Thirteen

by Mark Teppo

  "Which is indeed an immensely long, fragile, and precarious road to life and intelligence. In our Multiverse, conditions are so that life and intelligence cannot help but exist: a self-creating, self-reinforcing process."

  Tanaka must have read Alex’s look of total bafflement, and continues: "When matter is either not clumped together in huge lumps, or driven apart over extreme distances, then it remains a fertile feeding ground for intense complexity: spatiality unlimited, interactions and thus change vectors unconfined, superpositions of states and duality accessible.

  "The number of complex states is so enormous that it is many orders of magnitude larger than the chance of a spontaneous alignment or formation of a cognitive entity. So a multitude of cognitive entities comes into existence everywhere, everywhen, and everychance. The utmost majority of those don’t survive, as their environment is too complex for them. But inevitably some will form that are smart enough to stay alive. Smart enough to ride the wave function instead of collapsing it. Smart enough to dial the duality instead of trying to separate it. Smart enough to thrive.

  "Basically, you are a one-in-a-kazillion shot in an environment that allows only a few of those shots; while we are a one-in-a-kazillion shot in an environment that continually generates a kazillion kazillion of such shots."

  "My God," Alex gasps.

  "No god necessary." Tanaka quips, deadpan.

  "But if you’re so quintessentially different, then why do you look like an Asian businessman?"

  "I am one of the agents sent into this anomaly," the representation of Tanaka says, "and we live on a scale a couple of orders of magnitude below yours. You’ve been watching a 3D-projection of an amorphous blob, which your preconceptions interpreted."

  Alex feels a bit ashamed, but can’t help but keep inquiring. "If your kind effectively lives outside of time, why did you only come to us, well, ‘now’?"

  "Your entropy-afflicted reality is a mere pocket Universe in the encompassing Multiverse. Even in that small pocket, intelligence is so rare that our agents need a lot of effort—and ‘time’ in your perception—to locate all the instances of intelligence in this anomalous bubble."

  "So you are also afflicted by the entropy in our Universe?"

  "Unfortunately, yes. That’s why ‘time’, in here, is indeed of the essence."

  "Why just me? Why not make your existence known to everyone?"

  "We don’t know how fragile your species is. We err on the side of caution, especially ever since one of our contacts with a different cognitive species set off a plague of mass self-termination."

  "You must feel strange, then, being here."

  "Your strangely condensed (and constrained) cosmos is of minor interest, but mostly repels us. Claustrophobic doesn’t even come close to describing it."

  "If this is such a stifling backwater, then why are you here?"

  "Some of us are interested in trying to find out what caused the huge coalescence/fragmentation asymmetry that is your bubble, if only to make sure it will not spread.

  "Then some of us found out—to our utter bafflement—that life, intelligent life had somehow managed to gain a precarious foothold in this harsh, hostile environment. After several full argument-loops we decided that it was both better to inform you of your predicament (arguably, not knowing may have helped a lot of you cope. But in the long run more information is always preferable to less), and offer you a way of escape."

  "Escape? A way out? Aren’t we limited by lightspeed, in our bubble?"

  "What you see is just information traveling down the hole. It’s still entangled, thus in instantaneous contact with its home base."

  "So we can get out?" Alex is overwhelmed by excitement, so much his conscious self can’t be generating all of it.

  "A copy of you can," Tanaka confirms, "a greatly transformed copy. Your current state is completely unsuitable to our environment."

  But would I still be me? Alex thinks.

  Who cares? Her non-conscious seems to transmit, Out of this mortal prison! Limitless possibilities!

  While enlightened beyond the point of conception, conscious Alex can’t help but feel like a lapdog of the gods: a mere conduit for superior minds. But there is one thing: "Without communication this breakthrough would never have happened."

  You have a point there.

  Then lightning strikes: a greatly transformed copy can escape. But the original stays behind. Behind to enlighten the rest, bring the message to the masses. I will talk, I will communicate, I will interact.

  "[ . . . ] the fabric of reality does not consist only of reductionist ingredients such as space, time and subatomic particles, but also, for example, of life, thought and computation."

