Schismatrix plus (19 page)

"There's just three left," Kleo said. "The Speaker, her man, and Senator Three. We have them. My poor precious darlings." She threw her arms around Paolo, who stiffened at the sudden gesture but then relaxed, cradling his head in the hollow at Kleo's neck and shoulder.

"I'll start the power plant," Nora said. She drifted to the wall panel and tapped switches for the preliminary sequence.

"Paolo and I will cover the entrances and wait for them," Kleo said.

"Nora, you go to the radio room. Raise the Council, report in. We'll regroup there." She gave Nora the candle and left.

Nora stuck the candle above the tokamak's control board and got it up into stage one. A bluish glow seeped through the polarized blast shield as magnetic fields uncurled within the chamber. The tokamak flickered uneasily as it bootstrapped its way up to fusion velocities. False sunlight flared yellow as the ion streams collided and burned. The field stabilized, and suddenly all the lights were on.

Holding it warily, Nora snuffed the candle against the wall. Paolo brushed petulantly at the acid blisters on his unprotected hands.

"I'm the one, Nora," he said. "The one percent destined for survival."

"I know that, Paolo."

"I'll remember you, though. All of you. I loved you, Nora. I wanted to tell you one more time."

"It's a privilege to live in your memory, Paolo."

"Goodbye, Nora."

"If I ever had luck," Nora said, "it's yours." He smiled, hefting his slingshot.

Nora left. She skidded quickly through the tunnels, holding one leg stiff. Waves of pain dug into her, knotting her body. Without the spinal crab, she could no longer stop the cramps.

The pirates had been through the radio room. They had smashed about them wildly in the darkness. The transmitters were saw-torn wreckage; the table-top console had been wrenched off and flung aside.

Fluid leaked from the liquid crystal display. Nora pulled needle and thread from her hairnet and sewed up the gash in the screen. The CPU was still working; there were signals incoming from the dishes outside. But the deciphering programs were down. Ring Council transmissions were gibberish. She picked up a general frequency propaganda broadcast. The slashed television still worked, though it blurred around the stitches. And there it was: the outside world. There was not much to it: words and pictures, lines on a screen. She ran her fingertips gently over the scalding pain in her knee.

She could not believe what the faces on the screen were telling her, what the images showed. It was as if the little screen in its days of darkness had fermented somehow, and the world behind it was frothing over, all its poisons wet-wared into wine. The faces of the Shaper politicos were alight with astounded triumph.

She watched the screen, transfixed. The shocked public statements of Mechanist leaders: broken men, frightened women, their routines and systems stripped away. The Mech armor of plans and contingencies had been picked off like a scab, showing the raw flesh of their humanity. They gabbled, they scrambled for control, each contradicting the last. Some with tight smiles that looked wired on by surgery, others misty-eyed with secondhand religious awe, gesturing vaguely, their faces bright as children's.

And the doyens of the Shaper academic-military complex: the smoothfaced Security types, facile, triumphant, still too pleased at the amazing coup to show their ingrained suspicion. And the intelligentsia, dazzled by potential, speculating wildly, their objectivity in rags.

Then she saw one. There were more, a dozen of them. They were huge. Their legs alone were as tall as men, enormous corded masses of muscle, bone, and tendon under slickly polished corrugated hide. Scales. Brown scaled hide showed under their clothing: they wore skirts, glittering beads on wire. Their mighty chests were bare, with great keelbone ridges of sternum. Compared to the treelike legs and the massive jutting tails, their arms were long and slender, with quick, swollen-tipped fingers and oddly socketed thumbs. Their heads were huge, the size of a man's torso, split with great cavernous grins full of thumb-sized flat peg teeth. They seemed to have no ears, and their black eyeballs, the size of fists, were shielded under pebbly lids and grayish nictitating membranes. Ribbed, iridescent frills draped the backs of their heads.

There were people talking to them, holding cameras. Shaper people. They seemed to be hunched in fear before the aliens; their backs were bent, they shuffled subserviently from one to another. It was gravity, Nora realized. The aliens used a heavy gravity.

They were real! They moved with relaxed, ponderous grace. Some were holding clipboards. Others were talking, with fluted, birdlike tongues as long as a forearm.

