Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  “Biggest we have left,” she said. “And if you Muslims weren’t so pimpy about it, maybe we could pull down a few riyals and get out of debt.”

  “We buy a great deal from America,” I told her. “Grain and timber and minerals.”

  “That’s Third-World stuff. We’re not your farm.” She looked at the spotless floor. “Look, our industries suck, everybody knows it. So we sell entertainment. Except where there’s media barriers. And even then the fucking video pirates rip us off.”

  “We see things differently,” I said. “America ruled the global media for decades. To us, it’s cultural imperialism. We have many talented musicians in the Arab world. Have you ever heard them?”

  “Can’t afford it,” she said crisply. “We spent all our money saving the Persian Gulf from commies.”

  “The Global Threat of Red Totalitarianism,” said the heavyset man in the seat next to Doll-Hair. The others laughed grimly.

  “Oh,” I said. “Actually, it was Zionism that concerned us. When there was a Zionism.”

  “I can’t believe the hate shit I see about America,” said the heavy man. “You know how much money we gave away to people, just gave away, for nothing? Billions and billions. Peace Corps, development aid…for decades. Any disaster anywhere, and we fall all over ourselves to give food, medicine…Then the Russians go down and the whole world turns against us like we were monsters.”

  “Moscow,” said another crewman, shaking his shaggy head.

  “You know, there are still motherfuckers who think we Americans killed Moscow. They think we gave a Bomb to those Afghani terrorists.”

  “It had to come from somewhere,” I said.

  “No, man. We wouldn’t do that to them. No, man, things were going great between us. Rock for Detente—I was at that gig.”

  We drove to Miami’s Memorial Colosseum. It was an ambitious structure, left half-completed when the American banking system collapsed.

  We entered double-doors at the back, wheeling the equipment along dusty corridors. The Colosseum’s interior was skeletal; inside it was clammy and cavernous. A stage, a concrete floor. Bare steel arched high overhead, with crudely bracketed stage-lights. Large sections of that bizarre American parody of grass, “Astroturf,” had been dragged before the stage. The itchy green fur was still lined with yard-marks from some forgotten stadium.

  The crew worked with smooth precision, setting up amplifiers, spindly mike-stands, a huge high-tech drum kit with the clustered, shiny look of an oil refinery. Others checked lighting, flicking blue and yellow spots across the stage. At the public entrances, two crewmen from a second bus erected metal detectors for illicit cameras, recorders, or handguns. Especially handguns. Two attempts had already been made on Boston’s life, one at the Chicago Freedom Festival, when Chicago’s Mayor had been wounded at Boston’s side.

  For a moment, to understand it, I mounted the empty stage and stood before Boston’s microphone. I imagined the crowd before me, ten thousand souls, twenty thousand eyes. Under that attention, I realized, every motion was amplified. To move my arm would be like moving ten thousand arms, my every word like the voice of thousands. I felt like a Nasser, a Qadaffi, a Saddam Hussein.

  This was the nature of secular power. Industrial power. It was the West that invented it, that invented Hitler, the gutter orator turned trampler of nations, that invented Stalin, the man they called “Genghis Khan with a telephone.” The media pop star, the politician. Was there any difference anymore? Not in America; it was all a question of seizing eyes, of seizing attention. Attention is wealth, in an age of mass media. Center stage is more important than armies.

  The last unearthly moans and squeals of sound-check faded. The Miami crowd began to filter into the Colosseum. They looked livelier than the desperate searchers who had pursued Boston to his hotel. America was still a wealthy country, by most standards; the professional classes had kept much of their prosperity. There were the legions of lawyers, for instance, that secular priesthood that had done so much to drain America’s once-vaunted enterprise. And their associated legions of state bureaucrats. They were instantly recognizable; the cut of their suits, their telltale pocket telephones proclaiming their status.

  What were they looking for here? Had they never read Boston’s propaganda paper, with its bitter condemnations of the wealthy? With its fierce attacks on the “legislative-litigative complex,” its demands for purges and sweeping reforms?

  Was it possible that they had failed to take him seriously?

