Schismatrix plus (15 page)

"When they sent us out here, we knew we weren't coming back," Paolo said. "We'll die here, and why? Not because our genetics are bad. We're a good line. Mavrides rule." He was talking faster now, falling into the cadences of Ring Council slang.

Fazil nodded silently.

"It's just bad percentages. Chance. We were burned by chance before we were twenty years old. You can't edit out chance. Some of the gene-line are bound to fall so the rest can live. If it weren't me and Fazil, it would be our crechemates."

"I understand," Lindsay said.

"We're young and cheap. They throw us into the enemy's teeth so the ink is black not red. But we're alive, me and Fazil. There's something inside us. We'll never see ten percent of the life the others back home will see. But we were here. We're real."

"Living is better," Lindsay said.

"You're a traitor," Paolo said without resentment. "Without a gene-line you're bloodless, you're just a system."

"There are more important things than living," Fazil said.

"If you had enough time you'd outlive this war," Lindsay said. Paolo smiled. "This is no war. This is evolution in action. You think you'll outlive that?"

Lindsay shrugged. "Maybe. What if aliens come?"

Paolo looked at him wide-eyed. "You believe in that? The aliens?"

"Maybe."

"You're all right," Paolo said.

"How can I help you?" Lindsay said.

"It's the launch ring. We plan to launch this head. An oblique launch, top velocity, full power, off the plane of the ecliptic. Maybe somebody sees it someday. Maybe some thing, five hundred million years, no trace of human life, picks it up, my face. There's no debris off the plane, no collisions, just dead-space vacuum, perfect. And it's good hard rock. Out this far the sun could go red giant and barely warm it. It could orbit till white dwarf stage, maybe till black cinder, till the galaxy bursts or the Kosmos eats its own tail. My image forever."

"Only first we have to launch it," said Fazil.

"The President won't like it," Lindsay said. "The first treaty we signed said no more launches for the duration. Maybe later, when our trust is stronger."

Paolo and Fazil traded glances. Lindsay knew at once that things were out of hand.

"Look," he said. "You two are talented. You have a lot of time on your hands since the launch ring's down. You could do heads of all of us."

"No!" Paolo shouted. "It's between us two, that's it."

"What about you, Fazil? Don't you want one?"

"We're dead," Fazil said. "This took us two years. There was only time for one. Chance burned us both. One of us had to give everything for nothing. So we decided. Show him, Paolo."

"He shouldn't look," Paolo said sullenly. "He doesn't understand."

"I want him to know, Paolo." Fazil was stern. "Why I have to follow, and you get to lead. Show him, Paolo."

Paolo reached under his poncho and pulled out a hinged box of clear acrylic. There were two stone cubes in it, black cubes with white dots on their faces. Dice.

Lindsay licked his lips. He had seen this in the Ring Council: endemic gambling. Not just for money, but for the core of personality. Secret agreements. Dominance games. Sex. The struggles within gene-lines, between people who knew with flat certainty that they were equally matched. The dice were quick and final.

"I can help you," Lindsay said. "Let's negotiate."

"We're supposed to be on duty," Paolo said. "Monitoring radio. We're leaving, Mr. Secretary."

"I'll come along," Lindsay said.

The two Shapers resealed the stone lid of their secret workshop and scuttled off in the darkness. Lindsay followed as best he could. The Shapers had listening dishes dug in all over the asteroid. The bowl-shaped impact craters were ready-made for their camouflaged gridworks of copper mesh. All antennae fed into a central processor, whose delicate semiconductors were sheltered in a tough acrylic console. Slots in the console held cassettes of homemade recording tape, constantly spooling on a dozen different heads. Another cutout on the acrylic deck held a flat liquid crystal display for video copy and a hand-lettered keyboard.

The two genetics combed the waveband, flickering through a spectrum of general-issue cartel broadcasts. Most bands were cypher-static, anonymous blips of cybernetic datapulse. "Here's something," Paolo said. "Triangulate it, Fazil."

"It's close," Fazil said. "Oh, it's just the madman."

"What?" Lindsay said. A huge green roach speckled in lustrous violet flew past with a clatter of wings.

"The one who always wears the spacesuit." The two glanced at one another. Lindsay read their eyes. They were thinking about the man's stench.

"Is he talking?" Lindsay said. "Put him on, please."

