Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

by Bruce Sterling

  Purchase shook his head. “You don’t really think Devereaux is going to come through, do you? Do you know who’s the new SA Security chief? Old Sackville-West. Devereaux’s the nervous type. Old Sacks will smell that.”

  “Then he may smell our Swenson.”

  “I think not. Swenson has the talent. And he’ll have Ellen Mae’s support. Trust me.”

  They took a moment to work on their drinks. Steinfeld looked down, through the table, and through the floor. The floor was transparent; the disco jutted from the side of a highmall rising two hundred stories over the main Freezone helicopter port; far below—and directly below—radio-controlled copters rose and landed, dragonfly bright in the ocean-burnished sunlight.

  Steinfeld shivered with vertigo. He shifted his gaze to the expanse of cobalt sea. “Funny how from up here, the waves look regular, perfect and orderly. Down close they’re all chaotic.”

  Purchase looked up from his drink. Without quite taking the straw from his mouth he said, “That supposed to be a parable of some kind?”

  “No. But I guess it could be: from up here we’re taking too much for granted.” The waitress walked by, her dress flashing with forty TV channels at once. It made Steinfeld’s skin crawl. “How much of that programming”—he nodded toward the televisioned dress—“is Worldtalk’s doing?”

  “Not a great deal in slices of time. But lots of it in small, regular pulses … Worldtalk’ll be active on the SA account this week. Naturally Crandall wants me to shepherd it. And I’ll have to do a good job of it. You know that.”

  “For a while. But try not to promote them brilliantly. Okay?”

  Worldtalk. The globe-straddling agency for public relations and advertising. Purchase was a Chinese-boxes man, working from the inside box out: his own man and yet Witcher’s man; Witcher’s man and yet Steinfeld’s; Steinfeld’s and yet the SA’s. The SA’s and yet Worldtalk’s. Steinfeld believed the sequence moved in that order of importance. He had to believe it, because he needed Purchase. There were too few like him.

  There was Devereaux, of course. Who just might be a waste.

  “You can pick up … Swenson, in an hour, at … ” He took a plastic-tagged hotel keycard from his pocket and gave it to Purchase, who pocketed the key casually but quickly. “He’ll be there. Report on placing him to Ben-Simon at the Israeli Embassy. He’s still with me. And to Witcher. Let us know if he gets close to them … to her.”

  “You sound as if you doubt Devereaux’s going to come through, yourself.” (The light shifting, Purchase’s face green, then blue.)

  “Just thinking in contingencies.”

  “If Devereaux doesn’t come through, we’ll have to roll up his backup team, fast.”

  “They’ll have to cope with it themselves. I’m leaving in a few hours. They’ll do fine. They’re … basic. But good.”

  He looked out over the sea, thinking, If Devereaux doesn’t come through …

  There were eight people in the room, and, each in their own way, they were all killers. No: seven were killers. One was a man who had come here hoping to become a killer; to kill one of the other seven people within the hour, in this undersea conference room beneath Freezone.

  Freezone’s enormous octagonal raft was pocketed with air and layers of flotation synthetics. Most of the buildings in the exclusive Freezone Central complex—walled off from the rest of Freezone to guarantee safety for its inhabitants and visitors—extended like enormous undersea stalactites beneath the “flotation support structure” for greater stability and less vulnerability to winds.

  In one of those buildings, the inverted wedge of the Fuji Hilton, Richard Crandall and Ellen Mae Crandall presided over the meeting …

  The room was dimmed for the briefing screen. Five men and the woman sat at the table. There were two Security men standing behind Crandall at the head of the table. All were bathed in the sickly electronic-blue light from the screen that filled the upper half of the wall to the right of the door.

  On three sides, it was a standard convention meeting room, a forty-by-fifty-foot “planning center.” The walls were the usual imitation woodgrain, the table matching. The chairs were confoam swivels; soft track lighting overhead was muted now. A bank of remote controls for the screen and room service was inset at one end of the oblong table.

