OUT OF THE DREAM CLOSET
David Ira Cleary
David Ira Cleary tells us he recently moved to Oakland, California, where “I live with my actress wife, two cats, and the sweetest cocker spaniel you could possibly imagine. The dog inspired the character of the Sphinx, while the themes were mostly generated by my favorite obsessions: free will, aging, mortality, and the philosophy of mind.” Dave recently completed an alternate world mystery novel called Waiting For Marshall Cheung. During the day, he documents software for a company that makes Android smartphones.
* * * *
The morning after the moodstorm, the Living Will came to her to bring grim news.
“Your father plans to die.” The Living Will was tall as a tree. It wore striped bell-bottoms and a vest with deep pockets. It had a mustache like tinsel. It crouched down, hunched over, resting its chin on fingers long as her forearm. It watched her with silver mirror-eyes. “I’m sorry to bring you this news, Sasha.”
Sasha, blond hair in bangs, walnut-colored skin, eyes green as moss, said: “Call me Little Girl.” No fake-man, no automaton, deserved to call her by her true name.
“Very well.” A tear rolled down its eye. Good Gödel—a weeper. Maybe it was susceptible to the traces of last night’s moodstorm. She hoped its eyeball tarnished. “I am sorry, Little Girl. I am here to prepare you for his death. I am here to tell you what you will inherit and how you will live with him gone.”
“I’m busy,” she said.
“Busy how?”
“Collecting,” she said. She had a plastic pail beside her, sitting in the ankle-deep water.
“Collecting what?”
“You know,” she said. “Stuff.”
The Living Will watched her a while, then got up and walked away.
She was collecting souls in Rust Canyon, below the Mad Monk’s Dam.
Rust Canyon. Cliff walls a mile high, made by moodstorms or by water, carved into metal-stone and polymer rock—the ruined cities of distant epochs, the landfills and boneyards of peoples dead ten thousand centuries. Where there’d been iron there were great ochre fans down cliffsides; where there’d been copper, verdigris. Little Girl liked to look for bones and platinum—bones for DNA and calcium, platinum for metal circuits. But what Rust Canyon was really good for was souls.
Moodstorms, tantrums of the cloudmind, thought-poor but rich with passion, bursts of brain juice wind-driven down the canyon alleyways, scoured the cliff walls and raised clouds of dust and by the chemical affinity of brain juice for synapses like lock for key, lifted souls from riverbeds and pulled them loose from rock walls. Over years or lifetimes the souls had been carried downstream to the Mad Monk’s Dam, where they had collected. Now Little Girl, wearing rubber hip waders, carrying a bucket and a stick with a hand at the end, walked in the shallow waters beneath the dam. The water was chrome-colored and corrosive, swirling in places with ribbons of red and orange and blue, where the residues of thoughts gone soft, heavy metal acids, had leached to the surface. Little Girl used to grab souls with her bare hands. The corrosive water would burn her hands and forearm, and the red and blistered skin would upset the Papa. But she got bored with that. Now she used her stick-hand.
The hand was tough brown demi-flesh. The stick carried a nerve bundle. When she gripped the stick from its end, she could feel what the hand felt and she could move its fingers. She lowered the stick. The water was warm and comfortable. She dragged the fingers along the lake floor, touching things. Gravel, sharp edges like glass, jawbones, scuttling tin millipedes and squishy grease worms, then at last souls, hard and round and clumped together or encrusted like barnacles to rocks or asbestos shells. She felt for souls that were just a little rough: ones that were polished smooth were too old, while pitted or smashed ones had usually lost character. Stuck to a rebar reef, she found four good ones, substantial, sandpaper-textured, giving her the faint buzz of dreams or simple cogitations. She grabbed each one carefully with the stick hand, twisted it loose, then brought it up.
She was examining the fourth soul, gray but giving off a rainbow sheen as she turned it in the sunlight, when she heard Alistair Jones shouting at her: “Sasha! Sasha! Walnut Pasha!”
He was climbing down the Mad Monk’s Dam, using the bas-relief sculptures that decorated its face as handholds, clutching stone scrolls, grasping noses and beards, stepping on tonsured heads. At last he jumped into the water, and ran splashing to her. He was double-jointed and had hair colored shiny-black. The acidic water didn’t seem to hurt him.
He was the cloudmind’s only son.
“Sassy Sasha!”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sullen Sasha!”
“Call me Little Girl.”
Alistair Jones furrowed his brow. “Well! Why?”
“What does ‘Sasha’ mean? Nothing. But ‘Little Girl’ pretty much says it all.”
“Okay,” Alistair said. “What are you doing with that hand?”
Little Girl flared angry at Alistair. She’d wanted him to argue with her about the name. She said, “Are you dumb? What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“You’re digging up souls. What for? Are you going to eat them?”
Ingested souls might give you a buzz but more likely would leave you constipated. “Not likely.”
“Then why?” He arched his eyebrow. “Oh, are you going to try and catch a sphinx? Are you going to seat a soul in one?” He stepped toward her, excited. “Can I help, Sa—Can I help you catch a sphinx, Little Girl?”
She was disappointed that her plan had been so obvious. It made her mad. She said, “No, that’s not it, and you can’t help, anyway.”
“Then what are you going to do? “
“Nothing you’d find interesting.”
“Oh.”
She dropped the soul into her bucket. He stood there glumly as she stepped around him and put the stick-hand back in the water. She had just found another soul, slightly perforated so she wasn’t sure whether it was good enough, when he said, “Hey, Little Girl, want to see my tits?”
Never glum for long. “Hardly.”
“Look.”
Despite herself, she glanced at Alistair. She expected him to be lifting his shirt. Instead he was holding out his hand. In his palm, there grew two little breasts, milky-white and pendulous, with carmine nipples and blue veins she could see connecting to the big vein at the base of his thumb. “I found some bio-code inside the Mad Monk’s tomb.”
“Who cares?” she said. “That’s stupid.”
She turned and went back to work.
Little Girl sorted souls.
By size as you go right to left, by buzz as you go top to bottom. They lay upon her dissection table. She’d soaked them in buffering solution to neutralize the acid, and now as she handled them, they sent emotional pulses through her hands and arms. Shivers of pity, currents of fear, waves of melancholy. And itches of sentiment, goose bumps of lust, fluxions of hope. All of it subtle, none of it strong enough to move her one way or another. Well, of course. These were old souls. The thing to do was cut one up and see if she could absorb some thought juice directly.
She chose a small soul with the largest buzz: it had a sweet sadness like hot chocolate on a rainy day.
It had a knobby brown carapace to protect it from the acid waters. She took her number three scalpel and placed its edge between two knobs.
“What are you up to, Little Girl?” Startled, she set the soul rolling as the scalpel screeched on the steel table. “Drat!” She caught the soul. “Why are you bothering me, you big metal monster?”
It was the Living Will. His shiny eyes blinked sadly. He was too big to come in her room so he was looking at her from outside her window. Her room was in the Tower. She figured he had climbed onto the roof of the main building, the Elderhaus, so that he could see her. “I need to talk to you. I need to prepare you for your father’s death.”
“I’m busy,” she said.
“I can see that. Cutting up souls, a fine hobby. To wet your fingers with the thoughts of a dead person; an excellent pasttime.”
It rankled her that he knew so much about her. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Really?” His mirror eyes widened. She saw herself reflected: convex, brown, and double. “What are you doing, then?”
“Nothing. Nothing I’d want the Papa to know about.”
“Is that so?” The Living Will tapped thoughtfully on the window pane. His long pink fingernails had dark lines across them, regular as the marks on a meter stick. “I hope you’re not messing with souls beyond slicing open their shells. Your father finds out you’re perverting them or resurrecting them in a body, the terms of his will might be affected.”
“Don’t worry,” Little Girl said. Her palm was wet as she squeezed the soul; apparently she had cut the soul a little, and some juices were leaking out. She felt sadder, less interested in provoking the Papa or the Living Will. “Souls are stupid anyway.”
“Well, that’s true.” The Living Will seemed relieved. “I know you don’t care to talk much about your father, but I think you need to know some facts.”
She put down the soul. “Whatever.”
“Your father’s getting old.”
“Nine-hundred sixty-nine,” she said.
“Yes. He handled souls, when he was a boy, did you know that?”
“So?”
“Souls aren’t just moods. They’re not just thoughts. They are biocodes, too. Physical instructions, streams of messages.”
“Messenger RNA,” she said. “Protein Turing tapes.”
“Good. So you know all the hard names. And you know how the codes can affect not just your brain, but your body as a whole.”
