The Incrementalists (31 page)

Oskar was mute, and so were the rest of us. “All right,” he said at last. “Then what’s the mechanism?”

Ramon frowned. “Yes. That’s the question.”

“It still doesn’t matter,” I said.

“How can you say that?” Felicia asked.

“Jimmy,” I said.

Jimmy didn’t look at me.

“Jimmy?” Phil’s voice carried a danger even Matsu could not have protected Jimmy from.

“Oskar says personality,” Jimmy whispered. “Ramon says attribute. I would say essence.”

Oskar let out an exasperated sigh, but Jimmy had everyone else’s complete attention.

“When we spike a new recruit, we introduce not just memories, but the way memory knits up experience into learning, how learning patterns behavior. We introduce a disembodied person into an existing person and we watch and wait until one of them dominates the other. If the essence of the dead Incrementalist wins, the person the recruit was effectively dies, and we continue to call him by the dead Incrementalist’s name.” He looked at me. “You would have become Celeste. It’s terrible.

“Don’t you remember, Phil?” Jimmy was almost pleading. “Do you remember Chuck’s mother? What did she say? What do they all say? ‘It’s like I don’t know you anymore.’ ‘You aren’t the boy I raised.’ And then, finally, ‘You’re dead to me.’”

“A self dies,” I said. “Same as it does when a heart breaks.”

“Or when a man is made a father,” Nick said. “He becomes a new thing. Pivots destroy and re-create us.”

I was still looking at Jimmy. He was still not looking at me. “When you say essence…” I said.

Jimmy nodded. “Yes, I mean
rûh
. Soul.”

“Essence,” said Oskar slowly, “is movement. Call it soul, call it spirit, but matter is always in motion, and when we speak of essence, we speak of the most basic, most primal movement.”

“And so?” said Ramon, gripping Oskar’s face with his eyes.

“Matter moves according to different laws. The laws of motion for planetary bodies are not the laws of motion for subatomic particles. The laws of motion for the spread of ideas are not the laws of motion for evolutionary biology. You study, and you learn, and you test, and you verify. Deducing the laws of motion from the facts is science; imposing laws of motion on the facts is schematism. What we’re doing now is a new thing. These are the laws of motion that determine personality maintained in an exobrain.”

Ramon nodded. “So we can’t, yet, know how it will work, or what it will do, or how to confront it.” He nodded to Jimmy. “Call it a soul if you want; that’s as good a name as any.”

I wanted to hug Jimmy for having been so afraid for my soul, even though I wasn’t certain I had one. And I was relieved, although maybe stupidly, to know Oskar and Matsu were never going to kill me. Because I don’t think I would have done well against either of them, but I would have tried. They had only been risking in me what I had already agreed to gamble: the sublimation of my personality to Celeste’s, if she should become dominant in me. And I felt a little silly for the hours I spent in Elise’s red-and-gold apartment hoping there was enough of my corrupt great-aunt in me to double her stub-doubling. But most of all, it pleased me that they knew Phil would have fought it too—fought it and them—and he might have stood a chance in that battle. Even against Matsu. It was me he wanted, curled like a princess into the body of a little bird. Even then he had wanted me and not Celeste.

I stood up. “I’m going to go graze,” I said.

“Why?” Felicia asked.

“Because we know Who—some shade or essence of Celeste, the pattern of Celeste. And that’s just confusing and not helpful. But she’s tipped her hand on Where. She’s wherever Kate lives.”

“Western Pennsylvania,” Ramon said.

“Okay,” I said. “Someone ought to keep an eye on that from the outside. In the real world, or whatever you call it. I’m going to see if I can find a What in the Garden.”

“No,” Felicia said. “I meant why are you leaving to graze?”

I shrugged. “It feels like a private thing to me.”

I found no comprehension on anyone’s face. “Want me to come with you?” Phil asked.

“I’m just going in here,” I said, looking into the bedroom. “That’s okay, right, Oskar?”

Oskar was sitting on the corner of the bed, looking abstracted. He nodded.

“We’ll wait for you,” Matsu said.

“Hey, Oskar,” Nick called from the living room. “I need a drink. Can you show me where the bar is in this madhouse?”

“Take the fucking elevator to the lobby.” Oskar stood up. “Jesus Christ, Nick.”

