Schismatrix plus (6 page)

"Good," the President said. "We eat." The Speaker of the House unmasked herself; her face was bony, with slitted, suspicious eyes. A painful-looking skin rash dotted her jaw and neck.

The two pirates stalked into the next room. It was a combination bunkroom and command center, with a bank of harsh, flickering videos in a central cluster. One of the screens was tracking by telephoto: it showed a group of nine red-clad pirates approaching on foot down the Zaibatsu's northern slope, picking their way through the ruins.

"Here come the rest of us," the Speaker said.

The President glanced about him. "Not so bad. We stay here, then. At least we'll have a place to keep the air in."

Something rustled under one of the bunks. The Speaker of the House flung herself headlong under the bed. Lindsay swung his camera around. There was a high-pitched scream and a brief struggle; then she emerged, dragging out a small child. The Speaker had pinned the child in a complicated one-handed armlock. She got it to its feet.

It was a dark-haired, glowering, filthy little creature of indeterminate sex. It wore an Eighth Orbital Army uniform, cut to size. It was missing some teeth. It looked about five years old.

"So they're not all dead!" the President said. He crouched and looked the child in the eye. "Where are the rest of you?" He showed it a knife. The blade flickered into his hand from nowhere.

"Talk, citizen! Otherwise I show you your guts!"

"Come on!" said Lindsay. "That's no way to talk to a child."

"Who are you kidding, citizen? Listen, this little squealer might be eighty years old. There are endocrine treatments—"

Lindsay knelt by the child and tried to approach it gently. "How old are you? Four, five? What language do you speak?"

"Forget it," the Speaker of the House said. "There's only one small-sized bunk, see it? I guess the spyplanes just missed this one."

"Or spared it," Lindsay said.

The President laughed skeptically. "Sure, citizen. Listen, we can sell this thing to the whore bankers. It ought to be worth a few hours' attention for us, at least."

"That's slavery," Lindsay protested.

"Slavery? What are you talking about? Don't get theological, citizen. I'm talking about a national entity freeing a prisoner of war to a third party. It's a perfectly legal commercial transaction."

"I don't want to go to the whores," the child piped up suddenly. "I want to go to the farmers."

"The farmers?" said the President. "You don't want to be a farmer, micro-citizen. Ever had any weapons training? We could use a small assassin to sneak through the air ducts—"

"Don't underestimate those farmers," Lindsay said. He gestured at one of the video screens. A group of two dozen farmers had walked across the interior slope of the Zaibatsu. They were loading the dead Eighth Orbitals onto four flat sledges, drawn by shoulder harnesses.

"Blast!" the President said. "I wanted to roll them myself." He smirked.

"Can't blame 'em, I guess. Lots of good protein in a corpse."

"I want to go with the farmers," the child insisted.

"Let it go," Lindsay spoke up. "I have business with the Geisha Bank. I can treat your nation to a stay."

The Speaker of the House released the child's arm. "You can?" Lindsay nodded. "Give me a couple of days to negotiate it." She caught her husband's eye. "This one's all right. Let's make him Secretary of State." THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 2-1-'16

The Geisha Bank was a complex of older buildings, shellacked airtight and connected by a maze of polished wooden halls and sliding paper airlocks. The area had been a red-light district even before the Zaibatsu's collapse. The Bank was proud of its heritage and continued the refined and eccentric traditions of a gentler age.

Lindsay left the eleven nationals of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy in an antiseptic sauna vault, being scrubbed by impassive bathboys. It was the first real bath the pirates had had in months. Their scrawny bodies were knobbed with muscle from constant practice in free-fall jujutsu. Their sweating skins were bright with fearsome tattoos and septic rashes.

Lindsay did not join them. He stepped into a paneled dressing room and handed over his Nephrine Medicals uniform to be cleaned and pressed. He slipped into a soft brown kimono. A low-ranking male geisha in kimono and obi approached him. "Your pleasure, sir?"

"I'd like a word with the yarite, please."

The geisha looked at him with well-bred skepticism. "One moment. I will ask if our chief executive officer is prepared to accept guests." He vanished. After half an hour a blonde female geisha in business suit and obi appeared. "Mr. Dze? This way, please."

