Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  Then we were on the street, daypack bumping on her spine, duffel slung across her shoulder. Neither really fit, and I suspected they were hard on still-healing incisions. "You okay?" I asked.

  "No problem."

  But chemicals don't lie. From what her stress hormones were telling me she was in nontrivial pain. I wondered again what had produced that kind of toughness. Nobody, I suspected, had ever taken Memphis seriously.

  I remembered how much I'd craved Floyd's respect in our early days together. Little one. It's amazing how easy it can be to do unto others as we would have them not do unto us. "You've not asked the plan," I said. "What's the point? You're the boss." We were back on the False Creek parkway. Cyclists spun by in whirs of spokes, colors, and clipped conversations. Joggers pushed doublewide strollers. Teenagers tossed Frisbees. Vancouver on a Saturday morning.

  A few blocks away, hundreds of runners lined up before an enormous bank of portable toilets. Floyd would have been right at home. No, that was wrong. Before he fled Earth forever, he'd occasionally overcome his dislike of crowds to run races, but he'd never done anything shorter than a marathon—a distance at which, however large the crowd, every runner is his own island of suffering. This was probably a 5K or 10K. Too much crowd, too little island, not enough suffering.

  Memphis and I found a park bench and sat, watching the scene unfold. "We're in this together," I said. I outlined the plan, inviting her to poke holes in it.

  Meanwhile, I uplinked, grabbing the latest queue of vids, hoping for a message from Floyd. Maybe he'd been too busy with Yokomichi. Stop it, I told myself. Surprisingly, the Others didn't pounce immediately. But I was sure they were there, waiting.

  Memphis had shifted her gaze from the starting area to one of the bridges arching across False Creek, where workers were setting out orange cones behind a slow-moving truck. "It looks like the race is going to go over there," she said.

  A new idea formed. I tried running sims, but those work better for things that don't involve people. People do too many things you can't guess—like this race, which I could never have predicted, though I might have found it on the Web if I'd not been so worried about leaving tracks. All I'd known was that the busy waterfront was likely to present opportunities.

  "See," I told Memphis. "Two minds really are better than one."

  Seventeen minutes later, we were in the crowd of runners and walkers, now swollen to several thousand. Before leaving the park bench, I'd instituted a flurry of web searches, most prominently about bridge heights, railings, and falls.

  As hoped, that brought the Others' attention.

  "How much time will it take for me to up-load?" I asked, the moment I felt their presence.

  About seven minutes if you insist on bringing along all the data you've collected. And yes, you can upload even after your host is dead. There was a pause, just long enough to let me appreciate how smart this insight made them. But isn't jumping a rather... messy... solution?

  "Maybe. But Memphis's family thinks she's impulsive, and this lets them make a nice show of grief. They knew she was self-destructive, tried to save her with an expensive implant, but the doctors botched it, sob, sob."

  I could feel the assent before it was spoken. Just make sure you hit land, not water. If she sinks, you'll lose the Web until they dredge up the body.

  En route to the start, I routed Memphis past three traffic cams. "Try to look like you're attempting to resist me," I said.

  "I'm not sure how to do that. Maybe if..."

  "Are you asking?"

  I could feel her shoulders tighten as she screwed up her courage. "Yes. Besides, if you really are going to throw me off the bridge there's not much I can do about it."

  Even with permission, taking control made me uncomfortable. Again I had a new understanding of Floyd. I would have shut me off, too.

  "Feel helpless, used, manipulated," I said to Memphis, more to make myself quit thinking about Floyd than anything else. "Think of all the bad things that have ever happened to you and pretend they're all happening at once."

  "That's a bit too easy."

  "You might also try to scream for help. I won't try to control your expression, but I won't let you shout."

  "That might really panic me."

  "Method acting," I said. "The more it looks like I'm frog-marching you to your death, the better."

  The race never went off.

  Five minutes before the scheduled start, we were registered as fitness walkers and I'd dumped Memphis's duffel bag behind a bank of portable toilets, where hopefully, nobody would bother to peek inside.

