“You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m full of shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”
It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I have prepared a judgment,” he says slowly.
“Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger, seemingly unaware. It is Amber that looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree-
“Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.
“Does that mean what I think it does?” she asks.
Sadeq breathes deeply again. “Yes.”
Her smile returns. “And is that the end of it?” she asks.
He raises a dark eyebrow. “Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation.”
Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh, sure. That’s the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations.”
“What? From the aliens?”
The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. “Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get the Franklin trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork. We’ve known for years that there’s a whole alien packet-switching network out there and we’re just getting spillover from some of their routes: it turns out there’s a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io-there is a purpose to all this activity.”
Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re going to narrowcast a reply?”
“No, much better than that: we’re going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to realtime. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise.”
The cat yawns, then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god,” it says, “and you’re it. There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian. I don’t suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?”
In Paradise - BRUCE STERLING
One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to enter SF in the past few decades, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1 976. By the end of the ’80s, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future, with novels such as the complex and Stapeldonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth), as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary “Cyberpunk” movement in science fiction, and also as one of the best new hard science writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, the novels The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, and Distraction, a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, and the landmark collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. His most recent books include the omnibus collection (it contains the novel Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus, a new collection, A Good Old-Fashioned Future, and a new novel, Zeitgeist. Upcoming is a nonfiction study of the future, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. His story “Bicycle Repairman” earned him a long- overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1997 for his story “Taklamakan.” His stories have appeared in our First through Eighth, Eleventh, Fourteenth, and Sixteenth Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.
In the sly and deceptively quiet story that follows, he offers us a postmodern romance, quirky, bittersweet-and surprising.
The machines broke down so much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about that.
Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a plastic flask and had a solid nip of Scotch.
The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone. Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed through the big metal frame just as the scanner broke down. So these two somber, suited old men were getting the full third degree with the hand wands, while daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy coat and thick black headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her minders stretched the no man’s land of official insecurity. She waved across the gap.
The security geeks found something metallic in the black wool jacket of the Wicked Uncle. Of course it was harmless, but they had to run their full ritual, lest they die of boredom at their posts. As the Scotch settled in, Felix felt time stretch like taffy. Little Miss Mujihadeen discovered that her phone was dying. She banged at it with the flat of her hand.
The line of hopeful shoppers, grimly waiting to stimulate the economy, shifted in their disgruntlement. It was a bad, bleak scene. It crushed Felix’s heart within him. He longed to leap to his feet and harangue the lot of them. Wake up, he wanted to scream at them, cheer up, act more human. He felt the urge keenly, but it scared people when he cut loose like that. They really hated it. And so did he. He knew he couldn’t look them in the eye. It would only make a lot of trouble.
The Mideastern men shouted at the girl. She waved her dead phone at them, as if another breakdown was going to help their mood. Then Felix noticed that she shared his own make of cell phone. She had a rather ahead- of-the-curve Finnish model that he’d spent a lot of money on. So Felix rose and sidled over.
“Help you out with that phone, ma’am?”
She gave him the paralyzed look of a coed stuck with a dripping tap. “No English?” he concluded. “Habla espanol, seсorita?” No such luck.
He offered her his own phone. No, she didn’t care to use it. Surprised and even a little hurt by this rejection, Felix took his first good look at her, and realized with a lurch that she was pretty. What eyes! They were whirlpools. The line of her lips was like the tapered edge of a rose leaf.
“It’s your battery,” he told her. Though she had not a word of English, she obviously got it about phone batteries. After some gestured persuasion, she was willing to trade her dead battery for his. There was a fine and delicate little moment when his fingertips extracted her power supply, and he inserted his own unit into that golden-lined copper cavity. Her display leapt to life with an eager flash of numerals. Felix pressed a button or two, smiled winningly, and handed her phone back.
She dialed in a hurry, and bearded Evil Dad lifted his phone to answer, and life became much easier on the nerves. Then, with a groaning buzz, the scanner came back on. Dad and Uncle waved a command at her, like lifers turned to trusty prison guards, and she scampered through the metal gate and never looked back.
She had taken his battery. Well, no problem. He would treasure the one she had given him.
Felix gallantly let the little crowd through before he himself cleared security. The geeks always went nuts about his plumbing tools, but then again, they had to. He found the assignment: a chi-chi place that sold fake antiques and potpourri. The manager’s office had a clogged drain. As he worked, Felix recharged the phone. Then he socked them for a sum that made them wince.
On his leisurely way out-whoa, there was Miss Cell phone, that looker, that little goddess, browsing in a jewelry store over Korean gold chains and tiaras. Dad and Uncle were there, with a couple of off-duty cops.
Felix retired to a bench beside the fountain, in the potted plastic plants. He had another bracing shot of Scotch, then put his feet up on his toolbox and punched her number.
He saw her straighten at the ring, and open her purse, and place the phone to the kerchiefed side of her head. She didn’t know where he was, or who he was. That was why the words came pouring out of him.
