Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 169

by Neil Clarke

  Ice overhead, then vacuum, then tumbling shards of rock that moved so slowly they seemed to be hanging in the void. Perhaps the Centaur would retrieve its wayward children, or the Beings who controlled it—why now deny that?—reconcile with their seceded peers. Koishi stood in the darkness, uncounseled and unsought, and marshaled his slow and imperfect thoughts toward what this now could mean.

  About the Author

  Gregory Feeley writes science fiction and about science fiction. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and. His stories have been finalists for the Nebula Award and his essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Book World, and USA Today. Feeley’s most recent novel is Kentauros and he recently completed a long novel, Hamlet the Magician. His previous Clarkesworld story, “Cloud-Born” will be reprinted in two “year’s best” anthologies this year.

  You and Whose Army?

  Greg Egan

  1

  The last thing Rufus could recall his brother Linus doing was swimming laps, in the aquatic center twenty minutes’ walk from his apartment in West Ryde. Rufus hadn’t been near a pool in years, but he booked a lane, went to the center and climbed, shivering, down into the water.

  He floundered at first, thrashing about, getting the acrid, chlorinated water up his nose. Then Linus’s memories took over, and Rufus found himself gliding along, if not effortlessly, at least competently. The sound of children shouting in the paddling pool, coming and going as he turned his head to breathe, anchored him with its familiarity, and whenever his technique began to falter he managed to think back to some moment when Linus had corrected a similar flaw in his own stroke.

  Linus had completed his usual twenty laps. Rufus settled for eight; his lungs and limbs should have been in good enough shape from his running and weights, but his shoulders were protesting and his breathing was growing labored. He climbed out and went looking for his towel, chilly again, pondering the dissonance between his own mixture of pride in this mildly uncomfortable achievement, and Linus’s memory of emerging from the water, far more invigorated and physically at ease, but too accustomed to that for it to mean much.

  He dried himself and pulled on his T-shirt, then sat on the lowest tier of the spectators’ benches, watching the other swimmers for a while. After a few minutes he noticed a woman approaching, goggles on her forehead, arms still dripping, frowning at him uncertainly.

  “Linus?”

  Rufus shook his head. “I’m his brother.” He recognized the woman: Beth, a regular in the same time slot, whom Linus had chatted with now and then.

  She laughed with surprise and came closer, and they introduced themselves. “Linus never told me he had a twin! Do you live nearby?”

  “No, I just flew in from Adelaide.”

  “Oh, it must be nice to catch up.” She looked back toward the water. “Is he still going? I can’t see which lane he’s in.”

  “I didn’t come here with Linus,” Rufus replied. “Actually, he hasn’t been in touch for a while.”

  Beth digested that. “You’re looking for him?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought for a moment. “The last time I saw him here was Thursday.”

  That was the last session Rufus remembered. “Did you speak to him?” he asked, though he believed he knew the answer.

  “No,” she confirmed. “I just saw him getting out of the pool.” She hovered, concerned, clearly struggling to think of something more tangible she could offer. “If I see him, should I tell him to call you?”

  “That would be great, thank you.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  Rufus nodded and smiled, and she departed.

  Even if Linus had dropped this part of his routine at the same time as he’d stopped sharing his memories, that didn’t necessarily mean he’d come to harm. But it did suggest that he hadn’t merely decided to pull the plug and then continue with his life as if nothing had changed.

  Rufus returned to Linus’s apartment. He knocked a few times, then tried Linus’s phone again, listening in vain for any hint of the ringtone coming through the walls. Either it was on silent, or it was somewhere else entirely—and there really was no reason to think that Linus was lying comatose on the floor. He couldn’t go to the police with nothing but the fact that a healthy twenty-four-year-old man didn’t seem to be at home, and had had no contact with his brothers for five days.

  As he headed down to the railway station, he set up a group call with Caius in Bonn and Silus in London.

  “Any news?” Caius asked.

  “It looks like he hasn’t been to the pool since Thursday.” Rufus felt strange conversing this way, but their usual mode of interaction didn’t make for a speedy exchange of information.

  “You need to get into his apartment,” Silus insisted.

  “How?” However many memories they had of Linus opening the door and walking straight in, the biometric lock wasn’t so shoddy as to succumb to either their shared knowledge or their shared DNA.

  “Break a window,” Caius suggested. “Quietly.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that last bit.” The apartment had no alarm system, and the building wasn’t known for its late-night parties; by midnight, the chance of him encountering any neighbors coming or going would be minimal. “I’ll buy a glass cutter,” he decided, talking over Silus who’d just come up with the same idea.

  “I’ll call back if I find something,” Rufus said. “But if I end up in prison, I’m going to expect both of you to start pulling your weight and having a lot more fun.”

