Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  He was improving at the keyboards. He had attacked the problem of music with his usual inhuman steadiness. For years he had worked hard enough to kill himself, but modern biomonitoring technique saw each breakdown coming and averted it months ahead of time. The bed took care of that, feeding him subterranean flashes of intense and blurry dream that left him each morning blank and empty with perfect mental health.

  Eighteen years had passed since his wife’s remarriage. The pain of it had never fully hit him. He’d known her present husband briefly in the Council: Graham Everett, a colorless Détentiste with powerful clan connections. Nora used Everett’s influence to parry the attacks of militants. It was sad: Lindsay didn’t remember the man well enough to hate him.

  Warnings cut short his playing. Someone had arrived at his entry hall. The scanners there assured him that the visitor, a woman, bore only harmless Mechanist implants: plaque-scraping arterial microbots, old-fashioned teflon kneecaps, plastic knuckles, a porous drug duct in the crook of the left elbow. Much of her hair was artificial, implanted strands of shining optical fibers.

  He had his household servo escort the woman in. She had the strange complexion common to many older Mechanist women, smooth unblemished skin like a perfectly form-fitted paper mask. Her red hair was shot through with copper highlights from the fiberoptics. She wore a sleeveless gray suit, furred vest, and elbow-length white thermal gloves. “Auditor Milosz?”

  She had a Concatenate accent. He ushered her to the couch. She sat gracefully, her movements honed to precision by age. “Yes, madam. What may I do for you?”

  “Forgive me for intruding, Auditor. My name is Tyler. I’m a clerk with Limonov Cryonics. But my business here is personal. I’ve come to ask your help. I’ve heard of your friendship with Neville Pongpianskul.”

  “You’re Alexandrina Tyler,” Lindsay realized aloud. “From Mare Serenitatis. The Republic.”

  She looked surprised and lifted her thin, arched brows. “You already know my case, Auditor?”

  “You”—Lindsay sat down in the stirruped chair—“would like a drink, perhaps?” She was his first wife. From some deeply buried level of reflex he felt the stirrings of a long-dead persona, the brittle layer of false kinesics he had put between them in their marriage. Alexandrina Tyler, his wife, his mother’s cousin.

  “No, thank you,” she said. She adjusted the fabric over her knees. She’d always had trouble with her knees; she’d had the teflon put in in the Republic.

  Her familiar gesture brought it all back to him: the marriage politics of the Republic’s aristocrats. She had been fifty years his senior, their marriage a stifling net of strained politeness and grim rebellion. Lindsay was ninety now, older than she had been at their marriage. With a flood of new perspective, he could taste the long-forgotten pain that he had caused her.

  “I was born in the Republic,” she said. “I lost my citizenship in the Shaper purges, almost fifty years ago. I loved the Republic, Auditor. I’ve never forgotten it…I came from one of the privileged families, but I thought, perhaps now, since the new regime there has settled, surely that’s all a dead issue?”

  “You were Abelard Lindsay’s wife.”

  Her eyes widened. “So you do know my case. You know I’ve applied to emigrate? I had no response from the Pongpianskul government. I’ve come to ask for your help, Auditor. I’m not a member of your Carbon Clique, but I know their power. You have influence that works around the laws.”

  “Life must have been difficult for you, madam. Thrown out without resources into the Schismatrix.”

  She blinked, china-white lids falling over her eyes like paper shutters. “Things were not so bad once I’d reached the cartels. But I can’t pretend I’ve known happiness. I haven’t forgotten home. The trees. The gardens.”

  Lindsay knotted his hands, ignoring the tingle of confused sensation from his right. “I can’t encourage false hopes, madam. Neotenic law is very strict. The Republic has no interest in those our age, those who are estranged in any way from the raw state of humanity. It’s true that I’ve handled some matters for the Neotenic government. Those involve the resettlement of Neotenic citizens who reach the age of sixty. ‘Dying out into the world,’ they call it. The flow of emigration is strictly one-way. I’m very sorry.”

  She was silent a moment. “You know the Republic well, Auditor?” Her voice told him that she had accepted defeat. Now she was hunting for memories.

