by Steven Brust
“Jesus Christ. In how many thousand years of evolution, that’s the best you can manage? Talk about a terrible user interface.”
“Something for you to work on, then.” But the tiny lines beside his eyes had gone from care to patience, and now cracked into smile. “But you should eat something first,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
I had to think about it. My body, arranged politely in the dead center of his bed seemed farther away than the Renaissance. “Yeah,” I said. “I think so. Got any lark’s tongue in aspic?”
He grinned. “I’ll go check.” He stood up, and I panicked. Without his weight on the mattress, I felt like I might float off the bed. “I know I’ve got peanut butter and jelly,” he said.
My field of vision opened to include both of us, him standing, me on the bed lying rigid, the Ikea furniture and the clean tile floor. “And frozen pizza,” he said. But I was falling out of a well backwards, away from the confines and claustrophobia, and into something much worse. He put a receipt in the open page of the book and closed it.
“Or we could order in,” he said. “You can get almost anything delivered.” He turned back to me, and both of us were small and distant. “Really. Almost anything. Except, for some reason, pizza. You can’t get pizza late at night in Las Vegas. Is that weird, or what?” I could see his living room too, and the kitchen, the little yard in back with a palm tree. “Are you okay?”
If I blinked I would lose sight of us altogether in the weave of bungalows and sidewalks.
“Ren?” He touched my arm.
“Ren?” His fingers closed over my shoulder and trapped the whole suburban block between his palm and my skin. He was sitting, leaning over me, trying to see into my eyes. I let his eyes come into focus. Brown with flecks of something lighter—yellow, or gold maybe, almost amber, and concern. No, worry.
“Peanut butter and jelly, dear chef?” my voice said. “Do not a gas-flame stove and electrical refrigeration and every modern contraption invented to make the preservation and preparation of food into a trivial act or an outrageous hobby now attend your pleasure, where once the collection and preparation of food occupied you so utterly that you scarcely netted even the calories it cost to fell and section meat and wood? Where even the simplest grains and meanest, hard apples were once daily defended from spoilage and rot, frost-burn and rodents. Do not now apples from Oregon, oranges from Florida, and bananas from Mexico all await you at the mini-mart you pass before you reach the grocery store in whose vast and air-cooled domain everything from pork loin to fish eggs now stands packed in glass or wrapped in cellophane to be eaten by its expiration date or thrown away? Yet with all of this—all this splendor, all this wanton excess, you offer me either pizza, knowing I abhor it, or crushed peanuts and squashed strawberries mashed between two slabs of something that bears no more resemblance to bread than this flat futon does to a feather mattress. Having, only hours hence, seared me, cursed me yet again, and impaled me upon the tip of your flaming stake, you now offer to feed me on children’s food?”
“Oh, hello Celeste,” Phil said. “I have good bread. From a bakery.”
“Fuck off.”
Phil’s mouth twisted into a screamlike shape. With a snarl of warning or rage or despair, his hand spanned the back of my head nearly ear to ear. He kissed me. And when he took his mouth from mine, he held my head still, our temples pressed together. I felt his shoulders shake. “I loved you,” he said, choked.
“You should quit smoking.” My voice was tart.
“I did.”
“Not this lifetime.”
“I never started this lifetime. Celeste—”
“I loved you too,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.
Phil was quiet a long time. I watched the hairless little hollow where his collarbones met and tried to remember what the big deal was about peanut butter.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Ren.” Phil stood up and walked to the bedroom’s little window. He shoved the curtains back and looked into the yard like it’d better not have anything to say about it.
“Maybe we should go with pizza,” I said.
He looked back suddenly and caught me testing the skin of my lips for razor burn.
“I’m sorry about that too,” he said, very quietly.
I shrugged and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Will Celeste keep doing that?” I asked him. “Just talking out of my mouth that way? She’s kind of long-winded.”
Phil’s face ran through a range of emotions. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you want her to?”
He held his hands out and I took them. I stood up slowly, but it still ground the headache tighter.
