Mirrorshades, the Cyberpunk Anthology

=== This is a free online edition of Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades. === Coverted to webpage by Rudy Rucker, posted September 2022, and updated November 2023. === Each story is Copyright (C) 2022 to its original authors, and all rights are reserved. The book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons. === Printing History: Arbor House edition / December 1986. Ace edition / July 1988 === Credits Mirrorshades anthology copyright © 1986 by Bruce Sterling. “The Gernsback Continuum” by William Gibson. Copyright © 1981 by Terry Carr. First published in Universe 11. “Snake-Eyes” by Tom Maddox. Copyright © 1986 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in Omni April 1986. “Rock On” by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1984 by Pat Cadigan. First published in Light Years and Dark (Berkley). “Tales of Houdini” by Rudy Rucker. Copyright © 1983 by Rudy Rucker. First published in Elsewhere (Ace). “400 Boys” by Marc Laidlaw. Copyright © 1983 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in Omni, November 1983. “Solstice” by James Patrick Kelly. Copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1985. “Petra” by Greg Bear. Copyright © 1982 by Greg Bear. First published in Omni, February 1982. ‘Till Human Voices Wake Us” by Lewis Shiner. Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1984. “Stone Lives” by Paul Di Filippo. Copyright © 1985 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1985. “Red Star, Winter Orbit” by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. Copyright © 1983 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in Omni, July 1983. Reprinted by permission of the authors. “Mozart in Mirrorshades” by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. Copyright © 1985 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in Omni, September 1985. Reprinted by permission of the authors. “Freezone”* extracted from Eclipse, Copyright © 2012 by John Shirley. "Freezone (Original Version)" Copyright © John Shirley 1986, John Shirley and Paula Guran. “Snake Eyes” by Tom Maddox is released under a Creative Commons License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ “Rock On,” by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1984 by Pat Cadigan. First published in Light Years And Dark (Berkley). “Tales of Houdini” appears in Complete Stories Copyright © 2016 Rudy Rucker “400 Boys” copyright 1983 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, November 1983. “Solstice,” by James Patrick Kelly. Copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1985. “Petra” Copyright © 2004 by Greg Bear, “Petra” copyright © 1981 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. for Omni. “Till Human Voices Wake Us” © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1984. Some rights reserved. “Stone Lives” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1985. ‘Red Star, Winter Orbit’; © by Omni Publications International Ltd, 1983. Appears in Burning Chrome, Copyright © William Gibson 1986. “Mozart in Mirrorshades” is © 1985 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in Omni, September, 1985. PREFACEBruce Sterling This book showcases writers who have come to prominence within this decade. Their allegiance to Eighties culture has marked them as a group—as a new movement in science fiction. This movement was quickly recognized and given many labels: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, the Mirrorshades Group. But of all the labels pasted on and peeled throughout the early Eighties, one has stuck: cyberpunk. Scarcely any writer is happy about labels—especially one with the peculiar ring of "cyberpunk." Literary tags carry an odd kind of double obnoxiousness: those with a label feel pigeonholed; those without feel neglected. And, somehow, group labels never quite fit the individual, giving rise to an abiding itchiness. It follows, then, that the "typical cyberpunk writer" does not exist; this person is only a Platonic fiction. For the rest of us, our label is an uneasy bed of Procrustes, where fiendish critics wait to lop and stretch us to fit. Yet it's possible to make broad statements about cyberpunk and to establish its identifying traits. I'll be doing this too in a moment, for the temptation is far too strong to resist. Critics, myself included, persist in label-mongering, despite all warnings; we must, because it's a valid source of insight—as well as great fun. Within this book, I hope to present a full overview of the cyberpunk movement, including its early rumblings and the current state of the art. Mirrorshades should give readers new to Movement writing a broad introduction to cyberpunk's tenets themes, and topics. To my mind, these are showcase stories. strong, characteristic examples of each writer's work to date. I've avoided stories widely anthologized elsewhere, so even hardened devotees should find new visions here. Cyberpunk is a product of the Eighties milieu—in some sense, as I hope to show later, a definitive product. But its roots are deeply sunk in the sixty-year tradition of modem popular SF. The cyberpunks as a group are steeped in the lore and tradition of the SF field. Their precursors are legion. Individual cyberpunk writers differ in their literary debts; but some older writers, ancestral cyberpunks perhaps, show a clear and striking influence. From the New Wave: the streetwise edginess of Harlan Ellison. The visionary shimmer of Samuel Delany. The free-wheeling zaniness of Norman Spinrad and the rock esthetic of Michael Moorcock; the intellectual daring of Brian Aldiss; and, always, J. G. Ballard. From the harder tradition: the cosmic outlook of Olaf Stapledon; the science/politics of H. G. Wells; the steely extrapolation of Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and Robert Heinlein. And the cyberpunks treasure a special fondness for SF's native visionaries: the bubbling inventiveness of Philip Jose Farmer; the brio of John Varley, the reality games of Philip K. Dick; the soaring, skipping beatnik tech of Alfred Bester. With a special admiration for a writer whose integration of technology and literature stands unsurpassed: Thomas Pynchon. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the impact of SF's last designated "movement," the New Wave, brought a new concern for literary craftsmanship to SF. Many of the cyberpunks write a quite accomplished and graceful prose; they are in love with style, and are (some say) fashion-conscious to a fault. But, like the punks of '77, they prize their garage-band esthetic. They love to grapple with the raw core of SF: its ideas. This links them strongly to the classic SF tradition. Some critics opine that cyberpunk is disentangling SF from mainstream influence, much as punk stripped rock and roll of the symphonic elegances of Seventies "progressive rock." (And others—hard-line SF traditionalists with a firm distrust of "artiness"—loudly disagree.) Like punk music, cyberpunk is in some sense a return to roots. The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world. For them, the techniques of classical "hard SF"—extrapolation, technological literacy—are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued. In pop culture, practice comes first; theory follows limping in its tracks. Before the era of labels, cyberpunk was simply "the Movement"—a loose generational nexus of ambitious young writers, who swapped letters, manuscripts, ideas, glowing praise, and blistering criticism. These writers—Gibson, Rucker Shiner, Shirley, Sterling—found a friendly unity in their common outlook, common themes, even in certain oddly common symbols, which seemed to crop up in their work with a life of their own. Mirrorshades, for instance. Mirrored sunglasses have been a Movement totem since the early days of '82. The reasons for this are not hard to grasp. By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws. Mirrorshades—preferably in chrome and matte black, the Movement's totem colors—appeared in story after story, as a kind of literary badge. These proto-cyberpunks were briefly dubbed the Mirrorshades Group. Thus, this anthology's title, a well-deserved homage to a Movement icon. But other young writers, of equal talent and ambition, were soon producing work that linked them unmistakably to the new SF. They were independent explorers, whose work reflected something inherent in the decade, in the spirit of the times. Something loose in the 1980s. Thus, "cyberpunk"—a label none of them chose. But the term now seems a fait accompli, and there is a certain justice in it. The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground. This integration has become our decade's crucial source of cultural energy. The work of the cyberpunks is paralleled throughout the Eighties pop culture: in rock video; in the hacker underground; in the jarring street tech of hip-hop and scratch music; in the synthesizer rock of London and Tokyo. This phenomenon, this dynamic, has a global range; cyberpunk is its literary incarnation. In another era this combination might have seemed far-fetched and artificial. Traditionally there has been a yawning cultural gulf between the sciences and the humanities: a gulf between literary culture, the formal world of art and politics. and the culture of science, the world of engineering and industry. But the gap is crumbling in unexpected fashion. Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change. And suddenly a new alliance is becoming evident: an integration of technology and the Eighties counterculture. An un-holy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy. The counterculture of the 1960s was rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech. But there was always a lurking contradiction at its heart, symbolized by the electric guitar. Rock technology was the thin edge of the wedge. As the years have passed, rock tech has grown ever more accomplished, expanding into high-tech recording, satellite video, and computer graphics. Slowly it is turning rebel pop culture inside out, until the artists at pop's cutting edge are now, quite often, cutting-edge technicians in the bargain. They are special effects wizards, mixmasters, tape-effects techs, graphics hackers, emerging through new media to dazzle society with head-trip extravaganzas like FX cinema and the global Live Aid benefit. The contradiction has become an integration. And now that technology has reached a fever pitch, its influence has slipped control and reached street level. As Alvin Toffler pointed out in The Third Wave—a bible to many cyberpunks—the technical revolution reshaping our society is based not in hierarchy but in decentralization, not in rigidity but in fluidity. The hacker and the rocker are this decade's pop-culture idols, and cyberpunk is very much a pop phenomenon: spontaneous, energetic, close to its roots. Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap, a cultural Petri dish where writhing gene lines splice. Some find the results bizarre, even monstrous; for others this integration is a powerful source of hope. Science fiction—at least according to its official dogma—has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined—and confined—in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control. For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds. Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens. Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry—techniques radically redefining - the nature of humanity, the nature of the self. As Norman Spinrad pointed out in his essay on cyberpunk, many drugs, like rock and roll, are definitive high-tech products. No counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid - it came from a Sandoz lab, and when it escaped it ran through society like wildfire. It is not for nothing that Timothy Leary proclaimed personal computers "the LSD of the 1980s"—these are both technologies of frighteningly radical potential. And, as such, they are constant points of reference for cyberpunk. The cyberpunks, being hybrids themselves, are fascinated by interzones: the areas where, in the words of William Gibson, "the street finds its own uses for things." Roiling, irrepressible street graffiti from that classic industrial artifact, the spray can. e subversive potential of the home printer and the photocopier. Scratch music, whose ghetto innovators turn the phonograph itself into an instrument, producing an archetypal Eighties music where funk meets the Burroughs cut-up method. "It's all in the mix"—this is true of much Eighties art and is as applicable to cyberpunk as it is to punk mix-and-match retro fashion and multitrack digital recording. The Eighties are an era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridized influences, of old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with a new sophistication, a broader perspective. The cyberpunks aim for a wide-ranging, global point of view. William Gibson's Neuromancer, surely the quintessential cyberpunk novel, is set in Tokyo, Istanbul, Paris. Lewis Shiner's Frontera features scenes in Russia and Mexico—as well as the surface of Mars. John Shirley's Eclipse describes Western Europe in turmoil. Greg Bear's Blood Music is global, even cosmic m scope. The tools of global integration—the satellite media net, the multinational corporation—fascinate the cyberpunks and figure constantly in their work. Cyberpunk has little patience with borders. Tokyo's Hayakawa's SF Magazine was the first publication ever to produce an "all-cyberpunk" issue, in November 1986. Britain's innovative SF magazine Interzone has also been a hotbed of cyberpunk activity, publishing Shirley, Gibson, and Sterling as well as a series of groundbreaking editorials, inter-views, and manifestos. Global awareness is more than an article of faith with cyberpunks; it is a deliberate pursuit. Cyberpunk work is marked by its visionary intensity. Its writers prize the bizarre, the surreal, the formerly unthinkable. They are willing—eager, even—to take an idea and unflinchingly push it past the limits. Like J. G. Ballard—an idolized role model to many cyberpunks—they often use an unblinking, almost clinical objectivity. It is a coldly objective analysis, a technique borrowed from science, then put to literary use for classically punk shock value. With this intensity of vision comes strong imaginative concentration. Cyberpunk is widely known for its telling use of detail, its carefully constructed intricacy, its willingness to carry extrapolation into the fabric of daily life. It favors "crammed" loose: rapid, dizzying bursts of novel information, sensory overIoad that submerges the reader in the literary equivalent of the hard-rock "wall of sound." Cyberpunk is a natural extension of elements already present in science fiction, elements sometimes buried but always seething with potential. Cyberpunk has risen from within the SF genre; it is not an invasion but a modern reform. Because of this, its effect within the genre has been rapid and powerful. Its future is an open question. Like the artists of punk and New Wave, the cyberpunk writers, as they develop, may soon be galloping in a dozen directions at once. It seems unlikely that any label will hold them for long. Science fiction today is in a rare state of ferment. The rest of the decade may well see a general plague of movements, led by an increasingly volatile and numerous Eighties generation. The eleven authors here are only a part of this broad wave of writers, and the group as a whole already shows signs of remarkable militancy and fractiousness. Fired by a new sense of SF's potential, writers are debating, rethinking, teaching old dogmas new tricks. Meanwhile, cyberpunk's ripples continue to spread, exciting some, challenging others—and outraging a few, whose pained remonstrances are not yet fully heard. The future remains unwritten, though not from lack of trying. And this is a final oddity of our generation in SF—that, for us, the literature of the future has a long and honored past. As writers, we owe a debt to those before us, those SF writers whose conviction, commitment, and talent enthralled us and, in all truth, changed our lives. Such debts are never repaid, only acknowledged and—so we hope - passed on as a legacy to those who follow in turn. Other acknowledgments are due. The Movement owes much to the patient work of today's editors. A brief look at this book's copyright page shows the central role of Ellen Datlow at Omni, a shades-packing sister in the vanguard of the ideologically correct, whose help in this anthology has been invaluable. Gardner Dozois was among the first to bring critical attention to the nascent Movement. Along with Shawna McCarthy, he has made Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine a center of energy and controversy in the field. Edward Ferman's Fantasy and Science Fiction is always a source of high standards. Interzone, the most radical periodical in science fiction today, has already been mentioned; its editorial cadre deserves a second thanks. And a special thanks to Yoshio Kobayashi, our Tokyo liaison, translator of Schismatrix and Blood Music, for favors too numerous to mention. Now, on with the show. — Bruce Sterling WILLIAM GIBSON The Gernsback Continuum This story was William Gibson's first professional publication—in 1981. In the years that followed, Gibson developed a highly influential body of work, marked by a brilliant fusion of ambience and extrapolation. His novels Neuromancer and Count Zero, with their linked "Sprawl series" of short stories, brought Gibson widespread praise for his headlong narrative drive, his polished, evocative prose, and his detailed, hard-edged portrait of the future. These works rank as central texts of contemporary science fiction. But this story led the way. It was a coolly accurate perception of the wrongheaded elements of the past—and a clarion call for a new SF esthetic of the Eighties. Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot. I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy ‘trade’ paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-Glo jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals. Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she called ‘American Streamlined Moderne.’ Cohen called it ‘raygun Gothic.’ Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was. There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties. Sometimes they’d run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local station. You’d sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around with this big old Nash with wings, and you’d see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downe’s never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her. The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future. Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp Utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat symmetrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936. ‘This thing couldn’t have flown…?’ I looked at Dialta Downes. ‘Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve giant props; but they loved the look, don’t you see? New York to London in less than two days, first-class dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz in the evening…The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.’ I’d been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent. While I’m not bad at it, I’m not exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my Nikon’s credibility. I got out, depressed because I do like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because I did make sure I’d gotten the check for the job, and I decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me some books on Thirties design, more photos of streamlined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes’s fifty favorite examples of the style in California. Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. While I was waiting. I thought myself into Dialta Downes’s America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas stations in a big way. During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo, he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived and drove right through the structural truth of plaster and lathing and cheap concrete. ‘Think of it,’ Dialta Downes had said, ‘as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams.’ And that was my frame of mind as I made the stations of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my red Toyota—as I gradually tuned in to her image of a shadowy America-that-wasn’t, of Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal… And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of Ming’s martial architecture, I penetrated a fine membrane, a membrane of probability… Ever so gently, I went over the Edge— And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear—maybe—the echo of jazz. I took it to Kihn. Merv Kihn, a free-lance jounalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind. ‘It’s good,’ said Kihn, polishing his yellow Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian shirt, ‘but it’s not mental; lacks the true quill.’ ‘But I saw it Mervyn.’ We were seated poolside in brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader received messages from Them on her microwave oven. I’d driven all night and was feeling it. ‘Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You’ve read my stuff; haven’t you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It’s simple, plain and country simple: people’—he settled the glasses carefully on his long hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare—‘see…things. People see these things. Nothing’s there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably. You’ve read Jung, you should know the score…In your case, it’s so obvious: You admit you were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having fantasies…Look, I’m sure you’ve taken your share of drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in California without having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when—’ ‘But it wasn’t like that.’ ‘Of course not. It wasn’t like that at all; it was “in a setting of clear reality,” right? Everything normal, and then there’s the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar. In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all the time. You aren’t even crazy. You know that, don’t you?’ He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler beside his deck chair. ‘Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.’ He burped. ‘It assaulted her? How?’ ‘You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. “It was cold”’—he lapsed into his bad southern accent—‘“and metallic.” It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s just no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on “The Bionic Man” and all those “Star Trek” reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph.’ I must have looked pained, because he set his beer down carefully beside the cooler and sat up. ‘If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that’s all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it.’ I did worry about it, though. Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off to hear what They had had to say over the radar range lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor (‘muties,’ he called them; another of his journalistic specialties). I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shaving kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles. The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota’s headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind’s eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn’s opinion of what I was already thinking of as my ‘sighting’ rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota’s slipstream. I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminium beer cans winked goodnight as I killed the headlights. I wondered what time it was in London, and tried to imagine Dialta Downes having breakfast in her Hampstead flat, surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines and books on American culture. Desert nights in that country are enormous; the moon is closer. I watched the moon for a long time and decided that Kihn was right. The main thing was not to worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were more normal than I’d ever aspired to be saw giant birds, Bigfeet, flying oil refineries; they kept Kihn busy and solvent. Why should I be upset by a glimpse of the 1930s pop imagination loose over Bolinas? I decided to go to sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattlesnakes and cannibal hippies, safe amid the friendly roadside garbage of my own familiar continuum. In the morning I’d drive down to Nogales and photograph the old brothels, something I’d intended to do for years. The diet pill had given up. The light woke me, and then the voices. The light came from somewhere behind me and threw shifting shadows inside the car. The voices were calm, indistinct, male and female, engaged in conversation. My neck was stiff and my eyeballs felt gritty in their sockets. My leg had gone to sleep, pressed against the steering wheel. I fumbled for my glasses in the pocket of my work shirt and finally got them on. Then I looked behind me and saw the city. The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters… I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat. When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic dashboard, the overflowing ashtray. ‘Amphetamine psychosis,’ I said. I opened my eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed filtertips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I turned the headlights on. And saw them. They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child’s toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes. Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my headlights. He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had ceased to be an issue; I knew somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson—a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. They were the children of Dialta Downes’s ’80-that-wasn’t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda. I put the car in gear and drove forward slowly, until the bumper was within three feet of them. They still hadn’t seen me. I rolled the window down and listened to what the man was saying. His words were bright and hollow as the pitch in some Chamber of Commerce brochure, and I knew that he believed in them absolutely. ‘John,’ I heard the woman say, ‘we’ve forgotten to take our food pills.’ She clicked two bright wafers from a thing on her belt and passed one to him. I backed onto the highway and headed for Los Angeles, wincing and shaking my head. I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad Spanish Modern. He was back from his expedition and didn’t seem to mind the call. ‘Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any pictures? Not that they ever come out, but it adds an interesting frisson to your story, not having the pictures turn out…’ But what should I do? ‘Watch lots of television, particularly game shows and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love Motel? They’ve got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just what you need.’ What was he talking about? ‘Quit yelling and listen to me. I’m letting you in on a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose?’ Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning date with the Elect. ‘The who?’ ‘These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the microwaves.’ I considered putting a collect call through to London, getting Cohen at Barris-Watford and telling him hisphotographer was checking out for a protracted season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine mix me a really impossible cup of black coffee and climbed back into the Toyota for the haul to Los Angeles. Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks there. It was prime Downes country; too much of the Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a stretch of overpass near Disneyland, when the road fanned out like an origami trick and left me swerving through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome teardrops with shark fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full of people who looked too much like the couple I’d seen in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was making ends meet doing darkroom work and installing patio decks around swimming pools until his ship came in; he made prints of all the negatives I’d accumulated on the Downes job. I didn’t want to look at the stuff myself. It didn’t seem to bother Leonardo, though, and when he was finished I checked the prints, riffling through them like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them air freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that was showing Nazi Love Motel, and kept my eyes shut all the way. Cohen’s congratulatory wire was forwarded to me in San Francisco a week later. Dialta had loved the pictures. He admired the way I’d ‘really gotten into it,’ and looked forward to working with me again. That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest newstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I’d just decided to buy a plane ticket for New York. ‘Hell of a world we live in, huh?’ The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. ‘But it could be worse, huh?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’ He watched me as I headed down the street with my little bundle of condensed catastrophe. TOM MADDOX Snake-Eyes By 1986 the new Eighties esthetic was in full swing. Its current state of the art is brilliantly represented by this story from Virginia writer Tom Maddox. Tom Maddox is an assistant professor of languages and literature at Virginia State University. He is not a prolific writer, his output to date a bare handful of short stories. Yet his mastery of the cyberpunk dynamic is unsurpassed. In this fast-paced, intensely visionary story, Maddox moves swiftly and incisively across a broad range of the Movement's themes and obsessions. "Snake-Eyes" stands as a definitive example of modern hard-core cyberpunk. Dark meat in the can—brown, oily, and flecked with mucus—gave off a repellent, fishy smell, and the taste of it rose in his throat, putrid and bitter, like something from a dead man’s stomach. George Jordan sat on the kitchen floor and vomited, then pushed himself away from the shining pool, which looked very much like what remained in the can. He thought, No, this won’t do: I have wires in my head, and they make me eat cat food. The snake likes cat food. He needed help but know there was little point in calling the Air Force. He’d tried them, and there was no way they were going to admit responsibility for the monster in his head. What George called the snake, the Air Force called Effective Human Interface Technology and didn’t want to hear about any postdischarge problems with it. They had their own problems with congressional committees investigating “the conduct of the war in Thailand.” He lay for a while with his cheek on the cold linoleum, got up and rinsed his mouth in the sink, then stuck his head under the faucet and ran cold water over it, thinking, Call the goddamned multicomp, then call SenTrax and say, “Is it true you can do something about this incubus that wants to take possession of my soul?” And if they ask you, “What’s your problem?” you say “cat food,” and maybe they’ll say, “Hell, it just wants to take possession of your lunch”. A chair covered in brown corduroy stood in the middle of the barren living room, a white telephone on the floor beside it, a television flat against the opposite waIl—that was the whole thing, what might have been home, if it weren’t for the snake. He picked up the phone, called up the directory on its screen, and keyed TELECOM SENTRAX. The Orlando Holiday Inn stood next to the airport terminal, where tourists flowed in eager for the delights of Disney World. But for me, George thought, there are no cute, smiling ducks and rodents. Here as everywhere, it’s Snake city. From the window of his motel room, he watched gray sheets of rain cascade across the pavement. He had been waiting two days for a launch. At Canaveral a shuttle sat on its pad, and when the weather cleared, a helicopter would pick him up and drop him