  Behind Crandall, the fourth wall was a window of thick plate glass, looking out on the underside of the floating city. The dull blue vista was lit brokenly by flat white rectangles of light staggered along the down-juts of other buildings; the buildings looked like reflections in a pond, upside down. But look closer and you could see men in them: right-side-up men in upside-down buildings. Now and then some glossy, striped, gape-mouthed thing would swim up near the windows, attracted by the lights; jellyfish billowed up, pumping like disembodied heart valves.

  Devereaux sat at the table, looking out into the undersea, carefully keeping up his mask of absentmindedness, carefully thinking only about jellyfish. Not permitting himself to think about the act he was about to perform. It was not yet time to think about it.

  Best not to think about it at all. Best to let it happen the way an alarm clock goes off.

  A voice droned through the air-conditioned room from the bluewhite screen, accompanying the charts and figures appearing and disappearing there. “Alliance registration in Brussels,” the voice said, “rose forty-three percent in the last sixty days. Alliance coordinator for Brussels credits this abrupt rise to the anti-Russian/anti-American information campaign. Antipathy to the ‘foreign war-makers’ has drawn increasing numbers of Belgians into the Alliance, their registration always hinging on the Alliance’s guarantee of eventual ejection of all foreigners. Coordinator Casterman expects very little abreaction from Belgian inductees during the Final Phase, anticipating that thorough Camp indoctrination will obviate any significant resentment when, in the words of the resistance leader Chartres, ‘the country is taken over by foreigners who promised to protect us from foreigners.’ ”

  Crandall stabbed a button. The narrative froze. He dialed the lights up and turned to Sackville-West, head of Internal Security, asking sharply, “Who wrote that report?” Crandall’s faint Southern accent was almost undetectable. He was slender, almost gaunt, his black eyes a little sunken. His wide, flexible mouth could flare into a smile like a dove flushed from cover; could just as easily clamp down into a frown firm enough to use as a metal-shop vise. His hair was receding, and he compensated with long sideburns. A strong nose, craggy cheekbones—a face almost like a beardless Lincoln. He wore a suit and tie, brown leather and cream-colored silk. His sister, to his left, looked unpleasantly like him, to Devereaux’s eye. Even without sideburns. Her face was a little softer, her lips redder—but like him. Maybe it was the expression.

  “That report … ” Sackville-West muttered, clearing his throat several times as he looked through his pocket filer. “Ah, that report was written by … ah … ” Sackville-West was a pinkfaced Britisher with three chins and a comma of hair on his forehead. He was always sweating, even in an air-conditioned room. “Swenson wrote the report,” Sackville-West said at last, looking up from his console.

  Casually, Devereaux raised a hand to his cheek and pressed the stud under the skin, just below his right cheekbone. His Mossad-issue right eye increased its impressions-per-second ratio by five hundred percent. He rubbed at his left eye, as if it were tired, closing it so only the right took impressions. Details normally lost to the human eye showed up in his prosthetic perception: a flicker of fear in Sackville-West, the expression flashing through the face so rapidly Devereaux would have been unable to see it without the implant.

  All it told Devereaux was that Sackville-West was physically intimidated by Crandall. Nothing new there.

  Sackville-West was repeating, “John Swenson. SA Number 34428, inducted February of—”

  “I don’t like him quoting Chartres,” Crandall interrupted.

  “I ca
n see that, Rick.” Sackville-West responded, nodding effusively. Calling him Rick but in a tone that meant Yes, sir. “But—I think it was just his sense of humor. It says here his sense of irony is strong. I’d evaluate the remark as a kind of smug solidarity with us: mocking the resistance.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Crandall said. “Have him observed.”

  “Quite right, Rick—I’ve already punched out an order to that effect.” He tapped in something more on the pocket filer; its tiny keys were almost too small for his pudgy fingers.

  Most of Devereaux’s attention went to watching Ellen Mae with his fast-action eye. And something flickered across her face—zip, and it was gone. But Devereaux had seen: anxiety. Concern. For—

  For Swenson. So they’d already managed to interest her in Swenson …

  She glanced at Devereaux, and away. He thought: Mustn’t draw attention to myself, rubbing my eye so much.

  He opened the left eye and, as if scratching his cheek, switched off the overdrive in the prosthetic one.

