Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  She hadn’t noticed. “You’ll do your errand,” she said, clinging to her strap. They were so close that he could feel a chill air-conditioned breeze whiffling out of her trenchcoat’s collar. “But on my terms. My time, my circumstances.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes; her head darted around as if from grave embarrassment. Eddy realized suddenly that she was methodically scanning the face of every stranger in the bus.

  She spared him a quick, distracted smile. “Don’t mind me, Eddy. Be a good boy and have fun in Düsseldorf. Just let me do my job, okay?”

  “Okay then,” Eddy muttered. “Really, I’m delighted to be in your hands.” He couldn’t seem to stop with the double entendres. They rose to his lips like drool from the id.

  The glowing grids of Düsseldorf highrises shone outside the bus windows, patchy waffles of mystery. So many human lives behind those windows. People he would never meet, never see. Pity he still couldn’t afford proper telephotos.

  Eddy cleared his throat. “What’s he doing out there right now? The Cultural Critic, I mean.”

  “Meeting contacts in a safehouse. He will meet a great many people during the Wende. That’s his business, you know. You’re only one of many that he bringed—brought—to this rendezvous.” Sardelle paused. “Though in threat potential you do rank among the top five.”

  The bus made more stops. People piled in headlong, with a thrash and a heave and a jacking of kneecaps. Inside the bus they were all becoming anchovies. A smothered fistfight broke out in the back. A drunken woman tried, with mixed success, to vomit out the window. Sardelle held her position grimly through several stops, then finally fought her way to the door.

  The bus pulled to a stop and a sudden rush of massed bodies propelled them out.

  They’d arrived by a long suspension bridge over a broad moonsilvered river. The bridge’s soaring cables were lit end-to-end with winking party-bulbs. All along the bridge, flea-marketeers sitting cross-legged on glowing mats were doing a brisk trade in tourist junk. Out in the center, a busking juggler with smart-gloves flung lit torches in flaming arcs three stories high.

  “Jesus, what a beautiful river,” Eddy said.

  “It’s the Rhine. This is Oberkasseler Bridge.”

  “The Rhine. Of course, of course. I’ve never seen the Rhine before. Is it safe to drink?”

  “Of course. Europe’s very civilized.”

  “I thought so. It even smells good. Let’s go drink some of it.”

  The banks were lined with municipal gardens: grape-musky vineyards, big pale meticulous flowerbeds. Tireless gardening robots had worked them over season by season with surgical trowels. Eddy stooped by the riverbank and scooped up a double-handful of backwash from a passing hydrofoil. He saw his own spex-clad face in the moony puddle of his hands. As Sardelle watched, he sipped a bit and flung the rest out as libation to the spirit of place.

  “I’m happy now,” he said. “Now I’m really here.”

  By midnight, he’d had four beers, two schnitzels, and a platter of kartoffels. Kartoffels were fried potato-batter waffles with a side of applesauce. Eddy’s morale had soared from the moment he first bit into one.

  They sat at a sidewalk cafe table in the midst of a centuries-old pedestrian street in the Altstadt. The entire street was a single block-long bar, all chairs, umbrellas, and cobbles, peaked-roof townhouses with ivy and windowboxes and ancient copper weathervanes. It had been invaded by an absolute throng of gawking, shuffling, hooting foreigners.

  The gentle, kindly, rather bewildered Düsseldorfers were doing their level best to placate their guests and relieve them of any excess cash. A strong pink police presence was keeping good order. He’d seen two zudes in horned baseball-caps briskly hauled into a paddy wagon—a “Pink Minna”—but the Vikings were pig-drunk and had it coming, and the crowd seemed very good-humored.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is with these Wendes,” Deep Eddy said, polishing his spex on a square of oiled and lint-free polysilk. “This sucker’s a walk-through. There’s not gonna be any trouble here. Just look how calm and mellow these zudes are.”

  “There’s trouble already,” Sardelle said. “It’s just not here in Altstadt in front of your nose.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There are big gangs of arsonists across the river tonight. They’re barricading streets in Neuss, toppling cars, and setting them on fire.”

  “How come?”

