Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  He was drinking coffee. He hated coffee. Their nest-egg was gone and foreclosure’s fatal blow was next. But even that wasn’t cut and dried. It wasn’t like the bank could turn around and sell the land, could it? Either way, the investment was a write-off, and if any compensation ever arrived, it would be for the bank, not David and Evelyn Ketchen. Because that was how the world worked.

  Or used to.

  Now? Who knew?

  Last night, Ev had been excited. She’d been saying things that Dave thought had more to do with reassuring the kids than being possible, even though all the technical terms were clearly way over their heads. It had to do with financial structures and what some economist was calling Market Disarticulation, the plucking and prying apart of all those things once interconnected. The dismantling of the entire global economy, and what it meant for investment strategies and asset relocation. Of course, the bitter pill at the very end was the one investment deemed safe in terms of value: real estate.

  But Ev had simply laughed, waving away that advice. “No! It’s idiotic. It’s one last grasp at the straw. Value? What’s that even mean now?” Her face had been flushed, offsetting her golden blonde hair in a way that had reminded Dave of that one skiing holiday in Banff all those years ago, before they’d sworn off planes and started up their ledger of carbon-heavy frivolities that they could do without. “Dave, are you listening to me? We have to stop thinking in the old way. That’s all going away.”

  “And are we?” Mark had then asked. Twelve-year-olds had knack of getting back to the point. The things that needed doing. It was a whole other side to his son, one that Dave had never seen before. The dreamer suddenly pragmatic, like throwing a switch. But it wasn’t a switch Mark should have felt the need to make. He’d done it because his dad was too broken to utter a single damned word. The boy took over from the father, but Dave had been too numb to feel any pride. Too self-pitying, to be honest.

  “We don’t have to go anywhere at all,” Ev had said, smiling down at her son, and then at Susan, whose teenaged misery had just found new heights of despair at the prospect of a different school, a different town or city or, as her desperation went over the edge, a refugee camp on the Canadian border. “Don’t you see? The bank can’t kick us out unless we decide they can. They can’t evict us.”

  “So what do we eat?” Susan demanded. “How do I buy clothes? Make-up? Get my hair done?”

  Ev had blinked. “Suze, you’ve never bought make-up in your entire life. And anyone can cut your hair in that style—it’s a brush-cut for crying out loud. You wear second-hand jeans and—”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “Look, darling, we still have the garden and the greenhouse. And besides, you’ve seen it online. No one goes hungry. No one at all.” She’d paused, to take them all in with incredulous eyes. “Are any of you getting it? It’s all changed! All of it!”

  All right, then, Dave had wanted to say. All right, then.

  But what do we do? With our lives. What the fuck do we do with our lives?

  Too numb to talk, too past caring to feel, too pathetically eager for sleep’s blessed oblivion.

  Her enthusiasm sputtered and died on the dining room table. In sudden anger, she’d thrown up her hands and stood. “Fine. You’ll figure it out sooner or later. I’m going to bed.”

  But she hadn’t gone to bed. She’d gone back to her laptop.

  How would she take it, he wondered, when the internet service went down due to unpaid bills? When all that information stopped tapping her dopamine? When the howling silence filled her skull?

  It was a normal kitchen. All the usual appliances, the dripping tap, the ticking clock, the sunlight pouring in. Yet it was packed solid, so solid with its invisible truth that Dave could barely move.

  Destitution. Like concrete settling, still settling. You couldn’t see it from this angle, but a single nudge of the chair, and you couldn’t see anything else. He had a reason for not moving. This was it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Ah yes, the search for consciousness by dismantling the brain. I’m not the first to pose the question this way, but when was the last time you dismantled your radio looking for the little guy doing all the singing?”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  “Beliefs provide the unseen, rarely examined scaffolding upon which attitudes, opinions, and certainties are founded,” said Adam. “They are held to be self-evident and unassailable. Most conflicts, no matter the scale, are essentially a clash of such belief systems. Does this seem obvious, Samantha August?”

  “Yes,” she murmured, eyes on the screen where ER and ambulance attendants were wheeling out covered corpses amid flashing lights and a blustery wind, with the banner beneath the live feed scrolling past announcing the total number of dead at eleven hundred and twenty-six.

  “The manipulation of power is an ancient force among human cultures,” Adam went on, “and from these early battles of will, a tribe comes to define itself, its range of acceptable behaviors, its taboos, its daily rules of conduct. These are the foundations of belief systems. Conformity becomes a pressure invoked with every passing moment. Rarely is it recognized that the most insidious element of this system is to be found in the earliest triumphs of power. All that follows is thereby tainted. Samantha August, you seem to have disengaged with us.”

  “Eight hundred seventy-three orphans,” she said.

  “When selfishness becomes a pathology there will be many innocent victims,” said Adam. “Religious conviction can, if unchecked, lead to a form of ego-centrism that dehumanizes everyone else, and would make of them little more than symbols, each one sacrificed to a single ego. In this sense, you return once more to the many reprehensible expressions of unconstrained power. In the case of these mass cult suicides, such power is denied in the only manner available to you.”

