Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 112

by Neil Clarke

  As he continued to daydream, Naoto carelessly tapped on his keyboard. He signed on to a discussion forum for livecasting, and the large-font text at the top instantly grabbed his attention.

  CHARLES MANN REVIVED!!!

  What in the world?

  Naoto clicked on the link and found himself staring at an ad from Time Media.

  In order to pay tribute to the heroic Charles Mann, we have purchased the rights to the entire archive of his livecast for the delectation of our subscribers. The entire livecast stream is 85,439 hours long, encompassing about ten years of his life. You may jump to review any particular segment or play it from end to end in order to gain a deeper understanding of this amazing life . . .

  Naoto’s heart began to leap wildly. Ten years of livecasting data! As a subscriber to Charles’s stream, he had been prevented by technical means from recording the sensory signals, but of course the company that handled the livecast would have a proper archive to permit re-livecasting. Since Naoto had tuned in only during the last three years of Charles’s life, he had never lived the first seven years of the livecast. But now . . .

  Naoto sucked in his breath. He was going to possess the entire ten years, the best part of Charles’s life. He was being given a chance to once again meld into Charles, and to anticipate an exciting life in a bright new future (even if it had happened in the past). And this time, he would no longer have to worry about anyone cutting him off for at least ten years. He could confidently lose himself as deeply in Charles as he liked.

  Of course, this time the subscription was no longer free, but the price they were charging was reasonable: only 100 yen an hour. If he purchased more than a day’s worth of data, the price was discounted to 50 yen per hour. If he purchased the entire archive at once, the price was further reduced to 20 yen per hour. This was eminently affordable.

  Quickly, he connected his bank account. The entire archive would cost him almost 1.6 million yen. He didn’t have that much in savings, so he decided to pay over two hundred thousand yen for the rights to the first year’s archives. He would have to earn more to pay for the rest later.

  He lay back on his tatami mat and switched on the neutrino converter. The computer voice informed him that the connection was being established, and the data stream was being buffered. The livecast, no, the re-livecast, would begin in about one minute.

  As Naoto waited anxiously, his phone rang, informing him there was a voice message from Minami. Naoto quickly switched off his phone. Perhaps Minami had changed her mind about the break-up, but it was too late now. As long as he could be Charles again, why would he need a woman like Minami?

  The neutrino beam was converted into electromagnetic waves, and then, into brainwaves. The re-livecast began:

  Vestibular systems synchronized: I am lying down somewhere; tactile sensations synchronized: I think this is a bed, rather soft and comfortable; olfactory sensations synchronized: it smells medicinal, like a hospital, but not too overwhelming; hearing synchronized: a woman is speaking to me, her voice gradually becoming clearer; sight synchronized: a blurry figure looms before my eyes . . .

  He is gazing up at the ceiling, and his future manager, Lisa Goldstone, is bending down to speak to him. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m all right,” he says, his voice sounding a bit weak. “I think.”

  “We’re about to start the livecast now. Do you remember who you are?”

  A confident smile appears over his pasty face. “What kind of question is that? I’m Charles, the one and only Charles.”

  Footnote

  1 - All East Asian names are rendered with surname first in this translation, following the custom of the region.

  Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, September 2014.

  Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

  About the Author

  After graduating from Peking University, Bao Shu obtained a Master’s degree in philosophy from KU Leuven, Belgium (a degree that is very handy for science fiction). Working as a freelance writer in China, he has published four novels and over 30 novellas, novelettes and short stories since 2010. His best-known works include Three Body X: Aeon of Contemplation (an authorized sequel to Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy), Ruins of Time (winner of the 2014 Chinese Nebula Award for Best Novel), and “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” (English translation in F&SF March/April 2015). He now lives in Xi'an.

  His novelette, “Everybody Loves Charles,” won three important awards this year: the 2015 Chinese SF Galaxy Award for Best Novelette, the 2015 Chinese SF Nebula Silver Award for Best Novelette, and Chinese SF Coordinate Award for Best Novelette.

