The Incrementalists (21 page)

With eyes that weren’t blinking and a belly made of rock ice, I ran down the hall—some sort of dank root cellar with crude wood-doored cubbies dug into the earth. I was so afraid, I wasn’t even thinking in words anymore. I was just running. When I reached the hatch, I peered into the hole beneath it, but it was entirely dark. “Matsu?” I called into it. My voice sounded breathless and too young.

“You can’t kill her Phil,” Ramon said. “This is just an image of her.”

Nothing. From Matsu or Phil.

“Actually,” said Jimmy, “we don’t know that.”

“Ramon, how deep is the cellar?” I asked.

“There’s a ladder on the near side.”

I felt with one hand along the lip of the hole. Well, that was stupid. People trying to access the cellar would need to hoist the door, then turn away from it and back themselves down. My knees were shockingly wobbly.

“Phil’s with me,” Ramon said.

“Let me through.” Phil’s voice was hoarse with warning. “She tried to kill Ren.”

“But she didn’t succeed,” Jimmy soothed. “And killing her here may accomplish nothing.”

I paused at the bottom of the ladder to get oriented. The stone under my feet was cold, or adrenaline had claimed them, and a few yards ahead, the silhouettes of Ramon and Phil squared off against a warm glowing backdrop of firelight. A shadow moving quickly along the black wall toward Phil was all I could see of Matsu.

I couldn’t move.

“Phil,” I said, but he faked left and stepped right, slipped by Ramon and lunged out of sight around the corner.

I ran full tilt and would have rounded the corner not much behind him, but Ramon caught me and pinned me against the rough-hewn wall.

“Ren.”

I fought against his hands on me. I couldn’t breathe. Phil was in trouble. I battled Ramon for all I was worth.

“Ren.” Jimmy’s voice was still falsely calm. “We can help Phil best if Irina thinks he’s alone.”

Ramon grunted as my elbow connected with his ribs.

“Almost there, Ramon,” Oskar said.

“Matsu’s here,” Ramon said.

And he was. And somehow, without hurting me, he caught my flailing hands and pinned them to my hips. I could flop forward or back, and that was it. I tried to kick, but he pushed my wrist gently into the opposite hip and I staggered to keep my balance.

Then Oskar reached us too, and I quit fighting. It was pointless, and I didn’t want Oskar to touch me.

Matsu opened his hands until they merely circled my wrists. “You will stay hidden?”

“I will stay hidden,” I said.

We peered around the corner, and all four of us took a startled breath.

“What?” demanded Jimmy. “What are you seeing?”

“Well,” Oskar said. “Phil’s right on target again.”

“And Irina’s beautiful,” Ramon whispered, something like reverence in his voice. “Her hair is loose and flows like water, but it’s brilliant, bright fresh green. Her skin, even in this unworthy firelight, is radiant white, purer than the thinnest teacup, with such a tender pink at the edges. And her body moves with slender, boneless grace, like the spring air.”

“Jesus, Ramon!” Jimmy said. “Pull yourself together. Stress has reduced you to poetry. Tell me what’s happening!”

“Irina’s got Phil in her sights again,” Oskar said. And she did. She drew a delicate silver bow from the pocket of her apron and fitted it with a slender arrow, smaller even than the single brass key and sheathless bone knife looped to her apron by its strings. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to make my will into a weapon, or force her own knife to cut her. But most, I wanted Phil away from Irina, away from the curved walls and low ceiling that gave him no space to maneuver as he tried to get around her.

Matsu wasn’t moving, but I’ve never seen a less restful stillness. My body, in contrast, was twisting and dodging involuntarily in pointless synch with Phil’s delicate combat. He dodged, but Irina fired and skewered him to the wall with a glittering barbed arrow through the armpit of his shirt, quiveringly close to his heart.

Matsu caught me again and held me. Irina nocked another arrow into her bow and drew it. I could see her lips moving, but couldn’t hear her. Then Matsu picked me up and chucked me over his shoulder. He headed, fast and soundless, back to the ladder while I slugged him right where I figured I’d find a kidney. He climbed us out in three fluid steps.

Jimmy was waiting at the top. “I’m sure Ren will come the rest of the way of her own accord,” he said. “It’s time to wake up.”

“I’m not leaving without Phil,” I said.

