Schismatrix plus

Bruce Sterling

Copyright 1996

ISBN: 0-441-00370-2

Introduction: The Circumsolar Frolics

First among them was THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL by J. D. Bernal. This book was written in the 1920s, and would be universally acknowledged as a stellar masterpiece of cosmic speculation, except for the uncomfortable fact that J. D. Bernal was a lifelong fervent Communist. His work simply couldn't be metabolized during most of the twentieth century, because the author himself was politically unacceptable. I never had much use for Communism, but I had plenty of use for J. D. Bernal.

The second book was Freeman Dyson's DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE. Freeman Dyson could have been a mighty figure in the genre if he'd become a science fiction writer instead of a mere world-class physicist at Princeton. I was lucky enough to have lunch with Freeman Dyson a couple of years ago. I was able to thank him for the fact that I had filed the serial numbers off his prose, hot-wired it and employed it in my work. Professor Dyson had never read SCHISMATRIX, but he was astonishingly good-humored about the fact that I had boldly hijacked thirty or forty of his ideas. What a gentleman and scholar!

The third book was Ilya Prigogine's FROM BEING TO BECOMING. This book boasted some of the most awesomely beautiful scientific jargon that I had ever witnessed in print. The writing was of such dense, otherworldly majesty that it resembled Scripture. It was very like the "crammed Prose" and "eyeball kicks" that we cyberpunks were so enamored of, with the exception of course that Prigogine's work was actual science and bore some coherent relation to consensus reality. So naturally I used his terminology as the basis for the Shaper/Mechanist mysticism. It worked like a charm. Eventually a fan of mine who happened to be one of Professor Prigogine's students gave him a copy of CRYSTAL EXPRESS, which contained the Shaper/Mechanist short stories. Professor Prigogine remarked perceptively that these stories had nothing whatever to do with his Nobel Prizewinning breakthroughs in physical chemistry. Well, that was very true, but charms are verbal structures. They work regardless of chemistry or physics.

I wrote the stories before the novel. I used the Shaper/Mechanist short stories as a method of exploration, a way to creep methodically into the burgeoning world of the book. First came "Swarm," which involves two characters only, and is set light-years away from the eventual center of the action. Next I wrote "Spider Rose," set on the fringes of the solar system, and the fringes of Schismatric society. After that came "Cicada Queen," which thundered headlong into a major Shaper/Mechanist city and examined their society as it boiled like a techno-crazed anthill. "Sunken Gardens" was set late in my future-history, a framing work. The experimental "Twenty Evocations" was my final word on the subject. It was a dry-run for the forthcoming novel, and with that effort, I was carrying my "crammed-prose" technique as far as it would go.

These were my first published short stories. I had one other story,

"Man-Made Self," published when I was a teenager; but alas, the manuscript pages were scrambled at the printer's, and the published story was rendered unintelligible. I had to disown it. That made "Swarm" my official story premiere. "Swarm" was also my first magazine sale (to THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY

AND SCIENCE FICTION, in April 1982). "Swarm" is still the story of mine most often reprinted. I'm still fond of it: I can write a better prose now, but with that story, I finally gnawed my way through the insulation and got my teeth set into the buzzing copper wire.

SCHISMATRIX was my third novel, but the first to go into an immediate second-printing—in Japan. I've valued the Japanese SF milieu very highly ever since. Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured with the original. One might not think that a book this weird and idiosyncratic could survive translation into non-Indo-European languages; but on the contrary, it's that very weirdness that seems to push it through the verbal and cultural barriers. SCHISMATRIX is a creeping sea-urchin of a book—spikey and odd. It isn't very elegant, and it lacks bilateral symmetry, but pieces of it break off inside people and stick with them for years.

These stories, and this novel, are the most "cyberpunk" works I will ever write. I wrote them in a fine fury of inspiration, in those halcyon days when me and my ratty little cyberpunk co-conspirators first saw our way clear into literary daylight. I think I could write another book as surprising as this one, or even as weird as this one; but it would no longer surprise people that I can be surprising. My audience would no longer find it weird to discover that I can be weird. When I wrote this book, I was surprising myself every day.