  Three minutes before the start, we dashed for the nearest bathroom. "Sorry," I told the Others before they asked. "Your techs didn't give me control over her bowels. I think she knows something's up. If we don't deal with this before the start, we could draw a lot of the wrong kind of attention."

  Two minutes before the start, I hit the Web again, savoring for one final moment that instant-everywhere feeling that had nearly stolen my soul. But this time I wasn't chasing spats, pandas, hurricanes, or quarks. Within microseconds I found Vancouver's traffic-control system, located a backdoor similar to the one I'd used to run sims in Chicago, and crashed everything within a klick of False Creek, taking down big chunks of the power grid for good measure.

  Sorry, Vancouver. A lot of folks were going to have a bad day. I took a final look for a message from Floyd... and logged off.

  Ninety seconds later, having retrieved the duffel bag, we were changing clothes in another portable toilet. We donned sunglasses and a baseball cap, ditched the bag and day-pack in favor of the backpack, and joined the crowd dispersing from the race. A few minutes later, we veered off for the six-klick walk to one of Canada's largest freight yards.

  It was the best I could do. Several thousand racers had milled around, waiting for the start that never came, then scattered. With most of the cams out, I couldn't have tracked us. Hopefully the Others couldn't, either.

  The only thing I wasn't sure of was where the railroad cars were headed. Finding out would have alerted the Others, but springing electronic locks was something I could do without having to access the Web.

  Humans have trouble remembering numbers more complex than local-zone com codes. Most set their bank codes at a mere four to six digits, and nobody was going to put hyper-complex lock codes on a boxcar. As long as the locks were on battery power—and they were—I could run through the options as fast as the locks could cycle.

  On the 24,592nd attempt, one of the nearby doors gave a click. Pushing it open, Memphis started to swing her backpack inside, then yelped as the effort strained one of her incisions.

  "Want help?"

  "No, I can manage."

  But the second heave was no better than the first. "Okay," she said. "Call me a wimp."

  I took control and heaved the pack in, then, when she quit gasping from the pain, grabbed the door frame and hauled us aboard, shoving the door all-but-shut behind us. Then I gave back control.

  In short doses, this wasn't as addictive as I'd feared. Maybe it was because I merely issued neural commands, while she got the true muscle feedback... and pain. Maybe pain was a crucial part of being human. I thought of the runners whose race I'd cancelled... and of Floyd. Pain was something such people flirted with, courted, and eventually married—a crucial part of the body-thing. I might help Floyd dance, but I would never understand a marathon. I would never understand what made Memphis try to pretend she didn't hurt. But maybe that was okay, because I was who I am. Me. Not Floyd. Not Memphis. Not the Others.

  Hours later, as the train rolled out, the glimmer of light through the door crack revealed one important fact. At least for the moment, we were headed south.

  Annums before, Floyd had escaped into the deserts of the American Southwest. For better or worse, they had made him who he was. Some of the containers in the boxcar looked like Canadian products. Others bore names like Desert Sun Industries or Brazos Healthcare
—empty pallets returning home?

  One more time, I played back the song. Floyd had made a career of disappearing to the fringes of civilization. If Memphis and I were to survive, I needed everything I could remember of how he had done it, because if I hit the Web to learn more, the Others would instantly find me.

  Did I ever tell you...

  No, I hadn't.

  Yet I still linger beneath your spell...

  Yes, but not just for the reasons I'd thought. The rails clicked beneath us, and somehow even as night settled in, I knew we were still going south. Call it God, call it AI intuition. All I knew was that without Floyd, Memphis and I wouldn't have had a chance. With what I'd learned from all those years of trying to figure him out... maybe it was fifty-fifty.

  Maybe I'd never figure Floyd out. But if Memphis and I were very lucky, maybe we would, to some life-saving degree, become something he would understand.

  * * *

  The Tansy Tree

  Rob Chilson | 9609 words

  Illustrated by Zelda Devon

  "Darioch. Darioch, you are where, eh?" came Ziana's breathless voice.

  Darioch paused, called, "At the back door, heh," using the Executant of response to query. "I'm just stepping out to the tree. You are comfortable, eh?"

