Schismatrix plus (10 page)

"Forget up and down," the President advised. "When we're talking free-fall combat, the central rule is haragei. That's this." He punched Lindsay suddenly in the stomach. Lindsay doubled over with a wheeze and his velcro slippers ripped free from the wall, shredding loudly. The President grabbed Lindsay's wrist, and with a sinuous transfer of torque he stuck Lindsay's feet to the ceiling. "Okay, you're upside down now, right?" Lindsay stood on the upward or bow side of the deck; the President crouched on the sternward side, so that their feet pointed in opposite directions. He glared upside down into Lindsay's eyes. His breath smelled of raw algae.

"That's what they call the local vertical," he said. "The body was built for gravity and the eyes look for gravity in any situation; that's the way the brain's wired. You're gonna look for straight lines that go up and down and you're going to orient yourself to those lines. And you're gonna get killed, soldier, understand?"

"Yes sir!" Lindsay said. In the Republic, he'd been taught from childhood to despise violence. Its only legitimate use was against one's self. But his brush with the antibiotic had changed his thinking.

"That's what haragei's for." The President slapped his own belly. "This is your center of gravity, your center of torque. You meet some enemy in free-fall, and you grapple with him, well, your head is just a stalk, see?

What happens depends on your center of mass. Your haragei. Your actions, the places where you can punch out with hands and feet, form a sphere. And that sphere is centered on your belly. You think of that bubble around you all the time."

"Yes sir," Lindsay said. His attention was total.

"That's number one," the President said. "Now we're gonna talk about number two. Bulkheads. Control of the bulkhead is control of the fight. If I pull my feet up, off this bulkhead, how hard do you think I can hit you?" Lindsay was prudent. "Hard enough to break my nose, sir."

"Okay. But if I have my feet planted, so my own body holds me fast against the recoil, what then?"

"You break my neck. Sir."

"Good thinking, soldier. A man without bracing is a helpless man. If you got nothing else, you use the enemy's own body as bracing. Recoil is the enemy of impact. Impact is damage. Damage is victory. Understand?"

"Recoil is impact's enemy. Impact is damage, damage is victory," Lindsay said immediately. "Sir."

"Very good," the President said. He then reached out, and, with a quick pivoting movement, he broke Lindsay's forearm over his knee with a wet snap.

"That's number three," he said over Lindsay's sudden scream. "Pain."

"Well," said the Second Justice, "I see he showed you the old number three."

"Yes, ma'am," Lindsay said.

The Second Justice slid a needle into his arm. "Forget that," she said kindly. "This isn't the army, this is sick bay. You can just call me Judge Two."

A rubbery numbness spread over the fractured arm. "Thanks, Judge." The Second Justice was an older woman, maybe close to a century. It was hard to tell; her constant abuse of hormone treatments had made her metabolism a patchwork of anomalies. Her jawline was freckled with acne, but her wrists and shins were flaky and varicose-veined.

"You're okay, State, you'll do," she said. She stuck Lindsay's anesthetized arm into the wide rubber orifice of an old-fashioned CAT scanner. Multiple x-rays whirred from its ring, and a pivoting three-D image of Lindsay's arm appeared on the scanner's screen.

"Good clean break, nothin' to it," she said analytically. "We've all had it. You're almost one of us now. Want me to scroll you up while the arm's still numb?"

"What?"

"Tattoos, citizen."

The thought appalled him. "Fine," he said at once. "Go right ahead."

"I knew you were okay from the beginning," she said, nudging him in the ribs. "I'll do you a favor: vein-pop you with some of those anabolic steroids. You'll muscle up in no time; the Prez'll think you're a natural." She pulled gently on his forearm; the sullen grating of jagged bone ends was like something happening at the other end of a telescope.

She pulled a needled tattoo rig from the wall, where it clung by a patch of velcro. "Any preferences?"

"I want some moths," Lindsay said.

The history of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy was a simple one. Fortuna was a major asteroid, over two hundred kilometers across. In the first flush of success, the original miners had declared their independence. As long as the ore held out, they did well. They could buy their way out of political trouble and could pay for life-extension treatments from other more advanced worlds.

