Schismatrix plus (34 page)

"Good. The commissure approach was the right one, then. In split-brain cases we sometimes get a fragmentation of consciousness, a ghost image overlooking the perceptual self. Let me know if you feel anything of the sort."

"No. But outside I felt—" He wanted to tell her about the moment when waking had come suddenly, his long epiphanic insight into self and life. The vision still blazed within him, but the vocabulary was completely beyond him. He knew suddenly that he would never be able to tell anyone the full truth. It was not something that words could hold.

"Don't struggle," she said. "Let it come easily. There's plenty of time."

"My arm," Lindsay said suddenly. He realized with confusion that his right arm, the metal one, had turned to flesh. He raised the left one. It was metal. Horror overloaded him. He had turned inside out!

"Careful," she said. "You may have some trouble with space perceptions, left and right. It's an artifact of the commissural dominance. And you've had a new rejuvenation. We've done a lot of work on you in the past five years. Just to mark time."

The careless ease of it stunned him. "Are you God?" Lindsay said. She shrugged. "There' ve been breakthroughs, Abelard. A lot has changed. Socially, politically, medically—all the same thing nowadays, I know, but think of it as spontaneous self-organization, a social Prigoginic Leap to a new level of complexity—"

"Oh, no," Lindsay said.

She tapped the scanner, and it whirred upward off his head. She sat before him in an antique wooden office chair, curling one leg beneath her.

"Sure you don't want a chocolate?"

"No!"

"I'll have one, then." She pulled a candy from the case and bit into it, chewing happily. "They're good. " She spoke unaffectedly, her mouth full.

"This is one of the good times, Abelard. It's why they thawed me out, I think."

"You changed."

"Ice assassination does that. They were right, the Cataclysts. Right to put me out. I was calcifying. One moment I was floating through the math hall at the Kosmosity, printouts in my hand, on my way to the office, mind full of little problems, worries, schedules. ... I was dizzy for a moment. I looked around, and everything was gone. Deserted. Trashed. The printouts were crumbling in my hands, clothes full of dust, Goldreich-Tremaine in ruins, computers down, classes all gone.... The world leaped thirty years in a moment; it was total Cataclysm. For three days I chased down news, trying to find our Clique, learning I was history, and then it came over me in a wave. I

'preeked,' Abelard. My preconceptions shattered. The world didn't need me, and everything I'd thought was important was gone. My life was totally futile. And totally free."

"Free," Lindsay said, tasting the word. "Constantine," he said suddenly.

"My enemy."

"He's dead, so to speak," Margaret Juliano said, "but it's a question of definition. I have the scans on his condition from his congenetics. The damage is very severe. He fell into a protracted fugue state and suffered an accelerated consciousness that must have lasted for subjective centuries. His consciousness could not maintain itself on the data it received from the Arena device. It lasted so long that his personality was abraded away. Speaking metaphorically, he forgot himself to pieces."

"They told you that? His siblings?"

"Times have changed, Abelard. Detente is back. The Constantine gene-line is in trouble, and we paid them well for the information. Skimmers Union lost the capitalship. Jastrow Station is the capital now, and it's full of Zen Seroton-ists. They hate excitement."

The news thrilled Lindsay. "Five years," he said. He stood up in agitation. "Well, what's five years to me?" He tried to pace about the room, swinging dizzily. The left-right hemispheric confusion made him clumsy. He drew himself up and tried to get a grip on his kinesics.

He failed.

He turned on Juliano. "My training. My kinesics." She nodded. "Yes. When we went in we noticed the remnants of it. Early Shaper psychotechnic conditioning. Very clumsy by modern standards. It interfered with your recovery. So, over the years, we chased it down and extinguished it bit by bit."

"You mean it's gone?"

"Oh, yes. We had enough cerebral dichotomy to deal with without your training giving you dual modes of thought. 'Hypocrisy as a second state of consciousness' and all that." She sniffed. "It was a bad idea to begin with." Lindsay sagged back into the scanning chair. "But all my life.... And now you took it away. With feck—" He closed his eyes, struggled for the word.

"With technology."

She took another candy. "So what?" she said indistinctly, munching.