  2

  When Rufus had bought the tools he needed, he got a pizza and took it to his hotel room, then he lay on the bed and passed the time watching the same shows as he would have streamed at home: a couple of comedies, a police procedural, a supernatural thriller, a psychological drama. He hadn’t much liked Louisiana Nights at first, but recalling Linus mulling over his own memories of the first few episodes had really turned him around, and anticipating Caius’s groans and eye rolls did nothing to change his mind.

  Around eleven o’clock, he left and caught a train to West Ryde. When he reached the apartment his nerve almost failed him, but then he convinced himself that if a neighbor showed up he could probably bluff his way through the encounter by pretending to be the rightful occupant, wielding a desperate solution to a malfunctioning lock. Linus hadn’t had much contact with anyone in the building, but he’d been there long enough for the people on either side to know his face.

  Rufus attached a suction-cupped handle to the kitchen window and started rolling the cutting wheel along the edge of the pane, oiling it to silence its squeaking, feeling like a jewel thief from a heist comedy transplanted into some kind of weird suburban melodrama. He’d tried Linus’s phone again while he was on the train, but hadn’t risked waking the neighbors by knocking, so it was entirely possible he was about to blunder in and find his brother, safe and well, in bed with someone whose intimacies he’d had no wish to share.

  The square of glass came free; Rufus set it down on the balcony, lifted out the insect screen, placed a bath towel over the remaining sharp edges, and then climbed through the curtains onto the kitchen sink.

  He pulled out his phone to light up the scene. The kitchen looked completely bare, and the refrigerator stood with its door ajar, unplugged and empty.

  When he got down off the sink and tried the light switch, it confirmed that the power had been disconnected. Linus wasn’t lying dead in an alley; he’d simply moved out of the apartment.

  A fraternal corpse was the last thing Rufus had been hoping for, but robbed of the potential exculpatory gravitas, he suddenly felt ten times more embarrassed at the prospect of being caught. He quickly opened the front door and brought the excised pane inside, pretty sure that the deglazed window itself would attract no attention from a casual passerby.

  He move
d from room to room, checking the landlord’s furniture for anything Linus might have left in a drawer or a cupboard. It was strange to see bare plywood where he was accustomed to recalling socks or stationary, and however presumptuous it would be to feel as shocked as if he’d come home to his own place and found it burgled, he couldn’t deny the skin-prickling sense that a sudden change had been wrought on things he’d always thought of as lying fixed beneath his gaze.

  Linus had left no possessions behind, let alone any revelatory clues. If he’d wanted out, why hadn’t he just said so? Rufus couldn’t deny that the loss would have been painful, but he did not believe that any of them would have stood in his way.

  Then again, if he hadn’t even known what Linus was planning, how much were his predictions of his other siblings worth?

  Rufus booked a glazier to come and repair the window in the morning, charging everything to his credit card; the landlord was sure to discover the whole story eventually, but restoring the damage as swiftly as possible seemed like an honorable compromise that would probably keep him out of court.

  He called the others as he walked to the train station, and described what he’d seen.

  “If he doesn’t want to be found,” Caius said, “then I don’t know what else we can do.”

  “Hire a private investigator?” Silus proposed.

  “That could make things worse,” Rufus replied. “If he wanted to get away from us, and we start chasing after him, it isn’t going to help.”

  “Why would he throw away four weeks’ rent by moving out without giving notice?” Silus protested. “And even if he felt like he had to act on the spur of the moment—at the very same time as he decided to pull the plug on us—don’t you think that sounds as if someone pressured him into it?”

  Rufus could feel his memories of Caius agreeing with Caius, those of Silus agreeing with Silus. His memories of Linus stayed silent on the matter, just gliding through the water, content with the rhythm of his stroke.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “Let me look into some options in the morning.”

  Back at the hotel, Rufus undressed and crawled into bed, almost tempted to switch off the link himself. He could understand Linus doing that if they’d been badgering him, ganging up against him, trying to control his life. But no one had filled his head with reproach or disapproval; they’d accepted him as he was, as they always had.

  Rufus dreamed his own dream first: breaking into his father’s prison cell, carrying the glass cutter and a birthday cake. “Shouldn’t you have hidden it in the cake?” his father complained. “What good is it out here in plain sight?”

  “It’s not your birthday,” Rufus replied. “None of this is for you.”

  As Caius, he hung like a sloth from a power line, inching his way along the live wire, sure that he was safe so long as he remained scrupulously isolated. Urchins down on the ground tossed their shoes at him, but he didn’t flinch. He could smell burning rubber, though: maybe from the shoes, maybe something closer.

  Then he was Silus, eight years old again, in their first foster home: the Coopers. He had found a ball of wool, and he was using it to tie the cat’s collar to the dog’s. Mrs. Cooper came in and began denouncing him angrily.

