Schismatrix plus (8 page)

She sat it up on a floor mat and spooned vitaminized pap into its mouth.

"You should seize control on your own," he said. He inserted a dripping plug into a duct on the yarite's veiny forearm.

"I'd like that," she said. "But I have a problem getting rid of this one. The sockets on its head will be hard to explain away. I could cover them with skin grafts, but that won't fool an autopsy.... The staff expect this thing to live forever. They've spent enough on it. They'll want to know why it died."

The yarite moved its tongue convulsively and dribbled out its paste. Kitsune hissed in annoyance. "Slap its face," she said. Lindsay ran a hand through his sleep-matted hair. "Not this early," he said,, half pleading.

Kitsune said nothing, merely straightened her back and shoulders and set her face in a prim mask. Lindsay was defeated at once. He jerked his hand back and swung it across the thing's face in a vicious open-handed slap. A spot of color showed in its leathery cheek.

"Show me its eyes," she said. Lindsay grabbed the thing's gaunt cheeks between his thumb and fingers and twisted its head so that it met Kitsune's eyes. With revulsion, he recognized a dim flicker of debased awareness in its face.

Kitsune took his hand away and lightly kissed his palm. "That's my good darling," she said. She slipped the spoon between the thing's slack lips. THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 21-4-'16

The Fortuna pirates floated like red-and-silver paper cutouts against the interior walls of the Kabuki Bubble. The air was loud with the angry spitting of welders, the whine of rotary sanders, the wheeze of the air filters.

Lindsay's loose kimono and trousers ruffled in free-fall. He reviewed the script with Ryumin. "You've been rehearsing this?" he said.

"Sure," said Ryumin. "They love it. It's great. Don't worry." Lindsay scratched his floating, puffy hair. "I don't quite know what to make of this."

A camouflaged surveillance plane had forced itself into the Bubble just before the structure was sealed shut. Against the bright triangular pastels, its dreary camouflage made it as obvious as a severed thumb. The machine yawed and dipped within the fifty-meter chamber, its lenses and shotgun microphones swiveling relentlessly. Lindsay was glad it was there, but it bothered him.

"I have the feeling I've heard this story before," he said. He flipped through the printout's pages. The margins were thick with cartoon stick figures scribbled there for the illiterate. "Let me see if I have it right. A group of pirates in the Trojan asteroids have kidnapped a Shaper woman. She's some kind of weapons specialist, am I right?"

Ryumin nodded. He had taken his new prosperity in stride. He wore ribbed silk coveralls in a tasteful shade of navy and a loose beret, high fashion in the Mech cartels. A silver microphone bead dotted his upper lip. Lindsay said, "The Shapers are terrified by what the pirates might do with her expertise. So they form an alliance and put the pirates under seige. Finally they trick their way in and burn the place out." Lindsay looked up.

"Did it really happen, or didn't it?"

"It's an old story," Ryumin said. "Something like that actually happened once; I feel sure of it. But I filed off the serial numbers and made it my own."

Lindsay smoothed his kimono. "I could swear that... hell. They say if you forget something while you're on vasopressin, you'll never remember it. It causes mnemonic burnout." He shook the script in resignation.

"Can you direct it?" Ryumin said.

Lindsay shook his head. "I wanted to, but it might be best if I left it to you. You do know what you're doing, don't you?"

"No," Ryumin said cheerfully. "Do you?"

"No.... The situation's getting out of hand. Outside investors keep trying to buy Kabuki stock. Word got out through the Geisha Bank's contacts. I'm afraid that the Nephrine Black Medicals will sell their Kabuki holdings to some Mech cartel. And then ... I don't know ... it'll mean—"

"It'll mean that Kabuki Intrasolar has become a legitimate business."

"Yes." Lindsay grimaced. "It looks like the Black Medicals will escape unscathed. They'll even profit. The Geisha Bank won't like it."

"What of it?" said Ryumin. "We have to keep moving forward or the whole thing falls apart. The Bank's already made a killing selling Kabuki stock to the Black Medicals. The old crone who runs the Bank is crazy about you. The whores talk about you constantly."

He gestured at the center stage. It was a spherical area crisscrossed with padded wires, where a dozen actors were going through their paces. They flung themselves through free-fall aerobatics, catching the wires, spinning, looping, and rebounding.

