Schismatrix plus (12 page)

"That's where the aliens will come from," the Rep informed him. Lindsay opened his eyes. It was just a bubble, he told himself, with white specks spattered on it: a bubble with himself at its center—there, now he had it stabilized. "What aliens?"

"The aliens, State." The Rep was genuinely puzzled. "You know they're out there."

"Sure," Lindsay said.

"Wanna watch the Sun a while? Maybe it'll tell us something."

"How about Mars?" Lindsay suggested.

"No good, it's in opposition. We can try asteroids, though. Check out the ecliptic." There was a moment's silence, filled by the low-key music of the control room, as the stars wheeled. Lindsay used haragei and felt the drone's turning as a smooth movement around his own center of gravity. The constant training paid off; he felt solid, secure, confident. He breathed from the pit of his stomach.

"There's one," the Rep said. A distant pinpoint of light centered itself in his field of vision and swelled into a smudge. When it seemed about finger-sized, its edges fuzzed out and lost definition. The Rep kicked in the computer resolution and the image grew into a sausage-shaped cylinder, glowing in false data-bit colors.

"It's a decoy," the Rep said.

"You think so?"

"Yeah, I've seen 'em. Shaper work. Just a polymer skin, a balloon. Airtight, though. There might be someone in it."

"I've never seen one," Lindsay said.

"There's thousands." It was true. Shaper claim-jumpers in the Belt had been manufacturing the decoys for years. The polymer skins were large enough to house a small outpost of data spies, drone hijackers, or defectors. Would-be Mech sundogs could hide from police agencies there, or Shaper cypher experts could lurk within them, tapping inter-cartel broadcasts. The strategy was to overload Mech tracking systems with a swarm of potential hideouts. The Shapers had made a strong early showing in the struggle for the Belt, and there were still isolated groups of Shaper agents moving from cell to cell behind Mech lines while the Ring Council was under siege. Many decoys were outfitted with propaganda broadcasting systems or with solar wind-tracking devices that could distort their orbits; some could shrink and expand repeatedly, disappearing from Mech radar. It was cheaper to manufacture them than it was to track down and destroy them, giving the Shapers a financial edge.

The outpost the Red Consensus had been hired to hit was one of those manufacturing centers.

"When there's peace," the Rep told him, "you get a dozen of these, link

'em up with tubeways, and you got a good cheap nation-station."

"Will there ever be peace?" Lindsay said.

The walls hummed as the Red Consensus reeled in line. "When the aliens come," the Rep said.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 30-11-'16

They were training in the gym. "That's enough for today," the President said. "You're all looking good. Even State has the fundamentals down." The three Reps laughed, lifting off their helmets. Lindsay popped the seal and pulled the suit helmet over his head. The combat session had lasted longer than he'd expected. He had hidden the wad from an inhaler inside the suit; he'd soaked it in vasopressin. He knew what was coming next, and he knew he would need his training at its finest pitch. But the fumes had been stronger than he'd realized; he felt dizzy, and his bladder ached.

"You're flushed, State," the President said. "Feel winded?"

"It's the air inside the suit, sir," Lindsay lied, the words ringing loudly in his own ears. "The oxygen, sir." The vasopressin had dilated the blood vessels beneath his skin.

Rep 1 laughed and made a face. "State's a feeb."

"At ease, the rest of you citizens. State and I have business." The suits were entered through a long horseshoe-shaped inseam along the crotch and thighs. The others, except for Rep 3, were out of their suits in seconds. Lindsay unzipped his seam and kicked his legs out of the heavy magnetic boots.

The others left, leaving Lindsay and the President. Lindsay shrugged the suit over his head, and as he did so he squeezed his right hand shut within the suit's bulky arm, driving a hypo needle deep into the base of his palm. He plucked the needle loose and let it float down into the glove fingers. He left the suit open to air it out and tucked it under one arm. No one would bother it; it was Lindsay's now, with the diplomatic seal of the FMD on both shoulders. He followed the President up a deck and stowed the suit on its rack.

The two of them were alone in the "broom closet." The President's face was anxious. "You're ready, soldier? You feel okay? Ideologically, I mean?"

"Yes, sir," Lindsay said. "My mind's made up, sir."

