The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

In Paradise - BRUCE STERLING

One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to enter SF in the past few decades, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1 976. By the end of the ’80s, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future, with novels such as the complex and Stapeldonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth), as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary “Cyberpunk” movement in science fiction, and also as one of the best new hard science writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, the novels The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, and Distraction, a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, and the landmark collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. His most recent books include the omnibus collection (it contains the novel Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus, a new collection, A Good Old-Fashioned Future, and a new novel, Zeitgeist. Upcoming is a nonfiction study of the future, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. His story “Bicycle Repairman” earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1997 for his story “Taklamakan.” His stories have appeared in our First through Eighth, Eleventh, Fourteenth, and Sixteenth Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

In the sly and deceptively quiet story that follows, he offers us a postmodern romance, quirky, bittersweet-and surprising.

The machines broke down so much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about that.

Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a plastic flask and had a solid nip of Scotch.

The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone. Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed through the big metal frame just as the scanner broke down. So these two somber, suited old men were getting the full third degree with the hand wands, while daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy coat and thick black headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her minders stretched the no man’s land of official insecurity. She waved across the gap.

The security geeks found something metallic in the black wool jacket of the Wicked Uncle. Of course it was harmless, but they had to run their full ritual, lest they die of boredom at their posts. As the Scotch settled in, Felix felt time stretch like taffy. Little Miss Mujihadeen discovered that her phone was dying. She banged at it with the flat of her hand.

The line of hopeful shoppers, grimly waiting to stimulate the economy, shifted in their disgruntlement. It was a bad, bleak scene. It crushed Felix’s heart within him. He longed to leap to his feet and harangue the lot of them. Wake up, he wanted to scream at them, cheer up, act more human. He felt the urge keenly, but it scared people when he cut loose like that. They really hated it. And so did he. He knew he couldn’t look them in the eye. It would only make a lot of trouble.

The Mideastern men shouted at the girl. She waved her dead phone at them, as if another breakdown was going to help their mood. Then Felix noticed that she shared his own make of cell phone. She had a rather ahead-of-the-curve Finnish model that he’d spent a lot of money on. So Felix rose and sidled over.

“Help you out with that phone, ma’am?”

She gave him the paralyzed look of a coed stuck with a dripping tap. “No English?” he concluded. “Habla espanol, seсorita?” No such luck.

He offered her his own phone. No, she didn’t care to use it. Surprised and even a little hurt by this rejection, Felix took his first good look at her, and realized with a lurch that she was pretty. What eyes! They were whirlpools. The line of her lips was like the tapered edge of a rose leaf.

“It’s your battery,” he told her. Though she had not a word of English, she obviously got it about phone batteries. After some gestured persuasion, she was willing to trade her dead battery for his. There was a fine and delicate little moment when his fingertips extracted her power supply, and he inserted his own unit into that golden-lined copper cavity. Her display leapt to life with an eager flash of numerals. Felix pressed a button or two, smiled winningly, and handed her phone back.

She dialed in a hurry, and bearded Evil Dad lifted his phone to answer, and life became much easier on the nerves. Then, with a groaning buzz, the scanner came back on. Dad and Uncle waved a command at her, like lifers turned to trusty prison guards, and she scampered through the metal gate and never looked back.

She had taken his battery. Well, no problem. He would treasure the one she had given him.

Felix gallantly let the little crowd through before he himself cleared security. The geeks always went nuts about his plumbing tools, but then again, they had to. He found the assignment: a chi-chi place that sold fake antiques and potpourri. The manager’s office had a clogged drain. As he worked, Felix recharged the phone. Then he socked them for a sum that made them wince.

On his leisurely way out-whoa, there was Miss Cell phone, that looker, that little goddess, browsing in a jewelry store over Korean gold chains and tiaras. Dad and Uncle were there, with a couple of off-duty cops.

Felix retired to a bench beside the fountain, in the potted plastic plants. He had another bracing shot of Scotch, then put his feet up on his toolbox and punched her number.

