by Tom Caldwell
“I never feel clean anymore,” Ezra said, stepping under the water with Jacob behind him. “At least we have hot water, fuck knows I’m not complaining. But everything outside is so dirty.”
“The dust is all ejecta from the impact, it comes in on the wind,” Jacob said absently. “Let me wash your hair?”
Ezra had taken a long time to get his head around this in the beginning, and maybe he still didn’t understand it, but there were chores that Jacob did because someone had to, and then there were chores that he loved. Ezra would have thought that this was one of Jacob’s excuses—the way he would pretend to prefer sitting in the middle seat on a plane. But no, there was a note to Jacob’s voice when he asked…and he always asked first, when it was something like this.
That was Ezra’s cue, so he let go.
Jacob touched him as if he were beautiful. Ezra didn’t believe that he was, but he did believe that he might become beautiful if Jacob kept touching him. The enchantment might be slow but any day now it would start working. That was how Jacob’s hands felt, long fingers combing through Ezra’s hair, smoothing it back from his forehead and temples.
It was as good as a shower quickie could get, realistically speaking. Filling a need. Ezra still needed to sleep, and he still needed to eat. And he needed Jacob to keep touching him, so that one day the enchantment would finally be finished—it was an extraordinarily long ritual that took many years—and make him beautiful. Like Jacob’s smooth pale hands, like his black hair slicked back with water, beautiful like that.
There was no moaning allowed. Not here. Ezra coped with this using a technique that he’d thought he invented as a kid, a sort of harsh but controlled breath, like Darth Vader. Jacob said it was ujjayi breath, a yoga thing. Ujjayi meant “breath of victory.” Jacob liked yoga. Ezra was swearing too much for a yoga class right now, a stream of whispered profanity, eyes closed, full, ecstatic.
“That’s it, that’s okay, I’m okay,” he told Jacob. “Just a—over—good Christ, yup, like that, like that…”
It was over quickly; they had both been sorely in need. Ezra came and then Jacob did, and they washed up afterward in comparative silence. Jacob was often meditative after sex. He used to cry, although he could never put into words why, except to say that it was nothing Ezra had or hadn’t done. It’s only the past.
Ezra believed him. He knew what the past could do to you.
“Are you coming to bed?” said Jacob as he turned the water off again.
“I have to work a little more.”
“I thought we were done for the day.”
Ezra bit his lip. “I think I’m still really close.”
“How long do you think you’ll be?”
“I don’t know. I never know how long it’ll take, you know that.”
“Ezra…” Jacob began, and then he gave up. Sighed. Opened the shower door. “Okay. We talked about this, so okay. Do whatever you need to do, babe.”
Ezra wasn’t sure if that was sincere or if it was the prelude to a fight, but he decided to take it as sincerity. Because he needed to get back to work.
He didn’t even assemble his memory palace this time, just sleepwalked back to his blanket nest. The water was running, and the sinks were overflowing and the season of the inundation was upon them. Acqua alta. The abbey blurred into visions.
The kids were worn out, clapping songs in place of jump-rope, down down baby down by the rollercoaster, and Jacob was sitting stoically with Mars and Iona, reading aloud from a tattered copy of Blubber by Judy Blume. “It’s very foolish to laugh if you don’t know what’s funny in the first place…”
In the back of the church, silent Etienne had been tapping messages into the ansible all day, or all night, or whatever time it was. Nobody knew what he was typing, but it was probably good for him. He slept a little sounder.
Ezra settled down behind his pillar in the sanctuary, cross-legged with the folded blanket underneath him for padding.
Somewhere—somewhere very far away, across the vast reaches, jai guru deva om and all that—there was another ansible on Earth. It sat in a closet in an office of Sant’Anselmo Church, Saint Anselm on the Aventine. He could watch the near future of that ansible, to see when someone would notice it.
