Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  Molly hit the Floor, moving.

  The Floor screamed.

  It was miked and amplified, with pickups riding the four fat coil springs at

  the corners and contact mikes taped at random to rusting machine fragments.

  029

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  Somewhere the Lo Teks had an amp and a synthesizer, and now I made out

  the shapes of speakers overhead, above the cruel white floods.

  A drumbeat began, electronic, like an amplified heart, steady as a metronome.

  She’d removed her leather jacket and boots; her T-shirt was sleeveless,

  faint telltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms. Her leather jeans gleamed under the floods. She began to dance.

  She flexed her knees, white feet tensed on a flattened gas tank, and the

  Killing Floor began to heave in response. The sound it made was like a world

  ending, like the wires that hold heaven snapping and coiling across the sky.

  He rode with it, for a few heartbeats, and then he moved, judging the

  movement of the Floor perfectly, like a man stepping from one flat stone to

  another in an ornamental garden.

  He pulled the tip from his thumb with the grace of a man at ease with

  social gesture and flung it at her. Under the floods, the filament was a

  refracting thread of rainbow. She threw herself flat and rolled, jackknifing up as the molecule whipped past, steel claws snapping into the light in what

  must have been an automatic rictus of defense. The drum pulse quickened,

  and she bounced with it, her dark hair wild around the blank silver lenses,

  her mouth thin, lips taut with concentration. The Killing Floor boomed and

  roared, and the Lo Teks were screaming their excitement.

  He retracted the filament to a whirling meter-wide circle of ghostly

  polychrome and spun it in front of him, thumbless hand held level with his

  sternum. A shield.

  And Molly seemed to let something go, something inside, and that was the

  real start of her mad-dog dance. She jumped, twisting, lunging sideways,

  landing with both feet on an alloy engine block wired directly to one of the

  coil springs. I cupped my hands over my ears and knelt in a vertigo of sound,

  thinking Floor and benches were on their way down, down to Nighttown,

  and I saw us tearing through the shanties, the wet wash, exploding on the

  tiles like rotten fruit. But the cables held, and the Killing Floor rose and fell like a crazy metal sea. And Molly danced on it.

  And at the end, just before he made his final cast with the filament, I saw

  in his face, an expression that didn’t seem to belong there. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t anger. I think it was disbelief, stunned incomprehension mingled

  with pure aesthetic revulsion at what he was seeing, hearing—at what was

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  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  happening to him. He retracted the whirling filament, the ghost disk shrinking

  to the size of a dinner plate as he whipped his arm above his head and brought

  it down, the thumb tip curving out for Molly like a live thing.

  The Floor carried her down, the molecule passing just above her head; the

  Floor whiplashed, lifting him into the path of the taut molecule. It should

  have passed harmlessly over his head and been withdrawn into its diamond-

  hard socket. It took his hand off just behind the wrist. There was a gap in the Floor in front of him, and he went through it like a diver, with a strange

  deliberate grace, a defeated kamikaze on his way down to Nighttown. Partly,

  I think, he took that dive to buy himself a few seconds of the dignity of

  silence. She’d killed him with culture shock.

  The Lo Teks roared, but someone shut the amplifier off, and Molly rode the

  Killing Floor into silence, hanging on now, her face white and blank, until

  the pitching slowed and there was only a faint pinging of tortured metal and

  the grating of rust on rust.

  We searched the Floor for the severed hand, but we never found it. All we

  found was a graceful curve in one piece of rusted steel, where the molecule

  went through. Its edge was bright as new chrome.

  We never learned whether the Yakuza had accepted our terms, or even

  whether they got our message. As far as I know, their program is still waiting

  for Eddie Bax on a shelf in the back room of a gift shop on the third level of

  Sydney Central-5. Probably they sold the original back to Ono-Sendai

  months ago. But maybe they did get the pirate’s broadcast, because nobody’s

  come looking for me yet, and it’s been nearly a year. If they do come, they’ll

  have a long climb up through the dark, past Dog’s sentries, and I don’t look

  much like Eddie Bax these days. I let Molly take care of that, with a local

  anesthetic. And my new teeth have almost grown in.

  I decided to stay up here. When I looked out across the Killing Floor, before

  he came, I saw how hollow I was. And I knew I was sick of being a bucket. So

  now I climb down and visit Jones, almost every night.

  We’re partners now, Jones and I, and Molly Millions, too. Molly handles

  our business in the Drome. Jones is still in Funland, but he has a bigger tank, with fresh seawater trucked in once a week. And he has his junk, when he

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  WILLIAM GIBSON

  needs it. He still talks to the kids with his frame of lights, but he talks to me on a new display unit in a shed that I rent there, a better unit than the one

  he used in the navy.

  And we’re all making good money, better money than I made before,

  because Jones’s Squid can read the traces of anything that anyone ever stored

  in me, and he gives it to me on the display unit in languages I can understand.

