Schismatrix plus (11 page)

"I think so."

"Birds. Parks. Grass. Clouds. Trees." The Mech's right arm, a prosthetic job, whirred softly as he whacked a roach from the console with one wire-tendoned finger. "I knew it would come to trouble, this business with the plebes.... I even wrote a play about it once."

"A play? For the theatre? What was it called?"

Vague surprise showed in the old man's eyes. "The Conflagration."

"You're Evan James Tyler Kelland," Lindsay blurted. "I—ah ... I saw your play. In the archives." Evan Kelland was Lindsay's own great-granduncle. An obscure radical, his play of social protest had been lost for years until Lindsay, hunting for weapons, had found it in the Museum. Lindsay had staged the play's revival to annoy the Radical Old. The men who had exiled Kelland were still in power, sustained by Mech technologies after a hundred years. When the time was right they had exiled Lindsay too.

Now they were in the cartels, he remembered suddenly. Constantine, the descendant of plebes, had cut a deal with the wireheads. And the aristocracy had paid at last, as Kelland had prophesied. Lindsay, and Evan Kelland, had only paid early.

"You happened to see my play," Kelland said. Suspicion turned the lines in his face to deep crevasses. He looked away, his ash-gray eyes full of pain and obscure humiliation. "You shouldn't have presumed."

"I'm sorry," Lindsay said. He looked with new dread at his old kinsman's mechanical arm. "We won't speak of this again."

"That would be best." Kelland turned up his earphones and seemed to lose the grip on his fury. His eyes grew mild and colorless. Lindsay looked at the others, deliberately blind behind their videogoggles. None of this had happened.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 27-10-'16

"Sleep troubles, citizen?" said the Second Judge. "Those steroids getting under your skin, stepping on your dream time? I can fix it." She smiled, showing three ancient, discolored teeth amid a rack of gleaming porcelain.

"I'd appreciate it," Lindsay said, struggling for politeness. The steroids had covered his long arms with ropes of muscle, healed the constellation of bruises from constant jujutsu drills, and filled him with hot flashes of aggressive fury. But they robbed him of sleep, leaving only feverish catnaps.

As he watched the Fortuna medic through red-rimmed eyes, he was reminded of his ex-wife. Alexandrina Lindsay had had just that same china-doll precision of movement, the same parchmentlike skin, the same telltale age wrinkles on the knuckles. His wife had been eighty years old. And, watching the Judge, Lindsay felt stifled by secondhand sexual attraction.

"This'U do it," Judge Two said, drawing up a hypo of muddy fluid from a plastic-topped vial. "Some REM promoter, serotonin agonists, muscle relaxant, and just a taste of mnemonics to pry loose troublesome memories. Use it all the time myself; it's fabulous. While you're out, I'll scroll up the other arm."

"Not just yet," Lindsay said through gritted teeth. "I haven't decided what I want on it yet."

The Second Judge put away her tattoo rig with a moue of disappointment. She seemed to live, eat, and breathe needles, Lindsay thought. "Don't you like my work?" she said.

Lindsay examined his right arm. The bone had knitted well, but he'd put on so much muscle that the designs were distorted: coax-cable snakes with television eyes, white death's-heads with flat solar-panel wings, knives wreathed in lightning, and everywhere, fluttering along and between them, a horde of white moths. The skin of his arm from wrist to bicep was so laden with ink that it felt cold to the touch and no longer sweated.

"It was well done," he said as the hypo sank into his arm through the hollow eye of a skull. "But wait till I've finished muscling for the rest, all right, citizen?"

"Sweet dreams," she said.

At night, the Republic was truest to itself. The Preservationists preferred the night, when watchful older eyes were closed in sleep. Truths hidden in daylight revealed themselves in blazing nightlights. The solar energy of the power panels was the Republic's currency. Only the wealthiest could squander financial power.

To his right, at the world cylinder's north end, light poured from the hospitals. In their clinics around the cylinder's axis, the frail bones of the Radical Old rested easily, almost in free-fall. Gouts of light spilled from distant windows and landing pads, a smeared and bogus Milky Way of wealth. Suddenly Lindsay, looking up, was behind those windows. It was his Great-Grandfather's suite. The old Mechanist floated in a matrix of life-support tubes, his eye sockets wired to a video input, in a sterile suite flooded with oxygen.

