A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  Aino reached over the fiberglass gunwale and cleaned her hands in the racing seawater. “Just talk slowly to her,” she said. “The old lady writes in Swedish, did you know that? I found out all about her. That’s her first language, Swedish. But they say her Finnish is very good. For an Ålander.”

  • • •

  Starlitz pulled up at the little wooden dock. The entire island, shored in weed-slimed dark granite, was about twenty acres. The little old lady lived here with her even older and frailer brother. They’d both been born on the island, and had originally lived with their parents, but the father had died in 1950 and the mother in 1968.

  The only access to the island was by boat. There were no phones, no electricity, and no plumbing. The home was a two-story stone mansion with a steep slate roof, a stone well, and a wooden outhouse. The eaves were carved and painted in yellow and red. There were some chickens and a couple of squat little island sheep. A skinny wooden derrick had a homemade lighthouse, with an oil lantern. A lot of seagulls around.

  Starlitz yelled a loud ‘ahoy’ from the dock, which seemed the most polite approach, but there was no answer from the house. So they trudged up across the rocks and turf, and found the mansion’s door and knocked. No response.

  Starlitz tried the salt-warped door. It was unlocked. The windows were open and a faint breeze was playing through the parlor. There were hundreds of shelved books in Finnish and Swedish, some fluttering papers, and quite a few cheerily demented oil paintings. Some quite handsome bronze statuary and some framed Finnish theater posters from the 1930s. A wind-up Victrola.

  Starlitz opened the hall closet and looked at the rough weather gear—oilskins and boots. “You know something? This little old lady is as tall as a house. She’s a goddamned Viking.” He left the parlor for the composition room. He found a wooden secretary and a fine velvet chair. Dictionaries, a Swedish encyclopedia. Some well-thumbed travel books and Nordic photography collections. “There’s nothing in here,” he muttered.

  “What are you looking for?” said Aino.

  “I dunno exactly. Something to explain how this works.”

  “Here’s a note!” Aino called.

  Starlitz went back into the parlor. He took the note, which had been written in copperplate longhand on lined Speffy the Nerkulen novelty notepaper.

  “Dear Mister Starlins,” read the note, “please pardon my not here being. I go to Helsingfors to testify. I go to Suomi Parliament as long needing for civic duty call. I regret I must miss you and hoping to speak with you about my many readers in Tokio another much more happier time. Sorry you must row so far and not have meet. Please help your self(s) to tea and biscuits all ready in kitchen. Goodbye!”

  “She’s gone to Helsinki,” Starlitz said.

  “She never travels anymore. I’m very surprised.” Aino frowned. “She cernid have saved us a lot of trouble if she had a cellphone.”

  “Why would they want her in Helsinki?”

  “Oh, they made her go there, I suppose. The local Ålanders. The local collaborationist power structure.”

  “What good do they think she can do? She’s not political.”

  “That’s true, but they are very proud of her here. After all, the children’s clinic—The Flüüvin’s Children’s Clinic in Föglö?—that was hers.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Also the park in Sottunga. The Flüüvin Park in Brändö and the Grand Flüüvin Festival Playground. She built all of those. She never keeps the money. She gives the money away. Mostly to the Flüüvin Pediatric Disease Foundation.”

  Starlitz pulled off his shades and wiped his forehead. “You wouldn’t know exactly which pediatric diseases in particular have caught her fancy, right?”

  “I never understood such behavior,” said Aino. “Really, it must be a mental illness. A childless spinster from the unjust social order.… Denied any healthy sex life or outlets.… Living as a hermit with all her silly books and paintings all these years.… No wonder she’s gone mad.”

  “Okay, we’re going back,” Starlitz said. “I’ve had it.”

  Raf and Starlitz were outside in the woods, slapping at the big slow-moving Scandinavian mosquitoes. “I thought we had an understanding,” Raf said, over a muffled chorus of bestial howls from the sauna. “I told you not to bring her back here.”

  “She’s your lieutenant, Raf. You straighten her out.”

  “You could have been more tactful. Invent some little deception.”

