Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep

by Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep- The Best New Science Fiction from Sweden (retail) (epub)

  But anyhow. The old girl said that the water only was part of what she intended to give our world. 'My time is up,' she said, 'and your world is ready to accept what I have to give you.' At first, I didn't think very much about that. But I could see he and Mwunga exchange glances. That was when I started thinking.

  She died the next day.

  I didn't see her die. I had been bathing in that wonderful water and came back, almost naked, letting Africa's sun caress my body. My young body. Can you imagine ... I remember it as yesterday ..." He made an obvious effort, shook his feelings off and sat up straight. "I saw her sitting in her usual place, in front of those steep pyramids, while Mwunga stood in front of her. I saw her offering something to him. Saw him accept it. She closed her eyes. And then – I was maybe a hundred feet away – then a kind of wave seemed to sort of undulate through her. And she fell, very still, so slowly that the Negro in front of her had time to catch her and lay her down on the ground ..."

  His language made me want to get up and walk away. But I stayed. Just a few minutes more ...

  He went on. "I called out to Mwunga. He turned around. I immediately saw guilt in his face.

  'What happened?' I said.

  'Granny' – he called her that – 'granny, she die.'

  'How do you know?' I said. 'You're no doctor? Maybe she just fainted?'

  'I know, boss.'

  And he was right. She was dead. And somehow she had died by her own volition. I could tell. Sometimes one just knows. I said:

  'What was that she gave you?'

  You see, I already knew. But I asked anyway. Courtesy, you know.

  'Nothing, boss,' the Negro said.

  'Don't push me,' I said. 'Now get it out.'

  He only wore a loincloth. I could just have ripped that off him. But I rather wouldn't. One has some decency in one, isn't that right? So instead I bored my eyes into him. He gave up in two seconds. Started fumbling in his loincloth.

  'But it mine, boss,' he said. 'She say it mine ...'

  He gave me something that looked like a folded piece of paper. I accepted it very carefully – knowing where he'd kept it – and tried to unfold it. Which was impossible. Instead, it fell apart. Or rather it divided. Divided into hundreds of pages, maybe thousands. Every impossibly thin page was covered in writing. I tried to flip quickly, which wasn't that easy – every page seemed to divide over and over again, as if they were infinitely thin. The letters were Latin but I couldn't understand a single word.

  'Is Lango,' he said. 'My language. But boss, his letters.'

  Of course, his tribe had no written language.

  'What does it say?' I asked. I was fascinated by that material. Have you read Moby Dick? Melville's book? When they cut blubber in slices and the mates cry 'Bible leaves, Bible leaves?' I stood there and let the pages split under my fingers. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Bible leaves.

  Mwunga hadn't answered my question. 'What does it say?' I asked again.

  He hesitated.

  'Come on, out with it.'

  He opened his mouth. Gaped like a fish.

  'Eh ... it be ...'

  'Well?' I raised my hand, just a little. That made him decide.

  'She say, it be answers to all questions. Water we drink here. Never be sick. She say, go to other Earths. Boss, she say great witchcraft.' His eyes were wide. Round.

  'I'll take care of it.'

  'No!' He almost attacked me. Immediately changed his mind. 'Boss, she say it mine.'

  'Yours?' I said. 'Why the hell should it be yours?'

  He hesitated again. I could see him steeling himself. 'Boss, she say my people be the real people. She say, first people. She say boss people be ...' he hesitated over again ... 'lower race.'

  I couldn't help laughing. 'Lower race?'

  'I just say what she say, boss!' His eyes rolled in his black face.

  'I'll take care of it,' I said. I put all those pages together and they promptly melted together, becoming a single folded paper again.

  'But boss ...'

  'Be quiet,' I said. I held my hand up and the darkie was silent. I said: 'Bury her.'

  You see, I'd already started thinking about possibilities. I needed a Lango interpreter whose English was better than Mwunga's. If I could find that interpreter, and if just a tenth of what the Negro said was true ... I could be a millionaire. A dollar millionaire.

