FSF, January-February 2010 Read online

  “Or God,” Gale said.

  I looked around the giant spaces of the church; at the light pouring through the clear windows. How easy it would be to sit up so quickly and join the light above me. I pictured myself rising high enough that I entered free fall, and there I drifted waiting for one of the deacons to reach out to me with some metal pole. I gave up on the notion of transcendence.

  Dinner was served with assigned seats, and I found myself placed between Tensi and Esner. Several people eyed me from time to time as if trying to calculate what had placed me there first. Gale was at the other end of the table, between the young man from Angkor and a woman, around twenty, who had metallic forearms and hands. I was proud to be seated next to Esner, anxious not to look like a sycophant because every now and then people glanced our way to see what we were talking about, but I also longed to be next to Gale. Esner ate without speaking. Every question that came to my lips sounded like something that would be asked in the most routine interviews. Poor Tensi didn't know what to say to me; at the garden she'd already asked me the routine questions of my life. So I asked her those questions, and she seemed to respond to the idea that someone wanted to hear her story for a change.

  Esner was focused on Gale. I was half-listening because Tensi was telling me about their children while at the other end of the table they had started talking about the variations of the one person-one child limit. But soon it was clear that everyone was arguing with Gale. She had wanted to write a story where one world abolished the limit, and it would be a good thing, not a tragedy. The consumption of limited resources would drive the world to new creativity.

  Esner's voice cut through every conversation. “If I understand you correctly, you're not proposing to write a tragedy. Or a warning. Your story would actually speculate about what future conditions would be like if this were to happen.”

  Gale hesitated.

  Everyone at the table was waiting for her response.

  “Well, yes,” she said.

  “You know, it's been ages since anyone has written such a story.”

  Esner told us to take a break, to enjoy the night air of Santa Fe, to walk off our meals. We would enjoy some evening reading when we got back. I was rising from the table, ready to clear my plate and somehow intersect with Gale, when Esner's hand clapped my shoulder. “We have to prepare you for your reading.”

  The woman with metal forearms wanted to know if Gale would set this story on a world that actually existed or would she make up a fictional world.

  It was hard to listen to this and make sense of what Esner was talking about. His tone became condescending. I must have missed the bit of procedure that morning when he went on and on. I had sat between Esner and Tensi as a prelude to this evening when everyone would read my submission piece. Esner had been surprised that I didn't have any questions during supper. Usually the first reader was very anxious.

  The guy from Angkor wanted to know if Gale really believed it was wise to set up such an unstable system. He was arguing the point as he followed Gale and the other woman out the door.

  Tensi had finagled a guy my age—I think he was from Yorubana—to help her clean up, and while Esner was setting me up in a writing chair, the two of them were readying ten reading chairs in the space where the dining room table had been. The chairs were like a gathering of the ages, from one reupholstered with fresh fabric and scarred legs, to one that was threadbare and creaked when Tensi unfolded it. The writing chair was locally made, Esner said, and it looked like no writing chair I'd ever seen, not a trace of metal or fabric, all wood and organic coverings, and when I sat in it, tendrils looped around and into my ears and Esner placed eye patches with the textures of leaves over my face.

  We had all returned from the walk. There was some chatting, then Tensi said it was time to take a seat. Everyone avoided the old rickety reading chair, but when Esner leaned forward to sit there, at least two, maybe three people offered to take it instead of him. “No, no,” he said. “I'm rather fond of this one.”

  And now I was seated, and they were seated, ready to begin. I thought of myself, back at home, sitting in the community library, working an hour here, an hour there, certain I was creating something absolutely new, and soon there would be ten readers testing it out. Here they weren't reading it the way I'd read all of Esner's works; they were reading it the way people did on most anti-Minds worlds, places where people didn't trust the limited sentience of a book, so the only way a person could experience the joy of an open narrative was on an occasion when the writer themself appeared on the world to give public readings.

  My story starts with a dinner between friends. Gregory has just come back to Haynlayn from his worlds tour. Gregory tells Ben various adventures, but saves his secret for last. He went to Bombay, where human-Mind contact is permitted. He downloaded himself into Mindspace. Gregory says, “When I die, I won't die. And my secrets won't die with me.” Ben screams at his friend, “How could you do this? Get out! Get out!”

  It takes Ben several days to regret his reaction and to wonder about what secrets Gregory could have. Several more days, he hears nothing from Gregory and he begins to worry. He goes to Gregory's tiny bachelor's apartment to patch things up. There's no answer at the door. There's no answer to his calls. Ben's thumbprint has been programmed to the lock, so he enters. Gregory lies unmoving on his bed.

  The meds determine cause of death to be poison. Gregory's mother won't even talk to Ben, and Gregory's father says, “We have enough shame.” Both parents testify before the review board: Gregory returned home agitated and upset. The review board calls on Ben. Ben tells them of Gregory's high spirits, his future plans.

  “But you didn't see Gregory for the next five days,” the review board chief asked, a man by the name of Findley. “Why not?”

  How does Findley know this? Before Ben knows what to do or say, they get the story out of him. The board determines that Gregory had gone to Bombay, downloaded himself, and had returned home to commit suicide.

