Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology Page 6

  “She’s naked under there.”

  “Okay,” she said impatiently, “cut a slit in the bag and throw some clothes in it. Get going, Lyle.”

  Lyle threw in some biking pants and a sweatshirt.

  “What about my gear?” Kitty demanded, wriggling her way into the clothes by feel.

  “I tell you what,” said Mabel thoughtfully. “Pete here will give your gear back to you in a week or so, after his friends have photographed all the circuitry. You’ll just have to let him keep all those knickknacks for a while, as his reward for our not immediately telling everybody who you are and what you’re doing here.”

  “Great idea,” Pete announced, “terrific, pragmatic solution!” He began feverishly snatching up gadgets and stuffing them into his shoulderbag. “See, Lyle? One phone-call to good ol’ Spider Pete, and your problem is history, zude! Me and Mabel-the-Fed have crisis negotiation skills that are second to none! Another potentially lethal confrontation resolved without any bloodshed or loss of life.” Pete zipped the bag shut. “That’s about it, right, everybody? Problem over! Write if you get work, Lyle buddy. Hang by your thumbs.” Pete leapt out the door and bounded off at top speed on the springy soles of his reactive boots.

  “Thanks a lot for placing my equipment into the hands of sociopathic criminals,” Kitty said. She reached out of the slit in the bag, grabbed a multitool off the corner of the workbench, and began swiftly slashing her way free.

  “This will help the sluggish, corrupt, and underpaid Chattanooga police to take life a little more seriously,” Mabel said, her pale eyes gleaming. “Besides, it’s profoundly undemocratic to restrict specialized technical knowledge to the coercive hands of secret military elites.”

  Kitty thoughtfully thumbed the edge of the multitool’s ceramic blade and stood up to her full height, her eyes slitted. “I’m ashamed to work for the same government as you.”

  Mabel smiled serenely. “Darling, your tradition of deep dark government paranoia is far behind the times! This is the postmodern era! We’re now in the grip of a government with severe schizoid multiple-personality disorder.”

  “You’re truly vile. I despise you more than I can say.” Kitty jerked her thumb at Lyle. “Even this nut-case eunuch anarchist kid looks pretty good, compared to you. At least he’s self-sufficient and market-driven.”

  “I thought he looked good the moment I met him,” Mabel replied sunnily. “He’s cute, he’s got great muscle tone, and he doesn’t make passes. Plus he can fix small appliances and he’s got a spare apartment. I think you ought to move in with him, sweetheart.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t think I could manage life here in the zone like you do, is that it? You think you have some kind of copyright on living outside the law?”

  “No, I just mean you’d better stay indoors with your boyfriend here until that paint falls off your face. You look like a poisoned raccoon.” Mabel turned on her heel. “Try to get a life, and stay out of my way.” She leapt outside, unlocked her bicycle, and methodically pedaled off.

  Kitty wiped her lips and spat out the door. “Christ, that baton packs a wallop.” She snorted. “Don’t you ever ventilate this place, kid? Those paint fumes are gonna kill you before you’re thirty.”

  “I don’t have time to clean or ventilate it. I’m real busy.”

  “Okay, then I’ll clean it. I’ll ventilate it. I gotta stay here awhile, understand? Maybe quite awhile.”

  Lyle blinked. “How long, exactly?”

  Kitty stared at him. “You’re not taking me seriously, are you? I don’t much like it when people don’t take me seriously.”

  “No, no,” Lyle assured her hastily. “You’re very serious.”

  “You ever heard of a small-business grant, kid? How about venture capital, did you ever hear of that? Ever heard of federal research-and-development subsidies, Mr. Schweik?” Kitty looked at him sharply, weighing her words. “Yeah, I thought maybe you’d heard of that one, Mr. Techie Wacko. Federal R and D backing is the kind of thing that only happens to other people, right? But Lyle, when you make good friends with a senator, you become ‘other people.’ Get my drift, pal?”

  “I guess I do,” Lyle said slowly.

  “We’ll have ourselves some nice talks about that subject, Lyle. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”

  “No. I don’t mind it now that you’re talking.”

