Patterns

by Pat Cadigan

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

This is a book of science fiction - without galactic fleets or plucky scientists' daughters; a book of fantasies - without elves, barbarians or wizards; a book of horror - without clichéd mad slashers in hockey masks. If one must categorize this collection by Pat Cadigan, then the inevitable conclusion would be that Patterns is a book about people, good and bad, noble and monstrous, common and oh so extraordinary. Cadigan's characters live and breathe in these fourteen astonishing stories, making even the most outlandish ideas seem more than possible.

Release date: November 14, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 211

Sample

Science fiction books are supposed to have red-hot pizzazz in the title, like Rocket Thrust Galaxy Blast Trek! Or maybe some bogus lyricism, with catchwords like “star,” “song,” “dream,” or “dance.” (Star Song of the Dream Dancers could be an SF bestseller, easy.)

But instead we’ve got this short story collection which is simply called Patterns, and when you look in here (as you will very soon, if you’ve got a lick of sense), you’ll see that this is, well, pretty unusual science fiction. More like science fiction fantasy, actually. No, make that science fiction fantasy horror …

Or maybe it’d be best just to skip the usual labels, and put it this way. When you cut these Cadigan stories, they bleed real juice. It isn’t normal blood exactly … kinda slick like high-grade silicone lubricant, and there’s a whiff to it that makes you dizzy, maybe even (gulp) thirsty in a way you’re not used to (and might not feel too cozy about).

These are visionary stories with … with a certain indefinable yet chilling insight into the invisible infrastructure of the late twentieth century! Yeah! This book, Patterns, is what contemporary “commercial science fiction” looks and sounds like when it’s really imaginative, as opposed to just cute.

Cadigan’s work makes the invisible visible. Certain aspects of contemporary reality emerge that you didn’t used to see – patterns, really, that can only be called Cadiganesque. TV, God help us, is full of ’em. Like the pop-music program on BET cable – one of my personal favorites – called “Video Soul.” The experienced Cadigan reader will sit bolt upright at a dead giveaway like that one.

And let’s not forget the Postmodern Elvis, Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson is flesh and blood, right? I mean, he’s a person, not a photographic negative. But Michael Jackson is so … well … overexposed, that people tend to just absorb his image, the way they soak up Chernobyl fallout.

Michael is a kind of ancestral Eohippus to the arch-hip quasi-naif antihero of Cadigan’s “Pretty Boy Crossover.” Read that story – it’s in here and it’s great – and you’ll get a whole new slant on that record ad that sells (and I’m not kidding), “The Original Soul of Michael Jackson.”

The world today is sneaky. There’s so much going on that you can’t possibly keep up with it. But if you have half a brain, you must be gnawingly aware that there are vast swarming activities going on behind the glossy surface of the fifteen-second video sound-bites. Global TV covers the Earth like Sherwin-Williams paint, but a lot of what you see in “the news” is exactly one phosphor dot thick.

And if you get up really close to TV – I mean, nose-pressing, touchy-feely close, so close that it’s scary – you can see that there’s really nothing there at all, nothing but these swarms of dots behind cold static-crackling glass. And suddenly you’re in Cadiganland.

Pat Cadigan is sneaky too. There’s a lot going on inside her stories, a lot of depth and intelligence behind the page. Pat Cadigan always knows damn well what she’s up to, long before we figure it out.

Her favorite weapon is the jolting one-liner, and one of her favorite images – watch for it – is the needle. These are needling stories, both in the sense that they can jab you wide awake, and in the sense that they can pump you full of mind-altering substances before you even know you’re hit. In the typical Cadigan story (there’s really no such thing, but bear with me) we’re cruising along, fully informed, right on top of developments, when – yow! – what we thought was bedrock turns out to be Saran Wrap.

Things become revelatory – things become unspeakably clear. This sensation is what H.P. Lovecraft – one of the great SF/horror visionaries, who used to own the eldritch woods where Pat has built her condo and broadcast station – called “cosmic fear.” It hasn’t much to do with gore, or some guy with an axe jumping out boo! from the closet. No, this is a cool analysis of “sanity” and “the real world” unraveling at the seams. Cadigan characters come in two basic patterns. The first is cool, collected, completely together, totally with-it; characters with a gloss on them like high-tech ceramic. The second pattern is ontologically fractured: people with insides like a bag of broken glass. (That much is easy – but now try to tell them apart!)

Characters like “Deadpan Allie,” the wire-tough heroine of Cadigan’s landmark SF novel Mindplayers, make an actual career of going from Pattern A to Pattern B and back again. When Allie makes it, she nets a bag of gleaming goodies from the public id. And she feels just great about it, too. At least until it’s time for the next run, anyway.

