Assumpta’s date comes back on. JoyAnna goes still. A file opens, flowers, showing research-grant application, and its summary with a date. JoyAnna’s voice quavers. “Twenty-third December? You only have five days left!”
Ping.
Assumpta receives an RSS report. The newly established dates from the Martian mass extinction match those of the cylinders. The Spiral and the climate tipped at the same time.
The English have been picking raspberries in December. That night Assumpta reads two gardening romances.
The next morning, Assumpta wakes up hungover and immediately begins to do housework. She has a long-handled feather duster to reach up into the corners to get the cobwebs. She then washes dishes and the eight soupbowls that arrived from Spain. Her physiome shows she is dehydrated.
She gets herself a whiskey. Sitting at the table she says, “The only thing I have is the numbers. If that is indeed what they are. If I can understand why they are not in sequence, then I will understand something at least.”
JoyAnna starts to talk and you realize that she’s been silent for hours. “I think Assumpta’s understood that lifeblogging counts as publication. If she makes a discovery and it’s logged, she’ll get the credit.”
The flickering stops, once again at cylinder forty-seven, where the Spiral gets stuck on the number sixteen.
The cylinders move in order inside Assumpta’s eyes.
First cylinder forty-seven in which there are four groups of four. Is that indeed a representation of sixteen?
Cylinder forty-eight starts off with two sequences of eight swirls, also sixteen.
Forty-nine repeats that but follows it with several prickly-pear nodes.
Assumpta then stops, and orders a system check and special backup. Ping. The blog has been published, but also backed up.
JAH: “Good girl. I was right. She’s in a race and she’s making sure the blog is being backed up, saved, and registered. She’s got it.”
Fifty shows sixteen individual swirls piano-rolling the length of the entire cylinder.
Fifty-one repeats that pattern and follows it with a single very large node.
And Assumpta begins to laugh.
At first she laughs like Oliver Hardy, everything bouncing up and down, her hands patting the table in unison. Then a happy, gentle sound, through teeth, like rain.
“Ssh ssh ssh ssh It’s … a … ha … ha … TURD! They shat to hoo hoo hoo say NO!”
Assumpta stands up to do a little dance. Her hips roll in a perfect figure eight and her feet trace a samba.
JoyAnna laughs aloud a hearty, British, baying laugh, and that knocks her back into blogging mode. “That’s a samba.” Thanks, you think. “Assumpta lived in Brasil for a while, taught at the State University of Para in Belem, right on the mouth of the Amazon.”
The arthritis intervenes, Assumpta stumbles, goes ooooh, and then finds that funny as well. She starts to sing a song in Portuguese. It’s a laughing song, the chorus consists of the sound of laughter. Translated the title is “Who’s Laughing Now?” Aha-ha-HAH-HAH-HAH.
She calls Schelling. The Turing says, “Sorry, Assumpta, but he’s away for Christmas now.”
She chuckles. “Just tell him I have something to report on the cylinders.”
The cylinders with their numbers flutter back and forth. “Well, my darlings. What were you up to?”
Then she says. “Hmm. It’s chilly in here.”
The cylinders dance all day long. Assumpta keeps pouring herself a whiskey to celebrate. By six p.m. it’s dark, and she is asleep.
Day three starts very late. The blog records snores, then the slow waxing of light on the walls. But Assumpta is not conscious to see it.
Up come the feeds with news from Bangladesh, and the American Southwest, and now trouble on the border between India and China.
Assumpta groans, then stomps her way out the bed and goes downstairs to the refrigerator. She surveys it for a moment before taking out the sherry, but what she says is, “Nothing can survive just eating iron in clay. What else did they eat? They must have eaten something!”
Still in her nightie, she puts in a round-robin call to biologists in her network. She magnifies the signs again, to see how they were made.
AC: “All right. I think we can say that the worms definitely did not have teeth.”
