by Steven Brust
A ritual deployed around anything but a true pivot has no power. A pivot unringed in ritual is an uninsulated wire. Phil and I were holding bare metal when the lines went live. And I still wasn’t breathing.
Celeste had made a copy of her stub, a memory of all her memories, and alpha-locked it by seeding it with the memory of her death. Almost a week ago now, when Phil drove Celeste’s stub between my eyes, I’d gotten her memories. But her symbol for herself, her essence—Jimmy, bless him, would say her soul—had stayed in the Garden in the other, secret, alpha-hidden stub. It had shared a body with Irina in order to access the material world, and Irina had been willing to poison me just to be rid of her. Then, Phil had saved my life, and he’d killed Irina out of rage or despair. Then, I’d saved him.
But saving and safety were Celeste’s concerns, and not who Phil and I wanted to be.
I poisoned myself in Celeste’s Garden on the wild gamble that Phil, unlike Celeste’s pattern of him, would reach out for my mind before my brain ran out of air. And, in a single searing flame, I knew he had.
Celeste pushed into me.
Phil had driven my essence, my stub, between Celeste’s eyes, gambling that I, unlike her image of me, was strong enough to keep my great-auntie’s pattern subordinate to mine.
But Celeste opened my mouth and stuffed it with negative space. I gasped around her, her mind and mine occupying the same skull. I wasn’t enough. I could never hold everything I remembered. I could not breathe.
But it was never a princess who hid in the little bird you made of me, dear Hoho. It was a dragon, and its song is made of fire.
Phil and I gambled each other, and were electrified. We grounded each other, and we won.
I opened my mouth, and breathed her flaming stake to ash.
TWENTY
Spiked
Phil
“Ren? Ren. Come back, Ren. Keep breathing, Ren. It’s not a win if you can’t drag the pot. I need you, Ren. Please stay with me. Ray says the antidote won’t help, because it’s not your body you poisoned, but you can still be fine. Please. Please be fine.
“I get it now, Ren. I understand why you wanted to speak for her. It’s because you hate arrogance, and you don’t trust final answers. It’s because you think we’re getting cocky in our conviction of what Better means. But don’t you see? That just makes you one of us. It means you have to argue with us, and that means you have to be here, and all Oskar will say is that you’re strong.
“If you don’t come back, Ren, I won’t either. I don’t mean that as a threat. I won’t do anything. But I know that, after all this, without you, there won’t be enough of me to go on. I have to keep moving, Ren, and I can’t keep moving alone, and there isn’t anyone else who can move with me. Don’t you see that? I want you to argue with me, Ren. I want you to convince me that sometimes what we see as Better is just more of the same. I want you to show me where doubt lives, so I can embrace it. But Jimmy says you have to save your own soul.
“Oskar is wrong, Ren. And so was Celeste. And they were both right, as well. We are at the time when the amnemones can get what they need, or destroy themselves. That much is true. But there was a piece I didn’t get before. Jimmy explained it days ago, I just couldn’t listen. I thought it was about whether we should help them, like Oskar wants, or let them stew, like Celeste wants, but I’m listening now. They are us, and we are them, and we’re in this together, and we need to make it work that way or it’ll never work.
“I understand that now, Ren. And I want a piece of making it work. But I can’t do that without you, because you’re the one who showed it to me.
“Ren? Please come back, Ren. Please.”
Ren
Phil wanted me there. His voice was strong and urgent, offering me belonging and arguments. But I was breathing fire and it hurt.
I flew over the mudflats and saw the grooves cut in my Garden, like state lines on a map, following natural contours sometimes, and sometimes not and arbitrarily straight. Celeste’s pattern in overlay on mine. Not Celeste, the dragon had incinerated her, but the patterning force of Celeste, that impulse that makes you want to sing the final “dahm” if someone starts Beethoven’s Fifth, and stops at “dah-dah-dah.” That was there under me, inside me, Celeste’s pattern of fear, and raking power up.
I had something to tell Phil about that, so I opened my eyes and saw his eyebrows do the strangest things. Then he pulled me up close against him.
“We looped the loop,” I said. “Or unlooped it.”
“Yes.”
“Have you checked your Garden yet for the kithara?” I asked him.
“I don’t care about the Garden,” he said.
“Yes, you do.”
“Yeah, I do, but I care about things outside of it more.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We lay together in the middle of the big suite’s big bed, and I missed his awful curtains. “Let’s go home,” I said.
“We should eat something first.” Phil tightened his grip on my body. “And Jimmy and Oskar will want to know what happened. I made them leave.” He kissed the top of my head. “And it sounds like something has run off the rails with Kate in Pennsylvania.”
I laughed. “Good,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
So we lay still, enjoying our bodies soaking into each other’s calm, and the overflow sounds of passionate discussion from the next room. I thought I could live like this.
“Celeste’s still around, you know,” I said, and felt Phil’s body tense.
“How?”
“Not her personality or her essence or whatever,” I explained. “She’ll never talk out of my mouth again, or share a body like she did with Irina, but her pattern is still there, aggregating power.”
