Globalhead

by Bruce Sterling

“Shut up, for God’s sake!” Rodolphe flung his scissors to the floor. “I don’t need that, do you understand me? I have a world here in Paysage, a world I can understand, a world I can work within, a world that makes sense! I won’t become some empty puppet of your vast inhuman system—”

  The door slammed downstairs. Rodolphe’s wife had arrived; he heard her familiar footsteps, plus a lurch and a yelp of pain as she missed her footing on a cracked stair.

  Amelie hurried in, whipping the bonnet from her hair. “Rodolphe!” She stopped short with a swish of skirts and stared in horror at Charles. “So! It’s true, then!”

  “Please don’t be frightened, Amelie,” Charles said.

  Amelie put her fists on her hips. “I’m not frightened of you, you worthless layabout!”

  “I meant the bear,” Charles said, pointing at the corner. Amelie turned, went white, and shrieked aloud.

  “He won’t hurt you, dear,” Rodolphe said.

  “Rodolphe, what have you done? My God, think of the scandal! Rodolphe, what is this creature in our house? What will the neighbors think?”

  “Calm down, dear,” Rodolphe said. “I don’t like this situation any better than you do! But let’s discuss it like civilized beings.”

  “Oh, don’t give me any of your Monsieur Architect calm rationality!” Amelie shouted, stamping the carpet. “Of course we’re ‘civilized beings’! That’s exactly why we abhor persons of his sort!” She glared at Charles. “Why we shouldn’t look at such people, much less invite them into our drawing room with their vile snorting animals!”

  “I’m not an animal, Amelie,” the bear said.

  “You keep out of this, you walking hearth-rug!” She turned to Rodolphe, folding her arms. “Have you gone mad, Rodolphe?”

  “Dear, this is Charles. Our old friend. You remember. We used to have him to dinner.”

  “This miserable personage is not what I call ‘our old friend Charles,’ ” Amelie said. “He has betrayed us. He has joined the oppressor gerontocracy. He is our class enemy!”

  “Oh no,” Rodolphe begged. “Not politics, Amelie!”

  “It’s the truth,” Amelie retorted. “Why won’t you face it? You, with your head-in-the-clouds masculine construction-schemes! I always told you, Rodolphe: you mustn’t get mystical about your business! It’s just stones and mortar, Rodolphe: stones and mortar! Otherwise, it turns your head, and you end up … well … like one of them! Just like he is now!” She drew a breath. “Is that what you want?”

  “No!” Rodolphe said. “You know that’s not so!” The accusation stabbed him with anxiety. “It would mean the end of everything,” he said. “The end of our marriage. And our home. The end of everything I’ve built here—that we have built here, together! You know I don’t want that, Amelie!”

  Amelie was silent a moment, biting her lip. She seemed moved by his distress. “Well, if that’s so,” she said, “then why do I find you in this person’s company?”

  Rodolphe sat down. His legs felt weak. “Perhaps I did make a mistake, dear. But it seemed the best way to avoid an even larger scandal. There was a nasty stir at the Enantiodrome. It seemed best to … well … get Charles out of sight.”

  “You should have summoned the police.”

  The bear spoke up again. “That action would have engendered an unfortunate complexity.”

  “Let me speak,” Charles told it. “Amelie, I know my presence is unpleasant to you, but please try to understand. A … a vital transition is about to occur in this place. I had a hand in creating it. I have a right to witness it. You owe me this.”

  “Oh, so that’s it, is it?” Amelie said. “You barge in here with this horrific instrument of brute authority, and then try to appeal to our better natures. A typical powerplay of the coercive gerontocracy!”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Charles said meekly.

  “Don’t pretend you’re not implicated,” Amelie said. “Maybe you don’t oppress us, directly and obviously. But you profit by everything that’s done to confine us here, and disrupt our lives, and rob us of a normal, civilized existence!”

  Charles winced. “What a strange mode of discourse …”

  “Be fair, dear,” Rodolphe urged. “He doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Amelie walked across the sitting room to the chaise lounge. She noticed the stain on it, but sat there anyway, her lips tightening. “Oh, it ought to be clear enough,” she said. “After all, most of the world belongs to him, and his antediluvian friends. All we have of it is little ghettos and caravan routes. We could civilize the whole world again, if we were allowed to. We could have hot water, and meals three times a day, and books, and art, and decent clothes, and roads, and rules … and families, too.” Suddenly she burst into tears.

