Schismatrix plus (30 page)

He wiped his eyes, became aware of his wife sitting beside him, her finely chiseled Shaper face a study in surprise. Was she aware that he had been sitting rapt for four seconds with his eyes showing only a rim of white?

No. She thought he was touched by the play, was startled to see this excess of emotion in her iron-hard husband. Constantine favored her with a smile. Her color heightened; she leaned forward in her seat, her jeweled hands in her lap, studying the play alertly. Later she would try to discuss it with him. Natalie Constantine was young and bright, the scion of a military gene-line. She had grown used to his demands.

Not like his first wife, the treasonous bitch.... He had left the old aristocrat in the Republic, having nurtured her vicious streak patiently until his own coup allowed him to turn it against her peers. Now rumor said she was Pongpi-anskul's lover, won over by fraudulent Shaper charm and degraded senile intimacy. No matter, no matter. Long years had taken the sting from it; tonight's stroke, if it came, was more important than any circumlunar moondock.

His nine-year-old daughter, Vera, leaned in her seat to whisper to Natalie. Constantine gazed at the child he had built. Half her genetics were Vera Kel-land's, drawn from skin flakes he had taken before the woman's suicide. For years he had treasured the stolen genes, and when the time was ripe he had brought them to flower in this child. She was his favorite, the first of his progeny. When he thought how his own failure might doom her, he felt the fear again, sharper than before, because it was not for himself. An extravagant gesture from the stage caught his attention, a brief flurry of stilted action as the deranged Superbright villain clutched his head and fell. Con-stantine surreptitiously scratched his ankle with the sole of his foot-glove. Over the years his skin virus had improved, limited to dry outbreaks of shingles at his extremities.

The play was one of Zeuner's, and it bored him. Skimmers Union had caught the habit from Goldreich-Tremaine, bolstered by dramatists fleeing the crippled ex-capital. But the modern theatre was lifeless. Fernand Vetterling, for instance, author of The While Periapsis and The Technical Advisor, languished in sullen silence with his disgraced Mavrides wife. Other artists with Detentiste leanings now paid for their indiscretion with fines or house arrest. Some had defected, others had "gone undertime" to join the Cataclyst action brigades in the graveyard dayshifts.

But the Cataclysts were losing cohesion, becoming mere terrorists. Their Superbright elite was under severe attack. The pogrom on the Superbrights was increasingly thorough as hysteria mounted. Their promoters and educators were now political nonpersons, many having fallen to the twisted vengeance of the Superbrights themselves.

The Superbrights were too brilliant for community; they demanded the world-shattering anarchy of supermen. That could not be tolerated. And Con-stantine had served that intolerance. Life had never looked better for him: high office, his own Constantine gene-line, a free hand for anti-Mech adventurism, and his own barbed nets poised for disloyalty. And tonight he had risked it all. Would his news ever come? How would he hear it? From his bodyguards, through the earpiece? Through the stolen Mech implants in his own brain, that opened internal channels to the thin data-whispers of the wireheads? Or something was happening. The banner-waving choreography on the curved stage disintegrated in sudden confusion, the colored corporate logos and gene-line insignia slowing and tangling. The dancers fell back in chaos in response to shouted orders. Someone was floating to the edge of the podium. It was the wretched Charles Vetterling, his aged face bloated with triumph and a lackey's self-importance.

This was it. Vetterling was shouting. The play's leading man gave him a throat mike. Vetterling's voice roared suddenly in thudding feedback.

"... of the War! Mech markets are in panic! The asteroid Nysa has declared for the Ring Council! I repeat, the Nysa Cartel has abandoned the Mechanist Union! They have asked for admittance as a Ring Council Treaty State! The Council is meeting...." His words were drowned in the roar from the audience, the clatter of buckles as they unstrapped from their seats and rose in confusion.

Vetterling struggled with the mike. Patches of his words broke the din.

". . . capitulation . . . through banks in Skimmers Union . . . industrial . .

. new victory!"

It started among the actors. The leading man was pointing above the heads of the audience at Constantine's box, shouting fiercely at the rest of the cast. One of the women began applauding. Then it spread. The whole cast was applauding, their faces alight. Vetterling heard them behind him, turned to look. He grasped things at once, and a stiff smile spread over his face. He pointed dramatically. "Constantine! he shouted. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Chancellor-General!"

