Schismatrix plus (27 page)

Greta called through the door. "You want a sauna?"

"Anything to get warm."

"The controls are on the left."

Lindsay stripped, gasping as the freezing metal of his artificial arm brushed his bare ribs. He held the arm well away as he stepped into the blizzard of steam. In the low gravity the air was thick with flying water. Coughing, he groped for the breathing mask. It was pure oxygen; in moments he felt like a hero. He twisted the controls recklessly, biting back a scream as he was pelted with a sudden sandblast of powdered snow. He twisted back and let himself cook in wet heat, then stepped out. The sauna cycled through the boiling point, sterilizing itself.

He turbaned his damp hair, absently knotting the towel's ends in a Goldreich-Tremaine flourish. He found pajamas his size in the cabinet; royal blue with matching fur-lined mukluks.

Outside, Greta had changed from her fur jacket and tights into a quilted nightrobe with a flaring collar. For the first time he noticed her forearms, both heavily overlaid with Mechanist implants. The right one held some kind of weapon: a series of short parallel tubes mounted above the wrist. There was no sign of a trigger; it probably worked by nerve interaction. From inside the other sleeve he caught a red flicker of readouts from a biomonitor. Mechs cherished a fanatic interest in biofeedback. It was part of most Mech programs for longevity. He hadn't thought of Greta as a Mechanist. Despite himself, the sight shocked him.

"You're not sleepy?"

He yawned. "A little."

She raised her right arm above her head, absently. A remote control unit leaped across the room into her hand, and she turned on the video wall. It showed an overhead view of the Extraterrarium, taken through one of the monitors in the Camassus Palace.

Lindsay joined her on the couch, tucking his mukluks into the heated stirrups. "Not that," he said, shivering. She touched a button; the videowall blurred and resolved into the Saturnian surface, crawling in red and amber. Nostalgia flooded him. He turned his face away.

She switched scenes. A craggy landscape appeared; enormous pits next to a blasted, flaking area cut by two huge crevasses. "This is erotica," she said. "Skin at twenty thousand times life size. One of my favorites." She touched buttons and the video raced across the ominous landscape, pulling to a stop by the root of a gigantic scaled spar. "See those domes?"

"Yes."

"Those are bacteria. This is a Mechanist, you see."

"You?"

She smiled. "This is often the hardest part for a Shaper. You can't stay sterile here; we depend on these little creatures. We don't have your internal alterations. We don't want them. You'll have to crawl like the rest of us." She took his left hand. Her hand was warm and faintly moist. "This is contamination. Is it so bad?"

"No."

"Better to get it over with all at once. Do you agree?" He nodded. She put her hand on the back of his neck and kissed him warmly, her mouth open. Lindsay touched his flannel sleeve to his lips. "That was more than a medical action," he said.

She pulled the knotted towel from his head and tossed it to the household servo. "Nights are cold in Dembowska. A bed is warmer with two."

"I have a wife."

"Monogamy? How quaint." She smiled sympathetically. "Face facts, Bela. Defection broke your contract with the Mavrides gene-line. You're a nonperson now. Except to us."

Lindsay brooded. An image surged up within him: Nora, curled alone in their bed, her eyes wide, her mind racing as her enemies closed in. He shook his head.

Calmly, Greta smoothed his hair. "If you tried a little, you'd recover your appetite. Still, it's wise not to rush things."

She showed the polite disappointment that a hostess might show to a guest who refused dessert. He felt tired. Despite his renewed youth he ached from the Investor gravity.

"I'll show you the bedroom." It was lined in dark fur. The bed's canopy was an overhead videoceiling. The massive headboard was equipped with the latest in slumber technology. He recognized an encephalogram, monitoring jacks for artificial body parts, fluorographs for midnight blood fractionation. He climbed into the bed, kicking off his mukluks. The sheets rippled, swaddling over him. "Sleep well," Greta said, leaving. Something touched the top of his head; above him the canopy flickered gently into life, sketching out brain rhythms. The waves were complex and annotated cryptically. One of the wave functions was outlined in roseate pink. As he looked at it, relaxing, it began to grow. He intuited suddenly what went on inside his mind to make it larger. He gave in to it and was suddenly asleep.