He saw her straighten at the ring, and open her purse, and place the phone to the kerchiefed side of her head. She didn’t know where he was, or who he was. That was why the words came pouring out of him.

“My God you’re pretty,” he said. “You are wasting your time with that jewelry. Because your eyes are like two black diamonds.”

She jumped a little, poked at the phone’s buttons with disbelief, and put it back to her head.

Felix choked back the urge to laugh and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “A string of pearls around your throat would look like peanuts,” he told the phone. “I am totally smitten with you. What are you like under that big baggy coat? Do I dare to wonder? I would give a million dollars just to see your knees!”

“Why are you telling me that?” said the phone.

“Because I’m looking at you right now. And after one look at you, believe me, I was a lost soul.” Felix felt a chill. “Hey, wait a minute-you don’t speak English, do you?”

“No, I don’t speak English-but my telephone does.”

“It does?”

“It’s a very new telephone. It’s from Finland,” the telephone said. “I need it because I’m stuck in a foreign country. Do you really have a million dollars for my knees?”

“That was a figure of speech,” said Felix, though his bank account was, in point of fact, looking considerably healthier since his girlfriend Lola had dumped him. “Never mind the million dollars,” he said. “I’m dying of love out here. I’d sell my blood just to buy you petunias.”

“You must be a famous poet,” the phone said dreamily, “for you speak such wonderful Farsi.”

Felix had no idea what Farsi was-but he was way beyond such fretting now. The rusty gates of his soul were shuddering on their hinges. “I’m drunk,” he realized. “I am drunk on your smile.”

“In my family, the women never smile.”

Felix had no idea what to say to that, so there was a hissing silence.

“Are you a spy? How did you get my phone number?”

“I’m not a spy. I got your phone number from your phone.”

“Then I know you. You must be that tall foreign man who gave me your battery. Where are you?”

“Look outside the store. See me on the bench?” She turned where she stood, and he waved his fingertips. “That’s right, it’s me,” he declared to her. “I can’t believe I’m really going through with this. You just stand there, okay? I’m going to run in there and buy you a wedding ring.”

“Don’t do that.” She glanced cautiously at Dad and Uncle, then stepped closer to the bulletproof glass. “Yes, I do see you. I remember you.”

She was looking straight at him. Their eyes met. They were connecting. A hot torrent ran up his spine. “You are looking straight at me.”

“ You’re very handsome.”

It wasn’t hard to elope. Young women had been eloping since the dawn of time. Elopement with eager phone support was a snap. He followed her to the hotel, a posh place that swarmed with limos and videocams. He brought her a bag with a big hat, sunglasses, and a cheap Mexican wedding dress. He sneaked into the women’s restroom-they never put videocams there, due to the complaints-and he left the bag in a stall. She went in, came out in new clothes with her hair loose, and walked straight out of the hotel and into his car.

They couldn’t speak together without their phones, but that turned out to be surprisingly advantageous, as further discussion was not on their minds. Unlike Lola, who was always complaining that he should open up and relate-“You’re a plumber,” she would tell him, “how deep and mysterious is a plumber supposed to be?”-the new woman in his life had needs that were very straightforward. She liked to walk in parks without a police escort. She liked to thoughtfully peruse the goods in Mideastern ethnic groceries. And she liked to make love to him. She was nineteen years old, and the willing sacrifice of her chastity had really burned the bridges for his little refugee. Once she got fully briefed about what went inside where, she was in the mood to tame the demon. She had big, jagged, sobbing, alarming, romantic, brink-of-the-grave things going on, with long, swoony kisses, and heel-drumming, and clutching-and-clawing.

When they were too weak, and too raw, and too tingling to make love anymore, then she would cook, very badly. She was on her phone constantly, talking to her people. These confidantes of hers were obviously women, because she asked them for Persian cooking tips. She would sink with triumphant delight into cheery chatter as the Basmati rice burned.