"Technology put it there in the first place. You have your self back. What more do you want?"

Alexandrina Tyler came through the open doorway with a swish of heavy fabric. She wore the finery of her girlhood: a puffed, floor-length skirt and a stiff cream-colored jacket with embroidered input jacks and a round neck-circling collar. She looked at the floor. "Margaret," she said. "Your feet."

Juliano looked absently at the dried mud flaking from her boots. "Oh, dear. Sorry."

The sudden juxtaposition of the two women filled Lindsay with vertigo. A confused wash of tainted deja vu bubbled up from some drugged cerebral recess, and for a moment he thought he would pass out. When he revived he could feel that he had improved, as if some paralyzing sludge had trickled out of his head, leaving light and space. "Alexandrina," he said, feeling feebler yet somehow more real. "You've been time? All this here?"

"Abelard," she said, surprised. "You're talking."

"Trying to."

"I heard you were better," she said. "So I brought you clothes. From the Museum wardrobe." She showed him a plastic-wrapped suit, an antique. "You see?

This is actually one of your own suits from seventy-five years ago. One of the looters saved it when the Lindsay Mansion was sacked. Try it on, dear." Lindsay touched the suit's stiff, age-worn fabric. "A museum piece," he said.

"Well, of course."

Margaret Juliano Looked at Alexandrina. "Maybe he'd be more comfortable dressed as an orderly. He could fade into the background. Take on local color."

"No," Lindsay said. "All right. I'll wear it."

"Alexandrina's been looking forward to this," Juliano confided as he struggled into the suit's trousers, ramming his bare feet past the wire-stiffened accordioned knees. "Every day she's come to feed you Tyler apples."

"I brought you here after the duel," Alexandrina said. "Our marriage expired, but I run the Museum now. I have a post here." She smiled. "They sacked the mansions, but the family orchards are still standing. Your Grandaunt Marietta always swore by the family's apples." A seam gave way in the shoulder as Lindsay pulled on the shirt.

"You wolfed down those apples, seeds, stems, and all," Juliano told him.

"It was a wonder."

"You're home, Alexa," Lindsay said. It was what she had wanted. He was glad for her.

"This was the Tyler house," Alexandrina said. 'The left wing and the grounds are for the clinic; that's Margaret's work. I'm the Curator. I run the rest. I've gathered up all the mementos of our old way of life—all that was spared by Constantine's reeducation squads." She helped him pull the spacesuit-collared formal jacket over his head. "Come on, I'll show you." Juliano kicked off her boots and stood in her rumpled socks. "I'll come along. I want to judge his reactions."

The main ballroom had become an exhibit hall, with glass-fronted displays and portraits of early clan founders. An antique pedal-driven ultralight aircraft hung from the ceiling. Five Shapers marveled over a case full of crude assembly tools from the circumlunar's construction. The Shapers'

chic low-gravity clothing sagged grotesquely in the Republic's centrifugal spin. Alexandrina took his arm and whispered, "The floor looks nice, doesn't it? I refinished it myself. We don't allow robots here." Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan's founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer's face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically.

"It's a joke!" he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.

Alexandrina glanced anxiously at the bemused Shapers. "Maybe this was too early for him, Margaret."

Juliano laughed. "He's right. It is a joke. Ask the Cataclysts." She took Lindsay's arm. "Come on, Abelard. We'll go outside."

"It's a joke," Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the words gushed free. "This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no idea. How could they? They were dead before they had a chance to see! What's five years to us, what's ten, a hundred—"

"You're babbling, dear." Juliano walked him down the hall and through the mortared stone archway into dappled sunlight and grass. "Watch where you step," she said. "We have other patients. Not housebroken." Beside the high moss-crusted walls a nude young woman was tearing single-mindedly at the grass, pausing to suck grime from her fingers.

Lindsay was horrified. He seemed to taste the grit on his own tongue.

"We'll go outside the grounds," Margaret said. "Pongpianskul won't mind."

"He's letting you stay here, is he? That woman's a Shaper. A Cataclyst?

He owed a debt to the Cataclysts. You're taking care of them for him."

