The Incrementalists (10 page)

“Oh, sorry. I wasn’t talking about me being here. I’m talking about what Celeste did.”

I stared at her. “You know about that? I haven’t seeded it yet.”

“Wait. You know about it? Then why—” She broke off. She looked at me for a moment, then stood up and walked over to the refrigerator. She opened it, and a tiny part of me was surprised that it was opening the wrong way, or the right way. She pulled out a bottle of Big Sky IPA. She opened it with the magnetized opener on the door of the refrigerator. She carefully threw away the cap, came back, sat down, and drank some.

“Help yourself to a beer,” I said.

“Phil, we may have … okay. What meddlework are you talking about that Celeste did?”

“Aftermath of the 2000 elections. I was with Oskar on that. I was ready to go to Florida, get some people to come clean, and blow the whole thing open. She stopped me. I just found out about it yesterday; she meddled.”

“I see,” said Irina quietly. “I hadn’t known about that.”

Irina had been a
maroon
in Haiti in 1754 and been stubbed by having her head crushed during a slave revolt. She had thought the revolt was a mistake, and her last seed, at that time, had been about loyalty, and the need to be with those you loved even when they were doing the wrong thing. The look on her face while she seeded that must have been much like the look on her face now.

“That isn’t what I’m talking about, Phil.”

“Irina,” I said, “you have my complete and undivided attention.”

She took another sip of beer. “This is good,” she remarked. “Microbrew?”

“From Montana,” I said.

She nodded and cleared her throat.

“I’ll tell you what set off the alarms in my head,” she said. “How long have we known each other?”

“About seven hundred years, give or take.”

“What you did to that girl, to Ren—”

“What did I do to her?”

“For Chrissakes, Phil! You put Celeste into someone with close genetic ties to herself, and you let Ren take Celeste’s stub without a full explanation, and you, shit, you did everything it’s possible to do to arrange things so Ren would be wiped out and replaced, and you concealed what you were doing.”

“I—”

“Shut up. That’s what you did. The point is, it isn’t like you.”

“I—”

“However,” she said, staring hard at me, “it is very, very much like Celeste.”

I stared back at her.

It sank in. And sank. And kept sinking. Ramifications, implications, consequences. They all just tumbled home. I finally got it.

For the first time in more than five hundred years, I put my head in my hands and sobbed.

Ren

I was sinking. And sinking. I should have anchored myself in the brilliant empty place Phil showed me when we danced, but I was too tired, and maybe a little drunk. Elise and I hadn’t left much in that bottle. I kept sinking. I let all the spaces between things elongate—more air between my muscles’ strings, more empty under my skin. I was sinking into sleep, or it was rising up around me. I was floating in it. Like flying.

I wanted to fly.

I drifted, sailing over timeless sweeps of memory. Over Matsu’s garden. Ramon’s grid. Phil’s villa, with its low Roman wall and its prehistoric, terrifying date palm.

His sharp-fronded right-in-front-of-me date palm.

I was sitting in Phil’s date palm, stuck too high off the ground on a trunk made of scales, in yards and yards of lilac muslin, my legs spread embarrassingly wide for balance on the foreshortened flat part of a long and very spiky frond.

I remembered that tree from his Las Vegas yard. And I remembered this dress, its well-made, delicate layers of cloth, and the freedom of a dancing gown worn uncorsetted again at last. It was
trés Neo-Grec
, draped after what the dressmakers said was the classic style. I never told them otherwise; the high waist and low cut were too flattering. But really all wrong for trees.

A man stood under me, looking up my skirts. I yanked the muslin around to cover my thighs, and tore it.

“My dear lady, you have treed yourself,” he said. “Will you come down?” His blond hair was cropped close, and his fingers were long and slender—more delicate than mine. “Aristocratic” could be the only word for those pale hands, yet this was Oskar. I was certain of it. Whoever had chosen this Second for him had been teasing just a little, putting his stub into an aesthete’s body. He wore a peasant’s coarse flax and a red neckerchief anyway.

