Memorys legion, p.25
Memory’s Legion, page 25
The conference room had a table; soft, indirect lighting; eight chairs built for longer frames than my own; a nonluminous screen displaying Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of a fetus in the womb; two armed guards on either side of the double doors leading to the hall; Michio Pa wearing sharply tailored clothes that mimicked a military uniform without being one; and me. A carafe of fresh water sat in the center of the table, sweating, four squat glasses beside it. Anxiety played little arpeggios on my nerves.
“So the illness made it so she couldn’t see what the illness was doing to her?”
“It was harder for me than her, I think,” I said. “From outside, I could see what had happened to her. What she’d lost. She caught glimpses now and then, I think, but even those didn’t seem to stay with her.”
Pa tilted her head. I recognized that she was an attractive woman, though I felt no attraction to her and saw none in her toward me. Something focused her on me, though. If not attraction, fascination maybe. I couldn’t imagine why.
“Do you worry about that?”
“No,” I said. “They screened me when I was still on basic. I don’t have that allele. I won’t develop her illness.”
“But something else, something that acts the same way…”
“I went through something like it in college. I won’t be doing that again,” I said and laughed.
Her eyelids fluttered, her mind—I supposed—dancing through a rapid succession of thoughts, each quickly abandoned. She chuffed out a single laugh, then shook her head. I smiled without knowing what I was smiling about. Her hand terminal chimed, and she glanced at it. Her expression cooled.
“I have to see to this,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be right here.”
After the guards closed the door behind her, I got up, pacing the room with my hands clasped behind my back. At the Leonardo screen, I stopped and stared. Not at the sketch, but at the reflection of the man looking at it. It had been three days since I’d left the room, and I still struggled to recognize my reflection as my own. I wondered how many people, roughly, went through years without a mirror. Very few, I thought, though I personally knew almost three dozen.
Even with my hair barbered, my scrub-brush beard shaved away, I looked feral. Somewhere during my years in the room, I’d developed jowls. Little sacks of skin puffed under my eyes, a shade darker and bluer than the brown of my cheeks. I had gray hair now, which I’d known intellectually, but seeing it now felt shocking. Quintana’s attacks on me had left no marks. Even the knife wound, cared for by the station’s medical expert system, would leave no scar. Time had done me immeasurably more damage, as it did with everyone. If I squinted, I could still make out traces of the man I thought of when I pictured myself. But only traces. I wondered how Alberto had been able to bring himself to fuck the tired old man in my reflection. But, I supposed, beggars and choosers.
That I would not return to the room seemed a given now. They had not sent me back there, had given me new clothes, new quarters. Even Brown, during his long interrogations, hadn’t been allowed to shave. My naked, white-stubbled chin bore witness to the fact that I’d surpassed him. For the first day, I’d proudly marched out my egg hypothesis for one person, then another, then another, then the first again. Then they gave me a read-only access file that covered the years I had been gone. Two thousand pages, and I read it with the kind of longing and jealousy I imagined of someone following the career of an estranged child. From the uncanny transit of Eros to the surface of Venus to the creation of the ring gate to the discovery and activation of more than a thousand other gates that opened to a thousand empty solar systems, it filled me with wonder and joy and the bone-deep regret that I hadn’t been there to see it happen.
I dropped the egg theory and took up my more natural hypothesis of the gate. They thought they’d given me a cheat sheet, a way to pass myself off as better than I was for the Martian. I wasn’t concerned with what they thought. If they considered me a fool, it still wouldn’t be less than I thought of them. I could only hope that the negotiation between the Belters and Mars went well. My fate was in their hands, as it had been for years now.
The door opened and Michio Pa returned. The Martian was at her side. The same unfortunate skin, the same nut-brown hair. My heart beat with a violence that left me short of breath, and for a long moment I feared that something dire and medical was happening.
“Dr. Cortázar?” the Martian said.
