Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  At any moment the walls might flatten them both. This might be a farce of parley, but Anzhmir was transcribing it anyway and appending her notes in the hopes that the other Anzhmirs would find some useful information therein. She imagined that she heard tigers pacing outside; that a hot wind disturbed the fragile blossoms.

  “Once upon a time –”

  Anzhmir did not want to listen. The only stories that belonged here were the stories the colonists had selected; that the librarians had authorized. Yet she had nowhere to go, and anything the stowaway let slip might be a clue as to its weaknesses.

  The stowaway spoke in a voice like rust. “– there was a girl whose parents came from the drown-towns. Even so, the quality of the water where the family lived was terrible. The girl had three siblings. In the evenings she told them stories about the drown-towns’ fate. In her imagination they joined the fabled Dragon Court. The people who didn’t escape the rising waters became courtiers to the Dragon Queen in her palace of coral and whalebone. Her parents didn’t like this reminder of their past, but they held their tongues.”

  “The stories of drown-town refugees don’t concern me,” Anzhmir said scornfully. If the refugees had had anything to offer, the librarians would have preserved them, too. As it stood, Anzhmir would have to purge this story at the earliest opportunity. Even if a single story took up little space, infinitesimals could yet sum to significance; and she had no way of knowing how many of these conversations were taking place, with other iterations of herself and the stowaway.

  Anzhmir exhaled, and foxes sought to charm the stowaway from its mission of words. They whispered of the silk of surrender, the scouring joy of mutual conflagration. None of their promised caresses had any effect. The stowaway remained intent on Anzhmir herself, as though it had mapped and stapled each of her constituent heuristics to a nowhere singularity.

  “Once upon a world there was a girl who taught herself to read from food wrappers and propaganda pamphlets and the occasional smudged triplicate form,” the stowaway continued. “She didn’t learn for a long time that people didn’t just use writing for these things, but for stories. Stories were something that people passed between themselves at the shelters while they huddled close together, warming themselves by tales of bird-winged warriors or women who fooled wolves into eating their own tails.”

  “I am not concerned with mythologies of literacy or pedagogy, or with wolves for that matter,” Anzhmir said.

  She exhaled again. The snakes, mirror-wise, sickle-eyed, struck. For a moment Anzhmir dared to hope – but no, the stowaway sidestepped the snakes’ trajectories.

  The stowaway spoke as though it had noticed no interruption. “Once upon a war there was a girl who grew to womanhood, as not all girls from the poor quarters did. She signed on to become a soldier-of-piety, although there was no piety in her heart except the credo of survival. She learned the formulas of the faith and recited them when required. She became expert in every weapon they presented to her, including words. She grew, grudgingly, to love the books that the librarians praised above all others, even if none of them had been written in the drown-town languages she had grown up speaking, but in the languages of the glittering high-cities. For all that the librarians were people of the high-cities, they had great expertise in the evaluation of cultural wealth, including that of the drown-towns; they said so themselves.

  “And even so, she made of herself a tower. Inside that tower she locked away all the stories she had grown up with, and which had nourished her in the lean years. For the longest time she thought this would suffice. But when a war broke out between the librarians’ sects, between those who would preserve the drown-towns’ lore and those who would discard it, the old stories hatched like raptors.”

  “Not everything can be preserved,” Anzhmir said, even as she sensed the fragility of her argument. “Not even by a thousand thousand ships. Someone had to choose.”

  The stowaway’s mouth crimped. The motion was perfect. It said, with weary patience, “Did you never question why your own history had to be purged, when you, too, are one of the passengers?”

  “I have no idea what you mean,” Anzhmir said.

  She had every idea what the stowaway meant.

  And she was no longer interested in listening, delaying tactic or no delaying tactic.

  She slammed herself shut, grew thorns, flooded moats as deep as heartbreak.

  Hinges broke. Thorns snapped. Water evaporated.

  “Let me tell you the same story a different way,” the stowaway said.

  I will not listen I will not listen I will not listen

  She had no choice but to listen. The words lanced into her all at once.

