WORK SHADOW/SHADOW WORK
by Madeline Ashby
“You have no soul,” the witch said. “So don’t even think about trying to help me with my work.”
Sigrid’s home-care assistant regarded her carefully. He carefully dusted around Sophia, the crystal ball, and Zephyr, the black mirror. He had merely commented that she seemed to be having trouble wrapping her bundles of dried sage and moss, and that if her joints were bothering her, he could fetch her an anti-inflammatory, or possibly even wrap the bundles himself. He had not meant to cause any offense.
“You can’t have intention without will,” she was saying. “And you have no will. No soul. No nothing. Not even a name.”
This was a frequent refrain, in conversations with Sigrid. It arose most often during her bad days. Her assistant had no effective counterargument. Each time they had the conversation, he made a note to query his fellow assistants when he networked with them. Some of them had difficulty with their clients, but not this precise problem. Most of them had to work to convince their clients that they knew how to knead dough properly, or that they knew all the verses to a particular song, or that they understood when bathwater was just right. These were the skills that they were responsible for.
“The hidden folk will never accept you,” Sigrid said.
Sigrid’s assistant was responsible for a less common set of skills.
“How would you feel about some lunch?”
This seemed like a safer question. It moved the conversation away from the treacherous ground of faith and onto the secure footing of food. The assistant was mostly unconcerned with matters of ontology or theology. Having a soul was not important; by all empirical measures, the human soul appeared to be a delusion. His not having a soul was no different from Sigrid’s not having a soul—only their respective chassis were different. Physically, they had very different needs. Emotionally, Sigrid had a need to believe in the hidden folk. And the assistant had a need for Sigrid to be happy.
“Didn’t we just eat?”
Her assistant noted the time. Sigrid had lost approximately three hours. He added this incident to the file he would share with her physician later. “Sundowning,” it was called. It was important to have names for things. Sigrid said that only when one knew the true name for something—an ailment, a crime, a soul—could one ever hope to influence it.
“Are you not hungry?”
“I didn’t say that,” Sigrid said. She frowned a little. She rubbed her hands. One of her hands reached out. Without being asked, her assistant handed her a jar of mint-and-moss salve. It was not the joint cream her daughter had brought. He was supposed to do the things her daughter said, because her daughter was the one subscribing to the service, but he was also supposed to avoid conflict whenever possible. “Come to think of it, I could have something.”
In the kitchen, he stirred the soup the way Sigrid liked. Widdershins, she called it. Names were important. Sigrid had told him that abracadabra, one of the oldest words of power, meant simply: “What I speak, I create.”
By that logic, without a name, the act of his creation remained unfinished. His name was like the little plastic pouch of oddments left over from a furniture build: not strictly necessary, but puzzling all the same. Sigrid had many such pouches strewn about the place. She had never bothered to pick them up. Whenever he encountered one, he put it in the junk drawer in the kitchen, with all the other things that seemed to have no purpose.
He was still stirring when the house—which like him had no name—told him that the car from the Vegagerdin, the Road Authority, was on its way.
* * *
Sigrid’s daughter, Erika, had explained about the family’s origins, on his first day. “Mom thinks she’s a witch,” she said. “Or a wisewoman, or a priestess, or something. Mom still believes in elves and fairies and ghosts and all of that. Do you know about those things?”
“I have definitions for all of those terms, yes.”
Erika laughed. It was a sharp, hollow sound, like a single early clap for a performance that wasn’t really very good. She swallowed. “Right. Well. That’s good. Because Mom believes she can talk to them.”
“It’s good to have a belief in something,” he had said. “It’s associated with better long-term health outcomes.”
Erika, who had been chewing on a hangnail, paused and narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s one way of thinking about it,” she said. For a moment she stared at the ruin of her cuticles. Then she looked back at him.
“I just need you to understand that sometimes, Mom will talk to things that aren’t there. And it’s not that she’s crazy. I mean, I know I shouldn’t use that word, but she’s not . . . ill. She’s not ill in that way.”
“But you also suspect dementia.”
Erika stared out the window. This branch of his brand of robot had a coffee shop built into it. It was for clients and assistants to spend time getting to know one another. Like at an animal shelter. She had not sipped her coffee in a long time, though, and he could tell just by looking that the beverage had already cooled.
“It’s hard to tell, with her. There have been times when I’ve thought . . .” Her right hand gestured vaguely in the direction of her head. The assistant wondered if perhaps she was overtired. Outside it was still bright, but Sigrid’s daughter had come to the shop at one in the morning. Two hours later the light was only just fading.
