So this place is apart - away. And more apart than other places. Which is why it has a ment.
She says that to Daddy, who looks confused. He looks confused a lot. He says that things will be different now. No Mommy. Mommy is sick and needs to see doctors.
Suzette could've told him that a long time ago.
She likes the apartment on that first day, mostly (she knows) because it doesn't smell like Mommy's perfume. She knows Mommy won't be there, and Suze isn't quite so tense. Tense. Mommy's word.
Why're you so tense, honey? Feel how tight your muscles are? Relax. You'll play better. Just relax.
Daddy brought the piano, and her bed, and all her dolls, even the ones she doesn't like. But he didn't bring the window seat. He put her cushions on a big old chair near a small window, but it's not quite the same.
Nothing's quite the same.
Her furniture is the only stuff that is the same. Her furniture and her toys. The living room, all new. The entertainment screen, new. Daddy's bedroom, new. His clothes, the same, so his closet smells the same - shoe leather and cologne and Daddy. Sometimes, she goes in there and sits.
In the quiet.
Because he forgot her music.
She tells him, and he says that he couldn't bring it.
Can't afford it, babe, he says, and gives her a handheld music device. With forbidden buds. Which, he says, are programmed so they won't hurt her.
But it's not the same. There are no notes. The music doesn't dance around her in multicolours. It's flat and tinny, not at all what it used to be.
She touches behind her ear to turn on the music, but nothing happens. She doesn't know why. She's with family.
But she thinks, maybe, Mommy lied about the ear thing. Mommy lied about a lot, mostly to Daddy, but sometimes to Suze. And Suze hated the lies, because Mommy sometimes wanted Suze to lie too.
Suze used to hide in her room. Her old room.
Where the music danced.
She asks Daddy for her music every day, and every day, he tells her he can't.
So she waits. After the first week, he says, she's going to Grams. Grams will watch her after school. Grams and Gramps - Daddy's mommy and daddy - they love her and they have good music, with dancing notes and colours. She can't wait. Grams is a better cook than Daddy. Gramps doesn't talk much, but he hugs good. And they have music, real music.
And she'll be there real soon.
The end of a long day. Nils has held onto his job through this entire mess, his boss understanding, but now that it's over - at least as far as his boss is concerned - Nils must perform again. Long hours, stellar work.
And he does. He has been. He'll continue.
Thank God he has his parents. Thank God they love Suzette. Thank God they understand.
He walks into their house - the house he grew up in - a one-hundred-and-fifty year old Craftsman, original wood, polished floors, real Tiffany lamps, put away since Suze will come over every day. When she gets old enough, the Tiffany will come back out. The antiques will fill the living room again, but for now, everything is as familiar as his childhood.
His parents had put out this furniture when he was a kid, so he could scuff the tables and break the springs on the couch. Suze can do the same.
She'll have a real childhood here.
Only the comfort he expects as he pushes the door open isn't here. The air is fraught with tension. He can sense it in the silence. He knows this place, knows the people in it, almost better than he knows himself. And he knows how this house feels when something is wrong.
His stomach lurches, turns. He's had stomach troubles so bad that he is saving for an enhancement - although the doc probably won't give it, saying reduce the stress instead.
Sure. When the lawyer is paid, the experts are paid, the bills are paid. Thank God he doesn't have to pay for Madeline's care. Her parents will do that.
Although they blame him.
What did you do to her? Her father shouted outside the courthouse. She was perfect until she met you.
The signs were there, Nils had said more to himself than to her father. The signs were there from the beginning.
He tries not to worry about this with his own daughter. They enhanced her intelligence, messed with her mind, made her better, the doctor said, but the technology isn't perfect. Did they enhance her tendency toward perfection, which she inherited from her mother? Will things show up later that might not have otherwise been there?
He goes into the kitchen, which should smell of his mother's lasagne. Instead, it smells of the morning coffee and dirty dishes. His mother sits in her favourite kitchen chair, looking old. Her eyes are red-rimmed.
She's been crying.
"What?" he says. "What?"
She points to the den. He hurries in, afraid - what happened to his daughter? His girl? What would he be without Suze? God, once he didn't even know her and now he can't imagine losing her.
Or he can, really, that's the problem. He can, and in those few seconds, filled with the hint of his mother's tears, he can imagine life without Suze. And it is beyond bleak.
Then he sees his father in his overstuffed chair, arms around Suze. Suze, who is asleep. Suze, whose face is puffy and red, like it always is when she cries.
Nils lets out a relieved breath, then sees the rest of the room. The destroyed wall mount, the scratches on the side of the old family upright. The overturned table, the broken lamp.
"What happened?" he asks softly, so he doesn't wake his daughter.
His father looks at him. Accusing. That's the look. A look Nils hasn't seen since he was a teenager. You should've known better. What were you thinking? What's wrong with you?
"What happened?" Nils asks again.
"She says the music's broken," his father says.
Nils sinks into a chair. "What does that mean?"
His father shrugs a single shoulder, effortlessly, a man who has had practice communicating with a child in his arms. A sleeping child.