But sometimes they don’t make it. They find a trap, a sinkhole – maybe they explore too rashly, maybe they jump, maybe they’re pushed; in the saddest cases they may even be born there. But it’s a place, whether it’s cold junkie streets or a high-tech altered state-of-mind, that they can never come out of again.

The common Cadigan voice is one of sardonic intelligence and crisp objectivity. But look at stories like “Angel” or “Eenie Meenie Ipsateenie,” and it’s clear that Pat Cadigan knows the deep recesses of the heart. Feelings are never cheap in Cadigan’s fiction. She knows that tragedy exists, and she’s willing to face it: even the grinding and unglamorous kind of tragedy that hurts a lot more than the swift dramatic variety. She will tackle situations that most other writers wouldn’t touch with tongs. This gives her work a startling emotional dimension that – but don’t mind me; just read the astonishing “My Brother’s Keeper,” with its killer last line, and you can see it shine for yourself, as clear as winter daylight.

Pat Cadigan writes “science fiction” (in its widest sense) for the best of reasons: because she can accomplish things in this mode of expression that are impossible elsewhere. She has the gift of a truly original vision, and the gift of expression with power and clarity. These gifts are rare enough in isolation, but when combined they burn with the proverbial hard gemlike flame.

Let me put it this way, in conclusion. In this, well, wonderful and frightening world of ours – our current milieu – this videocratic world of mirrors, lenses, scanners, public images, flashbacks, fast-forwards and freeze-frames, Russian dolls and Chinese boxes, the kind of thing the folks at Nanterre U. like to call the precession of simulacra – Pat Cadigan’s patterns are the quote real unquote thing.

But don’t take my word at face value. Better to look for yourself. Better to look much deeper.

Better to turn the page.

I have this continuing fantasy of assassinating the President. Any President.

To step forward within a crowd, raising my weapon and aiming it at the President’s head. Sometimes in the movie unreeling in my mind, my hand comes up holding a Luger Parabellum P08 with the ridiculously long 190mm barrel. Other times I am holding a more likely Mauser Military Pistol. Twice I have found myself clutching an Uzi with the stock detached, three or four times I held a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum. Once – only once – I stared down the length of a crossbow at the chief executive.

In the fantasy, I am not scared or angry. I don’t think about the fact that I am taking a human life – the President, after all, is not so much human as manufactured, a product made flesh by the bipartisan system and the media in accidental conjugation. Is it wrong to fire at the dot pattern on a TV screen? I feel nothing beyond a mild nervousness, the slight (very slight) stage-fright I used to experience during my acting days. That my stage-fright was never acute enough to give me the cold sweats or send me vomiting into the handiest receptacle probably contributed to my lack of success in the theatre. In a one-person show, I could have been overlooked.

I know what you’re thinking. I dream of assassination as a way to become visible at last. You are wrong. There is far more power in invisibility than in fame.

In fact, my fantasy movie has never proceeded beyond the point at which I raise my weapon and train it on the President. The action freezes when the President’s gaze rests on the instrument of his/her destruction. But I know the rest of it:

I brace myself and fire. The President falls backwards, face a red ruin, body jerking in every direction. He/she is caught by aides and Secret Service agents and lowered to the ground. The crowd is completely silent. They are neither frightened nor in shock, just passive as the dot pattern rearranges itself. I lower the weapon to my side, then turn and walk away without hurry. Nobody looks at me. I walk some unmeasured distance to a car I recognize as mine, parked at an innocuous curb. I get in, twist the key waiting in the ignition and drive off.

In the days to come, there will be no mention of what happened to the President, ever, nor will there be any news about the government again. With one shot, I have obliterated not just the President but both Houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, Social Security, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Government Printing Office, the Gross National Product, the FTC, the CIA, the HEW and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, among others, as well as postponing for-ever the next election year. But life goes on anyway. I drive an endless highway across the United States and through the windshield I observe the permanent status quo I have visited on the American people. They don’t know what has happened and they don’t find it odd that they keep living in the same homes, working the same jobs, hearing the same music on the radio, watching the same dot patterns. Like me, they travel without destination. The days melt into each other with no distinguishing characteristics. The seasons come in and go out as they were meant to do in textbooks, but no one grows older. The treadmill has achieved a state of being both in motion and at rest simultaneously. Test pattern. Entropy.

All because I shot the President’s dot pattern.

Seen in close-up, the dot pattern could almost be taken for a collection of organisms, very cooperative organisms which have discovered a choreography that will produce patterns pleasing to the eyes of much larger and much less cooperative organisms.

Quotation from Chairman Busby Berkeley and Miss Amy Lowell: Christ! What are patterns for?

I’ll tell you.

The screen crackles when I put my finger on it. Static electricity; the dots warning me off their pattern. I pull my finger back and make it a pistol barrel pointing at the President, who is giving the State of the Union address. The President looks directly at “me” and hesitates. The dots at work on his pattern burble and boil and show me the red ruin that could be the result of my gun hand. Then the President’s head re-forms and he goes on with his speech. We are in great need of re-form in this country, he says, but even so, the State of the Union in general is most hope-inspiring.

