Schismatrix plus (41 page)

The dead astronaut's former orifices had been stripped of tissue and outfitted with cameras and scanning systems. The specimen hold had a hatchway installed, but there was no room for an airlock in the crew's compartment. The three of them had been welded in.

Pilot hadn't liked it. Pilot could be trusted, though. He cared nothing for Europa or their plans, but he relished the chance to count coup on the ancestral gravity well. He had been everywhere, from the turbulent fringes of the solar corona to the cometary Oort Cloud at the edge of circumsolar space. He was not human, but for the time being he was one of them. The scanners began to clear. Deceleration faded into the heavy tug of Earth gravity. Lindsay slumped in his seat, wheezing as the cuirass pumped his lungs. "Look what this muck is doing to the stars," Pilot complained melodiously.

Vera reached beside her chair and unfolded her tight-packed accordioned screens. She straightened the videoboard with a pop and smoothed out the creases. "Look, Abelard. There's so much air above us that it's blurring the stars. Think how much air. It's fantastic."

Lindsay stirred himself and examined the view from the aft camera. Behind them, a wall of thunderheads towered to the limits of the troposphere. Black roots furred with rain rose to white anvil heads glowing in the last of twilight. This was one outstretched arm of the storm zone of permanent tempests that girdled the planet's equator.

He expanded the aft view to fill the whole videoboard. What he saw awed him. "Look aft at the storm clouds," he said. "Huge streaks of fire are leaping out of them. What could be burning?"

"Chunks of vegetation?" Vera said.

"Wait. No. It's lightning," Lindsay said. "As in the old phrase,

'thunder and lightning.' " He stared in utter fascination.

"Lightning bolts are supposed to be red, with jagged edges," Vera said.

"These are like thin white branches."

"The disaster must have changed their form," Lindsay said. The storm vanished over the horizon. "Coastline coming up," Pilot said. Sunset fell; they switched to infrareds. "This is part of America," Lindsay concluded. "It was called Mexico, or possibly Texico. The coastline looked different before the ice caps melted. I don't recognize any of this." Pilot struggled with the controls. Vera said, "We're going faster than the movement of sound in this atmosphere. Slow down, Pilot."

"Muck," Pilot complained. "Do you really want to see this? What if the locals see us?"

"They're primitives, they don't have infrareds," Vera said.

"You mean they use only the visible spectrum?" Now Pilot himself was stunned.

They studied the landscape below: knots of dense scrubland, shining in the false black-and-white of infrared. The wilderness was striped occasionally by half-obscured dark streaks. "Tectonic faults?" Vera said.

"Roads," Lindsay said. He explained about low-friction surfaces for ground travel in gravity. They had not seen any cities as yet, though there had been suggestive patches here and there where the rioting vegetation seemed thinner.

Pilot took them lower. They pored over the growth at high magnification.

"Weeds," Lindsay concluded. "Since the disaster all ecological stability has collapsed. . .. Adventitious species have moved in. This was probably all cropland once."

"It's ugly," Vera said.

"Systems in collapse often are."

"High-energy flux ahead," Pilot said. The spacecraft dipped and hovered over a ridge.

Wildfire swept the hillside, whole kilometers of orange glow in the darkness. Roaring updrafts flung up flakes of glowing ash, reverse cascades of stripped-off leaves and branches. Behind the wall of fire were the twisted, glowing skeletons of weeds grown large as trees, their smoldering trunks thick bundles of woody filaments. They said nothing, stirred to the core by the wonder of it. "Sundog plants," Lindsay said at last.

"What?"

"The weeds are like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They move in anywhere where systems break down. After this disaster the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive...."

"More weeds," Vera concluded.

"Yes." They left the fire behind and cruised past the foothills. Lindsay tapped one of the algae frames and ate a mouthful of green paste.

"Aircraft," Pilot said.

