“And those same people are very scared, very focused,” his opponent countered. “Their borders are a priority to them. You are their top priority. And even if your thought processes are accelerated a thousandfold, they’ve got AIs who can blister you in any race of intellect. At least for the time being, they can.”
Shoot him, an inner voice urged.
Yet Julian did nothing, waiting silently, hoping to be saved from this onerous chore.
“You can’t cross into Canada without me,” Blaine told him.
“I know what happened . . .” Julian felt the gun’s barrel adjusting itself as his hands grew tired and dropped slightly. “Up in North Dakota . . . we know all about it . . .”
It was Blaine’s turn to keep silent.
Again, Julian asked, “Who are you? Just tell me that much.”
“You haven’t guessed it, have you?” The round face seemed genuinely disappointed. “Not even in your wildest dreams . . .”
“And why help us?” Julian muttered, saying too much.
“Because in the long run, helping you helps me.”
“How?”
Silence.
“We don’t have any wealth,” Julian roared. “Our homes were destroyed. By you, for all I know—”
The man laughed loudly, smirking as he began to turn away. “You’ve got some time left. Think about the possibilities, and we’ll talk again.”
Julian tugged on the trigger. Just once.
Eighteen shells pierced the back of Blaine’s head, then worked down the wide back, devastating every organ even as the lifeless body crumpled. Even a huge man falls fast, Julian observed. Then he rose, walking on weak legs, and with his own aim, he emptied the rest of his clip into the gore.
It was easy, pumping in those final shots.
What’s more, shooting the dead carried an odd, unexpected satisfaction—which was probably the same satisfaction that the terrorists had felt when their tiny bomb destroyed a hundred million soulless machines.
With every refugee watching, Julian cut open the womb with laser shears.
Julian Jr. was born a few seconds after two-thirty A.M., and the audience, desperate for a good celebration, nearly buried the baby with gifts and sweet words. Yet nobody could spoil him like his father could. For the next few hours, Julian pestered his first son with love and praise, working with a manic energy to fill every need, every whim. And his quest to be a perfect father only grew worse. The sun was beginning to show itself; Canada was waiting over the horizon; but Julian was oblivious, hunched over the toddler with sparkling toys in both hands, his never-pretty voice trying to sing a child’s song, nothing half as important in this world as making his son giggle and smile . . .!
They weren’t getting past the border. Their enemies were too clever, and too paranoid. Julian could smell the inevitable, but because he didn’t know what else to do, he went through the motions of smiling for the President and the public, saying the usual brave words whenever it was demanded of him.
Sometimes Julian took his boy for long rides around the lifeboat.
During one journey, a woman knelt and happily teased the baby, then looked up at the famous man, mentioning in an off-handed way, “We’ll get to our new home just in time for him to grow into it.”
Those words gnawed at Julian, although he was helpless to explain why.
By then the sun had risen, its brilliant light sweeping across a sleepy border town. Instead of crossing at Detroit, the refugees had abandoned the Tollway, taking an old highway north to Port Huron. It would be easier here, was the logic. The prayer. Gazing out the universal window, Julian looked at the boarded up homes and abandoned businesses, cars parked and forgotten, weeds growing in every yard, every crack. The border cities had lost most of their people in the last year-plus, he recalled. It was too easy and too accepted, this business of crossing into a land where it was still legal to be remade. In another year, most of the United States would look this way, unless the government took more drastic measures such as closing its borders, or worse, invading its wrong-minded neighbors . . .!
Julian felt a deep chill, shuddering.
That’s when he suddenly understood. Everything. And in the next few seconds, after much thought, he knew precisely what he had to do.
Assuming there was still time . . .
A dozen cars were lined up in front of the customs station. The Buick had slipped in behind a couple on a motorcycle. Only one examination station was open, and every traveler was required to first declare his intentions, then permanently give up his citizenship. It would be a long wait. The driver turned the engine off, watching the Marines and Tech officials at work, everything about them relentlessly professional. Three more cars pulled up behind him, including a Tokamak, and he happened to glance at the rearview screen when Blaine climbed out, walking with a genuine bounce, approaching on the right and rapping on the passenger window with one fat knuckle, then stooping down and smiling through the glass, proving that he had made a remarkable recovery since being murdered.
Julian unlocked the door for him.
With a heavy grunt, Blaine pulled himself in and shut the door, then gave his companion a quick wink.
Julian wasn’t surprised. If anything, he was relieved, telling his companion, “I think I know what you are.”
“Good,” said Blaine. “And what do your friends think?”
“I don’t know. I never told them.” Julian took the steering wheel in both hands. “I was afraid that if I did, they wouldn’t believe me. They’d think I was crazy, and dangerous. And they wouldn’t let me come here.”
The line was moving, jerking forward one car-length. Julian started the Buick and crept forward, then turned it off again.
With a genuine fondness, Blaine touched him on a shoulder, commenting, “Your friends might pull you back into their world now. Have you thought of that?”
“Sure,” said Julian. “But for the next few seconds, they’ll be too confused to make any big decisions.”
