Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (566 page)

“Girl roommate working out okay this time?”

“Yeah, she’s good at pumping the flywheel and she lets me get on with my bike work. Bike business has been picking up a lot lately. Looks like I might get a legal electrical feed and some more floorspace, maybe even some genuine mail delivery. My new roomie’s got a lot of useful contacts.”

“Boy, the ladies sure love you, Lyle! Can’t beat ’em off with a stick, can you, poor guy? That’s a heck of a note.”

Eddy leaned forward a little, shoving aside a silver tray full of dead gold-tipped zigarettes. “You been getting the packages?”

“Yeah. Pretty regular.”

“Good deal,” he said briskly, “but you can wipe ’em all now. I don’t need those backups anymore. Just wipe the data and trash the disks, or sell ’em. I’m into some, well, pretty hairy opportunities right now, and I don’t need all that old clutter. It’s kid stuff anyway.”

“Okay, man. If that’s the way you want it.” Eddy leaned forward. “D’you happen to get a package lately? Some hardware? Kind of a settop box?”

“Yeah, I got the thing.”

“That’s great, Lyle. I want you to open the box up, and break all the chips with pliers.”

“Yeah?

“Then throw all the pieces away. Separately. It’s trouble, Lyle, okay? The kind of trouble I don’t need right now.”

“Consider it done, man.”

“Thanks! Anyway, you won’t be bothered by mailouts from now on.” He paused. “Not that I don’t appreciate your former effort and goodwill, and all.”

Lyle blinked, “How’s your love life, Eddy?”

Eddy sighed. “Frederika! What a handful! I dunno, Lyle, it was okay for a while, but we couldn’t stick it together. I don’t know why I ever thought that private cops were sexy. I musta been totally out of my mind.…Anyway, I got a new girlfriend now.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s a politician, Lyle. She’s a radical member of the Spanish Parliament. Can you believe that? I’m sleeping with an elected official of a European local government.” He laughed. “Politicians are
sexy,
Lyle. Politicians are
hot
!
They have charisma. They’re glamorous. They’re powerful. They can really make things happen! Politicians get around. They know things on the inside track. I’m having more fun with Violeta than I knew there was in the world.”

“That’s pleasant to hear, zude.”

“More pleasant than you know, my man.”

“Not a problem,” Lyle said indulgently. “We all gotta make our own lives, Eddy.”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

Lyle nodded. “I’m in business, zude!”

“You gonna perfect that inertial whatsit?” Eddy said.

“Maybe. It could happen. I get to work on it a lot now. I’m getting closer, really getting a grip on the concept. It feels really good. It’s a good hack, man. It makes up for all the rest of it. It really does.”

Eddy sipped his mimosa. “Lyle.”

“What?”

“You didn’t hook up that settop box and look at it, did you?”

“You know me, Eddy,” Lyle said. “Just another kid with a wrench.”

* * * *

Copyright © 1996 by Bruce Sterling.

(1950– )

Part of a richly talented group of Philadelphia-area writers, Mike Swanwick is a remarkable writer, but also one who writes very slowly. He has a unique ability to combine surreal and gritty in counterintuitive ways which produce stories that feel both utterly real and utterly absurd. His marvelous novel
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
(1993), for instance, straddles a line between fantasy and science fiction and includes a Dickensian vision of a hideous factory complex where various fey creatures are forced to make powerful war machines for Italian-suited elven executives. He’s also got an ear for the cruelty and pettiness underlying ordinary interactions and speech.

Born in Schenectady, New York, Swanwick went to college in Virginia before arriving in Philadelphia in the early 1970s; by 1980 he was writing full time. In a field that breeds insecurities, Mike Swanwick has always come off as supremely confident in his talent and his writing, but he also takes remarkable care over his craft. I remember a Lunacon panel we did together on Dickensian fantasy in which he described how he reread all of Dickens before writing
Iron Dragon’s Daughter
. (He wanted to find out Dickens’s formula, which in his words amounted to “take an attractive child and then torture her for 400 pages, then give her a pat on the head and an ice cream cone and send her on her way.”)

While his writing output has always been sparse, its consistent quality is remarkable. Swanwick is a five-time Hugo winner, and has also won the Nebula, World Fantasy Award, and other honors. He is married to microbiologist Marianne Catherine Porter, with whom he has a son.

