Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  “It’s because of the crosses. We’re in an emergency vehicle according to their protocols.” That was the mechanic, Jenny, sitting in the front seat and trying to staunch a nosebleed with a greasy rag. “I can hear the Governor,” she said.

  Soma could hear Japheth raging and cursing. He stretched the Owl out along the back seat and climbed out of the car. Japheth was pounding on the doors in futility, beating his fists bloody, spinning, spitting. He caught sight of Soma.

  “These weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”

  “What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.

  Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.

  “I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.

  The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.

  “Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to remove the plate.

  The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.

  Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.

  The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley and at Soma’s car.

  “We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.

  breached come home all you commodores come home cancel emergency designation on identified vehicle and downcycle now jump in jump in jump in

  Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.

  Here was the true and awesome thing, here was the forty-foot-tall sculpture — armed and armored — attended by the broken remains of her frozen marble enemies. Jenny managed to lift her head and look past sandaled feet, up cold golden raiment, past tart painted cheeks to the lapis lazuli eyes.

  Athena looked back at her. Athena leapt.

  Inside Jenny’s head, inside so small an architecture, there was no more room for Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails. Jenny fled.

  Soma saw the mechanic, the woman who’d been so kind to his car, fall to her knees, blood gushing from her nose and ears. He saw Japheth laying out the Owl like a sacrifice before the Governor. He’d been among the detractors, scoffing at the idea of housing the main armature in such a symbol-potent place.

  Behind him, his car beeped. The noise was barely audible above the screaming metal sounds out in the Lick. The standing Commodore was swiveling its torso, turning its upper half toward the Parthenon. Superheated salt melted in a line slowly tracking toward the steps.

  Soma trotted back to his car. He leaned in and remembered the back door, the Easter egg he hadn’t documented. A twist on the ignition housing, then press in, and the key sank into the column. The car shivered.

  “Run home as fast you can, car. Back to the ranch with your kin. Be fast, car, be clever.”

  The car woke up. It shook off Soma’s ownership and closed its little head. It let out a surprised beep and then fled with blazing speed, leaping down the steps, over the molten salt, and through the storm, bubblewinged bicycles descending all around. The Commodore began another slow turn, trying to track it.

  Soma turned back to the relative calm inside the Parthenon. Athena’s gaze was baleful, but he couldn’t feel it. The Owl had ripped the ability from him. The Owl lying before Japheth, defenseless against the knife Japheth held high.

  “Why?” shouted Soma.

  But Japheth didn’t answer him, instead diving over the Owl in a somersault roll, narrowly avoiding the flurry of kicks and roundhouse blows being thrown by Jenny. Her eyes bugged and bled. More blood flowed from her ears and nostrils, but still she attacked Japheth with relentless fury.

  Japheth came up in a crouch. The answer to Soma’s question came in a slurred voice from Jenny. Not Jenny, though. Soma knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere, and it wasn’t Jenny’s.

  “there is a bomb in that meat soma-friend a knife a threat an eraser”

  Japheth shouted at Soma. “You get to decide again! Cut the truth out of him!” He gestured at the Owl with his knife.

  Soma took in a shuddery breath. “So free with lives. One of the reasons we climbed up.”

  Jenny’s body lurched at Japheth, but the Crow dropped onto the polished floor. Jenny’s body slipped when it landed, the soles of its shoes coated with the same oil as its jumpsuit.

  “My Owl cousin died of asphyxiation at least ten minutes ago, Soma,” said Japheth. “Died imperfect and uncontrolled.” Then, dancing backward before the scratching thing in front of him, Japheth tossed the blade in a gentle underhanded arc. It clattered to the floor at Soma’s feet.

  All of the same arguments.

  All of the same arguments.

  Soma picked up the knife and looked down at the Owl. The fight before him, between a dead woman versus a man certain to die soon, spun on. Japheth said no more, only looked at Soma with pleading eyes.

  Jenny’s body’s eyes followed the gaze, saw the knife in Soma’s hand.

  “you are due upgrade soma-friend swell the ranks of commodores you were 96th percentile now 99th soma-with-the-paintbox-in-printer’s-alley the voluntary state of tennessee applauds your citizenship”

  But it wasn’t the early slight, the denial of entry to the circle of highest minds. Memories of before and after, decisions made by him and for him, sentiences and upgrades decided by fewer and fewer and then one; one who’d been a product, not a builder.

  Soma plunged the knife into the Owl’s unmoving chest and sawed downward through the belly with what strength he could muster. The skin and fat fell away along a seam straighter than he could ever cut. The bomb—the knife, the eraser, the threat — looked like a tiny white balloon. He pierced it with the killing tip of the Kentuckian’s blade.

