Schismatrix

that we can take their risks. And weed out. Bad treatments.

With our casualties."

"Could've been worse," Ross said. "He could have fallen for

one of those skin-virus scams. He'd be peeling like a snake right now, hah!"

Young Paolo Mavrides stepped through the soundproof field in

the doorway. "Nora says come see Kleo and Mr. Vetterling off."

"Thank you, Paolo." Juliano and the Regent Vetterling headed

for the doorway, small-talking about construction costs. Fetzko

tottered after them, his legs buzzing audibly. Ross took Lindsay

by the arm.

"A moment, Abelard."

"Yes, Arts-Lieutenant?"

"It's not Security business, Abelard. You won't tell Juliano that

I put Pongpianskul up to it?"

"The unproven treatment, you mean? No. It was cruel,

though."

Ross smirked. "Look, I almost married Margaret a few decades

back, and from what Neville tells me my marrying days may be

back any day now. . . . Listen, Mavrides. It hasn't escaped me

the way you've been looking these past few years. Frankly,

you're in decay."

Lindsay touched his graying hair. "You're not the first to say

so."

"It's not a money problem?"

"No." He sighed. "I don't want my genetics inspected. There

are loo many Security groups watching, and frankly I'm not all I

seem. . . ."

"Who the hell is, at this age? Listen, Mavrides: I figured it was

something like that, you being eunique. That's my point: I've

gotten wind of something, very quiet, very confidential. It costs

but there's no questions asked, no records: operations take

place in a discreet. Out in one of the dogtowns."

"I see," Lindsay said. "Risky."

Ross shrugged. "You know I don't get along with the rest of

my gene-line. They won't give me their records; I have to handle

my own research. Can't we work out something?"

"Possibly. I have no secrets from my wife. May she know?"

"Surely, surely. . . . You'll do it?"

"I'll be in touch." Lindsay put his prosthetic arm on Ross's

shoulder; Ross shuddered, just a little.

The wedding couple had made it as far as the alcove, where

they had bogged down in a crowd of well-wishers and hat-

fetching junior genetics. Lindsay embraced Kleo, and took

Fernand Vetterling's arm left-handed. "You'll take good care of

my sib, Fernand? You know she's very young."

Fernand met his eyes. "She's life and breath to me, friend."

"That's the spirit. We'll put the new play off awhile. Love is

more important."

Nora kissed Fernand, smearing his makeup. Back within the

domicile the younger set were hitting full stride. The dancing

across the ceiling footloops had degenerated into a near brawl,

where young Shapers, screaming with laughter, struggled to

shove one another off the crowded dance rig. Several had fallen

already and were clinging to others, dangling loosely in the half gravity.

High spirits, Lindsay thought. Soon many of these would be

married as well; few would find the convenient meshing of love

and politics that Fernand had. They were pawns in the dynastic

games of their seniors, where money and genetics set the rules.

He looked over the crowd with the close judgment that thirty

years of Shaper audiences had taught him. Some were hidden by

the trees of the garden, a central rectangle of lush greenery

surrounded by tessellated patio floors. Four Mavrides children

were tormenting one of the serving robots, which wouldn't spill

its drinks though they tugged it and tripped it up. Lindsay

leaped upward in the mild gravity to look past the garden.

An argument was brewing on the other side: half a dozen

Shapers surrounding a man in black coveralls. Trouble. Lindsay

walked to the garden roofway and leaped up onto the ceiling.

He pulled himself across the pathway with the ease of long

habit, clinging deftly to knobs and foot-niches. He was forced to

pause as a pack of three children raced past and over him,

giggling excitedly. His sleeve lace came loose again.

Lindsay dropped to the floor on the other side. "Burn the

sleeves," he muttered. By now everyone looked a little unraveled. He made his way toward the cluster of debaters.

A young Mechanist stood at the circle's center, wearing well-

cut satin overalls with black frogging and a suggestion of Shaper

lace at the throat. Lindsay recognized him: a disciple of

Ryumin's, come in with the latest Kabuki Intrasolar tour. He

called himself Wells.

Wells had a brash, sundoggish look: short matted hair, shifty

eyes, a wide free-fall stance. He had the Kabuki mask logo on

his coverall's shoulders. He looked drunk.

"It's an open-and-shut case," Wells insisted loudly. "When

they used the Investors as a pretext to stop the war, that was one

thing. But those of us who've known the aliens since we were

children can recognize the truth. They're not saints. They have

played on us for profit."

The group had not yet noticed Lindsay. He hung back, judging

their kinesics. This was grim: the Shapers were Afriel, Besetzny,

Warden, Parr, and Leng: his graduate class in alien linguistics.

They listened to the Mechanist with polite contempt. Obviously

they had not bothered to tell him who they were, though their

predoctoral overvests marked their rank clearly.

"You don't feel they bear any credit for detente?" This was

Simon Afriel, a cold and practiced young militant already making his mark in the Shaper academic-military complex. He had

confessed once to Lindsay that he had his sights set on an alien

diplomatic assignment. So did they all: surely, out of nineteen

known alien races, there would be one with which the Shapers

could establish strong rapport. And the diplomat who returned

sane from that assignment would have the world at his feet.

"I'm an ardent Detentiste," said Wells. "I just want humanity

to share the profit from it. For thirty years the Investors have

bought and sold us. Do we have their secrets? Their stardrive?

Their history? No. Instead they fob us off with toys and expen-

sive joyrides to the stars. These scaly con artists have preyed on

human weakness and division. I'm not alone in thinking this.

There's a new generation in the Cartels these days-"

"What's the point?" This was Besetzny, a wealthy young woman who already spoke eight languages as well as Investor. She

was the picture of young Shaper glamour in her slashed cordless

sleeves and winged velvet headdress. "In the Cartels you're

outnumbered by your old. They'll deal with us as they always

have; that's their routine. Without the Investors to shield us-"

"That's just it, doctor-designate." Wells was not as drunk as he looked. "There are hundreds of us who long to see the Rings for

what they are. You're not without your admirers, you know. We

have third-hand Ring fashions, fourth-hand Ring art, passed

around secretly. It's pathetic! We have so much to offer each

other, . . . But the Investors have squeezed everything they can

from the status quo. Already they've begun abetting warmongers: cut down Ring-Cartel interflights, encouraged bidding

wars. . . . You know, the mere fact that I've come here is

enough to brand me for life, possibly even as an agent for Ring

Security: a bacillus, I think you call them? I'll never set foot in a

Cartel again without eyes watching me- "

Afriel lifted his voice. "Good evening, Captain-Doctor." He

had spotted Lindsay.

Making the best of it, Lindsay ambled forward. "Good evening,

doctors-designate. Mr. Wells. I trust you're not embittering

yourselves with youthful cynicism. This is a happy time. . . ."

But now Wells was nervous. All Mechanists were terrified of

agents of Ring Security, not realizing that the academic-military

complex permeated Shaper life so thoroughly that a quarter of

the population was Security in one form or another. Besetzny,

Afriel, and Parr, for instance, all ardent leaders in Goldreich-

Tremaine paramilitary youth, were much more of a threat to

Wells than Lindsay, with his reluctant captaincy. Wells, though,

was galvanized with distrust. He mumbled pleasantries until

Lindsay walked away.

The worst of it was that Wells was right. The Shaper students

knew it. But they were not about to jeopardize their hard-won

doctorates by publicly agreeing with a naive Mech. No one

would have Ring Council clearance to visit other stars without

an impeccable ideology.

Of course the Investors were profiteers. Their arrival had not

brought the millennium humankind had expected. The Investors

were not even particularly intelligent. They made up for that

with a cast-iron gall and a magpie's lust for shiny loot. They

were simply too greedy to become confused. They knew what

they wanted, and that was their critical advantage.

They had been painted much larger than life. Lindsay had

done as much himself, when he and Nora had parlayed their

asteroid deathtrap into three months of language lessons and a

free ride to the Ring Council. With his instant notoriety as a

friend to aliens, Lindsay had done his best to inflate the Investor mystique. He was as guilty of the fraud as anyone.

He had even defrauded the Investors. The Investors' name for

him was still a rasp and whistle meaning "Artist." Lindsay still

had friends among the Investors: or, at least, beings whom he

felt sure he could amuse.

Investors had a sense of something close to humor, a certain

sadistic enjoyment in a sharp deal. That sculpture they had

given him, which rested in a place of honor in his home, might

well be two frost-eaten chunks of alien dung.

God only knew to what befuddled alien they had sold his own

piece of found art. It was only to be expected that a young man

like Wells would demand the truth and spread it. Not knowing

the consequences of his action, or even caring; simply too young

to live a lie. Well, the falsehoods would hold up awhile longer.

Despite the new generation bred in the Investor Peace, who

struggled to rip aside the veil, not knowing that it was the very

canvas on which their world was painted.

Lindsay looked for his wife. She was in her office, closeted

with her conspirator's crew of trained diplomats. Colonel-

Professor Nora Mavrides cast a large shadow in Goldreich-

Tremaine. Sooner or later every diplomat in the capital had

drifted into it. She was the best known of her class's loyalists

and served as their champion.

Lindsay hid within the comfort of his own mystique. As far as

he knew, he was the last survivor of the foreign section. If other

non-Shaper diplomats survived, it was not by advertising them-

selves.

He entered the room briefly for politeness' sake, but as usual

their smooth kinesics made him nervous. He left for the smok-

ing room, where two stagedoor hangers-on were being intro-

duced to the modish vice by the cast of Vetterling's Shepherd

Moons.

Here Lindsay sank at once into his role as impresario. They

believed in what they saw of him: an older man, a bit slow,

perhaps, without the fire of genius others had, but generous and

with a tang of mystery. With that mystery came glamour; Doctor

Abelard Mavrides had set his share of trends.

He drifted from one conversation to another: genetic marriage-

politics, Ring Security intrigues, city rivalries, academic doc-

trines, day-shift clashes, artistic cliques-threads all of a single

fabric. The sheen of it, the smooth brilliance of its social design,

had lulled him into routine. Fie wondered sometimes about the

placidity he felt. How much of it was age, the mellowness of

decay? Lindsay was sixty-one.

The wedding party was ending. Actors left to rehearse, seniors

crept to their antique warrens, the hordes of children scampered

to the creches of their gene-lines. Lindsay and Nora retired at

last to their bedroom. Nora was bright-eyed, a little tipsy. She

sat on the edge of their bed, unloosing the clasp at the back of

her formal dress. She pulled it forward and the whole complex

fretwork hissed loose across her back, in a web of strings.

Nora had had her first rejuvenation twenty years ago, at thirty-

eight, and a second at fifty. The skin of her shoulders was

glassily smooth in the bedside lamp's roseate light. Lindsay

reached into his bedside table's upper drawer and took his old

video monocle from its padded box. Nora pulled her slim arms

from the gown's beaded sleeves and reached up to unwire her

hat. Lindsay began filming.

"You're not undressing?" She turned. "Abelard, what are you

doing?"

"I want to remember you like this," he said. "This perfect

moment."

She laughed and threw the headdress aside. With a few deft

movements she yanked the jeweled pins from her hair and

tossed loose a surge of dark braids. Lindsay was aroused. He put

the monocle aside and slid out of his clothes.

They made slow, comfortable love. Lindsay, though, had felt

the sting of mortality that night, and it put the spur into him.

Passion seized him; he made love with ardent urgency, and she

responded. He climaxed hard, looking throughout the heart-

beats of orgasm at his own iron hand on her sleek shoulder. He

lay gasping, his heart beating loud in his ears. After a moment

he moved aside. She sighed, stretched, and laughed.

"Wonderful," she said. "I'm happy, Abelard."

"I love you, darling," he said. "You're my life."

She leaned up on one elbow. "You're all right, sweetheart?"

Lindsay's eyes were slinging. "I was talking with Dietrich Ross

tonight," he said carefully, "He has a rejuving program he wants

me to try."

"Oh," she said, delighted. "Good news."

"It's risky."

"Listen, darling, being old is risky. The rest of it is just a

matter of tactics. All you need is some minor decatabolism; any

lab can handle that. You don't need anything ambitious. That

can wait another twenty years."

"It'll mean dropping my mask to someone. Ross says this lot is

discreet, but I don't trust Ross. Vetterling and Pongpianskul had

a peculiar scene tonight. Ross abetted them."

She unraveled one of her braids. "You're not old, darling, and

you've been pretending it loo long. Your history won't be a

problem much longer. The diplomats are winning their rights

back, and you're a Mavrides now. Regent Vetterling's

unplanned, and no one thinks less of him."

"Of course they do."

"Maybe a little. That's not it, though. That's not why you've

put this off. Your eyes look puffy, Abelard. Have you been

taking your antioxidants?"

Lindsay was silent a moment. He sat up in bed, propping

himself up with his untiring prosthetic arm. "It's my mortality,"

he said. "It meant so much to me once. It's all I have left of my

old life, my old convictions. . . ."

"But you're not slaying the same by letting yourself age. You

should stay young if you want to preserve your old feelings."

"There's only one way to do that. Vera Kelland's way."

Her hands stopped with the braid half-twisted. "I'm sorry,"

Lindsay said. "But it's there somewhere: the shadow.... I'm

afraid, Nora. If I'm young again it will change things. All these

years that there's been such joy for us ... I froze here, lying in

the shadows, safe with you, and happy. To be young again, to

take this risk -I'll be out in the open. Eyes will be watching."

She caressed his check. "Darling, I'll watch over you. I'll

protect you. No one alive will hurt you without coming through

me first."

"I know that, and I'm glad for it, but I can't shake off this

feeling. Is it just guilt? Guilt, that life has been good to us, that

we've had love while those others died like rats in a corner?"

His voice trembled; he looked at the sienna weave of the bed-

spread in the lamp's mild glow. "How long can the Peace go

on? The old despise us while the young see through us. Things

must change, and how could they be better? It can only be

worse for us. . . . Sweetheart. . . ." He met her eyes. "I remember the days when we had nothing, not even the air to breathe,

and the rot crept in all around us. Everything we've gained

since then has been sheer profit to us, but it's not been

real . . . What's between us two is real, that's all. Tell me that if

this all collapses, you'll still be with me. . . ."

She took his hands, curling the iron one over her own. "What's

brought this on? Is it Constantine?"

"Vetterling wants to bring one of Constantine's men into the

Clique."

"Burn him, I knew that despot came into this somehow. He's

what frightens you, isn't he? Stirring up old tragedies. ... I feel

better now that I know who I'm facing!"

"It's not just him, darling. Listen: Goldreich-Tremaine can't

stay on top forever. The Investor Peace is crumbling; it'll be

open struggle again between Shaper and Mechanist. The military wing is bound to reassert itself. We'll lose the

capitalship-"

"This is pure alarm, Abelard. We haven't lost anything yet.

The Detentistes in G-T have never been stronger. My

diplomats-"

"I know you're strong. You'll win, I think. But if you don't, if

we have to sundog it-"

"Sundog? We're not refugees, darling, we're Mavrides genetics,

with offices, property, tenure! This is our fortress! We can't just

abandon this, when it's given us so much. . . . You'll feel different after the treatment. When your youth is back you'll see

things differently."

"I know," Lindsay said. "And it scares me."

"I love you, Abelard. Tell me you'll call Ross tomorrow."

"Oh, no," Lindsay said. "It would be a bad mistake to seem

too eager."

"When, then?"

"Oh, a few more years; that's nothing by Ross's standards. . ."

"But Abelard ... it hurts me, watching age cut into you. It's

gone far enough. It's just not reasonable. . . ." Her eyes filled

with tears. Lindsay was startled and alarmed. "Don't cry, Nora. You'll hurt yourself." He put his arms around her.

She embraced him. "Can't we keep what we have? You've

made me doubt myself."

"I'm a fool," Lindsay said. "I'm in good shape, there's no need

to be rash. I'm sorry I've said all this." Her eyes were dry again. "I'll win. We'll win. We'll be young and strong together. You'll see."

GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 16-4-'53

Lindsay had put off this meeting as long as possible. Now

antioxidants and his special diet were no longer enough. He was

sixty-eight.

The demoralization clinic was in the outskirts of Goldreich-

Tremaine, part of the growing cluster of inflatable subbles. The

tube-linked bubbles could mushroom or vanish overnight, a

perfect habitat for Black Medicals and other dubious enclaves.

Mechanists lurked here, hunting Shaper life-extension while

evading Shaper law. Supply and demand had conjured up corruption, while Goldreich-Tremaine grew lax with success. The capital had overreached itself, and cracks in the economy were papered over with black money.

Fear had driven Lindsay to this point: fear that things might

fall apart and find him weak. Ross had promised him anonymity. He would be in and out in a hurry, two days at the most.

