The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust

  Then I had to sit down.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said. “Oh, no.”

  “What?” Phil was crouched in front of me, hands on my knees. “Ren, what?”

  All I could think was that, if the fridge door had still been hung backwards, I wouldn’t have whacked my back on the handle. “She was mine,” I said.

  “What?” Phil demanded.

  “Celeste was my Great-auntie Cece.”

  “We knew that,” Jimmy said. “And you used to. Did you just remember again?”

  But I could only shake my head and remember one summer when it was so hot out at the lake house that we’d nailed tied-together bedsheets up as hammocks on the second-floor porch. One of those torpid nights, glamorous Great-auntie Cece, who never noticed children, came out into the moonlight after all my cousins were asleep. Leaning against the railing, with her elegant bathrobe billowing around her like white smoke, she had told me a story about a powerful magician who fell in love with the little bird who loved to fly up and sing at his window in the tallest tower.

  One day the magician caught the bird in his hand and spoke to her. She must have been enchanted, he told her, for he could see that, hidden within her, there dwelt a dreaming princess. In order to return to her true form, she must eat, from his hand, the seeds of a pomegranate. For pomegranates are poisonous to singing birds, but juicy and sweet enough to feed a princess on.

  But the bird thought, It is true, I have sometimes felt I was not truly a little bird, but I do not think I am a princess. I too much love to fly and sing. This man wants to make minced bird soup of me, and so she flew away.

  Long after, after she had forgotten she was ever anything but a songbird, a woodsman set a trap for her. He baited its trigger with the dried seeds birds love, but which no princess would consider food. The little bird saw that there was no sweet fruit to eat, but she thought, This man loves my songs and flying, and so she let him capture her. The woodsman sold the little bird at market, and she lived in a cage and did not sing until she forgot how to fly.

  “I ate the fruit and not the birdseed,” I said.

  Phil was holding my knees and shook me by them, but all I could see was the moon-bleached face of my beautiful aunt who leaned down over my makeshift hammock to kiss me with cool lips, and whisper, “Someday you will meet someone who shares your hidden dreams, who knows, even before you do, when you’re ready to become what you are inside, not because he can see the future, but because he can see you. Whatever he offers you, even if it looks like wicked fruit from a poisoned garden, take it. Until then, learn yourself well enough to know what truly sings inside you. Because once you do, it will take only one other in the whole world who hears it to set it free.”

  “I ate the fruit because she told me to,” I said.

  “Ren, you have to make sense for me.”

  I managed to get my eyes focused on Phil, on his handsome, powerful magician’s face. “You asked me why I didn’t have to think about taking the spike,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “It was because of Celeste,” I said. “She prepped me to take it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Phil.

  “I was ten, and she meddled with me.”

  Phil sat down against the cabinets.

  “She all but programmed me to take her stub,” I said. I looked at Phil.

  I didn’t want to say it.

  “And to love me,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Phil

  Some people say life is a game. Maybe that’s a good attitude, I don’t know. Maybe it keeps them playing their best, enjoying it the most, taking pleasure in the drive to win. But life really isn’t a game. Poker is a game. Life is life.

  If I were to win a big pot, and then find out the guy had deliberately misplayed the hand because he wanted me to win, I have to say, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I’d be curious about why he did that, and if the opportunity to ask him came up I would, but I’d take the money and be happy. I play poker against the worst players I can find, and there’s a reason for that.

  But poker is a game.

  Life isn’t a game.

  And love is only a game if you’re an asshole.

  The weird part is that I actually felt nauseated. I know the expression about something making you feel sick, but I can’t recall ever having had the experience before. You’re never so old that life can’t surprise you. Isn’t that grand?

  Ren was looking at me, and her eyes were watery. For just a moment, I was able to pull myself out of my self-centered, self-created pool of misery to get a glimpse of how this must be for her. She hadn’t asked for any of it, and the way she felt about me, well, that was real to her no matter how it had been done.

  I said, “I wish Celeste were alive, so I could kill her again.”

  Ren tried to chuckle, but it didn’t come off so well. Still, I appreciated the effort.

  Jimmy spoke softly. “It is evil, what we do.”

  Ren and I didn’t say anything. He said, “We have good reasons, and we always hope to achieve good effects. But it is evil to meddle with people, to change who they are, to force them to our will, giving them no chance to even know we are there. It is evil. Perhaps the good we do makes up for it. I hope so. But we must never forget the violence, the violation, of our methods. And should we ever use them for even small things that do not make the world better, surely we deserve nothing but curses and contempt from those around us, and from ourselves.”

  Still no one spoke.

  I took Ren’s hand, turned it over, and kissed her palm. Then I stood up. “If you need me,” I said, “I’ll be at The Palms. Call the poker room; my cell will be off.”

  I put on my cap and walked out of the house.

  FIFTEEN

  Staying Matters

  Ren

  “I don’t want you to go,” I said.

  “He’s left.” Jimmy’s voice was colorless and dull, but he tried to fake some energy for my sake. “He’ll come back.”

