Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

by Bruce Sterling

  Wynne had been Cage’s greatest extravagance. He had never really sought the money; the entertainment multinationals kept forcing it on him. Once he had acquired a Raphael and a Constable and a Klee, vacationed in the Mindanao Trench on the Habitat Three and at the Disney on the moon, he found precious little else worth the trouble of buying.

  People envied him: the rich, the famous drug artist. But when Cage first hit it at Western Amusement, he had almost suffocated in his new wealth. The problem was that the money would not just sit there and keep quiet. It screamed for attention. It had to be collected, managed and disbursed by an endless procession of people with tight smiles and firm handshakes who insisted on giving him advice no matter how much he paid them to leave him alone. To them he was Tony Cage, Incorporated.

  It was while he was developing Focus that Cage decided he needed someone to help him spend the money. He felt no particular urge to contract a marriage. None of the women he was sleeping with at the time mattered to him. He knew that they had been drawn by that irresistible pheromone: the smell of success. He wanted to share his life with someone who would be bound to him by ties no lawyer could break. Someone who would be uniquely his. Forever. Or so he imagined. Perhaps there was nothing romantic about it at all. Maybe the sociobiologists were right and what was at work was an instinct that had been wired into the brains of vertebrates back in the Devonian: reproduce, reproduce.

  Wynne was carried in an artificial womb. It was cleaner that way, medically and legally. All it took was a tissue culture from a few of Cage’s intestinal epithelial cells and some gene sculpturing to change the “Y” chromosome to an “X,” as well as a few other miscellaneous improvements. Just this and a little matter of one-point-two-million new dollars and Wynne was his.

  He told himself that he must reject all the labels that they tried to put on Wynne. He refused to think of her as his daughter. Nor was she exactly his clone. She was like a twin, except that they were carried to term in different wombs and her birth came some twenty-six years after his and the abusive environment that twisted him never touched her. Which was to say she was nothing like a twin. She was something new, something infinitely precious. There were no rules for her behavior, no boundaries for her abilities. He liked to brag that he had got exactly what he had ordered. “She’s prettier than me, smarter, a better tennis player,” he would joke, “worth every cent.”

  Cage did not have much time for Wynne when she was a toddler. Back in those days he was still testing the product on himself and often as not would stagger home quite twisted. He found her an English nanny—the best kind. He did not pay Mrs. Detling to love the little girl; Wynne earned that on her own. The fierce old woman spent truckloads of Cage’s money on Wynne; their philosophy was to treat the girl as if she were a blank disk on which must be recorded only the most important information. For Wynne’s sake they traveled whenever Cage could get away from the lab. Detling helped her develop an Old World command of languages; Wynne spoke English, Russian, Spanish, a smattering of Japanese, and she could read her Virgil in Latin. When she entered third form she tested in the ninety-ninth percentile for her age group on the Geneva Culture-Free Intelligence Profile.

  It was not until she was seven that Cage began to take real pleasure in her company. Her charm was an incongruous mix of maturity and childishness.

  He came home from the lab one day to find Wynne networking a game on the telelink.

  “I thought you were going to see your friend. What’s her name?” he said.

  “Haidee? I decided not to when Nanny told me you were coming home early.”

  “I just came home to change.” At the time he was working on Laughers and still had a buzz from a morning dose. He did not want to start giggling like a fool in front of the child so he opened the bar and poked a pressure syringe filled with neuroleptic to straighten himself out. “I have a date. Have to go out at six.”

  She signed off from the game. “With that new one? Jocelyn?”

  “Jocelyn, yes.” He held out his hand for the telelink controller. “Mind if I check the mail?”

  She gave it to him. “I miss you when you’re at work, Tony.”

  He had heard this before. “I miss you too, Wynne.” He brought up the mail menu on the screen and began the sort.

  She snuggled next to him and watched in silence. “Tony,” she said at last, “do grownups ever cry?”

  “Hmmm.” Western was bitching about the delays with Laughers, threatened to hold up the bonus from Soar. “Sometimes, I guess.”