She has a continental breakfast of cheddar cheese, oatcakes and raisins. She calls on the CGI package. “So let’s just try to imagine what they were like.”
She tries to imagine the worms in a colony. She pastes them onto a Mars whose surface is not red, but streaked with ice and tiny melted puddles. In the end it looks like grass, a lawn of worms, reaching up toward the light.
“They photosynthesized.” That’s JoyAnna. “Rhodopsin. It’s protein in the human eye, it photosynthesizes, and it’s red, like Mars.”
And Assumpta says, “Yes, that’s it.”
And it takes you a moment to realize that the two of them cannot be in discussion.
AC: “If they photosynthesized they might eat clay only when suffering iron deficiency. So we might not find any other cylinders. They wouldn’t need them that often.”
She checks to make sure the lifeblog is still saving and registering. She goes upstairs, puts the blog on block. Presumably she showers.
When it comes back on the time is 15:37 and the sky has gone ominously dark. Assumpta is bundling herself up in sweaters and a coat, and goes outside. She has difficulty opening her French doors, steps outside and gasps. The air looks like solidified crystal. The sky overhead is clear pale blue, except for a bank of cloud to the north that is being pulled over it like a blanket.
You see the outside temperature is minus fifteen degrees. Assumpta’s breath sidles out of her nostrils like thick steam. She shivers her way to the clothesline and starts unpegging a shirt. Her hand shakes and fumbles it. A solid sheet of cotton, the shirt tumbles to the paving.
And shatters like china. It lies in shards.
AC: “What is going on?”
She turns and hobbles, quivering, back inside. She closes the French doors and then, lumbering, rolls up the kitchen rug against the lower edge of the door. She collects bread and bananas, a tub of yogurt, all the food in the house, and then retreats into the sitting room. She rolls up rugs against the doors there too, and turns on the heater at full blast.
Then she checks to make sure that the lifeblog is continuing to save.
“I’m afraid we are having some unusual weather.”
She goes back to the CGI. As she uses the blog to tell the University computers what she wants. Worms, two centimetres long. Photosynthesizing. Capable of movement. The CGI system goes to work.
Turings begin to call, delivering automatic Christmas greetings. Hello (slight pause) Assumpta, Ted’s calling to wish you a merry season! She turns them all off.
Overhead, the sky begins to make an ominous grinding sound, like pepper being milled.
JoyAnna suddenly yelps. “Shit! The date of your death is actually the day they found you. But you’d been lying dead for two days. This is it. It’s now. You’re going to die now.”
The worm resolves as an image.
AC: “For the sake of neatness. Make them the same size as the cylinders.”
The machine takes over, and the worm is there, wrestling with a cylinder in clay, and it is clear: one is a simulacrum of the other.
Assumpta breathes out. “Of course.”
The sky grinds. The heat blows.
“Any system of writing must mimic the original kind of communication.” Then she says to her system, “Make them both worms.”
Two worms roll together, mouthing each other’s bodies.
“They communicated by touch. By kissing the lengths of their bodies. And the cylinders tried to record that process of whole-body touching. We’ll never translate that language without a Rosetta stone. But why the debate over numbers?”
She calls up a gathering of worms and
then superimposes the Spiral. A Spiral of worms.
They are passing the cylinders along its length. Passing them out, passing them back.
AC: “The definition of writing is that which preserves information across both space and time.”
The worms seethe, the university pseudo-AI starts to improve the image. You see a Martian sky, slightly blue from the presence of water vapour; you see the congress.
AC: “They were trying to invent writing. They started with numbers. The Spiral was a debate about how to write numbers. Todd told me they couldn’t be intelligent, their whole body size would not allow the brain complexity. But what if they had some kind of neural interface when they touched?
“What if it started to go cold and dry? They knew they needed to measure that?”
And she starts to cry. It must be all that booze at work. “Deaf dumb blind. But they could feel the cold!”
JoyAnna says, “You don’t have to feel that we are like them.”
Two of the worms dance together, turning each other, kissing in spirals.
