Cyberpunk
Page 6
room. He stripped goggles from his smoke-blackened face, revealing
Oriental eyes. A pair of greased braids hung down his back. He cradled an
assault rifle in the crook of one arm and wore two bandoliers of grenades.
“Good,” he grunted. “The last of them.” He tore the gag from Rice’s mouth.
He smelled of sweat and smoke and badly cured leather. “You are Rice?”
Rice could only nod and gasp for breath.
His rescuer hauled him to his feet and cut his ropes with a bayonet. “I am
Jebe Noyon. Trans-Temporal Army.” He forced a leather flask of rancid
mare’s milk into Rice’s hands. The smell made Rice want to vomit. “Drink!”
Jebe insisted. “Is koumiss, is good for you! Drink, Jebe Noyon tells you!”
046
MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES
Rice took a sip, which curdled his tongue and brought bile to his throat.
“You’re the Gray Cards, right?” he said weakly.
“Gray Card Army, yes,” Jebe said. “Baddest-ass warriors of all times and
places! Only five guards here, I kill them all! I, Jebe Noyon, was chief general to Genghis Khan, terror of the earth, okay, man?” He stared at Rice with
great, sad eyes. “You have not heard of me. “
“Sorry, Jebe, no.”
“The earth turned black in the footprints of my horse.”
“I’m sure it did, man.”
“You will mount up behind me,” he said, dragging Rice toward the door. “You
will watch the earth turn black in the tire prints of my Harley, man, okay?”
From the hills above Salzburg they looked down on anachronism gone wild.
Local soldiers in waistcoats and gaiters lay in bloody heaps by the gates of
the refinery. Another battalion marched forward in formation, muskets at the
ready. A handful of Huns and Mongols, deployed at the gates, cut them up
with orange tracer fire and watched the survivors scatter.
Jebe Noyon laughed hugely. “Is like siege of Cambaluc! Only no stacking
up heads or even taking ears any more, man, now we are civilized, okay?
Later maybe we call in, like, grunts, choppers from ’Nam, napalm the son-of-
a-bitches, far out, man.”
“You can’t do that, Jebe,” Rice said sternly. “The poor bastards don’t have
a chance. No point in exterminating them.”
Jebe shrugged. “I forget sometimes, okay? Always thinking to conquer the
world.” He revved the cycle and scowled. Rice grabbed the Mongol’s stinking
flak jacket as they roared downhill. Jebe took his disappointment out on the
enemy, tearing through the streets in high gear, deliberately running down a
group of Brunswick grenadiers. Only panic strength saved Rice from falling
off as legs and torsos thumped and crunched beneath their tires.
Jebe skidded to a stop inside the gates of the complex. A jabbering horde of
Mongols in ammo belts and combat fatigues surrounded them at once. Rice
pushed through them, his kidneys aching.
Ionizing radiation smeared the evening sky around the Hohensalzburg
Castle. They were kicking the portal up to the high-energy maximum,
047
BRUCE STERLING AND LEWIS SHINER
running cars full of Gray Cards in and sending the same cars back loaded to
the ceiling with art and jewelry.
Over the rattling of gunfire Rice could hear the whine of VTOL jets
bringing in the evacuees from the US and Africa. Roman centurions, wrapped
in mesh body armor and carrying shoulder-launched rockets, herded Realtime
personnel into the tunnels that led to the portal.
Mozart was in the crowd, waving enthusiastically to Rice. “We’re pulling
out, man! Fantastic, huh? Back to Realtime!”
Rice looked at the clustered towers of pumps, coolers, and catalytic cracking
units. “It’s a goddamned shame,” he said. “All that work, shot to hell.”
“We were losing too many people, man. Forget it. There’s plenty of eighteenth
centuries.”
The guards, sniping at the crowds outside, suddenly leaped aside as Rice’s
hovercar burst through the gates. Half a dozen Masonic fanatics still clung to
the doors and pounded on the windscreen. Jebe’s Mongols yanked the
invaders free and axed them while a Roman flamethrower unit gushed fire
across the gates.
Marie Antoinette leaped out of the hovercar. Jebe grabbed for her, but her
sleeve came off in his hand. She spotted Mozart and ran for him, Jebe only a
few steps behind.
“Wolf, you bastard!” she shouted. “You leave me behind! What about your
promises, you merde, you pig-dog!”
Mozart whipped off his mirrorshades. He turned to Rice. “Who is this
woman?”
“The Green Card, Wolf! You say I sell Rice to the Masonistas, you get me
the card!” She stopped for breath and Jebe caught her by one arm. When
she whirled on him, he cracked her across the jaw, and she dropped to the
tarmac.
The Mongol focused his smoldering eyes on Mozart. “Was you, eh? You,
the traitor?” With the speed of a striking cobra he pulled his machine pistol
and jammed the muzzle against Mozart’s nose. “I put my gun on rock and
roll, there nothing left of you but ears, man.”
A single shot echoed across the courtyard. Jebe’s head rocked back, and he
fell in a heap.