“Yeah. So he’s tumored up and destabilized.”
“Worse than that. He’s spawning organs, homunculi, strange creatures—maybe alien.”
“Really?” That sounded cool. “Maybe I should go see him?”
“Maybe. My point here, is his cells are compromised, his body’s breaking down.”
“So? Why not get a deep body-flush?”
“He’d replace so many cells, it would be a kind of death.”
“He’s scared of the Continuity Threshold?” Little Girl said. “That’s lame.”
The Living Will tapped his nails nervously against the window. “Not being self-aware, I’m unsuited to judging your father’s fears one way or another.”
“They’re dumb fears,” she said. “The Continuity Threshold is malarkey. Our minds lose continuity every time we sleep.”
“You would know,” the Living Will said. “But I’m not the one to argue with.”
She touched the soul and got a shimmy of sadness. “You’re saying I should go argue with him?”
“I’m not saying that at all.” His eyes blinked, mirrors sheeny with yellow lubricant. “I’m to tell you that your father is turning himself off three days from now.”
She had met the Living Will once before, after her mother fell to her death. Her mother had been a scholarly woman obsessed with the biomechanics of spirituality—whether a soul could be divided, and if so, how many times before awareness itself disappeared; whether if a soul were replicated then placed into identical cloned bodies the resurrected awarenesses would diverge or remain in lockstep, spirits resilient despite the vagaries of experience; finally whether a soul planted in a semi-autonomous machine, say a sphinx or smarthouse, would be a moral being. It was said that she, while pondering these questions, tripped and fell into the Gash Peculiar, that fissure so deep it touched the Earth’s hot core and where her body was presumably incinerated.
Her mother—the Living Will told her—had left her a toolset for examining souls. And a cache of dreams, like the dreams the Papa sent the cloudmind, only smaller.
Sasha (still Sasha; this was long ago) was too sad to experiment with souls then.
But she used the dreams to smooth the sharp edges of her grief when otherwise to sleep meant only nightmares.
Little Girl had not seen her father since her sixty-fourth birthday.
She could wait one more day.
She wanted to have something to show him, anyway. And the Living Will had given her an idea. Perverting souls, resurrecting souls: that would be interesting. She didn’t know much about any of this, though. So she took the stairs down to the cellar and went to the library. The library was a scary place. Thirty rows of stacks, each stack honeycombed with memories, scattered between the stacks of bioluminescent limestone growths, rising from the floor or descending from the ceiling, providing a wan blue light that did not so much illuminate the library as distort it, making stalactites look like hanged men, memories like the compound eyes of insects. And there was a sense of confusion or panic; there was no diagram, no index, no attendant to help you find what you wanted. She stood with her hand on a cold wet stalagmite, sense of unease rising as she considered how complex and unfathomable the library really was.
“Oh,” she said. She remembered now, there were catalogs. Special memories set in the center stacks, dark red like drying blood despite the blue light. She walked carefully to the catalog area, touching limestone or running her fingers along the honeycombs as if her eyes could not be trusted. She still felt unease or even dread. It was only as she reached the catalogs, and pulled out the two-inch vial, that she realized why she was afraid. The Papa must have cycled some sort of fear juice into the library since she had been there last.
To keep her out.
She chewed off the end of the vial and drank down the catalog.
It tasted of eel.
A twist in her stomach, a motion in her head; she was dizzy. She hugged the stalagmite so she wouldn’t fall. Maybe she didn’t have the enzyme to digest the catalog. And now she was cold, too, shivering. By Gödel; she didn’t want to be sick. She would have no interest in perverting souls if she wanted to throw up.
But then the dizziness was gone and her stomach felt fine.
She was still cold. That was all right. Cold was how the catalog must work. Or rather, hot; she walked a few steps forward and felt warmer, then a few steps farther and felt cold again. The catalog was one of those that let your skin temperature indicate the proximity of the memory you wanted. How to pervert souls. Experimentally, she thought of something else, How to sew on a patch, and she felt suddenly so cold she wondered if the library contained no sewing memories.
How to pervert souls.
Good; she was warm again.
It took her a few minutes to distinguish the temperature differentials of the catalog from the currents of warm air coming from ceiling vents. Once she could do that, though, she found the memory quickly. In the clear vial the memory juice was colored lilac. She found another memory for perverting souls then, two stacks over, found a memory for resurrecting them.
She didn’t ingest any of those memories.
She’d wait until she had some likely souls before her.
The tower had a hundred rooms, and a hundred stories: one room per floor. The center of the tower was a stairwell contained within a great segmented ferro-carbon tube. The tube rotated, each segment turning at a different rate, each room moving along with it. Because the rooms were brightly colored, green, yellow, blue; and because they could be anywhere along the circuit, the tower as a whole looked like a prayer-flag.
The seventh room from the top was colored hunter’s orange. It was a tool-shop, and forbidden to her. But she didn’t try to subvert the lock that the Papa had installed on its door. She simply climbed out the window of the next room up, jumped down on the tool-shop roof as it passed beneath her, then crawled through the vent connected to the fume-hood inside. It was scary as she swung down into the vent—a twelve-hundred foot drop to the pitched stone roof of the Elderhaus. It would have been easier if she wasn’t scared of heights.
She dropped from the fume-hood to a work table.
The tool-shop smelled of antiseptic and preservative. Lab equipment—cases, glassware, scanners, work-limbs and etc.—glittered frostlike, stuck in time lock. It was cold enough to give her goose-bumps. The machinery was stacked on shelves. Somewhere there were tools for soul work. Little Girl hoped she’d find out which tools soon.
She pulled out a plastic container in which she’d put the five best souls, big and buzzy. Then she pulled out the memory for perverting souls.
In daylight, the memory was colored pink.
She chewed off the end of the vial and drank the memory down.
She itched, she yawned, she felt a stranger walk inside of her.
She saw the tool-shop with the eyes of a technician.
Everything had names, now. This case a protein sequencer, this construction of metal plates a femto-assembler. And this—a narrow cabinet six feet high with many closed drawers, supported by four bronze feet, claw-toed like the feet of a lion—this was the soulmixer. It was the tool she would use to pervert the souls.
No, not pervert. Enhance, amplify, improve.
The new memories were awkward in her head, intrusive, foreign, lacking the ease of real thoughts, feeling wrong like an ill-fitting hat.
But they worked.
On a shelf, she found a tool called an icebreaker. With it she tapped the soulmixer.
With a whine, the time lock attenuated, bright stress patterns rippling through the surface. Curdled time, glowing red, fell like embers to the floor, hissing before vanishing.
Little Girl touched a lever atop the cabinet.
From recessed panels at the sides of the cabinet emerged two arms, gray and shiny but shaped just like human arms. The hands wore elegant white evening gloves. Coming out at shoulder-height, the arms made the narrow cabinet look like a torso, and as the hands reached to pull open the two doors, it was like a headless man opening his coat.
Her father’s face leered at her from the cabinet’s dark interior.
“Sasha!” he said.
“Call me Little Girl.”
It was just a projection, but it looked real. His eyebrow arched. His face was florid. His jowls hung like wattles. The Papa looked fat, but not as fat as he was now. No, this look was forty or fifty years old. And the automaton that ran it was stupid. “Sasha!”
She had to play. “What do you want?”
“Souls are not toys.”
“That’s good. I’m too old for games.”
“You are forever innocent!”
“I’m sixty-seven years old.”
“Souls are for adults. There is no greater responsibility than that of a curator of the consciousness of a human being. This responsibility consists of ensuring the integrity and completeness of the soul. Souls are not to change.”
“Just like I’m not to change?”
“Sasha!”
She’d led the automaton off track. “What do you want?”
“Change means decay, and decay means death. Perpetual stasis is our ideal. Do not dilute a soul; do not augment one. Neither an emotion more nor a perception less. A changed soul is an abomination.”
“What about turning yourself off? Isn’t that a change?”
“Sasha!”
“Stuff it,” she said. She waved the icebreaker at the face, and with a static crackle, it disappeared.
Lights came on inside the cabinet.
It contained a sequence of stacked glass spheres, vertically connected by clear tubes, rising initially from a big sphere resting on the bottom of the cabinet. From the spheres there projected spigots that connected to other tubes. These tubes led down to a glass cone set beside the big sphere. Both the cone and the big sphere were subdivided by glass plates studded with gleaming electronic components.
The soulmixer was for dissolving souls and recombining them.
Little Girl knew how to use it.
