“You sew that spacesuit yourself?” the Speaker of the House said.
“Yes, Madam Speaker. The seams are threadwire and epoxy from our wetware tanks.”
“Clever.”
“I like your roaches,” said Rep 2. “Pink and gold and green. Hardly look like roaches at all. I’d like to have some of those.”
“That can be arranged, I’m sure,” Nora said.
“Trade you some relaxant for it. I have lots.”
“Thank you,” Nora said. She was doing well. Lindsay felt obscurely proud of her.
She unzipped her spacesuit and stepped out of it. Below it she wore a triangular over-the-shoulders poncho, geometrically embroidered in white and ice blue. The poncho’s tapering ends were laced across her hips, leaving her legs bare except for lace-up velcro sandals.
The pirates had tactfully given up their red-and-silver skeleton jumpsuits. Instead they wore dun-brown Zaibatsu coveralls. They looked like savages.
“I could do with one of these,” said Rep 3. He held the accordioned arm of his ancient spacesuit next to the thin plastic of hers. “How you breathe in that sucker?”
“It’s not for deep space. We just fill it with pure oxygen and breathe as long as we can. Ten minutes.”
“I could hook tanks to one. More spacey, citizen-to-be. The Sun would like it.”
“We could teach you to sew one. It’s an art worth knowing.” She smiled at Rep 3, and Lindsay shuddered inwardly. He knew how the sweaty reek of the Rep’s suit must turn her stomach.
He drifted between the two of them, unobtrusively nudging Rep 3 to one side. And, for the first time, he touched Nora Mavrides. He put his hand gently on the soft blue and white shoulder of her poncho. The muscle beneath his hand was as stiff as wire.
She smiled again, quickly. “I’m sure the others will find this ship fascinating. We came here in a drogue. Our cargo was nine-tenths ice, for the wetware tanks. We were in paste, close to dead. We had our robot and our pocket tokamak. The rest was bits and pieces. Wire, a handful of microchips, some salt and trace minerals. The rest’s genetics. Eggs, seeds, bacteria. We came here naked, to save launch weight. Everything else we’ve done with our hands, friends. Flesh against rock. Flesh wins, if it’s smart enough.”
Lindsay nodded. She had not mentioned their electromagnetic pulse weapon. No one talked about the guns.
She struggled to charm the pirates, but her pride stung them. The pride of the Family was justified. They’d bootstrapped themselves into prosperity with bacterial wetware from gelatin capsules no bigger than pinheads. They had mastered plastics; they conjured them out of the rock. Their artifacts were as cheap as life itself.
They had grown themselves into the rock; wormed their way in with soft-bodied relentless persistence. ESAIRS was riddled with tunnels; their sharp-toothed tunneling hoops ran around the clock. They had air blowers rigged from vinyl sacks and ribs of memory plastic. The ribs breathed. They were wired to the tokamak fusion plant, and a small change in voltage made them bend and flex, bend and flex, sucking in air with a pop of plastic lung and an animal wheeze of exhalation. It was the sound of life inside the rock, the rasp of the hoops, the blowers breathing, the sullen gurgling of the fermenters.
They had plants. Not just algae and protein goo but flowers: roses, phlox, daisies—or plants that had known those names before their DNA had felt the scalpel. Celery, lettuce, dwarf corn, spinach, alfalfa. Bamboo: with fine wire and merciless patience they could warp bamboo into complex pipes and bottles. Eggs: they even had chickens, or things that had once been chickens before Shaper gene-splicers turned them into free-fall protein tools.
They were powerful, subtle, and filled with desperate hatred. Lindsay knew that they were waiting for their chance, weighing odds, calculating. They would attack to kill if they could, but only when they could maximize the chance of their own survival.
But he also knew that with each day that passed, with each minor concession and agreement, another frail layer of shellac was laid over the open break between them. Day by day a new status quo struggled to form, a frail détente supported by nothing but habit. It was not much, but it was all he had: the hope that, with time, the facade of peace would take on substance.
ESAIRS XII: 3-2-’17
“Hey, Secretary of State.”
Lindsay woke. In the ghostlike gravity of the asteroid he had settled imperceptibly to the bottom of his cavern. They called his dugout “the Embassy.” With the passage of the Integration Act, Lindsay had moved into the rock, with the rest of the FMD.
