Schismatrix plus (4 page)

Ryumin was sitting cross-legged on a tatami mat with his hands on a portable joystick. "Let me take care of the robot first," he said. "I'll be with you in a moment."

Ryumin's broad face had a vaguely Asiatic cast, but his thinning hair was blond. Age spots marked his cheeks. His knuckles had the heavy wrinkles common to the very old. Something was wrong with his bones. His wrists were too thin for his stocky body, and his skull looked strangely delicate. Two black adhesive disks clung to his temples, trailing thin cords down his back and into the jungle of wires.

Ryumin's eyes were closed. He reached out blindly and tapped a switch be-side his knee. He peeled the disks from his temples and opened his eyes. They were bright blue.

"Is it bright enough in here?" he said.

Lindsay glanced at the bulb overhead. "I think so." Ryumin tapped his temple. "Chip grafts along the optic nerves," he said.

"I suffer a little from video burn. I have trouble seeing anything not on scan lines."

"You're a Mechanist."

"Does it show?" Ryumin asked, ironically.

"How old are you?"

"A hundred and forty. No, a hundred and forty-two." He smiled. "Don't be alarmed."

"I'm not prejudiced," Lindsay said falsely. He felt confusion, and, with that, his training seeped away. He remembered the Ring Council and the long, hated sessions of anti-Mech indoctrination. The sense of rebellion recalled him to himself.

He stepped over a tangle of wires and set his diplomatic bag on a low table beside a plastic-wrapped block of synthetic tofu. "Please understand me, Mr. Ryumin. If this is blackmail, you've misjudged me. I won't cooperate. If you mean me harm, then do it. Kill me now."

"I wouldn't say that too loudly," Ryumin cautioned. "The spyplanes can burn you down where you stand, right through that tent wall." Lindsay flinched.

Ryumin grinned bleakly. "I've seen it happen before. Besides, if we're to murder each other, then you should be killing me. I run the risks here, since I have something to lose. You're only a fast-talking sundog." He wrapped up the cord of his joystick. "We could babble reassurances till the sun expands and never convince each other. Either we trust each other or we don't."

"I'll trust you," Lindsay decided. He kicked off his mud-smeared shoes. Ryumin rose slowly to his feet. He bent to pick up Lindsay's shoes, and his spine popped loudly. "I'll put these in the microwave," he said. "When you live here, you must never trust the mud."

"I'll remember," Lindsay said. His brain was swimming in mnemonic chemicals. The drugs had plunged him into a kind of epiphany in which every tangled wire and pack of tape seemed of vital importance. "Burn them if you want," he said. He opened his new bag and pulled out an elegant cream-colored medical jacket.

"These are good shoes," Ryumin said. "They're worth three or four minutes, at least."

Lindsay stripped off his coveralls. A pair of injection bruises mottled his right buttock.

Ryumin squinted. "I see you didn't escape unscathed." Lindsay pulled out a pair of creased white trousers. "Vasopressin," he said.

"Vasopressin," Ryumin mused. "I thought you had a Shaper look about you. Where are you from, Mr. Dze? And how old are you?"

"Three hours old," Lindsay said. "Mr. Dze has no past." Ryumin looked away. "I can't blame a Shaper for trying to hide his past. The System swarms with your enemies." He peered at Lindsay. "I can guess you were a diplomat."

"What makes you think so?"

"Your success with the Black Medicals. Your skill is impressive. Besides, diplomats often turn sundog." Ryumin studied him. "The Ring Council had a secret training program for diplomats of a special type. The failure rate was high. Half the alumni were rebels and defectors." Lindsay zipped up his shirt.

"Is that what happened to you?"

"Something of the sort."

"How fascinating. I've met many borderline posthumans in my day, but never one of you. Is it true that they enforced an entire second state of consciousness? Is it true that when you're fully operational, you yourself don't know if you're speaking the truth? That they used psychodrugs to destroy your capacity for sincerity?"

"Sincerity," Lindsay said. "That's a slippery concept." Ryumin hesitated. "Are you aware that your class is being stalked by Shaper assassins?"

"No," Lindsay said sourly. So it had come to this, he thought. All those years, while the spinal crabs burned knowledge into every nerve. The indoctrinations, under drugs and brain taps. He'd gone to the Republic when he was sixteen, and for ten years the psychotechs had poured training into him. He'd returned to the Republic like a primed bomb, ready to serve any purpose. But his skills provoked panic fear there and utter distrust from those in power. And now the Shapers themselves were hunting him. "Thank you for telling me," he said.

