Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) by James Tiptree Jr. Page A
Authors: James Tiptree Jr.
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Barcelona’s Playa Nueva. Which means switching her channel to the EurAf synchsat.
They ship her at night so the nanosecond transfer isn’t even noticed by that insignificant part of Delphi that lives five hundred feet under Carbondale, so excited the nurse has to make sure she eats. The circuit switches while Delphi “sleeps,” that is, while P. Burke is out of the waldo cabinet. The next time she plugs in to open Delphi’s eyes it’s no different—do you notice which relay boards your phone calls go through?
And now for the event that turns the sugarcube from Colorado into the PRINCESS.
Literally true, he’s a prince, or rather an Infante of an old Spanish line that got shined up in the Neomonarchy. He’s also eighty-one, with a passion for birds—the kind you see in zoos. Now it suddenly turns out that he isn’t poor at all. Quite the reverse; his old sister laughs in their tax lawyer’s face and starts restoring the family hacienda while the Infante totters out to court Delphi. And little Delphi begins to live the life of the gods.
What do gods do? Well, everything beautiful. But (remember Mr. Cantle?) the main point is Things. Ever see a god empty-handed? You can’t be a god without at least a magic girdle or an eight-legged horse. But in the old days some stone tablets or winged sandals or a chariot drawn by virgins would do a god for life. No more! Gods make it on novelty now. By Delphi’s time the hunt for new god-gear is turning the earth and seas inside-out and sending frantic fingers to the stars. And what gods have, mortals desire.
So Delphi starts on a Euromarket shopping spree squired by her old Infante, thereby doing her bit to stave off social collapse.
Social what? Didn’t you get it, when Mr. Cantle talked about a world where advertising is banned and fifteen billion consumers are glued to their holocam shows? One capricious self-powered god can wreck you.
Take the nose-filter massacre. Years, the industry sweated years to achieve an almost invisible enzymatic filter. So one day a couple of pop-gods show up wearing nose-filters like big purple bats . By the end of the week the world market is screaming for purple bats. Then it switched to bird-heads and skulls, but by the time the industry retooled the crazies had dropped bird-heads and gone to injection globes. Blood!
Multiply that by a million consumer industries, and you can see why it’s economic to have a few controllable gods. Especially with the beautiful hunk of space R & D the Peace Department laid out for and which the taxpayers are only too glad to have taken off their hands by an outfit like GTX, which everybody knows is almost a public trust.
And so you—or rather, GTX—find a creature like P. Burke and give her Delphi. And Delphi helps keep things orderly , she does what you tell her to. Why? That’s right, Mr. Cantle never finished his speech.
But here come the tests of Delphi’s button-nose twinkling in the torrent of news and entertainment. And she’s noticed. The feedback shows a flock of viewers turning up the amps when this country baby gets tangled in her new colloidal body-jewels. She registers at a couple of major scenes, too, and when the Infante gives her a suncar, little Delphi trying out suncars is a tiger. There’s a solid response in high-credit country. Mr. Cantle is humming his happy tune as he cancels a Benelux subnet option to guest her on a nude cook-show called Wok Venus.
And now for the superposh old-world wedding! The hacienda has Moorish baths and six-foot silver candelabra and real black horses, and the Spanish Vatican blesses them. The final event is a grand gaucho ball with the old prince and his little Infanta on a bowered balcony. She’s a spectacular doll of silver lace, wildly launching toy doves at her new friends whirling by below.
The Infante beams, twitches his old nose to the scent of her sweet excitement. His doctor has been very helpful. Surely now, after he has been so
They ship her at night so the nanosecond transfer isn’t even noticed by that insignificant part of Delphi that lives five hundred feet under Carbondale, so excited the nurse has to make sure she eats. The circuit switches while Delphi “sleeps,” that is, while P. Burke is out of the waldo cabinet. The next time she plugs in to open Delphi’s eyes it’s no different—do you notice which relay boards your phone calls go through?
And now for the event that turns the sugarcube from Colorado into the PRINCESS.
Literally true, he’s a prince, or rather an Infante of an old Spanish line that got shined up in the Neomonarchy. He’s also eighty-one, with a passion for birds—the kind you see in zoos. Now it suddenly turns out that he isn’t poor at all. Quite the reverse; his old sister laughs in their tax lawyer’s face and starts restoring the family hacienda while the Infante totters out to court Delphi. And little Delphi begins to live the life of the gods.
What do gods do? Well, everything beautiful. But (remember Mr. Cantle?) the main point is Things. Ever see a god empty-handed? You can’t be a god without at least a magic girdle or an eight-legged horse. But in the old days some stone tablets or winged sandals or a chariot drawn by virgins would do a god for life. No more! Gods make it on novelty now. By Delphi’s time the hunt for new god-gear is turning the earth and seas inside-out and sending frantic fingers to the stars. And what gods have, mortals desire.
So Delphi starts on a Euromarket shopping spree squired by her old Infante, thereby doing her bit to stave off social collapse.
Social what? Didn’t you get it, when Mr. Cantle talked about a world where advertising is banned and fifteen billion consumers are glued to their holocam shows? One capricious self-powered god can wreck you.
Take the nose-filter massacre. Years, the industry sweated years to achieve an almost invisible enzymatic filter. So one day a couple of pop-gods show up wearing nose-filters like big purple bats . By the end of the week the world market is screaming for purple bats. Then it switched to bird-heads and skulls, but by the time the industry retooled the crazies had dropped bird-heads and gone to injection globes. Blood!
Multiply that by a million consumer industries, and you can see why it’s economic to have a few controllable gods. Especially with the beautiful hunk of space R & D the Peace Department laid out for and which the taxpayers are only too glad to have taken off their hands by an outfit like GTX, which everybody knows is almost a public trust.
And so you—or rather, GTX—find a creature like P. Burke and give her Delphi. And Delphi helps keep things orderly , she does what you tell her to. Why? That’s right, Mr. Cantle never finished his speech.
But here come the tests of Delphi’s button-nose twinkling in the torrent of news and entertainment. And she’s noticed. The feedback shows a flock of viewers turning up the amps when this country baby gets tangled in her new colloidal body-jewels. She registers at a couple of major scenes, too, and when the Infante gives her a suncar, little Delphi trying out suncars is a tiger. There’s a solid response in high-credit country. Mr. Cantle is humming his happy tune as he cancels a Benelux subnet option to guest her on a nude cook-show called Wok Venus.
And now for the superposh old-world wedding! The hacienda has Moorish baths and six-foot silver candelabra and real black horses, and the Spanish Vatican blesses them. The final event is a grand gaucho ball with the old prince and his little Infanta on a bowered balcony. She’s a spectacular doll of silver lace, wildly launching toy doves at her new friends whirling by below.
The Infante beams, twitches his old nose to the scent of her sweet excitement. His doctor has been very helpful. Surely now, after he has been so
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