Transreal Cyberpunk (39 page)

“I love the sight of saucers now,” said Kalinin, gazing into the haunted, moonlit sky. He still had his beaky nose and his high cheekbones. His teeth were straighter than before, and he spoke English. His passage through the phantom world of the saucer-beings had changed him other, less definable ways. He said odd things, and he had a heavy aura.

Kalinin had told Ida that he was one of twelve resurrected saucer saints—twelve saints scattered across the surface of the Earth—and that he could hear the voices of the other saints within his head at all times. But Ida and Kalinin kept these secrets from those around them. They walked among humankind like an ordinary woman and man.

Silvered by the low moon, a nearby saucer’s energetic surface was a ceaseless flurry of subtle, mercurial patterns, like wave-chop, or like the scales of a swimming fish.

“You always understood them better than anyone else, Kalinin,” said Ida. “Do they plan to annihilate us? Is that why they sent you back?”

“They’re refining us,” said Kalinin. “Like ore within a crucible. Like vapor in an alembic. Life and death are philosophical mistakes.”

“Sometimes I miss the old Kalinin,” said Ida. “It was noble to be so stubborn. Fighting the inevitable, no matter what.”

“Discarded dross,” said Kalinin. “Economics, government, military power—nonsensical, distorted, irrelevant.” Imposing as he seemed to others, when he gazed at Ida, his eyes were as warm as ever before. “Love remains. Art is the path to the final unification.”

“Everyone at the party was saying things like that,” said Ida, shrugging her bared shoulders in her shining gown. “People are so full of themselves in America! They talk as if they were demigods, but what do they do? They crank themselves up on grubs and watch someone’s thousand-hour video in ten minutes.”

“A mirage that flies by, half-seen, half-sensed,” said Kalanin. “The saucers want a richer kind of art. They want us to change the world.”

“But Kalinin, what if the saucers are like children who poke sticks into anthills to watch the ants seethe? The ants build and build, they strive and strive—but are any of them famous artists?”

“We’ll craft a great work of ant,” said Kalanin.

“Everyone at the party was talking about totem poles,” said Ida. “In the old days, the Native Americans of the northwest carved faces on sticks with stone knives. That was their art. But then, one day—one strange day—the sailing ships came to them, and strangers brought them steel axes. How did they respond? They made huge totem pole logs, from Oregon to Alaska!”

“Totem poles,” said Kalinin slowly. “Yes. Of course. Totem poles are good.”

“But the story is tragic! The old world that the natives knew by heart became someone else’s New World. A world of syphilis and smallpox, with the totem poles stored in museums.”

“The grubs are our steel axes,” said Kalanin.

“Why don’t the saucers speak to us, Kalinin? Will they let us join their world? Can we join the Higher Circles of galactic citizenship?”

Kalinin gave a dry laugh. “Higher than the Kremlin.”

They walked along in silence for a few minutes, bringing their minds into synch. They even got a levitation thing going, loping along in long strides, laughing at each other.

“You see it too?” said Kalanin, coming to a stop, panting for breath. “You’ll make a painting. Monumental. And then—

“The end of the world,” said Ida. “Brought to you by a crazy woman who made her crazy boyfriend slit his own throat with a bayonet.”

“And who brought him back to life. This is holy, Ida. No need to joke.”

Ida held out her hands. “I laugh because I’m scared.”

The two of them embraced, lit by the moon and the silver saucers and the first rays of the rising sun. A gentle puff of breeze came off the bay.

“I’ll paint now,” said Ida.

“Paint everything,” said Kalanin. “Can it fit?”

“I’ll use—poetic compression,” replied Ida. “Room to spare.”

She raised her arms and the skies opened. Tens of thousands of saucer grubs rained down upon her. Some of the grubs became brushes, others formed pools of paint.

