Schismatrix plus (35 page)

"Abelard. That name's not too common."

The boy laughed. "Maybe not in C-K. But every fifth kid in the Republic's named Abelard. After Abelard Lindsay, the big historical cheese. You must have heard of him." The boy hesitated. "He used to dress like you. I've seen pictures."

Lindsay looked at the boy's own clothes. Young Gomez wore a faked-up low-grav outfit which sagged dreadfully. "I can tell I'm out of date," Lindsay said. "They make a big deal out of this Lindsay fellow, do they?"

"You don't know the half of it," Gomez said. "Take school. School's completely antique here. They make us read Lindsay's book. Shakespeare, it's called. Translated into modern English by Abelard Lindsay."

"Is it that bad?" Lindsay said, tingling with deja vu.

"You're lucky, old man. You don't have to read it. I've looked through the whole thing. Not one word in there about spontaneous self-organization." Lindsay nodded. "That's a shame."

"Everybody's old in that book. I don't mean fake-old like the Preservationists here. Or weird-old like old Pong."

"You mean Pongpianskul?" Lindsay said.

"The Warden, yeah. No, I mean everybody's used up too fast. All burnt up and cramped and sick. It's depressing."

Lindsay nodded. Things had come full circle, he decided. "You resent the control on your life," he speculated. "You and your friends are radicals. You want things changed."

"Not really," the boy said. "They only have me for sixty years. I've got hundreds, cousin. I mean to do big things. It's going to take a lot of time. I mean big things. Huge. Not like those little dried-up people in the past."

"What kinds of things?"

"Life-spreading. Planet-ripping. World-building. Terraforming."

"I see," Lindsay said. He was startled to see so much self-possession in one so young. It must be the Cataclyst influence. They'd always favored wild schemes, huge lunacies that in the end boiled down to nothing. "And will that make you happy?"

The boy looked suspicious. "Are you one of those Zen Serotonists?

'Happy.' What kind of scam is that? Burn happiness, cousin. This is the Kosmos talking. Are you on the side of life, or aren't you?" Lindsay smiled. "Is this political? I don't trust politics."

"Politics? I'm talking biology. Things that live and grow. Organisms. Integrated forms."

"Where do people come in?"

The boy waved his hand irritably and caught the kite as it swooped.

"Never mind them. I'm talking basic loyalties now. Like that tree. Are you on its side, against the inorganic?"

His recent epiphany was still fresh in Lindsay's mind. The boy's question was genuine. "Yes," he said. "I am."

"You see the point of terraforming, then."

"Terraforming," Lindsay said slowly. "I've seen theories. Speculations. And I suppose that it's possible. But what does it have to do with us?"

"A true commitment to the side of Life demands the moral act of Creation," Gomez said promptly.

"Someone's been teaching you slogans," Lindsay said. He smiled. "Planets are real places, not just grids on a drawing board. The effort would be titanic. All out of human scale."

The boy was impatient. "How big are you? Are you bigger than something inert?"

"But it would take centuries—"

"You think that tree would hesitate? How much time do you have, anyway?" Lindsay laughed helplessly.

"Fine, then. Are you going to live a squished-down little human life, or are you going to go for the potential?"

"At my age," Lindsay said, "if I were human I'd already be dead."

"Now you're talking. You're as big as your dreams. That's what they say in C-K, right? No rules, no limits. Look at the Mechs and Shapers." The boy was contemptuous. "All the power in the world, and they're chasing each other's tails. Burn their wars and midget ideologies. Posthumanity's bigger than that. Ask the people in there." The boy waved one hand at the woven-wire enclosure. "Ecosystem design. Rebuilding life for new conditions. A little biochemistry, a little statistical physics, you can pick it up here and there, that's where the excitement is. If Abelard Lindsay was alive today that's the sort of thing he'd be working on."

The irony of it stung Lindsay. At Gomez's age, he'd never had any sense, either. He felt a sudden alarm for the boy, an urge to protect him from the disaster that his rhetoric would surely earn him. "You think so?"

"Sure. They say he was a hot Preservationist type, but he sundogged off when the getting was good, didn't he? You didn't see him hanging around here to 'die of old age.' Nobody really does anyway."

"Not even here? In the home of Preservationism?"

"Of course not. Everyone here over forty's on the black market for life extension. When they turn sixty they scarper for Czarina-Kluster. The Cicadas don't care about your history or your genes. They take all clades. Dreams matter more."

