Schismatrix plus (39 page)

"Your friends, Doctor Gomez and Undersecretary Nakamura, have been most attentive. Thank you for the tapes and gifts."

"It was nothing," Lindsay said.

She feared suddenly that she was disappointing him. He had not seen her in the fifteen years since the duel. She had been very young then—only twenty. She still had the Kelland cheekbones and pointed chin, but time had changed her, and her genotype was not pure. She was not Vera Kelland's clone. Her sleeveless kimono mercilessly showed the changes brought by her years as an alien emissary. Two circulatory ducts dented the flesh of her neck, and her skin still had a peculiar waxiness. Inside the Embassy at Fomalhaut, she had lived in water for years.

Lindsay's gray eyes would not stop wandering. She was convinced that he could feel the Presence, sense its pervasive eeriness. Sooner or later he would attribute that feeling to her, and then her chance to win his favor would be gone. He spoke abstractedly. "I'm sorry that matters can't be resolved more quickly.... In matters of defection it's best not to be rash." She thought she heard a veiled reference to the fate of Nora Mavrides. That chilled her. "I see your point, Chancellor." Vera had no official backing by the Constantine clan, for they could not risk denunciation within the Ring Council. Life was hard in Skimmers Union these days: with the loss of the capitalship had come a vicious struggle for the remaining scraps of power and a hunt for scapegoats. Constantine clan members were prominent victims. Once, she had been the favorite of their clan founder, showered with gifts and Constantine's strained affection.

But her clan had made too many bad gambles. Philip Constantine had risked their future on the chance to kill Lindsay and had failed. The clan had invested heavily in Vera's ambassadorship, but she had returned without the riches they'd expected. And she had changed in a way that alarmed them. Now, she was expendable.

As the clan's power dwindled, they had lived in terror of Lindsay. He had survived the duel and returned more powerful than ever. He seemed unstoppable, bigger than life. But the attack they'd expected had never come, and it oc-curred to them that he had weaknesses. Through her, they hoped to prey on his emotions, on the love or guilt he felt for Vera Kelland. It was the latest and most desperate of gambles. With luck they might win sanctuary. Or vengeance. Or both.

"Why come to me?" he said. "There are other places. Life as a Mechanist is not so bad as the Ring Council paints it."

"The Mechs would turn us against our own people. They would break up our clan. No, Czarina-Kluster is best. There's sanctuary in the shadow of your Queen. But not if you work against us."

"I see," Lindsay said. He smiled. "My friends don't trust you. We have very little to gain, you see. C-K already swarms with defectors. Your clan does not share our Posthuman ideology. Worse yet, there are many in C-K who hate the name Constantine. Former Detentistes, Cataclysts, and so on.. . . You understand the difficulties."

"Those days are behind us, Chancellor. We mean no harm to anyone." Lindsay closed his eyes. "We could babble reassurances until the sun expands," he said—he seemed to be quoting someone—"and never convince each other. Either we trust each other or we don't."

His bluntness filled her with misgivings. She was at a loss. The silence stretched uncomfortably. "I have a present for you," she said. "An ancient heirloom." She crossed the narrow cell to lift a rectangular wire cage, shrouded in peach-colored velvet. She lifted the cage cover and showed him the clan treasure, an albino laboratory rat. It ran back and forth through its cage, mincing along with bizarre, repetitive precision. "It is one of the first creatures ever to attain physical immortality. An ancient lab specimen. It is over three hundred years old."

Lindsay said, "You're very generous." He lifted the cage and examined it, Within it, the rat, its capacity to learn completely exhausted by age, had been reduced to absolute rote behavior. The twitchings of its muzzle, even the movement of its eyes, were utterly stereotyped.

The old man watched it searchingly. She knew he would get no response. There was nothing in the rat's jellied pink eyes, not even the dimmest flicker of animal awareness. "Has it ever been out of the cage?" he said.

"Not in centuries, Chancellor. It's too valuable." Lindsay opened the cage. Its routines shattered, the rat cowered beside the steel tube of its water drip, its sinewy furred limbs trembling. Lindsay wiggled his gloved fingers beside the entrance. "Don't be afraid," he told the rat seriously. "There's a whole world out here." Some ancient, corroded reflex kicked over in the rat's head. With a squeal it launched itself across the cage at Lindsay's hand, clawing and biting in convulsive fury. Vera gasped and leaped forward, shocked at his action, appalled by the rat's response. Lindsay gestured her back and lifted his hand, watching in pity as the rat attacked him. Beneath his torn right glove, hard prosthetic fingers gleamed with black and copper gridwork. He grasped the squirming animal with gentle firmness, watching to see that it did not crack its teeth. "Prison has set its mind," he said. "It will take a long time to melt the bars behind its eyes." He smiled. "Luckily, time is in great supply."