For a moment Lindsay thought he was seeing a mutant gasbag, some bizarre example of parallel evolution. Then he realized it was a flying machine: some kind of blimp or zeppelin. Long seamed ridges of sewn balloon skin supported a skeletal gondola. A thin skein of flexible solar-power disks dotted the craft's skin, dappling over its back, fading to a white underbelly. Long mooring lines trailed from its nose, like drooping antennae. They approached cautiously and saw its mooring-ground: a city. A gridwork of streets split a checkerboard of white stone shelters. The houses were marshaled around a looming central core: a four-sided masonry pyramid. The zeppelin was moored to the pyramid's apex. The whole city was hemmed in by a high rectangular wall; outside, agriculture fields glowed a ghastly white, manured with ashes.

A ceremony was progressing. A pyre blazed at the masonry plaza at the pyramid's foot. The city's population was drawn up in ranks. They numbered less than two thousand. Their clothing was bleached by the infrared glow of their body heat. "What is it?" said Vera. "Why don't they move?"

"A funeral, I think," Lindsay said.

"What's the pyramid, then? A mausoleum? An indoctrination center?"

"Both, maybe. ... Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum has an information line, the only one in the village. Whoever lives there holds all links to the outside world." Lindsay thought suddenly of the domed stronghold of the Nephrine Black Medicals in the circumlunar Zaibatsu. He hadn't thought of it for years, but he remembered the psychic atmosphere within it, the sense of paranoid isolation, of fanaticism slowly drifting past the limits through lack of variety. A world gone stale. "Stability," he said. "The Terrans wanted stability, that's why they set up the Interdict. They didn't want technology to break them into pieces, as it's done to us. They blamed technology for the disasters. The war plagues, the carbon dioxide that melted the ice caps.... They can't forget their dead."

"Surely the whole world isn't like this," Vera said.

"It has to be. Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of change. Change that can't be tolerated."

"But they have telephones. Aircraft."

"Enforcement technology," Lindsay said.

On their way to the Pacific they saw two more settlements, separated by miles of festering wilderness. The cities were as identical as circuit chips. They crouched unnaturally on the landscape; they could have been stamped out from some hydraulic press and dropped from the air.

Pilot pointed out more of the bloated aircraft. Their full significance became clear to Lindsay. The flying machines were like plague vectors, carrying the ideological virus of some calcifying cultural disease. The pyramids towered in the heart of every city, enormous, dwarfing all hope, the strangling monuments of the legions of the dead.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute. They slipped beneath the ocean south of the rocky island chain of Baja California. Pilot opened the hatchway, flooding the cargo hold with water, and they began at once to sink.

They were in search of the world's largest single ecosystem, the only biqme man had never touched.

The surface waters had not escaped. Over the drowned lands of the continental margins, rafts of rotting moss and algae, the ocean's equivalents of weeds, festered in choking profusion. But the abyssal depths were undisturbed. In the crushing blackness of the abyss, larger in area than all the continents combined, conditions scarcely varied from pole to pole. The denizens of this vast realm were poorly known. No human being had ever invented a way to wring advantage from them.

But in the Schismatrix, man's successors were more clever. The resemblance of this realm to the dark oceans of Europa had not escaped Lindsay. For decades he had searched the ancient databanks for scraps of knowledge. The surviving records of abyssal life were almost useless, dating back to the dawn of biology. But even these crude hints lured Lindsay with their potential for sudden miracle. Europa too had the gloominess, the depths. And the vast drowned ranges of volcanic rifts, oozing geothermal energy. The abyss had oases. It had always had them. The knowledge had lit a slow, subterranean fire in his imagination. Life: untouched, primeval life, swarmed in boiling splendor at the fiery edges of the Earth's tectonic plates. An entire ecosystem, older than mankind, clustered there in all its miraculous richness. Life that could be seized, that could be Europa's. At first he had rejected the idea. The Interdict was sacred: as old as the unspoken guilt of ancestral spacefarers, who had deserted Earth as disaster loomed. In their desertion, they had robbed the planet of the very expertise that might have saved it. Over centuries of life in space, that guilt had sunk into a darkened region of cultural awareness, surfacing only as caricature, as ritual denial and deliberate ignorance.

The parting had come with hatred: with those in space condemned as anti-human thieves, and Earth's emergency government denounced as fascist barbarism. Hatred made things easier: easier for those in space to shrug off all responsibility, easier for Earth to starve its myriad cultures down to a single gray regime of penance and pointless stability.

