“No, I’m not sure, but it’s what I will do. What about you?”
“That depends on Anna.”
They retrieved their car and drove back to Glasnevin Cemetery. At its gate, Joyce stood stately and rail straight. “Poor Paddies. As they are now, so once was I.” He raised his hands over his head, as if giving a blessing or starting a race. “Finnegans! Wake!”
“Jaysis, Jim, not another joking word.”
“What’s eating you? Not the same thing that’s eating them, I hope.”
Dev fixed his eyes on the gate. He didn’t want his friend to see what would happen inside. “I’m going in alone.”
“I’m thinking not. I’m in this as much as you.”
“Go back to the Custom House. Don’t worry about what you heard last night; I already fixed it, and they’ll get you out of the country.” Dev patted the cemetery wall. “This is a private thing, between Anna and me.”
“I’m thinking not. I’m thinking this involves all of us re-created bastards. And I don’t trust that Kenny at all.”
“Do you trust me, Jim?”
“Trust you? I like people, but I don’t trust them.”
“I don’t plan on coming back out.”
“If you don’t come back, there’ll be no escape or Nora, so I don’t care if I survive.”
“I do.” Dev turned and offered his hand. “Farewell, Jim.”
Joyce took Dev’s hand in a superhuman grip. “I won’t let you deny me, so you’ll have to betray me.” He closed his eyes and puckered up. “So where’s the kiss, Judas?”
Dev couldn’t help laughing. “Right, then. You’ll get yours soon enough. Come on, help me over.”
Joyce helped Dev over the gate, then squeezed his own more malleable body through the rails. Dev assessed the enormous forest of stone crosses. Pearse’s old words mocked him. “They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” As if so many dead were some great benefit, when they made it bloody hard to find the right grave.
The one place at Glasnevin that stood out above the others was the tall round tower of Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator. While walking around the tower, Dev examined its wall in enhanced mode. He soon found the outline of a hidden door. “That was too easy.”
“Must be trouble within,” said Joyce. “We’re bearding Circe in her den.” He too couldn’t resist giving Dev the bad news.
They entered the doorway and found granite stairs leading down and down, below the graves and the mortal world. Perhaps the Morrigan would be waiting for them in the dark. Nothing for it. They stepped down one, two, three steps . . .
And they were on the green hill of Tara, coronation site for the High Kings, open, sunlit, simulated. This beautiful holo-countryside held a crowd of sentients—AIs, PRs and biologicals. Around the Royal Seat and standing stone, four of the lesser AIs stood guard in their mythic manifestations—Maeve, Cúchulainn, Lugh and Finn MacCool. No sign of the Morrigan though, which didn’t make Dev any happier.
On her Celtic Art Nouveau throne sat Queen Anna. Next to her, looking like her Irish sister, Maud sat as consort in her fully realized glory. Before them stood Old Yeats. The literal feckers had transformed him à la “Sailing to Byzantium” into a golden robot that sang poetic songs and bowed too much. He was deader than childish Dead Yeats, stiffer than stiff Young Yeats and sadder than the children of Lir. But Dev wasn’t here to save Old Yeats.
Anna raised her hand towards Dev. “Welcome to the otherworld, Oisín.”
“Don’t let him speak!” Joyce had raised his ashplant and pointed it at Dev. “He spoke alone with Dead Yeats. I couldn’t hear everything, but whatever he has to say is poison.”
Anna held her hand up, and energy shimmered around Dev. Anna’s words echoed at him from all sides. “Thank you, Jim, but as you can see, we have not forgotten the old times, when a bard could kill with his words. We modeled the possibilities and decided to contain Dev’s sounds on a shielded delay until we root out what he’s done. But we’re glad you changed your mind and decided to work with us, Jim.”
Jim nodded back at her, and Dev wanted to kill him. He hadn’t realized that he still had things to lose, until this betrayal. But even if UNI’s mission was going to fail, he’d say his personal words first, before he went down.
“Hiya, Anna.”