“I’m helpless as a baby,” Nick called.

Oskar picked up a meticulously folded suit coat draped over the television. “It’ll cost you,” he told Nick.

“I was counting on that.”

Oskar’s eyes caught mine, flicked to the enormous bed behind us, and back to me. The old wolf’s smile glinted for just a second. “Have fun,” he told me.

“You too,” I said.

“I’m drinking the good stuff tonight.” Oskar stalked out.

I left the door open and climbed up into the center of the ridiculous bed. I took a deep breath and wondered if it was a mistake to go Celeste-hunting without Phil. I closed my eyes and saw the mudflats and reached out for the taste of blood.

Phil

I stood up and saw Matt looking at me. Ray was staring off into the distance, and Jimmy had his eyes closed. I shrugged to Matt. He continued watching me as I walked into the bedroom and shut the door behind me.

Ren had positioned herself on her back in the middle of the bed. I got in next to her, and touched her temple with mine.

You can speak of battles of will, if you want, and there may be truth in the concept. But when I think of a battle of will, I remember when I was Reggie and decided to quit smoking. White-knuckle time, you know? Something all happening inside.

So even if this came down to a fight between Ren’s will and Celeste’s, it wouldn’t be the same. It was external, and so it would take the form of something else; it would feel tangible and material and real, even inside the Garden.

I had a flash, then, of someone who was me, still called Carter, who was taking a ship to the New World sometime in the mid-seventeenth century. I was at the bow, watching the ocean, which was perilously wild, and I was thinking,
This would be a stupid time to die.

I hadn’t died, though. I had made landfall, and I’d been part of something that felt big, and I’d liked the feeling. The loneliness that had defined me for the last few hundred years was sublimated in the day-to-day work of building, hunting, farming. The more you’re determined to do something, the less attention you have to focus on self-pity.

From the vantage of now, I realized how sad it was that I hadn’t decided that fifty years sooner. I would never have recruited Celeste and things would have been better for everyone.

Or maybe not. Maybe we needed a Celeste from time to time, just to keep us awake and aware and paying attention to consequences.

No. Bullshit. We are always aware of consequences. It’s that awareness that keeps everyone from agreeing with Oskar. Fear of consequences was the best ally Celeste had during their long battles. None of us could forget Cambodia.

The old familiar taste, the old familiar smell, and I looked around my Garden. A shame that I couldn’t physically move in there with Ren. I’d like that. Just for twenty or thirty years, or maybe fifty. Just for a while. Take a break from it all and live a life.

But I’d go nuts and so would she. She was as full of the need to do as I was, or more.

And that, I realized, was the heart of the conflict: Ren’s need to do versus Celeste’s need to keep from doing. The irresistible platitude versus the immovable cliché.

They were going to have to fight it out, one way or another.

I found Ren, and she looked up at me with no expression of surprise.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s end this.”

Ren

“Lay on, Macduff,” I said, raising my imaginary sword and looking around Celeste’s storeroom.

“Right, I know,” Phil said. “We have to find her first.”

“Hard to fight someone you can’t see,” I said. “Any ideas?”

“Not a one.” He bounced on the balls of his feet, impatient to get going. “Why are we at Celeste’s?”

“She had a key on her belt,” I said.

“So we’re looking for locks,” Phil said, which made me want to kiss him. “Let’s go.”

We scanned the room we were standing in. The same soft, yellow light filtered in from the high windows, the same jumble of tools and ingredients lay scattered on the workbench and stood collected in the jars and canisters lining the walls.

“How do you organize your memories, Phil?” I asked. “How do you keep everything you’ve done, or wish you’d done, or are sorry that you did in separate places?”

“Christ. I never told you about that. As a titan, I’m a putz. Okay. Long conversation pending, but not now.”

I watched the dust dance in the sun. Phil sneezed. “Let’s go back to the wine cellar,” I said. “It wasn’t as dusty there.”

“Stands to reason,” Phil said, eyebrows threatening. “Celeste liked her wine.”

We walked through the back door and down the stairs. Phil pulled up the trapdoor set into the floor and we navigated the awkward twisting and climbing required by its poor design. “Celeste liked wine, but not apples,” I guessed. The baskets inset in the root cellar’s walls were empty and barred with cobwebs.

