Schismatrix plus (7 page)

It was narcotic. The glands of her mouth oozed drugs.

They sprawled on the floor in front of the old woman's half-lidded eyes. She slipped her arms inside his loose kimono. "Shaper," she said, "I want your genetics. All over me."

Her warm hand caressed his groin. He did what she said.

THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 16-1-'16

Lindsay lay on his back on the floor of Ryumin's dome, his long fingers pressed to the sides of his head. His left hand had two glittering impact rubies set in gold bands. He wore a shimmering black kimono with a faint pattern of irises set in the weave. His hakama trousers were of the modern cut.

The right sleeve of his kimono held the fictitious corporate emblem of Kabuki Intrasolar: a stylized white mask striped across the eyes and cheeks with flaring bands of black and red. His sleeves had fallen back as he clutched his head and revealed an injection bruise on his forearm. He was on vasopressin.

He dictated into a microphone. "All right," he said. "Scene Three: Amijima. Jihei says: No matter how far we walk, there'll never be a place marked for suicides. Let us kill ourselves here.

"Then Koharu: Yes, that's true. One place is as good as another to die. But I've been thinking. If they find our dead bodies together, people will say that Koharu and Jihei committed a lovers' suicide. I can imagine how your wife will resent and envy me. So you should kill me here, then choose another spot, far away, for yourself.

"Then Jihei says—" Lindsay fell silent. As he had been dictating, Ryumin had occupied himself with an unusual handicraft. He was sifting what appeared to be tiny bits of brown cardboard onto a small slip of white paper. He carefully rolled the paper into a tube. Then he pinched the tube's ends shut and sealed it with his tongue.

He put one end of the paper cylinder between his lips, then held up a small metal gadget and pressed a switch on its top. Lindsay stared, then screamed. "Fire! Oh my God! Fire, fire!"

Ryumin blew out smoke. "What the hell's wrong with you? This tiny flame can't hurt anything."

"But it's fire! Good God, I've never seen a naked flame in my life." Lindsay lowered his voice. "You're sure you won't catch fire?" He watched Ryumin anxiously. "Your lungs are smoking."

"No, no. It's just a novelty, a small new vice." The old Mechanist shrugged. "A little dangerous maybe, but aren't they all."

"What is it?"

"Bits of cardboard soaked in nicotine. They've got some kind of flavoring, too. It's not so bad." He drew on the cigarette; Lindsay stared at the glowing tip and shuddered. "Don't worry," Ryumin said. "This place isn't like other colonies. Fire's no danger here. Mud doesn't burn." Lindsay sagged back to the floor and groaned. His brain was swimming in memory enhancements. His head hurt and he had an indescribable tickling sensation, like the first fraction of a second during an onset of deja vu. It was like being unable to sneeze.

"You made me lose my place," he said peevishly. "What's the use? When I think of what this used to mean to me! These plays that hold everything worth preserving in human life. . . . Our heritage, before the Mechs, before the Shapers. Humanity, morality, a life not tampered with." Ryumin tapped ashes into an upended back lens cap. "You're talking like a circumlunar native, Mr. Dze. Like a Concatenate. What's your home world?

Crisium S.S.R.? Copernican Commonwealth?"

Lindsay sucked air through his teeth.

Ryumin said, "Forgive an old man's prying." He blew more smoke and rubbed a red mark on his temple, where the eyephones fit. "Let me tell you what I think your problem is, Mr. Dze. So far, you've recited three of these compositions: Romeo and Juliet, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and now The Love Suicide at Amijima. Frankly, I have some problems with these pieces."

"Oh?" said Lindsay on a rising note.

"Yes. First, they're incomprehensible. Second, they're impossibly morbid. And third and worst of all, they're preindustrial.

"Now let me tell you what I think. You've launched this audacious fraud, you're creating a huge stir, and you've set the whole Zaibatsu on its ear. For this much trouble, you should at least repay the people with a little fun."

"Fun?" Lindsay said.

"Yes. I know these sundogs. They want to be entertained, not clubbed by some ancient relic. They want to hear about real people, not savages."

"But that's not human culture."

"So what?" Ryumin puffed his cigarette. "I've been thinking. I've heard three 'plays' now, so I know the medium. There's not much to it. I can whip one up for us in two or three days, I think."

