Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  “And now,” my brother said, holding out the alien artifact, “I can return this thing to the person who was sent to fetch it.”

  A small, white, palpitating hand was stretched forward to receive it. I turned to see who it was. “Oh, no,” I said softly.

  For it was Mary who had taken the artifact…and Mary who was now gyrating about the paddy field in a most unfeminine, most cockroachlike manner.

  * * * *

  Later that night, Phii Lek and I sat on the floor of our room, waiting for Mary to snap out of her extraterrestrial seizure so we could find out what had happened.

  Toward dawn the alien gave her her first break. “I can talk now,” she said, suddenly, calmly.

  “Do you need chilies?” I said.

  “I think a good hamburger would be more my style,” she said.

  “We can probably fake it,” my brother said, “if you don’t mind having it on rice instead of a bun.”

  “Well,” she said, when my brother had finished clattering about the kitchen fixing this unorthodox meal, and she was sitting cross-legged on my bedding munching furiously. “I suppose I should tell you what I’m allowed to tell you.”

  “Take your time,” I said, not meaning it.

  “Okay. Well, as you know, the exorcist is a total fake, a charlatan, a mountebank. But he does enter a passable state of samadhi, and apparently this was close enough to the psychic null state necessary for psychic transference to enable a mindswap to occur over a short distance. His blank mind was a sort of catalyst, if you will, through which, under the influence of the tachyon calibrator, I could leave Phii Lek’s mind and enter Mary’s.”

  “So you’ll be taking the spittoon back to America?”

  I said.

  “Right on schedule. And it’s not a spittoon. That happens to be a very clever disguise.”

  “So…” It suddenly occurred to me that she would soon be leaving. I was irritated at that. I didn’t know why. I should have been pleased, because, after all, I had essentially traded her for my brother, and family always comes first.

  “Look,” she said, noticing my unease, “do you think…maybe…one last time?” She caressed my arm.

  “But you’re a giant cockroach!” I said.

  She kissed me.

  “You’ve been bragging to your friends all month about ‘arriving’ in America,” she said. “How’d you like to ‘arrive’ on another planet?”

  * * * *

  In the middle of the act I became aware that someone else was there with us. I mean, I was used to the way Mary moved, the delicious abandon with which she made her whole body shudder. I thought, “The alien’s here too! Well, I’m really going to show it how a Thai can drive. Here we go!”

  The next morning, I said, “How was it?”

  She said, “It was a fascinating activity, but frankly I prefer mitosis.”

  Fiddling for waterbuffaloes.

  * * * *

  In a day or so I saw her off; I went back to the antique store; I found my grandmother hard at work in her antique faking studio. A perfect Ming spittoon lay beside her where she squatted. She saw me, spat out her betelnut, and motioned me to sit.

  “Why, grandmother,” I said, “That’s a perfect copy of whatever it was the alien took to America.”

  “Look again, my grandson,” she said, and chuckled to herself as she rocked back and forth kneading clay.

  I picked it up. The morning light shone on it through the window. I had an inkling that…no. Surely not. “You didn’t!” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Grandmother—”

  No answer.

  “But the solar system is at stake!” I blurted out. “If they find out that they’ve got the wrong tachyon calibrator—”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said my grandmother. “The way I think is this: it’s obviously very important to someone, and anything that valuable is worth faking. You say these interstellar diplomats will be arguing the question for years, perhaps. Well, as the years go by, the price will undoubtedly go up.”

  “But khun yaai, how can you possibly play games with the destiny of the entire human race like this?”

  “Oh, come, come. I’m just an old woman looking out for her family. The movie house has been sold, and we’ve lost maybe 50,000 baht on the exorcism and the feast. Besides, your father will insist on another wife, I’m afraid, and after all this brouhaha I can’t blame him. We’ll be out 100,000 baht by the time we’re through. I have a perfect right to some kind of recompense. Hopefully, by the time they come looking for this thing, we’ll be able to get enough for it to open a whole antique factory…who knows, move to Bangkok…buy up Channel Seven so your brother can dub movies to his heart’s content.”

  “But couldn’t the alien tell?” I said.

