All I need do is press the buttons. The molecular kink in the monofiber will contract, neatly severing my wrists. A fifth of a second later they will dissolve completely. Lightspeed will do the rest. All I need do is press the buttons. They are hidden in my palms, slick with sweat.
“Okay, Kathy, counting down to persona transfer. Preliminary tadon scan on, transfer pulse on in five seconds … four …”
The mortification of the flesh, I whisper. Behind me someone shouts. Too late.
“ … one.”
I press the buttons.
Green lights all the way down the line on the final run into Llangonnedd. Clear road: dirty freighters pulled into sidings blare their horns and the ugly, ugly robot locals squawk their nasty Klaxons as the Lady races by. Suburban passengers blink as she streaks past; by the time the shout reaches their lips she is around the next bend and leaning into the one after that like a pacehound.
And all the lights are green. More magic. Grandfather Taam tells you that you never get a full run of greens coming into Llangonnedd, no, not even for the Aries Express. Never ever. It must be more magic, of the same kind that let the Lady reach the incredible 450 kilometers per hour out there on the flats beyond Hundred Lakes. Grandfather Taam tells you she never touched 450 before, never ever, not even 400. Why, the people who built her had told him themselves that she would blow apart if she went over 390.
You reckon that engineers know nothing about engines and their special magic. After all, they are just engineers, but Grandfather Taam is an Engineer. Looking out of the side windows even a leisurely 250 seems frighteningly fast in these crowded suburbs. Canal flash houses flash fields flash park flash factories flash: you can feel your eyes widening in apprehension as the stations and the signals hurl themselves out of the distance at you. And all the lights are green.
That can only mean one thing.
“She’s doing this, isn’t she, Grandfather?”
A station packed with round-mouthed commuters zips by. Taam Engineer lights a cheroot.
“Must be. I’ve hardly had to lay a finger on those buttons for the past hour or so.”
Beneath you the brakes start to take hold, slowing you down from your mad rampage through outer Llangonnedd to a more civilized pace. You say, “She really must love this train very much.”
Grandfather Taam looks straight ahead of him down the silver track.
“After all, she did save it.”
“But it wasn’t the people, was it, Grandfather? It was nothing to do with the five hundred souls; she saved the train because it was the train she wanted to save. All those people were extra, weren’t they?”
“They didn’t matter to her one bit, boy.”
“And you said she’s a saint of machines, didn’t you? Not a saint of people? That’s why she loves the train, why she loved it enough not to let it die, isn’t it? If there hadn’t been a single person there, she would still have saved the train, wouldn’t she? But, if that’s true, why do people love her?”
“Love her? Who said anything about loving her? I tell you, boy, I have little love for Catharine of Tharsis. Respect yes, love no. And I’ll tell you why. Because if she hadn’t thought the train was worth saving, if she hadn’t loved the train, she would just have let it blow those five hundred people to hell without a single thought. That’s the kind of God those crazy Cathars are worshipping, but as to why they love her, I don’t know. Do you have any idea why people would love someone like that?”
He looks straight at you. You have been expecting this question. You know that he has never been able to answer it himself, and that it is the reason why he brought you along on this ride.
“I don’t know what I think … . If she’s really like that, then I think that most people must be very foolish most of the time, especially when they have to look for someone to help them when things go wrong and then put the blame on when things don’t happen like they want. People are like that. I think if I were a saint like Saint Catharine I would be a saint of machines, too. Then I wouldn’t care what people said about me or thought of me because I wouldn’t be doing anything for them and they could cry away and pray away all day like those silly Cathars and the Poor Sisters of Tharsis and I wouldn’t care one bit, because machines are never foolish.”
Catharine of Tharsis has slowed right down. The end of the journey is near now. Tomorrow Taam Engineer and you will be flying home on one of those dreadful ’rigibles and Catharine of Tharsis will be taken away to the museum for foolish people to stare at and marvel over her record-breaking final run. And now you understand.
“Grandfather, of course I’d be a saint of machines! Because I could fly with the aveopters and the sky-mirrors and even the great Sky Wheel herself and I could burrow with the Seekers and swim with the ’Mersibles, but most of all I could run with the Lady of Tharsis faster than she ever ran before and show off to everyone what a wonderful engine she is before they put her away for good in a museum. People are always moaning and complaining about their troubles and their problems; they won’t let you run and be free from them, people won’t let you do things like that.”
“Ah, the ways of saints and children,” Taam Engineer says as the Lady rumbles over the Raj-Canal into the glassite dome of Pulaski station. Already you can hear the roars and the cheers of the crowds and every loco in the yards is sounding its horn in salute.
“Here, button three,” Grandfather Taam says and you reply to the people with the wonderful blare of the steam horns. You press and press and press that button and the trumpets sound and sound and sound until the notes shatter against the glass roof of the station. And how the crowds cheer! Taam Engineer is hanging out of the window waving to the mobs of petal-throwing Cathars as the Catharine of Tharsis glides in to Platform Three as smooth as smooth. You are sliding the other side window open ready to cheer out when something stops you. An odd feeling like a persistent itch in the nose that suddenly stops or a noise in your ears that you never hear until it goes away. A kind of click. You shake your head but it is gone and you shout and wave for all you are worth to the excited people. They wave and call back to you, but you do not see them because you are really thinking about the click. For a second or so it puzzles you. Then you realize that it is nothing very important, it is only the empty space filling in where once there might have been a saint.
