Schismatrix

Other books by Bruce Sterling

INVOLUTION OCEAN

THE ARTIFICIAL KID

SCHISMATRIX

by Bruce Sterling

ARBOR HOUSE

New York

Copyright 1985 by Bruce Sterling

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in

whole or in part in any form. Published in the United States

of America by Arbor House Publishing Company and in

Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Ltd.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 987654321

This book is printed on acid-free paper. The paper in this

book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of

the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity

of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bruce Sterling

Schismatrix (lacking pp 78-79, 102-103 of this paper version)

PROLOGUE

Painted aircraft flew through the core of the world. Lindsay

stood in knee-high grass, staring upward to follow their flight.

Flimsy as kites, the pedal-driven ultralights dipped and soared

through the free-fall zone, far overhead. Beyond them, across

the diameter of the cylindrical world, the curving landscape

glowed with the yellow of wheat and the speckled green of

cotton fields.

Lindsay shaded his eyes against the sunlit glare from one of the

world's long windows. An aircraft, its wings elegantly stenciled

in blue feathers on white fabric, crossed the bar of light and

swooped silently above him. He saw the pilot's long hair trailing

as she pedaled back into a climb. Lindsay knew she had seen

him. He wanted to shout, to wave frantically, but he was

watched.

His jailers caught up with him: his wife and his uncle. The two

old aristocrats walked with painful slowness. His uncle's face

was flushed; he had turned up his heart's pacemaker. "You

ran," he said. "You ran!"

"I stretched my legs," Lindsay said with bland defiance.

"House arrest cramps me."

His uncle peered upward to follow Lindsay's gaze, shading his

eyes with an age-spotted hand. The bird-painted aircraft now

hovered over the Sours, a marshy spot in the agricultural panel

where rot had set into the soil. "You're watching the Sours, eh?

Where your friend Constantine's at work? They say he signals

you from there."

"Philip works with insects, Uncle. Not cryptography."

Lindsay was lying. He depended on Constantine's covert signals for news during his house arrest.

He and Constantine were political allies. When the crackdown

came, Lindsay had been quarantined within the grounds of his

family's mansion. But Philip Constantine had irreplaceable ecological

skills. He was still free, working in the Sours.

The long internment had pushed Lindsay to desperation. He

was at his best among people, where his adroit diplomatic skills

could shine. In isolation, he had lost weight: his high cheek-

bones stood out in sharp relief and his gray eyes had a sullen,

vindictive glow. His sudden run had tousled his modishly curled

black hair. He was tall and rangy, with the long chin and

arched, expressive eyebrows of the Lindsay clan.

Lindsay's wife, Alexandrina, took his arm. She was dressed

fashionably, in a long pleated skirt and white medical tunic. Her

pale, clear complexion showed health without vitality, as if her

skin were a perfectly printed paper replica. Mummified kiss-

curls adorned her forehead.

"You said you wouldn't talk politics, James," she told the

older man. She looked up at Lindsay. "You're pale, Abelard.

He's upset you."

"Am I pale?" Lindsay said. He drew on his Shaper diplomatic

training. Color seeped into his cheeks. He widened the dilation

of his pupils and smiled with a gleam of teeth. His uncle

stepped back, scowling.

Alexandrina leaned on Lindsay's arm. "I wish you wouldn't do

that," she told him. "It frightens me." She was fifty years older

than Lindsay and her knees had just been replaced. Her Mechanist teflon kneecaps still bothered her.

Lindsay shifted his bound volume of printout to his left hand.

During his house arrest, he had translated the works of Shakespeare into modern circumsolar English. The elders of the Lindsay clan had encouraged him in this. His antiquarian hobbies,

they thought, would distract him from plotting against the state.

To reward him, they were allowing him to present the work to

the Museum. He had seized on the chance to briefly escape his

house arrest.

The Museum was a hotbed of subversion. It was full of his

friends. Preservationists, they called themselves. A reactionary

youth movement, with a romantic attachment to the art and

culture of the past. They had made the Museum their political

stronghold.

Their world was the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate

Republic, a two-hundred-year-old artificial habitat orbiting the

Earth's Moon. As one of the oldest of humankind's nation-

states in space, it was a place of tradition, with the long habits of

a settled culture.

But change had burst in, spreading from newer, stronger

worlds in the Asteroid Belt and the Rings of Saturn. The

Mechanist and Shaper superpowers had exported their war into

this quiet city-state. The strain had split the population into

factions: Lindsay's Preservationists against the power of the

Radical Old, rebellious plebes against the wealthy aristocracy.

Mechanist sympathizers held the edge in the Republic.

The Radical Old held power from within their governing hospitals. These ancient aristocrats, each well over a century old,

were patched together with advanced Mechanist hardware, their

lives extended with imported prosthetic technology. But the

medical expenses were bankrupting the Republic. Their world

was already deep in debt to the medical Mech cartels. The

Republic would soon be a Mechanist client state.

But the Shapers used their own arsenals of temptation. Years

earlier, they had trained and indoctrinated Lindsay and Constantine. Through these two friends, the leaders of their generation, the Shapers exploited the fury of the young, who saw their

birthrights stolen for the profit of the Mechanists.

Tension had mounted within the Republic until a single gesture could set it off.

Life was the issue. And death would be the proof.

Lindsay's uncle was winded. He touched his wrist monitor and

turned down the beating of his heart. "No more stunts," he said.

"They're waiting in the Museum." He frowned. "Remember, no

speeches. Use the prepared statement."

Lindsay stared upward. The bird-painted ultralight went into a

powerdive.

"No!" Lindsay shouted. He threw his book aside and ran.

The ultralight smashed down in the grass outside the ringed

stone seats of an open-air amphitheatre.

The aircraft lay crushed, its wings warped in a dainty convulsion of impact. "Vera!" Lindsay shouted.

He tugged her body from the flimsy wreckage. She was still

breathing; blood gushed from her mouth and nostrils. Her ribs

were broken. She was choking. He tore at the ring-shaped collar

of her Preservationist suit. The wire of the collar cut his hands.

The suit imitated space-suit design; its accordioned elbows were

crushed and stained.

Little while moths were flying up from the long grass. They

milled about as if drawn by the blood.

Lindsay brushed a moth from her face and pressed his lips to

hers. The pulse stopped in her throat. She was dead.

"Vera," he groaned. "Sweetheart, you're burned. . . ."

A wave of grief and exultation hit him. He fell into the sun-

warmed grass, holding his sides. More moths sprang up.

She had done it. It seemed easy now. It was something the two of them had talked about a hundred times, deep into the night

at the Museum or in bed after their adultery. Suicide, the last

protest. An enormous vista of black freedom opened up in

Lindsay's head. He felt a paradoxical sense of vitality. "Darling,

it won't be long. . . ."

His uncle found him kneeling. The older man's face was gray.

"Oh," he said. "This is vile. What have you done?"

Lindsay got dizzily to his feet. "Get away from her."

His uncle stared at the dead woman. "She's dead! You damned

fool, she was only twenty-six!"

Lindsay yanked a long dagger of crudely hammered metal

from his accordioned sleeve. He swept it up and aimed it at his

own chest. "In the name of humanity! And the preservation of

human values! I freely choose to-"

His uncle seized his wrist. They struggled briefly, glaring into

one another's eyes, and Lindsay dropped the knife. His uncle

snatched it out of the grass and slipped it into his lab coat.

"This is illegal," he said. "You'll face weapons charges."

Lindsay laughed shakily. "I'm your prisoner, but you can't stop

me if I choose to die. Now or later, what does it matter?"

"You're a fanatic." His uncle watched him with bitter con-

tempt. "The Shaper schooling holds to the end, doesn't it? Your

training cost the Republic a fortune, and you use it to seduce

and murder."

"She died clean! Better to burn in a rush than live two hundred years as a Mechanist wirehead."

The elder Lindsay stared at the horde of white moths that

swarmed on the dead woman's clothing. "We'll nail you for this

somehow. You and that upstart plebe Constantine."

Lindsay was incredulous. "You stupid Mech bastard! Look at

her! Can't you see that you've killed us already? She was the

best of us! She was our muse."

His uncle frowned. "Where did all these insects come from?"

He bent and brushed the moths aside with wrinkled hands.

Lindsay reached forward suddenly and snatched a filigreed

gold locket from the woman's neck. His uncle grabbed his

sleeve.

"It's mine!" Lindsay shouted. They began to fight in earnest.

His uncle broke Lindsay's clumsy stranglehold and kicked

Lindsay twice in the stomach. Lindsay fell to his knees.

His uncle picked up the locket, wheezing. "You assaulted me,"

he said, scandalized. "You used violence against a fellow citizen." He opened the locket. A thick oil ran out onto his fingers.

"No message?" he said in surprise. He sniffed at his fingers.

"Perfume?"

Lindsay knelt, panting in nausea. His uncle screamed.

White moths were darting at the man, clinging to the oily skin

of his hands. There were dozens of them.

They were attacking him. He screamed again and batted at his

face.

Lindsay rolled over twice, away from his uncle. He knelt in the

grass, shaking. His uncle was down, convulsing like an epileptic.

Lindsay scrambled backward on his hands and knees.

The old man's wrist monitor glared red. He stopped moving.

The white moths crawled over his body for a few moments, then

flew off one by one, vanishing into the grass.

Lindsay lurched to his feet. He looked behind him, across the

meadow. His wife was walking toward them, slowly, through the

grass.

Part One

SUNDOG ZONES

CHAPTER ONE

THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR

ZAIBATSU: 27-12-'15

They shipped Lindsay into exile in the cheapest kind of Mechanist drogue. For two days he was blind and deaf, stunned with

drugs, his body packed in a thick matrix of deceleration paste.

Launched from the Republic's cargo arm, the drogue had

drifted with cybernetic precision into the polar orbit of another

circumlunar. There were ten of these worlds, named for the

lunar mares and craters that had provided their raw materials.

They'd been the first nation-states to break off all relations with

the exhausted Earth. For a century their lunar alliance had been

the nexus of civilization, and commercial traffic among these

"Concatenate worlds" had been heavy.

But since those glory days, progress in deeper space had

eclipsed the Concatenation, and the lunar neighborhood had

become a backwater. Their alliance had collapsed, giving way to

peevish seclusion and technical decline. The circumlunars had

fallen from grace, and none had fallen further than the place of

Lindsay's exile.

Cameras watched his arrival. Ejected from the drogue's docking port, he floated naked in the free-fall customs chamber of

the Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu. The

chamber was of dull lunar steel, with strips of ragged epoxy

where paneling had been ripped free. The room had once been

a honeymoon suite, where newlyweds could frolic in free-fall.

Now it was bleakly transformed into a bureaucratic clearing

area.

Lindsay was still drugged from the trip. A drip-feed cable was

plugged into the crook of his right arm, reviving him. Black

adhesive disks, biomonitors, dotted his naked skin. He shared

the room with a camera drone. The free-fall videosystem had

two pairs of piston-driven cybernetic arms.

Lindsay's gray eyes opened blearily. His handsome face, with

its clear pale skin and arched, elegant brows, had the slack look

of stupor. His dark, crimped hair fell to high cheekbones with

traces of three-day-old rouge.

His arms trembled as the stimulants took hold. Then, abruptly,

he was back to himself. His training swept over him in a phys-

ical wave, flooding him so suddenly that his teeth clacked to-

gether in the spasm. His eyes swept the room, glittering with

unnatural alertness. The muscles of his face moved in a way that

no human face should move, and suddenly he was smiling. He

examined himself and smiled into the camera with an easy,

tolerant urbanity.

The air itself seemed to warm with the sudden radiance of his

good-fellowship.

The cable in his arm disengaged itself and snaked back into

the wall. The camera spoke.

"You are Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay? From the Mare

Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic? You are seeking

political asylum? You have no biologically active materials in

your baggage or implanted on your person? You are not carry-

ing explosives or software attack systems? Your intestinal flora

has been sterilized and replaced with Zaibatsu standard microbes?"

"Yes, that's correct," Lindsay said, in the camera's own Japanese. "I have no baggage." He was comfortable with the modern

form of the language: a streamlined trade patois, stripped of its

honorific tenses. Facility with languages had been part of his

training.

"You will soon be released into an area that has been ideologically decriminalized," the camera said. "Before you leave customs, there are certain limits to your activities that must be

understood. Are you familiar with the concept of civil rights?"

Lindsay was cautious. "In what context?"

"The Zaibatsu recognizes one civil right: the right to death.

You may claim your right at any time, under any circumstances.

All you need do is request it. Our audio monitors are spread

throughout the Zaibatsu. If you claim your right, you will be

immediately and painlessly terminated. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Lindsay said.

"Termination is also enforced for certain other behaviors," the

camera said. "If you physically threaten the habitat, you will be

killed. If you interfere with our monitoring devices, you will be

killed. If you cross the sterilized zone, you will be killed. You

will also be killed for crimes against humanity."

"Crimes against humanity?" Lindsay said. "How are those

defined?"

"These are biological and prosthetic efforts that we declare to

be aberrant. The technical information concerning the limits of

our tolerance must remain classified."

"I see," Lindsay said. This was, he realized, carte blanche to

kill him at any time, for almost any reason. He had expected as

much. This world was a haven for sundogs: defectors, traitors,

exiles, outlaws. Lindsay doubted that a world full of sundogs

could be run any other way. There were simply too many

strange technologies at large in circumsolar space. Hundreds of

apparently innocent actions, even the breeding of butterflies,

could be potentially lethal.

We are all criminals, he thought.

"Do you wish to claim your civil right?"

"No, thank you," Lindsay said politely. "But it's a great solace

to know that the Zaibatsu government grants me this courtesy. I

will remember your kindness."

"You need only call out," the camera said, with satisfaction.

The interview was over. Wobbling in free-fall, Lindsay stripped

away the biomonitors. The camera handed him a credit card

and a pair of standard-issue Zaibatsu coveralls.

Lindsay climbed into the baggy clothing. He'd come into exile

alone. Constantine, too, had been indicted, but Constantine, as

usual, had been too clever.

Constantine had been his closest friend for fifteen years. Lindsay's family had disapproved of his friendship with a plebe, but

Lindsay had defied them.

In those days the elders had hoped to walk the fence between

the competing superpowers. They'd been inclined to trust the

Shapers and had sent Lindsay to the Ring Council for diplomatic training. Two years later, they'd sent Constantine as well,

for training in biotechnology.

But the Mechanists had overwhelmed the Republic, and Lindsay and Constantine were disgraced, embarrassing reminders of

a failure in foreign policy. But this only united them, and their

dual influence had spread contagiously among the plebes and

the younger aristos. In combination they'd been formidable:

Constantine, with his subtle long-term plans and iron determination; Lindsay as the front man, with his persuasive glibness

and theatrical elegance.

But then Vera Kelland had come between them. Vera: artist,

actress, and aristocrat, the first Preservationist martyr. Vera

believed in their cause; she was their muse, holding to the

conviction with an earnestness they couldn't match. She too was

married, to a man sixty years her senior, but adultery only

added spice to the long seduction. At last Lindsay had won her.

But with the possession of Vera came her deadly resolve.

The three of them knew that an act of suicide would change

the Republic when all else was hopeless. They came to terms.

Philip would survive to carry on the work; that was his consolation for losing Vera and for the loneliness that was to come.

And the three of them had worked toward death in feverish

intimacy, until her death had truly come, and made their sleek

ideals into a sticky nastiness.

The camera opened the customs hatch with a creak of badly

greased hydraulics. Lindsay shook himself free of the past. He

floated down a stripped hallway toward the feeble glow of

daylight.

He emerged onto a landing pad for aircraft, cluttered with

dirty machines.

The landing pad was centered at the free-fall zone of the

colony's central axis. From this position, Lindsay could stare

along the length of the Zaibatsu, through five long kilometers of

gloomy, stinking air.

The sight and shape of the clouds struck him first. They were

malformed and bloated, with an ugly yellowish tinge. They

rippled and distorted in fetid updrafts from the Zaibatsu's land

panels.

The smell was vile. Each of the ten circumlunar worlds of the

Concatenation had its own native smell. Lindsay remembered

that his own Republic had seemed to reek when he first re-

turned to it from the Shaper academy. But here the air seemed

foul enough to kill. His nose began to run.

