Schismatrix plus (28 page)

"Beatty. She hasn't told you about her cult affiliation? Zen Serotonin?"

"No," Lindsay hesitated. "She seems very self-possessed."

"Odd. I understand the cult is well established in your homeworld. Bettina, wasn't it?"

Lindsay locked eyes with him. "You know me, Wells. Think back. Gold-reich-Tremaine."

Wells smirked one-sidedly and squeezed his bulb of tea, firing an amber stream into his mouth. His teeth were strong and square, and the effect was alarmingly feral. "I thought you had a Shaper look about you. If you're a Cata-clyst, don't try anything desperate under the eyes of the Chief of Police."

"I was a Cataclyst victim," Lindsay said. "They put me on ice for a month. It broke me out of my routines. And then I defected." He pulled the glove from his right hand.

Wells recognized the antique prosthetic. "Captain-Doctor Mavrides. This is an unexpected pleasure. Rumor said you were hopelessly insane. Frankly, the news had pleased me. Abelard Mavrides, the Investor pet. What's become of your jewels and cables, Captain-Doctor?"

"I travel light these days."

"No more plays?" Wells opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a humidor. He offered Lindsay a cigarette. Lindsay took it gratefully. "The theatre's out of fashion," he said. They lit up. Lindsay coughed helplessly.

"I must have annoyed you at that wedding party, doctor. When I came in to recruit your students."

"They were the ideologues, Wells, not me. I was afraid for you."

"You needn't have been." Wells blew smoke and smiled. "Your student Be-setzny is one of ours now."

"A Detentiste?"

"Our thinking's progressed since then, doctor. The old categories, Mechanist and Shaper—they're a bit outmoded these days, aren't they? Life moves in clades." He smiled. "A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It's happened to other successful animals, and now it's humanity's turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists."

"You're talking Cataclysm."

"There are others just as crazy. Those who hold power in the Cartels, in the Ring Council. Blinding the Schismatrix with hatred is easier than accepting our potentials. Our missions to the aliens have failed because we can't even deal with the strangers who share our own ancestry. We are breaking up into clades. We have to let go and reunite on a more basic level."

"If humankind flies to pieces, what could possibly unite it?" Wells glanced at his videowall and froze a piece of news with his finger ring. "Have you ever heard of Prigoginic Levels of Complexity?" Lindsay's heart sank. "I've never been one for metaphysics, Wells. Your religious beliefs are your own business. I had a woman who loved me and a safe place to sleep. The rest is abstract."

Wells examined his wall. Print blurred by, discussing a scandalous defection on Ceres. "Oh yes, your Colonel-Professor. I can't help you with that. You need a kidnapper to spirit her out. You won't find one here. You should try Ceres or Bettina."

"My wife's a stubborn woman. Like you, she has ideals. Only peace can reunite us. And there's only one source of peace in our world. That's the Investors."

Wells laughed shortly. "Still the same line, Captain-Doctor?" Suddenly he spoke in halting Investor. "The value of your argument has depreciated."

"They have their weaknesses, Wells." His voice rose. "Do you think I'm any less desperate than the Cataclysts? Ask your friend Ryumin if I know weakness when I see it, or if I lack the will to exploit it. The Investor Peace: yes, I had a hand in that. It gave me what I wanted. I was a whole man. You can't know what that meant to me—" He broke off, sweating even in the cold.

Wells looked shocked. Lindsay realized suddenly that his outburst had broken every diplomatic rule. The thought filled him with savage satisfaction.

"You know the truth, Wells. We've been Investor pawns for years. It's time we turned the chessboard around."

"You mean to attack the Investors?" Wells said.

"What else, fool? What choice do we have?"

A woman's voice came from the base of the lamp. "Abelard Mavrides, you are under arrest."

* * *

The elevator car hissed shut behind him. False gravity hit as they accelerated upward. "Put your hands against the wall, please," Greta said politely. "Move your feet backward."

Lindsay complied, saying nothing. The old-fashioned elevator clacked noisily on rails up the vertical wall of the Dembowska Crevasse. Two kilometers passed. Greta sighed. "You must have done something drastic."

"That's not your worry," Lindsay said.

"To go by the book, I ought to cut the cables on your iron arm. But I'll let it go. This is my fault too, I think. If I'd made you feel more at home you wouldn't have been so fanatic."

"No weapons in my arm," Lindsay said. "Surely you examined it while I slept."