"Try not to talk too much, dear. You might hurt something." She opened the iron gateway. "They like it here, the Cataclysts. Something about the view."

"Oh, my God," Lindsay said.

The Republic had run wild. The overarching trees on the Museum grounds had hid the full panorama from him. Now it loomed over and around him in its full five-kilometer range, a stunning expanse of ridged and tangled green, three long panels glowing in triple-crossed shafts of mirror-reflected sunlight. He'd forgotten how bright the sun was in circumlunar space.

"The trees," he gasped. "My God, look at them!"

"They've been growing ever since you left," Juliano said. "Come with me. I want to show you another project."

Lindsay looked up through reflex toward his own former home. Seen from above, the sprawling mansion grounds bordered what had once been a lively tangle of cheap low-class restaurants. Those were in decline, and the Lindsay home was in ruin. He could see yawning holes in the red-tiled roofs of fused lunar slate. The private landing pad atop the mansion's four-story tower was swamped in ivy.

At the northern end of the world, up its sloping walls, a crew of ant-sized workmen tore languidly at the skeletal remains of one of the wirehead hospitals. Shoals of clouds hid the old power grid and the area that had once been the Sours. "It smells different," Lindsay realized. He stumbled on the bicycle path beside the Museum's walls and was forced to watch his feet. They were filthy. "I need a bath," he said.

"Either you crawl or you don't, right? If you've got skin bacteria, what's a little dirt? I like it." She smiled. "It's big here, isn't it? Sure, Goldreich-Tremaine's ten times this size, but nothing this open. A big risky world."

"I'm glad Alexandrina found her way back," Lindsay said. Their marriage had been a success, because it had gotten her what she wanted most. At last he had made amends. It had always been a strain. Now he was free. The Republic had changed so much that it filled him with weird exaltation. Yes, big, he thought, but nowhere near big enough. He felt a sense of impatience with it, a fierce longing to grab hold of something, something huge and basic. He had slept for five years. Now he felt every hour of that long rest pressing in on him with uncontainable reviving-energy. His knees buckled, and Juliano caught him with her Shaper-strengthened arms.

"Easy," she said.

"I'm all right." They crossed the openwork bridge over the blazing expanse of metaglass that separated two land panels. Lindsay saw the former site of the Sours beneath a raft of clouds. The once-foul morass had become an oasis of vegetation so blindingly green that it seemed to shine even in the clouds' shadow. A tall gangling boy in baggy clothing was running headlong beside the woven-wire fence surrounding the Sours, tugging a large box kite into flight.

"You're not the first I've cured," Juliano said as they walked toward it. "I always said my Superbright students had promise. Some of them work here. A pilot project. I want to show you what they've done. They've been tackling botany from a perspective of Prigoginic complexity theory. New species, advanced chlorophylls, good solid constructive work."

"Wait," said Lindsay. "I want to talk to this youngster." He had noticed the boy's kite. Its elaborate paint job showed a nude man crammed stiflingly within the rigid planes of the box kite's lifting surfaces. A woman in mud-smeared corduroy leaned over the woven fence, waving a pair of shears. "Margaret! Come see!"

"I'll be back for you," Juliano said. "Don't go away." Lindsay ambled unsteadily to where the boy stood, expertly managing his kite. "Hello, old cousin," the boy said. "Got any tapes?"

"What kind?"

"Video, audio, anything from the Ring Council. That's where you're from, right?"

Lindsay reached automatically for his training, for the easy network of spontaneous lies that would show the boy a plausible image. His mind was blank. He gaped. Time was passing. He blurted the first thing that came into his head. "I'm a sundog. From Czarina-Kluster."

"Really? Posthumanism! Prigoginic levels of complexity! Fractal scales, bedrock of space-time, precontinuum ur-space! Have I got it right?"

"I like your kite," Lindsay hedged.

"Old Cataclyst logo," the boy said. "We get a lot of old Cataclysts around here. The kite gets their attention. First time I've caught a Cicada, though."

Cicada, Lindsay thought. A citizen of C-K. Wellspring had always been fond of slang. "You're a local?"

"That's right. My name's Abelard. Abelard Gomez."