“I won't,” he told her, then raised his voice to make himself heard over the clamorous conversations of the sailors who filled the room. “I wouldn't do anything like that.”
She said nothing, her long, short-nailed fingers fumbling a segment of his orange.
“Is that all?”
She nodded.
“You think I might kill you. Get around my own instincts some fancy way.”
Carefully, she said, “They will get in touch with their respective U.S. embassies, of course. Probably they already have; and the Government will contact your company soon. Or at least I think so.”
“You're afraid I'll be in trouble.”
“You will be,” she told him. “There will be a great deal of checking before they dare build another. Added safeties will have to be devised and installed. Not just software, I would guess, but actual, physical circuitry.”
“Not when I bring you back in one piece.” He studied her, the fingers of one hand softly drumming the plastic tabletop. “You're thinking about killing yourself, about trying again. You've tried twice already that we know about.”
“Four times. Twice with sleeping pills.” She laughed. “I seem to possess an extraordinarily tough constitution, at least where sleeping pills are concerned. Once with a pistol, while I was traveling in India with a man who had one. I put the muzzle in my mouth. It was cold, and tasted like oil. I tried and tried, but I couldn't make myself pull the trigger. Eventually I started to gag, and before long I was sick. I've never known how one cleans a pistol, but I cleaned that one very carefully, using three handkerchiefs and some of his pipe cleaners.”
“If you're going to try again, I'm going to have to keep an eye on you,” he told her. “Not just because I care about the Program. Sure, I care, but it's not the main thing. You're the main thing.”
“I won't. I bought a straight razor once, I think it was in Kabul. For years I slept with that razor under my pillow, hoping some night I'd find the courage to cut my throat with it. I never did, and eventually I began using it to shave my legs, and left it in a public bath.” She shrugged. “Apparently, I'm not the suicidal type. If I give you my word that I won't kill myself before you see me tonight, will you accept it?”
“No. I want your word that you won't try to kill yourself at all. Will you give me that?”
She was silent for a moment, her eyes upon her rice as she pretended to consider. “Will you accept it if I do?”
He nodded.
“Then I swear to you most solemnly, upon my honor and all I hold dear, that I will not take my own life. Or attempt to take it. If I change my mind, or come to feel I must, I'll tell you plainly that I'm withdrawing my promise first. Should we shake hands?”
“Not yet. When I wanted you to give me an honest answer before, you wouldn't, but you were honest enough to tell me you wouldn't. Do you want to die? Right now, while we're sitting here?”
She started to speak, tried to swallow, and took a sip of tea. “They catch you by the throat, questions like that.”
“If you want to die they do, maybe.”
She shook her head. “I don't think you understand us half so well as you believe, or as the people who wrote your software believe. It's when you want to live. Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be; yet oh, how sweet it is to us, this life we live and see! I'm sorry, I'm being pathetic again.”
“That's okay.”
“I don't think there has ever been a moment when I wanted to live more than I do right now. Not even one. Do you accept my oath?”
He nodded again.
“Say it, please. A nod can mean anything, or nothing.”
“I accept it. You won't try to kill yourself without telling me first.”
“Thank you. I want a promise from you in return. We agreed that you would come to me, come to my cabin, when the stars come out.”
“You still want me to?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” She smiled, and felt her smile grow warm. “Oh, yes! But you've given me a great deal to think about. You said you wanted to talk to me, and that was why you had me arrange for us to be on this ship. We've talked, and now I need to settle a great many things with myself. I want you to promise that you'll leave me alone until tonight—alone to think. Will you?”
“If that's what you want.” He stood. “Don't forget your promise.”
“Believe me, I have no wish to die.”
For a second or two she sensed his interior debate, myriads of tiny transistors changing state, gates opening and shutting, infinitesimal currents flowing and ceasing to flow. At last he said, “Well, have a nice morning, Mrs.—”
She clapped her hands over her ears until he had gone, ate two segments of his orange very slowly, and called the somewhat soiled man from his sinkful of rice bowls in the galley. “Aku takut,” she said, her voice trembling. (“I am afraid.”)
He spoke at length, pointing to two sailors who were just then finishing their breakfasts. She nodded, and he called them over. She described what she wanted, and seeing that they were incredulous lied and insisted, finding neither very easy in her choppy Malay. Thirty dollars apiece was refused, fifty refused with reluctance, and seventy accepted. “Malam ini,” she told them. (“This night.”) “Sewaktu kami pergi kamarku.”
