by Tom Caldwell
“Wait, so…” Shruti stopped and turned around in the water, pushing her mosquito veil back from her face. “You’re worried about Magnus breaking the economy, but not about the effects of just unleashing this on humanity?”
“Oh, I’m worried,” said Ezra. “Believe me. But we lost all our progress to gravity and the Handsome Lake, so there won’t be any universal precog revolution. Magnus either figures out the tech on his own and accidentally fucks humanity, or he doesn’t, and everything stays like it is. Either way, Taltos just lost the race.”
Shruti rolled her eyes and dropped her mosquito veil again. “So that’s it?”
“Until we get off Perdigon, yeah.”
“You know, all I ever wanted,” said Shruti, “was to get a great coding job that wasn’t on Perdigon. I’ve been trapped on this backwater planet all my life. But my parents really, really wanted me to check things out at Taltos. So that I could stay close to home. When I came here to shadow Jacob Roth for a day, I was humouring them, that’s it. I didn’t plan to work here no matter what you offered me. And now…”
“We can still get off Perdigon,” said Ezra. “Everyone can.”
“Yeah, but now it’s never gonna be nice,” Shruti said, weary but soft. “You know? I don’t get to have fun in my twenties, I just get to deal with this. Shruti and her tragic story. Something massive and shitty happened to me, and now I have to define myself against it. Do you have any idea how much work that’s gonna be? How many therapists I have to talk to, how many goony self-help books I have to read? No matter how lucky I get, even on Earth, even with a dream job, even with an amazing apartment, even with the world’s sexiest boyfriend or girlfriend, it’ll be this. Do you get it?”
“I get it,” said Ezra. And he did. If there was one thing he understood, it was the way in which the blind stupid luck of one split-second could mutate someone’s future timeline into the strangest of shapes. Words failed him, but he tried saying the same thing she’d said to him, hoping it might be enough: “I’m sorry. That’s fucked up.”
Even though he found those words painfully inadequate, Shruti still seemed gratified to hear them, in some small way. Maybe they weren’t a waste of time after all. “Thanks,” she said, giving him a very slight nod of approval before turning back to stalk the next frog.
Back in the abbey, Jacob was helping Shruti clean the frogs, a disagreeable business. Océane and Raff were helping too; Etienne was silently typing distress calls into the ansible while Mars sat with him, suggesting words and phrases to send. They were friends, and right now Etienne needed someone to watch him. The younger ones were sorting through the daily pile of scavenged goods, bored out of their skulls and chanting pop song lyrics at each other in lieu of actual entertainment. It was an improvement over Margot labourez les vignes, at least.
“I think we’ve got enough here that we can throw the jellies back,” said Jacob, snipping through the frog’s rubbery skin with a pair of the monks’ kitchen shears. “These heavy little guys here are a good size. And I won’t have any, so there’s more for everyone else.”
“Ezra said you wouldn’t.”
“Oh, it’s not that I think I’m above it,” Jacob said, anxious not to give that impression. “And it’s not a religious thing. I’m just very well acquainted with the quirks of my GI tract. Sensitive digestion, I’m afraid. I can still help clean them—my foster parents taught me how. If I didn’t clean frogs at night, there wasn’t any dinner for me.”
“Jacob…” Shruti took the scissors away from him, sparing him the gruesome work of pulling the skins off the bodies. “Come on, man.”
“I didn’t mean to sound like I was asking for special treatment.”
“No, but come on, man. What’re you gonna eat, anyway? More ramen?”
“Julie found a big bag of TVP in the kitchens, so we can bulk out the ramen with extra protein for a while yet. I’ll be fine. So will Ezra—he’s not the biggest fan of Perdigon cuisine.”
Shruti skinned another frog and handed it to Jacob for dismemberment with the cleaver. “He was kinda getting into the frog-gigging, though. By the end.”
“Well, that’s normal. It took him some time to loosen up, that’s all,” said Jacob. “I know you two haven’t been getting along very well, but…”
“We’re okay.” Shruti paused to stretch her hands, which were getting numb in the damp cold. “Something he said—even if Hannah Gwynn or someone does send help, Taltos is done, right? You lost your entire physical plant, employees, research labs, data storage, everything?”
