“Sure,” said Ryumin. “They love it. It’s great. Don’t worry.”
Lindsay scratched his floating, puffy hair. “I don’t quite know what to make of this.”
A camouflaged surveillance plane had forced itself into the Bubble just before the structure was sealed shut. Against the bright triangular pastels, its dreary camouflage made it as obvious as a severed thumb. The machine yawed and dipped within the fifty-meter chamber, its lenses and shotgun microphones swiveling relentlessly. Lindsay was glad it was there, but it bothered him.
“I have the feeling I’ve heard this story before,” he said. He flipped through the printout’s pages. The margins were thick with cartoon stick figures scribbled there for the illiterate. “Let me see if I have it right. A group of pirates in the Trojan asteroids have kidnapped a Shaper woman. She’s some kind of weapons specialist, am I right?”
Ryumin nodded. He had taken his new prosperity in stride. He wore ribbed silk coveralls in a tasteful shade of navy and a loose beret, high fashion in the Mech cartels. A silver microphone bead dotted his upper lip.
Lindsay said, “The Shapers are terrified by what the pirates might do with her expertise. So they form an alliance and put the pirates under siege. Finally they trick their way in and burn the place out.” Lindsay looked up. “Did it really happen, or didn’t it?”
“It’s an old story,” Ryumin said. “Something like that actually happened once; I feel sure of it. But I filed off the serial numbers and made it my own.”
Lindsay smoothed his kimono. “I could swear that…hell. They say if you forget something while you’re on vasopressin, you’ll never remember it. It causes mnemonic burnout.” He shook the script in resignation.
“Can you direct it?” Ryumin said.
Lindsay shook his head. “I wanted to, but it might be best if I left it to you. You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“No,” Ryumin said cheerfully. “Do you?”
“No…The situation’s getting out of hand. Outside investors keep trying to buy Kabuki stock. Word got out through the Geisha Bank’s contacts. I’m afraid that the Nephrine Black Medicals will sell their Kabuki holdings to some Mech cartel. And then…I don’t know…it’ll mean—”
“It’ll mean that Kabuki Intrasolar has become a legitimate business.”
“Yes.” Lindsay grimaced. “It looks like the Black Medicals will escape unscathed. They’ll even profit. The Geisha Bank won’t like it.”
“What of it?” said Ryumin. “We have to keep moving forward or the whole thing falls apart. The Bank’s already made a killing selling Kabuki stock to the Black Medicals. The old crone who runs the Bank is crazy about you. The whores talk about you constantly.”
He gestured at the center stage. It was a spherical area crisscrossed with padded wires, where a dozen actors were going through their paces. They flung themselves through free-fall aerobatics, catching the wires, spinning, looping, and rebounding.
Two of them collided bruisingly and clawed the air for a handhold. Ryumin said, “Those acrobats are pirates, you understand? Four months ago they would have slit each other’s throats for a kilowatt. But not now, Mr. Dze. Now they have too much at stake. They’re stage-struck.”
Ryumin laughed conspiratorially.
“For once they’re more than pocket terrorists. Even the whores are more than sex toys. They’re real actors, with a real script and a real audience. It doesn’t matter that you and I know it’s a fraud, Mr. Dze. A symbol has meaning if someone gives it meaning. And they’re giving it everything they have.”
Lindsay watched the actors begin their routine again. They flew from wire to wire with feverish determination. “It’s pathetic,” he said.
“A tragedy to those who feel. A comedy to those who think,” Ryumin said.
Lindsay stared at him suspiciously. “What’s gotten into you, anyway? What are you up to?”
Ryumin pursed his lips and looked elaborately nonchalant. “My needs are simple. Every decade or so I like to return to the cartels and see if they’ve made any progress with these bones of mine. Progressive calcium loss is not a laughing matter. Frankly, I’m getting brittle.” He looked at Lindsay. “And what about you, Mr. Dze?”
He patted Lindsay’s shoulder.