Every Concatenate world faced biological problems as the

habitat aged.

Fertile soil required a minimum of ten million bacterial cells

per cubic centimeter. This invisible swarm formed the basis of

everything fruitful. Humanity had carried it into space.

But humanity and its symbionts had thrown aside the blanket

of atmosphere. Radiation levels soared. The circumlunar worlds

had shields of imported lunar rubble whole meters deep, but

they could not escape the bursts of solar flares and the random

shots of cosmic radiation.

Without bacteria, the soil was a lifeless heap of imported lunar

dust. With them, it was a constant mutational hazard.

The Republic struggled to control its Sours. In the Zaibatsu,

the souring had become epidemic. Mutant fungi had spread like

oil slicks, forming a mycelial crust beneath the surface of the

soil. This gummy crust repelled water, choking trees and grass.

Dead vegetation was attacked by rot. The soil grew dry, the air

grew damp, and mildew blossomed on dying fields and orchards, gray pinheads swarming into blotches of corruption,

furred like lichen. . . .

When matters reached this stage, only desperate efforts could

restore the world. It would have to be evacuated, all its air

decompressed into space, and the entire inner surface charred

clean in vacuum, then reseeded from scratch. The expense was

crippling. Colonies faced with this had suffered breakaways and

mass defections, in which thousands fled to frontiers of deeper

space. With the passage of time, these refugees had formed their

own societies. They joined the Mechanist cartels of the Asteroid

Belt, or the Shaper Ring Council, orbiting Saturn.

In the case of the People's Zaibatsu, most of the population

had gone, but a stubborn minority refused defeat.

Lindsay understood. There was a grandeur in this morose and

rotting desolation.

Slow whirlwinds tore at the gummy soil, spilling long tendrils

of rotten grit into the twilit air. The glass sunlight panels were

coated with filth, a gluey amalgam of dust and mildew. The long

panels had blown out in places; they were shored up with

strut-braced makeshift plugs.

It was cold. With the glass so filthy, so cracked, with daylight

reduced to a smeared twilight, they would have to run the place

around the clock simply to keep it from freezing. Night was too

dangerous; it couldn't be risked. Night was not allowed.

Lindsay scrabbled weightlessly along the landing deck. The

aircraft were moored to the scratched metal with suction cups.

There were a dozen man-powered models, in bad repair, and a

few battered electrics.

He checked the struts of an ancient electric whose fabric wings

were stenciled with a Japanese carp design. Mud-smeared skids

equipped it for gravity landings. Lindsay floated into the skeletal

saddle, fitting his cloth-and-plastic shoes into the stirrups.

He pulled his credit card from one of the coverall's chest

pockets. The gold-trimmed black plastic had a red LED readout

displaying credit hours. He fed it into a slot and the tiny engine

hummed into life.

He cast off and caught a downdraft until he felt the tug of

gravity. He oriented himself with the ground below.

To his left, the sunlight panel had been cleaned in patches. A

cadre of lumpy robots were scraping and mopping the fretted

glass. Lindsay nosed the ultralight down for a closer look. The

robots were bipedal; they were crudely designed. Lindsay realized suddenly that they were human beings in suits and gas

masks.

Columns of sunlight from the clean glass pierced the murk like

searchlights. He flew into one, twisted, and rode its updraft.

The light fell upon the opposite land panel. Near its center a

cluster of storage tanks dotted the land. The tanks brimmed

with oozing green brew: algae. The last agriculture left in the

Zaibatsu was an oxygen farm.

He swooped lower over the tanks. Gratefully, he breathed the

enriched air. His aircraft's shadow flitted over a jungle of refinery pipes.

As he looked down, he saw a second shadow behind him.

Lindsay wheeled abruptly to his right.

The shadow followed his movement with cybernetic precision.

Lindsay pulled his craft into a steep climb and twisted in the

seat to look behind him.

When he finally spotted his pursuer, he was shocked to see it

so close. Its splattered camouflage of dun and gray hid it perfectly against the interior sky of ruined land panels. It was a

surveillance craft, a remotely controlled flying drone. It had flat,

square wings and a noiseless rear propeller in a camouflaged

exhaust cowling.

A knobbed array of cylinders jutted from the robot aircraft's

torso. The two tubes that pointed at him might be telephoto

cameras. Or they might be x-ray lasers. Set to the right frequency, an x-ray laser could char the interior of a human body

without leaving a mark on the skin. And x-ray beams were

invisible.

The thought filled him with fear and profound disgust. Worlds

were frail places, holding precious air and warmth against the

hostile nothingness of space. The safety of worlds was the universal basis of morality. Weapons were dangerous, and that

made them vile. In this sundog world, only weapons could keep

order, but he still felt a deep, instinctive outrage.

Lindsay flew into a yellowish fog that roiled and bubbled near

the Zaibatsu's axis. When he emerged, the aircraft had vanished.

He would never know when they were watching. At any moment, unseen fingers might close a switch, and he would fall.

The violence of his feelings surprised him. His training had

seeped away. There flashed behind his eyes the uncontrollable

image of Vera Kelland, plunging downward, smashing to earth,

her craft's bright wings crumpling on impact. . . .

He turned south. Beyond the ruined panels he saw a broad

ring of pure white, girdling the world. It abutted the Zaibatsu's

southern wall.

He glanced behind him. The northern wall was concave,

crowded with abandoned factories and warehouses. The bare

southern wall was sheer and vertical. It seemed to be made of

bricks.

The ground below it was a wide ring of blazingly clean, raked

white rocks. Here and there among the sea of pebbles, enigmatically shaped boulders rose like dark islands.

Lindsay swooped down for a closer look. A squat guardline of

black weapons bunkers swiveled visibly, tracking him with delicate bluish muzzles. He was over the Sterilized Zone.

He climbed upward rapidly.

A hole loomed in the center of the southern wall. Surveillance

craft swarmed like hornets in and around it. Microwave antennae bristled around its edges, trailing armored cables.

He could not see through the hole. There was half a world

beyond that wall, but sundogs were not allowed to glimpse it.

Lindsay glided downward. The ultralight's wire struts sang with

tension.

To the north, on the second of the Zaibatsu's three land

panels, he saw the work of sundogs. Refugees had stripped and

demolished wide swaths of the industrial sector and erected

crude airtight domes from the scrap.

The domes ranged from small bubbles of inflated plastic,

through multicolored caulked geodesies, to one enormous isolated hemisphere.

Lindsay circled the largest dome closely. Black insulation foam

covered its surface. Mottled lunar stone armored its lower rim.

Unlike most of the other domes, it had no antennae or aerials.

He recognized it. He'd known it would be here.

Lindsay was afraid. He closed his eyes and called on his

Shaper training, the ingrained strength of ten years of

psychotechnic discipline.

He felt his mind slide subtly into its second mode of conscious-

ness. His posture altered, his movements were smoother, his

heart beat faster. Confidence seeped into him, and he smiled.

His mind felt sharper, cleaner, cleansed of inhibitions, ready to

twist and manipulate. His fear and his guilt faltered and warped

away, a tangle of irrelevance.

As always, in this second state, he felt contempt for his former

weakness. This was his true self: pragmatic, fast-moving, free of

emotional freight.

This was no time for half measures. He had his plans. If he was to survive here, he would have to take the situation by the

throat.

Lindsay spotted the building's airlock. He brought the

ultralight in for a skidding landing. He unplugged his credit

card and stepped off. The aircraft sprang into the muddy sky.

Lindsay followed a set of stepping-stones into a recessed alcove in the dome's wall. Inside the recess, an overhead panel flicked into brilliant light. To his left, in the alcove's wall, a camera lens flanked an armored videoscreen. Below the screen, light

gleamed from a credit-card slot and the steel rectangle of a

sliding vault.

A much larger sliding door, in the interior wall, guarded the

airlock. A thick layer of undisturbed grit filled the airlock's

groove. The Nephrine Black Medicals were not partial to visitors.

Lindsay waited patiently, rehearsing lies.

Ten minutes passed. Lindsay tried to keep his nose from

running. Suddenly the videoscreen flashed into life. A woman's

face appeared.

"Put your credit card in the slot," she said in Japanese.

Lindsay watched her, weighing her kinesics. She was a lean,

dark-eyed woman of indeterminate age, with close-cropped

brown hair. Her eyes looked dilated. She wore a white medical

tunic with a metal insignia in its collar: a golden staff with two

entwined snakes. The snakes were black enamel with jeweled

red eyes. Their open jaws showed hypodermic fangs.

Lindsay smiled. "I haven't come to buy anything," he said.

"You're buying my attention, aren't you? Put in the card."

"I didn't ask you to appear on this screen," Lindsay said in

English. "You're free to sign off at any time."

The woman stared at him in annoyance. "Of course I'm free,"

she said in English. "I'm free to have you hauled in here and

chopped to pieces. Do you know where you are? This isn't

some cheap sundog operation. We're the Nephrine Black

Medicals."

In the Republic, they were unknown. But Lindsay knew of

them from his days in the Ring Council: criminal biochemists

on the fringes of the Shaper underworld. Reclusive, tough, and

vicious. He'd known that they had strongholds: black laboratories scattered through the System. And this was one of them.

He smiled coaxingly. "I would like to come in, you know. Only

not in pieces."

"You must be joking," the woman said. "You're not worth the

credit it would cost us to disinfect you."

Lindsay raised his brows. "I have the standard microbes."

"This is a sterile environment. The Nephrines live clean."

"So you can't come in and out freely?" said Lindsay, pretend-

ing surprise at the news. "You're trapped in there?"

"This is where we live" the woman said. "You're trapped

outside."

"That's a shame," Lindsay said. "I wanted to do some recruit-

ing here. I was trying to be fair." He shrugged. "I've enjoyed our

talk, but time presses. I'll be on my way."

"Stop," the woman said. "You don't go until I say you can go."

Lindsay feigned alarm. "Listen," he said. "No one doubts your

reputation. But you're trapped in there. You're of no use to

me." He ran his long fingers through his hair. "There's no point

in this."

"What are you implying? Who are you, anyway?"

"Lindsay."

"Lin Dze? You're not of oriental stock."

Lindsay looked into the lens of the camera and locked eyes

with her. The impression was hard to simulate through video,

but its unexpectedness made it very effective on a subconscious

level. "And what's your name?"

"Cory Prager," she blurted. "Doctor Prager."

"Cory, I represent Kabuki Intrasolar. We're a commercial the-

atrical venture." Lindsay lied enthusiastically. "I'm arranging a

production and I'm recruiting a cast. We pay generously. But, as

you say, since you can't come out, frankly, you're wasting my

time. You can't even attend the performance." He sighed.

"Obviously this isn't my fault. I'm not responsible."

The woman laughed unpleasantly. Lindsay had grasped her

kinesics, though, and her uneasiness was obvious to him. "You

think we care what they do on the outside? We have a seller's

market cornered here. All we care about is their credit. The rest

is of no consequence."

"I'm glad to hear you say that. I wish other groups shared your

attitude. I'm an artist, not a politician. I wish I could avoid the

complications as easily as you do." He spread his hands. "Since

we understand each other now, I'll be on my way."

"Wait. What complications?"

"It's not my doing," Lindsay hedged. "It's the other factions. I

haven't even finished assembling the cast, and already they're

plotting together. The play gives them a chance to negotiate."

"We can send out our monitors. We can watch your production."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Lindsay said stiffly. "We don't allow our plays

to be taped or broadcast. It would spoil our attendance." He

was rueful. "I can't risk disappointing my cast. Anyone can be

an actor these days. Memory drugs make it easy."

"We sell memory drugs," she said. "Vasopressins, carbolines,

endorphins. Stimulants, tranquilizers. Laughers, screamers,

shouters, you name it. If there's a market for it, the Nephrine

black chemists can make it. If we can't synthesize it, we'll filter

it from tissue. Anything you want. Anything you can think of."

She lowered her voice. "We're friends with Them, you know.

The ones beyond the Wall. They think the world of us."

Lindsay rolled his eyes. "Of course."

She looked offscreen; he heard the rapid tapping of a key-

board. She looked up. "You've been talking to the whores,

haven't you? The Geisha Bank."

Lindsay looked cautious. The Geisha Bank was new to him. "It

might be best if I kept my dealings confidential."

"You're a fool to believe their promises."

Lindsay smiled uneasily. "What choice do I have? There's a

natural alliance between actors and whores."

"They must have warned you against us." The woman put a

pair of headphones against her left ear and listened distractedly.

"I told you I was trying to be fair," Lindsay said. The screen

went silent suddenly and the woman spoke rapidly into a pin-

head microphone. Her face flashed offscreen and was replaced

by the wrinkle-etched face of an older man. Lindsay had a brief

glimpse of the man's true appearance-white hair in spiky dis-

array, red-rimmed eyes -before a video-manicuring program

came on line. The program raced up the screen one scan line at

a time, subtly smoothing, deleting, and coloring.

"Look, this is useless," Lindsay blustered. "Don't try to talk

me into something I'll regret. I have a show to put on, I don't

have time for this-"

"Shut up, you," the man said. The steel vault door slid open,

revealing a folded packet of transparent vinyl. "Put it on," the

man said. "You're coming inside."

Lindsay unfolded the bundle and shook it out. It was a full-

length decontamination suit. "Go on, hurry it up," the Black

Medical insisted. "You may be under surveillance."

"I hadn't realized," Lindsay said. He struggled into the booted

trousers. "This is quite an honor." He tunneled into the gloved

and helmeted top half of the suit and sealed the waist.

The airlock door shunted open with a scrape of grit. "Get in,"

the man said. Lindsay stepped inside, and the door slid shut

behind him.

Wind stirred the dust. A light, filthy rain began to fall. A

skeletal camera robot minced up on four tubular legs and

trained its lens on the door.

An hour passed. The rain stopped and a pair of surveillance

craft kited silently overhead. A violent dust storm blew up in

the abandoned industrial zone, to the north. The camera continued to watch.

Lindsay emerged from the airlock, weaving a little. He set a

black diplomatic bag on the stone floor beside him and struggled out of the decontamination suit. He stuffed the suit back

into the vault, then picked his way with exaggerated grace along

the stepping-stones.

The air stank. Lindsay stopped and sneezed. "Hey," the cam-

era said. "Mr. Dze. I'd like a word with you, Mr. Dze."

"If you want a part in the play you'll have to appear in

person," Lindsay said.

"You astonish me," the camera remarked. It spoke in trade

Japanese. "I have to admire your daring, Mr. Dze. The Black

Medicals have the foulest kind of reputation. They could have

rendered you for your body chemicals."

Lindsay walked north, his flimsy shoes scuffing the mud. The

camera tagged after him, its left rear leg squeaking. .

Lindsay descended a low hill into an orchard where fallen

trees, thick with black smut, formed a loose, skeletal thicket.

Below the orchard was a scum-covered pond with a decayed

teahouse at its shore. The once-elegant wooden and ceramic

building had collapsed into a heap of dry rot. Lindsay kicked

one of the timbers and broke into a coughing fit at the explosion of spores. "Someone ought to clean this up," he said.

"Where would they put it?" the camera said.

Lindsay looked around quickly. The trees screened him from

observation. He stared at the machine. "Your camera needs an

overhaul," he said.

"It was the best I could afford," the camera said.

Lindsay swung his black bag back and forth, narrowing his

eyes. "It looks rather slow and frail."

The robot prudently stepped backward. "Do you have a place

to stay, Mr. Dze?"

Lindsay rubbed his chin. "Are you offering one?"

"You shouldn't stay in the open. You're not even wearing a

mask."

Lindsay smiled. "I told the Medicals that I was protected by

advanced antiseptics. They were very impressed."

"They must have been. You don't breathe raw air here. Not

unless you want your lungs to end up looking like this thicket."

The camera hesitated. "My name is Fyodor Ryumin."

"I am pleased to make your acquaintance," Lindsay said in

Russian. They had injected him with vasopressin through the

suit, and his brain felt impossibly keen. He felt so intolerably

bright that he was beginning to crisp a little around the edges.

Changing from Japanese to his little-used Russian felt as easy as

switching a tape.

"Again you astonish me," the camera said in Russian. "You

pique my curiosity. You understand that term, 'pique'? It's not

common to trade Russian. Please follow the robot. My place

isn't far. Try to breathe shallowly."