Lake Huron lay on Blaine’s left, vast and deeply blue, and he studied the picket boats that dotted the water, bristling with lasers that did nothing but flip back and forth, back and forth, incinerating any flying object that appeared even remotely suspicious.
“So tell me,” he asked his companion, “why do you think I’m here?”
Julian turned his body, the cultured leather squeaking beneath him. Gesturing at Port Huron, he said, “If these trends continue, everything’s going to look that way soon. Empty. Abandoned. Humans will have almost vanished from this world, which means that perhaps someone else could move in without too much trouble. They’ll find houses, and good roads to drive on, and a communication system already in place. Ready-made lives, and practically free for the taking.”
“What sort of someone?”
“That’s what suddenly occurred to me.” Julian took a deep breath, then said, “Humans are making themselves smaller, and faster. But what if something other than humans is doing the same thing? What if there’s something in the universe that’s huge, and very slow by human standards, but intelligent nonetheless. Maybe it lives in cold places between the stars. Maybe somewhere else. The point is, this other species is undergoing a similar kind of transformation. It’s making itself a thousand times smaller, and a thousand times quicker, which puts it roughly equal to this.” The frail face was smiling, and he lifted his hands from the wheel. “Flesh and blood, and bone…these are the high-technology materials that build your version of microchines!”
Blaine winked again, saying, “You’re probably right. If you’d explained it that way, your little friends would have labeled you insane.”
“But am I right?”
There was no reason to answer him directly. “What about me, Mr. Winemaster? How do you look at me?”
“You want to help us.” Julian suddenly winced, then shuddered. But he didn’t mention it, saying, “I assume that you have different abilities than we do…that you
can get us past their sensors—”
“Is something wrong, Mr. Winemaster?”
“My friends . . . they’re trying to take control of this body . . .”
“Can you deal with them?”
“For another minute. I changed all the control codes.” Again, he winced. “You don’t want the government aware of you, right? And you’re trying to help steer us and them away from war . . . during this period of transition—”
“The way we see it,” Blaine confessed, “the chance of a worldwide cataclysm is just about one in three, and worsening.”
Julian nodded, his face contorting in agony. “If I accept your help . . .?”
“Then I’ll need yours.” He set a broad hand on Julian’s neck. “You’ve done a remarkable job hiding yourselves. You and your friends are in this car, but my tools can’t tell me where. Not without more time, at least. And that’s time we don’t have . . .”
Julian stiffened, his clothes instantly soaked with perspiration.
Quietly, quickly, he said, “But if you’re really a government agent . . . here to fool me into telling you . . . everything . . .?”
“I’m not,” Blaine promised.
A second examination station had just opened; people were maneuvering for position, leaving a gap in front of them.
Julian started his car, pulling forward. “If I do tell you . . . where we are . . . they’ll think that I’ve betrayed them . . .!”
The Buick’s anticollision system engaged, bringing them to an abrupt stop.
“Listen,” said Blaine. “You’ve got only a few seconds to decide—”
“I know . . .”
“Where, Mr. Winemaster? Where?”
“Julian,” he said, wincing again.
“Julian.”
A glint of pride showed in the eyes. “We’re not . . . in the car . . .” Then the eyes grew enormous, and Julian tried shouting the answer . . . his mind suddenly losing its grip on that tiny, lovely mouth . . .
Blaine swung with his right fist, shattering a cheekbone with his first blow, killing the body before the last blow.
By the time the Marines had surrounded the car, its interior was painted with gore, and in horror, the soldiers watched as the madman—he couldn’t be anything but insane—calmly rolled down his window and smiled with a blood-rimmed mouth, telling his audience, “I had to kill him. He’s Satan.”
A hardened lieutenant looked in at the victim, torn open like a sack, and she shivered, moaning aloud for the poor man.
With perfect calm, Blaine declared, “I had to eat his heart. That’s how you kill Satan. Don’t you know?”
For disobeying orders, the President declared Julian a traitor, and she oversaw his trial and conviction. The entire process took less than a minute. His quarters were remodeled to serve as his prison cell. In the next ten minutes, three separate attempts were made on his life. Not everyone agreed with the court’s sentence, it seemed. Which was understandable. Contact with the outside world had been lost the instant Winemaster died. The refugees and their lifeboat were lost in every kind of darkness. At any moment, the Tech specialists would throw them into a decontamination unit, and they would evaporate without warning. And all because they’d entrusted themselves to an old DNA-born human who never really wanted to be Transmutated in the first place, according to at least one of his former lovers . . .
Ostensibly for security reasons, Julian wasn’t permitted visitors.
Not even his young son could be brought to him, nor was he allowed to see so much as a picture of the boy.
Julian spent his waking moments pacing back and forth in the dim light, trying to exhaust himself, then falling into a hard sleep, too tired to dream at all, if he was lucky…
Before the first hour was finished, he had lost all track of time.
After nine full days of relentless isolation, the universe had shriveled until nothing existed but his cell, and him, his memories indistinguishable from fantasies.
On the tenth day, the cell door opened.
A young man stepped in, and with a stranger’s voice, he said, “Father.”
“Who are you?” asked Julian.
His son didn’t answer, giving him the urgent news instead. “Mr. Blaine finally made contact with us, explaining what he is and what’s happened so far, and what will happen . . .!”
