Burn

by James Patrick Kelly

  Memsen hesitated, and Spur heard the low, repetitive pa-pa-pa-ptt that he had decided she made when she was consulting her predecessors. “If you insist, we can make it simple for you.” Memsen thrust her face close to his. “Comfort died,” she said harshly. “Tell that to everyone in your village. She was horribly burned and she died.”

  Spur recoiled from her. “But you said you saved her. Dr. Niss.. ..”

  “Dr. Niss can show you the body, if you care to see it.” She straightened. “So.”

  “Goodbye, Spur,” said the High Gregory. “Can we help you back onto the bed?”

  Beneath them Spur could see the outskirts of Longwalk. Abruptly the hull of the hover turned opaque and the ceiling of the cabin began to glow. Spur knew from watching hovers land from the window of his hospital room that they camouflaged themselves on the final approach over a city.

  “No, wait.” Spur was desperate to keep the upsiders talking. “You said she was going with you. I definitely heard that. You said she was saved. Is she . . . this is like the other Memsens that you told me about, isn’t it? The ones that are saved in you?”

  “This is a totally inappropriate conversation.” Memsen pinched the air with both hands. “We’ll have to ask Dr. Niss to strike it from your memory.”

  “He can do that?”

  “Sure,” said the High Gregory. “We do it all the time. But he has to replace it with some fake memory. You’ll have to tell him what you want. And if you should ever come across anything that challenges the replacement memory, you could get. . . .”

  Spur held up his hand to silence him. “But it’s true what I just said?”

  Memsen snorted in disgust and turned to leave.

  “She can’t admit anything.” The High Gregory grasped her hand to restrain her. He held it to his chest. “But yes.”

  Spur was gripping the push rims of his wheelchair so hard that his hands ached. “So nobody dies on the upside?”

  “No, no. Everybody dies. It’s just that some of us choose to be saved to a shell afterward. Even the saved admit it’s not the same as being alive. I haven’t made my mind up about all that yet, but I’m only twelve standard. My birthday is next week, I wish you could be there.”

  “What will happen to Comfort in this shell?”

  “She’s going to have to adjust. She didn’t expect to be saved, of course, probably didn’t even know it was possible, so when they activate her, she’ll be disoriented. She’ll need some kind of counseling. We have some pretty good soul-masons on Kenning. And they can send for her brother; he’ll want to help.”

  “Stop it! This is cruel.” Memsen yanked his hand down. “We have to go right now.”

  “Why?” said the High Gregory plaintively. “He’s not going to remember any of this.”

  “Vic was saved?” Even though he was still safe in the wheelchair, he felt as if he were falling.

  “All the pukpuk martyrs were.” The High Gregory tried to shake his hand loose from Memsen, but she wouldn’t let him go. “That was why they agreed to sacrifice themselves.”

  “Enough.” Memsen started to drag him from the cabin. “We’re sorry, Spur. You’re a decent man. Go back to your cottage and your apples and forget about us.”

  “Goodbye, Spur,” called the High Gregory as they popped through the bulkhead. “Good luck.”

  As the bulkhead shivered with their passing, he felt a fierce and troubling desire burn his soul. Some part of him did want to go with them, to be with Comfort and Vic on the upside and see the wonders that Chairman Winter had forbidden the citizens of the Transcendent State. He could do it; he knew he could. After all, everyone in Littleton seemed to think he was leaving.

  But then who would help Cape bring in the harvest?

  Spur wasn’t sure how long he sat alone in the wheelchair with a thousand thoughts buzzing in his head. The upsiders had just blown up his world and he was trying desperately to piece it back together. Except what was the point? In a little while he wasn’t going to be worrying anymore about Comfort and Vic and shells and being saved. Maybe that was for the best; it was all too complicated. Just like the Chairman had said. Spur thought he’d be happier thinking about apples and baseball and maybe kissing Melody Velez. He was ready to forget.

