The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 Edition, page 54
4
“Power,” I instructed Marius. These days he was playing a thirty-string guitarangi da Gamba in a band called The Fluting Opera (they did no opera, and there were no flautists) and slept very late, but always came over to the lab, even early in the morning, for big occasions. He toggled the board. Lights went from red and yellow to green or white. Overhead, there was a perceptible flicker as we drained juice from the building’s transformer.
“It’s alive!” Marius cried in a maniacal voice that echoed inside the acoustically shielded control room. “It’s alive!”
I shot him a grin, then ignored him. Janey was poised at the edge of a second-order phase transition, with cortical correlations and anti-correlations extending across her entire brain. At criticality, the phases would collapse together in a series of neuronal avalanches. With luck and exquisite timing, we’d capture a time slice of Janey’s soul, and port it to the D-Wave box. I switched my microphone on.
“Think of a butterfly lighting on a daylily, Janey,” I suggested, and displayed a stereo picture of a gorgeous zebra swallowtail drifting past a tiger lily in Mom’s garden.
“Yo,” she said, drowsily. “With warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
It took me a moment to catch the quote: Gerard Manley Hopkins. Over the bent world broods. Yes. I activated the scan.
Diode lights went on everywhere.
“Mirror neurons,” Janey said, and Marius nodded. The boyish chubbiness, I noticed absently, had lately drained from his face; there was a firmness in his cheeks and his jaw.
“They’re big players in the qualia game,” I agreed, “but we’ve been through this before.” Dedicated F5 cells in the premotor cortex. Monkey see, monkey do—and presumably monkey feel the same raw feels. Trust me, urged the politicians, I feel your pain. But was that all? The Peggy Lee standard that my Mom used to croon drifted in memory: Is that all there is? “The neurology of emotive reciprocation is a prerequisite for empathy, sure—”
“For even the simplest appreciation that other people have feelings,” Janey said more loudly. “That their experience is akin to our own. To my own. To yours. However oddball each of us is, and I think it’s clear that when it comes to odd, you, my dear Saul, take the—”
Beneath the good natured banter, I felt a current of frustration and even animosity. This was my project, finally; somehow they’d allowed themselves to be roped in, years ago, and all we had for our thousands of hours and millions in investment was a machine, an engine, that did just what evolved mirror neurons did in an ape: echoed back, mirrored, what it saw. Seized, or rather embraced, a frozen instant of a soul in very ordinary passage. Less than ordinary, in fact: lying on your back, or propped up on a padded chair, sniffing a rose is a rose as sweet or attending to Delius in a country garden or tasting jalapenos, capsaicins burning the front of your tongue . . . these qualia were vivid enough as you experienced them, and worthy of capture and butchering on the analytic bench—but was it science? In the true sense: was it knowledge that eased open the universe a little more readily to our human grasp?
I felt my throat constrict. Fear? Anxiety, at least. I must take the next step. This was the key commitment we’d been working toward all these years. In a sense, Ruthie had given up her life for it. I had to patch into someone else’s qualia and run them through me in the most intimate embrace of another’s experience the world had ever dreamed of, outside delusions of spirit possession. Mom or Paul, it occurred to me, would probably be more at home with this prospect than I, soul believers both. The thought made me shiver and clench my toes. Yes, Oedipus, step right up to the scanner. But that risk was well in abeyance; none of the Atom Kids knew about this project. Quite a lot we never told them. Poor supermen.
“Cut the crap,” I said. “Let’s roll.”
The MEG imager room uses active shielding, a nested set of aluminum layers wrapping a one mm. sheet of high permeability ferromagnetic alloy. Inside that safe, quiet barrier, the MEG listens for the fragile magnetic fields generated by ionic currents in the brain’s dendrites as synapses pulse out or swallow their neurotransmitter messages. The signals it registers are foully dirty, the babbling from hundreds of adjacent cortical columns conflated and run together, so we cleaned them on the fly with a Bayes classifier and k-Nearest neighbor machine learning algorithms. All this took place at the interface between the D-Wave kilo-qubit processing units and a living brain—in this case, mine.
