Black Swan

by Bruce Sterling

  With his head down, muttering and sour, Massimo was weaving across the millions of square stone cobbles of the huge Piazza Vittorio Veneto. As if through long experience, he found the emptiest spot in the plaza, a stony desert between a handsome line of ornate lamp-posts and the sleek steel railings of an underground parking garage.

  He dug into a trouser pocket and plucked out tethered foam earplugs, the kind you get from Alitalia for long overseas flights. Then he flipped his laptop open.

  I caught up with him. “What are you doing over here? Looking for wifi signals?”

  “I’m leaving.” He tucked the foam plugs in his ears.

  “Mind if I come along?”

  “When I count to three,” he told me, too loudly, “you have to jump high into the air. Also, stay within range of my laptop.”

  “All right. Sure.”

  “Oh, and put your hands over your ears.”

  I objected. “How can I hear you count to three if I have my hands over my ears?”

  “Uno.” He pressed the F-1 function key, and his laptop screen blazed with sudden light. “Due.” The F-2 emitted a humming, cracking buzz. “Tre.” He hopped in the air.

  Thunder blasted. My lungs were crushed in a violent billow of wind. My feet stung as if they’d been burned.

  Massimo staggered for a moment, then turned by instinct back toward the Elena. “Let’s go!” he shouted. He plucked one yellow earplug from his head. Then he tripped.

  I caught his computer as he stumbled. Its monster battery was sizzling hot.

  Massimo grabbed his overheated machine. He stuffed it awkwardly into his valise.

  Massimo had tripped on a loose cobblestone. We were standing in a steaming pile of loose cobblestones. Somehow, these cobblestones had been plucked from the pavement beneath our shoes and scattered around us like dice.

  Of course we were not alone. Some witnesses sat in the vast plaza, the everyday Italians of Turin, sipping their drinks at little tables under distant, elegant umbrellas. They were sensibly minding their own business. A few were gazing puzzled at the rich blue evening sky, as if they suspected some passing sonic boom. Certainly none of them cared about us.

  We limped back toward the café. My shoes squeaked like the shoes of a bad TV comedian. The cobbles under our feet had broken and tumbled, and the seams of my shoes had gone loose. My shining patent-leather shoes were foul and grimy.

  We stepped through the arched double-doors of the Elena, and, somehow, despite all sense and reason, I found some immediate comfort. Because the Elena was the Elena: it had those round marble tables with their curvilinear legs, those maroon leather chairs with their shiny brass studs, those colossal time-stained mirrors… and a smell I hadn’t noticed there in years.

  Cigarettes. Everyone in the café was smoking. The air in the bar was cooler—it felt chilly, even. People wore sweaters.

  Massimo had friends there. A woman and her man. This woman beckoned us over, and the man, although he knew Massimo, was clearly unhappy to see him.

  This man was Swiss, but he wasn’t the jolly kind of Swiss I was used to seeing in Turin, some harmless Swiss banker on holiday who pops over the Alps to pick up some ham and cheese. This Swiss guy was young, yet as tough as old nails, with aviator shades and a long narrow scar in his hairline. He wore black nylon gloves and a raw canvas jacket with holster room in its armpits.

  The woman had tucked her impressive bust into a hand-knitted peasant sweater. Her sweater was gaudy, complex and aggressively gorgeous, and so was she. She had smoldering eyes thick with mascara, and talon-like red painted nails, and a thick gold watch that could have doubled as brass knuckles.

  “So Massimo is back,” said the woman. She had a cordial yet guarded tone, like a woman who has escaped a man’s bed and needs compelling reasons to return.

  “I brought a friend for you tonight,” said Massimo, helping himself to a chair.

  “So I see. And what does your friend have in mind for us? Does he play backgammon?”

  The pair had a backgammon set on their table. The Swiss mercenary rattled dice in a cup. “We’re very good at backgammon,” he told me mildly. He had the extremely menacing tone of a practiced killer who can’t even bother to be scary.

  “My friend here is from the American CIA,” said Massimo. “We’re here to do some serious drinking.”

  “How nice! I can speak American to you, Mr. CIA,” the woman volunteered. She aimed a dazzling smile at me. “What is your favorite American baseball team?”

