PILGRIMAGE TO NODE ZERO by Seth L. Lapcart

The Old Polemicist paused for a moment in the scant shade of a utility pole and wiped sweat from the plastic headband of his gimmie cap as he watched an emaciated grackle wandering around, pecking listlessly at the baked brown earth of a nearby backyard. For some reason, he felt a poignant affinity with the pathetic bird.

"Your problem," said the Younger Polemicist, unaware of his companion's glum preoccupation, "is that you are not Culturally Online."

"Jargon," complained the Old Polemicist, roused briefly from his torpor. "I have come two thousand miles in search of enlightenment, and all I get is empty jargon."

"It only sounds empty to you because you are so totally 'out of touch'. Or, to rephrase it in a dated idiom that you might be better aable to relate to, 'unhip.'"

They climbed quaint wooden stairs to the Younger Polemicist's aerie, from whence, it was rumoured, all postmodern radical science-fiction ideology emanated. "I detested jargon just as much in the 1960's as I do now," the Old Polemicist complained, threading his way between tottering book cases into the shadowy recesses of Node Zero (as the simple wooden cabin was known in the cybernetic argot that the Younger Polemicist and his fellow-travelers found so apt). Brushing aside back issues of SCIENCE 86 and SOVIET LIFE, the Old Polemicist slumped onto the couch.

The Younger Polemicist put on a tape of Handel played by a Japanese 'koto' orchestra, knowing that his visitor would be unable to cope with anything more modern. "Let's face it, you don't even read ASIMOV's magazine. You hadn't heard of the Humanist Faction, till I told you about it. You probably even LIKE some of their stuff." He sneered contemptuously. "Deeply meaningful mood pieces evoking insight into the human condition -- that's what your 'new wave' was all about back in '68, wasn't it?"

"Well, to some extent. But --"

"Read this." The Younger Polemicist handed his a copy of the April 1986 ASIMOV's, open at "Down and Out in the Year 2000" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The Old Polemicist struggled to focus his bleary eyes in the shuttered dimness. Already, in the same issue, he had attempted "R&R" by Lucius Shepard only to disgrace himself by dozing off during the early pages, baffled and bored by the implausible mix of mysticism, drugs, and futuristic warfare.

"Actually I rather like this one," he said a while later, upon finishing Robinson's grim depiction of street Blacks hustling spare change from high-tech yuppies of tomorrow. "It has verisimilitude."

"That's not the point." The Younger Polemicist seized the magazine and flipped back to page 73. "Look at this description of the holo-TV program that the panhandlers are watching."

The Old Polemicist re-read the relevant paragraphs:

"Who the fuck is this?" Said Ramon. Johnnie said, "That be Sam Spade, the greatest computer spy in the world. ... Watch out now, Sam about to go plug his brain in to try and find out who he is." "And then he gonna be told of some stolen WETWARE he got to find." "I got some wetwear myself, only I call it a shirt."

There was more, and it was suddenly obvious: the show which the characters were mocking was a direct parody of William Gibson's NEUROMANCER. Robinson's story was not a story at all. It was a REBUTTAL, debunking the glitz of techno-fetishistic escapist fiction. No wonder the Younger Polemicist saw things in terms of factions. There WERE two factions now -- a whole literary context that the Old Polemicist hadn't even known about. "I'm not just offline," he admitted sadly, "I'm unplugged."

"Your shame is admirable, and too seldom seen." The Younger Polemicist dumped more ASIMOV's issues on his disciple's arthritic knees. "Better get busy." He turned back to his computer and logged onto some distant samizdatabase. Flickering green symbols danced across the CRT in response to stacatto bursts from his fingers at the keyboard.

The Old Polemicist paged through the magazines in the manner of one doing dutiful penance. Norman Spinrad's "The Neuromantics" seemed to offer help, as an overview; yet it was an overview through binoculars, surveying the subject in a wistful attempt to get closer to it. Despite ugly modern idiom ("informed his intellectuality" and so on) it had a dated air, and Spinrad underlined his own lack of authority by inadvertantly using the word "perhaps" three separate times in two short concluding paragraphs.

"A User's Guide to the Postmoderns" by Michael Swanwick seemed more comprehensive. Swanwick's gross ignorance of history was disconcerting (he credited Delany, Disch, Lafferty, Spinrad, and Zelazny with "ushering in" the 1960s "new wave," while omitting Moorcock, who invented it, and Ellison, who imported it); but might ignorance of the past imply a viewpoint aligned with the present? Alas, no: the article divided writers into arbitrary, incestuous cliques invested with bogus drama via silly phrases such as "they engaged in a frenzy of inference swapping" or "Sides had been chosen, names dropped, and the battle could commence." Swanwick, who had once cowritten a hard-core cyberpunk story with William Gibson, sounded like a housewife narrating gossip about new neighbors who'd moved in next door. The characatures were less than enlightening.

Where, then, could the Old Polemicist find truth?

ASIMOV's was the new marketplace for postmoderns, and Dozois, its editor, had invented the term "cyberpunk"; so the magazine's editorials should offer guidance, much like Moorcock's or Campbell's in bygone eras. But Dozois wasn't allowed to write the editorials. Asimov did that; and it looked as if he hadn't read the stories in his own magazine. He seemed more in his element answering the laughably lamebrained letters from readers whose middlebrow complacency implied that they didn't read the stories either. An odd (and precarious) situation indeed.

These idle musings were interrupted by a sudden call to action. "Hey, we have to make it down to the copy center before 5:30 to Xerox the agitprop." The Younger Polemicist logged off, grabbed a battered file folder stuffed with anonymous diatribes against the status-quo, and slipped into his plastic Korean sandals.

The Old Polemicist dutifully accompanied his guru back out into the hear. "I gather David Brin doesn't actually believe there is any such thing as a new movement," he remarked hesitantly as the Younger Polemicist nursed his rust-riddled Volkswagen along Main Street, frugally seeking a parking meter with free time left on it.

"There's a trenchant quote from Comrade Shirley about that." The Younger Polemicist parked his car and plucked from his folder a transcript of the Science Fiction Research Association's 1986 conference panel on cyberpunk literature. "Listen: 'You don't want to believe there is a movement, because it frightens you -- because you think you're not compentent to handle the new idiom of it.'" He gave the Old Polemicist a meaning look, then entered the copy center and commenced operating a self-service Xerox machine with obsessive intensity.

"It seems to me," the Old Polemicist suggested, "that Shirley's quote implies HE'S not frightened by cyberpunk, so he IS compentent to handle the idiom of it."

"So?"

"Well, forgive my hubris, O master, but if John Shirley can handle it, shouldn't I be able to?"

The Younger Polemicist waved an admonishing finger. "Not until you get Culturally Online."

They drove back to Node Zero. The Younger Polemicist urged his aged disciple back up the wooden steps. "Come on, we have important work to do."

"You're SURE it's important?" the Old Polemicist asked a little later, as he folded leaflets to be disseminated through the network of ideological activists spanning the globe from Haiti to Vladivostok.

"Important?" The Younger Polemicist paused in his envelope-stuffing. "This is the first new movement in science fiction in twenty years. Its best-known member has won every major award. It is the only literature with an online, informed world-view. And you question its importance?"

"Well, maybe not."

"Good. When you finish folding those leaflets, we have a couple hundred stamps to lick. And after you finish reading those ASIMOV's, there's three years worth of OMNI."

"All right." The Old Polemicist nodded dutifully.

Before getting back to work, he stole a momentary glance through the venetian blind that half-obscured the window. Down in the yard, the ragged old grackle was still there, feebly but persistently pecking, pecking at the unyielding soil, under the merciless sun.