But here came Charlie, rushing through the aisles, brimming over with syllables of delight, grabbing Jo’s hand and dragging her away to share the discoveries of the last five minutes—as if, with the fluid enthusiasms of childhood, he’d already forgotten his earlier grudge. She had to tell him three times before he noticed the gadget Evan was holding. Then it took three more tries to explain the thing’s significance. Even after he understood what it meant, Charlie’s reaction wasn’t quite what Jo had expected. Almost with reluctance, he let Evan place the drive in his outstretched hands, solemnly closing his fingers around the plastic, stretching out a finger to stroke the screen. A streak of light appeared and faded: a glimmer of Hello.
Jo didn’t have to remind him to say thank you.
“He’s going to have to stay in there. And there are going be some rules. No use in the house, for one. Or during school. This’ll be a special occasion kind of thing, not an all-the-time thing. Got it?”
Charlie squinted across the seat, then back at the block of plastic in his hand. When Jo nudged him, he looked up, blinking.
“Puppa, this is important. I know how it sounds. But we can’t let the other moms know, okay? Not for now. At some point, maybe, when things have changed . . .” Jo decided this particular conversation could wait for another day. “The important thing is—”
“Mom?” He was looking at her with a face he wore often these days, an expression that scared Jo as much as it delighted her. It reminded her of the father she’d lost, of the husband she’d once imagined she’d have—of the man her son was slowly becoming. A smile that would almost have been cruel, if Charlie had been aware of what it did to her. “Thanks.”
Jo waited until she could trust herself to speak. “I should have told you,” she said. “About what we were planning. But . . . I wasn’t sure you’d understand. Or that we’d be able to pull it off. Or I thought things would get messed up somehow, or that we—oh, I don’t know, I just should have—”
They bumped into the drive, the Zephyr purring, waiting for them to hurry up and leave so it could enter the garage and do its nightly diagnostics. Charlie was fiddling with the gizmo in his lap, swiping symbols into the screen, changing settings, as he pulled a roll screen from the glovebox and pried back the rubber socket protector.
“I never got to show you. What we were building.”
“I—” Jo took a second to recalibrate. “You mean your new model? That thing’s not supposed to have any Wi-Fi—”
“No, no, it’s okay. Sparklybits’ll remember.” Charlie unrolled the screen across his lap. “You really want to get the full effect.”
The images were forming already, swoops of color, curving lines, sketchy shapes that gathered slowly, clicking together to form a blocky frame.
“Interesting,” Jo said. “Is it a castle?”
“Kind of.” Charlie gave a little smile.
“A palace? A fortress?” Jo angled her head as the pieces accumulated. “Is it a church?”
Charlie didn’t answer. He’d begun to stroke the screen along with the ghost, adjusting, guiding, adding and deleting, making subtle edits to the spectral assemblage, contributing to the dance of shapes.
“A school?” Jo said. “A hospital?” Surprising herself, she made her own contribution, reaching down to trace the ghostly movements, letting out a laugh of surprise as the hovering blocks ticked into position. Charlie laughed, too, moving his hands more quickly, now—in loops, in jabs, in pirouettes of dexterous motion—and Jo sat back to admire his fluency, his eloquence, in this language with only two speakers, this culture of two souls.
Her eye drifted to the windows, the gold and violet shapes of dusk, and in a blink she had it.
“It’s our house. Right? That’s what it is. You’re building our house!”
Charlie was silent, absorbed in his craft. Only when the work was almost finished did he look up, conspiratorial, grin slowly widening, as the details continued to accrete beneath this hands—the bricks, the fixtures, the dollhouse doors and windows—and a plush sweep of lawn where two tiny figures stood, joined at the hands, like ornaments on the phantasmal grass.
“Just wait,” her son told her. “Just wait and see.”
5
A Little Wisdom
Mary Robinette Kowal
Stepping out of the light rail on West End Avenue, Gail felt Nashville’s humidity smack her in the face. It was like stepping into a sauna and being slapped with a hot, wet towel. Sweat slicked her skin. The space between her palm and her service eDawg’s support handle became its own fetid swamp.