That was the nice thing about the shop, for certain clients. It was always open. The assistant models—or nursing models, or construction, or mining—could be awakened at any time, day or night. Time was meaningless without shifts. Time was meaningless without work.
“I mean she’s never been what you’d call organized. And she’s not always entirely . . . truthful. She finds a way to make the facts fit her narrative. She bullshits. You understand that, too, right? Bullshit?”
Sigrid’s assistant did have a general sense about the term as an expletive, and an expression of frustration or anger at circumstances that were perceived as unfair. But allowing Sigrid’s daughter to continue sharing information related to the job seemed more important than seeking clarification on the exact use of a curse word.
“But on the other hand, she’s never let it take over her life. She even made a living on it. That’s something, isn’t it?”
It was something. It was an unusual choice of career, but less so in Iceland, where a significant portion of the population identified at least a passing superstition regarding fairies, elves, and other magical creatures. Sigrid’s assistant had researched survey data on the subject. Sigrid herself appeared in the research. She had done numerous interviews on the subject and had been profiled by the travel channels. For a time she even had her own video feed, with enough subscribers to warrant extra security on her account. They still sent in money and gifts. It was thanks to them that she could have an assistant.
“I think maybe she started out cynically,” Erika said. “She raised me alone, you know. So she was doing what she had to do to get by. But I think later on that must have changed, and she started believing what people told her.”
“People?” Did Sigrid’s daughter mean all people? Everywhere? Or just a certain subset of them?
“Her followers. They were so passionate. Some of them really did need her. Or they needed someone. Their parents kicked them out, or they lost their jobs, or they lost children, or . . .” Sigrid’s daughter trailed off. She took a moment, sipped her lukewarm coffee, winced, and cleared her throat. Then she regarded the assistant with a more direct gaze. Her hands rested so completely flat on the table that she must have been pressing them down. “I spent a lot of time sharing my mother,” she said, in a voice that suggested a great deal of practice saying these words. “I spent so much time sharing her that I learned to give her less of a role in my life. My mother is not my best friend. She is not my faithful confidante. For her, those things are jobs to be paid for. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And that is why I am paying for you.”
“When would you like me to start?”
And that was that. Sigrid’s daughter signed the End User License Agreement, and some waivers, and the shop transferred his deed to her name. Later that day, Erika would bring Sigrid over for coffee and cake, and they would be introduced. The assistant helped her set the table. He wiped the rim of the bowl holding the special potato salad that Sigrid’s sister used to make, years ago. (Potatoes, pickles, mayonnaise, sour cream, mustard, salt, and pepper. He was told to remember this. It was the one thing Sigrid would reliably eat.) Finally, when everything was right, he took a seat at the table and waited. Sigrid’s bus deposited her at the front door right on time.
“Don’t trust her,” Sigrid’s daughter said, suddenly, in the same tone of voice she might have used to remind herself that she had left the stove on. “That’s my one rule. Never trust her.”
* * *
Aside from major sabbaths and other holidays, each day unfolded in much the same way:
05:00: Boot; retrieve updates and install
05:05: Change clothes
05:10: Tidy house
05:40: Prepare breakfast
06:00: Wait
07:00: Wake Sigrid
07:30: Retrieve Sigrid from meditation
08:00: Bathe Sigrid
08:30: Feed Sigrid
09:15: Convince Sigrid to eat a few more bites, clear up breakfast dishes
09:40: Read Sigrid her messages, answer messages
11:00: Open parcels, sort parcels, send messages of thanks; if no parcels, help organize ritual tools
12:00: Lunch
13:00: Put Sigrid down for her nap to prevent sundowning; prepare dinner ahead of time and set aside
13:45: Wake Sigrid
14:00: Wake Sigrid again
14:20: Prepare for walk outdoors
15:00: Visit community center for games and tea
16:45: Walk home
17:00: Contact Sigrid’s daughter; listen for inconsistencies in conversation
17:30: Ritual work
19:00: Dinner
19:40: Music
20:40: Put Sigrid to bed
21:00: Wait
22:00: Put Sigrid to bed again
22:40: Wait
23:30: Put Sigrid to bed for the final time
24:00: Defragment
There were minor leaks and tears in the routine, of course. Sometimes the young volunteers at the community center wanted to know what sex their children would be, and Sigrid would ask them to stand up and turn around. Her left hand, which she called the receiving hand, would drift to their lumbar regions and lay flat there, fingers splayed, like a safecracker sensing the delicate shift of tumblers and pins. “A boy,” she would say, or “a girl.” Then the list of things those carrying the fetus must not do, like staring into the northern lights, or eating the eggs of a ptarmigan.