Ryumin's place was a small inflated dome of gray-green plastic

near the smeared and broken glass of one window panel. Lindsay unzipped the fabric airlock and stepped inside.

The pure air within provoked a fit of coughing. The tent was

small, ten strides across. A tangle of cables littered the floor,

connecting stacks of battered video equipment to a frayed storage battery propped on ceramic roof tiles. A central support

pole, wreathed in wire, supported an air filter, a lightbulb, and

the roots of an antenna complex.

Ryumin was sitting cross-legged on a tatami mat with his hands

on a portable joystick. "Let me take care of the robot first," he

said. "I'll be with you in a moment."

Ryumin's broad face had a vaguely Asiatic cast, but his

thinning hair was blond. Age spots marked his cheeks. His

knuckles had the heavy wrinkles common to the very old.

Something was wrong with his bones. His wrists were too thin

for his stocky body, and his skull looked strangely delicate. Two

black adhesive disks clung to his temples, trailing thin cords

down his back and into the jungle of wires.

Ryumin's eyes were closed. He reached out blindly and tapped

a switch beside his knee. He peeled the disks from his temples

and opened his eyes. They were bright blue.

"Is it bright enough in here?" he said.

Lindsay glanced at the bulb overhead. "I think so."

Ryumin tapped his temple. "Chip grafts along the optic

nerves," he said. "I suffer a little from video burn. I have

trouble seeing anything not on scan lines."

"You're a Mechanist."

"Does it show?" Ryumin asked, ironically.

"How old are you?"

"A hundred and forty. No, a hundred and forty-two." He

smiled. "Don't be alarmed."

"I'm not prejudiced," Lindsay said falsely. He felt confusion,

and, with that, his training seeped away. He remembered the

Ring Council and the long, hated sessions of anti-Mech indoctrination. The sense of rebellion recalled him to himself.

He stepped over a tangle of wires and set his diplomatic bag on a low table beside a plastic-wrapped block of synthetic tofu.

"Please understand me, Mr. Ryumin. If this is blackmail, you've

misjudged me. I won't cooperate. If you mean me harm, then do

it. Kill me now."

"I wouldn't say that too loudly," Ryumin cautioned. "The

spyplanes can burn you down where you stand, right through

that tent wall."

Lindsay flinched.

Ryumin grinned bleakly. "I've seen it happen before. Besides,

if we're to murder each other, then you should be killing me. I

run the risks here, since I have something to lose. You're only a

fast-talking sundog." He wrapped up the cord of his joystick.

"We could babble reassurances till the sun expands and never

convince each other. Either we trust each other or we don't."

"I'll trust you," Lindsay decided. He kicked off his mud-

smeared shoes.

Ryumin rose slowly to his feet. He bent to pick up Lindsay's

shoes, and his spine popped loudly. "I'll put these in the micro-

wave," he said. "When you live here, you must never trust the

mud."

"I'll remember," Lindsay said. His brain was swimming in

mnemonic chemicals. The drugs had plunged him into a kind of

epiphany in which every tangled wire and pack of tape seemed

of vital importance. "Burn them if you want," he said. He

opened his new bag and pulled out an elegant cream-colored

medical jacket.

"These are good shoes," Ryumin said. "They're worth three or

four minutes, at least."

Lindsay stripped off his coveralls. A pair of injection bruises

mottled his right buttock.

Ryumin squinted. "I see you didn't escape unscathed."

Lindsay pulled out a pair of creased white trousers.

"Vasopressin," he said.

"Vasopressin," Ryumin mused. "I thought you had a Shaper

look about you. Where are you from, Mr. Dze? And how old

are you?"

"Three hours old," Lindsay said. "Mr. Dze has no past."

Ryumin looked away. "I can't blame a Shaper for trying to

hide his past. The System swarms with your enemies." He

peered at Lindsay. "I can guess you were a diplomat."

"What makes you think so?"

"Your success with the Black Medicals. Your skill is impressive.

Besides, diplomats often turn sundog." Ryumin studied

him. "The Ring Council had a secret training program for diplomats of a special type. The failure rate was high. Half the alumni were rebels and defectors." Lindsay zipped up his shirt.

"Is that what happened to you?"

"Something of the sort."

"How fascinating. I've met many borderline posthumans in my

day, but never one of you. Is it true that they enforced an entire

second state of consciousness? Is it true that when you're fully

operational, you yourself don't know if you're speaking the

truth? That they used psychodrugs to destroy your capacity for

sincerity?"

"Sincerity," Lindsay said. "That's a slippery concept."

Ryumin hesitated. "Are you aware that your class is being

stalked by Shaper assassins?"

"No," Lindsay said sourly. So it had come to this, he thought.

All those years, while the spinal crabs burned knowledge into

every nerve. The indoctrinations, under drugs and brain taps.

He'd gone to the Republic when he was sixteen, and for ten

years the psychotechs had poured training into him. He'd re-

turned to the Republic like a primed bomb, ready to serve any

purpose. But his skills provoked panic fear there and utter

distrust from those in power. And now the Shapers themselves

were hunting him. "Thank you for telling me," he said.

"I wouldn't worry," Ryumin said. "The Shapers are under

siege. They have bigger concerns than the fate of a few

sundogs." He smiled. "If you really took that treatment, then

you must be less than forty years old."

"I'm thirty. You're a cagey old bastard, Ryumin."

Ryumin took Lindsay's well-cooked shoes out of the micro-

wave, studied them, and slipped them on his own bare feet.

"How many languages do you speak?"

"Four, normally. With memory enhancement I can manage

seven. And I know the standard Shaper programming language."

"I speak four myself," Ryumin said. "But then, I don't clutter

my mind with their written forms."

"You don't read at all?"

"My machines can do that for me."

"Then you're blind to mankind's whole cultural heritage."

Ryumin looked surprised. "Strange talk for a Shaper. You're

an antiquarian, eh? Want to break the Interdict with Earth,

study the so-called humanities, that sort of thing? That explains

why you used the theatrical gambit. I had to use my lexicon to

find out what a 'play' was. An astonishing custom. Are you

really going through with it?"

"Yes. And the Black Medicals will finance it for me."

"I see. The Geisha Bank won't care for that. Loans and finance

are their turf."

Lindsay sat on the floor beside a nest of wires. He plucked the

Black Medicals pin from his collar and twirled it in his fingers.

"Tell me about them."

"The Geishas are whores and financiers. You must have noticed that your credit card is registered in hours."

"Yes."

"Those are hours of sexual service. The Mechanists and Shapers use kilowatts as currency. But the System's criminal element

must have a black market to survive. A great many different

black currencies have seen use. I did an article on it once."

"Did you?"

"Yes. I'm a journalist by profession. I entertain the jaded

among the System's bourgeoisie with my startling exposes of

criminality. Low-life antics of the sundog canaille." He nodded

at Lindsay's bag. "Narcotics were the standard for a while, but

that gave the Shaper black chemists an edge. Selling computer

time had some success, but the Mechanists had the best cybernetics. Now sex has come into vogue."

"You mean people come to this godforsaken place just for

sex?"

"It's not necessary to visit a bank to use it, Mr. Dze. The

Geisha Bank has contacts throughout the cartels. Pirates dock

here to exchange I6ot for portable black credit. We get political

exiles from the other circumlunars, too. If they're unlucky."

Lindsay showed no reaction. He was one of those exiles.

His problem was simple now: survival. It was wonderful how

this cleared his mind. He could forget his former life: the

Preservationist rebellion, the political dramas he'd staged at the

Museum. It was all history.

Let it fade, he thought. All gone now, all another world. He

felt dizzy, suddenly, thinking about it. He'd lived. Not like Vera.

Constantine had tried to kill him with those altered insects.

The quiet, subtle moths were a perfect modern weapon: they

threatened only human flesh, not the world as a whole. But

Lindsay's uncle had taken Vera's locket, booby-trapped with the

pheromones that drove the deadly moths to frenzy. And his

uncle had died in his place. Lindsay felt a slow, rising flush of

nausea.

"And the exhausted come here from the Mechanist cartels,"

Ryumin went on. "For death by ecstasy. For a price the Geisha

Bank offers shinju: double suicide with a companion from the

staff. Many customers, you see, take a deep comfort in not dying

alone."

For a long moment, Lindsay struggled with himself. Double

suicide -the words pierced him. Vera's face swam queasily be-

fore his eyes in the perfect focus of expanded memory. He

pitched onto his side, retching, and vomited across the floor.

The drugs overwhelmed him. He hadn't eaten since leaving the

Republic. Acid scraped his throat and suddenly he was choking,

fighting for air.

Ryumin was at his side in a moment. He dropped his bony

kneecaps into Lindsay's ribs, and air huffed explosively through

his clogged windpipe. Lindsay rolled onto his back. He breathed

in convulsively. A tingling warmth invaded his hands and feet.

He breathed again and lost consciousness.

Ryumin took Lindsay's wrist and stood for a moment, counting

his pulse. Now that the younger man had collapsed, an odd,

somnolent calm descended over the old Mechanist. He moved

at his own tempo. Ryumin had been very old for a long time.

The feeling changed things.

Ryumin's bones were frail. Cautiously, he dragged Lindsay

onto the tatami mat and covered him with a blanket. Then he

stepped slowly to a barrel-sized ceramic water cistern, picked

up a wad of coarse filter paper, and mopped up Lindsay's

vomit. His deliberate movements disguised the fact that, without

video input, he was almost blind.

Ryumin donned his eyephones. He meditated on the tape he

had made of Lindsay. Ideas and images came to him more easily

through the wires.

He analyzed the young sundog's movements frame by frame.

The man had long, bony arms and shins, large hands and feet,

but he lacked any awkwardness. Studied closely, his movements

showed ominous fluidity, the sure sign of a nervous system

subjected to subtle and prolonged alteration. Someone had devoted great care and expense to that counterfeit of footloose

case and grace.

Ryumin edited the tape with the reflexive ease of a century of

practice. The System was wide, Ryumin thought. There was

room in it for a thousand modes of life, a thousand hopeful

monsters. He felt sadness at what had been done to the man,

but no alarm or fear. Only time could tell the difference be-

tween aberration and advance. Ryumin no longer made judgments. When he could, he held out his hand.

Friendly gestures were risky, of course, but Ryumin could

never resist the urge to make them and watch the result. Curios-

ity had made him a sundog. He was bright; there'd been a place

for him in his colony's soviet. But he had been driven to ask

uncomfortable questions, to think uncomfortable thoughts.

Once, a sense of moral righteousness had lent him strength.

That youthful smugness was long gone now, but he still had pity

and the willingness to help. For Ryumin, decency had become

an old man's habit.

The young sundog twisted in his sleep. His face seemed to

ripple, twisting bizarrely. Ryumin squinted in surprise. This man

was a strange one. That was nothing remarkable; the System was

full of the strange. It was when they escaped control that things

became interesting.

Lindsay woke, groaning. "How long have I been out?" he said.

"Three hours, twelve minutes," Ryumin said. "But there's no

day or night here, Mr. Dze. Time doesn't matter."

Lindsay propped himself up on one elbow.

"Hungry?" Ryumin passed Lindsay a bowl of soup.

Lindsay looked uneasily at the warm broth. Circles of oil

dotted its surface and white lumps floated within it. He had a

spoonful. It was better than it looked.

"Thank you," he said. He ate quickly. "Sorry to be trouble-

some."

"No matter," Ryumin said. "Nausea is common when Zaibatsu

microbes hit the stomach of a newcomer."

"Why'd you follow me with that camera?" Lindsay said.

Ryumin poured himself a bowl of soup. "Curiosity," he said. "I

have the Zaibatsu's entrance monitored by radar. Most sundogs

travel in factions. Single passengers are rare. I wanted to learn

your story. That's how I earn my living, after all." He drank his

soup. "Tell me about your future, Mr. Dze. What are you

planning?"

"If I tell you, will you help me?"

"I might. Things have been dull here lately."

"There's money in it."

"Better and better," Ryumin said. "Could you be more specific?"

Lindsay stood up. "We'll do some acting," he said, straightening his cuffs. " 'To catch birds with a mirror is the ideal snare,'as my Shaper teachers used to say. I knew of the Black Medicalsin the Ring Council. They're not genetically altered. The Shapers despised them, so they isolated themselves. That's their

habit, even here. But they hunger for admiration, so I made

myself into a mirror and showed them their own desires. I

promised them prestige and influence, as patrons of the theatre." He reached for his jacket. "But what does the Geisha

Bank want?"

"Money. Power," Ryumin said. "And the ruin of their rivals,

who happen to be the Black Medicals."

"Three lines of attack." Lindsay smiled. "This is what they

trained me for." His smile wavered, and he put his hand to his

midriff. "That soup," he said. "Synthetic protein, wasn't it? I

don't think it's going to agree with me."

Ryumin nodded in resignation. "It's your new microbes. You'd

better clear your appointment book for a few days, Mr. Dze.

You have dysentery."

CHAPTER TWO

THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR

ZAIBATSU: 28-12-'15

Night never fell in the Zaibatsu. It gave Lindsay's sufferings a

timeless air: a feverish idyll of nausea.

Antibiotics would have cured him, but sooner or later his body

would have to come to terms with its new flora. To pass the

time between spasms, Ryumin entertained him with local anecdotes and gossip. It was a complex and depressing history,

littered with betrayals, small-scale rivalries, and pointless power

games.

The algae farmers were the Zaibatsu's most numerous faction,

glum fanatics, clannish and ignorant, who were rumored to

practice cannibalism. Next came the mathematicians, a proto-Shaper breakaway group that spent most of its time wrapped in

speculation about the nature of infinite sets. The Zaibatsu's

smallest domes were held by a profusion of pirates and privateers: the Hermes Breakaways, the Gray Torus Radicals, the

Grand Megalics, the Soyuz Eclectics, and others, who changed

names and personnel as easily as they cut a throat. They feuded

constantly, but none dared challenge the Nephrine Black

Medicals or the Geisha Bank. Attempts had been made in the

past. There were appalling legends about them.

The people beyond the Wall had their own wildly varying

mythos. They were said to live in a jungle of overgrown pines

and mimosas. They were hideously inbred and afflicted with

double thumbs and congenital deafness.

Others claimed there was nothing remotely human beyond the

Wall: just a proliferating cluster of software, which had acquired

a sinister autonomy.

It was, of course, possible that the land beyond the Wall had

been secretly invaded and conquered by-aliens. An entire

postindustrial folklore had sprung up around this enthralling

concept, buttressed with ingenious arguments. Everyone expect-

ed aliens sooner or later. It was the modern version of the

Millennium.

Ryumin was patient with him; while Lindsay slept feverishly,

he patrolled the Zaibatsu with his camera robot, looking for

news. Lindsay turned the corner on his illness. He kept down

some soup and a few fried bricks of spiced protein.

One of Ryumin's stacks of equipment began to chime with a

piercingly clear electronic bleeping. Ryumin looked up from

where he sat sorting cassettes. "That's the radar," he said.

"Hand me that headset, will you?"

Lindsay crawled to the radar stack and untangled a set of

Ryumin's adhesive eyephones. Ryumin clamped them to his

temples. "Not much resolution on radar," he said, closing his

eyes. "A crowd has just arrived. Pirates, most likely. They're

milling about on the landing pad."

He squinted, though his eyes were already shut. "Something

very large is moving about with them. They've brought some-

thing huge. I'd better switch to telephoto." He yanked the

headset's cord and its plug snapped free.

"I'm going outside for a look," Lindsay said. "I'm well

enough."

"Wire yourself up first," Ryumin said. "Take that earset and

one of the cameras."

Lindsay attached the auxiliary system and stepped outside the

zippered airlock into the curdled air.

He backed away from Ryumin's dome toward the rim of the

land panel. He turned and trotted to a nearby stile, which led

over the low metal wall, and trained his camera upward.

"That's good," came Ryumin's voice in his ear. "Cut in the

brightness amps, will you? That little button on the right. Yes,

that's better. What do you make of it, Mr. Dze?"

Lindsay squinted through the lens. Far above, at the northern

end of the Zaibatsu's axis, a dozen sundogs were wrestling in

free-fall with a huge silver bag.

