Stories for Chip (2 page)

I see versions of that feeling in all the stories and essays collected here. Delany's writing is beautiful, which is rare enough; but rarer still, it is encouraging, by which I mean, it gives courage. People respond to that encouragement with pleasure and thanks, as you will see here.

These tributes mostly don't try to imitate Delany's style, which is good, as it is a very personal style, one that has morphed through the years in complex ways. Imitation could only result in pastiche or parody, forms of limited interest, although a good parody can be fun, and I've seen some pretty good ones of Delany's work elsewhere. A “Bad Delany” contest would be at least as funny as the famous “Bad Hemingway” and “Bad Faulkner” contests. But a better tribute, as the writers gathered here seem to agree, results from considering not style but substance. Delany's subject matter, his mode or method, involves a characteristic mix of the analytical and the emotional, the realistic and the utopian. By exploring this delanyesque space (and I think delanyesque has become an adjective, like ballardian or orwellian or kafkaesque), the stories and essays here make the best kind of tribute. They perhaps help to make the Delanyspace a new genre or subgenre. However that works, it's certain that Delany's work has effected a radical reorientation of every genre he has written in. Time and other writers will tell the sequel as to what that means for science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, pornography, memoir, and criticism. Here we get hints of what that will be like.

It was a persistence of vision that created the Delanyspace, over decades of hard work. It's both theoretical and material; it pays attention to sex and bodies more than most fiction, but also it is often more social and political. It is, remembering what Virginia Woolf said about George Eliot's books relative to earlier English literature, “a literature for grown-ups.” Reading Delany provides us with new cognitive maps, which reorient us to our experiences and to our own thoughts. This is what literature should always do, but it's rare to experience the effect so distinctly and joyfully. Even when emerging from his books chastened, or alarmed, or shocked, or even appalled, there is something deeply positive in Delany's vision. His books are utopian in a sense bigger than politics. They make you bolder. Their greatness includes a great generosity. This volume is one sign of their impact.

Output from a nostalgic, if somewhat misinformed, guydavenport storybot, in the year 2115

Transcribed by Eileen Gunn

Their journey took place in verdant March, when the sun was not yet so high in the sky as to be dangerous. The New Jersey Turnpike was redolent with the scent of magnolias, and the trees in the Joyce Kilmer Service Area were clad in exuberant green. What brought them, the nascent politician and the noted philosopher, to this place, in a vehicle that shed its rich hydrocarbons liberally into the warm, clean air?

The truth was that Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany shared a taste for animal flesh, and had come to this bucolic waystation to satisfy their common need. “I'm a burger kind of guy,” said the future ruler of Russia. “So am I,” said the white-bearded semiotician, and they chose an imperial meat-patty palace for their repast.

As they stood in line, contemplating a panoply of burgers, fries, and blue raspberry Icee®s and basking in the cool green glow of fluorescent lights, Swanwick was struck with nostalgia for a time long past.

“I miss Howard Johnson's,” he said. “Not the food, of course—I miss the orange-roofed temples, celebrated by Jean Shepard as sirens of the highway. Once upon a time, every rest area on the Jersey Turnpike had a Howard Johnson's. ‘A landmark for hungry Americans.'”

Though Swanwick had spoken the words, each man, involuntarily, heard the chime of the ghastly jingle. “Funny thing,” he continued quickly. “It was capitalism that killed it. Marriott bought it for the real estate.”

“Red in tooth and claw,” said Delany. “I miss the pistachio ice cream cones, that's all…. But
here
,” he added in a soothing tone, “
here
we have trading cards with robots on them.” He accepted a trading card from the cashier. It depicted Cappy, a sleekly androgynous silver-metal lover. “I want a different one,” he said.

“Have it your way,” said the cashier, shrugging. He handed Delany another card, this one featuring Crank, a grubby makeshift robot with rust under his gnawed fingernails.

Delany laughed, a musical sound somewhere between a snort and a giggle. “I'll keep this one,” he said. He ordered a beef patty made with real beef, medium rare, topped with horseradish and Béarnaise sauce, kosher dill slices on the side.

“Have it your way,” said the cashier again.

“Are you a robot?” asked Swanwick, suddenly concerned. The cashier did not reply.

“I would like a big, sloppy, greasy double cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato and all the trimmings,” Swanwick told the cashier. “I want ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, and Russian dressing with beluga caviar. Hold the pickle.”