  “They do?” She sounded shocked. “If they fall down and scrape their knees?”

  “Usually it’s because something sad happens.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something sad.” Long silence. “You know.” He wanted her to change the subject.

  “I saw Jocelyn crying.”

  She had his attention.

  “The other night,” Wynne said. “She came and sat on the couch, waiting for you. I was playing house behind the chair. She didn’t know I was here. She’s ugly, you know, when she cries. The stuff under her eyes makes her tears black. Then she got up and she was going toward the bathroom and she saw me and looked at me like it was my fault she was crying. But she kept going and didn’t say anything. When she came out, she was happy again. At least she wasn’t crying. Did you make her sad?”

  “I don’t know, Wynne.” He felt as thought he should be angry but he did not know at whom. “Maybe I did.”

  “Well, I don’t think that was a very grownup thing to do. I don’t think I like her much.” Wynne looked at him then to see if she had gone too far.

  “Well, what does she have to be sad about? She sees you more than I do and I don’t cry.”

  He hugged her. “You’re a good girl, Wynne.” He decided then not to see Jocelyn that night. “I love you.”

  Many people try to make a division between personal life and life at work. Before Wynne, Cage had always been lonely, no matter whom he was with. He hated facing the void at the center of his personal life; throwaway women like Jocelyn only fed the emptiness. He went to work to escape himself; this was the secret of his success. But as Wynne grew older he had to change, gradually making room for her in his life until she filled it.

  William Stukeley belonged to the grand tradition of English eccentrics. From 1719 to 1724 this impressionable young antiquarian spent his summers exploring Stonehenge. His meticulous fieldwork was not to be equaled for a century and a half. Stukeley made precise measurements of the relationships between the stones. He explored the surrounding countryside and discovered that the circle was but a part of a much larger neolithic complex. He was the first to point out the orientation of Stonehenge’s axis toward the summer solstice. He did not, however, publish these findings until ten years later. In the interim he took holy orders, married, moved from London to Lincolnshire and decided he was a Druid.

  From his quirky reading of the Bible, Pliny, and Tacitus, Stukeley had deduced that the Druids must be direct descendants of the Biblical Abraham, who had hitched a ride to England on Phoenician ships. Although his book contained an account of the superb fieldwork at Stonehenge, Stukeley’s polemical intent was best summed up in the frontispiece, a portrait of the author as Chyndonax, a prince of the Druids. It was “a chronological history of the origin and progress of true religion, and of idolatry.” Stukeley painted a vision of noble sages practicing a pure natural religion, the modern equivalent of which, he was at pains to point out, was none other than his own beloved Church of England! The Druids had built Stonehenge as a temple to their serpent god. Although Stukeley believed that the rites practiced there may have included human sacrifice, he was inclined to forgive his spiritual forebears their excesses. Perhaps they had got Abraham’s example wrong.

  A hundred years later Stukeley’s Druidical fantasy had wormed its way both into the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the popular imagination. In 1857 a direct rail link b
etween London and Salisbury was established and the Victorians descended in droves. To some Stonehenge was splendid confirmation of the ancient and present greatness of Britannia, to others it was a dark dream of disemboweled maidens and pagan license. It was about this time that the summer solstice became a spectacle. The pubs in nearby Amesbury stayed open all night, although by license only tourists were to be served. If the skies were clear those who staggered on to Stonehenge might number in the thousands. It was not a respectful crowd. They would break bottles against the bluestones and climb the sarsens, dancing in the midsummer dawn. The dreaming stillness of the Wiltshire plain would be shattered by rowdy laughter and the clatter of vehicles.

  Cage never liked Tod Schluermann. He told himself the fact that Tod had become Wynne’s lover while Cage was in the tank had nothing to do with it. Nor did it matter that Tod had convinced her to go with him to England. Tod had bounced around the world in his twenty-four years; his father had been an Air Force doctor. Born in the Philippines, he had grown up on bases in Germany, Florida, and Colorado. He had flunked out of the Air Force Academy and had attended several other colleges without acquiring anything more substantial than distaste for getting up early.