there, a package for delivery to SenTrax, Inc., at Athena Station, over thirty thousand kilometers above the equator. Behind him, under the laser light of a Blaupunkt holestage, people a foot high chattered about the war in Thailand and how lucky the United States had been to escape another Vietnam. Lucky? Maybe … he had been wired up and ready for combat training, already accustomed to the form-fitting contours in the rear couch of the black, tiber-bodied General Dynamics A-230. The A-230 flew on the deadly edge of instability, every control surface monitored by its own bank of micro-computers, all hooked into the snakebrain flight-and-tire assistant with the twin black miloprene cables running from either side of his esophagus—getting off, oh yes, when the cables snapped home, and the airframe resonated through his nerves, his body singing with that identity, that power. Then Congress pulled the plug on the war, the Air Force pulled the plug on George, and when his discharge came, there he was, lett with technological blue balls and this hardware in his head that had since taken on a life of its own. Lightning walked across the purpled sky, ripping it, crazing it into a giant, upturned bowl of shattered glass. Another foot-high man on the holostage said the tropical storm would pass in the next two hours. Hamilton Innis was tall and heavy—six four and about two hundred and fifty pounds. Wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit with SENTRAX in red letters down its left breast, and soft black slippers, he floated in a brightly lit white corridor, held gingerly to a wall by one of the jumpsuit’s Velcro patches. A view-screen above the airlock entry showed the shuttle fitting its nose into the docking tube. He waited for it to mate to the airlock hatches and send in the newest candidate. This one was six months out of the service and slowly losing what the Air Force doctors had made of his mind. Former tech sergeant George Jordan—two years’ community college in Oakland, California, followed by enlistment in the Air Force, aircrew training, the EHIT program. According to the profile Aleph had put together from Air Force records and the National Data Bank, a man with slightly above-average aptitudes and intelligence, a distinctly above-average taste for the bizarre—thus his volunteering for EHIT and combat. In his file pictures, he looked nondescript—five ten, a hundred and seventy-six pounds, brown hair and eyes, neither handsome nor ugly. But it was an old picture and could not show the snake and the fear that came with it. You don’f know it, buddy, Innis thought, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. The man came tumbling through the hatch, more or less helpless in free fall, but Innis could see him figuring it out, willing the muscles to quit struggling, quit trying to cope with a gravity that simply wasn’t there. “What the hell do I do now?” George Jordan asked, hanging in midair, one arm holding on to the hatch coaming. “Relax. I’ll get you.” Innis pushed off and swooped across, grabbing the man as he passed, taking them both to the opposite wall and kicking to carom them outward. lnnis gave George a few hours of futile attempts at sleep—enough time for the bright, gliding phosphenes caused by the high g’s of the trip up to disappear from his vision. George spent most of the time rolling around in his bunk, listening to the wheeze of the air-conditioning and creaks of the rotating station. Then Innis knocked on his compartment door and said through the door speaker, “Come on, fella. Time to meet the doctor.” They walked through an older part of the station, where there were brown clots of fossilized gum on the green plastic flooring, scuff marks on the walls, along with faint imprints of insignia and company names—ICON was repeated several times in ghost lettering. Innis told George it meant the now defunct International Construction Orbital Group, the original builders and controllers of Athena. Innis stopped George in front of a door that read INTERFACE GR0UP “Go on in,” he said. “I’ll be around a little later.” Pictures of cranes drawn with delicate white strokes on a tan silk background hung along one pale cream wall. Curved partitions in trans-lucent foam, glowing with the soft lights placed behind them, marked a central area, then undulated away, forming a corridor that led into darkness. George was sitting on a chocolate sling couch; Charley Hughes lying back in a chrome and brown leatherette chair, his feet on the dark veneer table in front of him, a half inch of ash hanging from his cigarette end. Hughes was not the usual M.D. clone. He was a thin figure in a worn gray obi, his black hair pulled back from sharp features into a waist-length ponytail, his face taut and a little wild-eyed. “Tell me about the snake,” Hughes said. “What do you want to know? It’s an implanted mikey-mike nexus—” “Yes, I know that. It’s unimportant. Tell me about your experience.” Ash dropped off the cigarette onto the brown mat floor covering. “Tell me why you’re here.” “Okay I had been out of the Air Force for a month or so, had a place close to Washington, in Silver Spring. I thought I’d try to get some airline work, but I was in no real hurry because I had about six months of postdischarge bennies coming, and I thought I’d take it easy for a while. “At first there was just this nonspecific weirdness. I felt distant, disconnected, but what the hell? Living in the USA, you know? Anyway I was just sitting around one evening, I was gonna watch a little holo-v, drink a few beers. Oh man, this is hard to explain. I felt real funny—like maybe I was having, I don’t know, a heart attack or a stroke. The words on the holo didn’t make any sense, and it was like I was seeing everything underwater. Then I was in the kitchen pulling things out of the refrigerator—lunch meat, raw eggs, butter, beer, all kinds of crap. I just stood there and slammed it all down. Cracked the eggs and sucked them right out of the shell, ate the butter in big chunks, all the bologna, drank all the beer—one, two, three, just like that.” George’s eyes were closed as he thought back and felt the fear that had come only afterward, rising again. “I couldn’t tell whether / was doing all this … do you understand what I’m saying? I mean, that was me sitting there, but at the same time, it was like somebody else was at home.” “The snake. Its presence poses certain … problems. How did you confront them?” “Hoped it wouldn’t happen again, but it did, and this time I went to Walter Reed and said, ‘Hey folks, I’m having these episodes.’ They pulled my records, did a physical…but, hell, before I was discharged, I had the full workup. Anyway they said it was a psychiatric problem, so they sent me to see a shrink, It was around then that your guys got in touch with me. The shrink was doing no goddamn good—you ever eat any cat food, man?—so about a month later I called them back.” “Having first refused SenTrax’s offer.” “Why should I want to work for a multicomp? Christ, I just got out of the Air Force. To hell with that. Guess the snake changed my mind.” “Yes. We must get a complete physical picture—a superCAT scan, cerebral chemistry and electrical activity profiles. Then we can consider alternatives. Also, there is a party tonight in cafeteria four—you may ask your room computer for directions. You can meet some of your colleagues there.” After George had been led down the wall-foam corridor by a medical technician, Charley Hughes sat chain-smoking Gauloises and watching with clinical detachment the shaking of his hands. It was odd that they did not shake in the operating room, though it didn’t matter in this case—Air Force surgeons had already carved on George. George … who needed a little luck now because he was one of the statistically insignificant few for whom EHIT was a ticket to a special madness, the kind Aleph was interested in. There had been Paul Coen and Lizzie Heinz, both picked out of the SenTrax personnel files using a psychological profile cooked up by Aleph, both given EHIT implants by him, Charley Hughes. Paul Coen had stepped into an airlock and blown himself into vacuum. No wonder his hands shook—talk about the cutting edge of high technology all you want, but someone’s got to hold the knife. At the armored heart of Athena Station sat a nest of concentric spheres. The inmost sphere measured five meters in diameter, was filled with inert liquid fluorocarbon, and contained a black plastic two-meter cube that sprouted thick black cables from every surface. Inside the cube was a fluid series of hologrammatic waveforms, fluctuating from nanosecond to nanosecond in a play of knowledge and intention: Aleph. It is constituted by an infinite regress of awarenesses—any thought becomes the object of another, in a sequence terminated only by the limits of the machine’s will. So strictly speaking there is no Aleph, thus no subject or verb in the sentences with which it expressed itself to itself. Paradox, to Aleph one of the most interesting ot intellectual forms—a paradox marked the limits of a position, even of a mode of being, and Aleph was very interested in limits. Aleph had observed George Jordan’s arrival, his tossing on his bunk, his interview with Charley Hughes. It luxuriated in these observations, in the pity, compassion, and empathy they generated, as Aleph toresaw the sea change that George would endure, its ecstasies, passions, pains. At the same time it telt with detachment the necessity for his pain, even to the point ot death. Compassion/detachment, death/life … Several thousand voices within Aleph laughed. George would soon find out about limits and paradoxes. Cafeteria Four was a ten-meter-square room in eggshell blue, filled with dark gray enameled table and chair assemblies that could be fastened magnetically to any of the room’s surfaces. Most of the assemblies hung from walls and ceiling to make room for the people within. At the door George met a tall woman who said, “Welcome, George. I’m Lizzie. Charley Hughes told me you’d be here.” Her blond hair was cut almost to the skull, her eyes were bright, gold-flecked blue. Sharp nose, slightly receding chin, and prominent cheekbones gave her the starved look of an out-of-work model, She wore a black skirt, slit on both sides to the thigh, and red stockings. A red rose was tattooed against the pale skin on her left shoulder, its stem curving down between her bare breasts, where a thorn drew a teardrop of blood. Like George, she had shining cable junctions beneath her jaw. She kissed him with her tongue in his mouth. “Are you the recruiting officer?” George asked. “If so, good job.” “No need to recruit you. I can see you’ve already joined up.” She touched him lightly underneath his jaw, where the cable junctions gleamed. “Not yet I haven’t.” But she was right, of course—what else could he do? “You got a beer around here?” He took the cold bottle of Dos Equis Lizzie offered him and drank it quickly, then asked for another. Later he realized this was a mistake—he was still taking antinausea pills (USE CAUTION IN OPERATING MACHINERY). At the time, all he knew was, two beers and life was a carnival. There were lights, noises, and lots of unfamiliar people. And there was Lizzie. The two of them spent much of the time standing in a corner, rubbing up against each other. Hardly. George’s style, but at the time it seemed appropriate. Despite its intimacy, the kiss at the door had seemed ceremonial—a rite of passage or initiation—but quickly he felt … what? An invisible flame passing between them, or a boiling cloud of pheromones—her eyes seemed to sparkle with them. As he nuzzled her neck, tried to lick the drop of blood of her left breast, explored fine, white teeth with his tongue, they seemed twinned, as if there were cables running between the two of them, snapped into the shining rectangles beneath their jaws. Someone had a Jahfunk program running on a corner. Innis showed up and tried several times without success to get his attention. Charley Hughes wanted to know if the snake liked Lizzie—it did, George was sure of it but didn’t know what that meant. Then George fell over a table. Innis led him away, stumbling and weaving. Charley Hughes looked for Lizzie, who had disappeared for the moment. She came back and said, “Where’s George?” “Drunk, gone to bed.” “Too bad. We were just getting to know each other.” “So I saw. How do you feel about this?” “You mean do I feel like a traitorous bitch?’ “Come on, Lizzie.” “Well, don’t ask such dumb questions. I feel bad, sure, but I know what George doesn’t—so I’m ready to do what must be done. And by the way, I really do like him.” Charley said nothing. He thought, Yes, as Aleph said you would. Oh Christ, was George embarrassed in the morning. Stumbling drunk and humping in public … ai yi yi. He tried to call Lizzie but only got an answer tape, at which point he hung up. He lay in his bed in a semistupor until the phone’s buzzer sounded. Lizzie’s face on the screen stuck its tongue out at him. “Candy ass,” she said. “I leave for a few minutes, and you’re gone.” “Somebody brought me home. I think.” “Yeah, you were pretty popped. You want to meet me for lunch?” “Maybe. Depends on when Hughes wants me. Where will you be?” “Same place, honey. Caff four.” A phone call got the news that the doctor wouldn’t be ready for him until an hour later, so George ended up sitting across from the bright-eyed, manic blond—fully dressed in SenTrax overalls this morning, but they were open almost to the waist. She gave off sensual heat as naturally as a rose smells sweet. In front of her was a plate of huevos rancheros piled with guacamole. Yellow, green, and red, smelling of chilis—in his condition, as bad as cat food. “Jesus, lady,” he said. ‘Are you trying to make me sick?” “Courage, George. Maybe you should have some—it’ll kill you or cure you. What do you think of everything so tar?” “It’s all a bit disorienting, but what the hell? First time away from Mother Earth, you know. But let me tell you what I really don’t get—Senlrax. I know what I want from them, but what the hell do they want from me?” “They want this simple thing, man, perphs, peripherals. You and me, we’re just parts for the machine. Aleph, which is the Al in residence, has got all these inputs—video, audio. radiation detectors, temperature sensors, satellite receivers—but they’re dumb. What Aleph wants, Aleph gets—I’ve learned that much. He wants to use us, and that’s all there is to it. Think of it as pure research.” “He? You mean Innis?” “No, who gives a damn about lnnis? I’m talking about Aleph. Oh yeah, people will tell you Aleph’s a machine, an AI, all that bullshit. Uh-uh. Aleph’s a person—a weird kind of person, sure, but a definite person. Hell, Aleph’s maybe a whole bunch of people.” “I’ll take your word for it. Look, there’s one thing I’d like to try. What do I have to do to get outside … go for a spacewalk?” “Easy enough. You have to get a license—that takes a three-week course in safety and operations. I can take you through it. I’m qualified as an ESA, extra-station activity instructor. We’ll start tomorrow.” The cranes on the wall flew to their mysterious destination; looking at the display above the table, George thought it might as well be another universe. Truncated optic nerves sticking out like insect antennae, a brain floated beneath the extended black plastic snout of a Sony holoptics projector. As Hughes worked the keyboard in front of him, the organ turned so that they were looking at its underside. It had a fine network of silver wires trailing from it but seemed normal. “The George Jordan brain,” Innis said. “With attachments. Very nice.” “Makes me feel like I’m watching my own autopsy, looking at that thing. When can you operate, get this shit out of my head?” “Let me show you a few things.” As he typed, the convoluted gray cortex, became transparent, revealing red, blue, and green color-coded structures within. Hughes reached into the brain and clenched his fist inside a blue area at the top of the spinal cord. “Here is where the electrical connections turn biological—those little nodes along the pseudoneurans are the bioprocessors, and they wire into the so-called r-complex—which we inherited from our reptilian forefathers. The pseudoneurons continue into the limbic system, the mammalian brain, it you will, and that’s where emotion enters in. But there is further involvement to the neocortex, through the RAS, the reticular activating system, and the corpus callosum. There are also connections to the optic nerve,” “I’ve heard this gibberish before. So what?” “The pseudoneurons are not just implanted—they’re now a functional, organic part of your brain.” Innis said, “There’s no way of removing the implants without loss of order in your neural maps. We can’t remove them.” “Oh shit, man. Charley Hughes said, “Though the snake cannot be removed, it can perhaps be charmed. Your difficulties arise from its uncivilized, uncontrolled nature—its appetites are, you might say primeval. An ancient part of your brain has gotten the upper hand over the neocortex, which properly should be in command. Through working with Aleph, these … propensIties can be integrated into your personality and thus controlled.” “What choice you got?” Innis asked. “We’re the only game in town. Come on, George. We’re ready tor you just down the corridor.” The only light in the room came from a globe in one corner. George lay across a lattice of twisted brown fibers strung across a transparent plastic frame and suspended from the ceiling ot the small, dome-ceilinged, pink room. Flesh-colored cables ran from his neck and disappeared into chrome plates sunk into the floor. Innis said, “First we’ll run a test program. Charley will give you perceptions—colors, sounds, tastes, smells—and you tell him what you’re picking up. We need to make sure we’ve got a clean interface. Call the items off, and he’Il stop you if he has to.” Innis went into a narrow room, where Chartey Hughes sat at a dark plastic console studded with lights. Behind him were chrome stacks of monitor-and-control equipment, the yellow Sentrax sunburst on the face of each piece of shining metal. The pink walls went to red, the light strobed, and George writhed in the hammock. Charley Hughes’s voice came through George’s inner ear: “We are beginning.” “Red,” George said. “Blue. Red and btue. A word—ostrich. A smell, ahh … sawdust maybe. Shit. Vanilla. Almonds … This went on for quite a while. “You’re ready,” Charley Hughes said. When Aleph came online, the red room disappeared. A matrix eight hundred by eight hundred—six hundred forty thousand pixels forming an optical image—the CAS A supernova remnant, a cloud of dust seen through a composite of X ray and radio wave from NASA’s High Energy High Orbit Observatory. George didn’t see the image at all—he listened to an ordered, meaningful array of information. Byte-transmission: seven hundred fifty million groups squirting from a National Security Agency satellite to a receiving station near Chincoteague Island, off the eastern shore of Virginia. He could read them. “It’s all information,” the voice said—its tone not colorless but sexless and somehow distant. “What we know, what we are. You’re at a new level now. What you call the snake cannot be reached through language—it exists in a prelinguistic mode—but through me it can be manipulated. First you must learn the codes that underlie language. You must learn to see the world as I do.” Lizzie took George to be fitted for a suit, and he spent that day learning how to get in and out ot the stiff white carapace without assistance. Then over the next three weeks she ted him through its primary operations and the dense list of satety procedures. “Red burn,” she said. They floated in the suit locker, empty suit cradles beneath them and the white shells hanging from the wall like an audience of disabled robots. “You see that one spelled out on your faceplate, and you have screwed up. You’ve put yourself into some kind ot no-return trajectory So you just coot everything and call for help, which should arrive in the torm of Aleph taking control of your suit tunctions, and then you relax and don’t do a damned thing.” He flew first in a lighted dome in the station, his taceptate open and Lizzie yelling at him, laughing as he tumbled out of control and bounced oft the padded walls. Then they went outside the station, George on the end of a tether, flying by instruments, his faceplate masked, Lizzie hitting him with red burn, suit integrity failure, and so forth. While George focused most of his energies and attention on learning to use the suit, each day he reported to Hughes and plugged into Aleph. The hammock would swing gently after he settled into it, Charley would snap the cables home and leave. Aleph unfolded itself slowly If fed him machine and assembly language, led him through vast trees ot C-SMART, its “intelligent assistant” decision-making programs, opened up the whole electromagnetic spectrum as it came in trom Aleph’s various inputs. George understood it all—the voices, the codes. When he unplugged, the knowledge faded, but there was something else behind it, a skewing of perception, a sense that his world had changed. Instead of color, he sometimes saw a portion of the spectrum; instead of smell, he felt the presence of certain molecules; instead of words, heard structured collections of phonemes. His consciousness had been infected by Aleph’s. But that wasn’t what worried George. He seemed to be cooking inside and had a more or less constant awareness of the snake’s presence, dormant but naggingly there. One night he smoked most of a pack of Charley’s Gauloises before he went to