Wilbur mistook her hesitation for a Parkinsonian freeze and paused next to her.
“Wilbur, heel.” Gail braced herself for the walk across Millennium Park to the Parthenon, the world’s only full-scale replica of the ancient monument. And today, the site of yet another battle with the park administrator. Barnum’s email still filled her veins with a fury to match the day’s heat. I stopped in to see how it was going. These are smaller than expected. We need to make plans to compensate.
Compensate. It was an exhibition of Persian miniatures. The paintings were supposed to be small. When she got there, she would explain, again, that—
Her feet stuck.
Immediately, her faithful eDawg compensated, balancing her suddenly off-balanced body as Parkinson’s nailed her feet to the pavement. Gail tried to step forward, but her feet wouldn’t lift from the ground. All she got for her efforts were some half-hearted knee movements that didn’t even get her heels off the ground.
Gail stopped trying. Agitation and multitasking made her symptoms worse. She took a slow breath, looking at the Parthenon sitting on its low, green hill with a wall of storm clouds piled behind it.
She wouldn’t have the fight with Barnum until she saw him.
A message from the medication pump in her side appeared on her heads-up display. “Rescue dose?”
“No.” It would start a bout of dyskinesia, and she needed steady hands to do the matting. Her Deep Brain Stimulator kept the Parkinson’s tremors under control, but the random dyskinetic motions were pure medication side effect.
eDawg understood. The purple artificial dog took one step in front of her and flashed a laser line in the grass as a visual cue. Her internal metronome might be stuck, but she could still step over or on things. eDawg’s bright red laser gave her a visual cue.
Gail stepped over the line. “Right foot.”
Did she feel like an idiot talking to herself? Not anymore. “Left foot.”
Two big steps later, she unstuck and walked the rest of the way to the Parthenon as if she were any other old lady out walking her robot dog. And she was not alone. Mixed among the teens on their hover scooters and dads with their strollers were other elderly folks out for walks with their robot companion animals. Most of them were themed as dogs, but she also saw a robot pony and a robot emu. Sure, any of them could have been an automated walker, but those didn’t look at her with sad eyes when she skipped an exercise session or wag a stumpy tail with delight when they went out.
Programming, yes. But it worked.
Across the lawn, she saw one of the women from poker night and raised her free hand to wave.
“Watch out!” Someone slammed into her right side. Both of them tumbled over eDawg, who tried to compensate but staggered sideways. They all went down in a flail of limbs and robot dog and hover scooter.
The teen scrambled to their knees first and swept a riot of violet locs back from their face. “Oh no! Oh—I’m ever so sorry.” Their British accent marked them as a tourist. “Are you okay? I’m so sorry—I just. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Aside from an elbow that was screaming and what was sure to be a massive bruise on her left hip. Her service dog extricated himself from them and moved to Steady position in front of her. Gail put her hands on Wilbur’s warm, smooth back like a bench. “I’ve had worse falls all on my own.”
“I’m dread
fully sorry. I lost control of the scooter.” The teen offered their hand to help her up the rest of the way. “I’m Keisha Brown. He/him.”
Gail had noticed the loss of control, but gave the boy the kindness of not being sarcastic out loud. She took his hand “I’m Gail Krishnasami. She/her.” Between eDawg and the teenager, Gail got to her feet with gratifying ease. “New to Nashville?”
He nodded, bending down to right the scooter. “I always see them on telly and wanted to try one. I’m so sorry. I was going too fast and . . .”
“It’s all right.” She gestured across the great lawn to the Parthenon on its low hill. “Have you been to the . . .”
“My mums are in there now with my kid sister.” He shrugged, studying a scuff on the rental scooter. “I’ve seen the real one. This is just . . . concrete.”
