Paradise Tales (34 page)

The image pulls back from the French doors, its attention fixed on the cracks that run around the edge of the balcony. The shutters thunk shut, and the green handle turns as if by itself.

Assumpta looks out; the rooftops are now dark, street lights shining. There is a fizzing from below. Children scatter and a rocket squeedles like a mouse, shooting up into the trees. It gets stuck in the branches. It sprays glitter and then suddenly the image blanks out with a boom. When the cameras adjust, the tree is on fire, burning like a torch.

Assumpta says to herself, “Car paint. So. Peels. Some fades. Lately all gray, perhaps puritan. No one wants to look fancy, though more intelligent than their owners. We preserve, the trees root us too in the old shapes. Firewood in winter.”

Something wrong with the translation? Cars, those ancient monstrosities, still swollen and polished, line the street.

And JoyAnna says as all of you watch, “Why is the past glamorous? I mean, it was everyday to them. But I love all those shiny things, and the beautiful cloth, it looks just like coloured fog, it’s that thin. It makes everything here look gray and cold. I am so sick of digging in cold mud. Your trees and sunsets aren’t really that much more beautiful than mine. Except to me.”

A particularly huge rocket bursts overhead, its dancing light, its illuminated smoke for a moment imitating a nebula.

“This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else’s sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.”

All of you watch in silence until the fireworks die.

The cylinders turn.

JoyAnna no longer sounds quite so young.

Blip.

Autumn 2030. Assumpta has a phone call in her head. It rings with the sound of blackbirds singing. A name comes up in the eye: Magda Parentes.

JAH: “Oh no! It’s the Horrible Serb!”

A new voice says, “Assumpta, my dear, are you very busy? Can you talk?” She sounds polite, sugary.

AC: “Yes, of course.”

MP: “You must feel so dreadful. So sad.”

“Must I?”

Assumpta summons up one of the cylinders, the usual one, number forty-seven, the one that begins with sixteen.

MP:”Well, with Tomas not there any longer.”

The walls and ceiling seem to nod. Assumpta pauses only briefly but sails on. “Well, I finished my work on that over a year ago, so though it’s sad …” She lets her voice trail away in what sounds like wisps of relative unconcern, but the physiome shows her heart is thumping.

“You’re being very brave. But still. It must rankle just a touch to have someone take over your work on the cylinders. At the 3D print. And for it to be Herr Kurtmeier?”

Assumpta’s voice manages to chuckle and be icy at the same time. “Which is the point of your call, obviously.”

“You don’t mean to say you didn’t know?”

JoyAnna hisses. “Lie, Assumpta. Tell her they consulted you. Tell her that you and Kurtmeier patched up the quarrel.”

MP: “Personally, I’ve never cared for Kurtmeier, but his work isn’t bad. And people so want to be told that the artifacts are cultural, don’t they? They’ll keep hiring people till they find someone who will.”

AC: “Are you working on them as well? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Magda sighs. “Well, yes, actually. I hope I can keep his fantastical streak in check.”

“So kind of you to call.”

“Well, you were always so good to me in the past.”

End.

Her physiome roils. She calls Tomas. His Turing answers sounding just enough like him to be maddening. Hearty. “He’s away on holiday. How are you, Assumpta?”

“You can tell him that I’m not well. That I’m sorry he’s lost his post. He must feel dreadful. I’m mystified that no one had the grace to tell me what is going on. Have him call me.”

She paces the house.

JoyAnna says, “I wish I could get you to just let it go. Of course other people will want a chance to work on them, but there’s nothing to stop you doing something as well.”

Assumpta stands up with a sniff. “Yes.”

She scrapes her chair toward the terminal and the keyboard. There is a ping. Her newsfeeds automatically begin to chime: a story about the salt pump and the Gulf Stream. Assumpta switches it off, muttering. “Get out of my head.”

Something disappears from your array. Your date, JoyAnna’s date are both there, but the blogdate for Assumpta is missing. You want to ask JoyAnna: What day is this?