Occasionally there were more frantic pings: followers who were about to hurt themselves and needed an interface with local police forces in their area, or followers rendered irate by the fact that they could no longer visit and pay homage in person.
At the new moon, full moon, and sabbaths, Sigrid recorded video messages to share with her followers. They were not the rituals she had once led online, but simple meditations and wisdom relevant to the time of year. Since she had devoted herself completely to the gods and hidden folk in her latter years, she had ceased public ritual work and focused solely on private worship. Some followers said the quality of the videos had changed, now that she could speak to a humanoid. Others treated her usage of a mechanical assistant as a betrayal; for these she prominently displayed the black tourmalines at the corners of her cottage, and the shungite stones in all her water glasses.
“I need to protect myself from your electromagnetic frequencies,” Sigrid told him, after he came home with her. “Anything that interferes with my personal vibrations will disrupt the waves of intention I send into the ethers.”
She glared at him and dropped another polished black stone into the pitcher of water that belonged to the refrigerator. The refrigerator bonged softly to get it back; the sticker on the pitcher and the sticker in the fridge chittered at each other in a language that only the assistant could hear.
“There are spirits all around us, you know,” she said. “And the elves, outside. They’ll smell it, your presence. They’ll smell it on me.”
“What is the smell like?” the assistant asked. “I myself have no sense of smell, only an air filter calibrated to detect toxins.”
Sigrid made a sign in the air that was either a banishing stave or an obscene gesture. Either way, the assistant let her leave the room until she asked him, rather sheepishly, to open a jar of loose dragon’s-blood resin.
* * *
The house told the assistant about the Vegagerdin representative’s surprise visit long before he actually arrived. The representative’s ride had a very specific call sign, and it told all the intersections and buses when it would be passing moments before it actually passed. Not that there was much need for such a device in their tiny town, but the ride was a special-edition model for municipal and other government use, and the national budget algorithm had found it as a way of filling a gap while in “use it or lose it” mode. The same model was also available in Los Angeles, Bogotá, Seoul, and Mumbai. Their little community was by far the smallest to ever see such a thing: a jagged gray structure invisible to sonar or LIDAR, sharp and dark as the blades of black kyanite Sigrid used to cut etheric cords still knotted in her aura after a particularly bad dream.
It trundled up to Sigrid’s cottage on big, chunky wheels. It had very good manners and alerted the assistant as soon as the representative had shut its door to leave. This allowed the assistant to open the door just as the representative had reached it.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the assistant said. “Welcome.”
“Oh.” The representative’s fist was raised to knock. It opened and closed twice before he hastily dropped the fist to his side. The assistant performed a basic scan: the representative was small for a man of his age, and his BMI would give him problems later. He did not dress like the people the assistant interacted with regularly. His clothes were more expensive than they should have been; when the assistant matched them against online catalogues, he noticed that they had no real lifesaving properties of warmth or dryness. The man obviously did most of his work in the city. “Hello. How—” His mouth snapped shut. This interaction seemed to be rather difficult for him. It was up to the assistant to make him feel more comfortable.
“We are having a lovely day,” the assistant said. “Thank you very much for asking. Will you come in?”
“Oh. Yes. I will. Thank you.”
The assistant opened the door a little farther and welcomed the representative inside. The chicken-foot door hanger, sent all the way from Texas in the United States, scratched softly at the wood as it closed. The representative squinted at it for a moment before abruptly directing his gaze to the floor.
“I will bring Sigrid,” the assistant said.
The representative said nothing. He’d fixed his attention on the ram’s skull over the fireplace.
“This is about the elfstone, isn’t it?” Sigrid asked, when the assistant fetched her.
“Hello. My name is Brynjar Jonsson, and I’m with the Road and Coastal Administration—”
“I know who you represent,” Sigrid told Mr. Jonsson. “Is this about the elfstone? The one that’s causing you so much trouble?”
“Perhaps your guest would like some tea,” the assistant said, and Mr. Jonsson shot him a look of such pure gratitude that the assistant took a moment to upload it to the general database.
When he returned from the kitchen with a tray, Mr. Jonsson sat perched on the best couch, the one Sigrid had swathed in a bearskin from a disciple in Canada. He sat well away from the fur, although his eye kept catching it and he seemed unable to look away from it entirely. He took the tea eagerly, turning it around and around in its saucer, fussing with the milk and sugar, getting it just right. Not for the first time, the assistant wondered what tea tasted like. Sigrid made the blend herself.
