Schismatrix

falling to the floor. Beneath the table's sheltering expanse the

blazing light was dimmer, and a pair of supportive waterbeds

were brought in to combat Investor gravity.

The Arena itself was tiny, a fist-sized dodecahedron, its triangular sides so glossily black that they shimmered with faint

pastels. Wire trailed from metal-bound sockets in two opposing

poles of the structure. The wires led to two goggle-equipped

helmets with flexible neck extensions. The helmets had the

blunt utilitarian look of Mechanist manufacture.

Constantine won the toss and took the right-hand helmet. He

produced a flat curved lozenge of beige plastic from his gold-

threaded coat and hooked an elastic strap to its anchor loops.

"A spatial analyzer," he explained. "One of my routines.

Permitted?"

"Yes." Lindsay pulled a flesh-colored strip of dotted adhesive

disks from his breast pocket. "PDKL Ninety-five," he said. "In

doses of two hundred micrograms."

Constantine stared. " 'Shatter.' From the Cataclysts?"

"No," Lindsay said. "This was part of the stock of Michael

Carnassus. It's original Mechanist issue, for the embassies.

Interested?"

"No," Constantine said. He looked shaken. "I protest. I came

here to fight Abelard Lindsay, not a shattered personality."

"That scarcely matters now, does it? This is to the death,

Constantine. My humanity would only get in the way."

Constantine shrugged. "Then I win, no matter what."

Constantine attached the spatial analyzer, fitting its custom-

made curves against the back of his skull. Its microprongs slid

smoothly into the jacks connected to his right hemisphere. With

its use, space would assume a fantastic solidity, movement

would show with superhuman clarity. Constantine lifted the

helmet and caught a glimpse of his own sleeve. Lindsay saw him

hesitate, studying the fabric's complex interwoven topology. He

seemed fascinated. Then he shuddered briefly and slid his head

within the helmet.

Lindsay pressed the first dosage against his wrist and donned

his headpiece. He felt the adhesive eye-cusps grip his sockets,

then a wash of numbness as local anesthetics took effect and

threads of stiffened biogel slid over the eyeballs to penetrate his

optic nerves. He heard a faint annihilating ringing as other

threads wormed past his eardrums into predetermined

chemotactic contact with his neurons.

They both lay back on their waterbeds, waiting as the helmets'

neck units soaked through predrilled microholes in the seventh

cervical vertebra. The microthreads grew their way harmlessly

through the myclin casings of the spinal axons in a self-

replicating gelatin web.

Lindsay floated quietly. The PDKL was taking hold. As the

spinal cutoff proceeded he felt his body dissolving like wax,

each sensory clump of muscle sending a final warm glow of

sensation as the neck unit shut it off, a last twinge of humanity

too thin to be called pain. The Shatter helped him forget. By

rendering everything novel, it was intended to rob everything of

novelty. While it broke up preconceptions, it heightened the

powers of comprehension so drastically that entire intuitive

philosophies boiled up from a single moment of insight.

It was dark. His mouth tasted of cobwebs. He felt a brief wave

of vertigo and terror before the Shatter aborted it, leaving him

suddenly stranded in an emotional no-man's-land where his fear

transmuted itself bizarrely into a crushing sense of physical

weight.

He was crouching next to the base of a titanic wall. Before him, dim sheens of radiance gleamed from a colossal arch. Beside it,

jutting balustrades of icy stone were shrouded in thin webs of

sagging dust-covered cable. He reached out to touch the wall

and noted with dulled surprise that his arm had transmuted

itself into a pallid claw. The arm was jointed in pale armor. It

had two elbows.

He began crawling up the wall. Gravity accompanied him.

Looking out with new perspective he saw that bridges had

transformed themselves into curved columns; loops of sagging

cable were now vicious, stiffened arcs.

Everything was old. Something behind his eyes was opening.

He could see time lying on the world like a sheen, a frozen blur

of movement chopped out of context and painted onto the

surface of the cold stone like alien shellac. Walls became floors,

balustrades cold barricades. He realized then that he had too

many legs. There were legs where his ribs should have been and

the crawling feeling in his stomach was a literal crawling: the

sensations from his guts were transmuted into the movement of

his second pair of limbs.

He struggled to look at himself. He could not curl forward, but

his back arched with fantastic ease and his lidless eyes gazed at

armored plates thick with intersegmental fur. A pair of wrinkled

organs protruded on stalks from his back: he brushed his muzzle against them and suddenly, dizzyingly, he smelted yellow. He

tried to scream, then. He had nothing to scream with.

He flopped back against the cold rock. Instinct seized him, and

he scuttled headlong across acres of porous gritty stone toward

the safe darkness of a huge jutting cornice and a racklike

checkerboard of rust eaten bars. Proportion left him as he

crouched there, wobbling in a hideous burst of intuition, and he

realized that he was tiny, infinitesimal, that the titanic mortared

blocks that dwarfed him must themselves be small, so small

that . . .

He jabbed at the porous stone with a raking flex of his

foreclaw. It was solid, solid with a weary durability that had

waited out uncaring eons, painted with the feeble dust of huge

groaning machinery run past the point of uselessness into an

utter exhaustion of grit.

He could smell the age of it, even feel it as a kind of pressure,

a kind of dread. It was massive, unyielding, and he thought

suddenly of water. Water moving at high speed was as hard as

steel. His mind rocketed off, then, and he thought of the identity of speed and substance, the kinetic energy of atoms giving form to hard stone, stone which was empty space. It was all abstract structure, ageless form, level after level, emptiness permeated by disturbances of emptiness, waves, quanta. He became aware of fine detail within the stone, the surface suddenly no more than frozen smoke, a hard fog petrified by captive eons. Below the surface a finer level, detail on obsessive detail in an ever-recessive web. . . .

He was attacked. The enemy was on him. He felt a sudden

ghastly rending as claws tore into him from above, the alien pain

garbled in translation, cramming his brain with black nausea

and dread. He flopped in death-stricken convulsion, his face

slid apart in a nightmare extrusion of razored mandibles, and he

caught a leg and sheared it off at the joint; he smelled hot

hunger and pain and the bright hot radiance of his own juices

bursting, and then the cold, the seeping, the bright spark fading

to become one with the old stone and the age and the dark. . . .

The exterior microphones of his helmet caught Constantine's

voice and fed it through his nerves. "Abelard."

Lindsay's throat was full of rust. "I hear you."

"You're alive?"

The nerve block in his neck half dissolved and he felt his own

body, as insubstantial as warm gas. He groped for the strip of

dermadisks beside his hand: the perforated plastic felt as thin as

ribbon. He peeled off another disk with his fingers and pressed

it raggedly against the base of his thumb. "We must try again."

"What did you see, Abelard? I must know."

"Halls. Walls. Dark stones."

"And gulfs? Black gulfs of nothing, bigger than God?"

"I can't talk." The other dose was hitting him, language was

collapsing, a tangle of irrelevant assumptions shattered by sudden doubt, wads of grammar mashed beneath the impact of the drug. "Again."

He was back. He could feel the enemy now, sense his presence as a weak distant tingling. The light was clearer, gigantic radiant washes seeping through masses of stone so rotten with age that they were thin as cloth. Fastidiously, he ran his foreclaws

through the polyps around his mouth, cleansing them of damp

grime. He felt a sense of hunger so overwhelming that the scales

equalized, and he realized that the urge to live and kill was as

huge as the vaults around him.

He found the enemy crouched within a cul-de-sac between a

harsh decaying bridge and its supporting beams. He smelled the

fear.

The enemy's position was wrong. The enemy clung to the wall

in a false perspective, perceiving the endless horizon as a shattering abyss. The gulf below was an eternal one, a chaos of walls, chambers, landings, self-replicating, built from nothing, a terrifying ramification of infinity.

He attacked, biting deep into the back plates, the taste of hot

ooze driving him into frenzy. The enemy slashed back, digging,

pushing, pale claws scraping the rock. His jaws ripped free from

the enemy's back. The enemy struggled to push him away, to

shove him backward into the horizon. For a moment he was

gripped by the enemy's own perspective. He knew suddenly that

if he fell he would fall forever. Into the abyss, plunging into his

own terror and defeat, endlessly, through the self spinning labyrinth, mind frozen in boundless anguish, a maze of unending experience, unending fright, implacable walls, halls, steps, ramps, crypts, vaults, passages, always icy, always out of reach.

He skidded back. The enemy was desperate, scrabbling convulsively, galvanized with pain. His own claws were slipping. The

stone was rejecting him, becoming slicker. Suddenly the break-

through came, and he saw the world for what it was. His claws

slid in, then, with phantom case, stone slipping aside like smoke.

Then he was anchored. The enemy pushed at him helplessly,

uselessly. He tasted the sudden gush of despair as the enemy

turned to flee.

He ran him down at once, caught him, and rended him. A

miasma of dust and terror burst from the enemy's flesh. He

ripped him free from the wall, held him out in an orgasm of

hatred and victory-and flung him into the gulf.

Part Three

MOVING IN CLADES

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE NEOTENIC CULTURAL REPUBLIC: 17-6-'91

The dreams were pleasant, dreams of warmth and light, an animal's

life, an eternal present.

Consciousness returned in tingling pain, like blood seeping into a leg long numbed. He struggled to unify himself, to assume the

burden of being Lindsay again, and the pain of it made him claw the

grass, spattering his naked skin with dirt.

Chaos roared around him: reality in its rawest form, a buzzing, blinding confusion. He sprawled on his back in the grass, gasping. Above him the world swam into focus: green light, white light, a brown framework of branches. Solidity returned to the world. He saw a living spray of branching leaves and twigs: a form of such

fantastic beauty that he was overwhelmed with awe. He heaved

himself over and slithered toward the tree's rough trunk, hauling

his naked flesh through the sleek grass. He threw his arms around

the tree and pressed his bearded cheek against the bark.

Ecstasy seized him. He pressed his face against the tree, sobbing in frenzy, torn with deep visionary rapture. As his mind coalesced he burned with insight, a smoldering oneness with this living being. Helpless joy pervaded him as he joined its serene integration.

When he called for help, two young Shapers wearing hospital

whites answered his broken cries. Taking his arms, they helped him

stagger across the lawn through the arched stone doorway of the

clinic.

Lindsay was afflicted by language. His thoughts were clear, but the words wouldn't come. He recognized the building. It was the

mansion of the Tyler clan. He was back in the Republic. He wanted

to speak to the orderlies, ask them how he had returned, but his

brain couldn't shuffle his vocabulary into order. The words waited

agonizingly on the tip of his tongue, just past his reach.

They took him down an entry hall crowded with blueprints and

glass-topped exhibits. The left wing of the mansion, with its suite of

bedrooms, had been stripped down to the polished wood and filled

with medical equipment. Lindsay stared helplessly into the face of

the man on his left. He had the smooth grace of a Shaper and the

riveting eyes of a Superbright.

"You are- " Lindsay burst out suddenly.

"Relax, friend. You're safe. The doctor's on her way." Smiling, he draped Lindsay in a broad-sleeved hospital gown, tying it behind

him in an easy flurry of knots. They seated him under an overhead

cerebral scanner. The second orderly handed him an inhaler.

"Whiff up on this, cousin. It's tagged glucose. Radioactive. For the scanner." The Superbright whacked the curved white dome of the

machine affectionately. "We've got to look you over. I mean right

down to the core."

Lindsay sniffed obediently at the inhaler. It smelled sweet. The

scanner whirred down its upright track-stand to settle around the

top of his head.

A woman entered the room. She carried a wooden instrument

case and wore a loose medical tunic, short skirt, and muddied

plastic boots." Has he spoken?" she said.

Lindsay recognized her gene-line. "Juliano," he said with difficulty.

She smiled at him. She opened her wooden case with a squeak of antique hinges. "Yes, Abelard," she said. She gave him a Look.

"Margaret Juliano," Lindsay said. He could not interpret the

Look, and the inability filled him with a sudden reviving trickle of

energy and fear. "The Cataclysts, Margaret. They put you on ice."

"That's right." She reached inside the case and produced a dark

candy in a little creased paper tray. "Have a chocolate?"

Lindsay's mouth flooded with saliva. "Please," he said reflexively.

She popped the candy into his mouth. It was cloyingly sweet. He chewed it reluctantly.

"Scarper," Juliano told the two technicians. "I'll handle this." The two Superbrights left, grinning.

Lindsay swallowed.

"Another?" she said.

"Never much canned -never much cared for candy," Lindsay said.

"That's a good sign," she said, closing the box. She examined the scanner's screen and pulled a light-pen from the cluster of loose

blonde hair at her ear. "Those chocolates were the center of your

life for the last five years."

The shock was bad, but he had known it was coming. His throat felt dry. "Five years?"

"You're lucky to have any you left," she said. "It's been a long

treatment: restoring a brain altered by heavy dosage of PDKL

Ninety-five. Complicated by changes in your spatial perception,

caused by the Arena artifact. It's been a real challenge. Expensive,

too." She studied the screen, nibbling the end of her light-pen. "But

that's all right. Your friend Wellspring footed the bills."

She had changed so much that it dizzied him. It was hard to

reconcile the disciplined pacifist of the Midnight Clique, Margaret

Juliano of Goldreich-Tremaine, with this calm, careless woman

with grass stains on her knees and loose, dirty hair.

"Don't try to talk too much at first," she said. "Your right

hemisphere is handling language functions through the

commissure. We can expect neologisms, poverty of speech, a

private idiolect . . . don't be alarmed." She circled something on

the display screen and pressed a control key: cross-sections of his

brain snuffled past in bright false-color blues and oranges.

"How many people in this room?" she said.

"You and I," Lindsay said.

"No sense of someone behind you, to your left?"

Lindsay twisted to look, scraping his forehead painfully on an

inner node of the scanner. "No."

"Good. The commissure approach was the right one, then. In

split-brain cases we sometimes get a fragmentation of conscious-

ness, a ghost image overlooking the perceptual self. Let me know if

you feel anything of the sort."

"No. But outside I felt-" He wanted to tell her about the moment when waking had come suddenly, his long epiphanic insight into self and life. The vision still blazed within him, but the vocabulary

was completely beyond him. He knew suddenly that he would never he able to tell anyone the full truth. It was not something that

words could hold.

"Don't struggle," she said. "Let it come easily. There's plenty of time."

"My arm," Lindsay said suddenly. He realized with confusion that his right arm, the metal one, had turned to flesh. He raised the left one. It was metal. Horror overloaded him. He had turned inside

out!

"Careful," she said. "You may have some trouble with space

perceptions, left and right. It's an artifact of the commissural dominance. And you've had a new rejuvenation. We've done a lot

of work on you in the past five years. Just to mark time."

The careless ease of it stunned him. "Are you God?" Lindsay said.

She shrugged. "There've been breakthroughs, Abelard. A lot has changed. Socially, politically, medically-all the same thing nowadays, I know, but think of it as spontaneous self-organization, a

social Prigoginic Leap to a new level of complexity-"

"Oh, no," Lindsay said.

She tapped the scanner, and it whirred upward off his head. She sat before him in an antique wooden office chair, curling one leg

beneath her. "Sure you don't want a chocolate?"

"No!"

"I'll have one, then." She pulled a candy from the case and bit into it, chewing happily. "They're good." She spoke unaffectedly, her

mouth full. "This is one of the good limes, Abelard. It's why they

thawed me out, I think."

"You changed."

"Ice assassination docs that. They were right, the Cataclysts. Right to put me out. I was calcifying. One moment I was floating through the math hall at the Kosmosity, printouts in my hand, on my way to the office, mind full of little problems, worries, schedules. . . . I was dizzy for a moment. I looked around, and everything was gone.

Deserted. Trashed. The printouts were crumbling in my hands,

clothes full of dust,Goldreich-Tremaine in ruins, computers down,

classes all gone. . . . The world leaped thirty years in a moment; it

was total Cataclysm. For three days I chased down news, trying to

find our Clique, learning I was history, and then it came over me in

a wave. I 'preeked,' Abelard. My preconceptions shattered. The

world didn't need me, and everything I'd thought was important

was gone. My life was totally futile. And totally free."

"Free," Lindsay said, tasting the word. "Constantine," he said

suddenly. "My enemy."

"He's dead, so to speak," Margaret Juliano said, "but it's a

question of definition. I have the scans on his condition from his

congenetics. The damage is very severe. He fell into a protracted

fugue state and suffered an accelerated consciousness that must

have lasted for subjective centuries. His consciousness could not

maintain itself on the data it received from the Arena device. It

lasted so long that his personality was abraded away. Speaking

metaphorically, he forgot himself to pieces."

"They told you that? His siblings?"

"Times have changed, Abelard. Detente is back. The Constantine gene-line is in trouble, and we paid them well for the information. Skimmers Union lost the capitalship. Jastrow Station is the capital now, and it's full of Zen Serotonists. They hate excitement."

The news thrilled Lindsay. "Five years," he said. He stood up in agitation. "Well, what's five years to me?" He tried to pace about

the room, swinging dizzily. The left-right hemispheric confusion

made him clumsy. He drew himself up and tried to get a grip on his

kinesics. He failed.

He turned on Juliano. "My training. My kinesics."

She nodded. "Yes. When we went in we noticed the remnants of it.

Early Shaper psychotechnic conditioning. Very clumsy by modern

standards. It interfered with your recovery. So, over the years, we

chased it down and extinguished it bit by bit."

"You mean it's gone?"

"Oh, yes. We had enough cerebral dichotomy to deal with without your training giving you dual modes of thought. 'Hypocrisy as a second state of consciousness' and all that." She sniffed. "It was a

bad idea to begin with."

Lindsay sagged back into the scanning chair. "But all my life.

. . . And now you took it away. With feck - " He closed his eyes,

struggled for the word. "With technology." She took another candy. "So what?" she said indistinctly, munching. "Technology put it there in the first place. You have your self back. What more do you want?"

