It might have been near dawn when we finished and came back, but it was still black as midnight, and the storm wasn't letting up. There was two empty bottles on the bar and Lanark had passed out on the floor. Uncle Jacques had made himself an eyepatch. He said it'd be likely another day before he got his eye working again.
I offered to fix them some breakfast before they set out. They thanked me kindly but said they had better not. They gave us some careful instructions, me and Miss Harlan, about what to look out for and what to say to anybody else who came looking around. They told us some other stuff, too, like what that awful Hitler was going to do pretty soon and about international Business Machines stocks. Cut off from the world like we were, we couldn't make a lot of use of it, but it was nice of them.
And they apologized. They said they'd only been trying to make the world a better place for people, and it had all gone wrong somehow.
I got one of Papa's coats down for Uncle Jacques, and he shrugged out of the bloody torn one he had on. I burned it in the stove later. It flared up in some strange colors, I tell you.
Then they walked out together into that awful night, poor people, and we never saw them again.
When Lanark sobered up he said he didn't remember anything, but he never asked any questions either, like why there was a hole in the ceiling or where all the blood had come from. We cleaned up and mended as best we could. One thing we had plenty of in this town was lumber, anyhow.
That's all. The radio worked for a few years, and when it finally broke we couldn't fix it, so I put it away in the attic. We missed it, especially once the war started, but maybe we were better off not worrying about that, with what we'd been told.
Lanark never talked about what happened in so many words, but one time when he was sober he told me he'd figured out that Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina must have been Socialists, because of the way they talked, and maybe J. Edgar Hoover had come after them. I told him he was probably right. Anyway nobody else ever came sniffing around after them. There was a wildfire across Gamboa Ridge a few years later, 1938 that would have been, and now there's only an old rusted stove back in the manzanita to show where their house was.
Lanark drank more after that, but why shouldn't he, and it got so I'd have to walk him home nights to be sure he got there. Sometimes he kissed me at the door, but he was too broken up to do anything else. Eventually I'd have to go make sure he was still alive in the mornings too. One morning he wasn't. That was back in 1942, I guess.
Miss Harlan lived on a good long time in that cottage, kept Billy waiting until 1957 before she went off into the sea with him. At least, I imagine that's what happened; the door was standing open, the house all full of damp, and there was a trail of sand clear from her room down to the beach, like confetti and rice after a wedding. Nobody haunts the place now. That snooty woman sells her incenses and herbal teas out of it, but I have to say she keeps the garden nice.
So I'm the last one that knows.
I kept the bar open. Right after the war the highway was put through, and those young drifters found the shacks that didn't belong to anybody and started living in them, with their beat parties and poetry. Then later the hippies came in, and pretty soon rich people from San Francisco discovered the place, and it was all upscale after that.
Not that it's a bad thing. When Kevin and Jon offered me all that money for the hotel, I was real happy. Being the way they are, I knew they'd fix everything up beautiful, which they have too, mahogany and brass all restored so I don't have to feel guilty about it anymore. They're kind to me. I stay on in my old room and they call me Nana Luisa, and that's nice.
They sit me out here in this chair so I can watch everything going on, all along the street, and sometimes they'll bring guests and introduce me as the town's official history expert, and I get interviewed for newspapers now and then. I tell them about the old days, just the kinds of stuff they want to hear. I listen more than I talk. Mostly I just like to watch people.
It's pretty now, with the flower gardens and art galleries, and the cottages all lived in by rich folks with sports cars, and you'd never think there'd been whorehouses or saloon brawls here. The biggest noise is the town council complaining about the traffic jams we get weekends. People talk about how Harlan's Landing was such an unspoiled weekend getaway once, and how more tourists are going to ruin it. They don't know what ruin is.
I look out my window at night and there's lights in all the little houses, the human community all nice and cozy and thinking they're here to stay, but that cold black night out there is just as heartless as it was, and a lot bigger than they are. Anything could happen. I know. The lights could go out, dwindling one by one or all at once, and there'd be nothing but the sea and the dark trees behind us, and maybe one roomful of folks left behind, lighting a lamp in the window so they don't feel so alone.
But I don't worry much about Arion.
Even with all the restoration and remodeling, even with them selling T-shirts and kites and ice cream out of the sawmill now, nobody's ever found any of him. He's still down there, under that new redwood decking, and sometimes at night I hear him moaning, though people think it's just the wind in a sea cave. He's growing back together, or growing himself some new parts; Aunty Irina said he might do either.
He will get out one of these days, but I figure I'll be dead by the time he does. That's one of the advantages to being a mortal.
I do worry about my sweetie boys, I'm afraid this AIDS epidemic will get them. I wonder if it's something to do with that Labienus fellow, the one Uncle Jacques told me cooks up epidemics because he hates mortal folk. And I wonder if Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina found a new place to hide, some shelter in out of the black night, and how the war for power over the Earth is going.
Because that's what it is, see. I'm not crazy, honey. It's all there in the Bible. For some have entertained angels unawares, but some folks get let in on their secrets, you follow me? And it isn't a comforting thing to know the truth about angels.
