Globalhead

by Bruce Sterling

  For a while Dori calls herself Dori Seda-Bangs, like her good friend Aline Komisky-Crumb, but after a while she figures what’s the use? and just calls herself Dori Bangs which sounds pretty weird enough on its own.

  Lester can’t say he’s really happy or anything, but he’s sure busy. He renames the club “Waxy’s Travel Lounge” for some reason known only to himself. The club loses money quickly and consistently. After the first month Lester stops playing Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music before sets, and that helps attendance some, but Waxy’s is still a club which books a lot of tiny weird college-circuit acts that Albert Average just doesn’t get yet. Pretty soon they’re broke again and living off Lester’s reviews.

  They’d be even worse off, except Dori does a series of promo posters for Waxy’s that are so amazing they draw people in, even after they’ve been burned again and again on weird-ass bands only Lester can listen to.

  After a couple of years they’re still together, only they have shrieking crockery-throwing fights and once, when he’s been drinking, Lester wrenches her arm so badly Dori’s truly afraid it’s broken. It isn’t, luckily, but it’s sure no great kick being Mrs. Lester Bangs. Dori was always afraid of this: that what he does is work and what she does is cute. How many Great Women Artists are there anyway, and what happened to ’em? They went into patching the wounded ego and picking up the dropped socks of Mr. Wonderful, that’s what. No big mystery about it.

  And besides, she’s thirty-six and still barely scraping a living. She pedals her beat-up bike through the awful Kansas weather and sees these yuppies come by with these smarmy grins: hey, we don’t have to invent our lives, our lives are invented for us and boy, does that ever save a lot of soul-searching.

  But still somehow they blunder along; they have the occasional good break. Like when Lester turns over the club on Wednesdays to some black kids for (ecch!) “disco nite” and it turns out to be the beginning of a little Kansas City rap-scratch scene which actually makes the club some money. And “Polyrock,” a band Lester hates at first but later champions to global megastardom, cuts a live album in Waxy’s.

  And Dori gets a contract to do one of those twenty-second animated logos for MTV, and really gets into it. It’s fun, so she starts doing video animation work for (fairly) big bucks and even gets a Macintosh II from a video-hack admirer in Silicon Valley. Dori had always loathed, feared and despised computers but this thing is different. This is a kind of art that nobody’s ever done before and has to be invented from leftovers, sweat, and thin air! It’s wide open and ’way rad!

  Lester’s novel doesn’t get anywhere, but he does write a book called A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise which becomes a hip coffeetable cult item with an admiring introduction by a trendy French semiotician. Among other things, this book introduces the term “chipster” which describes a kind of person who, well, didn’t really exist before Lester described them but once he’d pointed ’em out it was obvious to everybody.

  But they’re still not happy. They both have a hard time taking the “marital fidelity” notion with anything like seriousness. They have a vicious fight once, over who gave who herpes, and Dori splits for six months and goes back to California. Where she looks up her old girlfriends and finds the survivors married with kids, and her old boyfriends are even seedier and more pathetic than Lester. What the hell, it’s not happiness but it’s something. She goes back to Lester. He’s gratifyingly humble and appreciative for almost six weeks.

  Waxy’s does in fact become a cultural legend of sorts, but they don’t pay you for that; and anyway it’s hell to own a bar while attending sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous. So Lester gives in, and sells the club. He and Dori buy a house, which turns out to be far more hassle than it’s worth, and then they go to Paris for a while, where they argue bitterly and squander all their remaining money.

  When they come back Lester gets, of all the awful things, an academic gig. For a Kansas state college. Lester teaches Rock and Popular Culture. In the ’70s there’d have been no room for such a hopeless skidrow weirdo in a, like, Serious Academic Environment, but it’s the late ’90s by now, and Lester has outlived the era of outlawhood. Because who are we kidding? Rock and Roll is a satellite-driven worldwide information-industry which is worth billions and billions, and if they don’t study major industries then what the hell are the taxpayers funding colleges for?

