Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Now the Krait, and he was, slithering around the sound, in and out. Never mind the tattooed cheeks, he wasn’t just flash for the fools. He knew; you wouldn’t have thought it, but he knew.

  Featherweight and the silent type, melody and first harmony. Bad. Featherweight was a disaster, didn’t know where to go or what to do when he got there, but he was pitching ahead like the S.S. Suicide.

  Christ. If they had to rape me, couldn’t they have provided someone upright? The other four kept on, refusing to lose it, and I would have to make the best of it for all of us. Derivative, unoriginal—Featherweight did not rock. It was a crime, but all I could do was take them and shake them. Rock gods in the hands of an angry sinner.

  They were never better. Small change getting a glimpse of what it was like to be big bucks. Hadn’t been for Featherweight, they might have gotten all the way there. More groups now than ever there was, all of them sure that if they just got the right sinner with them, they’d rock the moon down out of the sky.

  We maybe vibrated it a little before we were done. Poor old Featherweight.

  I gave them better than they deserved, and they knew that, too. So when I begged out, they showed me respect at last and went. Their techies were gentle with me, taking the plugs from my head, my poor old throbbing abused broken-hearted sinning head, and covered up the sockets. I had to sleep and they let me. I hear the man say, “That’s a take, righteously. We’ll rush it into distribution. Where in hell did you find that sinner?”

  “Synthesizer,” I muttered, already asleep. “The actual word, my boy, is synthesizer.”

  Crazy old dreams. I was back with Man-O-War in the big CA, leaving him again, and it was mostly as it happened, but you know dreams. His living room was half outdoors, half indoors, the walls all busted out. You know dreams; I didn’t think it was strange.

  Man-O-War was mostly undressed, like he’d forgotten to finish. Oh, that never happened. Man-O-War forget a sequin or a bead? He loved to act it out, just like the Krait.

  “No more,” I was saying, and he was saying, “But you don’t know anything else, you shitting?” Nobody in the big CA kids, they all shit; loose juice.

  “Your contract goes another two and I get the option, I always get the option. And you love it, Gina, you know that, you’re no good without it.”

  And then it was flashback time and I was in the pod with all my sockets plugged, rocking Man-O-War through the wires, giving him the meat and bone that made him Man-O-War and the machines picking it up, sound and vision so all the tube-babies all around the world could play it on their screens whenever they wanted. Forget the road, forget the shows, too much trouble, and it wasn’t like the tapes, not as exciting, even with the biggest FX, lasers, spaceships, explosions, no good. And the tapes weren’t as good as the stuff in the head, rock ‘n’ roll visions straight from the brain. No hours of set-up and hours more doctoring in the lab. But you had to get everyone in the group dreaming the same way. You needed a synthesis, and for that you got a synthesizer, not the old kind, the musical instrument, but something—somebody—to channel your group through, to bump up their music and their tube-fed little souls, to rock them and roll them the way they couldn’t do themselves. And anyone could be a rock ‘n’ roll hero then. Anyone!

  In the end, they didn’t have to play instruments unless they really wanted to, and why bother? Let the synthesizer take their imaginings and boost them up to Mount Olympus.

  Synthesizer. Synner. Sinner.

  Not just anyone can do that, sin for rock ‘n’ roll. I can.

  But it’s not the same as jumping all night to some bar band nobody knows yet … Man-O-War and his blown-out living room came back, and he said, “You rocked the walls right out of my house. I’ll never let you go.”

  And I said, “I’m gone.”

  Then I was out, going fast at first because I thought he’d be hot behind me. But I must have lost him and then somebody grabbed my ankle.

  Featherweight had a tray, like he was Mr. Nursie-Angel-of-Mercy. Nudged the foot of the bed with his knee, and it sat me up slow. She rises from the grave, you can’t keep a good sinner down.

  “Here.” He set the tray over my lap, pulled up a chair. Some kind of thick soup in a bowl he’d given me, with veg wafers to break up and put in. “Thought you’d want something soft and easy.” He put his left foot up on his right leg and had a good look at it. “I never been rocked like that before.”

