Perdigon

  Magnus’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “You think so?”

  “I can do it better than you could.” That was all that Ezra was sure of, but maybe it was enough. “I’m done with trying to strike it rich, I don’t fucking care anymore. All I want is to make some real contributions to actual science—remember science?—and do the right thing by the next generation. You might have the numbers, but we can train the best in the business. And we’ll teach them how to—how to resist. How to organise.”

  Ezra was thinking of the abbey on Perdigon, about the afternoons when he used to spend telling the kids about amphibian biology and solar wind, arguing about Margot labourez les vignes. Not so different from the earliest medieval universities that grew out of the same monastic tradition. Students and teachers gathered from all over the countryside, a community trying to preserve its few precious texts against the forces of entropy, walled off from the outside world but open to the sky.

  “Ezra’s right,” Jacob said, perhaps not just out of loyalty. “By the time that patent expires in twenty years, Bija will have to deal with an educated workforce that’s aware of its own value. Training institutions can be a powerful source of solidarity over the long term.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.” Ezra could feel sweat running down his back, his hands clammy. “And if they want to work for you, you won’t be in any position to dictate the terms. Those kids won’t be tools to advance your agenda.”

  Magnus raised his eyebrows as if waiting for them to keep going, then shrugged and said, “That’s it? So you’re just retreating in defeat. You really are bending the knee. You can’t beat me, so you’re telling yourself that running a telepathic trade school is exactly what you wanted to do all along.”

  “No, I’m going to do what I always wanted to do. Like I told you, Magnus, I want to make it normal,” said Ezra, gripping Jacob’s arm hard. “I want to give these kids a chance at normal. I can’t control what happens, because there are events that can’t be changed. Disasters that nobody can stop. But you can still change people’s minds. And that’s the real way you change the future.”

  Magnus didn’t look convinced, but he looked at the others too, trying to gauge the right level of scepticism. Natalie and Murdoch were poker-faced; Roshan seemed to be recalibrating his plans; Shruti’s chin was lifted, defiant. Magnus’s gaze lingered on Jacob for a few moments, as if trying to squeeze out one more moment of intimidation, but then he turned on his heel to leave. “Turnbull, get these lights back on. Whatever they’ve recorded here, have the teams at the security checkpoints delete it. I want these…people off my station.”

  Turnbull hurried out of his way, calling ahead to warn the next sector of the station that their king was approaching.

  “We get to leave now, right?” said Marty. “I’m probably fired.”

  “I think we’d better,” Jacob said.

  Ennead’s Juno-class ship, the Atropos, was small but plush within. It had plenty of legroom, cushy seats that converted to mediocre beds. Too cold, of course, but an attendant brought Jacob some folded blankets to ward off the usual chills and draughts of space travel.

  Ezra was trying to eat a plastic tray of cheap vegetable roll sushi, one of the few things he could always keep down when he was travelling. Jacob thought it was only the pickled ginger that helped, but it didn’t matter so long as it worked. His hands were shaking too much to manipulate the chopsticks, so he started to eat with his hands.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he mumbled when Jacob sat down next to him on the converted bed. “This was stupid, it’s stupid, it’s stupid…”

  “It’s not stupid,” said Jacob, automatically. “We’re in transition. Nobody expects you to have it all figured out. But did you mean what you said in there? That you want us to pivot to…I don’t even know what to call it. Psionic education? Or was that just something you told Magnus to throw him off?”

  Ezra nodded, not looking up from his tray of vegetable roll. “Unless you have a better idea.”

  “I didn’t mean it was a bad one.”

  “Is it, though?”

  Jacob put his arm around him. “No. I think you’re right. There’s going to be another generation of telepaths, and someone’s going to have to teach them. You’re the only one who can.”

  “God help them.”

  “Well, obviously it’s not going to be easy,” Jacob admitted. “But this is how you change the future.”

  Chapter 10

  The Bronze Horseman

  Gentlemen,

  Natalie has informed me that her sally to PPLOS Siddhartha was successful; therefore, I shall assume that at the present, you need little more from Ennead. Little more, that is, other than time for recovery. You may stay at my vacation house if you wish; attached please find the address and the relevant codes for the security service. In two weeks, we will resume the process of Ahriman’s acquisition of Taltos.