Two of them collided bruisingly and clawed the air for a handhold. Ryumin said, "Those acrobats are pirates, you understand? Four months ago they would have slit each other's throats for a kilowatt. But not now, Mr. Dze. Now they have too much at stake. They're stage-struck."

Ryumin laughed conspiratorially.

"For once they're more than pocket terrorists. Even the whores are more than sex toys. They're real actors, with a real script and a real audience. It doesn't matter that you and I know it's a fraud, Mr. Dze. A symbol has meaning if someone gives it meaning. And they're giving it everything they have." Lindsay watched the actors begin their routine again. They flew from wire to wire with feverish determination. "It's pathetic," he said.

"A tragedy to those who feel. A comedy to those who think," Ryumin said. Lindsay stared at him suspiciously. "What's gotten into you, anyway?

What are you up to?"

Ryumin pursed his lips and looked elaborately nonchalant. "My needs are simple. Every decade or so I like to return to the cartels and see if they've made any progress with these bones of mine. Progressive calcium loss is not a laughing matter. Frankly, I'm getting brittle." He looked at Lindsay. "And what about you, Mr. Dze?"

He patted Lindsay's shoulder.

"Why not tag along with me? It would do you good to see more of the System. There are two hundred million people in space. Hundreds of habitats, an explosion of cultures. They're not all scraping out a living on the edge of survival, like these poor bezprizorniki. Most of them are the bourgeoisie. Their lives are snug and rich! Maybe technology eventually turns them into something you wouldn't call human. But that's a choice they make—a rational choice." Ryumin waved his hands expansively. "This Zaibatsu is only a criminal enclave. Come with me and let me show you the fat of the System. You need to see the cartels."

"The cartels . . ." Lindsay said. To join the Mechanists would mean surrendering to the ideals of the Radical Old. He looked around him, and his pride flared. "Let them come to me!"

THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 1-6-'16

For the first performance, Lindsay gave up his finery for a general-issue jumpsuit. He covered his diplomatic bag with burlap to hide the Kabuki decals.

It seemed that every sundog in the world had filtered into the Bubble. They numbered over a thousand. The Bubble could not have held them, except in free-fall. There were light opera-box frameworks for the Bank elite, and a jackstraw complex of padded bracing wires where the audience clung like roosting sparrows.

Most floated freely. The crowd formed a percolating mass of loose concentric spheres. Broad tunnels had opened spontaneously in the mass of bodies, following the complex kinesics of crowd flow. There was a constant excited murmur in a flurry of differing argots.

The play began. Lindsay watched the crowd. Brief shoving matches broke out during the first fanfare, but by the time the dialogue started the crowd had settled. Lindsay was thankful for that. He missed his usual bodyguard of Fortuna pirates.

The pirates had finished their obligations to him and were busy preparing their ship for departure. Lindsay, though, felt safe in his anonymity. If the play failed disastrously, he would simply be one sundog among others. If it went well, he could change in time to accept the applause. In the first abduction scene, pirates kidnapped the young and beautiful weapons genius, played by one of Kitsune's best. The audience screamed in delight at the puffs of artificial smoke and bright free-fall gushes of fake blood.

Lexicon computers throughout the Bubble translated the script into a dozen tongues and dialects. It seemed unlikely that this polyglot crowd could grasp the dialogue. To Lindsay it sounded like naive mush, mangled by mistranslation. But they listened raptly.

After an hour, the first three acts were over. A long intermission followed, in which the central stage was darkened. Rude claques had formed spontaneously for the cast members, as pirate groups shouted for their own. Lindsay's nose stung. The air inside the Bubble had been supercharged with oxygen, to give the crowd a hyperventilated elan. Despite himself, Lindsay too felt elation. The hoarse shouts of enthusiasm were contagious. The situation was moving with its own dynamics. It was out of his hands. Lindsay drifted toward the Bubble's walls, where some enterprising oxygen farmers had set up a concessions stand.

The farmers, clinging awkwardly to footloops on the Bubble's frame, were doing a brisk business. They sold their own native delicacies: anonymous green patties fried up crisp, and white blobby cubes on a stick, piping hot from the microwave. Kabuki Intrasolar took a cut, since the food stands were Lindsay's idea. The farmers paid happily in Kabuki stock.

