Schismatrix plus (26 page)

Lindsay lurched down the entry ramp, his scuffed foot-gloves skidding. After the blaze aboard the starship the disembarkation mall seemed murky, subaqueous. Dizziness seized him. He might have managed free-fall, but the Dembowska asteroid's feeble gravity made his stomach lurch. The lobby was sprinkled with travelers from the other Mechanist cartels. He'd never seen so many Mechs in one place, and despite himself the sight alarmed him. Ahead, luggage and passengers entered the scanning racks of customs. Beyond them loomed the glass fronts of the Dembowska duty-free shops. Lindsay shuddered suddenly. He had never felt air so cold. An icy draft seeped through his thin coveralls and the flexible fabric of his foot-gloves. His breath was steaming. Dazed, he headed for the customs. A young woman waited just before it, poised easily on one booted foot. She wore dark tights and a fur-collared jacket. "Captain-Doctor?" she said. Lindsay stopped with difficulty, gripping the carpet with his toes.

"The bag, please?" Lindsay handed her his ancient diplomatic bag, crammed with data lifted from Kosmosity files. She took his arm in a friendly fashion, leading him through an unmarked door past the customs scanners. "I'm Policewife Greta Beatty. Your liaison." They went down a flight of stairs to an office. She handed the bag to a woman in uniform and accepted a stamped envelope in return.

She led him out onto a lower floor of the duty-free mall, prying open the envelope with her lacquered nails. "This holds your new papers," she said. She handed him a credit card. "You are now Auditor Andrew Bela Milosz. Welcome to Dembowska Cartel."

"Thank you, Policewife."

"Greta will do. May I call you Andrew?"

"Call me Bela," Lindsay said. "Who picked the name?"

"His parents. Andrew Milosz died recently, in Bettina Cartel. But you won't find his death in the records; his next of kin sold his identity to the Dembowska Harem Police. All identifying marks in his records have been erased and replaced with yours. Officially, he emigrated here." She smiled. "I'm here to help you over the transition. To keep you happy."

"I'm freezing," Lindsay said.

"We'll see to that at once." She led him past the frosted glass into one of the duty-free shops, a clothier's. When they reemerged Lindsay wore new coveralls, of thicker quilted fabric with inset vertical puckers at wrists and ankles. The tasteful charcoal gray matched his new fur-lined velcro boots. Gloves were clipped to the vest pocket of his flared fuzzplastic jacket. He sported a microphone boutonniere in one creamtone lapel.

"Now your hair," said Greta Beatty. She carried his new zip-up wardrobe bag. "It's in an awful state."

"It was gray," Lindsay said. "The roots grew in black. So I shaved it off. Since then it's been on its own." He looked at her levelly.

"You want to keep the beard?"

"Yes."

"Whatever makes you happy."

After ten minutes under the stylers Lindsay's hair was brushed back from his forehead and temples in slickly brilliantined curves. The beard was trimmed.

Lindsay had been watching his companion's kinesics. There was a calmness, a quietude about her movements that belied her youth. Lindsay felt strained, hypertensive, but Greta's smooth cheerfulness was beginning to affect him through kinesic contamination. He found himself smiling involuntarily.

"Hungry yet?"

"Yes."

"We'll go to the Periscope. You look fine, Bela. You'll get the hang of Dembowska gravity in no time. Stick close by me." She wrapped her arm around his. "I like your antique arm."

"You're staying with me?"

"As long as you like."

"I see. And if I suggest you leave?"

"Do you really think you'll be better off for that?" Lindsay considered this. "No. Forgive me, Policewife." He felt touchy, obscurely annoyed. His new identity bothered him. He had never had one forced on him before. His old training urged him to take on local coloration, but the years had calcified him.

Greta led him down two flights of stirruped escalators, deeper into the asteroid. The floor and walls were of scuffed and ancient metal, lined with new velcro. The crowd moved in stately, shredding leaps. Overhead, citizens in a hurry flung themselves along with ceiling loops. They followed a very old Dem-bowskan who was making good time along the wall in a velcro-wheeled prosthetic chair. "We'll have a little something to eat," Greta Beatty said.

"You'll feel better."

He considered mimicking her kinesics. He was a little rusty but he thought he could manage it. It might be the smartest thing: to match her easy affability with his own. He didn't want to. He hurt too much.

"Greta, this easy generosity surprises me. Why are you this way?"

"A policewife? Oh, I wasn't involved in security at first. I was a Carnassus wife, a strictly erotic relationship. Promotion came later. I'm not in espionage. I just do liaison work."

"Many others before me?"