Phil and I turned the corner into the cool, whitewashed domed room where I’d watched Celeste back Phil into a corner. “Look,” he whispered. Against the far wall a wooden ladder disappeared into a hole in the low, arched ceiling. The rungs were worn thin in the middle and the rails almost gleamed. “Told you.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

We followed the absence of dust and the wear of wood up from the ceiling of the tidy wine cellar through the floor of a muggy greenhouse. The ladder kept going through its glass ceiling, but we both saw the swept paving stones and stepped into Celeste’s Garden’s garden. We moved through the bombastic flowers to a low stone trough with a crimson hand pump worn to silver at the grip, and pushed our way out through heavy gold velvet curtains. We followed worn places in rugs and dustless trails across parquet, and I remembered a UI story about a college campus that sodded all the space between buildings and waited to see where students wore the grass away, and paved only there. The sidewalks weren’t straight, but all the remaining grass grew untrampled.

In a room that looked like an alchemist’s apartment, the trail of Celeste’s habitual paths ran dry. Every surface and edge of the workspace—cabinets, shelves, cases, and containers—were polished with use and gleaming with age. Every path was worn. And not one thing was locked. Phil flung himself onto the canopied bed with a groan, and I sank into a high-backed armchair that was the only other piece of furniture in the room. I felt a little weird about lying down beside him in her bed, no matter how much I wanted to. He sat up looking puzzled.

“This is just wrong,” he said.

“What?”

“Celeste loved comfort,” he said. “Demanded it. But her bed’s harder than mine.”

He pushed the brocade coverlet aside and we both laughed. The bed was a massive chest, secured with a single, recessed lock.

“You know,” I said to Phil, “I’d very much like to know what she kept close at hand and locked up.”

“I’m on it,” he said.

It took him maybe ten minutes. He found a scalpel in a Saltine tin and unscrewed the hinges from the sides of the doors. Together we lifted the massive things and set them aside. Arrayed before us, in various degrees of polish and wear, were rows of differently shaped, colored and sized cookie jars. Phil and I looked down warily.

“I feel like Pandora,” I said.

I took the top off a bright yellow ceramic smiley face. Phil reached in and felt around. Finally he pulled his hand back holding only a tiny wad of paper. When he unfolded it, we found “selfish,” written in a looping, elegant hand.

I opened another jar and found only tiny paper balls inside it too. I unwadded one, and read “smarter.”

Phil held up another he’d opened. “Not pretty enough,” he read out loud.

I shrugged and, since it had come out of a cookie jar, I popped the paper I was holding into my mouth. It dissolved into a warm, smug glow filling my chest. “Felicia’s beautiful,” I said, putting the lid back on the jar. “But I’m smarter than she is, and that’s why she doesn’t like me.”

Phil swallowed hard around his slip of paper. His eyes were wide and almost overflowing. “Felicia never took Celeste seriously,” he said, “because she wasn’t pretty enough.”

I stared at him. He blinked, and a tear slipped down his cheek.

“Phil!” I said. “What the hell?”

He rubbed both eyes with the heels of his hands. “I have no idea,” he said. “Holy shit.”

“Is Felicia maybe trying to reach us, talking to us through these?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Maybe,” Phil shook his head, distracted. “But holy shit.”

“What?” I said, no longer feeling smart at all.

“Jesus,” Phil said. “The number of times I heard Celeste say both those things. And ‘everyone’s selfish,’ and I’ll bet every other damn reason and excuse and explanation in here.” Phil looked ready to kick the whole chest in. “Celeste’s been baking alpha cookies,” he said. “She’s found a way to feed us her Whys, to give other Incrementalists a taste of her victimization and innocence and force her perspective on the rest of us. What I believed about her motivations, I didn’t understand, I ingested. I swallowed her explanations whole. Oskar too. We gotta tell Ray.”

Phil

“Why?” she said. “Is there something he can do about it from there that we can’t from here?”

“He has to know,” I said. “In case.”

“Right,” she said. “Seed it, then. In case we don’t make it back.”

I said, “You’re anxious to get on with this.”

“Yes. I hate designing when I don’t have the specs.”

“Mike Caro says people make a lot of bad decisions just to get it over with.”

“Who?”

“Poker theorist.”

“Great. You’re giving me poker wisdom now?”