Globalhead

by Bruce Sterling

  Rockefeller shakes his head mournfully. “They didn’t make many of these, though. They were barely off the Pentagon production-line, when the shit hit the fan. Experimental model, really. Cost a fortune to make ’em. I’ve never even fired it; I was lucky to find one.”

  He grins at Spittzler, slaps an ammunition belt into the feed tray. The Swiss looks poker-faced. Andolini focuses his camera on the gun, and Rockefeller obligingly shows it off. “Bet you got nothing like this over there. Shit, everybody knows y’all in Europe were only good for making watches! But you can copy any American break-through, right? Better, if you got the krauts to manage the factories and the wops to work the line.” He draws a breath. “So I tell you what. Y’all give me thirty of these, with ammo belts to match, and I’ll give you the City of Raleigh. Simple as that!”

  “Weapons are not an answer to this global crisis.”

  “They’ll do till a better one comes along.”

  Spittzler nods calmly. “We have a better answer now,” he says. “The moral bullet.”

  “Say what?”

  Spittzler’s voice takes on a schoolmarmish tone. “People want longer lives, from medicine—not a faster death from guns. The problem centers on a proper distribution of the medical resources. The moral bullet has given us a system that works, without violence and greed.”

  “People are never satisfied, Spittzler.”

  “Even if I grant you that everybody has the ape in them, they can still be socialized. They have the angel in them, too. The Endocrine Enhancer has freed us from human mortality; we humans must now act morally in a manner which matches our new potentials. Together with each dose of FREE, we distribute—the moral bullet. It is our own medical breakthrough, the proper complement to the rejuvenation drug. It is the Empathic Enhancer.”

  Sniffy’s curiosity is piqued. “This is some kind of neuro-physiological agent? Not a real bullet?”

  “No, not a bullet. It affects the limbic system. I am not a neurologist, and cannot explain its workings, but it vastly increases our compassion, our sympathy for our fellow human beings. It restores the person’s capacity to act morally.”

  “Doesn’t sound very moral to me,” Rockefeller says. “Sounds like some kind of mind-altering drug. You say everybody in Europe is shooting up this stuff?”

  “Everyone who takes the rejuvenation drug. Immortality cannot come without a price. Better the moral bullet than the physical one.”

  “That’s brainwashing!” Sniffy says. “Maybe you got a bunch of sheep over there willing to give up freedom for security, but this is America!” Despite himself, Sniffy’s getting drawn into the argument. The clash of ideas has always stimulated him.

  “We are not entirely happy with the system, either,” Spittzler says. “It is an improvement over chaos, but manufacturing and distributing both these drugs still strains our limited resources. We have a bolder plan yet: we will alter the human genetic system so that the human body itself produces both FREE and the moral bullet, internally. When human nature is permanently changed on the cellular level—then we can say that the angel has overwhelmed the ape. We will finally transcend this squalid catastrophe, to enter a new order of being.”

  “That’s pretty ambitious,” Sniffy says.

  “We are working very hard at it,” Spittzler says. “Unfortunately, progress is slow.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” Sniffy says. “Cellular synthesis of endocrine enhancer would take a major design breakthrough. Not to mention that other gunk.… It would take more than just hard work. It’d take genius.”

  “That is why we want Sidney Havercamp,” Spittzler says. “He is a genius. But he’s also an amoral sociopath. He is the one who created this tragedy. You give Havercamp to us. We shoot him with the moral bullet, and we put him to work in the World Health Organization’s pharmaceutical labs in Zurich. Then we will do better than merely dole out the youth drug. We will transform the world.”

  “I prefer the old-fashioned kind of bullets,” Rockefeller says. “They’re still a lot cheaper, plus a lot more permanent.”

  Spittzler ignores him. “I can’t imagine that Havercamp is using his abilities here,” he continues. “It is a waste of his intellect. Let us take him back, where he can work again in the service of mankind, and atone for his great crime.”

  Spittzler’s voice is cool. It’s the kind of infuriating voice that used to drive Sniffy wild when he was in grad school. His girlfriend, the ice maiden, Miss Moral Philosophy of 1996, had a voice like that. “Crime, huh?” Sniffy says. “You’ll thank Sidney Havercamp on your knees when you’re two hundred years old, buster.”

