Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  “Suddenly, Tim Powers appeared. He looked about himself alertly.”

  No, if I’m gonna do this at all, I’d better try it Powers-style.

  “Suddenly, Tim Powers burst headlong into the story! His hair was on fire, and he was perched on a pair of stilts. Gnashing his teeth, he glared wildly from under layers of peeling clown-makeup and said:

  “‘What the heck kind of fictional set-up is this? There’s nothing here but some kind of half-collapsed ancient Greek stage-set! I could do better research than this in my sleep! Anyway, I prefer Victoriana.’”

  And then a voice emerged into the story from an area of narrative discourse that we can’t even reach from here. It said, “-‘-“Tim, what’s going on in there?”-’-”

  And Powers said: “I dunno, sweetheart, I was just sitting here at the word-processor, and—ow! Somebody set my hair on fire! Serena, get the shotgun!”

  Aw, jeez!…uhm:

  “Tim Powers quickly disappeared from the story. The makeup disappeared from his face, and he looked just like he always did. And his hair stopped burning. There was no real damage done to it. He went into the bathroom of his Santa Ana apartment, got a comb, and lent fresh meaning to his hair. Then he forgot he had even been involved in this story.”

  ‘“Don’t bet on it, pal.’”

  I swear it’ll never happen again. Don’t get mad! Lots of writers do it. Like the wife of Damocles, “Pandora.” She’s not the original Greek-legend Pandora, wife of Epimetheus. Pandora hasn’t appeared in this story yet, but she’s a really interesting character. She likes to make blunt declarations to the reader, from a really weird narrative stance. Stuff like:

  “‘Am I not the sister of Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank? Have I not eaten, drunk, and breathed poison all my life? Do you take me for an innocent, my colluding reader?’” That sort of thing.

  “Pandora” is actually the thinly disguised author-character from Ursula K. Le Guin’s experimental SF epic Always Coming Home! How “Pandora” got into this story I’m not really sure, I guess it’s my mistake, but I’ll fight any man who claims that Always Coming Home isn’t “real SF”! Even if it’s not really, exactly, a “book.” For one thing, Always Coming Home has got an audiotape that comes with it, which puts a pretty severe dent in its narrative closure. I’d have liked to supply an audiotape with this story—maybe some Japanese pop music, or John Cage—but I was too cheap. Instead, I’ll just play the Always Coming Home tape here in my office. I ordered it from a P .O. box in Oregon. It’s got weird mellow chanting in made-up languages.

  So much for Pandora. I was going to have a scene where Damocles wakes up in bed with Pandora, and she makes some biting remarks about having to weave the chitons and everything, but I guess you get the idea.

  So here’s Damocles quickly leaving his home and going straight to work. He’s so eager to start the story that, not only does he jump right in with a Homeric “in medias res” routine, but he’s willing to settle for a breathless present-tense. Damocles works as a minor palace official in the court of Dionysius. Actually he’s a “flatterer,” according to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. He’s not a bureaucrat, like a postmodern official. There’s no bureaucracy in Syracuse, it’s all done by a tiny group of elite families, who run everything. Syracuse is a pre-industrial city-state of maybe fifty thousand people. An independent city-state about the size of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

  Damocles earns his living by making up flattering things about people who can kill him out-of-hand. He’s kind of a jackleg-poet crossed with a public-relations flack. He’s done pretty well by it, considering his lowly birth. He gets to eat meat almost every week. For most other Greeks of the period, common folk, there are two kinds of dietary staple. The first is a kind of mush, and the second is a kind of mush.

  Damocles, though, has pretty much reached the top of his career arc. Once the Tyrant has taken you into the palace and deigned to feed you, there’s not a whole lot of room for further advancement. Everything else is pretty much determined by birth, or coup d’etat. Damocles doesn’t have the birth, and if a coup d’etat came Damocles would probably get snuffed first thing for being a loudmouth intellectual.

