A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  “Yeah. It is, actually. The chances are eighty to one that she’ll turn me down flat.” Eddy laughed. “But I’m gonna try anyway. Because you’re not letting me live and breathe.”

  Djulia’s face went stiff. “When we’re face to face, you always abuse my trust. That’s why I don’t like for us to go past virching.”

  “Come off it, Djulia.”

  She was defiant. “If you think you’ll be happier with some weirdo virch-whore in Europe, go ahead! I don’t know why you can’t do that by wire from Chattanooga, anyway.”

  “This is Europe. We’re talking actuality here.”

  Djulia was shocked. “If you actually touch another woman I never want to see you again.” She bit her lip. “Or do wire with you, either. I mean that, Eddy. You know I do.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  He hung up, got change from the phone, and dialed his parents’ house. His father answered.

  “Hi, Bob. Lisa around?”

  “No,” his father said, “it’s her night for optic macrame. How’s Europe?”

  “Different.”

  “Nice to hear from you, Eddy. We’re kind of short of money. I can spare you some sustained attention, though.”

  “I just dumped Djulia.”

  “Good move, son,” his father said briskly. “Fine. Very serious girl, Djulia. Way too straitlaced for you. A kid your age should be dating girls who are absolutely jumping out of their skins.”

  Eddy nodded.

  “You didn’t lose your spex, did you?”

  Eddy held them up on their neck chain. “Safe and sound.”

  “Hardly recognized you for a second,” his father said. “Ed, you’re such a serious-minded kid. Taking on all these responsibilities. On the road so much, spexware day in and day out. Lisa and I network about you all the time. Neither of us did a day’s work before we were thirty, and we’re all the better for it. You’ve got to live, son. Got to find yourself. Smell the roses. If you want to stay in Europe a couple of months, forget the algebra courses.”

  “It’s calculus, Bob.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Thanks for the good advice, Bob. I know you mean it.”

  “It’s good news about Djulia, son. You know we don’t invalidate your feelings, so we never said a goddamn thing to you, but her glassware really sucked. Lisa says she’s got no goddamn aesthetics at all. That’s a hell of a thing, in a woman.”

  “That’s my mom,” Eddy said. “Give Lisa my best.” He hung up.

  He went back out to the sidewalk table. “Did you eat enough?” Sardelle asked.

  “Yeah. It was good.”

  “Sleepy?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “Do you have a place to stay, Eddy? Hotel reservations?”

  Eddy shrugged. “No. I don’t bother, usually. What’s the use? It’s more fun winging it.”

  “Good,” Sardelle nodded. “It’s better to wing. No one can trace us. It’s safer.”

  She found them shelter in a park, where an activist group of artists from Munich had set up a squatter pavilion. As squatter pavilions went, it was quite a nice one, new and in good condition: a giant soap-bubble upholstered in cellophane and polysilk. It covered half an acre with crisp yellow bubblepack flooring. The shelter was illegal and therefore anonymous. Sardelle seemed quite pleased about this.

  Once through the zippered airlock, Eddy and Sardelle were forced to examine the artists’ multimedia artwork for an entire grueling hour. Worse yet, they were closely quizzed afterward by an expert-system, which bullied them relentlessly with arcane aesthetic dogma.

  This ordeal was too high a price for most squatters. The pavilion, though attractive, was only half-full, and many people who had shown up bone-tired were fleeing the art headlong. Deep Eddy, however, almost always aced this sort of thing. Thanks to his slick responses to the computer’s quizzing, he won himself quite a nice area, with a blanket, opaquable curtains, and its own light fixtures. Sardelle, by contrast, had been bored and minimal, and had won nothing more advanced than a pillow and a patch of bubblepack among the philistines.

  Eddy made good use of a traveling pay-toilet stall, and bought some mints and chilled mineral water from a robot. He settled in cozily as police sirens, and some distant, rather choked-sounding explosions, made the night glamorous.

  Sardelle didn’t seem anxious to leave. “May I see your hotel bag,” she said.

  “Sure.” He handed it over. Might as well. She’d given it to him in the first place.

  He’d thought she was going to examine the book again, but instead she took a small plastic packet from within the bag, and pulled the packet’s ripcord. A colorful jumpsuit jumped out, with a chemical hiss and a vague hot stink of catalysis and cheap cologne. The jumpsuit, a one-piece, had comically baggy legs, frilled sleeves, and was printed all over with a festive cut-up of twentieth-century naughty seaside postcards.