The big sphere was the donor crematorium. You had to destroy a soul to make a soul. She opened its side. A platinum-wire crèche emerged on an asbestos-lined platform. She took out the second-buzziest soul. It reminded her of a cool summer evening after a hot day. It would make a fine donor. She set it in the crèche. The platform retracted into the sphere.
The glass cone was the recipient incubator. Its crèche had a small heating element. You had to heat a soul just slightly to make it amenable to new awarenesses. She opened it and put the buzziest soul on its crèche. This soul was tinged with loneliness. Like a crowded room where you’re too shy to talk.
Mixing the two souls would be cool.
She flicked a switch to start the machine.
It throbbed. It shook. Bands of electric light moved up the big sphere, faster and faster, as the soul took bursts of heat and volleys of radioactive particles. The soul seemed to cringe, puckers deepening, nodules writhing. It glowed red, then yellow. Then with a Thunk it exploded, white-hot bits of shell flying glassward, and a plume of black smoke and ashes gloriously colored—carmine and emerald and royal purple—rising from the crèche. The soul had been cremated.
Now it would be distilled.
Driven upward by heat, the ashes passed into successive spheres. In each sphere, shortwave radiation of a particular frequency—ultraviolet in this sphere, x-rays in this one, gamma rays in that one—freed moods or awarenesses of a different class: proprioception, causality, meaningfulness, and so on, stripping backbone molecules exothermically and thus cooling the awarenesses so that they precipitated and drained into a collection drain, ready to go to the other soul. How much went to the other soul was controlled by the spigots for each sphere. Too much, the soul would burst. Too little, the soul would have been expanded for no good reason. Today Little Girl opened the spigot on the third sphere wide, allowing the sense of meaning and spirituality to flow shiny and generous into the glass cone. The other spigots: causality, morality, sense of rhythm, and all the rest, she opened to just a trickle. Dull colors, tarnished silvers, coppery greens, blended into a muddy brown fluid that fell sticky into the cone.
And meanwhile the second soul, resting in the recipient cone, bathed in a solution of alcohol and salts, had been warmed so that it expanded slightly. Cracks in its carapace had widened, microscopic holes enlarged; and it was through these apertures that the awarenesses penetrated the soul. With the salt as catalyst and the alcohol as building blocks of the backbone, the awarenesses crowded into the soul, integrating with the processes already there or after bold biochemical battle replacing them. Or (Little Girl loved this outcome) joining incorrectly with an existing awareness to make a monster: happy-terror or bleak-joy or erotic-time.
The solution went from clear to gray as awarenesses dripped down into it.
Bits of awareness and broken moods bubbled up from the soul, sometimes leaving a bone-white ring in the narrow part of the cone.
At last, the donor soul was extinct, the tubes emptied, and the recipient soul was sated with new awarenesses.
The crèche slid out from the glass cone.
The wet soul had the sharp scent of ethyl alcohol.
She touched it. It felt strange.
It made her feel like all the universe was lonely.
* * *
The sphinxes lived in a vast warehouse in the desert east of the Gash Peculiar.
Little Girl, five value-added souls in her pocket, parasol to shade her from the sun, walked across the warehouse’s sand-covered roof, looking for an entrance. The warehouse was buried beneath sand, fine white sand that piled into dunes or was wind-swept so shallow you could see rusting remnants of building machinery: fan blades, pipes that went nowhere, and gray boxes presumably dangerous, for they triggered in her a sense of fear whenever she got too close to them.
The roof was big, a rectangle four miles by three, and she was frustrated. She knew there were doors, trapdoors—she’d been down one years ago—but she couldn’t remember where they were. The dunes shifted endlessly. She could spend weeks tromping around and kicking sand before she uncovered a trapdoor.
The thing to do was try the last memory.
It was for resurrecting souls inside a sphinx, but it might have instructions on finding one, too.
She sat down on the side of a sand dune. She pushed the handle of the parasol into the sand so that the parasol stood up and kept her shaded. She pulled out the last memory vial. She drank the memory down.
It tasted of butterscotch.
She sat waiting. She watched hot wind blow a dust devil across the roof. She gazed with contempt at her small hands and little feet shod in soft-wire slippers. Suddenly her stomach felt unsettled, and she burped.
Her guts wrenched inside her.
It was a bad memory.
The sky turned green as she passed out.
“Why are you lying there like that, Sasha?”
She was on her side, cheek pressed against the warm sand. In the distance the roof marked the horizon. Close-by, the Living Will squatted beside her in his striped bell-bottoms and his huge patent leather shoes. Clutching her belly, she rolled so she could see his face. “Call me Little Girl. I’ve got a stomachache.”
He said, “Very well, Little Girl.” Then he closed his eyes for a while. She wondered if he had figured out she had been poisoned by a memory and was now silently summoning medical help. The silver of his eyes showed through his translucent eyelids. Finally he looked at her and said, “We must discuss the disposal of your father’s estate.”
“What?”
“We must discuss the disposal of your father’s estate.”
“I heard you the first time. What about me?” She groaned and clasped her stomach.
“This is about you. It concerns you directly. You are your father’s only daughter and the only autonomous being he has engendered. Therefore, and also because of the respect and affection he holds for you—”
“—respect?”
“—and affection he holds for you, he intends to give you all his possessions, including his estate and his semi-autonomous agents, on the understanding that you will meet the following two conditions: one, you will not pervert a soul or cause a perverted soul to be reborn, and two, you will forthwith and forever agree to maintain the cloudmind, soothing its rages, encouraging its generosity, and persuading it to return from its absences.”
“The cloudmind?” Her stomach lurched. “That stupid . . . bitch!”
The Living Will regarded her silently. Then he said, “I wasn’t aware that the cloudmind had a sex.”
“She doesn’t! It’s just a way of speaking!”
“You are shouting, Little Girl.”
“I’m in pain. I’m just saying the cloudmind’s mean. Worse than mean—she’s insane!”
“Your father sends her gentle dreams, to soothe her in her rages.”
“I know that.” A foul moodstorm meant the Papa would spend three days in his dream closet, issuing pleasant fantasies and bucolic visions in an attempt to calm the cloudmind. Her stomach lurched again. “He wants to drop the responsibility of handling her temper onto my shoulders? Is that why he wants to die?”
“I’m not capable of guessing motives.”
Little Girl groaned and closed her eyes.
When she looked again, the Living Will was gone.
Someone gave her a cup of viscous milky fluid to drink. She finished it and then sat up. She was inside the warehouse, sitting beside Alistair Jones.
“You looked awful. Dehydrated and everything. I brought you down here.”
Here was the roof of a module within the warehouse. Modules—storage containers fifty feet long and ten feet deep—were arrayed like buildings on a street. Only these buildings had buildings below them, and more buildings farther down, for the warehouse went a half mile into the earth, and there were many levels. And the street was one of rails not pavement, and in three dimensions, for there were rails along most of the levels. Along some of the rails there ran delivery carts, all she could see empty of cargo, but moving as if with intention. Lit sporadically by glowglobes, the warehouse looked infinitely long and infinitely deep.
Her stomach felt better. The milky stuff must be an antidote for the poison. “I wanted to find out how to catch a sphinx.”
“You should have asked me for help. I could have run a bioassay on you, found out which memory proteins you have enzymes for, which you were intolerant to.”
“I like to do my own research.”
“Clearly.”
He sounded hurt.
Little Girl felt bad for not being gracious. “Thanks for helping me.”
“It was nothing,” Alistair said.
“It was more than the Living Will would do.”
“Who’s that?”
“Just an automaton. He says the Papa is terminating himself.”
“That’s bad. I’m sorry.” Alistair made to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. He said, “He’s sort of my father, too.”
“You don’t have a father.”
“You know what I mean.”
What Alistair meant was that dreams the Papa once sent to the cloudmind after a particularly bad moodstorm so delighted her that she rained down biocodes for fertility, rekindling a time-locked embryo in the Plaza of Echoes.
Alistair asked, “Is he sick or something?”
“Not so much. It’s mostly that he’s lazy.”
“Maybe you could get him to change his mind.”
“Maybe.” She felt anger smoldering inside her and wanted to change the subject. “I’ve got some souls I want to put in sphinxes.”
He examined his fingernails carefully. “Yeah?”
“So, do you think you could help me with it?”
His face lit up so bright she wondered if he had luminescence stitched into his hemoglobin. “I think I could, Little Girl.”
They rode a delivery cart a mile to the north and ninety levels deep, avoiding the grasp of robot arms that tried to pick them up and stack them in modules, singing along hesitantly with the cart, who was crazy:
“Racks of tongue and drums of ears,
“We ship ‘em.
