Complete Stories (141 page)

Morse patted his old friend on the back and gazed into the lambent sky. Something was rising over the dark horizon. A cosmic jewel, with its facets etched in light, slowly turning and unfolding.

“Dream on,” said Morse. “Dream on.”

============

Written June, 2010.

Tor.com
, 2010.

Bruce Sterling happened to be in San Jose, California, for a conference on a new graphics trick called “augmented reality.” The idea is to overlay computer generated images on real-world views. You might see these images via the screen of a cellphone, a desktop monitor, or possibly with special goggles. I went to hear Bruce’s keynote speech at the conference, and brought him home to spend a day at our house in Los Gatos, near San Jose. We decided to do another story and, as it happened, this time the collaboration went very smoothly. No fits of apoplexy.

As usual in our collaborations, the characters are basically Bruce and me. We mixed in some augmented reality, but the real core of the story is to dramatize what it’s like to be a pair of aging science-fiction writers.

The ferry slid away, trailing thick, luscious ripples across the waters of the fjord. A not-unpleasant scent compounded of brine, pine and gutted fish filled the air. Most of the new arrivals were jostling into a sanitary, hermetic tour bus. But one man and woman set off on foot along a tiny paved road, pulling their wheeled suitcases behind them.

The village ahead seemed utterly deserted.

“They’re resting in peace,” said the man, pausing to light a cigarette, his angular face intent. He wore jeans, a pale shirt, an expensive anorak, and designer shades. “Dead as network television.”

“It’s Sunday, Mark,” said his companion. “It’s Norway.” She wore oversize sunglasses and low heels. A lemon-yellow silk scarf enfolded her crop of blond hair, a soft red cashmere sweater draped her shoulders. She looked as if she wanted to be happy, but had forgotten how.

The stodgy crypt of a tour bus lumbered past them. The man offered the passengers a wave. Nobody acknowledged him. “Sweet silence,” said the man as the bus’s roar faded. “Like being packed in cotton wool.”

The woman looked around, studying the scene. “With the fjord and the mountains—anything we say feels kind of superficial, doesn’t it? The beauty here—it’s like a giant waterfall. And my soul’s a tiny glass.”

“We’re fugitives, Laura. They could gun us down any minute. That’s why everything seems so heavy.”

“Shove it, Mark!”

“Never hurts to face the facts. That big house up ahead, you think that’s a hotel?”

“I hope it’s a love nest for us,” said Laura with a sad little smile. “I’m ready to relax and be friends, aren’t you? It might help if I had a book to read.”

“You’ll be reading this,” said Mark, playfully tapping his crotch. “Page one.”

Laura tossed her head, mildy amused. A few steps later she stopped still and made a sudden extravagant gesture. “Lo and behold!”

Right beside the narrow road was an unmanned shelf of books—warped boards, a piece of stapled-down, folded-back canvas for protection from the elements—with a sign reading:
Honest Books, 10 Kr. each
. A gnome-shaped metal coin-bank was beside the sign.

“
Honest
—that’s wishful thinking on their part, right?” said Mark. “I say you just help yourself.”

“The windows look empty, but there’s people inside the houses watching us,” said Laura. “Village life, right?” She leaned over the books. “The only English ones I see are totally foul best-sellers.”

“Which you’ve already read.”

“Which I’ve already read. Years ago. I guess I could try a Norwegian book. I can read that a little bit. Thanks to all my work as an interpreter.”

“And thanks to granny on your family’s Minnesota farm.”

“Don’t mock the farm, Mark. We can’t all be city slickers. Oh, look at this strange book here. I’ll dream over it while nibbling brown bread.”

“No words in it at all,” said Mark, flipping through the moldy, leather-bound volume. “Just symbols and blobs.”

“I wonder if it’s math?”

“Not like any I’ve ever seen. And what’s up with the title?
God Bøk
with that slash through the
o
.”

“Means
Good Book
,” said Laura. “I want it. Pay the troll, Mark.”

Mark dropped a ten kroner coin into the troll-shaped bank beside the books. The coin clattered resonantly, the sound seeming to issue from impossibly cavernous depths.

They passed a gray wooden church and came to the big house that Mark had noticed. It was indeed a hotel, the Hotel Fjaerland. A fresh-faced young woman sat at desk downstairs. She wore her brown hair in a bun, her eyes were ice blue.

