The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  Day Two

  “I thought I should call you both at once. Trina’s OK.” Janet was the first with the news. “She’s still under, but the operation worked. I’ve talked to the hospital. They won’t know for at least six hours about her mental state and stuff, but the mechanics are fine and she’ll live.”

  “I thought they were going to contact me,” said Diana, stupidly.

  “They don’t do that until 9am, though, and I asked a nurse yesterday—they already know if she’ll live.” Janet was half-apologetic. “I thought you’d rather know.”

  “And maybe get some sleep,” said Antoinette.

  “Only if you do,” suggested Diana. “I’m not the one just out of hospital!”

  “Not this time,” agreed Janet, her voice evincing slight sarcasm. “But if you don’t rest, then you will be.”

  Diana sighed. Janet was right. She hadn’t slept all night, worried about Trina, worried about Judgement, and just plain worried. Six hours of sleep wouldn’t hurt. Besides, she could give Janet and the secret-spilling nurse a point between them, for making the lives of others easier. This wasn’t a point she could give if she hadn’t become so very human, and this worried her, but the fact was, immersion was part of Judgement and objectivity (which would be, if one were actually human) wasn’t. So she gave a point, went to bed and slept, unsoundly, for six hours.

  Diana was still tired when she woke up. Her head felt heavy and her body had to work very hard simply to stand up straight. Janet had been right about her overdoing things. And sarcasm wasn’t as good as irony for making truth palatable, but it worked. What she wanted, above everything at this moment, was to return to the confusion of twenty years ago, with the half-memories and the feeling of safety.

  Her messages included one from the hospital. Trina was conscious but needed quiet for a bit. Visitors could come by in two hours. Diana was torn between relief that Trina was conscious and petty concern that she’d wasted all of the morning and some of the afternoon. Diana had a Judgement plan, after all, and it had so far not been followed at all.

  It wasn’t going to be followed. No Parliamentary Question Time, no observing people from a park bench, no random shopping incidents. Instead, she would spend the next two hours getting Trina a care package and sorting out more of her own third path idea.

  This idea was impossible, really. It consisted of rendering Judgement on her other people, the ones that had sent her here. It meant hacking into the system from three directions, to get past approvals and safety measures. It was, in fact, abysmally complicated. But she was going through the motions of Judgement and was programmed (inside herself, right from the beginning) to Judge on that particular day in that particular way and she wanted an extra choice. She needed an extra choice.

  Later scholars would wonder, at this point, if she knew that Judgement was programmed to kill her if she chose to free Earth. Or if she knew that Earth was doomed whatever her verdict. The answer was, she didn’t. She was full of mistrust since the failsafe had proven to be false, however, she might as well have known, for all the difference it made to what she did.

  This is my opinion and I shall stand by it. And my reconstruction in this section is more reliable than others because we have so very much information about that last week, but I still can’t get inside Diana’s mind. I am, as ever, making suggestions on her thoughts and feelings based on detailed observation of her physical reactions and words, adding that to her psychological profile and adding in my own supremely intelligent assumptions and deductions.

  Now that you know that I’m here and it isn’t some random stranger telling you these things, I shall efface myself again. This is the second last day before Judgement and it’s too important for me to ramble away. So many aspects of this last week make such a difference in the equations. In the story, not so much. Story heads towards a particular place and we’re almost there. At this stage, there’s nothing to prove. There is no test to make. We already know that there will be Judgement and that the outcome is fruitcake. This is the weakness of story. This is why Earth was doomed: we knew they used story. My own experience just demonstrates how very dangerous story is.

  Moving from story from me to story from someone else is also hard. I should be able to recount the conversation where Trina boasted about her radioactive diamond battery, the one that would keep her going for five thousand years. I should also be able to explain the events in the hospital and how the nurses carried the day when a doctor nearly killed Trina by mistake, and how another nurse remembered Janet and thought she was back in the cardiac section rather than visiting a friend.

  I can’t. I’ve lost it all.

  What I did wrong was to begin to translate the material into maths. I tried to save myself by distancing myself from the story I was telling. This was a very strange experience. I’m so used to putting myself in story now that I am not comfortable doing otherwise. I’m so used to not putting myself into maths, on the other hand. I’m trapped between two worlds.

  This ought to be a temporary aberration. A mere diversion. It isn’t, because it strikes me now that I need to adjust my equations. Diana experienced this. She experienced it in a far more difficult situation than mine.

  She was living a human narrative and had been telling herself human narratives about it for decades. Her human friend was translated into story the moment we gave her a rare illness that starved her heart of function, and the records are clear that this was intentional; Diana noted it down as suspicious at the time, in case everything was investigated and she was not there—all precautions she took, which is why we know so much about her thoughts those last days, and again, I digress—it’s very hard to think clearly when one is between states of thinking. Let me return to the heart of the subject. Diana was living fully as a human. Judgement is made in an interim state, the moment when story and sums come together, in this instance. Diana was obviously working in her own way, the way she was expected to, in the interstices for this potential third judgement of hers.