“But this is the only full-scale replica of how it used to—” Her phone rang in her ear, with her wife’s alert signal. Of course. She would have gotten notification about the fall and always checked in right away. If Gail ignored the call, Bobbi would assume the worst. She grimaced and held up her hand. “Sorry—incoming.”
Keisha nodded and wheeled the scooter around, walking it away. “Take care.”
Sighing, Gail activated the connection. “Hi, Bobbi. I’m fine.”
“You had another fall.” Her wife’s voice was tight with concern. “Are you all right?”
“I just told you I was fine.” She slapped her left thigh, and Wilber moved into heel position. “A teenager just lost control of a hover scooter.”
“I can see the GPS. How many times have you fallen on the way to work?”
“Someone running into me is not related to Parkinson’s.” She started walking, because otherwise, Bobbi would start asking if she were frozen. There were times when, as much as she loved her wife, Gail deeply regretted that she’d agreed to let Bobbi get fall alerts. Gail needed to derail this conversation before her wife really got going. “What are your plans for the day?”
“It’s still a fall. The eDawg is supposed to prevent those and it isn’t.”
“I would have fallen a lot more often if not for Wilbur.” She kept her gaze fixed on the Parthenon and activated Wilbur’s laser prompt. If Bobbi kept on like this, Gail would absolutely wind up freezing out of sheer agitation.
“My point exactly. Honey, they’re getting more frequent.” In the pause, Gail could picture Bobbi rolling the end of her silver braid between her fingers. “I think we need to revisit the retirement conversation.”
“We’ll talk about this another time.” If not for the GPS, Gail would lie and say that she was walking into the building now. When she’d started there fifteen years ago, the massive concrete walls would have cut off the call for her. Repeaters meant that it would continue without a bleep, and that did not seem like a positive in the moment. “I need to prepare for a meeting with my boss about the new exhibit.”
“Gail . . .”
“Bobbi Ruth Varnell, so help me if you keep talking about this I will tie a skunk to your belt and wallop you from here to Wednesday.” Gail blew breath out her nose like a racehorse. The Parthenon loomed over her. Beyond it, the sky had the green tinge of an impending thunderstorm. Maybe she’d get lucky and they’d lose power. “I have to go.”
“Sweetheart—”
“I have to go. Walking into the building now. Bye!” She’d said goodbye, so it didn’t really count as hanging up on her wife, but just by a thin split hair. Gail set her phone to Do Not Disturb and very deliberately turned off the GPS and fall alert. It would send an update to Bobbi that she’d deactivated it, and that would just have to be part of the larger conversation. At the moment, she had to focus on talking to her boss, and she needed to be reasonably calm for that.
Gail dodged tourists as she walked down the short tunnel leading under and into the Parthenon. When she pulled the door open, the air conditioning rolled out to grip her in a dry Arctic blast.
She sighed with relief as the sweat on her skin suddenly did its job and cooled her, instead of sitting there as another layer of misery.
From behind the welcome desk, Slim Jenkins lifted their exquisitely manicured hand and gave a gold-embellished wave. “Morning, Mx Krishnasami.”
“Morning, Slim.” She nodded toward the small gallery that filled the back half of the basement of the Parthenon. Brown paper covered the glass partition as they prepared for the new exhibit. “He in?”
The young person fiddled with their bolo tie. “He’s . . . in a mood.”
Barnum Smith was the youngest park director in the history of Nashville. He was good at his job, but occasionally had a case of Imposter Syndrome that he overcompensated for by micromanaging his staff.
“Bless his heart, so am I.” She headed for the stairs, guiding eDawg around a gaggle of teenagers on a fieldtrip. They were paused at the cases of artifacts, tapping the air at the interactive digital presentations that had popped in their heads-up displays. That or playing Mindfox or GalaxyKitten or whatever the kids these days played on their HUDs.
The door unlocked as it recognized her and hissed open. Inside, Barnum was leaning over the table Gail had been working on. His spiky blue hair caught the light like the plumes on Pallas Athena’s helmet. If only he had as much wisdom as enthusiastic vision.
