Tales of Old Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  “The singularity did what it could. It disassembled what bits of the ship remained to build the sub-space distress beacon. That didn’t leave much to keep you alive with. So it used what it had: Your suit. And your body.

  “It took you apart, and with your elements built a microscopic version of ancient Manhattan inside your space suit. Then it reconstructed you, with appropriate memories, inside that environment. I think you’ll agree that it interpreted your commands well.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” Ellen said wildly. “I won’t!”

  She turned her back and walked away. Dog did not follow.

  But there was no exit.

  There was nothing but the Whitney, with its two and a half floors of video installations, its half-floor of abstract expressionism, its gift shop, and its rather basic ground-floor patisserie. The doors no longer existed, and all the windows looked out upon anymore was human blood and tissue.

  All that was left of New York City was this one small bubble of space suspended within a world of her own flesh.

  She found Dog waiting for her in the patisserie. Almost in tears, she demanded, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “The rescue ship has come,” it replied. “New York is no longer needed, so it’s being dismantled.”

  “That’s what’s become of Stasi, then? And Rudolfo and Gregor and everybody else? They’ve been destroyed?”

  “They never were real. Only you were real. And now it’s time for you to rejoin the outer world.” Dog lowered its voice persuasively. “That’s why I’m here. To ease the way for you.”

  “Ease the way?”

  “It’s your turn now.” Where a pastry cart had been was now a couch with brocaded red-and-green roses. “I want you to lie down and close your eyes. This won’t take a minute.”

  “Hey, wait. Hold on here. What if I don’t want to?”

  “Relax. This won’t hurt a bit. You have my word on it.”

  Ellen thought she detected a trace of unctuousness in Dog’s voice. But she wasn’t sure. To focus herself, she picked up a bread stick and carefully buttered it on one side, thinking only of the task at hand and how good it would taste. She was about to eat it, in spite of her diet, when a thought came to her.

  She put the bread stick, untasted, down on a plate.

  “Not so fast,” Ellen said slowly. “I said to keep me safe, and I said to call for help, but I didn’t say anything about what to do when help came. Your orders didn’t say anything about reconstructing me. So if I don’t cooperate, I don’t have to leave.”

  For a long moment Dog was silent. Finally it said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t realize that.”

  “Well, I do. And I’m not cooperating!”

  “Ellen, the singularity can’t look after you and serve the needs of the New Amsterdam colony as well. It’s needed there. They’ve reached the critical population mass where human beings alone can’t run the society without wars and economic disasters. There are people dying for lack of what you’re selfishly refusing to share.”

  “I don’t care,” Ellen said harshly. “Put it back. I want my life just the way it was—Rudy, the Village, my job, everything. You have to keep me healthy and sane, right? Well, this is making me feel distinctly unhealthy. I am definitely having unbalanced thoughts.”

  Dog sighed. “As you wish,” it said. “So be it.”

  Everything was back to normal.

  To celebrate, Ellen held a party. She told the caterers from Too Cute to Cook to set out beluga on crackers, raw tuna wrapped in kelp, and crudites for the vegetarians, and to keep the Perignon flowing. Then she invited all her very best friends, and a few celebrities from the literary world, with a seasoning of strangers just to keep the mix from getting predictable.

  It was fun. For a while.

  But there came a moment … when Stasi was doing her impression of Richard Nixon voguing at the Rubber Club, and Rudolfo and Gregor were camping it up and exchanging desperate little kisses in the guise of making fun of themselves, and Tom Disch and Joyce Carol Oates were analyzing the latest John Grisham novel with delicate mockery, and a handsome stranger—a stockbroker who had come in with Esme and then high-handedly abandoned her—was giving Ellen the eye from the far side of the room … that she realized how empty it all felt.

  None of it really mattered. None of them was real.

  It was like finding herself trapped inside a television sitcom. Everybody was manic. Everybody was funny. They were all doing their damnedest to amuse her. And it had all the charm of canned laughter.

  Meat puppets, she thought. They’re all nothing more than meat puppets.

