Globalhead

by Bruce Sterling

  “Yes, Monsieur Councilman,” Charles said.

  “I’m now the mayor, Charles.”

  “I always knew you were meant for great things, Henri,” Charles said with a smile.

  Rodolphe picked up a piece of marble rubble with the broken face of a horned cherub. “I presume you realize, by this striking evidence of incompetence, that none of this is proceeding according to my plans.”

  “Yes,” the mayor said, “somehow I gathered as much, by the fact that you were absent and the place was full of a mob.”

  “Well? What are we to do about this?”

  “It’s a politician’s dream,” the mayor said, smiling. “A genuine popular movement, Rodolphe! You ask what I should do? I’m their leader, aren’t I? I run in front of the marchers and wave a flag! So here I am.”

  “But it’s senseless, Monsieur Mayor. There’s no point to it.”

  “The people are not required to ‘make sense’—not to you, at least,” the mayor said. “The Voice of the People is the Voice of God.”

  “You’ll regret this, when you see the mess they make of things,” Rodolphe said.

  “It’s their mess,” the mayor said. “Not yours, Rodolphe. We’re not the public. We only serve it.”

  “Well put,” Charles remarked.

  Rodolphe put his hands to his head. “What am I to do, then?”

  “Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” the mayor suggested. He looked upward suddenly, and prudently stepped sideways. A chunk of marble a foot across came plummeting down from the summit to smash to dust nearby.

  A tiny head with waving arms showed at the daylit hole. “Hey! You lot be careful, down there!”

  “Let’s go,” Charles murmured, clapping Rodolphe across the back. “One last time, eh? To the heights!”

  The hours that followed were a sweaty nightmare of sledges and levers and pulley work. The vast unwieldy slab of stolen marble came foot by foot, sometimes inch by inch, around, under, and through the maze of scaffolding. Men rushed back and forth with crayons and tape measures, chopping the slab to fit with saws, mauls, and chisels. Cranes were raised, timbers set, as the incomplete Dome itself squeaked and shuddered under the strain.

  Toward the end they worked by torchlight. In the grounds below a vast crowd swayed, singing in unison.

  The workers were in a cheerful frenzy. Both Rodolphe and Charles found themselves struggling to keep a rudiment of order; trying to keep the crew from injuring themselves in enthusiasm. Everyone wanted to contribute something, even something without apparent meaning of any kind. Their restless energy could not be brooked. Those who could not help with the capstone were stripping away the scaffolds and catwalks. As the gangs flung the lumber down, end over end, people scattered below, scrambling, laughing, and cheering.

  Then the last wedge was hammered loose and the capstone sank into place with a shrill grinding. One man lost his crowbar; another lost the end of his finger, and held up the bloody stump in white-faced glee, like a badge of honor.

  They stood around for a moment, expecting some epiphany that no one seemed able to define. “Why aren’t they cheering down there?” someone asked dazedly.

  “They don’t know yet,” Charles said patiently. “They see no vital signal of consummation.”

  “Well, let’s tell them, then!” Mercier shouted joyfully. He glanced around the top of the Dome, in the wind-whipped torchlight. “Wait a moment—where’s our catwalk?”

  The scaffolding of the Great Dome was gone. People had been disassembling it wholesale and flinging it down, cleaning the building of it, in thoughtless haste. “My God, we’re trapped up here!” Mercier said.

  The night watchman, Hugo, spoke up. He had a length of tarred rope around his shoulder. “No,” he said. “There is still a way for you; I know it.” He knotted his line to the tripod crane at the summit, and began to pay out rope, hopping downward across the curve of the Dome with a strange and crooked grace.

  Rodolphe hustled the work crew into a proper order. “Show some dignity,” he told them. “Remember, the eyes of the people are upon you. Behave in a way that matches the majesty of this great moment.”

  They nodded, and followed the rope down, hand over hand, to a shaky catwalk. But when they reached earshot of the people below, their dignity broke and they began shouting wildly.

  Then the celebration began.

  Amelie was amid the turbulent crowd, waiting. She had the bear with her. No one seemed to mind its presence.

