Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

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Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 39

by Nalo Hopkinson


  Audrey found herself blinking down at the note Dunbar had had passed to her, understanding it now. Clearing his name did not entail coming out from behind the curtains, clearing his conscience. Clearing his conscience was clearing his name.

  No signed online confession could satisfy Kevin Dunbar’s deep-seated need for atonement; this hearing, harrowing as it had been for him, was the penitent release he’d longed for.

  After a long minute or two of silence, standing before the Iraqi orphans, widows, wounded soldiers, Dunbar turned at last, took a step toward the prosecution’s table, where he quietly said something that the floor mikes picked up and piped out over the viewing gallery speakers:

  “To answer the only question you seem interested in asking me, just for the record … I never discussed or divulged anything about the Oracle SOOPE to Jorges Mennochio when I met with him.”

  An echo of whoops and claps of delight from Audrey’s threadset. The Darwin team was ecstatic.

  As the entire prosecution team retreated into chambers for a brief closed-doors powwow with the chief justice, Audrey slipped into a hall behind the viewing gallery, re-entered a lower gallery, maneuvered her way to the exit door closest to the table where Dunbar was sitting, just in case things turned out the way she thought they were about to.

  And then, shortly before 11 AM, the Chief Justice returned, announced that, lacking any evidence of a lineage between the Oracle SOOPE and Immensity’s founding SOOPE sims, he was throwing the DUTT case out.

  Heaven and Earth

  by Allan Weiss

  I found you at last, Uncle Martin. You were buried beneath centuries of accumulated stone, and your face had changed, altered by recognition rather than time. I’m sorry I had to go so far to find you.

  I found you in the eye of a creature who had never known either of us, and wouldn’t have understood a word of our speech: our verbal games, our forays into Yiddish. He or she or it (you’d hate to hear me violate Martin Buber’s directive against objectifying the Other, but I may have no choice) had no ears. If the creature had met you, then, he/she/it would have learned nothing about you.

  They brought the creature back to camp for study, encased in ceramic amber, and placed it in a hall tent big enough for many of us to stand around and analyze, discuss, or merely gape in wonder. We surrounded Andrew Cornell’s find like children around a magic trick, experiencing a kind of intellectual delirium. It couldn’t get any better than this, we knew. No one would ever do what we were about to do: be the first to touch, study, and try to explain another intelligent species. Those of us who were ourselves intelligent, or at least wise, knew others would come along and supersede our conclusions, demonstrate how misguided we were about everything. But in this case who was right didn’t matter. All that mattered to us was who was first. I was going to be one of the very first, and I think I glowed.

  Dr. Nur, Project Leader, held court frequently, bringing us the latest results from a colleague’s studies or word from the company station. The enthusiastic support we got from our corporate masters didn’t quite make up for our sense of being slaves — to European General Technologies or maybe our dependence on it — but at least we got everything (mainly the data) we needed to do our work and make ourselves (and of course E.G.T.) rich and famous.

  By the way, none of us could come up with a name for our discovery. I can’t believe that Lucy and those who came after — the ice-men found in the Alps, the bits of skull — were grateful for how we exercised Adam’s prerogative. You told me once how important it was for God to give Adam that power to name, even before the power of procreation — the ability to give identity and otherness. But we were second-rate Adams, and couldn’t think of any name we could all agree on.

  When I visited you every week or two in the Manhattan apartment where you moved yourself and your private lab after Auntie Ida died, it was mostly out of a sense of obligation. Your own children had emulated you and disappeared into the maw of science, sent to far-flung parts of the globe or even other planets by the demands of the pursuit of knowledge, credentials, and company profits. I was just a kid myself, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, and a true product of what you called the New Mentality. Years earlier you’d insisted that my parents give me a Bar Mitzvah (over Dad’s atheistic hesitation), unwilling to let them shirk their cultural duties; you even promised to contribute substantially to the cost. I hated you for piling all that extra study on me — the blessings, the Haftorah, most of which I had to memorize because my Hebrew was virtually non-existent — but my desire to keep you from feeling abandoned was more powerful than my childish resentment.

  It was from you that I learned about the other, angled history left out of the usual Hebrew School litany of oppressions. Your lines strayed dizzyingly, annoyingly, from Babylonians, Egyptians, and Germans toward philosophy and politics, aesthetics and physics. You would sit on the flowery easy chair in your living room, sipping chocolate cocktails and munching bagel sticks. When you offered me such unhealthy fare, which violated every tenet of pre-med, I would decline in my Healthier-Than-Thou way. But I did eat your steaming coconut biscuits straight out of the zapper. And I’d listen to your long lectures, wondering where you were going — what was the point? I think I began to need those visits; you made me a learning addict like yourself. And that was when my parents were finally divorcing; they’d waited till I’d moved out before starting the inevitable legal process. It never occurred to me what a generous gift of your time you were giving me; to me your growing fame as a cyberneticist was simply a part of you, not something requiring huge amounts of time-consuming labour in your home lab.

  “Can you remember anything we talked about last time?” you asked once, and I thought the question absurd. I didn’t always know what you were saying, but I couldn’t forget any of it, not after the attention you demanded from me.

