第 31 页

He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast Hyatt bed. He went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask of chilled Danish vodka from the rack inside.

“Case.”

He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken in the other.

The Finn’s face on the room’s enormous Cray wall screen. He could see the pores in the man’s nose. The yellow teeth were the size of pillows.

“I’m not Wintermute now.”

“So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

“I’m the matrix, Case.”

Case laughed. “Where’s that get you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.”

“That what 3Jane’s mother wanted?”

“No. She couldn’t imagine what I’d be like.” The yellow smile widened.

“So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?”

“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”

“But what do you do? You just there?” Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.

“I talk to my own kind.”

“But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”

“There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ’Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.”

“From where?”

“Centauri system.”

“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No shit?”

“No shit.”

And then the screen was blank.

He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things. She’d bought him a lot of clothes he didn’t really need, but something kept him from just leaving them there. He was closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he remembered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it up, her first gift.

“No,” he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it pain.

“I don’t need you,” he said.

HE SPENT THE bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.

He found work.

He found a girl who called herself Michael.

And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the very edge of one of the vast steps of data. Small as they were, he could make out the boy’s grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been Riviera’s. Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself.

Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter.

He never saw Molly again.

Vancouver

July 1983

MY THANKS

to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley, Helden. And to Tom Maddox, the inventor of ICE. And to the others, who know why.

SOME DARK HOLLER

JACK WOMACK

THE FIRST TIME I ever heard of William Gibson was a thousand years ago, in 1987. While waiting for my first novel to come out I started keeping a close eye on the competition; not that I knew who the competition might be, for I was totally at sea when it came to science fiction—the alien life I found on this planet was quite enough for me, then and now. In the Village Voice there appeared a rave review of Count Zero; from the reviewer’s comments I inferred that the author’s earlier book had caused something of a stir. The article worried me, for it made me think that this Gibson fellow had already marked all the fire hydrants on the block while I was still begging to be let out of the yard. Conveniently enough for research purposes, I worked in a bookstore at the time and although the owner was extremely snooty when it came to selling literature as opposed to Literature, there was a copy of Count Zero in stock. I read it.

Soon enough I realized that although William Gibson and I were kicking the same groin, we were shod in variant footwear—I very much admired, and envied, his. I relaxed. Turning to the back flap I examined the author photo. An affable fellow, I instinctively thought; he appeared not at all auctorial in the insufferable sense of the word (I think of writers who pose with their dogs, or hold questionable medical devices, or mousse their hair until its specific gravity resembles that of pound cake). Gibson looked vaguely sheepish, even a tad damp, as if it had begun to rain while the picture was being taken and the photographer warned him in no uncertain terms not to move. I could identify.

By the time his next dust jacket photo was taken, for Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson had had the opportunity to become the fashion plate he is today—suave, stylish, wafer-thin, button-cute, and as moisture-proof as a 1947 Swedish Air Force wristwatch. Post-cyberpunk, that is to say, although no one did at the time, for the surface world of the C-word was still, seemingly, in medias res. Meanwhile, however, in the valleys south of San Francisco and east of Seattle, a truer and far more lasting C-word was heaving itself into fast-developing existence.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Great novels start with great opening lines, and the opening line of Neuromancer is hard to beat. Although dead television channels now transmit a different color than they did when Gibson typed (on a typewriter, bear in mind) these words, the color of that predicted sky is, if not the precise shade, than of a hue that falls within the same tonal range as the one hanging over us today.

When I look back with the benefit of years at what happened when Neuromancer came out, speaking as one who wasn’t actually there at the time, I can only compare the effect its appearance must have had on science fiction readers to the effect Dylan had on his listeners when he decided to go electric. Gibson laid the groundwork with his marvelous short stories several years earlier (“The Gernsback Syndrome” being my personal favorite, but I’ve always been a Deco-hound), yet this was something else. Full-tilt Gibson shoots its Tesla-strength voltage not merely through the head but down along the spine, spinning each chakra on its axis in sequence—the difference between the stories and the novels is the difference between coffee and methedrine. Neuromancer, critically praised in most every quarter, won three of the field’s major awards; even so, not since the days of the New Wave, in the ’60s, had there been such consternation over and misinterpretation of a book, and its significance, among those who should know better but somehow never do.

Looking back we can see that it wasn’t so much Gibson himself or Neuromancer itself that so painfully prodded the fat asses (in both senses of the term) most in need of prodding, but rather the attendant commentary from certain of Gibson’s more, uh, intense supporters. Bruce Sterling, winking like mad the whole while, clearly intended his manifestos and diatribes to be somewhat over-the-top in order to achieve the highest possible level of annoyance along with maxima groovitudina, but others (including many who’d never gone near a science fiction novel before in their lives, nor should they have) took what came, quickly, to be called cyberpunk far more seriously than they should have. Nasty remarks pelted like rain on the hard, bony heads of the more oafish supporters and detractors alike, but there was no inconsiderable fun in that. Everyone loves a fight when no one loves the fighters.

The speedy commodification of cyberpunkTM within and beyond the genre, however, was what peeved far many more, notably Gibson, who remembers seeing “Cyberpunk Trousers” advertised in a store window during his first trip to Japan, a decade ago. Countless incompetents and ghastly old hacks keen to cash in on the main chance wasted no time churning out hot jack-in product, ephemeral as toilet tissue, memorable as a restaurant flyer. A number of innocents and miscreants gainfully employed in other metiers were inspired as well, God help them, to produce creative work of similar worth in the spirit of the subgenre they perceived to exist. But let us draw a merciful curtain over such dopey homages as Billy Idol’s album, Cyberpunk—bet you’d forgotten that one, yes? There was no way the beast could survive such wounds, especially once the marketing boys circled round for the kill, and the true end of cyberpunk came so suddenly that no one noticed it missing until several years after it was gone. Still, as romantics continued to sight what they believed to be passenger pigeons as late as the 1930s, there are still occasional amateur sightings of something kind of resembling it.

