Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  She died two days later.

  She had left a will, to my surprise. I got the house and contents. I picked up the phone as soon as I learned of it, and called a garbage company. While they were on the way I went for the last time into Kluge’s house.

  The same computer was still on, and it gave the same message.

  PRESS ENTER

  I cautiously located the power switch, and turned it off. I had the garbage people strip the place to the bare walls.

  I went over my own house very carefully, looking for anything that was even the first cousin to a computer. I threw out the radio. I sold the car, and the refrigerator, and the stove, and the blender, and the electric clock. I drained the waterbed and threw out the heater.

  Then I bought the best propane stove on the market, and hunted a long time before I found an old icebox. I had the garage stacked to the ceiling with firewood. I had the chimney cleaned. It would be getting cold soon.

  One day I took the bus to Pasadena and established the Lisa Foo Memorial Scholarship fund for Vietnamese refugees and their children. I endowed it with seven hundred thousand eighty-three dollars and four cents. I told them it could be used for any field of study except computer science. I could tell they thought me eccentric.

  And I really thought I was safe, until the phone rang.

  I thought it over for a long time before answering it. In the end, I knew it would just keep on going until I did. So I picked it up.

  For a few seconds there was a dial tone, but I was not fooled. I kept holding it to my ear, and finally the tone turned off. There was just silence. I listened intently. I heard some of those far-off musical tones that live in phone wires. Echoes of conversations taking place a thousand miles away. And something infinitely more distant and cool.

  I do not know what they have incubated out there at the NSA. I don’t know if they did it on purpose, or if it just happened, or if it even has anything to do with them, in the end. But I know it’s out there, because I heard its soul breathing on the wires. I spoke very carefully.

  “I do not wish to know any more,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone anything. Kluge, Lisa, and Osborne all committed suicide. I am just a lonely man, and I won’t cause you any trouble.”

  There was a click, and a dial tone.

  Getting the phone taken out was easy. Getting them to remove all the wires was a little harder, since once a place is wired they expect it to be wired forever. They grumbled, but when I started pulling them out myself, they relented, though they warned me it was going to cost.

  PG&E was harder. They actually seemed to believe there was a regulation requiring each house to be hooked up to the grid. They were willing to shut off my power—though hardly pleased about it—but they just weren’t going to take the wires away from my house. I went up on the roof with an axe and demolished four feet of eaves as they gaped at me. Then they coiled up their wires and went home.

  I threw out all my lamps, all things electrical. With hammer, chisel, and handsaw I went to work on the drywall just above the baseboards.

  As I stripped the house of wiring I wondered many times why I was doing it. Why was it worth it? I couldn’t have very many more years before a final seizure finished me off. Those years were not going to be a lot of fun.

  Lisa had been a survivor. She would have known why I was doing this. She had once said I was a survivor, too. I survived the camp. I survived the death of my mother and father and managed to fashion a solitary life. Lisa survived the death of just about everything. No survivor expects to live through it all. But while she was alive, she would have worked to stay alive.

  And that’s what I did. I got all the wires out of the walls, went over the house with a magnet to see if I had missed any metal, then spent a week cleaning up, fixing the holes I had knocked in the walls, ceiling, and attic. I was amused trying to picture the real-estate agent selling this house after I was gone.

  It’s a great little house, folks. No electricity …

  Now I live quietly, as before.

  I work in my garden during most of the daylight hours. I’ve expanded it considerably, and even have things growing in the front yard now.

  I live by candlelight, and kerosene lamp. I grow most of what I eat. It took a long time to taper off the Tranxene and the Dilantin, but I did it, and now take the seizures as they come. I’ve usually got bruises to show for it.

  In the middle of a vast city I have cut myself off. I am not part of the network growing faster than I can conceive. I don’t even know if it’s dangerous, to ordinary people. It noticed me, and Kluge, and Osborne. And Lisa. It brushed against our minds like I would brush away a mosquito, never noticing I had crushed it. Only I survived.

  But I wonder.

  It would be very hard …

  Lisa told me how it can get in through the wiring. There’s something called a carrier wave that can move over wires carrying household current. That’s why the electricity had to go.

  I need water for my garden. There’s just not enough rain here in southern California, and I don’t know how else I could get the water.

  Do you think it could come through the pipes?

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  New Rose Hotel

  Speaking of meteoric rises to prominence, as I was in the last story introduction, William Gibson’s own ascent into the public eye has described an arc as clean and tight and high 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 a taut and vivid story called “Johnny Mnemonic” to Omni. “Johnny Mnemonic” was a Nebula finalist that year, and 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. He solidified his growing reputation last year with the publication of his remarkable first novel Neuromancer, one of the most critically-acclaimed and widely talked-about debut novels in a decade or more. Gibson’s stories have also appeared in Universe, Modern Stories, and Interzone. Upcoming are two new novels: Count Zero, set in “the same universe as Neuromancer,” from Ace, and The Log of the Mustang Sally, from Arbor House. Born in South Carolina, Gibson now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and family.

