Arkadya smiled and nervously rubbed the skin-metal interface of a silvery blob of machinery grafted along her forearm. “Valery’s in one of her states,” she said. “I thought I’d come see how you were.”
In my mind’s eye flickered the nightmare image of our naked skins slicked with blood. I said, “It was…unfortunate.”
“C-K’s full of talk about the Comptroller’s death.”
“It was the Comptroller?” I said. “I haven’t seen any news.”
Slyness crept into her eyes. “You saw him there,” she said.
I was shocked that she should expect me to discuss my stay in a discreet. “I have work,” I said. I kicked my fins so that I drifted off our mutual vertical. Facing each other sideways increased the social distance between us.
She laughed quietly. “Don’t be a prig, Hans. You act as if you were still under the dogs. You have to tell me about it if you want me to help the two of you.”
I stopped my drift. She said, “And I want to help. I’m Valery’s friend. I like the way you look together. It appeals to my sense of aesthetics.”
“Thanks for your concern.”
“I am concerned. I’m tired of seeing her on the arm of an old lecher like Wellspring.”
“You’re telling me they’re lovers?” I said.
She fluttered her metal-clad fingers in the air. “You’re asking me what the two of them do in his favorite discreet? Maybe they play chess.” She rolled her eyes under lids heavy with powdered gold. “Don’t look so shocked, Hans. You should know his power as well as anyone. He’s old and rich; we Polycarbon women are young and not too terribly principled.” She looked quickly up and away from beneath long lashes. “I’ve never heard that he took anything from us that we weren’t willing to give.” She floated closer. “Tell me what you saw, Hans. C-K’s crazy with the news, and Valery does nothing but mope.”
I opened the refrigerator and dug among Petri dishes for more liqueur. “It strikes me that you should be doing the talking, Arkadya.”
She hesitated, then shrugged and smiled. “Now you’re showing some sense, my friend. Open eyes and ears can take you a long way in C-Kluster.” She took a stylish inhaler from a holster on her enameled garter. “And speaking of eyes and ears, have you had your place swept for bugs yet?”
“Who’d bug me?”
“Who wouldn’t?” She looked bored. “I’ll stick to what’s common knowledge, then. Hire us a discreet sometime, and I’ll give you all the rest.” She fired a stream of amber liqueur from arm’s length and sucked it in as it splashed against her teeth. “Something big is stirring in C-K. It hasn’t reached the rank and file yet, but the Comptroller’s death is a sign of it. The other Advisers are treating it like a personal matter, but it’s clear that he wasn’t simply tired of life. He left his affairs in disorder. No, this is something that runs back to the Queen herself. I’m sure of it.”
“You think the Queen ordered him to take his own life?”
“Maybe. She’s getting erratic with age. Wouldn’t you, though, if you had to spend your life surrounded by aliens? I feel for the Queen, I really do. If she needs to kill a few stuffy rich old bastards for her own peace of mind, it’s perfectly fine by me. In fact, if that’s all there was to it, I’d sleep easier.”
I thought about this, my face impassive. The entire structure of Czarina-Kluster was predicated on the Queen’s exile. For seventy years, defectors, malcontents, pirates, and pacifists had accreted around the refuge of our alien Queen. The powerful prestige of her fellow Investors protected us from the predatory machinations of Shaper fascists and dehumanized Mechanist sects. C-K was an oasis of sanity amid the vicious amorality of humanity’s warring factions. Our suburbs spun in webs around the dark hulk of the Queen’s blazing, jeweled environment.
She was all we had. There was a giddy insecurity under all our success. C-K’s famous banks were backed by the Cicada Queen’s tremendous wealth. The academic freedom of C-K’s teaching centers flourished only under her shadow.
And we did not even know why she was disgraced. Rumors abounded, but only the Investors themselves knew the truth. Were she ever to leave us, Czarina-Kluster would disintegrate overnight.
I said offhandedly, “I’ve heard talk that she’s not happy. It seems these rumors spread, and they raise her Percentage for a while and panel a new room with jewels, and then the rumors fade.”
