As it fell, Kulagin appeared and caught it on the points of four extended fingertips. His left eye, an artificial implant, glistened darkly as he examined it.
“Eisho Zaibatsu?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “They handled the synthesizing work; the lichen is a special variety of my own.” I saw that a curious circle was gathering and said aloud, “Our host is a connoisseur.”
“Only of finance,” Kulagin said quietly, but with equal emphasis. “I understand now why you patented the process in your own name. It’s a dazzling accomplishment. How could any Investor resist the lure of a living jewel, friends? Someday soon our initiate will be a wealthy man.”
I looked quickly at Wellspring, but he unobtrusively touched one finger to his lips. “And he’ll need that wealth to bring Mars to fruition,” Wellspring said loudly. “We can’t depend forever on the Kosmosity for funding. Friends, rejoice that you too will reap the profits of Landau’s ingenious genetics.” He caught the jewel and boxed it. “And tonight I have the honor of presenting his gift to the Queen. A double honor, since I recruited its creator myself.” Suddenly he leapt toward the exit, his powerful legs carrying him quickly above our heads. As he flew he shouted, “Goodbye, son! May another dog never darken your doorstep!”
With Wellspring’s exit, the non-Polycarbon guests began leaving, forming a jostling knot of hat-fetching servos and gossiping well-wishers. When the last was gone, the Clique grew suddenly quiet.
Kulagin had me stand at a far corner of his studio while the Clique formed a long gauntlet for the dogs, arming themselves with ribbons and paint. A certain dark edge of smoldering vengeance only added a tang to their enjoyment. I took a pair of paint balloons from one of Kulagin’s scurrying servos.
The time was almost on me. For two long years I’d schemed to join the Polycarbon Clique. I needed them. I felt they needed me. I was tired of suspicion, of strained politeness, of the glass walls of the dogs’ surveillance. The keen edges of my long discipline suddenly, painfully, crumbled. I began shaking uncontrollably, unable to hold it back.
The dogs were still, taping steadily to the last appointed instant. The crowd began to count down. Exactly at the count of zero the two dogs turned to go.
They were barraged with paint and tangled streamers. A moment earlier they would have turned savagely on their tormentors, but now they had reached the limits of their programming, and at long last they were helpless. The Clique’s aim was deadly, and with every splattering hit they split the air with screams of laughter. They knew no mercy, and it took a full minute before the humiliated dogs could hop and stagger, blinded, to the door.
I was overcome with mob hysteria. Screams escaped my clenched teeth. I had to be grappled back from pursuing the dogs down the hall. As firm hands pulled me back within the room I turned to face my friends, and I was chilled at the raw emotion on their faces. It was as if they had been stripped of skin and watched me with live eyes in slabs of meat.
I was picked up bodily and passed from hand to hand around the room. Even those that I knew well seemed alien to me now. Hands tore at my clothing until I was stripped; they even took my computer gauntlet, then stood me in the middle of the room.
As I stood shivering within the circle, Kulagin approached me, his arms rigid, his face stiff and hieratic. His hands were full of loose black cloth. He held the cloth over my head, and I saw that it was a black hood. He put his lips close to my ear and said softly, “Friend, go the distance.” Then he pulled the hood over my head and knotted it.
The hood had been soaked in something; I could smell that it reeked. My hands and feet began to tingle, then go numb. Slowly, warmth crept like bracelets up my arms and legs. I could hear nothing, and my feet could no longer feel the floor. I lost all sense of balance, and suddenly I fell backward, into the infinite.
My eyes opened, or my eyes closed, I couldn’t tell. But at the limits of vision, from behind some unspoken fog, emerged pinpoints of cold and piercing brightness. It was the Great Galactic Night, the vast and pitiless emptiness that lurks just beyond the warm rim of every human habitat, emptier even than death.
I was naked in space, and it was so bitterly cold that I could taste it like poison in every cell I had. I could feel the pale heat of my own life streaming out of me like plasma, ebbing away in aurora sheets from my fingertips. I continued to fall, and as the last rags of warmth pulsed off into the devouring chasm of space, and my body grew stiff and white and furred with frost from every pore, I faced the ultimate horror: that I would not die, that I would fall forever backward into the unknown, my mind shriveling into a single frozen spore of isolation and terror.