When he woke next morning Greta was sleeping peacefully beside him, an alarm tiara clamped to her forehead, tied in to the house security. He climbed out of bed. His skin itched ferociously. His tongue felt furred. He was beginning to crawl.

DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 24-10-'53

"I never thought I'd see you this way, Fyodor." On Greta's parlor wall across the room from Lindsay, Ryumin's video-manicured face glowed with bogus health. It was a good replica, but to Lindsay's trained eye it was clearly computer-generated; its perfection was frightening. The lips moved accurately with Ryumin's words, but its little idiosyncracies of movement were eerily off-key. "How long have you been a wirehead?"

"Ten years or so. Time alters under the wires. You know, I can't remember offhand where I left my brain. Someplace unlikely, I'm sure." Ryumin smiled. "It must be in Dembowska Cartel, or there'd be a transmission lag."

"I want to talk privately. How many people do you suppose are listening in on us?"

"Just the police," Ryumin assured him. "You're in a Harem safehouse; their calls are routed directly through the Chief's databanks. In Dembowska this is as private as it gets. Especially for someone whose past is as dubious as yours, Mr. Dze."

Lindsay dabbed at his nose with a kerchief. The new bacteria had hit his sinuses badly; they had already been weakened by the Investors' ozone-charged air. "Things were different in the Zaibatsu. When we were face to face."

"The wires bring changes," Ryumin said. "It all becomes a matter of input, you see. Systems. Data. We tend toward solipsism; it comes with the territory. Please don't resent it if I doubt you."

"How long have you been in Dembowska?"

"Since the Peace began to crumble. I needed a haven. This is the best available."

"So your travels are over, old man?"

"Yes and no, Mr. Dze. With the loss of mobility comes extension of the senses. If I want I can switch out to a probe in Mercurian orbit. Or in the winds of Jupiter. I often do, in fact. Suddenly I'm there, just as fully as I'm ever anywhere these days. The mind isn't what you think, Mr. Dze. When you grip it with wires, it tends to flow. Data seem to bubble up from some deep layer of the mind. This is not exactly living, but it has advantages."

"You've given up Kabuki Intrasolar?"

"With the war heating up, the theatre's glory days are over for a while. The Network takes up most of my time."

"Journalism?"

"Yes. We wireheads—or, rather, Senior Mechanists, to give us a name not tainted by Shaper propaganda—we have our own modes of dataflow. News networks. At its most intense it approaches telepathy. I'm the local stringer for Ceres Datacom Network. I hold citizenship in it, though legally speaking it's sometimes more convenient to be treated as wholly owned depreciable hardware. Our life is information—even money is information. Our money and our life are one and the same."

The Mechanist's synthesized voice was calm, detached, but Lindsay felt alarm. "Are you in danger, old man? Is it something I can help?"

"My boy," Ryumin said, "there's a whole world behind this screen. The lines have blurred so much that mere matters of life and death have to take a back seat. There are those among us whose brains broke down years ago: they totter along on investments and programmed routines. If the fleshies knew, they'd declare them legally dead. But we're not telling." He smiled. "Think of us as angels, Mr. Dze. Spirits on the wires. Sometimes it's easier that way."

"I'm a stranger here. I'd hoped you could help me, as you did once. I need advice. I need your wisdom."

Ryumin sighed precisely. "I knew a Dze once when we were both rogues. I trusted him; I admired his daring. We were men together. That's no longer the case."

Lindsay blew his nose. With a shudder of deep loathing he handed the soiled kerchief to the household servo. "I would have dared anything then. I was ready to die, but I didn't. I kept looking. And I found someone. I had a wife, and there was no pretense between us. We were happy together."

"I'm glad for you, Mr. Dze."

"When danger crowded in on us I broke and ran. Now after almost forty years I'm a sundog again."

"Forty years is a human lifetime, Mr. Dze. Don't force yourself to be human. A time comes when you have to give that up."

Lindsay looked at his prosthetic arm, flexed the fingers slowly. "I still love her. It was the war that parted us. If there were peace again—"

"Those are Detentiste sentiments. They're out of fashion."

"Have you given up hope, Ryumin?"

"I'm too old for passion," Ryumin said. "Don't ask me to take risks. Leave me to my data streams, Mr. Dze, or whoever you are. I'm what I am. There's no going back, no starting over. That's a game for those who still have flesh. Those who can heal."