  Self-destruction is awfully tiring. After a while, they just give it up. They’ve lost the energy to flame-out, and it hurts too much; besides, it’s less trouble just to live. They eat balanced meals, go to bed early, and attend faculty parties where Lester argues violently about the parking privileges.

  Just after the turn of the century, Lester finally gets his novel published, but it seems quaint and dated, and gets panned and quickly remaindered. It would be nice to say that Lester’s book was discovered years later as a Klassic of Litratchur but the truth is that Lester’s no novelist; what he is, is a cultural mutant, and what he has in the way of insight and energy has been eaten up. Subsumed by the Beast, man. What he thought and said made some kind of difference, but nowhere near as big a difference as he’d dreamed.

  In the year 2015, Lester dies of a heart attack while shoveling snow off his lawn. Dori has him cremated, in one of those plasma-flash cremators that are all the mode in the 21st-cent. undertaking business. There’s a nice respectful retrospective on Lester in the New York Times Review of Books, but the truth is Lester’s pretty much a forgotten man; a colorful footnote for cultural historians who can see the twentieth century with the unflattering advantage of hindsight.

  A year after Lester’s death they demolish the remnants of Waxy’s Travel Lounge to make room for a giant high-rise. Dori goes out to see the ruins. As she wanders amid the shockingly staid and unromantic rubble, there’s another of those slips in the fabric of Fate, and Dori is approached by a Vision.

  Thomas Hardy used to call it the Immanent Will and in China it might have been the Tao, but we late 20th-cent. postmoderns would probably call it something soothingly pseudoscientific like the “genetic imperative.” Dori, being Dori, recognizes this glowing androgynous figure as The Child They Never Had.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Bangs,” the Child tells her, “I might have died young of some ghastly disease, or grown up to shoot the President and break your heart, and anyhow you two woulda been no prize as parents.” Dori can see herself and Lester in this Child, there’s a definite nacreous gleam in its right eye that’s Lester’s, and the sharp quiet left eye is hers; but behind the eyes where there should be a living breathing human being there’s nothing, just a kind of chill galactic twinkling.

  “And don’t feel guilty for outliving him either,” the Child tells her, “because you’re going to have what we laughingly call a natural death, which means you’re going to die in the company of strangers hooked up to tubes when you’re old and helpless.”

  “But did it mean anything?” Dori says.

  “If you mean were you Immortal Artists leaving indelible graffiti in the concrete sidewalk of Time, no. You never walked the Earth as Gods, you were just people. But it’s better to have a real life than no life.” The Child shrugs. “You weren’t all that happy together, but you did suit each other, and if you’d married other people instead, there would have been four people unhappy. So here’s your consolation: you helped each other.”

  “So?” Dori says.

  “So that’s enough. Just to shelter each other, and help each other up. Everything else is gravy. Someday, no matter what, you go down forever. Art can’t make you immortal. Art can’t Change the World. Art can’t even heal your soul. All it can do is maybe ease the pain a bit or make you feel more awake. And that’s enough. It only matters as much as it matters, which is zilch to an ice-cold interstellar Cosmic Principle like yours truly. But if you try to live by my standards it will only kill you faster. By your own standards, you did pretty good, really.”

  “Well okay then,” Dori s
ays.

  After this purportedly earth-shattering mystical encounter, her life simply went on, day following day, just like always. Dori gave up computer-art; it was too hairy trying to keep up with the hotshot high-tech cutting edge, and kind of undignified, when you came right down to it. Better to leave that to hungry kids. She was idle for a while, feeling quiet inside, but finally she took up water-colors. For a while Dori played the Crazy Old Lady Artist and was kind of a mainstay of the Kansas regionalist art scene. Granted, Dori was no Georgia O’Keeffe, but she was working, and living, and she touched a few people’s lives.

  Or, at least, Dori surely would have touched those people, if she’d been there to do it. But of course she wasn’t, and didn’t. Dori Seda never met Lester Bangs. Two simple real-life acts of human caring, at the proper moment, might have saved them both; but when those moments came, they had no one, not even each other. And so they went down into darkness, like skaters, breaking through the hard bright shiny surface of our true-facts world.