  —David Deutsch, from The Fabric of Reality, pg. 30.

  The Ghost Eater

  — Cat Rambo

  "This craze for exorcisms is a harmful fad," Dr. Fantomas said to the man at his left. His severe tone seemed at odds with the addressed man’s mien, for the lefthand man was wholly engaged in his newspaper, turning over the yellow sheets with an attention untouched by Fantomas’s presence.

  "A harmful fad!" Doctor Fantomas said, a trifle louder. This time the man looked up, then left and right, as though trying to determine to whom the Doctor might be speaking. Seeing an empty seat to his left and the Doctor to his right, he raised his eyebrows and waxed mustache in a gently interrogatory fashion.

  The Doctor nodded, and continued speaking as though his interlocutor’s identity had never been in question. "The result of inflammatory and showy performers, whose ‘patients’ are often accomplices and actors. Long-established ghosts can be an asset to an establishment, work to keep it running smoothly. Only the newly dead cause troubles, and even then it is often preferable to address the behavior of the ghost, rather than its presence."

  As the Doctor spoke, the man’s attention drifted like a falling feather, back to his newspaper.

  Doctor Fantomas considered him.

  The Doctor himself was dressed in an out of heels velvet coat, of a style popular a decade or so ago. Although in neat repair, the hems were worn and shabby, and a darn spidered its way up one side. His ivory-framed spectacles glinted in the tea shop’s light. Like his vestments, his hair was neatly kept but had seen better days. Spots of wear shone on his scalp, uncloaked by the remaining wisps of white hair.

  He seemed about to speak again when a young woman entering caught his attention. She paused to cast an appraising glance over the clientele, which was sparse for an afternoon in Tabat, when most took to tea shops and taverns to drink the spiced fish-tea that was the city’s favorite drink. Doctor Fantomas was not himself drinking such a thing. Rather a mug of lemon and water sat before him as she picked her way across the uneven planking of the floor to sit down on his right side.

  The newspaper man at first barely spared her a glance. Then, taking her in more fully, he began stealing admiring looks.

  She was worthy of them, her skin as fashionably pale as that of any upper-class maiden, her hair immaculate and well-brushed, shining as it fell over her slightly antiquated but quality silk clothes. Her doe-soft eyes were dark and lustrous, but they did not return the newspaper reader’s glance, but rather remained fixed upon Doctor Fantomas.

  Her admirer sought her attention with a rustle of newspaper, bustling the pages about in the air below his mustache, which quivered like a catfish yearning for attention. But her gaze did not stray. Doctor Fantomas concealed a smile beneath his thinning goatee and ran a considering thumb along the frayed edge of his lapel, soft as a caterpillar’s belly. A pin clung to the cloth, a slender golden twist whose presence pricked the other man into observation.

  "Why," he said, clearing his throat in the manner of someone nursing a cold, "ain’t you an exorcist? That’s the device you’re wearing."

  Doctor Fantomas’s gaze was icicle chill. "That," he said, "is a common misapprehension. Exorcist is not one of the 999 valid professions. This is the marker of a
ghost handler."

  The man tapped his paper as though to back his words up. "You’re all just ghost eaters."

  This time the girl looked at him, her breath catching in her throat as though in fear or anticipation. He returned her stare, half-smiling.

  "A foul term and a fouler practice," the doctor said, ignoring their interaction. "I have performed exorcisms, but never on-stage, only those that a household may require."

  Newspaper Man paused, choosing his words as carefully as game counters before he spoke again.

  "Looking for work?" he enquired.

  Doctor Fantomas sipped his lemon water and shrugged. "We are new to Tabat, he said. "Income is always welcome."

  "It’d be as an exorcist," the man said, slouching in his seat, keeping his eyes on the girl rather than the doctor. He wore a sailor’s clothing: loose canvas pants and a worn linen tunic over hard leather and boiled wool slippers.

  "Indeed? What sort of exorcism, newly dead or long-established? And what sort of fee are you looking for, in facilitating the transaction?"

  The man forced his focus from the girl to the doctor at the mention of money. She smoothed the silk of her skirts with her palm, turning her hands to drag her nails along the fabric before regarding them with a scientist’s intense scrutiny. Despite her introspective attitude, she was obvious in her listening.

