Complete Stories (46 page)

Now the Cosmos is stormed every day, but the rockets are nothing more than bread trucks. This is not surprising from Americans, who will always try their best to turn the stars into dollars. But where is our memorial? We had the great dream of Tsiolkovsky right there in our hands. Vlad and I found it ourselves and brought it back from Siberia. We practically threw the Infinite right there at their feet! If only the Higher Circles hadn’t been so hasty, things would have been different.

Vlad has always told me not to say anything, now that we’re safe and rich and officially dead, but it’s just not fair. We deserve our historian, and what’s a historian but a fancy kind of snitch? So I wrote this all down while Vlad wasn’t looking.

I couldn’t help it—I just had to inform somebody. No one has ever known how Vlad Zipkin and I stormed the cosmos, except ourselves and the Higher Circles…and maybe some American top brass.

And Laika? Yes, the Artifact brought her to Paris, too. She still lives with us—which proves that all of this is true.

============

Written in 1985.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, December, 1985.

The first I heard of Bruce Sterling was in 1982, when he sent me a review of my
Software
and of
Spacetime Donuts
that he’d written for a free newspaper in Austin. It was about the best review I’d ever gotten, clearly this guy understood where I was coming from. He also sent me a copy of his novel
Involution Ocean,
a delightful take on
Moby Dick
which features dopers on a sea of sand.

I met Bruce in the flesh at a science-fiction convention in Baltimore in 1983, right after the publication of my fourth SF book,
The Sex Sphere
. He was there with his wife Nancy, William Gibson, Lou Shiner, and Lou Shiner’s wife. After the con, the five of them unexpectedly drove down to visit me in Lynchburg. I came home from my rundown office in shades and a Hawaiian shirt, driving our 1956 Buick. I was thrilled to have them visit me.

Around that time, Bruce started publishing a single-sheet newsletter called
Cheap Truth
, which railed at the plastic artificiality of much SF. The zine—and Gibson’s huge commercial success—soon established cyberpunk as a legitimate form of writing.

“Storming the Cosmos” takes off on Bruce’s deep interest in all things Soviet. One way to organize a story collaboration is for each author to “own” or even to “be” one of the characters. Loosely speaking, Bruce is Nikita and I’m Vlad.

I just went back to look at the accident again. It’s truly horrible. I don’t even look human. My head’s being crushed under the right front wheel; it’s half as thick as it should be, and blood is squirting out my faceholes. A monster. I can’t stand looking at it, but as long as I’m here in frozen time, I’ll be slinking back and looking at my death, over and over, like a dog returning to his vomit, I know it, I know it, I know it.

I keep running up and down these boring few streets—something keeps me from getting too far—running up and down, and nothing’s changing. All I can do is rush around, hating the dull ugly buildings, the mindless plants, the priggish, proper people. And my thoughts, all in loops, never ending.

I don’t see how I’m going to stand this. My poor body, my poor wife, our poor wasted lives. Why couldn’t I have done better? I want to kill myself all over again, but I’m already dead. Oh God, oh God, oh, dear God, please help me. Please make this stop.

Once again, my hysteria ebbs. That’s my only measure of time now: my moodswings, and the walks I take, lonely ghost in a bland little town.

It took me a few years to kill myself. I guess it was losing my last teaching job that started me off with the suicide thoughts. Losing my good job, and then some marriage problems…ah, it wasn’t just the big things getting me down, it was a lot of things. The hangovers, being 38, no goals, and, worst of all, the boredom. The sameness. Day after day, month after month, the same fights, the same brief joys, the same problems. The menial job, shelving books in a library.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, Wedding Anniversary, Summer Vacation, Thanksgiving, Christmas…I couldn’t take it anymore, and finally I got the nerve to step in front of a truck. Now I’m dead and it’s 9:17:06 A.M., September 14, forever.
Forever
.

It’s so horrible, so Dantean, that I almost have to laugh. A guy kills himself because life’s such a boring drag, and then time freezes up on him, and he can’t walk more than three blocks from his body. Till recently, I never really knew what boredom was. Being here is like…an airport lounge with streets and buildings in it. Frozen time.

