Paolo burst in suddenly, his eyes wild, his long hair matted with blood. “Quickly! They’re right behind me!” He glanced around. “Give me that panel cover!”
“It’s over, Paolo!”
“Not yet!” Paolo snatched the broad console top from midair. Wiring trailed behind it. He catapulted across the room and slammed the console across the tunnel entrance. Placed flat against it, it formed a crude barricade; Paolo whipped a tube of epoxy from his belt and glued the console top against the stone.
There was a gap to one side; Paolo pulled his slingshot and fired down the corridor. They heard a distant howl. Paolo jammed his face against the gap and screamed with laughter.
“The television, Paolo! News from the Council! The siege is over!”
“The siege?” Paolo said, glancing back at her. “What the fuck does that have to do with us?”
“The siege, the war,” she said. “There never was any war, it’s the new party line. There were just…misunderstandings. Bottlenecks.” Paolo ignored her, staring down the tunnel, readying another shot. “We were never soldiers. Nobody was ever trying to kill anyone. The human race is peaceful, Paolo, just—good trading partners…Aliens are here, Paolo. The aliens.”
“Oh, God,” Paolo moaned. “I just have to kill two more, that’s all, and I already winged the woman. Just help me kill them first, then you can tell me anything you want.” He pressed his shoulder against the barricade, waiting for the epoxy to set.
Nora drifted over him and shouted through one of the console’s instrument holes into the darkness. “Mr. President! This is the diplomat! I want a parley!”
There was silence for a moment. Then: “You crazy bitch! Come out and die!”
“It’s over, Mr. President! The siege is lifted! The System is at peace, do you understand? Aliens, Mr. President! Aliens have arrived, they’ve been here for days already!”
The President laughed. “Sure. Come on out, baby. Send that little fucker with the slingshot out first.” She heard the sudden whine of the power saw.
Paolo pushed her aside with a snarl and fired down the hall. They heard half a dozen sharp clicks as the shot ricocheted far down the tunnel. The President cawed triumphantly. “We’re gonna eat you,” he said, very seriously. “We’re gonna eat your fuckin’ livers.” He lowered his voice. “Take ’em out, State.”
Nora clawed past Paolo and screamed aloud. “Abelard! Abelard, it’s true, I swear it by everything between us! Abelard, you’re not stupid, let us live! I want to live—”
Paolo clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her back. She clung to the barricade, now glued firm, staring down the hall. A white form was drifting there. A spacesuit. Not a Mavrides one, but one of the bloated armored ones from the Red Consensus.
Paolo’s slingshot was useless against the suit. “This is it,” he muttered. “The cusp.” He released Nora and pulled a candle and a flat bladder of liquid from within his blouse. He wrapped the bladder around the candle, cinching it with a sleeve-tie. He hefted the bomb. “Now they burn.”
Nora threw her sash around his neck. She put her good knee into his back and pulled savagely. Paolo made a sound like broken pipes and kicked away from the entrance. He clawed at the sash. He was strong. He was the one with luck.
Nora pulled harder. Abelard was alive. The idea gave her strength. She pulled harder. Paolo was pulling just as hard. His fists were locked around the belt’s gray fabric so hard that blood oozed from his nail-cut palms in little crescent blisters.
There were screams down the hall. Screams and the sound of the power saw.
And now the knot that had never left her shoulders had spread into her arms and Paolo was pulling against muscle that had set like iron. He was not breathing in the sudden silence that followed. The wrinkled ridge of the sash had vanished into his neck. He was dead, still pulling.
She let the ends of the sash slide through her cramped fingers. Paolo twisted slowly in free-fall, his face blackened, his arms locked in place. He seemed to be strangling himself.
A gauntleted hand, drenched in blood, came through the crescent hole at the side of the barricade. There was a muffled buzzing from within the spacesuit. He was trying to talk.
She rushed to his side. He leaned his head against the outside of the barricade, shouting within the helmet. “Dead!” he said. “They’re dead!”
“Take off the helmet,” she said.
He shrugged his right shoulder within the suit. “My arm!” he said.
She stuck one hand through the crevice and helped him twist the helmet off. It popped free with a suck of air and the familiar reek of his body. There were half-dried scabs of blood under his nostrils and one in his left ear. He had been decompressed.
Carefully, she ran her hand across his sweating cheek. “We’re alive, aren’t we?”
“They were going to kill you,” he said. “I couldn’t let them.”
“The same for me.” She looked backward at Paolo. “It was like suicide to kill him. I think I’m dead.”
“No. We belong to each other. Say so, Nora.”
“Yes, we do,” she said, and pressed her face blindly against the gap between them. He kissed her with the bright salt taste of blood.
The demolition had been thorough. Kleo had finished the job. She had crept out in a spacesuit and soaked the inside of the Red Consensus with sticky contact venom.
