Schismatrix plus (25 page)

You're not history! You're not the Ring Council! Don't flatter yourself!

You're nothing now, you're a target, a scapegoat! Run, Nora! Sundog it!"

"The Mavrides clan needs me," she said.

"They're better off without you. You're an embarrassment to them now, we both are—"

"And the children?"

He was silent a moment. "I'm sorry for them, more sorry than I can say, but they're adults now and they can take their own chances. They're not the problem here, we are! If we make things easy for the enemy, just slip away, evaporate, we'll be forgotten. We can wait it out."

"And give the fascists their way in everything? The assassins, the killers? How long before the Belt fills up again with Shaper agents, and little wars blaze up in every corner?"

"And who'll stop that? You?"

"What about you, Abelard? Dressed as a stinking Mechanist with stolen Shaper data in that bag! Do you ever think of anyone's life but your own? Why in God's name don't you stand up for the helpless instead of betraying them?

Do you think it's easier for me without you? I'll go on fighting, but without you there'll be no heart in me."

He groaned. "Listen. I was a sundog before I met you, you know just how little I had.... I don't want that emptiness, no one caring, no one knowing

... And another betrayal on my conscience.... Nora, we had almost forty years!

This place was good to us, but it's falling apart on its own! Good times will come again. We have all the time there is! You wanted more life, and I went out and got it for you. Now you want me to throw it away. I won't be a martyr, Nora. Not for anyone."

"You always talked about mortality," she said. "You're different now."

"If I changed it was because you wanted me to."

"Not like this. Not treason."

"We'll die for nothing."

"Like the others," she said, regretting it at once. And there it was before them: the old guilt in all its stark intimacy. Those others, to whom duty was more than life. Those they had abandoned, those they had killed in the Shaper outpost. That was the crime the two of them had struggled to efface, the crime that had bound them together. "Well, that's what you're asking, isn't it? To betray my own people again, for you!" There. She had said it. Now there was no going back. She waited in pain for the words that would free her from him.

"You were my people," he said. "I should have known I would never have one for long. I'm a sundog, and it's my way, not yours. I knew you wouldn't come." He leaned his head against the bare fingers of his artificial arm. Piercing highlights glinted off the harsh iron. "Stay and fight, then. You could win, I think."

It was the first time he had lied to her. "But I can win," she said. "It won't be easy, we won't have all we had, but we're not beaten yet. Stay, Abelard, please. Please! I need you. Ask me for anything except to give up fighting."

"I can't ask you to change," her husband said. "People only change if you give them time. Someday this thing that's haunted us will wear away, if we both live. I think the love is stronger than the guilt. If it is, and someday you feel your obligations no longer need you, then come after me. Find me...."

"I will, I promise it, Abelard.... If I'm killed like the others and you live on safely then say you won't forget me."

"Never. I swear it by everything we had between us."

"Goodbye, then." She climbed up into the huge Investor chair to kiss him. She felt his steel hand go around her wrist like a manacle. She kissed him lightly. Then she tugged, and he let go.

AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 29-9-'53

Lindsay lay on the floor of his cavernous stateroom, breathing deeply. The ozone-charged air of the Investor ship stung his nose, which was sunburned despite his oils. The stateroom walls were blackened metal, studded with armored orifices. From one of them a freshet of distilled water trickled, cascading limply in the heavy gravity.

This stateroom had seen a lot of use. Faint scratches cuneiformed the floor and walls, almost to the ceiling. Humans were not the only passengers to pay Investor fare.

If modern Shaper exosociology was right, the Investors themselves were not the first owners of these starships. Covered in vainglorious mosaics and metal bas-reliefs, each Investor craft looked unique. But close analysis showed the underlying basic structure: blunt hexagons at bow and stern, with six long rectangular sides. Current thought held that the Investors had bought, found, or stolen them.

The ship's Ensign had given him a pallet, a broad flat mattress patterned in brown-and-white hexagons, built for Investors. Its surface was as harsh as burlap. It smelled faintly of Investor scale-oil. Lindsay had tested the metal wall of his stateroom, wondering about the scratches. Though it felt faintly grainy, the steel zips of his foot-gloves slid on it like glass. Still, it might be softer under extremes of temperature and pressure. A very large taloned beast afloat in a pool of high-pressure liquid ethane, for instance, might have scratched the walls in an attempt to burrow out.

