by John Kessel
The home where he and Amestris had lived for the last twenty years was more luxurious than any that had existed in the Society when he was growing up. They had two bedrooms, separate studies, a fully equipped kitchen, a dining room, and a large living room with a balcony. A Kazedi grand, sleek and black as obsidian, dominated the living room.
Erno sent his bag to the bedroom to unpack itself, set some clarity tea brewing, opened the doors to the balcony to let in the air, and stood looking out over the lushly wooded neighborhood. The single-family homes here were more widely separated than any that had existed before the reformation. His and Amestris’s was one of the more modest ones, but it still was well beyond where anyone had lived while the Board of Matrons ruled.
Thinking of this did not steady Erno.
When the tea was done he took it into his study. It brightened him, and his mind flitted from thought to thought. At his desk he tried to work on the speech he would give at the memorial ceremony in three days. So far he had a sentence:
When preserving the status quo becomes the sole raison d ’être of a society, then change becomes treason.
An hour later he still had only the one sentence. The tea didn’t clarify anything. Whose status quo was he talking about? The Society before the reformation? Or the Society as it was today? He had no answers. What did he have to say about the disaster that anyone needed to hear? Could he repudiate his entire career? Would anyone believe him? Would anyone care?
He leaned way back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. He didn’t think about anything for a while.
Renewalists would be holding a counter-ceremony, and protesters would be at the memorial. The colony was in a ferment it had not seen in decades. Young people everywhere were disgusted with the way things were. The Renewalists had a slate of constitutional amendments they propounded to restore some laws to their Cousins state. They called the Matrons era a utopia in comparison to the Society under the new constitution. He could not argue with them.
Every person Erno touched was restive.
Maybe if he could talk to the Renewal organizers. He changed clothes. He got out a casual jacket, nice but nothing excessive. Lemmy might be at the meeting; he was one of Renewal leaders. Erno finished his tea and took two more serentol before he left. He’d used serentol a lot back when he was in the legislature; it took the edge off his anger and let him listen more than he was able to otherwise. He used it too much.
Erno set off across the floor of the crater. Late afternoon sunshine threw green shadows of the trees onto the path, reminding him of his walk thirty years before through Lemmy’s test forest that had made so much money for the people who had stolen it—that had made so much money for Erno—and created Kazedi Woods in Persepolis. Amestris had been in Persepolis with Sam for the last month. Erno considered calling her, but he did not want to call her: He wanted her to call him. In truth, despite the fact that they had not spoken for a week, he had nothing to say to her.
He wondered if Amestris had visited Cyrus. At the age of eighty Cyrus had begun to show symptoms of incurable neo-Alzheimer’s. He’d had the foresight to have himself scanned when he first obtained the IQSA. Once he understood the inevitable decline he faced from the disease, he had a magpie implanted in his brain to record his experiences. He left instructions that when the Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point where he could not function, a new Cyrus should be created from the scan and the recordings used to bring that new version of himself up to date on what had happened to him in the decade since the scan.
Unfortunately, the new Cyrus had not really experienced that decade, and the recordings were a pale shadow of the life Cyrus had lived, so his new version’s ability to integrate with the ten-years-advanced world he’d been thrust into was imperfect. Worse, the new Cyrus was subject to the same decline, so after another ten years he had to repeat the process. Twice now the increasingly demented Cyrus had been hidden away in a private care facility and replaced by a younger version.
Each time he did this, he lost more of himself. Gradually, Cyrus’s influence had leached away. The Eskander family and his business associates were increasingly unhappy to be ruled over by this poorly functioning simulacrum of the Shah of Ice, with his spotty memory and ignorance of the contemporary world. Eventually day-to-day control of his commercial empire was taken out of his hands.
The original Cyrus, over a hundred years old now, did not know who he was and could neither feed nor bathe himself. The first duplicate, ninety-one, was in a room next to the first. Rumor had it that the current Cyrus was failing, and Erno didn’t know whether Afroza would bother to repeat the resurrection yet again.