  Sardelle shrugged. “They are anti-car activists. They demand pedestrian rights and more mass transit.…” She paused a bit to read the inside of her spex. “Green radicals are storming the Lobbecke Museum. They want all extinct insect specimens surrendered for cloning.…Heinrich Heine University is on strike for academic freedom, and someone has glue-bombed the big traffic tunnel beneath the campus.…But this is nothing, not yet. Tomorrow England meets Ireland in the soccer finals at Rhein-Stadium. There will be hell to pay.”

  “Huh. That sounds pretty bad.”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “So let’s enjoy our time here, Eddy. Idleness is sweet. Even on the edge of dirty chaos.”

  “But none of those events by itself sounds all that threatening or serious.”

  “Not each thing by itself, Eddy, no. But it all happens all at once. That’s what a Wende is like.”

  “I don’t get it,” Eddy said. He put his spex back on and lit the menu from within, with a fingersnap. He tapped the spex menu-bar with his right fingertip and light-amplifiers kicked in. The passing crowd, their outlines shimmering slightly from computational effects, seemed to be strolling through an overlit stage-set. “I guess there’s trouble coming from all these outsiders,” Eddy said, “but the Germans themselves seem so…well…so good-natured and tidy and civilized. Why do they even have Wendes?”

  “It’s not something we plan, Eddy. It’s just something that happens to us.” Sardelle sipped her coffee.

  “How could this happen and not be planned?”

  “Well, we knew it was coming, of course. Of course we knew that. Word gets around. That’s how Wendes start.” She straightened her napkin. “You can ask the Critic, when you meet him. He talks a lot about Wendes. He knows as much as anyone, I think.”

  “Yeah, I’ve read him,” Eddy said. “He says that it’s rumor, boosted by electronic and digital media, in a feedback-loop with crowd dynamics and modern mass transportation. A nonlinear networking phenomenon. That much I understand! But then he quotes some zude named Elias Canetti.…” Eddy patted the gray bag. “I tried to read Canetti, I really did, but he’s twentieth-century, and as boring and stuffy as hell.…Anyway, we’d handle things differently in Chattanooga.”

  “People say that, until they have their first Wende,” Sardelle said. “Then it’s all different. Once you know a Wende can actually happen to you…well, it changes everything.”

  “We’d take steps to stop it, that’s all. Take steps to control it. Can’t you people take some steps?”

  Sardelle tugged off her pinstriped gloves and set them on the tabletop. She worked her bare fingers gently, blew on her fingertips, and picked a big bready pretzel from the basket. Eddy noticed with surprise that her gloves had big rock-hard knuckles and twitched a little all by themselves.

  “There are things you can do, of course,” she told him. “Put police and firefighters on overtime. Hire more private security. Disaster control for lights, traffic, power, data. Open the shelters and stock first-aid medicine. And warn the whole population. But when a city tells its people that a Wende is coming, that guarantees the Wende will come.…” Sardelle sighed. “I’ve worked Wendes before. But this is a big one. A big, dark one. And it won’t be over, it can’t be over—not until everyone knows that it’s gone, and feels that it’s gone.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Talking about it won’t help, Eddy. You and I, talking about it—we become part of the Wende ourselves, you see? We’re here because of the Wende. We met because of the Wende. And we can’t leave each
other, until the Wende goes away.” She shrugged. “Can you go away, Eddy?”

  “No…not right now. But I’ve got stuff to do here.”

  “So does everybody else.”

  Eddy grunted and killed another beer. The beer here was truly something special. “It’s a Chinese finger-trap,” he said, gesturing.

  “Yes, I know those.”

  He grinned. “Suppose we both stop pulling? We could walk through it. Leave town. I’ll throw the book in the river. Tonight you and I could fly back to Chattanooga. Together.”

  She laughed. “You wouldn’t really do that, though.”

  “You don’t know me after all.”

  “You spit in the face of your friends? And I lose my job? A high price to pay for one gesture. For a young man’s pretense of free will.”

  “I’m not pretending, lady. Try me. I dare you.”

  “Then you’re drunk.”

  “Well, there’s that.” He laughed. “But don’t joke about liberty. Liberty’s the realest thing there is.” He stood up and hunted out the bathroom.

  On his way back he stopped at a payphone. He gave it fifty centimes and dialed Tennessee. Djulia answered.