Mozart in Mirrorshades
Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner
Much is said in anthropological circles about the dangers of cultural contamination, a primitive culture being corrupted by contact with a more technologically advanced one, succumbing to the lure of glitzy gadgets and civilized comforts that totally disrupt the old ways of life. Much the same might happen when the future starts colonizing the past, with results that could ultimately be as dangerous for the contaminator as for the contaminatee …
One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to enter SF in the past few decades, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the '80s, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic "Shaper/ Mechanist" future and with novels such as the complex and Stapeldonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net(as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth), as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary "Cyberpunk" movement in science fiction, and also as one of the best new hard science writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include a critically acclaimed non-fiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, the novels The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Distraction, and Zeitgeist, a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, an omnibus collection (it contains the novel Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus, and the landmark collections Crystal Express, Globalhead, and A Good Old-fashioned Future. His most recent books include a nonfiction study of the future, Tomorrow Nów.: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, and a new novel, The Zenith Angle. Coming up is a new collection, Visionary in Residence. His story "Bicycle Repairman" earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1999 for his story "Taklamakan."
Lewis Shiner was widely regarded
as one of the most exciting new SF writers of the eighties. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, Oui, Shayol, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Wild Card, and elsewhere, and have been collected in Nine Hard Questions About the Nature of the Universe and The Edges of Things. His novels include Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart, Glimpses, and the mainstream novel Slam. As editor, he produced the original anthology When the Music's Over. His novel Glimpses won a World Fantasy Award in 1994. His most recent novel is Say Goodbye: The Laurie Moss Story.
FROM THE HILL north of the city, Rice saw eighteenth-century Salzburg spread out below him like a half-eaten lunch.
Huge cracking towers and swollen, bulbous storage tanks dwarfed the ruins of the St. Rupert Cathedral. Thick white smoke billowed from the refinery's stacks. Rice could taste the familiar petrochemical tang from where he sat, under the leaves of a wilting oak.
The sheer spectacle of it delighted him. You didn't sign up for a time-travel project, he thought, unless you had a taste for incongruity. Like the phallic pumping station lurking in the central square of the convent, or the ruler-straight elevated pipelines ripping through Salzburg's maze of cobbled streets. A bit tough on the city, maybe, but that was hardly Rice's fault. The temporal beam had focused randomly in the bedrock below Salzburg, forming an expandable bubble connecting this world to Rice's own time.
This was the first time he'd seen the complex from outside its high chain-link fences. For two years, he'd been up to his neck getting the refinery operational. He'd directed teams all over the planet, as they caulked up Nantucket whalers to serve as tankers, or trained local pipefitters to lay down line as far away as the Sinai and the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, finally, he was outside. Sutherland, the company's political liaison, had warned him against going into the city. But Rice had no patience with her attitude. The smallest thing seemed to set Sutherland off. She lost sleep over the most trivial local complaints. She spent hours haranguing the "gate people:' the locals who waited day and night outside the square-mile complex, begging for radios, nylons, a jab of penicillin.
To hell with her, Rice thought. The plant was up and breaking design records, and Rice was due for a little R and R. The way he saw it, anyone who couldn't find some action in the Year of Our Lord 1775 had to be dead between the ears. He stood up, dusting windblown soot from his hands with a cambric handkerchief.
A moped sputtered up the hill toward him, wobbling crazily. The rider couldn't seem to keep his high-heeled, buckled pumps on the pedals while carrying a huge portable stereo in the crook of his right arm. The moped lurched to a stop at a respectful distance, and Rice recognized the music. from the tape player: Symphony No. 40 in G Minor.
The boy turned the volume down as Rice walked toward him. "Good evening, Mr. Plant Manager, sir. I am not interrupting?"
"No, that's okay" Rice glanced at the bristling hedgehog cut that had replaced the boy's outmoded wig. He'd seen the kid around the gates; he was one of the regulars. But the music had made something else fall into place. "You're Mozart, aren't you?"
"Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, your servant."
"I'll be goddamned. Do you know what that tape is?" "It has my name on it."
"Yeah. You wrote it. Or would have, I guess I should say. About fifteen years from now."
Mozart nodded. "It is so beautiful. I have not the English to say how it is to hear it."
By this time most of the other gate people would have been well into some kind of pitch. Rice was impressed by the boy's tact, not to mention his command of English. The standard native vocabulary didn't go much beyond radio, drugs, and fuck. "Are you headed back toward town?" Rick asked.
"Yes, Mr. Plant Manager, sir."
Something about the kid appealed to Rice. The enthusiasm, the gleam in the eyes. And, of course, he did happen to be one of the greatest composers of all time.
"Forget the titles," Rice said. "Where does a guy go for some fun around here?"
AT FIRST SUTHERLAND hadn't wanted Rice at the meeting with Jefferson. But Rice knew a little temporal physics, and Jefferson had been pestering the American personnel with questions about time holes and parallel worlds.
Rice, for his part, was thrilled at the chance to meet Thomas Jefferson, the first President of the United States. He'd never liked George Washington, was glad the man's Masonic connections had made him refuse to join the company's "godless" American government.
