The Incrementalists (30 page)

“I don’t know how I’d go about that.” She sounded like her voice was even and steady only because she was putting a lot of effort into making it so.

“You know Celeste’s sense images,” I said. “Use them. See if you can track her, look over her shoulder.”

“Now?” she said, as if I’d asked her if she had any last requests.

“No. Let’s wait till we get to The Palms and see what they think of the idea.”

“All right,” she said, her voice telling me how pleased she was with the Governor’s reprieve. She said, “How can someone be loose in the Garden? It’s a metaphorical construct. It doesn’t have an objective existence, does it?”

“It has all sorts of objective existences, scattered everywhere one of us is. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

“It is infuriating that I have to ask these questions. I know, I know, that this is the sort of thing that ought to just be flooding back to me; all of the answers about what we can and cannot do, and how we meddle, and where to search for switches. She’s taken that from me.”

“Just delayed it,” I said, wishing I were sure of that.

We finally reached the 15, only a few minutes away from The Palms and, I hoped, some answers.

“You can fight her, you know.”

I felt her glancing at me. “What do you mean?”

“Do you remember our first meeting at The Palms?”

“I’ll withhold the sarcasm, and just say yes.”

“Two things struck me about that meeting. The first was that it was harder to convince you to let me sit down than I had expected it to be. The other was that, when you asked me how old I was, I got angry, upset, even though that’s an obvious question that we always expect.”

“Go on,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“The first means you were fighting her, and the second means I was.”

We drove in thoughtful silence up to valet parking at The Palms.

EIGHTEEN

Unpleasant Personality Traits

Ren

We stopped in front of Jimmy’s door to listen to the shouting on the other side, and Phil’s face split in a wide grin.

“What?” I asked.

“That sounds great,” he said. “All the quiet, serious conversation was starting to worry me.”

“Ah,” I said, like I understood. He raised a hand to knock, but I slipped between him and the door and kissed him. “For luck,” I said.

“You don’t need it,” he said, but he kissed me again anyway, one arm braced us against the wood veneer, the other around my waist. If the door had opened suddenly we would have fallen, him onto me, into the room. But it didn’t, and we didn’t, and when I opened one eye just a little, his eyebrows were drawn together like I’d only seen them when he was furious. But it didn’t feel like the time he’d kissed Celeste.

He must have felt me looking, because his face softened and he opened his eyes. “Are you worried?” he asked.

“Nah,” I said.

He smiled at me and tugged his shirt straight where it had ridden up between our bodies.

“More like terrified right out of my socks,” I said.

“Well, that’s okay then.” He squeezed my hand and knocked.

The shouting stopped abruptly, and Matsu opened the door.

Jimmy’s suite somehow managed to look expensive without being elegant or beautiful, but the living room was spacious and all the furniture was new. Ramon stood with his back to the balcony, radiating beneficent calm. Oskar clutched the back of an upholstered armchair, and two people I didn’t know sat on an overstuffed settee.

Matsu pushed two more chairs in from the bedroom while Ramon introduced me to Felicia and Nick. Felicia was striking—the kind of beautiful that makes everyone nervous, and I felt suddenly grubby in my jeans and anxiety.

If Oskar had any sense he’d stop glaring at her and try smiling. He had a nice one, and they’d make a handsome couple. Instead, he prowled the space between the bedroom and living room, and got in everybody’s way as the chairs were arranged and drinks doled out and quick updates given.

Nick’s voice was liquor-scorched and accented, the least attractive Incrementalist I’d met yet. Not that physical beauty meant anything, I reminded myself. But it made a peculiar contrast, Felicia’s sleek to Nick’s mangy, her poise to his slouch. I shook hands with them both, and smiled as openly as I could manage under their scrutiny.

Phil kissed Felicia on the cheek, shook hands with Nick, and sat in the chair Oskar had been abusing. He leaned back and grinned. “So,” he said. “Why the hell are you two here?”

Felicia widened her lash-fringed, green eyes. “Ramon called me and said to come.”

“Did he say why?”

Her cheeks pinked. “Yes.”

“Want to tell me?”

Felicia looked at her hands.

“What’d Ramon tell you, Nick?” Phil asked.

“That you were in trouble.”