"I don't understand this hard suspicion, Bela. Have I mistreated you somehow?"

"Tell me about Zen Serotonin, Greta."

She straightened slightly. "I'm not ashamed of belonging to the Nonmove-ment. I would have told you, but we don't proselytize. We win over by exam-pie."

"Very laudable, I'm sure."

She frowned. "In your case I should have made an exception. I'm sorry for your pain. I knew pain once." Lindsay said nothing. "I was born on Themis," she said. "I knew some Cataclysts there, one of the Mechanist factions. They were ice assassins. The military found one of their cryocells, where they were enlightening one of my teachers with a one-way ticket to the future. I didn't wait for arrest. I ran to Dembowska.

"When I got here the Harem drafted me. I found out I had to whore to Car-nassus. I didn't take to it. But then I found Zen Serotonin."

"Seretonin's a brain chemical," Lindsay said.

"It's a philosophy," she said. "The Shapers, the Mechanists—those aren't philosophies, they're technologies made into politics. The technologies are at the core of it. Science tore the human race to bits. When anarchy hit, people struggled for community. The politicians chose enemies so that they could bind their followers with hate and terror. Community isn't enough when a thousand new ways of life beckon from every circuit and test tube. Without hatred there is no Ring Council, no Union of Cartels. No conformity without the whip."

"Life moves in clades," Lindsay murmured.

"That's Wells with his mishmash of physics and ethics. What we need is nonmovement, calmness, clarity." She stretched out her left arm. "This monitor drip-feeds into my arm. Fear means nothing to me. With this, there's nothing I can't face and analyze. With Zen Serotonin you see life in the light of reason. People turn to us, especially in crisis. Every day the Nonmovement wins more adherents."

Lindsay thought of the brainwaves he had seen in his safehouse bed.

"You're in a permanent alpha state, then."

"Of course."

"Do you ever dream?"

"We have our vision. We can see the new technologies that disrupt human life. We throw ourselves into those currents. Perhaps each one of us is no more than a particle. But together we form a sediment that slows the flow. Many innovators are profoundly unhappy. After Zen Serotonin they lose their neurotic urge to meddle."

Lindsay smiled grimly. "It was no accident that you were assigned my case."

"You are a profoundly unhappy man. It's brought this trouble on you. The Nonmovement has a strong voice in the Harem. Join us. We can save you."

"I had happiness once, Greta. You'll never know it."

"Violent emotion isn't our forte, Bela. We're trying to save the human race."

"Good luck," Lindsay said. They had reached the end of the line. The old acromegalic stepped back to admire his handiwork. "Strap is all right, sundog? You can breathe?"

Lindsay nodded. The kill-clamp dug painfully into the base of his skull.

"It reads the backbrain," the giant said. Growth hormones had distorted his jaw; he had a bulldog's underbite and his voice was slurred. "Remember to shuffle. No sudden movements. Don't think about moving fast, and your head will stay whole."

"How long have you been in this business?" Lindsay said.

"Long enough."

"Are you part of the Harem?"

The giant glared. "Sure, I fuck Carnassus, what do you think?" His enormous hand grasped Lindsay's entire face. "You ever see your own eyeball?

Maybe I pull one out. The Chief can graft you a new one." Lindsay flinched. The giant grinned, revealing poorly spaced teeth. "I see your type before. You are a Shaper antibiotic. Your type tricked me once. Maybe you think you can trick the clamp. Maybe you think you can kill the Chief without moving. Keep in mind you must get by me on the way out." He gripped the top of Lindsay's head and lifted him off the velcro. "Or maybe you think I'm stupid."

Lindsay spoke in trade Japanese. "Save it for the whores, yakuza. Or maybe your excellency would care to take this clamp off and go hand to hand." The giant laughed, startled, and set Lindsay down carefully. "Sorry, friend. Didn't know you were one of our own."

Lindsay stepped through the airlock. Inside, the air was at blood heat. It reeked of perfumed sweat and the odor of violets. The brittle whine of a synthesizer broke off suddenly.

The room was full of flesh. It was made of it: satiny brown skin, broken here and there by rugs of lustrous black hair and mauve flashes of mucus membrane. Everything was involuted, curved: armchair lounges, a rounded mass like a bed of flesh, studded with mauve holes. Blood thrummed through a pipe-sized artery beneath his feet.