Jacob let out a whuff of breath. “Rebuilding the company would cost a fortune. Hannah’s already invested one fortune in us, and she lost that bet. Insurance will help, but there’s no big profit in store for her this time, unfortunately. The data’s still worth a lot of money, though.”
“You’re backed up on Earth?”
“We couldn’t quite afford that, considering the physical space we needed, but there’s a server farm on Basser-440b.”
“Maybe it’s better not to…I mean, maybe this is for the best,” said Shruti, picking up another frog. “This is some intense tech. Maybe it just shouldn’t be on the market.”
“A lot of people have told Ezra that in the past, so…” Jacob shrugged. Talking Ezra out of his ideas was no easy task. “I don’t really like saying that anything like this is for the best.”
“I only meant the business side of it.”
“I know. But…well, do you want to hear a story?”
The answer to this was always yes, in the abbey, because time pressed on them like a lead weight. “Okay.”
“Years ago, my therapist told me that I should work on some of my feelings about my birth family,” said Jacob, as he processed his small pile of frogs. “Including religion, so I talked to a rabbi. I was telling her about my childhood, and she told me that there’s a section in the Talmud which tries to explain why people suffer.”
“Oh boy, so this won’t be heavy at all,” Shruti said dryly, but she didn’t stop him.
“It’s heavy, I can’t lie to you. So the various rabbis in this section all contribute their opinions about suffering—that God is teaching us a lesson, or that bad things happen because we sin. But one guy, Rabbi Yochanan, speaks up and says one word: Banim! It means children. That was all he had to say. The other rabbis understood right away that none of these explanations make any sense when you try to justify why a child should ever be hurt.”
“Dostoevsky used that move too.”
“It’s pretty universal. But later on, the Talmud gives us more details about Rabbi Yochanan and his whole story. We find out that ten of his own children died. He used to wear a single tiny bone from his youngest child’s skeleton on a string around his neck.”
“Jesus. I mean sorry, but—”
“Oh, no, I agree with you. Very socially maladaptive coping mechanism. But Rabbi Yochanan was also a man of tremendous faith. He was known as a healer, but not a great theologian. He’d go around to see his sick friends, and he’d say really unhelpful things. The sick people would have to correct all his mistaken ideas before they could be healed.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Well, once he went to see his friend Rabbi Eleazar, who was dying. Eleazar had been crying all night on his bed, so sick that he couldn’t move, in terrible pain. Physical pain, mental pain. Rabbi Yochanan walks in and starts trying to comfort him. ‘What’s with the crying?’ he says. ‘Are you upset because you weren’t a great Talmud scholar? I mean, you tried your best!’ Rabbi Eleazar says no, that’s not why he’s crying. Yochanan tries again. ‘Are you depressed because you never got rich? Not everyone gets to be wealthy, you know.’ Again, this doesn’t address the problem. So Yochanan remembers the earlier conversation—banim. This time he thinks he’s got it nailed. ‘Oh, I see,’ he says. ‘Are you grieving because you lost your son? Things could be worse. I lost ten children, remember. See this bone?’ And he shows off the bone aro
und his neck, his memento of his youngest son. ‘Suffering of this kind afflicts great people,’ he says. ‘And these are the afflictions of love.’
“But that doesn’t make Eleazar stop crying either. Finally, Eleazar says, ‘I’m not crying for any of these reasons, and none of your stupid, hackneyed attempts at comfort are worth anything to me right now. I’m crying because of kol chai shifra d’balei b’afra—because of all this living beauty which is sinking into the earth. Even when I look at you, my friend, that’s what I see. All this living beauty which is sinking into the earth. Falling, fading, getting lost, decomposing in the dust. Nobody knows how to stop it from happening. That’s what I’m crying for.’