“Thank you, no. My dog will come,” I told him. Oskar had been a woman during
La Révolution
, but had not survived to wear the lovely dresses after. Had he been female since? Not during the buttoned-up days when the high waists dropped again and the corsets came back with a vengeance. But since when did I give so much thought to clothes?

“Aren’t you afraid of falling?” he asked.

“No. Not afraid of falling or heights. I’m quite happy up here. As soon as I untangle my dress, I’ll fly off again.”

“He could have killed you.”

“Incrementalists can’t be killed,” I said. “Not really.”

“But you weren’t one yet, just a nemone, no memories beyond your one life’s brain-bound ones.”

My dress was truly Greek now, a woolen peplos. I hiked the skirts of it up and swung my legs around. “You take risks with the nemones all the time,” I reminded him.

“Now you sound like Celeste.”

I had to think a moment. “I don’t know Celeste.”

“Celeste of the Little Steps,” Oskar’s voice was cold. “Stuck in a tree because she won’t jump.”

“I’m not Celeste,” I said. “And legs are broken by bold leaps.”

“Progress only happens in leaps. Mutations, not evolutions. Small steps are fine, sometimes. But if you mince when circumstances call for bounds, you hold back progress. Hold it back enough and it goes in the other direction. That’s why liberal policies support reaction, however much the liberal may wish otherwise.”

I didn’t want to fall. Someone was coming. “Lukos!” I called, but saw right away that it wasn’t.

“Wolf!” I cried as it got closer, but I already knew it wasn’t one of mine.

I—the primal I, the Primary I—haven’t had a life without a dog since we first trapped wild wolf pups and hand-raised them. I’ve called them all “wolf,” or the word for it in the language of the moment. Dogs have herded and pulled and hunted for me, with their strong bodies and faithful eyes, creatures well-suited to their lives, time-designed to love and serve.

The Dog of Good Design dutifully began chewing down the tree I was trapped in. “Good dog,” I said, and gave Oskar a benevolent smile. He shrugged. I fed the dog a date from the tree he had gnawed down to hip level, and stepped from its leaves into the dusty courtyard. Phil had admired this merchant’s villa in his life as a Roman shoemaker and had chosen it as his metaphor for memory when he took the spike.

I left Oskar in the courtyard sampling Phil’s dates. The Dog of Good Design and I walked soundlessly out of the courtyard to the red-and-white jungle gym from the backyard of my childhood home. Phil stood on its summit, like king of the mountain, smelling like summer grass and pink lemonade. He jumped down between the bars and turned to face me, Persephone’s fruit in his large hands. I wanted to tell him not to eat the dreams, but with his long neck and agile fingers, he looked more like an iguana.

He was no bigger than my dog now, but I knew I was falling for him. I bent down and reached a hand under a horizontal red bar to stroke his lizard’s back, scaled like the date palm’s trunk. But he shrugged off my finger and shook his wings free. The jungle gym folded into their fierce ribbing and stretched outward. He put a thumbless claw on my shoulder and reached out his serpentine dragon’s neck to kiss my ear.

But he bit it instead, with electronic teeth that stabbed into my dream.

I reached out and slapped my alarm clock.

The Winged Iguana of Love kissed me between my eyes and flew away. The Dog of Good Design licked his balls. I guess he was made that way.

I checked my phone.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Schedule for today

Monday, July 4, 2011 8:42 am GMT - 7

Hey Kiddo—

Hope you managed to keep yourself entertained in Vegas over the weekend. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.:-) Jorge has rescheduled for this afternoon at The Palms. We’re going to finally do this thing! Obviously, I won’t be there for breakfast, but have a mimosa on me!

See you by 5:00.

Liam

I didn’t admit to myself how pleased I was that Phil had made sure it wasn’t Liam meeting me at the 24/7 Café. For all the craziness in the world he’d spiked me into, I knew I was falling in love with him, and Oskar had a point after all. You can’t fly if you don’t jump. I showered and checked out of New York, New York, Las Vegas and got to The Palms in time to run up to my room and drop off the stuff I’d stolen out of it last night when I was running away from Phil and Irina. I was ready for both of them, if necessary, although I had to fight off a grin when I spotted him sitting alone at the table I’d first picked a week ago as the least likely to attract company.

