"What the hell are you doing?" I shouted.
"I might ask you the same." She motioned to the pile of muscleboys, who were struggling to their feet with dazed expressions.
"Abby! You disappeared!" I was waving my arms around like a Macromuppet. "Locator -- bad area -- disguise -- scary -- aargh!"
"Are you going to follow me around with a small army every time I turn off my locator?"
"Yes!!"
She sighed and put down her pencil and paper. "I'm really sorry," she called to the Fifteens. "My time was almost up anyway. Um, do you mind if we talk in here for a few minutes?"
"Yes!" gurgled the female.
"Abby, come on," I said. "They can't just stop in the middle. They have to, you know, finish what they were -- doing. Until it's finished their brains won't work properly."
"Okay," Abby said. "All right, ah -- thanks."
In the stairway, I said, "You couldn't just watch a porn channel?"
"It's not the same," she said. "That's all packaged and commercial. I wanted to interview them before and after. I have to know -- what it's like."
"Why?"
She paused on the stairs, and I stopped too. The muscleboys, muttering, went out onto the street, and we were alone in the flashing green and red light.
"Suze, I'm going to start the clock."
Like she'd poured a bucket of ice water down my spine. "You're what?"
"I'm going to take the treatments." She spoke quickly, as if afraid I'd interrupt her. "They've gotten much better in the past couple of years, there are basically no side effects. They're even making headway with infants. In five years, it looks like most babies won't have any arrestation effects at all, and -- "
Tears had sprung to my eyes. "What are you talking about?" I cried. "Why are you talking like them? Why are you talking like being like us is something to be cured?" I punched the wall, which hurt my hand. I sat down on the step and cried.
"Suze," Abby said. She sat down next to me and put her hand on my shoulder. "I love being like us -- but I want --"
"That?" I shouted, pointing up to the top of the stairs, where they were grunting again. "That's what you want? You'd rather have that than us?"
"I want everything, Suze. I want every stage of life --"
"Oh, every stupid stage, as designed by stupid God, who also gave us death and cancer, and --"
She grabbed my shoulders. "Suze, listen. I want to know what that up there is like. Maybe I won't like it, and then I won't do it. But Suze, I want to have babies."
"Babies? Abby, your eggs are forty years old --"
"Exactly! Exactly, my eggs are only forty years old, and most of them are still good. Who do you want to have the babies, Suze? The Geezers? The world is starting again, Suze, and I --"
"The world was fine!" I pulled away from her. "The world was just fine!" Snot and tears were running down my nose into my mouth, salty and gooey. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my stockbroker's suit, leaving a slick trail like a slug. "We were fine --"
"This isn't about us --"
"Oh baloney!!" I lurched to my feet, grabbing the railing for balance. "As if you're going to live with us in a galleon and fire water cannons and go to birthday parties! You're just not, Abby, don't kid yourself! You're going to be that!" I pointed up the stairs. "Sexual jealousy and sexual exchange economy and cheating and mutual-exploitation-and-ownership and serial monogamy and divorce and the whole stupid crazy boring..."
"Suze --" she said in a small voice.
"Just don't!" I said. "Don't drag it out! If you want to do it, do it, but then leave us alone! Okay? You're not welcome." I turned and headed down the stairs. "Get the hell out."
Max was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I didn't like the way he was looking at me. I brushed past.
The boys from the gym were in the car, eating yard-long submarine sandwiches with great gusto. Carla sat on the front steps, talking to a rag doll. She looked up, and her red jewel of an eye flashed -- for a moment it was as bright as looking into the sun at noon. Then she looked past me, into the sky.
"What are you afraid of?" she asked.
I leaned against the doorframe and said nothing. A wind came down the street and crumpled sheets of paper danced along it.
"I'm afraid of cows," she volunteered. "And Millie" -- she held up the rag doll -- "is afraid of, um, um, you know the thing where if you take all the money people spend and the way they looked at each other that day and you put it inside what the weather's going to do and then you can sing to cats and stuff? She's afraid of that."
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. "Can you see the future, Carla?"
She giggled, and then she looked serious.