There was a lost arch on the street outside, remnant of a long-gone building, straddling a garden wall. A young man with a shaved head and a radiant smile was bringing flowers for the secretary, and Ezra hitched a little ride on his worldline for awhile, watching this guy’s near future: soon he would round the corner on his bike and pass the ever-present summer construction scenes along the Tiber. Which was the shade of green that one only saw in slow rivers and the human iris, a hazel-green river. A section of grimy old medieval wall turned into concrete, covered with vines. Palms and plane trees on the Aventine Hill itself where its slope crested over the walls, and on the Via di Santa Sabina there were pollarded trees that looked like the background of a Giorgione painting, as perfect as bonsai. Pink blossoming bougainvillea behind a gate.
The young man was from Washington, still discerning, staying in monasteries, visiting the old favourites: Siena, Padua, Assisi. What little was left—coastal cities like Venice had been underwater for a generation. Some floods were real. This one was imaginary. Or perhaps it was better to say that it was part of Ezra’s mind. Swelling out of fountains and riverbanks, pouring invisibly through the streets.
The pretty admin assistant at the Benedictine headquarters was pleased but worried by the flowers; she had a boyfriend. The young man wasn’t dismayed at all; his intentions, maybe for once in human history, had been pure. He’d seen some pink carnations and wanted this girl to hold them for awhile. Nothing more. As if a Roman girl even needed flowers, living in a city like this.
The boy from Washington walked right past the closet that held the ansible.
Ezra could do nothing. He could watch it happen, and was privy to a certain flow of cause and effect, thought into action, feeling things happen, helpless to change them. The ansible was chiming. The Vatican news service.
The boy from Washington heard it, the sensory data reverberating all the way down the wire to Ezra. Answer it. Answer it.
Washington walked back, paused by the closet door. He wasn’t even an intern, just helping around the office for a couple of weeks until he moved on to Cascia, because he owed St. Rita a favour. The office was quiet, nearly empty. “Guys? Hi? Ciao?”
An Irish brother in a habit backed out of an office door with an armload of paperwork. “Lost?”
“Nah, but there’s a noise in the closet. Like, is that supposed to be there? Did somebody forget their phone? Ringtone like a music box?”
“Oh, that. An old ansible for the colonies. We have it set to run the headlines.”
“It’s really going nuts, though.”
The brother opened the closet door. Peered inside. “I don’t think its screen is usually lit up,” he said, sweeping some jackets and sweaters aside with a sistrum-rattle of metal hangers. The ansible’s screen filled the closet with blue light. “If Roy up in St. Columban’s wanted to send anything to headquarters I’m certain he would’ve used the usual…hmm.”
“It’s saying SOS. Should we do something?”
“Kids prank these things sometimes.” The brother swept back over to his desk, rosary clicking at his side, and he sat down at the computer. “When did we last talk to Roy, I can’t even…two weeks ago, right. Lumen, connect to St. Columban’s office on Perdigon, please.”
“Connection failed.”
“Why’s that?”
“No satellite.”
The hope was excruciating. Colonial satellites died all the time. They were garbage to begin with, usually. But the brother wrinkled his brow and went back to the closet, leaning in to type, “This is Brian at Sant’Anselmo—all right over there?”
Great.
So.
That would happen, but Ezra wasn’t sure when. It felt close; he wasn’t s
ure. Maybe in a few days. Maybe next week. Next month? Looked like summer in Rome. People ignored persistent notifs in the background all the time, turning up the music in their headphones, getting on with their lives. Ezra wouldn’t pin it all on the nice kid from Washington.
There was one other place he wanted to go.
Spooky action at a distance, as they said. Entanglement. The implant in his brain could theoretically transmit to Murdoch’s Ahriman network. Ahriman was designed to receive inputs from the Taltos mass precognitive network—which had never materialised. Right now, in fact, that network consisted of a single transmitter in Ezra’s implant, pinging on the hour.
In Portland:
“What the fuck was that?”
Roshan Tehrani had just stumbled through the door, buzzed, in a tux from some gala, recounting an anecdote that Liz Murdoch wasn’t listening to. “What the fuck was what, I’m talking here—”
“I know,” she interrupted. “Taltos is pinging Ahriman.”