By size alone they dominated the proceedings. There was nothing formalized or stagy about it; even the solemn narration could not hide the essential nature of the meeting. The aliens were not frightened or even much impressed. They had no bluster, no mystique. They were businesslike. Like tax collectors.

Paolo burst in suddenly, his eyes wild, his long hair matted with blood.

"Quickly! They're right behind me!" He glanced around. "Give me that panel cover!"

"It's over, Paolo!"

"Not yet!" Paolo snatched the broad console top from midair. Wiring trailed behind it. He catapulted across the room and slammed the console across the tunnel entrance. Placed flat against it, it formed a crude barricade; Paolo whipped a tube of epoxy from his belt and glued the console top against the stone.

There was a gap to one side; Paolo pulled his slingshot and fired down the corridor. They heard a distant howl. Paolo jammed his face against the gap and screamed with laughter.

"The television, Paolo! News from the Council! The siege is over!"

"The siege?" Paolo said, glancing back at her. "What the fuck does that have to do with us?"

"The siege, the war," she said. "There never was any war, it's the new party line. There were just. . . misunderstandings. Bottlenecks." Paolo ignored her, staring down the tunnel, readying another shot. "We were never soldiers. Nobody was ever trying to kill anyone. The human race is peaceful, Paolo, just— good trading partners. . . . Aliens are here, Paolo. The aliens."

"Oh, God," Paolo moaned. "I just have to kill two more, that's all, and I already winged the woman. Just help me kill them first, then you can tell me anything you want." He pressed his shoulder against the barricade, waiting for the epoxy to set.

Nora drifted over him and shouted through one of the console's instrument holes into the darkness. "Mr. President! This is the diplomat! I want a parley!"

There was silence for a moment. Then: "You crazy bitch! Come out and die!"

"It's over, Mr. President! The siege is lifted! The System is at peace, do you understand? Aliens, Mr. President! Aliens have arrived, they've been here for days already!"

The President laughed. "Sure. Come on out, baby. Send that little fucker with the slingshot out first." She heard the sudden whine of the power saw. Paolo pushed her aside with a snarl and fired down the hall. They heard half a dozen sharp clicks as the shot ricocheted far down the tunnel. The President cawed triumphantly. "We're gonna eat you," he said, very seriously.

"We're gonna eat your fuckin' livers." He lowered his voice. "Take 'em out, State."

Nora clawed past Paolo and screamed aloud. "Abelard! Abelard, it's true, I swear it by everything between us! Abelard, you're not stupid, let us live!

I want to live—"

Paolo clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her back. She clung to the barricade, now glued firm, staring down the hall. A white form was drifting there. A spacesuit. Not a Mavrides one, but one of the bloated armored ones from the Red Consensus.

Paolo's slingshot was useless against the suit. "This is it," he muttered.

"The cusp." He released Nora and pulled a candle and a flat bladder of liquid from within his blouse. He wrapped the bladder around the candle, cinching it with a sleeve-tie. He hefted the bomb. "Now they burn." Nora threw her sash around his neck. She put her good knee into his back and pulled savagely. Paolo made a sound like broken pipes and kicked away from the entrance. He clawed at the sash. He was strong. He was the one with luck. Nora pulled harder. Abelard was alive. The idea gave her strength. She pulled harder. Paolo was pulling just as hard. His fists were locked around the belt's gray fabric so hard that blood oozed from his nail-cut palms in little crescent blisters.

There were screams down the hall. Screams and the sound of the power saw.

And now the knot that had never left her shoulders had spread into her arms and Paolo was pulling against muscle that had set like iron. He was not breathing in the sudden silence that followed. The wrinkled ridge of the sash had vanished into his neck. He was dead, still pulling.

She let the ends of the sash slide through her cramped fingers. Paolo twisted slowly in free-fall, his face blackened, his arms locked in place. He seemed to be strangling himself.

A gauntleted hand, drenched in blood, came through the crescent hole at the side of the barricade. There was a muffled buzzing from within the spacesuit. He was trying to talk.

She rushed to his side. He leaned his head against the outside of the barricade, shouting within the helmet. "Dead!" he said. "They're dead!"

"Take off the helmet," she said.