"It looks like a tent," Lindsay said. "They're inflating it." The

silver bag wrinkled and tumesced suddenly, revealing itself as a

blunt cylinder. On its side was a large red stencil as wide as a

man was tall. It was a red skull with two crossed lightning bolts.

"Pirates!" Lindsay said.

Ryumin chuckled. "I thought as much."

A sharp gust of wind struck Lindsay. He lost his balance on

the stile and looked behind him suddenly. The glass window

strip formed a long white alley of decay. The hexagonal

metaglass frets were speckled with dark plugs, jackstrawed here

and there with heavy reinforcement struts. Leaks had been

sprayed with airtight coats of thick plastic. Sunlight oozed sullenly through the gaps.

"Are you all right?" Ryumin said.

"Sorry," Lindsay said. He tilted the camera upward again.

The pirates had gotten their foil balloon airborne and had

turned on its pair of small pusher-propellers. As it drifted away

from the landing pad, it jerked once, then surged forward. It

was towing something-an oddly shaped dark lump larger than

a man.

"It's a meteorite," Ryumin told him. "A gift for the people

beyond the Wall. Did you see the dark rocks that stand in the

Sterilized Zone? They're all gifts from pirates. It's become a

tradition."

"Wouldn't it be easier to carry it along the ground?"

"Are you joking? It's death to set foot in the Sterilized Zone."

"I see. So they're forced to drop it from the air. Do you

recognize these pirates?"

"No," Ryumin said. "They're new here. That's why they need

the rock."

"Someone seems to know them," Lindsay said. "Look at that."

He focused the camera to look past the airborne pirates to the

sloping gray-brown surface of the Zaibatsu's third land panel.

Most of this third panel was a bleak expanse of fuzz-choked

mud, with surging coils of yellowish ground fog.

Near the third panel's blasted northern suburbs was a squat,

varicolored dome, built of jigsawed chunks of salvaged ceramic

and plastic. A foreshortened, antlike crowd of sundogs had

emerged from the dome's airlock. They stared upward, their

faces hidden by filter masks. They had dragged out a large

crude machine of metal and plastic, fitted with pinions, levers,

and cables. They jacked the machine upward until one end of it

pointed into the sky.

"What are they doing?" Lindsay said.

"Who knows?" Ryumin said. "That's the Eighth Orbital Army,

or so they call themselves. They've been hermits up till now."

The airship passed overhead, casting blurred shadows onto all

three land panels. One of the sundogs triggered the machine.

A long metal harpoon flicked upward and struck home. Lind-

say saw metal foil rupture in the airship's tail section. The

javelin gleamed crazily as it whirled end over end, its flight

disrupted by the collision and the curve of Coriolis force. The

metal bolt vanished into the filthy trees of a ruined orchard.

The airship was in trouble. Its crew kicked and thrashed in

midair, struggling to force their collapsing balloon away from

the ground attackers. The massive stone they were towing continued its course withweightless, serene inertia. As its towline grew tight, it slowly tore off the airship's tail. With a whoosh of gas, the airship crumpled into a twisted metal rag. The engines fell, tugging the metal foil behind them in a rippling streamer.

The pirates thrashed as if drowning, struggling to stay within

the zone of weightlessness. Their plight was desperate, since the

zone was riddled with slow, sucking downdrafts that could send

fliers tumbling to their deaths.

The rock blundered into the rippling edge of a swollen

cloudbank. The dark mass veered majestically downward, wobbling a bit, and vanished into the mist. Moments later it

reappeared below the cloud, plummeting downward in a vicious

Coriolis arc.

It slammed into the glass and patchwork of the window strip.

Lindsay, following it with his camera, heard the sullen crunch of

impact. Glass and metal grated and burst free in a sucking roar.

The belly of the cloud overhead bulged downward and began

to twist. A white plume spread above the blowout with the grace

of creeping frost. It was steam, condensing from the air in the

suddenly lowered pressure.

Lindsay held the camera above his head and leaped down onto

the grimy floor of the window. He ran toward the blowout,

ignoring Ryumin's surprised protests.

A minute's broken-field running brought him as close as he

dared go. He crouched behind the rusted steel strut of a plug,

ten meters from the impact site. Looking down past his feet

through the dirty glass, Lindsay saw a long trail of freezing spray

fanning out in rainbowed crystals against the shine of the sun-

light mirrors.

A roaring vortex of sucking wind sprang up, slinging gusts of

rain. Lindsay cupped one hand around the camera's lens.

Motion caught his eye. A group of oxygen farmers in masks

and coveralls were struggling across the glass from the bordering

panel. They cradled a long hose in their arms. They lurched

forward doggedly, staggering in the wind, weaving among the

plugs and struts.

Caught by the wind, a camouflaged surveillance plane crashed

violently beside the hole. Its wreckage was sucked through at

once.

The hose jerked and bucked with a gush of fluid. A thick spray

of gray-green plastic geysered from its nozzle, hardening in

midair. It hit the glass and clung there.

Under the whirlwind's pressure the plastic warped and bulged,

but held. As more gushed forth, the wind was choked and

became a shrill whistle.

Even after the blowout was scaled, the farmers continued to

pump plastic sludge across the impact zone. Rain fell steadily

from the agitated clouds. Another knot of farmers stood along

the window wall, leaning their masked heads together and

pointing into the sky.

Lindsay turned and looked upward with the rest.

The sudden vortex had spawned a concentric surf of clouds.

Through a crescent-shaped gap, Lindsay saw the dome of the

Eighth Orbital Army, across the width of the Zaibatsu. Tiny

forms in white suits ringed the dome, lying on the ground. They

did not move.

Lindsay focused the telephoto across the interior sky. The

fanatics of the Eighth Orbital Army lay sprawled on the fouled

earth. A knot of them had been caught trying to escape into the

airlock; they lay in a tangle, their arms outstretched.

He saw no sign of the airship pirates. He thought for a moment

that they had all escaped back to the landing port. Then he

spotted one of them, mashed flat against another window panel.

"That was excellent footage," Ryumin said in his ear. "It. was

also very stupid."

"I owed you a favor," Lindsay said. He studied the dead. "I'm

going over there," he decided.

"Let me send the robot. There'll be looters there soon."

"Then I want them to know me," Lindsay said. "They might be

useful."

He crossed another stile onto the land panel. His lungs felt

raw, but he had decided never to wear a breathing mask. His

reputation was more important than the risk.

He skirted the Black Medicals' stronghold and crossed a second window strip. He walked north to the ragtag junk dome of

the Orbital Army. It was the only outpost in the entire third

panel, which had been abandoned to a particularly virulent

form of the blight. This had once been an agricultural zone, and

the heightened fertility of the soil brought forth a patchy crop of

ankle-high mold. Farm buildings, all pastel ceramic and plastic,

had been looted but not demolished, and their stiff inorganic

walls and gaping windows seemed to long to lapse into an

unattainable state of rot.

The recluses' dome was built of plastic door panels, chopped

to shape and caulked.

The corpses lay frozen, their limbs oddly bent, for they had

been dead before they hit the ground, and their arms and legs

had bounced a little, loosely, with the impact. There was a

curious lack of horror about the scene. The faceless masks and

watertight body suits of the dead fanatics conveyed a sense of

bloodless, prim efficiency. Nothing marked the dead as human

beings except the military insignia on their shoulders. He counted eighteen of them.

The lenses on the faces of the dead were fogged over with

internal steam.

He heard the quiet whir of aircraft. A pair of ultralights circled

once and skidded in for a landing. Two of the airship pirates

had arrived.

Lindsay trained his camera on them. They dismounted,

unplugging their credit cards, and the aircraft taxied off.

They walked toward him in the half-crouching shuffle of people unused to gravity. Lindsay saw that their uniforms were

full-length silver skeletons etched over a blood-red background.

The taller pirate prodded a nearby corpse with his foot. "You

saw this?" he said in English.

"The spyplanes killed them," Lindsay said. "They endangered

the habitat."

"The Eighth Orbital Army," the taller pirate mused, examining

a shoulder patch. The second pirate muttered through her

mask's filters, "Fascists. Antinationalist scum."

"You knew them?" Lindsay said.

"We dealt with them," said the first pirate. "We didn't know

they were here, though." He sighed. "What a burn. Do you

suppose there are others inside?"

"Only dead ones," Lindsay said. "The planes use x-ray lasers."

"Really?" the first pirate said. "Wish I could get my hands on

one of those."

Lindsay twirled his left hand, a gesture in surveillance argot

stating that they were watched. The taller pirate looked upward

quickly. Sunlight glinted on the silver skull inlaid over his face.

Me looked at Lindsay, his eyes hidden behind gleaming silver-

plated eye sockets. "Where's your mask, citizen?"

"Here," Lindsay said, touching his face.

"A negotiator, huh? Looking for work, citizen? Our last diplomat just took the plunge. How are you in free-fall?"

"Be careful, Mr. President," the second pirate warned.

"Remember the confirmation hearings."

"Let me handle the legal implications," the President said

impatiently. "I'll introduce us. I'm the President of the Fortuna

Miners' Democracy, and this is my wife, the Speaker of the

House."

"Lin Dze, with Kabuki Intrasolar," Lindsay said. "I'm a theatrical impresario."

"That some kind of diplomat?"

"Sometimes, your excellency."

The President nodded. The Speaker of the House warned,

"Don't trust him, Mr. President."

"The executive branch handles foreign relations, so shut the

fuck up," the President snarled. "Listen, citizen, it's been a hard

clay. Right now, we oughta be in the Bank, having a scrub,

maybe getting juiced, but instead these fascists cut in on us with

their surface-to-air stuff, a preemptive strike, you follow me? So

now our airship's burned and we've lost our fuckin' rock."

"That's a shame," Lindsay said.

The President scratched his neck. "You just can't make plans

in this business. You learn to take it as it comes." He hesitated.

"Let's get out of this stink, anyway. Maybe there's loot inside."

The Speaker of the House took a hand-held power saw out of

a holster on her red webbing belt and began to saw through the

wall of the sundog dome.-The caulk between the plastic panels

powdered easily. "You got to go in unexpected if you want to

live," the President explained. "Don't ever, never go in an

enemy airlock. You never know what's in 'em." Then he spoke

into a wrist attachment. He used a covert operational jargon;

Lindsay couldn't follow the words.

Together the two pirates kicked out the wall and stepped

inside. Lindsay followed them, holding his camera. They re-

placed the burst-out panel, and the woman sprayed it with

sealant from a tiny propellant can.

The President pulled off his skull mask and sniffed the air. He

had a blunt, pug-nosed, freckled face; his short ginger-colored

hair was sparse, and the skin of his scalp gleamed oddly. They

had emerged into the communal kitchen of the Eighth Orbital

Army: there were cushions and low tables, a microwave, a crate

of plastic-wrapped protein, and half a dozen tall fermenting

units, bubbling loudly. A dead woman whose face looked sun-

burned sprawled on the floor by the doorway.

"Good," the President said. "We eat." The Speaker of the

House unmasked herself: her face was bony, with slitted, suspicious eyes. A painful-looking skin rash dotted her jaw and neck.

The two pirates stalked into the next room. It was a combination bunkroom and command center, with a bank of harsh,

flickering videos in a central cluster. One of the screens was

tracking by telephoto: it showed a group of nine red-clad pirates

approaching on foot down the Zaibatsu's northern slope, picking their way through the ruins.

"Here come the rest of us," the Speaker said.

The President glanced about him. "Not so bad. We stay here,

then. At least we'll have a place to keep the air in."

Something rustled under one of the bunks. The Speaker of the

House flung herself headlong under the bed. Lindsay swung his

camera around. There was a high-pitched scream and a brief

struggle; then she emerged, dragging out a small child. The

Speaker had pinned the child in a complicated one-handed

armlock. She got it to its feet.

It was a dark-haired, glowering, filthy little creature of indeterminate sex. It wore an Eighth Orbital Army uniform, cut to size. It was missing some teeth. It looked about five years old.

"So they're not all dead!" the President said. He crouched and

looked the child in the eye. "Where are the rest of you?"

He showed it a knife. The blade flickered into his hand from

nowhere. "Talk, citizen! Otherwise I show you your guts!"

"Come on!" said Lindsay. "That's no way to talk to a child."

"Who are you kidding, citizen? Listen, this little squealer

might be eighty years old. There are endocrine treatments-"

Lindsay knelt by the child and tried to approach it gently.

"How old are you? Four, five? What language do you speak?"

"Forget it," the Speaker of the House said. "There's only one

small-sized bunk, see it? I guess the spyplanes just missed this

one."

"Or spared it," Lindsay said.

The President laughed skeptically. "Sure, citizen. Listen, we

can sell this thing to the whore bankers. It ought to be worth a

few hours' attention for us, at least."

"That's slavery," Lindsay protested.

"Slavery? What are you talking about? Don't get theological,

citizen. I'm talking about a national entity freeing a prisoner of

war to a third party. It's a perfectly legal commercial transaction."

"I don't want to go to the whores," the child piped up suddenly. "I want to go to the farmers."

"The farmers?" said the President. "You don't want to be a

farmer, micro-citizen. Ever had any weapons training? We could

use a small assassin to sneak through the air ducts - "

"Don't underestimate those farmers," Lindsay said. He gestured at one of the video screens. A group of two dozen farmers

had walked across the interior slope of the Zaibatsu. They were

loading the dead Eighth Orbitals onto four flat sledges, drawn

by shoulder harnesses.

"Blast!" the President said. "I wanted to roll them myself." He

smirked. "Can't blame 'em, I guess. Lots of good protein in a

corpse."

"I want to go with the farmers," the child insisted.

"Let it go," Lindsay spoke up. "I have business with the Geisha

Bank. I can treat your nation to a slay."

The Speaker of the House released the child's arm. "You

can?"

Lindsay nodded. "Give me a couple of days to negotiate it."

She caught her husband's eye. "This one's all right. Let's make

him Secretary of State."

THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR

ZAIBATSU: 2-1-'16

The Geisha Bank was a complex of older buildings, shellacked

airtight and connected by a maze of polished wooden halls and

sliding paper airlocks. The area had been a red-light district

even before the Zaibatsu's collapse. The Bank was proud of its

heritage and continued the refined and eccentric traditions of a

gentler age.

Lindsay left the eleven nationals of the Fortuna Miners' De-

mocracy in an antiseptic sauna vault, being scrubbed by impassive bathboys. It was the first real bath the pirates had had in

months. Their scrawny bodies were knobbed with muscle from

constant practice in free-fall jujutsu. Their sweating skins were

bright with fearsome tattoos and septic rashes.

Lindsay did not join them. He stepped into a paneled dressing

room and handed over his Nephrine Medicals uniform to be

cleaned and pressed. He slipped into a soft brown kimono. A

low-ranking male geisha in kimono and obi approached him.

"Your pleasure, sir?"

"I'd like a word with the yarite, please."

The geisha looked at him with well-bred skepticism. "One

moment. I will ask if our chief executive officer is prepared to

accept guests."

He vanished. After half an hour a blonde female geisha in

business suit and obi appeared. "Mr. Dze? This way, please."

He followed her to an elevator guarded by two men armed

with electrode-studded clubs. The guards were giants; his head

barely came to their elbows. Their long, stony faces were

acromegalic: swollen jaws, clifflike jutting cheekbones. They had

been treated with hormonal growth factors.

The elevator surged up three floors and opened.

Lindsay faced a thick network of brightly colored beads. Thou-

sands of dangling, beaded wires hung from floor to ceiling. Any

movement would disturb them.

"Take my hand," the banker said. Lindsay shuffled behind her,

thrashing and clattering. "Step carefully," she said. "There are

traps."

Lindsay closed his eyes and followed. His guide stopped; a

hidden door opened in a mirrored wall. Lindsay stepped

through it, into the yarite's private chamber.

The floor was of ancient wood, waxed to a dark gleam. There

were flat square cushions underfoot, in patterns of printed bamboo. In the long wall to Lindsay's left, glass double-doors

showed a sunlit wooden balcony and a splendid garden, where

crooked pines and tall japonicas arched over curving paths of

raked white pebbles. The air in the room smelled of evergreen.

He was gazing on this world before its rot, an image of the past,

projected on false doors that could never open.

The yarite was sitting cross-legged on a cushion. She was a

wizened old Mech with a tight-drawn mouth and hooded, reptilian eyes. Her wrinkled head was encased in a helmetlike

lacquered wig, skewered with pins. She wore an angular flowered kimono supported by starch and struts. There was room in it for three of her.