Alexandrina Tyler came through the open doorway with a swish of heavy fabric. She wore the finery of her girlhood: a puffed, floor-length skirt and a stiff cream-colored jacket with embroidered

input jacks and a round neck-circling collar. She looked at the

floor. "Margaret," she said. "Your feet."

Juliano looked absently at the dried mud flaking from her boots.

"Oh, dear. Sorry."

The sudden juxtaposition of the two women filled Lindsay with

vertigo. A confused wash of tainted deja vu bubbled up from some

drugged cerebral recess, and for a moment he thought he would

pass out. When he revived he could feel that he had improved, as if

some paralyzing sludge had trickled out of his head, leaving light

and space. "Alexandrina," he said, feeling feebler yet somehow

more real. "You've been time? All this here?"

"Abelard," she said, surprised. "You're talking."

"Trying to."

"I heard you were better," she said. "So I brought you clothes.

From the Museum wardrobe." She showed him a plastic-wrapped

suit, an antique. "You see? This is actually one of your own suits

from seventy-five years ago. One of the looters saved it when the

Lindsay Mansion was sacked. Try it on, dear."

Lindsay touched the suit's stiff, age-worn fabric. "A museum

piece," he said.

"Well, of course."

Margaret Juliano Looked at Alexandrina. "Maybe he'd be more

comfortable dressed as an orderly. He could fade into the back-

ground. Take on local color."

"No," Lindsay said. "All right. I'll wear it."

"Alexandrina's been looking forward to this," Juliano confided as he struggled into the suit's trousers, ramming his bare feet past the wire-stiffened accordioned knees. "Every day she's come to feed

you Tyler apples."

"I brought you here after the duel," Alexandrina said. "Our

marriage expired, but I run the Museum now. I have a post here."

She smiled. "They sacked the mansions, but the family orchards are

still standing. Your Grandaunt Marietta always swore by the family's apples."

A seam gave way in the shoulder as Lindsay pulled on the shirt.

"You wolfed clown those apples, seeds, stems, and all," Juliano told him. "It was a wonder."

"You're home, Alexa," Lindsay said. It was what she had wanted.

He was glad for her.

"This was the Tyler house," Alexandrina said. "The left wing and the grounds are for the clinic; that's Margaret's work. I'm the

Curator. I run the rest. I've gathered up all the mementos of our old

way of life-all that was spared by Constantine's reeducation

squads." She helped him pull the spacesuit-collared formal jacket

over his head. "Come on, I'll show you."

Juliano kicked off her boots and stood in her rumpled socks. "I'llcome along. I want to judge his reactions."

The main ballroom had become an exhibit hall, with glass-fronted displays and portraits of early clan founders. An antique pedal-driven ultralight aircraft hung from the ceiling. Five Shapers

marveled over a case full of crude assembly tools from the

circumlunar's construction. The Shapers' chic low-gravity clothing

sagged grotesquely in the Republic's centrifugal spin. Alexandrina

took his arm and whispered, "The floor looks nice, doesn't it? I

refinished it myself. We don't allow robots here."

Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan's founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer's face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers

and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a

painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at

seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by

people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically. "It's a joke!" he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.

Alexandrina glanced anxiously at the bemused Shapers.

"Maybe this was too early for him, Margaret."

Juliano laughed. "He's right. It is a joke. Ask the Cataclysts." She took Lindsay's arm. "Come on, Abelard. We'll go outside."

"It's a joke," Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the

words gushed free. "This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no

idea. I low could they? They were dead before they had a chance to

see! What's five years to us, what's ten, a hundred - "

"You're babbling, dear." Juliano walked him down the hall and

through the mortared stone archway into dappled sunlight and

grass. "Watch where you step," she said. "We have other patients

Not housebroken." Reside the high moss-crusted walls a nude

young woman was tearing single-mindedly at the grass, pausing to

suck grime from her fingers.

Lindsay was horrified. He seemed to taste the grit on his own

tongue. "We'll go outside the grounds," Margaret said.

"Pongpianskul won't mind."

"He's letting you stay here, is he? That woman's a Shaper. A

Cataclyst? He owed a debt to the Cataclysts. You're taking care of

them for him."

"Try not to talk too much, dear. You might hurt something." She opened the iron gateway. "They like it here, the Cataclysts. Something about the view."

"Oh, my God," Lindsay said.

The Republic had run wild. The overarching trees on the Museum grounds had hid the lull panorama from him. Now it loomed over and around him in its full five-kilometer range, a stunning expanse of ridged and tangled green, three long panels glowing in triple-crossed shafts of mirror-reflected sunlight. He'd forgotten how

bright the sun was in circumlunar space.

"The trees," he gasped. "My God, look at them!"

"They've been growing ever since you left," Juliano said.

"Come with me. I want to show you another project."

Lindsay looked up through reflex toward his own former home.

Seen from above, the sprawling mansion grounds bordered what

had once been a lively tangle of cheap low-class restaurants. Those

were in decline, and the Lindsay home was in ruin. He could see

yawning holes in the red-tiled roofs of fused lunar slate. The private

landing pad atop the mansion's four-story tower was swamped in

ivy.

At the northern end of the world, up its sloping walls, a crew of ant-sized workmen lore languidly at the skeletal remains of one of

the wirehead hospitals. Shoals of clouds hid the old power grid and

the area that had once been the Sours. "It smells different," Lindsay

realized. He stumbled on the bicycle path beside the Museum's

walls and was forced to watch his feet. They were filthy. "I need a

bath," he said.

"Either you crawl or you don't, right? If you've got skin bacteria, what's a little dirt? I like it. "She smiled. "It's big here, isn't it? Sure, Goldreich-Tremaine's ten times this size, but nothing this open. A big risky world."

"I'm glad Alexandrina found her way back," Lindsay said. Their

marriage had been a success, because it had gotten her what she

wanted most. At last he had made amends. It had always been a

strain. Now he was free.

The Republic had changed so much that it filled him with weird

exaltation. Yes, big, he thought, but nowhere near big enough. He

felt a sense of impatience with it, a fierce longing to grab hold of

something, something huge and basic. He had slept for five years.

Now he felt every hour of that long rest pressing in on him with

uncontainable reviving energy. His knees buckled, and Juliano

caught him with her Shaper-strengthened arms.

"Easy," she said.

"I'm all right." They crossed the openwork bridge over the blazing expanse of metaglass that separated two land panels. Lindsay saw the former site of the Sours beneath a raft of clouds. The once-foul morass had become an oasis of vegetation so blindingly green that it seemed to shine even in the clouds' shadow. A tall gangling boy in baggy clothing was running headlong beside the woven-wire fence surrounding the Sours, tugging a large box kite into flight.

"You're not the first I've cured," Juliano said as they walked

toward it. "I always said my Superbright students had promise.

Some of them work here. A pilot project. I want to show you what

they've done. They've been tackling botany from a perspective of

Prigoginic complexity theory. New species, advanced chlorophylls, good solid constructive work."

"Wait," said Lindsay. "I want to talk to this youngster." He had

noticed the boy's kite. Its elaborate paint job showed a nude man

crammed stiflingly within the rigid planes of the box kite's lifting

surfaces.

A woman in mud-smeared corduroy leaned over the woven fence, waving a pair of shears. "Margaret! Come see!"

"I'll be back for you," Juliano said. "Don't go away."

Lindsay ambled unsteadily to where the boy stood, expertly

managing his kite. "Hello, old cousin," the boy said. "Got any

tapes?"

"What kind?"

"Video, audio, anything from the Ring Council. That's where

you're from, right?"

Lindsay reached automatically for his training, for the easy network of spontaneous lies that would show the boy a plausible

image. His mind was blank. He gaped. Time was passing. He

blurted the first thing that came into his head. "I'm a sundog. From

Czarina-Kluster."

"Really? Posthumanism! Prigoginic levels of complexity! Fractal

scales, bedrock of space-time, precontinuum ur-space! Have I got it

right?"

"I like your kite," Lindsay hedged.

"Old Cataclyst logo," the boy said. "We get a lot of old Cataclysts around here. The kite gets their attention. First time I've caught a Cicada, though."

Cicada, Lindsay thought. A citizen of C-K. Wellspring had always been fond of slang. "You're a local?"

"That's right. My name's Abelard. Abelard Gomez."

"Abelard.That name's not too common."

The boy laughed. "Maybe not in C-K. But every fifth kid in the

Republic's named Abelard. After Abelard Lindsay, the big historical cheese. You must have heard of him." The boy hesitated. "He

used to dress like you. I've seen pictures."

Lindsay looked at the boy's own clothes. Young Gomez wore a

faked-up low-grav outfit which sagged dreadfully. "I can tell I'm

out of date," Lindsay said. "They make a big deal out of this

Lindsay fellow, do they?"

"You don't know the half of it," Gomez said. "Take school.

School's completely antique here. They make us read Lindsay's

book. Shakespeare, it's called. Translated into modern English by

Abelard Lindsay."

"Is it that bad?" Lindsay said, tingling with deja vu.

"You're lucky, old man. You don't have to read it. I've looked

through the whole thing. Not one word in there about spontaneous self-organization."

Lindsay nodded. "That's a shame."

"Everybody's old in that book. I don't mean fake-old like the

Preservationists here. Or weird-old like old Pong."

"You mean Pongpianskul?" Lindsay said.

"The Warden, yeah. No, I mean everybody's used up too fast. All burnt up and cramped and sick. It's depressing."

Lindsay nodded. Things had come full circle, he decided. "You

resent the control on your life," he speculated. "You and your

friends are radicals. You want things changed."

"Not really," the boy said. "They only have me for sixty years. I've got hundreds, cousin. I mean to do big things. It's going to take a lot of time. I mean big things. Huge. Not like those little dried-up

people in the past."

"What kinds of things?"

"Life-spreading. Planet-ripping. World-building. Terraforming."

"I see," Lindsay said. Me was startled to see so much self-

possession in one so young. It must be the Cataclyst influence.

They'd always favored wild schemes, huge lunacies that in the end

boiled down to nothing. "And will that make you happy?"

The boy looked suspicious. "Are you one of those Zen

Serotonists? 'Happy.' What kind of scam is that? Burn happiness,

cousin. This is the Kosmos talking. Are you on the side of life, or

aren't you?"

Lindsay smiled. "Is this political? I don't trust politics."

"Politics? I'm talking biology. Things that live and grow. Organisms. Integrated forms."

"Where do people come in?"

The boy waved his hand irritably and caught the kite as it swooped.

"Never mind them. I'm talking basic loyalties now. Like that tree. Are you on its side, against the inorganic?"

His recent epiphany was still fresh in Lindsay's mind. The boy's

question was genuine. "Yes," he said. "I am."

"You see the point of terraforming, then."

"Terraforming," Lindsay said slowly. "I've seen theories. Speculations. And I suppose that it's possible. But what does it have to do with us?"

"A true commitment to the side of Life demands the moral act of Creation," Gomez said promptly.

"Someone's been teaching you slogans," Lindsay said. He smiled.

"Planets are real places, not just grids on a drawing board. The effort would be titanic. All out of human scale."

The boy was impatient. "How big are you? Are you bigger than

something inert?"

"But it would take centuries-"

"You think that tree would hesitate? How much time do you have, anyway?"

Lindsay laughed helplessly.

"Fine, then. Are you going to live a squished-down little human life, or are you going to go for the potential?"

"At my age," Lindsay said, "if I were human I'd already be dead."

"Now you're talking. You're as big as your dreams. That's what

they say in C-K, right? No rules, no limits. Look at the Mechs and

Shapers." The boy was contemptuous. "All the power in the world,

and they're chasing each other's tails. Burn their wars and midget

ideologies. Posthumanity's bigger than that. Ask the people in

there." The boy waved one hand at the woven-wire enclosure.

"Ecosystem design. Rebuilding life for new conditions. A little

biochemistry, a little statistical physics, you can pick it up here and

there, that's where the excitement is. If Abelard Lindsay was alive

today that's the sort of thing he'd be working on."

The irony of it stung Lindsay. At Gomez's age, he'd never had any sense, either. He felt a sudden alarm for the boy, an urge to protect him from the disaster that his rhetoric would surely earn him.

"You think so?"

"Sure. They say he was a hot Preservationist type, but he

sundogged off when the getting was good, didn't he? You didn't see

him hanging around here to 'die of old age.' Nobody really does

anyway."

"Not even here? In the home of Preservationism?"

"Of course not. Everyone here over forty's on the black market

for life extension. When they turn sixty they scarper for Czarina-

Kluster. The Cicadas don't care about your history or your genes.

They take all clades. Dreams matter more."

Dreams, Lindsay thought. Dreams of Preservationism, turned

into a black-market scrabble for immortality. The dream of Investor Peace had rusted and collapsed. The dream of terraforming still

had a shine on it. Young Gomez could not know that it too would

surely tarnish.

But somehow, Lindsay thought, you had to dream or die. And

with new life pouring through him, he knew which choice was his.

Margaret Juliano leaned over the fence. "Abelard! Abelard, over here! You need a look at this."

The boy, startled, began reeling in his kite hand over hand.

"Now this is luck! That old psychotech wants to show me something in the compound."

"Go to it," Lindsay said. "You tell her that I said to show you

anything you like, understand? And tell her that I've gone off for a

little talk with Pongpianskul. All right,cousin?"

The hoy nodded slowly. "Thanks, old Cicada. You're one of us."

Pongpianskul's office was a paper wasteland. Musty cloth-bound hooks of Concatenate law were heaped beside his wooden desk; schedules and production graphs were pinned up at random on the room's ancient paneling. A tortoiseshell cat yawned in one corner

and sharpened its claws in the carpet. Lindsay, whose experience

with cats was limited, watched it guardedly.

Pongpianskul wore a suit similar to Lindsay's but newer and

obviously hand-stitched. He had lost hair since his days in

Goldreich-Tremaine, and light gleamed dully on the dusky skin of

his scalp. Me swept a sheaf of records from the desk and paper-

clipped them with skinny, wrinkled fingers.

"Papers," he muttered. "Trying to take everything off computers these days. Don't trust 'em. You use computers and there's always some Mech ready to step in with new software. Thin edge of the wedge, Mavrides. Lindsay, I mean."

"Lindsay is better."

"You must admit it's hard keeping track of you. It was a fine scam you pulled, passing yourself off as a senior genetic in the Rings." He Looked at Lindsay. Lindsay caught part of the Look. The experience of age made up somewhat for his loss of kinesic training.

Pongpianskul said, "How long has it been since we last talked?"

"Hmm. What year is this?"

Pongpianskul frowned. "No matter. You were in Dembowska

then, anyway. Things aren't so bad here under Neotenic aegis, eh,

Mavrides, you admit? Gone a bit to rack and ruin, but all the better

for the tourist trade; those Ring Council types eat it up with a spoon.

Tell the truth, we had logo into the old Lindsay mansion and bash it

about a bit, make it more romantic. Had some mice installed. You

know mice? Bred 'em back to the wild state from lab specimens.

You know their eyes weren't pink in the wild? Funny look in those

eyes, reminds me of a wife of mine."

Pongpianskul opened one of the drawers in his cavernous desk

and tossed in his sheaf of clipped papers. He pulled out a crumbling

wad of graphs and started. "What's this? Should have been done

weeks ago. No matter. Where were we? Oh, yes, wives. I married

Alexandrina, by the way. Alexa's a fine Preservationist. Couldn't

risk her slipping away."

"You did well," Lindsay said. His marriage contract had expired; her new marriage was a sound political move. It did not occur to him to feel jealousy; that had not been in the contract. He was glad that she had secured her position.

"Can't have too many wives, it's what life's all about. Take

Georgiana for instance, Constantine's first wife. Talked her into a

trace of Shatter, no more than twenty mikes, I swear, and it

improved her disposition no end. Now she's as sweet as the day is

long." He looked at Lindsay seriously. "Can't have too many

oldsters around, though. Disturbs the ideology. Bad enough with

those pesky Cataclysts and their posthuman schemes. Keep 'em

behind wire, in quarantine. Even then kids keep sneaking in."

"It's kind of you to allow them here."

"I need the foreign exchange. C-K finances their research. But

they won't amount to much. Those Superbrights can't concentrate

on anything for long." He snorted, then snatched up a bill of lading.

"I need the money. Look at these carbon-dioxide imports. It's the

damn trees, gobbling it up." He sighed. "I need those trees, though.

Their mass helps with the orbital dynamics. These circumlunar

orbits are hell."

"I'm glad matters are in good hands."

Pongpianskul smiled sadly. "I suppose. Things never work out the way you plan them. Good thing, though, or the Mechs would have

taken over long ago." The cat jumped into Pongpianskul's lap, and

he scratched its chin. The animal emitted a rumbling sound that

Lindsay found oddly soothing. "This is my cat, Saturn," the old

Shaper said. "Say hello to Lindsay, Saturn."The cat ignored him.

"I had no idea you liked animals."

"Couldn't stand him at first. Hair just pours off the little beast.

Gets into everything. Dirty as a hog, too. liver seen a hog, by the

way? I had a few imported. Incredible creatures, the tourists just

marvel."

"I must have a look before I leave."

"Animals in the air these days. Not literally, I mean, though we did have some trouble with loose hogs running off to the free-fall zone. No, I mean this biomorality from Czarina-Kluster. Another

Cataclyst fad."

"You think so?"

"Well," the Warden mused, "maybe not. You start trifling with

ecology and it's hard to find a place to stop. I've had a slip of this

cat's skin shipped off to the Ring Council. Have to clone off a whole

gene-line of them. Because of the mice, you know. Little vermin are

over running everything."

"A planet might be better," Lindsay said. "More space."

"I don't hold with messing with gravity wells," Pongpianskul said.

"It's just more room for error. Don't tell me you've fallen for that,

Mavrides."