Time dilated. Eons of silent fear telescoped into a few heartbeats and I saw before me a single white blob of light, like a rent from this cosmos into some neighboring realm full of alien radiance. This time I faced it as I fell toward it, and through it, and then, finally, jarringly, I was back behind my own eyes, within my own head, on the soft floor of Kulagin’s studio.
The hood was gone. I wore a loose black robe, closed with an embroidered belt. Kulagin and Valery Korstad helped me to my feet. I wobbled, brushing away tears, but I managed to stand, and the Clique cheered.
Kulagin’s shoulder was under my arm. He embraced me and whispered, “Brother, remember the cold. When we your friends need warmth, be warm, remembering the cold. When friendship pains you, forgive us, remembering the cold. When selfishness tempts you, renounce it, remembering the cold. For you have gone the distance, and returned to us renewed. Remember, remember the cold.” And then he gave me my secret name, and pressed his painted lips to mine.
I clung to him, choked with sobs. Valery embraced me and Kulagin pulled away gently, smiling.
One by one the Clique took my hands and pressed their lips quickly to my face, murmuring congratulations. Still unable to speak, I could only nod. Meanwhile Valery Korstad, clinging to my arm, whispered hotly in my ear, “Hans, Hans, Hans Landau, there still remains a certain ritual, which I have reserved to myself. Tonight the finest chamber in the Froth belongs to us, a sacred place where no glassy-eyed dog has ever trespassed. Hans Landau, tonight that place belongs to you, and so do I.”
I looked into her face, my eyes watering. Her eyes were dilated, and a pink flush had spread itself under her ears and along her jawline. She had dosed herself with hormonal aphrodisiacs. I smelled the antiseptic sweetness of her perfumed sweat and I closed my eyes, shuddering.
Valery led me into the hall. Behind us, Kulagin’s door sealed shut, cutting the hilarity to a murmur. Valery helped me slip on my air fins, whispering soothingly.
The dogs were gone. Two chunks of my reality had been edited like tape. I still felt dazed. Valery took my hand, and we threaded a corridor upward toward the center of the habitat, kicking along with our air fins. I smiled mechanically at the Cicadas we passed in the halls, members of another day crowd. They were soberly going about their day shift’s work while the Poly-carbon Clique indulged in bacchanalia.
It was easy to lose yourself within the Froth. It had been built in rebellion against the regimented architecture of other habitats, in C-K’s typical defiance of the norm. The original empty cylinder had been packed with pressurized plastic, which had been blasted to foam and allowed to set. It left angular bubbles whose tilted walls were defined by the clean topologies of close packing and surface tension. Halls had been snaked through the complex later, and the doors and airlocks cut by hand. The Froth was famous for its delirious and welcome spontaneity.
And its discreets were notorious. C-K showed its civic spirit in the lavish appointments of these citadels against surveillance. I had never been in one before. People under the dogs were not allowed across the boundaries. But I had heard rumors, the dark and prurient scandal of bars and corridors, those scraps of licentious speculation that always hushed at the approach of dogs. Anything, anything at all, could happen in a discreet, and no one would know of it but the lovers or survivors who returne
d, hours later, to public life…
As the centrifugal gravity faded we began floating, Valery half-towing me. The bubbles of the Froth had swollen near the axis of rotation, and we entered a neighborhood of the quiet industrial domiciles of the rich. Soon we had floated to the very doorstep of the infamous Topaz Discreet, the hushed locale of unnumbered elite frolics. It was the finest in the Froth.
Valery looked at her timepiece, caressing away a fine film of sweat that had formed on the flushed and perfect lines of her face and neck. We hadn’t long to wait. We heard the mellow repeated bonging of the discreet’s time alarm, warning the present occupant that his time was up. The door’s locks unsealed. I wondered just what member of C-K’s inner circle would emerge. Now that I was free of the dogs, I longed to boldly meet his eyes.
Still we waited. Now the discreet was ours by right and every moment lost pained us. To overstay in a discreet was the height of rudeness. Valery grew angry, and pushed open the door.