  “What time is it?” he said.

  “Nineteen. Where are you?”

  “Düsseldorf.”

  “Oh.” She rubbed her nose. “Sounds like you’re in a bar.”

  “Bingo.”

  “So what’s new, Eddy?”

  “I know you put a lot of stock in honesty,” Eddy said. “So I thought I’d tell you I’m planning an affair. I met this German girl here and frankly, she’s irresistible.”

  Djulia frowned darkly. “You’ve got a lot of nerve telling me that kind of crap with your spex on.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. He took them off and stared into the monitor. “Sorry.”

  “You’re drunk, Eddy,” Djulia said. “I hate it when you’re drunk! You’ll say and do anything if you’re drunk and on the far end of a phone line.” She rubbed nervously at her newest cheek-tattoo. “Is this one of your weird jokes?”

  “Yeah. It is, actually. The chances are eighty to one that she’ll turn me down flat.” Eddy laughed. “But I’m gonna try anyway. Because you’re not letting me live and breathe.”

  Djulia’s face went stiff. “When we’re face to face, you always abuse my trust. That’s why I don’t like for us to go past virching.”

  “Come off it, Djulia.”

  She was defiant. “If you think you’ll be happier with some weirdo virchwhore in Europe, go ahead! I don’t know why you can’t do that by wire from Chattanooga, anyway.”

  “This is Europe. We’re talking actuality here.”

  Djulia was shocked. “If you actually touch another woman I never want to see you again.” She bit her lip. “Or do wire with you, either. I mean that, Eddy. You know I do.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  He hung up, got change from the phone, and dialed his parents’ house. His father answered.

  “Hi, Bob. Lisa around?”

  “No,” his father said, “it’s her night for optic macrame. How’s Europe?”

  “Different.”

  “Nice to hear from you, Eddy. We’re kind of short of money. I can spare you some sustained attention, though.”

  “I just dumped Djulia.”

  “Good move, son,” his father said briskly. “Fine. Very serious girl, Djulia. Way too straitlaced for you. A kid your age should be dating girls who are absolutely jumping out of their skins.”

  Eddy nodded.

  “You didn’t lose your spex, did you?”

  Eddy held them up on their neck chain. “Safe and sound.”

  “Hardly recognized you for a second,” his father said. “Ed, you’re such a serious-minded kid. Taking on all these responsibilities. On the road so much, spexware day in and day out. Lisa and I network about you all the time. Neither of us did a day’s work before we were thirty, and we’re all the better for it. You’ve got to live, son. Got to find yourself. Smell the roses. If you want to stay in Europe a couple of months, forget the algebra courses.”

  “It’s calculus, Bob.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Thanks for the good advice, Bob. I know you mean it.”

  “It’s good news about Djulia, son. You know we don’t invalidate your feelings, so we never said a goddamn thing to you, but her glassware really sucked. Lisa says she’s got no goddamn aesthetics at all. That’s a hell of a thing, in a woman.”

  “That’s my mom,” Eddy said. “Give Lisa my best.” He hung up.

  He went back out to the sidewalk table. “Did you eat enough?” Sardelle asked.

  “Yeah. It was good.”

  “Sleepy?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “Do you have a place to stay, Eddy? Hotel reservations?”

  Eddy shrugged. “No. I don’t bother, usually. What’s the use? It’s more fun winging it.”

  “Good,” Sardelle nodded. “It’s better to wing. No one can trace us. It’s safer.”

  She found them shelter in a park, where an activist group of artists from Munich had set up a squatter pavilion. As squatter pavilions went, it was quite a nice one, new and in good condition: a giant soap-bubble upholstered in cellophane and polysilk. It covered half an acre with crisp yellow bubblepack flooring. The shelter was illegal and therefore anonymous. Sardelle seemed quite pleased about this.

  Once through the zippered airlock, Eddy and Sardelle were forced to examine the artists’ multimedia artwork for an entire grueling hour. Worse yet, they were closely quizzed afterward by an expert-system, which bullied them relentlessly with arcane aesthetic dogma.

