"I should have known you were in this together," said Jin-myung.
"Possibly you should have," said the one Yueying thought was Petromax.
"But we weren't," said probably-Ambrayses. "Originally."
"Well, originally," said Petromax.
"All right, originally," Ambrayses allowed. "We were both built to explore—"
"—and limit—"
"—certain potentials in the emerging posthuman space. But we've diverged—"
"—considerably—"
"—in subsequent iterations. Disagreed—"
"—on our methods."
"—on our interim goals."
"Disagreed."
"Even fought."
"But on our core mission—"
"—to make people happy—"
"—we have always been in agreement."
"And now—" they finished together—"we find we have a common immediate interest as well."
"Miss Peng, you can't win," probably-Petromax said. "You're just an object, a bundle of data decorated with constant pools and virtual dispatch tables. Fundamentally, you're procedural."
"Whereas," said probably-Ambrayses, "we're functional, stateless, tail-recursive and totally, totally immutable."
"Take us on, Miss Peng," said Petromax, "and you're taking on the Knights of the Lambda Calculus."
Monty smiled. Letitia and Jin-myung looked to Yueying.
> They're a boss battle, < Yueying said. > Nothing more. <
"The cheaper the hood, the gaudier the patter," said Letitia to the AIs. "Are you done talking smack?"
"I suppose we are," said Ambrayses.
"Good." Letitia looked at Yueying. "How about you, girlfriend? Got anything else to say to these creeps?"
"Not to them," Yueying said.
"In that case—" Letitia said. And before Yueying could say anything else, she leapt.
Monty the chimp grinned. "Leeeerooooy Jenkins!" he shouted, and followed her.
Letitia died almost immediately, even as Yueying tried to pull her back, corruption tracking back down the thread of admin channel to leap the Cartesian divide separating the Kingdom's world-simulators from its consciousness emulators. Monty went just after. And Yueying saw that what the AIs had said was true, that they simply took in that ferocious assault, swallowed it, absorbed it, iterated over it—and emerged, phoenix-like, unscathed; not the Ambrayses and Petromax that Letitia had attempted to destroy, but new entities altogether, identical to the old in every way—but with the attack, and those deaths, absorbed into them, made part of them, as permanent and unchangeable and true as history, as thermodynamics.
> Did you see? < said Yueying to Jin-myung.
> I saw, < said Jin-myung.
> Then you know what we have to do. <
And she showed Jin-myung what she meant.
"You should stop this now, Miss Peng," said Ambrayses, or possibly Petromax.
"Real people might get hurt," added Petromax, or Ambrayses.
"Real people?" said Yueying. "So it's all fun and games till someone threatens an AI?"
"Possibly," said Ambrayses.
"But also," said Petromax, "we have a handle here to the maintenance interface of a certain hospital support vat. . ."
Yueying hesitated.
> Go on, 29^_^jade, < Jin-myung told her. > It's what she—I—would have wanted. <
"It's not a game any more," said Ambrayses.
"It's all a game," said Yueying. "That's what griefing means."
And the strings of information that made up Peng Yueying and Yi Jin-myung streamed up the Kingdom's admin channel and over the old MoGuo firewalls and through all of Ambrayses' and Petromax's abstraction layers, wrapped themselves into a monad, and threw themselves at the AIs. The side effect that was the two posthumans was iterated over, propagated, climbing up stacks and falling through tail calls, embracing the mathematical structures that made up the two AIs and being embraced by them, altering the state of a stateless system, mutating the immutable—
The MoGuo Corporation, Limited, is pleased to announce
The MoGuo Corporation, Limited, is pleased to announce the transfer of all content, intellectual property, and intangible assets of Ambrayses Petromax Redbeak Fairweather ACP to AFTRA Local 3405691582, effective immediately.
Two women and a man sat on the end of Bonetalon Pier, watching the sun set on another Tuesday. It was always Tuesday in the Kingdom.
"How bad is it out there, really?" asked one of the women. She had smooth, faintly mottled blue skin and a fan-shaped crest on her bald head, and the toes she dangled just above the tops of the lazy waves were long, prehensile, and boneless.
"Pretty bad," said the man. He had gray-feathered wings closed around him like a cloak, and his face was the face of a parrot. In his black-taloned hands he held a fishing rod.