"The world needs dreams," Lindsay said.

"You're not going to start on about levels of complexity, I hope."

Lindsay smiled. "No."

"Good. When you came in here unwashed and with no shoes on, I concluded the worst."

"They say the hogs and I had a lot in common," Lindsay said.

Pongpianskul stared, then laughed. "Haw. Haw. Glad to see you're

not standing on your dignity. Too much dignity cripples a man.

Fanatics never laugh. I hope you can still laugh when you're

breaking worlds to the leash."

"Surely someone will get a good chuckle out of it."

"Well, you'll need your humor, friend. Because these things never work out as you plan. Reality's a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams. . . . You know what I wanted here, don't you? A preserve for humanity and the human way of life, that's

what. Instead I've ended up with a huge stage set full of tourist shills

and Cataclyst fry-brains."

"It was worth a try," Lindsay said.

"That's it, break an old man's heart," Pongpianskul said. "A

consoling lie wouldn't have hurt."

"Sorry," Lindsay said. "I've lost the skill."

"Better get it back in a hurry, then. It's still a wide wicked

Schismatrix out there, detente or no detente." Pongpianskul

brooded. "Those fools in Czarina-Kluster. Selling out to aliens.

What's to become of the world? I hear some idiot wants to sell

Jupiter."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Yes, sell it off to some group of intelligent gasbags. A scandal, isn't it? Some people will do anything to suck up to aliens. Oh, sorry, no offense." He Looked at Lindsay and saw that he was not

insulted. "It won't come to anything. Alien embassies never do.

Luckily, aliens all seem to have a lot more sense than we do, with

the possible exception of the Investors. Investors, indeed. Just a

bunch of interstellar pests and nosey-parkers. . . . If aliens show up

in force I swear I'll put the whole Republic under the tightest

quarantine this side of a Ring Council session. I'll wait till society

disintegrates totally. I'll be faded by then, but the locals can move

out to pick up the pieces. They'll see then that there was sense in my

little game preserve after all."

"I see. Hedging humanity's bets. You were always a clever gambler, Neville."

The Shaper was pleased. He sneezed loudly, and the startled cat leaped from his lap across the desk, clawing papers. Sorry, he

said "Bacteria and cat hairs, never got used to them.

"I have a favor to ask," Lindsay said. "I'm leaving for Czarina-

Kluster and would like to take one of the locals with me

"Someone 'dying into the world?' You always handled that well in Dembowska. Certainly."

"No, a youngster."

"Out of the question. A terrible precedent. Wait a moment. Is it Abelard Gomez?"

"The very same."

"I see That boy troubles me. He has Constantine blood, did you know? I've been watching the local genetics. Genius turns up in

that line like a bad roll of the dice."

"I'm doing you a favor, then."

"I suppose so. Sorry to see you go, Abelard, but with your current ideological cast you're a bad influence. You're a culture hero here, you know."

"I'm through with the old dreams. My energy s back, and there s a new dream loose in Czarina-Kluster. Even if I can't believe it. At least I can help those who do." He stood up stepping back

prudently as the cat inspected his ankles. "Good luck with the

mice, Neville."

"You too, Abelard."

CHAPTER NINE

CZARINA-KLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 15-12-'91

The engines of wealth were at full throttle. A torrent of riches

was drowning the world. The exponential curves of growth hit

with their always deceptive speed, a counterintuitive quickness

that stunned the unwary and dazzled the alert.

The circumsolar population stood at 3.2 billion. It had doubled

every twenty years and would double again. The four hundred

major Mechanist asteroids roiled in a tidal wave of production

from an estimated 8 billion self-replicating mining robots and

forty thousand full scale automated factories. The Shaper worlds

measured wealth differently, dwarfed by a staggering 20 billion

tons of productive biomass.

The primal measurement of Circumsolar Kilobytes soared to

an astronomical figure best estimated as 9.45 x 1018. World

information, estimating only that available in fully open

databanks and not counting the huge empires of restricted data,

totalled 2.3 x 10 27 bits, the equivalent of 150 full-length books

for every star in every galaxy in the visible universe.

Stern social measures had to be adopted to keep entire populations from disintegrating in an orgy of plenty.

Megawatts of energy sufficient to run entire Council States

were joyfully squandered on high-speed transorbital liners.

These spacecraft, large enough to provide every comfort to

hundreds of passengers, assumed the dignity of nation-stales and

suffered their own population booms.

None of these material advances matched the social impact of

the progress of the sciences. Breakthroughs in statistical physics

proved the objective existence of the four Prigoginic Levels of

Complexity and postulated the existence of a fifth. The age of

the cosmos was calculated to an accuracy value of plus or minus

four years, and rarefied attempts were under way to estimate the

"quasi-time" consumed by the precontinuum ur-space.

Slower-than-light interstellar travel became physically possible,

and five expeditions were launched, manned by star-peering

low-mass wireheads. Ultra-long baseline interferometry, beamed

from radiotelescopes aboard the wirehead starships, established

hard parallaxes for most stars in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy.

Examinations of the Perseus and Centaurus Arms showed troubling patches where patterns of stars appeared to have an ominous regularity.

New studies of the galaxies of the Local Supercluster led to

refinements in the Hubble Constant. Minor discrepancies caused

some visionaries to conclude that the expansion of the universe

had been subjected to crude tampering.

Knowledge was power. And in seizing knowledge, humanity

had gripped a power as bright and angry as a live wire. At stake

were issues vaster than any before: the prospects were more

dazzling, the potentials sharper, and the implications more stag-

gering than anything ever faced by humanity or its successors.

Yet the human mind still had its own resources. The gifts for

survival were not found only in the sharp perceptions of the

Shapers, with their arsenals of brain-stretching biochemicals, or

the cybernetic advances of the Mechanists and the relentless

logic of their artificial intelligences. The world was kept intact

by the fantastic predilection of the human mind for boredom.

Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous.

Nothing much had ever come of it. Under the shadow of cosmic

revelations, life still swathed itself in comforting routine. The

breakaway factions were much more bizarre than ever before,

but people had grown used to this, and their horror had

lessened. Frankly antihuman clades like the Spectral

Intelligents, the Lobsters, and the Blood Bathers were somehow

incorporated into the repertoire of possibility and even made

into jokes.

And yet the strain was everywhere. The new multiple humanities hurtled blindly toward their unknown destinations, and the vertigo of acceleration struck deep. Old preconceptions were in

tatters, old loyalties were obsolete. Whole societies were para-

lyzed by the mind blasting vistas of absolute possibility.

The strain took different forms. For the Cataclysts, those

Superbrights who had been the first to feel it, it was a frenzied

embrace of the Infinite, careless of consequences. Even self-

destruction eased the unspoken pain. The Zen Serotonists aban-

doned the potential for the pale bliss of calm and quiet. For

others the strain was never explicit: just a tingling of unease at

the borders of sleep, or sudden frantic tears when the mind's

inhibitions crumbled from drink or drugs.

For Abelard Lindsay the current manifestation involved sitting

strapped to a table in the Bistro Marineris, a Czarina-Kluster

bar. The Bistro Marineris was a free-fall inflatable sphere at the

junction of four long tubeways, a way station amid the sprawling

nexus of habitats that made up the campus of Czarina-Kluster

Kosmosity-Metasystems.

Lindsay was waiting for Wellspring. He leaned on the dome-

shaped table, pressing the sticktite elbow patches of his aca-

demic jacket against its velcro top.

Lindsay was a hundred and six years old. His latest rejuvena-

tion had not erased all outward signs of age. Crow's feet webbed

his gray eyes, and creases drooped from his nose to the corners

of his mouth. Overdeveloped facial muscle ridged his dark,

mobile eyebrows. He had a short beard, and jewel-headed pins

held his long hair, streaked with white. One hand was heavily

wrinkled, its pale skin like waxed parchment. The metal hand

was honeycombed with sensor grids.

He watched the walls. The owner of the Marineris had

opaqued the inner surface of the Bistro and turned it into a

planetarium. All around Lindsay and the dozen other customers

spread the racked and desolate landscape of Mars, relayed live

from the Martian surface in painfully vivid 360-degree color.

For months the sturdy robot surveyor had been picking its way

along the rim of the Valles Marineris, sending its broadcasts.

Lindsay sat with his back to the mighty chasm: its titanic scale

and air of desolate, lifeless age had painful associations for him.

The rubble and foothills projected on the rounded wall before

him, huge upthrust blocks and wind-carved yardangs, struck

him as an implied reproach. It was new to him to have a sense

of responsibility for a planet. After three months in C-K, he was

still trying the dream on for size.

Three Kosmosity academics unbuckled themselves and kicked

off from a nearby table. As they left, one noticed Lindsay,

started, and came his way. "Pardon me, sir. I believe I know

you. Professor Bela Milosz, am I right?"

The stranger had that vaguely supercilious air common to

many Shaper defectors, a sense of misplaced fanaticism spinning

its wheels. "I've gone by that name, yes."

"I'm Yevgeny Navarre."

The name struck a distant echo. "The membrane chemistry

specialist? This is an unexpected pleasure." Lindsay had known

Navarre in Dembowska, but only through video correspon-

dence. In person, Navarre seemed arid and colorless. As an

annoying corollary, Lindsay realized that he himself had been

arid and colorless during those years. "Please join me, Professor

Navarre."

Navarre strapped in. "Kind of you to remember my article for

your Journal," he said. " 'Surfactant Vesicles in Exoarchosauri-

an Colloidal Catalysis.' One of my first."

Navarre exuded well-bred satisfaction and signaled the bistro's

servo, which ambled up on multiple plastic legs. The trendy

servo was a faithful miniature of the Mars surveyor. Lindsay

ordered a liqueur for politeness' sake.

"How long have you been in C-K, Professor Milosz? Your

musculature tells me that you've been in heavy gravity. Investor

business?"

The heavy spin of the Republic had marked Lindsay. He

smiled cryptically. "I'm not free to speak."

"I see." Navarre offered him the grave, confidential look of a

fellow man-of-the-world. "I'm pleased to find you here in the

Kosmosity's neighborhood. Are you planning to join our fac-

ulty?"

"Yes."

"A stellar addition to our Investor researchers."

"Frankly, Professor Navarre, Investor studies have lost their

novelty for me. I plan to specialize in terraforming studies."

Navarre smiled incredulously. "Oh dear. I'm sure you can do

much better than that."

"Oh?" Lindsay leaned forward in a brief burst of crudely

imitative kinesics. His whole facility was gone. The reflex em-

barrassed him, and he resolved for the hundredth time to give it

up.

Navarre said, "The terraforming section's crawling with post-

Cataclyst lunatics. You were always a very sound man. Thor-

ough. A good organizer. I'd hate to see you drift into the wrong

circles."

"I see. What brought you to C-Kluster, Professor?"

"Well," said Navarre, "the Jastrow Station labs and I had some

differences about patenting. Membrane technology, you see. A

technique for producing artificial Investor hide, a very fashion-

able item here; you'll notice for instance that young lady's

boots?" A Cicada student in a beaded skirt and bright face paint

was sipping a frappe against the desolate backdrop of shattered

red terrain. Her boots were miniature Investor feet, toes, claws,

and all. Behind her the landscape lurched suddenly as the

surveyor moved on. Lindsay grasped the table in vertigo.

Navarre swayed slightly and said, "Czarina-Kluster is more

friendly to the entrepreneur. I was taken off the dogs after only

eight months."

"Congratulations," Lindsay said.

The Queen's Advisors kept most immigrants under the surveil-

lance dogs for a full two years. Out in the fringe dogtowns there

were whole environments where reality was nailed down by

camera and everyone was tagged ceaselessly by videodogs.

Widespread taps and monitors were part of public life in

Czarina-Kluster. But full citizens could escape surveillance in

the discreets, C-K's lush citadels of privacy.

Lindsay sipped his drink. "To prevent confusion, I should tell

you that these clays I use the name Lindsay."

"What? Like Wellspring?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You weren't aware of Wellspring's true identity?"

"Why, no," Lindsay said. "I understood the records were lost

on Earth, where he was born."

Navarre laughed delightedly. "The truth is an open secret

among Cicada inner circles. It's the talk of the discreets.

Wellspring is a Concatenate. His true name is Abelard Malcolm

Tyler Lindsay."

"You astonish me."

"Wellspring plays a very deep game. The Terran business is

only a camouflage."

"How odd."

"Speak of the devil," Navarre said. A noisy crowd burst from

the tubeway entrance to Lindsay's left. Wellspring had arrived

with a claque of Cicada disciples, a dozen students fresh from

some party, flush faced and shouting with laughter. The young

Cicadas were a bustle of blues and greens in long, flowing

overcoats, slash-cuffed trousers, and glimmering reptile-scaled

waistcoats.

Wellspring spotted Lindsay and approached in free-fall. His

mane of matted black hair was held by a copper-and-platinum

coronet. Over his foliage-printed green coat he wore a tape-

deck armband, which emitted a loud quasi-music of rustling

boughs and the cries of animals.

"Lindsay!" he shouted. "Lindsay! Good to have you back." He

embraced Lindsay roughly and strapped himself to a chair.

Wellspring looked drunk. His face was flushed, he had pulled

his collar open, and something was crawling in his beard, a

small population of what appeared to be iron fleas.

"How was your trip?" Lindsay said.

"The Ring Council is dull! Sorry I wasn't here to meet you."

He signaled the servo. "What are you drinking? Fantastic

chasm, the Marineris, isn't it? Even the tributaries are the size

of the Grand Canyon in Azirona." He pointed past Lindsay's

shoulder at a gap between towering canyon walls, where icy

winds kicked up thin puffs of ocher dust. "Imagine a cataract

there, pealing out in a thunderband of rainbows! A sight to stir

the soul to the roots of its complexity."

"Surely," Navarre said, smiling slightly.

Wellspring turned to Lindsay. "I have a little spiritual drill for

doubters like Ycvgeny. Every day he should recite to himself,

'Centuries . . . centuries . . . centuries.' "

"I'm a pragmatic man," Navarre said, catching Lindsay's eye

and lifting one eyebrow significantly. "Life is lived day to day,

not in centuries. Enthusiasms don't last that long. Flesh and

blood can't bear it." He addressed Wellspring. "Your ambitions

are bigger than life."

"Of course. They must he. They encompass it."

"The Queen's Advisors are more practical." Navarre watched

Wellspring with half-contemptuous suspicion.

The Queen's Advisors had risen to authority since the early

days of C-K. Rather than fighting them for power, Wellspring

had stepped aside. Now, while the Queen's Advisors struggled

with day-to-day rule in the Czarina's Palace, Wellspring chose to

frequent the dogtowns and discreets. Often he vanished for

months, to reappear with shadowy posthumans and bizarre re-

cruits from the fringes of society. These actions clearly baffled

Navarre.

"I want tenure," Lindsay told Wellspring. "Nothing political."

"I'm sure we could see to that."

Lindsay glanced about him. It came to him in a burst of

conviction. "I don't like Mars."

Wellspring looked grave. "You realize that an entire future

destiny might accrete around this momentary utterance? It's

from just such nuclei of free will that the future grows, in

smooth determinism."

Lindsay smiled. "It's too dry," he said. The crowd gasped and

shouted as the surveyor scuttled rapidly down a treacherous

slope, sending the world reeling. "And it moves too much."

Wellspring was troubled. As he adjusted his collar, Lindsay

noted the faint bruise of teethmarks on the skin of his neck. He

turned down the forest soundtrack on his armband. "One world

at a time seems wisest, don't you think?"

Navarre laughed incredulously.

Lindsay ignored him, gazing over Wellspring's shoulder at his

claque of followers. A young Shaper in a fuzz-elbowed academic

jacket was burying his elegant face in the floating red-blonde

curls of a tigerish young woman. She tilted her head back,

laughing in delight, and Lindsay saw, half eclipsed behind her,

the stricken face of Abelard Gomez. There were two surveil-

lance dogs with Gomez, crouched on the wall behind him, their

metal ribs gleaming, their glassy camera faces taping up his life.

Pity struck Lindsay, and a sadness for the transient nature of

eternal human verities.

Wellspring plunged into impassioned argument, sweeping aside Navarre's wry comments in a torrent of rhetoric. Wellspring

waxed eloquent about asteroids; chunks of ice the size of cities,

to be dropped in searing arcs onto the surface of Mars, blasting

out damp oases in a crust-ripping megatonnage. Creeks would

appear at first, then lakes, as steam and volatiles peeled into the

starved air and the polar ice caps dissolved into vaporized

carbon dioxide. Crater oases would be manned by teams of

scientists, biosculpting whole ecosystems into being. For the first

time, humanity would be bigger than life: a living world would

owe its existence to humankind, and not vice versa. Wellspring

saw it as a moral obligation, a repayment of debt. The cost was

irrelevant. Money was symbolic. Life was the real.

Navarre broke in. "But it's the human element that must

defeat you. Where's the appeal to greed? That's where you

erred before. You could have run Czarina-Kluster. Instead you

let your control slip, and now the Queen's Advisors, those

Mechanist"-Navarre stopped short, noticing the dogs accom-

panying Gomez-"gentlemen, are running things with their cus-

tomary efficiency. But politics aside, this nonsense is ruining

C-K's ability to do decent science! Real research, that is; the

kind that brings new patents to armor C-K against its enemies.

Terraforming squanders our resources, while Mech and Shaper

militants scheme relentlessly against us. Yes, I admit your

dreams are pretty. Yes, they even serve a social use as a rela-

tively harmless state ideology. But in the end they'll collapse

and take C-K with them."

Wellspring's eyes glittered. "You're overworked, Yevgeny. You

need a new perspective. Take ten years off, and see if time

won't change your mind."

Navarre flushed angrily. He turned to Lindsay. "You see?