Sunken Gardens
BRUCE STERLING
One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling as yet may still be better known to the cognoscenti than to the SF-reading population at large, in spite of recent Hugo wins. If you look behind the scenes, though, you will find him everywhere, and he had almost as much to do, as writer, critic, propagandist, aesthetic theorist, and tireless polemicist, with the shaping and evolution of SF in the 1980s and 1990s as Michael Moorcock did with the shaping of SF in the 1960s; it is not for nothing that many of his peers refer to him, half ruefully, half admiringly, as “Chairman Bruce.”
Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the eighties, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future, with novels such as the complex and Stapledonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirror-shades: 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 nonfiction 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, and Distraction, a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, and the landmark collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. His most recent books include the omnibus collection (it contains the novel
Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus, a new collection, A Good Old-Fashioned Future, and a new novel, Zeitgeist. His story “Bicycle Repairman” earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1997 for his story “Taklamakan.” He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.
Here he gives us a ringside seat for a strange and deadly biotech contest between competing ecosystems, a literal battle of worlds, in which the stakes are life itself … .
Mirasol’s crawler loped across the badlands of the Mare Hadriacum, under a tormented Martian sky. At the limits of the troposphere, jet streams twisted, dirty streaks across pale lilac. Mirasol watched the winds through the fretted glass of the control bay. Her altered brain suggested one pattern after another: nests of snakes, nets of dark eels, maps of black arteries.
Since morning the crawler had been descending steadily into the Hellas Basin, and the air pressure was rising. Mars lay like a feverish patient under this thick blanket of air, sweating buried ice.
On the horizon thunderheads rose with explosive speed below the constant scrawl of the jet streams.
The basin was strange to Mirasol. Her faction, the Patternists, had been assigned to a redemption camp in northern Syrtis Major. There, two-hundred-mile-an-hour surface winds were common, and their pressurized camp had been buried three times by advancing dunes.
It had taken her eight days of constant travel to reach the equator.
From high overhead, the Regal faction had helped her navigate. Their orbiting city-state, Terraform-Kluster, was a nexus of monitor satellites. The Regals showed by their helpfulness that they had her under closer surveillance.
The crawler lurched as its six picklike feet scrabbled down the slopes of a deflation pit. Mirasol suddenly saw her own face reflected in the glass, pale and taut, her dark eyes dreamily self-absorbed. It was a bare face, with the anonymous beauty of the genetically Reshaped. She rubbed her eyes with nail-bitten fingers.
To the west, far overhead, a gout of airborne topsoil surged aside and revealed the Ladder, the mighty anchor cable of the Terraform-Kluster.
Above the winds the cable faded from sight, vanishing below the metallic glitter of the Kluster, swinging aloofly in orbit.
Mirasol stared at the orbiting city with an uneasy mix of envy, fear and reverence. She had never been so close to the Kluster before, or to the all-important Ladder that linked it to the Martian surface. Like most of her faction’s younger generation, she had never been into space. The Regals had carefully kept her faction quarantined in the Syrtis redemption camp.
Life had not come easily to Mars. For one hundred years the Regals of Terraform-Kluster had bombarded the Martian surface with giant chunks of ice. This act of planetary engineering was the most ambitious, arrogant, and successful of all the works of man in space.
The shattering impacts had torn huge craters in the Martian crust, blasting tons of dust and steam into Mars’s threadbare sheet of air. As the temperature rose, buried oceans of Martian permafrost roared forth, leaving networks of twisted badlands and vast expanses of damp mud, smooth and sterile as a television. On these great playas and on the frost-caked walls of channels, cliffs, and calderas, transplanted lichen had clung and leapt into devouring life. In the plains of Eridania, in the twisted megacanyons of the Coprates Basin, in the damp and icy regions of the dwindling poles, vast clawing thickets of its sinister growth lay upon the land—massive disaster areas for the inorganic.
As the terraforming project had grown, so had the power of Terraform-Kluster.
As a neutral point in humanity’s factional wars, T-K was crucial to financiers and bankers of every sect. Even the alien Investors, those star-traveling reptiles of enormous wealth, found T-K useful, and favored it with their patronage.
And as T-K’s citizens, the Regals, increased their power, smaller factions faltered and fell under their sway. Mars was dotted with bankrupt factions, financially captured and transported to the Martian surface by the T-K plutocrats.
Having failed in space, the refugees took Regal charity as ecologists of the sunken gardens. Dozens of factions were quarantined in cheerless redemption camps, isolated from one another, their lives pared to a grim frugality.
And the visionary Regals made good use of their power. The factions found themselves trapped in the arcane bioaesthetics of Posthumanist philosophy, subverted constantly by Regal broadcasts, Regal teaching, Regal culture. With time even the stubbornest faction would be broken down and digested into the cultural bloodstream of T-K. Faction members would be allowed to leave their redemption camp and travel up the Ladder.