  Rodolphe sat beside her, and took her hand. “Try not to take it so hard, dear.”

  She looked up, wiping her eyes with a kerchief from her bodice. “Oh no,” she said, “I don’t suppose I should be allowed to take it hard, should I? Perhaps I should simply sublimate my feelings, in piling stones on stones, instead of giving care and love to other human beings!”

  She turned on Charles fiercely. “I’m a grown woman! I may not be two hundred, or three hundred, or four hundred years old, but I have the wants and needs of a normal human being! I want a child! And you won’t let me have one.”

  “But you’re not old enough,” Charles said.

  “That’s your answer to everything,” Amelie said. “Of course I’m old enough! Women used to bear children at forty, or thirty, or even younger!”

  “Yes, but that was when people died young,” Charles said. “You can’t expect to live for centuries, and bear hundreds of children! The Earth would be overwhelmed.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth,” Amelie said. “That’s not what I said.” She pointed at Rodolphe. “I’m not being selfish. It’s very simple. I love this man! I want his child, I want a true marriage with him, with a family! But you tell me I must wait for that fulfillment until I’m a strange old crone. Are Rodolphe and I supposed to wait out centuries, while the dust slowly settles on our souls? No, we’ll surely drift apart, and our love will be nothing but an episode.” She wrung her hands. “Every day of my life, thanks to you, I have to taste my own sterility.”

  “I’m sorry for your distress,” Charles said. “But at least you don’t have to taste your own approaching death. And other people have lived through this situation. Your own parents, for instance!”

  “I never really knew my parents,” Amelie said. “None of us do. How can we, in this world? They were always patient with me, and I think perhaps they loved me in their own strange way, but I never really saw them, did I? I only saw the facade that the very old create to show to the very young. We can’t love each other simply and directly; there’s too much distance between our hearts. The situation isn’t humane, it’s not natural. It hurts!”

  “There’s no other way to manage, though.”

  “All that means is that you don’t want another way.” She glared at Charles. “Why don’t you get out of here? Leave this place, and go back where you belong. Paysage belongs to us! We built everything here, with our own ideas and our own hands. We never used your help; we owe you nothing, we reject you totally. I want you out of my house!”

  There was a ringing silence. “Amelie,” Rodolphe said at last. “This isn’t some stranger. This person used to be us.”

  “That only makes it worse,” she said. “You ought to throw him downstairs.”

  “That would scarcely be polite, would it?” Rodolphe said, with a sidelong glance at the bear.

  She noticed his look. “Oh yes,” she said. “For a moment, I forgot that he holds the whip hand of authority over us. I suppose, if we gave him the hiding he deserves, this great brute of his would reduce our home to matchsticks!”

  “I thought, if we made Charles seem presentable,” Rodolphe suggested, “we could leave without him creating a public stir.
”

  “Are you going to shave the bear, too?”

  “We can’t help the bear, dear. Perhaps, if Charles looks fairly normal, people will forgive him that eccentricity.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s something,” Amelie admitted. “I suppose I could help you, if it comes to that. His hair looks dreadful.”

  “Thank you, dear. I knew I could depend on you.”

  Rodolphe chose a suit of clothes, while Amelie set to work, reluctantly, on their guest.

  Charles was too short for the trousers, so Amelie took in the hems. With his hair trimmed, and the proper accoutrements, Charles looked almost human.

  At Rodolphe’s suggestion, they treated Charles to a proper home-cooked lunch. Charles had trouble with the silverware, and the flavors of the food seemed to startle him, but he did well enough. The bear devoured two loaves of bread and apparently went to sleep.

  When the domestic ritual was over, Amelie seemed mollified.

  “Perhaps I was a bit overwrought earlier,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about my grievances—after all, there’s not much I can do about the oppressive power structure, is there?—but sometimes it simply overwhelms me. And it makes me feel quite wild.” She looked at Rodolphe, troubled. “Are you angry with me, Rodolphe?”

