by Jim Nisbet
Tipsy cleared her throat. In other circumstances this alone, this glancing admission to phlegm, might be considered a signal courtesy, a kind of intimation of humanity.
But these weren’t other circumstances.
“Let me help you help me help you,” Tipsy said.
“Thanks very much, Tipsy, but I—”
“That was not a suggestion,” she suggested curtly.
“Quite,” Red consented readily.
“You seek unemployment,” Tipsy told him.
“Actually, I—”
“And how is the fishing?”
Red lifted his free hand off the crook of his walking stick and, in the timeless gesture, extended it palm down, parallel to the floor, and waggled it. “Eh,” he said. “Feck.” Sad to say, however, these days it was true. Not even a globally mandated cessation of all commercial fisheries had brought back the fish.
Tipsy smiled. “Why do you still bother? If you need protein, make a requisition. Every time you come back from the Bahamas, you tell me the fishing has gotten worse.”
“It is The True,” Red replied.
Tipsy’s mouth tightened. “Not a good choice of witticisms, Red,” she said, “if wit is what you thought to deploy.”
“May I remind you—”
Tipsy lofted a forestalling tridactyl, known throughout the Republics as the ultimate homoremote. “Comprehension doesn’t get any more expensive than mine,” she reminded him.
Comprehension, thought Red. Now there’s a word to be used advisedly. How about we substitute scripted awareness?
“… history,” Tipsy finished.
Red blinked. He hadn’t registered the beginning of her sentence. Involuntarily, he shook his head, as if to clear it. For some time, he’d often been finding himself on the other side of some undefined gap between whatever she had been telling him and whatever she was presently saying. Oftener and oftener.
“That’s the word,” she continued. “And you get the credit.”
Another one, thought Red. She had always relished the right word. A satirical poet had even rhymed it with relish—lush-embellished hishtorical relish :: condiments for freeee, for you and for sheee—and discovered himself or herself reset without a public trace; subsequently to reappear, no doubt, as a midlevel Infoscriptor in Condor Silversteed’s anthem factory. The first thing upon which Red deployed every Quietus he’d ever owned was on that sonofabitch’s so-called music.
“It was a close thing,” she was saying. “He failed, however, and it was left to Red Means, People’s Hero, to cut his way through the Legion of Cedrics and save the day. There is no question. It’s in the historical record.”
Right, Red thought. And I killed the daemonic Lieutenant Miou Miou by virtue of my clairvoyance in regard to the postchondrophoric storyline. What about the fact that Red Means had cut off her own brother’s head? Surely that must count for something?
“We persevered—”
We, Red inwardly snorted, persevere with the broken record.
“The world needed and deserved my brother’s fundamental humanity,” she recited, engaging full Auntie mode, “not to mention his various talents. Pertinacity, the facility with tools, the cool head in a crisis—.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Red impatiently blurted. “That’s a good one, about the cool head—!” And look what you got, he didn’t shout aloud. An illusion of dialogue, nourished by shells and years, with a proper little Caligula. Except he’s not so damned little anymore. And now you’re going to marry him off? What’s that? A late-blooming death wish?
The outburst surprised him at least as much as it surprised her.
“Without you, I never would have gotten in touch with him,” she stated simply.
Another argument he’d heard before. In fact it had taken Red only six months, and a casual six months at that, to identify a middle-management blow monkey in the San Francisco office of the Cavalcade of Wonders, and it was but a moment or two later, big-picture-wise, that the barely post-cognitive Klegan was given to understand the nature of his special relationship with a Cavalcade real estate specialist called Tipsy Powell.
Red had counseled her to wait and see. But no.
He never heard about what happened to the blow monkey.
Nobody had.
She insisted that he had pulled off an almost impossible task, and he’d let her go on insisting. It wasn’t even worth a laugh. He looked at the tiger. The tiger looked at him.
“He is Klegan,” Tipsy continued. “The world needs and deserves him. It was all to the greater good …”
How sick he was of that expression.
“… ours a higher purpose. We—”
“I just want to retire,” Red interrupted.
