Ryman-Paradise-interior-ebook

by Paradise Tales (v5. 0) (mobi)

  I’m in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.

  I’m famous now too. I mean “genius” to people, kindly intelligence.

  Together we roll out of the Hotel Grande in Geneva and thousands of people are waiting for us. They call our names, his and mine. They press their hands against the windows.

  I am confounded by it; I don’t know why they are shouting or what they want. I look to Charlie in dismay. “Mr. Chaplin, what does it all mean?”

  He leans back and chuckles with affection. Charlie Chaplin is charmed by me. “Professor,” he says. “It means absolutely nothing.”

  They will rule us.

  Perhaps it’s no bad thing.

  Talk Is Cheap

  It’s first thing and I’m already out Walking and listening for Jinny.

  I dream of Jeannie ref Stephen Foster 19th century composer in Minstrel tradition. Jin as in cotton gin, Eli Whitney. Gin, prohibition, speakeasies, the pansy craze, the 18th amendment …

  A blizzard of links, and none of them from her. Culture bores me, but I added it to my Priorities because of Jinny.

  She’s a continual stream of beautiful little visual notes, flowers with sheep’s heads or entire false catalogues for museums of anachronisms. Bakelite handsets on Flash Gordon spaceships (produced three serials, the first being in 1936, etc., etc.). Collab music 2030 craze of different flavours from different eras.

  I love it that Jinny wants to share so much with me, with everyone. She shares continually, even when she’s working, sometimes when she’s sleeping, through her Turing. I always have my Turing turned off.

  I love Jinny’s teeth. Yes, I know, that’s the bacteria gnawing away—no links, please. I just love her bright white teeth. They protrude and gleam so that Jinny always looks as though she’s smiling.

  Her Turing seems to touch my arm and the touch feels like sunlight. Everything out here is brushed by sunlight, still cool, a delicate rose colour, not at all like sunset or the bleaching white light of noon. I’m walking out of our little town through scant agriculture modelled on that of the Mayans … wide-planted corn and beans under shade. I’m going to check our river.

  The Turing and I walk together, she in my head. It’s monitored that something’s bothering me, and sends me one of Jinny’s little packages, a history of charitable acts, all folded, crisp and delicious like a spring roll:

  the refusal of the UK to retaliate for the bomb

  the Bill Gates bequest and its long history

  the arrival of Concurrency as a medium of exchange

  the abolishing of copyright.

  If you prioritise charity, caritas and acts of breathtaking neutrality, you also apparently tend to prioritise effectiveness, weightlessness, spoons, weeds, ants and old gramophone recordings. How Jinny gets that I don’t know, but I can see the files weave. It works. She just does it, mixes things, makes things.

  I can’t keep up. The packet keeps blossoming out, laced with all kinds of daffy Jinny things. They make me smile; they make me despair because I would like to keep her, like to stay part of her world. But I don’t do this, make all those gifts of info.

  “It’s not content, it’s the act that’s important,” I say. It sounds grumpy even to me.

  “Of course,” the Turing answers. “But projecting is an act too.” Of a kind, and there is so much of it at so little cost to anyone. Talk is cheap.

  “What is she really doing now?” I ask.

  “I … I could wake her if you like,” says the Turing.

  “No, no,” I say. I want Jinny to sleep. I can imagine her, all soft and warm and dreamy. I love that image of her; my heart pines, sinking again.

  I walk naked in our beautiful desert sun, and I smell sage and dust all around me. Wind sweeps along the arroyo.

  For years since my Joey died, I’ve been putting out feelers for other people. An old guy like me. Even to me it’s like I’m peeking out of my snail shell, oozing out soft antennae, hoping to find love. Yuck.

  I must have reccied seven hundred people. Jinny was one of the few who reached back. She said our profiles matched. They didn’t, but we kept talking. We kept almost meeting. That “almost” makes my heart sore. It makes me think that she’s just being polite; she’s just being friendly; I’m an embarrassment, she wants me to go away but won’t say so.