  “Coming back doesn’t matter,” I said. “Staying matters.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to my mind scrambling, like dog claws on ice, for a toehold, spinning out into the vacant cold. I quit trying not to cry.

  “I feel like Goldilocks,” Jimmy said from the middle stool between the three bowls of oatmeal.

  I stood up. “Can I see your phone?”

  He handed it to me, and I pulled up his contacts, scrolled down for Oskar and dialed.

  “Hey, how’s it going, Jimmy?” I could hear the smile in Oskar’s voice.

  “It’s Ren,” I said.

  “Oh.” Oskar was now on full alert. “Where’s Phil?”

  “He’s on his way to The Palms for poker. He’s not okay.”

  “Fuck.” Oskar hung up.

  Jimmy pushed an empty oatmeal bowl away and pulled the next one to him.

  “You can take a nap, if you want,” I told him, like having slept with Phil one night made me hostess here. “I’m going to shower.”

  I turned the water on, but I didn’t have clean clothes, and the thought of Phil’s bathrobe made me sob. I sat down on the tub edge.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  I thought about calling Oskar back; he’d tell me what to do. But it was more important that he stop Phil from going all Lady Macbeth at The Palms. Besides, two kinds of people have the courage to make someone else’s decisions: the hero, who comes to your rescue when you can’t even cry out for help, and the tyrant. The only difference between them is the hero listens. As soon as you can talk, he’ll put you down if you say so. I wasn’t sure Oskar even had ears.

  I knew for certain Celeste didn’t.

  And they were both very busy right now making decisions.

  I turned the water off.

  Jimmy hadn’t moved from his middle stool. There was no oatmeal left. “Too hot, too cold, and just right?” I asked him.

  He laughed without smiling. “I never realized what
an Aristotelian Goldilocks was.”

  “With a name like that, are you kidding?” I said. “Her parents were hippies. It’s Buddha’s Middle Path all the way.”

  He just stared at me.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Three reasons: because I saw what you did with my bosses last night and that wasn’t evil, because I’m the reason Celeste can still stroll the Garden, and because I’m in love with Phil.”

  Jimmy looked hard at me. “What I did with your bosses won’t make a difference beyond a few hundred people. If you’re the reason Celeste has autonomy, our wisest action would be to kill you and retire the stub, so you should think before you broadcast that. And you might love Phil; he might even still love you, but if you and Celeste are that entangled—and I can’t see how you wouldn’t be—it will be more than Phil can handle. Game over, Renee.”

  “Can I take your car, then?”

  “No,” Jimmy said, standing slowly. “I’ll drive.”

  Phil

  It was Wednesday afternoon, so The Palms poker room wasn’t very busy. There were some limit games, and a short-handed one-three no limit, but no two-five.

  Greg said, “Hey, Phil. Want the one-three?”

  I was about to say yes when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  I turned around and was staring up into Oskar’s too-blue eyes. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” he said.

  I didn’t want to. I wanted to be where everything vanished except information and odds, and where the only options were raise, pass, or call, and where if you made a mistake you could put a magnitude to it and know exactly how expensive a mistake it was. I didn’t want to be in that world where you had to make everything up as you went along, and the consequences of mistakes were fuzzy, and might wear you down, or vanish entirely to reappear in years or lifetimes later. If I was going to find love, I didn’t want it to be a fraud. If there must be pain, I didn’t want it to be meaningless. I wanted there to be a God, even if he did play dice with the universe.

  Oskar was still holding my eyes. “Quit whining to yourself,” he said. “We have things to deal with.”

  I glanced at the one-three. It really did look like a crappy game.

  “All right,” I said. “But buy me a cup of coffee at the bar.” I didn’t want to go to the café just then.

  We found seats at the bar in the wide open middle of the casino, and even now there was the fake sound of fake coins hitting fake trays as the losers got enough of their money back to keep them playing. He got me coffee. I added cream to it. I usually drink my coffee black except in the evening, but I wanted to watch the cream hit the coffee, permeate, gradually turn it from black to brown. I drank some.

  “What?” I said. “What do you need?”

  “I need you to graze,” said Oskar.

  “What can I graze for that Jimmy can’t better?”

  “It’s one of yours. I can’t be sure I have it right; facts only tell you so much. But I’m guessing I found the right one. September 18, 1606.”

  “Christ, Oskar. Is this really important? Now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “On several levels. Go thou and graze, my son.”

  The old same place. The smell of cherry blossoms, the taste of chive, the villa, the table filled with scrolls. I focused on finding the right table, the next right table, the right date, and I put my hand on the right scroll. I unrolled it.

  A room lit only by a single candle; blank bare walls. A couple of pieces of bad furniture. The stench of rotting vegetables and dung coming in through the window along with a halfhearted breeze that couldn’t even blow the candle out.

  I was writing, jaw clenched, seeding a message to be read by anyone who wandered by my front gate. I wrote in an artisan’s simple but urgent hand, “I may have found a potential recruit for Betsy’s souche. If some of you want to look it over, the most important details are in the white porcelain mug on the small table in my dining room.”