But Lindsay had gone there before her. He had leaped the gap of naked space, decompressing himself, to get one of the armored spacesuits. He’d caught Kleo in the control room. In her thin suit she was no match for him; he’d ripped her suit open and she’d died of the poison.
Even the Family’s robot had suffered. The two Reps had lobotomized it while passing through the decoy room. Operations by the launch ring ran at manic speed, the brain-stripped robot loading ton after ton of carbon ore into the overstuffed and belching wetware. A frothing mass of plastic output gushed into the launch ring, which was itself ruined by the skidding launch cage. But that was the least of their problems.
The worst was sepsis. The organisms brought from the Zaibatsu wreaked havoc on the delicate biosystems of ESAIRS XII. Kleo’s garden was a leprous parody five weeks after the slaughter.
The attenuated blossoms of the Shaper garden mildewed and crumbled at the touch of raw humanity. The vegetation took strange forms as it suffered and contorted, its stems corkscrewing in rot-dusted perversions of growth. Lindsay visited it daily, and his very presence hastened the corruption. The place smelled of the Zaibatsu, and his lungs ached with its nostalgic stench.
He had brought it with him. No matter how fast he moved, he dragged behind him a fatal slipstream of the past.
He and Nora would never be free of it. It was not just the contagion, or his useless arm. Nor the galaxy of rashes that disfigured Nora for days, crusting her perfect skin and filling her eyes with flinty stoicism. It dated back to the training they had shared, the damage done to them. It made them partners, and Lindsay realized that this was the finest thing that life had ever offered him.
He thought about death as he watched the Shaper robot at its task. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, it loaded ore into the distended guts of the decoy wetware. After the two of them had smothered, this machine would continue indefinitely in its hyperactive parody of life. He could have shut it down, but he felt a kinship with it. Its headlong, blind persistence cheered him somehow. And the fact that it was pumping tons of frothing plastic into the launch ring, ruining it, meant that the pirates had won. He could not bear to rob them of that useless victory.
As the air grew fouler they were forced to retreat, sealing the tunnels behind them. They stayed near the last operative industrial gardens, shallowly breathing the hay-scented air, making love and trying to heal each other.
With Nora, he reentered Shaper life, with its subtleties, its allusions, its painful brilliance. And slowly, with him, her sharpest edges were smoothed. She lost the worst kinks, the hardest knots, the most i
nsupportable levels of stress.
They turned down the power so that the tunnels grew colder, retarding the spread of the contagion. At night they clung together for warmth, swaddled in a carpet-sized shroud that Nora compulsively embroidered.
She would not give up. She had a core of unnatural energy that Lindsay could not match. For days she had worked on repairs in the radio room, though she knew it was useless.
Shaper Ring Security had stopped broadcasting. Their military outposts had become embarrassments. Mechanists were evacuating them and repatriating their Shaper crews to the Ring Council with exquisite diplomatic courtesy. There had never been any war. No one was fighting. The cartels were buying out their pirate clients and hastily pacifying them.
All this was waiting for them if they could only raise their voices. But their broadcast equipment was ruined; the circuits were irreplaceable, and the two of them were not technicians.
Lindsay had accepted death. No one would come for them; they would assume that the outpost was wiped out. Eventually, he thought, someone would check, but not for years.
One night, after making love, Lindsay stayed up, toying with the dead pirate’s mechanical arm. It fascinated him, and it was a solace; by dying young, he thought, he had at least escaped this. His own right arm had lost almost all feeling. The nerves had deteriorated steadily since the incident with the gun, and his battle wounds had only hastened it.
“Those damned guns,” he said aloud. “Someone will find this place someday. We ought to tear those fucking guns apart, to show the world that we had decency. I’d do it but I can’t bear to touch them.”
Nora was drowsy. “So what? They don’t work.”
“Sure, they’re disarmed.” That had been one of his triumphs. “But they could be armed again. They’re evil, darling. We should smash them.”
“If you care that much…” Nora’s eyes opened. “Abelard. What if we fired one?”
“No,” he said at once.
“What if we blew up the Consensus with the particle beam? Someone would see.”
“See what? That we were criminals?”
“In the past it would just be dead pirates. Business as usual. But now it would be a scandal. Someone would have to come after us. To see that it never happened again.”
“You’d risk this facade of peace that they’re showing the aliens? Just on the chance that someone would rescue us? Fire, imagine what they’d do to us when they came.”
“What? Kill us? We’re dead already. I want us to live.”
“As criminals? Despised by everyone?”
Nora smiled bitterly. “That’s nothing new for me.”
“No, Nora. There are limits.”
She caressed him. “I understand.”
