Schismatrix plus (29 page)

"In the Rings they say he rules here."

"Of course they do; that's what I told them. Carnassus belongs to me. My surgeons have been at him. There's not a neuron in him that pleasure hasn't blasted. Life is simple for him, a constant dream of flesh." Lindsay looked about the room. "And you're his favorite."

"Would I tolerate anything else, darling?"

"You don't mind that other wives practice Zen Serotonin?"

"I don't care what they think or claim they think. They obey me. I'm not concerned with ideology. What concerns me is the future."

"Oh?"

"The day will come when we've squeezed everything we can out of Carnassus. And cryonic products will lose their novelty as the technology spreads."

"That might take years."

"It all takes years," she said. "And it's a question of years. The ship you arrived on has left circumsolar space."

"You're sure?" Lindsay said, stricken.

"That's what my databanks tell me. Who knows when they'll return?"

"It doesn't matter," Lindsay said. "I can wait."

"Twenty years? Thirty?"

"Whatever it takes," Lindsay said, though the thought suffocated him.

"By then Carnassus will be useless. I'll need a new front. And what could be better than an Investor Queen? It's a risk worth taking. You'll work on it for me. You and Wells."

"Of course, Kitsune."

"You'll have the support you need. But don't squander a kilowatt of it trying to save that woman."

"I'll try to think only of the future."

"Carnassus and I will need a safehouse. That will be your priority."

"Depend on it," said Lindsay. 'Carnassus and I,' he thought. DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 14-2-'58

Lindsay studied the latest papers from the peer review committee. He paged through the data expertly, devouring the abstracts, screen-scanning through paragraphs, highlighting the worst excesses of technical jargon. He worked with driven efficiency.

The credit went to Wells. Wells had placed him in the department chairmanship at the Kosmosity; Wells had put the editorship of the Journal of Exoarchosaurian Studies into his hands.

Routine had seized Lindsay. He welcomed the distractions of administration and research, which robbed him of the leisure necessary for pain. Within his office in the Crevasse, in an exurb of the newly completed Kosmosity, he wheeled in his low-grav swivel chair, chasing rumors, coaxing, bribing, trading information. Already the Journal was the largest unclassified databank on the Investors, and its restricted files mushroomed with speculation and espionage. Lindsay was at its core, working with the stamina of youth and the patience of age.

In the five years since Lindsay's arrival in Dembowska, he had watched Wells move from strength to strength. In the absence of a state ideology, the influence of Wells and his Carbon Clique spread throughout the colony, encompassing art, the media, and academic life.

Ambition was an endemic vice among Wells and his group. Lindsay had joined the Clique without much enthusiasm. With proximity, though, he had picked up their plans as if they were local bacteria. And their fashions as well: his hair was slickly brilliantined and his mustache was nicked for a paste-on microphone lip bead. He wore video-control rings on the wrinkled fingers of his left hand.

Work ate the years. Once time had seemed solid to him, dense as lead. Now it flowed through his hands. Lindsay saw that his perception of time was slowly coming to match that of the senior Shapers he'd known in Goldreich-Tremaine. To the truly old, time was as thin as air, a keening and destructive wind that erased their pasts and attacked their memories. Time was accelerating. Nothing could slow it down for him but death. He tasted this truth, and it was bitter as amphetamine.

He returned his attention to the paper; a reassessment of a celebrated Investor scale fragment found among the effects of a failed Mechanist interstellar embassy. Few bits of matter had ever been analyzed so exhaustively. The paper, "Proximo-Distal Gradients in Epidermal Cell Adhesiveness," came from a Shaper defector in Diotima Cartel. His desk rang. His visitor had arrived.

The unobtrusive guard systems in Lindsay's office showed Wells's characteristic touch. The visitor had been issued a stylish coronet, which had evolved from the much clumsier kill-clamp. A tiny red light, unseen by the guest himself, glowed on the man's forehead. It denoted the potential impact site for armaments, decently concealed in the ceiling.

"Professor Milosz?" The visitor's dress was odd. He wore a white formal suit with a ring-shaped open collar and accordioned elbows and knees.

"You're Dr. Morrissey? From the Concatenation?"

"From the Mare Serenitatis Republic," the man said. "Dr. Pongpianskul sent me."

"Pongpianskul is dead," Lindsay said.