  The Turing hears me think that. “That’s not true.” The thing touches me again on the arm, invisible but soothing. “She especially wants me to talk to you.”

  It’s a strange situation. Both of us want me to win her love. But neither of us has succeeded. I have this numbing idea that she can’t really respect or like me, but that there is, or may be only at times, something simple about me that she likes, and I feel very lucky and very sad, because this simple something is probably quite fragile. It could blow away.

  She’s a Doctor for heaven’s sake. Only Infotechs get more respect and that’s kind of a branch of medicine, and anyway she freelances as one of those as well.

  Me, I’m only a Walker. I go places, confirm that reality matches our models, that all our balanced and merged Priorities are being met.

  I’m following an irrigation canal, the sun growing stronger on my skin. I feel photosynthesis kick in, to power the tech that inhabits me. My body and my tools are fuelled by the same sugars, the same blood. And my feet grow their own shoes.

  “Oh,” people say when I tell them who I am. “Well you must be strapping fit.” They don’t know what else to say; they’re embarrassed. A necessary task, but not really dazzling, is it? It’s not healing people, or advancing the genome. It’s not combining information. The Techs engineer info like mutant DNA. It keeps re-combining. Hi! I’m a mutant idea!

  In all the Fictions that whiz by so entertainingly these days, the walking is all done by robots. That’s how automatic people think my work is. Only, guess what, dream on fellow travellers, there is no A.I. There are just us Walkers, alone, on our appointed rounds.

  A few days ago she said, the real Jinny not her Turing, “I want to go with you on one of your walks.” This was imaginative and sweet and careful of my feelings, as if what I do were interesting, as if we might share insights as we stroll.

  “Do you have the right shoes?” I asked her.

  She giggled and barraged me with a million files on shoes prioritized by Uselessness.

  The most Useless shoes she indexed were made out of chocolate. They melt or crumble and stain the floor.

  “You made those up!”

  “No, no, they’re real!” she protested, “The Sybarites really made delicious shoes you could eat!”

  She kept on linking and projecting, and I didn’t know if she was joking or not, a whole range of hopping, useless shoes:

  shoes that obey simple heurirstics to spin spiderwebs as you walk,

  shoes that sing

  shoes that know all the constellations

  shoes that sail the seven seas all by themselves out of interest; sweet except that they love making sea turtles abort their egg sacs

  shoes with delicious new recipes tickertaping across their soles,

  shoes that calculate values of pi

  shoes that suck up anything with a positive charge

  shoes that keep scuttling away from you the moment you take them off.

  “Stop!” I laughed. Creativity scares me. I always think it’s going to run away with us. My real Priority is rectitude.

  I’m at the edge of our creek, standing on a rock shelf that’s gray with dead lichen.

  I try and put it off. I kneel down and sip water from my cupped hand and it’s cool and tastes of granite, and the sensors understand its qualities. The water is just as people want it. The Joshua trees stand around me like friends, holding up their arms as if to show that they’re honest. I smell sage and dust all around me. T
oday is the day I scheduled months ago to test levels once again, now when the snows upstream are supposed to melt.

  I wade in, my legs reading the depth and flow.

  Yep. Welp. Here it is.

  The water may be delicious, but we’re using too much of it. Current and projected population; water usage average preferred and necessary all rattle past me.

  Soon we won’t have enough water. Soon as in say five years.

  Nothing is simple, except for reality. Reality is a tiny white stable dot in the middle of all this info. Everything else, all the talk, is piled up sky-high, prioritised, processed, and offered back.

  Mr. Cranky, my old mean streak, would say that folks could just as easily test the water themselves. They could all take turns confirming.

  Later Jinny, the real Jinny, connects to whisper that tomorrow she wants to join me on my Walk.

  She shows up in reality. I see her coming and I can feel my arms tense up, specifically my arms for some reason. For her I’m wearing shorts, how old-fashioned. I worry about the creases age has made across my skinny stomach.

