by David Brin
The woman pulls back. Stares at Lucy. Leaves the cubicle for a moment and returns with a glass in her hand. Grabs Lucy’s cheeks, squeezes her mouth open in a Betty Boop pout. “Drink.”
“Ow! Stop it!”
“Drink, damn you! You’re wrong. They are terrorists.” The woman yanks Lucy’s head back with her hair, pours bitter night down her throat.
The flavor of knowing right, doing right, being punished for it.
“We can do this without you, you know.”
* * *
Waking once more in her cubicle, Lucy wonders. Not for the first time, but more surely. This wonder is a cool breeze in her mind, a tang of snow, and white stars aglow on the back of her black arms and hands. She clasps star-hands in prayer, and they sing.
She knows there are no angels. They are from baby-time, Nanya’s time.
Still, they sing.
Still, she listens.
A turquoise wave of Knowing, built on all the currents she tastes and sees, lifts her: Denise and Fred are not terrorists. This is iron-blood certainty. And further: she tastes, surely now, unpacking what she learned in a snip of time, the twist-reason for this, heavy and caustic. Upshaw knows something that, if revealed, could change a policy that is bringing floods of illegal money to various parties. their names, nearby on her spectrum, a dry taste, like sand, hidden in a crease she can unfold and shake out, like grains on a square of pure white paper.
She plans an intricate possible future: the blacksuits’ own orange revenge, turned on them, blinking always in her upper right screen. To touch when it is Time. Not because she hates them. But yes, now. Because she hates them. All of them. They are using her. She sees that now.
Hug-Woman opens the door to her coffin space. She is sweet now. Another breakfast. More coffee, more French fries, more pills, more hugs. As if all is past, all is good, let’s move on.
Back in her cubicle, Lucy’s wonder now is very sharp: why? Do you not know what I know?
If so: sly delight.
Her mother: “They promised me I could always talk to you. Any time. I could see you. Any time. I could pull you out. Any time. But they keep—”
Silence.
* * *
They are in a hospital, Upshaw and his wife, on different floors. Machines beep. A disposition hovers. A turn of a valve, they live. A turn of the valve, they die.
Lucy does not know how to turn the valve.
She will gather knowing sidewise.
She does not have to infer anyone’s intent this time.
She just needs the strength she knows is somewhere, past the flimsy pills, for she can smell it on the wind when helmeted. She walks up the street to home, cardamom and popped mustard-seed an abstract, repeating mirage she can dive into and swim to nearly remembered Somewhere, Someone. Anger trumps fear, mostly, but when anger congeals and shimmers, contained like mercury blobs that roll around the bottom of her mind, a poison that spatters when shaken, but apart from her, there is the flat desert certainty of them hurting her, her mother, with casual, chilling efficiency.
And that is fear.
* * *
Helmeted, Lucy follows one swooping, singing string and arrives sudden in a marketplace bursting with all her old signs, viridian on her tongue blending to tamarind turquoise. A flash of uprising gray, spurting machine curses, draws her down one bright aisle of chattering vendors. She takes a close look at a flapping scarf and sees a moving picture of Nanya staring at a deck of Cincinnati Bee Cards spread out on a small green table. The suits are new: Nanya flips up a parrot card. Looks straight at her. I want to help is a vase on the table with singing flowers swept by deep spring sun.
* * *
Offshift, a tired, big girl, asleep in jerk-dreams where she wonders: Now? Now? Now?
Still afraid to jump.
* * *
The thing is, she notices, they always believe her. She will have only one chance to use this knowledge. She can betray them only once.
Is it betrayal?
She wonders why she even thinks it may be. What is their pull on her?
* * *
Her mother, a brief call: “We are trying to get you out. I called—”
Then, silence.
It doesn’t feel like a game any more.
* * *
Olu is in the market, gray as fog, large as her, hobbling alongside her and speaking in pictures, his claws splayed flat on pavement. Saying a picture of Nanya, a turquoise curse of springs and clicks.
What else would he say?
Can you hear that smell?
