Richard Kadrey - Kabbalah Cowboys.pdf - Richard Kadrey - allforjesus2001

Kabbalah Cowboys

Kadrey, Richard

Published: 2002

Type(s): Short Fiction, Science Fiction

Source: http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shortshorts/kad-

rey37.html

About Kadrey:

Richard Kadrey is a novelist, freelance writer, and photographer based

in San Francisco.

Kadrey's first novel, Metrophage, was published in hardcover in 1988

by Victor Gollancz Ltd., and went on to various other American and for-

eign printings in paperback. Mac Tonnies' Cyberpunk/Postmodern Book

Reviews calls Metrophage "one of the quintessential 1980s cyberpunk

novels," going on to describe "a gritty acid-trip through an ultraviolent

L.A. where nothing is what it seems… . Alongside novels such as

[William Gibson's] Neuromancer and Lewis Shiner's debut novel

Frontera, Metrophage helped establish the cyberpunk aesthetic: relent-

less, paranoid and playfully cynical."

Kadrey's second novel, Kamikaze L'Amour, is described by the same

source as "mesmerizing… a surreal (and distinctly Ballardian) account of

synesthesia and mutant desire set in the jungle-choked ruins of L.A."

Kadrey's short story Carbon Copy: Meet the First Human Clone was

filmed as After Amy.

The publisher website, Amazon booksellers, and other sources list a

July 15, 2007 publication date for Kadrey's next book, Butcher Bird: A

Novel Of The Dominion (Night Shade Books). Other works include col-

laborative graphic novels and over 50 published short stories.

His non-fiction books as a writer and/or editor include The Catalog of

Tomorrow (Que/TechTV Publishing, 2002), From Myst to Riven

(Hyperion, 1997), The Covert Culture Sourcebook and its sequel (St.

Martin's Press, New York, 1993 and 1994); Kadrey also hosted a live in-

terview show on Hotwired in the 1990s called Covert Culture. He was an

editor at print magazines Shift and Future Sex, and at online magazines

Signum and Stim. He has published articles about art, culture and tech-

nology in publications including Wired, Omni, Mondo 2000, the San

Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, Ear, Artforum, ArtByte, Bookforum,

World

Art,

Whole

Earth

Review,

Reflex,

Science

Fiction

Eye,

and

Interzone.

Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks for Kadrey:

• Metrophage (1988)

• Butcher Bird (2005)

• Zombie (2002)

• SETI (2002)

• A Cautionary Tale (2002)

• Ubiquitous Computing (2002)

• Second-Floor Girls (2002)

• Bad Blood (2002)

• The Tears of the Moon (2002)

• Chronalgia (2002)

check the copyright status in your country.

Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks.

http://www.feedbooks.com

Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes.

It was a roughneck expedition a week out of LA and deep into Nevada's

"Big Empty." In keeping with true western cowboy tradition, the rough-

necks traveled on horseback. Specially bred and modified for the harsh

climate, their steeds weren't much more than bone and gristle, fitted out

with just enough wires and electrodes to keep their jerky-dry muscles

moving. The horses' brains were housed in oval-shaped, high-impact-

plastic bubbles in their bare skulls. Turns out, a brain doesn't take up

much room when all it has to do is understand Giddyup, Whoa, and

turn Left or Right.

The crew's patron saint was Teresa of Avila. A hunchbacked angel

traveled with them. Saint Teresa loved the disfigured. The cowboys all

wore bright masks to hide scarred and radiation-burned faces that were

more Dadaist than C.M. Russell.

Ten days beyond the dusty canals of the Venetian resort on the Vegas

strip, the cowboys spotted a cyborg crew bringing in a herd of cattle and

slaves from up north. The cyborgs were all drip tubes and leaking joints

where the desert had worked its way inside and fouled their prosthetics.

The longhorns were all skinless, like walking butchers signs, the better to

dissipate the heat. The slaves were pitiful and stinking, as slaves often

were. Feynmann made a big show of thanking the Lord that all their

tongues had been cut out, so they couldn't start begging for food or res-

cue. Cassiel, the roughnecks' crippled angel, got down from his mount

and went to the slaves. He pressed his hand to each forehead and

blessed them. In fits of gran mal religious ecstasy, ten or more of the

slaves threw themselves onto the horns of the bulls, dying in heavenly

agony. The cowboys nodded to the cyborgs, acknowledging this breach

of decorum. They knew they were protected as long as they traveled

with their angel. Still, the cyborgs looked none too pleased, so the cow-

boys moved out.

When the next Friday rolled around, the roughneck crew all fasted.

They force fed Cassiel a fist-size chunk of peyote, then took turns skin-

popping N-dimethyl-5-methoxytryptamine until the crew was on a vis-

ion quest that was an E ticket neural hotrod through the Milky Way,

with pit stops in Heaven and Hell. They hadn't had anything to drink for

days. LA was as dry, as Teller liked to say, as "the moon's puckered gray

asshole." The cowboys had been subsisting on their own recycled urine

and angel sweat. The hallucinations slammed them hard. They stumbled

across the sand and onto the cracked glass plains of Alamogordo.

Feynmann was the one who pointed out the vision to his caballeros.

Saint Teresa, luminous and smelling like rose petals, had appeared and

was having a hard bump and grind with Cassiel in the black glass empti-

ness. Muddling back to camp, the cowboys dragged a laser borer out

(careful not to disturb the rutting lovers) and sank a test well. A gusher

of faintly glowing, cyan-colored heavy water erupted over their heads.

The cowboys whooped and danced in the radioactive rain, celebrating

with shots of Jack Daniels and Three Mile Island Ice Teas.

Hungover and exhausted from capping the well, the cowboys slept

through most of the next day. At sunset, they nailed Cassiel to a cross

made from wood they'd dragged all the way from a beached gondola at

the Venetian. They burned Cassiel on the cross as an offering to Teresa,

then ate his flesh for strength. The angel's bones they laid out in a Sefirot

to mark their claim on the land and the precious water below.

"A hot ride, but a good one," said Alvarez as they headed back LA-

way to conscript a crew to tap the well. They laughed about all those

poor saps cooped up in bunkers back in the city. The cowboys agreed

that it was a good day to be alive and riding the open range.

Richard Kadrey - Kabbalah Cowboys.pdf

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