  Spittzler inspects him calmly. “It’s the greatest crime in history.”

  “History’s over, man! We can outlive history now.”

  “Why are you defending Dr. Havercamp? It is your country that was ruined. We suffered in Europe, but we endure. We are coming back. Poor America today is nothing but a collection of bandit kingdoms, many of them no bigger than a few city blocks. Not even kingdoms—pitiful drug-gangs.”

  “Watch your mouth, pal!” Rockefeller says. “What makes you so great?”

  “I don’t wish to argue with you. All you need do, is look in the sad life in your own nation. The sight is almost unbearable. I fear you will all die in this endless anarchy; there will be no one left here for us to help, when we step in to gather up the pieces.”

  Rockefeller leans on his desk, fists clenched. “That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it? Well, if you think you can just step in here and take over, you faggot cuckoo-clock-winders are in for a surprise. Maybe we’re down, but it doesn’t take but one half-witted American fighting-man to whup a whole platoon of your candyass bleeding-heart soldiers. If it weren’t for us Americans bailing you out, you’d be speaking Russian now, or German.”

  “I do speak German. Russian, too.”

  “It figures. Nazi superman bastards.”

  Sniffy likes the way this has turned. The cameraman is shuffling from foot to foot as if this is more documentary than he bargained for. Now for a little inflammatory rhetoric to nail it down. “Maybe you can con those egghead wimps at the Library Defense League,” Sniffy sneers, “but the Chamber of Commerce is made of real men! Don’t let these cheese-eaters push you around, General!”

  At last Spittzler begins to look worried. “We are unarmed,” he points out, raising his empty hands. “It is true that we are engaged in dialogue with other factions. But the moral bullet can bring peace here. It can save your world!”

  “The stars and stripes and a continent of kicked European asses will save the world!” Rockefeller shouts. “Forbes, collar these two loudmouth foreigners and throw their butts in the cell.”

  “Yes sir!” Forbes says gratefully.

  Spittzler stiffens. “That would be foolish. What do you hope to accomplish?”

  “I’m taking you hostage, for ransom,” Rockefeller announces. “It’s the only way to get any real use out of you sanctimonious bastards. Moral bullet, my ass!”

  Forbes advances. Spittzler, still holding up empty hands, places his palms gently over his eyes. Andolini squeezes the video camera.

  A blistering flash of white lightning sheets through the room.

  Sniffy can’t see anything.

  “I’m blind!” Rockefeller howls. “Goddammit, they’ve blinded me!”

  There are long moments of frantic stumbling confusion and desperate cursing. At last a loud wooden thump. “I’m at the door, chief!” Forbes shouts. “They can’t escape while I block this door!”

  “That’s great, Forbes. You’re a smart sucker.”

  “Thanks, chief. I’m blind, though.”

  “Me, too,” Sniffy says. Everything is a red fog, fading to black. He stumbles toward what he hopes is the center of the room, until he barks his shin against the box. He stoops, hauls out the machine gun. He fumbles with the feed-cover, feeling for the ammunition belt. The smooth cartridges are as big as his thumb. Luckily, th
e belt-feed is already engaged. He backs away, feeling a surge of power like a coke high, suffused with supreme confidence, an edgy energy. “Say, chief,” Sniffy says, “you were right. This baby hardly weighs a thing. How do you fire it?”

  “Wait a sec, Sniff,” Rockefeller says. “We don’t even know the bastards are really still here in the room with us.”

  “Oh, they’re here, all right,” Sniffy says. “I can hear ’em snickering.”

  “You’ve never been exactly a crack shot, Sniffy. You have any idea what that thing in your hands can really do?”

  “Not really, no. But I just found the trigger.” Sniffy steps forward, tripping for a moment on the ammunition belt. He jerks up on the barrel, raises his voice. “Okay, you two. Give up or be cheesecloth.” He laughs. “Swiss cheesecloth!”

  No answer.

  “You know I mean it!”

  Nothing.

  “Chief?” Forbes says quietly. He’s closer than Sniffy expected, and off to the left. Sniffy had been sure that Forbes was on his right. “I’m pretty sure I got this door blocked real good, but it may be the closet door, actually. I mean, maybe those two already snuck off.”

