Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  “What are you talking about?” He was terrified.

  “I’m talking about the survival of values in America! Simply that.” Cigar smoke swirled in front of the dashboard lights, and my voice had reached a shout. Milo was gripping the sides of his seat. The speedometer read 105. “And you, Milo, are at the heart of this process! If people continue to think the way they do, Milo, throwing their crossword puzzle books out the windows of their Audis across America, the future will be full of absolutely valueless people! Right, MILO?” I leaned over, taking my eyes off the road, and blew smoke into his face, screaming, “ARE YOU LISTENING, MILO? MARK MY WORDS!”

  “Y – yes.”

  “GOO, GOO, GA-GA-GAA!”

  I put my foot all the way to the floor. The wind howled through the window; the gray highway flew beneath us.

  “Mark my words, Milo,” I whispered. He never heard me. “Twenty-five across. Eight letters. N-i-h-i-l –”

  My pulse roared in my ears, there joining the drowned choir of the fields and the roar of the engine. My body was slimy with sweat, my fingers clenched through the cigar, fists clamped on the wheel, smoke stinging my eyes. I slammed on the brakes, downshifting immediately, sending the transmission into a painful whine as the car slewed and skidded off the pavement, clipping a reflecting marker and throwing Milo against the windshield. The car stopped with a jerk in the gravel at the side of the road, just shy of a sign announcing Welcome to Ohio.

  There were no other lights on the road; I shut off my own and sat behind the wheel, trembling, the night air cool on my skin. The insects wailed. The boy was slumped against the dashboard. There was a star fracture in the glass above his head, and warm blood came away on my fingers when I touched his hair. I got out of the car, circled around to the passenger’s side, and dragged him from the seat into a field adjoining the road. He was surprisingly light. I left him there, in a field of Ohio soybeans on the evening of a summer’s day.

  * * *

  The city of Detroit was founded by the French adventurer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a supporter of Comte de Pontchartrain, minister of state to the Sun King, Louis XIV. All of these men worshipped the Roman Catholic God, protected their political positions, and let the future go hang. Cadillac, after whom an American automobile was named, was seeking a favorable location to advance his own economic interests. He came ashore on July 24, 1701 with fifty soldiers, an equal number of settlers, and about one hundred friendly Indians near the present site of the Veterans Memorial Building, within easy walking distance of the Greyhound Bus Terminal.

  The car had not run well after the accident, developing a reluctance to go into fourth, but I did not care. The encounter with Milo had gone exactly as such things should go, and was especially pleasing because it had been totally unplanned. An accident – no order, one would guess – but exactly as if I had laid it all out beforehand. I came into Detroit late at night via Route 12, which eventually turned into Michigan Avenue. The air was hot and sticky. I remember driving past the Cadillac Plant; multitudes of red, yellow and green lights glinting off dull masonry and the smell of auto exhaust along the city streets. The sort of neighborhood I wanted was not far from Tiger Stadium: pawnshops, an all-night deli, laundromats, dimly lit bars with red Stroh’s signs in the windows. Men on streetcorners walked casually from noplace to noplace.

  I parked on a side street just around the corner from a Seven-Eleven. I left the motor running. In the store I dawdled over a magazine rack until at last I heard the racing of an engine and saw the Audi flash by the window. I bought a copy of Time and caught a downtown bus at the corner. At the Greyhound station I purchased a ticket for the next bus to Toronto and sat reading my magazine until departure time.

  We got onto the bus. Across the river we stopped at customs and got off again. “Name?” they asked me.

  “Gerald Spotsworth.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Calgary.” I gave them my credentials. The passport photo showed me with hair. They looked me over. They let me go.

  I work in the library of the University of Toronto. I am well-read, a student of history, a solid Canadian citizen. There I lead a sedentary life. The subways are clean, the people are friendly, the restaurants are excellent. The sky is blue. The cat is on the mat.

  We got back on the bus. There were few other passengers, and most of them were soon asleep; the only light in the darkened interior was that which shone above my head. I was very tired, but I did not want to sleep. Then I remembered that I had Ruth’s pills in my jacket pocket. I smiled, thinking of the customs people. All that was left in the box were a couple of tiny pink tabs. I did not know what they were, but I broke one down the middle with my fingernail and took it anyway. It perked me up immediately. Everything I could see seemed sharply defined. The dark green plastic of the seats. The rubber mat in the aisle. My fingernails. All details were separate and distinct, all interdependent. I must have been focused on the threads in the weave of my pants leg for ten minutes when I was surprised by someone sitting down next to me. It was Ruth. “You’re back!” I exclaimed.

