by Neil Clarke
The boy was sent to school, paid for by the studio. He was given a new name, though later in life he, too, would eschew any surname, having no family connections to speak of save to a dead documentarian. He wore gloves, always, and shared his memories as generously as he could with the waves of popular interest in Venus, in Adonis, in the lost film. No, I don’t remember what happened to my parents. I’m sorry, I wish I did. One day they were gone. Yes, I remember Bysshe. She gave me a lemon candy.
And I do remember her. The jacket only looks black on film. I remember—it was red.
I once saw a group of performance artists—rich students with little better to do, I thought—mount a showing of the shredded, abrupt footage of The Radiant Car, intercut with highlights of the great Unck gothics. The effect was strange and sad: Bysshe seemed to step out of her lover’s arms and into a ballroom, becoming suddenly an unhappy little girl, only to leap out again, shimmering into the shape of another child, with a serious expression, turning in endless circles on a green lawn. One of the students, whose hair was plaited and piled upon her head, soaked and crusted in callowhale milk until it glowed with a faint phosphor, stood before the screen with a brass bullhorn. She wore a bustle frame but no bustle, shoelaces lashed in criss-crossings around her calves but no shoes. The jingly player-piano kept time with the film, and behind her Bysshe stared intently into the phantasm of a distant audience, unknowable as God.
“Ask yourself,” she cried brazenly, clutching her small, naked breasts. “As Bysshe had the courage to ask! What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly nurse. What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? I will tell you. For the space is not smooth that darkly floats between our earth and that morning star, Lucifer’s star, in eternal revolt against the order of heaven. It is thick, it is swollen, its disrupted proteins skittering across the black like foam—like milk spilled across the stars. And in this quantum milk how many bubbles may form and break, how many abortive universes gestated by the eternal sleeping mothers may burgeon and burst? I suggest this awe-ful idea: Venus is an anchor, where all waveforms meet in a radiant scarlet sea, where the milk of creation is milled, and we have pillaged it, gorged upon it all unknowing. Perhaps in each bubble of milk is a world suckled at the breast of a pearlescent cetacean. Perhaps there is one where Venus is no watery Eden as close as a sister, but a distant inferno of steam and stone, lifeless, blistered. Perhaps you have drunk the milk of this world—perhaps I have, and destroyed it with my digestion. Perhaps a skin of probabilistic milk, dribbling from the mouths of babes, is all that separates our world from the others. Perhaps the villagers of Adonis drank so deeply of the primordial milk that they became as the great mothers, blinking through worlds like holes burned in film—leaving behind only the last child born, who had not yet enough of the milk to change, circling, circling the place where the bubble between worlds burst!” The girl let her milk-barnacled hair fall with a violent gesture, dripping the peppery-sharp smelling cream onto the stage.
“Bysshe asked the great question: where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know. Adonis returned to his mother, the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld.” Behind her, on a forty-foot screen, the boy’s fern-bound palm—my palm, my vanished hand—shivered and vibrated and faded into the thoughtful, narrow face of Bysshe as she hears for the first time the name of Adonis. The girl screams: “Even here on Earth we have supped all our lives on this alien milk. We are the calves of the callowhales, and no human mothers. We will ride upon the milky foam, and one day, one distant, distant day, our heads will break the surf of a red sea, and the eyes of the whales will open, and weep, and dote upon us!”
The girl held up her hand, palm outward, to the meager audience. I squinted. There, on her skin, where her heart line and fate line ought to have been, was a tiny fern, almost imperceptible, but wavering nonetheless, uncertain, ethereal, new.
A rush of blood beat at my brow. As if compelled by strings and pulleys, I raised up my own palm in return. Between the two fronds, some silent shiver passed, the color of morning.
INT. The depths of the sea of Qadesh.
Bysshe swims through the murky water, holding one of Erasmo’s milk-lanterns out before her. St. John follows behind with George, encased in a crystal canister. The film is badly stained and burned through several frames. She swims upward, dropping lead weights from her shimmering counterpressure mesh as she rises. The grille of her diving bell gleams faintly in the shadows. Above her, slowly, the belly of a callowhale comes into view. It is impossibly massive, the size of a sky. Bysshe strains towards it, extending her fingers to touch it, just once, as if to verify it for herself, that such a thing could be real.
The audience will always and forever see it before Bysshe does. A slit in the side of the great whale, like a door opening. As the Documentarian stretches towards it, with an instinctual blocking that is nothing short of spectacular—the suddenly tiny figure of a young woman frozen forever in this pose of surprise, of yearning, in the center of the shot—the eye of the callowhale, so huge as to encompass the whole screen, opens around her.
About the Author
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.
The Jisei of Mark VIII
Berrien C. Henderson
Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit. Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit.
These were the most consistent sounds Mark Edward VIII had heard each day for the past thirteen years and five months of Sophia Loggia’s declining days. The dampened noises of his own servos provided counterpoint to the deliberate tedium of each day.
Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit. Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit.