“So?”
“Repeatedly. In patterns.”
Roshan sighed, sinking down on the couch and taking his jacket off. “I know what this is. You feel left out because I went to the gala and you were here, cowering in the dark with your machines. You could’ve just come along, you know. It’s not such a hardship to put on a dress once in awhile.”
“Then wear one yourself,” said Liz. “It’s a prime series. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13—”
“Yeah, I know what primes are.”
“Then you should find it interesting that a transmitter which normally emits one ping per hour is suddenly emitting two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen of them.”
“Fine. Call Ezra and find out. Maybe he’s working on something,” said Roshan, losing interest as he got up again. “There had better still be beer left.”
“I don’t drink that piss you like,” she said flatly. “I can’t call Ezra.”
“Then it must be aliens,” Roshan said, his head inside the fridge. “Is that where this is going?”
“The satellites are dead.”
“Yeah, because Perdigon’s a shitty backwater.”
“They’re all dead. At the same time.”
“Okay, Jodie Foster, so send some pings back. Be friendly, first contact is a big deal.”
“Maybe you should draft the greeting,” said Liz. Her tone might have sounded neutral to an outsider; Roshan knew her well enough to recognise that it was withering. “I can’t imagine a finer intergalactic diplomat than you.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, I mean it.”
“So do I.”
Murdoch didn’t respond for awhile, sitting in her desk chair with her arms folded, head bent to her chest, watching the pings hit the network. “Ezra’s implant might be malfunctioning.”
That brought Roshan up short, and he came to look over Murdoch’s shoulder at the screens. “But Ezra’s okay.”
“We don’t know that. He could be stroking out.”
“Can the implant do that?”
“Fuck if I know, I’m not a doctor. But this is weird. Hold on.” Murdoch tapped a few lines into the prompt, then took her hands abruptly away from the keyboard, as if it were a Ouija board planchette that was behaving erratically. Expressionless as always, but her speed gave her away. “No. I do not like this. At all.”
“What?”
“It’s answering me. That’s binary, look, it’s—” She pulled up a binary converter. “Yeah. Straight-up sending text from inside his thick skull. He’s going to overheat it.”
“That’s…bad.” Roshan was reading the screen. “Wow. That’s a classic Ezra text message, all right.”
Liz snorted. “Utter fucking nonsense, and coordinates to eight decimal places, yeah.”
“Is he serious?”
Murdoch shrugged, typed what into the prompt, received another flood of Ezra’s bullshit. “Accident. Taltos is gone. Cargoliner crash wiped the whole settlement out.”
“What?”
“Jacob’s alive. Some kids are with them.”
Roshan took a second to absorb that, but then smacked Murdoch on the shoulder. “Dude, we get to rescue a fucking planet.”
“I usually prefer to destroy planets.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re so edgy. I can’t believe how perfect this is. Ezra was so sure that his big genius idea was going to be the thing that really changed the world. And I may be down here with you, but I’m leading this company just fine. We’re the ones who get to pull him out of the mud. It’s beautiful. Tell him we’re sending a ship. Juno-class, fastest in the fleet.” Roshan was relishing every word, even if Murdoch wouldn’t. “When Roshan Tehrani rescues you from certain death, you ride in style.”
“This is the stupidest thing we’ve ever spent money on,” Liz complained. “Call whoever’s nearest and tell them to send a ship.”
Roshan accepted this concession to frugality with a wave of his hand. “Fucking…fine. But I’m going to be there when it lands on Earth, it’ll be an incredible photo-op. What about his company?”
Murdoch typed the question in. “Sounds like it’s gone,” she said when she read the answer.
“The compound? The data?”
“Everything. Employees, other than Jacob.”
“His data’s backed up, though.”
“Ezra’s not that dumb,” admitted Murdoch.
“Then I want it,” said Roshan, leaning over the desk to stare at the screen, his eyes shining. “Tell him we’ll come for him if he signs over all proprietary rights to the Taltos tech. To us.”
“He never fixed the hardware issues with his tech,” said Liz. “He couldn’t make it functional. He’s got nothing.”
