Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology Read online

The judge pulls out a turnip pocket-watch. The camera zooms in and out, four-fifty A. M., the sky is getting light.

  Houdini? He doesn’t know they’re handing him into the bomb-bay of The Dirty Lady. He can’t even hear or see or smell. But he’s at peace, glad to have all this out in the open, glad to have it really happen.

  Everyone gets in the plane. Bad camera-motion as Eddie climbs in. Then a shot of Houdini, long and white, worming around like an insect larva. He’s snuggled right down in the bomb cradle with Moanin’ Max leaning over him like some wild worker ant.

  The engines fire up with a hoarse roar. The priest and the rabbi sit and talk. Black clothes, white faces, grey teeth.

  “Do you have any food?” the priest asks. He’s powerfully built, young, with thin blonde hair. One hell of a Notre Dame linebacker under those robes.

  The rabbi is a little fellow with a fedora and a black beard. He’s got a Franz Kafka mouth, all ticks and teeth. “It’s my understanding that we’ll breakfast in the terminal after the release.”

  The priest is getting two hundred for this, the rabbi three. He has a bigger name. If the rushes work out they’ll be witnessing the other escapes as well.

  It’s not a big plane, really, and no matter which way Eddie points the camera, there’s always a white piece of Houdini in the frame. Up front you can see Johnny G. in profile, handsome Johnny not looking too good. There’s sweat-beads on his long upper lip, booze sweat. Peace is coming hard to Johnny.

  “Just spiral her on up,” Slick Tires says softly. “Like a bed-spring, Johnny.”

  Out the portholes you can see the angled horizon sweep by, until they hit the high mattress of clouds. Max watches the altimeter, grinning and showing his teeth. They punch out of the clouds, into high slanting sunlight. Johnny holds to the helix…he’d go up forever if no one said stop…but now it’s high enough.

  “Bombs away!” Slick Tires calls back. The priest crosses himself and Moanin’ Max pulls the release handle. Shot of white-wrapped Houdini in the coffin-like bomb-cradle. The bottom falls out, and the long form falls slowly, weightlessly at first. Then the slipstream catches one end, and he begins to tumble, dark white against the bright white of the clouds below.

  Eddie holds the shot as long as he can. There’s a big egg-shaped cloud down there, with Houdini falling towards it. Houdini begins to unwrap himself. You can see the bandages trailing him, whipping back and forth like a long flagellum, then thip he’s spermed his way into that rounded white cloud.

  On the way back to the airstrip, Eddie and the sound-man go around the plane asking everyone if they think Houdini’ll make it.

  “I certainly hope so,” the rabbi.

  “I have no idea,” the priest, hungry for his breakfast.

  “There’s just no way,” Moanin’ Max. “He’ll impact at two hundred miles per.”

  “Everyone dies,” Johnny G.

  “In his position I expect I’d try to drogue-chute the bandages,” Slick Tires.

  “It’s a conundrum,” the judge.

  The clouds drizzle and the plane throws up great sheets of water when it lands. Eddie films them getting out and filing into the small terminal, deserted except …

  Across the room, with his back to them, a man in pajamas is playing pinball. Cigar-smoke. Someone calls to him, and he turns—Houdini.

  Houdini brings his mother to see the rushes. Everyone except for her loves it. She’s very upset, though, and tears at her hair. Lots of it comes out, lots of white old hair on the floor next to her wheelchair.

  Back at home Houdini gets down on his knees and begs and begs until she gives him permission to finish the movie. Rabstein at Pathé figures two more stunts will do it.

  “No more magic after that,” Houdini promises. “I’ll use the money to open us a little music shop.”

  “Dear boy.”

  For the second stunt they fly Houdini and his mom out to Seattle. Rabstein wants to use the old lady for reaction shots. Pathé sets the two of them up in a boarding house, leaving the time and nature of the escape indeterminate.

  Eddie Machotka sticks pretty close, filming bits of their long strolls down by the docks. Houdini eating a Dungeness crab. His mom buying taffy. Houdini getting her a wig.

  Four figures in black slickers slip down from a fishing boat. Perhaps Houdini hears their footfalls, but he doesn’t deign to turn. Then they’re upon him: the priest, the judge, the rabbi, and this time a doctor as well—could be Rex Morgan.

