Tony Daniel (4 page)

Andre looked over the canvas. It was clamped down on a big board as long as he was tall. Sections of it were fine, but others looked like a baby had spilled its mashed peas all over it. Then again, maybe that was Pollock’s work after all.

“How can you possibly know how to put back all that spatter?”

“There’re pictures.” Molly pointed the wooden tip of her brush to the left-hand corner of the canvas. Her movements were precise. They had always been definite and precise. “Also you can kind of see the tracery of where this section was before it got . . . whatever that is that got spilled on it there. Also, I use grist for the small stuff. Did you want to talk about Ben?”

“I do.”

“Figured you didn’t come back to relive old times.”

“They
were
good. Do you still do that thing with the mirror?”

“Oh, yes. Are you a celibate priest these days?”

“No, I’m not that kind of priest.”

“I’m afraid I forgot most of what I knew about religion.”

“So did I.”

“Andre, what do you want to know about Ben?” Molly set the handle of her brush against her color palette and tapped it twice. Something in the two surfaces recognized one another, and the brush stuck there. A telltale glimmer of grist swarmed over the brush, keeping it moist and ready for use. Molly sat in a chair by her picture window, and Andre sat in a chair across from her. There was a small table between them. “Zen tea?” she said.

“Sure,” Andre replied.

The table pulsed, and two cups began forming on its surface. As the outsides hardened, a gel at their center thinned down to liquid. This was an expensive use of grist.

“Nice table. I guess you’re doing all right for yourself, Molly.”

“I like to make being in the studio as simple as possible so I can concentrate on my work. I indulge in a few luxuries.”

“You ever paint for yourself anymore? Your own work, I mean?”

Molly reached for her tea, took a sip, and motioned with her cup at the Pollock.

“I paint
those
for myself,” she said. “It’s my little secret. I make them mine. Or they make me theirs.”

“That’s a fine secret.”

“Now you’re in on it. So was Ben. Or Thaddeus, I should say.”

“You were on the team that made him, weren’t you?”

“Aesthetic consultant. Ben convinced them to bring me on. He told me to think of it as a grant for the arts.”

“I kind of lost track of you both after I . . . graduated.”

“You were busy with your new duties. I was busy. Everybody was busy.”

“I wasn’t
that
busy.”

“Ben kept up with your work. It was part of what made him decide to . . . do it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do. He read that paper you wrote on temporal propagation. The one that was such a big deal.”

“It was the last thing I ever wrote.”

“Developed a queer fascination with rocks?”

“You heard about that?”

“Who do you think sent those merci reporters after you?”

“Molly, you didn’t?”

“I waited until I thought you were doing your best work.”

“How did you see me . . .” He looked into her eyes, and he saw it. The telltale expression. Far and away. “You’re a LAP.”

Molly placed the cup to her lips and sipped a precise amount of tea. “I guess you’d classify me as a manifold by now. I keep replicating and replicating. It’s an art project I started several years ago. Alethea convinced me to do it when we were together.”

“Will you tell me about her? She haunted me for years, you know. I pictured her as some kind of femme fatale from a noir. Destroyed all my dreams by taking you.”

“Nobody took me. I went. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking. Alethea Nightshade was no picnic, let me tell you. She had the first of her breakdowns when we were together.”

“Breakdowns?”

“She had schizophrenia in her genes. She wanted to be a LAP, but wasn’t allowed because of it. The medical grist controlled her condition most of the time, but every once in a while . . . she outthought it. She was too smart for her own good.”

“Is that why you became a LAP?” Andre asked. “Because she couldn’t?”

“I told myself I was doing it for
me
, but yes.
Then.
Now things are different.” Molly smiled, and the light in the studio was just right. Andre saw the edge of the multiplicity in her eyes.

The fractal in the aspect’s iris that signaled a LAP.

“You have no idea how beautiful it is—what I can see.” Molly laughed, and Andre shuddered. Awe or fright? He didn’t know.