Ida and her living brushes set to work, painting on the street, on the sidewalks, on the nearby warehouse walls, Ida swinging her arm from the shoulder, carving sweeps of color and form. Her loose strokes limned buildings and people and trees. She depicted the insides of the buildings as well as the outsides, and the meanings of the things to be found in there, and the lives of those who’d made the things.

“Be sure to include an image of your painting,” urged Kalinin.

Ida nodded, uninterruptedly busy, sharpening the identities of her scribbles and blots. A tight spiral of darkly energetic grubs began converging onto a certain section of her mural. Ida was crafting a secondary world-mural within the main one.

Just like the main mural, the secondary mural held a image of the entire world. And within it you could see a third mural, with a yet tinier fourth mural inside that, and so on and on.

“Keep going,” said Kalinin.

“We’ve only begun,” said Ida. Flecks of paint bedizened her bobbed dark hair like stars in a night sky.

Kalinin closed his eyes and his lips moved. Rays of light flickered into life, one of them stellating out from Ida’s regress—the others from points across the globe.

Twelve poles of supernal light, needles of prismatic brilliance, radiating into the cosmos, dissolving the substance of our world. Bathing in its native glow, the Earth became a silver, dodecahedral orb, a mysterious cosmic traveler.

§

“I like this potlatch,” said Dirt Complaining.

“The best ever,” Dirt Harkening agreed.

Notes on “Totem Poles”

Tor.com
.

Written June - December, 2014.

Rudy on “Totem Poles”

“Totem Poles” began with me emailing Bruce about how the advent of European traders with steel axes had set the Northwest First Nations people to making large totem poles in the early 1900s, and about how the Europeans then crushed the tribal cultures. I wanted to create an analogous SF scenario in which cryptic aliens arrive and give us radically powerful creative tools with catastrophic consequences.

To get things rolling, I sent Bruce a scene featuring a woman painter in San Francisco. Bruce responded with a scene about a male Russian soldier and a female Russian administrator. Also a scene with two dead First Nations people talking. We couldn’t immediately see a good way to connect the scenes. For the next few revisions we kept tweaking each other’s scenes and repairing our own scenes.

We also toyed with the idea of adding on more scenes, wondering if we might make the story itself a kind of totem pole—and Bruce came up with a scene in India involving a man and a woman. At this point we’d done six versions of the story.

I did an extreme push, thinking about the story day and night until I’d found a plausible through-line for our tale. At this point, I was the woman painter and the woman Russian—who by now were the same person. Bruce was the Russian soldier. I thought the story was finished. Bruce approved of what I’d done, but even so he made changes—and so the process went on. We did four more revisions. It didn’t feel like we were converging. Bruce said it was like we were baking bread while floating in thin air. Or like we were cartoonists creating a jam strip for
Zap Comix
.

After version eleven, Bruce said he didn’t want to work on the story anymore, but that he didn’t think it was properly finished. I viewed this as my opportunity for an unsupervised final cut. I went into a blood-lust revision frenzy, and sent the resulting version twelve to the editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden at
Tor.com
. Patrick’s quick response: “This may be the weirdest thing we’ll have published yet, but I like it and I want it.”
Whew
. I was glad for this validation.

So, okay,
Tor.com
paid us for the story, but then a year went by, and they kept not actually publishing it, who knows why, and then it was time for
Transreal Cyberpun
k to appear in our antho, and I’m finalizing this note, and I’m not sure if
Tor.com
is going to post the story or not. I’ve been having a hard time getting info out of them. Oh well! I’ll update this info in a later edition…

Anyway, I think “Totem Poles” is trippy and cool, with a couple of great shock-cut scenes, and a lot of different levels working in it. Bruce wan’t happy with the story, but you can decide for yourself.

By the way, “Totem Poles” was our fourth story in a row that ends with the world as we know it coming to an end. Kind of tells you something about where we’re at. In the evening of our lives.