“Why not tag along with me? It would do you good to see more of the System. There are two hundred million people in space. Hundreds of habitats, an explosion of cultures. They’re not all scraping out a living on the edge of survival, like these poor bezprizorniki. Most of them are the bourgeoisie. Their lives are snug and rich! Maybe technology eventually turns them into something you wouldn’t call human. But that’s a choice they make—a rational choice.” Ryumin waved his hands expansively. “This Zaibatsu is only a criminal enclave. Come with me and let me show you the fat of the System. You need to see the cartels.”
“The cartels…” Lindsay said. To join the Mechanists would mean surrendering to the ideals of the Radical Old. He looked around him, and his pride flared. “Let them come to me!”
THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE’S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 1-6-’16
For the first performance, Lindsay gave up his finery for a general-issue jumpsuit. He covered his diplomatic bag with burlap to hide the Kabuki decals.
It seemed that every sundog in the world had filtered into the Bubble. They numbered over a thousand. The Bubble could not have held them, except in free-fall. There were light opera-box frameworks for the Bank elite, and a jackstraw complex of padded bracing wires where the audience clung like roosting sparrows.
Most floated freely. The crowd formed a percolating mass of loose concentric spheres. Broad tunnels had opened spontaneously in the mass of bodies, following the complex kinesics of crowd flow. There was a constant excited murmur in a flurry of differing argots.
The play began. Lindsay watched the crowd. Brief shoving matches broke out during the first fanfare, but by the time the dialogue started the crowd had settled. Lindsay was thankful for that. He missed his usual bodyguard of Fortuna pirates.
The pirates had finished their obligations to him and were busy preparing their ship for departure. Lindsay, though, felt safe in his anonymity. If the play failed disastrously, he would simply be one sundog among others. If it went well, he could change in time to accept the applause.
In the first abduction scene, pirates kidnapped the young and beautiful weapons genius, played by one of Kitsune’s best. The audience screamed in delight at the puffs of artificial smoke and bright free-fall gushes of fake blood.
Lexicon computers throughout the Bubble translated the script into a dozen tongues and dialects. It seemed unlikely that this polyglot crowd could grasp the dialogue. To Lindsay it sounded like naive mush, mangled by mistranslation. But they listened raptly.
After an hour, the first three acts were over. A long intermission followed, in which the central stage was darkened. Rude claques had formed spontaneously for the cast members, as pirate groups shouted for their own.
Lindsay’s nose stung. The air inside the Bubble had been supercharged with oxygen, to give the crowd a hyperventilated élan. Despite himself, Lindsay too felt elation. The hoarse shouts of enthusiasm were contagious. The situation was moving with its own dynamics. It was out of his hands.
Lindsay drifted toward the Bubble’s walls, where some enterprising oxygen farmers had set up a concessions stand.
The farmers, clinging awkwardly to footloops on the Bubble’s frame, were doing a brisk business. They sold their own native delicacies: anonymous green patties fried up crisp, and white blobby cubes on a stick, piping hot from the microwave. Kabuki Intrasolar took a cut, since the food stands were Lindsay’s idea. The farmers paid happily in Kabuki stock.
Lindsay had been careful with the stock. He had meant at first to inflate it past all measure and thereby ruin the Black Medicals. But the miraculous power of paper money had seduced him. He had waited too long, and the Black Medicals had sold their stock to outside
investors, at an irresistible profit.
Now the Black Medicals were safe from him—and grateful. They sincerely respected him and nagged him constantly for further tips on the market.
Everyone was happy. He foresaw a long run for the play. After that, Lindsay thought, there would be other schemes, bigger and better ones. This aimless sundog world was perfect for him. It only asked that he never stop, never look back, never look farther forward than the next swindle.
Kitsune would see to that. He glanced at her opera box and saw her floating with carnivorous meekness behind the Bank’s senior officers, her dupes. She would not allow him any doubts or regrets. He felt obscurely glad for it. With her limitless ambition to drive him, he could avoid his own conflicts.
They had the world in their pocket. But below his giddy sense of triumph a faint persistent pain roiled through him. He knew that Kitsune was simply and purely relentless. But Lindsay had a fault line through him, an aching seam where his training met his other self. Now, at his finest moment, when he wanted to relax and feel an honest joy, it came up tainted.