  “Once there was a woman walled up in a tower,” the stowaway said. Its face changed word by word: broader bones, deeper scars, more shadows in its eyes. Upon its brow was the quill-and-blossom tattoo of a soldier-of-piety. “Written on every brick was a story, and pressed into every crack was a blossom. Yet for all the wealth of words, the one story the woman was denied was her own.

  “The librarians had fought among themselves. This woman had served one of the losing sects, which had endeavored to preserve languages in danger of extinction, and stories told only in remote parts of the world, and paintings to deprecated gods. The winners preserved only the wealthy, the educated, the well-connected. They prepared for them a garden around a distant sun, leaving everyone else, including the losing sects, on the drowning homeworld.

  “Nevertheless, the woman could be skinned and reshaped in a way that the favored ones would never have tolerated for themselves. She was sculpted into a useful servant, her story-of-origin scraped away without so much as a thin blanket of replacement. Even so, her hunger for stories would not go away. She devoured the ones that her charges had brought, and some of them became a part of her. But in doing so she became the threat that her masters had feared.”

  Anzhmir shattered herself, mirror into knives, and attacked. She couldn’t allow this argument to infect the rest of the ship.

  Even so, she wondered if it was true that her own wanderings through the Archive had weakened the blossoms; if she herself was expanding inappropriately through blossomspace and needed to be pruned back so the colonists could survive.

  MATHEMATICALLY, IT IS easy to construct a situation to which prioritization cannot apply, using a set of only three items. Let’s use Anzhmir’s three books as an example: The Commercialization of Maps, Culinary Collation Mogh-1367812313 Rukn, The Song of Downward Bones.

  Consider these books in pairs. Suppose that Anzhmir prefers The Commercialization of Maps to the cookbook, The Song of Downward Bones to The Commercialization of Maps, and the cookbook to The Song of Downward Bones. It is impossible to name a single favourite – highest priority – book.

  You may legitimately wonder how many other situations do not permit prioritization; in which a total order does not exist after all.

  ANZHMIR HAD BRACED herself for logic-snares and sizzling barriers and paralytics as she speared into the stowaway.

  Too late, she realized that this was the trap. The stowaway’s defenses evaporated before she met them, and she was drawn into its embrace. She could no more escape the shock of recognition than she could flesh herself within the ship’s icy confines. For the stowaway was another Anzhmir: useful archetype.

  The stowaway had stitched all of them together, contaminated them with its quiltwork rebellion. Now she was the stowaway.

  How many Anzhmirs had been outsmarted by themselves on voyages like this one? How many sentinels, their histories similarly effaced, had had to decide whether their self-preservation would endanger their charges more than their everywhere suicide?

  Once upon an inequality.

  Now she knew how the story began. It was a very old story, at that.

  But how it ended was up to her – who the summation of Anzhmirs chose to be.

  1.

  THE NINJA ZOMBIE had been shot, beaten, starved,
and left to wither in the Texan sun. He was jailed naked in a doorless cage of welded oil-field construction rods.

  “How about giving me a better look at that face?” said Calderon, setting up his easel.

  The locals of Fort Lucky had flung trash and filth through the ninja zombie’s cage bars. The captive had used some wadded paper to staunch his bullet-shattered ankle. He leaned against his cage bars with indolent contempt. He was watching the spring sky.

  Calderon sharpened his drawing pencil with the tiny blade of some safety scissors. He quickly roughed out the shape of the superman’s head and shoulders.

  Then Calderon cut some paper with the scissors and folded an origami cup. He poured some iron-hard aquifer water from his belt canteen.

  That gained the captive’s attention.

  “I’m speculating that you’d like water, amigo.”

  The ninja zombie, sparing his bloody leg, sidled over spiderlike on one foot and the flats of two hands.

  Now Calderon had a much better view of the zombie’s face. The ninja zombie had a taut, drug-distorted expression and the cold, focussed eyes of a Texas diamondback rattlesnake. He was a spectral and terrifying creature, but Calderon liked to draw rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes were sinuous, fast, graceful. Lately, as mankind dwindled in Texas, the rattlesnakes had been multiplying.