  “Of course not. How many experts on disguised tachyon calibrators do you think there are, anyway?” My grandmother paused to turn the electric fan so that it blew exclusively on herself. The air-conditioning, as usual, was off. “Anyway, manus tang dao are only another kind of foreigner, and anyone can tell you that all foreigners are suckers.”

  I heard the bell ring in the front.

  “Go on!” she said. “There’s a customer!”

  “But what if—” I got up with some trepidation. At the partition I hesitated.

  “Courage!” she whispered. “Be a luk phuchai!”

  I remembered that I had the family honor to think of. Boldly, I marched out to meet the next customer.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc.

  BRUCE STERLING

  (1954– )

  While I’m glad that Bruce Sterling is now popular enough as a best-selling writer and technology expert that there are huge demands on his time, it did make including him in this book slightly more complicated. Four months after he’d agreed that Sense of Wonder needed a bicycle repairman, I still hadn’t received a contract back and was getting a bit panicked. My wife was about to go into labor with our first child, and Sterling was nowhere to be found. Finally I received an email saying that he was in the Brazilian jungle where printers and post offices were a bit thin on the ground so he wouldn’t be returning the contract yet, but in the meantime, he promised not to sue me, my wife, or our unborn daughter. Five months later still no contract, and the publisher is getting antsy and threatening to pull the story. I send another forlorn email, asking if he’s in a part of the world with post offices. A week before the book is due at the printer I receive back an emailed picture of Sterling holding up a signed copy of the contract, with the caption “Don’t give up hope!” Apparently this contract had traveled to far more interesting parts of the world than I’d ever been. But it did, in fact, arrive before the deadline.

  Sterling was born and mostly raised in Texas, until his family moved to India at when he was fifteen for his father’s work on a fertilizer plant. Returning to the U.S. for college at the University of Texas, Sterling attended the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop and started writing science fiction. Sterling graduated in 1976 with a degree in journalism and the same year sold his first SF story, “Man-Made Self,” in an anthology of Texan SF.

  His first novel was Involution Ocean in 1977. Like other cyberpunk writers, Sterling took a strong knowledge and comfort level with technology and extrapolated it into dissonant (yet somehow appealing) near futures. Sterling’s work was generally less bleak than that of, for instance, William Gibson (with whom Sterling co-wrote the best-selling The Difference Engine in 1990), but they both had wide appeal to both genre and mainstream audiences. In 1986, Sterling edited the seminal Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. In all he’s written a dozen novels and had seven collections of his stories published, including Schismatrix Plus, which collects the Shaper/Mechanist series of stories (started in 1982), and the related future history novel Schismatrix (1985). He’s won two Hugos (including one for “Bicycle Repairman”), a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Islands i
n the Net (1989), and an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Distraction (2000).

  Sterling was one of the first authors to get behind electronic formats for books. He wrote The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier in 1992 and (after it was published in print) distributed it via the internet and disk. He also started the Dead Media Project, an attempt to study obsolete forms of media. He occasionally teaches science fiction and Internet studies at the European Graduate School of Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

  When not in the Brazilian jungle, Sterling lives in Austin, Texas.

  BICYCLE REPAIRMAN, by Bruce Sterling

  First published in Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, January 1996

  Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.

  Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday’s grease-stained sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced Wearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.

  Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all the press of work, he’d collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him out.

  Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.

  More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle’s spot-welded doorknocker.

  Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium, Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium. Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water tanks, and squatters’ flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.

  Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed western elevators of Floor 34. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape. The lazy sons of bitches were all orj the take.

  Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch onto four concrete-filled metal drums.

  The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had once done some custom work on the kid’s cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he recalled, but he couldn’t remember the kid’s name. Lyle was terrible with names. “What’s up, zude?”

  “Hard night, Lyle?”

  “Just real busy.”

  The kid’s nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. “Doin’ a lot of paint work, huh?” He glanced at his palmtop notepad. “You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stub-bled 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 shrink-wrap, 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 gigabyte-age 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 35, right through the ceiling of Floor 34, 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 Der-touzas 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-j
unk 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 settop box. A laughable infobahn antique. You’d never see a cablebox 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 cablebox 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 41, 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 byproduct a pleasantly harmless reek rather like ripe bananas. Life was a lot easier when you came to proper terms with your microscopic flora.