  “I didn’t wanna get dumped off the boat.” Starlitz scratched his bitten neck. “I face a very serious kink in my negotiations, man. My target decamped big-time and I got a very limited market window. This is Japanese pop culture we’re talking here. The Japanese run product cycles in hyperdrive. They can burn out a consumer vogue in four weeks flat. There’s nobody saying that Froofies will move long-term product like Smurfs or Seuss.”

  “I understand your financial difficulties with your Tokyo backers. If you can just be patient. We can take steps. We’ll innovate. If necessary the Republic of the Ålands will nationalize literary production.”

  “Man, the point of this thing is to sue the guys in Japan who are already ripping her off. We gotta have something on paper that looks strong enough to stand up and bark in the courts in The Hague. You gonna strong-arm people anywhere over vaporous crap like intellectual property, it’s gotta look heavy-duty, or they don’t back off.”

  “Now you’re frightening me,” Raf said. “You should take a little time in the sauna. Relax. They’re running videos.”

  “Videos right in all that goddamn steam, Raf?”

  Raf nodded. “These are some very special videos.”

  “I fuckin’ hate videos, man.”

  “They’re Bosnian videos.”

  “Really?”

  “Not easy to obtain. They’re from the camps.”

  “You’re showing those mercs atrocity videos?”

  Raf spread his arms. “Welcome to twenty-first-century Europe!” he shouted at the empty shoreline. “Brand-new European apartheid regimes! Where gangs of war criminals abduct and systematically rape women from other ethnic groups. While the studio lights blaze and the mini-cams roll!”

  “I’d heard those rumors,” Starlitz said slowly. “Pretty hard to believe them, though.”

  “You go inside that sauna, and you’ll believe those videos. It’s quite incredible, but it’s all quite real. You might not enjoy them very much, but you need to see this video documentation. You must come to terms with these practices in order to understand modern political developments. It’s video that is like raw meat.”

  “Must be faked, man.”

  Raf shook his head. “Europeans always say that. They always ignore the rumors. They always discover the atrocities when it is five years too late. Then they act very shocked and concerned. Those videos exist, my friend. I’ve got them. And I’ve got more than that. I’ve got some of the women.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I bought the women. I bartered for them with a pair of Stinger missiles. Fifteen Bosnian abductees. I had them shipped up here in sealed cargo trucks. I went to a lot of trouble.”

  “White slavery, man?”

  “I’m not particular about color. It wasn’t me who enslaved them. I’m the man who saved their lives. There were many other girls who were more stubborn or, who knows, probably less pretty. They’re all dead in a ditch with bullets in the backs of their heads. These women are survivors. I wish I had more than fifteen of them, but I’m only getting started.” Raf smiled. “Fifteen human souls! I rescued fifteen people! Do you know that’s more people than I’ve ever personally killed?”

  “What are you going to do with these women?”

  “They’ll entertain my loyal troops, first of all. I needed them for that, which gave me the idea. I admit this: it’s very hard work in the sex-labor industry. But under my care, at least they won’t be shot afterward.”

  Raf strolled along the rocky
shoreline to the edge of the resort’s dock. It was a nice dock, well outfitted. The fiberglass speed launch was tied up to one rubber-padded edge of it, but the dock could have handled a minor cruise ship.

  “Those women will be grateful. Here, we will admit they exist! They haven’t even had identities. And this world is full of people like them. After ten years of civil war, they sell slaves openly now in the Sudan. Kurds are gassed like vermin by Iraqis and shot out of hand by Turks. The Sinhalese are killing Tamils. We can’t forget East Timor. All over the planet, groups of little people are quietly vanishing. You can find them cowering, hiding, all around the world, without papers, without legal identities.… The world’s truly stateless people. My kind of people. But these are rich little islands—where there is room for thousands of them.”

  “This is a serious new wrinkle to the scheme, man. Did you clear it with Petersburg?”

  “This development does not require debate,” Raf said loftily. “It is a moral decision. People should not be killed in pogroms, by brutes who hate them merely because they are different. As a revolutionary idealist, I refuse to stomach such atrocities. These oppressed people need a great leader. A visionary. A savior. Me.”

  “Kind of a personality-cult thing, then.”

  Raf shook his long-haired head in sorrow. “Oh, you’d prefer them all quietly dead, I suppose! Like everyone else in the modern world who never lifts a hand to help them!”

  “What if the locals complain?”