Another hooded lamp-device swiveled up on a sleek-skinned elbowed hinge. Dark eyes observed him. A mouth opened in the sleek rump of a footstool beside him. "Take off those velcro boots, darling. They itch." Lindsay sat down. "It's you, Kitsune."

"You knew when you saw my eyes in Wells's office," the voice purred from the wall.

"Not till I saw your bodyguard, really. It's been a long time. Sorry about the boots." He sat and pulled them off carefully, masking his shudder at the sensual warmth of the fleshy armchair. "Where are you?"

"All around you. I have eyes and ears everywhere."

"Where's your body?"

"I had it scrapped."

Lindsay was sweating. After four weeks in the Dembowska chill, the heated air was stifling. "You knew it was me?"

"You're the only one I cared to keep who ever left me, darling. I wasn't likely to forget."

"You've done well, Kitsune," Lindsay said, masking his terror under a sudden onrush of half-forgotten discipline. "Thank you for killing the antibiotic."

"It was easy," she said. "I pretended he was you." She hesitated. "The Geisha Bank believed your deception. It was thoughtful of you to take the yarite's head."

"I wanted to make you a parting gift," Lindsay said carefully, "of absolute power." He looked at the sleek masses of flesh. There was no face anywhere. From the walls and floors came the syncopated muffled thumping of half a dozen hearts.

"Were you upset because I wanted power more than you?" His mind raced. "You've gained in wisdom since those days. Yes, I admit it. The day would have come when you chose between me and your ambitions. And I knew which one you'd choose. Was I wrong to leave?" There was silence for a moment; then several of the mouths in the room laughed. "You could make anything plausible, darling. That was your gift. No, I've had many favorites since then. You were a good weapon, but I've had others. I forgive you."

"Thank you, Kitsune."

"You may consider yourself no longer under arrest."

"You're very generous."

"Now, what's this craziness about the Investors? Don't you know how the System depends on them now? Any faction that crosses the Investors might as well cut their own throats."

"I had in mind something more subtle. I thought we might persuade them to cross themselves."

"Meaning?"

"Blackmail."

Some of the mouths laughed uneasily. "In what form, darling?"

"Sexual perversion."

The eyes swiveled up on their organic mounting. Lindsay saw the wideness of their pupils, his first kinesic clue, and knew he had struck home. "You have the evidence?"

"I'd hand it over at once," Lindsay said, "but this clamp constrains me."

"Take it off. I've neutralized it."

Lindsay unbuckled the kill-clamp and set it gently on the chair's quivering arm. He walked toward the bed in his socks. He produced the videomonocle from within his shirt.

Dark eyes opened within the headboard. A pair of sleek arms emerged through soft furred slots. An arm took the monocle and placed it over one eye. Lindsay said, "I've set it to the beginning of the sequence."

"But that's not the beginning of the tape."

"The first part is—"

"Yes," she said icily. "I see. Your wife?"

"Yes."

"No matter. If she'd come with you, things might have been different. But now she's crossed Constantine."

"You know him?"

"Of course. He crowded the Zaibatsu with the victims of his purge. The Shapers are proud, in the Ring Council. They'll never believe an unplanned can match them scheme for scheme. Your wife is a dead woman."

"There might be—"

"Forget it. You had your years of peace. The next are his. Ah." She hesitated. "This was taken aboard an Investor starship? The one that brought you here?"

"Yes. I filmed it myself."

"Ahh." The moan was purely sensual. One of the room's huge hearts was under the bed; its pulse had speeded. "It's their queen, their captain. Oh, these Investor women and their harem rule, what a pleasure it is to have beaten one. The filthy creature. Oh, what a joy you are, Lin Dze, Mavrides, Milosz."

Lindsay said, "My name is Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay."

"I know. Constantine told me. And I convinced him you were dead."

"Thank you, Kitsune."

"What do names mean to us? They call me the Chief of Police. The control is what matters, darling, not the front. You fooled the Shapers in the Ring Council. The Mechanists were my prey. I moved to the Cartels. I watched, I waited. Then one day I found Carnassus. The last survivor of his mission." She laughed lightly, the high-pitched skipping laugh he once had known so well. "The Mechs sent out their best. But they were too strong, too stiff, too brittle. The strangeness of it broke them, and the isolation. Carnassus had to kill the other two, and he still wakes up screaming because of it. Yes, even in this room. His company was bankrupted. I bought him, and all his strange booty, from the wreckage."