She does not have a phone any longer but she sees that does not matter. Of course, as the ruby slippers revealed, it never mattered.
She works on it in scattered spurts, less than a second each, keeping track of her progress in a pattern of cloth in the market. Finally, when the pattern is whole she reaches out and wraps it round her neck. A vendor holds up a wavy mirror, smiling, and she sees that she is older, thinner, much more beautiful. But she is also two years old and crying.
Tone of phone ringing. The answering voice a clash of machines, a gold infinity of Nanya.
“I knew you would call. Praise God! You did it. My small amazing girl.
“You need help. Your mother has told me. Hah! After so many years, she calls. Life is good, I swear it.
“I was so wrong, Lucy. I am healed now. Gamblers Anonymous, drugs, psychiatrists—but for years she would not talk to me. Like a stone, your mother. I was not a good parent to her.
“But—listen! There is probably not much time. I tell you this from my heart and from my life. Maybe you can understand now. Your mother never did.
“It is hard to know when you are making the choices that cage you.
“They do not always feel like choices. They are strong flavors, new roads, blurs of numbers. Is this not like you? Ah, yes, I thought so. When you were a baby, I knew. Your mother would not hear of it, would not have you tested, would not seek help. She didn’t want you to be like me.
“But it is this.
“Cages can take many shapes and flavors. At first you might love them. Then you hear the wrong notes.
“Once you know you are in a cage, you can leave it.
“The cage itself holds the pathway. You always have the power to break loose.
“Use that power to leave or it will kill you.”
Nanya’s laugh before the connection severs is a clash of gears, and then a brief tonal song that pulses gold within her vision.
Lucy does not dare call her back.
But now she knows: she is a gambler too.
* * *
No room for a single mistake. The sequence of events a complicated symphony.
A room she can enter, without legs. Majestic Yodas tall and everything. Truly, everything.
If she were a surgeon she would cut precise.
If she were a memory machine her screen would light in all of history.
If she were reading the memory machine she would see one line of type: a poem of many letters glowing.
If she were the letters glowing it would be a long-skip dance.
If she were a long-skip dance the stretch would almost kill her.
If she were almost dead she would bend the caging bands with skillful tools, a surgeon again.
Sewing, knot: tight and sure and fine.
In the hospital, the tide turns right. The valve is open to the life side. The Upshaws will live.
Lucy blocks the paths to the Upshaws. They and their history vanish, lost in infinite humanity. They are nothing to Yoda now, and can never be.
She releases what Upshaw knew, all that damage and more, to the Internet. No one will ever know where it came from. She makes sure of that.
She is human. Not machine. She can decide what is important because of the difference.
* * *
Kelly yanks off her helmet.
“You can save everyone in a city.” Hug-Woman Kelly paces the tiny space. “You ca
n save everyone in a plane. In a café. Look!” She takes Lucy’s head, not gently, turns it toward a screen. “Open your eyes! Look at the horrible things they do! You could save so many people! You already have—”
“Let me out. Now.” Instead of the screen, there is a sweep of ghostly parrot, a West African curse, a brain like hers, a vase of singing flowers.
She is a sport. The future is full of sports, like her.
The future is a sport.
She gathers the lovely wires of a million untold colors into her hands and this time they do not burn.
She looses them.
The rules of the game sweep skyward, a flock of gray parrots.
All the brains of living creatures are strange, and different.
As is Yoda, who will live and grow, but whose command codes she transmutes into patterns that will be difficult—perhaps impossible—for anyone to follow.
She sets the fuse that will dynamite the entrance to the mine with cadmium intent, with cardamom and ghost pepper and ginger, with that deep meal of dreams.
The specials, the Upshaws, all the friends and enemies in the world (depending how they slant the light of information), Yoda-that-is and Yoda-to-be—in fact, everyone! can do what they please. The blacksuits will not know this until it is over.
* * *
Two men come to get her. The men do not blink; their eyes are watered by machine. To blink is to lose the mark. They do not smile. So what else is new?
This is: they escort her to the entrance, past the guards, accompanied by a woman Lucy has never seen, who wears a black suit.