Silence.
Well, now that it’s out in the open, blunder onward we must.
“When I see that little endomorph …” He pointed his stick at the beachscape volume formerly inhabited by the hologram. “How cunning, how patient, how … triangulating—”
“How evolved?” Tipsy posited.
How evil, Red thought she might better have said. Delusion upon delusion. Looking that kid in the eye is like looking into the wrong end of a riflescope.
“And, you know, hardly anybody in the world takes exception to the term descendant like you do.” She touched her breast and added, rather too meaningfully, “Starting with his dear Auntie.”
“Precisely.” Red seized on the idea. “To me it’s, it’s almost the opposite of old-fashioned. It’s distasteful, I don’t understand it. I’ve read over six hundred books since our …”
“Change of fortune,” Tipsy suggested.
“… and I still don’t understand it,” Red continued, exasperated, not bothering to remind her that they’d mostly been novels and history, with titles like The Story of a Life, and having little or nothing to do with political theory, which had become her specialty after she mastered real estate. Except they did have something to do with it. “Oh, I wish the world well and all that, nothing but the best. But for me, myself, I just don’t like what’s going on around me anymore, Tipsy. And I don’t get your wilful blindness to it. Can your probes suss that?”
She dismissed this with a gesture.
“You can’t know what it’s like to have attained seventy-nine years of age. But when you do, let me assure you, you will have no more interest in making it to one hundred and nine than I do.”
Tipsy almost laughed. “Is that what they’re advertising?”
“Ridiculous,” Red agreed. “I’m tired. The noise, the images, the onrush of their ubiquity, the knowledge of my part in all this.” He indicated the room with the crook of his cane. “I can’t sleep. I don’t want a job. I can’t think. I can’t do my job. I just want to fish all day. Since there are no more fish it’s the same as doing nothing. Can you understand that?” He swept the cane before him. “Not to mention my reputation. The least slippery of my old acquaintances—of the two or three still alive—sees me coming and puts on the big fade. None of them sticks around long enough to so much as express their contempt! And why? Because they’re afraid of you. Not of me. You. … And if they do stick around?” He made with a rubber face. “It’s pure sycophancy. Nothing more. It makes me sick. You yourself must remember the fear, also known as respect, I formerly struck into the hearts of my clients. Your friend Quentin, for example.”
“Venerable Asche, to you,” Tipsy stipulated coolly.
“I’d forgotten the Revision,” Red said caustically.
“Don’t come the acid with me,” she suggested, not without menace.
“Getting old isn’t for pirates!” Red pogoed the cane off the floor and caught it midshaft in his fist. “He was terrified to take a ride on a boat with me! And now that I’m his age?” Red chuckled without mirth. “I’m terrified to take a ride on a boat with me, too.” He was probably the only person in the world who thought this was funny. “If he hadn’t died on us, everything would fallen out otherwise.
Maybe he’d have talked some sense into you. At any rate you’d have remained broke and maybe by now you’d be nothing but a sniveling drunk in some basement apartment furnished entirely by detective novels—”
Red stopped, then sat back in his chair. That ought to have done it, he thought grimly. As he’d done any number of times before, he slyly eyed the various seams and corners of the room, insofar as they were discernible. Where could she be keeping all those detective novels? Was he, Red, the only one convinced of their existence? Convinced of the necessity of their existence? And the alcohol. There was just a little puffiness around the eyes. …
He blinked.
Was he the only apostate left?
Ah so, he bethought himself. Progress. Be careful what you wish for, Red. Old man. …
Tipsy appeared to consider his outburst. The fountain sounded like windblown leaves. Red listened. The clatter of palm fronds in a warm breeze, iced Kalik in the shade of the canvas bimini, a siesta in a hammock slung main to mizzen, the hammock that rocks by itself. …
And you wake up dead.
Sounds good to me, Red scowled fiercely. Real good.
“I suppose you know that this,” Tipsy’s gesture encompassed the room, “once belonged to Venerable Asche?”