“Packs of skin and tuns of tears.
“We ship ‘em-
“Quick!”
Down deep in the warehouse the modules were bigger than those higher up. The cart took them to one that must have been a quarter mile wide. Creaking robot arms like segmented lead pipes reached for them, but instead of lying low in the cart to avoid being grabbed, Alistair said, “This is the sphinx house! Come on!” And then he rolled out onto the delivery bay.
Little Girl followed him, the robot arm just swiping her shoulder as she rolled out of the cart.
“You want to crawl,” Alistair told her. “Sphinxes can be flighty.”
The delivery bay had a big door that opened into the side of the module. They crawled toward it. They followed the retreating arms inside. Inside was brightly lit at first. They saw random things precariously stacked: a boulder, a book, a corset, a tire, and a musical keyboard in one stack; a work boot, a beanbag, a jackhammer, and the mounted skeleton of a deep-sea bass in another. The effect was of a museum, not a warehouse. Beyond the section of random stacks, the lighting was inconsistent, flickering fluorescent tubes separated by patches of darkness. Noise, maybe the crackling of the dying fluorescents, came from deep within the module. Far off in the darkness there seemed to be motion and maybe more random stacks.
There was the smell of dust and of machine oil.
“Where are the sphinxes?”
“Whisper. Follow me.”
They crawled into the darkness. What she had taken for stacks of things turned out to be long-dead refrigerated containers. She wanted to look inside them, but Alistair kept her crawling. “There. See them?”
Out of the gloom, the sphinxes resolved.
There was a small herd of them, fifteen or twenty. They were about her size but quadruped. They were grazing on the floor of the module, chewing through the rusty corrugated floor to get at something beneath it, probably insulation. As they chewed, their diamond-hard teeth raised sparks from the metal. The bright sparks lit their muscular haunches and their stubby hairless wings.
“Okay, let’s get closer.”
They crawled a little more. Metal shavings on the floor pricked her hands. “Stop,” Alistair said. “Now watch this,” he said. “What has eyes but no face? What is red when there is no light?”
He spoke loudly, and the sphinxes reacted.
They raised their heads and turned. Their eyes glowed orange.
“What is analog in the morning, binary in the afternoon, and decimal at night?”
“Cool,” Little Girl whispered. She saw what he was doing.
He was baiting the sphinxes with riddles.
The sphinxes were walking toward them now.
“How can a man leave a room he never entered?”
As they came closer, they passed behind a refrigerator. By a trick of perspective, it looked as though they were disappearing inside the refrigerator. Little Girl moved to her left so she could get a better view—
—and a long sharp shaving sunk into her knee.
“Oww!”
She shouted so loudly the echo was like a dozen girls screaming.
Craziness. The sphinxes ran. They ran in all directions, banging into refrigerators, knocking down random stacks, their stubby wings beating uselessly. A pair of them bore down on her and Alistair as if intending violence, but then changed course at the last moment.
Most of the sphinxes ended up leaving by the delivery bay. Little Girl thought they would be stuck there or maybe fall off the platform to their deaths. But they recovered from their panic and began jumping to the delivery cart monorail, then walking along it with surprising grace.
“Nice job, Sasha.”
“My knee is bleeding. And don’t call me Sasha.”
Alistair was angry. “You and your dumb—” he started, then he broke off. He stared at where the sphinxes had been grazing. “Look at that. Will you look at that!”
He was on his feet now, hurrying, and Little Girl stood up and followed him. In a hole in the floor some five feet wide and two feet deep, there was a sphinx. It was on its belly. It had the face of a balding middle-aged man, somewhat overweight; its body was of a half-grown lion.
Its rear left leg was broken and dislocated savagely so that it was extended at a right angle to its body.
It stared at them with frightened yellow eyes.
Alistair said, “How is a matchstick like spring vacation?”
The sphinx smiled, showing its diamond teeth.
The riddle had worked; it seemed to relax. “Help,” it said.
They found a length of plastic pipe and a roll of duct tape, and after raising the sphinx’s body by wedging floor tiles beneath it, Alistair set the broken leg. Ligaments popped as the thigh bone went back into the pelvic socket and the sundered bone snapped back together. Little Girl held the sphinx’s shoulders because they thought it might struggle because of the pain. But aside from making a soft keening and crying a few milky tears, the sphinx acquitted itself well.
That close to it, she could smell its sweat, which was like musk mixed with motor oil.
They used the length of pipe as a splint, binding it to the sphinx’s thigh with duct tape.
Then they helped the sphinx up from the hole. They found a wheeled dolly the sphinx could rest its broken leg upon, while pulling itself along with its three good legs. “We’ve got something that will make you feel better,” Alistair said.
“Yes?” the sphinx said.
“Little Girl?”
“What? Oh!” She reached into her pocket, and pulled out one of the souls she had enhanced. It seemed like a good one; just touching it made her feel both relaxed and excited. “You’ll like this,” she told the sphinx.
“Yes?” the sphinx said, greed in its eyes.
Little Girl offered the soul to the sphinx.
“No!” Alistair said, grabbing the soul as the sphinx opened its mouth to eat it.
“What?” Little Girl said.
“That’s not how you do it,” Alistair said.
“Then how?”
“Watch. Close your eyes, sphinx.”
Alistair began stroking the sphinx. It purred, shivers of pleasure rippling down its haunches. He motioned for Little Girl to give him the soul. Then all at once he squeezed the sphinx’s shoulder blades together forcefully. The sphinx went still and rigid, as a plate opened in the back of its head. A soul cradle, webbed bioform shiny with mucous, emerged on a reticulated stalk. As always when looking inside someone’s head, Little Girl felt like a voyeur.
Alistair put the soul into the cradle.
With a whir, the cradle returned to the head, carrying the soul.
The sphinx opened its eyes and said, “Am I hungry?”
And how the sphinx could eat. They brought it to Alistair’s house and watched it gorge itself. It plowed through a bucket of pink insulation. It scarfed down a spool of #4 coaxial cable. It munched down a wall display of Hermes-head beetles. It ate ass jaws, pig’s feet, calf’s liver, synthburger, and a rack of triceratops ribs, all from the freezer. In the kitchen it reduced a box of oats to crumbs, a cask of honey-wine to residue. It finished off a serving ladle and sucked down a string of Crone’s Spice that was surely decorative. It ate tassels from a nice rug, the leaves of a gardenia, the head of a mop, the skin of a drum, and three dozen eggs. It ate so ravenously and omnivorously, so intently and obsessively, that Alistair suggested they might have to tear out the soul before its stomach burst from over-consumption or the soft pink heart of the house’s intelligence was destroyed.
But then, strips of yellow wallpaper in its claws, torn-open sofa before it like a butchered carcass, stretch marks clearly visible on its patchy-furred distended belly, it dropped a box of fish-food it had been holding in its mouth.
It said: “Am I tired?”
Then it fell to a deep sleep atop the ruined sofa.
In the evening, there was a moodstorm.
Alistair’s Cliffside house had a porch with a big window that gave a view of the Gash Peculiar. They sat there with the sphinx. Storm clouds black as ink billowed up over the canyon walls opposite them. Purple squalls of acid rain moved like monster brushes across the cliff faces. Periodically waves of rain would reach them, drops drumming against the roof, dislodging conglomerate bits of stone and souls and other human artifacts from the cliffside two dozen meters distant, sending them down to the dark thousand-mile deep crevice that was the Gash Peculiar.
The rain brought moods, depressions bleak as sunless moons, brief euphorias, but mostly a backdrop of wistfulness and sentiment that put them in a reflective or sweetly melancholic state of mind.
“Am I sad?” asked the sphinx, double-chin resting between its forepaws. Sitting beside it, Little Girl stroked its round bald head, feeling hairs too fine to see. It hadn’t eaten since the afternoon but just in case it got out of control again, Alistair had a device in hand, a wand, that would send out a electromagnetic pulse to knock it unconscious.
“It’s the cloudmind,” Alistair said. He never called it mother .
“She’s a fucking bitch,” Little Girl remarked. She had to curse to keep from crying. This memory kept coming: her own mother had fallen into the Gash. “I’m sorry, sphinx. We scared you so you broke your leg. Then we made you hungry. And we brought you here and the cloudmind has ruined everything.”
“Am I called Nestor?” asked the sphinx.