“That’s true…She and our sweet Valery are two of a kind where these dark moods are concerned. It’s clear, though, that the Comptroller was left no choice but suicide. And that means disaster is stirring at the heart of C-K.”
“It’s only rumors,” I said. “The Queen is the heart of C-K, and who knows what’s going on in that huge head of hers?”
“Wellspring would know,” Arkadya said intently.
“But he’s not an Adviser,” I said. “As far as the Queen’s inner circle is concerned, he’s little better than a pirate.”
“Tell me what you saw in Topaz Discreet.”
“You’ll have to allow me some time,” I said. “It’s rather painful.” I wondered what I should tell her, and what she was willing to believe. The silence began to stretch.
I put on a tape of Terran sea sounds. The room began to surge ominously with the roar of alien surf.
“I wasn’t ready for it,” I said. “In my crèche we were taught to guard our feelings from childhood. I know how the Clique feels about distance. But that kind of raw intimacy, from a woman I really scarcely know—especially under that night’s circumstances—it wounded me.” I looked searchingly into Arkadya’s face, longing to reach through her to Valery. “Once it was over, we were further apart than ever.”
Arkadya tilted her head to the side and winced. “Who composed this?”
“What? You mean the music? It’s a background tape—sea sounds from Earth. It’s a couple of centuries old.”
She looked at me oddly. “You’re really absorbed by the whole planetary thing, aren’t you? ‘Sea sounds.’”
“Mars will have seas someday. That’s what our whole Project is about, isn’t it?”
She looked disturbed. “Sure…We’re working at it, Hans, but that doesn’t mean we have to live there. I mean, that’s centuries from now, isn’t it? Even if we’re still alive, we’ll be different people by then. Just think of being trapped down a gravity well. I’d choke to death.”
I said quietly, “I don’t think of it as being for the purposes of settlement. It’s a clearer, more ideal activity. The instigation by Fourth-Level cognitive agents of a Third-Level Prigoginic Leap. Bringing life itself into being on the naked bedrock of space-time…”
But she was shaking her head and backpedaling toward the door. “I’m sorry, Hans, but those sounds, they’re just…getting into my blood somehow…” She shook herself, shuddering, and the filigree beads woven into her blonde hair clattered loudly. “I can’t bear it.”
“I’ll turn it off.”
But she was already leaving. “Goodbye, goodbye…We’ll meet again soon.”
She was gone. I was left to steep in my own isolation, while the roaring surf gnawed and mumbled at its shore.
One of Kulagin’s servos met me at his door and took my hat. Kulagin was seated at a workplace in a screened-off corner of his marigold-reeking domicile, watching stock quotations scroll down a display screen. He was dictating orders into a microphone on his forearm gauntlet. When the servo announced me he unplugged the jack from his gauntlet and stood, shaking my hand with both of his. “Welcome, friend, welcome.”
“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time.”
“No, not at all. Do you play the Market?”
“Not seriously,” I said. “Later, maybe, when the royalties from Eisho Zaibatsu pile up.”
“You must allow me to guide your eyes, then. A good Posthumanist should have a wide range of interests. Take that chair, if you would.”
I sat beside Kulagin as he sat before the console and plugged in. K
ulagin was a Mechanist, but he kept himself rigorously antiseptic. I liked him.
He said, “Odd how these financial institutions tend to drift from their original purpose. In a way, the Market itself has made a sort of Prigoginic Leap. On its face, it’s a commercial tool, but it’s become a game of conventions and confidences. We Cicadas eat, breathe, and sleep rumors, so the Market is the perfect expression of our zeitgeist.”
“Yes,” I said. “Frail, mannered, and based on practically nothing tangible.”
Kulagin lifted his plucked brows. “Yes, my young friend, exactly like the bedrock of the cosmos itself. Every level of complexity floats freely on the last, supported only by abstractions. Even natural laws are only our attempts to strain our vision through the Prigoginic event horizon…If you prefer a more primal metaphor, we can compare the Market to the sea. A sea of information, with a few blue-chip islands here and there for the exhausted swimmer. Look at this.”