  “Yeah, or maybe they’re gonna wrestle this machinegun right out of my hands, and cut loose on us with it,” Sniffy says. “That’s why I wanted to grab it first, right?”

  “Great thinking, Sidney,” Rockefeller says. “You always were clever.”

  Sniffy thinks furiously. They could try to yell for reinforcements, but then Spittzler would almost surely try to grab the gun.

  “They could kill us easy while we’re blind, and then blast their way out,” Sniffy says. “I mean, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Rockefeller admits. “You bet I would. Especially now that you’ve pointed that possibility out to them, pal.”

  For the first time, Sniffy begins to feel panic. His knees get a little shaky. “They might be sneaking up on me right now!” he says, swinging the gun muzzle wildly. “What do I do?”

  “I didn’t really want to live forever,” Rockefeller says. “But I’m damned if they will. I say cut loose and the hell with it.”

  “I think you should hold your fire,” Forbes says. “Just keep the best grip on it you can, and yell for help.”

  Maybe, Sniffy realizes, he isn’t as good at this as he thought. Despite its advanced design, the machine gun is getting heavy. His shoulders ache. The pistol grip feels slick in his hand. He can hardly get his fingers around it; it’s too big for a kid. He listens. Is that the sound of a footstep on the rug?

  What the hey. “I’m gonna give our audience a chance to decide,” he says. “If we have an audience. I’m gonna count to ten …”

  THE UNTHINKABLE

  Since the Strategic Arms Talks of the early 1970s, it had been the policy of the Soviets to keep to their own quarters as much as the negotiations permitted—in fear, the Americans surmised, of novel forms of technical eavesdropping.

  Dr. Tsyganov’s Baba Yaga hut now crouched warily on the meticulously groomed Swiss lawn. Dr. Elwood Doughty assembled a hand of cards and glanced out the hut’s window. Protruding just above the sill was the great scaly knee of one of the hut’s six giant chicken legs, a monstrous knobby member as big around as an urban water main. As Doughty watched, the chicken knee flexed restlessly, and the hut stirred around them, rising with a seasick lurch, then settling with a squeak of timbers and a rustle of close-packed thatch.

  Tsyganov discarded, drew two cards from the deck, and examined them, his wily blue eyes shrouded in greasy wisps of long graying hair. He plucked his shabby beard with professionally black-rimmed nails.

  Doughty, to his pleased surprise, had been dealt a straight flush in the suit of Wands. With a deft pinch, he dropped two ten-dollar bills from the top of the stack at his elbow.

  Tsyganov examined his dwindling supply of hard currency with a look of Slavic fatalism. He grunted, scratched, then threw his cards face-up on the table. Death. The Tower. The deuce, trey, and five of Coins.

  “Chess?” Tsyganov suggested, rising.

  “Another time,” said Doughty. Though, for security reasons, he lacked any official ranking in the chess world, Doughty was in fact quite an accomplished chess strategist, particularly strong in the end game. Back in the marathon sessions of ’83, he and Tsyganov had dazzled their fellow arms wizards with an impromptu tournament lasting almost four months, while the team awaited (fruitlessly) any movement on the stalled verification accords. Doughty could not outmatch the truly gifted Tsyganov, but he had come to know and recognize the flow of his opponent’s thought.

  Mostly, though, Doughty had conceived a vague loathing for Tsyganov’s prized personal chess set, which had been designed on a Reds versus Whites Russian Civil War theme. The little animate pawns uttered tiny, but rather dreadful, squeaks of anguish, when set upon by the commissar bishops and cossack knights.

  “Another time?” murmured Tsyganov, opening a tiny cabinet and extracting a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. Inside the fridge a small, overworked frost demon glowered in its trap of coils and blew a spiteful gasp of cold fog. “There will not be many more such opportunities for us, Elwood.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Doughty noted that the Russian’s vodka bottle bore an export label printed in English. There had been a time when Doughty would have hesitated to accept a drink in a Russian’s quarters. Treason in the cup. Subversion potions. Those times already seemed quaint.

  “I mean this will be over. History, grinding on. This entire business—” Tsyganov waved his sinewy hand, as if including not merely Geneva, but a whole state of mind—“will become a mere historical episode.”

