The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust

  “Language changes,” said Irina.

  “I don’t question that,” said Oskar. “But it changes on its own, according to its own laws. People trying to force their agenda on me by deciding how I’m permitted to speak is offensive.”

  “Aren’t you the one who said the more humanity exercises conscious control over social processes, the better off we’ll be?”

  I whispered to Ren, “Oh, nice one! Now watch Oskar wriggle.”

  “There is a difference,” said Oskar, “between exercising conscious control and sneaking in an agenda through subterfuge.”

  “What difference, other than whether you agree with the agenda?”

  Ren passed the popcorn back and leaned her head on my shoulder. I hadn’t realized what a knot I had in my stomach until it relaxed.

  “You’re missing the point,” said Oskar. “There are at least ten languages, not counting Klingon—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “—in current use that have a non-sex-specific pronoun.”

  “Which only proves—”

  Oskar held up his finger. “I include Finish, Estonian, Lappish, Hungarian, Swahili, spoken Mandarin, Farsi, Tamil, and Tuda. Can you show me any way in which those cultures demonstrate less oppression of women than those that use the male pronoun as the generic?”

  “Point for him,” whispered Ren.

  “Yeah, but Irina shouldn’t have let him off the ropes.”

  Oskar was still talking. “There are real, actual, material problems in the world. The burden on the working woman is brutal, and yet here come a bunch of petit bourgeois academics determined to remove the class content that is the essence of the oppression of women and imagine they are making things better by altering the conventions of the language. It’s offensive to women who are actually suffering.”

  “Done now,” I told Ren. “When Oskar uses petit bourgeois the conversation is over.”

  Irina turned to Ren. “What does the only other woman in the room say? Does a man get to decide what’s offensive to women?”

  Ren cocked her head at Irina. “In general, I’m more inclined to agree with you on the subject. And haven’t you—we—all been both sexes? But if you think the sex of the person making an argument has anything to do with the validity of the argument, you’re an idiot.”

  “Have some popcorn,” I said.

  Ren turned to me. “Was that performance for my benefit?”

  “Performance?” said Oskar, looking positively annoyed.

  “No,” I told Ren. “I’m pleased if you enjoyed it, but, yeah, they’re just like that. We all get a bit like that when Oskar starts in.”

  Oskar looked disgusted.

  “Perhaps,” said Irina, “we should return to the issue.”

  “Which issue is that?”

  “Celeste’s suicide. The alpha-lock on Celeste’s last seed. The fact that Ren can’t remember Celeste.”

  “What?” said Oskar. He looked at Ren. “You don’t remember Celeste?”

  “Celeste who?” said Ren.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Oskar.

  “Welcome to the party,” I said.

  Ren

  I felt like something bad the dog’s done on the rug, when everyone gathers round and points at the stinking pile and says, “See what you did?”

  Oskar leaned forward in his chair, his elbows resting on his knees, like a very focused king on a stolen throne. “Phil, your email said Ren was the one who realized Celeste had killed herself.”

  “Yeah,” Phil said. “Celeste was very present initially, to both Ren and me.”

  I was sitting beside Phil, so I couldn’t check his face, but I was pretty sure I heard the wry underscore that usually went with a cocked eyebrow in how he said “very present.”

  Irina chuckled, but Oskar only said, “Oh?”

  “Celeste has been dominant in Ren a couple of times, then resubmerges,” Phil said. “She gave me quite an earful on the subject of peanut butter. She felt I was culinarily unprepared for a new Second.”

  “Well, you were,” Irina said.

  “Yeah, I was. Have you ever had a recruit say yes at the second meet? She wasn’t even supposed to believe it yet.”

  “You must have been very persuasive,” said Oskar, still watching me. His eyes were the blue of those jewel-toned frogs, whose skin is too toxic to touch, and who can spit poison at you from three feet away. “How did you know that Celeste killed herself?” Oskar asked.

  “Who is Celeste?” I said.