"I don't want anything major," Lindsay told the old woman.

"Just a decatabolism."

"Did you bring your gene line records?"

"No."

"That complicates matters." The black-market demortalist

looked at him with an oddly girlish lilt of the head. "Genetics

determine the nature of the side-effects. Is that natural aging or

cumulative damage?"

"It's natural."

"Then we can try something less fine-tuned. Hormonals with a

deoxidation flush for free radicals. Quick and dirty. But it'll

bring your sparkle back."

Lindsay thought of Pongpianskul and his leathery skin. "What

treatment do you use yourself?"

"That's confidential."

"How old are you?"

The woman smiled. "You shouldn't pry, friend. The less we

know about each other, the better."

Lindsay gave her a Look. She failed to catch it. He Looked

again. She didn't know the language.

He crawled with unease. "I can't go through with this," he said.

"I find you too hard to trust." Lindsay floated toward the

bubble's exit, away from its free-fall core of hospital scanners

and samplers.

"Is our price too high, Dr. Abelard Mavrides?" the woman

called out.

His mind raced as his worst fears were realized. He turned,

determined to face her down. "Someone has misled you."

"We have our own intelligence."

He studied her kinesics warily. The wrinkles of her face were

very slightly wrong, not matching the muscles beneath the skin.

"You're young," he said. "You only look old."

"Then we share one fraud. For you, that's only one of many."

"Ross told me you were dependable," he said. "Why risk your

situation by annoying me?"

"We want the truth."

He stared. "How ambitious. Try the scientific method. And in

the meantime, let's talk sense."

The young woman smoothed her medical tunic with wrinkled

hands. "Pretend I'm a theatre audience, Dr. Mavrides. Tell me

about your ideology."

"I don't have one."

"What about the Investor Peace? All those Detentiste plays?

Did you think you would heal the Schism with this Investor

fraud?"

"You're younger than I thought," he said. "If you ask me that,

you must have never seen the war."

She glared at him. "We were raised in the Peace! Children,

told from the creche that love and reason would sweep the war

aside! But we read history. Not Juliano's version but the bitter

truth. Do you know what happens to groups whose innovations

fail? At best they're shuffled off to some wretched outpost. At

worst they're hunted down, picked off, turned against each

other-"

The truth of it stung him. "But some live!"

The girl laughed. "You're unplanned, so why should you care

for us? Stupidity is life and breath to you."

"You're one of Margaret Juliano's people," he said. "The

Superbrights." He stared at her. He had never met a

Superbright before. They were supposed to be closely sheltered,

constantly under study.

"Margaret Juliano," she said. "From your Midnight Clique.

She helped design us. She's a Detentiste! When the Peace falls,

we'll fall with her! They're always prying at us, spying, looking

for flaws. . . ." Her eyes were wild in the wrinkled face. "Do you

realize the potential we have? There are no rules, no souls, no

limits! But dogmas hedge us in. False wars and stupid loyalties.

The heaped-up garbage of the Schismatrix. Others wallow in it,

hiding from total freedom! But we want all the truth, without

conditions. We take our reality raw. We want all eyes open,

always: and if it takes a cataclysm, then we have a thousand

ready. . . ."

"No, wait," Lindsay said. The girl was a Superbright; she could

he no more than thirty. It appalled him to see her so fanatic, so

willing to repeat his errors: his, and Vera's. "You're too young

for absolutes. For God's sake, no pure gestures. Give it fifty

years first. Give it a hundred! You have all the time you want!"

"We don't think the way they want us to," the girl said. "And

they'll kill us for it. But not until we've pried the worldskull

open and put our needles in."

"Wait," Lindsay said. "Maybe the Peace is doomed. But you

can save yourselves. You're clever. You can - "

"Life's a joke, friend. Death's the punch line." She raised her

hand and vanished.

Lindsay gasped. "What have you - ?" He stopped suddenly. His own voice sounded odd to him. The room's acoustics seemed

different. The machines, however, were producing the same

quiet hums and subdued beeps.

He approached the machines. "Hello? Young girl. Let's talk

first. Believe me, I can understand." His voice had changed; it

had lost the subtle raspincss of age. He touched his throat

left-handed. His chin had a heavy growth of beard. Shocked, he

tugged at it. It was his own hair.

He floated closer to the machines, touched one. It rustled

beneath his hand. He seized it in a fury; it crumpled at once,

showing a flimsy lathwork of cellulose and plastic. He tore into

the next machine. Another mockup. In the center of the complex was a child's tape recorder, humming and beeping faithfully. He snatched it up left-handed and was suddenly aware of his left arm: a lingering soreness in the muscle.

He tore off his shirt and jacket. His stomach was taut, flat; the

graying hair on his chest had been painstakingly depilated.

Again he felt his face. He had never worn a beard, but it felt

like two weeks' growth, at least.

The girl must have drugged him on the spot. Then someone

had given him a cell-wash, reversed catabolism, reset the

Hayflick limit on his skin and major organs, at the same time

exercising his unconscious body to restore muscle tone. Then,

when all was done, replaced him in the same position and

somehow restored him to instant awareness.

Delayed shock struck him; the world seemed to shimmer.

Compared to this, almost anything was easier to doubt: his

name, his business here, his life. They left me the beard as a

calendar, he thought dazedly. Unless that too was fraud.

He took a deep breath. His lungs felt tight, stretched. They had stripped them of the tar from smoking.

"Oh God," he said aloud. "Nora." By now she would be past

panic: she would be full of reckless hatred for whoever had

taken him. He hurried at once to the bubble's exit.

The grapelike cluster of cheap inflatables was hooked to an

interurban tube-road. He floated at once down the lacquered

corridor and emerged through a filament doorway into the

swollen transparent nexus of crossroads. Below was Goldreich-

Tremaine, with its Besetzny and Patterson Wheels spinning in

slow majesty; with the moleculelike links and knobs of other

suburbs shining purple, gold, and green, surrounding the city

like beaded yarn. At least he was still in G-T. He headed at

once for home.

GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 18-9-'53

The chaos repulsed Constantine. Evacuations were untidy affairs. The docking port was littered with trash: clothing, ship

schedules, inhaler wrappers, propaganda leaflets. Baggage limits

were growing stricter by the hour. Not far away four Shapers

were pulling items from their overweight luggage and spitefully

smashing them against the walls and mooring-benches.

Long lines waited at the interaction terminals. The overloaded

terminals were charging by the second. Some of the refugees

were finding that it cost more money to sell their faltering

stocks than the stocks themselves were worth.

A synthetic voice on the address system announced the next

flight to Skimmers Union. Instant pandemonium swept the port.

Constantine smiled. His own craft, the Friendship Serene, had

that destination. Unlike the others, his berth was secure. Not

simply in the ship but in the new capital as well.

Goldreich-Tremaine had overreached itself. It had leaned too

heavily on the mystique of its capitalship. When that was gone,

seized by militants in a rival city, G-T's web of credit had

nothing to sustain it.

He liked Skimmers Union. It floated in circumtitanian orbit,

above the bloody glimmer of the clouds of Titan. In Skimmers

Union the source of the city's wealth was always reassuringly

close: the inexhaustible mass of rich organics that choked the

Titanian sky. Fusion-powered dredges punched through its at-

mosphere, sweeping up organics by the hundreds of tons. Methane, ethane, acetylene, cyanogen: a planetary feedstock for the

Union's polymer factories.

Passengers were disembarking; a handful compared to those

leaving, and not a savory handful. A group in baggy uniforms

floated past customs. Sundogs, clearly, and not even Shaper

sundogs: their skins shone with antiseptic oils.

Constantine's bodyguards murmured to one another in his

earpiece, sizing up the latest arrivals. The four guards were

unhappy with Constantine's reluctance to leave. Constantine's

many local enemies were close to desperation as Goldreich-

Tremaine's banks neared collapse. The guards were keyed to a

fever pitch.

But Constantine lingered. He had defeated the Shapers on

their own ground, and the pleasure of it was intense. He lived

for moments like this one. He was perhaps the only calm man

in a crowd of close to two thousand. Never had he felt so utterly

in control.

His enemies had been crippled by their underestimation. They

had taken his measure and erred completely. Constantine him-

self did not know that measure; that was the pang that drove

him on.

He considered his enemies, one by one. The militants had

chosen him to attack the Midnight Clique, and his success had

been thorough and impressive. Regent Charles Vetterling had

been the first to fall. Vetterling fancied himself a survivor.

Encouraged by Carl Zeuner, he had thrown in his lot with the

militants. The power of the Midnight Clique was broken from

within. It splintered into warring camps. Those who held their

ground were denounced by others more desperate.

The Mechanist defector, Sigmund Fetzko, had "faded." These

clays, those calling his residence received only ingenious delays

and temporizing from his household's expert system. Fetzko's

image lived; the man himself was dead, and too polite to admit it.

Neville Pongpianskul was dead, assassinated in the Republic at

Constantine's order.

Chancellor-General Margaret Juliano had simply vanished.

Some enemy of her own had finished her. This still puzzled

Constantine; on the day of her disappearance he had received a

large crate, anonymously. Cautiously opened by bodyguards, it

had revealed a block of ice with her name elegantly chiseled on

its surface: Margaret Juliano, on ice. She had not been seen

since.

Colonel-Professor Nora Mavrides had drastically overplayed

her hand. Her husband, the false Lindsay, had disappeared, and

she had accused Constantine of kidnapping him. When her

husband returned again, with a wild tale about Superbright

renegades and black market clinics, she was disgraced.

Constantine was still not sure what had happened. The most

likely explanation was that Nora Mavrides had been double-

crossed by her burnt-out little cadre of diplomats. Probably they

had seen what was coming and set up their one-time protectress,

hoping that the new Skimmers Union regime would thank them

for it. If so, they were grossly mistaken.

Constantine looked about the cavernous station, adjusting his

videoshades for closeups. Amid the fretting Shapers in their

overelaborate finery was a growing minority of others. An imported cargo of sundogs. Here and there shabbily clad ideological derelicts, their faces wreathed in smiles, were comparing

lace-sleeved garments to their torsos or lurking with predatory

nonchalance beside evacuees lightening their luggage.

"Vermin," Constantine said. The sight depressed him.

"Gentlemen, it's time we moved on."

The guards led him across the chained-off entry to a private

ramp padded in velcro. Constantine's clingtight boots crunched

and shredded across the fabric.

He floated down the free-fall embarkation tube to the airlock

of the Friendship Serene. Once inside he took his favorite acceleration chair and plugged in on video to enjoy the takeoff.

Within the port's skeletal gantryways, the smaller ships queued up for embarkation tubes, dwarfed by the stylized bulk of an

Investor starship. Constantine craned his neck, causing the hull

cameras of the Friendship Serene to swivel in slaved obedience.

"Is that Investor ship still here?" he said aloud. He smiled. "Do

you suppose they're hunting bargains?"

He lifted his videoshades. Within the ship's cabin his guards

clustered around an overhead tank, huffing tranquilizer gas

from breathing masks. One looked up, red-eyed. "May we go

into suspension now, sir?"

Constantine nodded sourly. Since the war had started up again, his guards had lost all sense of humor.

AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 22-9-'53

Nora looked up at her husband, who sprawled above her in a

towering chair. His face was hidden by a dark beard and opaque

wraparound sunshades. His hair was close-cropped and he wore

a Mech jumpsuit. His old, scarred diplomatic bag rested on the

scratchy plush of the deck. He was taking it with him. He meant

to defect.

The heavy gravity of the Investor ship weighed on both of them like iron. "Stop pacing, Nora," he said. "You'll only exhaust

yourself."

"I'll rest later," she said. Tension knotted her neck and shoulders.

"Rest now. Take the other chair. If you'll close your eyes,

sleep a little ... in almost no time-"

"I'm not going with you." She pulled off her own sunshades

and rubbed the bridge of her nose. The light in the cabin was

the light Investors favored: a searing blaze of blue-white radiance, drenched in ultraviolet.

She hated that light. Somehow she had always resented the

Investors for robbing her Family's deaths of meaning. And the

three months she'd once spent in a ship like this one had been

the eeriest time of her life. Lindsay had been quick, adaptable,

the consummate sundog, as willing to deal with the aliens as he

was with anyone. She'd wondered at it then. And now they had

come full circle.

He said, "You came this far. You wouldn't have, if you didn't

want to come with me. I know you, Nora. You're still the same,

even if I've changed."

"I came because I wanted to be with you for every moment

that I could." She fought down the tears, her face frozen. The

sensation was horrifying, a black nausea. Too many tears, she

thought, had been pushed away for too long. The day would

come when she would choke on them.

Constantine used every weakness in Goldreich-Tremaine, she

thought. And my special weakness was this man. When Abelard

came back from the rejuvenation clinic, three weeks late and so

changed that the household robots wouldn't let him in ... But

even that was not so bad as the days without him, hunting for

him, finding that the black-market subble he'd gone to had been

deflated and put away, wondering what furtive Star Chamber

was picking him to shreds. . . .

"This is my fault," she said. "I accused Constantine with no

proof, and he humiliated me. Next time I'll know better."

"Constantine had nothing to do with it," he said. "I know what

I saw in that clinic. They were Superbrights."

"I can't believe in the Cataclysts," she said. "Those

Superbrights are watched like jewels; they don't have room for

wild conspiracies. What you saw was a fraud; the whole thing

was staged to draw me out. And I fell for it."

"Don't be proud, Nora. It's blinded you. The Cataclysts

abducted me, and you won't even admit they exist. You can't

win, because you can't bring back the past. Let it go, and come

with me."

"When I see what Constantine did to the Clique-"

"It's not your fault! My God, aren't there disasters enough

without your heaping them all on your own shoulders?

Goldreich-Tremaine is through! We have to live now! I told you

years ago that it couldn't last, and now it's over!" He flung his

arms wide. The left one, tugged by gravity, fell limply; the other

whirred with smooth precision through a powered arc.

They had been over this a hundred times, and she saw that his nerves were frayed. Under the influence of the treatment his

hard-won patience had vanished in a blaze of false youth. He

was shouting at her. "You're not God! You're not history!

You're not the Ring Council! Don't flatter yourself! You're

nothing now, you're a target, a scapegoat! Run, Nora! Sundog

it!"

"The Mavrides clan needs me," she said.

"They're better off without you. You're an embarrassment to

them now, we both are-"

"And the children?"

He was silent a moment. "I'm sorry for them, more sorry than

I can say, but they're adults now and they can take their own

chances. They're not the problem here, we are! If we make

things easy for the enemy, just slip away, evaporate, we'll be

forgotten. We can wait it out."

"And give the fascists their way in everything? The assassins,

the killers? How long before the Belt fills up again with Shaper

agents, and little wars blaze up in every corner?"

"And who'll stop that? You?"

"What about you, Abelard? Dressed as a stinking Mechanist

with stolen Shaper data in that bag! Do you ever think of

anyone's life but your own? Why in God's name don't you

stand up for the helpless instead of betraying them? Do you

think it's easier for me without you? I'll go on fighting, but

without you there'll be no heart in me."

He groaned. "Listen. I was a sundog before I met you, you

know just how little I had. ... I don't want that emptiness, no

one caring, no one knowing . . . And another betrayal on my

conscience. . . . Nora, we had almost forty years! This place was

good to us, but it's falling apart on its own! Good times will

come again. We have all the time there is! You wanted more

life, and I went out and got it for you. Now you want me to

throw it away. I won't be a martyr, Nora. Not for anyone."

"You always talked about mortality," she said. "You're different now."

"If I changed it was because you wanted me to."

"Not like this. Not treason."

"We'll die for nothing."

"Like the others," she said, regretting it at once. And there it

was before them: the old guilt in all its stark intimacy. Those

others, to whom duty was more than life. Those they had

abandoned, those they had killed in the Shaper outpost. That

was the crime the two of them had struggled to efface, the crime

that had bound them together. "Well, that's what you're asking,

isn't it? To betray my own people again, for you!"

There. She had said it. Now there was no going back. She

waited in pain for the words that would free her from him.

"You were my people," he said. "I should have known I would

never have one for long. I'm a sundog, and it's my way, not

yours. I knew you wouldn't come." He leaned his head against

the bare fingers of his artificial arm. Piercing highlights glinted

off the harsh iron. "Stay and fight, then. You could win, I

think."

It was the first time he had lied to her. "But I can win," she

said. "It won't be easy, we won't have all we had, but we're not

beaten yet. Stay, Abelard, please. Please! I need you. Ask me for

anything except to give up fighting."

I can't ask you to change," her husband said. "People only

change if you give them time. Someday this thing that's haunted

us will wear away, if we both live. I think the love is stronger

than the guilt. If it is, and someday you feel your obligations no

longer need you, then come after me. Find me. . . ."

