Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (27 page)

Exene smiles at that. “Blackmail, Peter?”

I smile back. “Why not?”

“I always said you’d find something to take the place of music.”

The barb, unexpected as it is, strikes deep, right to the core of my self-doubt. I turn away from her, deciding at that instant to forget the whole thing. The more I push, the more they resist. I don’t need this on top of everything else. I’ll tell Emmett I gave it my best shot, but failed, and that will be that.

I call up the location for my beach and prepare to leave.

Then I feel Exene’s hand on my shoulder, kneading my virtual flesh with unexpected sympathy. “Peter, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

“No.” I am unable to keep the pain of loss from my voice, even after so long. “I don’t.”

“Listen, I — “

“And neither does Emmett.”

Her hand falls away, and I turn to face her. We are still so close we are almost touching. The others watch us in uncomfortable silence.

‘You’re asking too much,” she says.

“Just be there, Exene. That’s all I ask.”

“But—”

I cut her off in mid-sentence. The beachscape enfolds me and I am alone again.

~ * ~

“Thanks, Peter,” he says. “I knew I could count on you.”

I shrug in reply, not entirely certain what I have done or why I did it. Ordinarily, I would have required at least a token explanation before putting my head on the chopping-block. But not this time. That perplexes me as much as his desire to call the assembly in the first place.

He intrudes upon my private space as casually as he might have done when we first left Earth, before the accident. I find his presumption slightly annoying after so long, but not enough to make me angry.

“Why haven’t we been contacted?” I ask.

“There could be a number of reasons.” His gaze wanders to the sunset. “We were fifteen light-years out when the accident occurred. By the time our distress call reached Earth and their reply reached us, we would have passed our target system and been heading away.”

“But they still could’ve made the effort,” I retort, dredging up the argument as though there remains a chance it will make a difference. “They knew exactly where we were heading. It wouldn’t have been hard to make sure the message reached us.”

“That’s assuming they received our distress call in the first place, Peter. Anything could’ve happened back there —war, disease, resource shortages, you name it. Earth may have been forced to forget about the slowboats in order to survive.”

“The entire program? There were over a hundred ships!”

“Maybe they all had problems, and they had to choose the ones they could fix most easily.”

“They wrote us off as a bad loss, then.”

“Maybe.” It is his turn to shrug. “Or maybe they just didn’t know what the hell to do. We certainly didn’t.”

I nod silently. My stick pokes a row of three dots into the sand: an ellipsis, symbol of our fate.

“What do
you
think, Peter?” he asks.

“That your original abandoned us,” I say, avoiding his gaze.

“I hope you’re wrong. The prospect of rescue has, after all, kept me going for so long.”

“But if he
did,”
I go on, choosing my words with care, “then I’m hardly obliged to help
you,
am I?”

His stare burns like a brand on my cheek. “Is that what’s bothering you, Peter?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m your friend. Isn’t that enough?”

“It might once have been,” I say, finally looking him in the eye. “I can’t understand why it should still be, now.”

“Exactly.” He smiles in the same way my father might have, once —at a small child who’s missed the point completely. “Odd, isn’t it?”

I shake my head, angry enough to take some of it out on him. “Damn you, Emmett. I don’t owe you
anything!”

“And I respect you for helping me anyway. What more do you want?”

“I want to
know—”

“What?”

I can’t answer him. What
do
I want to know? Why Earth abandoned us? Why we aren’t allowed to die? Why the only lasting emotions I can recall feeling in the last twenty years are confusion and sadness?

I might as well ask how we came to be on the probe in the first place.

“Peter?”

“I want you to tell me why you’ve called this assembly.”

He says nothing for a long time. “Are you afraid you’ve done the wrong thing?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t. Believe me, Peter. You’ll see. When the time comes, everything will be clear.”

“Don’t talk like that.” I shake my head. “You sound like you did back on Earth, and I don’t believe that kind of talk anymore.”

“I know, and I hate it as much as you do.”

Before I can respond, he turns his back on me and begins to walk away.

I am suddenly fearful that I might have pushed him too far. “Wait, Emmett—”

“Pick a time that suits you best,” he calls over his shoulder, “and I’ll be there…until then, I’ll be waiting.”

“For what?” I call after him.

His reply is barely audible: “For something
new!”

Then he is gone.

~ * ~

I pick an hour at random, one real-time month from now. That should give everyone in deep slow-mo enough time to absorb the message and to meet the appointment—if they intend to come at all. I have no way of knowing if anyone will turn up. I deliberately don’t include a request to RSVP; my job is done for now.

I pass the time in my usual way: writing in the sand and thinking the same things, over and over. Words are a poor substitute for music, just as doubt is a pale shadow of life. But I have nothing else to do. I have long since exhausted the dubious pleasure of listening to the works of Peter Owen Leutenk, and confronting my disability.

My original was one of the great living composers of the twenty-first century— yet I haven’t written a note for a thousand years. I wonder how he would’ve felt, as the hydrogen tanks of the plane carrying him to his home in Paraguay exploded fifteen thousand metres above the South Atlantic Ocean, if he had known that the music inspired by the creation of his engram would go forever unwritten.

Part of me is glad that he would’ve had no time to think at all. I’d hate to suspect that he might have hoped I’d pick up where he left off—for didn’t it stand to reason that what he could do I could do just as well? It is enough that one of me has been disappointed.

