by Brian Daley
Mason let his irritation show. "If you've got antigravity, you certainly don't need me. Go take over the galaxy."
Yatt stood up and came closer. "But we do need you, Mason, as much as you need us. We can arrange for you to return to Aquamarine, but only in exchange for your help in facilitating our goals."
"Your goals. Why is Aquamarine important to the Quantum College all of a sudden?"
"The Quantum College is a paranoid legend, Mason, a modern wish myth with ten million derivations and not a gram of substance to it, save what we supply. We are the true face of it."
"It?"
"The quantum universe, Mason." Yatt extended a fat ocher forefinger, his smile no longer so simplemindedly benign.
The forefinger reached Mason's, but there was no physical contact. A pinpoint of light grew from the spot and began to dissolve Yatt. Instead of evaporating into genie smoke or random voxels, however, his substance swirled, transformed, and ultimately rezzed into stacks and piles of data.
The whirlwinds and gusts that blew closest to Mason pertained to him, carrying privy information about his life and classified data amassed by the Scepter survey team. Farther away were floating constellations and wavering auroras embodying other guarded Hierarchate and LAW files, Lyceum records, and documents from the Preservationist Party, the Rationalists, the Church of Teleology, and more. There were also real-time relays from orbital defense platforms and Roke threat assessments from the Defense Directorate.
Mason assumed that if Yatt was a hologram, he was a relatively simple follower image modeled directly by a virtsuit operator—a puppet of light. But the way the image was breaking up implied staggering computational power.
Yatt could only be artificial intelligence on an outlaw scale, one that defied all the restraints of post-Cyberplague statute and commandment.
Mason flailed back as some of the data recoalesced into Yatt's free-floating face. The smiling Buddha visage drifted his way, and Mason let out a scream. It was all too real to be a hallucination or nightmare, but the alternative was equally beyond belief.
He'd fallen captive to a Cybervirus.
* * * *
"Only 'delightful,' Major Lod, you adorable little Growler, you?" the lavender-haired debutante sporting the unicorn horn echoed. "If the Lyceum ball only rates 'delightful,' what, pray tell me, is your notion of a really good time?"
"That would be you and me, my enchantress, if we loaded a case of champagne into a lawn sprinkler, got some trays of sex-jelly and a couple of paint rollers, and let love and art be our muses."
The gloriously endowed deb gave a titter Lod assayed at sixty percent amusement and forty percent arousal and then raised a voguish, curvilinear lorgnette and studied him through the eyepieces. He saw tiny speckles of light deep in the double optical receptors, alphanumerics and image enhancements linked to some data bank.
"We have a rape club," she confided to him finally, putting the tip of her tongue between purple-dyed teeth. "You simply must come to our next venery. You wouldn't have to place yourself at hazard unless you found the experience… desirable."
"Unfortunately, LAW controls my social calendar," Lod told her, simultaneously brass-ringing a pretzel from a passing tray.
There were no autobuffets or dumbot carts at the Empyraeum, but human servers were in good supply. The aromas system was wafting pleasant, invigorating scents throughout the place, plus, Lod would have wagered, some olfactory signals that worked below the threshold of consciousness and made people especially sociable. Music was being provided by a quorum of Periapt's symphony orchestra.
The deb gave a dip and toss of her head, purple ringlets flying, the oblique slash of the needle-tipped horn making Lod draw back involuntarily. Then she fixed him with dilated eyes, a hint of instability. Was she hoping for some danger, he wondered, some erotic amps, a show of Ext savagery?
Purposefully, he glanced at the marquetized dance floor, asking, "Are those insects down there dancing the kazatskyl" While her head was tilted forward, he shoved the pretzel firmly onto her spiraled horn and slipped neatly away.
The unicorn deb wasn't the strangest somatic adjunct on hand, however. A woman nearby was wearing a new fashion innovation, a Godiva, an impossibly long and wafty blond smart-wig, which drifted and curled around her in endlessly varied patterns so that she was never quite naked. The fellow talking to her belonged to one of the born-three-times rightist fringes of the Preservationists, according to his shoulder ribbons. Part of his attire was textile, but some consisted of the padlocked, hardened chastity ArmorTogs his faction employed to show its style and make its moral statement. The spigoty metal groin carapace made Lod think of lost keys, emergency rooms, and delicate waldo procedures.