"I will I promise it. Abelard. ... If I'm killed like the others

and you live on safely then say you won't forget me "

"Never. I swear it by everything we had between us "

"Goodbye, then." She climbed up into the huge Investor chair

to kiss him. She felt his steel hand go around her wrist like a

manacle. She kissed him lightly. Then she tugged, and he let go.

CHAPTER SIX

AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 29-9-'53

Lindsay lay on the floor of his cavernous stateroom, breathing

deeply. The ozone-charged air of the Investor ship stung his

nose, which was sunburned despite his oils. The stateroom walls

were blackened metal, studded with armored orifices. From one

of them a freshet of distilled water trickled, cascading limply in

the heavy gravity.

This stateroom had seen a lot of use. Faint scratches

cuneiformed the floor and walls, almost to the ceiling. Humans

were not the only passengers to pay Investor fare.

If modern Shaper exosociology was right, the Investors them-

selves were not the first owners of these starships. Covered in

vainglorious mosaics and metal bas-reliefs, each Investor craft

looked unique. But close analysis showed the underlying basic

structure: blunt hexagons at bow and stern, with six long rectangular sides. Current thought held that the Investors had bought,

found, or stolen them.

The ship's Ensign had given him a pallet, a broad flat mattress

patterned in brown-and-white hexagons, built for Investors. Its

surface was as harsh as burlap. It smelted faintly of Investor scale-oil.

Lindsay had tested the metal wall of his stateroom, wondering

about the scratches. Though it felt faintly grainy, the steel zips

of his foot-gloves slid on it like glass. Still, it might be softer

under extremes of temperature and pressure. A very large taloned beast afloat in a pool of high-pressure liquid ethane, for

instance, might have scratched the walls in an attempt to burrow

out.

The gravity was painful, but the stateroom lights had been

turned down. The cabin was huge and unfurnished; his scattering of clothes on magnetic hooks seemed like pathetic scraps.

It was odd of the Investors to leave a room empty, even if it

doubled as a zoo. Lindsay lay quietly, trying to catch his breath,

thinking about it.

The armored hatchway rang, then shunted open. Lindsay

levered himself up with the artificial arm, the only limb not sore

from gravity. He smiled. "Yes, Ensign? News?"

The Ensign entered the room. He was small for an Ensign, a

mere forearm's length taller than Lindsay himself, and his wiry

build was accented by his birdlike habit of ducking his head. He

looked more like a crewman than an Ensign. Lindsay studied

him thoughtfully.

Academics still speculated about the Investor ranking system.

The Ship's Commanders were always female, the only females

aboard ship. They were twice the size of crewmen, massively

built. With their size went a sluggish calm, a laconic assumption

of power. Ensigns were second in command, as combination

diplomats and ministers. The rest of the crew formed an adoring

male harem. The scampering crewmen with their bead-bright

eyes weighed three times as much as a man, but around their

monstrous commanders they almost seemed to flutter.

The frills were the central kinesic display. The reptilian Investors had long ribbed frills behind their heads, rainbow-tinted

translucent skin netted with blood vessels. Frills had evolved for

temperature control; they could be spread to absorb sunlight or

opened in shade to dispel heat. In civilized Investor life they

were a relic, like the human eyebrow, which had evolved to

deflect sweat. Like the eyebrow, their social use was now paramount.

The Ensign's frill bothered Lindsay. It flickered too much.

Rapid flickering was usually interpreted as a sign of amusement.

In human beings, bad laughter kinesics were a sign of deep

stress. Lindsay, despite his professional interest, had no desire to

be the first to witness an Investor's hysteria. He hoped it was

simply a repulsive mannerism. This ship was new to the Solar

System and its crew was unused to humanity.

"No news, Artist," the Ensign said in pained trade English. "A

further discussion of payment."

"Good business," Lindsay said in Investor. His throat ached

from the high-pitched fluting, but he preferred it to the Ensign's

eerie attempts to master human language.

This Ensign was not like the first he had met. That Investor

had been smooth and urbane, his vocabulary heavy with glib

cliches gleaned from human video broadcasts. This new Ensign

was visibly struggling.

Clearly the Investors had sent in their best to make first

contact. After thirty-seven years, it seemed that the Solar System

was now considered safe for Investor fringe elements. "Our

Commander wants you on tape," the Ensign said in English.

Lindsay reached automatically for the thin chain around his

neck. His video monocle, with its treasured film of Nora, hung

there. "I have a tape which is mostly blank. I can't surrender it,

but-"

"Our Commander is very fond of her tape. Her tape has many

other images but not one of your species. She will study it."

"I'd like another audience with the Commander," Lindsay

said. "The first was so brief. I will gladly submit to the tape. You

have your camera?"

The Ensign blinked, the lucid nictitating membrane flickering

upward over his dark, bulging eyeball. The dimness of the room

seemed to upset him. "I have the tape." He opened his over-

the-shoulder valise and produced a flat round canister. He

grasped the canister with two of his huge toes and set it on the

black gunmetal floor. "You will open the canister. You will then

make amusing and characteristic movements of your species,

which the tape will see. Continue to do this until the tape

understands you."

Lindsay wobbled his jaw from side to side in imitation of the

Investor nod. The Investor seemed satisfied. "Language is not

necessary. The tape does not hear sound." The Investor turned

to the door. "I will return for the tape in two of your hours."

Left alone, Lindsay studied the canister. The ridged and gilded

metal lop was as wide as both outstretched hands. Before opening it he waited a moment, savoring his disgust. It was as much self-directed as aimed at his hosts.

The Investors had not asked to be deified; they had merely

pursued their own gain. They had been aware of mankind for centuries. They were much older than mankind, but they had

thoughtfully refrained from interfering until they saw that they

could wring a decent profit from the species. Seen from an

Investor's viewpoint, their actions were straightforward.

Lindsay opened the canister. A spool of iron-gray tape nestled

inside, with ten centimeters of off-white leader. Lindsay put the

lid aside-the thin metal was heavy as lead in the Investor

gravity-and then froze.

The tape rustled in its box. The leader end flicked upward,

twisting, and the whole length of it began to uncoil. It rose,

whipping and rippling, faint sheens of random color coiling

along its length. Within seconds it had formed an open cloud of

bright ribbon, supporting itself on a stiff, half-flattened

latticework.

Lindsay, still kneeling and moving only his eyes, watched cautiously. The white end-piece was the tape creature's head, he

realized. The head moved on a long craned loop, scanning the

room for movement.

The tape creature stirred restlessly, stretching itself in a loose-

looped open mass of rolling corkscrews. At its loosest, it was a

bloated, giddy yarnball as tall as a man, its stiffened support-

loops thinly hissing across the floor.

He'd thought it was machinery at first. Dangerous machinery,

because the edges of the warping tape were as thin as razors.

But there was an unplanned, organic ease to its coiling.

He had not yet moved. It didn't seem able to see him.

He shook his head sharply, and the heavy sunshades on his

forehead flew across the room. The tape's head darted after

them at once.

The mimicry started from the tail. The tape shrank, crumpling

like packing tissue, sketching the sunshades' form in tightly

crinkled ribbon. Before it had quite completed the job, the tape

seemed to lose interest. It hesitated, watching the inert

sunglasses, then fell apart in a loose, whipping mass.

Briefly it mimicked Lindsay's crouching form, looping itself

into a gappy man-sized sculpture of rustling tape. Its tinted

ribbon quickly matched the rust-on-black tinge of his coveralls.

Then the tape head looked elsewhere and it flew to pieces, its

colors racing fretfully.

It flickered as Lindsay watched. Its white head scanned slowly,

almost surreptitiously. It flashed muddy brown, the color of

Investor hide. Slowly, a memory, either biological or cybernetic,

took hold of it. It began to bunch and crumple into a new form.

The image of a small Investor took shape. Lindsay was thrilled.

No human being had ever seen an infant Investor, and they

were supposedly very rare. But soon Lindsay could tell from the

proportions that the tape was modeling an adult female. The

tape was too small to form a full-scale replica, but the accuracy

of the knee-high model astonished him. Tiny blisters on the

ribbon reproduced the hard, pebbly skin of the skull and neck;

the tiny eyes, two tinted bumps, seemed full of expression.

Lindsay felt a chill. He recognized the individual. And the

expression was one of dull animal pain.

The tape was mimicking the Investor Commander. She was

gasping, her barrel-like ribs heaving. She squatted awkwardly,

one clawed hand spread across each upthrust knee. The mouth

opened in spasms, showing poorly mimicked peg teeth and the

hollow paper-thin walls of the model's head.

The ship's Commander was sick. No one had ever seen an

Investor ill. The strangeness of it, Lindsay thought, must have

stuck in the tape's memory. This opportunity was not to be

missed. With glacial slowness Lindsay unsnapped his coverall

and exposed the video monocle on its chain. He began filming.

The scaled belly tightened and two edges of tape opened at the base of the model's heavy tail. A rounded white mass with the

gleam of dampness appeared, a lightly wrapped oblong of tape:

an egg.

It was a slow process, a painful one. The egg was leathery; the contractions of the oviduct were compressing it. At last it was

free, though still connected to the tape's parent body by a

transparent length of ribbon. The Investor captain's image

turned, shuffling, then bent to examine the egg with a sick, rapt

intensity. Slowly her huge hand stretched out, scratched the egg,

sniffed the fingers. Her frill began to rise stiffly, engorged with

blood. Her arms trembled.

She attacked her egg. She bit savagely into the narrow end,

shearing into the leathery shell with the badly mimicked teeth.

Yellow ribbon showed, a cheeselike yolk.

She feasted, the taped arms flushing yellow with slime. The

frill jutted behind her head, stiff with fury. The furtive nastiness

of her crime was unmistakable; it crossed the barrier of species

easily. As easily as wealth.

Lindsay put his monocle away. The tape, attracted by the

movement, unlaced its head and lifted it blankly. Lindsay waved

his arms at it and the model fell into tangles. He stood up and

began to shuffle back and forth in the heavy gravity. It watched

him, coiling and flickering.

DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 10-10-'53

Lindsay lurched clown the entry ramp, his scuffed foot-gloves

skidding. After the blaze aboard the starship the disembarkation

mall seemed murky, subaqueous. Dizziness seized him. He

might have managed free-fall, but the Dembowska asteroid's

feeble gravity made his stomach lurch.

The lobby was sprinkled with travelers from the other Mechanist cartels. He'd never seen so many Mechs in one place, and

despite himself the sight alarmed him. Ahead, luggage and pas-

sengers entered the scanning racks of customs. Beyond them

loomed the glass fronts of the Dembowska duty-free shops.

Lindsay shuddered suddenly. He had never felt air so cold. An

icy draft seeped through his thin coveralls and the flexible fabric

of his foot-gloves. His breath was steaming. Dazed, he headed

for the customs.

A young woman waited just before it, poised easily on one

booted foot. She wore dark tights and a fur-collared jacket.

"Captain-Doctor?" she said.

Lindsay stopped with difficulty, gripping the carpet with his

toes.

"The bag, please?" Lindsay handed her his ancient diplomatic

bag, crammed with data lifted from Kosmosity files. She took

his arm in a friendly fashion, leading him through an unmarked

door past the customs scanners. "I'm Policewife Greta Beatty.

Your liaison." They went down a flight of stairs to an office. She

handed the bag to a woman in uniform and accepted a stamped

envelope in return.

She led him out onto a lower floor of the duty-free mall,

prying open the envelope with her lacquered nails. "This holds

your new papers," she said. She handed him a credit card. "You

are now Auditor Andrew Beta Milosz. Welcome to Dembowska

Cartel."

"Thank you, Policewife."

"Greta will do. May I call you Andrew?"

"Call me Beta," Lindsay said. "Who picked the name?"

"His parents. Andrew Milosz died recently, in Bettina Cartel.

But you won't find his death in the records; his next of kin sold

his identity to the Dembowska Harem Police. All identifying

marks in his records have been erased and replaced with yours.

Officially, he emigrated here." She smiled. "I'm here to help

you over the transition. To keep you happy."

"I'm freezing," Lindsay said.

"We'll see to that at once." She led him past the frosted glass

into one of the duty-free shops, a clothier's. When they

reemerged Lindsay wore new coveralls, of thicker quilted fabric

with inset vertical puckers at wrists and ankles. The tasteful

charcoal gray matched his new fur-lined velcro boots. Gloves

were clipped to the vest pocket of his flared fuzzplastic jacket.

He sported a microphone boutonniere in one creamtone lapel.

"Now your hair," said Greta Beatty. She carried his new zip-up

wardrobe bag. "It's in an awful state."

"It was gray," Lindsay said. "The roots grew in black. So I

shaved it off. Since then it's been on its own." He looked at her

levelly.

"You want to keep the beard?"

"Yes."

"Whatever makes you happy."

After ten minutes under the stylers Lindsay's hair was brushed

back from his forehead and temples in slickly brilliantined

curves. The beard was trimmed.

Lindsay had been watching his companion's kinesics. There

was a calmness, a quietude about her movements that belied her

youth. Lindsay felt strained, hypertensive, but Greta's smooth

cheerfulness was beginning to affect him through kinesic con-

tamination. He found himself smiling involuntarily.

"Hungry yet?"

"Yes."

"We'll go to the Periscope. You look fine, Beta. You'll get the

hang of Dembowska gravity in no time. Stick close by me." She

wrapped her arm around his. "I like your antique arm."

"You're staying with me?"

"As long as you like."

"I see. And if I suggest you leave?"

"Do you really think you'll be better off for that?"

Lindsay considered this. "No. Forgive me, Policewife." He felt

touchy, obscurely annoyed. His new identity bothered him. He

had never had one forced on him before. His old training urged

him to lake on local coloration, but the years had calcified him.

Greta led him down two flights of stirruped escalators, deeper

into the asteroid. The floor and walls were of scuffed and

ancient metal, lined with new velcro. The crowd moved in

stately, shredding leaps. Overhead, citizens in a hurry flung

themselves along with ceiling loops. They followed a very old

Dembowskan who was making good time along the wall in a

velcro-wheeled prosthetic chair. "We'll have a little something

to eat," Greta Beatty said. "You'll feel better."

He considered mimicking her kinesics. He was a little rusty but

he thought he could manage it. It might be the smartest thing: to

match her easy affability with his own. He didn't want to. He hurt too much.

"Greta, this easy generosity surprises me. Why are you this

way?"

"A policewife? Oh, I wasn't involved in security at first. I was a

Carnassus wife, a strictly erotic relationship. Promotion came

later. I'm not in espionage. I just do liaison work."

"Many others before me?"

"A few. Sundogs mostly. Not ranking Shaper academics."

"You've seen Michael Carnassus?"

She smiled distantly. "Only in the flesh. We're almost there.

Harem Police have reserved tables. You'll want one of the

windows, I'm sure."

The dim intimacy of the Periscope, to Lindsay's light-blasted

eyes, seemed impossibly gloomy. Steam rose off the food on the

tables. He put on his left glove. He had never been anywhere so

cold.

Cool blue light poured through the bulging, concave windows.

Lindsay glanced through the metaglass briefly, saw a rocky cav-

ern half full of water. An observation sphere the size of a house

was anchored to the cavern's ceiling. Beside it was a bank of

blue spotlights, mounted across the ceiling on arching rails.

Lindsay set his boots into the stirrups of a low-grav chair. The

seat warmed beneath him; its padded saddle was wired with

heating elements.

Greta smiled at him across the table, her blue eyes huge in the dimness. It was a friendly smile without flirtation in it; without,

in fact, any subterranean elements at all. No fear, no shyness;

nothing but a well-balanced hint of mild benevolence. Her

blonde hair was parted in the middle and fell in modish

Dembowska fashion to smooth, blunt-cut edges along her ears

and cheekbones. The hair looked very clean. He had an abstract

urge to run his hand across it, the way he might run his fingers

over the spine of a book.

The fiery letters of the menu appeared in the table's dark

surface. Lindsay put his gloved hand on the tabletop. Its surface

was sticky with adhesive polymers. He pulled his fingers back;

the glue held him at first, then released its grip sharply, leaving

no trace. He looked at the menu. "No prices."

"The Harem Police will pick it up. We wouldn't want you

getting a bad opinion of our cuisine." She nodded across the

restaurant. 'That gentleman in the biocuirass, at the table to

your right -that's Lewis Martinez, with his wife, Lydia. He

heads Martinez Corp, his rank is Comptroller. They say she was

born on Earth."

"She looks well-preserved." Lindsay stared with frank curiosity

at the sinister pair, whose skill as industrial spies was a byword

in Shaper Security circles. They were speaking quietly between

courses, smiling at one another with unfeigned affection. Lind-

say felt a stab of pain.

