Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“Are you working on a new novel? Your fans must be getting very impatient.”

“I haven’t written anything new for a decade,” said Sollozzo, with a smile. He stroked Padma’s cheek. “She’s worried.”

“I’m not!” Padma did look very unworried. “I’m not just your wife. I’m also a reader. If I feel a writer is cutting corners, that’s it, I close the book. You’re a perfectionist; I love that. Remember how you tortured me over the translation?”

Sollozzo nodded fondly. “She’s equally mad. She’ll happily spend a week over a comma.”

“How we fought over footnotes! He doesn’t like footnotes. But how can a translator clarify without footnotes? Nothing doing, I said. I put my foot down.”

I felt good watching them nuzzle. I admired their passion. I must have been deficient in passion. Still, if I’d been deficient, why hadn’t Padma told me? Marriages needed work. The American labour theory of love. That worked for me; I liked work. Work, work. If she’d wanted me to work at our relationship, I would have. Then, just so, I lost interest in the subject.

“I don’t read much fiction anymore,” I confessed. “I used to be a huge reader. Then I got Enhanced in my twenties. There was the adjustment phase and then somehow I lost touch, what with career and all. Same story with my friends. They mostly read what their children read. But even kids, it’s not much. Makes me wonder. Maybe we are outgrowing the need for fiction. I mean, children outgrow their imaginary friends. Do you think we posthumans are outgrowing the need for fiction?”

I waited for Sollozzo to respond. But he’d filled his mouth with biryani and was masticating with the placid dedication of a temple cow. Padma filled the silence with happy chatter. Sollozzo was working on a collection of his short stories. He was doing this, he was doing that. I sensed reproach in her cheer, which was, of course, ridiculous. Then she changed the topic: “Are you, are you, are you, finally done with Modern Textiles?”

“I am, I am, I am not,” I replied, and we both laughed. “The usual usual, Padma. I’m trying to make the workers see that control is possible without ownership. Tough, though. The Enhanced ones are easy; they get it immediately. But the ones who aren’t, especially the Marxist types. Sheesh.”

“Sounds super-challenging!”

On the contrary. Her interested expression said: Super-tedious. I hadn’t intended to elaborate. As a merchant banker, I’d learned early on that most artists, especially the writer types, were put off by money talk.

It didn’t bother me. I just found it odd. Why weren’t they interested in capital, which had the power to transform the world more than any other force? But I was willing to bet Sollozzo’s novel wouldn’t spend a comma, let alone a footnote, on business. Even Padma, for all the time she spent with me, had never accepted that the strong poets she so admired were poets of action, not verbiage.

“I hate the word posthuman ,” exclaimed Sollozzo, startling us. “It’s an excuse to claim we’re innocent of humanity’s sins. It’s a rejection of history. Are you so eager to return to Zion? If so, you are lost, my brother.”

Silence.

“I know the way to Sion,” I said finally, and when Padma burst out laughing, I explained to the puzzled Sollozzo that Sahyun, where I lived with my mother, had originally been called Sion and that it had been a cosmopolitan North-Indian intersection between two South-Indian enclaves, Chembur and King’s Circle. Then Sahyun had become a Muslim enclave. Now it was simply a wealthy enclave.

“Sahyun! That’s Zion in Arabic. You are living in Zion!”

“Exactly. I even have one of the rivers of Paradise not too far from my house. Imagine. And Padma still left.”

“There’s no keeping women in Zion.” Sollozzo gifted me one of his slow smiles.

“Of course,” said Padma, smiling. “The river Jihran is recent. There wasn’t any river anywhere near Sion. The place was a traffic nightmare. Everything’s changed in the last sixty years. Completely, utterly changed.”

“On the contrary—” I began, leaning forward to help myself to a second helping of lamb.

“My dear children,” interrupted my mother, in Tamil, “I understand you don’t want to, but you mustn’t postpone it any longer. You have to tell Bittu.”

“Yes, Bittu. Break her heart, then mend it.” Sollozzo didn’t understand Tamil very well, not yet, but he had recognized the key word: Bittu. This meeting was really about Bittu.

First, the preliminaries. I took the divorce papers from Padma, signed wherever I was required to sign; a quaint anachronism in this day and age, but necessary nonetheless. With that single stroke of my pen, I gave up the right to call Padma my wife. My ex-wife’s glance met mine, a tender exchange of unsaid benedictions and I felt a profound sadness roil inside me. Then it was accompanied with a white-hot anger that I wasn’t alone in my misery. The damn Brain was watching, protecting. But there is no protection against loss. Padma— Oh god, oh god, oh god. Then, just so, I relaxed.

“There’s a park outside,” said Padma, also smiling. “We’ll tell Bittu there.”

It began well. Bittu, bless her heart, wasn’t exactly the brightest crayon in the box. It took her a long time to understand that her parents were divorcing. For good. She was going to live in Boston. Yes, she would lose all her friends. Yes, the uncle with the moustache was now her stepfather. No, I wasn’t coming along. Yes, I would visit. Et cetera, et cetera. Then she asked all the same questions once more. Wobbling chin, high-pitched voice, but overall quite calm. We felt things were going well. Padma and I beamed at each other, Sollozzo nodded approvingly.

Amma was far smarter. She knew her grandchild, remembered better than us what it had been like not to be fully Enhanced.

So when Bittu ran screaming towards the fence separating the park from the highway, Amma, my eighty-two-year-old mother, somehow sprinted after her and grabbed Bittu before she could hit the road. We caught up, smiling with panic. Hugs, more explanations. Bittu calmed. Then when we released her, she once again made a dash for it. This is just what we have pieced together after some debate, Padma, Sollozzo, and I. None of us remember too much of what happened. But it must have been very stressful, because my Brain mercifully decided to bury it. I remember flashes of a nose bleed, a frantic trip to the hospital, Bittu’s hysterical screams, Padma in Sollozzo’s arms. I remember Bittu’s Brain taking over, conferring with our Brains, and shutting down her reticular center. Bittu went to sleep.

“Please do not worry.” Bittu’s Brain broadcast directly to our heads. It had an airline-stewardess voice, and it spoke first in English, then in Hindi. “She can be easily awakened at the nearest Brain-equipped facility.”

I remember the doctor who handled Bittu’s case. She was very reassuring. I remember everything after the doctor took over. She was that reassuring.

“Bittu was Enhanced just last year, am I correct?” said the doctor.

She was. She wanted to know the specifics of the unit. Did Bittu’s Brain regulate appetite? How quickly would it forget things? What was our policy on impulse control? That was especially important. How did her Brain handle uncertainty? Was it risk-averse or risk-neutral? Superfluous questions, of course. The information was all there in the medical report. I listened, nodding every now and then, a quiet happiness growing in me as Padma answered every question, and thus answering what the doctor really needed to know: Are you caring parents? Do you know what you have done to your child with this technology?