Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

“No,” said the Modem offhandedly. “Or, at least, we don’t have to. Your brain’s your own.”

  I thought. “Can you do it in”—I looked at Wellspring’s forearm-”thirty-eight hours?”

  “If we hurry,” the Modem said. He detached himself from the table.

  I followed him.

  The Crowned Pawn was under way. My skin clung magnetically to a ship’s girder as we accelerated. I had my vision set for normal wavelengths as I watched Czarina-Kluster receding.

  Tears stung the fresh tracks of hair-thin wires along my deadened eyeballs. C-K wheeled slowly, like a galaxy in a jeweled web. Here and there along the network, flares pulsed as suburbs began the tedious and tragic work of cutting themselves loose. C-K was in the grip of terror.

  I longed for the warm vitality of my Clique. I was no Lobster. They were alien. They were solipsistic pinpoints in the galactic night, their humanity a forgotten pulp behind black armor.

  The Crowned Pawn was like a ship turned inside out. It centered around a core of massive magnetic engines, fed by drones from a chunk of reaction mass. Outside these engines was a skeletal metal framework where Lobsters clung like cysts or skimmed along on induced magnetic fields. There were cupolas here and there on the skeleton where the Lobsters hooked into fluidic computers or sheltered themselves from solar storms and ring-system electrofluxes.

  They never ate. They never drank. Sex involved a clever cyber-stimulation through cranial plugs. Every five years or so they “molted” and had their skins scraped clean of the stinking accumulation of mutated bacteria that scummed them over in the stagnant warmth.

  They knew no fear. Agoraphobia was a condition easily crushed with drugs. They were self-contained and anarchical. Their greatest pleasure was to sit along a girder and open their amplified senses to the depths of space, watching stars past the limits of ultraviolet and infrared, or staring into the flocculate crawling plaque of the surface of the sun, or just sitting and soaking in watts of solar energy through their skins while they listened with wired ears to the warbling of Van Allen belts and the musical tick of pulsars.

  There was nothing evil about them, but they were not human. As distant and icy as comets, they were creatures of the vacuum, bored with the outmoded paradigms of blood and bone. I saw within them the first stirrings of the Fifth Prigoginic Leap—that postulated Fifth Level of Complexity as far beyond intelligence as intelligence is from amoebic life, or life from inert matter.

  They frightened me. Their bland indifference to human limitations gave them the sinister charisma of saints.

  The Modem came skimming along a girder and latched himself soundlessly beside me. I turned my ears on and heard his voice above the radio hiss of the engines. “You have a call, Landau. From C-K. Follow me.”

  I flexed my feet and skimmed along the rail behind him. We entered the radiation lock of an iron cupola, leaving it open, since the Lobsters disliked closed spaces.

  Before me, on a screen, was the tear-streaked face of Valery Korstad. “Valery!” I said.

  “Is that you, Hans?”

  “Yes. Yes, darling. It’s good to see you.”

  “Can’t you take that mask off, Hans? I want to see your face.”

  “It’s not a mask, darling. And my face is, well, not a pretty sight. All those wires…”

  “You sound different, Hans. Your voice sounds different.”

  “That’s because this voice is a radio analogue. It’s synthesized.”

  “How do I know it’s really you, then? God, Hans…I’m so afraid. Everything…its just evaporating. The Froth is…there’s a bio-hazard scare, something smashed the gel frames in your domicile, I guess it was the dogs, and now the lichen, the damned lichen is sprouting everywhere. It grows so fast!”

  “I designed it to grow fast, Valery, that was the whole point. Tell them to use a metal aerosol or sulfide particulates; either one will kill it in a few hours. There’s no need for panic.”

  “No need! Hans, the discreets are suicide factories. C-K is through! We’ve lost the Queen!”

  “There’s still the Project,” I said. “The Queen was just an excuse, a catalyst. The Project can draw as much respect as the damned Queen. The groundwork’s been laid for years. This is the moment. Tell the Clique to liquidate all they have. The Froth must move to Martian orbit.”

  Valery began to drift sideways. “That’s all you cared about all along, wasn’t it? The Project! I degraded myself, and you, with your cold, that Shaper distance, you left me in despair!”