"He always talks," Paolo said. "Sings, mostly. He raves into an open channel."

"He's in his new spacesuit," Lindsay said urgently. "Put him on." He heard Rep 3. "—granulated like my mother's face. And sorry not to say goodbye to my friend Mars. Sorry for Carnaval, too. I'm out kilometers, and that hiss. I thought it was a new friend, trying to talk. But it's not. It's a little hole in my back, where I glued the tanks in. Tanks work fine, hole works better. It's me and my two skins, soon both cold."

"Try and raise him!" Lindsay said.

"I told you he keeps the channel open. The unit's two hundred years old if it's a day. He can't hear us when he talks."

"I'm not reeling back in, I'm staying out here." His voice was fainter.

"No air to talk with, and no air to listen. So I'll try and climb out. Just a zipper. With any luck I can skin out completely." There was a light crackling of static. "Goodbye, Sun. Goodbye, Stars. Thanks for—" The words were lost in a rush of decompression. Then the crackling of static was back. It went on and on.

Lindsay thought it through. He spoke quietly. "Was I your alibi, Paolo?

"What?" Paolo was shocked.

"You sabotaged his suit. And then you carefully weren't here when we could have helped him."

Paolo was pale. "We were never near his suit, I swear!"

"Then why weren't you here at your post?"

"Kleo set me up!" Paolo shouted. "Ian walks point, the dice said so! I'm supposed to be clean!"

"Shut up, Paolo." Fazil grabbed his arm.

Paolo tried to stare him down, then turned to Lindsay. "It's Kleo and Ian. They hate my luck—" Fazil shook him.

Paolo slapped him hard across the face. Fazil cried out and threw his arms around Paolo, holding him close.

Paolo looked stricken. "I was upset," he said. "I lied about Kleo; she loves all of us. It was an accident. An accident."

Lindsay left. He scrambled headlong down the tunnels, passing more wet-ware and a greenhouse where a blower gusted the smell of fresh-cut hay. He entered a cavern where grow-lights shone dusky red through a gas-permeable membrane. Nora's room branched off from the cavern, blocked by the wheezing bulk of her private air blower. Lindsay squeezed past it on the exhale and slapped the lights.

Violet arabesques covered the room's round walls. Nora was sleeping. Her arms, her legs, were gripped in wire. Braces circled her wrists and elbows, ankles and knees. Black myoelectrodes studded the muscle groups beneath her naked skin. The arms, the legs, moved quietly, in unison, side, side, forward, back. A long carapace knobbed her back, above the branching nerve clumps of her spine.

It was a diplomatic training device. A spinal crab. Memory flashed behind Lindsay's eyes and he went berserk. He jumped off the wall and rocketed toward her. Her eyes snapped open blearily as he shouted in fury. He seized her neck and jerked it forward, digging his nails into the rubbery rim where the spinal crab met her skin. He tore at it savagely. Part of it ripped free. The skin shone red beneath it, slick with sweat. Lindsay grabbed the left-arm cable and snapped it loose. He pulled harder; she wheezed as a strap dug in under her ribs.

The crab was peeling away. Its underside was ghastly, a hundred-footed mass of damp translucent tubes, pored with hair-thin wires. Lindsay ripped again. A cable nexus stretched and snapped, extruding colored wires. He braced his feet against her back and pulled. She gagged and clawed at the strap's buckle; the belt whipped loose, and Lindsay had the whole thing. With its programming disrupted, it flopped and curled like a live thing. Lindsay whirled it by the straps and slammed it into the wall with all his strength. The in-terlapping segments of its back split open, their brittle plastic crackling. He whiplashed it into the stone. Brown lubricant oozed, then spattered into free-fall drops as he smashed it again. He crushed it underfoot, tore at the strap until it gave way. Its guts showed beneath the plates: lozenge-shaped biochips nested in multicolored fiberoptics. He slammed it again, more slowly. The fury was leaving him. He felt cold. His right arm trembled uncontrollably.

Nora was against the wall, gripping a clothes rack. The sudden loss of nerve programming left her shaking with palsy.

"Where's the other one?" Lindsay demanded. "The one for your face?" Her teeth chattered. "I didn't bring it," she said. Lindsay kicked the crab away. "How long, Nora? How long have you been under that thing?"

"I wear it every night."

"Every night! My God!"

