Schismatrix plus (31 page)

"This is quite sudden."

"Nonsense, Alexandrina. At our age, if we put things off, we never accomplish anything. What's five years to us? We have reached the age of discretion."

"May I have that drink?" she said. "It's bad for my maintenance program, but I think I need it." She looked at him nervously, a ghost of strained intimacy waking behind her eyes.

He looked at her smooth paper skin, the brittle precision of her hair. He realized that his gesture of atonement would add another rote to his life, a new form of routine. He restrained a sigh. "I look to you to set our sexuality clause."

SHIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 23-6-'83

Constantine looked into the tank. Behind the glass window, below the surface of the water, was the waterlogged head of Paolo Mavrides. The dark, curled hair, a major trait of the Mavrides gene-line, floated soggily around the young man's neck and shoulders. The eyes were open, greenish and bloodshot. Injections had paralyzed his optic nerve. A spinal clamp left him able to feel but not to move. Blind and deaf, numbed by the blood-warmed water, Paolo Mavrides had been in sensory isolation for two weeks. A tracheal plug fed him oxygen. Intravenous taps kept him from starving. Constantine touched a black rocker switch on the welded tank, and the jury-rigged speakers came alive. The young assassin was talking to himself, some mumbled litany in different voices. Constantine spoke into the microphone. "Paolo."

"I'm busy," Paolo said. "Come back later." Constantine chuckled. "Very well." He tapped against the microphone to make the sound of a switch closing.

"No, wait!" Paolo said at once. Constantine smiled at the trace of panic. "Never mind, the performance is ruined anyway. Vetterling's Shepherd Moons."

"Hasn't had a performance in years," Constantine said. "You must have been a mere child then."

"I memorized it when I was nine."

"I'm impressed by your resourcefulness. Still, the Cataclysts believe in that, don't they? Testing the inner world of the will. . . You've been in there quite a while. Quite a while."

There was silence. Constantine waited. "How long?" Mavrides burst out.

"Almost forty-eight hours."

Mavrides laughed shortly.

Constantine joined in. "Of course we know that isn't so. No, it's been almost a year. You'd be surprised how thin you look."

"You should try it sometime. Might help your skin problems."

"Those are the least of my difficulties, young man. I made a tactical error when I chose the best security possible. It made me a challenge. You'd be surprised how many fools have had this tank before you. You made a mistake, young Paolo."

"Tell me something," Paolo said. "Why do you sound like God?"

"That's a technical artifact. My voice has a direct feed to your inner ear. That's why you can't hear your own voice. I'm reading it off the nerves to your larynx."

"I see," Paolo said. "Wirehead work."

"Nothing irreversible. Tell me about yourself, Paolo. What was your brigade?"

"I'm no Cataclyst."

"I have your weapon here." Constantine pulled a small timer-vial from his tailored linen jacket and rolled it between his fingers. "Standard Cataclyst issue. What is it? PDKL-Ninety-five?"

Paolo said nothing.

"Perhaps you know the drug as 'Shatter,' " Constantine said. Paolo laughed. "I know better than to try to re-form your mind. If I could have entered the same room with you I would have set it for five seconds and we would have both died."

"An aerosol toxin, is it? How rash."

"There are more important things than living, plebe."

"What a quaint insult. I see you've researched my past. Haven't heard the like in years. Next you'll be saying I'm unplanned."

"No need. Your wife tells us that much."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Natalie Constantine, your wife. Ever hear of her? She doesn't take neglect easily. She's become the prime whore of Skimmers Union."

"How distressing."

"How do you think I planned to enter your house? Your wife's a slut. She begs me for it."

Constantine laughed. "You'd like me to strike you, wouldn't you? The pain would give you something to hold on to. No, you should have stayed in Goldreich-Tremaine, young man. In those empty halls and broken-down offices. I'm afraid you've begun to bore me."

"Let me tell you what I regret, before you go. I regret that I set my sights so low. I've had time to think, recently." Hollow laughter. "I fell for your image, your propaganda line. The Nysa asteroid, for instance. It seemed so grand at first. The Ring Council didn't know that Nysa Cartel was a dumping ground for burnt-out wireheads from the moondocks. You were still sucking up to aristocrats from the Republic. With all your rank you're still a cheap informer, Constantine. And a fucking lackey."