When I died, my consciousness branched out of the normal time-stream. My time is now perpendicular to normal time. I walk around and look at things—I have an astral body that looks just like my real one—and it’s as if everything were frozen. Like a huge 3-D flash-photograph. Right now, sitting here in my empty office, thinking this out, I can see a bird outside the window. It’s just about to land, and its wings are outstretched, and its beak is half-open, and if I walk over for a closer look, which I’ve done several times, I can see the nictating membrane stretched halfway across each of the blinking bird’s eyes. The bird is hanging there like a raisin in jello, hanging there every time I look.

On the streets, all the people are still as statues, like the figures in Muybridge’s “zoopraxographic” photographs. Some people are frozen in such awkward positions that it’s hard to believe they won’t—after my eternity ends—fall over, especially the old lady standing on one foot to reach a bag of food in through her car window.

In my house, my wife is brushing her teeth. The toothbrush handle pushes her mouth to one side. She doesn’t know yet that I’m dead. In my time I’ve been dead for a while now, but relative to me, my wife is frozen at the instant I died. She hasn’t gotten the word. She thinks I’m on my way back from the store with milk and eggs, when in fact I’m out of my broken body, and walking around.

Walking and thinking, always alone. I’m the only thing that moves in this silent town’s streets. Nothing changes except my thoughts. Boredom, boredom, boredom. And the horror of my corpse.

I always thought in terms of shooting myself, but the way it worked out was that I stepped in front of a Japanese pickup truck. I was on the way up to the store to get milk and eggs when, just like that, I stepped off the curb in front of the truck. It wasn’t an accident—I saw the truck coming—it was suicide. But, really, I’d always planned to shoot myself.

I used to think about it a lot. Like on a Sunday night—lying there weak and shaky, going over and over the money worries, the dying marriage, and all the stinging memories of another weekend’s ugly drunken scenes: the fights with friends, the cop troubles, the self-degradation, and the crazy things my wife had done—I’d cut it all off with thoughts of a .45 automatic, one of those flat black guns that movie gangsters and WWII soldiers have—with the checks on the grip, and the heavy bullets that are fed in at the butt of the gun. Lying there in bed, depressed and self-hating. I’d cheer myself up by imagining there was a .45 on my night table. I wouldn’t reach out my real arm—I didn’t want to stir my miserable wife into painful apology or recrimination—no, I’d reach out a
phantom
arm. An astral arm, a ghost arm, an arm like the arm an amputee imagines himself still to have—an arm like my whole body is now. The phantom arm would peel on out of my right arm, and reach over, and pick up that longed for .45.

Lying there sleepless and desperate, I had a lot of time to analyze my fantasies. The fact that I always reached for the pistol with my right arm struck me as significant, for if you pick up a pistol with your right hand, and then hold it to your temple in the most natural way, this means that your right hand is shooting the right hemisphere of your brain. Now, as is well known, the left hemisphere of the brain is a) the uptight cop half, and b) in control of the right hand. So by shooting oneself in the right temple with a gun held in the right hand one is, in effect, letting the left-brain kill the right-brain. The digital, highly socialized left-brain shoots the dark and creative right-brain. This particular death always seemed somberly appropriate to me, and a good symbol of society forcing poor, intellectual me into an early grave.

But—hell—I guess getting run over by a Japanese pickup truck makes some kind of statement, too. The fact is that I really hate pickups. I think I hate pickups a lot more than my right-brain ever hated my left-brain. What is it that people think they need to haul around in all those pickups? The pickups you see are always empty, aren’t they? Especially the Japanese ones, the cute, preppy energy-savers that bank employees and insurance salesmen drive. Presumably, the preps want to share in some imagined pickup grit macho, but they’re too clean and sensible to get a rusted-out unmufflered ‘70s redneck Ford, so they buy one of these shiny little Nipponese jobs with the manufacturer’s name on the back like on a pair of designer jeans. UGH! I hate, I hate, I hate…so many things.

I was talking about suicide.