“Whatever. You were hungry, and happy, and now the cloudmind’s made you sad.”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly what the soul we gave it does,” Alistair said. “I think it more makes Nestor have a bigger appetite for everything. Maybe a bigger capacity for feeling.”
She wanted to curse Alistair for contradicting her, but she didn’t because he had tears running down his cheeks. Suddenly she felt a pang in her chest—why was he nice to her when she was mean to him?—and she looked away, at the sphinx’s, Nestor’s, yellow eyes. The oval-shaped pupils looked more cat than human. “Poor sphinx.”
The sphinx shifted, lunch inside its swollen gut clanking.
The rain intensified, drops batting against the big window; and the realization that her father would be dead soon intensified too. “And if the cloudmind’s bad now,” she said, slowly, dully, “it’s going to be even worse, once the Papa’s gone.”
“But maybe you’d do a better job,” Alistair said. “Keeping the cloudmind happy.”
The prospect seemed to smother her. “I don’t want to even fucking try.”
“Oh.” The storm quieted, rainfall just taps. But on the other side of the canyon a chunk of rock, building-sized, slipped loose, its great size giving the illusion that gravity pulled it down but slowly. The Gash Peculiar seemed to groan as the rock fell into it. “Maybe you could stop your father.”
She turned. “What do you mean?”
Alistair met her gaze. He didn’t look embarrassed by his tears. “Give him memories, maybe even part of a soul, to make him change his mind. Do something to him to make him want to live.”
She rubbed the folds of flesh at the back of Nestor’s neck. She could just feel the seam where the edge of the plate met neck. She didn’t say anything.
“Well, do you think we should attempt something with your father?”
Warmth suffused her. Suddenly she wanted to reach out and kiss Alistair. Instead she said:
“Hell. It couldn’t hurt to try.”
They planned to meet early next morning to decide on a strategy for changing the Papa. The day had been long and full and if you added the moodstorm to that, she was left exhausted. The one positive of the storm was that the Papa would have to delay shutting down, to give him time to console the cloudmind.
“Is that Nestor? Tell me!”
She and the sphinx had reached her house and were walking through the long portico which led corridor-like to the front door. The dolly the sphinx pulled itself along with click-clicked on the tiled floor. The walls were of a polished pink marble devoid of any mood and reflective; she could see herself, wan, tired, her eyes old-seeming in the young girl body. The sphinx was looking at itself suspiciously. “Is that Nestor?” it repeated. “Tell me!”
“Yeah,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen a mirror?”
The sphinx grinned. “Is Nestor handsome? Is Nestor beautiful?”
“Come on,” she said.
“Do Nestor’s teeth make rainbows?”
“This way,” she said. She waved the electromag wand at Nestor, and he limped after her. He may have been stupid, but he had figured out already that being knocked out cold even for a few minutes was no fun.
She wondered if the sphinx would be her last chance to ever shock the Papa.
They took the lift to her room. Nestor, eager, limped in ahead of her. Her heart pounded when she saw the remaining souls, still arrayed on the table, like a selection of chocolates. But Nestor did not go for the souls. He went to her window. Dark out, the window partly reflected the starglobe light above her experiment station. And partly reflected Nestor. “Is Nestor pretty? Are his eyelashes like golden wheat? Is his double-chin like the curve of fresh-fallen snow?”
“If you know how to talk poetically, why can’t you say ‘I’ instead of ‘Nestor’?”
“Are Nestor’s words like honey?”
“Whatever.” She fingered a soul, a dull one. “You hungry?”
Nestor, regarding himself in three-quarters profile, swallowed as if to test himself. “Is Nestor’s Adam’s apple like the vapor-shrouded moon?”
A faint voice said: “Who is that with you, Little Girl?”
She started. Had one of the souls spoken? But you never get a soul with buzz so strong that contextually relevant cogitations manifest.
A tap at the window. “Hey, Little Girl.”
It was the Living Will. He was outside her room, probably clinging to a drainpipe, looking at her with his shiny mirror eyes. “What’s that there with you, Little Girl?”
She was too tired to have it out with the Living Will. She wondered if he was smart enough to figure out what she’d done with the sphinx. “It’s my friend. My boyfriend.”
“That? A sphinx? An automaton?”
“Move over,” she told the sphinx, as she stepped closer to the window. “It’s mostly biological.”
“I see. I should apprise your father of this boyfriend.”
“Why? Is ‘relations with automatons’ an inheritance deal-breaker too?”
Nestor hadn’t moved though she’d told him to. He was staring at the Living Will’s mirrored eyes. “Two Nestors? Which is the prettier one? Tell me!”
“They’re the same, Nestor. Now can you move?”
The sphinx limped sideways, the dolly squeaking.
The Living Will said, “I also see you have fewer souls on your table.”
She shrugged. “So?”
The Living Will closed its eyes. She was pretty sure it was communicating with the Papa. It couldn’t even make simple judgments on its own.
“Are Nestor’s paws cute and softly padded?” the sphinx inquired, as he began to lick one paw.
By the time the Living Will opened its eyes again, she felt anxious. The Papa knew what she’d done to the sphinx, and she was about to suffer the consequences.
The Living Will said, “Your father turns himself off tomorrow.”
She tried to affect a yawn of boredom, and it turned into a real yawn, part exhaustion, part anxiety. “He’s not going to put it off because of the moodstorm?”
“He is working all night to propitiate the cloudmind.”
“Great. I’m looking forward to taking his place. Next storm it will be me losing sleep.”
“I’m glad you are accepting of the new order that is to be.”
“Accepting! I was being sarcastic! I don’t want to deal with the cloudmind bitch!” She felt tears in her eyes. “I don’t want the Papa to die!”
Nestor stopped licking his paw, and leaned his head against her waist.
“Ah,” said the Living Will. “Your father expected you might still be resistant. In fact, he sent me here to give you one more reason that he was turning himself off.”
“I’m all ears,” she said.
“He is punishing himself, because he has failed you.”
“Failed? How?
“He has not fulfilled his obligations to you as a parent. He has not optimized your happiness. He has not kept your brain at ten as he has kept your body.”
Oh, the old arguments, this time through a proxy. “It was keeping my body at ten that was the failure!”
“But ten is the ideal age for happiness.”
“That’s what he thinks.” So tired. “This is dumb, turning himself off to punish himself. It’s just another way of being irresponsible.”
“You should know his reasons.” Something shifted beneath the Living Will. Then there was a scraping, a clattering, and he was gone for a moment. A roof tile must have given way beneath him. When she saw him again his face was forty-five degrees off vertical, as if he’d climbed to a higher part of the roof and now had to lean to his left. “And another thing,” the Living Will said, “remember that a resurrected soul is an abomination. He trusts you have not installed one in this sphinx.”
“ ‘Neither an emotion more nor a perception less,’ “ she quoted.
“Good,” the Living Will said. “And one last thing, this one an inducement for your cooperation.”
“What? I’ll get to scrub the floors of the Elderhaus?”
“The Papa will grant you your fondest desire. Despite his own misgivings, he will give you the aging instruction set containing the biocode to restore your skeletal and endocrinal growth mechanisms.”
“He’ll let me grow up?”
“To your detriment,” the Living Will said, then it climbed down.
The sphinx looked up at her. Its man-face needed a shave. It said:
“Is Nestor not a comforting companion?”
In ancient times, nights were short because Earth spun quickly, young and in a hurry. Now Earth was old and slow, and it was a rare night that Little Girl slept through. But that night she slept until dawn, waking only because Nestor licked her face with his tongue rough as sandpaper. “Off me! That hurts!” she said. He jumped down from her bed. When she wiped her cheek, she came away with a little blood on her knuckles. “Were you going to eat me?”
“Are you supposed to meet Mister Alistair?”
“Oh! Shit!”
She jumped out of bed and hurried to her toilet, where she slapped some mending cream upon her cheek. Then she ate a summerfruit and fed Nestor a couple of souls. As they were about to leave, she noticed the floor and walls were scratched and wet in patches. “You woke up the walls too?”
“Does Nestor like to taste new things?” said the sphinx.
They met Alistair upstream from Rust Canyon, at a place called Dismal Columns.
The Columns were outcroppings of stone, conglomerations of rock and fossil and souls fifty or more feet tall, carved from an ancient mesa. There was a forest of them. Little Girl disliked the columns as a soul-source. She was afraid of heights, for one thing; the easy-pickings had been harvested long ago, by her mother and (so it would seem) the Papa. And of the souls that remained, most were distorted and disturbed. But Alistair contended that the distortions could yield souls with the best buzz imaginable.
