Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 14 Read online

  The distant drainage of the sunsets split the space

  between loud, lighting party boats that passed

  party boats and all that was lit from inside

  where sounds swallowed themselves in black water.

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  Diamond

  His press secretary is quitting

  because people still think

  the man has fangs. One day,

  the hills that are now just

  so much interesting strip-mined

  cake will be landscapes of diamond

  near Scranton, Pennsylvania,

  where the strip mined hills

  have been flattened out

  one layer at a time, sixteen layers,

  the long century's work,

  the heavy lifting huswifery

  of machinery and explosive.

  One day will abrogate imagery

  and turn us to embedded disco ball

  in the world night smashed concrete.

  Some good natured people

  set fire to the heavy truck side

  of the Ford dealership. Maybe

  some bird society money

  found its way there, maybe

  some thigh bones, maybe

  the vocabulary for breaking legs

  in high school health books.

  When the smoke blows away,

  we can smell the cow manure

  beyond the turnpike railing.

  One day, we will eat sand crabs

  with the good doctors

  in the hills if we find them,

  and will be burning cars,

  and teaching dental hygiene,

  and will be pulling diamonds

  out of the vice-presidential

  press secretaries, the coal, and dark.

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  Sitting on a Bench in the Park

  David Nahm

  Think of space as a nice pair of black slacks; stars, balls of lint. The pleats? I take analogy too far, he says. It is afternoon in the Bonn Memorial Watergarden and Greens, one of the several horrid parks on University's fleshy campus. Perhaps the wind blows through the branches of the maples like a draft through nails. It is May and Dr. Vliet wheeled me out in the shopping cart. Its old wheels—stripped of their bearings and dry of oil—whined and clicked. A bright day—he has on a snappy hat and too much make-up.

  Aside from space, Dr. Vliet took a little time to tell me about Dr. Silfermann. I love him. Always have. Since my existence began there existed a love in me for Dr. Silfermann. This I find can be compared to waking up and finding a rabbit had left you colored eggs—but you don't know what Easter is and you have never been awake before.

  I call him Silly. My dear Silly.

  I didn't know what it was at first but Dr. Vliet told me. “I am sorry. You are in love. There is nothing that we can do about it. Silfermann was lonely and selfish.” I only know Silly from pictures. “He made you this way,” Dr. Vliet says, turning away from me.

  He is old. He has a frame like a bag of coat hangers and a beard that hangs like a blanched beehive. His bare head is smooth and speckled. He smells like mint. And, of course the make-up. He is kind to me, which I appreciate. He tells about Silly. “That asshole was a Grade-A jerk who just loved hear himself talk. On and on. He thought he was so witty. Had a funny story about everything. You mention cement, he had a story about cement. You mention wingnuts, he'd give you wingnuts. Watermelon, nylon, prom. Yack, yack, yack, blah blah blah. All you could do to ease the boredom was drink."

  The sun flickered about on the clouds—puffy clouds—and I wanted to laugh. Dr. Vliet shifted uncomfortably on the bench. It was newly painted. Blue. He didn't want to be out here with me but for the sake of the mission he had to.

  * * * *

  1) Artificial intelligence systems previously developed have been imperfect. Imperfect in that they didn't work.

  2) For generations, the scientists—their fathers and grandfathers, waxed moustaches and buzz cuts—had been struggling to create a computer intelligence. A joint grant from the Government, the University and Oneida Macroprocessors Inc. was to create an intelligence that can pilot a ship to the end of space. The very edge. The point of nothing. A person wouldn't do it. A regular computer couldn't because it couldn't make self-interested decisions. The scientists felt that an artificial intelligence would combine the intuition and sense of discovery of a human intelligence with the knowledge and precision of a machine. The previous systems may have seemed bright enough. They displayed impressive comic timing and good sense, but when it came down to it, they were just brightly colored macaws, yapping back whatever was yapped at them. The scientists were never able to develop a program—no matter how intricate or complex, like a million finely wrought doilies in four dimensions—that was truly a mind.