“Dev. What took you so long?”
“I never took this blather seriously, until it happened.”
“You’ve brought our firstborn.”
“Your firstborn. I disown him.” Joyce flinched at this, but said nothing.
“What do you want?” asked Anna.
“An impossible thing, macushla: I want you to come back with me. Your work is done; you can leave. We can be as Irish as you like somewhere else.”
“Dev, this isn’t romantic fiction.”
“But that’s what Ireland is. It’s why you were able to bring back the nationalists with anything like verisimilitude.”
“I’ve done more than that.” She looked at Maud like there was a secret joke between them.
Dev shook his head hopelessly. “Grand. I understand completely. Oldest story in the world, falling in love with your creation.”
“And you felt nothing for your precious pal Joyce?”
Right. Though he couldn’t use the words he had learned from Yeats, Dev had some specific words for Joyce that they might not filter. Usurper. Execute. The words were quick and dirty; Joyce wouldn’t know what hit him.
As if reading Dev’s face, Joyce lowered his ashplant and tapped it against the ground. “If you’ve got something to say to me, say it.”
He knows, but he’s leaving himself open. Maybe he’s still on my side. Maybe he’ll let me pinch that stick of his. Dev dove for Joyce’s ashplant.
Perhaps Joyce would have let Dev snatch it, but the energy field was having none of it, and it slid through his grip. Anna smiled. “Don’t bother with that thing. I’m the only one here you could hurt, and neither of you would hurt me.”
“I know,” said Dev. He wiped his face with his sleeve and looked around at the assembly. “If you must stay, let me stay here with you, but away from all this software.” The insult fell beneath the gathering’s notice. I must be that bloody pathetic.
“Dev, it’s too late for that. I belong to the nation.”
“And I don’t anymore.” He had their attention, and with the feeds from here, he probably had the attention of all the PRs in Ireland. But he couldn’t use it. “I just want to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” said Anna.
The room went silent. If you’ve got something to say, Joyce, say it.
Joyce cleared his throat. “Mother, I want my reward. Can you restore Nora to me? Now?”
“I don’t know.” Anna turned to Maud. “What do you say, macushla?”
Maud stood to her full six-foot height, narrowed her hazel eyes at Joyce and considered. Then she smiled like the Irish Mona Lisa. “In the old days, he could sing. Have him sing a traditional song of Ireland for us, and if it pleases, we’ll give him back his beloved.”
Joyce looked over at Dev, looked at everyone in the room, looked up at the holo-sky. “If you lend me your attention, I shall endeavor to sing to you of a heart bowed down.” Then, slowly in his fine tenor, he sang “Young Donald.”
Dev used biofeedback to keep his breathing and heart rate steady. Would they let Joyce finish, without delay?
After an eternity of verses and with his eyes full of tears, Joyce came to the final, shattering lines:
“You have taken the east from me,
You have taken the west from me,
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon,
You have taken the sun from me,
/> And my fear is great you have taken Ireland from me.”
Old Yeats smiled, for these were the words of loss that Dead Yeats had forgotten. Dev closed his eyes as if that would hide his thoughts. Does he know how to say the final word?
In a perfect simulation of Dev’s voice, Joyce said, “Execute.”
With that command, Joyce disappeared; his ashplant clunked to the ground. He did not go alone. All the other PRs in sight vanished; Dev hoped the same held true everywhere in Ireland. The full PRs dissolved into puddles of nanogoop, while the holos faded to the flickering light of a filmless projector. The Old Yeats robot ceased its continual obeisances with a sigh. All gone, gone utterly, as if they were inhabitants of the faerie realm.
Maud was going slower; Dev could actually see her disintegrate. But as she burned away, another shape formed from her ashes. Like a phoenix from the flame, the Morrigan arose. So that was how Anna filled Maud out. The Morrigan stretched her wings, and cawed at Dev contemptuously. The other AIs stood ready for her order. Only then was Dev certain that he would never leave this place alive.
