Join (31 page)

From across the room, they
hear someone loudly clear his throat. Don had left while they were talking and is now approaching them carrying a large double-layer flat cake.

“All right,” he says loudly, “there are other things we need to do today!”

Hamish closes his eyes and smiles. “Don,” he says, “right now?”

“Yes. You may not know it down here in paradise, but the days keep passing out there in the phenomenal world. And today is the day!”

“Please, forgive us,” Hamish says to Chance and Leap. “I'm sure this will be more than you anticipated.”

“Carrot cake!” Don says to Hamish. “Your favorite. It's not real cream-cheese frosting this year, but it's pretty good.”

Chance and Leap are momentarily speechless. Then Chance says, “Cake?”

Don steps close to Hamish and stands, waiting for the older man to lean back so he can lower the cake to the table. “Yeah,” Don says, “it's the birthday of the world's first join.”

“Now?” Hamish asks. “Can we wait a little while? I think our guests still have questions.”

“Well,” Don says. “A couple of the little ones have to go to bed soon.”

“Ah,” Hamish turns to Chance and Leap. “You'll have to indulge us, I'm afraid.”

Chance says, “But it's February, right? The first join happened in May.”

“That's the story,” says Don as he sets the cake down. “But this is the real anniversary.”

Elicia is now standing beside Don. Around them are gathering Marco and Emily and many other people whom Leap and Chance haven't met yet, including several children. Only a moment before, their discussion with Hamish had felt intimate and close, but now they're surrounded by movement and noise. A young boy briefly tries to get Leap One's attention but then disappears, and other children are dodging one another while the voices of men and women rise and fall with a constant and comfortable regularity.

Elicia has begun placing candles in the cake. There's a burst of loud laughter, and a child's hand repeatedly creeps toward the cake while Elicia swats it back.

Don moves around the table toward Chance Four and Leap One. He raises his voice so they can hear him over the greetings and talk of the others. “Hamish says he joined Derek Okoro two years before the official date,” Don says, “and that it happened in February, not in May.”

Hamish, who is now fielding multiple congratulations, takes a moment to interject. “Yes, Derek and I joined in February, forty-two years ago. More than two years before the official date.” Then he turns back to the others.

“You see?” Don says.

Elicia has lit the candles, five of them.

“Hamish is a join?” Chance asks. Don gives her a sidelong glance as Elicia works to get people's attention.

Chance wants to ask about Music again, but Elicia is calling out, “Quiet, quiet everyone.” Then she says, “Ready?” She lifts her arms and brings them down, and the group begins to sing “Happy Birthday” to Hamish, who smiles broadly.

After the cake, the tables
are cleared, folded, and then stacked near the wall with most of the chairs. The gathered crowd makes quick work of the cleanup, and when they're done the room seems much larger than it had. Chance estimates close to a hundred people in the room, and there's still space for a quickly assembled platform and an open area in front of it. The flush, bright light fades to a softer glow. The group still seems to be growing.

Hamish produces a banjo, and a few other people—including Elicia, who plays guitar, and Marco, who summons an upright bass—spend a couple of minutes organizing themselves on the raised platform and then launch into a snappy folk tune. Chance and Leap have moved to seats near a wall and are feeling separate from the celebration but thankful for it. The band, led by a woman whom they haven't met, follows with an energetic set.

People are dancing, improvising steps. It's clear that this kind of thing isn't unusual. There's an occasional, disorganized line dance and a single, disorderly attempt at calling from the band that ultimately dissolves into laughter. Don joins Chance and Leap, but the room is noisy, and the two of them are hesitant to interrupt the festivities with their several remaining questions.

Though obviously tired, almost morose, Leap finally tells Don that the party is a welcome distraction. Don steps away from them for a few moments. Chance Four says, in a voice she hopes only Leap One can hear, “You're doing well.”

Leap One relaxes. With his beard short and his hair not fully recovered from the Ritual of Retirement, his jaw looks heavier, and his eyes are sunken and shadowed.

“You looked pretty bad,” Chance says, “when we got here in the hovercraft.”

“I felt like hell,” Leap says. He watches the band as he talks. “Still do. When I woke up in the hovercraft, I got confused. I thought, just for a minute, that I was sick again. That I was trapped in my old, sick body.” He pauses, staring silently at the musicians, then says with a deadened voice, “Instead, I am—this. I have many bodies, and every one of them is just worn out.” Leap stops speaking, as if following the thought further would be too taxing.