Sometimes, if I was
really
strung out, the imaginary .45 would start to grow. It would get as big as a coffin: a heavy, L-shaped coffin lying on top of me and crushing out my breath. As big as the house I lived in. And every day, set into the classified ads, there was a picture of my gun, part of an ad for Ace Hardware, “Largest Selection of Guns in Central Virginia.”

I got so
tired
of not killing myself.

Some days it would sandbag me. I’d be, say, waiting in the car for the wife to come out of the library where we worked (she full-time, me part-time), and I wouldn’t be able to come up with one single iota of wanting to be there. And then, all of a sudden, there’d be Death, breathing in my face,
so much closer than the last time
.

I don’t want to exaggerate—my life wasn’t any worse than that of any other unhappily married, underemployed, middle-aged alcoholic. There wasn’t any one thing that made me want to die. It was the boredom that got me. My life was, quite literally, boring me to death, and I didn’t have the will power to do anything to change it. The only change I could come up with was suicide. And for the longest time, I was scared to even do that. Thinking back, I realize that I never could have shot myself. Focusing on the .45 was a kind of cop-out. But finally I got it together and stepped in front of that truck.

Got it together? In a way, yes. At first I was upset to be here, but now I’m getting used to it. What do I do? I sit in my office, and I take walks. Back and forth. It’s a rhythm. Thinking these thoughts, I stare at my computer, imagining that my words are being coded up on disk.

I’ve been thinking some more about what’s happened to me. I was, before my final occupation as book-shelver, a physics teacher, and it amuses me to try to analyze my present supernatural existence in scientific terms.

My astral body is of a faintly glowing substance, somewhat transparent—call it aether. I can pass through walls in good ghost-fashion, yet the gravitational curvature of space still binds me to the earth’s surface: I cannot fly. Although I am not of ordinary matter, I can see. Since nothing is moving for me, I must not be seeing in the usual fashion (that is, by intercepting moving photons). I would guess that my fine aether-body sees, rather, by directly sensing the space-undulations caused by the photons’ passage. This is borne out by the fact that I can see with my eyes closed.

My theory, as I’ve said before, is that when one dies, one’s soul enters frozen time—a volume of space corresponding to the instant of one’s death. I think of time as a long, gently undulating line, with each space-instant a hypersheet touching time at one point. A ghost lives on and on, but it is always in the now-space of its body’s death. In ordinary life, people encounter ghosts regularly—but only once for each ghost. A given instant is haunted only by the ghost of that particular space-slice, the ghost of whoever died that moment.

Image:
the long corridor of time, lined with death-cells, some cells empty, some holding one tattered soul
.

How long is a moment? How long does it take a person to die? Looking at the frozen world around me, it seems that my death instant has almost no time-duration at all. If it were even a hundredth of a second long, then some things would be blurred. But nothing is blurred, not even the flies’ wings, or the teeth of the chainsaw my neighbor is forever gunning. My death lasts no more than a thousandth of a second…and perhaps much less. This is significant.

Why? Because if the death-instant is so short, then each ghost is in solitary confinement. I know that someone, somewhere, dies every second—but what are the odds that any given person dies at the exact same thousandth of a second after 9:17, September 14, as I? I have calculated the odds—I have ample time for such calculations. The odds against such a coincidence are well over one thousand billion to one. And there are only a few billion people in the world. The chances that any other ghost shares my space-cell are less than one in a thousand.

So I’ll quest me no quests. Really, I’m not at all sure that I could leave Killeville, even if I tried. My astral body is, it may be, a holographic projection powered by my dying brain’s last massive pulse. If I go even three blocks away from my body, I feel faint and uneasy. There is no hope of walking to another city.

Here I am, and here I will be, forever. Alone.

It’s a sunny day.

It’s funny about boredom. The physical world is so complex, yet I used to think of it as simple. Each time I walk around the block I see something new.

Just now, I was out looking at all the wasps and bees feeding at one of the flowering bushes in our yard. I marveled at the bristles on the bees’ bulging backs, and at their little space-monster faces. And in the fork of a branchlet, caught in a hidden web, was a wasp being attacked by a spider. The wasp is biting the spider’s belly.