But when the ore was gone and Fortuna was a mined-out heap of rubble, they found they had crucially blundered. Their wealth had vanished, and they had failed to pursue technology with the cutthroat desperation of rival cartels. They could not survive on their outmoded expertise or sustain an information economy. Their attempts to do so only hastened their bankruptcy. The defections began. The nation's best and most ambitious personnel were brain-drained away to richer worlds. Fortuna lost its spacecraft, as defectors decamped with anything not nailed down.

The collapse was exponential, and the government devolved upon smaller and smaller numbers of diehards. They got into debt and had to sell their infrastructure to the Mech cartels; they even had to auction off their air. The population dwindled to a handful of knockabout dregs, mostly sundogs who'd meandered to Fortuna out of lack of alternatives.

They were, however, in full legal control of a national government, with its entire apparat of foreign relations and diplomatic protocol. They could grant citizenship, coin money, issue letters of marque, sign treaties, negotiate arms control agreements. There might be only a dozen of them, but that was irrelevant. They still had their House, their Senate, their legal precedents, and their ideology.

They therefore redefined Fortuna, their national territory, as the boundaries of their last surviving spacecraft, the Red Consensus. Thus equipped with a mobile nation, they were able to legally annex other people's property into their national boundaries. This was not theft. Nations are not capable of theft, a legal fact of great convenience to the ideologues of the FMD. Protests were forwarded to the Fortuna legal system, which was computerized and of formidable intricacy.

Lawsuits were the chief source of income for the pirate nation. Most cases were settled out of court. In practice, this was a simple process of bribing the pirates to make them go away. But the pirates were very punctilious about form and took great pride in preserving the niceties. ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 29-9-'16

"What are you doing in the sweatbox, State?"

Lindsay smiled uneasily. "The State of the Nation address," he said.

"I'd prefer to escape it." The President's rhetoric filled the spacecraft, filtering past the slight figure of the First Representative. The girl slipped into the radiation shelter and wheeled the heavy hatch shut behind her.

"That ain't very patriotic, State. You're the new hand here; you ought to listen."

"I wrote it for him," Lindsay said. He knew he had to treat this woman carefully. She made him nervous. Her sinuous movements, the ominous perfection of her features, and the sharp, somehow overattentive intensity of her gaze all told him that she was Reshaped.

"You Shaper types," she said. "You're slick as glass."

"Are we?" he said.

"I'm no Shaper," she said. "Look at these teeth." She opened her mouth and showed a crooked overlapping incisor and canine. "See? Bad teeth, bad genetics."

Lindsay was skeptical. "You had that done yourself."

"I was born," she insisted. "Not decanted." Lindsay rubbed a fading combat-training bruise on his high cheekbone. It was hot and close in the box. He could smell her.

"I was a ransom," the girl admitted. "A fertilized ovum, but a Fortuna citizen brought me to term." She shrugged. "I did do the teeth, it's true."

"You're a rogue Shaper, then," Lindsay said. "They're rare. Ever had your quotient done?"

"My IQ? No. I can't read," she said proudly. "But I'm Rep One, the majority whip in the House. And I'm married to Senator One."

"Really? He never mentioned it."

The young Shaper adjusted her black headband. Beneath it, her red-blonde hair was long and done up with bright pink alligator clips. "We did it for tax reasons. I'd throw you a juice otherwise, maybe. You're looking good, State." She drifted closer. "Better now that the arm's healed up." She ran one fingertip along the tattooed skin of his wrist.

"There's always Carnaval," Lindsay said.

"Carnaval don't count," she said. "You can't tell it's me, tripped out on aphrodisiacs."

"There's three months left till rendezvous," Lindsay said. "That gives me three more chances to guess."

"You been in Carnaval," she said. "You know what it's like, shot up on

'disiacs. After that, you ain't you, citizen. You're just wall-to-wall meat."

"I might surprise you," Lindsay said. They locked eyes.

"If you do I'll kill you, State. Adultery's a crime." ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 13-10-'16

One of the shipboard roaches woke Lindsay by nibbling his eyelashes. With a start of disgust, Lindsay punched it and it scuttled away. Lindsay slept naked except for his groin cup. All the men wore them; they prevented the testicles from floating and chafing in free-fall. He shook another roach out of his red-and-silver jumpsuit, where it feasted on flakes of dead skin.