  “Pajamas,” Eddy said. “Gosh, how thoughtful.”

  “You can sleep in this if you want,” Sardelle nodded, “but it’s daywear. I want you to wear it tomorrow. And I want to buy the clothes you are wearing now, so that I can take them away for safety.”

  Deep Eddy was wearing a dress shirt, light jacket, American jeans, dappled stockings, and Nashville brogues of genuine blue suede. “I can’t wear that crap,” he protested. “Jesus, I’d look like a total loser.”

  “Yes,” said Sardelle with an enthusiastic nod, “it’s very cheap and common. It will make you invisible. Just one more party boy among thousands and thousands. This is very secure dress, for a courier during a Wende.”

  “You want me to meet the Critic in this get-up?”

  Sardelle laughed. “The Cultural Critic is not impressed by taste, Eddy. The eye he uses when he looks at people … he sees things other people can’t see.” She paused, considering. “He might be impressed if you showed up dressed in this. Not because of what it is, of course. But because it would show that you can understand and manipulate popular taste to your own advantage … just as he does.”

  “You’re really being paranoid,” Eddy said, nettled.

  “I’m not an assassin. I’m just some techie zude from Tennessee. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I believe you,” she nodded. “You’re very convincing. But that has nothing to do with proper security technique. If I take your clothes, there will be less operational risk.”

  “How much less risk? What do you expect to find in my clothes, anyway?”

  “There are many, many things you might have done,” she said patiently. “The human race is very ingenious. We have invented ways to kill, or hurt, or injure almost anyone, with almost nothing at all.” She sighed. “If you don’t know about such techniques already, it would only be stupid for me to tell you all about them. So let’s be quick and simple, Eddy. It would make me happier to take your clothes away. A hundred ecu.”

  Eddy shook his head. “This time it’s really going to cost you.”

  “Two hundred then,” Sardelle said.

  “Forget it.”

  “I can’t go higher than two hundred. Unless you let me search your body cavities.”

  Eddy dropped his spex.

  “Body cavities,” Sardelle said impatiently. “You’re a grown-up man, you must know about this. A great deal can be done with body cavities.”

  Eddy stared at her. “Can’t I have some chocolate and roses first?”

  “It’s not chocolate and roses with us,” Sardelle said sternly. “Don’t talk to me about chocolate and roses. We’re not lovers. We are client and bodyguard. It’s an ugly business, I know. But it’s only business.”

  “Yeah? Well, trading in body cavities is new to me.” Deep Eddy rubbed his chin. “As a simple Yankee youngster I find this a little confusing. Maybe we could barter then? Tonight?”

  She laughed harshly. “I won’t sleep with you, Eddy. I won’t sleep at all! You’re only being foolish.” Sardelle shook her head. Su
ddenly she lifted a densely braided mass of hair above her right ear. “Look here, Mr. Simple Yankee Youngster. I’ll show you my favorite body cavity.” There was a fleshcolored plastic duct in the side of her scalp. “It’s illegal to have this done in Europe. I had it done in Turkey. This morning I took half a cc through there. I won’t sleep until Monday.”

  “Jesus,” Eddy said. He lifted his spex to stare at the small dimpled orifice. “Right through the blood-brain barrier? That must be a hell of an infection risk.”

  “I don’t do it for fun. It’s not like beer and pretzels. It’s just that I won’t sleep now. Not until the Wende is over.” She put her hair back, and sat up with a look of composure. “Then I’ll fly somewhere and lie in the sun and be very still. All by myself, Eddy.”

  “Okay,” Eddy said, feeling a weird and muddy sort of pity for her. “You can borrow my clothes and search them.”

  “I have to burn the clothes. Two hundred ecu?”

  “All right. But I keep these shoes.”

  “May I look at your teeth for free? It will only take five minutes.”

  “Okay,” he muttered. She smiled at him, and touched her spex. A bright purple light emerged from the bridge of her nose.

  At 08:00 a police drone attempted to clear the park. It flew overhead, barking robotic threats in five languages. Everyone simply ignored the machine.

