Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11 Page 10

  “Go for it,” said Alistair.

  She waved the wand at the Living Will, and set off an EMG blast. The Living Will blinked. “Oh, no,” he said. He took a couple of steps toward them. She sent off another blast. He blinked again as his trousers turned spangled. As she was about to send a third blast, he grabbed the wand from her. He broke it across his knee.

  “Hey man, that was mine,” Alistair said.

  “I will remunerate you, with an object of equivalent value,” said the Living Will. Then he returned to the skyloft box.

  “Crap,” Little Girl said.

  “Does Little Girl grieve for her father?”

  “I don’t get why,” she said. She rubbed Nestor’s glabrous head. “He’s right. He’ll be copied up there.”

  Alistair looked thoughtful. “Intellectually you can separate his mind from his body. Emotionally you can’t.”

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “Is Nestor full of sadness, too?” The sphinx leaned its head against her shoulder.

  A minute later the Living Will stepped back from the skyloft box.

  The Papa looked at her, trunk nose twitching.

  “Sasha,” he said, “I do love you.”

  Her heart felt as though it would break.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  Now the Papa put his head into the skyloft box, and the Living Will lowered a sliding panel at the back of the box. The panel was polyformous; it reshaped its edges to snugly fit the Papa’s neck. A pain went through Little Girl. It felt as though the Papa was gone, and all that was left was this white whale of a body, with buttocks like sofas, appendages like paddles, green cilia for hair.

  “The Papa left me a long time ago,” she said.

  Alistair, sitting on the other side of the sphinx, squeezed her shoulder.

  “Does Nestor feel all alone?”

  She couldn’t comfort the sphinx. She was too deep in her own misery. She watched the Living Will step back from the flatbed and pick at his tinsel mustache as he considered the Papa. With the sun just setting, the Living Will was like a dark cardboard cutout against the peach and pinkish sky.

  “Let’s charge it,” she said. “Let’s wreck it.” But she spoke so quietly Alistair said, “Huh?”

  “Let’s—”

  The skyloft box began to buzz as the Living Will took another step back.

  It was starting.

  Nacreous light pulsed across the gunmetal gray surface of the box. The buzz pitched higher, changed first into a whine and then into a keen, a sound painful enough that they covered their ears with their hands (or paws in Nestor’s case). Then as a shudder passed through the Papa, coxcombs on his spine and nipples on his thighs vibrating, she understood the procedure was beginning.

  The scanning procedure. She knew about it. From the top of the brain, the post-neo cortex, to the bottom, the brainstem, the box sliced horizontally, progressing down in millimeter increments. Gamma rays, ultra-high energy, their wavelength a mere Planck unit, converged inside the brain, mapping neurons down to atoms, atoms down to protons, neutrons, and electrons. The measurement was so faithful and so fine-grained that the tissue was destroyed utterly. Down the vertical axis transverse slices were taken, post-neo cortex to neo-cortex, paleocortex to archicortex, subcortex to thalamus, cerebellum to brainstem. Successively more ancient and primitive structures were captured, a billion year history of brain evolution read backward.

  The dozen feet hanging from the abdomen kicked and shuffled desperately.

  “Could you close your eyes? Tell me!” said Nestor, who was sobbing.

  She wondered at which point exactly the Papa’s consciousness came to an end; probably well before the brainstem was reached.

  The big body went limp, feet going still, coxcombs, gills, and fins relaxing. Curiously, an arm that grew out of the Papa’s right knee began to flex, as if to flaunt its muscular bicep. Maybe a brain, some isolated lump of nervous tissue, had innervated the arm.

  Then it went still.

  “We’re done,” said the Living Will. He pressed a button on the skyloft box. The back panel rose and the Papa’s head flopped down. It was steaming. Blood trickled from its eyes and ears. The Living Will reached into the box and pulled out a dark mass about the size of a sourdough roll. Or more aptly, a cannonball.

  The Papa’s soul. His entire self recorded into a five-dimensional array of magnetic monopoles, said array protected and insulated by a dark composite shell. The Living Will said to her, “Would you like to hold it for a moment?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Does she want to keep the Papa’s soul for herself?” said Nestor.