  Tod was a skinny kid who looked good in the gaudy skintights that had come into fashion. He was handsome in a streamlined way. Beneath his face was the delicate bone structure of a Renaissance madonna. In order to get into the Academy he had needed cochlear implants to correct a slight hearing problem; he had ordered the surgeons to clip his ears. He had no hair on him at all except for a black brush on his head. Like Wynne he had a pale blue skin tint; in some lights he looked like a corpse.

  He and Wynne had met at a drug club; she was doing Soar at a light table when he sat down next to her. Cage never understood exactly what Tod was doing at the club. Tod did not often use psychoactive drugs and, although he tried to hide it, seemed to disapprove of regular users. A good candidate for the Drug Temperance League. There was a streak of the puritan in him that distanced him from his licentious generation. In his years in and out of college, Tod had read widely but not well. Like many self-taught men, hesuspected expertise. He had native intelligence, that was clear, but arrogance often made him seem stupid.

  “And where are you two going to get the money to live?” Cage asked him over dinner the night before they left Ireland.

  Tod swirled a premier cru Chablis in a Waterford crystal wineglass and smiled. “Money is only a problem if you think too much about it, man.”

  “Tony, would you stop worrying and pass the veal?” Wynne said. “We’ll be fine.” No one spoke as Tod helped himself to seconds and passed her the serving dish. “After all,” she continued, “we’ll have my allowance.”

  There was a spot of Madeira sauce on Tod’s chin. “I don’t want your money, Wynne.”

  Cage knew that was for his benefit. Wynne’s allowance was generous enough to support a barrister in Mayfair; he didn’t want her wasting it on Tod. “What makes you think you can learn to program a video synthesizer? People go to school for that, you know.”

  “School, yes.” He and Wynne exchanged glances. “Well, you know, the problem is that by the time the teachers get done with you, they’ve mashed your creativity flat. Talk to the good little ‘A’ students who catch on with the big companies and you find that they’ve forgotten why they became artists in the first place. All they know how to do is recycle the stale old crap they learned at school. Anyone can see it. Just call up some videos on the telelink. Yesterday’s news, man.”

  “Tod’s been studying very hard. And he’s had some experience already,” said Wynne. “Besides, it isn’t as hard to learn to program as it used to be. They’ve really been working to make the interface a lot more accessible.”

  “They? You mean the stale old corporate grinds?”

  “Tony.” Wynne pushed away from the table.

  “No,” said Tod. “He’s right.” She settled down again. Cage hated the way she always gave in to Tod. “Look, man, I’m not saying that everything you learn in school is corrupt. Look at you. I mean, you could never have developed Soar or anything if you hadn’t done your time. I give you a lot of credit for coming out of that whole. Your work is brilliant. I know artists who can’t even think about a project until they poke a few ml’s of your Focus. But that’s what it’s about, man. What’s important is the art, not the technology.”

  “We’re talking about computer-driven video synthesizers, Tod.” Cage laid his fork across the plate. The conversation had killed his appetite. “I happen to know a little something about them. I’ve had programmers working for me, remember. They’re complicated machines. And expensive to use. How are you going to afford the access time you’ll need?”

  Tod was the only one still eating. “There are ways,” he said between bites. “The small shops are open to hackers after business hours. Go in at three in the morning and work until five. Cheap.”

  “Even if you come up with anything worthwhile, you have to get it distributed. The multinationals like Western Amusement won’t even touch freelance.”

  Tod shrugged. “So? I’ll start at the bottom. That’s why we’re going to England. British telelink has plenty of open slots on community access stations. Once people see what I’ve got, it’ll be easy. I know it.”

  Wynne poured a volatile stimulant called Bliss into a brandy snifter, breathed deeply of the fumes, and passed it. Tod’s sniff was quick and disapproving; he offered the glass to Cage. Colleen came in with the dessert and Cage realized that there was nothing he could say. It was obvious that Tod did not have the resiliency to fight through the inevitable setbacks. In six months it would be another scheme. Tod would blame Wynne or Cage—someone else!—for his failure and continue his aimless life without them, secure in the delusion that he was a genius trapped in a world full of fools. It was obvious.

