Schismatrix plus (38 page)

"I beg your pardon?"

The Colonel frowned. "Male ejaculations become the property of the recipient. This is an ancient feminine principle."

"Oh. I see."

Murasaki pursed her lips. "You consider this odd, doctor?"

"Not at all," Meyer said winningly. "It makes perfect sense." The Dembowskan girl pressed on. "Any children sired by the men of your group will be full citizens. All Wallchildren are equally beloved. I happen to be a perfect clone, but I've won my post by merit, in the Mother's love. Isn't that so, Martin?"

The Colonel had a firmer grasp of diplomatic niceties. He nodded shortly. "The water of the baths is sterile and contains a minimum of dissolved organics. It may be drunk freely. The plumbing is genitourinary technology, but it is not waste fluid."

Gomez oozed charm. "As a biological designer, I'm delighted by your ingenious architecture. Not merely by its technical adroitness but by its fine aesthetics." He hesitated. "Is there time for a bath before the luggage arrives?"

The Cicadas needed baths. The bacterial changeover had not quite settled in, and the blood heat of the Dembowskan air made them itch. Lindsay withdrew to one end of the suite and lowered the membrane wall. At once his tempo changed. Without his young followers, he moved at his own pace.

He didn't need to bathe. His aged skin could no longer support a large population of bacteria.

He sat on the edge of the bed. He was tired. Without volition, his eyes glazed over. A long moment passed in which he was simply empty, thinking nothing at all.

At last, blinking, he came back to himself. He reached reflexively into his jacket pocket and produced an enameled inhaler. Two long whifs of Green Rapture brought interest back into the world. He looked slowly about him and was surprised to see a blue kimono against the wall. Murasaki was wearing it. Her body was camouflaged almost perfectly against the background of skin.

"Captain Murasaki," he said. "I didn't notice you. Forgive me."

"I was—" She'd been standing there in polite silence. She was flustered by his reputation. "I was ordered to—" She gestured at the door, a pucker in the wall.

"You want to take me somewhere?" he said. "My companions can manage without me. I'm at your disposal."

He followed the girl into the ivory and fur of the hall.

In the lobby she stopped and ran her hand along the smooth flesh of the wall. A hole sphinctered open beside her feet, and the two of them dropped gently down one floor.

Below the hostel was a maintenance area. He heard a steady rushing of arteries and an occasional bowel-like gurgle from the naked walls. Biomonitors flickered, set in puckered rims of flesh.

"This is a health center," Murasaki explained. "The Wallmother's health, I mean. She has a mind-link here. She can speak to you here, through me. You mustn't be alarmed." She turned her back to him and lifted the dark fringe of hair at her neck, showing him the stippled interlink at the base of her skull. Green Rapture washed gently over Lindsay, a tingling wave of curiosity. Green Rapture was the ultimate antiboredom drug, the biochemical basis of wonder boiled down to its complex essence. With enough Green Rapture a man could find a wealth of interest in the lines of his own hands. Lindsay smiled with unfeigned delight. "Marvelous," he said.

Murasaki hesitated and looked at him quizzically.

"You mustn't mind if I stare," Lindsay said. "You remind me so of your mother."

"You're really him, Chancellor? Abelard Lindsay, who was my mother's lover?"

"Kitsune and I have always been friends."

"Am I much like she was?"

"Clones are their own people." He spoke soothingly. "In the Ring Council, I had a family once. My congenetics—my children—were clones. And I loved them."

"You mustn't think I'm a mere piece of the Wall," Murasaki said. "The Wall cells are chromosomally depauperate. Chimeric blastomas. The Wall is not as fully human as Kitsune's original flesh. Or mine." She looked searchingly into his eyes. "You don't mind talking to me first? I'm not boring you?"

"Impossible," Lindsay said.

"We Wallchildren have had trouble before. Some foreigners treat us as monsters." She sighed, relaxing. "The truth is, we're really rather dull." He was sympathetic. "You find it so?"

"It's not like Czarina-Kluster. Things are exciting there, aren't they?

Always something happening. Pirates. Posthumanists. Defectors. Investors. I see tapes from there sometimes. I'd love to have clothes like that." Lindsay smiled. "Clothes look better at a distance, my dear. Cicadas dress for social status. It can take hours."