  I joined the crowd, mingling, listening to conversations. At the doors, Boston cadres were cutting ticket prices for those who showed voter registrations. Those who showed unemployment cards got in for even less.

  The more prosperous Americans stood in little knots of besieged gentility, frightened of the others, yet curious, smiling. There was a liveliness in the destitute: brighter clothing, knotted kerchiefs at the elbows, cheap Korean boots of iridescent cloth. Many wore tricornered hats, some with a cockade of red, white, and blue, or the circle of thirteen stars.

  This was the milieu of rock and roll, I realized; that was the secret. They had all grown up on it, these Americans, even the richer ones. To them, the sixty-year tradition of rock music seemed as ancient as the Pyramids. It had become a Jerusalem, a Mecca of American tribes.

  The crowd milled, waiting, and Boston let them wait. At the back of the crowd, Boston crewmen did a brisk business in starred souvenir shirts, programs, and tapes. Heat and tension mounted, and people began to sweat. The stage remained dark.

  I bought the souvenir items and studied them. They talked about cheap computers, a phone company owned by its workers, a free data-base, neighborhood cooperatives that could buy unmilled grain by the ton. ATTENTION MIAMI, read one brochure in letters of dripping red. It named the ten largest global corporations and meticulously listed every subsidiary doing business in Miami, with its address, its phone number, the percentage of income shipped to banks in Europe and Japan. Each list went on for pages. Nothing else. To Boston’s audience, nothing else was necessary.

  The house lights darkened. A frightening animal roar rose from the crowd. A single spot lit Tom Boston, stenciling him against darkness.

  “My fellow Americans,” he said. A funereal hush followed. Boston smirked. “My f-f-f-fellow Americans.” He had a clever microphone, digitized, a small synthesizer in itself. “My fellow Am-am-am-am-AMM!” His words vanished in a sudden wail of feedback. “My Am—my fellows—my am—my fellows—my am my, Miami, Miami, MIAMI!” Boston’s warped voice, suddenly leaping out of all human context, became shattering, superhuman—the effect was bone-chilling. It passed all barriers, it seeped directly into the skin, the blood.

  “Tom Jefferson Died Broke!” he shouted. It was the title of his first song. Stage lights flashed up and hell broke its gates. Was this a “song” at all, this strange, volcanic creation? There was a melody loose in it somewhere, pursued by Plisetskaya’s saxophone, but the sheer volume and impact hurled it through the audience like a sheet of flame. I had never before heard anything so loud. What Cairo’s renegade set called rock music paled to nothing beside this invisible hurricane.

  At first it seemed raw noise. But that was only a kind of flooring, a merciless grinding foundation below the rising architectures of sound. Technology did it: that piercing, soaring, digitized, utter clarity, of perfect computer acoustics adjusting for every echo, a hundred times a second.

  Boston played a glass harmonica: an instrument invented by the early American genius Benjamin Franklin. The harmonica was made of carefully tuned glass disks, rotating on a spindle, and played by streaking a wet fingertip across each moving edge.

  It was the sound of crystal, seemingly sourceless, of tooth-aching purity.

  The famous Western musician, Wolfgang Mozart, had composed for the Franklin harmonica in the days of its novelty. Legend said that its players went mad, their nerves shredded by its clarity of sound. It was a legend Boston was caref
ul to exploit. He played the machine sparingly, with the air of a magician, of a Solomon unbottling demons. I was glad of this, for the beauty of its sound stung the brain.

  Boston threw aside his hat. Long coiled hair spilled free. Boston was what Americans called “black”; at least, he was often referred to as black, though no one seemed certain. He was no darker than myself. The beat rose up, a strong animal heaving. Boston stalked across the stage as if on strings, clutching his microphone. He began to sing.

  The song concerned Thomas Jefferson, a famous American president of the eighteenth century. Jefferson was a political theorist who wrote revolutionary manifestos and favored a decentralist mode of government. The song, however, dealt with the relations of Jefferson and a black concubine in his household. He had several children by this woman, who were a source of great shame, due to the odd legal code of the period. Legally, they were his slaves, and it was only at the end of his life, when he was in great poverty, that Jefferson set them free.

