Cyberpunk

hell.”
    “We were losing too many people, man. Forget it. There’s plenty of eighteenth centuries.”
    The guards, sniping at the crowds outside, suddenly leaped aside as Rice’s hovercar burst through the gates. Half a dozen Masonic fanatics still clung to the doors and pounded on the windscreen. Jebe’s Mongols yanked the invaders free and axed them while a Roman flamethrower unit gushed fire across the gates.
    Marie Antoinette leaped out of the hovercar. Jebe grabbed for her, but her sleeve came off in his hand. She spotted Mozart and ran for him, Jebe only a few steps behind.
    “Wolf, you bastard!” she shouted. “You leave me behind! What about your promises, you merde , you pig-dog!”
    Mozart whipped off his mirrorshades. He turned to Rice. “Who is this woman?”
    “The Green Card, Wolf! You say I sell Rice to the Masonistas, you get me the card!” She stopped for breath and Jebe caught her by one arm. When she whirled on him, he cracked her across the jaw, and she dropped to the tarmac.
    The Mongol focused his smoldering eyes on Mozart. “Was you, eh? You, the traitor?” With the speed of a striking cobra he pulled his machine pistol and jammed the muzzle against Mozart’s nose. “I put my gun on rock and roll, there nothing left of you but ears, man.”
    A single shot echoed across the courtyard. Jebe’s head rocked back, and he fell in a heap.
    Rice spun to his right. Parker, the DJ, stood in the doorway of an equipment shed. He held a Walther PPK. “Take it easy, Rice,” Parker said, walking toward him. “He’s just a grunt, expendable.”
    “You killed him!”
    “So what?” Parker said, throwing one arm around Mozart’s frail shoulders. “This here’s my boy! I transmitted a couple of his new tunes up the line a month ago. You know what? The kid’s number five on the Billboard charts! Number five!” Parker shoved the gun into his belt. “With a bullet!”
    “You gave him the Green Card, Parker?”
    “No,” Mozart said. “It was Sutherland.”
    “What did you do to her?”
    “Nothing! I swear to you, man! Well, maybe I kind of lived up to what she wanted to see. A broken man, you know, his music stolen from him, his very soul?” Mozart rolled his eyes upward. “She gave me the Green Card, but that still wasn’t enough. She couldn’t handle the guilt. You know the rest.”
    “And when she got caught, you were afraid we wouldn’t pull out. So you decided to drag me into it! You got Toinette to turn me over to the Masons. That was your doing!”
    As if hearing her name, Toinette moaned softly from the tarmac. Rice didn’t care about the bruises, the dirt, the rips in her leopard-skin jeans. She was still the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen.
    Mozart shrugged. “I was a Freemason once. Look, man, they’re very uncool. I mean, all I did was drop a few hints, and look what happened.” He waved casually at the carnage all around them. “I knew you’d get away from them somehow.”
    “You can’t just use people like that!”
    “Bullshit, Rice! You do it all the time! I needed this siege so Realtime would haul us out! For Christ’s sake, I can’t wait fifteen years to go up the line. History says I’m going to be dead in fifteen years! I don’t want to die in this dump! I want that car and that recording studio!”
    “Forget it, pal,” Rice said. “When they hear back in Realtime how you screwed things up here—”
    Parker laughed. “Shove off, Rice. We’re talking Top of the Pops, here. Not some penny-ante refinery.” He took Mozart’s arm protectively. “Listen, Wolf, baby, let’s get into those tunnels. I got some papers for you to sign as soon as we hit the future.”
    The sun had set, but a muzzle-loading cannon lit the night, pumping shells into the city. For a moment Rice stood stunned as cannonballs clanged harmlessly off the storage tanks. Then, finally, he shook his head. Salzburg’s time had run out.
    Hoisting Toinette over one shoulder, he ran toward the safety of the tunnels.

INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB

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    By Jonathan Lethem

    The door to the crab’s faux-Georgian Tallahassee mansion was opened by a male housekeeper with a trim red mustache, razor-cut orange hair showing white at the temples, and the disapproving air of a Mormon or Scientologist functionary. He was dressed, though, not in Western garb, nor that of a houseboy or cook, but instead in Chinese robes, so he resembled the token occidental opponent in a martial arts