He followed her to an elevator guarded by two men armed with electrode-studded clubs. The guards were giants; his head barely came to their elbows. Their long, stony faces were acromegalic: swollen jaws, clifflike jutting cheekbones. They had been treated with hormonal growth factors. The elevator surged up three floors and opened.

Lindsay faced a thick network of brightly colored beads. Thousands of dangling, beaded wires hung from floor to ceiling. Any movement would disturb them.

"Take my hand," the banker said. Lindsay shuffled behind her, thrashing and clattering. "Step carefully," she said. "There are traps." Lindsay closed his eyes and followed. His guide stopped; a hidden door opened in a mirrored wall. Lindsay stepped through it, into the yarite's private chamber.

The floor was of ancient wood, waxed to a dark gleam. There were flat square cushions underfoot, in patterns of printed bamboo. In the long wall to Lindsay's left, glass double-doors showed a sunlit wooden balcony and a splendid garden, where crooked pines and tall japonicas arched over curving paths of raked white pebbles. The air in the room smelled of evergreen. He was gazing on this world before its rot, an image of the past, projected on false doors that could never open.

The yarite was sitting cross-legged on a cushion. She was a wizened old Mech with a tight-drawn mouth and hooded, reptilian eyes. Her wrinkled head was encased in a helmetlike lacquered wig, skewered with pins. She wore an angular flowered kimono supported by starch and struts. There was room in it for three of her.

A second woman knelt silently with her back to the right-hand wall, facing the garden's image. Lindsay knew at once that she was a Shaper. Her startling beauty alone was proof, but she had that strange, intangible air of charisma that spread from the Reshaped like a magnetic field. She was of mixed Asiatic-African gene stock: her eyes were tilted, but her skin was dark. Her hair was long and faintly kinked. She knelt before a rack of white keyboards with an air of meek devotion.

The yarite spoke without moving her head. "Your duties, Kitsune." The girl's hands darted over the keyboards and the air was filled with the tones of that most ancient of Japanese instruments: the synthesizer. Lindsay knelt on a cushion, facing the old woman. A tea tray rolled to his side and poured hot water into a cup with a chaste tinkling sound. It dipped a rotary tea whisk into the cup.

"Your pirate friends," the old woman said, "are about to bankrupt you."

"It's only money," Lindsay said.

"It is our sweat and sexuality. Did you think it would please us to squander it?"

"I needed your attention," Lindsay said. His training had seized him at once, but he was still afraid of the girl. He hadn't known he would be facing a Shaper. And there was something drastically wrong with the old woman's ki-nesics. It looked like drugs or Mechanist nerve alteration.

"You came here dressed as a Nephrine Black Medical," the old woman said.

"Our attention was guaranteed. You have it. We are listening." With Ryumin's help, Lindsay had expanded his plans. The Geisha Bank had the power to destroy his scheme; therefore, they had to be co-opted into it. He knew what they wanted. He was ready to show them a mirror. If they recognized their own ambitions and desires, he would win.

Lindsay launched into his spiel. He paused midway to make a point. "You can see what the Black Medicals hope to gain from the performance. Behind their walls they feel isolated, paranoid. They plan to gain prestige by sponsoring our play.

"But I must have a cast. The Geisha Bank is my natural reservoir of talent. I can succeed without the Black Medicals. I can't succeed without you."

"I see," the yarite said. "Now explain to me why you think we can profit from your ambitions."

Lindsay looked pained. "I came here to arrange a cultural event. Can't that be enough?"

He glanced at the girl. Her hands flickered over the keyboards. Suddenly she looked up at him and smiled, slyly, secretly. He saw the tip of her tongue behind her perfect teeth. It was a bright, predatory smile, full of lust and mischief. In an instant it burned itself into his bloodstream. Hair rose on the back of his neck. He was losing control.

He looked at the floor, his skin prickling. "All right," he said heavily. "It isn't enough, and that shouldn't surprise me... . Listen, madame. You and the Medicals have been rivals for years. This is your chance to lure them into the open and ambush them on your own ground. They're naive about finance. Naive, but greedy. They hate dealing in a financial system that you control. If they thought they could succeed, they'd leap at the chance to form their own economy.

