the expanding EM sphere of humanity was collected and cached—stored alongside the data trail of the generations since. And so, while Earth certainly still exists, it has disappeared. Along with all sign that it was ever there, including a gravity signature. We were very thorough.
There's your answer to Fermi's paradox, by the way. If we assume all the other alien species—none of whom we've met—did the same, why then the emptiness of the universe has an explanation.
We sentients all cleaned up after ourselves, like good campers. We left the place like we found it. And are presumably still living somewhere in balance with nature, but just not making a fuss about it.
Of course there is another, simpler explanation. And a lonelier one.
In any case, we don't call it Fermi's paradox anymore. We call it Fermi's Law.
Nobody's home.
I love my desk. It's made of teak ported over from the forests of Mars. I put it together myself in my workshop back at the house before things got too busy to keep up with any hobbies. The desktop tilts up to create a full screen for design work, and there are drawers that stretch into fractal dimensions. As a result, my paperwork always seems to be filed, and my workspace uncluttered. This is all appearance. I've got what I think is a fairly tidy mind, but I'm a pack rat at heart and I never throw anything away. That's why I built in, essentially, infinite storage capacity. You wouldn't want to go looking for something in my desk if you didn't know where to find it. It's a long drop to the bottom of the drawers. And there are drawers within drawers too. I kid you not. Told you I was a pack rat.
Behind my desk is a bookshelf with an ever-morphing array of "real" books, all chosen by an embedded subroutine that bases its choices on
what it sees me reading. A bunch of technical manuals and design catalogs grace the shelves at present. I wish that I read more fiction, poetry. Read more anything other than work-related material these days. Later, after the project's done, I tell myself. A repeated mantra that would be funny if it weren't so sad.
On the second shelf, a picture of Rebecca. Caught on our Andromeda Falls trip, when we visited the ship that's hauling the new portal to the next galaxy over. Not many places you can stand and, unenhanced, take in another galaxy complete through a viewport.
In the picture, Rebecca's wearing a pastel pink dress. Her hair is shorter than it is now, and her bangs trail over her eyes in a sweep that's graceful and careless at the same time. Completely Rebecca.
Yep. That was the trip when I told her why we could never have children.
I put it to Rebecca more delicately, but here's the basic low-down.
I can have a kid, but the moment my kid achieves sentience, I'm toast.
I can build a heaven. I can blow up the universe. I can sit and watch movies all day. But if I pass on my genes, I hook myself back up to time. I enter into a mod-x operation that will prevent me from traveling beyond my current time-frame.
Oh yeah. I may have forgotten to tell you.
I'm a time traveler.
So, surprise, surprise, it turns out that people are more than the sum of their information. More than the epiphenomenal consequence of their historical context, if you want to put it precisely.
People are one-way functions. Or I should say we incorporate one-way functions. We have a non-reversible, extra-algorithmic component in our basic make-up. Like adding together times on a clock face, what we are, what we truly are as a thinking being, can't be unmixed into components.
Ah hell, I'll just come out and say it: people have souls.
Not transcendent, immortal, God-endowed souls. Maybe we have those, too. I don't know. I'm talking clock math here. 9 + x = 2. Easy huh? Five is the answer. Try this one:
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