"She turned on the music, then started yelling and when we tried to fix it, everything got worse. She did this. She was screaming and crying and holding her head. What did you do to her, Nils?"
Nils stares at his daughter. She never has tantrums. She's the best child. But she's been complaining about music.
Music, Madeline's obsession. Madeline spent so much money on apps, apps he couldn't renew with all their monthly fees - a quarter of his wages in fees, for apps for his daughter.
"I didn't do anything," he says. And that's the problem, isn't it? In a nutshell, as they say. In something small that will grow into something big.
Has grown into something big.
He didn't do anything. He watched the enhancement money disappear, but his wife - who used to use enhancements to remain thin - grew fat. He watched five dollars go away here, fifteen there.
What did you buy? he would ask her.
Lattes, she'd snap.
Lattes.
She lied. She bought music apps. Inappropriate apps. Apps for lounge singers, who had to know every single request from every single patron. Apps for garage bands, who needed to learn how to play. Apps on music theory. Music appreciation. And sight-reading.
He'd come home, and Madeline would be hunched over the piano, telling Suze to try again. Try. Make it sound right the first time. With no music in front of her.
Make it sound right.
He never questioned. He never did. He got his wife away from his daughter, had dinner, read to his little girl, spent time with her, pretended everything was all right. And he loved it, loved it, when she'd hold him tight and say, I wish you could always be here, Daddy. I like it when you're here.
Not realizing what his wife had been doing.
His ex-wife.
"You cannot blame Madeline for this," his father says. "You both raised this child. You could have stopped things."
Echoing his own thoughts.
"I know," he says. "But I didn't."
&nb
sp; Except he did. Cold turkey. His daughter, without her music. Like a drinker without his booze.
He closes his eyes.
"What should I do, Dad?" he says. "Please tell me. What should I do?"
He takes Suze to doctors who all chastise him, tell him she's too young for enhancements, too old for genetic modification. Then he tells them about the apps, and the doctors pull him aside, tell him his daughter will lose her mind without her music.
Lose her mind, like her mother.
He can see bits of it already - the desperation, the haunted looks. She walks into a room and shuts off any music she can hear. She won't watch entertainments. She won't let anyone sing.
She destroyed the player he bought her, and smashed the earbuds.
She's five going on forty, disillusioned and bitter.
He can't afford the apps, but he'll ruin her without them.
A quarter of his income. More when she can actually get the enhancements when her skull stops growing. Different doctors give him a different timeline: ten, thirteen, twenty.
His decision, they say. His.
Alone.
She'll be in silence until then. No music, no refuge. He does know that much about his daughter. Until her mother left, until he discontinued the apps, his daughter lived inside her music.
Escaped in it.
Became it, in a way he - a non-musical person - can never really understand.
But it is essential to her, one doctor says. As essential as breathing.
Nils shakes his head. People die when they can't breathe, he says, hating it when people overdramatize.
But the doctor stares at him, and says, in that same tone the judge used. The too-late tone, I know.
She'll die? Suze will die?
Maybe. Not physically die. But stop. Stop being Suze. Stop being the person he loves.
He begins to see it: She can't sleep, won't smile, reverts - thumb in mouth, baby talk. She won't let anyone touch her, not even her grandfather - Gramps, whom she loves most of all.
Nils can't lose her. He can't. He won't.
So he does the only thing he can:
He moves back in with his parents, taking over the basement. He lets the apartment go. He gives Suze the large bedroom, him the small one. She complains only once - no window - and he tells his father, who makes her a window seat in the den.
What kind of thirty-five year-old man with a good job and a daughter moves in with his parents?
A failure, that's what.
But a failure who can afford improper apps for his daughter. A failure who can spend a quarter of his income on Sight Reading For Lounge Singers, on Music Appreciation, on Multi-coloured Notes.
A man who will not lose his daughter, no matter what.
Daddy found it. The music. He says it lives in a tiny chip, one that goes behind her ear. He puts it there, and reminds her to turn it off when she leaves the house.
She does.
But she can go upstairs in the den (I'm sorry, Gramps, so sorry I broke everything. Please let me in the den again. I'm so sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.) and she sits in her corner, and she plays Gramps's old-fashioned music machine which he fixed after she hit it, and notes fly around her face - light blue for flutes, red for trumpets, purple for piano, black for vocals.
She can sit in her corner, with Dolly, and watch the music, listen to the music, and sometimes, when she closes her eyes, she misses Mommy.
Just sometimes.
But she doesn't have to hide here because nobody yells. And Gramps holds her when he reads to her before bed, and Grams makes good food, and Daddy smiles sometimes.
She wishes she could show him the music. She knows he can't see it. He doesn't even understand it.
She knows that.
But he knows she doesn't feel good without it.
So he brought it from the old house. The big house. He found it and gave it back to her.
It makes her happy in a way she can't explain.
He says he likes seeing her happy.
So now that the music's back, she plays only happy songs. For him, for her. For Grams and Gramps. For the family.
She plays only happy songs.
And she watches the music dance.
