Cyberpunk, page 29
She pulled the cellophane from one deck. On the edge of the deck was the awkward scrawl of Musnt, written in fountain pen. Musnt immediately looked at his deck. The edges were blank.
Fibers formed curious worms and squirmed closer, lights pulsing.
"The other deck, now," I told Dont. She unwrapped the second deck, and there, in fountain pen, was written, Wont.
"Hand the deck to the person whose name is written on the side," I said. She passed the deck to Wont.
"Write on the other side your name and any number," I told Wont, giving him the pen. "And then, on a card within the deck, write the name of anybody in this room—in big, sloppy, wet letters. Show the card to everybody except me, and put it within the deck and press the deck together firmly."
He did this.
"Now give the deck to Cant."
He passed the deck to her. "How many decks do you carry now?" I asked. She reached into her pockets and found two more decks, which she handed to me, keeping Wont's deck with his name written on it.
"Now find the card Wont has written on, and the card immediately next to it, smeared with the wet ink from that card. Write your name on the face of that card, and another number. Show them to everybody but me."
She did so.
"How many decks do we all have now?" I asked.
I went among them, counting the decks presently in circulation—five. I redistributed the decks one to each of the five Negatives.
"The cards have told each other all about you, and you have no secrets. But I am the master of the cards—and from me not even the cards have secrets!"
I reached behind their ears, one by one, and pulled the cards that had been written on, with the names Cant, Musnt, Dont, and Wont. "The gossip of the cards goes full circle," I said. "Show us your decks!"
On the top of each deck, the cards bearing the suit and number of the written-on cards—for all had been number cards—appeared, bearing a newly written number, and a new name— Cardino. $
The Negatives seemed befuddled. They showed the cards to each other and to the questing fibers.
They had forgotten the art of applause, and the fibers were silent, but no applause was necessary.
"How is this done?" Musnt asked. "You must tell . . ."
I pitied them, just as a caveman might pity a city slicker who has lost the art of flint knapping. From the beginning of their lives to the present moment, they had truly fooled nobody. They had lived lives of illusion without wonder, for always they could explain how things were done—all their magic was performed by silent, subservient, electronic demiurges.
"Turn to the last card in your decks," I said. "Show me who is King."
On every one of their decks, the King of Hearts was inscribed with two names. They held the cards out simultaneously. Each Negative carried a card bearing his or her name, and in larger letters, RODERICK ESCHER.
The fibers seemed to give a mighty heave. Roderick came forward, and I saw the fibers fleeing from his legs, his suit, his face and skin.
The Negatives turned to each other in confusion. Cant giggled. They compared their decks, searched them. "They're made of matter," Wont said. "They aren't false—"
"Tricks," Shant said.
"Can you do them?" Wont asked.
"In an instant," Shant said. Cards fluttered down around him, twisted, formed a tall mannequin, and danced around us all. The fibers withdrew from around him as if singed by flames.
"Not the point," Roderick said, free of fibers now. "You can do anything you want, but you subscribe. Cardino does these things by himself, alone."
The fibers bunched around my feet. Shant made his cards and the mannequin vanish. "How?" he asked, shrugging.
"Skill," Roderick said.
"Skill of the body," Shant said haughtily. "Who needs that?"
"Self-discipline, training, years of concentrated effort," Roderick said.
"Isn't that right, Cardino?"
"Yes," I said, the confidence of my performance fading. I was caught in a game whose rules I could not understand. Roderick was using me, and I did not know why.
"Nothing any of us can experience compares to what this man does all by himself," Roderick continued.
The five froze in place for a moment. I could see some change in their structure, a momentary fluctuation in their illusory solid shapes.
Roderick lifted his arms and stared at his body. "I'm free!" he said to me in an undertone, as if confiding to a priest.
"What's all this about?" I asked.
"It's about skill and friendship and death," Roderick said.
The five began to move again. The fibers touched my shoes, the hem of my pants. Instinctively, I kicked at them, sending glowing bits scattering like sparks. They recoiled, toughened, pushed in more insistently.
