“I’ll keep what you said in mind,” I said.
“Right. I knew it was wasted effort.” He smiled ironically. “Why should I blight the purity of your emotions? A tragic first love may become an asset to you, fifty or a hundred years from now.” He turned his attention back to the screen. “I’m glad we had this talk, Hans. I hope you’ll get in touch again when the Eisho Zaibatsu money comes through. We’ll have some fun with it.”
“I’d like that,” I said, though I knew already that every kilowatt not spent on my own research would go—anonymously—to the terraforming fund. “And I don’t resent your advice. It’s just that it’s of no use to me.”
“Ah, youth,” Kulagin said. I left.
Back to the simple beauty of the lichens. I had been trained for years to specialize in them, but they had taken on beauty and meaning for me only after my Posthumanist enlightenment. Viewed through C-K’s philosophies, they stood near the catalysis point of the Prigoginic Leap that brought life itself into being.
Alternately, a lichen could be viewed as an extended metaphor for the Poly-carbon Clique: a fungus and an alga, potential rivals, united in symbiosis to accomplish what neither could do alone, just as the Clique united Mechanist and Shaper to bring life to Mars.
I knew that many viewed my dedication as strange, even unhealthy. I was not offended by their blindness. Just the names of my genetic stocks had a rolling majesty: Alectoria nigricans, Mastodia tessellata, Ochrolechia frigida, Stereocaulon alpinum. They were humble but powerful: creatures of the cold desert whose roots and acids could crumble naked, freezing rock.
My gel frames seethed with primal vitality. Lichens would drench Mars in one green-gold tidal wave of life. They would creep irresistibly from the moist craters of the iceteroid impacts, proliferating relentlessly amid the storms and earthquakes of terraformation, surviving the floods as permafrost melted. Gushing oxygen, fixing nitrogen.
They were the best. Not because of pride or show. Not because they trumpeted their motives, or threatened the cold before they broke it. But because they were silent, and the first.
My years under the dogs had taught me the value of silence. Now I was sick of surveillance. When the first royalty payment came in from Eisho Zaibatsu, I contacted one of C-K’s private security firms and had my apartment swept for bugs. They found four.
I hired a second firm to remove the bugs left by the first.
I strapped myself in at a floating workbench, turning the spy eyes over and over in my hands. They were flat videoplates, painted with one-way colorshifting polymer camouflage. They would fetch a nice price on the unofficial market.
I called a post office and hired a courier servo to take the bugs to Kulagin. While I awaited the servo’s arrival, I turned off the bugs and sealed them into a biohazard box. I dictated a note, asking Kulagin to sell them and invest the money for me in C-K’s faltering Market. The Market looked as if it could use a few buyers.
When I heard the courier’s staccato knock, I opened my door with a gauntlet remote. But it was no courier that whirred in. It was a guard dog.
“I’ll take that box, if you please,” said the dog.
I stared at it as if I had never seen a dog before. This dog was heavily armored in silver. Thin powerful limbs jutted from its silver-seamed black-plastic torso, and its swollen head bristled with spring-loaded taser darts and the blunt nozzles of restraint webs. Its swiveling antenna tail showed that it was under remote control.
I spun my workbench so that it stood between me and the dog. “I see you have my comm lines tapped as well,” I said. “Will you tell me where the taps are, or do I have to take my computer apart?”
“You sniveling little Shaper upstart,” commented the dog, “do you think your royalties can buy you out from under everyone? I could sell you on the open market before you could blink.”
I considered this. On a number of occasions, particularly troublesome meddlers in C-K had been arrested and offered for sale on the open market by the Queen’s Advisers. There were always factions outside C-K willing to pay good prices for enemy agents. I knew that the Ring Council would be overjoyed to make an example of me. “You’re claiming to be one of the Queen’s Advisers, then?”
“Of course I’m an Adviser! Your treacheries haven’t lured us all to sleep. Your friendship with Wellspring is notorious!” The dog whirred closer, its clumped camera eyes clicking faintly. “What’s inside that freezer?”
“Lichen racks,” I said impassively. “You should know that well enough.”
“Open it.”
