Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

But it was hard to imagine battling his way past resurgent robots, climbing the walls with an injured shoulder, then making a four-day bitter trek through a freezing desert, all completely alone. Gliders didn’t last forever, either. Spy gliders weren’t built to last. If Pete found the glider with its batteries flat, or its cute little brain gone sour, Pete would be all over. Even if he’d enjoyed a full set of equipment, with perfect health, Pete had few illusions about a solo spring outing, alone and on foot, over the Himalayas.

  Why risk all that? After all, it wasn’t like this subterranean scene was breaking news. It was already many years old. Someone had conceived, planned and executed this business a long time ago. Important people with brains and big resources had known all about this for years. Somebody knew. Maybe not the Lieutenant Colonel, on the lunatic fringe of NAFTA military intelligence. But…

  When Pete really thought about the basic implications.… This was a great deal of effort, and for not that big a payoff. Because there just weren’t that many people cooped up down here. Maybe fifteen thousand of them, tops. The Asian Sphere must have had tens of thousands of unassimilated tribal people, maybe hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions. And why stop at that point? This wasn’t just an Asian problem. It was a very general problem. Ethnic, breakaway people, who just plain couldn’t, or wouldn’t, play the twenty-first century’s games.

  How many Red Chinese atom-bomb tests had taken place deep in the Taklamakan? They’d never bothered to brief him on ancient history. But Pete had to wonder if, by now, maybe they hadn’t gotten this stellar concept down to a fine art. Maybe the Sphere had franchised their plan to Europe and NAFTA. How many forgotten holes were there, relic pockets punched below the hide of the twenty-first century, in the South Pacific, and Australia, and Nevada? The deadly trash of a long-derailed Armageddon. The sullen trash-heaps where no one would ever want to look.

  Sure, he could bend every nerve and muscle to force the world to face all this. But why? Wouldn’t it make better sense to try to think it through first?

  Pete never got around to admitting to himself that he had lost the will to leave.

  As despair slowly loosened his grip on him, Pete grew genuinely interested in the locals. He was intrigued by the stark limits of their lives and their universe, and in what he could do with their narrow little heads. They’d never had a supernatural being in their midst before; they just imagined them all the time. Pete started with a few poltergeist stunts, just to amuse himself. Stealing the spangled hats of the local greybeards. Shuffling the palm leaf volumes in their sacred libraries. Hijacking an abacus or two.

  But that was childish.

  The locals had a little temple, their special holy of holies. Naturally Pete made it his business to invade the place.

  The locals kept a girl locked up in there. She was very pretty, and slightly insane, so this made her the perfect candidate to become their Sacred Temple Girl. She was the Official Temple Priestess of Starship Number One. Apparently, their modest community could only afford one, single, awe-inspiring Virgin High Priestess. But they were practical folks, so they did the best with what they had available.

  The High Priestess was a pretty young woman with a stiflingly pretty life. She had her own maidservants, a wardrobe of ritual clothing, and a very time-consuming hairdo. The High Priestess spent her entire life carrying out highly complex, totally useless, ritual actions. Incense burnings, idol dustings, washings and purifications, forehead knockings, endless chanting, daubing special marks on her hands and feet. She was sacred and clearly demented, so they watched her with enormous interest, all the time. She meant everything to them. She was doing all these crazy, painful things so the rest of them wouldn’t have to. Everything about her was completely and utterly foreclosed.

  Pete quite admired the Sacred Temple Girl. She was very much his type, and he felt a genuine kinship with her. She was the only local that Pete could bear to spend any personal time with.

  So after prolonged study of the girl and her actions, one day, Pete manifested himself to her. First, she panicked. Then she tried to kill him. Naturally that effort failed. When she grasped the fact that he was hugely powerful, totally magical, and utterly beyond her ken, she slithered around the polished temple floor, rending her garments and keening aloud, clearly in the combined hope/fear of being horribly and indescribably defiled.

  Pete understood the appeal of her concept. A younger Pete would have gone for the demonic subjugation option. But Pete was all grown up now. He hardly saw how that could help matters any, or, in fact, make any tangible difference in their circumstances.