  Damocles could enlist in the army and join one of the incessant minor wars of Dionysius, but he’d probably get nicked in battle and die of infection or tetanus. There’s a damn good chance he’d croak of dysentery without ever leaving the camp-tents. Homer’s war-brags don’t talk about sickness much, but it’s there all right. There’s even a killer plague of the period called “the sweats” which Thucydides talks about in his histories; it once killed off half of Athens. Nobody knows what kind of disease “the sweats” was or where it came from. We’d just better hope it never comes back.

  So Damocles goes to the court, dressed in his second-best outfit, since the day doesn’t augur much. Damon and Pythias are there; Damocles has known them since they were kids; he knows pretty much everybody who counts in Syracuse, since it’s a small town. Ever since D&P won the favor of Dionysius, through this stunt they pulled by offering to die for each other, they’ve been big cheeses at the court. Damocles has had to make up a lot of flattering dithyrambs and iambics and anapests about them; he’s just about run out of rhymes for “Phyntias” and wishes the guy would change his goddamn name.

  Today though he finds to his surprise that there’s a big celebration. Three of Dionysius’s war-galleys are back from raiding the coast of Egypt, where they sank a few reed-boats and got some slaves and loot. It’s a famous victory. There’s lots of millet-beer and grapewine.

  Damocles elbows his way through the revelers and helps himself. The wine quickly goes to his head. Nobody knows what “fermentation” is yet, so the quality of the wine varies a lot. Every once in a while it makes you puke on the spot, but sometimes it gets way up to four, five percent alcohol. This is prime stuff all the way from Greece, and it only tastes a little of the tar they use to seal the amphoras. Damocles gets totally plastered.

  Dionysius is in one of his jolly moods. The kind where he thinks up ingenious psychological tortures for his hangers-on. He calls the drunken, tottering Damocles front-and-center to have him immortalize the glorious day in extemporaneous verse.

  Damocles gives it his best shot. He picks up a goatskin tambourine and starts banging it against his hip so he can remember the proper meter. He spouts out a lot of the canned stuff from Homer, the cliched “epithets” you use when you can’t think of anything original, like “So-and-so of the nodding plumed helmet,” and “his armor rang about him as he fell,” and even stuff that sounds vaguely comical nowadays, like “he bit the dust.”

  But he can see it’s not working. He starts to get desperate. He starts babbling out whatever comes into his head. Free association, surrealism. We postmoderns are really into that kind of stuff since Max Ernst and Dada, but it doesn’t cut much ice with ancient Dionysius.

  So Damocles plays his last ace, and starts laying on the flattery with a trowel. What a lucky guy Dionysius is; how the Gods smile on him; how supreme the Tyrant’s power is; how everybody wishes they were him.

  “Oh really,” interrupts Dionysius, with that awful smile of his. He gives some orders to his lithe teenage male wine-bearer and then beckons Damocles forward. “So you want to be the Tyrant, eh?”

  “Yeah, sure, who wouldn’t?” says Damocles.

  “Fine,” says Dionysius loudly. “You sit right here on my throne”—actually, it’s a dining-couch—“and help yourself to this feast. You, the humble Damocles, can be Tyrant, just for today!” He takes the gold fillet from his head and places it on the sweating noggin of Damocles. “You can give the orders. See how much you enjoy it.”

  “Gosh, thanks!” says Damocles. “Hot dog!” The cup-bearer has mysteriously disappeared, but Damocles, who’s somewhat partial to women, has one of the new Egyptian slave-girls do the honors for him. Soon he’s eating chunks of roast boar, knocking back goblets of honey-mead, and making satirical wisecracks that have
the whole court in stitches. There’s a bit of nervousness in their laughter, but Damocles writes it off to the oddity of the situation.

  Just to break the ice, he issues a few tentative Tyrannical orders. He forces some of the more elderly and dignified courtiers to imitate goats or donkeys. It’s good clean fun.

  Then Damocles spots a disquieting reflection in the polished bronze of his mead-cup. He looks up. The wine-bearer of Dionysius has shinnied high up into the palace rafters. He’s got a sharp, heavy bronze sword, and he’s tied it to the rafter with a single woolen thread. The sword is dangling, point-first, directly over the reclining torso of Damocles.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Damocles says.