Greta was still talking. "The man with the tabletop servo is

Coordinator Brandt. . . . The group by the next window are

Kabuki Intrasolar types. The one in the silly jacket is

Wells. . . ."

"Does Ryumin ever dine here?"

"Oh . . . no." She smiled briefly. "He transmits in different

circles."

Lindsay rubbed his bearded chin. "He's well, I hope."

She was polite. "I'm not the one to judge. He seems happy. Let

me order for you." She punched in orders on the table's key-

board wing.

"Why is it so cold?"

"History. Fashion. Dembowska's an old colony; it suffered an

ecobreakdown. There are places where I can show you layers of

flashfrozen mold still peeling off the walls. The worst rots have

adjusted to a narrow range in temperature. When it's this cold

they're dormant. That's not the only reason, though." She gestured at the window. "That has its influence." Lindsay looked out. "The swimming pool?" Greta laughed politely. "That's the Extraterrarium, Bela."

"Burn me!" Lindsay stared outward.

The rough-hewn cavity was slopping over with a turgid, rusttinged liquid. He'd thought it was water at first. "That's where

they keep the monsters," he said. "That observation globe-that's the Carnassus Palace, isn't it?"

"Of course."

"It's quite small."

"It's an exact replica of the observatory of the Chaikin Expedition. Of course it's not large. Imagine what the Investors

charged them to ship it to the stars. Carnassus lives very modestly, Bela. It's not like Ring Security told you."

Every diplomatic instinct held Lindsay back. With an effort, he

broke them. "But he has two hundred wives."

"Think of us as a psychiatric staff. Auditor. Marriage to Carnassus is an arrangement of rank. Dembowska depends on

him, and he depends on us." Lindsay said, "Could I meet Carnassus?"

"That would he up to the Chief of Police. But what's the

point? The man can barely speak. It's not like they say in the

Rings. Carnassus is a very dazed, very gentle person, who was

terribly wounded. When his embassy was failing, he took an

experimental drug, PDKL-Ninety-five. It was supposed to help

him grasp alien modes of thought, but it shattered him. He was

a brave man. We feel pity for him. The sexual aspect is a very

minor part of it."

Lindsay considered this. "I see. With two hundred others,

some of them favorites, presumably, it must be a rather rare

role. . . . Once a year, perhaps?"

She was calm. "Not quite that rare, but you've grasped the

basics. I won't disguise the truth, Bela. Carnassus is not our

ruler; he's our resource. The Harem rules Dembowska because

we surround him and we're the only ones he'll talk to." She

smiled. "It's not a matriarchy. We're not mothers. We're the

police."

Lindsay looked out the window. A drip fell and rippled. It was

liquid ethane. Just beyond the insulated metaglass the sluggish

pond was at an instantly lethal 180 degrees below zero Celsius.

A man in that reddish pool would freeze in seconds into a

bloated mass of rock. The grayish stones of the shores, Lindsay

realized suddenly, were water ice.

Something was emerging onto the shoreline. In the dim bluish

light, the ethane's surface was pierced by what appeared to be a

rack of broken twigs. Even in the feeble gravity the creature's

movements were glacial. Lindsay pointed.

"A sea scorpion," Greta said. "Eurypteroid, to give it its for-

mal name. It's attacking that lump on the shoreline. That black

slime is vegetation." More of the predator slid with paralytic

slowness from the thin liquid. The twigs were now revealed as

interlocking basketlike foreclaws that meshed together like

saberteeth. "Its prey is gathering energy to leap. That will take a

while. By the standards of this ecosystem, this is a lightning

attack. Look at the size of its cephalothorax, Bela."

The sea scorpion had heaved its broad, platelike prosoma out

of the water; this crablike head-body was half a meter across.

Behind the lozenge-shaped compound eyes was the creature's

long, tapering abdomen, plated in overlapping horizontal ridges.

"It's three meters long," Greta said as a servo delivered the first

course. "Longer if you count the tailspike. A nice size for an invertebrate. Have some soup."

"I'm watching this." The extended claws were closing on the

prey with the slow deliberation of a hydraulic door. Suddenly

the prey-creature flopped wobblingly into the air and landed in

the pool with a splash.

"It jumps fast!" Lindsay said.

"There's only one speed for jumping." Greta Beatty smiled.

"That's physics. Eat something. Have a breadstick." Lindsay

could not tear his eyes from the eurypteroid, which lay with its

claw-teeth intermeshed, inert and apparently exhausted. "I pity

it," he said.

Greta was patient. "It came here as an egg, Bela. It didn't get

that large eating breadsticks. Carnassus takes good care of them.

He was the embassy's exobiologist."

Lindsay tried some soup with the sliding trap-bowl of his

low-gravity spoon. "You seem to share his expertise."

"Everyone in Dembowska takes an interest. in the

Extraterrarium. Local pride. Of course, the tourist trade isn't

what it was, since the Investor Peace collapsed. We make up for

it with refugees."

Lindsay stared moodily into the pool. The food was excellent,

but his appetite was off. The eurypteroid stirred feebly. He

thought of the sculpture the Investors had given him and wondered what its droppings looked like.

A burst of laughter came from Wells's table. "I want a word

with Wells," Lindsay said.

"Leave it to me," she said. "Wells has Shaper contacts. Word

might leak back to the Ring Council." She looked grave. "You

wouldn't want to risk your cover before it's well established."

"You don't trust Wells?"

She shrugged. "That's not your worry." A new course arrived,

borne by a squeaking, velcro-footed robot. "I love the antique

servos here, don't you?" She squirted heavy cream sauce over a

meat pastry and gave him the plate. "You're under stress, Bela.

You need food. Sleep. A sauna. The good things in life. You

look edgy. Relax."

"I live on the edge," Lindsay said.

"Not now. You live with me. Eat something so I'll know you

feel safe."

To please her, Lindsay bit reluctantly into the pastry. It was

delicious. Appetite flooded back into him. "I have things to do," he said, stifling the urge to wolf it down.

"Think you'll do them better without food and sleep?"

"I suppose you have a point." He looked up; she handed him

the sauce bulb. As he squeezed on more sauce she passed him a

slotted wineglass. "Try the local claret." He sampled it. It was as

good as vintage Synchronis, from the Rings. "Someone stole this

technology," he said.

"You aren't the first defector. Things are calmer here." She

pointed out the window. "Look at that xiphosuran." A lumpy

crab was sculling across the pool with intolerable sluggish calm.

"It has a lesson for you."

Lindsay stared quietly, thinking.

Greta's domicile was seven levels down. A silver-plated house-

hold servo took Lindsay's wardrobe bag. Greta's parlor had a

baroque furred couch with sliding stirrups and two anchored

chairs upholstered in burgundy velvet. An adhesive coffee table

held a flip-top inhaler case and a rack of cassettes.

The bathroom had a sauna compartment and a fold-out suction toilet with a heated elastic rim. The overhead light glowed

pink with infrared heat. Standing on the icy tiles, Lindsay

dropped his glove. It fell slowly, at a pronounced slant. The

room's verticals didn't match the local gravity. This keen touch

of avant-garde interior design filled Lindsay with sudden nausea.

He leaped up and clung to the ceiling, closing his eyes until the

dizziness passed.

Greta called through the door. "You want a sauna?"

"Anything to get warm."

"The controls are on the left."

Lindsay stripped, gasping as the freezing metal of his artificial

arm brushed his bare ribs. He held the arm well away as he

stepped into the blizzard of steam. In the low gravity the air was

thick with flying water. Coughing, he groped for the breathing

mask. It was pure oxygen; in moments he felt like a hero. He

twisted the controls recklessly, biting back a scream as he was

pelted with a sudden sandblast of powdered snow. He twisted

back and let himself cook in wet heat, then stepped out. The

sauna cycled through the boiling point, sterilizing itself.

He turbaned his damp hair, absently knotting the towel's ends

in a Goldreich-Tremaine flourish. He found pajamas his size in

the cabinet; royal blue with matching fur-lined mukluks.

Outside, Greta had changed from her fur jacket and tights into

a quilted nightrobe with a flaring collar. For the first time he

noticed her forearms, both heavily overlayed with Mechanist

implants. The right one held some kind of weapon: a series of

short parallel tubes mounted above the wrist. There was no sign

of a trigger; it probably worked by nerve interaction. From

inside the other sleeve he caught a red flicker of readouts from

a biomonitor.

Mechs cherished a fanatic interest in biofeedback. It was part

of most Mech programs for longevity. He hadn't thought of

Greta as a Mechanist. Despite himself, the sight shocked him.

"You're not sleepy?"

He yawned. "A little."

She raised her right arm above her head, absently. A remote

control unit leaped across the room into her hand, and she

turned on the videowall. It showed an overhead view of the

Extralerrarium, taken through one of the monitors in the

Carnassus Palace.

Lindsay joined her on the couch, tucking his mukluks into the

healed stirrups. "Not that," he said, shivering. She touched a

button; the videowall blurred and resolved into the Saturnian

surface, crawling in red and amber. Nostalgia flooded him. He

turned his face away.

She switched scenes. A craggy landscape appeared; enormous

pits next to a blasted, flaking area cut by two huge crevasses.

"This is erotica," she said. "Skin at twenty thousand times life

size. One of my favorites." She touched buttons and the video

raced across the ominous landscape, pulling to a stop by the

root of a gigantic scaled spar. "Sec those domes?"

"Yes."

"Those are bacteria. This is a Mechanist, you see."

"You?"

She smiled. "This is often the hardest part for a Shaper. You

can't stay sterile here; we depend on these little creatures. We

don't have your internal alterations. We don't want them. You'll

have to crawl like the rest of us." She look his left hand. Her

hand was warm and faintly moist. "This is contamination. Is it

so bad?"

"No."

"Better to get it over with all at once. Do you agree?"

He nodded. She put her hand on the back of his neck and

kissed him warmly, her mouth open. Lindsay touched his flannel sleeve to his lips. "That was more than a medical action," he

said.

She pulled the knotted towel from his head and tossed it to the household servo. "Nights are cold in Dembowska. A bed is

warmer with two."

"I have a wife."

"Monogamy? How quaint." She smiled sympathetically. "Face

facts, Bela. Defection broke your contract with the Mavrides

gene-line. You're a nonperson now. Except to us."

Lindsay brooded. An image surged up within him: Nora, curled alone in their bed, her eyes wide, her mind racing as her

enemies closed in. He shook his head.

Calmly, Greta smoothed his hair. "If you tried a little, you'd

recover your appetite. Still, it's wise not to rush things."

She showed the polite disappointment that a hostess might

show to a guest who refused dessert. He felt tired. Despite his

renewed youth he ached from the Investor gravity.

"I'll show you the bedroom." It was lined in dark fur. The

bed's canopy was an overhead videoceiling. The massive head-

board was equipped with the latest in slumber technology. He

recognized an encephalogram, monitoring jacks for artificial

body parts, fluorographs for midnight blood fractionation.

He climbed into the bed, kicking off his mukluks. The sheets

rippled, swaddling over him. "Sleep well," Greta said, leaving.

Something touched the top of his head; above him the canopy

flickered gently into life, sketching out brain rhythms. The

waves were complex and annotated cryptically. One of the wave

functions was outlined in roseate pink. As he looked at it,

relaxing, it began to grow. He intuited suddenly what went on

inside his mind to make it larger. He gave in to it and was

suddenly asleep.

When he woke next morning Greta was sleeping peacefully

beside him, an alarm tiara clamped to her forehead, tied in to

the house security. He climbed out of bed. His skin itched

ferociously. His tongue felt furred. He was beginning to crawl.

DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 24-10-'53

"I never thought I'd see you this way, Fyodor." On Greta's

parlor wall across the room from Lindsay, Ryumin's video-

manicured face glowed with bogus health. It was a good replica,

but to Lindsay's trained eye it was clearly computer-generated;

its perfection was frightening. The lips moved accurately with

Ryumin's words, but its little idiosyncracies of movement were

eerily off-key. "How long have you been a wirehead?"

"Ten years or so. Time alters under the wires. You know, I

can't remember offhand where I left my brain. Someplace un-

likely, I'm sure." Ryumin smiled. "It must be in Dembowska

Cartel, or there'd be a transmission lag."

"I want to talk privately. How many people do you suppose

are listening in on us?"

"Just the police," Ryumin assured him. "You're in a Harem

safehouse; their calls are routed directly through the Chief's

databanks. In Dembowska this is as private as it gets. Especially

for someone whose past is as dubious as yours, Mr. Dze."

Lindsay dabbed at his nose with a kerchief. The new bacteria

had hit his sinuses badly; they had already been weakened by

the Investors' ozone-charged air. "Things were different in the

Zaibatsu. When we were face to face."

"The wires bring changes," Ryumin said. "It all becomes a

matter of input, you see. Systems. Data. We tend toward solipsism; it comes with the territory. Please don't resent it if I doubt you." "How long have you been in Dembowska?"

"Since the Peace began to crumble. I needed a haven. This is

the best available."

"So your travels are over, old man?"

"Yes and no, Mr. Dze. With the loss of mobility comes extension of the senses. If I want I can switch out to a probe in

Mercurian orbit. Or in the winds of Jupiter. I often do, in fact.

Suddenly I'm there, just as fully as I'm ever anywhere these

days. The mind isn't what you think, Mr. Dze. When you grip it

with wires, it tends to flow. Data seem to bubble up from some

deep layer of the mind. This is not exactly living, but it has advantages."

"You've given up Kabuki Intrasolar?"

"With the war heating up, the theatre's glory days are over for

a while. The Network takes up most of my time."

"Journalism?"

"Yes. We wireheads-or, rather, Senior Mechanists, to give us

a name not tainted by Shaper propaganda -we have our own

modes of dataflow. News networks. At its most intense it approaches telepathy. I'm the local stringer for Ceres Datacom

Network. I hold citizenship in it, though legally speaking it's

sometimes more convenient to be treated as wholly owned depreciable hardware. Our life is information -even money is

information. Our money and our life are one and the same."

The Mechanist's synthesized voice was calm, detached, but

Lindsay felt alarm. "Are you in danger, old man? Is it some-

thing I can help?"

"My boy," Ryumin said, "there's a whole world behind this

screen. The lines have blurred so much that mere matters of life

and death have to take a back seat. There are those among us

whose brains broke down years ago: they totter along on invest-

ments and programmed routines. If the fleshies knew, they'd

declare them legally dead. But we're not telling." He smiled.

"Think of us as angels, Mr. Dze. Spirits on the wires. Sometimes it's easier that way."

"I'm a stranger here. I'd hoped you could help me, as you did

once. I need advice. I need your wisdom."

Ryumin sighed precisely. "I knew a Dze once when we were

both rogues. I trusted him; I admired his daring. We were men

together. That's no longer the case."

Lindsay blew his nose. With a shudder of deep loathing he

handed the soiled kerchief to the household servo. "I would

have dared anything then. I was ready to die, but I didn't. I kept

looking. And I found someone. I had a wife, and there was no

pretense between us. We were happy together."

"I'm glad for you, Mr. Dze."

"When danger crowded in on us I broke and ran. Now after

almost forty years I'm a sundog again."

"Forty years is a human lifetime, Mr. Dze. Don't force yourself

to be human. A time comes when you have to give that up."

Lindsay looked at his prosthetic arm, flexed the fingers slowly.

"I still love her. It was the war that parted us. If there were

peace again - "

"Those are Detentiste sentiments. They're out of fashion."

"Have you given up hope, Ryumin?"

"I'm loo old for passion," Ryumin said. "Don't ask me to take

risks. Leave me to my data streams, Mr. Dze, or whoever you

are. I'm what I am. There's no going back, no starting over.

That's a game for those who still have flesh. Those who can

heal."

"I'm sorry," Lindsay said, "but I need allies. Knowledge is

power, and I know things others don't. I mean to fight. Not

against my enemies. Against the circumstances. Against history.

I want my wife back, Ryumin. My Shaper wife. I want her back

free and clear, without the shadows on her. If you won't help

me, who will?"

Ryumin hesitated. "I have a friend," he said at last. "His name

is Wells."

DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 31-10-'53

Before the advent of humankind, the Asteroid Belt had arranged itself through the physics of rubble. Fragments were distributed in powers of ten. For every asteroid there were ten others a third its size, from Ceres at a thousand kilometers down to the literal trillions of uncharted boulders following spacetime potentials at relative speeds of five kilometers per second.