Paolo had spoken. Fazil was with him. The two young men wore embroidered ponchos and stiff plastic crowns holding floating manes of shoulder-length hair.
The skin bacteria had hit them badly. Every day they looked worse. Paolo’s neck was so badly inflamed that his throat looked cut. Fazil’s left ear was infected; he carried his head tilted to one side.
“We want to show you something,” Paolo said. “Can you come with us, Mr. Secretary? Quietly?” His voice was gentle, his hazel eyes so clear and guileless that Lindsay knew at once that he was up to something. Would they kill him? Not yet. Lindsay laced on a poncho and struggled with the complex knots of his sandals. “I’m at your disposal,” he said.
They floated into the corridor. The corridors between dugouts were no more than long wormholes, a meter across. The Mavrides clansmen propelled themselves along with a quick side-to-side lizardlike skittering. Lindsay was slower. His injured arm was bad today, and his hand felt like a club.
They glided silently through the soft yellow light of one of the fermenting rooms. The blunt, nippled ends of three wetware bags jutted into the room. They were stuffed like a string of sausages into stone tunnels. Each tunnel held a series of bags, united by filters, each bag passing its output to the next. The last bag had a spinneret running, a memory-plastic engine, clacking slowly. A hollow tube of flawless clear acrylic coiled in free-fall, reeking as it dried.
They entered another black tunnel. The tunnels were all identical, all perfectly smooth. There was no need for lighting. Any genius could easily memorize the nexus.
To his left Lindsay heard the slow clack-rasp, clask-rasp of a tunneling hoop. The hoops were handmade, their teeth hand-set in plastic, and they each sounded slightly different. They helped him navigate. They could gnaw two meters a day through the softer rock. In two years they had gnawed over twenty thousand tons of ore.
When the ore was processed, the tailings were shot into space. Everything launched away left a hole behind it. A hole ten kilometers long, pitch black, and as knotted as snarled fishline, beaded with living caverns, greenhouses, wetware rooms, and private hideyholes.
They took a turn Lindsay had never used before. Lindsay heard the grating sound of a stone plug hauled away.
They went a short distance, squirming past the flaccid bulk of a deactivated air blower. As Lindsay crawled past it in the darkness, the blower came to life with a gasp.
“This is our secret place,” Paolo said. “Mine and Fazil’s.” His voice echoed in the darkness.
Something fizzed loudly with a leaping of white-hot sparks. Startled, Lindsay braced to fight. Paolo was holding a short white stick with flame gnawing at one end. “A candle,” he said.
“Kindle?” said Lindsay. “Yes, I see.”
“We play with fire,” Paolo said. “Fazil and I.”
They were in a workshop cavern, dug into one of the large stony veins within ESAIRS XII. The walls looked like granite to Lindsay’s untrained eye: a grayish-pink rock studded with little gleams of rock crystal.
“There was quartz here,” Paolo said. “Silicon dioxide. We mined it for oxygen, then Kleo forgot about it. So we drilled this room ourselves. Right, Fazil?”
Fazil spoke eagerly. “That’s right, Mr. Secretary. We used hand drills and expansion plastic. See where the rock shattered and came loose? We hid the chunks in the debris for launch, so that no one knew. We worked for days and saved the biggest chunk.”
> “Look,” Paolo said. He touched the wall, and the stone wrinkled in his hand and came away. In a broken-out rough cavity the size of a closet, an oblong boulder floated, kept from falling by a thread. Paolo snapped the thread and pulled the boulder out. It moved sluggishly; Fazil helped him stop its inertia.
It was a two-ton sculpture of Paolo’s head.
“Very fine work,” Lindsay said. “May I?” He ran his fingertips across the slickly polished cheekbone. The eyes, wide and alert, cored out for pupils, were as big as his outstretched hands. There was a faint smile on the enormous lips.
“When they sent us out here, we knew we weren’t coming back,” Paolo said. “We’ll die here, and why? Not because our genetics are bad. We’re a good line. Mavrides rule.” He was talking faster now, falling into the cadences of Ring Council slang.
Fazil nodded silently.