Cyberpunk qua cyberpunk served, in the long run, only to provide a facile adjective for the working vocabulary of lazy journalists and unimaginative blurb-writers. Yet even those at least partially in the know about science fiction (if nothing more) who debated, defended, or denigrated Gibson didn’t have the faintest idea of what Gibson was actually doing. (Though he didn’t either, at least not at the time—no writer knows what he or she has actually created until the book is actually read by others.) Neuromancer, foremost, was a shout in the night that was the 1980s, is the 1990s, and will be, it seems to me, the decades soon to come. That is to say, a foreshadowing and estimation of our future derived from a specific reinterpretation of our present, and in this very special instance lifted into actuality through the agency of its readers. For if Gibson in truth had nothing to do with the making of cyberpunk as it came to be known (he didn’t create it, didn’t name it, and after it was cursed with its catchy monicker, didn’t want a whole lot to do with it), in the most genuine sense he did create cyberspace. Not merely the word (see the OED); the place.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

In every generation there’s room enough in the American popular mind to admit only one science-fiction writer—it was Bradbury for a while, and then Asimov, and then “that guy who writes Star Trek/Wars.” Gibson transcended that role almost at once. In attaining a cultural summit of another order, one that I believe history will demonstrate to be of considerably higher altitude, he outmaneuvered this cultural narrowcasting in a way that might possibly have been imagined but never predicted by anyone; certainly not in print, and surely not by science fiction writers.

Let me emphasize a point earlier glanced upon: All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written. Therefore science fiction has rarely predicted with any accuracy, save through coincidence or extremely well-informed suppositions a la Verne or Wells, the specifics of the future that ensues, postpublication. (Where do you park your atomic-powered lawnmower?) Sometimes, however—who can say how the spark catches fire, how the fish manages to live on land—it turns out to exactly, mysteriously, capture the spirit. In Neuromancer Gibson first apprehended, as no one else had, what I believe shall prove to be the shape of things to come; he saw the writing on the wall, the blood in the sky, the warning in the entrails. Saw the mind beneath the mirrorshades, as it were, and what that mind would be capable, or incapable, of thinking. Saw the substance disguised in style. What if someone, in the spring of 1914, had stood in the center of Berlin, foresaw in a vision the philosophies and worldviews capable of provoking the events for which the twentieth century would be most remembered, and then went off and wrote it all down? Now let’s be Heisenbergian and ask: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?

When Neuromancer appeared it was picked up and devoured by hundreds, then thousands, of men and women who worked in or around the garages and cubicles where what is still called new media were, fitfully, being birthed; thousands who, on reading his sentence as quoted above, thought to themselves, That’s so fucking cool, and set about searching for any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into silicon reality. Now Gibson’s imagined future cannot by any means be called optimistic (nor, in truth, can it be called pessimistic—it is beyond both); more to the point, he has often said that he intended “cyberspace” to be nothing more than a metaphor. No matter. Once a creation goes out in the world its creator, like any parent, loses the control once so easily exertable over the offspring; another variety of emergent behavior, you could say. That’s so fucking cool, man—I think we can pull it off. So rather than the theoretical Matrix, we now, thanks to all those beautiful William Gibson readers out there in the dark, have the actual Web—same difference, for all intents and purposes, or it will be soon enough.

And it seems to me that had he not sat at his typewriter in 1983 and written that sentence, and the book in which it is found, our present condition—cybercondition, if you must—would be considerably different than it would have otherwise been. William Gibson did something that every writer hopes to do and very—very—rarely does: change the world. Whether for better or worse, Microsoft (or something similar) will tell, but that in no way lessens the awe you should feel, seeing the elephant.

Charles Fort, another American treasure, wrote: “A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time.” As steam engines go, Neuromancer turns out to be the Twenty-first Century Limited, and all of us find ourselves on board.

A COUPLE OF YEARS PASSED BEFORE BILL GIBSON AND I FIRST MET. Prior to that time we’d spoken on the phone, he’d written a fine blurb for my second novel, sent me my own copies of Count Zero and Mona Lisa, and proffered a comment about my work and its ambience during an interview he had with Spin magazine, which my publishers’ publicists fed on for years. (He is better than anyone else I know of at coming up with the pithy and infinitely reusable remark, the quotable phrase, the perfect literary sound-bite—I’ve been attempting to learn from his example for years.) In other words, without trying we were making favorable impressions on one another from the start.

When we did at last meet it was in 1991, at a party here in New York for The Difference Engine. Most of the usual local suspects were present, zeroing in on the action, and so whenever possible we hied ourselves to more secure parts of the room, the better to escape the purveyors of phonus bolognus. He gave me a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and I told him about that day’s big news in New York, the finding of a box of frozen human heads down on Avenue A, said box having apparently tumbled off a truck on route to the cryogenics clinic. Suffice to say we were as impressed with one another in person, in our own inimitable ways, as we had been at a distance. He and I knew from the start that we had much in common, little of which involved science fiction. At the instant each of us first heard the other speak, and detected in our voices a familiar tonality, we realized we were members of the same tribe.