In those days of yore, cyberpunk wasn't hype or genre history; it had no name at all. It hadn't yet begun to be metabolized by anyone outside a small literary circle. But it was very real to me, as real as anything in my life, and when I was hip-deep into SCHISMATRIX chopping my way through circumsolar superpower conflicts and grimy, micro-nation terrorist space pirates, it felt like holy fire.

Now all the Shaper/Mechanist stuff is finally here in one set of covers. At last I can formally tell a skeptical public that the title of SCHISMATRIX

is pronounced "Skiz-mat'-rix." With a short a. Like "Schismatics," but with an R. Also, SCHISMATRIX is spelled without a "Z." I do hope this helps in future. People are always asking me about—demanding from me even—more Shaper/Mechanist work. Sequels. A trilogy maybe. The Schismatrix sharecrop-ping shared-universe "as created by" Bruce Sterling. But I don't do that sort of thing. I never will. This is all there was, and all there is. Bruce
Sterling—[email protected] Austin, Texas: 29-11-'95

Painted aircraft flew through the core of the world. Lindsay stood in knee-high grass, staring upward to follow their flight.

Flimsy as kites, the pedal-driven ultralights dipped and soared through the free-fall zone, far overhead. Beyond them, across the diameter of the cylindrical world, the curving landscape glowed with the yellow of wheat and the speckled green of cotton fields.

Lindsay shaded his eyes against the sunlit glare from one of the world's long windows. An aircraft, its wings elegantly stenciled in blue feathers on white fabric, crossed the bar of light and swooped silently above him. He saw the pilot's long hair trailing as she pedaled back into a climb. Lindsay knew she had seen him. He wanted to shout, to wave frantically, but he was watched. His jailers caught up with him: his wife and his uncle. The two old aristocrats walked with painful slowness. His uncle's face was flushed; he had turned up his heart's pacemaker. "You ran," he said. "You ran!"

"I stretched my legs," Lindsay said with bland defiance. "House arrest cramps me."

His uncle peered upward to follow Lindsay's gaze, shading his eyes with an age-spotted hand. The bird-painted aircraft now hovered over the Sours, a marshy spot in the agricultural panel where rot had set into the soil. "You're watching the Sours, eh? Where your friend Constantine's at work. They say he signals you from there."

"Philip works with insects, Uncle. Not cryptography." Lindsay was lying. He depended on Constantine's covert signals for news during his house arrest.

He and Constantine were political allies. When the crackdown came, Lindsay had been quarantined within the grounds of his family's mansion. But Philip Constantine had irreplaceable ecological skills. He was still free, working in the Sours.

The long internment had pushed Lindsay to desperation. He was at his best among people, where his adroit diplomatic skills could shine. In isolation, he had lost weight: his high cheekbones stood out in sharp relief and his gray eyes had a sullen, vindictive glow. His sudden run had tousled his modishly curled black hair. He was tall and rangy, with the long chin and arched, expressive eyebrows of the Lindsay clan.

Lindsay's wife, Alexandrina, took his arm. She was dressed fashionably, in a long pleated skirt and white medical tunic. Her pale, clear complexion showed health without vitality, as if her skin were a perfectly printed paper replica. Mummified kiss-curls adorned her forehead.

"You said you wouldn't talk politics, James," she cold the older man. She looked up at Lindsay. "You're pale, Abelard. He's upset you."

"Am I pale?" Lindsay said. He drew on his Shaper diplomatic training. Color seeped into his cheeks. He widened the dilation of his pupils and smiled with a gleam of teeth. His uncle stepped back, scowling.

Alexandrina leaned on Lindsay's arm. "I wish you wouldn't do that," she told him. "It frightens me." She was fifty years older than Lindsay and her knees had just been replaced. Her Mechanist teflon kneecaps still bothered her.