Confusion wrestled with a fledging sense of relief.
“He’s from between the stars, just like you guessed, Father. And he’s been found insane for your murder. Though of course you’re not dead. But the government believes there was a Julian Winemaster, and it’s holding Blaine in a Detroit hospital, and he’s holding us. His metabolism is augmenting our energy production, and when nobody’s watching, he’ll connect us with the outside world.”
Julian couldn’t imagine such a wild story: It had to be true!
“When the world is safe, in a year or two, he’ll act cured or he’ll escape—whatever is necessary—and he’ll carry us wherever we want to go.”
The old man sat on his bed, suddenly exhausted.
“Where would you like to go, Father?”
“Out that door,” Julian managed. Then a wondrous thought took him by surprise, and he grinned, saying, “No, I want to be like Blaine was. I want to live between the stars, to be huge and cold, and slow…
“Not today, maybe . . .
“But soon . . . definitely soon . . .!”
Suicide Coast (1999)
M. JOHN HARRISON
At the start of his career, M. JOHN HARRISON (b. 1945) was part of the New Wave movement in science fiction, and he served in London as the literary editor for New Worlds magazine for eight years. Over the course of the next four decades, he published more than a dozen novels, including high-fantasy novels (the long-running Viriconium series); science-fiction novels, such as The Centauri Device and Light; Climbers, a mainstream novel about rock climbers; literary fantasy novels, such as Signs of Life and The Course of the Heart; and a series of cat-fantasy novels co-written with Jane Johnson under the pen name Gabriel King.
In a recent interview, Harrison says that every genre needs contrarians: “It needs constantly reminding that it isn’t the centre of the world.” In “Suicide Coast,” he takes on the subgenre of Virtual Reality and pushes it to its limits.
OUR-THIRTY IN the afternoon in a converted warehouse near Mile End underground station. Heavy, persistent summer rain was falling on the roof. Inside, the air was still and humid, dark despite the fluorescent lights. It smelled of sweat, dust, gymnasts’ chalk. Twenty-five feet above the thick blue crash-mats, a boy with dreadlocks and baggy knee-length shorts was supporting his entire weight on two fingers of his right hand. The muscles of his upper back, black and shiny with sweat, fanned out exotically with the effort, like the hood of a cobra or the shell of a crab. One leg trailed behind him for balance. He had raised the other so that the knee was almost touching his chin. For two or three minutes he had been trying to get the ball of his foot in the same place as his fingers. Each time he moved, his center of gravity shifted and he had to go back to a resting position. Eventually he said quietly:
“I’m coming off.”
We all looked up. It was a slow afternoon in Mile End. Nobody bothers much with training in the middle of summer. Some teenagers were in from the local schools and colleges. A couple of men in their late thirties had sneaked out of a civil engineering contract near Cannon Street. Everyone was tired. Humidity had made the handholds slippery. Despite that, a serious atmosphere prevailed.
“Go on,” we encouraged him. “You can do it.”
We didn’t know him, or one another, from Adam.
“Go on!”
The boy on the wall laughed. He was good but not that good. He didn’t want to fall off in front of everyone. An intention tremor moved through his bent leg. Losing patience with himself, he scraped at the foothold with the toe of his boot. He lunged upward. His body pivoted away from the wall and dropped ont
o the mats, which, absorbing the energy of the fall, made a sound like a badly winded heavyweight boxer. Chalk and dust billowed up. He got to his feet, laughing and shaking his dreadlocks.
“I can never do that.”
“You’ll get it in the end,” I told him. “Me, I’m going to fall off this roof once more then fuck off home. It’s too hot in here.”
“See you, man.”
I had spent most of that winter in London, assembling copy for MAX, a web site that fronted the adventure sports software industry. They were always interested in stuff about cave diving, BASE jumping, snowboarding, hang-gliding, ATB and so on: but they didn’t want to know about rock climbing.
“Not enough to buy,” my editor said succinctly. “And too obviously skill-based.” He leafed through my samples. “The punter needs equipment to invest in. It strengthens his self-image. With the machine parked in his hall, he believes he could disconnect from the software and still do the sport.” He tapped a shot of Isobelle Patissier seven hundred feet up some knife-edge arête in Colorado. “Where’s the hardware? These are just bodies.”
“The boots are pretty high tech.”
“Yeah? And how much a pair? Fifty, a hundred and fifty? Mick, we can get them to lay out three grand for the frame of an ATB.”
He thought for a moment. Then he said: “We might do something with the women.”
“The good ones are French.”
“Even better.”
I gathered the stuff together and put it away.
“I’m off then,” I said.
“You still got the 190?”
I nodded.
“Take care in that thing,” he said.
“I will.”
“Focke-Wulf 190,” he said. “Hey.”
“It’s a Mercedes,” I said.
He laughed. He shook his head.
“Focke-Wulf, Mercedes, no one drives themselves anymore,” he said. “You mad fucker.”
He looked round his office—a dusty metal desk, a couple of posters with the MAX logo, a couple of PCs. He said: “No one comes in here in person anymore. You ever hear of the modem?”
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