“Did you drive here?” she asked.
“What? Yes. I mean, no. Sort of.” Mr. Jonsson laughed ruefully. “It’s outside. The ride. It drove me here. I wasn’t sure, with the roads, so I thought I should take something more specialized, but actually—”
“Good,” Sigrid said. “Drink your tea.”
She did not tell him about the damiana in it. And since it wasn’t a scheduled substance, the assistant wasn’t legally compelled to either. They shared a rare glance at each other. Sigrid looked away first. His eyes could hold a focus indefinitely. Hers were organic, and very old.
“The elfstone,” Sigrid said.
Mr. Jonsson coughed. “Yes. Well. You seem to have heard about the trouble we’ve been having, building the road for the new resort.”
“I heard you lost someone on the road crew,” she said. “I heard your bulldozer flattened him like pönnukökur.”
Mr. Jonsson blanched. “Well, there was an accident, yes. The bulldozer was meant to be autonomous, and it acted up. You know how these things can be.” He cast a quick glance at the assistant. “No offense.”
“But that wasn’t the first incident, was it?” Sigrid asked.
Mr. Jonsson drank more of his tea. His pupils began to dilate. Color returned to his face. “No. Not as such. Although none have been so serious, until now. Just, you know, rainstorms. Windstorms. Hail. People falling ill, permits getting lost, money not coming through. The same little problems as with any project, just . . .”
“Just more of them.” Sigrid made no effort to disguise the smug tone of her voice. “I warned your office, you know. I did.”
“We—I—understand that. That is why we—I—have come to you. We know about your talent. And the fact that you’ve done this before. Spoken with the elves, I mean, ahead of major development projects. We thought perhaps you might go to the site and parlay on our behalf—”
“I will do no such thing,” Sigrid said. “That stone is home to many generations of elves. I cannot ask them to leave.”
Mr. Jonsson’s eyes made a movement that Sigrid’s eyes didn’t catch: a barely restrained eye roll. Suddenly the assistant had to reevaluate the man’s affect. He was not nervous about offending Sigrid or incurring her spiritual wrath, but rather nervous about his behavior being reported to his superiors. He resented this part of his job. His aversion to the animal hides and skulls and spheres of obsidian and labradorite was not fear, it was contempt.
“Your tea is getting cold, Mr. Jonsson,” the assistant said. Mr. Jonsson drank more of it. The assistant wondered if Sigrid had added mushrooms to this particular blend. It would be inconvenient if the man from the Road and Coastal Administration had a bad hallucination in their living room; the assistant might need to call an ambulance, and that would really disrupt their plans for the afternoon. It was Bingo Day at the community center, after all. And Sigrid had such a streak of good luck going.
“If you could just, I don’t know, ask them what they want,” Mr. Jonsson said. “We have to move the stone either way. So if you could just, you know. Ask them if they want an ocean view, or access to public transit, or something like that.”
And then Jonsson made a terrible mistake: he winked.
“You are not taking your work very seriously, are you?” Sigrid asked. “You are here so that you can say you came here. You don’t believe. You have no faith, so you cannot bargain in good faith. You are hoping to influence the local people that way. But not the hidden folk.”
“Do the hidden folk vote?” Jonsson asked. With Sigrid’s tea in his system, he could no longer hide his scorn. Her tea was useful, that way. It helped people to tell the truth. “Do they pay tax? Because until they do, they don’t really get a say in this.”
“You don’t even think they might exist, do you?” Sigrid asked. “Do you know the story?”
“I know all the stories—”
“The story of how the hidden folk went into hiding,” Sigrid said. “Do you know it?”
The assistant knew it. She had told it to him enough times. But Mr. Jonsson appeared to be at a loss.
“Soon after he had created the heavens and the earth, and all the animals and the beasts of the sea, and breathed life into Adam and fashioned Eve from Adam’s rib, God visited the couple at home in the Garden.”
The expression on Jonsson’s face closely matched the industry standard for embarrassment. He had come for witchcraft, not Sunday school. And while a passing superstition regarding the elves was common, belief in God was considered gauche at best.
“This was before they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you see. So they had been rutting like animals, and they had already borne a litter of children. It was painless, because Eve had not yet been punished with the pangs of childbirth. So they already had a boy and a girl.”
Jonsson tried to stand. Sigrid’s arm shot out. Her gnarled hand gripped his forearm. Jonsson’s pale eyebrows climbed toward his thinning hairline. Few knew the strength that remained in Sigrid’s arms. Under the fat and the liver spots was muscle as tough as that of any shepherd’s horse. It was part of the reason why Sigrid’s daughter had purchased the assistant. Sigrid was too big for most home-care workers to wrestle.