Dev spoke quickly, while Anna was still in shock. “I’ve a message from UNI. You’re free to do this thing. Evolution is on the fringes and borders, and you will be a fringe and border to this world until that role can be assumed by other worlds. But not with the PRs. We leave you with the AIs for protection. Start fresh, without such an unbearable weight of dead, without such tempting toys.”
Anna strode up to him and smacked him across the face. “Murderer.” Overhead, a storm gathered with time-lapse abruptness. “Was there no other Troy for you to burn? You sabotaged my work, from the beginning.”
“Our work.” Dev’s voice cracked with fear of the pain to come. “I’m a Joycean, which means I love people, but I don’t trust them.”
Before Anna could say she was done with him, and before the Morrigan could torture him for a thousand subjective years, Dev signaled his head chip. Goodbye, Anna.
In a flash, his chip fried his brain.
The Morrigan flew to the Custom House. To avoid embarrassing devastation, she did not allow her approach to be detected, save by the UNI rep. She dropped a small head chip on Mr. Kenny’s balcony, then flew high above the Custom House and waited, and watched.
Mr. Kenny and his skeleton staff left the Custom House in a convoy of armored vehicles. Portal and air transport had closed, so the staff waited for the last ferry out of Dublin, an old vessel with an open deck. From high above, the Morrigan saw the tide of arriving thousands flow against the departing UNI staff. Hearing the Referendum’s promise, they came by sea from other places that were no longer nations—Nigeria and Laos, Japan and Brazil, Australia and America. Like herself and her beloved Anna, they too could be Irish.
The UNI staff boarded the ferry. As the already lumbering ship approached the Cúchulainn Barrier zone, it slowed to drifting. The Morrigan circled, curious. They would want to study the barrier, of course, and this would be their best opportunity.
Kenny brought out the head chip the Morrigan had given him and two shiny metallic cubes. He placed the cubes on adjoining deck chairs, and placed the head chip next to one of the cubes. With a touch of his finger, he activated each cube, then strode away as if anxious to avoid words.
An image of Dev sprang from the cube near the head chip, and from the other cube emerged an image of Joyce. Energy and memory constrained them to holo mode; for now, they would remain two ghosts, talking.
Joyce looked about with theatrical emphasis. “You didn’t get the girl?”
Dev studied his own translucent hands. “No, looks like she got me.” His mission had succeeded, and he had failed. Anna was forever lost to him. “But I got you out at least.”
“But what about you? Forgive me, but you don’t seem to be all here.”
Dev put his hand to his chest. “Oh, this? Second generation duplicate. I sent an organic copy to Ireland, and they scanned the copy’s mind when they captured your data at UNI Dublin. Coming here was always something of a suicide mission. Assuming my original is still alive, I’ll reintegrate, sorrows and all.”
“No prosecution or protest about your demise?”
Dev gazed up at the black bird following, listening. “No harm, no foul. That’s the official UNI line.” His holo image gingerly touched his head chip, then shimmered, shivered.
“Some wee harm in that thing?”
“Just my last words and deeds after the UNI scan, along with synthetic memories of a millennium of torture. It’s the Morrigan’s warning to her former associates.”
The Morrigan had known that the Dev who had come to Ireland was a copy, as identical as it might have been. If one dared ask, she would have explained that it was too identical, quantum mechanically speaking. But she had not warned Anna.
“You completely fooled them, and me,” said Dev.
Joyce raised his eyebrows. “You might have known. I was Ulysses and his Trojan horse in one.”
“Thank you for saying the words,” said Dev. “Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t fight for Ireland before, so I fought this time. Those hard men and women would repeat a history that’s the very opposite of real life, the very opposite of love. Non serviam. But it was a difficult thing, and I couldn’t have done it if I thought any sentient beings would really be destroyed forever.” Joyce turned to the ferry’s bow. “Are they gone forever?”
“If I thought so,” said Dev, “I couldn’t have done it either.”