Then sunlight flashes off cars in the parking lot. Blue sky above. Wind. It is all so normal that it startles Lucy. Her mother is there. Waving, crying smiling hugging. Lucy: enfolded.
A woman in a green suit next to Lucy’s mother leans against the car, holding a tablet. The bright wind wilds her hair.
Blacksuit woman, her hair unmoving as a helmet, writes on the tablet. The greensuit woman touches it.
Alone after so long, without the rainbow pathways, Lucy still feels the gold arrow strike deep into Yoda, behind her and beneath her, in that instant of consent, at her note of freeing.
Can you hear that smell?
A single parrot, with strange brain, swoops into the blue, clear sky.
Mostly, we’ll adapt to changing times …
… except for our thundering dinosaurs.
ELEPHANT ON TABLE
BRUCE STERLING
Tullio and Irma had found peace in the Shadow House. Then the Chief arrived from his clinic and hid in the panic room.
Tullio and Irma heard shuddering moans from the HVAC system, the steely squeak of the hydraulic wheels, but not a human whisper. The Shadow House cat whined and yowled at the vault door.
* * *
Three tense days passed, and the Chief tottered from his airtight chamber into summer daylight. Head bobbing, knees shaking, he reeled like an antique Sicilian puppet.
Blank-eyed yet stoic, the elderly statesman wobbled up the perforated stairs to the Shadow House veranda. This expanse was adroitly sheltered from a too-knowing world.
The panic rooms below ground were sheathed in Faraday copper, cast iron and lead, but the mansion’s airy upper parts were a nested, multilayer labyrinth of sound baffles, absorbent membranes, metastructured foam, malleable ribbons, carbon filaments, vapor smoke and mirror chaff. Snakelike vines wreathed the trellises. The gardens abounded in spiky cactus. Tullio took pains to maintain the establishment as it deserved.
The Chief staggered into a rattan throne. He set his hairy hands flat on the cold marble tabletop.
He roared for food.
Tullio and Irma hastened to comply. The Chief promptly devoured three hard-boiled eggs, a jar of pickled artichoke hearts, a sugar-soaked grapefruit, and a jumbo-sized mango, skin and all.
Some human color returned to his famous, surgically amended face. The Chief still looked bad, like a reckless, drug-addict roué of fifty. However, the chief was actually 104 years old. The Chief had paid millions for the zealous medical care by his elite Swiss clinic. He’d even paid hundreds of thousands for the veterinary care of his house cat.
While Irma tidied the sloppy ruins of breakfast, Tullio queried Shadow House screens for any threats in the vicinity.
The Chief had many enemies: thousands of them. His four ex-wives were by far his worst foes. He was also much resented by various Italian nationalists, fringe leftist groups, volatile feminist cults, and a large sprinkling of mentally disturbed stalkers who had fixated on him for decades.
However, few of these fierce, gritty, unhappy people were on the island of Sardinia in August 2073. None of them knew that the Chief had secretly arrived on Sardinia from Switzerland. The Shadow House algorithms ranked their worst threat as the local gossip journalist Carlo Pizzi, a notorious little busybody who was harassing supermodels.
Reassured by this security check, Tullio carried the card table out to the beach. Using a clanking capstan and crank, Tullio erected a big, party-colored sun umbrella. In its slanting shade he arranged four plastic chairs, a stack of plastic cups, plastic cryptocoins, shrink-wrapped card decks, paper pads, and stubby pencils. Every object was anonymous and disposable: devoid of trademarks, codes or identities. No surface took fingerprints.
The Chief arrived to play, wearing wraparound mirrorshades and a brown, hooded beach robe. It was a Mediterranean August, hot, blue, and breezy. The murmuring surf was chased by a skittering horde of little shore birds.
Irma poured the chief a tall iced glass of his favorite vitamin sludge while Tullio shuffled and dealt.
The Chief disrobed and smeared his seamy, portly carcass with medicated suntan unguent. He gripped his waterproofed plastic cards.
“Anaconda,” he commanded, and belched.