  “I’ll make the aliens into citizens. I’ll have them outvote all the locals. A warlord, justly voted into power by the will of the majority—wouldn’t that be lovely? I’ll raise a postmodern Statue of Liberty for the world’s huddled masses. Not like that pious faker in New York harbor. Refugees aren’t vermin, even if the rich despise them. They’re displaced human beings without a place to rally. Let them rally here with me! By the time I leave power—years from now, when I’m old and gray—they’ll be accomplishing great works in these little islands.”

  The hookers arrived on a fishing trawler. They looked very much like normal hookers from the world’s fastest-growing hooker economy, Russia. They might have been women from the Baltic States. They looked like Slavic women at any rate. When they climbed from the trawler they looked rather seasick, but they seemed resolved. Not panicked, not aghast, not crushed by terror. Just like a group of fifteen more-or-less-young women, in microskirts and spandex, about to go through the hard work of having sex with strangers.

  Starlitz was unsurprised to find Khoklov shepherding the hookers. Khoklov was accompanied by two brand-new bodyguards. The number of people aware of Raf’s location was necessarily kept small.

  “I hate working as a pimp,” Khoklov groaned. He had been drinking on the boat. “At times like these, I truly know I’ve become a criminal.”

  “Raf says these girls are Bosnian slave labor. What’s the scoop?”

  Khoklov started in surprise. “What do you mean? What do you take me for? These girls are Estonian hookers. I brought them over from Tallinn myself.”

  Lekhi watched carefully as the bodyguards shepherded their charges toward the whooping brutes inside the sauna. “That sure sounds like Serbo-Croatian those girls are talking, ace.”

  “Nonsense. That’s Estonian. Don’t pretend you can understand Estonian. Nobody understands that Finno-Ugric jabber.”

  “Raf told me these women are Bosnians. Says he bought them and he’s going to keep them. Why would he say that?”

  “Raf was joking with you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘joking’? He says they’re victims from a rapists’ gulag! There’s nothing funny about that! There just isn’t any way to make that funny.”

  Khoklov gazed at Starlitz in mournful astonishment. “Lekhi, why do you want gulags to be ‘funny’? Gulags aren’t funny. Pogroms aren’t funny. War is not funny. Rape is never funny. Human life is very hard, you see. Men and women truly suffer in this world.”

  “I know that, man.”

  Khoklov looked him over, then slowly shook his head. “No, Lekhi, you don’t know that. You just don’t know it the way that a Russian knows it.”

  Starlitz considered this. It seemed inescapably true. “Did you ask those girls if they were from Bosnia?”

  “Why would I ask them that? You know the official Kremlin line on the Yugoslav conflict. Yeltsin says that our fellow Orthodox Slavs are incapable of such crimes. Those rape-camp stories are alarmist libels spread by Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Relax, Lekhi. These women here today, they are all Estonian professionals. You can have my word on that.”

  “Raf just gave me his word in a form that was highly otherwise.”

  Khoklov looked him in the eye. “Lekhi, who do you believe: some hippie terrorist, or a seasoned KGB officer and member in good standing of the Russian mafia?”

  Starlitz gazed down at the flower-strewn Åland turf. “Okay, Pulat Romanevich.… For a moment there, I was actually considering taking some kind of, you know, action.… Well, never mind. Lemme get to the point. Our bank deal is falling apart.”

  Khoklov was truly shocked. “What do you mean? You can’t be serious. We’re doing wonderfully. Petersburg loves us.”

  “I mean that the old lady can’t be bought. She’s just too far away to touch. The deal is dead meat, ace. I don’t know just how the momentum died, but I can sure smell the decay. This situation is not sustainable, man. I think it’s time you and me got the hell out of here.”

  “You couldn’t get your merchandising deal? That’s a pity, Lekhi. But never mind that. I’m sure we can find some other capitalization scheme that’s just as quick and just as cheap. There’s always dope and weapons.”

  “No, the whole set-up stinks. It was the video thing that tipped me off. Pulat, did I ever tell you about the fact that I, personally, never show up on video?”

  “What’s that, Lekhi?”

  “At least, I didn’t used to. Back in the eighties, if you pointed a video camera at me it would crack, or split, or the chip would blow. I just never registered on videotape.”