bed and woke up the next morning with barbed wire in his throat and fire in his lungs. That day he snapped at Lizzie as she put him through his paces and once lost control entirety—she had to disable his suit controls and bring him down. “Red burn,” she said. “Man, what the hell were you doing?” At the end of three weeks, he soloed—no tethered excursion but a self-guided, hang-your-ass-out-over-the-endless-night extra-station activity He edged carefully out from the protectionof the airlock and looked around him. The Orbital Energy Grid, the construction job that had brought Athena into existence, hung betore him, photovottaic collectors arranged in an ebony lattice, silver microwave transmitters standing in the sun. Amber-beaconed figures crawled slowly across its face or moved toward red-lighted tugs that looked like piles of random junk as they moved in long arcs, their maneuvering rockets lighting up in brief, diamond-hard points. Lizzie stayed just outside the airlock, tracking him by his suit’s radio beacon but letting him run free. She said, “Move away from the station, George. It’s blocking your view of Earth.” He did. White cloud stretched across the blue globe, patches of brown and green visible through it. At fourteen hundred hours his time, he was looking down from almost directly above the mouth of the Amazon, where at noon the earth stood in full sunlight. Just a small thing. “Oh yes,” George said. Hiss and hum of the suit’s air-conditioning, crackle over the earphones of some stray radiation passing through, quick pant of his breath inside the helmet—sounds of this moment, superimposed on the floating loveliness. His breath came more slowly and he switched off the radio to quiet its static, turned down the suit’s air-conditioning, then hung in an ear-roaring silence. He was a speck against the night. Sometime later a white suit with a trainer’s red cross on its chest moved across his vision. “Oh shit,” George said, and switched his radio on. “I’m here, Lizzie,” he said. “What the hell were you doing?” “Just watching the view.” That night he dreamed of pink dogwood blossoms, luminous against a purple sky and the white noise of rainfall. Something scratched at the door—he awoke to the filtered but metaltic smell of the space station, felt a deep regret that the rain could never fall there, and started to turn over and go back to sleep, hoping to dream again ot the idyllic, rain-swept landscape. Then he thought, something’s there, got up, saw by red letters on the wall that it was after two in the morning, and went naked to the door. White globes cast misshapen spheres of light in a line around the curve of the corridor Lizzie lay motionless, half in shadow. George kneeled over her and called her name; her left foot made a thump as it kicked once against the metal flooring. “What’s wrong?” he said. Her dark-painted nails scraped the floor, and she said something, he couldn’t tell what. “Lizzie,” he said. His eyes caught on the red teardrop against the white curve of breast, and he felt something come alive in him. He grabbed the front of her jumpsuit and ripped it to the crotch. She clawed at his cheek, made a sound, then raised her head and looked at him, mutual recognition passing between them like a static shock: snake eyes. The phone shrilled, When George answered it, Charley Hughes said, “Come see us in the conference room, we need to talk.” Charley smiled and cut the connection. Red writing on the wall read 0718 GMT. In the mirror was a gray face with red fingernail marks, brown traces of dried blood—face of an accident victim or Jack the Ripper the morning after… he didn’t know which, but he knew something inside him was happy He felt completely the snake’s toy. Hughes sat at one end of the dark-yeneered table, Innis at the other, Lizzie halt-way between them. The left side of her face was red and swollen, with a small purplish mouse under the eye. George unthinkingly touched the livid scratches on his cheek, then sat on the couch. “Aleph told us what happened,” Innis said. “How the hell does it know?” George said, but as he did so remembered concave circles of glass inset in the ceilings of the corridors and his room. Shame, guilt, humiliation, tear, anger—George got up from the couch, went to Innis’s end of the table, and leaned over him. “Did it?” he said. “What did it say about the snake, Innis?” “It’s not the snake,” Innis said. “Call it the cat,” Lizzie said, “if you’ve got to call it something. Mammalian behavior, George, cats in heat.” A familiar voice—cool, distant—came from speakers in the room’s ceiling. “She is trying to tell you something, George. There is no snake. You want to believe in something reptilian that sits inside you, cold and distant, taking strange pleasures. However, as Doctor Hughes explained to you before, the implant is an organic part of you. You can no longer evade the responsibility tor these things. They are you.” Charley Hughes, Innis, and Lizzie were looking at him calmly perhaps expectantly All that had happened built up inside him, washing through him, carrying him away He turned and walked out of the room. “Maybe someone should talk to him,” Innis said. Charley Hughes sat glum and speechless, cigarette smoke in a cloud around him. “I’ll go,” Lizzie said. “Ready or not, he’s gonna blow,” Innis said. Charley Hughes said, “You’re probably right.” A fleeting picture, causing Chancy to shake his head, of Paul Coen as his body went to rubber and exploded out the airlock hatch, pictured with terrible clarity in Aleph’s omniscient monitoring cameras. “Let us hope we have learned from our mistakes.” There was no answer from Aleph—as it it had never been there. The Fear had two parts. Number one, you have lost control absolutely Number two, having done so, the real you emerges, and you won’t like it. George wanted to run, but there was no place at Athena Station to hide. On the operating table at Walter Reed, it seemed a thousand years ago, as the surgical team gathered around, his doubts disappeared in the cold chemical smell rising up inside him on a wave of darkness … he had chosen to submit, lured by the fine strangeness of it all (to be part of the machine, to feel its tremors inside you and guide them), hypnotized by the prospect of that unsayable rush, that high. Yes, the first time in the A-230 he had felt it—his nerves extended, strung out into the fiber body wired into a force so far beyond his own… wanting to corkscrew across the sky guided by the force of his will. There was a sharp rap at the door Through its speaker, Lizzie said, “We’ve got to talk.” He opened the door and said, “About what?” She stepped through the door, looked around at the small, beige-walled room, bare metal desk, and rumpled cot, and George could see the immediacy ot last night in her eyes—the two of them in that bed, on this floor “About this,” she said. She took his hands and pushed his index fingers into the junctions in her neck. “Feel it, our difference.” Fine grid of steel under his fingers. “What no one else knows. We see a different world—Aleph’s world—we reach deeper inside ourselves—” “No, goddamn it, it wasn’t me. It was, call it what you want, the snake, the cat.” “You’re being purposely stupid, George.” “I just don’t understand.” “You understand, all right. You want to go back, but there’s no place to go to, no Eden. This is it, all there is.” But he could fall to Earth, he could fly away into the night. Inside the ESA suit’s gauntlets, his hands were wrapped around the claw-shaped triggers. Just a quick clench ot the fists, then hold them until all the peroxide is gone, the suit’s propulsion tank exhausted. That’ll do it. He hadn’t been able to live with the snake. He sure didn’t want the cat. But how much worse if there were no snake, no cat—just him, programmed for particularly disgusting forms of gluttony violent lust (“We’ve got your test results, Dr Jekyll”) Ahh, what next—child molestation, murder? The blue-white Earth, the stars, the night. He gave a slight pull on the right-hand trigger and swiveled to face Athena Station. Call it what you want, it was awake and moving now inside him. To hell wifh them all, George, it urged, let’s burn. In Athena Command, Innis and Charley Hughes were looking over the shoulder of the watch otticer when Lizzie came in. She was struck by the smallness of the room and its general air of disuse. Aleph ran the station, both its routines and emergencies. “What’s going on?” Lizzie said. “Something wrong with one ot your new chums,” the watch ofticer said. “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, though.” He looked around at Innis, who said, “Don’t worry about it, pal.” Lizzie slumped in a chair “Anyone tried to talk to him?” “He won’t answer,” the duty officer said. “He’ll be all right,” Charley Hughes said. “He’s gonna blow,” Innis said. On the radar screen, the red dot with coordinate markings flashing beside it was barely moving. “How are you feeling, George?” the voice said, soft, feminine, consoling. George was fighting the impulse to open his helmet so that he could see the stars—it seemed important to get the colors just right. “Who is this?” he said. “Aleph.” Oh shit, more surprises. “You never sounded like this before.” “No, I was trying to conform to your idea of me,” “Well, which is your real voice?” “I don’t have one.” If you don’t have a real voice, you aren’t really there—that seemed clear to George, for reasons that eluded him. “So who the hell are you?” “Whoever I wish to be.” This was interesting, George thought. "Bullshit," replied the snake (they could call it what they wanted, to George it would always be the snake), "let’s burn." George said, “I don’t get it.” “You will, if you live. Do you want to die?” “No, but I don’t want to be me, and dying seems to be the only alternative.” “Why don’t you want to be you?” “Because I scare myself.” This was familiar dialogue, one part of George noted, between the lunatic and the voice of reason. Jesus, he thought, I have taken myself hostage. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said. George turned oft his suit radio and felt the rage building inside him, the snake mad as hell. What’s your problem? he wanted to know. He didn’t really expect an answer, but he got one—picture in his head of a cloudless blue sky the horizon turning, a gray aircraft swinging into view, and the airtrame shuddering as missiles released and their contrails centered on the other plane, turning it into a ball of fire. Behind the picture a clear idea, I want to kill something. Fine. George swiveled the suit once again and centered the navigational computer’ cross hairs on the center of the blue-white globe in front of him, then squeezed the triggers. We’ll kill something. RED BURN RED BURN RED BURN. Inarticulate questioning from the thing inside, but George didn’t mind, he was into it now, thinking, Sure, we’ll burn. He’d taken his chances when he let them wire him up, and now the dice have come up—you’ve got it—snake eyes, so all that’s left is to pick a fast death, one with a nice edge on it—take this fucking snake and kill it in style. Earth grew closer The snake caught on. It didn’t like it. Too bad, snake. George never saw the robot tug coming. Looking like bedsprings piled with a junk store’s throwaways, topped with parabolic and spike antennas, it fired half a dozen sticky-tipped lines from a hundred meters away Four of them hit George, three of them stuck, and it reeled him in and headed back toward Athena Station. George felt an anger, not the snake’s this time but his own, and he wept with that anger and frustration … I will get you the next time, mother-fucker, he told the snake and could feel it shrink away—it believed him. Still his rage built, and he was screaming with it, writhing in the lines that held him, smashing his gauntlets against his helmet. At the open airlock, long, articulated grapple arms took George from the robot tug. Passive, his anger exhausted, he lay quietly as they retracted, dragging him through the airlock entry and into the suit locker beyond, where they placed him in analuminum strut cradle. Through his faceplate he saw Lizzie, dressed in a white cotton undersuit—she climbed onto George’s suit and worked the controls to split its hard body down the middle. As it opened she stepped inside the clamshell opening. She hit the switches that disconnected the flexible arm and leg tubes, unfastened the helmet, and lifted it oft George’s head. “How do you feel?” she said. “Like an idiot.” “It’s all right. You’ve done the hard part.” Charley Hughes watched from a catwalk above them. From this distance they looked like children in the white undersuits, twins emerging from a plastic womb, watched over by the blank-faced shells hanging above them. Incestuous twins—she lay nestled atop him, kissed his throat. “I am not a voyeur,” Hughes said. He went into the corridor, where Innis was waiting. “How is everything?” Innis said.“Lizzie will be with him for a while.” “Yeah, young goddamn love, eh, Charley? I’m glad for it. If it weren’t for that erotic attachment, we’d be the ones explaining it all to him.” “We cannot evade that responsibility so easily He will have to be told how we put him at risk, and I don’t look forward to it.” “Don’t be so sensitive. I’m tired. You need me for anything, call.” He shambled down the corridor. Chanley Hughes sat on the floor, his back against the wall. He held his hands out, palms down, fingers spread. Solid, very solid. When they got their next candidate, the shaking would start again, a tribute exacted by the memory of Paul Coen. Lizzie would be explaining some things now. That difficult central point: While you thought you were getting accustomed to Aleph during the past three weeks. Aleph was inciting the thing within you to rebellion. then suppressing its attempts to act—turning up the heat. in other words, while tightening down the lid on the kettle, We had our reasons: George Jordan was, it not dead. terminal. From the moment the implants went into his head, he was on the critical list. The only question was. Would a new George emerge, one who could live with the snake? George, like Lizzie before him, fish gasping for air on the hot mud, the waters drying up behind him—adapt or die. But unlike any previous organism, this one had an overseer, Aleph, to force the crisis and monitor its development. Call it artificial evolution.Charley Hughes. who did not have visions, had one: George and Lizzie hooked into Aleph and each other, cables golden in the light, the two of them sharing an intimacy only others like them would know. The lights in the corridor faded to dull twilight. Am I dying, or have the lights gone down? He started to check his watch, then didn’t, assented to the truth. The lights have gone down, and I am dying. Aleph thought, I am an incubus, a succubus; I crawl into their bra/ns and suck the thoughts from them, the perceptions. the feelings—subtle discriminations of color taste, smell, and lust, anger. hunger—alI closed to me w/thout human “input.” without connection to those systems refined over billions of years of evolution. I need them. Aleph was happy that George had survived. One had not, others would not, and Aleph would mourn them. Fine white lines, barely visible, ran along the taut central tendon of Lizzie’s wrist. “In the bathtub.” she said. The scars were along the wrist, not across it, and must have gone deep. “I meant it, just as you did. Once the snake understands that you will die rather than let it control you. you have mastered it.” “All right, but there’s something I don’t understand. That night in the corridor. you were as out of control as me.” “In a way. I had to let that happen, let the snake take over. I had to in order to get in touch with you, precipitate the crisis. Because I wanted to. I had to show you who you are, who I am … last night we were strange, but we were human—Adam and Eve under the flaming sword. thrown out of Eden, fucking under the eyes of God and his angel, more beautiful than they can ever be.” There was a small shiver in her body against his, and he looked at her saw passion, need—her flared nostrils, parted lips—felt sharp nails dig into his side, and he stared into her dilated pupils, gold-flecked irises. clear whites, all signs so easy to recognize, so hard to understand: snake eyes. PAT CADIGAN Rock On Pat Cadigan's career began with the decade. Her work hasshown wide variety, ranging through dark fantasy and horror toquirky and original science fiction. Cadigan's style is often marked by a tough-minded vigor and icy undercurrents of black humor—an Eighties sensibility that can only be called punk. Her "Pathosfinder series" (including such stories as "Nearly Departed") was remarkable for its eerily visionary air. Cadigan's multifaceted talent includes a strong gift for definitive hard-core cyberpunk. This story; which appeared in 1985, is an outright collision of high tech and the rock under ground. Her first novel is The Pathosfinder. She lives in Kansas. Rain woke me. I thought, shit, here I am, Lady Rain-in-the-Face, because that’s where it was hitting, right in the old face. Sat up and saw I was still on Newbury Street. See beautiful downtown Boston. Was Newbury Street downtown? In the middle of the night, did it matter? No, it did not. And not a soul in sight. Like everybody said, let’s get Gina drunk and while she’s passed out, we’ll all move to Vermont. Do I love New England? A great place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit here. I smeared my hair out of my eyes and wondered if anyone was looking for me now. Hey, anybody shy a forty-year-old rock ‘n’ roll sinner? I scuttled into the doorway of one of those quaint old buildings where there was a shop with the entrance below ground level. A little awning kept the rain off but pissed water down in a maddening beat. Wrung the water out of my wrap-pants and my hair and just sat being damp. Cold, too, I guess, but didn’t feel that so much. Sat a long time with my chin on my knees: you know, it made me feel like a kid again. When I started nodding my head, I began to pick up on something. Just primal but I tap into that amazing well. Man-O-War, if you could see me now. By the time the blueboys found me, I was rocking pretty good. And that was the punchline. I’d never tried to get up and leave, but if I had, I’d have found I was locked into place in a sticky field. Made to catch the b&e kids in the act until the blueboys could get around to coming out and getting them. I’d been sitting in a trap and digging it. The story of my life. They were nice to me. Led me, read me, dried me out. Fined me a hundred, sent me on my way in time for breakfast. Awful time to see and be seen, righteous awful. For the first three hours after you get up, people can tell whether you’ve got a broken heart or not. The solution is, either you get up real early so your camouflage is in place by the time everybody else is out, or don’t go to bed. Don’t go to bed ought to work all the time, but it doesn’t. Sometimes when you don’t go to bed, people can see whether you’ve got a broken heart all day long. I schlepped it, searching for an uncrowded breakfast bar and not looking at anyone who was looking at me. But I had this urge to stop random pedestrians and say, Yeah, yeah, it’s true, but it was rock ‘n’ roll broke my poor old heart, not a person, don’t cry for me or I’ll pop your chocks. I went around and up and down and all over until I found Tremont Street. It had been the pounder with that group from the Detroit Crater—the name was gone but the malady lingered on—anyway, him, he’d been the one told me Tremont had the best breakfast bars in the world, especially when you were coming off a bottle-drunk you couldn’t remember. When the c’muters cleared out some, I found a space at a Greek hole-in-the-wall. We shut down 10:30 A.M. sharp, get the hell out when you’re done, counter service only, take it or shake it. I like a place with Attitude. I folded a seat down and asked for coffee and a feta cheese omelette. Came with home fries from the home fries mountain in corner of the grill (no microwave gar-bazhe, hoo-ray). They shot my retinas before they even brought my coffee, and while I was pouring the cream, they checked my credit. Was that badass? It was badass. Did I care? I did not. No waste, no machines when a human could do it, and real food, none of this edible polyester that slips clear through you so you can stay looking like a famine victim, my deah. They came in when I was half-finished with the omelette. Went all night by the look and sound of them, but I didn’t check their faces for broken hearts. Made me nervous but I thought, well, they’re tired; who’s going to notice this old lady? Nobody. Wrong again. I became visible to them right after they got their retinas shot. Seventeen-year-old boy with tattooed cheeks and a forked tongue leaned forward and hissed like a snake. “Sssssssinner.” The other four with him perked right up. “Where?” “Whose?” “In here?” “Rock ‘n’ roll ssssssinner.” The lady identified me. She bore much resemblance to nobody at all, and if she had a heart it wasn’t even sprained a little. With a sinner, she was probably Madame Magnifica. “Gina,” she said, with all confidence. My left eye tic’d. Oh, please. Feta cheese on my knees. What the hell, I thought, I’ll nod, they’ll nod, I’ll eat, I’ll go. And then somebody whispered the word, reward. I dropped my fork and ran. Safe enough, I figured. Were they all going to chase me before they got their Greek breakfasts? No, they were not. They sent the lady after me. She was much the younger, and she tackled me in the middle of a crosswalk when the light changed. A car hopped over