infinities (3 page)

"Hnh? Oh... Shanghai. They can wait, can't they?"

Warrener gave him a funny look and then turned away. But by then the moment was lost and Priscilla was staring into the distance, dealing with mail, moving on.

~

You take me to New York, make me walk half the length of Manhattan. We take the ferry from Battery Park out to the Statue of Liberty and climb up inside to look back upon the city. You kiss me there. Kiss me while I look back upon the city of my birth. We cross Brooklyn Bridge on foot, heading ultimately for the Heights. We both marvel and laugh at the aches and pains and fatigue we are suffering from all the walking. "This is a reality," I remind you. "It is
meant
to feel real!"

I am showing you my childhood haunts, distant memories as they are for me. You want to know it all, everything about me. You want to get inside my head, find the real person that I am. I have never known anything like this, an all-consuming passion to share. You know me so well already. It is a continuing cause of wonder to me that since we started this thing, we each of us have discovered a person, a lover, hidden inside the public person we already knew, and that the private you, the private me — we really are two halves of a single whole.

How could we ever have known that it would be like this? How could we ever have known what we might have been missing if we had turned away, accepted the impossibility of our relationship?

You stop me halfway across Brooklyn Bridge. I think it is to do the tourist thing and stare back at the view of the Manhattan skyline, but no: you take my face in your hands and kiss me long and hard.

"Thank you," you say, in such a quiet voice.

I raise an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Just... thank you."

You take my hand and we resume our walk. Almost at the far side, you smile at me and say, "Will you come and see where I grew up one day? I'll take you, show you everything."

I smile. We will do that.

~

It was nearly two weeks before their next encounter. Noah had mailed Priscilla, gently reminding her of their conversation, prompting her but not pressing. Priscilla had not replied.

He walked into the crowded boardroom and seated himself at one of the few remaining places.

Electee Priscilla was already there. She caught his eye immediately, held it.

Noah swallowed, looked away.

A short time later, Elector Burnham entered the room and the meeting could begin. Afterwards, there was coffee and Noah mixed with the attendees until finally his path crossed that of Priscilla.

"You know that we can't," she told him, cutting straight to the point. "It's impossible."

"'Can't'?"

"Like there's no tomorrow," she said. "Or like anything."

"You have changed your mind?"

She locked his gaze. "Not one bit," she said.

"So...?"

"Darling!" A smile broke out across her features and she turned, kissed Elector Burnham on the cheek, one hand resting lightly, briefly, on his chest.

"Elector," said Noah, bowing his head.

Burnham studied him with narrowed eyes for a moment and then smiled, and said, "Noah, you old code monkey! When're you going to be finished, eh? Heaven can't wait forever."

Later, as the crowded room started to thin, Noah got Priscilla alone again. "So tell me," he said, "why is it impossible?" He did not know why he asked, why he pushed — he had never done anything like this before, had never been so compelled.

She raised her eyebrows. "Because I am a respected Electee and you a high profile v-space architect, and if it ever got out we would both be ruined. Because I am married to a man who is not only one of our state's five Electors, but an utter ruthless bastard into the bargain. He would destroy you. He would destroy us both. And not least, Noah, because you are married too — had you forgotten that?"

"I have never done anything like this before. I have never wanted to..."

"And you won't. Not with me. I'm sorry, Noah. I should never have said what I did. It simply is not possible."

Noah smiled then... "But it is," he said. "It is."

~

Everything is new, fresh. I have been reborn, but reborn whole, adult, myself. I have been reloaded.

I am in my studio, rising from the chaise longue. I am in a reality, I know, one of the fractal realities that will contribute to consensus. Out in the garden, you are there. Priscilla. My love. The other half of me.

I remember you telling me that it wasn't to be — that "we" could never be. That it was simply not possible.

I create realities. I run and re-run realities until one day they will come together into a whole, a consensus.

In my realities we can be free, we can be us. We can be.

In my realities we can explore the selves that we hide from the world, plot the course of our love, find out what "we" really is, and can be.

I am in my studio, rising from the chaise longue. Walking towards the French windows, pushing one open, going to greet you in the garden, in our garden, in a world where all the complications, all the responsibilities and risks and assumptions — a world where all of that is as nothing.

I have been reloaded.

I go to greet you.

~

"Okay, then..." she said. She wouldn't meet his eyes and it was not simply that she was not looking directly into the cam. She would not meet his look. "Okay — come. Now. He's going back to the city for the weekend. Come to me, Noah. Prove that what you say about us is true."

Noah cut the link.

He had told her. Told her how it was, how in realities other than this, where they were able to be together, they had fallen so deeply, madly in love... gone way beyond the mutual attraction they felt now.

Finally, he had told her that he loved her — that the Priscilla he knew from meetings and consultations and social events for the project was a woman who fascinated and beguiled him.

And she had said, "Okay then..."

He pushed open the French windows of his studio, called across the garden to his wife. "Darling?" She looked. "I've been called away. London. I may be late."

She rolled her eyes and shooed him on his way. He loved her, and was surprised at his own surprise: he had always loved her. This was not about him loving or not loving Marie, it was about Priscilla, always about Priscilla.

