Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  “You mean it’s gone?”

  “Oh, yes. We had enough cerebral dichotomy to deal with without your training giving you dual modes of thought. ‘Hypocrisy as a second state of consciousness’ and all that.” She sniffed. “It was a bad idea to begin with.”

  Lindsay sagged back into the scanning chair. “But all my life…And now you took it away. With feck—” He closed his eyes, struggled for the word. “With technology.”

  She took another candy. “So what?” she said indistinctly, munching. “Technology put it there in the first place. You have your self back. What more do you want?”

  Alexandrina Tyler came through the open doorway with a swish of heavy fabric. She wore the finery of her girlhood: a puffed, floor-length skirt and a stiff cream-colored jacket with embroidered input jacks and a round neck-circling collar. She looked at the floor. “Margaret,” she said. “Your feet.”

  Juliano looked absently at the dried mud flaking from her boots. “Oh, dear. Sorry.”

  The sudden juxtaposition of the two women filled Lindsay with vertigo. A confused wash of tainted déjà vu bubbled up from some drugged cerebral recess, and for a moment he thought he would pass out. When he revived he could feel that he had improved, as if some paralyzing sludge had trickled out of his head, leaving light and space. “Alexandrina,” he said, feeling feebler yet somehow more real. “You’ve been time? All this here?”

  “Abelard,” she said, surprised. “You’re talking.”

  “Trying to.”

  “I heard you were better,” she said. “So I brought you clothes. From the Museum wardrobe.” She showed him a plastic-wrapped suit, an antique. “You see? This is actually one of your own suits from seventy-five years ago. One of the looters saved it when the Lindsay Mansion was sacked. Try it on, dear.”

  Lindsay touched the suit’s stiff, age-worn fabric. “A museum piece,” he said.

  “Well, of course.”

  Margaret Juliano Looked at Alexandrina. “Maybe he’d be more comfortable dressed as an orderly. He could fade into the background. Take on local color.”

  “No,” Lindsay said. “All right. I’ll wear it.”

  “Alexandrina’s been looking forward to this,” Juliano confided as he struggled into the suit’s trousers, ramming his bare feet past the wire-stiffened accordioned knees. “Every day she’s come to feed you Tyler apples.”

  “I brought you here after the duel,” Alexandrina said. “Our marriage expired, but I run the Museum now. I have a post here.” She smiled. “They sacked the mansions, but the family orchards are still standing. Your Grandaunt Marietta always swore by the family’s apples.”

  A seam gave way in the shoulder as Lindsay pulled on the shirt.

  “You wolfed down those apples, seeds, stems, and all,” Juliano told him. “It was a wonder.”

  “You’re home, Alexa,” Lindsay said. It was what she had wanted. He was glad for her.

  “This was the Tyler house,” Alexandrina said. “The left wing and the grounds are for the clinic; that’s Margaret’s work. I’m the Curator. I run the rest. I’ve gathered up all the mementos of our old way of life—all that was spared by Constantine’s reeducation squads.” She helped him pull the spacesuit-collared formal jacket over his head. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Juliano kicked off her boots and stood in her rumpled socks. “I’ll come along. I want to judge his reactions.”

  The main ballroom had become an exhibit hall, with glass-fronted displays and portraits of early clan founders. An antique pedal-driven ultralight aircraft hung from the ceiling. Five Shapers marveled over a case full of crude assembly tools from the circumlunar’s construction. The Shapers’ chic low-gravity clothing sagged grotesquely in the Republic’s centrifugal spin. Alexandrina took his arm and whispered, “The floor looks nice, doesn’t it? I refinished it myself. We don’t allow robots here.”

  Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan’s founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer’s face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically. “It’s a joke!” he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.

  Alexandrina glanced anxiously at the bemused Shapers. “Maybe this was too early for him, Margaret.”

  Juliano laughed. “He’s right. It is a joke. Ask the Cataclysts.” She took Lindsay’s arm. “Come on, Abelard. We’ll go outside.”