"I wouldn't worry," Ryumin said. "The Shapers are under siege. They have bigger concerns than the fate of a few sundogs." He smiled. "If you really took that treatment, then you must be less than forty years old."

"I'm thirty. You're a cagey old bastard, Ryumin." Ryumin took Lindsay's well-cooked shoes out of the microwave, studied them, and slipped them on his own bare feet. "How many languages do you speak?"

"Four, normally. With memory enhancement I can manage seven. And I know the standard Shaper programming language."

"I speak four myself," Ryumin said. "But then, I don't clutter my mind with their written forms."

"You don't read at all?"

"My machines can do that for me."

"Then you're blind to mankind's whole cultural heritage." Ryumin looked surprised. "Strange talk for a Shaper. You're an antiquarian, eh? Want to break the Interdict with Earth, study the so-called humanities, that sort of thing? That explains why you used the theatrical gambit. I had to use my lexicon to find out what a 'play' was. An astonishing custom. Are you really going through with it?"

"Yes. And the Black Medicals will finance it for me."

"I see. The Geisha Bank won't care for that. Loans and finance are their turf."

Lindsay sat on the floor beside a nest of wires. He plucked the Black Medicals pin from his collar and twirled it in his fingers. "Tell me about them."

"The Geishas are whores and financiers. You must have noticed that your credit card is registered in hours."

"Yes."

"Those are hours of sexual service. The Mechanists and Shapers use kilowatts as currency. But the System's criminal element must have a black market to survive. A great many different black currencies have seen use. I did an article on it once."

"Did you?"

"Yes. I'm a journalist by profession. I entertain the jaded among the System's bourgeoisie with my startling exposes of criminality. Low-life antics of the sundog canaille." He nodded at Lindsay's bag. "Narcotics were the standard for a while, but that gave the Shaper black chemists an edge. Selling computer time had some success, but the Mechanists had the best cybernetics. Now sex has come into vogue."

"You mean people come to this godforsaken place just for sex?"

"It's not necessary to visit a bank to use it, Mr. Dze. The Geisha Bank has contacts throughout the cartels. Pirates dock here to exchange loot for portable black credit. We get political exiles from the other circumlunars, too. If they're unlucky."

Lindsay showed no reaction. He was one of those exiles.

His problem was simple now: survival. It was wonderful how this cleared his mind. He could forget his former life: the Preservationist rebellion, the political dramas he'd staged at the Museum. It was all history. Let it fade, he thought. All gone now, all another world. He felt dizzy, suddenly, thinking about it. He'd lived. Not like Vera.

Constantine had tried to kill him with those altered insects. The quiet, subtle moths were a perfect modern weapon: they threatened only human flesh, not the world as a whole. But Lindsay's uncle had taken Vera's locket, booby-trapped with the pheromones that drove the deadly moths to frenzy. And his uncle had died in his place. Lindsay felt a slow, rising flush of nausea.

"And the exhausted come here from the Mechanist cartels," Ryumin went on. "For death by ecstasy. For a price the Geisha Bank offers shinju: double suicide with a companion from the staff. Many customers, you see, take a deep comfort in not dying alone."

For a long moment, Lindsay struggled with himself. Double suicide—the words pierced him. Vera's face swam queasily before his eyes in the perfect focus of expanded memory. He pitched onto his side, retching, and vomited across the floor.

The drugs overwhelmed him. He hadn't eaten since leaving the Republic. Acid scraped his throat and suddenly he was choking, fighting for air. Ryumin was at his side in a moment. He dropped his bony kneecaps into Lindsay's ribs, and air huffed explosively through his clogged windpipe. Lindsay rolled onto his back. He breathed in convulsively. A tingling warmth invaded his hands and feet. He breathed again and lost consciousness. Ryumin took Lindsay's wrist and stood for a moment, counting his pulse. Now that the younger man had collapsed, an odd, somnolent calm descended over the old Mechanist. He moved at his own tempo. Ryumin had been very old for a long time. The feeling changed things.

Ryumin's bones were frail. Cautiously, he dragged Lindsay onto the tatami mat and covered him with a blanket. Then he stepped slowly to a barrel-sized ceramic water cistern, picked up a wad of coarse filter paper, and mopped up Lindsay's vomit. His deliberate movements disguised the fact that, without video input, he was almost blind.

