Delayed shock struck him; the world seemed to shimmer. Compared to this, almost anything was easier to doubt: his name, his business here, his life. They left me the beard as a calendar, he thought dazedly. Unless that too was fraud.
He took a deep breath. His lungs felt tight, stretched. They had stripped them of the tar from smoking.
“Oh God,” he said aloud. “Nora.” By now she would be past panic: she would be full of reckless hatred for whoever had taken him. He hurried at once to the bubble’s exit.
The grapelike cluster of cheap inflatables was hooked to an interurban tube-road. He floated at once down the lacquered corridor and emerged through a filament doorway into the swollen transparent nexus of crossroads. Below was Goldreich-Tremaine, with its Besetzny and Patterson Wheels spinning in slow majesty; with the moleculelike links and knobs of other suburbs shining purple, gold, and green, surrounding the city like beaded yarn. At least he was still in G-T. He headed at once for home.
GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 18-9-’53
The chaos repulsed Constantine. Evacuations were untidy affairs. The docking port was littered with trash: clothing, ship schedules, inhaler wrappers, propaganda leaflets. Baggage limits were growing stricter by the hour. Not far away four Shapers were pulling items from their overweight luggage and spitefully smashing them against the walls and mooring-benches.
Long lines waited at the interaction terminals. The overloaded terminals were charging by the second. Some of the refugees were finding that it cost more money to sell their faltering stocks than the stocks themselves were worth.
A synthetic voice on the address system announced the next flight to Skimmers Union. Instant pandemonium swept the port. Constantine smiled. His own craft, the Friendship Serene, had that destination. Unlike the others, his berth was secure. Not simply in the ship but in the new capital as well.
Goldreich-Tremaine had overreached itself. It had leaned too heavily on the mystique of its capitalship. When that was gone, seized by militants in a rival city, G-T’s web of credit had nothing to sustain it.
He liked Skimmers Union. It floated in circumtitanian orbit, above the bloody glimmer of the clouds of Titan. In Skimmers Union the source of the city’s wealth was always reassuringly close: the inexhaustible mass of rich organics that choked the Titanian sky. Fusion-powered dredges punched through its atmosphere, sweeping up organics by the hundreds of tons. Methane, ethane, acetylene, cyanogen: a planetary feedstock for the Union’s polymer factories.
Passengers were disembarking; a handful compared to those leaving, and not a savory handful. A group in baggy uniforms floated past customs. Sundogs, clearly, and not even Shaper sundogs: their skins shone with antiseptic oils.
Constantine’s bodyguards murmured to one another in his earpiece, sizing up the latest arrivals. The four guards were unhappy with Constantine’s reluctance to leave. Constantine’s many local enemies were close to desperation as Goldreich-Tremaine’s banks neared collapse. The guards were keyed to a fever pitch.
But Constantine lingered. He had defeated the Shapers on their own ground, and the pleasure of it was intense. He lived for moments like this one. He was perhaps the only calm man in a crowd of close to two thousand. Never had he felt so utterly in control.
His enemies had been crippled by their underestimation. They had taken his measure and erred completely. Constantine himself did not know that measure; that was the pang that drove him on.
He considered his enemies, one by one. The militants had chosen him to attack the Midnight Clique, and his success had been thorough and impressive. Regent Charles Vetterling had been the first to fall. Vetterling fancied himself a survivor. Encouraged by Carl Zeuner, he had thrown in his lot with the militants. The power of the Midnight Clique was broken from within. It splintered into warring camps. Those who held their ground were denounced by others more desperate.
The Mechanist defector, Sigmund Fetzko, had “faded.” These days, those calling his residence received only ingenious delays and temporizing from his household’s expert system. Fetzko’s image lived; the man himself was dead, and too polite to admit it.
Neville Pongpianskul was dead, assassinated in the Republic at Constantine’s order.