The rat stopped struggling. It panted in the throes of some rodent epiphany. Lindsay set it gently on the tabletop beside the Market monitor. It struggled to its pink feet and began to pace in agitation, turning in its tracks at the former limits of its cage.

"It can't change," Vera told him. "Its capacities are exhausted."

"Nonsense," Lindsay said. "He merely needs to make a Prigoginic leap to a new level of behavior." The calm assertion of his ideology frightened her. Something must have shown in her face. He tugged the torn glove from his hand.

"Hope is our duty," he said. "You must always hope."

"For years we hoped we could heal Philip Constantine," Vera said. "Now we know better. We are ready to trade him to you for our own safe-conduct." Lindsay looked at her seriously. "This is cruelty," he said.

"He was your enemy," she said. "We wanted to make amends."

"For me, you are that chance."

It was working. He still remembered Vera Kelland.

"Don't deceive yourself," he said. "I don't offer true recompense. Czarina-Kluster must fall someday. Nations don't last in this era. Only people last, only plans and hopes. ... I can only offer you what I have. I don't have safety. I have freedom."

"Posthumanism," she said. "It's your state ideology. Of course we'll adapt."

"I thought you had your own convictions, Vera. You're a Galacticist." She ran her fingers lightly, absently, over one of the gill seams in her neck. "I learned my politics in the observation sphere. In Fomalhaut. The Embassy." She hesitated. "Life there changed me more than you could know. There are things I can't explain."

"There's something in this room," he said.

She was stunned. "Yes," she blurted. "You felt it? Not many do."

"What is it? Something from the Fomalhaut aliens? The gasbags?"

"They know nothing about it."

"But you do," he said. "Tell me."

She was in too far to back out. She spoke reluctantly. "I first noticed it in the Embassy. The Embassy floats in the atmosphere of Fomalhaut Four, a gas-giant planet, like Jupiter... . We had to live in water there to survive the gravity. We were thrown together, Mechanists and Shapers; we shared the Embassy, there was no choice. Everything was changed; we changed. .. . The Investors came to take a Mechanist contingent back to the Schismatrix. I think the Presence was aboard the Investor ship. Since then the Presence has been with me."

"Is it real?" said Lindsay.

"I think so. Sometimes I almost see it. A kind of flickering. A mirror-colored thing."

"What did the Investors say?"

"They denied everything. They said I was deluded." She hesitated. "And they weren't the last to say so." She regretted confessing it at once. But the burden had eased. She looked at him, daring to hope.

"An alien, then," Lindsay said. "Not one of the nineteen known species."

"You believe me," she said. "You think that it's really here."

"We must believe each other," Lindsay said. "Life is better that way." He looked about the narrow room carefully, as if testing his eyes. "I'd like to lure it into the open."

"It won't come out," the girl said. "Believe me, I've begged it many times." "We mustn't try it here," Lindsay said. "Any manifestation would alarm Kitsune. She feels secure in this world. We must consider her feelings." His sincerity startled her. It hadn't occurred to her that her captor might have feelings, or that anyone might relate, in a personal way, to that titanic mass of flesh.

He picked up the rat, which began squealing loudly, with desperate energy.

He examined it with such guileless interest that, before she could help herself, she felt a stab of pity for him, an urge to protect him. The feeling surprised and warmed her.

He said, "We'll be leaving soon. You'll be coming with us." He put the rat in the pocket of his long coat. It rested there quietly. The history of the Schismatrix was one long racking chronicle of change. The population had reached nine billion. Within the Ring Council, power had slipped from the narcotized hands of the Zen Serotonists. After forty years of their reign, new Shaper ideologues embraced the aggressive schemes of visionary Galacticism.

The new creed had spread slowly. It was born in the interstellar embassies, where ambassadors broke human limits in their struggle to grasp alien ways of life. Now the Galacticist prophets stood ready to abandon humanity entirely, to achieve a Galactic consciousness where mere loyalty to species was obsolete.

