Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [101]
“You’re the bride,” Benjamin whispered, and brought his lips close enough to kiss. Anne laughed and turned away.
There’d be plenty of time later for that sort of thing.
Kessel to Sterling, 30 August 1986:
“Thanks for your comments on Sycamore Hill. I am fired by your picture of what this workshop can be, a real focus for consciousness-raising, mutual support for writers who may not be willing otherwise to take the chances that it’s necessary to take to write the stuff that may really break down the walls. Or who might not know the direction to take without sharpening their viewpoints by clashing with other honed minds. I’ll say again, as I have before, that I’m not sure exactly what this new SF will look like — I have the feeling that it won’t be just one kind of fiction — but I’m ready to listen to all theories as long as there’s some spark in them and they’re spoken by writers with talent and passion.”
Daddy’s World
Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams spins a PCP story of best intentions gone awry in VR. What presents as a chapter out of the sweetest children’s book ever soon turns into a sadistic nightmare and finally into a stark world flensed of all emotion. The attempt to avert a family tragedy leads to an even greater tragedy in this story set on the near edge of the singularity. The choice of the point of view character is key here, as Williams interrogates our notions of humanity in an era of digital immortality.
One day Jamie went with his family to a new place, a place that had not existed before. The people who lived there were called Whirlikins, who were tall thin people with pointed heads. They had long arms and made frantic gestures when they talked, and when they grew excited threw their arms out wide to either side and spun like tops until they got all blurry. They would whirr madly over the green grass beneath the pumpkin-orange sky of the Whirlikin Country, and sometimes they would bump into each other with an alarming clashing noise, but they were never hurt, only bounced off and spun away in another direction.
Sometimes one of them would spin so hard that he would dig himself right into the ground, and come to a sudden stop, buried to the shoulders, with an expression of alarmed dismay.
Jamie had never seen anything so funny. He laughed and laughed.
His little sister Becky laughed, too. Once she laughed so hard that she fell over onto her stomach, and Daddy picked her up and whirled her through the air, as if he were a Whirlikin himself, and they were both laughing all the while.
Afterward, they heard the dinner bell, and Daddy said it was time to go home. After they waved goodbye to the Whirlikins, Becky and Jamie walked hand-in-hand with Momma as they walked over the grassy hills toward home, and the pumpkin-orange sky slowly turned to blue.
The way home ran past El Castillo. El Castillo looked like a fabulous place, a castle with towers and domes and minarets, all gleaming in the sun. Music floated down from El Castillo, the swift, intricate music of many guitars, and Jamie could hear the fast click of heels and the shouts and laughter of happy people.
But Jamie did not try to enter El Castillo. He had tried before, and discovered that El Castillo was guarded by La Duchesa, an angular forbidding woman all in black, with a tall comb in her hair. When Jamie asked to come inside, La Duchesa had looked down at him and said, “I do not admit anyone who does not know Spanish irregular verbs!” It was all she ever said.
Jamie had asked Daddy what a Spanish irregular verb was—he had difficulty pronouncing the words — and Daddy had said, “Someday you’ll learn, and La Duchesa will let you into her castle. But right now you’re too young to learn Spanish.”
That was all right with Jamie. There were plenty of things to do without going into El Castillo. And new places, like