Dembowska was of the third rank, two hundred kilometers

across. Like other circumsolar bodies, it had paid its homage to

the laws of chance. In the time of the dinosaurs, something large

had hit Dembowska. The visitor was there and gone in a split

second, leaving chunks of its impact-melted pyroxene embedded

in the crust as it flew apart in gouts of fire. At the point of

impact, Dembowska's silicate matrix had shattered, opening a

ragged vertical crevasse twenty kilometers down to the asteroid's

nickel-iron core.

Now most of the core was gone, devoured by ever-hungry

industry. Dembowska Cartel lived within the crevasse, long plazas dropping level after level into the fading gravity, the gradient

shifting until what were formerly walls became floors, until walls

and floors vanished altogether into the closest thing to free-fall.

At the crevasse's base the world expanded into an enormous

cavernous dugout, Dembowska's hollow heart, where genera-

lions of mining drones had gnawed at the metal and the ores

that held it.

The hole was too large for air. They treated it as space. Within

the free-fall vacuum at the asteroid's core were the new heavy

industries: the cryonics factories, where hints and memories

teased from the blasted mind of Michael Carnassus were translated into a steady rise of Dembowska Cartel slock on the market monitors of a hundred worlds.

Trade secrets were secure within Dembowska's bowels, snug

beneath kilometers of rock. Life had forced itself like putty into

the fracture in this minor planet: dug out its inert heart and

filled it with engines.

Seen from the industrial core, the bottom of the crevasse was

the top layer of the outside world. Here Wells had his offices;

where twenty-four-hour crews of his employees monitored the

datapulses of the Union of Cartels, under the quasinational

aegis of Ceres Datacom Network.

The offices were walled in velcro and video, the glowing walls

with their ceaseless murmur of news acting as work partitions.

Bits of hard copy were velcro-clipped underfoot and overhead;

reporters in headsets spoke over audiolines or tapped energetically at keyboards. They looked young; there was a calculated extravagance in their dress. Over the mumble of narrative, the smooth rattle of printouts, the whir of booted datatapes, came faint background music: the brittle keening of synthesizers. The cold air smelled of roses.

A secretary announced them. His hair crisped out from under

a loose Mech beret. Its puffiness suggested possible cranial taps.

He wore a patriotic lapel tag, showing the wide-eyed face of

Michael Carnassus.

Wells's office was more secure than the rest. His videowalls

formed a surging mosaic of headlines, interlocking rectangles of

data that could be frozen and expanded at will. He wore quilted

coveralls with Shaper lace at the throat; the gray fabric was

overprinted with stylized eurypteroids in darker gray. His stylish

gloves were overlaid with circuit-laden control rings.

"Welcome to CDN, Auditor Milosz. You too, Policewife. May

I offer you hot tea?"

Lindsay accepted the warm bulb gratefully. The tea was synthetic but good. Greta took the bulb but drank nothing. She

watched Wells with calm wariness.

Wells touched a switch on the sticky surface of his free-fall

desk. A large goose-necked lamp swiveled on its coiled neck

with subtle, reptilian grace and stared at Lindsay. There were

human eyes within the hood, embedded in a smooth matrix of

dark flesh. The eyes blinked and shifted from Lindsay to Greta

Beatty. Greta bowed her head in recognition.

"This is a monitor outlet for the Chief of Police," Wells told

him. "She prefers to see things with her own eyes, when they

have as much importance as you claim your news does." He

turned to Greta. "The situation is under control, Policewife."

The accordioned door shunted open behind her.

Tight-lipped, she bowed again to the lamp, shot a quick look at Lindsay, and kicked her way off the wall and out the door. It

slid shut.

"How'd you get stuck with the Zen nun?" Wells said.

"I beg your pardon?" said Lindsay.

"Beatty. She hasn't told you about her cult affiliation? Zen

Serotonin?"

"No." Lindsay hesitated. "She seems very self-possessed."

"Odd.I understand the cult is well established in your

homeworld. Bettina, wasn't it?"

Lindsay locked eyes with him. "You know me, Wells. Think

back. Goldreich Tremaine."

Wells smirked one-sidedly and squeezed his bulb of tea, firing

an amber stream into his mouth. His teeth were strong and

square, and the effect was alarmingly feral. "I thought you had a

Shaper look about you. If you're a Cataclyst, don't try anything

desperate under the eyes of the Chief of Police."

"I was a Cataclyst victim," Lindsay said. "They put me on ice

for a month. It broke me out of my routines. And then I

defected." He pulled the glove from his right hand.

Wells recognized the antique prosthetic. "Captain-Doctor

Mavrides. This is an unexpected pleasure. Rumor said you were

hopelessly insane. Frankly, the news had pleased me. Abelard

Mavrides, the Investor pet. What's become of your jewels and

cables, Captain-Doctor?"

"I travel light these days."

"No more plays?" Wells opened a drawer in his desk and

pulled out a humidor. He offered Lindsay a cigarette. Lindsay

took it gratefully. "The theatre's out of fashion," he said. They

lit up. Lindsay coughed helplessly.

"I must have annoyed you at that wedding party, doctor. When I came in to recruit your students."

"They were the ideologues, Wells, not me. I was afraid for

you."

"You needn't have been." Wells blew smoke and smiled.

"Your student Besetzny is one of ours now."

"A Detentiste?"

"Our thinking's progressed since then, doctor. The old categories, Mechanist and Shaper-they're a bit outmoded these

days, aren't they? Life moves in clades." He smiled. "A clade is

a daughter species, a related descendant. It's happened to other

successful animals, and now it's humanity's turn. The factions

still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can

claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer

exists."

"You're talking Cataclysm."

"There are others just as crazy. Those who hold power in the

Cartels, in the Ring Council. Blinding the Schismatrix with

hatred is easier than accepting our potentials. Our missions to

the aliens have failed because we can't even deal with the

strangers who share our own ancestry. We are breaking up into

clades. We have to let go and reunite on a more basic level."

"If humankind flics to pieces, what could possibly unite it?"

Wells glanced at his videowall and froze a piece of news with

his finger ring. "Have you ever heard of Prigoginic Levels of

Complexity?"

Lindsay's heart sank. "I've never been one for metaphysics,

Wells. Your religious beliefs are your own business. I had a

woman who loved me and a safe place to sleep. The rest is abstract."

Wells examined his wall. Print blurred by, discussing a scandalous defection on Ceres. "Oh yes, your Colonel-Professor. I can't help you with that. You need a kidnapper to spirit her out. You

won't find one here. You should try Ceres or Bettina."

"My wife's a stubborn woman. Like you, she has ideals. Only

peace can reunite us. And there's only one source of peace in

our world. That's the Investors."

Wells laughed shortly. "Still the same line, Captain-Doctor?"

Suddenly he spoke in halting Investor. "The value of your

argument has depreciated."

"They have their weaknesses, Wells." His voice rose. "Do you

think I'm any less desperate than the Cataclysts? Ask your

friend Ryumin if I know weakness when I see it, or if I lack the

will to exploit it. The Investor Peace: yes, I had a hand in that.

It gave me what I wanted. I was a whole man. You can't know

what that meant to me-" He broke off, sweating even in the

cold.

Wells looked shocked. Lindsay realized suddenly that his out-

burst had broken every diplomatic rule. The thought filled him

with savage satisfaction. "You know the truth, Wells. We've

been Investor pawns for years. It's time we turned the chess-

board around."

"You mean to attack the Investors?" Wells said.

"What else, fool? What choice do we have?"

A woman's voice came from the base of the lamp. "Abelard

Mavrides, you are under arrest."

The elevator car hissed shut behind them. False gravity hit as

they accelerated upward. "Put your hands against the wall,

please," Greta said politely. "Move your feet backward."

Lindsay complied, saying nothing. The old-fashioned elevator

clacked noisily on rails up the vertical wall of the Dembowska

Crevasse. Two kilometers passed. Greta sighed. "You must have

done something drastic."

"That's not your worry," Lindsay said.

"To go by the book, I ought to cut the cables on your iron

arm. But I'll let it go. This is my fault too, I think. If I'd made

you feel more at home you wouldn't have been so fanatic."

"No weapons in my arm," Lindsay said. "Surely you examined

it while I slept."

"I don't understand this hard suspicion, Bela. Have I mis-

treated you somehow?"

"Tell me about Zen Serotonin, Greta."

She straightened slightly. "I'm not ashamed of belonging to the Nonmovement. I would have told you, but we don't proselytize.

We win over by example."

"Very laudable, I'm sure."

She frowned. "In your case I should have made an exception.

I'm sorry for your pain. I knew pain once." Lindsay said noth-

ing. "I was born on Themis," she said. "I knew some Cataclysts

there, one of the Mechanist factions. They were ice assassins.

The military found one of their cryocells, where they were

enlightening one of my teachers with a one-way ticket to the

future. I didn't wait for arrest. I ran to Dembowska.

"When I got here the Harem drafted me. I found out I had to

whore to Carnassus. I didn't take to it. But then I found Zen

Serotonin."

"Serotonin's a brain chemical," Lindsay said.

"It's a philosophy," she said. "The Shapers, the Mechanists-those aren't philosophies, they're technologies made into

politics. The technologies are at the core of it. Science lore the

human race to bits. When anarchy hit, people struggled for

community. The politicians chose enemies so that they could

bind their followers with hate and terror. Community isn't

enough when a thousand new ways of life beckon from every

circuit and test tube. Without hatred there is no Ring Council,

no Union of Cartels. No conformity without the whip."

"Life moves in clades," Lindsay murmured.

"That's Wells with his mishmash of physics and ethics. What

we need is nonmovemenl, calmness, clarity." She stretched out

her left arm. "This monitor drip-feeds into my arm. Fear means

nothing to me. With this, there's nothing I can't face and analyze. With Zen Serotonin you see life in the light of reason. People turn to us, especially in crisis. Every day the

Nonmovement wins more adherents."

Lindsay thought of the brainwaves he had seen in his safehouse

bed. "You're in a permanent alpha stale, then."

"Of course."

"Do you ever dream?"

"We have our vision. We can see the new technologies that

disrupt human life. We throw ourselves into those currents.

Perhaps each one of us is no more than a particle. But together

we form a sediment that slows the flow. Many innovators are

profoundly unhappy. After Zen Serotonin they lose their neurotic urge to meddle."

Lindsay smiled grimly. "It was no accident that you were

assigned my case."

"You are a profoundly unhappy man. It's brought this trouble

on you. The Nonmovement has a strong voice in the Harem.

Join us. We can save you."

"I had happiness once, Greta. You'll never know it."

"Violent emotion isn't our forte, Bela. We're trying to save the

human race."

"Good luck," Lindsay said. They had reached the end of the

line.

The old acromegalic stepped back to admire his handiwork.

"Strap is all right, sundog? You can breathe?"

Lindsay nodded. The kill-clamp dug painfully into the base of

his skull.

"Ft reads the backbrain," the giant said. Growth hormones had

distorted his jaw; he had a bulldog's underbite and his voice was

slurred. "Remember to shuffle. No sudden movements. Don't

think about moving fast, and your head will stay whole."

"How long have you been in this business?" Lindsay said.

"Long enough."

"Are you part of the Harem?"

The giant glared. "Sure, I fuck Carnassus, what do you think?"

His enormous hand grasped Lindsay's entire face. "You ever see

your own eyeball? Maybe I pull one out. The Chief can graft

you a new one."

Lindsay flinched. The giant grinned, revealing poorly spaced

teeth. "I see your type before. You are a Shaper antibiotic. Your

type tricked me once. Maybe you think you can trick the clamp.

Maybe you think you can kill the Chief without moving. Keep

in mind you must get by me on the way out." He gripped the

top of Lindsay's head and lifted him off the velcro. "Or maybe

you think I'm stupid."

Lindsay spoke in trade Japanese. "Save it for the whores,

yakuza. Or maybe your excellency would care to take this

clamp off and go hand to hand."

The giant laughed, startled, and set Lindsay down carefully.

"Sorry, friend. Didn't know you were one of our own."

Lindsay stepped through the airlock. Inside, the air was at

blood heat. It reeked of perfumed sweat and the odor of violets.

The brittle whine of a synthesizer broke off suddenly.

The room was full of flesh. It was made of it: satiny brown

skin, broken here and there by rugs of lustrous black hair and

mauve flashes of mucus membrane. Everything was involuted,

curved: armchair lounges, a rounded mass like a bed of flesh,

studded with mauve holes. Blood thrummed through a pipe-

sized artery beneath his feet.

Another hooded lamp-device swiveled up on a sleek-skinned

elbowed hinge. Dark eyes observed him. A mouth opened in the

sleek rump of a footstool beside him. "Take off those velcro

boots, darling. They itch."

Lindsay sat down. "It's you, Kitsune."

"You knew when you saw my eyes in Wells's office," the voice

purred from the wall.

"Not till I saw your bodyguard, really. It's been a long time.

Sorry about the boots." He sat and pulled them off carefully,

masking his shudder at the sensual warmth of the fleshy arm-

chair. "Where are you?"

"All around you. I have eyes and ears everywhere."

"Where's your body?"

"I had it scrapped."

Lindsay was sweating. After four weeks in the Dembowska

chill, the heated air was stifling. "You knew it was me?"

"You're the only one I cared to keep who ever left me, darling.

I wasn't likely to forget."

"You've done well, Kitsune," Lindsay said, masking his terror

under a sudden onrush of half-forgotten discipline. "Thank you

for killing the antibiotic."

"It was easy," she said. "I pretended he was you." She hesitated. "The Geisha Bank believed your deception. It was

thoughtful of you to take the yarite's head."

"I wanted to make you a parting gift," Lindsay said carefully,

"of absolute power." He looked at the sleek masses of flesh.

There was no face anywhere. From the walls and floors came

the syncopated muffled thumping of half a dozen hearts.

"Were you upset because I wanted power more than you?"

His mind raced. "You've gained in wisdom since those days.

Yes, I admit it. The day would have come when you chose

between me and your ambitions. And I knew which one you'd

choose. Was I wrong to leave?"

There was silence for a moment; then several of the mouths in

the room laughed. "You could make anything plausible, darling.

That was your gift. No, I've had many favorites since then. You

were a good weapon, but I've had others. I forgive you."

"Thank you, Kitsune."

"You may consider yourself no longer under arrest."

"You're very generous."

"Now, what's this craziness about the Investors? Don't you know how the System depends on them now? Any faction that

crosses the Investors might as well cut their own throats."

"I had in mind something more subtle. I thought we might persuade them to cross themselves."

"Meaning?"

"Blackmail."

Some of the mouths laughed uneasily. "In what form, darling?"

"Sexual perversion."

The eyes swiveled up on their organic mounting. Lindsay saw

the wideness of their pupils, his first kinesic clue, and knew he

had struck home. "You have the evidence?"

"I'd hand it over at once," Lindsay said, "but this clamp

constrains me."

"Take it off. I've neutralized it."

Lindsay unbuckled the kill-clamp and set it gently on the

chair's quivering arm. He walked toward the bed in his socks.

He produced the videomonocle from within his shirt.

Dark eyes opened within the headboard. A pair of sleek arms

emerged through soft furred slots. An arm took the monocle

and placed it over one eye. Lindsay said, "I've set it to the

beginning of the sequence."

"But that's not the beginning of the tape."

"The first part is-"

"Yes," she said icily. "I see. Your wife?"

"Yes."

"No matter. If she'd come with you, things might have been

different. But now she's crossed Constantine."

"You know him?"

"Of course. He crowded the Zaibatsu with the victims of his

purge. The Shapers are proud, in the Ring Council. They'll

never believe an unplanned can match them scheme for scheme.

Your wife is a dead woman."

"There might be-"

"Forget it. You had your years of peace. The next are his. Ah."

She hesitated. "This was taken aboard an Investor starship? The

one that brought you here?"

"Yes. I filmed it myself."

"Ahh." The moan was purely sensual. One of the room's huge

hearts was under the bed; its pulse had speeded. "It's their

queen, their captain. Oh, these Investor women and their harem

rule, what a pleasure it is to have beaten one. The filthy crea-

ture. Oh, what a joy you are, Lin Dze, Mavrides, Milosz."

Lindsay said, "My name is Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay."

"I know. Constantine told me. And I convinced him you were

dead."

"Thank you, Kitsune."

"What do names mean to us? They call me the Chief of Police.

The control is what matters, darling, not the front. You fooled

the Shapers in the Ring Council. The Mechanists were my prey.

I moved to the Cartels. I watched, I waited. Then one day I

found Carnassus. The last survivor of his mission."

She laughed lightly, the high-pitched skipping laugh he once

had known so well. "The Mechs sent out their best. But they

were too strong, too stiff, too brittle. The strangeness of it broke

them, and the isolation. Carnassus had to kill the other two, and

he still wakes up screaming because of it. Yes, even in this

room. His company was bankrupted. I bought him, and all his

strange booty, from the wreckage."