  The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale

  Robert Silverberg

  Puillayne of Ghiusz was a man born to every advantage life offers, for his father was the master of great estates along the favored southern shore of the Claritant Peninsula, his mother was descended from a long line of wizards who held hereditary possession of many great magics, and he himself had been granted a fine strong-thewed body, robust health, and great intellectual power.

  Yet despite these gifts, Puillayne, unaccountably, was a man of deep and ineradicable melancholic bent. He lived alone in a splendid sprawling manse overlooking the Klorpentine Sea, a place of parapets and barbicans, loggias and pavilions, embrasures and turrets and sweeping pilasters, admitting only a few intimates to his solitary life. His soul was ever clouded over by a dark depressive miasma, which Puillayne was able to mitigate only through the steady intake of strong drink. For the world was old, nearing its end, its very rocks rounded and smoothed by time, every blade of grass invested with the essence of a long antiquity, and he knew from his earliest days that futurity was an empty vessel and only the long past supported the fragile present. This was a source of extreme infestivity to him. By assiduous use of drink, and only by such use of it, he could succeed from time to time in lifting his gloom, not through the drink itself but through the practice of his art, which was that of poetry: his wine was his gateway to his verse, and his verse, pouring from him in unstoppable superiloquent abundance, gave him transient release from despond. The verse forms of every era were at his fingertips, be they the sonnet or the sestina or the villanelle or the free chansonette so greatly beloved by the rhyme-loathing poets of Sheptun-Am, and in each of them he displayed ineffable mastery. It was typical of Puillayne, however, that the gayest of his lyrics was invariably tinged with ebon despair. Even in his cups, he could not escape the fundamental truth that the world’s day was done, that the sun was a heat-begrudging red cinder in the darkening sky, that all striving had been in vain for Earth and its denizens; and those ironies contaminated his every thought.

  And so, and so, cloistered in his rambling chambers on the heights above the metropole of Ghiusz, the capital city of the happy Claritant that jutted far out into the golden Klorpentine, sitting amidst his collection of rare wines, his treasures of exotic gems and unusual woods, his garden of extraordinary horticultural marvels, he would regale his little circle of friends with verses such as these:

  The night is dark. The air is chill.

  Silver wine sparkles in my amber goblet.

  But it is too soon to drink. First let me sing.

  Joy is done! The shadows gather!

  Darkness comes, and gladness ends!

  Yet though the sun grows dim,

  My soul takes flight in drink.

  What care I for the crumbling walls?

  What care I for the withering leaves?

  Here is wine!

  Who knows? This could be the world’s last night.

  Morning, perhaps, will bring a day without dawn.

  The end is near. Therefore, friends, let us drink!

  Darkness . . . . darkness . . . .

  The night is dark. The air is chill.

  Therefore, friends, let us drink!

  Let us drink!

  “How beautiful those verses are,” said Gim
biter Soleptan, a lithe, playful man given to the wearing of green damask pantaloons and scarlet sea-silk blouses. He was, perhaps, the closest of Puillayne’s little band of companions, antithetical though he was to him in the valence of his nature. “They make me wish to dance, to sing—and also . . . ” Gimbiter let the thought trail off, but glanced meaningfully to the sideboard at the farther end of the room.

  “Yes, I know. And to drink.”

  Puillayne rose and went to the great sideboard of black candana over-painted with jagged lines of orpiment and gamboge and flake blue in which he kept the wines he had chosen for the present week. For a moment, he hesitated among the tight-packed row of flasks. Then his hand closed on the neck of one fashioned from pale-violet crystal, through which a wine of radiant crimson glowed with cheery insistence.

  “One of my best,” he announced. “A claret, it is, of the Scaumside vineyard in Ascolais, waiting forty years for this night. But why let it wait longer? There may be no later chances.”

  “As you have said, Puillayne. ‘This could be the world’s last night.’ But why, then, do you still disdain to open Erzuine Thale’s True Vintage? By your own argument, you should seize upon it while opportunity yet remains. And yet you refuse.”