  They never learned each other’s languages. They never connected in any physical, mental, or emotional way. But they finally achieved a kind of status quo, where they could sit together in the same room, and quietly study one another, and fruitlessly speculate on the alien contents of one another’s heads. Sometimes, they would even get together and eat something tasty.

  That was every bit as good as his connection with these impossibly distant people was ever going to get.

  It had never occurred to Pete that the stars might go out.

  He’d cut himself a sacred, demonic bolt-hole, in a taboo area of the starship. Every once in a while, he would saw his way through the robots’ repair efforts and nick out for a good long look at the artificial cosmos. This reassured him, somehow. And he had other motives as well. He had a very well-founded concern that the inhabitants of Starship Two might somehow forge their way over, for an violent racist orgy of looting, slaughter, and rapine.

  But Starship Two had their hands full with the robots. Any defeat of the bubbling gelbrain and its hallucinatory tools could only be temporary. Like an onrushing mudslide, the gizmos would route around obstructions, infiltrate every evolutionary possibility, and always, always keep the pressure on.

  After the crushing defeat, the bubbling production vats went into bio-mechanical overdrive. The old regime had been overthrown. All equilibrium was gone. The machines had gone back to their cybernetic dreamtime. Anything was possible now.

  The starry walls grew thick as fleas with a seething mass of new-model jailers. Starship Two was beaten back once again, in another bitter, uncounted, historical humiliation. Their persecuted homeland became a mass of grotesque cement. Even the portholes were gone now, cruelly sealed in technological spit and ooze. A living grave.

  Pete had assumed that this would pretty much finish the job. After all, this clearly fit the parameters of the system’s original designers.

  But the system could no longer bother with the limits of human intent.

  When Pete gazed through a porthole and saw that the stars were fading, he knew that all bets were off. The stars were being robbed. Something was embezzling their energy.

  He left the starship. Outside, all heaven had broken loose. An unspeakable host of creatures were migrating up the rocky walls, bounding, creeping, lurching, rappelling on a web of gooey ropes. Heading for the stellar zenith.

  Bound for transcendence. Bound for escape.

  Pete checked his aging cleats and gloves, and joined the exodus at once.

  None of the creatures bothered him. He had become one of them now. His equipment had fallen among them, been absorbed, and kicked open new doors of evolution. Anything that could breed a can-opener could breed a rock chock and a piton, a crampon, and a pulley, and a carabiner. His haul bags, Katrinko’s bags, had been stuffed with generations of focused human genius, and it was all about one concept: UP. Going up. Up and out.

  The unearthly landscape of the Taklamakan was hosting a robot war. A spreading mechanical prairie of inching, crawling, biting, wrenching, hopping mutations. And pillars of fire: Sphere satellite warfare. Beams pouring down from the authentic heavens, invisible torrents of energy that threw up geysers of searing dust. A bio-engineer’s final nightmare. Smart, autonomous hell. They couldn’t kill a thing this big and keep it secret. They couldn’t burn it up fast enough. No, not without breaking the con
tainment domes, and spilling their own ancient trash across the face of the earth.

  A beam crossed the horizon like the finger of God, smiting everything in its path. The sky and earth were thick with flying creatures, buzzing, tumbling, sculling. The beam caught a big machine, and it fell spinning like a multi-ton maple seed. It bounded from the side of a containment dome, caromed like a dying gymnast, and landed below Spider Pete. He crouched there in his camou, recording it all.

  It looked back at him. This was no mere robot. It was a mechanical civilian journalist. A brightly painted, ultramodern, European network drone, with as many cameras on board as a top-flight media mogul had martinis. The machine had smashed violently against the secret wall, but it was not dead. Death was not on its agenda. It was way game. It had spotted him with no trouble at all. He was a human interest story. It was looking at him.

  Glancing into the cold spring sky, Pete could see that the journalist had brought a lot of its friends.

  The robot rallied its fried circuits, and centered him within a spiraling focus. Then it lifted a multipronged limb, and ceremonially spat out every marvel it had witnessed, up into the sky and out into the seething depths of the global web.

