Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [199]
He waited. Finally, she nodded. He stood and dragged the body to the edge of the boat. He tied it with weights and levered the legs over the lip. The old man slid out of his hands. The girl was silent, staring at where Bowman had disappeared into the water.
Lalji finished his mopping. In the morning he would have to mop again, and sand the stains, but for the time it would do. He began pulling in the anchors. A moment later, the girl was with him again, helping. Lalji settled himself at the tiller. Such a waste, he thought. Such a great waste.
Slowly, the current drew their needleboat into the deeper flows of the river. The girl came and knelt beside him. “Will they chase us?”
Lalji shrugged. “With luck? No. They will look for something larger than us to make so many of their men disappear. With just the two of us now, we will look like very small inconsequential fish to them. With luck.”
She nodded, seeming to digest this information. “He saved me, you know. I should be dead now.”
“I saw.”
“Will you plant his seeds?”
“Without him to make them, there will be no one to plant them.”
Tazi frowned. “But we’ve got so many.” She stood and slipped down into the hold. When she returned, she lugged the sack of Bowman’s food stores. She began pulling jars from the sack: rice and corn, soybeans and kernels of wheat.
“That’s just food,” Lalji protested.
Tazi shook her head stubbornly. “They’re his Johnny Appleseeds. I wasn’t supposed to tell you. He didn’t trust you to take us all the way. To take me. But you could plant them, too, right?”
Lalji frowned and picked up a jar of corn. The kernels nestled tightly together, hundreds of them, each one unpatented, each one a genetic infection. He closed his eyes and in his mind he saw a field: row upon row of green rustling plants, and his father, laughing, with his arms spread wide as he shouted, “Hundreds! Thousands if you pray!”
Lalji hugged the jar to his chest, and slowly, he began to smile.
The needleboat continued downstream, a bit of flotsam in the Mississippi’s current. Around it, the crowding shadow hulks of the grain barges loomed, all of them flowing south through the fertile heartland toward the gateway of New Orleans; all of them flowing steadily toward the vast wide world.
Sterling to Kessel, 4 September 1993:
“The reason that your alienation is your strength — and I agree that it is — is that alienation is just a phase-shift away from transcendence. That the crippling inability to believe anything is just a phase-shift away from the admirably cosmopolitan determination not to believe anything. That bleak cosmic futility is the flipside of the freedom and power of the scientific method, the sense that you’re standing on your own ontological feet and can walk without crutches now. All these supposed oppositions are really only ambiguities. And the alienation that causes you to retreat to the firm but lonely citadel of your own personality is one small phase-change away from a wild charge outside the fortress to amaze and scatter the besiegers and loot their baggage train. There’s some fucking neat stuff in that baggage train. It belongs to other people at the moment, and yeah, some of it is noisome junk, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t find some nice uses for the rest of it. Swords have two edges, and arrows fly wherever they are pointed.
When you’re our age, if you want to stay alive and supple, inside you have to spend a lot of time looking hard at things you really hate. We’ll never have the imaginative fire we had when we were twenty years old. If we have any advantage over those twenty-year-old guys, it’s that we know a fucking galaxy of things they didn’t know…. But if I’m not going to end up as some self-satisfied fart doing dekalogies to put my kid through college, I’ve got to push it and push it and push it some more.”
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