  “No—” she said, but too late. The Living Will shook its head, then returned the soul to the skyloft box. Little Girl wished Nestor could be discreet.

  The Living Will closed the back panel on the skyloft, then said:

  “Ashes to ashes, rust to rust, he who is father to Sasha and Minister to the Cloudmind, commends his consciousness and spirit to the sky.”

  With a roar, the top third of the skyloft began to rise.

  It rose on a column of flame, a steady orange brilliance that blinded her for a moment. When she could see again, the skyloft had risen eighty or a hundred feet, and cast a cone of light bright as daylight on the Papa’s body and the Living Will, whose mirror eyes seemed to glow. When the skyloft was a little higher, Little Girl gasped. The cilia atop the Papa’s head were burning like candles.

  “At least treat him with some respect!” she said. She ran over to the flatbed and put her hands on the Papa’s head, extinguishing the flames. Up close, she saw his eyelashes were singed.

  His head felt fever-hot, from the flames or maybe the scanning procedure.

  She pulled his eyelids closed.

  Even though there was no brain to make those eyes see.

  “Is Little Girl sad?”

  “Leave me alone,” she said, but she let the sphinx nuzzle her hip.

  Far above them, the skyloft was a bright star in the night sky, seeming motionless.

  Then it burst open, blooming brightly red-orange-green like a firework.

  The Papa’s mind had made it.

  He was spread across the stratosphere.

  The Living Will said, “You’ll want to step away.”

  “Screw you, machine.”

  But a minute later, she and Nestor were back with Alistair.

  They sat on big stones made of crushed and petrified human shoes: cross trainers and high-heeled boots.

  They watched the Living Will finish with the Papa.

  He had the automatons cut loose all the rubber straps that had been supporting the Papa. The Papa’s big body slumped to the floor of the flatbed; she winced as his head fell down as if he were praying, forehead to the floor, trunk of a nose kinked into an S-shape. It would have hurt if he’d been alive.

  Then the Living Will activated a control, and the flatbed rose up at one end like a ramp.

  Slowly at first, huge inertia to overcome, the Papa slid down the ramp. Then fast, faster, great creakings in the vehicle, cracks as gantries were snapped off, and face-first the Papa fell down into the Gash Peculiar.

  Boulders at the edge tumbled thunderously after him.

  But there was no other noise as his body fell.

  They sat on the edge of the cliff, staring down into the Gash Peculiar. A half-moon, swaddled with storm-clouds, had risen. It lit the opposite cliff-face a ghostly blue but did not penetrate deeply into the Gash. “Such a big fat man,” Little Girl said. “You’d think he would have gotten stuck in the Gash. But there was nothing . . .”

  No splash, no lightshow, no chorus of the angels.

  Alistair looked down. “Well, like you said, it wasn’t really him . Just his body.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Actually, it was more than his body that fell.”

  The Living Will had moved closer to them. He had stooped down. His mirror eyes reflected the Moon. />
  “Who asked you?” Little Girl said.

  “Your father asked me to explain this contingency. He deeply regrets the course of action that was necessitated by your violation of the terms of your inheritance.”

  “He regrets throwing himself into the Gash?”

  “He regrets—or I should say, regretted—that the memory went with him when he fell.”

  “What memory?” Little Girl asked. “What do you mean?”

  “The memory that contained the instructions for allowing you to grow.”

  “Grow? You mean grow up?”

  “Yes.”

  Heart thump-thumping. “What do you mean—‘it went with him?’ ”

  “A memory vial was within him.”

  “He’d ingested it?”

  “It was surgically implanted in his sacrum. Had you kept to the terms of the will, I would have removed it and given it to you.”

  “You bastard,” Little Girl said. She stood up and charged at him. It would be so fine to knock him over.

  But she couldn’t even move him.

  Running into his leg was like charging into a tower of souls turned to stone.

