The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. “If I have to.”

  The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. “Can you sign for him?”

  Lyle folded his bare arms warily. “Naw, man, I can’t sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy’s in Europe somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven’t seen Eddy in ages.”

  The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.

  “I’ll get a bonus if you sign for this thing.” The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. “It’s gotta be worth something, Lyle. It’s a really weird kind of routing; they paid a lot of money to send it just that way.”

  Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. “Let’s have a look at it.”

  The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrinkwrap, with a plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.

  Lyle held the box up two-handed to his ear and shook it. Hardware.

  “You gonna sign, or not?”

  “Yeah.” Lyle scratched illegibly at the little signature panel, then looked at the delivery trike. “You oughta get that front wheel trued.”

  The kid shrugged. “Got anything to send out today?”

  “Naw,” Lyle grumbled, “I’m not doing mail-order repair work anymore; it’s too complicated and I get ripped off too much.”

  “Suit yourself.” The kid clambered into the recumbent seat of his trike and pedaled off across the heat-cracked ceramic tiles of the atrium plaza.

  Lyle hung his hand-lettered OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outside the door. He walked to his left, stamped up the pedaled lid of a jumbo garbage can, and dropped the package in with the rest of Dertouzas’s stuff.

  The can’s lid wouldn’t close. Deep Eddy’s junk had finally reached critical mass. Deep Eddy never got much mail at the shop from other people, but he was always sending mail to himself. Big packets of encrypted diskettes were always arriving from Eddy’s road jaunts in Toulouse, Marseilles, Valencia, and Nice. And especially Barcelona. Eddy had sent enough gigabyteage out of Barcelona to outfit a pirate data-haven.

  Eddy used Lyle’s bike shop as his safety-deposit box. This arrangement was okay by Lyle. He owed Eddy; Eddy had installed the phones and virching in the bike shop, and had also wangled the shop’s electrical hookup. A thick elastic curly-cable snaked out the access crawlspace of Floor Thirty-five, right through the ceiling of Floor Thirty-four, and directly through a ragged punch-hole in the aluminum roof of Lyle’s cable-mounted mobile home. Some unknown contact of Eddy’s was paying the real bills on that electrical feed. Lyle cheerfully covered the expenses by paying cash into an anonymous post-office box. The setup was a rare and valuable contact with the world of organized authority.

  During his stays in the shop, Eddy had spent much of his time buried in marathon long-distance virtuality sessions, swaddled head to foot in lumpy strap-on gear. Eddy had been painfully involved with some older woman in Germany. A virtual romance in its full-scale thumping, heaving, grappling progress, was an embarrassment to witness. Under the circumstances, Lyle wasn’t too surprised that Eddy had left his parents’ condo to set up in a squat.

  Eddy had lived in the bicycle-repair shop, off and on, for almost a year. It had been a good deal for Lyle, because Deep Eddy had enjoyed a certain clout and prestige with the local squatters. Eddy had been a major organizer of the legendary Chattanooga Wende of December ’35, a monster street party that had climaxed in a spectacular looting-and-arson rampage that had torched the three floors of the Archiplat.

  Lyle had gone to school with Eddy and had known him for years; they’d grown up together in the Archiplat. Eddy Dertouzas was a deep zude for a kid his age, with political contacts and heavy-duty network connections. The squat had been a good deal for both of them, until Eddy had finally coaxed the German woman into coming through for him in real life. Then Eddy had jumped the next plane to Europe.

  Since they’d parted friends, Eddy was welcome to mail his European data-junk to the bike shop. After all, the disks were heavily encrypted, so it wasn’t as if anybody in authority was ever gonna be able to read them. Storing a few thousand disks was a minor challenge, compared to Eddy’s complex, machine-assisted love life.

  After Eddy’s sudden departure, Lyle had sold Eddy’s possessions, and wired the money to Eddy in Spain. Lyle had kept the screen TV, Eddy’s mediator, and the cheaper virching helmet. The way Lyle figured it—the way he remembered the deal—any stray hardware of Eddy’s in the shop was rightfully his, for disposal at his own discretion. By now it was pretty clear that Deep Eddy Dertouzas was never coming back to Tennessee. And Lyle had certain debts.

