Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  Reed narrows his eyes. “How?”

  Leigh shakes her head. “They met by accident, but Middleton tracked Cheswich down after he realized she was on campus. He seemed very invested in getting her to talk to him.”

  “Are they still capable of communicating non-verbally?”

  “I don’t know.” The admission clearly pains her. “After the amount of time they spent apart, the ability should have atrophied—but we didn’t expect them to be so tightly bonded that the Cheswich girl could call for help after she opened her damn wrists.” She makes no effort to hide her disappointment. A cuckoo that attempted to kill itself was weak, as far as Leigh was concerned: it had no business in the program. Had things been allowed to progress to their natural conclusion, the Cheswich girl would have bled out, the Middleton boy would have died of shock, and that entire generation of cuckoos would have been excised. She could have closed the book on a failed experiment, not been forced to devote time and resources to continuing to monitor their progress.

  For Leigh, there is nothing more terrible than a waste of time. Time is the most precious commodity of all.

  “Tell your remaining minder to find out. We need all the information we can acquire on how they interact … and tell her not to interfere.” Reed folds his hands behind his back, coin still dancing from knuckle to knuckle. “I want to see how they’ll mature without roadblocks. They should be old enough to have fully distinct senses of self; that will keep them from blending into each other to such a degree that they become useless.”

  “Sir—”

  “Leigh.” He looks at her. This time, there’s no mercy in his eyes. “Have I not been right up until now? Have I not fed you, clothed you, kept you, given you the materials for your own experiments, and covered up the signs of your less … savory interests? I could have discarded you as a failed Eve when I found you in that lab, but I took you as my own, testified to your stability before the Congress. I took responsibility for you, and all I’ve ever asked in return is that you obey me without question. Trust me. Believe in me, and I will lead you into the light.”

  “I’m sorry.” She ducks her head, that old, not-quite-human motion that presses her chin to her sternum and reveals the extra vertebrae tucked into her neck. “I’ll tell my girl to watch without interfering.”

  “Good. Very good. How is your generation?”

  Suddenly Leigh is all smiles again. “Good,” she echoes. “Very good. Two of them have abandoned the idea of individual bodies. They treat themselves as a single thought-form entity with four hands and four feet that sometimes needs to be fed. Two more committed a ritualized form of murder-suicide without even needing to be asked. They’re all coming along nicely.”

  Reed doesn’t remind her that she’s just described losing two of her subjects as “coming along nicely.” Instead, he looks at her, and says, “I thought you had three pairs. Multiples of three are ritually important.” Roger and Dodger started as one pair out of three, and have outlived their fellows by a matter of years. Of the pairs he created after them, two remain, neither showing their early promise, neither showing their early problems.

  “I wish you’d been willing to sign off on twelve,” she says. She shakes her head. “My third pair is good around the lab. They pull their own weight, don’t complain about the chores they’re given. The boy is language, and he’s been translating some of my old workbooks for me—but not for fun. He has to work. He does it dutifully, without complaint, but there’s no joy in it. The girl is math, and she’s the same when I set her jobs that involve measurement or calculation. Her work is always perfect. It’s not inspired. I think they didn’t bake properly.”

  “You can recycle them if you like.”

  This is a rare treat, the opportunity to dismantle something living without needing to justify herself. To his surprise, Leigh says, “Not yet, unless that’s an order. As long as my first pair is around, you won’t authorize a new batch, and they make an interesting control group. One set has become so entangled as to be ritually useless, even if they’re a fascinating puzzle, and a second set has managed to avoid the Doctrine almost entirely. I want to understand why. I’m going to give them another six months, and if they haven’t produced useful results by then, I’m going to set them against each other and see who survives. It will be interesting to see what happens to either set if one of them is killed. I have theories.”

