Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 103

by Robert Reed

  There was still money in the coffers.

  Doctors and cooks and maids and more doctors arrived and then left the house again, following complicated schedules.

  And the original seven disciples took up residence in the nearby houses, complete with spouses and kids and at least one mistress.

  Adrianne left her doors unlocked.

  Her balance wasn’t worth trusting anymore, and she hated the chore of seeing who was calling.

  One day, a boy from another neighborhood invited himself inside that famous house. He was curious what brain cancer looked like. It looked like an ordinary old lady sitting before a small desk, watching a thousand solar panels opening like giant flowers on someone’s desert. It looked like a dull thing to watch, and he said so.

  The woman turned slowly, looking at him and then looking back at the monitor.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Sitting,” she said. And she began to laugh, one hand touching the back of her skull. He thought she was strange and left.

  She didn’t notice her solitude.

  Then another boy said, “You should lock your doors.”

  Adrianne turned to discover what she assumed was the first boy. Except he had grown up in the last few moments. Grown up and grown heavy too, and his hair had left him and then come back again. The new hair was paler and thicker than natural, which was common with these treatments.

  Thirty years had passed in an instant.

  This was a very interesting disease, she thought.

  But no, that face wasn’t the same face, even with the added decades. She almost remembered the face and its name. But then with a hurt tone, the new visitor said, “I’m your son. I’ve come to see you.”

  That seemed enough reason to stand.

  The legs proved strong, at least for the moment.

  “I heard the news,” her son said.

  “There’s always news,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your health,” he said.

  “Is there something I don’t know?”

  “Oh, Mother.” The man blinked, shrinking down a bit.

  “You mean this growth.” She tapped her head and laughed again. Twice in one day. She was practically a giddy little girl. “Yes, it’s going to kill me. But probably not today.”

  The conversation stopped altogether.

  Casting for words, she fell into cliches. “How is your life, son?”

  “Well,” he said, happy for the prodding. “I’m doing well. Sober three years, and very rich.”

  “Are you?”

  “Exceptionally rich, thanks to you.”

  “Sober, I meant.”

  But the man with the fresh hair didn’t want to dwell on old weaknesses. “It’s amazing what people give you, particularly when they learn that your mother controls the world and everyone on it.”

  Honest thoughts came to Adrianne.

  She worked hard, and her mouth remained closed.

  The man was wearing both fine clothes and a smug smile, and he was watching her. But his thoughts were on the move. Feeling strong enough, he stopped smiling. “This is where he killed himself. Isn’t it?”

  She said nothing.

  He looked at the ceiling. Then he stepped past her, touching the desk. The earlier desk was gone, too big and too bloody for the room that she had wanted. Maybe he didn’t remember the original furniture. She refused to clear up these matters. What she wanted was to be left alone . . .

  But this was her only child.

  Mindless, uncaring pressure on neurons. Pressure bringing emotion. Is that where this sudden trickle of tears was coming from?

  Her son didn’t notice.

  Again, the smug, rich-man’s smile.

  “I was sorry when you lost the job,” he confessed.

  “Were you?”

  “But it’s all right,” he said. “Our relationship is still valuable.”

  “Is it?” she asked, wiping one wet eye.

  “You often talk to our overlords,” he said.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “But they don’t know that. And I’m very convincing.”

  She approached the office door. Wanting something. To send him away, or flee for herself?

  The awful man kept talking.

  “In fact, I’ll sometimes claim that I can talk to them too. The powers in charge. Not so much that I have to prove anything. But you know, it’s crazy what smart people believe, if you give them any excuse.”

  She gasped.

  Her son blinked, straightening his back.

  “Help me,” she said. “Would you do me one enormous favor?”

  He nodded.

  “Wait,” she said.

  Waiting was an easy favor, easily accomplished.

  She returned with the handgun and bullets, and his first reaction was to warn, “Guns are illegal now. You made it so.”

  “I did,” she agreed. “Maybe somebody should arrest me.”

  He watched her load one chamber.

  “Now,” she said. “Kill me.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the favor. I’m sick. I’m going to get sicker and die horribly. But according to euthanasia laws—my wise laws—I can implore another person to end my suffering by whatever means I want.”

  “Mother . . . !”

  “And I don’t want to do the chore myself. So if you would.” She shoved the gun into his hands, aiming the barrel at her chest. Then, as if having second thoughts, she said, “No, wait. Let me sit, and we can catch the bullet and the spray with pillows. I’ll get my pillows out of the bedroom.”

  “Mother, no!”

  The heavy man dropped the gun and ran away.