“The Edge of the World,” a Sturgeon Award winner in 1990, highlights the ordinary qualities we give to special things. While most writers emphasize the reader’s sense of wonder in discovering unusual things, Swanwick reminds us of our ability to stop noticing remarkable things that are a part of our everyday lives.

First published in
Full Spectrum 2
, April 1989

The day that Donna and Piggy and Russ went to see the Edge of the World was a hot one. They were sitting on the curb by the gas station that noontime, sharing a Coke and watching the big Starlifters lumber up into the air, one by one, out of Toldenarba AFB. The sky rumbled with their passing. There’d been an incident in the Persian Gulf, and half the American forces in the Twilight Emirates were on alert.

“My old man says when the Big One goes up, the base will be the first to go,” Piggy said speculatively. “Treaties won’t allow us to defend it. One bomber comes in high and whaboom—” he made soft nuclear explosion noises—“it’s all gone.” He was wearing camouflage pants and a khaki teeshirt with an iron-on reading
kill ’em all and let god sort ’em out
. Donna watched as he took off his glasses to polish them on his shirt. His face went slack and vacant, then livened as he put them back on again, as if he were playing with a mask.

“You should be so lucky,” Donna said. “Mrs. Khashoggi is still going want that paper done on Monday morning, Armageddon or not.”

“Yeah, can you believe her?” Piggy said. “That weird accent! And all that memorization! Cut me some slack. I mean, who cares whether Ackronnion was part of the Mezentian Dynasty?”

“You ought to care, dipshit,” Russ said. “Local history’s the only decent class the school’s got.” Russ was the smartest boy Donna had ever met, never mind the fact that he was flunking out. He had soulful eyes and a radical haircut, short on the sides with a dyed-blond punklock down the back of his neck. “Man, I opened the Excerpts from Epics text that first night, thinking it was going to be the same old bullshit, and I stayed up ‘til dawn. Got to school without a wink of sleep, but I’d managed to read every last word. This is one weird part of the world; its history is full of dragons and magic and all kinds of weird monsters. Do you realize that in the eighteenth century three members of the British legation were eaten by demons? That’s in the historical record!”

Russ was an enigma to Donna. The first time they’d met, hanging with the misfits at an American School dance, he’d tried to put a hand down her pants, and she’d slugged him good, almost breaking his nose. She could still hear his surprised laughter as blood ran down his chin. They’d been friends ever since. Only there were limits to friendship, and now she was waiting for him to make his move and hoping he’d get down to it before her father was rotated out.

In Japan she’d known a girl who had taken a razor blade and carved her boyfriend’s name in the palm of her hand. How could she do that, Donna had wanted to know? Her friend had shrugged, said, “As long as it gets me noticed.” It wasn’t until Russ that Donna understood.

“Strange country,” Russ said dreamily. “The sky beyond the Edge is supposed to be full of demons and serpents and shit. They say that if you stare into it long enough, you’ll go mad.”

They all three looked at one another.

“Well, hell,” Piggy said. “What are we waiting for?”

* * * *

The Edge of the World lay beyond the railroad tracks. They bicycled through the American enclave into the old native quarter. The streets were narrow here, the sideyards crammed with broken trucks, rusted out buses, even yachts up in cradles with stoven-in sides. Garage doors were black mouths hissing and spitting welding sparks, throbbing to the hammered sound of worked metal. They hid their bikes in a patch of scrub apricot trees where the railroad crossed the industrial canal and hiked across.

Time had altered the character of the city where it bordered the Edge. Gone were the archers in their towers, vigilant against a threat that never came. Gone were the rose quartz palaces with their thousand windows, not a one of which overlooked the Edge. The battlements where blind musicians once piped up the dawn now survived only in Mrs. Khashoggi’s texts. Where they had been was now a drear line of weary factory buildings, their lower windows cinderblocked or bricked up and those beyond reach of vandals’ stones painted over in patchwork squares of grey and faded blue.

A steam whistle sounded and lines of factory workers shambled back inside, brown men in chinos and white shirts, Syrian and Lebanese laborers imported to do work no native Toldenarban would touch. A shredded net waved forlornly from a basketball hoop set up by the loading dock.

There was a section of hurricane fence down. They scrambled through.

