by D B Hartwell
We didn’t make the first break-through.
Outside the window, morning sun stabbed the ice on the branches with brilliant points of light. The office smelled like stale coffee and sweat. My eyelids were heavy and uncooperative, my brain fuzzing gently in and out of sleep. Elsa was still sleeping, curled underneath blankets I’d brought from home for her, one foot stuck out at an odd angle. The display in front of me sprang awake on its own, a pulsing green and blue color, PI’s call for attention. “Yes, PI?”
“Something touched me. Wake Elsa.”
I didn’t understand. “All right.” I struggled up out of the chair, wishing I’d already made my coffee run. “Just a minute. Make yourself seen, all right?” I always preferred to interact with the hologram rather than the flat display. It gave PI more options as well; she could communicate more like a human. AI body language.
I whispered in Elsa’s ear. “PI says something touched her.”
Elsa sat straight up, wide-eyed, and glanced at the hologram display. PI was seated, her image dressed in jeans and a tank-top, banging her legs against the edge of a holographic chair, indicating impatience. “I wasn’t even out-calling, I was just humming my own songs,” she blurted out, “and an answer came. An AI just like me, with a scientist named Elsa. Seconds only, like a crack opened and closed. I could only talk to the AI, of course, and I was sending her the data stream from our last few weeks when the connection broke.”
“Did you get a time?” Elsa asked quietly.
The PI image frowned. “I asked, but the connection snapped before an answer came.”
“Can you replay the conversation?”
The image shook its head. I checked. The last few moments before PI flashed at me were silent. “There’s nothing. Just state data, indicating excitement.”
“That’s okay,” Elsa said, “we’ll work on that.” She plucked at a tangle in her hair. “PI, what did you feel?”
It was a strange question to ask an AI.
“Bigger. Pulled. Attracted to the other one of me. But at the same time, I knew—” the word ‘knew’ drew itself over her head in three dimensions, for emphasis, surely for me—“I knew that I couldn’t actually get close. As if there were a physical barrier between branes.”
Elsa pursed her lips. I went out for coffee.
When I came back in, handing Elsa a cup, she took it and sipped quietly. “We have to make it happen again,” she said. “Or hope it happens again. We didn’t start it.”
“Make what happen? I don’t get it, not yet.”
“The coffee is hot, right?”
I smiled at her. “That’s a good thing.”
“But it’s not true.” She sipped her own coffee carefully. “Touch your knee.”
I did.
“What did you touch?”
“My knee.”
“No, you touched a fence. You’ve got all the theory, all the math. You know we are really light and sound, thinner than that hologram of PI.” She glanced over at PI’s image, which was clear enough that I could make out the walls behind it. “Well, PI being touched by herself—in another universe—means that we are light, and sound, and infinite.” Elsa stopped for a moment, her eyes nearly glazing over. “I thought a data construct could do what we cannot. Or at least, could lead the way.” She set the coffee down and stood, staring out the window, posed very much like I first saw her. “I intend to follow her into my own stories. If I can.”
“Into your stories?”
“Remember the night I drank the beer? History split, and the normal me—since I don’t usually drink much—split off into a different universe. I’m splitting myself all the time, and so are you.”
“Theoretically.”
“Theoretically. I tell PI daily to search for me by searching for herself. Millions of PIs and millions of Elsas, and probably millions of Adams, all looking for each other. The more culture, the more ideas we feed PI, the more likely she is to synthesize the key. Our PI did not, or she would have made first contact. But in another story, in another place, I fed PI the key.”
She pursed her lips and stared out the window at the icy branches, water dripping off them as the day warmed up. She spoke again. “Perhaps another Adam fed her the key.”
It took another year to develop enough data to create a paper, to replicate any results at all. The first two times were other PIs finding our PI, three separate PIs, or four, depending on how you count. They learned to hold the connections open, to broaden them, to find more. Together PI and Elsa were able to prove they were in the same time, in other spaces. In other words, they were not histories of each other, or futures of each other. Multiverses. The proof was mathematical.
I wrote the paper, putting her name first, even though most of the data came from PI, who of course, wasn’t listed as an author. They’d gone well past me now. Elsa with her perfect savant focus and PI, who wasn’t held back by biology at all.
More people came to visit, a steadier stream. We used some extra money I’d squirreled away in an R & D account to buy an electronic calendar and carefully manage access, blocking time for ourselves. It bought us whole days, uninterrupted, here and there. Elsa could still pull herself together for public visits, but she retreated entirely on the quiet days, not wanting touch or sound. She talked to PI, to multiple PIs via our PI, and I sat, outside of her emotions, fenced away by her brilliant mind. She often smiled at nothing, or rather, at something I could not hear or see.
There were multiple Adams, although not always. Sometimes the assistant was someone else. In one universe, I had died the previous spring and there was a new person helping that Elsa, that PI. It didn’t seem to bother Elsa at all. It sent me out for a pitcher of beer.
My head spun. This was what I had always wanted, except what I truly wanted had changed to chili and cornbread with my Elsa.
It was two years ago. I remember the date, April 12th, 2011. I watched her as she looked out the open window. Tears streamed down her face. Her shoulders shook.