  It’s cool dawn. The sunlight catches her sideways. Her skin has a perfect pink glow, her smile is ready on her face like she’s come back from a future where everything works. And she’s wearing serious shoes.

  She says hi, I say hi. Our PAs do a quick exchange to look at the day’s tasks. If she was in any doubt before, Jinny will now know for sure that I’m the bottom of the social heap. Everybody sets Priorities together and I just check them out. I guess she wants to see what that’s like.

  So she’s going to do air-quality analysis for me, and keep track of wind direction, humidity, acidity, all that stuff as it changes over time and distance. I’m going to do street semiology, traffic absence, and basic demographics. There’s numbers, and there’s graphs, but what counts is being able to say how all of this will land for people with very different Priorities. Oh, and here’s another thrill: I’m checking for termites.

  Me, I’m a Dog man. Really, that’s what I’m now called. People with my nest of Priorities get called Dogs because we value faithfulness, trust, and constant grooming. We like repetition but we want to get to know things, too, so we like to go out sniffing and snooping. I’m in the perfect job.

  Oops, I’ve been telling her all that. She nods, looking slightly glazed and distracted. “How’s your gout?”

  She means the pains in my feet. She remembers stuff.

  “Medication. Little critters are eating up those crystals.”

  “You should have come to me for that!”

  If she can’t love me, then maybe we can still be friends. I can use friends, too. I feel an idiot grin on my face, just to have her near me, and I can’t think of anything to say.

  She’s not just a doctor. Naw, that wouldn’t occupy her. She runs a business on the side as a Bespoke Prioritiser. She probably needs a whole lake of homeopathic info to store her credits. I want to ask her dumb questions such as: Do you rank for anybody who’s well crucial? I don’t ask, but she answers anyway.

  “Naw, not really. Most of mine are overseers needing to find balance. One of them wanted every single thing about the Buddha itemized, ranked, and prioritised around something “innovative.” He didn’t say what, just something, anything zazzie and chic. Do you know how complicated Buddhism is? All those different Ways? Minayana, Therevada, Zen …”

  “Not as big as Hinduism.”

  She laughs lazily, and I don’t know if it’s because what I said was charmingly irrelevant or not. I was, of course, being entirely serious. She touches my arm again, grooming. “I gave him a package centered on the need to keep records as the main criteria.” Maybe she sees her job as part of the same hazy joke. “Buddhism as an aid to bureaucracy.”

  We’re alone outside, the streets press in close around us. It’s not a particularly nice day and the village is still asleep. Who walks except Walkers?

  Our streets wind, houses close together, friendly, with shared doorways between them, rooftop pathways across them, and all around us on the slopes, turbines white as doves that turn in our arroyo winds. On some roofs, fleshsails catch the sun and make sugar.

  Folks still have to have things in reality. Paint which adjusts to temperature and heats the rooms. The grafts which grow some of the houses, or the mud bricks baked in kilns, or the wires and circuits that also work like spiders to spin more wires and circuits. Some houses are made of flowers, growing. Some are made of laterite for people who love the miracle of mined dirt oxydizing into stone; others are stacked shitcakes dried and sterilized. Those match people who value self-sufficiency. Plenty of those still since the time of the troubles.

  “Semiologizing,” Jinny says and chuckles.

  “We’re about to metastasize,” I say. Our village will split, probably along Predator/Herbivore lines. I guess the Predators will make us poor Herbivores move again.

  “Dogs aren’t Herbivores,” she reminds me. But there is a glow of agreement coming off her. Like me, she’s clocked this crowding of styles, the closely packed fabric of the town almost not quite on the edge of mismatch, conflict.

  Partition they tell us is fun, good. New birth is always good. “Water’s the problem,” she says. And I wonder, how did she get hold of that?

  “Didn’t you report that yesterday? We’re running out of water.”

