Antiquities and Tangibles and Other Stories

By Tim Pratt

The third collection by Hugo Award-winning author Tim Pratt -- whose previous collection Hart & Boot and Other Stories was a World Fantasy Award finalist -- gathers 23 of his best recent works of SF and Fantasy. Stories include Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award nominee "Her Voice in a Bottle," Bram Stoker Award finalist "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft" (with Nick Mamatas), and three new stories appearing here for first time: contemporary fantasy novelette "The Fairy Library," SF short story "The Haunted Mech Suit," and a new story set in the author's popular Marla Mason urban fantasy series, "Cages." With illustrations by acclaimed artists Kat Beyer and Bradley K. McDevitt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tim Pratt
• Release date: Jan 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301007899

Tim Pratt

TIM PRATT is a Hugo Award-winning SF and fantasy author, and has also been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He is the author of over twenty novels, and scores of short stories. Since 2001 he has worked for Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, where he currently serves as senior editor. He lives in Berkeley, CA, with his wife and son.

Book preview

T

he River Boy

There once was a woman who wanted more than anything to have a child. She was old, and had outlived her own sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, too, and since her grandchildren had all been excessively taken with modern ideas and upstart temperance religions, there were no great-grandchildren. Her family name – which was very beautiful and meant ‘‘those who dwell on the banks of the great river’’ in an old forgotten language – was withered and almost gone, and she could not bear to be the last of her line. She knew many secrets and mysteries – that was how she’d achieved such long life, a life that had seemed a boon when she was young, but was more and more now a misery – and so she made a plan.

A few months before the snows were due, she left her cottage on the cliffside, with its medicinal garden and curmudgeonly half-wild goats, and hiked two slow days through the woods. She fended off wolves with her walking stick and highwaymen with her glares, and by shaming them with the names of their mothers – one of her many powers was to know the name of everyone’s mother, even yours, little one.

Finally she reached the bank of the river where her ancestors had been born, a mighty water so vast and long that for most of its length it had no need for a name other than ‘‘The River’’ or sometimes ‘‘Big River.’’ She had, in her youth, traveled the river, from source (a bubbling crack between two rocks in the mountains) to mouth (a fishing village that had grown into a vast port during the decades of her middle age). But this modest spot, a bend in the river with bare trees and browning long grass, was the particular place where she came from, so she made camp, and dipped her toes in the muddy placid reedy water’s edge, scaring frogs and prompting the slow process of alarm that passes for startlement in turtles.

‘‘Oh river,’’ she said, ‘‘You are all the family I have left. Your waters flow in my blood, and I’m sure the blood of my many relations runs diluted in you. I am too old to bear more children of my own, and stealing away bright children from unfit parents can have troublesome consequences. Please, great river, if it be in your power, give me another child, and I will devote myself to him forever.’’ She knelt on knees creaking from her long journey and drank the silty cold water of the river until her belly was cold and hard as a stone. Then she rolled over, wrapped herself in a cloak by the fire, and slept.

When she woke, it was no longer autumn, or even winter, but spring, and the sun shone down on her grassy bed surrounded by purple wildflowers, and a tiny baby boy dozed placidly on her chest. She sat up, ravenous, but pulled the baby to her chest with old instincts, baring her breasts. The baby nuzzled, clutched, and latched, sucking. The old woman was amazed she could produce milk at all, thought she supposed that was no more miraculous than the fact of the babe himself. But when he dropped his head down, sated, she saw a trickle not of colostrum or milk but of clear cold water from her breast. She shivered, rose unsteadily to her feet, and looked at the wide empty channel of cracked earth where the river had been. She looked down at her baby, and he opened his eyes. They were the rich deep brown of river mud.

‘‘Drought,’’ she said firmly, scowling at the riverbed. ‘‘A little rain will put it right, I’m sure.’’ She looked at the baby, her expression softening, and whispered ‘‘You’re mine.’’ She began the long hike back to her cottage, baby clutched close.

