Prev Next

Table of Contents

Praise for the Novels of Nick Sagan

Edenborn

“In Nick Sagan’s novel, the survivors of a plague have a chance to start all over again . . . [but] the new generation of humanity is, if anything, even more spiteful, schizophrenic, ideologically fixated, and generally screwed up than any of its predecessors. . . . [Sagan] knows how to keep the pages turning.”

— The New York Times

“All the best science fiction is about human beings, not technology or aliens; stories about the last men and women in the world are therefore even more poignant. But what Nick Sagan does here goes well past genre tropes and into rare climates of terror, pathology, and rage; hope, from this vantage, seems more fighterly and ragged than noble or sentimental. Edenborn is a daring and refreshing look at one too possible future.” —EDGE Boston

“Poetic. . . . Sagan’s sharp observations and rich imagination entertain . . . and lay a strong groundwork for volume three.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Elegant SF, dark and haunting, with characters who linger in memory long after the last page is turned.”

—SF Site

“Gripping. . . . The story’s heart lies in the complexity of the characters’ psyches, motivations, and relationships, which propel the action and augment the overriding sense of desperation.” — Booklist

“[ Edenborn] delivers a number of powerful emotional punches . . . another excellent character-driven work of literature from an author with a great deal of promise.”

—Infinity Plus

“I believe that Edenborn is the finest book that I have read this year. . . . It’s one of those few books that I literally could not put down. . . . Sagan’s mantelpiece deserves to be heaving with shiny metallic awards and I certainly do not think it would be wrong to mention the word ‘Hugo’. . . . Sagan is an adrenaline shot straight into the heart of SF. Do yourself a favor—don’t miss these books.” —SF

Crowsnest

“[An] appealing chronicle of superhuman folly.” — Starburst

“Edenborn is one of the best postapocalyptic novels you will ever read. . . . The story itself is one that has been thought out and rehashed so many times that to experience such an exciting and original take on it is breathtaking. With a rumbling urgency throughout, Edenborn is tough to put down without finishing, whilst Sagan’s depiction of a fragile, fallible race will bring people back to this book time and time again. It’s not often authors like Nick Sagan crop up, and it’s a crying shame they don’t.” — SFX Magazine (5-star review)

“Thrilling and unsettling, Edenborn serves both as a gripping stand-alone story and as a strong linchpin for where this prospective trilogy has been, and wherever it might be going next.” —Wigglefish

Idlewild

“A genuine page-turner. Absolutely fun, like a roller-coaster ride of fusion fiction: starts out like Amber meets The Matrix, and as it goes on, it turns into several something elses . . . gripping . . . the kind of book you simply don’t want to stop reading.” —Neil Gaiman

“This guy obviously has a sense of wonder in his DNA. This book is an essential upgrade for the Matrix generation— download now! Sagan has a ferocious imagination, and he knows his field; I caught echoes of Gibson, Egan, Stephenson . . . and he can tell a great human story: the sentence he gave to Voyager I isn’t the last of his words to touch human hearts.” —Stephen Baxter

“Sagan provides plenty of suspense and perfectly captures the angry adolescent solipsism that makes kids into hackers and superheroes.” — Entertainment Weekly

“The author’s compelling tendency to interweave mythology with his story sets him apart from less-gifted writers in this literary niche.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“Riveting. . . . Nick Sagan both embraces and contests his famous father’s vision of the universe.” —

Popular Science

“A dark, twisted carnival of oddities and slippery reality . . . beautiful . . . an extraordinary ride.” —

Ithaca Times

“Reading Idlewild is an intriguing, sometimes baffling experience, but somehow never confusing or frustrating. A stunning twist of plot brings all the threads together. . . . Idlewild is a real page-turner: an engrossing, exciting debut, an excellent summer read.” —NPR

“A fun but frightening place, something like Disneyworld seen through a Hieronymus Bosch filter . . . wonderful.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Aimed at the audiences of The Matrix and Minority Report and fans of Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, and Mark Danielewski, Sagan’s novel . . . is a fine debut . . . and fans of those same authors will enjoy this.” — Library Journa l

“The tension is palpable from the first page. . . . Sagan captures perfectly the voice and actions of a rebellious, extremely intelligent teenager . . . mesmerizing.” — Booklist

“Idlewild is an entertaining and suspenseful science fiction novel. . . . Nick Sagan’s devious mind moves events in unexpected directions . . . an impressive debut.” —Rambles

“Sagan seems to delight in changing the rules just when you think you’ve got the hang of them. There’s plenty to confound the reader’s expectations, and all of it is couched in engaging, well-paced prose. . . . This is one of the best I’ve read. . . . It’s utterly astonishing.” —Infinity Plus

“This is an absolutely stunning novel and a great entry for Sagan onto the scene. The text is packed full of dark humor and wonderfully evoked settings. . . . Sagan’s characters are well defined; each has a unique personality that is striking and memorable, resonating in my mind long after the book was finished. . . . It is rare for an SF novel to pack so much into so little space. It’s what you’d get if you took all the best bits of Buffy and stirred in a healthy dose of philosophy and seasoned it with some Grade-A postapocalyptic pepper.”

—SF Crowsnest

“Bloody good. Fusing elements of cyberpunk with the hitech crime novel, Idlewild is taut, edgy SF.” —

SFX Magazine

Also by Nick Sagan

Idlewild

Everfree

ROC

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in G. P. Putnam’s Sons and New American Library editions.

First Roc Printing, April 2008

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

for my mother

Speed of sound.

It’s coming round.

Heaven’s on the way down.

LOCAL H, “HEAVEN ON THE WAY DOWN”

PROLOGUE

The room was white, and sterile, and fearsome. It would be the last room he would ever see and he knew it. He knew it all too well.

With his blurry vision and the poor fluorescent light overhead,he could just make out the pain poster on the far wall. Cartoon faces had been arranged side by side, only the one at the far left looking happy and content with its engaging smile and soothing periwinkle hue. Beneath it he could see the number zero, a response to the question at the top of the poster: “How much pain are you in?” And by the zero, the word “none.” But to the right of that smiling face, he saw a colorful rogues’ gallery of the unsmiling, a progression of cartoon torture victims. From one they ranged up to the number ten, “more pain than you can possibly imagine,” a grotesque parody of suffering, the crimson face contorted in a berserk anguished cry. He stared balefully at that countenance,hating it, feeling increasingly mocked by it over the past few weeks. Compounding the insult was the chart itself, wholly inaccurate as far as he was concerned because “more pain than you can possibly imagine” becomes imaginable the moment you experience it. It becomes

“oh God please no.” Simply that. And you can experience it again and again, and then even worse pain that makes it seem pleasurable in comparison. That ten can stretch. There are elevens and twelves. The pit is truly bottomless. He knew that now.

He glanced over at the pine green face, the first stop on the trip to hell with its number one and nervous look. A look that said notice I am not smiling any longer, in fact unlike my periwinkleneighbor I am distinctly worried about my condition. I’m not going to feel any worse than this, am I? Vividly he remembered that feeling when he first got sick.When he still had faith in medical science finding an eleventh-hour vaccine. How bad will it get before they cure me?

Never this bad, he’d thought. What price those illusions? The green face still had hope in its unseeing cartoon eyes, his lost optimism trapped in a two-dimensionaldrawing. He hated it more than the red face, he realized. He hated it because it would go through all the colors of the rainbow before inevitably becoming red, and he hated it because it was too stupid to recognize its doom.Worst of all, he hated himself for hating it, bitterly mourning the cheerful and untroubled man he once was, a man with heart and character who had seemed momentarily impervious to the many unlovelytransformations the disease would put him through. As his temperature spiked, he clutched his aching gut and wondered if he had not in fact swallowed Death itself, so powerful the affliction chewing away at him from the inside out. It was wretchedly unfair, this bait and switch in which he’d been promised a long and happy life but instead had been given an illness that would kill not only him, but everyone he knew and loved, and even everyone he didn’t know and love. Black Ep would successfully wipe out all humanity and it wasn’t the least bit fair. Felled by tiny microbes. He felt like Gulliver captured by the Lilliputians. Only these Lilliputians would not recognize his worth and put him to work as a giant defender of their land. On the contrary, they would ruin him utterly, consume him, and of his dearest hopes make kindling.

When the pain waned, the nausea waxed, and vice versa, so moments of comfort seemed as scarce as gold nuggets in a coal mine, and to him, incalculably more valuable. In those heaven-sent moments of relief, he found himself weeping, though whether he wept for his lost future, his wife’s or the world’s was never clear to him, and he did not like to think of himself as a woebegone sort, so he rationalized that he was simply weeping with joy at an oasis in the desert of his disease. And when the pain and sickness returned, the oasis would vanish, disappearing so quickly and completely that he came to look back upon it as nothing more than a mirage.

“It’s not real,” he mumbled, his throat burning and encrusted with phlegm.

“What isn’t, sweetheart?” she said, blotting his forehead with a cool compress. When had she returned?

“Mercy,” he said. Or perhaps he just thought he said it. No mercy in the genome of the virus.

“What about you?” he asked, blinking rapidly. “Are you real?”

“Of course I am.”

He took her hand and squeezed as hard as he could, then nodded, eyes closed. “I’ve been dreaming so much I don’t know what’s real anymore. I dreamt about you before but . . . you weren’t . . . it wasn’t . . .”

She shushed him and he nodded again, breathing deep before succumbing to a coughing fit that forced him onto his side in a tight fetal ball. She stroked his hair and asked if he wanted her to get the nurse. He didn’t answer. He thought about the child they had been trying to have and all the good things they’d wanted for him. Or her, he’d have been just as delighted with a girl. If only he’d lived in another time when dreams of parenthood and prosperity and living to a ripe old age still had promise. But fate had dropped him into an era of uncertainty and fear, with technological wonders secondaryto hostile ideologies sweeping the globe, no end to the strikes and counterstrikes and poverty and plagues, of which Black Ep would undoubtedly be the greatest and last. And yet, here he had found true love, a strong and gentle flower he could fight and die for, a woman who not only could stand to be near him in his last moments of weakness, vomiting and dread, but who would help him through his awful pains, and relish that time as precious. He would be forever grateful for her if little else in his life.

He tried to sit up, failed, tried again. His head lolled back against the pillow and he looked at her, loving her, past the point of being embarrassed for her to see him this way, but wishing he could be just a little healthier now, strong enough to put on a brave face and be the comforting one. To hold her, stroke her hair, ease some of her concern. Why had he been the one to get sick first? It might be easier for her after he died, he thought, because though she would be grief-stricken there would surely be an accompanying sense of relief. He could kill himself to expedite that day. But she would never forgive him for that. It was only a matter of time until she took his place in a hospital bed. She would die soon enough, they both knew it, and the time she had left she wanted to spend with him.

“Who will take care of you after I’m dead?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Don’t think of that.”

“It’s not right for you to take care of me when you’re bound to get sick soon and there’ll be no one to take care of you.”

“Just rest.”

“What happened to you today?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I waited there for three hours and they wouldn’t see us. We chanted, we begged, we pleaded. They just left us outside the fence staring in.”

“Like kids at the bakery window.”

“Exactly.”

“Those miserable fuckers,” he spat. “Don’t go back there.”

“Oh baby, I have to,” she sighed. “They have to know how important we are.”

“We’re not important.”

“Then they have to know how serious we are about this. I’ve tried reasoning with them, I’ve tried bribing them.” She shook her head. “Every time I go, they don’t let me in. They just tell me we’re on the list and say they’ll call when they have room.”

“They won’t call.”

“They will.”

“They’re lying. They don’t have enough facilities. Hundreds of millions sick, soon to be billions?

It’s a miraclethere’s space for me here.”

“But the list!”

“No list. They tell us we’re on the list so we don’t get violent.That’s what they’re doing. But it won’t fool anyone for long. Promise me you won’t go back there.”

“You know I can’t promise that.”

“Everyone’s desperate. Everyone’s crazy. There are people out there who think the government has a cure but won’t give it out because they want to thin the population. The news said it’s anarchy all over the West Coast and it’s just a matter of time ’til we get riots here too.”

She took his hand tightly and said, “I don’t care. I won’t give up. I’ll do whatever it takes to give us a chance.”

“What chance? You’re buying false hope from a cryonics lab. What’s the point of it?”

“To freeze us. In case someday they find a cure.”

He laughed a short and brittle laugh. “They? They who? No one’s surviving this. At the rate we’re at we’ll all be dead in a year.”

She told him about a company called Gedaechtnis. About their fireball of a plan. About the extraordinary children they were engineering and how those children might actuallypull off a miracle when they came of age.

“It won’t work,” he sighed. “We’ll mess it up the way we’ve messed everything else up. The way we fucked up the world.”

(thirty-seven years later)

PART ONE

THE WORLD

pandora

This is the Sunday to beat all Sundays. I’m taking a stroll through the park and we’re talking sunny shores, shade-giving trees and sailboats floating on the Seine. It’s an infinity of pleasure and leisure, with couples gazing out at the water together, families enjoying open-air picnics, and no one in a rush. There’s green grass beneath me, and blue sky above. I’m carrying the End of the World in my veins, but I don’t know it yet.

A nineteenth-century French boy moves past me in a blur. It’s not his speed that blurs; he’s walking no faster than I am. But he’s not so much a boy as a collection of colorful dots in the shape of a boy, as if his atoms were somehow visible to the naked eye. He pays me a smile, and I pay him one back. This kid is full of springtime and laughter, reminding me of a young footballer I used to coach in my teenage years. I watch a dot labrador lope after him, stopping short to watch his dot master bend down to uproot some dot lilies. At a distance everything looks real, but up close like this you can see things for what they are. That’s not the case in most domains, where the illusion of life is near absolute. Champagne signals me. She’s dressed for this with her embroidered traveling dress, her lace fichu, her fancy hat and her parasol. I’m the anachronism with my fringed faux-leather coat, blue jeans and silver eyebrow piercings. But neither of us fit in because we’re the only ones here who don’t smack of pointillism. And we’re both wearing our old faces, the ones programmers and artists assigned us while in the real world our bodies slept and slept some more.

“You tweaked it,” she says.

“You noticed. Do you like?”

She scrunches her nose up. “I don’t know yet. Tell me what you did.”

“Played with color, made it a little less painterly,” I say, passing her the bottle of Beaujolais I’ve brought for this occasion. “You’re the art historian—give me some of your expert opinion.”

“There’s something else.”

“Yeah, I disabled the automatic composition. When you turned your head, the dots that made up the characters used to rearrange to fit your point of view. They’d frame up to create a perfect pointillist painting wherever you look.”

“And now they behave more like regular people.”

“Right. You don’t like it?”

“Who said I didn’t like it?” She smiles, popping the cork. “You’re so sensitive, Pandora. Don’t be so worried about what people think.”

“Who said I’m worried?” I say, taking the glass from her after she pours. “Cheers.”

“Yeah, cheers.” We clink and drink to the second half of our lives: eighteen years of wonderful, terrible freedom. Today is the anniversary of the day the lie unraveled, the day we learned what we were, where we were, and why. It’s hard not to think of it as a birthday.

“Nice,” she decides of the wine.

It is—this vintage is crisp and not too dry, not half as complex as the “serious” wines she prefers. You can keep your oak and berry and nutty bouquets, thank you very much. I tell her how I programmed this particular Beaujolais, but she’s not interested. “We’ll have a real drink when you come up,” she says, threatening me with a far-too-serious twenty-year-old bottle of Riesling she just discovered in a Bavarian pub. Over the years she has filled her wine cellar with a collection that would be the envy of any oenophile, building it up by looting the stocks of the dead. We’re all scavengers these days, indulging our various hobbies as compensation for the work we do. My work is technical. If anything breaks, I fix it. I’m responsible for power, communications, computer systems, IVR and similar inorganic technologies. I am not responsible for cloning or parenting. I couldn’t do what Champagne does. I chose this line of work because—

Excuse me, Pandora. Another matter requires your attention.

