It was not really the world anyone wanted, of course. Third world countries, especially but not exclusively in Africa, were still essentially ungovernable. Fetid urban slums, disease, and terror from local warlords. Daily want, brutality, and suffering, all made orders of magnitude worse by the lunatic compulsion to genocide. Much of the globe lives like this, with little hope of foreseeable change.
But inside the United States's tightly guarded, expensively defended borders, a miracle had occurred. Loaves from fishes, something for nothing, the free lunch there ain't supposed to be one of. Nanotechnology.
It was still an embryonic industry. But it had brought burgeoning prosperity. And with prosperity came the things that aren't supposed to cost money but always do: peace, generosity, civility. And one more thing: a space program, the cause of all the news agitation I was pointedly not watching.
"It's not fair to say that nano brought civility," Lucy protested. She was back from a journalism assignment in Sudan that had left her gaunt and limping, with half her hair fallen out. Lucy didn't volunteer details and I didn't ask. From the look in her haunted eyes, I didn't think I could bear to hear her answers.
"Civility is a by-product of money," I said. "Starving people are not civil to each other."
"Sometimes they are," she said, looking at some painful memory I could not imagine.
"Often?" I pressed.
"No. Not often." Abruptly Lucy left the room.
I have learned to wait serenely until she's ready to return to me, just as she has learned to wait, less serenely, until she is ready to return to those parts of the world where she makes her living. My daughter is too old for what she does, but she cannot, somehow, leave it alone. Injured, diseased, half bald, she always goes back.
But Lucy is partly right. It isn't just America's present riches that have led to her present civility. This decade's culture—optimistic, tolerant, fairly formal—is also a simple backlash to what went before. Pendulums swing. They cannot not swing.
While I waited for Lucy, I returned to my needlepoint. Now that nano has begun to easily make us anything, things that are hard to make are back in fashion. My eyes are too old for embroidery or even petit point, but gros point I can do. Under my fingers, roses bloomed on a pair of slippers. A bird flew to the tree beside me, lit on a branch, and watched me solemnly.
I'm still not used to birds in the house. But, then, I'm not used to this house of my son's, either. All the rooms open into an open central courtyard two stories high. Atop the courtyard is some sort of invisible shield that I don't understand. It keeps out cold and insects, and it can be adjusted to let rain in or keep it out. The shield keeps in the birds who live here. What Lem has is a miniature, climate-controlled, carefully landscaped, indoor Eden. The bird watching me was bright red with an extravagant gold tail, undoubtedly genetically engineered for health and long life. Other birds glow in the dark. One has what looks like blue fur.
"Go away," I told it. I like the fresh air; the genemod birds give me the creeps.
When Lucy returned, someone was with her. I put down my needlework, pasted on a smile, and prepared to be civil. The visitor used a walker, moving very slowly. She had sparse gray hair. I let out a little cry.
I hadn't even known Kyra was still alive.
"Mom, guess who's here! Your cousin Kyra!"
"Hello, Amy," Kyra said, and her voice hadn't changed, still low and husky.
"Where … how did you …"
"Oh, you were always easy to find, remember? I was the difficult one to locate."
Lucy said, "Are they looking for you now, Kyra?"
Kyra. Lucy was born too soon for the new civil formality. Lem's and Robin's children would have called her Ms. Lunden, or ma'am.
"Oh, probably," Kyra said. "But if they show up, child, just tell them my hearing implant failed again." She lowered herself into a chair, which obligingly curved itself around her. That still gives me the creeps, too, but Kyra didn't seem to mind.
We stared at each other, two ancient ladies in comfortable baggy clothing, and I suddenly saw the twenty-six-year-old she had been, gaudily dressed mistress to an enemy general. Every detail was sharp as winter air: her blue jumpsuit with a double row of tiny mirrors sewn down the front, her asymmetrical hair the color of gold-leaf. That happens to me more and more. The past is so much clearer than the present.
Lucy said, "I'll go make some tea, all right?"
"Yes, dear, please," I said.
Kyra smiled. "She seems like a good person."
"Too good," I said, without explanation. "Kyra, why are you here? Do you need to hide again? This probably isn't the best place."
"No, I'm not hiding. They're either looking for me or they're not, but I think not. They've got their hands full, after all, up at Celadon."
Celadon is the aggressively new international space station. When I first heard the name, I'd thought, why name a space station after a color?But it turns out that's the name of some famous engineer who designed the nuclear devices that make it cheap to hoist things back and forth from Earth to orbit. They've hoisted a lot of things. The station is still growing, but it already houses one hundred seventy scientists, techies, and administrators. Plus, now, two aliens.
They appeared in the solar system three months ago. The usual alarms went off, but there was no rioting, at least not in the United States. People watched their children more closely. But we had the space station now, a place for the aliens to contact, without actually coming to Earth. And maybe the New Civility (that's how journalists write about it, with capital letters) made a difference as well. I couldn't say. But the aliens spent a month or so communicating with Celadon, and then they came aboard, and a few selected humans went aboard their mother ship, and the whole thing began to resemble a tea party fortified with the security of a transnational bank vault.