  "Ah. Yes, heh, I am as comfortable as a sick woman can be." He heard a sigh of laughter.

  Darioch shaped a wry, painful smile and let the door close behind him. He stepped across the back yard of Jollicot, toward the tansy tree that grew, half again as tall as he, discreetly in a corner of the utility orchard.

  The tansy trees had been created millions of years before by the wizards of the Heights of Mankind, that luminous time.

  Standing before it was a middle-aged woman, grayed by lifelong labor.

  "Ginchy, it is true that you were your lady's governess, eh?" he asked.

  "No, heh, mea dominus, I was but her nurse. 'NaNa' was the first word she learned to pronounce."

  "Ah. I know she chose wisely when she selected you to accompany her to this place. But I had not known why she chose you."

  "Thank you, mea dominus. Please, sir, we are to do what, eh?"

  "One day soon, the doctor has promised, he will bring us a new supply, heh."

  The tansy tree's large leaves were an attractive and distinctive dark green, but it was the objects that grew under the limbs which they regarded. Nuts, thick-shelled, brightly colored, and marked with black glyphs.

  "Sky blue for anodynes," Darioch muttered, "deep blue for analgesics, purple for the anesthetics."

  "There be but few blues remaining," said Ginchy, "and they mostly unripe."

  "Yes," he said, pain in his voice. "And some of the others have also been decimated. Red, for instance."

  He continued his unhappy mutter of old lessons: "Red is for the antiseptics. Scarlet with this glyph is for external use, and crimson with this one for internal. The yellows, golds, oranges, ambers, browns; these are the antibiotics, to fight infections: all but gone."

  "Gold striped with crimson for the analeptics, to rally and hearten the sufferer," Ginchy said. "And there be but few of them, too. Poor lass!"

  "Poor lass indeed," said Darioch, with a sigh. "And here: the large pinks and creams with their various stripes and glyphs for the soothing balms and unguents." He reached into the tansy tree.

  "The pinks—those are for burns, including sunburn. And the creams, these are what we seek—capital treatment for skin sores, rashes, pimples, and chapped lips."

  He picked two ripe creams and a small scarlet antiseptic.

  The sound of padding feet and the gride of wheels brought them round, in time to glimpse an equipage on the road before Jollicot. They heard it stop in front of the stonewalled cottage. Still holding his medicinals, Darioch strode round the cot. It was not a large building, and he arrived before it even as his visitor was descending the spokes of his front wheel.

  "Dr. Reevish Townman," said Darioch, his bow unembarrassed by his burden.

  The doctor turned from his chariot and gave him as polished a bow—the doctor was an Excellent of the University of Manming, after all.

  "Mea dominus Darioch Famm and Trayce of High Hallum," the other greeted him, in due form.

  "I had not expected to see you this day, doctor," Darioch said.

  "I had another case in the neighborhood, and slipped by, heh."

  The doctor gestured to his assistant, a pale-haired baseborn youth whom he had, quite properly, never named to his aristocratic patients. This youth shyly reached into the back of the equipage and lifted a brown fiber sack and a bundle of switches with leaves still on them.

  "Ach, the cuttings for my tree, ha," Darioch cried.

  "Darioch, ha," came Ziana's weak voice. "That is whom, eh?"

  "The doctor, heh," he called, and to the doctor, "Come, ho."

  The doctor followed him into the commons room of Jollicot. Punctiliously he genuflected and gave her title and name with all due ceremony: "Mea Domina Ziana Famm née Lozani of High Hallum."

  "Dr. Reevish," said Ziana gently, smiling.

  Darioch put the nuts in a basket and stood smiling sadly down on the wasted body of his wife. She had never been a large woman, but one hadn't noticed, so full of life had she been. Now, only her bright eyes glimpsed that life. Even under the silken coverlet, she seemed tiny in the slope chair.

  "And what brings you all unexpected to our humble abode, good doctor, eh?" she asked, smiling, revealing the fine bones beneath her wasted cheeks.

  "Your beauty and grace, as ever, heh," said the doctor, bowing again, less punctiliously.

  "Och, you are a flatterer, doctor, and we all love you for it."