Rice spun to his right. Parker, the DJ, stood in the doorway of an equipment
048
MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES
shed. He held a Walther PPK. “Take it easy, Rice,” Parker said, walking
toward him. “He’s just a grunt, expendable.”
“You killed him!”
“So what?” Parker said, throwing one arm around Mozart’s frail shoulders.
“This here’s my boy! I transmitted a couple of his new tunes up the line a
month ago. You know what? The kid’s number five on the Billboard charts!
Number five!” Parker shoved the gun into his belt. “With a bullet!”
“You gave him the Green Card, Parker?”
“No,” Mozart said. “It was Sutherland.”
“What did you do to her?”
“Nothing! I swear to you, man! Well, maybe I kind of lived up to what she
wanted to see. A broken man, you know, his music stolen from him, his very
soul?” Mozart rolled his eyes upward. “She gave me the Green Card, but that
still wasn’t enough. She couldn’t handle the guilt. You know the rest.”
“And when she got caught, you were afraid we wouldn’t pull out. So you
decided to drag me into it! You got Toinette to turn me over to the Masons.
That was your doing!”
As if hearing her name, Toinette moaned softly from the tarmac. Rice
didn’t care about the bruises, the dirt, the rips in her leopard-skin jeans. She was still the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen.
Mozart shrugged. “I was a Freemason once. Look, man, they’re very uncool.
I mean, all I did was drop a few hints, and look what happened.” He waved
casually at the carnage all around them. “I knew you’d get away from them
somehow.”
“You can’t just use people like that!”
“Bullshit, Rice! You do it all the time! I needed this siege so Realtime would haul us out! For Christ’s sake, I can’t wait fifteen years to go up the line.
History says I’m going to be dead in fifteen years! I don’t wan
t to die in this dump! I want that car and that recording studio!”
“Forget it, pal,” Rice said. “When they hear back in Realtime how you
screwed things up here—”
Parker laughed. “Shove off, Rice. We’re talking Top of the Pops, here. Not
some penny-ante refinery.” He took Mozart’s arm protectively. “Listen, Wolf,
baby, let’s get into those tunnels. I got some papers for you to sign as soon as we hit the future.”
049
BRUCE STERLING AND LEWIS SHINER
The sun had set, but a muzzle-loading cannon lit the night, pumping shells
into the city. For a moment Rice stood stunned as cannonballs clanged
harmlessly off the storage tanks. Then, finally, he shook his head. Salzburg’s
time had run out.
Hoisting Toinette over one shoulder, he ran toward the safety of the tunnels.
050
INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB
By Jonathan Lethem
The door to the crab’s faux-Georgian Tallahassee mansion was opened by
a male housekeeper with a trim red mustache, razor-cut orange hair
showing white at the temples, and the disapproving air of a Mormon or
Scientologist functionary. He was dressed, though, not in Western garb,
nor that of a houseboy or cook, but instead in Chinese robes, so he
resembled the token occidental opponent in a martial arts film—the type
who lurks at the side of the primary Asian villain, and is dispatched by the
hero penultimately and with great effort, as a kind of respectful nod to the
Western viewer. I wondered if he might be the same person I’d negotiated
with on the telephone, so protractedly, in seeking my interview with his
employer. If so, he said nothing to confirm my suspicion, and spoke only
deferentially now that I’d been granted access to the house. The foyer and
entrance hallway of the crab’s home were two stories high, with round-
topped cathedral windows that flooded midday illumination on the mute,
carpeted surfaces of floor and stairway, on the beige walls and tastefully
framed black-and-white photographs, many of which, I noted at a glance,
contained images of the crab with grinning visitors to the set of his old
television program, Crab House Days. The housekeeper closed the door
behind me and we stood together dwarfed in pillars of high light and
suffocated, it seemed to me, by the Floridian summer heat and the faint
odor of proteinous seashore rot that permeated the unconditioned air of
the apparently immaculate house.
“He’ll see you by the pool, Mr. Lethem.”
I wasn’t a fan of Crab House Days during its original run. The sitcom’s five-season heyday as ABC’s leading Wednesday night comedy program
began during my second year of college, the years when I was least likely to
care or even know what was on television or on the covers of supermarket
magazines—a condition which actually persisted well into my thirties,
when I got cable for the first time, largely in order to keep my eye on my
favorite baseball team, the Mets. Crab House Days was by then well into its life as a late-night rerun, nobody’s idea of hot news. And the crab’s brief,
JONATHAN LETHEM
unsavory resurgence in the form of the late-night cable reality show Crab
Sex Dorm was still a few years off then, in the mid-nineties, when I
increasingly began to linger, in my channel surfing, over episodes of the
now-classic show. I watched Crab House Days idly at first, but soon I found myself entranced by the melancholic longueurs which would from time to
time open up within the antic behaviors of the giant, housebound crab and
his bawdy, ingenuous human family, the Foorcums.
