The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust

  That’s where we keep our own master index, organized however we organize it. There are, at present, something like a billion memories seeded in the Garden. If you’re going to have any chance of finding one, you need a method, and you need organization. This was mine.

  We could each find our own memory of a memory Celeste had also seeded, except for Ren, who should have had all Celeste’s memories as her own. Well, that was fine; she could have one of mine. She had once asked me who I was. Now, when she hadn’t asked, I thought she wanted to know. And I wanted her to know, because however necessary lies may or may not be to keep love alive, if you build love on a lie, you’re an idiot.

  If you’re going to do this, Phil, do it right.

  A narrow, rickety wooden table arose and on it were scrolls bound in white ribbon, each labeled with a neat, precise glyph of the kind used in Sumeria five thousand years ago. For just a moment, I thought about Livianus, who held this consciousness before me. I’d vowed I wouldn’t forget him, and I haven’t, quite. He wasn’t much like me; he spoke less and thought more and had a passion for Greek poetry. He’d held that stub for more than three hundred years. Then I came along, and he was gone.

  “Phil,” said Ren. “What—”

  I shook my head and she fell silent.

  I’d kept his filing system, if you can call it that, as a sort of tribute, as he had kept it from his previous, and so on back to before there was farming. I no longer remembered how to read the glyphs, but I didn’t need to. I found the one I wanted by touch, and it led me to another set, and another, until—

  “This one,” I told Ren.

  “I can’t read it.”

  “Just touch it,” I said, and opened it.

  And there I was.

  I called myself Carter, and I sat in my tiny room at my tiny table and wrote on coarse paper with cheap ink and a poor excuse for a quill. The execution of Guy Fawkes was still recent, and it seemed to me I ought to be doing something besides playing noddy and draughts. There was Ireland, and there was King James, and there was the printing press, and it all spelled trouble for anyone with the misfortune to be Catholic. But what could we do? I didn’t know, but I was worried, and so I seeded my worries on coarse paper until there came a knock at the door.

  I stood up and opened it, my thick shoes loud on the floor.

  “Celeste,” I said. “Enter and be welcome.”

  She did, walking briskly and sitting down without an invitation, her light green skirts giving life to the fire that had almost died. She said, “I have one last question, of all the questions there are, and if your answer should engender yet more questions, as your answers are wont to do, why then, these newborn questions will pour forth in a torrent until you, dear devil, are so mazed you cannot answer, upon which I do purpose to laugh at you, both cruelly and in friendship, and possess myself in patience until you are possessed of yourself again.”

  I sat down, facing her. She was so lovely; a dimple on her cheek, her fair hair curling, and mischief in her eyes. “Ask, then,” I said.

  “That wight whose—I have forgot the word; what called you it?”

  “Souche,” I said. “In English, it is ‘stub.’”

  “Yes. That wight. Betsy. An it become me, what doth become of her?”

  “As best you may, remember her.”

  “She is known to you?”

  “For many a year, Celeste. She is my steadfast friend. An you take her place, I’ll mourn her.”

  She looked at me, her head tilted charmingly. “I would be a steadfast friend,” she said.

  I smiled. “And so?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I will do’t. You are a dicer, is it not so? I will roll the dice. I see but the smallest part of what may come, but it doth fill my heart with such ardor as I have not known. I might not bear myself, did I say no, and so I do say yes.”

  I let that memory go instead of playing it out, and Ren said, “Phil? That isn’t her memory, it’s yours.”

  “But she will have made a congruent one,” I said. “Her first seed. As you should seed your memory, by the way, of taking the stub. The point is, now we can find hers. December 4, 1606. Welcome to the group, Celeste. What did you write on your fine lady’s paper with your expensive quill?”

  Ren squeezed my arm as I found the scroll.

  “When I open this,” I said, “as we start to fall into the memory—”

  “I know,” said Ren.

  “All right.”

  I unrolled it.

  Ren

  Phil unrolled the parchment of Celeste’s first seeded memory, still smelling softly of her uniquely compounded pounce. I closed my eyes. I could still feel Phil standing near me and the wooden table of white-tied scrolls. Nothing was happening. It wasn’t going to work.

  I opened my eyes to ask Phil what pounce was, and realized I knew. Vellum was greasy no matter how high quality, so you kept a muslin bag of powdered pumice or fishbone, or Celeste’s peculiar blend of ground incense and egg shell, to dust over and rub into it. I also knew that Celeste felt fairly confident Phil was the devil Mephistopheles whom she had seen onstage not more than a year or two ago in Mr. Marlowe’s scandalous play about Dr. Faustus. But she didn’t care. She had lost everyone she loved to the plague three years back.

  I tried to read the looping, sloping hand unrolled before me. I could pick out letters: a capital A, the word you, but it distracted me from the memory seeping, not in images or smells, but in clumps of fact, into my awareness. Celeste preferred a swan quill. Phil lived alone in rented accommodations. It had taken extraordinary cunning to meet him here, at night, alone. Even before the flaming stake, Celeste hadn’t been certain she would survive the night.