Amestris seldom visited him. Yet there she was in Persepolis again, while Erno was here.
Erno wobbled a little as he walked along the greenway. He told himself it was not the drugs, but dizziness from that morning’s episode of zero-G. The path wound its way through the woods, crowded with parents and children, young people on rollers, cyclists, couples walking.
Eventually he came to the far side of the crater and climbed the slope to the home of Eva Maggiesdaughter, where Carey Evasson had grown up, almost a shrine to the Cousins family. He hesitated at its doorstep.
With the serentol, the tea, his fatigue, the confusion weightlessness had brought to his inner ears, and his climb up the crater, he felt woozy. He stood up straight and knocked on the door.
• • • • •
After saving the final version of the vid she’d made for the counter-memorial, Mira lingered at her editor. Frozen on the screen was an image from the hours of video that camera midges had recorded on the day of the dome disaster: Carey and Erno attempting to lift a sheet of titanium while an emergency worker crouched to pull out the person trapped beneath.
Carey’s long hair, dusty with gray powder, has come undone and fallen over his forehead. His lips are slightly parted, almost a grin. Shoulders tense, he is in complete control of his body, doing what he needs to do.
In making her vid she’d used no images of Carey, but it had been impossible to avoid him in the raw footage. She couldn’t help studying them. How young he looked. He had been ten years older than Mira, and now Mira was nineteen years older than he was on that day he died. She’d learned not to spend much time looking back and it had served her well, but for a moment she wondered what that Carey would think if he saw her today. A pillar of the family. A responsible person, the crazy part of her no longer on public display.
The point of the counter-memorial was to look forward: The Renewalists sought to bring the Society that had existed before the takeover into the future. They treated the intervening thirty years as a series of mistakes. Mira thought the ones born since that day, who had no memory of the Society as it had been, had idealized it. But they were right to use the past as a rallying cry, and she and the Green family were doing what they could to support them.
Roz stuck her head into the editing room. “They’ll be here soon. Come out and eat something.”
Then Roz noticed the image on the screen. She toggled on the room lights. “Too much time in the dark.”
Mira smiled at her. “More light!” she said.
She turned off the pixwall and followed Roz out to the kitchen. They had some gazpacho and talked about the meeting. Mira and Roz had offered the Green home as the site for the Renewalists to prepare their counter-memorial. Most of the family was out or at work, but as a director of Darkside Materials & Fabrication, Roz could take the time off, and Mira worked out of their home.
By the time they’d finished eating, the organizers started showing up. First Harald Smithsson and Greta Barbarasdaughter, married to each other in the kind of two-person union that the OLS had tried to make the norm. Strozzi Palmyra, an immigrant from Tycho. Alessandra Sofiasdaughter. All of them under forty. The last to arrive was Lemmy Odillesson, at one hundred and five a generation older than Roz and Mira.
They gathered aroun
d the big table out on the terrace, afternoon sunlight throwing shadows of trees across their faces. A light breeze rustled the leaves.
Mira showed them her video, A Brief History of Anger, and talked about the installations she had arranged. They discussed the order of speakers, the music, the expected turnout. They reviewed their precautions to keep the event peaceful and the contingencies in case the police tried to provoke trouble.
For the most part Roz and Mira kept quiet. The younger people liked having them around—Roz was a highly placed executive and Mira well known for the Fowler Project, which had preserved much of the cultural heritage of the Society. They brought with them the cachet of having worked with Eva. Lemmy, who over the last thirty years had parlayed his knowledge of biotech into prominence as an opposition leader, received the younger organizers’ deference for his legendary persistence.
The afternoon was fading and Mira was in the kitchen getting something to drink when there was a knock at the front door. She detoured to the entryway and opened it. On the doorstep stood Erno Pamelasson.
Taken aback, she said, “Well, this is a surprise.”