  The disturbance was finished.

  Alone, Adrianne unloaded the one bullet, placing the weaponry into a closet. And exhausted, she sat at the desk, watching a live view from a probe launched last month and already halfway to Neptune.

  Time passed.

  And someone else came to visit.

  The first boy was back, an older sister holding his hand.

  “This is her,” he said with conviction. “That’s our Empress.”

  Adrianne didn’t have the legs to stand. That’s why their faces were at the same level when she said, “Yes, it’s your empress. Sitting in her glory.”

  She laughed hard.

  The children laughed with her, to be friendly.

  Touching her head once more, she said, “The monster inside my head. It’s pushing at the best nerves.”

  They stopped.

  “A talent for comedy,” she said, her laugh growing dark and slow. “That’s what the gods give you, if they want to be kind, right before you die.”

  About the Author

  Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

  Let Baser Things Devise


  Berrien C. Henderson

  1: Pierre

  Before Clockwork Corp.’s space ape project heads managed to uplift the chimpanzee, he was simply known as No. 157. Some anonymous lab assistant nicknamed him Pierre, and the moniker stuck. After Pierre survived the rigors of testing and training, his world went dark for a time once the Neuroscience Division got their needles and scalpels and computer-brain interfaces onto and into him.

  He was a child again. A sponge. Malleable. He had dreams and remembered them—the great ape facility from which he‘d come, the jungle before that. A troop. He had flirted with moonlight and squinted against sunshine while his troop loped through the undergrowth and scampered up the trees and foraged amid the generous loam where he groomed and was groomed. Various Shes were there in limbo, too, between dream and memory. Pierre’s mind reached out, clutching at phantoms from a blurry past and running into the long now—all of it oozing and hrmmm-ing like fluorescent lights with faulty ballasts. He weighed his new life amid antiseptic halls, an institution’s sterility and scientists’ data points and vagaries of conditioning against the harsher realities of death, quick in its smiting, in the tropics and faces framed with their own intelligence. He yearned for a place absent this new awareness—signals of higher and greater thoughts like thunder at the hem of distant mountains.

  Inside a year, he learned to speak with his newly acquired vocal cords—3D bio-printed wonders of Clockwork Corp.’s NuFlesh(tm) proprietary systems—and, thus, No. 157 became the first uplifted articulate chimpanzee.

  And he was going to the moon.

  2: Comped

  Pierre received the ping of a incoming message on his way out the door. He had a mandatory conditioning session and made to ignore the message to queue up later, then fell short of his initial plans.

  Bureau of Personhood.

  He caught himself wanting to oohoohooh in anxiety and excitement but tamped down those impulses. Some quirks hadn’t quite ironed out since uplift, and his human handlers and colleagues overlooked much, thank goodness.

  “This is Pierre.”

  A woman’s face greeted him with a sliver of a smile that bespoke scores of such practiced smiles daily and the beginnings of crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes. Pierre wondered what kind of punishment the poor liaison had done to deserve shuffling files and contacting various hominids and none too few uplifted canines (a recent development) along with some advanced NuEmote(tm) Model Mark robots. Still, he was glad she had contacted him.

  “Pierre, I have good news.”

  Finally.

  “I’ve sent you a message with a printable, watermarked certificate of personhood.”

  “Thank you, Sarah, for all your help.”

  “Thank the lawyers at Clockwork Corp.,” she said. “They saw the handwriting on the wall. You had the virtue of many legal precedents on your side.”

  “I”—the words sometimes wouldn’t come—“appreciate your taking time to-oohooh face-contact me.”

  The practiced smile widened, and he saw the glimmers of a few teeth. “Why, thank you kindly, Pierre.”

  “At least I’m not working basic municipal services,” he said. The majority of uplifted apes ended up employed in recycling facilities or treatment plants unless, of course, one was part of an R&D department for the largest corporation in the world and a handy PR football tossed around in the mining claims wars raging on the moon.

  “Well, there’s that,” she said. “You realize how fortunate you are.”

  “Yes.” And he felt immediately unlucky to be condescended to. Or complimented. He still had trouble navigating social mores. “Thank you.”

  “Have a good day, Pierre.”

  “You, too-ooh, Sarah.”

  As her image faded, Pierre stared at the screen and considered his newfound reality.

  Personhood.

  The company wanted a poster child for the new wave of lunar exploration. All he had to do was make a loathsome trip to Human Resources and request an addendum to his work contract for this upcoming expedition. The concept of money didn’t escape him, but he had little use for it. He banked a pittance for little things like sodas. Sodas he loved.