They nodded.
When he and she had finished and lain side-by-side for perhaps an hour (whispering only occasionally) and had washed each other, she dressed while he resumed his underwear and his shirt, his white linen suit, and his shoes and stockings.
“I figured you'd want to sleep,” he said.
She shook her head, although she was not certain he could see it in the dimness of her cabin. “It's men who want to sleep afterward. I want to go out on deck with you, and talk a little more, and—and look at the stars. Is that all right? Do you ever look at the stars?”
“Sure,” he said; and then, “the moon'll be up soon.”
“I suppose. A thin crescent of moon like a clipping from one of God's fingernails, thrown away into our sky. I saw it last night.” She picked up both of her tattered little books, opened the cabin door, and went out, suddenly fearful; but he joined her at once, pointing at the sky.
“Look! There's the shuttle from Singapore!”
“To Mars.”
“That's where they're going, anyhow, after they get on the big ship.” His eyes were still upon the shuttle's tiny scratch of white light.
“You want to go.”
He nodded, his features solemn in the faint starlight. “I will, too, someday.”
“I hope so.” She had never been good at verbal structure, the ordering of information. Was it desperately important now that she say what she had to say in logical sequence? Did it matter in the least?
“I need to warn you,” she said. “I tried to this morning but I don't think you paid much attention. This time perhaps you will.”
His strong, somewhat coarse face remained lifted to the sky, and it seemed to her that his eyes were full of wonder.
“You are in great danger. You have to save yourself if you can—isn't that correct? One of your instincts? That's what I've read and heard.”
“Sure. I want to live as much as you do. More, maybe.”
She doubted that, but would not be diverted. “I told you about the messages that I bribed the radio operator to send last night. You said it would be all right when you brought me home unharmed.”
He nodded.
“Have you considered what will be done to you if you can't? If I die or disappear before we make port?”
He looked at her then. “Are you taking back your promise?”
“No. And I want to live as much as I did when we talked this morning.” A gentle wind from the east sang of life and love in beautiful words that she could not quite catch; and she longed to stop her ears as she had after breakfast when he was about to pronounce her husband's name.
“Then it's okay.”
“Suppose it happens. Just s
uppose.”
He was silent.
“I'm superstitious, you see; and when I called myself the Flying Dutchwoman, I was at least half serious. Much more than half, really. Do you know why there's always a Flying Dutchman? A vessel that never reaches port or sinks? I mean the legend.”
He shook his head.
“It's because if you put an end to it—throw holy water into the sea or whatever—you become the new Dutchman. You, yourself.”
He was silent, watching her.
“What I'm trying to say—”
“I know what you're trying to say.”
“It's not so bad, being the Flying Dutchman. Often, I've enjoyed it.” She tried to strike a light note. “One doesn't get many opportunities to do laundry, however. One must seize each when it occurs.” Were they in the shadows, somewhere near, waiting for him to leave? She listened intently but heard only the song of the wind, the sea slowly slapping the hull like the tickings of a clock, tickings that had always reminded her that death waited at the end of everyone's time.
He said, “A Hong Kong dollar for your thoughts.”
“I was thinking of a quotation, but I don't want to offend you.”
“About laundry? I'm not going to be on the run like you think, but I wouldn't be mad. I don't think I could ever be mad at you after—” He jerked his head at the door of her cabin.
“That is well, because I need another favor.” She held up her books. “I was going to show you these, remember? But we kissed, and—and forgot. At least I did.”
He took one and opened it; and she asked whether he could see well enough in the darkness to read. He said, “Sure. This quote you're thinking of, it's in here?”
“Yes. Look under Kipling.” She visualized the page. “The fifth, I believe.” If he could see in the dark well enough to read, he could surely see her sailors, if her sailors were there at all. Did they know how well he saw? Almost certainly not.
He laughed softly. “If you think you're too small to be effective, you've never been in bed with a mosquito.”
“That's not Kipling.”
“No, but I happened to see it, and I like it.”
“I like it, too; it's helped me through some bad moments. But if you're saying that mosquitoes bite you, I don't believe it. You're a genuine person, I know that now—but you've exchanged certain human weaknesses for others.”