  “Valery!” I shouted, stricken. “I called you a dozen times, it was you who closed yourself off, it was me who needed warmth after those years under the dogs—”

  “You could have done it!” she screamed, her face white with passion. “If you cared you would have broken in to prove it! You expected me to come crawling in humiliation? Black armor or dog’s eyeglass, Hans, what’s the difference? You’re still not with me!”

  I felt the heat of raw fury touching my numbed skin. “Blame me, then! How was I to know your rituals, your sick little secrets? I thought you’d thrown me over while you sneered and whored with Wellspring! Did you think I’d compete with the man who showed me my salvation? I would have slashed my wrists to see you smile, and you gave me nothing, nothing but disaster!”

  A look of cold shock spread across her painted face. Her mouth opened, but no words came forth. Finally, with a small smile of total despair, she broke the connection. The screen went black.

  I turned to the Modem. “I want to go back,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “First, you’d be killed. And second, we don’t have the wattage to turn back. We’re carrying a massive cargo.” He shrugged. “Besides, C-K is in dissolution. We’ve known it was coming for a long time. In fact, some colleagues of ours are arriving there within the week with a second cargo of mass drivers. They’ll fetch top prices as the Kluster dissolves.”

  “You knew?”

  “We have our sources.”

  “Wellspring?”

  “Who, him? He’s leaving, too. He wants to be in Martian orbit when that hits.” The Modem glided outside the cupola and pointed along the plane of the ecliptic. I followed his gaze, shifting clumsily along the visual wavelengths.

  I saw the etched and ghostly flare of the Martian asteroid’s mighty engines. “The iceteroid,” I said.

  “Yes, of course. The comet of your disaster, so to speak. A useful symbol for C-K’s decay.”

  “Yes,” I said. I thought I recognized the hand of Wellspring in this. As the ice payload skimmed past C-K the panicked eyes of its inhabitants would follow it. Suddenly I felt a soaring sense of hope.

  “How about that?” I said. “Could you land me there?”

  “On the asteroid?”

  “Yes! They’re going to detach the engines, aren’t they? In orbit! I can join my fellows there, and I won’t miss the Prigoginic catalyst!”

  “I’ll check.” The Modem fed a series of parameters into one of the fluidics. “Yes…I could sell you a parasite engine that you could strap on. With enough wattage and a cybersystem to guide you, you could match trajectory within, say, seventy-two hours.”

  “Good! Good! Let’s do that, then.”

  “Very well,” he said. “There remains only the question of price.”

  I had time to think about the price as I burned along through the piercing emptiness. I thought I had done well. With C-K’s Market in collapse I would need new commercial agents for the Eisho jewels. Despite their eeriness, I felt I could trust the Lobsters.

  The cybersystem led me to a gentle groundfall on the sunside of the asteroid. It was ablating slowly in the heat of the distant sun, and infrared wisps of volatiles puffed here and there from cracks in the bluish ice.

  The iceteroid was a broken spar calved from the breakup of one of Saturn’s ancient glacial moons. It was a mountainous splintered crag with the fossilized scars of primordial violence showing themselves in wrenched and jagged cliffs a
nd buttresses. It was roughly egg-shaped, five kilometers by three. Its surface had the bluish pitted look of ice exposed for thousands of years to powerful electric fields.

  I roughened the gripping surfaces of my gauntlets and pulled myself and the parasite engine hand over hand into shadow. The engine’s wattage was exhausted, but I didn’t want it drifting off in the ablation.

  I unfolded the radio dish the Modem had sold me and anchored it to a crag, aligning it with C-K. Then I plugged in.

  The scope of the disaster was total. C-K had always prided itself on its open broadcasts, part of the whole atmosphere of freedom that had vitalized it. Now open panic was dwindling into veiled threats, and then, worst of all, into treacherous bursts of code. From all over the system, pressures long held back poured in.

  The offers and threats mounted steadily, until the wretched cliques of C-K were pressed to the brink of civil war. Hijacked dogs prowled the tubes and corridors, tools of power elites made cruel by fear. Vicious kangaroo courts stripped dissidents of their status and property. Many chose the discreets.