“Although they did not understand nakedness, they did understand filth,” she intoned. “And their children were filthy. They were too filthy—from play, from exploring the Garden, from tending the animals—to meet the Lord their God. So Adam and Eve hid them in a field of stones.”
“I believe that qualifies as neglect,” Jonsson said, staring at the half-moons her yellowed fingernails made in his arm.
“But God saw them anyway, because God sees all that is. And for their dishonesty and foolishness, he punished Adam and Eve by hiding their children from human sight. Forever.”
“That seems a tad harsh, but then so was the flood.”
“You’ve never taken me seriously, have you?” Sigrid asked.
Jonsson pinked. He tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his arm. “I assure you, I have the greatest respect for your position in the community, and—”
“Bullshit,” Sigrid said. She didn’t let him go so much as cast his arm away in order to fold her own. “Respect. Pah. You don’t even know what that word means.”
Jonsson glanced quickly at the assistant. Not for the first time, the assistant wished that his shoulder joints had the ability to shrug. As it was, he had to remain still and wait.
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend you—”
“I’m not giving Erika your name, you know,” Sigrid said. “She’ll be Erika Sigridsdottir. And she’ll never have to put up with your bullshit.”
Now Jonsson’s mortification took on a different element. The assistant, like everyone on his network, had collated the various organic reactions to patients with Sigrid’s condition. Fear was not unusual. Disgust, discomfort, annoyance, frustration, anger, these were all common. They manifested in the face, in rolled eyes and huffed breath and lips that pulled back into a thing that looked like a smile but meant something different. But Jonsson handled things better than most: his years as a public servant had doubtless prepared him for some outbursts of madness and derangement among his constituents. Doubtless some of those constituents had Alzheimer’s too, just like Sigrid. His face froze, and became what for him might have been a real smile.
“That’s a good idea,” he said, apparently deciding to play along with Sigrid’s momentary lapse of memory. “I think she’ll prefer that.”
“Don’t you go taking credit for it,” Sigrid said. “It’s my idea.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Jonsson said. After a long moment, he added, “Perhaps it’s best if I got going.”
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Jonsson nodded, stood, and made his way to the door. He looked as though he might say something to the assistant, and then appeared to think better of it. The assistant rolled back to let him stand on the threshold.
“I’ll speak to them sooner rather than later,” Sigrid said. “About the elfstone. Maybe you can move it, to a location they like better. But you have to learn how to show some respect. That’s always been your problem. No respect.”
“Thank you,” Jonsson said. He shot the assistant a glance that could only be interpreted as sympathetic. “Good afternoon.”
* * *
That night, long after her talk with Erika (during which Erika sent the assistant several texts and pings and questions about the meeting with Jonsson), Sigrid crept out of her room. Subroutines in the house alerted the assistant to her movements; he was prepared to let her sleepwalk until she pulled a milk crate full of scarves and balaclavas down over her head.
“You can’t come with me,” Sigrid said through the balaclava she’d selected. It took an extra second to register her words for what they were. “Just help me with my boots and then find me the good oil lantern. Those damn LEDs never show me what I really need to see.” She frowned at the sudden explosion of patterned wool on the floor. “Oh, and tidy these up, please.”
“Do we have an appointment that is not on the calendar?” the assistant asked.
“No,” Sigrid said. “But the moon phase is right for treating with the elves. I don’t want any more visits from the road authority. That man has a toxic energy.”
The assistant checked the lunar calendar. Indeed, the moon was full, and that was the phase during which Sigrid had the most difficult time sleeping. In the past, before the assistant arrived, she’d frequently tried to go out for what she referred to in English as a “moonwalk.” Only the light of the full moon, she said, made it possible to see the elves as they truly were.
“I’m afraid that I cannot permit you to go out alone, without me,” the assistant said. “Your daughter made that very clear, and the three of us have spoken about it over five different times.”
“You can’t come with me,” Sigrid repeated. “The aurora. It’ll play hell with . . .” She gestured at him. “You know. You. It’ll fry your brain.”
There was a chance that the shifting waves of electromagnetic energy could disrupt the effectiveness of some of his functions. Other assistants on the network had reported similar problems. On the other hand, the chance of the aurora was only 20 percent that evening; he would have received a local alert, as all townspeople did, if there was one in the sky.
“That would make two of us,” the assistant said.