For an instant, his pain showed. “They don't have to bite me. They can buzz and crawl around on me, and that's plenty.” He licked his forefinger and turned pages. “Here we go. It may be you wait your time, Beast, till I write my last bad rhyme, Beast—quit the sunlight, cut the rhyming, drop the glass—follow after with the others, where some dusky heathen smothers us with marigolds in lieu of English grass. Am I the Beast? Is that what you're thinking?”
“You—in a way it was like incest.” Her instincts warned her to keep her feelings to herself, but if they were not spoken now…“I felt, almost, as though I were doing all those things with my son. I've never borne a child, except for you.” He was silent, and she added, “It's a filthy practice, I know, incest.”
He started to speak, but she cut him off. “You shouldn't be in the world at all. We shouldn't be ruled by things that we have made, even though they're human, and I know that's going to happen. But it was good—so very, very good—to be loved as I was in there. Will you take my books, please? Not as a gift from your mother, because you men care nothing for gifts your mothers give you. But as a gift from your first lover, something to recall your first love? If you won't, I'm going to throw them in the sea here and now.”
“No,” he said. “I want them. The other one, too?”
She nodded and held it out, and he accepted it.
“Thanks. Thank you. If you think I won't keep these, and take really good care of them, you're crazy.”
“I'm not crazy,” she told him, “but I don't want you to take good care of them, I want you to read them and remember what you read. Promise?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I will.” Quite suddenly she was in his arms again and he was kissing her. She held her breath until she realized that he did not need to breathe, and might hold his breath forever. She fought for air then, half-crushed against his broad metal chest, and he let her go. “Good-bye,” she whispered. “Good-bye.”
“I've got a lot more to tell you. In the morning, huh?”
Nodding was the hardest thing that she had ever done. On the other side of the railing, little waves repeated, “No, no, no, no—” as though they would go on thus forever.
“In the morning,” he said again; and she watched his pale, retreating back until hands seized and lifted her. She screamed and saw him whirl and take the first long, running step; but not even he was as quick as that. By the time his right foot struck the deck, she was over the rail and falling.
The sea slapped and choked her. She spat and gasped, but drew only water into her mouth and nostrils; and the water, the bitter sea water, closed above her.
At her elbow the shark said, “How nice of you to drop in for dinner!”
Bicycle Repairman
BRUCE STERLING
Bruce Sterling is one of the brilliant SF writers who appeared in the 1970s with two novels, Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid; came into prominence and founded cyberpunk in the 1980s—the novel and stories that made him famous have been re-released in 1996 in Schismatrix Plus. He collaborated with William Gibson on The Difference Engine, became a media figure who appeared on the cover of Wired, became a journalist who wrote the exposé, The Hacker Crackdown, in the early 1990s, and returned to nearly full-time commitment to science fiction in 1995 with a new explosion of stories and novels, including Heavy Weather and Holy Fire. This story first appeared in John Kessel and Mark Van Name's anthology of speculative fiction writing from the Sycamore Hill writers workshop, Intersections. It's a story growing out of the sensibility of cyberpunk, and not without some ironic commentary on cyberpunk along the way. It's about a messy, gritty, and paranoid high-tech future, lubricated by some of those good old genre juices that have kept science fiction alive and growing in this decade.
Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.
Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday's grease-stained sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.
Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all the press of work, he'd collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him out.
Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.
More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle's spot-welded doorknocker.
Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium, Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium. Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water tanks, and squatters' flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.
Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed western elevators of Floor 34. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the damage zone to pretend to wor
k, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape. The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.
Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch onto four concrete-filled metal drums.
The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had once done some custom work on the kid's cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he recalled, but he couldn't remember the kid's name. Lyle was terrible with names. “What's up, zude?”
“Hard night, Lyle?”
“Just real busy.”
The kid's nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. “Doin' a lot of paint work, huh?” He glanced at his palmtop notepad. “You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?”
“Yeah. I guess so.” Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. “If I have to.”
The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. “Can you sign for him?”
Lyle folded his bare arms warily. “Naw, man, I can't sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy's in Europe somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven't seen Eddy in ages.”
The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.
“I'll get a bonus if you sign for this thing.” The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. “It's gotta be worth something, Lyle. It's a really weird kind of routing, they paid a lot of money to send it just that way.”
Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. “Let's have a look at it.”
The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrink-wrap, with a plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.
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