"A few. Sundogs mostly. Not ranking Shaper academics."

"You've seen Michael Carnassus?"

She smiled distantly. "Only in the flesh. We're almost there. Harem Police have reserved tables. You'll want one of the windows, I'm sure." The dim intimacy of the Periscope, to Lindsay's light-blasted eyes, seemed impossibly gloomy. Steam rose off the food on the tables. He put on his left glove. He had never been anywhere so cold.

Cool blue light poured through the bulging, concave windows. Lindsay glanced through the metaglass briefly, saw a rocky cavern half full of water. An observation sphere the size of a house was anchored to the cavern's ceiling. Beside it was a bank of blue spotlights, mounted across the ceiling on arching rails. Lindsay set his boots into the stirrups of a low-grav chair. The seat warmed beneath him; its padded saddle was wired with heating elements.

Greta smiled at him across the table, her blue eyes huge in the dimness. It was a friendly smile without flirtation in it; without, in fact, any subterranean elements at all. No fear, no shyness; nothing but a well-balanced hint of mild benevolence. Her blonde hair was parted in the middle and fell in modish Dem-bowska fashion to smooth, blunt-cut edges along her ears and cheekbones. The hair looked very clean. He had an abstract urge to run his hand across it, the way he might run his fingers over the spine of a book. The fiery letters of the menu appeared in the table's dark surface. Lindsay put his gloved hand on the tabletop. Its surface was sticky with adhesive polymers. He pulled his fingers back; the glue held him at first, then released its grip sharply, leaving no trace. He looked at the menu. "No prices."

"The Harem Police will pick it up. We wouldn't want you getting a bad opinion of our cuisine." She nodded across the restaurant. "That gentleman in the biocuirass, at the table to your right—that's Lewis Martinez, with his wife, Lydia. He heads Martinez Corp, his rank is Comptroller. They say she was born on Earth."

"She looks well-preserved." Lindsay stared with frank curiosity at the sinister pair, whose skill as industrial spies was a byword in Shaper Security circles. They were speaking quietly between courses, smiling at one another with unfeigned affection. Lindsay felt a stab of pain.

Greta was still talking. "The man with the tabletop servo is Coordinator Brandt.. . . The group by the next window are Kabuki Intrasolar types. The one in the silly jacket is Wells...."

"Does Ryumin ever dine here?"

"Oh ... no." She smiled briefly. "He transmits in different circles." Lindsay rubbed his bearded chin. "He's well, I hope." She was polite. "I'm not the one to judge. He seems happy. Let me order for you." She punched in orders on the table's keyboard wing.

"Why is it so cold?"

"History. Fashion. Dembowska's an old colony; it suffered an ecobreak-down. There are places where I can show you layers of flashfrozen mold still peeling off the walls. The worst rots have adjusted to a narrow range in temperature. When it's this cold they're dormant. That's not the only reason, though." She gestured at the window. "That has its influence." Lindsay looked out. "The swimming pool?"

Greta laughed politely. "That's the Extraterrarium, Bela."

"Burn me!" Lindsay stared outward.

The rough-hewn cavity was slopping over with a turgid, rust-tinged liquid. He'd thought it was water at first. "That's where they keep the monsters," he said. "That observation globe—that's the Carnassus Palace, isn't it?"

"Of course."

"It's quite small."

"It's an exact replica of the observatory of the Chaikin Expedition. Of course it's not large. Imagine what the Investors charged them to ship it to the stars. Carnassus lives very modestly, Bela. It's not like Ring Security told you."

Every diplomatic instinct held Lindsay back. With an effort, he broke them. "But he has two hundred wives."

"Think of us as a psychiatric staff, Auditor. Marriage to Carnassus is an arrangement of rank. Dembowska depends on him, and he depends on us." Lindsay said, "Could I meet Carnassus?"

"That would be up to the Chief of Police. But what's the point? The man can barely speak. It's not like they say in the Rings. Carnassus is a very dazed, very gentle person, who was terribly wounded. When his embassy was failing, he took an experimental drug, PDKL-Ninety-five. It was supposed to help him grasp alien modes of thought, but it shattered him. He was a brave man. We feel pity for him. The sexual aspect is a very minor part of it." Lindsay considered this. "I see. With two hundred others, some of them favorites, presumably, it must be a rather rare role... . Once a year, perhaps?"

She was calm. "Not quite that rare, but you've grasped the basics. I won't disguise the truth, Bela. Carnassus is not our ruler; he's our resource. The Harem rules Dembowska because we surround him and we're the only ones he'll talk to." She smiled. "It's not a matriarchy. We're not mothers. We're the police."