  “Well enough to know that the wife of Abelard Lindsay has been defamed. Your late husband is regarded there as a Preservationist martyr. They portray you as a Mechanist collaborator, driving Lindsay into exile and death.”

  “How terrible.” Her eyes filled with tears; she stood up in agitation. “I’m very sorry. May I use your biomonitor?”

  “Tears don’t alarm me, madam,” Lindsay said gently. “I am not a Zen Serotonist.”

  “My husband,” she said. “He was such a bright boy; we thought we’d done well when we scholarshipped him to the Shapers. I never understood what they did to him, but it was horrible. I tried to make our marriage work, but he was so clever, so smooth and plausible, that he could twist anything I said or did to serve some other purpose. He terrified the others. They swore he would rip our world apart. We should never have sent him to the Shapers.”

  “I’m sure it seemed a wise decision at the time,” Lindsay said. “The Republic was already in the Mechanist orbit, and they wanted to redress the balance.”

  “Then they shouldn’t have done it to my cousin’s son. There were plenty of plebes to send out, people like Constantine.” She put one wrinkled knuckle to her lips. “I’m sorry. That’s aristocratic prejudice. Forgive me, Auditor, I’m distraught.”

  “I understand,” Lindsay said. “To those our age, old memories can come with unexpected force. I’m very sorry, madam. You have been treated unjustly.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She accepted a tissue from the household servo. “Your sympathy touches me deeply.” She dabbed at her eyes with precise, birdlike movements. “I almost feel that I know you.”

  “A trick of memory,” Lindsay said. “I was married once to a woman much like you.”

  A slow Look passed between them. A great deal was said, below the level of words. The truth surfaced briefly, was acknowledged, and then vanished beneath the necessity for subterfuge.

  “This wife,” she said. Her face was flushed. “She did not accompany you on your journey here.”

  “Marriage in Dembowska is a different situation,” Lindsay said.

  “I was married here. A five-year contract marriage. Polygamous. It expired last year.”

  “You are currently unattached?”

  She nodded. Lindsay gestured about the room with a whir of his right arm. “Myself as well. You can see the state of my domestic affairs. My career has made my life rather arid.”

  She smiled tentatively.

  “Would you be interested in the management of my household? An Assistant Auditorship would pay rather better than your current position, I think.”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  “Shall we say, a six-month probationary period against a five-year joint management contract, standard terms, monogamous? I can have my office print out a contract by tomorrow morning.”

  “This is quite sudden.”

  “Nonsense, Alexandrina. At our age, if we put things off, we never accomplish anything. What’s five years to us? We have reached the age of discretion.”

  “May I have that drink?” she said. “It’s bad for my maintenance program, but I think I need it.” She looked at him nervously, a ghost of strained intimacy waking behind her eyes.

  He looked at her smooth paper skin, the brittle precision of her hair. He realized that his gesture of atonement would add another rote to his life, a new form of routine. He restrained a sigh. “I look to you to set our sexuality clause.”

  SKIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 23-6-’83

  Constantine looked into the tank
. Behind the glass window, below the surface of the water, was the waterlogged head of Paolo Mavrides. The dark, curled hair, a major trait of the Mavrides gene-line, floated soggily around the young man’s neck and shoulders. The eyes were open, greenish and bloodshot. Injections had paralyzed his optic nerve. A spinal clamp left him able to feel but not to move. Blind and deaf, numbed by the blood-warmed water, Paolo Mavrides had been in sensory isolation for two weeks.

  A tracheal plug fed him oxygen. Intravenous taps kept him from starving.

  Constantine touched a black rocker switch on the welded tank, and the jury-rigged speakers came alive. The young assassin was talking to himself, some mumbled litany in different voices. Constantine spoke into the microphone. “Paolo.”

  “I’m busy,” Paolo said. “Come back later.”

  Constantine chuckled. “Very well.” He tapped against the microphone to make the sound of a switch closing.

  “No, wait!” Paolo said at once. Constantine smiled at the trace of panic. “Never mind, the performance is ruined anyway. Vetterling’s Shepherd Moons.”

  “Hasn’t had a performance in years,” Constantine said. “You must have been a mere child then.”

  “I memorized it when I was nine.”