  Lyle snicked the blade from a roadkit multitool and cut open Eddy’s package. It contained, of all things, a television cable set-top box. A laughable infobahn antique. You’d never see a cable box like that in NAFTA; this was the sort of primeval junk one might find in the home of a semiliterate Basque grandmother, or maybe in the armed bunker of some backward Albanian.

  Lyle tossed the archaic cable box onto the beanbag in front of the wallscreen. No time now for irrelevant media toys; he had to get on with real life. Lyle ducked into the tiny curtained privy and urinated at length into a crockery jar. He scraped his teeth with a flossing spudger and misted some fresh water onto his face and hands. He wiped clean with a towelette, then smeared his armpits, crotch, and feet with deodorant.

  Back when he’d lived with his mom up on Floor Forty-one, Lyle had used old-fashioned antiseptic deodorants. Lyle had wised up about a lot of things once he’d escaped his mom’s condo. Nowadays, Lyle used a gel roll-on of skin-friendly bacteria that greedily devoured human sweat and exuded as their metabolic by-product a pleasantly harmless reek rather like ripe bananas. Life was a lot easier when you came to proper terms with your microscopic flora.

  Back at his workbench, Lyle plugged in the hot plate and boiled some Thai noodles with flaked sardines. He packed down breakfast with four hundred cc’s of Dr. Breasaire’s Bioactive Bowel Putty. Then he checked last night’s enamel job on the clamped frame in the workstand. The frame looked good. At three in the morning, Lyle was able to get into painted detail work with just the right kind of hallucinatory clarity.

  Enameling paid well, and he needed the money bad. But this wasn’t real bike work. It lacked authenticity. Enameling was all about the owner’s ego—that was what really stank about enameling. There were a few rich kids up in the penthouse levels who were way into “street aesthetic,” and would pay good money to have some treadhead decorate their machine. But flash art didn’t help the bike. What helped the bike was frame alignment and sound cable-housings and proper tension in the derailleurs.

  Lyle fitted the chain of his stationary bike to the shop’s flywheel, straddled up, strapped on his gloves and virching helmet, and did half an hour on the 2033 Tour de France. He stayed back in the pack for the uphill grind, and then, for three glorious minutes, he broke free from the domestiques in the peloton and came right up at the shoulder of Aldo Cipollini. The champion was a monster, posthuman. Calves like cinder blocks. Even in a cheap simulation with no full-impact bodysuit, Lyle knew better than to try to take Cipollini.

  Lyle devirched, checked his heart-rate record on the chronometer, then dismounted from his stationary trainer and drained a half-liter squeeze bottle of antioxidant carbo refresher. Life had been easier whe
n he’d had a partner in crime. The shop’s flywheel was slowly losing its storage of inertia power these days, with just one zude pumping it.

  Lyle’s disastrous second roommate had come from the biking crowd. She was a criterium racer from Kentucky named Brigitte Rohannon. Lyle himself had been a wannabe criterium racer for a while, before he’d blown out a kidney on steroids. He hadn’t expected any trouble from Brigitte, because Brigitte knew about bikes, and she needed his technical help for her racer, and she wouldn’t mind pumping the flywheel, and besides, Brigitte was lesbian. In the training gym and out at racing events, Brigitte came across as a quiet and disciplined little politicized tread-head person.

  Life inside the zone, though, massively fertilized Brigitte’s eccentricities. First, she started breaking training. Then she stopped eating right. Pretty soon the shop was creaking and rocking with all-night girl-on-girl hot-oil sessions, which degenerated into hooting pill-orgies with heavily tattooed zone chyx who played klaxonized bongo music and beat each other up, and stole Lyle’s tools. It had been a big relief when Brigitte finally left the zone to shack up with some well-to-do admirer on Floor Thirty-seven. The debacle had left Lyle’s tenuous finances in ruin.

