Perhaps I could buy her off. A prize beyond prize: a jewel from the stars, from their goddess itself. Arthur said that sapphires are unknown on this world. A stone beyond compare.
I am writing as fast as I am thinking now.
I must go and face the Duke of Yoo, female to female. I am of Ireland, a citizen of no mean nation. We confront the powerful, we defeat empires. I will go to her and name myself and I shall offer her the Blue Empress. The true Blue Empress. Beyond that, I cannot say. But I must do it, and do it now.
I cannot make the driver of my spider-car take me into the camp of the enemy. I have asked her to leave me and make her own way back to Yelta. I am writing this with a stub of pencil. I am alone on the high altiplano. Above the shield wall, the cloud layer is breaking up. Enormous shafts of dazzling light spread across the high plain. Two mounted figures have broken from the line and ride towards me. I am afraid—and yet I am calm. I take the Blue Empress from its box and grasp it tight in my gloved hand. Hard to write now. No more diary. They are here.
* * *
V. Gloria medianocte: The Midnight Glory, or Blue Empress.
Card, paper, ink.
Consolation
JOHN KESSEL
Here’s a fascinating, multilayered look at an impoverished, Balkanizing future America where the Northeastern and Pacific states have been absorbed by Canada, and which centers around an unlikely romance between a political activist who allows herself to be talked into becoming a reluctant terrorist and a nonpolitical would-be immortal obsessed with life-extension.
Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American Literature and the director of the creative writing program at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975. His first solo novel, Good News from Outer Space, was released in 1988 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which were assembled in his collection Meeting in Infinity. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991, and his novella Stories for Men won the prestigious James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2003. His other books include Freedom Beach (in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly), a major solo novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and two new collections, The Pure Product and The Collected Kessel, as well as a series of anthologies coedited with James Patrick Kelly: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012. Recently married, he is at work on a much-anticipated new novel.
LESTER
Given last month’s denial-of-service attack on the robocar network, I was surprised when, over the streetcam, I saw Alter arrive in a bright blue citicar. As it pulled away from the curb toward its next call, he tugged his jacket straight and looked directly up into the camera, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. 11:42 AM, 5 November, the readout at the corner of my pad said .30 C. Major rain in the forecast.
Alter was forty, stork-like and ungainly. He stuck his hands into his pockets and approached the lobby, and the door opened for him.
I set down the pad and got up to open my office door. Alter was standing with his back to me, peering at the directory. “Mr. Alter,” I called. “Over here.”
He turned, looked at me warily, and then came over.
“Right in here,” I said. I ushered him into the office. He stood there and inspected it. It looked pretty shabby. A bookshelf, a desk covered with papers, a window on the courtyard where a couple of palms grew and a turtle sat on a log, a framed print of Magritte’s La reproduction interdite, two armchairs facing each other. Like an iceberg, nine tenths of the office was invisible.
“No receptionist,” Alter said.
“That’s right. Just you and me. Have a seat.”
Alter didn’t move. “I thought this would be a government office.”
“I work for the government. This is my office.”
“You people,” Alter said. He sat down. I sat across from him. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“It’s uncomfortable, isn’t it, working in a state of incomplete knowledge. Call me Lester.”
“I like to know where I am, Lester.”
Everything in his manner, in the way he sat in the chair, in the timbre of his voice, screamed sociopath. I didn’t need some expert system to tell me where he fell on the spectrum: I had been dealing with men like Alter—always men—for long enough to read them in my sleep.
“You’re in Canada,” I said. “In Massachusetts, to be specific. You’re in my office, about to tell us what you’ve done.”
“Us?” he said. “Do you have a hamster in your pocket?”
“Think of ‘us’ as the rest of the human race.”
Alter’s eyes narrowed. “‘Us’ like the U.S. You’re a Fed.”
“There are no Feds anymore. That’s a Sunbelt fantasy.”
“You know I’m not from the Sunbelt. I’m from Vermont. You’ve been invading my privacy, surveilling me. You’re going to doxx me. Turnabout is fair play. Eye-for-eye kind of thing. Very biblical.”
“Do you always assume that everybody else is like you?”
“Most people aren’t.” He smiled at that, quite pleased with himself.
“Doxxing only works against a person who has something to lose. Friends. A family. A valuable job. A reputation. You’re doxx-proof, Jimmy. All we want is for you to explain what you’ve done.”
“You already know what I’ve done. That’s why I’m here. You violated my privacy, my personhood.”
“Yes, that’s true. Why do you think we did that?”
“Why? What I wish I knew was how. No way you should have been able to trace me.” He looked around my office. “Certainly not with anything you have here.”
“You aren’t here for me to tell you things, you are here for you to tell me things. So let’s get on with it. We’d like you to say what you’ve done. We need to hear you speak the words. Imagine it’s so we can measure your degree of remorse.”
“I’m not remorseful. Everything I did was right.”
