Schismatrix plus (40 page)

"That's harsh," Jane Murray said.

"It's us or them," Szilard said. "Once the news spreads, the other factions will be holding kangaroo courts, seizing strongholds, stripping dissidents of property. Anarchy is coming. We must defend ourselves."

"What about our allies?" Gomez said.

Nakamura spoke. "According to our Polycarbon Clique contacts, the announcement of Wellspring's coup d'etat will coincide with the first asteroid impact on Mars, in the morning of 4-14-'54. . . . C-K will disintegrate within weeks. Most Czarina-Kluster refugees will flee to Martian orbit. Wellspring holds the Queen there. He will rule. The new Terraforming-Kluster will have a much stronger Posthuman ideology."

"The Mechs and Shapers will tear C-K apart," Jane Murray said. "And our philosophy profits by the destruction. . . . This is high treason, friends. I feel sick."

"People outlive nations," Lindsay said gently. He was breathing with inhuman regularity: a Mechanist biocuirass managed his internal organs. "C-K

is doomed. No number of dogs or purges can hold it, without the Queen. We're finished here."

"The Chancellor Emeritus is right," Gomez told them. "Where will we go?

We must decide. Do we join the Polycarbon Clique around Mars, to live in the Queen's shadow? Or do we make our move to CircumEuropan orbit and put our own plans into effect?"

"I say Mars," Nakamura said. "In today's climate Posthumanism needs all the help it can get. The Cause demands solidarity."

"Solidarity? Fluidarity, rather," Lindsay said. He sat upright with an effort. "What's one Queen, more or less? There are always more aliens. Posthumanism must find its own orbit someday ... why not now?" While the others argued, Gomez looked moodily, through half-shut eyes, at his old mentor. The remnants of old pain gnawed at him. He could not forget his long marriage to Lindsay's favorite, Vera Constantine. There had been too many shadows between himself and Vera.

Once they had put the shadows aside. That was when she'd confessed to Gomez that she had meant to kill Lindsay. Lindsay had made no move to defend himself, and there had been many opportunities, but the time had never quite been right. And years passed. And convictions faltered and became buried in routines and practicalities. The day came when she knew she could not go through with it. She had confessed it to Gomez, because she trusted him. And they had loved each other.

Gomez led her away from vengeance. She embraced Posthumanism. Even her clan had been won over. The Constantine clan were now the Lifesiders'

pioneers, working around Europa.

But Gomez himself had not escaped the years. Time had a way of making passion into work. He had what he wanted. He had his dream. He had to live it and breathe it and do its budget. And he had lost Vera, for there had been one shadow left.

Vera had never been entirely sane. For years she had quietly insisted that an alien Presence followed and watched her. It seemed to come and go with her mood swings; for days she would be cheerful, convinced that it was "off somewhere"; then he would find her moody and withdrawn, convinced that it was back.

Lindsay condoned her illness and claimed to believe her. Gomez too believed in the Presence: he believed it was the reflection of his wife's estrangement from reality. It was not for nothing that she had called it "a mirror-colored thing...." Something that could not be pinned down, an incarnation of unverifi-able fluidity.... When Gomez got to the point where he himself could feel it, even sense it flickering at the corners of his vision, he knew things had gone too far. Their divorce had been amiable, full of cool politeness.

He wondered sometimes if Lindsay had planned it all. Lindsay knew the trap that was human joy, and the strength that came from clawing free of it. Scalded by pain, Gomez had won that strength.... Szilard was reeling off facts and figures about the state of CircumEuropa. The future Lifesiders habitat was being blown into shape around the Jovian moon, an orbiting froth of hard-set angles, walls, bubbled topologies.

The flourishing Constantine clan was snaking plumbing through the walls already and booting up the life-support system. But an attempt by the Lifesiders to move there en masse, in their thousands, would stretch resources to the limit.

Their relations with the gasbag colony on Jupiter were good; they had the expertise of Vera and her cadre of trainees. But the Jovian aliens could not protect them from other human factions. They had no such ambition and no prestige to match that of the Cicada Queen.

