Near + Far (40 page)

Corint also confessed himself unable to elicit any information from Trice about the artifact that allowed her to cook so well, despite his many conversations with her and his offers to assist her in the kitchen during the day, peeling roots, washing greens, and engaging in a myriad more chores that were, he told Ector, designed to find a chance to snoop and discover where Trice had hidden the artifact.

It seemed to Ector that as time wore on, the girl's parents regarded him with a certain sympathy. Sometimes they waved aside the payment for an evening meal, saying it was on the house since he was such a faithful customer. It unnerved him, the look in their eyes, it made all will ooze from his veins.

He tried to stop playing the flute at night, but it soothed him. It let him sleep. Unless he played it, he found himself waking throughout the night, every time there was a footfall or a distant conversation. The inn was in the cavern closest to the Tube and sometimes he could even hear the wind rushing there, a sound almost as sad and lonely as the flute's.

This had gone on for three weeks when he ran, by chance, into another artifact hunter, one who had not studied with the same tutor as Corint and Ector, thereby enabling an ease of interchange not always possible among fellow students. This was a human hunter, who lacked in senses but possessed the ability to make great leaps of logic. Indeed, after inviting him to a meal, she divined the circumstances in the space of time between appetizer and entrée and got him to admit to them in a series of pointed questions.

Her look, when the interrogation was over, was pitying in a way that reminded him of Trice's parents. The feeling sharpened when she tactfully steered away from discussion of his old obsession, as though it were a former lover whose new relationship might have saddened or infuriated him. The look was on his mind when he returned to the inn, determined to have it out once and for all with Trice. He would lay his heart bare, would explain all that he was thinking and feeling and hoping and perhaps in return she would embrace him or perhaps she would spurn him, but either would be better than this aimless existence, this void of not knowing what to do or say in order to gain what he so desperately wanted.

At the inn, Trice's parent stood feeding the little bats in the courtyard. The creatures flittered back and forth in unsteady flight, snatching morsels from their fingertips. The air was full of their squeaks, just on the edge of hearing, audible enough to be annoying and yet still out of range.

Ector said, as he approached, "Is Trice in the kitchen? I must speak to her."

The parent blinked. "She's gone to be married," they said.

Ector gaped. "Married? To whom?"

"That fellow Corint."

Ector stood in silence for a moment, his lips parted but not breathing. His face twitched, just below the left eye, a persistent, maddened twitch of nerves pushed past their limit.

At length, he said, "Well. I suppose that's one way to gain her artifact."

The parent set the pan of grubs down and clasped him on the shoulder. "Ah, lad," they said. "Corint told us of your odd obsession."

"My odd obsession?" Ector said, not moving, his tone as bland as unsullied paper.

"These artifacts, the ones you seized on due to brain fever and too much studying. You must realize they are imaginary, my good fellow. Corint explained it all to us."

"Then Trice had no artifact," Ector said.

The parent gawped at him in turn. "Why would you believe such a thing?"

"Her food."

"You thought her cooking was due to some magical object?" The parent laughed, and somewhere inside there was an echo from the common room as someone there made their own joke. "Lad, she's been cooking since she was able to lift a wooden spoon, and cooking not just for her family, but for an innsworth of critics every time. It is a more demanding school for a cook than any academy."

"Corint told Trice of my ... odd obsession as well?"

"Ay, and she was hard pressed to keep you from the topic sometimes, she said. But she knew that if you were allowed to talk at length about them, you would fall prey to one of the fits that Corint described. Trice is a tender soul; she did not want to see you in such a circumstance."

Ector stood for a while longer as though absorbing all of these things a morsel at a time, letting the meaning seep into him until he could comprehend it. His face gave nothing away, shuttered as a cliff-face window.

In later years he went back to artifact hunting, although never with the same relish that he had previously exhibited. He did not travel as far as he once had, and he never returned to the village where Trice and Corint lived.

He carried with him a packful of his artifacts. On the day that he had learned of Trice's marriage, he had returned to his room and smashed the querulous flute of bone. But then he reconstructed it, albeit in a different shape.