Laika's Ghost
Karl Schroeder
Karl Schroeder was born in Manitoba, Canada, in 1962. He started writing at age fourteen, following in the footsteps of A. E. van Vogt, who came from the same Mennonite community. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and became a founding member of SF Canada (he was president from 1996 - 97). He sold early stories to Canadian magazines, and his first novel, The Claus Effect (with David Nickle) appeared in 1997. His first solo novel, Ventus, was published in 2000, and was followed by Permanence and Lady of Mazes. His most recent work is the Virga series of science fiction novels (Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, and The Sunless Countries). He also collaborated with Cory Doctorow on The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science Fiction. Schroeder lives in East Toronto with his wife and daughter.
The flight had been bumpy; the landing was equally so, to the point where Gennady was sure the old Tupolev would blow a tire. Yet his seat-mate hadn't even shifted position in two hours. That was fine with Gennady, who had spent the whole trip trying to pretend he wasn't there at all.
The young American been a bit more active during the flight across the Atlantic: at least, his eyes had been open and Gennady could see coloured lights flickering across them from his augmented reality glasses. But he had exchanged less than twenty words with Gennady since they'd left Washington.
In short, he'd been the ideal travelling companion.
The other four passengers were stretching and groaning. Gennady poked Ambrose in the side and said, "Wake up. Welcome to the ninth biggest country in the world."
Ambrose snorted and sat up. "Brazil?" he said hopefully. Then he looked out his window. "What the hell?"
The little municipal airport had a single gate, which as the only plane on the field, they were taxiing up to uncontested. Over the entrance to the single-story building was the word '???????????.' "Welcome to Stepnogorsk," said Gennady as he stood to retrieve his luggage from the overhead rack. He travelled light by habit. Ambrose, he gathered, had done so from necessity.
"Stepnogorsk...?" Ambrose shambled after him, a mass of wrinkled clothing leavened with old sweat. "Secret Soviet town," he mumbled as they reached the plane's hatch and a burst of hot dry air lifted his hair. "Population sixty-thousand," Ambrose added as he put his left foot on the metal steps. Halfway down he said, "Manufactured anthrax bombs in the cold war!" And as he set foot on the tarmac he finished with, "Where the hell is Kazakhstan...? Oh."
"Bigger than Western Europe," said Gennady. "Ever heard of it?"
"Of course I've heard of it," said the youth testily - but Gennady could see from how he kept his eyes fixed in front of him that he was still frantically reading about the town from some website or other. In the wan August sunlight he was taller than Gennady, pale, with stringy hair, and everything about him soft - a sculpture done in rounded corners. He had a wide face, though; he might pass for Russian. Gennady clapped him on the shoulder. "Let me do the talking," he said as they dragged themselves across the blistering tarmac to the terminal building.
"So," said Ambrose, scratching his neck. "Why are we here?"
"You're here because you're with me. And you needed to disappear, but that doesn't mean I stop working."
Gennady glanced around. The landscape here should look a lot like home, which was only a day's drive to the west - and here indeed was that vast sky he remembered from Ukraine. After that first glance, though, he did a double-take. The dry prairie air normally smelled of dust and grass at this time of year, and there should have been yellow grass from here to the flat horizon - but instead the land seemed blasted, with large patches of bare soil showing. There was only stubble where there should have been grass. It looked more like Australia than Asia. Even the trees ringing the airpo
rt were dead, just grey skeletons clutching the air.
He thought about climate change as they walked through the concrete-floored terminal; since they'd cleared customs in Amsterdam, the bored-looking clerks here just waved them through. "Hang on," said Ambrose as he tried to keep up with Gennady's impatient stride. "I came to you guys for asylum. Doesn't that mean you put me up somewhere, some hotel, you know, away from the action?"
"You can't get any farther from the action than this." They emerged onto a grassy boulevard that hadn't been watered nor cut in a long while; the civilized lawn merged seamlessly with the wild prairie. There was nothing visible from here to the horizon, except in one direction where a cluster of listless windmills jutted above some low trees.
A single taxicab was sitting at the crumbled curb.
"Oh, man," said Ambrose.
Gennady had to smile. "You were expecting some Black Sea resort, weren't you?" He slipped into the taxi, which stank of hot vinyl and motor oil. "Any car rental agency," he said to the driver in Russian. "It's not like you're some cold war defector," he continued to Ambrose in English. "Your benefactor is the U.N. And they don't have much money."
"So you're what - putting me up in a motel in Kazakhstan?" Ambrose struggled to put his outrage into words. "What I saw could -"
"What?" They pulled away from the curb and became the only car on a cracked blacktop road leading into town.
"Can't tell you," mumbled Ambrose, suddenly looking shifty. "I was told not to tell you anything."
Gennady swore in Ukrainian and looked away. They drove in silence for a while, until Ambrose said, "So why are you here, then? Did you piss somebody off?"
Gennady smothered the urge to push Ambrose out of the cab. "Can't tell you," he said curtly.
"Does it involve SNOPB?" Ambrose pronounced it snop-bee.
Gennady would have been startled had he not known Ambrose was connected to the net via his glasses. "You show me yours, I'll show you mine," he said. Ambrose snorted in contempt.
Engineering Infinity Page 4