Masika grabbed my arm, and when I tried to break free, he tightened his grip and pulled me back into the truck. I turned on him angrily, but before I could say a word he whispered, “She’ll be all right. Just tell me: do you want them to take the ring?”
“What?”
He glanced nervously towards the exit, but the bandits had moved Okwera and Iganga out of sight. “I’ve paid them to do this. It’s the only way. But say the word now and I’ll give them the signal, and they won’t touch the ring.”
I stared at him, waves of numbness sweeping over my skin as I realised exactly what he was saying.
“You could have taken it off under anaesthetic.”
He shook his head impatiently. “It’s sending data back to HealthGuard all the time: cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, prostaglandins. They’ll have a record of your stress levels, fear, pain…if we took it off under anaesthetic, they’d know you’d given it away freely. This way, it’ll look like a random theft. And your insurance company will give you a new one.”
His logic was impeccable; I had no reply. I might have started protesting about insurance fraud, but that was all in the future, a separate matter entirely. The choice, here and now, was whether or not I let him have the ring by the only method that wouldn’t raise suspicion.
One of the bandits was back, looking impatient. Masika asked plainly, “Do I call it off? I need an answer.” I turned to him, on the verge of ranting that he’d willfully misunderstood me, abused my generous offer to help him, and put all our lives in danger.
It would have been so much bullshit, though. He hadn’t misunderstood me. All he’d done was taken me at my word.
I said, “Don’t call it off.”
The bandits lined us up beside the truck, and had us empty our pockets into a sack. Then they started taking watches and jewellery. Okwera couldn’t get his wedding ring off, but stood motionless and scowling while one of the bandits applied more force. I wondered if I’d need a prosthesis, if I’d still be able to do surgery, but as the bandit approached me I felt a strange rush of confidence.
I held out my hand and looked up into the sky. I knew that anything could be healed, once it was understood.
Sterling to Kessel, 7 April 1986:
“Actually I’ve been wanting to do something on BOFFO [aka humanist sf] for some time…. I was further stimulated by the appearance of [Kim Stanley] Robinson’s ‘Down and Out in the Year 2000’ in the April MOV’S, with its long Gibson parody and slashing backhand to Sterling. This was one of Robinson’s best stories, I thought, and a point well taken. His attempt to seize the moral high ground in the debate seemed a canny attempt to use BOFFO’S perceived strengths — at least vis-à-vis the anomic medical objectivity of true chrome-and-matte-black cyberpunk. Also, Shepard’s amazing ‘R&R’ in that issue seems to capture a kind of Mirrorshades incandescence without in any way kowtowing to shock-effect high-tech.
It seems to me that ‘R&R’ and ‘Down and Out’ both represent a kind of elastic and powerful reaction of other 80s writers to the impact of cyberpunk. A kind of waking from dogmatic slumbers which, without following the c-p line at all, still shows a new kind of alertness and commitment. A sense that the stakes have been raised. A healthy and very encouraging reaction to challenge — and not a blind reaction by any means, but an intelligent and wide-ranging response.”
Pat Cadigan
The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry, with a Completely Remastered Soundtrack and the Original Audience
Pat Cadigan gives us a variety of VR that aspires to historicity in this witty piece; “fraudulent pasts and faked memories” will get you a kick in the teeth from the authorities. The surface of this story is ornamented with all the bedazzlements of classic cyberpunk: drugs and rock and roll and cyborgs and a technophilic art form. Narrators with an attitude have always been a specialty of Cadigan and here Gracie lays down a line of pharmaceutical quality wisecracks and caustic insight. But what informs this story is its pervasive sense of irony: this culture, so desperate to recover a lost past, has got it pretty much all wrong.
So! Fix yourself a smell and sit down!
There’s a wet bar, too, if you go that way. You know, for years I told myself I didn’t, even though I always kept a full complement of cheers, vines, and the hards and their pards. I’d say to myself, Oh, but of course the hooch is strictly for hospitality and nothing else.
But now, I’m out about it and I really feel much more non-bad about it. And wasn’t it Elvis who said, “Drinkers, like the poor, we will always have with us”?
Or was that Dylan? Might have been — Dylan was the big expert on drinkers, wasn’t he, dying as he did face down in the gutter — lucky beast! — not fifty paces from the Tired Horse Tavern where he came up with his biggest and best — “All the Tired Horses” (of course!), “Knockin’ on Fern Hill’s Door,” “The Hand That Signed a Paper Got to Serve Somebody,” and, my personal favorite, “Do Not Go Gentle into Those Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “Rage, rage against the leaders, watch the parking — ”
Sorry, sorry, sorry! I can barely hold still, this is such an exciting time for me. I think my man Dylan put it best when he said, “I sang in my chains: everybody must get stoned.” One of his most evocative lines, at least for me. Even now, long, long, long after I first read it, it still stirs up for me the sensation of that state where you’re practically thrumming in excitement, and the only thing that keeps you from flying up in the air and dragging the whole world after you like a cape tied around your shoulders is the incontrovertible fact of your just-that-much-too-heavy flesh —
Sorry again! The human condition tends to make me wax poetic. Rather, it makes me want to wax poetic, except I can never think of the poetic counterpart to words like “incontrovertible.” Got a drink now? Good, good, sit, sit. Did you smell anything you liked? No? Ah — you must tell me the truth here: did the aromabar intimidate you, or are you just not olfactory? I vow that either way, I’m not insulted, truly I’m not. Not all senses can be our senses, can they? And when you’re retro besides — well, some people can get that so wrong.
Like the other day. Packed in my usual buzzbomb was a silly tag from one of my sillier friends telling me that everyone was saying behind my back that I was the most retro creature they’d ever heard of. I tagged back to tell Old Sillyhead that not only were they saying it behind my back, but also behind my front, too, and in front of my back and all that, and so what.
Anyway, it’s not like I’m detoxing and then relapsing just for the wallop that first sinful sip will give you. I know people who have gone through three and four livers that way, even with top-of-the-line blood-doping. But I don’t consider them drinkers. And personally, I think Teflon™ on the central nervous system is cheating.
And in spite of what you may have heard, the aromabar really is just for amusement, I don’t do aromatherapy of any kind. Of course, anyone who does is welcome to mix themselves a bouquet with my essences and if they want to claim it gives them some kind of therapeutic fizz, I’m not going to argue with them. After all, we all sing our own particular song in our chains, don’t we.