  “You always do,” Reed says. “Middleton and Cheswich are the closest we’ve come to the controllable manifest Doctrine. Even her attempts at self-harm have served us; they’ll make him protective, which makes her a lever that can be used. Keep them under watch. If they show signs of entangling further, we may have to intervene. For the time being, we can let them alone. See what they’ll do, given the chance to exist together without external conflicts.”

  Leigh frowns. Just a little. More than she usually allows in the presence of her owner and employer. Like all failed experiments, she’s far too aware of what it could mean if she incurs her keeper’s wrath. “All right.” She doesn’t sound pleased. Reed will not punish her for that; flashes of empathy are rare enough from her that he feels inclined to encourage them. Perhaps a bit more empathy would make her a bit less vicious. No less gifted, but … less inclined to “accidents” in the lab. “I’ll call Erin with her updated instructions.”

  “Very good,” he says. They walk together through the halls of the Congress, away from the old fools who dream of an Impossible City they will never see, and the improbable road has never been more achievable, or closer to hand.

  Bucolic

  TIMELINE: 17:20 PST, NOVEMBER 16, 2008 (TWO MONTHS AT PEACE).

  “When are your parents expecting you?” Dodger is at the far wall, a dry-erase marker in her hand, adding numbers to the columns already there. Her handwriting is surprisingly precise, more like a font processed through a human hand than anything natural; every digit fits into the same amount of space, perfectly matched to its neighbors on either side.

  Roger wouldn’t expect anything less. He’s cross-legged on her bed, elbows on his knees. The way she has the room arranged offers no back support; the mystery of her morning yoga classes has been answered. Without them, he’s fairly sure she’d pull a muscle trying to deal with her homework every morning, much less handle the rest of her day. The air smells of marker fumes and cleaning fluid; the single open window can’t clear it all out. Old Bill is on the sill outside, showing with his presence that he could come in if he wanted to, he’s just choosing not to. The sky is gray, and the air tastes of rain, and the world has never been so perfect.

  “My flight leaves Sunday morning,” he says patiently. She already has this information: she helped him find the tickets, working some sort of mathematical wizardry to find the best deal for a holiday flight between Berkeley and Cambridge. (Well, San Francisco and Boston: she may be a math wizard, but conjuring airports out of nothing is outside both her skill set and her overall interests. Where would they put it?) “I’ll be gone six days, returning the Saturday after Thanksgiving. You’re still welcome to come, if you want to.”

  “And get murdered by my own parents for being an ungrateful child? No, thank you.” She adds another row of figures. “I’ll go home to Palo Alto, and have my father’s deep-fried turkey, and like it. Really. He’s good at things that involve borderline ridiculous amounts of fire. Remember the time zone: I don’t get out of bed before nine, which’ll be noon for you.”

  “I remember when you habitually got up at five.”

  “Yeah, because you were up and active and eager at eight, and because I had people enforcing a tyrannical and unreasonable bedtime on my growing mind.” She smiles over her shoulder. “I keep different hours now.”

  He lifts his head and smiles back. They’re falling more and more into sync lately; not enough that she’s worried the quantum entanglement is getting worse, but enough that she once again truly believes he’d be there to catch her if she fell. (Quantum enta
nglement is still their best way to describe the situation, despite carefully asked questions directed at the physicists they know. What they’re experiencing is, if not unique in the annals of human history, at the least unusual and bizarre. This has also made them cautious when it comes to looking for additional information. Exploring a strange phenomenon from the comfort of their respective apartments is one thing. Doing it from someone else’s lab is something else altogether.)

  “And I’ve learned how to read a clock,” he says. “I won’t wake you up. Although I may scold you if you’re still awake when I’m going to bed. You have to sleep sometime, Dodge. Not sleeping is not good for you.”

  “Says the man who stayed awake for three days reading and analyzing a bunch of books in ancient Sumerian. For fun.”

  “It was fun,” he says, turning on the bed to face her. “I had a question for you, if you’ve got a second.”