  “You don’t have it, no matter who rocks you ever in this world. Cut and run, go into management. The big Big Money’s in management.”

  He snacked on his thumbnail. “Can you always tell?”

  “If the Stones came back tomorrow, you couldn’t even tap your toes.”

  “What if you took my place?”

  “I’m a sinner, not a clown. You can’t sin and do the dance. It’s been tried.”

  “You could do it. If anyone could.”

  “No.”

  His stringy cornsilk fell over his face and he tossed it back. “Eat your soup. They want to go again shortly.”

  “No.” I touched my lower lip, thickened to sausage size. “I won’t sin for Man-O-War and I won’t sin for you. You want to pop me one again, go to. Shake a socket loose, give me aphasia.”

  So he left and came back with a whole bunch of them, techies and do-kids, and they poured the soup down my throat and gave me a poke and carried me out to the pod so I could make Misbegotten this year’s firestorm.

  I knew as soon as the first tape got out, Man-O-War would pick up the scent. They were already starting the machine to get me away from him. And they kept me good in the room—where their old sinner had done penance, the lady told me. Their old sinner came to see me, too. I thought, poison dripping from his fangs, death threats. But he was just a guy about my age with a lot of hair to hide his sockets (I never bothered, didn’t care if they showed). Just came to pay his respects, how’d I ever learn to rock the way I did?

  Fool.

  They kept me good in the room. Drunks when I wanted them and a poke to get sober again, a poke for vitamins, a poke to lose the bad dreams. Poke, poke, pig in a poke. I had tracks like the old B&O, and they didn’t even know what I meant by that. They lost Featherweight, got themselves someone a little more righteous, someone who could go with it and work out, sixteen-year-old snip girl with a face like a praying mantis. But she rocked and they rocked and we all rocked until Man-O-War came to take me home.

  Strutted into my room in full plumage with his hair all fanned out (hiding the sockets) and said, “Did you want to press charges, Gina darling?”

  Well, they fought it out over my bed. When Misbegotten said I was theirs now, Man-O-War smiled and said, “Yeah, and I bought you. You’re all mine now, you and your sinner. My sinner.” That was truth. Man-O-War had his conglomerate start to buy Misbegotten right after the first tape came out. Deal all done by the time we’d finished the third one and they never knew. Conglomerates buy and sell all the time. Everybody was in trouble but Man-O-War. And me, he said. He made them all leave and sat down on my bed to re-lay claim to me.

  “Gina.” Ever see honey poured over the edge of a saw-tooth blade? Ever hear it? He couldn’t sing without hurting someone bad and he couldn’t dance, but inside, he rocked. If I rocked him.

  “I don’t want to be a sinner, not for you or anyone.”

  “It’ll all look different when I get you back to Cee-Ay.”

  “I want to go to a cheesy bar and boogie my brains till they leak out the sockets.”

  “No more, darling. That was why you came here, wasn’t it? But all the bars are gone and all the bands. Last call was years ago, it’s all up here now. All up here.” He tapped his temple. “You’re an old lady, no matter how much I spend keeping your bod young. And don’t I give you everything? And didn’t you say I had it?”

  “It’s not the same. It wasn’t meant to be put on a tube for people to watch.”

  “But it’s not as though r
ock ‘n’ roll is dead, lover.”

  “You’re killing it.”

  “Not me. You’re trying to bury it alive. But I’ll keep you going for a long, long time.”

  “I’ll get away again. You’ll either rock ’n’ roll on your own or give it up, but you won’t be taking it out of me any more. This ain’t my way, it ain’t my time. Like the man said, ‘I don’t live today.’”

  Man-O-War grinned. “And like the other man said, ‘Rock ‘n’ roll never forgets.’”

  He called in his do-kids and took me home.