  Today I made this white paper dream to cover the holes they left.

  BRUCE STERLING is the author of the nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown, as well as the novels Distraction, Holy Fire, Heavy Weather, Involution Ocean, The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, and Islands in the Net and the short-story collections Crystal Express, A Good Old-Fashioned Future, and Globalhead. He co-authored, with William Gibson, the critically acclaimed novel The Difference Engine. He also writes for popular science and travel journals. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Austin, Texas.

  Turn the page for a special preview of

  Holy Fire

  by BRUCE STERLING

  Bruce Sterling’s latest novel takes us a century into the future, when medical technology has made possible a gerontocracy, the first human generation not born to suffer. It is a wondrous place where computers can be entirely liquid, politics and lifestyles are brave and visionary, and the bohemian subculture of Europe has touched something it calls “holy fire,” a vaulting sense of perception and insight that may be the key toward the next step in human evolution: the utter transformation of the race. Here is a special preview of Holy Fire’s opening scene.

  HOLY FIRE

  Available now wherever

  Bantam Books are sold

  1

  Mia Ziemann needed to know what to wear at a deathbed.

  The net counseled simplicity and sincerity. Mia was a ninety-four-year-old Californian medical economist, while the prospective deceased, Martin Warshaw, had been her college sweetheart some seventy-four years previously. Mia could expect some prepared statement. There would very likely be a bequest of some sort. Conversation would involve an attempt to put Mr. Warshaw’s life into retrospective order, to supply the sense of grace and closure so desirable during life’s final chapter. She would not be asked to witness the actual moment of death.

  A deathbed reunion of long-separated lovers was a challenge to etiquette, but the late twenty-first century shone in social tidiness. Dilemmas of this sort were exhaustively debated in endless rounds of calls for commentary, working papers from boards of experts, anecdotal testimonies, ethics conventions, sworn public hearings, policy manuals. No aspect of human existence escaped smoothing over by thoughtful, seasoned, and mature counsel.

  Mia studied as much of this material as she could stomach. She spent the afternoon reacquainting herself with Martin Warshaw’s financial and medical records. She hadn’t seen Martin in fifty years, though she had followed his public career to some extent. Those records of Martin’s were most revealing and informative. They had made his life an open book. This was their purpose.

  Mia reached a decision: black flats, support hose, a reactive girdle and cuirass, a knee-length silk dress in maroon and gray, long sleeves, high collar. A hat definitely seemed in order. No gloves. Gloves were recommended, but gloves seemed too clinical.

  Mia had a blood filtration, a skin enzymation, a long bone-deep massage, a mineral bath, and a manicure. She had her hair cleaned, laminated, volumized, styled, and lacquered. She increased the saturated fat in her diet. She slept that night under a hyperbaric tent.

  Next morning, November 19, Mia went into the city to look for a decent hat, some kind of hat that might truly suit her circumstances. It was a cold autumnal day in San Francisco. Fog crept in off the Bay, oozing through the leafy cliff-sides of the office high-rises. She walked and shopped, and shopped and walked, for a long time. She saw nothing that could match her mood.

  A dog was following her up Market Street, loping through the crowd. She stopped behind the shadowed column of a portico and stretched out her bare hand, beckoning.

  The dog paused timidly, then came up and sniffed at her fingers.

  “Are you Mia Ziemann?” the dog said.

  “Yes, I am,” Mia said. People walked past her, brisk and purposeful, their solemn faces set, neat shoes scuffing the red brick sidewalks. Under the steady discipline of Mia’s gaze, the dog settled on his haunches, crouching at her feet.

  “I tracked you from your home,” bragged the dog, panting rhythmically. “It’s a long way.” The dog wore a checkered knit sweater, tailored canine trousers, and a knitted black skullcap.

  The dog’s gloved front paws were vaguely prehensile, like a raccoon’s hands. The dog had short clean fawn-colored fur and large attractive eyes. His voice came from a speaker implanted in his throat.