“She was just a woman,” Molly said. “I think she came from around Jupiter. A moon or something, you know.” Molly made a sweeping motion toward her window. As with many inner-system denizens, the outer system was a great unknown, and all the same, to her. “She grew up on some odd kind of farm.”

“A Callisto free grange?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. She didn’t talk about it much.”

“What was she like?”

“Difficult.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you.” Tea sip. Andre realized he hadn’t picked his up yet. He did so, tried it. It was wonderful, and all grist. A bit creepy to think about drinking it down.

I’ll take care of it, don’t you worry,
said his pellicle.

I know you will.

“Alethea had two qualities that should never exist within one organic mind. A big intellect and a big heart. She felt everything, and she thought about it far too much. She was born to be a LAP. And she finally found a way to do it.”

“Ben.”

“They fell in love. It was also her good fortune that he could get her past the screening procedures. But Alethea always was a fortunate woman. She was lucky, on a quantum level. Until she wasn’t.”

“So she and Ben were together before he became . . . Thaddeus.”

“For a year.”

“Were you jealous?”

“I’d had enough of Alethea by then. I’ll always love her, but I want a life that’s . . . plain. She was a tangle I couldn’t untangle.” Molly touched her fingers to her nose and tweaked it. It was a darling gesture, Andre thought. “Besides,” Molly said, “
she
left
me
.”

“What did that do to you and Ben?”

“Nothing. I love Ben. He’s my best friend.”

She was speaking in the present tense about him, but Andre let it pass.

“Why did he change his name, Molly? I never understood that.”

“Because he wasn’t a LAP.”

“What do you mean? Of course he was. A special one. Very special. But still—”

“No. He said he was something new. He said he wasn’t Ben anymore. It was kind of a joke with him, though. Because, of course, he
was
still Ben. Thaddeus may have been more than a man, but he definitely was
at least
a man, and that man was Ben Kaye. He never could explain it to me.”

“Time propagation without consciousness overlap. That was always the problem with the time-tower LAPs. Interference patterns. Dropouts. But with Thaddeus, they finally got the frequency right. One consciousness propagated into the future and bounced back with antiparticle quantum entanglement.”

“I never understood a bit of that jargon you time specialists use.”

“We made God.”

Molly snorted, and tea came out her nose. She laughed until tears came to her eyes.

“We made something,” she said. “Something very different than what’s come before. But Andre, I
knew
Thaddeus. He was the last thing in the universe I would consider
worshiping
.”

“Some didn’t share your opinion.”

“Thaddeus thought they were crazy. They made him very uncomfortable.”

“Was Alethea one of them?”

“Alethea? Alethea was a stone-cold atheist when it came to Thaddeus. But what she did was worse. Far worse.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She fell in love with him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Alethea fell in love with Thaddeus.”

“But she was already in love with Thaddeus.”

“Think about what I’ve said.”

“Ben,” Andre said after a moment. “Thaddeus and Ben were not the same person.”

“It was a very melodramatic situation.”

“Ben lost his love to . . . another version of himself.”

“The new, improved Ben was born in Thaddeus. Of course
he
would be the one Alethea loved. The only problem was, the old Ben was still around.”

“God,” Andre said. “How—”

“Peculiar?”

“How very peculiar.”

Molly stood up and went to her window. She traced a line along the clean glass with her finger, leaving a barely visible smudge. The light was even and clean in Connacht. It was very nearly perfect if what you wanted was accurate illumination. Andre gazed at the shape of Molly against the light. She was beautiful in outline.

“Let me tell you, so was the solution they came up with, the three of them,” Molly said. “Peculiar.”

“Alethea would become like Thaddeus.”

“How did you guess?”

“It has a certain logic. There would be the new Alethea, and there would be the old Alethea left for Ben.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “A logic of desperation. It only left out one factor.”

“Alethea’s heart.”

“That’s right. She loved Thaddeus. She no longer loved Ben. Not in the same way.” Molly turned to face him, but Andre was still blinded by the light streaming in. “But she let them go ahead with it. And for that, I can never forgive her.”

“Because she wanted to be a LAP.”

