by Greg Bear
“I alone keep my present shape, though not without some gaps,” Roderick said with a pale pride. “I am the last of the embodied and walkabout Eschers … I, and my sister. But she is not well.” His face creased into a mask of sorrow, a well-worn expression I could not entirely credit. “I have mourned her a thousand times already, and a thousand times she has returned to something like life. She feigns death, I think, to taunt me, and abhors my quest, but … I could ask for no one more obedient.”
“I don’t remember you having a sister,” I said.
Roderick closed his eyes. “Come, this place is filled with unpleasant associations. I no longer eat. The thought of using my jaws to grind severed tissue … ugh!”
Roderick led me from the dining room, back to the foyer and a staircase which rose opposite the main door. The stairs branched midpoint to either side, leading to an upper floor. Roderick ascended the stairs with an eerie grace, halting and surveying his surroundings unpredictably, as if motivated not by human desires, but by the volition of a hunting insect or spider. His eyes studied the fiber-crusted walls, lids half-closed, head shaking at some association or memory conjured by stimuli invisible to me.
“You must find a place here,” Roderick said. “You are the last in the vault. All the others have long since been freed and either vapored or joined with some neural clan or another. I have kept you in reserve, dear Robert, because I value you most highly. You have a keen mind and quick fingers. I need you.”
“How may I be useful?”
“All this, the house and the lands around us, survive at the whim of King Nerve,” Roderick said. “We are entertainers, and our tenure wears thin. Audiences demand so much of us, and of everything around us. You are new and unexplored.”
“What kind of entertainment?”
“Our lives and creations—the lives of my sister and I—are one illusion following on the tail of another,” Roderick said. “All that we do and think is marked and absorbed by billions. It is our prison, and our glory. Our family has always had conjurers—do you remember? It is how we met and became friends.”
“I remember. Your father—”
“I have not thought of him in a century,” Roderick said, and his eyes glowed. “Fine work, Robert! Already my mind tingles with associations. My father … and my mother …”
“But Roderick, you did not get along with your father. You abhorred magic and illusions. You called them ‘tricks,’ and said they ‘deceived the simple and the unobservant.’”
“I remained a faithful friend, did I not?”
“Yes,” I said. “You must have. You brought me back from the dead.”
“Sufficient time shows how wrong even I can be,” he murmured.
We reached the top of the stairs. A familiar figure, the doctor named Ont, passed down the endless hallway, black robes swirling like ink in water. She stopped before us, paying no attention to me, but staring at Roderick with pained solicitude, as if she might cry if he grew any more pale or thin.
“Thank you, Dr. Ont,” Roderick said, bowing slightly.
She nodded. “Is he what you wanted, what you need?”
“So soon, and unexpected, but already valuable.”
“He can help?”
“I do not know,” Roderick said.
Ont now fixed her gaze on me.
“You must be very cautious with Roderick Escher,” she warned. “He is a national cleverness, a treasure. It is my duty to sustain him, or to do his bidding, whichever he desires.”
“How is she?” Roderick asked, hands clasped before him, naked fingers preposterously thin and white against the thick leathern glove.
Ont replied, “Even this vortex soon spins itself out, and this time I fear the end will be permanent.”
“You fear … more than you hope?” Roderick asked.
Ont shook her head sternly. “I do not understand this conceit between you.” With another tip of her head, she walked on, the hall curling ahead of her steps into a corkscrew. Remaining upright, she trod the spiraling floor and vanished around the curve.
The hall straightened, but she was no longer visible.
“A century ago, I chose to come back into this world refreshed,” Roderick said, “and took from myself a kind of rib or vault of my mind, to make a sister. She became my twin. Now, let me show you how the house works …”
Roderick gripped me by the elbow and guided me to a steep, winding stair that might have coiled within the largest tower surmounting the house. He gave what he meant to be an encouraging smile, but instead revealed his teeth in a conspiratorial rictus, and climbed the steps before us. I hesitated, palms and upper lip moist with growing dread of this odd time and incomprehensible circumstance.
Soon, however, as my friend’s form vanished around the first curve in the stair, I felt even more dread at being left alone, and hoped knowledge of whatever sort might ease my apprehension.
I raced to catch up with him.
“As a species, in the plenitude of time—a very short time—we have found our success,” Roderick said. “Lacking threat from without, and at peace within, our people enjoy the fruits of the endeavors of all civilizations. All that has been suffered is here repaid.” In the tower, his voice sounded hollow, echoing into the mocking laughter of a far-off crowd.
“How?” I asked, following on Roderick’s heels. That which might have once winded me now seemed almost effortless. Whatever shortness of breath I felt was due to anxiety, not frailness of body.
“All work is stationary,” Roderick said, again favoring me with that peculiar grimace that had replaced a once fine and encouraging smile. We had made two turns around the tower.
“Then why do we walk?” I asked.