“So Yochanan, finally, is stunned into silence. He can’t answer. He has no argument. All he says is, ‘Well, in that case, you’re right to cry. I’ll cry with you.’ And they do, they cry together for half the night, over Eleazar’s deathbed. Finally, forgetting all his stupid advice and his explanations, Yochanan says to his friend, ‘Ten li yadchah. Give me your hand.’ And in that moment, with that touch, Eleazar was healed.”
Shruti had stopped her work to listen to the story, along with the other kids. “That’s amazing,” she said finally. “How do you remember all that?”
“It was in a book she gave me, so I read it over and over,” said Jacob. “I think about it a lot. You have to, in a business like this. Trying to manage the future. Otherwise…otherwise, I think working on tech like this would make you very arrogant.”
Shruti nodded, reaching for the bucket again. “Has Ezra heard that story?”
“Yes, he has,” said Jacob, not missing the implication. “I’ve told him. And he’s not arrogant. He’s driven, and he needs people around him to act as brakes, but he knows. Okay? I promise he does.”
“Where is he, anyhow?” asked Océane as she hefted the heavy bucket where the still-living jellies were squirming around in their silty water. “Still outside?”
“Yeah. Wanna go check on him?” said Shruti. “Make sure he hasn’t drowned or choked on swamp gas, while you’re dumping out the jellies.”
Océane dragged her bucket outside, but in a few minutes she was back. “I don’t see him.”
Jacob’s shoulders tightened up, and he put the cleaver aside to go pick up his NBC gear from the corner. “I’m sure he’s not far,” he said to the kids, as reassuringly as he knew how, although he had just finished teaching them that reassurance was a bit of a sucker’s game. “I’ll go look. If I don’t find anything in half an hour, I’ll come back and get Shruti to help. But I’m coming back.”
“Be safe,” Shruti said, such an embarrassingly maternal thing to say that she winced. It wasn’t a huge deal; Ezra wandered off periodically, sometimes because the thing in his head was frying his brain or whatever, and sometimes just because he wanted space to think. If Jacob were to disappear too, that would have been a much bigger problem, frankly.
But there was no point in obsessing over that. They had work to do.
Jacob was overreacting, maybe. Visibility wasn’t always great in the marshes, and Océane was short. Maybe the height advantage was all he needed to spot Ezra.
Right. Being tall will fix this. That’s all it’ll take.
He was trying to stay positive, but feeling some foreboding. Ezra had talked about overclocking the tech, but naturally he wouldn’t pull something like that outdoors and alone, right? Yes, actually, he would, because that way I wouldn’t be there to stop him.
The lip of the crater rose above the wreckage of the abbey, forming a hillside on land that once was flat. Everything was even muddier than usual. The causeway was empty, and in the frog-hunting grounds, there was no movement but the wind in the reeds. Jacob followed the remains of the road a little further past the abbey, heading uphill to the crater’s edge.
It was raining again, and the sky was almost like evening on Earth, clouded over to hide the red sun, big thunderheads looming on the horizon. Jacob was just about to turn back to try the eastbound side of the road, when he saw Ezra’s figure at the crater’s height.
From here, the wind was as stiff as if it came from the ocean. For the same reason: it was howling across a massive void, with nothing to slow it down. No city, no forest, no hills or mountains, nothing but emptiness. The height of it was mind-breaking. Ezra had compared it to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai; you could have also dropped a couple of Eiffel Towers down into that pit without filling it up.
Jacob didn’t think he was afraid of heights, in general, but he was afraid of this—one look over that edge and he got on his hands and knees to crawl. Not taking any chances with his centre of gravity. Ezra seemed to have been sane enough to feel the same way, because he was curled up in the foetal position some twenty feet from the edge.
“I’m so close,” Ezra whispered when Jacob came near.
“Come on back down, Ez.”
“Not yet. I can almost reach him.”
“Who?”
“Roshan.”
Jacob had no clue what this meant. It might have been very literal, from Ezra’s perspective, or it might have been some symbolic vision (like the lentil soup) that couldn’t be easily deciphered, and made little material difference. Jacob never argued with Ezra directly; the psychologist had said that it was better to simply empathise, validate, and keep him physically safe. “Well, can you reach him from back down in the abbey?”