  “I root for the Boston Red Sox.”

  “I love the Seattle Green Sox,” she told us, just to be coy.

  The waiter brought us a bottle of Croatian fruit brandy. The peoples of the Balkans take their drinking seriously, so their bottles tend toward a rather florid design. This bottle was frankly fantastic: it was squat, acid-etched, curvilinear, and flute-necked, and with a triple portrait of Tito, Nasser and Nehru, all toasting one another. There were thick flakes of gold floating in its paralyzing murk.

  Massimo yanked the gilded cork, stole the woman’s cigarettes, and tucked an unfiltered cig in the corner of his mouth. With his slopping shot-glass in his fingers he was a different man.

  “Zhivali!” the woman pronounced, and we all tossed back a hearty shot of venom.

  The temptress chose to call herself “Svetlana,” while her Swiss bodyguard was calling himself “Simon.”

  I had naturally thought that it was insane for Massimo to denounce me as a CIA spy, yet this gambit was clearly helping the situation. As an American spy, I wasn’t required to say much. No one expected me to know anything useful, or to do anything worthwhile.

  However, I was hungry, so I ordered the snack plate. The attentive waiter was not my favorite Elena waiter. He might have been a cousin. He brought us raw onions, pickles, black bread, a hefty link of sausage, and a wooden tub of creamed butter. We also got a notched pig-iron knife and a battered chopping board.

  Simon put the backgammon set away.

  All these crude and ugly things on the table—the knife, the chopping board, even the bad sausage—had all been made in Italy. I could see little Italian maker’s marks hand-etched into all of them.

  “So you’re hunting here in Torino, like us?” probed Svetlana.

  I smiled back at her. “Yes, certainly!”

  “So, what do you plan to do with him when you catch him? Will you put him on trial?”

  “A fair trial is the American way!” I told them. Simon thought this remark was quite funny. Simon was not an evil man by nature. Simon probably suffered long nights of existential regret whenever he cut a man’s throat.

  “So,” Simon offered, caressing the rim of his dirty shot glass with one nylongloved finger, “So even the Americans expect ‘the Rat’ to show his whiskers in here!”

  “The Elena does pull a crowd,” I agreed. “So it all makes good sense. Don’t you think?”

  Everyone loves to be told that their thinking makes good sense. They were happy to hear me allege this. Maybe I didn’t look or talk much like an American agent, but when you’re a spy, and guzzling fruit brandy, and gnawing sausage, these minor inconsistencies don’t upset anybody.

  We were all being sensible.

  Leaning his black elbows on our little table, Massimo weighed in. “The Rat is clever. He plans to sneak over the Alps again. He’ll go back to Nice and Marseilles. He’ll rally his militias.”

  Simon stopped with a knife-stabbed chunk of blood sausage on the way to his gullet. “You really believe that?”

  “Of course I do! What did Napoleon say? ‘The death of a million men means nothing to a man like me!’ It’s impossible to corner Nicolas the Rat. The Rat has a star of destiny.”

  The woman watched Massimo’s eyes. Massimo was one of her informants. Being a woman, she had heard his lies before and was used to them. She also knew that no informant lies all the time.

  “Then he’s here in Torino tonight,” she concluded.

 
Massimo offered her nothing.

  She immediately looked to me. I silently stroked my chin in a sagely fashion.

  “Listen, American spy,” she told me politely, “you Americans are a simple, honest people, so good at tapping phone calls… It won’t hurt your feelings any if Nicolas Sarkozy is found floating face-down in the River Po. Instead of teasing me here, as Massimo is so fond of doing, why don’t you just tell me where Sarkozy is? I do want to know.”

  I knew very well where President Nicolas Sarkozy was supposed to be. He was supposed to be in the Elysée Palace carrying out extensive economic reforms.

  Simon was more urgent. “You do want us to know where the Rat is, don’t you?” He showed me a set of teeth edged in Swiss gold. “Let us know! That would save the International Courts of Justice a lot of trouble.”