  “Children don’t understand any of that,” Samantha said. She pulled her attention away from the screen, rose, and began pacing. “To them, it’s just Mommy and Daddy going away forever. Abandoning them. And now strangers surround them, offering blankets and sweets.”

  “I cannot refute your observations, Samantha August. Nor can I reasonably defend the necessary limits of my intervention with regard to voluntary suicide. Such acts are the supreme expression of free will, after all. As to the human wreckage left in the wake of these acts, I have no defense.”

  After a long moment, she shook her head. “I need to talk to my husband. I need to sit down with him, late into the night, talking until the silence finds us. Then I’d go outside and watch the sun rise.”

  “Your husband is being electronically monitored.”

  “Of course he is. Canadian government?”

  “Curiously, no. American.”

  “Oh, right. Sovereignty is a one-way street when you’ve got the biggest gun.” She paused. “Can’t you block them?”

  “I can. This will of course escalate their panic.”

  “And in the old times, they’d then abduct him. But they can’t do that anymore, can they? So block them, Adam. Leave them to their panic.”

  “Very well. A physical visit between you and your husband, however, could prove difficult.”

  She shook her head. “I know. Never mind that. But enough of these text messages. I want to hear his voice. I want him to hear mine.”

  “Understood. Preparations have begun to enable this. In the meantime, Samantha, shall we resume our discussion of religious crises in the wake of my arrival?”

  She sat back down on the bed, rubbed at her eyes. “Good grief, how can faiths so strongly held prove so fragile?”

  “They hold up the entire house of cards in which one lives, Samantha,” Adam replied. “The fragility is more pervasive than it might at first seem to be. The fiercer the certainty the more vulnerable it is. Our arrival and Intervention has shattered that certainty for many of your kind. One must then examine the details of those convictions. To begin: Humanity stands alone betwee
n God and the beasts of the wild. Two: God’s grace of the awakened soul is a gift given exclusively to humanity. Three: the defined institutions of human religion each purport to be the singular legitimate path to God. Four: your planet is the sole home of God’s chosen children. Five: human domination and superiority are both by the will and desire of God.”

  “Right,” Sam interjected, nodding behind her hands. “One: humanity does not stand alone between God and the beasts of the wild. Two: the divine spark has scattered far wider than is believed, thus diminishing our sense of being special. Three: there are myriad paths to God. Four: we’re not unique and God’s children occupy countless planets in this universe. And five: this one is the real kicker, because it knocks us off that pedestal from which we justified our every act of domination as being righteous in the eyes of God. Because you show up, change the rules, and make it clear in no uncertain terms that we’re not in charge anymore.” She looked up. “Is that about it, then?”

  “Too often the virtue of humility is confused with shame,” said Adam. “That said, there is plenty to be ashamed about.”

  “Ouch.” Then she managed a dry laugh. “Don’t you get it yet? The shameful things are the first things swept under the rug. History is constantly revised. Truths pared down, crimes whittled away.” She shrugged. “But how much of that is a survival mechanism? How much of that keeps us sane?”

  “How much of it permits the continuation of crimes, the repetition of atrocity, the persistence of patently destructive behavior?”

  “Careful,” she murmured, “you’re showing the fangs behind that benign smile.”

  “Imposing denial seems to have elicited the fiercest responses, Samantha. More so than any other form of intervention. The Exclusion Zones are already being accommodated. The ending of all wars and military conflicts has already begun redefining diplomacy, compromise, and negotiation. Even the global market is adjusting, as best it can, to the closure of numerous industries. Governments are redefining their roles as bastions of stability, triggering unprecedented examples of co-operation. The core value systems of political parties continue to evolve.”

  “And yet.”

  Adam was silent for a moment, and then the AI said, “Indeed.” She returned her attention to the scenes on the screen. “Freedom or death. The number of suicides is growing at an exponential rate—”

  “Not universally, Samantha.”

  “No.”

  “Cultures in which collective precepts successfully counterbalance individualism are proving more adaptable to the Intervention.”

  “Some people just don’t like being told what they can and can’t do.”

  “Some people use that line to rationalize being assholes.”

  Samantha barked a surprised laugh, and then shook her head. “Those people don’t like being called out. Used to be, the media would do just that. But then the media got co-opted, bought up and now tows the party line. About the same time we lost our collective ability to be so outraged by things that we actually did something about them.”

  “Individual freedom among humans was lost a long time ago, Samantha. What remains is but an illusion, a cherished one to be sure, but nonetheless an illusion. Now, may I ask, what is the primary factor responsible for ending human freedom?”

  “Economics.”

  “Yes. Capitalism is founded on the selective application of freedom among the few at the expense of everyone else.”

  “But every time it’s dragged down, Adam, what takes its place is just as ugly, if not uglier.”

  “Not this time,” the AI replied.

  “Promise?”

  “In economic terms, Samantha, what happens when there is too much of something?”

  “It loses value.”

  “Yes. What would happen when there is too much of everything?”

  “The economy collapses. But … too much of everything except freedom.”