“It’s just bad percentages. Chance. We were burned by chance before we were twenty years old. You can’t edit out chance. Some of the gene-line are bound to fall so the rest can live. If it weren’t me and Fazil, it would be our crèchemates.”
“I understand,” Lindsay said.
“We’re young and cheap. They throw us into the enemy’s teeth so the ink is black not red. But we’re alive, me and Fazil. There’s something inside us. We’ll never see ten percent of the life the others back home will see. But we were here. We’re real.”
“Living is better,” Lindsay said.
“You’re a traitor,” Paolo said without resentment. “Without a gene-line you’re bloodless, you’re just a system.”
“There are more important things than living,” Fazil said.
“If you had enough time you’d outlive this war,” Lindsay said.
Paolo smiled. “This is no war. This is evolution in action. You think you’ll outlive that?”
Lindsay shrugged. “Maybe. What if aliens come?”
Paolo looked at him wide-eyed. “You believe in that? The aliens?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re all right,” Paolo said.
“How can I help you?” Lindsay said.
“It’s the launch ring. We plan to launch this head. An oblique launch, top velocity, full power, off the plane of the ecliptic. Maybe somebody sees it someday. Maybe some thing, five hundred million years, no trace of human life, picks it up, my face. There’s no debris off the plane, no collisions, just dead-space vacuum, perfect. And it’s good hard rock. Out this far the sun could go red giant and barely warm it. It could orbit till white dwarf stage, maybe till black cinder, till the galaxy bursts or the Kosmos eats its own tail. My image forever.”
“Only first we have to launch it,” said Fazil.
“The President won’t like it,” Lindsay said. “The first treaty we signed said no more launches for the duration. Maybe later, when our trust is stronger.”
Paolo and Fazil traded glances. Lindsay knew at once that things were out of hand.
“Look,” he said. “You two are talented. You have a lot of time on your hands since the launch ring’s down. You could do heads of all of us.”
“No!” Paolo shouted. “It’s between us two, that’s it.”
“What about you, Fazil? Don’t you want one?”
“We’re dead,” Fazil said. “This took us two years. There was only time for one. Chance burned us both. One of us had to give everything for nothing. So we decided. Show him, Paolo.”
“He shouldn’t look,” Paolo said sullenly. “He doesn’t understand.”
“I want him to know, Paolo.” Fazil was stern. “Why I have to follow, and you get to lead. Show him, Paolo.”
Paolo reached under his poncho and pulled out a hinged box of clear acrylic. There were two stone cubes in it, black cubes with white dots on their faces. Dice.
Lindsay licked his lips. He had seen this in the Ring Council: endemic gambling. Not just for money, but for the core of personality. Secret agreements. Dominance games. Sex. The struggles within gene-lines, between people who knew with flat certainty that they were equally matched. The dice were quick and final.
“I can help you,” Lindsay said. “Let’s negotiate.”
“We’re supposed to be on duty,” Paolo said. “Monitoring radio. We’re leaving, Mr. Secretary.”
“I’ll come along,” Lindsay said.
The two Shapers resealed the stone lid of their secret workshop and scuttled off in the darkness. Lindsay followed as best he could.
The Shapers had listening dishes dug in all over the asteroid. The bowl-shaped impact craters were ready-made for their camouflaged gridworks of copper mesh. All antennae fed into a central processor, whose delicate semiconductors were sheltered in a tough acrylic console. Slots in the console held cassettes of homemade recording tape, constantly spooling on a dozen different heads. Another cutout on the acrylic deck held a flat liquid crystal display for video copy and a hand-lettered keyboard.
The two genetics combed the waveband, flickering through a spectrum of general-issue cartel broadcasts. Most bands were cypher-static, anonymous blips of cybernetic datapulse. “Here’s something,” Paolo said. “Triangulate it, Fazil.”
“It’s close,” Fazil said. “Oh, it’s just the madman.”
“What?” Lindsay said. A huge green roach speckled in lustrous violet flew past with a clatter of wings.
“The one who always wears the spacesuit.” The two glanced at one another. Lindsay read their eyes. They were thinking about the man’s stench.
“Is he talking?” Lindsay said. “Put him on, please.”
“He always talks,” Paolo said. “Sings, mostly. He raves into an open channel.”
“He’s in his new spacesuit,” Lindsay said urgently. “Put him on.”