Ryumin donned his eyephones. He meditated on the tape he had made of Lindsay. Ideas and images came to him more easily through the wires. He analyzed the young sundog's movements frame by frame. The man had long, bony arms and shins, large hands and feet, but he lacked any awkwardness. Studied closely, his movements showed ominous fluidity, the sure sign of a nervous system subjected to subtle and prolonged alteration. Someone had devoted1 great care and expense to that counterfeit of footloose ease and grace.

Ryumin edited the tape with the reflexive ease of a century of practice. The System was wide, Ryumin thought. There was room in it for a thousand modes of life, a thousand hopeful monsters. He felt sadness at what had been done to the man, but no alarm or fear. Only time could tell the difference between aberration and advance. Ryumin no longer made judgments. When he could, he held out his hand.

Friendly gestures were risky, of course, but Ryumin could never resist the urge to make them and watch the result. Curiosity had made him a sundog. He was bright; there'd been a place for him in his colony's soviet. But he had been driven to ask uncomfortable questions, to think uncomfortable thoughts. Once, a sense of moral righteousness had lent him strength. That youthful smugness was long gone now, but he still had pity and the willingness to help. For Ryumin, decency had become an old man's habit. The young sundog twisted in his sleep. His face seemed to ripple, twisting bizarrely. Ryumin squinted in surprise. This man was a strange one. That was nothing remarkable; the System was full of the strange. It was when they escaped control that things became interesting.

Lindsay woke, groaning. "How long have I been out?" he said. "Three hours, twelve minutes," Ryumin said. "But there's no day or night here, Mr. Dze. Time doesn't matter."

Lindsay propped himself up on one elbow.

"Hungry?" Ryumin passed Lindsay a bowl of soup.

Lindsay looked uneasily at the warm broth. Circles of oil dotted its surface and white lumps floated within it. He had a spoonful. It was better than it looked.

"Thank you," he said. He ate quickly. "Sorry to be troublesome."

"No matter," Ryumin said. "Nausea is common when Zaibatsu microbes hit the stomach of a newcomer."

"Why'd you follow me with that camera?" Lindsay said. Ryumin poured himself a bowl of soup. "Curiosity," he said. "I have the Zaibatsu's entrance monitored by radar. Most sundogs travel in factions. Single passengers are rare. I wanted to learn your story. That's how I earn my living, after all." He drank his soup. "Tell me about your future, Mr. Dze. What are you planning?"

"If I tell you, will you help me?"

"I might. Things have been dull here lately."

"There's money in it."

"Better and better," Ryumin said. "Could you be more specific?" Lindsay stood up. "We'll do some acting," he said, straightening his cuffs. " 'To catch birds with a mirror is the ideal snare,' as my Shaper teachers used to say. I knew of the Black Medicals in the Ring Council. They're not genetically altered. The Shapers despised them, so they isolated themselves. That's their habit, even here. But they hunger for admiration, so I made myself into a mirror and showed them their own desires. I promised them prestige and influence, as patrons of the theatre." He reached for his jacket.

"But what does the Geisha Bank want?"

"Money. Power," Ryumin said. "And the ruin of their rivals, who happen to be the Black Medicals."

"Three lines of attack." Lindsay smiled. "This is what they trained me for." His smile wavered, and he put his hand to his midriff. "That soup," he said. "Synthetic protein, wasn't it? I don't think it's going to agree with me."

Ryumin nodded in resignation. "It's your new microbes. You'd better clear your appointment book for a few days, Mr. Dze. You have dysentery."

THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 28-12-'15

Night never fell in the Zaibatsu. It gave Lindsay's sufferings a timeless air: a feverish idyll of nausea.

Antibiotics would have cured him, but sooner or later his body would have to come to terms with its new flora. To pass the time between spasms, Ryumin entertained him with local anecdotes and gossip. It was a complex and depressing history, littered with betrayals, small-scale rivalries, and pointless power games.

The algae farmers were the Zaibatsu's most numerous faction, glum fanatics, clannish and ignorant, who were rumored to practice cannibalism. Next came the mathematicians, a proto-Shaper breakaway group that spent most of its time wrapped in speculation about the nature of infinite sets. The Zaibatsu's smallest domes were held by a profusion of pirates and privateers: the Hermes Breakaways, the Gray Torus Radicals, the Grand Megalics, the Soyuz Eclectics, and others, who changed names and personnel as easily as they cut a throat. They feuded constantly, but none dared challenge the Nephrine Black Medicals or the Geisha Bank. Attempts had been made in the past. There, were appalling legends about them.