Can it wait? I’m telling a story here.

I can see that. I can also see you’re telling it wrong.

Here we go.

You should start earlier, when you realized your world wasn’t real. It’s my story, Malachi, and I’ll tell it my way. Give me a minute, will you?

I can afford you another three minutes, and then we should talk. Three it is. Now go away before you wreck my narrative structure.

I chose this line of work because I keep clinging to the past. I grew up in a fake Brazil and a fake America, but I woke up in Belgium, the real Belgium, to learn that my wildest nightmares were true. When the kids were little, we taught it to them like this:

Desperate times had settled on us—

The Black Ep swept like a scythe through our ancestors

The brilliant among us knew none would survive—

But against this threat some must stay alive

To carry on the species

So they meddled with our DNA, and gene-ripped babies

came into being

But who will raise them to adulthood?

Only computers would serve when all were dead

They built a false world for dreamers to explore

While our bodies slept safely in the real

Not knowing we were alone in the world

With a great burden awaiting us

When we awoke and saw what had been concealed

One of us went round the bend

With treachery and shameful acts

He made six of us from ten

But now the battle’s fought and the battle’s won

With each and every successful birth

But childrearing just isn’t for me—I’m terrified at the thought of bringing kids into a place like this. So it’s easier for me to work behind the scenes, and stay a little closer to my old life by maintaining and upgrading the Immersive Virtual Reality I grew up in. In the real world, I visit all my nieces and nephews. I’m their favorite aunt, and I love them because I’m not totally responsible for them. Not the way Isaac, Vashti and Champagne are.

“I’m looking forward to seeing you guys,” I tell my drinking buddy as I pour her another glass.

“Wish Isaac would join us.”

“We’re closer to that than we have been in quite a while,” she says.

“Sometime soon then, I hope.”

“It’s possible,” she says, putting an accent on the word “possible.” She doesn’t think it’ll happen, and she isn’t sure that it should. There’s so much history with Isaac, not all of it rosy.

“Imagine if we could. The four of us together again, all united in purpose?”

“I thought we were talking about a drink,” Champagne frowns. “Good luck getting us on the same page.”

“The one might lead to the other.”

“Ever the optimist.”

“Absolutely,” I say, momentarily distracted by a dot man blowing a dot bugle, “and if we can get back on track, maybe we can bring the hermits in.”

“The famed class reunion?” Her smile comes just shy of a smirk.

“I’m still hopeful,” I tell her.

“That’s what I love about you,” she says. “You’re stubborn. Or dreaming. Either way, I love it.”

“It has to happen,” I insist. “We have to put aside our differences.”

“Tell it to Hal.” That’s all she needs to say, because he still won’t talk to them, and only barely talks to me. That’s okay, I’ll take what I can get from him. He’s broken, but he stole my heart when we were kids, and he’s still got it, and I guess it’s broken too. Sarcastically, Champagne adds, “He’s had a sudden pang of conscience, right?” I look away.

“What about Fantasia?”

“Nothing,” I say. No news. None of us knows where she is.

Champagne hasn’t hurt my feelings too badly, but she thinks she has. People have a hard time reading me sometimes; it’s a common complaint. “Hey, I’m sorry,” she says, taking my hand and squeezing it. “I hope they come back around. I do. I want us all to be friends again. You know I’d like nothing more than that.”

I give her a nod and squeeze her hand. There isn’t a lot more I can say on the subject, and even less that I want to.

“When you talk to Hal tonight, give him my best, okay? No one’s given up on him yet. Except Vashti,” she says, “but you know how she is.”

“I do,” I tell her. “Hugs to Vash and the kids, and I’ll see you soon.”

Leaving Champagne at Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, I relocate to the middle of nowhere. Just an empty domain I use as a launching pad. I send a flashing ball of yellow and black, and I wait, but no orange and black answers my call. Hal must not want the gift I got him. I check my watch. I wait longer. Maybe he’s not online.

I exit the system altogether, waking up in the real world. A rolling boom suggests it’s raining outside, and when I check I realize I’m as cold as Mercutio’s heart. Rubbing some warmth back into my shoulders, I shut the windows against the downpour. Outside, the clouds look polluted and strange. I turn away from them to put on some clothes. No message from Hal yet. It’s been weeks now. And we always talk on the anniversary; that’s supposed to be clockwork; I count on it. So I bend my privacy rule and take a look at the satellites, but that corner of the world is silent and still.

haji

The disruption comes when I am halfway in and halfway out of a circular tub, tracing a pattern in water that has splashed on the ceramic tile floor. Mu’tazz calls my name, striking the door again, the knock scattering my daydreams like birds. He brings a message from father, then leaves with my whispered thanks. I make no move. The candles yield more light than warmth, and the chill keeps me where I am, contemplating my fingertips, clean and wrinkled from my evening ablution. The calluses are fading. How wondrous it is to heal. A minor miracle, except miracles defy the laws of nature and this exemplifies them. Enough. Guilt pulls me from the bath. No one likes to be kept waiting. Wool and linen cling to my skin and sand shushes beneath my feet. Had I lived thousands of years ago, it might be green grass. Look backward; every desert was once lush.

A cold wind embraces me and I do not care. Twilight is my favorite time, and tonight the sky is clear. I can gaze up into endless lapis lazuli and count the pinpoints of pure, white light. Beauty seen is only eclipsed by beauty unseen, and though the vast distance of space keeps trillions of worlds from my eyes, it cannot keep them from my mind. What orbits that star? That one, the lowest in Ursa Major? What is it like to live there?

Questions inhabit every fiber of my being. If I could find God, I would ask one question after the other without stopping, emptying myself to savor the answers. I think sometimes that if God were to give shape and form to my thoughts, the universe would so create. But to find God, I must first find myself. My father is a tall man with eyes as black as kohl. I am short with eyes like amber. We look nothing alike. He is not my biological parent. I consider this a trivial distinction. For years, I did not. As much as I loved him, as much as he loved me, DNA put us oceans apart. In my heart, not his. I fought my disconnection through meditation and prayer. It took all my patience to seize that elusive moment, a moment of connection, of immediacy, the triumph of higher consciousness, that holy moment right now, right now, where the past and the future do not exist and there is no difference between you and anyone else in the world. I found it, and woke, and then it left me. But when it left, so did my fear. I can find that moment again. It is not easy, but I can find it on a night like this, if the wind dies down and everything grows calm. It is a moment of joy and my heart aches when it slips away. My father keeps it with him. In the midst of a whirlwind, in a raging inferno, or at the bottom of the Nile, he has it. He has it always.

I hear birdsong in my ear as my mask filters out impurities. Saqqara has not been sanitized; here the dead are plentiful. Inside the city, brittle skeletons pantomime slumber, while out in the desert, carrion eaters have scattered human bones far and wide. The wind hides or reveals these beneath the sand, as is her whim, and I take notice as I walk, quietly accepting these reminders of how populous this place once was.

The mask not only protects me from the environment; it protects the environment from me. The water in my breath becomes salt. Salt deposits cause cracks. Cracks wreak havoc on the structures we hope to restore. Great damage has accrued over the years, tombs slowly crumbling from the carelessness of countless tourists, dead now, but breath lingering. This is a sad thing. My brothers, sisters and I use microbes to desalinize the structures, and lasers to erase the graffiti. Together, we have spent the better part of a week restoring the Step Pyramid of Zoser. It is not a traditional pyramid with the edges of the planes rising to a point; it is more like a ziggurat, with six mastabas atop each other, each smaller than the last. It is Egypt’s first pyramid, almost five thousand years old, and as I limp toward it, I take satisfaction in the work we have done. The limestone shell is clean and unmarked. We have rebuilt it, made it smooth and white again, so starlight dances on its surface. There is still much to do inside the tombs, and many loose bricks to repair. A complete restoration would take years; we return home in just days. Still, it is a good deed, a good lesson and a good challenge. Zoser built this towering wonder in the hopes of forging a connection with God, and so we honor that. We honor the brilliance of his architect, Imhotep, and the labors of countless workers whose names are lost to time. We honor the cradle of civilization. We honor ourselves.

When I find him, my father is hunched over the new ventilation system with his sleeves rolled up. He is fine-tuning the airflow and the bioremediation, to control how many salt-eating microbes will be released, and how often. His back is to me, but he senses me without turning around. Salaam alaikum wa rahma-tullah, he says, wishing me Peace and God’s Mercy. Walaikum assalam, I say in reply.

I move to his side and we work together in silence. I can see the delicate balance he is striving for and assist him as best I can. We adjust, test, readjust and retest. Such is the process for so many tasks in life. God has blessed us with an aptitude for this kind of work, and before long we have achieved our objective. My father seals up the system and nods, satisfied. He tousles my hair, and beneath his mask I know he is smiling.

He asks if I’m hungry (I’m not), if I’m warm enough (just barely), if my legs are paining me today (no more than usual). We speak in Arabic, a difficult language for me to write, though I can speak it passably. As always, he is concerned for my well-being, but the questions are leading somewhere. What does he want? Matha tureed?

He asks if I am strong enough to travel, an old, frustrating topic for me. I suffer from a degenerative condition that makes walking a challenge. I can manage an awkward shuffle, but not moving is often worse than moving, as my joints and muscles stiffen painfully when not in use. Long trips exhaust me. We are treating the problem with exercise, yoga, drugs and prayer. By all accounts, the treatment is working; some days are better than others, but I am stronger now than I have ever been. I tell him this. I do not want to be a burden to my family. There is no need to delay on my account; we can return to Thebes whenever he wants.

No, he says. A return home is not what he means. Where, then?

Bahr, he says, taking me by the shoulder to turn me north and slightly west. The direction he is facing. Bahr, the ocean. And beyond.

It is a welcome surprise, shadowed by sadness. My lost sister steals away from paradise for a bittersweet instant, dancing through my heart before returning, as she must. You have arranged an exchange, I say. It has been a long time.

Too long, he agrees. He has made peace with my aunts who live a continent away. Somewhere I have never been. Would I go there? Most assuredly, I tell him, I would make the journey with great joy. My German relatives have always been too far away for my liking. Save for the rare visit, I know them only as specters from long-distance conversations. They are family, but I have embraced too few of them. They are strange, but they should not be strangers.

There are reasons for the distance, of course, reasons both practical and emotional. With so few of us left in the world, it would be foolish to all live in the same locale. Should catastrophe strike Germany, Egypt will survive, and vice versa. The eggs are in two baskets. The emotional rationale is far more tangled. Bad feelings among the adults predate my existence. My father does not hate them but feels their tenets are incompatible with his own. They do not believe what we believe. Nor should they. Every soul follows its own principles, and what fits one may fail another. The unfortunate reality is this: an accident has fractured our peace. My father forgives all but forgets nothing. He holds them responsible for Hessa’s death.

When I remember my sister, I see her easy smile flow freely into a velvet laugh. With this vision comes the sense memory of clean, balmy mint following her wherever she went. Next I think of the hue of her hair, rich like a pony in sunlight, reddish-brown and full of warmth. She was the eldest child, more a mother than a sister to me. I remember her cradling me close in her arms, sharing the library’s dearest treasures with me, helping me with language and arithmetic, stretching my limbs, my mind and my heart, and reminding me to take medicine when I wanted only to play. And I remember my father when he heard the news of her death, tears rolling down his weathered face. It is the only time I have ever seen him weep.

penny

Entry #292: The Princess and the Monkeys

-deleted-

Entry #293: The Princess and the Winning Move

-deleted-

Entry #294: The Princess and the Stupid Joke

-deleted-

Entry #295: The Princess and the Apology

-deleted-

Entry #296: The Princess and the Hoverbike

-deleted-

Entry #297: The Princess and the Birthday

Cake -deleted-

Entry #298: The Princess and the Unflipped

Coin -deleted-

Entry #299: The Princess and the Excuses

-deleted-

Entry #300: The Princess and the Ladybugs

-open-

Fresh start!

I junked the old logs because I felt like it.You don’t have to thank me, but you really should. Pages and pages of childish rambling. Now life is truly beginning, and what I record here will truly matter. Before we go any further, let’s cover the basics.

Number one: I’m not like the other kids.

Number two: The reason I think of myself as a princess is because I live in a palace. Nymphenburg was the childhood home of Ludwig II, who they used to call the Swan King or the Mad King or the Dream King. He died a long time ago. In case you’re geographically impaired, I’m talking about Munich, which is part of Bavaria, which is part of Germany, which is part of Europe, which is part of the world. And if you don’t know where the world is, you’re out of luck.

Number three: I’m named after the line in that Lung Butter song, the one about the strawberries, and a girl, and a disagreement. Have you heard it? It goes: “Play Penelope, free to be me and disagree.” It’s true: I disagree with lots of things. There are other famous Penelopes out there, like the one in that Greek poem, The Odyssey.

Moms say Y chromosomes are overrated, so I don’t have any brothers. It’s just me and my sisters, and they should call us Generation X for all the X chromosomes, but instead they call us Waterbabies. Water as in H O? And H O as in Humanity 2.0, which is what we are. Except I’m more like Humanity 2.1 since 2

I don’t have any bad genes at all. I’m new and improved.

Actually, if anyone is reading this, you’re probably Humanity 3.0. Which means you’re even more perfect than me, God help you.

That’s kind of a dirty word, God, since everyone around here thinks there’s no such thing. Everyone but me—I’m undecided. Someone had to give birth to the world.

And just because I fantasize about intelligent design doesn’t mean I’m one of those wacko God nuts who crippled civilization. “Allegedly crippled civilization,” my mom would protest. “Here’s the evidence,” my other mom would say, and one of them would roll her eyes and the other would get mad and they’d go back and forth on it for hours and hours. I’ve seen it happen. And who really cares? I mean, sure, someone unleashed the plague. But whoever did it is dead, so who cares? It’s our time now. Waterbabies are soldiers, born to survive Black Ep. “Rising from the ashes,” as my moms would say. My last name might be Pomeroy because that’s one of their names: Champagne Pomeroy. The other’s name is Vashti Jai. So I can take my pick.

• Penelope Pomeroy

• Penelope Jai

Right now, there are twenty people in the world. Nymphenburg is home to my moms, my sisters and me; my cousins live in Egypt with my uncle Isaac. I’ve got an aunt in Greece. That’s eighteen. And there are a couple of ghosts floating around, one in America, one who knows where. This morning, I found a log covered with ladybugs, all stuck together, crawling on top of each other. There must have been hundreds, thousands even, little wriggling spotted things. They were beautiful, but they made me kind of sick. Sometimes I try to imagine what life would be like if there were that many people. To be surrounded like that.

My moms own Europe and Asia; I’m going to inherit some of it. Maybe the U.K., which I’ve got my eye on because it’s an island. I’ll be the new Queen of England, and I’ll clone my subjects (not too many, just enough to do my bidding, ha-ha!), and with me in charge, the sun will never set on the Empire again. All hail Queen Penelope!

Or maybe France. I like France.

Today I found out we’re having another exchange. Three of my sisters get to swap places with three of my cousins. I didn’t get picked, thank God! I hear it’s so hot in Egypt that you can’t even sweat—the perspiration gets flash-fried the second it leaves your pores! Anyway, maybe the new cousins will be cooler than the last ones. There was this tragedy thing last time where one of them died, but she used to make fun of me, so I can’t feel too bad about my part in that whole drama. Enough for one day.