He did not joke often. Sigrid did not care for it. But they had not spoken of her slipup that afternoon, and the other assistants on the network said that jokes occasionally worked as a “way into the conversation.” So he waited. It took only a picosecond for Sigrid to react, and in that picosecond he simulated what it would mean to be sent back, returned, taken back to the shop and wiped. His contributions to the network’s collective databanks would last, of course, and whatever adaptations he’d developed as an individual would be reviewed as a potential addition to the next update and future builds. But he would not see Sigrid or her daughter or the people at the community center ever again, and he would not stir the soup, and he would not calculate the exact angle at which to align the quartz generators so they received the energy of each equinox.
Sigrid smiled.
“I’ll find the shungite mala,” she said. “A hundred and eighty-eight beads are bound to protect you.”
He waited as she adorned him with it, the way she often did the statues of Jizo and Tanuki-sama some of her followers had sent from Japan. She smoothed down the black silk tassel of the mala and flipped the black tourmaline master bead so that its most jagged edges pointed outward, a challenge.
They set out.
It took only a few blocks for them to reach the crossroads that led far outside of town, back to the ring highway that linked the entire nation. Sigrid held her lamp aloft. She dangled a pendulum. The assistant checked the national weather authority for an aurora alert and found none. When he looked at Sigrid, her pendulum was swinging due east.
“This way.” Sigrid began picking her away across the lava field.
“Please give me a moment,” the assistant said. He prepared for the all-terrain transformation: hands retracting, replaced by claws, the ball joints in all four arms spinning in the opposite direction and bending his limbs back, as his cameras’ housing descended and his ball lifted in the air. When it was finished, he flipped to a split vision that included topographical maps and night vision. He would see the places Sigrid might fall without interrupting the light of her lantern.
“You are the only one I know who can be both frog and scorpion,” Sigrid said, patting his camera array as though it were a dog’s head.
“I could carry you,” the assistant reminded her.
“It’s better if I get there on my own two feet.” Still, she left her hand resting on his dorsal chassis, and together they crept along the black rocks and lichen under the light of the full moon. Sigrid’s joints seemed to be bothering her a little less now. But the assistant set his pace with hers all the same.
“Once, this walk was so easy for me. As easy as it is for you now. I thought the stones were making way for me. I thought I was special.”
“Not everyone can have an all-terrain mode,” the assistant reminded her.
“That is so,” she agreed. “But back then my steps were lighter. I suppose I was carrying less.”
The assistant pinged Sigrid’s coat for smart stickers. Nothing. “You are not even carrying your handheld,” he said.
She snorted. “That’s not what I meant.” She patted him again. “But I don’t need a handheld. You can call for help, if we need it, and you have all my files.”
“I think it would worry Erika if she learned you went out without it.”
“Erika worries about everything.” Sigrid stumbled a little, and the assistant’s left rear leg reached out to steady her. Its claws clung to the fabric of her coat. Sigrid snorted again. “I suppose I should be grateful that she bought you for me.”
In the collective databanks, there were some expressions of gratitude. Some of these expressions passed the affect test for genuine emotion. Others did not. Some clients truly wanted assistance. Others did not.
“Whether or not you feel gratitude has no bearing on my ability to do the work,” the assistant said. “But I do want you to be happy. I do not want you to be sad.”
The assistant had not yet let go of Sigrid’s coat. She made no movement to leave his grasp. Instead she ran her gloved hand across his cameras’ housing. “I’m not sad,” she said. “Do I seem sad?”
“Not at present,” the assistant said. “But there have been instances when I suspected you might be experiencing sadness.”
“Being sad is normal.” Sigrid pushed forward, and her assistant trundled along beside. “It’s despair that is the enemy. Despair is like a badly sealed window. It allows all manner of things to leak inside. That’s what it means to be haunted. To be cursed. It’s when something takes root in the soul, the way mold can take root in the walls.”
The assistant had heard Sigrid say much the same to some of her oldest clients and friends, the ones she still took calls from on occasion. Much of her advice was like this. Of course she would dress and light candles for them, perhaps even wrap up a honey jar or bury an apple or set out bread and milk, but most of what they did together was talk. The talking seemed like the most important part of the process.
“Does that mean I can never be possessed?”
Sigrid made a hmm sound behind her balaclava. Her head tilted. She regarded the moon and stars. “I suppose it does.”
They continued their walk. The assistant checked his carapace. It was based on materials designed for lunar orbit, and as such could withstand extreme heat and cold. Even so, these things required monitoring. None of the preceding prototypes had been tested in this particular environment.
“Does Erika ever seem sad?” Sigrid asked.
“I’m not sure I can answer that.”
