He works his mouth and still feels the hiss of dry paper. He swallowed it long ago when he began to speak.
Twisted. Sorcerer. A candle's tzelem. His brother in Prague, a life without stairs. But the first letter had been erased, so--what is life?
He moves with the nettlesome creak of fired clay. The others he sees--they are clay, too, but nothing rattles when they move. His hands are afire, his body a shadow. Thus he passes, and passes again, and the sweat and cold breeze are his footprints.
He thinks of the Jinn, the people of wind and flame. Could he be an ifrit? Were they wicked? He must be, a twisted imitation of those little animals that speak, jostle, touch, hug, live in the bright air and cast shadows.
Didn't the Jinn grant wishes? Maybe he should, too.
Wishes. He spies a little girl, suddenly, at the far end of a school playground. She is alone, sitting on a swing. Absent-faced, lost in her thoughts. Nobody comes near her.
Hmm, the golem thinks. He watches.
A bell rings somewhere. She is the last student inside, speaking to no one. Soon, the yard is deserted, and he can slip inside the school unobserved. Doors opening and closing on their own tend to, he's discovered, attract attention.
Inside is all cold white linoleum and steely blue-gray walls. He feels almost claustrophobic, but steels himself. The golem has never been in a school before, so does not feel lucky that each door is set with a wide window, providing a clear view of each classroom and the students incarcerated therein. Instead, a dull certainty that this is how all schools are sets in his hollow head with a singular thunk.
He takes a good five minutes at each window, scanning each face carefully and thoroughly, looking for the girl--his girl, he has already begun to think. He examines one side of the hall first, then the other. It therefore takes him nearly an hour to complete his circuit of the first floor. No sign of his girl. He stands stock-still for a moment, wondering if he has misremembered her face, then sees a sign at the far end of the hall next to a formidable steel door fitted with a push-bar: "Stairs."
He trudges to the end of the hall, makes certain no one is watching, and pushes the door open. Slowly, heavily, he begins to climb the concrete-and-iron staircase. When he reaches the second floor, a sign on the steely-blue cinderblock wall points up and to the right, saying "Administration," while below it, a taped-up sheet of printer paper reads "Lower Grades," complete with a thick black arrow pointing to the door on the left.
He pulls it open and sees another hallway. Fortunately, it takes only three classrooms before he finds her.
This, then, is where he waits.
Three hours later, the bell rings, creating an echoing clangor up and down the hall and across the golem's stone skin. The vibration is unpleasant, but the golem forgets this when a stream of children begins pouring out of each door and flows into a great river of shrieking, shouting babble that barely comes up to the golem's waist.
Last, finally, last, his girl leaves. Sad and silent, her tread is slow, her shoulders bowed. He follows her down the stairs, down the hall, out the door, and past the chain-link gate. She walks only two blocks before entering a narrow doorway in a grimy brick building, and he follows. The narrow staircase provides difficult climbing for the golem, whose chest is as broad as his girl is tall.
She reaches the third floor, where a hallway lies, its walls yellowed with years and cigarette smoke. There are only two doors, and she chooses the one on the left. The golem quickly slips in behind her, but has to hold the door open long enough for him to enter. Fortunately, his girl thinks the rug has gotten caught in the doorjamb, and spends several seconds adjusting its position, precious seconds the golem uses to slide into the apartment unnoticed.
The apartment is filthy, broken appliances and old newspapers everywhere. It smells of stale cigarettes and, vaguely, of cat piss, though the golem hears no meowing. The living room is the foyer, a worn-out old green couch positioned in front of the TV, a faded plaid armchair next to it, just in front of the door. In it is a man, fat, goateed, wearing a gray sleeveless undershirt (it was once white), and boxers with such enormous holes that the golem does not know how his genitals are not visible.
Though he has little experience with normal living conditions, the golem somehow, intrinsically, knows that this is not a good home. This is not his girl's proper place. He sees the open can of beer in the man's left hand, poised over a pile of crushed beer cans of similar make, and knows this man is not in his right mind.
Still, he is surprised when the man's right hand snaps out and grabs hold of the girl's upper arm. She starts in shock, and so does the golem.
The man belches, giving vent to a prodigiously flammable vapor. "You're an hour late," he says, his speech not, perhaps, quite as well-defined as human speech should be.
The girl says nothing.
"Well?" he asks. "Gonna be a smart-ass bitch? Too good to talk to your ol' daddums?"
She maintains her silence, looking away. The golem senses that she knows this will not end well, no matter what she chooses to do. So she does nothing. It is going to happen anyway.
"Smart-ass bitch, huh?" the man growls. He jerks her closer to him and grins, showing several gaps. "Not a fucking sound. That's gonna change right here, right now." With a quick, convulsive movement, he pulls the lever that closes his recliner, yanks the girl in front of him, and throws her on the couch. Still, she says nothing.
He turns her over and pulls down his boxer shorts.
The golem has had enough. He grabs the man's shoulders, pulls him off of the girl, grips the man's lower jaw, the man's flesh sizzling in the golem's burning grip, and twists. A dull snap is heard, and then nothing.
The golem lets the body fall.
His girl still does not speak. She stares at the corpse, her mouth open, stunned. She waits. When no motion is forthcoming, and she realizes that he is no longer breathing, she gingerly climbs off of the couch, and pokes his arm with the toe of her shoe. Nothing.
She pokes him harder. Nothing. Still harder, and a new sound flashes through the gloomy apartment. Startled, the golem realizes that this new sound is a sob. His girl keeps poking the lifeless thing on the floor--and here, the golem begins to wonder what the difference between himself and the meat lying at his feet really is--harder, and harder, until she is no longer poking but kicking. Viciously her tennis shoe stabs the cooling flesh as her weeping becomes louder and more--somehow--exultant.
When the girl finally stops, winding down like a broken toy, her father's face is a ruined, pulpy mass, and his body is covered in bruises. She is once again silent, except for a certain catch in her breath. She sits back down on the couch, and suddenly, she thinks of something.
"Is someone there?" she calls out. It is the first time the golem hears her voice.
He considers for a moment. Finally, he says quietly, "I am here."
"Where? I can't see you. Why are you here?"
"I am a golem," he says bluntly. "A thing of clay. You cannot see me because I do not want to be seen. I am here because..." His voice fades. He does not know, precisely, why he is here.
"Because why?" Her voice is plaintive.
It is as good an answer as any. "Because you needed me."
She is quiet for a moment. Then she asks, "Can I see you?"
"No."
She does not say anything. Finally, the golem says, "You should call the police. Tell them you surprised a man in here, assaulting your father. He could not bring himself to hurt a child, so fled."