“Pepperoni or Deluxe?” he said.
Phil
You’re always sleepy and hungry as a new Second; you’re always sleepy and jumpy as a new titan. Ren managed some pizza and then fell asleep. I opened my laptop, disposed of email, and seeded the ritual, leaving it as a bright blue flower in a vase just inside the front gate. I looked around while I was there; a knee-high statue of Iupiter stood next to a full-size brick oven, and on top of the oven was a basket holding six loaves of bread; and just past that were three coils of hemp, followed by nine or ten candles. I didn’t bother looking in the other direction; I was going to need to clean the place up or I’d be unable to graze my own Garden.
Not now, though. Now I had to deal with a new Second, and, dammit, I was missing all the WSOP side action. I’d expected to do the interview, then leave Ren to think about it for a week or two.
I leaned against the wall that existed in my mind and rubbed a virtual hand over a symbolic cheek. Why hadn’t she had to think about it? I walked over to the oven and grabbed the second loaf, ripped off a hunk, and started eating it. The loaf remained in the basket because that’s how things work. I swallowed, and the memory became part of me and I examined it.
She’d been one of those precocious children who pronounce words wrong because she’d read them before hearing them, but it had bothered her more than most, and as a teenager she’d taken to reading with an online dictionary open so she could hear the pronunciation of words she didn’t know. Interesting, but so?
I bit into the next loaf of bread and recalled how she’d gotten into user interface, and how angry she got over poor design, and realized that she took bad design as a personal insult directed at everyone who used it. Again, interesting, but so?
I continued, and got nothing; but, as so often happens, the accumulation of little things built up an obvious answer so gradually that it had been sitting in front of me for some time before I realized it: She hadn’t hesitated, because there was something she wanted to do. She had an agenda I hadn’t seen.
And I was her titan—responsible for her and it, whatever it was.
Crap.
I let the Garden dissolve around me and there I was, shaking and in desperate need of the pizza that was all the way across the room. According to the clock on my laptop, I’d spent more than two hours grazing.
I ate cold pizza, then threw myself onto the couch.
I was going to have a lot to talk to Ren about when she woke up.
Ren
I woke up happy, with the heavy-boned tired you get from swimming all afternoon in a summer lake. Easy, and not wanting to hurry back to the real world—whatever that means when half my work and all my correspondence exist only electronically. After pizza, I’d stripped down to my skivvies and crawled into Phil’s bed. Now I dove back out of it and dug through the pile of my clothes for my phone, but a short message from Cindi settled me down. Phil—or someone in the Big Power Tiny Action organization I’d just joined—had jiggered things overnight to keep me in Vegas and Liam in Phoenix through the rest of the weekend at least. A longer note from Liam apologized a lot and promised to make it up to me. I sat back down on Phil’s bed and pondered whether I could fit out his window. Head first or feet? Shoulders stuck in the opening or ass wedged in the wall?
Not like he—they—couldn’t find me, even if I managed to squeeze through. Where would I go? And it wasn’t really Phil I wanted to flee, just everything I’d seen while I slept, and what it all meant.
I stood up and stretched. Celeste had been right about the futon mattress—it was unforgivingly firm. I wanted a shower and clean clothes and decent food and time to think it all over. I settled for Phil’s vintage bathrobe of white-and-blue, striped cotton, soft enough to make me wonder if Celeste had a stash of favorite clothes hidden for me, and if they’d fit, and whether she would have been prettier in them.
I tiptoed past Phil, sprawled on his sofa, looking more poleaxed than asleep, one arm thrown over his eyes, the other fallen off his chest. He was still wearing all his clothes. I could have walked right out the front door and slammed it and gotten away, but I guess I didn’t want to. I rubbed my lips, remembering his rough mouth.
His narrow galley kitchen was separated from the living room by a Formica bar. The fridge, pantry and stove all stood on the opposite wall in a line with the sink. A very squashy work triangle, but useable enough until you opened the fridge.