"In the Rings they say he rules here."

"Of course they do; that's what I told them. Carnassus belongs to me. My surgeons have been at him. There's not a neuron in him that pleasure hasn't blasted. Life is simple for him, a

constant dream of flesh."

Lindsay looked about the room. "And you're his favorite."

"Would I tolerate anything else, darling?"

"You don't mind that other wives practice Zen Serotonin?"

"I don't care what they think or claim they think. They obey

me. I'm not concerned with ideology. What concerns me is the

future."

"Oh?"

"The day will come when we've squeezed everything we can

out of Carnassus. And cryonic products will lose their novelty as

the technology spreads."

"That might take years."

"It all takes years," she said. "And it's a question of years. The

ship you arrived on has left circumsolar space."

"You're sure?" Lindsay said, stricken.

"That's what my databanks tell me. Who knows when they'll

return?"

"It doesn't matter," Lindsay said. "I can wait."

"Twenty years? Thirty?"

"Whatever it takes," Lindsay said, though the thought suffocated him.

"By then Carnassus will be useless. I'll need a new front. And

what could be belter than an Investor Oueen? It's a risk worth

taking. You'll work on it for me. You and Wells."

"Of course, Kitsune."

"You'll have the support you need. But don't squander a

kilowatt of it trying to save that woman."

"I'll try to think only of the future."

"Carnassus and I will need a safehouse. That will be your

priority."

"Depend on it," said Lindsay, Carnassus and I,'he thought.

DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 14-2-'58

Lindsay studied the latest papers from the peer review commit-

tee. He paged through the data expertly, devouring the abstracts,

screen-scanning through paragraphs, highlighting the worst ex-

cesses of technical jargon. He worked with driven efficiency.

The credit went to Wells. Wells had placed him in the department chairmanship at the Kosmosity; Wells had put the editorship of the Journal of Exoarchosaurian Studies into his hands.

Routine had seized Lindsay. He welcomed the distractions of

administration and research, which robbed him of the leisure

necessary for pain. Within his office in the Crevasse, in an exurb

of the newly completed Kosmosity, he wheeled in his low-grav

swivel chair, chasing rumors, coaxing, bribing, trading information. Already the Journal was the largest unclassified databank

on the Investors, and its restricted files mushroomed with speculation and espionage. Lindsay was at its core, working with the stamina of youth and the patience of age.

In the five years since Lindsay's arrival in Dembowska, he had

watched Wells move from strength to strength. In the absence of

a state ideology, the influence of Wells and his Carbon Clique

spread throughout the colony, encompassing art, the media, and

academic life.

Ambition was an endemic vice among Wells and his group.

Lindsay had joined the Clique without much enthusiasm. With

proximity, though, he had picked up their plans as if they were

local bacteria. And their fashions as well: his hair was slickly

brilliantined and his mustache was nicked for a paste-on micro-

phone lip bead. He wore video-control rings on the wrinkled

fingers of his left hand.

Work ate the years. Once time had seemed solid to him, dense as lead. Now it flowed through his hands. Lindsay saw that his

perception of time was slowly coming to match that of the

senior Shapers he'd known in Goldreich-Tremaine. To the truly

old, time was as thin as air, a keening and destructive wind that

erased their pasts and attacked their memories. Time was accelerating. Nothing could slow it down for him but death. He

tasted this truth, and it was bitter as amphetamine.

He returned his attention to the paper; a reassessment of a

celebrated Investor scale fragment found among the effects of a

failed Mechanist interstellar embassy. Few bits of matter had

ever been analyzed so exhaustively. The paper, "Proximo-Distal

Gradients in Epidermal Cell Adhesiveness," came from a Shaper defector in Diotima Cartel.

His desk rang. His visitor had arrived.

The unobtrusive guard systems in Lindsay's office showed

Wells's characteristic touch. The visitor had been issued a stylish coronet, which had evolved from the much clumsier kill clamp. A tiny red light, unseen by the guest himself, glowed on

the man's forehead. It denoted the potential impact site for

armaments, decently concealed in the ceiling.

"Professor Milosz?" The visitor's dress was odd. He wore a

white formal suit with a ring-shaped open collar and accordioned elbows and knees.

"You're Dr. Morrissey? From the Concatenation?"

"From the Mare Serenitatis Republic," the man said. "Dr.

Pongpianskul sent me."

"Pongpianskul is dead," Lindsay said.

"So they said." Morrissey nodded. "Killed on Chairman Con-

stantine's orders. But the doctor had friends in the Republic. So

many that he now controls the nation. His title is Warden, and

the nation is reborn as the Neotenic Cultural Republic. I am the

harbinger of the Revolution." He hesitated. "Maybe I should let

Dr. Pongpianskul tell it."

Lindsay was stunned. "Perhaps you should."

The man produced a videolablet and plugged it into his brief

case. He handed Lindsay the tablet, which flickered into life. It

showed a face: Pongpianskul's. Pongpianskul brushed at his

braids, disheveling them with leathery, wrinkled hands.

"Abelard, how are you?"

"Neville. You're alive?"

"I'm still a tenant of the flesh, yes. Morrissey's briefcase is

programmed with an interactive expert system. It ought to carry

out a decent conversation with you, in my absence."

Morrissey cleared his throat. "These machines are new to me. I

think, though, that I should let the two of you speak privately."

"That might be best."

"I'll wait in the lobby."

Lindsay watched the man's retreating back. Morrissey's clothes amazed him. Lindsay had forgotten that he'd ever dressed like that, in the Republic.

He studied the tablet's screen. "You look well, Neville."

"Thank you. Ross arranged my last rejuvenation. By the

Cataclysts. The same group that treated you, Mavrides."

"Treated me? They put me on ice."

"On ice? That's odd. The Cataclysts woke me up. I never felt

so alive as when I was here in the Republic, pretending to be

dead. It's been a long ten years, Abelard. Eleven, whatever."

Pongpianskul shrugged.

Lindsay Looked at the tablet. The image made no response to

the Look, and the charm faded. Lindsay spoke slowly. "So

you've attacked the Republic? Through the Cataclyst terror

networks?"

The tablet smiled Pongpianskul's smile. "The Cataclysts had

their part in it, I admit. You would have appreciated this,

Mavrides. I played off the youth element. There was a political

group called the Preservationists, dating-oh, forty or fifty years

back. Constantine used them to seize power, but they detested

the Shapers as much as they did the Mechs. What they wanted,

really, was a human life, droll as that might seem. Now there's a

new generation of them, raised under Shaper influence and

hating it. But thanks to Shaper breeding policies, the young

hold a majority."

Pongpianskul laughed. "Constantine used the Republic as a

storehouse for Shaper militants. He made things here a muddle

of subterfuge. When the war heated up, the militants rushed

back to the Ring Council and Cataclyst Superbrights hid here

instead. Constantine spent too much time in the Rings, and lost

touch. . . . The Cataclysts like my notion of a cultural preserve.

It's all down in the new Constitution. My messenger will give

you a copy."

"Thank you."

"Things haven't gone well with the rest of the Midnight Clique.

. . . It's been too long since we've talked. I tracked you down

through your ex-wife."

"Alexandrina?"

"What?" The programmed system was confused; the persona

flickered for a second's fraction. "It took some doing. Nora's

under close surveillance."

"Just a moment." Lindsay rose from his chair and poured

himself a drink. A cascade of memories from the Republic had

rushed through him, and he'd thought automatically of his first

wife, Alexandrina Tyler. But of course she was not in the

Republic. She had been a victim of Constantine's purge,

shipped out to the Zaibatsu.

He returned to the screen. It said, "Ross left for the cometaries when G-T crumbled. Fetzko has faded. Vetterling's in Skimmers Union, sucking up to the fascists. Ice assassins took Margaret Juliano. She's still awaiting the thaw. I have power here,

Mavrides. But that can't make up for what we lost."

"How is Nora?" Lindsay said.

The false Pongpianskul looked grave. "She fights Constantine

where he's strongest. If it weren't for her my coup here would

have failed; she distracted him. . . . I'd hoped I could lure her

here, and you as well. She was always so good to us. Our

premier hostess."

"She wouldn't come?"

"She has remarried."

The slotted glass broke in Lindsay's iron hand. Blobs of liqueur drifted toward the floor.

"For political reasons," the screen continued. "She needs every

ally she can find. Having you join me would have been difficult

in any case. No one over sixty is allowed in the Neotenic

Cultural Republic. Except for myself and my officers."

Lindsay yanked the cord from the tablet. He helped the small

office servo pick up the shards of glass.

When he called Morrissey in again, much later, the man was

diffident. "Are you quite through, sir? I've been instructed to

erase the tablet."

"It was kind of you to bring it." Lindsay gestured at a chair.

"Thank you for waiting so long."

Morrissey wiped the construct's memory and put the tablet in

his briefcase. He studied Lindsay's face. "I hope I haven't

brought bad news."

"It's astonishing," Lindsay said. "Maybe we should have a

drink to celebrate."

A shadow crossed Morrissey's face.

"Forgive me," Lindsay said. "Perhaps I was tactless." He put

the bottle away. There was not much left.

"I'm sixty years old," Morrissey said. He sat uncomfortably.

"So they ousted me. They were polite about it." He smiled

painfully. "I was a Preservationist once. I was eighteen in the

first Revolution. It's ironic, isn't it? Now I'm a sundog."

Lindsay said carefully, "I'm not without power here. And not

without funds. Dembowska handles many refugees. I can find

you room."

"You're very kind." Morrissey's face was stiff. "I worked as a

biologist, on the nation's ecological troubles. Dr. Constantine

trained me. But I'm afraid I'm very much behind the times."

"That can be remedied."

"I've brought an article for your Journal."

"Ah. You have an interest in Investors, Dr. Morrissey?"

"Yes. I hope my piece meets your standards."

Lindsay forced a smile. "We'll work on it together."

SKIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 13-5-'75

He could feel it coining on, creeping across the back of his head

in a zone of quivering subepidermal tightness. A fugue state.

The scene before him trembled slightly, the crowds below his

private box blurring in a frieze of packed heads against dark

finery, the rounded stage with actors in costume, dark red,

gleaming, a gesture. It slowed -it froze:

Fear ... no, not even that, exactly ... a certain sadness now

that the die was cast. The waiting was the hell of it ... He had

waited sixty years to resume his old contacts, the wirehead

Radical Old of the Republic. . . . Now the wirehead leaders, like

him, had worked their way to power in the worlds outside. Sixty

years was nothing to a mind on the wires . . . time meant nothing ... fugue states. . . . They still remembered him quite well,

their friend, Philip Khouri Constantine. . . .

It was he who had sprung them loose, purging the middle-aged aristocrats to finance the wirehead defections. . . . Memories

went back; they were data, that was all, just as fresh on reels

somewhere as the enemy Margaret Juliano was on her bed of

Cataclyst ice. . . . Even amid fugue the surge of satisfaction was

quick and sharp enough to penetrate into consciousness from

his backbrain. .. . That unique sense of warmth that came only

from the downfall of a rival. . . .

Now, trailing sluggishly behind his racing thoughts, the slow-

motion blooming of a light tingle of fear. . . . Nora Everett, the

wife of Abelard Mavrides. . . . She had hurt him seventeen years

ago with the coup in the Republic, though he was able to

entangle her in charges of treason. . . . The tinpot Republic was

of no concern to him now, its willfully ignorant child-citizens

flying kites and eating apples under the crazed charlatan gaze of

Dr. Pongpianskul. ... No problem there, the future would ig-

nore them, they were living fossils, harmless in themselves. . . .

But the Cataclysts . . . the fear was resolving itself now, beginning to flower, its first dim shades of backbrain unease taking

on emotional substance now, uncoiling through his conscious-

ness like a drop of ink streaming into a glass of water. . . . He

would see to his emotions later when the fugue was over; now

he was struggling to shut his eyes . . . focus was lost, dim tear-

blur over frozen performers; his eyelids were dropping with

nightmare sluggishness, nerve impulses confused by the racing

fugue-consciousness. . . . The Cataclysts, though. . . . They took

it all as an enormous joke, enjoyed hiding in the Republic

disguised as plebes and farmers, the huge panorama interior of

the cylindrical world as weird to them as a trace dose of their

favorite drug, PDKL-95. . . . The Cataclyst mind-set fed on correspondences and poetic justice, a trip to the human past in the

Neotenic Republic the inverse of an ice assassination, with its

one-way ticket to the future. . . .

The fugue was about to break. He felt a strange cracking

sensation of psychic upheaval, mental crust giving way before

the upsurge. In the last microseconds of fugue an eidetic flash

seized him, surveyor photos from the surface of Titan, red

volcanic shelves of heavy hydrocarbon split by ammonia lava,

bursting from the depths . . . from Titan, far below their orbit,

prime wall-decor in Skimmers Union. . . .

Gone. Constantine leaned forward in his box seat, clearing his

throat. Delayed fear swept over him; he pushed it brusquely

away, had a light sniff of acetaminophen to avert migraine. He

glanced at his wristwatch through damp lashes. Four seconds of

fugue.

He wiped his eyes, became aware of his wife sitting beside him, her finely chiseled Shaper face a study in surprise. Was she

aware that he had been sitting rapt for four seconds with his

eyes showing only a rim of white? No. She thought he was

touched by the play, was startled to see this excess of emotion in

her iron-hard husband. Constantine favored her with a smile.

Her color heightened; she leaned forward in her seat, her jeweled hands in her lap, studying the play alertly. Later she would

try to discuss it with him. Natalie Constantine was young and

bright, the scion of a military gene-line. She had grown used to

his demands.

Not like his first wife, the treasonous bitch. . . . He had left the

old aristocrat in the Republic, having nurtured her vicious

streak patiently until his own coup allowed him to turn it

against her peers. Now rumor said she was Pongpianskul's lover,

won over by fraudulent Shaper charm and degraded senile

intimacy. No matter, no matter. Long years had taken the sting

from it; tonight's stroke, if it came, was more important than

any circumlunar moondock.

His nine-year-old daughter, Vera, leaned in her seat to whisper to Natalie. Constantine gazed at the child he had built. Half her genetics were Vera Kelland's, drawn from skin flakes he had

taken before the woman's suicide. For years he had treasured

the stolen genes, and when the time was ripe he had brought

them to flower in this child. She was his favorite, the first of his

progeny. When he thought how his own failure might doom her,

he felt the fear again, sharper than before, because it was not for

himself.

An extravagant gesture from the stage caught his attention, a

brief flurry of stilted action as the deranged Superbright villain

clutched his head and fell. Constantine surreptitiously scratched

his ankle with the sole of his foot-glove. Over the years his skin

virus had improved, limited to dry outbreaks of shingles at his

extremities.

The play was one of Zeuner's, and it bored him. Skimmers

Union had caught the habit from Goldreich-Tremaine, bolstered

by dramatists fleeing the crippled ex-capital. But the modern

theatre was lifeless. Fernand Vetterling, for instance, author of

The White Periapsis and The Technical Advisor, languished in

sullen silence with his disgraced Mavrides wife. Other artists

with Detentiste leanings now paid for their indiscretion with

fines or house arrest. Some had defected, others had "gone

undertime" to join the Cataclyst action brigades in the graveyard

dayshifts.

But the Cataclysts were losing cohesion, becoming mere terror-

ists. Their Superbright elite was under severe attack. The pogrom on the Superbrights was increasingly thorough as hysteria mounted. Their promoters and educators were now political nonpersons, many having fallen to the twisted vengeance of the Superbrights themselves.

The Superbrights were too brilliant for community; they de-

manded the world-shattering anarchy of supermen. That could

not be tolerated. And Constantine had served that intolerance.

Life had never looked better for him: high office, his own

Constantine gene line, a free hand for anti-Mech adventurism,

and his own barbed nets poised for disloyalty.

And tonight he had risked it all. Would his news ever come?

How would he hear it? From his bodyguards, through the

earpiece? Through the stolen Mech implants in his own brain,

that opened internal channels to the thin data-whispers of the

wireheads? Or-

Something was happening. The banner-waving choreography

on the curved stage disintegrated in sudden confusion, the colored corporate logos and gene-line insignia slowing and tangling. The dancers fell back in chaos in response to shouted orders. Someone was floating to the edge of the podium. It was the wretched Charles Vetterling, his aged face bloated with triumph and a lackey's self-importance.

This was it. Vetterling was shouting. The play's leading man

gave him a throat mike. Vetterling's voice roared suddenly in

thudding feedback.