AC: “Earthworms subsist on rich organics in soil. But there is no loam or hummus on Mars. So why no other finds of cylinders if they are the remains of food? Otters leave heaps of abalone shells, Neanderthals leave gnawed bones. But there is no other similar find.” Assumpta makes her rustling, breathing-out sound. “Not even the faeces.”

She steadies her nerves with a small sherry.

AC: “All right. Then we must assume it is some other kind of purposeful activity other than feeding and look at it again.”

She makes a lunch out of cheese and salad, but doesn’t eat it. She reads papers and listens to taped lectures on earthworms and cuttlefish, then a very bad popular book on possible alien biologies.

She turns her newsfeeds back on. It talks to her as she works. It’s a blog from a young Reservist overseeing the evacuation of Phoenix. He’s heard gunfire getting out of town. Vehicles are running out of electricity while idling in the jam; people are walking in the heat toward California; there’s no water. JoyAnna’s blog offers her the option of following the Reservist’s lifeblog instead.

Assumpta’s date comes back on. JoyAnna goes still. A file opens, flowers, showing research-grant application, and its summary with a date. JoyAnna’s voice quavers. “Twenty-third December? You only have five days left!”

Ping.

Assumpta receives an RSS report. The newly established dates from the Martian mass extinction match those of the cylinders. The Spiral and the climate tipped at the same time.

The English have been picking raspberries in December. That night Assumpta reads two gardening romances.

The next morning, Assumpta wakes up hungover and immediately begins to do housework. She has a long-handled feather duster to reach up into the corners to get the cobwebs. She then washes dishes and the eight soupbowls that arrived from Spain. Her physiome shows she is dehydrated.

She gets herself a whiskey. Sitting at the table she says, “The only thing I have is the numbers. If that is indeed what they are. If I can understand why they are not in sequence, then I will understand something at least.”

JoyAnna starts to talk and you realize that she’s been silent for hours. “I think Assumpta’s understood that lifeblogging counts as publication. If she makes a discovery and it’s logged, she’ll get the credit.”

The flickering stops, once again at cylinder forty-seven, where the Spiral gets stuck on the number sixteen.

The cylinders move in order inside Assumpta’s eyes.

First cylinder forty-seven in which there are four groups of four. Is that indeed a representation of sixteen?

Cylinder forty-eight starts off with two sequences of eight swirls, also sixteen.

Forty-nine repeats that but follows it with several prickly-pear nodes.

Assumpta then stops, and orders a system check and special backup.
Ping
. The blog has been published, but also backed up.

JAH: “Good girl. I was right. She’s in a race and she’s making sure the blog is being backed up, saved, and registered. She’s got it.”

Fifty shows sixteen individual swirls piano-rolling the length of the entire cylinder.

Fifty-one repeats that pattern and follows it with a single very large node.

And Assumpta begins to laugh.

At first she laughs like Oliver Hardy, everything bouncing up and down, her hands patting the table in unison. Then a happy, gentle sound, through teeth, like rain.

“Ssh ssh ssh ssh It’s … a … ha … ha … TURD! They
shat
to hoo hoo hoo say NO!”

Assumpta stands up to do a little dance. Her hips roll in a perfect figure eight and her feet trace a samba.

JoyAnna laughs aloud a hearty, British, baying laugh, and that knocks her back into blogging mode. “That’s a samba.” Thanks, you think. “Assumpta lived in Brasil for a while, taught at the State University of Para in Belem, right on the mouth of the Amazon.”

The arthritis intervenes, Assumpta stumbles, goes ooooh, and then finds that funny as well. She starts to sing a song in Portuguese. It’s a laughing song, the chorus consists of the sound of laughter. Translated the title is “Who’s Laughing Now?” Aha-ha-HAH-HAH-HAH.

She calls Schelling. The Turing says, “Sorry, Assumpta, but he’s away for Christmas now.”

She chuckles. “Just tell him I have something to report on the cylinders.”

The cylinders with their numbers flutter back and forth. “Well, my darlings. What were you up to?”

Then she says. “Hmm. It’s chilly in here.”