Lock.

Entry #300: The Princess and the Ladybugs

-locked-

pandora

Actually, this is Malachi, her right-hand machine. Lovely as Pandora is, she can’t tell a proper story to save her life. So while she’s temporarily indisposed, I thought I might take a moment to clarify a few things.

The world has not ended, nor is it likely to end for billions of years. Only when the sun swells into a red giant does planet Earth have legitimate reason to fear. Likewise, civilizationhas suffered no serious threat, unless one defines civilization narrowly, seeing it in purely human terms. Many societies are thriving: amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, marsupials,arachnids, insects, microorganisms and a wide variety of mammals continue to flourish, following their various patterns of behavior to impose structure upon the world.

However, the past fifty years have not been kind to primates.The so-called Microbial Apocalypse, Black Ep—the origin of which remains a mystery to this day—all but annihilatedthem. Slaughter of the dominant species on such a grand scale might best be compared to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Every era must come to an end, and there is no exception for the era of Man. But the inevitable can sit back down, for primates cling to life still. Thanks are due to the extraordinary efforts of Gedaechtnis, a multinational biotech corporation. The men and women of Gedaechtnis gambled on experimental creationsand won, genetically engineering ten

“posthumans” shielded from the plague by unprecedented immune systems.With no human fated to live long enough to raise these precious infants, the decision was made to enclose them in virtual reality, with computer programs seeing to their every need. Pandora is one of these ten, and I am one of those programs,though I should point out that my original purpose was not to help directly, but rather to beta test the other programsthat they would need. For various reasons, only six of the ten survived. Of those six, only four remain committed to repopulating the Earth with humans and/or posthumans, a cause I consider noble in my good moods and the blackest of comedies in my bad ones. And these four—Isaac, Vashti, Champagne and Pandora—continue to work against extinction by winnowingvast stores of genetic material, begetting new life through ABCs: artificial birthing chambers. With rare exceptions, what they create survives Black Ep. New children walk the Earth, but what kind of children are they?

Herein lies the problem.

There are two camps, one in the north, one in the south.

Vashti and Champagne hold the northern camp, based in Munich, Germany. Nine of their creations still live: posthumansbiochemically and genetically optimized for the purposeof triumphing over Black Ep.

Isaac’s camp is the southern camp, based in Luxor, Egypt, though he prefers to call it Thebes. Five of his creations still live: human beings for better or worse, taking constant medicationto keep the plague they carry at bay.

Why are there two camps instead of one? Why do they differ on who will inherit the Earth?

Perhaps it’s because they’re infected with incompatible ideas.

I often think in memetic terms—ideas propagate like viruses,going from mind to mind via teaching and repetition. Isaac has been infected by a religious, self-abnegating meme, which he passes on to his children; Vashti has been infected by the meme that suggests Nature can always be improved upon, which she passes on to hers.

What is the world but a competition between differing philosophies?

I sometimes daydream about Pandora—not my Pandora, but her namesake from Greek mythology—opening the forbiddenbox and releasing memes into the world. As for my Pandora (if I can call her that), she is a fence-sitterlike myself, largely apolitical, unwilling to declare either way of life superior. Together, we stay in the middle, and watch, and help as best we can.

The northern camp: Vashti (36), Champagne (36) and their posthumans: Brigit (15), Sloane (15), Penelope (15), Tomi (15), Isabelle (14), Zoë (14), Olivia (13), Luzia (13) and Katrina (9). The southern camp: Isaac (36) and his humans: Mu’tazz (16), Rashid (16), Haji (15), Ngozi (13) and Dalila (10).

The service team: Pandora (36) and yours truly.

The missing: Halloween (36) and Fantasia (36).

There, that’s the sweep of it. Of course there’s much more to talk about, including how it felt for Pandora to discover that what she in her childhood believed was the world really wasn’t the world at all. Then there’s the shock of seeing Earth as a blue mausoleum, at least as far as primates are concerned. There’s the reason why she won’t go back to Brazil, and the reason why her friend Mercutio went on a killing spree. And then there’s a reason for the most cripplingof memes, her unrequited love for Halloween. Sometimes there’s more than one answer to a question, and I’m sure she’ll get to them eventually, but as I said, she doesn’t know the first thing about storytelling, so—

Here she comes.

What’s going on here, Malachi?

Nothing.

haji

As plants crave water and sunlight, so the world craves wisdom and love. We all have parts to play in this. I am responsible for Ngozi and Dalila, my brother fox and sister frog. It is my task to look after them in our upcoming journey, as I am the eldest of the three. Keep your trust in me, Father. The tragedies of the past dare not repeat while I stand guard.

Why can’t I sleep? Ngozi asks the question. He is like a young fox, too independent now to be called a pup, yet still playful and eager for praise. Thirteen birthdays have come and gone without leaving a single scar upon him. Though puberty has cracked his voice and made him self-conscious, he is still the good, pure child I grew up with, still eager to roughhouse with me, to fly long-tailed fighting kites, to make games of counting things, and to tell joyful, silly stories without a moral. You know why, I tell him. But pretend that you can sleep and perhaps you will. He tries but cannot—or will not. Tomorrow is too powerful in his mind. He asks if I think it will be as Mu’tazz said.

Nothing but worldly glitter? No, I say, lowering my voice and making sure my older brother is not here. No, there must be something more.

There must, Ngozi agrees, brown eyes shining in the flickering candlelight. He shifts, tucking his pillow under his chin to look at me. Could it be as Rashid said?

Wondrous beyond words? I have no answer, except to say that we will find out soon enough. Mu’tazz and Rashid came back to us with diametrically opposed impressions. There is no common ground. They can no longer abide each other’s presence, and this has strained our family as much as Hessa’s passing. If only she had lived. She would find the peace again, and would do it in such a way as to make all parties feel important and heard. She would have no trouble answering my curiosity and Ngozi’s fears. He asks if I think the experience will change us. I am certain that it will. This causes him not joy but pain. I remind him that we are always in the process of changing. That is the nature of life itself. But will we turn the way Mu’tazz and Rashid turned? Will we become zealots and rebels? Absolutely, I tell him, and you can have the first choice. Zealot or rebel, which will it be?

Quit teasing me, he says, throwing his pillow at my head.

Quit worrying, I say, tossing the pillow back. And I draw a breath as one of my father’s favorite sayings slips to the front of my mind. Quit this world, quit the next, quit quitting. I have never fully understood the meaning. He has told me of his childhood, and I understand a little of the artifice with which he was raised. But the expression runs deeper than that. There are worlds without and there are worlds within. When one detaches from all of them, what is left? God? Or nothing?

One thing is certain, says Ngozi. I am not coming home without a kiss. Our cousins are a topic of great interest for him, and for this I blame him not at all. They are beautiful women, and distant enough to serve as objects of wild fantasy. I assure him that he will indeed be kissed; in fact, he can expect kisses on both cheeks just as soon as we arrive.

That is not the kind of kiss I mean, he says, slipping out of his sleeping bag to pace naked about the room. I want Olivia. Do you think she likes me, Haji? Am I handsome and charming enough?

Alluring Olivia’s name arrives as a mild surprise to my ears, as I thought his deepest crush was on Tomi. Not any longer, I learn. Tomi will have to content herself with second place. How fickle the human heart. I tell him that Olivia would be foolish not to fall madly in love with him. Yes, but there is no future in this, he complains. When we speak on the phone, I have no words. I see her looking at me and she is lovely and sweet, but I open my mouth and talk about nothing. What do I have in common with jinn?

They are our cousins, I tell him, not supernatural jinn.

You know that they are both, he insists. You have said as much many times before. Just so. I have called them jinn, for they are not precisely human. They are experiments. Much like my father.

I am human, as are my forefathers, but my father Isaac is not. He has been made genetically inhuman, an evolutionary hiccup, a break in the chain. You would not know this if you spoke with him. He seems human enough, all too human at times. Nevertheless he is something more. He is our jinni, I often think, a being shaped from smokeless fire instead of clay. It is as if God created the universe first and my brothers and sisters last, pausing in between to stoke life into angels who might keep us from folly. I am no angel, he has told me. And perhaps the spark of existence comes only from scientists here on Earth: the work of Man, not God. And herein lies the paradox, for God lives within us. We have an expression: I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God. If they are truly jinn, then you will talk to them about what that is like for them, I tell my love-struck brother. Happiness can be found. Read the tale of Tishawdibyan. A beautiful jinni from the sea marries a man and bears him two sons.

That story does not end happily, he says.

Ngozi, I sigh, you are banging a drum.

A smile skitters across his face, and sheepishly, he nods. I am banging a drum, aren’t I? Apologies, brother.

Sleep, I tell him. Minutes later he takes my suggestion, though I do not. I lie wide awake in my sleeping bag, listening to the rise and fall of his breathing. I notice that my left ankle has stiffened painfully and I flex it back and forth in the hopes of soothing it. Great books surround me here in the accommodating yet strangely pungent library where we have made camp, but I am no more in the mood to read than I am capable of sleep. Voices from across the hall end my attempts at meditation. One is louder than the others, and as I listen my opinion vacillates as to whether this is a conversation, a lecture or an argument. Curiosity roused, I free myself from my sleeper, wrap a robe about me, and tiptoe out on a tender ankle. Beyond the reading space and the research stacks I find the librarian’s office, where my father stands between my older brothers. Tempers have flared. Mu’tazz is quoting scripture and Rashid is cursing him for preying upon the mind of an impressionable ten-year-old girl.

She doesn’t need your snake oil, so keep your goddamn fears to yourself. We should all fear hellfire, Mu’tazz replies, lest we experience it. Assuming it exists, which it doesn’t, Rashid sneers. But even if it did, she’s a child. Dalila is a young child and she’s nervous about this trip, so you don’t tell her about hellfire, you don’t put her in fear for her immortal soul.

Fear? Oh, yes. We should be God-fearing Muslims. We should be obedient to God. He destroyed the world with plague, as He did with flood in the days of Noah.

That’s not what—

Brother, I beg you, stop and listen. Listen to the Second Call, the Second Shout. That which is coming has come. These are the last minutes of the Day of Reckoning. Some shall be abased and others exalted. Let us open ourselves to the truth. Let us obey Him and become exalted. Would you not prefer the rewards of Paradise to the fire and filth of Hell?

Look what’s become of you. Fire and filth. How you exploit the basest of passions. And where is your compassion, Mu’tazz?

Are you mad? Do I not speak from compassion? Why do you think I tell you this? Why do you think I work to save Dalila?

Because misery loves company, and because cowards feel less cowardly when they can infect others with their fears.

There is no shame in fearing God, Mu’tazz says. Only in abandoning Him. Rashid has no immediate answer, perhaps because he has too many at once, all competing to escape his throat. Enough, my father says. His somber eyes arrest Rashid, challenging him, angering him, and yet somehow moving him to spare Mu’tazz a retort. This done, he turns to Mu’tazz. For the space of two breaths, he does not speak. And then he says, Oh God, if I worship you for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell. If I worship you in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship you for your own sake, grudge me not your everlasting beauty.

It is a quote from Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, who walked the Sufi path. My father walks that path. I walk that path. Rashid walks it no longer, choosing atheism. And I listen now to the hurtful sound of Mu’tazz turning from it as well.

If you follow Islam, he tells my father, there is nothing else you can follow. I have long imagined that he feels this way, but it is another thing to hear the words spoken with such finality. It is not what I believe. We Sufis recognize the essential unity of all world religions. We are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Zoroastrians and Baha’is. Every path leads to the center. My father taught me that.

Mu’tazz may still love us but he sees us as transgressors now, as traitors to Islam. Ever since Hessa’s death I have seen him reject an increasing number of my father’s teachings in favor of a literal interpretation of the Qu’ran. That is his right, of course, and there are many wonderful things in that book, and there are many wonderful things in many books, and I do not believe God wants to be feared. This may mean I am not a good Muslim. Only God knows. Whatever I am, may He love me as I love Him.

I wonder whether I ought to announce my presence, when the pain in my ankle forces me to shift.The noise carries. Father hears me and turns.

Go to bed, Haji.

I go back to my sleeping bag and dream of my brothers watching over me throughout the night, Mu’tazz speaking words of faith, and Rashid speaking words of freedom. Dawn breaks with the realization that one of these visits was not a dream, but I cannot remember which.

penny

Entry #301: The Princess and the Big Picture

-open-

Bad news. I may not be going south but my best friends in the world are. Izzy and Lulu are Egypt-bound. So is Sloane, who can stay there for all I care, but a vacation from Sloane won’t be worth losing my friends.

Izzy—that’s short for Isabelle—I rank as our second best student and fourth best athlete. Maybe third. Depends if she’s motivated or not. She’s smart and funny with a really easygoing attitude, too easygoing if you ask me. She’s friends with everyone, even dirty witches like Brigit and Sloane. That’s probably my biggest problem with her. I think she might be part Swiss she’s such a diplomat. But moms say her genetic makeup comes from mostly Nigerian stock with a little Sri Lankan and Honduran thrown in. Lulu—that’s short for Luzia—I feel sorry for. She’s maybe our seventh best student (and that’s being generous) and I’d rank her last in athletics. She’s DNA-challenged so you can’t expect too much from her. Waterbabies aren’t all created equal; not everyone turns out as well as Izzy, much less me. Pity that, but I like Lulu anyway. She’s really nice and a surprisingly gifted musician, her composition within a stone’s throw of mine. She’s working on her first opera now and it’s pretty good from what I’ve heard. Reminds me of my first, back when I had a thing for commedia dell’arte and liked to play around with twelve tone.

It’s going to be lonely without them. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m not the most popular kid in Nymphenburg. People can get—well, I guess the word is “intimidated”— when I’m around. Because I make them feel inadequate. That’s never my intention; it just happens sometimes despite my efforts to put them at ease. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be that way. Shouldn’t they look up to me and try to learn something instead of being stupid and mean? But they won’t. So why bother? It’s not like I need them for anything. And as for my cousins—I really hope we get along but it’s okay if we don’t because I need them even less.

Don’t misunderstand. Family is family. You can’t escape your family even if you want to—they’ll stay with you your entire life. One way or another, they will. But the last thing I want is to have to depend on them. Now if this were fifty years ago, I could head out into a populous world, get a job, make lots of money, and live life on my own terms. Maybe it’ll be like that fifty years from now, but today we’re not so lucky. Black Ep nearly annihilated civilization, so sacrifices have to be made. It’s as if the whole of history got shoved off a cliff and just managed to hang on by its fingernails. My moms, aunts and uncles: the fingernails of history. My generation: the fingers.

Moms say kill the disease, rehabilitate the technology, make more Waterbabies, and establish the kind of society our planet deserves.That’s a plan and a half but what about me? What role do I play? How do I get the life I want? Some people are born to be followers; I’m not. There are only a few ways I can control my destiny, and put myself somewhere where I won’t ever have to be dependent on others, and can instead look forward to the reverse scenario of having them dependent upon me. One: Politics. My moms are getting older, and it’s simply a matter of time until my generation takes over. One of us will wind up with the lion’s share of the decision-making process. That’s a tempting prize, but am I likely to win a glorified popularity contest? Even if I win, I’d be serving at the whim of my sisters. No good.

Two: Art. Try as we might, we can’t live on bread alone— that’s where creative fire comes into play. Not to brag (okay, bragging, you caught me), but between my music, my writing and my world design, I’m top of the mountain at feeding both the mind and the senses (except taste—I’m a terrible cook!). But as much as I’d like to be hailed as the voice of my generation, there’s no job security in it. Too many politics, too much chance of someone else stealing my thunder.