“Ah,” Phil said. “That’s true. Did he offer you a place in the Salt?”

“He knows I don’t want one.”

“Did he suggest one might be opening up?” Phil kept his tone conversational, but he had a grip on the arms of his chair like he thought they might fly off.

“Jesus, Phil,” Oskar cut in. “We told you we were bringing them in. You didn’t have an issue with it.”

“I’m asking why,” Phil said.

“For our expertise and experience,” Felicia said, with just enough English on “experience” to imply seniority without saying so.

“Why they are here is not important,” Ramon said.

“It is to me,” Phil said. “And Ren.”

“They are here at my invitation,” Ramon said.

“Not good enough.”

“They are here to help,” Jimmy said. “And we need all the help we can get. Have you seen Kate’s email?”

Phil nodded.

“It was Celeste,” I said.

Matsu nodded. “That’s what Phil said.”

“There is no way that’s possible!” Oskar exploded. “The Garden isn’t a real place people can go. It’s a metaphor. It’s a way of thinking about an abstraction that’s too…” He gestured wildly out the window, into the bedroom. “Abstract,” he said. “Ren can’t know Celeste was in Kate’s Garden any more than I can.”

“Have you been in Kate’s Garden?” Phil asked.

“No,” Oskar snapped. “It sounds insipid.”

Phil smiled without dimpling. “So tell me how it’s not a contradiction for you to have been in her Garden or mine or Jimmy’s, and that makes sense, but Ren knowing Celeste was in Kate’s doesn’t.”

“Same way it makes sense for me to have been in your house, but Ren wouldn’t know whether Felicia had ever been in it.”

“I know Celeste hasn’t,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“I also know Celeste never visited Phil’s house,” I said. “Not the one here.”

“Because you now have Celeste’s memories,” Ramon said slowly.

I shrugged. “I don’t know why,” I said. “I just know.”

“I want to talk to Celeste,” Oskar said.

I felt Phil go taut in the chair beside me.

“No way,” I said.

Oskar started to say something else, but Felicia interrupted. “Have you tried grazing for her?” she asked me.

“You’ve been to her Garden,” Jimmy added. “Maybe you could go back there?”

I shook my head. “I could try that,” I said, “but I don’t think it’d work.”

“Ren,” there was something like urgency in Ramon’s voice. “We need to know what Celeste is meddling in now.”

“Goddamn it!” Oskar said. “How can Celeste meddle at all? How can we even talk about Celeste like she exists somewhere? Celeste is dead. Has been for a while now. Irina too. There is no Celeste. There is no ghost of Celeste in the Garden.”

“Oskar,” Phil said very quietly. “Sit down.”

“There are our memories of Celeste,” Nick said.

“And there are Celeste’s memories,” I said. “I don’t have them all.”

“What
do
you have, Ren?” Ramon asked.

I closed my eyes to keep from looking at Phil. I didn’t know the answer to Ramon’s question. All I knew was of the infinite possible answers I might find, maybe six wouldn’t hurt Phil. Of those, I wasn’t sure even one would give whatever love we were creating enough air to thrive or fail on its own merits. If what I had of Celeste was too much of her, or even too much like her, how could Phil stand to love me?

I still wasn’t going to eat the fucking birdseed. I kept my eyes stubbornly closed.

“I knew Celeste was in Kate’s Garden,” I said, “because I recognized the pattern. It’s like what Matsu said in Phil’s Garden with the olives. From just two stones, you can know a diagonal. It’s the diagonal-ness I recognize. The Celeste-ness. And trying to explain that is like trying to explain anything without either an example or a metaphor.”

I opened my eyes.

Matsu nodded. “You recognized the Celeste pattern. A Celeste way of ordering information. The data points didn’t change, you just saw the lines Celeste would have drawn between them.”

Oskar grunted.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“Can you just go find it, see what it’s doing?” Nick asked.

I shook my head. “You aren’t going to like this,” I told Phil. “Her pattern isn’t in the Garden now. I don’t know where Celeste is.”

Phil

There are at least three things that it is impossible to avoid when you talk about yourself as much as I’ve been doing here: lies, errors, and revealing nasty, unpleasant personality traits. Now it’s time for the one of the latter: I was taking great pleasure in how discomfited Oskar was by the whole thing. With everything else that was going on, I hope I can be permitted a bit of pleasure at Oskar’s pain, but permitted or not, there it was.