". . . of the War! Mech markets are in panic! The asteroid

Nysa has declared for the Ring Council! I repeat, the Nysa

Cartel has abandoned the Mechanist Union! They have asked

for admittance as a Ring Council Treaty State! The Council is

meeting. . . ." His words were drowned in the roar from the

audience, the clatter of buckles as they unstrapped from their

scats and rose in confusion. Vetterling struggled with the mike.

Patches of his words broke the din. ". . . capitulation . . . through banks in Skimmers Union . . . industrial ... new victory!"

It started among the actors. The leading man was pointing

above the heads of the audience at Constantine's box, shouting

fiercely at the rest of the cast. One of the women began applauding. Then it spread. The whole cast was applauding, their faces alight. Vetterling heard them behind him, turned to look. He grasped things at once, and a stiff smile spread over his face. He pointed dramatically. "Constantine!" he shouted. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Chancellor-General!"

Constantine rose to his feet, gripping the iron banister behind

the transparent shield. When they saw him the crowd exploded,

a free-fall maelstrom of shouts and applause. They knew it was

his triumph. The joy of it overwhelmed them, the brief bright

release from the dark tension of the War. If he'd failed, they

would have hounded him to death with the same passion. But

that dark knowledge had been blasted by victory. Because he'd

won, now the risk he'd run only sharpened his delight.

He turned to his wife. Her eyes brimmed over with tears of

pride. Slowly, not leaving the banister, he extended his hand to

her. When their fingers touched he read her face. He saw the

truth there. From this night on his dominion over her was total.

She took her place beside him. Vera tugged his sleeve, her eyes wide. He lifted her up, cradling her in his left arm. His lips

touched her ear. "Remember this," he whispered fiercely.

The anarchic shouts died down as another rhythm spread. It

was the rhythm of applause, the long, cadenced, ritual applause

that followed every session of the Ring Council itself, ageless,

solemn, overwhelming applause, applause that brooked no dissent. The music of power. Constantine raised his wife's hand above their heads and closed his eyes.

It was the happiest moment of his life.

DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 15-5-'75

Lindsay was playing keyboards for the sake of his new arm. It

was much more advanced than his old one, and the fine discrimination of its nerve signals confused him. As he ran through

the composition, one of Kitsune's, he felt each key click down

with a brief muddled sensation of sharp heat.

He rested, rubbing his hands together. A pins-and-needles

tingling ran up the wires. The new hand was densely

honeycombed with fingertip sensors. They were much more

responsive than his old arm's feedback pads.

The change had jarred him. He looked about his desolate

apartment. In twenty-two years it had never been anything more

to him than a place to camp. The apartment's fashions, its

ribbed wallpaper and skeletal chairs, were two decades out of

dale. Only the security systems, Wells's latest, had any touch of

the mode.

Lindsay himself had gone stale. At ninety, grooves marked his

eyes and mouth from decades of habitual expression. His hair

and beard were sprinkled with gray.

He was improving at the keyboards. He had attacked the

problem of music with his usual inhuman steadiness. For years

he had worked hard enough to kill himself, but modern

biomonitoring technique saw each breakdown coming and averted it months ahead of time. The bed took care of that, feeding

him subterranean flashes of intense and blurry dream that left

him each morning blank and empty with perfect mental health.

Eighteen years had passed since his wife's remarriage. The

pain of it had never fully hit him. He'd known her present

husband briefly in the Council: Graham Everett, a colorless

Detentiste with powerful clan connections. Nora used Everett's

influence to parry the attacks of militants. It was sad: Lindsay

didn't remember the man well enough to hate him.

Warnings cut short his playing. Someone had arrived at his

entry hall. The scanners there assured him that the visitor, a

woman, bore only harmless Mechanist implants: plaque-scraping

arterial microbots, old-fashioned teflon kneecaps, plastic knuckles, a porous drug duct in the crook of the left elbow. Much of her hair was artificial, implanted strands of shining optical fibers.

He had his household servo escort the woman in. She had the

strange complexion common to many older Mechanist women,

smooth unblemished skin like a perfectly form-fitted paper

mask. Her red hair was shot through with copper highlights

from the fiberoptics. She wore a sleeveless gray suit, furred vest,

and elbow-length white thermal gloves. "Auditor Milosz?"

She had a Concatenate accent. He ushered her to the couch.

She sat gracefully, her movements honed to precision by age.

"Yes, madam. What may I do for you?"

"Forgive me for intruding, Auditor. My name is Tyler. I'm a

clerk with Limonov Cryonics. But my business here is personal.

I've come to ask your help. I've heard of your friendship with

Neville Pongpianskul."

"You're Alexandrina Tyler," Lindsay realized aloud. "From

Mare Serenitatis. The Republic."

She looked surprised and lifted her thin, arched brows. "You

already know my case, Auditor?"

"You" -Lindsay sal down in the stirruped chair- "would like

a drink, perhaps?" She was his first wife. From some deeply

buried level of reflex he felt the stirrings of a long-dead persona,

the brittle layer of false kinesics he had put between them in

their marriage. Alexandrina Tyler, his wife, his mother's cousin.

"No, thank you," she said. She adjusted the fabric over her

knees. She'd always had trouble with her knees; she'd had the

teflon put in in the Republic.

Her familiar gesture brought it all back to him: the marriage

politics of the Republic's aristocrats. She had been fifty years his

senior, their marriage a stifling net of strained politeness and

grim rebellion. Lindsay was ninety now, older than she had

been at their marriage. With a flood of new perspective, he

could taste the long-forgotten pain that he had caused her.

"I was born in the Republic," she said. "I lost my citizenship in

the Shaper purges, almost fifty years ago. I loved the Republic,

Auditor. I've never forgotten it. ... I came from one of the

privileged families, but I thought, perhaps now, since the new

regime there has settled, surely that's all a dead issue?"

"You were Abelard Lindsay's wife."

Her eyes widened. "So you do know my case. You know I've

applied to emigrate? I had no response from the Pongpianskul

government. I've come to ask for your help, Auditor. I'm not a

member of your Carbon Clique, but I know their power. You

have influence that works around the laws."

"Life must have been difficult for you, madam. Thrown out

without resources into the Schismatrix."

She blinked, china-white lids falling over her eyes like paper

shutters. "Things were not so bad once I'd reached the cartels.

But I can't pretend I've known happiness. I haven't forgotten

home. The trees. The gardens."

Lindsay knotted his hands, ignoring the tingle of confused

sensation from his right. "I can't encourage false hopes, madam.

Neotenic law is very strict. The Republic has no interest in those

our age, those who are estranged in any way from the raw state

of humanity. It's true that I've handled some matters for the

Neotenic government. Those involve the resettlement of

Neotenic citizens who reach the age of sixty. 'Dying out into the

world,' they call it. The flow of emigration is strictly one-way.

I'm very sorry."

She was silent a moment. "You know the Republic well, Auditor?" Her voice told him that she had accepted defeat. Now she

was hunting for memories.

"Well enough to know that the wife of Abelard Lindsay has

been defamed. Your late husband is regarded there as a

Preservationist martyr. They portray you as a Mechanist collaborator, driving Lindsay into exile and death."

"How terrible." Her eyes filled with tears; she stood up in

agitation. "I'm very sorry. May I use your biomonitor?"

"Tears don't alarm me, madam," Lindsay said gently. "I am

not a Zen Serotonist."

"My husband," she said. "He was such a bright boy; we

thought we'd done well when we scholarshipped him to the

Shapers. I never understood what they did to him, but it was

horrible. I tried to make our marriage work, but he was so

clever, so smooth and plausible, that he could twist anything I

said or did to serve some other purpose. He terrified the others.

They swore he would rip our world apart. We should never have

sent him to the Shapers."

"I'm sure it seemed a wise decision at the time," Lindsay said.

"The Republic was already in the Mechanist orbit, and they

wanted to redress the balance."

"Then they shouldn't have done it to my cousin's son. There

were plenty of plebes to send out, people like Constantine." She

put one wrinkled knuckle to her lips. "I'm sorry. That's aristocratic prejudice. Forgive me, Auditor, I'm distraught."

"I understand," Lindsay said. "To those our age, old memories

can come with unexpected force. I'm very sorry, madam. You

have been treated unjustly."

"Thank you, sir." She accepted a tissue from the household

servo. "Your sympathy touches me deeply." She dabbed at her

eyes with precise, birdlike movements. "I almost feel that I

know you."

"A trick of memory," Lindsay said. "I was married once to a

woman much like you."

A slow Look passed between them. A great deal was said,

below the level of words. The truth surfaced briefly, was ac-

knowledged, and then vanished beneath the necessity for subterfuge.

"This wife," she said. Her face was flushed. "She did not

accompany you on your journey here."

"Marriage in Dembowska is a different situation," Lindsay

said.

"I was married here. A five-year contract marriage. Polygamous. It expired last year."

"You are currently unattached?"

She nodded. Lindsay gestured about the room with a whir of

his right arm. "Myself as well. You can see the state of my

domestic affairs. My career has made my life rather arid."

She smiled tentatively.

"Would you be interested in the management of my house

hold? An Assistant Auditorship would pay rather better than

your current position, I think."

"I'm sure it would."

"Shall we say, a six-month probationary period against a five

year joint management contract, standard terms, monogamous?

I can have my office print out a contract by tomorrow morning."

"This is quite sudden."

"Nonsense, Alexandrina. At our age, if we put things off, we

never accomplish anything. What's five years to us? We have

reached the age of discretion."

"May I have that drink?" she said. "It's bad for my maintenance program, but I think I need it." She looked at him

nervously, a ghost of strained intimacy waking behind her eyes.

He looked at her smooth paper skin, the brittle precision of

her hair. He realized that his gesture of atonement would add

another rote to his life, a new form of routine. He restrained a

sigh. "I look to you to set our sexuality clause."

SKIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 23-6-'83

Constantine looked into the tank. Behind the glass window,

below the surface of the water, was the waterlogged head of Paolo Mavrides. The dark, curled hair, a major trait of the Mavrides gene-line, floated soggily around the young man's neck and shoulders. The eyes were open, greenish and blood-shot. Injections had paralyzed his optic nerve. A spinal clamp left him able to feel but not to move. Blind and deaf, numbed by the blood-warmed water, Paolo Mavrides had been in sensory isolation for two weeks.

A tracheal plug fed him oxygen. Intravenous taps kept him

from starving.

Constantine touched a black rocker switch on the welded tank,

and the jury-rigged speakers came alive. The young assassin was

talking to himself, some mumbled litany in different voices.

Constantine spoke into the microphone. "Paolo."

"I'm busy," Paolo said. "Come back later."

Constantine chuckled. "Very well." He tapped against the microphone to make the sound of a switch closing.

"No, wail!" Paolo said at once. Constantine smiled at the trace

of panic. "Never mind, the performance is ruined anyway.

Vetterling's Shepherd Moons."

"Hasn't had a performance in years," Constantine said. "You

must have been a mere child then."

"I memorized it when I was nine."

"I'm impressed by your resourcefulness. Still, the Cataclysts

believe in that, don't they? Testing the inner world of the

will. . . You've been in there quite a while. Quite a while."

There was silence. Constantine waited. "How long?" Mavrides

burst out.

"Almost forty-eight hours."

Mavrides laughed shortly.

Constantine joined in. "Of course we know that isn't so. No,

it's been almost a year. You'd be surprised how thin you look."

"You should try it sometime. Might help your skin problems."

"Those are the least of my difficulties, young man. I made a

tactical error when I chose the best security possible. It made

me a challenge. You'd be surprised how many fools have had

this tank before you. You made a mistake, young Paolo."

"Tell me something," Paolo said. "Why do you sound like

God?"

"That's a technical artifact. My voice has a direct feed to your

inner ear. That's why you can't hear your own voice. I'm reading it off the nerves to your larynx."

"I see," Paolo said. "Wirehead work."

"Nothing irreversible. Tell me about yourself, Paolo. What was

your brigade?"

"I'm no Cataclyst."

"I have your weapon here." Constantine pulled a small timer-

vial from his tailored linen jacket and rolled it between his

fingers. "Standard Cataclyst issue. What is it? PDKL-Ninety-

five?"

Paolo said nothing.

"Perhaps you know the drug as 'Shatter,' " Constantine said.

Paolo laughed. "I know better than to try to re-form your

mind. If I could have entered the same room with you I would

have set it for five seconds and we would have both died."

"An aerosol toxin, is it? How rash."

"There are more important things than living, plebe."

"What a quaint insult. I see you've researched my past. Haven't heard the like in years. Next you'll be saying I'm unplanned."

"No need. Your wife tells us that much."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Natalie Constantine, your wife. Hver hear of her? She doesn't

take neglect easily. She's become the prime whore of Skimmers

Union."

"How distressing."

"How do you think I planned to enter your house? Your wife's

a slut. She begs me for it."

Constantine laughed. "You'd like me to strike you, wouldn't

you? The pain would give you something to hold on to. No, you

should have stayed in Goldreich-Tremaine, young man. In those

empty halls and broken-down offices. I'm afraid you've begun

to bore me."

"Let me tell you what I regret, before you go. I regret that I set my sights so low. I've had time to think, recently." Hollow

laughter. "I fell for your image, your propaganda line. The Nysa

asteroid, for instance. It seemed so grand at first. The Ring

Council didn't know that Nysa Cartel was a dumping ground for

burnt-out wireheads from the moondocks. You were still sucking up to aristocrats from the Republic. With all your rank you're still a cheap informer, Constantine. And a fucking lackey."

Constantine felt a quiver of familiar tension across the back of

his head. He touched the plug there and reached in his pocket

for the inhaler. No use going into fugue when the boy was

starling to babble, at the point of breaking. "Go on," he said.

"The great things you claim you've done are all facades and

frauds. You've never built anything of your own. You're small,

Constantine. Very small. I know a man who could hide ten of

you under his thumbnail."

"Who?" Constantine said. "Your friend Vetterling?"

"Poor Fernand, your victim? Yes, of course he's a thousand

times your size, but that's hardly fair, is it? You never had an

atom of artistic talent. No, I mean in your own skill. Politics.

Espionage."

"Some Cataclyst, then." Constantine was bored.

"No. Abelard Lindsay."

It hit him then. A lightning stroke of migraine raced across his

left frontal lobe. The surface of the tank came toward him in

slow motion as he fell, a frozen icescape of dull metallic glitter,

and he struggled to get his hands up, nerve impulses locked in a

high-speed fugue that seemed to last a month. When he came

to, his cheek pressed against the cold metal, Mavrides was still

babbling. ". . . the whole story from Nora. While you were here

holding treason trials for artists, Lindsay was scoring the biggest

coup in history. An Investor defector. ... He has an Investor

defector, a starship Queen. In the palm of his hand."

Constantine cleared his throat. "I heard that news. Mech pro-

paganda. It's a farce."

Mavrides laughed hysterically. "You're burned! You're a

fucking footnote. Lindsay led the revolution in your nation

while you were still swatting bugs in the germs and muck and

plotting to seize his credit. You're microscopic! I shouldn't have

bothered to kill you, but I've never had any luck."

"Lindsay's dead. He's been dead sixty years."

"Sure, plebe. That's what he wanted you to think." The laughter from the speakers was metallic, drawn straight from the

nerve. "I lived in his house, fool. He loved me."

Constantine opened the tank. He twisted the timer on the vial

and dropped it into the water, then slammed the tank shut. He

turned and walked away. As he reached the doorway he heard a

sudden frenzied splashing as the toxin hit.

CZARINA-KLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 3-1-'84

The long bright line of welded radiance was the cleanest thing

he had ever seen. Lindsay floated in an observation bubble,

watching construction robots crawl in vacuum. The Mechanist

engines had the long sharp noses of weevils, their white-hot

welding tips casting long shadows across the blackened hull of

the Czarina's Palace.

They were building a full-sized replica of an Investor starship,

a starship without engines, a hulk that would never move under

its own power. And black, with no trace of the gaudy arabesques

and inlays of a true Investor craft. The other Investors had

insisted on it: condemned their pervert Queen to this dark and

mocking prison.

After years of research, Lindsay had pieced out the truth about

the Commander's crime.

Queens intromitted their eggs into the womblike pouches of

their males. The males fertilized the eggs and brought them to

term within the pouch. The neuter Ensigns controlled ovulation

through a complex hormonal pseudo-copulation.

The criminal Queen had killed her Ensign in a fit of passion

and set up a common male in his place. But without a true

Ensign, the cycles of her sexuality had become distorted. Lindsay's evidence showed her destroying one of her malformed eggs. To an Investor, it was worse than perversion, worse even than murder: it was bad for business.

