Schismatrix plus (37 page)

Lindsay said nothing. There had been a time when he might have twisted the conversation to his advantage. But now his skill was gone. And he no longer wanted it.

Words were useless. He had grown impatient with words. They could no longer hold him.

Suddenly he knew he had to step outside the rules.

He floated out of his chair and began stripping off his clothes. Navarre left at once, insulted and flustered. Lindsay's clothes drifted off in free-fall, his jacket and trousers pinwheeling slowly over other tables. The customers ducked, laughing. Soon he was naked. The crowd's nervous laughter died down into puzzled unease. They moved away from Gomez's dogs and muttered together in disconcerted awe.

Lindsay ignored them. He folded his legs in midair and gazed at the wall. Wellspring's students deserted the bar, mumbling excuses and glancing back over their shoulders. Even Wellspring was nonplused. When Wellspring left he took the last of the crowd with him.

Lindsay was left alone with the bar servo, young Gomez, and his dogs. Gomez edged closer. "Czarina-Kluster isn't like I'd thought it was, in the Republic."

Lindsay meditated on the landscape.

"They put these dogs on me. Because supposedly I might be dangerous. You don't mind the dogs, do you? ... No, I see that you don't." Gomez sighed tremulously. "After three months, the others still keep me at arm's length. They won't initiate me into their Clique. You saw the girl, didn't you?

Melanie Omaha, Dr. Omaha from the Kosmosity? Fire, she's fantastic, isn't she?

But she doesn't care for men under the dogs; who would, knowing Security's watching? I'd give my right arm for ten minutes in a discreet with her. Oh, sorry." He looked in embarrassment at Lindsay's mechanical arm. Gomez wiped red streaks of facepaint from his cheeks. "You remember me telling you about Abelard Lindsay? Well, rumor says you're him. And I think I believe it. You are Lindsay. You're him."

Lindsay drew a deeper breath.

"I understand," Gomez said. "You're telling me that it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the Cause. But listen to this!" He pulled a notebook from inside his willow-printed coat. He read loudly, desperately. "

'A dissipative self-organizing system evolves along a coherent sequence of space-time structures. We may distinguish between four different dimensional frameworks: au-topoiesis, ontogeny, phylogeny, anagenesis.' " He crumpled the paper in anguish. "And this is from my poetry class!" There was a moment's silence. Then Gomez burst out: "Maybe it's the secret of life! But if it is, can we bear it? Can we meet the goals we set ourselves? Over centuries? What about the simple things? How can I find any joy in a single day when the specters of these centuries loom over me. ... It's all too huge, yes, even you ... You! You, who brought me here. Why didn't you tell me you were Wellspring's friend? Was it modesty? But you're Lindsay!

Lindsay himself! I didn't believe it at first. When I decided it was true, it terrified me. Like hearing your own shadow speak to you." Gomez hesitated. "All these years you've hidden. But you're coming into the Schismatrix openly now, aren't you? You've come out to do greatness, to dazzle the world. . . . It's frightening to see you in the open. Like seeing the bones of mathematics under the flesh of the world. But even if the principles are true, then what about the flesh? We are the flesh! What about the flesh?"

Lindsay had nothing to tell him.

"I know what you're thinking," Gomez said at last. " 'Love has broken his heart; it's an old story. Only time can bring him to a better sense of himself.' That's what you're thinking, isn't it? ... Of course it is." When Gomez spoke again he was calm, meditative. "Now I begin to see. It isn't something that words can capture, is it? It can only be grasped all at once. Someday I'll have it entirely. Someday when these dogs are long gone. Someday when even Melanie Omaha is only a memory to me." He was sad but exalted. "I heard them talking as you made your—uh, gesture. These so-called sophisticates, these proud Cicadas. They may have the jargon, but the wisdom is yours." Gomez was radiant. "Thank you, sir." Lindsay waited until Gomez had left. Then he could not hold it back any longer. He thought he would never stop laughing.

DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 21-2-'01

Despite her role in its foundation, Kitsune had never visited Czarina-Kluster. Like Wellspring, Kitsune had held great power in C-K's pioneer days; unlike him, she had not released it gracefully. While Wellspring had retreated from day-to-day government and pursued his strategy of rule-by-fashion, Kitsune had blatantly challenged the Queen's Advisors. In the years while Lindsay recuperated, she had had some success. She announced plans to move to C-K, but as years passed she refused to disturb her routines, and her power decayed. It had led to a break, and the destinies of C-K and Dembowska had radically diverged.

