The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “And it didn’t occur to either of us that Celeste had one. Does Irina know that, too?”

  “I haven’t gotten around to seeding that part yet.”

  “Seeding?”

  “It’s how we put memories in the Garden for each other to see. We graze for them when we need to retrieve information.”

  “Do you water and weed them too?”

  “Look, our words for things evolved, okay? It’s not like we all sat down and made it up in accordance with a style sheet somewhere. You can make a project of that, if you need one.”

  “I’m plenty busy, thanks. Is Celeste going to be pissed I outed her meddling with you in the 2000 election?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. Either you’ll become Celeste, and maybe wish you hadn’t, or you’ll stay Ren and live with your decision.” A shudder went through her. I recognized it. I knew what she was going to ask next, so I answered it. “I was Chuck Purcell. Born in January of 1972, in Pittsburgh. In ’94, I was driving home from work, and there was a fire, and I stopped, and I helped. Celeste recruited me. It took me a long time to decide.”

  “Is Chuck sorry you did?”

  “Chuck is me, and I’m not sorry.”

  “But Chuck is gone.”

  “His memories aren’t.”

  “Is there anything left?”

  “I’m a Pirates fan. I never used to follow baseball.”

  “What about his family?”

  “Mother and a sister.”

  “Do you keep in touch?”

  “Christmas and birthday cards. That part is hard, when you change. That’s the worst part.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “There was a lot I could have told you. But you said yes before I finished asking. I wasn’t about to talk you out of it. Why did you say yes, by the way?”

  She ate another slice of orange, then wiped her fingers. “Are you going to have one?”

  I did. It brought back memories. The sugary, smooth, melting orange tasted like—

  “What’s funny?” she asked.

  I held up the bit of peel left in my hand. “This is one of the things Celeste used as a switch on me. I didn’t eat it, but something around me had a hint of the flavor, or the smell. She’s very good. Why did you say yes?”

  She stared out the window over my shoulder. I have a date palm back there. I never eat the dates. She said, “A couple of reasons.”

  “And one is?”

  “At my work, we’re trying to build a device that does what the Garden can: store memories remotely. It’s kind of a passion project for me.”

  Out my front window there isn’t much to see except a stone lawn and a dog fence. I haven’t had a dog in years.

  “And?” I said.

  “And someone told me once that if I ever met a guy who shared my hidden dream, to jump at any chance he offered me.”

  Maybe I should get a dog. Times like this, I could use a dog to lick the juice off my fingers. And to nuzzle me and look up at me like I couldn’t possibly have fucked up.

  “Well?” she said.

  “But they’re a pain in the ass to take care of.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I sighed. “Well, isn’t this just grand?”

  Ren

  Phil had powdered sugar on his face, but I wasn’t going to tell him. “I’m tired,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I want to go to sleep, but…”

  “But I haven’t taught you any of the tricks yet for managing your dreams.”

  I picked up another orange slice and put it down again.

  “And the dreams are usually pretty intense the first couple of nights,” he said.

  “Yeah.” I didn’t want to relive last night if there was a way to funnel the torrent into something I could drink from rather than drown in. He was studying my face. I held his eyes.

  We’d cleared a space in the flowers for the bowl of oranges, but he was framed on either side by the extravagant color and smell of bloom, stamen and leaf. His face could have been veiled too, for all I could read in it. “Can you trust me?” he said at last.

  “Probably not.”

  He nodded.

  “I have to touch you.” It wasn’t desire in his voice. Almost regret. “It’s the only way I know how to get into your experience enough to shape it for you. It’s not something I can do with language.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s—” I could see, in the tiny muscle tic over his left eyebrow, what it was costing him not to drop my eyes. “It’s intimate,” he said.

  “I’ll close my eyes and think of England.”

  His smile only reached half his mouth. “Not like that.”

  “Okay.”

  “More.”

  “Stop it!” I snapped. “I said okay.”