  The handsome young stockbroker chose that moment to make his move. He strolled over to Ellen’s chair and, putting one hand on its back, leaned over to murmur a cynical witticism in her ear. As he did, the other hand lightly clenched her knee.

  Revolted, she pushed him away.

  She shoved him so hard that the stockbroker fell over backward, right on his Armani-clad ass. Then Ellen stood and shouted, “Get out!”

  The party fell silent. Everybody looked at her, shocked.

  “Get out, get out, get out! You’re not real, any of you! Why should I pretend you are?” And then, as mouths opened in protest, “Don’t look hurt either!”

  Mouths closed. Faces blank, her guests obediently filed out. In less than a minute the room was empty.

  Ellen began to cry.

  “Hell,” somebody said, “is no other people.”

  Ellen looked up. Dog stood in the doorway. “Had enough?” it asked.

  She nodded wearily.

  “Good.” Taking her by the hand, Dog gently led Ellen to her bedroom. It sat her down on the bed. Through the open window, she could hear the city noises—traffic, sirens, saxophones—one by one shut themselves off.

  Silence enfolded the universe.

  At Dog’s direction, Ellen kicked off her shoes and lay on her back. The mattress was soft and comforting. She crossed her hands on her chest. “What do I do now?”

  “Close your eyes,” Dog said.

  “I’m afraid.”

  “There’ll be an instant of darkness. Then you’ll wake up in the larger world—the real world.”

  A sudden spasm of doubt hit Ellen then, as cold and hard as a cupronickel asteroid in a decades-long orbit around a dead star. “Suppose I don’t wake up? What if I just cease to be like all my fr—all the people I thought were my friends? I don’t want that to happen to me.”

  “Your rescuers are scrambling out of their airlock,” Dog said soothingly. “They’re desperate to save you. They’re coming just as fast as they can.”

  “But I only have your word for that!”

  “Now they can see your suit. Their hearts are filled with joy and hope. They’re flying toward you with arms extended.”

  A silk-soft paw brushed lightly over her face from forehead to chin. Reflexively, her eyelids fluttered shut.

  “Have faith,” Dog said.

  The darkness closed about her like a mouth.

  12

  In Concert

  The posters had been plastered all over Sevastopol for a month, huge black-and-red things with only two words on them:

  IN CONCERT

  Nothing else. Just those two words and the harsh profile of a face so familiar to Tex that it sometimes seemed hard-wired into his neural structure, the outward expression of a truth encoded in his genes from birth. Time, place, and price had been omitted so the same posters could be used in every city of the tour. Everybody knew no tickets would ever reach the box office. Favors would be called in, backs scratched, envelopes stuffed with American currency exchanged. For weeks, the pasteboards had described complex orbits between the black market and the highest reaches of the Party hierarchy, each one being traded again and again, multiplying in value, greasing the wheels, the perfect bribe, the surest way of getting anything from a new Sony Walkman to a preferred position on the waiting lists for a bigger apa
rtment.

  Tonight they would all—tickets, favors, bribes—come to rest.

  “Get up, you hooligan!”

  Tex squinted up into the face of the squattest, ugliest woman he had ever seen. Shapeless dress, shapeless body, a red babushka from which dry wisps of grey hair struggled to escape. Twin lines from the corners of her mouth framed her chin, giving her the jaws of a turtle. Maybe she was a gnome.

  “Hah?” He had been sitting at the bottom of a long flight of public steps, staring idly through the fumes and traffic at a lot across the prospekt. A makeshift market had been built there, where vendors sold vegetables, hot coffee, and flowers from small kiosks. He was working on a song. Trying to come up with a rhyme for “oblivion.”

  “Don’t sprawl like that! Shame on you! Who do you think you are to block everybody’s passage?”

  The steps rose past the white-walled city offices, and though it was not yet quitting time all the apparatchiks had left early to avoid the weekend crush of traffic to their country dachas. The buildings were empty and so were the stairs. Without saying a word, Tex put his guitar back into its case and closed the snaps. Swiping at the seat of his cheap Bulgarian jeans, he stood and smiled at her. She sniffed and turned away.