  “Because,” Puillayne said, smiling gravely, and glancing toward the cabinet of embossed doors where that greatest of all wines slept behind barriers of impenetrable spells, “This may, after all, not be the world’s last night, for none of the fatal signs have made themselves apparent yet. The True Vintage deserves only the grandest of occasions. I shall wait a while longer to broach it. But the wine I have here is itself no trifle. Observe me now.”

  He set out a pair of steep transparent goblets rimmed with purple gold, murmured the word to the wine-flask that unsealed its stopper, and held it aloft to pour. As the wine descended into the goblet it passed through a glorious spectrum of transformation, now a wild scarlet, now deep crimson, now carmine, mauve, heliotrope shot through with lines of topaz, and, as it settled to its final hue, a magnificent coppery gold. “Come,” said Puillayne, and led his friend to the viewing-platform overlooking the bay, where they stood side by side, separated by the great vase of black porcelain that was one of Puillane’s most cherished treasures, in which a porcelain fish of the same glossy black swam insolently in the air.

  Night had just begun to fall. The feeble red sun hovered precariously over the western sea. Fierce eye-stabbing stars already blazed furiously out of the dusky sky to north and south of it, arranging themselves in the familiar constellations, the Hoary Nimbus, the Panoply of Swords, the Cloak of Cantenax, the Claw. The twilight air was cooling swiftly. Even here in this land of the far south, sheltered by the towering Kelpusar range from the harsh winds that raked Almery and the rest of Grand Motholam, there was no escape from the chill of the night. Everywhere, even here, such modest daily warmth as the sun afforded fled upward through the thinning air the moment that faint light was withdrawn.

  Puillayne and Gimbiter were silent a time, savoring the power of the wine, which penetrated subtly, reaching from one region of their souls to the next until it fastened on the heart. For Puillayne, it was the fifth wine of the day, and he was well along in the daily defeat of his innate somberness of spirit, having brought himself to the outer borderlands of the realm of sobriety. A delightful gyroscopic instability now befuddled his mind. He had begun with a silver wine of Kauchique flecked with molecules of gold, then had proceeded to a light ruby wine of the moorlands, a sprightly sprezzogranito from Cape Thaumissa, and, finally, a smooth but compelling dry Harpundium as a prelude to this venerable grandissimus that he currently was sharing with his friend. That progression was a typical one for him. Since early manhood he had rarely passed a waking hour without a goblet in his hand.

  “How beautiful this wine is,” said Gimbiter finally.

  “How dark the night,” said Puillayne. For even now he could not escape the essentially rueful cast of his thoughts.

  “Forget the darkness, dear friend, and enjoy the beauty of the wine. But no: they are forever mingled for you, are they not, the darkness and the wine. The one encircles the other in ceaseless chase.”

  This far south, the sun plunged swiftly below the horizon. The ferocity of the starlight was remorseless now. The two men sipped thoughtfully.

  Gimbiter said, after a further span of silence, “Do you know, Puillayne, that strangers are in town asking after you?”

  “Strangers, indeed? And asking for me?”

  “Three men from the north. Uncouth-looking ones. I have this from my gardener, who tells me that they have been making inquiries of your gardener.”

  “Indeed,” said Puillayne, with no great show of interest.

  “They are a nest of rogues, these gardeners. They all spy on us, and sell our secrets to any substantial bidder.”

  “You tell me no news here, Gimbiter.”

  “Does it not concern you that rough-hewn strangers are asking questions?”

  Puillayne shrugged. “Perhaps they are admirers of my verses, come to hear me recite.”

  “Perhaps they are thieves, come from afar to despoil you of some of your fabled treasures.”

  “Perhaps they are both. In that case, they must hear my verses before I permit any despoiling.”

  “You are very casual, Puillayne.”

  “Friend, the sun itself is dying as we stand here. Shall I lose sleep over the possibility that strangers may take some of my trinkets from me? With such talk you distract us from this unforgettable wine. I beg you, drink, Gimbiter, and put these strangers out of your mind.”

  “I can put them from mine,” said Gimbiter, “but I wish you would devote some part of yours to them.” And then he ceased to belabor the point, for he knew that Puillayne was a man utterly without fear. The profound bleakness that lay at the core of his spirit insulated him from ordinary cares. He lived without hope and therefore without uneasiness. And by this time of day, Gimbiter understood, Puillayne had further reinforced himself within an unbreachable palisade of wine.