Now. While there’s still hope.

I cover the President’s face with my finger. Loud crackling, followed by a close-up which put my finger absurdly on the President’s moving mouth. He doesn’t bite, but there is some mild electricity running up my arm.

“It was all them cop shows,” his mother said. “All that violence, they oughta get it off the tube.” She said it on television, at his televised trial. Christ! What are patterns for? First-degree murder.

“Always such a good kid,” my mother would say. “Never a moment’s trouble. Helped around the house and never answered back, either. Good-natured, you know. And when all the other kids were hanging out on the streets or chasing each other around and getting into trouble, my kid was studying. My kid always wanted to be somebody.”

How true. I could have had my own show, in fact. If the technology had been good enough in those days, I might have lived in a suburban dot pattern, walked to school to my own theme music, mouthed dialog to my own laugh track. And achieved endless childhood in syndication. I could have been syndicated; I could have been a contender. Instead of a COMMERCIAL INTERRUPT FOR STATION IDENTIFICATION. It is often necessary to amputate a frame or two for the sake of format. So sorry, apparently the program director spliced this one a little early. But since it happened anyway, you have sixty seconds to contemplate your mantra. Now how much would you pay?

Late at night, the patterns change and rearrange. I can’t sleep. Two, three, four in the morning, the dots perform before my dry eyes. Slices, dices, juliennes. How much would you pay? Don’t answer yet … stainless steel never needs sharpening. Now how much would you pay? Don’t answer yet … act now and well throw in the fabulous Kalashnikov rifle, the most successful automatic rifle ever made! Gas operated, simultaneous bolt action and cocking, with a handy selector lever for single shot or automatic at a rate of 100 rpm, that’s 100 rpm! Isn’t that amazing? A mere 8 pounds with a folding metal stock, perfect for the murder of the head of state of your choice! Call now, operators are standing by!

I blink. When you awake, you will remember everything.

I want to call friends to ask if they have just seen this, too. Then I remember, all my friends are electric.

In living color.

A Famous Actor has shot himself. When they found him, the television in his townhouse was still on, murmuring merrily to itself as it played one of his old movies. I see it on the six o’clock news. Dot pattern of a dot pattern.

Now how much would you pay?

I have taken to dreaming in dots. Reruns. I raise my arm. I am holding a Browning GP35. I know nothing about guns. Its rate of fire is 25 rpm with a muzzle velocity of 1110 feet per second and it is going to make cheap chuck of the President’s face. I know nothing about guns. The dot pattern knows. Point-blank range is that distance at which the bullet achieves its highest velocity, the distance the President is from me now. And it’s on every channel, even cable.

Cable?

When I awake, I remember everything, in dot patterns, in living color.

A soap opera actress reports being assaulted in a restaurant by an irate woman wielding a Totes umbrella, shouting, “You leave that nice lady’s husband alone, you slut! Hasn’t that poor woman had enough trouble without you trying to steal her man?” The actress’s companions manage to pull the woman away. The rest of the people in the restaurant-diners, waiters, waitresses, busboys, maitre d’ – all watch. They are neither frightened nor in shock.

And now, what will I do?

I consult the schedule. It is not time to run all the drug dealers out of Florida. Last night, the score was evened for the right-thinking on the mean streets of New York, it won’t have to be done again for another week. I think I will defend my heavyweight title against the challenger in Las Vegas. I double up my fists and inspect the knuckles. Yes, these can go fifteen rounds, piece of Duncan Hines cake.

I press my knuckles against the screen. Wild crackling. The dots swarm in liquid patterns around each point of contact. Electricity is flowing up both arms, dancing through the nerve endings which sizzle into life and join the pattern.

My hands are being taped as I hold them out. I got to keep my fuckin hands up, do I hear, just keep my fuckin hands up and let him dance himself out and then jab his motherfuckin head off. The dots pulse, live from Caesar’s Palace, more live than life. Fitted out with this dot pattern to wear, I could strike sparks in the moving, living air.

Now I know it can be done. The fight goes by in a swirl of dot pattern light. I keep my fuckin hands up and let him dance himself out and then jab his motherfuckin head off. The fight is not important. Now I know it can be done.

But I have to wait until the swelling goes down and the black eye fades. Never mind. You should see the other dot pattern.

More on that story from our correspondent in Washington.

Dot-pattern Washington snaps under the scanning line. The White House looks a little fuzzy. So does our correspondent. I touch her microphone; the dots leap in frenzy as I reshape their pattern into a 127mm barrel version of the Gyrojet pistol and then back into a microphone. Not yet. Tonight there is a press conference.