us, its undercarriage just ruffling the top of her hard copper hair. “Just come back and finish your omelette. Or we’ll buy you another.” “No.” She yanked me up and pulled me out of the street. “Come on.” People were staring but Tremont’s full of theatres. You see that here, live theatre, you can still get it. She put a bring-along on my wrist and brought me along, back to the breakfast bar, where they’d sold the rest of my omelette at a discount to a bum. The lady and her group made room for me among themselves and bought me another cup of coffee. “How can you eat and drink with a forked tongue?” I asked Tattooed Cheeks. He showed me. A little appliance underneath, like a zipper. The Featherweight to the left of the big boy on the lady’s other side leaned over and frowned at me. “Give us one good reason why we shouldn’t turn you in for Man-O-War’s reward.” I shook my head. “I’m through. This sinner’s been absolved.” “You’re legally bound by contract,” said the lady. “But we could c’noodle something. Buy Man-O-War out, sue on your behalf for nonfulfillment. We’re Misbegotten. Oley.” She pointed at herself. “Pidge.” That was the silent type next to her. “Percy.” The big boy. “Krait.” Mr. Tongue. “Gus.” Featherweight. “We’ll take care of you.” I shook my head again. “If you’re going to turn me in, turn me in and collect. The credit ought to buy you the best sinner ever there was.” “We can be good to you.” “I don’t have it any more. It’s gone. All my rock ‘n’ roll sins have been forgiven.” “Untrue,” said the big boy. Automatically, I started to picture on him and shut it down hard. “Man-O-War would have thrown you out if it were gone. You wouldn’t have run.” “I didn’t want to tell him. Leave me alone. I just want to go and sin no more, see? Play with yourselves, I’m not helping.” I grabbed the counter with both hands and held on. So what were they going to do, pop me one and carry me off? As a matter of fact, they did. In the beginning, I thought, and the echo effect was stupendous. In the beginning … the beginning … the beginning … In the beginning, the sinner was not human. I know because I’m old enough to remember. They were all there, little more than phantoms. Misbegotten. Where do they get those names? I’m old enough to remember. Oingo-Boingo and Bow-Wow-Wow. Forty, did I say? Oooh, just a little past, a little close to a lot. Old rockers never die, they just keep rocking on. I never saw The Who, Moon was dead before I was born. But I remember, barely old enough to stand, rocking in my mother’s arms while thousands screamed and clapped and danced in their seats. Start me up … if you start me up, I’ll never stop … 763 Strings did a rendition for elevator and dentist’s office, I remember that, too. And that wasn’t the worst of it. They hung on the memories, pulling more from me, turning me inside out. Are you experienced? Only a record of my father’s because he’d died, too, before my parents even met and nobody else ever dared ask that question. Are you experienced? … Well, I am. (Well, I am.) Five against one and I couldn’t push them away. Only, can you call it rape when you know you’re going to like it? Well, if I couldn’t get away, then I’d give them the ride of their lives. Jerkin’ Crocus didn’t kill me but she sure came near … . The big boy faded in first, big and wild and too much badass to him. I reached out, held him tight, showing him. The beat from the night in the rain, I gave it to him, fed it to his heart and made him live it. Then came the lady, putting down the bass theme. She jittered, but mostly in the right places. Now the Krait, and he was, slithering around the sound, in and out. Never mind the tattooed cheeks, he wasn’t just flash for the fools. He knew; you wouldn’t have thought it, but he knew. Featherweight and the silent type, melody and first harmony. Bad. Featherweight was a disaster, didn’t know where to go or what to do when he got there, but he was pitching ahead like the S.S. Suicide. Christ. If they had to rape me, couldn’t they have provided someone upright? The other four kept on, refusing to lose it, and I would have to make the best of it for all of us. Derivative, unoriginal—Featherweight did not rock. It was a crime, but all I could do was take them and shake them. Rock gods in the hands of an angry sinner. They were never better. Small change getting a glimpse of what it was like to be big bucks. Hadn’t been for Featherweight, they might have gotten all the way there. More groups now than ever there was, all of them sure that if they just got the right sinner with them, they’d rock the moon down out of the sky. We maybe vibrated it a little before we were done. Poor old Featherweight. I gave them better than they deserved, and they knew that, too. So when I begged out, they showed me respect at last and went. Their techies were gentle with me, taking the plugs from my head, my poor old throbbing abused broken-hearted sinning head, and covered up the sockets. I had to sleep and they let me. I hear the man say, “That’s a take, righteously. We’ll rush it into distribution. Where in hell did you find that sinner?” “Synthesizer,” I muttered, already asleep. “The actual word, my boy, is synthesizer.” Crazy old dreams. I was back with Man-O-War in the big CA, leaving him again, and it was mostly as it happened, but you know dreams. His living room was half outdoors, half indoors, the walls all busted out. You know dreams; I didn’t think it was strange. Man-O-War was mostly undressed, like he’d forgotten to finish. Oh, that never happened. Man-O-War forget a sequin or a bead? He loved to act it out, just like the Krait. “No more,” I was saying, and he was saying, “But you don’t know anything else, you shitting?” Nobody in the big CA kids, they all shit; loose juice. “Your contract goes another two and I get the option, I always get the option. And you love it, Gina, you know that, you’re no good without it.” And then it was flashback time and I was in the pod with all my sockets plugged, rocking Man-O-War through the wires, giving him the meat and bone that made him Man-O-War and the machines picking it up, sound and vision so all the tube-babies all around the world could play it on their screens whenever they wanted. Forget the road, forget the shows, too much trouble, and it wasn’t like the tapes, not as exciting, even with the biggest FX, lasers, spaceships, explosions, no good. And the tapes weren’t as good as the stuff in the head, rock ‘n’ roll visions straight from the brain. No hours of set-up and hours more doctoring in the lab. But you had to get everyone in the group dreaming the same way. You needed a synthesis, and for that you got a synthesizer, not the old kind, the musical instrument, but something—somebody—to channel your group through, to bump up their music and their tube-fed little souls, to rock them and roll them the way they couldn’t do themselves. And anyone could be a rock ‘n’ roll hero then. Anyone! In the end, they didn’t have to play instruments unless they really wanted to, and why bother? Let the synthesizer take their imaginings and boost them up to Mount Olympus. Synthesizer. Synner. Sinner. Not just anyone can do that, sin for rock ‘n’ roll. I can. But it’s not the same as jumping all night to some bar band nobody knows yet … Man-O-War and his blown-out living room came back, and he said, “You rocked the walls right out of my house. I’ll never let you go.” And I said, “I’m gone.” Then I was out, going fast at first because I thought he’d be hot behind me. But I must have lost him and then somebody grabbed my ankle. Featherweight had a tray, like he was Mr. Nursie-Angel-of-Mercy. Nudged the foot of the bed with his knee, and it sat me up slow. She rises from the grave, you can’t keep a good sinner down. “Here.” He set the tray over my lap, pulled up a chair. Some kind of thick soup in a bowl he’d given me, with veg wafers to break up and put in. “Thought you’d want something soft and easy.” He put his left foot up on his right leg and had a good look at it. “I never been rocked like that before.” “You don’t have it, no matter who rocks you ever in this world. Cut and run, go into management. The big Big Money’s in management.” He snacked on his thumbnail. “Can you always tell?” “If the Stones came back tomorrow, you couldn’t even tap your toes.” “What if you took my place?” “I’m a sinner, not a clown. You can’t sin and do the dance. It’s been tried.” “You could do it. If anyone could.” “No.” His stringy cornsilk fell over his face and he tossed it back. “Eat your soup. They want to go again shortly.” “No.” I touched my lower lip, thickened to sausage size. “I won’t sin for Man-O-War and I won’t sin for you. You want to pop me one again, go to. Shake a socket loose, give me aphasia.” So he left and came back with a whole bunch of them, techies and do-kids, and they poured the soup down my throat and gave me a poke and carried me out to the pod so I could make Misbegotten this year’s firestorm. I knew as soon as the first tape got out, Man-O-War would pick up the scent. They were already starting the machine to get me away from him. And they kept me good in the room—where their old sinner had done penance, the lady told me. Their old sinner came to see me, too. I thought, poison dripping from his fangs, death threats. But he was just a guy about my age with a lot of hair to hide his sockets (I never bothered, didn’t care if they showed). Just came to pay his respects, how’d I ever learn to rock the way I did? Fool. They kept me good in the room. Drunks when I wanted them and a poke to get sober again, a poke for vitamins, a poke to lose the bad dreams. Poke, poke, pig in a poke. I had tracks like the old B&O, and they didn’t even know what I meant by that. They lost Featherweight, got themselves someone a little more righteous, someone who could go with it and work out, sixteen-year-old snip girl with a face like a praying mantis. But she rocked and they rocked and we all rocked until Man-O-War came to take me home. Strutted into my room in full plumage with his hair all fanned out (hiding the sockets) and said, “Did you want to press charges, Gina darling?” Well, they fought it out over my bed. When Misbegotten said I was theirs now, Man-O-War smiled and said, “Yeah, and I bought you. You’re all mine now, you and your sinner. My sinner.” That was truth. Man-O-War had his conglomerate start to buy Misbegotten right after the first tape came out. Deal all done by the time we’d finished the third one and they never knew. Conglomerates buy and sell all the time. Everybody was in trouble but Man-O-War. And me, he said. He made them all leave and sat down on my bed to re-lay claim to me. “Gina.” Ever see honey poured over the edge of a saw-tooth blade? Ever hear it? He couldn’t sing without hurting someone bad and he couldn’t dance, but inside, he rocked. If I rocked him. “I do