Lindsay shifted his bound volume of printout to his left hand. During his house arrest, he had translated the works of Shakespeare into modern circumsolar English. The elders of the Lindsay clan had encouraged him in this. His antiquarian hobbies, they thought, would distract him from plotting against the state.

To reward him, they were allowing him to present the work to the Museum. He had seized on the chance to briefly escape his house arrest. The Museum was a hotbed of subversion. It was full of his friends. Preservationists, they called themselves. A reactionary youth movement, with a romantic attachment to the art and culture of the past. They had made the Museum their political stronghold.

Their world was the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic, a two-hundred-year-old artificial habitat orbiting the Earth's Moon. As one of the oldest of humankind's nation-states in space, it was a place of tradition, with the long habits of a settled culture.

But change had burst in, spreading from newer, stronger worlds in the Asteroid Belt and the Rings of Saturn. The Mechanist and Shaper superpowers had exported their war into this quiet city-state. The strain had split the population into factions: Lindsay's Preservationists against the power of the Radical Old, rebellious plebes against the wealthy aristocracy. Mechanist sympathizers held the edge in the Republic.

The Radical Old held power from within their governing hospitals. These ancient aristocrats, each well over a century old, were patched together with advanced Mechanist hardware, their lives extended with imported prosthetic technology. But the medical expenses were bankrupting the Republic. Their world was already deep in debt to the medical Mech cartels. The Republic would soon be a Mechanist client state.

But the Shapers used their own arsenals of temptation. Years earlier, they had trained and indoctrinated Lindsay and Constantine. Through these two friends, the leaders of their generation, the Shapers exploited the fury of the young, who saw their birthrights stolen for the profit of the Mechanists. Tension had mounted within the Republic until a single gesture could set it off.

Life was the issue. And death would be the proof.

Lindsay's uncle was winded. He touched his wrist monitor and turned down the beating of his heart. "No more stunts," he said. "They're waiting in the Museum." He frowned. "Remember, no speeches. Use the prepared statement." Lindsay stared upward. The bird-painted ultralight went into a power dive.

"No!" Lindsay shouted. He threw his book aside and ran. The ultralight smashed down in the grass outside the ringed stone seats of an open-air amphitheatre.

The aircraft lay crushed, its wings warped in a dainty convulsion of impact. "Vera!" Lindsay shouted.

He tugged her body from the flimsy wreckage. She was still breathing; blood gushed from her mouth and nostrils. Her ribs were broken. She was choking. He tore at the ring-shaped collar of her Preservationist suit. The wire of the collar cut his hands. The suit imitated space-suit design; its accordioned elbows were crushed and stained.

Little white moths were flying up from the long grass. They milled about as if drawn by the blood.

Lindsay brushed a moth from her face and pressed his lips to hers. The pulse stopped in her throat. She was dead.

"Vera," he groaned. "Sweetheart, you're burned... ." A wave of grief and exultation hit him. He fell into the sun-warmed grass, holding his sides. More moths sprang up.

She had done it. It seemed easy now. It was something the two of them had talked about a hundred times, deep into the night at the Museum or in bed after their adultery. Suicide, the last protest. An enormous vista of black freedom opened up in Lindsay's head. He felt a paradoxical sense of vitality.

"Darling, it won't be long. . .."

His uncle found him kneeling. The older man's face was gray.

"Oh," he said. "This is vile. What have you done?" Lindsay got dizzily to his feet. "Get away from her." His uncle stared at the dead woman. "She's dead! You damned fool, she was only twenty-six!"

Lindsay yanked a long dagger of crudely hammered metal from his accordioned sleeve. He swept it up and aimed it at his own chest. "In the name of humanity! And the preservation of human values! I freely choose to—" His uncle seized his wrist. They struggled briefly, glaring into one another's eyes, and Lindsay dropped the knife. His uncle snatched it out of the grass and slipped it into his lab coat. "This is illegal," he said.