The collected short fict.., p.104
The Collected Short Fiction, page 104
“Sneaky devils, these cards. They go anywhere and everywhere, and listen to our most intimate words. You have to be discreet around playing cards. Open the decks, please.”
She pulled the cellophane from one deck. On the edge of the deck was the awkward scrawl of Musnt, written in fountain pen. Musnt immediately looked at his deck. The edges were blank.
Fibers formed curious worms and squirmed closer, lights pulsing.
“The other deck, now,” I told Dont. She unwrapped the second deck, and there, in fountain pen, was written, Wont.
“Hand the deck to the person whose name is written on the side,” I said. She passed the deck to Wont.
“Write on the other side your name and any number,” I told Wont, giving him the pen. “And then, on a card within the deck, write the name of anybody in this room—in big, sloppy, wet letters. Show the card to everybody except me, and put it within the deck and press the deck together firmly.”
He did this.
“Now give the deck to Cant.”
He passed the deck to her. “How many decks do you carry now?” I asked. She reached into her pockets and found two more decks, which she handed to me, keeping Wont’s deck with his name written on it.
“Now find the card Wont has written on, and the card immediately next to it, smeared with the wet ink from that card. Write your name on the face of that card, and another number. Show them to everybody but me.”
She did so.
“How many decks do we all have now?” I asked.
I went among them, counting the decks presently in circulation—five. I redistributed the decks one to each of the five Negatives.
“The cards have told each other all about you, and you have no secrets. But I am the master of the cards—and from me not even the cards have secrets!”
I reached behind their ears, one by one, and pulled the cards that had been written on, with the names Cant, Musnt, Dont, and Wont. “The gossip of the cards goes full circle,” I said. “Show us your decks!”
On the top of each deck, the cards bearing the suit and number of the written-on cards—for all had been number cards—appeared, bearing a newly written number, and a new name—Cardino.
The Negatives seemed befuddled. They showed the cards to each other and to the questing fibers.
They had forgotten the art of applause, and the fibers were silent, but no applause was necessary.
“How is this done?” Musnt asked. “You must tell . . .”
I pitied them, just as a caveman might pity a city slicker who has lost the art of flint knapping. From the beginning of their lives to the present moment, they had truly fooled nobody. They had lived lives of illusion without wonder, for always they could explain how things were done—all their magic was performed by silent, subservient, electronic demiurges.
“Turn to the last card in your decks,” I said. “Show me who is king.”
On every one of their decks, the king of hearts was inscribed with two names. They held the cards out simultaneously. Each Negative carried a card bearing his or her name, and in larger letters, RODERICK ESCHER.
The fibers seemed to give a mighty heave. Roderick came forward, and I saw the fibers fleeing from his legs, his suit, his face and skin.
The Negatives turned to each other in confusion. Cant giggled. They compared their decks, searched them. “They’re made of matter,” Wont said. “They aren’t false—”
“Tricks,” Shant said.
“Can you do them?” Wont asked.
“In an instant,” Shant said. Cards fluttered down around him, twisted, formed a tall mannequin, and danced around us all. The fibers withdrew from around him as if singed by flames.
“Not the point,” Roderick said, free of fibers now. “You can do anything you want, but you subscribe. Cardino does these things by himself, alone.”
The fibers bunched around my feet. Shant made his cards and the mannequin vanish. “How?” he asked, shrugging.
“Skill,” Roderick said.
“Skill of the body,” Shant said haughtily. “Who needs that?”
“Self-discipline, training, years of concentrated effort,” Roderick said. “Isn’t that right, Cardino?”
“Yes,” I said, the confidence of my performance fading. I was caught in a game whose rules I could not understand. Roderick was using me, and I did not know why.
“Nothing any of us can experience compares to what this man does all by himself,” Roderick continued.
The five froze in place for a moment. I could see some change in their structure, a momentary fluctuation in their illusory solid shapes.