  Slowly, Khoklov removed a silver flask from within his suit jacket. He had a long contemplative glug, then shuddered violently. He focused his eyes on Starlitz with weary deliberation. “I beg your pardon. Would you repeat that, please?”

  “It’s that whole video thing, man. That’s why I got into the online business in the first place. Originally, I was a very analog kind of guy. But the video surveillance was seriously getting me down. I couldn’t even walk down to the corner store for a pack of cigs without setting off half a dozen goddamn videos. But then—I discovered online anonymity. Online encryption. Online pseudonymity. That really helped my personal situation. Now I had a way to stay underground, stay totally unknown, even when I was being observed and monitored twenty-four hours a day. I found a way that I could go on being myself.”

  “Lekhi, are you drunk?”

  “Nyet. Pay attention, ace. I’m leveling with you here.”

  “Did Raf give you something to drink?”

  “Sure. We had a coffee earlier.”

  “Lekhi, you’re on drugs. Do you have a gun? Give it to me now.”

  “Raf gave all the guns to the Suomi kids. They’re keeping the guns till the mercs sober up. Simple precaution.”

  “Maybe you’re still jetlagged. It’s hard to sleep properly when the sun never sets. You should go lie down.”

  “Look, ace, I’m not the kind of fucking wimp who doesn’t know when he’s on acid. Normal people’s rules just don’t apply to me, that’s all. I’m not a normal guy. I’m Leggy Starlitz, I’m a very, very strange guy. That’s why I tend to end up in situations like this.” Starlitz ran his hand over his sweating scalp. “Lemme put it this way. You remember that mafia chick you were banging, back in Azerbaijan?”

  Khoklov took a moment to access the memory. “You mean the charming and lovely Tamara Akhmedovna?”

  “That’s right. The wife of the Party Secre
tary. I leveled with Tamara in a situation like this. I told her straight-out that her little scene was coming apart. I couldn’t tell her why, but I just knew it. At the time, she didn’t believe me, either. Just like you’re not believing me now. You know where Tamara Akhmedovna is, right now? She’s selling used cars in Los Angeles.”

  Khoklov had gone pale. “All right,” he said. He whipped the cellular from an inner pocket of his jacket. “Don’t tell me any more. I can see you have a bad feeling. Let me make some phone calls.”

  “You want Tamara’s phone number?”

  “No. Don’t go away. And don’t do anything crazy. All I ask is—just let me make a few contacts.” Khoklov began punching digits.

  Starlitz walked by the sauna. Four slobbering, buck-naked drunks dashed out and staggered down the trail in front of him. Their pale sweating hides were covered with crumpled green birch leaves from Finnish sauna whisks.

  They plunged into the chilly sea with ecstatic grunts of ambiguous pain.

  Somewhere inside, the New World Order comrades were singing “Auld Lang Syne.” The Russians were having a hard time finding the beat.

  Raf was enjoying a snooze in the curvilinear Aalto BarcaLounger when Khoklov and Starlitz woke him.

  “We’ve been betrayed,” Khoklov announced.

  “Oh?” said Raf. “Where? Who is the traitor?”

  “Our superiors, unfortunately.”

  Raf considered this, rubbing his eyelids. “Why do you say that?”

  “They liked our idea very much,” Khoklov said. “So they stole it from us.”

  “Intellectual piracy, man,” Starlitz said. “It’s a bad scene.”

  “The Ålands deal is over,” Khoklov said. “The Organizatsiya’s Higher Circles have decided that we have too much initiative. They want much closer institutional control of such a wonderful idea. Our Finnish hacker kids have jumped ship and joined them. They re-routed all the Suns to Kaliningrad.”

  “What is Kaliningrad?” Raf said.

  “It’s this weird little leftover piece of Russia on the far side of all three independent Baltic nations,” Starlitz said helpfully. “They say they’re going to make Kaliningrad into a new Russian Hong Kong. The old Hong Kong is about to be metabolized by the Chinese, so the mafia figures it’s time for Russia to sprout one. They’ll make this little Kaliningrad outpost into a Baltic duty-free zone cum European micro-buffer state. And they’re paying our Finn hacker kids three times what we pay, plus air fare.”