She nods, saying nothing.
"I am going to go," he says hesitantly. "You will not see me again." Something in him makes him pause, and then say, "Make the most of this."
She nods silently again.
He exits the apartment, leaving the girl nothing but a warm breeze and a door that opens and closes by itself.
He leaves the building, joins the crowd of humans washing its way past the doorway, and realizes that he has just killed a human. He has just ended. The end of a golem comes about by either one of two means. First, in smithereens; second, by erasing a single letter on a piece of paper.
Is that easier than snuffing the sapient flame? He thinks it is much easier to erase a human than a golem. Does that make him a wicked creature?
I was visiting Pasiphaë, the Tan-Kon Corporation seed off the coast of Maryland, when I got tagged with a request for a private meeting. The Manager.
I smiled at the young woman straddling my lap and said, "Just a moment." Before she said anything, I left the stream and moved to the designated meeting-place, a randomly-chosen water molecule living in a cloud that was, at the moment, transiting Ceuta.
The Manager was observing the valence, playing a little probability game, when I arrived. He grunted slightly.
"It's no fun anymore with a second observer," he said quietly, and turned to me. "Hello, Associate Ascher. How are MaMa Bendel's offerings today?"
"Quite alluring, thank you," I said. "She just hired this new Korean/African girl. I was giving her a test-drive when you called. How can I help you?"
He sighed. "We're in a bit of a pickle."
Odd. The man who was singularly responsible for developing the Associate corps was in a bit of a pickle. Quietly, I began recording.
"Sir?" I said.
He smiled slightly. "I'm scrambling your recording. Very good, though, Ascher. I'm pleased to see that the conditioning has taken such a solid hold."
I felt cold. We were venturing into classified territory here. The Manager, though only a man, had been the main beneficiary of the Tan-Kon technology that made the world what it was today, with seeds sprouting into gigantic, aesthetically-appealing cities in the ocean that were responsible for cleaning our world, and claustrophobes and agoraphobes transforming into Associates, government agents with near-absolute control of the space-time continuum--up to the edge of the atmosphere. The vacuum was out of our jurisdiction.
But The Manager was responsible for the Solar System subsidiary corporation. The ultimate administrator of the human race and CEO of a sphere of space with the sun at its center and a radius of 50 AU, totaling 11,554,517 cubic light-years. And he was worried. And he was coming to me.
I paid attention.
He continued. "I've spoken with the Tan-Kon about this, and they honestly don't seem concerned about it. Evidently this is something that happens once in a while, specifically because it has little or no effect on history. Evidently such an occurrence has a negligible impact on their profit margin."
Okay. "Sir?"
He looked at me. "Hm? Sorry. Listen--a guy from 1953 just cropped up. I need you to show him around a little bit. I assume you have the next few weeks free. Go ahead and finish up with MaMa's Deal o' the Day. He'll be outside the door when you see her out." He looked at me knowingly. "There'll be a slight increase of status in it for you if he survives long enough to return home, Ascher. Bear that in mind."
Holy shit. Maybe I'd be made an Assistant VP of Earthside Affairs or something. Although I heard about this one guy who did The Manager a favor but bungled it slightly, resulting in his promotion to Executive Secretary to the Deputy Assistant Manager Office Assistant of Titan. Still not too bad, though--Titan was well-known for its methane pubs. Better than being the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary to the Executive Mailroom Custodial Engineer's Hazardous-Materials Intercessional Equipment Assistant of the Sun.
I nodded. "Yes, sir," and shunted back into the stream.
"For what?" she asked.
I shifted slightly. "There," I said, and smiled widely. "Please...do continue."
He was standing outside the door, uninserted. The whore looked at him, slightly taken aback.
"God-damn," she brayed. "What the hell happened to that?"
I shrugged. "He didn't get when I told him to get."
"Wha-eva," and with a shimmy of her hips, she was gone around the corner.
I moved him inside and snapped him back into time.
"--are you?" he said.
"I am Associate Ascher," I said smoothly. "Would you have a seat, please, and perhaps something to drink?" A chair grew just behind him, nudging the back of his knees just enough to make him nearly fall onto the seat.
His eyes looked wild as he gripped the conformable material of the chair and felt its almost-living motion accommodate his hand, and he snapped his arm back, nearly falling off the chair in the process.
"Something to drink," I reminded him.
His eyes suddenly looked lost. Associates are trained in, among many, many other things, psychology, and I knew that the juxtaposition of his surroundings' alienness and my seeming normalcy was having its effect. As far as he was concerned, he had, just a few moments ago, been in his own time. Then everything changed--and here I was standing before him, offering him a drink while he reclined on a chair that hadn't been there a moment ago and cradled his body like a living thing.
1953. 2029. A difference of 76 years in absolute terms and millions in relative terms. I was suddenly unsure how to speak to this hominid at all.
"Water?" he said, suddenly and tremulously.
Ah, sweet relief. "Certainly," I said, and entered the other room, a private general-purpose space I had partitioned off in preparation. It was strictly unnecessary--one room was all rooms, so to speak--but psychologically significant. I had the room grow a chair that had wheels on its legs along with the glass of water, so I could bring it in front of this strange visitor from another age without alarming him even more.
After wheeling the chair in and handing him the glass, I sat down.
"What's your name?" I asked, as friendly as I could be.
He took a moment to respond. "I'm Billy Parker," he said.
I nodded, noting the name. "And where are you from, Billy?" Trying to be as pleasantly nonthreatening as possible. We Associates have an unfortunate tendency to be impersonal. It's what happens when you deal with the annals of human crime and observe the minutiae of human life. It's also often a consequence of our conditioning and of the underlying phobias that make us suitable for what we do. The average claustro- or agoraphobic's sensitivity to space also lends itself to a certain personal distance.
"Park City, Illinois," he said, taking a sip from the glass. He looked surprised as he swallowed, and looked at the glass. "It's cold!" At my questioning look, he said, "There's no ice in it."
"Ah," I said. "It's fresh from a pitcher in the refrigerator. Is it too cold?"
Billy shook his head. "Where am I? What is this place? Why am I here? Why are you here? I..." his mouth opened and closed in the face of excessive uncertainty.
I smiled. "Would you like me to answer your questions in order?"
"I don't care," Billy said. "Just tell me--What's going on?"
I nodded. "Certainly. But you must promise me two things."
He looked dubious. "What?"
"First," I said. "You must believe me. Second, please remain calm and take it all in on good faith. Is that possible?"
Billy swallowed heavily. "I can try."
"Very well," I said, and leaned on the chair back. "Do you know what year it is?"
"I don't want questions!" he said angrily. "I want answers!"
