Schismatrix

"I'm sorry for what's come between us, Philip."

"Vera's dead," Constantine said. He closed his eyes. "You and

I did this. We engineered her death. We share that guilt. We

know our power now. And we've discovered our differences."

Me wiped his eyes with a round disk of filter paper.

"I lied to them," Lindsay said. "I said my uncle died of hear

failure. The inquest said as much. I let them think so, so that I

could shield you. You killed him, Philip. But it was me you;

meant to kill. Only my uncle stumbled into the trap."

"Vera and I discussed it," Constantine said. "She thought you

would fail, that you wouldn't carry out the pact. She knew your

weaknesses. I knew them. I bred those moths for stings and

poison. The Revolution needs its weapons. I gave her the

pheromones to drive them into frenzy. She took them gladly."

"You didn't trust me," Lindsay said.

"And you're not dead."

Lindsay said nothing.

"Look at this!" Constantine peeled off one of his lab gloves.

Beneath it his olive skin was shedding like a reptile's. "It's a

virus," he said. "It's immortality. A Shaper kind, from the cells

themselves, not those Mech prosthetics. I'm committed, cousin."

He picked at an elastic shred of skin. "Vera chose you, not me.

I'm going to live forever, and to hell with you and your cant

about humanities. Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There

are no more souls. Only states of mind. If you think you can

deny that, then here." He handed Lindsay a dissection scalpel.

"Prove yourself. Prove your words weren't empty. Prove you're

better dead and human."

The knife was in Lindsay's hand. He stared at the flesh of his

wrist. He stared at Constantine's throat. He raised the knife over

his head, poised it, and screamed aloud.

The sound woke him, and he found himself in sick bay,

drenched in sweat, while the Second Judge, her eyes heavy with

intoxicants, ran one veiny hand along the inside of his thigh.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 20-11-'16

The Third Representative, or Rep 3 as he was commonly called,

was a stocky, perpetually grinning young man with a scarred

nose and short, brush-cut sandy hair.

Like many EVA experts, he was a space fanatic and spent most of his time outside the ship, towed on long kilometers of line.

Stars talked to him, and the Sun was his friend. He always wore

his spacesuit, even inside the craft, and the whiff of long-

fermented body odor came through its open helmet collar with

eye-watering pungency.

"I'm gonna send out the drone," he said to Lindsay as they ate

together in the control room. "You can hook up to it from in

here. It's almost like being Outside."

Lindsay put aside his empty canister of green paste. The drone

was an ancient planetary probe, found in long-forgotten orbit by

some long-forgotten crew, but its telescopes and microwave an-

tennae were still useful, and it could broadcast as well. Hundreds of klicks out on its fiber-optic cable, the unmanned drone

could pick up deep-space broadcasts and mislead enemy radar

with electronic countermeasures. "Sure, citizen," Lindsay said.

"What the hell."

Rep 3 nodded eagerly. "It'll be beautiful, State. Your brain'll

spread out so-fast-so-thin be like a second skin for you."

"I won't take any drugs," Lindsay said guardedly.

"You can't take drugs," Rep 3 said. "If you take drugs the Sun

won't talk to you." He picked a pair of strap-on videogoggles

from the console and adjusted them over Lindsay's head. With-

in the goggles, a tiny video system projected images directly

onto the eyeballs. The drone was shut down at the moment;

Lindsay saw only an array of cryptic blue alphanumeric

readouts across the bottom of his vision. There was no sense of

a screen. "So far so good," he said.

He heard a series of keyboard clicks as Rep 3 activated the

drone. Then the whole ship shook gently as the robot probe cast

off. Lindsay heard his guide strap on another pair of showphones, and then, through the drone's cameras, he saw the outside of the Consensus for the first time.

It was pitiful how shabby and makeshift it looked. The old

engines had been ripped off the stern and replaced with a

jury-rigged attack tunnel, a long, flexible, accordioned tube with

the jagged teeth of a converted mining drill at its end. A new

engine, one of the old-fashioned Shaper electromagnetic SEPS

types, had been welded on at the end of four long stanchions.

The globular engine was a microwave hazard and was kept as

far as possible from the crew's quarters. Foil-wrapped control

cables snaked up the stanchions, which had been clumsily

bolted to the stern deck.

Beside the stanchions crouched the inert hulk of a mining

robot. Seeing it waiting there, powered down, Lindsay realized

what a powerful weapon it was; its gaping, razor-sharp claws

could rip a ship like tinfoil.

Another mechanism clung to the hull: a parasite rocket. The

old corrugated hull, painted an ugly shade of off-green, bore

scrapes and scratches from the little rocket's magnetic feet.

Being mobile, the parasite handled all the retrorocket work.

The third deck, with its life-support system, was an untidy

mashed tangle of fat ventilation and hydraulics tubes, some so

old that their insulation had burst and hung in puffy free-fall

streamers. "Don't worry, we don't use those," Rep 3 said conversationally.

The four jointed solar panels spread laterally from the fourth

deck, a gleaming cross of black silicon cut by copper gridwork.

The nasty muzzle of the particle beam gun was just visible

around the curve of the hull.

"Little star nation under the Sun's eye," the Rep said. He

swung the drone around so that, briefly, Lindsay saw the drone's

own tether line. Then its cameras focused on the rigging of the

spacecraft's solar sail. In the bow was a storage chamber of

accordioned fabric, but it was empty now; the nineteen tons of

metallic film were spread for light pressure in a silver arc two

kilometers across. The camera zoomed in and Lindsay saw as

the sail expanded that it too was old: creased a bit here and

there, and peppered with micrometeor holes.

"Prez says, next time, if we can afford it, we get a monolayer

sprayer, stencil a big mother-burner skull and crossed lightnings

on the outside of that," the Rep offered.

"Good idea," Lindsay said. He was off steroids now, and

feeling a lot more tolerant.

"I'll take it out," the Rep said. Lindsay heard more clicks, and

suddenly the drone unreeled its way into deep space at frighten-

ing speed. In seconds, the Red Consensus shrank to thimble-size

beside the tabletop smear of its sail. Lindsay was seized with a

gut-wrenching vertigo and clutched blindly at the console. He

closed his eyes tightly within the goggles, then opened them

onto the cosmic panorama of deep space.

"Milky Way," the Rep said. An enormous arc of white spread

itself across half of reality. Lindsay lost control of perspective:

he felt for a moment that the billion white pinpoints of the

galactic ridge were pressing pitilessly down onto his eyeballs. He

closed his eyes again, deeply thankful that he was not actually

out there.

"That's where the aliens will come from," the Rep informed him.

Lindsay opened his eyes. It was just a bubble, he told himself,

with white specks spattered on it: a bubble with himself at its

center-there, now he had it stabilized. "What aliens?"

"The aliens, State." The Rep was genuinely puzzled. "You

know they're out there."

"Sure," Lindsay said.

"Wanna watch the Sun a while? Maybe it'll tell us something."

"How about Mars?" Lindsay suggested.

"No good, it's in opposition. We can try asteroids, though.

Check out the ecliptic." There was a moment's silence, filled by

the low-key music of the control room, as the stars wheeled.

Lindsay used haragei and felt the drone's turning as a smooth

movement around his own center of gravity. The constant training paid off; he felt solid, secure, confident. He breathed from

the pit of his stomach.

"There's one," the Rep said. A distant pinpoint of light centered itself in his field of vision and swelled into a smudge.

When it seemed about finger-sized, its edges fuzzed out and lost

definition. The Rep kicked in the computer resolution and the

image grew into a sausage-shaped cylinder, glowing in false

data-bit colors.

"It's a decoy," the Rep said.

"You think so?"

"Yeah, I've seen 'em. Shaper work. Just a polymer skin, a

balloon. Airtight, though. There might be someone in it."

"I've never seen one," Lindsay said.

"There's thousands." It was true. Shaper claim-jumpers in the

Belt had been manufacturing the decoys for years. The polymer

skins were large enough to house a small outpost of data spies,

drone hijackers, or defectors. Would-be Mech sundogs could

hide from police agencies there, or Shaper cypher experts could

lurk within them, tapping inter-cartel broadcasts.

The strategy was to overload Mech tracking systems with a

swarm of potential hideouts. The Shapers had made a strong

early showing in the struggle for the Belt, and there were still

isolated groups of Shaper agents moving from cell to cell behind

Mech lines while the Ring Council was under siege. Many

decoys were outfitted with propaganda broadcasting systems or

with solar wind-tracking devices that could distort their orbits;

some could shrink and expand repeatedly, disappearing from

Mech radar. It was cheaper to manufacture them than it was to

track down and destroy them, giving the Shapers a financial

edge.

The outpost the Red Consensus had been hired to hit was one

of those manufacturing centers.

"When there's peace," the Rep told him, "you get a dozen of

these, link 'em up with tubeways, and you got a good cheap

nation-station."

"Will there ever be peace?" Lindsay said.

(lacking pp 78-79 of this paper version)

modern Mech cartels, in the Shaper Ring Council, even in the

far-flung outposts of the cometary miners and the blazing smelters of intra-Mercurian orbit, every single thinking being carried

this knowledge. Too many generations had lived and died under

the shadow of catastrophe. It had soaked itself into everyone

from childhood.

Habitats were sacred; sacred because they were frail. The frailty was universal. Once one world was deliberately destroyed,

there could be no more safety anywhere, for anyone. Every

world would burst in a thousand infernos of total war.

There was no true safety. There had never been any. There

were a hundred ways to kill a world: fire, explosion, poison,

sabotage. The constant vigilance exercised by all societies could

only reduce the risk. The power of destruction was in the hands

of anyone and everyone. Anyone and everyone shared the burden of responsibility. The specter of destruction had shaped the

moral paradigm of every world and every ideology.

The destinies of man in space had not been easy, and Lindsay's

universe was not a simple one. There were epidemics of suicide,

bitter power struggles, vicious techno-racial prejudices, the crippling suppression of entire societies.

And yet the ultimate madness had been avoided. There was

war, yes: small-scale ambushes, spacecraft destroyed, tiny min-

ing camps claim-jumped with the murder of their inhabitants:

all the grim and obscure conflicts that burst like sparks from the

grinding impact of the Mech and Shaper superpowers. But

humankind had survived and flourished.

It was a deep and fundamental triumph. On the same deep

level of the mind that held the constant fear, there was a

stronger hope and confidence. Ft was a victory that belonged to

everyone, a victory so thorough and so deep that it had van-

shed from sight, and belonged to that secret realm of the mind

on which everything else is predicated.

And yet these pirates, as pirates must, controlled a weapon of

mass destruction. It was an ancient machine: a relic of a lunatic

era when men first pried open the Pandora crypts of physics. An

age when cosmic explosives had spread across the surface of

Earth like bleeding scabs across the brain of a paretic.

"I fired it myself last week," the President said, "so I know the

Zaibatsu security didn't booby-trap the bastard. Some of the

Mech cartels will do that. Pick you up with frontier craft four

thousand klicks out, shut down your weaponry, then put a delay

chip in the wiring-you pull the trigger, chip vaporizes, nerve

as. . . . It makes no difference. You pull that trigger in combat

you're dead anyway, ninety-nine percent. The Shapers we're

attacking have Armageddon stuff too. We gotta have anything

they have. We gotta do anything they can do. That's nuclear

war, soldier; otherwise, we can't talk together. . . . Now, fire."

"Fire!" cried Lindsay. There was nothing. The gun was silent.

"Something's wrong," Lindsay said.

"Gun down?"

"No, it's my arm. My arm." Me pulled backward. "I can't get it

off the pistol grip. The muscles have knotted."

"They what?" the President said. He gripped Lindsay's fore-

arm. The muscles stood out like cables, cramped in paralytic

rigor.

"Oh, God," Lindsay said, a well-practiced edge of hysteria in

his voice. "I can't feel your hand. Squeeze my arm."

The President crushed his forearm with bruising force.

"Nothing," Lindsay said. He had filled his arm with anesthetic

in the spacesuit. The cramping was a diplomatic trick. It was not

an easy one. He hadn't meant to get his fingers caught around

the grip.

The President dug his calloused fingertips into the outside

groove of Lindsay's elbow. Even past the anesthetic, pain knifed

through the crushed nerves. His hand jumped slightly, releasing

the grip. "I felt that, just a little," he said calmly. There was

something he could do with pain, if the vasopressin would help

him remember. .. . There. The pain transformed itself, lost its

color, became something nastily close to pleasure.

"I could try it left-handed," Lindsay said gamely. "Of course, if

that arm goes too, then - "

"What the hell's wrong with you. State?" The President dug his

thumb cruelly into the complex of nerves in Lindsay's wrist.

Lindsay felt the agony as a cool black sheet draped across his

brain. He almost lost consciousness; his eyes fluttered and he

smiled faintly.

"It must be some Shaper thing," he said. "Neural programming. They fixed it so that I could never do this." He swallowed

hard. "It's like it's not my arm." Sweat beaded on his forehead.

He was so wired on vasopressin that he could feel each muscle

in his face as a separate entity, just like they taught at the

Academy.

"I can't accept this," the President told him. "If you can't pull

the trigger then you can't be one of us."

"It might be possible to rig up some kind of mechanical thing,"

Lindsay said adroitly. "Some kind of piston-powered glove I

could fit over it. I'm willing, sir. It's this that's not." He lifted

the arm, stiffly, from the shoulder, then slammed it down on the

hard-edged ridge of the gun. He hit it again. "I can't feel it."

Skin peeled from the muscle. Bright microglobes of blood

leaped up to float in midair. The arm stayed rigid. A flat

amoebalike ripple of blood oozed from the long scrape.

"We can't try an arm for treason," the President said.

Lindsay shrugged one-sidedly. "I'm doing my best, sir." He I

knew that he would never pull that trigger. He thought they

might kill him for it, though he hoped to escape that. Life was I

important, but not so crucial as the trigger.

"We'll see what Judge Two says," the President said.

Lindsay was willing. This much had gone according to plan.

Judge Two was asleep in sick bay. She came awake with a start,

her eyes wild. She saw the blood, then stared at the President.

"Burn it, you've hurt him again."

"Not me," said the President, with a flicker of confusion and

guilt. The President explained while Judge 2 examined the arm

and bandaged it. "Might be psychosomatic."

"I want that arm moving," the President said. "Do it, soldier."

"Yes sir," said the Judge, startled. She hadn't realized they

were under military rule. She scratched her head. "I'm outa my

depth. I'm just a mechanic, not some Shaper psychotech." She

looked sidelong at the President; he was adamant. "Lemme

think. . . . This should do it." She produced another vial,

labeled in an impenetrable scrawl. "Convulsant. Five times as

powerful as the nerves' own firing signals." She drew up three

cc's. "We'd better tourniquet that arm. If this hits his blood-

stream it'll really rack him up." She looked guiltily at Lindsay.

"This'll hurt some. A lot."

Lindsay saw his chance. His arm was full of anesthetic, but he

could fake the pain. If he seemed to suffer badly enough, they

might forget about the test. They would feel he'd been punished

enough, for something that wasn't his fault. The Judge was

sympathetic; he could play her against the President. Their guilt

would do the rest.

He spoke sternly. "The President knows best. You should

follow his orders. Never mind my arm, it's numb anyway."

"You'll feel this, State. If you ain't dead." The needle went in.

She twisted the hose tight around his bicep. The tattoos rippled

as his veins began to bulge.

When agony hit he knew the anesthetic was useless. The

convulsant scorched him like acid. "It's burning!" he screamed.

"It's burning!" His arm rippled, its muscles writhing eerily. It

began to flop in spasms, yanking one end of the hose loose from the Judge's grip.

Congested blood seeped past the tourniquet into Lindsay's

chest. He choked on a scream and bent double, his face gray.

The drug crept like hot wires around his heart. He swallowed

his tongue and went into convulsions.

He was near death for two days. By the time he'd recovered,

the others had reached a decision. No one ever spoke of the test

again. It had never happened.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 19-12-'16

"It's just a rock," said Rep 2. She brushed a roach from the

videoscreen.

"It's the target," said the Speaker of the House. The control

room was powered down, and the familiar chorus of pops, squeaks, and rumbles had dwindled to a faint, tense scratching.

The Speaker's face was greenish with screen light. "It's camouflage. They're in there. I can feel it."

"It's a rock," said Senator 3. Her tool belt rattled as she drifted

overhead, watching the screen. "They've scrammed, they've scarpered. There's no infrareds."

Lindsay drifted quietly in a corner of the control room, not

watching the screen. He was rubbing the tattooed skin of his

right arm, slowly, absently, staring at nothing. The skin had

healed, but the combination of drugs had burned the crushed

nerves. His skin felt rubbery below the cold ink of his tattoos.