Cataclysm! That remark meant ice assassination, you heard him

allude to it! Come, Milosz, surely you can't hold with these

boondoggles!"

Lindsay said nothing. There had been a time when he might

have twisted the conversation to his advantage. But now his skill

was gone. And he no longer wanted it.

Words were useless. Me had grown impatient with words. They could no longer hold him. Suddenly he knew he had to step outside the rules. He floated out of his chair and began stripping off his clothes.

Navarre left at once, insulted and flustered. Lindsay's clothes

drifted off in free-fall, his jacket and trousers pinwheeling slowly

over other tables. The customers ducked, laughing. Soon he was

naked. The crowd's nervous laughter died down into puzzled

unease. They moved away from Gomez's dogs and muttered

together in disconcerted awe.

Lindsay ignored them. He folded his legs in midair and gazed

at the wall. Wellspring's students deserted the bar, mumbling

excuses and glancing back over their shoulders. Even Wellspring

was nonplused. When Wellspring left he took the last of the

crowd with him.

Lindsay was left alone with the bar servo, young Gomez, and

his dogs.

Gomez edged closer. "Czarina-Kluster isn't like I'd thought it

was, in the Republic."

Lindsay meditated on the landscape.

"They put these dogs on me. Because supposedly I might be

dangerous. You don't mind the dogs, do you? . . . No, I see that

you don't." Gomez sighed tremulously. "After three months, the

others still keep me at arm's length. They won't initiate me into

their Clique. You saw the girl, didn't you? Melanie Omaha, Dr.

Omaha from the Kosmosity? Fire, she's fantastic, isn't she? But

she doesn't care for men under the dogs; who would, knowing

Security's watching? I'd give my right arm for ten minutes in a

discreet with her. Oh, sorry." He looked in embarrassment at

Lindsay's mechanical arm.

Gomez wiped red streaks of facepaint from his cheeks. "You

remember me telling you about Abelard Lindsay? Well, rumor

says you're him. And I think I believe it. You are Lindsay.

You're him."

Lindsay drew a deeper breath.

"I understand," Gomez said. "You're telling me that it doesn't

matter. The only thing that matters is the Cause. But listen to

this!" He pulled a notebook from inside his willow-printed coat.

He read loudly, desperately. " 'A dissipative self-organizing sys-

tem evolves along a coherent sequence of space-time structures.

We may distinguish between four different dimensional frame-

works: autopoiesis, ontogeny, phylogeny, anagenesis.'" He

crumpled the paper in anguish. "And this is from my poetry

class!"

There was a moment's silence. Then Gomez burst out: "Maybe

it's the secret of life! But if it is, can we bear it? Can we meet

the goals we set ourselves? Over centuries? What about the

simple things? How can I find any joy in a single day when the

specters of these centuries loom over me. . . . It's all too huge,

yes, even you . . . You! You, who brought me here. Why didn't

you tell me you were Wellspring's friend? Was it modesty? But

you're Lindsay! Lindsay himself! I didn't believe it at first.

When I decided it was true, it terrified me. Like hearing your

own shadow speak to you."

Gomez hesitated. "All these years you've hidden. But you're

coming into the Schismatrix openly now, aren't you? You've

come out to do greatness, to dazzle the world. . . . It's frighten-

ing to see you in the open. Like seeing the bones of mathemat-

ics under the flesh of the world. But even if the principles are

true, then what about the flesh? We are the flesh! What about

the flesh?"

Lindsay had nothing to tell him.

"I know what you're thinking," Gomez said at last. " 'Love has

broken his heart; it's an old story. Only time can bring him to a

better sense of himself.' That's what you're thinking, isn't it? ...

Of course it is."

When Gomez spoke again he was cairn, meditative. "Now I

begin to see. It isn't something that words can capture, is it? It

can only be grasped all at once. Someday I'll have it entirely.

Someday when these dogs are long gone. Someday when even

Melanie Omaha is only a memory to me." He was sad but

exalted. "I heard them talking as you made your-uh, gesture.

These so-called sophisticates, these proud Cicadas. They may

have the jargon, but the wisdom is yours." Gomez was radiant.

"Thank you, sir."

Lindsay waited until Gomez had left. Then he could not hold

it back any longer. He thought he would never stop laughing.

CHAPTER TEN

DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 21-2-'01

Despite her role in its foundation, Kitsune had never visited

Czarina-Kluster. Like Wellspring, Kitsune had held great power

in C-K's pioneer days; unlike him, she had not released it

gracefully. While Wellspring had retreated from day-to-day gov-

ernment and pursued his strategy of rule-by-fashion, Kitsune

had blatantly challenged the Queen's Advisors.

In the years while Lindsay recuperated, she had had some

success. She announced plans to move to C-K, but as years

passed she refused to disturb her routines, and her power de-

cayed. It had led to a break, and the destinies of C-K and

Dembowska had radically diverged.

Disquieting stories of her transformations had reached Lindsay

in C-K. Rumor said she had embraced new technologies, ex-

ploiting the laxity that had come with detente. Dembowska was

still a member of the Mechanist Union of Cartels but was

constantly on the verge of expulsion, tolerated only as a

clearinghouse for Ring Council defectors.

Even the Ring Council was appalled by Dembowska's emer-

gent technology of flesh. In the hands of the Zen Serotonists,

the Ring Council struggled for stability; as a result, it was falling

behind. The cutting edge of genetics technology had been seized

by the wild-eyed black surgeons of the cometaries and the

Uranian rings, mushrooming post human clades like the

Metropolarity, the Blood Bathers, and the Endosymbiotics.

They had discarded humanity like a caul. Disintegrating

microfactions surrounded the Schismatrix like a haze of superheated plasma.

The march of science had become a headlong stampede. The

Mechanists and Shapers had become like two opposing armies,

whose rank and file, scattering into swamps and thickets, ignore

the orders of their aging generals. The emergent philosophies of

the age-Posthumanism, Zen Serotonin, Galacticism -were like

signal bonfires lit to attract stragglers. Deserters' philosophies.

Lindsay's fire burned brightly, and its glow attracted many.

They called Lindsay's group the Lifesiders Clique.

Czarina-Kluster's cliques had the power of minor factions in

their own right. The cliques formed a shadow government in

C-K, a moral parallel to the distracted formal rule of the

Queen's Advisors. Clique elites moved behind the scenes, imi-

tating their paragon Wellspring in deliberate webs of self-spun

obfuscation. The forms of power and its realities had been

gently disentangled. The social arbiters of the Polycarbon

Clique, the Lifesiders, or the Green Camarilla could work won-

ders with a dropped hint or a lifted eyebrow.

It followed, then, that groups considering defection to C-K

consulted the Cicada cliques before formally requesting asylum.

Normally this was Wellspring's domain.

In the latest case, however, Wellspring was absent on one of his many recruiting trips. Lindsay, knowing the nature of the case,

had agreed to meet the representative of the breakaway group

on neutral ground in Dembowska.

His entourage consisted of his chief lieutenant, Gomez; three

of his postdoctoral students; and a diplomatic observer from the

Queen's Advisors.

Dembowska had changed. When they debarked into customs

amid the sparse crowd from the liner, Lindsay was struck by the

warmth. The air was at blood heat and smelled faintly of

Kitsune's skin. The smell brought seeping memory with it. Lind-

say's smile was melancholy. The memories were eighty-five

years old, as thin as paper; they seemed to have happened to

someone else.

Lindsay's Lifesiders checked their luggage. Two of the

graduate students, Mechanist types, murmured first impressions

into their lip mikes. Other passengers waited at the scanning

booths.

Two Dembowska agents approached their group. Lindsay

stepped forward in the faint gravity. "Harem police?" he said.

"Wallchildren," said the first of the pair, a male. He wore a

thin, sleeveless kimono; his bare arms were covered with author-

ity tattoos. His face seemed familiar. Lindsay recognized the

genetics of Michael Carnassus. He turned to the other, a woman, and saw Kitsune, younger, her hair shorn, her dark arms

stenciled in white ink.

"I'm Colonel Martin Dembowska, and this is my Wallsister,

Captain Murasaki Dembowska."

"I'm Chancellor Lindsay. These are cliquemembers Abelard

Gomez, Jane Murray, Glen Szilard, Colin Szilard, Emma Meyer, and Undersecretary Fidel Nakamura, our diplomatic observer." The Cicadas bowed, each in turn.

"I hope you weren't distressed by the bacterial change aboard

ship," Murasaki said. She had Kitsune's voice.

"A minor inconvenience."

"We are forced to take great care with the Wallmother's skin

bacteria," the Colonel explained. "There is a considerable acre-

age involved. I'm sure you understand."

"Could you offer us exact figures?" asked one of the Szilard

brothers, with a Mechanist's dry craving for hard data. "Reports

in Czarina-Kluster are clouded."

"At last report the Wallmother massed four hundred thousand,

eight hundred and twelve tons." The Colonel was proud. "Have

you anything to declare? No? Then follow me."

They followed the Dembowskan into a confidential clearance

office, where they left their luggage and were provided with

sterilized guest's kimonos. They floated barefoot into the hot air

of Dembowska's first mall.

The cavernous duty-free shopping area was paved, walled, and ceilinged in flesh. The Cicadas padded along reluctantly, their

toes just brushing the resilient skin. They looked with hidden

longing at the shops, safe islands of stone and metal. Lindsay

had schooled them to be tactful and was proud of their masked

reactions.

Even Lindsay felt a qualm when they entered the first long

tunnel; its round, gulletlike design tapped a deep well of unease.

The party boarded an openwork sled, propelled by peristaltic

twitches from the sinewed tracks beneath it.

The slick wall was studded periodically by sphinctered plugs

for predigested pap. Light glowed gently from translucent bladders swollen with white phosphorescence. Gomez, at Lindsay's

elbow, studied the architecture with a trancelike intensity. His

attention was sharpened to a cutting edge by a drug known in

Cicada circles as "Green Rapture."

"They've gone for broke," Gomez, said softly. "Could there be

personality behind this? It must take half a ton of backbrain to

manage all this meat." His eyes narrowed. "Imagine how it must

feel."

The Carnassus clone, in the sled's first compartment, touched

the controls. A seam parted wetly in the floor, pitching the sled

into vertical free-fall. They catapulted down a multitrack eleva-

tor shaft, broken periodically by dizzying vistas of plazas and

suburbs.

Shops and offices flashed past, embedded in billows of dark

satiny skin. The heat and smell of perfumed flesh were everywhere: intimacy on an industrial scale. The crowds were sparse. Many were young children, running naked. The sled braked to a halt. The group disembarked onto a furred landing. Gomez nudged Lindsay as the empty sled slid back up the rails. "The walls have ears, Chancellor." They did, and eyes as well.

There was something in the air on this level. The perfume was

particularly heady. Gomez grew heavy-lidded suddenly, and the

Szilard brothers, who had donned headband cameras, took

them off to dab at sweat. Jane Murray and Emma Meyer,

puzzled by something they couldn't define, looked about suspiciously. As the two Dembowskans led them off the landing and into the fleshy depths, Lindsay placed it suddenly: sex pheromones. The architecture was aroused. The group followed a low-grav footpath: toughened skin

marked with the massive whorls of endless fingerprints. The

ceiling overhead was a waving carpet of lustrous black hair, for

traveling hand-over-hand.

This level was clearly a showpiece; the former buildings had

been stripped down to mere frameworks, trellises for flesh.

Voluptuous organics rose at every side, euclidean corners

scrapped for smooth maternal curves. Structures flowed up from

the floor to merge in swan's-neck arches into the lustrous ceiling. Buildings were dimpled, hollowed, the sleek pink of

sphinctered doors sliding imperceptibly into skin lightly stippled

with down.

They stopped on the furred lawn of an elaborate, massive

edifice, its dark walls gleaming with ivory mosaic. "Your hostel," the Colonel announced. The building's double doors yawned open on muscular, jawlike hinges. Jane Murray hesitated as the others entered; she took Lindsay's arm. "That ivory in the walls-it's teeth." She had gone pale under the cool blues and aquamarines of her Cicada face paint.

"Female pheromones in the air," Lindsay said. "They're making you uneasy. It's backbrain response, doctor."

"Jealous of the walls." The postanthropologist smiled. "This

place feels like a gigantic discreet."

Despite her bravado, Lindsay saw her fright. She would have

preferred even the most notorious of Cicada discreets, with their

clandestine games, to this dubious lodging. They stepped inside.

Murasaki addressed the group. "You'll be sharing the hostel

with two groups of commercial agents from Diotima and

Themis, but you'll have a wing of your own. This way, please."

They followed her along a walkway of flat ivory implants. One

of Dembowska's myriad of hearts, an industrial-scale blood-

pumping station, thudded behind the ribs of the ceiling. Its

double beat set the rhythm to light musical warbling from a

wall-set larynx.

Their quarters were a biomechanical mix. Market monitors

glowed in the walls, tracing the rise and fall of prominent

Mechanist stocks. The furniture was a series of tasteful lumps

and hummocks: curved beds of flesh, dressed modestly in iris-

printed bedclothes.

The extensive suite was divided by tattooed membranous

screens. The Colonel tapped one membrane divider. It wrinkled

into the ceiling like an eyelid. He gestured politely at one of the

beds. "These furnishings are exemplars of our Wallmother's

erototechnology. They exist for your comfort and pleasure. I

must inform you, though, that our Wallmother reserves the right

to fecundity."

Emma Meyer, who had settled cautiously onto one of the beds, stood up. "I beg your pardon?"

The Colonel frowned. "Male ejaculations become the property

of the recipient. This is an ancient feminine principle."

"Oh. I see."

Murasaki pursed her lips. "You consider this odd, doctor?"

"Not at all," Meyer said winningly. "It makes perfect sense."

The Dembowskan girl pressed on. "Any children sired by the

men of your group will be full citizens. All Wallchildren are

equally beloved. I happen to be a perfect clone, but I've won my

post by merit, in the Mother's love. Isn't that so, Martin?"

The Colonel had a firmer grasp of diplomatic niceties. He

nodded shortly. "The water of the baths is sterile and contains a

minimum of dissolved organics. It may be drunk freely. The

plumbing is genitourinary technology, but it is not waste fluid."

Gomez oozed charm. "As a biological designer, I'm delighted

by your ingenious architecture. Not merely by its technical

adroitness but by its fine aesthetics." He hesitated. "Is there

time for a bath before the luggage arrives?"

The Cicadas needed baths. The bacterial changeover had not

quite settled in, and the blood heat of the Dembowskan air

made them itch.

Lindsay withdrew to one end of the suite and lowered the

membrane wall.

At once his tempo changed. Without his young followers, he

moved at his own pace.

He didn't need to bathe. His aged skin could no longer sup-

port a large population of bacteria.

He sat on the edge of the bed. He was tired. Without volition,

his eyes glazed over. A long moment passed in which he was

simply empty, thinking nothing at all.

At last, blinking, he came back to himself. He reached reflex-

ively into his jacket pocket and produced an enameled inhaler.

Two long whiffs of Green Rapture brought interest back into

the world. He looked slowly about him and was surprised to see

a blue kimono against the wall. Murasaki was wearing it. Her

body was camouflaged almost perfectly against the background

of skin.

"Captain Murasaki," he said. "I didn't notice you. Forgive me."

"I was - " She'd been standing there in polite silence. She was flustered by his reputation. "I was ordered to - " She gestured at the door, a pucker in the wall.

"You want to take me somewhere?" he said. "My companions

can manage without me. I'm at your disposal."

He followed the girl into the ivory and fur of the hall.

In the lobby she stopped and ran her hand along the smooth

flesh of the wall. A hole sphinctered open beside her feet, and

the two of them dropped gently down one floor.

Below the hostel was a maintenance area. He heard a steady

rushing of arteries and an occasional bowel like gurgle from the

naked walls. Biomonitors flickered, set in puckered rims of flesh.

"This is a health center," Murasaki explained. "The Wallmother's health, I mean. She has a mind-link here. She can speak to you here, through me. You mustn't be alarmed." She turned her back to him and lifted the dark fringe of hair at her neck,

showing him the stippled interlink at the base of her skull.

Green Rapture washed gently over Lindsay, a tingling wave of

curiosity. Green Rapture was the ultimate antiboredom drug,

the biochemical basis of wonder boiled down to its complex

essence. With enough Green Rapture a man could find a wealth

of interest in the lines of his own hands. Lindsay smiled with

unfeigned delight. "Marvelous," he said. Murasaki hesitated and looked at him quizzically.

"You mustn't mind if I stare," Lindsay said. "You remind me

so of your mother."

"You're really him, Chancellor? Abelard Lindsay, who was my

mother's lover?"

"Kitsune and I have always been friends."

"Am I much like she was?"

"Clones are their own people." He spoke soothingly. "In the

Ring Council, I had a family once. My congenetics-my

children -were clones. And I loved them."

"You mustn't think I'm a mere piece of the Wall," Murasaki

said. "The Wall cells are chromosomally depauperate. Chimeric

blastomas. The Wall is not as fully human as Kitsune's original

flesh. Or mine." She looked searchingly into his eyes. "You

don't mind talking to me first? I'm not boring you?"

"Impossible," Lindsay said.

"We Wallchildren have had trouble before. Some foreigners

treat us as monsters." She sighed, relaxing. "The truth is, we're

really rather dull."

He was sympathetic. "You find it so?"

"It's not like Czarina-Kluster. Things are exciting there, aren't

they? Always something happening. Pirates. Posthumanists. Defectors. Investors. I see tapes from there sometimes. I'd love to

have clothes like that."

Lindsay smiled. "Clothes look better at a distance, my dear.

Cicadas dress for social status. It can take hours."

"You're only prejudiced, Chancellor Lindsay. You invented

social stripping!"

Lindsay winced. Was he always to be dogged by this cliche?