  So we’re learning a lot about all my former clients. And one day I’ll have a

  surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdala, and I’ll live with my own

  memories and nobody else’s, the way other people do. But not for a while.

  In the meantime it’s really okay up here, way up in the dark, smoking a

  Chinese filtertip and listening to the condensation that drips from the

  geodesics. Real quiet up here—unless a pair of Lo Teks decide to dance on

  the Killing Floor.

  It’s educational, too. With Jones to help me figure things out, I’m getting to

  be the most technical boy in town.

  032

  MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES

  By Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner

  From the hill north of the city, Rice saw eighteenth-century Salzburg spread

  out below him like a half-eaten lunch.

  Huge cracking towers and swollen, bulbous storage tanks dwarfed the ruins

  of the St. Rupert Cathedral. Thick white smoke billowed from the refinery’s

  stacks. Rice could taste the familiar petrochemical tang from where he sat,

  under the leaves of a wilting oak.

  The sheer spectacle of it delighted him. You didn’t sign up for a time-travel

  project, he thought, unless you had a taste for incongruity. Like the phallic

  pumping station lurking in the central square of the convent, or the ruler-

  straight elevated pipelines ripping through Salzburg’s maze of cobbled streets.

  A bit tough on the city, maybe, but that was hardly Rice’s fault. The temporal

  beam had focused randomly in the bedrock below Salzburg, forming an

  expandable bubble connecting this world to Rice’s own time.

  This
was the first time he’d seen the complex from outside its high chain-

  link fences. For two years, he’d been up to his neck getting the refinery

  operational. He’d directed teams all over the planet, as they caulked up

  Nantucket whalers to serve as tankers, or trained local pipefitters to lay down line as far away as the Sinai and the Gulf of Mexico.

  Now, finally, he was outside. Sutherland, the company’s political liaison,

  had warned him against going into the city. But Rice had no patience with

  her attitude. The smallest thing seemed to set Sutherland off. She lost sleep

  over the most trivial local complaints. She spent hours haranguing the “gate

  people,” the locals who waited day and night outside the square-mile

  complex, begging for radios, nylons, a jab of penicillin.

  To hell with her, Rice thought. The plant was up and breaking design

  records, and Rice was due for a little R and R. The way he saw it, anyone who

  couldn’t find some action in the Year of Our Lord 1775 had to be dead

  between the ears. He stood up, dusting windblown soot from his hands with

  a cambric handkerchief.

  A moped sputtered up the hill toward him, wobbling crazily. The rider

  couldn’t seem to keep his high-heeled, buckled pumps on the pedals while

  BRUCE STERLING AND LEWIS SHINER

  carrying a huge portable stereo in the crook of his right arm. The moped

  lurched to a stop at a respectful distance, and Rice recognized the music from

  the tape player: Symphony No. 40 in G Minor.

  The boy turned the volume down as Rice walked toward him. “Good

  evening, Mr. Plant Manager, sir. I am not interrupting?”

  “No, that’s okay.” Rice glanced at the bristling hedgehog cut that had

  replaced the boy’s outmoded wig. He’d seen the kid around the gates; he was

  one of the regulars. But the music had made something else fall into place.

  “You’re Mozart, aren’t you?”

  “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, your servant.”

  “I’ll be goddamned. Do you know what that tape is?”

  “It has my name on it.”

  “Yeah. You wrote it. Or would have, I guess I should say. About fifteen

  years from now.”

  Mozart nodded. “It is so beautiful. I have not the English to say how it is to

  hear it.”

  By this time most of the other gate people would have been well into

  some kind of pitch. Rice was impressed by the boy’s tact, not to mention

  his command of English. The standard native vocabulary didn’t go much

  beyond radio, drugs, and fuck. “Are you headed back toward town?” Rice asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Plant Manager, sir.”

  Something about the kid appealed to Rice. The enthusiasm, the gleam in

  the eyes. And, of course, he did happen to be one of the greatest composers

  of all time.

  “Forget the titles,” Rice said. “Where does a guy go for some fun around here?”

  At first Sutherland hadn’t wanted Rice at the meeting with Jefferson. But

  Rice knew a little temporal physics, and Jefferson had been pestering the

  American personnel with questions about time holes and parallel worlds.

  Rice, for his part, was thrilled at the chance to meet Thomas Jefferson, the

  first president of the United States. He’d never liked George Washington,

  was glad the man’s Masonic connections had made him refuse to join the

  company’s “godless” American government.

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  MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES

  Rice squirmed in his Dacron double knits as he and Sutherland waited in

  the newly air-conditioned boardroom of the Hohensalzburg Castle. “I forgot

  how greasy these suits feel,” he said.

  “At least,” Sutherland said, “you didn’t wear that goddamned hat today.”

  The VTOL jet from America was late, and she kept looking at her watch.

  “My tricorne?” Rice said. “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s a Masonista hat, for Christ’s sake. It’s a symbol of anti-modern

  reaction.” The Freemason Liberation Front was another of Sutherland’s

  nightmares, a local politico-religious group that had made a few pathetic

  attacks on the pipeline.

