Schismatrix plus (24 page)

"Is our price too high, Dr. Abelard Mavrides?" the woman called out. His mind raced as his worst fears were realized. He turned, determined to face her down. "Someone has misled you."

"We have our own intelligence."

He studied her kinesics warily. The wrinkles of her face were very slightly wrong, not matching the muscles beneath the skin. "You're young," he said. "You only look old."

"Then we share one fraud. For you, that's only one of many."

"Ross told me you were dependable," he said. "Why risk your situation by annoying me?"

"We want the truth."

He stared. "How ambitious. Try the scientific method. And in the meantime, let's talk sense."

The young woman smoothed her medical tunic with wrinkled hands. "Pretend I'm a theatre audience, Dr. Mavrides. Tell me about your ideology."

"I don't have one."

"What about the Investor Peace? All those Detentiste plays? Did you think you would heal the Schism with this Investor fraud?"

"You're younger than I thought," he said. "If you ask me that, you must have never seen the war."

She glared at him. "We were raised in the Peace! Children, told from the creche that love and reason would sweep the war aside! But we read history. Not Juliano's version but the bitter truth. Do you know what happens to groups whose innovations fail? At best they're shuffled off to some wretched outpost. At worst they're hunted down, picked off, turned against each other—" The truth of it stung him. "But some live!"

The girl laughed. "You're unplanned, so why should you care for us?

Stupidity is life and breath to you."

"You're one of Margaret Juliano's people," he said. "The Superbrights." He stared at her. He had never met a Superbright before. They were supposed to be closely sheltered, constantly under study.

"Margaret Juliano," she said. "From your Midnight Clique. She helped design us. She's a Detentiste! When the Peace falls, we'll fall with her!

They're always prying at us, spying, looking for flaws. . .." Her eyes were wild in the wrinkled face. "Do you realize the potential we have? There are no rules, no souls, no limits! But dogmas hedge us in. False wars and stupid loyalties. The heaped-up garbage of the Schismatrix. Others wallow in it, hiding from total freedom! But we want all the truth, without conditions. We take our reality raw. We want all eyes open, always: and if it takes a cataclysm, then we have a thousand ready...."

"No, wait," Lindsay said. The girl was a Superbright; she could be no more than thirty. It appalled him to see her so fanatic, so willing to repeat his errors: his, and Vera's. "You're too young for absolutes. For God's sake, no pure gestures. Give it fifty years first. Give it a hundred! You have all the time you want!"

"We don't think the way they want us to," the girl said. "And they'll kill us for it. But not until we've pried the worldskull open and put our needles in."

"Wait," Lindsay said. "Maybe the Peace is doomed. But you can save yourselves. You're clever. You can—"

"Life's a joke, friend. Death's the punch line." She raised her hand and vanished.

Lindsay gasped. "What have you—?" He stopped suddenly. His own voice sounded odd to him. The room's acoustics seemed different. The machines, however, were producing the same quiet hums and subdued beeps. He approached the machines. "Hello? Young girl. Let's talk first. Believe me, I can understand." His voice had changed; it had lost the subtle raspiness of age. He touched his throat left-handed. His chin had a heavy growth of beard. Shocked, he tugged at it. It was his own hair. He floated closer to the machines, touched one. It rustled beneath his hand. He seized it in a fury; it crumpled at once, showing a flimsy lathwork of cellulose and plastic. He tore into the next machine. Another mockup. In the center of the complex was a child's tape recorder, humming and beeping faithfully. He snatched it up left-handed and was suddenly aware of his left arm: a lingering soreness in the muscle.

He tore off his short and jacket. His stomach was taut, flat; the graying hair on his chest had been painstakingly depilated. Again he felt his face. He had never worn a beard, but it felt like two weeks' growth, at least. The girl must have drugged him on the spot. Then someone had given him a cell-wash, reversed catabolism, reset the Hayflick limit on his skin and major organs, at the same time exercising his unconscious body to restore muscle tone. Then, when all was done, replaced him in the same position and somehow restored him to instant awareness.

Delayed shock struck him; the world seemed to shimmer. Compared to this, almost anything was easier to doubt: his name, his business here, his life. They left me the beard as a calendar, he thought dazedly. Unless that too was fraud.

He took a deep breath. His lungs felt tight, stretched. They had stripped them of the tar from smoking.