  “It’s a joke,” Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the words gushed free. “This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no idea. How could they? They were dead before they had a chance to see! What’s five years to us, what’s ten, a hundred—”

  “You’re babbling, dear.” Juliano walked him down the hall and through the mortared stone archway into dappled sunlight and grass. “Watch where you step,” she said. “We have other patients. Not housebroken.” Beside the high moss-crusted walls a nude young woman was tearing single-mindedly at the grass, pausing to suck grime from her fingers.

  Lindsay was horrified. He seemed to taste the grit on his own tongue. “We’ll go outside the grounds,” Margaret said. “Pongpianskul won’t mind.”

  “He’s letting you stay here, is he? That woman’s a Shaper. A Cataclyst? He owed a debt to the Cataclysts. You’re taking care of them for him.”

  “Try not to talk too much, dear. You might hurt something.” She opened the iron gateway. “They like it here, the Cataclysts. Something about the view.”

  “Oh, my God,” Lindsay said.

  The Republic had run wild. The overarching trees on the Museum grounds had hid the full panorama from him. Now it loomed over and around him in its full five-kilometer range, a stunning expanse of ridged and tangled green, three long panels glowing in triple-crossed shafts of mirror-reflected sunlight. He’d forgotten how bright the sun was in circumlunar space.

  “The trees,” he gasped. “My God, look at them!”

  “They’ve been growing ever since you left,” Juliano said. “Come with me. I want to show you another project.”

  Lindsay looked up through reflex toward his own former home. Seen from above, the sprawling mansion grounds bordered what had once been a lively tangle of cheap low-class restaurants. Those were in decline, and the Lindsay home was in ruin. He could see yawning holes in the red-tiled roofs of fused lunar slate. The private landing pad atop the mansion’s four-story tower was swamped in ivy.

  At the northern end of the world, up its sloping walls, a crew of ant-sized workmen tore languidly at the skeletal remains of one of the wirehead hospitals. Shoals of clouds hid the old power grid and the area that had once been the Sours. “It smells different,” Lindsay realized. He stumbled on the bicycle path beside the Museum’s walls and was forced to watch his feet. They were filthy. “I need a bath,” he said.

  “Either you crawl or you don’t, right? If you’ve got skin bacteria, what’s a little dirt? I like it.” She smiled. “It’s big here, isn’t it? Sure, Goldreich-Tremaine’s ten times this size, but nothing this open. A big risky world.”

  “I’m glad Alexandrina found her way back,” Lindsay said. Their marriage had been a success, because it had gotten her what she wanted most. At last he had made amends. It had always been a strain. Now he was free.

  The Republic had changed so much that it filled him with weird exaltation. Yes, big, he thought, but nowhere near big enough. He felt a sense of impatience with it, a fierce longing to grab hold of something, something huge and basic. He had slept for five years. Now he felt every hour of that long rest pressing in on him with uncontainable reviving-energy. His knees buckled, and Juliano caught him with her Shaper-strengthened arms.

  “Easy,” she said.

  “I’m all ri
ght.” They crossed the openwork bridge over the blazing expanse of metaglass that separated two land panels. Lindsay saw the former site of the Sours beneath a raft of clouds. The once-foul morass had become an oasis of vegetation so blindingly green that it seemed to shine even in the clouds’ shadow. A tall gangling boy in baggy clothing was running headlong beside the woven-wire fence surrounding the Sours, tugging a large box kite into flight.

  “You’re not the first I’ve cured,” Juliano said as they walked toward it. “I always said my Superbright students had promise. Some of them work here. A pilot project. I want to show you what they’ve done. They’ve been tackling botany from a perspective of Prigoginic complexity theory. New species, advanced chlorophylls, good solid constructive work.”

  “Wait,” said Lindsay. “I want to talk to this youngster.” He had noticed the boy s kite. Its elaborate paint job showed a nude man crammed stiflingly within the rigid planes of the box kite’s lifting surfaces.

  A woman in mud-smeared corduroy leaned over the woven fence, waving a pair of shears. “Margaret! Come see!”

  “I’ll be back for you,” Juliano said. “Don’t go away.”

