Schismatrix plus (20 page)

"Those damned guns," he said aloud. "Someone will find this place someday. We ought to tear those fucking guns apart, to show the world that we had decency. I'd do it but I can't bear to touch them." Nora was drowsy. "So what? They don't work."

"Sure, they're disarmed." That had been one of his triumphs. "But they could be armed again. They're evil, darling. We should smash them."

"If you care that much ..." Nora's eyes opened. "Abelard. What if we fired one?"

"No," he said at once.

"What if we blew up the Consensus with the particle beam? Someone would see."

"See what? That we were criminals?"

"In the past it would just be dead pirates. Business as usual. But now it would be a scandal. Someone would have to come after us. To see that it never happened again."

"You'd risk this facade of peace that they're showing the aliens? Just on the chance that someone would rescue us? Fire, imagine what they'd do to us when they came."

"What? Kill us? We're dead already. I want us to live."

"As criminals? Despised by everyone?"

Nora smiled bitterly. "That's nothing new for me."

"No, Nora. There are limits."

She caressed him. "I understand."

Two nights later he woke in terror as the asteroid shook. Nora was gone. At first he thought it was a meteor strike, a rare but terrifying event. He listened for the hiss of blowout, but the tunnels were still sound. When he saw Nora's face he realized the truth. "You fired the gun." She was shaken. "I cast the Consensus loose before I shot it. I went out on the surface. There's something weird there, Abelard. Plastic has been leaking oat of the launch ring into space."

"I don't want to hear about it."

"I had to do it. For us. Forgive me, darling. I swear I'll never deceive you again."

He brooded. "You think they'll come?"

"It's a chance. I wanted a chance for us." She was distracted. "Tons of plastic. Squeezing out like paste. Like a huge worm."

"An accident," Lindsay said. "We'll have to tell them that it was an accident."

"I'll destroy the gun now." She looked at him guiltily.

"What's done is done." He smiled sadly and reached toward her. "Let it wait."

ESAIRS XII: 17-7-'17

Somewhere in his dreams Lindsay heard a repeated pounding. As always, Nora woke first and was instantly alert. "Noise, Abelard." Lindsay woke painfully, his eyelids gummy. "What is it? A blowout?" She slipped out of the sheets, launching herself off his hip with one bare foot. She hit the lights. "Get up, darling. Whatever it is, we're meeting it head on."

It was not the way Lindsay would have preferred to meet death but he was willing to go along with her. He pulled on drawstring pants and a poncho.

"There's no breeze," she said as he struggled with a complex Shaper knot. "It's not decompression."

"Then it's a rescue! The Mechs!"

They hurried through darkened tunnels to the airlock.

One of their rescuers—he must have been a courageous one—had managed to force his vast bulk through the airlock and into the loading room. He was picking fussily at the huge birdlike toes of his spacesuit as Lindsay peered out of the access tunnel, squinting and shielding his eyes. The alien had a powerful searchlight mounted on the nasal bridge of his cavernous spacesuit helmet. The light gushing from it was as vivid as a welding torch: harsh and electric blue, heavily tinged with ultraviolet. The spacesuit was brown and gray, dotted with input sockets and accordion-ribbed around the alien's joints.

The light swept across them and Lindsay squinted, averting his face.

"You may call me the Ensign," the alien said in trade English. He politely aligned himself with their vertical axis, stretching overhead to finger-walk along the wall.

Lindsay put his hand on Nora's forearm. "I'm Abelard," he said. "This is Nora."

"How do you do? We want to discuss this property." The alien reached into a side pocket and pulled out a wad of tissue. He shook it out with a quick bird-like motion, and it became a television. He put the screen against the wall. Lindsay, watching carefully, saw that the television had no scan lines. The image was formed in millions of tiny colored hexagons. The image was esairs xii. Bursting from the launch ring's exit hole was an extruded tube of foamed plastic almost half a kilometer long. There was a rough knob at the tip of the wormlike coil. Lindsay realized with instantly smothered shock that it was Paolo's stone head, neatly framed in the flowerlike wreckage of the launch cage. The entire mass had been smoothly embedded in the decoy complex's leakage of plastic, then squeezed out under pressure into a coiling helical arc.

"I see," Lindsay said.

"Are you the artist?"