  While the old lady screams and screams, the doctor knocks Houdini out with a big injection of sodium pentathol. The great escape artist doesn’t resist, just watches and smiles till he fades. The old lady bashes the doctor with her purse before the priest and rabbi get her and Houdini bundled onto the fishing boat.

  On the boat, it’s Johnny G. and the A-Holes again. Johnny can fly anything, even a boat. His eyes are bloodshot and all over the place, but Slick Tires guides him out of the harbor and down the Puget Sound to a logging river. Takes a couple of hours, but Eddie time-lapses it all…Houdini lying in half of a hollowed log and the doc shooting him up every so often.

  Finally they get to a sort of mill-pond with a few logs in it. Moanin’ Max and the judge have a tub of plaster mixed up, and they pour it in around Houdini. They tape over his head-holes, except for the mouth, which gets a breathing tube. What they do is to seal him up inside a big log, with the breathing tube sticking out disguised as a branch-stub. Houdini is unconscious and locked inside the log by a plaster-of-Paris filling…sort of like a worm dead inside a Twinkie. The priest and the rabbi and the judge and the doctor heave the log overboard.

  It splashes, rolls, and mingles with the other logs waiting to get sawed up. There’s ten logs now, and you can’t tell for sure which is the one with Houdini in it. The saw is running and the conveyor belt snags the first log.

  Shot of the logs bumping around. In the foreground, Houdini’s mom is pulling the hair out of her wig. Big SKAAAAAZZT sound of the first log getting cut up. You can see the saw up there in the background, a giant rip-saw cutting the log right down the middle.

  SKAAAZZZZT! SKAAAAZZZZZT! SKAAAZZZZT! The splinters fly. One by one the logs are hooked and dragged up to the saw. You want to look away, but you can’t…just waiting to see blood and used food come flying out. SKAAAZZZZT!

  Johnny G. drinks something from a silver hip-flask. His lips move silently. Curses? Prayers? SKAAAZZZZT! Moanin’ Max’s nervous horse-face sweats and grins. Houdini’s Mom has the wig plucked right down to the hair-net. SKAAAZZZZZT! Slick Tire’s eyes are big and white as hard-boiled eggs. He helps himself to Johnny’s flask. SKAAAZZT! The priest mops his forehead and the rabbi…SKNAKCHUNKFWEEEEE!

  Plaster dust flies from the ninth log. It falls in two, revealing only a negative of Houdini’s body. An empty mold! They all scramble onto the mill dock, camera pointing around, looking for the great man. Where is he?

  Over the shouts and cheers you can hear the jukebox in the mill-hands’ cafeteria. The Andrews Sisters. And inside there’s…Houdini, tapping his foot and eating a cheeseburger.

  “Only one more escape,” Houdini promises, “And then we’ll get that music shop.”

  “I’m so frightened, Harry,” his bald mom says. “If only they’d give you some warning.”

  “They have, this time. Piece of cake. We’re flying out to Nevada.”

  “I just hope you stay away from those show-girls.”

  The priest and the rabbi and the judge and the doctor are all there, and this time a scientist, too. A low-ceilinged concrete room with slits for windows. Houdini is dressed in a black rubber wet suit, doing card-tricks.

  The scientist, who’s a dead ringer for Albert Einstein, speaks briefly over the telephone and nods to the doctor. The doctor smiles handsomely into the camera, then handcuffs Houdini and helps him into a cylindrical tank of water. Refrigeration coils cool it down, and before long they’ve got Houdini frozen solid insi
de a huge cake of ice.

  The priest and the rabbi knock down the sides of the tank, and there’s Houdini like a big firecracker with his head sticking out for a fuse. Outside is a truck with a hydraulic lift. Johnny G. and the A-Holes are there, and they load Houdini in back. The ice gets covered with pads to keep it from melting in the hot desert sun.

  Two miles off, you can see a spindly test-tower with a little shed on top. This is an atom-bomb test range, out in some godforsaken desert in the middle of Nevada. Eddie Machotka rides the truck with Houdini and the A-Holes.

  Shot of the slender tower looming overhead, the obscene bomb-bulge at the top. God only knows what strings Rabstein had to pull to get Pathé in on this.