Then, with a soft click, all the lights go out. You can hear the blow heater die. The room is as dark as the inside of the brain. Assumpta’s physiome fluxes in panic. She yelps, stands up, thumps against furniture. She checks if the lifeblog was being saved.
JAH: “It’s all right, Assumpta, the Library has its own generators, it has saved all of this. It is saving it!”
A clumping of furniture. No light at all. Garments rustle and slither. A clatter in the dark, a fumbling, and finally a battery-operated torch snaps on. Assumpta now wears an overcoat.
Her front corridor is spotlit all around us. She steps outside her front door, and her breath is pulled out of her, making a noise like the counterstroke of a cello. The numbers for temperatures rattle through her eyes. She tries to call Tomas.
NO NETWORK COVERAGE.
The phone system is down.
Outside there is only driving snow, like stars shooting past at warp speed. They swallow up all the light; there is nothing beyond. Gasping for breath, Assumpta tries to advance, but the wind is extraordinary, pushing her back. From somewhere up the street, peoples’ voices echo, shouting. Assumpta tries to shout, too, but it is too cold; she can’t.
A voice echoing from down the street says, “The radio says to stay inside!”
Assumpta turns and the wind harries her back. Hinges squeal as the front door opens. They resist being closed against the gale. The lock won’t click shut. She rams her body against it. Her knee gives away and she cries aloud, but she falls against the door and it finally closes. On the floor, she pushes the welcome mat against the lower edge of the doorway and crawls along the corridor.
“Stupid!” She’d left the sitting room door ajar, and much of its saved heat will have been sucked up the staircase. As if praying, on her knees, she pushes the sitting room door shut behind her. She crawls across the floor onto the sofa and pulls the sofa cushions on top of herself, and curls up. To save the batteries, she turns off the flashlight.
The air outside growls like a wounded beast. She sits chill in the dark.
She calls Schelling again, gets his Turing again.
“Hello, Tomas. Things are pretty serious here; there really is the most terrible storm. All the lights and power are out, and of course I have no heating. Please call.”
She rings Bella, but her sister has put her on block.
She waits in the dark.
JoyAnna says, “How did your pretty little sister, the one everyone adored, the one you used to dress up, how did she get so mean? Maybe it’s better never to be adored, like us. Momma never called me pretty; I could see I wasn’t pretty. I’d go to the movies and pray for the lights to go down so that people wouldn’t see what a dump I was, and that I had to go to movies alone. I was too brainy, I brought in my files to the class and showed my favourite saved things: planets and starfish and Persepolis, and that popular girl tossed her hair and said what’s so interesting about all of that stuff? Papa said I would have to get by on my brains.”
Still no image, except for three glowing physiomes and lots of numbers, so many numbers and icons that they almost crowd out the world.
Her voice constrained, Assumpta calls up a number code and clearance information. She turns on the torch and points it into her eye, and the darkness disappears in light.
JAH: “You’ve just retinaed Mars. Can that work?”
Nine minutes to wait. The image of the worms comes back. The worms turn each other like corncobs, talking in a spiral.
Then they begin to make love.
JoyAnna murmurs, “You spent the last quarter century trying to find love. You believed in progress, too, I bet, the advancement of science. The world is folding in on itself. Your Martians died just as they invented culture.
“Our world isn’t dying, Assumpta. I know it feels like that now. Because of Gudu, your sister, your work, everything that’s on the news, but it isn’t the same as those little bits of brain on Mars. We already have writing and numbers; we have more than writing. We have wireless and blogging; we can reason; we didn’t fight a war, we won’t; we’re all still here, Assumpta.”
The flashlight snaps on. The temperature in the room is still above freezing. Assumpta opens a wooden cabinet, and gets out the whiskey, and starts to drink. Alcohol is a food. But it opens the circulation system near the skin and speeds freezing. Assumpta climbs back into her shelter of sofa cushions. She puts all her mailing list on autodial.