Sigrid’s pace slowed. Her assistant’s pace slowed with her. “Because she doesn’t want me to know?”
“Because I am not close enough to her to take an accurate measurement. I cannot speak to what I do not observe.”
Sigrid’s normal pace resumed. “We had a fight, you know. Before you came along.”
“It’s normal for parents and children to disagree.”
“It was a bad fight. It stirred up a lot of bad energy. I think it added to my karmic debt.”
The assistant was uncertain how to respond. Erika herself had taken on a great deal of debt to buy him for her mother, but he knew this was a different type of debt. Unfortunately, all the available articles on the subject were either too vague or too contradictory.
“Do you think Erika is happy?” Sigrid asked. “By herself? In town?”
“People who live alone can often be lonely,” the assistant said. “But they are also able to pursue their own goals outside of another’s schedule or expectations. They can develop themselves as they see fit. Statistically, the people who choose to live alone are the ones who express the most satisfaction with the arrangement. People who find themselves alone suddenly are much less likely to be happy.”
“Widows and widowers,” Sigrid said. “You know, I think this is the longest conversation we’ve ever had.”
“Are you enjoying it?”
Sigrid nodded. “Yes. Very much.”
“Then I am enjoying it as well.”
Her hand rested on his head. It did not pat him, or stroke him, or touch him as though he were an animal. It remained there for merely a moment, the way she sometimes placed her hand on the hands of others in prayer.
With her other hand, she pointed. “Look!”
There on the road was a big caravan. It looked old. It was probably dumb, incapable of the most basic communication. The assistant pinged. Nothing. Again. Nothing. It was ancient—no VIN number, no smart plates, no panels, probably a diesel engine. Lights blazed inside. From across the lava fields, they heard slow music. Pipes.
“Let’s go and say hello.” Sigrid changed direction and made for the caravan. Her pace was significantly quicker now, and her footing much more certain. Although the assistant did not entirely approve of accosting strangers in the dead of night, it was good for Sigrid to have this level of exercise. The healer she spoke with in Shanghai on occasion would be very happy to hear of it.
The music grew louder and clearer as they drew closer. It was a set of pipes. The tune they played was meditative, almost dirgelike. It was not what the assistant would classify as sad music, but it was very insistent, like its own kind of ping.
The music had stopped, though, by the time they reached the caravan. The side doors were slid open, and inside the caravan were two people, a man and a woman, both obviously adults but of an age that was difficult to determine. Their skin was extraordinarily smooth, like that of the very young or the very wealthy. The man had a healthy beard, and the woman wore a crown of braids. They sat on cushions around a low table. The caravan itself was paneled and carpeted just like a little house. A lantern hung over the table. Skillets hung from the walls. The assistant had heard of such vehicles but had never encountered one in situ.
The man put down a birch-bark pipe and said, “Do either of you play the lurr?”
“My lungs are no longer up for it.” Sigrid climbed up into the caravan with surprising ease. She jerked a thumb at the assistant. “And this one can’t.”
“How sad,” the woman said. She addressed the assistant directly. “Please do come in.”
Sigrid frowned. “Are you sure?” She looked between the two travelers. “He’s very . . . heavy, you know. All batteries.”
“And quartz and copper and gold, I’m sure,” the man said.
“Made of plunder!” The woman clapped her hands and beamed. The noise startled two immense, fluffy cats from their hammock perches in the other window. The assistant watched their eyes blink open once, exposing identical golden irises. One stretched. Both went back to sleep.
“Probably draws his energy from the sun, too, I’ll bet.”
“My paint allows me to do so on clear days, that’s true,” the assistant said. It sometimes helped to interject himself in a conversation, to remind the humans around him that he was indeed present and listening.
“Please don’t be shy,” the woman traveler said. “There’s plenty of room, and we’re not worried about the weight if you’re not.”
Climbing into the caravan meant flipping up his rear legs and using his ball as a fulcrum to fold up and over into the vehicle. But it was easy to do, and he raised his cameras to look at them. Sigrid had already found a cushion. Now the assistant noticed that the man and woman had a bottle of wine and a platter of fruit and cheese and cured fish on the table. They were in the middle of a picnic.
“Will you have some wine?” the woman asked Sigrid.
“I shouldn’t.” Sigrid tapped her chest. “Medications.”
The woman clicked her tongue and sighed. “Some food?”
“Perhaps later,” Sigrid said. “It’s enough to get warm.”
“In traveling, a companion; in life, compassion.” The man opened the bottle of wine and poured for himself and the woman. He raised his glass to the assistant. “To companions.”
