Ascendancies (93 page)

Borislav went to prison. It was necessary that somebody should go. The idiots were only the idiots. The competent guys had quickly found good positions in the new regime. The fanatics had despaired of the new dispensation, and run off to nurse their bitter disillusionment.

As a working rebel whose primary job had been public figurehead, Borislav was the reasonable party for public punishment.

Borislav turned himself in to a sympathetic set of cops who would look much better for catching him. They arrested him in a blaze of publicity. He was charged with “conspiracy”: a rather merciful charge, given the host of genuine crimes committed by his group. Those were the necessary, everyday crimes of any revolutionary movement, crimes such as racketeering, theft of services, cross-border smuggling, subversion and sedition, product piracy, copyright infringement, money-laundering, fake identities, squatting inside stolen property, illegal possession of firearms, and so forth.

Borislav and his various allies weren't charged with those many crimes. On the contrary; since he himself had been so loudly and publicly apprehended, those crimes of the others were quietly overlooked.

While sitting inside his prison cell, which was not entirely unlike a kiosk, Borislav discovered the true meaning of the old term “penitentiary.” The original intention of prisons was that people inside them should be penitent people. Penitent people were supposed to meditate and contemplate their way out of their own moral failings. That was the original idea.

Of course, any real, modern “penitentiary” consisted mostly of frantic business dealings. Nobody “owned” much of anything inside the prison, other than a steel bunk and a chance at a shower, so simple goods such as talcum powder loomed very large in the local imagination. Borislav, who fully understood street-trading, naturally did very well at this. At least, he did much better than the vengeful, mentally limited people who were doomed to inhabit most jails.

Borislav thought a lot about the people in the jails. They, too, were the people, and many of those people were getting into jail because of him. In any Transition, people lost their jobs. They were broke, they lacked prospects. So they did something desperate.

Borislav did not much regret the turmoil he had caused the world, but he often thought about what it meant and how it must feel. Somewhere, inside some prison, was some rather nice young guy, with a wife and kids, whose job was gone because the fabs took it away. This guy had a shaven head, an ugly orange jumpsuit, and appalling food, just like Borislav himself. But that young guy was in the jail with less good reason. And with much less hope. And with much more regret.

That guy was suffering. Nobody gave a damn about him. If there was any justice, someone should mindfully suffer, and be penitent, because of the harsh wrong done that guy.

Borislav's mother came to visit him in the jail. She brought printouts from many self-appointed sympathizers. The world seemed to be full of strange foreign people who had nothing better to do with their time than to email tender, supportive screeds to political prisoners. Ivana, something of a mixed comfort to him in their days of real life, did not visit the jail or see him. Ivana knew how to cut her losses when her men deliberately left her to do something stupid, such as volunteering for a prison.

These strangers and foreigners expressed odd, truncated, malformed ideas of what he had been doing. Because they were the Voice of History.

He himself had no such voice to give to history. He came from a small place under unique circumstances. People who hadn't lived there would never understand it. Those who had lived there were too close to understand it. There was just no understanding for it. There were just…the events. Events, transitions, new things. Things like the black kiosks.

These new kiosks…No matter where they were scattered in the world, they all had the sinister, strange, overly-dignified look of his own original black kiosk. Because the people had seen those kiosks. The people knew well what a black fabbing kiosk was supposed to look like. Those frills, those fringes, that peaked top, that was just how you knew one. That was their proper look. You went there to make your kid's baby-shoes indestructible. The kiosks did what they did, and they were what they were. They were everywhere, and that was that.

After twenty-two months, a decent interval, the new regime pardoned him as part of a general amnesty. He was told to keep his nose clean and his mouth shut. Borislav did this. He didn't have much to say, anyway.

X.

Time passed. Borislav went back to the older kind of kiosk. Unlike the fancy new black fabbing kiosk, these older ones sold things that couldn't be fabbed: foodstuffs, mostly.

Now that fabs were everywhere and in public, fabbing technology was advancing by leaps and bounds. Surfaces were roughened so they shone with pastel colors. Technicians learned how to make the fibers fluffier, for bendable, flexible parts. The world was in a Transition, but no transition ended the world. A revolution just turned a layer in the compost heap of history, compressing that which now lay buried, bringing air and light to something hidden.

On a whim, Borislav went into surgery and had his shinbone fabbed. His new right shinbone was the identical, mirror-reversed copy of his left shinbone. After a boring recuperation, for he was an older man now and the flesh didn't heal as it once had, he found himself able to walk on an even keel for the first time in twenty-five years.

Now he could walk. So he walked a great deal. He didn't skip and jump for joy, but he rather enjoyed walking properly. He strolled the boulevards, he saw some sights, he wore much nicer shoes.

Then his right knee gave out, mostly from all that walking on an indestructible artificial bone. So he had to go back to the cane once again. No cure was a miracle panacea: but thanks to technology, the trouble had crept closer to his heart.

That made a difference. The shattered leg had oppressed him during most of his lifetime. That wound had squeezed his soul into its own shape. The bad knee would never have a chance to do that, because he simply wouldn't live that long. So the leg was a tragedy. The knee was an episode.

It was no great effort to walk the modest distance from his apartment block to his mother's grave. The city kept threatening to demolish his old apartments. They were ugly and increasingly old fashioned, and they frankly needed to go. But the government's threats of improvement were generally empty, and the rents would see him through. He was a landlord. That was never a popular job, but someone was always going to take it. It might as well be someone who understood the plumbing.

It gave him great satisfaction that his mother had the last true granite headstone in the local graveyard. All the rest of them were fabbed.