  Her being poised between those states is as critical to fruitcake as her realisation that there had been gross and unethical interference in the proceedings. This is what brought about the third option. Three options in constant tension, with none of them providing good outcomes—this is the essence of fruitcake.

  Human story tells us how the fruitcake came about. Narrative is a useful tool. The pressure and the poise and the elegance and the danger of fruitcake: this can only be expressed through the most subtle of mathematics.

  Humans cannot be like us. This elegance is beyond them. From this point of view, the Judgement should always have been to destroy humanity. This is all the more so since Diana took on story and lived in story and was overwhelmed by story and was unable to calculate clearly because of it. Look at what English and narratives do to my mind. This corruption was potentially the lot of all of us.

  That’s where we are now. At the crisis point. Diana was compromised and her thinking corrupted and this was not as bad a thing as it should have been, for it exposed vast breaches of ethics.

  I need to return to narrative and tell this in order.

  Day One

  I can’t do it. I can’t return to story. I’ve lost most of Day Two, and most of Day One.

  I mine events for my analysis and cannot keep the sequence straight. And that’s just an excuse. I don’t know how Diana managed when things became impossible, but I can’t even manage to keep her impossible days straight. I want to break them down into component parts for proper analysis, and yet I get pulled in emotionally and…this is one of the most important days in the history of the fruitcake, and the recent history of so many planets, and it’s so very messy and so very small.

  I can’t keep it straight. I know all the events. I know nothing about them as story. I’ve lost that human touch.

  I’ve given my recommendations and
I’m getting out of this and yet I can’t stop tracking, day by day and accounting for Judgement. I hate story. It won’t let me go.

  There were coffee and chocolate and hampers from Antoinette.

  There were yellow flowers involved. Janet produced them. Our interference tried to make it look as if the flowers attracted the attention of someone who was off their meds and who then attacked Janet, but two nurses intervened (one by pushing a trolley at the culprit) and Janet escaped almost unscathed. The flowers were spread across the floor. Diana noted: “A lizard dressed in human skin tried another intervention,” but it really wasn’t that simple.

  All the closest people to Diana had been attacked, just before Judgement. What gets me about this is it means that someone at our end understood humans and still wanted to play this farce.

  Deep knowledge, stupid politics, and human skin: the anthro­pological service. The service was trying to push Diana. I knew this when I began my study, obviously, but I hadn’t mentioned it until now, for the strands of influence had to be properly disentangled.

  These are the ingredients. We have techs who wanted profit; we have a political group who wanted social change; we have poor management; we have another political group that wanted to remove Diana; we have policies towards colonisation that included murdering Judges in order to take useful planets without controversy. We have fruitcake.

  The whole colonial service has been frozen for sixty-one years because of this and I do recommend that it remain frozen until all my recommendations have been met. I have placed the full list in a separate document. A small percentage of them can be found in this document, which gives you a sense of how I’ve reached those conclusions.

  They knew humanity better than anyone, but obviously they didn’t know Diana. It didn’t work the way they expected. Fruitcake became bigger.

  I can’t tell this properly.

  I’ll try sequentially again. Maybe it will help.

  Janet nearly died. Diana—who knows how?—deduced that the would-be murderer was one of us.

  This new crisis pushed Diana beyond all decision. She tore up the piece of paper containing the marks that were supposed to determine the fate of humanity. She gave the lizard the biggest dressing off s/he’d ever experienced. This lizard (and why I’m calling t/hem a lizard is Diana’s influence—we are not lizards—not in any way, but Diana’s nickname has rubbed off and everyone calls us this now) was my rearing-uncle, which is one of the reasons I joined the anthropological service.

  Now you know how I was recruited into this mess. Now you know that I can’t tell this part of the story because I have one of my own: I’m trying to atone for my family’s attempt to kill a planet.

  I’m like Diana was at that precise point. I can’t deal.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll handle everything. I’ll make my decision from scratch and be damned.” Diana said this aloud, so I’m certain of it.

  Before she went to bed, Diana laid the table ready for the next day. She put out her coffee cup and set her coffee pot ready near the stove. She took out cutlery for both her husband and herself, for there was strength in memory. Then just one glass for juice. Next to her glass, she put the daisy in a tall thin vase. Next to the daisy, she put one of the chocolates Antoinette had given her the day before.

  The rest of the table she covered with papers. Her journals. Her calculations. Her newspaper clippings and web printouts. Everything she had collected over the years put into paper form. This made up most of the bulk of the paper, but only covered half of the table. The rest of the table was dedicated to specific analysis for each decision and, in smaller piles, the way to bring each outcome into effect. One pile was for “I never see my clan or my burrow again” and the other was for “Die, Earthlings!”

