Paradise Tales (24 page)

Reminiscence

Einstein came back to show me his baby.

I was sitting outside on a bench at night, nothing to do, and there was a wuffling sound, and suddenly, there he was—Albert, sitting next to me. He bounced the baby up and down on his lap. It looked just like any other baby only bigger, healthier, very pink. Adorable. Even with the fangs. And the muzzle.

“He’s beautiful,” I said. I thought that Albert had come to take me with him.

“Of course he’s beautiful; he’s me,” said Albert. He turned and smiled, and—oh God!—the light, the joy, seemed to surround him like a halo. “Do you want to hold the baby? He’ll try to bite, but he’s perfectly safe.”

He handed over the child, and our hands touched. How can someone’s hand be moving? It was soft and warm, so warm, feverish with life, constantly burning with the virus. Their eyes glow with it. So did the baby’s. I wanted to offer the baby my neck.

“He can walk out into the sunlight,” Albert said, with love. “If you gave him a pressure suit, he could ride outside a spaceship and the radiation would do him no harm. He will be well placed to survive all the coming catastrophes. We all will be, all us vampires, thanks to you.”

I kept hoping, hoping that he’d offer.

He asked me about Henny.

“I told her about you. I didn’t—I couldn’t—hide it. I just said, I’ve fallen in love with a guy at work. And he’s a vampire. Maybe she could have handled a guy. But a vampire? I think she worried about the virus around the kids. So. She left.”

“Ah! I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t have a job. I guess I’m lucky not to be in jail. Sometimes at night I can’t stop shaking.”

He still didn’t invite me. He told me a story, instead. “When I was young, I was a Patent Clerk in Berne, and I had no money, and my first child was born and I had to beg my boss for a raise, and when I got it, it was so small. It seemed to me then that all life was against me, and that those things were the most important things in the world. Now that little baby is not even an old man. He’s dust, and I can’t remember Mileva’s maiden name. Everything passes. You must be ruthless about what to forget and what to remember.” His eyes suddenly looked hard.

I think he was saying, forget me.

I finally asked, “Can I come with you?”

He looked sad, and didn’t answer. He took back the baby. “For all the talk of viruses, there is still something supernatural in this. We don’t take blood only. We take what is most precious about you. Life, certainly, but also beauty, mathematics, the ability to tap dance. We leave you drained, but we shine. Or, if you are a genius, we recruit you.” He stroked my face. “There’s nothing precious about you.”

I loved him and he was going to leave and I would be left with nothing.

“I muh-make great pancakes.” I meant I could make a beautiful life, full of sunny mornings.

He knew that. “Find someone,” he counselled. He stood up, and put his hat on backward. Then he paused.

“We don’t just take,” he said. His face was so full of kindness and wisdom, you’d think he was seeing God. “We give, too. We can give back small things, or everything. This little fellow here? I’m going to give him my identity. He will look like me, smell like me, and reason as I do. He will have all my memories. I’ll let him drain this body entirely, of everything. I’ll drop it like an old shoe. And he’ll walk with all of his kind, into the future. A sunlit future.”

The baby had a beautiful laugh.

“But there is a little something I can spare for you,” he said.

He touched my hand, and this time I felt a kind of Halloween sparkler dazzle inside my head. “I’m sorry you must suffer,” he said. He took his hand away, and it was as if he was tearing a spider’s web of love.

“How far ahead does your plan go?” I asked him.


“To the stars,” he said. “Fifty-year voyages in deep space make sense if you’re a vampire. We’ll have to take care of you, too. You are so short-sighted and destructive and bound up in ideas of goodness. We will love you and tend you like farmers love their cattle.”

I mooed like a cow as a joke.

“In about fifteen years time, you might see Einstein again, but be extremely careful, because it won’t be me, it will be this little fellow here. He may be hungry and kill you.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

“He won’t let you join us. Even if he says that he will. When a population cannot die, you have to be very sparing about the number of births.”

Then he excused himself, gathered up the baby, and walked away, still wearing odd socks with no shoes.

I still have his shoes. They are as empty as he will be by now.

My wife has the house. I managed to buy a small apartment. Ex-housing project, but at least it has hot water in winter. I’m left with my memories. One of them isn’t mine.

I’m in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.

I’m famous now too. I mean “genius” to people, kindly intelligence.

Together we roll out of the Hotel Grande in Geneva and thousands of people are waiting for us. They call our names, his and mine. They press their hands against the windows.

I am confounded by it; I don’t know why they are shouting or what they want. I look to Charlie in dismay. “Mr. Chaplin, what does it all mean?”

He leans back and chuckles with affection. Charlie Chaplin is charmed by me. “Professor,” he says. “It means absolutely nothing.”

They will rule us.

Perhaps it’s no bad thing.