As they cut across the grounds, a loud whine arose from within the factory building. Down the way another plant lifted its voice in a solid wham-wham-wham as rhythmic and unrelenting as a headache. One by one the factories shook themselves from their midday drowse and went back to work. “Why do they locate these things along the Edge?” Donna asked.

“It’s so they can dump their chemical waste over the Edge,” Russ explained. “These were all erected before the Emir nationalized the culverts that the Russian Protectorate built.”

Behind the factory was a chest-high concrete wall, rough-edged and pebbly with the slow erosion of cement. Weeds grew in clumps at its foot. Beyond was nothing but sky.

Piggy ran ahead and spat over the Edge. “Hey, remember what Nixon said when he came here?
It is indeed a long way down.
What a guy!”

Donna leaned against the wall. A film of haze tinted the sky grey, intensifying at the focal point to dirty brown, as if a dead spot were burned into the center of her vision. When she looked down, her eyes kept grabbing for ground and finding more sky. There were a few wispy clouds in the distance and nothing more. No serpents coiled in the air. She should have felt disappointed but, really, she hadn’t expected better. This was of a piece with all the natural wonders she had ever seen, the waterfalls, geysers and scenic vistas that inevitably included power lines, railings and parking lots absent from the postcards. Russ was staring intently ahead, hawklike, frowning. His jaw worked slightly, and she wondered what he saw.

“Hey, look what I found!” Piggy whooped. “It’s a stairway!”

They joined him at the top of an institutional-looking concrete and iron stairway. It zigzagged down the cliff toward an infinitely distant and nonexistent Below, dwindling into hazy blue. Quietly, as if he’d impressed himself, Piggy said, “What do you suppose is down there?”

“Only one way to find out, isn’t there?” Russ said.

* * * *

Russ went first, then Piggy, then Donna, the steps ringing dully under their feet. Graffiti covered the rocks, worn spraypaint letters in yellow and black and red scrawled one over the other and faded by time and weather into mutual unreadability, and on the iron railings, words and arrows and triangles had been markered onto or dug into the paint with knife or nail:
jurgen bin scheisskopf. motley crue. death to satan america imperialist. Seventeen steps down, the first landing was filthy with broken brown glass, bits of crumbled concrete, cigarette butts, soggy, half-melted cardboard. The stairway folded back on itself and they followed it down.

“You ever had fugu?” Piggy asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “It’s Japanese poisonous blowfish. It has to be prepared very carefully—they license the chefs—and even so, several people die every year. It’s considered a great delicacy.”

“Nothing tastes that good,” Russ said.

“It’s not the flavor,” Piggy said enthusiastically. “It’s the poison. Properly prepared, see, there’s a very small amount left in the sashimi and you get a threshhold dose. Your lips and the tips of your fingers turn cold. Numb. That’s how you know you’re having the real thing. That’s how you know you’re living right on the edge.”

“I’m already living on the edge,” Russ said. He looked startled when Piggy laughed.

A fat moon floated in the sky, pale as a disk of ice melting in blue water. It bounced after them as they descended, kicking aside loose soda bottles in styrofoam sleeves, crushed Marlboro boxes, a scattering of carbonized sparkplugs. On one landing they found a crumpled shopping cart, and Piggy had to muscle it over the railing and watch it fall. “Sure is a lot of crap here,” he observed. The landing smelled faintly of urine.

“It’ll get better farther down,” Russ said. “We’re still near the top, where people can come to get drunk after work.” He pushed on down. Far to one side they could see the brown flow from the industrial canal where it spilled into space, widening and then slowly dispersing into rainbowed mist, distance glamoring it beauty.

“How far are we planning to go?” Donna asked apprehensively.

“Don’t be a weak sister,” Piggy sneered. Russ said nothing.

The deeper they went, the shabbier the stairway grew, and the spottier its maintenance. Pipes were missing from the railing. Where patches of paint had fallen away the bolts anchoring the stair to the rock were walnut-sized lumps of rust.

Needle-clawed marsupials chittered warningly from niches in the rock as they passed. Tufts of grass and moth-white gentians grew in the loess-filled cracks.

Hours passed. Donna’s feet and calves and the small of her back grew increasingly sore, but she refused to be the one to complain. By degrees she stopped looking over the side and out into the sky, and stared instead at her feet flashing in and out of sight while one hand went slap grab tug on the rail. She felt sweaty and miserable.