"Oh God," he said aloud. "Nora." By now she would be past panic: she would be full of reckless hatred for whoever had taken him. He hurried at once to the bubble's exit.

The grapelike cluster of cheap inflatables was hooked to an interurban tube-road. He floated at once down the lacquered corridor and emerged through a filament doorway into the swollen transparent nexus of crossroads. Below was Goldreich-Tremaine, with its Besetzny and Patterson Wheels spinning in slow majesty; with the moleculelike links and knobs of other suburbs shining purple, gold, and green, surrounding the city like beaded yarn. At least he was still in G-T. He headed at once for home.

GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 18-9-'53

The chaos repulsed Constantine. Evacuations were untidy affairs. The docking port was littered with trash: clothing, ship schedules, inhaler wrappers, propaganda leaflets. Baggage limits were growing stricter by the hour. Not far away four Shapers were pulling items from their overweight luggage and spitefully smashing them against the walls and mooring-benches. Long lines waited at the interaction terminals. The overloaded terminals were charging by the second. Some of the refugees were finding that it cost more money to sell their faltering stocks than the stocks themselves were worth.

A synthetic voice on the address system announced the next flight to Skimmers Union. Instant pandemonium swept the port. Constantine smiled. His own craft, the Friendship Serene, had that destination. Unlike the others, his berth was secure. Not simply in the ship but in the new capital as well. Goldreich-Tremaine had overreached itself. It had leaned too heavily on the mystique of its capitalship. When that was gone, seized by militants in a rival city, G-T's web of credit had nothing to sustain it. He liked Skimmers Union. It floated in circumtitanian orbit, above the bloody glimmer of the clouds of Titan. In Skimmers Union the source of the city's wealth was always reassuringly close: the inexhaustible mass of rich or-ganics that choked the Titanian sky. Fusion-powered dredges punched through its atmosphere, sweeping up organics by the hundreds of tons. Methane, ethane, acetylene, cyanogen: a planetary feedstock for the Union's polymer factories. Passengers were disembarking; a handful compared to those leaving, and not a savory handful. A group in baggy uniforms floated past customs. Sundogs, clearly, and not even Shaper sundogs: their skins shone with antiseptic oils. Constantine's bodyguards murmured to one another in his earpiece, sizing up the latest arrivals. The four guards were unhappy with Constantine's reluctance to leave. Constantine's many local enemies were close to desperation as Goldreich-Tremaine's banks neared collapse. The guards were keyed to a fever pitch.

But Constantine lingered. He had defeated the Shapers on their own ground, and the pleasure of it was intense. He lived for moments like this one. He was perhaps the only calm man in a crowd of close to two thousand. Never had he felt so utterly in control.

His enemies had been crippled by their underestimation. They had taken his measure and erred completely. Constantine himself did not know that measure; that was the pang that drove him on.

He considered his enemies, one by one. The militants had chosen him to attack the Midnight Clique, and his success had been thorough and impressive. Regent Charles Vetterling had been the first to fall. Vetterling fancied himself a survivor. Encouraged by Carl Zeuner, he had thrown in his lot with the militants. The power of the Midnight Clique was broken from within. It splintered into warring camps. Those who held their ground were denounced by others more desperate.

The Mechanist defector, Sigmund Fetzko, had "faded." These days, those calling his residence received only ingenious delays and temporizing from his household's expert system. Fetzko's image lived; the man himself was dead, and too polite to admit it.

Neville Pongpianskul was dead, assassinated in the Republic at Constan-tine's order.

Chancellor-General Margaret Juliano had simply vanished. Some enemy of her own had finished her. This still puzzled Constantine; on the day of her disappearance he had received a large crate, anonymously. Cautiously opened by bodyguards, it had revealed a block of ice with her name elegantly chiseled on its surface: Margaret Juliano, on ice. She had not been seen since. Colonel-Professor Nora Mavrides had drastically overplayed her hand. Her husband, the false Lindsay, had disappeared, and she had accused Constantine of kidnapping him. When her husband returned again, with a wild tale about Super-bright renegades and black market clinics, she was disgraced. Constantine was still not sure what had happened. The most likely explanation was that Nora Mavrides had been double-crossed by her burnt-out little cadre of diplomats. Probably they had seen what was coming and set up their one-time protectress, hoping that the new Skimmers Union regime would thank them for it. If so, they were grossly mistaken.