“May I come in?” His eyes were guarded. He was dressed in an expensive jacket of natural fibers, and he shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. He’d aged pretty well considering the toll his career had taken, but he looked tired.
She opened the door wider and ushered him into the living room. Strozzi sat in one of the chairs there. The others, out on the terrace, looked up with expressions of astonishment.
“You know Harald Smithsson and Greta Barbarasdaughter?” Mira said.
“We haven’t met in person,” Erno said.
“This is Betty, this is Alessandra, this is Strozzi.”
“Good afternoon, Administrator,” Harald said.
“Hello, Erno,” Lemmy said.
Erno brightened. “Hello, Lemmy,” he said. “It’s been a while. Good to see you. Have you seen that latest on the subtropical ecology they’re planning for Rima—”
“What brings you here?” Greta asked.
Erno stood uncertainly. Mira realized that he was lifted. She gestured to an empty chair, and he sat. “I’ll be brief. You may know that I’m scheduled to speak at the memorial. I would like to speak out on behalf of your movement.”
“You aren’t a part of our movement,” Greta said. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“What exactly do you expect to say?” Alessandra asked.
“I was thinking I might finish the speech I started to give at the Reform Party rally thirty years ago, that day everything came crashing down. I was going to speak out in defense of the Society and against intervention by the OLS. I was going to say that the injustices that existed here didn’t warrant the destruction of a way of life that gave people less exploitation than I had lived through over my ten years in the other colonies.”
“It’s too bad you ignored all that when you took over,” Harald said.
Erno took it without protest. “I made many mistakes. But I’m here to offer you any help I can give. I know that the current administration is not well disposed toward you. I don’t have as much influence as you might imagine, but I do know some people in the First Minister’s office and in the legislature. I offer my name.”
“Your name,” Greta said.
“You think your name would help us?” Strozzi asked.
“Well, I—”
“We know of your efforts,” Greta said. “But we don’t want you to speak.”
“I was there on that day. I’ve never wavered in my public opinion that no Cousins were behind the disaster. It was an outside job.”
Lemmy spoke up. “The people who support us know that, Erno. The people who don’t know that won’t support us.”
“I can’t help?”
“Certainly you can’t speak for us,” Greta said. “I’d prefer, actually, if you didn’t even come out in support, Mr. Administrator. We’re trying to create a new movement here, without any obligation to the past.”
“But what you want is to restore the Society to what it was intended to be. From the time I was a boy, that’s what I’ve wanted. I may not always have been able to do what I wanted, and sometimes my judgment was bad, but I’ve spent most of my life trying.”
Betty laughed. “That’s not the general perception of your career.”
“You sold off the public enterprises,” Strozzi said. “You built a freezer system.”
“You were a functionary for repression,” Alessandra said.
“That’s really not fair. I prevented the abolition of Cousins marriage. I—”
Strozzi shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do. You can’t understand us. You’ll say things we don’t believe.”
“When you were sixteen you were a radical,” Alessandra said. “How old are you now?”
Erno looked at Mira. “I’m the same age as Mira—fifty-eight.”
No one said anything. The daylight beyond the lanai had gone, and Roz turned on the room lights.
Mira could tell that Erno expected her to speak up. She saw the repressed anger in his face. She’d seen that same expression when they were seventeen at his trial for exile, and later, when they were twenty-eight hiding in the cab of the truck in the stacked-pinch reactor lab. It was not an attractive expression, yet she felt for him. She said nothing.
Finally Greta spoke.
“I’m not saying your motives were bad. I think you did what you thought was best. You accomplished some good things. But in large part, you failed.
“We don’t want our movement saddled with the baggage of your failures,” she went on. “You have enemies, friends, allies, connections with the OLS, with Persepolis, with the economic exploiters. You’re a wealthy man, and you have history. Anything you say, even if we agree with it completely, will get buried under that baggage. If it didn’t crush our efforts before they began, it would at least distract everyone from the work that needs to be done.”
