Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  “Hmm. Not his best work.”

  “You always had good taste, Philip.”

  Constantine sat up in his chair. “Should I call for a robe? I’ve looked better, I know.”

  Lindsay spread his hands. “If you could see beneath this suit…I haven’t wasted much money on rejuvenation lately. I’m going for total transformation when I return. It’s Europa for me, Philip. The seas.”

  “Sundogging out from under human limitations?”

  “Yes, you could say that…I’ve brought the plans with me.” Lindsay reached inside his coat and produced a brochure. “I want you to look at them with me.”

  “All right. To please you.” Constantine accepted the pamphlet.

  The center pages showed an Angel’s portrait: an aquatic posthuman. The skin was smooth and black and slick. The legs and pelvic girdle were gone; the spine extended to long muscular flukes. Scarlet gills trailed from the neck. The ribcage was black openwork, gushing white, feathery nets packed with symbiotic bacteria.

  The long black arms were dotted with phosphorescent patches, in red and blue and green, keyed into the nervous system. Along the ribs and flukes were two long lateral lines. The nerve-packed stripes housed a new aquatic sense that could feel the water’s trembling, like touch at a distance. The nose led to lung-like sacs packed with chemosensitive cells. The lidless eyes were huge, and the skull had been rebuilt to accommodate them.

  Constantine moved the brochure before his eyes, struggling to focus. “Very elegant,” he said at last. “No intestines.”

  “Yes. The white nets filter sulfur for bacteria. Each Angel is self-sufficient, drawing life, warmth, everything from the water.”

  “I see,” Constantine said. “Community with anarchy…Do they speak?”

  Lindsay leaned forward, pointing to the phosphorescent lights. “They glow.”

  “And do they reproduce?”

  “There are genetics labs. Aquatic ones. Children can be created. But these creatures can last out centuries.”

  “But where’s the sin, Abelard? The lies, the jealousy, the struggle for power?” He smiled. “I suppose they can commit gauche acts of ecosystem design.”

  “They don’t lack ingenuity, Philip. I’m sure they can find crimes if they try hard enough. But they’re not like we were. They’re not forced to it.”

  “Forced to it…” A bee landed on Constantine’s face. He brushed it gently away. He said, “I went to see the impact site last month.” He meant the spot where Vera Kelland had crashed. “There are trees there that look as old as the world.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “I don’t know what I expected…Some kind of golden glow, perhaps, some shimmer to show where my heart was buried. But we’re small creatures, and the Kosmos doesn’t care. There was no sign of it.” He sighed. “I wanted to measure myself against the world. So I killed the thing that might have held me back.”

  “We were different people then.”

  “No. I thought I could make myself different…I thought that with you dead, you and Vera, I’d be a clean slate, a machine for pure ambition…A bullet fired into the head of history…I tried to seize power over love. I wanted everything bound in iron. And I tried to bind it. But the iron broke first.”

  “I understand,” Lindsay told him. “I’ve also learned the power of plans. My life’s ambition awaits me in Europa.” He took the brochure. “It could be yours, too. If you want it.”

  “I told you in my message that I was ready for death,” Constantine said. “You always want to sidestep things, Abelard. We go back a long way together, too far for words like ‘friend’ or ‘enemy.’…I don’t know what to call you, but I know you. I know you better than anyone, better than you know yourself. When you face the consummation, you’ll step aside. I know you will. You’ll never see Europa.”

  Lindsay bowed his head.

  “It has to end, Abelard. I measured myself against the world, that was why I lived. And I cast a large shadow. Didn’t I?”

  “Yes, Philip.” Lindsay’s voice was choked. “Even when I hated you most, I was proud of you.”

  “But to measure myself against life and death, as if I could go on forever…There’s no dignity in that. What are we to life? We’re only sparks.”

  “Sparks that start a bonfire, maybe.”

  “Yes. Europa is your bonfire, and I envy you that. But if you go to Europa you will lose yourself in it. And you couldn’t bear that.”

  “But you could do it, Philip. It could be yours. Your people will be there. The Constantine clan.”

  “My people. Yes. You co-opted them.”

  “I needed them. I needed your genius…And they came to me willingly.”

  “Yes…Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.” He smiled. “I tried not to love them. I wanted them to be like me, all steel and edge. But I loved them anyway…not because they were like me, but because they were different. And the one most different, I loved the best.”

  “Vera.”

  “Yes. I created her from the samples I stole here, in the Republic. Flakes of skin. Genetics from the ones I loved…” He looked at Lindsay pleadingly. “What can you tell me of her, Abelard? How is your daughter?”

  “My daughter…”

  “Yes. You and Vera were a splendid pair…It seemed a shame that death should make you barren. I loved Vera too; I wanted to guard her child, and the child of the man she chose. So I created your daughter. Was I wrong to do it?”

  “No,” Lindsay said. “Life is better.”

  “I gave her everything I could. How is she?”

  Lindsay felt dizzy. Beneath him, the robot slid a needle into his unfeeling leg. “She’s in the labs now. She is going through the transformation.”

