But what are those skills [of a first-rate writer]? I think in the end, they are not skills at all, but a matter of temperament or character, or not even that — it’s a state of mind that you can attain for moments but which isn’t finally you…. What I mean is what I said in a letter to you a long time ago, that great writers go out on a limb farther than good writers do. They aren’t afraid to violate rules, good taste, logic, sensible advice, proportion, etc. in the pursuit of whatever demon they’re trying to catch, whatever quicksilver they’re trying to nail to the tree.”
Elizabeth Bear
Two Dreams on Trains
In Gibson, the corporations and power structures control everything (and ultimately, shadowy Wintermute rules all). The only hope for freedom is to live completely outside of “Babylon” like his space rastas, or to drop out into the underworld like Case and Molly, the beautiful losers of the urban night world, or to steal enough money in the hope of placing your self beyond control.
Most people in the world cannot opt out. What if you are part of a permanent underclass? What if you are part of a family, connected, and stuck?
The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience’s left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn’t bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist’s bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the prickle of tears.
Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a massive spacelighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a spaceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall shaggy with peeling paint.
Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted — like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real — in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience’s hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift. She didn’t look down and she didn’t close her eyes as the needle pattered and scratched, pattered and scratched. The long Poplar Street barge undulated under the tread of feet moving past the scarrist’s, but his fingers were steady as a gin-soaked frontier doctor’s.
The prick and shift of the needle stopped and the pock-faced scarrist sat back on his heels. He set his tools aside and made a practiced job of applying the quickseal. Patience looked down at her hands, at the palm fretted indigo to mark her caste. At the filigree of emerald and crimson across the back of her right hand, and underneath the transparent sealant swathing the last two fingers of her left.
A peculiar tightness blossomed under her breastbone. She started to raise her left hand and press it to her chest to ease the tension, stopped herself just in time, and laid the hand back on the chair. She pushed herself up with her right hand only and said, “Thank you.”
She gave the scarrist a handful of cash chits, once he’d stripped his gloves and her blood away. His hands were the silt color he’d been born with, marking him a tradesman; the holographic slips of poly she paid with glittered like fish scales against his skin.
“Won’t be long before you’ll have the whole hand done.” He rubbed a palm across his sweat-slick scalp. He had tattoos of his own, starting at the wrists — dragons and mermaids and manatees, arms and chest tesseraed in oceanic beasts. “You’ve earned two fingers in six months. You must be studying all the time.”
“I want my kid to go to trade school so we can get berths outbound,” Patience said, meeting the scarrist’s eyes so squarely that he looked down and pocketed his hands behind the coins, like pelicans after fish. “I don’t want him to have to sell his indenture to survive, like I did.” She smiled. “I tell him he should study engineering, be a professional, get the green and red. Or maintenance tech, keep his hands clean. Like yours. He wants to be an artist, though. Not much call for painters up there. ”
The scarrist grunted, putting his tools away. “There’s more to life than lighters and cargo haulers, you know.”
Her sweeping gesture took in the little room and the rainy window. The pressure in her chest tightened, a trap squeezing her heart, holding her in place, pinned. “Like this?”
He shrugged, looked up, considered. “Sure. Like this. I’m a free man, I do what I like.” He paused. “Your kid any good?”
“As an artist?” A frown pulled the corner of her lip down. Consciously, she smoothed her hand open so she wouldn’t squeeze and blur her new tattoos. “Real good. No reason he can’t do it as a hobby, right?”
“Good? Or good?”
Blood scorched her cheeks. “Real good.”
The scarrist paused. She’d known him for years: six fingers and a thumb, seven examinations passed. Three more left. “If he keeps his hands clean. When you finish the caste” — gesture at her hands — “if he still doesn’t want to go. Send him to me.”
“It’s not that he doesn’t want to go. He just — doesn’t want to work, to sacrifice.” She paused, helpless. “Got any kids?”
He laughed, shaking his head, as good as a yes, and they shared a lingering look. He glanced down first, when it got uncomfortable, and Patience nodded and brushed past on the way out the door. Rain beaded on her nanoskin as it shifted to repel the precipitation, and she paused on decking. Patchy-coated rats scurried around her as she watched a lighter and train lay itself into the lake, gently as an autumn leaf. She leaned out over the Poplar Street Canal as the lights taxied into their berth. The train’s wake lapped gently at the segmented kilometers-long barge, lifting and dropping Poplar Street under Patience’s feet. Cloying rain and sweat adhered her hair to the nape of her neck. Browning roux and sharp pepper cut the reek of filthy water. She squeezed the railing with her uninjured hand and watched another train ascend, the blossom of fear in her chest finally easing. “Javier Alexander,” she muttered, crossing a swaying bridge. “You had best be home safe in bed, my boy. You’d best be home in bed.”
A city like drowned New Orleans, you don’t just walk away from. A city like drowned New Orleans, you fly away from. If you can. And if you can’t…
You make something that can.
Jayve lay back in a puddle of blood-warm rain and seawater in the “borrowed” dinghy and watched the belly lights of another big train drift overhead, hulls silhouetted against the citylit salmon-colored clouds like a string of pearls. He almost reached up a pale-skinned hand: it seemed close enough to touch. The rain parted to either side like curtains, leaving him dry for the instant when the wind from the train’s fans tossed him, and came together again behind as unmarked as the sea. “Beautiful,” he whispered. “Fucking beautiful, Mad.”
“You in there, Jayve?” A whisper in his ear, stutter and crack of static. They couldn’t afford good equipment, or anything not stolen or jerry-built. But who gave a damn? Who gave a damn, when you could get that close to a starship?