He shrugged his right shoulder within the suit. "My arm!" he said. She stuck one hand through the crevice and helped him twist the helmet off. It popped free with a suck of air and the familiar reek of his body. There were half-dried scabs of blood under his nostrils and one in his left ear. He had been decompressed.

Carefully, she ran her hand across his sweating cheek. "We're alive, aren't we?"

"They were going to kill you," he said. "I couldn't let them."

"The same for me." She looked backward at Paolo. "It was like suicide to kill him. I think I'm dead."

"No. We belong to each other. Say so, Nora."

"Yes, we do," she said, and pressed her face blindly against the gap between them. He kissed her with the bright salt taste of blood. The demolition had been thorough. Kleo had finished the job. She had crept out in a spacesuit and soaked the inside of the Red Consensus with sticky contact venom.

But Lindsay had gone there before her. He had leaped the gap of naked space, decompressing himself, to get one of the armored spacesuits. He'd caught Kleo in the control room. In her thin suit she was no match for him; he'd ripped her suit open and she'd died of the poison.

Even the Family's robot had suffered. The two Reps had lobotomized it while passing through the decoy room. Operations by the launch ring ran at manic speed, the brain-stripped robot loading ton after ton of carbon ore into the overstuffed and belching wetware. A frothing mass of plastic output gushed into the launch ring, which was itself ruined by the skidding launch cage. But that was the least of their problems.

The worst was sepsis. The organisms brought from the Zaibatsu wreaked havoc on the delicate biosystems of esairs xii. Kleo's garden was a leprous parody five weeks after the slaughter.

The attenuated blossoms of the Shaper garden mildewed and crumbled at the touch of raw humanity. The vegetation took strange forms as it suffered and contorted, its stems corkscrewing in rot-dusted perversions of growth. Lindsay visited it daily, and his very presence hastened the corruption. The place smelled of the Zaibatsu, and his lungs ached with its nostalgic stench. He had brought it with him. No matter how fast he moved, he dragged behind him a fatal slipstream of the past.

He and Nora would never be free of it. It was not just the contagion, or his useless arm. Nor the galaxy of rashes that disfigured Nora for days, crusting her perfect skin and filling her eyes with flinty stoicism. It dated back to the training they had shared, the damage done to them. It made them partners, and Lindsay realized that this was the finest thing that life had ever offered him.

He thought about death as he watched the Shaper robot at its task. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, it loaded ore into the distended guts of the decoy wetware. After the two of them had smothered, this machine would continue indefinitely in its hyperactive parody of life. He could have shut it down, but he felt a kinship with it. Its headlong, blind persistence cheered him somehow. And the fact that it was pumping tons of frothing plastic into the launch ring, ruining it, meant that the pirates had won. He could not bear to rob them of that useless victory.

As the air grew fouler they were forced to retreat, sealing the tunnels behind them. They stayed near the last operative industrial gardens, shallowly breathing the hay-scented air, making love and trying to heal each other. With Nora, he reentered Shaper life, with its subtleties, its allusions, its painful brilliance. And slowly, with him, her sharpest edges were smoothed. She lost the worst kinks, the hardest knots, the most insupportable levels of stress.

They turned down the power so that the tunnels grew colder, retarding the spread of the contagion. At night they clung together for warmth, swaddled in a carpet-sized shroud that Nora compulsively embroidered. She would not give up. She had a core of unnatural energy that Lindsay could not match. For days she had worked on repairs in the radio room, though she knew it was useless.

Shaper Ring Security had stopped broadcasting. Their military outposts had become embarrassments. Mechanists were evacuating them and repatriating their Shaper crews to the Ring Council with exquisite diplomatic courtesy. There had never been any war. No one was fighting. The cartels were buying out their pirate clients and hastily pacifying them.

All this was waiting for them if they could only raise their voices. But their broadcast equipment was ruined; the circuits were irreplaceable, and the two of them were not technicians.

Lindsay had accepted death. No one would come for them; they would assume that the outpost was wiped out. Eventually, he thought, someone would check, but not for years.

One night, after making love, Lindsay stayed up, toying with the dead pirate's mechanical arm. It fascinated him, and it was a solace; by dying young, he thought, he had at least escaped this. His own right arm had lost almost all feeling. The nerves had deteriorated steadily since the incident with the gun, and his battle wounds had only hastened it.