They might come to him through the wireless pings of the house’s com-system or via the audiBELL embedded in his synthetic cortex or in the stale yet otherwise antiseptic air of Madame’s upstairs bedroom. Companions, though quite unwelcome.
6:40 p.m.
He read the blinking notice on a free-floating screen, some phantom display ghosting through the air.
Mark VIII, upon expiration of primary employer, return to Clockwork Corp. home office for de-servicing, upgrade, and re-assignment per Section 912.579, Directive 31518.
He pressed the air and disrupted the holographic waves, and the notice dissipated. He shook his gleaming mimetic alloy head. All Mark VIII models came with loyalty A-Life programming, just the thing for a proper butler (or botler in the argot of the consumer) or an eldercare bot, yet that same programming had to be decommissioned for that selfsame model to be perpetually useful. So, loyalty was for terms of service, and those ended.
Marcus went to a bookshelf. Madame Sophia had always insisted, even when her arms wouldn’t work right, that a good dead-tree book, dense though it was with information, was worth all the digitization in the world. He even admired the precision grandfather clock in the foyer; he had to wind it ever so often, and its Old English script on that old analogue face reminded him of the clockwork mechanical past—the golden age of the nineteenth century. Halcyon years, some might say. Madame Sophia even had the most antique of entertainment systems—an old-style stereophonic system complete with record turntable, fully serviceable for the collection of vinyl records she had amassed before her waning years caught up to her. The machine even contained a transistor radio, but that only crackled in obtuse protest of its own impotence.
But, again, they always had the bookshelves.
�
��There will always be time for books and music and such,” came her words. “Do understand and humor an old woman, won’t you, Marcus?” His mimetics conformed to his A-Life mood—a silvered smile, though bittersweet, cut itself in the alloy.
Marcus. Not Mark. Not VIII.
Just Marcus.
The first book she’d asked him to read her was Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
6:58 p.m.
He found the book he needed to read to her, that he thought she might have enjoyed.
He dreaded the idea of leaving; there had been thirteen good years with Sophia Loggia. These last several months, though, had challenged his programming to say the least. All his memories would be wiped in a trice. All combinations of 0’s and 1’s that became them—became him—would drizzle to naught.
A soft, whining alarm went off, and Marcus hurried into the bedroom. His pistons and actuators whispered urgency with his strides. The alarm faded. He surveyed the computer array keeping Sophia Loggia alive: nothing but flat lines and any of a dozen redundant warning chimes.
He placed a gloved titanium hand on her shoulder, then smoothed back her hair (all original, even at 129 years old).
7:12 p.m.
In eighteen minutes, the paramedics would arrive to confirm her death. Around that same time, a pair of human Clockwork Corp. handlers would come.
Damn them, thought the robot.
“I am sorry I do not have anything witty or sentimental to say,” said Marcus, indulging himself an extrapolation. Do humans experience beyond death as suggested by many of the religious tomes he’d read and researched? Like another operating system upgrade? An opportunity for a patch?
“Thank you for this opportunity to serve.” He had been serving her and reading to her for these past months even when she was too far gone to know another presence other than the shadowy one slithering closer each passing day.
He went to the entertainment holo-grid and reached out to begin a spot of music, then shook his head. He instead went to the stereophonic system and fwip-fwip-fwipped through the record albums until he found the one he desired and shucked it ever-so-gently from its sleeve. Record to hub. Needle to record. Flip ON. The turntable spun and noise scritchle-scratchled from the speakers for a few seconds until the strains of Moonlight Sonata began playing as he went to the bathroom and studied his smooth alloy face, the mimetics making him appear appropriately sad although that wasn’t quite right, was it? There was sad, yet there was a sense of no longer.
Off came the gloves. He wiggled the cleanly articulated fingers, ran them over the antique marble lavatory countertop. His tactile input stream coded “smooth” and “imported” and then metalinked through associative content tags “Italy” and “custom-ordered” and “dense.” Mark VIII went out, came back in, and placed a thin, clothbound hardcover book on the edge of the countertop. He traced his fingerpads over the cover and whispered, “Tsunetomo Yamamoto.”
7:22 p.m.
He entered a code in the blue-lit strip on the wall near the linen closet. Now water poured into the tub, just in time for one last bath. He methodically unplugged all wires and removed all tubes from the Sophia’s corpse back in the master bedroom. There were tugs and wet sounds as though the body refused to surrender these accoutrements of medically assisted living and hospice—of the once-living.
Marcus picked up Sophia’s body.
Promptly at 7:30 p.m., Ms. Sophia always had a bath up until her frailty made it no longer feasible.
It was 7:24 p.m.
He still had time before the paramedics came. And the handlers.
He disabled the auto-assist medi-tentacles in their wall sockets. Gleaming cool fluorescent light belayed a soft halo effect to the crown of his head. His servos whined and sssshhhhed under the added weight. Already the Madame’s clothes, robes, slippers, towel, washcloth, and soap stood watch by a platter-sized goferit bot. It looked up at Marcus with its dumb, ovoid, blank face as it skittered forward on thin, insectile legs, then back-crawled like a crab and scuttled into a far corner to observe.