His right-hand fingertips were numb.

He had no faith in the Shapers' restraint. The billowing sunsail

of the Red Consensus was supposed to hide the ship itself from

radar, preventing a preemptive strike from the asteroid. But he

expected at any moment to feel the last half second of impact as

Shaper weapons tore the ship apart. From within the gun room,

he heard the whine of the gunner's seat as Justice 3 shifted

nervously.

"They're waiting for us to drift past," the President said.

"They're waiting for a shot past the sail."

"They can't just blow us away," Senator 2 said plaintively. "We

might be sundogs. Mech defectors."

"Stay on that drone, Rep Three!" the President ordered.

Smiling sunnily, Rep 3 removed his earphones and turned his

goggled face toward the others. "What's that, Mr. President?"

"I said stay on those frequencies, God damn it!" the President

shouted.

"Oh, that," said Rep 3. He scratched within his spacesuit

collar, holding the doubled phones to one ear. "I was doing that

already. And -oh, yeah." He paused, while the crew held their

breath. The goggles blocked his eyesight, but he reached out

unerringly and touched switches on the board before him. The

control room was filled with a high-pitched staccato whine.

"Cut it in on visuals," Rep 3 explained, tapping the keyboard.

The asteroid vanished, replaced on the screen by column after

column of alphanumeric gibberish:

TCGAGGCTATCTAGCTAAAGCTCTCCCGATCGATATCGTCTCGAGATCGATCGATGCRTAGCRAGCTAGTTGTCGATCGTAGGGCTCGAGCTA. . .

"Shaper genetics code," the Speaker said. "I told you so."

"Their last signal before we take them out," the President said

boldly. "I'm declaring martial law as of this moment. I want

everyone in battle gear-except you, State. Hop to it."

The crew scrambled, their nerves unkinking in a burst of

action. Lindsay watched them go, thinking of the stream of data

to the Ring Council that had betrayed the outpost.

The Shapers might have thrown their lives away with that last

cry. But the enemy, at least, had someone who would know

their deaths, and mourn.

CHAPTER FOUR

ESAIRS XII: 21-12-'16

They called the asteroid ESAIRS 89-XII, the only name it had ever

had, drawn from an ancient catalog. ESAIRS XII was a potato-

shaped lump of slag, half a kilometer long.

The Red Consensus hovered over its bulging equator, anchored by a guy line.

Lindsay pulled himself one-handed down the line. Glimpsed

through his faceplate, the asteroid was dark, with long coal-

powder streaks of carbonaceous ore. Cold gray and white blurs

marked the charred impact points of primeval collisions. The

biggest craters were eighty meters across, huge lava sumps of

cracked slag and splattered glass.

Lindsay landed. The expanse beneath his boots was like pumice, a static off-while surf of petrified bubbles. He could see up

and down the asteroid's length, but its width curved out of sight

behind a horizon a dozen steps away.

He bent and pulled himself along, gripping knobs and cavities

with the rough fingers of his gauntlets. The right hand was bad.

The tough interior fabric of the glove felt soft as cotton to his

nerve-burned fingers.

He crawled, legs bobbing aimlessly, over the rim of an oblong

crater, the scarred gouge of some glancing collision. It was five

times as deep as he was tall, and its floor was a long gas-

smoothed blister of greenish basalt. A long bloated ridge of

molten rock had almost lifted free into space but then frozen,

preserving every last ripple and warp. . . .

It slid aside. The rock ridge shriveled, crumpling like silk, its

warps and bumps revealed as shaded camouflage on a plastic

film.

A cavern yawned below. It was a tunnel, curving just below the surface.

Lindsay picked his way cautiously down the slope and flung

himself into the tunnel. He braced himself against its walls.

Stretching overhead, he pushed against the tunnel's ceiling to

plant his feet.

Sunlight dawned over the tiny horizon and fell into the tunnel.

It was precisely circular and inhumanly smooth. Six tracks of

thin metallic ribbon had been epoxied into place, running

lengthwise along the corridor. In raw sunlight the tracks had the

gleam of copper.

The tunnel apparently girdled the asteroid. It curved rapidly,

like the horizon. Before him, almost hidden by the tunnel's

curvature, he glimpsed the dim sheen of brown plastic. Jumping

and shoving along the walls, he bounced toward it in free-fall.

It was a plastic film with an inset fabric airlock. Lindsay pulled

the zippered airlock tag and stepped in. He zipped it up behind

him, undid a second zipper in the lock's inner wall, and

climbed through.

He was in a cavernous black and ocher balloon. It had been

blown up within the tunnel, filling it tightly.

A figure in a plastic decontamination suit floated upside down

below the ceiling, a bright green silhouette against hand-sprayed

black arabesques on an ocher background.

Lindsay's suit had gone flat, indicating air pressure. He took

his helmet off and inhaled cautiously. It was an oxy-nitrogen

mix, standard air.

Lindsay held his right arm across his chest with deliberate

awkwardness. "I, uh, have a prepared statement to read. If you

have no objection."

"Please proceed." The woman's voice was thin, half muffled.

He glimpsed her face behind the plate: cold eyes, tawny skin,

dark hair held in a green net.

Lindsay read the words slowly, without inflection. "Greetings

from the Fortuna Miners' Democracy. We are an independent

nation, operating under the rule of law, firmly predicated on a

basis of individual civil rights. As emigrants into our national

territory, new members of the body politic are subject to a brief

naturalization process before assuming full citizenship. We re-

gret any inconvenience caused by the imposition of a new politi-

cal order.

"It is our policy that ideological differences be settled by a

process of negotiation. To that end, we have deputized our

Secretary of State to establish preliminary terms, subject to

ratification by the Senate. It is the wish of the Fortuna Miners'

Democracy, as expressed in House Joint Resolution Sixteen,

Sixty-Seventh Session, that you begin negotiation without delay

under the Secretary's aegis, so that the interim period may be as

brief and as secure as possible.

"We extend to our future -citizens the hand of friendship and

warm congratulations.

"Signed, President."

Lindsay looked up.

"You'll want a copy of this," he said, extending it.

The Shaper woman floated closer. Lindsay saw that she was

beautiful. It meant very little. Beauty was cheap among Shapers.

She took the document. Lindsay pulled more from a hip valise,

with his left hand. "These are my credentials." He handed them

over: a wad of recycled printout gaudy with Fortuna foil seals.

The woman said, "My name is Nora Mavrides. The rest of the

Family has asked me to convey to you our impression of the

situation. We feel that we can convince you that the actions

you've taken are rash, and that you can profit by turning your

attention elsewhere. We ask for nothing but the time to con-

vince you. We have even shut down our main gun."

Lindsay nodded. "That's nice. Very good. Should impress the

government very much. I'd like to see this gun."

"We are inside it," said Nora Mavrides.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 22-12-'16

Lindsay said, "I played dumb. But I don't think she bought it."

He was addressing a joint session of the House and Senate, with

the Speaker of the House presiding. The President was in the

audience. The Supreme Court Justices were manning the gun

and control room, listening in on intercom.

The President shook his head. "She believed it. Shapers always

think we're stupid. Hell, to Shapers we are stupid" Lindsay said,

"We're tethered just past the outlet of their

launch ring. It's a long circular tunnel, a ring around the rock's

center of gravity, cored just under the surface. It has magnetic

snips for acceleration and some kind of magnetic launch buck-

et."

"I heard of those," said Justice 3, over the intercom. He was

their regular gunner, a former miner, close to a century old. "It

starts with just a little boost, get that bucket up, magnetized.

Rides on a magnetic cushion, then you accelerate it, let it zip

around a while, then brake it just behind the outlet. The bucket

slows but the cargo shoots out at klicks per second."

"Klicks per second?" said the Speaker of the House. "That

could blow us away."

"No," said the President. "They'd have to use a lot of power

for a launch. This close, we'd pick up the magnetics."

"They won't let us in," Lindsay said. "Their Family lives clean.

No microbes, or only tailored ones. And we have Zaibatsu stuff

in every pore. They're going to offer us loot to go away."

"That's not our assignment," the Speaker said.

"We can't judge their loot unless we see their quarters," Rep 1

said. The young Shaper renegade brushed at her hair with

enameled fingertips. She had been dressing well lately.

"We can dig our way in with the excavator," the President said.

"We'll use the sonar readings we made. We gol a good idea of

the closest tunnels to the surface. We could core in in five-ten

minutes, while State negotiates." He hesitated. "They might kill

us for it."

The Speaker's voice held cold certainty. "We're dead anyway,

if they keep holding us off at arm's length. Our gun is short-

range. That launch ring can plaster us hours after we leave."

"They didn't do it before," said Rep I.

"Now they know who we are."

"There's only one thing for it," the President said. "Put it to a

vote."

ESAIRS XII: 23-12-'16

"We're a miners' democracy, after all," Lindsay told Nora

Mavrides. "According to Forluna ideology, we had a perfect

right to drill. If you'd mapped your tunnel network for us, this

wouldn't have happened."

"You risked everything," Nora Mavrides said.

"You have to admit there were benefits," Lindsay said. "Now

that your network has been, as you say, 'contaminated,' we can

at least meet face to face, without spacesuits."

"It was reckless, Secretary."

Lindsay touched his chest left-handed. "Look at it from our

perspective, Dr. Mavrides. The FMD will not wait indefinitely

to take possession of its own property. I think we've been quite

reasonable.

"You keep assuming that we mean to leave. We are settlers,

not brigands. We won't be turned aside by nebulous promises

and anti-Mechanist propaganda. We are miners."

"Pirates. Mech hirelings."

Lindsay shrugged one-sidedly.

"Your arm," she said. "Is it really hurt? Or do you pretend it,

to make me think you're harmless?"

Lindsay said nothing.

"I take your point," she said. "There's no true negotiation

without trust. Somewhere we have common ground. Let's find

it."

Lindsay straightened his arm. "All right, Nora. If this is between just the two of us, role-playing aside, let's hear you. I can

bear any level of frankness you're willing to advance."

"Tell me your name, then."

"It won't mean anything to you." She was silent. "It's

Abelard," he said. "Call me Abelard."

"What's your gene-line, Abelard?"

"I'm no Shaper."

"You're lying, Abelard. You move like one of us. The arm

business camouflaged it, but your clumsiness is too deliberate.

How old are you? A hundred? Less? How long have you been

sundogging it?"

"Does that matter?" Lindsay said.

"You can go back. Believe me, it's different now. The Council

needs you. I'll sponsor you. Join us, Abelard. We're your people. Not these germy renegades."

Lindsay reached out. Nora drew back, the long laces of her

sleeve ties jerking in free-fall.

"You see," Lindsay said. "I'm as filthy as they are." lie

watched her closely.

She was beautiful. The Mavrides clan was a gene line he hadn't seen before. Wide, hazel eyes, with a trace of epicanthic fold,

more Amerindian than oriental. High cheekbones, straight aquiline nose. Feathery black eyebrows, and a wealth of shimmering

black hair, which in free-fall formed a bushy mass of curled

tendrils. Nora's hair was confined in a loose free-fall headdress,

a jade-green plastic turban with a crimson drawstring at the

back and a serrated fringe of forest green above her bangs. Her

coppery skin was clear and inhumanly smooth, with a dusting of

rouge.

There were six of them. They had a close family resemblance,

but they were not identical clones. The six were that tiny per-

centage of the Mavrides gene-line which had been drafted: Kleo,

Paolo, Fazil, lan, Agnes, and Nora Mavrides. Kleo was their

leader. She was forty. Nora was twenty-eight. The rest were all

seventeen years old.

Lindsay had seen them. He'd pitied them. The Ring Council

did not waste investment. A seventeen-year-old genius was more

than sufficient for the assignment, and they were cheap. They

had looked him over with cold hazel eyes, with the alert and

revolted stare that a man reserves for vermin. They longed to

kill him, with a hunger tempered only by disgust.

It was loo late for that now. They should have killed him far

away, when they could have stayed clean. Now he was too close.

His skin, his breath, his teeth, even his blood seethed with

corruption.

"We have no antiseptics," Nora said. "We never thought we'd

need them. It won't be pleasant for us, Abelard. Boils, weals,

rashes. Dysentery. There's no help for it. Even if you left tomorrow, (he air from your ship ... it was crawling." She spread her

hands. Her blouse had scarlet drawstrings at the wrists, with

puffed slashed sleeves showing the smooth skin of her forearms.

The blouse was a wraparound garment, tied with short strings at

each hip and belted at the waist. She'd sewn it herself, embroidering the lapels in pink-and-white gridwork. Below it she wore

shorts cinched at the knee and lace-up crimson sandals.

"I'm sorry," Lindsay said. "But it's better than dying. The

Shapers are burned, Nora. They're finished. I have no love for

the Mechs, believe me." For the first time, he gestured with his

right arm. "Let me tell you something I'll deny if you repeat.

The Mechs wouldn't exist if it weren't for you. Their Union of

Cartels is a sham. It's only united by fear and hatred of the

Reshaped. When they've destroyed the Ring Council, as they

must, the Mechs themselves will fly to pieces.

"Please, Nora. See it my way for a moment, for the sake of

argument. I know you're committed, I know you're loyal to

your gene-line, your people back home. But your death won't

save them. They're burned, doomed. It's just you and us now.

Eighteen people. I've lived with these Fortunans. We know what

they are. They're scum, pirates, marauders. Failures. Victims,

Nora. They live in the gap between what's right and what's

possible.

"But if you go along, they won't kill you. It's your chance, a

chance for the six here. . . . After they've shut you down, they'll

go back to the cartels. If you surrender, they'll take you along.

You're all young. Disguise your pasts, and in a century you

could be running those cartels. Mech, Shaper, those are only

labels. The point is that we live."

"You're tools," the woman said. "Victims, yes, I'll accept that.

We're victims ourselves. But victims in a better cause than

yours. We came here naked, Abelard. We were shipped here in

a one-way drogue, and the only reason we weren't blown away

in flight is because the Council launches fifty decoys for every

real mission. It costs the cartels mote to kill us than we're

worth.

"That's why they hired you. The rich Mechs, the ones in

power, have turned you on us. And we were surviving. We made

this base from nothing with our hands, brains, and wetware. It

was you who came to kill us."

"But we're here now," Lindsay said. "What's past can't be

helped. I'm begging you to let me live, and yon give me ideology. Please, Nora, bend a little. Don't kill us all."

"I want to live," she said. "It's you who should join us here.

Your lot won't be of much use, but we could tolerate you.

You'll never be true Shapers, but there's room for the

unplanned under our aegis. In one way or another, we outflank

every move the cartels make against us."

"You're under siege," Lindsay said.

"We break out. Haven't you heard? The Concatenation will

declare for us. We have one circumlunar already: the Mare

Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic."

Even here Constantine's shadow had touched him. "You call

that a triumph?" he said. "Those decadent little worlds? Those

broken-down relics?"

"We will rebuild them," she said with chilling confidence. "We

own their youth."

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 1-1-'17

"Welcome aboard, Dr. Mavrides," the President said. He extended his hand. Nora shook it without hesitation; her skin was

protected under the thin plastic of her spacesuit.

"A fine beginning for the new year," Lindsay said. They were

on the control deck of the Red Consensus. Lindsay realized how

much he'd missed the familiar pop-blip-and-squeak of the instruments. The sound settled into him, releasing tension he

hadn't known he had.

The negotiations were twelve days old. He'd forgotten how bad the pirates looked, how consummately grubby. They had

clogged pores, hair rank with grease, teeth rimmed with plaque.

To a Shaper's eyes they looked like wild animals.

"This is our third agreement," the President said formally.

"First the Open Channels Act, then the Technological Assessment and Trade Consensus, and now a real breakthrough in

social justice policy, the Integration Act. Welcome to the Red

Consensus, doctor. We hope you'll regard every angstrom of the

craft as part of your national heritage."

The President pinned the printout treaty to a bulkhead and

signed it with a flourish. Lindsay printed the state seal with his

left hand. The flimsy paper ripped a little.

"We're all nationals here," the President said. "Let's relax a

little. Get to, uh, know each other." He pulled a gunmetal

inhaler and sniffed at it ostentatiously.

"You sew that spacesuit yourself?" the Speaker of the House

said.

"Yes, Madam Speaker. The seams are threadwire and epoxy

from our wetware tanks."

"Clever."

"I like your roaches," said Rep 2. "Pink and gold and green.

Hardly look like roaches at all. I'd like to have some of those."

"That can be arranged, I'm sure," Nora said.

"Trade you some relaxant for it. I have lots."

"Thank you," Nora said. She was doing well. Lindsay felt

obscurely proud of her.