Elsewhere were antennae, claws, hooves, and at least two people so furry that it was impossible to tell their gender from where Lod stood. Even on Periapt the cost of that kind of modification was beyond the reach of all but the top-income strata. The craze didn't run to third eyes or extra sets of arms, though; people were justifiably wary of getting their central nervous systems rewired.
Lod spied Dextra Haven working the crowd. Trinity notwithstanding, the media and a clear momentum in public opinion were hers in the wake of the Matsya coup, and open hostility from rival Hierarchs had been set aside for the moment. Lod doubted that the Lyceum potentates understood that Haven had risked her life by throwing in with the Exts. Hoping to avoid any friction and maximize the chance of building bridges to Periapt's elected nobility, Burning was sticking close to her, with Ghost at his right elbow.
Haven generated a personal force field with her political clout, her presence, and her looks that eclipsed the more divinely beautiful or physically imposing. She made an arresting contrast with Ghost. Where Lod's cousin was all exclusion and dangerous enigma, Haven was the promise—for the extremely fortunate—of magnanimous unrestrained passion. A small woman with a slim gap between her front teeth and a bowed Semitic lip line, she was larger than life.
"Are we too decadent for you, piecemeal?" somebody purred near his ear.
Lod turned, realizing immediately that at least one attendee had not drawn the line at radical transmog. Tall and lissome as she was, the feline whiskers looked just right on her. Bioen-chancement had supplied her with slanted eyes, a generous scattering of black spots on a yellow to tan pelt, and a muscular white-tipped tail, which she lashed and curled.
Lod gave her a sardonic degree or two of raised eyebrow. "Since you're gracious enough to express interest, I was thinking that while decadence is to be admired, much of what we're seeing here is, sad to say, mere excess."
She made a burbling, amused sound. "I'm Cheetah. Like the big cat at the city zoo? Decided I'd do something fun with my money and have myself medimorphed into a living homage."
Lod knew about the Terran feline from TechPlex images and docudata. Periapt had a lot more Old Earth sample bioforms than Concordance did. "The original should be flattered," he remarked.
"A quip, just like on the news loops!" She took his hand, stroking it "Tell me another one."
"'The simple things are always hard.' " When she flickered her long cat eyes at him, he gave her his most innocent smile.
"Why, Major Lod!" She gave his fingers a long lick with her raspy tongue. "Come right over here and tell me more."
Chapter
Thirty
Burning watched Lod wander off with the cheetah on his arm. Changes in the woman's skeletal framework and musculature had given her the fluid, high-rumped gait of her namesake.
He had told both Lod and Ghost not to stray too far, but there wasn't much he could do about his cousin at the moment; a freshman Hierarch had chatted him up insistently, and Dextra was busy autographing a copy of her poetry collection, Summer Gloves and Sherry. Over the decades the book had been cited in scores of spousal abuse retaliation cases, including a half dozen homicide trials.
The newly installed Lyceum member, a ranch stationer's kerchief worn over
his chasuble, insisted on shaking Burning's hand. The hand surprised Burning in that it was big and weathered. But something about the calluses felt wrong in his grip, as if they were unaccustomed to following their own creases and rigidities.
"Great, huh?" the Hierarch chortled, turning the hand so that Burning could admire both sides. He appeared to be halfway hoisted on drink or drugs. "Cost me a bundle at TransSoma Labs. But I pressed the flesh like no candidate you ever saw, General!"
Again the man began pumping Burning's hand to demonstrate. "I'm not a gener—"
"Voters go for that image of a hardworking honest man! 'Give the people what they want,' that's what I told my iconography consultants. 'Old-time virtues.' It's what won me my chasuble. Common sense and homespun values."
To Burning's left grew one of the expanding pools of silence that tended to form in the wake of combative words. The sound of Ghost's voice breaking the silence ruffled the determined Flowstate in which he had hoped to glide through the ball.
"I do not feel threatened," Ghost was saying. "I simply won't have hands laid on me by anyone, much less the likes of you."