  Lyle laid down a new tracery of scarlet enamel on the bike’s chainstay, seat post and stem. He had to wait for the work to cure, so he left the workbench, picked up Eddy’s set-topper, and popped the shell with a hexkey. Lyle was no electrician, but the insides looked harmless enough: lots of bit-eating caterpillars and cheap Algerian silicon.

  He flicked on Eddy’s mediator, to boot the wallscreen. Before he could try anything with the cable box, his mother’s mook pounced upon the screen. On Eddy’s giant wallscreen, the mook’s waxy, computer-generated face looked like a plump satin pillowcase. Its bowtie was as big as a racing shoe.

  “Please hold for an incoming vidcall from Andrea Schweik of Carnac Instruments,” the mook uttered unctuously.

  Lyle cordially despised all low-down, phone-tagging, artificially intelligent mooks. For a while, in his teenage years, Lyle himself had owned a mook, an off-the-shelf shareware job that he’d installed in the condo’s phone. Like most mooks, Lyle’s mook had one primary role: dealing with unsolicited phone calls from other people’s mooks. In Lyle’s case these were the creepy mooks of career counselors, school psychiatrists, truancy cops, and other official hindrances. When Lyle’s mook launched and ran, it appeared on-line as a sly warty dwarf that drooled green ichor and talked in a basso grumble.

  But Lyle hadn’t given his mook the properly meticulous care and debugging that such fragile little constructs demanded, and eventually his cheap mook had collapsed into artificial insanity.

  Once Lyle had escaped his mom’s place to the squat, he had gone for the low-tech. gambit and simply left his phone unplugged most of the time. But that was no real solution. He couldn’t hide from his mother’s capable and well-financed corporate mook, which watched with sleepless mechanical patience for the least flicker of video dial tone off Lyle’s number.

  Lyle sighed and wiped the dust from the video nozzle on Eddy’s mediator.

  “Your mother is coming on-line right away,” the mook assured him.

  “Yeah, sure,” Lyle muttered, smearing his hair into some semblance of order.

  “She specifically instructed me to page her remotely at any time for an immediate response. She really wants to chat with you, Lyle.”

  “That’s just great.” Lyle couldn’t remember what his mother’s mook called itself. “Mr. Billy,” or “Mr. Ripley,” or something else really stupid … .

  “Did you know that Marco Cengialta has just won the Liege Summer Classic?”

  Lyle blinked and sat up in the beanbag. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Cengialta used a three-spoked ceramic wheel with internal liquid weighting and buckyball hubshocks.” The mook paused, politely awaiting a possible conversational response. “He wore breathe-thru Kevlar microlock cleatshoes,” it added.

  Lyle hated the way a mook cataloged your personal interests and then generated relevant conversation. The machine-made intercourse was completely unhuman and yet perversely interesting, like being grabbed and buttonholed by a glossy magazine ad. It had probably taken his mother’s mook all of three seconds to snag and download every conceivable statistic about the summer race in Liege.

  His mother came on. She’d caught him during lunch in her office. “Lyle?”

  “Hi, Mom.” Lyle sternly reminded himself that this was the one person in the world who might conceivably put up bail for him. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Oh, nothing much, just the usual.” Lyle’s mother shoved aside her platter of sprouts and tilapia. “I was idly wondering if you were still alive.”

  “Mom, it’s a lot less dangerous in a squat than landlords and cops would have you believe. I’m perfectly fine. You can see that for yourself.”

  His mother lifted a pair of secretarial half-spex on a neckchain, and gave Lyle the computer-assisted once-over.

  Lyle pointed the mediator’s lens at the shop’s aluminum door. “See over there, Mom? I got myself a shock-baton in here. If I get any trouble from anybody, I’ll just yank that club off the door mount and give the guy fifteen thousand volts!”

  “Is that legal, Lyle?”

  “Sure. The voltage won’t kill you or anything, it just knocks you out a good long time. I traded a good bike for that shock-baton, it’s got a lot of useful defensive features.”

  “That sounds really dreadful.”

  “The baton’s harmless, Mom. You should see what the cops carry nowadays.”

  “Are you still taking those injections, Lyle?”