“Gail. I want to talk to you about—”
“I got your email.” She let go of Wilbur and the eDawg’s handle retracted into his back. “And I’ll gently remind you that I sent you the dimensions of the miniatures with my original proposal.”
“Sure. But in context, they’re too small. No one will be able to see them.” He turned and looked at the walls. “We can do a projection on the end walls.”
“They are designed to be small and to be viewed up close.” She walked to the table, with her eDawg following as if he were glued to her. “Part of what makes these so amazing is that they were painted by unaided human hands at this scale. Enlarging them removes that wonder.”
“It’s an accessibility concern.”
“We’ve got plans for people with vision challenges. The virtual display will open on their HUDs and for those who prefer analog, we have magnifying glasses.” She leaned over the table. The top painting had a garden filled with intricate tiny flowers and dotted with gilt. In the top center, Anahita, the Persian incarnation of Wisdom, rode a chariot drawn by four horses.
She had built the entire exhibit around this one, rare depiction of Anahita in the miniature school from the classic period. The other miniatures showed scholars or women reading, in ways that related to wisdom, but were not an overt depiction of the goddess.
“I just think that it’s going to show poorly against . . .” He waved his hand toward the ceiling. “That.”
“That.” Above them, in the Naos, a reproduction of Athena Parthenos stood at an impressive 12.75 meters. Gail straightened the paintings in their protective sleeves. “The contrast is the entire point. The exhibit is about the reverence of wisdom and that scale is immaterial. You liked this, specifically because the emphasis on miniatures would appeal to school children who always think they need to be big.”
“Yes, well that was before I knew that they would be so small.” Barnum grimaced and pointed to a painting of women listening to music near him. “I’m not denying that they are beautiful. I’m just saying that enlarging them for ease in viewing is a prudent choice.”
“So you want the exhibit to make a visually semantic argument that something has to be large to be appreciated.”
He rolled his eyes. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that—”
Tornado sirens cut through the conversation. On Gail’s HUD, a weather warning popped up and her AI’s voice came out of Do Not Disturb. “Alert, alert, alert. Tornado warning. Seek shelter.”
The HUD showed the tornado overlaid on a map of Nashville. It was heading straight toward the Parthenon.
Across from her, Barnum said, “Oh, shit.”
“Safest place.” Barnum headed for the doors of the gallery. “I’ll get Slim to open the side stairs, so we can move people faster.”
“Glass ceiling.” The Parthenon had glass panels to let natural light reach Athena. Gail slapped her thigh and her eDawg moved into heel position, extending his stability handle. Outside, she could hear the rising confusion of the tourists. “There’s a school tour in the building. Herd people in here. I’ll direct them to the back gallery. No windows.”
“Good call. And wrap that art up. We’re insured, but I don’t want someone to claim negligence.”
“Of course.” He could not let people just do their jobs. Gail ground her teeth and slid the art on the table into the travel case it had come in. In her HUD, the tornado hit the far end of Centennial Park.
He pulled the door open and propped it in place. “Friends and guests! Please come this way for shelter.”
The first person through the door was a woman with two children in tow. Gail set the art back on the table and gestured to the back of the gallery. “This way.” She tried to take a step to lead the woman but her right foot stuck to the floor. She shuffled for a moment, desperate to move.
Her AI flashed a message from the medication pump in her side. “Rescue dose?”
Grimacing, she accepted the change with a silent command. Outwardly, she pointed for the woman. “Through that doorway.”
Nodding, the woman hauled her children along like bags of wheat. Tourists flooded through the gallery door after her, and Gail stopped trying to move. Some she recognized as members, who came to gallery openings or sat in the calm quiet space upstairs.
Nothing today was calm. Through the open doors at the end of the tunnel leading outside, she could hear a train roaring toward them. The light was the green-yellow of an old bruise and made the people sprinting toward her look ill. Slim staffed the outer door, waving people toward them.
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