7:26 p.m.
The fount of hot water, steaming as it rippled halfway up the inside of the tub, turned off automatically. He had never actually washed her; he could and couldn’t. His model came specific for inside purposes, basic service functions sans limited exposure to water. That’s what the goferit bots and medi-tentacles were for, not botler models. Surely not a Model Mark VIII.
Sophia had never felt heavy until now the life was gone.
They would come, yes. Come for him after the paramedics came to confirm death. They would arrive and take all good things she had shown him, and within seconds his synthetic cortex ripped through entire libraries and museums and theaters—linking and associating and superimposing. Hyperimposing beyond anything he’d ever allowed himself to do. A fugue state. Wanderlust knowledge for Clockwork Corp. Model Mark VIII Eldercare Robot.
Tennyson . . . In Memoriam
Manet . . . Olympia
Monet . . . Argenteuil
Moonlight Sonata . . . Beethoven
Homer . . . “Sing in me, O Muse, the anger of Achilles . . . ”
Upanishads . . . OM
Musashi Miyamoto . . . Book of Five Rings
Rembrandt . . . contrast
Vitruvian Man . . . da Vinci notebook hidden away upon Bill Gates’s death
Rosetta Stone . . . Linear A
Analects of Confucius
Gilgamesh
The Renaissance canon
The Old Man and the Sea
Mayan calendar
Hagakure
All. All. All in that meta-Alexandrian library of his memory. Thousands of years in seconds down quantum hallways and Heisenberg shelves.
He got in the tub. He lowered himself and her waif-like corpse. Although he had no tactile sense of temperature per se, his shell knew it was a pleasing 44 C, just as Madame Sophia always had requested.
7:28 p.m.
He switched off A-Life schema warning him of his circuits’ being inundated. He reached over and took the washcloth, dipped it, daubed Sophia’s forehead, cheeks, chin.
The goferit bot tic-tic-ticked to the edge of the tub and twittered.
“Yes. I am well aware. Thank you for reminding me,” said Marcus.
7:30 p.m.
His decentralized servos and actuators began a cascade of failures up to his waist. He did not remember any of the other contracts he’d helped fulfill; not after a handful of services’ worth of decommissions. He would never know. That bothered him. He would never remember, but Sophia Loggia had shown him more of humanity with her arts and conversation (while she still could) than thousands upon thousands of downloads could have accomplished. It was her lifetime. Her life. A life.
And they would not take it from him.
A door opened. Startled human faces. “What in the world are you doing? Stand down!”
Marcus said, “Just read it.” He pointed to the book perched on the edge of the marble lavatory and forced a plasticine smile.
With Madame Sophia arched across his legs, he simply took his arms and eased himself down the slope of the tub, helped his own dense body succumb to the water. Ozone crackles and wisps of electric smoke found Marcus.
“Model Mark VIII, stop! You’re ruining your— ”
Yes, he thought, the ruin of it all, as basic input programming stalled and faltered, then the internal imaging, until at last he saw only a thin line of 0’s and 1’s and began composing it before utter system decay ate him like technorganic cancer.
Such a thin . . .
. . . ruin . . .
FOCUS—Just this last . . .
The westering sun
My eyes blinded
Only this tiny shadow of bird or angel
Yet only this: hidden by the leaves
That seesaw earthward —
Stray thoughts in the caress
Of autumn’s whisper.
01000101 01010010 01010010 01001111 01010
010
About the Author
Berrien C. Henderson lives with his family in southeast Georgia. He was born in a small town and currently lives in a farming community. For fifteen years he has taught high school English. Ever-elusive free time he spends with family and late in the evening or late at night, writing speculative fiction and poetry.
Passwords
John A. McDermott
Every four months a security program sent Max an email to his work account reminding him to change his password. The first reminder came two weeks before he had to make the shift or lose access to his incoming messages. The second reminder came ten days before the change was necessary. The third note—a little shorter, even curt—came with a week left before he was locked out. Max ignored them all. It had been seventeen days since the initial message—Dearest Max, A Gentle Missive to Stir You—and three since the last—Attention: You Will Be Denied Access—and still, Max could log on safely, read, respond, ignore, even delete, his mail. The deadline passed and nothing changed.
Max reluctantly read the latest contact this morning, the first in a line of four messages, the yellow envelope pulsing from his mailbox icon, the red flag flipped up. Change Now, is all it said. No, he muttered and shook his head (though no one was there to hear or see him. His cubicle had high beige walls and most of his co-workers had yet to arrive, coffee and umbrellas in hand). He’d deliberately resisted the password change. He was sick of new codes. He’d worked for Bender Incorporated for seven years. A new password every four months (that’s three a year, folks) and the total tally, so far: twenty. The one he refused would have made twenty-one. 21: the year of independence, the year of maturation, the password to full citizenship.