  Crèche cooperatives broke up. Stone-faced children wandered aimlessly through suburban halls, dazed on mood suppressants. Precious few dared to care any longer. Sweating Marketeers collapsed across their keyboards, sinuses bleeding from inhalants. Women stepped naked out of commandeered airlocks and died in sparkling gushes of frozen air. Cicadas struggled to weep through altered eyes, or floated in darkened bistros, numbed with disaster and drugs.

  Centuries of commercial struggle had only sharpened the teeth of the cartels. They slammed in with the cybernetic precision of the Mechanists, with the slick unsettling brilliance of the Reshaped. With the collapse of the Market, C-K’s industries were up for grabs. Commercial agents and arrogant diplomats annexed whole complexes. Groups of their new employees stumbled through the Queen’s deserted Palace, vandalizing anything they couldn’t steal outright.

  The frightened subfactions of C-K were caught in the classic double bind that had alternately shaped and splintered the destinies of humanity in Space. On the one hand their technically altered modes of life and states of mind drove them irresistibly to distrust and fragmentation; on the other, isolation made them the prey of united cartels. They might even be savaged by the pirates and privateers that the cartels openly condemned and covertly supported.

  And instead of helping my Clique, I was a black dot clinging like a spore to the icy flank of a frozen mountain.

  It was during those sad days that I began to appreciate my skin. If Wellspring’s plans had worked, then there would come a flowering. I would survive this ice in my sporangial casing, as a windblown speck of lichen will last out decades to spread at last into devouring life. Wellspring had been wise to put me here. I trusted him. I would not fail him.

  As boredom gnawed at me I sank gently into a contemplative stupor. I opened my eyes and ears past the point of overload. Consciousness swallowed itself and vanished into the roaring half existence of an event horizon. Space-time, the Second Level of Complexity, proclaimed its noumenon in the whine of stars, the rumble of planets, the transcendent crackle and gush of the uncoiling sun.

  There came a time when I was roused at last by the sad and empty symphonies of Mars.

  I shut down the suit’s amplifiers. I no longer needed them. The catalyst, after all, is always buried by the process.

  I moved south along the asteroid’s axis, where I was sure to be discovered by the team sent to recover the mass driver. The driver’s cybersystem had reoriented the asteroid for partial deceleration, and the south end had the best view of the planet.

  Only moments after the final burn, the ice mass was matched by a pirate. It was a slim and beautiful Shaper craft, with long ribbed sun wings of iridescent fabric as thin as oil on water. Its shining organo-metallic hull hid eighth-generation magnetic engines with marvelous speed and power. The blunt nodes of weapons systems knobbed its sleekness.

  I went into hiding, burrowing deep into a crevasse to avoid radar. I waited until curiosity and fear got the better of me. Then I crawled out and crept to a lookout point along a fractured ice ridge.

  The ship had docked and sat poised on its cocked manipulator arms, their mantislike tips anchored into the ice. A crew of Mechanist mining drones had decamped and were boring into the ice of a clean-sheared plateau.

  No Shaper pirate would have mining drones on board. The ship itself had undergone systems deactivation and sat inert and beautiful as an insect in amber, its vast sun wings folded. There was no sign of any crew.

  I was not afraid of drones. I pulled myself boldly along the ice to observe their operations. No one challenged me.

  I watched as the ungainly drones rasped and chipped the ice. Ten meters down they uncovered the glint of metal.

  It was an airlock.

  There they waited. Time passed. They received no further orders. They shut themselves down and crouched inert on the ice, as dead as the boulders around us.

  For safety’s sake I decided to enter the ship first.

  As its airlock opened, the ship began switching itself back on. I entered the cabin. The pilot’s couch was empty.

  There was no one on board.

  It took me almost two hours to work my way into the ship’s cybersystem. Then I learned for certain what I had already suspected. It was Wellspring’s ship.

  I left the ship and crawled across the ice to the airlock. It opened easily. Wellspring had never been one to complicate things unnecessarily.

  Beyond the airlock’s second door a chamber blazed with blue-white light. I adjusted my eye systems and crawled inside.