He got into his clothes and looked about the gym room. Two of the Senators were still asleep, their velcro-soled shoes stuck to the walls, their tattooed bodies curled fetally. A roach was sipping sweat from the female senator's neck.

If it weren't for the roaches, the Red Consensus would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast-off skin and built-up layers of sweated and exhaled effluvia. Lysine, alanine, methionine, carbamino compounds, lactic acid, sex pheromones: a constant stream of organic vapors poured invisibly, day and night, from the human body. Roaches were a vital part of the spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking up grease. Roaches had haunted spacecraft almost from the beginning, too tough and adaptable to kill. At least now they were well-trained. They were even housebro-ken, obedient to the chemical lures and controls of the Second Representative. Lindsay still hated them, though, and couldn't watch their grisly swarming and free-fall leaps and clattering flights without a deep conviction that he ought to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Dressed, Lindsay meandered in free-fall through the filamented doors between decks. The plasticized doors unraveled into strands as he approached and knitted themselves shut behind him. They were thin but airtight and as tough as steel when pressed. They were Shaper work. Stolen, probably, Lindsay thought.

He wandered into the control room, drawn by the instrumental music. Most of the crew was there. The President, two Reps, and Justice 3 were watching a Shaper agit-broadcast with strap-on videogoggles.

The Chief Justice was strapped in beside the waist-high console, monitoring deep-space broadcasts with the ship's drone. The Chief Justice was by far the oldest member of the crew. He never took part in Carnaval. This, his age, and his office made him the crew's impartial arbiter. Lindsay spoke loudly beside the man's earphones. "Any news?"

"The siege is still on," the Mech said, without any marked satisfaction.

"The Shapers are holding." He stared emptily at the control boards. "They keep boasting about their victory in the Concatenation."

Justice 2 came into the control room. "Who wants some ketamine?" Rep 1 took off her videogoggles. "Is it good?"

"Fresh out of the chromatograph. I just made it myself."

"The Concatenation was a real power in my day," the Chief Justice said. With his earphones on, he hadn't seen or heard the two women. Something about the broadcast he had monitored had stirred some deep layer of ancient indignation. "In my day the Concatenation was the whole civilized world." Through long habit, the women ignored him, raising their voices. "Well, how much?" Rep 1 said.

"Forty thousand a gram?" the Judge bargained.

"Forty thousand? I'll give you twenty."

"Come on, girl, you charged me twenty thousand just to do my nails." Lindsay listened with half an ear, wondering if he could cut himself in. The FMD still had its own banks, and though its currency was enormously inflated, it was still in circulation as the exclusive legal tender of eleven billionaires. Lindsay, unfortunately, as junior crew member, was already deeply in debt.

"Mare Serenitatis," the old man said. "The Corporate Republic." He fixed Lindsay suddenly with his ash-gray eyes. "I hear you worked for them." Lindsay was startled. The unwritten taboos of the Red Consensus suppressed discussion of the past. The old Mech's face had brightened with a reckless upwash of memory. Decades of the same expressions had dug deep furrows into his ancient muscle and skin. His face was an idiosyncratic mask.

"I was only there briefly," Lindsay lied. "I don't know the moondocks well."

"I was born there."

Rep 1 cast an alarmed glance in the old man's direction. "All right, forty thousand," she said. The two women left for the lab. The President lifted his videogoggles. He looked sardonically at Lindsay, then deliberately turned up the volume on his headset. The other two, Rep 2 and the grizzled Justice 3, ignored the whole situation.

"The Republic had a system in my day," the Mech said. "Political families. The Tylers, the Kellands, the Lindsays. Then there was an underclass of refugees we'd taken in, just before the Interdict with Earth. The plebes, we called them. They were the last ones to get off the planet, just before things fell apart. So they had nothing. We had the kilowatts in our pockets, and the big mansions. And they had the little plastic slums."

"You were an aristocrat?" Lindsay said. He couldn't restrain his fatalistic interest.

"Apples," the Mech said sadly. The word was heavy with nostalgia. "Ever had an apple? They're a kind of vegetable growth."