  A nova erupted at the center of the space where math and Detectives live. A wave of scouring numbers washed outward, spreading all across Nashville, all across the Voluntary State to fill all the space within the containment field.

  The 144 Detectives evaporated. The King of the Rock Monkeys, nothing but twisted light, fell into shadow. The Commodores fell immobile, the ruined biology seated in their chests went blind, then deaf, then died.

  And singing Nashville fell quiet. Ten thousand thousand heads slammed shut and ten thousand thousand souls fell insensate, unsupported, in need of revival.

  North of the Girding Wall, alarms began to sound.

  At the Parthenon, Japheth Sapp gently placed the tips of his index and ring fingers on Jenny’s eyelids and pulled them closed.

  Then the ragged Crow pushed past Soma and hurried out into the night. The Great Salt Lick glowed no more, and even the lights of the city were dimmed, so Soma quickly lost sight of the man. But then the cawing voice rang out once more. “We only hurt the car because we had to.”
r />   Soma thought for a moment, then said, “So did I.”

  But the Crow was gone, and then Soma had nothing to do but wait. He had made the only decision he had left in him. He idly watched as burning bears floated down into the sea. A striking image, but he had somewhere misplaced his paints.

  Kessel to Sterling, 2 December 1988:

  “I don’t think, in the end, this is a matter of rational ‘ideas.’ You are nearer the quick of it with words like ‘wonder,’ ‘transcendence,’ ‘visionary drive,’ ‘conceptual novelty’ — and especially ‘cosmic fear.’ This is the dirty little secret of science fiction: that its roots are planted not in the logical, positivistic assumptions of ‘science,’ but in some twisted apprehension (I use the word in the sense both of understanding and fear) that ‘the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.’ We fear and are attracted by that irrationality. It yawns like a pit beneath our attempts to understand technology’s effects on us; it tugs at us like a cliff whispering, ‘come on, jump.’ In the interview Kelly and I did with you in Austin a year ago, you talked about wanting to seize the crowbar and smash something. What is that thing you want to smash? Could it be the mundane world’s assumption (born, more and more in our time, out of desperate need instead of smug complacency) that the universe makes sense, that things are stable, that change can be understood and controlled? I have this gut feeling that almost all children destined to grow up to become science fiction writers have some fundamental experience of chaos somewhere in their formative years…. Some writers react by seeking a rigid authoritarianism…others may reach for certainty but remain convinced throughout their lives that Things Change and Are Not What They Seem…

  But what are those skills [of a first-rate writer]? I think in the end, they are not skills at all, but a matter of temperament or character, or not even that — it’s a state of mind that you can attain for moments but which isn’t finally you…. What I mean is what I said in a letter to you a long time ago, that great writers go out on a limb farther than good writers do. They aren’t afraid to violate rules, good taste, logic, sensible advice, proportion, etc. in the pursuit of whatever demon they’re trying to catch, whatever quicksilver they’re trying to nail to the tree.”

  Two Dreams on Trains

  Elizabeth Bear

  In Gibson, the corporations and power structures control everything (and ultimately, shadowy Wintermute rules all). The only hope for freedom is to live completely outside of “Babylon” like his space rastas, or to drop out into the underworld like Case and Molly, the beautiful losers of the urban night world, or to steal enough money in the hope of placing your self beyond control.

  Most people in the world cannot opt out. What if you are part of a permanent underclass? What if you are part of a family, connected, and stuck?

  The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience’s left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn’t bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist’s bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the prickle of tears.

  Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a massive spacelighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a spaceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall shaggy with peeling paint.

  Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted — like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real — in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience’s hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift. She didn’t look down and she didn’t close her eyes as the needle pattered and scratched, pattered and scratched. The long Poplar Street barge undulated under the tread of feet moving past the scarrist’s, but his fingers were steady as a gin-soaked frontier doctor’s.

  The prick and shift of the needle stopped and the pock-faced scarrist sat back on his heels. He set his tools aside and made a practiced job of applying the quickseal. Patience looked down at her hands, at the palm fretted indigo to mark her caste. At the filigree of emerald and crimson across the back of her right hand, and underneath the transparent sealant swathing the last two fingers of her left.

  A peculiar tightness blossomed under her breastbone. She started to raise her left hand and press it to her chest to ease the tension, stopped herself just in time, and laid the hand back on the chair. She pushed herself up with her right hand only and said, “Thank you.”

  She gave the scarrist a handful of cash chits, once he’d stripped his gloves and her blood away. His hands were the silt color he’d been born with, marking him a tradesman; the holographic slips of poly she paid with glittered like fish scales against his skin.

