by Steven Brust
“Yes,” Jimmy said.
“Usually,” corrected Ren, a touch of bitterness in her voice.
* * *
I want you to understand our complacency here is due to the fact that we know our intrusions: one, are personal and respectful, and two, make things better, but Jane’s outrage is correct and admirable, and her courage in calling us on it is, I hope, inspiring.
—Oskar
* * *
“That’s crazy,” said Jane. “What happens if someone just, I don’t know, goes off on his own, and tries to fix something in some crazy way?”
“Then,” said Oskar, “that person is likely to be shot in the back three times and throw us all into a crisis and drag in a few innocent strangers, as well.”
Ren was away from the table before Jimmy realized she’d stood up.
* * *
If Oskar made one more snarky comment about Phil or implied again that he’d deserved to get shot, Ren thought she might—
Or if Jimmy, for that matter, much as Ren loved him, revealed another secret idiocy of theirs that she didn’t know about because she hadn’t gotten all of Celeste’s memories, Ren was going to—
Or if Oskar answered her door and let people in or kept them out like he lived there, Ren could—
Or if they both decided it was okay for Kate to titan without even looking at Ren, or announced Jane and Phil were the priorities, or told her to take some time to pull herself together, Ren would—
And if either of them acted one more time like Jane was the one with the big problem here, Ren was going to lose her ever-loving mind.
She picked up the omelet plates and carried them to the sink.
“But it works?” Jane asked. “Most of the time?”
“Yes.”
Ren could hear Jimmy’s warmest smile in his voice as she scraped the plates.
“Most of the time it works, and things get better.” Jimmy’s head nodded inside his folds of neck. “Just a little bit.”
Oskar shifted forward, elbows on the table. “Sometimes it gets quite a lot better. There are times when we have been able to marshal our disparate resources and make a courageous move instead of a merely cosmetic one.”
Jimmy said, “Do you call it ‘cosmetic’ when—”
Ren turned the water and the garbage disposal on and Jimmy’s voice got lost in the metal grinding, but it wasn’t working. For them, this was another problem to solve, another stub, another recruit, another bit of meddlework. Ren kept feeding food scraps to the drain, cramming them in with her fork. Cleaning usually made her feel better, but she was integrating about as smoothly as the disposal gears with the fork tines.
Jimmy’s velvet hands wrapped her wrists, freed the fork from her fingers, and turned her away from the spinning handle. He flipped the disposal off, and folded Ren against his chest. She let her forehead drop against him, but couldn’t lift her arms to hug him back. She just stood there.
“Ren.” Jimmy’s voice resonated in his piano-deep chest. “I know. I miss him too.”
Ren nodded, and he tightened his massive arms around her.
“SB 1070 was more than just meddlework to him, Jimmy. It represented something, or stood for something, about optimism, maybe.”
Jimmy nodded. “I can see how it might. Immigration and the idea that any nation or bit of land could belong to one type of people has always been problematic for him.”
“It was personal to him, and it killed him.”
“Ren?”
“We need to hold the dust ritual.”
“Of course.”
“I want you to pick the memory.”
“Bien sûr,” Jimmy said, and his voice caught. A shudder went through his massive frame, then a sob.
Ren put her arms around him. Her fingers didn’t reach and she put her palms flat on the heavy silk of his shirt.
“I made a Fibonacci spiral for him in my Garden,” she told Jimmy. “He has to come back.”
“There is no question.”
“I already told her that,” Oskar said.
“Be quiet now,” Jane told him, and left him at the table to put her arms around Ren and Jimmy.
“We need a recruit for Phil,” Oskar muttered. “And Irina’s up to something. And we have to have the dust ritual.” Oskar threw himself out of his chair. “I’m going to swim,” he announced. “Because here I can. It’s still freezing in Milwaukee.”
* * *
“Kate,” Daniel said, opening the passenger door of Kate’s minivan as she pulled up in front of the hospital doors, “Right on time.”