So many evenings Crab House Days, ostensibly a laugh-riot, seemed to end on a wistful note. Pansy Foorcum, the abrasive sexpot daughter who was
nonetheless the crab’s only reliable confidante, would make herself ready for
a date, talking to the crab through the shared wall of their bedrooms as she
dressed and applied makeup for a night out, and then go, leaving the crab
time and time again to scuttle and fiddle alone in his room. Pansy in many
ways played the role of the crustacean’s advocate and mediator among the
other Foorcums: Sternwood, the crab’s loutish father; Grania, the crab’s
befuddled and mawkish mother; and, of course, the crab’s and Pansy’s
younger sibling, the scene-stealing punk-Libertarian brat Feary Foorcum.
Squabbling would cease as all four of the others contemplated Pansy’s
departure from the house. The other family members seemed saddened, their
energies dampened, as though the pleasure in baiting and insulting the giant
crab were diminished past any value once Pansy was no longer present to
stick up for him. For the crab’s part, his passive-aggressive ripostes and
mordant asides were seemingly lost on their actual targets, Sternwood and
Grania and Feary; rather, they were meant for Pansy’s ears, and with her
departure the crab typically fell to an irate and wounded silence.
Now I allowed myself to be led through the foyer, past a vast, apparently
unused dining room, its chairs and table covered with sheets, and through
to the back patio. The housekeeper and I stepped through the frame of a
sliding glass door. Lawn and gardens extended to high walls of vine-covered
brick, fronted with a row of palm trees, and scattered between the house
and the limits of the yard were well-tended circular plantings of midget
palms and ferns, around an unusually large rectangular pool lipped with a
wide margin of peach-colored tile. On the pool’s tile, between three slatted
wooden deck chairs and a low matching table, squatted the crab, wide and
round as a golf cart, yet no higher than my knee.
054
INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB
His armor’s sheen wasn’t what it had seemed fifteen years before, on
television, or even in the low-resolution video of Crab Sex Dorm, a scant three years ago. Perhaps his burnished forest green and fawn brown color
scheme had always been an illusion created by makeup artists. I didn’t
know and couldn’t—wouldn’t—ask. Today his mottling was more irregular,
his colors black-to-puce, with nothing of the chestnut shine and richness
that had always seemed his badge, his pride, no matter how grim the
burden of crabdom in a human realm. Otherwise, though, he seemed
unchanged. The crab’s fragmentary leg, famously amputated in a botched
Halloween prank attempted, in a rare instance of filial accord, by
Sternwood and Feary, in the show’s fourth season, still looked as freshly
wounded as ever. The static nature of the crab’s injury, and his unwillingness
to disguise the rather undelectable gooeyness of the stump, was often
given partial credit for the erosion of the show’s ratings by the end of that
fourth season.
“Will you and Mr. Lethem be needing anything, sir?”
The crab didn’t speak, only turned slightly, rattling claws on tile. I’d been
warned of his recalcitrance, his hot and cold moods.
“Very good, sir.” The housekeeper departed the lawn, leaving me there.
No breeze stirred, and apart from my own breathing, and the swim of the
sun’s pinpoint reflections in the blue of the pool’s surface, we might have
“May I sit?”
Again the crab only scuttled. What the housekeeper had taken as a no I
took as a yes, and found my way to one of the slatted chairs, one facing the crab but not, I hoped, so near as to make him feel intruded upon.
“I don’t use a tape recorder, so I hope you don’t mind my taking notes.”
This drew no response.
“I want you to know, first of all, that I’m a fan. I came to your work quite
embarrassingly late, but it’s touched me in ways I’m not sure I can describe.
But then you’ve touched so many lives.”
The crab now began to issue a sound like a lizard’s cry, or perhaps it was
the high whine of a distant vacuum cleaner. Without wanting to stare too
intently, I searched for signs of a listening attitude in amongst his eyestalks and feelers.
055
JONATHAN LETHEM
“I don’t mean to suggest I have any special insights that would surprise or
enlighten an artist of your stature. Think of me merely as a humble
representative of an audience that hasn’t forgotten you. If anything, the work
grows more resonant over the years.”
The sound that signaled the end of the hiss or whine was like a barely
detectable yawn. The crab raised one leg, too, as if finger-testing the
windless air, or calling an invisible class to order with a single, authoritative gesture—one which also evoked, inevitably, a massive hand flipping the
bird to the sky, issuing a fuck-you proclamation to the world at large.
“As the more unimportant local and temporal elements of your show
recede into time—I mean, all the dated jokes about long-forgotten current
events, and the generic vulgar badinage which is only so typical of network
comedy of that era—the singularity of your presence becomes more evident,
more timeless and pure. You take part in a continuum of rather desultory
figures who stand in symbolic protest against the crassness of the
contemporary world, running back through Abe Vigoda and Bob Newhart
and Imogene Coca, and pointing all the way, really, to Buster Keaton.”
“I’ve heard that before,” said the crab in his loud, gravelly, immensely
familiar voice. It startled me almost out of my chair, but I tried to disguise my reaction. “People used to write that all the time, but it’s a flat-out lie. I wasn’t influenced by Buster Keaton in any way.”