Caroline trailed behind them. The look on her face drove me forward as far as the property line. Her eyes were red from crying. In the months we’d been watching her, luring her, worrying about her, she’d never cried. Not that we’d seen. She was tough.
The three new robots stood to the side, waiting. They gleamed. All of their clothes were new.
The three old robots slid down into the seats of the big car, smooth as butter, silken as silver, the move both simple and final.
Caroline buried her face in her hands.
Aliss let out a soft squeak of pain so deep it forced me forward, across the line and over to where the old woman stood beside Caroline, watching her, but not touching her. I had Bear with me, close in case the guard-bots turned away from the old woman. Aliss followed by my side, her face as stricken as Caroline’s. I didn’t understand what was going on except the obvious; this woman was taking Caroline’s family and giving her a better, newer one.
The woman herself had steel in her eyes, human steel. She looked at least seventy, slightly shrunken and bowed. But not a bit frail. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised when she said, “Hello, Aliss and Paul.”
I glanced around for Caroline, and found her standing by the door Roberto had slid into, watching us and clutching the door-handle all at once. It appeared to be locked.
I tried to keep as much control in my voice as possible as I looked back at the old woman. “And you are?”
“Jilly.”
I’d heard the name. The first day we were on this property. “You’re Caroline’s head of security?”
“And you can tell us where her parents are,” Aliss hissed over my shoulder. “And why she’s been left all alone.” Her voice rose enough to make me wince and feel proud all at once. “And why she can’t ever leave, and she can’t even pet the dog.” She glanced down at Bear who was looking between Jilly and his obviously upset Aliss as if trying to decide who bore the most watching. “Why she can’t come see our deer and can’t even eat my cookies!”
The woman appeared nonplussed by Aliss’s outburst.
Caroline’s eyes had widened, but she said nothing. The fear in her eyes was worse than I’d ever seen it. Except this time she wasn’t looking at me. Poor kid.
I took a deep breath and added to Aliss’s list. “And why you’re taking the only family she has.”
Caroline yelled at me. “It’s the deer. Your damned deer were better than Roberto and Ruby, and Jilly can’t stand that.”
She finally sounded like a pre-teen girl. But this wasn’t the moment to heartily approve.
Jilly responded with a quiet and sure voice. “No. Your help gets upgraded every three years, and you know that. It’s simply time.”
“It’s the deer,” Caroline insisted.
I tried to sound calm, but my voice still shook. “They’re Christmas decorations.” She probably changed the robots because they came over to see the deer. I could still picture Ruby’s silver finger reaching toward the fawn’s silver nose.
“Does she ever see her parents?” Aliss demanded. “Do they bother?”
The seven-footed guard-bots began to circle the old woman restlessly. She gave them hand signals and they stopped, all three of them between us and her. “You’re overstepping your bounds. I have no legal right to kill you, but I can take any unleashed dog.”
Aliss drew in a sharp breath.
A bright red light played along Bear’s leash, just below my hand.
Caroline cried out, “No!”
“Then go in the house,” Jilly said.
Caroline had to pass us to go in. Aliss handed her the tote bag. Surprisingly, Jilly said nothing, but allowed Caroline to take it into the house. The three new bots followed her, gliding even more smoothly than the old ones.
I looked at the woman and said, “When Roberto mentioned you, I assumed you were another robot. Now that I’ve met you, I wish my first guess had been right. You can’t give her a family of robots and then take them away.” My hands shook. Part fear, part anger. Of course, we should never have let it continue. Calling the cops once shouldn’t have been enough. The poor, poor kid.
Jilly’s lips thinned, and for a moment she looked like all of the irascible old women I’d ever met. She probably had two thousand dollars worth of clothes on, and more in jewelry. Thousands of dollars worth of robots swirled around her feet. She looked like stone.
Allis pleaded, “Please. Leave the robots.”