  At the far end, in the iceteroid’s faint gravity, there was a bed of jewels. It was not a conventional bed. It was simply a huge, loose-packed heap of precious gems.

  The Queen was asleep on top of it.

  I used my eyes again. There was no infrared heat radiating from her. She lay quite still, her ancient arms clutching something to her chest, her three-toed legs drawn up along her body, her massive tail curled up beneath her rump and between her legs. Her huge head, the size of a man’s torso, was encased in a gigantic crowned helmet encrusted with blazing diamonds. She was not breathing. Her eyes were closed. Her thick, scaled lips were drawn back slightly, showing two blunt rows of peg-shaped yellowing teeth.

  She was ice-cold, sunk in some kind of alien cryosleep. Wellspring’s coup was revealed. The Queen had joined willingly in her own abduction. Wellspring had stolen her in an act of heroic daring, robbing his rivals in C-K to begin again in Martian orbit. It was an astounding fait accompli that would have put him and his disciples into unquestioned power.

  I was overcome with admiration for his plan. I wondered, though, why he had not accompanied his ship. Doubtless there were medicines aboard to wake the Queen and spirit her off to the nascent Kluster.

  I moved nearer. I had never seen an Investor face to face. Still, I could tell after a moment that there was something wrong with her skin. I’d thought it was a trick of the light at first. But then I saw what she had in her hands.

  It was the lichen jewel. The rapacity of her clawed grip had split it along one of the fracture planes, already weakened by the lichens’ acids. Released from its crystalline prison, and spurred to frenzy by the powerful light, the lichens had crept onto her scaly fingers, and then up her wrist, and then, in an explosive paroxysm of life, over her entire body. She glittered green and gold with devouring fur. Even her eyes, her gums.

  I went back to the ship. It was always said of us Shapers that we were brilliant under pressure. I reactivated the drones and had them refill their borehole. They tamped ice chips into it and melted them solid with the parasite rocket.

  I worked on intuition, but all my training told me to trust it. That was why I had stripped the dead Queen and loaded every jewel aboard the ship. I felt a certainty beyond any chain of logic. The future lay before me like a drowsing woman awaiting the grip of her lover.

  Wellspring’
s tapes were mine. The ship was his final sanctum, programmed in advance. I understood then the suffering and the ambition that had driven him, and that now were mine.

  His dead hand had drawn representatives of every faction to witness the Prigoginic impact. The proto-Kluster already in orbit was made up exclusively of drones and monitors. It was natural that the observers would turn to me. My ship controlled the drones.

  The first panic-stricken refugees told me of Wellspring’s fate. He had been dragged heels first from a discreet, followed closely by the bloodless corpse of sad Valery Korstad. Never again would she create delight. Never again would his charisma enthrall the Clique. It might have been a double suicide. Or, perhaps more likely, she murdered him and then herself. Wellspring could never believe that there was anything beyond his abilities to cure. A madwoman and a barren world were part and parcel of the same challenge. Eventually he met his limit, and it killed him. The details scarcely matter. A discreet had swallowed them in any case.

  When I heard the news, the ice around my heart sealed shut, seamless and pure.

  I had Wellspring’s will broadcast as the iceteroid began its final plunge into the atmosphere. Tapes sucked the broadcast in as volatiles peeled smoking into the thin, starved air of Mars.

  I lied about the will. I invented it. I had Wellspring’s taped memories to hand; it was a simple thing to change my artificial voice to counterfeit his, to set the stage for my own crucial ascendancy. It was necessary for the future of T-K, Terraform-Kluster, that I proclaim myself Wellspring’s heir.

  Power accreted around me like rumors. It was said that beneath my armor I was Wellspring, that the real Landau had been the one to die with Valery in C-K. I encouraged the rumors. Misconceptions would unite the Kluster. I knew T-K would be a city without rival. Here, abstractions would take on flesh, phantoms would feed us. Once our ideals had slammed it into being, T-K would gather strength, unstoppably. My jewels alone gave it a power base that few cartels could match.

  With understanding came forgiveness. I forgave Wellspring. His lies, his deceptions, had moved me better than the chimeric “truth.” What did it matter? If we needed solid bedrock, we would have it orbit us.