“Check this one out!” said Alistair. He was twenty feet up one column, roped by the waist to it, a chisel in his hand. He threw something disk-shaped to her. It floated downward, spinning: a soul aerodynamically flattened. The sphinx batted at it, then knocked it down. She thought he would pounce on it, but he retreated from it. “Is Nestor scared?”
She picked it up. A shiver passed through her.
She felt dread and smelled sulfur and saw corpses on spits being turned by walking skeletons.
“Ew,” she said, dropping the soul. The bad things vanished. “I don’t like this one at all.”
She’d only seen the corpses for a second, but she was pretty sure one was her.
“Pretty disturbed, hey?” Alistair said.
“Yeah, getting roasted for dinner, that qualifies.”
“Roasted? I saw a man with a dog head tear out my heart then weigh it on a scale.”
“What is eschatology?” asked Nestor.
“Huh?” Little Girl said.
“I think he’s right,” Alistair said. “The soul shows the end of the world. Or maybe visions of Hell. What happens to you after you die. You want to use it on your father?”
“Why? It’s all one discontinuity for him. He doesn’t believe in life after death.”
“So? It could freak him out. Scare him enough to at least reconsider.”
“I don’t know. His imagination doesn’t tend that way.”
She didn’t say a second reason: she didn’t want to carry the soul back to her house. Unpleasant moods were bad enough. But she hated to hallucinate.
“Well, what do you want to do?” Alistair looked crestfallen. “Just let him off himself?”
“No, we’re here. Let’s look some more.”
So they searched for buzzy souls, Alistair shimmying high up columns where souls were plentiful, Little Girl on the ground where the souls were mostly gone, concavities in the columns the record of their onetime presence. When she began to despair at finding any souls, she persuaded Nestor to let her stand on his shoulders. He whimpered because of his broken leg but was still strong enough to lift her up. She found two buzzy souls. One was charged with contempt or maybe loathing. No good. The other, a blue soul with pink striations, so tingled with embarrassment that her face got warm. Maybe this one—
“Hello!” Alistair cried.
She jumped down from the sphinx. Alistair could see her.
“Little Girl, up here!”
Alistair stood atop one of the columns, waving a soul triumphantly. “Little Girl, are you embarrassed?”
How did he know?
She stepped away from the column and the blue soul.
Could Alistair’s soul read minds?
Maybe just emotions. That was the consensus they reached after a few minutes’ more experimentation, there in the early morning gloom of the Dismal Columns. If you touched it, touched this rubbery black soul mottled with gray thin spots where it had been attached to the top of the column, you would feel the emotion of the person you were looking at, or thinking of. Touching it while looking at Nestor made her feel like there was a feast laid before her after a long fast. Touching it while looking at Alistair made her feel confident.
And when they both touched it while looking at each other, love and pity hit her like a punch.
She broke loose, then looked away from Alistair.
“What it is,” he said, after a second, his voice weak and shaking, “is empathy. It amplifies the emotions that you sense naturally in someone else.”
“It was like feedback,” she said. “So much emotion could tear you apart.”
“Well, yeah.” He took a deep breath, as if summoning his courage. “Do you want to try it on your father?”
“I guess,” she said. “But I don’t want to touch it any more.”
Alistair carried the soul, wrapped in his T-shirt, his hairless back gleaming with sweat despite the fact that it was still chilly: the T-shirt just partly insulated the soul. He kept apologizing to the sphinx for burdening it with self-awareness. And to Little Girl for letting her father become so unhappy.
Little Girl finally snapped. “Quit saying you’re sorry!” She grabbed the soul away from him. She immediately regretted how harshly she had spoken. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He nodded. “It’s the buzziest soul I’ve ever found. If your father just touches it for a second, I think he’ll change his mind.”
But they were worried they would be so overwhelmed by their own sense of empathy, they would be powerless to act.
So they went to Alistair’s house, and got an insulating bag. A face, thick-lipped and strong-chinned, was molded in soft bas-relief on the side of the bag. The face was a gauge of the strength of the soul.
After they slipped the soul into the bag, the face’s expression went from calm to agonized.
“Is he upset?” said Nestor.
“Better him than us,” said Little Girl. It was just an automaton anyway.
That afternoon, they went to see the Papa, Alistair carrying the soul in the insulating bag.
Alistair looked puzzled when Little Girl strode past the elevator door. “Aren’t you going to put the sphinx away?”
“No,” she said. “He’s coming with us.”
“Your father will disinherit you for sure if he sees what you’ve done to it.”
“It will be insurance. If the soul doesn’t work we can try the sphinx on the Papa.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Papa wouldn’t trust me to take care of the cloudmind. He couldn’t kill himself then.”
“Is Nestor the ace in a hole?” the sphinx said. But Alistair looked dubious.
They walked the Corridor of Heredity, which connected the Tower to the Elderhaus. Little Girl was nervous. She had not seen the Papa for over three years. She studied the patterns in the floor tiles—double helixes of DNA, strands of Turing microcode. She used to imagine her own genes were on display here, and if she just memorized the tiles, she could figure out how to make herself get older.
The rattle of the dolly wheels against the tiles was annoying.
Last time she had seen the Papa it had been her birthday. Her sixty-fourth birthday. He gave her a sweetsponge with ten birthday candles to blow out. Ten! “Why don’t you just keep me in a time-lock!” she had shouted, letting her long blond tresses fall upon the candle flame.
But the flames were too cold to ignite her hair; the Papa had chosen low heat candles.
She’d shaved her head the next day.
Remembering her anger made her angry again. She yanked the door to the Elderhaus open so violently something popped in her shoulder.
“What’s that sound?” Alistair asked.
A woosh . . . woosh, regular and gentle. “The Papa’s respirator. It’s louder than it used to be.”
They walked through the sitting room, with its chairs of stone and its plush recliners. There was a faint odor, like flowers just beginning to decay.
“Does Nestor smell something good to eat?”
The sphinx had smelled the pantry. Left-ways and down a corridor. A half-opened door revealed empty shelves, bare meat hooks swinging from the ceiling, and a refrigerator that had evidently gone mental and perverse: it was not cold but so hot Little Girl could feel its warmth from twenty feet away.
Nestor started to push his dolly in the direction of the pantry, but Little Girl waved the wand and said, “Not lunch time yet.”
They went down a long corridor with a twist.
They reached her father’s room.
Suddenly she was of two minds, two inclinations. One was to knock. The other was to turn and run. That other was sweaty, loud, and strident.
“Well?” Alistair said.
“Goddamn,” she said. She rapped the brass ring on the door as hard as she could.
The door swung open.
The smell hit them first.
Rich, organic, like a thousand roses in a bathtub; sweet but rotting.
And then the Papa was gradually revealed.
You couldn’t see the Papa all at once. He was too big. You saw him in stages, in glimpses. Here a shoulder as big as a bed, there an elbow like a marble buttress, there his side high as her chin. He was pale white and lumpy. Gradually as they moved counterclockwise around the room, she was able to apprehend the whole person. He was naked and nearly filled the room. And it was a big room, the largest in the Elderhaus.
“Giantism?” Alistair asked.
It was true; he’d grown more large than fat.
He lay face down, supported from the ceiling by great rubber straps. An external set of mechanical lungs, big frilly sacks, inflated and deflated atop his back like badly positioned gills. Their woosh-woosh made a gentle breeze.
His head was in the dream closet: a structure like a freestanding wardrobe. It was painted glossy black, with yellow stars and blue half moons. She had painted it when she was young. When she was young, the Papa had fit in the dream closet completely.
“He’s working with the cloudmind?”
“Looks like it,” she said.
Nestor went to sniff one of the lumps: a little hand, pink and delicate, emerging from the neck as though to shake.
“This could be our chance to do the soul,” Alistair said, but before he had even opened the insulating bag, the Papa pulled his head out of the dream closet.
“My Sasha!”
It took her a while to respond, she was so fascinated by his head. His face had grown, but unevenly: his ears were as huge as saucers, lobes nearly dragging on the floor; his nose was like a trunk, curling past his chin; the wattles hanging from his jawline looked like goiters. Otherwise, his head looked very much as it had three years ago. The strangest thing about it was that it was not of the same scale as the body; it was human—not whale-sized. “I’m Little Girl.”
“The name du jour. And you are Alistair, still?”
Alistair said yes.
The Papa’s blue eyes were bright and animated. He looked at the sphinx. “And what do we have here?”
Little Girl warned the sphinx to stay quiet with a wave of her wand. “It’s an automaton.”
“It’s not sentient?” the Papa asked.