She unzipped her spacesuit and stepped out of it. Below it she

wore a triangular over-the-shoulders poncho, geometrically embroidered in white and ice blue. The poncho's tapering ends

were laced across her hips, leaving her legs bare except for

lace-up velcro sandals.

The pirates had tactfully given up their red-and-silver skeleton

jumpsuits. Instead they wore dun-brown Zaibatsu coveralls.

They looked like savages.

"I could do with one of these," said Rep 3. He held the

accordioned arm of his ancient spacesuit next to the thin plastic

of hers. "How you breathe in that sucker?"

"It's not for deep space. We just fill it with pure oxygen and

breathe as long as we can. Ten minutes."

"I could hook tanks to one. More spacey, citizen-to-be. The

Sun would like it."

"We could teach you to sew one. It's an art worth knowing."

She smiled at Rep 3, and Lindsay shuddered inwardly. He knew

how the sweaty reek of the Rep's suit must turn her stomach.

He drifted between the two of them, unobtrusively nudging

Rep 3 to one side. And, for the first time, he touched Nora

Mavrides. He put his hand gently on the soft blue and white

shoulder of her poncho. The muscle beneath his hand was as

stiff as wire.

She smiled again, quickly. "I'm sure the others will find this

ship fascinating. We came here in a drogue. Our cargo was

nine-tenths ice, for the wetware tanks. We were in paste, close

to dead. We had our robot and our pocket tokamak. The rest

was bits and pieces. Wire, a handful of microchips, some salt

and trace minerals. The rest's genetics, Eggs, seeds, bacteria. We

came here naked, to save launch weight. Everything else we've

done with our hands, friends. Flesh against rock. Flesh wins, if

it's smart enough."

Lindsay nodded. She had not mentioned their electromagnetic

pulse weapon. No one talked about the guns.

She struggled to charm the pirates, but her pride stung them.

The pride of the Family was justified. They'd bootstrapped

themselves into prosperity with bacterial wetware from gelatin

capsules no bigger than pinheads. They had mastered plastics;

they conjured them out of the rock. Their artifacts were as

cheap as life itself.

They had grown themselves into the rock; wormed their way in with softbodied relentless persistence. ESAIRS was riddled with

tunnels; their sharp-toothed tunneling hoops ran around the

clock. They had air blowers rigged from vinyl sacks and ribs of

memory plastic. The ribs breathed. They were wired to the

tokamak fusion plant, and a small change in voltage made them

bend and flex, bend and flex, sucking in air with a pop of plastic

lung and an animal wheeze of exhalation. It was the sound of

life inside the rock, the rasp of the hoops, the blowers breathing, the sullen gurgling of the fermenters.

They had plants. Not just algae and protein goo but flowers:

roses, phlox, daisies-or plants that had known those names

before their DNA had felt the scalpel. Celery, lettuce, dwarf

corn, spinach, alfalfa. Bamboo: with fine wire and merciless

patience they could warp bamboo into complex pipes and bot-

tles. Eggs: they even had chickens, or things that had once been

chickens before Shaper gene-splicers turned them into free-fall

protein tools.

They were powerful, subtle, and filled with desperate hatred.

Lindsay knew that they were waiting for their chance, weighing

odds, calculating. They would attack to kill if they could, but

only when they could maximize the chance of their own survival.

But he also knew that with each day that passed, with each

minor concession and agreement, another frail layer of shellac

was laid over the open break between them. Day by day a new

status quo struggled to form, a frail detente supported by nothing but habit. It was not much, but it was all he had: the hope

that, with time, the facade of peace would take on substance.

ESAIRS XII: 3-2-'17

"Hey. Secretary of State."

Lindsay woke. In the ghostlike gravity of the asteroid he had

settled imperceptibly to the bottom of his cavern. They called

his dugout "the Embassy." With the passage of the Integration

Act, Lindsay had moved into the rock, with the rest of the FMD.

Paolo had spoken. Fazil was with him. The two young men

wore embroidered ponchos and stiff plastic crowns holding

floating manes of shoulder-length hair.

The skin bacteria had hit them badly. Every day they looked

worse. Paolo's neck was so badly inflamed that his throat looked

cut. Fazil's left ear was infected; he carried his head tilted to

one side.

"We want to show you something," Paolo said. "Can you come

with us, Mr. Secretary? Quietly?" His voice was gentle, his hazel

eyes so clear and guileless that Lindsay knew at once that he

was up to something. Would they kill him? Not yet. Lindsay

laced on a poncho and struggled with the complex knots of his

sandals. "I'm at your disposal," he said.

They floated into the corridor. The corridors between dugouts

were o more than long wormholes, a meter across. The Mavrides clansmen propelled themselves along with a quick

side-to-side lizardlike skittering. Lindsay was slower. His injured

arm was bad today, and his hand felt like a club.

They glided silently through the soft yellow light of one of the

fermenting rooms. The blunt, nippled ends of three wetware

bags jutted into the room. They were stuffed like a string of

sausages into stone tunnels. Each tunnel held a series of bags,

united by filters, each bag passing its output to the next. The last

bag had a spinneret running, a memory-plastic engine, clacking

slowly. A hollow tube of flawless clear acrylic coiled in free-fall,

reeking as it dried.

They entered another black tunnel. The tunnels were all identical, all perfectly smooth. There was no need for lighting. Any

genius could easily memorize the nexus.

To his left Lindsay heard the slow clack-rasp, clack-rasp of a

tunneling hoop. The hoops were handmade, their teeth hand-set

in plastic, and they each sounded slightly different. They helped

him navigate. They could gnaw two meters a day through the

softer rock. In two years they had gnawed over twenty thousand

tons of ore.

When the ore was processed, the tailings were shot into space.

Everything launched away left a hole behind it. A hole ten

kilometers long, pitch black, and as knotted as snarled fishline,

beaded with living caverns, greenhouses, wetware rooms, and

private hideyholes.

They took a turn Lindsay had never used before. Lindsay heard the grating sound of a stone plug hauled away.

They went a short distance, squirming past the flaccid bulk of

a deactivated air blower. As Lindsay crawled past it in the

darkness, the blower came to life with a gasp.

"This is our secret place," Paolo said. "Mine and Fazil's." His

voice echoed in the darkness.

Something fizzed loudly with a leaping of white-hot sparks.

Startled, Lindsay braced to fight. Paolo was holding a short

white stick with flame gnawing at one end. "A candle," he said.

"Kindle?" said Lindsay. "Yes, I see."

"We play with fire," Paolo said. "Fazil and I."

They were in a workshop cavern, dug into one of the large

stony veins within ESAIRS XII. The walls looked like granite to Lindsay's untrained eye: a grayish-pink rock studded with little

gleams of rock crystal.

"There was quartz here," Paolo said. "Silicon dioxide. We

mined it for oxygen, then Kleo forgot about it. So we drilled this

room ourselves. Right, Fazil?"

Fazil spoke eagerly. "That's right, Mr. Secretary. We used

hand drills and expansion plastic. See where the rock shattered

and came loose? We hid the chunks in the debris for launch, so

that no one knew. We worked for days and saved the biggest

chunk."

"Look," Paolo said. He touched the wall, and the stone wrinkled in his hand and came away. In a broken-out rough cavity

the size of a closet, an oblong boulder floated, kept from falling

by a thread. Paolo snapped the thread and pulled the boulder

out. It moved sluggishly; Fazil helped him stop its inertia.

It was a two-ton sculpture of Paolo's head.

"Very fine work," Lindsay said. "May I?" He ran his fingertips

across the slickly polished cheekbone. The eyes, wide and alert,

cored out for pupils, were as big as his outstretched hands.

There was a faint smile on the enormous lips.

"When they sent us out here, we knew we weren't coming

back," Paolo said. "We'll die here, and why? Not because our

genetics are bad. We're a good line. Mavrides rule." He was

talking faster now, falling into the cadences of Ring Council

slang.

Fazil nodded silently.

"It's just bad percentages. Chance. We were burned by chance

before we were twenty years old. You can't edit out chance.

Some of the gene-line are bound to fall so the rest can live. If it

weren't me and Fazil, it would be our crechemates."

"I understand," Lindsay said.

"We're young and cheap. They throw us into the enemy's teeth so the ink is black not red. But we're alive, me and Fazil.

There's something inside us. We'll never see ten percent of the

life the others back home will see. But we were here. We're

real."

"Living is better," Lindsay said.

"You're a traitor," Paolo said without resentment. "Without a

gene-line you're bloodless, you're just a system."

"There are more important things than living," Fazil said.

"If you had enough time you'd outlive this war," Lindsay said.

Paolo smiled. "This is no war. This is evolution in action. You

think you'll outlive that?"

Lindsay shrugged. "Maybe. What if aliens come?"

Paolo looked at him wide-eyed. "You believe in that? The

aliens?"

"Maybe."

"You're all right," Paolo said.

"How can I help you?" Lindsay said.

"It's the launch ring. We plan to launch this head. An oblique

launch, top velocity, full power, off the plane of the ecliptic.

Maybe somebody sees it someday. Maybe some thing, five hundred million years, no trace of human life, picks it up, my face.

There's no debris off the plane, no collisions, just dead-space

vacuum, perfect. And it's good hard rock. Out this far the sun

could go red giant and barely warm it. It could orbit till white

dwarf stage, maybe till black cinder, till the galaxy bursts or the

Kosmos eats its own tail. My image forever."

"Only first we have to launch it," said Fazil.

"The President won't like it," Lindsay said. "The first treaty we

signed said no more launches for the duration. Maybe later,

when our trust is stronger."

Paolo and Fazil traded glances. Lindsay knew at once that

things were out of hand.

"Look," he said. "You two are talented. You have a lot of time

on your hands since the launch ring's down. You could do

heads of all of us."

"No!" Paolo shouted. "It's between us two, that's it."

"What about you, Fazil? Don't you want one?"

"We're dead," Fazil said. "This took us two years. There was

only time for one. Chance burned us both. One of us had to

give everything for nothing. So we decided. Show him, Paolo."

"He shouldn't look," Paolo said sullenly. "He doesn't under-

stand."

"I want him to know, Paolo." Fazil was stern. "Why I have to

follow, and you get to lead. Show him, Paolo."

Paolo reached under his poncho and pulled out a hinged box

of clear acrylic. There were two stone cubes in it, black cubes

with white dots on their faces. Dice.

Lindsay licked his lips. He had seen this in the Ring Council:

endemic gambling. Not just for money, but for the core of

personality. Secret agreements. Dominance games. Sex. The

struggles within gene-lines, between people who knew with flat

certainty that they were equally matched. The dice were quick

and final.

"I can help you," Lindsay said. "Let's negotiate."

"We're supposed to be on duty," Paolo said. "Monitoring

radio. We're leaving, Mr. Secretary."

"I'll come along," Lindsay said.

The two Shapers resealed the stone lid of their secret work-

shop and scuttled off in the darkness. Lindsay followed as best

he could.

The Shapers had listening dishes dug in all over the asteroid.

The bowl-shaped impact craters were ready-made for their cam-

ouflaged gridworks of copper mesh. All antennae fed into a

central processor, whose delicate semiconductors were sheltered

in a tough acrylic console. Slots in the console held cassettes of

homemade recording tape, constantly spooling on a dozen different heads. Another cutout on the acrylic deck held a flat liquid crystal display for video copy and a hand-lettered key-

board.

The two genetics combed the waveband, flickering through a

spectrum of general-issue cartel broadcasts. Most bands were

cypher-static, anonymous blips of cybernetic datapulse. "Here's

something," Paolo said. "Triangulate it, Fazil."

"It's close," Fazil said. "Oh, it's just the madman."

"What?" Lindsay said. A huge green roach speckled in lustrous violet flew past with a clatter of wings.

"The one who always wears the spacesuit." The two glanced at

one another. Lindsay read their eyes. They were thinking about

the man's stench.

"Is he talking?" Lindsay said. "Put him on, please."

"He always talks," Paolo said. "Sings, mostly. He raves into an

open channel."

"He's in his new spacesuit," Lindsay said urgently. "Put him

on."

He heard Rep 3. " - granulated like my mother's face. And

sorry not to say goodbye to my friend Mars. Sorry for Carnaval,

too. I'm out kilometers, and that hiss. I thought it was a new

friend, trying to talk. But it's not. It's a little hole in my back,

where I glued the tanks in. Tanks work fine, hole works better.

It's me and my two skins, soon both cold."

"Try and raise him!" Lindsay said.

"I told you he keeps the channel open. That unit's two hundred years old if it's a day. He can't hear us when he talks."

"I'm not reeling back in, I'm staying out here." His voice was

fainter. "No air to talk with, and no air to listen. So I'll try and

climb out. Just a zipper. With any luck I can skin out completely." There was a light crackling of static. "Goodbye, Sun.

Goodbye, Stars. Thanks for-"

The words were lost in a rush of decompression. Then the

crackling of static was back. It went on and on.

Lindsay thought it through. He spoke quietly. "Was I your

alibi, Paolo?"

"What?" Paolo was shocked.

"You sabotaged his suit. And then you carefully weren't here

when we could have helped him."

Paolo was pale. "We were never near his suit, I swear!"

"Then why weren't you here at your post?"

"Kleo set me up!" Paolo shouted, "lan walks point, the dice

said so! I'm supposed to be clean!"

"Shut up, Paolo." Fazil grabbed his arm.

Paolo tried to stare him down, then turned to Lindsay. "It's

Kleo and lan. They hate my luck - " Fazil shook him.

Paolo slapped him hard across the face. Fazil cried out and

threw his arms around Paolo, holding him close.

Paolo looked stricken. "I was upset," he said. "I lied about

Kleo; she loves all of us. It was an accident. An accident."

Lindsay left. He scrambled headlong down the tunnels, passing

more wetware and a greenhouse where a blower gusted the

smell of fresh-cut hay.

He entered a cavern where grow-lights shone dusky red

through a gas-permeable membrane. Nora's room branched off

from the cavern, blocked by the wheezing bulk of her private air

blower. Lindsay squeezed past it on the exhale and slapped the

lights.

Violet arabesques covered the room's round walls. Nora was

sleeping.

Her arms, her legs, were gripped in wire. Braces circled her

wrists and elbows, ankles and knees. Black myoelectrodes stud-

ded the muscle groups beneath her naked skin. The arms, the

legs, moved quietly, in unison, side, side, forward, back. A long

carapace knobbed her back, above the branching nerve clumps

of her spine.

It was a diplomatic training device. A spinal crab. Memory

flashed behind Lindsay's eyes and he went berserk. He jumped

off the wall and rocketed toward her. Her eyes snapped open

blearily as he shouted in fury.

He seized her neck and jerked it forward, digging his nails into

the rubbery rim where the spinal crab met her skin. He tore at

it savagely. Part of it ripped free. The skin shone red beneath it,

slick with sweat. Lindsay grabbed the left-arm cable and

snapped it loose. He pulled harder; she wheezed as a strap dug

in under her ribs.

The crab was peeling away. Its underside was ghastly, a

hundred-footed mass of damp translucent tubes, pored with

hair-thin wires. Lindsay ripped again. A cable nexus stretched

and snapped, extruding colored wires.

He braced his feet against her back and pulled. She gagged and clawed at the strap's buckle; the belt whipped loose, and Lind-

say had the whole thing. With its programming disrupted, it

flopped and curled like a live thing. Lindsay whirled it by the

straps and slammed it into the wall with all his strength. The

interlapping segments of its back split open, their brittle plastic

crackling. He whiplashed it into the stone. Brown lubricant

oozed, then spattered into free-fall drops as he smashed it again.

He crushed it underfoot, tore at the strap until it gave way. Its

guts showed beneath the plates: lozenge-shaped biochips nested

in multicolored fiberoptics.

Me slammed it again, more slowly. The fury was leaving him.

He felt cold. His right arm trembled uncontrollably.

Nora was against the wall, gripping a clothes rack. The sudden

loss of nerve programming left her shaking with palsy.

"Where's the other one?" Lindsay demanded. "The one for

your face?"

Her teeth chattered. "I didn't bring it," she said.

Lindsay kicked the crab away. "How long, Nora? How long

have you been under that thing?"

"I wear it every night."

"Every night! My God!"

"I have to be the best," she said, shaking. She fumbled a

poncho from the rack and ducked her head through the collar.

"But the pain," Lindsay said. "The way it burns!"

Nora smoothed the bright fabric from her shoulders to hips.

"You're one of them," she said. "The early classmates. The

failures. The defectors."

"What was your class?" Lindsay said.

"Fifth. The last one."

"I was first," Lindsay said. "The foreign section."

"Then you're not even a Shaper."

"I'm a Concatenate."

"You're all supposed to be dead." She peeled the crab's

broken braces from her knees and ankles. "I should kill you.