  Here he takes us on a typically fast-paced and hard-edged tour through the decadent high-tech underworld of the future, with a cast of characters in search of that elusive Edge that can make all the difference between success and failure—and between life and death.

  Seven rented nights in this coffin, Sandii. New Rose Hotel. How I want you now. Sometimes I hit you. Replay it so slow and sweet and mean, I can almost feet it. Sometimes I take your little automatic out of my bag, run my thumb down smooth, cheap chrome. Chinese .22, its bore no wider than the dilated pupils of your vanished eyes.

  Fox is dead now, Sandii.

  Fox told me to forget you.

  I remember Fox leaning against the padded bar in the dark lounge of some Singapore hotel, Bencoolen Street, his hands describing different spheres of influence, internal rivalries, the arc of a particular career, a point of weakness he had discovered in the armor of some think tank. Fox was point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers. He was a soldier in the secret skirmishes of the zaibatsus, the multinational corporations that control entire economies.

  I see Fox grinning, talking fast, dismissing my ventures into intercorporate espionage with a shake of his head. The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists.

  You can’t put Edge down on paper, Fox said, can’t punch Edge into a diskette.

  The money was in corporate defectors.

  Fox was smooth, the severity of his dark, French suits offset by a boyish for
elock that wouldn’t stay in place. I never liked the way the effect was ruined when he stepped back from the bar, his left shoulder skewed at an angle no Paris tailor could conceal. Someone had run him over with a taxi in Berne, and nobody quite knew how to put him together again.

  I guess I went with him because he said he was after that Edge.

  And somewhere out there, on our way to find the Edge, I found you, Sandii.

  The New Rose Hotel is a coffin rack on the ragged fringes of Narita International. Plastic capsules a meter high and three long, stacked like surplus Godzilla teeth in a concrete lot off the main road to the airport. Each capsule has a television mounted flush with the ceiling. I spend whole days watching Japanese game shows and old movies. Sometimes I have your gun in my hand.

  Sometimes I can hear the jets, laced into holding patterns over Narita. I close my eyes and imagine the sharp, white contrails fading, losing definition.

  You walked into a bar in Yokohama, the first time I saw you. Eurasian, half gaijin, long-hipped and fluid in a Chinese knock-off of some Tokyo designer’s original. Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones. I remember you dumping your purse out on the bed, later, in some hotel room, pawing through your makeup. A crumpled wad of New Yen, dilapidated address book held together with rubber bands, a Mitsubishi bank chip, Japanese passport with a gold chrysanthemum stamped on the cover, and the Chinese .22.

  You told me your story. Your father had been an executive in Tokyo, but now he was disgraced, disowned, cast down by Hosaka, the biggest zaibatsu of all. That night your mother was Dutch, and I listened as you spun out those summers in Amsterdam for me, the pigeons in Dam Square like a soft, brown carpet.

  I never asked what your father might have done to earn his disgrace. I watched you dress; watched the swing of your dark, straight hair, how it cut the air.

  Now Hosaka hunts me.

  The coffins of New Rose are racked in recycled scaffolding, steel pipes under bright enamel. Paint flakes away when I climb the ladder, falls with each step as I follow the catwalk. My left hand counts off the coffin hatches, their multilingual decals warning of fines levied for the loss of a key.

  I look up as the jets rise out of Narita, passage home, distant now as any moon.

  Fox was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to credit you with ambition. But then he never lay all night with you on the beach at Kamakura, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your child’s mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, and always the one, you swore, that was really and finally the truth.

  I didn’t care, holding your hips while the sand cooled against your skin.

  Once you left me, ran back to that beach saying you’d forgotten our key. I found it in the door and went after you, to find you ankle deep in surf, your smooth back rigid, trembling; your eyes far away. You couldn’t talk. Shivering. Gone. Shaking for different futures and better pasts.

  Sandii, you left me here.

  You left me all your things.

  This gun. Your makeup, all the shadows and blushes capped in plastic. Your Cray microcomputer, a gift from Fox, with a shopping list you entered. Sometimes I play that back, watching each item cross the little silver screen.

  A freezer. A fermenter. An incubator. An electrophoresis system with integrated agarose cell and transilluminator. A tissue embedder. A high-performance liquid chromatograph. A flow cytometer. A spectrophotometer. Four gross of borosilicate scintillation vials. A microcentrifuge. And one DNA synthesizer, with in-built computer. Plus software.

  Expensive, Sandii, but then Hosaka was footing our bills. Later you made them pay even more, but you were already gone.

  Hiroshi drew up that list for you. In bed, probably. Hiroshi Yomiuri. Maas Biolabs GmbH had him. Hosaka wanted him.

  He was hot. Edge and lots of it. Fox followed genetic engineers the way a fan follows players in a favorite game. Fox wanted Hiroshi so bad he could taste it.