"I saw it in a play," the girl confessed. "Goldreich Intrasolar

came through on tour. They showed Fernand Vetterling's Pity

For the Vermin. The hero strips at the climax."

Lindsay felt chagrin. Vetterling's plays had lost all punch since

he had become a Zen Serotonist. Lindsay would have told the

girl as much, but he felt too much shadowy guilt at the tragic

course of Vetterling's career. Because of politics, Vetterling had

spent years as a nonperson. Lindsay could not blame the drama-

tist for choosing peace at any price. "Stripping's bad form, these

days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation."

"I thought it was marvelous. Though nudity doesn't mean

much in Dembowska. ... I shouldn't tell you about plays.

Didn't you start Kabuki Intrasolar?"

"That was Fyodor Ryumin," Lindsay said.

"Who's he?"

"A brilliant playwright. He died some years ago."

"Was he very old?"

"Extremely. More so even than me."

"Oh, I'm sorry." He had embarrassed her. "I'll be going now.

You and the Wallmother must have a lot to discuss." She

pressed her hand against the wall behind her, then turned to

him again. "Thank you for indulging me. It was a very great

privilege." A fleshy tentacle extruded from the wall behind her.

The splayed clump at the tentacle's end grasped the back of her

neck. She lifted her hair aside and adjusted the plug. Her face went slack.

Her knees buckled and she fell slowly in the feeble gravity.

Kitsune came on line and caught her before she hit the floor.

The body trembled briefly in a palsy of feedback; then Kitsune

stretched it and ran her hands along the arms. The face set

itself; the body was all grace, electric with an old and ferocious

vitality. Only the eyes were dead.

"Hello, Kitsune."

"Do you like this body, darling?" She stretched luxuriously.

"Nothing brings memory back like being in a young woman.

What do you call yourself these days?"

"Abelard Lindsay. Chancellor of Czarina-Kluster Kosmosity-

Metasystems, Jovian Systems Division."

"And Arbiter of the Lifesiders Clique?"

Lindsay smiled. "Positions in social clubs have no legal validity, Kitsune."

"It's a position strong enough to bring a defector here, all the

way from Skimmers Union. . . . She says her name is Vera

Constantine. And that name means enough to you to bring you

here?"

Lindsay shrugged. "You see me, Kitsune."

"The daughter of your old enemy? And the congenetic of a

long-dead woman whose name escapes me?"

"Vera Kelland."

"How well you remember it. Better than you remember our

own relationship?"

"We've had more than one, Kitsune. I remember our youth in

the Zaibatsu, though not as well as I would like. And I remember my thirty years here in Dembowska, when I held you at

arm's length because your form repulsed me and I missed my wife."

"You could not have resisted me in any form, if t had pressed.

In those years I only teased you."

"I've changed since then. These days I'm pressed by other

things."

"But now I have a better form. Like the old one." She

shrugged the girl's body out of its kimono. "Shall we have a go,

for old times' sake?"

Lindsay approached the body and ran his wrinkled hand lingeringly along the long flank. "It's very beautiful," he said.

"It's yours," she said. "Enjoy yourself."

Lindsay sighed. He ran his fingers over the splayed tentacular

clump at the back of the girl's neck. "In my duel with Constantine, I had something like this installed. The wires lose a lot in translation. You can't feel it like this, Kitsune. Not like you did then."

"Then?" She laughed aloud. The mouth opened, but the face

scarcely moved. "I left those limits behind so long ago that I've

forgotten them."

"It's all right, Kitsune. I can't feel it in the same way any more, either." He stepped back and sat on the floor. "If it's any

consolation, I still feel something for you. Despite all times and

changes. I don't have a name for it. But then what we had

between us never had a name."

She picked up the sleeveless kimono. "People who waste time

naming never have time for living."

They passed a few moments in companionable silence. She put

the robe on and sat before him. "How is Michael Carnassus?" he said at last.

"Michael is well. With each rejuvenation we repair a little

more Shatter damage. He leaves his Extraterrarium for longer

and longer times, these days. He feels safe in my corridors. He

can speak now."

"I'm glad for that."

"He loves me, I think."

"Well, that's not to be despised."

"Sometimes, when I think of how much profit I made from

him, I have a strange warm feeling. I never had a better bargain.

He was so wonderfully malleable. . . . Even though he's useless now, I still feel real satisfaction when I look at him. I've decided that I'll never throw him away."

"Very good."

"For a Mechanist, he was bright, in his day. An ambassador to

aliens; he had to be one of the best. He has many children

here-congenetics-they are all very satisfactory."

"I noticed that when I met Colonel Martin Dembowska. A

very capable officer."

"You think so, truly?"

Lindsay looked judicious. "Well, young, of course. But that

can't be helped."

"No. And this one, this chatterbox" -the body pointed a finger

at its own chest-"is even younger. Only nineteen. But my

Wallchildren must grow up quickly. I mean to make

Dembowska my genetic nest. All others must go. And that

includes your Shaper friend from Skimmers Union."

"I'll take her off your hands at your convenience."

"It's a trap, Abelard. Constantine's children have no reason to

love you. Don't trust her. Like Carnassus, she has been with

aliens. They left their mark on her."

"I must confess I'm curious." He smiled. "I suppose it's the drugs."

"Drugs? It can't be vasopressin, your old favorite. Or you'd

have a better memory."

"Green Rapture, Kitsune. I have certain long term plans. . . .

Green Rapture keeps my interest up."

"Your terraforming."

"Yes. It's a problem of time and scale, you see. Long term

fanaticism is hard work. Without Green Rapture, the mind

gnaws away at the fantastic until it becomes the commonplace."

"I see," she said. "Your fantastic, and my ecstatic. . . . Child-

birth is a wonderful thing."

"To bring new life into the world ... it is the mystery. Truly a

Prigoginic event."

"You must be tired, darling. I've reduced you to Cicada platitudes."

"I'm sorry." He smiled. "It comes with the territory."

"You and Wellspring have a clever front. You're both great

talkers. I'm sure you can lecture for hours. Or days. But centuries?"

Lindsay laughed. "It seems like a joke sometimes, doesn't it?

Two sundogs embracing the ultimate. Wellspring believes, I

think. As for me, I do my best."

"Maybe he thinks you believe."

"Maybe he does. Maybe I do." Lindsay tugged a long lock of

hair through his iron fingers. "As dreams go, Posthumanism has

merits. The existence of the Four Levels of Complexity has been

proven mathematically. I've seen the equations."

"Spare me, darling. Surely we're not so old that we have to

discuss equations."

The words bypassed him. Under the influence of Green Rapture, his brain succumbed momentarily to the lure of mathematics, that purest of intellectual pleasures. In his normal state of mind, despite years of study, he found the formulas painful, a

brain-numbing mass of symbols. In Rapture he could grasp

them, though afterward he remembered only the white joy of

comprehension. The feeling was close to faith.

A long moment passed. He snapped out of it. "I'm sorry,

Kitsune. You were saying?"

"Do you remember, Abelard. . . . Once I told you that ecstasy

was better than being God."

"I remember."

"I was wrong, darling. Being God is better."

Vera Constantine's quarters were a measure of Kitsune's distrust. The young Shaper clanswoman had been under house

arrest for weeks. Her lodging was a three-room cell of stone and

iron, outside Kitsune's world-consuming embrace.

She sat at an inset Market monitor, studying the flow of transaction in a three-dimensional grid. She had never dealt in the

Market before, but Abelard Gomez, a kindly young Cicada, had

given her a financial stake to pass the time. Knowing no better,

she applied to the flow of the Market the principles of atmospheric dynamics she'd learned on Fomalhaut IV. Oddly, it

seemed to be working. She was clearly gaining.

The door unsealed and shunted open. An old man stepped in,

tall and thin in muted Cicada garb: a long coat, dark slash-

cuffed trousers, jeweled rings worn over white gloves. His lined

face was bearded, and a silvered coronet of patterned leaves

accented his white-streaked, shoulder-length hair. Vera rose

from her stirrup-chair and bowed, imitating the Cicada flourish.

"Chancellor, welcome."

Lindsay's eyes searched the cell, his sinewy brows knitting in

puzzlement. He seemed wary, not of her but of something in the

room. Then she felt it herself, and knew that the Presence had

returned. Despite herself, knowing it was useless, she looked for

it quickly. Something flickered in the corner of her eye as it escaped her vision.

Lindsay smiled at her. Then he continued to scan the room.

She didn't want to tell him about the Presence. After a while he

would give up looking for it, just as all the others did. "Thank

you," he said belatedly. "I trust you're well, Captain-Doctor."

"Your friends, Doctor Gomez and Undersecretary Nakamura,

have been most attentive. Thank you for the tapes and gifts."

"It was nothing," Lindsay said.

She feared suddenly that she was disappointing him. He had

not seen her in the fifteen years since the duel. She had been

very young then -only twenty. She still had the Kelland cheek-

bones and pointed chin, but time had changed her, and her

genotype was not pure. She was not Vera Kelland's clone.

Her sleeveless kimono mercilessly showed the changes brought by her years as an alien emissary. Two circulatory ducts dented the flesh of her neck, and her skin still had a peculiar waxiness. Inside the Embassy at Fomalhaut, she had lived in water for years.

Lindsay's gray eyes would not stop wandering. She was con-

vinced that he could feel the Presence, sense its pervasive eeriness. Sooner or later he would attribute that feeling to her, and

then her chance to win his favor would be gone. He spoke

abstractedly. "I'm sorry that matters can't be resolved more

quickly. ... In matters of defection it's best not to be rash."

She thought she heard a veiled reference to the fate of Nora

Mavrides. That chilled her. "I see your point, Chancellor." Vera

had no official backing by the Constantine clan, for they could

not risk denunciation within the Ring Council. Life was hard in

Skimmers Union these days: with the loss of the capitalship had

come a vicious struggle for the remaining scraps of power and a

hunt for scapegoats. Constantine clan members were prominent

victims. Once, she had been the favorite of their clan founder, showered with gifts and Constantine's strained affection.

But her clan had made too many bad gambles. Philip Constantine had risked their future on the chance to kill Lindsay

and had failed. The clan had invested heavily in Vera's ambassadorship, but she had returned without the riches they'd expected. And she had changed in a way that alarmed them. Now,

she was expendable.

As the clan's power dwindled, they had lived in terror of

Lindsay. He had survived the duel and returned more powerful

than ever. He seemed unstoppable, bigger than life. But the

attack they'd expected had never come, and it occurred to them

that he had weaknesses. Through her, they hoped to prey on his

emotions, on the love or guilt he felt for Vera Kelland. It was

the latest and most desperate of gambles. With luck they might

win sanctuary. Or vengeance. Or both.

"Why come to me?" he said. "There arc other places. Life as a

Mechanist is not so bad as the Ring Council paints it."

"The Mechs would turn us against our own people. They

would break up our clan. No, Czarina-Kluster is best. There's

sanctuary in the shadow of your Queen. But not if you work

against us."

"I see," Lindsay said. He smiled. "My friends don't trust you.

We have very little to gain, you see. C-K already swarms with

defectors. Your clan does not share our Posthuman ideology.

Worse yet, there are many in C-K who hate the name Con-

stantine. Former Detentistes, Cataclysts, and so on. . . . You

understand the difficulties."

"Those days are behind us, Chancellor. We mean no harm to

anyone."

Lindsay closed his eyes. "We could babble reassurances until

the sun expands," he said -he seemed to be quoting

someone-"and never convince each other. Either we trust each

other or we don't."

His bluntness filled her with misgivings. She was at a loss. The

silence stretched uncomfortably. "I have a present for you," she

said. "An ancient heirloom." She crossed the narrow cell to lift

a rectangular wire cage, shrouded in peach-colored velvet. She

lifted the cage cover and showed him the clan treasure, an

albino laboratory rat. It ran back and forth through its cage,

mincing along with bizarre, repetitive precision. "It is one of the

first creatures ever to attain physical immortality. An ancient

lab specimen. It is over three hundred years old."

Lindsay said, "You're very generous." He lifted the cage and

examined it. Within it, the rat, its capacity to learn completely

exhausted by age, had been reduced to absolute rote behavior.

The twitchings of its muzzle, even the movement of its eyes,

were utterly stereotyped.

The old man watched it searchingly. She knew he would get no response. There was nothing in the rat's jellied pink eyes, not

even the dimmest flicker of animal awareness. "Has it ever been

out of the cage?" he said.

"Not in centuries. Chancellor. It's too valuable."

Lindsay opened the cage. Its routines shattered, the rat cowered beside the steel tube of its water drip, its sinewy furred

limbs trembling.

Lindsay wiggled his gloved fingers beside the entrance. "Don't

be afraid," he told the rat seriously. "There's a whole world out

here."

Some ancient, corroded reflex kicked over in the rat's head.

With a squeal it launched itself across the cage at Lindsay's

hand, clawing and biting in convulsive fury. Vera gasped and

leaped forward, shocked at his action, appalled by the rat's

response. Lindsay gestured her back and lifted his hand, watching in pity as the rat attacked him. Beneath his torn right glove, hard prosthetic fingers gleamed with black and copper gridwork.

Me grasped the squirming animal with gentle firmness, watching to see that it did not crack its teeth. "Prison has set its

mind," he said. "It will take a long time to melt the bars behind

its eyes." Me smiled. "Luckily, time is in great supply."

The rat stopped struggling. It panted in the throes of some

rodent epiphany. Lindsay set it gently on the tablelop beside the

Market monitor. It struggled to its pink feet and began to pace

in agitation, turning in its tracks at the former limits of its cage.

"It can't change," Vera told him. "Its capacities are exhausted."

"Nonsense," Lindsay said. "Me merely needs to make a

Prigoginic leap to a new level of behavior." The calm assertion

of his ideology frightened her. Something must have shown in

her face. Me tugged the torn glove from his hand. "Hope is our

duty," he said. "You must always hope."

"For years we hoped we could heal Philip Constantine," Vera

said. "Now we know better. We are ready to trade him to you

for our own safe-conduct."

Lindsay looked at her seriously. "This is cruelty," he said.

"He was your enemy," she said. "We wanted to make

amends."

"For me, you are that chance."

It was working. Me still remembered Vera Kelland.

"Don't deceive yourself," he said. "I don't offer true recompense. Czarina-Kluster must fall someday. Nations don't last in

this era. Only people last, only plans and hopes. ... I can only

offer you what I have. I don't have safety. I have freedom."

"Posthumanism," she said. "It's your state ideology. Of course

we'll adapt."

"I thought you had your own convictions, Vera. You're a

Galaclicist."

She ran her fingers lightly, absently, over one of the gill scams

in her neck. "I learned my politics in the observation sphere. In

Fomalhaut. The Embassy." She hesitated. "Life there changed

me more than you could know. There are things I can't ex-

plain."

'There's something in this room," he said.

She was stunned. "Yes," she blurted. "You felt it? Not many do."

"What is it? Something from the Fomalhaut aliens? The

gasbags?"

"They know nothing about it."

"But you do," he said. "Tell me."

She was in too far to back out. She spoke reluctantly. "I first

noticed it in the Embassy. The Embassy floats in the atmosphere of Fomalhaut Four, a gas-giant planet, like Jupiter. . . .

We had to live in water there to survive the gravity. We were

thrown together, Mechanists and Shapers; we shared the Em-

bassy, there was no choice. Everything was changed; we

changed. . . . The Investors came to take a Mechanist contingent

back to the Schismatrix. I think the Presence was aboard the

Investor ship. Since then the Presence has been with me."

"Is it real?" said Lindsay.

"I think so. Sometimes I almost see it. A kind of flickering. A

mirror-colored thing."

"What did the Investors say?"

"They denied everything. They said I was deluded." She hesitated. "And they weren't the last to say so." She regretted

confessing it at once. But the burden had eased. She looked at

him, daring to hope.

"An alien, then," Lindsay said. "Not one of the nineteen

known species."

"You believe me," she said. "You think that it's really here."

"We must believe each other," Lindsay said. "Life is better

that way." He looked about the narrow room carefully, as if

testing his eyes. "I'd like to lure it into the open."

"It won't come out," the girl said. "Believe me, I've begged it

many times."

"We mustn't try it here," Lindsay said. "Any manifestation

would alarm Kitsune. She feels secure in this world. We must

consider her feelings."

His sincerity startled her. It hadn't occurred to her that her

captor might have feelings, or that anyone might relate, in a

personal way, to that titanic mass of flesh.

He picked up the rat, which began squealing loudly, with

desperate energy. Me examined it with such guileless interest that, before she could help herself, she felt a stab of pity for him, an urge to protect him. The feeling surprised and warmed her.

He said, "We'll be leaving soon. You'll be coming with us." Me

put the rat in the pocket of his long coat. It rested there quietly.

The history of the Schismatrix was one long racking chronicle

of change. The population had reached nine billion. Within the

Ring Council, power had slipped from the narcotized hands of

the Zen Serotonists. After forty years of their reign, new Shaper

ideologues embraced the aggressive schemes of visionary

Galacticism.

The new creed had spread slowly. It was born in the inter-

stellar embassies, where ambassadors broke human limits in

their struggle to grasp alien ways of life. Now the Galacticist

prophets stood ready to abandon humanity entirely, to achieve a

Galactic consciousness where mere loyalty to species was obsolete.

Once again detente had shattered. The Mechanists and Shapers fought in bitter rivalry for the favor of aliens. Of the nine

teen alien races, only five had shown even the vaguest interest

in a closer relationship with humankind. The Chondrule Cloud

Processors were willing to move in, but only if Venus could be

atomized for easier digestion. The Nerve Coral Aquatics ex-

pressed mild interest in invading the Earth, but this would mean

breaking the sacred tradition of Interdict. The Culture Ghosts

were willing to join with anyone who could endure them, but

their hideous effects on the Schismatric diplomatic corps had

made them objects of genuine horror.