You attacked me. You're a traitor."

"When I smashed that thing I felt real freedom." He rubbed

his arm absently, marveling. He'd truly lost control. Rebellion

had overwhelmed him. For a moment, sincere human fury had

burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine

rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, than

he'd been for years.

"Your kind ruined it for the rest of us," Nora said. "We

diplomats should be on top, coordinating things, making peace.

But they shut down the whole program. We're undependable,

they said. A bad ideology."

"They want us dead," Lindsay said. "That's why you were

drafted."

"I wasn't drafted. I volunteered." She tied the poncho's last

hip-lace. "I'll have a hero's welcome if I make it back. That's

the only chance I'll ever have at power in the Rings."

"There are other powerful places."

"None that count."

"Rep Three is dead," Lindsay told her. "Why did you kill

him?"

"Three reasons," she said. They were past pretense. "It was

easy. It helps our odds against you. And third, he was crazy.

Worse even than the rest of your crew. Too unpredictable. And

too dangerous to let live."

"He was harmless," Lindsay said. "Not like the two of us." His

eyes filled with tears.

"If you had my control you wouldn't weep. Not if they tore

your heart out."

"They already have," Lindsay said. "And yours as well."

"Abelard," she said, "he was a pirate."

"And the rest?"

"You think they'd weep over us?"

"No," Lindsay said. "And not much, even over their own. It's

vengeance they'll want. How would you feel if lan disappears

tomorrow? And two months from now you find his bones in the

sludge drain of some fermenter? Or, better yet, if your nerves

are so well steeled, what about yourself? How would power taste

to you if you were retching bloody foam outside some airlock?"

"It's in your hands," she said. "I've told you the truth, as we

agreed between us. It's up to you to control your faction."

"I won't be put in this position," Lindsay said. "I thought we

had an understanding."

She pointed at the oozing wreckage of her spinal crab. "You

didn't ask my permission to attack me. You saw something you

couldn't bear, and you destroyed it. We did the same."

"I want to talk to Kleo," he said.

She looked hurt. "That's against our understanding. You talk

through me."

"This is murder, Nora. I have to see her."

Nora sighed. "She's in her garden. You'll have to put on a

suit."

"Mine's in the Consensus."

"We'll use one of lan's, then. Come on." She led him back

into the glowing cavern, then down a long fissured-out mining

vein to lan Mavrides's room.

The spacesuit maker and graphic artist was awake and work-

ing. He had refused to put his decontamination suit aside and

wore it constantly, a one-man sterile environment.

lan was point man for the Mavrides Family, a focus for threats

and resentment. Paolo had blurted as much, but Lindsay knew

it already.

(lacking pp 102-103)

him forward, and put his thumb Jeep into her mouth. She held

it there, then released him. "Tell me what you felt."

"It was warm," Lindsay said. "Wet. And uncomfortably intimate."

"That's what sex is like on suppressants," she said. "We have

love in the Family, but not erotics. We're soldiers."

"You're chemically castrated, then?"

"You're prejudiced," she said. "You haven't lived it. That's

why the orgy you propose is out of the question."

"Carnaval isn't an orgy," Lindsay said. "It's a ceremony. It's

trust, it's communion. It holds the group together. Like animals

huddling."

"It's too much to ask," she said.

"You don't realize what's at stake. It's not your body they

want. They want to kill you. They hate your sterile guts. You

don't know how I talked, persuaded, coaxed them. . . . Listen,

they use hallucinogens. Your brain turns to pudding in

Carnaval. You don't know what your own hands are, much less

someone else's genitals. . . . You're helpless. Everyone is help-

less, that's the point. No more games, no politics, no ranks and

grudges. No self. When you come out of Carnaval it's like the

first day of Creation. Everyone smiles." Lindsay looked aside,

blinking. "It's real, Nora. It's not their government that sustains

them, that's just the brain. Carnaval is the blood, the spine, the

groin."

"It's not our way, Abelard."

"But if you could join us, even once, for a few hours! We'd

dissolve these tensions, truly trust each other. Listen, Nora, sex

is not some handicraft. It's real, it's human, it's one of the last

things we have left. Burn it! What do you have to lose?"

"It could be an ambush," she said. "You could bend our minds

with drugs and kill us. It's a risk."

"Of course it is, but there are ways around that." Me locked

eyes with her. "I'm telling you this on the basis of all the trust

we have between us. At least we can give it a trial."

"I don't like this," Nora said. "I don't like sex. Especially with

the unplanned."

"It's that or juice your own gene-line," Lindsay said. He pulled

a loaded hypodermic from inside his lapel and attached its

needle. "I have mine ready."

She looked at it sidelong, then produced her own. "You may

not take well to this, Abelard."

"What is it?"

"Suppressant. With phenylxanthine to kick your IQ up. So

you'll see how we feel."

"This isn't the full Carnaval mixture," Lindsay said. "Just the

aphrodisiacs, half strength, and muscle relaxant. I think you

need it since I smashed the spinal crab. You seem jumpy."

"You seem to know all too well what I need."

"That makes two of us." Lindsay pulled aside the loose sleeve

of his wraparound blouse. "This is it, Nora. You could kill me

now and call it allergic reaction, stress, anything." He looked at

the gaudy tattoos on the skin of his arm. "Don't do it."

She shared his suspicion. "Are you taping this?"

"I don't allow tapes in my room." Me pulled a pair of elastic

cords from a styrene cabinet and passed her one.

He tied off his bicep. She did the same. With their sleeves

rolled up, they waited quietly for the veins to swell. It was the

most intimate moment they had ever had together. The thought

aroused him.

She slipped her hypodermic into the crook of his elbow, and

found the vein by the sudden rosette of blood at the needle's

root. Me did the same. They stared into each other's eyes and

pressed the plungers home.

The moment passed. Lindsay withdrew the needle and pressed

a sterile plastic dot against her puncture. Then he did his own.

They loosened the cords.

"Neither of us seems to be dying," she said.

"It's a good sign," Lindsay said. Me tossed the cords aside. "So

far so good."

"Oh." She half closed her eyes. "It's hitting me. Oh, Abelard."

"Mow do you feel?" Me took her shoulder. The nexus of bone

and muscle seemed to soften under his hand. She was breathing

shallowly, lips parted, her eyes dark.

"Like I'm melting," she said.

The phenylxanthine hit him first. Me felt like a king. "You

wouldn't hurt me," he said. "We're two of a kind, you and I."

Me undid the ties and pulled her blouse off, then peeled the

trousers inside out over her feet. Me left the sandals on. Mis

clothes flapped as he threw them off. They spun slowly in

midair.

Me pulled her close, his eyes blazing.

"Help me breathe," she whispered. The relaxant had hit her

lungs. Lindsay took her chin in his hands, opened her mouth,

and sealed his lips around it. Me puffed gently and felt her ribs

expand against his chest. Her head lolled back; the muscles of

her neck were like wax. He hooked his legs around hers, from

the inside, and breathed for her.

She let her arms drift, sluggishly, around his neck. She pulled

her mouth back a fraction of an inch. "Try now."

He tried to enter her. Despite his own excitement, it was

useless; the aphrodisiacs hadn't hit her yet, and she was dry.

"Don't hurt me," she said.

"I want you," Lindsay said. "You belong to me. Not to those

others."

"Don't say that," she said, her voice slurring. "This is an

experiment."

"For them, maybe. Not for us." The phenylxanthine had made

him certain, and reckless in his certainty. "The rest don't matter. I'd kill any one of them at a word from you. I love you,

Nora. Tell me you love me."

"I can't say that." She winced. "You're hurting me."

"Say you trust me, then."

"I trust you. There, it's done. Hold still a moment." She

wrapped her legs around him, then rocked her hips from side to

side, settling around him. "This is it, then. Sex."

"Haven't you had it before?"

"In the Academy once, on a bet. It wasn't like this."

"You feel all right?"

"I'm comfortable. Go ahead, Abelard."

But now his curiosity was aroused. "Did they give you the

pleasure tap too? I had it once. An interrogation drill."

"Of course they did. But that was nothing human, just white

ecstasy." She was sweating. "Come on, darling."

"No, wait a minute." He blinked as she clutched his waist. "I

see what you mean. This is stupid, isn't it? We're friends al-

ready."

"I want you, Abelard! Come on, finish me!"

"We've proved our point. Besides, I'm filthy!"

"I don't care how fucking filthy you are! For God's sake,

hurry!"

He tried to oblige her, then, and worked away mechanically for

almost a minute. She bit her lip and groaned in anticipation,

rolling her head back. But all the meaning had leached out of it

for him. "I can't go on," he said. "I just don't see why we

should bother."

"Just let me use you. Come on!"

He tried to think of something arousing. The usual damp whirl

of his mind's erotic imagery seemed abstract and distant to him,

like something done by another species. He thought of his

ex-wife. Sex with Alexandrina had been something like this, an

act of politeness, an obligation.

Me held still, letting her slam herself against him. At last a cry

of desperate pleasure escaped her.

She pulled away, patting sweat from her face and neck with the sleeve of her blouse. She smiled shyly.

Lindsay shrugged. "I see your point. It's a waste of time. I may have some trouble talking the others into it, but if I can reason

with them. . . ."

She looked at him hungrily. "I made a mistake. It shouldn't

have been this awful for us. I feel selfish now, since you had

nothing."

"I feel fine," Lindsay insisted.

"You said you loved me."

"That was just hormones talking. Of course I have deep respect for you, a sense of comradeship. . . . I'm sorry I told you that. Forgive me. I didn't mean it, of course."

"Of course," she said, putting on her blouse.

"Don't be bitter," Lindsay said. "You should take some of this.

I'm grateful for it. I see it now in a way I never did before.

Love ... it has no substance. It might be right for other people,

other places, another time."

"Not us."

"No. I feel bad about it, now. Reducing our negotiations to a

sexual stereotype. You must have found it insulting. And

inconvenient."

"I feel sick," she said.

ESAIRS XII: 24-2-'17

"You're okay now, huh?" the President said, wrinkling his pug

nose. "No more of that crap about dryin' up our juice?"

"No, sir, no." Lindsay shook his head, shivering. "I'm better

now."

"Good enough. Untie him, Rep Two."

The woman undid Lindsay's ropes, uncoupling him from the

cavern wall.

"I lost it," Lindsay said. "I can see that now, but when those

suppressants hit me, everything just went crystal clear. Seam-

less."

"That's okay for you, but we have marriages," Senator 1 said

sternly. He clutched the hand of Rep 1.

"I'm sorry," Lindsay said, rubbing his arms. "They're all under

slats, waving whip thin antennae as long as a forearm. Fazil

snatched his hand back with a hiss of disgust. Lindsay made a

quick grab at the roach but missed.

"Filthy," Fazil muttered. "Help me with the head."

Lindsay followed him into the workshop. Together, they

heaved and wrestled the massive head out into the corridor. It

was a tight fit in the narrow tunnel. "Maybe we should grease

it," Lindsay said.

"Paolo's face isn't going into eternity with a snotty nose," said

Fazil. He blew out the candle and resealed the workshop. He

pushed the sculpture ahead of him, toward the launch ring.

Lindsay followed, towing the crate.

The route was devious, traversing gnawed-out rock veins where the air was stale. The ring's loading dock was near the surface of the asteroid, set in one wall of ESAIRS' major industrial center.

Here, next to the launch ring, they manufactured the decoys.

The decoy complex was a grapelike cluster of fermentation

bags, connected by flaccid hydraulic tubes, anchored with guy

ropes and ringed by harsh banks of bluish grow-lights. The

cluster hung in midair, its translucent chambers churning sluggishly.

The complex had not been shut down completely; that would

have killed the wetware. But its production was cut almost to

nothing. The blowpipes had been unplugged from their output

duct into the launch ring. Instead of thin decoy film, they were

producing a thick, colorless froth. The air reeked with the sharp

fever stench of hot plastic.

The Family's robot was on duty. It stopped in mid-program as

Fazil floated past it, clutching the head. As Lindsay drifted by,

the robot crouched quietly, a powder bellows gripped in its

forward manipulators. Its huge single eye tilted to follow him in

movement, with a ratchetlike clicking.

The robot was all wires and joints, its six skeletal limbs made

of lightweight foamed metal. It was bigger than Lindsay. Its

brain and motor were shielded in its torso, behind barrel-like

ribs. The forward end held the sensors and two long, jointed

pincer arms. A cross-shaped junction of four swiveling limbs

sprouted from its aft end, set that way for work in free-fall. It

had a rotary spindle tail for drilling.

The robot lacked the smoothness of a Mech unit, but there was an alarming liveliness about it. It was like an animated skeleton,

a vivisected animal stripped down to jumpy knee-jerk reflex.

When Lindsay drifted out of range, the robot clicked back into

motion, kicked off a wall, and plugged its bellows into the wet

duct of a fermentation bag.

Fazil crawled over the head and caught it against the wall.

The launching ring had an airlock of translucent plastic. Fazil

plucked a tightly wrapped green spacesuit from the wall and

shook it out. He zipped himself into it and unzipped the airlock

wall. He stepped inside.

Lindsay passed him the crate.

Fazil zipped the airlock shut and opened the loading chamber.

A curved rectangular section of wall slid up on spring-loaded

exterior hinges. Air gusted out into the vacuum of the launch

ring. The airlock's flimsy walls sucked in, clinging like soap film

to an interior support trellis.

Five huge roaches and a cloud of smaller ones burst from the

crate's interior, kicking in the vacuum. Fazil shrieked silently

behind his transparent faceplate. He batted around his head as

the roaches convulsed, their paper-thin wings beating in crip-

pled angles. Decompression bloated their abdomens. Froth

oozed from their joints and rumps.

A roach clung vomiting to the plastic, near Lindsay's face. It

had been eating something within the crate. Something viscous

and red.

Faint wisps of steam were coming from the crate. Fazil didn't

notice; he was swatting the roaches out into the launch ring.

Fazil stepped through the hatchway into the ring and pulled

the crate after him. He wrestled it into the launch cage.

He emerged, then knocked the last of the dead insects through the chamber hatch and locked it shut. A green ready-light came on as the hatch door sealed the circuit. An LED raced through

numbers as launch power hit the magnets.

Fazil pulled the entrance zipper and air rushed in. The plastic

airlock flapped like a sail. Fazil climbed out, shaking. His

shouts were muffled by the suit. "Did you see that?" He pulled

his own zip down to mid-chest. "What was in there? What were

they eating?"

"I didn't see them pack the crate," Lindsay said. "Could have

been anything."

Fazil examined the smeared sleeve of his suit. "Looks like

blood."

Lindsay leaned closer. "Doesn't smell like blood."

"This is evidence," Fazil said, tapping the suit.

Lindsay was thoughtful. The pirates had lied to him. They had

tried to be clever, as clever as the Shapers. They had tried to make someone disappear. "It might the best, Fazil, if we

launched that suit."

"Have you seen lan today?" Fazil said.

"I wasn't looking for him."

They eyed one another. Lindsay said nothing. Fazil glanced

quickly, warily, over one shoulder at the LED. "It's launched

away," he said.

"If you'll launch the suit," Lindsay said, "I'll scrub the inside

of the airlock."

"I'm not launching this suit with the head," Fazil said.

"You could feed in into one of the chambers," Lindsay said,

pointing. "The fermentation vats." He thought fast. "If you'll do

that, I'll help you set this complex to full capacity. You can

make decoys again." Lindsay pulled another suit from the wall

and shook it out. "We'll launch the head. We'll dump the suit.

We'll do those two things first, and then we'll talk. All right?"

The moment to attack was when Lindsay had his legs half

trapped in the suit. That moment passed, and once again Lind-

say knew he had bought time.

He and Fazil manhandled the head into the airlock. Fazil

zipped the lock shut behind the two of them. Lindsay opened

the rectangular hatch.

Light spilled into the launch ring's glassy interior, gleaming off

its inset copper tracks. The iron bars of the launch cage shone

with a faint rime of condensed steam from the body that had

been within the crate.

Lindsay stepped into the launch ring. He shoved the head

within the cage and set the clamps.

Fazil's shadow passed across the light. He was slamming the

hatch. Lindsay wheeled and jumped.

He got his right arm through. The hatch door bounded off

flesh and bone and Lindsay's suit began at once to fill with

blood.

Lindsay snarled as he jammed his head and shoulders past the

hatch. He snagged Fazil's leg with his left hand. His fingertips

dug deep into the socket of the Shaper's ankle and he smashed

the man's shin against the sharp edge of the hatch. Bone grated

and Fazil, levered backward, lost his grip.