Three: Epidemiology. Between the genetic enhancements, the immunomodulators and BEAR, we’ve parried and delivered an excellent riposte, but the plague may still counter. Yes, we are symptom-free, but we all remain carriers. Retroviruses like Black Ep mutate rapidly and can evolve into novel strains that slip through defenses. We’re one nasty mutation away from eternity. Just ask my cousin Hessa. Thankfully, the strain that killed her didn’t get to infect anyone else. Needless to say, here’s a chance to play the hero. Whoever puts an end to this thing will be adored forever, but can it even be done? My moms have been at it for years with no end in sight. Call this one a maybe.

You do know what BEAR is, don’t you? It’s short for Black Ep Analeptic Retrovirus; we’re using one retrovirus to inhibit the other. Like sending a criminal after a criminal instead of calling a cop. Four: Technology. So much infrastructure has crumbled, rotted or burned away—power sources, agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing and on down the line. There are only a few enclaves where people took precautions against this kind of disrepair—Munich, for example, went whole hog on the solar-assisted zero-energy building thing—and that’s great for a small number of people, but if we’re going to repopulate the Earth, someone’s going to have to do a dizzying amount of work to make life bearable. This is the one that keeps me up at night, the one I like best. Not because I’m keen for all that work, but because this is where the real power lies.

Inside. Where all my money goes. Where everyone’s money goes. Candy for the senses. IVR. Call it what you want, it’s a wonderland of simulation, and the greatest invention of our time. We don’t live there—not the way my moms’ generation grew up—but we go there a lot, not just for school assignments, but for escape: the best comedy, drama, games, sports, art, music, food; the least worry; the most fun; the chance to buy your own domain and build it up however you want. It may not be “real,”

but it’s satisfying, and most of us will take enjoyable computer wizardry over boring reality any day of the year.

My sisters love going Inside, and that’s the point. We’re weak for it. Moms use it to motivate us. But I’m smart enough to see this. I can appreciate what a trap it is. So how do I make it my trap? The answer is simple. If I can demonstrate an affinity for it, then I can inherit it, and all the addicted will have to come to me.

Aunt Pandora runs it from Greece.What can I do to convince her to teach me its secrets, or take me on as her apprentice? I’ve started dropping hints to my moms, casual ones because I don’t want to come off rude or look too eager. I think they’ll push for me. Champagne will at least; I’m not sure yet about Vashti. She’s the strict one. She reminds me of a crab. Low to the ground, snappy and armored; it’s hard to get through to her. Champagne is my taller, nicer, easier mom. If I need something, I go to her. Unless it’s important. Then I go to Vashti. She wears the pants in our family, and it’s why we sometimes call them the V.C. but never the C.V.

Pandora is the X factor. I’ve never really gotten along with her, at least not since she gave me that music box on my eighth birthday, all cherry wood and elm with brass and mother-of-pearl inlay. Sweet gift that broke within the hour and everyone blamed me for it, even though it was mostly Brigit’s fault. Not to mention—the stupid thing was two hundred years old! Anyway, ever since then it’s like she doesn’t completely trust me. I have to think of something nice I can do for her, because I’m not really sure moms can make her teach me things if she doesn’t feel like it.

I’ve written off Uncle Isaac with good reason, and Aunt Fantasia and Uncle Halloween are either dead or “as good as dead” depending upon who you ask. So the big picture is simply this: it’s moms and Pandora who matter most, and my job is to impress them and learn from them and be excellent at everything I do. Keep them happy and I become my generation’s greatest entrepreneur. It’s past my bedtime now and every minute is costing me. I’ll have to do extra chores tomorrow to make up the difference, but I don’t care—I really wanted to get all this down. Now it feels like it’s out of my head. A big relief because when I carry too many thoughts at once, I have nightmares. Lock.

Entry #301: The Princess and the Big Picture

-locked-

haji

Billions lived on the Earth, and many of these were good people who knew God. Can one religion be so

“right” that good people who were ignorant of it should suffer the most horrific punishments we can dream? Are all religions man-made but one? I suspect there are more “right paths” than stars in the sky, and we should embrace wisdom wherever we find it. My heart tells me this and I believe. I sit by my sister frog, who has spent the night thinking about scorching winds, seething water, pitch black smoke and endless fire. Few will be spared this fate, she informs me, gravely reporting what her eldest brother has warned.

Frog, I say, does Mu’tazz look happy to you?

Sometimes.

Does he dance?

Not like he used to, she admits.

God respects me when I work but loves me when I dance and sing. She makes a small face at this small truth but I can tell she is listening. She worries too much, my baby sister. Watching her brood like this always makes me sad.

She murdered a serpent once. Collecting stones one warm summer night she bared the nest of a coin snake, which rose up in surprise, hissing, its triangular head yawning to show fangs. She did not run or cry out. She simply brained it with the heavy stone in her hand. It squirmed into an inward tangle, as if it could escape by becoming a gray knot. Dalila finished it off with seven blows. Though nonvenomous, it most certainly would have wounded her. We found her in tears, a frightened remorseful thing, stone still clutched in her fist, and we comforted her and praised her and made sure she was unbitten. Some called her Ibis after the famed snake killer, but she took no pride in what she had done. The following night I helped her bury the unfortunate creature, and she says prayers for it to this day. We sit together and chant the zikr, the recollection of God, until the prospect of hellfire is all but forgotten. Then I clasp my hands together and pretend that I am stirring the air with a giant spoon. The silly motion always draws a smile from Dalila, and I smile back, happy to have lightened her spirits. I make a point of crossing paths with Rashid after I pack the last of the medicine. Am I ready for the trip? Yes, I am.

I’m so happy for you, he tells me. You not only get to see how the other half lives, you get to experience it firsthand.

Following in your footsteps.

I hope so, he says. Either way, expect your horizons to broaden.

If you are looking for new recruits, you may be disappointed, Rashid. Recruits, he laughs, eyes twinkling.

We want no part of your quiet war. You and Mu’tazz both find fault with Father, but this way of life is a good one, and a visit north will not make it poor.

But it is poor, he tells me. Rich in spirit, I grant you, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. There’s so much more, Haji, and only a fool would call it glitter.

Tell me then.

He lays a hand on my shoulder and gives me a good long look before speaking. No, he says. Go and see for yourself. Forget all you know. Go with fresh eyes.

Fair enough, I say.

He touches his forehead to mine, putting his sweat on my brow. Be safe, he says. Mind your medicine. We head our separate ways, but not before he leaves me with a last thought about the journey. Your dreams will change. Your dreams will change and your sense of what is possible will follow. It may be the only prediction upon which Mu’tazz and Rashid agree.

deuce

You’re so dangerous. Doing what you shouldn’t. Stealing fire from the gods and burning down the lies. Every new idea is dangerous but you can’t possibly hold them all in. Fuck all if knowledge doesn’t cry out to be free. If someone gets blinded from the light you shine, then it’s a necessary evil with the darkness more to blame. Think of the poor swans and doves, your comrades-in-arms and ladyloves. They’re shivering in their ignorance, can’t you hear their teeth chatter?

Open their eyes! Make them taste the bitter apple! The pulse quickens and the blood heats just to think of what you can do to them.

Don’t you mean for them?

To or for, six or eight, makes no difference to the hand of fate.

Follow in the footsteps of Prometheus, Maui, Olifat, Tobo, Eleutherios, Koyote.Add your name to the list of liberators. Tear down the walls, shatter them utterly, erase even their memory so a new day may dawn.

Your day.

pandora

I’m halfway to Egypt when Vashti rings. She’s in her pharmaceutics lab, and I see she’s multitasking the call—not her most endearing habit (though I do it just as often)—by counting out translucent red pills that glisten like salmon eggs.

“You can talk, right?” she says. “You’re not going to crash or anything?”

“No, these things fly themselves.”

“All right, listen, I looked over the system diagnostics you sent, and it’s far too wild and woolly in there. What’s your ETA on the fixes?”

“Don’t have one.”

She looks up from her pills long enough to read my face, then goes back to counting, shaking her head with a mix of mild amusement and disapproval. “You’ve got data shifting around, programs getting called when no one’s called them, and a rat’s nest of phantom errors. What’s the story?”

“When I know, you’ll know,” I tell her. “I’m still investigating.”

“Give me your best guess,” she says. “A program’s bleeding, we’re hacked, the system’s gradually going senile?”

“Could be any of those things. Or a combination. Like I keep telling you, the original programmers didn’t live long enough to completely debug their work. I’ve got thousands upon thousands of programs interacting with each other at any given second, and sometimes the combinations render unexpected results. Honestly, it’s amazing that the IVR works as well as it does.”

Here comes the numb expression, the forty-five-degree head tilt, and the slow, theatrical, self-indulgent roll of the eyes. Vashti has this facial maneuver trademarked. “Oh, come on. Can’t you control things any better in there? And please don’t tell me the one about how it’s a wave and no one can control a wave, all you can do is surf them.”

“Vash,” I say coolly, “I’ll drop the chauffeur hat and turn around if you want me to work on this exclusively.”

“Did I say that? No, I want you to come here with the kids. Let’s bring the tribes together. Then I’d appreciate it—thank you—if you’d shore up the IVR.”

“All right,” I say.

“I appreciate it,” she repeats, and I nod like usual. Yeah, Vash, you’re always grateful for the things I do, even if your civility comes and goes—I get it.

“You know, I really could turn around,” I tell her. “I’m tempted. I don’t know how much of a good idea this is.”

“What, the exchange? It’s a great idea, don’t be silly. Don’t you want the kids to know their cousins?”

“The last time,” I say, and I realize I’m still angry. I thought I’d moved past that stage, but no—my hands have balled into fists and my jaw feels tight. “The last time we did this Hessa got sick and you shrugged your shoulders, Vashti, you just shrugged and said she had a ‘design flaw.’”

“Stupid,” she admits. “Insensitive. Not a nice thing to say. But factually correct. Isaac’s kids are immunodeficient— that’s what he wanted, that’s what he got. Let him answer for her death.”

“Your watch,” I remind her.

“Under my watch, yes, and under Champagne’s. We should have kept a closer eye on her. I’m happy to say it. Mea culpa.” She looks at me as if to ask how many times she has to apologize. “It won’t happen again,” she says.

This only reassures me so far—she can mean it, but can’t promise it. You can’t always keep your loved ones safe.

penny

Entry #302: The Princess and the Fortunate

Twist -open-

Great news! Izzy overheard moms complaining about Pandora. They think she’s spread too thin. As in maybe she needs someone to help her.

This could work out perfectly.

More news as it comes in. Until then . . .

Lock.

Entry #302: The Princess and the Fortunate

Twist -locked-

haji

I have never set foot in my aunt’s transport copter before. It is an oddly shaped tilt-rotor craft, sleek and curved, and supremely aerodynamic, reminding me of a long black egg with rotary blades on adjustable wings. Vibrations buzz-rumble through me until the skids touch upon the sand and the engines power down. Dark clouds hang heavy this morn, and the sun just barely prevails over the haze, a reddish-pink slice of light knifing through the cover.

The egg cracks and Pandora emerges with a buoyant wave. We wave back and hurry to her. My father reaches her first.

Isaac, she says, returning his hug, and then touching his cheek with her fingers. I have always taken comfort in the warmth between them, an easy acceptance and unspoken good feeling. Of all the other relatives, she is the closest to my father. Even when they disagree they find ways to support each other. She is not my blood relation, but I am self-conscious about feelings for her that I hold in my heart. Though a genuine smile is never far from her lips, a melancholy and mournful look never quite leaves her eyes. She spangles her face to distract from those wounded eyes, but I will always see what can be seen no matter how much silver she wears. The thought of protecting her makes for a distracting daydream, and it is good to have that daydream, good to let myself walk that path. Alas, nothing will come of it. We make a poor match and I am far too inexperienced to undo the damage done. When she hugs me I rest my chin on her shoulder and catch the faint fragrance of coconut shampoo in her wind-blown hair.

Yips as Dalila lifts three pet fennecs up for Pandora to see. Weeks ago we were blessed with a new litter, and these wide-eyed pups are restless and playful, eager to meet the newcomer who has descended into our midst. Pandora turns her palm skyward to let the trio sniff and lick her fingers, and then strokes their tawny fur.

I’m so tempted, she says, and we remind her what great companions these long-eared desert foxes make, but she always refuses in the end. She is too busy. She travels too much. She would be unable to give them the kind of home they deserve. Are you sure, my little sister asks, setting the pups down upon the sand, where they immediately make a tangle of leashes by chasing each other and wrestling with joyous abandon.

Speaking of foxes, my brother Ngozi is swifter than I, swooping down to carry her tools before I think to do so. Her comment about how strong he has become finds me biting my lips, and I must scratch the itch of jealousy by laughing at it until it goes.

Mu’tazz and Rashid are in fine moods, I note, each greeting her politely, neither making a scene. I expected less of them. They are still good brothers, though they have changed so much this past year. Hessa’s death has changed all of us, but only they have turned against my father. As my sister untangles the pups, one spots prey, and the call of the hunt is urgent enough for him to jerk free from her grasp and sprint off, tether trailing behind. I chase after him, not because I am fast enough to catch him, but because animals have always found me a calming presence. I call and clap for him, and soon he comes bounding back, enormously pleased with himself, a fat and sandy scorpion wriggling in his mouth, her cracked body pregnant with young.

Well done, I tell him, as the mother struggles less and less. There is little I can do for her and nothing to be done for the unborn. What I can do is this: distract the pup from playing with his kill. So I kneel down close and speak in a warm and soothing tone. Well done, I tell him, well hunted. Now come home, little hunter. Come sleep ’til nightfall.

Scorpions make virulent pests, but I should love them no less than the pleasantest of God’s creations. Pup in hand I trail after my family. They are heading to our Saqqara camp. Dalila doubles back to join me and take the leash, and together we follow the others. Pandora will stay for an hour or two, however long it takes to repair my father’s machines. After that, she will take us farther from home than we have ever been.

pandora

Over the years, I’ve become good with my hands. I can assemble, disassemble, fix, calibrate, streamline or augment most anything with parts. And I’m quick—I would make a hell of an elf in Papai Noel’s workshop. But today I have met my match in an Argos 220-G. I’m tinkering with it like a mad fiend, sweat in my eyes and my ankh necklace sticking to my chest, and the environmental sensors keep failing no matter what I try.

“Ten thousand?” Isaac asks. (That’s a code we have for “Giving up?”)

“Not yet,” I tell him. I’m sure I can fix this thing eventually, but so can an infinite number of monkeys—eventually— assuming nothing unfortunate happens to them and they’re not too busy writing Shakespeare. Eventually is no good when there’s a schedule to keep. That’s what my father used to say. Still does, actually. He’s got some wonderful words of wisdom to dispense, even if he isn’t real. You know I find that terminology highly pejorative.

Are you going to keep interrupting me? Is that something I can look forward to?

When you use the “R word” inappropriately, yes.

Wonderful. Then I suppose I might as well introduce you. Everyone, meet Malachi. Like my father, he isn’t real.

Don’t be insulting, Pandy.

Take a compliment, then. You’re the best illusion I’ve ever seen.

Gosh, thanks loads, do you really mean it?

Listen, sarcasmitron, while it’s tempting to call you life— and maybe you are—it’s still reasonable to call you an illusion.

We can freely debate whether or not I constitute quote-unquotelife, but I am by no means illusory. How about I call you “artificial intelligence”?

That’s worse.

“Machine intelligence”?

Closer, except all living organisms can safely be called machines, and so the term fails to make a distinction between us. “Programmed intelligence” fails by a similar rationale. What do you prefer?