Of course he knew it. Now where are we going? Red shifted uncomfortably. “It’s … been a long time, Tipsy,” he admitted. “Madame Powell. Handmaiden of Our Future. People’s Shero. Mentor to Klegan.” He couldn’t help himself. As he recited these titles he did not withhold a sneer. Why should he? He had helped this woman make this mess.
Abruptly he sat forward in the chair and changed his tone. “I head back to the islands tomorrow,” he announced calmly. “I won’t be returning.”
“I see,” she said, with remarkable equanimity. She did see, he realized. And she didn’t care. No more than he did. Tipsy’s eyes focused on some middle distance, and the projection of Auntie ceased to be animated.
Uh oh, Red said to himself.
The wall to Red’s right abruptly repixelated into a wood-mullioned window of sixteen lites and flaking paint. The sound of the fountain went away, and the sounds of distant traffic filtered into the room, as if through an open window. Among them could be discerned the remote honk of an air horn atop a diesel locomotive, a diesel locomotive decommissioned long ago.
“Venerable Asche treasured this view,” said her voice. “All the Info continues to say so.”
Then it must be The True, Red thought to himself, and who wouldn’t treasure such a view? Or any view at all?
“Look at it,” her voice suggested. Its tone bore just a hint of coercion.
Red looked. Half the window stood open, the view was framed by the tops of tall eucalyptus trees. A breeze crepitated their leaves, olive, russet, and a red the color of dried blood. The air was cool and fitful and, introduced from west to east, it actually moved, bearing with it the salt tang of a vast, cold sea. A scrub jay, perched on a branch, scolded a domestic house cat, far below the window sill, as it chased and batted at a monarch butterfly down a long flight of redwood treads laid in dirt beneath windrows of leaves.
Beyond the proscenium formed by the eucalyptuses proceeded a vista of forgotten bucolic sublimity. Down the slope and perhaps two blocks away, the tapered stacks of the Pioneer Soap Factory, a rambling assemblage of yellow wooden buildings, emitted sleepy gouts of steam. Farther out, beyond the flatlands spreading away from the north-facing slope of Potrero Hill, boxcars from all over the continent stood patiently in rows, and a diminutive brakeman in blue and white striped coveralls moved among them, lantern in hand. Beyond the freight yards rose the westernmost suspension tower of the old Bay Bridge, beyond that lifted the steep shoulders of Yerba Buena Island, blushing green in response to the ministrations of the first month of winter rains, and far beyond lifted the tawny hills of Berkeley where, if Red were to peer very carefully, he might discern the cylindrical outcrop of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and beyond that the resolution failed and one could begin to discern the edges and corners of the technology.
By an act of will Red kept his mind just within the outer boundary of this projection.
It was there, Red reflected sheepishly, that Lawrencium was first smashed into existence, only to wink out again, as if wilfully. Three-fifths of a nanosecond, as he recalled. That’s as long as Lawrencium ever existed.
Was there really a reset button? He might never know. He waited. The image of Tipsy regarded the middle distance without emotion. It was the only way it had regarded anything for a long time.
“Consider yourself retired,” she finally said.
EPILOGUE
I could have warned you; but you are young
So we speak a different tongue.
—W. B. YEATS, “Two Years Later”
HUANDYAI AND CROWDER WENT TO THE CHARLEY TO PETITION PERMISSION to take a walk.
It always unnerved Huandyai to visit a Charley. The eyes followed you no matter what, whether the head spoke or not. He wasn’t sure of the technology. Except insofar as it applied to the latest shoes, he knew very little about technology.
Crowder was another story. His shoes were another story too. Crowder’s shoes converted from Skate to Shock mode and back again within eight to ten neural bursts. Huandyai’s shoes took ages to change modes and, often, they caused him to fall down. He’d discovered that it was a lot safer to leave his shoes set to Manual. But only Closet was slower than Manual.
“What’s up, fellas?” the Charley asked.
“I want a new pair of shoes,” Huandyai whined.
