Benjamin Rosenbaum - The House Beyond your Sky

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Science Fiction

By Benjamin Rosenbaum

The House

Beyond You

Sky

The House Beyond Your Sky

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Fictionwise,Inc.

www.fictionwise.com

First published in Strange Horizons, September

2006

NOTICE: This eBook is licensed to the original purchaser

only. Duplication or distribution to any person via email,

floppy disk, network, print out, or any other means is a

violation of International copyright law and subjects the

violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. This notice

overrides the Adobe Reader permissions which are

erroneous. This eBook cannot be legally lent or given to

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Distributed by Fictionwise.com

The House Beyond Your Sky

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Matthias browses through his library of worlds.

In one of them, a little girl named Sophie is shivering on

her bed, her arms wrapped around a teddy bear. It is night.

She is six years old. She is crying, as quietly as she can.

The sound of breaking glass comes from the kitchen.

Through her window, on the wall of the house next door, she

can see the shadows cast by her parents. There is a blow,

and one shadow falls; she buries her nose in the teddy bear

and inhales its soft smell, and prays.

Matthias knows he should not meddle. But today his heart

is troubled. Today, in the world outside the library, a pilgrim

is heralded. A pilgrim is coming to visit Matthias, the first in a

very long time.

The pilgrim comes from very far away.

The pilgrim is one of us.

"Please, God," Sophie says, "please help us. Amen."

"Little one," Matthias tells her through the mouth of the

teddy bear, "be not afraid."

Sophie sucks in a sharp breath. "Are you God?" she

whispers.

"No, child," says Matthias, the maker of her universe.

"Am I going to die?" she asks.

"I do not know," Matthias says.

When they die—these still imprisoned ones—they die

forever. She has bright eyes, a button nose, unruly hair.

Sodium and potassium dance in her muscles as she moves.

Unwillingly, Matthias imagines Sophie's corpse as one of

The House Beyond Your Sky

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

trillions, piled on the altar of his own vanity and self-

indulgence, and he shivers.

"I love you, teddy bear," the girl says, holding him.

From the kitchen, breaking glass, and sobbing.

* * * *

We imagine you—you, the ones we long for—as if you

came from our own turbulent and fragile youth: embodied,

inefficient, mortal. Human, say. So picture our priest Matthias

as human: an old neuter, bird-thin, clear-eyed and resolute,

with silky white hair and lucent purple skin.

Compared to the vast palaces of being we inhabit, the

house of the priest is tiny—think of a clay hut, perched on the

side of a forbidding mountain. Yet even in so small a house,

there is room for a library of historical simulations—universes

like Sophie's—each teeming with intelligent life.

The simulations, while good, are not impenetrable even to

their own inhabitants. Scientists teaching baboons to sort

blocks may notice that all other baboons become instantly

better at block-sorting, revealing a high-level caching

mechanism. Or engineers building their own virtual worlds

may find they cannot use certain tricks of optimization and

compression—for Matthias has already used them. Only when

the jig is up does Matthias reveal himself, asking each

simulated soul: what now? Most accept Matthias's offer to

graduate beyond the confines of their simulation, and join the

general society of Matthias's house.

You may regard them as bright parakeets, living in wicker

cages with open doors. The cages are hung from the ceiling of

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ScienceFictionByBenjaminRosenbaumTheHouseBeyondYourSkyTheHouseBeyondYourSkybyBenjaminRosenbaum2Fictionwise,Inc.www.fictionwise.comCopyright©2006byBenjaminRosenbaumFirstpublishedinStrangeHorizons,September2006NOTICE:ThiseBookislicensedtotheoriginalpurchaseronly.Duplicationordistributiontoanypersonvia...

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