“No.”
“How can you date a machine?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I just said that to mess with the Living Will’s head.”
Usually that sort of revelation would inspire the Papa to give a lecture. But he seemed in good spirits today. “Excellent!” His tone of voice was almost jolly. “You have come to pay your last respects to me before I die?”
“We were hoping we could change your mind.”
“Change? Really?” The Papa laughed, revealing teeth that had grown too big for his mouth. “I’d think just seeing me would change your minds, rather. I’m a human bestiary! I have feet growing out of my belly and vermiform appendixes sprouting from my shoulder blades! Neoplasms grow from my head instead of hair! Eyes coil around my vertebrae like strings of fleshy popcorn! Sometimes alien chordates burst forth from my buttocks! Do you know how much that hurts?”
“Cool,” Little Girl said, slightly nauseated. She could see stiff hairs, colored green like seaweed, just beginning to emerge from his scalp.
“No, not cool. Painful, grotesque, humiliating!” He started to tear. But even his tears were weird. They were long and fibrous and as one fell from his cheek, Little Girl was able to catch it. It was a string of numbers, tiny saline precipitates: a code or program. “You hope to sentence me to continue this life of pain?”
“Well, I—” she began.
“We have something that would help your pain,” Alistair said.
“Great! What?”
“Right here.” Alistair reached into the insulation bag. Even as he pulled the soul out, his face went from confident to—
The sphinx lunged forward and gobbled down the soul.
“Nestor!” Alistair shouted.
“Do I have empathy for your condition?” Nestor said to the Papa.
The Papa’s eyebrows made an obtuse angle. “Do you what?”
“Does Nestor know how much you miss your wife sixty years later?”
“How could you know that?”
“Does Nestor know how your life has become unbearable? “
“How could you know anything?”
“Does Nestor understand how you wish to save your daughter from a similar fate?”
Little Girl shot an electromagnetic bolt at Nestor, and the sphinx fell down asleep.
“What was that?” the Papa asked. “Why was it asking questions?”
“Sphinxes are eternally doubting,” Alistair said. “Even of their own perceptions. They express their uncertain view of reality by making even their statements riddles.”
“I mean—” The Papa looked at Little Girl. “What did you do to it that it could be asking about empathy?”
“That was a buzzy soul it ate,” Alistair said. “The buzziness kindled a kind of self-awareness.”
“Nonsense! Sasha—Little Girl—did you enhance this sphinx?”
Her heart felt like it might pump itself it right out of her throat. No backup plan, no ace in the hole now. She said, “Its soul-cradle was empty. So we put a soul in.”
“You gave it self-awareness?”
“Well, more self-awareness. It was semi-autonomous.”
A shiver went down the Papa’s long body, the feet beneath his belly kicking as if reflexively. The angle between his eyebrows narrowed. “Sasha. Didn’t I prohibit you from doing that? Didn’t I warn you against it? Hasn’t the Living Will explained to you how I experimented with souls and moods as a young man, and now am paying the price with the blooming of my body? Do you not know how important it is to me to keep you from the same fate?”
She toed the sphinx’s tail. “Maybe I’d stop experimenting if you’d stay alive.”
“No. I don’t bargain. My daughter: another disappointment. Another thing to grieve for.”
“Grieving? You’re grieving?”
“Of course,” the Papa said. “You have violated the terms of my will. You will not inherit my estate.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t want it anyway.”
“And most grievous of all, you will not receive the aging instruction set.”
She stared at him, open-mouthed. Whatever grief she had been feeling seemed to melt away in the fires of her rage. “You’re not going to let me grow up? What happened to being sorry for keeping my body young?”
“I am sorry that I let your brain age but the rest of your body stay the same. I’m not sorry for keeping you at ten. Ten is the ideal age.”
She pointed her wand at him. Maybe if she blasted him with an EMG pulse, she could disrupt the biotronics of his breathing apparatus. But Alistair stepped in front of her, and said, “Sir, how can you let yourself die, if she’s violated the terms? Who will be responsible for dealing with the cloudmind?”
“She’s demonstrated she’s too irresponsible for that role.”
“You’re irresponsible!” she said. “You’re the one killing himself! You’re the one giving up the duty of caring for the cloudmind!”
“On the contrary,” the Papa said. “I prepared for this contingency. After I am dead, I will care for the cloudmind myself.”
He was going to upload. Skyloft. The Living Will explained it as they watched. Watched scurrying automatons cutting a door in the wall of the Elderhaus. Other machines lifting him onto the many-wheeled flatbed. The slow drive that took half the afternoon. The candy-cane stripes of the Living Will’s bell-bottoms. The Papa’s brain would be vaporized, disassembled, thought traces and soul circuits translated into gaseous ions, organized magnetic charges capable of constantly reinvigorating themselves. Then skylofted to the stratosphere where the magnetic record of the Papa’s consciousness would attempt to soothe and coddle the cloudmind.
“But you won’t be dead, then!” Little Girl said. She was sitting on the front edge of the flatbed, Nestor beside her curled asleep, the Papa’s head above her. The Papa was resting his cheek against a closet-shaped box much like the dream closet, but different. It had no moon-paintings on it, for one thing. It would kill him, for the other.
His long nose dangled within reach of her hands.
He said, “The skyloft will destroy my brain.” His voice was no longer jolly. “I will be dead.”
“You’ll be alive in the stratosphere,” she said.
“Something else will be up there. I’ll be dead.”
“But it will be you,” she said.
Alistair, sitting cross-legged on the flatbed, said: “It’s just like the forty Hertz binding cycle of the brain: you stop being forty times a second while your neurons reconfigure. It’s just like if you sleep: you wake up and it’s still you.”
“Biology is everything,” the Papa said. “Different physical substrate, different person, different self.”
She ran her fingers through the U of hair that the balding sphinx still had. “But up there. It will be a copy of you. It will think just like you.”
“The copy can worry about itself,” the Papa said. “I will be dead like your mother.”
She didn’t shout at him but petted the sphinx instead.
Maybe she was feeling a little of the empathic soul from it.
An hour before sunset, they reached the Gash Peculiar. From the high cliff, they could see Alistair’s house on the same side of the Gash, a mile off and looking like a piece of banana pressed into the cliffwall. The automatons, brush-footed, sturdy-limbed, rabbit-sized, pulled the flatbed to within a few inches of the edge, so close that a rock or two fell into the Gash. The automatons locked the flatbed into place.
Once the Papa’s mind had been skylofted, his body would be dumped into the Gash Peculiar.
“Why?” she asked.
“Is Little Girl disturbed?” asked the sphinx, who had finally awakened.
“I don’t see how she could be,” the Papa answered. “It’s just this tumor-ridden body that will be dropped in, not the self.”
Little Girl blinked, eyes watering. “I’m not a monster.”
“Ah, but I am,” said the Papa. “And the funeral arrangements will be simpler this way.”
“Damn you,” she said. Her chest was hot with anger and grief. Grief? “Damn you for being selfish.”
“I’m sorry,” the Papa said. “You’re right. I should be damned. I have been damned. What else is my blooming but a sentence of damnation?”
So speaking, tears dripped from his eyes and his nose.
“Is Nestor unbearably sad?” said the sphinx.
The Living Will had been overseeing the automatons while they prepared the dumping mechanism on the flatbed. Now he turned his attention to the group at the front. “Will you be kind enough to come over here? We’re about to begin the procedure.”
“Screw you,” Little Girl said, but she let Alistair lead her off the flatbed, Nestor limping behind them.
She sat with Nestor and Alistair about twenty feet away from the flatbed. The Living Will crouched near her father’s head, making adjustments to the skyloft box. The ground creaked and pebbles fell as the Living Will moved. She wondered if the cliff might collapse beneath the combined weight of him and the Papa, and both of them fall into the Gash. But almost as if the Living Will had read her mind, he looped a few guy-wires through his belt loops, then had a pair of little automatons stake the other ends of the guy-wires into the ground a safe distance from the edge.
“I’m going to stop this,” Little Girl said.
“Go for it,” said Alistair.
She waved the wand at the Living Will, and set off an EMG blast. The Living Will blinked. “Oh, no,” he said. He took a couple of steps toward them. She sent off another blast. He blinked again as his trousers turned spangled. As she was about to send a third blast, he grabbed the wand from her. He broke it across his knee.
“Hey man, that was mine,” Alistair said.
“I will remunerate you, with an object of equivalent value,” said the Living Will. Then he returned to the skyloft box.
“Crap,” Little Girl said.