The air was full of blood. In free-fall, it floated in a thousand clotting red blobs.
Near the center of the room floated the suicide, his flaccid body still wheeling slowly from the gush of his severed throat. A scalpel glittered in the mechanically clenched fingers of the cadaver’s outstretched hand. He wore the sober black overalls of a conservative Mechanist.
The body spun, and I saw the insignia of the Queen’s Advisers stitched on his breast. His partially metallic skull was sticky with his own blood; the face was obscured. Long streamers of thickened blood hung from his throat like red veils.
We had cometaried into something very much beyond us. “I’ll call Security,” I said.
She said two words. “Not yet.” I looked into her face. Her eyes were dark with fascinated lust. The lure of the forbidden had slid its hooks into her in a single moment. She kicked languidly across one tessellated wall, and a long streak of blood splattered and broke along her hip.
In discreets one met the ultimates. In a room with so many hidden meanings, the lines had blurred. Through constant proximity pleasure had wedded with death. For the woman I adored, the private rites transpiring there had become of one unspoken piece.
“Hurry,” she said. Her lips were bitter with a thin grease of aphrodisiacs. We interlaced our legs to couple in free-fall while we watched his body twist.
That was the night the Queen called off her dogs.
It had thrilled me in a way that made me sick. We Cicadas lived in the moral equivalent of de Sitter space, where no ethos had validity unless it was generated by noncausative free will. Every level of Prigoginic Complexity was based on a self-dependent generative catalyst: space existed because space existed, life was because it had come to be, intelligence was because it is. So it was possible for an entire moral system to accrete around a single moment of profound disgust…Or so Posthumanism taught. After my blighted consummation with Valery I withdrew to work and think.
I lived in the Froth, in a domestic-industrial studio that reeked of lichen and was much less chic than Kulagin’s.
On the second day-shift of my meditation I was visited by Arkadya Sorienti, a Polycarbon friend and one of Valery’s intimates. Even without the dogs there were elements of a profound strain between us. It seemed to me that Arkadya was everything that Valery was not: blonde where Valery was dark, covered with Mechanist gimmickry where Valery had the cool elegance of the genetically Reshaped, full of false and brittle gaiety where Valery was prey to soft and melancholy gloom. I offered her a squeezebulb of liqueur; my apartment was too close to the axis to use cups.
“I haven’t seen your apartment before,” she said. “I love your airframes, Hans. What kind of algae is it?”
“It’s lichen,” I said.
“They’re beautiful. One of your special kinds?”
“They’re all special,” I said. “Those have the Mark III and IV varieties for the terraforming project. The others have some delicate strains I was working on for contamination monitors. Lichen are very sensitive to pollution of any sort.” I turned up the air ionizer. The intestines of Mechanists seethed with bacteria, and their effects could be disastrous.
“Which one is the lichen of the Queen’s jewel?”
“It’s locked away,” I said. “Outside the environs of a jewel its growth becomes very distorted. And it smells.” I smiled uneasily. It was common talk among Shapers that Mechanists stank. It seemed to me that I could already smell the reek of her armpits.
Arkadya smiled and nervously rubbed the skin-metal interface of a silvery blob of machinery grafted along her forearm. “Valery’s in one of her states,” she said. “I thought I’d come see how you were.”
In my mind’s eye flickered the nightmare image of our naked skins slicked with blood. I said, “It was…unfortunate.”
“C-K’s full of talk about the Comptroller’s death.”
“It was the Comptroller?” I said. “I haven’t seen any news.”
Slyness crept into her eyes. “You saw him there,” she said.
I was shocked that she should expect me to discuss my stay in a discreet. “I have work,” I said. I kicked my fins so that I drifted off our mutual vertical. Facing each other sideways increased the social distance between us.
She laughed quietly. “Don’t be a prig, Hans. You act as if you were still under the dogs. You have to tell me about it if you want me to help the two of you.”
I stopped my drift. She said, “And I want to help. I’m Valery’s friend. I like the way you look together. It appeals to my sense of aesthetics.”
“Thanks for your concern.”
“I am concerned. I’m tired of seeing her on the arm of an old lecher like Wellspring.”
