Free Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling Page B

and behind us.
    I should have fainted then. But I felt fine. I’d just had a good lunch and my mouth tasted of a fine cigar. I blurted something in confusion, and the girl with Vlad said, “Shhhh!” and suddenly everyone was cheering.
    Vlad grabbed me in a bear hug. I noticed then how fat we were. I don’t know why, but it just struck me. Our suits were so well-cut that they’d disguised it. “We’ve done it!” Vlad bellowed. “The moon!”
    All around us people were chattering wildly. In French.
    We were in Paris. And Americans were on the moon.
    §
    Vlad and I had lost nine years in a moment. Nine years in limbo, as the Artifact flung us through time and space to that moment Vlad had longed so much to see. We were knit back into the world with many convincing details: paunches from years of decadent Western living, apartments in the émigré quarter full of fine suits and well-worn shoes, and even some pop-science articles Vlad had written for the émigré magazines. And of course, our Swiss bank accounts.
    It was a disappointment to see the Americans steal our glory. But of course, the Americans would never have made it if we Russians hadn’t shown them the way and supplied the vision. The Artifact was very generous to the Americans. If it weren’t for the Nedelin Disaster, which killed so many of our best technicians, we would surely have won.
    The West still believes that the Nedelin Disaster of October 1960 was caused by the explosion of a conventional rocket. They did not even learn of the disaster until years after the fact. Even now this terrible catastrophe is little known. The Higher Circles forged false statements of death for all concerned: heart attacks, air crashes, and the like. Years passed before the coincidences of so many deaths became obvious.
    Sometimes I wonder if even the Higher Circles know the real truth. It’s easy to imagine every document about Vlad and myself vanishing into the KGB shredders as soon as the disaster news spread. Where there is no history, there can be no blame. It’s an old principle.
    Now the Cosmos is stormed every day, but the rockets are nothing more than bread trucks. This is not surprising from Americans, who will always try their best to turn the stars into dollars. But where is our memorial? We had the great dream of Tsiolkovsky right there in our hands. Vlad and I found it ourselves and brought it back from Siberia. We practically threw the Infinite right there at their feet! If only the Higher Circles hadn’t been so hasty, things would have been different.
    Vlad has always told me not to say anything, now that we’re safe and rich and officially dead, but it’s just not fair. We deserve our historian, and what’s a historian but a fancy kind of snitch? So I wrote this all down while Vlad wasn’t looking.
    I couldn’t help it—I just had to inform somebody. No one has ever known how Vlad Zipkin and I stormed the cosmos, except ourselves and the Higher Circles ... and maybe some American top brass.
    And Laika? Yes, the Artifact brought her to Paris, too. She still lives with us—which proves that all of this is true.
    Notes on “Storming the Cosmos”
    Asimov’s Science Fiction , December, 1985.
    Written Spring, 1985.
    Rudy on “Storming the Cosmos”
    The first I heard of Bruce Sterling was in 1982, when he sent me a review of my two novels Software and Spacetime Donuts . He’d written the review for a free newspaper in Austin. It was about the best review I’d ever gotten. Clearly this guy understood where I was coming from. He also sent me a copy of his novel Involution Ocean, a delightful take on Moby Dick which features dopers on a sea of sand.
    I met Bruce in the flesh at a science-fiction convention in Baltimore in 1983, right after the publication of my fourth SF book, The Sex Sphere . He was there with his wife Nancy, plus William Gibson, Lou Shiner, and Lou Shiner’s wife. The day after the con, the five of them unexpectedly drove down