Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  “It’s okay, Zeta. You’re fine. You just gotta take it a little easy. Try not to scare the straights.”

  “I bet Turkey would really be fun if it wasn’t for all the scary guys.”

  Starlitz turned from the window. “Forget about Turkey, babe. Real soon now, you and me, we’re flying to Mexico.”

  Zeta’s clear brow clouded thoughtfully. “They’re not real, either, are they, Dad? I mean, the G-7 girls. You made them up, right? They’re not real.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “It’s okay, Dad. I don’t care. Mom One and Mom Two really hate G-7, but I knew all along that they were just pretend. I like G-7. I like video games, they’re not real. I like cartoons, they’re not real. I like John Webster’s revenge plays, even though they’re just make-believe.”

  Starlitz stood flatfooted. “You like John Webster’s revenge plays?”

  “Yeah, Duchess of Malfi, White Devil, those are my favorites!”

  “I keep forgetting you were schooled at home,” Starlitz said.

  Zeta stared across the echoing hall. She had suddenly noticed Gonca Utz. “Who is she?”

  “Well, that happens to be a real one.”

  “A real one! Wow! How did she get in here?”

  “She’s a star,” said Starlitz. “She is a true rising star, and the world doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Wow, she is so beautiful!” Zeta looked at her, goggle eyed behind her cheap plastic shades. “What should I do, Dad? Because she’s a star.”

  “Go ask her for her autograph.”

  “Oh, I can’t.” Zeta was attacked by shyness.

  “Go ahead! It’s what stars live for.”

  Starlitz watched from a careful distance as his daughter approached Gonca Utz. Zeta bravely traipsed around the perimeter of Ozbey’s thick-necked bodyguards, and intruded herself on the actress’s attention. Miss Utz put down her clipboard, plucked out her Walkman earplugs, removed her Milanese sunglasses. She offered Zeta a radiant, unguarded smile that would have killed and cooked any male human being.

  Zeta returned, skipping. “Look, she signed on my arm with a pen!”

  “Wow.”

  “She was super nice to me! She wrote, like, a whole secret message on me.” Zeta stared at the long Turkish script. “I wonder what it says.”

  “Let’s go wash that off before we leave,” said Starlitz.

  STARLITZ AND ZETA WOKE ANOTHER CABDRIVER AS HE slumbered in the sun outside the terminal. They returned to the Meridien. Dragged from its dogmatic snooze, the hotel was suddenly booming. A new set of international flagpoles had gone up, and every banner in developed Europe snapped in the offshore sea breeze. The ancient neon had been uprooted and cast aside, while a new digital display board, four times its size, lay in the grass to await its moment. A new television logo was being painted across the hotel’s top floors, while the roof sprouted a high-tech forest of spanking-new microwave horns.

  A flock of limos had appeared like magic below the casino’s portico, sporting plates from Istanbul, Ankara, and Adana.

  Inside the place the line at registration was bustling.

  “I’m hungry,” Zeta complained. “I’m all hot and sweaty!”

  Starlitz examined her. “Better lose that big hat and the pullover. You can change in my room.”

  They stepped into the elevator. Even the hotel’s Muzak had transmuted, from old sixties British nostalgia hits to a snappy syndrum medley of nineties Turkish pop divas: Sibel Can, Ebru Gündes, Hülya Avsar. Zeta tapped her foot in time, with a flapping, smacking sound. She was wearing a plastic, pebbled set of G-7 beach zoris.

  Starlitz tried his key. The door did not respond. He removed an American Express card and popped the lock.

  The rumpled hotel bed had been stripped and not remade. There was no sign of Vanna. “Damn!” Starlitz said. “We gotta find your mom.”

  “Why, Dad?”

  “Because she’s got all your clothes and all your documents.”

  “But I don’t have any luggage! Mom One sold all our stuff in Budapest.”

  “Well, I noticed she still had that big Guatemala bag with her.”

  “Huh.” Zeta wrinkled her nose. Then she walked across the room to the phone. She picked it up entirely from the bedside: an ungainly, old-fashioned Ericsson handset.

  An American passport had been taped to the phone’s brass bottom, along with some baby aspirin, a folding toothbrush, three animal Band-Aids, and a set of barrettes.

  “She always hides stuff under there,” said Zeta practically. “Like our house keys, and our pager numbers and stuff.”