I didn’t move. “You’re going beyond the bounds of normal operations,” I said, knowing that this would trouble any Mechanist. “My Clique has friends among the Advisers. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Open it, or I’ll web you and open it myself, with this dog.”
“Lies,” I said. “You’re no Adviser. You’re an industrial spy, trying to steal my gemstone lichen. Why would an Adviser want to look into my freezer?”
“Open it! Don’t involve yourself more deeply in things you don’t understand.”
“You’ve entered my domicile under false pretense and threatened me,” I said. “I’m calling Security.”
The dog’s chromed jaws opened. I twisted myself free of the workbench, but a thready spray of white silk from one of the dog’s facial nozzles caught me as I dodged. The filaments clung and hardened instantly, locking my arms in place where I had instinctively raised them to block the spray. A second blast caught my legs as I struggled uselessly, bouncing off a tilted Froth-wall.
“Troublemaker,” muttered the dog. “Everything would have gone down smooth without you Shapers quibbling. We had the soundest banks, we had the Queen, the Market, everything…You parasites gave C-K nothing but your fantasies. Now the system’s crumbling. Everything will crash. Everything. I ought to kill you.”
I gasped for breath as the spray rigidified across my chest. “Life isn’t banks,” I wheezed.
Motors whined as the dog flexed its jointed limbs. “If I find what I expect in that freezer, you’re as good as dead.”
Suddenly the dog stopped in midair. Its fans whirred as it wheeled to face the door. The door clicked convulsively and began to slide open. A massive taloned forelimb slammed through the opening.
The watchdog webbed the door shut. Suddenly the door shrieked and buckled, its metal peeling back like foil. The goggling head and spiked legs of a tiger crunched and thrashed through the wreckage. “Treason!” the tiger roared.
The dog whirred backward, cringing, as the tiger pulled its armored hindquarters into the room. The jagged wreckage of the door didn’t even scratch it. Armored in black and gold, it was twice the size of the watchdog. “Wait,” the dog said.
“The Council warned you against vigilante action,” the tiger said heavily. “I warned you myself.”
“I had to make a choice, Coordinator. It’s his doing. He turned us against one another, you have to see that.”
“You have only one choice left,” the tiger said. “Choose your discreet, Councilman.”
The dog flexed its limbs indecisively. “So I’m to be the second,” he said. “First the Comptroller, now myself. Very well, then. Very well. He has me. I can’t retaliate.” The dog seemed to gather itself up for a rush. “But I can destroy his favorite!”
The dog’s legs shot open like telescopes, and it sprang off a wall for my throat. There was a terrific flash with the stench of ozone, and the dog slammed bruisingly into my chest. It was dead, its circuits stripped. The lights flickered and went out as my home computer faltered and crashed, its programming scrambled by incidental radiation from the tiger’s electromagnetic pulse.
Flanges popped open on the tiger’s bulbous head, and two spotlights emerged. “Do you have any implants?” it said.
“No,” I said. “No cybernetic parts. I’m all right. You saved my life.”
“Close your eyes,” the tiger commanded. It washed me with a fi
ne mist of solvent from its nostrils. The web peeled off in its talons, taking my clothing with it.
My forearm gauntlet was ruined. I said, “I’ve committed no crime against the state, Coordinator. I love C-K.”
“These are strange days,” the tiger rumbled. “Our routines are in decay. No one is above suspicion. You picked a bad time to make your home mimic a discreet, young man.”
“I did it openly,” I said.
“There are no rights here, Cicada. Only the Queen’s graces. Dress yourself and ride the tiger. We need to talk. I’m taking you to the Palace.”
The Palace was like one gigantic discreet. I wondered if I would ever leave its mysteries alive.
I had no choice.
I dressed carefully under the tiger’s goggling eyes, and mounted it. It smelled of aging lubrication. It must have been in storage for decades. Tigers had not been seen at large in C-K for years.
The halls were crowded with Cicadas going on and off their day shifts. At the tiger’s approach they scattered in terror and awe.
We exited the Froth at its cylinder end, into the gimbaling cluster of interurban tube roads.