Bruce on “Totem Poles”

Rudy and I have been at it quite a while, so for “Totem Poles” we had little in the way of conceptual framework, and decided just to jam around a loose theme, and see what happened. The result was a violently disordered series of drafts which were rather more interesting than the resultant final text. You sort of had to be there, and nobody else was there, so, well, no one else will ever know how brilliant this scheme was; all we’ve got left is this burnt soufflé from a kitchen on fire.

“Totem Poles” is formally interesting, but it strongly reminds me of one of those Brian Eno “curiosities” recordings where Eno sets up loops and tracks on his hacked equipment and then deserts the studio to go ponder Long Now clocks. I happen to be quite the Brian Eno fan, and I will cheerfully forgive Professor Eno most anything, but even Jove nods. “Totem Poles” is our worst story. It’s the most disjointed and threadbare of our works, but it does have the virtue of revealing our compositional methods. If you can work your way through the haze of free-jazz distortion, you might see us flinging our favorite fantasy-riffs, Jackson-Pollack style, splattering onto the page. We were making soup from a single iron nail, and the two quarreling chefs smashed every spice-rack in sight.

Although it’s morbid, “Totem Poles” doesn’t feel like a proper conclusion to anything; on the contrary, it feels like a teenage garage band rehearsal for something that might become really good, after a thousand hours of practice. I hope we write at least one more story. We may not have the time, but we’ve got the power.
Ars longa, vita brevis,
folks.

Kraken and Sage

Early in his career, Jorge Jones turned himself into a supercomputer. By deftly biohacking the Golgi apparatus and mitochondria power molecules of his cells, Jorge brought every part of his body into his mental network. With a little hacker yoga, he pushed his mathematical thinking out of his busy brain-matter, down his spine and nervous system, and into the flexing meat of his muscles and tendons. He used his fat cells for data storage.

Soon after this feat, Jorge’s activated ponderings allowed him to create an organic programming tool he called the Hydra. A user could design a Hydra program, download the code into a customizable virus known as the “Jones Flu,” and then infect some hapless plant or animal to carry out whatever strange demands possessed the programmer.

Thanks to the Hydra, life on Earth could be forced to serve Mammon’s passing whim.

Whales carried passengers. Sheep grew colored wool. Jones flu cows were milk-emitting silos, big enough to live in. Feverish chickens could fire up within their insulating feathers and roast themselves on the spot. Exquisite glass bottles grew upon winery vines, slowly filling themselves with champagne. Clean water and snug shelter were as trivial as disposable phones.

The Jorge Jones Hydra was the dominant, global-scale tool of biotech—patented, licensed, and the only platform of its kind. The Hydra supported armies of engineers, divisions of lawyers, battalions of designers, and conspiracies of investors. A stack, a network, a global octopus.

Then the bubble burst.

§

It was a misty morning in the mountains, blessedly quiet. Jorge Jones was surrounded by living timber, graciously bent to his will. His possessions were few, but perfect: a polished wooden bowl, a voluptuously curved chair, a carved table, a horn spoon, and garments of down and spider-silk. Jorge Jones, the guru of organic computation, had no more need for copper, silicon, or plastic.

Other than his organically programmed crows and squirrels—and the occasional freebooter nuthatch, woodpecker, or beetle—the visitors to Jorge’s sequoia tree were few and far between, and he liked life that way. Jorge Jones liked life to go entirely his own way. And he still had his Hydra working for him.

He’d infected his crows with the Jones flu virus, and they ferried raisin bran to him. And he’d coaxed this sequoia tree into hollowing out a spacious two-story apartment within its massive trunk. A hidden cave, with a few choice pieces of elegant temperfoam Milanese furniture, and a generous balcony with swirling art-deco railings. Design was important to Jorge. His last marriage had broken up over his wife’s horrid appliance choices.

So here he was, after the revolution, living alone in his sequoia—in an ascended state of computation and meditation. He’d become a sage of pure science and lofty conceptual metaphysics, with no annoying legal, ethical, social, economic, or military complications. He was finally free of nagging hassles from his best friend, or more likely his worst enemy, Frank Sharp.