  Lindsay ambled unsteadily to where the boy stood, expertly managing his kite. “Hello, old cousin,” the boy said. “Got any tapes?”

  “What kind?”

  “Video, audio, anything from the Ring Council. That’s where you’re from, right?”

  Lindsay reached automatically for his training, for the easy network of spontaneous lies that would show the boy a plausible image. His mind was blank. He gaped. Time was passing. He blurted the first thing that came into his head. “I’m a sundog. From Czarina-Kluster.”

  “Really? Posthumanism! Prigoginic levels of complexity! Fractal scales, bedrock of space-time, precontinuum ur-space! Have I got it right?”

  “I like your kite,” Lindsay hedged.

  “Old Cataclyst logo,” the boy said. “We get a lot of old Cataclysts around here. The kite gets their attention. First time I’ve caught a Cicada, though.”

  Cicada, Lindsay thought. A citizen of C-K. Wellspring had always been fond of slang. “You’re a local?”

  “That’s right. My name’s Abelard. Abelard Gomez.”

  “Abelard. That name’s not too common.”

  The boy laughed. “Maybe not in C-K. But every fifth kid in the Republic’s named Abelard. After Abelard Lindsay, the big historical cheese. You must have heard of him.” The boy hesitated. “He used to dress like you. I’ve seen pictures.”

  Lindsay looked at the boy’s own clothes. Young Gomez wore a faked-up low-grav outfit which sagged dreadfully. “I can tell I’m out of date,” Lindsay said. “They make a big deal out of this Lindsay fellow, do they?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Gomez said. “Take school. School’s completely antique here. They make us read Lindsay’s book. Shakespeare, it’s called. Translated into modern English by Abelard Lindsay.”

  “Is it that bad?” Lindsay said, tingling with déjà vu.

  “You’re lucky, old man. You don’t have to read it. I’ve looked through the whole thing. Not one word in there about spontaneous self-organization.”

  Lindsay nodded. “That’s a shame.”

  “Everybody’s old in that book. I don’t mean fake-old like the Preservationists here. Or weird-old like old Pong.”

  “You mean Pongpianskul?” Lindsay said.

  “The Warden, yeah. No, I mean everybody’s used up too fast. All burnt up and cramped and sick. It’s depressing.”

  Lindsay nodded. Things had come full circle, he decided. “You resent the control on your life,” he speculated. “You and your friends are radicals. You want things changed.”

  “Not really,” the boy said. “They only have me for sixty years. I’ve got hundreds, cousin. I mean to do big things. It’s going to take a lot of time. I mean big things. Huge. Not like those little dried-up people in the past.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Life-spreading. Planet-ripping. World-building. Terraforming.”

  “I see,” Lindsay said. He was startled to see so much self-possession in one so young. It must be the Cataclyst influence. They’d always favored wild schemes, huge lunacies that in the end boiled down to nothing. “And will that make you happy?”

  The boy looked suspicious. “Are you one of those Zen Serotonists? ‘Happy.’ What kind of scam is that? Burn happiness, cousin. This is the Kosmos talking. Are you on the side of life, or aren’t you?”

  Lindsay smiled. “Is this political? I don’t trust politics.”

  “Politics? I’m talking biology. Things that live and grow. Organisms. Integrated forms.”

  “Where do people come in?”

  The boy waved his hand irritably and caught the kite as it swooped. “Never mind them. I’m talking basic loyalties now. Like that tree. Are you on its side, against the inorganic?”

  His recent epiphany was still fresh in Lindsay’s mind. The boy’s question was genuine. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

  “You see the point of terraforming, then.”

  “Terraforming,” Lindsay said slowly. “I’ve seen theories. Speculations. And I suppose that it’s possible. But what does it have to do with us?”

  “A true commitment to the side of Life demands the moral act of Creation,” Gomez said promptly.

  “Someone’s been teaching you slogans,” Lindsay said. He smiled. “Planets are real places, not just grids on a drawing board. The effort would be titanic. All out of human scale.”

  The boy was impatient. “How big are you? Are you bigger than something inert?”

  “But it would take centuries—”

  “You think that tree would hesitate? How much time do you have, anyway?”

