Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

“Isn’t that Mehmet Ozbey, the very man we were just speaking of?” said Kashmas.

  Starlitz was properly cautious. “Is he still breathing?”

  With his loafered foot and both his shoulders Kashmas forced open the car’s rear door. Ozbey flopped down and hung off the edge of the seat, arms limp as wax in his tailored jacket, his muscular neck like the snapped stalk of a dandelion, blood leaking demurely from both his handsome nostrils. “No. He’s not breathing. He’s dead.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Absolutely positive?”

  “I’m not a doctor. But I’ve been to many crime scenes. This man is dead.”

  “Take his picture. Take a lot of them.”

  “Good idea.” Kashmas fired off several snapshots with his sturdy, road-worn German automatic.

  “Your camera’s working?” Starlitz said.

  “Of course!”

  “Okay, then that’s Mehmet Ozbey,” said Starlitz finally. “Or rather, Abdullah Oktem.”

  “Mehmet Ozbey has two identities?”

  “He has at least six identities. Check him for passports.”

  Another driver came forward, from his stopped car. He was a tubby Turkish businessman with a dazed, good-Samaritan look. The trunk of the Mercedes had snapped open from the impact of the crash. The would-be rescuer was babbling aloud, waving his hands in amazement. He had noticed that the limo’s trunk was chockful of machine guns.

  “Do you know who this policeman is?” called Kashmas.

  “Uh, yeah, I do. That would be the assistant head of the Turkish National Police Academy. Specialist in psychological warfare and counterinsurgency. I forget the guy’s name.” Starlitz climbed up into the back of the truck. Cantilevered on the ruptured hood of the Mercedes, it moved with a screech under his weight. Starlitz put his hands on the deadly sealed crate that was its special cargo.

  Copper jugs. Old discontinued cartons of Bafra cigarettes. Turkish kids’ alphabet books from the teens and twenties, with zebras and zeppelins. Ancient state lottery tickets, never redeemed. Pink Turkish lira from before the hyperinflation. Herbal toothache remedies. Spare parts for American-imported Packards and De Sotos. Vacuum jars of quince and sour-cherry preserves. Rose-scented bubble bath in powder-leaking canisters. Minty toothpastes and liqueur-filled chocolates turned to stone in their foil wrappers. Yellowed mosquito netting. Tinted postcards with blushing teenage brides. Dried figs in sacks of burlap. Massive black telephones and moth-eaten red fezzes.

  Suggestively shaped bottles of Yorgi Tomatis brand cologne. Spaghetti-western kids’ photo-novels called Texas and Tom Mix. Cracked backgammon boards with pink dice. Coffee-stained card decks, greasy with use. Pistol-shaped cigarette lighters and mother-of-pearl cigarette holders. Eyeglass frames. Cummerbunds. The bookworm-eaten memoirs of Safiye Ayla, the twenties café chanteuse who rightfully boasted of giving her womanly all to Kemal Atatürk.

  It had taken him so long to put it all together just right. Those heartbreaking mementos of Turkey’s twentieth century, the period’s descent into its final banality and decay. The century’s inevitable descent, oh, how very inevitable. Starlitz had thought to take all the physical evidence with him somehow, to erase it from the scene just as time had erased its meaning, but the truck was wrecked now, and his precious crate was too heavy to budge.

  Leave it all, then. Draw two lines under it, just write it off. Bury all that is dead within us.

  Now Gonca arrived on the scene, with a screech of rubber and a long honk. She flung open her scarlet door and raced forward headlong. She thrust herself through the gathering crowd, her sunglasses flying and her shoulder straps slipping.

  Raising both hands with a vivid keen of anguish, she fell to one knee by the corpse of her lover. She threw her braceleted slim arms and ringed fingers around Ozbey’s broken head. For one terrible moment it seemed that such devotion was unstoppable, that Ozbey was sure to pop back up with a smirk and a suave wink, but then Gonca opened her throat and released a cry of such power and desolation that a woman fainted and two men burst into tears.

  “This is quite a story,” said Kashmas thoughtfully. “Do you have a telephone?”

  BY THE TIME THE SCANDAL BROKE FULLY IN TURKEY’S sluggish press, Starlitz had already sold the trucking business. Repeated official attempts were made to dismiss the scandal, but it was just too undismissable, too eager to tell itself. A heroin smuggler, still wanted by Interpol after breaking from Swiss prison. With a top-ranking police officer, the former bodyguard of the Turkish ambassador to Washington. With a Kurdish warlord, who was still alive, and stoutly refusing to talk. All tied to a comely pop star on a TV game show. There was just no way to swerve around a story like that.