"Yes," Lindsay said. He pointed at the screen. "Notice the subtle shading effect where our recent blast darkened the sculpture."

"We noticed the explosion," the alien said. "An unusual artistic technique."

"We are unusual," Lindsay said. "We are unique."

"I agree," the Ensign said politely. "We seldom see work on this scale. Do you accept negotiations for purchase?"

Lindsay smiled. "Let's talk."

Community and Anarchy

By fits and starts the world entered a new age. The aliens benignly accepted a semidivine mystique. Millennial fervor swept the System. Detente came into vogue. People began to speak, for the first time, of the Schismatrix—-of a posthuman solar system, diverse yet unified, where tolerance would rule and every faction would have a share.

The aliens—they called themselves the Investors—seemed unlimited in power. They were ancient, so old that they remembered no tradition earlier than starflight. Their mighty starships ranged a vast economic realm, buying and selling among nineteen other intelligent races. Obviously they possessed technologies so potent that, if they chose, they could shatter the narrow world a hundred times over. Humanity rejoiced that the aliens seemed so serenely affable. The goods they offered were almost always harmless, often artworks of vast academic interest and surprisingly small practicality. Human wealth poured into the alien coffers. Tiny embassies traveled to the stars in Investor ships. They failed to accomplish much, and they remained tiny, because the Investors charged fares that were astronomical. The Investors recycled the riches they tapped from the human economy. They bought into human enterprises. With a single technological novelty from one of their packed holds, the aliens could transform a flagging industry into a rocketing growth stock. Factions competed wildly for their favor. And uncooperative worlds soon learned how easily they could be outflanked and rendered obsolete.

Trade flourished in the new Investor Peace. Open warfare became vulgar, replaced by the polite covertness of rampant industrial espionage. With each new year, a golden age seemed just out of reach. And the years passed, and passed.

GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 3-4-'37

The crowd pleased Lindsay. People filled the air around him: colored jackets with a froth of lace, legs in patterned stockings with sleek five-toed foot-gloves. The air in the theatre lobby reeked of Shaper perfumes. Lindsay lounged against one patterned velvet wall, his jacketed elbow hooked through a mooring-loop. He dressed in the cutting edge of fashion: sea-green brocade jacket, green satin kneelongs, stockings pinstriped in yellow. His feet were elegantly gloved for free-fall. A gold-chained video monocle gleamed in his waistcoat.

Braids interlaced with yellow cord bound his long, graying hair. Lindsay was fifty-one. Among the Shapers he passed for one much older—

some genetic from the dawn of Shaper history. There were many such in Gold-reich-Tremaine, one of the oldest Shaper city-states in the Rings of Saturn.

A Mechanist emerged into the lobby from the theatre. He wore a ribbed one-piece suit in tasteful mahogany brown. He noticed Lindsay and kicked off from the doorway, floating toward him.

Lindsay reached out in friendly fashion and stopped the man's momentum. Beneath his sleeve, Lindsay's prosthetic right arm whined slightly with the movement. "Good evening, Mr. Beyer."

The handsome Mechanist nodded and took a mooring-loop. "Good evening, Dr. Mavrides. Always a pleasure."

Beyer was with the Ceres Legation. He was Undersecretary for Cultural Affairs, a colorless title meant to camouflage his affiliation with Mech intelligence.

"I don't often see you during this day-shift, Mr. Beyer."

"I'm slumming," Beyer said comfortably. Life in Goldreich-Tremaine ran around the clock; the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight, was the loosest and least policed. A Mechanist could mingle during the graveyard shift without attracting stares.

"Are you enjoying the play, sir?"

"A triumph. As good as Ryumin, I'd say. This author—Fernand Vetter-ling—his work is new to me."

"He's a local youngster. One of our best."

"Ah. One of your proteges. I appreciate his Detentiste sentiments. We're having a little soiree at the Embassy later this week. I'd like to meet Mr. Vetter-ling. To express my admiration."

Lindsay smiled evasively. "You're always welcome at my home, Mr. Beyer. Nora speaks of you often."

"How flattering. Colonel-Doctor Mavrides is a charming hostess." Beyer hid his disappointment, but his kinesics showed signs of impatience. Beyer wanted to leave, to touch base with some other social doyen. Lindsay bore him no resentment for it; it was the man's job. Lindsay himself held a rank in Security. He was Captain-Doctor Abelard Mavrides, an instructor in Investor sociology at Goldreich-Tremaine Kosmosity. Even in these days of the Investor Peace, a rank in Security was mandatory for those in the Shaper academic-military complex. Lindsay played the game, as they all did.