Lindsay had presented his evidence in a way that pierced to

the core of Investor ethics. Embarrassment was not an emotion

native to Investors. They had been stunned. But Lindsay was

quick with his remedy: exile. Behind it was the implied threat to

spread the evidence, to play out the details of the scandal to

every Investor ship and every human faction.

It was bad enough that a select group of wealthy Queens and

Ensigns had been apprised of the shocking news. That the

impressionable males should learn of it was unthinkable. A

bargain was struck.

The Queen never knew what had betrayed her. The approach

to her had been even more subtle, stretching Lindsay's talents to

the utmost. A timely gift of jewels had helped, distracting her

with that overwhelming avidity that was the very breath of life to

Investors. Business had been poor on her ship, with its debased

crew and wretched eunuch Ensign.

Lindsay came armed with charts from Wells, statistics predicting the wealth to be wrung from a city-state independent of

faction. Their exponential curves rose to a clean rake-off of

breathtaking riches. He told her that he knew nothing of her

disgrace; only that her own species was eager to condemn her.

With a large enough hoard, he hinted, she might buy her way

back into their good graces.

Patiently, fluently, he helped her see that this was her best

chance. What could she accomplish alone, without crew, with-

out Ensign? Why not accept the industrious aid of the small

polite strangers? The social instincts of the tiny gregarious

mammals drove them to consider her their Queen, in truth, and

themselves her subjects. Already a Board of Advisors awaited

her whims, each one fluent in Investor and begging leave to

heap her with wealth.

Greed would only have taken her so far. It was fear that broke

her to his will: fear of the small soft-skinned alien with dark

plastic over his pulpy eyes and his answers for everything. He

seemed to know her own people better than she did herself.

The announcement had come a week later, and with it a

sudden hemorrhage of capital to the newborn place of exile.

They called the Queen "Czarina," a nickname given by Ryumin.

And her city was Czarina-Kluster: in four months already a

boom town, accreting out of nothing on the inner edge of the

Belt. The Czarina-Kluster People's Corporate Republic had

leaped into sudden concrete existence out of raw potential, in

what Wells called a "Prigoginic leap," a "mergence into a higher

level of complexity." Now the Board of Advisors was deluged

with business, comlines frantic with would-be defectors maneuvering for asylum and a fresh start. The presence of an Investor cast an enormous shadow, a wall of prestige that no Mechanist or Shaper dared to challenge.

Makeshift squatter's digs crowded the Queen's raw Palace: nets of tough Shaper bubble suburbs, "subbles"; sleazy pirate craft

copulating in a daisy-chain of accordioned attack tunnels; rough

blown-out honeycombs of Mechanist nickel-iron, towed into

place; limpetlike construction huts clinging to the skeletal girders of an urban complex scarcely off the drawing board. This city would be a metropolis, a circumsolar free port, the ultimate sundog zone. He had brought it into being. But it was not for him.

"A sight to stir the blood, friend." Lindsay looked to his right.

The man once called Wells had arrived in the observation

bubble. In the weeks of preparation Wells had vanished into a

carefully prepared false identity. He was now Wellspring, two

hundred years old, born on Earth, a man of mystery, a maneuverer par excellence, a visionary, even a prophet. Nothing less would do. A coup this size demanded legendry. It demanded fraud.

Lindsay nodded. "Things progress."

"This is where the real work starts. I'm not too happy with that Board of Advisors. They seem a bit too stiff, too Mechanist.

Some of them have ambition. They'll have to be watched."

"Of course."

"You wouldn't consider the job? The Coordinator's post is

open for you. You're the man for it."

"I like the shadows, Wellspring. A role your size is too close to

the footlights for me."

Wellspring hesitated. "I have trouble enough with the philosophy. The myth may be too much for me. I need you and your

shadows."

Lindsay looked away, watching two construction robots follow

a seam to meet in a white-hot kiss of their welding-beaks. "My wife is dead," he said.

"Alexandrina? I'm sorry. This is a shock."

Lindsay winced. "No, not her. Nora. Nora Mavrides. Nora

Everett."

"Ah," Wellspring said. "When did you get the news?"

"I told her," Lindsay said, "that I had a place for us. You

remember I mentioned to you that there might be a Ring Council breakaway."

"Yes."

"It was as quiet as I could make it, but not quiet enough.

Constantine got word somehow, exposed the breakaway. She

was indicted for treason. The trial would have implicated the

rest of her clan. So she chose suicide."

"She was courageous."

"It was the only thing to do."

"One supposes so."

"She still loved me, Wellspring. She was going to join me here. She was trying to do it when he killed her."

"I recognize your grief," Wellspring said. "But life is long. You

mustn't be blinded to your ultimate aims."

Lindsay was grim. "You know I don't follow that post-

Cataclyst line."

"Posthumanist," Wellspring insisted. "Are you on the side of

life, or aren't you? If you're not, then you'll let the pain over-

whelm you. You'll go against Constantine and die as Nora did.

Accept her death, and stay with us. The future belongs to

Posthumanism, Lindsay. Not to nation-states, not to factions. It

belongs to life, and life moves in clades."

"I've heard your spiel before, Wellspring. If we embrace the

loss of our humanity then it means worse differences, worse

struggle, worse war."

"Not if the new clades can reach accord as cognitive systems

on the Fourth Prigoginic Level of Complexity."

Lindsay, despairing, was silent. Finally he said, "I wish you the

best of luck here, sincerely. Protect the damaged, if you can.

Maybe it'll come to something."

"There's a universe of potential, Lindsay, think of that. No

rules, no limits."

"Not while he lives. Forgive me."

"You'll have to do that for yourself."

AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 14-2-'86

"This is not the sort of transaction we prefer," the Investor said.

"Have we met before, Ensign?" said Lindsay.

"No. I knew one of your students once. Captain-Doctor Simon

Afriel. A very accomplished gentleman."

"I remember Simon well."

"He died on embassy." The Investor stared, his dark eyeballs

gleaming with hostility above the white rims of his nictitating

membranes. "A pity. I always enjoyed his conversation. Still, he

had that urge to meddle, to tamper. You call it curiosity. An

urge to value useless data. A being with such a handicap runs a

great many unnecessary risks."

"Without a doubt," Lindsay agreed. He had not heard of

Afriel's death. The knowledge filled him with bitter pleasure:

another fanatic gone, another gifted life wasted. . . .

"Hatred is an easier motive to fathom. Strange that you should fall prey to it, Artist. It makes me doubt my judgment of your

species."

"I regret being a source of confusion. Chancellor-General Constantine might explain it better."

"I'll speak to him. He and his party have just come aboard. He

is not a fit model, though, for a judgment on human nature.

Our scanning reveals that he favors severe alterations."

Many did these days, Lindsay thought. Even the very young.

As if the existence of the Neotenic Republic, with its forced

humanity, freed the other factions from a stifling pretense. "You

find this odd in a spacegoing race?"

"No. Not at all. That's why there are so few of them left."

"Nineteen," Lindsay said.

"Yes. The number of vanished races within our trading realm

is larger by an order of magnitude. Their artifacts persist,

though, such as the one we plan to lease to you presently." The

Investor showed his striated, peglike teeth, a sign of distaste and

reluctance. "We'd hoped for truly long-term trade with your

species, but we cannot dissuade you from aiming for break-

throughs in questions of metaphysics. We will soon have to put

your solar system under quarantine for fear of being caught in

your transmutations. In the meantime we must abandon a few

scruples to make our local investments worthwhile."

"You alarm me," Lindsay said. He had heard this before:

vague warnings from the Investors, intended to freeze humanity

at its current level of development. It amused him that Investors

should preach Preservationism. "Surely the War is a greater threat."

"No," the Investor said. "We ourselves presented you with

evidence. Our interstellar drive showed you that space-time is

not what you thought. You must be aware of this, Artist. Consider recent breakthroughs in the mathematical treatment of what you call Hilbert space and the ur-space of the precontinuum. They can't have escaped your attention."

"Mathematics isn't my forte," Lindsay said.

"Nor ours. We only know that these discoveries are danger

signs of an imminent transition to another mode of being."

"Imminent?"

"Yes. A matter of mere centuries."

Centuries, Lindsay thought. It was easy to forget how old the

Investors were. Their deep disinterest in change gave them a

wide but shallow field of view. They had no interest in their

own history, no urge to contrast their own lives with those of

their dead, because there was no assumption that their lives or

motives varied in even the slightest degree. They had vague

legends and garbled technical readouts concerning particularly

prized objects of booty, but even these fragments of history were

lost in a jackdaw scramble of loot.

"Not all the extinct races made the transition," the Ensign said, "and those who invented the Arena probably died violently. We

have no data on that: only technical data on their modes of

perception, allowing us to make the Arena comprehensible to

the human nervous system. In this we had the assistance of the

Department of Neurology from the Kosmosity of the Nysa Corporate Treaty State."

Constantine's recruits, Lindsay thought. The Nysa rogue

wireheads, Mechanist defectors to the Shaper cause, combining

Mech techniques with the fascist structure of the Shaper

academic-military complex. "The very men -the very beings,

rather, for the job."

"So said the Chancellor-General. His party has assembled now.

Shall we join them?"

Constantine's group mingled with Lindsay's in one of the cavernous lounges of the Investor ship. The lounge was crowded

with towering rococo furniture: dizzyingly overdecorated settees

and slablike tables, supported on curved legs crusted with

ribbed domes and stylized scrolls. It was all far too large to be

of any conventional use to the score of human visitors, who

crouched under the furniture warily, careful not to touch any-

thing. Lindsay saw as he entered the lounge that the alien

furnishings had been sprayed with a thick protective lacquer to

guard them from oxygen.

He had never seen any of the young Constantine genetics.

Constantine had brought ten of them: five women, five men.

The Constantine siblings were taller than Constantine and had

lighter hair, clearly a percentage cut from some other gene-line.

They had that peculiar Shaper magnetism, an acrobatic

smoothness and fluidity. Yet something in the set of their shoulders, their slim, dexterous hands, kinesically displayed Con-

stantine's genetic heritage. They wore outlandish finery: round

velvet hats, ruby earrings, and gold-laced brocade coats. They

dressed for the sake of Investors, who appreciated a prosperous

look in their customers.

One woman had her back to Lindsay, examining the towering

legs of the furniture. The others stood calmly, trading meaning-

less pleasantries with Lindsay's people, a motley group of academics and Investor specialists on leave from Czarina-Kluster.

His wife Alexandrina was among them; she was talking to Constantine himself, with her usual perfect good breeding. Nothing

showed that all of them were seconds at a duel, witnesses

present to assure fairness.

It had been a two-year struggle, a matter of prolonged and

delicate negotiation, to arrange a meeting between himself and

Constantine. At last they had settled on the Investor starship as

a suitable battleground, one where treachery would be

counterproductive. The Arena itself had remained in Investor

hands; the Nysa technicians had worked on data freely available

to both parties. The costs were split equitably, with Constantine

assuming most of the financing, on an option against possible

technological spinoffs. Lindsay had received data through a

double-blind in Czarina-Kluster and Dembowska, to confuse

possible assassins. Constantine, to his credit, had sent no one.

The mechanics of their duel had been fraught with difficulty.

Varying proposals had been debated by an ever-widening circle

of those in the know. Physical combat was rejected at once as

beneath the dignity of the estranged parties. Those familiar with

the social gambling of the Shaper underworld favored a form of

gambling for suicide. An appeal to chance, though, presumed

equality between the parties, which neither was willing to grant.

A proper duel should assure the triumph of the better man. It

was argued that this required a test of alertness, will, and mental

flexibility, qualities central to modern life. Objective tests were

possible, but it was difficult to ensure that one party would not

prepare himself ahead of time or influence the judges. Various

forms of direct mind-to-mind struggle existed among the

wirehead community, but these often lasted for decades and

involved radical alteration of the faculties. They decided to

consult the Investors.

At first the Investors had difficulty grasping the concept. Later,

characteristically, they suggested economic warfare, with each

party granted a stake and offered the opportunity to increase it.

After a stated period the poorer man was to be executed.

This was not satisfactory. Another Investor suggestion involved attempts by both parties to read the "literature of the

(untranslatable)," but it was suggested that the survivor might

repeat something of what he had read and become a hazard to

the rest of humanity. At this point the Arena was rediscovered

in one of the booty-crammed holds of an Investor craft present

in circumsolar space.

Study quickly showed the Arena's advantages. Alien forms of

experience challenged even the finest members of society: the

emissaries to alien worlds. The extremely high casualty rate

among this group proved that the Arena would be a test in

itself. Within the Arena's simulated environment, the duelists

would battle in two alien bodies of guaranteed equality, thus

ensuring that victory would go to the superior strategist.

Constantine stood beneath one of the towering tables, sipping a self-chilling silver goblet of distilled water. Like his gaudily clad

congenetics, he wore soft lace-cuffed trousers and a gold threaded coat, its high collar studded with insignias of rank. His round, delicate eyes gleamed black with soft antiglare lenses. His face, like Lindsay's, was creased where years of habitual expression had worked their way into the muscles.

Lindsay wore a dun-brown jumpsuit without markings. His

face was oiled against the blue-white glare, and he wore dark

sunshades.

He crossed the room to join Constantine. A hush fell, but

Constantine gestured urbanely, and his fellow genetics picked

up the tag-ends of their conversations.

"Hello, cousin," Constantine said.

Lindsay nodded. "A fine group of congenetics, Philip. Con-

gratulations on your siblings."

"Good sound stock," Constantine agreed. "They handle the

gravity well." He looked pointedly at Lindsay's wife, who had

shuffled tactfully toward another group, visibly troubled by pain

in her knees.

"I spent a lot of time on gene politics," Lindsay said. "In

retrospect it seems like an aristocratic fetish."

Constantine's lids narrowed over the black adhesive lenses. "A

little more work on the Mavrides production run might have

been in order."

Lindsay felt a surge of cold fury. "Their loyalties betrayed

them."

Constantine sighed. "The irony hasn't escaped me, Abelard. If

you had only maintained your pledged faith to Vera Kelland

years ago, none of these aberrations would have occurred."

"Aberrations?" Lindsay smiled icily. "Decent of you to mop

up after me, cousin. To tie up my loose ends."

"Small wonder, when you left so many pernicious ones." Con-

stantine sipped his water. "Appeasement policy, for instance.

Detente. It was typical of you to fast-talk a population into

disaster and then sundog off when it came to the crunch."

Lindsay showed interest. "Is that the new party line? To blame

me for the Investor Peace? How flattering. But is it wise to bring

up the past? Why remind them that you lost the Republic?"

Constantine's knuckles whitened on the goblet. "I see that

you're still an antiquarian. Odd that you should embrace Wellspring and his cadre of anarchists."

Lindsay nodded. "I know that you'll attack Czarina-Kluster if

you have the chance. Your hypocrisy astounds me. You're no

Shaper. Not only are you unplanned, but your use of Mech

techniques is notorious. You're a living demonstration of the

power of detente. You seize advantage wherever you find it but

deny it to anyone else."

Constantine smiled. "I'm no Shaper. I'm their guardian. It's

been my fate, and I've accepted it. I've been alone all my life,

except for you and Vera. We were fools then."

"I was the fool," Lindsay said. "I killed Vera for nothing. You

killed her to prove your own power."

"The price was bitter, but the proof was worth it. I've made

amends since then." He drained his goblet and stretched out his arm.

Vera Kelland took the cup. Around her neck she wore the

gold filigree locket she had worn in the crash, the locket that

was meant to guarantee his death.

Lindsay was dumbstruck. He had not seen the girl's face when

her back was turned.

She did not meet his eyes.

Lindsay stared at her in icy fascination. The resemblance was

strong but not perfect. The girl turned and left. Lindsay forced

the words. "She's not a full clone."

"Of course not, Vera Kelland was unplanned."

"You used her genetics."

"Do I hear envy, cousin? Are you claiming her cells loved you

and not me?" Constantine laughed.

Lindsay tore his gaze from the woman. Her grace and beauty

wounded him. He felt shell-shocked, panicky. "What will hap-

pen to her, when you die here?"

Constantine smiled quietly. "Why not mull that over, while we

fight?"

"I'll make you a pledge," Lindsay said. "I swear that if I win

I'll spare your congenetics in the years to come."

"My people are loyal to the Ring Council. Your Czarina-

Kluster rabble are their enemies. They're bound to come in

conflict."

"Surely that will be grim enough without our adding to it."

"You're naive, Abelard. Czarina-Kluster must fall."

Lindsay looked aside, studying Constantine's group. "They

don't look stupid, Philip. I wonder if they won't rejoice at your

death. They might be swept away in the general celebration."

"Idle speculation always bores me," Constantine said.

Lindsay glared. "Then it's time we put the matter to the

proof."

Heavy curtains were spread over one of the huge alien tables,