NO NETWORK CONNECTION.
The power for the network is down. Only military channels are open now. You have those because of your contract: to the Rylands Library. To Mars.
JAH: “Assumpta, can you sense me in the future, sitting next to you, reading with you, drinking with you, hell, even peeing with you. You got love, Assumpta. Me.”
Wind batters the roof.
“You might still have been alive after I was born. I might have met you as a little girl. I could have sat on your lawn, or looked at your twenty-thousand books and said, ‘Why would anyone want so many books? Just keep ’em on your pod.’ I could have called you Aunty.”
Assumpta sits up again and reads out new parameters for her blog.
JAH: “She’s trying to make this last sequence have a wider distribution; it will be stored in a different inbox than usual. That’s one of the reasons it wasn’t noted. Also, nobody thought that anybody’s blog was saved with the power down. It’s the military channels.”
Assumpta says, to the lifeblog, her audience, her people, “The Spiral is a record of a process of invention. It was an attempt to turn a system of communication through touch into a system of writing. They photosynthesized but ate clay for mineral content. They wrote with their mouths. They did not finish developing their system of numbering and writing. The Spiral was a debate about how to record numbers and something like words. We now know climate change comes quickly. It tips. This change happened in four Martian years, as it is coming upon us.
“Record and post.”
ENTRY POSTED.
Ping.
And suddenly, there is a bronze plain, bronze sky. All three of you now stand on Mars, with the bot. Assumpta tells it, “Please show me the Spiral.”
Nine minutes to receive, nine minutes to answer. The image is frozen. Somewhere Handel plays.
All three of you sit and wait.
Assumpta says, “All my books are upstairs.”
Her physiome shows pains around her chest. There’s a burble, and she looks down; she’s coughed up whiskey.
JAH: “I bet it’s like this for angels. They just have to stand by and watch it happen as we make a mess of everything. Mouth useless, God’s love useless, freedom useless. Freedom is the enemy, it just lets us make mistakes. Love in a Changing Climate. Love without words. Love as angels love beyond comprehension, outside words, beyond hope or any objective correlative. You don’t know I’m here, but I’ll stay here and I’ll keep listening. I’ll ke
ep watch.”
The cold sinks in. The physiome starts to shut down. Time rolls down, the numbers decrease.
“Your blog still keeps going on. Your eyes still get data. The blog’s still there. And me. For a while.”
Elsewhen, on Mars, JoyAnna when old has finished her tale, and is being buckled in. There is a jerk, and she is swept up, swung out over the dig. The Spiral opens its arms wide.
“Rendition,” she says, with the accent of Assumpta Ciges. The cameras blank and you, and me, and they and us, we hang with her in the very centre of the light.
K is for Kosovo
(or, Massimo’s Career)
I like the Serbs. My friend Vesna is Serbian. We used to come here all the time, drink together, talk about luxury brands: Vuitton, Gucci, Hugo Boss. You do that in our job.
She’s a trained UNHCR interviewer. Mostly our job was to get the Kosovo refugees back home. We follow the principle of durable solutions. If it’s not possible for them we would settle them somewhere else, another country willing to take them. Our job was to go over their testimonies, interview them separately, verify the basics from whatever state records were left. And spot inconsistencies.
We had a family of gypsies, Roma. They were from Mitroviça. The Roma Mahala district is mostly destroyed now, the big houses gone or occupied. Mostly the Roma live in barracks on the north side side of the railway. It’s not good, but we still try to get them home.
This family said their daughter had been raped by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Well, you know, the Albanians had been through it as well and they think gypsies sided with the Serbs. We briefed the family on what was going to happen and why, but they showed up wanting to be interviewed all together.
In Italy, we think gypsies are dark; some say they are really Asian. It’s not that different here. The old omen cover their heads, even the Christians. They wear brown and yellow and smell of wood smoke. They’re tiny. The men look like plump little sad eyed dolls.
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