Lindsay slithered out into the airlock, still grappling, and

jacked his foot into Fazil's crotch. As Fazil convulsed, Lindsay

seized the man's leg and bent it double, jamming one arm

behind Fazil's knee. He braced himself against the Shaper's

body and yanked upward, wrenching the man's thighbone from

its socket.

In agony, Fazil scrabbled lor a hold. His hand struck the edge

of the hatch and slammed it shut. The launch ring's circuit

sealed and the ready-light came on.

Lindsay held the leg and twisted. Two globes of his own blood

floated up within his faceplate. He sneezed, blinded, and Fazil

kicked him in the neck. He lost his grip, and the Shaper attacked.

He threw his arms around Lindsay's chest with the panic

strength of desperation. Lindsay wheezed, and black uncon-

sciousness loomed close for four loud heartbeats. Then he

kicked wildly, and his foot caught the edge of the airlock's

support trellis.

They spun, grappling. Lindsay slammed his elbow into the side

of the Shaper's head. The grip loosened. Lindsay swung his free

arm over Fazil's head and seized his neck in a hammerlock.

Fazil squeezed again and Lindsay's ribs bent in the power of his

Shaper-strengthened arms.

Lindsay locked eyes with him through his blood-spattered

faceplate. Lindsay's face rippled hideously. Fazil went wall-eyed

in terror and tried to claw his way free. Lindsay broke his neck.

Lindsay was panting. The suits had no air tanks; they were for

brief exposures only. He had to get out into air.

He turned for the airlock's exit. Kleo was there. Her eyes were

dark with fascination and terror. She held the zipper's outside tag.

Lindsay stared at her, blinking as a microglobe of blood clung

to his lashes. Kleo pulled her favorite weapon: a needle and thread.

Lindsay kicked off from Fazil's body. He fumbled for the tag.

With a few deft moves, Kleo sewed the zipper shut.

Lindsay pulled at it frantically. The slender pink thread was

like steel wire. He shook his head: "No!" Vacuum surrounded

him. He was cut off; the words that had always saved him could

not leap the gap.

She waited to watch him die. Overhead, the LED raced

through its readout. The lights were dimming. A launch off the

ecliptic required full power.

Lindsay pulled left-handed at the hatch. There was a faint

vibration through his fingers. He kicked the hatch, savagely,

three times, and something gave. He pulled with all his strength.

The hatch opened, just a finger's width.

Safety fuses tripped. And all the lights went out.

The hatch opened easily, then. The darkness was total. He didn't know how long it would take the circling launch cage to grate to a stop within the ring. If it were still whirring by at klicks per second, it would shear his arm or leg off as neatly as a laser.

He couldn't wail long. The air inside the suit was thick with his

own breath and the reek of blood. He made up his mind and

thrust his head into the ring.

He lived.

Now he faced another problem. The cage was resting within

the ring, somewhere, blocking it. If he reached it on his way to

the Outside, he would have to turn around, wasting air. Left or

right?

Left. Breathing shallowly, favoring his arm, he leaped along theinside of the ring. He cradled his arms against his chest, using

his legs, bounding, somersaulting, skidding.

Three hundred meters-that was half the length of the ring. All

he would have to go. But what if the camouflage plastic was

sealing the ring's launch exit? What if he had already passed the

exit in the blackness, noticing nothing?

Starlight. Lindsay leaped upward frantically, remembering only

at the last moment to catch himself on the rim. ESAIRS' gravity

was so weak that his leap would have put him into circumsolar

orbit.

Once again he was outside the asteroid, amid streaks of

charred black and off-white blast sumps.

He leaped across a buckled crater, almost missing the far rim.

When he grappled along a stretch of pumice, rock powdered

under his fingers and went into slow orbit just above the surface.

He was gasping when he found the second airlock: plastic film

dappled with camouflage, inset into the surface of ESAIRS where

the Family's first drill had bitten in. He brushed the film aside

and twisted the hatch wheel. His right arm was bleeding steadily. It felt broken again.

The hatch popped free. He slipped into the airlock and

slammed the outside hatch behind him. Then there was another.

He was panting steadily; each lungful offered less, and he tasted

inhaled blood.

The second hatch opened. He pulled himself through, and

there was a sudden flurry of movement in darkness. He heard

his suit rip. Cold steel nicked his throat, his legs were seized,

and he screamed as hands in the blackness grabbed his wound-

ed arm and twisted.

"Talk!"

"Mr. President!" Lindsay gasped at once. "Mr. President!"

The knife against his throat drew back. He heard a deafening

buzz-saw grinding, and sparks flew. In the sudden gory light

Lindsay saw the President, the Speaker of the House, the Chief

Justice, and Senator 3.

The sparks went out. The Speaker had held the blade of her

small power saw against a length of pipe.

The President ripped the head from Lindsay's suit. "The arm,

the arm," Lindsay yelped. The Chief Justice released it; Senator

3 released his legs. Lindsay breathed deeply, filling his lungs with air.

"Fucking preemptive strike," the President muttered. "Hate

'em."

"They tried to kill me," Lindsay said. "The equipment- you

destroyed it? We can leave now?"

"Something tipped 'em off," the President growled. "We were

in the launch center with Paolo. Learning how to smash the

launch controls. Then Agnes and Nora show up. Supposed to be

sleeping. And all of a sudden, black as fire - "

"Power blackout," said the Speaker.

"I yell ambush," said the President. "Only it's black. They

have the advantage: fewer of them, less chance of hitting their

own. So, I go for machinery. Sleeve knife into the circuitry. We

hear Second Senator howl, meat breaks open."

"Something wet touched my face," the Chief Justice said. His

ancient voice was heavy with doomed satisfaction. "The air was

full of blood."

"They were armed," the President said. "I caught this in the

scuffle. Feel it, State."

In the darkness, the President pressed something into Lindsay's left hand. It was the size of his palm -a flattened disk of

dense stone, wrapped in braided thread. Part of it was sticky.

"Had 'em taped to their ribs, I think. Swinging weapons. Bludgeons. Stranglers. Those threads are thin enough to cut. Opened

my thumb to the bone when I caught it."

"Where are the rest of us?" Lindsay said.

"We got a contingency plan. The two Reps were cleaning up

after lan -they're aboard the Consensus now, getting ready to

lift."

"Why'd you kill Ian?"

"Kill him?" the Speaker said. "There's no proof. He evap-

orated."

"The FMD don't take a wound without returning it," the

President said. "We thought we'd be gone by morning, and we

thought, Hah, let 'em think he defected with us! Cute, huh?" He

snorted. "The Senate were with us but two got lost. They'll show

up here, 'cause this is rendezvous. Justices Two and Three are

looting, lifting some of that hot Shaper wetware. Good loot for

us. We figured -we seize the exit. If we have to, we jump to the

Consensus, naked. We could make it with just nosebleeds and

gut ache, hard vacuum thirty seconds."

Tapping echoed down the corridor. It had crept up imperceptibly under the sound of their voices. It continued with faint,

rhythmic precision, the flat click of plastic against stone.

"Aw, shit," said the President.

"I'll go," said the Chief Justice.

"It's nothing," Senator 3 said. "A blower settling." Lindsay

heard the rattle of her tool belt.

"I'm gone," the Chief Justice said. Lindsay felt a light movement of air as the old Mechanist floated past him.

Fifteen seconds passed in darkness. "We need light," the

Speaker hissed. "I'll use the saw and - "

The tapping stopped. The Chief Justice called out. "I have it!

It's a piece of-"

A sudden nasty crunch cut him off.

"Justice!" the President cried. They rushed down the corridor,

bumping and colliding blindly.

When they reached the spot, the Speaker pulled her saw, and

sparks flew. The noisemaker was a simple flap of stiff plastic,

glued to the mouth of a branching tunnel and tugged by a long

thread. The assassin -Paolo-had waited deep within the tunnel.

When he'd heard the old Mechanist's voice he had fired his

weapon, a slingshot. A heavy stone cube-Paolo's six-sided

die-was half buried in the dead pirate's fractured skull.

In the brief blazing light of sparks, Lindsay saw the dead man's head covered by a flattened mass of blood, held by surface

tension to the skin around the wound.

"We could leave," Lindsay said.

"Not without our own," the President said. "And not leaving

the one who did this. They got only five left."

"Four," Lindsay said. "I killed Fazil. Three, if I can talk to

Nora."

"No time for talk," the President said. "You're wounded,

State. Stay here and guard the airlock. When you see the others,

tell 'em we've gone to kill the four."

Lindsay forced himself to speak. "If Nora surrenders, Mr.

President, I hope that you'll - "

"Mercy was his job," said the President. Lindsay heard him tug

at the dead judge's body. "You got a weapon, State?"

"No."

"Take this, then." Me handed Lindsay the dead man's mechanical arm. "If one of 'em strays by here, kill them with the

old man's fist."

Lindsay clutched the cabled ridges of the stiff prosthetic wrist.

The others went quickly, with a click, a rustle, and the whisper

of calloused skin against stone. Lindsay floated back up the

tunnel to the airlock, bouncing along the smooth stone with

knees and shoulders, thinking of Nora.

The old woman wouldn't die, that was the horror of it. If it

had only been as quick and clean as Kleo had said it would.

Nora could have borne it, endured it as she endured all things.

But in the darkness, when she whipped the weighted sash

around the pirate's neck and pulled, it had not been quiet, it

had not been clean.

The old woman-Judge 2, the pirates called her-her throat

was a mass of cartilage and gristle, tough as wire beneath her

skin's false smoothness. Twice, when Nora thought she was dead

at last, the pirate woman had lurched shudderingly into life

again with a tortured rasp in the darkness. Nora's wrists bled

freely from the old woman's splintered nails. The body stank.

Nora smelled her own sweat. Her armpits were a tormenting

mass of rashes. She floated quietly in the pitch-black launch

control room, her bare feet perched on the dead woman's

shoulders, one end of the sash in each hand.

She had not fought well when the pirates had launched their

strike in the sudden blackout. She had hit someone, swinging

her stone bola, but then lost it in the struggle. Agnes had fought

hard and been wounded by the Speaker's handsaw. Paolo had

fought like a champion.

Kleo murmured a password from the door, and in a few

moments there was light in the room. "I told you they worked,"

Paolo said.

Kleo held the plastic candle away; the sodium at the lip of the

wick was still sputtering where it had ignited. The waxy plastic

reeked as the wick burned down. "I brought all you made,"

Kleo told Paolo. "You're a bright boy, dear."

Paolo nodded proudly. "My luck beat this contingency. And

I've killed two."

"You made the candles," Agnes said. " I said they wouldn't

work." She looked at him adoringly. "You're the one, Paolo.

Give me orders."

Nora saw the dead pirate's face in candlelight. She unwrapped

the strangling sash and tied it around her waist.

She felt another siege of weakness. Her eyes filled with tears

and she felt a sudden horror and regret for the woman she had

killed. It was the drugs Abelard had given her. She had been a fool to

take that first injection. Firing up with aphrodisiacs had been a

surrender, not just to the enemy but to those bits and pieces of

temptation and doubt that lurked within her. Throughout her

life, the brighter her convictions had burned, the darker these

shadows had been, flitting, creeping.

On her own, she might have held her ground. But there was

the fatal example of the other diplomats. The traitors. The

Academy had never officially spoken of them, leaving that to

the covert world of gossip and rumor that boiled unceasingly in

every Shaper colony. The rumors festered in darkness, taking on

all the distorted forms of the forbidden.

In her own mind, Nora had become a criminal: sexual, ideological, professional. Things had happened to her that she dared

not speak of, even to Kleo. Her Family knew nothing of the

diplomatic training, the burning glare in every muscle, the at-

tack on face and brain that had made her own body into an

alien object before she turned sixteen.

If it had been anyone but another diplomat, she could have

fought and died with the conviction and serenity that Kleo

showed. But she had faced him now and understood. Abelard

was not as bright as she was, but he was resilient and quick. She

could become what he was. It was the first real alternative she

had ever known.

"I gave us light," Paolo bragged. He whirled his bola in a

twisting figure-eight, catching the string on his padded forearms.

"I played odds, even the farthest. I beat lan, I beat Fazil, and I

killed two." Sleeve ties flailed at his elbows as he slapped his

chest. "I say ambush, ambush, ambush!" The bola whirled to a

stop, wrapping his arm, and he pulled his slingshot from his

belt.

"They mustn't escape," Kleo said. Her face was warm and

calm in the candlelight, framed by the fringed gold crown of her

hairnet. "If survivors leave, they'll bring others. We can live,

darlings. They're stupid. And they're split. We've lost two, they

seven." A flicker of pain crossed her face. "The diplomat was

quick, but odds say he died in the launch ring. The others we

can outflank, like the Judges."

"Where are the two Representatives?" said Agnes. The Speaker's handsaw had slashed her above the left knee; she was pale

but still full of fight. "We have to get the rogue genetic. She's

trouble."

"What about the wetware?" Nora said. "It'll stale if we stay

powered down. We have to get power back."

"They'd know we were in the power plant!" Paolo said. "One

could start it, the others wait in ambush! Strike and fall back,

strike and fall back!"

"First we hide the bodies," Kleo said. She turned, bracing her

feet near the doorway, and tugged hand over hand on a line.

The third Judge appeared, his wrinkled neck almost slashed

through by Kleo's wire-thin garotte. The syringes on his belt

were filled with stolen wetware. Like Judge 2, he had been

caught at his theft.

Paolo peeled camo plastic from the launch room's secret al-

cove. The bodies of Senators 1 and 2 already floated within it,

killed by Agnes and Paolo. They shoved the other dead inside,

reluctant to touch them. "They'll know they're here," Agnes

said. "They'll smell them." She sneezed violently.

"They'll think it's themselves," Paolo said, smoothing the filmy

false wall back into place.

"To the tokamak," Kleo said. "I'll take the candles; Agnes, you

take point."

"All right." Agnes stripped off her blouse and heavy hairnet.

She attached them together with a few loose stitches. Puffing out

in free-fall, they looked like a human form in the dimness. She

slipped into the narrow corridor, pushing the decoy ahead of

her with her extended arm.

The others followed, Nora as rear guard.

At each intersection they halted, listening, smelling. Agnes

would push her clothes ahead, then peer quickly around the lip

of the opening. Kleo would pass her the candle and she would

check for ambushers.

As they neared the tokamak power plant, Agnes sneezed loudly again. After a moment Nora smelled it as well: an appalling

alien stench. "What is it?" she whispered to Kleo, ahead of her.

"Fire, I think. Smoke." Kleo was grim. "The Reshaped one is

smart. I think she has gone to the tokamak."

"Look!" Agnes whispered loudly. From the corridor branching

to their left, a thin gray stream undulated in the candle's light.

Agnes ran her fingers through it, and the smoke broke into

dissipating wisps. Agnes coughed rawly and caught herself

against the wall, her naked ribs heaving silently.

Kleo blew out the candle. In the darkness they saw a feeble

gleam reflected along the bends and curves of the tunnel's

smooth stone.

"Fire," Kleo said. For the first time, Nora heard fear in her

leader's voice. "I'll go first."

"No!" Agnes brushed her lips against Kleo's ear and whispered

to her rapidly. The two women embraced, and Agnes sneaked

forward, leaving her clothes and pressing herself against the

tunnel wall. When Nora followed the others she felt Agnes's

smeared sweat cold against the stone.

Nora peered behind her, guarding their back. Where was

Abelard? He wasn't dead, she thought. If only he were here

now, with his incessant glibness, and his gray eyes glowing with

an animal's determination to survive. . . .

A sudden sharp clack echoed up the tunnel. A second passed,

Agnes screamed, and the air filled with the sharp metallic

stench of acid. There were howls of pain and hatred, the snap of

Paolo's slingshot. Nora's back and shoulders tightened so suddenly that they cramped in agony and she scrambled head first

down the tunnel, deafened by her own screams.

The rogue genetic whirled in the red gleam of firelight, slashing Agnes across the face with the spout of her weapon, a

bellows. The air was full of flying globes of corrosive acid,

drawn from a wetware tank. Steam curled from Agnes's naked

chest. To the side, Kleo grappled, slashing and kicking, with the

stocky Rep 2, whose arm was broken by Paolo's shot. Paolo was

pulling another heavy stone from his belt pouch.

Nora yanked the sash from her waist with a silken hiss and

launched herself at the enemy Shaper. The woman saw her

coming. She wrapped a leg around Agnes's throat, crushing it,

and swung forward, arms spread to grapple.