Once again detente had shattered. The Mechanists and Shapers fought in bitter rivalry for the favor of aliens. Of the nineteen alien races, only five had shown even the vaguest interest in a closer relationship with humankind. The Chondrule Cloud Processors were willing to move in, but only if Venus could be atomized for easier digestion. The Nerve Coral Aquatics expressed mild interest in invading the Earth, but this would mean breaking the sacred tradition of Interdict. The Culture Ghosts were willing to join with anyone who could endure them, but their hideous effects on the Schismatric diplomatic corps had made them objects of genuine horror.

The gasbags of Fomalhaut offered most. It had taken many decades to master their "language," which was best expressed as complex unstable states of atmospheric dynamics. Once true contact had been established, progress was rapid. Fomalhaut was an enormous star with a huge asteroid belt rich in heavy metals.

The asteroid belt was useless to the gasbags, who disliked space travel. They were, however, interested in Jupiter and planned to seed it with aerial krill.

The Investors were willing to handle transportation, though even their huge ships could carry only a handful of surgically deflated gasbags per trip. Controversy had raged for decades. The Mechanists had their own Galacti-cist faction, who struggled to grasp the mind-shattering physics of the sinister Hijack Boosters. The Boosters, like the Investors, possessed a technique of faster-than-light travel. The Investors were willing to sell their secret, but only at a crippling price. The Hijack Boosters mocked mankind but were occasionally indiscreet.

An advance into the galactic arm seemed inevitable. One of two strategies would succeed: that of the Shapers, with their diplomatic negotiation, or of the Mechanists, who directly attacked the problem of starflight. Only a major faction could succeed; the minor breakaway groups lacked the wealth, the skilled population, the diplomatic pull. A new, uneasy polarity took shape.

In the meantime, gasbag larvae in their egg-shaped spacecraft painstakingly inspected circumsolar space. Small groups of Shapers and Mechanist renegades mapped the riches of Fomalhaut. One solar system would never again be enough.

The breakdown of detente aroused old hatreds. Brushfire warfare flourished, unrestrained by the faltering Investors. Bizarre new factions sprang up, led by returned diplomats. Their recruits loomed at the edges of society: the Carnivores, the Viral Army, the Coronaspherics. History's kaleidoscope worked its permutations, its pace ever faster, approaching some unknown cresendo. Patterns changed and warped and flew apart, each chip of light a human life.

CZARINA-HLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 13-1-'54

After seventy years of wealth and stability, disaster was loose in Czarina-Kluster. The elite of the Lifesiders Clique met in secret council, to wrestle with crisis.

Aquamarine Discreet was a Lifesider citadel, and its security was absolute. Mosaic blowups of the Jovian moon, Europa, covered the discreet's walls: bright grooved terrain in ice-white and dusky orange, interior seas in blue and indigo. Over the burnished conference table hung a Europan orrery, where jeweled spacecraft representing Lifesider satellites ticked quietly on orbits of silver wire.

Chancellor Abelard Gomez, a vigorous eighty-five-year-old, had taken over management of the Clique's affairs. His chief compatriots were Professor Glen Szilard, Queen's Advisor Fidel Nakamura, and Gomez's current wife, Project Manager Jane Murray. At the far end of the table sat Chancellor Emeritus Abelard Lindsay. The old visionary's lined face showed the quizzical smile associated with a heavy dosage of Green Rapture.

Gomez rapped the table, bringing the meeting to order. They fell silent, except for the loud chattering of the ancient rat on Lindsay's shoulder.

"Sorry," Lindsay murmured. He put the rat in his pocket. Gomez took control. "Fidel, your report?"

"It's true, Chancellor. The Queen has vanished." The others groaned. Gomez spoke sharply. "Defected or kidnapped?" Nakamura wiped his brow. "Wellspring took her; only he can answer that. My fellow Advisors are in uproar. The Coordinator is calling out the dogs. He's even brought the tigers out of mothballs. They want Wellspring for high treason. They won't rest until they have him."

"Or until C-K collapses around them," Gomez said. Gloom settled over the chamber. "Tigers," Gomez said. "Tigers are huge machines; they could shred through the walls of this discreet like paper. We mustn't meet again until we have armed ourselves and established secure perimeters." Szilard spoke up. "Our dogs have this suburb's exits monitored. I stand ready to carry out loyalty tests. We can purge the suburb of unfriendly ideologues and make this our bastion as the Kluster dissolves."