Kate kept her smile friendly, but not overly so. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I just got out of prison.” Daniel sat down heavily. “They made me sit in a wheelchair and they pushed me out the door, like, ‘Fly, little bird! You’re free now!’” Daniel gave a wry chuckle as Kate put the van in gear. “Whatever. I was starting to think I’d spend the rest of my life there. Staph infection, pneumonia—what else was I going to catch?”
“I think we got everything.”
“We? You said this morning you didn’t really work there.”
“Right. Sorry,” Kate said. “They.”
“Are you doing it again? What you did before, with the mint tea, and the train sounds?” He was studying her face, but not with the aesthetic appreciation he had earlier.
“Meddling? No, now we’re just talking. I’ll tell you anything. What do you want to know?” Kate pulled into traffic. She drove, tracking the turmoil in the young man next to her more closely than the changing traffic lights. He’d want to know a lot of things, starting with “Are you insane?” Kate tried to figure out a way to answer that without making him ask. She said, “I said some pretty wild things this morning, and I’ll be saying more this afternoon, so maybe try to treat it as a game. Pretend I’m telling you a story, and go along with it as a thought experiment. Ask yourself, what if it was all true?”
“I can do that,” he said carefully. The sweet flintiness of yesterday was gone, but not the frustrated, nascent heroism.
Kate straightened her spine and swallowed the tenderness blocking her throat. “You’re at loose ends,” she said. “You had a defining moment where you almost died. You know you don’t want to go back to working for the city, but you look forward and it’s terrifying. You want to do something big, but all your options are tiny. So I’ll tell you a story, and maybe we’ll both learn something from it.”
She took Bartlett to Panther Hollow Road, found a parking place, and they got out. She let Daniel amble in the sunlight until she guessed his leg was about to start throbbing, then led them to a bench. It was cool and cloudy, but pleasant.
“So, this group that you’re a part of, are you all ‘heroes?’” Daniel did that thing where you make quotation marks with your fingers.
“I’m certainly not!” Kate said. “Gracious. Look at me! I’m a mom!”
Daniel laughed, which gave Kate permission to be serious. “I never risked my life for anyone the way you did. The Incrementalists recruited me because I had a patient who needed an abortion—preeclampsia, it used to be called toxemia. I diagnosed her, submitted the paperwork, the court refused, I performed it, they threw me in jail for a while, and I lost my license.”
“I didn’t know that still happened.”
“Things were different then.”
“Then?”
“1961.”
Daniel stared. “You can’t be more than—”
“I’m ninety,” she said, flirting just a little.
“That’s … okay.”
“Remember now, just pretend. It’s all make-believe.”
“All right.” Daniel scrubbed at the new growth on his scalp. “What would I ask you if I believed you?” he mused. “All right, I’ll go with the obvious: why do you look so young? Are you immortal or something?”
“Immortal? No. Or something? Yes.”
“Okay. Start there. Start explaining with tha
t.”
“Right you are!” Kate patted his knee and settled herself on the bench. “A lot of this we know and understand, but there are a couple of big things we don’t, so let’s start with those. Imagine that forty thousand years ago…”
* * *
Ren watched Jimmy settle himself on the living room sofa, his body somehow more cushioned than the upholstery, his skin’s warmth and depth making the gray velvet look wan by comparison. He closed his dark-lashed eyes and an indulgent smile curled his lips.
“He’s going to seed what’s been happening to keep everyone up to date,” she told Jane. “Then he’ll graze for one of Phil’s memories for the dust ritual. He’ll pick the right one, one that Incrementalists all over the planet can share today and not just remember, but relive, as if they were Phil.”
“Okay,” Jane said.
“Then this afternoon, each one of our disbanded little band will hold one broken piece, one portion of my dead and dismembered almost-husband and together, we will re-member him.”
“Okay,” Jane said again. “A little Osiris, but okay.” She checked messages on her phone while Ren made a quick post to the Incrementalists forum announcing the time of Phil’s dust ritual.
