The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  Hellene spooned sugar into her teacup, returning to the sugar bowl at least six times before she was done. She drank down the sweet, syrupy mess with a small moue of distaste. “These are only the crude physical manifestations of what optimization makes possible. Mentally there are hardly the words. Absolute clarity of thought, even during emergencies. Freedom from prejudice and superstition. Freedom from the tyranny of emotion.”

  There was a smooth, practiced quality to her words. She’d said she was in human resources—now I knew she was a corporate recruiter. One salesman can always recognize another.

  “Sometimes,” I said carefully, “I enjoy my emotions.”

  “So do I—when I have them under control,” Hellene said witha touch of asperity. “You mustn’t judge the experience by a malfunctioning mediator.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It would be like judging ecological restoration by the Sitnikov Tundra incident.”

  “Of course.”

  “Or seeing a junked suborbital and deciding that rocket flight was impossible.”

  “I understand completely.”

  Abruptly, Hellene burst into tears.

  “Oh God—no. Please,” she said when I tried to hold her and comfort her. “It’s just that I’m not used to functioning without the mediator and so I get these damned emotional transients. All my chemical balances are out of whack.”

  “When will your new mediator be—?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Less than three days, then. That’s not so bad.”

  “It wouldn’t be, if I didn’t need to see my children.”

  I waited while she got herself under control again. Then, because the question had been nagging at me for hours, I said, “I don’t understand why you had children in the first place.”

  “Blame it on Berne. The Bureau des Normalisations et Habitudes was afraid not enough people were signing up for optimization. It was discovered that optimized people weren’t having children, so they crafted a regulation giving serious career preference to those who did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people like me are necessary. Do you have any idea how complicated the world has gotten? Unaugmented minds couldn’t begin to run it. There’d be famines, wars…”

  She was crying again. This time when I put my arms around her, she did not protest. Her face turned to bury itself in my shoulder. Her tears soaked a damp rectangle through my shirt. I could feel their moisture on my skin.

  Holding her like that, stroking her infinitely fine hair, thinking of her austere face, those pale, pale eyes, I felt the shunts and blocks shifting within me. All my emotional components wheeled about the still instant, ready to collapse into a new paradigmatic state at the least provocation. The touch of a hand, the merest ghost of a smile, the right word. I could have fallen in love with her then and there.

  Which is the price one pays for having a wild mind. You’re constantly at the mercy of forces you don’t fully understand. For the moment I felt like a feral child standing on the twilight lands between the cultivated fields and the wolf-haunted forests, unable to choose between them.

  ***

  Then, as quickly as it began, it was over. Hellene pushed herself away from me, once again in control of her emotions. “Let me show you something,” she said. “Have you got home virtual?”

  “I don’t use it much.”

  She took a small device out of her purse. “This is an adapter for your set. Very simple, very safe. Give it a try.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s a prototype recruitment device, and it’s intended for people like you. For the space of fifteen seconds, you’ll know how it feels to be optimized. Just so you can see there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Will it change me?”

  “All experience changes you. But this is only a magnetic resonance simulacrum. When the show’s over, the lights come up and the curtains go down. There you are in your seat, just as before.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, “if you’ll agree to try out something for me afterwards.”

  Wordlessly, she handed me the adapter.

  ***

  I put on the wraparounds. At my nod, Hellene flicked the switch. I sucked in my breath.

  It was as if I had shrugged off an enormous burden. I felt myself straighten. My pulse strengthened and I breathed in deep, savoring the smells of my apartment; they were a symphony of minor and major keys, information that a second ago I had ignored or repressed. Wood polish and hair mousse. A hint of machine oil from the robot floor-cleaner hiding under my bed, which only came out while I was away. Boiled cabbage from a hundred bachelor dinners. And underneath it all, near-microscopic traces of lilac soap and herbal shampoo, of Ambrosie and Pas de Regret, of ginger candies and Trinidadian rum, the olfactory ghost of Sophia no amount of scrubbing could exorcise.