No change. But then something more vulnerable flashed across Jilly’s eyes and the corners of her mouth softened. She took a deep breath. “Her parents are dead. They died seven years ago. Her grandmother pays for her care, and I take care of her grandmother. That’s all I can do. There is no one else. If anything happens to either of us, Caroline could end up in the state’s hands.”
She waited, let us absorb this. Maybe the woman said this so we’d stop harassing her, maybe because it was true. She was old enough to be the grandmother or the friend of the grandmother. Between being raised by Roberto and Ruby or the State of Washington, it was a tough call.
Aliss’s arm snaked around my waist. I’d had a few friends in foster care in high school. One had done well, gone on to college, turned into a lawyer. One had been raped and otherwise ignored by her foster parents and the state. Caroline was too old to be adopted easily. And rich, apparently. The State might “need” her money. And even if well intentioned, how would they deal with a kid who knew advanced physics? Would they let us take her?
As if Jilly had been reading my mind, she said, “She is safe, and halfway through her first bachelor’s degree.”
“But she’s lonely,” Aliss blurted out. “Can’t you see that? Surely there’s money? Look at this house! Hire people to take care of her instead of bots.”
Jilly watched us for a long while, and then closed her eyes, mumbling. I didn’t see a communication loop across her ear, but her gray hair was thick enough to hide one. Surely she was talking to someone. In the meantime, the only movement was Bear trying to watch everything at once and the guard-bots trying to watch Bear and us and the perimeter all at once. And us, shivering in the cool wind, which made the ten minutes before Jilly spoke seem like forever. “She had a live-in teacher until two years ago. She outgrew her capabilities, and the . . . circumstances . . . were problematical. Caroline is exceptionally bright, and she is doing better in this situation than in her previous one.”
She sounded like she believed her words completely.
We stood silent. Surely Aliss felt as struck dumb as me.
“Caroline is scraping the bottom of the kind of complex physics and math that breaks old men’s hearts. She does well with machine teachers.”
“She has no friends!” Aliss blurted. “At least leave her Ruby.”
Jilly stood and watched us, the guard-bots floating in agitated tiny circles, drifting up and down, as if restless. At least they’d stopped targeting the leash.
Caroline’s face was pressed to the glass in the second story window, looking down at us all. She was crying again, her eyes raking the car. In her arms, she clutched the toy dog Aliss had made her. I couldn’t see Aliss’s face, but I hoped she could see the girl with the dog.
“When did you change her keepers last?”
“I think you should leave now,” Jilly said. She punctuated her words with a hand signal that caused the bots to scoot close enough that Bear started barking and snarling. We backed off, but I hated every step. This whole situation was an odd trap, for Caroline for sure, and maybe for us. We stood to the side of the driveway and gave the long black limousine plenty of time to pull away.
“Boy, I thought I hated this before,” Aliss said. She wasn’t crying, but she’d gone still and angry.
“Did you see Caroline with the dog? I think she likes it.”
“I should have sewn in a nail file.”
“Maybe. At least we have more information now. We best keep walking so Bear won’t be deprived of
his routine.”
So we did. Keep walking. Sad. On our return trip, we looked up at the windows of Caroline’s house, but she no longer stood looking out. The guard-bots made sure we saw them, floating at the edge of the property, as menacing as the first time we saw them. My feet kept dragging, and beautiful Aliss looked far more disturbed than pretty. Although it took a long time, we made it home.
Even though it was still a few hours before dusk, we both gravitated to the enclosed deck, bundling up under fleece blankets and watching a light wind blow the lowest branches of the trees softly back and forth. It was too early for animals, so all we saw outside were birds: two crows and a Stellar’s Jay. Bear settled for his afternoon nap and I stroked Aliss’s hair and wished we’d never moved here, and never seen the robot’s girl, and didn’t know about the situation we seemed unable to do anything about. Once Aliss got up and made us both strong-smelling Chai tea, and once we let Bear out at his request, watching him avoid the silver deer like the plague while doing his business. When he came back in, Aliss patted him and held him close. “I hate robots, too.”