  “Ah. Good. She makes her own choices. As we all must.” Constantine reached beneath his lounge chair. “I have poison here. The attendants gave it to me. They grant us the right to die.”

  Lindsay nodded in distraction as the drugs calmed his pounding heart. “Yes,” he said. “We all deserve that right.”

  “We could walk out to the impact site together, you and I. And drink the poison. There’s enough for two.” Constantine smiled. “It would be good to have company.”

  “No, Philip. Not yet. I’m sorry.”

  “Still no commitment, Abelard?” Constantine showed him a glass vial filled with brown liquid. “It’s just as well. I have trouble walking. I have trouble with all dimensions, since…since the Arena. That’s why they gave me new eyes. The eyes see dimensions for me.” He twisted the top from the vial with gnarled fingers. “I see life for what it is now. That’s why I know I must do this.” He put the poison to his lips, and drank it down. “Give me your hands.”

  Lindsay reached out. Constantine gripped his hands. “Both of them are metal now?”

  “I’m sorry, Philip.”

  “No matter. All our beautiful machines…” Constantine shuddered briefly. “Bear with me, this won’t take long.”

  “I’m here, Philip.”

  “Abelard…I’m sorry. For Nora. For the cruelty…”

  “Philip, it doesn’t…I forgive…” It was too late. The man had died.

  CIRCUMEUROPA: 25-12-’86

  What was left of life in CircumEuropa was clustered in the labs. When Lindsay disembarked, he found customs deserted. CircumEuropa was through; imports no longer mattered.

  He followed a snaking hallway through translucent tilted walls of membrane. The corridors glimmered, painted with all the blue-green tints of seawater. They were almost deserted.

  Lindsay glimpsed occasional sundogs and squatters, come for junk and loot. A party of them waved politely as they sawed noisily through a hard-set wall. An Investor ship had docked as well, but there was no sign of its crew.

  The movement was all outwards. Giant ice ships, hulled in crystal, were arcing down to the planet’s surface, for gentle splashdowns through the new crevasses. Vera, his
daughter, was aboard one of them. She had already gone.

  The population had shrunk to a final handful, the last for the transformation. CircumEuropa had dwindled to a series of labs, where the last transformees floated in smoky Europan seawater.

  Lindsay paused outside an airlock, watching the activity within, through a hall-mounted monitor. Transformed surgeons were assisting at the birth of Angels, tracking the growth of new nerves through the altered flesh. Their glowing arms flickered rapidly in conversation.

  He had only to don an aqualung, step through that airlock into blood-warm water, and join the others. Vera had done it. So had Gomez and the rest. They would greet him joyfully. There would be no pain. It would be easy.

  The past hung balanced on the moment.

  He could not do it.

  He turned away.

  Then he sensed it. “You’re here,” he said. “Show yourself.”

  The Presence flowed down from the tilted, sea-green membrane of the wall. A puddle of mirrors trickled across the floor, seeping into shape.

  Lindsay watched it in wonder. The Presence had its own gravity; it clung to the floor as if pulled there. It warped and rippled, taking form to please him. It became a small, fleet thing, poised on four legs, crouching like an animal. Like a weasel, he thought. Like a fox.

  “She’s gone,” Lindsay told it. “And you let her go.”

  “Relax, citizen,” the fox told him. Its voice had no echo; it made no sound. “It’s not my business to hold on to things.”

  “Europa’s not to your taste?”

  “Aw, hell,” it said. “I’m sure it’s fabulous there, but I’ve seen the real thing, remember? On Earth. What about you, sundog? I don’t see you going for it.”

  “I’m old,” Lindsay said. “They’re young. It should be their world. They don’t need me.”

  The creature stretched, rippling. “I thought you’d say as much. What do you say, then? Now that you have a chance for, ah, reflection?”

  Lindsay smiled, seeing his own warped face across the shining film of the Presence. “I’m at loose ends.”

  “Oh, very good.” There was laughter in the unheard voice. “I suppose you’ll be dying now.”

  “Should I?” He hesitated. “It might be premature.”

  “It might,” the Presence agreed. “You’ll stay here a few more centuries, then? And await the final transcendence?”

  “The Fifth Prigoginic Level of Complexity?”

  “You could call it that. The words don’t matter. It’s as far beyond Life as Life is from inert matter. I’ve seen it happen, many times before. I can feel it moving here, I can smell it in the wind. People…creatures, beings, they’re all people to me…they ask the Final Questions. And they get the Final Answers, and then it’s goodbye. It’s the Godhead, or as close as makes no difference to the likes of you and me. Maybe that’s what you want, sundog? The Absolute?”

  “The Absolute,” Lindsay mused. “The Final Answers…What are your answers, then, friend?”

  “My answers? I don’t have ’em. I don’t care what goes on beneath this skin, I want only to see, only to feel. Origins and destinies, predictions and memories, lives and deaths, I sidestep those. I’m too slick for time to grip, you get me, sundog?”

  “What do you want then, Presence?”

  “I want what I already have! Eternal wonder, eternally fulfilled…Not the eternal, even, just the Indefinite, that’s where all beauty is…I’ll wait out the heat-death of the Universe to see what happens next! And in the meantime, isn’t it something, all of it?”