"So they said." Morrissey nodded. "Killed on Chairman Constantine's orders. But the doctor had friends in the Republic. So many that he now controls the nation. His title is Warden, and the nation is reborn as the Neotenic Cultural Republic. I am the harbinger of the Revolution." He hesitated. "Maybe I should let Dr. Pongpianskul tell it." Lindsay was stunned. "Perhaps you should."

The man produced a videotablet and plugged it into his briefcase. He handed Lindsay the tablet, which flickered into life. It showed a face: Pongpi-anskul's. Pongpianskul brushed at his braids, disheveling them with leathery, wrinkled hands. "Abelard, how are you?"

"Neville. You're alive?"

"I'm still a tenant of the flesh, yes. Morrissey's briefcase is programmed with an interactive expert system. It ought to carry out a decent conversation with you, in my absence."

Morrissey cleared his throat. "These machines are new to me. I think, though, that I should let the two of you speak privately."

"That might be best."

"I'll wait in the lobby."

Lindsay watched the man's retreating back. Morrissey's clothes amazed him. Lindsay had forgotten that he'd ever dressed like that, in the Republic. He studied the tablet's screen. "You look well, Neville."

"Thank you. Ross arranged my last rejuvenation. By the Cataclysts. The same group that treated you, Mavrides."

"Treated me? They put me on ice."

"On ice? That's odd. The Cataclysts woke me up. I never felt so alive as when I was here in the Republic, pretending to be dead. It's been a long ten years, Abelard. Eleven, whatever." Pongpianskul shrugged. Lindsay Looked at the tablet. The image made no response to the Look, and the charm faded. Lindsay spoke slowly. "So you've attacked the Republic?

Through the Cataclyst terror networks?"

The tablet smiled Pongpianskul's smile. "The Cataclysts had their part in it, I admit. You would have appreciated this, Mavrides. I played off the youth element. There was a political group called the Preservationists, dating—oh, forty or fifty years back. Constantine used them to seize power, but they detested the Shapers as much as they did the Mechs. What they wanted, really, was a human life, droll as that might seem. Now there's a new generation of them, raised under Shaper influence and hating it. But thanks to Shaper breeding policies, the young hold a majority." Pongpianskul laughed. "Constantine used the Republic as a storehouse for Shaper militants. He made things here a muddle of subterfuge. When the war heated up, the militants rushed back to the Ring Council and Cataclyst Super-brights hid here instead. Constantine spent too much time in the Rings, and lost touch.. . . The Cataclysts like my notion of a cultural preserve. It's all down in the new Constitution. My messenger will give you a copy."

"Thank you."

"Things haven't gone well with the rest of the Midnight Clique.. . . It's been too long since we've talked. I tracked you down through your ex-wife."

"Alexandrina?"

"What?" The programmed system was confused; the persona flickered for a second's fraction. "It took some doing. Nora's under close surveillance."

"Just a moment." Lindsay rose from his chair and poured himself a drink. A cascade of memories from the Republic had rushed through him, and he'd thought automatically of his first wife, Alexandrina Tyler. But of course she was not in the Republic. She had been a victim of Constantine's purge, shipped out to the Zaibatsu.

He returned to the screen. It said, "Ross left for the cometaries when G-T crumbled. Fetzko has faded. Vetterling's in Skimmers Union, sucking up to the fascists. Ice assassins took Margaret Juliano. She's still awaiting the thaw. I have power here, Mavrides. But that can't make up for what we lost."

"How is Nora?" Lindsay said.

The false Pongpianskul looked grave. "She fights Constantine where he's strongest. If it weren't for her my coup here would have failed; she distracted him.... I'd hoped I could lure her here, and you as well. She was always so good to us. Our premier hostess."

"She wouldn't come?"

"She has remarried."

The slotted glass broke in Lindsay's iron hand. Blobs of liqueur drifted toward the floor.

"For political reasons," the screen continued. "She needs every ally she can find. Having you join me would have been difficult in any case. No one over sixty is allowed in the Neotenic Cultural Republic. Except for myself and my officers."

Lindsay yanked the cord from the tablet. He helped the small office servo pick up the shards of glass.

When he called Morrissey in again, much later, the man was diffident.

"Are you quite through, sir? I've been instructed to erase the tablet."

