Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [1]
These stories, and this novel, are the most "cyberpunk" works I will ever write. I wrote them in a fine fury of inspiration, in those halcyon days when me and my ratty little cyberpunk co-conspirators first saw our way clear into literary daylight. I think I could write another book as surprising as this one, or even as weird as this one; but it would no longer surprise people that I can be surprising. My audience would no longer find it weird to discover that I can be weird. When I wrote this book, I was surprising myself every day.
In those days of yore, cyberpunk wasn't hype or genre history; it had no name at all. It hadn't yet begun to be metabolized by anyone outside a small literary circle. But it was very real to me, as real as anything in my life, and when I was hip-deep into SCHISMATRIX chopping my way through circumsolar superpower conflicts and grimy, micro-nation terrorist space pirates, it felt like holy fire.
Now all the Shaper/Mechanist stuff is finally here in one set of covers. At last I can formally tell a skeptical public that the title of SCHISMATRIX
is pronounced "Skiz-mat'-rix." With a short a. Like "Schismatics," but with an R. Also, SCHISMATRIX is spelled without a "Z." I do hope this helps in future. People are always asking me about—demanding from me even—more Shaper/Mechanist work. Sequels. A trilogy maybe. The Schismatrix sharecrop-ping shared-universe "as created by" Bruce Sterling. But I don't do that sort of thing. I never will. This is all there was, and all there is. Bruce Sterling—bruces@well.com Austin, Texas: 29-11-'95
Prologue
Painted aircraft flew through the core of the world. Lindsay stood in knee-high grass, staring upward to follow their flight.
Flimsy as kites, the pedal-driven ultralights dipped and soared through the free-fall zone, far overhead. Beyond them, across the diameter of the cylindrical world, the curving landscape glowed with the yellow of wheat and the speckled green of cotton fields.
Lindsay shaded his eyes against the sunlit glare from one of the world's long windows. An aircraft, its wings elegantly stenciled in blue feathers on white fabric, crossed the bar of light and swooped silently above him. He saw the pilot's long hair trailing as she pedaled back into a climb. Lindsay knew she had seen him. He wanted to shout, to wave frantically, but he was watched. His jailers caught up with him: his wife and his uncle. The two old aristocrats walked with painful slowness. His uncle's face was flushed; he had turned up his heart's pacemaker. "You ran," he said. "You ran!"
"I stretched my legs," Lindsay said with bland defiance. "House arrest cramps me."
His uncle peered upward to follow Lindsay's gaze, shading his eyes with an age-spotted hand. The bird-painted aircraft now hovered over the Sours, a marshy spot in the agricultural panel where rot had set into the soil. "You're watching the Sours, eh? Where your friend Constantine's at work. They say he signals you from there."
"Philip works with insects, Uncle. Not cryptography." Lindsay was lying. He depended on Constantine's covert signals for news during his house arrest.
He and Constantine were political allies. When the crackdown came, Lindsay had been quarantined within the grounds of his family's mansion. But Philip Constantine had irreplaceable ecological skills. He was still free, working in the Sours.
The long internment had pushed Lindsay to desperation. He was at his best among people, where his adroit diplomatic skills could shine. In isolation, he had lost