  I am relieved that you are all alive.

  Hannah

  Hannah Gwynn didn’t take a lot of vacations, and her vacation home was nothing more than a sound real estate investment in northern Vermont. Green mountains, well isolated, not too far south, not too close to the coast, safe from floods and storms and social unrest—it must have been worth a fortune. Every inch of it was designed and staged, elegantly impersonal. There was probably a bunker underground, as Ezra had muttered to himself when they first walked in.

  But Jacob loved the house. To him, it was calm, quiet, and luxurious. He loved the high ceilings, the drawers that soundlessly glided open and closed, the generous and well-organised pantry (sexy, in Jacob’s opinion). The air was clean. Magnus’s recorded voice on the Lumen menus was muted. Everything worked, the appliances and faucets submitted without argument—even temperamental divas like the shower-heads and the furnace. Jacob used to dream of houses like this, back when he was living on the street.

  Other than his preoccupied remark about the bunker, however, Ezra didn’t offer an opinion on the house. He’d submerged himself in his thoughts on the flight back to Earth, and since then he’d been quiet. Not catatonic, exactly, but taciturn, his eyes unfocused, as if the real world was a minor distraction from something complex and important that he was doing. He replied the way you would if you were busy disarming a bomb.

  Jacob had been sitting on the back verandah through the supper hour, as the rosy sunset cooled to blue dusk. He was sweating faintly in the humid air, back bare as he knotted his damp shirt in his hands. Which was uncouth, but even Jacob’s commitment to decorum suffered in this heat. Vermont was a steaming jungle in May, the remains of its old green forests now teeming with migrant life. Flamingos and roseate spoonbills had come up from the Deep South, pink and pale in the deep woods, fishing with the tall white egrets in the lakes.

  Jacob had loved birds ever since he was a kid. His mother used to have a bird book with beautiful illustrations, an old and out-of-date Audubon Society field guide to Montana. She would read to him every night before bed, fairy tales and Tolkien and Narnia, the Matter of Britain, Scheherazade and her thousand-and-one nights. On nights when Jacob was indecisive about choosing the reading material, his mother would say, “We’ll look at the bird pictures then, until you get sleepy.”

  Birding was one of Jacob’s hobbies that Ezra instinctively understood, even if he wasn’t interested himself—he pretended aloofness but would listen intently if Jacob wanted to talk about changing migration patterns or the nesting habits of grebes. Once, early on in their relationship and quite unsolicited, Ezra had wordlessly sent him a picture of a fat baby owl.

  “Ezra, did you mean to send this to me?”

  “Yeah,” Ezra had said, not looking up from his monitor. “He’s a fat one, huh?”

  Jacob was not inexperienced in the matter of wooing. He understood right away.

  Perdigon didn’t have much indigenous aerial life—small reptiles, big bugs, and a species that looked like a flying squirrel, but no birds. Jacob missed
them.

  He used to listen for bird calls with his mother, sitting on the front step with her in the evenings while she waited for her boyfriend to take her to work.

  “Listen to that sweet little bird,” she used to say. “He’s a long way from home.”

  “Where is he from?”

  “Mexico, or maybe from California. He’s called an Inca dove—that two-hoots call.” His mother imitated it: coo, coo.

  “How did he get here?”

  “He flew. What, did you think he took the bus?”

  Jacob laughed at that, burrowing against her side. “But what did he come here for?”

  “He came to see you, baby.” She put her arm around him. “He heard that Jacob Roth lived up here and he wanted to say hello.”

  Jacob’s mother never lied to him, but she did tell him stories. The truth, as she must have known, was that the birds came north driven by hunger, their old homes and habitats in ruin behind them. The Inca doves had been on the move ever since, and now Jacob could hear their curt, penetrating cry even on a summer evening in Vermont. They’d come to see him.

  The screen door banged as Ezra came out to find Jacob on the verandah. “I slept through dinner, sorry.”