But life moved in clades. Lindsay knew it as a fact. A successful species always burst into a joyous wave of daughter species, of hopeful monsters that rendered their ancestors obsolete. Denying change meant denying life.

By this token he knew that humanity on Earth had become a relict. In the long term, the vast biological timescape that had become Lindsay's obsession, rust ate anything that failed to move. Earth's future did not belong to humanity but to the monstrous weeds, grown strange and woody, and whatever small fleet creatures leaped and bred among them. And Lindsay felt justice in it.

They sank into darkness.

Pressure meant nothing to their alien hull. The gasbags flourished at extremes of pressure that made Earth's oceans seem as thin as plasma. Pilot switched controls over to the water jets epoxied to the hull. He kicked in aperture radar, and their videoboards lit up with the clean green contour lines of the abyssal floor.

Lindsay's heart leaped as he saw the familiar geology. "Just like Europa," Vera murmured. They were floating over an extended tension fault, where volcanic basalt had snapped and rifted, harsh blocks jutting upward, the cracked primeval violence untouched by wind or rain. Rectilinear mountains, lightly dusted with organic ooze, dropped in breathtaking precipitous cliffs, where contour lines crowded together like the teeth of a comb. But here the rift was dead. They saw no sign of thermal energy. "Follow the fault," Lindsay said. "Look for hot spots." He had lived too long for impatience, even now.

"Shall I kick in the main engines?" Pilot said.

"And make the water boil for miles around? We're deep, Pilot. That water is like steel."

"Is it?" Pilot made an electronic churring noise. "Well, I'd rather have no stars at all than blurry ones."

They followed the rift for hours without finding a lava seep. Vera slept; Lindsay dozed briefly, an old man's cat-sleep. Pilot, who slept only on formal occasions, woke them. "A hot spot," he said. Lindsay examined his board. Infrareds showed sluggish heat from deep within the interior of a jutting cliff. The cliff was extremely odd: a long, tilted plane of euclidian smoothness, rising abruptly from an oozy badlands of jumbled terrain. An angular foothill at the base of the cliff lay strangely distorted, almost crumpled, atop a dome-shaped rise of lava.

"Send out the drone," he said.

Vera pulled the robot's controls from under her seat and slipped on a pair of eyephones. The robot sculled easily out to the anomalous cliff, its lights blazing. Lindsay switched his board over to the robot's optics. The tilted cliff was painted. There were white stripes on it, long peeling dashes, some kind of dividing line. "It's a wreck," he said suddenly.

"It's man-made."

"Can't be," Vera said. "It's the size of a major spacecraft. There'd be room in it for thousands."

But then she found something that settled it. A machine was lashed to the smooth clifflike deck of the enormous ship. Centuries had corroded it, but its winged outlines were clear. "It's an aircraft," Pilot said. "It had jets. This was some kind of watery spaceport. Airport, rather."

"A ratfish!" Lindsay exulted. "After it, Vera!" The surveyor lunged after the abyssal creature. The long-tailed, blunt-headed fish, the size of a man's forearm, darted for safety along the broad deck of the aircraft carrier. It vanished through a ruptured crevice in the multistory wreckage of the control tower. The robot pulled up short.

"Wait," Vera said. "If this is a ship, where did the heat come from?" Pilot examined his instruments. "It's radioactive heat," he said. "Is that unusual?"

"Fission power," Lindsay said. "It must have sunk with an atomic pile on board." Common decency forbade him to mention the possibility of atomic weapons.

Vera said, "My instruments show dissolved organics. Creatures are huddling up around the pile for warmth." She tore at an ancient bulkhead with the pressure-toughened arms of the drone. The corroded alloy burst easily, gushing rust. "Should I go after it?"

"No," Lindsay said. "I want the primeval." She returned the drone to its hold. They sputtered onward. Time passed; terrain scrolled by with a slowness he would have once found dreadful. Lindsay found himself thinking again of Czarina-Kluster. Sometimes it troubled him that the despair, the suffering there, meant so little to him. C-K was dying, its elegance dissolving into squalor, its delicate, sophisticated balance ripped apart, pieces flung like seeds throughout the Schismatrix. Was it evil of him to accept the flower's death, in hope of seeds?