"I thought you promised to remain calm," I said mildly.
He looked guilty, but then remembered. "I only said I'd try, buddy. You can't get me that way!"
I sighed. "Just tell me what year it is to you."
Hesitantly, he guessed. "1953? That can't be wrong...can it?"
I chuckled. "It certainly can. You, my dear friend, are currently breathing the air of the Year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty-nine."
Billy paled, but took it admirably. He formed a weak expression of dubiousness and said, "You're pulling my leg, aren't you?"
"I'm afraid not," I said. "You are currently in my apartment, which is a pod in one of the fruiting bodies of the seedcity Pasiphaë, which is located in the Atlantic Ocean approximately one hundred and fifty miles off the shore of Maryland. Are you with me so far?"
No words. I nodded, stood up, and drew a window in the wall. His mouth fell open as I expanded the diamondoid pore to a circle roughly twelve feet in diameter, revealing Pasiphaë's glory, gleaming towers and lacy-filigreed walkways that exploded in an organic euphony from the blue-gray Atlantic waters. The sky was full of majestic white clouds (one of them, perhaps, hosting The Manager, keeping a watchful eye on us) painted on a brilliant, near-sapphire blue. The sun glinted off the platinum membranes enclosing each tower and sparkled off the various mid-air transports as they wound their ways through Pasiphaë's fruiting bodies.
"You see," I said gently, "Pasiphaë is a city, yes. But it is not made from steel and glass and concrete. It's a living organism, grown from a single seed the size of your thumbnail, which was dropped in the water at that spot--" I pointed at the center of the city, visible from here as a giant cobalt-blue glass sphere, "--and turned into this within a matter of hours."
I turned away from the pore, and pointed at the chair Billy had been sitting on. "You asked me earlier how I made that chair move so that you would sit on it. I didn't. It grew in that spot specifically for you to sit on, grown by Pasiphaë at my request. This apartment is just one small pore in a massive reproductive structure that I live in. All those buildings--" I indicated the shimmering towers. "--Are reproductive structures of a giant organism. You could think of them as the toadstools of a single, large fungus growing underground. Yes?"
He responded surprisingly quickly. "Fungi are saprophytes. Does this city also feed on the dead?"
Shock cracked my professional facade. "Good Lord."
Billy smiled. "Sorry. I read a lot of speculation, so..."
I renormalized and continued. "You're right, Billy. The analogy is inexact. Pasiphaë's growth and life is sustained by various processes. Most of them are very complex, but can be summed up as the harvesting of certain substances from the air, water, and ocean floor."
"What substances?"
1953. Hmm. "Have you ever heard of global warming?" Clearly not. "All right. You're from Illinois, yes? Have you ever seen a factory?"
"I'm not a child," Billy said darkly.
I nodded. My opinion of people from the 1950s was changing by the minute. "Fair enough. Did you know that industrialization creates a great deal of chemical compounds that, when released into the environment, cause a great deal of ecological damage?"
He laughed. "That's silly. The world's too big to be damaged by us."
I shrugged. "Well, the truth came out not long after your time. Carbon dioxide and other gases were being released into the atmosphere in staggering amounts, trapping heat and changing the climate, while chemicals poisoned soil and water. Consider it the consequences of ignorance."
He was quiet for a moment. "Really?"
"Indeed. It was reaching a point where the Earth was going to be uninhabitable for living things, which made the situation even worse. Fortunately, the Tan-Kon arrived."
He looked at me. I could tell he was getting lost, and took pity. "Why don't I explain the Tan-Kon later? In the meantime, allow me take you on a tour of Pasiphaë."
He nodded wordlessly. "Please."
So I had the apartment manufacture a diamagnetic lift, attached to the apartment by a dock that stretched out from the diamondoid pore. We stepped through the carbon, whose molecular structure had disengaged and flipped sideways, turning into something like air. Billy, of course, marveled, but he was silent as we stepped into the lift and wafted into the air.
We circled some of the tallest towers as I pointed out the key governmental offices and residential pseudo-ziggurats. He took it all in without a single word. The only sound he made was a gasp as the lift plunged into the water so that I could show him the seedcity's digestive system, a mess of rootlike tentacles that extended all the way down to the sea floor, the smallest at least a hundred feet in diameter.
Finally, he said something. "Holy cow. Those things sure are big."
"Indeed," I said. "They need to be in order to gather enough material to feed the city, process it, absorb it, and release the waste material back into the oceanic environment, where they serve as food and nucleation sites for life. Quite a fascinating process, really."
He nodded. "I don't suppose you have any...coffee?"
I chuckled. "Why don't we return to the mainland? I know a good shop in Georgetown."
He looked at me quizzically. "Is that one of your new cities?"
1953. "Not at all. It's actually a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. that's been there since before even your time."
He looked mildly embarrassed. "Sorry. I haven't left Park City very much."
I smiled, comfortingly, I'd like to think. "Not a problem. Here we are."
Billy started. "Already?" He looked around and his mouth fell open as he saw the National Mall, the Washington Monument and all of the attendant recognizable buildings. But a key thing was missing. "Where's the White House? I don't know exactly where it's supposed to be, but..."
"Ah," I said. "It's not there anymore. Burned down in the riots from a couple of decades ago, just before the Tan-Kon arrived. There was a president in office that--well, let me explain over some coffee, yes?"
His mouth fell open again. I was starting to wonder if primitives had weaker jaw-hinges--but that was unfair. He wasn't that far removed from me, could have been my grandfather, in fact. "A riot--?" It snapped shut. "Okay."
We settled down in a historic district, not far from a Starbucks, lovingly-preserved by the family of another Associate I had briefly partnered with.
As we walked the two blocks over to the coffee shop, Billy asked, "Why doesn't this place look like Pasiphaë? I mean, for all I know, we could be back in my time."
"Well, yes," I said. "What you probably should bear in mind is that Pasiphaë is a seedcity, grown from scratch. We certainly do have technology that we could use to turn Washington into a similar city, but we humans are sentimental beings." I looked at him pointedly. "I'm sure you know."
"Not really," he mumbled. "Mostly we're just interested in Progress."
"Progress doesn't take steps back in order to move forward," I said dryly. "But then, perhaps I'm passing unfair judgments on your time. Hindsight is 20/20, after all. But to answer your question, Washington is a Designated Preservation Sub-Unit of the larger Preserve that encompasses the entire eastern coast of this continent all the way down to the Mexico border with Texas."
"So everything is preserved as it was--when?"
"At the coming of the Tan-Kon. Perfect timing, in fact," I said, pulling open a door, "because we're here. Welcome to Starbucks, one of the many, many apotheoses of early-21st-century America."