  She embraced him. “I’m proud of you, Rodolphe.”

  Rodolphe laughed. He was light-headed with fatigue and triumph. “I don’t deserve the credit,” he said. “It wasn’t really my idea.”

  “Whose idea was it, then?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed to come out of the air somehow.”

  “Take the credit,” Charles advised. “Who knows who deserves the fame? Who knows who really started this thing, so many years ago?”

  Rodolphe paused. The idea of final credit, of credit for origination, had never really struck him before. “I don’t know how it started. But it can’t have been much to begin with, can it? Some poor fool, I suppose, piling a stone on a stone with his bare hands, while the rest of the world was wrapped in its strange transformation. His motive is lost in time.”

  “It was defiance,” Charles said. “Stubbornness. The act of someone who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—join the Conventional world.”

  “You think so, Charles?”

  “I know it.”

  Rodolphe laughed again. “Well, that would fit, wouldn’t it? The central impulse at the secret heart of our milieu. I hope he’s happy today, if he’s still alive somehow. I’d dearly like to shake his hand.”

  Amelie was looking at him strangely. Rodolphe shrugged. “Or her hand, of course. It might very well have been a woman!”

  Amelie said nothing. She was wide-eyed, looking into his face. Rodolphe touched her shoulder gently. “You’re not angry with me, are you, dear?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  Rodolphe spread his hands. “You mean, now that it’s all done? Have I changed so very much?”

  “I don’t know … But I’ve never seen you before, as the father of my child.”

  Rodolphe started. “What’s that, dear?”

  Amelie smiled. A slow, secret, radiant look. “It will happen, Rodolphe. We will be parents together. Someday.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t think it, Rodolphe. I know it.”

  Rodolphe stared at her in alarm. “Oh dear. You haven’t been talking to the bear, have you?”

  “You’re wrong about the bear, Rodolphe. It’s not a personality, like us. It’s just an intelligence—a repository of much vaster forces. It knows things without understanding them.”

  Rodolphe was stricken with despair. He barely heard her next words. “But I understand them, Rodolphe. Someday you and I will meet again, in deep futurity. And we’ll have a true marriage then. Something strange and profound, that we can barely imagine now.”

  “Well,” Rodolphe said. “I suppose that’s very good news, dear. In the meantime, you and I can … Well, you can be the belle of the ball tonight, can’t you? We can share the acclaim. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”

  She shook her head. “No, Rodolphe. You do understand, don’t you? In your heart, you know how this changes things between us. We can’t play the game of young lovers, now that we know the truth. There’s no point in it, darling.”

  “But you can’t simply leave me! Not here. Not like this!”

  “There will never be a better, truer time, Rodolphe. I know you’ll remember me always, if we part at this very moment. But it’s not good-bye. Only au revoir.” She turned her back on him.

  In a moment she had run gracefully into the depths of the crowd.

  “Oh my God!” Rodolphe cried. He turned on the bear. “This is your fault, you stupid beas
t! I should kill you for this!”

  The bear nosed at his knee with a snuffle. Rodolphe looked into its eyes. There was nothing there—just an animal blankness.

  “Then it’s your fault!” he shouted at Charles.

  “I haven’t done anything,” Charles pointed out.

  “I’ll rush home, then, and find her. She’ll never leave me without taking her favorite things.”

  “She won’t need ‘things’ where she’s going,” Charles said.

  Rodolphe gasped. He braced himself to plunge into the crowd in pursuit; to find his wife somehow, tackle her, chain her down if necessary. But the mayor and a crowd of celebrants emerged, blocking his way.

  The mayor offered Rodolphe an open bottle of sparkling wine. “Fireworks!” he shouted. “Fireworks soon! What a fete, my dear fellow! The ball will last till dawn!”

  A timber fell nearby, tumbling end over end to splinter on the turf. The crowd billowed away in alarm. “What’s this?” the mayor shouted, staring at Rodolphe. “My God! The whole thing’s not going to fall on us, is it?”

  Rodolphe, stung, drew himself to his full height. “Get a grip on yourself, Henri,” he said sternly. “Of course it won’t fall! It’s only poor Hugo, the night watchman. He’s flinging down the last of the scaffolding, from high up on his Dome.”