But first they would have to prove themselves. The Patternists had awaited their chance for years. It had come at last in the Ibis Crater competition, an ecological struggle of the factions that would prove the victors’ right to Regal status. Six factions had sent their champions to the ancient Ibis Crater, each one armed with its group’s strongest biotechnologies. It would be a war of the sunken gardens, with the Ladder as the prize.
Mirasol’s crawler followed a gully through a chaotic terrain of rocky permafrost that had collapsed in karsts and sinkholes. After two hours, the gully ended abruptly. Before Mirasol rose a mountain range of massive slabs and boulders, some with the glassy sheen of impact melt, others scabbed over with lichen.
As the crawler started up the slope, the sun came out, and Mirasol saw the crater’s outer rim jigsawed in the green of lichen and the glaring white of snow.
The oxygen readings were rising steadily. Warm, moist air was drooling from within the crater’s lip, leaving a spittle of ice. A half-million-ton asteroid from the Rings of Saturn had fallen here at fifteen kilometers a second. But for two centuries rain, creeping glaciers, and lichen had gnawed at the crater’s rim, and the wound’s raw edges had slumped and scarred.
The crawler worked its way up the striated channel of an empty glacier bed. A cold alpine wind keened down the channel, where flourishing patches of lichen clung to exposed veins of ice.
Some rocks were striped with sediment from the ancient Martian seas, and the impact had peeled them up and thrown them on their backs.
It was winter, the season for pruning the sunken gardens. The treacherous rubble of the crater’s rim was cemented with frozen mud. The crawler found the glacier’s root and clawed its way up the ice face. The raw slope was striped with winter snow and storm-blown summer dust, stacked in hundreds of red-and-white layers. With the years the stripes had warped and rippled in the glacier’s flow.
Mirasol reached the crest. The crawler ran spiderlike along the crater’s snowy rim. Below, in a bowl-shaped crater eight kilometers deep, lay a seething ocean of air.
Mirasol stared. Within this gigantic airsump, twenty kilometers across, a broken ring of majestic rain clouds trailed their dark skirts, like duchesses in quadrille, about the ballroom floor of a lens-shaped sea.
Thick forests of green-and-yellow mangroves rimmed the shallow water and had overrun the shattered islands at its center. Pinpoints of brilliant scarlet ibis spattered the trees. A flock of them suddenly spread kitelike wings and took to the air, spreading across the crater in uncounted millions. Mirasol was appalled by the crudity and daring of this ecological concept, its crass and primal vitality.
This was what she had come to destroy. The thought filled her with sadness.
Then she remembered the years she had spent flattering her Regal teachers, collaborating with them in the destruction of her own culture. When the chance at the Ladder came, she had been chosen. She put her sadness away, remembering her ambitions and her rivals.
The history of mankind in space had been a long epic of ambitions and rivalries. From the very first, space colonies had struggled for self-sufficiency and had soon broken their ties with the exhausted Earth. The independent life-support systems had given them the mentality of city-states. Strange ideologies had bloomed in the hothouse atmosphere of the o’neills, and breakaway groups were common.
Space was too vast to police. Pioneer elites burst forth, defying anyone to stop their pursuit of aberrant technologies. Quite suddenly the march of science had become an insane, headlong scramble. New sciences and technologies had shattered whole societies in waves of future shock.
The shattered cultures coalesced into factions, so thoroughly alienated from one another that they were called humanity only for lack of a better term. The Shapers, for instance, had seized control of their own genetics, abandoning mankind in a burst of artificial evolution. Their rivals, the Mechanists, had replaced flesh with advanced prosthetics.
Mirasol’s own group, the Patternists, was a breakaway Shaper faction.
The Patternists specialized in cerebral asymmetry. With grossly expanded right-brain hemispheres, they were highly intuitive, given to metaphors, parallels, and sudden cognitive leaps. Their inventive minds and quick, unpredictable genius had given them a competitive edge at first. But with these advantages had come grave weaknesses: autism, fugue states, and paranoia. Patternists grew out of control and became grotesque webs of fantasy.
With these handicaps their colony had faltered. Patternist industries went into decline, outpaced by industrial rivals. Competition had grown much fiercer. The Shaper and Mechanist cartels had turned commercial action into a kind of endemic warfare. The Patternist gamble had failed, and the day came when their entire habitat was bought out from around them by Regal plutocrats. In a way it was a kindness. The Regals were suave and proud of their ability to assimilate refugees and failures.
The Regals themselves had started as dissidents and defectors. Their Posthumanist philosophy had given them the moral power and the bland assurance to dominate and absorb factions from the fringes of humanity. And they had the support of the Investors, who had vast wealth and the secret techniques of star travel.
The crawler’s radar alerted Mirasol to the presence of a landcraft from a rival faction. Leaning forward in her pilot’s couch, she put the craft’s image onscreen. It was a lumpy sphere, balanced uneasily on four long, spindly legs. Silhouetted against the horizon, it moved with a strange wobbling speed along the opposite lip of the crater, then disappeared down the outward slope.
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