“Caviar is available only at the Walt Whitman Service Area,” said the cashier, frowning. “You can't
always
have
every
thing
your
way.” He gave Swanwick a trading card depicting Aunt Fanny, a matronly, pink, lipstick-wearing robot with a protuberant posterior. Swanwick accepted it with bemusement, wondering whether Burger King offered the same card in the United Kingdom. “Can I have another, too?” he asked. The cashier handed him a card with a pigtailed Lolita robot on it. “Another?” The third was Madame Gasket, who was a bit scary, frankly, for a trading card. He couldn't get
any
thing
his
way.

“Lucky in love, unlucky at cards,” said Delany.

“They hand these things out to children?” Swanwick asked, glancing again at Madame Gasket.

They paid for their meals in the devalued currency of the late-period religio-capitalist hegemony, and took their food trays to a small table at a window overlooking the Sunoco station.

“Bon appétit,” said Delany, gesturing with his hamburger as one would with a wineglass.

“Priyatnovo appetita,” replied Swanwick with a similar gesture. He had recently returned from the Urals, where he had been the toast of Ekaterinburg.

At first they ate in hungry silence, gazing out at the gas station, as languid pump attendants with huge palm-frond fans hailed approaching automobiles and waved them toward available fueling bays as though they were New Jersey's famous zeppelins. Then, having taken the edge off their appetites, the two men continued the conversation they had begun in the car, the one great debate that writers and thinkers everywhere have carried on since writing and thinking first evolved: the debate about the ultimate futility of writing and thinking.

“I'm a cult writer in Russia,” said Swanwick, “and I'm a cult writer in the United States. And I'm sick of it.”

“Nothing so terrible about being a cult writer,” said Delany. “Christianity started out as a cult, and look at it now.”

◊

“I want to make some
difference
in the world, communicate with the mass of
humanity
, have an
effect
.” He gestured toward the crowded freeway. “I want to change
entire lives
for the
better
.”

“Have you thought of a different career?” asked Delany gently. “Perhaps emigration to a land of greater opportunity? You speak some Russian, do you not?”

“Nyemnoshka,” Swanwick answered, with a modest shake of his shaggy head. “A smidgeon,” he translated.

“Maybe you should consider pulling up stakes, retooling for the new millennium. As a cult writer in the US, you're nothing. You have considerably less effect on how the world fares than a Hollywood screenwriter, which is low indeed in the social hierarchy. But as a cult writer in Russia, you'd have some clout. They are afraid of writers in Russia, and with good reason. You could leverage your celebrity into a political career, take control of that long-suffering country, and change the world. Of course, you could also get killed.” He sighed. “It's a sad thing, but nobody kills writers in the U.S. They just don't matter enough.”

“I will consider that,” said Swanwick, and did. It would not be so difficult for him and his wife to create new lives in another land. She was a public-health scientist, although, when provoked, she sometimes described herself as a career bureaucrat. Russia had jobs in either category; like everyplace else, it needed scientists more, and paid bureaucrats better. And Michael had always enjoyed caviar and sour cream, however difficult they were to obtain on the Jersey Turnpike. It could work.

But, he thought, it was time to get back on the road. They gathered up their things, recycled the trash, slapped on their canvas hats and a heavy layer of sunblock, and hit the road.

They continued north in Swanwick's chartreuse 1959 Thunderbird, past service areas named for the heroes of New Jersey: Allen Ginsberg, Paul Robeson, William Carlos Williams, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Hoffa, Yogi Berra, and Jon Bon Jovi. Soon enough, they found themselves at the most intellectually exciting stretch of highway in the United States. Between exits 16E and 13A, the New Jersey Turnpike at that time passed over the Passaic River. The General Casimir Pulaski Skyway, a masterpiece of Depression-era engineering, soared off to one side, crossing the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers in great lattice-work leaps. As the car approached New York City, the primeval Meadowlands swept off on the left, balancing the demands of nature and of solid-waste disposal, and the darkly crystalline rectangles of the Manhattan skyline arose to the right. Gleaming networks of railroad tracks recalled to them the glorious empire, created by commerce and forced labor, that had, until the new century and its disasters, sustained the American Dream. Where the towers had been there was still, in 2005, negative space.

