第 55 页

“I am Madame Tournachon,” she said, “Sybil Tournachon.”

“My name is Fraser.” He bowed.

Sybil Tournachon fidgeted with her kid-skin gloves, as though her palms were perspiring. The day was very hot. “Are you one of her paladins, Mr. Fraser?”

“I’m afraid I fail to take your meaning, madame,” Fraser said politely. “Do you live in Paris, Mrs. Tournachon?”

“In Cherbourg,” she said, “but I came all that way, by the morning express, simply to see her speak.” She paused. “I scarcely understood a word she said.”

“No harm in that, madame,” Fraser said, “neither do I.” He had begun to like her.

The gurney arrived. The chauffeur, with a bold wink at Fraser, hopped from behind the wheel and whipped a dirty chamois from his pocket. He applied it to the tarnished trim of a scalloped fender, whistling.

Her Ladyship emerged from the lecture-hall. She had remembered her hand-bag. As she approached, Mrs. Tournachon went a bit pale with excitement, and took a lecture-program from her jacket.

She was quite harmless.

“Your Ladyship, may I present Mrs. Sybil Tournachon,” Fraser said.

“How do you do?” Lady Ada said.

Mrs. Tournachon curtsied. “Will you sign my program? Please.”

Lady Ada blinked. Fraser, adroitly, handed her the pen from his notebook. “Of course,” Lady Ada said, taking the paper. “I’m sorry—what was the name?”

“ ‘To Sybil Tournachon.’ Shall I spell it?”

“No need,” said Her Ladyship, smiling. “There’s a famous French aeronaut named Tournachon, isn’t there?” Fraser offered his back to the flourish of Her Ladyship’s pen. “A relation of yours, perhaps?”

“No, Your Highness.”

“I beg your pardon?” Lady Ada said.

“They call you Queen of Engines….” Mrs. Tournachon, smiling triumphantly, plucked the inscribed program from Her Ladyship’s unresisting fingers. “The Queen of Engines! And you’re just a funny little grey-haired blue-stocking!” She laughed. “This lecture-gull you’re running, dearie—does it pay at all well? I do hope it pays!”

Lady Ada regarded her with unfeigned astonishment.

Fraser’s grip tightened on the cane. He stepped to the curb, swiftly opened the gurney door.

“One moment!” The woman tugged with sudden energy at one gloved finger, came up with a gaudy ring. “Your Ladyship—please—I want you to have this!”

Fraser stepped between them, lowering the cane. “Leave her alone.”

“No,” Mrs. Tournachon cried, “I’ve heard the tales, I know she needs it….” She pressed against him, stretching out her arm. “Your Ladyship, please take this! I shouldn’t have wounded your feelings, it was low of me. Please take my gift! Please, I do admire you, I sat through that whole lecture. Please take it, I brought it just for you!” She fell back then, her hand empty, and smiled. “Thank you, Your Ladyship! Good luck to you. I shan’t trouble you again. Au revoir! Bonne chance!”

Fraser followed Her Ladyship into the gurney, shut the door, rapped the partition. The chauffeur took his post.

The gurney pulled away.

“What a queer little personage,” Her Ladyship said. She opened her hand. A fat little diamond gleamed in its filigreed setting. “Who was she, Mr. Fraser?”

“I should guess an exile, ma’am,” Fraser said. “Very forward of her.”

“Was it wrong of me to take this?” Her breath smelled of brandy and seltzer. “Not really proper, I suppose. But she would have made a scene, otherwise.” She held the gem up, in a sheet of dusty sunlight through the window. “Look at the size of it! It must be very dear.”

“Paste, Your Ladyship.”

Swift as thought, Lady Ada pinched the ring in her fingers like a bit of chalk, and ran the stone along the gurney’s window. There was a thin grating shriek, almost inaudible, and a shining groove appeared across the glass.

They sat in companionable silence, then, on their way to the hotel.

Fraser watched Paris through the window and recalled his instructions. “You may let the old girl drink as she likes,” the Hierarch had told him, with his inimitable air of mincing irony, “talk as she likes, flirt as she likes, saving open scandal, of course…. You may take your mission as fulfilled if you can keep our little Ada from the wagering-machines.” There had been small chance of that disaster, for her purse held nothing but tickets and small-change, but the diamond had rather changed matters. He would have to keep a closer eye, now.

Their rooms in the Richelieu were quite modest, with a connecting-door he had not touched. The locks were sound enough, and he had found and plugged the inevitable spyholes. He kept the keys.

“Is there anything left of the advance?” Lady Ada asked.

“Enough to tip the chauffeur,” Fraser said.

