Moonlight & Vines (4 page)

She shrugs. “That kind of thing happens all the time in the Wordwood.”

“What? There's somebody sitting at their keyboard somewhere, scanning whoever else happens to be online and responding to their questions?”

Holly shakes her head. “The program wasn't set up for two-way dialogues between users. It's just a database.”

“So who answered me?”

“I don't know.” I hear a nervousness in the laugh she offers me. “It just happens.”

“And you're not the least curious about it?”

“It's hard to explain,” Holly says. “It's like the program's gone AI, kind of taken on a life of its own, and none of us quite knows how to deal with it, so we've sort of been ignoring it.”

“But this has got to be a real technological breakthrough.”

“I suppose.”

I can't figure out why she's not as excited about it as I am. I don't keep up on all the scientific journals, but I've read enough to know that no one's managed to produce a real artificial intelligence program yet—something indistinguishable from a real person, except it hasn't got a body, it's just living out there in the Net somewhere.

“There's something you're not telling me,” I say.

Holly gives me a reluctant nod. “None of us has been entering data into the program for months,” she admits.

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying it's getting the information on its own. The Wordwood's so
comprehensive now that we couldn't have entered all the information it now holds even if each of us had spent all our time keying it in, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And the really weird thing is, it's not on the hard drive of our server anymore. It's just . . . out there, somewhere.”

I give her a blank look, still not understanding why she's not excited about this, why she hasn't trumpeted their accomplishment to the world.

“The Wordwood's everything we hoped it would be and more,” she explains when I ask. “It's efficient beyond anything we could have hoped for.”

“And?”

“And we're afraid of screwing around with it, or talking it up, for fear that it'll go away.”

“It.”

I suddenly find myself reduced to one-word responses and I don't know why.

“The program,” Holly says. “The entity that's taken up residence in the Wordwood, whatever it is. It's like a piece of magic, our own guardian angel of books and literature. Nobody wants to take the chance of losing it—not now. It's become indispensable.”

“Holly—”

“Did you recognize its voice?” she asks. I shake my head.

“Some of the others using the program recognize its speech patterns, the cadence of its language, as belonging to people they once knew—or still know, but rarely see anymore.”

I finally manage a whole sentence. “You mean it's mimicking these people?”

“No. It's more like it really is these people—or at least it is them when you happen to be talking to it. When I'm online with the Wordwood, I hear my grandmother's voice in the way it responds to me. Sometimes . . .” She hesitates, then goes on. “Sometimes it's like I'm actually sitting in a forest somewhere with Gran, talking about books.”

I love a good mystery and this has all the makings of the best kind of urban myth.

“How long has this been going on?” I ask.

“About two years.”

It's not until much later that I realize this is around the same time Saskia first arrived in Newford.

Spirits and ghosts.

My last serious relationship was with a woman who wasn't so much flesh and blood as a spirit borrowing her cloak of humanity. Her name was Tally. Tallulah. The essence of the city, made manifest for the nights we stole from its darker corners, the hours in which we made light between us when everything else lay in shadows. She left because she had to be hard, she had to be tough to survive, the way the city is now. Loving me, she couldn't meet the spite and meanness with like intent. She couldn't survive.

She's out there still. Somewhere. I don't see her, but I can still feel her presence sometimes. On certain nights.

The last time Geordie got serious about a woman, she turned into a ghost.

My therapist would have a heyday with this material, but I've never come right out and told her about any of it. I couch the truths I give her with the same thin veneer of plausibility that I slip onto the facts of some of my stories. I know how weird that sounds, considering what I write, but I've seen things that are real—that I know are true—but they're so outrageous, the only way I can write about them is to start with “Once upon a time.” Truth masquerading as lies, but then it's all artifice, isn't it? Language, conversation, stories. All of it. Since Babel fell, words can no longer convey our intent. Not the way that music can.

And the music I hear now . . .

I can't get enough of it. Long, slow chords that resonate deep in my chest for hours after Saskia and I have been together, tempered only by the fear that she's too deeply cloaked in mystery and that, like Tally, that mystery will one day take her away.

I don't mean the mystery that we are to each other, small islands of flesh and bone that are yet great with thought, lumbering like behemoths through dark waters, occasionally interacting with one another, but rarely understanding the encounter. No, I sense that Saskia is part of a deeper mystery, the kind that catwalks over the marrow of our spines, the kind that wakes awe deep in our chests and makes our ribs reverberate with their sacred tones. The kind that we may experience, but only briefly. The kind that resonates so deeply as much because of its brevity. Because our mortal frailty was not meant to hold such music for more than a whisper of time. A few days. A few weeks at most.

In short, I imagine Saskia as Geordie's ghost, as my Tallying spirit, a mystery that will hold me for a brief time, fill me with her inescapable music, then leave me holding only memories, chasing echoes.

I try to tell Geordie about it one day, but all he says is that I'm merely exaggerating what all new lovers feel, blowing my insecurities way out of proportion.

“Like you're suddenly an expert,” I say, frustrated. “When was the last time you were even on a date?”

I regret the words as soon as they're out of my mouth—long before the hurt look comes into my brother's eyes. It was a cheap shot. Neither of us has to be reminded of his deficiencies, least of all by each other.

“I'm sorry,” I tell him.

He knows it's true. He knows I mean it. But it doesn't change the fact that we're walking wounded, both of us, we've always been walking wounded, we've just learned how to hide it better than most. It's not simply the ghosts and spirits; it's the emotional baggage we've had to carry around with us ever since we were kids. Don't feel sorry for us. But don't pretend you understand, either.

“I know you miss Tally,” Geordie says to me. “But—”

“Saskia's not Tally,” I say.

Geordie nods.

“So what are you trying to tell me?” I have to ask.