It was a heart-shaped thing now, with hollow tubes running through it until it was empty and as light as though it was a thought and not an actual object. Prone to turn in the hand, slicing bone-deep if you were not careful how you touched it. Sometimes he held it, because it evoked a set of emotions as deep and true as any he had ever experienced, a set that Nackle had described in the category of loss, which outweighed any fear of hurt. Indeed, that fear seemed as unimportant as the scars on his hands where the artifact had bitten time and time again, writing its own addendum to Nackle's final text.

Afternotes

This story was written for a shared world project created by Phillip Athans, and appeared in
Tales from the Fathomless Abyss
. The world premise is a giant tube, which opens up periodically on other worlds, sucking in beings and materials, and in which the inhabitants live on the sides in a variety of ways. I'm currently working on a novella set in the Fathomless Abyss world that draws on William S. Burroughs'
Junky
and H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House," which is the scariest story I know.

When I sat down to write it, I knew I wanted to do something with gender, and I also wanted to model the piece on a favorite O.Henry story, "The Pimaloosa Pancakes." I found it extremely difficult to tinker with the genders in there, but it was an exceedingly interesting exercise as well.

I
t's an unfortunate fact that Bodys break down with age. In this case, one of my heels was coming loose, and with two legs, that ended up being more destabilizing than if I'd opted for a model with four or six. Back before we'd split up, my girlfriend Sally had always been the one to remind me to get maintenance. We'd go together, two happy female lovers holding hands as they walked along, and sometimes people would smile when they'd see us, because we'd gotten matching Bodys in the Danish style that Sally favored.

Inside them, we were as different as night and day: Sally was dark and beautiful, and I was brown haired and ordinary, although pleasant looking, or so Sally always said, right up to the day she moved out.

So I got up early that Thursday morning and walked down the block to the Repair Shoppe to ask Laura, my mechanic, to take a look at it before work.

The shop was busy that day, and a phalanx of athletes was in, getting their stabilizers adjusted en masse and chatting about rugby scores. Like everyone else, I like to keep up on the ways to express my individuality, so I spent some time window shopping.

New models of Bodys hung along the walls: retro robotics in chrome and steel, adorned with blinking lights; the life-like human models, which I found a touch unsettling, towering like giant China dolls; and the latest line, shaped like Martian spiders, holding one's form in a cylinder of glass, looking like collection specimens surrounded by flimsy, filamented legs. Laura insisted on taking the whole rig to run it through diagnostics—she was a Holistic Mechanic—so I took a rest booth amid the insipid strains of Stellar Music, and was preparing myself to flip through the channels on the holo screen, when someone knocked on the booth's door.

Those padded chairs are hard to shift around in for a reason. Body shops want to keep their customers down and not wandering around disturbing the other UnBodied. But I managed to get out of the bucket chair and open the door.

A Kali Suit, one of the more popular models in the Mythological series, stood there. Despite their cost, I've always thought they look tacky. There is an upper limit on the number of arms you need, which is six, in my opinion. And the wearer had twinked it out, the whole ten yards: red lacquer, a blue-skinned face mask, bindi, henna patterns on the arms, and an incense brazier in either shoulder. Only one was lit, but the blue curls of sandalwood smoke coming from it made me cough.

"Sorry," the Kali said and flicked a finger to set its internal fans into motion. The smoke swirled as it was sucked inside the suit and the set expression of the faceplate stared at me, its wearer rudely invisible behind it. Out of my Body, I was at eye level with its nipples, which were big and gold, and worked in ornate floral designs.

"I lost a screw when I was in here yesterday, and I was wondering if you'd found it," it said.

I shrugged. "Nope."

It hovered for an expectant moment until I reluctantly added, "But you're welcome to come in and take a look."

The booth wasn't very big for one person, let alone two, but I didn't want to be standing around in my UnderWear out in the shop, so I curled back up in the chair and watched the Kali. Stooping, it detached a set of fingers and sent them rummaging along the baseboards, to no avail.

