Totem Poles (3 page)

Authors: Bruce Sterling

BOOK: Totem Poles

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“We'll craft a great work of ant,” said Kalanin.

“Everyone at the party was talking about totem poles,” said Ida. “In the old days, the Native Americans of the northwest carved faces on sticks with stone knives. That was their art. But then, one dayâone strange dayâthe sailing ships came to them, and strangers brought them steel axes. How did they respond? They made huge totem pole logs, from Oregon to Alaska!”

“Totem poles,” said Kalinin slowly. “Yes. Of course. Totem poles are good.”

“But the story is tragic! The old world that the natives knew by heart became someone else's New World. A world of syphilis and smallpox, with the totem poles stored in museums.”

“The grubs are our steel axes,” said Kalanin.

“Why don't the saucers speak to us, Kalinin? Will they let us join their world? Can we join the Higher Circles of galactic citizenship?”

Kalinin gave a dry laugh. “Higher than the Kremlin.”

They walked along in silence for a few minutes, bringing their minds into synch. They even got a levitation thing going, loping along in long strides, laughing at each other.

“You see it too?” said Kalanin, coming to a stop, panting for breath. “You'll make a painting. Monumental. And thenâ

“The end of the world,” said Ida. “Brought to you by a crazy woman who made her crazy boyfriend slit his own throat with a bayonet.”

“And who brought him back to life. This is holy, Ida. No need to joke.”

Ida held out her hands. “I laugh because I'm scared.”

The two of them embraced, lit by the moon and the silver saucers and the first rays of the rising sun. A gentle puff of breeze came off the bay.

“I'll paint now,” said Ida.

“Paint everything,” said Kalanin. “Can it fit?”

“I'll useâpoetic compression,” replied Ida. “Room to spare.”

She raised her arms and the skies opened. Tens of thousands of saucer grubs rained down upon her. Some of the grubs became brushes, others formed pools of paint.

Ida and her living brushes set to work, painting on the street, on the sidewalks, on the nearby warehouse walls, Ida swinging her arm from the shoulder, carving sweeps of color and form. Her loose strokes limned buildings and people and trees. She depicted the insides of the buildings as well as the outsides, and the meanings of the things to be found in there, and the lives of those who'd made the things.

“Be sure to include an image of your painting,” urged Kalinin.

Ida nodded, uninterruptedly busy, sharpening the identities of her scribbles and blots. A tight spiral of darkly energetic grubs began converging onto a certain section of her mural. Ida was crafting a secondary world-mural within the main one.

Just like the main mural, the secondary mural held a image of the entire world. And within it you could see a third mural, with a yet tinier fourth mural inside that, and so on and on.

“Keep going,” said Kalinin.

“We've only begun,” said Ida. Flecks of paint bedizened her bobbed dark hair like stars in a night sky.

Kalinin closed his eyes and his lips moved. Rays of light flickered into life, one of them stellating out from Ida's regressâthe others from points across the globe.

Twelve poles of supernal light, needles of prismatic brilliance, radiating into the cosmos, dissolving the substance of our world. Bathing in its native glow, the Earth became a silver, dodecahedral orb, a mysterious cosmic traveler.

*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *

“I like this potlatch,” said Dirt Complaining.

“The best ever,” Dirt Harkening agreed

About the Authors

Rudy Rucker
is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. His books include
Postsingular
and
Spaceland
. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

Bruce Sterling
is an American science fiction writer, born in Brownsville, Texas on April 14, 1954. His first published fiction appeared in the late 1970s, but he came to real prominence in the early 1980s as one of several writers associated with the "cyberpunk" tendency, and as that movement's chief theoretician and pamphleteer. He also edited the anthology Mirrorshades (1986), which still stands as a definitive document of that period in SF. His novel
Islands in the Net
(1988) won the John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel of the year; he has also won two Hugo awards, for the stories "Bicycle Repairman" (1996) and "Taklamakan" (1998). His 1990 collaboration with William Gibson,
The Difference Engine,
was an important work of early steampunk/neo-Victoriana. His latest novel is
The Caryatids
(2009). In 1992 he published
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier,
heralding a second career as a journalist covering social, legal, and artistic matters in the digital world. The first issue of
Wired
magazine, in 1993, featured his face on its cover; today, their web site hosts his long-running blog, Beyond the Beyond. You can sign up for email updates
here
.