Lindsay looked out the window. A drip fell and rippled. It was liquid ethane. Just beyond the insulated metaglass the sluggish pond was at an instantly lethal 180 degrees below zero Celsius. A man in that reddish pool would freeze in seconds into a bloated mass of rock. The grayish stones of the shores, Lindsay realized suddenly, were water ice.

Something was emerging onto the shoreline. In the dim bluish light, the ethane's surface was pierced by what appeared to be a rack of broken twigs. Even in the feeble gravity the creature's movements were glacial. Lindsay pointed.

"A sea scorpion," Greta said. "Eurypteroid, to give it its formal name. It's attacking that lump on the shoreline. That black slime is vegetation." More of the predator slid with paralytic slowness from the thin liquid. The twigs were now revealed as interlocking basketlike foreclaws that meshed together like saberteeth. "Its prey is gathering energy to leap. That will take a while. By the standards of this ecosystem, this is a lightning attack. Look at the size of its cephalothorax, Bela."

The sea scorpion had heaved its broad, platelike prosoma out of the water; this crablike head-body was half a meter across. Behind the lozenge-shaped compound eyes was the creature's long, tapering abdomen, plated in overlapping horizontal ridges. "It's three meters long," Greta said as a servo delivered the first course. "Longer if you count the tailspike. A nice size for an invertebrate. Have some soup."

"I'm watching this." The extended claws were closing on the prey with the slow deliberation of a hydraulic door. Suddenly the prey-creature flopped wob-blingly into the air and landed in the pool with a splash.

"It jumps fast!" Lindsay said.

"There's only one speed for jumping." Greta Beatty smiled. "That's physics. Eat something. Have a breadstick." Lindsay could not tear his eyes from the eurypteroid, which lay with its claw-teeth intermeshed, inert and apparently exhausted. "I pity it," he said.

Greta was patient. "It came here as an egg, Bela. It didn't get that large eating breadsticks. Carnassus takes good care of them. He was the embassy's exobiologist."

Lindsay tried some soup with the sliding trap-bowl of his low-gravity spoon. "You seem to share his expertise."

"Everyone in Dembowska takes an interest in the Extraterrarium. Local pride. Of course, the tourist trade isn't what it was, since the Investor Peace collapsed. We make up for it with refugees."

Lindsay stared moodily into the pool. The food was excellent, but his appetite was off. The eurytpteroid stirred feebly. He thought of the sculpture the Investors had given him and wondered what its droppings looked like. A burst of laughter came from Well's table. "I want a word with Wells," Lindsay said.

"Leave it to me," she said. "Wells has Shaper contacts. Word might leak back to the Ring Council." She looked grave. "You wouldn't want to risk your cover before it's well established."

"You don't trust Wells?"

She shrugged. "That's not your worry." A new course arrived, borne by a squeaking, velcro-footed robot. "I love the antique servos here, don't you?" She squirted heavy cream sauce over a meat pastry and gave him the plate.

"You're under stress, Bela. You need food. Sleep. A sauna. The good things in life. You look edgy. Relax."

"I live on the edge," Lindsay said.

"Not now. You live with me. Eat something so I'll know you feel safe." To please her, Lindsay bit reluctantly into the pastry. It was delicious. Appetite flooded back into him. "I have things to do," he said, stifling the urge to wolf it down.

"Think you'll do them better without food and sleep?"

"I suppose you have a point." He looked up; she handed him the sauce bulb. As he squeezed on more sauce she passed him a slotted wineglass. "Try the local claret." He sampled it. It was as good as vintage Synchronis, from the Rings. "Someone stole this technology," he said.

"You aren't the first defector. Things are calmer here." She pointed out the window. "Look at that xiphosuran." A lumpy crab was sculling across the pool with intolerable sluggish calm. "It has a lesson for you." Lindsay stared quietly, thinking.

Greta's domicile was seven levels down. A silver-plated household servo took Lindsay's wardrobe bag. Greta's parlor had a baroque furred couch with sliding stirrups and two anchored chairs upholstered in burgundy velvet. An adhesive coffee table held a flip-top inhaler case and a rack of cassettes. The bathroom had a sauna compartment and a fold-out suction toilet with a heated elastic rim. The overhead light glowed pink with infrared heat. Standing on the icy tiles, Lindsay dropped his glove. It fell slowly, at a pronounced slant. The room's verticals didn't match the local gravity. This keen touch of avant-garde interior design filled Lindsay with sudden nausea. He leaped up and clung to the ceiling, closing his eyes until the dizziness passed.