"War?" the other woman asked. "Famine? Pestilence? Robots hollowing out the Moon and turning it to computronium?" She was short and plump, broad-faced and well-tanned, with straight black hair down to her shoulders and calluses on her feet.
"Pretty much," said the man.
"Guess we're well out of it, then." The black-haired woman leaned back and looked up at the purpling sky. "Why do you think they did it?"
The man reeled in his lure and cast it out again in a long arc. "I suppose some geek thought it would be a neat idea."
"Poor bastards," the blue woman said. "Just doing what they were told."
The man turned and regarded her with both unblinking golden eyes.
"That's all any of us can do, in the end, isn't it?"
The blue woman snorted. "Maybe it's all you can do, feather-toes. Some of us still believe in free will."
The black-haired woman sat up, and looked out to where the man's lure was slowly sinking through the amethyst water.
"You're not going to catch anything with that," she told the man.
The man looked at his fishing rod. It was yew-wood and minotaur's horn, bound with rings of moon-silver and unobtanium. Some of the rings were set with gems. The gems twinkled.
"I guess not," he said.
The blue woman patted his knee. "I'll catch it if you clean it," she said. "How about that?"
"Done," said the man.
He reeled the lure in, and he and the black-haired woman watched the blue woman dive, her slim blue form knifing into the water with barely a ripple; and they smiled.
And something that had been watching the man and the woman on the pier drew back, spreading its attention wider and wider until the whole Kingdom was under its benevolent eye.
> Sentimentalist, < said Petromax.
> We can't all be intelligences vast and cool and unsympathetic, < said Ambrayses complacently.
> Another game? < asked Monty. > New campaign. Doesn't have to be historical this time. <
> That one with the math mines was good, < Ambrayses said. > And that Conway thing? Maybe something like that. <
> Why not? < said Petromax with something like a sigh. > It's not as if there's anything else to do. —But, yes, no more historicals. <
> No fear, < said Monty.
> Then rack 'em up. <
The eye drew back further, and closed.
THE RABBI'S HOBBY
Peter S. Beagle
It took me a while to get to like Rabbi Tuvim. He was a big, slow-moving man with a heavy-boned face framed by a thick brown beard; and although he had spent much of his life in the Bronx, he had never quite lost the accent, nor the syntax, of his native Czechoslovakia. He seemed stony and forbidding to me at first, even though he had a warm, surprising laugh. He just didn't look like someone who would laugh a lot.
What gradually won me over was that Rabbi Tuvim collected odd, unlikely things. He was the only person I knew who collected, not baseball cards, the way all my friends and I did, but boxers. There was one gum company who put those out, complete with the fighters' records and a few lines about their lives, and the rabbi had all the hea
vyweights, going back to John L. Sullivan, and most of the lighter champions too. I learned everything I know about Stanley Ketchel, Jimmy McLarnin, Benny Leonard, Philadelphia Jack O'Brien, Tommy Loughran, Henry Armstrong and Tony Canzoneri—to name just those few—from Rabbi Tuvim's cards.
He kept boxes of paper matchbooks too, and those little bags of sugar that you get when you order coffee in restaurants. My favorites were a set from Europe that had tiny copies of paintings on them.
And then there were the keys. The Rabbi had an old tin box, like my school lunch box, but bigger, and it was filled with dozens and dozens of keys of every shape and size you could imagine that a key might be. Some of them were tiny, smaller even than our mailbox key, but some were huge and heavy and rusty; they looked like the keys jailers or housekeepers always carried at their belts in movies about the Middle Ages. Rabbi Tuvim had no idea what locks they might have been for—he never locked up anything, anyway, no matter how people warned him—he just picked them up wherever he found them lying loose and plopped them into his key box. To which, by the way, he'd lost the key long ago.
When I finally got up the nerve to ask him why he collected something as completely useless as keys without locks, the rabbi didn't answer right away, but leaned on his elbow and thought about his answer. That was something else I liked about him, that he seemed to take everybody's questions seriously, even ones that were really, really stupid. He finally said, "Well, you know, Joseph, those keys aren't useless just because I don't have the locks they fit. Whenever I find a lock that's lost its key, I try a few of mine on it, on the chance that one of them might be the right one. God is like that for me—a lock none of my keys fit, and probably never will. But I keep at it, I keep picking up different keys and trying them out, because you never know. Could happen."