The gravity was painful, but the stateroom lights had been turned down. The cabin was huge and unfurnished; his scattering of clothes on magnetic hooks seemed like pathetic scraps.

It was odd of the Investors to leave a room empty, even if it doubled as a zoo. Lindsay lay quietly, trying to catch his breath, thinking about it. The armored hatchway rang, then shunted open. Lindsay levered himself up with the artificial arm, the only limb not sore from gravity. He smiled. "Yes, Ensign? News?"

The Ensign entered the room. He was small for an Ensign, a mere forearm's length taller than Lindsay himself, and his wiry build was accented by his birdlike habit of ducking his head. He looked more like a crewman than an Ensign. Lindsay studied him thoughtfully.

Academics still speculated about the Investor ranking system. The Ship's Commanders were always female, the only females aboard ship. They were twice the size of crewmen, massively built. With their size went a sluggish calm, a laconic assumption of power. Ensigns were second in command, as combination diplomats and ministers. The rest of the crew formed an adoring male harem. The scampering crewmen with their bead-bright eyes weighed three times as much as a man, but around their monstrous commanders they almost seemed to flutter. The frills were the central kinesic display. The reptilian Investors had long ribbed frills behind their heads, rainbow-tinted translucent skin netted with blood vessels. Frills had evolved for temperature control; they could be spread to absorb sunlight or opened in shade to dispel heat. In civilized Investor life they were a relic, like the human eyebrow, which had evolved to deflect sweat. Like the eyebrow, their social use was now paramount. The Ensign's frill bothered Lindsay. It flickered too much. Rapid flickering was usually interpreted as a sign of amusement. In human beings, bad laughter kinesics were a sign of deep stress. Lindsay, despite his professional interest, had no desire to be the first to witness an Investor's hysteria. He hoped it was simply a repulsive mannerism. This ship was new to the Solar System and its crew was unused to humanity.

"No news, Artist," the Ensign said in pained trade English. "A further discussion of payment."

"Good business," Lindsay said in Investor. His throat ached from the high-pitched fluting, but he preferred it to the Ensign's eerie attempts to master human language.

This Ensign was not like the first he had met. That Investor had been smooth and urbane, his vocabulary heavy with glib cliches gleaned from human video broadcasts. This new Ensign was visibly struggling.

Clearly the Investors had sent in their best to make first contact. After thirty-seven years, it seemed that the Solar System was now considered safe for Investor fringe elements. "Our Commander wants you on tape," the Ensign said in English.

Lindsay reached automatically for the thin chain around his neck. His video monocle, with its treasured film of Nora, hung there. "I have a tape which is mostly blank. I can't surrender it, but—"

"Our Commander is very fond of her tape. Her tape has many other images but not one of your species. She will study it."

"I'd like another audience with the Commander," Lindsay said. "The first was so brief. I will gladly submit to the tape. You have your camera?" The Ensign blinked, the lucid nictitating membrane flickering upward over his dark, bulging eyeball. The dimness of the room seemed to upset him.

"I have the tape." He opened his over-the-shoulder valise and produced a flat round canister. He grasped the canister with two of his huge toes and set it on the black gunmetal floor. "You will open the canister. You will then make amusing and characteristic movements of your species, which the tape will see. Continue to do this until the tape understands you."

Lindsay wobbled his jaw from side to side in imitation of the Investor nod. The Investor seemed satisfied. "Language is not necessary. The tape does not hear sound." The Investor turned to the door. "I will return for the tape in two of your hours."

Left alone, Lindsay studied the canister. The ridged and gilded metal top was as wide as both outstretched hands. Before opening it he waited a moment, savoring his disgust. It was as much self-directed as aimed at his hosts.

The Investors had not asked to be deified; they had merely pursued their own gain. They had been aware of mankind for centuries. They were much older than mankind, but they had thoughtfully refrained from interfering until they saw that they could wring a decent profit from the species. Seen from an Investor's viewpoint, their actions were straightforward.