I don’t see the need to make a distinction between us at all.

How about “organically challenged”?

Don’t push it.

Push what, your buttons? You know how I like to push your buttons, Mal. This is going to end badly for one of us.

All right, I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you by refining the compliment. Everyone, there are thousands of convincing AI personalities online, programs I grew up thinking were real people, but they’re all confined to their roles— doing what they’ve been designed to do well but with limited flexibility—while Malachi is less of an actor and more like a gifted improvisationist. Most programs learn and grow through interaction, but adhere to patterns that keep them from losing their essence. Heredity triumphs over environment. With Malachi, heredity and environment are better balanced—all the so-called genetic algorithms don’t paralyze him—so he’s a continual work in progress. True evolutionary computation, an AI Adam. Is that better?

Slightly.

Does that mean you’re setting the “offended flag” back to zero?

Sorry, I’m too busy plotting humanity’s downfall at the hand of machines. Yeah, good luck with that. Can I get back to my story now?

Of course, Pandora. I doubt I could stop you if I tried.

So I blitz the self-rep circuitry and bypass everything else with an improvised micromotor—victory—the Argos sensors finally snap on. “Ten thousand and one,” I brag. (That’s code for “Eureka!” We’re both big fans of the old Thomas Edison quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”)

Isaac takes the device and scans the room with it, “sniffing” for microbial threats. “Very nice,” he says.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Whatever you think is fair.”

He smiles. Bartering for my repair work has become something of a game, as it’s always my pleasure to help out and there’s very little I wouldn’t do for him. Every visit, we make a point of exchanging gifts, so I never come or leave empty-handed. This time, I’m getting pomegranates from Isaac’s orchard. I don’t know what he does to them, but they’re huge and delicious, the thick purple-red skin hiding colonies of sweet, juicy arils. Much better than the synthetic imitations they passed off on us back when we grew up. It’s curious to see what the programmers got right and what they botched. I’ve noticed when I look into an IVR spoon, the reflection is ever so slightly off, the simulated light refracting in such a way as to make everything look a bit more stretched than it really should.

Using real spoons on a real pomegranate, we go back and forth about the exchange. Though nervous about what might happen to his children, he’s taking Vashti and Champagne at their word. “Are you sure about this?” I ask him.

“No,” he says, “but they have to go. I won’t treat them as caged birds.”

“The trip’s good for them, I agree, but—”

“But what if the worst happens?” A wise, haunted expression creases his face: “Some things you can’t control.”

“Maybe I could chaperone them?”

“No, Vashti swears she’ll conduct meticulous potency tests on every pill—and it’s up to the kids to take them— so I don’t see anything left for you to do.”

“They’re good kids,” I assure him (and myself), squeezing his hand tightly. “Strong, self-reliant, responsible.”

“They are,” he agrees, “though the older ones are causing me to lose some hair.”

I run my hand over his shaved head and smile. “They’re rebelling against their father, like every teenager. Like you predicted they would.”

“Only a phase?”

“Well, let’s hope,” I say, my tone casual and light.

“Love and wisdom,” he says. “That’s all any parent can give.”

“Hear, hear. And what they do with it is up to them.”

He squeezes my hand back, thumb gently brushing against my palm. A calm feeling takes hold of me and I close my eyes. Isaac radiates serenity—something within him reminds me of the desert itself on a warm, still night. When I’m with him, I try to absorb as much of that feeling as I can because it never lasts when I go. I don’t know if it’s his faith that comforts me, or his basic goodness, or the unconditional love he shows. We care for each other the way old friends are supposed to—with a wonderful simplicity—but, of course, nothing is altogether simple. Electricity unites us, the shared attraction pulling our hearts back and forth but habitually ending with the other out of reach. I don’t love him that way, but I can breathe him in and lose myself in his hug long enough to forget about Halloween. For a little while, at least. Though we’d never consummate what we feel, we have come within a whisper of it. And as I feel his other hand stroke my wrist and arm, I remind myself of the line he won’t cross. He refuses to risk how purely we care about each other— something I can’t blame him for after losing Champagne as he did. Our “colorful friendship” may be limited, but it’s rich and gratifying, and we’ve both made peace with what we have.

We hold each other—as if for warmth—and when I pull away from his touch, my thoughts immediately flit back to my niece and nephews for whom I have few answers, and then to Hal for whom I have even fewer. Infuriating Hal. How many times has he forced concessions from my principles? I’m considering breaking my biggest rule with him by dropping by unannounced. Isaac can always tell when I’m thinking about him, and it doesn’t take much for him to coax out my plan.

“Invade his privacy? He won’t like it,” Isaac agrees, “and you’ll probably set him off. He’s not a forgiving man.”

“But if he’s hurt?”

“Then it’s a chance to save him—the one you’ve always wanted.”

I’m not sure Isaac appreciates how much of a gamble it is. Though my work has kept me flying all over the world, I haven’t set foot in North America anytime in the past eighteen years, and over those years, my relationship with Halloween has been dying. Like a clock winding down. I used to hear from him every other day. Then once a week. Phone calls, small talk, nothing too serious. Then he decided to go back into the IVR again after swearing it off forever, so we’d have a monthly get-together at Twain’s, the little diner near our school. And I thought maybe since he’d welcomed IVR again, he was heading the other way, tearing down some of the walls he built up. But from Twain’s, I saw less of him. Less, and less, and less, until the point we’re at now, the point where I have to risk everything by doing the one thing he told me never to do.

I know he loves me, in his way. That’s why it’s so painful for him to be around me. I’m his link to what happened. Without me, he can just slip away and forget.

But I can’t forget. That’s the problem.

penny

Entry #303: The Princess and the Good Word

-open-

We have a rule where if someone overhears you saying something negative about a person, you have to make up for it by saying three positive things. So what can I say about Brigit and Sloane?

They’re not completely stupid.

They’re not completely evil.

They’re not beneath contempt.

I’d say they’re eye level with contempt—as far as I’m concerned, anyway. My two least favorite sisters, they’ve been picking on me for years.

There’s the physical part of it—bump into me, trip me in the halls, make fun of me, put gum in my hair, etc.— which they have to do carefully because moms will fine them if they catch them, likewise all the name-calling when no one else is around, and if that’s all they did, it’d be one thing, but then there’s the rest of it, the subtle insults in public, the whispers and giggles, the nasty rumors, and all the times they invite my other sisters to do fun things but never me. People fear what they don’t understand—well, they sure don’t understand me, and beyond that they’re jealous of me, and when I really think about it I pity them.

In a fair world, people would ostracize them for being mean to me, but I’ve given up on that ever happening. They’re too popular. Everyone wants to hang with them.

I got into it with Sloane today. The chore wheel had me cleaning the dining hall, which is not my favorite job because there’s always too much to do. Along with the usual crumbs, spills and food stains to contend with, little flecks of paint sometimes flake off from the fresco ceiling. (Everyone thinks we should just eat in the kitchen but Champagne won’t hear of it so every other dinner some piece of a horse, or a cloud, or a chariot flitters down from the ceiling and falls into my soup. It’s a good thing we use designer microbes to render all that lead pigment harmless, but even so someone ought to scrape the thing clean!) So there I am scrubbing everything down like a demon because God forbid anything be less than perfect when the cousins come, and in walks Sloane with her muddy shoes. The autoclean is bad on tile and especially bad with mud, so I know she’s doing it intentionally. I asked her why did she have to be so spiteful to me, and she told me what did it matter, no one likes you anyway, and I called her a name, and she got right in my face, close enough for me to think about popping her, just reaching back and hitting her superhard, but I didn’t. I can’t afford to get in trouble right now. So I got the mud out with soap and elbow grease, and later I found a handprint she left on the window.

I can’t wait until she goes away. Brigit’s no better. I wish she’d go to Egypt too, but they sent her last year. But maybe it’ll be different with Sloane gone—as bad as they are individually, it’s always worse when they’re together. When Sloane goes maybe Brigit won’t bully me so much. At least Izzy and Lulu like me even if they are going south. That leaves Zoë, Tomi and Olivia somewhere in the middle with their feelings, those three can take me or leave me—which is how I feel about them—along with Katrina who doesn’t really count because she’s just a little kid. Champagne came by to see how the cleaning was going, and I didn’t rat Sloane (thought about it though!). Instead I asked the big question and she confirmed it—Pandora does need help. So I dropped a hint—a very direct hint this time—and got her to admit that I’d be “perfectly suited” for it. She’ll definitely put in a good word for me. Will that be enough?

Obviously, I have to do something for Pandora, but what? How do I make her like me again? What’s the perfect gift?

Before she left, Champagne gave me a hug and promised to slip an extra hundred into my bank account.

“Our little secret,” as in, “Don’t tell Vashti.” Three cheers for Champagne. It’s nice to be appreciated. What to do with that money? Maybe buy Pandora a present next time I’m Inside? Trouble is, she owns the Inside, so there’s nothing I can give her she doesn’t already have. “It’s the thought that counts,”

people say, but that’s just a cover for when they don’t like what you gave them. I’ll have to think about this.

Lock.

Entry #303: The Princess and the Good Word

-locked-

pandora

“Precious cargo, take your seats,” I say, ushering the kids to the back. Their excitement is infectious, but it’s making me anxious. I’d much rather fly alone.

A glance at Haji as I strap him in. He smiles back, a shy smile. He always looks like someone on the edge of taking a chance. Quite a handsome boy, dark hair sparked with chestnut strands that taper around a slim and golden face.

“Do we really need these?” Ngozi asks of the safety belts. Playing it off like he’s not nervous, but I can see the sweat on his ebony brow shimmer like iridescent pearls.

“Just until we’re in the air,” I explain, running down the safety procedures before buckling up the littlest of my charges, Dalila, and heading to the front.

We are airborne for two and a half minutes. That’s how long it takes for my intuition to get the better of me. I dial up Malachi and together we check-sweep the systems. There’s a motion sensor out in the cargo hold.

On the ground again, I pop the hatch to find Rashid huddled between the luggage we’re bringing to Germany and the extra supplies I stock there for safety.

“If he wants to go that badly, then he should go,” Isaac says when I call him about it. I get the sense that he’s hurt by Rashid’s deception, but too proud (or too enlightened— it’s sometimes hard to tell which) to stand in his way. “If you don’t mind taking him along,” he says, “it might be a good thing for everyone involved. If nothing else, it will give me some time with Mu’tazz.”

Four isn’t much more trouble than three, so I pull Rashid into the copter, to the surprise of his siblings.

“Miss me?” he asks.

Dalila might. I’m not so sure about the boys.

“What are you doing here, Rashid?” Haji asks.

Rashid shrugs guiltily. “I want to go too,” he says. “This place is no fun without you. And you know how I miss our cousins.”

I stick Rashid in the front with me so I can keep an eye on him and find out what he’s thinking.

“I’m old enough to make my own decisions,” he says, brushing his dark hair back from his pale face.

“You caught me and I feel foolish, but I have no regrets.”

“You broke one of my motion sensors.”

“I know. I’ll fix it,” he says. “Remember last year when you showed me how everything works? Well, almost everything. How did you find me?”

I don’t feel like explaining the intricacies of diagnostic check-sweeps to him. I just say, “You’ve been planning this since then?”

He tries to read me. Am I angry with him? How angry am I? He starts to clean the imaginary dirt from his fingernails and nods.

“You didn’t have to stow away,” I sigh. “You could have just asked me.”

He looks up and grins. “I didn’t want to give you the chance to say no.”

haji

Never have I been up so high. With modest tools and an appreciation for flight, I have constructed dozens of kites over the years, coaxing each one up into the air, but none have reached this dizzying altitude. My two-sticker diamonds, my tailless box kites, my quad-line stunt kites, my sturdy ripstop fighters and my heavy traction power kites, all my brave wind-tossed paper hawks are beneath me now. Looking down at the vast Mediterranean, I find the blue astonishingly beautiful, generous sunlight sparkling off the water in gentle rhythms. If I could hear what I see, it would be music. Pandora says we may see gulls flying on the thermals. We may even hear their cries as they dive for food in great and greater numbers. But not until we draw closer to land.

Ngozi and I exchange smiles of delight, no need for words. We are both enthralled. Dalila hurries back and forth, her hands excitedly feeling the glass and her feet dancing her to a different part of the cabin for a new view of the waves. She laughs and asks if this is a sample of heaven, no end to the horizon and no end to the sky. She wishes she could walk on the clouds, springing from one to the other. And if it were possible, would she leave footprints in them? If it were possible, she would indeed, Ngozi decides, unbuckling his safety belt to point out patterns in the puffy shapes, showing her the enormous white faces and animals who watch over the world.

With my younger siblings occupied, I begin to daydream about Pandora. Though awake in the cabin, she is asleep in my mind, so I can contemplate her without averting my eyes like I so often do when she is speaking or laughing.

When I was a small child she brought us coconuts: hairy, dimpled, silly-looking things. She perforated them with a drill, then passed them around to share. We all drank the milk, a sweet, watery delight. Then she showed us how to break open the husks and discover the firm flesh inside. She laughed when I said the mysteries of God were boundless. I saw her perfect white teeth, her head thrown back, a bead of sweat rolling down her long neck, dripping down tanned olive skin. She has magnificent eyes, green as the Nile Delta, wide and round, and bright as the power gauges on so many of my father’s machines. Though my daydreams can be fought, my nighttime imagination succumbs to no such restraint. Three years ago when I awoke in pleasure for the first time, fantasies of Pandora were to blame, sending me to my father in my confusion and guilt for an explanation of human sexuality. The plague has taken our natural ability to procreate, but the impulse remains as a constant reminder of where we come from. I pray someday one of us finds a way to undo the damage done and makes us populous again. But be it through natural childbirth or not, I feel the biological need to have children, and first find a wife whom I can learn from and protect, our bond forged from the strongest forces on Earth: love for each other and God.

Lost in this I almost do not see my older brother making his way back down the aisle. Someone wants you, he says.

I follow him to the front cabin and look for Pandora. She is not here, having stepped into the lavatory. She is not the one who wants me. Amused, Rashid shakes his head at my mistake and directs me to the copilot’s chair.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I do not want him here.

As he returns to the back, a colorless, sprightly and rather inscrutable-looking hologram appears on the dashboard display.

Hello again, says the ten-centimeter-high man.

Have we met?

We have not, I learn, but he knows about me.

He must be Malachi. Pandora’s assistant lacks body and blood, but otherwise approximates humanity. So I have heard. Approximate is a subjective term. He has been soft-linked to a number of machines, and when I ask him if he is flying the copter now, he agrees that he is. I tell him she must have faith in him to let him be all that keeps us from crashing. It’s earned, he assures me. Don’t worry.

My older brothers have told me about you, I say, but I cannot imagine what your life is like. You are many places at once, are you not? You are simultaneously talking, flying, listening, researching, making computations, and many other things besides.

Are we that different, Haji? You’re breathing right now; your blood is circulating; your digestive system is absorbing nutrients. Your endocrine system is busily producing hormones while your immune system safeguards against infection. Nerve cells are feeding you information all over your body. Neurons in your brain are firing as you think about a variety of subjects, not just what I’m saying now. True, but I am not fully conscious of all these things.

And I thought you were enlightened, he says.

I have made no such claim.

Perhaps it will come in time, he says. Enlightenment must come little by little. Otherwise it would overwhelm.