  “I’m ready for that,” Doughty said stoutly. Vodka splashed up the sides of his shot glass with a chill, oily threading. “I never much liked this life, Ivan.”

  “No?”

  “I did it for duty.”

  “Ah.” Tsyganov smiled. “Not for the travel privileges?”

  “I’m going home,” Doughty said. “Home for good. There’s a place outside Fort Worth where I plan to raise cattle.”

  “Back to Texas?” Tsyganov seemed amused, touched. “The hard-line weapons theorist become a farmer, Elwood? You are a second Roman Cincinnatus!”

  Doughty sipped vodka and examined the gold-flake socialist-realist icons hung on Tsyganov’s rough timber walls. He thought of his own office, in the basement of the Pentagon. Relatively commodious, by basement standards. Comfortably carpeted. Mere yards from the world’s weightiest centers of military power. Secretary of Defense. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force. Director of Defense Research and Necromancy. The Lagoon, the Potomac, the Jefferson Memorial. The sight of pink dawn on the Capitol Dome after pulling an all-nighter. Would he miss the place? No. “Washington D.C. is no proper place to raise a kid.”

  “Ah.” Tsyganov’s peaked eyebrows twitched. “I heard that you married at last.” He had, of course, read Doughty’s dossier. “And your child, Elwood, he is strong and well?”

  Doughty said nothing. It would be hard to keep the tone of pride from his voice. Instead, he opened his wallet of tanned basilisk skin and showed the Russian a portrait of his wife and infant son. Tsyganov brushed hair from his eyes and examined the portrait closely. “Ah,” he said. “The boy much resembles you.”

  “Could be,” Doughty said.

  “Your wife,” Tsyganov said politely, “has a very striking face.”

  “The former Jeane Siegel. Staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

  “I see. The defense intelligentsia?”

  “She edited Korea and the Theory of Limited War. Considered one of the premier works on the topic.”

  “She must make a fine little mother.” Tsyganov gulped his vodka, ripped into a crust of black rye bread. “My son is quite grown now. He writes for Literaturnaya Gazeta. Did you see his article on the Iraqi arms question? Some very serious developments lately concerning the Islamic jinni.”


  “I should have read it,” Doughty said. “But I’m getting out of the game, Ivan. Out while the getting’s good.” The cold vodka was biting into him. He laughed briefly. “They’re going to shut us down in the States. Pull our funding. Pare us back to the bone, and past the bone. ‘Peace dividend.’ We’ll all fade away. Like Mac Arthur. Like Robert Oppenheimer.”

  “ ‘I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,’ ” Tsyganov quoted.

  “Yeah,” Doughty mused. “That was too bad about poor old Oppy having to become Death.”

  Tsyganov examined his nails. “Will there be purges, do you think?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I understand the citizens in Utah are suing your federal government. Over conduct of the arms tests, forty years ago …”

  “Oh,” Doughty said. “The two-headed sheep, and all that … There are still night-gaunts and banshees downwind of the old test sites. Up in the Rockies … Not a place to go during the full moon.” He shuddered. “But ‘purges’? No. That’s not how it works for us.”

  “You should have seen the sheep around Chernobyl.”

  “ ‘Bitter wormwood,’ ” Doughty quoted.

  “No act of duty avoids its punishment.” Tsyganov opened a can of dark fish that smelled like spiced kippered herring. “And what of the Unthinkable, eh? What price have you paid for that business?”

  Doughty’s voice was level, quite serious. “ ‘We bear any burden in defense of freedom.’ ”

  “Not the best of your American notions, perhaps.” Tsyganov speared a chunk of fish from the can with a three-tined fork. “To deliberately contact an utterly alien entity from the abyss between universes … an ultrademonic demi-god whose very geometry is, as it were, an affront to sanity … That Creature of nameless eons and inconceivable dimensions …” Tsyganov patted his bearded lips with a napkin. “That hideous Radiance that bubbles and blasphemes at the center of all infinity—”

  “You’re being sentimental,” Doughty said. “We must recall the historical circumstances in which the decision was made to develop the Azathoth Bomb. Giant Japanese Majins and Gojiras crashing through Asia. Vast squadrons of Nazi juggernauts blitzkrieging Europe … And their undersea leviathans, preying on shipping …”