Chancellor-General Margaret Juliano had simply vanished. Some enemy of her own had finished her. This still puzzled Constantine; on the day of her disappearance he had received a large crate, anonymously. Cautiously opened by bodyguards, it had revealed a block of ice with her name elegantly chiseled on its surface: Margaret Juliano, on ice. She had not been seen since.
Colonel-Professor Nora Mavrides had drastically overplayed her hand. Her husband, the false Lindsay, had disappeared, and she had accused Constantine of kidnapping him. When her husband returned again, with a wild tale about Superbright renegades and black market clinics, she was disgraced.
Constantine was still not sure what had happened. The most likely explanation was that Nora Mavrides had been double-crossed by her burnt-out little cadre of diplomats. Probably they had seen what was coming and set up their one-time protectress, hoping that the new Skimmers Union regime would thank them for it. If so, they were grossly mistaken.
Constantine looked about the cavernous station, adjusting his videoshades for closeups. Amid the fretting Shapers in their overelaborate finery was a growing minority of others. An imported cargo of sundogs. Here and there shabbily clad ideological derelicts, their faces wreathed in smiles, were comparing lace-sleeved garments to their torsos or lurking with predatory nonchalance beside evacuees lightening their luggage.
“Vermin,” Constantine said. The sight depressed him. “Gentlemen, it’s time we moved on.”
The guards led him across the chained-off entry to a private ramp padded in velcro. Constantine’s clingtight boots crunched and shredded across the fabric.
He floated down the free-fall embarkation tube to the airlock of the Friendship Serene. Once inside he took his favorite acceleration chair and plugged in on video to enjoy the takeoff.
Within the port’s skeletal gantryways, the smaller ships queued up for embarkation tubes, dwarfed by the stylized bulk of an Investor starship. Constantine craned his neck, causing the hull cameras of the Friendship Serene to swivel in slaved obedience. “Is that Investor ship still here?” he said aloud. He smiled. “Do you suppose they’re hunting bargains?”
He lifted his videoshades. Within the ship’s cabin his guards clustered around an overhead tank, huffing tranquilizer gas from breathing masks. One looked up, red-eyed. “May we go into suspension now, sir?”
Constantine nodded sourly. Since the war had started up again, his guards had lost all sense of humor.
AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 22-9-’53
Nora looked up at her husband, who sprawled above her in a towering chair. His face was hidden by a dark beard and opaque wraparound sunshades. His hair was close-cropped and he wore a Mech jumpsuit. His old, scarred diplomatic bag rested on the scratchy plush of the deck. He was taking it with him. He meant to defect.
The heavy gravity of the Investor ship weighed on both of them like iron. “Stop pacing, Nora,” he said. “You’ll only exhaust yourself.”
“I’ll rest later,” she said. Tension knotted her neck and shoulders.
“Rest now. Take the other chair. If you’ll close your eyes, sleep a little…in almost no time—”
“I’m not going with you.” She pulled off her own sunshades and rubbed the bridge of her nose. The light in the cabin was the light Investors favored: a searing blaze of blue-white radiance, drenched in ultraviolet.
She hated that light. Somehow she had always resented the Investors for robbing her Family’s deaths of meaning. And the three months she’d once spent in a ship like this one had been the eeriest time of her life. Lindsay had been quick, adaptable, the consummate sundog, as willing to deal with the aliens as he was with anyone. She’d wondered at it then. And now they had come full circle.
He said, “You came this
far. You wouldn’t have, if you didn’t want to come with me. I know you, Nora. You’re still the same, even if I’ve changed.”
“I came because I wanted to be with you for every moment that I could.” She fought down the tears, her face frozen. The sensation was horrifying, a black nausea. Too many tears, she thought, had been pushed away for too long. The day would come when she would choke on them.
Constantine used every weakness in Goldreich-Tremaine, she thought. And my special weakness was this man. When Abelard came back from the rejuvenation clinic, three weeks late and so changed that the household robots wouldn’t let him in…But even that was not so bad as the days without him, hunting for him, finding that the black-market subble he’d gone to had been deflated and put away, wondering what furtive Star Chamber was picking him to shreds…
“This is my fault,” she said. “I accused Constantine with no proof, and he humiliated me. Next time I’ll know better.”