Dr. Grootjans was no longer working in a government. Dr. Grootjans was remarkably well-preserved. If anything, this female functionary from an alien system looked
younger
than she had looked, years before. She had two prim Nordic braids. She wore a dainty little off-pink sweater. She had high heels.

Dr. Grootjans was writing about her experiences in the transition. This was her personal, confessional text, on the net of course, accompanied by photographs, sound recordings, links to other sites, and much supportive reader commentary.

“Her gravestone has a handsome Cyrillic font,” said Dr. Grootjans.

Borislav touched a handkerchief to his lips. “Tradition does not mean that the living are dead. Tradition means that the dead are living.”

Dr. Grootjans happily wrote this down. This customary action of hers had irritated him at first. However, her strange habits were growing on him. Would it kill him that this over-educated foreign woman subjected him to her academic study? Nobody else was bothering. To the neighborhood, to the people, he was a crippled, short-tempered old landlord. To her, the scholar-bureaucrat, he was a mysterious figure of international significance. Her version of events was hopelessly distorted and self-serving. But it was a version of events.

“Tell me about this grave,” she said. “What are we doing here?”

“You wanted to see what I do these days. Well, this is what I do.” Borislav set a pretty funeral bouquet against the headstone. Then he lit candles.

“Why do you do this?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You're a rational man. You can't believe in religious rituals.”

“No,” he told her, “I don't believe. I know they are just rituals.”

“Why do it, then?”

He knew why, but he did not know how to give her that sermon. He did it because it was a gift. It was a liberating gift for him, because it was given with no thought of any profit or return. A deliberate gift with
no possibility
of return.

Those gifts were the stuff of history and futurity. Because gifts of that kind were also the gifts that the living received from the dead.

The gifts we received from the dead: those were the world's only genuine gifts. All the other things in the world were commodities. The dead were, by definition, those who gave to us without reward. And, especially: our dead gave to us, the living, within a dead context. Their gifts to us were not just abjectly generous, but archaic and profoundly confusing.

Whenever we disciplined ourselves, and sacrificed ourselves, in some vague hope of benefiting posterity, in some ambition to create a better future beyond our own moment in time, then we were doing something beyond a rational analysis. Those in that future could never see us with our own eyes: they would only see us with the eyes that we ourselves gave to them. Never with our own eyes: always with their own. And the future's eyes always saw the truths of the past as blinkered, backward, halting. Superstition.

“Why?” she said.

Borislav knocked the snow from his elegant shoes. “I have a big heart.”

Acknowledgments

“Introduction” by Karen Joy Fowler. © 2007 Karen Joy Fowler.

“Foreword” by Bruce Sterling. © 2007 Bruce Sterling.

“Are You for 86?,” © 1992 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Globalhead
, Shingletown, CA: Ziesing 1992.

“Bicycle Repairman,” © 1996 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Intersections
, ed. John Kessel, Mark L. Van Name & Richard Butner, Tor 1996.

“Cicada Queen,” © 1983 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Universe 13
, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday 1983.

“Deep Eddy,” © 1993 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Asimou's Science Fiction
Aug 1993.

“Dinner in Audoghast,” © 1985 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine
May 1985.

“Dori Bangs,” © 1989 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine
Sep 1989.

“Flowers of Edo,” © 1987 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine
May 1987; first published in Japanese in
Hayakawa's Science Fiction Magazine
.

“Green Days in Brunei,” © 1985 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine
Oct 1985.

“Hollywood Kremlin,” © 1990 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Oct 1990.

“In Paradise,” © 2002 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Sep 2002.

“Maneki Neko,” © 1998 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
May 1998; originally published in Japanese in
Hayakawa's Science Fiction Magazine
.

“Our Neural Chernobyl,” © 1988 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Jun 1988.

“Spider Rose,” © 1982 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Aug 1982.

“Sunken Gardens,” © 1984 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Omni
, June 1984.

“Swarm,” © 1982 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Apr 1982.

“Taklamakan,” © 1998 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Asimov's Science Fiction
Oct/Nov 1998.

“The Blemmye's Strategem,” © 2005 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Jan 2005.

“The Compassionate, the Digital,” © 1985 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Interzone
#14, 1985.

“The Little Magic Shop,” © 1987 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine
Oct 1987.

“The Littlest Jackal,” © 1996 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Mar 1996.

“The Sword of Damocles,” © 1990 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Science Fiction Magazine
Feb 1990.

“Twenty Evocations,” © 1984 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Interzone
#7 1984.

“We See Things Differently,” © 1989 Bruce Sterling. First published in
Semiotext(e) #14
1989.

“Kiosk,” © 2007 Bruce Sterling. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Jan 2007.

About the Author

Bruce Sterling is an American author and one of the founders of the cyberpunk science fiction movement. He began writing in the 1970s; his first novel,
Involution Ocean
, about a whaling ship in an ocean of dust, is a science fictional pastiche of Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick
. His other works, including his series of stories and a novel,
Schismatrix
, set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, often deal with computer-based technologies and genetic engineering. His five short story collections and ten novels have earned several honors: a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, a Hayakawa's SF Magazine Reader's Award, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award. Sterling has also worked as a critic and journalist, writing for
Metropolis
,
Artforum
,
Icon
,
MIT Technology Review
,
Time
, and
Newsweek
, as well as
Interzone
,
Science Fiction Eye
,
Cheap Truth
, and
Cool Tools
. He edits
Beyond the Beyond
, a blog hosted by
Wired
.