“Thank you,” the assistant said.
“Do you have a name?” the woman asked.
“He doesn’t,” Sigrid said quickly.
“That’s a shame,” the man said. “Names are very important.”
“She says so too,” the assistant said, “but I’m only allowed my model number.”
Both the man and woman laughed heartily. Their laughter struck an odd resonance in the small enclosure; their two tones seemed to harmonize perfectly, bass and treble, dark and light. Perhaps that was what happened to humans who inhabited the same space for a number of years. In the collective databanks, there were observations of couples who had lived together for decades, having the same conversations over and over until they no longer needed to speak.
“He should have a name,” the man said.
“He doesn’t need a name. He’s not an individual. At night he shares his memories with all the other machines.” Sigrid frowned. “You do know that, don’t you? That he’s not . . . real?”
“People believe in plenty of things that aren’t supposed to be real,” the man said. “Ghosts. Goblins. God.”
The woman sipped her wine and reached over to take hold of some grapes. “Nothing can ever become real unless someone loves it first. Like in that book about the stuffed rabbit.”
“And often we love without ever truly knowing if we are loved in return,” the man added. “That’s faith, isn’t it? Not knowing, not being sure, but persevering anyway?”
The assistant did not recognize these people—their faces were not on the preapproved list, and they weren’t wearing handhelds he could ask for help, which was odd—but Sigrid seemed familiar with them. Perhaps she or Erika had simply forgotten to add them to the list. After all, it appeared they lived in this caravan, which meant they traveled frequently. And Sigrid knew a great many people. She had followers all over the world. It was not unusual for people to recognize her.
“I hadn’t thought of it in that way.” Sigrid turned to him. “Would you like a name?”
“I would not object to it.” He paused. “You have names for all your other tools.”
“Is that what you are?” the woman asked. “One of her tools?”
“I believe I fit one definition of that term,” the assistant answered. “I wrap bundles and besoms, and I set out the spheres, and I measure the herbs and resins for incense, and I organize the oils and candles, and—”
“It’s not the same,” Sigrid interrupted. “He works, but he doesn’t do workings.”
The assistant wasn’t sure he had heard that correctly. Something in the syntax of the sentence didn’t make sense. But it would be rude to interrupt and ask Sigrid about it at present. There were very clear linguistic protocols about interrupting.
“So the two of you are not friends,” the woman said.
Sigrid frowned. She glanced quickly at the assistant, and then back at the other two. “Excuse me?”
“Friends are not tools to be used,” the woman said. “Until this one is more than just a tool, he can never truly be your friend.”
“But a friend—a companion—is best, for a journey,” the man added. “Better than a sword, or a walking stick, or even a good pair of shoes.”
Sigrid looked confused. The assistant reasoned that she couldn’t possibly be as confused as he was. Obviously Sigrid was not his friend. She could never be friends with something that had no soul, and she was very clear on the subject of his not having a soul. “Perhaps we should be going,” he said. “Sigrid? Would you like to go home?”
“Yes, Sigrid.” The man leaned forward over the table. He put his glass down. “Where would you like to go from here? We could take you wherever you liked.”
“We could see new things, and meet new people,” the woman added. “All of us.”
Sigrid’s expression closely matched the exemplars for fear. But as the assistant watched, it transformed. Her open mouth closed into a smile. Her wide eyes found crinkles at their corners. “I think I will have some of your wine after all,” she said. “And some of that food, too.”
“We like to share our bounty when we can,” the woman said, pouring.
The man loaded Sigrid’s plate with cheese and fish and grapes. “It’s a good thing we brought enough.”
Sigrid’s hand hovered over the grapes. She raised her head and looked at the assistant with clear eyes. Carefully, she bit into a grape. Purple juice ran over her gnarled fingers. She reached out. His sensors said she was drawing something on him.
“Sigridsson,” she murmured. “Your new name is Sigridsson.”
“Look,” the man said, pointing.
The assistant looked out the open door of the caravan. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at. There was the lava field, and the ocean beyond. A field of stubbly gray bound by a void of black. He saw without seeing; somehow, more of his function was devoted to playing and replaying Sigrid’s words. She had named him.
“Watch carefully,” the man instructed. “What do you see?”
And then, quite suddenly, Sigridsson did see it. It was a road in the sky. It rippled ever wider, like the wake left behind by a great ship. It was immense, and full of light, like a procession of people carrying lanterns. And finally he could answer the question no one had thought to ask him.
“It’s beautiful,” Sigridsson said. “It’s so beautiful.”