  I didn’t know Nicolas Sarkozy. I had met him twice when he was French Minister of Communication, when he proved that he knew a lot about the Internet. Still, if Nicolas Sarkozy was not the President of France, and if he was not in the Elysée Palace, then, being a journalist, I had a pretty good guess of his whereabouts.

  “Cherchez la femme,” I said.

  Simon and Svetlana exchanged thoughtful glances. Knowing one another well, and knowing their situation, they didn’t have to debate their next course of action. Simon signaled the waiter. Svetlana threw a gleaming coin onto the table. They bundled their backgammon set and kicked their leather chairs back. They left the café without another word.

  Massimo rose. He sat in Svetlana’s abandoned chair, so that he could keep a wary eye on the café’s double-door to the street. Then he helped himself to her abandoned pack of Turkish cigarettes.

  I examined Svetlana’s abandoned coin. It was large, round, and minted from pure silver, with a gaudy engraving of the Taj Mahal. “Fifty Dinars,” it read, in Latin script, Hindi, Arabic, and Cyrillic.

  “The booze around here really gets on top of me”, Massimo complained. Unsteadily, he stuffed the ornate cork back into the brandy bottle. He set a slashed pickle on a buttered slice of black bread.

  “Is he coming here?”

  “Who?”

  “Nicolas Sarkozy. ‘Nicolas the Rat.’”

  “Oh, him,” said Massimo, chewing his bread. “In this version of Italy, I think Sarkozy’s already dead. God knows there’s enough people trying to kill him. The Arabs, Chinese, Africans… he turned the south of France upside down! There’s a bounty on him big enough to buy Olivetti—not that there’s much left of Olivetti.”

  I had my summer jacket on, and I was freezing. “Why is it so damn cold in here?”

  “That’s climate change,” said Massimo. “Not in this Italy—in your Italy. In your Italy, you’ve got a messed-up climate. In this Italy, it’s the human race that’s messed-up. Here, as soon as Chernobyl collapsed, a big French reactor blew up on the German border… and they all went for each other’s throats! Here NATO and the European Union are even deader than the Warsaw Pact.”

  Massimo was proud to be telling me this. I drummed my fingers on the chilly tabletop. “It took you a while to find that out, did it?”

  “The big transition always hinges in the 1980s,” said Massimo,“because that’s when we made the big breakthroughs.”

  “In your Italy, you mean.”

  “That’s right. Before the 1980s, nobody understood the physics of parallel worlds… but after that transition, we could pack a zero-point energy generator into a laptop. Just boil the whole problem down into one single micro-electronic mechanical system.”

  “So you’ve got zero-point energy MEMS chips,” I said.

  He chewed more bread and pickle. Then he nodded.

  “You’ve got MEMS chips and you were offering me some fucking lousy memristor? You must think I’m a real chump!”

  “You’re not a chump.” Massimo sawed a fresh slice of bad bread. “But you’re from the wrong Italy. It was your own stupid world that made you this stupid, Luca. In my Italy, you were one of the few men who could talk sense to my Dad. My Dad used to confide in you. He trusted you, he thought you were a great writer. You wrote his biography.”

  “‘Massimo Montaldo, Senior,’” I said.

  Massimo was startled. “Yeah. That’s him.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not supposed to know that.”

  I had guessed it. A lot of news is made from good guesses.

  “Tell me how you feel about that,” I said, because this is always a useful question for an interviewer who has lost his way.

  “I feel desperate,” he told me, grinning. “Desperate! But I feel much less desperate here than I was when I was the spoilt-brat dope-addict son of the world’s most famous scientist. Before you met me—Massimo Montaldo—had you ever heard of any ‘Massimo Montaldo’?”

  “No. I never did.”

  “That’s right. I’m never in any of the other Italies. There’s never any other Massimo Montaldo. I never meet another version of myself—and I never meet another version of my father, either. That’s got to mean something crucial. I know it means something important.”

  “Yes,” I told him, “that surely does mean something.”

  “I think,” he said, “that I know what it means. It means that space and time are not just about physics and computation. It means that human beings really matter in the course of world events. It means that human beings can truly change the world. It means that our actions have consequence.”

  “The human angle,” I said, “always makes a good story.”