Kyra was watching me. "You aren't paying any attention to the aliens' return, are you, Amy?"
"Not really." I picked up my needlepoint and started to work.
"That's a switch, isn't it? It used to be you who were interested in the political and me who wasn't."
It seemed an odd thing to say, given her career, but I didn't argue. "How are you, Kyra?"
"Old."
"Ah, yes. I know that feeling."
"And your children?"
I made myself go on stitching. "Robin is dead. Cross-fire victim. His ashes are buried there, under that lilac tree. Lucy you saw. Lem and his wife are fine, and their two kids, and my three great-grandchildren."
Kyra nodded, unsurprised. "I have three step-children, two step-grandchildren. Wonderful kids."
"You married again?"
"Late. I was sixty-five, Bill sixty-seven. A pair of sagging gray arthritic honeymooners. But we had ten good years, and I'm grateful for them."
I knew what she meant. At the end, one was grateful for all the good years, no matter what their aftermath. I said, "Kyra, I still don't know why you're here. Not that you're not welcome, of course, but why now?"
"I told you. I wanted to hear what you thought of the aliens' coming to Celadon."
"You could have comlinked."
She didn't say anything to that. I stitched on. Lucy brought tea, poured it, and left again.
"Amy, I really want to know what you think."
She was serious. It mattered to her. I put down my teacup. "All right. On Mondays I think they're not on Celadon at all and the government made the whole thing up. On Tuesdays I think that they're here to do just what it looks like: make contact with humans, and this is the first time it looks safe to them. The other three times we met them with soldiers and bombs and anger because they landed on our planet. Now there's a place to interact without coming too close, and we aren't screeching at them in panic, and they were waiting for that in order to establish trade and/or diplomatic relations. On Wednesdays I think they're worming their way into our confidence, gathering knowledge about our technology, in order to enslave us or d
estroy us. On Thursdays I think that they're aliens, so how can we ever hope to understand their reasons? They're not human. On Fridays I hope, and on Saturdays I despair, and on Sundays I take a day of rest."
Kyra didn't smile. I remembered that about her: she didn't have much of a sense of humor. She said, "And why do you think they took me and that Kikuyu boy into their ships?"
"On Mondays—"
"I'm serious, Amy!"
"Always. All right, I guess they just wanted to learn about us in person, so they picked out two growing specimens and knocked them out so they could garner all the secrets of our physical bodies for future use. They might even have taken some of your DNA, you know. You'd never miss it. There could be small culture-grown Kyras running around some distant planet. Or not so small, by now."
But Kyra wasn't interested in the possibilities of genetic engineering. "I think I know why they came."
"You do?" Once she had told me that the aliens came just to destroy her life. But that kind of hubris was for the young.
"Yes," Kyra said. "I think they came without knowing the reason. They just came. After all, Amy, if I think about it, I can't really say why I did half the things in my life. They just seemed the available course of action at the time, so I did them. Why should the aliens be any different? Can you say that you really know why you did all the things in your life?"
Could I? I thought about it. "Yes, Kyra. I think I can, pretty much. That's not to say my reasons were good. But they were understandable."
She shrugged. "Then you're different from me. But I'll tell you this: Any plan the government makes to deal with these aliens won't work. You know why? Because it will be one plan, one set of attitudes and procedures, and pretty soon things will change on Earth or on Celadon or for the aliens, and then the plan won't work any more and still everybody will try desperately to make it work. They'll try to stay in control, and nobody can control anything important."
She said this last with such intensity that I looked up from my needlepoint. She meant it, this banal and obvious insight that she was offering as if it were cutting edge knowledge.
And yet, it was cutting edge, because each person had to acquire it painfully, in his or her own way, through loss and failure and births and plagues and war and victories and, sometimes, a life shaped by an hour in an alien spaceship. All fodder for the same trite, heart-breaking conclusion. Everything old is new again.
And yet—
Sudden tenderness washed over me for Kyra. We had spent most of our lives locked in pointless battle. I reached over to her, carefully so as not to aggravate my creaky joints, and took her hand.
"Kyra, if you believe you can't control anything, then you won't try for control, which of course guarantees that you end up not controlling anything."
"Never in my whole life have I been able to make a difference to—what the fuck is that!"
The furry blue bird had landed on her head, its feet tangling briefly in her hair. "It's one of Lem's genemod birds," I said. "It's been engineered to have no fear of humans."
"Well, that's a stupid idea!" Kyra said, swatting at it with surprising vigor. The bird flew away. "If that thing lands on me again, I'll strangle it!"
"Yes," I said, and laughed, and didn't bother to explain why.