Dreams, Lindsay thought. Dreams of Preservationism, turned into a black-market scrabble for immortality. The dream of Investor Peace had rusted and collapsed. The dream of terraforming still had a shine on it. Young Gomez could not know that it too would surely tarnish.

But somehow, Lindsay thought, you had to dream or die. And with new life pouring through him, he knew which choice was his.

Margaret Juliano leaned over the fence. "Abelard! Abelard, over here!

You need a look at this."

The boy, startled, began reeling in his kite hand over hand. "Now this is luck! That old psychotech wants to show me something in the compound."

"Go to it," Lindsay said. "You tell her that I said to show you anything you like, understand? And tell her that I've gone off for a little talk with Pongpi-anskul. All right, cousin?"

The boy nodded slowly. "Thanks, old Cicada. You're one of us." Pongpianskul's office was a paper wasteland. Musty cloth-bound books of Concatenate law were heaped beside his wooden desk; schedules and production graphs were pinned up at random on the room's ancient paneling. A tortoiseshell cat yawned in one corner and sharpened its claws in the carpet. Lindsay, whose experience with cats was limited, watched it guardedly. Pongpianskul wore a suit similar to Lindsay's but newer and obviously hand-stitched. He had lost hair since his days in Goldreich-Tremaine, and light gleamed dully on the dusky skin of his scalp. He swept a sheaf of records from the desk and paper-clipped them with skinny, wrinkled fingers.

"Papers," he muttered. "Trying to take everything off computers these days. Don't trust 'em. You use computers and there's always some Mech ready to step in with new software. Thin edge of the wedge, Mavrides. Lindsay, I mean."

"Lindsay is better."

"You must admit it's hard keeping track of you. It was a fine scam you pulled, passing yourself off as a senior genetic in the Rings." He Looked at Lindsay. Lindsay caught part of the Look. The experience of age made up somewhat for his loss of kinesic training.

Pongpianskul said, "How long has it been since we last talked?"

"Himn. What year is this?"

Pongpianskul frowned. "No matter. You were in Dembowska then, anyway. Things aren't so bad here under Neotenic aegis, eh, Mavrides, you admit? Gone a bit to rack and ruin, but all the better for the tourist trade; those Ring Council types eat it up with a spoon. Tell the truth, we had to go into the old Lindsay mansion and bash it about a bit, make it more romantic. Had some mice installed. You know mice? Bred 'em back to the wild state from lab specimens. You know their eyes weren't pink in the wild? Funny look in those eyes, reminds me of a wife of mine."

Pongpianskul opened one of the drawers in his cavernous desk and tossed in his sheaf of clipped papers. He pulled out a crumbling wad of graphs and started. "What's this? Should have been done weeks ago. No matter. Where were we? Oh, yes, wives. I married Alexandrina, by the way. Alexa's a fine Preservationist. Couldn't risk her slipping away."

"You did well," Lindsay said. His marriage contract had expired; her new marriage was a sound political move. It did not occur to him to feel jealousy; that had not been in the contract. He was glad that she had secured her position.

"Can't have too many wives, it's what life's all about. Take Georgiana for instance, Constantine's first wife. Talked her into a trace of Shatter, no more than twenty mikes, I swear, and it improved her disposition no end. Now she's as sweet as the day is long." He looked at Lindsay seriously. "Can't have too many oldsters around, though. Disturbs the ideology. Bad enough with those pesky Cataclysts and their posthuman schemes. Keep 'em behind wire, in quarantine. Even then kids keep sneaking in."

"It's kind of you to allow them here."

"I need the foreign exchange. C-K finances their research. But they won't amount to much. Those Superbrights can't concentrate on anything for long." He snorted, then snatched up a bill of lading. "I need the money. Look at these carbon-dioxide imports. It's the damn trees, gobbling it up." He sighed. "I need those trees, though. Their mass helps with the orbital dynamics. These circumlu-nar orbits are hell."

"I'm glad matters are in good hands."

Pongpianskul smiled sadly. "I suppose. Things never work out the way you plan them. Good thing, though, or the Mechs would have taken over long ago." The cat jumped into Pongpianskul's lap, and he scratched its chin. The animal emitted a rumbling sound that Lindsay found oddly soothing. "This is my cat, Saturn," the old Shaper said. "Say hello to Lindsay, Saturn." The cat ignored him.