  “Yes,” Lindsay said. His heart was hammering in his chest. His robot nurse reached for him with a needle-load of soothing chemicals; he turned it off, then laughed and stretched. “It’s all very much something.”

  “I had a fine time here,” the Presence said. “It’s quite a place you have here, around this little sun.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Hey, the thanks are all yours, citizen. But there are other places waiting.” The Presence hesitated. “You want to come along?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then hold me.”

  He stretched his arms out toward it. It came over him in a silver wave. Stellar cold, a melting, a release.

  And all things were fresh and new.

  He saw his clothes floating within the hallway. His arms drifted out of the sleeves, prosthetics trailing leashes of expensive circuitry: Atop its clean white ladder of vertebrae, his empty skull sank grinning into the collar of his coat.

  An Investor appeared at the end of the hall, bounding along in free-fall. Reflexively, Lindsay smeared himself out of sight against the wall. The Investor’s frill lifted; it pawed with magpie attraction through the tangle of bones, stuffing items of interest into a swollen bag.

  “They’re always around to pick up the pieces,” the Presence commented. “They’re useful to us. You’ll see.”

  Lindsay perceived his new self. “I don’t have any hands,” he said.

  “You won’t need ’em.” The Presence laughed. “C’mon, we’ll follow him. They’ll be going someplace soon.”

  They trailed the Investor down the hall. “Where?” Lindsay said.

  “It doesn’t matter. Somewhere wonderful.”

  Swarm

  “I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage,” the alien said.

  Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. “I regret it also, ensign,” he said in the alien’s own hissing language. “Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely.”

  “But that was only information,” the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. “We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait.” The alien lifted the long ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.

  “No doubt you are right,” Afriel said, despising him. “We humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us.” Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.

  “You have not done badly,” the alien said magnanimously. “You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit.”

  “Things are different now,” Afriel said. “We’ll make you rich.”

  “Indeed,” the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. “Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our starflight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research.”

  Afriel was annoyed. As a member of the Reshaped faction, he did not appreciate the reference to the rival Mechanists. “Don’t put too much stock in mere technical expertise,” he said. “Consider the aptitude for languages we Shapers have. It makes our faction a much better trading partner. To a Mechanist, all Investors look alike.”

  The alien hesitated. Afriel smiled. He had appealed to the alien’s personal ambition with his last statement, and the hint had been taken. That was where the Mechanists always erred. They tried to treat all Investors consistently, using the same programmed routines each time. They lacked imagination.

  Something would have to be done about the Mechanists, Afriel thought. Something more permanent than the small but deadly confrontations between isolated ships in the Asteroid Belt and the ice-rich Rings of Saturn. Both factions maneuvered constantly, looking for a decisive stroke, bribing away each other’s best talent, practicing ambush, assassination, and industrial espionage.

  Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel was a past master of these pursuits. That was
why the Reshaped faction had paid the millions of kilowatts necessary to buy his passage. Afriel held doctorates in biochemistry and alien linguistics, and a master’s degree in magnetic weapons engineering. He was thirty-eight years old and had been Reshaped according to the state of the art at the time of his conception. His hormonal balance had been altered slightly to compensate for long periods spent in free-fall. He had no appendix. The structure of his heart had been redesigned for greater efficiency, and his large intestine had been altered to produce the vitamins normally made by intestinal bacteria. Genetic engineering and rigorous training in childhood had given him an intelligence quotient of one hundred and eighty. He was not the brightest of the agents of the Ring Council, but he was one of the most mentally stable and the best trusted.

  “It seems a shame,” the alien said, “that a human of your accomplishments should have to rot for two years in this miserable, profitless outpost.”

  “The years won’t be wasted,” Afriel said.

  “But why have you chosen to study the Swarm? They can teach you nothing, since they cannot speak. They have no wish to trade, having no tools or technology. They are the only spacefaring race that is essentially without intelligence.”

  “That alone should make them worthy of study.”

  “Do you seek to imitate them, then? You would make monsters of yourselves.” Again the ensign hesitated. “Perhaps you could do it. It would be bad for business, however.”

  There came a fluting burst of alien music over the ship’s speakers, then a screeching fragment of Investor language. Most of it was too high-pitched for Afriel’s ears to follow.

  The alien stood, his jeweled skirt brushing the tips of his clawed birdlike feet. “The Swarm’s symbiote has arrived,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Afriel said. When the ensign opened the cabin door, Afriel could smell the Swarm’s representative; the creature’s warm yeasty scent had spread rapidly through the starship’s recycled air.

  Afriel quickly checked his appearance in a pocket mirror. He touched powder to his face and straightened the round velvet hat on his shoulder-length reddish-blond hair. His earlobes glittered with red impact-rubies, thick as his thumbs’ ends, mined from the Asteroid Belt. His knee-length coat and waistcoat were of gold brocade; the shirt beneath was of dazzling fineness, woven with red-gold thread. He had dressed to impress the Investors, who expected and appreciated a prosperous look from their customers. How could he impress this new alien? Smell, perhaps. He freshened his perfume.