I thought again of Ruthie. But it was Janey’s qualia I was about to . . . what? Emulate? Re-run? Instantiate, that’s probably the mot juste.
I was drowsy; we used a low dose of diazepam to settle the butterflies. (Swallowtails winging across bright daylilies! My zonky mind skittered.) I moved lips that seemed thick and heavy. “Hit me, maestro.”
It was—
Faintly sickening, like a moment of vertigo, peering over the edge of a tall building and waiting for your confused eyes to focus on the tiny vehicles creeping past below. The double vision didn’t correct itself at once. A photo flashed into the display above me. A hairy dog running beside waves, golden sand spraying up from his galumphing paws, tail high, grinning mouth open, tongue flapping and moist in the brilliant beach sunshine. “Scarf,” I started to say, and knew at the same moment that this was Mousy, my grandparents’ beloved dog, when I was five, visiting them in Fort Lauderdale, and—
That wasn’t my memory. Nor my perception. And the colors were wrong, a little off. The reds were a tad flatter, somehow, and the yellows glowed as if in a heightened, pushed Photoshop rendition. Then hues swerved back to the spectrum I was used to. Erp. Oops. Next picture. Fruit in a gleaming bowl, on a table I remembered, one of us remembered. I’d knocked it over when I was three, climbing from chair to tabletop against Mother’s strict prohibition, and it shattered into shards of light that stung . . . Not my memory, either. But it resonated with my authentic recollection of tearing off sheet after sheet of toilet paper and dumping it in the toilet bowl, then lighting a match and throwing it in. The sharp stink of the match igniting, the slow blue-edged spread of flame across sagging, sogging paper, the rising thread of black and merry, gray smoke, the sudden terrifying racket of the smoke alarm, L.C.’s frightened, angry shout—
We’re not that different, I thought, and my mind wrapped itself about Janey’s memories, her guesses, her being. I looked up at picture after picture in the stimulus display, falling more and more deeply into resonance with her soul, I suppose you’d have to say, jolted back out again from time to time (the weight and heft of breasts as I jumped, smacking the volleyball hard, cramping in my guts with my period, the pleasure of lightly coating my pouted mouth with lipgloss of just the right color, the faintly heavy sweet odor of that gloss in my nostrils, those three savage hours of Britten’s Peter Grimes at the Met), but all of it no more, really, than a visit to a museum exhibit, a wonderful holographic or (somehow) articulated waxworks display of a mind and caught in one timeless moment—
“Here are some people you know,” said a voice. Marius, I supposed. Not Paul, my father. But there was Paul’s face, and again from another angle, snapped at different ages, hair never too long or short, never the rebel, Paul, always the good dutiful boy who accepted his responsibilities with grace and endurance, but wasn’t it a little odd how sometimes, in the right light, with his mouth held at that angle, he seemed so much like Saul—
Marius, defiant at six years of age, when they’d decided to send us to conventional schools, the Atom Kids had, explaining how we must try to fit in as best we might, not boasting, not showing off what we knew, our skills, our odious specialness, must learn how to be them, dear god, to absorb and mimic the qualia of their limited lives, learn that their hungers and heartbreaks were no less agonizing to them than ours to us, that their joys called for respect and happiness shared, that—
Ruthie’s face, and she was gone, gone, half-cyborg, half sweet sharp-tongued angel, never to grow through the rest of our life together, never to have our babies together as, girl to girl, we’d promised each other—But that was Janey’s recollection, channeled like the whisper of a ghost to my memory, my clenching, bitter gut—
Janey, now. My clever friend. My sister. My companion. My—
Oh, oh, oh. Like a cruel light flung in your blinking eyes. Unable to turn away. Insupportable. Had her qualia been utterly impenetrable, if the machine had worked but shown that we inhabited dissimilar inward realities—that would have been disheartening, the waste of years and effort, but this was—
I was scalded by her incandescent love. The richness of it was a wave crushing my petty pragmatism, my small resentments against L.C. and Paul.