  “I’m impressed by your resourcefulness. Still, the Cataclysts believe in that, don’t they? Testing the inner world of the will…You’ve been in there quite a while. Quite a while.”

  There was silence. Constantine waited. “How long?” Mavrides burst out.

  “Almost forty-eight hours.”

  Mavrides laughed shortly.

  Constantine joined in. “Of course we know that isn’t so. No, it’s been almost a year. You’d be surprised how thin you look.”

  “You should try it sometime. Might help your skin problems.”

  “Those are the least of my difficulties, young man. I made a tactical error when I chose the best security possible. It made me a challenge. You’d be surprised how many fools have had this tank before you. You made a mistake, young Paolo.”

  “Tell me something,” Paolo said. “Why do you sound like God?”

  “That’s a technical artifact. My voice has a direct feed to your inner ear. That’s why you can’t hear your own voice. I’m reading it off the nerves to your larynx.”

  “I see,” Paolo said. “Wirehead work.”

  “Nothing irreversible. Tell me about yourself, Paolo. What was your brigade?”

  “I’m no Cataclyst.”

  “I have your weapon here.” Constantine pulled a small timer-vial from his tailored linen jacket and rolled it between his fingers. “Standard Cataclyst issue. What is it? PDKL-Ninety-five?”

  Paolo said nothing.

  “Perhaps you know the drug as ‘Shatter,’” Constantine said.

  Paolo laughed. “I know better than to try to re-form your mind. If I could have entered the same room with you I would have set it for five seconds and we would have both died.”

  “An aerosol toxin, is it? How rash.”

  “There are more important things than living, plebe.”

  “What a quaint insult. I see you’ve researched my past. Haven’t heard the like in years. Next you’ll be saying I’m unplanned.”

  “No need. Your wife tells us that much.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Natalie Constantine, your wife. Ever hear of her? She doesn’t take neglect easily. She’s become the prime whore of Skimmers Union.”

  “How distressing.”

  “How do you think I planned to enter your house? Your wife’s a slut. She begs me for it.”

  Constantine laughed. “You’d like me to strike you, wouldn’t you? The pain would give you something to hold on to. No, you should have stayed in Goldreich-Tremaine, young man. In those empty halls and broken-down offices. I’m afraid you’ve begun to bore me.”

  “Let me tell you what I regret, before you go. I regret that I set my sights so low. I’ve had time to think, recently.” Hollow laughter. “I fell for your image, your propaganda line. The Nysa asteroid, for instance. It seemed so grand at first. The Ring Council didn’t know that Nysa Cartel was a dumping ground for burnt-out wireheads from the moondocks. You were still sucking up to aristocrats from the Republic. With all your rank you’re still a cheap informer, Constantine. And a fucking lackey.”

  Constantine felt a quiver of familiar tension across the back of his head. He touched the plug there and reached in his pocket for the inhaler. No use going into fugue when the boy was starting to babble, at the point of breaking. “Go on,” he said.

  “The great things you claim you’ve done are all facades and frauds. You’ve never built anything of your own. You’re small, Constantine. Very small. I know a man who could hide ten of you under his thumbnail.”

  “Who?” Constantine said. “Your friend Vetterling?”

  “Poor Fernand, your victim? Yes, of course he’s a thousand times your size, but that’s hardly fair, is it? You never had an atom of artistic talent. No, I mean in your own skill. Politics. Espionage.”

  “Some Cataclyst, then.” Constantine was bored.

  “No. Abelard Lindsay.”

  It hit him then. A lightning stroke of migraine raced across his left frontal lobe. The surface of the tank came toward him in slow motion as he fell, a frozen icescape of dull metallic glitter, and he struggled to get his hands up, nerve impulses locked in a high-speed fugue that seemed to last a month. When he came to, his cheek pressed against the cold metal, Mavrides was still babbling. “…the whole story from Nora. While you were here holding treason trials for artists, Lindsay was scoring the biggest coup in history. An Investor defector…He has an Investor defector, a starship Queen. In the palm of his hand.”

  Constantine cleared his throat. “I heard that news. Mech propaganda. It’s a farce.”