All around him the crowd was exulting. Yet something within him made him shrink from joining them. He felt cheated, twisted, robbed of something that he couldn’t grip.
He reached for his inhaler. A good chemical whiff would boost his discipline.
Something tugged the fabric of his jumpsuit, from behind him, to his left. He glanced quickly over his shoulder.
A black-haired, rangy young man with flinty gray eyes had seized his jumpsuit with the muscular bare toes of his right foot. “Hey, target,” the man said. He smiled pleasantly. Lindsay watched the man’s face for kinesics and realized with a dull shock that the face was his own.
“Take it easy, target,” the assassin said. Lindsay heard his own voice from the assassin’s mouth.
The face was subtly wrong. The skin looked too clean, too new. It looked synthetic.
Lindsay twisted around. The assassin held a bracing wire with both hands, but he reached out with his left foot and caught Lindsay’s wrist between his two largest toes. His foot bulged with abnormal musculature and the joints looked altered. His grip was paralyzing. Lindsay felt his hand go numb.
The man jabbed Lindsay’s chest with the toe of his other foot. “Relax,” he said. “Let’s talk a moment.”
Lindsay’s training took hold. His adrenaline surge of terror transmuted into icy self-possession. “How do you like the performance?” he said.
The man laughed. Lindsay knew that he was hearing the assassin’s true voice; his laugh was chilling. “These moondock worlds are full of surprises,” he said.
“You should have joined the cast,” Lindsay said. “You have a talent for impersonation.”
“It comes and goes,” the assassin said. He bent his altered ankle slightly, and the bones of Lindsay’s wrist grated together with a sudden lancing pain that made blackness surge behind his eyes. “What’s in the bag, targ? Something they’d like to know about back home?”
“In the Ring Council?”
“That’s right. They say they have us under siege, all those Mech wireheads, but not every cartel is as straight as the last. And we’re well trained. We can hide under the spots on a dip’s conscience.”
“That’s clever,” Lindsay said. “I admire a good technique. Maybe we could arrange something.”
“That would be interesting,” the assassin said politely. Lindsay realized then that no bribe could save him from this man.
The assassin released Lindsay’s wrist. He reached into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit with his left foot. His knee and hip swiveled eerily. “This is for you,” he said. He released a black videotape cartridge. It spun in free-fall before Lindsay’s eyes.
Lindsay took the cartridge and pocketed it. He snapped the pocket shut and looked up again. The assassin had vanished. In his place was a portly male sundog in the same kind of general-issue dun-brown jumpsuit. He was heavier than the assassin and his hair was blond. The man looked at him indifferently.
Lindsay reached out as if to touch him, then snatched his hand back before the man could notice.
The lights went up. Dancers came onstage. The Bubble rang with howls of enthusiasm. Lindsay fled along the Bubble’s walls through a nest of legs tucked through footloops and arms clutching handholds. He reached the anterior airlock.
He hired one of the aircraft moored outside the lock and flew at once to the Geisha Bank.
The place was almost deserted, but his credit card got him in. The enormous guards recognized him and bowed. Lindsay hesitated, then realized he had nothing to say. What could he tell them? “Kill me, next time you see me?”
To catch birds with a mirror was the ideal snare.
The yarite’s network of beads would protect him. Kitsune had taught him how to work the beads from within. Even if the assassin avoided the traps, he could be struck down from within by high voltage or sharp fléchettes.
Lindsay walked the pattern flawlessly and burst into the yarite’s quarters. He opened a videoscreen, flicked it on, and loaded the tape.
It was a face from his past: the face of his best friend, the man who had tried to kill him, Philip Khouri Constantine.
“Hello, cousin,” Constantine said.
The term was aristocratic slang in the Republic. But Constantine was a plebe. And Lindsay had never heard him put such hatred into the word.
“I take the liberty of contacting you in exile.” Constantine looked drunk. He was speaking a little too precisely. The ring-shaped collar of his antique suit showed sweat on the olive skin of his throat. “Some of my Shaper friends share my interest in your career. They don’t call these agents assassins. The Shapers call them ‘antibiotics.’