  Pete adjusted his mask and his camou suit. He wouldn’t look right, otherwise.

  “Dang,” he said.

  PART V:

  LATER SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

  The Sword of Damocles

  “The Sword of Damocles” is an ancient Greek story with the deeply satisfying structure of classical legend. It’s chock-full of eternal human truths, which, believe-you-me, still have plenty of meaning and relevance, even for our so-called-sophisticated, postmodern generation.

  I’ve been looking the story over lately, and the material is great. It’s just a question of filing off a few serial numbers, and bringing it up-to-date. So here we go.

  Once upon a time, there was a man named Damocles, a minor courtier at the palace of Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse. Damocles was unhappy with his role, and he envied the splendor of the Tyrant.

  Actually the term “Tyrant” is a bit misleading here, because it didn’t mean at the time what it means today. All “tyrant” really meant was that Dionysius (405 BC-367 BC) had seized the government by force, rather than coming to power legitimately. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Dionysius was an evil thug. After all, it’s results that count, and sometimes one has to bend the rules a bit, just to get things started.

  Take this “Once upon a time” business I just used, for instance. It starts the story all right, but it doesn’t sound very Greek, when you come right down to it. It’s more of a Grimm Brothers fairy-tale riff, kind of a kunstmarchen thing. Using it with a Greek myth is like putting a peaked Gothic spire on a Greek temple. Some people—Modernist critics—might say it’s a bad move aesthetically, and kind of bastardizes the whole artistic effort!

  Of course, real hifalutin Modernist critics must have a pretty hard time of it lately. They must find life a trial. I bet they don’t watch much MTV. Modernists like coherent, systematic structures, but it’s all hybridized by now. Especially in the places that are really moving, like Tokyo. Postmodern Japan is like a giant Shinto temple with smokestacks. Culturally speaking, the whole place is a chimera, but people don’t criticize Japan’s set-up much, because capitalistically speaking they’re kicking everybody’s ass. Whatever works, man.

  You know—this is amazing, but I swear it’s true—there are people nowadays who literally live in Tokyo “once upon a time.” They’re bankers and stockbrokers from New York and London, and they moved to Tokyo as expatriates, because they had to settle the Tokyo timezone. It’s a fact! Postmodern bankers have to do twenty-four-hour trading, and the stock market closes in New York hours before it opens in London. So nowadays all the big financial operators send people out to major markets all around the world, to colonize Time. “Time” is just another postmodern commodity now.

  So that kind of blows my opening sentence, but the important thing is to get the story across. Simply, directly, in an unpretentious, naturalistic fashion. So forget the Gothic fairy-tale riff. I’m just gonna tell it straight. The way I’d talk to close friends, in my own living room, here in Austin, Texas.

  So y’all listen up. There was this dude named Damocles, see, and he used to hang out in this palace, in Sicily. Ancient Sicily. Damocles was Greek though, not Italian, because, y’see, way back then…This was before Rome got started, and the Greeks were really good sailors, so they got all these remote colonies started up…

  Okay, never mind the historical analysis, y’all. It’s kinda vital to the background, but I can’t get it across in this casual hick tone of voice without making it sound really goofy. So let’s stick to the drama, okay? The important plot-thing is that Damocles really envies his boss, this magnificent prince, Dionysius. So one day Damocles puts on his chiton—that’s a kind of Greek tunic—and his buskins—those were tall sandals like you see in the opera, if you ever go to those, which I don’t, personally. But you’ve probably seen them on public TV, right?

  In fact, now that I mention it, since we’re all here in my living room, why don’t we just give this up, and watch some TV? I mean, forget this “oral storytelling tradition.” When was the last time you listened to some pal of yours tell a story out loud? I don’t mean lies about what he and his pals did last Friday, I mean a real myth-type story with a beginning, middle, and end. And a moral.

  Let’s face it, we don’t really do that anymore. We postmoderns don’t live in an oral storytelling culture. If we want a story we can all enjoy together, we can rent a goddamn video. Near Dark is pretty good. My treat.