“I’m Ola,” she told them in a lightly accented voice. Somehow her lilting English managed to remind Mark of otters at play. “I can give you the room just up those stairs.” She handed them a large skeleton key with the number 3 on a tag. “We have a wine and orientation session at six. I’ll be giving a little talk about the house’s history. You’ll be taking your supper here?”

“Sure,” said Mark.

“But I wonder if we could get some breakfast right now?” asked Laura. “We had to leave so early this morning to catch the ferry.”

“I’m bringing you something on the porch,” said Ola pleasantly. “I’m the manager, the receptionist, the waitress and more. The hotel’s been in my family for quite some time.”

It was lovely on the gazebo-like back porch, with a green lawn rolling down to the final finger of the fjord. Ola served them tea, coffee, berries and bread with butter.

“Life’s rich panoply,” said Laura to Mark. “I’m grateful that we made it this far.”

They strolled the hotel grounds. The month was July, and the northern days were twenty hours long. The plants were making the most of it, burgeoning with petals and leaves. Set among some five-pointed pink flowers was a vertical stone plinth, like a gravestone higher than a man, covered not with writing, but with irregular spots of moss or lichen. Nature had built a monument to her own subtle variety.

“They look like the pictures in my
God Bøk
,” remarked Laura.

“Let’s go up to the room and study,” suggested Mark.

“High time,” said Laura. “Page one.”

The pair of lumpy Norwegian mattresses favored by the Hotel Fjaerland contorted themselves under their shifting weights into non-intuitive topologies, and the two-mattress iron bedstead creaked. But they got the job done—their first carnal encounter in weeks. They dropped off into a blissful couple of hours of sleep.

When Mark awoke, he saw Laura leaning on one elbow, studying him across the bed’s expanse. The linen-sheeted comforter had slumped to reveal her shapely breasts, unquenched by nearly forty years of living.

“That was tender and intense,” she said, planting a gentle kiss on his forehead.

Feeling cautious, Mark kept his face blank.

“Don’t tell me you’re still holding a grudge!” exclaimed Laura. “We’re here to erase the bad times while we can, right? To taste those good old vibes that we had before the work burnout and—and before that horrible night. And before we had to flee the law.”

Uneasily Mark made a joke. “Tender and intense, yeah. Is that like jalapeno-flavored Cool Whip? Or more like a Brillo pad massage?”

Laura’s face assumed a fixed and frozen expression. Slowly but deliberately, she got out of the bed and began to dress.

“Hey, where are you going?”

She said nothing for a drawn-out few seconds, as if mastering her temper, and then replied, “Mark, I don’t know if you want to waste the time you’ve got left on wallowing in bitterness and defeat and sarcasm. Okay, the feds have stolen our semiotic analyzer and we’re up to our asses in debt and we’re charged with some serious crimes. We can still bounce back—but not if you keep nursing your sulk. It’s spoiling everything—especially our marriage.”

Mark huffed. “Our marriage. You laid that wide open when you caught me with my chief exec—””

“With Beryl,” spat Laura. “We can say her name.”

“With Beryl, yes,” continued Mark. “We were just having a little party to celebrate the final beta tests for the Yotsa 7. I wasn’t trying to sneak around on you or I wouldn’t have invited you. I was drunk and happy. All I did was kiss her. But nothing I said was a good enough excuse. And then you had to take your petty revenge with Lester Lo—my chief tech! In the office right next door! So thanks to you I had to fire Lester. He went rogue, the feds came down on us, and we missed the chance to market our new product.”

Laura’s voice began to rise, despite her best efforts. “It’s just like you to turn things around and put me in the wrong. We both made mistakes, yes. But I’m trying to make the best of things, and you’re not! You’re clutching your misery to yourself like you’ve fathered some inhuman changeling baby. It’s sucking the lifeblood out of you—and out of me too!”

Mark made no reply, and Laura continued. “Listen to me, dear. I’m here in a strange and beautiful land. I’ve come here at no little cost and effort, to relax and enjoy myself and to take stock of my life—with or without you! If you can drag your mind out of despond, and notice where we are, and contemplate a shared future—well, if you can do all that, you’ll find me on the lawn, ready for a stroll. And if not—”

Laura didn’t bang the door to their room on the way out, but Mark could tell she wanted to. And he wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.