He was beyond tiresome. His pathetic individualism, his fantasy of his uniqueness, his solipsism. I wanted to punch him just so he might know that what was happening in this room was real. “So tell us all those right things you did.”
“Well, I turned up all the thermostats in the Massachusetts State House. Sweated them out of there for an afternoon, anyway.”
“What else?”
“I inventoried the contents of all the refrigerators of government employees with a BMI over thirty. And the bathroom scales, the medical interventions, the insurance records. All those morbidly obese—I posted it on Peeperholic.”
“Is that all?”
“I scrambled the diagnostic systems in the Pittsfield New Clinic. I deflated all the tires in the Salem bikeshare—that one was just for fun. At UMass I kept the chancellor out of her office for a week and put videos of her and her wife in bed onto every public display on the campus.”
“Is that all?”
“That covers the most significant ones, yes.”
“I know you don’t believe in law, but I thought you believed in privacy.”
“They don’t deserve privacy.”
“But you do.”
“Apparently not. So here I am.”
“You resent us. But you object to your victims resenting you?”
“Victims? Who’s a victim? I was punching up. The people I troubled needed to be troubled. Here’s what I did—I punctured their hypocrisies and exposed their lies. I made some powerful and corrupt people a little uncomfortable. I managed to tell some truths about a pitifully few people, to a pitifully small audience. I wish I could have done more.”
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I’d been doing this too long. One too many sociopathic losers with computers, broken people who didn’t know how broken they were. The world churned them out, full of defensive self-righteousness, deformed consciences, spotty empathy, and a sense of both entitlement and grievance—bullies who saw themselves as victims, the whole sodden army of them out there wreaking havoc small and large without a clue as to how pathetic and pathetically dangerous they were. A sea of psychopathy, with computers. The mid-21st century.
Thank god I didn’t have to deal with the ones carrying guns. That was another department.
Alter was still going on. I interrupted him. “Why don’t you tell me about Marjorie Xenophone.”
“Funny name. I don’t believe I know that woman.”
“You knew her well enough to send her STD history to her husband. To tell her car to shut down every time she turned onto her lover’s street.”
“That’s a terrible thing to do. But I never heard of the woman before you mentioned her name.”
“So you don’t know she killed herself.”
“Suicide, huh? She must have been one messed-up lady.”
“You turned off her birth control implant and she got pregnant. Her husband left her, she lost her job. She was humiliated in front of everybody she knew.”
“Some people can’t deal with life.”
“Mr. Alter, you are one bad, bad pancake,” I said. “You worked with her at Green Mountain Video Restoration.”
Alter’s eyes slid from mine up to the Magritte painting. A man is looking into a mirror, the back of his head to us. The mirror shows an identical image of the back of his head.
When Alter spoke, his tone was more serious. “What went on between me and that woman was private.”
“Privacy was an historical phase, Jimmy, and it’s over. Nobody had a right to privacy when they were indentured servants or slaves. For one or two hundred years people imagined they could have secrets. That was a local phenomenon and it’s now over. Your career is evidence of why.”
“So why is it a crime when an individual does it but perfectly fine when your social media platform or service provider or the government does? People sign away their privacy with every TOS box they check. If they get upset when I liberate publicly available materials, too bad. Maybe they’ll get smart and stand up to people like you.”
“Well said. Where were you born, again?”
“Burlington, Vermont.”
“Right. Burlington. South Burlington—the part that’s in Texas.”
Alter didn’t say anything. I had never seen a man look more angry. “Indentured servants and slaves,” he muttered.
“Did you really think you could create an identity that would get past our friends at MIT?” I said. “And then have the arrogance to pursue a career as a troll? Where did you go to school? Texas Tech?”
“That’s a lot of questions at once.”
“We already know the answers.”
Outside, thunder sounded. Fat raindrops began to fall into the courtyard, moving the leaves of the palms. The turtle remained motionless. “Where were you born?”
After a hesitation, he said, “Galveston.”
“Sad about Galveston, the hurricane. How long have you been a refugee?”
“I’m not a refugee.”
“An illegal immigrant, then?”
“I’m a Texas citizen. I just happen to be working here.”
“Under a false identity.”
“I pay your taxes. I pay as much as any citizen.”
“Don’t like our taxes, go back to Texas.” I smiled. “Could be a bumper sticker.”
Alter looked straight at me for a good five seconds. “Please, don’t make me.”
“But we’re persecuting you. The jackbooted thugs of the totalitarian Canadian government.”
“You’re no more Canadian than I am. You’re an American.”
“Check out the flagpole in Harvard Square sometime. Note the red maple leaf.”
“Look, I get it. You have power over me.” Alter rubbed his hands on his pant legs. “What do you want me to say? I’ll sign anything you want me to sign.”
“What about Marjorie?”
“You’re right. I went too far. I feel bad about that.” Alter’s belligerence had faded. He shifted in his chair. “I’m sorry if I got out of line. Just tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”
“I got the impression you didn’t like people telling you what to do.”
