Transreal Cyberpunk (9 page)

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I saw nothing but white for the longest time, seeing nothing, touching nothing. I floated in the timeless void. All the panic, the terror of the event, evaporated from me. All thoughts stopped. It was like death. Maybe it was a kind of death, I still don’t know.

And then, somehow, that perfect silence and oneness broke into pieces again. It shattered into millions of grainy atoms, a soundless crawling blizzard. Like phantom, hissing snow.

I stared into the snow, seeing it swirling, resolving into something new, with perfect ease, as if it were following the phase of my own dreams ... A beautiful sheen, a white blur—

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The white blur of reflections on glass. I was standing in front of a glass window. A department-store window. There were televisions behind the glass, the biggest televisions I had ever seen.

Vlad was standing next to me. A woman was holding my arm, a pretty beatnik girl with a flowered silk blouse and a scandalous short skirt. She was staring raptly at the television. A crowd of well-dressed people filled the pavement around and behind us.

I should have fainted then. But I felt fine. I’d just had a good lunch and my mouth tasted of a fine cigar. I blurted something in confusion, and the girl with Vlad said, “Shhhh!” and suddenly everyone was cheering.

Vlad grabbed me in a bear hug. I noticed then how fat we were. I don’t know why, but it just struck me. Our suits were so well-cut that they’d disguised it. “We’ve done it!” Vlad bellowed. “The moon!”

All around us people were chattering wildly. In French.

We were in Paris. And Americans were on the moon.

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Vlad and I had lost nine years in a moment. Nine years in limbo, as the Artifact flung us through time and space to that moment Vlad had longed so much to see. We were knit back into the world with many convincing details: paunches from years of decadent Western living, apartments in the émigré quarter full of fine suits and well-worn shoes, and even some pop-science articles Vlad had written for the émigré magazines. And of course, our Swiss bank accounts.

It was a disappointment to see the Americans steal our glory. But of course, the Americans would never have made it if we Russians hadn’t shown them the way and supplied the vision. The Artifact was very generous to the Americans. If it weren’t for the Nedelin Disaster, which killed so many of our best technicians, we would surely have won.

The West still believes that the Nedelin Disaster of October 1960 was caused by the explosion of a conventional rocket. They did not even learn of the disaster until years after the fact. Even now this terrible catastrophe is little known. The Higher Circles forged false statements of death for all concerned: heart attacks, air crashes, and the like. Years passed before the coincidences of so many deaths became obvious.

Sometimes I wonder if even the Higher Circles know the real truth. It’s easy to imagine every document about Vlad and myself vanishing into the KGB shredders as soon as the disaster news spread. Where there is no history, there can be no blame. It’s an old principle.

Now the Cosmos is stormed every day, but the rockets are nothing more than bread trucks. This is not surprising from Americans, who will always try their best to turn the stars into dollars. But where is our memorial? We had the great dream of Tsiolkovsky right there in our hands. Vlad and I found it ourselves and brought it back from Siberia. We practically threw the Infinite right there at their feet! If only the Higher Circles hadn’t been so hasty, things would have been different.

Vlad has always told me not to say anything, now that we’re safe and rich and officially dead, but it’s just not fair. We deserve our historian, and what’s a historian but a fancy kind of snitch? So I wrote this all down while Vlad wasn’t looking.

I couldn’t help it—I just had to inform somebody. No one has ever known how Vlad Zipkin and I stormed the cosmos, except ourselves and the Higher Circles ... and maybe some American top brass.

And Laika? Yes, the Artifact brought her to Paris, too. She still lives with us—which proves that all of this is true.

Notes on “Storming the Cosmos”

Asimov’s Science Fiction
, December, 1985.

Written Spring, 1985.

Rudy on “Storming the Cosmos”

The first I heard of Bruce Sterling was in 1982, when he sent me a review of my two novels
Software
and
Spacetime Donuts
. He’d written the review for a free newspaper in Austin. It was about the best review I’d ever gotten. Clearly this guy understood where I was coming from. He also sent me a copy of his novel
Involution Ocean,
a delightful take on
Moby Dick
which features dopers on a sea of sand.