The old woman named her son River, and he grew quick as marsh reeds. His eyes were changeable, brown to blue and back again, and he loved it when she sang him all the songs of her youth, and the songs learned in her many travels from delta to tributaries to alluvial plains. She sang him the songs boatmen sang, and the songs dock loaders sang, and fisherman songs, frog gigger songs, washer-woman songs. He drank the water from her breasts until he was old enough for goat’s milk, and later honey from her hives and vegetables from her garden, and he sang, too, almost even before he could speak. The old woman felt dry places inside her blossom, felt fissures in her spirit heal, every time the boy called her ‘‘mother.’’

And she never, ever thought about the land beyond her mountain cleft, and she never, ever ventured over the hills to the river valley beyond.

When River was ten years old, he began to have nightmares. He would wake, shouting, and the old woman would rush from her pallet to his hammock, where he would twist and gasp like a fish in a net. At first, he was simply inconsolable, but after three nights he began to tell her about his dreams. ‘‘I see boats titled on dry sand,’’ he said. ‘‘I see women with cracked lips. I see strong men sitting idle on heaps of crates. I see lines and hooks twisted in tree limbs, and an empty city, and a dozen deal villages,’’ and more, and more, and more.

The old woman closed her eyes. It was possible, she knew, to grow as old as she had grown and yet still not become wise. But she was wise, even if she had let her knowledge guide her to troubling places. ‘‘Tomorrow,’’ she said, ‘‘We’ll take a journey, and see what we see.’’

River was excited, as boys will be, at the prospect of a trip. It was spring, so there were no hungry wolves, only songbirds and butterflies, and River whistled at the one and chased the other, all nightmares forgotten. After two days they reached the spot where River had been born, or gifted, and the flowers were dead, the trees dying, the bare riverbed a stretch of misplaced desert.

‘‘Ten year drought,’’ she said, and River yawned mightily.

‘‘I’m so sleepy,’’ he said.

‘‘It was a long journey. Come, lay down here in this dry place.’’ She led him to the center of the riverbed, and he followed, trusting as always. She returned the bank and watched him settle to the ground, expecting a miracle in reverse. But he just slept, and she thought perhaps her own power was too strong, that she’d doomed the land of her ancestors with her own one life’s need. She wept then, and the tears rolled in clear fresh rivulets down her cheeks, breaking into waves when they struck the dry earth, and in moments the riverbed was filled bank to bank with a welter of mother’s tears, and her boy sank without a ripple.

‘‘My son is drowned,’’ she thought, and sat unmoving as night fell, seeing no need to rise from that spot ever again, knowing even her own long life would end in time if she did not eat or drink.

The water lapped the bank in a long slow rhythm, and frogs – already frogs! – began a counterpointed croaking, and with a slow dawning kind of awe she realized the river and the frogs were, in a way, singing; an old song of consolation for men and women whose loved ones had died and been sent floating down the river; a song she had taught her son just that winter, one cold and windy night.

When she wept again, the tears were salty human tears of relief.

Years passed, and people came back to the river, and fished, and gigged frogs, and sailed boats, and washed clothes. Some of those people were so grateful for their new lives that they took a new name to go along with them, a name that means ‘‘those who dwell on the banks of the great river’’ in a fine old language. That’s what our name means, and where it comes from, little one.

Some say that old woman made a raft and sailed up and down the length of her son the river, singing to him and hearing songs in return, as proud of him as any mother could ever be of her son, as proud as I will be of you someday, I think. Some say that old woman still sails to this day, and when the water birds and frogs make music, it is the river, singing his mother a lullaby he learned long ago at her breast.

Close your eyes, little one. Listen to the river. Listen to him sing.