The roads were transparent polycarbon conduits, linking C-K’s cylindrical suburbs in an untidy web. The sight of these shining habitats against the icy background of the stars gave me a sharp moment of vertigo. I remembered the cold.
We passed through a thickened knot along the web, a swollen intersection of tube roads where one of C-K’s famous highway bistros had accreted itself into being. The lively gossip of its glittering habitués froze into a stricken silence as I rode by, and swelled into a chorus of alarm as I left. The news would permeate C-K in minutes.
The Palace imitated an Investor starship: an octahedron with six long rectangular sides. Genuine Investor ships were crusted with fantastic designs in hammered metal, but the Queen’s was an uneven dull black, reflecting her unknown shame. With the passage of time it had grown by fits and starts, and now it was lumped and flanged with government offices and the Queen’s covert hideaways. The ponderous hulk spun with dizzying speed.
We entered along one axis into a searing bath of blue-white light. My eyes shrank painfully and began oozing tears.
The Queen’s Advisers were Mechanists, and the halls swarmed with servos. They passively followed their routines, ignoring the tiger, whose chromed and plated surfaces gleamed viciously in the merciless light.
A short distance from the axis the centrifugal force seized us and the tiger sank creaking onto its massive legs. The walls grew baroque with mosaics and spun designs in filamented precious metals. The tiger stalked down a flight of stairs. My spine popped audibly in the increasing gravity, and I sat erect with an effort.
Most of the halls were empty. We passed occasional clumps of jewels in the walls that blazed like lightning. I leaned against the tiger’s back and locked my elbows, my heart pounding. More stairs. Tears ran down my face and into my mouth, a sensation that was novel and disgusting. My arms trembled with fatigue.
The Coordinator’s office was on the perimeter. It kept him in shape for audiences with the Queen. The tiger stalked creaking through a pair of massive doors, built to Investor scale.
Everything in the office was in Investor scale. The ceilings were more than twice the height of a man. A chandelier overhead gushed a blistering radiance over two immense chairs with tall backs split by tail holes. A fountain surged and splattered feebly, exhausted by strain.
The Coordinator sat behind a keyboarded business desk. The top of the desk rose almost to his armpits, and his scaled boots dangled far above the floor. Beside him a monitor scrolled down the latest Market reports.
I heaved myself, grunting, off the tiger’s back and up into the scratchy plush of an Investor chair seat. Built for an Investor’s scaled rump, it pierced my trousers like wire.
“Have some sun shades,” the Coordinator said. He opened a cavernous desk drawer, fished elbow-deep for a pair of goggles, and hurled them at me. I reached high, and they hit me in the chest.
I wiped my eyes and put on the goggles, groaning with relief. The tiger crouched at the foot of my chair, whirring to itself.
“Your first time in the Palace?” the Coordinator said.
I nodded with an effort.
“It’s horrible, I know. And yet, it’s all we have. You have to understand that, Landau. This is C-K’s Prigoginic catalyst.”
“You know the philosophy?” I said.
“Surely. Not all of us are fossilized. The Advisers have their factions. That’s common knowledge.” The Coordinator pushed his chair back. Then he stood up in its seat, climbed up onto his desk top, and sat on its forward edge facing me, his scaled boots dangling.
He was a blunt, stocky, powerfully muscled man, moving easily in the force that flattened me. His face was deeply and ferociously creased with two centuries of seams and wrinkles. His black skin gleamed dully in the searing light. His eyeballs had the brittle look of plastic. He said, “I’ve seen the tapes the dogs made, and I feel I understand you, Landau. Your sin is distance.”
He sighed. “And yet you are less corrupt than others…There is a certain threshold, an intensity of sin and cynicism, beyond which no society can survive…Listen. I know about Shapers. The Ring Council. Stitched together by black fear and red greed, drawing power from the momentum of its own collapse. But C-K’s had hope. You’ve lived here, you must have at least seen it, if you can’t feel it directly. You must know how precious this place is. Under the Cicada Queen, we’ve drawn survival from a state of mind. Belief counts, confidence is central.” The Comptroller looked at me, his dark face sagging. “I’ll tell you the truth. And depend on your goodwill. For the proper response.”