"You think so?"

Ryumin nodded. "We'll have to scrap some things."

"Such as?"

"Well, gravity, first of all. I don't see how you can get any good dancing or fighting done except in free-fall."

Lindsay sat up. "Dancing and fighting, is it?"

"That's right. Your audience are whores, oxygen farmers, two dozen pirate bands, and fifty runaway mathematicians. They would all love to see dancing and fighting. We'll get rid of the stage; it's too flat. The curtains are a nuisance; we can do that with lighting. You may be used to these old circumlunars with their damned centrifugal spin, but modern people love free-fall. These poor sun-dogs have suffered enough. It'll be like a holiday for them."

"You mean, get up to the free-fall zone somehow."

"Yes indeed. We'll build an aerostat: a big geodesic bubble, airtight. We'll launch it off the landing zone and keep it fixed up there with guy wires, or some such thing. You have to build a theatre anyway, don't you? You might as well put it in midair where everyone can see it."

"Of course," Lindsay said. He smiled as the idea sank in. "We can put our corporate logo on it."

"Hang pennants from it."

"Sell tickets inside. Tickets and stock." He laughed aloud. "I know just the ones to build it for me, too."

"It needs a name," Ryumin said. "We'll call it... the Kabuki Bubble!"

"The Bubble!" Lindsay said, slapping the floor. "What else?" Ryumin smiled and rolled another cigarette.

"Say," Lindsay said. "Let me try some of that." Whereas, throughout this Nation's history, its citizens have always confronted new challenges; and whereas, The Nation's Secretary of State, Lin Dze, finds himself in need of aeronautic engineering expertise that our citizens are uniquely fitted to supply; and whereas, Secretary Dze, representing Kabuki Intrasolar, an autonomous corporate entity, has agreed to pay the Nation for its labors with a generous allocation of Kabuki Intrasolar corporate stock; now, therefore, be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy, the Senate concurring, that the Nation will construct the Kabuki Bubble auditorium, provide promotional services for Kabuki stock, and extend political and physical protection to Kabuki staff, employees, and property.

"Excellent," Lindsay said. He authenticated the document and replaced the Fortuna State Seal in his diplomatic bag. "It truly eases my mind to know that the FMD will handle security."

"Hey, it's a pleasure," said the President. "Any dip of ours who needs it can depend on an escort twenty-four hours a day. Especially when you're going to the Geisha Bank, if you get my meaning."

"Have this resolution copied and spread through the Zaibatsu," Lindsay said. "It ought to be good for a ten-point stock advance." He looked at the President seriously. "But don't get greedy. When it reaches a hundred and fifty, start selling out, slowly. And have your ship ready for a quick getaway."

The President winked. "Don't worry. We haven't been sitting on our hands. We're lining up a class assignment from a Mech cartel. A bodyguard gig ain't bad, but a nation gets restless. When the Red Consensus is shipshape again, then our time has come to kill and eat."

THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 13-3-'16

Lindsay slept, exhausted, with his head propped against the diplomatic bag. An artificial morning shone through the false glass doors. Kitsune sat in thought, toying quietly with the keys of her synthesizer.

Her proficiency had long since passed the limits of merely technical skill. It had become a communion, an art sprung from dark intuition. Her synthesizer could mimic any instrument and surpass it: rip its sonic profile into naked wave forms and rebuild it on a higher plane of sterilized, abstract purity. Its music had the painful, brittle clarity of faultlessness. Other instruments struggled for that ideal clarity but failed. Their failure gave their sound humanity. The world of humanity was a world of losses, broken hopes, and original sin, a flawed world, yearning always for mercy, empathy, compassion.... It was not her world.

Kitsune's world was the fantastic, seamless realm of high pornography. Lust was ever present, amplified and tireless, broken only by spasms of superhuman intensity. It smothered every other aspect of life as a shriek of feedback might overwhelm an orchestra.

Kitsune was an artificial creature, and accepted her feverish world with a predator's thoughtlessness. Hers was a pure and abstract life, a hot, distorted parody of sainthood.

The surgical assault on her body would have turned a human woman into a blank-eyed erotic animal. But Kitsune was a Shaper, with a Shaper's unnatural resilience and genius. Her narrow world had turned her into something as sharp and slippery as an oiled stiletto.