"You guys are all wrong about that. It's just a game you made up. There isn't any future."
"Do you like being Augmented?" I asked.
"I like it but Millie doesn't like it. Millie thinks it's scary but she's just silly. Millie wishes we were like people and trees and we didn't have to make things okay all the time. But then we couldn't play with bolshoiye-gemeinschaft-episteme-mekhashvei-ibura."
"Okay," I said.
"Max is coming out with Abby four thousand five hundred and sixty-two milliseconds after I finish talking right now and projected group cohesion rises by thirty-six percent if you don't have a fight now so you should take the clown car and I'll give them a ride and I'd love to live with you but I know I'm too scary but it's okay but can I visit on Max's birthday?"
"Yes," I said. "You can visit on my birthday too."
"I can? I can?" She jumped up and hugged me, flinging her arms around my waist, pressing her cheek into my chest. "Wow, I didn't even know you'd say that!" She pulled away, beaming at me, then pointed to the car. "Okay, quick, go! Bye!"
I got in the car and clicked on the engine. Carla waved and she held Millie's arm and waved it too. The door behind her opened, I saw Max's shoe, and I drove off.
A quarter mile away from Carla, the flatscreen blinked on again, and my earring started buzzing like crazy. I told it to let Travis through.
"Abby's fine," I said. "She's with Max. They'll be coming home."
"Cool," Travis said. "Whew! That's a relief!"
"Yeah."
"So Tommy and Shiri sent me video of the house. It looks awesome. Do you love it too?"
"Yeah, I love it." I was on I-90 now. Beyond the spires and aerial trams of Billings, I could see the funhouse suburbs spreading out before me -- windmills, castles, ships, domes, faerie forests.
"Cool, because I think they signed some papers or something."
"What? Travis, we all have to agree!" As I said it, it occurred to me that the only one who hadn't seen the place was Abby. I gripped the wheel and burst out crying.
"What? What?" Travis said.
"Travis!" I wailed. "Abby wants to start the clock!"
"I know," Travis muttered.
"What? You know??"
"She told me this morning."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"She made me promise not to."
"Travis!"
"I was hoping you'd talk her out of it."
I took the exit for Pirateland, swooshing through an orange plastic tunnel festooned with animated skeletons climbing out of Davy Jones' lockers. "You can't talk Abby out of anything."
"But we've got to, Suze, we've got to. C'mon, we can't just fall apart like this. Katrina and Ogbu --" he was doing his panicstricken ratsqueak again, and suddenly I was very sick of it.
"Just shut up and stop whining, Travis!" I shouted. "Either she'll change her mind or she won't, but she won't, so you'll just have to deal with it."
Travis didn't say anything. I told my earring to drop the connection and block all calls.
I pulled up outside the galleon and got out. I found a handkerchief in the glove compartment and cleaned my face thoroughly. My suit, like the quality piece of work it was, had already eaten and digested all the snot I'd smeared on it -- the protein would proba
bly do it good. I checked myself in the mirror -- I didn't want the Real Estate Lady to see me weepy. Then I got out and stood looking at the house. If I knew Tommy and Shiri, they were still inside, having discovered a rollerskating rink or rodeo room.
Parked at the side of the house was the Real Estate Lady's old-fashioned van -- a real classic, probably gasoline-burning. I walked over to it. The side door was slid open. I looked in.
Inside, reading a book, was a Nine. She was tricked out in total Kidgear -- pony tails, barettes, t-shirt with a horse on it, socks with flashy dangly things. Together with the Lady's Mommystyle getup, it made perfect, if twisted, sense. Personally I find that particular game of Let's-Pretend sort of depressing and pitiful, but to each her own kink.
"Hey," I said. She looked up.
"Um, hi," she said.
"You live around here?"
She wrinkled her nose. "My mom, um, kinda doesn't really want me to tell that to strangers."
I rolled my eyes. "Give the roleplaying a rest, would you? I just asked a simple question."
She glanced at me. "You shouldn't make so many assumptions about people," she said, and pointedly lifted her book up in front of her face.
The clop-clop of the Lady's shoes came down the drive. My scalp was prickling. Something was not altogether kosher in this sausage.
