“I guess I do,” Lyle said slowly.
“We’ll have ourselves some nice talks about that subject, Lyle. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”
“No. I don’t mind it now that you’re talking.”
“There’s some stuff going on down here in the zone that I didn’t understand at first, but it’s important.” Kitty paused, then rubbed dried dye from her hair in a cascade of green dandruff. “How much did you pay those Spider gangsters to string up this place for you?”
“It was kind of a barter situation,” Lyle told her.
“Think they’d do it again if I paid ’em real cash? Yeah? I thought so.” She nodded thoughtfully. “They look like a heavy outfit, the City Spiders. I gotta pry ’em loose from that leftist gorgon before she finishes indoctrinating them in socialist revolution.” Kitty wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “This is the Senator’s own constituency! It was stupid of us to duck an ideological battle, just because this is a worthless area inhabited by reckless sociopaths who don’t vote. Hell, that’s exactly why it’s important. This could be a vital territory in the culture war. I’m gonna call the office right away, start making arrangements. There’s no way we’re gonna leave this place in the hands of the self-styled Queen of Peace and Justice over there.”
She snorted, then stretched a kink out of her back. “With a little self-control and discipline, I can save those Spiders from themselves and turn them into an asset to law and order! I’ll get ’em to string up a couple of trailers here in the zone. We could start a dojo.”
Eddy called, two weeks later. He was in a beachside cabana somewhere in Catalunya, wearing a silk floral-print shirt and a new and very pricey looking set of spex. “How’s life, Lyle?”
“It’s okay, Eddy.”
“Making out all right?” Eddy had two new tattoos on his cheekbone.
“Yeah. I got a new paying roommate. She’s a martial artist.”
“Girl roommate working out okay this time?”
“Yeah, she’s good at pumping the flywheel and she lets me get on with my bike work. Bike business has been picking up a lot lately. Looks like I might get a legal electrical feed and some more floorspace, maybe even some genuine mail delivery. My new roomie’s got a lot of useful contacts.”
“Boy, the ladies sure love you, Lyle! Can’t beat ’em off with a stick, can you, poor guy? That’s a heck of a note.”
Eddy leaned forward a little, shoving aside a silver tray full of dead gold-tipped zigarettes. “You been getting the packages?”
“Yeah. Pretty regular.”
“Good deal,” he said briskly, “but you can wipe ’em all now. I don’t need those backups anymore. Just wipe the data and trash the disks, or sell ’em. I’m into some, well, pretty hairy opportunities right now, and I don’t need all that old clutter. It’s kid stuff anyway.”
“Okay, man. If that’s the way you want it.”
Eddy leaned forward. “D’you happen to get a package lately? Some hardware? Kind of a settop box?”
“Yeah, I got the thing.”
“That’s great, Lyle. I want you to open the box up, and break all the chips with pliers.”
“Yeah?
“Then throw all the pieces away. Separately. It’s trouble, Lyle, okay? The kind of trouble I don’t need right now.”
“Consider it done, man.”
“Thanks! Anyway, you won’t be bothered by mailouts from now on.” He paused. “Not that I don’t appreciate your former effort and goodwill, and all.”
Lyle blinked. “How’s your love life, Eddy?”
Eddy sighed. “Frederika! What a handful! I dunno, Lyle, it was okay for a while, but we couldn’t stick it together. I don’t know why I ever thought that private cops were sexy. I musta been totally out of my mind…. Anyway, I got a new girlfriend now.”
“Yeah?”
“She’s a politician, Lyle. She’s a radical member of the Spanish Parliament. Can you believe that? I’m sleeping with an elected official of a European local government.” He laughed. “Politicians are sexy, Lyle. Politicians are hot! They have charisma. They’re glamorous. They’re powerful. They can really make things happen! Politicians get around. They know things on the inside track. I’m having more fun with Violeta than I knew there was in the world.”
“That’s pleasant to hear, zude.”
“More pleasant than you know, my man.”
“Not a problem,” Lyle said indulgently. “We all gotta make our own lives, Eddy.”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
Lyle nodded. “I’m in business, zude!”
“You gonna perfect that inertial whatsit?” Eddy said.
“Maybe. It could happen. I get to work on it a lot now. I’m getting closer, really getting a grip on the concept. It feels really good. It’s a good hack, man. It makes up for all the rest of it. It really does.”
Eddy sipped his mimosa. “Lyle.”
“What?”
“You didn’t hook up that settop box and look at it, did you?”
“You know me, Eddy,” Lyle said. “Just another kid with a wrench.”
Sterling to Kessel, 29 March 1985:
“You can’t turn pop genre into mainstream. You can’t turn rock and roll into modern symphonic music. It won’t wash.”
Kessel to Sterling, 2 April 1985:
‘“You can’t turn pop genre into mainstream.’ Maybe. I see the problem. But a lot of good stuff has been produced in the past by artists trying to do exactly that…. look at Shakespeare and revenge tragedy (Hamlet). Hammett and the hardboiled detective story (The Glass Key). Jane Austen and the romance (Persuasion). Conrad and the spy novel (The Secret Agent). Melville and the swindle story (The Confidence Man).”
Gwyneth Jones
Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland
(With apologies to E. R. Eddison)
The virtual reality stories that followed in the wake of PCP’S first wave traded in the wonders of the digital alternative to reality, a world transcending the limitations of the flesh. Here Gwyneth Jones draws a sharp contrast between the lives of people in our world and their fantasy lives in the VR world.
In the process she performs an interrogation of the uses of fantasy. Like so much fantasy (and science fiction), VR offers the temptation of effortless sex, physical prowess, and costless adventure in a romanticized world without entropy. Can the virtual world escape the limitations of humanity?
The earth walls of the caravanserai rose strangely from the empty plain. She let the black stallion slow his pace. The silence of deep dusk had a taste, like a rich dark fruit; the air was keen. In the distance mountains etched a jagged margin against an indigo sky; snow-streaks glinting in the glimmer of the dawning stars. She had never been here before, in life. But as she led her horse through the gap in the high earthen banks she knew what she would see. The camping-booths around the walls; the beaten ground stained black by the ashes of countless cooking fires; the wattle-fenced enclosure where travellers’ riding beasts mingled indiscriminately with their host’s goats and chickens… the tumbledown gallery, where sheaves of russet plains-grass sprouted from empty window-spaces. Everything she looked on had the luminous intensity of a place often-visited in dreams.