Silence. Was she deliberating? Could they change her mind? Khalidah strained to hear the sound of Tango starting back up again. They flicked nervous, tearful glances at each other.
“Are you just going to quit?” Khalidah asked, when the silence stretched too long. “Are you just going to run away, like this? Now that it’s hard?”
“You have no idea how hard this is, Khal, and you’ve never once thought to ask.”
It stung. Khalidah let the pain transform itself into anger. Anger, she decided, was the only way out of this problem. “I thought you didn’t want me to ask, given how you never told us anything until it was too late.”
“It’s not my fault I’m dying!”
“But it’s your fault you didn’t tell us! We would have—”
“You would have convinced me to go home.” Donna chuckled. It became a cough. The cough lasted too long. “Because you love me, and you want me to live. And I love you, so I would have done it.” She had another little coughing jag. “But the trouble with home is that there’s nothing to go back to. I’ve thrown my whole life into this. I’ve had to pass on things—real things—to get to this place. But now that I’m here, I know it was worth it. And that’s how I want to end it. I don’t want to die alone in a hospital surrounded by people who don’t understand what’s out here, or why we do this.”
Khalidah forced her voice to remain firm. “And so you want to die alone, down there, surrounded by nothing at all?”
“I’m not alone, Khal. You’re with me. You’re all with me, all the time.”
Brooklyn broke down. She pushed herself into one corner. Khalidah reached up, and held her ankle, tethering her into the group. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears bud away. Song’s beautiful ponytail drifted across her face. Arms curled around Khalidah’s body. Khalidah curled her arms around the others. They were a Gordian knot, hovering far above Donna, a problem she could not solve and could only avoid.
“That’s right, Donna,” Marshall said. “We’re here. We’re right here.”
“I’m sorry,” Donna said. “I’m sorry I lied. I didn’t want to. But I just… I wanted to stay, more than I wanted to tell you.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Khalidah said. “I…” She wiped at her face. Her throat hurt. “I miss you. Already.”
“I miss you, too. I miss all of you.” Donna sniffed hard. “But this is where we’re supposed to be. Because this is where we are at our best.”
They were quiet for a while. There was nothing to do but weep. Khalidah thought she might weep forever. The pain was a real thing—she had forgotten that it hurt to cry. She had forgotten the raw throat and pounding head that came with full-body grief. She had forgotten, since her mother, how physically taxing it could be.
“Are you ready, now?” Song asked, finally. She wiped her eyes and swallowed. “Donna? Are you ready to take the dose?”
The silence went on a long time. But still, they kept asking: “Are you ready? Are you ready?”
Elephant on Table
BRUCE STERLING
One of the most powerful and innovative talents to enter science fiction in the past few decades, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the ’80s, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future and with novels such as the complex and Stapeldonian Schismatrix and 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. 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, Distraction, Zeitgeist, The Zenith Angle, and The Difference Engine (with William Gibson); a nonfiction study of the future, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years; and the landmark collections Crystal Express, Globalhead, Schismatrix Plus, A Good Old-Fashioned Future, and Visionary in Residence. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection, Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling, and the new novel The Caryatids. His story “Bicycle Repairman” earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1997 for his story “Taklamakan.”
Here he gives us a slyly satiric look at the end of an era and of one way of competing for power, as new ways evolve, leaving old-style politicians who can’t adapt stranded way behind.
Tullio and Irma had found peace in the Shadow House. Then the Chief arrived from his clinic and hid in the panic-room.
Tullio and Irma heard shuddering moans from the HVAC system, the steely squeak of the hydraulic wheels, but not a human whisper. The Shadow House cat whined and yowled at the vault door.
Three tense days passed, and the Chief tottered from his airtight chamber into summer daylight. Head bobbing, knees shaking, he reeled like an antique Sicilian puppet.
Blank-eyed yet stoic, the elderly statesman wobbled up the perforated stairs to the Shadow House veranda. This expanse was adroitly sheltered from a too-knowing world.
The panic rooms below ground were sheathed in Faraday copper, cast-iron, and lead, but the mansion’s airy upper parts were a nested, multilayer labyrinth of sound baffles, absorbent membranes, metastructured foam, malleable ribbons, carbon filaments, vapor smoke, and mirror chaff. Snakelike vines wreathed the trellises. The gardens abounded in spiky cactus. Tullio took pains to maintain the establishment as it deserved.
The Chief staggered into a rattan throne. He set his hairy hands flat on the cold marble tabletop.
He roared for food.
Tullio and Irma hastened to comply. The Chief promptly devoured three hard-boiled eggs, a jar of pickled artichoke hearts, a sugar-soaked grapefruit, and a jumbo-sized mango, skin and all.
Some human color returned to his famous, surgically amended face. The Chief still looked bad, like a reckless, drug-addict roué of fifty. However, the Chief was actually one hundred and four years old. The Chief had paid millions for the zealous medical care of his elite Swiss clinic. He’d even paid hundreds of thousands for the veterinary care of his house cat.
While Irma tidied the sloppy ruins of breakfast, Tullio queried Shadow House screens for any threats in the vicinity.
The Chief had many enemies: thousands of them. His four ex-wives were by far his worst foes. He was also much resented by various Italian nationalists, fringe leftist groups, volatile feminist cults, and a large sprinkling of mentally disturbed stalkers who had fixated on him for decades.
However, few of these fierce, gritty, unhappy people were on the island of Sardinia in August 2073. None of them knew that the Chief had secretly arrived on Sardinia from Switzerland. The Shadow House algorithms ranked their worst threat as the local gossip journalist “Carlo Pizzi,” a notorious little busybody who was harassing supermodels.
Reassured by this security-check, Tullio carried the card-table out to the beach. Using a clanking capstan and crank, Tullio erected a big, party-colored sun umbrella. In its slanting shade he arranged four plastic chairs, a stack of plastic cups, plastic crypto-coins, shrink-wrapped card decks, paper pads, and stubby pencils. Every object was anonymous and disposable: devoid of trademarks, codes, or identities. No surface took fingerprints.