The object of her wrath was wearing a Hierarch's chasuble but was turned out in Preservationist formal attire. The man had the size and carriage of a ramball forward and the battered face and beetling smile of a man who enjoyed violent collisions.
"That's my point," he told Ghost. "You are thinking confused and contrabiological thoughts because you're living an unnatural life. A vestal soldier! Do you hear voices, Joan of Arc?" He was saying it playfully, but he was reaching to touch her death scars in spite of her warning.
Burning glided toward them, exercising a Yu serenity inoculation the Skills masters had drawn from the 3,500-year-old writings of Chuang Tzu.
Someone else had stepped in to intervene, saying, "Torio. Torio, enough."
But the Preservationalist ignored the tug on his sleeve and was continuing to close on Ghost. "You should be bearing children who'll claim the stars for mankind!" Torio said. "These scars, this pretense that women make good soldiers—they're nothing but symptoms of your misguided ego."
Ghost did not react to his facial caress. Burning knew that it was because Torio was bulky and bad-looking and because she'd want to be sure to plant him for good with her opening attack. He slid precisely between them without seeming hasty, his shoulder moving Torio's hand aside as if by accident, putting them almost eye to eye. Burning hoped that the act itself would be enough to defuse the incident; he didn't know what word or act might bring down retribution on him and the Exts.
Torio gazed at him as if he'd spied a shiteboar. "The proprietary Allgrave intervening in the cause of procreative shirking? Or is there something sexual in his possessiveness?"
"She's my sister."
It came out plaintive and flummoxed instead of admonishing. The spoken word had never been his strong suit. Burning was only beginning to apprehend what Torio had been getting at when the Preservationist sidestepped and again reached for Ghost.
Burning made up his mind that no sane code of behavior could ask him to suffer this. He would quite likely be ousted as Allgrave if he tolerated it.
The inside of Torio's extending right arm had presented itself, as good an opening as any. Burning crab-stepped slightly, bringing his left hand in and up to guard the right side of his head, cocking his right fist with the middle knuckle out, and driving a KaJuKenBo punch into the nerves where Torio's biceps and triceps converged. He made it fast, letting the angle and leverage add the force.
Torio was half spun by the impact, the smile only beginning to disappear as his right arm popped away, paralyzed. But where Burning was glumly expecting an instant and expert counter, Torio's head came wobbling his way instead, complying with centrifugal force.
In the calm of Flowstate Burning assessed it as one of those flukes not to be gainsaid. Shifting his guard so he would not clothesline himself on his own left forearm, he skull-butted Torio in the snout, feeling bone and cartilage crack and stave.
Torio floundered back, making a gurgling, lamenting sound, with crimson squirting from his face. Burning wondered how long it would be before matters started going seriously wrong.
* * * *
"That's two hops you've made to Matsya in two days, Driver Elide. Getting addicted to Steamer Quant's jolly naval camaraderie, is that it?"
"Why do they call him 'Steamer'?"
Tonii half turned, resting an elbow on the seat back. "It's a navy term that goes back to Old Earth. It denotes a skipper who hates sitting still, who feels the need to be under way and going somewhere, no matter what it takes."
Kurt Elide snorted. "He doesn't go many places these days.
What I heard is that the damn ship just putt-putts in circles when it moves at all."
"Mm-hm, but Commander Quant got the nickname a long time ago."
They were sitting in the passenger compartment of the air-limo, killing time with the main holoscreen on mute, waiting for Dextra's call that would allow Tonii into the Empyraeum. The aircraft was grounded in a VBP transport waiting area downhill from the landing platforms. A few other drivers had gathered to talk and kill time, but Kurt clearly wasn't pining for their society.
Covertly, he glanced at Tonii, unable to resist eyeballing the mixed-signals body. When he had initially collected the gynander from Dextra Haven's villa, he did not notice anything but the shifting patterns of Tonii's glamour, which 'e had politely dimmed to a phosphorescent puce to avoid impairing his driving. Then he saw the breasts and assumed that his passenger was a woman. But something in Tonii's glance, along with a slightly exaggerated contour to the crotch, suggested otherwise.