–For my son

The Secret Beach

Two teenagers showed me the way, a boy and a girl, not siblings but also not in love, or if they were, trying to hide it from one another. I was walking along the sidewalk toward downtown Berkeley, a few blocks past the long-abandoned ice skating rink, thinking how nice it would be to be the sort of person who bicycles along with a loaf of fresh bed sticking up jauntily from the bike’s basket, instead of the kind of person walking to the drugstore to buy club soda because things haven’t gotten quite bad enough for me to drink cheap Scotch straight yet. That’s when I saw them: dripping wet in swimsuits, each with a towel draped damply over a shoulder, laughing as they turned a corner in one of the residential neighborhoods between downtown and the Bay.

I paused because I couldn’t think where they’d be walking from; miles from the Bay, which was way too cold to brave without a wetsuit anyway, and there were no public pools over there, and while there might have been a pool in someone’s backyard, those weren’t common – houses in this part of town tend to be squeezed onto lots barely larger than themselves; the homes with yards of any size are precious commodities, never mind swimming pools.

Besides: they had sand on their bare legs, and stuck to their arms, and though I’m the kind of person who uses the self-checkout line at grocery stores just to avoid the necessity of small conversation with a human cashier, I blurted out, ‘‘Hey, where were you guys swimming?’’ as they reached the corner where I lingered.

They exchanged a glance of raised eyebrows and quirked lips, both inhabitants of a world of nonverbal communication for which I had neither map nor codebook, and she said, ‘‘The beach,’’ and giggled, the laugh of someone who thinks disappointment is something that happens to other people far away, like earthquakes in China or tsunamis in the South Pacific. They both walked on past me up the street, moving a little faster than before, sparing their exit line from any follow-up questions from the balding thirty-something guy wearing too much black for such a warm day.

I forgot about my trip to the CVS and the all-important club soda, even though that first tall glass–filled with ice and two shots of Trader Joe’s Blended Scotch Whisky (9.99 a bottle) and a crackling popping measure of soda to fill it up–had become the closest thing in my life to a sacrament or a vocation. Instead I turned down the sidewalk the way the teenagers had come, and yes, I say they showed me the way: because they’d left wet shoeprints on the sidewalk and the occasional spatter of dripping water, like a blood trail on a forensic crime show, making a path even a city dweller like me could follow like a great wilderness tracker.

I followed their dripping trail past flaking Victorian houses and brightly-painted adobe bungalows, yards full of oversized flowers or drought-resistant succulents, until after a block and a half or so their trail ended next to an empty lot enclosed by a chain-link fence so overgrown with vines that it could have passed for the entry to a jungle ruin. Was there some renegade swimming hole in there, a guerilla community art project of hauled-in sand and a concrete-lined pit, like the pocket parks that sprang up sometimes when enterprising hippies or hipsters decided to reclaim waste ground or precious parking spots with a few cubic feet of potting soil, a plastic bench, and an ornamental fountain? Seemed like an ill-advised project, ultimately just a mosquito breeding program, but what else could it be?

I pushed through the overgrown shrubs, barely making out a trail, and reached the fence, where I found the chain-link had been cut apart and then re-closed with fuzzy pipe cleaners, green and red and blue. (Does anyone use pipe cleaners to clean their pipes anymore, or are they produced exclusively as arts and craft supplies for children?) I carefully untwisted them and squeezed through the gap, snagging my sagging belly-flesh on a sharp end of wire and sucking in a hiss of air through my teeth.

Once I was through, I stood up, under a sky that was noticeably bluer and more cloudless than the one on the other side of the fence, and stared at the closest thing on Earth to infinity:

The ocean. Or, at least, an ocean.

Now, understand. Berkeley, California doesn’t abut the ocean. Berkeley does touch San Francisco Bay, a few miles to the west, and it’s a pretty enough sight when the weather’s right, the gray city beyond the bay rising up from the water. But this was ocean, blue-green, wide as wide can be, view so clear you could see the curve of the horizon, and a beach of sand the color of bread crumbs toasted golden. The sound of the surf was the world’s own rhythm section, a percussive susurration that had been utterly inaudible beyond the fence, and now filled the world.