  “We’re all back,” she said. I looked around and it was true: on the opposite side of the aisle, two seats ahead, Milo sat watching me over his shoulder, a trickle of blood running down his forehead. One corner of his mouth pulled tighter in a rueful smile. Mr Graves came back from the front seat and shook my hand. I saw the fat singer from the country club, still naked. The locker room boy. A flickering light from the back of the bus: when I turned around there stood the burning man, his eye sockets two dark hollows behind the wavering flames. The shopping mall guard. Hector from the hardware store. They all looked at me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Ruth.

  “We couldn’t let you go on thinking like you do. You act like I’m some monster. I’m just a person.”

  “A rather nice-looking young lady,” Graves added.

  “People are monsters,” I said.

  “Like you, huh?” Ruth said. “But they can be saints, too.”

  That made me laugh. “Don’t feed me platitudes. You can’t even read.”

  “You make such a big deal out of reading. Yeah, well, times change. I get along fine, don’t I?”

  The mall guard broke in. “Actually, miss, the reason we caught on to you is that someone saw you go into the men’s room.” He looked embarrassed.

  “But you didn’t catch me, did you?” Ruth snapped back. She turned to me. “You’re afraid of change. No wonder you live back here.”

  “This is all in my imagination,” I said. “It’s because of your drugs.”

  “It is all in your imagination,” the burning man repeated. His voice was a whisper. “What you see in the future is what you are able to see. You have no faith in God or your fellow man.”

  “He’s right,” said Ruth.

  “Bull. Psychobabble.”

  “Speaking of babble,” Milo said, “I figured out where you got that goo-goo-goo stuff. Talk –”

  “Never mind that,” Ruth broke in. “Here’s the truth. The future is just a place. The people there are just people. They live differently. So what. People make what they want of the world. You can’t escape human failings by running into the past.” She rested her hand on my leg. “I’ll tell you what you’ll find when you get to Toronto,” she said. “Another city full of human beings.”

  This was crazy. I knew it was crazy. I knew it was all unreal, but somehow I was getting more and more afraid. “So the future is just the present writ large,” I said bitterly. “More bull.”

  “You tell her, pal,” the locker room boy said.

  Hector, who had been listening quietly, broke in, “For a man from the future, you talk a lot like a native.”

  “You’re the king of bullshit, man,” Milo said. “‘Some people devote themselves to artwork!’ Jesus!”

  I felt dizzy. “Scut down, Milo. That means ‘Fuck you too.’” I shook my head to try to make them go away. That was
a mistake: the bus began to pitch like a sailboat. I grabbed for Ruth’s arm but missed. “Who’s driving this thing?” I asked, trying to get out of the seat.

  “Don’t worry,” said Graves. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  “He’s brain-dead,” Milo said.

  “You couldn’t do any better,” said Ruth, pulling back down.

  “No one is driving,” said the burning man.

  “We’ll crash!” I was so dizzy now that I could hardly keep from vomiting. I closed my eyes and swallowed. That seemed to help. A long time passed; eventually I must have fallen asleep.

  When I woke it was late morning and we were entering the city, cruising down Eglinton Avenue. The bus has a driver after all – a slender black man with neatly trimmed sideburns who wore his uniform hat at a rakish angle. A sign above the windshield said Your driver – safe, courteous, and below that, on the slide-in name plate, Wilbert Caul. I felt like I was coming out of a nightmare. I felt happy. I stretched some of the knots out of my back. A young soldier seated across the aisle from me looked my way; I smiled, and he returned it briefly.

  “You were mumbling to yourself in your sleep last night,” he said.

  “Sorry. Sometimes I have bad dreams.”

  “It’s okay. I do too, sometimes.” He had a round, open face, an apologetic grin. He was twenty, maybe. Who knew where his dreams came from? We chatted until the bus reached the station; he shook my hand and said he was pleased to meet me. He called me “sir.”

  I was not due back at the library until Monday, so I walked over to Yonge Street. The stores were busy, the tourists were out in droves, the adult theaters were doing a brisk business. Policemen in sharply creased trousers, white gloves, sauntered along among the pedestrians. It was a bright, cloudless day, but the breeze coming up the street from the lake was cool. I stood on the sidewalk outside one of the strip joints and watched the videotaped come-on over the closed circuit. The Princess Laya. Sondra Nieve, the Human Operator. Technology replaces the traditional barker, but the bodies are more or less the same. The persistence of your faith in sex and machines is evidence of your capacity to hope.

  Francis Bacon, in his masterwork The New Atlantis, foresaw the utopian world that would arise through the application of experimental science to social problems. Bacon, however, could not solve the problems of his own time and was eventually accused of accepting bribes, fined forty thousand pounds, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He made no appeal to God, but instead applied himself to the development of the virtues of patience and acceptance. Eventually he was freed. Soon after, on a freezing day in late March, we were driving near Highgate when I suggested to him that cold might delay the process of decay. He was excited by the idea. On impulse he stopped the carriage, purchased a hen, wrung its neck and stuffed it with snow. He eagerly looked forward to the results of his experiment. Unfortunately, in haggling with the street vendor he had exposed himself thoroughly to the cold and was seized with a chill which rapidly led to pneumonia, of which he died on April 9, 1626.