Disquieting stories of her transformations had reached Lindsay in C-K. Rumor said she had embraced new technologies, exploiting the laxity that had come with detente. Dembowska was still a member of the Mechanist Union of Cartels but was constantly on the verge of expulsion, tolerated only as a clearinghouse for Ring Council defectors.

Even the Ring Council was appalled by Dembowska's emergent technology of flesh. In the hands of the Zen Serotonists, the Ring Council struggled for stability; as a result, it was falling behind. The cutting edge of genetics technology had been seized by the wild-eyed black surgeons of the cometaries and the Uran-ian rings, mushrooming posthuman clades like the Metropolarity, the Blood Bathers, and the Endosymbiotics. They had discarded humanity like a caul. Disintegrating microfactions surrounded the Schismatrix like a haze of superheated plasma.

The march of science had become a headlong stampede. The Mechanists and Shapers had become like two opposing armies, whose rank and file, scattering into swamps and thickets, ignore the orders of their aging generals. The emergent philosophies of the age—Posthumanism, Zen Serotonin, Galacti-cism—were like signal bonfires lit to attract stragglers. Deserters'

philosophies.

Lindsay's fire burned brightly, and its glow attracted many. They called Lindsay's group the Lifesiders Clique.

Czarina-Kluster's cliques had the power of minor factions in their own right. The cliques formed a shadow government in C-K, a moral parallel to the distracted formal rule of the Queen's Advisors. Clique elites moved behind the scenes, imitating their paragon Wellspring in deliberate webs of self-spun obfus-cation. The forms of power and its realities had been gently disentangled. The social arbiters of the Polycarbon Clique, the Lifesiders, or the Green Camarilla could work wonders with a dropped hint or a lifted eyebrow.

It followed, then, that groups considering defection to C-K consulted the Cicada cliques before formally requesting asylum. Normally this was Well-spring's domain.

In the latest case, however, Wellspring was absent on one of his many recruiting trips. Lindsay, knowing the nature of the case, had agreed to meet the representative of the breakaway group on neutral ground in Dembowska. His entourage consisted of his chief lieutenant, Gomez; three of his postdoctoral students; and a diplomatic observer from the Queen's Advisors. Dembowska had changed. When they debarked into customs amid the sparse crowd from the liner. Lindsay was struck by the warmth. The air was at blood heat and smelled faintly of Kitsune's skin. The smell brought seeping memory with it. Lindsay's smile was melancholy. The memories were eighty-five years old, as thin as paper; they seemed to have happened to someone else. Lindsay's Lifesiders checked their luggage. Two of the graduate students, Mechanist types, murmured first impressions into their lip mikes. Other passengers waited at the scanning booths.

Two Dembowska agents approached their group. Lindsay stepped forward in the faint gravity. "Harem police?" he said.

"Wallchildren," said the first of the pair, a male. He wore a thin, sleeveless kimono; his bare arms were covered with authority tattoos. His face seemed familiar. Lindsay recognized the genetics of Michael Carnassus. He turned to the other, a woman, and saw Kitsune, younger, her hair shorn, her dark arms stenciled in white ink.

"I'm Colonel Martin Dembowska, and this is my Wallsister, Captain Murasaki Dembowska."

"I'm Chancellor Lindsay. These are cliquemembers Abelard Gomez, Jane Murray, Glen Szilard, Colin Szilard, Emma Meyer, and Undersecretary Fidel Nakamura, our diplomatic observer." The Cicadas bowed, each in turn.

"I hope you weren't distressed by the bacterial change aboard ship," Murasaki said. She had Kitsune's voice.

"A minor inconvenience."

"We are forced to take great care with the Wallmother's skin bacteria," the Colonel explained. "There is a considerable acreage involved. I'm sure you understand."

"Could you offer us exact figures?" asked one of the Szilard brothers, with a Mechanist's dry craving for hard data. "Reports in Czarina-Kluster are clouded."

"At last report the Wallmother massed four hundred thousand, eight hundred and twelve tons." The Colonel was proud. "Have you anything to declare? No? Then follow me."