  These were not their official names. The official titles for the two options had mysteriously appeared in her mind when the feeling that it was time the Judge also appeared. Programmed language, Diana wanted to joke, but this really wasn’t a joking matter.

  Unsurprisingly, the official terms had a clear bias in favour of destroying Earth. Just as well she’d given up on allocating marks for good behaviour. No-one behaved well. Not her own species, not the lizards, and really (if one were honest about the species overall), not the humans. Judging them on ethics was as dubious as judging them on potential to corrupt, in her mind. And yet she had no choice.

  The Judge didn’t simply hand the decision over to minions. She pushed the button herself. The spaceship would collect her after her final report, she knew, even though she also knew, in reality, that something would go wrong. The lizards’ time of betrayal was upon her. Diana was almost ready to Judge on that, too.

  The main impediment at this moment was still her own mind. She wanted to be fair to everyone. She wanted to go home. She had no choice but to Judge.

  This meant that there was one last pile of important concepts that had to be dealt with. Diana thought about them while she laid out her clothes. With her clothes, she had two yellow scarves, as possible choices to accessorise. She read her notes through before she went to sleep and then let her sleeping brain mull over them.

  As she prepared for bed, she allowed herself the luxury of pretending her husband was still with her. She chatted with him. He was puzzled.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Just something I have to work through, dear,” she answered. “Don’t let it worry you.”

  “You’ll clear it up by dinner?”

  “Of course”

  She put on the pendant he’d given her before her last birthday and wore it to bed. Her memory of him teased her about this, but nothing came of it. They slept comfortably together.

  He had never been aware at any point that his wife was an alien, nor that she would one day decide the fate of his best friend along with every other human. Diana’s errant mind interpreted this into the feeling that he was with her the whole time. That he grumbled at her in the middle of the night, when a car alarm went off and again when he thought there was someone at the door.

  His imagined grumbles and laziness kept her sane and helped her get some sleep. She didn’t want a vigil—she wanted a normal night. If it was the last night for humanity, she wanted to share it with him.

  Diana woke up, refreshed, ready to destroy Earth. Or not.

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Y/N

  A simple question.

  You’ve had years to work on a clear decision. We have no more time.

  Answer. Now.

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Will the world end?

  Y/N

  This was the programming. This is what humankind faced.

  Diana woke up and yawned. In her mind, her husband was still asleep.

  Quietly she slipped out of bed, washed, dressed, made herself toast and coffee. They’d laughed so many times that he would sleep through the end of the world if it happened after 3am. He woke up from the sound of a dropped pin until that hour, and then he slept solidly until everything was almost too late. Today it was better he sleep. Today it was better that she not acknowledge that one single truth. The other truths would swamp her if he weren’t there, in bed, safely asleep, waiting for her to come home. His murder was intended to divorce her from Earth, so it didn’t happen.

  She had work to do.

  Diana looked at the slightly withered daisy on her dressing table. Next to it was a large stack of notes. She had forgotten them. This was her clever idea from three weeks ago. The one she had nea
rly trashed because it was so damn chancy. The one she’d worked on whenever she could in the hope of doing the job she ought to have been sent to do, rather than the job she was actually sent to do.

  Diana nodded to herself and skimmed through that last pile. As she read the papers, she walked both herself and her notes into the kitchen and finished making and eating breakfast. Then she looked at the other piles.

  Her memory was as intact as it had been in months. It wasn’t a bad day to make a decision. It would never be a good day, but it wasn’t a bad day. If she was missing anything now, it was not going to be in the final decision. But her notes had been compiled over various stages of memory, and today she remembered every single one of them.

  Today she was able. Not willing, but who would be willing to do any of the things she had to do?

  The pile of papers by her bedside was the one that intrigued her. It was filled with formulae. Not Earth maths—her own maths. It was part of her forgotten, highly political self. It was quite possibly the main reason she had been turned into an anthropologist and her memory erased. Today, she clearly knew why.

  A good day after all. She had realised the need for this solution before, and had made a third option viable.

  Diana smiled. It was a slightly bitter smile. “I have the option to save Earth. Not just one option, but two, if I play my cards right and deceive those damn deceivers,” she said to herself, aloud. “But if I take my path rather than either of theirs, I am going to make those lizards wish they’d done things differently. I may be spending the rest of my unnatural life on this planet, but everyone back home is so going to wish they had never decided to Judge it.”

  This was the moment when she accepted, absolutely, that going home was so dangerous that it was safer not to risk it. This is when three became two again.

  Diana walked through the arc door two hours later, as planned. The daisy from the table was in her right hand, in her purse was the chocolate, around her neck were both yellow scarves. In her left hand was a list of instructions she had written for herself. She knew it would get by unseen. The lizards had never once paid any attention to notepaper for, after all, it was only unprinted paper. Humanstuff of the kind that was not of any interest. She had tested this many times. She always got her work material back after Download: it wasn’t sexy enough to steal. This meant she didn’t need to trust that fallible memory of hers for any equations or any action.