"Oh, hello," the Lady said brightly, if awkwardly. "I see you've met my daughter."
"Is that your actual daughter, or can the two of you just not get out of character?"
The Lady crossed her arms and fixed me with her green-eyed stare. "Corintha contracted Communicative Developmental Arrestation Syndrome when she was two years old. She started the treatments seven years ago."
I realized my mouth was hanging open. "She's a clock-started Two? She spent twenty-five years as an unaugmented two-year-old?"
The Lady leaned past me into the van. "You okay in here, honey?"
"Great," said Corintha from behind her book. "Other than the occasional ignoramus making assumptions."
"Corintha, please don't be rude," the Lady said.
"Sorry," she said.
The Lady turned to me. I think my eyes must have been bugging out of my head. She laughed. "I've seen your documentaries, you know."
"You have?"
"Yes." She leaned up against the van. "They're technically very well done, and I think some of what you have to say is very compelling. That one with all the blanked out footage -- that gave me a real feeling for what it's like for those children who are wired up into the Internet."
An odd and wrongheaded way of putting it, but I limited myself to saying, "Uh -- thanks."
"But I think you're very unfair to those of us who didn't Augment our children. To watch your work, you'd think every parent who didn't Augment succumbed to Parenting Fatigue and sent their toddlers off to the government daycare farms, visiting only at Christmas. Or that they lived some kind of barbaric, abusive, incestuous existence." She looked over at her daughter. "Corintha has been a joy to me every day of her life --"
"Oh, mom!" Corintha said from behind her book.
" -- but I never wanted to stand in the way of her growing up. I just didn't think Augmentation was the answer. Not for her."
"And you thought you had the right to decide," I said.
"Yes." She nodded vigorously. "I thought I had the obligation to decide."
The Suze everyone who knows me knows would have made some sharp rejoinder. None came. I watched Corintha peek out from behind her book.
There was silence for a while. Corintha went back to reading.
"My friends still inside?" I asked.
"Yes," the Lady said. "They want the place. I think it fits six very comfortably, and -- "
"Five," I said huskily. "I think it's going to be five."
"Oh," the Lady looked nonplussed. "I'm -- sorry to hear that."
Corintha put her book down. "How come?"
The Lady and I looked at her.
"Oh, is that a rude question?" Corintha said.
"It's a bit prying, dear," the Lady said.
"Ah -- " I said. I looked at Corintha. "One of us wants to -- start the clock. Start the conventional biological aging process."
"So?" Corintha said.
"Honey," said the Lady. "Sometimes if people -- change -- they don't want to live together any more."
"That's really dumb," said Corintha. "If you didn't even have a fight or anything. If it's just that somebody wants to grow up. I would never get rid of my friends over that."
"Corintha!"
"Would you let her talk? I'm trying to respect your archaic ideas of parent-child relationships here, Lady, but you're not making it easy."
The lady cleared her throat. "Sorry," she said after a moment.
I looked out at the mainmast and the cannons of our galleon. The rolling lawn. This place had everything. The trampolines and the pools, the swingropes and the games. I could just imagine the birthday parties we'd have here, singing and cake and presents and dares, everyone getting wet, foamguns and crazy mixed-up artificial animals. We could hire clowns and acrobats, storytellers and magicians. At night we'd sleep in hammocks on deck or on blankets on the lawn, under the stars, or all together in a pile, in the big pillowspace in the bow.
And I couldn't see Abby here. Not a growing-upwards Abby, getting taller, sprouting breasts, wanting sex with some huge apes of men or women or both. Wanting privacy, wanting to bring her clock-started friends over to whisper and laugh about menstruation and courtship rituals. Abby with a mate. Abby with children.
"There's a place over by Rimrock Road," the Lady said slowly. "It's an old historic mansion. It's not quite as deluxe or as -- thematic as this. But the main building has been fitted out for recreation-centered group living. And there are two outbuildings that allow some privacy and -- different styles of life."
I stood up. I brushed off my pants. I put my hands in my pockets.
"I want us to go see that one," I said.
Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 2004.