  “But they don’t mind,” Silus pointed out. The cat was tentatively licking the dog’s nose, and the dog, so far, was tolerating it.

  “That’s the worst part!” Mrs. Cooper raged. “We trained them to fight! They should be fighting!”

  The alarm dragged Rufus back to the hotel room. He lay still for a moment, sorting out exactly who and where he was. His expatriate brothers had not yet shared their still-unfinished Tuesday; on the European Monday he now recalled, both of them had tried and failed to make progress on their theses, too distracted by their worries about Linus as they’d waited for Rufus to arrive in Sydney and report back. This kind of lag had rarely mattered before, but Rufus found it annoyingly disorienting, now that they were trying to coordinate in real time as well.

  As he started to rise, the absence hit him anew. At the back of his mind he’d still been hoping for a miraculous reconnection, but where the signal from Radio Linus should have been there was nothing but dead air.

  When he’d showered and eaten breakfast, Rufus sat glumly scrolling through advertisements for investigators. The fact that everyone promised “discretion” only made the whole business seem sleazier. If Linus had found a girlfriend who’d persuaded him to walk away from the shared house of his brothers’ skulls, all power to her; the two of them should be left in peace, not chased down with a telephoto lens as if they were adulterers hiding from jealous spouses.

  But . . . persuaded him in the space of a day? As far as Rufus could tell, there’d been no candidate waiting in the wings to take on the role of liberator. Silus was right: the sheer speed with which Linus had cut all his ties with them raised doubts about how freely he’d acted. And if the PI found him blissfully shacked up with some mono-cerebral Juliet after all, the happy couple need be none the wiser. Linus’s brothers could step back and give him space, reassured that he was safe, and hope for invitations to the wedding.

  Rufus picked a firm in Lane Cove, reasonably close to Linus’s haunts, and diligently checked the details against the official register. The website offered him an appointment at eleven o’clock, so he steeled himself and prepared to rip away the bandage. Sharing the family’s secrets with a total stranger almost never went smoothly, but if that was what it took to protect their brother, so be it.

  3

  As Rufus entered the waiting room, his phone pinged with a message telling him he’d be seen shortly, and in less than a minute this promise was fulfilled.

  “Mr. Bennett? I’m Catherine Leong. Please come through.”

  Rufus followed her into her office. She ushered him into a seat, then sat behind the desk and glanced down at a tablet.

  “You’re concerned for your brother, but you don’t believe this is a matter the police would be willing to take up?”

  “That’s right,” Rufus confirmed. In fact, the firm’s website had stated that it would redirect him to the police if he checked any of a list of potential red flags.

  “Why do you think he might be in trouble?” Leong asked.

  “He cut off contact with the whole family very suddenly. No arguments, no warnings.”

  “He just stopped returning your calls? Since last Thursday?”

  “Yes. And it looks like he moved out of his apartment at the same time.”

  “Is it possible he just lost his phone,” Leong suggested, “and with the move he’s been too busy to replace it?”

  “Not really.” Rufus squirmed inside, unprepared despite all his rehearsals. If this woman was so good at her job, why didn’t she know everything about the family already? But the names had all been redacted from the court files, and no one had paid her to go trawling yet.

  Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”

  “Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”

  Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.

  “You were born on the Physalia?”

  “That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.

  “And you and Linus are quadruplets?”

  “Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.

  “For
give me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories . . . ?”

  “We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.”

  Leong pondered this. “Does that stretch to everything they planned as well? Everything they imagined?”

  Rufus said, “Maybe not everything. I mean, when we were on the boat, Linus used to tell us he was building a castle under the sea—which confused the hell out of me, because I couldn’t even remember him imagining it. But I doubt he could plan something as concrete as cutting his ties and moving home without any of us knowing about it.”

  “Okay.” Leong consulted the tablet again. “You’ve said that Linus wasn’t working. Is he on unemployment benefits?”

  “No. There was a settlement a few years ago with the organization that ran the Physalia; all the children got some compensation.”

  “So you’re independently wealthy?”

  Rufus laughed. “More like independently not-quite-starving. It’s a small income stream, not a lump sum. Caius and Silus use theirs to supplement their scholarships while they’re finishing their PhDs; I’m the only one of us with a job, so I pool mine with Linus’s to keep him afloat.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a high school teacher. Mathematics.”

  “And how does Linus pass the time?”

  “Swimming,” Rufus replied. “Walking. Reading.”

  “What kind of books?”

  “Nineteenth century fiction, mostly.”

  Leong grimaced. “So what’s his plan? What does he want from life?”

  Rufus had no definitive verdict on that, so he confined himself to the facts. “He’s tried to get work in the past. Mostly seasonal, like fruit-picking. But it’s been hard to find for the last few years.”