"My time is ending," Roderick said. "I've done all I can, experienced all I can."
The five smiled and circled around me. "They favor you," Cant said, and she bent to push a wave of growing fibers toward my legs. I backed off, kicked again without effect, shouted to Roderick, "What do they want?"
"You," Roderick said. "My time is done. Maja is dead; I go to follow her."
I turned and ran from the room, sliding on the clumps of fibers, falling. The fibers lightly touched my face, felt at my cheeks, prodded my lips as if to push into my mouth, but I jumped to my feet and ran through the door. Roderick followed, and behind him a surge of fibers clogged the door.
Wherever I ran in the house, eager fibers grew from the walls, the floor, fell from the ceiling, like webs trying to ensnare me. Cant appeared in a twisted hallway ahead. I fell to my hands and knees, staring as the floor twisted into a corkscrew, afraid I would pitch forward into the architectural madness.
Dr. Ont appeared, shoulders dipped in failure, hands beseeching to explain. "Roderick, do not—"
"It is done!" Roderick cried.
A cold wind flowed down the hall, conveying a low moan of endless agony. Roderick helped me to my feet, his thin fingers cold even through the fabric of my suit.
"Can you feel it?" he whispered to me. "King Nerve has released me. I'm dying, Robert!" He turned to Dr. Ont. "I'm dying, and there's nothing you can do! I know all the permutations! I've experienced it all, and I am bored. Let me die! "
Dr. Ont stared at Roderick with an expression of infinite pity. "Your sister—"
Roderick gripped my shoulders. "We are walled in like prisoners by the laziness of gods, all desires sated, all refinements exhausted. Let them crown the new master!"
The moaning grew louder. Behind Dr. Ont, Roderick's sister appeared, even more haggard and pale, the feeblest energy of purpose animating a husk, her dry and shrunken mouth trying to speak.
Dr. Ont stood aside as Roderick saw her. "Maja!" Roderick cried, holding up his hands to block out sight of her.
"Still alive," Dr. Ont said. "I was wrong. She cannot die. We have all forgotten how."
The five brushed past Roderick, smiling only at me.
"The House of Escher loses all support," Cant said, touching my arm lightly. "The flow is with you. The world wants you. You will teach them your experience. You will show them what it feels to be skilled and to have fleshly talents, to work and touch in a primal way. Roderick was absolutely correct—you are a marvel!"
I looked at Roderick, frozen in terror, and then at Maja, her eyes like pits sucking in nothing, as isolated as any corpse but still alive.
The walls shuddered around me. The fibers withdrew from the stones, and where they no longer held, cracks appeared, running in crazed patterns over the white-and-yellow surfaces. The tiles of the floor heaved up, the tessellations disrupted, all order scattered.
Cant took my hand and led me through the disintegrating corridors, down the shivering and swaying stairs. Behind me, the stairs buckled and crumbled, and the beams of the ceiling split and jabbed down to the floor like broken elbows. Ahead, a tide of fibers withdrew from the house like sea sucked from a cave, and above the ripping snap of tearing timbers, the rumble and slam of stone blocks falling and shattering, I heard Roderick's high, chicken-cluck shriek, the cry of an avatar driven past desperation into madness:
"No death! No Death!
And his bray of laughter at the final jest revealed, all his plans cocked asunder.
The antitheticals blew me through the front door like a wind, and down the walk into the ruined garden, among the twisted and fiber-covered trees, until I was away from the house of Roderick Escher. All of his spreading distractions and entertainments, all of his chambers filled with the world's diversions, the pandering to the commonest denominators of a frozen or disembodied horde . . . the impossible and convoluted towers leaned, shuddered, and collapsed, blowing dust and splinters through the door and the windows of the first floor.
The fibers pushed from the ground, binding my feet, rising up my legs toward my trunk, feeling through my suit, probing for secrets, for solutions. I felt voices and demands in my head, petulant, childish, Show us. Do for us. Give us. The fibers burrowed into my flesh, with the pricks of thousands of tiny cold needles.
Cant took my arm. "You are favored," she said.