  The visuals were minimal. I was standing in an empty room. Everything—windows, doorknob, floor—had been painted a uniform white. But mentally, the experience was wonderful. Like standing upon a mountain top facing into a thin, chill wind. Like diving naked into an ice-cold lake at dawn. I closed my eyes and savored the blessed clarity that filled my being.

  For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt just fine.

  There were any number of mental exercises I could try out. The adapter presented me with a menu of them. But I dismissed it out of hand. Forget that nonsense.

  I just wanted to stand there, not feeling guilty about Sophia. Not missing her. Not regretting a thing. I knew it wasn’t my fault. Nothing was my fault, and if it had been that wouldn’t have bothered me either. If I’d been told that the entire human race would be killed five seconds after I died a natural death, I would’ve found it vaguely interesting, like something you see on a nature program. But it wouldn’t have troubled me.

  Then it was over.

  ***

  For a long instant I just sat there. All I could think was that if this thing had been around four years ago, Sophia would be here with me now. She’d never have chosen optimization knowing it would be like that. Then I took off the wraparounds.

  Hellene was smiling. “Well?” she said. She just didn’t get it.

  “Now it’s your turn to do something for me.”

  For a flicker of an instant she looked disappointed. But it didn’t last. “What is it?”

  “It’ll be morning soon,” I said. “I want you to come to Mass with me.”

  Hellene looked at me as if I’d invited her to wallow in feces. Then she laughed. “Will I have to eat human flesh?”

  It was like a breath of wind on a playing-card castle. All the emotional structures my assemblers had been putting together collapsed into nothingness. I didn’t know whether I should be glad or sad. But I knew now that I would never—could never—love this woman.

  Something of this must have showed in my expression, for Hellene quickly said, “Forgive me, that was unspeakably rude.” One hand fluttered by the side of her skull. “I’ve grown so used to having a mediator that without it I simply blurt out whatever enters my head.” She unplugged the adapter and put it back in her purse. “But I don’t indulge in superstitions. Good God, what would be the point?”

  “So you think religion is just a superstition?”

  “It was the first thing to go, after I was optimized.”

  ***

  Sophia had said much the same thing, the day of her optimization. It was an outpatient operation, in by three, out by six, no more complicated than getting your kidneys regrown. So she was still working things out when she came home. By seven she’d seen through God, prayer, and the Catholic Church. By eight she had discarded her plans to have children and a lifelong love of music. By nine she’d outgrown me.

  Hellene cocked her head to the side in that mannered little gesture optimized businesspeople use to let you know they’ve just accessed the time. “It’s been lovely,” she said. “Thank you, you’ve been so very kind.But no
w if you’ll excuse me, I really must go. My children—”

  “I understand.”

  “I face a severe fine if I don’t see them at least twice a month. It’shappened three times so far this year and quite frankly my bank account can’t take it.”

  ***

  On the way out, Hellene noticed the portrait of Sophia by the door. “Your wife?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s exquisite.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She is.” I didn’t add that I’d killed her. Nor that a panel of neuroanalysts had found me innocent by virtue of a faulty transition function and, after minor chemical adjustments and a two-day course on anger control techniques, had released me onto the street without prejudice.

  Or hope.

  That was when I discovered the consolation of religion. Catholics do not believe in faulty transition functions. According to the Church, I had sinned. I had sinned, and therefore I must repent, confess, and atone.

  I performed an act of true contrition, and received absolution. God has forgiven me.

  Mind you, I have not forgiven myself. Still, I have hope.

  Which is why I’ll never be optimized. The thought that a silicon-doped biochip could make me accept Sophia’s death as an unfortunate accident of neurochemistry and nothing more, turns my stomach.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  Hellene waved a hand in the air without turning around. She disappeared in the direction of Queen Street Station. I shut the door.