  There’s a cylindrical hole in the ground right under the tower, right at ground zero, and they slip the frozen Houdini in there. His head, flush with the ground, grins at them like a peyote cactus. They drive back to the bunker, fast.

  Eddie films it all in real time, no cuts. Houdini’s mom is in the bunker, of course, plucking a lapful of wigs. The scientist hands her some dice.

  “Just to give him fighting chance, we won’t detonate until you are rolling a two. Is called snake-eyes, yes?”

  Close on her face, frantic with worry. As slowly as possible, she rattles the dice and spills them onto the floor.

  Snake-eyes!

  Before anyone else can react, the scientist has pushed the button, a merry twinkle in his faraway eyes. The sudden light filters into the bunker, shading all the blacks up to grey. The shock wave hits next, and the judge collapses, possibly from heart attack. The roar goes on and on. The crowded faces turn this way and that.

  Then it’s over, and the noise is gone, gone except for…an insistent honking, right outside the bunker. The scientist undogs the door and they all look out, Eddie shooting over their shoulders.

  It’s Houdini! Yes! In a white convertible with a breast-heavy show-girl!

  “Give me my money!” he shouts. “And color me gone!”

  MARC LAIDLAW

  * * *

  400 Boys

  * * *

  The cyberpunk writers are known for bizarre concepts and a general allegiance to the strange. Marc Laidlaw stands out even in this company. His work is marked by odd leaping juxtapositions, unexpected angles of vision, and a black humor that shades into the ultraviolet. He draws inspiration from a slew of contemporary influences, with a special fondness for all that is mysterious, intuitive, and outré.

  The following story demonstrates Laidlaw's inspired fusion of elements, blending features of apocalyptic myth with the modern legendry of urban street gangs. “400 Boys” is a genuinely weird, headlong mélange that is much more easily enjoyed than described.

  Marc Laidlaw lives in San Francisco. His latest novel is Dad's Nuke.

  "Sacrifice us!"

  —The Popol Vuh

  We sit and feel Fun City die. Two stories above our basement, at street level, something big is stomping apartment pyramids flat. We can feel the lives blinking out like smashed bulbs; you don’t need second sight to see through other eyes at a time like this. I get flashes of fear and sudden pain, but none last long. The paperback drops from my hands, and I blow my candle out.

  We are the Brothers, a team of twelve. There were twenty-two yesterday, but not everyone made it to the basement in time. Our slicker, Slash, is on a crate loading and reloading his gun with its one and only silver bullet. Crybaby Jaguar is kneeling in the corner on his old blanket, sobbing like a maniac; for once he has a good reason. My best Brother, Jade, keeps spinning the cylinders of the holotube in search of stations, but all he gets is static that sounds like screaming turned inside out. It’s a lot like the screaming in our minds, which won’t fade except as it gets squelched voice by voice.

  Slash goes, “Jade, turn that thing off or I’ll short-cirk it.”

  He is our leader, our slicker. His lips are gray, his mouth too wide where a Soooooot scalpel opened his cheeks. He has a lisp.

  Jade shrugs and shuts down the tube, but the sounds we hear instead are no better. Faraway pounding footsteps, shouts from the sky, even monster laughter. It seems to be passing away from us, deeper into Fun City.

  “They’ll be gone in no time,” Jade goes.

  “You think you know everything,” goes Vave O’Claw, dissecting an alarm clock with one chrome finger the way some kids pick their noses. “You don’t even know what they are—”

  “I saw ‘em,” goes Jade. “Croak and I. Right, Croak?”

  I nod without a sound. There’s no tongue in my mouth. I only croaked after my free fix-up, which I got for mouthing badsense to a Controller cognibot when I was twelve.

  Jade and I went out last night and climbed an empty pyramid to see what we could see. Past River-run Boulevard the world was burning bright, and I had to look away. Jade kept staring and said he saw wild giants running with the glow. Then I heard a thousand guitar strings snapping, and Jade said the giants had ripped up Big Bridge by the roots and thrown it at the moon. I looked up and saw a black arch spinning end over end, cables twanging as it flipped up and up through shredded smoke and never fell back—or not while we waited, which was not long.

  “Whatever it is could be here for good,” goes Slash, twisting his mouth in the middle as he grins. “Might never leave.”