The empty fourth chair at their card table was meant to attract the public. The Chief was safe from surveillance inside his sumptuous Shadow House—that was the purpose of the house, its design motif, its reason for being. However, safety had never satisfied the Chief. He was an Italian politician, so it was his nature to flirt with disaster.
Whenever left to themselves, Tullio and Irma passed their pleasant days inside the Shadow House, discreet, unseen, unbothered and unbothering. But the two of them were still their chief’s loyal retainers. The Chief was a man of scandal and turbulence—half-forgotten, half-ignored by a happier era. But the Chief still had his burning need to control the gaze of the little people.
The Chief’s raw hunger for glory, which had often shaken the roots of Europe, had never granted him a moment’s peace. During his long, rampaging life, he’d possessed wealth, fame, power, and the love of small armies of women. Serenity, though, still eluded him. Privacy was his obsession: fame was his compulsion.
Tullio played his cards badly, for it seemed to him that a violent host of invisible furies still circled the Chief’s troubled, sweating head. The notorious secrecy. The covert scandals. The blatant vulgarity which was also a subtle opacity—for the Chief was an outsized statesman, a heroic figure of many perverse contradictions. His achievements and his crimes were like a herd of elephants: they could never stand still within a silent room.
Irma offered Tullio a glance over their dwindling poker hands. They both pitied their Chief, because they understood him. Tullio had once been an Italian political-party operative, and Irma, a deft Italian tax-avoidance expert. Nowadays they were reduced to the status of the house-repairman and the hostess, the butler and the cook. There was no more Italy. The Chief had outlived his nation.
Becoming ex-Italian meant a calmer life for Tullio and Irma, because the world was gentler without an Italy. It was their duty to keep this lonely, ill-starred old man out of any more trouble. The Chief would never behave decently—that was simply not in his character—but their discreet beach mansion could hush up his remaining excesses.
The first wandering stranger approached their open table. This fringe figure was
one tiny fragment of the world’s public, a remote demographic outlier, a man among the lowest of the low. He was poor, black, and a beach peddler. Many such émigrés haunted the edges of the huge Mediterranean summer beach crowds. These near-vagrants sold various forms of pretty rubbish.
The Chief was delighted to welcome this anonymous personage. He politely relieved the peddler of his miserable tray of fried fish, candy bars, and kid’s plastic pinwheels, and insisted on seating him at the green poker table.
“Hey, I can’t stay here, boss,” complained the peddler, in bad Italian. “I have to work.”
“We’ll look after you,” the Chief coaxed, surveilling the peddler, from head to foot, with covert glee. “My friend Tullio here will buy your fish. Tullio has a hungry cat over there, isn’t that right, Tullio?”
The Chief waved his thick arm at the Shadow House, but the peddler simply couldn’t see the place. The mansion’s structure was visually broken up by active dazzle lines. Its silhouette faded like a cryptic mist into the island’s calm palette of palms and citruses.
Tullio obediently played along. “Oh yes, that’s true, we do have a big tomcat, he’s always hungry.” He offered the peddler some plastic coinage from the poker table.
Irma gathered up the reeking roast sardines. When Irma rounded a corner of the Shadow House, she vanished as if swallowed.
“It has been my experience,” the Chief said sagely, scooping up and squaring the poker cards, “that the migrants of the world—men like yourself—are risk-takers. So, my friend: how’d you like to double your money in a quick hand of hi-lo with us?”
“I’m not a player, boss,” said the peddler, though he was clearly tempted.
“So, saving up your capital, is that it? Do you want to live here in Italy—is that your plan?”
The peddler shrugged. “There is no Italy! In Europe, the people love elephants. So, I came here with the elephants. The people don’t see me. The machines don’t care.”
Irma reappeared as if by magic. Seeing the tense looks on their faces, she said brightly, “So, do you tend those elephants, young man? People in town say they brought whales this year, too!”
“Oh no, no, signora!” cried the peddler. “See the elephants, but never look at the whales! You have to ride a boat out there, you get seasick, that’s no good!”