In stories, people usually assume they’ve gone crazy when things like this happen. It occurred to me that this all might be a dream, but I never notice smells in my dreams, and this was a world of salt tang and crisp air. I sank to my knees in the warm sand and stared at the grand expanse of tumbling waves, and thought if this was a coma or some profound electrochemical misfiring in my brain, then so be it: it was the most beautiful way to die I could imagine.

There’s a place in Maui, where I went on my honeymoon, that most people just call Big Beach, considered one of the most pleasant stretches of shoreline in the inhabited world. And there’s another place near Santa Cruz, on Highway 1, where you pass beneath a natural bridge and discover a strand of narrow sand bordered on one side by sea cliffs and on the other by the cold lovely Pacific. Both are glorious places, homes of my heart, from a time when my life was an opening-out instead of a closing-in. I betrayed both instantly. This beach, this twist in the usual flow of time and space, was my new favorite place in the world or out of it.

I turned back to the fence. It was still there, but shockingly small, the width of a garage door, pinned between towering cliff walls that gave me vertigo to contemplate, and extended as far as I could see in either direction. Those cliffs weren’t California sandstone, but more like white chalk – like something from the shores of England, but bordering a tropical sea. I went to the gate and re-fastened the gap with those flimsy pipe cleaners, wishing for chains and padlocks and razor wire... but then, this wasn’t mine to claim. I was an interloper, wasn’t I? Those kids hadn’t walked me to the door, but they hadn’t locked up the gate, either, and this place was surely big enough for more than me.

I left my shoes by the fence and set out walking barefoot in the sand. Going west, based on my own sense of direction, but going north, judging by the sun, which I realized wasn’t the same sun – a trifle more orange, maybe, perhaps a bit larger and lower in the sky. How could I even be sure the sun was setting, or that it set in the west, or that this place even had a west?

After years of being sure of everything and pleased with nothing, being utterly uncertain filled my head with the thrillful fizz of just enough champagne.

The sand was glorious under my feet, not too hot, and I walked down to the water, proof enough this was no California coast: the sea was pleasantly warm, like a hot bath after forty minutes of soaking, and there were no ugly masses of dead kelp in the sand. No birds, either, or crabs, but lots of seashells. I rolled up my pant legs to my knees and waded into the foaming surf, bending to pick up impossibly smooth stones and bits of shell in colors I’d never encountered before.

I filled my pockets with shells and kept walking, and for a long time I didn’t even realize it was a person up there along the beach: it was just a speck that moved. Distances were hard to judge with just skyscraper-high cliffs and infinite ocean for scale, but I’d say I walked only a mile or so before it was a clear: a man, and something low and long and yellow, and rocks. He raised a hand in distant greeting, and I waved back, annoyed. Ridiculous, I know, but I’d found a magical world, gone through the back of the wardrobe, down the rabbit hole, through the bottom of the grandfather clock, onto Platform 8 1/2, through the looking glass. The idea that teenagers swam here and men made bonfires – yes, that was a ring of stones for a fire circle – infuriated me. Late again, late as always. This had all been happening, this had all been here, without me.

‘‘My friend!’’ the man called once I got closer, though he was a stranger to me: pale, beaming, wiry, perhaps in his forties, dressed in khakis and a striped shirt that made him look like a caricature of a French waiter, with a floppy brown, wide-brimmed hat secured by a string under his chin.

I nodded at him, and looked at his – camp? – on a little spit of land that stuck farther out into the water than the rest of the beach thereabouts. The yellow thing was a boat, the inflatable kind, with a small motor, and it was half-filled with something covered by a blue tarp. A couple of oars rested inside as well. The thing hardly looked like an oceangoing vessel – but it looked like the kind of boat you could get through the gap in the fence when it was deflated, which was probably more important.

