Near + Far (26 page)

"Enough," I said. "Let's tag the find, in our names, Pippi."

She dropped back. I clung to the rigging, started to thumb in figures. She pushed forward. "Let me, it's faster." Fingers clicking, she muttered under her breath, "Get us all home quicker that way."

I took over after she'd tagged the spot and put the coordinates in. I was trying not to be angry. Hope mellowed out some of the harsh emotion. It could be a significant find. It was nice of Star to give up his claim.

Back in the ship bay, the lights laddered his face till he looked like a decoration. Pippi was strapping our find into a jitney.

"Why not a place where there's rain?" I said.

"That could only be Earth," he said. "Do you know the worst thing about rain there?"

"What?"

Pippi tied a rope into place, tested it with a quick tug, glanced over her shoulder at us.

"Rain there has gotten so acidic that if I stand out in it I have to come in and shower after a few minutes. It damages my outer skin."

I tried to picture the cold, then acid burn. Luna was better.

"I'm sorry about Pippi."

She honked the horn.

"Go ahead. I'm taking the tram over to the Cluster," he said.

I hesitated. "Meet me later?"

"I'll call you."

He didn't, of course. We cashed in the case—a lump sum from a company's R&D division that doubled our incomes and then some.

I texted him, "Come celebrate with us, we're dockside and buying dumplings." But he didn't reply until three days later. "Sorry, things got busy. Bought house. Come out and see it."

"When?"

"Tomorrow morning. I'll make you breakfast."

I left in the morning before Pippi was awake.

His place was swank, built into a cliff-side, with a spectacular view of the endless white plains below. He made me waffles with real maple syrup. He was an amazing cook. I said so.

"I was programmed that way," he said, and made a sound that was sort of a laugh.

The sexbots—all of the AIs struggling for emancipation lately—had had to demonstrate empathy and creativity. I wondered what that had been like.

He was standing uncomfortably close. I leaned forward to make it even closer, thinking he'd draw back.

He didn't.

"I'm programmed a certain way," he said.

"How is that?"

"I want to please you. But at the same time I know it's just the way I'm programmed."

"It can't be something more than that?" My arm was pressed against his surface. It was warm and yielding as flesh. I couldn't have told the difference.

He pulled away. I bit my lip in frustration, but I liked him enough to be civilized.

I drank the last of my coffee. Real Blue Mountain blend. He kept his kitchen well stocked for human visitors—who did he hope would stop in?

As it turns out, Pippi. Next time I came through on a quick flight (I might be rich, but who was I to turn down fast and easy money?), she told me how he'd fed her.

"Pasta," she said, rolling the words out. "And wine, and little fish, from Earth. And afterwards something sweet to drink."

She said they'd fucked. I believed her. It wouldn't be her style to lie. It would never occur to her.

So I did and said I'd fucked him too. She didn't respond, not right off the bat, but I caught her looking at me oddly by the time I said toodle-oo and went off to sleep in my ship.

It wasn't the first time I'd slept in there, not by a long shot.

I wished them both happiness, I supposed.

Still, two weeks later, I came in response to Pippi's panicked call. He was going back to Earth, she said.

We both showed up at the farewell hall. He was standing with a tall blonde woman, Earth-fat. Star slipped away from her, came over with a bearing jaunty and happy, his polished face expressionless as always.

"Who is that?" Pippi said.

"A journalist. She's going to help me tell my story, back on Earth."

"I see," Pippi said. She and I both surveyed the woman, who pretended not to notice us. Her manicured hand waved a porter over to take her luggage aboard, the hard-shelled cases the same color as her belt.

Pippi said, "Is this because you don't want to fuck me any longer? You said you liked it, making me feel good. We don't have to do that. We can do whatever you like, as long as you stay."

He averted his face, looking at the ship. "That's not it."

"Then what?"

"I want to go back to the rain."

"Earth's acid rain?" I said. "The rain that will destroy you?"

Now he was looking at neither of us.

"What about your place?" Pippi said.

"You can have it," he said. "It never felt like home."

"Will anyplace?" I asked. "Anywhere?"

"When I'm telling my story, it feels like home," he said. "I see myself on the camera and I belong in the world. That's what I need to do."

"Good luck," I said. What else could I say?

Pippi and I walked away through the terminal. There were tourists all around us, going home, after they'd played exotic for a few days, experienced zero-grav and sky-diving and painted their faces in order to play glide-ball and eaten our food and drunk our wine and now were going home to the rain.

We didn't look at each other. I didn't know how long Star's shadow would lie between us. Maybe years. Maybe just long enough for sunlight to glint on forgotten metal, out there in the sky. Maybe long enough and just so long.