  A car bleeped once at a tardy pedestrian, rudely breaking the subtle urban murmurs of downtown San Francisco. “I’ve walked a long way,” Mia said. “It was clever of you to find me. Good dog.”

  The dog brightened at the praise, and wagged his tail. “I think I’m lost and I feel rather hungry.”

  “That’s all right, nice dog.” The dog reeked of cologne.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Plato,” the dog said shyly.

  “That’s a fine name for a dog. Why are you following me?”

  This sophisticated conversational gambit exhausted the dog’s limited verbal repertoire, but with the usual cheerful resilience of his species he simply changed the subject. “I live with Martin Warshaw! He’s very good to me! He feeds me well. Also Martin smells good! Except not … like other days. Not like …” The dog seemed pained. “Not like now.…”

  “Did Martin send you to follow me?”

  The dog pondered this. “He talks about you. He wants to see you. You should come talk to him. He can’t be happy.” The dog sniffed at the paving, then looked up expectantly. “May I have a treat?”

  “I don’t carry treats with me, Plato.”

  “That’s very sad,” Plato observed.

  “How is Martin? How does he feel?”

  A dim anxiety puckered the hairy canine wrinkles around the dog’s eyes. It was odd how much more expressive a dog’s face became once it learned to talk. “No,” the dog offered haltingly, “Martin smells unhappy. My home feels bad inside. Martin is making me very sad.” He began to howl.

  The citizens of San Francisco were a very tolerant lot, civilized and cosmopolitan. Mia could see that the passersby strongly disapproved of anyone who would publicly bully a dog to tears.

  “It’s all right,” Mia soothed, “calm down. I’ll go with you. We’ll go to see Martin right away.”

  The dog whined, too distraught to manage speech.

  “Take me home to Martin Warshaw,” she commanded.

  “Oh, all right,” said the dog, brightening. Order had returned to his moral universe. “I can do that. That’s easy.”

  He led her, frisking, to a trolley. The dog paid for both of them, and they got off after three stops. Martin Warshaw had chosen to live north of Market in Nob Hill, in one of the quake-proofed high-rises built in the 2060s, a polychrome pile. It had been ambitious, by the garish standards of its period, with vividly patterned exterior tiling and a rippling mess of projecting bay windows and balconies.

  Inside the building it was narcotically tranquil. The lobby offered an interio
r grove of hotly fragrant orange and avocado trees in portable two-ton polychrome pots. The trees were hoppingly alive with small, twittering flocks of finches.

  Mia followed her canine escort into a mural-crusted elevator. They emerged on the tenth floor, onto pavement set with stone cobbles. The building’s internal lighting glowed in superrealist mimicry of northern California sunlight. People had hung laundry inside the building’s sweet breeze and light. Mia worked her way through the big potted jacarandas and bought a shrink-wrapped pack of dog treats from an automated street shop. The dog accepted a bone-shaped lozenge with polite enthusiasm.

  Fragrant wisteria vines were flowering on the stone veneer of Martin’s apartment. The heavy door shunted open at a single knowing touch of the dog’s paw.

  “Mia Ziemann is here!” the dog announced heartily to the empty air. The living room had the sanitary neatness of some strange old-fashioned hotel: potted palms, a mahogany media cabinet, tall brass floor lamps, a glass-topped teak table with spotless untouched glassware and hermetic jars of mixed nuts. A pair of large rats with control collars were eating lab chow from a bowl on the table.

  “May I take your coat?” asked the dog.

  Mia shrugged out of her tan gabard and handed it over. She was wearing what she usually wore to shop: tailored trousers and a long-sleeved blouse. Informal clothes would have to do. The dog gamely engaged in complex maneuvers with a hatstand.

  Mia hung her purse. “Where is Martin?”

  The dog led her to the bedroom. A dying man in patterned Japanese pajamas lay propped on pillows in a narrow bed. He was asleep or unconscious, his lined face sagging, his thin, lifeless hair in disarray.

  At the sight of him, Mia almost turned and ran at once. The impulse to simply flee the room, flee the building, flee the city, was as strong and raw as any emotional impulse she had felt in years.