  The doctor seemed embarrassed.

  "Dr. Reevish has brought more medicaments, and cuttings for the tree," Darioch said quickly.

  "That is so," said the doctor, apparently relieved at the ending of the flirtation game. "Mea dominus said that you were running short, so I thought it best to slip by. I trust the cuttings will give you more relief; they are from some fine variants, and should produce antibiotics your own tree does not."

  "Our gratitude is for you," said Ziana. "Darioch was worried, I know."

  "And you get on how, eh, mea domina?"

  "Och, doctor, well enough for one chronically ill, heh. I suffer, as always. But the winter is over, the rains are gone and the gray skies; the Sun shines and the air is warm and mild. I could ask for what more, eh?"

  He bowed again. "I can only salute your grace and courage. By your leave, mea domina." He felt her forehead, peered into her obediently opened mouth, looked at her tongue, placed a thermometer under it. He unfolded his pulsilogium, a pendulum on a silver tripod, set it up on the table, and started the pendulum swinging. Ziana extended her thin wrist, and the doctor counted her pulse.

  Nodding, he withdrew the thermometer, read it, and asked a few questions, chiefly about her diet. "You seem no worse, thanking the Long Father," he said. "And better than last winter."

  "Better indeed, huh."

  The doctor turned to Darioch. "Perhaps, sir, you mean to prepare a salve, eh?" glancing at the colors of the nuts Darioch had put in the basket.

  "Yes, heh, especially if there is a sky-blue nut in that bag," Darioch said, glancing out where the boy stood patiently holding the items the doctor had brought. He was surprised to find a look of concern on the lad's face.

  "But you should not do that yourself, mea dominus. I'll have the boy do it. Boy, ho!"

  "Oh!" called the assistant, and started forward. Then he checked, unsure of the propriety of entering the domicile of a lord, even a cottage.

  "Do not trouble yourself, ho," Darioch said mildly. "It is quite within my capabilities to prepare a salve. I do have 'Dr. Mankish's Superb Compendium of Home Remedies for Man-kin and Beast,' after all." He smiled, to show that it was a jest, and was disproportionately pleased to hear Ziana's ghost of a laugh.

  The doctor smiled feebly, but hesitated, glancing
within, whence came the sound of dishwashery. "Perhaps your girl could help."

  Darioch merely smiled. "Ginchy has been a strong buttress. But I shall compound the unguent and apply it to my wife's body with my own hands."

  Doctor Reevish bowed to his resolution, and to his lady. "By your leave, then, mea domina, I shall be on my way."

  Ziana graciously gave permission. Darioch followed him outside.

  "Boy, ha! Put the articles on the bench, ho!" the doctor cried, as if his assistant were the length of a field away. "To your place, ho!"

  The assistant made haste to lay the sack and the bundle of cuttings on the door-side bench, and to scramble into the chariot.

  "No improvement, eh?" Darioch asked bleakly.

  "None of any significance, heh," the doctor murmured. "Her constitution seems quite shattered by the ordeal she has undergone. Still, she is young and was otherwise in good health—until the birth it was, I am led to understand, an unexceptional pregnancy. Eh?"

  "Indeed, quite unexceptional, heh."

  "Yes. Well, the long travail of childbirth, and the grief of the loss of your daughter, were enough to throw the strongest woman into a decline, but it has been months, the grief is well aged, and yet the body does not rally." The doctor shook his head. "I suspect a deep-seated infection, perhaps in the bones or some obscure organ, which our antibiotics have not reached. I know you have properly injected the tansy tree with her sputum, blood, and urine, to personalize the drugs."

  "Most carefully, as you taught me, heh." The tansy tree had orifices for these injections.

  "Yes," with a sigh. "Usually the tree finds the source of the illness from the ejecta and forms new antibiotics to strike it down. Well. I hope the new strains give satisfaction, but... She may yet be well, but when the malaise persists so long as this, it may persist forever, or at least require years, half a lifetime, to overcome."

  He looked sharply at Darioch. "You might do better to return her to her father's house. Or to High Hallum, and give her care over to servants. To nurse her yourself might well be to throw your own life away."