The pictures had moved on. Kuzi, the Patriarch, all the rest of them, but I was floundering.
“Turn it off,” I said. “For god’s sake turn it off.”
There was Janey, beside me, practical, matter of fact, pulling the sticky squid contacts from my head and torso. I watched her sensible face. It was impossible to reconcile my inward knowledge that she was profoundly, achingly, in love with me, had been for years, had never said the smallest word or given any hint because Ruthie—
“Thanks,” I said. “We can do a debriefing in a few minutes. Have to be . . . by myself for a while,” and stumbled to the rest room, perched on the toilet seat. I was thinned by her absence from my doubled soul, by my self-knowledge that, to me, she had never been, can never be, anything more than a pal.
“Oh shit,” I muttered. “What the hell am I going to do?”
Reality came back into single focus. I had to stop her from undergoing a reciprocal qualia immersion. It would devastate her, I told myself.
A dying echo of her soul inside mine gave a derisive laugh. Get over yourself, Saul Collins. You condescending, sexist little man.
But that, too, was just a slice of the complex reality.
I washed myself quickly, making the water run as hot as I could tolerate, then as cold, splashing myself back to myself, then walked to the control room where they waited for me.
“Hey, Odysseus,” Janey said, and sent me a sad smile. She knew. She had known, of course she had, what I would find there. I shook my head.
Marius glanced between us, rose casually and left the room. “Later, dude.”
I looked at Janey, and she looked at me. “Hey, Jane,” I said. “Hello, my dear friend.” Eyes misting, I waved one hand at the MEG control panel, at our Qualia Engine. “You’ll have to take it for a spin.”
“Jump right in, huh?”
“Sure,” I said, mixing my metaphors, “the water’s fine!”
We went out arm in arm, as friends do, qualia humming in us, to where Marius cooled his heels against a corridor wall, and headed off, all three, toward The Genteel Pizzeria to eat something disgustingly wicked and clogged with cholesterol.
THE RADIANT CAR THY SPARROWS DREW
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk: a soulless phantasm and nothing more. “Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!’”
—Wordsworth Donisthorpe,
inventor of the Kinesigraph Camera
View the Famous Callowhale Divers of Venus from the Safety of a Silk Balloon! Two Bits a Flight!
—Advertisement Visible in the Launch Sequence of
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
EXT. The cannon pad at the Vancouver World’s Fair in 1986, late afternoon, festooned with crepe and banners wishing luck and safe travel.
The Documentarian Bysshe and her crew wave jerkily as confetti sticks to their sleek skullcaps and glistening breathing apparati. Her smile is immaculate, practiced, the smile of the honest young woman of the hopeful future; her copper-finned helmet gleams at her feet. Bysshe wears women’s clothing but reluctantly and only for this shot, and the curl of her lip betrays disdain of the bizarre, flare-waisted swimming costume that so titillates the crowds. Later, she would write of the severe wind-burns she suffered in cannon-flight due to the totally inadequate protection of that flutter of black silk. She tucks a mahogany case smartly under one arm, which surely must contain George, her favorite cinematographe. Each of her crewmen strap canisters of film—and the occasional bit of food or oxygen or other minor accoutrements—to their broad backs. The cannon sparkles, a late-model Algernon design, filigreed and etched with motifs that curl and leaf like patterns in spring ice breaking.
They are a small circus—the strongmen, the clowns, the trapeze artist poised on her platform, arm crooked in an evocative half-moon, toes pointed into the void.
I find it so difficult to watch her now, her narrow, monkish face, not a pore wasted, her eyes huge and sepia-toned, her smile enormous, well-practiced, full of the peculiar, feral excitement which in those days seemed to infect everyone who looked up into the evening sky to see Venus there, seducing behind veils of light, as she has always done. Those who looked and had eyes only for red Mars, all baleful and bright, were rough, raucous, ready and hale. Those who saw Venus were lost.