"I had no idea you liked animals."

"Couldn't stand him at first. Hair just pours off the little beast. Gets into everything. Dirty as a hog, too. Ever seen a hog, by the way? I had a few imported. Incredible creatures, the tourists just marvel."

"I must have a look before I leave."

"Animals in the air these days. Not literally, I mean, though we did have some trouble with loose hogs running off to the free-fall zone. No, I mean this biomorality from Czarina-Kluster. Another Cataclyst fad."

"You think so?"

"Well," the Warden mused, "maybe not. You start trifling with ecology and it's hard to find a place to stop. I've had a slip of this cat's skin shipped off to the Ring Council. Have to clone off a whole gene-line of them. Because of the mice, you know. Little vermin are overrunning everything."

"A planet might be better," Lindsay said. "More space."

"I don't hold with messing with gravity wells," Pongpianskul said. "It's just more room for error. Don't tell me you've fallen for that, Mavrides."

"The world needs dreams," Lindsay said.

"You're not going to start on about levels of complexity, I hope." Lindsay smiled. "No."

"Good. When you came in here unwashed and with no shoes on, I concluded the worst."

"They say the hogs and I had a lot in common," Lindsay said. Pongpianskul stared, then laughed. "Haw. Haw. Glad to see you're not standing on your dignity. Too much dignity cripples a man. Fanatics never laugh. I hope you can still laugh when you're breaking worlds to the leash."

"Surely someone will get a good chuckle out of it."

"Well, you'll need your humor, friend. Because these things never work out as you plan. Reality's a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams.... You know what I wanted here, don't you? A preserve for humanity and the human way of life, that's what. Instead I've ended up with a huge stage set full of tourist shills and Cataclyst fry-brains."

"It was worth a try," Lindsay said.

"That's it, break an old man's heart," Pongpianskul said. "A consoling lie wouldn't have hurt."

"Sorry," Lindsay said. "I've lost the skill."

"Better get it back in a hurry, then. It's still a wide wicked Schismatrix out there, detente or no detente." Pongpianskul brooded. "Those fools in Czarina-Kluster. Selling out to aliens. What's to become of the world? I hear some idiot wants to sell Jupiter."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Yes, sell it off to some group of intelligent gasbags. A scandal, isn't it? Some people will do anything to suck up to aliens. Oh, sorry, no offense." He Looked at Lindsay and saw that he was not insulted. "It won't come to anything. Alien embassies never do. Luckily, aliens all seem to have a lot more sense than we do, with the possible exception of the Investors. Investors, indeed. Just a bunch of interstellar pests and nosey-parkers. ... If aliens show up in force I swear I'll put the whole Republic under the tightest quarantine this side of a Ring Council session. I'll wait till society disintegrates totally. I'll be faded by then, but the locals can move out to pick up the pieces. They'll see then that there was sense in my little game preserve after all."

"I see. Hedging humanity's bets. You were always a clever gambler, Neville."

The Shaper was pleased. He sneezed loudly, and the startled cat leaped from his lap across the desk, clawing papers. "Sorry," he said. "Bacteria and cat hairs, never got used to them."

"I have a favor to ask," Lindsay said. "I'm leaving for Czarina-Kluster and would like to take one of the locals with me."

"Someone 'dying into the world?' You always handled that well in Dem-bowska. Certainly."

"No, a youngster."

"Out of the question. A terrible precedent. Wait a moment. Is it Abelard Gomez?"

"The very same."

"I see. That boy troubles me. He has Constantine blood, did you know?

I've been watching the local genetics. Genius turns up in that line like a bad roll of the dice."

"I'm doing you a favor, then."

"I suppose so. Sorry to see you go, Abelard, but with your current ideological cast you're a bad influence. You're a culture hero here, you know."

"I'm through with the old dreams. My energy's back, and there's a new dream loose in Czarina-Kluster. Even if I can't believe it, at least I can help those who do." He stood up, stepping back prudently as the cat inspected his ankles. "Good luck with the mice, Neville."

"You too, Abelard."

CZARINA-HLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 15-12-'91

The engines of wealth were at full throttle. A torrent of riches was drowning the world. The exponential curves of growth hit with their always deceptive speed, a counterintuitive quickness that stunned the unwary and dazzled the alert.