  Mavrides laughed hysterically. “You’re burned! You’re a fucking footnote. Lindsay led the revolution in your nation while you were still swatting bugs in the germs and muck and plotting to seize his credit. You’re microscopic! I shouldn’t have bothered to kill you, but I’ve never had any luck.”

  “Lindsay’s dead. He’s been dead sixty years.”

  “Sure, plebe. That’s what he wanted you to think.” The laughter from the speakers was metallic, drawn straight from the nerve. “I lived in his house, fool. He loved me.”

  Constantine opened the tank. He twisted the timer on the vial and dropped it into the water, then slammed the tank shut. He turned and walked away. As he reached the doorway he heard a sudden frenzied splashing as the toxin hit.

  CZARINA-KLUSTER PEOPLE’S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 3-1-’84

  The long bright line of welded radiance was the cleanest thing he had ever seen. Lindsay floated in an observation bubble, watching construction robots crawl in vacuum. The Mechanist engines had the long sharp noses of weevils, their white-hot welding tips casting long shadows across the blackened hull of the Czarina’s Palace.

  They were building a full-sized replica of an Investor starship, a starship without engines, a hulk that would never move under its own power. And black, with no trace of the gaudy arabesques and inlays of a true Investor craft. The other Investors had insisted on it: condemned their pervert Queen to this dark and mocking prison.

  After years of research, Lindsay had pieced out the truth about the Commander’s crime.

  Queens intromitted their eggs into the womblike pouches of their males. The males fertilized the eggs and brought them to term within the pouch. The neuter Ensigns controlled ovulation through a complex hormonal pseudo-copulation.

  The criminal Queen had killed her Ensign in a fit of passion and set up a common male in his place. But without a true Ensign, the cycles of her sexuality had become distorted. Lindsay’s evidence showed her destroying one of her malformed eggs. To an Investor, it was worse than perversion, worse even than murder: it was bad for business.

  Lindsay had presented his evidence in a way that pierced to the core
of Investor ethics. Embarrassment was not an emotion native to Investors. They had been stunned. But Lindsay was quick with his remedy: exile. Behind it was the implied threat to spread the evidence, to play out the details of the scandal to every Investor ship and every human faction.

  It was bad enough that a select group of wealthy Queens and Ensigns had been apprised of the shocking news. That the impressionable males should learn of it was unthinkable. A bargain was struck.

  The Queen never knew what had betrayed her. The approach to her had been even more subtle, stretching Lindsay’s talents to the utmost. A timely gift of jewels had helped, distracting her with that overwhelming avidity that was the very breath of life to Investors. Business had been poor on her ship, with its debased crew and wretched eunuch Ensign.

  Lindsay came armed with charts from Wells, statistics predicting the wealth to be wrung from a city-state independent of faction. Their exponential curves rose to a clean rake-off of breathtaking riches. He told her that he knew nothing of her disgrace; only that her own species was eager to condemn her. With a large enough hoard, he hinted, she might buy her way back into their good graces.

  Patiently, fluently, he helped her see that this was her best chance. What could she accomplish alone, without crew, without Ensign? Why not accept the industrious aid of the small polite strangers? The social instincts of the tiny gregarious mammals drove them to consider her their Queen, in truth, and themselves her subjects. Already a Board of Advisors awaited her whims, each one fluent in Investor and begging leave to heap her with wealth.

  Greed would only have taken her so far. It was fear that broke her to his will: fear of the small soft-skinned alien with dark plastic over his pulpy eyes and his answers for everything. He seemed to know her own people better than she did herself.

  The announcement had come a week later, and with it a sudden hemorrhage of capital to the newborn place of exile. They called the Queen “Czarina,” a nickname given by Ryumin. And her city was Czarina-Kluster: in four months already a boom town, accreting out of nothing on the inner edge of the Belt. The Czarina-Kluster People’s Corporate Republic had leaped into sudden concrete existence out of raw potential, in what Wells called a “Prigoginic leap,” a “mergence into a higher level of complexity.” Now the Board of Advisors was deluged with business, comlines frantic with would-be defectors maneuvering for asylum and a fresh start. The presence of an Investor cast an enormous shadow, a wall of prestige that no Mechanist or Shaper dared to challenge.