  Rodolphe smiled indulgently. “No, sweetheart. Truth to tell, I feel much the same way, sometimes.”

  “You don’t show it. Not to me, at least.”

  “I try to be reticent. I depend on you for solid common sense.”

  Amelie sighed and looked at the clean tiled floor. “I broke your clock last night, Rodolphe.”

  “You did?”

  “I couldn’t bear to listen to it ticking any longer—it was like a reproach.” Amelie was fighting tears.

  “That’s perfectly all right, dear,” Rodolphe said numbly. “We can get another clock.”

  Charles rose cheerfully from the table, wiping his mouth on his coat sleeve. “This was charming! I feel quite fit now. Perhaps we should go.”

  After the dishes had been scrubbed, and arranged in the china cabinets, they went to the drawing room.

  “Can you come with us, dear? It’s worth seeing today; quite a hubbub. Might cheer you up.”

  “Later tonight, perhaps,” Amelie said. “I don’t want to walk in public with a bear.”

  “I’ll stay here,” the bear remarked. It opened its jaws in a horrific yawn.

  A nano-gnat the size of a horsefly emerged from its gullet. The little mechanism flew silently across the room and landed on Charles’s lapel.

  “Will you be all right here, dear?” Rodolphe said.

  “I won’t be staying home either,” Amelie said tartly. “The beast can stay here by itself. I have work to do at the garage.”

  Rodolphe and Charles picked their way down the fractured stairs. “I’m surprised that your bear is willing to stay behind, Charles. Though that should help matters a great deal.”

  “Baltimore doesn’t have a ‘will,’ ” Charles said. “The nano-gnat will link us. Baltimore can move very quickly should I need his services.”

  They walked together into the afternoon streets. As two respectable gentlemen, they did not attract a second glance. Charles walked a bit stiffly as though the clothes chafed him, but he was not so odd as to be an anomaly.

  “Why do you call him ‘Baltimore’?” Rodolphe said.

  “Baltimore was a city,” Charles said. “An ancient city on the shore of America. But when the seas rose, the waves came and claimed Baltimore. The site is long submerged.”

  “So ‘Baltimore’ was a lost city from the age of industrial mortality?” Rodolphe shrugged. “Interesting.”

  Charles grunted.

  They paused on a street corner. Traffic was snarled. Cordons had been erected half a block down the street. A gang of men in work clothes were tearing the great marble facade from the City Bank.

  “I don’t like the look of this,” Rodolphe said. He led Charles up the street.

  A circle of onlookers were admiring the action. Rodolphe noticed the president of the Bank, a portly gentleman of great dignity whose name was Gustave. They exchanged greetings. “What’s all this?” Rodolphe said.

  “It is the future capstone of the Enantiodrome, of course,” said Gustave in surprise. “Surely you knew.”

  “I gave no such orders,” Rodolphe said. “Besides, we already have a capstone! Fifty years ago, the capstone was hewn from Carrara marble, and transported here over the Alps by mule team. It was then decorated by a generation of artisans, and now lies safely in the basement of the Enantiodrome, awaiting the great moment of its installation!”

  “Oh that,” Gustave said. “Apparently they broke that one. They’re going to chisel out a new one, from out of the front of my Bank.”

  “They broke it?” Rodolphe shouted. “My God! How did it happen?”

  “Don’t alarm yourself,” Gustave said. “We at the Bank are more than pleased to help you out. It’s a civic honor for us, really. Why, they dug a ton of bricks out of City Hall last night; in comparison, we in private enterprise are getting off cheaply!”

  Rodolphe backed away into the crowd, disguising his horror. “Someone is flouting my authority,” he said to Charles. “It’s a conspiracy, clearly. Come, we must hurry.”

  Within minutes they were at the Enantiodrome. The great building was the scene of near-riot. The crowd of workers had swollen from mere hundreds to a large fraction of the city’s whole populace. Men and women swarmed across the grounds, hauling boards, shoving wheelbarrows, eating, laughing, sitting around bonfires of scrap lumber. It was like an army of occupation.

  “What is this outrage?” Rodolphe said. “Have they all gone out of their heads?”