He walked through the door. "What do you mean?" And then he looked around. The earth tones, the wood, the calm, slickly polished atmosphere, the counter with authentic baristas behind it, fiddling with espresso machines, the semi-comfortable chairs with peacoated old men reading newspapers, the sales racks hawking exotic, alien coffees. A hush fell over his face.
I sidled up behind him calmly. "At one point, there were four thousand Starbucks in the United States alone. There was one under the Eiffel Tower, one in the Chinese Forbidden City, one in the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, one on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. An American company. One of many, many American companies with thousands of copies in thousands of cities all over the world." I gestured, taking it all in. "This, my young friend, is the future that you and millions of others like you, were--or possibly still are--servicing."
"It's beautiful," he said, his eyes shining.
"Indeed." I went to the counter and ordered a nice venti mocha frappuccino. I loved these when I was much younger, and retained a taste for them today. I turned to Billy. "What would you like?"
He shook himself enough to say, "Whatever you're having, I guess."
"Two, please," I said to the barista, and steered Billy toward one of the small, circular tables. "Sit here, and I'll get our drinks."
When I returned with the drinks, he was examining the table.
"Formica?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Laminate. Here."
He took his mocha frapp and sipped. His eyes grew wide as he tasted the fragrant confection for the first time, and almost involuntarily drank half of the rest.
After his sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia passed, he gasped.
Before he could say anything, I started to speak. "The Tan-Kon are a race of people from another star. Their culture is, oh, sort of a super-corporate bureaucracy. Their technology is quite amazing, and they've bestowed some of it on us."
"A-aliens?" His eyes were wide as he sipped from the frapp.
I nodded. "They came to us after reading a certain signature in our atmosphere that told them that our world was changing for the worse. The Tan-Kon had been observing us for some time before then, and they admitted that it was our own corporate culture that had attracted them at first, and its evolution from the robber barons of the 19th century to the world-spanning besuited megaliths of the dawn of the 21st century."
I sipped from my own frapp and continued, waving my arm around at the Starbucks. "In fact, this coffee shop is essentially the perfect example of the megalithic corporate culture."
Billy looked around. "It's just a coffee shop. I mean, I know you said there are thousands of coffee shops like this, but..."
I shook my head. "No, look. Let me think of a good example. All right. Do you recall when I showed you the aquatic processing facilities of Pasiphaë? Those tentacles?" He nodded. "This shop is the end of one of those tentacles. The corporation behind it is Pasiphaë from sea level on up. Do you see?"
He finished his frapp in a single slurp. After he was done grimacing, he squeezed out, "Yes, I do see. It sounds awful, in my opinion."
I shrugged. "So's life, sometimes. Anyway, the Tan-Kon liked us, so they picked one man--this deaf guy from Georgia who suffered from crippling claustrophobia--and gave him everything they could."
"Why?"
I sucked on my straw. "This guy had a kind of unique ability to process a huge amount of information pretty quickly. He wasn't an idiot savant or anything, he was just a thinker. The claustrophobia, according to the Tan-Kon, made him suitable for the kind of spatial manipulation he'd be able to do. The deafness really didn't have any bearing on their decision--they just liked him."
"Spatial manipulation?"
I nodded. "That's where I come in. You see, a good deal of Tan-Kon technology involves the manipulation of time and space--what we call the continuum."
"Yeah," Billy said. "I know about that--Einstein was before my time."
"Good," I said. "Then you know about how time and space are inextricably wedded together. Control of one leads to control of another. However--" and here I raised my finger, "--the key here is to have a sensitivity to space to begin with. You need to be acutely aware of how much there is--or isn't--around you. Thus, claustrophobes and agoraphobes are ideal, and that's why the man who became The Manager was selected to begin with."
"So where do you come in?"
I sat back in my chair. "I am a member of the Associates. We're a kind of elite corps of government agents--kind of like the FBI was in your day--and our job is to patrol the planet and investigate or all-out prevent violations of planetary law. Those violations can range from simple pickpocketing to nuclear warfare. Due to our nature, we're in constant contact with the future, which tells us where and when a particular crime will happen so that we're there in time to prevent it.
"The system isn't perfect, of course--it requires an actual victim of the crime taking place. Victimless crime, like personal drug use, doesn't appear on our radar, if that's what you want to call it, so even though violations of the law do still occur without our intervention, personal harm to others is greatly minimized."
"So what does The Manager do?"
I shrugged. "Mostly administrative tasks for local space. He oversees commerce, transport, enforcement, foreign relations, defense, things like that. He's a good guy, if a bit strange sometimes. He's the one who assigned me to watch over you until you return to your own time."
He nodded and sat back, stretching his arms. "So you can travel through time and stuff?"
"Yes, although our activities are self-limited to the present and the future as much as possible. For the most part, we exist outside of time, and enter only for personal reasons or to intervene in an incident that requires our participation." I knew the next question he would ask.
"Self-limited? So you could take me home if you wanted to?"
Hm. "I could, yes, but I won't."
"Why?"
I sighed. "Well, first of all, the Tan-Kon don't appreciate it very much. Although we do have the ability to influence the past, they prefer that we leave it up to them if any changes need to be made. Second, there's just too much to go wrong." I fiddled with the straw. My frapp was almost gone. Soon, he would ask either to return to Pasiphaë or to see the world. "According to The Manager, the Tan-Kon have said that incidents like yours are generally better resolved on their own."
"I see." He sat for a moment, quietly. "I'm not too keen on that, you know."
"I know."
"You're done with your drink?"
"Yes."
"What now?"
"What would you like to do?"
He licked his lips. "What can we do?"
I shrugged. "Go back to Pasiphaë and learn more about what the city has to offer. Or I can show you the world. Or, if I get permission from The Manager, I could show you the Solar System. Or I can remove you from the timestream until you go home."
Billy's eyes lit up. "The Solar System?"
"Sure. The human race--which really means The Manager--has jurisdiction all the way out the farthest ends of the Kuiper Belt."
"What's that?"
1953. "It's a large cloud of smaller material surrounding the Solar System, right around Pluto. Mostly rock and ice. Nothing too interesting. Is that what you want to do?"
"Yes!" he said ecstatically.
"Any particular planets or moons you'd like to visit?"
"Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Those three are my favorites."
I snorted. "Yours and everyone else's. Very well, then." I put in a request to The Manager and got approved. "Any preference to start?"
He looked taken aback. "We're going now?"
"Now."
"Where's the spaceship?"
"Don't need any."
Nothing for a few seconds. Then, "Let's work our way outward."
"Certainly. The transit may take a few seconds, though." I looked at him appraisingly. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"
Billy took a deep breath. "Absolutely."