"Look," I said, then decided to be polite and speak in perception-neutral forms. You never know. "Perceive," I said, "that your screw is not here and act accordingly."

The Kali's hair writhed as it considered my words.

Laura appeared in the doorway, my Body draped over an arm, and a flicker of disapproval visible through her faceplate as she saw the Kali.

"Miz Andrews, I think it's fixed, if you want to slip it on and check the gait," she said to me, and then, to the Kali, "I told you not to come around bothering my customers."

The Kali's faceplate cleared, and the wearer's face became apparent. Young, female, short blue hair and matching eyes, all combined in indignation.

"I'm not bothering her!" she said. "Am I bothering you?"

"Actually, I'd like to put my Body back on," I said with a touch of stiffness. I don't like standing around naked. While you expect some amount of that while you're at the mechanics, you never get used to it.

"Yeah, yeah," she said, and I felt a twinge of unmerited guilt at the hurt expressed in her voice. Reclaiming her fingers, she slipped out the booth door. "See you around."

Laura helped me back into my Body. At the ripe, mature age of 35, I'd found I preferred a classic model, suitable for business or everyday life—simple gray, plain lines, no flash or chassis augmentation, a touch of extra height so I can hit the standard two meters when Bodied. My one nod to style is a pair of butterfly vanes on the back. I don't know why I like them, but I do. On the inner surface they're shaded in vermilion and amethyst, almost metallic, almost jewel. Subtle but rich, suggesting that maybe inside the gray plastiflesh, there was something entirely different. Sometimes my job gets to me and I get carried away by my prose, but you get the picture.

I wriggled my way back into my Body, feeling its solidity settling around me, the augmented tendons and sinews adding strength to my limbs, and a new, if mechanical, grace to my movements. I ran the usual checks on my internal sensors, and then the Net hookup. One by one the icons shimmered into view at the edge of my vision: map, weather, bank, communications, news, analysis, medical, advertisements.

Laura checked the heel and nodded, satisfied.

"Need any augmentations, Miz Andrews?" she said.

"Not today."

"Got a sixth finger set on sale if you're musically inclined."

I shook my head. "I can't tell the difference between a patterdrum and a synpop. Wasted on me." My trade is words, not music, not pictures. I paused, not sure why or what I was asking. "Hey, who was that Kali?"

Laura snorted, an odd and garbled sound as though her vocomotor had shorted out. "Mimsy? Mimsy Star. Knew her in college. Spoiled rich kid with nothing better to do than make trouble for other folks. She lives off her uncle's money—he's a big vid star on the cooking channel. Stay away from her, Miz Andrews. Nothing but trouble, I tell you."

I felt that irritation you feel when someone tells you something perfectly reasonable that you'd be doing on your own anyhow. Pressing my palm against the credit reader, I okayed the transaction with a nod and a blink, and headed out into the bleached light of the street.

It was one of those painfully bright spring days when visors shade to black and your cooling system kicks in the minute you hit the sidewalk carrier. My block's usually pretty uncomplicated, but some throwback must have been trying to raise its own luxuries again—there were bumbledrones all over the fake greenery, making futile attempts to extract pollen. Those were fine when I was a kid, but nowadays, real vegetation's a precious commodity. I eyed the bumbledrone corpses, neat pinhole laser burns through their nav systems, which marked the guard boundaries of the two real flowerboxes flanking one entrance. Even as I watched, one buzzed into range, then fell, emitting a single line of smoke, amid its dead fellows. I tried to extrapolate some new simile from it—you never know when you're going to come across something you can use, but ended up just snapshotting the image and storing it away. I was late for work as it was.

They cut us creative types slack as far as issues of late and early go, because the downstairs bunch had been bamboozled into believing that a certain amount of sitting around staring into space and waiting for the Muse to strike is part of the job. My office held three writers, one editor, and Daisy, the administrative assistant, who everyone feared.

Sure enough, as soon as I walked in, Daisy handed me a sheet of plastipaper with her latest batch of similes on it. Daisy wanted to be a writer, and since the writers were always calling for fresh similes, she figured she'd break in that way.