Afternotes

A central source of inspiration for this piece was a combination of Robert A. Heinlein's
Podkayne of Mars
and "The Menace From Earth"—indeed, the plot is shamelessly stolen from the latter, mainly because that story always infuriated me with its assumptions about teen-age girls. It was originally written for a contest focusing on disabilities in science fiction, but Sean Wallace snagged it after taking an early look.

The title is taken from a favorite e.e. cummings poem, "as freedom is a breakfastfood."

The story appeared in
Lightspeed Magazine
, edited by John Joseph Adams, the same year the story "Amid the Words of War", which is included in + Far.

M
y neighbor makes robotic cats.

Perhaps cyborg cats would be a better term, since they're an amalgam of metal and plastic parts he took from Microsoft Research Labs a few blocks away, and fur and flesh from the home kit he used to clone his own cat, a one-eyed, lop-jawed male.

His creations haunt our landscape of condominiums and ruin. They ratchet and swivel their way through the desiccated cedar bushes after the squirrels and Stellar's Jays they cannot catch. There are three of them so far.

He offered to make one for me, in return for my picking up his supplies each week, but I declined and said it was no trouble. He is elderly, and his two false legs make it difficult to travel. As the youngest man in the complex, I felt obliged to help him out.

He thanked me. His immense cat rubbed against his legs, watching its two descendents out in the parking lot, circling each other on the cracked asphalt. Up on a telephone pole leaning at an angle, victim of a windstorm ten years past, three crows sat at angles and cawed in slanted commentary. We stood with our arms folded, men discussing the world as it faded around us.

"I'm going to make a kitten next," he said.

"A kitten?"

"Yep. I'll make the brain pan small. Juice it up a bit."

"Juice it up how?"

He squinted at me. At one point he worked for a large company, and the habit of secrecy has stuck with him. I half expected him to say, "Have you signed an NDA?" He hawked and spat instead.

"There's chemicals," he said.

"I think it's a bad idea, Joe."

"Why?"

The two Frankenstein cats traced slow loops around each other. They purred and spat, confused by their own proximity, caught between longing and antipathy.

"Just do," I said.

"The ladies might like 'em."

"Maybe."

"Yer gal might like one."

"Celeste? Yeah, she might. I dunno."

"Always seems such a sad girl. A kitten would cheer her up."

"We're all sad, Joe. We're living at the end of the world."

He squinted up at the immaculate, cloudless sky, then looked back at the cats grooming themselves. "Least we're living," he said.

"Do you ever think about what might have happened to them?"

"Ain't like wondering will make us find out any sooner."

We turned to look at the parking lot. Past it lay the cabana and boat docks, the wood long since fallen into decay, overgrown with water lilies except where we had cut them back to keep the fish pens clear. Two golden eagles circled the lake in slow loops and a heron worked its way along the shore.

"I guess it won't," I said. "Still."

"I ain't saying it wouldn't be nice to know."

He named the first robotic cat Gaston Le Deux, after its progenitor. Its skeleton, supplemented with outside struts and ribs made from red plastic, gave it a macabre toy's appearance. It had something wrong with its ears, which stayed in the same position always, never flicking back or forward in the subtle language cats employ. This stillness gave it an uncanny appearance, dead but blinking.

The second was covered with fur but had steel paws that clicked awkwardly when it walked. Joe christened it Pierre, but another neighbor, Sally, started calling it Patches when some of its fur fell off.

The third he called Heracles and refused to divulge the name's origin.

"If you have to ask!' he would say, blue-veined hand fluttering outward like a broken-winged sparrow. "Well, then." Then he'd subside into silence.

Heracles was the most monstrous looking; the cloned fur had grown awry and clumped in angry black bristles. Like the other two, it was neuter, unsexed. The construction-surplus orange hue of its eyes proved their artificial nature. It was nowhere to be seen at the moment; it spent its time skulking in the dry juniper bushes.

Today's clear sky meant everyone would have their curtains closed tight against the ultraviolet. I checked my truck to see if the windmill had generated enough juice for me to go to the market. We were close enough to walk, but in these unrelenting days, I wanted to stay out of the sun. Skin cancer brewed along my forearms. No sense in making it worse. The battery had charged, so I went around to the five occupied apartments to see who needed anything.

Sally wanted canned peaches if they had any. Mrs. Daily had an armload of orders, shirts she'd sewn. I stuffed my pockets with vouchers and lists.

I loaded up the truck with baskets of salmon to trade. It was not fit for human consumption, of course, but as a cheap feed for livestock it would be worth some vouchers. Beyond that, we had smoked trout and squash and peppers from the garden, along with comfrey.