"All right, then." I took ahold of his arm, we stood up, and I took us both outside of space. Even with this kind of physics, there was a great deal of adjustment to make for the separate orbits of the two planets, the solar radiation, and the sheer distance. As such, the spatial transit was perceivable and probably a bit jarring.
As we exited the Earth's atmosphere and I began the claudication process, something changed, and I could feel someone else close by.
Without a warning, as we entered the claudicative zone, Billy was torn away by something only visible as a stranger's hand on his other arm, and I saw the spinning stars, heard the screaming roar as I blasted through the trace gases in the void, felt the solar wind ripping through me.
And then, as I impacted the Martian surface, nothing.
I was examining the Grand Central district of St. Petersburg when a case came up--hostage situation, drug dealers, little girl, debt owed. The address flashed across my vision momentarily, so I began to watch.
The situation unfolded almost as soon as I focused on the right living room. Two black men (Antwon Hamilton--27, six priors, all drug related; Eric James, 24, nine priors, six drug-related, two robberies, one grand theft auto) one middle-class white man (Arnold Susentava, 31, no priors, works for a local Citibank branch), and one seven-year-old girl (Kelly Daniel, biological issue of Arnold Susentava and Amy Daniel).
I listened carefully.
"You owe me six large," said Hamilton. "Where is it?"
"I-I don't have it right now," Sustentava stammered. "I have a couple hundred on me, though. Can we do a payment plan?"
James chuckled and Hamilton shook his head. "Fucking crackheads," he said. "No. Money, now." Then his face changed as a new idea came into his head. "Well, then again, we can certainly consider it a loan." His voice mocked Arnold, doing his best to sound like a banker, but now it dropped back into the usual gait. "But we gonna have to take some--what y'all call it?--collateral."
Sustentava looked bewildered. "Collateral--?"
With a great lunge, Kelly was in Hamilton's arms, a nine-millimeter Glock nestled at the base of her skull. I examined the gun and noted the hollow-point artillery, and the modifications made to the acoustic multiplier--an innovation to discourage illegal use of approved citizen armament; the report should be audible to anyone within a one-mile radius--to silence the gunshot. The little one began to cry.
Interesting. It had all been recorded and noted, of course. A crime was now being committed, and enough information had been conveyed to arrest all those who were involved. It was time to intervene.
I stepped back into space.
Hamilton started violently, and swung his gun around at me, firing almost before he knew it. I removed the bullet from the flow of time, like a grizzly bear scooping an iridescent trout from a raging torrent. It hung in midair, no longer truly existing within our particular brand of geometry.
I was calm. Invulnerable. A master of time and space. An agent of the government's elite corps of Associates. "Greetings. You may refer to me as Associate Ascher. A violent crime has been committed here, among several others. I suggest you stand down."
I looked at Hamilton, into his eyes. He knew there was no getting away. Suddenly, he made up his mind, snapped the gun to the girl's temple, and fired.
I got there first. Or I was always there. Or I was never there. It all depends on your point of view, on what direction you're looking in.
I extracted tiny Kelly from Hamilton's arms and from the continuum. When she came alive, she gasped to see my face across from hers, and looked around, seeing the three men as they looked within the timeflow we were standing next to.
"What happened?" she said.
"You're safe," I said. "Do you wish to remain with your father?"
She shrank into herself. "No." I barely heard it, so close to a whisper.
"Why not?" I needed reasons. Reasons are always needed.
She shook her head and said nothing, refusing to make eye contact. I took hold of her chin and guided her face up to meet mine.
"Listen," I said. "I can bring you someplace safe, away from your father, but I need a good reason to do it. The only person who can give me that reason is you. Do you understand?"
She was quiet for a long moment. Fortunately, we had all the time in the world.
Finally, she said quietly, "Sometimes he hurts me. He burns weird things and then he hurts me. But...when he hasn't burned anything in a long time, he hurts me worse. I want to go home."
"Where is home?" I asked.
"With my mom," she said, sighing the last word, making it sound almost reverent.
Hm. I checked the records for Amy Daniel. Interesting. She had dissolved her marriage to Susentava nearly three weeks before their daughter's birth and gone into a program for battered women, which had gained her a new identity and a new locale. She had been called Denise Lipton and now lived and worked as Amy Daniel, Librarian I, in Santa Fe. I fast-forwarded through the intervening years, and discovered that Susentava had taken seven years to track his ex-wife and daughter down, used the public transfer booths to arrive in Santa Fe only three hours prior to this incident, snatch his daughter as she was walking home from school, and return to St. Petersburg.
Her mother didn't get home from work on Tuesdays until eight o'clock at night, and until then, Kelly was in the care of the household's educational robot. However, her father had paid a hacker nearly five thousand dollars to break into the robot and deactivate it, all in order to prevent it from contacting the police when Kelly didn't get home.
Amy Daniel would get home in two hours. Best to do this delicately.
I deposited Kelly in her house in Santa Fe and put in a retroactive work order for the educational robot, waiting for several minutes before it reactivated with the new Associate-issued orders and programming. It would now use a miniscule part of its memory to begin the search for the hacker who had violated its sacrosanct caretaking functions.
She hugged me once, before turning away and sitting down in front of the robot, who had brought out a memory puzzle. After checking through the house and examining the city, I returned to the bank-teller's house in St. Petersburg, where all three were waiting for me. A simple mop-up operation--the three men would not realize what had happened until the day they were re-inserted into the continuum for their trial.
I inserted them into their individual cells in the Associate Depository before returning to St. Petersburg and folding up Sustentava's house, possessions, and property. Pending a verdict and/or completion of his sentence, it would wait in storage for him to claim it. All recorded, noted, and approved. Completely by the book.
In the meantime, the scene of the crime was effectively excised from the universe, two clean cuts made and sewn together so smoothly that no rupture was visible. I examined the site once again, two houses standing next to each other, a fence dividing both and offering no hint that a house had once stood somewhere inside that thin wooden line.
"These are smart pills, if you will," said Dr. Fau, holding up a pill bottle containing what, to the professional opinions of the doctors seated around the mahogany table, looked like a hundred-count.
"They are quite advanced," Dr. Fau continued. "Historically, there have always been problems with overdoses for various reasons ranging from simple carelessness to malicious intent. These pills, in this small plastic container, will ensure that overdoses are a thing of the past."
Bearded Dr. Gregor grunted loudly. "Snake-oil, Dr. Fau?"
Dr. Fau smiled, though no humor was visible on his countenance. "Clever. Actually, no. The latest advances in nanotechnology have enabled us to develop smart pills, which recognize their surroundings--whether organic and living or not--and communicate with one another. The principle, really, is quite astounding."