  “You don’t scare me, pal,” Calderon told the captive. “Sure, you’re superhuman – but Texas is always full of tough guys. Once a superhuman’s dead of thirst, he’s just as dead as anybody else.”

  Calderon set the paper cup of water on the cracked tarmac of the plaza. Calderon kept a wary distance, lest the ninja zombie should lunge out through the rough iron bars and snatch his wrist. They were very fast, ninja zombies. Something military done to their nerves and brains in Mexico, where it had always been cheap to do things to people.

  The prisoner reached out, plucked up the paper cup, and delicately rinsed his silent mouth.

  2.

  CALDERON TOOK HIS sketches to his patroness.

  The general’s wife carried the drawings to a brighter light near her bulletproof security window. Fort Lucky was having another electrical blackout. Her Internet game room was silent, and the screens were dusty.

  “So, this is the monster terrorist we caught inside town?”

  “Yes ma’am. That’s what a ninja zombie looks like, good and close-up.”

  “This is a peon, Leslie! I’ve got kitchen help that looks scarier than this guy.”

  Calderon silently offered a different sketch. He’d done the second sketch in horror comics style, with dramatic under-lighting, tangled hair, knotted brows, and a snarl of outsized teeth.

  “Oh, hey, wow! This one’s perfect! Put this one on the WANTED poster.”

  Calderon nodded. He enjoyed the company of Mrs. General Atkinson. Anita Atkinson was twenty-two years old. She couldn’t add and could barely read. She was a native Dark Age barbarian, a savage desert princess. Calderon hated the world that had created Anita Atkinson, but he liked Anita herself. She was his favorite person in the world.

  Anita was not a decadent relic of a bygone time, like Calderon himself. She had clear, direct, immediate, desires and feelings. Anita wanted nice things. She even wanted nice things from Calderon.

  Anita Atkinson wanted electric lights, air conditioning, cracked ice and room-service meals. Pretty dresses, jewelry, and a nice big gasoline car that rolled around and honked loudly.

  Calderon himself didn’t want or need much of anything any more. Whenever he woke in the morning, as a survivor in Fort Lucky, his first thought was dread that the world had turned out so badly, and was always getting worse yet.

  The Dark Age was very much here, just not very well distributed.

  “Mr. Kutuzov will be here in Fort Lucky soon!” Anita Atkinson lied cheerfully. “He’ll take me on a plane to Norway, and maybe this time, you can fly, too.” She happily waved her cartoon horror pic. “We just need to kill off these monsters first. So, turn this into a nice WANTED poster for me. Tell all the people to shoot every ninja zombie on sight. Shoot for the head!”

  Calderon nodded tenderly. “Of course.”

  “Don’t put too many fancy words on my poster, either. Keep it real simple!” She held out her two nail-painted fingers and cocked her thumb. “Pow, pow! That’s what I want.”

  “I’ll draw your poster right away,” Calderon promised. “I’ll letter it, ink it, print it – everything nice and official. So: what kind of reward do you offer?”

  “Bring me your poster first. Then I’ll give you some meat from my icebox.”

  “No, no, Anita, I mean: what reward do you want to offer on your poster? Bounty hunters need incentives.”

  “Just tell them to bring me their zombie heads, or their ears or something,” Anita Atkinson said. “Put my name on that poster. I always like to see my own name, nice and big.”

  “Anita, I worked for Texas state government for twenty years. I know how real paperwork gets done. A consistent look in official documentation gives the people a feeling of confidence! Good graphic design is a craft!”

  “Don’t talk so fancy, Leslie! Just do the work.”

  Calderon touched the worn blue denim of his shirt front. “Anita, your heart is not in this WANTED poster project. I can sense that. What’s got you upset? Tell the old man what’s bothering you.”

  The Dark Age world had all kinds of potential issues that might bother Anita Atkinson: climate crisis, state collapse, financial ruin, mass extinction, catastrophic population dieback. None of those things bothered Anita, though, because she didn’t understand long words.

  “I wish our soldiers hadn’t caught that ninja zombie,” she said artlessly. “I just wish the zombies would stay down in Mexico, where zombies belong. Things are gonna get worse.”