“You’re telling me they’re lovers?” I said.
She fluttered her metal-clad fingers in the air. “You’re asking me what the two of them do in his favorite discreet? Maybe they play chess.” She rolled her eyes under lids heavy with powdered gold. “Don’t look so shocked, Hans. You should know his power as well as anyone. He’s old and rich; we Polycarbon women are young and not too terribly principled.” She looked quickly up and away from beneath long lashes. “I’ve never heard that he took anything from us that we weren’t willing to give.” She floated closer. “Tell me what you saw, Hans. C-K’s crazy with the news, and Valery does nothing but mope.”
I opened the refrigerator and dug among Petri dishes for more liqueur. “It strikes me that you should be doing the talking, Arkadya.”
She hesitated, then shrugged and smiled. “Now you’re showing some sense, my friend. Open eyes and ears can take you a long way in C-Kluster.” She took a stylish inhaler from a holster on her enameled garter. “And speaking of eyes and ears, have you had your place swept for bugs yet?”
“Who’d bug me?”
“Who wouldn’t?” She looked bored. “I’ll stick to what’s common knowledge, then. Hire us a discreet sometime, and I’ll give you all the rest.” She fired a stream of amber liqueur from arm’s length and sucked it in as it splashed against her teeth. “Something big is stirring in C-K. It hasn’t reached the rank and file yet, but the Comptroller’s death is a sign of it. The other Advisers are treating it like a personal matter, but it’s clear that he wasn’t simply tired of life. He left his affairs in disorder. No, this is something that runs back to the Queen herself. I’m sure of it.”
“You think the Queen ordered him to take his own life?”
“Maybe. She’s getting erratic with age. Wouldn’t you, though, if you had to spend your life surrounded by aliens? I feel for the Queen, I really do. If she needs to kill a few stuffy rich old bastards for her own peace of mind, its perfectly fine by me. In fact, if that’s all there was to it, I’d sleep easier.”
I thought about this, my face impassive. The entire structure of Czarina-Kluster was predicated on the Queen’s exile. For seventy years, defectors, malcontents, pirates, and pacifists had accreted around the refuge of our alien Queen. The powerful prestige of her fe
llow Investors protected us from the predatory machinations of Shaper fascists and dehumanized Mechanist sects. C-K was an oasis of sanity amid the vicious amorality of humanity’s warring factions. Our suburbs spun in webs around the dark hulk of the Queen’s blazing, jeweled environment.
She was all we had. There was a giddy insecurity under all our success. C-K’s famous banks were backed by the Cicada Queen’s tremendous wealth. The academic freedom of C-K’s teaching centers flourished only under her shadow.
And we did not even know why she was disgraced. Rumors abounded, but only the Investors themselves knew the truth. Were she ever to leave us, Czarina-Kluster would disintegrate overnight.
I said offhandedly, “I’ve heard talk that she’s not happy. It seems these rumors spread, and they raise her Percentage for a while and panel a new room with jewels, and then the rumors fade.”
“That’s true…She and our sweet Valery are two of a kind where these dark moods are concerned. It’s clear, though, that the Comptroller was left no choice but suicide. And that means disaster is stirring at the heart of C-K.”
“It’s only rumors,” I said. “The Queen is the heart of C-K, and who knows what’s going on in that huge head of hers?”
“Wellspring would know,” Arkadya said intently.
“But he’s not an Adviser,” I said. “As far as the Queen’s inner circle is concerned, he’s little better than a pirate.”
“Tell me what you saw in Topaz Discreet.”
“You’ll have to allow me some time,” I said. “It’s rather painful.” I wondered what I should tell her, and what she was willing to believe. The silence began to stretch.
I put on a tape of Terran sea sounds. The room began to surge ominously with the roar of alien surf.
“I wasn’t ready for it,” I said. “In my crèche we were taught to guard our feelings from childhood. I know how the Clique feels about distance. But that kind of raw intimacy, from a woman I really scarcely know—especially under that night’s circumstances—it wounded me.” I looked searchingly into Arkadya’s face, longing to reach through her to Valery. “Once it was over, we were further apart than ever.”
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