  Crybaby stops snorting long enough to say, “Nuh-never?”

  “Why should they? Looks like they came a long way to get to Fun City, doesn’t it? Maybe we have a whole new team on our hands, Brothers.”

  “Just what we need,” goes Jade. “Don’t ask me to smash with ‘em, though. My blade’s not big enough. If the Controllers couldn’t keep ‘em from crashing through, what could we do?”

  Slash cocks his head. “Jade, dear Brother, listen close. If I ask you to smash, you smash. If I ask you to jump from a hive, you jump. Or find another team. You know I only ask these things to keep your life interesting.”

  “Interesting enough,” my best Brother grumbles.

  “Hey!” goes Crybaby. He’s bigger and older than any of us but doesn’t have the brains of a ten-year-old. “Listen!”

  We listen.

  “Don’t hear nothin’,” goes Skag.

  “Yeah! Nuh-nuthin’. They made away.”

  He spoke too soon. Next thing we know there is thunder in the wall, the concrete crawls underfoot, and the ceiling rains. I dive under a table with Jade.

  The thunder fades to a whisper. Afterward there is real silence.

  “You okay, Croak?” Jade goes. I nod and look into the basement for the other Brothers. I can tell by the team spirit in the room that no one is hurt.

  In the next instant we let out a twelve-part gasp.

  There’s natural light in the basement. Where from?

  Looking out from under the table, I catch a parting shot of the moon two stories and more above us. The last shock had split the old tenement hive open to the sky. Floors and ceilings layer the sides of a fissure; water pipes cross in the air like metal webs; the floppy head of a mattress spills foam on us.

  The moon vanishes into boiling black smoke. It is the same smoke we saw washing over the city yesterday, when the stars were sputtering like flares around a traffic wreck. Lady Death’s perfume comes creeping down with it.

  Slash straddles the crack that runs through the center of the room.

  He tucks his gun into his pocket. The silver of its only bullet was mixed with some of Slash’s blood. He saves it for the Sooooot who gave him his grin, a certain slicker named HiLo.

  “Okay, team,” he goes. “Let’s get out of here pronto.”

  Vave and Jade rip away the boards from the door. The basement was rigged for security, to keep us safe when things got bad in Fun City. Vave shielded the walls with baffles so when Controller cognibots came scanning for hideaways, they picked up plumbing and an empty room. Never a scoop of us.

  Beyond the door the stairs tilt up at a cr
azy slant; it’s nothing we cannot manage. I look back at the basement as we head up, because I had been getting to think of it as home.

  We were there when the Controllers came looking for war recruits. They thought we were just the right age.

  “Come out, come out, wherever in free!” they yelled. When they came hunting, we did our trick and disappeared.

  That was in the last of the calendar days, when everyone was yelling:

  “Hey! This is it! World War Last!”

  What they told us about the war could be squeezed into Vave’s pinky tip, which he had hollowed out for explosive darts. They still wanted us to fight in it. The deal was, we would get a free trip to the moon for training at Base English, then we would zip back to Earth charged up and ready to go-go-go. The SinoSovs were hatching wars like eggs, one after another, down south. The place got so hot that we could see the skies that way glowing white some nights, then yellow in the day.

  Federal Control had sealed our continental city tight in a see-through blister: Nothing but air and light got in or out without a password. Vave was sure when he saw the yellow glow that the SinoSovs had launched something fierce against the invisible curtain, something that was strong enough to get through.

  Quiet as queegs we creep to the Strip. Our bloc covers Fifty-sixth to Eighty-eighth between Westland and Chico. The streetlights are busted like every window in all the buildings and the crashed cars. Garbage and bodies are spilled all over.

  “Aw, skud,” goes Vave.

  Crybaby starts bawling.

  “Keep looking, Croak,” goes Slash to me. “Get it all.”

  I want to look away, but I have to store this for later. I almost cry because my ma and my real brother are dead. I put that away and get it all down. Slash lets me keep track of the Brothers.

  At the Federal Pylon, where they control the programmable parts and people of Fun City, Mister Fixer snipped my tongue and started on the other end.

  He did not live to finish the job. A team brigade of Quazis and Moofs, led by my Brothers, sprang me free.