"Then follow me." They went up two more decks to the control room. The President hauled himself head first through the narrow armory room and into the gun compartment.

Lindsay followed. His head throbbed, dilated blood vessels pounding rhythmically. He felt sharper than broken glass. He took a deep breath and pulled himself feet first into the gunroom. He plunged at once into an underworld of paranoia.

"You're ready?"

"Yes, sir," Lindsay said. Slowly, he strapped himself into the skeletal control chair. The ancient gun was grisly and impressive. He felt a flash of intuition suddenly, a cold steel certainty that the muzzle of the gun was pointed at his own gut. To pull the trigger would be to blow himself apart. Lindsay remembered the procedures. In his state they might as well have been stenciled on his brain. He ran his hand over the matte-black surface of the control panel and kicked in power with a tap of the rocker switch. Behind him, the muffled music of the control room dropped an octave as the power drain set in. A rack of evil red blips and readouts sprang into life below the eerie blue of the target screen.

Lindsay looked past the screen, his eyes blurring. There was a light sheen of oil on the ribbed struts along the gun barrel. Thick black hard-edged ribs: superconducting magnets, oozing gutlike coils of foil-covered power cables.

It was a pornography of death. A degradation of the human genius in abject whoredom to racial suicide.

Lindsay tripped an arming switch and flipped up the first safety seal. He stuck his right hand within the hollow behind the seal. His fingers settled around a ribbed plastic grip. He flicked aside another catch with his thumb. The machine began to whine.

"We all have to do it," the President said. "It can't rest on any one of us."

"I understand, sir," Lindsay said. He had rehearsed the words. The gun was not aimed at anything; it pointed off the ecliptic into empty galactic space. No one would be harmed. All he had to do was pull the trigger. He was not going to be able to do it.

"We all hate it," the President said. "The gun's under seal at all times, I swear it. But we gotta have it. You never know what you'll find in the next action. Maybe the big score. The score that'll buy us into a cartel, make us a nation again. Then we can junk this monster."

"Yes, sir." It was not something he could confront directly, not something he could coldly think through. It was too deep for that. It was the basis of the universe.

Worlds could burst. The walls held life itself, and outside those locks and bulkheads loomed utterly pitiless darkness, the lethal nothingness of naked space. In the old circumlunars, in the modern Mech cartels, in the Shaper Ring Council, even in the far-flung outposts of the cometary miners and the blazing smelters of intra-Mercurian orbit, every single thinking being carried this knowledge. Too many generations had lived and died under the shadow of catastrophe. It had soaked itself into everyone from childhood. Habitats were sacred; sacred because they were frail. The frailty was universal. Once the world was deliberately destroyed, there could be no more safety anywhere, for anyone. Every world would burst in a thousand infernos of total war.

There was no true safety. There had never been any. There were a hundred ways to kill a world: fire, explosion, poison, sabotage. The constant vigilance exercised by all societies could only reduce the risk. The power of destruction was in the hands of anyone and everyone. Anyone and everyone shared the burden of responsibility. The specter of destruction had shaped the moral paradigm of every world and every ideology.

The destinies of man in space had not been easy, and Lindsay's universe was not a simple one. There were epidemics of suicide, bitter power struggles, vicious techno-racial prejudices, the crippling suppression of entire societies.

And yet the ultimate madness had been avoided. There was war, yes: small-scale ambushes, spacecraft destroyed, tiny mining camps claim-jumped with the murder of their inhabitants: all the grim and obscure conflicts that burst like sparks from the grinding impact of the Mech and Shaper superpowers. But humankind had survived and flourished.

It was a deep and fundamental triumph. On the same deep level of the mind that held the constant fear, there was a stronger hope and confidence. It was a victory that belonged to everyone, a victory so thorough and so deep that it had vanished from sight, and belonged to that secret realm of the mind on which everything else is predicated.

And yet these pirates, as pirates must, controlled a weapon of mass destruction. It was an ancient machine: a relic of a lunatic era when men first pried open the Pandora crypts of physics. An age when cosmic explosives had spread across the surface of Earth like bleeding scabs across the brain of a paretic.