  Devereaux turned to watch Crandall, who had gone on to comment on the Belgian brief. “ … I do think, however, that the new disinfo campaign is working very well, and we should continue through the same means—making sure it’s as anti-American as anti-Russian. Our friends at NATO”—he smiled, and that was a cue for a companionable chuckle around the table, which dutifully came—“would hardly approve of such indiscrimination, if it came out.”

  Devereaux smiled and nodded as he was expected to. He glanced at the Security men behind Crandall, essentially mere bodyguards … and wondered if they were bodyguards. The damn eye-blanking helmets made them maddeningly inscrutable. He thought he felt them watching him.

  Don’t get nervous, he told himself. Don’t think about the job at all. You’ll do it when the time comes.

  But Crandall was eminently paranoid; his Security knew it, and knew they were expected to be suspicious of everyone. Even now they stood behind him, between him and the window, because Crandall had instantly mistrusted the window when he’d come into the room.

  “I just don’t like it, my friends,” he’d say. “Anybody could frogman right up to the window, fire a subaqueous rocket through it … ”

  But they were behind schedule, and he’d grudgingly agreed to the room with the glass wall.

  Crandall switched the report back on. It droned out troop movement figures, confirming the Russian pullback, reporting the taking of crucial sectors. When it began on Paris, Devereaux felt the pressure rising in him again.

  He wondered if the detection-shielding on the gun in his briefcase had been adequate. But they’d have arrested him by now if it hadn’t been. He wondered, too, if he could shoot the Security men before Crandall, and still be assured of getting Crandall himself. No. He’d have to get Crandall first. Which meant Security would get him. And Devereaux would die.

  He remembered a few lines from Rimbaud.

  Monâme eternelle,

  Observe ton voeu,

  Malgré la nuit seule …

  My eternal soul,

  Redeem your promise,

  In spite of the night alone …

  It was a silent prayer of Devereaux’s own, as Crandall stood to offer a prayer for the meeting.

  The olive-drab simuleather briefcase was on the tabletop beside Devereaux’s notetaker. Devereaux laid his hand on the table beside the briefcase.

  It was almost time.

  Crandall’s prayers took about three minutes. Every head in the room was lowered for the prayer, even the guards. Even Devereaux’s. But his finger closed on the latch at the corner of the briefcase. The latch that would release the gun into his hand.

  Another thirty seconds, he told himself, as Crandall intoned in polished rhythms, “We’re asking your help, Lord, in this your battle, in this struggle to free the earth from the bonds of inbred social sin; from the sickness of miscegeny … ”

  Devereaux had twenty seconds. In those twenty seconds he found himself wondering, remembering—

  Stop thinking about it, he told himself. Steinfeld told you, again and again, When the moment comes, act, don’t think. Act, don’t think.

  But he saw himself at the New Right meeting, in Nice, raising objections, eliciting odd looks from the other members, realizing that he didn’t belong there anymore. Saw himself approached afterward by one of Steinfeld’s men. Bashung. Bashung had heard him voice a few cautious misgivings about the proposal to demand that the government oust all recent immigrants from France. Bashung had watched Devereaux through a perceptual prosthetic, identical to the one he now carried in place of his right eye. Had seen the flash of confusion and worry and sorrow and anger the others had missed.

  It hadn’t taken long to recruit him. They revealed a great many things about Crandall that were usually kept suppressed. They took Devereaux along when they went to record statements by two widows whose husbands had been assassinated by the SA. Bashung and Steinfeld had played video of Crandall’s early meetings with his coordinators, at which he made a series of insane statements in tones so calm and measured as to make the hair stand up on the back of Devereaux’s neck. Devereaux had entered the New Right chiefly out of his hatred for the Russians. But when you grasped what Crandall’s full intentions were …

  Crandall made the Russians look like playful imps.

  Crandall was the one long awaited, long feared. The one they’d all known would come again.

  And Devereaux had been recruited and trained to throw himself deeply into bogus support for the SA, to join the SA’s ranks, to ascend to this very room, where he was adviser on the French SA takeover.