  “They’re working very hard,” Charles observed, his eyes gleaming.

  “With no efficiency at all,” Rodolphe said.

  “They work like ants,” Charles said. “Small individual actions, some even counterproductive, yet adding up to an unspoken emergent whole.”

  “Spare me,” Rodolphe said. He plunged into the crowd. People waved at him cheerily, clapped him on the back, and shouted incoherent congratulations. It took him a long time to find Mercier.

  “What happened?” he asked the foreman.

  “Isn’t it wonderful how the people have responded in our time of need?” Mercier said. He grinned politely at Charles, clearly failing to recognize him. “It’s a bit of a muddle, but we’ll get it up by tonight, all right. Imagine that, Monsieur Rodolphe! Finished by midnight! It makes you want to weep with joy!”

  “Who specified this so-called deadline?” Rodolphe asked.

  Mercier looked startled. “Well … I don’t know. But we’re finishing today! I mean, ask anyone—everyone knows it is the truth!”

  “Some irresponsible rumormonger,” Rodolphe grated. “This is grotesque! Look at this blundering amateurism. It’s mob hysteria!”

  Mercier looked cowed. “But, sir—everyone’s having such a good time—”

  “You’ve all fallen for some sort of stupid prank! This will set our schedule back by months! Tomorrow, we’ll have to dismantle and repair all this botched work—not to mention apologizing to City Hall and the Bank!” Rodolphe wiped his brow with his kerchief. “My God, think of the damage to our credibility! To my reputation! This is what I get for abandoning my project, even for a few short hours—”

  Charles took his elbow gently. “Rodolphe?”

  Rodolphe yanked his arm away. “Now what?”

  “This is a building, Rodolphe. It’s not you. It doesn’t belong to you.”

  “What do you mean? It’s my responsibility; everyone knows that!”

  “But the Enantiodrome doesn’t care, Rodolphe. It was here before you and it will be here after you. You can’t be this thing, Rodolphe. It has its own momentum. You have to let it go.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Rodolphe said, sweating.

  “Look at the people, Rodolphe. They’re
doing it. Not exactly as you wanted it, perhaps, but in a way that … well … suits the innate purposes.”

  Rodolphe hesitated, stunned. Then he rallied. “No. I can still restore order here. I’ll fetch the mayor, I’ll summon the police …”

  “Some of these people are the police, my poor friend.” Charles smiled angelically. Rodolphe felt a strong urge to strike him.

  Mercier spoke up. “Sir? I think I saw the mayor here earlier—he was here with the City Council. He went inside.”

  “Then there’s still a chance to settle things!” Rodolphe said.

  He ran quickly across the site and through the gigantic double doors of the Enantiodrome. The doors had been hung in an earlier century, and were weather-stained, their massive hinges eaten with verdigris. But they were still stout, and even beautiful, with bas-reliefs of bats and angels.

  Rodolphe hurried up the cavernous entrance hall, with its flanking rows of vast peaked windows. Men and women thronged the galleries, slopping soap buckets, polishing the colored glass. Some were even singing.

  Beneath the echoing vastness of the Great Dome stood a group in dark suits and dresses—the mayor and his City Council. The late afternoon sun cast a vast column of dusty light through the open apex of the Dome, splashing in a lozenge shape against the stair railings ringing the fretted interior.

  The politicians were examining a heap of fresh rubble in the center of the great circular enclosure. Their muttering echoed with ghostlike authority.

  Rodolphe saw that it was the great capstone. The huge marble lid had slipped through the hole it was meant to seal, and fallen, end over end like some vast stone coin, to shatter against the stained tessellations of the Dome’s hard floor. Rodolphe’s heart constricted. Years of careful work and preparation, smashed and cast aside …

  “Monsieur Mayor,” Rodolphe began.

  “Ah, Rodolphe,” the mayor said, offering his hand. “It seems we were both mistaken, my dear fellow. We shall finish even sooner than we had hoped.”

  “Henri, I need a word with you,” Rodolphe said.

  “If you mean this,” the mayor said, gesturing at the rubble, “well, these things happen, eh?” He paused, staring at Rodolphe’s companion, who had just arrived. “Charles,” he said. “Charles, is it not?”