"I fired it myself last week," the President said, "so I know the Zaibatsu security didn't booby-trap the bastard. Some of the Mech cartels will do that. Pick you up with frontier craft four thousand klicks out, shut down your weaponry, then put a delay chip in the wiring—you pull the trigger, chip vaporizes, nerve gas.... It makes no difference. You pull that trigger in combat you're dead anyway, ninety-nine percent. The Shapers we're attacking have Armageddon stuff too. We gotta have anything they have. We gotta do anything they can do. That's nuclear war, soldier; otherwise, we can't talk together.... Now, fire."

"Fire!" cried Lindsay. There was nothing. The gun was silent.

"Something's wrong," Lindsay said.

"Gun down?"

"No, it's my arm. My arm." He pulled backward. "I can't get it off the pistol grip. The muscles have knotted."

"They what?" the President said. He gripped Lindsay's forearm. The muscles stood out like cables, cramped in paralytic rigor.

"Oh, God," Lindsay said, a well-practiced edge of hysteria in his voice.

"I can't feel your hand. Squeeze my arm."

The President crushed his forearm with bruising force. "Nothing," Lindsay said. He had filled his arm with anesthetic in the spacesuit. The cramping was a diplomatic trick. It was not an easy one. He hadn't meant to get his fingers caught around the grip.

The President dug his calloused fingertips into the outside groove of Lindsay's elbow. Even past the anesthetic, pain knifed through the crushed nerves. His hand jumped slightly, releasing the grip. "I felt that, just a little," he said calmly. There was something he could do with pain, if the vasopressin would help him remember.. . . There. The pain transformed itself, lost its color, became something nastily close to pleasure.

"I could try it left-handed," Lindsay said gamely. "Of course, if that arm goes too, then—"

"What the hell's wrong with you, State?" The President dug his thumb cruelly into the complex of nerves in Lindsay's wrist. Lindsay felt the agony as a cool black sheet draped across his brain. He almost lost consciousness; his eyes fluttered and he smiled faintly.

"It must be some Shaper thing," he said. "Neural programming. They fixed it so that I could never do this." He swallowed hard. "It's like it's not my arm." Sweat beaded on his forehead. He was so wired on vasopressin that he could feel each muscle in his face as a separate entity, just like they taught at the Academy.

"I can't accept this," the President told him. "If you can't pull the trigger then you can't be one of us."

"It might be possible to rig up some kind of mechanical thing," Lindsay said adroitly. "Some kind of piston-powered glove I could fit over it. I'm willing, sir. It's this that's not." He lifted the arm, stiffly, from the shoulder, then slammed it down on the hard-edged ridge of the gun. He hit it again. "I can't feel it." Skin peeled from the muscle. Bright microglobes of blood leaped up to float in midair. The arm stayed rigid. A flat amoebalike ripple of blood oozed from the long scrape.

"We can't try an arm for treason," the President said. Lindsay shrugged one-sidedly. "I'm doing my best, sir." He knew that he would never pull that trigger. He thought they might kill him for it, though he hoped to escape that. Life was important, but not so crucial as the trigger.

"We'll see what Judge Two says," the President said. Lindsay was willing. This much had gone according to plan. Judge Two was asleep in sick bay. She came awake with a start, her eyes wild. She saw the blood, then stared at the President. "Burn it, you've hurt him again."

"Not me," said the President, with a flicker of confusion and guilt. The President explained while Judge 2 examined the arm and bandaged it. "Might be psychosomatic."

"I want that arm moving," the President said. "Do it, soldier."

"Yes sir," said the Judge, startled. She hadn't realized they were under mili-, tary rule. She scratched her head. "I'm outa my depth. I'm just a mechanic, not some Shaper psychotech." She looked sidelong at the President; he was adamant. "Lemme think.... This should do it." She produced another vial, labeled in an impenetrable scrawl. "Convulsant. Five times as powerful as the nerves' own firing signals." She drew up three cc's. "We'd better tourniquet that arm. If this hits his bloodstream it'll really rack him up." She looked guiltily at Lindsay. "This'U hurt some. A lot." Lindsay saw his chance. His arm was full of anesthetic, but he could fake the pain. If he seemed to suffer badly enough, they might forget about the test. They would feel he'd been punished enough, for something that wasn't his fault. The Judge was sympathetic; he could play her against the President. Their guilt would do the rest.