  Yes. In those days, the fastest way to speak with each other was to leave messages in the Garden, which we’d check from time to time. That custom, which had been going on since we started scattering, pretty much ended in the late twentieth century when long-distance telephone calls became trivial, and was gone completely with email.

  I stopped writing, and I wondered what Oskar was on about. But it was my memory, and so I relived it fully, and so even as the memory trailed off and faded, I was filled, utterly if briefly, with all of my feelings of that moment:

  Funny, they were a lot like what I was feeling right now.

  I came back. Oskar was watching me. “Was I right?”

  “How could I do that?” I said. “How could you guys let me?”

  “I wasn’t around,” he said. “But, the Second of my Primary didn’t question you. You were Phil. You’d been around for sixteen hundred years. If you said it—”

  “Jesus Christ. Didn’t anyone know? I was lonely, I was miserable, a girl smiled at me, and—”

  “And you were sloppy. You just barely checked her over, and no one else checked her at all, and we spiked a selfish, unstable personality into the group. Everything we do is based on every one of us. We didn’t have email back then, Phil. You didn’t wait. You spiked her too quickly because you wanted to.”

  “But Betsy wasn’t my lover!”

  “No. And no one else was. We are all alone, Phil. I mean, everyone is alone, but we’re more alone than most. And after sixteen hundred years, you weren’t handling it very well.”

  “Someone should have—”

  “Who? How? One thousand, six hundred fucking years, Phil. No one else has ever come close to that. Who could know what effect that much loneliness would have on someone? And, you know, self-examination has never been your strong suit.”

  “So, this is all my fault?”

  He smiled. “Yep. No way around that. All you, buddy.”

  “One thing I admire about you, Oskar. You always manage to keep an even keel in the face of someone else’s pain.”

  “I learn from the best.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I should think that would be obvious. This is your problem. You caused it, now it’s biting you in the ass. So, okay. Quit hiding behind a poker table. Go fix it.”

  I came very, very close to taking a swing at him. It would have been stupid, because he’s bigger, stronger, and probably faster. But I came close.

  Instead, after a moment, I said, “All right. I’m going home. Want to come?”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” he said. “I’m sure everyone will be here soon.”

  I looked around the bar. “We should find a better place.”

  He pulled out his phone. “I’ll tell them where to meet us. I imagine it won’t be long.”

  Ren

  Jimmy’s phone rang as we were leaving. “We’re already headed that way,” he said.

  He was quiet for a while, then he looked over at me. “No,” he said. “She looks like hell.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Okay, Oskar. That’s what we’ll do.” Jimmy stuffed the phone back in his pocket and started the car. “Sorry,” he said to me, “but Phil killed someone at The Palms last night. It’s bad enough we have him wandering their casino shell-shocked. People have seen the two of you together, and you’re not a local. We’ll take the garage elevator up.”

  “Up where?”

  “Ops suite. Oskar’s taking Phil there now.”

  We rode through the sunlight to the cavernous parking lot then up the elevator. When the doors closed, I started to shake.

  “You wanted this,” Jimmy reminded me.

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  He knocked on a door and Ramon answered it. “Matsu is sleeping. Hello, Ren. Can I get you anything? We have a small kitchenette and room service.”

  “No,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I’m not sure what the rooms we were in had been intended for, but r
ight now they looked like every Internet startup I’d seen. Sofas shoved into a squashed U-shape in a halfhearted nod to civilized conversation, and all the rest of the space filled with collapsible tables sagging under computers, printers, routers and scanners.

  Oskar was sitting at a computer. Phil was on the sofa.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s happening here?”

  “Same old, same old. I was kind of upset before, on account of, you know, being in love with you and thinking maybe you loved me until I found out that you only loved me because you’d been bitchmeddled. Like that term? Bitchmeddled? I just made it up. Anyway, I was upset, but then Oskar showed me that, really, it’s all my fault because of a mistake I made four hundred years ago, so now things are fine. How are you?”

  “If I love you, does it matter what Celeste did? Does the Why have to matter?”

  “The fourth axis?” Ramon asked.

  Phil didn’t say anything. And he didn’t look at me. “How the hell can I answer that?” he said at last. “How can I even look at it to answer it? I mean … shit. Obviously it matters, or I wouldn’t feel this way. Do you mean should it matter? I don’t know. This isn’t a situation I’ve ever been in before.” His laugh was all mustache and no dimple. “I remember you asked me once if anything could surprise me.” He glanced at me, but didn’t hold my eyes. Matsu came into the room, not looking sleepy.

  “Well,” I said. “Now I know Celeste can.”

  “Yeah. Well. We need to fix that.”

  When I was hurting this much, why did Celeste matter more again? Why was it her, not us, that needed fixing? But Matsu’s calm, clipped voice called Phil off before I could. “I think it would be best,” he said, “if you did not try again at fixing Celeste.”

  Now Matsu had Phil’s complete and furious attention. I wanted it back. “Matt, my dear friend, that woman has controlled and dominated my life for the last four hundred years. Now she threatens to continue doing so indefinitely. And you think I shouldn’t try to stop her? What do you suppose the odds of that are?”

  “What do you suppose the odds are that you can this time, given your rage and your record to date?”