The cylinders dance all day long. Assumpta keeps pouring herself a whiskey to celebrate. By six p.m. it’s dark, and she is asleep.

Day three starts very late. The blog records snores, then the slow waxing of light on the walls. But Assumpta is not conscious to see it.

Up come the feeds with news from Bangladesh, and the American Southwest, and now trouble on the border between India and China.

Assumpta groans, then stomps her way out the bed and goes downstairs to the refrigerator. She surveys it for a moment before taking out the sherry, but what she says is, “Nothing can survive just eating iron in clay. What else did they eat? They must have eaten something!”

Still in her nightie, she puts in a round-robin call to biologists in her network. She magnifies the signs again, to see how they were made.

AC: “All right. I think we can say that the worms definitely did not have teeth.”

She has a continental breakfast of cheddar cheese, oatcakes and raisins. She calls on the CGI package. “So let’s just try to imagine what they were like.”

She tries to imagine the worms in a colony. She pastes them onto a Mars whose surface is not red, but streaked with ice and tiny melted puddles. In the end it looks like grass, a lawn of worms, reaching up toward the light.

“They photosynthesized.” That’s JoyAnna. “Rhodopsin. It’s protein in the human eye, it photosynthesizes, and it’s red, like Mars.”

And Assumpta says, “Yes, that’s it.”

And it takes you a moment to realize that the two of them cannot be in discussion.

AC: “If they photosynthesized they might eat clay only when suffering iron deficiency. So we might not find any other cylinders. They wouldn’t need them that often.”

She checks to make sure the lifeblog is still saving and registering. She goes upstairs, puts the blog on block. Presumably she showers.

When it comes back on the time is 15:37 and the sky has gone ominously dark. Assumpta is bundling herself up in sweaters and a coat, and goes outside. She has difficulty opening her French doors, steps outside and gasps. The air looks like solidified crystal. The sky overhead is clear pale blue, except for a bank of cloud to the north that is being pulled over it like a blanket.

You see the outside temperature is minus fifteen degrees. Assumpta’s breath sidles out of her nostrils like thick steam. She shivers her way to the clothesline and starts unpegging a shirt. Her hand shakes and fumbles it. A solid sheet of cotton, the shirt tumbles to the paving.

And shatters like china. It lies in shards.

AC: “What is going on?”

She turns and hobbles, quivering, back inside. She closes the French doors and then, lumbering, rolls up the kitchen rug against the lower edge of the door. She collects bread and bananas, a tub of yogurt, all the food in the house, and then retreats into the sitting room. She rolls up rugs against the doors there too, and turns on the heater at full blast.

Then she checks to make sure that the lifeblog is continuing to save.

“I’m afraid we are having some unusual weather.”

She goes back to the CGI. As she uses the blog to tell the University computers what she wants. Worms, two centimetres long. Photosynthesizing. Capable of movement. The CGI system goes to work.

Turings begin to call, delivering automatic Christmas greetings
. Hello (slight pause) Assumpta, Ted’s calling to wish you a merry season!
She turns them all off.

Overhead, the sky begins to make an ominous grinding sound, like pepper being milled.

JoyAnna suddenly yelps. “Shit! The date of your death is actually the day they found you. But you’d been lying dead for two days. This is it. It’s now. You’re going to die now.”

The worm resolves as an image.

AC: “For the sake of neatness. Make them the same size as the cylinders.”

The machine takes over, and the worm is there, wrestling with a cylinder in clay, and it is clear: one is a simulacrum of the other.

Assumpta breathes out. “Of course.”

The sky grinds. The heat blows.

“Any system of writing must mimic the original kind of communication.” Then she says to her system, “Make them both worms.”

Two worms roll together, mouthing each other’s bodies.

“They communicated by touch. By kissing the lengths of their bodies. And the cylinders tried to record that process of whole-body touching. We’ll never translate that language without a Rosetta stone. But why the debate over numbers?”

She calls up a gathering of worms and then superimposes the Spiral. A Spiral of worms.

They are passing the cylinders along its length. Passing them out, passing them back.

AC: “The definition of writing is that which preserves information across both space and time.”