  Ben refuses to believe Gregory killed himself, but how to prove that? How to find out what bigger things are going on? Ben travels to Bombay. He goes to the guesthouse where Gregory stayed, but only one person there has even the vaguest memory. Just another young man on a worlds tour. He asks around at shops and tea houses, but no one recalls having seen Gregory, or better, they recall having seen a lot of young men who could have been Gregory.

  Ben decides to download his mind, and then he can talk to Gregory. He finds a place where he can download his mind, he goes through the necessary steps to be permitted in the cubicle. A reader, this guy who was picky about everything, knew the skullcaps in Bombay didn't look like the ones I'd imagined. The book's level of sentience should have corrected for that, and it did, and once the image changed, he let his Jake put it on.

  It's the first time I felt the readers rebel. Ben's data in Mindspace can talk to Gregory's data, but the mind saved in Mindspace will not be permitted to communicate with the outside world until the body has died.

  One reader thought: This must be where Ben realizes he's gone too far and has to live with injustices and not knowing. Another thought: Ben should have realized his sexual attraction for Gregory a long time ago because who would come this far to prove this much if they weren't desperately in love? I realized: I'd failed. When I wrote this chapter, I had thought it would be just enough to have Ben want to know the truth, but of course, he's about to kill himself and surrender the joy of living in this particular body.

  Such failure.

  I wasn't convincing enough.

  I was waiting for each of them to take off their headsets.

  There was a knock at the door to the cubicle. Please, Ben, we have to talk. You want to consider what you're doing.

  It's Findley. He's caught up. He won't kill Ben here on Bombay, but Ben will never see Haynlayn again. He will die without knowing the truth. It's now or never.

  It worked, but I hadn't done it. Esner
had. He had so politely volunteered to take the broken-down chair, he had taken the one chair that must have been rigged to feed into the writing chair.

  Afterward, they discussed my story. Someone named two novels with similar themes. Someone else named another title, and the lack of originality echoed through the group. My mood varied so much that the floor and furniture seemed to waver. I wanted just to get up and leave. The woman with the metal forearms—she had a name like Sonisa, something that sounded almost like the Spanish word for smile but wasn't—she liked how Findley had appeared and forced Ben to go into Mindspace. Others, who had been more accepting, said how much they liked that idea and would have liked the chapter more if that had been part of it.

  “I don't know,” Gale said. “At that point it's not a choice anymore. The author has manipulated character and reader into a situation where there's only one option.”

  I looked at Esner.

  “Gale's right,” he said, “but, Sonisa, would you have kept reading if he hadn't been forced into that choice?”

  “Probably not.”

  That night, when we were alone, I wanted to tell Gale that it had been Esner, that I wasn't manipulative, not that way. But the truth is, even though she clearly had looked down on the idea, I wished I'd thought of it.

  “You know,” she said, after we both were in our separate beds and the lights out, “I didn't want to embarrass you, but my biggest problem is that he kills himself.”

  “It wasn't like it was easy for him to do that,” I said. Again, I felt that spinning, as if reality had fallen away.

  “No. But was it as hard as it really would be? Everyone makes it sound so easy to die in these stories. Oh, the character says, I have a version of myself seventy million clicks away in Mindspace. But it's me, the me here and now, the only me I know, who's about to die. I have no connection with that other me. I think the only people who could do it are the people who would be willing to end their lives even if they had no backup.”

  I couldn't sleep. I wasn't the future brilliant writer I thought I would be. I was a thinker of shallow thoughts. I had to be saved in secret and I didn't have the courage to admit it. I clambered down from the bunk.

  “What's wrong?” Gale asked.

  “I can't sleep. I'm going to take a walk.”

  I hoped she'd offer to join me, but instead she told me how beautiful Santa Fe was at night, that a walk would do me good. While I walked, I imagined that when I got back she'd offer me a massage to help me relax. In one version, we end up relaxing into each other's bodies. In another, she slips on clothes so I won't get the wrong idea, and her hands, which I imagine as skilled and powerful, send me to sleep.

  The room was silent when I got back. I listened to her breathe and realized she was truly asleep.

  In the morning she asked me, “Are you feeling better?” and she sat next to me almost like a protector.

  Esner walked by, patted the back of my head, and told me it was hard to be the first one to go, and then he sat down by Gale. Tensi, who was serving food, watched him. Yesterday, he'd helped her in the kitchen. Esner wanted to talk about the story Gale discussed last night with Sonisa, the one about the world where the one-person-one-child limit was not observed.

  “That wasn't your submission piece,” he said.

  “No,” Gale said and she smiled. “I haven't written it.”

  “Yet,” he said. “What you mean is you haven't written it yet.” He smiled, but the smile was more awkward punctuation than anything else. “What fascinated me was that you wanted something different. Change. Back before the end of Earth, there was a whole fiction devoted to change. They imagined how we'd live on other worlds. How we'd travel there. You haven't read any of that, have you?”

  “I don't think so. I read Alone.”

