Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 116 Read online

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 116

  Table of Contents

  Left Behind

  by Cat Rambo

  The Universal Museum of Sagacity

  by Robert Reed

  Breathe

  by Cassandra Khaw

  Jonas and the Fox

  by Rich Larson

  Away from Home

  by Luo Longxiang

  Tough Times All Over

  by Joe Abercrombie

  A Heap of Broken Images

  by Sunny Moraine

  Destination: Venus

  by Andrew Liptak

  Transcendent Transformation: A Conversation with James Gunn

  by Chris Urie

  Another Word: Strange Stars

  by Jason Heller

  Editor’s Desk: Stress Relief

  by Neil Clarke

  Ananiel, Angel of Storms

  Art by Peter Mohrbacher

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2016

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Left Behind

  Cat Rambo

  Her office doorway was one of the many things that annoyed Shi about her job. It wasn’t a proper door, one that could be closed, but an open arch. She’d complained about it more than once, but been told that doors were antithetical to the institute’s brand.

  “It signifies openness,” the director had said, smiling effulgently. It was a thin neuter with glossy hair and eyebrows that curled in elaborate patterns. Floral tattoos colored its pale brown skin, colored purple and blue that pulsed with the director’s heartbeat. An expensive body-mod, one that signaled the director’s financial status, in a way that Shi’s Business professors would have approved of.

  It didn’t really matter how you presented, as long as it was costly enough to signal your status, they had said. You figured out a percentage of your budget—were you maintaining or actually trying to get ahead? And of course there were other investments you could—should—make, but none of that mattered if it was a dead end job, being phased out, with no lateral shifts available, only downward, if you didn’t have the initial dollars to invest. Time advances; adapt or be left behind.

  Shi had put together a solid wardrobe a few years back but things were starting to fray. She caught the director eying her sleeve and folded her arms to hide the shirt’s cuff.

  “I have a new case for you,” the director said, tone as pleasant as a pastel.

  Relief made Shi realize she’d been holding herself stiffly upright in the director’s presence. That means I’ve made quota with still another week to go this month. Every month her clientele dwindled further, though. How will I manage when the inevitable moment comes and I fail to meet requirements three months in a row? She took a breath, and triggered calming agents in her bloodstream. They’d give me six months severance. All I have to do is figure out how to best use it.

  The director was saying something about the client’s children. “They seem conflicted. They’ve agreed to it, but only if you can help their mother be more than a dumbship. Remember our work enables an entire industry.” They dropped a pad on her desk.

  The director had transferable skills. And they were management. So they’d be among the last to go.

  She smiled at them and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Shi was currently female. She had chosen to present as an eleven-year-old girl, a slim, short shape that she had found disarmed most older people. Although there was a small percentage who found it off-putting. “Creepy,” one had called it, trying to explain the aversion. “An adult mind in a kid’s body? You just know too much.”

  She’d handed him off to another client. Most people were genderfluid, able to inhabit any sort of body, but changing was expensive. Not just the procedure, but maintenance, clothes, sometimes furniture and other necessities of life. More than just changing the uncomplicated pronoun to be used in day-to-day affairs or the much more complicated set to be used in intimate occasions, signaling sexual availability and preferences.

  That was risky, establishing personal relationships manually. Easier to figure out what you wanted—which you knew intimately after first establishing a profile scan and diagnostic discussion, and which might actually be the opposite of what you thought you wanted. Imagine being someone who didn’t understand all of that internal stuff and just blundered along on gut feeling! The computers used DNA and personality tests and your social media presence and a barrage of other factors in order to figure things out, and while you could game the system by picking the right keywords, certainly, why would you ever want to do that and risk setting yourself up with a relationship that was doomed before it even started?

  It might be different if you didn’t have choices. But that battle had been fought decades ago. You had a right to your own body, to make it take whatever shape you wanted (and could afford). At the highest and lowest levels, they went “natural” although at the high end of that it was a nature that was augmented with as much beneficial science as could possibly be crammed in a body without making it obvious.

  When the trio appeared in her door, she had the file open. Cianna Jones, age 98. The two adult children, Rick and Ruth, flanked their parent, who presented as an older woman. They had chosen to present genders themselves, one male, one female, though Shi wasn’t sure whether it was by preference or to keep their parent more comfortable. Each held their mother by the arm, steering her.

  Cianna herself seemed adrift, a fluff of feathery white hair and vague blue eyes. She had undergone some minor cosmetics, but for the most part she seemed unaltered, which often happened with older citizens, ones who might even remember the early part of the century and the old ways there, that primitive time that seemed so obsessed with sex.

  Introductions were made by the children, while the mother smiled vaguely at Shi from the seat they had pushed and tugged her into.

  Shi didn’t address the group overall, though—just her client. There were important formalities to be observed.

  “You understand why you are here?” she asked.

  “I can have my mind wiped or else you can build me a palace,” the woman murmured. Her voice carried a slight natural drawl, somewhere between southern and Midwestern, probably uncorrected natural rather than a mod. She smiled sleepily at Shi, and Shi wondered briefly if she were drunk or stoned.