"I'm sorry," Lindsay said, "but I need allies. Knowledge is power, and I know things others don't. I mean to fight. Not against my enemies. Against the circumstances. Against history. I want my wife back, Ryumin. My Shaper wife. I want her back free and clear, without the shadows on her. If you won't help me, who will?"

Ryumin hesitated. "I have a friend," he said at last. "His name is Wells."

DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 31-10-'53

Before the advent of humankind, the Asteroid Belt had arranged itself through the physics of rubble. Fragments were distributed in powers of ten. For every asteroid there were ten others a third its size, from Ceres at a thousand kilometers down to the literal trillions of uncharted boulders following spacetime potentials at relative speeds of five kilometers per second.

Dembowska was of the third rank, two hundred kilometers across. Like other circumsolar bodies, it had paid its homage to the laws of chance. In the time of the dinosaurs, something large had hit Dembowska. The visitor was there and gone in a split second, leaving chunks of its impact-melted pyroxene embedded in the crust as it flew apart in gouts of fire. At the point of impact, Dembowska's silicate matrix had shattered, opening a ragged vertical crevasse twenty kilometers down to the asteroid's nickel-iron core. Now most of the core was gone, devoured by ever-hungry industry. Dembowska Cartel lived within the crevasse, long plazas dropping level after level into the fading gravity, the gradient shifting until what were formerly walls became floors, until walls and floors vanished altogether into the closest thing to free-fall. At the crevasse's base the world expanded into an enormous cavernous dugout, Dembowska's hollow heart, where generations of mining drones had gnawed at the metal and the ores that held it. The hole was too large for air. They treated it as space. Within the free-fall vacuum at the asteroid's core were the new heavy industries: the cryonics factories, where hints and memories teased from the blasted mind of Michael Carnas-sus were translated into a steady rise of Dembowska Cartel stock on the market monitors of a hundred worlds.

Trade secrets were secure within Dembowska's bowels, snug beneath kilometers of rock. Life had forced itself like putty into the fracture in this minor planet: dug out its inert heart and filled it with engines. Seen from the industrial core, the bottom of the crevasse was the top layer of the outside world. Here Wells had his offices; where twenty-four-hour crews of his employees monitored the datapulses of the Union of Cartels, under the quasinational aegis of Ceres Datacom Network.

The offices were walled in velcro and video, the glowing walls with their ceaseless murmur of news acting as work partitions. Bits of hard copy were vel-cro-clipped underfoot and overhead; reporters in headsets spoke over audiolines or tapped energetically at keyboards. They looked young; there was a calculated extravagance in their dress. Over the mumble of narrative, the smooth rattle of printouts, the whir of booted datatapes, came faint background music: the brittle keening of synthesizers. The cold air smelled of roses.

A secretary announced them. His hair crisped out from under a loose Mech beret. Its puffiness suggested possible cranial taps. He wore a patriotic lapel tag, showing the wide-eyed face of Michael Carnassus. Wells's office was more secure than the rest. His videowalls formed a surging mosaic of headlines, interlocking rectangles of data that could be frozen and expanded at will. He wore quilted coveralls with Shaper lace at the throat; the gray fabric was overprinted with stylized eurypteroids in darker gray. His stylish gloves were overlaid with circuit-laden control rings.

"Welcome to CDN, Auditor Milosz. You too, Policewife. May I offer you hot tea?"

Lindsay accepted the warm bulb gratefully. The tea was synthetic but good. Greta took the bulb but drank nothing. She watched Wells with calm wariness.

Wells touched a switch on the sticky surface of his free-fall desk. A large goose-necked lamp swiveled on its coiled neck with subtle, reptilian grace and stared at Lindsay. There were human eyes within the hood, embedded in a smooth matrix of dark flesh. The eyes blinked and shifted from Lindsay to Greta Beatty. Greta bowed her head in recognition.

"This is a monitor outlet for the Chief of Police," Wells told him. "She prefers to see things with her own eyes, when they have as much importance as you claim your news does." He turned to Greta. "The situation is under control, Policewife." The accordioned door shunted open behind her. Tight-lipped, she bowed again to the lamp, shot a quick look at Lindsay, and kicked her way off the wall and out the door. It slid shut.

"How'd you get stuck with the Zen nun?" Wells said.

"I beg your pardon?" said Lindsay.