Constantine rose to his feet, gripping the iron banister behind the transparent shield. When they saw him the crowd exploded, a free-fall maelstrom of shouts and applause. They knew it was his triumph. The joy of it overwhelmed them, the brief bright release from the dark tension of the War. If he'd failed, they would have hounded him to death with the same passion. But that dark knowledge had been blasted by victory. Because he'd won, now the risk he'd run only sharpened his delight.

He turned to his wife. Her eyes brimmed over with tears of pride. Slowly, not leaving the banister, he extended his hand to her. When their fingers touched he read her face. He saw the truth there. From this night on his dominion over her was total.

She took her place beside him. Vera tugged his sleeve, her eyes wide. He lifted her up, cradling her in his left arm. His lips touched her ear.

"Remember this," he whispered fiercely.

The anarchic shouts died down as another rhythm spread. It was the rhythm of applause, the long, cadenced, ritual applause that followed every session of the Ring Council itself, ageless, solemn, overwhelming applause, applause that brooked no dissent. The music of power. Constantine raised his wife's hand above their heads and closed his eyes.

It was the happiest moment of his life.

DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 15-5-'75

Lindsay was playing keyboards for the sake of his new arm. It was much more advanced than his old one, and the fine discrimination of its nerve signals confused him. As he ran through the composition, one of Kitsune's, he felt each key click down with a brief muddled sensation of sharp heat. He rested, rubbing his hands together. A pins-and-needles tingling ran up the wires. The new hand was densely honeycombed with fingertip sensors. They were much more responsive than his old arm's feedback pads. The change had jarred him. He looked about his desolate apartment. In twenty-two years it had never been anything more to him than a place to camp. The apartment's fashions, its ribbed wallpaper and skeletal chairs, were two decades out of date. Only the security systems, Wells's latest, had any touch of the mode.

Lindsay himself had gone stale. At ninety, grooves marked his eyes and mouth from decades of habitual expression. His hair and beard were sprinkled with gray.

He was improving at the keyboards. He had attacked the problem of music with his usual inhuman steadiness. For years he had worked hard enough to kill himself, but modern biomonitoring technique saw each breakdown coming and averted it months ahead of time. The bed took care of that, feeding him subterranean flashes of intense and blurry dream that left him each morning blank and empty with perfect mental health.

Eighteen years had passed since his wife's remarriage. The pain of it had never fully hit him. He'd known her present husband briefly in the Council: Graham Everett, a colorless Detentiste with powerful clan connections. Nora used Everett's influence to parry the attacks of militants. It was sad: Lindsay didn't remember the man well enough to hate him. Warnings cut short his playing. Someone had arrived at his entry hall. The scanners there assured him that the visitor, a woman, bore only harmless Mechanist implants: plaque-scraping arterial microbots, old-fashioned teflon kneecaps, plastic knuckles, a porous drug duct in the crook of the left elbow. Much of her hair was artificial, implanted strands of shining optical fibers. He had his household servo escort the woman in. She had the strange complexion common to many older Mechanist women, smooth unblemished skin like a perfectly form-fitted paper mask. Her red hair was shot through with copper highlights from the fiberoptics. She wore a sleeveless gray suit, furred vest, and elbow-length white thermal gloves. "Auditor Milosz?" She had a Concatenate accent. He ushered her to the couch. She sat gracefully, her movements honed to precision by age. "Yes, madam. What may I do for you?"

"Forgive me for intruding, Auditor. My name is Tyler. I'm a clerk with Limonov Cryonics. But my business here is personal. I've come to ask your help. I've heard of your friendship with Neville Pongpianskul."

"You're Alexandrina Tyler," Lindsay realized aloud. "From Mare Serenita-tis. The Republic."

She looked surprised and lifted her thin, arched brows. "You already know my case, Auditor?"

"You"—Lindsay sat down in the stirruped chair—"would like a drink, perhaps?" She was his first wife. From some deeply buried level of reflex he felt the stirrings of a long-dead persona, the brittle layer of false kinesics he had put between them in their marriage. Alexandrina Tyler, his wife, his mother's cousin.

