The city looked different in daylight. Women in shawls and silver bracelets, men in clothes fashionable fifty years ago walked past the hotel as Charles looked out in the morning. The sun was shining. His heart rose. This was going to be the day he made it to the airport.

  He walked along the streets almost jauntily, ignoring the ache in his arms. His beard itched because last night, in a moment of panic, he had thrown his electric razor into the suitcase to be sold. He shrugged. There were still things he could sell. Today he would find a better pawn shop.

  He walked, passing run-down houses and outdoor markets, beggars and children, automobile garages and dim restaurants smelling of frying fish. “Excuse me,” he said to a man leaning against a horse-drawn carriage. “Do you know where I can find a pawn shop?”

  The man and horse both looked up. “Ride, yes?” the man said enthusiastically. “Famous monuments. Very cheap.”

  “No,” Charles said. “A pawn shop. Do you understand?”

  The man shrugged, pulled the horse’s mane. “No speak English,” he said finally.

  Another man had come up behind Charles. “Pawn shop?” he said.

  Charles turned quickly, relieved. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know—”

  “Two blocks down,” the man said. “Turn left, go five blocks. Across the hospital.”

  “What street is that?” Charles asked.

  “Street?” the man said. He frowned. “Two blocks down and turn left.”

  “The name,” Charles said. “The name of the street.”

  To Charles’ astonishment the man burst out laughing. The carriage-driver laughed too, though he could not have possibly known what they were talking about. “Name?” the man said. “You tourists name your streets as though they were little children, yes?” He laughed again, wiping his eyes, and said something to the carriage-driver in another language, speaking rapidly.

  “Thank you,” Charles said. He walked the two blocks, turned left and went five blocks more. There was no hospital where the man had said there would be, and no pawn shop. A man who spoke a little English said something about a great fire, but whether it had been last week or several years ago Charles was unable to find out.

  He started back toward the man who had given him directions. In a few minutes he was hopelessly lost. The streets became dingier and once he saw a rat run from a pile of newspapers. The fire had swept through this part of the city leaving buildings charred and water-damaged, open to the passers-by like museum exhibits. Two dirty children ran towards him, shouting, “Money, please, sor! Money for food!” He turned down a side street to lose them.

  Ahead of him were three young men in grease-stained clothes. One of them hissed something at him, the words rushing by like a fork of lightning. Another held a length of chain which he played back and forth, whispering, between his hands. “I don’t speak—” Charles said, but it was too late. They were on him.

  One tore the suitcase from his hand, shouting “El amak! El amak!” Another knocked him down with a punch to his stomach that forced the wind out of him. The third was going through his pockets, taking his wallet and the little folder of traveler’s checks. Charles tried feebly to rise and the second one thrust him back, hitting him once more in the stomach. The first one yelled something and they ran quickly down the street. Charles lay where they left him, gasping for breath.

  The two dirty children passed him, and an old woman balancing a basket of clothes on her head. After a few minutes he rolled over and sat up, leaning against a rusty car up on blocks. His pants were torn, he noticed dully, torn and smeared with oil. And his suitcase with the rest of his clothes was gone.

  He would go to the police, go and tell them that his suitcase was gone. He knew the word for suitcase because the young thief had shouted it. Amak. El amak. And suddenly he understood something that knocked the breath out of him as surely as a punch to the stomach, understood that he had understood nothing since coming to this country. At the back of his mind, despite all his education, he had somehow expected every native he met to drop this ridiculous charade and start speaking like normal people. But now, learning his first word in this strange tongue, he came to a realization of language, understood in his bones that every word you could think of—hand, love, table, hot—was conveyed to these natives by another word, a word not English. He tried to laugh at his stupidity but the pain wrenched his stomach and he stopped abruptly.

  After a while he stood up gingerly, breathing shallowly to make the pain go away. He began walking again, following the maze of the city in deeper. At last he found a small park and sat on a bench to rest.

  A native came up to him almost immediately. “Cards?” the native said. “Look.” He opened his embroidered bag.

  Charles sighed. He was too tired to walk away. “I don’t want any cards,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”

  “Of course not,” the native said. “Look. They are beautiful, no?” He spread the brightly colored cards on the grass. Charles saw a baseball player, a fortune-teller, a student, some designs he didn’t recognize. “Look,” the native said again and turned over the next card. “The tourist.”

  Charles had to laugh, looking at the card of the man carrying suitcases. These people had been visited by tourists for so long that the tourist had become an archetype, a part of everyone’s reality like kings and jokers. He looked closer at the card. Those suitcases were familiar. And the tourist…he jerked back as though shocked. It was him.

  He stood quickly and began to run, ignoring the pain in his stomach. The native did not follow.

  He noticed the card-sellers on every corner after that. They called to him even if he crossed the street to avoid them. “Tiraz, tiraz!” they called after him. He knew what it meant now. Tourist.

  As the sun set he became ravenously hungry. He walked around a beggar-woman squatting in the street and saw, too late, a card-seller waiting on the corner. The card-seller held out something to him, some kind of pastry, and Charles took it, too hungry to refuse.