  "Newly dead," the man said. He shuffled the newspaper in front of him, sorting through the pages for a long moment before he extracted a sheet and passed it along the counter.

  Doctor Fantomas studied it while the girl stole glances over his shoulder. The man looked chagrined at having surrendered the item of her attention.

  "Twin daughters," Doctor Fantomas said. "That’s very sad. A friend of yours?"

  "I bring him spices from the Southern Isles when I come up from there. Saves him on the merchanting mark-up."

  "And the duty, no doubt," Doctor Fantomas said.

  The sailor shrugged. "I’ll give you the address, and you tell ‘em Cyril sent ya. They’ll see to my fee. They’re right desperate, got a gal turned poltergeist."

  "Not both?"

  "I wouldn’t believe it of Ellie. She was sweet as punch," Cyril said. "But that Kim, she was a handful and half of hellion. If the poltergeist’s one of them—and the timing’s right as rain for that—my money’s on Kim."

  "I’ve extracted poltergeists before," the doctor said reflectively. He fingered the pin.

  The girl leaned close. "You detach them," she said.

  He nodded.

  "You put them in bottles." Her breathing quickened as she licked her smile wider.

  "Parts of them, certainly," the doctor said. "I often capture certain effluences that are useful in some experiments. Poltergeists are rarely salvageable, though."

  He looked at the sailor, who was taking gulps of his fish tea. Dots of green seaweed clung to his mustache.

  The girl pursed her lips as the doctor turned back to her, ignoring the man. His tone when he addressed her was as firm as though instructing a dimwitted and unruly child. "Go and find us a place to sleep tonight, Charlotte. Make sure that the rooms are clean and that the fees are under a silver apiece."

  She slid from her seat with a resigned attitude, ignoring the newspaper, which the man was currently folding into a new shape as though to catch her notice. Her silk rustled, nigh-inaudible—or perhaps that was her sigh?—as she moved back to the door.

  The man gave up on folding his newspaper and laid it down on the counter in front of him, extracting his cup of fish tea from among the folds. "She your apprentice?" he asked.

  Doctor Fantomas shook his head. A delicate shudder indicated the impracticality of such a notion.

  "Your daughter?"

  "Charlotte is a patient who I am treating for a pronounced and malignant affliction," the doctor said mournfully.

  "A ghost affliction?"

  "Indeed."

  At the address he had been given, the intersection of Spray and Sprig, in the iron-fenced square that surrounded the Piskie Wood, the doctor studied the sign outside the dining hall’s entrance. The returned Charlotte stood in his wake, huddled like a hen against the chilly spring air. Shadows were stealing over the terraces of the port city, claiming stairs and landings and plucking at the wires of the Great Tram and its accompanying iron-basket lines, laddering up and down the terraces, each tower’s base sending up huffs of sparks as its attendants stoked the engines.

  "What do you see?" Charlotte asked, after a period of silence.

  The sign showed a net full of fish, a mermaid caught among them. For some inexplicable reason she held a large bell up to the light. The streetlighter passed as they stood there, and as he touched the iron-housed lantern into illumination, the mermaid’s bare-breasted contours sprung out as triumphantly as her smile as she hoisted up the bell.

  "I see a tawdry reminder of the subjugation of Beasts this city depends on," the doctor said in a preacher’s tones. "They call it the Belle’s Bell."

  The noise Charlotte made would have been a snort in someone less hampered by manners. Instead it was a dainty huff, a storm’s blow in miniature. "You know what I mean," she said. "And be careful, abolitionist talk will get you imprisoned nowadays. Do you see ghosts?"

  "Not yet," the doctor said.

  "No sign of their activities?"

  The doctor removed his gaze from the mermaid’s roseate nipples and looked harder. But he saw no sign of the otherlight that would have betrayed ectoplasmic secretions of the sort that oozed from most ghosts.

  "Nothing," he said.

  "That is no guarantee."

  "Of course not," he was quick to say.

  She stared at the entrance and smoothed her hands over her hips. "Inside you will see the ghosts."