“More than anything. More than she loved Ben. More than she loved
Thaddeus
. But I suppose she was punished for it. They all were.”

“How did she get around the screening? I mean, her condition should preclude—”

“You know Ben. Thaddeus and Ben decided they wanted it to happen. They are very smart and persuasive men. So
very
smart and persuasive.”

Andre got up and stood beside her in the window, his back to the light. It was warm on his neck.

“Tell me,” he said. He closed his eyes and tried only to listen, but then he felt a touch and Molly was holding his hand.

“
I
am Molly,” she said. “I’m the aspect. All my converts and pellicle layers are
Molly
—all that programming and grist—it’s
me
, it’s Molly, too. The woman you once loved. But I’m all along the Diaphany and into the Met. I’m wound into the outer grist. I watch.”

“What do you watch?”

“The sun. I watch the sun. One day I’m going to paint it, but I’m not ready yet. The more I watch, the less ready I feel. I expect to be watching for a long time.” She squeezed his hand gently. “I’m still Molly. But Ben
wasn’t
Thaddeus. And he was. And he was eaten up with jealousy, but jealousy of whom? He felt he had a right to decide his own fate. We all do. He felt he had that right. And did he not? I can’t say.”

“It’s a hard question.”

“It would never have
been
a question if it hadn’t been for Alethea Nightshade.”

“What happened?” he asked, eyes still closed. The warm pressure of her hand. The pure light on his back. “Were you there?”

“Ben drove himself right into Thaddeus’s heart, Andre. Like a knife. It might as well have been a knife.”

“How could he do that?”

“I was there in Elysium when it happened,” she said.

“On Mars?”

“On Mars. I was on the team, don’t you know. Aesthetic consultant. I was hired on once again.”

Andre opened his eyes, and Molly turned to him. In this stark light, there were crinkles around her lips, worry lines on her brow. The part of her that was here.

We have grown older, Andre thought. And pretty damn strange.

“It’s kind of messy and . . . organic . . . at first. There’s a lab near one of the steam vents where Ben was transmuted. There’s some ripping apart and beam splitting at the quantum level that I understand is very unsettling for the person undergoing the process. Something like this happens if you’re a multiple and you ever decide to go large, by the way. It’s when we’re at our most vulnerable.”

“Thaddeus was there when Alethea underwent the process?”

“He was there. Along with Ben.”

“So he was caught up in the integration field. Everyone nearby would be,” Andre said. “There’s a melding of possible futures.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “Everyone became part of everyone else for that instant.”

“Ben and Thaddeus and Alethea.”

“Ben understood that his love was doomed.”

“And it drove him crazy?”

“No. It drove him to despair. Utter despair. I was there, remember? I felt it.”

“And at that instant, when the integration field was turned on—”

“Ben drove himself into Thaddeus’s heart. He pushed himself in where he couldn’t be.”

“What do you mean,
couldn’t be?
”

“Have you ever heard the stories of back when the Merced effect was first discovered, of the pairs of lovers and husbands and wives trying to integrate into one being?”

“The results were horrific. Monsters were born. And died nearly instantly.”

Andre tried to imagine what it would be like if his pellicle or his convert presence were not really
him
. If he had to live with another presence, an
other,
all the time. The thing about a pellicle was that it never did anything the whole person didn’t want to do. It
couldn’t
. It would be like a wrench in your toolbox rebelling against you.

Molly walked over to the painting and gave it an appraising look, brushed something off a corner of the canvas. She turned, and there was the wild spatter of the Pollock behind her.

“There was an explosion,” Molly said. “All the aspects there were killed. Alethea wasn’t transmuted yet. We don’t
think
she was. She may have died in the blast. Her body was destroyed.”

“What about you?”

“I was in the grist. I got scattered, but I re-formed quickly enough.”

“How was Thaddeus instantiated there at the lab?”

“Biological grist with little time-propagating nuclei in his cells. He looked like a man.”

“Did he look like Ben?”

“Younger. Ben was getting on toward forty.” Molly smiled wanly and nodded as if she’d just decided something. “You know, sometimes I think that was
it
.”