  “Ren keeps forgetting Celeste,” Phil said. “I’ve told her twice. It’s like the shelf where information about Celeste goes has turned into a vacuum. But just that shelf. She remembers everything else. And sometimes she remembers Celeste.”

  “What do you remember, Ren?” Oskar asked.

  “I remember hearing myself talking and thinking, ‘That isn’t me,’ but I knew who it was. I guess that’s what it feels like when your personality steps aside for an older one. The other one—Celeste, I guess—told Phil I wasn’t like her, I wasn’t a martyr. And I remember thinking, ‘That’s right. I’m not. Get out of my head, bitch.’”

  Irina laughed. “I can’t imagine Celeste’s reaction to that.”

  “But the suicide?” Oskar pressed.

  “The idea that she had killed herself just popped into my head.”

  Phil’s voice was low and warm beside me. “The idea or the memory?”

  “Just the word, actually,” I said.

  “The word ‘suicide’?”

  “Vicodin,” I said. “My roommate OD’d on it in college after the guy she was dating broke up with her. It was really twisted. She said she loved him so much that if he didn’t want her, she’d just take herself out of his way so he could be happy.”

  “I imagine that put her right centered in it,” Oskar said. “Sounds like Celeste. Is that when you forgot her?”

  “Who?”

  Phil drained his beer. “No, that wasn’t when. It was overnight last night.”

  “Has she tried grazing?” Irina asked Phil. “When I was grazing over here yesterday—”

  “She’s sitting right here,” Oskar interrupted. “Ren, have you tried grazing for Celeste?”

  “I haven’t tried grazing at all,” I said.

  It was Phil’s turn to be the pool ball. Oskar and Irina gaped at him.

  “He hasn’t had a chance to teach me,” I said. “There’s been so much going on.”

  “It doesn’t take teaching. Surely you’ve remembered how?” Irina sounded cross.

  “Ren’s not having a normal integration,” Phil said. “Celeste’s memories aren’t creeping back to her. Most of the time, either Celeste is fully present and talking through Ren, or she’s just gone.”

  “But you’ve been having dreams?” Oskar’s voice was a low rumble of worry.

  “Last night was pretty wild,” I confessed.

  “Well, go ahead and show her, Phil,” Irina said. “We’ll wait.”

  Phil set the popcorn bowl on the floor and pulled one knee up onto the sofa, turning to face me. He took my hand and held it. Irina yanked her phone out of her bag and started texting. Oskar watched me.

  “Close your eyes,” Phil said. His back was to Oskar and all his attention was on me. But so was all of Oskar’s, and I wasn’t sure why that bothered me. I closed my eyes.

  “What do you see?” Phil asked.

  “Can we go in the bedroom?”

  “Sure.”

  “Phil—” Irina said, warning and question in her voice, but he ignored her and led me across what suddenly seemed an endless stretch of living room rug. Irina went back to her texting with an exasperated sigh, but Oskar sat back in his chair, smiled, and closed his eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Phil asked once the door was closed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It just seemed like a private thing.”

  He shrugged. “It isn’t really. We graze in front of each other all the time. Sometimes i
t’s nice to have someone to keep an eye on you, when you’re gone.”

  He sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed. “Come here.”

  I climbed up beside him and he took my hand again. “Close your eyes and tell me what you see.”

  It was almost immediate. “Your villa,” I told him.

  “How do you know it’s mine?”

  “I dreamed it last night.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said in his neutral voice. “It probably isn’t, actually. We don’t experience each other’s metaphors. But I told you mine was a villa and Jimmy’s was a medieval castle, so your imagination is filling in for what it doesn’t know since you haven’t created your own yet.”

  I was pretty sure the villa was his, but I said, “Okay,” matching him neutral for neutral. “How do I look for someone?”

  “You can’t yet, we have to get you located in your Garden first. Once you can navigate your own analogy, you can start manipulating it. What are you seeing now?”

  “The mudflats out behind your wall.”

  “Okay.”

  “But they aren’t mudflats. It’s just mud in every direction forever. I don’t like it, Phil.”