A weary sigh was barely audible. Snake oil, indeed, thought Dr. Fau as he, along with his colleagues, looked at the far end of the long table at Joseph Luche, a middle-aged, sharply-dressed pharmaceutical representative who had cajoled, flattered, and ass-kissed his way onto the regulatory board. In spite of the onerous scrutiny of the regulatory board, however, Luche respectfully declined to say a word or even acknowledge that he was the center of attention.
As attention shifted back to Dr. Fau's end of the table, he went on. "If more than one pill is ingested within the set time period allowable by the prescription, a collapsing probability wave-function determines--at random--which pill will activate and which pill will be--to speak colloquially, if I may--a dud. The 'dud' then passes through the host's system, completely unchanged. Bear in mind, however, that this process is only initiated when more than one pill is ingested simultaneously."
"An interesting concept, Dr. Fau, and certainly worthy of consideration and--if I may dare say--approval by this board," said Sandra Williams, a neurosurgeon with the teaching hospital at Princeton. "But although I will certainly agree that such a technology is quite useful, I still don't understand what's so astounding about it, to borrow your phrasing."
Dr. Fau smiled, and for the first time all day, he seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. "Because the wave function's collapse propagates backwards through time. By the time you shake out the second pill, one of the two you take has already decided that it will not activate from the moment it is manufactured."
A hush fell. Dr. Fau's delight only increased as he watched his colleagues struggle with that little apple.
"So," Dr. Gregory said slowly, "If I shook out two pills...?"
Dr. Fau nodded. "One of them will have always been a dud."
Dr. Williams cleared her throat. "Supposing I shook out two pills, intending to take them, then shook out another pair of pills, planning instead on taking those, you'd have two active pills and two dud pills?"
"No," said Dr. Fau. "You'd have three dud pills and one active pill."
"And those three would always have been duds?"
"Yes. But you should bear in mind," said Dr. Fau, "That it all depends on whether or not you actually take them. It really doesn't matter how much you shove into your gob at once--only one will work. The rest will not. The wave-function does not collapse until the pills are actually ingested."
Luche spoke up then. The fluorescent light glinted greasily off of the large gold ring on his left pinky finger, momentarily blinding Dr. Fau. "So what you're essentially telling us is that all of the pills manufactured by this method might be duds. All of them. Is that correct, Dr. Fau?"
A nasty feeling began to coalesce in the pit of Dr. Fau's stomach. "Well, uh," he stammered. "Technically, well, that is to say, uh, well, that's putting a bit of a, a, a fine point on it."
"Well, Dr. Fau?" Luche was looking lazily at the large gold ring on his pinky finger, cowlike in his sudden contentment.
Dr. Fau sighed. "Yes, potentially, every pill is a dud. However--"
"Therefore, Dr. Fau," Luche interrupted, chuckling fatly. "I must ask why in the world you would ask us to manufacture pills that have a--what are the odds--fifty percent chance of being completely worthless?"
Suddenly Dr. Fau felt much better. "Ah, but you're not looking at the bigger picture." Luche bristled; score one for Dr. Fau. "Only those pills that will actually be involved in overdoses will turn out to be duds. I believe only 19,470 people died of overdoses last year: this is out of a daily pill-popping population of nearly 240 million. That number is so small as to be statistically insignificant. Therefore, the rest of the pills, or 99.992% of the total yearly volume will be viable."
"Still," Luche grunted. "I don't think you're the one seeing the bigger picture here. I'm concerned about the bottom line. And what I'm hearing is that you're asking us to manufacture thousands of dud pills. Is there any way of detecting those dud pills and eliminating them from the retail shipments?"
Dr. Fau was taken aback by this peculiar example of complete obtuseness. "First, no, it's not possible to find out which are duds and which are active without losing half of your product, because of the peculiarities of the probability wave-function. Second--"
"Ah," said Luche. Dr. Fau's mouth snapped shut. "So you're saying half of the product we manufacture would be useless."
It took a moment for Dr. Fau to stop grinding his teeth. "Only if you check on whether or not they are useless. Otherwise, they are perfectly fine. As I was saying before, it would be counterproductive to the purpose of these pills to eliminate the duds if you detected them anyway, because--"
"Dr. Fau?" said Dr. Schuller. "Are you feeling well?"
Dr. Fau sank back into his chair. "Excuse me," he said, and shook out a pill from the bottle he'd been gripping in his right hand. After washing it down with a glass of water and looking back around the table, he ignored the dull pounding in his head and the severe pain in his neck and went on. "A slight cardiac complaint. Luche, I suggest you listen. There is no point in checking for duds. Why is this? Because we want duds. Duds are what prevent overdoses. Do you understand?"
"Frankly, Dr. Fau," said Luche, "I am not at all comfortable with asking my constituency to produce pills that may or may not work. I am just not sure that it's cost-effective for us to risk being sued for some kind of confused attempt at the placebo effect just so a few less people will die every year. That's the bigger picture for me, Dr. Fau."
"The bigger picture," shrieked Dr. Fau, "is that you are a money-grubbing moron."
"Dr. Fau!" said Dr. Williams, backing away from the table. "Please calm down!"
"Goodness, Dr. Fau," said Luche, who was gazing at him with a mixture of awe, amusement, and burgeoning pity. "It's only a pill, after all."
At that moment, Dr. Fau's heart exploded in his chest. He jerked, his eyes bulging out, his arms thrown back and nearly dislocating his shoulders, and finally, he slumped forward in his seat. At that moment, a young orderly entered the room and checked the corpse.
"What--?" said Dr. Williams.
There was no response from the orderly. He looked at the clock above Dr. Fau's head, checked his watch, and brought out a pencil and a piece of paper, which on closer examination turned out to be Dr. Fau's death certificate. He spoke as he filled in the "Time of Death" blank. "Time of probability wave-function collapse: 10:04 a.m. Time of Death: also 10:04 a.m. Hmm."
He turned around and signaled through the open door. Two burly orderlies entered, picked up Dr. Fau, and carried him out. The first orderly faced the roomful of shocked doctors and a traumatized (but secretly thrilled) pharmaceutical rep and said, "We apologize for the interruption," turned around, and walked out.
This is the account of an event in the life of the man known as el-Musafir, the Traveler. The year, as nearly as can be accounted, is 1363. The place, a small Greek island now known as Corfu, on which the Atsinganoi (who may in this time be more popularly known as 'Roma' or 'Gypsies') of Constantine IX have settled. The wanderers had stopped wandering, but old habits can be difficult to abandon.