It's not a long ride over to the market. The usual stores were open—the market occupied the old Redmond Town Center mall, anchored in the middle with a waterless fountain of a bear and cubs. There used to be a Starbucks there. And everywhere.

Nowadays, ever since It happened, there's not so many. There's not so many of anything.

We only know a few facts, although there are many speculations:

1. On November 14, 2017, at 7:07 pm PST, the majority of the world's inhabitants vanished, leaving a very small number (some estimate 1 in 10000, others even smaller figures). A few people wanted to claim it was the Rapture, but when it became evident every religious sect, Christian or otherwise, was represented in those left behind, that theory died away.
   
2. No children have been born since then.
   
3. In the following years, society collapsed, not with a bang, but a whimper. The East Coast broke out into assorted kingdoms which battled each other, but few people wanted to work hard enough to build an empire. Here on the West Coast, most felt content to live out their remaining years. They clustered in the larger cities, although a few chose to live in isolation, vanishing into national parks or other deserted stretches.
   
4. No one in politics survived, even those with the most tenuous connections.
   

Other leadership, more reluctant but more thoughtful, arose in the politicians' place. Here in Redmond, a market formed through the work of two men who said they were brothers, even though that seemed unlikely. Their store sold scavenged goods, bartering them for fresh food or long-hoarded treasures. We moved the library down to the old Borders and everyone brought books as they found them. Caroline Livegood lived in the back there, and spent her days cataloging and sorting books, subsisting on the food the market brought her. Perhaps a hundred of us lived around the market. Another thousand or so over in Seattle; smaller groups in other towns.

A self-appointed committee tried to keep water and power running at first, but as people grouped up, they formed small enclaves dependent on their own water and power. Villa Marina edged Lake Sammamish as well as the park, so we turned to growing vegetables in the old Pea Patch Community Sites, thick with rapacious comfrey that Sally chopped and boiled for medicinal tonic. Haphazard travelers carried mail for pay. Some, rumors said, just went through the mail for valuables once they left town, throwing the rest away.

At any rate, the market is the closest thing we have to a town hall. There's a computer network in the old Starbucks, which another woman runs off wind and solar cells and scavenged batteries, and sometimes people bring mp3s or software to the market to test them on the system there.

The other stores have been sorted through for the useful and distributed through the market or the companion stores flanking it, selling clothing and technology.

I found three boxes of old-time candles at the Market. The label said T.J.Maxx. 12.99 each, but I got all three for a half-bushel of peppers, which was a good deal. I swapped the fish around back near REI –no humans would want to eat the salmon, swollen and ghost white, but as I said, they make good animal food. The Home Depot rep was there this week; next week he'd be down in Bellevue, so I traded him squash for some rope and screws, as well as several seed packets: sunflowers, hot peppers, tomatillos. No need to look through the envelopes of winter vegetables. Our lives will fall away in heat and growing silence.

I was sorting through canned vegetables and fruit when I caught sight of Celeste.

She wore black as always. She says she is in mourning for the human race and manages to say it sincerely. Most of us sound insincere when we say anything like that, I've noticed. We smirk too, unable to avoid the irony in the phrases. The Last Days. The Final Years. The End of Civilization. Or we mark it by the happening: the Vanishing, the Disappearing, the Gone.

Celeste and I met two years after it. She used to go sit beside the Sammamish River late at night, light candles and float them down the silent, black water in origami boats. I walked a lot in those first frightening days and stood there watching, when she turned and looked at me.

I spoke, wanting to reassure her I meant no harm. "The boats are pretty," I said. "What are they for?"

"They're to carry lost souls to the afterlife."

"Think there's many lost souls around?" Further down the river, the frogs sang frenzies. It was one of those moist, damp springs we used to get, when everything was growing and alive at once.

"Aren't we all lost souls?" she said. She rose from where she squatted on the bank and walked forward to shake my hand. "Two lost souls, swimming in a fish bowl ... "

I chuckled. "Do you live around here?" I asked, and blushed with the inanity.

"Down in Bear Creek, near Redmond Town Center. Where the herons are."

"I'm over at Villa Marina. Past Marymoor."

She nodded.

"Well, it was a pleasure meeting you," I said awkwardly. The only light was that of the full moon above, obscured by wispy clouds like curdled milk.

"Do you want to light a ship?" she asked.

"I do."

I stayed and lit a candle and sent it bobbing down the river, off into the darkness. We were friends after that, and nodded to each other at the market and library, and little by little, over the intervening eighteen years, we became lovers. She sent those ships out every week. In all the time Celeste has done this, I've never found any of those boats washed up on the lake shore.