"You're only prejudiced, Chancellor Lindsay. You invented social stripping!"

Lindsay winced. Was he always to be dogged by this cliche?

"I saw it in a play," the girl confessed. "Goldreich Intrasolar came through on tour. They showed Fernand Vetterling's Pity For the Vermin. The hero strips at the climax."

Lindsay felt chagrin. Vetterling's plays had lost all punch since he had become a Zen Serotonist. Lindsay would have told the girl as much, but he felt too much shadowy guilt at the tragic course of Vetterling's career. Because of politics, Vetterling had spent years as a nonperson. Lindsay could not blame the dramatist for choosing peace at any price. "Stripping's bad form, these days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation."

"I thought it was marvelous. Though nudity doesn't mean much in Dem-bowska. ... I shouldn't tell you about plays. Didn't you start Kabuki Intrasolar?"

"That was Fyodor Ryumin," Lindsay said.

"Who's he?"

"A brilliant playwright. He died some years ago."

"Was he very old?"

"Extremely. More so even than me."

"Oh, I'm sorry." He had embarrassed her. "I'll be going now. You and the Wallmother must have a lot to discuss." She pressed her hand against the wall behind her, then turned to him again. "Thank you for indulging me. It was a very great privilege." A fleshy tentacle extruded from the wall behind her. The splayed clump at the tentacle's end grasped the back of her neck. She lifted her hair aside and adjusted the plug. Her face went slack. Her knees buckled and she fell slowly in the feeble gravity. Kitsune came on line and caught her before she hit the floor. The body trembled briefly in a palsy of feedback; then Kitsune stretched it and ran her hands along the arms. The face set itself; the body was all grace, electric with an old and ferocious vitality. Only the eyes were dead.

"Hello, Kitsune."

"Do you like this body, darling?" She stretched luxuriously. "Nothing brings memory back like being in a young woman. What do you call yourself these days?"

"Abelard Lindsay. Chancellor of Czarina-Kluster Kosmosity-Metasystems, Jovian Systems Division."

"And Arbiter of the Lifesiders Clique?"

Lindsay smiled. "Positions in social clubs have no legal validity, Kitsune."

"It's a position strong enough to bring a defector here, all the way from Skimmer's Union. .. . She says her,name is Vera Constantine. And that name means enough to you to bring you here?"

Lindsay shrugged. "You see me, Kitsune."

"The daughter of your old enemy? And the congenetic of a long-dead woman whose name escapes me?"

"Vera Kelland."

"How well you remember it. Better than you remember our own relationship?"

"We've had more than one, Kitsune. I remember our youth in the Zaibatsu, though not as well as I would like. And I remember my thirty years here in Dembowska, when I held you at arm's length because your form repulsed me and I missed my wife."

"You could not have resisted me in any form, if I had pressed. In those years I only teased you."

"I've changed since then. These days I'm pressed by other things."

"But now I have a better form. Like the old one." She shrugged the girl's body out of its kimono. "Shall we have a go, for old times' sake?" Lindsay approached the body and ran his wrinkled hand lingeringly along the long flank. "It's very beautiful," he said.

"It's yours," she said. "Enjoy yourself." Lindsay sighed. He ran his fingers over the splayed tentacular clump at the back of the girl's neck. "In my duel with Constantine, I had something like this installed. The wires lose a lot in translation. You can't feel it like this, Kitsune. Not like you did then."

"Then?" She laughed aloud. The mouth opened, but the face scarcely moved. "I left those limits behind so long ago that I've forgotten them."

"It's all right, Kitsune. I can't feel it in the same way any more, either." He stepped back and sat on the floor. "If it's any consolation, I still feel something for you. Despite all times and changes. I don't have a name for it. But then what we had between us never had a name." She picked up the sleeveless kimono. "People who waste time naming never have time for living."

They passed a few moments in companionable silence. She put the robe on and sat before him. "How is Michael Carnassus?" he said at last.

"Michael is well. With each rejuvenation we repair a little more Shatter damage. He leaves his Extraterrarium for longer and longer times, these days. He feels safe in my corridors. He can speak now."

"I'm glad for that."

"He loves me, I think."

"Well, that's not to be despised."

"Sometimes, when I think of how much profit I made from him, I have a strange warm feeling. I never had a better bargain. He was so wonderfully malleable. ... Even though he's useless now, I still feel real satisfaction when I look at him. I've decided that I'll never throw him away."