  From Hill Street, which runs the height of Glasgow’s Old City, you can stand at an intersection and look down on one side upon Charing Cross and on the other upon Cowcaddens. The logic of the city is laid clear there and although the buildings are largely Victorian (save for those areas cleared by enemy bombings in World War II, which are old modern), the logic is essentially medieval: The streets have grown as they will, in a rough sort of grid, and narrow enough that most are now fit for one-way traffic only.

  But if you look beyond Cowcaddens, the ruins of the M8 Motorway cut through the city, wide and out of scale, long unused but still fringed by derelict buildings, still blighting the neighborhoods it was meant to serve. A dead road, fringed by the dead flesh of abandoned buildings.

  Beyond, by the horizon, were the shimmering planes and uncertain surfaces of the buildings where the new people lived, buildings that could never have been designed without mental optimization, all tensengricity and interactive film. I’d been in those bright and fast habitats. The air sings within their perfect corridors. Nobody could deny this.

  Still, I preferred the terraces and too-narrow streets and obsolete people you find in the old city. The new people don’t claim to be human, and I don’t claim that being human is any longer essential. But I cling to the human condition anyway, out of nostalgia perhaps but also, possibly, because it contains something of genuine value.

  I sat in the straight-backed Charles Rennie MacIntosh and stared at the icon. It was all there, if only I could comprehend it: the dark dimensions of the human mind. Such depths it holds!

  Such riches.

  Scherzo with Tyrannosaur

  A keyboardist was playing a selection of Scarlotti’s harpsichord sonatas, brief pieces one to three minutes long, very complex and refined, while the Hadrosaurus herd streamed by the window. There were hundreds of the brutes, kicking up dust and honking that lovely flattened near-musical note they make. It was a spectacular sight.

  But the hors d’oeuvres had just arrived: plesiosaur wrapped in kelp,beluga smeared over sliced maiasaur egg, little slivers of roast dodo on toast, a dozen delicacies more. So a stampede of common-as-dirtherbivores just couldn’t compete.

  Nobody was paying much attention.

  Except for the kid. He was glued to the window, staring with an intensity remarkable even for a boy his age. I figured him to be about ten years old.

  Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, I went over to stand next to him. “Enjoying yourself, son?”

  Without looking up, the kid said, “What do you think spooked them? Was it a—?” Then he saw the wranglers in their jeeps and his face fell. “Oh.”

  “We had to cheat a little to give the diners something to see.” I gestured with the wine glass past the herd, toward the distant woods. “But there are plenty of predators lurking out there—troodons, dromaeosaurs…even old Satan.”

  He looked up at me in silent question.

  “Satan is our nickname for an injured old bull rex that’s been hanging around the station for about a month, raiding our garbage dump.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. The kid looked devastated. T. rex a scavenger! Say it ain’t so.

  “A tyrannosaur is an advantageous hunter,” I said, “like a lion. When it chances upon something convenient, believe you me, it’ll attack. And when a tyrannosaur is hurting, like old Satan is—well, that’s about as savage and dangerous as any animal can be. It’ll kill even when it’s not hungry.”

  That satisfied him. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad.”

  In companionable silence, we stared into the woods together, looking for moving shadows. Then the chime sounded for dinner to begin, and I sent the kid back to his table. The last hadrosaurs were gone by then.

  He went with transparent reluctance.

  The Cretaceous Ball was our big fund-raiser, a hundred thousand dollars a seat, and in addition to the silent auction before the meal and the dancing afterwards, everybody who bought an entire table for six was entitled to their very own paleontologist as a kind of party favor.

  I used to be a paleontologist myself, before I was promoted. Now I patrolled the room in tux and cummerbund, making sure everything was running smoothly.

  Waiters slipped in and out of existence. You’d see them hurry behind the screen hiding the entrance to the time funnel and then pop out immediately on the other side, carrying heavily-laden trays. Styracosaurus medallions in mastodon mozzarella for those who liked red meat. Archaeopteryx almondine for those who preferred white. Radicchio and fennel for the vegetarians.