  “I ordered in, so we’ve got leftovers in the fridge.” Jacob started to get up, but Ezra sat down behind him, one step above, and planted his hands on Jacob’s shoulders to keep him there. “Did you get some good rest?”

  Ezra nodded, putting his arms around Jacob, straddling him. “You okay?”

  “I think so. I’m only sitting out here because I like hearing the birds.”

  Ezra listened for the birds too, resting his cheek on the back of Jacob’s bare shoulder. “You know something stupid?”

  “What?”

  “I actually miss those goddamn frogs.”

  Jacob smiled. “They were good singers too. Very talented. Svelte twilight soubrettes.”

  “They helped me fall asleep. The ambient sounds on the Lumen don’t have—okay, they have two settings with recordings of spring peepers, but neither of them sounds right. The pitch is wrong.”

  “I’m surprised you noticed,” said Jacob, stretching out his neck when he felt Ezra’s lips graze briefly over his skin. “You never told me you had perfect pitch, Amadeus—”

  “Yeah, it’s called absolute pitch, smartass, and no, I don’t,” said Ezra. He was playing with the drawstring of Jacob’s sleep pants, distracted. “But I can still tell the pitch is wrong.”

  He fell silent for a few moments, then said, “I think I’ve got myself back now. Warp flights make me feel weird. Like I’m scattered in pieces all over the galaxy.”

  “You were a little more preoccupied than usual, I thought, but I figured you were…” Jacob had to stop to choose a word. “Looking ahead.”

  “That too. I don’t know.” Ezra let out a long breath, a rush of warm air across Jacob’s back. “I’m worried about this whole…big pivot thing.”

  “Why, is it a bad idea?”

  Ezra batted the question back over the net. “Do you think it is?”

  “I’m not really sure. What are you hoping for? What do you want from this thing you’re trying to build?” Sometimes Jacob felt like he was intruding by asking Ezra questions like this. As if he’d forgotten his place, acting beyond his station. You should be honoured to be so close to genius, whispered the old ghost of Jake Ross in the back of his mind. You shouldn’t ask him questions he doesn’t want to answer. But it was an attitude that Jacob wanted to outgrow. “What do you want it to look like?”

  Ezra took a breath, as if he was about to try explaining, but cancelled that with a shrug. “I dunno. I’m thinking about it. Different things, different…y’know.”

  “Of course you are, but can you sketch out the rough shape of it for me?” Jacob ventured. “I mean, you’ve managed to make sense of your own abilities, but is that something you can teach? I don’t disagree that you’re better-equipped to do it than Magnus Vollan, but you’ve always struggled to explain your visions to me.”

  “I always—” Ezra began, a false start, and then tried again. “Jacob, look, I thought one of the best things about us as a couple is that I never had to explain them to you,” he said. “Everybody else in—in the goddamn universe was trying to figure out my broken brain, analysing and parsing and measuring everything I ever said. ‘What does this mean’, ‘what does that mean’, ‘are you sure’, ‘can you quantify that?’ Everything I ever told them about myself and the way I thought—it was all up for debate. And you weren’t like that. You just…let me happen. You let me happen.”

  Your passivity is one of your best features, you know. Something Magnus used to tell him. But Jacob ignored the voice in his memory. “Mostly I do. But sometimes I still have questions.”

  “Okay. Sorry. Okay.” But Ezra’s tone wasn’t sulky. He settled down again with his cheek against Jacob’s back, and he tried. “It wasn’t that—I’m not being cagey on purpose. Well, maybe kinda. I know what I want this school to be like but then…” He trailed off and was quiet for a few moments, tracing a finger softly over Jacob’s lean belly.

  Jacob’s stomach muscles had drawn taut in anticipation, but it seemed that for once Ezra wasn’t making one of his abrupt kamikaze dive-bombs into sexuality. Just touching, absent-minded but affectionate and even (by Ezra’s standards) flirtatious. “But then…?”

  “But then…I know that it won’t turn out that way. Not for long.” Ezra took a long breath. “What I want—you know, my parents raised me to hate private schools but it’s our only option. We need total control over program and curriculum, because we’re trying to do something totally different from normal schools. Small class sizes, training new teachers alongside the students as our population of telepaths gets older.”