  “It’s okay, just drift on.”

  “I can’t drift on. I’m standing in the mud. I mean, I know I’m sitting there with you. I can feel your hand still, but when I look down, I’m barefoot and standing in the mud.

  “Phil, I can’t walk. When I try to lift one foot up to take a step, the other one presses down into the goo. I can’t stay here. Open spaces make me jumpy. It’s like the opposite of claustrophobia. I want to open my eyes.”

  “See if you can hold on.” Phil’s other hand wrapped around the one of mine he was holding. “Just be still,” he whispered. “What does the air smell like?”

  “It smells like mud,” I said testily. “And like the ocean.”

  “Can you taste anything on the breeze? You’re smiling. That’s good. What do you taste?”

  I had to think for a second to find the name for the fizzy sweet tickle. “Root beer,” I said.

  “I think this is your Garden, Ren.”

  “A mud garden? There are no plants, no sun, not a single living thing out here. It’s not a garden, it’s some kind of special hell for gardeners. Phil, I’m up to my ankles.”

  “It’s okay. This is why Seconds have titans. I’ll help you orient yourself.”

  “Orient myself in the barren sucking wasteland that is my imagination? Wonderful.”

  “The easiest line is usually ‘When.’ For most of us, it runs up and down. So look up. Is there anything at eye-level?”

  “There isn’t anything at any level.”

  “Nothing raised or lowered?”

  “Hang on.”

  “Nothing growing up out of the ground?”

  “No. But I think there’s something pressing into it. When you said ‘When,’ it was like a giant screen dropped down over the mud.”

  “Good, Ren. Say ‘Friday, July first.’”

  I said “Friday, July first,” and an invisible mesh screen pushed down into the mud. The sunken places looked darker and more solid, the raised places grainier, almost pixilated and dynamic, moving like tiny, color-changing fireflies. Warm air eddied over the endless mud, and brushed the skin of my face and arms. I squeezed Phil’s hand.

  “Say, ‘Las Vegas, Nevada.’”

  I did, and watched another screen settle over the landscape. In the cross-hatched places where both layers of filter pushed into the mud, it became clay and a dry powder over my feet. I bent down and brushed off my toes, appreciating their candy apple red nail polish. If my metaphysical self was a terrible gardener, at least she had cute feet.

  “Say, ‘Phil.’”

  “Phil,” I said, and watched yet another screen drop over the landscape. It compacted the pushed-down places further and contoured the rest with color.

  “It’s a bright blue flower in a vase just past my front gate,” he said, so I walked along the hard-packed dirt, touching the singing reeds which take root in secrets, each one whispering a story, as they have since King Midas’s barber dug a hole to bury what he mustn’t say.

  A little black-and-white dog with a bow to match my toenails trotted out from behind a clump of reeds and walked along beside me. Then one of the tall, slender leaves sprouted a blue flower and I reached for it.

  The reed was as tall as I was and supple, blowing in the warm air. “Hey, little wolf, do you know how to make these things talk?” I asked the dog, but it dropped to its haunches and cocked its clever head at me.

  I put my nose to the reed, and it was sweet and grassy, greener smelling than it looked, but inert. I pulled at its roots, but I didn’t really want to, and it made Wolfie growl. I put my ear up against it, feeling like an idiot for trying to hear a leaf talk. Wolfie watched me. “I know,” I told him. “Look at my Garden. Clearly I’m no plant whisperer.” But my thumb hooked in the reed. I followed the furled edge up, and it peeled open.

  It wasn’t a hollow tube after all, but a tightly curled leaf. I thought maybe, if I could flatten it out, I would see the memory playing out on its surface like on a television screen. But the leaf had other ideas. I pushed apart the two bottom corners, holding them with my feet, and the top rolled up like a window shade. I pushed the right top up and the right bottom down, and the whole left side closed up like a fist.

  Wolfie watched me struggle, his face a portrait of canine concern. He barked.