  Dionysius, who has been watching and chuckling from the sidelines, steps forward. He crosses his arms, and strokes his royal beard. “This,” he says, “is the true nature of political power. This is the daily terror that we Tyrants must live under, which you thoughtless subjects somehow fail to appreciate.” He laughs deep in his kingly chest.

  “I get it,” Damocles says. “It’s a metaphor. Kind of a koan.”

  “That’s right,” says Dionysius. “Now go on, Damocles, enjoy yourself. You won’t be leaving that couch for some time.”

  “Good thing, I was just getting comfortable,” says Damocles, and he pillows his head on an enormous bundle of two hundred pounds of primed TNT. He’s been carrying this massive weight of explosive with him all the time, wired to his body in a kind of backpack

  In fact, everybody in the palace has got a TNT bundle of their own, too. They just haven’t really noticed it, until the situation was made metaphorically clear. Everybody in Syracuse has their own share of explosive. Every man, woman and child on the planet; even the innocent babes in their cradles. Everybody carries their share of the global megatonnage; they’re never without it, even when they somehow manage to forget about it. They just lug it around, day in day out, because they have to; because it’s the postmodern condition. The cost of it nearly bankrupts them and the weight wears calluses on their souls, but nobody dwells on the horror of it much. It’s the only way to stay sane.

  So, with a merry laugh, Damocles has two of the guards seize Dionysius. They demonstrate to him some of the unappreciated hazards of living like a peasant, instead of a king. They start by ripping out several of his teeth, without health insurance. Then they do some other things to him which are even funnier, and finally leave him penniless and ragged in the streets.

  So much for the famous legend of “The Sword of Damocles.” I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Damocles went on to live it up happily ever after, in his merry, pranksterish way, until he got gout, or cirrhosis, or a bad cocaine habit, or AIDS.

  As for Dionysius, he retired to California, where he now lives. He often appears on talk-shows, and makes lucrative speaking-tours before Chambers of Commerce and political action committees. He is writing a set of memoirs defending his public-service record. He’s looking for a movie-option, too. But it’s okay—I don’t think he’ll get one.

  Maneki Neko

  “I can’t go on,” his brother said.

  Tsuyoshi Shimizu looked thoughtfully into the screen of his pasokon. His older brother’s face was shiny with sweat from a late-night drinking bout. “It’s only a career,” said Tsuyoshi, sitting up on his futon and adjusting his pyjamas. “You worry too much.”

  “All that overtime!” his brother whined. He was making the call from a bar somewhere in Shibuya. In the background, a middle-aged office lady was singing karaoke, badly. “And the examination hells. The internal proficiency tests. The manager cultivation programs.… I never have time to live!”

  Tsuyoshi grunted sympathetically. He didn’t like these late-night videophone calls, but he felt obliged to listen. His big brother had always been a decent sort, before he had gone through the elite courses at Waseda, joined a big corporation, and gotten professionally ambitious.

  “My back hurts,” his brother groused. “I have an ulcer. My hair is going gray. And I know they’ll fire me. No matter how loyal you are to the big companies, they have no loyalty to their employees any more. It’s no wonder that I drink.”

  “You should get married again,” Tsuyoshi offered.

  “I can’t find the right girl. Women never understand me.” He shuddered. “Tsuyoshi, I’m truly desperate. The market pressures and the competition are crushing me. I can’t breathe. My life has got to change. I’m thinking of taking the vows. I’m serious! I want to renounce this whole modern world.”

  Tsuyoshi was alarmed. “You’re very drunk, right?”

  His brother leaned closer to the screen. “Life in a monastery sounds truly good to me. It’s so quiet there. You recite the sutras. You consider your existence. There are rules to follow, and rewards that make sense. It’s just the way that Japanese business used to be, back in the good old days.”

  Tsuyoshi grunted skeptically.

  “Last week I went out to a special place in the mountains.… a monastery on Mount Aso,” his brother confided. “The monks there, they know about people in trouble, people who are burned out by modern life. The monks protect you from the world. No computers, no phones, no faxes, no e-mail, no overtime, no commuting, nothing at all. It’ s beautiful, and it’s peaceful, and nothing ever happens there. Really, it’s like paradise.”