“His data could still be worth billions—to someone else. Ezra only needs one thing right now, and that’s a ship to Perdigon. The price for that Taltos data has never been lower. This is great for us. All of us.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re suggesting that we hold them hostage for tech that might not ever work.”
“We started together. I’m bringing Ezra and Jacob back into the fold,” said Roshan, wheedling her a little. “And I’ll be the CEO, and he won’t be able to throw childish temper tantrums about his precious artisanal handcrafted precog tech because it won’t be his anymore. Finally cutting the goddamn cord. He needs that, the company needs that, and Jacob will never, ever make him do it. This will be the best thing that ever happened to Taltos. What’s so wrong about that?”
“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” said Murdoch. “I’m saying the tech doesn’t work. But you are the CEO, and I’m ecstatic to do your bidding.” She swivelled in her chair to type in the offer. Pause. “He said yes.”
“Fuck, yes, I can’t believe it, I finally got that skinny little goblin—okay, okay, tell him we’re coming—wait,” said Roshan, barely remembering in time. “Get a peppercorn from him.”
“A what?”
“Symbolic payment. Legal thing, something has to change hands to prove his intent to make a deal with me. If he gives me anything in exchange, even one dollar, that counts. Can he do that on this connection?”
“He can authorise a payment if—”
In Roshan’s tuxedo jacket pocket, his phone chimed. “That…was my banking app,” he said, beginning to be discomfited. He checked his phone’s screen. “One dollar.”
“That’s Ezra all right,” said Liz. “He knew you’d ask.”
“Yeah, I did not miss this shit at all,” Roshan drawled, looking at his bank app. “He knows he’s being creepy. But you know what? I just acquired a billion-dollar company and I’m not even sober.”
“Potentially billion-dollar.”
“Whatever.”
“Right now it’s just a big fuckin’ hole in the ground, but I mean…” Murdoch shrugged. “If it makes you happy.”
“It does, actually. I’m happy and you can’t do anything about it.”
“You just took your brother’s inheritance for the pr
overbial mess of pottage, but fine.”
“I don’t know what pottage is,” said Roshan, taking his beer bottle with him to the other room. “I don’t care. I won.”
Ezra broke the connection and found his body beaded with sweat, back at the abbey. Instant jackhammer migraine. He was shuddering with the elevator-rise of nausea that meant a seizure was on its way. He slid out of his blanket nest to lie on the floor of the sanctuary, pressing his cheek to the cool stone. He didn’t think he was crying, not really, but his eyes were watering profusely, without emotion.
Jacob came to his side, and pressed his palm lightly across Ezra’s forehead. As if to hold his thoughts in. “Breathe steady, okay? I’m right here, I’m right here…”
“I did it,” Ezra whispered, but lost consciousness.
When he came to, he had to break out his ASL, a language he’d learned poorly and used rarely—he only knew a few words. Water, bed, pain. It was useful when his brain refused to let him speak.
He formed letters slowly with his fingers. Roshan’s name.
“You found him?” Jacob was holding Ezra upright, helping him with a water bottle.
Ezra nodded. He gave up on ASL and segued into mime. He shaped the flight of a paper plane with his hands.
“Plane. Flying. He’s coming here, you mean? You’re sure? You spoke to him?”
Yes.
“When?”
Ezra didn’t know. S-O-O-N, he spelled. Coordinates. Numbers were easier than letters.
Jacob had a paper map of Perdigon that was falling apart at the creases, warped and water-damaged, but he found the spot. “That’s a piece down the road,” he said. “But we have the bikes. We can start heading that way tomorrow…unless it’s not that soon?”
Tomorrow, Ezra signed. Go.
The coordinates took them to an empty field, solid ground underfoot, just off the highway. There was a Scotch mist, and everyone was miserable as usual in their swamp gear. The wind stung and made their eyes well up with tears, so they pulled up goggles and breathing apparatus while they waited. Shruti looked worn out, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, swaying on her feet as the toddlers pulled at her pant legs.