The Incrementalists (34 page)
Read The Incrementalists Online
Authors: Steven Brust,Skyler White
He finally took a drink from the coffee he’d been staring into. “But how do we tell them, ‘Hi, we’re this secret group that houses human memories, coded in symbol, reaching back to the birth of symbol itself? We’ve been screwing with your heads for millennia, shaping the way you think, but oops, sorry! One of our number has gone crazy, so now we’re uncloaking?’ They’d stub us all.”
“Except the ones who would pretend to be us, and start selling Incrementalist services and insights to the highest bidder,” I said.
Phil drained his coffee cup. “We mass meddle.”
“With everyone?”
“We use switches that will only work on people like us. We arm the ones we love against us.”
“We recruit them?”
“Incrementally.” His dimple twitched. “Knowing it’s called the ‘impulse rack’ makes you less likely to buy something from the display stand by the cash register.”
“But how do we reach them?” I asked.
“Right. How do we become signal, not just more of the noise?” he said. “They can’t all be spiked.”
I stood up and carried my plate and Phil’s coffee cup into the kitchen. “Maybe we can.”
“How?”
“Same way we’ve always done.” I put my plate in the sink and filled his coffee cup. “We do it in symbol. That’s what makes a memory into a switch, right? The overlay of symbol on it. The sugar-covered oranges
mean
something. They’re reference points in meaning, tiny triggers of precise emotion. When you gave me your switches, you gave me the power to make you feel things.” I put milk and sugar in Phil’s coffee and stirred it, because I remembered he liked it that way in the evening, even though I’d never seen him take it like that or then. “We do the same for them.” I put his mug down in front of him.
He put his hands around my waist instead of his mug. “But from a distance, and with our own symbols, not theirs.” His hands weren’t holding still; I was losing my interest in talking.
“We meddle with who we are,” I said, and kissed him. “But Phil, you know what that means.”
Phil
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I’m working on not knowing things, remember? Just for a while. You tell me.”
She smiled with all of her, and I drank it in. Yes, I could deal with this. Contentment is fine, if you don’t let it get out of hand. I picked up my coffee and sipped, and it hit me that there was milk and sugar in it. She was remembering. She was getting it back.
“It means,” she said, running a hand across my forehead, “that it has to be you.”
“Uh, not following.”
“Think symbol.”
“You’re enjoying making me guess, aren’t you?”
She grinned and nodded and another frozen thing inside of me melted. I wondered how long that would continue.
“Art?” I said. “Rich with symbol, like the Pre-Raphs? I could tell you things about Rossetti, by the way. One time he—”
“I remember, and there’s a whole ’nother side to that, and no, that isn’t what I meant. Words as symbol.”
“Story?”
“Story,” Ren said.
“So, we write a story about it? I’m not—”
“We don’t write
it
. We write the pivot Celeste wanted to define. We write
you
.”
I considered. “And open it up to a hundred different definitions? That could work.”
“Oskar said we needed their help.”
“We’d have to write it and find someone with no scruples to put his name on it.”
“Or find a writer with scruples and meddle with him,” Ren said. “Or we put Irina’s stub into a writer and have her do it. Irina’d like that.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” I said. “I kind of like it. I used to have a T-shirt with the Ford logo, in the script they use, only it said ‘Fuck.’ Those who’d be offended by it thought it said Ford, those who actually saw it thought it was funny.”
“Yes,” she said. “Like that. Let them determine what’s there, instead of Celeste.”
“You’re brilliant.”
“It was a user interface problem.”
“You’re still brilliant.”
“Tell me more,” she said, so I did.
Ren
Phil has a way of saying things without words that’s persuasive, and by the time I’d climbed back off the breakfast bar, he’d convinced me. Who Phil was
was
a story. A tale told by an idiot—or a couple of them—our metaphor for symbol.
Phil went out to the bakery for bread, so I wrote the email—my first to the group. I had the memories of Celeste’s Primary, but not of her life. I was the first incremental Incrementalist, but we hoped not the last.
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
The Incrementalists
Thursday, July 7, 2011 1:35 pm GMT-7
Phil and I have found a potential defense against Celeste’s pattern. If some of you want to look it over, we’ve put it close at hand.
B
OOKS BY
S
TEVEN
B
RUST
The Dragaeran Novels
Brokedown Palace
THE KHAAVREN ROMANCES
The Phoenix Guards
Five Hundred Years After
The Viscount of Adrilankha,
which comprises
The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black,
and
Sethra Lavode
THE VLAD TALTOS NOVELS
Jhereg
Yendi
Teckla
Taltos
Phoenix
Athyra
Orca
Dragon
Issola
Dzur
Jhegaala
Iorich
Other Novels
To Reign in Hell
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
Agyar
Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille
The Gypsy
(with Megan Lindholm)
Freedom and Necessity
(with Emma Bull)
B
OOKS BY
S
KYLER
W
HITE
and Falling, Fly
In Dreams Begin
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
S
TEVEN
B
RUST
is the author of
Dragon, Issola,
the
New York Times
bestsellers
Dzur
and
Tiassa
, and many other fantasy novels. He lives in Minneapolis.
S
KYLER
W
HITE
is the author of
and Falling, Fly
and
In Dreams Begin.
She lives in Texas.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
THE INCREMENTALISTS
Copyright © 2013 by Steven Brust and Skyler White
All rights reserved.
Edited by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden
Cover photograph by Getty Images
Cover design by Base Art Co.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request
ISBN 978-0-7653-3422-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-0931-4 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466809314
First Edition: September 2013
