Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather

"Leo," said the first chess player, in weary exasperation, "why on earth are you dropping our pants to this woman?"

One of the women spoke up. "Oh, go ahead and tell her, Leo. I'm enjoying this. It doesn't matter. We're free now. We're inside the big silence. We can talk."

"That's you all over, Rosina," said the first chess player in disgust. "I hate this bullshit! I hate watching people blow all operational security, and spew their guts like some teenage burglar, drunk in a bar. We're professionals. for Christ's sake, and she's just some prole. Don't you have any pride?"

"She's not just anyone," Leo protested. "She's family.

She's my sister-in-law."

"No, I'm not," Jane said. "I didn't marry him, Leo."

"Details." Leo shrugged, irritably. "Jerry will marry you. I suppose you don't realize that yet, but he'll do it, all right. He'll never let you go, because he's pulled too much of you inside of him now; and besides, you're too useful to him, and he needs you too much. But that's fine, that's fine, I like that idea; you'd never do anything to hurt Jerry, would you? No, I can see that. Of course not. It's all right it's all just fine."

"You are being a complete moral idiot," said the chess player.

"Look," Leo snapped at him, "if I wanted to stay in the Great Game, do you think I'd have gone this far? Do you know anybody else who could get that danm cuff off you? Then shut up and listen. It's the last time you'll ever have to hear me out."

"Have it your way," the chess player interrupted, with a calm and deadly look. "Jane Unger, listen to me. I can see that you're a very observant person. Stop watching me so very observantly. I don't like it, and I won't have it. It's boring and clumsy to threaten people, but I'm threatening you, so listen." He pulled his manicured hands from the chessboard and steepled his fingertips. "I can commit an act in three seconds that will make you a clinical schizophrenic for eighteen months. You'll hear voices in your head, you'll rave about conspiracies and plots and enemies, you'll paint yourself with your own shit, and that can all be done in three seconds with less than three hundred micrograms. Dead men actually do tell tales sometimes but madwomen tell nothing but pathetic lies, and no one believes what madwomen say, about anything, ever. Am I clear? Yes? Good." He moved a bishop.

Jane sat, weak-kneed, on one of the cowhide hassocks.

"Leo, what are you doing? What have you gotten into?"

"It wasn't for us. It was never for ourselves. It was for the future."

The woman spoke up again. "The delightful part about the Great Game-I mean, the genuinely clever and innovative part-is that we don't even know what we've done! It all takes place through electronic blinds, and cells, and fail-safes, and need-to-know, and digital anonymity and encryption. One cell, for instance, will think up five potential direct actions. Then another cell will choose just one candidate action from that list of five, and break the action up into independent pieces. And then, yet other cells will distribute that work into small independent actions, so fragmented as to be meaningless. It's just the way engravers used to design money. When money was on engraved paper and money still meant something."

"Right," said the second chess player, nodding. "So that one year, some theorist predicts how useful it would be to have Bengali cholera decimate some overcrowded hellhole of a city. And eight months later, someone watches some little paper sailboats melting in a reservoir."

Jane stared. "Why would anyone do that?"

"The best of reasons," Leo said. "Survival. Survival of humanity, and of millions of endangered species. A chance for humanity to work its way out of heavy weather into real sunlight an& blue skies again. We had a lot of chances to take steps to save our world, and we blew them all, Jane. All of them. We were greedy and stupid and shortsighted, and we threw all our chances away. Not you personally, not me personally, not any of us personally, just our ancestors, of course. No one convenient to blame. But you, and me, and the people here, we are all the children of heavy weather, and we have to live under consequences, we have to deal with them. And the only real way to them is ugly, just unbearably ugly."

"Why you, Leo?"

"Because we know! Because we can! For the sake of the survivors. I suppose." He shrugged. "There's no global... There's no formal, deliberate control over these or events, anywhere. Institutions have given up. vernments have given up. Corporations have given up. 'the people in the room, and the many others who are us and with us, we've never given up. We're the closest this planet has to an actual working government." ane looked around the room. They were agreeing with It wasn't any joke. He was telling a truth that they all and recognized.

"Some of us, most of us, are in the government. But there's not any government in the world that can stand up publicly, and say coldly and openly, that the eight billion people on this collapsing planet are at least four billion people too many. Jane, each year, every year, there are children born on Earth to equal the entire populaot Mexico. That's insanely far too many, and it's been that for eighty years now. The situation is so desperate mat working to solve it is like joining a bomb squad. Every war a bomb explodes, and it's a bomb made of human and every human splinter in that bomb means extincand carbon dioxide and toxins and methane and pestiand clearcutting and garbage and further decline.

There were a lot of ways out once, but there are no more alternatives now. Just people who will probably survive, people who probably won't."

"Leo's being a bit dramatic, as usual, but that's part of bis charm," said the woman, Rosina, with a fond smile at him. Rosina looked like a schoolteacher might look-a teacher with a taste for platinum jewelry and expensive facial surgery. "The Great Game is less romantic than iniaht sound. Basically, it's just another American secret and, and while those are common enough, they iasr long. We're very much like the southern resisace during Reconstruction. Like the Invisible Empire- e Ku Klux Klan. For a decade or so, the Ku Klux Klan was a genuine underground government! Where everybody took turns holding the rope for a minute. So nobody really lynched the darkie. You see, the darky just sort of perished."

She smiled. She said this terrible, heart-freezing thing, and she smiled, because she found it amusing. "And everybody involved went right back to being a county judge and a policeman and a lawyer and the owner of the hardware store. And next week they rode out in their hoods and masks and they killed again. That's exactly what it's like for us, Jane. It can really happen. It has happened. It's happened in the United States. And it's happened here be-fore, long before networks or encryption, or any of the really easy, safe, convenient ways to facilitate large conspiracies. It's not farfetched at all, it's not even hard. It's quite easy if you work at it sincerely, and it's very real, it's real like this table is real." She slapped it.

"Just because we few are dropping out of the game doesn't mean that the Great Game will end," said another poker player. He looked vaguely Asian, with a West Coast accent. There weren't any black people among these people. No Hispanics, either. Jane got the strong impression that ethnic balance hadn't been high on the agenda when they did their recruiting, however people like this did their recruiting. Floating Nietzschean Ubermensch IQ tests in obscure corners of networks, maybe. Intriguing intellectual puzzles that only those of a certain cast of mind could win. Little suction spots in the Net where people could slip into the Underground and never, ever come out... "Like AIDS for instance. That bug is a godsend, we might have cured it by now, but there are brave, determined, clever people who will guard every last AIDS variant like a Holy Grail... . A virus that kills sexually careless people! While at the same time lowering nnmunity, so that afflicted people become a giant natural reservoir for epidemics. It's thanks mainly to AIDS that new tuberculosis treatments become so useless so quickly... . If AIDS didn't exist, we'd have been forced to invent it. If it weren't for AIDS, we'd have ten billion people now, not eight."