Brought to you by, sponsored in part. The whole world is waiting and watching. Ladies and gentlemen on every channel, the President of the United States. The reception has never been so good, it must be me. The dots dance for me now and we know each other; tropism. Whenever they appear, I turn to look and my looking excites the patterns.

What are patterns for?

I’ll show you. I’ll … show … you. As I show myself.

The dots sparkle around my hands in the continuing fantasy shown live on every channel. I run my fingers through them like a helping of stardust and reshape the pattern. They know what I need here. The Colt Commando with telescopic butt fully extended for shoulder firing, as used by the Green Berets, who have also been on this channel. The dots remember the pattern and here it is.

I step forward in the crowd of reporters demanding to be called on. The President’s dot pattern scans the room, looking for a likely questioner. Then he sees “me” and hesitates. I have raised the Colt to my shoulder. Everyone is watching.

I touch my finger to the screen. The President’s head disappears in a red mist, dot patterns gone insane. The room is completely silent, neither frightened nor shocked. Behind the podium, the Great Seal, the curtains, the President’s aides, and Secret Service agents begin to unravel from the hole where the President’s head was.

Embarrassed, puzzled anchorman. We are sorry for the interruption in transmission. Apparently we are having technical difficulties. We’ll have more information for you after this.

No, we won’t. That is all the information we are ever going to have, ever.

Fade to commercial. Dogs pounce on bowls of food. I sit on the couch, nodding. It’s all over now. It wasn’t quite how I expected it to go but it was, after all, adapted for television.

The commercial is followed by another commercial and then the embarrassed, puzzled anchorman. Apparently we are permanently cut off from our hook-up in the nation’s capital. We will try to have some news on the rest of the press conference as soon as possible.

A fast recap of the statements and questions up until the moment I murdered the President’s dot pattern, when things unraveled like celluloid melting away, a promise of an update soon. They patch the foreshortened evening schedule with a made-for-TV movie. Time to go,

I leave my apartment, go down to my car parked at an innocuous curb. The key is not waiting in the ignition but in my pocket. Such a good kid, never a moment’s trouble. We can live in the same homes, work at the same jobs, hear the same music on the radio, watch the same dot patterns. We travel without destination. What are patterns for?

Nothing, any more.

There used to be too much violence on TV. But not now.

In the long, late summer afternoons in the alley behind the tenement where Milo Sinclair had lived, the pavement smelled baked and children’s voices carried all over the neighborhood. The sky, cracked by TV aerials, was blue, the way it never is after you’re nine years old and in the parking lot of La Conco D’Oro Restaurant, the garlic-rich aroma of Siciliano cooking was always heavy in the air.

It had never been that way for the boy walking down the alley beside Milo. La Conco D’Oro didn’t exist any more; the cool, coral-tinted interior now held a country-western bar, ludicrous in a small industrial New England town. He smiled down at the boy a little sadly. The boy grinned back. He was much smaller than Milo remembered being at the same age. Milo also remembered the world being bigger. The fence around Mr. Parillo’s garden had been several inches higher than his head. He paused at the spot where the garden had been, picturing it in front of the brown and tan Parillo house where the irascible old gardener had been landlord to eleven other families. The Parillo house was worse than just gone – the city was erecting a smacking new apartment house on the spot. The new building was huge, its half-finished shell spreading over to the old parking lot where the bigger boys had sometimes played football. He looked at the new building with distaste. It had a nice clean brick facade and would probably hold a hundred families in plasterboard box rooms. Several yards back up the alley, his old tenement stood empty now, awaiting the wrecking ball. No doubt another erstwhile hundred-family dwelling would rise there, too.

Beside Milo, the boy was fidgeting in an innocent, patient way. Some things never changed. Kids never held still, never had, never would. They’d always fumble in their pants pockets and shift their weight from one foot to the other, just the way the boy was doing. Milo gazed thoughtfully at the top of the white-blond head. His own sandy hair had darkened a good deal, though new grey was starting to lighten it again.

Carelessly, the boy kicked at a pebble. His sneaker laces flailed the air. “Hey,” said Milo. “Your shoelaces came untied.”

The boy was unconcerned. “Yeah, they always do.”

“You could trip on ’em, knock your front teeth out. That wouldn’t thrill your mom too much. Here.” Milo crouched on one knee in front of the boy. “I’ll tie ’em for you so they’ll stay tied.”

The boy put one sneaker forward obligingly, almost touching Milo’s shoe. It was a white sneaker with a thick rubber toe. And Milo remembered again how it had been that last long late summer afternoon before he and his mother had moved away.

There in the alley behind Water Street, in Water St. Lane, when the sun hung low and the shadows stretched long, they had all put their feet in, making a dirty canvas rosette, Milo and Sammy and Stevie, Angie, Kathy, Flora and Bonnie, for. . .