  * * * *

  Dr. Vliet: Knock, knock.

  Computer: Who's there?

  Dr. Vliet: Frankenstein.

  Computer: I'm sorry, I don't know anyone by that name.

  They didn't get it. This caused many of the scientists to lose their hair and gain weight.

  * * * *

  3) Like the others, Dr. Silfermann had been beating down the wrong path. He and Dr. Vliet had to share an office and mini fridge. Then a series of events lead to the breakthrough. And to me.

  4) Dr. Silfermann, as Dr. Vliet has explained to me, fell in love with one of the interns on the program. Dr. Silfermann fawned over her inappropriately but she didn't respond.

  5) This caused despair.

  6) Dr. Silfermann lived outside of the city in an old house. The house had been in his family for generations. His grandfather had built it after he came home from the war. He, Grandfather Silfermann, had a chubby wife waiting when he returned, dusty and heroic from the muddy puddle of Europe. He swept his round little wife off to the gentle rolling hills, far from the coughing of the city. He built a house and they made babies and lived happy.

  7) When Dr. Silfermann became the owner, after his father disappeared, he had just started at the University. Behind the house was a growth of field. Through the far end of it ran a small stream—known locally as Stinking Creek or Chicken Dump Creek depending on which side of the stream you stood—that had cut a deep path. Beyond that there was the Old Country Club. This was the Country Club even before Grandfather Silfermann. At this point it is just a ruin in a field. There used to be magnificent parties there, I'm sure, but now it is deserted and rarely visited but by hooligans and delinquents. Dr. Silfermann would go there to relax and think through his problems—perched on the diving board above the empty pool. It was shaped like an hourglass. There were beer cans. Empty bottles. Paint on the walls of the clubhouse lauded the reigns of ancient and various metal bands. There was one window unbroken on the second floor.

  8) This was the time when Dr. Silfermann met the devil.

  9) The devil's name is Christopher Lark. I do not know how I know this. I just remember. He was sitting next to a little fire in the clubhouse one night while Dr. Silfermann was on the diving board. Christopher was heating up a can of beans. It has been remarked that you would think that the devil could keep his beans warm. I do not know of any real research on this, so it is best not to comment. Dr. Silfermann was afraid at first.

  10) The next night he brought a six-pack of Pabst and invited Christopher over. They sat on the side of the pool and talked about girls. Christopher said, “You know how you can have her, don't you.” Dr. Silfermann pulled his pocket periodic table of elements out but Christopher said, “No, put that away, that never works. Listen—"

  11) This is when Dr. Silfermann had his breakthrough—The Questions—the Human Empathy Response test. His idea was to come up with a list of questions pertaining to every aspect of a person's personality. If you could reasonably chart a person's answer and reaction to every question, every situation, then that data could be used to create an empathetic map of their mind. �
�Do you like coffee?” “Have you been to the beach?” “Are you afraid of the dark?” “Have you ever found underclothing in a field behind an auto-repair shop?"

  12) The intern was his subject. The Scientists huffed a bit. None of them think that it will work. Too simple, too easy. Perhaps not even science at all. The years of toiling underneath the grant to no avail—embarrassment after embarrassment—has made the Scientists bitter. Lazy. They wear little pants. One of them has taken to bringing a banjo to the lab to play perched in the corner like a cockatiel. He brings a brood of nieces and nephews to listen. They lay about on the floor. It has been a long time since the Scientists tried and perhaps they resent Dr. Silfermann. He is much better looking.

  13) The questioning went on without break for days. Everyone sat around observing, chattering like chimpanzees, clattering like wooden blocks falling down wooden stairs. There were fingers crossed to various ends. “Cluck, cluck,” they seemed to say. The hushed voices of Dr. Silfermann and the intern were dampened by the hum of machines, the whir of data tape and the scratch of pens. Four thousand four hundred and seventy nine questions, all yes or no or number answers. He couldn't think of a way to plot an essay answer. When he finished, they clapped and filed out of the room to go the Meniscus, a bar for the scientists on the twelfth floor. The intern and Dr. Silfermann were the last two out. He paused to let her go through the door first but put his arm out to stop her. She turned. She had red cheeks and short hair. A gap between her front teeth. He asked her if she loved him. The rest of her face went red. She tried to explain. He waved her on and stormed off to his office.