He touched buttons, and a three-dimensional grid display sprang into being. “This is Market activity in the past forty-eight hours. It looks rather like the waves and billows of a sea, doesn’t it? Note these surges of transaction.” He touched the screen with the light pen implanted in his forefinger, and gridded areas flushed from cool green to red. “That was when the first rumors of the iceteroid came in—”
“What?”
“The asteroid, the ice-mass from the Ring Council. Someone has bought it and is mass-driving it out of Saturn’s gravity well right now, bound for Martian impact. Someone very clever, for it will pass within a few thousands of klicks from C-K. Close enough for naked-eye view.”
“You mean they’ve really done it?” I said, caught between shock and joy.
“I heard it third-, fourth-, maybe tenth-hand, but it fits in well with the parameters the Polycarbon engineers have set up. A mass of ice and volatiles, well over three klicks across, targeted for the Hellas Depression south of the equator at sixty-five klicks a second, impact expected at UT 20:14:53, 14-4-’54…That’s dawn, local time. Local Martian time, I mean.”
“But that’s months from now,” I said.
Kulagin smirked. “Look, Hans, you don’t push a three-klick ice clump with your thumbs. Besides, this is just the first of dozens. It’s more of a symbolic gesture.”
“But it means we’ll be moving out! To Martian orbit!”
Kulagin looked skeptical. “That’s a job for drones and monitors, Hans. Or maybe a few rough and tough pioneer types. Actually, there’s no reason why you and I should have to leave the comforts of C-K.”
I stood up, knotting my hands. “You want to stay? And miss the Prigoginic catalyst?”
Kulagin looked up with a slight frown. “Cool off, Hans, sit down, they’ll be looking for volunteers soon enough, and if you really mean to go I’m sure you can manage somehow…The point is that the effect on the Market has been spectacular…It’s been fairly giddy ever since the Comptroller’s death, and now some very big fish indeed is rising for the kill. I’ve been following his movements for three day-shifts straight, hoping to feast on his scraps, so to speak…Care for an inhale?”
“No, thanks.”
Kulagin helped himself to a long pull of stimulant. He looked ragged. I’d never seen him without his face paint before. He said, “I don’t have the feeling for mob psychology that you Shapers have, so I have to make do with a very, very good memory…The last time I saw something like this was thirteen years ago. Someone spread the rumor that the Queen had tried to leave C-K, and the Advisers had restrained her by force. The upshot of that was the Crash of ’Forty-one, but the real killing came in the Rally that followed. I’ve been reviewing the tapes of the Crash, and I recognize the fins and flippers and big sharp teeth of an old friend. I can read his style in his maneuvering. It’s not the slick guile of a Shaper. It’s not the cold persistence of a Mechanist, either.”
I considered. “Then you must mean Wellspring.”
Wellspring’s age was unknown. He was well over two centuries old. He claimed to have been born on Earth in the dawn of the Space Age, and to have lived in the first generation of independent space colonies, the so-called Concatenation. He had been among the founders of Czarina-Kluster, building the Queen’s habitat when she fled in disgrace from her fellow Investors.
Kulagin smiled. “Very good, Hans. You may live in moss, but there’s none on you. I think Wellspring engineered the Crash of ’Forty-one for his own profit.”
“But he lives very modestly.”
“As the Queen’s oldest friend, he was certainly in a perfect position to start rumors. He even engineered the parameters of the Market itself, seventy years ago. And it was after the Rally that the Kosmosity-Metasystems Department of Terraformation was set up. Through anonymous donations, of course.”
“But contributions came in from all over the system,” I objected. “Almost all the sects and factions think that terraforming is humanity’s sublimest effort.”
“To be sure. Though I wonder just how that idea became so widely spread. And to whose benefit. Listen, Hans. I love Wellspring. He’s a friend, and I remember the cold. But you have to realize just what an anomaly he is. He’s not one of us. He wasn’t even born in space.” He looked at me narrowly, but I took no offense at his use of the term born. It was a deadly insult against Shapers, but I considered myself a Polycarbon first and Cicada second, with Shaperism a distant third.