  “Which injections?”

  She frowned. “You know which ones.”

  Lyle shrugged. “The treatments are perfectly safe. They’re a lot safer than a lifestyle of cruising for dates, that’s for sure.”

  “Especially dates with the kind of girls who live down there in the riot zone, I suppose.” His mother winced. “I had some hopes when you took up with that nice bike-racer girl. Brigitte, wasn’t it? Whatever happened to her?”

  Lyle shook his head. “Someone with your gender and background oughta understand how important the treatments are, Mom. It’s a basic reproductive-freedom issue. Antilibidinals give you real freedom, freedom from the urge to reproduce. You should be glad I’m not sexually involved.”

  “I don’t mind that you’re not involved, Lyle, it’s just that it seems like a real cheat that you’re not even interested.”

  “But, Mom, nobody’s interested in me, either. Nobody. No woman is banging at my door to have sex with a self-employed fanatical dropout bike mechanic who lives in a slum. If that ever happens, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Lyle grinned cheerfully into the lens. “I had girlfriends back when I was in racing. I’ve been there, Mom. I’ve done that. Unless you’re coked to the gills with hormones, sex is a major waste of your time and attention. Sexual Deliberation is the greatest civil-liberties movement of modern times.”

  “That’s really weird, Lyle. It’s just not natural.”

  “Mom, forgive me, but you’re not the one to talk about natural, okay? You grew me from a zygote when you were fifty-five.” He shrugged. “I’m too busy for romance now. I just want to learn about bikes.”

  “You were working with bikes when you lived here with me. You had a real job and a safe home where you could take regular showers.”

  “Sure, I was working, but I never said I wanted a job, Mom. I said I wanted to learn about bikes. There’s a big difference! I can’t be a loser wage-slave for some lousy bike franchise.”

  His mother said nothing.

  “Mom, I’m not asking you for any favors. I don’t need any bosses, or any teachers, or any landlords, or any cops. It’s just me and my bike work down here. I know that people in authority can’t stand it that a twenty-four-year-old man lives an independent life and does exactly what he wants, but I’m being very quiet and di
screet about it, so nobody needs to bother about me.”

  His mother sighed, defeated. “Are you eating properly, Lyle? You look peaked.” Lyle lifted his calf muscle into camera range. “Look at this leg! Does that look like the gastrocnemius of a weak and sickly person?”

  “Could you come up to the condo and have a decent meal with me sometime?” Lyle blinked. “When?”

  “Wednesday, maybe? We could have pork chops.”

  “Maybe, Mom. Probably. I’ll have to check. I’ll get back to you, okay? Bye.” Lyle hung up.

  Hooking the mediator’s cable to the primitive set-top box was a problem, but Lyle was not one to be stymied by a merely mechanical challenge. The enamel job had to wait as he resorted to miniclamps and a cable cutter. It was a handy thing that working with modern brake cabling had taught him how to splice fiber optics.

  When the set-top box finally came on-line, its array of services was a joke. Any decent modern mediator could navigate through vast information spaces, but the set-top box offered nothing but “channels.” Lyle had forgotten that you could even obtain old-fashioned “channels” from the city fiber-feed in Chattanooga. But these channels were government-sponsored media, and the government was always quite a ways behind the curve in network development. Chattanooga’s huge fiber-bandwidth still carried the ancient government-mandated “public-access channels,” spooling away in their technically fossilized obscurity, far below the usual gaudy carnival of popular virching, infobahnage, demo-splintered comboards, public-service rants, mudtrufflage, remsnorkeling, and commercials.

  The little set-top box accessed nothing but political channels. Three of them: Legislative, Judicial, and Executive. And that was the sum total, apparently. A set-top box that offered nothing but NAFTA political coverage. On the Legislative Channel there was some kind of parliamentary debate on proper land use in Manitoba. On the Judicial Channel, a lawyer was haranguing judges about the stock market for air-pollution rights. On the Executive Channel, a big crowd of hicks was idly standing around on windblown tarmac somewhere in Louisiana waiting for something to happen.