  She didn’t remember the ritual any more than I did, but Phil had carried a white, two-handled milk pot to her from the fireplace when she first woke, and had alternately fed her posset and answered her questions. And I knew I could keep telescoping down into the memory until I knew every question verbatim and its answer. This was Celeste’s memory; it would never become something I experienced, only something I knew, unless I got the rest of her stub. I closed my eyes.

  I knew Celeste had worn her new shoes with cork heels, but I tried to see my mudflats. I knew Celeste had stepped in something foul on the way up the back stairs, and for a moment, the stairs were muddy. But it felt like trying to imagine Cinderella while your dad reads Treasure Island aloud. Or the trick I’d seen on a science museum wall once when I’d gone with my little brother. They had painted the color names—red, blue, green, black—on the wall, but in different colors. The word red in blue paint, green in yellow, with the instruction to say what color the letters were, not read the word they spelled. I’d laughed that he couldn’t do it, he was such a good reader, even then, but I couldn’t do it either, and I remember realizing then that I had no idea how my brain did anything, saw color, or read words.

  Or remember Celeste, or feel Phil beside me, even with my eyes closed.

  I must have been chewing my lip with the effort, hard enough to have bitten it to bleeding. It tasted like hot wine in pewter tankards, blood on the sides of my tongue. But the smell was of cloying spice and fruit. Pomander. I’d found Celeste’s sense triggers: blood and pomander.

  Phil

  “What now?” I said, just to be saying something.

  “Let’s look around,” said Ray.

  “Just pick the first memory you come to.”

  “Celeste must have been an apothecary,” Ren said, eyeing the wooden counters and row upon row of wooden tubs, glass bottles and stoneware jars. Above that, dried herbs, flowers and moss hung on strings from the ceiling.

  “Not necessarily,” I told her. “My Garden is a merchant’s villa, and I was a shoemaker.”

  “And I’m guessing you didn’t come from the swamp,” Oskar said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Ren said. “Is everything in here a memory?”

  I felt a flash of anger at Celeste. Ren should know
this by now. This all ought to have come back. It was like she’d been blinded.

  I said, “Yes, in one way or another. You can create anything you want in your Garden, if it amuses you. But only three things remain when you’re gone: seeds, stubs, and hedges. Seeds are memories you or someone else deliberately put there, stubs are the memories of a Primary waiting for a new Second, and hedges are information that just made its way into the Garden from some other source. The hedges are what you use—”

  “—for finding switches,” she said. “It’s coming back. And you can tell the difference by looking at them or touching them. These are all seeds.”

  I smiled. “Yes,” I said. “Good.”

  “And that’s Jimmy’s skill, isn’t it? Grazing hedges to find what he’s looking for?”

  “We can all do it, but he’s especially fast. I’m glad you’re remembering.”

  I realized that everyone was standing around waiting for me to finish talking. I said, “Jesus, guys. Just grab one. Any one.”

  “The same one, maybe?” said Ray.

  “Why?”

  “Better control,” he said. “So we get the same data to work with, the same time.”

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s one. This jar, the blue one with white designs. Let’s do it.”

  “I’ll remind you,” said Oskar, “that it’s different when you graze in someone else’s Garden.”

  I stopped, my hand just above the jar. “Remind me more.”

  “It’s like grazing your own seed. You don’t just get the facts. You relive it. I was there at your meal with the Praetorian, like I lived it.”

  “That could be interesting,” I said, and put my hand in the jar and let it happen.

  Stupid move.

  I sat there and let it play out, living it, living Celeste. Everyone else experienced it, too. They all saw us argue, saw my eyes abstract and twitch, running the Fibonacci sequence. They all saw Celeste’s imagination paint a bull’s-eye on my forehead.

  Not my best day.

  But, okay, it was over, and no one has ever died of embarrassment.

  Jimmy said, “She really did a number on you, didn’t she, my friend?”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t a good day.”

  “I don’t mean that day,” he said. “I meant what it’s done to you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He said, “Matsu? Think you can try? He trusts you.”

  I did, now that Jimmy mentioned it. I trust Matt more than, perhaps, anyone else. Odd that I’d never thought about it.

  Matt said, “You’ve spent long enough as Celeste’s target, Phil, don’t you think?”

  “What the hell—”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Who are you, Phil?”

  “That’s a stupid question.”

  “Maybe, but you’re the one with Celeste’s arrows in you. And now they’ve hooked us all. Who are you?”

  “The sum total of all that I’ve done, all that I haven’t done, all that I’ve wished I’ve done, all that I’m sorry I did—”

  “Who did Celeste think you were?”

  I wanted to say, “The center of her concentric universes,” but that wouldn’t have helped. I said, “Evidently, she thought of me as something to take aim and fire at.”

  “She defined you in terms of your relationship to her.”

  “Don’t we all do that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But the other person doesn’t usually accept it and make it part of his own identity.”

  Oh. That’s what Jimmy had meant. And I could answer Matt now, too. I was comfort for Celeste. A soft, marked hay bale, a familiar destination. Comfort, in the sense of having things stay the same, of knowing she could count on her life from year to year, and day to day, anchored in me. And she had rejected me because I was always moving, and it’s hard to hit a moving target, but she had kept me around, because knowing I was there made her comfortable.