  “If you don’t have anything helpful to offer, shut up,” I said. “Can’t you see I’m engaged in mighty combat here?”

  He wagged his tail and watched me fight the leaf.

  I anchored the bottom of it with my feet and wriggled my hand between the upper corners and pushed. I managed to stretch the furl open at last, my body in a painful X, like a racked man. And wedged there. “Great,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” Phil’s voice sounded parched and distant. I let go to look for him, and the leaf snapped in on itself and wrapped me up inside it.

  I was in the living room. In Phil’s chair. In Phil. The leaf held me motionless, and I watched through him, learned of the ritual he’d done that brought me into this strange world, and heard him talk of my reactions. Then the leaf opened, the reeds dissolved into mud, and I opened my eyes.

  Phil was watching me closely, still holding my hand.

  “Okay, I can graze now,” I said. “But I want pizza.”

  Phil

  Her voice was the same, but there was a glitter in her eyes. She was starting to feel the Garden, and the connection to it, and to all of us. She wouldn’t recognize, yet, the feeling of finding her family, but the first hints of it would be making their way into her spine.

  There are good parts to this thing we do, this thing we are. Being someone’s titan reminds you of that.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” I told her.

  “That I want pizza? I’m pretty sure I do.”

  There was nothing different in her expression, or her body language, but it was like there was a glow under her skin.

  I shook my head. “Think about it, Ren. You. Me. Irina. Oskar. We will starve to death before we can manage to agree on a pizza. Or two pizzas. And I’m too hungry to even get started with them.”

  “You and I will agree,” she said. “Those two can do whatever the hell they like.”

  I opened the door, stuck my head out, and said, “Ren and I are ordering pizza. Flamingo. 702-889-4554. You two can do whatever the hell you like.” Then I shut the door before they could respond. Fortunately, my cell was in my pocket, so I didn’t have to ignominiously walk back in there to get it. I ordered us pepperoni, onion and green pepper. When I was done, Ren was looking thoughtful.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you ever agree on anything?”

  “Not much, really.”

  She shook her head. “Then why are you still together?”

  “Can’t hel
p it.”

  “That’s the only reason?”

  “On bad days, I think it might be. But I don’t know.”

  “Two hundred pure-blood altruists and you can’t get along with each other?”

  “Something like that.”

  She squinted one eye. “That altruism thing has me stumped,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Well, are you saying that no one, in all this time, has, I don’t know, gone rogue? Used these abilities for himself? Gone crazy? Become evil, whatever that means?”

  I started to tell her she’d remember, but then I realized that wasn’t a given. “That’s all happened. I think of them as the Dark Years. Hear the capital letters? But—” How to put it? “Okay, I said we don’t agree on much of anything. But eventually, we did have to agree on one thing: If you’re going to live indefinitely, one lifetime doesn’t count for much.”

  She frowned. “That seems like—”

  “Let me finish. This is hard to explain.”

  “All right.”

  “You live a normal lifetime; actually less, because the first twenty or thirty years you’re someone else. Then, pop, you’re someone else again, and you can’t control who. So, what do you do to try to give your next Second a good life? When you don’t have a clue who that Second is going to be?”

  She thought for a moment, chewing her lower lip, which I found adorable. “You try to make everything better?”

  I nodded. “With as little risk as possible of making things worse.”

  “So, it’s all self-interest and Rawl’s veil?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Couldn’t you do more good if you were rich and powerful?”

  I grunted. “You’d think so. But most of the time, money and power make you spend all of your time dealing with money and power. If you don’t, you tend to turn into an asshole. Most of us make enough to get by and don’t worry about anything more. Usually at least one of us is wealthy at any given time, which is a pain for that person, but useful for the group. Right now, it’s poor Jimmy. His last recruit invested in Google before taking the spike.”

  She thought some more, her forefinger tapping her eyebrow. “Self-interest is a little easier to accept.” She curled her hand into a fist. “But couldn’t a group, a subset, all agree that they were going to become powerful, and give each other powerful Seconds, and—”