  “Of course I do. You told me about Ari, the guy in the Renaissance.” Ari was a scholar, a mystic, blessed or burdened with a wealth of knowledge. “He had his own version of the creation of the world.”

  “Do you remember the story?” you asked.

  I repeated it practically word-for-word, gesture-for-gesture, pressing my hands together then moving them apart the way you had: the world in its original form as a giant pot; the pot exploding, shattering; the pieces tracing diverse paths.

  You grinned and wagged your head. “Not bad, putzele.” You patted my forearm with a crooked, grey-haired hand. “Remember the ending, too?”

  I did. Like the universe itself eons after the Big Bang, the fragments would fall into each other again; shards of dark matter would coalesce, collapse space and time into a cosmic One again. God’s head would be reintegrated; Adam Cadmon, the primordial Self, would be whole again, and Mankind with it.

  What I didn’t understand was why we bothered covering all that abstruse ground. I saw you as an old man trying vainly to help me through the horrors of divorcing parents by drowning me in information. You never gave up trying to brighten my lot with distracting stories and European candies. I now see that Ari’s creation myth was a separation story with a happy ending, something a kid from a breaking home needed to hear. But at the time all I knew was that you were exasperatingly hard to follow, and I even thought sometimes that you were just showing off.

  The Castormondians inhabited this world about three thousand years before we arrived, then died off for reasons unknown and possibly unknowable. They favoured one dominant foodstuff, the things the botanists called ‘land corals,’ and also ate the corals’ airborne spores, we think, through the two extra appendages that protruded dorsally from their midsections and that were breathing apparatuses (and maybe sense organs) as well. The Castormondians possessed basic toolmaking technologies — they could work metal, stone, tree-fibre — and most importantly for us an acquaintance with preservation techniques. They used heat-treated resins to protect
tools and the dead against humidity, especially important given the planet’s violently changeable weather, leaving us with the well-preserved remains of their equipment and of someone clearly high up in their society. The tomb, as Research Site 1 proved to be, contained a single but intact Very Important Corpse.

  “I’m afraid to touch it,” I confided to Kelly Defalco, my chief assistant. “I can’t explain why, but—”

  “I understand.” We usually kibbitzed with each other, but as we stared down at the Castormondian we couldn’t come up with any suitable one-liners. It was a moment I knew I’d always recall in its every detail. The Castormondian seemed to be enclosed in a bubble I was loathe to break. Kelly and I finally looked at each other, exchanged smiles, and raised our eyebrows: time to get to work.

  The anatomy work was like every other sort of research here: you start with nothing and see what flows into your mind. My understanding of cranial structure was terracentric but not entirely useless, and my job was to explore the jellied blobs that remained of its eyes. The Castormondians did have eyes, a point that disturbed me because it made them less alien. I felt that they should have been entirely different, but occasionally we would find similarities that were more striking than the differences. I found it hard to wrap my mind around the idea that such a thorough Other could be like Us, too.

  The Castormondian’s head was spherical and possessed few prominent features: no nose, no ears, and no sign that any had been there and gone missing. (As far as we could tell nothing had been cut from the corpse prior to burial.) Where the ‘chin’ would be there was a tiny round mouth which, with its narrow-range mandibular joint, would open very slightly. The skull was significantly fragmented that it would need some reconstruction to show for certain how the eyes were positioned or moved.

  I remembered something you said about wonder as a fragile sensation. A thing or event is a source of wonder for a brief time, then begins to seem routine no matter how outlandish it is: seeing a spaceship standing on the surface of the moon, killing people just for being of a particular race, flying to another planet, visiting an old scientist uncle who’s read Wittgenstein, cutting open the organs of an alien creature. Instead of going “Wow!” non-stop as I explored the tissues beneath my optical and ceramic instruments, I grew impatient at the toughness of the ciliary muscles, disturbed by the problem of the sockets’ placement and form — as if I were back in anatomy class dissecting sheep’s eyes.

  But at night, thinking back on how I’d spent my day, I couldn’t believe any of it had been real.

  The problems were real and nagging. The biggest was the placement of the eyes, which never seemed right in our mental and computer reconstructions; the other was the apparent shape of the pupil. I was convinced we didn’t have enough remaining tissue to come to proper conclusions about either, but we’d try anyway. We had a team of five exobiologists working on the head, not to mention the neurologists who had jurisdiction over the tiny blackened lump that seemed to be the remains of a brain. I couldn’t help wondering if they were all stillborn doctors like I was, people who’d had dreams of financial and healing glory but had found research impossible to give up.

  As for the apparent positioning: the eyes were very widely spaced, so much so I wondered if we’d made a mistake in our reconstruction too obvious to be noticed, if you know what I mean. The eyeball itself was remarkably well preserved, its structures either still intact or easily reconstructed using the services of our forensics imaging expert. The pupil seemed to be a kind of thickened barbell at contraction. That started me thinking about something that I slotted in the back of my mind, waiting for corroborating evidence. The pupil was our doorway, and we were determined to avoid dissection if at all possible. I stared inside the Castormondian’s window to the soul; I looked for the soul, but I’m sorry, I don’t think I found it. What I did find was a retinal fossil that demanded inspection. No matter how decayed it was, it would still yield up lots of answers, and — more importantly, of course — lots of questions.