"It was kind of you to bring it." Lindsay gestured at a chair. "Thank you for waiting so long."

Morrissey wiped the construct's memory and put the tablet in his briefcase. He studied Lindsay's face. "I hope I haven't brought bad news."

"It's astonishing," Lindsay said. "Maybe we should have a drink to celebrate."

A shadow crossed Morrissey's face.

"Forgive me," Lindsay said. "Perhaps I was tactless." He put the bottle away. There was not much left.

"I'm sixty years old," Morrissey said. He sat uncomfortably. "So they ousted me. They were polite about it." He smiled painfully. "I was a Preservationist once. I was eighteen in the first Revolution. It's ironic, isn't it? Now I'm a sundog."

Lindsay said carefully, "I'm not without power here. And not without funds. Dembowska handles many refugees. I can find you room."

"You're very kind." Morrissey's face was stiff. "I worked as a biologist, on the nation's ecological troubles. Dr. Constantine trained me. But I'm afraid I'm very much behind the times."

"That can be remedied."

"I've brought an article for your Journal."

"Ah. You have an interest in Investors, Dr. Morrissey?"

"Yes. I hope my piece meets your standards."

Lindsay forced a smile. "We'll work on it together."

SHIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 13-5-'75

He could feel it coming on, creeping across the back of his head in a zone of quivering subepidermal tightness. A fugue state. The scene before him trembled slightly, the crowds below his private box blurring in a frieze of packed heads against dark finery, the rounded stage with actors in costume, dark red, gleaming, a gesture. It slowed—it froze:

Fear ... no, not even that, exactly ... a certain sadness now that the die was cast. The waiting was the hell of it... He had waited sixty years to resume his old contacts, the wirehead Radical Old of the Republic.... Now the wire-head leaders, like him, had worked their way to power in the worlds outside. Sixty years was nothing to a mind on the wires ... time meant nothing

... fugue states. . . . They still remembered him quite well, their friend, Philip Khouri Constantine. . . .

It was he who had sprung them loose, purging the middle-aged aristocrats to finance the wirehead defections.. . . Memories went back; they were data, that was all, just as fresh on reels somewhere as the enemy Margaret Juliano was on her bed of Cataclyst ice... . Even amid fugue the surge of satisfaction was quick and sharp enough to penetrate into consciousness from his back-brain. . .. That unique sense of warmth that came only from the downfall of a rival....

Now, trailing sluggishly behind his racing thoughts, the slow-motion blooming of a light tingle of fear. . . . Nora Everett, the wife of Abelard Mavrides.... She had hurt him seventeen years ago with the coup in the Republic, though he was able to entangle her in charges of treason. . . . The tinpot Republic was of no concern to him now, its willfully ignorant child-citizens flying kites and eating apples under the crazed charlatan gaze of Dr. Pong-pianskul.... No problem there, the future would ignore them, they were living fossils, harmless in themselves....

But the Cataclysts ... the fear was resolving itself now, beginning to flower, its first dim shades of backbrain unease taking on emotional substance now, uncoiling through his consciousness like a drop of ink streaming into a glass of water.... He would see to his emotions later when the fugue was over; now he was struggling to shut his eyes ... focus was lost, dim tear-blur over frozen performers; his eyelids were dropping with nightmare sluggishness, nerve impulses confused by the racing fugue-consciousness. . . . The Cataclysts, though.... They took it all as an enormous joke, enjoyed hiding in the Republic disguised as plebes and farmers, the huge panorama interior of the cylindrical world as weird to them as a trace dose of their favorite drug, PDKL-95.... The Cataclyst mind-set fed on correspondences and poetic justice, a trip to the human past in the Neotenic Republic the inverse of an ice assassination, with its one-way ticket to the future....

The fugue was about to break. He felt a strange cracking sensation of psychic upheaval, mental crust giving way before the upsurge. In the last microseconds of fugue an eidetic flash seized him, surveyor photos from the surface of Titan, red volcanic shelves of heavy hydrocarbon split by ammonia lava, bursting from the depths ... from Titan, far below their orbit, prime wall-decor in Skimmers Union....

Gone. Constantine leaned forward in his box seat, clearing his throat. Delayed fear swept over him; he pushed it brusquely away, had a light sniff of acetaminophen to avert migraine. He glanced at his wristwatch through damp lashes. Four seconds of fugue.