  Around 08:30 an actual line of human police showed up. In response, a group of the squatters brought out their own bullhorn, an enormous battery-powered sonic assault-unit.

  The first earthshaking shriek hit Eddy like an electric prod. He’d been lying peacefully on his bubble-mattress, listening to the doltish yap of the robot chopper. Now he leapt quickly from his crash-padding and wormed his way into the crispy bubblepack cloth of his ridiculous jumpsuit.

  Sardelle showed up while he was still tacking the jumpsuit’s Velcro buttons. She led him outside the pavilion.

  The squatter bullhorn was up on an iron tripod pedestal, surrounded by a large group of grease-stained anarchists with helmets, earpads, and studded white batons. Their bullhorn’s enormous ululating bellow was reducing everyone’s nerves to jelly. It was like the shriek of Medusa.

  The cops retreated, and the owners of the bullhorn shut it off, waving their glittering batons in triumph. In the deafened, jittery silence there were scattered shrieks, jeers, and claps, but the ambience in the park had become very bad: aggressive and surreal. Attracted by the apocalyptic shriek, people were milling into the park at a trot, spoiling for any kind of trouble.

  They seemed to have little in common, these people: not their dress, not language, certainly nothing like a coherent political cause. They were mostly young men, and most of them looked as if they’d been up all night: redeyed and peevish. They taunted the retreating cops. A milling gang knifed one of the smaller pavilions, a scarlet one, and it collapsed like a blood-blister under their trampling feet.

  Sardelle took Eddy to the edge of the park, where the cops were herding up a crowd-control barricade-line of ambulant robotic pink beanbags. “I want to see this,” he protested. His ears were ringing.

  “They’re going to fight,” she told him.

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Everything,” she shouted. “It doesn’t matter. They’ll knock our teeth out. Don’t be stupid.” She took him by the elbow and they slipped through a gap in the closing battle-line.

  The police had brought up a tracked glue-cannon truck. They now began to threaten the crowd with a pasting. Eddy had never seen a glue-cannon before—except on television. It was quite astonishing how frightening the machine looked, even in pink. It was squat, blind, and nozzled, and sat there buzzing like some kind of wheeled warrior termite.

  Suddenly several of the cops standing around the machine began to flinch and duck. Eddy saw a glittering object carom hard off the glue-truck’s armored canopy. It flew twenty meters and landed in the grass at his feet. He picked it up. It was a stainless-steel ball-bearing the size of a cow’s eyeball.

  “Airguns?” he said.

  “Slingshots. Don’t let one hit you.”

  “Oh yeah. Great advice, I guess.” To the far side of the cops a group of people—some kind of closely organized protestors—were advancing in measured step under a tall two-man banner. It read, in English: The Only Thing Worse Than Dying Is Outliving Your Culture. Every man jack of them, and there were at least sixty, carried a long plastic pike topped with an ominous-looking bulbous sponge. It was clear from the way they maneuvered that they understood military pike-tactics only too well; their phalanx bristled like a hedgehog, and some captain among them was barking distant orders. Worse yet, the pikemen had neatly outflanked the cops, who now began calling frantically for backup.

  A police drone whizzed just above their heads, not the casual lumbering he had seen before, but direct and angry and inhumanly fast. “Run!” Sardelle shouted, taking his hands. “Peppergas …”

  Eddy glanced behind him as he fled. The chopper, as if cropdusting, was farting a dense maroon fog. The crowd bellowed in shock and rage and, seconds later, that hellish bullhorn kicked in once more.

  Sardelle ran with amazing ease and speed. She bounded along as if firecrackers were bursting under her feet. Eddy, years younger and considerably longer in leg, was very hard put to keep up.

  In two minutes they were well out of the park, across a broad street and into a pedestrian network of small shops and restaurants. There she stopped and let him catch his breath.

  “Jesus,” he puffed, “where can I buy shoes like that?”

  “They’re made-to-order,” she told him calmly. “And you need special training. You can break your ankles, otherwise.…” She gazed at a nearby bakery. “You want some breakfast now?”

  Eddy sampled a chocolate-filled pastry inside the shop, at a dainty, doily-covered table. Two ambulances rushed down the street, and a large group of drum-beating protesters swaggered by, shoving shoppers from the pavement; but otherwise things seemed peaceful. Sardelle sat with arms folded, staring into space. He guessed that she was reading security alerts from the insides of her spex.