Roderick lifted his arms and stared at his body. “I’m free!” he said to me in an undertone, as if confiding to a priest.
“What’s all this about?” I asked.
“It’s about skill and friendship and death,” Roderick said.
The five began to move again. The fibers touched my shoes, the hem of my pants. Instinctively, I kicked at them, sending glowing bits scattering like sparks. They recoiled, toughened, pushed in more insistently.
“My time is ending,” Roderick said. “I’ve done all I can, experienced all I can.”
The five smiled and circled around me. “They favor you,” Cant said, and she bent to push a wave of growing fibers toward my legs. I backed off, kicked again without effect, shouted to Roderick, “What do they want?”
“You,” Roderick said. “My time is done. Maja is dead; I go to follow her.”
I turned and ran from the room, sliding on the clumps of fibers, falling. The fibers lightly touched my face, felt at my cheeks, prodded my lips as if to push into my mouth, but I jumped to my feet and ran through the door. Roderick followed, and, behind him, a surge of fibers clogged the door.
Wherever I ran in the house, eager fibers grew from the walls, the floor, fell from the ceiling, like webs trying to ensnare me. Cant appeared in a twisted hallway ahead. I fell to my hands and knees, staring as the floor twisted into a corkscrew, afraid I would pitch forward into the architectural madness.
Dr. Out appeared, shoulders dipped in failure, hands beseeching to explain. “Roderick, do not—”
“It is done!” Roderick cried.
A cold wind flowed down the hall, conveying a low moan of endless agony. Roderick helped me to my feet, his thin fingers cold even through the fabric of my suit.
“Can you feel it?” he whispered to me. “King Nerve has released me. I’m dying, Robert!” He turned to Dr. Ont. “I’m dying, and there’s nothing you can do! I know all the permutations! I’ve experienced it all, and I am bored. Let me die!”
Dr. Ont stared at Roderick with an expression of infinite pity. “Your sister—”
Roderick gripped my shoulders. “We are walled in like prisoners by the laziness of gods, all desires sated, all refinements exhausted. Let them crown the new master!”
The moaning grew louder. Behind Dr. Ont, Roderick’s sister appeared, even more haggard and pale, the feeblest energy of purpose animating a husk, her dry and shrunken mouth trying to speak.
Dr. Ont stood aside as Roderick saw her. “Maja!” Roderick cried, holding up his hands to block out sight of her.
“Still alive,” Dr. Ont said. “I was wrong. She cannot die. We have all forgotten how.”
The five brushed past Roderick, smiling only at me.
“The House of Escher loses all support,” Cant said, touching my arm lightly. “The flow is with you. The world wants you. You will teach them your experience. You will show them what it feels to be skilled and to have fleshly talents, to work and touch in a primal way. Roderick was absolutely correct—you are a marvel!”
I looked at Roderick, frozen in terror, and then at Maja, her eyes like pits sucking in nothing, as isolated as any corpse but still alive.
The walls shuddered around me. The fibers withdrew from the stones, and where they no longer held, cracks appeared, running in crazed patterns over the white and yellow surfaces. The tiles of the floor heaved up, the tessellations disrupted, all order scattered.
Cant took my hand and led me through the disintegrating corridors, down the shivering and swaying stairs. Behind me, the stairs buckled and crumbled, and the beams of the ceiling split and jabbed down to the floor like broken elbows. Ahead, a tide of fibers withdrew from the house like sea sucked from a cave, and above the ripping snap of tearing timbers, the rumble and slam of stone blocks falling and shattering, I heard Roderick’s high, chicken-cluck shriek, the cry of an avatar driven past desperation into madness:
“No death! No Death! King Nerve forever!”
And his bray of laughter at the final jest revealed, all his plans cocked asunder.