The gasbags of Fomalhaut offered most. It had taken many

decades to master their "language," which was best expressed as

complex unstable states of atmospheric dynamics. Once true

contact had been established, progress was rapid. Fomalhaut

was an enormous star with a huge asteroid belt rich in heavy

metals.

The asteroid belt was useless to the gasbags, who disliked space travel. They were, however, interested in Jupiter and planned to seed it with aerial krill. The Investors were willing to handle

transportation, though even their huge ships could carry only a

handful of surgically deflated gasbags per trip.

Controversy had raged for decades. The Mechanists had their

own Galacticist faction, who struggled to grasp the mind

shattering physics of the sinister Hijack Boosters. The Boosters,

like the Investors, possessed a technique of faster-than-light

travel. The Investors were willing to sell their secret, but only at

a crippling price. The Hijack Boosters mocked mankind but were occasionally indiscreet.

An advance into the galactic arm seemed inevitable. One of

two strategies would succeed: that of the Shapers, with their

diplomatic negotiation, or of the Mechanists, who directly at-

tacked the problem of starflight. Only a major faction could

succeed; the minor breakaway groups lacked the wealth, the

skilled population, the diplomatic pull. A new, uneasy polarity

took shape.

In the meantime, gasbag larvae in their egg-shaped spacecraft painstakingly inspected circumsolar space. Small groups of

Shapers and Mechanist renegades mapped the riches of

Fomalhaut. One solar system would never again be enough.

The breakdown of detente aroused old hatreds. Brushfire war-

fare flourished, unrestrained by the faltering Investors. Bizarre

new factions sprang up, led by returned diplomats. Their re-

cruits loomed at the edges of society: the Carnivores, the Viral

Army, the Coronaspherics.

History's kaleidoscope worked its permutations, its pace ever

faster, approaching some unknown crescendo. Patterns changed

and warped and flew apart, each chip of light a human life.

CZARINA-KLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 13-1-'54

After seventy years of wealth and stability, disaster was loose in

Czarina-Kluster. The elite of the Lifesiders Clique met in secret

council, to wrestle with crisis.

Aquamarine Discreet was a Lifesider citadel, and its security

was absolute. Mosaic blowups of the Jovian moon, Europa,

covered the discreet's walls: bright grooved terrain in ice-white

and dusky orange, interior seas in blue and indigo. Over the

burnished conference table hung a Europan orrery, where jeweled spacecraft representing Lifesider satellites ticked quietly on orbits of silver wire.

Chancellor Abelard Gomez, a vigorous eighty-five-year-old,

had taken over management of the Clique's affairs. His chief

compatriots were Professor Glen Szilard, Queen's Advisor Fidel

Nakamura, and Gomez's current wife, Project Manager Jane

Murray. At the far end of the table sat Chancellor Emeritus

Abelard Lindsay. The old visionary's lined face showed the quizzical smile associated with a heavy dosage of Green Rapture.

Gomez rapped the table, bringing the meeting to order. They

fell silent, except for the loud chattering of the ancient rat on Lindsay's shoulder. "Sorry," Lindsay murmured. He put the rat

in his pocket.

Gomez took control. "Fidel, your report?"

"It's true, Chancellor. The Queen has vanished."

The others groaned. Gomez spoke sharply. "Defected or kidnapped?"

Nakamura wiped his brow. "Wellspring took her; only he can answer that. My fellow Advisors are in uproar. The Coordinator is calling out the dogs. He's even brought the tigers out of mothballs. They want Wellspring for high treason. They won't rest until they have him."

"Or until C-K collapses around them," Gomez said. Gloom

settled over the chamber. "Tigers," Gomez said. "Tigers are

huge machines; they could shred through the walls of this discreet like paper. We mustn't meet again until we have armed ourselves and established secure perimeters."

Szilard spoke up. "Our dogs have this suburb's exits

monitored. I stand ready to carry out loyalty tests. We can purge

the suburb of unfriendly ideologues and make this our bastion

as the Kluster dissolves."

"That's harsh," Jane Murray said.

"It's us or them," Szilard said. "Once the news spreads, the

other factions will be holding kangaroo courts, seizing

strongholds, stripping dissidents of property. Anarchy is coming.

We must defend ourselves."

"What about our allies?" Gomez said.

Nakamura spoke. "According to our Polycarbon Clique con-

tacts, the announcement of Wellspring's coup d'etat will co-

incide with the first asteroid impact on Mars, in the morning of

4-14-'54. . . . C-K will disintegrate within weeks. Most Czarina-

Kluster refugees will flee to Martian orbit. Wellspring holds the

Queen there. He will rule. The new Terraforming-Kluster will

have a much stronger Posthuman ideology."

"The Mechs and Shapers will tear C-K apart," Jane Murray

said. "And our philosophy profits by the destruction. . . : This is

high treason, friends. I feel sick."

"People outlive nations," Lindsay said gently. He was breathing with inhuman regularity: a Mechanist biocuirass managed

his internal organs. "C-K is doomed. No number of dogs or

purges can hold it, without the Queen. We're finished here."

"The Chancellor Emeritus is right," Gomez told them. "Where

will we go? We must decide. Do we join the Polycarbon Clique

around Mars, to live in the Queen's shadow? Or do we make

our move to CircumEuropan orbit and put our own plans into

effect?"

"I say Mars," Nakamura said. "In today's climate

Posthumanism needs all the help it can get. The Cause demands

solidarity."

"Solidarity? Fluidarity, rather," Lindsay said. He sat upright

with an effort. "What's one Queen, more or less? There are

always more aliens. Posthumanism must find its own orbit

someday . . . why not now?"

While the others argued, Gomez looked moodily, through half-

shut eyes, at his old mentor. The remnants of old pain gnawed

at him. Me could not forget his long marriage to Lindsay's

favorite, Vera Constantine. There had been too many shadows

between himself and Vera.

Once they had put the shadows aside. That was when she'd

confessed to Gomez that she had meant to kill Lindsay. Lindsay

had made no move to defend himself, and there had been many

opportunities, but the lime had never quite been right. And

years passed. And convictions faltered and became buried in

routines and practicalities. The day came when she knew she

could not go through with it. She had confessed it to Gomez,

because she trusted him. And they had loved each other.

Gomez led her away from vengeance. She embraced

Posthumanism. Even her clan had been won over. The Con-

stantine clan were now the Lifesiders' pioneers, working around

Europa.

But Gomez himself had not escaped the years. Time had a way of making passion into work. He had what he wanted. He had

his dream. He had to live it and breathe it and do its budget.

And he had lost Vera, for there had been one shadow left.

Vera had never been entirely sane. For years she had quietly

insisted that an alien Presence followed and watched her. It

seemed to come and go with her mood swings; for days she

would be cheerful, convinced that it was "off somewhere"; then

he would find her moody and withdrawn, convinced that it was

back.

Lindsay condoned her illness and claimed to believe her.

Gomez too believed in the Presence: he believed it was the

reflection of his wife's estrangement from reality. It was not for

nothing that she had called it "a mirror-colored thing. . . ."

Something that could not be pinned down, an incarnation of

unverifiable fluidity. . . . When Gomez got to the point where he

himself could feel it, even sense it flickering at the corners of

his vision, he knew things had gone too far. Their divorce had

been amiable, full of cool politeness.

He wondered sometimes if Lindsay had planned it all. Lindsay

knew the trap that was human joy, and the strength that came

from clawing free of it. Scalded by pain, Gomez had won that

strength. . . . Szilard was reeling off facts and figures about the

state of CircumEuropa. The future Lifesiders habitat was being

blown into shape around the Jovian moon, an orbiting froth of

hard-set angles, walls, bubbled topologies.

The flourishing Constantine clan was snaking plumbing

through the walls already and booting up the life-support sys-

tem. But an attempt by the Lifesiders to move there en masse,

in their thousands, would stretch resources to the limit.

Their relations with the gasbag colony on Jupiter were good;

they had the expertise of Vera and her cadre of trainees. But the

Jovian aliens could not protect them from other human factions.

They had no such ambition and no prestige to match that of the

Cicada Queen.

Jane Murray presented things from a Project perspective. The

surface of Europa was the bleakest of prospects: a vacuum

seared wasteland of smooth water ice, so cold that blood and

bone would crack like glass, bathed in deadly Jovian radiation.

Rut there were fissures in that ice, dark streaks thousands of

kilometers long. . . . Tidal cracks. For beneath the moon's crust

was molten ice, a planet-girdling lava ocean of liquid water. The

constant tidal energy of Jupiter, Ganymede, and lo warmed

Europa's ocean to blood heat. Beneath the lacelike web of

fractures, a sterile ocean washed a bed of geothermal rock.

For years the Lifesiders had planned a series of massive disasters for the inorganic. It would start with algae. They had

already bred forms that could survive in the peculiar mix of

salts and sulfurs native to Europan seas. The algae could cluster

around fresh cracks where light seeped through, feasting on the

strands of heavy hydrocarbons bobbing aimlessly within the

sterile sea. Fish would be next; small ones at first, bred from the

half-dozen species of commercial fish mankind had brought into

space. Ocean arthropods such as "crabs" and "shrimp," known

only from ancient textbooks, could be mimicked through skilled

manipulation of the genes of insects.

Fault-lines could be shattered from orbit by dropped projectiles, leaving light flooded patches of pack ice. They could experiment on a dozen cracks at once, adapting rival ecosystems

through trial and error.

It would take centuries. Once again, Gomez took the burden

of the years upon himself. "Biodesign is still in its infancy," he

said. "We must face facts. At least, with the Queen, the Martian

Kluster will have wealth and safety for us. There, at least, our

only enemies will be the years."

Lindsay lurched forward abruptly and slammed his iron fist

into the. table. "We must act now! This is the moment of crux,

when a single act can crystallize our future. We have our choice:

routines or miracles. Demand the miraculous!"

Gomez was stunned. "It's Europa, then, Chancellor?" he said.

"Wellspring's plans seem safer."

"Safer?" Lindsay laughed. "Czarina-Kluster seemed safe. But

the Cause moved on, and the Queen moved with it, when

Wellspring took her. The abstract dream will flourish, but the

tangible city will fall. Those who can't dream will die with it.

The discreets will be thick with the blood of suicides.

Wellspring himself may be killed. Mech agents will annex whole

suburbs, Shapers will absorb whole banks and industries. The

routines that seemed so solid here will melt like tears. ... If we

embrace them, we melt with them."

"Then what must we do?"

"Wellspring is not the only one whose crimes are secret and

ambitious. And he's not the last to vanish."

"You're leaving us, Chancellor?"

"You must handle distress and disaster yourselves. I'm past

any use in that capacity."

The others looked stricken. Gomez rallied himself. "The

Chancellor Emeritus is right," he said. "I was about to suggest

something similar. Our enemies will focus attacks on the

Clique's Arbiter; it might be best if he were hidden."

The others protested automatically; Lindsay overruled them.

"There can't always be Queens and Wellsprings. You must trust in your own strength. I trust in it."

"Where will you go, Chancellor?"

"Where I'm least expected." He smiled. "This isn't my first

crisis. I've seen many. And when they hit, I always ran. I've

preached to you for years, asked you to dedicate your lives. . . .

And always I knew that this moment would come. I never knew

what I would do when the dream faced its crisis. Would I

sundog it as I always have, or would I commit myself? The

moment's here. I must defy my past, just as you must. I know

how to get you your miracle. And I swear to you, I will."

A sudden dread struck Gomez. He had not seen such resolution in Lindsay for years. It occurred to him suddenly that

Lindsay meant to die. He did not know Lindsay's plans, but he

realized now that they would be the crux of the old man's life. It

would be like him to exit at the climax, to fade into the shadows

while some unknown glory still shone. "Chancellor," he said,

"when may we expect your return?"

"Before I die, we'll be Europa's angels. And I'll see you in

Paradise." Lindsay cycled open the scaled door of the discreet;

outside, the free-fall corridors were a burst of sudden crowd

noise. The door thunked shut. He was gone. Thick silence fell.

The old man's absence left a hollowness behind. The others sat silently, savoring the sense of loss. They looked at one another.

Then, as one, they looked to Gomez. The moment passed; the

uneasiness dissolved. Gomez smiled. "Well," he said. "It's miracles, then."

Lindsay's rat leaped spryly onto the table. "He's left it be-

hind," Jane Murray said. She stroked its fur, and it chittered

loudly.

"The rat will come to order," Gomez said. He rapped the

table, and they set to work.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CIRCUMTERRAN ORBIT: 14-4-'54

Three of them waited within the spacecraft: Lindsay, Vera Constantine, and their Lobster navigator, who was known simply as

Pilot.

"Final approach," Pilot said. His beautiful synthesized voice

emerged from a vocoder unit hooked to his throat.

Strapped in before his control board, the Lobster was a chunk

of shadow. Me was sealed within a matte-black permanent

spacesuit, knobbed with lumps of internal machinery and dotted

with shiny gold input jacks. Lobsters were creatures of the

vacuum, faceless posthumans, their eyes and ears wired to sensors woven through the suits. Pilot never ate. Me never drank.

The routines of his body were subsumed within the life-

supporting rhythms of his suit.

Pilot did not like being within this spacecraft; Lobsters had a

horror of enclosed spaces. Pilot, though, had put up with the

discomfort for the thrill of the crime.

Now that they were dropping from orbit, the drugged calm of

weeks of travel had broken. Lindsay had never seen Vera so

animated. Her open delight filled him with pleasure.

And she had reason for gladness. The Presence was gone. She

had not felt it since the three of them had been scaled within

the spacecraft. They'd come so far since then that she believed

she had escaped it for good. She found as much happiness in

this relief as in the fulfillment of their long conspiracy.

Lindsay was happy for her. Me had never had true proof of the

objective existence of the Presence, but he had agreed to believe

in it for her. And similarly, she had never doubted him. It was a

contract and a trust between them. Me knew she might have

killed him, but that trust had saved his life. Long years since

then had only strengthened it.

"Looks good," the Lobster sang. The spacecraft began to buck

as it hit the entrance window of the Earth's atmosphere. The

Lobster emitted a burst of static, then said, "Air. I hate air. I

hate it already."

"Steady," Lindsay said. He tightened the straps of his chair and unfolded his videoscreens.

They were coming in over the continent once known as Africa.

Its outlines had been radically changed by the rising seas: archipelagos of drowned hills trailed clouds above a soup of weed-

choked ocean. Along the dark shore, rivers poured gray topsoil

into water streaked reel with algal blooms.

The white-hot flare of entry heat obscured his vision, flickering

over the diamond-hard hull lens of the forward scanner. Lindsay leaned back in his seat.

It was an odd ship, an uncomfortable one, not of human

manufacture. The egg-shaped hull had the off-white sheen of

stabilized metallic hydrogen, built only by gasbags. Its naked

interior floor and ceiling bore the rounded, scalloped segmentation marks of its former pilot, a gasbag grub. The spacefaring

grub had been packed within the hull as tightly as expanding

dough.

One of the gasbags had alluded to the astronaut's death in a

"conversation" with Vera Constantine. With its keen sensitivity

to magnetic flux, the unlucky grub had perceived a solar flare

whose shape and substance it found somehow blasphemous. It

had expired in despair.

Lindsay had been looking for just such a chance. When Vera

told him of the accident, Lindsay acted at once, lie recruited

the Lobsters through their business contact in Czarina-Kluster, a

Lobster they called "the Modem."

A complex deal was worked out, in utter secrecy, with the

anarchic Lobsters. One of their lacy, airless spacecraft used

Vera's coordinates to track down the dead grub. Lindsay allowed them to dissect it and appropriate its alien engines. In

return they outfitted the emptied shell for a furtive attempt to

break the Interdict with Earth.

The Interdict had never applied to the gasbags. They had

insisted on exploring the entire solar system, and had granted

equal rights to the pioneers in Fomalhaut. Their surveying craft

had often studied the Earth. They made no attempt to contact

the local primitives. They had satisfied themselves that the plan-

et was harmless and had returned in utter disinterest.

With his two companions, Lindsay had assumed his ultimate

disguise. Me was passing himself off as an alien, in an attempt to

deceive the entire Schismatrix.

Excitement and triumph had stripped decades from Lindsay.

He had turned up his chest cuirass so that his heart could labor

in time with his feelings. The forearm monitor embedded in his

arm glowed amber with adrenaline.

The spacecraft skipped above the bloated South Atlantic and

sank deep within the atmosphere at the twilight line. Deceleration pressed Lindsay into the straps of his skeletal chair.

The Lobsters had clone a quick, primitive job. The three-man

crew was crammed into a ribbed lozenge four meters across. It

held two air-frames, a recycler, and three acceleration couches,

of black elastic webbing over iron frames epoxied to the floor.

The rest of the craft was taken up by engines and a garagelike

specimen hold. In the hold crouched a surveyor robot, one of

the Europan submarine probes.

The dead astronaut's former orifices had been stripped of

tissue and outfitted with cameras and scanning systems. The

specimen hold had a hatchway installed, but there was no room

for an airlock in the crew's compartment. The three of them

had been welded in.

Pilot hadn't liked it. Pilot could be trusted, though. He cared

nothing for Europa or their plans, but he relished the chance to

count coup on the ancestral gravity well. He had been everywhere, from the turbulent fringes of the solar corona to the cometary Oort Cloud at the edge of circumsolar space. He was not human, but for the time being he was one of them. The scanners began to clear. Deceleration faded into the heavy tug of Earth gravity. Lindsay slumped in his seat, wheezing as the cuirass pumped his lungs. "Look what this muck is doing to the stars," Pilot complained melodiously.

Vera reached beside her chair and unfolded her tight-packed

accordioned screens. She straightened the videoboard with a

pop and smoothed out the creases. "Look, Abelard. There's so

much air above us that it's binning the stars. Think how much

air. It's fantastic."