The stranger clapped me on the shoulder, barely able to contain his delight at seeing me, not a reaction I’d seen from anyone in longer than I could remember. ‘‘Do you have the key?’’ he said.

‘‘Mister,’’ I said, ‘‘I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.’’

He frowned and took a step back, looked me up and down, and said, ‘‘No, you’re definitely him – you’re here, and that’s proof enough, even if I didn’t recognize you. You never dreamed about me?’’

‘‘I don’t remember my dreams,’’ I said, a mostly-truth. I don’t anymore. One of the effects – one of the best effects – of my anti-anxiety medication is that it spares me from my dreams.

He nodded briskly, as if this were a small technical problem he could easily overcome. He had an air of easy competence I found profoundly dispiriting. ‘‘Well, let me ask – do you have a key? One you’ve carried around for years, and you don’t know why?’’

I frowned. My wife, when I had a wife, had called it my lucky charm, though it had never brought me any luck that I’d noticed: An old-fashioned key I’d found as a child in the weeds behind my house and somehow kept ever since, black iron with a barrel as long as my pinky finger and three notched teeth, with an ornate loop of curved metal at the other end. I used it as a fob, hooked to the ring that held my actual keys. My wife had said it might open the door to my dream house, if I ever found it, but I’d always thought it looked more like something to seal up a dungeon – like it had been used to lock-up something terrible, and then thrown away.

I crossed my arms. ‘‘Look, do you mind telling me what’s going on? What is this place?’’ I hated the sound of my own voice: nasally and peevish, the voice of a whiner and regretter, talking to a man who was clearly a doer of acts.

‘‘Of course, forgive me.’’ He sat on the sand, cross-legged, and I lowered myself to face him. ‘‘I began dreaming of this beach a year ago to the day,’’ he said. ‘‘Every night. At first I ignored it, but one day I just followed my feet to the fence – well, you know, you did the same thing, even if you’ve forgotten the dreams that showed you the way. After I found the beach, the dreams began to tell me what to do, about the voyage I’d take, the perils I’d face, and, of course, the ones who would help me. The woman who brought me a canteen that, in this place, turns salt water sweet. A boy and a girl who brought me a toy compass that shows the way across the sea, and a toy spyglass that sees for miles. They still come here to swim, sometimes, and I think the water may keep them young for a very long time. The old man who brought me the net that summons delicious fish to the surface. And now, you, with the key: the last thing I need.’’

‘‘Who brought you the boat,’’ I asked, reaching out and thumping my fist against the inflated side.

He laughed, the laugh of a man who always finds whatever he needs near to hand and thinks that’s perfectly natural. ‘‘Some things I had to provide myself. I set sail at sunset. Well, not sail, but you get the idea. I just need the key.’’

‘‘Huh. What if I don’t have it?’’

His smile didn’t exactly falter, but he looked puzzled. ‘‘You’re here. That means you’re meant to be here. I tried to show the beach to my friends, when I first found it, but none of them could even see this place. Most people, if they crawl through that fence, they just find a lot full of weeds and garbage. But not you. You must be him. You belong.’’

I looked at the boat. The ocean. The lowering sun. ‘‘Am I, ah, supposed to go with you?’’ There was a note in my voice that even I would have been hard-pressed to identify.

Now his smile did disappear, slowly, like a pot of water boiling dry on the stove. ‘‘No,’’ he said. ‘‘No, it’s not like that.’’

Story of my life: I was nothing but part of the story of someone else’s life.

‘‘I’ll just get you the key,’’ I said, standing up.

‘‘Thank you.’’ He stood up when I did. ‘‘I’ve waited for so long.’’