“Let’s go outside,” Ren suggested, and led Jane out into the heat and shade of the back patio. She knew Jane believed the earth and sky were imbued with a sentient benevolence. Even if they weren’t, they couldn’t hurt, and Jane looked like she needed all the help she could get.
What she got was Oskar, in Phil’s entirely-too-small-for-him trunks, moving through the water like a pale shark, all cartilage and teeth. When he spotted Ren and Jane, he stood up, waist deep in the water, dripping and winded. Ren thought Jane looked a bit the same.
“Ready for me to run you home?” he asked.
“What? Oh. No,” Jane said. “Actually, I’ve messaged Sam.”
Oskar squeezed water from his hair in a way that did something lovely to his arms.
Jane gave a tiny sigh. “My husband,” she clarified. “Your new recruit?”
“And?” Oskar wiped water from his face.
“He’s on his way.”
“Excellent!” Oskar clapped his big hands together and arced himself onto the decking in a fluid swoop that took half the pool with him. “I’ll go graze for his switches. Ren, do you have anything already?” He wrapped his narrow hips in one of Ren’s bath towels. “Maybe I should get Jimmy to help.”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Ren said.
Oskar looked at her. “Why is it,” he asked with a superior sniff, “that everyone feels the need to be so fucking vulgar today?”
Jane snorted.
“Jimmy is seeding what’s happening, and then he’s grazing for the dust ritual,” Ren explained.
“I know that,” Oskar said. “How long will it take Sam to get here?”
“Twenty minutes maybe,” Jane said.
“That’s not a lot of time, Ren. Jimmy could—”
“No.”
“But—”
“But nothing, Oskar,” Ren said. “But not a solitary god damned thing.”
“Ren, do you want…” Oskar stopped. Ren could see him trying to make his face gentle. “Look, you miss him. You want him back. We have an excellent potential recruit on the way right now. He’s altruistic. He actively wants to make things better. He’s not overly, narcissistically attached to his own personality. His wife is willing to let him go. Ren. We may not get a better chance. Why not get Phil back as soon as possible? Why choose to keep on grieving?”
“I don’t even know what he looks like.”
“So?” Oskar looked from Ren to Jane, uncomprehending.
“It matters,” Jane told him.
Oskar shrugged. “Jane’s pretty enough.”
Jane blushed, and it was Ren’s turn to look between them in confusion. “Pretty enough for what?” she asked. She had felt the tension between Oskar and Jane, but she didn’t think he had, or would comment so baldly on it.
“People select partners of approximately comparable physical attractiveness,” Oskar explained toweling himself. “Jane’s husband should be about as good-looking as Jane is. Which should more than suffice.”
Jane dusted invisible dust from her yoga pants. Ren took a slow breath. “It’s not about good-looking enough.”
“What then?” Oskar rounded on her drippily. “What is it Ren? Does he need to have a mustache? Does he have to fit in Phil’s clothes? Why do you care? It’s Phil. Or it will be. The man you love.” He took her shoulders, trying to see some hint of rationality in her eyes. “Would you be this fussy if he’d lived through the shooting, but with new scars? Or missing a leg? How much of his old body would be enough for you?”
Jane hit him. Or she tried to. Oskar caught her hand and stepped back and Jane missed her footing and nearly fell into the pool.
“Stop it!” Ren said, surprised by the screaming in her very quiet voice. “We are not going to act this way,” she said. “It’s sordid, and embarrassing, and you all are the closest thing I have to family, and we are not going to be like this. I do not allow it. We will be better than this, starting now. Dignified. Unified. We will hold Phil’s dust ritual at three thirty our time. I’ve already written the group and said so. Jimmy is right now re-seeding the memory we’ll all share. And it will be a memory of something noble. And not divisive. Because we do make things better, god damn it. And we will not meddle with Sam when he comes over. We will meet him like normal people and we will tell him the truth. Jane, you can go home with him afterward and talk it all over, and you can make whatever decision is best for the two of you. Together. And you, dear Oskar, will be pleasant, like a normal person. Friendly. Agreeable.”