  I chose to go to med school at Columbia in part because I would then be near Ma. I thought it would destroy her to lose her son so soon after her husband left. Dad’s departure, even though it came after years of fighting, cut into her so deeply I’m sure you could see her pain whenever she cabbed it down to visit you. My mother was still of the old school: never learned to drive because Dad was there to take her where she needed to go, never stopped observing the holidays, never missed the lighting of the yahrzeit candles for Zaida and Bubby; continued to have me over for shabbos dinner. All of that became even more important to her after Dad took off.

  She was glad, too, that I kept visiting you. Did I do it to make her happy, because she wanted me to keep in touch with you? Even if I didn’t always see the connections between the things you told me, or between them and the rest of my life, I couldn’t give up those visits. Maybe I badly needed a comforting family routine during a time when my family life was a crisis, or maybe I just kept wanting to figure you out. You’d gone from being an obligation to an aggravating mystery to me; what was all that erudition for? I became less confused by what you were telling me than why you were telling it to me.

  And then, scientist though you were you always came to my mother’s seders, shared the bitters and matzohs with her no matter what other invitations you received. And you made me ask the Four Questions. I thought you were a terrible hypocrite, because you were not only a scientist but an atheist. You turned me into one, too. You told me about the ‘other’ Jewish history, the one that made a mockery of Rabbi Gold’s hero- and villain-mongering at Young Israel Hebrew Academy. After you told me about the conflicts between the fundamentalists and the Hellenists, how could I still take seriously the business of spinning noisemakers at the sound of Haman’s name? How could I believe God passed over us in Egypt when our enslavement, just like the blacks’, was an economic act, not a special test for a chosen people? Yet, while you were advancing your career in AI research, you were pushing me further into the Hebrew teacher’s arms, saying, “Here, you need this.” I decided to forgive you for destroying my comfortable quasi-faith in what I learned at Hebrew school only because your presence at Passovers, your insistence that they be as kosher (in the broadest sense) as possible, made my mother happy. Happier. After my father left for greener pastures and an intense pianist, in Scotland, my mother wanted you to be a surrogate or something close to it. So devoting an hour every week to your company was a small price to pay for her softer looks when I told her I’d seen you. But by then I’d met Bev, and saw my frustrating visits with you as taking time away from her.

  We laboured our way through the eye; we had a remarkable amount to work with, and it all stunned us with the terrestrial analogues we could draw. The basic structures were there, from cornea to retina; unfortunately, we couldn’t follow the nerves through and out the sclera without some dissection. Where the tissue was decayed we could use our fil-optics to see right down into the sclera’s nuclear layers, in other words the absolute depths of the eye.

  The iris gave us pause for thought: it had such highly developed contractor muscles that Kelly postulated voluntary iris control. I tried to keep her from going too far with that theory. Here on Castormond anything is postulatable, anything is possible, and people tend to let their wishes for something dramatic overrule their obligation to go very slowly. Just about everything we saw fit what we might expect in a terrestrial creature; even the circumference of the eye matched what you might see in an Earth animal of 1.25 metres in length/height. Again, I wasn’t sure if that similarity comforted or disturbed me more. But we couldn’t afford to let our imaginations (and our ambitions) run away with us.

  You knew I’d have made a terrible doctor; one time you said after one of my learned outbursts, “My God, I hope they don’t give you a real patient. You’ll want to cut him up to see how his pancreas works!” At which point you began lecturing me
on Noam Chomsky, of all people.

  The day I told you I was leaving med school, you asked, “Don’t you want to save people’s lives? Or at least their eyesight?”

  “Not especially. Ma wanted me to, and so did I — for a while.”

  “Did you want to be a doctor because she wanted you to?”

  I’d asked myself that question a thousand times, and every time came up with a different answer. I once vowed that if I ever came up with the same answer twice in a row, I would consider it the right one and stop wondering. All I could come up with for a reply was a shrug that implied, “Probably.”

  “And what does your girlfriend say?”

  “Bev? To tell you the truth, she shared your doubts.”

  “So, what now?”

  “Research. Northeastern Pharmaceuticals is looking for new brains.” I drank the lemon-flavoured camomile tea you’d kindly supplied. You knew very well that med students live on caffeine, and need a respite from it sometimes.

  “You’re going into the corporate sector?” I couldn’t tell from your tone or look if you were disappointed in me. “Didn’t I tell you enough about what Marx said?”

  “He didn’t have to attend med school.” I stared down into the yellow tea. “Maybe I want to be rich and famous.”

  You smiled that tight-lipped smile of yours. “Do exo, then; that’s where all the real work is being done.”

  You were right, of course; exobiology would be the field to enter, with its huge potential for real basic research, patents, the chance to do something meaningful: a CV goldmine. I’d considered it but wasn’t sure I had the guts to leave Earth, spend years on another planet worried that in some terrible excursive accident I’d contaminate it with my germs or be killed instantly by the planet’s. Would I have to leave Bev behind, maybe for good? But the temptations were stronger than the fears.

 

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