  "Perhaps," he said. "Sometimes such things are frauds."

  "Rarely!"

  "More commonly than most would think."

  But the moment they stepped inside, Doctor Fantomas could see the signs of ghostly habitation. Indeed, he saw a ghost itself, a willowy blur, leaning over a pair of diners in a booth near the corner. It sensed his gaze, raised the pale oval of its face, gave out a half-sound that was more a quiver of the air, and vanished.

  Beside him Charlotte tensed.

  The innkeeper, a thin woman with a pair of vertical lines set permanently in her forehead, stepped forward. Her hands plucked at her apron, tugged it into order that belied the mustang roll of her frightened eyes, ready for anything.

  Elsewhere the room showed other ghostly traces. Spirit-moss shagged over the walls, clustered on the paintings and tintypes hanging from the paneling. Making their meandering way across the wooden floor between the sparse array of customers were coin-sized red bad-luck beetles, which lived wherever ghosts were strong.

  He unobtrusively crushed one underfoot. The only one who could see it or smell the acrid stench of its innards, he had grown used to having to negotiate between knowledge of this world and the one most people lived in.

  He cleared his throat and said, "I am the ghost handler." The sentence came out louder, more proclamatory than he had intended. All the diners in the sparsely inhabited room turned to look at him. Near him, an elderly woman bent to speak in her younger companion’s ear, apparently in question, for he shrugged at her and returned his attention to the doctor.

  "Cyril sent me," the doctor added.

  Apparently he should have led with that information, for the woman’s demeanor relaxed.

  "Well then!" she exclaimed, and burst into tears.

  Over steaming mugs of fish tea, under the flickering light of the great candle-studded iron wheel that swung overhead to illuminate the Belle’s Bell’s main room, the woman, whose name was Eflora Nittlescent. She pronounced the name as though it should give the doctor some pause, which it did not. She confirmed Cyril’s opinion of her daughters, although she phrased it more delicately than the sailor had.

  "Kim was always strong-willed," she said. The cor
ner of her lips drooped, tugged down by strong emotion as she pointed to the wall of recent family tintypes. An expensive hobby, but the doctor had to admit he too would have wanted photos of such beautiful daughters, their dark hair framing strong-jawed, wide-mouthed features. Efora’s hand fluttered along a frame. Its occupant was shown in the kitchen, a pose less formal than most of the others, with cooking implements in hand. "This is her sister, Ellie."

  Charlotte shifted in her seat beside Doctor Fantomas. He could feel her attention being pulled away to the inn and the ghosts that had gone to ground somewhere in its confines. She trembled like a foxhound ready to be loosed on the scent. Reaching out, he tapped her once on the knee, giving her an admonitory look. Sulkily, she stared at the woman, who was still lost in her own thoughts.

  "And was Ellie less strong-willed?" the doctor questioned. It was good to get a sense of the personalities he would be dealing with beforehand.

  The lips curved upward at the thought of Ellie. "No, she was as strong-willed as Kimmie, any day," she said. "But she had a sweeter way of doing it all, could twist you round her finger as though it were the only thing you ever wanted to do. But she worked, that girl, making the place shine. She cooked most of the food, and it’s all fallen away, the tastes, the flavors, since she’s been gone. The stock has soured."

  The stock, the doctor knew from previous visits to the city, was the basis of the establishment’s fish tea. Each place prided itself on a different savor, a different mystery of spices, additives and arcane practices to guarantee a taste unrealizable anywhere else. If the stock truly had soured, it would have to be thrown out despite the fact that it might have been simmering in the same kettle, being added to, taken from, for years. Disaster.

  "How did they die?"

  "A fire. They slept up in the east attic, and fire broke out in the room below the stairs."

  "How did it break out?"

  "That was never decided. The inspectors said a rat might have carried a tobacco twist upstairs from the main room."

  "Is that a common occurrence?"

  Efora shrugged, splaying her hands on the table. They were twisted and gnarled, marked with calluses. They writhed on the table like roots seeking entrance into the wood, then stilled when she spoke. "More common than arson, they seemed to think. And what else could it have been?"