“What are you doing?” Phil sank onto one of the barstools.
“Good morning!” I said. “Wow. That’s backwards too.”
“What?”
“The morning. We shouldn’t be seeing each other with morning hair and the sleep stupids before we’ve had sex. We should be all after-glowed and satisfied before we have to look at each other in this condition.”
Phil scrubbed at his face. “Why is the refrigerator door in the hall?”
“It was backwards. I noticed it yesterday. The handle and hinges were on the wrong sides.”
“So you’re switching them? Before breakfast? God, before coffee?”
I surveyed Phil’s kitchen, then his face. They were both a bit of a wreck, honestly. Both probably my fault. “I don’t drink coffee,” I reminded him.
“But I do,” he said and stalked into his bedroom.
Fifteen minutes later he had showered and dressed, and I had reassembled his kitchen and done my best with his coffeepot. Five minutes after that, he suggested we go out for coffee.
“Ask a carpenter to dress you and you’ll wear wooden clothes,” I snapped, then tried to figure out what the hell I meant. Phil waited. I said, “You didn’t ask for any of this, did you?”
He shook his head and looked tired. “It’s okay,” he said. “I did know you do that—order your physical environment when you feel frightened.”
“I do that, or Celeste did?”
His rogue eyebrow twitched upward, but his voice stayed calm. “She did too, actually, but I wasn’t thinking about her.”
Nothing in his face moved. He sat impassively on the barstool, swiveling gently, looking out through the sliding glass doors into the yard.
“Bullshit,” I said.
He swiveled back to scan my face.
“No, not Celeste,” I said. “It’s all me.”
The eyebrow quirked a question mark my direction.
“You’ve been thinking about Celeste since we met,” I said. “She’s been a shadow under everything you’ve said. So either you’re so repressed you don’t know you have feelings at all, or you’re lying to me.”
“I have not lied to you.”
I mirrored his total lack of movement.
“But I haven’t told you everything,” he said.
I stayed quiet; it was working for me.
“Let’s go get some decent food,” he said. “I think we’d both be better for it.” He stood up and walked into his bedroom.
I got as far as the barstool side of the kitchen before I realized the bias-cut green dress and difficult stockings I was planning to put on belonged to a woman seventy years ago. I had darned the silk where it wore thin at the toes and could feel, on the backs of my knees, how they bagged before synthetics. I don’t wear nylons often. It’s too hot, and my legs are dark enough. But they’ve always been nylon. Celeste was mixing into me.
I faced Phil’s icebox. No, his fridge, hinged properly now. But the sharp edge of the counter bit into the palms of my hands, and my fingertips went cold with the effort of not trailing after him. I wanted him here to hold me, lock me down, grip my wavering reality in his big hands and bend it into sense.
Phil hit the light switch on the way out of his bedroom and started reeling the blinds over the glass patio doors. “Saves on the A/C,” he explained.
“I gotta go,” I said. “Make whoever do whatever and get me back to Phoenix. I need to stop and think this through.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
“What do you mean ‘a little late’?”
“The memories are going to keep coming back, Ren. You can’t stop them. The best you can do is let me show you how to organize the lifetimes of personal information you’ll be getting. And how to graze the shared memory you have access to now. And how to put the two together and start your own meddlework.”
“Until I fade away altogether under Celeste?”
“Until it all settles out.”
There were no lines in the skin above his eyebrows, no sign of worry or concern, just information, but he came to stand where I was milking the Formica.
“You’re not an impulsive person,” he said. “You knew you could take your time to think this over. You wanted to experiment with it—watch me meddle, learn more about us.” A strange tenderness turned his voice liquid. “But you took the spike last night without waiting for any of that.” His words slipped over my shoulders like bathwater. “You already had some meddlework in mind, didn’t you?”
I turned to look at him. “Did you know you can drown someone in two inches of water?”
The one wild eyebrow shot up, then dove. Surprised, then angry. “You’ve never drowned anyone.”