“Yes,” I said, rushing toward him too quickly, pushing my hand out before me like the unfounded presumption of intimacy. “Yes, I am. That’s me.”
The Martian smiled coolly, but he shook my hand. No physical contact had ever been more electric.
“I understand you’ve made some sense of our ring gates?”
Michio Pa, at his side, nodded as if unconsciously prompting me.
“Not in exhaustive depth,” I said. “But I have the broad strokes.”
When he replied, it was like a punch in the gut. “Why did you lie to us at first?”
“About?” I asked, trying to buy time.
He smiled, though the expression had no humor. “You had to know that every sound in that holding cell is monitored and recorded.”
No. I hadn’t known that. Though in hindsight it seemed obvious.
He continued. “You deliberately fed Dr. Brown a false story about your analysis, then at the last minute gave him the correct version. I’d like to understand why.”
“I rethought my…” I began, then trailed off when I saw the knowing look in his eye.
“You were gaming him,” the Martian said. “Manipulating him to try to secure your position. Incorrectly believing that we would be traded the least valuable prisoner.”
The way he said it was not a question, but I found myself nodding anyway.
“The fact that he didn’t spot your falsified conclusions in the data,” the Martian continued, “is the reason you’re here. So, I suppose, your plan failed its way to success.”
“Thank you,” I replied inanely.
“Be aware that we know exactly what you are, what tactics you favor, and will not tolerate this behavior in the future. The consequences of failing to understand this fact of your future existence would be extreme.”
“I understand,” I said, and it was the truth. Something in my expression seemed to please him, and he relaxed a little.
“I am developing something of a private task force to examine the data that’s coming in from the initial probes that have gone through to the other side of the ring gate. Your experience with the initial discovery puts you in a rare position. I’d like you to join us. It won’t be freedom. That was never in the cards. But it won’t be here, and it will be work.”
“I don’t need freedom,” I said.
His smile held an echo of sorrow I couldn’t parse. I wondered if Alberto would have known what it meant. The Martian clapped my shoulder and a wave of relief lifted me up.
“Come with me, Doctor,” he said. “I have some things to show you.”
I offered silent thanks to whatever imaginary God was listening and let the Martian lead me to this wide new universe, opening before me.
I did let myself wonder how the room would be without me. Whether Brown would ever understand how I’d outplayed him. Whether Alberto would take another lover. How many years would stretch out before Fong and Navarro gave up hope that I would somehow come back for them all. Questions I did not expect ever to answer, because in the end I didn’t actually care.
The Vital Abyss
Author’s Note
Oh, so much to talk about with this one.
If there’s one real regret in writing The Expanse, it’s that we didn’t keep the right title for this story. When it was written, it was “The Necessary Abyss.” Our editor at the time was adamant that the title wouldn’t work, and we needed to change it. We went back and forth and landed on “The Vital Abyss.”
We should have stuck to our guns.
Here’s the thing. We don’t know what a vital abyss is. But a necessary one? That goes back to Will & Grace.
You remember Will & Grace, right? It was a sitcom with Eric McCormack and Debra Messing. It was also maybe the most widely missed obscure philosophy joke in popular culture. Will and Grace are common first names, but put together like that, they’re also one of the central questions of Western philosophy—how much we are self-determined and how much we are controlled by deterministic forces. Agents of our own free will or else predestined cogs whose fates are out of our hands, determined instead by the grace of God. Freedom or necessity. Will or Grace.
Cortázar makes himself a kind of moral zombie in this story. There’s a reason that Dresden has the modification made permanent before Cortázar recovers from the temporary version of it. If he had come to, he would have had the capacity to understand what he’d lost. Instead, he becomes someone incapable of moral choice. The way that his mother lost parts of her experience, he loses his ability to judge—and even be interested in—questions of right and wrong. He’s beyond good vs. evil and deeply into effective vs. ineffective. It’s a very Nietzschean place to be, and so the abyss. And it’s the abyss where there can be no moral choice. The Abyss of Grace. The Necessary Abyss.