Rice squirmed in his Dacron double knits as he and Sutherland waited in the newly air-conditioned boardroom of the Hohensalzburg Castle. "I forgot how greasy these suits feel," he said.
"At least," Sutherland said, "you didn't wear that goddamned hat today" The VTOL jet from America was late, and she kept looking at her watch.
"My tricorne?" Rice said. "You don't like it?"
"It's a Masonista hat, for Christ's sake. It's a symbol of antimodern reaction." The Freemason Liberation Front was another of Sutherland's nightmares, a local politico-religious group that had made a few pathetic attacks on the pipeline.
"Oh, loosen up, will you, Sutherland? Some groupie of Mozart's gave me the hat. Theresa Maria Angela somethingor-other, some broken-down aristocrat. They all hang out together in this music dive downtown. I just liked the way it looked."
"Mozart? You've been fraternizing with him? Don't you think we should just let him be? After everything we've done to him?"
"Bullshit," Rice said. "I'm entitled. I spent two years on start-up while you were playing touch football with Robespierre and Thomas Paine. I make a few night spots with Wolfgang and you're all over me. What about Parker? I don't hear you bitching about him playing rock and roll on his late show every night. You can hear it blasting out of every cheap transistor in town."
"He's propaganda officer. Believe me, if I could stop him I would, but Parker's a special case. He's got connections all over the place back in Realtime." She rubbed her cheek. "Let's drop it, okay? Just try to be polite to President Jefferson. He's had a hard time of it lately."
Sutherland's secretary, a former Hapsburg lady-in-waiting, stepped in to announce the plane's arrival. Jefferson pushed angrily past her. He was tall for a local, with a mane of blazing red hair and the shiftiest eyes Rice had ever seen. "Sit down, Mr. President." Sutherland waved at the far side of the table. "Would you like some coffee or tea?"
Jefferson scowled. "Perhaps some Madeira," he said. "If you have it."
Sutherland nodded to her secretary, who stared for a moment in incomprehension, then hurried off. "How was the flight?" Sutherland asked.
"Your engines are most impressive," Jefferson said, "as you well know." Rice saw the subtle trembling of the man's hands; he hadn't taken well to jet flight. "I only wish your political sensitivities were as advanced."
"You know I can't speak for my employers," Sutherland said.
"For myself, I deeply regret the darker aspects of our operations. Florida will be missed."
Irritated, Rice leaned forward. "You're not really here to discuss sensibilities, are you?"
"Freedom, sir," Jefferson said. "Freedom is the issue." The secretary returned with a dust-caked bottle of sherry and a stack of clear plastic cups. Jefferson, his hands visibly shaking now, poured a glass and tossed it back. Color returned to his face. He said, "You made certain promises when we joined forces. You guaranteed us liberty and equality and the freedom to pursue our own happiness. Instead we find your machinery on all sides, your cheap manufactured goods seducing the people of our great country, our minerals and works of art disappearing into your fortresses, never to reappear!" The last line brought Jefferson to his feet.
Sutherland shrank back into her chair. "The common good requires a certain period of—uh, adjustment—"
"Oh, come on, Tom," Rice broke in. "We didn't "join forces,' that's a lot of crap. We kicked the Brits out and you in, and you had damn-all to do with it. Second, if we drill for oil and carry off a few paintings, it doesn'
t have a goddamned thing to do with your liberty. We don't care. Do whatever you like, just stay out of our way. Right? If we wanted a lot of back talk we could have left the damn British in power."
Jefferson sat down. Sutherland meekly poured him another glass, which he drank off at once. "I cannot understand you," he said. "You claim you come from the future, yet you seem bent on destroying your own past."
"But we're not," Rice said. "It's this way. History is like a tree, okay? When you go back and mess with the past, another branch of history splits off from the main trunk. Well, this world is just one of those branches."
"So," Jefferson said. "This world—my world—does not lead to your future."
"Right:' Rice said.
"Leaving you free to rape and pillage here at will! While your own world is untouched and secure!" Jefferson was on his feet again. "I find the idea monstrous beyond belief, intolerable! How can you be party to such despotism? Have you no human feelings?"
"Oh, for God's sake," Rice said. "Of course we do. What about the radios and the magazines and the medicine we hand out? Personally I think you've got a lot of nerve, coming in here with your smallpox scars and your unwashed shirt and all those slaves of yours back home, lecturing us on humanity."
"Rice?" Sutherland said.
Rice locked eyes with Jefferson. Slowly, Jefferson sat down. "Look," Rice said, relenting. "We don't mean to be unreasonable. Maybe things aren't working out just the way you pictured them, but hey, that's life, you know? What do you want, really? Cars? Movies? Telephones? Birth control? Just say the word and they're yours."
Jefferson pressed his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. "Your words mean nothing to me, sir. I only want … I want only to return to my home. To Monticello. And as soon as possible."
"Is it one of your migraines, Mr. President?" Sutherland asked. "I had these made up for you." She pushed a vial of pills across the table toward him.
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