Nora swung her weighted sash at the woman's face. She caught it, grinned with her crooked teeth, and darted a hand at Nora's face, two fingers spread to spear her eyes. Nora twisted and the nails drew blood from her cheeks. She kicked, missed, kicked

with the other leg, felt a sudden searing pain as the combat-

trained pirate sank her fingers into the joint of her knee. She

was strong, with a genetic's smooth, deceptive strength. Nora

fumbled at the other end of the sash and smashed the weight

against the pirate's cheek. Rep 1 grinned and Nora felt some-

thing snap as her kneecap soggily gave way. Suddenly blood

sprayed across her as Paolo's slung shot broke the woman's jaw.

Her mouth hung open, bloody, in the firelight, as the pirate

woman fought with the sudden wild strength of desperation. The

back of her heel slammed bruisingly into Nora's solar plexus as

she launched herself at Paolo. Paolo was ready; his bola

whipped overhand from nowhere with the force of a hatchet,

taking the woman's ear off and slashing deep into her collar-

bone. She faltered and Paolo stamped her body into the wall.

The pirate's head cracked against the stone and Paolo was on

her at once, slashing into her throat with the bola's cord. Be-

hind him Kleo and the other woman struggled in midair, the

pirate flailing with legs and a broken arm as Kleo's braced

thumbs pressed relentlessly into the woman's throat.

Nora, winded by the kick, struggled for breath. Her whole rib

cage locked in a sudden radiating cramp. Somehow she forced a

thin gasp of smoky air into her lungs, wheezed, then breathed

again, feeling as if her chest were full of molten lead. Agnes

died before her eyes, skin steaming from the acid spray.

Paolo finished the Shaper woman. Kleo was still strangling the

second woman, who had died; Paolo slammed his bola into the

back of the dead woman's head and Kleo released her, yanking

her stiffened hands away. She rubbed them together as if

spreading on lotion, breathing hard. "Put out that fire," she

said.

Paolo approached the flaming, gluey mass of hay and plastics

carefully. He shrugged out of his heavy blouse, which was

speckled with pinholes of acid, and threw it over the fire as if

trapping an animal. He stamped it vindictively, and there was

darkness. Kleo spat on the sodium tip of another candle, which

sputtered into life.

"Not good," she said. "I'm hurt. Nora?"

Nora looked down at her leg, felt it. The kneecap was loose

beneath the skin. There was no pain yet, only a shocked numb-

ness. "My knee," she said, and coughed. "She killed Agnes."

"There's just three left," Kleo said. "The Speaker, her man,

and Senator Three. We have them. My poor precious darlings."

She threw her arms around Paolo, who stiffened at the sudden

gesture but then relaxed, cradling his head in the hollow at

Kleo's neck and shoulder.

"I'll start the power plant," Nora said. She drifted to the wall

panel and tapped switches for the preliminary sequence.

"Paolo and I will cover the entrances and wait for them," Kleo

said. "Nora, you go to the radio room. Raise the Council, report

in. We'll regroup there." She gave Nora the candle and left.

Nora stuck the candle above the tokamak's control board and

got it up into stage one. A bluish glow seeped through the

polarized blast shield as magnetic fields uncurled within the

chamber. The tokamak flickered uneasily as it bootstrapped its

way up to fusion velocities. False sunlight flared yellow as the

ion streams collided and burned. The field stabilized, and suddenly all the lights were on.

Holding it warily, Nora snuffed the candle against the wall.

Paolo brushed petulantly at the acid blisters on his unprotected hands. "I'm the one, Nora," he said. "The one percent destined for survival."

"I know that, Paolo."

"I'll remember you, though. All of you. I loved you, Nora. I

wanted to tell you one more time."

"It's a privilege to live in your memory, Paolo."

"Goodbye, Nora."

"If I ever had luck," Nora said, "it's yours."

He smiled, hefting his slingshot.

Nora left. She skidded quickly through the tunnels, holding

one leg stiff. Waves of pain dug into her, knotting her body.

Without the spinal crab, she could no longer stop the cramps.

The pirates had been through the radio room. They had

smashed about them wildly in the darkness. The transmitters

were saw-torn wreckage; the tabletop console had been

wrenched off and flung aside.

Fluid leaked from the liquid crystal display. Nora pulled needle and thread from her hairnet and sewed up the gash in the

screen. The CPU was still working; there were signals incoming

from the dishes outside. But the deciphering programs were

down. Ring Council transmissions were gibberish.

She picked up a general frequency propaganda broadcast. The

slashed television still worked, though it blurred around the

stitches.

And there it was: the outside world. There was not much to it:

words and pictures, lines on a screen. She ran her fingertips

gently over the scalding pain in her knee.

She could not believe what the faces on the screen were telling her, what the images showed. It was as if the little screen in its days of darkness had fermented somehow, and the world behind

it was frothing over, all its poisons wetwared into wine. The

faces of the Shaper politicos were alight with astounded triumph.

She watched the screen, transfixed. The shocked public statements of Mechanist leaders: broken men, frightened women,

their routines and systems stripped away. The Mech armor of

plans and contingencies had been picked off like a scab, showing the raw flesh of their humanity. They gabbled, they scrambled for control, each contradicting the last. Some with tight smiles that looked wired on by surgery, others misty-eyed with secondhand religious awe, gesturing vaguely, their faces bright as children's.

And the doyens of the Shaper academic-military complex: the

smooth-faced Security types, facile, triumphant, still too pleased

at the amazing coup to show their ingrained suspicion. And the

intelligentsia, dazzled by potential, speculating wildly, their objectivity in rags.

Then she saw one. There were more, a dozen of them. They

were huge. Their legs alone were as tall as men, enormous

corded masses of muscle, bone, and tendon under slickly polished corrugated hide. Scales. Brown scaled hide showed under

their clothing: they wore skirts, glittering beads on wire. Their

mighty chests were bare, with great keelbone ridges of sternum.

Compared to the treelike legs and the massive jutting tails, their

arms were long and slender, with quick, swollen-tipped fingers

and oddly socketed thumbs. Their heads were huge, the size of

a man's torso, split with great cavernous grins full of thumb-

sized flat peg teeth. They seemed to have no ears, and their

black eyeballs, the size of fists, were shielded under pebbly lids

and grayish nictitating membranes. Ribbed, iridescent frills

draped the backs of their heads.

There were people talking to them, holding cameras. Shaper

people. They seemed to be hunched in fear before the aliens;

their backs were bent, they shuffled subserviently from one to

another. It was gravity, Nora realized. The aliens used a heavy

gravity

They were real! They moved with relaxed, ponderous grace.

Some were holding clipboards. Others were talking, with fluted,

birdlike tongues as long as a forearm.

By size alone they dominated the proceedings. There was nothing formalized or stagy about it; even the solemn narration

could not hide the essential nature of the meeting. The aliens

were not frightened or even much impressed. They had no

bluster, no mystique. They were businesslike. Like tax collectors.

Paolo burst in suddenly, his eyes wild, his long hair matted

with blood. "Quickly! They're right behind me!" He glanced

around. "Give me that panel cover!"

"It's over, Paolo!"

"Not yet!" Paolo snatched the broad console top from midair.

Wiring trailed behind it. lie catapulted across the room and

slammed the console across the tunnel entrance. Placed flat

against it, it formed a crude barricade; Paolo whipped a tube of

epoxy from his belt and glued the console top against the stone.

There was a gap to one side; Paolo pulled his slingshot and

fired down the corridor. They heard a distant howl. Paolo

jammed his face against the gap and screamed with laughter.

"The television, Paolo! News from the Council! The siege is

over!"

"The siege?" Paolo said, glancing back at her. "What the fuck

does that have to do with us?"

"The siege, the war," she said. "There never was any war, it's

the new party line. There were just . . . misunderstandings. Bottlenecks." Paolo ignored her, staring down the tunnel, readying

another shot. "We were never soldiers. Nobody was ever trying

to kill anyone. The human race is peaceful, Paolo, just-good

trading partners. . . . Aliens are here, Paolo. The aliens."

"Oh, God," Paolo moaned. "I just have to kill two more, that's

all, and I already winged the woman. Just help me kill them

first, then you can tell me anything you want." He pressed his

shoulder against the barricade, waiting for the epoxy to set.

Nora drifted over him and shouted through one of the con-

sole's instrument holes into the darkness. "Mr. President! This

is the diplomat! I want a parley!"

There was silence for a moment. Then: "You crazy bitch!

Come out and die!"

"It's over, Mr. President! The siege is lifted! The System is at

peace, do you understand? Aliens, Mr. President! Aliens have

arrived, they've been here for days already!"

The President laughed. "Sure. Come on out, baby. Send that

little fucker with the slingshot out first." She heard the sudden

whine of the power saw.

Paolo pushed her aside with a snarl and fired down the hall.

They heard half a dozen sharp clicks as the shot ricocheted far

down the tunnel. The President cawed triumphantly. "We're

gonna eat you," he said, very seriously. "We're gonna eat your

fuckin' livers." He lowered his voice. "Take 'em out, State."

Nora clawed past Paolo and screamed aloud. "Abelard!

Abelard, it's true, I swear it by everything between us! Abelard,

you're not stupid, let us live! I want to live-"

Paolo clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her back.

She clung to the barricade, now glued firm, staring down the

hall. A white form was drifting there. A spacesuit. Not a

Mavrides one, but one of the bloated armored ones from the

Red Consensus.

Paolo's slingshot was useless against the suit. "This is it," he

muttered. "The cusp." He released Nora and pulled a candle

and a flat bladder of liquid from within his blouse. He wrapped

the bladder around the candle, cinching it with a sleeve-tie. He

hefted the bomb. "Now they burn."

Nora threw her sash around his neck. She put her good knee

into his back and pulled savagely. Paolo made a sound like

broken pipes and kicked away from the entrance. He clawed at

the sash. He was strong. He was the one with luck.

Nora pulled harder. Abelard was alive. The idea gave her

strength. She pulled harder. Paolo was pulling just as hard. His

fists were locked around the belt's gray fabric so hard that

blood oozed from his nail-cut palms in little crescent blisters.

There were screams down the hall. Screams and the sound of

the power saw.

And now the knot that had never left her shoulders had spread

into her arms and Paolo was pulling against muscle that had set

like iron. He was not breathing in the sudden silence that

followed. The wrinkled ridge of the sash had vanished into his

neck. He was dead, still pulling. She let the ends of the sash slide through her cramped fingers. Paolo twisted slowly in free-fall, his face blackened, his arms locked in place. He seemed to be strangling himself.

A gauntleted hand, drenched in blood, came through the crescent hole at the side of the barricade. There was a muffled

buzzing from within the spacesuit. He was trying to talk.

She rushed to his side. He leaned his head against the outside

of the barricade, shouting within the helmet. "Dead!" he said.

"They're dead!"

"Take off the helmet," she said.

He shrugged his right shoulder within the suit. "My arm!" he

said.

She stuck one hand through the crevice and helped him twist

the helmet off. It popped free with a suck of air and the familiar

reek of his body. There were half-dried scabs of blood under his

nostrils and one in his left ear. He had been decompressed.

Carefully, she ran her hand across his sweating cheek. "We're

alive, aren't we."

"They were going to kill you," he said. "I couldn't let them."

"The same for me." She looked backward at Paolo. "It was like

suicide to kill him. I think I'm dead."

"No. We belong to each other. Say so, Nora."

"Yes, we do," she said, and pressed her face blindly against the

gap between them. He kissed her with the bright salt taste of

blood.

The demolition had been thorough. Kleo had finished the job.

She had crept out in a spacesuit and soaked the inside of the

Red Consensus with sticky contact venom.

But Lindsay had gone there before her. He had leaped the gap

of naked space, decompressing himself, to get one of the

armored spacesuits. He'd caught Kleo in the control room. In

her thin suit she was no match for him; he'd ripped her suit

open and she'd died of the poison.

Even the Family's robot had suffered. The two Reps had

lobotomized it while passing through the decoy room. Operations by the launch ring ran at manic speed, the brain-stripped

robot loading ton after ton of carbon ore into the overstuffed

and belching wetware. A frothing mass of plastic output gushed

into the launch ring, which was itself ruined by the skidding

launch cage. But that was the least of their problems.

The worst was sepsis. The organisms brought from the Zaibatsu

wreaked havoc on the delicate biosystems of ESAIRS XII. Kleo's

garden was a leprous parody five weeks after the slaughter.

The attenuated blossoms of the Shaper garden mildewed and

crumbled at the touch of raw humanity. The vegetation took

strange forms as it suffered and contorted, its stems

corkscrewing in rot-dusted perversions of growth. Lindsay visited it daily, and his very presence hastened the corruption. The

place smelled of the Zaibatsu, and his lungs ached with its

nostalgic stench.

He had brought it with him. No matter how fast he moved, he

dragged behind him a fatal slipstream of the past.

He and Nora would never be free of it. It was not just the

contagion, or his useless arm. Nor the galaxy of rashes that

disfigured Nora for days, crusting her perfect skin and filling

her eyes with flinty stoicism. It dated back to the training they

had shared, the damage done to them. It made them partners,

and Lindsay realized that this was the finest thing that life had

ever offered him.

He thought about death as he watched the Shaper robot at its

task. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, it loaded ore into the distended guts

of the decoy wetware. After the two of them had smothered, this

machine would continue indefinitely in its hyperactive parody

of life. He could have shut it down, but he felt a kinship with it.

Its headlong, blind persistence cheered him somehow. And the

fact that it was pumping tons of frothing plastic into the launch

ring, ruining it, meant that the pirates had won. He could not

bear to rob them of that useless victory.

As the air grew fouler they were forced to retreat, sealing the

tunnels behind them. They stayed near the last operative industrial gardens, shallowly breathing the hay-scented air, making love and trying to heal each other.

With Nora, he reentered Shaper life, with its subtleties, its

allusions, its painful brilliance. And slowly, with him, her

sharpest edges were smoothed. She lost the worst kinks, the

hardest knots, the most insupportable levels of stress.

They turned down the power so that the tunnels grew colder,

retarding the spread of the contagion. At night they clung together for warmth, swaddled in a carpet-sized shroud that Nora

compulsively embroidered.

She would not give up. She had a core of unnatural energy that Lindsay could not match. For days she had worked on repairs

in the radio room, though she knew it was useless.

Shaper Ring Security had stopped broadcasting. Their military

outposts had become embarrassments. Mechanists were evacuating them and repatriating their Shaper crews to the Ring Council with exquisite diplomatic courtesy. There had never been any

war. No one was fighting. The cartels were buying out their

pirate clients and hastily pacifying them.

All this was waiting for them if they could only raise their

voices. But their broadcast equipment was ruined; the circuits

were irreplaceable, and the two of them were not technicians.

Lindsay had accepted death. No one would come for them;

they would assume that the outpost was wiped out. Eventually, he thought, someone would check, but not for years.

One night, after making love, Lindsay stayed up, toying with

the dead pirate's mechanical arm. It fascinated him, and it was a

solace; by dying young, he thought, he had at least escaped this.

His own right arm had lost almost all feeling. The nerves had

deteriorated steadily since the incident with the gun, and his

battle wounds had only hastened it.

"Those damned guns," he said aloud. "Someone will find this

place someday. We ought to tear those fucking guns apart, to

show the world that we had decency. I'd do it but I can't bear to

touch them."

Nora was drowsy. "So what? They don't work."

"Sure, they're disarmed." That had been one of his triumphs.

"But they could be armed again. They're evil, darling. We

should smash them."

"If you care that much . . ." Nora's eyes opened.' "Abelard.

What if we fired one?"

"No," he said at once.

"What if we blew up the Consensus with the particle beam?

Someone would see."

"See what? That we were criminals?"

"In the past it would just be dead pirates. Business as usual.

But now it would be a scandal. Someone would have to come

after us. To see that it never happened again."

"You'd risk this facade of peace that they're showing the

aliens? Just on the chance that someone would rescue us? Fire,

imagine what they'd do to us when they came."

"What? Kill us? We're dead already. I want us to live."

"As criminals? Despised by everyone?"

Nora smiled bitterly. "That's nothing new for me."

"No, Nora. There are limits."

She caressed him. "I understand."

Two nights later he woke in terror as the asteroid shook. Nora

was gone. At first he thought it was a meteor strike, a rare but

terrifying event. He listened for the hiss of blowout, but the

tunnels were still sound.

When he saw Nora's face he realized the truth. "You fired the

gun."

She was shaken. "I cast the Consensus loose before I shot it. I

went out on the surface. There's something weird there,

Abelard. Plastic has been leaking out of the launch ring into

space."

"I don't want to hear about it."

"I had to do it. For us. Forgive me, darling. I swear I'll never

deceive you again."

He brooded. "You think they'll come?"

"It's a chance. I wanted a chance for us." She was distracted.

"Tons of plastic. Squeezing out like paste. Like a huge worm."