  He walked into the living room like a man on the way to his own embalming. I followed too quickly and had to wait on the rug like an idiot while he found a CD and put it on. It was something low and wordless, all cello, or at least all strings. I’ve never been good with picking out instruments, Mom’s efforts and Prokofiev’s aside. But I thought it was odd, with everything he must know about me, that he wouldn’t pick a music matzo ball. But maybe this was one of his.

  He held his hands out in the universal symbol for “dance?” And I stepped into the hole his arms made, my right palm in his left, my left on his shoulder. He closed long, cool fingers over mine and rested his right hand lightly on my waist. Our feet made a slow, shuffling orbit around the empty space between our bodies, and for a long time, we just danced. My mind spun down, stopped grappling with what I’d heard and said, and finally quit listening to my thoughts. He brought the crown of his head to mine and rested it there, but none of the tension left the shoulder under my hand. He turned his head, and pressed his temple against mine, the way he’d done after he’d kissed Celeste on my mouth.

  Wanting to articulate the magic of what I felt, and to share its power with the man who held me, I said, “Oh.”

  He pulled me against him.

  “Close your eyes,” he whispered.

  The music held my feet and kept their little steps stepping, but everything that wasn’t my body was soaring. My knees wove between Phil’s. Our bellies, and his hips and mine floated over our feet and knees like boats in deep currents. My breasts against him made two polestars of white light. Our temples touched; we danced. And our dancing didn’t matter. Our bodies were extraneous. Symbolic.

  “Oh,” I said again.

  “Get to this place first, and the dreams slide through you,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Can you tell me what you see?”

  “Zombies,” I said.

  “No, love. That was just a game you were playing. Look.”

  I wanted him to call me “love,” again, but there were definitely zombies lurching my way. They shambled and shed bits of themselves in obliging conformity to type, with one flagrant violation. “They’ve got guns,” I mumbled.

  “Ren,” Phil’s voice was calm, but louder. “Keep dancing with me.”

  “They’re going to shoot me,” I said.

  “No one is going to shoot you.”

  But all I could feel of my body against Phil’s was my heart banging its way toward my teeth. “She’s going to shoot me, and you can’t reason with her because she thinks brains are food.”

  “You’re sticking bits of different memories together, Ren. None of this is real.”

  But it was real and what was stuck together were bits of rotting flesh. Celeste’s body decomposing.

  Phil’s hands were hard on my back and my fingers. “Ren!”

  The zombie raised its rifle to its shoulder and sighted down the barrel at me. It closed one eye, cocked the hammer and its eyebrow—Phil’s one emotional eyebrow. I stepped back from his arms into the blank white of someplace inside my head.

  “Yo
u wanted Celeste back,” I said. I couldn’t see Phil, but I could feel him there, and all the emptiness touching me without him. “You doubled up on Celeste to make sure I’d step aside for her. With her genes and all the other stuff you matched, you knew her personality could take over mine.”

  “I warned you that could happen,” he said.

  “Not could,” I said. “Would. You knew it would. And you were okay with that. You wanted that.”

  “Ren.”

  “Ren knows you wanted her to die.”

  “Celeste. I warned her, Celeste. You didn’t tell Chuck much more. I had no way of knowing she’d agree so quickly.”

  “She’s not me.”

  “Not yet.”

  “She won’t be. Here’s a riddle for you, dear Mendel. Without generations to study or pea pods to plant, how can you still know a trait’s not heritable?”

  “Celeste—”

  “When that trait itself would prevent genetic transmission, that’s how. Renee didn’t inherit martyrdom from me.”

  The whiteness went from rage-hot to bitter. I was shivering too hard to dance.

  I opened my eyes. “Celeste killed herself,” I said, and all I could feel were Phil’s arms, like the metal hoops around a barrel.

  “Will I remember this?” I asked him. “Can you make it so I won’t remember?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What I do next, who I am next depends on what I remember.”