“He’s probably already awake,” Jimmy said. “He won’t stay in Irina’s clutches.”

“That’s not Irina,” I said. I knew tears were running down my face, but I couldn’t unball my fists enough to wipe them.

“What do you mean?” Jimmy’s voice was wary.

“Of course it is,” Oskar said.

I swallowed air. “Irina?” I said. “With chive hair and cherry blossom skin?”

“Fuck,” Ramon said.

“It’s Celeste,” Jimmy whispered.

“She’s coming up the ladder.” Matsu’s voice mastered our collective shock. “Wake.”

With the bones in my body, and my voice—there and here—all saying “No, no, no,” I opened my eyes.

TWELVE

Raggedy Ann

Phil

One plus zero is one. One plus one is two. Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five.

Yeah, so, okay, sometimes the universe sucks. Sometimes you have all the odds on your side and all the chips in the middle, and the other guy spikes the miracle card. It happens.

Five plus three is eight. Eight plus five is thirteen. Thirteen plus eight is twenty-one.

Or maybe you lost because you played like an idiot. Doesn’t matter; same result, same solution.

Twenty-one plus thirteen is thirty-four. Thirty-four plus twenty-one is fifty-five. Fifty-five plus thirty-four is eighty-nine.

The solution? Simple. Play the next hand. That’s all you can do anyway, as long as you’re in the game. So play it, and play it right. And if you’re pissed off at the dealer, or your opponent, or yourself, or the world, you aren’t going to play it right.

Eighty-nine plus fifty-five is one hundred and forty-four. One hundred and forty-four plus eighty-nine is, uh, carry the one, two hundred and thirty-three.

So the first step is to get your head in shape to address the problem. The next step is to look at the situation; don’t blow it up bigger than it really is, don’t minimize it. Look at it. The next step is to remind yourself that you can’t control either the decisions your opponent makes or the deck; you’re dealing with unknowns and with random numbers. So you cut down the unknowns as much as possible, figure a way so that as many of the random numbers as possible work in your favor, then you make the play.

Short version: It doesn’t matter how many bad decisions you’ve just made, your job is to make the next one correct.

I tested myself against the three arrows pinning me to the wall and took a moment to stand in the cellar of Celeste’s Garden and think.

First, let’s see if I could cut down on some of the unknowns. As she’d shot the second arrow through my other shirtsleeve, she’d said, “Sorry, Phil. I just need a little time to work.”

And it went
thwik
into my head, in time to the arrow, that it was Celeste’s voice.

How could it be Celeste? Celeste was stubbed, and then put into Ren. Ren had Celeste’s stub. Ren—

Couldn’t remember Celeste, most of the time.

Because Celeste’s memories were floating around the Garden.

She put her bow back in her pocket and took the pot she’d been stirring off the flame.

The arrows weren’t real. They couldn’t hurt me, couldn’t even immobilize me, unless—

Unless I was willing to subordinate myself to her. Unless I saw myself as a reflection of her. Unless what defined me as me was my love for her. Then the arrows could hold me, because I would choose to let them.

“When I come back,” she said over her shoulder, “we should talk, dear.” And she left.

Just like her. But how could that be? The Garden, however real it feels, is a mental construct, created by us back in the beginning, when we first used symbols to communicate and needed a place to store the information so it wouldn’t be lost. Information, ideas, do not have an independent existence, except insofar as someone expresses them. We had seeded with ocher on cave walls, with sticks on sand, with chisels on stone tablets, with styluses on clay, with ink on paper, with electronic signals on Sony’s latest laptop. We became what we created, self-perpetuating memories, and we were forced to commit acts of altruism from fear of what would happen if we didn’t.

Because, when you stop and think about it, fear is the driving force behind so very much of what we human monkeys do. We work from fear of being without what we need. We fight from fear of what will happen if we don’t. We love from fear of being alone. Okay, maybe that last is a stretch, but it’s what Celeste thought, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. I’ve been around long enough to know. In any case, fear was driving Celeste. All right, fear of what?

She was terrified of Oskar, afraid he would do something that would upset the comfortable life, or lives, we’d all been having. So Oskar had to be kept out of Salt. Which was silly in its own way; it wasn’t like we had absolute power in the group, or even that much relative power. Oskar wanted in because he wanted some control over the discussion. So what? Is that a big enough deal to meddle with a lover, and several other people as well, just to ensure your personality stays on top to keep him out?