"I have to be the best," she said, shaking. She fumbled a poncho from the rack and ducked her head through the collar.

"But the pain," Lindsay said. "The way it burns!" Nora smoothed the bright fabric from her shoulders to hips. "You're one of them," she said. "The early classmates. The failures. The defectors.'

"What was your class?" Lindsay said.

"Fifth. The last one."

"I was first," Lindsay said. "The foreign section."

"Then you're not even a Shaper."

"I'm a Concatenate."

"You're all supposed to be dead." She peeled the crab's broken braces from her knees and ankles. "I should kill you. You attacked me. You're a traitor."

"When I smashed that thing I felt real freedom." He rubbed his arm absently, marveling. He'd truly lost control. Rebellion had overwhelmed him. For a moment, sincere human fury had burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, than he'd been for years.

"Your kind ruined it for the rest of us," Nora said. "We diplomats should be on top, coordinating things, making peace. But they shut down the whole program. We're undependable, they said. A bad ideology."

"They want us dead," Lindsay said. "That's why you were drafted."

"I wasn't drafted. I volunteered." She tied the poncho's last hip-lace.

"I'll have a hero's welcome if I make it back. That's the only chance I'll ever have at power in the Rings."

"There are other powerful places."

"None that count."

"Rep Three is dead," Lindsay told her. "Why did you kill him?"

"Three reasons," she said. They were past pretense. "It was easy. It helps our odds against you. And third, he was crazy. Worse even than the rest of your crew. Too unpredictable. And too dangerous to let live."

"He was harmless," Lindsay said. "Not like the two of us." His eyes filled with tears.

"If you had my control you wouldn't weep. Not if they tore your heart out."

"They already have," Lindsay said. "And yours as well."

"Abelard," she said, "he was a pirate."

"And the rest?"

"You think they'd weep over us?"

"No," Lindsay said. "And not much, even over their own. It's vengeance they'll want. How would you feel if Ian disappears tomorrow? And two months from now you find his bones in the sludge drain of some fermenter? Or, better yet, if your nerves are so well steeled, what about yourself? How would power taste to you if you were retching bloody foam outside some airlock?"

"It's in your hands," she said. "I've told you the truth, as we agreed between us. It's up to you to control your faction."

"I won't be put in this position," Lindsay said. "I thought we had an understanding."

She pointed at the oozing wreckage of her spinal crab. "You didn't ask my permission to attack me. You saw something you couldn't bear, and you destroyed it. We did the same."

"I want to talk to Kleo," he said.

She looked hurt. "That's against our understanding. You talk through me."

"This is murder, Nora. I have to see her."

Nora sighed. "She's in her garden. You'll have to put on a suit."

"Mine's in the Consensus."

"We'll use one of Ian's, then. Come on." She led him back into the glowing cavern, then down a long fissured-out mining vein to Ian Mavrides's room.

The spacesuit maker and graphic artist was awake and working. He had refused to put his decontamination suit aside and wore it constantly, a one-man sterile environment.

Ian was point man for the Mavrides Family, a focus for threats and resentment. Paolo had blurted as much, but Lindsay knew it already. The round walls of Ian's dugout were neatly stenciled in gridwork. For weeks he'd been decorating it with an elaborate geometric mosaic of interlocking L-shapes. With the passage of time the shapes were smaller, more tightly packed, crammed together in obsessive, crawling rigor. Its intricacy was claustrophobic, smothering; the tiny squares seemed to writhe and flicker. When they entered, Ian whirled, putting his hand to one bulky sleeve-pocket. "It's us," Nora said.

Behind the faceplate, Ian's eyes were wild. "Oh," he said. "Get burned."

"Save it for the others," Lindsay said. "I'd be more impressed if you got some sleep, Ian."

"Sure," said Ian. "So you could come in here and pull my suit off. And contaminate me."

Nora said, "We need a suit, Ian. State is going to the garden."

"Fuck him! He's not stinking up one of my suits! He can sew his own, like Rep Three did."

"You're clever with suits, Ian." Lindsay wondered if Ian had been the one to murder Rep Three. They had probably rolled dice for the privilege. He pulled a suit from the rack. "If you take your suit off, I might not put this on. What do you say? I'll roll you."

Ian pressed an oxygen balloon against the intake nozzle of his suit.

"Don't test your luck. Cripple."