  There’s no way to predict these things.

  When the videotape started repeating itself I got bored, crossed the street, and lost myself in the crowd.

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  The Winter Market

  Almost unknown only a few years ago, William Gibson won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award in 1985 for his remarkable first novel Neuromancer – a rise to prominence as fiery and meteoric as any in SF history. Gibson sold his first story in 1977 to the now-defunct semiprozine Unearth, but it was seen by practically no one, and Gibson’s name remained generally unknown until 1981, when he sold to Omni a taut and vivid story called “Johnny Mnemonic,” a Nebula finalist that year. He followed it up in 1982 with another and even more compelling Omni story called “Burning Chrome,” which was also a Nebula finalist … and all at once Gibson was very much A Writer To Watch.

  Those watching him did not have long to wait. The appearance of Neuromancer and its sequels, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, made him the most talked-about and controversial new SF writer of the decade – one might almost say “writer,” leaving out the “SF” part, for Gibson’s reputation spread far outside the usual boundaries of the genre. Wildly enthusiastic notices about him and interviews with him appeared in places like Rolling Stone, Spin and The Village Voice, and pop-culture figures like Timothy Leary (not someone ordinarily much given to close observation of the SF world) embraced him with open arms. Gibson was also at the heart of the acrimonious Cyberpunk Wars of the mid-’80s (although more as a somewhat aloof figurehead than as one of the sweaty strugglers up on the barricades), with most critics acclaiming him as the foremost cyberpunk, and some even saying that he was the only true cyberpunk. By the beginning of the ’90s, he was a bestseller in Britain, and was practically worshipped as a god in SF circles in Japan. Gibson stood aside from all this foofrah, smiling politely, and by the time the dust had settled, even most of his harshest critics had been forced to admit – sometimes grudgingly – that a major new talent had entered the field, the kind of major talent that comes along maybe once or twice in a literary generation.

  You’ll see why in the vivid, brilliant story that follows, a story in which he suggests that people who know exactly what they want can be a little frightening – particularly if they need you to get it for them …

  Gibson’s short fiction has been collected in Burning Chrome. His most recent book is a novel written in collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, and he also has a new solo novel coming up. Born in South Carolina, he now lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife and family.

  It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterminate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she’d merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I’d edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fast-wipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties.

  No, I said, no. Then yes, yes, and hung up on them. Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour blackout that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight. False Creek water. City lights, that same gray bowl of sky smaller now, illuminated by neon and mercury-vapor arcs. And it was snowing, big flakes but not many, and when they touched black water, they were gone, no trace at all. I looked down at my feet and saw my toes clear of the edge of concrete, the water between them. I was wearing Japanese shoes, new and expensive, glove-leather Ginza monkey boots with rubber-capped toes. I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back.

  Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way. And because I knew she’d phone me, in the morning.

  * * *

  My father was an audio engineer, a mastering engineer. He went way back, in the business, even before digital. The processes he was concerned with were partly mechanical, with that clunky quasi-Victorian quality you see in twentieth-century technology. He was a lathe operator, basically. People brought him audio recordings and he burned their sounds into grooves on a disk of lacquer. Then the disk was electroplated and used in the construction of a press that would stamp out records, the black things you see in antique stores. And I remember him telling me, once, a few months before he died, that certain frequencies – transients, I think he called them – could easily burn out the head, the cutting head, on a master lathe. These heads were incredibly expensive, so you prevented burnouts with something called an accelerometer. And that was what I was thinking of, as I stood there, my toes out over the water: that head, burning out.

  Because that wa
s what they did to her.

  And that was what she wanted.

  No accelerometer for Lise.

  * * *

  I disconnected my phone on my way to bed. I did it with the business end of a West German studio tripod that was going to cost a week’s wages to repair.

  Woke some strange time later and took a cab back to Granville Island and Rubin’s place.

  Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.

  I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I hadn’t seen before, rusty spider arms folded at the hearts of dented constellations of steel cans fished out of Richmond dumpsters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an artist. “Messing around,” he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extension of boyhood’s perfectly bored backyard afternoons. He wanders through his jammed, littered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi. I’ve seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing garments by a given season’s hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves with as much attendant noise as possible. He’s like a child, Rubin; he’s also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris.

  So I told him about Lise. He let me do it, get it out, then nodded. “I know,” he said. “Some CBC creep phoned eight times.” He sipped something out of a dented cup. “You wanna Wild Turkey sour?”