  “Listen, older brother,” Tsuyoshi said, “you’re not a religious man by nature. You’re a section chief for a big import-export company.”

  “Well… maybe religion won’t work for me. I did think of running away to America. Nothing much ever happens there, either.”

  Tsuyoshi smiled. “That sounds much better! America is a good vacation spot. A long vacation is just what you need! Besides, the Americans are real friendly since they gave up their handguns.”

  “But I can’t go through with it,” his brother wailed. “I just don’t dare. I can’t just wander away from everything that I know, and trust to the kindness of strangers.”

  “That always works for me,” Tsuyoshi said. “Maybe you should try it.”

  Tsuyoshi’s wife stirred uneasily on the futon. Tsuyoshi lowered his voice. “Sorry, but I have to hang up now. Call me before you do anything rash.”

  “Don’t tell Dad,” Tsuyoshi’s brother said. “He worries so.”

  “I won’t tell Dad.” Tsuyoshi cut the connection and the screen went dark.

  Tsuyoshi’s wife rolled over, heavily. She was seven months pregnant. She stared at the ceiling, puffing for breath. “Was that another call from your brother?” she said.

  “Yeah. The company just gave him another promotion. More responsibilities. He’s celebrating.”

  “That sounds nice,” his wife said tactfully.

  Next morning, Tsuyoshi slept late. He was self-employed, so he kept his own hours. Tsuyoshi was a video format upgrader by trade. He transferred old videos from obsolete formats into the new high-grade storage media. Doing this properly took a craftsman’s eye. Word of Tsuyoshi’s skills had gotten out on the network, so he had as much work as he could handle.

  At ten AM, the mailman arrived. Tsuyoshi abandoned his breakfast of raw egg and miso soup, and signed for a shipment of flaking, twentieth-century analog television tapes. The mail also brought a fresh overnight shipment of strawberries, and a homemade jar of pickles.

  “Pickles!” his wife enthused. “People are so nice to you when you’re pregnant.”

  “Any idea who sent us that?”

  “Just someone on the network.”

  “Great.”

  Tsuyoshi booted his mediator, cleaned his superconducting heads and examined the old tapes. Home videos from the 1980s. Someone’s grandmother as a child, presumably. There had been a lot of flaking and loss of polarity in the old recording medium.

  Tsuyoshi got to work with his desktop fractal detail generator, the image stabilizer, and the interlace algorithms. When he was done, Tsuyoshi’s new digital copies would look much sharper, cleaner and better co
mposed than the original primitive videotape.

  Tsuyoshi enjoyed his work. Quite often he came across bits and pieces of videotape that were of archival interest. He would pass the images on to the net. The really big network databases, with their armies of search engines, indexers, and catalogues, had some very arcane interests. The net machines would never pay for data, because the global information networks were noncommercial. But the net machines were very polite, and had excellent net etiquette. They returned a favor for a favor, and since they were machines with excellent, enormous memories, they never forgot a good deed.

  Tsuyoshi and his wife had a lunch of ramen with naruto, and she left to go shopping. A shipment arrived by overseas package service. Cute baby clothes from Darwin, Australia. They were in his wife’s favorite color, sunshine yellow.

  Tsuyoshi finished transferring the first tape to a new crystal disk. Time for a break. He left his apartment, took the elevator and went out to the corner coffee-shop. He ordered a double iced mocha cappuccino and paid with a charge-card.

  His pokkecon rang. Tsuyoshi took it from his belt and answered it. “Get one to go,” the machine told him.

  “Okay,” said Tsuyoshi, and hung up. He bought a second coffee, put a lid on it and left the shop.

  A man in a business suit was sitting on a park bench near the entrance of Tsuyoshi’s building. The man’s suit was good, but it looked as if he’d slept in it. He was holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth. He was unshaven and his eyes were red-rimmed.

  The pokkecon rang again. “The coffee’s for him?” Tsuyoshi said.

  “Yes,” said the pokkecon. “He needs it.”

  Tsuyoshi walked up to the lost businessman. The man looked up, flinching warily, as if he were about to be kicked. “What is it?” he said.