A second woman knelt silently with her back to the right-hand

wall, facing the garden's image. Lindsay knew at once that she

was a Shaper. Her startling beauty alone was proof, but she had

that strange, intangible air of charisma that spread from the

Reshaped like a magnetic field. She was of mixed Asiatic-

African gene stock: her eyes were tilted, but her skin was dark.

Her hair was long and faintly kinked. She knelt before a rack of

white keyboards with an air of meek devotion.

The yarite spoke without moving her head. "Your duties,

Kitsune." The girl's hands darted over the keyboards and the air

was filled with the tones of that most ancient of Japanese

instruments: the synthesizer.

Lindsay knelt on a cushion, facing the old woman. A tea tray

rolled to his side and poured hot water into a cup with a chaste

tinkling sound. It dipped a rotary tea whisk into the cup.

"Your pirate friends," the old woman said, "are about to

bankrupt you."

"It's only money," Lindsay said.

"It is our sweat and sexuality. Did you think it would please us

to squander it?"

"I needed your attention," Lindsay said. His training had

seized him at once, but he was still afraid of the girl. He hadn't

known he would be facing a Shaper. And there was something

drastically wrong with the old woman's kinesics. It looked like

drugs or Mechanist nerve alteration.

"You came here dressed as a Nephrine Black Medical," the

old woman said. "Our attention was guaranteed. You have it.

We are listening."

With Ryumin's help, Lindsay had expanded his plans. The

Geisha Bank had the power to destroy his scheme; therefore,

they had to be co-opted into it. He knew what they wanted. He was ready to show them a mirror. If they recognized their own

ambitions and desires, he would win.

Lindsay launched into his spiel. He paused midway to make a

point. "You can see what the Black Medicals hope to gain from

the performance. Behind their walls they feel isolated, paranoid.

They plan to gain prestige by sponsoring our play.

"But I must have a cast. The Geisha Bank is my natural reservoir of talent. I can succeed without the Black Medicals. I can't succeed without you."

"I see," the yarite said. "Now explain to me why you think we

can profit from your ambitions."

Lindsay looked pained. "I came here to arrange a cultural

event. Can't that be enough?"

He glanced at the girl. Her hands flickered over the keyboards.

Suddenly she looked up at him and smiled, slyly, secretly. He

saw the tip of her tongue behind her perfect teeth. It was a

bright, predatory smile, full of lust and mischief. In an instant it

burned itself into his bloodstream. Hair rose on the back of his

neck. He was losing control.

He looked at the floor, his skin prickling. "All right," he said

heavily. "It isn't enough, and that shouldn't surprise me.

Listen, madame. You and the Medicals have been rivals for

years. This is your chance to lure them into the open and

ambush them on your own ground. They're naive about finance.

Naive, but greedy. They hate dealing in a financial system that

you control. If they thought they could succeed, they'd leap at

the chance to form their own economy.

"So, let them do it. Let them commit themselves. Let them pile success on success until they lose all sense of proportion and

greed overwhelms them. Then burst their bubble."

"Nonsense," the old woman said. "How can an actor tell a

banker her business?"

"You're not dealing with a Mech cartel," Lindsay said in-

tensely, leaning forward. He knew the girl was staring at him.

He could feel it. "These are three hundred technicians, bored,

frightened, and completely isolated. They are perfect prey for

mass hysteria. Gambling fever will hit them like an epidemic."

He leaned back. "Support me, madame. I'll be your point man,

your broker, your go-between. They'll never know you were

behind their ruin. In fact, they'll come to you for help." He

sipped his tea. It tasted synthetic.

The old woman paused as if she were thinking. Her expression

was very wrong. There were none of the tiny subliminal flickers

of mouth and eyelid, the movements of the throat, that accompanied human thought processes. Her face was more than calm.

It was inert.

"It has possibilities," she said at last. "But the Bank must have

control. Covert, but complete. How can you guarantee this?"

"It will be in your hands," Lindsay promised. "We will use my

company, Kabuki Intrasolar, as a front. You will use your contacts outside the Zaibatsu to issue fictitious stock. I will offer it

for sale here, and your Bank will be ambivalent. This will allow

the Nephrines to score a financial coup and seize control of the

company. Fictitious stockholders, your agents, will react in

alarm and send in pleas and inflated offers to the new owners.

This will flatter their self-esteem and overwhelm any doubts.

"At the same time, you will cooperate with me openly. You

will supply me with actors and actresses; in fact, you will

jealously fight for the privilege. Your geishas will talk of nothing

else to every customer. You will spread rumors about me: my

charm, my brilliance, my hidden resources. You will underwrite

all my extravagances, and establish a free-wheeling, free-

spending atmosphere of carefree hedonism. It will be a huge

confidence trick that will bamboozle the entire world."

The old woman sat silently, her eyes glazed. The low, pure tones of the synthesizer stopped suddenly. A tense hush fell over the room. The girl spoke softly from behind her keyboards. "It will work, won't it?"

He looked into her face. Her meekness had peeled off like a

layer of cosmetics. Her dark eyes shocked him. They were full

of frank, carnivorous desire. He knew at once that she was

feigning nothing, because her look was beyond pretense. It was

not human.

Without knowing it, he rose to one knee, his eyes still locked

with hers. "Yes," he said. His voice was hoarse. "It will work, I

swear it to you." The floor was cold under his hand. He realized

that, without any decision on his part, he had begun to move

toward her, half crawling.

She looked at him in lust and wonder. "Tell me what you are,

darling. Tell me really."

"I'm what you are," Lindsay said. "Shaper's work." He forced

himself to stop moving. His arms began to tremble.

"I want to tell you what they did to me," the girl said. "Let me

tell you what I am."

Lindsay nodded once. His mouth was dry with sick excitement.

"All right," he said. "Tell me, Kitsune."

"They gave me to the surgeons," she said. "They took my

womb out, and they put in brain tissue. Grafts from the pleasure

center, darling. I'm wired to the ass and the spine and the

throat, and it's better than being God. When I'm hot, I sweat

perfume. I'm cleaner than a fresh needle, and nothing leaves my

body that you can't drink like wine or eat like candy. And they

left me bright, so that I would know what submission was. Do

you know what submission is, darling?"

"No," Lindsay said harshly. "But I know what it means not to

care about dying."

"We're not like the others," she said. "They put us past the

limits. And now we can do anything we like to them, can't, we?"

Her laugh sent a shuddering thrill through him. She leaped

with balletic grace over her deck of keyboards.

She kicked the old woman's shoulder with one bare foot, and

the yarite fell over with a crunch. Her wig ripped free with a

shredding of tape. Beneath it, Lindsay glimpsed her threadbare skull, riddled with cranial plugs. He stared. "Your keyboards,"he said.

"She's my front," Kitsune said. "That's what my life is. Fronts

and fronts and fronts. Only the pleasure is real. The pleasure of

control."

Lindsay licked his dry lips.

"Give me what's real," she said.

She undid her obi sash. Her kimono was printed in a design of

irises and violets. The skin beneath it was like a dying man's

dream of skin.

"Come here," she said. "Put your mouth on my mouth."

Lindsay scrambled forward and threw his arms around her.

She slipped her warm tongue deep into his mouth. It tasted of

spice.

It was narcotic. The glands of her mouth oozed drugs.

They sprawled on the floor in front of the old woman's half-

lidded eyes.

She slipped her arms inside his loose kimono. "Shaper," she

said, "I want your genetics. All over me."

Her warm hand caressed his groin. He did what she said.

THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR

ZAIBATSU: 16-1-'16

Lindsay lay on his back on the floor of Ryumin's dome, his long

fingers pressed to the sides of his head. His left hand had two

glittering impact rubies set in gold bands. He wore a shimmering black kimono with a faint pattern of irises set in the weave.

His hakama trousers were of the modern cut.

The right sleeve of his kimono held the fictitious corporate

emblem of Kabuki Intrasolar: a stylized white mask striped

across the eyes and cheeks with flaring bands of black and red.

His sleeves had fallen back as he clutched his head and revealed

an injection bruise on his forearm. He was on vasopressin.

He dictated into a microphone. "All right," he said. "Scene

Three: Amijima. Jihei says: No matter how far we walk, there'll

never be a place marked for suicides. Let us kill ourselves here.

"Then Koharu: Yes, that's true. One place is as good as an-

other to die. But I've been thinking. If they find our dead

bodies together, people will say that Koharu and Jihei commit-

ted a lovers' suicide. I can imagine how your wife will resent

and envy me. So you should kill me here, then choose another

spot, far away, for yourself.

"Then Jihei says-" Lindsay fell silent. As he had been

dictating, Ryumin had occupied himself with an unusual handicraft. He was sifting what appeared to be tiny bits of brown

cardboard onto a small slip of white paper. He carefully rolled

the paper into a tube. Then he pinched the tube's ends shut and

sealed it with his tongue.

Me put one end of the paper cylinder between his lips, then

held up a small metal gadget and pressed a switch on its top.

Lindsay stared, then screamed. "Fire! Oh my God! Fire, fire!"

Ryumin blew out smoke. "What the hell's wrong with you?

This tiny flame can't hurt anything."

"But it's fire! Good God, I've never seen a naked flame in my

life." Lindsay lowered his voice. "You're sure you won't catch

fire?" He watched Ryumin anxiously. "Your lungs are smoking."

"No, no. It's just a novelty, a small new vice." The old Mechanist shrugged. "A little dangerous maybe, but aren't they all."

"What is it?"

"Bits of cardboard soaked in nicotine. They've got some kind

of flavoring, too. It's not so bad." He drew on the cigarette;

Lindsay stared at the glowing tip and shuddered. "Don't worry,"

Ryumin said. "This place isn't like other colonies. Fire's no

danger here. Mud doesn't burn."

Lindsay sagged back to the floor and groaned. His brain was

swimming in memory enhancements. His head hurl and he had

an indescribable tickling sensation, like the first fraction of a

second during an onset of deja vu. It was like being unable to sneeze.

"You made me lose my place," he said peevishly. "What's the

use? When I think of what this used to mean to me! These plays

that hold everything worth preserving in human life. . . . Our

heritage, before the Mechs, before the Shapers. Humanity, mortality, a life not tampered with."

Ryumin tapped ashes into an upended black lens cap. "You're

talking like a circumlunar native, Mr. Dze. Like a Concatenate.

What's your home world? Crisium S.S.R.? Copernican Com-

monwealth?"

Lindsay sucked air through his teeth.

Ryumin said, "Forgive an old man's prying." He blew more

smoke and rubbed a red mark on his temple, where the

eyephones fit. "Let me tell you what I think your problem is.

Mr. Dze. So far, you've recited three of these compositions:

Romeo and Juliet, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and

now The Love Suicide at Amijima. Frankly, I have some problems with these pieces."

"Oh?" said Lindsay on a rising note.

"Yes. First, they're incomprehensible. Second, they're impossibly morbid. And third and worst of all, they're preindustrial.

"Now let me tell you what I think. You've launched this audacious fraud, you're creating a huge stir, and you've set the whole Zaibatsu on its ear. For this much trouble, you should at

least repay the people with a little fun."

"Fun?" Lindsay said.

"Yes. I know these sundogs. They want to be entertained, not clubbed by some ancient relic. They want to hear about real people, not savages."

"But that's not human culture."

"So what?" Ryumin puffed his cigarette. "I've been thinking.

I've heard three 'plays' now, so I know the medium. There's notmuch to it. I can whip one up for us in two or three days, I

think."

"You think so?"

Ryumin nodded. "We'll have to scrap some things."

"Such as?"

"Well, gravity, first of all. I don't see how you can get any good dancing or fighting done except in free-fall."

Lindsay sat up. "Dancing and fighting, is it?"

"That's right. Your audience are whores, oxygen farmers, two

dozen pirate bands, and fifty runaway mathematicians. They

would all love to see dancing and fighting. We'll get rid of the

stage; it's too flat. The curtains are a nuisance; we can do that

with lighting. You may be used to these old circumlunars with

their damned centrifugal spin, but modern people love free-fall.

These poor sundogs have suffered enough. It'll be like a holiday

for them."

"You mean, get up to the free-fall zone somehow."

"Yes indeed. We'll build an aerostat: a big geodesic bubble,

airtight. We'll launch it off the landing zone and keep it fixed up

there with guy wires, or some such thing. You have to build a

theatre anyway, don't you? You might as well put it in midair

where everyone can see it."

"Of course," Lindsay said. He smiled as the idea sank in. "We

can put our corporate logo on it."

"Hang pennants from it."

"Sell tickets inside. Tickets and stock." He laughed aloud. "I

know just the ones to build it for me, too."

"It needs a name," Ryumin said. "We'll call it ... the Kabuki

Bubble!"

"The Bubble!" Lindsay said, slapping the floor. "What else?"

Ryumin smiled and rolled another cigarette.

"Say," Lindsay said. "Let me try some of that."

WHEREAS, Throughout this Nation's history, its citizens have

always confronted new challenges; and

The Nation's Secretary of State, Lin Dze, finds

himself in need of aeronautic engineering expertise that our

citizens are uniquely fitted to supply; and

, Secretary Dze, representing Kabuki Intrasolar, an

autonomous corporate entity, has agreed to pay the Nation for

its labors with a generous allocation of Kabuki Intrasolar corporate stock;

NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the House of Representatives of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy, the Senate concurring, that the Nation will construct the Kabuki Bubble auditorium, provide promotional services for Kabuki stock, and

extend political and physical protection to Kabuki staff, employees, and property.

"Excellent," Lindsay said. He authenticated the document and

replaced the Fortuna State Seal in his diplomatic bag. "It truly

eases my mind to know that the FMD will handle security."

"Hey, it's a pleasure," said the President. "Any dip of ours

who needs it can depend on an escort twenty-four hours a day.

Especially when you're going to the Geisha Bank, if you get my

meaning."

"Have this resolution copied and spread through the

Zaibatsu," Lindsay said. "It ought to be good for a ten-point

stock advance." He looked at the President seriously. "But don't

get greedy. When it reaches a hundred and fifty, start selling

out, slowly. And have your ship ready for a quick getaway."

The President winked. "Don't worry. We haven't been sitting

on our hands. We're lining up a class assignment from a Mech

cartel. A bodyguard gig ain't bad, but a nation gets restless.

When the Red Consensus is shipshape again, then our time has

come to kill and eat."

THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR

ZAIBATSU: 13-3-'16

Lindsay slept, exhausted, with his head propped against the

diplomatic hag. An artificial morning shone through the false

glass doors. Kitsune sat in thought, toying quietly with the keys

of her synthesizer.

Her proficiency had long since passed the limits of merely

technical skill. It had become a communion, an art sprung from

dark intuition. Her synthesizer could mimic any instrument and

surpass it: rip its sonic profile into naked wave forms and

rebuild it on a higher plane of sterilized, abstract purity. Its

music had the painful, brittle clarity of faultlessness.

Other instruments struggled for that ideal clarity but failed.

Their failure gave their sound humanity. The world of humanity

was a world of losses, broken hopes, and original sin, a flawed

world, yearning always for mercy, empathy, compassion. ... It

was not her world.

Kitsune's world was the fantastic, seamless realm of high pornography. Lust was ever present, amplified and tireless, broken

only by spasms of superhuman intensity. It smothered every

other aspect of life as a shriek of feedback might overwhelm an

orchestra.

Kitsune was an artificial creature, and accepted her feverish

world with a predator's thoughtlessness. Hers was a pure and

abstract life, a hot, distorted parody of sainthood.

The surgical assault on her body would have turned a human

woman into a blank-eyed erotic animal. But Kitsune was a

Shaper, with a Shaper's unnatural resilience and genius. Her

narrow world had turned her into something as sharp and

slippery as an oiled stiletto.

She had spent eight of her twenty years within the Bank, where she dealt with customers and rivals on terms she thoroughly

understood. Still, she knew there was a realm of mental experience, taken for granted by humanity, that was closed to her.

Shame. Pride. Guilt. Love. She felt these emotions as dim

shadows, dark reptilian trash burnt to ashes in an instant by

searing ecstasy. She was not incapable of human feeling; it was

simply too mild for her to notice. It had become a second

subconscious, a buried, intuitive layer below her posthuman

mode of thought. Her consciousness was an amalgam of coldly

pragmatic logic and convulsive pleasure.