  Lindsay laughed helplessly.

  “Fine, then. Are you going to live a squished-down little human life, or are you going to go for the potential?”

  “At my age,” Lindsay said, “if I were human I’d already be dead.”

  “Now you’re talking. You’re as big as your dreams. That’s what they say in C-K, right? No rules, no limits. Look at the Mechs and Shapers.” The boy was contemptuous. “All the power in the world, and they’re chasing each other’s tails. Burn their wars and midget ideologies. Posthumanity’s bigger than that. Ask the people in there.” The boy waved one hand at the woven-wire enclosure. “Ecosystem design. Rebuilding life for new conditions. A little biochemistry, a little statistical physics, you can pick it up here and there, that’s where the excitement is. If Abelard Lindsay was alive today that’s the sort of thing he’d be working on.”

  The irony of it stung Lindsay. At Gomez’s age, he’d never had any sense, either. He felt a sudden alarm for the boy, an urge to protect him from the disaster that his rhetoric would surely earn him. “You think so?”

  “Sure. They say he was a hot Preservationist type, but he sundogged off when the getting was good, didn’t he? You didn’t see him hanging around here to ‘die of old age.’ Nobody really does anyway.”

  “Not even here? In the home of Preservationism?”

  “Of course not. Everyone here over forty’s on the black market for life extension. When they turn sixty they scarper for Czarina-Kluster. The Cicadas don’t care about your history or your genes. They take all clades. Dreams matter more.”

  Dreams, Lindsay thought. Dreams of Preservationism, turned into a black-market scrabble for immortality. The dream of Investor Peace had rusted and collapsed. The dream of terraforming still had a shine on it. Young Gomez could not know that it too would surely tarnish.

  But somehow, Lindsay thought, you had to dream or die. And with new life pouring through him, he knew which choice was his.

  Margaret Juliano leaned over the fence. “Abelard! Abelard, over here! You need a look at this.”

  The boy, startled, began reeling in his kite hand over hand. “Now this is luck! That old psychotech wants to show me something in the compound.”


  “Go to it,” Lindsay said. “You tell her that I said to show you anything you like, understand? And tell her that I’ve gone off for a little talk with Pongpianskul. All right, cousin?”

  The boy nodded slowly. “Thanks, old Cicada. You’re one of us.”

  Pongpianskul’s office was a paper wasteland. Musty cloth-bound books of Concatenate law were heaped beside his wooden desk; schedules and production graphs were pinned up at random on the room’s ancient paneling. A tortoiseshell cat yawned in one corner and sharpened its claws in the carpet. Lindsay, whose experience with cats was limited, watched it guardedly.

  Pongpianskul wore a suit similar to Lindsay’s but newer and obviously hand-stitched. He had lost hair since his days in Goldreich-Tremaine, and light gleamed dully on the dusky skin of his scalp. He swept a sheaf of records from the desk and paper-clipped them with skinny, wrinkled fingers.

  “Papers,” he muttered. “Trying to take everything off computers these days. Don’t trust ’em. You use computers and there’s always some Mech ready to step in with new software. Thin edge of the wedge, Mavrides. Lindsay, I mean.”

  “Lindsay is better.”

  “You must admit it’s hard keeping track of you. It was a fine scam you pulled, passing yourself off as a senior genetic in the Rings.” He Looked at Lindsay. Lindsay caught part of the Look. The experience of age made up somewhat for his loss of kinesic training.

  Pongpianskul said, “How long has it been since we last talked?”

  “Hmm. What year is this?”

  Pongpianskul frowned. “No matter. You were in Dembowska then, anyway. Things aren’t so bad here under Neotenic aegis, eh, Mavrides, you admit? Gone a bit to rack and ruin, but all the better for the tourist trade; those Ring Council types eat it up with a spoon. Tell the truth, we had to go into the old Lindsay mansion and bash it about a bit, make it more romantic. Had some mice installed. You know mice? Bred ’em back to the wild state from lab specimens. You know their eyes weren’t pink in the wild? Funny look in those eyes, reminds me of a wife of mine.”