  “Oh, loosen up, will you, Sutherland? Some groupie of Mozart’s gave me

  the hat. Theresa Maria Angela something-or-other, some broken-down

  aristocrat. They all hang out together in this music dive downtown. I just

  liked the way it looked.”

  “Mozart? You’ve been fraternizing with him? Don’t you think we should

  just let him be? After everything we’ve done to him?”

  “Bullshit,” Rice said. “I’m entitled. I spent two years on startup while

  you were playing touch football with Robespierre and Thomas Paine. I

  make a few night spots with Wolfgang and you’re all over me. What about

  Parker? I don’t hear you bitching about him playing rock and roll on his

  late show every night. You can hear it blasting out of every cheap transistor

  in town.”

  “He’s propaganda officer. Believe me, if I could stop him I would, but

  Parker’s a special case. He’s got connections all over the place back in

  Realtime.” She rubbed her cheek. “Let’s drop it, okay? Just try to be polite to President Jefferson. He’s had a hard time of it lately.”

  Sutherland’s secretary, a former Hapsburg lady-in-waiting, stepped in to

  announce the plane’s arrival. Jefferson pushed angrily past her. He was tall

  for a local, with a mane of blazing red hair and the shiftiest eyes Rice had ever seen. “Sit down, Mr. President.” Sutherland waved at the far side of the table.

  “Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  Jefferson scowled. “Perhaps some Madeira,” he said. “If you have it.”

  Sutherland nodded to her secretary, who stared for a moment in

  incomprehension, then hurried off. “How was the flight?” Sutherland

  asked.

  037

  BRUCE STERLING AND LEWIS SHINER

  “Your engines are most impressive,” Jefferson said, “as you well know.” Rice

  saw the subtle trembling of the man’s hands; he hadn’t taken well to jet flight.

  “I only wish your political sensitivities were as advanced.”

  “You know I can’t speak for my employers,” Sutherland said. “For myself,

  I deeply regret the darker aspects of our operations. Florida will be missed.”

  Irritated, Rice leaned forward. “You’re not really here to discuss sensibilities, are you?”

  “Freedom, sir,” Jefferson said. “Freedom is the issue.” The secretary

  returned with a dust-caked bottle of sherry and a stack of clear plastic cups.

  Jefferson, his hands visibly shaking now, poured a glass and tossed it back.

  Color returned to his face. He said, “You made certain promises when we

  joined forces. You guaranteed us liberty and equality and the freedom to

  pursue our own happiness. Instead we find your machinery on all sides,

  your cheap manufactured goods seducing the people of our great country,

  our minerals and works of art disappearing into your fortresses, never to

  reappear!” The last line brought Jefferson to his feet.

  Sutherland shrank back into her chair. “The common good requires a

  certain period of, uh, adjustment—”

  “Oh, come on, Tom,” Rice broke in. “We didn’t ‘join forces,’ that’s a lot of

  crap. We kicked
the Brits out and you in, and you had damn-all to do with it.

  Second, if we drill for oil and carry off a few paintings, it doesn’t have a

  goddamned thing to do with your liberty. We don’t care. Do whatever you

  like, just stay out of our way. Right? If we wanted a lot of backtalk we could

  have left the damn British in power.”

  Jefferson sat down. Sutherland meekly poured him another glass, which

  he drank off at once. “I cannot understand you,” he said. “You claim you

  come from the future, yet you seem bent on destroying your own past.”

  “But we’re not,” Rice said. “It’s this way. History is like a tree, okay?

  When you go back and mess with the past, another branch of history splits

  off from the main trunk. Well, this world is just one of those branches.”

  “So,” Jefferson said. “This world—my world—does not lead to your future.”

  “Right,” Rice said.

  “Leaving you free to rape and pillage here at will! While your own world is

  untouched and secure!” Jefferson was on his feet again. “I find the idea

  monstrous beyond belief, intolerable! How can you be party to such

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  MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES

  despotism? Have you no human feelings?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Rice said. “Of course we do. What about the radios

  and the magazines and the medicine we hand out? Personally I think you’ve

  got a lot of nerve, coming in here with your smallpox scars and your unwashed

  shirt and all those slaves of yours back home, lecturing us on humanity.”

  “Rice?” Sutherland said.

  Rice locked eyes with Jefferson. Slowly, Jefferson sat down. “Look,” Rice

  said, relenting. “We don’t mean to be unreasonable. Maybe things aren’t

  working out just the way you pictured them, but hey, that’s life, you know?

  What do you want, really? Cars? Movies? Telephones? Birth control? Just say the word and they’re yours.”

  Jefferson pressed his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. “Your words mean

  nothing to me, sir. I only want . . . I want only to return to my home. To

  Monticello. And as soon as possible.”

  “Is it one of your migraines, Mr. President?” Sutherland asked. “I had these

  made up for you.” She pushed a vial of pills across the table toward him.

  “What are these?”