“We are chosen. Privileged, in a way. We—my sister and I, Dr. Ont, and now you—maintain the last links with physical bodies. We give a foundation to all the world’s dreams. The entire Earth is like the seed in a peach, all but disposed of. What matters is the sweet pulp of the fruit—communication and expansion along the fiber optic lines, endless interaction, endless exchange of sensations. Some have abandoned all links with the physical, the seed, having bodies no more. They flit like ghosts through the interwoven threads that make the highways and rivers and oceans of our civilization. Most, more conservative, maintain their corporeal forms like shrines, and visit them now and then, though the bodies are vestigial, cold and unfeeling. You were reborn in one such vault, made to hold such as you, and eventually to receive my sister and me—though I have decided not to go there, never to go there. I think death would be more interesting.”
“I’ve been there,” I said. “It is not.”
“Yes, and I always ask my liches … What do you recall?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Look closely at that excised segment in your world-line. You were dead two and a half centuries, and you remember nothing?”
“No,” I said.
He smiled. “No one ever has. The demands … The voices … Gone.” He stopped and looked back at me. We had stopped more than halfway up the tower. “A blankness, a darkness. A surcease from endless art.”
“In my life, you were more concerned with business than the arts.”
“The world changed after you died. Everyone turned their eyes inward, and riches could be achieved by any who linked. Riches of the inner life, available to all. We made our world self-sustaining and returned to a kind of cradle. I grew bored with predicting the weather of money when it hardly mattered and so few cared. I worked with artists, and found more and more a sympathy, until I became one myself.”
He stood before a large pale wooden door set in the concrete and plaster of the tower. “Robert, when we were boys, we dreamed of untrammeled sensual delights. Soon enough, I saw that experiences that seemed real, but carried no onerous burdens of pain, would consume all of human
ity. Before my rebirth, I directed banks and shaped industries … Then I slept for twenty years, waiting for fruition. After my rebirth, my sister and I invested the riches I earned in certain industries and new businesses. We directed the flow and shape of the river of light, on which everyone floated like little boats. For a time, I controlled—but I never retired to the vaults myself.”
He touched the door with a long finger, smearing a spot of blood on the unpainted and bleached surface. “Physical desire,” he whispered, “drove the growth. Sex and lust without rejection or loss, without competition, was the beginning. Primal drives directed the river, until everyone had all the sex they wanted … In a land of ghosts and shades.”
The door swung open at two taps of his finger, two red prints on the wood. Within, more river sounds—and a series of breathless sighs.
“Now, hardly anyone cares about sex or any other basic drives. We have accessed deeper pleasures. We re-string our souls and play new tunes.”
A fog of gossamer filled the dark space beyond the door. Lights flitted along layer after layer of crossed fibers, and in the middle, a machine like a frightened sea-urchin squatted on a wheeled carriage. Its gray spines rose with rapid and sinuous grace to touch points on conjunctions between threads, and light seeped forth.
“This is the thymolecter. What I create, as well as what I think and experience, the thymolecter dispenses to waiting billions. And my thoughts are at work throughout this house, in room after room. Look!”
He turned and lifted his hand, and I saw a group of thin children form within the gossamer. They played listlessly around a bubbling green lump, poking it with a stick and laughing like fiends. It made little sense to me. “This amuses half the souls who occupy what was once the subcontinent of India.”
I curled my lip instinctively, but said nothing.
“It speaks to them,” Roderick whispered. “There is torment in every gesture, and triumph in the antagonism. This has played continuously for fifteen years, and always it changes. The audience responds, becomes part of the piece, takes it over … and I adjust a figure here, a sensibility there. Some say it is my masterpiece. And I had to fight for years to overcome the objections of the five!” His cheeks took on some color at the memory of this triumph. He must have sensed my underwhelming, for he added, “You realize we experience only the tip of the sword here, the cover of a deep book. You see it out of context, and without the intervening years to acculturate you.”
“I am sure,” I muttered, and was thankful when Roderick extinguished the entertainment.
“You’ve had experience with live audiences, of course, but never with a hundred billion respondents. My works spread in waves against a huge shore. At one time they beat up against other waves, the works of other artists. But there are far fewer artists than when you were first alive. As we have streamlined our arts for maximum impact, competition has narrowed and variety has waned, and now, the waves slide in tandem; we serve niches which do not overlap. Mine is the largest niche of all. I am the master.”
“It’s all vague to me,” I said. “Isn’t there anything besides entertainment?”
“There is discussion of entertainment,” Roderick said.
“Nothing else? No courtships, relationships, raising children?”
“Artists imagine children to be raised, far better than any real children. Remember how horrid we were?”
“I had no children … I had hoped, here—”
“A splendid idea! Eventually, perhaps we will re-enact the family. But for now …”
I sensed it coming. Roderick’s friendship, however grand, had always hung delicately upon certain favors, never difficult to grant individually, but when woven together, amounting to a subtle fabric of obligations.
“I need a favor,” Roderick said.
“I suppose I owe you my life.”
“Yes,” Roderick said, with an uninflected bluntness that chilled me. Roderick drew me from the gossamer chamber, and as he was about to close the door, I glimpsed another play of lights, arranged into curved blades slicing geometric objects. A few of the objects—angular polyhedra, flushing red—seemed to try to escape the blades.
“Half of Central America,” Roderick confided, seeing my puzzlement.
