Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (109 page)

One day, while playing find-the-bottle, Paper catches Bird drinking deep from a fifth of whiskey they’d discovered not a week earlier, one she’d thought had burst into the usual hole. She snatches the bottle from his hand and shatters it against the porcelain sink. Bird’s face begins to elongate into that horrible beak, skin shifting to barbed feathers, hands to scaled talons, as if he’s swallowed a black hole and it’s consuming him from the inside.

From the empty silence surrounding them comes the susurrus of their mother’s presence. Then mother and son are wrestling on the bathroom floor, him a winged, clawed monster, her a disembodied hush and ten fingernails that rake deep red furrows down his biceps. Paper squeezes her eyes shut tight as fists.

The house knows the three of them can’t go on like this, wants to help, and does what it can, battening down the insulation to keep in warmth against oncoming winter.

Master bathroom features two sinks and a separate shower area.

Paper arrives home from school to find the dim outline of her mother seated on the bathroom floor, the under-sink cabinet open and a whiskey bottle next to her. Eyes unseeing, Needle’s hands clutch at empty air. A black hole shimmers unreality beneath her. Paper wants to grab her hands and pull her away from the danger, but she’s been here before: If she’s not terribly careful—the house has watched it happen too many times—she’ll be sucked in as well.

Paper sifts through her mother’s sundry crafting bins until she finds something she thinks will work: a long skein of heavy cord in pale blue. She makes a lasso of cord and loops it over her mother’s shoulders, grips the end, and tugs. Needle tumbles free and the hole blinks out into memory.

Her mother lies comatose, her outline shimmering, a needle held up to light and turned this way and that so its eye flickers into and out of existence. Needle stares through her daughter, and Paper feels as invisible as she’d ever wished to be. She takes her mother’s cold hand in hers. Gently she loops blue cord around Needle’s bloodless fingers. Round and round it ravels. Paper is painstaking; she threads the skein about her mother’s every limb in ever-tightening circles, tugging the cord taut against her mother’s incorporeal corpus.

It takes all day and late into the night for Paper to wind cord, thread, yarn, and string—two full bins of material—around her mother’s body, a body shaped just like her own will be someday. Wrapped up like a spindle or a mummy, Needle can once again be seen. She meets her daughter’s eyes, pupils contracting and expanding in bewilderment.

Needle moves around the house more freely after rejoining the land of the visible, stacking boxes of their father’s things in the garage and out of sight, returning to her crafting, even hugging Paper every so often, though Bird still won’t go near her. The house, thrilled to have Needle back, stretches happily through the long wires inside its walls, solid in the surety of their connection to the outside world. The house can appreciate ties that bind.

Small attic for extra storage.

Bird’s slept in the attic since his mother’s attempted pinioning. He tugs the pull-down ladder up behind him each night, just to be sure. Skin mottled with brown tufts of downy feather, face craggy with shadow, he hunches his back under the weight of the full-grown wings arcing over his head. Bird has been working, saving up for his great escape, and he’s finally made enough, just six days shy of eighteen.

Paper’s stolen her mother’s shears; with them, she cuts Bird free of the silvery blue cord binding him to Needle. She holds out a loose twist of yellow embroidery thread, one end attached to the attic furnace. He recoils, hissing, but she pats his arm to reassure him: he’s tied only to his childhood home, not to Needle. His eyes are falcon-hooded; nevertheless, he allows her to encircle his wrist with the thread. It glimmers in sunlight, golden bright and joyful. He stands to his full height, aware that he’s taller now than their father had been. Stretching dark wings, he’s poised to swoop down from the attic window.

The house is having none of this. It bares paned-glass teeth and snaps a sill shut on Bird’s boot heel. Bird and Paper cry out, and then she braces herself against the window-frame and yanks upward, and Bird loosens his shoelaces and dives downward, and there’s just his black boot stuck in the house’s craw as he swoops low, then speeds sky-high. Windows rove wild-eyed; doors slam open and shut, enraged. Their father’s frayed red thread is still out on the lawn, its color faded to pink. Paper stares after her brother until the black dot of him winks out against the horizon, yellow thread pulled taut as it spools out thinner and thinner.

All through the night, the house growls and shudders like earthquake, terrified that soon it will be plunged into darkness. It’s grown too much like Needle, in her desperation and possessiveness, and too much like Glass, wanting only to be filled. The house’s fears form a yawning black hole that encompasses its plot entirely, as if the earth planned to open like a cellar door and suck the neighborhood underground like a hundred birdhouses perched atop quicksand. The house is immobile and has no means of escape, but it’s seen the family deal with enough such holes to understand their operations.

The dog is in a state of advanced decomposition when the house coughs Lucky up from its bowels. It’s swaddled the body in insulation, but that doesn’t much contain the stench; Paper finds the corpse almost immediately. Tugging a sleeve over her nose, she rolls it into the garden with a rusted shovel and leaves it to mulch. By summertime, the remains will be skin and bones and the hydrangea blooms nearby especially lovely.

Paper walks upstairs to stand before her mirror, turning sideways as if reveling in the acute angles she’s made of her body. Taking one hand in the other, she folds herself in half, then does it again and again and again. By the time the house realizes, long before it can formulate a plan to stop her, she’s disappeared. Her mother finds her that evening, a single sheet of translucent paper, a note explaining what she’s done. Needle and the house are left alone.

Large manicured front lawn with mature trees. Please call Arbor Realty to schedule an appointment to view this property.

A mess of bishop’s weed obscures the walkway. A lattice trestle covered in ivy creeps upward toward the roof’s edge. The house’s eyes are shut, mouth closed and locked up tight. Neighbors who walk past keep on moving; dogs pull their owners across to the other side of the street. The house mutters, settles into its cracked foundation. It monitors the single bright yellow thread that arcs into the distance, waiting for any movement on the line, any sign that its winged boy will soon fly home.