  Starlitz flipped through Zeta’s grimy passport. He examined the grinning, pigtailed blur beneath the official lamination. “This photo sure doesn’t look much like you.”

  “Oh, my pictures never look like me.”

  Starlitz examined the passport’s stamped pages. “I think they spelled your names wrong. And there’s no record here of your ever being in Cyprus. Or even in Hungary.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Starlitz shrugged.

  A polite knock sounded at the door. Viktor Bilibin had appeared.

  “Hi, Vic!” Zeta sang out.

  Viktor aimed a crooked grin at her. “Pretty clothes,” he said in English.

  “How did you get up here?” said Starlitz in Russian.

  “Our agents are watching this casino. There is much activity. They saw you come in with the little girl.”

  “And what about the girl’s mother? Have you seen her mother?”

  Viktor was startled. “Is that ugly old woman truly her mother?” He shook his head. “No, I haven’t seen her anywhere. I guess she left Girne.”

  “Stop talking Russian!” Zeta insisted.

  “Well, that’s Vanna all over,” Starlitz muttered. “She was never the kind of woman who would stay where you put her.”

  “For you we will speak English,” Viktor told Zeta gallantly. “You are ready to go inside the plane again? My uncle is waiting with the plane, to leave Cyprus.”

  “But I don’t want to get back in that stupid plane!” said Zeta bitterly. “There’s no room inside it, and it smells like plastic!” She threw herself on the bare mattress, crossed her arms, and lowered her chin to her chest.

  “It’s no use to stay here,” said Viktor sympathetically, and switched to Russian. “Ozbey has beaten you. The band is his story now.”

  “He hasn’t beaten me,” Starlitz said. “I have other obligations.”

  Viktor shrugged. “You are doing the best thing.” He patted his shallow chest, easing his tender Russian heart. “Forget G-7! Your own flesh and blood is more important than that silly pack of floozies!”

  “Why the tough talk, Viktor? You always came across like quite the G-7 fan.”

  “I liked them at first,” said Viktor sulkily. “But I bore easily.…”

  “You didn’t actually have sex with any of them, did you?”

  “Well, only one.”

  “Which one?”

  Viktor frowned. “That would be telling!”

  “Oh, never mind. To hell with it. It’s all part of the program.” Starlitz shook his head. “The sons of bitches tried to throw me outta my own room.… I gotta clean out my office and get the hell off this island.”

  “It’s too late. Ozbey’s men raided your office.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, they took the extra sets of financial books and all the floppy disks. In all the confusion here it was easy.”

  “Damn,” said Starlitz. “That’s a real blow.”

  “There is also some good news. While they were busy raiding your office, I took my black bag and burgled Ozbey’s office.” Viktor reached into the bellows pocket of his cargo ankle-pants. “Look, here is a fine Italian pistol from Ozbey’s own desk.”

  “Cool!” said Starlitz, accepting the loaded golden Beretta. He sniffed the chamber. The gun had seen plenty of use.

  “And here is a
Turkish gun permit identifying the bearer as a special weapons expert in the covert-action department of the MIT. It’s stamped and signed!”

  Starlitz examined the document, fingering its crisp rag paper with care. With its gilt curlicues and multicolored inks it bore the authentic musty reek of the highest, weirdest levels of Turkey’s Kafkalike bureaucracy. “Now, this is some valuable paper, kid. This license must be worth ten times what this pistol is. The paper’s no use outside Turkey, though.” Starlitz handed it back. “You keep it.”

  “Of course,” nodded Viktor, refolding the document carefully. “He has such good taste, Mr. Ozbey.… There was a very nice cocktail shaker.… Some cocaine, some amyl nitrate, some Viagra.… A very candid photo of the girlfriend Gonca.… A framed thank-you note from the female Turkish prime minister … Also, a complete set, in Turkish, of the works of Jan Fleeminck!”

  “ ‘Jan Fleeminck’? Who’s he, some kind of Belgian theorist?”

  “No, no, the British spy, the famous imperialist warmonger.”

  Starlitz pondered this. “ ‘Ian Fleming’?”

  “Yes.” Viktor scowled. “Jan Fleeminck, exactly as I said. I have seen those hateful propaganda films … From Russia with Love … Ha! Very old, stupid movie! No understanding of my culture! Many cheap special effects!”