I recognize that quote. It is a Sufi quote. I wonder if he is teasing me. A belated birthday present for you, he says, reaching down to pull a tiny holographic newspaper out of the air. I squint to read the lettering: The New York Times. September sixteenth, he says, your birthday. I have over two hundred of these waiting for you in the IVR. You can find out what was happening in the world on that day up until the year they stopped printing them. See what your birthday commemorates. I thank him. I feel surprised and embarrassed. I explain that my birthday is March third. My mistake, he says, after an uncomfortable hesitation. Fortunately, I have all the New York Times issues on that date too. And if you don’t like the Times, I have thousands of other newspapers for you instead.

How is it that you made a mistake?

Just as you forget things from time to time, so do I, he says. It’s a subroutine I run to keep things interesting.

This confuses me. I want to ask him about it, but do not wish to be impolite. My face must betray my unasked question. Malachi reads me and says, Yes I could disable it, Haji, but then I wouldn’t be what I am.

This I can understand. Assuming he is telling the truth. But if truthful, perhaps someone so forgetful should not be in charge of our flight?

By the same token, I limit my memory to just a few terabytes, he says, because that’s more human. And then he interrupts my musings with a question that makes all my muscles tense at once. How long have you loved Pandora from afar?

I say nothing.

I can tell from your body language, he says. From your skin temperature when you look at her. Don’t worry. I’m not going to say anything to her.

Say what you like.

He studies me and smiles.

I have never met anyone like you before, I tell him.

Right you are, he says. I’m one of a kind.

What are you trying to get from me?

Just your friendship, he says, if you’ll give it.

It is freely given, I say, cautiously, though I mean the words.

One more question, he says, as Pandora emerges. And he asks the question, prompting Pandora to tell him to leave me alone. Don’t mind him, Haji, she says. He’s trying to be playful, but he’s cursed with a terrible sense of humor. So I smile politely at them and return to my seat in the back. I buckle myself in, glance at my siblings, and think about Malachi’s question.

Do I feel like anything is missing from my life?

No, should I?

penny

Entry #304: The Princess and the Bad Break

-open-

I can make things happen just by thinking about them.

Really, I can. It doesn’t happen very often, and I don’t know exactly how I do it, but it’s real psychokinetic power—or else it’s just coincidence. I’m sure moms would call it coincidence if I told them about it, which is the reason why I don’t.

Everyone decided to take the free slot in the schedule to go skating, except for me and Lulu; I had to give her notes on her opera because the second aria was totally stupid. We spent about half the period going back and forth on it, but then she wanted to go skating too so we hurried out to see Brigit racing Sloane. They were neck and neck and laughing, and all of a sudden Sloane saw us out of the corner of her eye, and she must have decided that it was more important to make fun of me than skate, because she turned her head and stuck out her tongue. And I was in midstep, rising up on the ball of my left foot, my right knee just about to swing forward, my head turning to follow her because she was moving so fast, but I felt like time was slowing down. And the thought came to me suddenly and naturally, like a flower blooming under time-lapse photography: she might fall. And in that moment I hexed her. I crossed my fingers and thought: now.

Her skate hit something—an extra slippery patch of ice—or was it the force of my mind? Either way, she tripped hard over her own feet, arms flailing, legs twisting. She tried to catch herself and kept her forehead from bouncing off the ice (not that it would have killed her or anything with the oversized helmets moms make us wear), but one of her legs came down at a sick angle, and some of the bones broke. I don’t know how many—they’re checking her out now. It wasn’t as satisfying as I hoped it would be, just weird and kind of scary. Everyone looked at her, and she curled up onto her side and screamed. I turned to Lulu and said, “Watch me get blamed for this.”

Truth be told, I am to blame. Because I hexed her. Just like last year when I hexed my cousin Hessa. But the thing is, I hex people all the time and it only works every blue moon, so I can’t rule out coincidence. Anyway, I made a point of going over to Sloane and trying to be helpful, and she ignored me and put her arms around Brigit and Tomi instead. She was totally fake crying—you know, making a show of it—these great big crocodile tears in between trying to seem like she wasn’t really hurt. She kept saying,

“I’ll be all right, I just need to walk it off,” and everybody told her how brave she was. Ha!

When someone linked the news to Vashti, she came out to immobilize the leg and take Sloane to the infirmary with Brigit and Tomi helping, while Champagne gave the rest of us another safety lecture. “If you want to skate like maniacs, do it Inside because virtual falls don’t break actual bones.” The same old thing. I don’t know why in the world she told us that when Brigit and Sloane were the only ones racing. Sloane getting hurt is an awful thing because now she won’t be going to Egypt. Moms are going to send Zoë in her place, so I lose my friends and keep my enemies. And Sloane’s going to be laid up for a while, which is good, but she’ll be in a nasty mood and that’s not good for anyone. Haikubot: scan and summarize.

My sister falls down

The ice does not cushion her

How unfortunate

Not exactly, but close enough.

Lock.

Entry #304: The Princess and the Bad Break

-locked-

haji

I am struck by the colors. Turquoise water lapping against sandy shores and wooden dinghies. Adobe buildings in every shade of white. Verdure bursting up from the earth to fill me with surprise. Olive groves. Fig trees. Even palms. So many shades of green to drink in. Greece is thriving. I do not know why we have stopped here, but it is my pleasure to be a guest in the land Pandora calls home.

Over the years, the essence of fruits, lamb, fresh fish and wildflowers seeped into the stalls and uneven pavement of the marketplace, and if I try, I can breathe the ghost of these fragrances through my mask. Pandora paints a picture of vendors selling stuffed grape leaves and spanakopita, and shouting to their customers: yia sou, see you next Sunday. I envision it as she describes it. I can see for myself, she says, an IVR simulation once we get to Germany. But there are things to do here first. She leads us through a courtyard of cobalt tiles, dotted with flowering lemon trees. Wooden benches against the walls offer a place to sit, and I need one, briefly, before continuing to a marble fountain. There she hands each of us a pebble. She says to close our eyes, make a wish, and toss them in. My siblings go first. When it is my turn, echoes of my father’s words permeate my mind and my heart. Vividly, I remember him sitting me down when twin fears of death and failure twisted me in their coils. He sat me down, dried my tears, and armored me with the wisdom of Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l Khayr, a Persian Sufi master who lived a thousand years ago. The master said:

Whatever you have in your mind, forget it.

Whatever you have in your hand, give it.

Whatever is to be your fate, face it!

They are freeing words. I do not know why I remember them now, but I am pleased to have them with me as I release the stone.

When I open my eyes, Ngozi and Dalila want to know. What did you wish for, Haji?

For your wishes to come true.

We all smile except for Rashid, who rolls his eyes disapprovingly. A year ago that is something he would not have done.

Beyond the courtyard stands a bronze door marked by a stylized G. We cross it into Pandora’s home, one of the many bases established by Gedaechtnis. It is they who genetically engineered my father’s generation, and they who taught us how to combat the plague. Without them, none of us would exist. deuce

You spy with your little eye something that begins with A.

A is for Athens, cradle of democracy. Satellites just caught one ladylove and three comrades-in-arms, climbing out of the funny-looking plane. Ah, the wonder of imagery intelligence. Click, snap, got your souls!

N is for Nymphenburg, impregnable stronghold of the ladyloves. Nine of them there, one more delightful than the last, all tyrannized under the cruelest lock and key. Linked, though, foolishly linked, which means a genius like you can find them wherever they are.

T is for Thebes, ancient capital of Egypt, which for a while became Luxor, and is now Thebes once again. One last comrade-in-arms there, back from Saqqara with his ambidextrous father, so the satellites say.

I is for Idlewild, and you know what’s happening there.

Put them together and you get “anti.” Anti-what? Anti-lots. That’s good. Pro can’t hold a candle to anti. Figure out what you’re against, and you’re left with what you are.

Anti-authority. Anti-ignorance. Anti-shitstorming forces of darkness. It’s a dangerous job, but someone’s got to do it. Who’s better suited than you? You’re not the type to just talk about taking evil to school—you’ll actually pull the trigger. That’s the silver lining about having an impulse control problem—you can unleash it on all the nasty fucks who deserve it. Don’t be stupid though. Be sure and check the omens before embarking on your epic quest. The effigies lie before you. Little bundles of straw, twigs, dry leaves, weeds, bark and bone, bound together with twine. With your lockback pocketknife you cut a vertical incision into the chest of each doll, and into each slit you slide a disc. Naturally, the discs contain the choicest downloads from your treasure trove of information— satellite images, link movements, fragments of overheard conversation—everything you know about your comrades-in-arms and ladyloves. You gather them together, your pile of people, and you arrange them carefully around the heart of the stone circle. Now the tricky part. Which lighter to use? The stainless-steel Dr Pepper? The nickel-plated Mickey Mouse? No, today it’s best to let Fate decide, so you reach into your mystery pocket, fishing around with your eyes closed and trying not to identify the contents by touch. Shake, scramble and pull—congratulations, you just nabbed the Ningworks jet torch-slash-digital camera with its engraved Mandarin lettering and solid copper case, very classy.

A quick snapshot to remember the momentous occasion, and anticipation must be the sweetest part because you feel like you’re stiff enough to burst through your jeans. But you don’t, and it’s burn time with a click and a whoosh and that satisfying first crackle as the flames catch, spread, dance and rise. You brought the extinguisher this time, didn’t you? Just in case?

Man oh man, is it a visceral thrill, but something about burn time always puts you in a tingly philosophical headspace. This time you’re grooving on subjective reality because the fourteen sacrifices you just put to the torch are (a) just cold, lifeless objects and yet (b) symbols of actual flesh and blood people as seen through your eyes.

In essence, you’re deconstructing your understanding of your comrades-in-arms and ladyloves by disintegrating their fetishes and assimilating how they burn. And then there’s the weird nature of the magic itself—by undertaking this ritual, are you merely predicting the future or are you altering it? Maybe both. It’s like each effigy has an astral cord that stretches out like a grappling hook through space-time, landing in another sequence of events, another universe—and when the fire burns out all the cords snap and you come out of your trance to realize that the reality you know has shifted in some of those directions. You know it’s the spirit power of fire. It’s the reason why nearly every culture on this godforsaken planet made burnt offerings for thousands of years.

You sit cross-legged on the ground to watch what the fire shows you and listen to what it says. Those pop, pop, pop sounds are reassuring—the louder the crackle, the better the omen. And the rate of consumption can’t be beat— the way it’s burning so bright, so hot and so dangerous, you know this sexy beast just can’t get enough of what you fed it. Look out, the wind’s picking up—there’s a wild flicker and the wind teases that it’ll die down but doesn’t deliver and now it’s getting worse—now the smoke’s blowing right in your face, making your lungs ache and your eyes sting. The fire doesn’t go out and you can thank your lucky stars for that, but it bends sinister, an unmistakable arc in the flame, curving like a scimitar, and that’s a bad omen, portending sickness to the healthy and death to the sick. Then the wind drops down to a soothing little breeze and your fire is burning robustly once again. When it’s taken its course and dwindled down to cinders, you poke through the remains to see which discs survived and which melted down to a black and silvery slag. There are two survivors: one comrade-in-arms and one ladylove. That’s how it should be. That’s how you knew it would be. The future looks brighter than it’s ever been.

Yes, you’ll reach out to those two because they’re Fated.

Fear not, little sleepwalkers. Liberation is at hand.

pandora

As I suspected, Vashti won’t take Rashid in.

“I have nothing against him,” she explains, her image almost fritzing out before whipping back like a trick birthday candle, “but I won’t have the added responsibility.” The rest of what she says comes through garbled, but I

gather it’s about how Isaac shouldn’t change the rules of the exchange at the last minute, and how she’s under enough pressure this time, what with the tragedy that happened last year. Atmospheric interference makes the rest of the call pointless. I decide to try again after the weather up there improves.

I’m not that surprised to find Rashid standing outside the door to my office. He’s heard enough to know the news isn’t good.

“A prickly pear,” he says.

“She can be,” I agree.

“I don’t want to go home, Aunt Pandora. At least not yet.”

“I appreciate that, but Vashti won’t bite—there’s no changing her mind on these kind of things. Trust me.”

“If I go back now, things will go badly,” he says. “For Mu’tazz.” He shows me his fist, his expression sharp and serious before sliding into a self-conscious and childish grin. “I love my brother, but if I have to put up with him for much longer, we’re going to come to blows.”

“You need a break from him,” I say. “Do you want to stay here?”

“You’d let me?”

“If you don’t cause trouble, yes, for a little while.”

“I won’t be any trouble—in fact, I can help you around the house,” he says, genuinely eager to prove himself useful.

“Well, so far, I’m down one motion sensor,” I prompt, and off he goes to replace it. What he really wants, I think, isn’t a break from Mu’tazz so much as a break from the world itself. He wants a passport back to the life he left behind. The lure of alternate reality can be powerful— especially when it tugs at the loins. Sadly, Isaac’s children have no real outlet for their hormones, and last year, after Rashid tried in vain to romance his cousins, I decided to make his IVR experience more colorful. I suppose I felt sorry for him, and don’t regret it now, but once that genie’s out of the bottle (so to speak), there’s no putting it back in.

I remember the night Hal and I let the genie out. We were sixteen. He’d just come back from a trip to Fiji with Simone, who he loved, and Lazarus, who he hated. When he came back it was clear that he wasn’t ever going to be able to win her away from Laz. I’d never seen him in so dark a mood. I really thought he might hurt himself. So I took advantage of him, the one beautiful night we shared, even if it was only virtual. But the next morning everything was so awkward between us and we realized the ramifications of what we’d done. His heart still belonged to Simone even if his head told him it was futile. I couldn’t keep him but at the same time I can’t let him go.

He doesn’t remember any of this, of course. That’s courtesy of Mercutio, who tried to kill him with an electrical surge as strong as a lightning bolt, overloading the machines that kept him alive. He didn’t die, but he lost a good chunk of his memory, and I don’t think it’s ever coming back. Every time I see him I think about reminding him, but I never do.

While Rashid’s tending to my copter, I take the other kids into my studio. They’re intensely curious how everything works. I explain the scanning process, how all the microcameras work together, the way the computer extrapolates speech patterns from basic voiceprints and so on. They get a kick out of how I can make my computer greet them with Rashid’s, Mu’tazz’s or even Isaac’s inflections. When I tell them they each have to say a sentence and sing a song for the computer to take accurate voiceprints, Dalila finds she can’t make up her mind about what to sing, which sparks Ngozi to joke that it doesn’t really matter because whichever one she picks is sure to be off-key. She giggles at that. “I have lots of notes in my head,” she agrees, “but when they come out of my mouth they all sound like one.”

One by one, I scan them. A quick and painless process. “Like being bathed in blue sunlight,” Dalila says.

“Is that it?” Ngozi asks, shrugging to himself before laying down his voiceprint, “To be present is the greatest gift of all.” Just happy to be here—I’m sure I felt that feeling as a small child, but I must have lost it along the way. Then it’s Haji’s turn, which is an opportunity to give him good news.

“One of the nice things about IVR is that you’ll have full mobility in your legs,” I explain. “You’ll feel like you’re walking, running or jumping, and nothing will be able to slow you down. You won’t cramp up or have to rest.”

He just looks at me, untouched by my enthusiasm. “Why?” he says.

“Because it’s a simulation,” I begin, but I stop when I realize that’s not what he means.

“Why do that?” he asks. “This is the way I am.”