  Devereaux seemed to hear the words of the boy poet again, the debaucher Rimbaud. Mon âme eternelle … My eternal soul …

  “And we thank you, Lord,” Crandall was saying, “for advancing our struggle. We ask that you take charge now of our eternal souls … ”

  Redeem your promise …

  “In the name of Jesus the Redeemer … ”

  In spite of the night alone …

  “ … we stand against the armies of darkness. Praise God, and Amen.”

  What was the last line of the stanza? There was another line Devereaux had forgotten. It was …

  Ah, yes. He remembered, now, as he pressed the switch that ejected the cool grip of the gun into his palm, as the others intoned Amen.

  He spoke the last two lines aloud as he stood and turned and raised the gun to fire at Crandall. “Malgré la nuit seule, et le jour en Feu.”

  In spite of the night alone, and the day on fire.

  He fired the gun, the Teflon-coated slugs ripping through Crandall’s bulletproof vest, but the Security men were already firing back. They had been watching him. He tried to track the gun muzzle to Ellen Mae, but the automatic pistols in the hands of the big men had punched holes in him, and he felt a terrible hollowness beneath his feet, as if someone had pulled out the center of the Earth, left it without a core, and it cracked open and he fell into the emptiness and died with a sickening pang of knowing that he hadn’t hit Crandall squarely, the bastard would live, the bastard would live …

  Rickenharp was listening to a collector’s item Velvet Underground tape, from 1968. It was capped into his Earmite. The song was “White Light/White Heat.” The guitarists were doing things that would make Baron Frankenstein say, “There are some things man was not meant to know.” He screwed the Earmite a little deeper so that the vibrations would shiver the bone around his ear, give him chills, chills that lapped through him in harmony with the guitar chords. He’d picked a visorclip to go with the music: a muted documentary on expressionist painters. Listening to the Velvets and looking at Edvard Munch. Man!

  And then Julio dug a finger into his shoulder.

  “Happiness is fleeting,” Rickenharp muttered, as he flipped the visorclip back. Some visors came with camera eye and fieldstim. The fieldstim you wore snugged to the skin, as if it were a
sheer corset. The camera picked up an image of the street you were walking down and routed it to the fieldstim, which tickled your back in the pattern of whatever the camera saw. Some part of your mind assembled a rough image of the street out of that. Developed for blind people in the 1980s. Now used by viddy addicts who walked or drove the streets wearing visors, watching TV, reflexively navigating by using the fieldstim, their eyes blocked off by the screen but never quite bumping into anyone. But Rickenharp didn’t use a fieldstim.

  So he had to look at Julio with his own eyes. “What do YOU want?”

  “N’ten,” Julio said. Julio the technicki bassist. They went on in ten minutes.

  Mose, Ponce, Julio, Murch. Rhythm guitar backup vocals. Keyboards. Bass. Drums.

  Rickenharp nodded and reached up to flip the visor back in place, but Ponce flicked the switch on the visor’s headset. The visor image shrank like a landscape vanishing down a tunnel behind a train, and Rickenharp felt like his stomach was shrinking inside him at the same rate. He knew what was coming down. “Okay,” he said, turning to look at them. “What?”

  They were in the dressing room. The walls were black with graffiti. All rock club dressing rooms will always be black with graffiti; flayed with it, scourged with it. Like the flat declaration THE PARASITES RULE, the cheerful petulance of symbiosis THE SCREAMIN’ GEEZERS GOT FUCKING BORED HERE, the oblique existentialism of THE ALKOLOID BROTHERS LOVE YOU ALL BUT THINK YOU WOULD BE BETTER OFF DEAD, and the enigmatic ones like SYNC 66 CLICKS NOW. It looked like the patterning of badly wrinkled wallpaper. It was in layers; it was a palimpsest. Hallucinatory stylization as if tracing the electron firings of the visual cortex.

  The walls, in the few places they were visible under the graffiti, were a gray-painted pressboard. There was just enough room for Rickenharp’s band, sitting around on broken-backed kitchen chairs and one desk chair with three legs. Crowded between the chairs were instruments in their cases. The edges of the cases were false leather peeling away. Half the snaps broken.