In his role as theatrical manager, Lindsay never alluded to his rank. But Beyer was well aware of it, and only the grease of diplomatic politesse allowed them to be friends.

Beyer's light-blue eyes scanned the crowded lobby, and his face stiffened. Lindsay followed the man's gaze.

Beyer had spotted someone. Lindsay sized the man up at once: microphone lip bead, ear-clasp audiophones, clothing that lacked finesse. A bodyguard. And not a Shaper: the man's hair was sleeked back with antiseptic oils, and his face lacked Shaper symmetry.

Lindsay reached for his video monocle, fitted it to his right eye, and began filming.

Beyer noticed the gesture and smiled with a hint of sourness. "There are four of them," he said. "Your production has attracted a man of distinction."

"They look like Concatenates," Lindsay said.

"A state visit," Beyer said. "He is here incognito. It's the head of state from the Mare Serenitatis Republic. Chairman Philip Khouri Constantine." Lindsay turned aside. "I don't know the gentleman."

"He is not a friend of Detente," Beyer said. "I know him only by reputation. I can't introduce you."

Lindsay moved along the wall, keeping his back to the crowd. "I must visit my office. Will you join me for a smoke?"

"Lung-smoking?" Beyer said. "I never acquired the habit."

"Then you must excuse me." Lindsay fled.

"After twenty years," said Nora Mavrides. She sat before her console, her Security jacket thrown carelessly over her shoulders, a black cape over her amber-colored blouse.

"What's possessed him?" Lindsay demanded. "Isn't the Republic enough for him?"

Nora thought aloud. "The militants must have brought him here. They need him to back their cause here in the capital. He has prestige. And he's no Deten-tiste."

"That's plausible," Lindsay said, "but only if you turn it around. The militants think Constantine is their pet unplanned, their loyal general, but they don't know his ambitions. Or his potential. He's manipulated them."

"Did he see you?"

"I don't think so. I don't think he would have recognized me if he had." Lindsay stuck his spoon moodily into a carton of medicinal yogurt. "My age disguises me."

"My heart sank when I saw the film from your monocle. Abelard, these years, they've been so good to us. If he knew who you were, he could ruin us."

"Not completely." Lindsay forced himself to eat, grimacing. The yogurt was a special preparation for non-Shapers whose intestines had been rendered antiseptic. It was bitter with digestive enzymes. "Constantine could denounce me. But what if he does? We'd still have the aliens. The Investors don't give a damn about my genetics, my training.... The aliens could be our refuge."

"We should attack Constantine. He's a killer."

"We're not the ones to talk on that score, darling." Lindsay gripped the carton with his mechanical hand; its thin walls buckled precisely. "I always meant to avoid him if I could. It was something I fell into, a roll of the dice...."

"Don't talk that way. As if it were something we can't help." Lindsay drummed his iron fingers. Even the arm was part of his disguise. The antique prosthetic had once belonged to the Chief Justice, and Lindsay's affectation of it hinted at great age.

On the wall of Nora's office, a huge satellite telephoto of the Saturnian surface crawled slowly, red winds interlacing streams of muddy gold.

"We could leave," Lindsay said. "There are other Council States. Kirkwood Gap's all right. Cassini-Kluster."

"And give up everything we've built here?"

Lindsay watched the screen abstractly. "You're all I want."

"I want that tenure, Abelard. That Colonel-Professorship. If we go, what about the children? What about our Clique? They depend on us."

"You're right. This is our home."

"You're making too much of this," Nora said. "He'll return to the Republic soon. If Goldreich-Tremaine weren't the capital now, he wouldn't be here."

Children laughed in the next room; from her console, Nora turned down the audio. Lindsay said, "There's a horror between Philip and myself. We know too much about each other."

"Don't be a fatalist, darling. I'm not going to sit with folded hands while some unplanned upstart attacks my husband."

Nora left her console and walked across to him. A centrifugal half-gravity tugged at her skirt and sleeve laces. Lindsay pulled her into his lap and ran his human hand across the serpentine curls of her hair. "Let him be, Nora. Otherwise it will come to killing again."