  * * *

  The rain started falling as they walked toward Alistair’s house. Skin-numbing cold, wind-swept painful, it drenched them, soaked their clothes, gathered soggy in their shoes. It made walking tricky so they dared not get close to the cliffedge. It made sight difficult so Alistair’s house was just a smudge of light and the Gash Peculiar a solid purple wall. Worst, it made even breathing hard, for the rainwater was thick with moods, infused with sadness, shot-through with distress; it hurt to work her lungs when they seemed bound by barbed wire to terrible thoughts, to the memory of the dead Papa’s head flopping down, to stories of genocide and suns gone supernova, to the countless tragedies of the billion billion souls who formed the Earth’s crust but which were otherwise forgotten.

  “We can maybe synthesize . . . growth hormone,” Alistair said, or sobbed. She found no assurance in his words.

  “Does Nestor feel like he’s been buried alive?”

  “At least you’re honest,” she told the sphinx. Then she said: “Unlike the Papa! He’s failing! He can’t control the cloudmind, not at all!”

  “No,” Alistair said. “It’s not the cloudmind making this rain. It’s your father.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “But it is,” Alistair said.

  And in a voice devoid of joy, Nestor said: “He is crying for you.”

  Then she swore, and swore, and swore, so she would not cry herself.

  Copyright © 2010 David Ira Cleary

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  Sara Genge’s latest story is part of her Children of the Waste series that began with “Godtouched” in Strange Horizons, and continued with “Shoes-to-Run” (Asimov’s, July 2009) and “Malick Pan” (Asimov’s, April/May 2010). She tells us, “These tales are loosely set in a wild expanse outside Paris that is scarred by ecological disaster and social decline. The stories occur in different areas of the Waste, each with its own ecosystem and social structure, and in different periods in time. Survival is a strong connecting thread as well as the idea that sometimes it’s the society that’s sick and not the individual—and child psychopaths appeal to me for some reason.”

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  Eastwards, pinkish light swept in under the Rim and spread shadows under the mengue bushes and tamarisk trees. The Rim looked solid enough, but it was only the visual effect created by the edge of the nanobot haze that coated Paris. Out here, the haze was too thin to keep out most of the sun’s radiation. Beussy could protect himself against the light, but the gamma rays must be, as of now, pummeling his DNA. It was a sacrifice, and one worth making. His absolution lay hidden among the trash, red dust, and glare of the Waste.

  “Warning: sunrise. Warning: sunrise.” The skid console announced. At dawn and dusk, the sun shone directly under the dome, blinding and burning. Beussy swore like a Waster, hit the emergency stop, and skidded to a halt. Side flaps of woven polymer rose to cover his legs. Beussy yanked the hood out of the rear compartment and threw it over himself.

  He waited, cocooned in his green bubble. He had been warned not to look, but slivers of light seeped in between the cape and the side flaps. Cracks. He damned himself for missing them and pulled the pieces of fabric together as best he could, hoping the gaps weren’t critical.

  Beussy dug his head into his arm and prayed for his eyesight. An hour later, the skid declared it was safe, and he emerged from cover.

  Brother Beussy had never seen so much light.

  He had always thought of blindness as life in the dark, but now he saw that life in the light could be more intimidating. When his eyes finally adjusted, he laughed with relief.

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  In this trip, Brother Beussy sought neither to preach nor to teach, although he was willing to do both. His job was simple but immense; he had only his soul to care for, but the breadth of that endeavor brought him to his knees. He could fail by refusing change, but that would be a private failure and he could always try again. Martyrdom was the only permanent failure the Waste offered, and Brother Beussy would do anything to avoid it.

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  By mid-afternoon he’d covered only twenty kilometers.

  He saw the nails on the road, too late. The wheels hissed and deflated. The hub clanged and the handlebars yanked out of the priest’s hands. It was a low speed crash, but Brother Beussy was impotent to stop it. The skid swerved off the road and hit a petrified trunk. For a second, Beussy thought that the worst was over. But the skid tilted and fell with the certainty of a quarter-ton machine and Brother Beussy went down with it.

  He heard bone crack. Pain squeezed the air out of his lungs.

  He prodded the machine, but the pain in his calf kept him from attempting anything drastic. Back in the city, it had taken three grown men to lift the skid up from its side. He had no hope of lifting it now. He knew he was trapped.

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