He longed to take her out to eat; to show her to everyone, to the whole world; really, besides the sex, no act could have made him happier-but she was undocumented, and sooner or later some security geek was sure to check on that. People did things like that to people nowadays. To contemplate such things threw a thorny darkness over their whole affair, so, mostly, he didn’t think. He took time off work, and he spent every moment that he could in her radiant presence, and she did what a pretty girl could do to lift a man’s darkened spirits, which was plenty. More than he had ever had from anyone.

After ten days of golden, unsullied bliss, ten days of bread and jug wine, ten days when the nightingales sang in chorus and the reddest of roses bloomed outside the boudoir, there came a knock on his door, and it was three cops.

“Hello, Mr. Hernandez,” said the smallest of the trio. “I would be Agent Portillo from Homeland Security, and these would be two of my distinguished associates. Might we come in?”

“Would there be a problem?” said Felix.

“Yes there would!” said Portillo. “There might be rather less of a problem if my associates here could search your apartment.” Portillo offered up a handheld screen. “A young woman named Batool Kadivar? Would we be recognizing Miss Batool Kadivar?”

“I can’t even pronounce that,” Felix said. “But I guess you’d better come in,” for Agent Portillo’s associates were already well on their way. Men of their ilk were not prepared to take no for an answer. They shoved past him and headed at once for the bedroom.

“Who are those guys? They’re not American.”

“They’re Iranian allies. The Iranians were totally nuts for a while, and then they were sort of okay, and then they became our new friends, and then the enemies of our friends became our friends… Do you ever watch TV news, Mr. Hernandez? Secular uprisings, people seizing embassies? Ground war in the holy city of Qom, that kind of thing?”

“It’s hard to miss,” Felix admitted.

“There are a billion Moslems. If they want to turn the whole planet into Israel, we don’t get a choice about that. You know something? I used to be an accountant!” Portillo sighed theatrically. “ ‘Homeland Security.’ Why’d they have to stick me with that chicken outfit? Hombre, we’re twenty years old, and we don’t even have our own budget yet. Did you see those gorillas I’ve got on my hands? You think these guys ever listen to sense? Geneva Convention? U.S. Constitution? Come on.”

“They’re not gonna find any terrorists in here.”

Portillo sighed again. “Look, Mr. Hernandez. You’re a young man with a clean record, so I want to do you a favor.” He adjusted his handheld and it showed a new screen. “These are cell phone records. Thirty, forty calls a day, to and from your number. Then look at this screen, this is the good part. Check out her call records. That would be her aunt in Yerevan, and her little sister in Teheran, and five or six of her teenage girlfriends, still living back in purdah… Who do you think is gonna pay that phone bill? Did that ever cross your mind?”

Felix said nothing.

“I can understand this, Mr. Hernandez. You lucked out. You’re a young, red-blooded guy and that is a very pretty girl. But she’s a minor, and an illegal alien. Her father’s family has got political connections like nobody’s business, and I would mean nobody, and I would also mean business.”

“Not my business,” Felix said.

“You’re being a sap, Mr. Hernandez. You may not be interested in war, but war is plenty interested in you.” There were loud crashing, sacking and looting noises coming from his bedroom.

“You are sunk, hermano. There is video at the Lebanese grocery store. There is video hidden in the traffic lights. You’re a free American citizen, sir. You’re free to go anywhere you want, and we’re free to watch all the backup tapes. That would be the big story I’m relating here. Would we be catching on yet?”

“That’s some kind of story,” Felix said.

“You don’t know the half of it. You don’t know the tenth.”

The two goons reappeared. There was a brief exchange of notes. They had to use their computers.

“My friends here are disappointed,” said Agent Portillo, “because there is no girl in your residence, even though there is an extensive selection of makeup and perfume. They want me to arrest you for abduction, and obstruction of justice, and probably ten or twelve other things. But I would be asking myself: why? Why should this young taxpayer with a steady job want to have his life ruined? What I’m thinking is: there must be another story. A better story. The flighty girl ran off, and she spent the last two weeks in a convent. It was just an impulse thing for her. She got frightened and upset by America, and then she came back to her people. Everything diplomatic.”

“That’s diplomacy?”

“Diplomacy is the art of avoiding extensive unpleasantness for all the parties concerned. The united coalition, as it were.”