“Constantine had nothing to do with it,” he said. “I know what I saw in that clinic. They were Superbrights.”
“I can’t believe in the Cataclysts,” she said. “Those Superbrights are watched like jewels; they don’t have room for wild conspiracies. What you saw was a fraud; the whole thing was staged to draw me out. And I fell for it.”
“Don’t be proud, Nora. It’s blinded you. The Cataclysts abducted me, and you won’t even admit they exist. You can’t win, because you can’t bring back the past. Let it go, and come with me.”
“When I see what Constantine did to the Clique—”
“It’s not your fault! My God, aren’t there disasters enough without your heaping them all on your own shoulders? Goldreich-Tremaine is through! We have to live now! I told you years ago that it couldn’t last, and now it’s over!” He flung his arms wide. The left one, tugged by gravity, fell limply; the other whirred with smooth precision through a powered arc.
They had been over this a hundred times, and she saw that his nerves were frayed. Under the influence of the treatment his hard-won patience had vanished in a blaze of false youth. He was shouting at her. “You’re not God! You’re not history! You’re not the Ring Council! Don’t flatter yourself! You’re nothing now, you’re a target, a scapegoat! Run, Nora! Sundog it!”
“The Mavrides clan needs me,” she said.
“They’re better off without you. You’re an embarrassment to them now, we both are—”
“And the children?”
He was silent a moment. “I’m sorry for them, more sorry than I can say, but they’re adults now and they can take their own chances. They’re not the problem here, we are! If we make things easy for the enemy, just slip away, evaporate, we’ll be forgotten. We can wait it out.”
“And give the fascists their way in everything? The assassins, the killers? How long before the Belt fills up again with Shaper agents, and little wars blaze up in every corner?”
“And who’ll stop that? You?”
“What about you, Abelard? Dressed as a stinking Mechanist with stolen Shaper data in that bag! Do you ever think of anyone’s life but your own? Why in God’s name don’t you stand up for the helpless instead of betraying them? Do you think it’s easier for me without you? I’ll go on fighting, but without you there’ll be no heart in me.”
He groaned. “Listen. I was a sundog before I met you, you know just how little I had…I don’t want that emptiness, no one caring, no one knowing…And another betrayal on my conscience…Nora, we had almost forty years! This place was good to us, but it’s falling apart on its own! Good times will come again. We have all the time there is! You wanted more life, and I went out and got it for you. Now you want me to throw it away. I won’t be a martyr, Nora. Not for anyone.”
“You always talked about mortality,” she said. “You’re different now.”
“If I changed it was because you wanted me to.”
“Not like this. Not treason.”
“We’ll die for nothing.”
“Like the others,” she said, regretting it at once. And there it was before them: the old guilt in all its stark intimacy. Those others, to whom duty was more than life. Those they had abandoned, those they had killed in the Shaper outpost. That was the crime the two of them had struggled to efface, the crime that had bound them together. “Well, that’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? To betray my own people again, for you!”
There. She had said it. Now there was no going back. She waited in pain for the words that would free her from him.
“You were my people,” he said. “I should have known I would never have one for long. I’m a sundog, and it’s my way, not yours. I knew you wouldn’t come.” He leaned his head against the bare fingers of his artificial arm. Piercing highlights glinted off the harsh iron. “Stay and fight, then. You could win, I think.”
It was the first time he had lied to her. “But I can win,” she said. “It won’t be easy, we won’t have all we had, but we’re not beaten yet. Stay, Abelard, please. Please! I need you. Ask me for anything except to give up fighting.”
“I can’t ask you to change,” her husband said. “People only change if you give them time. Someday this thing that’s haunted us will wear away, if we both live. I think the love is stronger than the guilt. If it is, and someday you feel your obligations no longer need you, then come after me. Find me…”
“I will, I promise it, Abelard…If I’m killed like the others and you live on safely then say you won’t forget me.”
