Seeds of Change by John Joseph Adams (Editor)

Author:John Joseph Adams (Editor)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

A DANCE CALLED ARMAGEDDON, by Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod is the author of eleven novels, three novellas, and thirteen short stories. He is the winner of the Prometheus Award, the Sidewise Award, the BSFA Award, and the Seiun Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His most recent novel is The Execution Channel, and a new novel, The Night Sessions, is due out in 2008.

MacLeod said he found the anthology’s theme hard to get a handle on―for political reasons. “I don’t actually have a great deal of hope for positive change in the near future,“ he said. “I only found the story when I chose to write out of that pessimism.”

* * * *

I walk fast up the North Bridge under a sky yellow with city light on low cloud. The streets are almost empty. Even for the fifteenth winter of the Faith War, it’s quiet. Everyone on the street seems to have tense shoulders and wary eyes. For the past week, all the talking heads have been telling us the current battle’s going to be decisive, it’s going to be the big one, and right now they’re telling us it’s not looking good.

I’m out on the town because I don’t want to sit alone at home. But as I stride along I can’t help watching the news on my glasses. The picture flickers in the corner of my eye, the sound murmurs in the earpieces. Even on Fox News, the commentators and retired generals are all taking care not to call what’s going on Armageddon. They are, presumably, trying not to make the panic worse than it is already. America is going into national nervous breakdown from coast to coast: fires, riots, entire football stadiums packed with swaying, sobbing people waiting for the Rapture or the Second Coming.

My wife’s working nights at the hospital, hauled out of retirement to help cope with the rising flood of casualties flown in from the big medevac staging areas on Cyprus and Crete. Here in the UK―unlike the US, with two million so far thrown into the meat-grinder of the Middle East and Central Asia―we don’t have the draft. But every medical worker knows they’ll be on call until they die.

I walk in to the Heart of Oak and my glasses steam up. I take them off and slip them in their pouch inside my shirt pocket, taking more than usual care because I’ve only just got them, a Sony Ericsson Cyber-sight upgrade. I idly wonder whether it would be possible to give glasses a heating element, just so they don’t steam up when you step from a cold night into a warm and crowded pub. That would be a sight more useful, so to speak, than the menu of VR games bundled with my new specs. It might even be more useful than television.

The room’s so small I hardly need my glasses to see everyone in it, and I give them all a big grin.

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