Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  “That was excellent footage,” Ryumin said in his ear. “It was also very stupid.”

  “I owed you a favor,” Lindsay said. He studied the dead. “I’m going over there,” he decided.

  “Let me send the robot. There’ll be looters there soon.”

  “Then I want them to know me,” Lindsay said. “They might be useful.”

  He crossed another stile onto the land panel. His lungs felt raw, but he had decided never to wear a breathing mask. His reputation was more important than the risk.

  He skirted the Black Medicals’ stronghold and crossed a second window strip. He walked north to the ragtag junk dome of the Orbital Army. It was the only outpost in the entire third panel, which had been abandoned to a particularly virulent form of the blight. This had once been an agricultural zone, and the heightened fertility of the soil brought forth a patchy crop of ankle-high mold. Farm buildings, all pastel ceramic and plastic, had been looted but not demolished, and their stiff inorganic walls and gaping windows seemed to long to lapse into an unattainable state of rot.

  The recluses’ dome was built of plastic door panels, chopped to shape and caulked.

  The corpses lay frozen, their limbs oddly bent, for they had been dead before they hit the ground, and their arms and legs had bounced a little, loosely, with the impact. There was a curious lack of horror about the scene. The faceless masks and watertight body suits of the dead fanatics conveyed a sense of bloodless, prim efficiency. Nothing marked the dead as human beings except the military insignia on their shoulders. He counted eighteen of them.

  The lenses on the faces of the dead were fogged over with internal steam.

  He heard the quiet whir of aircraft. A pair of ultralights circled once and skidded in for a landing. Two of the airship pirates had arrived.

  Lindsay trained his camera on them. They dismounted, unplugging their credit cards, and the aircraft taxied off.

  They walked toward him in the half-crouching shuffle of people unused to gravity. Lindsay saw that their uniforms were full-length silver skeletons etched over a blood-red background.

  The taller pirate prodded a nearby corpse with his foot. “You saw this?” he said in English.

  “The spyplanes killed them,” Lindsay said. “They endangered the habitat.”

  “The Eighth Orbital Army,” the taller pirate mused, examining a shoulder patch. The second pirate muttered through her mask’s filters, “Fascists. Antinationalist scum.”

  “You knew them?” Lindsay said.

  “We dealt with them,” said the first pirate. “We didn’t know they were here, though.” He sighed. “What a burn. Do you suppose there are others inside?”

  “Only dead ones,” Lindsay said. “The planes use x-ray lasers.”

  “Really?” the first pirate said. “Wish I could get my hands on one of those.”

  Lindsay twirled his left hand, a gesture in surveillance argot stating that they were watched. The taller pirate looked upward quickly. Sunlight glinted on the silver skull inlaid over his face.

  He looked at Lindsay, his eyes hidden behind gleaming silver-plated eye sockets. “Where’s your mask, citizen?”

  “Here,” Lindsay said, touching his face.

  “A negotiator, huh? Looking for work, citizen? Our last diplomat just took the plunge. How are you in free-fall?”

  “Be careful, Mr. President,” the second pirate warned. “Remember the confirmation hearings.”

  “Let me handle the legal implications,” the President said impatiently. “I’ll introduce us. I’m the President of the Fortuna Miners’ Democracy, and this is my wife, the Speaker of the House.”

  “Lin Dze, with Kabuki Intrasolar,” Lindsay said. “I’m a theatrical impresario.”

  “That some kind of diplomat?”

  “Sometimes, your excellency.”

  The President nodded. The Speaker of the House warned, “Don’t trust him, Mr. President.”

  “The executive branch handles foreign relations, so shut the fuck up,” the President snarled. “Listen, citizen, it’s been a hard day. Right now, we oughta be in the Bank, having a scrub, maybe getting juiced, but instead these fascists cut in on us with their surface-to-air stuff, a preemptive strike, you follow me? So now our airship’s burned and we’ve lost our fuckin’ rock.”

  “That’s a shame,” Lindsay said.

  The President scratched his neck. “You just can’t make plans in this business. You learn to take it as it comes.” He hesitated. “Let’s get out of this stink, anyway. Maybe there’s loot inside.”

  The Speaker of the House took a hand-held power saw out of a holster on her red webbing belt and began to saw through the wall of the sundog dome. The caulk between the plastic panels powdered easily. “You got to go in unexpected if you want to live,” the President explained. “Don’t ever, never go in an enemy airlock. You never know what’s in ’em.” Then he spoke into a wrist attachment. He used a covert operational jargon; Lindsay couldn’t follow the words.

  Together the two pirates kicked out the wall and stepped inside. Lindsay followed them, holding his camera. They replaced the burst-out panel, and the woman sprayed it with sealant from a tiny propellant can.

  The President pulled off his skull mask and sniffed the air. He had a blunt, pug-nosed, freckled face; his short ginger-colored hair was sparse, and the skin of his scalp gleamed oddly. They had emerged into the communal kitchen of the Eighth Orbital Army: there were cushions and low tables, a microwave, a crate of plastic-wrapped protein, and half a dozen tall fermenting units, bubbling loudly. A dead woman whose face looked sunburned sprawled on the floor by the doorway.

  “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 TRANQUILLITATIS 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 kinesics. 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 wer
e 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 carefree 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.