"I thought of these while I was at the juice shop," she said. "Are you coming on Sunday, Addie?"

"Yeah, wouldn't miss it," I said. The annual office HyperBowl party scheduled for that weekend was one of the major perks of the job, and each year our publisher, Fitz, tries out a new batch of recipes on his team.

While that sounds as though there's not much going on in the office, it's actually the pleasantest place I've ever worked, and I've been a cog in some very big engines. Everyone gets along, mainly because Fitz jollies anyone who's in the doldrums back up and out of them, and we've got a certain amount of freedom as far as theme and structure goes. Within limits, of course—we are romance writers, after all.

I scanned down the plas, reading each of the similes. "His lips pruned like a lemon," was the most promising of them, although I did like the fruit theme that swirled like strawberry throughout them all. "Nope, nope, nope, possible with some tinkering, nope, nope, way no, and nope," I said. "You're getting better, though, kid."

Daisy took it on the chin, although I was pretty sure I saw a welling tear through the faceplate. She opaqued it as she turned away, but remembered to say, "Fitz is looking for you, Addie."

Every few weeks Fitz came through with an idea for a new line, usually from something he'd overheard in the pnematube. Plenty of time to talk to him later, I thought. I fired up my computer and started tinkering with a new script generator. We were working on a Viking line, and I'd figured out a new formula for dialogue that would eliminate the stilted tone of the last trial run they'd done, full of lines like, "Love for you festers in my soul."

But I hadn't even had the chance to get it to generate an opening scene when Fitz came in.

"Get this," he said, gesturing. "Time-traveling superhero romance."

"Baen tried that in the thirties," I said.

His face fell. Not literally, but one never knows with Fitz. He went with the Metaphorical for his suit, and it was full of quirks, like my favorite touch: shooting steam out of the ears when the emotional triggers went high enough. Right now, a swirl of clouds began to circle over the shiny bald pate, and I kept a wary eye on them. If things got bad enough, the lightning could short a Body out for a few seconds. I hadn't gotten zapped by it yet, but some of the other writers had.

"Are you sure?" he said dubiously. "We need something new here, Addie. My inbox is full of nothing but invoices and credit-related spam. Besides, I don't know why you think you're so good at romances. I've never seen you with anyone—well, no, not since that cute little number you brought to the office party—what, a decade ago?"

"Nine years," I said. I'd thought Sally was the one. We showed up for the party in matching Bodys, ones Sally had chosen, with tasteful emerald laminate and blue piping. Usually matching suits were the step leading towards a Commitment Ceremony, but Sally had gotten cold feet three weeks later and run off to Chicago, telling me repeatedly, "It's not you, it's me", which has to be one of the lamest, most unsatisfying phrases known to humanity. Last I heard, Sally was living in a Triad with two men, so maybe there had been something to the explanation. Or maybe, as I frequently told myself, it had been a total lie.

I forced a smile and patted Fitz's shoulder. "Be ye of good cheer," I said. "I think I've got that dialogue problem I was having licked."

Fitz, as I well knew, hated getting drawn into the technicalities, so when I started to explain how reducing the adverbial modifier minimum downwards had tautened the syntactical delivery, he backed out pretty fast. I spent a few hours testing it out, and was pleased with the results. 90% of writing is putting together the formulas, so once I had this one, and a slight problem with the scenery equivalence parameters solved, I'd be sitting pretty, ready to generate a manuscript to hand over to Mikka the editor. Around three, I took a break and went out to sit in the Plaza.

Everyone and their extra suit had had the same idea, it seemed. Baby-faced Chubbo Safety Bodys chased each other through the crowds, playing tag, while a multi-armed dog-walker passed by. Tourists in rented Bodys furnished with city-specific adaptations milled by in crowds, each one led by a brightly colored Guide. A main flight path led over the Plaza, and flying Bodys in a variety of colors and shapes ranging from Wasp to Balloon arched overhead, casting their oddly shaped shadows across the stone tiles. I set up a privacy field to signal I wasn't looking for conversation, and then sat enjoying the sunlight and recharging a few cells.