“Maybe I should program the deer to walk over there tomorrow.”
She laughed, a little sad. “I’d hate to see them torn up by the nasty-bots.”
“Yeah, me too.”
We sat and watched the day slide into darkness, not stirring again until it grew too dark to see each other’s expressions and Bear began letting out soft whuffs, asking for his dinner.
In the kitchen, habit caused me to turn Frankenbot’s eyes toward the robot house. I’d almost reached up to turn the controls back when I noticed something different. “Come here, Aliss.”
She was at my side in an instant.
A big square of something white—maybe butcher paper or poster-board—had been taped to the kitchen window. Words had been hand lettered on it. “You can sit on your deck now.”
Did that mean we could use the deck now because she’d taped something over the window? Or what?
Aliss seemed more confident than I felt. She took a bottle of syrah and two glasses up the stairs. The door to the bedroom deck slid open silently as we approached it and sat beside Frankenbot, sharing the empty chair. Aliss poured us each half a glass of wine. She raised hers. “To Frankenbot, who represents our first progress.” She stroked Frankenbot’s now slightly rusty head almost fondly.
I wasn’t sure we’d made progress, but I sipped my wine anyway. I added my own toast. “To Roberto and Ruby and the nameless garden-bot.”
Aliss laughed.
Below us, the paper from the window peeled back, and Caroline waved at us.
Two of the three new robots stood in the kitchen watching her with their shiny silver faces.
It was too far away for me to tell for sure, but I thought Caroline might be smiling.
SAVANT SONGS
I loved Elsa; the soaring tinkle of her rare laughter, the marbled blue of her eyes, the spray of freckles across her nose. Her mind. The first, deepest attraction; the hardest challenge. She flew with her mental intensity, taking me places I’d never been before, outdistancing me, searching the mathematical structures of string theory and mbranes, following n-dimensional folds across multiple universes. I loved her the way one loves the rarest Australian black opal or the view from the top of Mount Everest. Elsa’s rarity was its own attraction. There are very few female savants.
She captured me whole when I was her physics grad student, starting in 2001, nine years before breakthrough.
Ten years ago last week, I walked into Elsa’s office. She stood with her back to me, staring out her window. She didn’t move at all as I snicked the door shut and scraped the chair legs. I coughed. Nothing. She might have been a statue. Her straw-colored hair hung in a long braid, just touching her slender hips, fastened with a violet beaded loop, the kind little girls wore. Her arms hung loosely from her pink T-shirt, above faded jeans and Birkenstocks.
“Hello?” I spoke tentatively. “Professor Hill?” Was she all right? I’d never seen such stillness in anything but a sleeping child.
Louder. “Professor? I’m Adam Giles, here for an interview.”
She finally turned and stepped daintily over to her desk, curling up in the big scratched leather chair behind her empty desk. Her gaze fastened on my eyes, as if they were all she saw in that moment. “Do you know what the word atom means?”
I blinked. She didn’t. A warm breeze from the open windows blew stray strands of her hair across her face.
I struggled for the right answer, pinned by her gaze. She was an autistic savant. Literal. “Indivisible.”
“Why?”
I thought about it. Atoms are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and ever-infinitely smaller things. “It means they didn’t know any better when they named them. They couldn’t see anything smaller yet.”
“It means they were scared of anything smaller. They tried to make the word a fence. They thought that if they called atoms indivisible, they could make them indivisible.” Her gaze still hadn’t wavered. Her voice was high and firm, a soprano song even when she talked. I’d researched autistics, researched Elsa herself on the web. In physics, she was brilliant. She threw ideas right and left, half silly and wrong, half cutting-edge breakthroughs. If she accepted me, I would help the University winnow, feed her ideas to people who would follow them for years. One of her interviewers had summed her up by saying, “Talk to Elsa about physics, and all you see is the savant. The autistic exists over dinner.”