He smiled briefly. “To be sure, Wellspring has a few Mechanist knickknacks implanted, to extend his life span, but he lacks the whole Mech style. In fact he actually predates it. I’d be the last to deny the genius of you Shapers, but in a way it’s an artificial genius. It works out well enough on IQ tests, but it somehow lacks that, well, primeval quality that Wellspring has, just as we Mechanists can use cybernetic modes of thinking but we can never be actual machines…Wellspring simply is one of those people at the farthest reaches of the bell curve, one of those titans that spring up only once a generation. I mean, think what’s become of his normal human contemporaries.”
I nodded. “Most of them have become Mechs.”
Kulagin shook his head fractionally, staring at the screen. “I was born here in C-K. I don’t know that much about the old-style Mechs, but I do know that most of the first ones are dead. Outdated, crowded out. Driven over the edge by future shock. A lot of the first life-extension efforts failed, too, in very ugly ways…Wellspring survived that, too, from some innate knack he has. Think of it, Hans. Here we sit, products of technologies so advanced that they’ve smashed society to bits. We trade with aliens. We can even hitchhike to the stars, if we pay the Investors’ fare. And Wellspring not only holds his own, he rules us. We don’t even know his real name.”
I considered what Kulagin had said while he switched to a Market update. I felt bad. I could hide my feelings, but I couldn’t shake them off. “You’re right,” I said. “But I trust him.”
“I trust him too, but I know we’re cradled in his hands. In fact, he’s protecting us right now. This terraforming project has cost megawatt after megawatt. All those contributions were anonymous, supposedly to prevent the factions from using them for propaganda. But I think it was to hide the fact that most of them were from Wellspring. Any day now there’s going to be an extended Market crash. Wellspring will make his move, and that will start the rally. And every kilowatt of his profits will go to us.”
I leaned forward in my chair, interlacing my fingers. Kulagin dictated a series of selling orders into his microphone. Suddenly I laughed.
Kulagin looked up. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you laugh like you meant it, Hans.”
“I was just thinking…You’ve told me all this, but I came here to talk about Valery.”
Kulagin looked sad. “Listen, Hans. What I know about women you could hide under a microchip, but, as I said, my memory is excellent. The Shapers blundered when they pushed things to the limits. The Ring Council tried to break the so-called Two-Hundred Barrier las
t century. Most of the so-called Superbrights went mad, defected, turned against their fellows, or all three. They’ve been hunted down by pirates and mercenaries for decades now.
“One group found out somehow that there was an Investor Queen living in exile, and they managed to make it to her shadow, for protection. And someone—you can imagine who—talked the Queen into letting them stay, if they paid a certain tax. That tax became the Queen’s Percentage, and the settlement became Czarina-Kluster. Valery’s parents—yes, parents; it was a natural birth—were among those Superbrights. She didn’t have the schooling Shapers use, so she ranks in at only one forty-five or so.
“The problem is those mood cycles of hers. Her parents had them, she’s had them since she was a child. She’s a dangerous woman, Hans. Dangerous to herself, to all of us. She should be under the dogs, really. I’ve suggested that to my friends in Security, but someone stands in my way. I have my ideas who.”
“I’m in love with her. She won’t speak to me.”
“I see. Well, I understand she’s been full of mood suppressants lately; that probably accounts for her reticence…I’ll speak frankly. There’s an old saying, Hans, that you should never enter a discreet with someone crazier than you are. And it’s good advice. You can’t trust Valery.”
He held up his hand. “Hear me out. You’re young. You’ve just come out from under the dogs. This woman has enchanted you, and admittedly she has the famous Shaper charm in full measure. But a liaison with Valery is like an affair with five women, three of whom are crazy. C-K is full to bursting with the most beautiful women in human history. Admittedly you’re a bit stiff, a bit of an obsessive perhaps, but you have a certain idealistic charm. And you have that Shaper intensity, fanaticism even, if you don’t mind my saying so. Loosen up a little, Hans. Find some woman who’ll rub the rough edges off of you. Play the field. It’s a good way to recruit new friends to the Clique.”
Schismatrix Plus Page 42