Back home she had a half-finished paper on the Three Days Incident of March, 1810, when the French Occupation, by order of Napoleon himself, had fired cannonade after cannonade over the Edge into nothingness. They had hoped to make rainstorms of devastating force that would lash and destroy their enemies, and created instead only a gunpowder haze, history’s first great failure in weather control. This descent was equally futile, Donna thought, an endless and wearying exercise in nothing. Just the same as the rest of her life. Every time her father was reposted, she had resolved to change, to be somebody different this time around, whatever the price, even if—no, especially if—it meant playacting something she was not. Last year in Germany when she’d gone out with that local boy with the Alfa Romeo and instead of jerking him off had used her mouth, she had thought: Everything’s going to be different now. But no.

Nothing ever changed.

“Heads up!” Russ said. “There’s some steps missing here!” He leaped, and the landing gonged hollowly under his sneakers. Then again as Piggy jumped after.

Donna hesitated. There were five steps gone and a drop of twenty feet before the stairway cut back beneath itself. The cliff bulged outward here, and if she slipped she’d probably miss the stairs altogether.

She felt the rock draw away from her to either side, and was suddenly aware that she was connected to the world by the merest speck of matter, barely enough to anchor her feet. The sky wrapped itself about her, extending to infinity, depthless and absolute. She could extend her arms and fall into it forever. What would happen to her then, she wondered. Would she die of thirst and starvation, or would the speed of her fall grow so great that the oxygen would be sucked from her lungs, leaving her to strangle in a sea of air? “Come on, Donna!” Piggy shouted up at her. “Don’t be a pussy!”

“Russ—” she said quaveringly.

But Russ wasn’t looking her way. He was frowning downward, anxious to be going. “Don’t push the lady,” he said. “We can go on by ourselves.”

Donna choked with anger and hurt and desperation all at once. She took a deep breath and, heart scudding, leaped. Sky and rock wheeled over her head. For an instant she was floating, falling, totally lost and filled with a panicky awareness that she was about to die. Then she crashed onto the landing. It hurt like hell, and at first she feared she’d pulled an ankle. Piggy grabbed her shoulders and rubbed the side of her head with his knuckles. “I knew you could do it, you wimp.”

Donna knocked away his arm. “Okay, wiseass. How are you expecting to get us back up?”

The smile disappeared from Piggy’s face. His mouth opened, closed. His head jerked fearfully upward. An acrobat could leap across, grab the step and flip up without any trouble at all. “I—I mean, I—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Russ said impatiently. “We’ll think of something.” He started down again.

It wasn’t natural, Donna realized, his attitude. There was something obsessive about his desire to descend the stairway. It was like the time he’d brought his father’s revolver to school along with a story about playing Russian roulette that morning before breakfast. “Three times!” he’d said proudly.

He’d had that same crazy look on him, and she hadn’t the slightest notion then or now how she could help him.

* * * *

Russ walked like an automaton, wordlessly, tirelessly, never hurrying up or slowing down. Donna followed in concerned silence, while Piggy scurried between them, chattering like somebody’s pet Pekinese. This struck Donna as so apt as to be almost allegorical: the two of them together yet alone, the distance between filled with noise. She thought of this distance, this silence, as the sun passed behind the cliff and the afternoon heat lost its edge.

The stairs changed to cement-jacketed brick with small buttresses cut into the rock. There was a pile of stems and cherry pits on one landing, and the railing above them was white with bird droppings. Piggy leaned over the rail and said, “Hey, I can see seagulls down there. Flying around.”

“Where?” Russ leaned over the railing, then said scornfully, “Those are pigeons. The Ghazoddis used to release them for rifle practice.”

As Piggy turned to follow Russ down again, Donna caught a glimpse into his eyes, liquid and trembling with helplessness and despair. She’d seen that fear in him only once before, months ago when she’d stopped by his house on the way to school, just after the Emir’s assassination.

The living room windows were draped and the room seemed unnaturally gloomy after being out in the morning sun. Blue television light flickered over shelves of shadowy ceramic figurines: Dresden milkmaids, Chantilly Chinamen, Meissen pug-dogs connected by a gold chain held in their champed jaws, naked Delft nymphs dancing.