James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Soma turned back to the relative calm inside the Parthenon. Athena’s gaze was baleful, but he couldn’t feel it. The Owl had ripped the ability from him. The Owl lying before Japheth, defenseless against the knife Japheth held high.

“Why?” shouted Soma.

But Japheth didn’t answer him, instead diving over the Owl in a somersault roll, narrowly avoiding the flurry of kicks and roundhouse blows being thrown by Jenny. Her eyes bugged and bled. More blood flowed from her ears and nostrils, but still she attacked Japheth with relentless fury.

Japheth came up in a crouch. The answer to Soma’s question came in a slurred voice from Jenny. Not Jenny, though. Soma knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere, and it wasn’t Jenny’s.

“there is a bomb in that meat soma-friend a knife a threat an eraser”

Japheth shouted at Soma. “You get to decide again! Cut the truth out of him!” He gestured at the Owl with his knife.

Soma took in a shuddery breath. “So free with lives. One of the reasons we climbed up.”

Jenny’s body lurched at Japheth, but the Crow dropped onto the polished floor. Jenny’s body slipped when it landed, the soles of its shoes coated with the same oil as its jumpsuit.

“My Owl cousin died of asphyxiation at least ten minutes ago, Soma,” said Japheth. “Died imperfect and uncontrolled.” Then, dancing backward before the scratching thing in front of him, Japheth tossed the blade in a gentle underhanded arc. It clattered to the floor at Soma’s feet.

All of the same arguments.

All of the same arguments .

Soma picked up the knife and looked down at the Owl. The fight before him, between a dead woman versus a man certain to die soon, spun on. Japheth said no more, only looked at Soma with pleading eyes.

Jenny’s body’s eyes followed the gaze, saw the knife in Soma’s hand.

“you are due upgrade soma-friend swell the ranks of commodores you were 96th percentile now 99th soma-with-the-paintbox-in-printer’s-alley the voluntary state of tennessee applauds your citizenship”

But it wasn’t the early slight, the denial of entry to the circle of highest minds. Memories of before and after, decisions made by him and for him, sentiences and upgrades decided by fewer and fewer and then one; one who’d been a product , not a builder.

Soma plunged the knife into the Owl’s unmoving chest and sawed downward through the belly with what strength he could muster. The skin and fat fell away along a seam straighter than he could ever cut. The bomb — the knife, the eraser, the threat — looked like a tiny white balloon. He pierced it with the killing tip of the Kentuckian’s blade.

A nova erupted at the center of the space where math and Detectives live. A wave of scouring numbers washed outward, spreading all across Nashville, all across the Voluntary State to fill all the space within the containment field.

The 144 Detectives evaporated. The King of the Rock Monkeys, nothing but twisted light, fell into shadow. The Commodores fell immobile, the ruined biology seated in their chests went blind, then deaf, then died.

And singing Nashville fell quiet. Ten thousand thousand heads slammed shut and ten thousand thousand souls fell insensate, unsupported, in need of revival.

North of the Girding Wall, alarms began to sound.

At the Parthenon, Japheth Sapp gently placed the tips of his index and ring fingers on Jenny’s eyelids and pulled them closed.

Then the ragged Crow pushed past Soma and hurried out into the night. The Great Salt Lick glowed no more, and even the lights of the city were dimmed, so Soma quickly lost sight of the man. But then the cawing voice rang out once more. “We only hurt the car because we had to.”

Soma thought for a moment, then said, “So did I.”

But the Crow was gone, and then Soma had nothing to do but wait. He had made the only decision he had left in him. He idly watched as burning bears floated down into the sea. A striking image, but he had somewhere misplaced his paints.

Kessel to Sterling , 2 December 1988:

“I don’t think, in the end, this is a matter of rational ‘ideas.’ You are nearer the quick of it with words like ‘wonder,’ ‘transcendence,’ ‘visionary drive,’ ‘conceptual novelty’ — and especially ‘cosmic fear.’ This is the dirty little secret of science fiction: that its roots are planted not in the logical, positivistic assumptions of ‘science,’ but in some twisted apprehension (I use the word in the sense both of understanding and fear) that ‘the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.’ We fear and are attracted by that irrationality. It yawns like a pit beneath our attempts to understand technology’s effects on us; it tugs at us like a cliff whispering, ‘come on, jump.’ In the interview Kelly and I did with you in Austin a year ago, you talked about wanting to seize the crowbar and smash something. What is that thing you want to smash? Could it be the mundane world’s assumption (born, more and more in our time, out of desperate need instead of smug complacency) that the universe makes sense, that things are stable, that change can be understood and controlled? I have this gut feeling that almost all children destined to grow up to become science fiction writers have some fundamental experience of chaos somewhere in their formative years…. Some writers react by seeking a rigid authoritarianism…others may reach for certainty but remain convinced throughout their lives that Things Change and Are Not What They Seem…

But what are those skills [of a first-rate writer]? I think in the end, they are not skills at all, but a matter of temperament or character, or not even that — it’s a state of mind that you can attain for moments but which isn’t finally you…. What I mean is what I said in a letter to you a long time ago, that great writers go out on a limb farther than good writers do. They aren’t afraid to violate rules, good taste, logic, sensible advice, proportion, etc. in the pursuit of whatever demon they’re trying to catch, whatever quicksilver they’re trying to nail to the tree.”

In Gibson, the corporations and power structures control everything (and ultimately, shadowy Wintermute rules all). The only hope for freedom is to live completely outside of “Babylon” like his space rastas, or to drop out into the underworld like Case and Molly, the beautiful losers of the urban night world, or to steal enough money in the hope of placing your self beyond control.

Most people in the world cannot opt out. What if you are part of a permanent underclass? What if you are part of a family, connected, and stuck?

The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience’s left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn’t bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist’s bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the prickle of tears.

Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a massive spacelighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a spaceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall shaggy with peeling paint.

Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted — like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real — in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience’s hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift. She didn’t look down and she didn’t close her eyes as the needle pattered and scratched, pattered and scratched. The long Poplar Street barge undulated under the tread of feet moving past the scarrist’s, but his fingers were steady as a gin-soaked frontier doctor’s.