“They’ll chop her hands off and beat her like a dog!”

“Well, that would depend, Mr. Hernandez. That would depend entirely on whether the girl herself tells that story. Somebody would have to get her up to speed on all that. A trusted friend. You see?”

After the departure of the three security men, Felix thought through his situation. He realized there was nothing whatsoever in it for him but shame, humiliation, impotence, and a crushing and lasting unhappiness. He then fetched up the reposado tequila from beneath his sink.

Sometime later he felt the dulled stinging of a series of slaps to his head. When she saw that she had his attention, she poured the tequila onto the floor, accenting this gesture with an eye-opening Persian harangue. Felix staggered to the bathroom, threw up, and returned to find a fresh cup of coffee. She had raised the volume and was still going strong.

He’d never had her pick a lovers’ quarrel with him, though he’d always known it was in her somewhere. It was magnificent. It was washing over him in a musical torrent of absolute nonsense. It was operatic, and he found it quite beautiful. Like sitting through a rainstorm without getting wet: trees straining, leaves flying, dark, windy, torrential. Majestic.

Her idea of coffee was basically wet grounds, so it brought him around in short order. “You’re right, I’m wrong, and I’m sorry,” he admitted tangentially, knowing she didn’t understand a word, “so come on and help me,” and he opened the sink cabinet, where he had hidden all his bottles when he’d noticed the earlier disapproving glances. He then decanted them down the drain: vodka, Southern Comfort, the gin, the party jug of tequila, even the last two inches of his favorite single-malt. Moslems didn’t drink, and really, how wrong could any billion people be? He gulped a couple of aspirin and picked up the phone.

“The police were here. They know about us. I got upset. I drank too much.”

“Did they beat you?”

“Uh, no. They’re not big fans of beating over here, they’ve got better methods They’ll be back. We are in big trouble.”

She folded her arms. “Then we’ll run away.”

“You know, we have a proverb for that in America. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

“Darling, I love your poetry, but when the police come to the house, it’s serious.”

“Yes. It’s very serious, it’s serious as cancer. You’ve got no I.D. You have no passport. You can’t get on any plane to get away. Even the trains and lousy bus stations have facial recognition. My car is useless too. They’d read my license plate a hundred times before we hit city limits. I can’t rent another car without leaving credit records. The cops have got my number.”

“We’ll steal a fast car and go very fast.”

“You can’t outrun them! That is not possible! They’ve all got phones like we do, so they’re always ahead of us, waiting.”

“I’m a rebel! I’ll never surrender!” She lifted her chin. “Let’s get married.”

“I’d love to, but we can’t. We have no license. We have no blood test.”

“Then we’ll marry in some place where they have all the blood they want. Beirut, that would be good.” She placed her free hand against her chest. “We were married in my heart, the first time we ever made love.”

This artless confession blew through him like a summer breeze. “They do have rings for cash at a pawnbroker’s… But I’m a Catholic. There must be somebody who does this sort of thing… Maybe some heretic mullah. Maybe a Santeria guy?”

“If we’re husband and wife, what can they do to us? We haven’t done anything wrong! I’ll get a Green Card. I’ll beg them! I’ll beg for mercy. I’ll beg political asylum.”

Agent Portillo conspicuously cleared his throat. “Mr. Hernandez, please! This would not be the conversation you two need to be having.”

“I forgot to mention the worst part,” Felix said. “They know about our phones.”

“Miss Kadivar, can you also understand me?”

“Who are you? I hate you. Get off this line and let me talk to him.”

“Salaam alekom to you, too,” Portillo concluded. “It’s a sad commentary on federal procurement when a mullah’s daughter has a fancy translator, and I can’t even talk live with my own fellow agents. By the way, those two gentlemen from the new regime in Teheran are staking out your apartment. How they failed to recognize your girlfriend on her way in, that I’ll never know. But if you two listen to me, I think I can walk you out of this very dangerous situation.”

“I don’t want to leave my beloved,” she said.