  “It’s true. But try telling that story,” he said, and he looked on the point of tears. “Tell that story to any human being. Go on, do it! Tell anybody in here! Help yourself.”

  I looked around the Elena. There were some people in there, the local customers, normal people, decent people, maybe a dozen of them. Not remarkable people, not freakish, not weird or strange, but normal. Being normal people, they were quite at ease with their lot and accepting their daily existences.

  Once upon a time, the Elena used to carry daily newspapers. Newspapers were supplied for customers on those special long wooden bars.

  In my world, the Elena didn’t do that anymore. Too few newspapers, and too much Internet.

  Here the Elena still had those newspapers on those handy wooden bars. I rose from my chair and I had a good look at them. There were stylish imported newspapers, written in Hindi, Arabic and Serbo-Croatian. I had to look hard to find a local paper in Italian. There were two, both printed on a foul gray paper full of flecks of badly-pulped wood.

  I took the larger Italian paper to the café table. I flicked through the headlines and I read all the lede paragraphs. I knew immediately I was reading lies.

  It wasn’t that the news was so terrible, or so deceitful. But it was clear that the people reading this newspaper were not expected to make any practical use of news. The Italians were a modest, colonial people. The news that they were offered was a set of feeble fantasies. All the serious news was going on elsewhere.

  There was something very strong and lively in the world called the “Non-Aligned Movement.” It stretched from the Baltics all the way to the Balkans, throughout the Arab world, and all the way through India. Japan and China were places that the giant Non-Aligned superpower treated with guarded respect. America was some kind of humbled farm where the Yankees spent their time in church.

  Those other places, the places that used to matter—France, Germany, Britain, “Brussels”—these were obscure and poor and miserable places. Their names and locales were badly spelled.

  Cheap black ink was coming off on my fingers. I no longer had questions for Massimo, except for one. “When do we get out of here?”

  Massimo buttered his tattered slice of black bread. “I was never searching for the best of all possible worlds,” he told me. “I was looking for the best of all possible me’s. In an Italy like this Italy, I really matter. Your version of Italy is pretty backward—but this world had a nuclear exchange. Europe had a civ
il war, and most cities in the Soviet Union are big puddles of black glass.”

  I took my Moleskin notebook from my jacket pocket. How pretty and sleek that fancy notebook looked, next to that gray pulp newspaper. “You don’t mind if I jot this down, I hope?”

  “I know that this sounds bad to you—but trust me, that’s not how history works. History doesn’t have any ‘badness’ or ‘goodness.’ This world has a future. The food’s cheap, the climate is stable, the women are gorgeous… and since there’s only three billion people left alive on Earth, there’s a lot of room.”

  Massimo pointed his crude sausage-knife at the café’s glass double door. “Nobody here ever asks for ID, nobody cares about passports… They’ve never even heard of electronic banking! A smart guy like you, you could walk out of here and start a hundred tech companies.”

  “If I didn’t get my throat cut.”

  “Oh, people always overstate that little problem! The big problem is—you know—who wants to work that hard? I got to know this place, because I knew that I could be a hero here. Bigger than my father. I’d be smarter than him, richer than him, more famous, more powerful. I would be better! But that is a burden. ‘Improving the world,’ that doesn’t make me happy at all. That’s a curse, it’s like slavery.’”

  “What does make you happy, Massimo?”

  Clearly Massimo had given this matter some thought. “Waking up in a fine hotel with a gorgeous stranger in my bed. That’s the truth! And that would be true of every man in every world, if he was honest.”

  Massimo tapped the neck of the garish brandy bottle with the back of the carving knife. “My girlfriend Svetlana, she understands all that pretty well, but—there’s one other thing. I drink here. I like to drink, I admit that—but they really drink around here. This version of Italy is in the almighty Yugoslav sphere of influence.”

  I had been doing fine so far, given my circumstances. Suddenly the nightmare sprang upon me, unfiltered, total, and wholesale. Chills of terror climbed my spine like icy scorpions. I felt a strong, irrational, animal urge to abandon my comfortable chair and run for my life.

  I could run out of the handsome café and into the twilight streets of Turin. I knew Turin, and I knew that Massimo would never find me there. Likely he wouldn’t bother to look.