  We left the next day. Followed the water downstream this time.

  You can already guess what happened. The darkie was the person he was. During the third night he went for me, on a ledge above a waterfall. He tried to grab that strange paper. I punched his stomach but he already had hold of it. He yanked and I punched. The paper unfolded. Mwunga yanked till I almost lost my grip. I tried to get a better grip and the weird paper divided again; we were right above the abyss, fighting desperately, I tried to get a new grip but only caught a piece, a little corner of inconceivably thin leaves. A corner!

  And in that same moment Mwunga lost his footing. There was a ripping sound when the thin material tore. The only thing that had kept him on the cliff was my holding on to the paper.

  He fell.

  I shouted out 'No!' since he was falling with almost the entire document. Mwunga screamed an unintelligible word, probably something similar, in his own language. He and the document disappeared into the raging waters a hundred feet below.

  I made it to civilization. The effect of the water wore off and I caught malaria – I arrived as a gibbering fool. Spent six weeks in a hospital at Wadi Halfa. Refused to let go of the fragment. Still held it when I woke."

  The old man fell silent. I realized that I'd been spellbound by his tall story. I shook my head to clear my thoughts.

  "You don't believe me?" he said. He groped in his pocket. "I still have it ..."

  He reached over with something. I took it. It actually looked as paper, a corner of a page, and it was actually full of unintelligible words. I frowned when it parted under my fingers and the torn page became many.

  "Same writing everywhere ..." I said in surprise.

  "You don't believe me," he said. "Of course you don't believe me."

  "Wait," I said. "You mean to say ... you mean you let humanity lose a document that could have changed the entire world? Just to prevent it from ending up with a black man?"

  He looked at me as if I was an idiot.

  "Well, what would Mwunga have done with it?" he said. "Showed it to a medicine man? Danced around a fire, chanting prayers to his ancestors? No, young man, that belongs to Europe. Not to a bunch of naked savages."

  I shook my head again.

  "So what does it say?" I asked presently, trying to relieve the atmosphere.

  He looked wistful. "I found an interpreter. In Wadi Halfa. He translated the fragment for me. I still know it by heart." He cleared his throat, thinking, and then said: "It says: 'From world to world in the intensity of light across the membranes in the centering horn.'"

  I stared.

  "I know," he said apologetically. "But it's impossible even to know which lines are complete. By the way, you're right – every page has the same words. When I saw it that first time, it wasn't like that. Every page was different. But with the pages torn ... it's as if the document was a hologram or something, and this fragment just repeats that one phrase until it's connected to the whole ... And the words might as well mean 'Intense light from other worlds against the cornea.' I've thought about this for years and years." He gestured. "'Sharp spear of blinding light from another celestial body through the fabric of space.'"

  I tried to remember. "'From world to world in the intensity of light across the membranes in the centering horn?'"

  "Right." He shrugged. "That interpreter was a darkie and knew nothing of physics. Or maybe he thought of it as poetry. I still think there's something in that phrase. Something fascinating. But you don't believe me and it doesn't matter."

  "I don't believe you," I agreed. "You've been lying from
the start. You are a liar and a racist, and I –"

  At that moment I was interrupted, when there was a commotion from the next room. The oldster followed my glance. The butler Edmund came walking towards our table, a little too fast for his dignity.

  I could hear S's agitated voice over the din.

  The butler bowed quickly to me. He tried to conceal a certain shortness of breath. "Sir," he said, "your friend, he is leaving now ..."

  I tried to protest but quickly fell silent when a man of quite another type appeared from nowhere: under his tails he was a very modern bodybuilder, full of steroids up to his ears. He grabbed my arm and pushed me toward the exit. The old man didn't call after me, which surprised me a little.

  I guessed what had happened and S. confirmed the whole thing, out in the street a moment later: Big stakes, a lost hand, trouble. Thrown out.

  I told the old man's story in a few sentences. S. laughed heartily, unperturbed, as far as I could tell, by the intermezzo in the club.