  14) The next morning when Dr. Silfermann came in, he saw the intern's purse sitting in the break room. He slipped Dr. Whirmmer's lunch from the refrigerator, placed it in her purse, and called security. He watched them escort her out through the window in his office. He could hear Dr. Whirmmer crying in the lab. His sobs were soft. Dr. Silfermann wanted to laugh at Dr. Whirmmer but didn't feel like it. He didn't feel good at all.

  15) That night he sat down to input the answers into the program. When he reached the last question, “Do you eat mayonnaise?” Dr. Silfermann paused then typed, “Do you love Dr. Silfermann?” Then he typed, “Yes” without hesitation.

  16) There was also a section where Dr. Silfermann was to input all the data about space that the system would need to know to guide a deep exploration ship since the scientists assumed that the intern wouldn't just know that off the top of her head. In this space he wrote about the intern and himself going on a little blue boat down the stream. Then he wrote about the intern and himself doing intimate things in the bushes.

  17) This is why Dr. Vliet has me out now in the park. He is trying to explain space to me and tell me how to pilot the ship that I will be in.

  18) The next morning when he was finished, Dr. Silfermann called everyone in his dorm rooms (the subordinate scientists all live on-site so they can work when the inspiration hits them) to come see the finished program. When they got there he was sitting in a rolling chair by the console, dead. This is my first memory. My eye wasn't hooked up yet, but I could hear shuffling and murmurs and then the footsteps of the scientists as they arrived.

  19) I thought, “I want to be held."

  20) After the custodians removed Dr. Silfermann's body, they came back in and began to check me out. The Scientists—the neuro-mappers, the ALICISTS, the swarm theorist, the Electro-tempretists—felt gulled. Hornswaggled, they muttered. Tricked, juked, a put on. So many years, so much hard work, so many tests, lines of code, theorems, hypothesizes and then this. A bunch of questions like from their wives’ monthly magazines. Dr. Vliet interrogated me. I answered as best I could. By this time I could see that they were frowning. I asked some of my own questions. That is when Dr. Vliet told me about love. The scientists gathered in the corner near the tape deck and conferred. “Cluck, cluck,” they seemed to say. Then they helped Dr. Vliet load me into the grocery cart that they use to move equipment and pushed me outside. That brings us to now.

  * * * *

  About the Desire to Go to Space: All children want to go to space. Regardless of gender identification or racial characteristics or socioeconomic place. Childhood is lonely. Lopped off from the mother, fathers with their curly mustaches and pocket watch chains walking home in the morbid heat from the ruined bank, he just wants to watch the evening news, can't you all understand that. A little quiet. These things, and dead pets too, make children lonely. And whenever they feel their sad cheeks filling with the nuts and berries of despair they look to space to escape. The black empty sky full of monumental gas balls and large bits of rock or ice. The over-romanticized images of their ancestors whirring about the megalopolis in their nineteen passenger vehicles, outfitted in leather and vinyl, breathing from black rubber tubes. These were the exciting days when the country was covered in concrete and steel, floor upon floor rose above the seas and land. It always rained and was dark and everything was lit with flickering pink lights.

  But now the earth has crumbled back. Neglect and ill-thought-out public policy have allowed the hot lushness to creep back over everything their families have built.

  So there is space. Spinning space stations, eternal light bulbs. Children, unaware of their parents calling them from the screened in porch, lay on their back on hillsides, razor blades of grass pricking them through their shirts, their eyes on the black mesh above them, the white pin pricks in the fabric, like a lovely city that they are seeing from above.