Phil’s shoulder shrugged under my head. “So we’ll be the de-aggregators. We’ll keep walking into elevators where every decision is filtered through how to keep Mom not-angry, and we’ll take some of the power away from her temper. We’ll make it better.”
“A little?” I said.
“A little.”
“Sometimes it’ll get worse,” I said.
“Then we’ll never be out of work.”
I laughed and kissed him. “I can live with that,” I said. “But I’m not sure Oskar can.”
Phil
The problem was not the chair.
I was on the couch with Ren, and so much of me was wrapped up with so much of her that we were damn near fucking right there; so if Oskar wanted to sit in my chair, that was fine, I wasn’t using it anyway.
The problem was he was in my house.
“Oskar, why are you in my house?”
“I said—”
“Excuse me,” said Ren sweetly. “I think you misunderstood. Phil didn’t ask that wanting you to answer, he asked that wanting you to leave.”
Oskar glared at her.
“Just so we’re clear,” she added.
“We need to do something,” he said.
“Do it, then,” I said. “And please, get together with Jimmy and Ray and Matt, all of whom know better than to be in my house right now, and figure out what. And when you’ve figured out what, drop me an email. I’ll read it tomorrow.”
“This won’t wait.”
“Oskar, I have no idea how the Pirates have done in the last five days, and I don’t even care that much, but I care about it a great deal more than I care about Celeste’s pattern in the Garden.”
“Look, Phil, dammit. The Garden is a mental construct, right? It’s a shared imagining that’s comprised of, but larger than, the individual minds and imaginations that make it up. But it’s not just ours. It never has been. By rights, it belongs to every nemone with a diary. It’s the original commons. Time to tear down the fence! If we don’t, Celeste’s pattern will slowly brick the whole Garden away. She’s—”
“I don’t care,” I explained. “Maybe I’ll care tomorrow, or the next day. More likely next wee
k. But right now—”
“Phil. I have nothing against animal passion. I’m a big fan of animal passion. But can you please delay the animal passion for half an hour so we can figure this out? Half an hour. That’s all.”
I looked at Ren. She looked at me. We shook our heads. We looked back at Oskar and shook our heads again.
Damn, but I wish there’d been a camera.
Oskar looked exasperated. “We can’t do it without the nemones anymore,” he said. “They need to know the exobrain is real. They’re rooted in it.”
“We’ll find a way to tell them,” I said.
“Next week,” agreed Ren. “It was good to see you. Thanks for dropping by.” She smiled. “Bye.”
He growled, glared, stood, and walked out of my house.
I turned my attention to more important matters.
Ren
I took the RMMD conference call with Phil’s head in my lap, drawing slow circles with my fingertips against the unbroken space between his eyes. Sometimes I ran my fingers over his eyebrows and smoothed the wild, irregular hairs. Sometimes I stroked them the wrong way and swept them up like dragon lashes. His face stayed peaceful and vacant; he was grazing.
As the call wound down, with Jorge congratulating me on the PowerPoint deck Liam had demo’d and thanking us both for being so open to his new approach and priorities, Phil opened his eyes. He reached up and traced the line of my breast from the armpit down, then pressed his open palm against it. He stayed that way, feeling my heart beat, or my nipple harden, or both, or neither, listening.
“Do you know what I want?” he asked when I’d said good-bye to my bosses.
“Coffee?”
He turned his face into me and kissed my belly. “Yeah, actually,” he said.
“I think,” I said, “I shall have tea.”
He sat up and studied me. “Good,” he said.
He put on his bathrobe, so I grabbed boxers from the floor and followed him out to the kitchen. I didn’t need more clothes, as all Incrementalists had been banned from the house by direct email decree. Let them get along without him for a little while. It’d do them good.
I sat on the barstool while Phil put water on for me and started the coffeepot. He got out a mug for each of us and opened the fridge for milk.
“You know,” he said turning to me, fridge handle in hand. “This is better.”
“Not for falling into,” I said.
“No, but for getting milk, and for discovering cold pizza.”
“Hooray!” I said. “Will you heat me up a slice?”
He pulled the box out and set in on the counter, which really would have been difficult with the door hinged the old way.
“It’s better cold,” he said, handing me my tea.
“Your better is not my better,” I pronounced gravely.
“Right,” he said. “I did promise to embrace doubt, didn’t I?”
“Just nuke the pizza.”
He put it in the brand-new toaster oven.
“It’s better toasted than microwaved,” he said. “Trust me.”
I sipped my tea, which tasted like tea and not corpses. “We need to get a dog,” I said.
“I know.”
“Do you think there’s any chance Celeste planned it this way?”
“For us to end up in love and happy?” Phil smiled without dimpling. “Not a chance.”
“For her to end up in the Garden,” I said. “Maybe she was trying to get rid of her body so she could stay safe in the Garden and not have to deal with humanity. Just meddle with the meddlers.”