But the editor didn’t like it. So it’s Vital. You win some, you lose some.
Paolo Cortázar is named after Paolo Bacigalupi and Julio Cortázar, not because those two writers have much to do with the character but because they’re writers whose work we admire. The physical setup of the jail is a reference to The Enormous Room, which is an autobiographical novel by E. E. Cummings about his time as a political prisoner in France during the First World War.
And Dresden’s thing about biology being an exercise in pretending to be different in kind from animals, while every study proves more and more that we’re not, is a large part of why Daniel decided not to keep going as a biologist after he got his bachelor’s degree. He’s still looking for the hole in that argument.
Strange Dogs
The day after the stick moons appeared, Cara killed a bird.
That wasn’t exactly right. There had been stick moons—which her parents called platforms—as long as Cara could remember. At night, they’d glowed with reflected sunlight like burnt orange bones, and in the daytime, they’d been lines of white bent behind the blue. In her books, the moon was always a pale disk or a cookie with a bite taken out, but that was Earth’s moon, Luna. Laconia was different.
So it wasn’t that they had appeared the night before she killed the bird. It was only that they lit up red and blue and gold for the first time ever. Her parents had gotten up from the dinner table and gone out into the yard, staring up into the sky, and she and her little brother, Xan, had followed. Her father stood there slack-jawed, looking up. Her mother had frowned.
The next afternoon, lying in the blue clover by the pond with sunlight warming her skin and making her sleepy, Cara watched the newly glittering stick moons swim through the sky. They were as bright in the daytime sky as stars were against nighttime black. The colors shifted on them, rippling like videos of sea creatures. As if they were a little bit alive. They drifted east to west, high lacy clouds passing underneath them, and Cara at the bottom of the gravity well, looking up into the vastness like it had all been put there for her to appreciate.
The pond was one of her favorite places to be alone. The curve of the forest ran along one side. Thick trees with three or four trunks that rose up into a knot before blooming out in green-black fronds longer than her body and so thickly packed that a few steps under them was like walking into a cave. She could find as much shade from Laconia’s bright sun as she wanted, whenever she wanted it. The blue clover beside the water was softer than her bed at home and had a smell like bruised rain when she laid on it. The brook that fed the pond and then flowed back away from it again murmured and burbled in a gentle, random concert with the chirping of the goat-hair frogs. And there were the animals that came there to drink or hunt or lay their eggs. She could lie there for hours, bringing her own lunch and a handheld to read from or draw on or play games on, away from her parents and Xan. Away from the town and the soldiers and Mari Tennanbaum, who was her best friend when they weren’t enemies. The township was five thousand people—the biggest city on Laconia—and the pond was Cara’s place away from it.
She was halfway through her tenth year, but this was only her third summer. Her mother had explained to her that Laconia moved around its star more slowly than Earth did, and then talked about axial tilt in a way that Cara pretended to understand so they could talk about something else. It didn’t matter. Summer was summer and birthdays were birthdays. The two didn’t have any more relationship than her nut-bread sandwiches had with her shoes. Not everything had to be connected.
Cara was half asleep when she heard the soft tramp of paws and the creaking of the underbrush. She thought at first it was just in her imagination, but when she tried to change the sound into music the way she sometimes could when she was dreaming, it didn’t respond. She opened eyes she hadn’t realized were closed. Bright-blue dots like fireflies fluttered and spun in the air as the first of the doglike things came out of the trees.
Its body was long and low, four legs with joints that were put together just a little wrong—like a drawing by someone who’d only ever had legs described to them. Its jaw seemed too small for its face, and its bulbous brown eyes were set at angles that made it seem apologetic. She’d never seen anything like it before, but that happened fairly often.
“Hey,” she said, stretching. “What are you?”
The dog paused.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m friendly. See?” And she waved.