  It was a story whose pathos makes little sense to a Muslim. But Boston’s audience, knowing themselves Jefferson’s children, took it to heart.

  The heat became stifling, as massed bodies swayed in rhythm. The next song began in a torrent of punishing noise. Frantic hysteria seized the crowd; their bodies spasmed with each beat, the shaman Boston seeming to scourge them. It was a fearsome song, called “The Whites of Their Eyes,” after an American war-cry. He sang of a tactic of battle: to wait until the enemy comes close enough so that you can meet his eyes, frighten him with your conviction, and then shoot him point blank.

  Three more songs followed, one of them slower, the others battering the audience like iron rods. Boston stalked like a madman, his clothing dark with sweat. My heart spasmed as heavy bass notes, filled with dark murderous power, surged through my ribs. I moved away from the heat to the fringe of the crowd, feeling lightheaded and sick.

  I had not expected this. I had expected a political spokesman, but instead it seemed I was assaulted by the very Voice of the West. The Voice of a society drunk with raw power, maddened by the grinding roar of machines. It filled me with terrified awe.

  To think that, once, the West had held us in its armored hands. It had treated Islam as it treated a natural resource, its invincible armies tearing through the lands of the Faithful like bulldozers. The West had chopped our world up into colonies, and smiled upon us with its awful schizophrenic perfidy. It told us to separate God and State, to separate Mind and Body, to separate Reason and Faith. It had torn us apart.

  I stood shaking as the first set ended. The band vanished backstage, and a single figure approached the microphone. I recognized him as a famous American television comedian, who had abandoned his own career to join Boston.

  The man began to joke and clown, his antics seeming to soothe the crowd, which hooted with laughter. This intermission was a wise move on Boston’s part, I thought. The level of intensity, of pain, had become unbearable.

  It struck me then how much Boston was like the great Khomeini. Boston too had the persona of the Man of Sorrows, the sufferer after justice, the ascetic among corruption, the battler against odds. And the air of the mystic, the adept, at least as far as such a thing was possible in America. I contemplated this, and deep fear struck me once again.

  I walked through the gates to the Colosseum’s outer hall, seeking air and room to think. Others had come out too. They leaned against the walls, men and women, with the look of wrung-out mops. Some smoked cigarettes, others argued over brochures, others simply sat with palsied grins.

  Still others wept. These disturbed me most, for these were the ones whose souls seemed stung and opened. Khomeini made men weep like that, tearing aside despair like a bandage from a burn. I walked among them, watching them, making mental notes.

  I stopped by a woman in dark glasses and a trim business suit. She leaned within an alcove by a set of telephones, shaking, her face beneath the glasses slick with silent tears. Her cheekbones, the precision of her styled hair, struck a memory. I stood beside her, waiting, and recognition came.

  “Hello,” I said. “We have something in common, I think. You’ve been covering the Boston tour. For CBS.”

  She glanced at me once, and away. “I don’t know you.”

  “You’re Marjory Cale, the correspondent.”

  She drew in a breath. “You’re mistaken.”

  “‘Luddite fanatic,’” I said lightly. “’Rock demagogue.’”

  “Go away,” she said.

  “Why not talk about it? I’d like to know your point of view.”

  “Go away, you nasty little man.”

  I returned to the crowd inside. The comedian was now reading at length from the American Bill of Rights, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Freedom of advertising,” he said. “Freedom of global network television conglomerates. Right to a speedy and public trial, to be repeated until the richest lawyers win. A well-regulated militia being necessary, citizens will be issued orbital lasers and aircraft carriers…” No one was laughing.

  The crowd was in an ugly mood when Boston reappeared. Even the well-dressed ones now seemed surly and militant, not recognizing themselves as the enemy. Like the Shah’s soldiers who at last refused to fire, who threw themselves sobbing at Khomeini’s feet.

  “You all know this one,” Boston said. With his wife, he raised a banner, one of the first flags of the American Revolution. It bore a coiled snake, a native American viper, with the legend: DON’T TREAD ON ME. A sinister, scaly rattling poured from the depths of a synthesizer, merging with the crowd’s roar of recognition, and a sprung, loping rhythm broke loose. Boston edged back and forth at the stage’s rim, his eyes fixed, his long neck swaying. He shook himself like a man saved from drowning and leaned into the microphone.