~

She had told him to enter by the side door, that it would be open, and so he did. He had never been to this house before — a weekend home in the heart of the South Downs granted to Elector Burnham by the state.

The house gave every impression of being empty. She had told him that she and her husband had planned to be here for a quiet weekend, and that Burnham had taken his bodyguard and two assistants with him when he was called away.

Hesitantly, Noah called out, "Priscilla?" Then more loudly, "Priscilla, are you here?"

~

She was in one of the bedrooms, lying slumped on the floor, her body twisted. Blood pooled around her, staining the cream carpet almost black. Red spatters punctuated the wall and a nearby chair.

Her face was white, so deathly white, one strand of long hair trailing across her cheek, her eyes staring, unmoving.

The blood came from a gaping wound in her chest.

But she was breathing...

Noah rushed to her, kneeled, hot stickiness seeping through the knees of his trousers. He reached out a hand, tentatively touched knuckles to her cheek.

Her eyes moved, locked on him.

"N... Noah?" she gasped.

"My love..." He leaned close, her voice so faint.

"He found out..."

"Who found out?" But he did not need to ask. Burnham. The Elector had done this.

"He was suspicious. He read my mail..."

His face was almost touching hers. His tears started to fall onto her cheek.

He kissed her. Softly, briefly, on the lips. They had never kissed before now, had barely even touched, and yet he knew her so well, knew her responses, the way she moved. He knew what they could have had, what they could have been together...

~

I find you out in the marshes, walking along the seawall, arms wrapped around yourself against the stiff easterly. You have been crying; I think you still are, although you smile when you see me.

"Noah?"

I meet your look and wait.

"Why can't we be like this in reality?"

I take you in my arms now, bury my face in your hair.

"This
is
reality," I tell you. "It is now."

You sense something. You have always been so perceptive to subtle changes in intonation, in body language.

"What's happened, Noah?"

I tell you straight. "You are dead," I say. "Burnham became suspicious, so he read your mail, found the things we had said. He killed you. He will probably get away with it — he is an Elector, after all."

You understand immediately.

"Oh, Noah," you say, stroking my cheek. "You must hurt so badly."

Out in the real world: the grieving, the loss, the pain of holding the woman I love in my arms as she dies.

But there is more than that, the part you leave unspoken. Out in the real world, I would grieve, but then I would come to terms with loss, with a love that never really was. I would move on. With every day that passed I would move further from you.

I hold you away from me, so that you must look into my eyes. "I could not carry on without you," I tell you now. "How could I?"

Back in my studio... the drugs, they would haved been quick. I took them after I had reloaded for the last time.

This is it now. This, our reality. A fractal reality, a component of the consensus that must happen very soon now, a critical mass of consensual realities that will take on a permanence of their own, a new reality. A new heaven. A new heaven for you, Priscilla, and me.

I smile. We are together. What more could we possibly want?

"You said you were going to show me," I say now.

You look briefly puzzled.

"You said you would take me there, to the place where you grew up."

Now, at last, you manage a smile. You pull away, lead me by the hand back towards the cottage, the car. Together, Electee and Architect await the coming of consensus, of accord.

~

Afterword

Near-future wheeling and dealing with a backdrop of manipulative corporations and — later — underworld involvement in murder, people-trafficking and more. This could so easily be another GenGen story, but it's not; it heads off in other directions altogether.

"The Man Who Built Heaven" is another of those stories which, as soon as I started work on it, I knew could, and should, be part of something much larger. And so, rewritten, it forms the opening of my novel
The Accord
, which follows the development of Noah Barakh's virtual heaven, and the unfolding of his feud with Burnham — a feud that can never die, because the two of
them
can never die.

The idea came to me one morning when I was driving to work at my local university. Originally it was going to be a fantasy story: the tale of an emperor's trusted advisor who falls in love with the emperor's wife; the only way they can pursue this love is in a magical fantasy world of the advisor's creation. I shifted it to science fiction rather than fantasy because I wanted to ground it firmly in the here and now: it was far more interesting to me for a story that spanned millennia to start close to the present day.
The Accord
is the novel I'm most happy with; it really stretched me to write it and the end result comes close to what I was trying to achieve. And it's the only novel I've written that has inspired someone to approach me in the street and ask how on Earth I came up with as twisted and nasty a character as one of the main figures in the story. I took that as a compliment.

Copyright information
© Keith Brooke 2008, 2011
"The Man Who Built Heaven" was first published in
Postscripts
in 2008, and is reprinted in the infinity plus ebook
Faking It
by Keith Brooke:

Buy now:
Faking It by Keith Brooke
$2.99 / £2.18.

 

The Angels of Life and Death
collects ten science fiction stories from two times winner of the BSFA short story award Eric Brown. From cyberpunk visions of post-human futures to traditional tales of alien encounter and time travel, what connects these tales are Brown's storytelling ability and his concern for the human element. Whether he's writing about telepaths fleeing alien assassins on a vast spaceport city in the Bay of Bengal, or a woman reporter finding true love in the far, far future, Brown imbues his fictions with a concern for character and headlong narrative pace.

Buy now:
The Angels of Life and Death by Eric Brown
$2.99 / £2.21.

'SF infused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility' —
Paul McAuley