Kitsune knew that Lindsay was handicapped by his primitive

mode of thought. She felt a kind of pity for him, a compassionate sorrow that she could not recognize or admit to herself.

She believed he must be very old, from one of the first generations of Shapers. Their genetic engineering had been limited

and they could scarcely be told from original human stock.

He must be almost a hundred years old. To be so old, yet look

so young, meant that he had chosen sound techniques of life

extension. He dated back to an era before Shaperism had

reached its full expression. Bacteria still swarmed through his

body. Kitsune never told him about the antibiotic pills and

suppositories she took, or the painful antiseptic showers. She

didn't want him to know he was contaminating her. She wanted

everything between them to be clean.

She had a cool regard for Lindsay. He was a source of lofty

and platonic satisfaction to her. She had the craftsmanlike respect for him that a butcher might have for a sharp steel saw.

She took a positive pleasure in using him. She wanted him to

last a long time, so she took good care of him and enjoyed

giving him what she thought he needed to go on functioning.

For Lindsay, her affections were ruinous. He opened his eyes

on the tatami mat and reached out at once for the diplomatic

bag behind his head. When his fingers closed over the smooth

plastic handle, an anxiety circuit shut off in his head, but that

first relief only triggered other systems and he came fully awake

into a queasy combat alertness.

He saw that he was in Kitsune's chamber. Morning was breaking over the image of the long-dead garden. False daylight

slanted into the room, gleaming from inlaid clothes chests and

the perspex dome of a fossilized bonsai. Some repressed part of

him cried out within him, in meek despair. He ignored it. His

new diet of drugs had brought the Shaper schooling back in full

force and he was in no mood to tolerate his own weaknesses. He

was full of that mix of steel-trap irritability and slow gloating

patience that placed him at the keenest edges of perception and

reaction.

He sat up and saw Kitsune at the keyboards. "Good morning,"

he said.

"Hello, darling. Did you sleep well?"

Lindsay considered. Some antiseptic she used had scorched histongue. His back was bruised where her Shaper-strengthened

fingers had dug in carelessly. His throat had an ominous

rawness-he had spent too much time without a mask in the

open air. "I feel fine," he said, smiling. He opened the complex

lock of his diplomatic bag.

He slipped on his finger rings and stepped into his hakama trousers.

"Do you want something to eat?" she said.

"Not before my shot."

"Then help me plug in the front," she said.

Lindsay repressed a shudder. He hated the yarite's withered,

waxlike, cyborged body, and Kitsune knew it. She forced him to

help her with it because it was a measure of her control.

Lindsay understood this and wanted to help her; he wanted to

repay her, in a way she understood, for the pleasure she had

given him.

But something in him revolted at it. When his training faltered,

as it did between shots, repressed emotions rose and he was

aware of the terrible sadness of their affair. He felt a kind of

pity for her, a compassionate sorrow that he would never insult

her by admitting. There were things he had wanted to give her:

simple companionship, simple trust and regard.

Simple irrelevance. Kitsune hauled the yarite out of its

biomonitored cradle beneath the floorboards. In some ways the

thing had passed the limits of the clinically dead; sometimes

they had to slam it into operation like push-starting a balky

engine.

Its maintenance technology was the same type that supported

the Mechanist cyborgs of the Radical Old and the Mech cartels.

Filters and monitors clogged the thing's bloodstream; the inter-

nal glands and organs were under computer control. Implants

sat on its heart and liver, prodding them with electrodes and

hormones. The old woman's autonomous nervous system had

long since collapsed and shut down.

Kitsune examined a readout and shook her head. "The acid

levels are rising as fast as our stocks, darling. The plugs are

degrading its brain. It's very old. Held together with wires and

patchwork."

She sat it up on a floor mat and spooned vitaminized pap into

its mouth.

"You should seize control on your own," he said. He inserted

a dripping plug into a duct on the yarite's veiny forearm.

"I'd like that," she said. "But I have a problem getting rid of

this one. The sockets on its head will be hard to explain away. I

could cover them with skin grafts, but that won't fool an au-

topsy. . . . The staff expect this thing to live forever. They've

spent enough on it. They'll want to know why it died."

The yarite moved its tongue convulsively and dribbled out its

paste. Kitsune hissed in annoyance. "Slap its face," she said.

Lindsay ran a hand through his sleep-matted hair. "Not this

early," he said, half pleading.

Kitsune said nothing, merely straightened her back and shoulders and set her face in a prim mask. Lindsay was defeated at

once. He jerked his hand back and swung it across the thing's

face in a vicious open-handed slap. A spot of color showed in

its leathery cheek.

"Show me its eyes," she said. Lindsay grabbed the thing's gaunt

checks between his thumb and fingers and twisted its head so

that it met Kitsune's eyes. With revulsion, he recognized a dim

flicker of debased awareness in its face.

Kitsune took his hand away and lightly kissed his palm.

"That's my good darling," she said. She slipped the spoon

between the thing's slack lips.

THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR

ZAIBATSU:21-4-'16

The Fortuna pirates floated like red-and-silver paper cutouts

against the interior walls of the Kabuki Bubble. The air was

loud with the angry spitting of welders, the whine of rotary

sanders, the wheeze of the air filters.

Lindsay's loose kimono and trousers ruffled in free-fall. He

reviewed the script with Ryumin. "You've been rehearsing this?" he said.

"Sure," said Ryumin. "They love it. It's great. Don't worry."

Lindsay scratched his floating, puffy hair. "I don't quite know

what to make of this."

A camouflaged surveillance plane had forced itself into the

Bubble just before the structure was sealed shut. Against the

bright triangular pastels, its dreary camouflage made it as obvious as a severed thumb. The machine yawed and dipped

within the fifty-meter chamber, its lenses and shotgun micro-

phones swiveling relentlessly. Lindsay was glad it was there, but

it bothered him.

"I have the feeling I've heard this story before," he said. He

flipped through the printout's pages. The margins were thick

with cartoon stick figures scribbled there for the illiterate. "Let

me see if I have it right. A group of pirates in the Trojan

asteroids have kidnapped a Shaper woman. She's some kind of

weapons specialist, am I right?"

Ryumin nodded. He had taken his new prosperity in stride. He

wore ribbed silk coveralls in a tasteful shade of navy and a loose

beret, high fashion in the Mech cartels. A silver microphone bead dotted his upper lip.

Lindsay said, "The Shapers are terrified by what the pirates

might do with her expertise. So they form an alliance and put

the pirates under siege. Finally they trick their way in and burn

the place out." Lindsay looked up. "Did it really happen, or

didn't it?"

"It's an old story," Ryumin said. "Something like that actually

happened once; I feel sure of it. But I filed off the serial

numbers and made it my own."

Lindsay smoothed his kimono. "I could swear that . . . hell.

They say if you forget something while you're on vasopressin,

you'll never remember it. It causes mnemonic burnout." He

shook the script in resignation.

"Can you direct it?" Ryumin said.

Lindsay shook his head. "I wanted to, but it might be best if I

left it to you. You do know what you're doing, don't you?"

"No," Ryumin said cheerfully. "Do you?"

"No. . . . The situation's getting out of hand. Outside investors

keep trying to buy Kabuki stock. Word got out through the

Geisha Bank's contacts. I'm afraid that the Nephrine Black

Medicals will sell their Kabuki holdings to some Mech cartel.

And then ... I don't know . . . it'll mean - "

"It'll mean that Kabuki Intrasolar has become a legitimate

business."

"Yes." Lindsay grimaced. "It looks like the Black Medicals will

escape unscathed. They'll even profit. The Geisha Bank won't

like it."

"What of it?" said Ryumin. "We have to keep moving forward

or the whole thing falls apart. The Bank's already made a killing

selling Kabuki stock to the Black Medicals. The old crone who

runs the Bank is crazy about you. The whores talk about you

constantly."

He gestured at the center stage. It was a spherical area

crisscrossed with padded wires, where a dozen actors were going

through their paces. They flung themselves through free-fall

aerobatics, catching the wires, spinning, looping, and

rebounding.

Two of them collided bruisingly and clawed the air for a

handhold. Ryumin said, "Those acrobats are pirates, you under-

stand? Four months ago they would have slit each other's

throats for a kilowatt. But not now, Mr. Dze. Now they have too

much at stake. They're stage-struck."

Ryumin laughed conspiratorially.

"For once they're more than pocket terrorists. Even the whores are more than sex toys. They're real actors, with a real script and a real audience. It doesn't matter that you and I know

It's a fraud, Mr. Dze. A symbol has meaning if someone gives it meaning. And they're giving it everything they have."

Lindsay watched the actors begin their routine again. They

flew from wire to wire with feverish determination. "It's pathetic," he said.

"A tragedy to those who feel. A comedy to those who think,"

Ryumin said. Lindsay stared at him suspiciously. "What's gotten into you, anyway? What are you up to?"

Ryumin pursed his lips and looked elaborately nonchalant.

"My needs are simple. Every decade or so I like to return to the

cartels and see if they've made any progress with these bones of

mine. Progressive calcium loss is not a laughing matter. Frankly,

I'm getting brittle." He looked at Lindsay. "And what about

you, Mr. Dze?"

He patted Lindsay's shoulder.

"Why not tag along with me? It would do you good to see

more of the System. There are two hundred million people in

space. Hundreds of habitats, an explosion of cultures. They're

not all scraping out a living on the edge of survival, like these

poor bezprizorniki. Most of them are the bourgeoisie. Their

lives are snug and rich! Maybe technology eventually turns them

into something you wouldn't call human. But that's a choice

they make-a rational choice." Ryumin waved his hands expansively. "This Zaibatsu is only a criminal enclave. Come with me

and let me show you the fat of the System. You need to see the cartels."

"The cartels. . ." Lindsay said. To join the Mechanists would

mean surrendering to the ideals of the Radical Old. He looked

around him, and his pride flared. "Let them come to me!"

THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR

ZAIBATSU: 1-6-'16

For the first performance, Lindsay gave up his finery for a

general-issue jumpsuit. He covered his diplomatic bag with bur-

lap to hide the Kabuki decals.

It seemed that every sundog in the world had filtered into the

Bubble. They numbered over a thousand. The Bubble could not

have held them, except in free-fall. There were light opera-box

frameworks for the Hank elite, and a jackstraw complex of

padded bracing wires where the audience clung like roosting

sparrows.

Most floated freely. The crowd formed a percolating mass of

loose concentric spheres. Broad tunnels had opened spontaneously in the mass of bodies, following the complex kinesics of crowd flow. There was a constant excited murmur in a flurry of differing argots.

The play began. Lindsay watched the crowd. Brief shoving

matches broke out during the first fanfare, but by the time the

dialogue started the crowd had settled. Lindsay was thankful for

that. He missed his usual bodyguard of Fortuna pirates.

The pirates had finished their obligations to him and were

busy preparing their ship for departure. Lindsay, though, felt

safe in his anonymity. If the play failed disastrously, he would

simply be one sundog among others. If it went well, he could

change in time to accept the applause.

In the first abduction scene, pirates kidnapped the young and

beautiful weapons genius, played by one of Kitsune's best. The

audience screamed in delight at the puffs of artificial smoke and

bright free-fall gushes of fake blood.

Lexicon computers throughout the Bubble translated the script

into a dozen tongues and dialects. It seemed unlikely that this

polyglot crowd could grasp the dialogue. To Lindsay it sounded

like naive mush, mangled by mistranslation. But they listened

raptly.

After an hour, the first three acts were over. A long intermission followed, in which the central stage was darkened. Rude

claques had formed spontaneously for the cast members, as

pirate groups shouted for their own.

Lindsay's nose stung. The air inside the Bubble had been

supercharged with oxygen, to give the crowd a hyperventilated

elan. Despite himself, Lindsay too felt elation. The hoarse

shouts of enthusiasm were contagious. The situation was moving

with its own dynamics. It was out of his hands.

Lindsay drifted toward the Bubble's wall, where some enterprising oxygen farmers had set up a concessions stand.

The farmers, clinging awkwardly to footloops on the Bubble's

frame, were doing a brisk business. They sold their own native

delicacies: anonymous green patties fried up crisp, and white

blobby cubes on a stick, piping hot from the microwave. Kabuki

Intrasolar took a cut, since the food stands were Lindsay's idea.

The farmers paid happily in Kabuki stock.

Lindsay had been careful with the stock. He had meant at first inflate it past all measure and thereby ruin the Black

Medicals. But the miraculous power of paper money had se-

duced him. He had waited too long, and the Black Medicals had

sold their stock to outside investors, at an irresistible profit.

Now the Black Medicals were safe from him -and grateful.

They sincerely respected him and nagged him constantly for

further tips on the market.

Everyone was happy. He foresaw a long run for the play. After

that, Lindsay thought, there would be other schemes, bigger and

better ones. This aimless sundog world was perfect for him. It

only asked that he never stop, never look back, never look

farther forward than the next swindle.

Kitsune would see to that. He glanced at her opera box and

saw her floating with carnivorous meekness behind the Bank's

senior officers, her dupes. She would not allow him any doubts

or regrets. He felt obscurely glad for it. With her limitless

ambition to drive him, he could avoid his own conflicts.

They had the world in their pocket. But below his giddy sense

of triumph a faint persistent pain roiled through him. He knew

that Kitsune was simply and purely relentless. But Lindsay had

a fault line through him, an aching seam where his training met

his other self. Now, at his finest moment, when he wanted to

relax and feel an honest joy, it came up tainted.

All around him the crowd was exulting. Yet something within

him made him shrink from joining them. He fell cheated, twist-

ed, robbed of something that he couldn't grip.

He reached for his inhaler. A good chemical whiff would boost

his discipline.

Something tugged the fabric of his jumpsuit, from behind him,

to his left. He glanced quickly over his shoulder.

A black-haired, rangy young man with flinty gray eyes had

seized his jumpsuit with the muscular bare toes of his right foot.

"Hey, target," the man said. He smiled pleasantly. Lindsay

watched the man's face for kinesics and realized with a dull

shock that the face was his own.

"Take it easy, target," the assassin said. Lindsay heard his own

voice from the assassin's mouth.

The face was subtly wrong. The skin looked too clean, too new.

It looked synthetic.

Lindsay twisted around. The assassin held a bracing wire with

both hands, but he reached out with his left foot and caught

Lindsay's wrist between his two largest toes. His foot bulged

with abnormal musculature and the joints looked altered. His

grip was paralyzing. Lindsay felt his hand go numb.

The man jabbed Lindsay's chest with the toe of his other foot.'

"Relax," he said. "Let's talk a moment."

Lindsay's training took hold. His adrenaline surge of terror

transmuted into icy self-possession, "flow do you like the performance?" he said.

The man laughed. Lindsay knew that he was hearing the assassin's true voice; his laugh was chilling. "These moondock worlds

are full of surprises," he said.

"You should have joined the cast," Lindsay said. "You have a

talent for impersonation."

"It comes and goes," the assassin said. He bent his altered

ankle slightly, and the bones of Lindsay's wrist grated together

with a sudden lancing pain that made blackness surge behind

his eyes. "What's in the bag, targ? Something they'd like to

know about back home?"

"In the Ring Council?"

"That's right. They say they have us under siege, all those

Mech wireheads, but not every cartel is as straight as the last.

And we're well trained. We can hide under the spots on a dip's

conscience."

"That's clever," Lindsay said. "I admire a good technique.

Maybe we could arrange something."

"That would be interesting," the assassin said politely. Lindsay

realized then that no bribe could save him from this man.

The assassin released Lindsay's wrist. He reached into the

breast pocket of his jumpsuit with his left foot. His knee and hip

swiveled eerily. "This is for you," he said. He released a black

videotape cartridge. It spun in free-fall before Lindsay's eyes.

Lindsay took the cartridge and pocketed it. He snapped the

pocket shut and looked up again. The assassin had vanished. In

his place was a portly male sundog in the same kind of general-

issue dun-brown jumpsuit. He was heavier than the assassin and

his hair was blond. The man looked at him indifferently.

Lindsay reached out as if to touch him, then snatched his hand

back before the man could notice.