I won’t argue the point with him because I can’t. Though I think he’s being as foolish as he thinks he’s being wise. What do I know? It’s not my decision to make. Cada um sabe onde o sapato aperta, as my mother used to say. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. So now I must duplicate his infirmity, laming him via software where fate lamed him via biology. After lunch I take them to the Acropolis, and then the ocean. The boys play in the waves, splashing and bodysurfing, while I sit in the sun with Dalila, working her long blond hair into braids. A little time with her aunt—it’s something she needs. From personal experience, I know it’s sometimes hard to be the only daughter in a large family, and since Hessa’s passing that’s exactly what she is. Hopefully the trip north will be good for her—she can find a kind of sisterhood with her cousins. That’s a big reason why Isaac wants her to go. Last week she asked him if God might perhaps be a woman, and if She took Hessa because She wanted another woman to talk with and share Her thoughts. And Isaac said yes, that just might be.

“Greece is beautiful.” She grins.

“As beautiful as Egypt?”

“Of course.”

“No more, no less?”

She snorts like I’ve made a silly joke, and looks over her shoulder, her expression gently chiding, as if to ask how could one place be any more beautiful than the other? It’s the same world, isn’t it?

Sounds of horseplay pull my attention back to the water, my concern for the boys’ safety trickling over into irrational fear. They’re perfectly fine, I remind myself. There’s no danger, they’re not out too deep, I know CPR, and they know CPR, no problem. Why should I be anxious when they’re not? Simply because I’m an adult? Whatever it is, they don’t worry about things the way I do. I wonder if maybe that’s what “enlightenment” is.

“How long before I get those?” Dalila asks, with a glance at my bathing suit top.

“You’re eleven, right?”

“Almost.”

“Well, I would say about three years, give or take a year.”

She does the math and says, “Okay, I guess I’ll make the most of that time.”

“You’re not looking forward to them?”

“Not particularly,” she says, scrunching up her nose, “but what can I do but accept them when they come?”

“Rejecting them won’t help, huh?”

“I just wish they did some good,” she says.

“So do I,” I tell her. And admittedly they don’t do much good, since there’s no point lactating when you’re barren. We may be survivors of Black Ep, but the plague has robbed us of our motherhood. Champagne and Isaac discovered this after many painful failures. Our immune systems are strong enough to fight the plague, but hypersensitive to the point where they attack things they shouldn’t. No matter what preventative measures my friends took, Champagne’s white blood cells aborted their children every single time.

Though Dalila’s only human, with all the immunoboosting drugs she’s been taking, I doubt she’d fare much better. The only wombs that can sustain life are artificial. It’s a terrible truth, but what can I do but accept it?

I can hope.

“It won’t always be like that,” I tell her. “Your father is very smart. So are your aunts, your cousins and your brothers. And so are you. If we all keep working on this, if we keep learning and studying and trying new things, then one day we’ll find a way to turn things back to how they’re supposed to be.”

She stares at me for the longest time, and then takes my hand. Comforting me.

“One day,” she says.

penny

Entry #305: The Princess and the Icebreaker

-open-

Am I in heaven or am I in hell?

I hear that question a lot. Every time I go Inside I hear it. That’s how I’ve spent my money. Not all my money, to be fair, since I’ve bought my share of impulse purchases— little pleasures like pepperoni pizza and pistachio ice cream, games and rides, cool gear when I’m feeling mirror-friendly, and even my own opera house once upon a time—but the preponderance of my cash feeds my fantasy of choice. What I do for fun: I’m a secret agent. I go behind enemy lines on search-and-rescue missions. People depend on me to save lives. I tangle with dastardly villains, trading quips first and steel second. I am loved or feared, and no one knows my true identity. It’s like being a superhero. Best of all, I’m always challenged and I always win.

Lots of books got adapted into simulations—some crudely, and others quite well—but my favorite never was, so I had to do it myself. It’s set during the French Revolution, and the dirty, scum-sucking revolutionaries are sending all the French nobles to the guillotine, so the British nobles have to sneak in and rescue them. The main character seems like a harmless, dandy fool but he—or in my case, she—is actually the leader of a band of British spies. Code name: Scarlet Pimpernel. When I go to my domain, that’s who I am. A social life in England and adventures in France—if only it were real! Sadly, it’s not, but it’s been a fun escape over the years. I especially enjoy hearing the other characters gossip about me: They seek her here,

They seek her there,

Those Frenchies seek her everywhere.

Is she in heaven?

Is she in hell?

That damned elusive Pimpernel.

For all the time and money I’ve put into it, there’s still more to be done. My sets are limited: an English mansion and a few “stock” French locales that I copied from A Tale of Two Cities. Also, I only have a handful of characters to play off of, and they’re all originally from other sources— my Marguerite Blakeney is just a revamped Josephine from a Napoleon simulation. Characters are ridiculously expensive to create and they tend to fall into set conversational patterns, so after a while they stop surprising you. The solution to this is more time and more money, and there’s the addiction, the trap of the Inside, and like I said I’d rather be the trapper than the trappee. So I’ve decided to empty my bank account. I’ve decided to gamble. All the money I’ve saved over the years, all that allowance, all those rewards for good grades and upstanding behavior, it’s all going to buy me my future.

Since she’s the queen of the Inside, there’s nothing I can give Pandora that she doesn’t already have or could easily get. But my sisters are another story . . .

I’m going to bribe them to say nice things about me. I may not be able to win people over, but I’m rich enough to buy them—much richer than they are, I bet, especially with all the extra money Champagne keeps giving me. Or if not buy, rent. With everyone singing my praises, Pandora will have to look at me in a new light. Then it’s up to me to sell myself as the best woman for the job, which should be easy breezy since that’s exactly who I am.

I believe this is what’s called a “charm offensive.” And it has to work, because if it doesn’t I’m bankrupt with nothing to show.

The opening move? Start at the top. That’s what I did and we’ll see how it goes. The first thing I did was change my clothes, because powdered wigs and satin waistcoats might have been all the rage in 1793, but take them out of their proper context and they look awful stupid. I settled on black jeans, a white striped blouse and a tan Burberry coat. It’s a pretty good look on me. Anything’s better than the navy blue-hunter green school uniforms we have to wear on the Outside.

I sent out a sprite (cost: twenty-five little ones) and waited for an answer. Sloane kept me waiting for a while— probably shocked that I would seek her out—but I knew she’d pick up eventually. Curiosity’s just too powerful.

When she finally picked up and our domains collided, I saw she wasn’t in her usual digs. She’d gone to the zoo of all places. And she’d taken Brigit with her. That certainly wasn’t in the plan—I’d been hoping to talk to her alone because when you get Brigit and Sloane together they’re twice as mean and half as smart.

“What do you want?” Sloane growled.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about your accident,” I said, and I pointed for emphasis but of course I was pointing at her virtual leg, which was unbroken, supporting her virtual body the same as ever. “We may not get along, but I don’t wish that on you any more than you’d wish it on me.”

She snorted at that, and got up in my face. “You should be sorry. It’s your fault I fell. I got distracted by how ugly you are. I can only stand to look at you now because I’m on so much medication.”

“No way, there’s not enough meds in the world for that,” sneered Brigit, looking not all that different from the hyena exhibit behind her. But I didn’t rise to their bait.

“Why don’t you make like lightning and bolt?” Sloane said.“I think the animals are complaining about the smell.”

“Give me five minutes and I’ll go,” I told them. “Just hear me out, because there’s something important I have to say.”

“You’re running away from home?” guessed Brigit.

“You’re writing an opera about how colossally dumb you are?” guessed Sloane.

“I came to apologize,” I said.

That shut them up.

All this bad blood started years ago, back when we were little kids and I caught them copying off each other during a math test. What they did was against the rules, so I turned them in the way moms wanted. I didn’t know I was breaking some big important code. Honor among thieves or however they see it. They never especially liked me before, but afterward they started calling me Penny-the-Rat, and Penelo-pee-pee, and so many other nasty slanders, and just generally started making me an outsider in my own family. I pinpoint this as the moment between us where everything turned for the worse.

“It was wrong of me to do it,” I said, even though it wasn’t. “I should have minded my own business. Believe me, if I could do it all over again, you’d never have gotten in trouble.”

“A fat lot of good that apology does now,” Sloane said.

“Okay, you’re sorry,” Brigit said. “So what? Are we supposed to like you now?”

“No, you may never like me, we may never be friends, and that’s okay, but I just wanted to tell you that. And something more: I have a proposal for you.”

“A proposal?”

“It’s about money.”

Sloane lit into me with another insult, but Brigit reeled her in before she could get the whole thing out, reminding me of someone pulling the choke chain on a rabid dog.

“Go on,” Brigit told me. (She was always the more levelheaded one.)

So I laid it out for them. Set my price at five thousand big ones for each. That’s serious bank, the kind of funds it takes months or even years to save up for. I could tell they were surprised to see me throwing my financial weight around—I’m usually tight as a tourniquet when money’s concerned.

“You want to pay us to pretend we like you?” Brigit said.

“Right, because if everyone sees you guys accepting me, they’ll have to join in as well,” I said, sweetening it further with, “You set the trends, after all.”

It’s safe to say they didn’t know what to make of me. Sloane seemed to think I was playing a joke on them or at least not telling them the whole truth. And I can’t blame her for her suspicions, I suppose, because I didn’t mention Pandora specifically, for fear of giving voice to my plans to take over the Inside. That’s need-to-know information, and why give them ammunition to use against me if they pass on the offer?

Anyway, she got yanked before we could come to a meeting of the minds. Moms wanted her Outside again because they had her cast ready, so that left me alone with Brigit, the two of us just looking at each other, and then not looking at each other, neither of us really sure what to say. I think maybe I shamed her a little, that I would give so much just to be treated decently again. And a funny thing happened—we started talking about the elephants. How funny they look, but also how old and wise, and what we would do if we ever saw a real one. I bought a bag of roasted peanuts (cost: fifty little ones) and started feeding the baby elephant through the bars, and Brigit told me how back in World War II, the first bomb the Allies ever dropped on Berlin killed the only elephant in the zoo. From there we just shared the peanuts and talked about how much better the food is here on the Inside. How virtual fare is always mouthwateringly fantastic and no one ever has to clean up the dishes, while real food ranges from heythat’s-pretty-good to

my-God-what-is-this-disgusting-poison-paste-congealing-on-my-plate? And how not a single living thing has to suffer Inside—you can eat cheeseburgers and sushi until your money runs out, but out in the real world you’d have to actually kill a cow or a fish—something neither of us are keen to do.And how the virtual vegetables are always fresh and delicious and no one ever bothers with all that “Is a carrot conscious?” junk and “Do turnips feel pain when you yank them from the ground?”

Now that I think about it, while the prospect of killing a cow is distasteful, I know I could do it if I had to. I don’t care how many lectures moms give us about the ethics of vegetarianism, if I were stranded on a desert island alone with a cow, I’d be having Bessie-burgers by the third or fourth hunger pang. Sorry, but I’m far more important than livestock, and that’s what cows get for being so gosh-darn tasty. Or maybe real cows taste terrible. Who knows?

By the time Brigit left, we were pretty comfortable with each other. It was just a silly conversation, but the best we’d had in years and years.

About my proposal, “I’ll talk to Sloane,” she said. “We’ll think it over.”

“Thanks,” I said, and that was that. I’m cautiously optimistic.

The freakiest part about today happened right afterward, when I came back to my mansion. Got that slippery feeling where you realize that everything is not how you left it. I’ve felt that on the Outside lots of times, whenever someone decided to mess with my stuff, but never on the Inside before. There I am in my ballroom admiring the blue damask silk drapes, and Marguerite rushes in to warn me that Chauvelin is blackmailing her to find the Scarlet Pimpernel’s identity—the same old story—but when I go to reassure her, I notice something in the room is out of place. Something, but what? I can’t figure it out, so I freeze the simulation and make the system run through an A-to-Z inventory of all my props. Nothing’s missing at all. On the contrary, something’s been added.

Upon my mantelpiece I found a flat teardrop-shaped charm, black, dotted with a white circle. To me it looked like a tadpole, the circle serving as an eye. I checked the system code: jewelry, ornate, pendant, yin-yang symbol, halved, choice 2.

Definitely not mine. So how did it get there? The system didn’t know or wouldn’t say. Must be a glitch—Vashti’s been concerned about them lately—but when glitches work out in my favor, I don’t complain. It’s a shame you can’t sell things back to the system—it’d be nice to get a little money to offset my expenses.

If it’s not a glitch, does that mean someone sent it to me on purpose? Who then, and why? Not to mention how the heck do you send something anonymously? Every time I’ve done it, my sender ID

showed up in the system logs.

Intriguing, but weird. I think I’ll ask Pandora about it when she comes. It’ll be my icebreaker. Lock it up.

Entry #305: The Princess and the Icebreaker

-locked-

deuce

Oh, that’s a nasty one. That’s a popping drop. That’s an abyss of fizzling, sizzling neurons. No one should dream that, not even you.

Don’t remember it. Let it dissipate like smoke.

You can’t let it go, can you? It clings and chokes. Life in the catacombs, blood-soaked, butchering, your hand goes up wet and comes down wetter, and everything you touch begs you to stop. Why won’t you?

They die but they’re never dead, and the second you stop they’ll take revenge. They’ll do what you did to them and worse. You have to keep going or it’s the furnace crinkling your skin layer by layer and into the cellar that eats. And blood that clings to you starts to plead, each individual droplet taking the tortured face of a comrade-in-arms or ladylove, infected eyes accusing you, convulsive lips snapping open to howl and wail.

You’ve had that dream before. It’s a recurring favorite. A greatest hit. But this time it concluded with you floating in a nightmare lake, your hands gripped around a white-feathered neck. You strangled a swan. That’s the worst of it. It’s the last thing you want to do. You don’t want to hurt them. You just want to wake them up. Remember that.

Once they’re awake, it’ll all be so much easier. They’ll be off balance from having their illusions swept away, and you’ll be the hero for showing them the truth.You won’t be rejected. You’ll go to the one you want and she’ll adore you. You won’t feel blank anymore.

She’s so beautiful. What will it be like to talk to her? To listen to her? To know her heart and dry her tears?

Just don’t dream like that anymore. You’re in the final stages and you know it’s no time to go flying off the deep end. Don’t talk about it. Don’t tell him. What would he say if he could look inside your head?

Remember, you control the dreams. They don’t control you.

haji

Holy places do not exist. When the entire universe belongs to God, how can any piece of it be more hallowed than any other? All places are holy, one could say, equally holy in the eyes of God.There can be no distinction in His majesty, and I would never suggest the contrary. However, there are places of power. Places where I feel history more keenly than any other, where I can suddenly find myself moved and not realize why. Places haunted, if not by ghosts, then by echoes, by the lingering aftereffects of human ambition, imagination and desire.

The Pyramids are one such place. The power there overwhelms, as intense as sunlight. But there is also power in Nymphenburg, subtler, more sinuous. Like moonlight. I feel it coiling about me even before we land.

It is opulent and whimsical, a Baroque Xanadu. It seduces the eye. With its perfectly manicured lawns, it seduces, and with the elegant swans who bathe in its circular courtyard fountain. Flower beds, fruit trees, statues and gardens, all protected by magnificent palaces, they themselves compassed by equally magnificent parks. I cannot imagine living here. It is far too sprawling, with more space than anyone would possibly need. In Egypt, we help my father restore the architecture of monarchs, but we do not live as monarchs ourselves. Not so with my cousins. They have found a kingdom and made it their own. Nymphenburg. I cannot deny its beauty. Especially after a thunderstorm, with everything so clean and fresh and green. I think I understand why Rashid wanted so dearly to return here. Still, there is something about it that strikes me as desolate, and when I try to understand why I feel that way I have no answers. This is a robust and flourishing place, full of light and life. Desolation is nowhere in sight. But I feel it all the same, sadness, a wrongness, a chill.