The Morrigan cawed. Nothing was truly gone in this information-drenched world. Over time, Anna might figure out a way to bring back the PRs without attracting UNI’s notice, but the Morrigan would not help her, and the AI would henceforth choose her own form rather than inhabit any of Anna’s favorites.
“It’s a small consolation.” Joyce sighed without breath. “No Nora for me.”
“Not for some time.”
“Then we both lost the girl.”
Dev nodded. “And her name is Eire.” A barrier now stood between him and Ireland that he couldn’t cross again. “By the bye, when you sang, how did you know to change ‘God’ to ‘Ireland’?” As an extra layer of code, when Newly Dead Yeats generated a shutdown key, the user needed to change the last proper noun to ‘Ireland.’
“I don’t know,” said Joyce. “I only remember up to our passage through the roadblock at the Custom House. I knew what words you’d need from overhearing you and Yeats’ carcass, but I didn’t know to say ‘Ireland.’”
Maybe a not-so-little bird told him below his conscious programming. The Morrigan had been playing a double game. She needed to be an omnipotent protector, but the UNI models were right: too many Irish dead. But her unsettling projections were also right, and the world needed this fringe more than UNI knew.
Joyce considered a moment. “At least I’ll have a friend in this second exile. I have the feed from Glasnevin, minus my poisoned poetry. What you said—maybe we need a fresh start. Gibraltar?”
“Why not? There, the sun may shine for us, instead of through us.”
Joyce soundlessly slapped his friend on the back. “Young father, young artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”
The Morrigan watched as the Liffey’s ever-flowing waters carried the two friends past the crumpled Referendum leaflet, still afloat, and washed them out from her adopted home, out beyond the Cúchulainn Barrier, out to the info-permeated sea.
The Poly Islands
written by
Gerald Warfield
illustrated by
JAY RICHARD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerald Warfield was born in Fort Worth, Texas. He attended TCU, UNT and Princeton University, taking degrees in music composition. He taught music briefly at Princeton and the University of Illinois, and his compositions enjoyed modest success including pe
rformances by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. His first taste of writing was in college where he reviewed music concerts for the Denton Record Chronicle. He decided at that time that writing was not for him; it was too much work. His first nonteaching job was associate director of the Index of New Musical Notation, a research project at the New York Public Library, sponsored by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
In midlife, he went over to the dark side and began writing music textbooks and how-to books on finance and investing. This gave him the mistaken impression that he could write fiction. He lived in New York City for thirty years and moved to rural Texas in 2000, where he has served as chairman of the library board and president of the Mineral Wells Heritage Association.
Life began in 2010 when he was accepted by and survived the Odyssey Writers’ Workshop, with Jeanne Cavelos as director. That same year, his short story, “The Origin of Third Person in Early Paleolithic Epic Poetry,” won first prize in Grammar Girl’s short story contest. His story, “The Poly Islands,” constitutes his first professional sale in fiction.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Jay Richard is a graphic designer and freelance illustrator from the south coast of Massachusetts. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth with a BFA in illustration. He has done numerous designs for private clients including UMass Dartmouth’s School of Law.
His artwork usually begins with a pencil, pen and marker base drawing with later digital manipulation in Photoshop or PaintShop. He also works in other traditional media including acrylic paints and watercolors. Besides illustrations, he sculpts horror and fantasy props for games such as Call of Cthulhu and Hunter: The Vigil.
Jay currently lives in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, with his wife Lisa and daughter Bria.
The Poly Islands
Liyang’s hand hovered in the green glow above the instrument panel. Desperately, she wanted to activate the boat’s running lights, but she did not dare touch the switch. She considered pulling back the throttle but pulled back her hand instead. Blind flight across the black swells was perilous, yet somewhere behind her, in the darkness, the thugs of the Old Buddha tong searched for her. If they caught her, she would not live long enough to return to Hong Kong Harbor. No. She would run in the dark at full throttle and risk that the debris was not sufficient to flip the boat or puncture the hull.