  "So," he said, "how did you know he was lying?"

  "I barely got the chance to tell him," I said. "He claimed to have been in Africa during the war. But the Aswan dam wasn't planned until the fifties."

  S. made an impressed face. "Well, did he confess?"

  "No," I said. "Brace yourself. He was quite unperturbed. He said, 'Oh, I am sorry. I was talking about the Assuan dam. The first one, the lower dam. Those names are easy to mix up. I wasn't there during World War II. I was there during the Boer war.'"

  "The Boer war? When was that?"

  I met his gaze. "Around 1900."

  S. stared at me. Then he laughed again. "So he claimed to be a hundred and fifty years old. 'From world to world in the intensity' ... what was that?"

  "'From world to world in the intensity of light across the membranes in the centering horn.'"

  "What a wonderful cock-and-bull story."

  "Yes ..." I said. "Really. An inspired liar."

  "Did he try to have that weird paper analysed?"

  I shrugged. "No idea. Never thought to ask."

  My hand closed around the paper in my pocket.

  That's almost all. We went to my hotel and parted after a quick hug. The next morning, the paper was gone. I immediately suspected S., called him for days but got no answer.

  He was then found dead. He had starved to death at his kitchen table with two pieces of paper – two thin but almost infinite stacks – in front of him. Nobody seemed to care and I took the stacks. Saw them melt into one.

  I counted the pages. This took me a few weeks. I may have been slightly off but I counted to 1 327 653 corners of pages. All had the same text – except one. I'm sure I saw a different page. But I didn't want to stop counting at that time and when I backed up the page was gone. I know I saw it. Never found it again.

  The old man in the club didn't call for me when I left. I think he wanted to get rid of the paper. But S. was a fanatic gambler. He must have felt the kick for every infinitely thin Bible leaf he lifted.

  I still have the stack. Somewhere is that other page, a page with some important words. A clue. Maybe something that might work as a key and suffice to display the entire hologram. Something that may reveal the gift that the old woman wanted to give to Mwunga. I can't count the nights I've stared at that stack, quietly cursing the old fool who was so sure of his superiority that he stole the gift and ruined it.

  I've found a Lango teacher and begun my studies. The language is difficult. But I have to. Those fragments could change the world. Maybe they've just become jumbled. Maybe, when I have a sense for the language, my teacher and I will try rearranging the pages. Just a few tries. See what happens.

  The membranes in the centering horn.

  "One Last Kiss Goodbye" – Oskar Källner

  She walked the last stretch through the woods. The birds were singing and the wind played in her hair. The driver had protested when she left the car, but she wanted to feel the sun on her face and hear the road gravel crunch beneath her shoes. Also, it would give her some more time.

  Time.

  She laughed and nervously fiddled with the glasses in her blouse pocket. A lump grew in her stomach. At one time she had loved to walk here. Those memories were now just shadows from a distant past.

  The road passed over a crest and she glimpsed the cottage, traditionally painted in red with white trim. Everything felt smaller, the cottage, the garden and the lake. Suddenly the trees leaned over her. She couldn't breathe. She took some quick steps backward and touched the earpiece.

  "Who would you like to call?" said a synthetic voice.

  With a tug she tore the earpiece from her ear and pushed it deep into her pocket.

  What am I thinking? she thought, and clenched her fists. I must do this. Otherwise, I will always wonder ...

  She walked slowly toward the house, one foot in front of the other. She tasted the words which she had prepared; let them dance over her tongue again and again. She was good with words. At the holo interviews before the trip, she had quickly become the journalists' darling. There was not a magazine whose cover she had not graced, not a major talk show where she had not been a guest. After the return the media people had been even more persistent. But she did not have patience with them anymore. Nor did she need the attention.

  The forest parted and she stood in front of the cottage. It seemed to be in disrepair. The gray wood shone through in places and the roof was missing a few tiles. The garden was overgrown and in a corner a wheelbarrow and an old rake were rusting away. Around the corner the plot was cut short as it swiftly sloped towards the black lake. An old canoe lay in the grass, a life jacket slung beside.