He saw me and smiled, but stood up slowly looking tired or wary. I smiled back and saw something in his eyes collapse.

Phil

I had apparently stood up to greet her, and since I couldn’t figure out why, I sat down again.

“What’s wrong?” were the first words out of her mouth.

“Alphabetically or chronologically?”

“Prioritized by crisis level.”

“God. That requires thinking.”

Kendra arrived and asked Ren if she wanted anything. When she didn’t answer, I said, “Tea.” Ren looked mildly startled, then nodded. I said, “Dreams?”

When no answer came, I discovered I’d been staring into my coffee cup, so I looked up and she was staring at me; the expression on her face said she had no intention of being sidetracked, but was quite willing to wait all day if necessary. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Sometimes that helps. Not usually.

“Well, well, Philip. Who is this?”

Christ Jesus. “Hello, Captain. This is Ren. Ren, this is the Captain.”

“How do you do?” she said like a machine. “Captain of what?”

“I’ve never figured that out. Why did you start calling me that?”

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “They were calling you that when I met you.”

“Mind if I join you?”

I opened my mouth, but Ren said, “Actually, I’d love to talk to you another time. But we’re kind of in the middle of something.”

I looked up at the Captain and nodded. “Another time, then,” he said. “Good to meet you.”

He walked away and Ren said, “Did you do that on purpose?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I don’t know how I’d—no.”

“Phil, what happened?”

I was saved again by her tea arriving. If this would just continue, maybe I’d never have to say anything. That wouldn’t be good, but it would be better than speaking.

Silence stretched out, and I said, “Do I have to?”

“I think you do,” she said. There was something even and strong in her voice. I remembered when I was studying her, considering her as a potential recruit, I’d picked up on that strength. The sort of strength that shines brighter the more things around you fall apart. She’d shown it when she was fourteen and her grandfather had died; she’d shown it when she was seventeen and her father was arrested for fraud. She’d shown it in college when her dormmate had OD’d on Vicodin. I could use that strength just now, if only I could figure out how to tap into it.

I finally said, “It’s about Celeste. All right, so she meddled with me. But it turns out that’s not all. It seems—”

“Wait,” she said. “First of all, who is Celeste?”

I looked up and studied her. No, she wasn’t joking. I looked at her some more. She still wasn’t joking.

“What?” she said.

“Are you joking?”

“About what?”

She really wasn’t joking.

“Give me a moment,” I said.

One plus zero is one. One plus one is two. One plus two is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three is eight. Eight plus five is thirteen …

After a while, I said, “Well. And here I thought we had problems.”

Ren

I suspected Phil grew his mustache to hide the dimple that lurked just under its outmost edge on his right cheek. It usually did a poor job, but today the inviting little line was fully cloaked. Nothing in his face was giving anything away. Even when he met my eyes, there was nothing I could read in his. But as he sat across the table from me, holding his coffee in both hands and not talking, a bubble of terrible sadness opened up behind my solar plexus.

“Celeste?” I prompted.

He just nodded.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know her,” I said. “Did you get bad news?”

Worry twitched his eyebrow. “You remember me, right, Ren? And what we’ve been doing the last couple of days? The Incrementalists?”

I thought about his body against mine, dancing in his little flower-filled house, and about the slow seep of memories getting deeper and deeper in me, of lives I’d lived, some with him. “I remember,” I said. “Is Celeste part of that? Something I haven’t remembered yet?”

“You used to remember her.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Phil lifted his cap and smoothed his wild brown hair back against his scalp, retwisting the elastic that held it at the nape of his neck. I’d seen the same swift twist tie back periwigs and plaits. Behind him, a blond man walking past the café watched the same gesture with something like the same interest.

I refocused. “Something has happened to Celeste?” I guessed.

“She died.”

“Oh, God. Phil, I’m so sorry. She was someone you cared about?”

“Very much.”

“Someone you were in love with?” Even asking the question made my stomach twist.

“I thought so.”

“Are you still?”

“Good morning, Ren. Phil.”

“Irina.” Phil kept his voice carefully scrubbed of emotion, but a scowl hovered just above his eyes. “I’ve got this,” he said.