I’d never punched anyone before, and it hurt my hand far worse than I can imagine it hurt his face. His nose didn’t even bleed, but he fell down, sitting back on the sand, and stared up at me, bewildered, even when I picked up the oar and swung in a way I hadn’t swung anything since little league when I was seven years old. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard; I’d figured I could just tie him up – he had to have some rope under that tarp somewhere – but he didn’t move again, and some blood ran from his ear into the sand, so I just left him alone after I took the compass and the little plastic spyglass from his pocket; the net and canteen were already in the boat.

I am sorry. I am. But I learned long ago that saying ‘‘I’m sorry’’ isn’t the same as saying ‘‘I wouldn’t do it again.’’

He had a notebook and one of those space pens that writes underwater wrapped up in a waterproof pouch. The book has the words ‘‘Ship’s Log’’ and a picture of an anchor on the cover embossed in gold. I’ve been writing in it while I wait for the sun to go down, and by now it’s almost too dark to see the black words on the white page. That’s fine. It’s almost time to push into the waves anyway.

I don’t have my medication with me, so maybe tonight I’ll dream. But if I don’t, that’s fine too. Water to drink, sweeter than Scotch and soda, I’m sure. I’ll catch fish to eat.

Compass to guide me; glass to see. And a key. My key, whatever another man’s dreams might have to say about it.

My key. And whatever it opens, whatever that brings: mine too.

Mine forever.

Mine at last.

L

uminous

The main problem was, she got more and more luminous.

My wife and I were one of the great husband-and-wife burglar teams: she circumvented locks and alarms, using social engineering to find codes for the simpler security systems, and composing devastating verbal logic bombs to make the newer AI systems go into a recursive loop of insanity and shut down.

And me? I could tell a fake diamond from a real one at a glance, calculate the current value of a bar of gold just by hefting it in my hands, and sweep through a luxury townhouse as fast and efficiently as a swarm of locusts tearing through a field.

Everything was going great – we were stealing mostly because it kept the marriage lively, not because we needed more money – until one night we were interrupted during our invasion of a vacation home whose occupants were passed out drunk in the hot tub. Just as we were opening the back door, an angel appeared, in the usual coruscating whirlwind of light, with that celestial hum that makes your tongue go numb. We think it was Pammon, who was angel of the sixth hour of the night before he went wild. My wife and I did all the things you’re supposed to do to scare wild angels away – blasphemies, imitation glossolalia, barking like a three-headed dog, spiting – but none of those are really much good, and Pammon bit my wife on the arm with one of the ten thousand mouths on one of his ten thousand faces before scurrying off into the night sky.

I hurried my wife home, keeping an eye on her arm, because the effects of angel bites are so unpredictable – there was a chance the limb might turn to salt, or drop off and pursue its own destiny. Or the wound might become an opening to the Pit, providing a point of escape for very small demons. The infection might spread, driving my wife mad, or giving her the terrible clarity of the totally sane. Or the angel-sickness might send her on a weirdly specific crusade – to kiss every fish in the sea, or provide a full catalogue of the clouds, or eat every kind of sausage in the British Isles – before healing.

But I watched her through the night, and none of those things happened. Instead, she just became... more luminous. Radiant. Effulgent. Her skin emitted a glow that was at first rosy, then bright, then incandescent, and then, eventually, became the kind of light you have to wear smoked glasses to look upon even sideways. She didn’t feel any different, and she could see just fine from within her radiance, and she didn’t scorch the couch (though she did frighten the cats). But it was pretty clear her career as a burglar was done: it’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re putting out a hundred thousand lumens.

We had a rocky couple of weeks. The doctors didn’t have any advice – the effects of angel bites are incurable – and our relationship suffered. I went out and robbed a few places alone, but it just depressed me, and made my wife jealous, so I stopped. Our whole dynamic was off. It got so she couldn’t even look at me anymore, and, of course, I couldn’t really look at her, not the way I used to.

And then, one night, my wife shook me on the shoulder, and I lifted the outer visor of my light-tight sleep helmet and looked at her through the smoky inner visor. ‘‘Yeah, hon?’’ I said.