  “Is this ‘got a second’ in the ‘you can keep working’ sense, or in the ‘please cap your pen and give me your full attention, this is important’ sense?” Dodger keeps writing. She’s running out of room at eye level; soon, she’ll have to kneel, and eventually lie flat on her belly, numbers and figures unspooling from her pen, Scheherazade of the mathematical world. Roger rarely knows what she’s working on. The few times she’s tried to explain, he hasn’t been able to follow beyond the superficial level. He’s stopped asking. It’s worth it to see how happy it makes her.

  “The latter, if you don’t mind.”

  Dodger pauses. “Let me get this down,” she says, and writes double-speed until she reaches the end of the line. Then she caps her pen and turns, sinking to the floor as she does. It’s like watching a crane fold itself into its nest, an impossible amount of material compacting into something equally impossibly small. She cocks her head to the side, and asks, “Are you about to ask me to move in with you? Because I think it’s a bad idea. I’ve been doing some research—not into the physics, just into the math—and I have concerns—”

  “Many of which keep me awake at night, believe me,” says Roger. “I don’t want to get a place together for a lot of reasons. That’s one of them. Trying to explain you to any girls I happen to bring home is another.”

  “Most people on campus believe I’m your sister. Not that it matters. Any girl worth dating would listen when we both told her nothing like that was going on between us.”

  “I agree with you. But twenty years of romantic comedies do not agree with you, and they sort of make things complicated when, say, I bring a girl home and you’re just getting out of the shower, so the first thing she’s confronted with in my swinging bachelor pad is my wet, half-naked, redheaded sister.”

  “Everyone knows redheads are insatiable sex machines,” says Dodger blandly. “With our freckles and our math and our eschewing dating because it takes up so much time that could be spent on doing other things.”

  “Not everyone skips out on the dating part of their college experience.”

  “Not everyone enjoys having free time.”

  Roger shrugs. “We all prioritize what we enjoy. Can we get back on the topic?”

  “I wasn’t aware we’d left the topic. I don’t know what the topic is.”

  “You interrupted me before I could get there,” he protests. “It’s about my parents.”

  Dodger goes still. Roger settles in to wait. He’s seen her do this a few times before: he understands what’s happening. Words aren’t her forte, exactly. She can carry on a conversation easily enough, and she isn’t stupid, but sometimes the subtler meanings of language escape her. When that happens, and she knows it’s important, she shuts herself down, blocking out all extraneous input, and digs straight into the issue. What is he really asking? Why is he really asking it? What will happen when she replies?

  (He does something similar when he has to do math more complex than making change. Kelly used to joke about “tipping fugue,” when he’d stop responding for up to five minutes as he tried to calculate the appropriate amount to leave on a check. What he finds truly interesting about this phenomenon—what he wasn’t able to consider when it was just him, and Dodger was a phantom from his past who might never show her face again—is the fact that when she shuts down, he feels a faint tingling at the back of his mind, like he’s struggling to recall something he’s forgotten. It’s not quite déjà vu—call it jamais vu, the feeling of knowing something he knows he’s never seen before. Dodger worries more about the quantum entanglement than he does, in a quiet reversal of their childhood positions on the subject. He doesn’t want to scare her by bringing this up. Eventually, he’s going to have to.)

  Finally, she cocks her head and asks, “What are you hoping to achieve?”

  “I want to tell them about you. Maybe something in my adoption paperwork mentions a sister.” It would be easier than a blood test. It wouldn’t involve anyone new.

  Dodger’s frown is slow but deep. “I really thought you were going to ask about, I don’t know, asking Erin on a date or something.”

  “Uh, no. Dating Erin would be sort of like dating a blender. Sure, it makes great smoothies, but one day you’re going to be minding your own business and it’s going to switch on and remove your hand.”

  Dodger raises an eyebrow. “Okay, one, your metaphors have gotten weirder, and two, you are not allowed to borrow horror movies from my collection anymore. Your girlfriends may be a vague, amorphous mass to me, but that doesn’t make them kitchen appliances.”