Jane Murray presented things from a Project perspective. The surface of Europa was the bleakest of prospects: a vacuum-seared wasteland of smooth water ice, so cold that blood and bone would crack like glass, bathed in deadly Jovian radiation. But there were fissures in that ice, dark streaks thousands of kilometers long.... Tidal cracks. For beneath the moon's crust was molten ice, a planet-girdling lava ocean of liquid water. The constant tidal energy of Jupiter, Ganymede, and Io wanned Europa's ocean to blood heat. Beneath the lacelike web of fractures, a sterile ocean washed a bed of geothermal rock.

For years the Lifesiders had planned a series of massive disasters for the inorganic. It would start with algae. They had already bred forms that could survive in the peculiar mix of salts and sulfurs native to European seas. The algae could cluster around fresh cracks where light seeped through, feasting on the strands of heavy hydrocarbons bobbing aimlessly within the sterile sea. Fish would be next; small ones at first, bred from the half-dozen species of commercial fish mankind had brought into space. Ocean arthropods such as "crabs" and "shrimp," known only from ancient textbooks, could be mimicked through skilled manipulation of the genes of insects. Fault-lines could be shattered from orbit by dropped projectiles, leaving light-flooded patches of pack ice. They could experiment on a dozen cracks at once, adapting rival ecosystems through trial and error. It would take centuries. Once again, Gomez took the burden of the years upon himself. "Biodesign is still in its infancy," he said. "We must face facts. At least, with the Queen, the Martian Kluster will have wealth and safety for us. There, at least, our only enemies will be the years." Lindsay lurched forward abruptly and slammed his iron fist into the table. "We must act now! This is the moment of crux, when a single act can crystallize our future. We have our choice: routines or miracles. Demand the miraculous!"

Gomez was stunned. "It's Europa, then, Chancellor?" he said.

"Well-spring's plans seem safer."

"Safer?" Lindsay laughed. "Czarina-Kluster seemed safe. But the Cause moved on, and the Queen moved with it, when Wellspring took her. The abstract dream will flourish, but the tangible city will fall. Those who can't dream will die with it. The discreets will be thick with the blood of suicides. Wellspring himself may be killed. Mech agents will annex whole suburbs, Shapers will absorb whole banks and industries. The routines that seemed so solid here will melt like tears.... If we embrace them, we melt with them."

"Then what must we do?"

"Wellspring is not the only one whose crimes are secret and ambitious. And he's not the last to vanish."

"You're leaving us, Chancellor?"

"You must handle distress and disaster yourselves. I'm past any use in that capacity."

The others looked stricken. Gomez rallied himself. "The Chancellor Emeritus is right," he said. "I was about to suggest something similar. Our enemies will focus attacks on the Clique's Arbiter; it might be best if he were hidden."

The others protested automatically; Lindsay overruled them. "There can't always be Queens and Wellsprings. You must trust in your own strength. I trust in it."

"Where will you go, Chancellor?"

"Where I'm least expected." He smiled. "This isn't my first crisis. I've seen many. And when they hit, I always ran. I've preached to you for years, asked you to dedicate your lives. . . . And always I knew that this moment would come. I never knew what I would do when the dream faced its crisis. Would I sundog it as I always have, or would I commit myself? The moment's here. I must defy my past, just as you must. I know how to get you your miracle. And I swear to you, I will."

A sudden dread struck Gomez. He had not seen such resolution in Lindsay for years. It occurred to him suddenly that Lindsay meant to die. He did not know Lindsay's plans, but he realized now that they would be the crux of the old man's life. It would be like him to exit at the climax, to fade into the shadows while some unknown glory still shone. "Chancellor," he said, "when may we expect your return?"

"Before I die, we'll be Europa's angels. And I'll see you in Paradise." Lindsay cycled open the sealed door of the discreet; outside, the free-fall corridors were a burst of sudden crowd noise. The door thunked shut. He was gone. Thick silence fell.

The old man's absence left a hollowness behind. The others sat silently, savoring the sense of loss. They looked at one another. Then, as one, they looked to Gomez. The moment passed; the uneasiness dissolved. Gomez smiled.

"Well," he said. "It's miracles, then." Lindsay's rat leaped spryly onto the table. "He's left it behind," Jane Murray said. She stroked its fur, and it chittered loudly.

"The rat will come to order," Gomez said. He rapped the table, and they set to work.

CIRCUMTERRAN ORBIT: 14-4-'54

Three of them waited within the spacecraft: Lindsay, Vera Constantine, and their Lobster navigator, who was known simply as Pilot.