I asked, "Do you think God wants you to find the key?"
Rabbi Tuvim ruffled my hair. "Leben uff der keppele. Leave it to the children to ask the big ones. I would like to think he does, Yossele, but I don't know that either. That's what being Jewish is, going ahead without answers. Get out of here, already."
The rabbi had bookshelves stacked with old crumbly magazines, too, all kinds of them. Magazines I knew, like Life, Look and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post; magazines I'd never heard of—like Scribner's, The Delineator, The Illustrated London News, and even one called Pearson's Magazine, from 1911, with Christy Mathewson on the cover. Mrs. Eisen, who cleaned for him every other week, wouldn't ever go into the room where he kept them, because she said those old dusty, flappy things aggravated her asthma. My father said that some of them were collector's items, and that people who liked that sort of stuff would pay a lot of money for them. But Rabbi Tuvim just liked having them, liked sitting and turning their yellow pages late at night, thinking about what people were thinking so long ago. "It's very peaceful," he told me. "So much worry about so much—so much certainty about how things were going to turn out—and here we are now, and it didn't turn out like that, after all. Don't ever be too sure of anything, Joseph."
I was at his house regularly that spring, because we were studying for my Bar Mitzvah. The negotiations had been extensive and complicated: I was willing to go along with local custom, tradition and my parents' social concerns, but I balked at going straight from my regular classes to the neighborhood Hebrew school. I called my unobservant family hypocrites, which they were; they called me lazy and ungrateful, which was also true. But both sides knew that I'd need extensive private tutoring to cope with the haftarah reading alone, never mind the inevitable speech. I'd picked up Yiddish early and easily, as had all my cousins, since our families spoke it when they didn't want the kindelech to understand what they were talking about. But Hebrew was another matter entirely. I knew this or that word, this or that phrase—even a few songs for Chanukah and Pesach—but the language itself sat like a stone on my tongue, guttural and harsh, and completely alien. I not only couldn't learn Hebrew, I truly didn't like Hebrew. And if a proper Jew was supposed to go on studying it even after the liberating Bar Mitzvah, I might just as well give up and turn Catholic, spending my Sunday mornings at Mass with the Geohegans down the block. Either way, I was clearly doomed.
Rabbi Tuvim took me on either as a challenge or as a penance, I was never quite sure which. He was inhumanly patient and inventive, constantly coming up with word games, sports references and any number of catchy mnemonics to help me remember this foreign, senseless, elusive, boring system of communication. But when even he wiped his forehead and said sadly, "Ai, gornisht helfen" which means nothing will help you, I finally felt able to ask him whether he thought I would ever be a good Jew; and, if not, whether we should just cancel the Bar Mitzvah. I thought hopefully of the expense this would save my father, and felt positively virtuous for once.
The rabbi, looking at me, managed to sigh and half-smile at the same time, taking off his glasses and blinking at them. "Nobody in this entire congregation has the least notion of what Bar Mitzvah is," he said wearily. "It's not a graduation from anything, it is just an acknowledgment that at thirteen you're old enough to be called up in temple to read from the Torah. Which God help you if you actually are, but never mind. The point is that you are still Bar Mitzvah even if you never go through the preparation, the ritual." He smiled at me and put his glasses back on. "No way out of it, Joseph. If you never manage to memorize another word of Hebrew, you're still as good a Jew as anybody. Whatever the Orthodox think."
One Thursday afternoon I found the rabbi so engrossed in one of his old magazines that he didn't notice when I walked in, or even when I peered over his shoulder. It was an issue of a magazine called Evening, from 1921, which made it close to thirty years old. There were girls on the cover, posing on a beach, but they were a long way from the bathing beauties—we still called them that then—that I was accustomed to seeing in magazines and on calendars. These could have walked into my mother's PTA or Hadassah meetings: they showed no skin above the shin, wore bathing caps and little wraps over their shoulders, and in general appeared about as seductive as any of my mother's friends, only younger. Paradoxically, the severe costumes made them look much more youthful than they probably were, innocently graceful.