  “There’s some stuff going on down here in the zone that I didn’t understand at first, but it’s important.” Kitty paused, then rubbed dried dye from her hair in a cascade of green dandruff. “How much did you pay those Spider gangsters to string up this place for you?”

  “It was kind of a barter situation,” Lyle told her.

  “Think they’d do it again if I paid ’em real cash? Yeah? I thought so.” She nodded thoughtfully. “They look like a heavy outfit, the City Spiders. I gotta pry ’em loose from that leftist gorgon before she finishes indoctrinating them in socialist revolution.” Kitty wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “This is the Senator’s own constituency! It was stupid of us to duck an ideological battle, just because this is a worthless area inhabited by reckless sociopaths who don’t vote. Hell, that’s exactly why it’s important. This could be a vital territory in the culture war. I’m gonna call the office right away, start making arrangements. There’s no way we’re gonna leave this place in the hands of the self-styled Queen of Peace and Justice over there.”

  She snorted, then stretched a kink out of her back. “With a little self-control and discipline, I can save those Spiders from themselves and turn them into an asset to law and order! I’ll get ’em to string up a couple of trailers here in the zone. We could start a dojo.”

  Eddy called, two weeks later. He was in a beachside cabana somewhere in Catalunya, wearing a silk floral-print shirt and a new and very pricey looking set of spex. “How’s life, Lyle?”

  “It’s okay, Eddy.”

  “Making out all right?” Eddy had two new tattoos on his cheekbone.

  “Yeah. I got a new paying roommate. She’s a martial artist.”

  “Girl roommate working out okay this time?”

  “Yeah, she’s good at pumping the flywheel and she lets me get on with my bike work. Bike business has been picking up a lot lately. Looks like I might get a legal electrical feed and some more floorspace, maybe even some genuine mail delivery. My new roomie’s got a lot of useful contacts.”

  “Boy, the ladies sure love you, Lyle! Can’t beat ’em off with a stick, can you, poor guy? That’s a heck of a note.”

  Eddy leaned forward a little, shoving aside a silver tray full of dead gold-tipped zigarettes. “You been getting the packages?”

  “Yeah. Pretty regular.”

  “Good deal,” he said briskly, “but you can wipe ’em all now. I don’t need those backups anymore. Just wipe the data and trash the disks, or sell ’em. I’m into some, well, pretty hairy opportunities right now, and I don’t need all that old clutter. It’s kid stuff anyway.”

  “Okay, man. If that’s the way you want it.”

  Eddy leaned forward. “D’you happen to get a package lately? Some hardware? Kind of a settop box?”

  “Yeah, I got the thing.”

  “That’s great, Lyle. I want you to open the box up, and break all the chips with pliers.”

  “Yeah?

  “Then throw all the pieces away. Separately. It’s trouble, Lyle, okay? The kind of trouble I don’t need right now.”

  “Consider it done, man.”

  “Thanks! Anyway, you won’t be bothered by mailouts from now on.” He paused. “Not that I don’t appreciate your former effort and goodwill, and all.”

  Lyle blinked. “How’s your love life, Eddy?”

  Eddy sighed. “Frederika! What a handful! I dunno, Lyle, it was okay for a while, but we couldn’t stick it together. I don’t know why I ever thought that private cops were sexy. I musta been totally out of my mind…. Anyway, I got a new girlfriend now.”


  “Yeah?”

  “She’s a politician, Lyle. She’s a radical member of the Spanish Parliament. Can you believe that? I’m sleeping with an elected official of a European local government.” He laughed. “Politicians are sexy, Lyle. Politicians are hot! They have charisma. They’re glamorous. They’re powerful. They can really make things happen! Politicians get around. They know things on the inside track. I’m having more fun with Violeta than I knew there was in the world.”

  “That’s pleasant to hear, zude.”

  “More pleasant than you know, my man.”

  “Not a problem,” Lyle said indulgently. “We all gotta make our own lives, Eddy.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  Lyle nodded. “I’m in business, zude!”

  “You gonna perfect that inertial whatsit?” Eddy said.