“Oh dear. That little?”

Fraser nodded. The French savants had paid little enough for the pleasure of her learned company, and her debts had swiftly eaten that. The meager takings at the ticket-booth would scarcely have paid their passage from London.

Lady Ada opened the curtains, frowned at summer daylight, closed them again. “Then I suppose I shall have to take on that tour in America.”

Fraser sighed, inaudibly. “They say that continent boasts many natural wonders, milady.”

“Which tour, though? Boston and New Philadelphia? Or Charleston and Richmond?”

Fraser said nothing. The names of the alien cities struck him with a leaden gloom.

“I shall toss a coin for it!” Her Ladyship decided brightly. “Have you a coin, Mr. Fraser?”

“No, milady,” Fraser lied, searching his pockets with a muted jingle, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t they pay you at all?” Her Ladyship inquired, with a hint of temper.

“I have my police pension, milady. Quite generous, promptly paid.” The promptness part was true, at least.

She was concerned now, hurt. “But doesn’t the Society pay you a proper salary? Oh dear, and I’ve put you to so much trouble, Mr. Fraser! I had no idea.”

“They recompense me in their own way, ma’am. I am well rewarded.”

He was her paladin. It was more than enough.

She stepped to her bureau, searching among papers and receipts. Her fingers touched the tortoise-shell handle of her traveling-mirror.

She turned then, and caught him with a woman’s look. Under its pressure, he lifted his hand, quite without volition, and touched his bumpy cheek below the eye-patch. His white side-whiskers did not hide the scars. A shotgun had caught him there. It still ached sometimes, when it rained.

She did not see his gesture, though, or did not choose to see it. She beckoned him nearer. “Mr. Fraser. My friend. Tell me something, won’t you? Tell me the truth.” She sighed. “Am I nothing but a funny little grey-haired blue-stocking?”

“Madame,” Fraser said gently, “you are la Reine des Ordinateurs.”

“Am I?” She lifted the mirror, gazed within it. In the mirror, a City.

It is 1991. It is London. Ten thousand towers, the cyclonic hum of a trillion twisting gears, all air gone earthquake-dark in a mist of oil, in the frictioned heat of intermeshing wheels. Black seamless pavements, uncounted tributary rivulets for the frantic travels of the punched-out lace of data, the ghosts of history loosed in this hot shining necropolis. Paper-thin faces billow like sails, twisting, yawning, tumbling through the empty streets, human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye. And when a given face has served its purpose, it crumbles, frail as ash, bursting into a dry foam of data, its constituent bits and motes. But new fabrics of conjecture are knitted in the City’s shining cores, swift tireless spindles flinging off invisible loops in their millions, while in the hot unhuman dark, data melts and mingles, churned by gear-work to a skeletal bubbling pumice, dipped in a dreaming wax that forms a simulated flesh, perfect as thought—

It is not London—but mirrored plazas of sheerest crystal, the avenues atomic lightning, the sky a super-cooled gas, as the Eye chases its own gaze through the labyrinth, leaping quantum gaps that are causation, contingency, chance. Electric phantoms are flung into being, examined, dissected, infinitely iterated.

In this City’s center, a thing grows, an auto-catalytic tree, in almost-life, feeding through the roots of thought on the rich decay of its own shed images, and ramifying, through myriad lightning-branches, up, up, toward the hidden light of vision,

Dying to be born.

The light is strong,

The light is clear;

The Eye at last must see itself

Myself …

I see:

I see,

I see

I

!

AFTERWORD

PLEASE NOTE: THE TEXT BLOCKS IN ROMAN ARE BRUCE STERLING, AND THE TEXT BLOCKS IN ITALICS ARE WILLIAM GIBSON.

The Difference Engine took us seven years of work. Why so long? First, we had the silly notion that co-writing a book halves the effort, while, in reality, it doubles it. Second was our keen difficulty in figuring out who would write such a book, and to what end, and for what—“the voice of the book.” Once we realized that the narrator is a computer, we stopped researching and started writing.

In the run-up to the decision to write the book together, we each spoke as though the other would be writing it. It finally came to an actual “ ‘no, you write it,’ ‘no, you’ ” moment.

Bruce immediately proposed a protocol of collaboration that I still regard as having been essential. The text was to be considered to be the contents of the latest iteration, on what eventually became a thick and slippery stack of floppies. Either of us could change anything there at any time, but only by writing over the current version. We were specifically disallowed the option of pasting in some previous favorite text. If we wanted to restore some prior material, we could work only from memory. This last rule, I think, was crucial, though you’d have to try it yourself to see why.