The antitheticals blew me through the front door like a wind, and down the walk into the ruined garden, among the twisted and fiber-covered trees, until I was away from the house of Roderick Escher. All of his spreading distractions and entertainments, all of his chambers filled with the world’s diversions, the pandering to the commonest denominators of a frozen or disembodied horde . . . the impossible and convoluted towers leaned, shuddered, and collapsed, blowing dust and splinters through the door and the windows of the first floor.
The fibers pushed from the ground, binding my feet, rising up my legs toward my trunk, feeling through my suit, probing for secrets, for solutions. I felt voices and demands in my head, petulant, childish. Show us. Do for us. Give us. The fibers burrowed into my flesh, with the pricks of thousands of tiny cold needles.
Cant took my arm. “You are favored,” she said.
The voices picked at my thoughts, rudely invaded my memories, making crude and cruel jokes. They seemed to know nothing but expletives, arranged in no sensible order, and they applied them accompanied by demands that went beyond the obscene, demands that echoed again and again; and I saw that this new world was composed not of gods, but of mannerless children who had never faced responsibility or consequences, and whose lives were all secrecy, all privilege, conducted behind thick and impersonal walls.
Tingles shot up my hands and feet and along my spine, and I felt sparks at the very basement of my reason.
Do for us, do everything, live for us, let us feel, all new and all unique, all superlatives and all gladness and joy, and no death, no end.
My hands jerked out, holding a pack of cards, and I felt a will other than mine—a collective will—move my fingers, attempt to spread the cards into a fan. The fingers jerked and spilled the cards into the dirt, across the creeping fibers. “Get them away from me!” I cried in furious panic.
The blocks and timbers and reduced towers of the House of Escher settled with a final groaning sigh, but I pictured Roderick and Maja buried beneath its timbers, still alive.
The fibers lanced into my tongue. The voices filling my head hissed and slid and insinuated like snakes, like worms in my living brain, demanding tapeworms, asking numbing questions, prodding, prickling, insatiable.
Cant said, “You must assert yourself. They demand much, but you have so much to give—”
The fibers shoved down my throat, piercing and threading through my tissues as if to connect with every cell of my being. I clawed at my mouth, my throat, my body, trying to tug free, but the fibers were strong as steel wires, though thinner than the strands of a spiders web.
“Newness is a treasure,” Musnt said, standing beside Cant. Wont and Shant and Dont joined her.
My legs buckled, but the fibers stiffened and held me like a puppet. I could not speak, could only gag, could hardly hear above the dissonant voices. Amuse. Give all. Share all. Live all.
“Hail to the new and masterful,” Cant said worshipfully, smiling broadly, simply, innocently. Even in my terror and pain that smile seemed angelic, entrancing.
“A hundred billion people cannot be wrong,” Shant said, and touched the crown of my head with his outspread hand.
“We anoint the new Master of King Nerve,” the five said as one, and I could breathe, and speak, for myself, no more.
1999
The Way of All Ghosts
Once upon a very long extension, not precisely time nor any space we know, there existed an endless hollow thread of adventure and commerce called the Way, introduced in Eon. The Way, an artificial universe fifty kilometers in diameter and infinitely long, was created by the human inhabitants of an asteroid starship called Thistledown. They had become bored with their seemingly endless journey between the stars; the Way, with its potential of openings to other times and other universes, made reaching their destination unnecessary.
That the Way was destroyed (in Eternity is known; that it never ends in any human space or time is less obvious.
Even before its creators completed their project, the Way was discovered and invaded by the very non-human Jarts, who sought to announce themselves to Deity, what they called Descendant Mind, by absorbing and understanding everything, everywhere. The Jarts nearly destroyed the Way’s creators, but were held at bay for a time, and for a price.
Yet there were stranger encounters. The plexus of universes is beyond the mind of any individual, human or Jart.
One traveler experienced more of this adventure than any other. His name was Olmy Ap Sennen. In his centuries of life, he lived to see himself become a living myth, be forgotten, rediscovered, and made myth again. So many stories have been told of Olmy that history and myth intertwine.