It was hard to be sure with the thing’s eyes set the way they were, but she thought it was looking at her. She sat up slowly, trying not to startle it. Nothing on Laconia ate people, but sometimes they could get scared, and her mother always told her that frightened things weren’t safe to approach.
The dog looked up, staring at the stick moons for a moment, and then down again at her. She felt a wave of disorientation, like being dizzy but different, and then a twinge of uncertainty. The dog stepped forward, and two more like it came out from the darkness under the trees. Then two more.
On the pond, a sunbird hissed, lifting its leathery wings to make its body look bigger and baring its soft greenish teeth. Its fury-twisted face looked like a cartoon of an old woman, and half a dozen new-hatched babies darted behind her. The first dog turned to look at the momma bird and made three sharp sounds: ki-ka-ko. The other four picked up the sound. Momma bird swiveled her head toward each of them, hissing until flecks of saliva foamed at the curves of her mouth. The ki-ka-ko cry echoed in a way that didn’t match the space around the pond. It made Cara’s head ache a little. She levered herself up to her knees, partly out of fear that the dogs might eat sunbirds, and she didn’t want to see anything get killed, but mostly because she wanted them to stop making that sound. Her lunch pack and her handheld tumbled to the clover. When she stepped forward, the dogs went quiet and turned their attention toward her, and she had the sense that maybe she was dreaming after all.
She stepped between the dogs and the water’s edge. Momma bird hissed again, but it seemed to Cara like the sound came from a great distance. The dogs drifted closer, moving around her like children around a teacher. She knew in a distant way that she should probably be scared. Even if the dogs didn’t eat people, they could still attack her for getting between them and their prey. She didn’t know why she felt that they wouldn’t.
“You can’t be here right now,” she said.
The lead dog, the one that had come out first, looked past her at the water. Its embarrassed, bulbous eyes shifted back to her.
“Later, maybe,” she said. “You can be here later. Right now you have to go. Go on. Shoo.”
She pointed at the trees and the darkness underneath them. The dogs went perfectly, eerily still for the space of two long breaths together, then turned and shambled back into the forest on their weirdly built legs.
Cara watched them go with a kind of surprise. It was like shouting at a storm to go away and having the rain stop. Probably the dogs had just decided that dealing with her wasn’t worth the trouble. Still, the way it had happened let her feel a little magic. Momma bird was swimming along the side of the pond now, her back to Cara. When the sunbird reached the far edge and turned, she was grunting to herself, the danger of the dogs and the girl equally forgotten. Sunbirds weren’t smart—they weren’t even particularly nice—but Cara still felt good that she’d kept them from getting eaten.
She tried lying back down on the blue clover, but her lazy half sleep was gone now. She tried closing her eyes, then watching the stick moons and their shimmer of colors, but she could feel in her body that it wasn’t coming back. She waited a few minutes to be sure, then sat up with a sigh and gathered up her handheld and her lunch pack. The sun was high overhead, the heat a little bit oppressive now, and it had been a long time since breakfast. She popped open her lunch pack. The sandwich was simple and exactly the way she liked it: two slices of nut bread, each about as thick as her thumb, with a layer of cinnamon and molasses cream cheese between them. Her mother said that honey was better than molasses, but there weren’t any bees on Laconia. Cara had only ever seen pictures of them, and based on those, she didn’t like honey at all.
She took a bite, chewed, swallowed, took another. The baby sunbirds were jumping out of the water, running on the ground, and then plopping back into the pond, sputtering and angry. Momma bird ignored their little sighs of distress, and before long they stopped trying to get her attention and devoted themselves to swimming and searching for food. Earth birds didn’t look much like anything on Laconia, but Cara remembered something about how to treat them. How to share. When Momma bird turned toward her, Cara broke off a tiny bit of nut bread and tossed it out on the water. Momma bird struck at it like it was a threat and swallowed it greedily. Later on, she’d puke up little bits of it to feed her babies. Cara had watched them at the pond for months. She knew how sunbirds worked maybe better than anyone.