  “Sensible.”

  “And I need to study more myself,” said Ezra. “Like, some Vipassana exercises really helped me when I was younger, but I need to understand them better before I pass that stuff on to someone else.”

  “You can take some time to do that.”

  “The building doesn’t matter, really, not in the beginning,” Ezra went on. “When universities were first being founded, they met in professors’ houses. Although—elevation does matter, I know you hated it when I used the crater’s edge on Perdigon but being high up did help me. I’m not sure why yet, but I want to find out. We should find some land in the mountains someplace. Any planet will do, probably.”

  Jacob smiled. “Perdigon has some mountains to the north, in its habitable strip. We could probably get it cheap.”

  “Wow, yes, that’s exactly what I want.”

  Jacob laughed and turned on the steps to face Ezra. “I’m only joking. But you were the one who said you missed the frogs.” He added, “You said the school won’t measure up to the dream?”

  “Right. After a few decades, in every future I see, it turns into this…” Ezra made an inarticulate gesture. “Fucking…poisonous viper’s nest. Elitist, competitive, mean. More of a deep state project or a criminal syndicate than a school.”

  “Lots of places turn toxic like that, you know,” Jacob said, not sure whether he was being reassuring or not. “Maybe even most of them. A few budget cuts can turn a good institution into an authoritarian nightmare. I’ve lived in some.”

  “I know you have,” said Ezra. “That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to avoid. Not the budget thing. We’ll have money. Nestling’s gonna be very happy with this deal. But trying to…make a place that won’t turn into another type of prison, another type of sweatshop. I don’t know if I know how to do that.”

  “Well—I’m not sure it’s possible,” Jacob said, reaching down for Ezra’s hand, where it was pressed against his belly. “Or if that’s your responsibility. You build something for the kids now, and it’s up to them after that. Maybe they’ll carry on the way you’d like, and maybe they won’t. But it’s their choice.”

  “Yeah,” Ezra said softly, and
it didn’t sound like he was entirely convinced, but his arms loosened around Jacob.

  “It’s like they say—” Jacob said and then stopped, not sure if Ezra knew this story yet. Maybe it was only a memory of his own. “Did I ever tell you about Shelley Berman’s son?”

  “Come again?”

  “I thought you knew this one already. I think about it a lot, so I thought I must’ve told you,” said Jacob. “The comedian, Shelley Berman—he was from the 1960s, I think. Maybe later. He had a son who was twelve years old, studying for his bar mitzvah. The boy was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Does this sound familiar?”

  “No, keep going.”

  “Okay. All Berman wanted was to see his son become a bar mitzvah. Well, that wasn’t all he wanted, obviously, but he was fixated on it. Not for status or pride, exactly. It was as if fulfilling this tradition, meeting this milestone would mean that he’d brought his son to completion in some way. Closure. The boy was dying, he was so weak, but he made it. The bar mitzvah happened in the hospital room, but it happened. And then the boy died. Years later, in an interview, Berman told this story. He was choked with tears and he said, ‘I’ve been taught a terrible lesson. The future is a breaker of promises.’”

  Ezra spluttered with laughter, as though it were a punchline. “What—I can’t believe you never told me that. I could’ve been using that line all the time.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be a funny story, Ezra.”

  “It wasn’t, it’s not.” Ezra put his arms around Jacob again, burying his face in Jacob’s dark hair for a moment. “Relevant as all hell, though. The future is a breaker of promises, man. That’s exactly what the future is. Like, this is the kind of thing I want to teach those kids. I want to tell them that the future is a breaker of promises. And about Cleopatra’s nose, and Cúchulainn ignoring the omens, and Handsome Lake seeing the end of the world, and the rabbis saying all this beauty which is sinking into the earth, and Perdigon the troubadour running away to hide in the Silvabela monastery, and Margot in the vineyard. The Taltos and the Sacred Disease. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never understand all the things other people have told me until I tell them to someone else. Does that make any sense at all?”