Constantine felt a quiver of familiar tension across the back of his head. He touched the plug there and reached in his pocket for the inhaler. No use going into fugue when the boy was starting to babble, at the point of breaking. "Go on," he said.

"The great things you claim you've done are all facades and frauds. You've never built anything of your own. You're small, Constantine. Very small. I know a man who could hide ten of you under his thumbnail."

"Who?" Constantine said. "Your friend Vetterling?"

"Poor Fernand, your victim? Yes, of course he's a thousand times your size, but that's hardly fair, is it? You never had an atom of artistic talent. No, I mean in your own skill. Politics. Espionage."

"Some Cataclyst, then." Constantine was bored.

"No. Abelard Lindsay."

It hit him then. A lightning stroke of migraine raced across his left frontal lobe. The surface of the tank came toward him in slow motion as he fell, a frozen icescape of dull metallic glitter, and he struggled to get his hands up, nerve impulses locked in a high-speed fugue that seemed to last a month. When he came to, his cheek pressed against the cold metal, Mavrides was still babbling. "... the whole story from Nora. While you were here holding treason trials for artists, Lindsay was scoring the biggest coup in history. An Investor defector.... He has an Investor defector, a starship Queen. In the palm of his hand."

Constantine cleared his throat. "I heard that news. Mech propaganda. It's a farce."

Mavrides laughed hysterically. "You're burned! You're a fucking footnote. Lindsay led the revolution in your nation while you were still swatting bugs in the germs and muck and plotting to seize his credit. You're microscopic! I shouldn't have bothered to kill you, but I've never had any luck."

"Lindsay's dead. He's been dead sixty years."

"Sure, plebe. That's what he wanted you to think." The laughter from the speakers was metallic, drawn straight from the nerve. "I lived in his house, fool. He loved me."

Constantine opened the tank. He twisted the timer on the vial and dropped it into the water, then slammed the tank shut. He turned and walked away. As he reached the doorway he heard a sudden frenzied splashing as the toxin hit.

CZARINA-HLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 3-1-'84

The long bright line of welded radiance was the cleanest thing he had ever seen. Lindsay floated in an observation bubble, watching construction robots crawl in vacuum. The Mechanist engines had the long sharp noses of weevils, their white-hot welding tips casting long shadows across the blackened hull of the Czarina's Palace.

They were building a full-sized replica of an Investor starship, a starship without engines, a hulk that would never move under its own power. And black, with no trace of the gaudy arabesques and inlays of a true Investor craft. The other Investors had insisted on it: condemned their pervert Queen to this dark and mocking prison.

After years of research, Lindsay had pieced out the truth about the Commander's crime.

Queens intromitted their eggs into the womblike pouches of their males. The males fertilized the eggs and brought them to term within the pouch. The neuter Ensigns controlled ovulation through a complex hormonal pseudo-copulation.

The criminal Queen had killed her Ensign in a fit of passion and set up a common male in his place. But without a true Ensign, the cycles of her sexuality had become distorted. Lindsay's evidence showed her destroying one of her malformed eggs. To an Investor, it was worse than perversion, worse even than murder: it was bad for business.

Lindsay had presented his evidence in a way that pierced to the core of Investor ethics. Embarrassment was not an emotion native to Investors. They had been stunned. But Lindsay was quick with his remedy: exile. Behind it was the implied threat to spread the evidence, to play out the details of the scandal to every Investor ship and every human faction.

It was bad enough that a select group of wealthy Queens and Ensigns had been apprised of the shocking news. That the impressionable males should learn of it was unthinkable. A bargain was struck.

The Queen never knew what had betrayed her. The approach to her had been even more subtle, stretching Lindsay's talents to the utmost. A timely gift of jewels had helped, distracting her with that overwhelming avidity that was the very breath of life to Investors. Business had been poor on her ship, with its debased crew and wretched eunuch Ensign.

Lindsay came armed with charts from Wells, statistics predicting the wealth to be wrung from a city-state independent of faction. Their exponential curves rose to a clean rake-off of breathtaking riches. He told her that he knew nothing of her disgrace; only that her own species was eager to condemn her. With a large enough hoard, he hinted, she might buy her way back into their good graces.