  “Ah,” said the mayor, “the final touch. Yes, I had a feeling that there was something missing yet. Some final climax.” He paused. “Good old Hugo, eh? It’s a pity! You know, he’s been at it for ages! He must be the oldest and most faithful worker we have! The poor old wretch should be down here for this. We should honor him. Yes, honor him—that’s it.”

  “We can coin him a medal,” a city councilman suggested.

  “Capital idea. Medals all around.”

  “You’re drunk,” Rodolphe realized.

  “There will never be a better time for it,” the mayor said, forcing a bottle on him. “You look too sad, Rodolphe. It’s not proper. Dignity’s well enough in its place, but if you want to live within the walls of Paysage, you have to share the living heart of the people. There’s no other way, my friend.”

  Charles tapped the mayor’s shoulder. “Henri, forgive me if I phrase this question poorly, because the assumptions behind it are a little odd to me. But now that the Enantiodrome is finished, what are you going to do with it?”

  “It doesn’t need any purpose,” the mayor said loftily. “It’s entirely sufficient merely unto itself.”

  “There must be more to it than that.”

  “Yes … I suppose it is, for instance, beautiful.” He paused. “Why ask me, anyway? I only voted the funds. You built it, not me. Why did you work on it?”

  “I don’t really know why I did it when I did it,” Charles said naively. “But I think I know how it did itself now—wait, that didn’t come out right.”

  “All right,” Rodolphe interrupted. “Just tell us, Wild Man, if you know so much. Tell us what it’s for, then. Tell us all about it.”

  Charles blinked in the carnival torchlight. “It refreshes the soul of the world.”

  “And what on earth is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Charles confessed. “I know something ought to happen, but I don’t think it’s fully emergent yet.”

  A mass of cordage and lumber came slewing off the side of the building, caromed from a buttress, and fell in a heap. “He’s still busy up there,” Charles observed.

  “How are we going to get the poor idiot down again?” the mayor asked.

  “Oh, he lives up there,” Rodolphe said. “He’s used to it. He’ll be fine.” Suddenly he burst into tears.

  “Brace up, Rodolphe,” the bear told him kindly. “This transition won’t take long. Your suffering will be brief.”

  Rodolphe stared at it. “You dare to speak to me?”

  “Only to you, Rodolphe. The others can’t hear my speech—they hear only an animal muttering. But I know the structures of your perceptions.”

  “Ah, of course,” Rodolphe said in disgust. “Conventionality has always had its little spies, within my very body, eh? Nano-gnats. I suppose they must know my blood by heart, and every thread of my nerves …”

  “They keep you alive and youthful, Rodolphe. The secret structures of Conventionality support and sustain you, deep beneath your notice.”

  “I defy you and your secret structures!” Rodolphe shouted.

  The bear nodded. “I’m proud of you, Rodolphe.” The look in its eyes faded at once.

  Then the fireworks began.

  There were astonishing amounts of them. Great scarlet rockets and sky-scratching yellow sparklers. The city, it seemed, had kept a happy arsenal in stock. The fireworks lasted almost till dawn.

  At dawn, the sky began to answer them. Vast blazing streaks of light, skipping in from over the horizon. Meteors with blazing comet tails, flaming ensigns of powdered crystal.

  Above the city they unfurled their red-hot wings, with vast shattering booms. There they circled, like a flock of glowing kites, over the heads of the people. Vast cooling things, with angular crystalline heads and wings like woven auroras.

  They circled for a long moment, their eyeless faces twisting back and forth, like living pendulums. They seemed to search out some point of unspoken equilibrium.

  Then, one after another, they swooped down in sudden arcs of heart-aching precision. Straight through the open doors of the Enantiodrome.

  “What are they, Charles?”

  “They have come to refresh the soul of the world,” Charles said.

  “Come from where, for heaven’s sake?”

  “The Moon, I think,” Charles said. He paused, seeming to listen to an inner voice. “Yes, the Moon, Rodolphe.” He smiled. “Convention’s farthest-flung machineries. They are roosting in the Great Dome. Come, let us go inside and witness them.”