She had spent eight of her twenty years within the Bank, where she dealt with customers and rivals on terms she thoroughly understood. Still, she knew there was a realm of mental experience, taken for granted by humanity, that was closed to her.

Shame. Pride. Guilt. Love. She felt these emotions as dim shadows, dark reptilian trash burnt to ashes in an instant by searing ecstasy. She was not incapable of human feeling; it was simply too mild for her to notice. It had become a second subconscious, a buried, intuitive layer below her posthuman mode of thought. Her consciousness was an amalgam of coldly pragmatic logic and convulsive pleasure.

Kitsume knew that Lindsay was handicapped by his primitive mode of thought. She felt a kind of pity for him, a compassionate sorrow that she could not recognize or admit to herself. She believed he must be very old, from one of the first generations of Shapers. Their genetic engineering had been limited and they could scarcely be told from original human stock. He must be almost a hundred years old. To be so old, yet look so young, meant that he had chosen sound techniques of life extension. He dated back to an era before Shaperism had reached its full expression. Bacteria still swarmed through his body. Kitsune never told him about the antibiotic pills and supposi-tones she took, or the painful antiseptic showers. She didn't want him to know he was contaminating her. She wanted everything between them to be clean.

She had a cool regard for Lindsay. He was a source of lofty and platonic satisfaction to her. She had the craftsmanlike respect for him that a butcher might have for a sharp steel saw. She took a positive pleasure in using him. She wanted him to last a long time, so she took good care of him and enjoyed giving him what she thought he needed to go on functioning. For Lindsay, her affections were ruinous. He opened his eyes on the tatami mat and reached out at once for the diplomatic bag behind his head. When his fingers closed over the smooth plastic handle, an anxiety circuit shut off in his head, but that first relief only triggered other systems and he came fully awake into a queasy combat alertness.

He saw that he was in Kitsune's chamber. Morning was breaking over the image of the long-dead garden. False daylight slanted into the room, gleaming from inlaid clothes chests and the perspex dome of a fossilized bonsai. Some repressed part of him cried out within him, in meek despair. He ignored it. His new diet of drugs had brought the Shaper schooling back in full force and he was in no mood to tolerate his own weaknesses. He was full of that mix of steel-trap irritability and slow gloating patience that placed him at the keenest edges of perception and reaction.

He sat up and saw Kitsune at the keyboards. "Good morning," he said.

"Hello, darling. Did you sleep well?"

Lindsay considered. Some antiseptic she used had scorched his tongue. His back was bruised where her Shaper-strengthened fingers had dug in carelessly. His throat had an ominous rawness—he had spent too much time without a mask in the open air. "I feel fine," he said, smiling. He opened the complex lock of his diplomatic bag.

He slipped on his finger rings and stepped into his hakama trousers.

"Do you want something to eat?" she said.

"Not before my shot."

"Then help me plug in the front," she said.

Lindsay repressed a shudder. He hated the yarite's withered, waxlike, cy-borged body, and Kitsune knew it. She forced him to help her with it because it was a measure of her control.

Lindsay understood this and wanted to help her; he wanted to repay her, in a way she understood, for the pleasure she had given him. But something in him revolted at it. When his training faltered, as it did between shots, repressed emotions rose and he was aware of the terrible sadness of their affair. He felt a kind of pity for her, a compassionate sorrow that he would never insult her by admitting. There were things he had wanted to give her: simple companionship, simple trust and regard. Simple irrelevance. Kitsune hauled the yarite out of its biomonitored cradle beneath the floorboards. In some ways the thing had passed the limits of the clinically dead; sometimes they had to slam it into operation like push-starting a balky engine.

Its maintenance technology was the same type that supported the Mechanist cyborgs of the Radical Old and the Mech cartels. Filters and monitors clogged the thing's bloodstream; the internal glands and organs were under computer control. Implants sat on its heart and liver, prodding them with electrodes and hormones. The old woman's autonomous nervous system had long since collapsed and shut down.

Kitsune examined a readout and shook her head. "The acid levels are rising as fast as our stocks, darling. The plugs are degrading its brain. It's very old. Held together with wires and patchwork."