Lindsay stirred himself and examined the view from the aft

camera. Behind them, a wall of thunderheads towered to the

limits of the troposphere. Black roots furred with rain rose to

white anvil heads glowing in the last of twilight. This was one

outstretched arm of the storm zone of permanent tempests that

girdled the planet's equator.

He expanded the aft view to fill the whole videoboard. What

he saw awed him. "Look aft at the storm clouds," he said.

"Huge streaks of fire are leaping out of them. What could be

burning?"

"Chunks of vegetation?" Vera said.

"Wait. No. It's lightning," Lindsay said. "As in the old phrase,

'thunder and lightning.'" He stared in utter fascination.

"Lightning bolts are supposed to be red, with jagged edges,"

Vera said. "These are like thin white branches."

"The disaster must have changed their form," Lindsay said.

The storm vanished over the horizon. "Coastline coming up,"

Pilot said.

Sunset fell; they switched to infrareds. "This is part of America," Lindsay concluded. "It was called Mexico, or possibly

Texico. The coastline looked different before the ice caps melted. I don't recognize any of this."

Pilot struggled with the controls. Vera said, "We're going faster

than the movement of sound in this atmosphere. Slow down.

Pilot."

"Muck," Pilot complained. "Do you really want to see this?

What if the locals see us?"

"They're primitives, they don't have infrareds," Vera said.

"You mean they use only the visible spectrum?" Now Pilot

himself was stunned.

They studied the landscape below: knots of dense scrubland,

shining in the false black-and-white of infrared. The wilderness

was striped occasionally by half-obscured dark streaks.

"Tectonic faults?" Vera said.

"Roads," Lindsay said. He explained about low-friction surfaces for ground travel in gravity. They had not seen any cities

as yet, though there had been suggestive patches here and there

where the rioting vegetation seemed thinner.

Pilot took them lower. They pored over the growth at high

magnification. "Weeds," Lindsay concluded. "Since the disaster

all ecological stability has collapsed. . . . Adventitious species

have moved in. This was probably all cropland once."

"It's ugly," Vera said.

"Systems in collapse often are."

"High-energy flux ahead," Pilot said. The spacecraft dipped

and hovered over a ridge.

Wildfire swept the hillsides, whole kilometers of orange glow

in the darkness. Roaring updrafts flung up flakes of glowing ash,

reverse cascades of stripped-off leaves and branches. Behind the

wall of fire were the twisted, glowing skeletons of weeds grown

large as trees, their smoldering trunks thick bundles of woody

filaments. They said nothing, stirred to the core by the wonder

of it. "Sundog plants," Lindsay said at last.

"What?"

"The weeds arc like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They

move in anywhere where systems break down. After this disaster

the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive. . . ."

"More weeds," Vera concluded.

"Yes." They left the fire behind and cruised past the foothills.

Lindsay tapped one of the algae frames and ate a mouthful of

green paste.

"Aircraft," Pilot said.

For a moment Lindsay thought he was seeing a mutant gasbag, some bizarre example of parallel evolution. Then he realized it was a flying machine: some kind of blimp or zeppelin. Long

seamed ridges of sewn balloon skin supported a skeletal gondola. A thin skein of flexible solar-power disks dotted the craft's skin, dappling over its back, fading to a white underbelly. Long

mooring lines trailed from its nose, like drooping antennae.

They approached cautiously and saw its mooring-ground: a

city.

A gridwork of streets split a checkerboard of white stone

shelters. The houses were marshaled around a looming central

core: a four-sided masonry pyramid. The zeppelin was moored

to the pyramid's apex. The whole city was hemmed in by a high

rectangular wall; outside, agriculture fields glowed a ghastly

white, manured with ashes.

A ceremony was progressing. A pyre blazed at the masonry

plaza at the pyramid's foot. The city's population was drawn up

in ranks. They numbered less than two thousand. Their clothing

was bleached by the infrared glow of their body heat. "What is

it?" said Vera. "Why don't they move?"

"A funeral, I think," Lindsay said.

"What's the pyramid, then? A mausoleum? An indoctrination

center?"

"Both, maybe. . . . Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum has an information line, the only one in the village.

Whoever lives there holds all links to the outside world." Lindsay thought suddenly of the domed stronghold of the Nephrine

Black Medicals in the circumlunar Zaibatsu. He hadn't thought

of it for years, but he remembered the psychic atmosphere

within it, the sense of paranoid isolation, of fanaticism slowly

drifting past the limits through lack of variety. A world gone

stale. "Stability," he said. "The Terrans wanted stability, that's

why they set up the Interdict. They didn't want technology to

break them into pieces, as it's done to us. They blamed technology for the disasters. The war plagues, the carbon dioxide that

melted the ice caps. . . . They can't forget their dead."

"Surely the whole world isn't like this," Vera said.

"It has to be. Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of

change. Change that can't be tolerated."

"But they have telephones. Aircraft."

"Enforcement technology," Lindsay said.

On their way to the Pacific they saw two more settlements,

separated by miles of festering wilderness. The cities were as

identical as circuit chips. They crouched unnaturally on the

landscape; they could have been stamped out from some hydraulic press and dropped from the air.

Pilot pointed out more of the bloated aircraft. Their full significance became clear to Lindsay. The flying machines were

like plague vectors, carrying the ideological virus of some cal-

cifying cultural disease. The pyramids towered in the heart of

every city, enormous, dwarfing all hope, the strangling monuments of the legions of the dead.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He

mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that

the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from

their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final

purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

They slipped beneath the ocean south of the rocky island

chain of Baja California. Pilot opened the hatchway, flooding

the cargo hold with water, and they began at once to sink.

They were in search of the world's largest single ecosystem, the only biome man had never touched.

The surface waters had not escaped. Over the drowned lands

of the continental margins, rafts of rotting moss and algae, the

ocean's equivalents of weeds, festered in choking profusion. But

the abyssal depths were undisturbed. In the crushing blackness

of the abyss, larger in area than all the continents combined,

conditions scarcely varied from pole to pole. The denizens of

this vast realm were poorly known. No human being had ever

invented a way to wring advantage from them.

But in the Schismatrix, man's successors were more clever. The resemblance of this realm to the dark oceans of Europa had not

escaped Lindsay. For decades he had searched the ancient

databanks for scraps of knowledge. The surviving records of

abyssal life were almost useless, dating back to the dawn of

biology. But even these crude hints lured Lindsay with their

potential for sudden miracle. Europa too had the gloominess,

the depths. And the vast drowned ranges of volcanic rifts, oozing geothermal energy.

The abyss had oases. It had always had them. The knowledge

had lit a slow, subterranean fire in his imagination. Life:

untouched, primeval life, swarmed in boiling splendor at the

fiery edges of the Earth's tectonic plates.

An entire ecosystem, older than mankind, clustered there in all its miraculous richness. Life that could be seized, that could be

Europa's.

At first he had rejected the idea. The Interdict was sacred: as

old as the unspoken guilt of ancestral spacefarers, who had

deserted Earth as disaster loomed. In their desertion, they had

robbed the planet of the very expertise that might have saved it.

Over centuries of life in space, that guilt had sunk into a

darkened region of cultural awareness, surfacing only as caricature, as ritual denial and deliberate ignorance.

The parting had come with hatred: with those in space condemned as antihuman thieves, and Earth's emergency government denounced as fascist barbarism. Hatred made things easier: easier for those in space to shrug off all responsibility, easier for Earth to starve its myriad cultures down to a single gray regime of penance and pointless stability.

But life moved in clades. Lindsay knew it as a fact. A successful species always burst into a joyous wave of daughter species, of hopeful monsters that rendered their ancestors obsolete.

Denying change meant denying life.

By this token he knew that humanity on Earth had become a

relict.

In the long term, the vast biological timescape that had become Lindsay's obsession, rust ate anything that failed to move.

Earth's future did not belong to humanity but to the monstrous

weeds, grown strange and woody, and whatever small fleet creatures leaped and bred among them. And Lindsay felt justice in it.

They sank into darkness.

Pressure meant nothing to their alien hull. The gasbags flourished at extremes of pressure that made Earth's oceans seem as

thin as plasma. Pilot switched controls over to the water jets

epoxied to the hull. Me kicked in aperture radar, and their

videoboards lit up with the clean green contour lines of the

abyssal floor.

Lindsay's heart leaped as he saw the familiar geology. "Just

like Europa," Vera murmured. They were floating over an ex-

tended tension fault, where volcanic basalt had snapped and

rifted, harsh blocks jutting upward, the cracked primeval violence untouched by wind or rain. Rectilinear mountains, lightly dusted with organic ooze, dropped in breathtaking precipitious cliffs, where contour lines crowded together like the teeth of a comb.

But here the rift was dead. They saw no sign of thermal energy.

"Follow the fault," Lindsay said. "Look for hot spots." He had

lived too long for impatience, even now.

"Shall I kick in the main engines?" Pilot said.

"And make the water boil for miles around? We're deep, Pilot.

That water is like steel."

"Is it?" Pilot made an electronic churring noise. "Well, I'd

rather have no stars at all than blurry ones."

They followed the rift for hours without finding a lava seep.

Vera slept; Lindsay dozed briefly, an old man's cat-sleep. Pilot,

who slept only on formal occasions, woke them. "A hot spot,"

he said.

Lindsay examined his board. Infrareds showed sluggish heat

from deep within the interior of a jutting cliff. The cliff was

extremely odd: a long, tilted plane of euclidian smoothness,

rising abruptly from an oozy badlands of jumbled terrain. An

angular foothill at the base of the cliff lay strangely distorted,

almost crumpled, atop a dome-shaped rise of lava.

"Send out the drone," he said.

Vera pulled the robot's controls from under her seat and

slipped on a pair of eyephones. The robot sculled easily out to

the anomalous cliff, its lights blazing. Lindsay switched his

board over to the robot's optics.

The tilted cliff was painted. There were white stripes on it,

long peeling dashes, some kind of dividing line. "It's a wreck,"

he said suddenly. "It's manmade."

"Can't be," Vera said. "It's the size of a major spacecraft.

There'd be room in it for thousands."

But then she found something that settled it. A machine was

lashed to the smooth clifflike deck of the enormous ship. Centuries had corroded it, but its winged outlines were clear. "It's

an aircraft," Pilot said. "It had jets. This was some kind of

watery spaceport. Airport, rather."

"A ratfish!" Lindsay exulted. "After it, Vera!"

The surveyor lunged after the abyssal creature. The long-tailed, blunt-headed fish, the size of a man's forearm, darted for safety along the broad deck of the aircraft carrier. It vanished through a ruptured crevice in the multistory wreckage of the control

tower. The robot pulled up short. "Wait," Vera said. "If this is a

ship, where did the heat come from?"

Pilot examined his instruments. "It's radioactive heat," he said.

"Is that unusual?"

"Fission power," Lindsay said. "It must have sunk with an

atomic pile on board." Common decency forbade him to mention the possibility of atomic weapons.

Vera said, "My instruments show dissolved organics. Creatures

are huddling up around the pile for warmth." She tore at an

ancient bulkhead with the pressure-toughened arms of the

drone. The corroded alloy burst easily, gushing rust. "Should I

go after it?"

"No," Lindsay said. "I want the primeval."

She returned the drone to its hold. They sputtered onward.

Time passed; terrain scrolled by with a slowness he would have

once found dreadful. Lindsay found himself thinking again of

Czarina-Kluster. Sometimes it troubled him that the despair, the

suffering there, meant so little to him. C-K was dying, its elegance dissolving into squalor, its delicate, sophisticated balance

ripped apart, pieces flung like seeds throughout the Schismatrix.

Was it evil of him to accept the flower's death, in hope of seeds?

He could not think it was. Human time meant nothing to him

any longer. He wanted only for his will to leave its mark, to cast

its light down those long eons, in a world awakened, a planet

brought to irrevocable life. And then . . . then he could let go.

"Here," Pilot said.

They had found it. The craft descended.

Life rose all around them: a jungle in defiance of the sun. In

the robot's lights the steep, abrasive valley walls flushed in a

vivid panoply of color: scarlet, chalk-white, sulfur-gold,

obsidian. Like stands of bamboo, tubeworms swayed on the

hillsides, taller than a man. The rocks were thick with clams,

their white shells yawning to show flesh as red as blood. Purple

sponges pulsed, abyssal corals spread black branching thickets,

their thin arms jeweled with polyps.

The water of life gushed from the depths of the valley. Chimneys slimed with metal oxides spewed hot clouds of energized

sulfur. The sea floor boiled, wobbling bubbles of steam glinting

through a haze of bacteria. The bacteria were central. They were

the food chain's fundamental link. Through chemosynthesis,

they drew energy from the sulfur itself, scorning the sun to

thrive on the heat of the Earth.

Within the warmth and darkness, the valley seethed with life.

The rock itself seemed to live, festooned with porous knobs and

slimed crevasses, red-black tubes of cold lava-stone coiling like

snakes, phallic chimneys of precipitated minerals gleaming

copper-green with verdigris. Pale crabs with legs as long as a

man's arm kicked daintily across the slopes. Jet-black abyssal

fish, grown fat on unexpected bounty, moved with slick langour

through the clustered stalks of the tubeworms. Bright yellow

jellies, like severed flowerheads, floated in thick eddies of bacterial soup.

"Everything," Lindsay breathed. "I want it all."

Vera pulled away her eyephones; her eyes were flooded with

tears. She slumped back in the seat, shaking. "I can't see," she

said, her voice hoarse. She handed him the control box. "Please

... it should be yours, Abelard."

Lindsay strapped on the phones, slipped his fingers into the

control slots. Suddenly he was amid it all, the scanners turning

with the movements of his head. He extended the sampling

arms, extruding the delicate clockwork of the genetics needles.

He advanced on the nearest stand of tubeworms. Above the

serried white columns of their wrist-thick trunks, their foliage

was rank upon waving rank of arm-long feathered red fronds,

sweeping with feminine elegance, combing life from the water.

Their white stems clustered with sheltered creatures: barnacles,

tiny crabs, fringed worms in sea-green and electric blue, round

comb jellies glinting in faint pastels.

A predator emerged from the jungle, flowing sinously around

the trunks: a jet-black abyssal fish, leg-sized and flattened like

an eel, its sides studded with serried dots of phosphorescence. It

approached fearlessly, fascinated by the light. Gills pulsed be-

hind its huge-eyed head and it opened a pale, glowing mouth

bristling with fangs. "So," Lindsay addressed it. "You were

pressed past the limits, forced into the abyss where nothing

grows. But see what you've found. The fat of the system, sundog.

Welcome to Paradise." As he spoke he moved the arm toward

it; the long needle leaped out, touched it, and withdrew. The

fish glowed out in sudden gold and green and flashed away.

He moved to the forest, touching everything he could see,

sampling bacteria with gentle suction fillers. In half an hour he

had filled all his sample capsules and turned back to the ship

for more.

Then he saw something detach itself from the hull of the ship.

At first he thought it a trick of the light, a ripple of pure

reflection. Then he saw it moving toward him, wobbling, flutter-

ing, shapeless, and formless, a jellied mirror, fluid in a silver

bag. He heard Vera cry out.

He wrenched his hands from the controls and tore away the

eyephones. She was bent over the videoboard, staring. "The

Presence! You see it? The Presence!"

It was swimming, with an amoebalike rippling and stretching,

deeper into the grove. Lindsay quickly jammed on the

eyephones and took up the controls, following it with the robot's lights. Its formless surface threw washes of reflected brilliance over the clams and coral. Lindsay said, "You see it, Pilot?"

Pilot turned the spacecraft to follow it with tracking systems.

"I see something. ... It reflects in every wavelength. What a

strange creature. Take a sample of it, Lindsay."

"It's not native. It came with us. I saw it attached to the hull."

"To the hull? It survived raw space? And entry heat? And the

pressure of this water? It can't be."

"No?"

"No," the Lobster said. "Because if it was real, I couldn't bear

not to be it."

"It's showing itself," Vera exulted. "Because of where we are!

You see? You see?" She laughed. "It's dancing!"

The thing floated smoothly above one of the smoking chimneys, flattening itself to bathe in the searing updraft of unthinkable pressure and heat. Hot bubbles seethed beneath it, sliding with frictionless ease off its mirrored undersurface. As they

watched, it drew itself together into a rippling globe. Then,

liquescing with sudden speed, it poured itself through a thumb-

sized crevice into the core of the heat vent. It vanished at once.

"I didn't see that," the Lobster insisted. "I didn't see it vanish

into the bowels of the Earth. Should we leave now? I mean,

maybe we should try to get away from it."

"No," Vera said.

"You're right," Pilot quavered. "That might make it mad."

Vera marveled, "Did you see it? It was enjoying this! Even it

knows. It knows this is Paradise!" She was trembling. "Abelard,

someday, in Europa, this will all be ours, we can touch it, feel it,

breathe the water, smell it, taste it! I want it! I want to be out

there, like the Presence is. . . ." She was breathing hard, her

face radiant. "Abelard ... if it weren't for you I'd have never

known this. . . . Thank you. Thank you, too. Pilot."

"Right, yes, surely," Pilot fluted uneasily. "Lindsay, the drone.

Should you bring it in?"

Lindsay smiled. "Don't be afraid, Pilot. It's done you a favor.

You've seen the potential. Now you'll have something to aim

for."

"But think of the power it must have. It's like a god. . . ."

"Then it's in good company, with us."

Lindsay guided the drone into the specimen hold and unloaded the genetic capsules into their pressure racks. He reloaded its arms and returned to work.

The Presence emerged, ballooning suddenly from a second

chimney, beside the drone. It drifted toward him, watching. Me

waved a claw, but it made no response and soon drifted out of

the drone's lights into darkness and invisibility.

The creatures showed no fear of the drone. Vera took over,

gently parting the supple stems of the tubeworms to harvest

everything she could find. The drone walked the length of the

valley oasis, probing the oo7.e, prying into crevices.

