Paradise Tales, page 37
But we could not leave our brother to have stones thrown at him. He would be on the beach laughing at his own wild self, singing paeans of praise for the beauty of the bathers, asking their names, asking where they lived. Matthew and I would be numb from shame. “Come home, come home,” we said to him, and to the laborers, “Please excuse us, we are good Christians, he is not well.” We could not bring ourselves to call him our brother. He would laugh and run away. When we caught him, he would sit down on the ground and make us lift him up and carry him back to Matthew’s car. He was made of something other than flesh; his bones were lead, his blood mercury.
“I can’t take more of this,” said Matthew.
It ended so swiftly that we were left blinking. He disappeared from the house as usual; Mamamimi scolded Andrew to keep out of it and rang Matthew. He pulled up outside our gates, so back we went past the university, and the zoo where Baba had taken us as kids, then down beyond the old bridge.
This time was the worst, beyond anything. He was wearing one of Mamamimi’s dresses, sashaying among construction workers with a sun umbrella, roaring with laughter as he sang.
He saw us and called waving. “M’sugh! My brothers! My dear brothers! I am going swimming.”
He ran away from us like a child, into the river. He fought his way into those strong green currents, squealing like a child, perhaps with delight, as the currents cooled him. The great dress blossomed out then sank. He stumbled on pebbles underfoot, dipped under the water, and was not seen again.
“Go get him!” said Matthew.
I said nothing, did nothing.
“Go on, you’re the only one who likes him.” He had to push me.
I nibbled at the edge of the currents. I called his name in a weak voice as if I really didn’t want him back. I was angry with him as if he was now playing a particularly annoying game. Finally I pushed my way in partly so that Matthew would tell our mother that I’d struggled to find him. I began to call his name loudly, not so much in the hope of finding him as banishing this new reality. Raphael. Raphael, I shouted, meaning this terrible thing cannot be, not so simply, not so quickly. Finally I dove under the water. I felt the current pull and drag me away by my heels. I fought my way back to the shore but I knew I had not done enough, swiftly enough. I knew that he had already been swept far away.
On the bank, Matthew said, “Maybe it is best that he is gone.” Since then, I have not been able to address more than five consecutive words to him.
That’s what the family said, if not in words. Best he was gone. The bookcase was there with its notice. I knew we were cursed. I knew we would all be swept away.
Oh story, Raphael seemed to say to me. You just want to be miserable so you have an excuse to fail.
We need a body to bury, I said to his memory.
It doesn’t make any difference; nobody in this family will mourn. They have too many worries of their own. You’ll have to take care of yourself now. You don’t have your younger brother to watch out for you.
The sun set, everyone else inside the house. I wanted to climb up onto a roof, or sit astride the wall. I plugged the mobile phone into the laptop, but in the depths of our slough I could not get a signal. I went into our hot, unlit hall and pulled out the books, but they were unreadable without Raphael. Who would laugh for me as I did not laugh? Who would speak my mind for me as I could never find my mind in time? Who would know how to be pleasant with guests, civil in this uncivil world? I picked up our book on genetics and walked to the top of the hill, and sat in the open unlit shed of a church and tried to read it in the last of the orange light. I said, Patrick, you are not civil and can’t make other people laugh, but you can do this. This is the one part of Raphael you can carry on.
I read it aloud, like a child sounding out words, to make them go in as facts. I realized later I was trying to read in the dark, in a church. I had been chanting nonsense GATTACA aloud, unable to see, my eyes full of tears. But I had told myself one slow truth and stuck to it. I studied for many years.
Whenever I felt weak or low or lonely, Raphael spoke inside my indented head. I kept his books in order for him. The chemistry book, the human genetics book. I went out into the broken courtyard and started to lift the iron bars with balls of concrete that he had made. Now I look like the muscular champion on his netbook. Everything I am, I am because of my brother.
I did not speak much to anyone else. I didn’t want to. Somewhere what is left of Raphael’s lead and mercury is entwined with reeds or glistens in sand.
To pay for your application for a scholarship in those days you had to buy a scratch card from a bank. I had bought so many. I did not even remember applying to the Benue State Scholarship Board. They gave me a small stipend, enough if I stayed at home and did construction work. I became one of the workmen in the shallows.
Ex-colleagues of my father had found Matthew a job as a clerk in a bank in Jos. Matthew went to live with Uncle Emmanuel. Andrew’s jaw set, demanding to be allowed to go with him. He knew where things were going. So did Mamamimi, who saw the sense and nodded quietly, yes. Matthew became Andrew’s father.
We all lined up in the courtyard in the buzzing heat to let Matthew take the SUV, his inheritance. We waved good-bye as if half the family were just going for a short trip back to the home village or to the Chinese bakery to buy rolls. Our car pulled up the red hill past the church and they were gone. Mamamimi and I were alone with the sizzling sound of insects and heat and we all walked back into the house in the same way, shuffling flat-footed. We stayed wordless all that day. Even the TV was not turned on. In the kitchen, in the dark, Mamamimi said to me, “Why didn’t you go with them? Study at a proper university?” and I said, “Because someone needs to help you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. Not long afterward she took her rusty green car and drove it back to Kawuye for the last time. She lived with Uncle Jacob and the elders. I was left alone in this whispering house.
We had in our neglected, unpaid, strike-ridden campus a mathematician, a dusty and disordered man who reminded me of Raphael. He was an Idoma man called Thomas Aba. He came to Jide and me with his notebook and then unfolded a page of equations.
These equations described, he said, how the act of observing events at a quantum level changed them. He turned the page. Now, he said, here is how those same equations describe how observing alters effects on the macro level.
He had shown mathematically how the mere act of repeated observation changed the real world.