“Helps being up high.” Ezra wasn’t completely neurologically wrecked this time, since he could talk, but he was still pale and shuddering, shrinking back from Jacob’s touch like a sensitive plant. “Don’t make me go back down.”
“You have to eventually. And I don’t want to stay up here.”
“I’m so close. I’m so close. Ten more minutes.”
Jacob liked extravagant gestures of trust. He liked to take absurd risks for the sake of love, because he felt like that was the only way to be worthy of it. But he had found his breaking point. “Ezra. I don’t tell you this often, but no. Period. The end. Whatever you’re doing, you’re a smart guy and you can figure it out at sea-level. Without risking your life. Those kids down there need us, and this is unacceptable. Especially when you won’t even say what you’re trying to do.”
“I’ll try, I can try to tell you…” Ezra rolled over onto his back, letting his head loll on the ground, watching the thunderheads above. He was pale but practically vibrating with excitement. “Roshan and Murdoch. Their neural network, Ahriman. When we were all still working together, Ahriman had receptors built in to interface with our tech. They wanted to make sure they’d have the capability to use it if we ever got to market. Those receptors are ansibles, technically—they work using simultaneity and entanglement to communicate instantly over interstellar distances, just like an ansible does.”
“Right—”
“That means this—” Ezra slammed the heel of his palm against the scar on his temple. “Can still deliver data to Ahriman. A system that we know is still in use and closely monitored. Liz would never ignore a strange signal coming through those receptors. Never in a million years. She wouldn’t rest until she figured out what it was. And they’ve been doing amazing, their IPO was bananas—Roshan must be as rich as Hannah by now. He’d save us. He will.”
They’d had their hopes crushed so many times now that Jacob was afraid to believe in this new prospect, but he had to admit that it sounded plausible. “Can you stop for tonight, though?”
“Yes. No.” Ezra got up on his knees as well, crab-walking further away from the lip of the pit, back down towards the road. “Yes, yeah, I want to write some stuff down. I’m sorry, babe, I just—”
“If we leave right now, I won’t stay mad at you,” Jacob said, in the parental tone that often worked on Ezra. “You scared me, that’s all. Don’t wander off like this again.”
“I won’t. I won’t.” Lightning was jigging over the horizon, and in such a flat land, even Ezra took that risk very seriously. “Let’s go home.�
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Chapter 6
Mightily and Sweetly Ordering All Things
When Ezra disappeared inside his head, this was where he went.
As a kid, he’d read about the memory palace of Sherlock Holmes, and the memory palace of Hannibal Lecter, and the memory palace of Dr. Julian Bashir in a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tie-in novel. (Bashir’s was in the form of the Hagia Sophia, which was extra cool.) A kid in the hospital would read anything, and Ezra used to aimlessly search keywords on his tablet, combing through the most obscure pages of the results, fingertip tapping repeatedly on the glass (as if at a zoo) while books unfolded themselves in front of him.
So Ezra had built a palace of his own. Okay, well, he liked to sound smart about architecture, but it really wasn’t his thing. Not so much a Hagia Sophia, more of…a loving reproduction of one of his favourite puzzle game levels of all time. The floating tower in Hyperion II, the crown jewel of Ezra’s teenage obsessions. The graphic style looked dated now, but it had once inspired awe. Such a sense of melancholy satisfaction he’d had when he first explored the tower in the game—the mystery had been all but resolved by then, and Ezra had been left to grapple with the emotional weight of the story. All the doors were open then, and all the drawers gave up their secrets. Ezra used to speedrun through the whole game, over and over again, all the clues memorised, just to get a chance to wander through the dizzying upper floors of Hyperion itself. One more time.
The logic of a mental image like this was that it took advantage of the brain’s real estate—the hippocampus and the medial parietal cortex were activated when using the technique, improving retention of information. Cueing memory to images and pathways, he could build himself a system of navigation, and keep his brain from being overwhelmed by a surfeit of data.
Ezra used the levels of the tower to organise his awareness of the future. The higher he went, the more abstract and fragmented the data became. The non-rational was always encroaching on his system.