Cyberpunk

and other noisome particulates that come off mummified bodies.
    “How did it make you feel?” he asked. “Angry?”
    “At who?” I replied.
    “Me.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I . . .” he paused, reluctant to put it into words.
    “The Sandeesh family has tagged me as the executor of their . . . vengeance, I suppose,” I said. “I’m supposed to convince you that the best thing to do is to provide restitution for what you stole from them. In return for which, they’ll vanish. They have shipped you every piece of physical evidence they ever had. What you do with it is your business.”
    “What about you, Max?”
    “I don’t know. I’ll EOE when we’re done here. That’ll make things easier—”
    “Max,” he interrupted. “What am I supposed to give you?”
    He seemed just as confused as I was about my role. What did I want? I certainly couldn’t keep working here, not with the knowledge that I had. I had had to stop theory-brain from listing the ways in which I could be EOLed in industrial accidents.
    I sat back in my chair. It was a hard and uncomfortable surface, one I had been molding my body to for a long time. Too long, in fact, but what else could I have done? Entropy was easy.
    “I want to be needed, I think.” I glanced around my tiny—and despairingly empty—office. “ICE is an efficient machine. Like everything else. No one needs a theorist to think ‘what if?’ any more.”
    He gave me a fraction to add to that, and when I didn’t, he nodded. “I’ll have FinD retro-state you to Director, and then stamp you out with a full 590(t).”
    Theory-brain made a suggestion, and I concurred. I raised an eyebrow to Prescott Four, and he held up his hands. “Plus vestments.”
    “I think that’ll help me find a way to be useful somewhere else, sir.”
    He started to offer his hand, and then withdrew it, realizing he didn’t really want to shake this deal.
    Nor did I. We’d let the rest of the machine take care of it.
    He left without another word, and I caught sight of a dark cloud of disappointment on Yullg’s face as he was called away by Prescott Four.
    And just like that, it was over.
    I hadn’t had to tell Prescott Four that I knew iReset could do a sex change; that I knew whose DNA tags would come up for the mummified body that had exploded all over his XA’s office; and I didn’t have to tell him that I knew his birth mother had called him “Giselle.”
    Nor did I tell him that Hammurabi and Sophie were his grandchildren. That was their secret to keep.
    Regardless of what her tattoo said.
    When I got home, there was a package waiting. Inside was a tiny hypercube key and an Instaprint of a woman’s body. A close-up of her naked torso, draped with octopi tentacles. Scrawled on her belly, above her tattoo, was the phrase “I miss you.”
    The hypercube key was coded for domicile access. She had given me root privileges.
    It was, in the end, all I really wanted.

SOLDIER, SAILOR

----
    By Lewis Shiner

    Stepping out of the airlock behind Reese, Kane was amazed by the weight & wetness of the air. He could make out the odors of cut grass, honeysuckle & ivy. Martian night was falling outside the dome & he sensed clouds forming above him. Rain on Mars. Evenly spaced houses surrounded him, covered with ivy & separated by rows of elephant ears & ferns. The intricacy of the ecological planning startled him; a bee floated over his head & somewhere a mockingbird whistled.
    The sight of the colonists sitting on their porches in the sunset filled him with a mixture of nostalgia & surrealist horror. They smiled & nodded to Kane as if it had been days instead of years since they’d seen a stranger, as if the space program still existed & Reese was once more in uniform.
    Reading Ouspensky, he had found the first clue to the strange visions that spun around the lip of his consciousness. “Every separate human life is a moment in the life of some great being which lives in us .” But when he tried for a more concrete image than ships & shadowy figures rising from the ground, it melted away. From Campbell Kane learned of the Pattern of the Hero, the inexorable circle, the path of exile & return. For an instant the memories—if that was what they were—clarified. Kane saw that he must take it all personally. Then it was gone again.
    Eventually Curtis asked how things were on Earth & Reese framed a careful reply. Kane paid little attention to the measured, cautious description of the