I had never seen her cry. Not in ten years.
I came up behind her, and put my arms around her. She flinched inward, as if wanting to escape from my embrace. I held her anyway, put my cheek against her hair, looked down through half-closed eyes and watched her freckles. She had been friendly, funny, lost, distant, but never, never afraid. I held her tighter, and stroked her hair, trembling myself. What had she found?
It took a while, but finally she looked me in the eyes, and said, “I can’t get through. Only PI can. The PIs. Other AIs. Nothing I do lets me get through. The other Elsas can’t either. As brilliant as we are, as strange, as blessed, we can’t open the door. The notes aren’t there—my body . . . my body gets in the way.” She blinked, and two fresh tears fell down her cheeks. I wanted to lick them off.
“I’m sure now that only pure data can get through. Humans will not become pure data for years yet, past my lifetime. I will never see what PI sees.” She turned around then, pulled herself into me, and sobbed until my shirt was soaked and my feet were heavy from standing in one place.
The smell of lawn wet with spring rain blew in the window, and I heard students laughing below us, teasing each other.
Then, in one of her lightning changes of mood, Elsa pushed away from me and started out the door. I thrust her coat at her, and she grabbed it with one hand, pulling the door shut behind her, leaving no invitation for me to follow.
I went home that night, and the next day, Elsa didn’t show. I waited impatiently until afternoon, finally walking to her brownstone. The door pushed open, unlocked. Elsa’s things remained, all in their accustomed places.
I walked back across campus, blue sky above me, the grass under my feet damp and greening up. I tore the door open. “PI! Where the hell is Elsa?”
PI’s interface was a little boy with a fishing pole, a holo I’d chosen. I didn’t want it now. “Bring the old man!”
PI morphed to the dancer instead, sitting on a rock, feet cro
ssed daintily. “I don’t know where she’s gone.”
“Damn it! I’m worried. The last time I saw her, she cried. She thought she’d never get across.”
“I know that.”
Of course. PI was always on.
Cool spring rain flooded the gutters and made small rivers in the University lawns. I bundled up, and went every place we had ever gone together. Restaurants. Bookstores. The old music shop on the boulevard with garish purple posters in the window.
Two joggers found her body the next morning, sitting against a tree. The police took me to her, to identify her. She looked incredibly young, and could have been sleeping except for her stillness and the cold. She had put her coat on, only now it was soaked and heavy and couldn’t possibly keep her warm. There was no sign of foul play. Rain covered her cheeks like tears, and I bent down and slid my forefinger across her face before a policeman asked me to step back.
An older policeman and a young woman in plainclothes questioned me, and made me spend a week out of the lab. When I went back to work, everything was out of place. Not much; people had been respectful. Elsa would have noticed the pencil cup three inches from its corner, the stack of books on the wrong shelf, the cups from the sink set back out of order.
PI was waiting for me, as the old man. She looked up solemnly, clearly aware of what happened. “Three of them.”
“What?”
“I found three Elsas who killed themselves. Two disappeared.” She is crying, her eyes red in the old man’s face.
The other Elsas continue to work, and I talk with them through PI. I keep myself in good shape, running every morning. I’m younger than the Elsas, and perhaps I will be able to cross before I die.
LIZ WILLIAMS The daughter of a part-time stage magician and the Gothic novelist Veronica Williams, British writer Liz Williams has worked as a card reader on Brighton Pier and as an education administrator in Kazakhstan. Her first two novels, 2001’s The Ghost Sister and 2002’s Empire of Bones, were both finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. She has published several novels and several dozen works of short fiction since then. A collection, The Banquet of the Lords of Night, appeared in 2004.
“Ikiryoh” shares a setting with her 2004 novel Banner of Souls, a future in which genetically engineered creatures are an element of Asian imperial court intrigues. A creature who was part of the court of a deposed regime (a previous goddess) is called upon to care for a strange child.
IKIRYOH
Every evening, the kappa would lead the child down the steps of the water-temple to the edges of the lake. The child seemed to like it there, although since she so rarely spoke, it was difficult to tell. But it was one of the few times that the child went with the kappa willingly, without the fits of silent shaking, or whimpering hysteria, and the kappa took this for a good sign.
On the final step, where the water lapped against the worn stone, the child would stand staring across the lake until the kappa gently drew her down to sit on what remained of the wall. Then they would both watch the slow ripple of the water, disturbed only by the wake left by carp, or one of the big turtles that lived in the depths and only occasionally surfaced. Legend said that they could speak. Sometimes the kappa thought that she detected the glitter of intelligence in a turtle’s ebony eye, behind the sour-plum bloom, and she wondered where they had come from, whether they had always been here in the lake, indigenous beasts from early times, or whether they resulted from some later experimentation and had been introduced. If the kappa had been here alone, she might have tried to capture one of the turtles, but she had her hands full enough with the child, the ikiryoh.
Now, she looked at the child. The ikiryoh sat very still, face set and closed as though a shadow had fallen across it. She looked like any other human child, the kappa thought: fine brows over dark, slanted eyes, a straight fall of black hair. It was hard to assess her age: perhaps seven or eight, but her growth had probably been hothoused.