The Turing and I walk together, she in my head. It’s monitored that something’s bothering me, and sends me one of Jinny’s little packages, a history of charitable acts, all folded, crisp and delicious like a spring roll:

the refusal of the UK to retaliate for the bomb

the Bill Gates bequest and its long history

the arrival of Concurrency as a medium of exchange

the abolishing of copyright.

If you prioritise charity, caritas and acts of breathtaking neutrality, you also apparently tend to prioritise effectiveness, weightlessness, spoons, weeds, ants and old gramophone recordings. How Jinny gets that I don’t know, but I can see the files weave. It works. She just does it, mixes things, makes things.

I can’t keep up. The packet keeps blossoming out, laced with all kinds of daffy Jinny things. They make me smile; they make me despair because I would like to keep her, like to stay part of her world. But I don’t do this, make all those gifts of info.

“It’s not content, it’s the act that’s important,” I say. It sounds grumpy even to me.

“Of course,” the Turing answers. “But projecting is an act too.” Of a kind, and there is so much of it at so little cost to anyone. Talk is cheap.

“What is she really doing now?” I ask.

“I … I could wake her if you like,” says the Turing.

“No, no,” I say. I want Jinny to sleep. I can imagine her, all soft and warm and dreamy. I love that image of her; my heart pines, sinking again.

I walk naked in our beautiful desert sun, and I smell sage and dust all around me. Wind sweeps along the arroyo.

For years since my Joey died, I’ve been putting out feelers for other people. An old guy like me. Even to me it’s like I’m peeking out of my snail shell, oozing out soft antennae, hoping to find love. Yuck.

I must have reccied seven hundred people. Jinny was one of the few who reached back. She said our profiles matched. They didn’t, but we kept talking. We kept almost meeting. That “almost” makes my heart sore. It makes me think that she’s just being polite; she’s just being friendly; I’m an embarrassment, she wants me to go away but won’t say so.

The Turing hears me think that. “That’s not true.” The thing touches me again on the arm, invisible but soothing. “She especially wants me to talk to you.”

It’s a strange situation. Both of us want me to win her love. But neither of us has succeeded. I have this numbing idea that she can’t really respect or like me, but that there is, or may be only at times, something simple about me that she likes, and I feel very lucky and very sad, because this simple something is probably quite fragile. It could blow away.

She’s a Doctor for heaven’s sake. Only Infotechs get more respect and that’s kind of a branch of medicine, and anyway she freelances as one of those as well.

Me, I’m only a Walker. I go places, confirm that reality matches our models, that all our balanced and merged Priorities are being met.

I’m following an irrigation canal, the sun growing stronger on my skin. I feel photosynthesis kick in, to power the tech that inhabits me. My body and my tools are fuelled by the same sugars, the same blood. And my feet grow their own shoes.

“Oh,” people say when I tell them who I am. “Well you must be strapping fit.” They don’t know what else to say; they’re embarrassed. A necessary task, but not really dazzling, is it? It’s not healing people, or advancing the genome. It’s not combining information. The Techs engineer info like mutant DNA. It keeps re-combining.
Hi! I’m a mutant idea!

In all the Fictions that whiz by so entertainingly these days, the walking is all done by robots. That’s how automatic people think my work is. Only, guess what, dream on fellow travellers, there is no A.I. There are just us Walkers, alone, on our appointed rounds.

A few days ago she said, the real Jinny not her Turing, “I want to go with you on one of your walks.” This was imaginative and sweet and careful of my feelings, as if what I do were interesting, as if we might share insights as we stroll.

“Do you have the right shoes?” I asked her.

She giggled and barraged me with a million files on shoes prioritized by Uselessness.

The most Useless shoes she indexed were made out of chocolate. They melt or crumble and stain the floor.

“You made those up!”

“No, no, they’re real!” she protested, “The Sybarites really made delicious shoes you could eat!”

She kept on linking and projecting, and I didn’t know if she was joking or not, a whole range of hopping, useless shoes:

shoes that obey simple heurirstics to spin spiderwebs as you walk,

shoes that sing

shoes that know all the constellations

shoes that sail the seven seas all by themselves out of interest; sweet except that they love making sea turtles abort their egg sacs

shoes with delicious new recipes tickertaping across their soles,

shoes that calculate values of pi

shoes that suck up anything with a positive charge

shoes that keep scuttling away from you the moment you take them off.

“Stop!” I laughed. Creativity scares me. I always think it’s going to run away with us. My real Priority is rectitude.

I’m at the edge of our creek, standing on a rock shelf that’s gray with dead lichen.

I try and put it off. I kneel down and sip water from my cupped hand and it’s cool and tastes of granite, and the sensors understand its qualities. The water is just as people want it. The Joshua trees stand around me like friends, holding up their arms as if to show that they’re honest. I smell sage and dust all around me. Today is the day I scheduled months ago to test levels once again, now when the snows upstream are supposed to melt.