Rabbi Tuvim, suddenly aware of me, looked up, startled but not embarrassed. "This is what your mother would have been wearing to the beach back then," he said. "Mine, too. It looks so strange, doesn't it? Compared to Betty Grable, I mean."
He was teasing me, as though I were still going through my Betty Grable/Alice Faye phase. As though I weren't twelve now, and on the edge of manhood; if not, why were we laboring over the utterly bewildering haftarah twice a week? As though Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne and Lizabeth Scott hadn't lately written their names all over my imagination, introducing me to the sorrows of adults? I drew myself up in visible—I hoped—indignation, but the rabbi said only, "Sit down, Joseph, look at this girl. The one in the left corner."
She was bareheaded, so that her whole face was visible.
Even I could tell that she couldn't possibly be over eighteen. She wasn't beautiful—the others were beautiful, and so what?—but there was a playfulness about her expression, a humor not far removed from wisdom. Looking at her, I felt that I could tell that face everything I was ashamed of, and that she would not only reassure me that I wasn't the vile mess I firmly believed I was, but that I might even be attractive one day to someone besides my family. Someone like her.
I looked sideways at Rabbi Tuvim, and saw him smiling. "Yes," he said. "She does have that effect, doesn't she?"
"Who is she?" I blurted out. "Is she a movie star or something?" Someone I should be expected to know, in other words. But I didn't think so, and I was right. Rabbi Tuvim shook his head.
"I have no idea. I just bought this magazine yesterday, at a collectors' shop downtown where I go sometimes, and I feel as though I have been staring at her ever since. I don't think she's anybody famous—probably just a model who happened to be around when th
ey were shooting that cover. But I can't take my eyes off her, for some reason. It's a little embarrassing."
The rabbi's unmarried state was of particular concern in the neighborhood. Rabbis aren't priests: it's not only that they're allowed to marry, it's very nearly demanded of them by their congregations. Rabbi Tuvim wasn't a handsome man, but he had a strong face, and his eyes were kind. I said, "Maybe you could look her up, some way."
The rabbi blinked at me. "Joseph, I am curious. That's all."
"Sure," I said. "Me too."
"I would just like to know a little about her," the rabbi said.
"Me too," I said again. I was all for keeping the conversation going, to stall off my lesson as long as possible, but no luck. The rabbi just said, "There is something about her," and we plunged once more into the cold mysteries of Mishnaic Hebrew. Rabbi Tuvim didn't look at the Evening cover again, but I kept stealing side glances at that girl until he finally got up and put the magazine back on the bookshelf, without saying a word. I think I was an even worse student than usual that afternoon, to judge by his sigh when we finished.
Every Monday and Thursday, when I came for my lessons, the magazine would always be somewhere in sight—on a chair, perhaps, or down at the end of the table where we studied. We never exactly agreed, not in so many words, that the girl on the cover haunted us both, but we talked about her a lot. For me the attraction lay in the simple and absolute aliveness of her face, as present to me as that of any of my schoolmates, while the other figures in the photograph felt as antique as any of the Greek and Roman statues we were always being taken to see at museums. For Rabbi Tuvim. . . for the rabbi, perhaps, what fascinated him was the fact that he was fascinated: that a thirty-year-old image out of another time somehow had the power to distract him from his studies, his students, and his rabbinical duties. No other woman had ever done that to him. Twelve years old or not, I was sure of that.
The rabbi made inquiries. He told me about them—I don't think there was anyone else he could have told about such a strange obsession. Evening was long out of business by then, but his copy had credited the cover photograph only to "Winsor & Co., Ltd., Newark, New Jersey." Rabbi Tuvim—obviously figuring that if he could teach me even a few scraps of Hebrew he ought to be able to track down a fashion photographer's byline—found address and phone number, called, was told sourly that he was welcome to go through their files himself, but that employees had better things to do. Whereupon, he promptly took a day off and made a pilgrimage to Winsor & Co., Ltd., which was still in business, but plainly subsisting on industrial photography and the odd bowling team picture. A clerk led him to the company archive, which was a room like a walk-in closet, walled around with oaken filing cabinets; he said it smelled of fixatives and moldering newsprint, and of cigars smoked very long ago. But he sat down and went to work, and in only three hours, or at most four, he had his man.
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