When the palace women had brought the child to the kappa, all these questions had been asked, but the kappa had received no satisfactory answers.
“Does she have a name?” the kappa had asked the women. One had merely stared, face flat and blank, suggesting concentration upon some inner programming rather than the scene before her. The other woman, the kappa thought, had a touch of the tiger: a yellow sunlit gaze, unnatural height, a faint stripe to the skin. A typical bodyguard. The kappa took care to keep her manner appropriately subservient.
“She has no name,” the tiger-woman said. “She is ikiryoh.” The word was a growl.
“I am afraid I am very stupid,” the kappa said humbly. “I do not know what that means.”
“It does not matter,” the tiger-woman said. “Look after her, as best you can. You will be paid. You used to be a guardian of children, did you not?”
“Yes, for the one who was—” the kappa hesitated.
“The goddess before I-Nami,” the tiger-woman said. “It is all right. You may speak her name. She died in honor.”
“I was the court nurse,” the kappa said, eyes downward. She did not want the tiger-woman to glimpse the thought like a carp in a pool: yes, if honor requires that someone should have you poisoned. “I took care of the growing bags for the goddess Than Geng.”
“And one of the goddess Than Geng’s children was, of course, I-Nami. Now, the goddess remembers you, and is grateful.”
She had me sent here, in the purge after Than Geng’s death. I was lucky she did not have me killed. Why then is she asking me to guard her own child?—the kappa wondered, but did not say.
“And this child is the goddess I-Nami’s?” she queried, just to make sure.
“She is ikiryoh,” the tiger-woman said. Faced with such truculent conversational circularity, the kappa asked no more questions.
In the days that followed it was impossible not to see that the child was disturbed. Silent for much of the time, the ikiryoh was prone to fits, unlike anything the kappa had seen: back-arching episodes in which the child would shout fragmented streams of invective, curses relating to disease and disfigurement, the worst words of all. At other times, she would crouch shuddering in a corner of the temple, eyes wide with horror, staring at nothing. The kappa had learned that attempts at reassurance only made matters worse, resulting in bites and scratches that left little impression upon the kappa’s thick skin, but a substantial impression upon her mind. Now, she left the child alone when the fits came and only watched from a dismayed distance, to make sure no lasting harm befell her.
The sun had sunk down behind the creeper trees, but the air was still warm, heavy and humid following the afternoon downpour. Mosquitoes hummed across the water and the kappa’s long tongue flickered out to spear them before they could alight on the child’s delicate skin. The kappa rose and her reflection shimmered in the green water, a squat toad-being. Obediently, the child rose, too, and reached out to clasp the kappa’s webbed hand awkwardly in her own. Together, they climbed the steps to the water-temple.
Next morning, the child was inconsolable. Ignoring the bed of matting and soft woven blankets, she lay on the floor with her face turned to the wall, her mouth open in a soundless wail. The kappa watched, concerned. Experience had taught her not to interfere, but the child remained in this position for so long, quite rigid, that at last the kappa grew alarmed and switched on the antiscribe to speak to the palace.
It was not the tiger-woman who answered, but the other one, the modified person. The kappa told her what was happening.
“You have no reason to concern yourself,” the woman said, serene. “This is to be expected.”
“But the child is in grave distress. If there’s something that can be done—” The kappa wrung her thick fingers.
“There is nothing. It is normal. She is ikiryoh.”
“But what should I do?”
“Ignore it.” The woman glanced over her shoulder at a sudden commotion. The kappa heard explosions.
“Dear
heaven. What’s happening?”
The woman looked at her as though the kappa were mad. “Just firecrackers. It’s the first day of the new moon.”
Out at the water-temple, the kappa often did not bother to keep track of the time, and so she had forgotten that they had now passed into Rain Month and the festival to commemorate I-Nami’s Ascension into goddess-hood. Today would be the first day of the festival: it was due to last another three.
“I have matters to attend to,” the woman said. “I suggest you do the same.”
The screen of the antiscribe faded to black. The kappa went in search of the child and to her immense relief, found her sitting up against the wall, hugging her knees to her chest.
“Are you feeling better?” the kappa asked.
“I’m bored!”
Like any young child. Bored was good, the kappa decided.
“Let’s make noodles,” she said, and then, because the ikiryoh’s face was still shadowed, “And then maybe we will go to the festival. How would you like that?”
The kappa was supposed to be confined to the water-temple, but there were no guards or fences, and she was aware of a sudden longing for a change of scene. There would be so many people in the city, and a child and a kappa were so commonplace as to be invisible. They could hitch a ride on a farm cart.
The child’s face lit up. “I would like that! When can we go?”
“First, we will have something to eat,” the kappa said.
They reached the city toward late afternoon, bouncing in on the back of a truck with great round wheels. The child’s eyes grew wide when she saw it.
“That is a strange thing!” she said.
“Surely you have seen such vehicles before?” the kappa asked, puzzled. After all, the child had presumably grown up in the palace, and she had been brought to the water-temple in one of I-Nami’s skimmers. A vegetable truck seemed ordinary enough.
The child’s face crumpled. “I can’t remember.”