  The No. 10 trolleybus arrived then, and Tex got on. A couple of people were ahead of him at the punch, so he didn’t bother to cancel his ticket. He found a seat near the back and, gripping his guitar case between his knees, stared glumly out a scratched and dirty window, trying to imagine himself on stage, electric guitar slung low at the hip, and in the audience girls in punk leather screaming ecstatically. The old woman perversely took the seat beside him, though there were others available.

  With a lurch and a harsh clatter of gears, the trolleybus started off. A year ago it would have run soundlessly. Next year it might not run at all. Thank you, Comrade Gorbachev.

  More posters floated by, singly and in groups. On the blind side of an old warehouse they had been plastered up four-by-three, like a video array set to multiply the same static image over and over.

  IN CONCERT IN CONCERT IN CONCERT IN CONCERT

  IN CONCERT IN CONCERT IN CONCERT IN CONCERT

  IN CONCERT IN CONCERT IN CONCERT IN CONCERT

  Somebody had defaced each and every poster with the circle-and-A anarchy symbol.

  “Vandals!” The turtle woman jabbed a bony finger in Tex’s ribs. “That’s a disgusting way to treat the People’s property! These hoodlums probably go to the same school as you—why don’t you and your friends do something about them? Band together, show some solidarity, teach them respect. Sevastopol is such a beautiful city, after all, don’t you agree?”

  “Sevastopol is a shithole.” Tex turned away from the outraged O of her mouth and stared out the window again. They were going by a park; wrought-iron bandstands, couples out strolling hand in hand. It was very nineteenth-century. He sighed.

  He didn’t even know why he was bothering.

  Both Boris and Andrei had sneered when he asked if they wanted to come along. It was pointless, they said. The little he could hear from outside wasn’t going to be worth listening to. Anyway, the Boss was old stuff, little more than a walking cadaver kept alive by cryonics, morphine, and bimonthly whole-blood changes. Three surgeons traveled as part of his road crew and a team of paramedics waited on standby alert backstage whenever he performed.

  Then Andrei had said that if Tex wanted to take in some real music, he had the new Butthole Surfers bootleg, which his sister’s boyfriend, who worked a Black Sea merchanter, had copped in a greymarket bazaar in Turkey. They could maybe score some hashish from one of the Afghan War vets who hung around the servicemen’s club, and go out behind the skating rink and get stoned and drunk and break things.

  Tex had replied that he was sick to death of hardcore and that it was just an excuse for no-talents who could scream but couldn’t sing to avoid learning how to finger bar chords. That hadn’t pleased Boris, who had just settled on the stage name of Misha Cyberpunk and was thinking of shaving his head. He’d asked if that meant they were going to work up yet another version of “Mustang Sally.” At which point Andrei had had to step in to prevent a fight.

  So he was going alone.

  Worse, his friends had a point. This trip was a perfect example of what his teachers called “the cult of personality” whenever the bastards got onto the subject of their students’ taste in music. He was being a jerk. No question about that.

  But still. This was more than just another appearance by just another guitar hero. This was more than just another one-night stand by one of the founding fathers of rock and roll. So what if he had to listen from outside the hall? It was the last chance he was ever going to have to get even that close to the man.

  It was the Boss’s farewell tour.

  Forty minutes later the trolleybus let him off at the concert hall.

  The Fisherman’s Palace of Culture stood above Kamyshovaya Bay, surrounded by gently sloping grass lawns. It was a great four-story square building, all glass and concrete, with seating for two thousand spectators and half again that many more if they decided to pack the aisles. They could have booked the act into the soccer stadium and filled every seat; but the Boss preferred concert halls. The acoustics were more to his liking.

  It was late afternoon. A salt breeze blew up from the water, and he could look down on the fishing craft at anchor in the bay. The lawns were heroically large, muscular Social Realist landscaping intended to proclaim the glory and triumph of the Soviet sod and fertilizer industries. The effect was badly undercut by the line of totalitarian grey high-rises across the roadway, concrete monsters identical down to their water stains. Some of their hard-faced denizens had set up card tables by the parking lot and were offering packs of Winstons and Belgian beer at thirty rubles a can. A surprisingly large number of people were standing casually about the concert hall grounds, trying not to look conspicuous.

