The Incrementalists (19 page)

“I would,” she said.

I stood up. “All right.” I opened my arms for her. She stood up and walked into them, with no trace of self-consciousness. I felt everyone else’s fingers touch my temple.

“Is everyone ready?” said Jimmy. When no one spoke, he said, “Leaving now.”

Ren said, “What do I do?”

“I’ll show you my favorite way,” I said, and kissed her. I could feel the moment when, “I’m kissing someone in a crowd of strangers I don’t trust,” turned into, “To hell with them anyway.” She kissed me back.

Her skin smelled like cherry blossoms and her mouth tasted like chives.

ELEVEN

The Easy Way

Ren

Ocean air and root beer, sweet and salty, and wrapped up in Phil. Phil, and four other guys. Weird. Not bad, but weird.

I opened my eyes, and almost screamed. Phil’s villa must have been in Pompeii; it was hip-deep in black sludge and everything—the walls and trees, the courtyard and fountain—were coated in, or melting into, the ashy mud. Phil made a noise between a whimper and a moan, his mouth reaching for mine. I couldn’t talk, only try to kiss comfort onto his lips for the destruction of his Garden. He took it hungrily.

“It’s fine now, Phil.”

“No sign of Ren’s Garden bleeding over anymore, Phil.”

“Yup, nice and solid here.”

“Oh, for the love of God, Phil!”

I lost Phil’s mouth and opened my eyes. Jimmy had one beefy hand on my shoulder and one on Phil’s, his substantial bulk imposed between our bodies. “That should do nicely, thank you, you two,” he said.

Phil beamed blearily at him.

Oskar had stalked off to one end of the courtyard. Matsu wandered to the other. Ramon was still standing near us, studying his nail beds with unwarranted interest.

I looked around. “I’ve definitely been here,” I said. “Oskar too. I saw him eating dates.”

Phil tipped his head up, considering the fruit hanging from the branches over our heads. “They’re olives,” he said. “Dates are at the Las Vegas house.”

“Ever have a long argument with a Praetorian just before the war with Parthia, say 161 ACE, as they count the years now?” Oskar asked.

Phil looked up again, then at Oskar. “What about it?”

“That wine was awfully bitter.”

Phil exhaled slowly. “Damn,” he said.

“How did you get into his Garden?” Ramon asked Oskar, something almost like passion in the tart clip of his words. “And mine.”

“Celeste taught me.”

“Celeste?” It’s possible we all said it together.

“I caught her in mine.”

“And you threatened to tell the rest of us about her new ability unless she shared it with you?” Matsu guessed.

“There was no threat,” Oskar said, sounding annoyed. “I caught her, asked her, she told me.”

“You were lovers,” I said, remembering how he’d asked if Phil had told me what happened when Incrementalists made love. “Oh, shit,” I said. Oskar had been trying to see if Phil had made a similar deal with Celeste. Because Phil and Celeste had been. “You didn’t know. I’m sorry, Phil.”

Phil untied the knot holding back his hair and retied it, considering this new information about the man he’d just defended and the woman he had loved. He took my hand. “It’s okay,” he said, and somehow, I believed it was. “Let’s go find her last memory.”

Still holding my hand, he led us, strange parade that we were, past an orchard and out through a broken wooden gate to a little hill behind his house where a simple stone bench sat nestled in a modest grove of olive trees. “According to my Garden, this is where Celeste’s Garden begins.” He pointed at a hole in the ground. “That’s where her stub was,” he said. “And that pomegranate is her next-to-last memory. And that,” he said, pointing at the empty place between the hole and the fruit, “is where a
kithara
isn’t.”

We all gazed seriously at the thing that wasn’t there.

“Kithara?”
Matsu said at last.

“Stringed contraption,” Jimmy explained. “Like a lyre.”

“Liar?”

“Never mind.”

“Well,” Ramon said after serious consideration. “It’s not there.”

“Right,” Phil said.

“The Y axis is gone.”

“Right,” Phil said again.

“All we know for certain is the X.”

“The X is Celeste,” I said. “She’s dead.”

Phil looked at me a long time. Then he looked through me. We stood around Celeste’s missing memory like mourners graveside until Phil’s eyes refocused. “Gone,” he said. “But not forgotten.”