  Starlitz was still holding the Beretta. For some reason he did not yet grasp, the dim yet potent intuition struck him that it would make perfect sense to shoot Viktor five or six times now. The Russian had trustingly handed him the pistol, Starlitz knew that it was loaded, he had the drop on Viktor, and this was the last opportunity he would have to shoot Viktor for quite some time. The act of shooting Viktor would increase the world’s sum of human happiness. The planet’s thin pretense of consensus reality would be far better off with Viktor Bilibin shot. The next time Starlitz made Viktor’s acquaintance, it would probably be too late to shoot Viktor—considering that Viktor was an entity with such unique and rapidly developing personal qualities. A mature Viktor on the far side of Y2K would surely be trouble of the gravest kind.

  But Starlitz had put that kind of thing well behind him. Shooting Viktor was more trouble to him than it was worth. It was probably already too late to shoot Viktor. Besides, there was a child in the room.

  Starlitz carefully tucked the pistol in the back of his belt. “Viktor,” he said warmly, “I know your uncle’s kind of gruff, but deep down the old man must be mighty proud of you. You’ll be staying in Cyprus quite a while, right?”

  “Of course! I love this island! Girls, sun, music, grilled kebabs … It’s like paradise!”

  “You’re not heading anywhere near the United States, right?”

  Viktor chuckled. “Ha! As if they’d give me a green card.”

  “Then I guess this is good-bye, Vik. There’s just one thing. I want you to keep an eye peeled for this girl’s mother, okay? Try the gay bars, peace rallies, veggie restaurants.… If you happen to run into her, well, give her a hundred bucks and some tranquilizers. Put it all on my tab.”

  Viktor nodded respectfully. “Good-bye, Mr. Starlitz. It was pleasant to meet you. Thank you, that I learned so much from you. How do I call you?”

  “You just keep your cell phone handy, Viktor; I’ll call you. Where is Khoklov now?”

  KHOKLOV WAS WAITING FOR THEM, NEAR THE ABANDONED beach in the ghost town of Famagusta. Following his phoned instructions, they’d pulled up at the entropic, collapsing corner of the defunct Greek metropolis. The half-abandoned petrol station, which dated back to the early seventies, sat just at the edge of the Verboten Zone. A dispirited, weedy line of Martian-red barbed wire stretched halfway into the Mediterranean surf.

  Khoklov had brought his special airplane with him, stuffed into the trunk of a large Mercedes sedan. The petrol station had everything Khoklov needed for their escape flight: gasoline, compressed air, relative privacy, and a flat launching surface.

  Starlitz gazed past the feeble Famagusta Green Line at the glassless facades of the crumbling, pastel beach hotels. The grim exigencies of the civil war had caused the Greek section of Famagusta to be entirely evacuated. The Greeks were unwilling to return, and the Turks were forbidden to go in. Therefore, the little pocket Riviera had turned into a creaking, swaying, grass-covered necropolis.

  The year 1974 had taken a fatal wound to the guts here; pinned like a Cypriot moth in a cigar box, 1974 had become a parodic derelict, blasted clean from the grip of time. Big flocks of urban pigeons wheeled out of their impromptu rookeries. Houseplants had eaten all the homes. Feral lemons and oranges supported a mini-ecosystem of rats and stray dogs.

  “Nice car you got here,” Starlitz remarked.

  “It’s Albanian,” nodded Khoklov, lifting the trunk lid and pocketing the keys. “The Albanians are the biggest car thieves in Europe. The country’s entire regime are car thieves. They can snatch a Mercedes out of Bonn and have it in a minister’s garage in twelve hours.”

  “Swell racket,” Starlitz allowed. “Beats smuggling cigarettes.”

  “Luxury car alarms don’t scream aloud anymore. It’s all about satellite locators now,” Khoklov said darkly. He glanced across the tarmac. “Tell your daughter to hand me that air hose.”

  Zeta obediently came forward, tugging the long black reel. Then she returned to chatting with the gas station’s attendant, a scarred Turkish Cypriot urban guerrilla who had settled into a kindly middle age. The mustached station manager had the squinting look of a veteran sniper, but he had just favored Zeta with a gratis Neapolitan ice-cream bar from his big frosty gas-station fridge. It was clear that the old guy didn’t get much custom here at the edge of the abandoned barricade. The station was clearly a front for some other activity entirely.