  All to the accompaniment of music, pleasant chitchat, and the best view in the universe.

  Donald Hawkins had been assigned to the kid’s table—the de Cherville Family. According to the seating plan the heavy, phlegmatic man was Gerard, the money-making paterfamilias. The woman beside him was Danielle, once his trophy wife, now aging gracefully. Beside them were two guests—the Cadigans—who looked a little overwhelmed by everything and were probably a favored employee and spouse. They didn’t say much. A sullen daughter, Melusine, in a little black dress that casually displayed her perfect breasts. She looked bored and restless—trouble incarnate. And there was the kid, given name Philippe.

  I kept a close eye on them because of Hawkins. He was new, and I wasn’t expecting him to last long. But he charmed everyone at the table. Young, handsome, polite—he had it all. I noticed how Melusine slouched back in her chair, studying him through dark eyelashes, saying nothing. Hawkins, responding to something young Philippe had said, flashed a boyish, devil-may-care grin. I could feel the heat of the kid’s hero-worship from across the room.

  Then my silent beeper went off, and I had to duck out of the late Cretaceous and back into the kitchen, Home Base, year 2082.

  ***

  There was a Time Safety Officer waiting for me. The main duty of a TSO is to make sure that no time paradoxes occur, so the Unchanging wouldn’t take our time privileges away from us. Most people think that time travel was invented recently, and by human beings. That’s because our sponsors don’t want their presence advertised.

  In the kitchen, everyone was in an uproar. One of the waiters was leaning, spraddle-legged and arms wide against the table, and another was lying on the floor clutching what looked to be a broken arm. The TSO covered them both with a gun.

  The good news was that the Old Man wasn’t there. If it had been something big and hairy—a Creationist bomb, or a message from a million years upline�
�he would have been.

  When I showed up, everybody began talking at once.

  “I didn’t do nothing, man, this bastard—”

  “—guilty of a Class Six violation—

  “—broke my fucking arm, man. He threw me to the ground!”

  “—work to do. Get them out of my kitchen!”

  It turned out to be a simple case of note-passing. One of the waiters had, in his old age, conspired with another recruited from a later period, to slip a list of hot investments to his younger self. Enough to make them both multibillionaires. We had surveillance devices planted in the kitchen, and a TSO saw the paper change hands. Now the perps were denying everything.

  It wouldn’t have worked anyway. The authorities keep strict tabs on the historical record. Wealth on the order of what they had planned would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

  I fired both waiters, called the police to take them away, routed a call for two replacements several hours into the local past, and had them briefed and on duty without any lapse in service. Then I took the TSO aside and bawled him out good for calling me back real-time, instead of sending a memo back to me three days ago. Once something has happened, though, that’s it. I’d been called, so I had to handle it in person.

  It was your standard security glitch. No big deal.

  But it was wearying. So when I went back down the funnel to Hilltop Station, I set the time for a couple hours after I had left. I arrived just as the tables were being cleared for dessert and coffee.

  Somebody handed me a microphone, and I tapped it twice, for attention. I was standing before the window, a spectacular sunset to my back.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “let me again welcome you to the Maastrichtian, the final age of the late Cretaceous. This is the last research station before the Age of Mammals. Don’t worry, though—the meteor that put a final end to the dinosaurs is still several thousand years in the future.” I paused for laughter, then continued.

  “If you’ll look outside, you’ll see Jean, our dino wrangler, setting up a scent lure. Jean, wave for our diners.”

  Jean was fiddling with a short tripod. She waved cheerily, then bent back to work. With her blond ponytail and khaki shorts, she looked to be just your basic science babe. But Jean was slated to become one of the top saurian behaviorists in the world, and knew it too. Despite our best efforts, gossip slips through.