The lights went up. Dancers came onstage. The Bubble rang

with howls of enthusiasm. Lindsay fled along the Bubble's walls

through a nest of legs tucked through footloops and arms

clutching handholds. He reached the anterior airlock.

He hired one of the aircraft moored outside the lock and flew

at once to the Geisha Bank.

The place was almost deserted, but his credit card got him in.

The enormous guards recognized him and bowed. Lindsay hesitated, then realized he had nothing to say. What could he tell

them? "Kill me, next time you see me?"

To catch birds with a mirror was the ideal snare.

The yarite's network of beads would protect him. Kitsune had

taught him how to work the beads from within. Even if the

assassin avoided the traps, he could be struck down from within

by high voltage or sharp flechettes.

Lindsay walked the pattern flawlessly and burst into the

yarite's quarters. He opened a videoscreen, flicked it on, and

loaded the tape.

It was a face from his past: the face of his best friend, the man

who had tried to kill him, Philip Khouri Constantine.

"Hello, cousin," Constantine said.

The term was aristocratic slang in the Republic. But Constantine was a plebe. And Lindsay had never heard him put

such hatred into the word.

"I take the liberty of contacting you in exile." Constantine

looked drunk. He was speaking a little too precisely. The ring-

shaped collar of his antique suit showed sweat on the olive skin

of his throat. "Some of my Shaper friends share my interest in

your career. They don't call these agents assassins. The Shapers

call them 'antibiotics.'

"They've been operating here. The opposition is much less

troublesome with so many dead from 'natural causes.' My old

trick with the moths looks juvenile now. Very brash and risky.

"Still, the insects worked well enough, out here in the

moondocks. . . . Time flies, cousin. Five months have changed

things.

"The Mechanist siege is failing. When the Shapers are trapped

and squeezed, they ooze out under pressure. They can't be

beaten. We used to tell each other that, when we were boys,

remember, Abelard? When our future seemed so bright we

almost blinded each other, sometimes. Back before we knew

what a bloodstain was. . . .

"This Republic needs the Shapers. The colony's rotting. They

can't survive without the biosciences. Everyone knows it, even

the Radical Old.

"We never really talked to those old wireheads, cousin. You

wouldn't let me; you hated them too much. And now I know

why you were afraid to face them. They're tainted, Abelard, like

you are. In a way, they're your mirror image. By now you know

what a shock it is to see one." Constantine grinned and

smoothed his wavy hair with a small, deft hand.

"But I talked to them, I came to terms. . . . There's been a

coup here, Abelard. The Advisory Council is dissolved. Power

belongs to the Executive Board for National Survival. That's me,

and a few of our Preservationist friends. Vera's death changed

everything, as we knew it would. Now we have our martyr. Now

we're full of steel and fury.

"The Radical Old are leaving. Emigrating to the Mech cartels

where they belong. The aristocrats will have to pay the costs for

it.

"There are others coming your way, cousin. The whole mob of

broken-down aristos: Lindsays, Tylers, Kellands, Morrisseys. Political exiles. Your wife is with them. They're squeezed dry

between their Shaper children and their Mechanist grandparents, and thrown out like garbage. They're all yours.

"I want you to mop up after me, tie up my loose ends. If you

won't accept that, then go back to my messenger. He'll settle

you." Constantine grinned, showing small, even teeth. "Except

for death, you can't escape the game. You and Vera both knew

that. And now I'm king, you're pawn."

Lindsay shut off the tape.

He was ruined. The Kabuki Bubble had assumed a grotesque

.solidity; it was his own ambitions that had burst.

He was trapped. He would be unmasked by the Republic's

refugees. His glittering deceptions would fly apart to leave him

naked and exposed. Kitsune would know him for what he was: a

human upstart, not her Shaper lover.

His mind raced within the cage. To live here under Constantine's terms, in his control, in his contempt-the thought

scalded him.

He had to escape. He had to leave this world at once. He had

no time left for scheming.

Outside, the assassin was waiting, with Lindsay's own stolen

face. To meet him again was death. But he might escape the

man if he disappeared at once. And that meant the pirates.

Lindsay rubbed his bruised wrist. Slow fury built in him: fury

at the Shapers and the destructive cleverness they had used to

survive. Their struggle left a legacy of monsters. The assassin.

Constantine. himself.

Constantine was younger than Lindsay. He had trusted Lind-

say, looked up to him. But when Lindsay had come back on

furlough from the Ring Council, he'd painfully felt how deeply

the Shapers had changed him. And he had deliberately sent

Constantine into their hands. As always, he had made it sound

plausible, and Constantine's new skills were truly crucial. But

Lindsay knew that he had done it selfishly, so that he'd have

company, outside the pale.

Constantine had always been ambitious. But where there had

been trust, Lindsay had brought a new sophistication and deceit.

Where he and Constantine had shared ideals, they now shared

murder.

Lindsay felt an ugly kinship with the assassin. The assassin's

training must have been much like his own. His own self-hatred

added sudden venom to his fear of the man.

The assassin had Lindsay's face. But Lindsay realized with a

sudden flash of insight that he could turn the man's own

strength against him.

He could pose as the assassin, turn the situation around. He

could commit some awful crime, and the assassin would be

blamed.

Kitsune needed a crime. It would be his farewell gift to her, a

message only she would understand. He could free her, and his

enemy would pay the price.

He opened the diplomatic bag and tossed aside his paper heap

of stocks. He opened the floorboards and stared at the body of

the old woman, floating naked on the wrinkled surface of the

waterbed. Then he searched the room for something that would

cut.

CHAPTER THREE

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 2-6-'16

When the last slave rocket from the Zaibatsu had peeled away,

and the engines of the Red Consensus had cut in, Lindsay began

to think he might be safe.

"So how about it, citizen?" the President said. "You sundogged

off with the loot, right? What's in the bag, State? Ice-cold drugs?

Hot software?"

"No," Lindsay said. "It can wait. First we have to check every-

one's face. Make sure it's their own."

"You're twisted, State," said one of the Senators. "That

'antibiotic' stuff is just agitprop crap. They don't exist."

"You're safe," the President said. "We know every angstrom

on this ship, believe me." He brushed an enormous crawling

roach from the burlapped surface of Lindsay's diplomatic bag.

"You've scored, right? You want to buy into one of the cartels?

We're on assignment, but we can detour to one of the Belt

settlements-Bettina or Themis, your choice." The President

grinned evilly. "It'll cost you, though."

"I'm staying with you," Lindsay said.

"Yeah?" said the President. "Then this belongs to us!" He

picked up Lindsay's diplomatic bag and threw it to the Speaker of the House.

I'll open it for you," Lindsay said quickly. "Just let me

explain first."

"Sure," the Speaker said. "You can explain how much it's

worth." She pressed her portable power saw against the bag.

Sparks flew and the reek of melted plastic filled the spacecraft.

Lindsay averted his face.

Speaker groped within the bag, bracing her knee against it

in free-fall. With a wrenching motion she dragged out Lindsay's

booty. It was the yarite's severed head.

She let go of the head with the sudden hiss of a scorched cat.

"Get 'im!" the President yelled.

Two of the Senators bounced off the spacecraft's walls and

seized Lindsay's arms and legs in painful jujutsu holds.

"You're the assassin!" the President shouted. "You were hired

to hit this old Mechanist! There's no loot at all!" He looked at

the input-studded head with a grimace of disgust. "Get it into

the recycler," he told one of the representatives. "I won't have a

thing like that aboard this ship. Wait a second," he said as the

representative took tentative hold of a lock of sparse hair.

"Take it up to the machine shop first and dig out all the

circuitry."

He turned to Lindsay. "So that's your game, eh, citizen? An

assassin?"

Lindsay clung to their expectations. "Sure," he said reflexively.

"Whatever you say."

There was an ominous silence, overlaid by distant thermal

pops from the engines of the Red Consensus. "Let's throw his

ass out the airlock," suggested the Speaker of the House.

"We can't do that," said the Chief Justice of the Supreme

Court. He was a feeble old Mechanist who was subject to

nosebleeds. "He is still Secretary of Stale and can't be sentenced

without impeachment by the Senate."

The three Senators, two men and a woman, looked interested.

The Senate didn't see much action in the government of the tiny

Democracy. They were the least trusted members of the crew

and were outnumbered by the House.

Lindsay shrugged. It was an excellent shrug; he had captured

the feel of the President's own kinesics, and the subliminal

mimicry defused the situation for the crucial instant it took him

to start talking. "It was a political job." It was a boring voice,

the leaden sound of moral exhaustion. It defused their

bloodlust, made the situation into something predictable and

tiresome. "I was working for the Mare Serenitatis Corporate!

Republic. They had a coup there. They're shipping a lot of their

population to the Zaibatsu soon and wanted me to pave the

way."

They were believing him. He put some color into his voice.

"But they're fascists. I prefer to serve a democratic government.

Besides, they set an 'antibiotic' on my track -at least, I think it

was them." Me smiled and spread his hands innocently, twisting

his arms in the loosened grips of his captors. "I haven't lied to

you, have I? I never claimed that I wasn't a killer. Besides, think

of the money I made for you."

"Yeah, there's that," the President said grudgingly. "But did

you have to saw its head off?"

"I was following orders," Lindsay said. "I'm good at that, Mr.

President. Try me."

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 13-6-'16

Lindsay had stolen the cyborg's head to free Kitsune, to guarantee that her power games would not come to light. He had

deceived her, but he had freed her as a message of apology. The

Shaper assassin would bear the blame for it. He hoped the

Geisha Bank would tear the man apart.

He put aside the horror. His Shaper teachers had warned him

about such feelings. When a diplomat was thrown into a new

environment, he should repress all thoughts of the past and

immediately soak up as much protective coloration as possible.

Lindsay surrendered to his training. Crammed into the tiny

spacecraft with the eleven-member Fortuna nation, Lindsay felt

the environment's semiotics as an almost physical pressure. It

would be hard to keep a sense of perspective, trapped in a can

with eleven lunatics.

Lindsay had not been in a real spacecraft since his schooldays

in the Shaper Ring Council. The Mech cargo drogue that had

shipped him into exile didn't count; its passengers were drugged

meat. The Red Consensus was lived in; it had been in service for

two hundred and fifteen years.

Within a few days, following bits of evidence present within the spacecraft, Lindsay learned more about its history than the

Fortuna Miners knew themselves.

The living decks of the Consensus had once belonged to a

Terran national entity, an extinct group calling themselves the

Soviet Union, or CCCP. The decks had been launched from

Earth to form one of a series of orbiting "defense stations."

The ship was cylindrical, and its living quarters were four

interlocked round decks. Each deck was four meters tall and

ten meters across. They had once been equipped with crude

airlock safety doors between levels, but those had been

wrenched out and replaced with modern self-sealing pressure

filaments.

The stern deck had been ripped clean to the padded walls. The

pirates used it for exercise and free-fall combat practice. They

also slept there, although, having no day or night, they were

likely to doze off anywhere at any time.

The next deck, closer to the bow, held their cramped surgery

and sick bay, as well as the "sweatbox," where they hid from

solar flares behind lead shielding. In the "broom closet," a

dozen antiquated spacesuits hung flabbily beside a racked-up

clutter of shellac sprayers, strap-on gas guns, ratchets, clamps,

and other "outside" tools. This deck had an airlock, an old

armored one to the outside, which still had a series of peeling

operations stickers in green Cyrillic capitals.

The next deck was a life-support section, full of gurgling racks

of algae. It had a toilet and a food synthesizer. The two units

were both hooked directly to the algae racks. It was an object

lesson in recycling, but not one that Lindsay relished much.

This deck also had a small machine shop; it was tiny, but the

lack of gravity allowed the use of every working surface.

The bow deck had the control room and the power hookups to

the solar panels. Lindsay grew to like this deck best, mostly

because of the music. The control room was an old one, but

nowhere near as old as the Consensus itself. It had been de-

signed by some forgotten industrial theorist who believed that

instruments should use acoustic signals. The cluster of systems,

spread out along a semicircular control panel, had few optical

readouts. They signaled their functions by rumbles, squeaks, and

steady modular beeping.

Bizarre at first, the sounds were designed to sink unobtrusively

into the backbrain. Any change in the chorus, though, was

immediately obvious. Lindsay found the music soothing, a com-

bination of heartbeat and brain.

The rest of the deck was not so pleasant: the armory, with its

nasty racks of tools, and the ship's center of corruption: the

particle beam gun. Lindsay avoided that compartment when he

could, and never spoke of it.

He could not escape the knowledge that the Red Consensus

was a ship of war.

"Look," the President told him, "taking out some feeble old

Mech whose brain's shut down is one thing. But taking out an

armed Shaper camp full of hot genetics types is a different

proposition. There's no room for feebs or thumb-sitters in the

Fortuna National Army."

"Yes sir," said Lindsay. The Fortuna National Army was the

military arm of the national government. Its personnel were

identical to the personnel of the civilian government, but this

was of no consequence. It had an entirely different organization

and set of operating procedures. Luckily the President was

commander in chief of the armed forces as well as head of state.

They did military drills in the fourth deck, which had been

stripped down to the ancient and moldy padding. It held three

exercycles and some spring-loaded weights, with a rack of storage lockers beside the entrance port.

"Forget up and down," the President advised. "When we're

talking free-fall combat, the central rule is haragei. That's this."

He punched Lindsay suddenly in the stomach. Lindsay doubled

over with a wheeze and his velcro slippers ripped free from the

wall, shredding loudly.

The President grabbed Lindsay's wrist, and with a sinuous

transfer of torque he stuck Lindsay's feet to the ceiling. "Okay,

you're upside down now, right?" Lindsay stood on the upward

or bow side of the deck; the President crouched on the stern-

ward side, so that their feet pointed in opposite directions. He

glared upside down into Lindsay's eyes. His breath smelled of

raw algae.

"That's what they call the local vertical," he said. "The body

was built for gravity and the eyes look for gravity in any situ-

ation; that's the way the brain's wired. You're gonna look for

straight lines that go up and down and you're going to orient

yourself to those lines. And you're gonna get killed, soldier,

understand?"

"Yes sir!" Lindsay said. In the Republic, he'd been taught from

childhood to despise violence. Its only legitimate use was against

one's self. But his brush with the antibiotic had changed his

thinking.

"That's what haragei's for." The President slapped his own

belly. "This is your center of gravity, your center of torque. You

meet some enemy in free-fall, and you grapple with him, well,

your head is just a stalk, see? What happens depends on your

center of mass. Your haragei. Your actions, the places where

you can punch out with hands and feet, form a sphere. And that

sphere is centered on your belly. You think of that bubble

around you all the lime."

"Yes sir," Lindsay said. His attention was total.

"That's number one," the President said. "Now we're gonna

talk about number two. Bulkheads. Control of the bulkhead is

control of the fight. If I pull my feet up, off this bulkhead, how

hard do you think I can hit you?"

Lindsay was prudent. "Hard enough to break my nose, sir."

"Okay. But if I have my feet planted, so my own body holds

me fast against the recoil, what then?"

"You break my neck. Sir."

"Good thinking, soldier. A man without bracing is a helpless

man. If you got nothing else, you use the enemy's own body as

bracing. Recoil is the enemy of impact. Impact is damage.

Damage is victory. Understand?"

"Recoil is impact's enemy. Impact is damage, damage is victory," Lindsay said immediately. "Sir."

"Very good," the President said. He then reached out, and,

with a quick pivoting movement, he broke Lindsay's forearm

over his knee with a wet snap. "That's number three," he said

over Lindsay's sudden scream. "Pain."

"Well," said the Second Justice, "I see he showed you the old

number three."

"Yes, ma'am," Lindsay said.

The Second Justice slid a needle into his arm. "Forget that,"

she said kindly. "This isn't the army, this is sick bay. You can

just call me Judge Two."

A rubbery numbness spread over the fractured arm. "Thanks,

Judge." The Second Justice was an older woman, maybe close

to a century. It was hard to tell; her constant abuse of hormone

treatments had made her metabolism a patchwork of anomalies.

Her jawline was freckled with acne, but her wrists and shins

were flaky and varicose-veined.

"You're okay, State, you'll do," she said. She stuck Lindsay's

anesthetized arm into the wide rubber orifice of an old-

fashioned CAT scanner. Multiple x-rays whirred from its ring,

and a pivoting three-D image of Lindsay's arm appeared on the

scanner's screen.