  “Always. But who I am also depends on what you remember.”

  “Everything you remembered about Celeste wasn’t enough to change who she was.”

  “No.”

  “Phil?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Does hurting this much feel just like having her here?”

  “I can barely tell the difference,” he said, but his hands were lighter, and our feet were moving again. “Can you sleep now?”

  “I think I already am.”

  FIVE

  What Else Can I Get You?

  Phil

  Just like when I’ve spiked someone, I don’t know if I literally or figuratively carried her to the bed, but when I left her there, my arms were shaking. That isn’t conclusive, because the rest of me was shaking too. I was tired, and I was hungry, and I ached in places that weren’t even metaphorical. But I wasn’t going to rest. Not yet. There were used glasses and an empty beer bottle on the side table, and some dirty dishes next to the sink; I’d have liked a chance to redd up the place, flowers aside. But I wasn’t going to do that either.

  I sat down in my chair, closed my eyes, and smelled cherry blossoms and tasted chive. I opened my virtual eyes and I was in my villa, kicking aside dusty old memories in the shape of fruit and urns, candlesticks and furniture. I went out back, following a well-worn path. I’d once asked Ray why it is that paths showed up in our imaginations, and he suggested something about neural pathways in our brains that didn’t sound very convincing. It didn’t matter; I went past the orchard and out the broken wooden gate, leaving it swinging loudly behind me.

  Jesus Christ, Celeste.

  Four steps along the path brought me to the western orchard of my neighbor. There was a hole in the ground where once there’d been a bust of Juno until I’d pulled it up, fashioned it into a spike, set it on fire, and stuck it into Ren’s head. What I was looking for should be right next to it, because time flows linearly.

  Here’s the thing: Anything in the Garden can be found by locating it along three of four axis lines. Ray calls them X, Y, Z and alpha. Most of the rest of us call them by more useful names: Who, Where, When and Why. Any three will do, in theory. In practice, that means knowing who seeded it, where the person who seeded it was, and when it was seeded, leaving Why undefined.

  One axis must always be undefined, like a sort of psychic Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that one is always Why. Why?

  Because Why skips around a lot, and we pretty much ignore it. I mean, who knows why something happened? We either impose meaning on an event, or just shrug our shoulders. Why was the Civil War fought? To break the power of the Southern slaveholders so Eastern manufacturers could prosper? To preserve the Union? To defend the Southern homeland against invaders? To free slaves? To create a strong central government? Because a lot of pretty girls batted their eyelashes and convinced a lot of boys to go be heroes? To make a lot of national parks? When you get to a Why you don’t have an objective answer, so the Why, what Ray calls the alpha axis, floats around and you locate a memory using the other three.

  In practice, if you’re Ray, you interpret these as numbers along the various axes and you simply concentrate on the place those numbers identify. For most of us, they’re locations, and we follow paths in the imaginary world we’ve created to interpret the Garden until the object appears. When I seed a memory, perhaps it’s a marble bust of Cicero on a pedestal in my atrium; but when Jimmy wants to graze it, he’ll climb stairs to the turret of a medieval castle and find a bottle of wine sitting on a table, which he’ll drink; to Irina it’s an actual garden, and maybe she’ll see a bright red rose which she’ll sniff, whereas perhaps Matt sees a multicolored stone in a rock garden and he’ll study its colors. It’s all the same memory, but how we reach it depends on us. And, however you say it, the memory is found by locating the Who, the Where, and the When, leaving the Why undefined and variable.

  Once a memory has been seeded, except for stubs, it’s there forever. You can change the shape so it’s less obtrusive or your memory would get so cluttered you couldn’t find anything, but you can’t get rid of it, and you can’t move it without a deliberate act of will.

  With me so far?

  Next to where the bust of Juno had been was a ripe, red pomegranate. I knew that pomegranate; it contained Celeste’s penultimate memory, in which she reported on a just-completed piece of insignificant meddlework and spoke of going to see the “grandbratties.”