  He’d sent me up to Frankfurt three times before you turned up, just to have a look-see at Hiroshi. Not to make a pass or even to give him a wink and a nod. Just to watch.

  Hiroshi showed all the signs of having settled in. He’d found a German girl with a taste for conservative loden and riding boots polished the shade of a fresh chestnut. He’d bought a renovated townhouse on just the right square. He’d taken up fencing and given up kendo.

  And everywhere the Maas security teams, smooth and heavy, a rich, clear syrup of surveillance. I came back and told Fox we’d never touch him.

  You touched him for us, Sandii. You touched him just right.

  Our Hosaka contacts were like specialized cells protecting the parent organism. We were mutagens, Fox and I, dubious agents adrift on the dark side of the intercorporate sea.

  When we had you in place in Vienna, we offered them Hiroshi. They didn’t even blink. Dead calm in an L.A. hotel room. They said they had to think about it.

  Fox spoke the name of Hosaka’s primary competitor in the gene game, let it fall out naked, broke the protocol forbidding the use of proper names.

  They had to think about it, they said.

  Fox gave them three days.

  I took you to Barcelona a week before I took you to Vienna. I remember you with your hair tucked back into a gray beret, your high Mongol cheekbones reflected in the windows of ancient shops. Strolling down the Ramblas to the Phoenician harbor, past the glass-roofed Mercado selling oranges out of Africa.

  The old Ritz, warm in our room, dark, with all the soft weight of Europe pulled over us like a quilt. I could enter you in your sleep. You were always ready. Seeing your lips in a soft, round O of surprise, your face about to sink into the thick, white pillow—archaic linen of the Ritz. Inside you I imagined all that neon, the crowds surging around Shinjuku Station, wired electric night. You moved that way, rhythm of a new age, dreamy and far from any nation’s soil.

  When we flew to Vienna, I installed you in Hiroshi’s wife’s favorite hotel. Quiet, solid, the lobby tiled like a marble chessboard, with brass elevators smelling of lemon oil and small cigars. It was easy to imagine her there, the highlights on her riding boots reflected in polished marble, but we knew she wouldn’t be coming along, not this trip.

  She was off to some Rhineland spa, and Hiroshi was in Vienna for a conference. When Maas security flowed in to scan the hotel, you were out of sight.

  Hiroshi arrived an hour later, alone.

  Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.

  The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.

  Not the Edge lecture again, I said.

  Maas isn’t like that, he said, ignoring me.

  Maas was small, fast, ruthless. An atavism. Maas was all Edge.

  I remember Fox talking about the nature of Hiroshi’s Edge. Radioactive nucleases, monoclonal antibodies, something to do with the linkage of proteins, nucleotides … Hot, Fox called them, hot proteins. Highspeed links. He said Hiroshi was a freak, the kind who shatters paradigms, inverts a whole field of science, brings on the violent revision of an entire body of knowledge. Basic patents, he said, his throat tight with the sheer wealth of it, with the high, thin smell of tax-free millions that clung to those two words.

  Hosaka wanted Hiroshi, but his Edge was radical enough to worry them. They wanted him to work in isolation.

  I went to Marrakech, to the old city, the Medina. I found a heroin lab that had been converted to the extraction of pheromones. I bought it, with Hosaka’s money.

  I walked the marketplace at Djemaa-el-Fna with a sweating Portuguese businessman, discussing fluorescent lighting and the installation of ventilated specimen cages. Beyond the city walls, the high Atlas.
Djemaa-el-Fna was thick with jugglers, dancers, storytellers, small boys turning lathes with their feet, legless beggars with wooden bowls under animated holograms advertising French software.

  We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand.

  Sandii, I remember you in Harajuku, sometimes. Close my eyes in this coffin and I can see you there—all the glitter, crystal maze of the boutiques, the smell of new clothes. I see your cheekbones ride past chrome racks of Paris leathers. Sometimes I hold your hand.

  We thought we’d found you, Sandii, but really you’d found us. Now I know you were looking for us or for someone like us. Fox was delighted, grinning over our find: such a pretty new tool, bright as any scalpel. Just the thing to help us sever a stubborn Edge, like Hiroshi’s, from the jealous parent-body of Maas Biolabs.

  You must have been searching a long time, looking for a way out, all those nights down Shinjuku. Nights you carefully cut from the scattered deck of your past.

  My own past had gone down years before, lost with all hands, no trace. I understood Fox’s late-night habit of emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He’d lay the pieces out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew what he was looking for. You did the same thing with your childhoods.

  In New Rose, tonight, I choose from your deck of pasts.

  I choose the original version, the famous Yokohama hotel-room text, recited to me that first night in bed. I choose the disgraced father, Hosaka executive. Hosaka. How perfect. And the Dutch mother, the summers in Amsterdam, the soft blanket of pigeons in the Dam Square afternoon.