  Starlitz left Turkey. In the final weeks and months of the century, he moved his base of operations to Switzerland. It was a Y2K thing; they had gold there, and cash laundries, and fallout shelters. Starlitz bought into a small software company, and radically increased its profits by the cunning process of “value subtraction.”

  Many software merchants made the profound mistake of selling the best software they could make. Luckily, a study of strategies for information pricing had made it clear that this was not the best source of revenue in a true Information Economy. People became nervous and unhappy if they were sold decent software at a decent price. Decent software should only be offered at a terrifically high, premium price, and loaded down with extras and unnecessary but psychologically reassuring bells and whistles. Then, the middle tier of the market should be offered a cheaper, but still expensive, crippled version of the original software. And newbies and students and bottom feeders, in their many sorry thousands, were to be sold a barely functional, piece-of-shit, value-subtracted version of the product.

  So Starlitz engaged in the software’s deliberate ruination, and the market lavishly blessed him. Every other weekend he would sneak out to his daughter’s boarding school. He never spoke to Zeta, but he would take occasional snapshots with telephoto lenses. In her prim little uniform Zeta was actually showing up on camera now, a very good sign, considering her career intentions. Starlitz compiled extensive dossiers on her teachers. It was a form of subtle revenge on them, for turning his daughter into an upwardly mobile princess who would come to think of her dad as some kind of antique grease-monkey hick.

  Spying and stalking left him a hollow man without a life, but this situation had its rewards. He was getting along fine, at continental distance, with Mom One and Mom Two. Vanna and Judy were still on the splits and not speaking to each other, but they both seemed to be down with the Swiss-boarding-school notion, probably because it was so utterly unlike him. They read his periodic e-mail and studied his photograph jpeg enclosures with unfeigned interest. It seemed that the gender power struggle between them was fading with the last ticking months of the year. Because they were all too old now, thought Starlitz. They had lost their bloom and their youth, so the stakes were too low to fight over anymore. They were all too old to be attracted to people that they couldn’t stand.

  Judy even made an effort to rise from her wheelchair and generate some revenue. She bought a Body Shop franchise in Oregon, to help support Zeta’s demanding educational habits. Zeta was doing well in the school. Her classes were full of neurotic, neglected rich kids that she could totally dominate. After all, Zeta had unchallengeable twelve-year-old cool, because Zeta knew people in pop music. And she could prove it too. Betsy Ross answered Zeta’s fan mail.

  This was farsighted of Betsy. Zeta, or someone much like her, was going to be the person who would mercifully sign Betsy into a dry-out clinic. Zeta had a core of steel. The good died young, but Zeta was the kind of good who was too tight-lipped and practical to die young. Mere survival wasn’t good enough for Zeta; she was the type who prevailed. Zeta was bound to bury almost everyone she knew.

  When the fatal Y2K moment came, Starlitz met it in a crowd. Descending mirror balls, schmaltzy public singing, entirely predicta
ble. Just another face, another particle in the public wave. A fat drunk in a nothing suit in a town he didn’t know. It would never find him here.

  But the moment came and got him. It searched him up like a pursuing fury. It struck Starlitz from the inside out. Hot wire seized his heart. His shoulder was full of pain. He fell like a gutshot deer and tumbled silently into the red and the black.

  “AT LEAST YOU PICKED THE PROPER COUNTRY FOR A heart attack,” said Khoklov.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Starlitz hoarsely. “When it comes to CPR and EMS, Switzerland’s second to none.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “I just had a major coronary. I feel like hammered shit.” Starlitz leaned across the chrome tubing of his hospital bed to sniff at Khoklov’s massive bouquet. “It’s good of you to take the trouble to look in on me, Pulat Romanevich. And flowers too! I didn’t expect that of you.”

  “I kind of picked them up on the way in,” said Khoklov. “There’s a dead nuclear physicist just down the hall.”

  Starlitz nodded. “They’re common as rabbits in Switzerland. It’s that CERN setup in Geneva.”

  “The nuke professor’s stone dead. Right at the tick of the clock.”

  “Tough break for the hard-science maven. He must have been some special kind of atom guy. Swell bouquet, though.” Starlitz scratched at the itching intravenous drip. “So, catch me up on things. What brings you to the land of secret gnomes?”

  “Well,” said Khoklov, “it’s a very odd business. You see, at the hour of Balkan crisis I flew my radar-transparent escape craft to the rescue of Milosevic. He was very glad to see me. Grateful. His lovely daughter was grateful too. So, I was doing tune-ups for a possible family flight to Greece, and … Somehow I became ground zero in a Belgrade military airport. On the very first night of NATO strikes. Apparently I was standing directly beneath a million-dollar cruise missile.”

  “I wouldn’t brag about that to just anybody, if I were you.”