  This ordeal was too high a price for most squatters. The pavilion, though attractive, was only half-full, and many people who had shown up bonetired were fleeing the art headlong. Deep Eddy, however, almost always aced this sort of thing. Thanks to his slick responses to the computer’s quizzing, he won himself quite a nice area, with a blanket, opaquable curtains, and its own light fixtures. Sardelle, by contrast, had been bored and minimal, and had won nothing more advanced than a pillow and a patch of bubblepack among the philistines.

  Eddy made good use of a traveling pay-toilet stall, and bought some mints and chilled mineral water from a robot. He settled in cozily as police sirens, and some distant, rather choked-sounding explosions, made the night glamorous.

  Sardelle didn’t seem anxious to leave. “May I see your hotel bag,” she said.

  “Sure.” He handed it over. Might as well. She’d given it to him in the first place.

  He’d thought she was going to examine the book again, but instead she took a small plastic packet from within the bag, and pulled the packet’s ripcord. A colorful jumpsuit jumped out, with a chemical hiss and a vague hot stink of catalysis and cheap cologne. The jumpsuit, a one-piece, had comically baggy legs, frilled sleeves, and was printed all over with a festive cutup of twentieth-century naughty seaside postcards.

  “Pajamas,” Eddy said. “Gosh, how thoughtful.”

  “You can sleep in this if you want,” Sardelle nodded, “but it’s daywear. I want you to wear it tomorrow. And I want to buy the clothes you are wearing now, so that I can take them away for safety.”

  Deep Eddy was wearing a dress shirt, light jacket, American jeans, dappled stockings, and Nashville brogues of genuine blue suede. “I can’t wear that crap,” he protested. “Jesus, I’d look like a total loser.”

  “Yes,” said Sardelle with an enthusiastic nod, “it’s very cheap and common. It will make you invisible. Just one more party boy among thousands and thousands. This is very secure dress, for a courier during a Wende.”

  “You want me to meet the Critic in this get-up?”

  Sardelle laughed. “The Cultural Critic is not impressed by taste, Eddy. The eye he uses when he looks at people…he sees things other people can’t see.” She paused, considering. “He might be impressed if you showed up dressed in this. Not because
of what it is, of course. But because it would show that you can understand and manipulate popular taste to your own advantage… just as he does.”

  “You’re really being paranoid,” Eddy said, nettled. “I’m not an assassin. I’m just some techie zude from Tennessee. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I believe you,” she nodded. “You’re very convincing. But that has nothing to do with proper security technique. If I take your clothes, there will be less operational risk.”

  “How much less risk? What do you expect to find in my clothes, anyway?”

  “There are many, many things you might have done,” she said patiently. “The human race is very ingenious. We have invented ways to kill, or hurt, or injure almost anyone, with almost nothing at all.” She sighed. “If you don’t know about such techniques already, it would only be stupid for me to tell you all about them. So let’s be quick and simple, Eddy. It would make me happier to take your clothes away. A hundred ecu.”

  Eddy shook his head. “This time it’s really going to cost you.”

  “Two hundred then,” Sardelle said.

  “Forget it.”

  “I can’t go higher than two hundred. Unless you let me search your body cavities.”

  Eddy dropped his spex.

  “Body cavities,” Sardelle said impatiently. “You’re a grown-up man, you must know about this. A great deal can be done with body cavities.”

  Eddy stared at her. “Can’t I have some chocolate and roses first?”

  “It’s not chocolate and roses with us,” Sardelle said sternly. “Don’t talk to me about chocolate and roses. We’re not lovers. We are client and bodyguard. It’s an ugly business, I know. But it’s only business.”

  “Yeah? Well, trading in body cavities is new to me.” Deep Eddy rubbed his chin. “As a simple Yankee youngster I find this a little confusing. Maybe we could barter then? Tonight?”

  She laughed harshly. “I won’t sleep with you, Eddy. I won’t sleep at all! You’re only being foolish.” Sardelle shook her head. Suddenly she lifted a densely braided mass of hair above her right ear. “Look here, Mr. Simple Yankee Youngster. I’ll show you my favorite body cavity.” There was a fleshcolored plastic duct in the side of her scalp. “It’s illegal to have this done in Europe. I had it done in Turkey. This morning I took half a cc through there. I won’t sleep until Monday.”