  “Maybe. It could happen. I get to work on it a lot now. I’m getting closer, really getting a grip on the concept. It feels really good. It’s a good hack, man. It makes up for all the rest of it. It really does.”

  Eddy sipped his mimosa. “Lyle.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hook up that settop box and look at it, did you?”

  “You know me, Eddy,” Lyle said. “Just another kid with a wrench.”

  Sterling to Kessel, 29 March 1985:

  “You can’t turn pop genre into mainstream. You can’t turn rock and roll into modern symphonic music. It won’t wash.”

  Kessel to Sterling, 2 April 1985:

  ‘“You can’t turn pop genre into mainstream.’ Maybe. I see the problem. But a lot of good stuff has been produced in the past by artists trying to do exactly that…. look at Shakespeare and revenge tragedy (Hamlet). Hammett and the hardboiled detective story (The Glass Key). Jane Austen and the romance (Persuasion). Conrad and the spy novel (The Secret Agent). Melville and the swindle story (The Confidence Man).”

  Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

  (With apologies to E. R. Eddison)

  Gwyneth Jones

  The virtual reality stories that followed in the wake of 0CP’S first wave traded in the wonders of the digital alternative to reality, a world transcending the limitations of the flesh. Here Gwyneth Jones draws a sharp contrast between the lives of people in our world and their fantasy lives in the VR world.

  In the process she performs an interrogation of the uses of fantasy. Like so much fantasy (and science fiction), VR offers the temptation of effortless sex, physical prowess, and costless adventure in a romanticized world without entropy. Can the virtual world escape the limitations of humanity?

  The earth walls of the caravanserai rose strangely from the empty plain. She let the black stallion slow his pace. The silence of deep dusk had a taste, like a rich dark fruit; the air was keen. In the distance mountains etched a jagged margin against an indigo sky; snow-streaks glinting in the glimmer of the dawning stars. She had never been here before, in life. But as she led her horse through the gap in the high earthen banks she knew what she would see. The camping-booths around the walls; the beaten ground stained black by the ashes of countless cooking fires; the wattle-fenced enclosure where travellers’ riding beasts mingled indiscriminately with their host’s goats and chickens… the tumbledown gallery, where sheaves of russet plains-grass sprouted from empty window-spaces. Everything she looked on had the luminous intensity of a place often-visited in dreams.

  She was a tall woman, dressed for riding in a kilt and harness of supple leather over brief close-fitting linen: a costume that left her sheeny, muscular limbs bare and outlined the taut, proud curves of breast and haunches. Her red hair was bound in a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Her sword was slung on her back, the great brazen hilt standing above her shoulder. Other guests were gathered by an open-air kitchen, in the orange-red of firelight and the smoke of roasting meat. She returned their stares coolly: she was accustomed to attracting attention. But she didn’t like what she saw. The host of the caravanserai came scuttling from the group by the fire. His manner was fawning. But his eyes measured, with a thief’s sly expertise, the worth of the sword she bore and the quality of Lemiak’s harness. Sonja tossed him a few coins, and declined to join the company.

  She had counted fifteen of them. They were poorly dressed and heavily armed. They were all friends together and their animals—both terror-birds and horses — were too good for any honest travellers’ purposes. Sonja had been told that this caravanserai was a safe halt. She judged that this was no longer true. She considered riding out again onto the plain. But wolves and wild terror-birds roamed at night between here and the mountains, at the end of winter. And there were worse dangers; ghosts and demons. Sonja was neither credulous nor superstitious. But in this country no wayfarer willingly spent the black hours alone.

  She unharnessed Lemiak and rubbed him down: taking sensual pleasure in the handling of his powerful limbs, in the heat of his glossy hide, and the vigour of his great body. There was firewood ready stacked in the roofless booth. Shouldering a cloth sling for corn and a hank of rope, she went to fetch her own fodder. The corralled beasts shifted in a mass to watch her. The great flightless birds, with their pitiless raptors’ eyes, were especially attentive. She felt an equally rapacious attention from the company by the caravanserai kitchen, which amused her. The robbers — as she was sure they were — had all the luck. For her, there wasn’t one of the fifteen who rated a second glance.

