Future on Fire Page 6

  Startled, but still suspicious, Rachel caps the bottle and, keeping her eyes on the woman, drinks from the faucet. The woman steps back into the house. Rachel motions Johnson to do the same, signaling for him to hurry and drink. She turns off the faucet when he is done.

  They are turning to go when the woman emerges from the house carrying a plate of tortillas and a bowl of apples. She sets them on the edge of the porch and says, “These are for you.”

  The woman watches through the window as Rachel packs the food into her bag. Rachel puts away the last apple and gestures her thanks to the woman. When the woman fails to respond to the sign language, Rachel picks up a stick and writes in the sand of the yard. “THANK YOU,” Rachel scratches, then waves good-bye and sets out across the desert. She is puzzled, but happy.

  The next morning’s newspaper includes an interview with the dark-haired woman. She describes how Rachel turned on the faucet and turned it off when she was through, how the chimp packed the apples neatly in her bag and wrote in the dirt with a stick.

  The reporter also interviews the director of the Primate Research Center. “These are animals,” the director explains angrily. “But people want to treat them like they’re small hairy people.” He describes the Center as “primarily a breeding center with some facilities for medical research.” The reporter asks some pointed questions about their acquisition of Rachel.

  But the biggest story is an investigative piece. The reporter reveals that he has tracked down Aaron Jacobs’ lawyer and learned that Jacobs left a will. In this will, he bequeathed all his possessions—including his house and surrounding land—to “Rachel, the chimp I acknowledge as my daughter.”

  The reporter makes friends with one of the young women in the typing pool at the research center, and she tells him the office scuttlebutt: people suspect that the chimps may have been released by a deaf and drunken janitor, who was subsequently fired for negligence. The reporter, accompanied by a friend who can communicate in sign language, finds Jake in his apartment in downtown Flagstaff.

  Jake, who has been drinking steadily since he was fired, feels betrayed by Rachel, by the Primate Center, by the world. He complains at length about Rachel: They had been friends, and then she took his baseball cap and ran away. He just didn’t understand why she had run away like that.

  “You mean she could talk?” the reporter asks through his interpreter.

  —Of course she can talk, Jake signs impatiently.—She is a smart monkey.

  The headlines read: “Intelligent chimp inherits fortune!” Of course, Aaron’s bequest isn’t really a fortune and she isn’t just a chimp, but close enough. Animal rights activists rise up in Rachel’s defense. The case is discussed on the national news. Ann Landers reports receiving a letter from a chimp named Rachel; she had thought it was a hoax perpetrated by the boys at Yale. The American Civil Liberties Union assigns a lawyer to the case.

  By day, Rachel and Johnson sleep in whatever hiding places they can find: a cave; a shelter built for range cattle; the shell of an abandoned car, rusted from long years in a desert gully. Sometimes Rachel dreams of jungle darkness, and the coyotes in the distance become a part of her dreams, their howling becomes the cries of her fellow apes.

  The desert and the journey have changed her. She is wiser, having passed through the white-hot love of adolescence and emerged on the other side. She dreams, one day, of the ranch house. In the dream, she has long blonde hair and pale white skin. Her eyes are red from crying and she wanders the house restlessly, searching for something that she has lost. When she hears coyotes howling, she looks through a window at the darkness outside. The face that looks in at her has jug-handle ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face, she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in.

  By night, they travel. The rocks and sands are cool beneath Rachel’s feet as she walks toward her ranch. On television, scientists and politicians discuss the ramifications of her case, describe the technology uncovered by investigation of Aaron Jacobs’ files. Their debates do not affect her steady progress toward her ranch or the stars that sprinkle the sky above her.

  It is night when Rachel and Johnson approach the ranch-house. Rachel sniffs the wind and smells automobile exhaust and strange humans. From the hills, she can see a small camp beside a white van marked with the name of a local television station. She hesitates, considering returning to the safety of the desert. Then she takes Johnson by the hand and starts down the hill. Rachel is going home.

  Dogfight

  by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

  Introduction

  It happens that the first work of William Gibson’s that I read was Neuromancer, his first and, so far, most successful novel. It was compulsively readable, and it achieved what so few science fiction novels ever do: a detailed near-future that is different from the present reality and yet is connected to it. The style and plot were reminiscent of the hard-boiled detective tradition, which I enjoy, but it was the mastery of milieu that made Neuromancer such an extraordinary book.

  But it left a sort of bitter aftertaste in my mouth. It appeared to me to be a hopeless, despairing vision, which seemed to honor suicide and self-destruction in a world where almost no one ever created anything. It was morally confusing to me; I wasn’t sure if Gibson meant me to adopt the hip but cynical attitude of the hero, or stand ironically aside and reject the moral stance of all the characters. I finally came to the conclusion that Gibson was a writer I should admire, while rejecting his moral worldview.

  Then, a while later, I attended a convention in Washington, D.C., where Michael Swanwick was reading a new story. I attended in large part because I had such respect for his first novel, In the Drift. Artistically less successful than Gibson’s, it was still a remarkable debut—and I was more sympathetic to the way Swanwick seemed to view the world.

  Swanwick comes across exactly as a writer should—a little tweedy, a little seedy, and bright as hell. He started to introduce the story. It was called “Dogfight,” and it was a collaboration between Swanwick and Gibson.

  My heart sank. It was too late to get up and walk out. I was sitting in the front row—hard to be subtle from that position. It wasn’t because of my partial dislike for Gibson’s work that I wanted to leave. It was the word collaboration. While there are some inspired collaborations in the history of science fiction—Kornbluth and Pohl, Niven and Pournelle—most collaborations end up being neither fish nor fowl. The presence of two names under the title usually makes me want to save a story until I have more time—for instance, during the last ten years of my retirement, when I’m bedridden and have read everything else ever published.