“No, I haven’t. But how do you know that? How could you know what I am? Can you even see me through all the Celeste hanging over me?”
“I’m not the only one looking.” There was no morning softness, no sluggishness left to his face. My bathtub iced over.
But I didn’t care. Whatever else he was going to tell me I was or wasn’t, I knew for plain fact I wasn’t needy. I wasn’t helpless or pathetic or wanting protection and a big strong man to save me. I might be in over my head, but I wasn’t wasting air shouting for the lifeguard. And I wasn’t giving up my secrets. “You told me you see patterns,” I said. “That your whole niceness mafia is based on changing people by knowing what triggers them and orchestrating those triggers, by manipulating them to be better, right?”
“To do better; being better sort of comes along naturally.”
“How?”
“I explained that, Ren. We each draw from lifetimes of wisdom and have access to a collective memory that houses almost every fact about anyone. We know how to make someone trust us, we know how to find a memory that will cause gratification. We manipulate and suggest.”
“Then nothing can surprise you? Ever?”
“You have.”
I leaned against the corridor wall. Phil dropped back onto a barstool, one wary eyebrow watching me.
“Then we’re even,” I said. “We should eat something.”
Phil nodded.
“I want the full Vegas experience, lavish buffet, dancing girls,” I said. “I want you to show it all to me, and I want my boss to pay for it.”
“With all of human history available to you if you close your eyes, you want to see Las Vegas?”
“Yup,” I said. “Didn’t see that coming either, did you?”
His wariness doubled in eyebrow. “Are you just trying to be unpredictable?”
“Would that be out of character for me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then no, I’m not,” I said, like it was innocence and not exhaustion that kept me leaning against the wall. “But I’m not going to stay inside with the animatronics this time.”
Phil waited.<
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“For my seventh birthday, my parents took me to Disney World. Mom was pregnant; I didn’t know it yet, but I guess that was part of why we went: a last hurrah for the three of us, with the next two years going to be all diapers and learning to walk. The first morning, I had my first-ever room service meal and opened presents. I got a pair of plastic sparkle princess shoes from my nana’s sister, tore them out of their plastic bubble-pack, and wore them for breakfast in bed with my Tinker Bell nightie and the room service tray. Do you know this story?”
He shook his head. “What happened?”
I pushed my back into the wall. “We got dressed for our big day at the park. Mom wanted me to put my Keds on, but I was the birthday princess, and either I convinced her that princesses do not wear sneakers, or she needed to throw up and just gave in. She packed the Keds in my new Belle backpack and sent Dad and me down to the lobby where I took them out and hid them in a potted tree.
“We took the monorail, stood in the entrance line, and half an hour into our day with only ‘Dumbo the Flying Elephant’ and ‘Main Street USA’ checked off on my pages-long list, my feet started hurting. ‘It’s a Small World’ and ‘Cinderella’s Golden Carousel’ later, I’d chewed a bloody place on the inside of my lip.”
Phil chuckled, warm and easy, and I liked the sound and the way his shoulders sat down away from his ears now without the tension that always rode them. “What did you do?” he asked.
“What could I? Fess up and wait with Mom while Dad went back to the hotel to root through the lobby plants? Accept his offer of a most un-princessly piggyback? Keep walking till my awful, plastic torture shoes left trails of blood through the Magic Kingdom?”
“No?”
“Never!”
“What then?”
“Develop a sudden and unnatural love for the ‘Hall of Presidents.’ No lines. All sitting.”
“Very clever,” Phil said.
I sat down on the stool next to him, but couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “I need help,” I said. “And I’m not willing to miss out on seven-eighths of the fun because I’m too proud to ask for it. But I’m scared and overwhelmed and have a lot to learn and I can’t learn it all right now. After the dreams I had all night, I need a change of scenery. I want to look away from all this and come back with clean eyes. I want to throw myself into an experience that isn’t mine, a movie or not-a-memory, something I can’t possibly be responsible for.”