We published in Nature. People wanted to believe that someone working things out for themselves could revolutionize cosmology with a single set of equations. Of all of us, Doubting Thomas was the genius. Tsinghua University in Beijing offered him a Professorship and he left us. Citations for our article avalanched; Google could not keep up. People needed to know why everything was shifting, needing to explain both the climate-change debacle and the end of miracles.
Simply put, science found the truth and by finding it, changed it. Science undid itself, in an endless cycle.
Some day the theory of evolution will be untrue and the law of conservation of energy will no longer work. Who knows, maybe we will get faster-than-light travel after all?
Thomas still writes to me about his work, though it is the intellectual property of Tsinghua. He is now able to calculate how long it takes for observation to change things. The rotation of the Earth around the Sun is so rooted in the universe that it will take four thousand years to wear it out. What kind of paradigm will replace it? The Earth and the Sun and all the stars secretly overlap? Outside the four dimensions they all occupy the same single mathematical point?
So many things exist only as metaphors and numbers. Atoms will take only fifty more years to disappear, taking with them quarks and muons and all the other particles. What the Large Hadron Collider will most accelerate is their demise.
Thomas has calculated how long it will take for observation to wear out even his observation. Then, he says, the universe will once again be stable. History melts down and is restored.
My fiancée is a simple country girl who wants a Prof for a husband. I know where that leads. To Mamamimi. Perhaps no bad thing. I hardly know the girl. She wears long dresses instead of jeans and has a pretty smile. My mother’s family knows her.
The singing at the church has started, growing with the heat and sunlight. My beautiful suit wax-printed in blue and gold arches reflects the sunlight. Its cotton will be cool, cooler than all that lumpy knitwear from Indonesia.
We have two weddings; one new, one old. So I go through it all twice: next week, the church and the big white dress. I will have to mime love and happiness; the photographs will be used for those framed tributes: “Patrick and Leticia: True Love Is Forever.” Matthew and Andrew will be here with their families for the first time in years and I find it hurts to have brothers who care nothing for me.
I hear my father saying that my country wife had best be grateful for all that I give her. I hear him telling her to leave if she is not happy. This time, though, he speaks with my own voice.
Will I slap the walls all night or just my own face? Will I go mad and dance for workmen in a woman’s dress? Will I make stews so fiery that only I can eat them? I look down at my body, visible through the white linen, the body I have made perfect to compensate for my imperfect brain.
Shall I have a little baby with a creased forehead? Will he wear my father’s dusty cap? Will he sleepwalk, weep at night, or laugh for no reason? If I call him a family name, will he live his grandfather’s life again? What poison will I pass on?
I try to imagine all my wedding guests and how their faces would fall if I simply walked away, or strode out like Raphael to crow with delight, “No wedding! I’m not getting married, no way José!” I smile; I can hear him say it; I can see how he would strut.
I can also hear him say, What else is someone like you going to do except get married? You are too quiet and homely. A publication in Nature is not going to cook your food for you. It’s not going to get you laid.
I think of my future son. His Christian name will be Raphael but his personal name will be Ese, which means Wiped Out. It means that God will wipe out the past with all its expectations.
If witchcraft once worked and science is wearing out, then it seems to me that God loves our freedom more than stable truth. If I have a son who is free from the past, then I know God loves me too.
So I can envisage Ese, my firstborn. He’s wearing shorts and running with a kite behind him, happy, clean, and free, and we the Shawos live on the hill once more.
I think of Mamamimi kneeling down to look into my face and saying, “Patrick, you are a fine young boy. You do everything right. There is nothing wrong with you.” I remember my father, sane for a while, resting a hand on the small of my back and saying, “You are becoming distinguished.” He was proud of me.
Most of all I think of Raphael speaking his mind to Matthew, to Grandma, even to Father, but never to me. He is passing on his books to me in twilight, and I give him tea, and he says, as if surprised, That’s nice. Thank you. His shiny face glows with love.
I have to trust that I can pass on love as well.
Acknowledgments
With gratitude to the people who published these stories. In no particularly order: David Pringle, Paul Brazier, Gordon Van Gelder, Ellen Datlow, Esther Salomon, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Peter Crowther, Ra Page, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, and Andy Cox.
Publication History
These stories were originally published as follows:
The Film-makers of Mars, Tor.com, December 2, 2008
The Last Ten Years in the Life of Hero Kai, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2005
Birth Days, Interzone, April 2003
VAO, PS Publishing, 2002
The Future of Science Fiction, Nexus, Spring 1992
Omnisexual, Alien Sex, ed. Ellen Datlow, 1990
Home, Interzone, March 1995
Warmth, Interzone, October 1995
Everywhere, Interzone, February 1999. The author was specially commissioned to write this story by Artists Agency as part of the Visions of Utopia project.
No Bad Thing, The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, ed. Paul Brazier, 2007
Talk Is Cheap, Interzone, May/June 2008
Days of Wonder, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2008
You, When It Changed, Geoff Ryman, ed., 2010
K is for Kosovo (or, Massimo’s Career) is published here for the first time.
Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2006
Blocked, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2009
What We Found, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2011
Geoff Ryman was born in Canada in 1951, went to high school and college in the United States, and has lived most of his adult life in Britain. His longer works include The Unconquered Country, the novella version of which won the World Fantasy Award; The Child Garden, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; the hypertext novel 253, the “print remix” of which won the Philip K. Dick Award; Air, which won the Arthur C. Clarke and James Tiptree, Jr. awards; and a historical novel set in Cambodia, The King’s Last Song.
An early Web design professional, Ryman led the teams that designed the first web sites for the British monarchy and the Prime Minister’s office. He also has a lifelong interest in drama and film; his novel Was looks at America through the lens of The Wizard of Oz and has been adapted for the stage, and Ryman himself wrote and directed a stage adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales
