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A Year in the Linear City
by Paul Di Filippo



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Copyright (C)2002 by Paul Di Filippo

Hugo Award Nominee

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"[It] was the result of their vision of ... America as a monstrous danceland, extending from coast to coast,
roofed by a starless night, with hot bands propelling thousands of lonely couples with an accelerating,
Saturday-night intensity.тАЭ

тАФJohn Clellon Holmes, Go, 1952.
1.
A Dread of Yardbulls
February, and his father could talk only of his own impending death, swearing wildly that he saw coveys
of Yardbulls massing specifically for him, ragged-winged specks afloat like flakes of ash in the warped
fulgurant smokes of the northern rim of the world. Cold soul in a chilly Trackside/Trackview flat, the old
man raved freely at those odd intervals when Diego Patchen forced a reluctantly filial visit upon him, as if
caching all his hourly fears and recriminations until the arrival of his lone child. Much to the son's
astonishment, but true to the old man's character, Diego thought to detect in his father's fearful
vituperations a note of savage pride, as if the postulated quantity of Yardbulls necessary to drag the
antique sinner to his posthumous fate merited some perverse applause.

The Seasonsun gone entirely from the sky that month, slush heaped the gutters of Broadway, as if all the
flavored-ice carts of August had spilled their contents, both Trackside and Riverside. (Did the distant,
generally imperceptible heat from the Wrong Side of the Tracks possibly melt the slush slightly at the
corresponding curbing, while the cooling mists of the Other Shore gelled more firmly the parallel glaciated
sluice? Perhaps, but perhaps not. True, in summer residents of Trackside buildings claimed to swelter
more than their cross-Broadway neighbors, while heralding a compensatory lowering of the thermostat in
winter. And equally true, Riverside dwellers shivered a wee bit more in winter, but boasted of their
residential coolth when rat days raged beneath the ascendant Seasonsun. But Diego, favoring the
rationalism of an ingeniator, was inclined to believe that neither effect from the antipodal regions was real,
but only psychosomatic reactions to the respective proximity of Tracks and River.) Going out to visit the
old man was an offputting chore in the best of weathers, but particularly tiresome at this time of the year.