“I’m listening,” said Ramon.

“We don’t have Celeste’s memories, but we have our memories of Celeste. Could that be enough? Could we create her out of our memories of her?”

“Jimmy?” Ramon said.

Jimmy shrugged. “That’s not a grazing thing. Matsu’s the pattern shaman.”

I said, “Can someone please explain that?”

Matsu opened his mouth, closed it, and shrugged. “All right.” He pulled a handful of olives from a tree. “If I have six black rocks,” he said, placing six olives on the bench seat where they obligingly darkened from green to black and turned to stone. “And six white rocks.” Six neatly placed olives bleached to white pebbles. “And I arrange them in four rows of three each, three black above three white rocks, above three black, above three white; the rocks, the design, the space between the rocks and the activity of arranging them are all pattern. As is the set of three columns of alternating black, white, black, white rocks, or the diagonal. The pattern can be perceived and described different ways, but the act of patterning, both being and creating, is where my art lies. Do you understand?”

He pulled six more olives from the tree and divided them between his hands. “Three more black, three more white.” He opened his hands and held the bleached and blackened pebbles out to Phil. “The knowledge you have that the white go together in a row beneath the black is the voice of pattern. If we collect and bring to this place, as Phil suggests, our memories of Celeste, it’s possible that I could hear her pattern speak.”

“Or I could show you how to break into her Garden,” Oskar said.

Phil

I clamped my jaws together to keep from laughing. “What?” I said. “The easy way? We never do that.”

Ren had her hand on my arm. If I could have, right then, I’d have kicked everyone out, I mean, forever, and given up on everything, and grabbed Ren and pulled her to the bed that I’d wished I’d had two thousand years ago.

“That’s a good idea, Oskar,” said Ray. “How do you do it?”

“Be clear on what we’re doing,” he said. “You want to get inside an analogy that isn’t your own without being drawn into it by the creator. It’s like walking around in someone else’s dream.”

I nodded, as did everyone else. Ren’s brows were furrowed; she was listening and absorbing. “That’s what you did,” she said. “You were in my dream, when I dreamed Phil’s Garden. That’s why the olives were dates.”

Oskar nodded. “Right. You pick a memory seeded by the person whose Garden you want into. Any memory. Doesn’t matter. Then, just when the memory is starting to come clear, you superimpose your sense triggers over it, and try to force your metaphor onto his memory. It doesn’t work—the memory doesn’t change, and it’s not easy. But if you grit your teeth and hang on long enough, it’s like it pulls you back to the seeder, and you’ll start to get sense triggers that aren’t yours. You grip those, and follow them, and eventually there you are. Yours,” he said, looking at Jimmy, “are the taste of old shoe leather and the sound of a Mozart concerto played on a piano that’s just the least bit off from true.”

“You’ve been in my Garden?” said Jimmy.

“Have you eaten a lot of old shoe leather?” I asked Oskar.

Oskar ignored me and answered Jimmy. “Not far. Just to see if I could. Your images, Phil, are the taste of chives and the smell of cherry blossoms.”

“I knew that,” I said.

Jimmy said, “Will it be more like dropping into my own Garden, where I can do or create anything and nothing can hurt me, or more like being drawn into someone else’s analogy, where I can’t affect anything, but experience memories like they’re mine?”

We all looked at Oskar. “I have no idea,” he said. “But I know what dinner with a Roman guard tastes like.”

“Well,” said Jimmy. “Shall we try this then?”

To answer him, I nodded toward Ray, who was standing with his head bowed and his eyes closed. I looked at Ren, and she was looking at me. She nodded once. All right, then. I put my arm around her and led the way back into the villa, and down the stairway to the room that never ends. We all have one of those rooms, in one way or another, where the past lives, and where the dust of history fades gradually, almost imperceptibly, into what came before history, and where we can search for, and sometimes even find, the scattered consciousness of who we were, who our friends were, who we thought our friends were, and what they thought.

That’s where we keep our own master index, organized however we organize it. There are, at present, something like a billion memories seeded in the Garden. If you’re going to have any chance of finding one, you need a method, and you need organization. This was mine.