"Grandfather, I'm leaving," Lindsay said. The old man raised one hand, so crippled with arthritis that its swollen knuckles bulged, and rippled, and suddenly burst into a hissing net of needle-tipped tubes. They whipped into Lindsay, clinging, piercing, sucking. Lindsay opened his mouth to screamThe lights were far away. He was walking across the fretted glass window-pane. He emerged onto the Agricultural panel.

A faint smell of curdling rot came with the wind. He was near the Sours. Lindsay's shoes hissed through genetically altered wiregrass at the swamp's margins. Grasshoppers creaked in the undergrowth, and a chitinous thing the size of a rat scurried away from him. Philip Constantine had the rot under siege.

The wind gusted. Constantine's tent flapped loudly in the darkness. By the tent's doorflaps, two globes on stakes shone with yellow bioluminescence. Constantine's sprawling tent dominated the wiregrass borderlands, with the Sours to its north and the fertile grainfields shielded behind it. The no-man's land, where he battled the contagion, clicked and rustled with newly minted vermin from his labs.

From within, he heard Constantine's voice, choked with sobs.

"Philip!" he said. He went inside.

Constantine sat at a wooden bench before a long metal lab bureau, cluttered with Shaper glassware. Racks of specimen cases stood like bookshelves, loaded with insects under study. Globes on slender, flexible supports cast a murky yellow light.

Constantine seemed smaller than ever, his boyish shoulders hunched beneath his lab jacket. His round eyes were bloodshot and his hair was disheveled.

"Vera's burned," Constantine said. He trembled silently and put his face into his gloved hands. Lindsay sat on the bench beside him and threw his long, bony arm over Constantine's back.

They were sitting together as they had sat so often, so long ago. Side by side as usual, joking together in their half-secret argot of Ring Council slang, passing a spiked inhaler back and forth. They laughed together, the quiet laughter of shared conspiracy. They were young, and breaking all the rules, and after a few long whiffs from the inhaler they were brighter than anyone human had a right to be.

Constantine laughed happily, and his mouth was full of blood. Lindsay came awake with a start, opened his eyes, and saw the sick bay of the Red Consensus. He closed his eyes and slept again at once.

Lindsay's cheeks were wet with tears. He was not sure how long they had been sitting together, sobbing. It seemed a long time. "Can we talk freely here, Philip?"

"They don't need police spies here," Constantine said bitterly. "That's why we have wives."

"I'm sorry for what's come between us, Philip."

"Vera's dead," Constantine said. He closed his eyes. "You and I did this. We engineered her death. We share that guilt. We know our power now. And we've discovered our differences." He wiped his eyes with a round disk of filter paper.

"I lied to them," Lindsay said. "I said my uncle died of heart failure. The inquest said as much. I let them think so, so that I could shield you. You killed him, Philip. But it was me you meant to kill. Only my uncle stumbled into the trap."

"Vera and I discussed it," Constantine said. "She thought you would fail, that you wouldn't carry out the pact. She knew your weaknesses. I knew them. I bred those moths for stings and poison. The Revolution needs its weapons. I gave her the pheromones to drive them into frenzy. She took them gladly."

"You didn't trust me," Lindsay said.

"And you're not dead."

Lindsay said nothing.

"Look at this!" Constantine peeled off one of his lab gloves. Beneath it his olive skin was shedding like a reptile's. "It's a virus," he said. "It's immortality. A Shaper kind, from the cells themselves, not those Mech prosthetics. I'm committed, cousin."

He picked at an elastic shred of skin. "Vera chose you, not me. I'm going to live forever, and to hell with you and your cant about humanities. Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind. If you think you can deny that, then here." He handed Lindsay a dissection scalpel. "Prove yourself. Prove your words weren't empty. Prove you're better dead and human."

The knife was in Lindsay's hand. He stared at the flesh of his wrist. He stared at Constantine's throat. He raised the knife over his head, poised it, and screamed aloud.

The sound woke him, and he found himself in sick bay, drenched in sweat, while the Second Judge, her eyes heavy with intoxicants, ran one veiny hand along the inside of his thigh.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 20-11-'16

The Third Representative, or Rep 3 as he was commonly called, was a stocky, perpetually grinning young man with a scarred nose and short, brush-cut sandy hair.