“Celeste was always afraid of the Internet, but maybe she imagined the next step in human evolution was something to do with the whole virtual world. I don’t know.” The toaster binged and Phil slid my pizza onto a plate and put it by my tea. “I know she thought humanity was at a pivot, a place where universal sufficiency was achievable, if we could find the right fulcrum.”
“Either way, I think she meant for this to break you,” I said. “Not because you were at a pivot, but because you are the pivot. You’re the point the Incrementalists turn on. That’s why she kept asking who you were, and liking that you didn’t know. She wanted to define you.”
“And her pattern’s still there,” he said. He came around the kitchen bar and sat down beside me. “Oskar’s right. We have to tell the amnemones something. At least some of them. We need their help.”
I bit into the pizza and let him think. He was right about the toaster.
He finally took a drink from the coffee he’d been staring into. “But how do we tell them, ‘Hi, we’re this secret group that houses human memories, coded in symbol, reaching back to the birth of symbol itself? We’ve been screwing with your heads for millennia, shaping the way you think, but oops, sorry! One of our number has gone crazy, so now we’re uncloaking?’ They’d stub us all.”
“Except the ones who would pretend to be us, and start selling Incrementalist services and insights to the highest bidder,” I said.
Phil drained his coffee cup. “We mass meddle.”
“With everyone?”
“We use switches that will only work on people like us. We arm the ones we love against us.”
“We recruit them?”
“Incrementally.” His dimple twitched. “Knowing it’s called the ‘impulse rack’ makes you less likely to buy something from the display stand by the cash register.”
“But how do we reach them?” I asked.
“Right. How do we become signal, not just more of the noise?” he said. “They can’t all be spiked.”
I stood up and carried my plate and Phil’s coffee cup into the kitchen. “Maybe we can.”
“How?”
“Same way we’ve always done.” I put my plate in the sink and filled his coffee cup. “We do it in symbol. That’s what makes a memory into a switch, right? The overlay of symbol on it. The sugar-covered oranges mean something. They’re reference points in meaning, tiny triggers of precise emotion. When you gave me your switches, you gave me the power to make you feel things.” I put milk and sugar in Phil’s coffee and stirred it, because I remembered he liked it that way in the evening, even though I’d never seen him take it like that or then. “We do the same for them.” I put his mug down in front of him.
He put his hands around my waist instead of his mug. “But from a distance, and with our own symbols, not theirs.” His hands weren’t holding still; I was losing my interest in talking.
“We meddle with who we are,” I said, and kissed him. “But Phil, you know what that means.”
Phil
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I’m working on not knowing things, remember? Just for a while. You tell me.”
She smiled with all of her, and I drank it in. Yes, I could deal with this. Contentment is fine, if you don’t let it get out of hand. I picked up my coffee and sipped, and it hit me that there was milk and sugar in it. She was remembering. She was getting it back.
“It means,” she said, running a hand across my forehead, “that it has to be you.”
“Uh, not following.”
“Think symbol.”
“You’re enjoying making me guess, aren’t you?”
She grinned and nodded and another frozen thing inside of me melted. I wondered how long that would continue.
“Art?” I said. “Rich with symbol, like the Pre-Raphs? I could tell you things about Rossetti, by the way. One time he—”
“I remember, and there’s a whole ’nother side to that, and no, that isn’t what I meant. Words as symbol.”
“Story?”
“Story,” Ren said.
“So, we write a story about it? I’m not—”
“We don’t write it. We write the pivot Celeste wanted to define. We write you.”
I considered. “And open it up to a hundred different definitions? That could work.”
“Oskar said we needed their help.”
“We’d have to write it and f
ind someone with no scruples to put his name on it.”
“Or find a writer with scruples and meddle with him,” Ren said. “Or we put Irina’s stub into a writer and have her do it. Irina’d like that.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” I said. “I kind of like it. I used to have a T-shirt with the Ford logo, in the script they use, only it said ‘Fuck.’ Those who’d be offended by it thought it said Ford, those who actually saw it thought it was funny.”
“Yes,” she said. “Like that. Let them determine what’s there, instead of Celeste.”
“You’re brilliant.”
“It was a user interface problem.”
“You’re still brilliant.”
“Tell me more,” she said, so I did.
Ren
Phil has a way of saying things without words that’s persuasive, and by the time I’d climbed back off the breakfast bar, he’d convinced me. Who Phil was was a story. A tale told by an idiot—or a couple of them—our metaphor for symbol.
Phil went out to the bakery for bread, so I wrote the email—my first to the group. I had the memories of Celeste’s Primary, but not of her life. I was the first incremental Incrementalist, but we hoped not the last.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: The Incrementalists
Thursday, July 7, 2011 1:35 pm GMT-7
Phil and I have found a potential defense against Celeste’s pattern. If some of you want to look it over, we’ve put it close at hand.
BOOKS BY STEVEN BRUST
The Dragaeran Novels
Brokedown Palace
THE KHAAVREN ROMANCES
The Phoenix Guards
Five Hundred Years After
The Viscount of Adrilankha, which comprises
The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black,
and Sethra Lavode
THE VLAD TALTOS NOVELS
Jhereg