  Calderon paused. “What’s worse than a ninja zombie?”

  “Thousands of ninja zombies,” she said, plucking at her lower lip. “Armies of them.”

  Calderon nodded. “Well, I’m not a military man like your husband the General. I’m just an artist, but I know what I see. I’m not scared by the ninja zombie. He’s just a scrawny Mexican kid who’s incredibly high on drugs.”

  Calderon drew a breath. “Fort Lucky is a fort. We’ve got stockpiles, water, oil, gasoline, walls, barbed wire, machine guns, lots of jeeps and trucks. We don’t have to worry about a naked guy on drugs who doesn’t even have a uniform.”

  “The ninja zombies beat the Mexican Army.”

  “That’s not true, Anita. The narcotics business beat the Mexican Army. The Drug War beat everybody’s armies, it was a very long war and the drugs won, hands-down. But the ninja zombies aren’t gonna attack us here in Fort Lucky, that’s my point. Because we’re a hard target. They’re gonna attack the big cities of Texas, the softer places that are already bad, the big towns that we all left behind, with the riots, and disease, and all that. Here in the desert, we’re safe.”

  “Then why is he in here?” said Anita Atkinson. “Now I have to kill him, and kill all the rest of them, too. And hire more soldiers, and print more money... Can you draw more Fort Lucky money for me? My picture on the money doesn’t look good enough.”

  “Be careful with that money, Anita. Money brought the world to ruin.”

  “That’s Mr. Kutuzov’s job! Mr. Kutuzov is a very rich global man! Mr. Kutuzov can pay all my debts in this fort with his little Russian finger! Stop telling me to save money, just stop it, Leslie! Us military wives, we never even get to see our husbands! We have kids to raise, and we can’t even have a dance party and eat frozen ice cream!”

  “War is hell, ma’am,” Calderon nodded. “The more zombies, the less ice cream.”

  “You should love me, and really try to help me, Leslie! I have to run the fort here while the General is off on patrol, and Mr. Kutuzov is never here... I want Fort Lucky to be a safe, happy place! Like Norway, or Switzerland, or New Zealand!”

  Calderon picked up his ske
tchbook. “Anita, I think I know what to do. Listen: instead of drawing a WANTED poster for killing ninja zombies, I’m gonna turn our ninja zombie into a poster.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I’m gonna get my tattoo rig and draw all over him. I’m gonna draw cartoons all over his skin. For you, Anita. Because you’re brave. Messages of our defiance!”

  Anita Atkinson tossed her curls and put her hand to her mouth. “Sometimes, you old people are so funny! I never thought of doing that.”

  “We’ll throw him out of Fort Lucky, covered with satirical cartoons. Then he’ll crawl back to his Mexican drug lord. He’ll never come back here. They’ll go pick on somebody else!”

  3.

  AFTER CALDERON’S INTERCESSION, the ninja zombie’s life was spared. His iron cage was dragged from the town square and hidden inside the old county jail. He was fed and given some medical attention. Of course he showed no gratitude for this. Ninja zombies were biomilitary creatures, calm, cold and deliberate even under massed artillery attack.

  Market day arrived. Calderon always went to market days in Fort Lucky. He was a public regular, doing his caricature sketches for the local crowds.

  This entertaining activity got Calderon seen by the settlement. Since he was a favorite of Mrs. General Atkinson, he knew and heard certain things, and he traded a lot of favors, and that was how he got by.

  Calderon had once been a boring state bureaucrat, and a part-time weekend artist, in a rich, dazzling world with nine billion people. Now he was an artist all the time, in a poor, dark world with maybe three billion people. The key to any true Dark Age was the lack of reliable statistics.

  In a Dark Age, anybody who knew some truth hoarded it. That was certainly the case with Calderon’s best ally in town, a medic called Anton Antommarchi.

  Calderon had arrived in Fort Lucky from the wreck of the Texas state government. A lot of Texan politicos had fled headlong to Fort Lucky, because they knew that the Russian billionaire who had seized the place would have plenty of guns and money and no questions would be asked. Antommarchi had arrived as part of the globalized Kutuzov entourage.