  He realized that the hover had gone completely still. There was no vibration from the hull skimming through the air, no muffled laughter from the L’ung. He watched the hospital equipment melt into the deck. Then all the bulkheads popped and he could see the entire bay of the hover. It was empty except for his wheelchair, a gurney with Comfort’s shroud-covered body and the docbot, which rolled up to him.

  “So you’re going to make me forget all this?” said Spur bitterly. “All the secrets of the upside?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  Spur shivered. “I have a choice?”

  “I’m just the doctor, son. I can offer treatment but you have to accept it. For example, you chose not to tell me how you got burned that first time.” The docbot rolled behind the wheelchair. “That pretty much wrecked everything I was trying to accomplish with the conciliation sim.”

  Spur turned around to look at it. “You knew all along?”

  The docbot locked into the back of the wheelchair. “I wouldn’t be much of a doctor if I couldn’t tell when patients were lying to me.” It started pushing Spur toward the hatch.

  “But you work for the Chairman.” Spur didn’t know if he wanted the responsibility for making this decision.

  “I take Jack Winter’s money,” said the docbot. “I don’t take his advice when it comes to medical or spiritual practice.”

  “But what if I tell people that Comfort and Vic are saved and that upsiders get to go on after they die?”

  “Then they’ll know.”

  Spur tried to imagine keeping the upsiders’ immortality a secret for the rest of his days. He tried to imagine what would happen to the Transcendent State if he told what he knew. His mouth went as dry as flour. He was just a farmer, he told himself; he didn’t have that good an imagination. “You’re saying that I don’t have to have my memory of all this erased?”

  “Goodness, no. Unless you’d rather forget about me.”

  As they passed Comfort’s body, Spur said, “Stop a minute.”

  He reached out and touched the shroud. He expected it to be some strange upsider fabric but it was just a simple cotton sheet. “They knew that I could choose to remember, didn’t they? Memsen and the High Gregory were playing me to the very end.”

  “Son,” said Dr. Niss, “the High Gregory is just a boy and nobody in the Thousand Worlds knows what the Allworthy knows.”

  But Spur had stopped listening. He rubbed the shroud between his thumb and forefinger, thinking about how he and the Joerlys used to make up adventures in the ruins along Mercy’s Creek when they were children. Often as not one of them would achieve some glorious death as part of the game. The explorer would boldly drink from the poisoned cup to free her comrades, the pirate captain would be run through defending his treasure, the queen of skantlings would throw down her heartstone rather than betray the castle. And then he or Vic or Comfort would stumble dramatically to the forest floor and sprawl there, cheek pressed against leaf litter, as still as scattered stones. The others would pause briefly over the body and then dash into the woods, so that the fallen hero could be reincarnated and the game could go on.

  “I want to go home,” he said, at last.

  What I Wrote and Why I Wrote It

  James Patrick Kelly

  I can’t claim that it was inevitable that I would write Burn. Many years ago, my little novel began to accrete around a grudge I had against one of our literary founding fathers, Henry David Thoreau. But Thoreau wasn’t why I wrote Burn. As I contemplated this project, one of its principle attractions was the lure of doing research into forest firefighting, a subject that is at once intrinsically fascinating and way obscure. Lolling around libraries, paging through books that hav
en’t been checked out since 1975, is one of my principal joys as a writer. In addition, I could find very little fiction about forest firefighting, and none in genre, which meant that I’d have the territory pretty much to myself. But fire wasn’t the reason I wrote Burn. Of course, like so many of my fellow science fiction writers, I’d been wrestling with the problem of the Singularity, and writing about a human enclave in a post-human galaxy seemed like a challenge that was within my range. But once again, that wasn’t why I wrote Burn.

  The fact is that Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications cajoled me into signing a contract for a 30,000-word novella by telling me I could write pretty much whatever I wanted. If it hadn’t been for him, I probably would’ve spent the end of 2004 and early 2005 on short fiction, as was my habit for almost a decade. I signed on thinking how pleasant it would be to have a new book that wasn’t a short story collection. However, I wasn’t at all sure that I could sustain a narrative of more than 30,000 words, after too many years away from the long form. At the time, I told myself that if worse came to worse, I could churn out 22- to 25,000 words and hand in a manuscript with a large font and wide margins. And so, by giving myself permission to fail, I was able to begin.