“I don’t—” Oskar started, but Jimmy interrupted.
“Jane?” Jimmy’s bulk filled the opening he’d made in the sliding door. “Is this your phone?” He held the buzzing thing in his hand.
“Yeah, thanks!” Jane took the phone from him, walking a few steps toward the house as Jimmy came out onto the patio, smiling into the grinding sun.
“How’s everything out here?” he asked.
“Fine,” Ren said.
“Oskar?”
“Normal as fuck.”
“Sam’s going to be a while,” Jane said. “Some kind of ruckus at the library.”
* * *
Jimmy returned to the sofa and closed his eyes. Having seeded highlights of their current events for the group, he prepared his mind to graze for Phil’s dusting—a pleasurable prospect. Sometimes, when he wasn’t in a hurry, he would just fly or jump up to his western turret and sit in the window, looking out over the rolling hills and meadows beyond the stream. His subconscious, it seemed, had a thing for beauty. He was given to understand that Matsu’s Garden was also beautiful, and so were Irina’s and Stacy’s. Most of them weren’t; most were simple and practical, and if you wanted something of beauty you made a seed of what you wanted, like Phil did. Or you just concentrated on the purely practical, like Alexander. Or ignored it entirely, like John and Ramon.
But Jimmy felt fortunate in the natural beauty of the area surrounding the castle his subconscious provided for him, and sometimes, before grazing, he would take some time to simply sit in the turret window and enjoy it.
It could be overdone, of course. It was possible to become so used to sitting in a high place knowing one is perfectly safe, that one returns to the real world with normal caution unnaturally suppressed. Jimmy had accidentally stubbed himself that way once, about a hundred and fifty years ago, and it took a quarter of a century for his fellows to stop kidding him about it.
So after only a few minutes, he jumped down to the courtyard. The doors opened and he took himself past the entrance hall to the inner hall, and so to the withdrawing room. His first seed, of his first spiking, was a large chair, and the first seed of his most recent spiking was, as always, a footstool. Jimmy sat in the one, put his feet upon the other, and leaned back h
is head.
Ah, Phil.
Across the room, the fire roared into life, and Jimmy stared into it. He brought the flames into the room, engulfing himself and everything else and imagined being warmed just a little by those flames because a bit of realism gave the imagination something to latch on to.
He set the fire to searching for seeds of Phil. The first Jimmy examined was of the first time he had met Phil. Jimmy turned it into a pear. He loved pears. He made a mental note to pick up a good pear brandy back in the real world. He took a healthy bite, the juice running over his chin.
It was after the American War for Independence, and just before the Great Revolution. Jimmy had met Phil in La Havre, where his ship landed, and he was the first one off it. Phil spoke perfect French, then, with only the least trace of the accent of Picardy, and had recognized Jimmy at once and approached him. A tiny little man, balding, and missing a hand, Phil—going by Carter in those days—had hugged Jimmy saying he was glad to see him, and that if he didn’t find a decent bottle of wine in the next ten minutes, he’d stub the younger man. Jimmy had laughed and found Carter the wine. They ate roast goose in roux while Carter told story after story about famous people in the past, each more ribald than the last, and it had taken Jimmy a long time to realize Carter was making them up. He decided later that Carter must have known how intimidated Jimmy had been to meet a man who had lived for eighteen centuries and wanted to put him at his ease. It had worked.
It wasn’t the right memory for Phil’s dust ritual: it wasn’t his most recent Second, and it was too much about Jimmy, not enough about Phil, but Jimmy played out the whole seed because he wanted to. He could find things in the Garden pretty quickly when it was needed, but he took his time with this; the search felt like his own, private ritual. What could that gracious, easygoing man have done to make someone want to murder him?
He knew they’d get Phil back. He was certain of it. He was just superstitious enough not to take any comfort in that certainty for fear he might jinx it. But in truth, with Phil so deeply in love, so involved in the work, and so full of passion, how could there could be anyone whose will might overpower his? So, yes, Jimmy knew they’d get Phil back out of stub.