She was such a figure then: Bysshe, no surname, or simply the Documentarian. Her revolving lovers made the newsreels spin, her films packed the nickelodeons and wrapped the streets three times ‘round. Weeks before a Bysshe opened, buskers and salesmen would camp out on the thoroughfares beside every theater, selling genuine cells she touched with her own hand and replica spangled cages from To Thee, Bright Queen! sized just right to hold a male of Saturnine extraction. Her father, Percival Unck, was a brooding and notorious director in his time, his gothic dramas full of wraith-like heroines with black, bruised eyes and mouths perpetually agape with horror or orgiastic transcendence. Her mother was, naturally, one of those ever-transported actresses, though which one it is hard to remember, since each Unck leading lady became, by association and binding contract, little black-bobbed Bysshe’s mother-of-the-moment. Thus it is possible to see, in her flickering, dust-scratched face, the echoes of a dozen fleeting, hopeful actresses, easily forgotten but for the legacy of their adoptive daughter’s famous, lean features, her scornful, knowing grin.
Bysshe rejected her father’s idiom utterly. Her film debut in Unck’s The Spectres of Mare Nubium is charming, to say the least. During the famous ballroom sequence wherein the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, little Bysshe can be seen crouching unhappily near the rice-wine fountain, picking at the pearls on her traditional lunar kokoshnik and rubbing at her make-up. The legend goes that when Percival Unck tried to smudge his daughter’s eyes with black shadows and convince her to pretend herself a poor Schirm relation while an airy phantasm—years later to become her seventh mother—swooped down upon the innocent child, Bysshe looked up exasperatedly and said: “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”
And so she would be, forever, only and always Bysshe. As soon as she could work the crank on a cinematographe herself, she set about recording “the really real and actual world” (age 7) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale,” (age 21) and declaring her father’s beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double exposure drivel.” Her first documentary, The Famine Queen of Phobos, brought the colony’s food riots to harsh light, and earned her a Lumiere medal, a prize Percival Unck would never receive. When asked if his daughter’s polemics against fictive cinema had embittered him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said: “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”
Of her final film, The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, only five sequences remain, badly damaged. Though they have been widely copied, cut up and re-used in countless sallow and imitative documentaries on her life, the originals continue to deteriorate in their crystalline museum displays. I go there, to the Grand Eternal Exhibition, in the evenings, to watch them rot. It comforts me. I place my brow upon the cool wall, and she flashes before my eyes, smiling, waving, crawling into the mouth of the cannon-capsule with the ease of a natural performer, a natural aeronaut—and perhaps those were always much the same thing.
EXT. Former Site of the Village of Adonis, on the Shores of the Sea of Qadesh, Night.
A small boy, head bent, dressed in the uniform of a callowhale diver, walks in circles in what was once the village center. The trees and omnipresent cacao-ferns are splashed with a milky spatter. He does not look up as the camera watches him. He simply turns and turns and turns, over and over. The corrupted film skips and jumps; the boy seems to leap through his circuit, flashing in and out of sight.
When she was seventeen, Bysshe and her beloved cinematographe, George, followed the Bedouin road to Neptune for two years, resulting in her elegaic And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly. There, they say, she learned her skill at the sculpting of titanium, aquatic animal handling, and a sexual variant of Samayika mediation developed by a cult of levitation on tiny Halimede, where the wind blows warm and violet. There is a sequence, towards the melancholy conclusion of And the Sea, wherein Bysshe visits coral-devoured Enki, the great floating city which circumnavigates the planet once a decade, buoyed by the lugubrious Neptunian current. Reclining on chaises with glass screens raised to keep out the perpetual rain, Bysshe smokes a ball of creamy, heady af-yun with a woman-levitator, her hair lashed with leather whips. When theaters received the prints of And the Sea, a phonograph and several records were included, so that Bysshe herself could narrate her opus to audiences across the world. A solemn bellhop changed the record when the onscreen Bysshe winked, seemingly to no one. And so one may sit on a plush chair, still, and hear her deep, nasal voice echo loudly—too loud, too loud!—in the theater.