“What sort of favor?” I asked with a sigh as the door swung silently shut.
“I need you to perform magic,” Roderick said.
I brightened. “That’s all?”
“It will be enough,” Roderick said. “Nobody has performed magic of your sort for a hundred years. Few remember. It will be novel. It will be concrete. It will play on different strings. King Nerve has gotten demanding lately, and I feel …”
He did not complete this expression. “Pardon my enthusiasm, you must be exhausted,” he said, with a tone of sudden humility that again endeared him to me. “There is a kind of night here. Sleep as best you can, in a special room, and we will talk … tomorrow.”
Roderick led me through another of those helical halls, whose presence I keenly felt in every part of the house, and soon came to hate. I wondered if there were no real doors or halls, only illusions of connections between great stacks and heaps of cubicles, which Roderick could activate to carry us through the walls like Houdini or Joselyne.
In a few minutes, we came to a small narrow door, and beyond I found a pleasant though small room, with a canopy bed and a white marble lavatory, supplying a need I was beginning to feel acutely.
Roderick waited for me to return, and chided my physical limitations. “You still need to eat and drink, and suffer the consequences.”
“Can I change that?” I asked, half fearfully.
“Not now. It is part of your novelty. You are a lich. you subscribe to no services, move nothing by will alone.”
“As do the five?”
Again he shook his head and frowned. “They are projections. To you, they feel solid enough, real enough, but there is no amusement in them. They can seem to do anything. Including make my life a torment.”
“How?”
“They express the combined will of King Nerve,” he said, and answered no further questions on that subject, instead showing me the main highlights of the room. It was much larger than it seemed, and wherever I turned I beheld new walls, which met previous walls at square angles, each wall supporting shelves covered with thaumaturgical apparatus of such rareness and beauty that I lost all of my dread in a flush of professional delight.
“These can be your tools,” Roderick said with a flourish. I turned and walked from wall to apparent wall, shelf to shelf, picking up Brema brasses, numerous fine boxes nested and false-bottomed and with hidden pockets and drawers, large and small tables covered with black and white squares in which velvet-drop bags might be concealed, stacks of silver and gold and steel and bronze coins hollow and hinged and double-faced and rough on one side and smooth on the other, silk handkerchiefs and scarves and stacks of cloths of many colors; collapsing bird-cages of such beautiful craftsmanship I felt my eyes moisten; glasses filled with apparent ink and wine and milk, metal tubes of many sizes, puppet doves and mice and white rats and even monkeys, mummified heads of many expressions, some in boxes; slates spirit and otherwise, some quite small; pens and pencils and paint brushes with hidden talents; cords and retracting reels and loops; stacked boxes a la Welles in which a young woman might be rearranged at will; several Johnson Wedlocks in crystal goblets; tables and platforms and cages with seemingly impassable Jarrett pedestals; collapsible or compressible chess pieces, checkers, poker chips, potato chips, marbles, golf balls, baseballs, basketballs, soccer balls; ingenious items of clothing and collars and cufflinks manufactured by the Magnificent Traumata; handcuffs and strait jackets…
As I turned from wall to wall with delight growing to delirium, Roderick merely stood behind me, arms folded, receiving my awestruck glances with a patient smile. Fin
ally I came to a wall on which hung one small black cabinet with glass doors. Within this cabinet there lay…
Ten sealed decks of playing cards.
I opened this cabinet eagerly, aching to try my new hands, wrists, fingers, on them. I unwrapped cellophane from a deck and tamped the stack into one hand, immediately fanning the cards into a double spiral. With a youthful and pliant fold of skin near my thumb I pushed a single Ace of Spades to prominence, remembering with hallucinatory vividness the cards most likely to be chosen by audience members in any given geography, as recorded by Maskull in his immortal Force and Suit.
I turned and presented the deck to Roderick.
“Pick a card,” I said, “any card.”
He stared at me intensely, almost resentfully, and his left eye opened wider than the right, presenting an expression composed at once of equal mix delight and apprehension. “Save it. There is altogether too much time.”
But like a child suddenly brought home to familiar toys, I could not restrain myself. I propelled the deck in an arc from one hand to the other, and back. I shuffled the cards and cut them expertly behind my back, knowing the arrangement had not even now been disturbed. With my fingers I counted from the top of the precisely split deck, and brought up a Queen of Hearts. “Appropriate for your world,” I said.
“Impressive legerdemain,” Roderick said with a slight shudder. He had never been able to judge my lights of hand, or follow my instant sleights and slides and crosses. With almost carnivorous glee I wanted to dazzle this man who controlled so much illusion, to challenge him to a duel.
“It’s magic,” I said breathlessly. “Real magic.”
“Its charm,” he said in a subdued and musing voice, “lies in its simplicity and its antiquity.” He seemed doubtful, and rested his chin on the tip of an index finger. Again a spot of blood. “Still, I insist you need to rest, to prepare. Tomorrow … We will begin, and all will be judged.”
I realized he was correct. Now was not the time. I needed to know more. It was possible, in this unreal futurity, anything I might be able to accomplish with such simple props would be laughed at. Sooner expect a bird to fly to the moon…