◊

The car containing the two men sped across the George Washington Bridge and made its way, under Swanwick's instruction, to Delany's residence. Chip Delany, ever hospitable, invited Michael Swanwick to come upstairs and continue their conversation, but Swanwick, by now lost to American literature, made a hasty excuse in mumbled Russian, and disappeared into the gray fog of urban twilight.

Nick Harkaway

Billy Tumult, psychic surgeon, with six shooters on his hips, walks into the saloon. There are dancing girls dancing with dancing boys and dancing boys dancing together, and women behind the bar in hats made of feathers. There's a fat man at the piano and a poker game in each corner. Up on the balcony there's some comedic business involving infidelity, but no gunplay, not yet. Billy swaggers over and gets a beer. And make it a cold one, miss, okay? The barkeep leans across the shiny surface and prints a perfect lipstick mark on his cheek. Rein it in a little, cattle hand, she murmurs, you're cute but this here's a civilized sort of establishment.

Yeah, sure, Billy mutters, you can tell by the nice clean bullet holes in the furniture, I bet you dust ‘em nightly, and the barkeep actually laughs and says she likes his style. She sounds too much like Chicago, almost a moll, and Billy adjusts the filter a few notches to the left. Doesn't do to mix your conceptual frame during a house call.

I'm lookin' for a man, Billy Tumult says, probably comes over like a gunslinger. New in town, a solitary sort of fella, not much for talking. He'd be my height or more and looking to keep things quiet. Barkeep says she doesn't know nothing about that, maybe talk to the fat man, fat man hears everything, and Billy Tumult knows she's lying and she knows he knows and she blushes: talk to the fat man, and he says okay.

Billy turns his back on the bar and lets his hands fall down by his sides. Six shooters be damned, they're for show and to take care of any ambient hostility, the real weapon is invisible to these good townsfolk, the Neuronoetic Interference Scalpel 3.1.a holstered in the small of his back. He can clear and fire it in under seventy subjective milliseconds, literally faster than thought unless the thought is a really bad one. Patient in this case presents with anhedonia, and that's pretty damn bad.

He looks around at the room, and has to hand it to the guy: these are well-imagined people, and there's a decent ethnic mix. He's pretty sure that cardsharp is supposed to be a Yupik, for example, which may not be authentic—you surely didn't get a lot of Eskimo hustlers in the Old West—but it speaks well of the patient's interior life. Most of Billy's patients are assholes, by definition. Billy has no problem with assholes in the abstract. It is everyone's God-given right to be an asshole, in fact it's basically the default setting and you evolve your way up from there, but that does not mean Billy particularly enjoys spending time in worlds created by assholes, which is his working life. So this guy has problems but is less of an asshole than most and that is acceptable.

Billy walks over to the fat man. Fat man can't see him, surely, not from this angle, but he shifts to a minor key, staccato. Mood music? Billy wonders if he should just flat out erase the guy. Better not. Don't want to be talking to a patient's lawyer about how you came to delete his memory of nine thousand nine hundred hours of music tuition. Never a good scene, there are lawyers and all that but the worst is the crying. Billy hates emotional display, he's a fucking surgeon for crying out loud, not a therapist. You want to break things and scream about your momma you can go see one of those wishy-washy liberals on the East Coast. You want your problem hunted down and shot, you call Billy: mind medicine, open-carry style. Your psychological issue will bleed out and die and you carry right on with your life. It appeals to traditional men with sexual dysfunction, executive types who've suddenly discovered their humanity and want it gone, that kind of thing. Occasionally he does memories for divorce cases and once the State of Alabama had him kill a man's whole history from the present back down the line, leave nothing but the child he'd been before he became a crook. They raised that fella back to manhood inside the system, and he's a productive citizen now, although Billy went back and met him out of sheer curiosity and he's kinduva a jerk, basically a boring-ass wage slave of the dehumanizing statist system. Not Billy's problem, but he doesn't take government work any more. One time they asked him to do espionage. Fucking torture bullshit. Billy said no, turned those fuckers in to the real law, the sheriff's office, made a helluva stink, man from the
New York Times
came to interview him. Weirdest month of his life, so-clean liberal actresses draping themselves over his arm and whispering sweet nothings in his ear, sweet nothings and some really outré shit Billy was quick to take fullest advantage of because those chances do not come along twice. Weird, but really satisfying, sexually speaking. Got to hand it to the Democrats, they know from orgasms.