They had a stroke of luck where a new hot spring had broken

open, parboiling a colony of creatures clustered above it on an

overhang. They used the dead as bait to attract scavengers; they

opened them to sample gut bacteria and the agents of decay.

Their sample could not be complete; the oasis was far too rich

for that. But their success was still entire. No creature born to

the seas of Earth could live, unaltered, in Europa's alien waters.

That was the task of Europa's angels, the Lifesiders, who would

inherit this genetic treasure, tease it apart, and rebuild new

creatures for the new conditions. The living beings here would

be models, archetypes in a new Creation, where art and purpose

would take the place of a billion years of evolution.

As they packed the robot away for the last time and lifted ship, they saw no sign of the Presence. But Lindsay had no doubt that

it was with them.

He was tired as they ascended slowly toward the surface. More

than his Shaper favorite or the armored Mechanist, he felt the

burden of his hubris heavy on him. Who was he to have done

these things? The light had drawn him, and he had grown

toward it as a tree might grow, spreading blind leaves toward an

unknown radiance. Now he had come to his life's fruition, and

he was glad of it. But a tree dies when its roots are cut, and

Lindsay knew his roots were his humanity. He was a thing of

flesh and blood, of life and death, not an Immanent Will.

A tree drew strength from light, but it was not light itself. And

life was a process of changing, but it was not change itself. That

was what death was for.

When they saw sunlight flooding just below the surface, Pilot

yowled in electronic glee and kicked in the main engines. Steam

blasted out in an explosive cratering rosette as the sea recoiled.

They broke Mach 1 in seconds. As acceleration crushed them

into their seats, Vera strained to see her videoboard and

screamed. "The sky! Blue sky! A wall above the world! Pilot,

give us space!"

Below them, the sea absorbed the shock, as it did all things.

And they were gone.

THE NEOTENIC CULTURAL REPUBLIC: 8-8-'86

Life moved in clades.

Terraform-Kluster loomed over Mars, shattering red monotony

with white steam, green growth, blue nascent seas.

On Venus, death's back was broken, as honest clouds threw

lace across the searing, acid-bitten sky.

Ice ships with freshly minted creatures from the labs splashed

into Europa, dissolving deep within blood-warm abysses.

On Jupiter the Great Red Spot was breaking up, sloughing off

strange blooming clouds of red krill, tiny creatures gathered into

shoals and herds bigger than Earth.

At the Neotenic Cultural Republic, Abelard Lindsay decamped

from a monstrous spacecraft.

In the free-fall zone he moved easily, with the unconscious

grace of extreme age.

But as he moved down the slope inside the cylindrical world,

past the hotels and low-grav tourist shops, he leaned more and

more heavily on the squat head of his robot companion. The

two of them reached level ground, a loamy wilderness with

solemn, ancient ranks of trees. The tub-shaped robot nurse

nicked a quick blood sample from the nerveless flesh of Lindsay's leg. As they shuffled along the leaf-strewn footpath, the machine fractionated the blood and mumbled over its data.

The Republic had become a place of towering gloom, silence

broken by birdcalls, a canopy of foliage cracking mirrored sun-

light into dappled shards. Local Neotenics in studiedly antique

clothing lounged on lichen-eaten stone benches, while their

charges, senile Shapers and obsolescent Mechs, tottered marveling through the woods.

Lindsay paused, gasping as the cuirass pumped his chest beneath his dark blue coal. The baggy legs of his trousers and his

sturdy orthopedic shoes hid the prosthetic framework strapped

to his wasted legs. Overhead, at the core of the world, an

ultralight aircraft spewed a long trail of gray cremated powder

over the rich green treetops.

No one approached him. The embroidered squids and angler

fish on his coat-sleeves identified him as a CircumEuropan, but

he had come incognito.

Catching his breath, Lindsay walked on toward the Tyler mansion and his meeting with Constantine.

The mansion had expanded. Beyond its ivy shrouded walls,

other estates had sprung up, a complex of asylums and retirement wards. Over the years, despite the Preservationists, the outside world had seeped in irresistibly. The Republic's premier industries were hospitals and funerals; rehabilitation for those who could make it, a quiet transition for those who could not.

Lindsay crossed the courtyard of the first hospital. A group of

Blood Bathers basked in the sun, waiting with animal patience

for their skins to grow again. Beyond that estate was a second,

where two young Patternists were surrounded by guards. They

scratched at the dirt with twigs, their lopsided heads almost

touching. Lindsay saw one of them look up for a moment: the

boy's cold eyes had the chilly logic of utter paranoia.

Neatly dressed Neotenic attendants ushered Lindsay through

the gates of the Tyler estate. Margaret Juliano had been dead

for years. Lindsay recognized the new Director as one of her

Superbright students.

The Superbrighl met him on the lawn. The man's face had the

quiet self-possession of Zen Serotonin. "I've cleared your visit

with Warden Pongpianskul," he said.

"That was thoughtful," Lindsay said. Neville Pongpianskul was

dead, but it was not polite to refer to the fact. Following Ring

Council ritual, Pongpianskul had "faded," leaving behind him a

programmed web of speeches, announcements, taped appear-

ances, and random telephone calls. The Neotenics had never

bothered to replace him as Warden. It saved a lot of trouble all

around.

"May I show you through the Museum, sir?" the Superbrighl

asked. "Our late Curator, Alexandrina Tyler, left an unmatched

collection of Lindsaiana."

"Later, perhaps. Is Chancellor-General Constantine receiving

visitors?"

Constantine was in the rose garden, lying in a lounge chair

beside a beehive, staring up into the sun with flat plastic eyes.

The years had not been kind to him, despite the best of care.

Long years in natural gravity had left his body knotted with

muscle, strange knobs and bulges over his delicate bones.

There was no ultraviolet in the mirrored sunlight of the Re-

public, but nevertheless Constantine had tanned, his ancient,

naked skin taking on mottled birthmark tinges of purple and

blue. He had lost most of his hair, and there were dimpled

callosities at strategic points on his skull. The treatments had

been thorough and exhaustive. And at last they had succeeded.

Constantine turned as Lindsay creaked carefully toward him.

The pupils of his plastic eyes were of different sizes; they irised

visibly, struggling for focus. "Abelard? It's you?"

"Yes, Philip." The robot sank down beside the lounge chair;

Lindsay sat comfortably on its soft, pulpy head.

"So. Mow was your trip?"

"It's an old ship," Lindsay said. "A bit like a flying geriatrics

ward. They were having a revival of Vetterling's The While Periapsis."

"Hmm. Not his best work."

"You always had good taste, Philip."

Constantine sat up in his chair. "Should I call for a robe? I've

looked better, I know."

Lindsay spread his hands. "If you could see beneath this suit.

... I haven't wasted much money on rejuvenation lately. I'm

going for total transformation when I return. It's Europa for me.

Philip. The seas."

"Sundogging out from under human limitations?"

"Yes, you could say that. . . . I've brought the plans with me."

Lindsay reached inside his coat and produced a brochure. "I

want you to look at them with me."

"All right. To please you." Constantine accepted the pamphlet.

The center pages showed an Angel's portrait: an aquatic

posthuman. The skin was smooth and black and slick. The legs

and pelvic girdle were gone; the spine extended to long muscular flukes. Scarlet gills trailed from the neck. The ribcage was

black openwork, gushing white, feathery nets packed with symbiotic bacteria.

The long black arms were dotted with phosphorescent patches, in red and blue and green, keyed into the nervous system.

Along the ribs and flukes were two long lateral lines. The

nerve-packed stripes housed a new aquatic sense that could feel

the water's trembling, like touch at a distance. The nose led to

lunglike sacs packed with chemosensitive cells. The lidless eyes

were huge, and the skull had been rebuilt to accommodate

them.

Constantine moved the brochure before his eyes, struggling to

focus. "Very elegant," he said at last. "No intestines."

"Yes. The white nets filter sulfur for bacteria. Each Angel is

self-sufficient, drawing life, warmth, everything from the water."

"I see," Constantine said. "Community with anarchy. ... Do

they speak?"

Lindsay leaned forward, pointing to the phosphorescent lights.

"They glow."

"And do they reproduce?"

"There are genetics labs. Aquatic ones. Children can be created. But these creatures can last out centuries."

"But where's the sin, Abelard? The lies, the jealousy, the

struggle for power?" He smiled. "I suppose they can commit

gauche acts of ecosystem design."

"They don't lack ingenuity, Philip. I'm sure they can find

crimes if they try hard enough. But they're not like we were.

They're not forced to it."

"Forced to it. ..." A bee landed on Constantine's face. He

brushed it gently away. He said, "I went to see the impact site

last month." He meant the spot where Vera Kelland had

crashed. "There are trees there that look as old as the world."

"It's been a long time."

"I don't know what I expected. . . . Some kind of golden glow,

perhaps, some shimmer to show where my heart was buried. But

we're small creatures, and the Kosmos doesn't care. There was

no sign of it." He sighed. "I wanted to measure myself against

the world. So I killed the thing that might have held me back."

"We were different people then."

"No. I thought I could make myself different. ... I thought

that with you dead, you and Vera, I'd be a clean slate, a

machine for pure ambition. ... A bullet fired into the head of

history. ... I tried to seize power over love. I wanted everything

bound in iron. And I tried to bind it. But the iron broke first."

"I understand," Lindsay told him. "I've also learned the power

of plans. My life's ambition awaits me in Europa." He took the

brochure. "It could be yours, too. If you want it."

"I told you in my message that I was ready for death," Con

stantine said. "You always want to sidestep things, Abelard. We

go back a long way together, too far for words like 'friend' or

'enemy.' ... I don't know what to call you, but I know you. I

know you better than anyone, better than you know yourself.

When you face the consummation, you'll step aside. I know you

will. You'll never see Europa."

Lindsay bowed his head.

"It has to end, Abelard. I measured myself against the world,

that was why I lived. And I cast a large shadow. Didn't I?"

"Yes, Philip." Lindsay's voice was choked. "Even when I hated

you most, I was proud of you."

"But to measure myself against life and death, as if I could go

on forever. . . . There's no dignity in that. What are we to life?

We're only sparks."

"Sparks that start a bonfire, maybe."

"Yes. Europa is your bonfire, and I envy you that. But if you

go to Europa you will lose yourself in it. And you couldn't bear

that."

"But you could do it, Philip. It could be yours. Your people

will be there. The Constantine clan."

"My people. Yes. You co-opted them."

"I needed them. I needed your genius. . . . And they came to

me willingly."

"Yes. . . . Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our

revenge against it." He smiled. "I tried not to love them. I

wanted them to be like me, all steel and edge. But I loved them

anyway . . . not because they were like me, but because they

were different. And the one most different, I loved the best."

"Vera."

"Yes. I created her from the samples I stole here, in the

Republic. Flakes of skin. Genetics from the ones I loved. . . ."

Me looked at Lindsay pleadingly. "What can you tell me of her,

Abelard? How is your daughter?"

"My daughter. . . ."

"Yes. You and Vera were a splendid pair. ... It seemed a

shame that death should make you barren. I loved Vera too; I

wanted to guard her child, and the child of the man she chose.

So I created your daughter. Was I wrong to do it?"

"No," Lindsay said. "Life is better."

"I gave her everything I could. How is she?"

Lindsay felt dizzy. Beneath him, the robot slid a needle into

his unfeeling leg. "She's in the labs now. She is going through

the transformation."

"Ah. Good. She makes her own choices. As we all must."

Constantine reached beneath his lounge chair. "I have poison

here. The attendants gave it to me. They grant us the right to

die."

Lindsay nodded in distraction as the drugs calmed his

pounding heart. "Yes," he said. "We all deserve that right."

"We could walk out to the impact site together, you and I. And

drink the poison. There's enough for two." Constantine smiled.

"It would be good to have company."

"No, Philip. Not yet. I'm sorry."

"Still no commitment, Abelard?" Constantine showed him a

glass vial filled with brown liquid. "It's just as well. I have

trouble walking. I have trouble with all dimensions,

since . . . since the Arena. That's why they gave me new eyes,

"The eyes see dimensions for me." He twisted the top from the

vial with gnarled fingers. "I see life for what it is now. That's

why I know I must do this." He put the poison to his lips, and

drank it down. "Give me your hands."

Lindsay reached out. Constantine gripped his hands. "Both of

them are metal now?"

"I'm sorry, Philip."

"No matter. All our beautiful machines . . ." Constantine shuddered briefly. "Bear with me, this won't take long."

"I'm here, Philip."

"Abelard . . . I'm sorry. For Nora. For the cruelly. . . ."

"Philip, it doesn't ... I forgive. . . ." It was too late. The man

had died.

CIRCUMEUROPA: 25-12-'86

What was left of life in CircumEuropa was clustered in the labs.

When Lindsay disembarked, he found customs deserted.

CircumEuropa was through; imports no longer mattered.

He followed a snaking hallway through translucent tilted walls

of membrane. The corridors glimmered, painted with all the

blue-green tints of seawater. They were almost deserted.

Lindsay glimpsed occasional sundogs and squatters, come for

junk and loot. A party of them waved politely as they sawed

noisily through a hard-set wall. An Investor ship had docked as

well, but there was no sign of its crew.

The movement was all outwards. Giant ice ships, hulled in

crystal, were arcing down to the planet's surface, for gentle

splashdowns through the new crevasses. Vera, his daughter, was

aboard one of them. She had already gone.

The population had shrunk to a final handful, the last for the

transformation. CircumEuropa had dwindled to a series of labs,

where the last transformees floated in smoky Europan seawater.

Lindsay paused outside an airlock, watching the activity within,

through a hall-mounted monitor. Transformed surgeons were

assisting at the birth of Angels, tracking the growth of new

nerves through the altered flesh. Their glowing arms flickered

rapidly in conversation.

He had only to don an aqualung, step through that airlock into

blood-warm water, and join the others. Vera had done it. So

had Gomez and the rest. They would greet him joyfully. There

would be no pain, It would be easy. The past hung balanced on the moment. He could not do it. He turned away.

Then he sensed it. "You're here," he said. "Show yourself."

The Presence flowed down from the tilted, sea-green membrane of the wall. A puddle of mirrors trickled across the floor,

seeping into shape.

Lindsay watched it in wonder. The Presence had its own gravity; it clung to the floor as if pulled there. It warped and

rippled, taking form to please him. It became a small, fleet

thing, poised on four legs, crouching like an animal. Like a

weasel, he thought. Like a fox.

"She's gone," Lindsay told it. "And you let her go."

"Relax, citizen," the fox told him. Its voice had no echo; it

made no sound. "It's not my business to hold on to things."

"Europe's not to your taste?"

"Aw, hell," it said. "I'm sure it's fabulous there, but I've seen

the real thing, remember? On Earth. What about you, sundog? I

don't see you going for it."

"I'm old," Lindsay said. "They're young. It should be their

world. They don't need me."

The creature stretched, rippling. "I thought you'd say as much. What do you say, then? Now that you have a chance for, ah,

reflection?"

Lindsay smiled, seeing his own warped face across the shining

film of the Presence. "I'm at loose ends."

"Oh, very good." There was laughter in the unheard voice. "I

suppose you'll be dying now."

"Should I?" He hesitated. "It might be premature."

"It might," the Presence agreed. "You'll stay here a few more

centuries, then? And await the final transcendance?"

"The Fifth Prigoginic Level of Complexity?"

"You could call it that. The words don't matter. It's as far

beyond Life as Life is from inert matter. I've seen it happen,

many times before. I can feel it moving here, I can smell it in

the wind. People . . . creatures, beings, they're all people to

me . . . they ask the Final Questions. And they get the Final

Answers, and then it's goodbye. It's the Godhead, or as close as

makes no difference to the likes of you and me. Maybe that's

what you want, sundog? The Absolute?"

"The Absolute," Lindsay mused. "The Final Answers. . . .

What are your answers, then, friend?"

"My answers? I don't have 'em. I don't care what goes on

beneath this skin, I want only to see, only to feel. Origins and

destinies, predictions and memories, lives and deaths, I sidestep

those. I'm too slick for time to grip, you get me, sundog?"

"What do you want then. Presence?"

"I want what I already have! Eternal wonder, eternally

fulfilled. . . . Not the eternal, even, just the Indefinite, that's

where all beauty is. . . . I'll wait out the heat-death of the Universe to see what happens next! And in the meantime, isn't it something, all of it?"

"Yes," Lindsay said. His heart was hammering in his chest. His

robot nurse reached for him with a needle-load of soothing

chemicals; he turned it off, then laughed and stretched. "It's all

very much something."

"I had a fine time here," the Presence said. "It's quite a place

you have here, around this little sun."

"Thank you."

"Hey, the thanks are all yours, citizen. But there are other

places waiting." The Presence hesitated. "You want to come along?"

"Yes!"

"Then hold me."

He stretched his arms out toward it. It came over him in a

silver wave. Stellar cold, a melting, a release.

And all things were fresh and new.

He saw his clothes floating within the hallway. His arms drifted

out of the sleeves, prosthetics trailing leashes of expensive circuitry. Atop its clean white ladder of vertebrae, his empty skull sank grinning into the collar of his coat.

An Investor appeared at the end of the hall, bounding along in

free-fall. Reflexively, Lindsay smeared himself out of sight

against the wall. The Investor's frill lifted; it pawed with magpie

attraction through the tangle of bones, stuffing items of interest

into a swollen bag.

"They're always around to pick up the pieces," the Presence

commented. "They're useful to us. You'll see."

Lindsay perceived his new self. "I don't have any hands," he said.

"You won't need 'em." The Presence laughed. "C'mon, we'll

follow him. They'll be going someplace soon."

They trailed the Investor down the hall. "Where?" Lindsay

said.

"It doesn't matter. Somewhere wonderful."