Lindsay had been careful with the stock. He had meant at first to inflate it past all measure and thereby ruin the Black Medicals. But the miraculous power of paper money had seduced him. He had waited too long, and the Black Medicals had sold their stock to outside investors, at an irresistible profit.

Now the Black Medicals were safe from him—and grateful. They sincerely respected him and nagged him constantly for further tips on the market. Everyone was happy. He foresaw a long run for the play. After that, Lindsay thought, there would be other schemes, bigger and better ones. This aimless sundog world was perfect for him. It only asked that he never stop, never look back, never look farther forward than the next swindle. Kitsune would see to that. He glanced at her opera box and saw her floating with carnivorous meekness behind the Bank's senior officers, her dupes. She would not allow him any doubts or regrets. He felt obscurely glad for it. With her limitless ambition to drive him, he could avoid his own conflicts.

They had the world in their pocket. But below his giddy sense of triumph a faint persistent pain roiled through him. He knew that Kitsune was simply and purely relentless. But Lindsay had a fault line through him, an aching seam where his training met his other self. Now, at his finest moment, when he wanted to relax and feel an honest joy, it came up tainted. All around him the crowd was exulting. Yet something within him made him shrink from joining them. He felt cheated, twisted, robbed of something that he couldn't grip.

He reached for his inhaler. A good chemical whiff would boost his discipline.

Something tugged the fabric of his jumpsuit, from behind him, to his left. He glanced quickly over his shoulder.

A black-haired, rangy young man with flinty gray eyes had seized his jumpsuit with the muscular bare toes of his right foot. "Hey, target," the man said. He smiled pleasantly. Lindsay watched the man's face for kinesics and realized with a dull shock that the face was his own.

"Take it easy, target," the assassin said. Lindsay heard his own voice from the assassin's mouth.

The face was subtly wrong. The skin looked too clean, too new. It looked synthetic.

Lindsay twisted around. The assassin held a bracing wire with both hands, but he reached out with his left foot and caught Lindsay's wrist between his two largest toes. His foot bulged with abnormal musculature and the joints looked altered. His grip was paralyzing. Lindsay felt his hand go numb.

The man jabbed Lindsay's chest with the toe of his other foot. "Relax," he said. "Let's talk a moment."

Lindsay's training took hold. His adrenaline surge of terror transmuted into icy self-possession. "How do you like the performance?" he said. The man laughed. Lindsay knew that he was hearing the assassin's true voice; his laugh was chilling. "These moondock worlds are full of surprises," he said.

"You should have joined the cast," Lindsay said. "You have a talent for impersonation."

"It comes and goes," the assassin said. He bent his altered ankle slightly, and the bones of Lindsay's wrist grated together with a sudden lancing pain that made blackness surge behind his eyes. "What's in the bag, targ? Something they'd like to know about back home?"

"In the Ring Council?"

"That's right. They say they have us under siege, all those Mech wireheads, but not every cartel is as straight as the last. And we're well trained. We can hide under the spots on a dip's conscience."

"That's clever," Lindsay said. "I admire a good technique. Maybe we could arrange something."

"That would be interesting," the assassin said politely. Lindsay realized then that no bribe could save him from this man.

The assassin released Lindsay's wrist. He reached into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit with his left foot. His knee and hip swiveled eerily. "This is for you," he said. He released a black videotape cartridge. It spun in free-fall before Lindsay's eyes.

Lindsay took the cartridge and pocketed it. He snapped the pocket shut and looked up again. The assassin had vanished. In his place was a portly male sun-dog in the same kind of general-issue dun-brown jumpsuit. He was heavier than the assassin and his hair was blond. The man looked at him indifferently.

Lindsay reached out as if to touch him, then snatched his hand back before the man could notice.

The lights went up. Dancers came onstage. The Bubble rang with howls of enthusiasm. Lindsay fled along the Bubble's walls through a nest of legs tucked through footloops and arms clutching handholds. He reached the anterior airlock.

He hired one of the aircraft moored outside the lock and flew at once to the Geisha Bank.

The place was almost deserted, but his credit card got him in. The enormous guards recognized him and bowed. Lindsay hesitated, then realized he had nothing to say. What could he tell them? "Kill me, next time you see me?" To catch birds with a mirror was the ideal snare.