About the Author

Brooke Wonders
writes fiction that thinks it’s true and memoir that thinks it’s fabulism. Despite these oxymora, her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from
Monkeybicycle, Daily Science Fiction,
and
Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction,
among others. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A graduate of Clarion UCSD 2011, she shares an urban shoebox with fellow writer and partner in crime James Will Brady.

Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels

Mark Cole

“Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.”

—Isaac Asimov,
Foundation and Empire

Robots. That’s what most people think of first when they think of Isaac Asimov—and certainly, his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics are among the best he wrote. But he also came up with another unique and equally memorable science fiction concept: psychohistory.

Psychohistory (originally hyphenated as “psycho-history”) first appeared in the short stories Asimov would later collect in his episodic novel
Foundation
. Set in a distant future, the book details a vast, galactic empire which has controlled thousands of inhabited worlds for 12,000 years. The empire is on the verge of breakdown. However, very few people have realized this, primarily those working with the great mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon’s mathematical models have shown conclusively that the Empire will collapse within a few hundred years, followed by a 30,000 year dark age before civilization is rebuilt.

Seldon’s great accomplishment was his reinvention of the discipline of psychohistory. What had been little more than a set of vague axioms became, under his leadership, a profound statistical science, capable of charting the rise and fall of civilizations—and even, Seldon argued, of guiding the course of civilization so that the 30,000 years of darkness could be reduced to a mere millennium.

The underlying logic of psychohistory resembles Boyle’s gas law: The molecules in a gas move in a purely random way, and yet, collectively, that random behavior become predictable. So if you get enough people together (and Asimov very carefully avoided any suggestion of just how many), you could reduce the apparently random actions of billions of human beings to a set of physical laws describing the behavior of civilizations. That number, the Seldon constant, was extremely high—high enough that it could only be found in the vastness of the Galactic Empire.

On the surface this sounds fairly plausible, even if the degree of accuracy Seldon claimed for his work doesn’t. Yet it is far from clear that Asimov believes in his own invention. As in his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics,
Foundation
works because of the tension between the turn of events in the plot and whether they will lead to the next scheduled “Seldon Crisis.” Will the plan succeed, or will it fail?

In fact, the plan does fail by the end of the second novel, although this happens only because of an event which no one could have predicted: the rise of a mutant leader with enormous mental powers.

Whether he believed in psychohistory or not, Asimov was not alone in suggesting that a scientific approach to history would allow us to predict future trends.

Karl Marx’s notion of historical materialism was one of the first attempts at a scientific approach to history. In his view, the motor driving all of history was the means of production. As new technologies and methods changed how people produced the things they needed, he argued, this changed all of society. This historical progression would lead inevitably through a series of necessary steps towards the ultimate goal of history: socialism.

While many socialist thinkers have tinkered with Marx’s basic formulation, most versions start with what is called “primitive communism” (in prehistoric tribal societies), followed by ancient society, feudalism, and finally capitalism. Each one of these stages represents a different way in which people produced the goods they needed to survive—and a different way of living.

It should be noted, however, that, despite the term “scientific,” Marx’s system is not empirical but deduced from his own first principles.

Many of Asimov’s readers have in fact suggested that Marx was one of the major influences on psychohistory. However, Marx’s historical materialism bears little resemblance to Asimov’s conception. Seldon’s system appears to include far more than the purely economic factors Marx would allow—with the second crisis leading to the establishment of what amounts to a religion. What is far more important, though, is that Marx pictures a clear, evolutionary progress, each stage representing a more advanced society than the last, whereas Hari Seldon’s science predicts not a progression, but the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations—both development and decay. Psychohistory more closely resembles the work of a handful of 20th-century thinkers who dared to reject the standard, evolutionary view of society: most notably, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin.

Spengler was the first to propose a cyclic view of history in his 1918 book,
The Decline Of The West
(a second volume followed in 1923). He identified eight great world cultures—Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Classical (Greco-Roman), Arabian, and Western—and drew parallels between their development and decline. These parallels led him to believe that civilizations were organic, with a distinct life-cycle and a 1000-year lifespan. He divided this cycle into four stages: Spring, a period of cultural birth based largely on a new conception of God; Summer, marked by the rise of the earliest cities and the development of critical thought; Autumn, a time of rationalism, organization, and urban development; and Winter, when the civilization begins to break down, abstract reason falters, and people lose faith in their religious beliefs.

But it was Spengler’s assertion that Western Civilization had begun to decay that made his book an enormous success in his native Germany. It came at a time when the country was in the midst of moral and economic chaos, and it offered an explanation for Germany’s failures in World War I. To Spengler, democracy was a decadent form of government, one typical of a society deep in the winter of its existence. His vision of a vibrant new society run by a strong leader caught the imagination of the burgeoning Nazi movement. Spengler himself, while he agreed with many Nazi ideals, found Hitler absurd and distanced himself from the movement before his death in 1936.

While British historian Arnold Toynbee showed clear signs of Spengler’s influence in his massive work,
A Study of History,
he rejected the German historian’s organic vision of society in favor of a more complex model. His dozen volumes (published from 1934 to 1961) covered a far larger number of civilizations—21, although some of his divisions are debatable—in far greater detail. Rather than Spengler’s deterministic approach, with its rigid patterns every civilization had to follow, Toynbee believed that new challenges created a civilization, forcing its people to find new ways to overcome them and new ways to live their lives. Without these difficulties, a society would quickly stagnate, its creative impulses untapped—and yet, too great a series of disasters could easily destroy the fledging civilization.