This account was set down by Marath Kundela, faithful follower of Our Lady Nur in the 1,063rd year following her death, in the month of sequestration during what came to be known as the Marathan Jihad, encoded in digital form on microelectronic circuitry.
[Record begins here]
I remember what a beautiful day it was. Typical weather for the Ionian--brilliant blue sky, white clouds, glassy water. Just as it is outside today, some seven hundred-odd years later, although the water is considerably rougher. Funny how little some things change--and how much.
I had launched in a small boat from near where Buthrotum once was and crossed the narrow strait separating the island from what is now Albania. It was a rather short trip; the Straits of Corfu are at their narrowest at that end of the island. Kerkyra--pardon me, I apologize--Corfu was then administered by the House of Anjou, who had little real power to enforce their influence and even less inclination to care, at least according to the locals. It was, of course, quite a simple matter to navigate from Buthrotum to Corfu--just set Mount Pantokrator straight ahead and make a dead run at it.
I had forgotten how rough the coast was, and in the end, I had to swim ashore, barely missing the rocks. To this day, I'm still not clear on how I managed to avoid it, and by the time I was standing up on my own feet, I was breathing hard and not feeling very well.
Still, I had been traveling for just over four thousand years by that point, and I was more than hardy enough to keep going, which didn't take me long to regret. The terrain around Mount Pantokrator--indeed, across the northern part of the island--is incredibly mountainous.
Still, after three days of trudging, just as I was beginning to run out of my supplies of stale bread and dried goat, I found a small farm, consisting of mostly a small building with a fence around it, perhaps 150 feet wide, penning up several goats. I made my way over the fence, dodged a few horns, and strode up to the low opening in the small stone building.
The goatskin strung across the doorway was pulled aside before I even knocked, badly frightening me and taking me off balance. A small, skinny old man stared up at me, his tunic dirt-stained and hanging loosely over--nothing else. Good Lord, I remember how alarming that moment was.
"Yes?" he asked, quite politely if I remember correctly.
"Greetings, sir," I said. "I am a traveler who is running out of food. I was wondering if it would be at all possible to impose on you."
His bony chest thrust out. "Of course. I am a Greek, no matter what any Angevin dog thinks he owns, and we are known for our hospitality. Come inside."
This didn't surprise me. The last few times I had passed through the Achaean lands, hospitality was a major part of their culture, the rationale coming from their always-interesting mythology--any stranger that came knocking could be a god in disguise, waiting to reward those who opened their homes and hilariously punish those who spurned any imposition.
I ducked underneath the upper edge of the doorway and remained bent over. The ceiling was low. This man was tiny in comparison to me. You must understand, Marath, that I was a bit of a sport. On the day I was cursed with eternal life and endless wandering, I was the tallest person in the village--indeed, anywhere around. I was an object of ridicule and fear for nearly five thousand years--only about a century ago did that come to an end, and the rest of the human race began to catch up.
Perhaps it was my height that put the idea of godhood in his mind, because he came up to me with a large blanket filled to overflowing with farmer's bread, dried goat, mushrooms, and what meager fruit there was in the house. It was clear that he had given me all the food he had.
"If you wish," he said eagerly, "you could stay for the night. You can have my pallet. I can sleep outside with the goats!" He said it so enthusiastically that I felt terrible.
"I thank you for your kindness," I said. "But I would not presume to impose so much." I looked at the blanket, and sighed. It would be difficult to leave any food here without offending him, regardless of whether or not he starved. "I must admit, though, that this really is more than I can carry comfortably. How far is the nearest village?"
He looked offended anyway. "You would not be imposing! It would be my honor to serve you, as my guest."
I did not want to stay at all. Not only was he so poor that I felt sinful just breathing the air inside his home, but the whole place reeked of various types of goat effluvia, so I was caught coming and going. "Ah, but I have a relative who's expecting me within a day. Instead, could you tell me where the village of the Atsinganoi lies?"
He shrugged. "Very well. And yes. The Atsinganoi live about two days' walk south of here. Please take some bread and wine at least!"
I nodded. "Of course. Thank you, kind sir, and I must be going."
"Certainly, young man," he said, and he smiled. I took enough for two days' walk.
Hills and mountains, rain and sun, rivers and villages and farmsteads later, I arrived, the Atsinganoi village within view, nestled in a basin among the hills. I settled on the hillside and waited. A run-in with some Frankish Atsinganoi several years before had taught me that it was best not to speak with them directly; their culture prohibited contact with outsiders. It would be a while before they noticed I was there and sent someone who was permitted to speak with non-Atsinganoi.
It was almost night. I settled down and chewed some bread as I watched the bloody copper deepen and be replaced by shadow on the hills. The warmth drained out of the air and was replaced by a dry coolness. I built a fire and waited, warmed by the heat and watching the stars wheel overhead. It didn't take long for a shadow to extricate itself from the larger darkness and reveal itself as a young man wearing brightly-colored and inconsistent clothing.
Black-eyed, black-haired, white-skinned, he had a vaguely Hebrew look about him that made me remember my time in Syria--when I met your ancestor, in fact, Marath--and his eyes collected the firelight without reflection.
"Why are you here?" he asked in near-perfect Greek.
"Not Caló?" I asked in the same language.
"That is our language," he snapped. "What do you want?"
I sighed. "You Atsinganoi are so unfriendly sometimes. I've come in search of someone who, I've heard, is quite a skilled fortune-teller. She is supposed to have settled in that village down there," I pointed, as though he wouldn't know what I had been referring to. "And I would like to see her."
"She doesn't speak to outsiders," he said, sneering. "Go away."
"She doesn't need to. If I understand correctly, she just needs to lay out her cards in answer to a question. I would like for you to bring my question to her and to bring her answer back to me." I sat back and considered, searching my memory. "In return, I will tell you of a place near here where there is an ancient treasure left by Etruscan explorers many centuries ago." No need to tell him how I knew of this.
He looked doubtful, then pathetically clever. "How do I know this isn't a trick?"
I tossed him a small gold figurine of a wolf, intricately worked and set with a tiny ruby in its forehead. "There's more."
He nodded thoughtfully as he examined the figurine and tested its softness. "What is your question?"
I sighed. "Ask her when I can stop walking."
"That's all?" He looked quizzical. "And for this, you'll give me a fortune?"
I shrugged, and he ran off without saying a further word. Dangle a piece of gold in front of a poor man's eyes, and he sees nothing else.
It was another week before he returned. I understood why; the cleansing rituals the Atsinganoi had to put themselves through after speaking to an outsider required a great deal of time and ceremony.
He came just before sunset, looking respectful.
"She has asked to see you in person."
I felt cold, more so than could be explained by the sunset. "The fortune-teller? Why?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. But she said to meet her by the twin-trunks after dawn tomorrow."