  But there was Wynne, his beautiful Wynne, beaming at Tod as if he were the second coming of Leonardo. The son of a bitch was going to take her away.

  Sir Edmund Antrobus, the baronet who owned Stonehenge, died without an heir in 1915. For years he had squabbled with the Church of the Universal Bond, a modern reincarnation of Druidism based on equal parts of wish fulfillment and bad scholarship, over access to the site. The Chief Druid announced that it had been a Druid curse which had struck Sir Edmund down. Several months later his estate came up for sale. Mr. Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge at auction for 6600 pounds. He claimed it was an impulse purchase. Three years later Chubb offered Stonehenge to the nation and was knighted by Lloyd George for his generosity.

  To the cautious bureaucrats in the Office of Works, Stonehenge was a disaster waiting to happen. Several leaning stones threatened to collapse; wobbly lintels needed readjustment. The government sought help from the Society of Antiquaries for this work. The antiquarians seized the opportunity to expand the repairs into a grandiose, and disastrous, excavation of the entire monument. The government, however, withdrew funding soon after the stones were straightened and for years the Society struggled to finance the dig itself. More often than not Colonel William Hawley had to work alone, living in a drafty hut on the site. In 1926 the project was mercifully suspended, having accomplished little more than to disturb evidence and embarrass the Society. As the bewildered Hawley told the Times: “The more we dig, the more the mystery appears to deepen.”

  Like many people, Cage did not chose his career; he became a drug artist by accident. When he started at Cornell he intended to study genetic engineering. At that time Boggs was developing viruses that could alter chromosomes in existing cells. Kwabena had published her pioneering work reconstructing algae for human consumption. It seemed as if every month a different geneticist stepped forward to promise a miracle that would change the world. Cage wanted to make miracles, too. At the time, idealism did not seem so foolish.

  Unfortunately, genetic engineering excited every other bright kid in the country. The competition at Cor
nell was fierce. Cage started doing drugs in his sophomore year just to keep up with the course work. Soon he was the king of the all-nighters. He started with small doses of metrazine; it was only supposed to be psychologically addicting. Cage knew he was tougher than any drug. He did not much care for the recreationalstuff back then. No time. He tried THC on occasion: both pot and the new aerosols from Sweden. Once over a spring break a woman he had been seeing gave him some mescal buttons. She said it would give him new insight. It did—he realized he was wasting his time with her.

  Three semesters later it all went wrong. By then he was poking megamphetamines in massive doses, sometimes over eighty milligrams. The initial rush felt like a whole-body orgasm; he did not feel like studying much afterward. His advisor told him to switch out of the program after he took a “C” in genetic chemistry. He was burning up brain cells and losing weight; he had already lost his direction. He knew he had to get clean and start over again.

  He had signed up for a course in psychopharmacology on a paranoid whim. If he had to study something, why not the chemistry of what he was doing to himself with his habit? Bobby Belotti was a good teacher; he soon became a friend. He helped Cage get off the megs, helped him salvage a plain vanilla degree in biology and encouraged him to apply to graduate school. Much of Cage’s idealism had been seared away during those twisted semesters of amphetamine psychosis. Maybe that was why it was so easy to convince himself that developing new drugs was just as noble as curing hemophilia.

  Cage wrote his master’s thesis on the effects of indole hallucinogens on serontonergic and dopaminergic receptors. The eary indole hallucinogens like LSD and DMT had long since been thought to inhibit production of the neuroregulator serotonin, not surprising since their chemical structures were remarkably similar. His work showed that hallucinogens of this family also effect the dopamine-producing system and that many of the reported effects of these drugs resulted from interactions between these neuroregulators. It was not, he had to admit, particularly innovative or brilliant work; the foundations had been laid long ago. But by then he had grown tremendously bored with being a student. The work reflected it.