There was nothing else I was enjoying.

“All right,” I told Ren. Then to the others: “What were you trying?”

They all looked like they weren’t sure they should tell me, except Ray, who said, “We were trying to use your and Ren’s alpha-axes to triangulate Celeste’s x-axis.” I had an inordinate amount of trouble translating that into English, until Ren said, “You were trying to pin down enough of a Why for Celeste’s actions towards me and Phil that it would lead you to Who she is now?”

Ray got a look that said his way of saying it was more precise, but he nodded.

Jimmy said, “It occurred to us that Celeste is fundamentally a new Who now.”

“Not a bad thought,” I said. “Didn’t work?”

“We weren’t done trying,” said Ray.

“Must be rough on you, Oskar, looking for something that you know doesn’t exist.”

“I didn’t say Celeste doesn’t exist,” he said, looking irritated.

“My apologies. You said she can’t exist. That’s entirely different. But if she does exist, she can’t, and what’s more, she exists in a place that doesn’t exist. So simultaneous existence and nonexistence. Very dialectical.”

For just an instant, he looked positively furious, then he stopped and his mouth fell open. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, it is.”

Now he had everyone’s attention, and for a moment I forgot that I’d been trying to needle him.

He stood up and started pacing. I do that, too, when I think, so I really wish he wouldn’t. He said, “If I had a license as a practicing materialist, it would be revoked. The Garden is externalized thought.”

Ray said, “Well, yes, of course—”

Oskar rolled over him. “Thought is matter in its most highly developed, highly organized form. Consciousness is one property of brains, not of thoughts. I was so hung up on the impossibility of the Garden having consciousness, or anything in the Garden having consciousness, that I completely missed that consciousness is an attribute of the brain, of an organism, not of thoughts produced by that organism. Consciousness is a description of certain kinds of thoughts produced by a material organism, it can’t have an independent existence.”

He fell silent and looked at us.

“Well,” I said after a moment. “That solves everything then.”

He shook his head impatiently. “We’ve been looking for Celeste. We keep saying that. We’re looking for Celeste. And so, we get this image in our heads of Celeste; Celeste as we knew her, as a person, as a being. But that person is dead. That person no longer exists. What exists is a set of memories, and responses, and reactions in the form of thoughts, trapped in the Garden. Personality, but no consciousness.”

He stopped and looked at Ren. “You should go get your memories back.”

Ren

I shook my head. Oskar’s confidence in his own doggedly achieved conclusions, and his willingness to direct others to act on them, was really starting to irritate me. It probably would have rankled less if he hadn’t also been right. “The memories don’t matter,” I said.

Six people opened their mouths to argue.

“Okay,” I said. “Celeste’s memories matter. I do want them. I know they’re part of what I was supposed to get when I joined this thing of ours, and I do want the full meal deal, but right now, they’re dessert. Extraneous. Celeste’s memories can’t tell us what she’ll do next.”

“Celeste is personality without consciousness,” Oskar said. “She can’t do anything.”

“No,” Ramon spoke very deliberately.

Oskar, pacing between bedroom and living room, seized the door frame with enough force that a watercolor illustration from a children’s Bible I’ve never seen jumped into my mind. Samson at the temple, his arms braced against carved marble columns, head bowed, shoulder muscles mounded in furious protest. “We agreed on this, Ramon,” he ground out.

“I think ‘personality’ is imprecise.”

Oskar almost howled.

“What then, Ray?” Phil asked.

“Ramon,” Ramon said. “It’s Ramon.”

I saw the dimple before he said it. “Celeste is Ramon without consciousness?”

Oskar actually roared.

It startled Felicia, but Nick opened his goat teeth and laughed. Ramon waited.

Once we all settled down, he tried again. “I think it is not Celeste’s personality, but a selection of her personality’s attributes that remain active in the Garden. Her fearfulness, for example.”

“Attributes don’t have agency,” Oskar snapped. “Celeste’s fears can’t do anything. They can’t misfile fucking yarn balls.”

“It seems they can,” Ramon said. “To cling to belief in light of countervailing evidence is dogma, Oskar.”