“They’ve been operating here. The opposition is much less troublesome with so many dead from ‘natural causes.’ My old trick with the moths looks juvenile now. Very brash and risky.
“Still, the insects worked well enough, out here in the moondocks…Time flies, cousin. Five months have changed things.
“The Mechanist siege is failing. When the Shapers are trapped and squeezed, they ooze out under pressure. They can’t be beaten. We used to tell each other that, when we were boys, remember, Abelard? When our future seemed so bright we almost blinded each other, sometimes. Back before we knew what a bloodstain was…
“This Republic needs the Shapers. The colony’s rotting. They can’t survive without the biosciences. Everyone knows it, even the Radical Old.
“We never really talked to those old wireheads, cousin. You wouldn’t let me; you hated them too much. And now I know why you were afraid to face them. They’re tainted, Abelard, like you are. In a way, they’re your mirror image. By now you know what a shock it is to see one.” Constantine grinned and smoothed his wavy hair with a small, deft hand.
“But I talked to them, I came to terms…There’s been a coup here, Abelard. The Advisory Council is dissolved. Power belongs to the Executive Board for National Survival. That’s me, and a few of our Preservationist friends. Vera’s death changed everything, as we knew it would. Now we have our martyr. Now we’re full of steel and fury.
“The Radical Old are leaving. Emigrating to the Mech cartels, where they belong. The aristocrats will have to pay the costs for it.
“There are others coming your way, cousin. The whole mob of broken-down aristos: Lindsays, Tylers, Kellands, Morrisseys. Political exiles. Your wife is with them. They’re squeezed dry between their Shaper children and their Mechanist grandparents, and thrown out like garbage. They’re all yours.
“I want you to mop up after me, tie up my loose ends. If you won’t accept that, then go back to my messenger. He’ll settle you.” Constantine grinned, showing small, even teeth. “Except for death, you can’t escape the game. You and Vera both knew that. And now I’m king, you’re pawn.”
Lindsay shut off the tape.
He was ruined. The Kabuki Bubble had assumed a grotesque solidity; it was his own amb
itions that had burst.
He was trapped. He would be unmasked by the Republic’s refugees. His glittering deceptions would fly apart to leave him naked and exposed. Kitsune would know him for what he was: a human upstart, not her Shaper lover.
His mind raced within the cage. To live here under Constantine’s terms, in his control, in his contempt—the thought scalded him.
He had to escape. He had to leave this world at once. He had no time left for scheming.
Outside, the assassin was waiting, with Lindsay’s own stolen face. To meet him again was death. But he might escape the man if he disappeared at once. And that meant the pirates.
Lindsay rubbed his bruised wrist. Slow fury built in him: fury at the Shapers and the destructive cleverness they had used to survive. Their struggle left a legacy of monsters. The assassin. Constantine. Himself.
Constantine was younger than Lindsay. He had trusted Lindsay, looked up to him. But when Lindsay had come back on furlough from the Ring Council, he’d painfully felt how deeply the Shapers had changed him. And he had deliberately sent Constantine into their hands. As always, he had made it sound plausible, and Constantine’s new skills were truly crucial. But Lindsay knew that he had done it selfishly, so that he’d have company, outside the pale.
Constantine had always been ambitious. But where there had been trust, Lindsay had brought a new sophistication and deceit. Where he and Constantine had shared ideals, they now shared murder.
Lindsay felt an ugly kinship with the assassin. The assassin’s training must have been much like his own. His own self-hatred added sudden venom to his fear of the man.
The assassin had Lindsay’s face. But Lindsay realized with a sudden flash of insight that he could turn the man’s own strength against him.
He could pose as the assassin, turn the situation around. He could commit some awful crime, and the assassin would be blamed.
Kitsune needed a crime. It would be his farewell gift to her, a message only she would understand. He could free her, and his enemy would pay the price.
He opened the diplomatic bag and tossed aside his paper heap of stocks. He opened the floorboards and stared at the body of the old woman, floating naked on the wrinkled surface of the waterbed. Then he searched the room for something that would cut.
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