“Thank you.”
“C-K is in crisis. Rumors of the Queen’s disaffection have brought the Market to the point of collapse. This time they’re more than rumors, Landau. The Queen is on the point of defection from C-K.”
Stunned, I slumped suddenly into my chair. My jaw dropped. I closed it with a snap.
“Once the Market collapses,” the Coordinator said, “it means the end of all we had. The news is already spreading. Soon there will be a run against the Czarina-Kluster banking system. The system will crash, C-K will die.”
“But…,” I said. “If it’s the Queen’s own doing…” I was having trouble breathing.
“It’s always the doing of the Investors, Landau; it’s been that way ever since they first swept in and made our wars into an institution…We Mechanists had you Shapers at bay. We ruled the entire system while you hid in terror in the Rings. It was your trade with the Investors that got you on your feet again. In fact, they deliberately built you up, so that they could maintain a competitive trade market, pit the human race against itself, to their own profit…Look at C-K. We live in harmony here. That could be the case everywhere. It’s their doing.”
“Are you saying,” I said, “that the history of C-K is an Investor scheme? That the Queen was never really in disgrace?”
“They’re not infallible,” the Coordinator said. “I can save the Market, and C-K, if I can exploit their own greed. It’s your jewels, Landau. Your jewels. I saw the Queen’s reaction when her…damned lackey Wellspring presented your gift. You learn to know their moods, these Investors. She was livid with greed. Your patent could catalyze a major industry.”
“You’re wrong about Wellspring,” I said. “The jewel was his idea. I was working with endolithic lichens. ‘If they can live within stones they can live within jewels,’ he said. I only did the busywork.”
“But the patent’s in your name.” The Coordinator looked at the toes of his scaled boots. “With one catalyst, I could save the Market. I want you to transfer your patent from Eisho Zaibatsu to me. To the Czarina-Kluster People’s Corporate Republic.”
I tried to be tactful. “The situation does seem desperate,” I said, “but no one within the Market really wants it destroyed. There are other powerful forces prepa
ring for a rebound. Please understand—it’s not for any personal gain that I must keep my patent. The revenue is already pledged. To terraforming.”
A sour grimace deepened the crevasses in the Coordinator’s face. He leaned forward, and his shoulders tightened with a muffled creaking of plastic. “Terraforming! Oh, yes, I’m familiar with the so-called moral arguments. The cold abstractions of bloodless ideologues. What about respect? Obligation? Loyalty? Are these foreign terms to you?”
I said, “It’s not that simple. Wellspring says—”
“Wellspring!” he shouted. “He’s no Terran, you fool, he’s only a renegade, a traitor scarcely a hundred years old, who sold himself utterly to the aliens. They fear us, you see. They fear our energy. Our potential to invade their markets, once the star drive is in our hands. It should be obvious, Landau! They want to divert human energies into this enormous Martian boondoggle. We could be competing with them, spreading to the stars in one fantastic wave!” He held his arms out rigid before him, his wrists bent upward, and stared at the tips of his outstretched fingers.
His arms began to tremble. Then he broke, and cradled his head in his corded hands. “C-K could have been great. A core of unity, an island of safety in the chaos. The Investors mean to destroy it. When the Market crashes, when the Queen defects, it means the end.”
“Will she really leave?”
“Who knows what she means to do.” The Coordinator looked exhausted. “I’ve suffered seventy years from her little whims and humiliations. I don’t know what it is to care anymore. Why should I break my heart trying to glue things together with your stupid knickknacks? After all, there’s still the discreet!”
He looked up ferociously. “That’s where your meddling sent the Councilman. Once we’ve lost everything, they’ll be thick enough with blood to swim in!”
He leapt from his desk top, bounced across the carpet, and dragged me bodily from the chair. I grabbed feebly at his wrists. My arms and legs flopped as he shook me. The tiger scuttled closer, clicking. “I hate you,” he roared. “I hate everything you stand for! I’m sick of your Clique and their philosophies and their pudding smiles. You’ve killed a good friend with your meddling.
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