  “You know what I mean, though,” says Roger. “It seemed sort of cliché to compare her to a wild animal, which would have been the easier choice.”

  “Heaven forbid you do anything cliché, Mr. English-Professor-in-Training,” says Dodger. “You might find a single cliché is a gateway drug to tweed jackets and khaki slacks, and the next thing you know, you’re teaching Kerouac and making eyes at that cute undergrad in the front row who makes you think about fucking all of Middle America in one triumphant go.”

  Roger blinks.

  “How long have you been saving that one up?” he asks.

  “About a week,” Dodger admits.

  “Feel better?”

  “Little bit.” She still grins like she did when she was nine years old, on the rare occasions when she’s relaxed enough to grin at all. Even when she smiles with her whole face, one side of her mouth is a little higher, making it obvious that her real smile is buried in the mix. Then the smile fades. “I don’t mind if you want to tell your parents about me. Just … be careful.”

  “I will be,” he says. “I always am.”

  “Not always,” she says.

  Roger catches his breath and holds it, studying her. She doesn’t look upset. If anything, she looks … calm. Like she’s finally moving past their separation. He exhales.

  “You’re a pretty cool sister, you know that?”

  “I’d be a lot cooler if we’d grown up together.”

  He pauses. “You rethinking that blood test?”

  “Considering it,” she admits. “If we could prove we were related, I could take you to meet my parents. Maybe someday you could take me to meet yours. It would be a lot harder to split us up again, if our entire support structure was conjoined.”

  Her father probably wouldn’t take well to having her show up with the boy from Boston; it’s been years, but Roger has absolute faith that Professor Cheswich would recognize his voice. How could he not? There are things that can’t be forgotten, and the voice of the boy who called to say your daughter was bleeding to death has got to be at the top of that list. On the other hand, if they had proof they were related …

  “What if the blood test comes back and says we’re wrong?” he asks. “What then?”

  “That seems less likely with every data point,” says Dodger. “We have the same eyes. We have a similar bone structure. Same birthdate—same birth hour. If you can find your birth certificate while you’re at home, see if you can’t get a birth state. Mine’s Ohio.
That can all be falsified, but when you add it to the rest of the data, it becomes pretty conclusive. We know we have the same blood type. Red and brown hair are frequently found in the same family.”

  “This is important to you, isn’t it?” asks Roger.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if we’re related, they can’t ever tell you to give me up again.” Dodger is calm, precise: she’s done the math. “You don’t get to run away from family.”

  She’s talking about herself as much as she’s talking about him; more, even. He left her for a little while. She tried to leave him forever. Still. “And if we’re not related?”

  “You’re still my brother. Quantum entanglement is thicker than blood.”

  “You know, the original quote—”

  “Is irrelevant, and I have access to things I can throw, so don’t get pedantic,” she says pleasantly. “If we’re not biologically related, that removes one data point from the list of causes for our entanglement. If we are, then maybe we can start looking for other cases and find out what the possible consequences might be. I’m not going to hurt myself again, but what happens if one of us is in an accident? We already know that a near-death experience for one of us is a near-death experience for both of us, but is it possible for you to survive my death, or vice versa? We need to know how much we’re risking each other every time we do something dangerous.”

  “Then what? Wrap ourselves in cotton wool? I can’t ask you to stop living your life just because it might endanger mine.” Or vice versa, but he knows she’d never ask him to do that: her response every time the pressure has gotten unbearable has proven that. Finding proof that all injury could potentially transfer won’t make her careful. It will make her paranoid, locking her door and never letting anyone inside.

  “I don’t know.” She makes no effort to conceal her frustration. “This is uncharted ground, and it’s not like we have a physicist to help us figure it out. Maybe if we know the base situation, we can go and find one. Convince them we need help without turning us into a science project. It all starts with a blood test. So can we get a blood test?”