"The twin--?"
The boy pointed downhill. About halfway between my camp and the village was a single tree that had grown into two trunks. Good enough.
"Very well. Thank you." But he didn't move. "Yes?"
He had that stupidly clever expression on his face again. "What about payment?"
I shook my head. "Not until after I speak to the fortune-teller."
His face fell. "Certainly. But either way, I'm required to remain with you for the night and cleanse you."
I laughed. "No cleansing will take place around this fire, sir."
The young man's face colored. "But--"
I raised my hand. "Absolutely not. If this fortune-teller has seen what I think she's seen, cleansing is not the main concern in her mind right now."
He looked guilty, but accepted it. "I brought food and wine. You may eat it." He put a small sack on the ground between us and backed away.
"Er, thank you," I said, mentally collecting myself. I'd forgotten some aspects of the untouchability of the Atsinganoi. I picked up the sack and found a small wineskin, dates, grapes, and dried venison from the small deer I'd seen around. I'd actually just finished off the last of the fresh venison from a deer I'd killed the previous day, but this small gesture was so significant in the face of dealings with the Atsinganoi...
At dawn the next day, I woke up. Those grapes had tasted fermented, and the wine had been much stronger than I expected, and there was a light throb in my head. I sat up and looked around The fire had burned out and the Atsinganos was gone. I stood up, had my morning piss, stuck a piece of dried venison in my mouth, started chewing, and headed downhill to the twin-trunks.
It wasn't long before I noticed what looked like a tall, bright yellow bush standing next to the tree. It had a human face, and I had a nasty moment until I realized that the bright-yellow thing was the fortune-teller, dressed and painted in a color that was evidently intended for protection from the filth of the foreigner.
She had one chair and a barrel set up. On the barrel was a deck of cards made from super-valuable vellum and hand-scratched illustrations in ink.
"Stranger," she said, in passable Venetian. "Sit," and she indicated the chair. "Touch nothing but the chair."
I nodded and sat, folding my arms in my lap. "Certainly, lady. I must apologize for forcing myself on you in this manner, but I have been looking for someone like you for a very long time."
"Yes," she said slowly. "A very, very long time, no?" Her dark eyes looked at me out of the thickly-caked yellow paint, unreadable but meaningful.
I nodded again. "Yes, lady. A very...long time."
"Call me Imbri," she said suddenly. "It is a Latinate name, but it will do for this session."
I furrowed my brow. "Tears?"
She didn't respond, only laid out her cards. There was a high wind, which would have stirred cards made from cardboard or paper, but these were vellum. They lay solidly on the lid of the barrel. When she completed the layout, she was silent for a long time, considering very carefully what lay before her.
"You come from the east," Imbri said finally. "Though you are passing from the west. You have circled the world many times. This I know," she said, looking up suddenly, "From the last time I laid your cards out. But your question..." she trailed off.
"When I may stop walking," I said.
"Yes." She examined the cards even more closely. "This card here--it represents your path, unwinding. There is more, much more, ahead than that which lies behind. Hmm. This one, here, says that the stars must speak, and this one next to it says that the clouds must sing. But the meaning is vague; I'm not sure if it's metaphorical or literal."
I chuckled. "Isn't it all metaphorical?"
She looked at me sharply. "A youthful wanderer says this?"
She had a point there. I sighed. "I come from a very different age. Metaphor has little place here."
Imbri arched her left eyebrow and muttered quietly for a second. "Listen," she said. "I have never been wrong. This is the first time that I have felt that being wrong--it could happen this time, do you understand? This is very important."
"I apologize, Imbri," I said contritely. "Is there an indication of exactly how long I'm going to need to wait?"
She muttered again and looked down at the barrel head. "Ancient," she said, and looked at me, a new look in her eyes. "This card represents the elephant--a lost history. It's commonly associated with Hind. That, coupled with the long path unwinding, the voiced stars, and the singing clouds, suggests that you are from that land, and are much, much older than you seem."
I nodded mutely. This woman was good.
Imbri continued. "See this ship? You won't stop traveling for a good, long time." She looked at me curiously. "Do you think the stars are likely to start talking any time soon?"
I laughed, feeling bleak. "No, indeed. Quiet nights and cacophonous storms, I'm afraid."
She sighed. "My guess would be that you have just as much coming to you as what you've left behind. You'll keep walking for a long time, but--" She looked frustrated. "I can't figure out exactly how long. This is bothersome." She shuffled her deck of cards and drew out a single one. "For clarification," she said, and laid it down.
We both looked at it at the same time, leaning over the barrel head. A house, bracketed by the sun on the right, the moon on the left, and stars on the top and bottom. Our eyes met.
"I've never seen that one before," she whispered. "And I made these cards myself."
Every hair on my body stood on end, and the air fairly crackled, and I thought it was the chills that come over you when you encounter something you can't explained, but then the world turned white and hot and I woke up the next day, bobbing in the water off a coast that looked familiar.
Of course it looked familiar. It was eastern India.
Falling apart was not something that I'd planned to do. At all.
When my right index finger started investigating the underside of the couch and my left arm decided to go for a walk, of course I knew something was wrong. I'm not a total idiot.
And then I didn't wake up yesterday. At least, not right away. Parts of me woke up at different times and went off to grab themselves some breakfast. I don't really want to know what my left leg had for the morning meal, least of all my lower jaw. And my ears make me shudder.
I looked it up online. "Siphonophora." Colony organisms. I was cousin to the Portuguese Man o' War. I felt a funny shudder go through my right arm, left foot, my head, and the upper part of my torso.
You haven't seen strange until you look in the mirror and realize that your head decided to do its own thing, rolling about like a worm-infested coconut. My eyeballs were playing marbles with each other, which looked like a bizarre, self-directed game of pool. My ears were talking on the phone, the little ridges and curves on the inside of one wrinkling and burping into the receiver while the other one listened to the speaker.
My fingers were playing foosball against my palms, while my arms were figuring out the TV remote. My torso was trying to seduce my left leg, who was playing hard-to-get, while the right looked on and ate peanut butter. My ass was taking a nap and snoring, and my penis was arguing with my testicles about whether or not my right foot could be convinced to take it and some of my toes for a walk. The testicles, backed up by several of the other toes, strongly doubted it--the foot was notoriously slothful. The left foot, in the meantime, was arm-wrestling with my tongue with my teeth as referees. My nose wasn't in the room--last I had seen it, it was in the tub, pretending to be a cruise liner.
I sighed and rolled my tongueless, earless, eyeless, noseless, toothless head over to the oven. Would I ever perform surgery again?