  “There seems to have been a kind of … news blackout. A hiss on the tape. Something snapped, you see? Something ran out. I think it’s because I’m Russian. I’ve had an eventful life. Russia has had a very great deal of twentieth century. Russia had much more twentieth century than most other countries. I believe I overdrew the bank account of twentieth century, somehow. There wasn’t quite enough twentieth century left to get me all the way through.”

  “Okay. I can accept that.”

  “They discovered me much later. At the Prishtina airport, in Kosovo. When the first Russian troops rushed in to seize the airstrip, ahead of NATO. Apparently I was packed up in a kind of coffin, along with the aircraft. Very neatly folded. A hermetic seal, or something like that.”

  “What happened to the airplane?”

  “They confiscated it. Sent it back to Moscow for study, along with the crashed American Stealth bomber. They were nice about it. I have a claim check somewhere.”

  “Tough break, Pulat.”

  “Anyway, I do feel better now. I think that—involuntary retirement—did my morale some good. I rejoined my nephew in Budapest—he has some very interesting biznis deals going on there—and I recovered my health. When the actual Y2K day came along, I just breezed right through it. Not a problem. Who cares? Just another day on the calendar. How about you, Starlits?” Khoklov placed his hands along his scarred ribs. “I don’t envy a man in a hospital.”

  “Well, man, I’ve been lying here thinking deep thoughts. Tell me something, Pulat. Why is it that when people do evil things, they get psychoanalyzed forever? There’s always some lame explanation out of their background, or their genetics, or their impoverished upbringing, or their mood disorders, or some such crap. Whereas, if you do amazing, freakish good things, nobody ever CAT-scans you.”

  “It’s good to see you turning to philosophy again. In suffering is the beginning of wisdom.”

  “Check this out, man, I’ve got a theory. A good person can subsume the narrative of a bad person. Because it’s easy for a good person to imagine being bad. But a bad person can’t subsume the narrative of a good person. Because they have no understanding what that’s like. It’s just beyond them, it’s beyond their language.”

  “I like that theory,” said Khoklov. “It’s mathematical. It’s about surface areas, basically. It’s a kind of moral topology.”

  Starlitz nodded silently. Pilots were good at math. Russians were very good at math. Russian pilots really had it on the ball, mathwise.

  “It reminds me of the history of the unfortunate G-7,” said Khoklov, “which came to such a muddled end. Half the girls dead …”

  “Half of them alive,” offered Starlitz.

  “Canceled tours, fired staffers, a scandalous Turkish manager … A pop act as dead as mutton. Yesterday’s news, completely defunct. It was a lovely concept originally, though.”

  “Outlived its proper time, man. You really don’t want to push history when it’s past. It turns right into farce. Or it’s fatal. Or it’s both.”

  “Yes, but if you think about the problem with some intellectual rigor,” said Khoklov sternly, “far from your usual arty mush and cheap double-talk … What was the core G-7 concept? Seven trashy girls, from seven famous, powerful nations, singing stupid popular music, and doomed to rapidly vanish.”

  “Right. That was it exactly.”

  “What if we reversed the polarity? Turned the concept inside out, for the far side of Y2K. Seven very talented girls, from seven troubled, totally obscure nations. Singing fabulous, honest, and authentic music. Determined to last as long as possible.”

  “Why seven girls?”

  “Why not? Good number. Dead easy. Let’s say: East Timor, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kurdistan, Kosovo, and, oh … maybe a Basque girl and a Miskito Indian from embattled socialist Nicaragua.”

  Starlitz pondered the pitch. It had a solid backing but a nice kind of twist. “And they sing, what, like, in their own, obscure, teeny-tiny languages? And on native instruments? Like gamelans maybe? Assuming they have gamelans in East Timor?”

  “Yes, Starlits, but they sing good music. The best music we can get. And they mean it when they sing it. And we tour the globe with the world’s least globalizable women. We get huge moral credit with every bleeding-heart critic in the world.”

  “No commercial potential, man. It wouldn’t make any money.”

  “Lekhi, this is the keystone of the scheme. We don’t make any money. We’re beyond that now. Why should we care about budgets? After what the twentieth century put us through, we probably don’t even have souls. We lose money. Other people’s money. We have an infinite supply of bad conscience! They fall all over themselves to make us lose their money.”

  Starlitz sat bolt upright in his bed. “Absolutely! That is it! Brother, I am so with this! I can’t wait to get started! This is the Spirit of Now!” He grinned from ear to ear. “It’s a very, very happening thing.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BRUCE STERLING is the author of the nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown, as well as the novels Distraction, Holy Fire, Heavy Weather, Schismatrix, and Islands in the Net. With William Gibson he co-authored the acclaimed novel The Difference Engine. He also writes for popular science and travel journals. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Austin, Texas.