He heard Rep 3. “—granulated like my mother’s face. And sorry not to say goodbye to my friend Mars. Sorry for Carnaval, too. I’m out kilometers, and that hiss. I thought it was a new friend, trying to talk. But it’s not. It’s a little hole in my back, where I glued the tanks in. Tanks work fine, hole works better. It’s me and my two skins, soon both cold.”
“Try and raise him!” Lindsay said.
“I told you he keeps the channel open. The unit’s two hundred years old if it’s a day. He can’t hear us when he talks.”
“I’m not reeling back in, I’m staying out here.” His voice was fainter. “No air to talk with, and no air to listen. So I’ll try and climb out. Just a zipper. With any luck I can skin out completely.” There was a light crackling of static. “Goodbye, Sun. Goodbye, Stars. Thanks for—”
The words were lost in a rush of decompression. Then the crackling of static was back. It went on and on.
Lindsay thought it through. He spoke quietly. “Was I your alibi, Paolo?”
“What?” Paolo was shocked.
“You sabotaged his suit. And then you carefully weren’t here when we could have helped him.”
Paolo was pale. “We were never near his suit, I swear!”
“Then why weren’t you here at your post?”
“Kleo set me up!” Paolo shouted. “Ian walks point, the dice said so! I’m supposed to be clean!”
“Shut up, Paolo.” Fazil grabbed his arm.
Paolo tried to stare him down, then turned to Lindsay. “It’s Kleo and Ian. They hate my luck—” Fazil shook him.
Paolo slapped him hard across the face. Fazil cried out and threw his arms around Paolo, holding him close.
Paolo looked stricken. “I was upset,” he said. “I lied about Kleo; she loves all of us. It was an accident. An accident.”
Lindsay left. He scrambled headlong down the tunnels, passing more wetware and a greenhouse where a blower gusted the smell of fresh-cut hay.
He entered a cavern where grow-lights shone dusky red through a gas-permeable membrane. Nora’s room branched off from the cavern, blocked by the wheezing bulk of her private air blower. Lindsay squeezed past it on the exhale and slapped the lights.
Violet arabesques covered t
he room’s round walls. Nora was sleeping.
Her arms, her legs, were gripped in wire. Braces circled her wrists and elbows, ankles and knees. Black myoelectrodes studded the muscle groups beneath her naked skin. The arms, the legs, moved quietly, in unison, side, side, forward, back. A long carapace knobbed her back, above the branching nerve clumps of her spine.
It was a diplomatic training device. A spinal crab. Memory flashed behind Lindsay’s eyes and he went berserk. He jumped off the wall and rocketed toward her. Her eyes snapped open blearily as he shouted in fury.
He seized her neck and jerked it forward, digging his nails into the rubbery rim where the spinal crab met her skin. He tore at it savagely. Part of it ripped free. The skin shone red beneath it, slick with sweat. Lindsay grabbed the left-arm cable and snapped it loose. He pulled harder; she wheezed as a strap dug in under her ribs.
The crab was peeling away. Its underside was ghastly, a hundred-footed mass of damp translucent tubes, pored with hair-thin wires. Lindsay ripped again. A cable nexus stretched and snapped, extruding colored wires.
He braced his feet against her back and pulled. She gagged and clawed at the strap’s buckle; the belt whipped loose, and Lindsay had the whole thing. With its programming disrupted, it flopped and curled like a live thing. Lindsay whirled it by the straps and slammed it into the wall with all his strength. The interlapping segments of its back split open, their brittle plastic crackling. He whiplashed it into the stone. Brown lubricant oozed, then spattered into free-fall drops as he smashed it again. He crushed it underfoot, tore at the strap until it gave way. Its guts showed beneath the plates: lozenge-shaped biochips nested in multicolored fiberoptics.
He slammed it again, more slowly. The fury was leaving him. He felt cold. His right arm trembled uncontrollably.
Nora was against the wall, gripping a clothes rack. The sudden loss of nerve programming left her shaking with palsy.
“Where’s the other one?” Lindsay demanded. “The one for your face?”
Her teeth chattered. “I didn’t bring it,” she said.
Lindsay kicked the crab away. “How long, Nora? How long have you been under that thing?”
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