  So, yeah—if I’m gonna make this work, it’s gonna have to be literary. It’ll have to hit some kind of high archaic note. We’ll have to really get into it—tell it, not like postmoderns, but just as the ancient Greeks would have told it. Simple, dignified, classical, and stately. Full of gravitas, and hubris, and similar impressive terms. We’ll cast a magic net of words, something to take us across the centuries…back to the authentic, ancestral world of Western culture!

  So let’s envision it. We’re in an olive grove together, on a hillside in ancient Athens. I’m the mythagogue, probably some blind or lame guy, kept alive for my storytelling skills. I may be a slave, like Aesop. I’m making up (or reciting from memory) these marvelous mythic tales that will last forever, but I’m no particular big deal, personally.

  You, my audience, on the other hand, look really great. You’re all young rambunctious aristocrats whose parents are paying for this. Your limbs are oiled, your hair is curled, and every one of you is a whiz at the discus and javelin. Some of you are naked, but nobody cares; even the snappiest dressers are essentially wearing tablecloths held together with big bronze pins.

  Did I mention that you were all guys? Sorry, but yeah. Those of you who are young rambunctious women are, uhmmm…well, I’m afraid you’re off weaving chitons in the darkest part of your house. You don’t get to listen to mythagogues. It might give you ideas. In fact you don’t get to leave the house at all. We guys will be back to see you, sometime after midnight. After we get drunk with Socrates. Then we’ll have our jolly way with you.

  And we’ll probably get you pregnant. Decent contraception hasn’t been invented yet. At least, not the nifty plastic-wrapped kinds people will use in the late twentieth century. That’s one reason why Damocles has a very dear male friend called Pythias.

  But wait a sec—since I’m an authentic Greek mythagogue, I have to call him “Phyntias.” “Pythias” was called “Phyntias,” originally. A medieval scribe made a mistake transcribing the story in the fourteenth century, and he’s been “Pythias” ever since. There’s even a high-minded twentieth-century club called “The Pythian Society,” that’s named after a misprint! What a joke on them, huh? Goes to show what can happen if a storyteller gets careless!

  So anyway, Damocles and Pythias were two close friends who lived in the court of Dio
nysius. One day, Damocles offended the Tyrant, and was sentenced to death. Damocles begged a few days’ mercy, to bid farewell to his family, who lived in another town.

  But the cruel Dionysius refused him this mercy. At that point, the noble Pythias stepped forward. “I will stand in the place of my dear friend, Damocles,” he declared, to the assembled court. “If he does not return in seven days, I will die in his place!”

  The vindictive heart of Dionysius was touched by this strange offer. Curious to see the outcome, he granted the boon. The two friends embraced and wept, and Damocles left to carry the sad news to his family. Pythias, in his place, was clapped in a dungeon. Days passed, one by one.

  Wait a minute. Damn! Did I say “Damocles”? I meant “Damon.” It’s “Damon and Pythias,” not “Damocles.” Hell, I always get those two confused.

  Christ on a Harley, man! I was off to such a great start, too. I was really rolling there for a minute. Now look at me! I don’t even have a character in my story. There’s no real character here except me, the author.

  I can’t believe I got myself into this situation. I mean, that postmodernist lit-mag experimental stuff where authors use themselves as characters. That kind of crap really burns me up. I’m a sci-fi pop writer, myself. I write action-adventure stuff. Sure, it’s weird, but it’s not structurally weird; it’s weird ’cause it’s about weird ideas, like fractals and cranial jacks.

  But now look at me. Not only am I a character in my own story, but my only real topic so far is “narrative structure.” I can’t stand it when postmodern critics talk about stories in terms like “narrative structure.” These hard-hat deconstruction-workers harass stories as if they were gals passing by on the sidewalk. They yell out stuff that’s not only obnoxious, but completely bizarre and impenetrable. It’s like they yell: “Hey, check out the pelvic biomechanics on that babe! What a set of hypertrophied lactiferous tissues!”

  I should have stuck to hard-SF, that’s my real problem. It was clear from the beginning this was going to be one of those weird-ass historical-fantasy things. I’m not even the proper author to be a character in this story. What this story needs is a character like Tim Powers, author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.