  BRUCE STERLING

  Sunken Gardens

  One of the major new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first SF story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Last Dangerous Visions, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. He has attracted special acclaim in the last few years for a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny, and the nature of humanity itself. His acclaimed Shaper/Mechanist story “Swarm” was both a Hugo and Nebula finalist in 1982; “Spider Rose,” another story sharing the same background, was also a Hugo finalist that year. His story “Cicada Queen,” a Nebula finalist last year, was in our First Annual Collection. His novels include Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid. Upcoming from Arbor House is a big new novel set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, Schismatrix. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, and now lives in Austin, where he is a member of the well-known Turkey City Writers Workshop.

  Terraforming is a familiar concept in SF, but in the darkly fascinating story that follows—another of the Shaper/Mechanist stories—we are taken to witness a bizarre terraforming contest between competing ecosystems, a literal battle of worlds, in which the stakes are life itself …

  Mirasol’s crawler loped across the badlands of the Mare Hadriacum, under a tormented Martian sky. At the limits of the troposphere, jet streams twisted, dirty streaks across pale lilac. Mirasol watched the winds through the fretted glass of the control bay. Her altered brain suggested one pattern after another: nests of snakes, nets of dark eels, maps of black arteries. Since morning the crawler had been descending steadily into the Hellas Basin, and the air pressure was rising. Mars lay like a feverish patient under this thick blanket of air, sweating buried ice.

  On the horizon thunderheads rose with explosive speed below the constant scrawl of the jet streams.

  The basin was strange to Mirasol. Her faction, the Patternists, had been assigned to a redemption camp in northern Syrtis Major. There, two-hundred-mile-an-hour surface winds were common, and their pressurized camp had been buried three times by advancing dunes.

  It had taken her eight days of constant travel to reach the equator.

  From high overhead, the Regal faction had helped her navigate. Their orbiting city-state, Terraforming-Kluster, was a nexus of monitor satellites. The Regals showed by their helpfulness that they had her under close surveillance.

  The crawler lurched as its six picklike feet scrabbled down the slopes of a deflation pit. Mirasol suddenly saw her own face reflected in the glass, pale and taut, her dark eyes dreamily self-absorbed. It was a bare face, with the anonymous beauty of the genetically Reshaped. She rubbed her eyes with nail-bitten fingers.

  To the west, far overhead, a gout of airborne topsoil surged aside and revealed the Ladder, the mighty anchor cable of the Terraforming-Kluster.

  Above the winds the cable faded from sight, vanishing below the metallic glitter of the Kluster, swinging aloofly in orbit.

  Mirasol stared at the orbiting city with an uneasy mix of envy, fear, and reverence. She had never been so close to the Kluster before, or to the all-important Ladder that linked it to the Martian surface. Like most of her faction’s younger generation, she had never been into space. The Regals had carefully kept her faction quarantined in the Syrtis redemption camp.

  Life had not come easily to Mars. For one hundred years the Regals of Terraforming-Kluster had bombarded the Martian surface with giant chunks of ice. This act of planetary engineering was the most ambitious, arrogant, and successful of all the works of man in space.

  The shattering impacts had torn huge craters in the Martian crust, blasting tons of dust and steam into Mars’s threadbare sheet of air. As the temperature rose, buried oceans of Martian permafrost roared forth, leaving networks of twisted badlands and vast expanses of damp mud, smooth and sterile as a television. On these great playas and on the frost-caked walls of channels, cliffs, and calderas, transplanted lichen had clung and leapt into devouring life. In the plains of Eridania, in the twisted megacanyons of the Coprates Basin, in the damp and icy regions of the dwindling poles, vast clawing thickets of its sinister growth lay upon the land—massive disaster areas for the inorganic.

  As the terraforming project had grown, so had the power of Terraforming-Kluster.

  As a neutral point in humanity’s factional wars, T-K was crucial to financiers and bankers of every sect. Even the alien Investors, those star-traveling reptiles of enormous wealth, found T-K useful, and favored it with their patronage.

  And as T-K’s citizens, the Regals, increased their power, smaller factions faltered and fell under their sway. Mars was dotted with bankrupt factions, financially captured and transported to the Martian surface by the T-K plutocrats.

  Having failed in space, the refugees took Regal charity as ecologists of the sunken gardens. Dozens of factions were quarantined in cheerless redemption camps, isolated from one another, their lives pared to a grim frugality.