  “After a fashion, yes,” Shi said. “That’s one way people refer to them in the literature, mind palaces. It’s the virtual reality best suited to you. You can fill them with all sorts of things. All of your past, and the places you never got to but always wanted to.”

  She projected a smile at the client, a barrage of white teeth intended to elicit confidence. But the smile that was returned was much harder to read. Did Ms. Jones actually understand what was happening? Shi eyed Rick and Ruth, sitting on the edges of their seats and occasionally shooting dagger-eyed glares at each other, before she continued.

  “Your children don’t want you to be a simple shipmind. That’s where I come in. I teach you how to keep part of yourself separate. To that part, the conscious part, it’ll feel like a life in virtual reality.” She didn’t add that the life depended on the quality of Cianna’s mind, how well she could summon up details. Constructing a mind palace was a collaborative effort whose ineffectual results were another thing she hated about her job.

  But, oh, the good ones, the well-realized ones . . . those were her only chance to experience the sort of thing you usually had to pay an arm and a leg—sometimes literally—for.

  Cianna stared off into space. Shi looked again at the children.

  “Your parent does understand what we are doing?”

  “She�
��s measured .9 on the Sati meter,” Ruth said. “She has been declared incapable of autonomy and this seemed best for her.” She smirked at Rick.

  Shi looked at him, his hands clasped anger-tight in front of tensed torso. “You’re not comfortable with this decision?”

  “It’s the only choice,” he said stiffly. Shi sensed an echo in those words, that it was something that had been said to him over and over—probably by his sibling—until he was convinced by it. “But I don’t want her to go if she can’t . . . if she doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

  “She doesn’t, part of the time,” Ruth said. “She has episodes. She harmed someone during one. Not for the first time.”

  Cianna stirred but Rick replied. “Don’t exaggerate. You’re making a lot out of a couple of shoves.”

  “Human beings,” Ruth said primly, “don’t resort to physical violence to get what they want. That sort of thing may have been in style when she was growing up, but it’s outmoded now. So let her go off, into a place where she can’t hurt anyone.” The look she gave her mother said that “hurt” encompassed a great many things. “The money’s great. I’d volunteer for it myself if I could.”

  The automatic spiel spooled out of Shi’s mouth. “Younger brains like yours and mine—the ones that have lived all their lives with shunts—can’t adapt to the technology. You and I can inhabit the mind palaces, but our autonomic systems don’t interface with the system the way theirs do. We need them to drive the ships. To become them. That’s why the price the institute pays is so high.” She looked at Cianna again, trying to connect. “You’re a precious commodity.”

  The mother sat silent, smiling vaguely, but something about the glitter of her eyes made Shi uneasy. Something off about the situation, something out of kilter in a way that she couldn’t exactly define but definitely didn’t like.

  “You can try,” Rick said grudgingly. “Then we’ll talk.”

  In the chamber, the waiting couch smelled damply of antiseptic, freshly swabbed and ready, the plastic a soothing pinkish-gray that always made Shi think of uterine flesh. Muraled walls, confluences of pink and gray spirals, gauzily drawn in tiny tiles against a beige background, boxed in the chamber. The light calculated to the last lumen to provide just enough illumination to soothe, watery sunlight sifted through new leaves.

  Buckles clicked into place as she strapped the older woman into the plastic couch, explaining as she went. They were quieter and more docile if they understood what was happening.

  “We’re taking a brain scan,” she said. “In building the palace, we’ll use many of your memories, but we’ll also correlate them with the physical record, all the existing photos and videos, and use those to make details perfect. Think of all the wonderful places that are gone and that you would like to return to. They’ll all be back, there in your head, and you’ll be able to spend as much time as you like in them.”

  The older woman made no response other than an acquiescent murmur. Was it odd for her to have an apparent child explaining the situation? Shi wished she had picked some different way to present for today. Once you had presented to a client, you were supposed to stay in that form, in order to give them a sense of security and continuity.

  Not to mention Shi couldn’t afford it right now.

  “It will feel as though you’re going to sleep,” she said. “You will be, in a sense. Would you like me to explain the science behind it?”

  Cianna ignored her, stared off into space with an intensity that gave Shi pause. What was going on in the woman’s head? She watched the face slacken as the machine took hold and Cianna’s grip on consciousness was gently pried away, finger by finger, until she floated in the void, awaiting Shi.

  It was always enjoyable, stepping into someone’s inner landscape for the first time, but she could tell from the first second that this one would be extraordinary. It took a high level of sensitivity and imagination to create a mindworld like this one, surgical sharp and vivid, down to the smell of the tiny coral-colored tea roses around her feet, the feel of a sea breeze tickling her cheek as it came from a sweep of vast blue that footed a long green slope broken with a tiny red brick building, and an enormous tree (her infochip murmured madrona, identifying it) in the center.