  “You go,” Rodolphe suggested. Charles needed no urging. He was borne along into the building through the worshipful rush of the crowd.

  Rodolphe turned away. He began to walk around the building, the trampled earth littered with the sad debris of spent celebration.

  Someone had collapsed. The mayor and a small group of citizens were gathered by a fallen form, which lay beneath a blanket.

  It was Hugo. Rodolphe knelt quickly by his side.

  “He fell,” someone offered.

  “He jumped,” the mayor said. “From the edge of the Dome.” He wiped at tears. “No one noticed. We were distracted by the glory.”

  Rodolphe looked at Hugo’s battered face. Someone had already closed his eyes. He was quite dead. As Rodolphe watched, a tiny mechanism, no bigger than a pinhead, crept from between Hugo’s lips. It spread minuscule wings and took flight.

  “They are inside us. They’ve always been inside us.”

  “We are inside them,” the mayor said.

  “What consolation is that?”

  “We are their image. We are their antonym. We are their complement.” The mayor lifted his head. “It’s not a bad death, Rodolphe. Some of us never find it in ourselves to leave this place. I’ll die here too someday, I swear it!” He raised his hand, and his voice. “We cannot be defeated! Even if Paysage itself were demolished, street by street, there would still be places like it in spirit. Our immortality is no less than theirs. Our life is the glow of renewal in the secret heart of age. It is the shadow of dissent, cast from resignation, in the restless light of hope!”

  “Even to talk about ourselves, you have to talk just as they do,” Rodolphe said.

  The mayor’s face twisted in anguish. “Yes … but it’s still the truth!”

  “We have to bury this poor man,” a woman said.

  “It is my youth that is buried,” Rodolphe said. He turned on his heel and walked away.

  Some time later, as he was picking his way through the great wilderness, a large black raven appeared, and settled on a branch above his head. It followed him, cawing. At last it came to roost upon his s
houlder.

  After that they began to talk.

  THE MORAL BULLET

  BY BRUCE STERLING AND JOHN KESSEL

  The throb of a helicopter cruising low over the roof wakes Sniffy from a luxuriant dream about a banana split. His eyes snap open, his heart pounds, he flops out of his bed, to coil up tight beneath the rusting bedsprings, in the grit and dustbunnies. They’re after him!

  But after a moment the turbine’s whine, and his panic, fade. He’s just a kid; nobody’s really looking for him; nobody gives a damn about a kid. Sniffy crawls out, shivering, and peeks through the blackout curtains. The chopper is receding, in the daylight of summer morning.

  Sniffy’s mouth waters, anachronistically, for hot fudge, nuts, real whipped cream. A maraschino cherry. Banana splits are the stuff of legend now, but hunger’s still real; he’s gotta find something-or-other to eat. He pulls on sneakers, jeans and a T-shirt.

  Sniffy’s been living in this abandoned duplex for a couple of weeks, ever since the Chamber of Commerce took over this part of West Raleigh. The Commerce gang sort of take care of Sniffy, though most of the time they basically ignore him, to tell the truth. He hauls his rust-spotted Schwinn from beneath the back stairs, slings his baseball bat—an old George Brett signature—across the handlebars, and pedals up Brooks in the direction of the campus, weaving between the potholes.

  This is one of Raleigh’s older neighborhoods, heavily wooded. In every yard the pines stand tall and crowded; below them, oaks, maples and sweetgums fight for light. Nobody’s pruned them in years and with the heavy rains the city’s returning to forest. The lacing branches form thick green canopies over the narrower streets, which has been uncommonly handy lately, what with the helicopter raids.

  Three burnt-out pickups stretch across the intersection of Brooks and Wade. The busted truck beds are heaped with leaky sandbags. Grafitti covers the bright flaking wreckage, angry scrawls and morbid boasts from the local militia groups.

  A couple of Chamber of Commerce gangsters crouch beside the trucks, peering warily up through the treetops. There’s no sign of the helicopter, though. Sniffy leans his bike against a dead fireplug, and scuttles up to join the two men.