This story is set early in his life. Olmy has experienced only one reincarnation (Legacy). In fee for his memories, he has been rewarded with a longing to return to death everlasting.
—Greg Bear
The Way of All Ghosts
A Myth from Thistledown
by
Greg Bear
For William Hope Hodgson
• 1 •
“Probabilities fluctuated wildly, but always passed through zero, and gate openers, their equipment, and all associated personnel within a few hundred meters of the gate, were swallowed by a null that can only be described in terms of mathematics. It became difficult to remember that they had ever existed; records of their histories were corrupted or altered, even though they lay millions of kilometers from the incident. We had tapped into the geometric blood of the gods. But we knew we had to continue. We were compelled.”
Testimony of Master Gate Opener Ry Ornis, Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, “On the Advisability of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order”
The ghost of his last lover found Olmy Ap Sennen in the oldest columbarium of Alexandria, within the second chamber of Thistledown.
Olmy stood in the middle of the hall, surrounded by stacked tiers of hundreds of small golden spheres. The spheres were urns, most of them containing only a sample of ashes. They rose to the glassed-in ceiling, held within columns of gentle yellow suspension fields. He reached out to touch a blank silver plate at the base of one column. The names of the dead appeared as if suddenly engraved, one after another.
He removed his hand when the names reached Ilmo, Paul Yan. This is where the soldiers from his childhood neighborhood were honored; in this column, five names, all familiar to him from days in school, all killed in a single skirmish with the Jarts near 3 ex 9, three billion kilometers down the Way. All had been obliterated without trace. These urns were empty.
He did not know the details. He did not need to. These dead had served Thistledown as faithfully as Olmy, but they would never return.
Olmy had spent seventy-three years stranded on the planet Lamarckia, in the service of the Hexamon, cut off from Thistledown and the Way that stretched beyond the asteroid’s seventh chamber. On Lamarckia, he had raised children, loved and buried wives . . . lived a long and memorable life in primitive conditions on an extraordinary world. His rescue and return to the Way, converted within days from an old and dying man to a fresh-bodied youth, had been a shock worse than the return of any real and ancient ghost.
Axis City, slung on the singularity that occupied the geodesic center of the Way, had been completed during those tumultuous years before Olmy’s rescue and resurrection. It had moved four hundred thousand kilometers “north,” down the Way, far from the seventh chamber cap. Within the Geshel precincts of Axis City, the mental patterns of many who died were now transferred to City Memory, a technological afterlife not very different from the ancient dream of heaven. Using similar technology, temporary partial personalities could be created to help an individual multi-task. These were sometimes called ghosts. Olmy had heard of partials, sent to do the bidding of their originals, with most of their mental faculties duplicated, but limited power to make decisions. He had never actually met one, however.
The ghost appeared just to his right and announced its nature by flickering slightly, growing translucent, then briefly turning into a negative. This display lasted only a few seconds. After, the simulacrum seemed perfectly solid and real. Olmy jumped, disoriented, then surveyed the ghost’s features. He shook his head and smiled wryly.
“It will give my original joy to find you well,” the partial said. “You seem lost, Ser Olmy.”
Olmy did not quite know what form of speech to use with the partial. Should he address it with respect due to the original, a corprep and a woman of influence . . . The last woman he had tried to be in love with . . . Or as he might address a servant?
“I come here often. Old acquaintances.”
The image looked concerned. “Poor Olmy. Still don’t belong anywhere?”
Olmy ignored this. He looked for the ghost’s source. It was projected from a fist-sized flier hovering several meters away.
“I’m here on behalf of my original, corporeal representative Neya Taur Rinn. You realize . . . I am not her?”
“I’m not ignorant,” Olmy said sharply, finding himself once more at a disadvantage with this woman.
The ghost fixed her gaze on him. The image, of course, was not actually doing the seeing. “The Presiding Minister of the Way, Yanosh Ap Kesler, instructed me to find you. My original was reluctant. I hope you understand.”