  But within paragraphs my fears were gone; within a few pages I knew this story was on its way to being a masterwork. Here was the same level of detailed milieu creation that had made Neuromancer such astonishingly good science fiction. Here also was the same iron-hard attention to fully-rounded character that had made me have such high hopes for Michael Swanwick’s future work. I have a weak spot for stories about games that consume the lives of their players, but “Dogfight” kept insisting on being much, much more than that.

  As Swanwick neared the end of the story, however, I began to feel an old familiar dread. They were going to go for the easy, cop-out, ain’t-life-a-bitch ending that has long been the mark of fashionably angst-ridden adolescent writers. The child’s version of tragedy. Romeo and Juliet, where everybody dies because the author felt like it, instead of Lear, where the tragedy arises inevitably out of the characters.

  But no. Not at all. “Dogfight” ended as well as it had begun. And in my delight—and relief—I concluded that Swanwick had been a very good collaborator for Gibson. I was absolutely certain that Gibson had wanted the nihilistic ending, and Swanwick, with his unerring sense for character, had insisted on the far more truthful (and difficult) ending that the story achieved.

  I went up to Swanwick and, as I enthused about the story, I mentioned
my relief at the ending. As I remember the conversation, Swanwick confirmed that I was half right. They had wanted to follow different paths at the end, and they were pretty much the two alternatives I had assumed.

  But, said Swanwick, it was Gibson who insisted on the good ending, the one you’re about to read. Insisted until Swanwick saw the light and agreed. Go figure.

  It was almost certain that, along with Lucius Shepard, William Gibson will be one of my two least controversial choices as “most important short-fiction writers of the 1980s.” Though many of us discovered him through his novel, Neuromancer, his marvelously rich milieu creation was already fully developed in the short stories that had been appearing since the beginning of the decade. He remains, with Bruce Sterling and Lew Shiner, one of the three pillars of the Cyberpunk movement that will certainly be the most-remembered phenomenon of the eighties; and it’s Gibson’s work, his style, his milieu that most people think of when they think of Cyberpunk. Indeed, most imitators of and hangers-on to the Cyberpunk movement think that by aping Gibson’s work they have thus written “Cyberpunk,” completely missing the point that what Gibson wrote was one example of a methodology that still remains completely beyond most of these imitators’ abilities or ambitions.

  Michael Swanwick came late to the Cyberpunk movement, but he came the right way. He never ceased being himself; he never, as far as I can tell, imitated anybody. What he did was bring a new rigor to the invention of his fiction, which did not detract from what he already did well. His fame has not yet blossomed as Gibson’s has (a statement that is equally true of all other writers of the eighties), but when he and Gibson wrote this story, they were not unequally yoked together. They plowed a straight furrow; they wrote a story that both can be proud of throughout what will surely be long and remarkable careers.

  He meant to keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up conscripted into some rat-ass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as long as he didn’t stop riding, he’d just never get off—Greyhound’s Flying Dutchman. He grinned at his faint reflection in cold, greasy glass, while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus swaying on tired shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in the terminal lot, concrete lit gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching himself starve, maybe in some snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same bus window, and seeing his remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded coveralls. One way or the other, he decided, it didn’t mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to have died already. And the driver called a twenty-minute stopover—Tidewater Station, Virginia. It was an old cinder-block building with two entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous century.

  Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl behind it was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended on it. Probably does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered GAMES, the word flickered feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright-orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.

  “Tha’s right, Tiny,” a kicker bellowed, “you take that sum-bitch!”

  “Hey,” Deke said. “What’s going on?”

  The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh Peterbilt cap. “Tiny’s defending the Max,” he said, not taking his eyes from the table.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?” But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like the Maltese cross, the slogan Pour le Mérite divided among its arms.

  The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a fragile-looking chrome tube chair. The man’s khaki workshirt would have hung on Deke like the folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the tiny buttons threatened to tear away at any instant. Deke thought of Southern troopers he’d seen on his way down; of what weird, gut-heavy endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they’d been borrowed from some other body. Tiny might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale—a forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all—for now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike about the man’s face, an appalling suggestion of youth and even beauty in features buried in fold and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny, had bushy sideburns and a thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles of concentration spreading from the corners….

  “You dumbshit or what?” The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke’s Indo proleboy denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. “Why don’t you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here.” He turned back to the dogfight.

  Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious betters slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D VIIs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

  The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply—and stalled, too low to pull out in time.

  A stack of silver dimes was scooped up.

  The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

  “Way to go, Tiny!” The kickers closed in around the table.

  Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

  Frank’s Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the concrete crash-guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank’s, there was nobody to doubt that he’d come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn’t tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled SPADS&FOKKERS. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the magnet—which the cops in DC hadn’t even bothered to confiscate—across the universal security strip.

  On the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.

  He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he’d used since his welfare rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

  The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans across the walls. Deke kicked the trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the wafer pack.

  There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls and Immelmanns, a tube of saline paste,
and a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a blue biplane and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS&FOKKERS, FOKKERS&SPADS. Red and blue. He fitted the Batang behind his ear, after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur.

  He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep. He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no up and down, and never a green field to crash into.

  He woke to a rancid smell of frying krill-cakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well, there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who’d like to score a programming unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it: THERE’S A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the “space colony” that had been under construction since before he was born. LET’S GO, the poster said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.