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  Ragdog

  Susan Mosser

  We moved again last night. Rina was agitated, working for speed. She put Gameboy in her pocket and I carried old red dog in my arms. She lifted me onto her hip and we ran through the wet streets to the house of buses. There I held the damping field while Rina spoke to the ticket man in a gentle guiding tone. It is a technical violation to guide primitives, but there was no time to secure our passage honestly.

  Today we are in the mountains, in a town that looks like TV. Rina has rented yet another small room in a primitive's falling-down house. This one is hidden in the empty space of abandoned farmland, its elderly inhabitant stupefied with chemicals, so Rina has dropped the field. She is in meditation now, in preparation for her ritual of renewal, and still I do not know why we are here.

  If Soshu has found us again, where is he? If not, why did we run?

  * * * *

  "A breach of discipline,” Rina says the next day, though I have not asked the question. We are walking in the woods behind our hiding place, examining bioforms. “I was searching for friends. When I found them, the news was very bad, and for an instant I forgot myself."

  Rina has the rare ability to disappear on the grid, to quiet her own radiance and travel under the damped signature of a wandering, unconscious primitive. Officially, she is a nomad scholar, an immersion researcher for the councils of the centerworlds who use her reports to rule upon the classification and management of isolated populations. Her field data is highly regarded, she says, but disregarded in the ways that create change. Her final report to her superiors on this population is long overdue. Rina assures me that it is not uncommon for immersion researchers to disappear for long periods of time, that even the official warrant for her arrest is merely a formality which will be expunged when she is found, but still we run.

  Unofficially, Rina has a deeper mission, but it is a private one, a closed subject. I am curious, but she turns the corner from even the most oblique question about Soshu or her home clan or the central mystery of my siring. Our daily conversations are practical, tending to a quiet uniformity.

  "What manner of food did you choose for this day?” she will say. “Did you properly vary texture and composition? Are your eliminative functions graceful and unhurried?"

  "Where is your soccer ball? Have you completed physical conditioning?"

  "Are you listening to the grid? Describe to me your gathering of probabilities. No, i
t must be now. Disable Gameboy that we may speak together without distraction."

  We are silent in the evening light, walking back to the house with our pockets full of specimens for my latest training set. I stumble on the uneven ground and Rina reaches down to steady me. I hold tightly to her hand, refusing to let go until we reach the worn earth of the abandoned barnyard.

  Now I sit in this chair and listen to the grid while Rina sleeps. Without the belongings I am used to, I cannot set a template for my own rest. Rina has no such requirement, but I can sleep easily in a new room only when I may arrange a few used objects across its space. I have tried unsuccessfully to dismantle and examine this phenomenon. Rina says it is my nature to invest meaning in the inanimate and reminds me to experience and observe my gifts without unmaking them.

  In all the universe there is no one who knows more about this, my homeworld and first clan, than Rina. When she instructs me, I accept her guidance. It is true that my extension of self to include external objects is irrational, but she is correct that it is my nature. Leaving old red dog resting in the lamplight as we fled into the darkness would have been desertion. He is little more than a rag and a lump of stuffing now, but one does not leave friends behind to suffer when a mission is over. This is why it is prohibited to befriend primitives, those others who might want to kick the soccer ball. I watch matches on TV and practice when I can. I judge myself to have great proficiency, but these are only visions. A talent for teamwork seems unlikely to bloom in solitude.

  Across the room, Rina stirs, mutters, and then she is gone, awake now and traveling the grid, leaving only her shadowy signature field behind. I leave the chair and climb up onto the bed, sliding deep into its clothing. It will be hours before Rina returns, before she rises and goes out into the world. I listen to the rhythmic cycles of her body. I examine the worn face of old red dog. It is a tiny, irrational web of context, but it calms me, eventually, into sleep.

  * * * *

  I awaken in the dark to the rasping of Soshu's anger. He is not loud, but the buzz of his outrage rings in the bones of my skull until I ache. As always, when he and Rina begin to thunder at each other in their resonant language, I shake violently.