“Just remember that,” he says. “Take people as they are instead of always trying to second-guess them. Have some faith in her.”

He smiles as he uses the word. We both know all about faith, how belief in something is a commodity that requires a coin that we usually find too dear to pay.

“What about music?” I ask suddenly, changing the subject as abruptly as Jilly or Holly might, but it doesn't faze Geordie. He and Jilly see so much of each other that he's obviously used to it by now.

“What about it?” he says.

“Where does it come from?”

Now he gives me a blank look.

“I mean, where does it originate for you?” I say. “When you write a tune, how do you hear it? Where does it come from?”

Geordie taps his ear. “I just hear them. Faintly at first. There's always music going on in my ear, but every once in a while a tune becomes insistent and won't go away until I work it out or write it down.”

“So you have something like a soundtrack going on inside your head all the time?”

“No,” he says. “It's not like that. I guess the tunes are always there, a kind of background to whatever else I'm doing, but I have to pay attention to them to bring one of them out from the rest. And it's not as though I can't ignore them. I can. But if I do ignore them for too long, they just go away. Like when I don't play my fiddle or whistle for awhile. The music kind of dries up inside me and all I know is that I'm missing something, but I don't always know what. That's why I can't do the regular nine-to-five—I'm away from the music too long and I end up carrying around this desert inside. I'd rather be broke but with a forest of tunes in my head.”

I can't remember the last time Geordie talked to me like this, exposing such a private piece of himself at such length.

“For me it's like a soundtrack,” I tell him. “I can't write a tune, but I hear this music all the time, especially when I'm with somebody.”

Geordie smiles. “So what do you hear when you're with me?”

“Sad tunes,” I tell him. “Adagios. A bittersweet music on bowed cellos and piano that seems to hold a great promise that never quite had the chance to break through.”

Geordie's smile falters. He wants to think I'm kidding him, but he can tell I've given him an honest answer. One thing we've never been able to do is lie to each other. To ourselves, yes, but never to each other.

“I guess we should try harder,” he says.

“We do try, Geordie. Look at us, we're here, talking to each other, aren't we? Have been for years. When was the last time you saw anybody else in our family? Our problem isn't a lack of trying, it's getting past all the crap we've let get in the way.”

He doesn't say anything for a long time, but his gaze holds mine for longer than I can ever remember him doing.

“And Saskia?” he asks finally.

“I can't even begin to describe that music,” I tell him.

Until I met Saskia, the most curious person I knew was Jilly. Everything interests Jilly—no object, no event, no person is exempt—but she's particularly taken by the unusual, the same as I. I know the reason I started
chasing down urban legends and the like was because it was a way for me to escape from what was happening in my home life at the time, a chance for me to feel like I was a part of something. I don't know what her excuse is. She and Geordie have exchanged war stories, but conversations between Jilly and me invariably center around the latest curiosity we've happened to stumble across.

Saskia's inquisitiveness is more like Jilly's than mine—only multiplied a hundredfold. She wants to see and hear and taste everything. Whenever we eat out, it has to be at a different ethnic restaurant from the one before. I've seen her try every kind of coffee in a café, every kind of beer in a tavern, every kind of pastry in a bakery—not all in one day, of course. She simply keeps going back until she's had the chance to sample them all.

She's entranced with music and while she has very definite likes (opera, hip hop and flamenco) and dislikes (anything by Chopin—go figure), she approaches it in the same way she does food and drink: She wants to sample it all. Ditto live theater, films, TV, how and where we make love—everything except for books. The odd thing is that while she's incredibly knowledgeable with the background of just about everything she experiences, she savors each experience as though coming upon it for the first time. It can be disconcerting, this juxtaposing of familiarity and ignorance, but I like it. It's like being in the company of a friend with a particularly up-to-date edition of
Brewer's Phrase and Fable
in the back of her head.

What's less easy to accept is the negative reaction she garners from most people. Even complete strangers seem to go out of their way to be rude or impolite to her. Needless to say, it infuriates me, though it doesn't seem to bother Saskia at all. Or at least not so she ever lets on. Who knows how she really feels about it? It's not exactly the kind of question I feel comfortable bringing up this early in our relationship. What if she's never noticed it?

I ask Holly about it when I drop by the store, almost a month to the day I made my last visit. This time I come bearing fresh slices of banana bread with the usual coffees and doggie bone for Snippet.

“So now you've met her,” I say. Saskia and I ran into Holly at the opening for a new show by Sophie last night and went for drinks afterward. “What do you think?”

Holly takes a sip of coffee to wash down the last of her banana bread and smiles. “I think she's lovely.”

“Me, too.” I pause for a moment, then ask, “Did you notice anything unusual about her?”

Holly hesitates. “Well, she seems to know an awful lot about brandies for someone who says she's never had one before.”

“Besides that.”

Holly shakes her head.

“The way other people reacted to her in the bar?” I prompt.

Holly strokes the fur on Snippet's shoulders—the dog, having hopped up on Holly's lap when she finished her own treat, is now looking for possible holdouts in the folds of Holly's skirt. Holly glances at her computer screen. I recognize the Wordwood menu.

“A lot of people feel uncomfortable around magic,” she says finally. “You must've noticed this by now. The way some people will review your work, going into it with a negative attitude simply because of its content. Or the way they start to fidget and look uneasy if the conversation turns to the inexplicable.”

“Of course,” I say. “But I'm not sure I'm getting your point.”

“It's Saskia,” Holly says. “She's magic.”

“Magic.” I'm back to one-word echoes again.

Holly nods. “Her being magic is what antagonizes them. They recognize it in her, but they don't want to believe it, they can't believe it, so they lash out at her in defense. Humanity's whole unfortunate history is one long account of how we attack what we don't understand, what's strange to us. And what's stranger than magic?”