He knew he was being a jerk. He knew he should consign the past miserable year of overwork and ambition and failure to his personal dustbin of history, cut his losses, pick himself up, shine his shoes, wear a smile, look on the bright side, retool, get a good lawyer—all that optimistic, self-help, go-getter shit. But something deep inside him rebelled.

Their semiotic analyzer should be making them millions! And thanks to Lester Lo, the feds had grabbed it and made it top-secret and charged Mark and Laura with a bunch of trumped-up bullshit libel and sedition counts. When Mark had caught wind of the feds’ plans for devastating black-ops reprisals, he and Laura had gone undercover and headed for the ass-end of the civilized world. Norway.

Mark heaved his hairy naked form from the bed. Though forty-five, he was still more muscle and sinew than flab. The view out the windows drew his eyes. It was heart-breakingly lovely here, with yellow flowers around the window frames, a cozy little barn perched just so in the swooping field, and the backdrop of elegantly asymmetrical mountains. The fjord wobbled with liquid reflections that cycled through ever-lovelier forms of universal beauty. Mark’s new life with Laura could be paradise—and he was making it hell.

Everything had begun so well. Mark and Laura had met in grad school at Columbia, both of them studying linguistics. They’d fallen in love and married. Laura had become a professional interpreter for the U.N., and Mark had drifted into multimedia advertising, eventually founding his little ferret of a company: Bloviation. The sense of wonder that Mark and Laura shared over the deep structures of language had proved an abiding source of inspiration.

Mark smiled ruefully as his eye fell upon the
God Bøk
beside their bed. It was so typical of Laura to buy something like that. In past days, the loving couple might have spent hours poring over the artifact, forming hypotheses and spinning tales. With a sigh, Mark lifted the book, and began leafing through it it. Geometric mandalas alternated with splattered shapes that resembled stilled explosions. A slow tingle oozed from the book into Mark’s fingertips. Perhaps there was something here of special importance.

“I can decrypt this!” exclaimed Mark to himself. “I have my magic spectacles.” He opened his suitcase, unzipped a hidden inner pocket, and removed what appeared to be a lorgnette—a pair of glasses that unfolded from a delicately tooled stick.

The elegant device was a Yotsa 7, the last of the prototype semiotic analyzers that Mark possessed. All the other units had been commandeered by the feds the day after the big melt-down at Bloviation. Laura might have given Mark a tongue-lashing if she’d known he’d brought this one along, this bad seed offspring that lay at the heart of their troubles. But, in a way, the invention had been Laura’s idea.

“Imagine a search engine that goes beyond syntax or semantics,” Laura had mused in a casual conversation two years ago. “Something that treats its inputs as signposts pointing to vexed and hidden meanings. Like—what’s a hamburger really
about
—and what do people
want
it to be about? What mythic archetypes are packed inside an automobile’s trunk? What are the psychic and social subtexts of shampoo?”

“You’re talking about semiotics,” Mark said. “The meaning of signs.”

“Yes. You need to build a semiotic analyzer. Call it the Yotsa 7.”

“Why seven?”

“Seven is better than one, right?” Laura giggled infectiously. “
Yots
better.”

Although the couple lacked any deep technical skills, Laura knew some theoreticians heavily into natural-language recognition. And Mark employed a few savagely gifted techs, foremost among whom was Lester Lo.

After a year of research and another of frenzied tinkering, Bloviation had produced a prototype of the Yotsa 7. The lenses were of a special quasicrystalline substance related to Icelandic spar, and the filigreed handle contained a state-of-the-art quantum computer full of qubit memristors. So what did the Yotsa 7 do? It revealed the deeper meanings of the objects in view.

The semiotic analyses were derived from artificially-intelligent image parsers, from social network statistics, and—this, too, had been Laura’s idea—from a specialized search engine that flipped through an exhaustive data base that held a century’s worth of digitized international comic strips in a peta-qubit quantum loop within the handle. According to Laura, the demotic medium of comics was a royal road into the depths of the human psyche.

To use the Yotsa 7, you simply held the magic glasses to your eyes like a snooty Viennese dowager eyeing her niece’s dance-partner. As a nod to user-interface pizzazz, the layers of semiotic information appeared as if overlaid upon the scene in three-dimensional shells—and these layers of meaning were directly projected into your psyche via quantum entanglement.