“Why do you do this?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You’re a rational man. You can’t believe in religious rituals.”
“No,” he told her, “I don’t believe. I know they are just rituals.”
“Why do it, then?”
He knew why, but he did not know how to give her that sermon. He did it because it was a gift. It was a liberating gift for him, because it was given with no thought of any profit or return. A deliberate gift with no possibility of return.
Those gifts were the stuff of history and futurity. Because gifts of that kind were also the gifts that the living received from the dead.
The gifts we received from the dead: those were the world’s only genuine gifts. All the other things in the world were commodities. The dead were, by definition, those who gave to us without reward. And, especially: our dead gave to us, the living, within a dead context. Their gifts to us were not just abjectly generous, but archaic and profoundly confusing.
Whenever we disciplined ourselves, and sacrificed ourselves, in some vague hope of benefiting posterity, in some ambition to create a better future beyond our own moment in time, then we were doing something beyond a rational analysis. Those in that future could never see us with our own eyes: they would only see us with the eyes that we ourselves gave to them. Never with our own eyes: always with their own. And the future’s eyes always saw the truths of the past as blinkered, backward, halting. Superstition.
“Why?” she said.
Borislav knocked the snow from his elegant shoes. “I have a big heart.”
Acknowledgments
“Introduction” by Karen Joy Fowler. © 2007 Karen Joy Fowler.
“Foreword” by Bruce Sterling. © 2007 Bruce Sterling.
“Are You for 86?,” © 1992 Bruce Sterling. First published in Globalhead, Shingletown, CA: Ziesing 1992.
“Bicycle Repairman,” © 1996 Bruce Sterling. First published in Intersections, ed. John Kessel, Mark L. Van Name & Richard Butner, Tor 1996.
“Cicada Queen,” © 1983 Bruce Sterling. First published in Universe 13, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday 1983.
“Deep Eddy,” © 1993 Bruce Sterling. First published in Asimou’s Science Fiction Aug 1993.
“Dinner in Audoghast,” © 1985 Bruce Sterling. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine May 1985.
“Dori Bangs,” © 1989 Bruce Sterling. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine Sep 1989.
“Flowers of Edo,” © 1987 Bruce Sterling. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine May 1987; first published in Japanese in Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine.
“Green Days in Brunei,” © 1985 Bruce Sterling. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine Oct 1985.
“Hollywood Kremlin,” © 1990 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Oct 1990.
“In Paradise,” © 2002 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Sep 2002.
“Maneki Neko,” © 1998 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction May 1998; originally published in Japanese in Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine.
“Our Neural Chernobyl,” © 1988 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Jun 1988.
“Spider Rose,” © 1982 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Aug 1982.
“Sunken Gardens,” © 1984 Bruce Sterling. First published in Omni, June 1984.
“Swarm,” © 1982 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Apr 1982.
“Taklamakan,” © 1998 Bruce Sterling. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct/Nov 1998.
“The Blemmye’s Strategem,” © 2005 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Jan 2005.
“The Compassionate, the Digital,” © 1985 Bruce Sterling. First published in Interzone #14, 1985.
“The Little Magic Shop,” © 1987 Bruce Sterling. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine Oct 1987.
“The Littlest Jackal,” © 1996 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Mar 1996.
“The Sword of Damocles,” © 1990 Bruce Sterling. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine Feb 1990.
“Twenty Evocations,” © 1984 Bruce Sterling. First published in Interzone #7 1984.
“We See Things Differently,” © 1989 Bruce Sterling. First published in Semiotext(e) #14 1989.
“Kiosk,” © 2007 Bruce Sterling. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Jan 2007.
About the Author
Bruce Sterling is an American author and one of the founders of the cyberpunk science fiction movement. He began writing in the 1970s; his first novel, Involution Ocean, about a whaling ship in an ocean of dust, is a science fictional pastiche of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. His other works, including his series of stories and a novel, Schismatrix, set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, often deal with computer-based technologies and genetic engineering. His five short story collections and ten novels have earned several honors: a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, a Hayakawa’s SF Magazine Reader’s Award, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award. Sterling has also worked as a critic and journalist, writing for Metropolis, Artforum, Icon, MIT Technology Review, Time, and Newsweek, as well as Interzone, Science Fiction Eye, Cheap Truth, and Cool Tools. He edits Beyond the Beyond, a blog hosted by Wired.
Sterling is also involved in the technology and design community. In 2003 his web-only art piece, Embrace the Decay, was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and became the most-visited piece in the museum’s digital gallery. He has taught classes in design at the Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam, Centro in Mexico City, Fabrica in Treviso, Italy, and the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Sterling lives in Austin, Texas; Belgrade, Serbia; and Turin, Italy.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Bruce Sterling
Cover design by Jesse Hayes
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8812-4
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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