"No, thank you," she said. She adjusted the fabric over her knees. She'd always had trouble with her knees; she'd had the teflon put in in the Republic.

Her familiar gesture brought it all back to him: the marriage politics of the Republic's aristocrats. She had been fifty years his senior, their marriage a stifling net of strained politeness and grim rebellion. Lindsay was ninety now, older than she had been at their marriage. With a flood of new perspective, he could taste the long-forgotten pain that he had caused her.

"I was born in the Republic," she said. "I lost my citizenship in the Shaper purges, almost fifty years ago. I loved the Republic, Auditor. I've never forgotten it. ... I came from one of the privileged familes, but I thought, perhaps now, since the new regime there has settled, surely that's all a dead issue?"

"You were Abelard Lindsay's wife."

Her eyes widened. "So you do know my case. You know I've applied to emigrate? I had no response from the Pongpianskul government. I've come to ask for your help, Auditor. I'm not a member of your Carbon Clique, but I know their power. You have influence that works around the laws."

"Life must have been difficult for you, madam. Thrown out without resources into the Schismatrix."

She blinked, china-white lids falling over her eyes like paper shutters.

"Things were not so bad once I'd reached the cartels. But I can't pretend I've known happiness. I haven't forgotten home. The trees. The gardens." Lindsay knotted his hands, ignoring the tingle of confused sensation from his right. "I can't encourage false hopes, madam. Neotenic law is very strict. The Republic has no interest in those our age, those who are estranged in any way from the raw state of humanity. It's true that I've handled some matters for the Neotenic government. Those involve the resettlement of Neotenic citizens who reach the age of sixty. 'Dying out into the world,' they call it. The flow of emigration is strictly one-way. I'm very sorry." She was silent a moment. "You know the Republic well, Auditor?" Her voice told him that she had accepted defeat. Now she was hunting for memories.

"Well enough to know that the wife of Abelard Lindsay has been defamed. Your late husband is regarded there as a Preservationist martyr. They portray you as a Mechanist collaborator, driving Lindsay into exile and death."

"How terrible." Her eyes filled with tears; she stood up in agitation.

"I'm very sorry. May I use your biomonitor?"

"Tears don't alarm me, madam," Lindsay said gently. "I am not a Zen Sero-tonist."

"My husband," she said. "He was such a bright boy; we thought we'd done well when we scholarshipped him to the Shapers. I never understood what they did to him, but it was horrible. I tried to make our marriage work, but he was so clever, so smooth and plausible, that he could twist anything I said or did to serve some other purpose. He terrified the others. They swore he would rip our world apart. We should never have sent him to the Shapers."

"I'm sure it seemed a wise decision at the time," Lindsay said. "The Republic was already in the Mechanist orbit, and they wanted to redress the balance."

"Then they shouldn't have done it to my cousin's son. There were plenty of plebes to send out, people like Constantine." She put one wrinkled knuckle to her lips. "I'm sorry. That's aristocratic prejudice. Forgive me, Auditor, I'm distraught."

"I understand," Lindsay said. "To those our age, old memories can come with unexpected force. I'm very sorry, madam. You have been treated unjustly."

"Thank you, sir." She accepted a tissue from the household servo. "Your sympathy touches me deeply." She dabbed at her eyes with precise, birdlike movements. "I almost feel that I know you."

"A trick of memory," Lindsay said. "I was married once to a woman much like you."

A slow Look passed between them. A great deal was said, below the level of words. The truth surfaced briefly, was acknowledged, and then vanished beneath the necessity for subterfuge.

"This wife," she said. Her face was flushed. "She did not accompany you on your journey here."

"Marriage in Dembowska is a different situation," Lindsay said.

"I was married here. A five-year contract marriage. Polygamous. It expired last year."

"You are currently unattached?"

She nodded. Lindsay gestured about the room with a whir of his right arm. "Myself as well. You can see the state of my domestic affairs. My career has made my life rather arid."

She smiled tentatively.

"Would you be interested in the management of my household? An Assistant Auditorship would pay rather better than your current position, I think."

"I'm sure it would."

"Shall we say, a six-month probationary period against a five-year joint management contract, standard terms, monogamous? I can have my office print out a contract by tomorrow morning."