  Between the pomegranate and the hole was nothing.

  Celeste’s last memory was gone.

  I stood there looking at where her last memory should have been, appearing to me as a kithara, and I knew what had happened. You can’t get rid of a memory once it’s been seeded. And there’s only one way it can move.

  Who, Where, When and Why.

  If the Why becomes known, one of the others becomes undefined.

  I returned to the real world, turned off my cell phone, opened my laptop, and addressed an email to the group.

  Ren

  Phil was sleeping in his chair, the computer on his lap still open, mirroring his mouth in silent duet. For almost a day, I’d been certain Celeste was trying to assert her personality over mine, to swallow me up, or kill me, but it’d turned out to be Phil who was gunning for me. I considered hating him, but I went to the bathroom instead.

  I turned the shower on and studied his shelf of tiny toiletries, letting the anger climb up my legs. I wanted my own goddamn shampoo. My hair is thin, and “rich conditioning formula” and “extra moisturizing” and “volumizing” all translate to limp and droopy on me. I wanted my shampoo and my spiky gel and my makeup and my fucking phone charger. I slammed the shower dial off, ran my fingers through my sad hair and crept back past Phil, still pinned to his chair like a butterfly.

  I got my shoes and found his car keys, and went back to look at him again, a little embarrassed I wasn’t handling this better. Still, if he knew me so well, he should have known that running away isn’t out of my idiom. Broken mantel clocks stay broken, after all, no matter how much you didn’t mean to drop them, and your rage at that injustice does nothing for your terror of the holy hell you know you’re going to catch.

  It wasn’t a long-term plan, but a room in a hotel that wasn’t The Palms under a name that wasn’t Renee Mathers felt closer to the back of Nana’s closet than anything else and would give me time to think. But not without my own damn shampoo.

  I watched Phil a minute to make sure he was breathing. We both had reasons we’d rathe
r not confess for why we had needed to pick up a clock and shake it. He’d risked maybe more than I had to bring Celeste back. He’d risked me, and yeah, I was still angry about it. But not so angry that I didn’t want to know why. Was it possible his reason and my most secret one were the same? Did he just want her love? I closed his laptop and brought a cotton blanket in from the bed to cover him. I touched one finger to his wild eyebrow, and it twitched. I brought my lips to the naked space between it and his hair, and kissed him, lightly, on the temple. But I didn’t leave a note.

  Then again, neither had Celeste.

  Phil

  There are things about spending too much time in the Garden. One is that the real world takes a bit to adjust to, what with the sensory impressions being less vivid and not as compelling. Another is that it can be frustrating when the world doesn’t behave the way you want it to, and you can’t just make things appear, or change their shape, or move miles with a single step; you have to watch yourself, or you’ll be spending all of your time grinding your teeth, scowling at strangers, and imagining satisfying but nonproductive meddlework. Still another is that you eat too much and sleep too much.

  It took a few minutes after I woke up to realize that Ren had bolted, and another few to realize she’d done so in my car. I made coffee and ate a bagel. Then I drank coffee and ate another bagel, this one toasted; I put cream cheese on it.

  It was five in the afternoon, and I’d slept about twenty hours in the last day and a half. Not so good. I took a shower, standing under it for a lot longer than you’re supposed to when you live in the desert. I had some more coffee when I got out, after which I took a deep breath and checked the forums.

  It was what I’d expected: panic in the ranks. People who hadn’t said a word in ten years were suddenly chiming in, scared and disoriented. The most useful post was from Ray. He said he’d done a graze on a few random memories, and so far as he could tell, the Garden was intact. He pointed out that this had happened a few times before, and we’d dealt with it; he’d be pulling in those memories to figure out the next step. Meantime, he doubted panic would be all that helpful and suggested that perhaps Salt could meet in person after we knew more.