We constantly overwrote everything: ourselves, each other, the hods of actual Victorian print media Bruce hauled home from the University of Texas. The result is a text that couldn’t have been produced without word processing.

The book’s narrator, or “Narratron,” makes no big fuss about itself. In fact it doesn’t come into conscious existence until the book’s last page. But the novel is one long narrative adventure about computer composition. Specifically, it’s about word processing and what that process does to the texture of history. It’s not about composition. It’s about recomposition and decomposition. It’s about the future being already here only not distributed yet, and the past being a kind of future that has already happened. As authors of books with titles like Zero History and A Good Old-Fashioned Future, we still do a lot of work in that coal mine.

At the time we were writing this book, it was quite a novelty to walk around being all “cyber.” We cyberpunks had to face compelling questions from the normal people of that epoch. Since we were novelists who wrote about computers, we were commonly asked what we would do when computers themselves wrote the novels. We used to respond—quite urbanely, I thought, for guys so young and testy—that we were keen to review those books.

I still, sometimes, find myself addressed as though I were some version of Arthur C. Clarke with giant Gizmodo glands, and that after decades of patient denial. This was even funnier, while we were writing this book, as neither of us had yet ventured onto whatever passed, in those days, for the Internet. We had made one utterly futile attempt at transferring data via the telephone, between Bruce’s Apple II in Austin and mine in Vancouver. After that, we stuffed floppies into FedEx boxes and overnighted them.

What would a computer really do to write a novel, anyway? It’s easy to imagine a computer generating a mash-up pastiche of popular entertainment, with a textual manipulation of stock elements. Computers play music, they play chess, and nowadays computers even translate.

It’s more interesting to imagine a computer as a serious-minded litterateur—a literate witness to its own experience. A computer as a real writer, a sincere contributor to literary sensibility who happens to be electronic. This hardworking author is blind, deaf, disembodied, sexless, and immobile, of course … but it does have infinite patience and a giant databank.

Or imagine two people writing a novel, empowered by a new and subtly powerful technology that turns text into something plastic, fluid, effortlessly malleable….

So one can imagine it struggling toward awareness through an intricate process of world-building … like a historical novelist puffing life into the dry fragments of a forgotten era. Lacking a tongue, it could never perform human speech—it could only pastiche it. But to say “only” pastiche is a misnomer, because human authors don’t invent language by themselves. If the ink-and-scissors of William Burroughs is a “virus from outer space,” then a processed text is even more codelike.

Burroughs enjoyed the cut-up as artifact. The notebooks in which he compiled them are works of outsider art. But as we iterated, overwrote, and iterated, I began to see that what we were doing had more in common with airbrushing (or Photoshop, had Photoshop existed) than with scissors and paste. We could blur the edges of the collage, effortlessly blend disparate parts, render the juncture invisible. A different level of magic. “What do I need a computer for?” Burroughs had asked. “I’ve got a typewriter.” Ah, but for this, sir. For this.

Thus the book’s conclusion, where the pretense of novelization falls apart and the Narratron’s pastiche is laid bare. The text disintegrates into its source material: anecdotes, theater bills, song lyrics. An associative gumbo, for all the world like a bunch of Google search hits.

I remember watching those few final pages snake out of my fax, reading as they came. By then, the book’s author, who I’d come to think of as neither of us but some ominous third party, had been in control for a long time. I never doubted that that was good, and I’ve never since had quite the same faith in the auteur theory of literature. I knew that that was Bruce, on the other end of that line, in Austin, but by then we were both channeling. I tore the paper tongue from the machine and began to overwrite. But only very lightly, seeing that the Narratron had spoken.

Then there was that other major question we used to be asked a lot, commonly by wiser, older journalists who had some real paying jobs, unlike us. It was all about the cyberpunk slogan “Information wants to be free.” It was commonly pointed out to us, with an ironic flourish, that if we really believed this stuff then we were destroying our own business. People somehow thought that we imagined ourselves to be exempt from this. It was like being volcanologists predicting an earthquake and having someone retort we would lose our own crockery. Of course we did and still do have crockery problems, but we weren’t the first.

The first to go were our beloved manual typewriters, because that word-processing software blew them straight to kingdom come. After that, digital shipping methods destroyed the independent bookstores and replaced them with chains. Publishers were snapped up by other and larger media companies, mostly because spreadsheets and new cybernetic business management methods made this feasible. Consolidations in shipping completely disrupted the book distribution trade. Then Web browsers came along, eventually causing newspapers and magazines to collapse, causing journalists to be fired in droves. This transformed the remaining bookstores into coffeehouses that sell T-shirts and hold open-mike slams.