“Well … sometimes you have to go along to get along. Right?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“How many sessions are we going to have?”
“Sessions? What sessions?”
“Because of the court order. You’re supposed to heal me or certify me or something, before I can go back into the world.”
“It’s not my job to heal you.”
“Maybe it’s punishment, then.”
It was a pleasure to see the panic in his eyes. “This isn’t a prison and I’m not a cop. I’ll tell you what we will do, though. We’ll send you back to the hellhole you came from. Hope you kept your water wings.”
Just then I noticed something on my pad. It was raining hard now, a real monsoon, and the temperature had dropped 10 degrees. But in the middle of hustling pedestrians stood a woman, very still, staring at the entrance of my building. People walked by her in both directions, hunched against the storm. She wore a hat pulled low, and a long black coat slick with rain. She entered the lobby. She scanned it, turned purposefully toward my office, reached into her coat pocket, and walked off camera.
“I don’t think anything I’ve done’s so bad…” Alter said. I held up my hand to shut him up.
The door to my office opened. Alter started to turn around. Before he could, the woman in the black coat tossed something into the room, then stepped back and closed the door. The object hit the floor with a solid thunk and rolled, coming to rest by my right foot. It was a grenade.
ESMERALDA
The blast blew the door across the lobby into the plate-glass front wall, shattering it. By then I was out on the sidewalk. I set off through the downpour in the direction of the train station.
Before I had walked a hundred meters the drones swooped past me, rotors tearing the rain into mist, headed for Makovec’s office. People rushed out into the street. The citicar network froze, and only people on bikes and in private vehicles were able to move. I stepped off the curb into a puddle, soaking my shoe.
Teohad assured me that all public monitors had been taken care of and no video would be retrieved from five minutes before to five after the explosion. I walked away from Dunster Street, trying to keep my pace steady, acutely aware that everybody else was going in the other direction. Still, I crossed the bridge over the levees, caught a cab, and reached the station in good time.
I tried to sleep a little as the train made its way across Massachusetts, out of the rainstorm, through the Berkshires, into New York. It was hopeless. The sound of the blast rang in my ears. The broken glass and smoke, the rain. It was all over the net: Makovec was dead and they weren’t saying anything about Alter. Teo’s phony video had been released, claiming responsibility for the Refugee Liberation Front and warning of more widespread attacks if Ottawa turned its back on those fleeing Confederated Free America.
Outside the observation window a bleeding sunset poured over forests of russet and gold. After New England and New York became provinces, Canada had dropped a lot of money on the rail system. All these formerly hopeless decaying cities—from classical pretenders Troy, Rome, Utica to Mohawk-wannabe Chittenango and Canajoharie—were coming back. If it weren’t for the flood of refugees from the Sunbelt, the American provinces might make some real headway against economic and environmental blight.
Night settled in and a gibbous moon rose. Lots of time to think.
I was born in Ogdensburg back when it was still part of the U.S. There’d been plenty of backwoods loons where I grew up, in
the days when rural New York might as well have been Alabama. But the Anschluss with Canada and the huge influx of illegals had pushed even the local evangelicals into the anti-immigrant camp. Sunbelters. Ragged, uncontrollable, when they weren’t draining social services they were ranting about government stealing their freedom, defaming their God, taking away their guns.
My own opinions about illegals were not moderated by any ideological or religious sympathies. I didn’t need any more threadbare crackers with their rugged-individualist libertarian Jesus-spouting militia-loving nonsense to fuck up the new Northeast the way they had fucked up the old U.S. We’re Canadians now, on sufferance, and eager to prove our devotion to our new government. Canada has too many of its own problems to care what happens to some fools who hadn’t the sense to get out of Florida before it sank.
The suffering that the Sunbelters fled wasn’t a patch on the environmental degradation they were responsible for. As far as I was concerned, their plight was chickens coming home to roost. Maybe I felt something for the Blacks and Hispanics and the women, but in a storm you have to pick a side and I’d picked mine a long time ago. Teo’s video would raise outrage against the immigrants and help ensure that Ottawa would not relax its border policies.
But my ears still rang from the blast.
It was morning when the train arrived in Buffalo. The station was busy for early Saturday: people coming into town for the arts festival, grimly focused clients headed to one of the life extension clinics, families on their way up to Toronto, bureaucrats on their way to Ottawa. In the station I bought a coffee and a beignet. Buzzing from lack of sleep, I sat at a table on the concourse and watched the people. When the screen across from me slipped from an ad for Roswell Life Extension into a report on the Boston attack, I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked out.
I caught the Niagara Street tram. A brilliant early November morning: warm, sunny, cotton ball clouds floating by on mild westerlies. They used to call this time of year Indian summer back when it happened in mid-October, when the temperature might hit 70 for a week or so before the perpetual cloud cover of November came down and Seasonal Affective Disorder settled in for a five- or six-month run.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 48