  The three strangers, though, were troublesome to Gimbiter. He had gone to the effort of inspecting them himself earlier that day. They had taken lodgings, said his head gardener, at the old hostelry called the Blue Wyvern, between the former ironmongers’ bazaar and the bazaar of silk and spices, and it was easy enough for Gimbiter to locate them as they moved along the boulevard that ran down the spine of the bazaar quarter. One was a squat, husky man garbed in heavy brown furs, with purple leather leggings and boots, and a cap of black bearskin trimmed with a fillet of gold. Another, tall and loose-limbed, sported a leopard-skin tarboosh, a robe of yellow muslin, and red boots ostentatiously spurred with the spines of the roseate urchin. The third, clad unpretentiously in a simple gray tunic and a quilted green mantle of some coarse heavy fabric, was of unremarkable stature and seemed all but invisible beside his two baroque confederates, until one noticed the look of smoldering menace in his deep-set, resolute, reptilian eyes, set like obsidian ellipsoids against his chalky-hued face.

  Gimbiter made such inquiries about them at the hostelry as were feasible, but all he could learn was that they were mercantile travelers from Hither Almery or even farther north, come to the southlands on some enterprise of profit. But even the innkeeper knew that they were aware of the fame of the metropole’s great poet Puillayne, and were eager to achieve an audience with him. And therefore Gimbiter had duly provided his friend with a warning; but he was sadly aware that he could do no more than that.

  Nor was Puillayne’s air of unconcern an affectation. One who has visited the mephitic shores of the Sea of Nothingness and returned is truly beyond all dismay. He knows that the world is an illusion built upon a foundation of mist and wind, and that it is great folly to attach oneself in any serious way to any contrary belief. During his more sober moments, of course, Puillayne of Ghiusz was as vulnerable to despair and anxiety as anyone else; but he took care to reach with great speed for his beloved
antidote the instant that he felt tendrils of reality making poisonous incursions through his being. But for wine, he would have had no escape from his eternally sepulchral attitudinizing.

  So the next day, and the next, days that were solitary by choice for him, Puillayne moved steadfastly through his palace of antiquarian treasures on his usual diurnal rounds, rising at day-break to bathe in the spring that ran through his gardens, then breakfasting on his customary sparse fare, then devoting an hour to the choice of the day’s wines and sampling the first of them.

  In mid-morning, as the glow of the first flask of wine still lingered in him, he sat sipping the second of the day and reading awhile from some volume of his collected verse. There were fifty or sixty of them by now, bound identically in the black vellum made from the skin of fiendish Deodands that had been slaughtered for the bounty placed upon such fell creatures; and these were merely the poems that he had had sufficient sobriety to remember to indite and preserve, out of the scores that poured from him so freely. Puillayne constantly read and reread them with keen pleasure. Though he affected modesty with others, within the shelter of his own soul he had an unabashed admiration for his poems, which the second wine of the day invariably amplified.

  Afterward, before the second wine’s effect had completely faded, it was his daily practice to stroll through the rooms that held his cabinet of wonders, inspecting with ever-fresh delight the collection of artifacts and oddities that he had gathered during youthful travels that had taken him as far north as the grim wastes of Fer Aquila, as far to the east as the monster-infested deadlands beyond the Land of the Falling Wall. Where ghouls and deadly grues swarmed and thrived, as far west as ruined Ampridatvir and sullen Azederach on the sunset side of the black Supostimon Sea. In each of these places, the young Puillayne had acquired curios, not because the assembling of them had given him any particular pleasure in and of itself, but because the doing of it turned his attention for the moment, as did the drinking of wine, from the otherwise inescapable encroachment of gloom that from boyhood on had perpetually assailed his consciousness. He drew somber amusement now from fondling these things, which recalled to him some remote place he had visited, summoning up memories of great beauty and enchanting peace, or arduous struggle and biting discomfort, it being a matter of no importance to him which it might have been, so long as the act of remembering carried him away from the here and now.