  This would be Cianna’s core landscape. They differed from person to person, and usually you didn’t know what yours was. Shi did. Hers was an enormous skyscraper, resembling the one she’d grown up in, but with plenty of undiscovered halls leading in odd directions, and staircases of a kind that hadn’t existed in the actual building, long crawls of cement stairs that led downward, never upward, towards some menace that lurked at the foot of things. She had learned by now to break those dreams, to turn around and say determinedly not real not real loud enough to shatter the world around her but she had never done what her training suggested she should do: dig farther into the meaning and extract it, learn something about herself that she should—in theory—know.

  If you understood your internal workings, you were more in control of your life, able to compensate for your foibles, but Shi thought that she wanted to leave herself some level of unexplainable mystery, of moments where she wondered at the motivations of her unconscious, where it was unknown why she had lost her keys or had a particular piece of music playing in her head.

  Why she wasn’t preparing herself for the death of her profession. Cianna had to be one of the last. The competition was fierce. She’d been lucky to get it, the director had implied. The fact that they had felt the need to tell her that was alarming, had implications. Social networks were more important than luck in government work. You had to have influence to get a high-end job, one that came with good accommodations, even some luxuries.

  She walked down over springy, damp grass, covered with dewdrops that threw up scintillations of light, spangles of color that danced in the air around them. Shi had rarely witnessed such intensity of mind. She certainly couldn’t think of any cases that had been stronger.

  Cianna was there underneath the tree, but she didn’t greet Shi as she appeared, turned her face away. She was humming, a tune that Shi didn’t recognize, something slow and almost familiar.

  “Won’t you walk with me and tell me about things?” Shi said, but the other woman didn’t acknowledge her. Sometimes they weren’t capable of it, but Shi thought that she was perceived, simply that Cianna chose not to speak to her.

  And that was interesting in itself, because that spoke of an internal determination—perhaps even anger—that belied the vague smiles. Was it possible that Cianna didn’t want to retire to her memory palace? It would be—surely—a better existence than this one, with the two bickering children posing as adults.

  But people resist change, inevitably, particularity the personalities that have throve in older times. A fading mindset. At some point all of the minds like this would be dead and they would have to turn to some other way to do it. Maybe Shi would be suited for that, but probably not. Nowadays the computers steered you into a particular career and while it might not be the one that you would have chosen for yourself, it would always turn out to be the one that you ended up sticking with, for one reason or another.

  She set out. This initial session, she’d be sampling Cianna’s memories, building up an idea of what the ultimate structure would look like, how much it would hold. This brain would live for centuries, but it would always be confined by the limits of Shi’s creation. Part of her job was to gauge how narrow its confines could be, and with brutal efficiency, build not a step more.

  Sometimes that resulted in very small spaces indeed, depending on the type of mind. That one a few months ago had chosen a world the size of a couch, an endless coupling with a variety of partners and an algorithm designed to ensure that fresh choices would always be available. That seemed like a very circumscribed existence, and yet they had been happy enough with it. An eternity of good sex didn’t sound all that bad, but you could achieve something very similar right now if you
were willing to jack in.

  Cyberlife was almost always more interesting than real life; it was designed to be, in a way that real life just wasn’t. So much advertising science had gone into its design that it was deeply compelling and every year you heard horror stories about people plugging in and never being heard from again—there was a brand of assisted suicide that specialized in it, in fact—either go into the virtual reality and live there until your body starved or actually seek out your death inside it while a watching attendant threw the kill-switch at the right time.

  Some wealthy people lived that way by choice, though. Enabled by vivid minds, the minds of artists. Cianna was that sort of mind, but she was also compatible with one of the great transport ships that carried colonists outward, able to serve as its heart, its lungs, its guts, as well as the mind that drove it forward. Shi’s job was only to prepare and reconcile her. It didn’t matter what artistry might be lost in the process.

  To the left, white two-story buildings, old ones, surrounding a quadrangle of more deep green grass, five deer grazing there. She marveled at the depth as she moved closer to them, at the fuzzy ears on the half-grown fawn, the way they twitched. She studied a deer as it scratched its neck with a hind-hoof, twisting around to do so. This sort of detail meant this was a childhood landscape, something seen for the first time, observed with the grave intensity of a curious child.

  She went up a set of concrete steps, their edges eroded by time and weather’s subtle grip, to the first house. She could see nothing through the windows, which were silvered by the sunlight coming from behind her. The wooden door swung inward, admitting her, when she knocked, and she stepped into a white-walled hallway, a woolen rug underneath her feet to soften the pine planking. At the end of the hall, a glimpse of kitchen, but to her right an archway into a parlor decorated with pine furniture and small candles along the red-brick fireplace.

  A girl and boy playing there. One would be Cianna. The other would probably be a sibling; she made a mental note to research them, taking a quick shot of the narrow, long-nosed face and the wealth of coal black curls, the thin quick smile and dark penstrokes of eyebrows. A beautiful boy, made even more beautiful by the particularly of the rendering. Cianna had an extraordinary mind, and surely that must make the memory palace even more appealing to her? The sort of world she could construct for this client would be the best that she’d ever done, she thought. A masterwork, of the sort that got commissioned by the wealthiest of clients.