No grad student had lasted more than three months with her. I needed to last with her; my dissertation was based on her ideas. Whether she screamed or cried or just made me work, however strange she might be, I wanted—needed—to explore what she explored.
She kept going. “Scientists make fences with ideas. Accidentally. Do you like to jump fences?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll do.” She stood.
“Don’t you want to know about my dissertation?”
“You’re working on multiverses. It’s the only reason you can possibly have chosen me.”
She had a point. But multiverses was a rather broad subject. Mtheory: the latest plausible theory of everything, the current holy grail of physics. We live in universes made of 11 dimensions, called (mem)branes. We can render them with math, but settle for flat representations like folded shapes and balls full of air when we try to draw them in the few dimensions we can actually see. If you look at our pitiful drawings, we appear to live as holograms on flat sheets of see-through paper.
From that strange interview, I spent the next year near her every day, pounding away on my dissertation late at night, only giving myself Saturday nights for beer and chat with friends.
It was hard at first. Some days she talked endlessly about her most recent obsession, only not to me. She talked to herself, to the walls, to the windows, to the printers. I might as well have been inanimate. I wandered the lab behind her, taking notes. It was like following a six-year-old. She mumbled of memories from multiple universes, alternate histories, alternate futures. The first time I really understood her, months into following her, she stopped suddenly in the middle of one of her monologues, looking directly at me, as if today she saw me, and said, “Memory is a symphony call answered by the infinite databases on all the brane universes. We just need to hear the right notes, or make the right notes in an out-call, like requesting a certain table from a cosmic database.”
I learned she cared little for food, or weather, or even holidays. I learned never to change the location of anything in the lab, and that if she changed it, she never forgot the change. Even pencils had places. I had to hold her coat out to her when she left, trail it along her arm so she’d notice it, and then she’d shrug into it, safe from the New England weather until she made it across campus to the little brownstone apartment the University provided for her.
I didn’t care whether she ignored me or made me the center of her focus. Months passed when she work
ed with me by her side, when she seemed astoundingly normal, and guided me to new levels of understanding. But even when she fell into herself, when she wandered and talked to walls, I loved to watch her. Elsa had a dancer’s grace, flowing easily, absently, around every physical obstacle while her mind played in math jungle gyms and her hair glowed in the overhead lights. She was the fairy queen of physics, and I stayed with her, became her acolyte, her Watson, her constant companion.
Scientific dignitaries visited her, and reporters, and the Physics Chair, and I translated. “No, she thinks it is a music database. Or something like that. Related to Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields? A little. To Jung? She says he was too simple—it’s not a collective unconscious. It’s a collective database, a hologram, keyed to music. A bridge between eleven dimensions. Yes, some dimensions are too small to see. Elsa says size is an illusion.” I illustrated it the way she illustrated it to me once: plucking a hair from my head. “There are a million universes in here. And we are in here, too. Perhaps.” Whoever I was talking to would look puzzled, or awed, and angry at this, and I would shake my head. “No, I don’t fully understand it.”
Elsa nodded when I spoke, or when I changed something she’d said in physics-speak to English. Sometimes her hand fluttered to my arm, her thin fingers brushed my skin, and a nearly electric warmth surged through me.
There was an argument over my dissertation. One professor said the work I was doing was impossible and dangerous, another said it was Elsa’s work and not my own, but two others stood up for me. Elsa was there, of course, staring at the ceiling, scribbling on her tablet PC, barely engaged in the argument. I fretted. She only saw me on some days; if this were a day that I was furniture, would she vote for me? But at the right moment, she raised her voice, and said, “Adam is an exemplary student, and more than that, an exemplary physicist. The ideas put forward here are astonishing, and only partly based on my work. All of us build on each other. Give the man his doctorate so we can get back to work.”
Cracking the Sky Page 4