  The pastry was filled with meat and very good. As though that were the signal the other card-sellers he passed began to give him things—a skin of wine, a piece of fish wrapped in paper. One of them handed him money, far more money than a deck of cards would cost. It was growing dark. He took a room for the night with the money.

  * * *

  A card-seller was waiting for him at the corner the next day. “All right,” Charles said to him. Some of the belligerence had been knocked out of him. “I give up. What the hell’s going on around here?”

  “Look,” the card-seller said. He took his cards out of the embroidered bag. “It is in here.” He squatted on the sidewalk, oblivious to the dirt, the people walking by, the fumes from the street. The street, Charles noticed as he sat next to him, seemed to be paved with bottle-caps.

  The card-seller spread the cards in front of him. “Look,” he said. “It is foretold. The cards are our oracle, our newspaper, our entertainment. All depends on how you read them.” Charles wondered where the man had learned to speak English but he didn’t want to interrupt. “See,” the man said as he turned over a card. “Here you are. The tourist. It was foretold that you would come to the city.”

  “And then what?” Charles asked. “How do I get back?”

  “We have to ask the cards,” the man said. Idly he turned over another card, the ruins of Marmaz. “Maybe we wait for the next printing.”

  “Next—” Charles said. “You mean the cards don’t stay the same?”

  “No,” the man said. “Do your newspapers stay the same?”

  “But—who prints them?”

  The man shrugged. “We do not know.” He turned over another card, a young blonde woman.

  “Debbie!” Charles said, startled.

  “Yes,” the man said. “The woman you came with. We had to convince her to go, so that you would fulfill the prophecy and come to the city. And then we took your pieces of paper, the ones that are so important to the tiraz. That is a stupid way to travel, if I may say so. In the city the only papers that are important to us are the cards, and if a man loses his cards he can easily get more.”

  “You—you took my passport?” Charles said. He did not feel as angry as he would like. “My passport and my plane tickets? Where are they?”

  “Ah,” the man said. “For that you must ask the cards.” He took out another set of cards from his bag and gave them to Charles. Before Charles could answer he stood up and walked away.

  By mid-day Charles had found the small park again. He sat down and spread out the cards, wondering if there was anything to what the card-seller had said. Debbie did not appear in his deck. Was his an earlier printing, then, or a later one?

  An American couple came up to him as he sat puzzling over the cards. “There are those cards again,” the woman said. “I just can’t get over how quaint they are. How much are you charging for yours?” she asked Charles. “The man down the street said he’d give them to us for ten.”

  “Eight,” Charles said without hesitation, gathering them up.

  The woman looked at her husband. “All right,” he said. He took a five and three ones from his wallet and gave them to Charles.

  “Thank you, sor,” Charles said.

  The man grunted. “I thought he spoke English very well,” the woman said as they walked away. “Didn’t you?”

  A card-seller gave him three more decks of cards and an embroidered bag later that day. By evening he had sold two of the decks. A few nights later, he joined the sellers of cards as they waited in the small park for the new printing of the cards. Somewhere a bell tolled midnight. A woman with beautiful long dark hair and an embroidered shawl came out of the night and silently took out the decks of cards from her bag. Her silver bracelets flashed in the moonlight. She gave Charles twelve decks. The men around him were already tearing the boxes open and spreading the cards, reading the past, or the present, or the future.

  After about three years Charles got tired of selling the cards. His teeth had turned red from chewing the nut everyone chewed and he had learned to smoke the cigarettes wrapped in leaves.

  The other men had always told him that someone who spoke English as well as he did should be a tour guide, and finally he decided that they were right. Now he takes groups of tourists through the ruins of Marmaz, telling them about the god of the sun and the goddess of the moon and whatever else he chooses to make up that day. He has never found out what country he lives in.

  Introduction to “Blood Music”

  by Greg Bear

  I remember attending a cyberpunk panel at a convention in (I think) Austin, where Greg Bear shared a platform with Lewis Shiner and John Shirley. Shiner, definitely a co-conspirator with Bruce Sterling in the movement that had just been christened cyberpunk, was not even sure he wanted to be a science fiction writer; Shirley had always been punk (in the musical sense) and was perfectly content to add the “cyber.” But Greg Bear seemed genuinely baffled. Why was he being included on this panel? He was a hard-sf writer working within the tradition of cool-idea sf, but with real attention to believable characters. He didn’t pose or wear mirrorshades, nor did his characters.

  The thing is, he wrote “Blood Music,” and as cyberpunk was struggling for attention and credibility (back in the days before it became the mot-du-jour in the world of fashion and the fashionable arts), its proponents were seizing upon any story that seemed to have the “right” sensibility and claiming it for their own. Thus Greg Bear, writer, illustrator, family man, and all-around nice guy, found himself hailed as hero by a bunch of people for whom rage was the default emotion. Greg Bear had found a cool new way to destroy a world.