  A man appeared, from the darkness under the ruined gallery. He was tall. The rippled muscle of his chest, left bare by an unlaced leather jerkin, shone red-brown. His black hair fell in glossy curls to his wide shoulders. He met her gaze and smiled, white teeth appearing in the darkness of his beard. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…look on my works, ye mighty, and despair…. Do you knowthose lines?” He pointed to a lump of shapeless stone, one of several that lay about. It bore traces of carving, almost effaced by time. “There was a city here once, with market places, fine buildings, throngs of proud people. Now they are dust, and only the caravanserai remains.”

  He stood before her, one tanned and sinewy hand resting lightly on the hilt of a dagger in his belt. Like Sonja, he carried his broadsword on his back. Sonja was tall. He topped her by a head: yet there was nothing brutish in his size. His brow was wide and serene, his eyes were vivid blue, his lips full and imperious; yet delicately modelled, in the rich nest of hair. Somewhere between eyes and lips there lurked a spirit of mockery, as if he found some secret amusement in the perfection of his own beauty and strength.

  The man and the woman measured each other.

  “You are a scholar,” she said.

  “Of some sort. And a traveller from an antique land, where the cities are still standing. It seems we are the only strangers here,” he added, with a slight jerk of the chin towards the convivial company. “We might be well advised to become friends for the night.”

  Sonja never wasted words. She considered his offer, and nodded.

  They made a fire in the booth Sonja had chosen. Lemiak and the scholar’s terror-bird, left loose in the back of the shelter, did not seem averse to each other’s company. The woman and the man ate spiced sausage, skewered and broiled over the red embers, with bread and dried fruit. They drank water, each keeping to their own water-skin. They spoke little, after that first exchange, except to discuss briefly the tactics of their defence, should defence be necessary.

  The attack came around midnight. At the first stir of covert movement, Sonja leapt up, sword in hand. She grasped a brand from the dying fire. The man who had been crawling on his hands and knees toward her, bent on sly murder of a sleeping victim, scrabbled to his feet. “Defend yourself,” yelled Sonja, who despised to strike an unarmed foe. Instantly he was rushing at her with a heavy sword. A great two-handed stroke would have cleft her to the waist. She parried the blow and caught him between neck and shoulder, almost severing the head from his body. The beasts plunged and screamed at the rush of blood-scent. The s
cholar was grappling with another attacker, choking out the man’s life with his bare hands…and the booth was full of bodies: their enemies rushing in on every side.

  Sonja felt no fear. Stroke followed stroke, in a luxury of blood and effort and fire-shot darkness…until the attack was over, as suddenly as it had begun.

  The brigands had vanished.

  “We killed five,” breathed the scholar, “by my count. Three to you, two to me.”

  She kicked together the remains of their fire, and crouched to blow the embers to a blaze. By that light they found five corpses, dragged them and flung them into the open square. The scholar had a cut on his upper arm which was bleeding freely. Sonja was bruised and battered, but otherwise unhurt. The worst loss was their woodstack, which had been trampled and blood-fouled. They would not be able to keep a watchfire burning.

  “Perhaps they won’t try again,” said the warrior woman. “What can we have that’s worth more than five lives?”

  He laughed shortly. “I hope you’re right.”

  “We’ll take turns to watch.”

  Standing breathless, every sense alert, they smiled at each other in new-forged comradeship. There was no second attack. At dawn Sonja, rousing from a light doze, sat up and pushed back the heavy masses of her red hair.

  “You are very beautiful,” said the man, gazing at her.

  “So are you,” she answered.

  The caravanserai was deserted, except for the dead. The brigands’ riding animals were gone. The inn-keeper and his family had vanished into some bolt-hole in the ruins.

  “I am heading for the mountains,” he said, as they packed up their gear. “For the pass into Zimiamvia.”

  “I too.”

  “Then our way lies together.”

  He was wearing the same leather jerkin, over knee-length loose breeches of heavy violet silk. Sonja looked at the strips of linen that bound the wound on his upper arm. “When did you tie up that cut?”