"Very good."

"For a Mechanist, he was bright, in his day. An ambassador to aliens; he had to be one of the best. He has many children here—congenetics—they are all very satisfactory."

"I noticed that when I met Colonel Martin Dembowska. A very capable officer."

"You think so, truly?"

Lindsay looked judicious. "Well, young, of course. But that can't be helped."

"No. And this one, this chatterbox"—the body pointed a finger at its own chest—"is even younger. Only nineteen. But my Wallchildren must grow up quickly. I mean to make Dembowska my genetic nest. All others must go. And that includes your Shaper friend from Skimmers Union."

"I'll take her off your hands at your convenience."

"It's a trap, Abelard. Constantine's children have no reason to love you. Don't trust her. Like Carnassus, she has been with aliens. They left their mark on her."

"I must confess I'm curious." He smiled. "I suppose it's the drugs."

"Drugs? It can't be vasopressin, your old favorite. Or you'd have a better memory."

"Green Rapture, Kitsune. I have certain long-term plans.... Green Rapture keeps my interest up."

"Your terraforming."

"Yes. It's a problem of time and scale, you see. Long-term fanaticism is hard work. Without Green Rapture, the mind gnaws away at the fantastic until it becomes the commonplace."

"I see," she said. "Your fantastic, and my ecstatic.... Childbirth is a wonderful thing."

"To bring new life into the world ... it is the mystery. Truly a Prigoginic event."

"You must be tired, darling. I've reduced you to Cicada platitudes."

"I'm sorry." He smiled. "It comes with the territory."

"You and Wellspring have a clever front. You're both great talkers. I'm sure you can lecture for hours. Or days. But centuries?" Lindsay laughed. "It seems like a joke sometimes, doesn't it? Two sundogs embracing the ultimate. Wellspring believes, I think. As for me, I do my best."

"Maybe he thinks you believe."

"Maybe he does. Maybe I do." Lindsay tugged a long lock of hair through his iron fingers. "As dreams go, Posthumanism has merits. The existence of the Four Levels of Complexity has been proven mathematically. I've seen the equations."

"Spare me, darling. Surely we're not so old that we have to discuss equations."

The words bypassed him. Under the influence of Green Rapture, his brain succumbed momentarily to the lure of mathematics, that purest of intellectual pleasures. In his normal state of mind, despite years of study, he found the formulas painful, a brain-numbing mass of symbols. In Rapture he could grasp them, though afterward he remembered only the white joy of comprehension. The feeling was close to faith.

A long moment passed. He snapped out of it. "I'm sorry, Kitsune. You were saying?"

"Do you remember, Abelard.. . . Once I told you that ecstasy was better than being God."

"I remember."

"I was wrong, darling. Being God is better."

Vera Constantine's quarters were a measure of Kitsune's distrust. The young Shaper clanswoman had been under house arrest for weeks. Her lodging was a three-room cell of stone and iron, outside Kitsune's world-consuming embrace.

She sat at an inset Market monitor, studying the flow of tranaction in a three-dimensional grid. She had never dealt in the Market before, but Abelard Gomez, a kindly young Cicada, had given her a financial stake to pass the time. Knowing no better, she applied to the flow of the Market the principles of atmospheric dynamics she'd learned on Fomalhaut IV. Oddly, it seemed to be working. She was clearly gaining.

The door unsealed and shunted open. An old man stepped in, tall and thin in muted Cicada garb: a long coat, dark slash-cuffed trousers, jeweled rings worn over white gloves. His lined face was bearded, and a silvered coronet of patterned leaves accented his white-streaked, shoulder-length hair. Vera rose from her stirrup-chair and bowed, imitating the Cicada flourish. "Chancellor, welcome."

Lindsay's eyes searched the cell, his sinewy brows knitting in puzzlement. He seemed wary, not of her but of something in the room. Then she felt it herself, and knew that the Presence had returned. Despite herself, knowing it was useless, she looked for it quickly. Something flickered in the corner of her eye as it escaped her vision.

Lindsay smiled at her. Then he continued to scan the room. She didn't want to tell him about the Presence. After a while he would give up looking for it, just as all the others did. "Thank you," he said belatedly. "I trust you're well, Captain-Doctor."