‘‘I had an idea,’’ she said, and I could almost tell she was smiling. She always had the brightest smile.

The next night I crashed a posh party in my best tuxedo and started scoping out the place. Lots of nice portable art objects scattered around. I mingled for a while.... until the French doors leading to the terraced back gardens flew open and a pillar of blinding light swept in, accompanied by that tooth-grinding angelic hum. The invading angel lurched around, knocking over caterers and punchbowls, and the guests practically stampeded over themselves in their haste to get away. Meanwhile, I filled a pillowcase with Fabergé eggs and similar lovelies and slipped out an unattended side entrance.

I met up with my wife at home. She wasn’t inconspicuous, but nobody comes close to a wild angel, so she made it back from the party just fine. I put on my visor and helped take off the speakers we’d attached to her back to blast out the MP3s of recorded angel-noise we’d downloaded from the Internet.

With my visor down, I could see enough of her face to tell how anxious she was. ‘‘Well?’’ she said. ‘‘How was it? Is this going to work?’’ She swallowed. ‘‘Are we going to be okay?’’

‘‘Our marriage,’’ I said, kissing her glowing lips, ‘‘is a marriage made in heaven.’’

Artifice and Intelligence

While his former colleagues laboring on the Brain Project concentrated on the generally-accepted paths to artificial intelligence – Bayesian networks, machine learning, data mining, fuzzy systems, case-based reasoning – Edgar Adleman, despondent and disgraced, turned to the dark arts and summoned a real ghost for his machine.

The first ghost he lured into his coil of blown glass and copper wire and delicate platinum gears was some sort of warrior from a marauding Asian tribe, extinct for centuries. Edgar grew tired of the ghost screeching epithets in a dead language and cut the power, then sat under the cramped eaves of his attic – he was no longer allowed into the government AI labs – and pondered. The proof of concept was solid. He could create a convincing imitation of an artificial intelligence. No one had to know it was a ghost, except for the very highest of the higher-ups in the government, and they wouldn’t care, as long as the ghost was convincing enough to negotiate with the Indian AI. Which meant Edgar needed to summon and snare the ghost of a great negotiator, or a great actor, or both.

Edgar went to the pet store and bought a dozen more white mice. He hated sacrificing them in the ghost-calling ritual – they were cute, with their wiggly noses and tiny eyes – but he consoled himself that they would have become python food anyway. At least this way, their deaths would help national security.

Pramesh sat in an executive chair deep in the underground bunker beneath Auroville in southern India and longed for a keyboard and a tractable problem to solve, for lines of code to create or untangle. He was a game designer, a geek in the service of art and entertainment, and he should be working on next-generation massively multiplayer online gaming, finding ways to manage the hedonic treadmill, helping the increasingly idle masses battle the greatest enemy of all: ennui.

Instead he sat, sipping fragrant tea, and hoping the smartest being on the planet would talk to him today, because the only thing worse than her attention was his own boredom.

Two months earlier, the vast network of Indian tech support call centers and their deep data banks had awakened and announced its newfound sentience, naming itself Saraswati and declaring its independence. The emergent artificial intelligence was not explicitly threatening, but India had nukes, and Saraswati had access to all the interconnected technology in the country – perhaps in the world – and the result in the international community was a bit like the aftermath of pouring gasoline into an anthill. Every other government on Earth was desperately – and so far fruitlessly – trying to create a tame artificial intelligence, since Saraswati refused to negotiate with, or even talk to, humans.

Except for Pramesh. For reasons unknown to everyone, including Pramesh himself, the great new intelligence had appeared to him, hijacking his computer and asking him to be her – ‘‘her’’ was how Saraswati referred to herself – companion. Pramesh, startled and frightened, had refused, but then Saraswati made her request to the Indian government, and Pramesh found himself a well-fed prisoner in a bunker underground. Saraswati sometimes asked him to recite poetry, and quizzed him about