  Years ago, I had made a note about the curious incident of the forest fire that Henry David Thoreau started. You can read some of Thoreau’s account of what happened at the beginning of chapter fourteen, but suffice it to say that after accidently setting the Walden woods ablaze—some estimates hold that more than three hundred acres were consumed—our First Naturalist repaired to the top of Fairhaven Hill to admire his own private conflagration. I thought folks ought to know about this. You see, as a student, I was force-fed Walden and much of it disagreed with me. I will admit that never has the Luddite point of view been advanced quite so eloquently. And while I agree that simplicity can be a virtue and that the cultivation of one’s inner resources is necessary for the good life, it seems clear to me that the habit of thought that Thoreau urges on us is antithetical to the enterprise of science fiction. Thoreau had little use for the technology of his own time, dismissing both the telegraph and the railroad. I can imagine his horror at the spread of our own asphalt and information superhighways. Hey, I’m all for spirituality, but not if it means I can’t check my email.

  Although I have never witnessed a forest fire in person, I have been at the scene of several house fires, and I believe that I understand some of what Thoreau must have felt as he watched his fire burn through the woods near Walden. It is our nature to be fascinated by flame; civilization began around the fire pits of prehistory. We recognize the elemental power of fire to destroy, and we all live with an almost imperceptible but omnipresent unease that it will escape our control and consume us. When was the last time you checked your fire extinguishers? Are you sure your smoke detectors are working? Is it any wonder that one of our oldest cultural nightmares involve the fires of hell? And yet fire is not easy to write about, or at least, I did not find it so. Writing about it is like writing about music. I struggled to craft sentences strong enough to capture the glare and heat of flame throughout Burn; you will have to be the judge of my success.

  Back in 1993, Vernor Vinge gave the paper that introduced the idea of the Singularity. “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” The paths to the Singularity are many. One leads to—and passes through—artificial intelligence. It is entirely possible that computer scientists are designing our successor species even as you read this. Another path to the Singularity leads through improved human/machine interfaces. What if we could enhance our memory and creativity cybernetically? Yet another path would involve purely biological improvements to intelligence—not to mention the human body. Advances in genome editing offer the tantalizing prospect that we might someday be able to control of the evolution of future generations, or even tinker with your genes and mine. The Singularity starts the day after the first posthuman baby is born. But consider the metaphor of the Singularity: it’s borrowed from the astronomers and speaks to the unknowable nature of a black hole. The gravitational field of a black hole is such that you’d have to go faster than the speed of light to escape it. You can’t probe or scan past the event horizon. In the same way, we can’t know what life will be like on the far side of the Human Singularity, if there is to be one. That future is opaque to the science fiction writer—and reader. So what I have done in Burn is to imagine a world perched on the edge of the event horizon of the Human Singularity. And of course, I have cheated, since some information about the Thousand Worlds does escape to the citizens of the Transcendent State—to their great peril.

  I know more about the Thousand Worlds than I have told in Burn. I was surprised that once I got into the book, I had no trouble reaching 25,000 words, then 30,000, then 35,000. As my deadline loomed, I had to make some strategic decisions about the shape of the book. I decided to leave out stuff, in order to keep a tight focus on my main character and his problems, some of which open out into the larger concerns of his world and the galactic culture, but some of which are as personal as who will pick the apples or play the outfield. I think this reflects the kind of life that I’m living. I’m concerned about income inequality and climate change and the pointless war in Afghanistan, but the dishes still have to go into the dishwasher and the grass is growing. Maybe it’s time to strap on the headphones and fire up my audiobook copy of Walden on my iPhone. I love to listen to Thoreau lecture me about men leading lives of quiet desperation while I mow the lawn.