Like many EVA experts, he was a space fanatic and spent most of his time outside the ship, towed on long kilometers of line. Stars talked to him, and the Sun was his friend. He always wore his spacesuit, even inside the craft, and the whiff of long-fermented body odor came through its open helmet collar with eye-watering pungency.

"I'm gonna send out the drone," he said to Lindsay as they ate together in the control room. "You can hook up to it from in here. It's almost like being Outside."

Lindsay put aside his empty canister of green paste. The drone was an ancient planetary probe, found in long-forgotten orbit by some long-forgotten crew, but its telescopes and microwave antennae were still useful, and it could broadcast as well. Hundreds of klicks out on its fiber-optic cable, the unmanned drone could pick up deep-space broadcasts and mislead enemy radar with electronic countermeasures. "Sure, citizen," Lindsay said. "What the hell."

Rep 3 nodded eagerly. "It'll be beautiful, State. Your brain'll spread out so-fast-so-thin be like a second skin for you."

"I won't take any drugs," Lindsay said guardedly.

"You can't take drugs," Rep 3 said. "If you take drugs the Sun won't talk to you." He picked a pair of strap-on videogoggles from the console and adjusted them over Lindsay's head. Within the goggles, a tiny video system projected images directly onto the eyeballs. The drone was shut down at the moment; Lindsay saw only an array of cryptic blue alphanumeric readouts across the bottom of his vision. There was no sense of a screen. "So far so good," he said.

He heard a series of keyboard clicks as Rep 3 activated the drone. Then the whole ship shook gently as the robot probe cast off. Lindsay heard his guide strap on another pair of showphones, and then, through the drone's cameras, he saw the outside of the Consensus for the first time. It was pitiful how shabby and makeshift it looked. The old engines had been ripped off the stern and replaced with a jury-rigged attack tunnel, a long, flexible, accordioned tube with the jagged teeth of a converted mining drill at its end. A new engine, one of the old-fashioned Shaper electromagnetic SEPS types, had been welded on at the end of four long stanchions. The globular engine was a microwave hazard and was kept as far as possible from the crew's quarters. Foil-wrapped control cables snaked up the stanchions, which had been clumsily bolted to the stern deck. Beside the stanchions crouched the inert hulk of a mining robot. Seeing it waiting there, powered down, Lindsay realized what a powerful weapon it was; its gaping, razor-sharp claws could rip a ship like tinfoil. Another mechanism clung to the hull: a parasite rocket. The old corrugated hull, painted an ugly shade of off-green, bore scrapes and scratches from the little rocket's magnetic feet. Being mobile, the parasite handled all the retrorocket work.

The third deck, with its life-support system, was an untidy mashed tangle of fat ventilation and hydraulics tubes, some so old that their insulation had burst and hung in puffy free-fall streamers. "Don't worry, we don't use those," Rep 3 said conversationally.

The four jointed solar panels spread laterally from the fourth deck, a gleaming cross of black silicon cut by copper gridwork. The nasty muzzle of the particle beam gun was just visible around the curve of the hull.

"Little star nation under the Sun's eye," the Rep said. He swung the drone around so that, briefly, Lindsay saw the drone's own tether line. Then its cameras focused on the rigging of the spacecraft's solar sail. In the bow was a storage chamber of accordioned fabric, but it was empty now; the nineteen tons of metallic film were spread for light pressure in a silver arc two kilometers across. The camera zoomed in and Lindsay saw as the sail expanded that it too was old: creased a bit here and there, and peppered with micrometeor holes.

"Prez says, next time, if we can afford it, we get a monolayer sprayer, stencil a big mother-burner skull and crossed lightnings on the outside of that," the Rep offered.

"Good idea," Lindsay said. He was off steroids now, and feeling a lot more tolerant.

"I'll take it out," the Rep said. Lindsay heard more clicks, and suddenly the drone unreeled its way into deep space at frightening speed. In seconds, the Red Consensus shrank to thimble-size beside the tabletop smear of its sail. Lindsay was seized with a gut-wrenching vertigo and clutched blindly at the console. He closed his eyes tightly within the goggles, then opened them onto the cosmic panorama of deep space.

"Milky Way," the Rep said. An enormous arc of white spread itself across half of reality. Lindsay lost control of perspective: he felt for a moment that the billion white pinpoints of the galactic ridge were pressing pitilessly down onto his eyeballs. He closed his eyes again, deeply thankful that he was not actually out there.