"An accident," Lindsay said. "We'll have to tell them that it

was an accident."

"I'll destroy the gun now." She looked at him guiltily.

"What's done is done." He smiled sadly and reached toward

her. "Let it wait."

ESAIRS XII: 17-7-'17

Somewhere in his dreams Lindsay heard a repeated pounding.

As always, Nora woke first and was instantly alert. "Noise,

Abelard."

Lindsay woke painfully, his eyelids gummy. "What is it? A

blowout?"

She slipped out of the sheets, launching herself off his hip with

one bare foot. She hit the lights. "Get up, darling. Whatever it

is, we're meeting it head on."

It was not the way Lindsay would have preferred to meet death but he was willing to go along with her. He pulled on drawstring pants and a poncho.

"There's no breeze," she said as he struggled with a complex

Shaper knot. "It's not decompression."

"Then it's a rescue! The Mechs!"

They hurried through darkened tunnels to the airlock. One of their rescuers-he must have been a courageous one -had managed to force his vast bulk through the airlock and into the loading room. He was picking fussily at the huge birdlike toes of his spacesuit as Lindsay peered out of the access tunnel, squinting and shielding his eyes.

The alien had a powerful searchlight mounted on the nasal

bridge of his cavernous spacesuit helmet. The light gushing from

it was as vivid as a welding torch: harsh and electric blue,

heavily tinged with ultraviolet. The spacesuit was brown and

gray, dotted with input sockets and accordion-ribbed around the

alien's joints.

The light swept across them and Lindsay squinted, averting his

face. "You may call me the Ensign," the alien said in trade

English. He politely aligned himself with their vertical axis,

stretching overhead to finger-walk along the wall.

Lindsay put his hand on Nora's forearm. "I'm Abelard," he

said. "This is Nora."

"How do you do? We want to discuss this property." The alien

reached into a side pocket and pulled out a wad of tissue. He

shook it out with a quick birdlike motion, and it became a

television. He put the screen against the wall. Lindsay, watching

carefully, saw that the television had no scan lines. The image

was formed in millions of tiny colored hexagons.

The image was ESAIRS XII. Bursting from the launch ring's exit hole was an extruded tube of foamed plastic almost half a

kilometer long. There was a rough knob at the tip of the

wormlike coil. Lindsay realized with instantly smothered shock

that it was Paolo's stone head, neatly framed in the flowerlike

wreckage of the launch cage. The entire mass had been smoothly embedded in the decoy complex's leakage of plastic, then

squeezed out under pressure into a coiling helical arc.

"I see," Lindsay said.

"Are you the artist?"

"Yes," Lindsay said. He pointed at the screen. "Notice the

subtle shading effect where our recent blast darkened the sculpture."

"We noticed the explosion," the alien said. "An unusual artis-

tic technique."

"We are unusual," Lindsay said. "We are unique."

"I agree," the Ensign said politely. "We seldom see work on

this scale. Do you accept negotiations for purchase?"

Lindsay smiled. "Let's talk."

Part Two

COMMUNITY ANARCHY

CHAPTER FIVE

By fits and starts, the world entered a new age. The aliens

benignly accepted a semidivine mystique. Millennial fervor

swept the System. Detente came into vogue. People began to

speak, for the first time, of the Schismatrix-of a posthuman

solar system, diverse yet unified, where tolerance would rule

and every faction would have a share.

The aliens-they called themselves the Investors-seemed unlimited in power. They were ancient, so old that they remembered no tradition earlier than starflight. Their mighty starships

ranged a vast economic realm, buying and selling among nine-

teen other intelligent races. Obviously they possessed technologies so potent that, if they chose, they could shatter the narrow

world a hundred times over. Humanity rejoiced that the aliens

seemed so serenely affable. The goods they offered were almost

always harmless, often artworks of vast academic interest and

surprisingly small practicality.

Human wealth poured into the alien coffers. Tiny embassies

traveled to the stars in Investor ships. They failed to accomplish

much, and they remained tiny, because the Investors charged

fares that were astronomical.

The Investors recycled the riches they tapped from the human

economy. They bought into human enterprises. With a single

technological novelty from one of their packed holds, the aliens

could transform a flagging industry into a rocketing growth

stock. Factions competed wildly for their favor. And

uncooperative worlds soon learned how easily they could be

outflanked and rendered obsolete.

Trade flourished in the new Investor Peace. Open warfare

became vulgar, replaced by the polite covertness of rampant

industrial espionage. With each new year, a golden age seemed

just out of reach. And the years passed, and passed.

GOLDREICH -TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 3-4-'37

The crowd pleased Lindsay. People filled the air around him:

colored jackets with a froth of lace, legs in patterned stockings

with sleek five-toed foot-gloves. The air in the theatre lobby

reeked of Shaper perfumes.

Lindsay lounged against one patterned velvet wall, his jacketed elbow hooked through a mooring-loop. He dressed in the cutting edge of fashion: sea-green brocade jacket, green satin

kneelongs, stockings pinstriped in yellow. His feet were elegantly gloved for free-fall. A gold-chained video monocle gleamed in his waistcoat. Braids interlaced with yellow cord bound his long, graying

hair.

Lindsay was fifty-one. Among the Shapers he passed for one

much older-some genetic from the dawn of Shaper history.

There were many such in Goldreich-Tremaine, one of the oldest

Shaper city-states in the Rings of Saturn.

A Mechanist emerged into the lobby from the theatre. He wore

a ribbed one-piece suit in tasteful mahogany brown. He noticed

Lindsay and kicked off from the doorway, floating toward him.

Lindsay reached out in friendly fashion and stopped the man's

momentum. Beneath his sleeve, Lindsay's prosthetic right arm

whined slightly with the movement. "Good evening, Mr. Beyer."

The handsome Mechanist nodded and took a mooring-loop.

"Good evening, Dr. Mavrides. Always a pleasure."

Beyer was with the Ceres Legation. He was Undersecretary for

Cultural Affairs, a colorless title meant to camouflage his affili-

ation with Mech intelligence.

"I don't often see you during this day-shift, Mr. Beyer."

"I'm slumming," Beyer said comfortably. Life in Goldreich-Tremaine ran around the clock; the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight, was the loosest and least policed. A Mechanist could mingle during the graveyard shift without attracting stares.

"Are you enjoying the play, sir?"

"A triumph. As good as Ryumin, I'd say. This author -

Fernand Vetterling-his work is new to me."

"He's a local youngster. One of our best."

"Ah. One of your protege's. I appreciate his Detentiste sentiments. We're having a little soiree at the Embassy later this

week. I'd like to meet Mr. Vetterling. To express my admiration."

Lindsay smiled evasively. "You're always welcome at my

home, Mr. Beyer. Nora speaks of you often."

"How flattering. Colonel-Doctor Mavrides is a charming host-

ess." Beyer hid his disappointment, but his kinesics showed

signs of impatience.

Beyer wanted to leave, to touch base with some other social

doyen. Lindsay bore him no resentment for it; it was the man's job.

Lindsay himself held a rank in Security. He was Captain-

Doctor Abelard Mavrides, an instructor in Investor sociology at

Goldreich-Tremaine Kosmosity. Even in these days of the Investor Peace, a rank in Security was mandatory for those in the

Shaper academic-military complex. Lindsay played the game, as

they all did.

In his role as theatrical manager, Lindsay never alluded to his

rank. But Beyer was well aware of it, and only the grease of

diplomatic politesse allowed them to be friends.

Beyer's light-blue eyes scanned the crowded lobby, and his

face stiffened. Lindsay followed the man's gaze.

Beyer had spotted someone. Lindsay sized the man up at once: microphone lip bead, ear-clasp audiophones, clothing that

lacked finesse. A bodyguard. And not a Shaper: the man's hair

was sleeked back with antiseptic oils, and his face lacked Shaper

symmetry.

Lindsay reached for his video monocle, filled it to his right

eye, and began filming. Beyer noticed the gesture and smiled with a hint of sourness.

"There are four of them," he said. "Your production has at-

tracted a man of distinction."

"They look like Concatenates," Lindsay said.

"A state visit," Beyer said. "He is here incognito. It's the head

of stale from the Mare Sercnitatis Republic. Chairman Philip

Khouri Constantine."

Lindsay turned aside. "I don't know the gentleman."

"He is not a friend of Detente," Beyer said. "I know him only

by reputation. I can't introduce you."

Lindsay moved along the wall, keeping his back to the crowd.

"I must visit my office. Will you join me for a smoke?"

"Lung-smoking?" Beyer said. "I never acquired the habit."

"Then you must excuse me." Lindsay fled.

"After twenty years," said Nora Mavrides. She sat before her

console, her Security jacket thrown carelessly over her shoulders, a black cape over her amber-colored blouse.

"What's possessed him?" Lindsay demanded. "Isn't the Republic enough for him?"

Nora thought aloud. "The militants must have brought him

here. They need him to back their cause here in the capital. He

has prestige. And he's no Detentiste."

"That's plausible," Lindsay said, "but only if you turn it

around. The militants think Constantine is their pet unplanned,

their loyal general, but they don't know his ambitions. Or his

potential. He's manipulated them."

"Did he see you?"

"I don't think so. I don't think he would have recognized me if

he had." Lindsay stuck his spoon moodily into a carton of

medicinal yogurt. "My age disguises me."

"My heart sank when I saw the film from your monocle.

Abelard, these years, they've been so good to us. If he knew

who you were, he could ruin us."

"Not completely." Lindsay forced himself to eat, grimacing.

The yogurt was a special preparation for non-Shapers whose

intestines had been rendered antiseptic. It was bitter with digestive enzymes. "Constantine could denounce me. But what if he

does? We'd still have the aliens. The Investors don't give a

damn about my genetics, my training. . . . The aliens could be

our refuge."

"We should attack Constantine. He's a killer."

"We're not the ones to talk on that score, darling." Lindsay

gripped the carton with his mechanical hand; its thin walls

buckled precisely. "I always meant to avoid him if I could. It

was something I fell into, a roll of the dice. . . ."

"Don't talk that way. As if it were something we can't help."

Lindsay drummed his iron fingers. Even the arm was part of

his disguise. The antique prosthetic had once belonged to the

Chief Justice, and Lindsay's affectation of it hinted at great age.

On the wall of Nora's office, a huge satellite telephoto of the

Saturnian surface crawled slowly, red winds interlacing streams

of muddy gold. "We could leave," Lindsay said. "There are

other Council States. Kirkwood Gap's all right. Cassini-Kluster."

"And give up everything we've built here?"

Lindsay watched the screen abstractly. "You're all I want."

"I want that tenure, Abelard. That Colonel-Professorship. If we

go, what about the children? What about our Clique? They

depend on us."

"You're right. This is our home."

"You're making too much of this." Nora said. "He'll return to

the Republic soon. If Goldreich-Tremaine weren't the capital

now, he wouldn't be here."

Children laughed in the next room; from her console, Nora

turned down the audio. Lindsay said, "There's a horror between

Philip and myself. We know too much about each other."

"Don't be a fatalist, darling. I'm not going to sit with folded

hands while some unplanned upstart attacks my husband."

Nora left her console and walked across to him. A centrifugal

half-gravity tugged at her skirt and sleeve laces. Lindsay pulled

her into his lap and ran his human hand across the serpentine

curls of her hair. "Let him be, Nora. Otherwise it will come to

killing again."

She kissed him. "You were alone in the past. Now you're a

match for him. We have our Midnight Clique. We have the

Mavrides line, the Investors, my rank in Security. We have our

good trust. This life belongs to us."

GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 13-4-'37

Philip Constantine watched his ship's departure through his

video monocle. The monocle pleased him. He liked its stylish-

ness. Constantine took pains to stay abreast of such develop-

ments. Fashions were powerful manipulants.

Especially among the Reshaped. Behind his ship, the Friend-

ship Serene, the Goldreich-Tremaine complex spun in

gyroscopic counlerclockwork. Constantine studied the city's image, broadcast to his monocle from a camera mounted on the

ship's hull.

The orbiting city taught an object lesson in Shaper history.

Its core was the dark, heavily shielded cylinder that had sheltered the earliest settlers: desperate pioneers, driven to mine the

Rings of Saturn despite their sleets of radiation and complex

electrical storms. The central core of Goldreich-Tremaine was

as dark as a nut, a stubborn acorn that had endured and broken

forth at last into fantastic growth. Hubbed spheres wheeled

about it, radar installations slid with sleek precision on external

tracks, two huge tubed suburbs turned in counterbalanced array

on white ceramic stems. And all about the inner complex was a

lacy network of habitats in free-fall. Outside the bubbled

suburbs-the "subbles" - loomed the immaterial walls of the

Bottle.

The Friendship Serene hit the flaw in the Bottle. Colored static

raced across Constantine's monocle, and Goldreich-Tremaine

disappeared. It was visible now only by its absence: a lozenge of

dark fog in the white ice-rubble of the Ring. The dark fog was

the Bottle itself: a magnetic tokamak field eight kilometers long,

shielding the Shaper city-state within a fusion-powered web.

This far from the sun, solar kilowatts were useless. The

Reshaped had their own suns, bright fusion cores in every

Council State: Goldreich-Tremaine, Dermott-Gold-Murray,

Tauri Phase, Kirkwood Gap, Synchronis, Cassini-Kluster,

Encke-Kluster, Skimmers Union, Arsenal. . . . Constantine

knew them all.

Ghost acceleration wafted across him as the engines cut in.

The Goldreich-Tremaine weather station had cleared them for

launch; there was no chance of a crippling ring-lightning strike.

Background radiation was light. With the new Shaper drives he

faced mere weeks of travel.

The playwright, Zeuner, entered the cabin and seated himself

beside Constantine. "It's gone," he said.

"Homesick already, Carl?" Constantine looked up at the larger

man.

"For Goldreich-Tremaine? Yes. For the people? That's an-

other matter."

"Someday you'll return in triumph."

"Very kind of you to say so, your excellency." Zeuner ran one

fawn-colored glove over his chin. Constantine noted that the

Republic's standard bacteria were already spotting the man's

neck.

"Forget titles of state," Constantine said. "In the Ring Council

it's politesse. In the Republic, it smacks of aristocracy. Our local

form of bad ideology."

"I see, Dr. Constantine. I'll be more careful in the future."

Zeuner's clean-shaven face had the anonymous beauty of the

Reshaped. He dressed with fussy precision in understated

browns and beiges.

Constantine tucked the monocle into his copper-threaded velvet waistcoat. Beneath his embroidered linen jacket, his back

had begun to sweat. The skin of his back was peeling where the

rejuvenation virus ate at aging cells. For twenty years the in-

festation had wandered over his body, the first reward for his

loyalty to the Shaper cause. Where the virus had worked, his

olive skin had a child's smoothness.

Zeuner examined the cabin walls. The heavy insulation was

stitched with pointillistic tapestries depicting the Republic. Orchards spread under bright clouds, sunlight fell with cathedrallike solemnity across golden wheatfields, ultralight aircraft

dipped over stone-walled mansions with red-tiled roofs. The

vistas were as clean as a travel brochure's. Zeuner said, "What's

it really like, your Republic?"

"A backwater," Constantine said. "An antique. Before our

Revolution, the Republic was rotting. Not just socially. Physically. An ecosystem that large needs total genetic control. But the builders didn't care about the long run. In the long run they

were all dead."

Constantine steepled his fingers. "Now we inherit their mess.

The Concatenation exiled its visionaries. Their genetics theorists, for instance, who formed the Ring Council. The Concatenates were squeamish. Now they have lost all power. They are

client states."

"You think we'll win, doctor? The Shapers?"

"Yes." Constantine gave the man one of his rare smiles.

"Because we understand what this struggle is about. Life. I don't mean that the Mechs will be annihilated. They may totter on for

whole centuries. But they will be cut off. They'll be cybernetic,

not living flesh. That's a dead end, because there's no will

behind it. No imperatives. Only programming. No imagination."

The playwright nodded. "Sound ideology. Not like what you

hear in Goldreich-Tremaine these days. Detentiste slogans. Unity in diversity, where all the factions form one vast Schismatrix.

Humankind reuniting when faced by aliens."

Constantine shifted in his chair, surreptitiously rubbing his

back against the cushion. "I've heard that rhetoric. On the stage.

This producer you were mentioning-"

"Mavrides?" Zeuner was eager. "They're a powerful clan.

Goldreich-Tremaine, Jastrow Station, Kirkwood Gap. They've

never had a genetic on the Council itself, but they share genes

with the Garzas and the Drapers and the Vetterlings. The

Vetterlings have authority."

"This man is a Mavrides by marriage, you said. A nongenetic."

"A eunique, you mean? Yes. He's not allowed to contribute his

genes to the line." Zeuner was pleased to tell this bit of scandal.