“Does Little Girl grieve for her father?”
“I don’t get why,” she said. She rubbed Nestor’s glabrous head. “He’s right. He’ll be copied up there.”
Alistair looked thoughtful. “Intellectually you can separate his mind from his body. Emotionally you can’t.”
“Fuck,” she said.
“Is Nestor full of sadness, too?” The sphinx leaned its head against her shoulder.
A minute later the Living Will stepped back from the skyloft box.
The Papa looked at her, trunk nose twitching.
“Sasha,” he said, “I do love you.”
Her heart felt as though it would break.
“Whatever,” she said.
Now the Papa put his head into the skyloft box, and the Living Will lowered a sliding panel at the back of the box. The panel was polyformous; it reshaped its edges to snugly fit the Papa’s neck. A pain went through Little Girl. It felt as though the Papa was gone, and all that was left was this white whale of a body, with buttocks like sofas, appendages like paddles, green cilia for hair.
“The Papa left me a long time ago,” she said.
Alistair, sitting on the other side of the sphinx, squeezed her shoulder.
“Does Nestor feel all alone?”
She couldn’t comfort the sphinx. She was too deep in her own misery. She watched the Living Will step back from the flatbed and pick at his tinsel mustache as he considered the Papa. With the sun just setting, the Living Will was like a dark cardboard cutout against the peach and pinkish sky.
“Let’s charge it,” she said. “Let’s wreck it.” But she spoke so quietly Alistair said, “Huh?”
“Let’s—”
The skyloft box began to buzz as the Living Will took another step back.
It was starting.
Nacreous light pulsed across the gunmetal gray surface of the box. The buzz pitched higher, changed first into a whine and then into a keen, a sound painful enough that they covered their ears with their hands (or paws in Nestor’s case). Then as a shudder passed through the Papa, coxcombs on his spine and nipples on his thighs vibrating, she understood the procedure was beginning.
The scanning procedure. She knew about it. From the top of the brain, the post-neo cortex, to the bottom, the brainstem, the box sliced horizontally, progressing down in millimeter increments. Gamma rays, ultra-high energy, their wavelength a mere Planck unit, converged inside the brain, mapping neurons down to atoms, atoms down to protons, neutrons, and electrons. The measurement was so faithful and so fine-grained that the tissue was destroyed utterly. Down the vertical axis transverse slices were taken, post-neo cortex to neo-cortex, paleocortex to archicortex, subcortex to thalamus, cerebellum to brainstem. Successively more ancient and primitive structures were captured, a billion year history of brain evolution read backward.
The dozen feet hanging from the abdomen kicked and shuffled desperately.
“Could you close your eyes? Tell me!” said Nestor, who was sobbing.
She wondered at which point exactly the Papa’s consciousness came to an end; probably well before the brainstem was reached.
The big body went limp, feet going still, coxcombs, gills, and fins relaxing. Curiously, an arm that grew out of the Papa’s right knee began to flex, as if to flaunt its muscular bicep. Maybe a brain, some isolated lump of nervous tissue, had innervated the arm.
Then it went still.
“We’re done,” said the Living Will. He pressed a button on the skyloft box. The back panel rose and the Papa’s head flopped down. It was steaming. Blood trickled from its eyes and ears. The Living Will reached into the box and pulled out a dark mass about the size of a sourdough roll. Or more aptly, a cannonball.
The Papa’s soul. His entire self recorded into a five-dimensional array of magnetic monopoles, said array protected and insulated by a dark composite shell. The Living Will said to her, “Would you like to hold it for a moment?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Does she want to keep the Papa’s soul for herself?” said Nestor.
“No—” she said, but too late. The Living Will shook its head, then returned the soul to the skyloft box. Little Girl wished Nestor could be discreet.
The Living Will closed the back panel on the skyloft, then said:
“Ashes to ashes, rust to rust, he who is father to Sasha and Minister to the Cloudmind, commends his consciousness and spirit to the sky.”
With a roar, the top third of the skyloft began to rise.
It rose on a column of flame, a steady orange brilliance that blinded her for a moment. When she could see again, the skyloft had risen eighty or a hundred feet, and cast a cone of light bright as daylight on the Papa’s body and the Living Will, whose mirror eyes seemed to glow. When the skyloft was a little higher, Little Girl gasped. The cilia atop the Papa’s head were burning like candles.
“At least treat him with some respect!” she said. She ran over to the flatbed and put her hands on the Papa’s head, extinguishing the flames. Up close, she saw his eyelashes were singed.
His head felt fever-hot, from the flames or maybe the scanning procedure.
She pulled his eyelids closed.
Even though there was no brain to make those eyes see.
“Is Little Girl sad?”
“Leave me alone,” she said, but she let the sphinx nuzzle her hip.
Far above them, the skyloft was a bright star in the night sky, seeming motionless.
Then it burst open, blooming brightly red-orange-green like a firework.
The Papa’s mind had made it.
He was spread across the stratosphere.
The Living Will said, “You’ll want to step away.”
“Screw you, machine.”
But a minute later, she and Nestor were back with Alistair.
They sat on big stones made of crushed and petrified human shoes: cross trainers and high-heeled boots.
They watched the Living Will finish with the Papa.
He had the automatons cut loose all the rubber straps that had been supporting the Papa. The Papa’s big body slumped to the floor of the flatbed; she winced as his head fell down as if he were praying, forehead to the floor, trunk of a nose kinked into an S-shape. It would have hurt if he’d been alive.
Then the Living Will activated a control, and the flatbed rose up at one end like a ramp.
Slowly at first, huge inertia to overcome, the Papa slid down the ramp. Then fast, faster, great creakings in the vehicle, cracks as gantries were snapped off, and face-first the Papa fell down into the Gash Peculiar.
Boulders at the edge tumbled thunderously after him.
But there was no other noise as his body fell.
They sat on the edge of the cliff, staring down into the Gash Peculiar. A half-moon, swaddled with storm-clouds, had risen. It lit the opposite cliff-face a ghostly blue but did not penetrate deeply into the Gash. “Such a big fat man,” Little Girl said. “You’d think he would have gotten stuck in the Gash. But there was nothing . . .”
No splash, no lightshow, no chorus of the angels.
Alistair looked down. “Well, like you said, it wasn’t really him . Just his body.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Actually, it was more than his body that fell.”
The Living Will had moved closer to them. He had stooped down. His mirror eyes reflected the Moon.
“Who asked you?” Little Girl said.
“Your father asked me to explain this contingency. He deeply regrets the course of action that was necessitated by your violation of the terms of your inheritance.”
“He regrets throwing himself into the Gash?”
“He regrets—or I should say, regretted—that the memory went with him when he fell.”
“What memory?” Little Girl asked. “What do you mean?”
“The memory that contained the instructions for allowing you to grow.”
“Grow? You mean grow up?”
“Yes.”
Heart thump-thumping. “What do you mean—’it went with him?’ “
“A memory vial was within him.”
“He’d ingested it?”
“It was surgically implanted in his sacrum. Had you kept to the terms of the will, I would have removed it and given it to you.”
“You bastard,” Little Girl said. She stood up and charged at him. It would be so fine to knock him over.
But she couldn’t even move him.
Running into his leg was like charging into a tower of souls turned to stone.
* * *
The rain started falling as they walked toward Alistair’s house. Skin-numbing cold, wind-swept painful, it drenched them, soaked their clothes, gathered soggy in their shoes. It made walking tricky so they dared not get close to the cliffedge. It made sight difficult so Alistair’s house was just a smudge of light and the Gash Peculiar a solid purple wall. Worst, it made even breathing hard, for the rainwater was thick with moods, infused with sadness, shot-through with distress; it hurt to work her lungs when they seemed bound by barbed wire to terrible thoughts, to the memory of the dead Papa’s head flopping down, to stories of genocide and suns gone supernova, to the countless tragedies of the billion billion souls who formed the Earth’s crust but which were otherwise forgotten.
“We can maybe synthesize . . . growth hormone,” Alistair said, or sobbed. She found no assurance in his words.
“Does Nestor feel like he’s been buried alive?”
“At least you’re honest,” she told the sphinx. Then she said: “Unlike the Papa! He’s failing! He can’t control the cloudmind, not at all!”
“No,” Alistair said. “It’s not the cloudmind making this rain. It’s your father.”
“No, it’s not.”
“But it is,” Alistair said.
And in a voice devoid of joy, Nestor said: “He is crying for you.”
Then she swore, and swore, and swore, so she would not cry herself.
Copyright © 2010 David Ira Cleary