Constantine looked about the cavernous station, adjusting his videoshades for closeups. Amid the fretting Shapers in their overelaborate finery was a growing minority of others. An imported cargo of sundogs. Here and there shabbily clad ideological derelicts, their faces wreathed in smiles, were comparing lace-sleeved garments to their torsos or lurking with predatory nonchalance beside evacuees lightening their luggage.

"Vermin," Constantine said. The sight depressed him. "Gentlemen, it's time we moved on."

The guards led him across the chained-off entry to a private ramp padded in velcro. Constantine's clingtight boots crunched and shredded across the fabric.

He floated down the free-fall embarkation tube to the airlock of the Friendship Serene. Once inside he took his favorite acceleration chair and plugged in on video to enjoy the takeoff.

Within the port's skeletal gantryways, the smaller ships queued up for embarkation tubes, dwarfed by the stylized bulk of an Investor starship. Constantine craned his neck, causing the hull cameras of the Friendship Serene to swivel in slaved obedience. "Is that Investor ship still here?" he said aloud. He smiled. "Do you suppose they're hunting bargains?" He lifted his videoshades. Within the ship's cabin his guards clustered around an overhead tank, huffing tranquilizer gas from breathing masks. One looked up, red-eyed. "May we go into suspension now, sir?" Constantine nodded sourly. Since the war had started up again, his guards had lost all sense of humor.

AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 22-9-'53

Nora looked up at her husband, who sprawled above her in a towering chair. His face was hidden by a dark beard and opaque wraparound sunshades. His hair was close-cropped and he wore a Mech jumpsuit. His old, scarred diplomatic bag rested on the scratchy plush of the deck. He was taking it with him. He meant to defect.

The heavy gravity of the Investor ship weighed on both of them like iron. "Stop pacing, Nora," he said. "You'll only exhaust yourself."

"I'll rest later," she said. Tension knotted her neck and shoulders.

"Rest now. Take the other chair. If you'll close your eyes, sleep a little ... in almost no time—"

"I'm not going with you." She pulled off her own sunshades and rubbed the bridge of her nose. The light in the cabin was the light Investors favored: a searing blaze of blue-white radiance, drenched in ultraviolet. She hated that light. Somehow she had always resented the Investors for robbing her Family's deaths of meaning. And the three months she'd once spent in a ship like this one had been the eeriest time of her life. Lindsay had been quick, adaptable, the consummate sundog, as willing to deal with the aliens as he was with anyone. She'd wondered at it then. And now they had come full circle.

He said, "You came this far. You wouldn't have, if you didn't want to come with me. I know you, Nora. You're still the same, even if I've changed."

"I came because I wanted to be with you for every moment that I could." She fought down the tears, her face frozen. The sensation was horrifying, a black nausea. Too many tears, she thought, had been pushed away for too long. The day would come when she would choke on them.

Constantine used every weakness in Goldreich-Tremaine, she thought. And my special weakness was this man. When Abelard came back from the rejuvenation clinic, three weeks late and so changed that the household robots wouldn't let him in ... But even that was not so bad as the days without him, hunting for him, finding that the black-market subble he'd gone to had been deflated and put away, wondering what furtive Star Chamber was picking him to shreds....

"This is my fault," she said. "I accused Constantine with no proof, and he humiliated me. Next time I'll know better."

"Constantine had nothing to do with it," he said. "I know what I saw in that clinic. They were Superbrights."

"I can't believe in the Cataclysts," she said. "Those Superbrights are watched like jewels; they don't have room for wild conspiracies. What you saw was a fraud; the whole thing was staged to draw me out. And I fell for it."

"Don't be proud, Nora. It's blinded you. The Cataclysts abducted me, and you won't even admit they exist. You can't win, because you can't bring back the past. Let it go, and come with me."

"When I see what Constantine did to the Clique—"

"It's not your fault! My God, aren't there disasters enough without your heaping them all on your own shoulders? Goldreich-Tremaine is through! We have to live now! I told you years ago that it couldn't last, and now it's over!" He flung his arms wide. The left one, tugged by gravity, fell limply; the other whirred with smooth precision through a powered arc. They had been over this a hundred times, and she saw that his nerves were frayed. Under the influence of the treatment his hard-won patience had vanished in a blaze of false youth. He was shouting at her. "You're not God!