K. J. PARKER
K. J. Parker is an author of fantasy fiction. The name is a pseudonym and the writer's true identity has never been revealed.
While Parker's stories take place in alternate universes with invented geographies and histories, some of the typical features of fantasy fiction such as explicit use of magic are not present. The stories tend to have tragic themes with characters whose actions are unintentionally, ultimately self-destructive. Other major themes in the books are politics, technology (especially disruptive innovation), and either or both of the former as a means to power.
The Sun And I, by K. J. Parker
I mean to rule the earth, as He the sky;
We really know our worth, the Sun and I
—W. S. Gilbert
“We could always invent God,” I suggested.
We’d pooled our money. It lay on the table in front of us; forty of those sad, ridiculous little copper coins we used back then, the wartime emergency issue—horrible things, punched out of flattened copper pipe and stamped with tiny stick-men purporting to be the Emperor and various legendary heroes; the worse the quality of the die-sinking became, the more grandiose the subject matter. Forty trachy in those days bought you a quart of pickle-grade domestic red. It meant we had no money for food, but at that precise moment we weren’t hungry. “What do you mean?” Teuta asked.
“I mean,” I said, “we could pretend that God came to us in a dream, urging us to go forth and preach His holy word. Fine,” I added, “it’s still basically just begging, but it’s begging with a hook. You give money to a holy man, he intercedes for your soul, you get something back. Also,” I added, as Accila pursed his lips in that really annoying way, “it helps overcome the credibility issues we always face when we beg. You know, the College accents, the perfect teeth.”
“How so?” Razo asked.<
br />
“Well,” I said—I was in one of my brilliant moods, when I have answers for every damn thing; it’s as though some higher power possesses me and speaks through me—“it’s an established trope, right? Wealthy, well-born young man gets religion, he gives everything he owns to the poor, goes out and preaches the word. He survives on the charity of the faithful, such charity being implicitly accepted as, in and of itself, an act of religion entitling the performer to merit in heaven.”
Accila was doing his academic frown, painstakingly copied from a succession of expensive tutors. “I don’t think we can say we gave all our money to the poor,” he said. “In my case, most of the innkeepers, pimps and bookmakers I shared my inheritance with were reasonably prosperous. Giving away all our money to the comfortably off doesn’t have quite the same ring.”
I smiled. Accila had made his joke, and would now be quite happy for a minute or so. “Well?” I said. “Better ideas, anyone?”
“I still think we should be war veterans,” Teuta said stubbornly. “I used to see this actress, and she showed me how to do the most appalling-looking scars with red lead and pig-fat. People love war veterans.”
I had an invincible argument. “Have we got any red lead? Can we afford to buy any? Well, then.”
Accila lifted the wine-jar. The expression on his face told me that it had become ominously light. We looked at each other. This was clearly an emergency, and something had to be done. The only something on offer was my proposal. Therefore—
“All right,” Teuta said warily. “But let’s not go rushing into this all half-baked. You said, invent God. So—” Teuta shrugged. “For a start, which god did you have in mind?”
“Oh, a new one.” Not sure to this day why I said that with such determined certainty. “People are hacked off with all the old ones. You ask my uncle the archdeacon about attendances in Temple.”
“Precisely,” Razo said. “The public have lost interest in religion. We live in an enlightened age. Therefore, your idea is no bloody good.”
I knew he’d be trouble. “The public have lost interest in the established religions,” I said. “They view them, quite rightly, as corrupt and discredited. Therefore, given Mankind’s desperate need to believe in something, the time is absolutely right for a new religion; tailored,” I went on, as the brilliance filled me like an inner light, “precisely to the needs and expectations of the customer. That’s where all the old religions screwed up, you see; they weren’t planned or custom-fitted, they just sort of grew. They didn’t relate to what people really wanted. They were crude and full of doctrinal inconsistencies. They involved worshipping trees, which no rational man can bring himself to do after the age of seven. We, on the other hand, have the opportunity to create the perfect religion, one which will satisfy the demands of every class, taste and demographic. It’s the difference between making a chair and waiting for a clump of branches to grow into a sort of chair shape.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 374