They followed the Dembowskan into a confidential clearance office, where they left their luggage and were provided with sterilized guest's kimonos. They floated barefoot into the hot air of Dembowska's first mall. The cavernous duty-free shopping area was paved, walled, and ceilinged in flesh. The Cicadas padded along reluctantly, their toes just brushing the resilient skin. They looked with hidden longing at the shops, safe islands of stone and metal. Lindsay had schooled them to be tactful and was proud of their masked reactions.

Even Lindsay felt a qualm when they entered the first long tunnel; its round, gulletlike design tapped a deep well of unease. The party boarded an openwork sled, propelled by peristaltic twitches from the sinewed tracks beneath it.

The slick wall was studded periodically by sphinctered plugs for predi-gested pap. Light glowed gently from translucent bladders swollen with white phosphorescence. Gomez, at Lindsay's elbow, studied the architecture with a trancelike intensity. His attention was sharpened to a cutting edge by a drug known in Cicada circles as "Green Rapture."

"They've gone for broke," Gomez said softly. "Could there be personality behind this? It must take half a ton of backbrain to manage all this meat." His eyes narrowed. "Imagine how it must feel."

The Carnassus clone, in the sled's first compartment, touched the controls. A seam parted wetly in the floor, pitching the sled into vertical free-fall. They catapulted down a multitrack elevator shaft, broken periodically by dizzying vistas of plazas and suburbs.

Shops and offices flashed past, embedded in billows of dark satiny skin. The heat and smell of perfumed flesh were everywhere: intimacy on an industrial scale. The crowds were sparse. Many were young children, running naked.

The sled braked to a halt. The group disembarked onto a furred landing. Gomez nudged Lindsay as the empty sled slid back up the rails. "The walls have ears, Chancellor."

They did, and eyes as well.

There was something in the air on this level. The perfume was particularly heady. Gomez grew heavy-lidded suddenly, and the Szilard brothers, who had donned headband cameras, took them off to dab at sweat. Jane Murray and Emma Meyer, puzzled by something they couldn't define, looked about suspiciously. As the two Dembowskans led them off the landing and into the fleshy depths, Lindsay placed it suddenly: sex pheromones. The architecture was aroused.

The group followed a low-grav footpath: toughened skin marked with the massive whorls of endless fingerprints. The ceiling overhead was a waving carpet of lustrous black hair, for traveling hand-over-hand. This level was clearly a showpiece: the former buildings had been stripped down to mere frameworks, trellises for flesh. Voluptuous organics rose at every side, euclidean corners scrapped for smooth maternal curves. Structures flowed up from the floor to merge in swan's-neck arches into the lustrous ceiling. Buildings were dimpled, hollowed, the sleek pink of sphinctered doors sliding imperceptibly into skin lightly stippled with down. They stopped on the furred lawn of an elaborate, massive edifice, its dark walls gleaming with ivory mosaic. "Your hostel," the Colonel announced. The building's double doors yawned open on muscular, jawlike hinges. Jane Murray hesitated as the others entered; she took Lindsay's arm.

"That ivory in the walls—it's teeth." She had gone pale under the cool blues and aquamarines of her Cicada face paint.

"Female pheromones in the air," Lindsay said. "They're making you uneasy. It's backbrain response, doctor."

"Jealous of the walls." The postanthropologist smiled. "This place feels like a gigantic discreet."

Despite her bravado, Lindsay saw her fright. She would have preferred even the most notorious of Cicada discreets, with their clandestine games, to this dubious lodging. They stepped inside.

Murasaki addressed the group. "You'll be sharing the hostel with two groups of commercial agents from Diotima and Themis, but you'll have a wing of your own. This way, please."

They followed her along a walkway of flat ivory implants. One of Dem-bowska's myriad of hearts, an industrial-scale blood-pumping station, thudded behind the ribs of the ceiling. Its double beat set the rhythm to light musical warbling from a wall-set larynx.

Their quarters were a biomechanical mix. Market monitors glowed in the walls, tracing the rise and fall of prominent Mechanist stocks. The furniture was a series of tasteful lumps and hummocks: curved beds of flesh, dressed modestly in iris-printed bedclothes.

The extensive suite was divided by tattooed membranous screens. The Colonel tapped one membrane divider. It wrinkled into the ceiling like an eyelid. He gestured politely at one of the beds. "These furnishings are exemplars of our Wallmother's erototechnology. They exist for your comfort and pleasure. I must inform you, though, that our Wallmother reserves the right to fecundity."

Emma Meyer, who had settled cautiously onto one of the beds, stood up.