I met Bruce in the flesh at a science-fiction convention in Baltimore in 1983, right after the publication of my fourth SF book,
The Sex Sphere
. He was there with his wife Nancy, plus William Gibson, Lou Shiner, and Lou Shiner’s wife. The day after the con, the five of them unexpectedly drove down to visit me in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I was living as an unemployed writer, hoping to support my wife and three children. I came home from my rundown office in shades and a Hawaiian shirt, driving our 1956 Buick, and there they were. I was thrilled that they’d visited me.

Around that time, Bruce started publishing a single-sheet newsletter called
Cheap Truth
, which railed at the plastic artificiality of much SF. This zine—and Gibson’s huge commercial success—soon established cyberpunk as a legitimate form of writing. I was grateful to be included.

“Storming the Cosmos” takes off on Bruce’s deep interest in all things Soviet. He brought in a huge mass of facts for our story, which was wonderful. And he did more of the work on this one than me.

One way to organize a story collaboration is a transreal approach in which each author owns or in some sense
is
one of the characters. Ultimately Bruce and I organized every single one the
Transreal Cyberpunk
stories in that way. In “Storming the Cosmos,” Bruce is Nikita and I’m Vlad.

I was really thrilled that we worked in Laika, the very first space dog. And I still laugh whenever I recall the bit where Nikita is saying, “I did it for Science.”

This story got a cover on
Asimov’s Science Fiction
.

Bruce on “Storming the Cosmos”

To collaborate with another writer one needs an agenda, because collaboration’s not “half the work,” it’s twice the work, at the least. My agenda in “Storming the Cosmos” was the large problem I had as a Texan science fiction writer coming to terms with “fantastyka,” with Soviet science fiction writing.

My interest there was, and is, genuine, but I was rather over-burdened with my autodidactic Soviet erudition. Also, there’s something untoward and even tasteless about a Texan fantasist who rashly meddles with Soviet themes, especially when he lacks a humane sympathy for Russians or Marxists, and stares at the vast Soviet historical catastrophe as if it were some lunar ant-pile. As a story, “Storming the Cosmos” is a catalog of Russian catastrophes.

So the work needed a lighter touch, and Rudy supplied that: Russian beatniks.

No state-approved Soviet science fiction writer would ever valorize Russia’s bohemian scumbags, erratic dropouts, and wacky refuseniks. But of course Russia did have many genuine counterculture people during the Soviet Space Age: smugglers, stilyagi, jazz listeners, hooligans, parasites, the pampered children of the Red elite. These erratic people would become our Soviet science-fiction heroes.

It’s their Kerouackian lightness of heart that gets one through this picaresque tale that is, by any objective measure, terrifying. “Storming the Cosmos” is a perky road-tale, a Hope and Crosby Siberian buddy-movie where either or both of the dual leads can be denounced, arrested, jailed, liquidated, or even annihilated by unspeakable cosmic forces. “Storming the Cosmos” is dreadfully funny. Writing the story with Rudy allowed me to expand that blackly comic sensibility; it came pretty easily to him, but I learned it through imitation, and that was quite a useful, long-lasting lesson for me.

If you have to commit a breach of literary taste, there’s no use being coy and camp about that; you’ve got to be Rabelaisian, Burroughsian, open and big-hearted, it needs to yawp right from the rooftops.

We quickly decided on dual protagonists—that was a whim, but a whim of iron that has persisted through all our joint works. “My” character, Globov the story’s narrator, is less interesting than Zipkin, the Rucker character. Globov’s best moments, which center on blubbering Slavic self-pity, were written by Rudy. I preferred writing Zipkin, especially those various scenes where Zipkin, a starry-eyed incompetent, tries to harangue and boss his way out of a jam.

We proved something to one another by writing this story together, as we didn’t collaborate again for nine years.