We could each find our own memory of a memory Celeste had also seeded, except for Ren, who should have had all Celeste’s memories as her own. Well, that was fine; she could have one of mine. She had once asked me who I was. Now, when she hadn’t asked, I thought she wanted to know. And I wanted her to know, because however necessary lies may or may not be to keep love alive, if you build love on a lie, you’re an idiot.

If you’re going to do this, Phil, do it right.

A narrow, rickety wooden table arose and on it were scrolls bound in white ribbon, each labeled with a neat, precise glyph of the kind used in Sumeria five thousand years ago. For just a moment, I thought about Livianus, who held this consciousness before me. I’d vowed I wouldn’t forget him, and I haven’t, quite. He wasn’t much like me; he spoke less and thought more and had a passion for Greek poetry. He’d held that stub for more than three hundred years. Then I came along, and he was gone.

“Phil,” said Ren. “What—”

I shook my head and she fell silent.

I’d kept his filing system, if you can call it that, as a sort of tribute, as he had kept it from his previous, and so on back to before there was farming. I no longer remembered how to read the glyphs, but I didn’t need to. I found the one I wanted by touch, and it led me to another set, and another, until—

“This one,” I told Ren.

“I can’t read it.”

“Just touch it,” I said, and opened it.

And there I was.

I called myself Carter, and I sat in my tiny room at my tiny table and wrote on coarse paper with cheap ink and a poor excuse for a quill. The execution of Guy Fawkes was still recent, and it seemed to me I ought to be doing something besides playing noddy and draughts. There was Ireland, and there was King James, and there was the printing press, and it all spelled trouble for anyone with the misfortune to be Catholic. But what could we do? I didn’t know, but I was worried, and so I seeded my worries on coarse paper until there came a knock at the door.

I stood up and opened it, my thick shoes loud on the floor.

“Celeste,” I said. “Enter and be welcome.”

She did, walking briskly and sitting down without an invitation, her light green skirts giving life to the fire that had almost died. She said, “I have one last question, of all the questions there are, and if your answer should engender yet more questions, as your answers are wont to do, why then, these newborn questions will pour forth in a torrent until you, dear devil, are so mazed you cannot answer, upon which I do purpose to laugh at you, both cruelly and in friendship, and possess myself in patience until you are possessed of yourself again.”

I sat down, facing her. She was so lovely; a dimple on her cheek, her fair hair curling, and mischief in her eyes. “Ask, then,” I said.

“That wight whose—I have forgot the word; what called you it?”

“Souche,”
I said. “In English, it is ‘stub.’”

“Yes. That wight. Betsy. An it become me, what doth become of her?”

“As best you may, remember her.”

“She is known to you?”

“For many a year, Celeste. She is my steadfast friend. An you take her place, I’ll mourn her.”

She looked at me, her head tilted charmingly. “I would be a steadfast friend,” she said.

I smiled. “And so?”

“Yes,” she said. “I will do’t. You are a dicer, is it not so? I will roll the dice. I see but the smallest part of what may come, but it doth fill my heart with such ardor as I have not known. I might not bear myself, did I say no, and so I do say yes.”

I let that memory go instead of playing it out, and Ren said, “Phil? That isn’t her memory, it’s yours.”

“But she will have made a congruent one,” I said. “Her first seed. As you should seed your memory, by the way, of taking the stub. The point is, now we can find hers. December 4, 1606. Welcome to the group, Celeste. What did you write on your fine lady’s paper with your expensive quill?”

Ren squeezed my arm as I found the scroll.

“When I open this,” I said, “as we start to fall into the memory—”

“I know,” said Ren.

“All right.”

I unrolled it.

Ren

Phil unrolled the parchment of Celeste’s first seeded memory, still smelling softly of her uniquely compounded pounce. I closed my eyes. I could still feel Phil standing near me and the wooden table of white-tied scrolls. Nothing was happening. It wasn’t going to work.

I opened my eyes to ask Phil what pounce was, and realized I knew. Vellum was greasy no matter how high quality, so you kept a muslin bag of powdered pumice or fishbone, or Celeste’s peculiar blend of ground incense and egg shell, to dust over and rub into it. I also knew that Celeste felt fairly confident Phil was the devil Mephistopheles whom she had seen onstage not more than a year or two ago in Mr. Marlowe’s scandalous play about Dr. Faustus. But she didn’t care. She had lost everyone she loved to the plague three years back.