  “The value of freedom has never been truly expressed in economic terms, for the simple reason that freedom as an absolute has never existed,” Adam said. “But let us set freedom aside for the moment and return to notions of scarcity and post-scarcity. As you stated, when there is too much of everything, the economy collapses and a value system based on exchange must find a new paradigm. Now then, in place of the economy as humans recognize it, what arises within a post-scarcity scenario?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why, Samantha, the answer is simple. Freedom. Freedom arises, in a manner not yet experienced by humanity. What remains to be seen, of course, is what you will do with it.”

  She considered that. In her world, in her time, words had lost so much power that despair ever threatened to overwhelm her, although even in that instance, there was an imbalance, as hurtful words retained their ability to savage a human soul. But those of compassion seemed pretty much dead, buried beneath layers of well-earned cynicism. Virtues were readily adopted and corrupted, making a mockery of such things as fairness, integrity, and compassion. As Adam had just intimated, the assholes were winning the battle, souring the world for everyone.

  Yet, beneath it all, there were unspoken words. Those beliefs, core assumptions, unchallenged convictions, that collectively asserted the veracity of being self-evident.

  When they weren’t.

  The Intervention was challenging humanity at that base level, dismantling those unspoken assumptions, proving their falsehood. The notion that it doesn’t have to be that way would need to gain ground on that’s just how it is. She wondered if that was even possible.

  “Your husband’s television has been engaged to permit the two of you to see one another and speak in a less constrained manner.”

  “The television? Hamish never watches television.”

  “He has taken to doing so in your absence, and given the extraordinary events being reported on a daily basis.”

  “He’s watching the news? Good grief, he’s really in a bad way.”

  “Again, my apologies.”

  “Oh, and our television doesn’t have a camera, so how exactly are you pulling this off?”

  “Blanket agency.”

  “Ah. Right.” She stood, faced the nearest screen, and then paused to straighten and smooth down her clothes. “How do I look? Never mind. Oh, and is there anything like privacy here, Adam?”

  “Of course. Once the link is established, I will block out this room. When you are ready to resume our fascinating discussions, Samantha, simply call my name and this will re-establish connection.”

  She watched the images of the suicide event flicker and then fade. “Don’t hold your breath,” she muttered.

  A moment later she was looking at her husband’s shocked expression.

  “… and I said I’d do it. But now I’m not so sure.”

  The expression on her husband’s face was solemn. It was, she suspected, the same expression so many of his patients saw. He was listening, not saying much, but listening. That first rush of delight, relief and pleasure in this contact was now past, and Samantha found herself working through a litany of feelings, confessing in ways she had rarely done before. She was a competent, confident woman, after all. She didn’t do flustered. She didn’t do flailing around, either.

  “Those children, Hamish. Those orphans.”

  He slowly nodded.

  She scowled in return. “For crying out loud, say something!”

  He took his time to gather his thoughts. His hands, cradling a glass of whisky, looked sculpted by Madame Tussaud. They hadn’t moved at all which was something of a relief, since drinking was not her husband’s forte. Of course, these days, the prospect of abuse was no longer an option. Even so, the psychological lure could still exist, the one that simply used whatever was at hand, be it alcohol or morphine or whatever.

  “I’ve sat with enough families,” he finally said, “telling children that they would soon lose a father, or a mother. And if only one parent was left, then I was telling them that they would
be orphans.” He paused, and then sighed. “The generational turn-over. It comes at those precise moments, Sam, when the child takes the place of the parent. When the line is drawn anew. One moment still in front of you, the next right behind you. Just like that.”

  She thought about it. “Okay. But usually those children are already grown up.”

  He shook his head. “Age makes no difference, really. Oh, true, if they’re very young, there’s the question of whether they even comprehend the notion of death. But someone ‘going away forever,’ well, they do get that. And so they run the idea through their heads and you see that passage in their eyes, their faces. Loss, Sam, it’s universal.”

  “Parents getting sick. That’s not quite the same as parents killing themselves. And what happens when those orphans finally find out that their parents tried killing them, too?”

  “Yes. That will be hard.”

  Sam felt a surge of anger, of resistance, flaring up inside. It wasn’t the first time. “This First Contact has blood on its hands. Driving people to extremes, ruining lives, crushing hopes and dreams. Hamish, how can I be party to any of that? What happens to my conscience?”

  He sat back with a heavy release of breath. “Conscience, yes. Well, let me tell you about conscience. To be in the medical profession, Sam, is to be constrained by things we should never be constrained by, not if we want to make our Hippocratic Oath actually mean something. Even here in Canada, we have a hierarchy of response. The most expensive is invariably the rarest, and often the last resort. That applies to pharmaceuticals, diagnosis, treatment—the works.” Those hands finally moved, finally broke their waxen immobility as he set down the glass, and then held them up in a helpless gesture. “I listen to a bunch of symptoms from a patient and is my first thought to schedule an MRI? Well, no. If I did, and if every other GP did, how long the lag time? And what of the cost? Those units don’t come cheap, and they wear out.”