"Final approach," Pilot said. His beautiful synthesized voice emerged from a vocoder unit hooked to his throat.

Strapped in before his control board, the Lobster was a chunk of shadow. He was sealed within a matte-black permanent spacesuit, knobbed with lumps of internal machinery and dotted with shiny gold input jacks. Lobsters were creatures of the vacuum, faceless posthumans, their eyes and ears wired to sensors woven through the suits. Pilot never ate. He never drank. The routines of his body were subsumed within the life-supporting rhythms of his suit. Pilot did not like being within this spacecraft; Lobsters had a horror of enclosed spaces. Pilot, though, had put up with the discomfort for the thrill of the crime.

Now that they were dropping from orbit, the drugged calm of weeks of travel had broken. Lindsay had never seen Vera so animated. Her open delight filled him with pleasure.

And she had reason for gladness. The Presence was gone. She had not felt it since the three of them had been sealed within the spacecraft. They'd come so far since then that she believed she had escaped it for good. She found as much happiness in this relief as in the fulfillment of their long conspiracy. Lindsay was happy for her. He had never had true proof of the objective existence of the Presence, but he had agreed to believe in it for her. And similarly, she had never doubted him. It was a contract and a trust between them. He knew she might have killed him, but that trust had saved his life. Long years since then had only strengthened it.

"Looks good," the Lobster sang. The spacecraft began to buck as it hit the entrance window of the Earth's atmosphere. The Lobster emitted a burst of static, then said, "Air. I hate air. I hate it already."

"Steady," Lindsay said. He tightened the straps of his chair and unfolded his videoscreens.

They were coming in over the continent once known as Africa. Its outlines had been radically changed by the rising seas: archipelagos of drowned hills trailed clouds above a soup of weed-choked ocean. Along the dark shore, rivers poured gray topsoil into water streaked red with algal blooms. The white-hot flare of entry heat obscured his vision, flickering over the diamond-hard hull lens of the forward scanner. Lindsay leaned back in his seat.

It was an odd ship, an uncomfortable one, not of human manufacture. The egg-shaped hull had the off-white sheen of stabilized metallic hydrogen, built only by gasbags. Its naked interior floor and ceiling bore the rounded, scalloped segmentation marks of its former pilot, a gasbag grub. The spacefaring grub had been packed within the hull as tightly as expanding dough.

One of the gasbags had alluded to the astronaut's death in a

"conversation" with Vera Constantine. With its keen sensitivity to magnetic flux, the unlucky grub had perceived a solar flare whose shape and substance it found somehow blasphemous. It had expired in despair.

Lindsay had been looking for just such a chance. When Vera told him of the accident, Lindsay acted at once. He recruited the Lobsters through their business contact in Czarina-Kluster, a Lobster they called "the Modem." A complex deal was worked out, in utter secrecy, with the anarchic Lobsters. One of their lacy, airless spacecraft used Vera's coordinates to track down the dead grub. Lindsay allowed them to dissect it and appropriate its alien engines. In return they outfitted the emptied shell for a furtive attempt to break the Interdict with Earth.

The Interdict had never applied to the gasbags. They had insisted on exploring the entire solar system, and had granted equal rights to the pioneers in Fomal-haut. Their surveying craft had often studied the Earth. They made no attempt to contact the local primitives. They had satisfied themselves that the planet was harmless and had returned in utter disinterest. With his two companions, Lindsay had assumed his ultimate disguise. He was passing himself off as an alien, in an attempt to deceive the entire Schisma-trix.

Excitement and triumph had stripped decades from Lindsay. He had turned up his chest cuirass so that his heart could labor in time with his feelings. The forearm monitor embedded in his arm glowed amber with adrenaline. The spacecraft skipped above the bloated South Atlantic and sank deep within the atmosphere at the twilight line. Deceleration pressed Lindsay into the straps of his skeletal chair.

The Lobsters had done a quick, primitive job. The three-man crew was crammed into a ribbed lozenge four meters across. It held two air-frames, a recy-cler, and three acceleration couches, of black elastic webbing over iron frames epoxied to the floor. The rest of the craft was taken up by engines and a garage-like specimen hold. In the hold crouched a surveyor robot, one of the Europan submarine probes.