  I think most of us had read Alone. It was set before Minds had torn apart Jupiter. A world augmented with engines used Jupiter's gravity to accelerate out of the solar system. But it wasn't going all that fast, so over time people forgot they were on a world and thought it was the universe.

  “But,” I said, anxious to be too much on the edge of the conversation, “that story is designed to make us feel content with what we have. We have the other worlds. We know where we are.” I felt like a bit of a hypocrite. I was certainly happy to be where we were. Sure, I loved the stories of fighting the Minds, but that didn't mean I wanted to go back and restart that war. There had been a thousand worlds. When raiders from Haynlayn went and blew up some part of the Minds, the Minds retaliated by picking some world that was not Haynlayn and destroying it. Eventually a small armada of human ships laid siege to Haynlayn to put an end to the war.

  I looked to Gale to watch her nod; I no longer felt like a hypocrite.

  Esner said, “No. I mean written way before then, before the Minds. It might be important to your fiction. If you're willing, I can help you get access.”

  “Did their stories predict the Minds?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At some point,” Gale said, “they had to figure that machine intelligences would grow tremendously powerful. What did they think of all that?”

  “Well, they imagined humans more involved in the process. People would be augmented. They might have new biological capabilities or connections with the machine intelligences. They did think there would be computers who'd save their entire personality. They imagined they'd get new bodies and record their old minds on the new bodies.”

  “So their stories encouraged people to trust the new developments? So when people augmented themselves and the machine minds augmented themselves even more, people were led to believe that was a good thing, right?”

  Esner sat back. The conversation wasn't going where he'd wanted it to go. Tensi had turned away, I guess, to hide her response.

  “Should we even read their fiction?” Gale said. “They told us to embrace these changes. Look at what happened. Aren't they, in some metaphorical sense, traitors to the human race?”

  I don't remember the rest of the morning all that well but I remember the silence that followed. Esner had us get in the reading chairs; he'd take the writing chair. As people moved about, Sonisa went up and placed her metal hand on Gale's forearm and said something quietly; Sonisa had that look, half-friendship, half-condescension, of someone giving advice. Gale's face hardened and she pulled her arm away. Last night everyone had wanted to sit next to Gale; now there was a vacancy in the reading chair next to her. The young guy from Angkor sat as far away as he could.

  Esner did this exercise several times where we would go through a section of one of his books in progress; one day it was Invasion Minds, another time it was The Resurrection, but he would give us scenarios where we would hope the character would do something different. As he'd respond to the new situation, he talked about the response he was making and why, and how he handled different readings because in the end, the book would sit on a world and have concurrent readers wanting different things at the same time.

  I think it was that afternoon, but maybe it was the next day, when Gale and I were assigned neighborhood watch. Esner showed us how to handle the cell phones, so we went out to each item indicated on the phone screen, made a call to the building or the bench or the tree by the bench, and made sure the cells were functioning fine. At some point, we were told, there might be a little blip, some anomalous growth, which had to be corrected right away. It was boring work, but you had to concentrate on the screen, so it wasn't like pulling the weeds where we could talk while we worked. I expected Gale to point out how easy it would be for the Minds to interfere with the programming, to turn all these organics cancerous.

  “You know,” she said, “only one of us needs to do this. Would you mind if I went to the library to look some things up?”

  How could I say yes? I wanted to be with her. How could I say no? I wanted to say yes to everything she asked.

  She didn't go directly to the library, she told me later. She first
went to Esner's place. Tensi was out with the gardeners and Esner was supposed to be left alone to write. According to Gale, or according more to my memory of what Gale said, Esner was happy to see her. She apologized, and he accepted. She told him she wanted to hear more about these stories. He told her titles—none of which I remember—and the names of the writers, back in the days when writers actually applied ink to paper. He had copies. She could read them. He'd go get them. She said she would love to read them later, she'd taken up enough of his time. When she told me this, I wasn't sure if she was taking advantage of his sincerity or of his attraction to her.

  She next went to the library to read about these stories, to find out about these people. She found me calling the tables and chairs in a restaurant. She was clearly agitated, and I, knowing nothing of her adventures, wondered what had happened. I asked if she was okay; she said something to the effect that she was fine. She wanted to use the phone. “I'm just too full of energy to watch you work.” At first I was happy just to watch her, but she held her body so tightly, she stared too intensely at the screen, she moved directly from the exterior of a store to the internal cabinets, to the counter, that my gaze felt invasive. I ended up staring at the curve of wood, taken in by how this world was more curved than flat, trying to occupy my mind with something other than the knowledge that I barely existed in whatever world Gale Brisa was seeing.

  I think it was that night we did Gale's chapter. She sat between Esner and Tensi, and they talked more about these stories Esner was interested in, all the ones that imagined a variety of futures, everything from inhospitable worlds made hospitable to humans fighting aliens for galactic supremacy, all of it rather depressing when you thought of our situation, ninety-eight or ninety-nine worlds, whatever it was back then, circling the Sun, following the orbit Mars once used when Mars still existed, all of us wondering, in the backs of our minds, which world would go next, what minor error or oversight would cancer-growth into the death of another world, another nine or ten thousand souls, all their stories gone.