It wasn't that Kurt had anything against nonstraights, not even a man who got breast augmentation or a woman who packed a wagstaff or had traded in her vaj for a penile graft. But it gave him misgivings about himself not to be able to sort out the gender signifiers of someone sitting so close. Perhaps it was pheromones or some other subconscious cue, but Tonii had Kurt edgy and regretting that he'd been assigned to the Haven detail. First Quant's hardassing aboard the Matsya and suddenly this… person throwing off very disturbing emanations.
Tonii must have felt Kurt's eyes on 'erm, for 'e abruptly glanced at him. Embarrassed, Kurt wrenched his head around to stare out the windshield, then spoke to fill what seemed like ominous silence. "So the Steamer became a floater. How come?"
He was relieved to hear Tonii shift around to face forward again. "Quant was captain of an assault frigate late in the Turnback War. He put a team of SEALs ashore one night to carry out a hard delete on a terrorist apparat that had gotten hold of a pre-Plague AI and eleven hundred cryoed embryos from a very exclusive natal polyclinic on Feracity Cay.
"The SEALs were ashore in two ultrastealth wing-in-ground-effect fliers powered by SAT microwave tightbeams. One could just lift off with the cryounit, provided the SEALs left the power module behind and steered it by remote. The team got off the ground in the other WIGship only by abandoning all weapons and equipment, even their knives and clothes.
"There was a counterattack that interdicted the SAT beams. The frigate supplied backup with its own dishes, but one was knocked out by a freak-lucky missile shot."
"So Quant could only save one WIGship, huh?"
Tonii's voice was soft, somber, and remote. "If Quant had had specific orders giving the embryos priority, it might've been different. But for him it was really no contest, and that's part of what the civilian authorities and public opinion held against him.
"Those were his SEALs in the other WIG, his charges, his comrades in arms. So the cryo unit got smeared all over a reef at low tide, and fish noshed on the gamete caviar of some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world."
Kurt blew out his breath. "Jeez, and all he got was dead-ended? Staked out to a target drone, Fd've thought."
"Some of his superiors were courageous enough to close ranks around him. Especially his mentor, an admiral
named Maksheyeva."
"The museum curator. I met him yesterday."
"The very one. The Hierarchate needed the navy too much just then to push too hard. But if you think Commander Quant hasn't paid the price, Kurt, you're wrong. He was slated for great things and might've been chief of naval operations by now if he'd sacrificed the SEALs. Maybe even a Hierarch."
Kurt turned slightly toward Tonii. "How come you know so much about him? Did you lose siblings in that cryo unit or something?"
"No," Tonii said flatly. "My connection to him stems from something much farther back."
* * * *
Raoul Zinsser moved through the spoils-rich oligarchic broth of the Lyceum ball almost contentedly, as if his disrepute and exile were already a thing of the past. He had fallen from a high place, but not so low or so irredeemably that he couldn't by supreme effort finagle a ducat to the affair by calling in one of his few outstanding political IOUs.
The Pitfall tether device and the leverage his expertise could afford him in the looming Aquamarine debate were his cards to play, and no matter who won the overall game, Zinsser felt growing certainty that he'd walk away with the only pot that mattered to him: his own renascence.
Public news feeds had shown the arrival of Haven and the Exts while Zinsser was still en route from the Matsya in a LOGCOM helo. That business of surrendering the boot knives—sheer theatrical genius, he'd told himself. No wonder Haven had the more powerful Preservationists off balance. The coverage had also let him see that the press was fascinated with Ghost, just as he was.
With that and much more in mind, Zinsser made his way directly toward where a plainclothes woman said Haven's party had gone. Turned out in a moire gala suit with an asymmetrical diagonal-front jacket, accordion-pleat bell-bottoms, and Renaissance blouse—all in sea green—he was granted acknowledging nods, murmurs, and gestures by some of the attendees. As strong as the urge was to stop and milk those recognitions, he persisted in his search.
Freya Eulenspiegel, his bountiful semester consort, had been absolutely vile to him after the unpleasantness at the sorting table. It was a relief that she had left his bed, although he already missed the sexual outlet she'd so exuberantly provided. As for Ghost, Zinsser decided that the skirmish with her in the Exts' berthing space had amounted to a type of preliminary intimacy.