Chance Four doesn't say anything. She looks down at her hand—strong, reddish brown fingers tapering out from their broad bases. Chance wants to move closer to Leap and put her hand on his shoulder, but she can sense the work Leap is doing to hold emotions in check. She moves her chair closer to Leap One—an awkward, jerky motion as the chair scrapes across the floor of the mess hall.

The band plays a blues
number, sung by a guitar player they don't recognize, who follows it with a danceable rock song. After that, Hamish steps forward to sing a sweet and shaky rendition of “It's Only a Paper Moon.”

When the song ends, the crowd applauds loudly, and he takes a short bow.

Don has returned and is staying close to Chance and Leap, but not so close as to be intrusive. After Hamish's song, Chance Four stands and steps closer to Don to ask why there were five candles on Hamish's cake.

“Well, you do that too, don't you?” Don says.

“What?”

“Number of candles equals the number of people who joined.”

“Hamish is a join of five?”

Don fidgets, rubbing the back of his ear and then scratching his temple lightly. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose, yes.”

“What do you mean?”

Don runs a hand across his chin as he faces the band. Then he says, “This probably isn't the place for it, but”—he pulls a chair closer so he can sit facing Chance and Leap—“you two have made a pretty big effort to get here. I don't think we should be keeping secrets. It's really for Hamish to tell you, but, well, here's the thing. Hamish is Hamish Lyons, Derek Okoro, Qi Wei, Marina DelThomaso, and Duff Berjer.”

Chance knows every one of those names. Anyone who has done join science knows them. She says slowly, “That doesn't make any sense. It's impossible. Every one of those people was a join with Music. The bodies of three of them were drives that were killed by the meme virus. Duff Berjer's autopsy was the first finding of reflective prion growth.”

“Yeah,” says Don. “Look, I'm not an expert. I don't know how this stuff works. Hamish was part of Music, but . . . he separated. He just, he wasn't part of Music anymore. He says he doesn't know how it happened. The network connection failed or something. He was the first join, and the protocol developed a lot after that. He says that might be significant. But he is a continuation of all those five. He thinks the five of them were replicated, in him, and in Music.”

Chance Four says, “And in someone else.”

Leap One turns to Chance. “What do you mean?”

Chance says, “Marina DelThomaso was a philosopher. The only one on the original team.”

Chance can see the thought taking shape as Leap works through the implications. Leap One's face wrinkles into an expression that Chance hasn't seen before but that appears to be extreme disbelief. He says, “Rope?”

Chance turns to watch the elderly man playing banjo. The singer is delivering a lovely, quavery rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The room's artificial light is very close to early evening light. It has a natural, cool quality, but it comes from light strips that line the walls and stripe the ceiling. The effect is that of limpid, golden sunlight, but without the clear contrast of early evening shadows. It comes from every direction at once, filling the closed room.

Chance Four says, “Rope and Hamish are the same person.”

“No,” Don says, “of course not. Not the same. But maybe they both separated from Music.”

The band's tune bounces against the stone walls and reverberates softly, giving the sound an odd, additional solidity. The effect of the music and the sourceless light is of a strange, dreamlike world in which sound hangs almost palpably, a familiar presence in a world of denatured time.

Don looks over at the band.

After several moments, Chance Four says, “You're a feral community throwing a party for someone who invented Join. And if Hamish is a join, then why is he living here, with you?”

Don says, in a tone that remains conversational, friendly, “Some of us don't like being called ferals. To our faces, at least. As if we were animals.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Don says. “He saw what was happening. How joins were—not paying attention. He saw the effect on those of us who hadn't joined. He says he's trying to influence the Directorate's priorities, and he thinks he'll be more effective from outside the Directorate. He's helped us. He's tireless. He built this.” Don motions around the room. “Or planned it, showed us how to build it. Arcadia. He improves it all the time. It's actually pretty hard to live here. We wouldn't be able to do it without the things he does.”

Chance feels as if a world she had thought was comprehensible has been revealed as a facade. She knows it's a temporary emotional state, but the effect is so strong that everything she's sure of, even probability itself, seems at that moment like irrelevant artifacts.

The man playing banjo may be Hamish Lyons, though Hamish Lyons should no longer exist. He may be a separated join, even though such a thing has never been recorded. He may be the same person as the psychopath who killed Chance Three. Whoever the man is, he does have the face of Hamish Lyons.