  A fisherman reclined on the grass, cap on his knee and a brown paper bag in his hand. His trousers were dirty and his sweater torn. “Comrade musician! Come, have a swig.” He waggled the bag invitingly.

  Tex shrugged and awkwardly sat down beside him. Inside, though, he felt a wonderful warmth. For this one moment, everything was okay. Sitting above the bay, sharing a bottle with a real fisherman, was an authentic experience, an unquestionably cool thing to be doing. He accepted the bottle and drank. The vodka was warm and tasted of fusel oil.

  He took too large a mouthful, choked, gasped, and forced a smile. “Good stuff,” he said.

  “American!” The fisherman sounded pleased. He held out a hand. “It is good to meet a fine young American boy like you. My name is Yuri.”

  He took the proffered hand and shook his head. “I’ve been a citizen for years. My father’s a researcher for the Institute of Oceanography.” He was sick of the questions everyone asked when they heard his accent and he hated his parents for bringing him here. There were times when even the beatings the kids back in Austin gave him for being a Commie pinko creep would be a small price to pay if he could return home. He wasn’t treated all that much better here anyway.

  “The guys at school call me Tex.”

  He managed to make it sound as if they’d never meant it as an insult.

  Yuri grinned broadly, showing steel teeth and hideous gums. “Play some music. Something romantic, maybe it will draw in some pretty girls.”

  “Uh, well …” He unlatched the case, drew out the guitar, began tuning the strings. “Actually, I’m not as good as I’d like to be. I’ve got this band together,” presuming that Andrei and good old Misha Cyberpunk hadn’t dismantled Chernobyl in his absence, “but it’s hard to find a place to practice.” He strummed a C chord, shifted to an F and then a B. Finally he settled on a slow version he’d worked up of “I Am the Walrus,” singing the words in English and crooning the “yellow matter custard” line with exaggerated sweetness.

  “You are another Vladimir Vysotsky,”
the fisherman said admiringly. A couple of art students—the boy was dressed in black and had dyed his hair an unnatural red—wandered within range of Yuri’s bellow, and he waved them over. “Comrade artists! Come join us, have a swig!”

  “You know why I’m here?” Yuri asked two hours later. The No. 7 bus had just pulled up to the front of the hall, and the latest load of ticket-holders was getting off. They were chatting happily, eagerly, the pampered offspring of Party officials, most of them, with a few low-ranking Red Army or Black Sea Fleet officers scattered here and there for flavoring. Many were vacationers from the bathing resorts, dressed in Benetton fashions. They pooled and flowed elegantly up the twin stairways to the second-floor entrance. In addition to the art students, Yuri had drawn in a young grocery clerk, a locksmith, and a scruffy blond girl who said she was a truck driver, though nobody believed her. “Do you know why?”

  Smiling, they shook their heads.

  “I am here because of them. All those guys walking up the steps into the Fisherman’s Palace of Culture. I thought, how embarrassed they must be at not having a single fisherman in the Fisherman’s Palace. So here I am. You’re welcome!” he shouted to a cluster of apparatchiks climbing out of their Mercedes.

  They pointedly ignored him.

  “Ahh, I love those bastards, and they know it.”

  “You may be here,” said the redheaded art student, “but you couldn’t get inside that building tonight to save your life.”

  “Who said that?” Yuri sat up straight and stared around him incredulously. “Of course I could get in. There is always a way in for a man like me.”

  The student laughed uneasily, like someone who is trying to be pleasant but is not sure he understands the joke.

  “You don’t believe me? I’ll show you. I’ll get in, and I’ll get all of you in with me.” He lurched to his feet. “Come on, it’s my treat!”

  “This is crazy,” Tex said. They had circled the building three times, trying all the side doors and sizing up security—very tight—at the loading dock out back where the equipment trucks were parked. Now they were back at the first door they had checked.