“Over my dead body,” Felix declared. “Come and get me. Bring a gun.”

“Okay, Miss Kadivar, you would seem to be the more rational of the two parties, so let me talk sense to you. You have no future with this man. What kind of wicked man seduces a decent girl with phone pranks? He’s an aayash, he’s a playboy. America has a fifty percent divorce rate. He would never ask your father honorably for your hand. What would your mother say?”

“Who is this awful man?” she said, shaken. “He knows everything!”

“He’s a snake!” Felix said. “He’s the devil!”

“You still don’t get it, compadre. I’m not the Great Satan. Really, I’m not! I am the good guy. I’m your guardian angel, dude. I am trying really hard to give you back a normal life.”

“Okay cop, you had your say, now listen to me. I love her body and soul, and even if you kill me dead for that, the flames in my heart will set my coffin on fire.”

She burst into tears. “Oh God, my God, that’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“You kids are sick, okay?” Portillo snapped. “This would be mental illness that I’m eavesdropping on here! You two don’t even speak each other’s language. You had every fair warning! Just remember, when it happens, you made me do it. Now try this one on for size, Romeo and Juliet.” The phones went dead.

Felix placed his dead phone on the tabletop. “Okay. Situation report. We’ve got no phones, no passports, no ID and two different intelligence agencies are after us. We can’t fly, we can’t drive, we can’t take a train or a bus. My credit cards are useless now, my bank cards will just track me down, and I guess I’ve lost my job now. I can’t even walk out my own front door… And wow, you don’t understand a single word I’m saying. I can tell from that look in your eye. You are completely thrilled.”

She put her finger to her lips. Then she took him by the hand.

Apparently, she had a new plan. It involved walking. She wanted to walk to Los Angeles. She knew the words “Los Angeles,” and maybe there was somebody there that she knew. This trek would involve crossing half the American continent on foot, but Felix was at peace with that ambition. He really thought he could do it. A lot of people had done it just for the sake of gold nuggets, back in 1849. Women had walked to California just to meet a guy with gold nuggets.

The beautiful part of this scheme was that, after creeping out the window, they really had vanished. The feds might be all over the airports, over everything that mattered, but they didn’t care about what didn’t matter. Nobody was looking out for dangerous interstate pedestrians.

To pass the time as they walked, she taught him elementary Farsi. The day’s first lesson was body parts, because that was all they had handy for pointing. That suited Felix just fine. If anything, this expanded their passionate communion. He was perfectly willing to starve for that, fight for that and die for that. Every form of intercourse between man and woman was fraught with illusion, and the bigger, the better. Every hour that passed was an hour they had not been parted.

They had to sleep rough. Their clothes became filthy. Then, on the tenth day, they got arrested.

She was, of course, an illegal alien, and he had the good sense to talk only Spanish, so of course, he became one as well. The Immigration cops piled them into the bus for the border, but they got two seats together and were able to kiss and hold hands. The other deported wretches even smiled at them.

He realized now that he was sacrificing everything for her: his identity, his citizenship, flag, church, habits, money… Everything, and good riddance. He bit thoughtfully into his wax-papered cheese sandwich. This was the federal bounty distributed to every refugee on the bus, along with an apple, a small carton of homogenized milk, and some carrot chips.

When the protein hit his famished stomach Felix realized that he had gone delirious with joy. He was growing by this experience. It had broken every stifling limit within him. His dusty, savage, squalid world was widening drastically.

Giving alms, for instance-before his abject poverty, he’d never understood that alms were holy. Alms were indeed very holy. From now on-as soon as he found a place to sleep, some place that was so wrecked, so torn, so bleeding, that it never asked uncomfortable questions about a plumber-as soon as he became a plumber again, then he’d be giving some alms.

She ate her food, licked her fingers, then fell asleep against him, in the moving bus. He brushed the free hair from her dirty face. She was twenty days older now. “This is a pearl,” he said aloud. “This is a pearl by far too rare to be contained within the shell of time and space.”

Why had those lines come to him, in such a rush? Had he read them somewhere? Or were those lines his own?