  “This geezer grease monkey gonna give us any trouble here?” Starlitz said, squinting in the setting sun.

  “He’s on the payroll,” Khoklov said patiently. “He’s a Communist.”

  “Oh, yeah. Of course. That would explain it.”

  “Give me a hand with the president’s airplane. This is harder than it looks, you know.”

  Serbia’s version of Air Force One packed a lot of heft. With its ailerons, cable, and landing gear the collapsed aircraft weighed close to a ton. Getting it to the ghost town in a car trunk had been a real credit to Teutonic suspension systems.

  The aircraft had been folded up with crazy Swiss neatness, collapsing in on itself with layer after flat waffled layer, like an impossible cross between an Alpine tent and a vacuum-packed box of incontinence diapers. Starlitz and Khoklov couldn’t lift the entire fabric monster at once, but three men, working hard, could manhandle its polyester segments out of the bundling, and stretch and flop them into place.

  It was no picnic lugging the twin twenty-eight-horsepower engines. The toughest part of the job was bolting on the telescoping landing gear. Compared to the delicate plastic engines the aircraft’s rigid ailerons and the lean propellor blades were a literal snap.

  After they had spread it out, flat as polyester roadkill, Khoklov patiently pumped compressed air into the craft. Slowly it began to rise, yeastily, flopping and straining as the laboring compressor puffed it into proper shape. A segmented, multiwaffled, ridged single-wing began to assert itself across the weedy tarmac. The inflatable aircraft was twelve meters from tip to tip, and it was sleek, shiny, and deeply anomalous, just like a beached stingray.

  “You still remember DOS, don’t you?” Khoklov said. “Line commands, and all that?”

  “Doesn’t this heap run under Windows yet?” Starlitz said.

  “We only need to boot the system that controls these tensile cables,” Khoklov apologized. “After that I can pilot it by joystick.”

  Starlitz pulled fat, sturdy Velcro straps over the two tiny aircraft engines. Dwarfed by their own fuel tanks, the engines seemed absurdly small and frail. But it was obvious that they could get the job done, because the aircraft itself was nothing more than membranes, air, and wire. It possessed wings
, ailerons, a working rudder: with enough air pressure it was rigid enough for serious lift and speed. The polyester fabric skin was German ballistic rip-stop stuff that could probably take small-arms fire. Khoklov had a working four-man aircraft that weighed less than Styrofoam.

  “What kind of octane you want?” said Starlitz.

  “The highest available.”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t fill the reserve tanks. With you on board we don’t need the extra weight. The coast of Turkey is only half an hour away.”

  After a few words with the station attendant Starlitz began loading and carrying big jerricans full of gas. Once upon a time Starlitz had hauled containers this size with one hand. Nowadays, though, he waddled forth with a two-handed grip while his spine complained ominously.

  Starlitz laboriously decanted the jerrican into a stained plastic funnel. “Pulat Romanevich, this is some fine Swiss craftsmanship here, but I remember you as strictly a Mach one, Mach two kind of guy.”

  “It’s not about speed anymore, Lekhi. Speed went out with the Concorde and the cosmonauts. It’s all about stealth now.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “President Milosevic and his wife, they’re from the old East European school. They don’t want to end up like the Ceauşescus. No MiG can protect them from that.” Khoklov smiled as he patted the swelling fuselage, which now looked uncannily like a poolside air mattress. “If it comes to the worst, they want to take their famous Rembrandt painting, leave the Presidential Palace in Belgrade, and vanish completely from the NATO radar. Later they’ll reappear on their private Greek island with their eight-million-dollar dacha, under the protection of the Orthodox Church. Then the Milosevic clan will still have enough money in the banks of Greek Cyprus to buy the son and the daughter a radio station apiece. A year or two to let things cool down, and it’s back to the Slavic revenge fantasies, twenty-four hours a day.”

  Starlitz nodded. “Where do you find cool shit like this, ace? You’re way ahead of the curve here.”

  “Oh, word gets around among us cross-border pilots. The concept was invented by a German pneumatics company. They make blimps, air balloons, whole inflatable buildings with inflatable roofs and inflatable girders.… You see, it’s simple. It all goes up, it all comes down. Full of hot air. No one ever sees how it works, no one ever knows where it goes. So it’s just like a Russian bank, Lekhi.”