  And the visionary Regals made good use of their power. The factions found themselves trapped in the arcane bioaesthetics of Posthumanist philosophy, subverted constantly by Regal broadcasts, Regal teaching, Regal culture. With time even the stubbornest faction would be broken down and digested into the cultural bloodstream of T-K. Faction members would be allowed to leave their redemption camp and travel up the Ladder.

  But first they would have to prove themselves. The Patternists had awaited their chance for years. It had come at last in the Ibis Crater competition, an ecological struggle of the factions that would prove the victors’ right to Regal status. Six factions had sent their champions to the ancient Ibis Crater, each one armed with its group’s strongest biotechnologies. It would be a war of the sunken gardens, with the Ladder as the prize.

  Mirasol’s crawler followed a gully through a chaotic terrain of rocky permafrost that had collapsed in karsts and sinkholes. After two hours, the gully ended abruptly. Before Mirasol rose a mountain range of massive slabs and boulders, some with the glassy sheen of impact melt, others scabbed over with lichen.

  As the crawler started up the slope, the sun came out, and Mirasol saw the crater’s outer rim jigsawed in the green of lichen and the glaring white of snow.

  The oxygen readings were rising steadily. Warm, moist air was drooling from within the crater’s lip, leaving a spittle of ice. A half-million-ton asteroid from the rings of Saturn had fallen here at fifteen kilometers a second. But for two centuries rain, creeping glaciers, and lichen had gnawed at the crater’s rim, and the wound’s raw edges had slumped and scarred.

  The crawler worked its way up the striated channel of an empty glacier bed. A cold alpine wind keened down the channel, where flourishing patches of lichen clung to exposed veins of ice.

  Some rocks were striped with sediment from the ancient Martian seas, and the impact had peeled them up and thrown them on their backs.

  It was winter, the season for pruning the sunken gardens. The treacherous rubble of the crater’s rim was cemented with frozen mud. The crawler found the glacier’s root and clawed its way up the ice face. The raw slope was striped with winter snow and storm-blown summer dust, stacked in hundreds of red-and-white layers. With the years the stripes had warped and rippled in the glacier’s flow.

  Mirasol reached the crest. The crawler r
an spiderlike along the crater’s snowy rim. Below, in a bowl-shaped crater eight kilometers deep, lay a seething ocean of air.

  Mirasol stared. Within this gigantic airsump, twenty kilometers across, a broken ring of majestic rain clouds trailed their dark skirts, like duchesses in quadrille, about the ballroom floor of a lens-shaped sea.

  Thick forests of green and yellow mangroves rimmed the shallow water and had overrun the shattered islands at its center. Pinpoints of brilliant scarlet ibis spattered the trees. A flock of them suddenly spread kitelike wings and took to the air, spreading across the crater in uncounted millions. Mirasol was appalled by the crudity and daring of this ecological concept, its crass and primal vitality.

  This was what she had come to destroy. The thought filled her with sadness.

  Then she remembered the years she had spent flattering her Regal teachers, collaborating with them in the destruction of her own culture. When the chance at the Ladder came, she had been chosen. She put her sadness away, remembering her ambitions and her rivals.

  The history of mankind in space had been a long epic of ambitions and rivalries. From the very first, space colonies had struggled for self-sufficiency and had soon broken their ties with the exhausted Earth. The independent life-support systems had given them the mentality of city-states. Strange ideologies had bloomed in the hothouse atmosphere of the o’neills, and breakaway groups were common.

  Space was too vast to police. Pioneer elites burst forth, defying anyone to stop their pursuit of aberrant technologies. Quite suddenly the march of science had become an insane, headlong scramble. New sciences and technologies had shattered whole societies in waves of future shock.

  The shattered cultures coalesced into factions, so thoroughly alienated from one another that they were called humanity only for lack of a better term. The Shapers, for instance, had seized control of their own genetics, abandoning mankind in a burst of artificial evolution. Their rivals, the Mechanists, had replaced flesh with advanced prosthetics.