Erno looked around at their slightly embarrassed faces. He looked at Roz. He looked at Mira. What did he expect her to say? Mira supposed she needed to say something.
Before she could speak there came a noise from the front of the apartment. The sound of the street door. Loud voices in the entryway, laughter, and Val and Carey walked into the room, gym bags over their shoulders.
“Mother,” Val said to Roz, “I don’t want to disappoint you, but—” He saw Erno sitting there, and stopped. “What’s he doing here?”
No one spoke. Erno finally said, “I was asked to speak about your father at the memorial—”
There was a silence. “That’s priceless,” Val said. “Going to talk about how he died?”
“I tried to go with him; he asked me to find you instead.”
“Please, don’t do this,” Roz told Val. “Erno’s come to offer his help with the counter-memorial.”
“I was there, Mother. He knew that anybody who went up the tower would never come back alive.”
Carey stepped forward. “Will you ever be done with this morbid shit? It was thirty years ago. None of it matters. Come on, Val. Martina is waiting.”
Val turned on him. “It matters.”
“Well, you can do what your mother says,” Carey said. “I don’t have to listen.” He stalked back toward his room.
Roz looked exasperated. Val was ready to keep at Erno, but Mira intervened. “Erno, you should go. We all appreciate your offer, but it isn’t helping us.”
Erno said, “You let them believe the worst about me.”
“Please, go,” said Mira.
“Yes, go,” Val said.
Without another word, Erno left the room. They heard the front door close after him. Val dropped his bag and went into the kitchen.
“That was ugly,” Alessandra said.
“I hope he didn’t tell anyone he was coming here,” Harald said. He stepped back onto the terrace and picked up one of the tablets. “We have a few more things to
settle, and we can all go home.”
Roz said to Mira, “I’ll talk to Val; you’ve got Carey.”
“All right,” Mira said. Roz headed for the kitchen while Mira went back to Carey’s room.
Reviving Carey had been Cyrus’s idea. As soon as he got his hands on the IQSA and its associated files, Cyrus had used the old scan of Carey to produce a new copy. Carey came out of the assembler thinking he had just entered the scanner seconds ago—a beautiful, promising, funny, irreverent, trouble-loving fifteen-year-old boy.
They told him that twenty years had passed. They told him that he himself had died, not once, but twice over. They told him that he and Roz—this couldn’t be Roz, this grown woman—had a son. He met that son, who was the same age he was. Everyone Carey knew was twenty years older.
Eva fought for custody of Carey, but the legal status of a duplicated person was not established. Cyrus became Carey’s legal guardian—after all, this new Carey was Cyrus’s creation—but he allowed Carey to live with Eva if he wanted to. Carey tried it, but the strangeness of it drove him away within a week, and he ran back to Persepolis and Cyrus.
From day one Carey was a celebrity. The fact that his older, dead self was famous all over the moon, called by some a terrorist, by others a hero, made it impossible for him to be treated as a person in his own right.
Val had been shaken by Carey’s death. Then Carey was suddenly back, not as his father but as a boy: When Val finally met him, he realized, a boy equally shaken, so similar to him that they might have been brothers. Val turned seventeen, and Cyrus offered to sponsor his career in glass art. Val had gallery shows in Persepolis and New Guangzhou and in the process got to know Carey. Cyrus made sure that both had money and were given every attention. They rented an apartment together. They became famous, on vid throughout the system, pursued by AI cameras, never a moment’s privacy. They toured the moon, visited the Earth, Mars.
Eva and Roz objected to all of this, but under the new government Val and Carey were adults and the Greens had no power over them. Both women were deeply upset by this situation, amid all the other changes they were fighting. Eva had lost all formal political power, but coming after her earlier theoretical work, the revelation of the IQSA made her one of the most famous scientists in the solar system. She used that. Whenever she was invited to scientific gatherings, whenever she was asked to comment on public affairs, she brought her commitment to the Society of Cousins with her and became a roving ambassador for the preservation of the old ways.