  I turned to look at Ren, and she was looking back at me, steadily, and a little sadly.

  “What would you like me to be?” I said.

  “We’re still working that out,” and I mentally kicked myself, because now everyone was looking at her and she was getting a little red. But she held my eyes, and took my hand, squeezed it, and held on. Fibonacci, you have no clue.

  Ren

  “So how do we find Celeste’s last memory in all this mess?” I asked, still holding Phil’s hand. We were standing around a broad, raised wooden table, cluttered with brass scales, Pyrex beakers, empty gelatin capsules, stone mortars, and knives ranging from dull copper to surgical steel—clearly Celeste’s lab bench. On either side of us wooden shelves reached to the ceiling without any sign of organization by historical period, or material, or size. Unless they were arranged by use, they just weren’t arranged. It made me impatient. How would you find anything in such a jumble?

  “Celeste’s memories were always recorded like recipes,” Jimmy said. “Or an alchemist’s notes.”

  “Ray?” said Phil.

  Ramon shrugged. “That was long ago. And no two alchemists kept notes the same way.”

  “Anyone remember the formula she gave for the kithara?” Phil asked.

  “It was a rosemary bush in my castle garden,” mused Jimmy. “For remembrance.”

  “As she gave it?” Matsu clarified Phil’s question. “Yes. It was, ‘Decant four gils of brandy, having crushed together some oil, some bitumen and a pinch of cinnamon with four drachmas earth of Chios. Having melted chocolate, spread upon it the earth of Chios and stir in such a way as to mix them. Burn it on wood of juniper and extinguish in some buttermilk slightly thick. Season with salt to taste.’ I grazed for it before I followed you here.”

  “Right then.” Jimmy was back in charge. “Let’s each just pick a spot and work outward searching for anything on that list.”

  I said, “But, why would anything on the list be here, if these are all memories?”

  “They won’t,” said Phil. “Nothing on the list will be here. But if you concentrate on looking for those items, you’ll notice any seed that embodied any of them when she created it. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “All right. Then let’s start looking.”

  “Maybe we should stick together,” I said.

  It all felt too Disney-spooky, with the dust-mote sunbeams streaming in from high, opaque windows to risk flaunting the horror movie rules.

  “We are together,” Phil reminded me. “We’re all still standing in my living room.”

  “It’s bad,” Oskar said with a chuckle, “when Vegas is your safe place.”

  But Phil stayed near me, even in my imagination, and we struck off together, down one narrow corridor of bookcases. “I imagine she’d keep the oldest memories here,” Phil said as we walked. “Like my scroll vault.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you back there,” he said.

  “You didn’t.”

  “You were blushing.”

  “I wasn’t!” We reached the end of our row and turned the corner to find Matsu reading spines in the next row. We walked over to the next aisle and started up it, watching for anything hidden in the shelves.

  “What is it then?” he asked. “Or do you enjoy making me guess?”

  “I’m not being coy,” I said.

  He cocked the wild eyebrow at me.

  “I’m not!” I said, then realized I was. “I guess I just didn’t realize how much power she still has over you.”

  “Celeste? She’s dead, you know,” he said, trying not to smile, but dimpling.

  “So I’ve heard,” I said, feeling like I should drop it, but not quite able to. “But it was like you didn’t know who you were without her.”

  “Matt’s question just took me off guard, and I answered it.”

  “Right, but what you said, about being the sum t
otal of everything you’ve done or not done, that’s not a self. That’s a jumble.”

  “You’re critiquing my UI?”

  “You kept being an object to her. You’re so much more alive than that.”

  I was trailing my fingers over the dry spines of books and he took my hand and turned it over. He spread my palm open and placed a gentle kiss in its center. “Loving someone arms that person against you. I loved Celeste for lifetimes; she had a lot of time to pick up ammo.”

  He pulled me against him, and I leaned into his chest.

  “Quiet, everyone!” Ramon’s voice was cold and urgent. “There’s someone else here.”

  Phil’s arm hardened behind my back. “Where are you, Ray?” he whispered.

  Nothing.

  “It’s Irina,” said Oskar. “Try not to let her see you. She must have had the same idea.”

  “How do you know it’s her?” Jimmy asked.

  “She’s the only other person Celeste taught to move through people’s Gardens.” Oskar’s voice was heavy with anger. “She’s down here trying to re-create Celeste’s last memory just like we are, only she’s doing it because she believes the memory will be of me killing Celeste, and seeding it properly will be enough to keep me out of Salt.”

  “It doesn’t look like Irina,” Ramon said, keeping his voice low even though Irina’s actual ears were miles away at The Palms.

  “Where are you, Ramon?” Phil asked again, something cold and wary in his voice.

  “I was trying to find the outside,” Ramon whispered.

  “Celeste’s Garden doesn’t have one,” Oskar said. “At least not that I’ve found. It’s all ladders and hatches.”

  Ramon’s voice was a taut whisper. “I went through the back door,” he said. “From the workroom.”