The head let that one slide. Huandyai knew if he asked it a spurious question again the program would default to Sedition and after that it would take all day to get out of the jam. Parents, Councilors, the ride home deducted from his Social Contract—the works.
Well, not The Works.
Crowder shushed his friend. “He does need new shoes,” Crowder said, “but what he really wants is to play hooky and take a field trip to the Headlands.”
The head blinked and processed. “Is there some reasonable tie-in with your studies?” it reasonably asked.
Crowder was ready. If it had been up to Huandyai, Crowder would have an office out of which he’d be running the entire School District. “We’re doing birds,” Crowder said. “Songbirds of California.”
The eyes, which had reverted to their normally vigilant scan of Union Square, angled down toward Crowder. “You remember songbirds?” the Charley asked.
Crowder shook his head. There was little percentage in lying to a Charley, as he well knew. “No, sir,” he said truthfully. “But a bird was sighted in the Headlands last year and—”
“What species?” the head said.
“Audubon’s warbler,” Crowder said immediately.
The Charley’s eyes blinked twice.
Wow, Huandyai thought, in genuine admiration. That’s requesting one big data-sort.
“Beautiful bird,” the Charley said finally.
“So they say, Sir,” Huandyai replied ingenuously.
The eyes had time to roll Huandyai’s way before it announced, “Not seen lately.” The eyes rolled back at Crowder. “Last sighting almost … nine years ago.”
“Hey,” Huandyai piped up, “the year I was born.”
“Wow,” chimed Crowder, in full ingenuous mode. “I didn’t realize it had been that long.” The head chuckled without mirth. It sounded not unlike an empty soy drum ricocheting down the walls of a fifty-story fume-well. “That’s probably two-thirds your current enjoy-by date,” the Charley suggested, before adding in a severe tone, “Isn’t it, son?”
Crowder, who had been chuckling somewhat tentatively, in order to humor the Charley, agreed with drilled precision, “Point eight one eight, Sir.”
“Point nine exactly,” Huandyai hastened to put in.
“Actually, sir,” Crowder made bold to expand, “Nine divided by eleven is point 818181818, ad infinitum. A repeating decimal, lik
e.”
“How interesting,” the Charley replied, with no interest whatsoever.
I couldn’t agree more, Huandyai thought to himself.
Crowder, who knew his History, thought to himself, when I grow up, as go certain algorithms, there’s going to be some changes made. But “Yes, Sir,” was what he said aloud.
“You seem to have an aptitude for figures,” the Charley said, as if musing. “If you were to take up mathematics, what do you think? Theoretical? Or Applied?”
“Applied, Sir,” Crowder answered immediately. As ever, not only did he know his History, he knew what to say. “There are never mathematicians sufficient to undertake market analysis.”
“Very good,” declared the Charley.
“Thank you, Sir.”
A moment of pure algorithm passed in silence. “You boys realize there’s still no chip service out there in the Headlands,” the Charley reminded them patronizingly.
“Yes, Sir,” they said in unison.
“Be careful, then. Be sure to take vitamins and fluids before you go, and take some along with you. And sun block.”
“Yes, Sir,” Crowder replied. After receiving an elbow from his friend, Huandyai obsequiously parroted him. “Thank you, Sir.”
The head blinked. “I’ll e-ceph your parents.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Crowder said, not without revealing a trace of uncertainty.
Uh oh, Huandyai thought to himself.
“Hey,” said the Charley, opening its eyes, “Your mother disappeared shortly after you were born, and your father is a hepkeite miner.”
“That’s true, Sir,” Crowder replied.
And nobody talks about why, Huandyai added to himself.
“But you can e-ceph him on the moon,” Crowder stipulated. “Of course, that will take two point five six seconds, round trip.” He traced a circle in the terraturf with his toe. “If he’s not down in the mine, that is.”
As Crowder knows heckawell his dad is, Huandyai realized.
“You think so?” the head replied somewhat testily, as if they needed reminding that perhaps the single most dangerous thing a kid or anybody else for that matter could do in the entire world would be to tell a Charley something it didn’t know. “So who’s minding the store?”