The voices picked at my thoughts, rudely invaded my memories, making crude and cruel jokes. They seemed to know nothing but expletives, arranged in no sensible order, and they applied them accompanied by demands that went beyond the obscene, demands that echoed again and again; and I saw that this new world was composed not of gods, but of mannerless children who had never faced responsibility or consequences, and whose lives were all secrecy, all privilege, conducted behind thick and impersonal walls.
Tingles shot up my hands and feet and along my spine, and I felt sparks at the very basement of my reason.
Do for us, do everything, live for us, let us feel, all new and all unique, all superlatives and all gladness and joy, and no death no end
My hands jerked out, holding a pack of cards, and I felt a will other than mine—a collective will—move my fingers, attempt to spread the cards into a fan. The fingers jerked and spilled the cards into the dirt, across the creeping fibers. "Get them away from me!" I cried in furious panic.
The blocks and timbers and reduced towers of the House of Escher settled with a final groaning sigh, but I pictured Roderick and Maja buried beneath its timbers, still alive.
The fibers lanced into my tongue. The voices filling my head hissed and slid and insinuated like snakes, like worms in my living brain, demanding tapeworms, asking numbing questions, prodding, prickling, insatiable.
Cant said, "You must assert yourself. They demand much, but you have so much to give—"
The fibers shoved down my throat, piercing and threading through my tissues as if to connect with every cell of my being. I clawed at my mouth, my throat, my body, trying to tug free, but the fibers were strong as steel wires, though thinner than the strands of a spider's web.
"Newness is a treasure," Musnt said, standing beside Cant. Wont and Shant and Dont joined her.
My legs buckled, but the fibers stiffened and held me like a puppet. I could not speak, could only gag, could hardly hear above the dissonant voices. Amuse. Give all. Share all. Live all.
"Hail to the new and masterful," Cant said worshipfully, smiling broadly, simply, innocently. Even in my terror and pain that smile seemed angelic, entrancing.
"A hundred billion people cannot be wrong," Shant said, and touched the crown of my head with his outspread hand.
"We anoint the new Master of King Nerve," the five said as one, and I could breathe, and speak, for myself, no more.
SOLDIER, SAILOR
By Lewis Shiner
Stepping out of the airlock behind Reese, Kane was amazed by the weight & wetness of the air. He could make out the odors of cut grass, honeysuckle & ivy. Martian night was falling outside the dome & he sensed clouds forming above him. Rain on Mars. Evenly spaced houses surrounded him, covered with ivy & separated by rows of elephant ears & ferns. The intricacy of the ecological planning startled him; a bee floated over his head & somewhere a mockingbird whistled.
The sight of the colonists sitting on their porches in the sunset filled him with a mixture of nostalgia & surrealist horror. They smiled & nodded to Kane as if it had been days instead of years since they'd seen a stranger, as if the space program still existed & Reese was once more in uniform.
Reading Ouspensky, he had found the first clue to the strange visions that spun around the lip of his consciousness. "Every separate human life is a moment in the life of some great being which lives in us." But when he tried for a more concrete image than ships & shadowy figures rising from the ground, it melted away. From Campbell Kane learned of the Pattern of the Hero, the inexorable circle, the path of exile & return. For an instant the memories—if that was what they were—clarified. Kane saw that he must take it all personally. Then it was gone again.
Eventually Curtis asked how things were on Earth & Reese framed a careful reply. Kane paid little attention to the measured, cautious description of the riots, the famines, the plagues. Instead he examined Curtis, the governor of the colony, with care. The man was soft, pallid, mannered in his speech. Kane asked simple questions—limits to the population, energy sources, chains of command. He found Curtis's answers evasive, dismissive. Kane felt the vast gulf between himself & the Earth as an ache inside him.
Their first morning on Mars, Reese had taken him to the ruins of the native city. Kane was fascinated by the enigma of the Martian holocaust—the artifacts of intelligence assimilated into the processes of nature.
"Why no bodies?" Kane asked, scuffing through the rings of ash, sand & boiled rock. "They should have mummified when the water went."