  Well, that phase soon passed. Whether anybody bothers now to try to fit the cyberpunk label to Bear hardly matters. He has produced enough work that what he writes is not part of someone else’s movement. “The writing of Greg Bear” is a phrase that includes more originality and accomplishment than the label “cyberpunk” ever has. Would that more cyberpunks were Bearish (or Bearesque, or Ursine, or Bearlike, or whatever the term would be).

  In fact, if you chart a broad line of the mainstream of science fiction, rooted in Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, tracking through Silverberg, Le Guin, and Niven, with Ellison just off to one side and Forward just off to the other, that mainstream arrow will end up pointed straight at Greg Bear. The movement he belongs to, that he epitomizes, is called “science fiction,” and as long as Bear is writing, science fiction is in good health.

  BLOOD MUSIC

  Greg Bear

  There is a principle in nature I don’t think anyone has pointed out before. Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things—bacteria, microbes, “animalcules”—are born and die, not counting for much except in the bulk of their existence and the accumulation of their tiny effects. They do not perceive deeply. They do not suffer much. A hundred billion, dying, would not begin to have the same importance as a single human death.

  Within the ranks of magnitude of all creatures, small as microbes or great as humans, there is an equality of “elan,” just as the branches of a tall tree, gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal the bulk of the trunk.

  That, at least, is the principle. I believe Vergil Ulam was the first to violate it.

  It had been two years since I’d last seen Vergil. My memory of him hardly matched the tan, smiling, well-dressed gentleman standing before me. We had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employees’ cafeteria at the Mount Freedom Medical Center.

  “Vergil?” I asked. “My God, Vergil!”

  “Good to see you, Edward.” He shook my hand firmly. He had lost ten or twelve kilos and what remained seemed tighter, better proportioned. At university, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock-haired, snaggle-toothed whiz kid who hot-wired doorknobs, gave us punch that turned our piss blue, and never got a date except with Eileen Termagent, who shared many of his physical characteristics.

  “You look fantastic,” I said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”

  We stood in line at the counter and chose our food. “The tan,” he said, picking out a carton of chocolate milk, “is from spending three months under a sunlamp. My teeth were straightened just after I last saw you. I’ll explain the rest, but we need a place to talk where no one will listen close.”

  I steered him to the smoker’s corner, where three diehard puffers were scattered among six tables.

  “Listen, I mean it,” I said as we unloaded our trays. “You’ve changed. You’re looking good.”

  “I’ve changed more than you know.” His tone was motion-picture ominous, and he delivered the line with a theatrical lift of his brows. “How’s Gail?”

  Gail was doing well, I told him, teaching nursery school. We’d married the year before. His gaze shifted down to his food—pineapple slice and cottage cheese, piece of banana cream pie—and he said, his voice almost cracking, “Notice something else?”

  I squinted in concentration. “Uh.”

  “Look closer.”

  “I’m not sure. Well, yes, you’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”

  “No. I don’t need them anymore.”

  “And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”

  “Candice isn’t—wasn’t responsible for the improvement in my clothes,” he said. “I just got a better job, more money to throw around. My taste in clothes is better than my taste in food, as it happens.” He grinned the old Vergil self-deprecating grin, but ended it with a peculiar leer. “At any rate, she’s left me, I’ve been fired from my job, I’m living on savings.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “That’s a bit crowded. Why not do a linear breakdown? You got a job. Where?”

  “Genetron Corp.,” he said. “Sixteen months ago.”

  “I haven’t heard of them.”

  “You will. They’re putting out common stock in the next month. It’ll shoot off the board. They’ve broken through with MABs. Medical—”

  “I know what MABs are,” I interrupted. “At least in theory. Medically Applicable Biochips.”

  “They have some that work.”

  “What?” It was my turn to lift my brows.

  “Microscopic logic circuits. You inject them into the human body, they set up shop where they’re told and troubleshoot. With Dr. Michael Bernard’s approval.”

  That was quite impressive. Bernard’s reputation was spotless. Not only was he associated with the genetic engineering biggies, but he had made news at least once a year in his practice as a neurosurgeon before retiring. Covers on Time, Mega, Rolling Stone.

  “That’s supposed to be secret—stock, breakthrough, Bernard, everything.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “But you do whatever the hell you want. I’m through with the bastards.”

  I whistled. “Make me rich, huh?”

  “If that’s what you want. Or you can spend some time with me before rushing off to your broker.”

  “Of course.” He hadn’t touched the cottage cheese or pie. He had, however, eaten the pineapple slice and drunk the chocolate milk. “So tell me more.”

  “Well, in med school I was training for lab work. Biochemical research. I’ve always had a bent for computers, too. So I put myself through my last two years—”

  “By selling software packages to Westinghouse,” I said.

  “It’s good my friends remember. That’s how I got involved with Genetron, just when they were starting out. They had big money backers, all the lab facilities I thought anyone would ever need. They hired me, and I advanced rapidly.

  “Four months and I was doing my own work. I made some breakthroughs”—he tossed his hand nonchalantly—“then I went off on tangents they thought were premature. I persisted and they took away my lab, handed it over to a certifiable flatworm. I managed to save part of the experiment before they fired me. But I haven’t exactly been cautious…or judicious. So now it’s going on outside the lab.”