  We make our own sugar from the sun; our gut makes a lot of our protein. Our own bodies fuel the information which now lives as part of us. In the right climate, we could live without anything else, for a time at least. Except for water.

  “Not run out so much as just that it will trigger the breakup.”

  Our home. It will go.

  We walk, I watch her. She’s not just confirming, she’s filtering, scanning her takes through all kinds of Priorities from government diaries to chaotic monitors. She’s making something interesting out of my boring job.

  “This is fun,” she says. “It’s reassuring. It all works.” The movement of her hands takes in our settlement, the network as a whole, the desert landscape in cool morning. The soft pink light on the ridges, the deep kindly mauve in the canyons.

  “For now,” I say.

  She looks at the streets that coil about us. “I want to go inside the houses and swap with people.”

  “You don’t need to go inside to do that.”

  “I mean for real, one-to-one like us now.” She starts to giggle and footnote all kinds of sociologies. “Come on, keep up the semio.”

  I riff. “Deeply social creatures needing each other for physical shelter and to keep at bay a sense of threat to their highly complex culture. Being dependent on weather, they are also frightened and resentful of it. Spaces are designed to minimize the impact of sun, wind, rain, cloud, night, day. Needlessly, in some ways, as they are actually more independent of the environment than at any point in human history. They love info, they value preservation of it, but they have a low Priority for actual experience, thus the low Priority for physical transport. Me, I want to walk through the Rockies. Beyond that, fearful of a loss of a single member, driving a mix of socialisation and isolation caused by the intimacies of info.”

  “None of that footnotes.” She looks distracted. I feel inside her that a thesaurus of names from Saussure to Tamagocuchi is flurrying past with no matches.

  “None of that was a quote.” She means it’s harder to put in a tree. She blurts out a chuckle. “I’ll just have to quote you!”

  That’s why she likes me: because I say new things. I’m flattered.

  On a flat roof, sunbathers. Jinny wants to eyeball them. She calls hello. Silence. They remain on their soft roof, naked, sleeping in sunlight.

  “Conflicting Priorities for communication and independence,” I remind her. It’s a joke. She doesn’t laugh, she grimaces. She waves. She jumps up and down and calls. I just know she’s buzzing them with feelers. She sends them and me a gift of niche Priorities, a lovely lavender suggestion for empha
sising open-plan living and geneswapping as a substitute for reproduction.

  The people on the roof behave like plants. I mistake them for Herbivores. One of them finally says aloud, not looking up, “I’m not really here.”

  “We’re Dolphins,” murmurs the other and they share a sarky smile. They are both identical, which means they’ve morphed. Into each other. Yuck.

  “They’re Sharks,” Jinny says downturning her mouth quickly to mean, let’s get out of here. Sharks prioritize winning and making good use of you. This new astrology of Priority. It really works.

  “What are you?” the two Predators ask in unison.

  Jinny bursts out laughing and shakes her head. “I’m a Hamster!” The absurdity of a Hamster facing Sharks. “No, really. I prioritise …” She shakes her head cos it’s all too silly.

  “Activity,” I say for her. I’m a bit surprised that she’s something, well, so humble and sweet.

  “Running in circles,” she chuckles again. Already we are walking away from the Sharks and talking only for each other.

  I list a few other Hamster priorities for her. “Functional feeding only. Clear goals.”

  I have to admit it does sound slightly comic, this lean yet nourished looking woman taller than I am calling herself a Hamster. “Hamsters are harmless,” she says. “Harmless and delighted.”

  So you like Dogs because we’re harmless too. I’m thinking that maybe Jinny likes old guys, tall lanky old guys because everybody else is round and soft. She’s done comfort, she’s done fast, she’s done young and handsome. She’s lonely. How did she end up lonely? Long story. I hope to hear it.

  Next job, we confirm bacteria and virus levels and then spend the rest of the day counting numbers of beneficial insects and useful information retroviruses. All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque … I actually start producing footnotes from Priorities of my own. I feel like I’m flying.