  “We know you own us/ You step upon us/ We feel the onus/ But here’s a bonus/ Today I see/ So enemy/ Don’t tread on me/ Don’t tread on me…” Simple words, fitting each beat with all the harsh precision of the English language. A chant of raw hostility. The crowd took it up. This was the hatred, the humiliation of a society brought low. Americans. Somewhere within them conviction still burned. The conviction they had always had: that they were the only real people on the planet. The chosen ones, the Light of the World, the Last Best Hope of Mankind, the Free and the Brave, the crown of creation. They would have killed for him. I knew, someday, they would.

  I was called to Boston’s suite at two o’clock that morning. I had shaved and showered, dashed on the hotel’s complimentary cologne. I wanted to smell like an American.

  Boston’s guards frisked me, carefully and thoroughly, outside the elevator. I submitted with good grace.

  Boston’s suite was crowded. It had the air of an election victory. There were many politicians, sipping glasses of bubbling alcohol, laughing, shaking hands. Miami’s Mayor was there, with half his city council. I recognized a young woman Senator, speaking urgently into her pocket phone, her large freckled breasts on display in an evening gown.

  I mingled, listening. Men spoke of Boston’s ability to raise funds, of the growing importance of his endorsement. More of Boston’s guards stood in corners, arms folded, eyes hidden, their faces stony. A black man distributed lapel buttons with the face of Martin Luther King on a background of red and white stripes. The wall-sized television played a tape of the first Moon Landing. The sound had been turned off, and people all over the world, in the garb of the 1960s, mouthed silently at the camera, their eyes shining.

  It was not until four o’clock that I finally met the star himself. The party had broken up by then, the politicians politely ushered out, their vows of undying loyalty met with discreet smiles. Boston was in a back bedroom with his wife and a pair of aides.

  “Sayyid,” he said, and shook my hand. In person he seemed smaller, older, his hybrid face, with stage makeup, beginning to peel.

  “Dr. Boston,” I said.

  He laughed freely. “Sayyid, my friend. You’ll ruin my stre
et fucking credibility.”

  “I want to tell the story as I see it,” I said.

  “Then you’ll have to tell me what you see,” he said, and turned briefly to an aide, who had a laptop computer. Boston dictated in a low, staccato voice, not losing his place in our conversation, simply loosing a burst of thought. “Let us be frank. Before I showed an interest you were willing to sell the ship for scrap iron. This is not an era for supertankers. Your property is dead tech, smokestack-era garbage. Reconsider my offer.” The secretary pounded keys. Boston looked at me again, returning the searchlight of his attention.

  “You want to buy a supertanker?” I said.

  “I wanted an aircraft carrier,” he said, smiling. “They’re all in mothballs, but the Feds frown on selling nuke powerplants to private citizens.”

  “We will make the tanker into a floating stadium,” Plisetskaya put in. She sat slumped in a padded chair, wearing satin lounge pajamas. A half-filled ashtray on the chair’s arm reeked of strong tobacco.

  “Ever been inside a tanker?” Boston said. “Huge. Great acoustics.” He sat suddenly on the sprawling bed and pulled off his snakeskin boots. “So, Sayyid. Tell me this story of yours.”

  “You graduated magna cum laude from Rutgers with a doctorate. in political science,” I said. “In five years.”

  “That doesn’t count,” Boston said, yawning behind his hand. “That was before rock and roll beat my brains out.”

  “You ran for state office in Massachusetts,” I said. “You lost a close race. Two years later you were touring with your first band—Swamp Fox. You were an immediate success. You became involved in political fund-raising, recruiting your friends in the music industry. You started your own recording label, your own studios. You helped organize rock concerts in Russia, where you met your wife-to-be. Your romance was front-page news on both continents. Record sales soared.”

  “You left out the first time I got shot at,” Boston said. “That’s more interesting; Val and I are old hat by now.”