I
did
try, once, after the probe left Earth-orbit. The probe was designed to run itself, so there was little for its passengers to do, except talk. Most chose slow-mo for the duration of the trip, to save both power and their sanity. That gave me a perfect opportunity to begin work on my deceased original’s final opus —which, in a sense, would also be my first. I could proceed at my leisure, with every musical resource ever conceived at my virtual fingertips.

But time passed, and no notes came. Then the accident destroyed the drive and we lost contact with Earth, and still more time passed — and, ultimately, it became clear what had happened.

My father’s beatings continued until I turned thirteen, lasting for six years in total. The experience haunted my original throughout his adult life, compelling him to express in music what he could not in words. It is so obvious to me now, in hindsight, that what he was finding in the keen of a violin or the wail of a theremin was not simply melody, but the plaintive cries of a boy learning the hard way that the things we love most dearly often cause us the most pain.

I do not possess that voice, just as I do not truly possess those memories. I have only my pain to ponder, now. The music, as a result, is gone.

Space,
I write in the sand, the title of Elizabeth Li’s last, ever-looping poem. The rest follows naturally:

chips of ice

night-frozen eyes

hydrogen snow-flakes lost

in skies of absolute zero —

winter, winter
everywhere
...

When the appointed hour comes, I move to the assembly hall —a virtual arena large enough to hold the probe’s full complement. Five are already present, seated at random behind the low wall ringing the arena’s base. Jurgen nods in greeting and I solemnly return the gesture. None of us speak. I resign myself to wait, perhaps fruitlessly, for the others.

Minutes tick by. A few more arrive, including Cuby Kleinig and Letho Valente. Tiger Conveny appears in the seat next to Letho, her face a mask of displeasure.

“This had better be good,” she says to him. Her voice carries clearly across the arena, but I ignore her. The only one standing, I wait patiently with my arms folded. Three more to come.

Two appear at the fringes of the earlier arrivals, increasing the occupied arc around the arena to one hundred and twenty degrees. One place remains empty at the heart of the group, and I watch it closely.

Eventually Exene takes the spot. Grunting with displeasure, she looks once around the assembly hall, registers the fact that she is the last, then back to me. Her glower would have intimidated me, once.

“Get it over with,” she says.

“In good time,” I reply.

“The time is
now,
Peter. If you waste it, you won’t get another chance.”

“Why so hostile, Exene? It’s not as if we have much else to do.”

“Speak for yourself,” she mutters.

“Don’t worry,” says Emmett, stepping out of nowhere to stand next to me on the arena floor. His suit is shining like a mirror in sunlight, lending him a knightly appearance. “I’ll keep it brief.”

The gathering stirs. “We came to hear Peter,” says Cuby.

“You’re only here under our tolerance, Emmett.” Exene almost spits the words.

“Assume your seat and wait to be called.”

I raise my hand and step forward, praying that my relief at Emmett’s appearance is not visible. “It’s okay. I surrender the floor.”

Letho studies me closely, one hand supporting his chin. “I see.” His expression is half-annoyed, half-amused; it is clear he realizes that he has been tricked. “Then assume
your
seat, Peter, and let him speak.”

I jump to a position on the far side of the arena, away from everyone. By betraying their confidence, I have deliberately set myself apart from them. I can only hope that what Emmett has to say will restore the former status quo.

From a distance, his suit is less brilliant. I can see the colours flickering across the fabric like rainbows in an oil-slick.

“I won’t beat about the bush,” he begins, folding his hands in front of him. “The last general assembly was held almost ten centuries ago, eighteen real-time months after we were knocked off course. Fifty-eight people attended that assembly, and they decided then that participation in the day-to-day running of the probe should be voluntary. If people wanted to help, they could; if they didn’t, they could go about their personal business in complete privacy. I voted in favour of that proposal, as did most people here; we all believed that nothing short of another catastrophe would require our input. And in a sense we were right. Nothing has happened in almost a millennium to threaten the continued operation of the probe — although I’ll take some of the credit for that, as I will explain later.

“But I have asked Peter to call this assembly in order to outline a far more insidious problem than the ones the probe is used to dealing with. It is a threat that will, ultimately, destroy us all. I have been aware of its symptoms for some time now, but only recently isolated their cause. It is this problem I wish to address, with the assembly’s permission.”

He moves as he talks, forcing people to keep an eye on him. He was always a performer in public, and he has lost none of his ability through lack of practice. By taking only a small number of steps, he can confront anyone in the group who looks sceptical or disinterested.

When he says the word “permission,” he locks eyes with Exene.

“I defer to you all as I always have,” he says. “My function has never been more than that.”

Exene raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t interrupt.

He turns and takes several steps in the opposite direction. “As you are aware, I’ve spent most of this voyage waiting for some sign that humanity knows we’re still out here —be it from Earth itself, another ship or even a colony. My search has been fruitless but I have persevered nonetheless.” Emmett looks down at his clasped hands. “Luckily, there have been many other ways to amuse myself. I help the core AI maintain the probe, particularly the reactors and impact shields to prevent a repeat of the accident. I’ve modified nanos to plunder the drive for rare earths, which have been used in the repairs. I’ve even managed to redesign the tertiary and quaternary banks, thereby tripling both their capacity and complexity without sacrificing any redundancies.”

“How?” asks Letho, frowning.

Emmett glances at him. “Anyone interested in what I’ve done will find a record in the primary bank. Rest assured that I have taken no outrageous risks. Every alteration has only improved our overall well-being.”