Patiently, fluently, he helped her see that this was her best chance. What could she accomplish alone, without crew, without Ensign? Why not accept the industrious aid of the small polite strangers? The social instincts of the tiny gregarious mammals drove them to consider her their Queen, in truth, and themselves her subjects. Already a Board of Advisors awaited her whims, each one fluent in Investor and begging leave to heap her with wealth. Greed would only have taken her so far. It was fear that broke her to his will: fear of the small soft-skinned alien with dark plastic over his pulpy eyes and his answers for everything. He seemed to know her own people better than she did herself.

The announcement had come a week later, and with it a sudden hemorrhage of capital to the newborn place of exile. They called the Queen "Czarina," a nickname given by Ryumin. And her city was Czarina-Kluster: in four months already a boom town, accreting out of nothing on the inner edge of the Belt. The Czarina-Kluster People's Corporate Republic had leaped into sudden concrete existence out of raw potential, in what Wells called a "Prigoginic leap," a "mergence into a higher level of complexity." Now the Board of Advisors was deluged with business, comlines frantic with would-be defectors maneuvering for asylum and a fresh start. The presence of an Investor cast an enormous shadow, a wall of prestige that no Mechanist or Shaper dared to challenge.

Makeshift squatter's digs crowded the Queen's raw Palace: nets of tough Shaper bubble suburbs, "subbles"; sleazy pirate craft copulating in a daisy-chain of accordioned attack tunnels; rough blown-out honeycombs of Mechanist nickel-iron, towed into place; limpetlike construction huts clinging to the skeletal girders of an urban complex scarcely off the drawing board. This city would be a metropolis, a circumsolar free port, the ultimate sundog zone. He had brought it into being. But it was not for him.

"A sight to stir the blood, friend." Lindsay looked to his right. The man once called Wells had arrived in the observation bubble. In the weeks of preparation Wells had vanished into a carefully prepared false identity. He was now Wellspring, two hundred years old, born on Earth, a man of mystery, a maneu-verer par excellence, a visionary, even a prophet. Nothing less would do. A coup this size demanded legendry. It demanded fraud. Lindsay nodded. "Things progress."

"This is where the real work starts. I'm not too happy with that Board of Advisors. They seem a bit too stiff, too Mechanist. Some of them have ambition. They'll have to be watched."

"Of course."

"You wouldn't consider the job? The Coordinator's post is open for you. You're the man for it."

"I like the shadows, Wellspring. A role your size is too close to the footlights for me."

Wellspring hesitated. "I have trouble enough with the philosophy. The myth may be too much for me. I need you and your shadows." Lindsay looked away, watching two construction robots follow a seam to meet in a white-hot kiss of their welding-beaks. "My wife is dead," he said.

"Alexandrina? I'm sorry. This is a shock."

Lindsay winced. "No, not her. Nora. Nora Mavrides. Nora Everett."

"Ah," Wellspring said. "When did you get the news?"

"I told her," Lindsay said, "that I had a place for us. You remember I mentioned to you that there might be a Ring Council breakaway."

"Yes."

"It was as quiet as I could make it, but not quiet enough. Constantine got word somehow, exposed the breakaway. She was indicted for treason. The trial would have implicated the rest of her clan. So she chose suicide."

"She was courageous."

"It was the only thing to do."

"One supposes so."

"She still loved me, Wellspring. She was going to join me here. She was trying to do it when he killed her."

"I recognize your grief," Wellspring said. "But life is long. You mustn't be blinded to your ultimate aims."

Lindsay was grim. "You know I don't follow that post-Cataclyst line."

"Posthumanist," Wellspring insisted. "Are you on the side of life, or aren't you? If you're not, then you'll let the pain overwhelm you. You'll go against Constantine and die as Nora did. Accept her death, and stay with us. The future belongs to Posthumanism, Lindsay. Not to nation-states, not to factions. It belongs to life, and life moves in clades."

"I've heard your spiel before, Wellspring. If we embrace the loss of our humanity then it means worse differences, worse struggle, worse war."

"Not if the new clades can reach accord as cognitive systems on the Fourth Prigoginic Level of Complexity."