"So, let them do it. Let them commit themselves. Let them pile success on success until they lose all sense of proportion and greed overwhelms them. Then burst their bubble."

"Nonsense," the old woman said. "How can an actor tell a banker her business?"

"You're not dealing with a Mech cartel," Lindsay said intensely, leaning forward. He knew the girl was staring at him. He could feel it. "These are three hundred technicians, bored, frightened, and completely isolated. They are perfect prey for mass hysteria. Gambling fever will hit them like an epidemic." He leaned back. "Support me, madame. I'll be your point man, your broker, your go-between. They'll never know you were behind their ruin. In fact, they'll come to you for help." He sipped his tea. It tasted synthetic. The old woman paused as if she were thinking. Her expression was very wrong. There were none of the tiny subliminal flickers of mouth and eyelid, the movements of the throat, that accompanied human thought processes. Her face was more than calm. It was inert.

"It has possibilities," she said at last. "But the Bank must have control. Covert, but complete. How can you guarantee this?"

"It will be in your hands," Lindsay promised. "We will use my company, Kabuki Intrasolar, as a front. You will use your contacts outside the Zaibatsu to issue fictitious stock. I will offer it for sale here, and your Bank will be ambivalent. This will allow the Nephrines to score a financial coup and seize control of the company. Fictitious stockholders, your agents, will react in alarm and send in pleas and inflated offers to the new owners. This will flatter their self-esteem and overwhelm any doubts.

"At the same time, you will cooperate with me openly. You will supply me with actors and actresses; in fact, you will jealously fight for the privilege. Your geishas will talk of nothing else to every customer. You will spread rumors about me: my charm, my brilliance, my hidden resources. You will underwrite all my extravagances, and establish a free-wheeling, free-spending atmosphere of care-free hedonism. It will be a huge confidence trick that will bamboozle the entire world."

The old woman sat silently, her eyes glazed.

The low, pure tones of the synthesizer stopped suddenly. A tense hush fell over the room. The girl spoke softly from behind her keyboards. "It will work, won't it?"

He looked into her face. Her meekness had peeled off like a layer of cosmetics. Her dark eyes shocked him. They were full of frank, carnivorous desire. He knew at once that she was feigning nothing, because her look was beyond pretense. It was not human.

Without knowing it, he rose to one knee, his eyes still locked with hers. "Yes," he said. His voice was hoarse. "It will work, I swear it to you." The floor was cold under his hand. He realized that, without any decision on his part, he had begun to move toward her, half crawling.

She looked at him in lust and wonder. "Tell me what you are, darling. Tell me really."

"I'm what you are," Lindsay said. "Shaper's work." He forced himself to stop moving. His arms began to tremble.

"I want to tell you what they did to me," the girl said. "Let me tell you what I am."

Lindsay nodded once. His mouth was dry with sick excitement.

"All right," he said. "Tell me, Kitsune."

"They gave me to the surgeons," she said. "They took my womb out, and they put in brain tissue. Grafts from the pleasure center, darling. I'm wired to the ass and the spine and the throat, and it's better than being God. When I'm hot, I sweat perfume. I'm cleaner than a fresh needle, and nothing leaves my body that you can't drink like wine or eat like candy. And they left me bright, so that I would know what submission was. Do you know what submission is, darling?"

"No," Lindsay said harshly. "But I know what it means not to care about dying."

"We're not like the others," she said. "They put us past the limits. And now we can do anything we like to them, can't we?"

Her laugh sent a shuddering thrill through him. She leaped with balletic grace over her deck of keyboards.

She kicked the old woman's shoulder with one bare foot, and the yarite fell over with a crunch. Her wig ripped free with a shredding of tape. Beneath it, Lindsay glimpsed her threadbare skull, riddled with cranial plugs. He stared. "Your keyboards," he said.

"She's my front," Kitsune said. "That's what my life is. Fronts and fronts and fronts. Only the pleasure is real. The pleasure of control." Lindsay licked his dry lips.

"Give me what's real," she said.

She undid her obi sash. Her kimono was printed in a design of irises and violets. The skin beneath it was like a dying man's dream of skin.

"Come here," she said. "Put your mouth on my mouth." Lindsay scrambled forward and threw his arms around her. She slipped her warm tongue deep into his mouth. It tasted of spice.