"He's also an Investor pet. And a cepheid."

"Cepheid? You mean he has a rank in Security?"

"He's Captain-Doctor Abelard Mavrides, C.-Ph.D. It's a low

rank for one so old. He was a sundog once, a cometary miner,

they say. He met the aliens on the rim of the System, wormed

his way into their good graces somehow. . . . They'd been here

only a few months when they brought Mavrides and his wife

into Goldreich-Tremaine in one of their starships. Since then

he's moved from success to success. Corporations hire him as a

go-between with the aliens. He teaches Investor studies and

speaks their language fluently. He's wealthy enough to keep his past obscure."

"Old-line Shapers guard their privacy closely."

Zeuner brooded. "He's my enemy. He blighted my career."

Constantine thought it through. He knew more about Mavrides

than Zeuner did. He had recruited Zeuner deliberately, knowing that Mavrides must have enemies, and that finding them was easier than creating them.

Zeuner was frustrated. His first play had failed; the second was

never produced. He was not privy to the behind-the-scenes

machinations of Mavrides and his Midnight Clique. Zeuner was

harshly anti-Mechanist; his gene-line had suffered cruelly in the

War. The Detentistes rejected him.

So Constantine had charmed him. He had lured Zeuner to the

Republic with promises of the theatrical archives, a living tradition of drama that Zeuner could study and exploit. The Shaper

was grateful, and because of that gratitude he was Constantine's

pawn.

Constantine was silent. Mavrides troubled him. Tentacles of

the man's influence had spread throughout Goldreich-Tremaine.

And the coincidences went beyond chance. They hinted at

deliberate plot.

A man who chose to call himself Abelard. An impresario of

the theatre. Staging political plays. And his wife was a diplomat.

At least Constantine knew that Abelard Lindsay was dead. His

agents in the Zaibatsu had taped Lindsay's death at the hands of

the Geisha Bank. Constantine had even spoken to the woman

who had had Lindsay killed, a Shaper renegade called Kitsune.

He had the whole sorry story: Lindsay's involvement with pi-

rates, his desperate murder of the Geisha Bank's former leader.

Lindsay had died horribly.

But why had Constantine's first assassin never reported back

from the Zaibatsu? He had not thought the man would turn

sundog. Assassins had failsafes implanted; few traitors survived.

for years Constantine had lived in fear of this lost assassin.

The elite of Ring Council Security assured him that the assassin

was dead. Constantine did not believe them, and had never

trusted them again.

For years he had worked his way into the mirrored under-

world of Shaper covert action. Assassins and bodyguards-the

two were often one and the same, since they specialized in one

another's tradecraft-these had become his closest allies.

He knew their subterfuges, their fanatic loyalties. He struggled

constantly to win their trust. He sheltered them in his Republic,

hiding them from pacifist persecution. He used his prestige

freely to further their militarist ends.

Some Shapers still despised him for his unplanned genes; from many others he had won respect. Personal hatreds did not

bother him. But it bothered him that he might be cut short

before he had measured himself against the world. Before he

had satisfied the soaring ambition that had driven him since

childhood.

Who knew about Lindsay, the only man who had ever been his

friend? When he was young, and weaker, before the armor of

distrust had sealed around him, Lindsay had been his intimate.

Who let this phantom loose, and to what end?

GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 26-12-'46

Wedding guests surrounded the garden. From his hiding place

behind the boughs of a dwarf magnolia, Lindsay saw his wife

lightly bounding toward him, in half a gravity. Green fronds

brushed at the spreading wings of her headdress. Nora's formal

gown was a dense ocher weave beaded in silver, with openwork

amber sleeves. "You're all right, darling?"

Lindsay said, "My sleeve hems, burn it. I was dancing and

popped a whole weave loose."

"I saw you leave. Do you need help?"

"I can get it." Lindsay struggled with the complex interweave.

"I'm slow, but I can do it."

"Let me help." She stepped to his side, pulled inlaid knitting

needles from her headdress, and tatted his sleeves with a

smooth dexterity he could not hope to match. He sighed and

tucked his own needles carefully back into his braids. "The Regent is asking about you," she said. "The senior genetics are

here."

"Where'd you put them?"

"In the veranda discreet. I had to clear out a raft of kids." She

finished the sleeve. "There. Good enough?"

"You're a wonder."

"No kissing, Abelard. You'll smear your makeup. After the party." She smiled. "You look grand."

Lindsay ran his mechanical hand over his coils of gray hair.

The steel knuckles glittered with inlaid seed-gems; the wire

tendons sparkled with interwoven strands of fiberoptics. He

wore a formal Goldreich-Tremaine Kosmosity academic's ruffled overvest, its lapels studded with pins of rank. His kneelongs

were a rich coffee-brown. Brown stockings relieved the dignity

of his outfit with a hint of iridescence. "I danced with the

bride," he said. "I think I surprised them a bit."

"I heard the shouts, dear." She smiled and took his arm,

placing her hand on his sleeve above the steel of his artificial

ulna. They left the garden.

On the patio outside, the bride and groom were dancing on

the ceiling, heads downward. Their feet darted nimbly in and

out of the dance rig, a broad complex of padded footloops for

use in light gravity. Lindsay watched the bride, feeling a rush of

happiness close to pain.

Kleo Mavrides. The young bride was the dead woman's clone,

sharing her name and her genes. There were times when Lindsay felt that behind the merry eyes of the younger Kleo there

lurked an older spirit, as a sound might still vibrate in the glass

of a crystal just after it had ceased to ring. He had done what he

could. Since her production, the younger Kleo had been his

special care. He and Nora found satisfaction in these amends. It

was more than penance. They had taken too many pains to call

it simply recompense. It was love.

The groom danced powerfully; he had the bearlike build of all

the Vetterling genetics. Fernand Vetterling was a gifted man, a

standout even in a society of genius. Lindsay had known the

man for twenty years, as playwright, architect, and Clique mem-

ber. Vetterling's creative energy still filled Lindsay with a kind

of awe, even subdued fear. How long would the marriage last, he

wondered, between Kleo with her fleet graces and the sober

Vetterling, with his mind like a sharp steel ax? It was a marriage

of state as well as a love match. Much capital had been invested

in it, economic and genetic.

Nora led him on through a crowd of children, who were

lashing speed into whirring gyroscopes with dainty braided

whips. As usual, Paolo Mavrides was winning, his nine-year-old

face alight with preternatural concentration. "Don't hit my wheel, Nora," he said.

"Paolo's been gambling," said Randa Velterling, a muscular

six-year-old. She grinned mischievously, showing missing front

teeth.

"Nyaah," Paolo said, not looking up. "Randa's an informer."

"Play nicely," Nora said. "Don't bother the seniors."

The senior genetics were sitting around the buhl table in Lindsay's veranda, with its Investor centerpiece. They were conversing strictly in Looks, a language which to the untrained eye seemed to consist entirely of sidelong glances. Lindsay, nodding, glanced under the table. Two children were squatting beneath it, playing in tandem with a long loop of string. Using all four hands and their largest toes they had formed a complex rack of angles. "Very nice," Lindsay said. "But go play your spiders' games elsewhere."

"All right," the older child said grudgingly. Careful not to

disturb their structure, they wormed their way toward the open

doorway on their heels and toes, their string-wrapped hands outspread.

"I gave them some candy," said Dietrich Ross when they had

left. "They said they'd save it for later. Ever hear of kids that

age saving candy for later? What the hell's becoming of the world?"

Lindsay sat down, opening a pocket mirror. He pulled a powder puff from the pocket of his vest.

"Sweating like a pig," Ross observed. "You're not the man you

once were, Mavrides."

"You can talk when you've danced four measures, Ross, you

old fraud," Lindsay said.

"Margaret has a new opinion on your centerpiece," said

Charles Vetterling. The former Regent had gone frankly to seed

since his loss of office; he looked tubby and choleric, his old-

fashioned trimmed hair speckled with white.

Lindsay was interested. "What's that, Madam Chancellor?"

"It's erotica." Chancellor-General Margaret Juliano leaned

over the inlaid table and pointed into the perspex pressure-

dome. Beneath the dome was a complex sculpture. Speculation

had been rife ever since the Investors had first given it to

Lindsay.

The gift was carved out of water ice and plated in glimmering

frozen ammonia. Machinery beneath the dome maintained it at

40 degrees Kelvin. The sculpture consisted of two oblate lumps

covered in filigree spires of delicate crystalline frost. The tableau

was set on a rippled surface, possibly meant to represent some

unimaginably cold sludge-ocean. Off to one side, poking

through the surface, was a smaller hinged lump that might have

been an elbow.

"You'll notice there are two of them," the Shaper academic

said. "I believe that the physical goings-on are tastefully concealed beneath the water. The fluid, rather."

"They don't look much alike," Lindsay said. "It seems more

likely that one is eating the other. If they're alive at all."

"That's what I said," rasped Sigmund Fetzko. The Mechanist

renegade, by far the oldest of the six of them, lay back in his

chair in exhaustion. Words came to him with difficulty,

propelled by flexing rib-braces beneath his heavy coat. "The

second one has dimples. Shell collapsing. Juice sucked out of

it."

A Vetterling child came into the room, chasing a runaway

gyroscope. Vetterling Looked at Neville Pongpianskul, changing

the subject. The child left. "It is a good marriage," Pongpianskul

replied. "Mavrides grace with Vetterling determination: a for-

midable match. Mikhaila Vetterling shows promise, I think;

what was her split?"

Vetterling was smug. "Sixty Vetterling, thirty Mavrides, and ten percent Garza on a general reciprocity deal. But I saw to it that

the Garza genes were close to early-line Vetterling. None of that

new-line Garza tampering. Not till there's proof behind it."

"Young Adelaide Garza is brilliant," said Margaret Juliano.

"One of my advanced students. The Superbrights are astounding, Regent. A quantum leap." She smoothed the lapel of her

medal-studded overvest with graceful, wrinkled hands.

"Really?" said Ross. "I was married to the older Adelaide

once."

"What happened to Adelaide?" said Pongpianskul.

Ross shrugged. "Faded."

A faint chill crossed the room. Lindsay changed the subject.

"We're planning a new veranda. Nora needs this one for her

office."

"She needs a bigger place?" said Pongpianskul.

Lindsay nodded. "Tenure. And this is our best discreet. Wake-

field Zaibatsu did the debugging. Otherwise we have to have the

debuggers in again; it'll turn the place upside down."

"Building on credit?" Ross said.

"Of course." Lindsay smiled.

"Too flaming much loose credit in G-T these days," Ross said.

"I don't hold with it."

"Ah, Ross," Vetterling said, "you haven't changed those digs of

yours in eighty years. A man can't turn sideways in those core

ratholes. Take us Vetterlings, now. The bridegroom just delivered us the specs for a new complex of inflatables."

"Jerry-built crap," Ross opined. "G-T's too crowded these days

anyway. Too many young sharks. Things smell good now but

there's crash in the air, I can feel it. When it comes, I'll pull up

stakes and head for the cometaries. Been too long since I last

tested my luck."

Pongpianskul Looked at Lindsay, communicating in the set of

his wrinkled eyelids his amused contempt for Ross's incessant

luck-bragging. Ross had made his big mining strike a century

ago and had never let anyone forget it. Though he incessantly

goaded others on, Ross's own risk-taking was confined almost

entirely to his odd choice of waistcoats.

"I have a Clique candidate," Vetterling said. "Very polite, very

well-spoken. Carl Zeuner."

"The playwright?" said Margaret Juliano. "I don't care for his

work."

"You mean he's not a Detentiste," Vetterling said, "He doesn't

fit your pacifism, Margaret. Mavrides, I believe you know the man."

"We've met," Lindsay said.

"Zeuner's a fascist," said Pongpianskul. The topic galvanized

the elderly doctor; he leaned forward intently, knotting his

hands. "He's Philip Constantine's man. He spent years in the

Republic. A playground for Shaper imperialists."

Vetterling frowned. "Calm yourself, Neville. I know the Con

catenation; I was born there. Constantine's work there should

have been done a hundred years ago."

"You mean fill his garden world with broken-down assassins?"

"To bring a new world into the Shaper community - "

"Nothing but cultural genocide." Pongpianskul had just been

rejuvenated; his lean body quivered with unnatural energy.

Lindsay had never asked what technique he used; it left his skin

smooth but leathery, and of a peculiar dusky color not found in

nature. His knuckles were so heavily wrinkled that they looked

like small rosettes. "The Circumlunar Republic should be left as

a cultural museum. It's good policy. We need variety; not every

society we form can hold together."

"Neville." Sigmund Fetzko spoke heavily. "You are talking as if you were a boy."

Pongpianskul leaned back. "I confess I've heen reading my old

speeches since my last rejuve."

"That's what got you purged," Vetterling said.

"My taste for antiquities? My own speeches are antiques by

now. But the issues are still with us, friends. Community and

anarchy. Politics pulls things together; technology blows them

apart. Little enclaves like the Republic should be preserved

intact. So that if our own tampering strikes us down, there'll be

someone left to pick up the pieces."

"There's the Earth," said Fetzko.

"I draw the line at barbarians," Pongpianskul said. He sipped

his drink, a tranquilizer frappe.

"If you had any guts, Pongpianskul," Ross said, "you'd go to

the Republic and tackle things firsthand."

Pongpianskul sniffed. "I'll wager I could gather damning evidence there."

"Nonsense," said Vetterling.

"A wager?" Ross looked from one to the other. "Let me be

arbiter, then. Doctor, if you could find evidence that would

offend my hardened sensibilities, we would all agree that right is

on your side."

Pongpianskul hesitated. "It's been so long since I ..."

Ross laughed. "Afraid? Better hang back and cultivate your

mystique, then. You need a facade of mystery. Otherwise the

young sharks will have you for breakfast."

"There were breakfasters after the purge," Pongpianskul said.

"They couldn't digest me."

"That was two centuries back," Ross taunted. "I recall a certain episode-what was it-immortality from kelp?"

"What?" Pongpianskul blinked. Then the memory seemed to

ooze up within him, buried under decades. "Kelp," he said.

" 'The earth-ocean wonder plant.'" He was quoting himself.

" 'You wonder, friends, why your catalytic balances vary. . . .

The answer is kelp, the sea-born wonder plant, now genetically

altered to grow and flourish in the primeval brine from which

blood itself derives. . . .' My God, I'd forgotten entirely."

"He sold kelp pills," Ross confided. "Had a little dig in some

inflatable slum, radiation so hard you could poach an egg against the bulkhead."

"Placebos," Pongpianskul said. "Goldreich-Tremaine was full

of old unplanned types then. Miners, refugees cooked by radi-

ation. It was before the Bottle shielded us. If they looked hope-

less I used to slip a little painkiller into the mix."

"You don't get as old as we are without artifice," Lindsay said.

Vetterling snorted. "Don't start reminiscing, Mavrides. I want

to know what my angle is, Ross. What are my winnings once

Pongpianskul fails?"

"My domicile," Pongpianskul said. "In the Fitzgerald Wheel."

Vetterling's eyes widened. "Against?"

"Against your public denunciation of Constantine and Zeuner.

And the expenses of the trip."

"Your beautiful place," Margaret Juliano told Pongpianskul.

"How can you part with it, Neville?"

Pongpianskul shrugged. "If the future belongs to Constantine's

friends then I don't care to live here."

"Don't forget you've just had a treatment," Vetterling said

uncomfortably. "You're acting rashly. I hate to turn a man out

of his digs. We can put the bet off until - "

"Off," Pongpianskul said. "That's our curse; there's always

time for everything. While those younger than ourselves tear

into every year as if there were no yesterday. . . . No, I'm

settled, Regent." He extended his leathery hand to Vetterling.

"Fire!" Vetterling said. He took Pongpianskul's thin hand in

his heavy one. "Sealed, then. The four of you are witnesses."

"I'll take the next ship out," said Pongpianskul. He stood up,

his verdigris-colored eyes gleaming feverishly. "I must make

arrangements. A delightful little fete, Mavrides."

Lindsay was startled. "Oh. Thank you, sir. The robot has your

hat, I think."

"I must thank my hostess." Pongpianskul left.

"He's cracked," Vetterling said. "That new treatment's un-

hinged him. Poor Pongpianskul never was very stable."

"What treatment is he using?" Fetzko wheezed. "He seems so

energetic."

Ross smiled. "An unproven one. He can't afford a registered

treatment. I hear he's made an arrangement with a wealthier

man to serve as test subject; they split the cost."

Lindsay Looked at Ross. Ross hid his expression by biting into

a canape.

"A risk," said Fetzko. "That's why the young ones bear us. So