WILLIAM GIBSON
b. 1948
US-born writer, in Canada since 1968, when he moved north after being rejected by his draft-board. Gibson began publishing science fiction with "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" for Unearth in 1977, and by 1983 had produced most of the fiction later assembled in Burning Chrome (1986); some of these tales, like "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981), were set in the Neuromancer universe, and were early examples of what would soon become known as cyberpunk.
Gibson did not invent cyberpunk, nor has he ever claimed to have done so. Bruce Bethke's story "Cyberpunk" (1983) supplied the name, and Gardner Dozois, in a 1983 article, defined the movement as works set in computer-driven, high-tech near-future venues inhabited by a slum-bound streetwise citizenry. In terms of traditional US science fiction, this was heresy, and Gibson's enormous success must have seemed an ominous harbinger of the death of traditional science fiction.
The Neuromancer trilogy — Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero(1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) — is all about escaping the flesh. The protagonist of Neuromancer — which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards — is a matrix cowboy hired to link his mind into cyberspace itself (cyberspace being a worldwide computer matrix of information experienced as an infinitely complex virtual-reality labyrinth) to steal data. The outside world of the book is a near-future USA (although never named as such) dominated by Japanese corporations, one of which may be his employer. The story eventually moves from Earth into near space, where complex orbiting arcologies house the AIs which, perhaps, secretly run the world; but the protagonist does not covertly long to run the world in their stead. His longing is to transcend the flesh which pulls him back from the bliss of cyberspace.
Gibson's 1990 novel The Difference Engine, co-authored with Bruce Sterling, became central to the steampunk subgenre. Gibson's later works are not overtly science fiction, but continue to explore issues of sociology, technology and rapid change. Two of his stories have been made into films: Johnny Mnemonic(1995), and New Rose Hotel (1998).
Burning Chrome, by William Gibson
Although it has aesthetic antecedents in stories such as Samuel R. Delany's "Time Considered As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," the stunning tale that follows may be the first real hacker story ever written, the first to explore some of the darker future possibilities of the then-emergent computer community . . . which makes it all the more ironic that it was written not on a computer, but on a battered old manual typewriter. It's a story that has been imitated hundreds of times since, not only in print science fiction but in comics, movies, and even weekly television shows—none of which takes anything away from the elegance and power of the original. As you shall see, this prototype hacker story is still one of the best ever written. . . .
Almost unknown only a few years ago, William Gibson won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award in 1985 for his remarkable first novel Neuromancer—a rise to prominence as fiery and meteoric as any in SF history. By the late eighties, the appearance of Neuromancer and its sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, had made him the most talked-about and controversial new SF writer of the decade—one might almost say "writer," leaving out the "SF" part, for Gibson's reputation spread far outside the usual boundaries of the genre, with wildly enthusiastic notices about him and interviews with him appearing in places like Rolling Stone, Spin, and The Village Voice, and with pop-culture figures like Timothy Leary (not someone ordinarily much given to close observation of the SF world) embracing him with open arms. By the beginning of the nineties, even most of his harshest critics had been forced to admit—sometimes grudgingly—that a major new talent had entered the field, the kind of major talent that comes along maybe once or twice in a literary generation. Gibson's short fiction has been collected in Burning Chrome. His most recent books are a novel written in collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, and a solo novel, Virtual Light. Born in South Carolina, he now lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife and family.
It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby's loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the "Cyberspace Seven," but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon.
We waited side by side in front of the simulator console, watching the time display in the screen's lower left corner.
"Go for it," I said, when it was time, but Bobby w
as already there, leaning forward to drive the Russian program into its slot with the heel of his hand. He did it with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an arcade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a string of free games.
A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. The Russian program seemed to lurch as we entered the grid. If anyone else had been jacked into that part of the matrix, he might have seen a surf of flickering shadow roll out of the little yellow pyramid that represented our computer. The program was a mimetic weapon, designed to absorb local color and present itself as a crash-priority override in whatever context it encountered.
"Congratulations," I heard Bobby say. "We just became an Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority inspection probe. . . ." That meant we were clearing fiberoptic lines with the cybernetic equivalent of a fire siren, but in the simulation matrix we seemed to rush straight for Chrome's data base. I couldn't see it yet, but I already knew those walls were waiting. Walls of shadow, walls of ice.
Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. They said a lot of things about Chrome, none of them at all reassuring.
So I blotted her out with a picture of Rikki. Rikki kneeling in a shaft of dusty sunlight that slanted into the loft through a grid of steel and glass: her faded camouflage fatigues, her translucent rose sandals, the good line of her bare back as she rummaged through a nylon gear bag. She looks up, and a half-blond curl falls to tickle her nose. Smiling, buttoning an old shirt of Bobby's, frayed khaki cotton drawn across her breasts.
She smiles.
"Son of a bitch," said Bobby, "we just told Chrome we're an IRS audit and three Supreme Court subpoenas. . . . Hang on to your ass, Jack. . . ."
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