Big Jelly

The screaming metal jellyfish dragged long, invisible tentacles across the dry concrete acres of the San Jose airport. Or so it seemed to Tug—Tug Mesoglea, math-drunk programmer and fanatic aquarist. Tug was working on artificial jellyfish, and nearly everything looked like a jellyfish to him, even airplanes. Tug was here in front of the baggage claim to pick up Texas billionaire Revel Pullen.

It had taken a deluge of phone-calls, faxes and email to lure the reclusive Texan venture-capitalist from his decrepit, polluted East Texas oil-fields, but Tug had now coaxed Revel Pullen to a second face-to-face meet in California. At last, it seemed that Tug’s unconventional high-tech startup scheme would charge into full-scale production. The prospect of success was sweet.

Tug had first met Revel in Monterey two months earlier, at the Spring symposium of the ACM SIGUSC, that is, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group for Underground and Submarine Computation.

At the symposium, Tug had given a badly botched presentation on artificial jellyfish. He’d arrived with 500 copies of a glossy desktop-published brochure: “Artificial Jellyfish: Your Route to Postindustrial Global Competitiveness!” But when it came time for Tug’s talk, his 15-terabyte virtual jellyfish-demo had crashed so hideously that he couldn’t even reboot his machine—a cheap Indonesian Sun-clone laptop that Tug now used as a bookend. Tug had brought some slides as a backup, but of course the slide-tray had jammed. And, worst of all, the single working prototype of Tug’s plastic artificial jellyfish had burst in transit to Monterey. After the talk, Tug, in a red haze of shame, had flushed the sodden rags of decomposing gel down the conference center’s john.

Tug had next headed for the cocktail lounge, and there the garrulous young Pullen had sought him out, had a few drinks with him, and had even picked up the tab—Tug’s wallet had been stolen the night before by a cute older busboy.

Since Tug’s topic was jellyfish, the raucous Pullen had thought it funny to buy rounds of tequila jelly-shots. The slimy jolts of potent boozy Jell-O had combined with Revel’s bellowed jokes, brags, and wild promises to ease the pain of Tug’s failed speech.

The next day, Tug and Revel had brunched together, and Revel had written Tug a handsome check as earnest money for pre-development expenses. Tug was to develop an artificial jellyfish capable of undersea oil prospecting.

As software applications went, oil-drilling was a little roughnecked and analog for Tug’s taste; but the money certainly looked real enough. The only troubling aspect about dealing with Revel was the man’s obsession with some new and troublesome organic slime which his family’s oldest oil-well had recently tapped. Again and again, the garish Texan had steered the conversation away from jellyfish and onto the subject of ancient subterranean slime.

Perched now on the fire-engine red hood of his expensive Animata sports car, Tug waited for Revel to arrive. Tug had curly dark hair and a pink-cheeked complexion. He wore shorts, a sport shirt, and Birkenstock sandals with argyle socks. He looked like a depraved British schoolboy. He’d bought the Animata with his house-money nest-egg when he’d learned that he would never, ever, be rich enough to buy a house in California. Leaning back against the windshield of his car, Tug stared at the descending airplanes and thought about jellyfish trawling through sky-blue seawater.

Tug had whole tankfuls of jellies at home: one tank with flattish moon jellies each with its four whitish circles of sex organs, another tank with small clear bell jellies from the eel grass of Monterey bay, a large tank with sea nettles that had long frilly oral arms and whiplike purple tentacles covered with stinging cells, a smaller tank of toadstool-like spotted jellies from Jellyfish Lake in Palau, a special tank of spinning comb-jellies with trailing ciliated arms, a Japanese tank with Japanese umbrella jellies—and more.

Next to the arsenal of tanks was the huge color screen of Tug’s workstation. Tug was no biologist; he’d blundered under the spell of the jellies while using mathematical algorithms to generate cellular models of vortex sheets. To Tug’s mathematician’s eye, a jellyfish was a highly perfected relationship between curvature and torsion, just like a vortex sheet, only a jellyfish was working off dynamic tension and osmotic stress. Real jellyfish were gnarlier than Tug’s simulations. Tug had become a dedicated amateur of coelenteratology.