Reese shrugged, the motion barely discernible through his bulky suit.
Kane wandered off, trying to picture the city before the disaster. Some of the walls were almost intact, blistered & pitted, but recognizable, while on all sides there was only rubble. The stone, obviously artificial, was indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks. It formed an architecture of intersecting lines, with the Druidic power of Stonehenge.
At dinner he sat across from Curtis's wife, Molly. She was tall, dark, full breasted, with a quality of listless abstraction that Kane found compelling. He desired her in a dark, impersonal way that was nonetheless intense. As for Curtis, Kane found him increasingly officious, dangerously authoritative. He identified Curtis with his uncle; at the thought, the taste of his food turned sour. His mood turned chaotic & violent & he held his fists under the table until the worst of it passed.
"The panel," his uncle said, "is circular, about 35 cm in diameter, studded at irregular but frequent intervals with PROMs." The fluorescent light was harsh & Kane's attention wandered toward the smog & riot-torn streets outside the window. "At least three of these chips are mutants, and are responsible for the power output curves on this chart."
Kane glanced at the chart & away again, despising his uncle, the broad waxed desk, his own poverty & failure. His uncle's life depended on his staying in business; if he failed, his employees would tear him to pieces.
"We have to get those chips into the lab," his uncle said, "or we'll never know why they perform the way they do."
"You say this panel is dangerous."
"In the hands of the colonists, yes. It's been ten years since the space program was terminated. They undoubtedly need resources from Earth, if they're even alive at all. How do they feel about Earth after we cut them off? Can we even hope to understand them? A ship powered by that panel is a weapon pointed at the Earth."
The walls of the office were lined with renderings of yet more offices. Kane sat & allowed himself to be manipulated. Something had gone out of him during his years of student exile. He no longer had the will to resist.
On their second trip to the ruins, Reese took Kane into the central underground complex. The entrance was small, a vivid black hole in the orange glow of the desert. Kane lowered himself after Reese & found himself on a steeply descending ramp. As his eyes adjusted to their flashlights he made out the circular pit to his left. It seemed to have no bottom. The ramp curved around it & he followed, no more than a spectator, just as he had been in grade school, watching on TV as Reese planted the US flag on these same ruins & turned to wave to the cameras.
Now Reese turned off the ramp & moved between tilted slabs of rock to an inner chamber. Reese's hand moved & a door swung open from the wall. Kane followed him inside. The door closed behind them & Kane heard the unmistakable hiss of pressurized air. Inside his helmet a light changed from red to green. Reese took off his helmet & opened an inner door. Light flowed from the walls themselves & Kane turned off his flash.
The walls were made of the same artificial stone as the ruins above, lacking all ornament. Walking into the room, he loosened his helmet & set it on the floor. The chill air stung his cheeks & made him wince. Here there was finally decoration, a low relief that reminded Kane of a printed circuit board. It ran from floor to ceiling with circular protrusions at key points, but no visible dials or meters. He understood the chauvinism of such an expectation. At the far end of the room, where Reese stood, the outlines of a door were etched into solid rock. No handle or indentation marred its surface. Kane pressed his hand to it. He sensed its importance, connected it instinctively to the disappearance of the Martians, but could not guess its function. It did not respond to his touch. He turned to look at Reese. "What does it mean?"
Reese put his helmet back on & started for the door.
Like a fragment of melody on a tape loop: clear, high voices in a minor key, without a message, offering only coloration, a distortion in his ability to see the world. Or like a flickering at the edges of his vision that seemed to be the curves & angles of fourth-dimensional space. Behind it a sense of alien personality, lurking. The ghosts of the Martian builders?
Kane wandered barefoot through the city under the dome. It was a quiet suburb painted by Magritte, too uniform, too clearly defined, too obviously existing in a vacuum. The grass under his feet was a rich green, round-bladed & moist. The houses were like those in the poverty-level neighborhoods where Kane had grown up, after his father died—vinyl siding, short porches, bushes & trees growing unhindered against the walls.