"Good clean break, nothin' to it," she said analytically. "We've

all had it. You're almost one of us now. Want me to scroll you

up while the arm's still numb?"

"What?"

"Tattoos, citizen."

The thought appalled him. "Fine," he said at once. "Go right!

ahead."

"I knew you were okay from the beginning," she said, nudging

him in the ribs. "I'll do you a favor: vein-pop you with some of

those anabolic steroids. You'll muscle up in no time; the Prez'll

think you're a natural." She pulled gently on his forearm; the

sullen grating of jagged bone ends was like something happening

at the other end of a telescope.

She pulled a needled tattoo rig from the wall, where it clung

by a patch of velcro. "Any preferences?"

"I want some moths," Lindsay said.

The history of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy was a simple

one. Fortuna was a major asteroid, over two hundred kilometers

across. In the first flush of success, the original miners had

declared their independence.

As long as the ore held out, they did well. They could buy

their way out of political trouble and could pay for life-

extension treatments from other more advanced worlds.

But when the ore was gone and Fortuna was a mined-out heap

of rubble, they found they had crucially blundered. Their wealth

had vanished, and they had failed to pursue technology with the

cutthroat desperation of rival cartels. They could not survive on

their outmoded expertise or sustain an information economy.

Their attempts to do so only hastened their bankruptcy.

The defections began. The nation's best and most ambitious

personnel were brain-drained away to richer worlds. Fortuna

lost its spacecraft, as defectors decamped with anything not

nailed down.

The collapse was exponential, and the government devolved

upon smaller and smaller numbers of diehards. They got into

debt and had to sell their infrastructure to the Mech cartels;

they even had to auction off their air. The population dwindled

to a handful of knockabout dregs, mostly sundogs who'd me-

andered to Fortuna out of lack of alternatives.

They were, however, in full legal control of a national govern-

ment, with its entire apparat of foreign relations and diplomatic

protocol. They could grant citizenship, coin money, issue letters

of marque, sign treaties, negotiate arms control agreements.

There might be only a dozen of them, but that was irrelevant.

They still had their Mouse, their Senate, their legal precedents,

and their ideology.

They therefore redefined Fortuna, their national territory, as

the boundaries of their last surviving spacecraft, the Red Con-

sensus. Thus equipped with a mobile nation, they were able to

legally annex other people's property into their national bound-

aries. This was not theft. Nations are not capable of theft, a legal

fact of great convenience to the ideologues of the FMD. Protests

were forwarded to the Fortuna legal system, which was computerized and of formidable intricacy.

Lawsuits were the chief source of income for the pirate nation.

Most cases were settled out of court. In practice, this was a

simple process of bribing the pirates to make them go away. But

the pirates were very punctilious about form and took great

pride in preserving the niceties.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 29-9-'16

"What are you doing in the sweatbox, State?"

Lindsay smiled uneasily. "The State of the Nation address," he

said. "I'd prefer to escape it." The President's rhetoric filled the

spacecraft, filtering past the slight figure of the First Representative. The girl slipped into the radiation shelter and wheeled the

heavy hatch shut behind her.

"That ain't very patriotic. State. You're the new hand here;

you ought to listen."

"I wrote it for him," Lindsay said. He knew he had to treat this

woman carefully. She made him nervous. Her sinuous movements, the ominous perfection of her features, and the sharp, somehow overattentive intensity of her gaze all told him that she was Reshaped.

"You Shaper types," she said. "You're slick as glass."

"Are we?" he said.

"I'm no Shaper," she said. "Look at these teeth." She opened

her mouth and showed a crooked overlapping incisor and ca-

nine. "See? Bad teeth, bad genetics."

Lindsay was skeptical. "You had that done yourself."

"I was born," she insisted. "Not decanted."

Lindsay rubbed a fading combat training bruise on his high

cheekbone. It was hot and close in the box. He could smell her.

"I was a ransom," the girl admitted. "A fertilized ovum, but a

Fortuna citizen brought me to term." She shrugged. "I did do

the teeth, it's true."

"You're a rogue Shaper, then," Lindsay said. "They're rare.

Ever had your quotient done?"

"My IQ? No. I can't read," she said proudly. "But I'm Rep

One, the majority whip in the House. And I'm married to?

Senator One."

"Really? He never mentioned it."

The young Shaper adjusted her black headband. Beneath it,

her red-blonde hair was long and done up with bright pink

alligator clips. "We did it for tax reasons. I'd throw you a juice

otherwise, maybe. You're looking good, State." She drifted closer. "Better now that the arm's healed up." She ran one fingertip

along the tattooed skin of his wrist.

"There's always Carnaval," Lindsay said.

"Carnaval don't count," she said. "You can't tell it's me,

tripped out on aphrodisiacs."

"There's three months left till rendezvous," Lindsay said.

"That gives me three more chances to guess."

"You been in Carnaval," she said. "You know what it's like,

shot up on 'disiacs. After that, you ain't you, citizen. You're just

wall-to-wall meat."

"I might surprise you," Lindsay said. They locked eyes.

"If you do I'll kill you, State. Adultery's a crime."

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 13-10-'16

One of the shipboard roaches woke Lindsay by nibbling his

eyelashes. With a start of disgust, Lindsay punched it and it

scuttled away.

Lindsay slept naked except for his groin cup. All the men wore

them; they prevented the testicles from floating and chafing in

free-fall. He shook another roach out of his red-and-silver

jumpsuit, where it feasted on flakes of dead skin.

He got into his clothes and looked about the gym room. Two

of the Senators were still asleep, their velcro-soled shoes stuck

to the walls, their tattooed bodies curled fetally. A roach was

sipping sweat from the female senator's neck.

If it weren't for the roaches, the Red Consensus would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast-off skin and built-up

layers of sweated and exhaled effluvia. Lysine, alanine,

methionine, carbamino compounds, lactic acid, sex pheromones:

a constant stream of organic vapors poured invisibly, day and

night, from the human body. Roaches were a vital part of the

spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking up.

grease.

Roaches had haunted spacecraft almost from the beginning,

too tough and adaptable to kill. At least now they were well-

trained. They were even housebroken, obedient to the chemical

lures and controls of the Second Representative. Lindsay still

hated them, though, and couldn't watch their grisly swarming

and free-fall leaps and clattering flights without a deep conviction that he ought to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Dressed, Lindsay meandered in free-fall through the

filamented doors between docks. The plasticized doors unraveled into strands as he approached and knitted themselves shut

behind him. They were thin but airtight and as tough as steel

when pressed. They were Shaper work. Stolen, probably, Lindsay thought.

He wandered into the control room, drawn by the instrumental

music. Most of the crew was there. The President, two Reps,

and Justice 3 were watching a Shaper agit-broadcast with strap-

on videogoggles.

The Chief Justice was strapped in beside the waist-high con-

sole, monitoring deep-space broadcasts with the ship's drone.

The Chief Justice was by far the oldest member of the crew. He

never took part in Carnaval. This, his age, and his office made

him the crew's impartial arbiter.

Lindsay spoke loudly beside the man's earphones. "Any

news?"

"The siege is still on," the Mech said, without any marked

satisfaction. "The Shapers are holding." He stared emptily at the

control boards. "They keep boasting about their victory in the

Concatenation."

Justice 2 came into the control room. "Who wants some

ketamine?"

Rep 1 took off her videogoggles. "Is it good?"

"Fresh out of the chromatograph. I just made it myself."

"The Concatenation was a real power in my day," the Chief

Justice said. With his earphones on, he hadn't seen or heard the

two women. Something about the broadcast he had monitored

had stirred some deep layer of ancient indignation. "In my day

the Concatenation was the whole civilized world."

Through long habit, the women ignored him, raising their

voices. "Well, how much?" Rep 1 said.

"Forty thousand a gram?" the Judge bargained.

"Forty thousand? I'll give you twenty."

"Come on, girl, you charged me twenty thousand just to do my nails."

Lindsay listened with half an ear, wondering if he could cut

himself in. The EMD still had its own banks, and though its

currency was enormously inflated, it was still in circulation as

the exclusive legal tender of eleven billionaires. Lindsay, unfortunately, as junior crew member, was already deeply in debt.

"Mare Serenitatis," the old man said. "The Corporate Republic." He fixed Lindsay suddenly with his ash-gray eyes. "I hear

you worked for them."

Lindsay was startled. The unwritten taboos of the Red Consensus suppressed discussion of the past. The old Mech's face had

brightened with a reckless upwash of memory. Decades of the

same expressions had dug deep furrows into his ancient muscle

and skin. His face was an idiosyncratic mask.

"I was only there briefly," Lindsay lied. "I don't know the

moondocks well."

"I was born there."

Rep 1 cast an alarmed glance in the old man's direction. "All

right, forty thousand," she said. The two women left for the lab.

The President lifted his videogoggles. He looked sardonically at

Lindsay, then deliberately turned up the volume on his headset.

The other two, Rep 2 and the grizzled Justice 3, ignored the

whole situation.

"The Republic had a system in my day," the Mech said.

"Political families. The Tylers, the Kellands, the Lindsays. Then

there was an underclass of refugees we'd taken in, just before

the Interdict with Earth. The plebes, we called them. They were

the last ones to get off the planet, just before things fell apart.

So they had nothing. We had the kilowatts in our pockets, and

the big mansions. And they had the little plastic slums."

"You were an aristocrat?" Lindsay said. He couldn't restrain

his fatalistic interest.

"Apples," the Mech said sadly. The word was heavy with

nostalgia. "Ever had an apple? They're a kind of vegetable

growth."

"I think so."

"Birds. Parks. Grass. Clouds. Trees." The Mech's right arm, a

prosthetic job, whirred softly as he whacked a roach from the

console with one wire-tendoned finger. "I knew it would come

to trouble, this business with the plebes. ... I even wrote a play

about it once."

"A play? For the theatre? What was it called?"

Vague surprise showed in the old man's eyes. "The Conflagration."

"You're Evan James Tyler Kelland," Lindsay blurted.

"I-ah ... I saw your play. In the archives." Evan Kelland was

Lindsay's own great-granduncle. An obscure radical, his play of

social protest had been lost for years until Lindsay, hunting for

weapons, had found it in the Museum. Lindsay had staged the

play's revival to annoy the Radical Old. The men who had

exiled Kelland were still in power, sustained by Mech technologies after a hundred years. When the time was right they had

exiled Lindsay too.

Now they were in the cartels, he remembered suddenly. Constantine, the descendant of plebes, had cut a deal with the

wireheads. And the aristocracy had paid at last, as Kelland had

prophesied. Lindsay, and Evan Kelland, had only paid early.

"You happened to see my play," Kelland said. Suspicion

turned the lines in his face to deep crevasses. He looked away,

his ash-gray eyes full of pain and obscure humiliation. "You

shouldn't have presumed."

"I'm sorry," Lindsay said. He looked with new dread at his old

kinsman's mechanical arm. "We won't speak of this again."

"That would be best." Kelland turned up his earphones and

seemed to lose the grip on his fury. His eyes grew mild and

colorless. Lindsay looked at the others, deliberately blind be-

hind their videogoggles. None of this had happened.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 27-10-'16

"Sleep troubles, citizen?" said the Second Judge. "Those

steroids getting under your skin, stepping on your dream lime? I

can fix it." She smiled, showing three ancient, discolored teeth

amid a rack of gleaming porcelain.

"I'd appreciate it," Lindsay said, struggling for politeness. The

steroids had covered his long arms with ropes of muscle, healed

the constellation of bruises from constant jujutsu drills, and

filled him with hot flashes of aggressive fury. But they robbed

him of sleep, leaving only feverish catnaps.

As he watched the Fortuna medic through red-rimmed eyes,

he was reminded of his ex-wife. Alexandrina Lindsay had had

just that same china-doll precision of movement, the same

parchmentlike skin, the same telltale age wrinkles on the

knuckles. His wife had been eighty years old. And, watching the

Judge, Lindsay fell stifled by secondhand sexual attraction.

"This'll do it," Judge Two said, drawing up a hypo of muddy

fluid from a plastic-topped vial. "Some REM promoter,

serotonin agonists, muscle relaxant, and just a taste of mnemonics to pry loose troublesome memories. Use it all the time

myself; it's fabulous. While you're out, I'll scroll up the other

arm."

"Not just yet," Lindsay said through gritted teeth. "I haven't

decided what I want on it yet."

The Second Judge put away her tattoo rig with a moue of

disappointment. She seemed to live, eat, and breathe needles,

Lindsay thought. "Don't you like my work?" she said.

Lindsay examined his right arm. The bone had knitted well,

but he'd put on so much muscle that the designs were distorted:

coax-cable snakes with television eyes, white death's-heads with

flat solar-panel wings, knives wreathed in lightning, and every-

where, fluttering along and between them, a horde of white

moths. The skin of his arm from wrist to bicep was so laden

with ink that it felt cold to the touch and no longer sweated.

"It was well done," he said as the hypo sank into his arm

through the hollow eye of a skull. "But wait till I've finished

muscling for the rest, all right, citizen?"

"Sweet dreams," she said.

At night, the Republic was truest to itself. The Preservationists

preferred the night, when watchful older eyes were closed in

sleep.

Truths hidden in daylight revealed themselves in blazing night-

lights. The solar energy of the power panels was the Republic's

currency. Only the wealthiest could squander financial power.

To his right, at the world cylinder's north end, light poured

from the hospitals. In their clinics around the cylinder's axis,

the frail bones of the Radical Old rested easily, almost in

free-fall. Gouts of light spilled from distant windows and landing pads, a smeared and bogus Milky Way of wealth.

Suddenly Lindsay, looking up, was behind those windows. It

was his Great-Grandfather's suite. The old Mechanist floated in

a matrix of life-support tubes, his eye sockets wired to a video

input, in a sterile suite flooded with oxygen.

"Grandfather, I'm leaving," Lindsay said. The old man raised

one hand, so crippled with arthritis that its swollen knuckles

bulged, and rippled, and suddenly burst into a hissing net of

needle-tipped tubes. They whipped into Lindsay, clinging, piercing, sucking. Lindsay opened his mouth to scream-

The lights were far away. He was walking across the fretted

glass windowpane. He emerged onto the Agricultural panel.

A faint smell of curdling rot came with the wind. He was near

the Sours.

Lindsay's shoes hissed through genetically altered wiregrass at

the swamp's margins. Grasshoppers creaked in the undergrowth,

and a chitinous thing the size of a rat scurried away from him.

Philip Constantine had the rot under siege.

The wind gusted. Constantine's tent flapped loudly in the

darkness. By the tent's doorflaps, two globes on stakes shone

yellow bioluminescence.

Constantine's sprawling lent dominated the wiregrass border-

lands, with the Sours to its north and the fertile grainfields

shielded behind it. The no-man's land, where he battled the

contagion, clicked and rustled with newly minted vermin from

his labs. From within, he heard Constantine's voice, choked with sobs.

"Philip!" he said. He went inside.

Constantine sat at a wooden bench before a long metal lab

bureau, cluttered with Shaper glassware. Racks of specimen

cases stood like bookshelves, loaded with insects under study.

Globes on slender, flexible supports cast a murky yellow light.

Constantine seemed smaller than ever, his boyish shoulders

hunched beneath his lab jacket. His round eyes were bloodshot

and his hair was disheveled.

"Vera's burned," Constantine said. He trembled silently and

put his face into his gloved hands. Lindsay sat on the bench

beside him and threw his long, bony arm over Constantine's

back.

They were sitting together as they had sat so often, so long ago. Side by side as usual, joking together in their half-secret argot of Ring Council slang, passing a spiked inhaler back and forth.

They laughed together, the quiet laughter of shared conspiracy.

They were young, and breaking all the rules, and after a few

long whiffs from the inhaler they were brighter than anyone

human had a right to be.

Constantine laughed happily, and his mouth was full of blood.

Lindsay came awake with a start, opened his eyes, and saw the

sick bay of the Red Consensus. He closed his eyes and slept

again at once.

Lindsay's cheeks were wet with tears. He was not sure how

long they had been sitting together, sobbing. It seemed a long

time. "Can we talk freely here, Philip?"

"They don't need police spies here," Constantine said bitterly.

"That's why we have wives."