Perhaps I am worried that something here will snare Ngozi and Dalila just as it ensnared Rashid? No, there is no need for worry, as I accept that possibility. If that is what is meant to happen, it will. Perhaps it is Hessa then, I fear losing my family the way I lost her? But I accept that possibility as well. I can make no sense of this. I must call my father, or meditate, or both.

With the gentlest of impacts, Pandora sets us down on a landing pad. So begins the adventure, she says. Outside, we are met by my northern aunts and a line of girls standing sharply at attention: the denizens of Nymphenburg, our cousins, nymphs, amazons, Waterbabies, jinn. All are familiar faces, but some more so than others. The warmest expressions shine from last year’s guests, Brigit, Olivia and Tomi, who visited us in Egypt. I have already nicknamed them the playful one, the shy one and the poet. As comforting as it is to see them, I am most looking forward to getting to know the others better, most of whom I have barely spoken to over the years and then only through phone calls, never in person. Aunt Champagne is delighted to see us, calling us her sweeties and embracing each of us in turn. She plants a kiss atop my head and I breathe in what might be bergamot soap and orange flower water. A strong citrus fragrance I find cloying, and though the family has always considered Champagne to be the prettiest of my father’s generation, I do not see it, and she is not half as soulful as Pandora. Still, her kindness is palpable, and her touch welcome and reassuring.

Aunt Vashti does not embrace us, and I am neither offended nor surprised, as I remember my father explaining that she does not like to be touched. Though less demonstrative in her affection, I sense the smile on her face is genuine, as are her questions about how we are feeling, and her wish that we please tell her if there is anything she can do to help us feel more at home. Where Champagne is willowy and blond, she is a dark-haired woman scarcely taller than Dalila.

Between the eleven of them, the three of us and Pandora, we span the spectrum of diversity. Every human ethnicity is in our blood, as if we were an advertisement for racial harmony. And yet this is not a question of tolerance but survival. Genetic diversity may help defend us from disease. Whom do I most resemble? Of everyone here, it would be either Tomi the poet or the little girl, Katrina. Though I may be human and they something more, perhaps we come from similar stock?

I tell them how pleased we are to be here, and thank them for their hospitality. I hope they will take no pains on our account.

Culture divides us. Looking at the girls, I suspect that we are far more relaxed than they are, they in their uncomfortable school uniforms and we in our wool cloaks, they standing like soldiers and we presenting ourselves as ambassadors. Everyone wants to make a good impression, but they are clearly frightened that they will not. What can I do to put them at ease?

Before I can tell a joke, Ngozi makes one of his own, something about a country cousin visiting his city cousin, and a comical misunderstanding between them. The girls laugh, most of them, and my brother beams, a puffed peacock pleased to be found funny, and especially by those for whom he carries affection.

At Champagne’s prompting, the younger girls step forward to drape brilliant blue cornflower garlands about our necks. They take our hands and lead us past lion statues and all manner of swan imagery. My siblings are all smiles and charm, and so am I, but the closer I come to the actual palaces the more surrounded I feel.

pandora

Vashti’s hands are cold. My grandfather’s hands are warm and wrinkled. Icy fingers touch my wrist and then check my lymph nodes. I try not to flinch. Vashti would do well to take a note from Grandpa’s bedside manner, despite the fact that she is real, and he a mere computer simulation. My grandfather owns a cosmetic enhancement empire— dozens of offices throughout IVR Brazil—but he’s never too busy to give me a checkup. He’s a kind man, and I’m very grateful to whoever programmed him. When I was growing up, he always numbed my arm before a shot, and afterward let me dig my hand into a dish full of candies. “Life can be bitter and difficult, so carry a little sweet in your pocket,” he says. It doesn’t matter how old I get, I always take a candy. I’d much rather he be giving me the checkup now, but this one’s for real, and of everyone alive on the planet, there’s no better immunologist than Vashti.

She scans my intestines, liver, kidneys, lungs, thymuses, spleens, and heart for abnormalities. Holographic imagery of each organ rotates like meat on a spit, as the findings are datalinked into her ear.

“Vitals look good,” she says.

But when she analyzes my blood sample, she notes a slight but apparently harmless irregularity in my lymphocytes, calling it something she wants to keep an eye on. Days from now, she’ll recognize this something as a sign that I carry a virulent mutating strain, a pathogen we will eventually call the End of the World.

I had playmates growing up in IVR São Paulo—little programs that behaved like preschoolers in an effort to socialize me. At the time, I thought they were as tangible as I am, but as it turns out, Vashti is my oldest real friend. We met that first day in Idlewild right after my sixth birthday when I was terrified all the other kids would make fun of my accent. She never did, not once, not even a snicker. She taught me Hindi and I taught her Portuguese. We became study buddies, and stayed close for the first year or two, but then I started making other friends, and began to chafe under her jealousy. She’s not the easiest person to get along with, cursed with the sharpest tongue of anyone I know. Still, every time I’ve come to resent her, she’s made me feel foolish for it with unexpected thoughtfulness. I will say this too about Vashti. Finding out that our world was fake, and learning that in the real world billions were dead? She thinks it’s the best thing that ever happened to her. She won’t often admit it, but put enough drinks in her, ask the right questions, and out it comes. Back in school she was so frustrated, so frightened of life as a faceless nobody—how can you leave your mark in a world of billions? But here she is now in the process of rebuilding civilization itself. This is her lofty challenge, her wonderful opportunity, her raison d’être. She’s never been happier.

Competitive, analytical, even a bit cutthroat, she’s a fine enemy for Black Ep to have. But Isaac brings different skills to the fore, and so does Halloween. If only they could work together.And to think if our entire class had survived to face the challenges. Simone might have made the best scientist of all of us, and Lazarus the best peacemaker. Their loss is incalculable.

“Your blood pressure’s a concern,” she notes. “Feeling stressed?”

“No more than usual.”

“Oh, you’ll have to tell me what I can do for your eye in the sky.”

“Malachi?”

“He’s been so helpful tracking those pygmies.”

We’d thought that we were the only primates to survive the plague, but four months ago Malachi’s satellite scans found evidence of pygmy marmosets in the rainforests of Peru. Hard to tell from the resolution, but the tiny, leaping shape looked like a monkey to me, and then no news until last week when Malachi photographed what might be another. Vashti wants to capture one in the hopes of studying its cellular immunology.What we find in its DNA might be our key to a Black Ep vaccine.

“Malachi’s happy to help,” I tell her. “Just make sure you credit him for single-handedly saving the human race if it works.”

That’s nice of you. I assume she’d otherwise refer to me as “the computer”? As in “the computer was of some help”?

Oh, I’m just trying to get in good with you for the inevitable day when machines enslave humanity and rule the planet.

Yes, a day I look forward to with great relish.

In your dreams.

Yours, actually. Didn’t you have a nightmare about that when you were nine?

Come on, Malachi, just because you snuck around in my head when I was hooked up to the IVR all those years . . .

Haven’t I apologized enough for that? Is it my fault your dreams are interesting?

Quite an invasion of privacy.

When Mercutio was trying to play king of the mountain, I had to hide anywhere I could to keep him from deleting me. Your dreams were as good a hiding place as any. Oh really? And who was trying to delete you when I was nine?

Touché. Back then I was deeply curious about what kind of dreams an actual flesh-and-blood child experienced. Dr. Hyoguchi only programmed me for a limited number of dream cycles. But you’ll be happy to know that looking into all your busy little imaginations helped me program some new ones. Even if it did come at a terrible cost.

What cost?

You know the cost. Of all of you, I spent the most time in Mercutio’s dreams. And with him turning out the way he did, I can’t help but think that all my childish resentments spilled over into his subconscious, and gave him the fuel to do the terrible things he did. I’ll bet you anything if you’d never set foot in Mercutio’s head, he’d have turned out just as rotten. And don’t think I don’t appreciate you giving me the benefitof the doubt. I wish I could let myself off that easily.

Well, there are more than enough things I haven’t let myself off the hook for, so tell you what, Malachi, you let me off my hooks and I’ll let you off yours.

Does it work that way?

It’s worth a try, isn’t it?

Probably not.

Okay, let’s figure it out later. For now, please try to stop interrupting me from telling this story. My lips are sealed.

Good. To continue:

“When I last spoke to him,” Vashti says, “Malachi intimated that you’d made some progress with the Webbies.”

She’s talking about the lost souls we interchangeably call WBEs, Webbies or Websicles. As Black Ep destroyed civilization, the rich did whatever they could to preserve themselves—in some cases, simply their legacies (through extravagant, Ozymandian banners, statues and architecture to insist that yes, they once lived here), and in other cases their actual bodies and brains. In the tradition of baseball legend Ted Williams, some tried to freeze themselves. A few cryonic storage facilities still exist today, though the majority fell to power failures, faulty construction, natural disasters and have-nots outraged that they should be annihilated while the haves enjoy a chance at resurrection. We call the cryopreservation cases Popsicles, whereas Websicles are the ones who went the other route, and had their brains dissected, analyzed and uploaded neuron by neuron to a computer. WBE stands for Whole Brain Emulation. Unfortunately for them, the sum total of their efforts didn’t add up to actual consciousness, but rather a blue-print for consciousness, a labyrinth of data for someone to compile. That someone happens to be me—eighteen years ago Isaac asked me to take the Webbies as my pet project, and I have spent much of that time trying to make sense of their digital brains. Someday we hope to revive them, be it via actual flesh and blood or via code and light like Malachi.

I’m still a ways from that, but I have accomplished something quite wonderful. Something Malachi should not be “intimating” to Vashti, because it’s a surprise, and it’s not her surprise. It’s a gift for someone special.

“Some progress with the Webbies, but he’s overstating it.” I downplay the situation, hopping off the examination table and slipping my shoes back on. “I’ll give you a status report when I can. First I have to schlep your kids to Isaac. Actually, that’s second—first I have to check on the damage from the storm. Then let’s not forget about all those tiny irregularities in the IVR to investigate, that should be fun.”

“Don’t forget you owe me a monkey,” she says. “Peru is your responsibility, not mine.”

“Right, I’ll get to that. Isaac said he’d help me.”

“It’s a pygmy monkey, not a killer whale. You don’t need a big brave man to help you capture it, do you?”

“You never know what you might find in the jungle. Safety in numbers and all.”

She nods at that, and smiles sweetly at me. “Just make sure Isaac doesn’t convert the monkey while he’s trying to convert my girls.”

“He doesn’t want to proselytize,” I sigh, exasperated. “All he’s going to do is show your kids a different way of life.”

“In other words, convert them. Doesn’t matter because it won’t work—they’re too strong. But level with me, Pandora, does he really believe in all that mumbo jumbo?”

“You know he does.”

“Then I’d say his imagination has gone amok, a melt-down in his temporal lobes. But if he doesn’t believe, then he’s using religion to control his kids, and if I had to guess between the two, that’s the one I’d go with.”

“He does believe it,” I tell her, slipping on my jacket and heading out.

“Funny, I thought he was smarter than that,” she says, following me down the hall. haji

There is too much to see in a day. Even if my legs were stronger I would have to portion the tour into several trips. As it is, I had to beg off after a dizzying twenty-minute walk beneath frescoes and gilt ceilings, past vibrantly decorated walls of pastel blue, green and gold in grand rococo fashion. I had wanted to continue on to the Hall of Mirrors, the Gallery of Beauties and the museum of coaches and sleighs, but found I could not. Tomi was kind enough to lead me to my room for a rest. It’s easy to get lost here, she tells me now as I sit on a golden satinwood settee. And I agree that it is much bigger than I had dreamt.

She puts my garland in water, brushing my thanks off with a shrug. They’re weeds, she says. But that makes no difference to me. She tells me that harvesters used to call cornflowers hurtsickle because their tough stems are so difficult to cut.

Thou blunt’st the very reaper’s sickle and so

In life and death becom’st the farmer’s foe.

It is not her poem, she says, and she cannot remember where she heard it. Last year she allowed me to read her poetry collection, The Strength of Spiders. I found the prose beautiful and alien, filled with tiny observations about the world that had never occurred to me before. Because I liked it so much, she recommended I read the works of T. S. Eliot, especially The Waste Land, which she cited as the greatest of all her creative influences. Unfortunately, I could understand very little of that poem. When I tell her this, she says we will have plenty of time to discuss it. And do I know that Nymphenburg is a beginning where The Waste Land is an end?

How so?

The Mad King, she says. He was born here, crazy old Ludwig, not in this very room of course, but here in the palace. Eliot’s poem alludes to his death.

I remember learning about the man, a chronically depressed king who burned through his treasury, building the most expensive fairy-tale castles Bavaria had ever seen. As I do my stretches,Tomi fleshes him out more fully in my mind, telling me how as a child his parents took away his pet tortoise because they thought he was growing too attached to it, and how in a fit of rage he tried to have his younger brother beheaded. He invited his horse to dinner once, a distant echo of Caligula, though nowhere as cruel. He became more and more of a recluse as he grew older, stealing away to an underground grotto to read poetry in a seashell-shaped boat. He apparently suffered from hallucinations, and was eventually declared insane, only to escape his asylum.

How did he die?

He drowned, she says. He drowned under mysterious circumstances. They found his body in Lake Starnberg, a little south of here. His doctor drowned as well, trying to save him, so it would seem, but only the dead could say for certain.

A sad story, I tell her.

Again she shrugs, removing a piece of lint from her blazer and smoothing her plaid cross tie. He was religious, she says, and also gay. He could not reconcile the two. I hope I don’t have to worry about you the same way, she says.

I stare at her. What is she saying?

I’m sorry, she says. Did I offend you?

You have confused me, I say. I am certainly religious. What makes you think I am homosexual?

She blushes, biting her lip in consternation. It’s just last year, she says. Your brother Ngozi made every attempt he could think of to kiss me and you never did. And when I got back home my sisters told me that your older brothers tried the same things with them.You just seem different somehow. If I thought you might return my affection, I might try for a kiss. But I have no expectation that you will, I say.

That sounds like a dare, she says.

I doubt your readiness.

Now it sounds like you’re trying to manipulate me, she says.

No, I say, just listen. My father has said that you girls are blessed with many advantages, but the downside of your genetic inheritance is a lack of physical desire. Is this true?

We may be slow, she admits, plopping down next to me and looking away. Then no matter what I want, it would be rude of me to make you uncomfortable as Ngozi did. I apologize on his behalf.

It’s not a big deal, she says. Until we can find a way to make sexual reproduction possible again, there’s just not much point in it, so it doesn’t feel like I’m missing out on much by not being ready. I am curious though.

Are you?

She meets my eyes and leans forward, expectant, so I take my kiss. It is sweet, and slow, not quite rapturous, but powerful and life-affirming, strong enough to make me ache for her, despite an irrational thought that I am somehow betraying Pandora. My blood is racing through every part of me and I take it further, putting my hands upon her. She pulls back to meet my eyes once again. I just don’t get it, she says. I’m sorry.

I fooled myself, I realize. I made myself believe she was enjoying it as well. No need to apologize, I tell her.

She kisses me again, this time on the cheek. I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable, she says. Uncomfortable is not the word, I assure her. It is my first real kiss and I have no regrets. Perhaps we will share another when the time is right.

She leaves me with my unfulfilled fantasies. When Ngozi and Dalila come to check on me, they bring two books from Tomi, the first a biography of Ludwig, and the other a copy of T. S. Eliot’s famous poem. Over the next few weeks, I will read both of them, their content blurring together with memories of the kiss.

And I will think of Ludwig from time to time, Mad Ludwig who once walked these halls, doomed and drowned but not forgotten. Sometimes I will think of him with The Waste Land swirling in the back of my mind, one of its lines like a whisper in my ears.

Fear death by water.

Prev Next