“Never. I swear it by everything we had between us.”
“Goodbye, then.” She climbed up into the huge Investor chair to kiss him. She felt his steel hand go around her wrist like a manacle. She kissed him lightly. Then she tugged, and he let go.
Chapter 6
AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 29-9-’53
Lindsay lay on the floor of his cavernous stateroom, breathing deeply. The ozone-charged air of the Investor ship stung his nose, which was sunburned despite his oils. The stateroom walls were blackened metal, studded with armored orifices. From one of them a freshet of distilled water trickled, cascading limply in the heavy gravity.
This stateroom had seen a lot of use. Faint scratches cuneiformed the floor and walls, almost to the ceiling. Humans were not the only passengers to pay Investor fare.
If modern Shaper exosociology was right, the Investors themselves were not the first owners of these starships. Covered in vainglorious mosaics and metal bas-reliefs, each Investor craft looked unique. But close analysis showed the underlying basic structure: blunt hexagons at bow and stern, with six long rectangular sides. Current thought held that the Investors had bought, found, or stolen them.
The ship’s Ensign had given him a pallet, a broad flat mattress patterned in brown-and-white hexagons, built for Investors. Its surface was as harsh as burlap. It smelled faintly of Investor scale-oil.
Lindsay had tested the metal wall of his stateroom, wondering about the scratches. Though it felt faintly grainy, the steel zips of his foot-gloves slid on it like glass. Still, it might be softer under extremes of temperature and pressure. A very large taloned beast afloat in a pool of high-pressure liquid ethane, for instance, might have scratched the walls in an attempt to burrow out.
The gravity was painful, but the stateroom lights had been turned down. The cabin was huge and unfurnished; his scattering of clothes on magnetic hooks seemed like pathetic scraps.
It was odd of the Investors to leave a room empty, even if it doubled as a zoo. Lindsay lay quietly, trying to catch his breath, thinking about it.
The armored hatchway rang, then shunted open. Lindsay levered himself up with the artificial arm, the only limb not sore from gravity. He smiled. “Yes, Ensign? News?”
The Ensign entered the room. He was small for an Ensign, a mere forearm’s length taller than Lindsay himself, and his wiry build was accented by his birdlike habit of ducking his head. He looked more like a crewman than an Ensign. Lindsay studied him thoughtfully.
; Academics still speculated about the Investor ranking system. The Ship’s Commanders were always female, the only females aboard ship. They were twice the size of crewmen, massively built. With their size went a sluggish calm, a laconic assumption of power. Ensigns were second in command, as combination diplomats and ministers. The rest of the crew formed an adoring male harem. The scampering crewmen with their bead-bright eyes weighed three times as much as a man, but around their monstrous commanders they almost seemed to flutter.
The frills were the central kinesic display. The reptilian Investors had long ribbed frills behind their heads, rainbow-tinted translucent skin netted with blood vessels. Frills had evolved for temperature control; they could be spread to absorb sunlight or opened in shade to dispel heat. In civilized Investor life they were a relic, like the human eyebrow, which had evolved to deflect sweat. Like the eyebrow, their social use was now paramount.
The Ensign’s frill bothered Lindsay. It flickered too much. Rapid flickering was usually interpreted as a sign of amusement. In human beings, bad laughter kinesics were a sign of deep stress. Lindsay, despite his professional interest, had no desire to be the first to witness an Investor’s hysteria. He hoped it was simply a repulsive mannerism. This ship was new to the Solar System and its crew was unused to humanity.
“No news, Artist,” the Ensign said in pained trade English. “A further discussion of payment.”
“Good business,” Lindsay said in Investor. His throat ached from the high-pitched fluting, but he preferred it to the Ensign’s eerie attempts to master human language.
This Ensign was not like the first he had met. That Investor had been smooth and urbane, his vocabulary heavy with glib clichés gleaned from human video broadcasts. This new Ensign was visibly struggling.
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