  “You’re not tired, are you?” he said.

  “I don’t sleep on operations,” she said, “but sometimes I like to sit very still.” She smiled at him. “You wouldn’t understand.…”

  “Hell no I wouldn’t,” Eddy said, his mouth full. “All hell’s breaking loose over there, and here you are sipping orange juice just as calm as a bump on a pickle.… Damn, these croissants, or whatever the hell they are, are really good. Hey! Herr Ober! Bring me another couple of those, ja, danke.…”

  “The trouble could follow us anywhere. We’re as safe here as any other place. Safer, because we’re not in the open.”

  “Good,” Eddy nodded, munching. “That park’s a bad scene.”

  “It’s not so bad in the park. It’s very bad at the Rhein-Spire, though. The Mahogany Warbirds have seized the rotating restaurant. They’re stealing skin.”

  “What are Warbirds?”

  She seemed surprised. “You haven’t heard of them? They’re from NAFTA. A criminal syndicate. Insurance rackets, protection rackets, they run all the casinos in the Quebec Republic.…”

  “Okay. So what’s stealing skin?”

  “It’s a new kind of swindle; they take a bit of skin or blood, with your genetics, you see, and a year later they tell you they have a newborn son or daughter of yours held captive, held somewhere secret in the South.… Then they try to make you pay, and pay, and pay.…”

  “You mean they’re kidnapping genetics from the people in that restaurant?”

  “Yes. Brunch in the Rhein-Spire is very prestigious. The victims are all rich or famous.” Suddenly she laughed, rather bitter, rather cynical. “I’ll be busy next year, Eddy, thanks to this. A new job—protecting my clients’ skin.”

  Eddy thought about it. “It’s kind of like the rent-a-womb business, huh? But really twisted.”

 
; She nodded. “The Warbirds are crazy, they’re not even ethnic criminals, they are network interest-group creatures.… Crime is so damned ugly, Eddy. If you ever think of doing it, just stop.”

  Eddy grunted.

  “Think of those children,” she murmured. “Born from crime. Manufactured to order, for a criminal purpose. This is a strange world, isn’t it? It frightens me sometimes.”

  “Yeah?” Eddy said cheerfully. “Illegitimate son of a millionaire, raised by a high-tech mafia? Sounds kind of weird and romantic to me. I mean, consider the possibilities.”

  She took off her spex for the first time, to look at him. Her eyes were blue. A very odd and romantic shade of blue. Probably tinted contacts.

  “Rich people have been having illegitimate kids since the year zero,” Eddy said. “The only difference is somebody’s mechanized the process.” He laughed.

  “It’s time you met the Cultural Critic,” she said. She put the spex back on.

  • • •

  They had to walk a long way. The bus system was now defunct. Apparently the soccer fans made a sport of hitting public buses; they would rip all the beanbags out and kick them through the doors. On his way to meet the Critic, Eddy saw hundreds of soccer fans; the city was swarming with them. The English devotees were very bad news: savage, thick-booted, snarling, stamping, chanting, anonymous young men, in knee-length sandpaper coats, with their hair cropped short and their faces masked or war-painted in the Union Jack. The English soccer hooligans traveled in enormous packs of two and three hundred. They were armed with cheap cellular phones. They’d wrapped the aerials with friction tape to form truncheon handles, so that the high-impact ceramic phone-casing became a nasty club. It was impossible to deny a traveler the ownership of a telephone, so the police were impotent to stop this practice. Practically speaking, there was not much to be done in any case. The English hooligans dominated the streets through sheer force of numbers. Anyone seeing them simply fled headlong.

  Except, of course, for the Irish soccer fans. The Irish wore thick elbow-length grappling gloves, some kind of workmen’s gauntlets apparently, along with long green-and-white football-scarves. Their scarves had skull-denting weights sewn into pockets at their ends, and the tassels were fringed with little skin-ripping wire barbs. The weights were perfectly legitimate rolls of coins, and the wife—well, you could get wire anywhere. The Irish seemed to be outnumbered, but were, if anything, even drunker and more reckless than their rivals. Unlike the English, the Irish louts didn’t even use the cellular phones to coordinate their brawling. They just plunged ahead at a dead run, whipping their scarves overhead and screaming about Oliver Cromwell.