Oh, of course. Looked at that way, no. Oskar had nothing to do with it. Celeste wanted her personality to stay on top because she wanted her personality to stay on top. Because she didn’t want to die. It was that simple. Oskar served to have someone for us to focus on, to suspect.

And then—what?

She had chosen Ren because of blood relationship, and because she thought Ren was someone she could overpower. She’d miscalculated, and Ren’s personality came out on top. Why wasn’t that the end of it?

Because Celeste had a backup plan. Celeste always had backup plans. Okay, then. What would she do if plan A didn’t work? Best thing would be to arrange for a different Second, but that’s not so easy since the failure of Plan A alerts all of us to what’s going on.

So? So you make a copy of your stub, a memory of all of your memories; you replay them, seed them, and to make sure no one finds them except you, you alpha-lock them. How? By seeding the moment of your death, and looping it back to your own stub, even as you die. Hence, the need for suicide. And the result being, as long as Celeste existed only in the Garden, Ren could remember her. When Celeste existed in the real world, the memories were with Celeste. She’d probably been doing this for lifetimes, but we’d never seen because her personality had always been dominant, until now. But this time she knew, almost right away, that she’d miscalculated; that Ren was strong enough to assert control.

How could she exist in the real world? A confederate, of course; probably an unwilling one. Irina. Now Irina/Celeste. It would be uncomfortable, but still good enough until they killed Ren and found a new Second. Which one of them had tried to kill Ren? Irina. To get rid of Celeste.

All of which brought up the eternal question: Now what?

I could open my eyes and be back in my house in Las Vegas. That would be the safe play. I have nothing against the safe play; a lot of the time, the safe play is just another way to say the money-making play; the safe play is usually to throw away pocket 3s in early position.

But then there’s the rest of time. The safe play is to overbet the pot, make your opponent fold, and get what’s in the middle right now while it’s yours. Often the right play is to entice your opponent to make a mistake—to bet enough so that it’s a mathematical error for him to call, but little enough that he wants to anyway. If you do that, he’ll draw out on you and you’ll lose a good number of times. But, over the long run, it’s the way to make the most money.

Make the right play.

“I am who I am,” I told the empty room. “Not who Celeste wants me to be.”

I walked out of my clothes pinned to the wall of Celeste’s cellar, out of Celeste’s cellar, and in three steps brought myself back to my villa, wearing my old Roman clothes, because this was the Garden, and your own metaphor is always there, under everything. The first thing I did was seed my deductions and leave them in my atrium in the form of a Raggedy Ann doll hanging from a noose. Then I went out front and stood before the place where Celeste’s last memory should have been.

The Y/When and Z/Where were known quantities; X/Who was, quite appropriately, undefined.

If this didn’t work, Celeste might know what I’d tried, and then we’d be off to the races again. But you always play the odds. Even when you’re playing the other player, that’s just another factor in the odds.

I said, “Why, Celeste? In order to make sure your personality was dominant in the new Second, you self-centered, heartless bitch.”

Then I picked up the
kithara
and strummed it once.

Ren

We were standing in a ragged circle, leaning into one another like tepee poles. Oskar yawned. Matsu shook himself and bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. Phil, his eyes closed and his face slack, didn’t move.

“He didn’t come back!” I reached for him. “We have to go get him.”

“That’s not how it works.” Jimmy gently took my hands from Phil’s arm. “Think, Ren. We don’t know if he’s in Celeste’s Garden or his.”

Matsu moved behind Phil and crossed his arms over Phil’s chest.

“He can open his eyes whenever he wants,” Jimmy said. “Or put himself in his own Garden, if he chooses. If he hasn’t yet, it’s because he’s not done.”

“But Celeste trapped him!”

“I’m sure,” said Matsu, “that Celeste thinks she did. I’m just as sure that she’s wrong. He is now aware of how she controlled him. The awareness will be enough.”

“Are you
sure
?”

“Yes,” he said.

Matsu moved Phil’s inert body expertly across the room. Nothing I’d seen from Irina came even close in zombiness. I couldn’t watch; it was too eerie to see him in motion but vacant inside. I shivered. Matsu eased Phil into his chair.