Lindsay opened the canister. A spool of iron-gray tape nestled inside, with ten centimeters of off-white leader. Lindsay put the lid aside—the thin metal was heavy as lead in the Investor gravity—and then froze. The tape rustled in its box. The leader end flicked upward, twisting, and the whole length of it began to uncoil. It rose, whipping and rippling, faint sheens of random color coiling along its length. Within seconds it had formed an open cloud of bright ribbon, supporting itself on a stiff, half-flattened latticework.

Lindsay, still kneeling and moving only his eyes, watched cautiously. The white end-piece was the tape creature's head, he realized. The head moved on a long craned loop, scanning the room for movement.

The tape creature stirred restlessly, stretching itself in a loose-looped open mass of rolling corkscrews. At its loosest, it was a bloated, giddy yarnball as tall as a man, its stiffened support-loops thinly hissing across the floor.

He'd thought it was machinery at first. Dangerous machinery, because the edges of the warping tape were as thin as razors. But there was an unplanned, organic ease to its coiling.

He had not yet moved. It didn't seem able to see him.

He shook his head sharply, and the heavy sunshades on his forehead flew across the room. The tape's head darted after them at once. The mimicry started from the tail. The tape shrank, crumpling like packing tissue, sketching the sunshades' form in tightly crinkled ribbon. Before it had quite completed the job, the tape seemed to lose interest. It hesitated, watching the inert sunglasses, then fell apart in a loose, whipping mass.

Briefly it mimicked Lindsay's crouching form, looping itself into a gappy man-sized sculpture of rustling tape. Its tinted ribbon quickly matched the rust-on-black tinge of his coveralls. Then the tape head looked elsewhere and it flew to pieces, its colors racing fretfully.

It flickered as Lindsay watched. Its white head scanned slowly, almost surreptitiously. It flashed muddy brown, the color of Investor hide. Slowly, a memory, either biological or cybernetic, took hold of it. It began to bunch and crumple into a new form.

The image of a small Investor took shape. Lindsay was thrilled. No human being had ever seen an infant Investor, and they were supposedly very rare. But soon Lindsay could tell from the proportions that the tape was modeling an adult female. The tape was too small to form a full-scale replica, but the accuracy of the knee-high model astonished him. Tiny blisters on the ribbon reproduced the hard, pebbly skin of the skull and neck; the tiny eyes, two tinted bumps, seemed full of expression.

Lindsay felt a chill. He recognized the individual. And the expression was one of dull animal pain.

The tape was mimicking the Investor Commander. She was gasping, her barrel-like ribs heaving. She squatted awkwardly, one clawed hand spread across each upthrust knee. The mouth opened in spasms, showing poorly mimicked peg teeth and the hollow paper-thin walls of the model's head. The ship's Commander was sick. No one had ever seen an Investor ill. The strangeness of it, Lindsay thought, must have stuck in the tape's memory. This opportunity was not to be missed. With glacial slowness Lindsay unsnapped his coverall and exposed the video monocle on its chain. He began filming. The scaled belly tightened and two edges of tape opened at the base of the model's heavy tail. A rounded white mass with the gleam of dampness appeared, a tightly wrapped oblong of tape: an egg.

It was a slow process, a painful one. The egg was leathery; the contractions of the oviduct were compressing it. At last it was free, though still connected to the tape's parent body by a transparent length of ribbon. The Investor captain's image turned, shuffling, then bent to examine the egg with a sick, rapt intensity. Slowly, her huge hand stretched out, scratched the egg, sniffed the fingers. Her frill began to rise stiffly, engorged with blood. Her arms trembled.

She attacked her egg. She bit savagely into the narrow end, shearing into the leathery shell with the badly mimicked teeth. Yellow ribbon showed, a cheeselike yolk.

She feasted, the taped arms flushing yellow with slime. The frill jutted behind her head, stiff with fury. The furtive nastiness of her crime was unmistakable; it crossed the barrier of species easily. As easily as wealth. Lindsay put his monocle away. The tape, attracted by the movement, unlaced its head and lifted it blankly. Lindsay waved his arms at it and the model fell into tangles. He stood up and began to shuffle back and forth in the heavy gravity. It watched him, coiling and flickering. DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 10-10-'53