  There suddenly came the sound of splintering wood. She walked round the corner and found him swinging an axe against the chopping block. She stopped aghast. His hair was almost white. Fine wrinkles traced across the face. His bare arms had big, blue veins and wrinkled skin. She had always known he would be old when she returned. But it was one thing to know, quite another to see it with her own eyes. She cleared her throat.

  "Hello."

  He stopped mid-swing and stared at her. The axe fell from his hands. The look on his face went from shock to anger and finally settled on disgust. She would have preferred anger.

  "What are you doing here?"

  His eyes bored into her. They were as dark and intense as when they first met. She tried to speak, tried to bring out the rehearsed words, but they got stuck in her throat. Suddenly he turned his back to her, as if she was not there, and picked up the axe. A powerful swing and chips and splinters flew all around. He dropped the axe and leaned heavily against the block. His whole body shook. She took the final steps over to him and gently put a hand on his back. He spun around and pushed her away.

  "Don't touch me!"

  His face was red and eyes wide open. He stepped away from her, breathing heavily as if he had just run a marathon.

  "I just wanted ..."

  But he did not listen.

  "How dare you come here?"

  "I wanted to see you."

  An animalistic growl rose from his throat.

  "But I don't want see you." He pointed toward the road. "Get lost!"

  "But I've already sent the car away. It will be dark in an hour. You're not going to send me back into the woods, alone, are you?"

  "You can call it back in no time."

  She picked the earpiece out of her pocket and threw it in the lake.

  "Not now, I can't."

  He stared at her with bloodshot eyes and, for a moment, she was almost afraid of him. Then he sighed and turned his head away.

  "I could lend you my phone, but I know you. You'd probably just throw it in the lake as well. I'll drive you into town. Tomorrow." He yawned. "Now it's too late." He crossed his sinewy arms. "An old man needs his sleep."

  Then he climbed the stone steps and disappeared into the house. She was still standing on the lawn. He did not return. After a few minutes of silence s
he plucked up her courage and followed suit.

  Nothing seemed to have changed. Wooden bookcases filled with old-fashioned paper books lined the walls of the small living room. The floor was dominated by a brown couch and an old, brass floor lamp. In the hallway outside the kitchen was a small round table with two wooden chairs. On the walls hung paintings of Nordic artists: Anders Zorn, Carl Larsson and John Bauer. A voice came through the kitchen door.

  "Sit."

  She did as she was told and sat on a chair. He came out with a steaming cup in each hand and a packet of cookies clamped under his arm.

  "Coffee with a lot of milk," he said and sat it down in front of her.

  He remembers how I like it.

  "Thank you."

  He pulled out a chair for himself and sat down.

  "You can sleep on the couch tonight." His voice hardened. "But tomorrow, I want you out of here."

  He held the cup tightly with both hands, as if he was afraid it would fall out of his grip. His fingers were wrinkled with blunt, chipped nails. Suddenly she jolted.

  He still has the wedding ring!

  He followed her gaze. His face darkened.

  "This is nothing," he said, and tapped the ring against the cup. "You made sure of that."

  She looked down at her own hands. Her ring was long gone. She had thrown it into a sea of lava on Siponia. It had felt like final liberation back then. Now the gesture somehow felt paltry.

  "Why did you do it?" He stared down at the tabletop. The words were strangled, as if he couldn't get air. "I've never understood it. I did everything for you! I took care of the house. I cooked and cleaned. I took care of everything. It didn't bother me that you were in the orbital shipyards for months on end because I knew that you would always come back. I was proud of you." He lifted his gaze. A lone tear found its way down his cheek. "Why did you abandon me?"

  She tried desperately to find the words that she had planned to say. But they refused to come to her aid.

  "When they asked me ..." she tried. "You have to understand. It was the first expedition to leave the solar system, and see other stars, other worlds. I simply couldn't say no."