  “Won’t be long before you’ll have the whole hand done.” He rubbed a palm across his sweat-slick scalp. He had tattoos of his own, starting at the wrists — dragons and mermaids and manatees, arms and chest tesseraed in oceanic beasts. “You’ve earned two fingers in six months. You must be studying all the time.”

  “I want my kid to go to trade school so we can get berths outbound,” Patience said, meeting the scarrist’s eyes so squarely that he looked down and pocketed his hands behind the coins, like pelicans after fish. “I don’t want him to have to sell his indenture to survive, like I did.” She smiled. “I tell him he should study engineering, be a professional, get the green and red. Or maintenance tech, keep his hands clean. Like yours. He wants to be an artist, though. Not much call for painters up there. ”

  The scarrist grunted, putting his tools away. “There’s more to life than lighters and cargo haulers, you know.”

  Her sweeping gesture took in the little room and the rainy window. The pressure in her chest tightened, a trap squeezing her heart, holding her in place, pinned. “Like this?”

  He shrugged, looked up, considered. “Sure. Like this. I’m a free man, I do what I like.” He paused. “Your kid any good?”

  “As an artist?” A frown pulled the corner of her lip down. Consciously, she smoothed her hand open so she wouldn’t squeeze and blur her new tattoos. “Real good. No reason he can’t do it as a hobby, right?”

  “Good? Or good?”

  Blood scorched her cheeks. “Real good.”

  The scarrist paused. She’d known him for years: six fingers and a thumb, seven examinations passed. Three more left. “If he keeps his hands clean. When you finish the caste”—gesture at her hands —“if he still doesn’t want to go. Send him to me.”

  “It’s not that he doesn’t want to go. He just—doesn’t want to work, to sacrifice.” She paused, helpless. “Got any kids?”

  He laughed, shaking his head, as good as a yes, and they shared a lingering look. He glanced down first, when it got uncomfortable, and Patience nodded and brushed past on the way out the door. Rain beaded on her nanoskin as it shifted to repel the precipitation, and she paused on decking. Patchy-coated rats scurried around her as she watched a lighter and train lay itself into the lake, gently as an autumn leaf. She leaned out over the Poplar Street Canal as the lights taxied into their berth. The train’s wake lapped gently at the segmented kilometers-long barge, lifting and dropping Poplar Street under Patience’s feet. Cloying rain and sweat adhered her hair to the nape of her neck. Browning roux and sharp pepper cut the reek of filthy water. She squeezed the railing with her uninjured hand and watched another train ascend, the blossom of fear in her chest finally easing. “Javier Alexander,” she muttered, crossing a swaying bridge. “You had best be home safe in bed, my boy. You’d best be home in bed.”

  A city like drowned New Orleans, you don’t just walk away from. A city like drowned New Orleans, you fly
away from. If you can. And if you can’t…

  You make something that can.

  Jayve lay back in a puddle of blood-warm rain and seawater in the “borrowed” dinghy and watched the belly lights of another big train drift overhead, hulls silhouetted against the citylit salmon-colored clouds like a string of pearls. He almost reached up a pale-skinned hand: it seemed close enough to touch. The rain parted to either side like curtains, leaving him dry for the instant when the wind from the train’s fans tossed him, and came together again behind as unmarked as the sea. “Beautiful,” he whispered. “Fucking beautiful, Mad.”

  “You in there, Jayve?” A whisper in his ear, stutter and crack of static. They couldn’t afford good equipment, or anything not stolen or jerry-built. But who gave a damn? Who gave a damn, when you could get that close to a starship?

  “That last one went over my fucking head, Mad. Are you in?”

  “Over the buoys. Shit. Brace!”

  Jayve slammed hands and feet against the hull of the rowboat as Mad spluttered and coughed. The train’s wake hit him, picked the dinghy up and shook it like a dog shaking a dishrag. Slimed old wood scraped his palms; the cross brace gouged an oozing slice across his scalp and salt water stung the blood from the wound. The contents of the net bag laced to his belt slammed him in the gut. He groaned and clung; strain burned his thighs and triceps.

  He was still in the dinghy when it came back down.

  He clutched his net bag, half-panicked touch racing over the surface of the insulated tins within until he was certain the wetness he felt was rain and not the gooey ooze of etchant: sure mostly because the skin on his hands stayed cool instead of sloughing to hang in shreds.

  “Mad, can you hear me?”

  A long, gut-tightening silence. Then Mad retched like he’d swallowed seawater. “Alive,” he said. “Shit, that boy put his boat down a bit harder than he had to, didn’t he?”