  The ideas grew. Humans talked with anticipation about taking vacations, and he wanted vacation time, which was not a component of his old contract. No more day passes into the city. No more permission requests for visits to museums or . . . or . . .

  The possibilities unfurled in his mind, and Pierre smiled.

  3: Human Resources

  “Well, this is a first,” said the HR rep. “Wonder if the company ought to consider changing the name of the department now?”

  Pierre didn’t laugh during the man’s pregnant pause. “New territory.”

  “In more ways than one. First, congratulations on your official personhood status. You’ve come a long way, Pierre.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  A flash of jungle memory stung him: sunlight lancing the canopy and the screams of another chimpanzee caught in a great cat’s jaws. He could expect a headache—the single and sometimes debilitating side effect of the CBI gear in his head.

  “You still have a week before launch. It takes three days to process a contract addendum request. I can message you.”

  “Do you see any reason it might be denied?”

  “No more than any other request.”

  “Ooh.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean, ‘Oh.’ ”

  They shuffled through several documents that required e-signatures, eye-stamps, and DNA proofs as Pierre did his best to maneuver the platitudes of small talk.

  “Is this what they meant by signing in blood?”

  The fat man chuckled. “I suppose so.” He offered his hand to Pierre, who hesitated, then shook. A rarity. All of his physical reinforcement and interactions had consisted of claps on the shoulder and good-natured squeezes of the upper arm—even one high five. Very few handshakes. His hand met the clammy palmflesh of the fat man, who seemed quite appreciative.

  When Pierre excused himself, he left with the distinct impression that the fat man was lonely despite dealing with other humans on a daily basis. Alone in a troop. Pierre was stung again as he walked the fluorescent-lit halls to the Fitness and Conditioning wing, signed out, and trained outside. A hard workout in the obstacle course would boost his endorphins and help him fight the headache. He hated the humans’ pain relievers while understanding their necessity.

  A bright yellow sun bathed him. A great eye whose warmth slithered down through a noisy canopy. Pierre allowed himself thoughts of trees and courting and earth and night-nesting, and the daydream became a nightmare Klaxon calling out his buried limbic fears of being hunted. Captured.

  FLEE!

  He scaled trunks and brachiated vines and limbs, missed one and plummeted to earth. He became a caged thing in a preserve; the trees were not the same—constructs for primates to climb and maintain their facade of health and activity. A group of handlers seized him and parleyed him to an alien, antiseptic landscape full of hooting and yowling.

  The real nightmare, the waking one, happened when he fell asleep and woke to the reality of his uplifting and a flood of information, a cascade of new schema expanding exponentially—the synaptic flood churning and frothing in his mind from the cerebral implant. He understood the cries of the other animals the way an adult understands a child’s cries—a mixture of sympathy tinged with the patina of intellectual distance.

  The memory remained, still blunted by time and his uplifting—a photo fading from color to monochrome or perhaps spackled brightly, overexposed and portions blotted out.

  He needed to get away.

  4: Tsuki

  The susurration of servos and hissing of actuators alerted Pierre as he finished his gymnastics and, planning to warm down with yoga, dropped to the ground.

  The Model Mark II lunar-bot approached him in hexapod form, and Pierre couldn’t help thinking of a gigantic arachnid, some m
utant lurking and emerging from the shadows of the thick foliage of once-home, ready to snatch baby chimps from the troop. Still, Pierre’s edginess softened when he saw Tsuki.

  “Good afternoon, Pierre. News travels fast.”

  “Of?”

  “Your having been granted personhood. How does that make you feel?”

  Tendrils of the headache coiled around his brain. “I put in for a vacation after we revised the contract.”

  “A reward. I see.” She skittered alongside him and used one of her four arms to retrieve his water bottle and hand it to him.

  “Thank you, Tsuki. It still seems a mere formality.”

  “While conferring you wider latitude of rights and privileges.”

  “Today would have been the same regardless.”

  “A rather cynical view, if perhaps a valid observation.”

  His head echoed with the ghost-strains of the headache. A ripple from the back of his neck straight-lined from the CBI’s scar and to his eyes.

  “If you say so-ooh.”

  “Would you care to run through a mission simulation with me in the Augmentation Array?”

  “Hold on a moment.” Pierre retrieved his wafer tablet, which buzzed slightly, and he queued up his meager bank account. It had already been flagged for a deposit. “Huh. They actually did it.”

  “ ‘They’?”

  “The company. Given today’s news, I’ve received dividends on shares retroactively for the duration of my employment. Good faith call on their part.”

  “That was charitable if manipulative.”