Two nights later he woke in terror as the asteroid shook. Nora was gone. At first he thought it was a meteor strike, a rare but terrifying event. He listened for the hiss of blowout, but the tunnels were still sound.
When he saw Nora’s face he realized the truth. “You fired the gun.”
She was shaken. “I cast the Consensus loose before I shot it. I went out on the surface. There’s something weird there, Abelard. Plastic has been leaking out of the launch ring into space.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“I had to do it. For us. Forgive me, darling. I swear I’ll never deceive you again.”
He brooded. “You think they’ll come?”
“It’s a chance. I wanted a chance for us.” She was distracted. “Tons of plastic. Squeezing out like paste. Like a huge worm.”
“An accident,” Lindsay said. “We’ll have to tell them that it was an accident.”
“I’ll destroy the gun now.” She looked at him guiltily.
“What’s done is done.” He smiled sadly and reached toward her. “Let it wait.”
ESAIRS XII: 17-7-’17
Somewhere in his dreams Lindsay heard a repeated pounding. As always, Nora woke first and was instantly alert. “Noise, Abelard.”
Lindsay woke painfully, his eyelids gummy. “What is it? A blowout?”
She slipped out of the sheets, launching herself off his hip with one bare foot. She hit the lights. “Get up, darling. Whatever it is, we’re meeting it head on.”
It was not the way Lindsay would have preferred to meet death but he was willing to go along with her. He pulled on drawstring pants and a poncho.
“There’s no breeze,” she said as he struggled with a complex Shaper knot. “It’s not decompression.”
“Then it’s a rescue! The Mechs!”
They hurried through darkened tunnels to the airlock.
One of their rescuers—he must have been a courageous one—had managed to force his vast bulk through the airlock and into the loading room. He was picking fussily at the huge birdlike toes of his spacesuit as Lindsay peered out of the access tunnel, squinting and shielding his eyes.
The alien had a powerful searchlight mounted on the nasal bridge of his cavernous spacesuit helmet. The light gushing from it was as vivid as a welding torch: harsh and electric blue, heavily tinged with ultraviolet. The spacesuit was brown and gray, dotted with input sockets and accordion-ribbed around the alien’s joints.
The light swept across them and Lindsay squinted, averting his face. “You may call me the Ensign,” the alien said in trade English. He politely aligned himself with their vertical axis, stretching overhead to finger-walk along the wall.
Lindsay put his hand on Nora’s forearm. “I’m Abelard,” he said. “This is Nora.”
“How do you do? We want to discuss this property.” The alien reached into a side pocket and pulled out a wad of tissue. He shook it out with a quick birdlike motion, and it became a television. He put the screen against the wall. Lindsay, watching carefully, saw that the television had no scan lines. The image was formed in millions of tiny colored hexagons.
The image was ESAIRS XII. Bursting from the launch ring’s exit hole was an extruded tube of foamed plastic almost half a kilometer long. There was a rough knob at the tip of the wormlike coil. Lindsay realized with instantly smothered shock that it was Paolo’s stone head, neatly framed in the flowerlike wreckage of the launch cage. The entire mass had been smoothly embedded in the decoy complex’s leakage of plastic, then squeezed out under pressure into a coiling helical arc.
“I see,” Lindsay said.
“Are you the artist?”
“Yes,” Lindsay said. He pointed at the screen. “Notice the subtle shading effect where our recent blast darkened the sculpture.”
“We noticed the explosion,” the alien said. “An unusual artistic technique.”
“We are unusual,” Lindsay said. “We are unique.”
“I agree,” the Ensign said politely. “We seldom see work on this scale. Do you accept negotiations for purchase?”
Lindsay smiled. “Let’s talk.”
Chapter 5
By fits and starts the world entered a new age. The aliens benignly accepted a semidivine mystique. Millennial fervor swept the System. Détente came into vogue. People began to speak, for the first time, of the Schismatrix—of a posthuman solar system, diverse yet unified, where tolerance would rule and every faction would have a share.
The aliens—they called themselves the Investors—seemed unlimited in power. They were ancient, so old that they remembered no tradition earlier than starflight. Their mighty starships ranged a vast economic realm, buying and selling among nineteen other intelligent races. Obviously they possessed technologies so potent that, if they chose, they could shatter the narrow world a hundred times over. Humanity rejoiced that the aliens seemed so serenely affable. The goods they offered were almost always harmless, often artworks of vast academic interest and surprisingly small practicality.
Human wealth poured into the alien coffers. Tiny embassies traveled to the stars in Investor ships. They failed to accomplish much, and they remained tiny, because the Investors charged fares that were astronomical.
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br /> The Investors recycled the riches they tapped from the human economy. They bought into human enterprises. With a single technological novelty from one of their packed holds, the aliens could transform a flagging industry into a rocketing growth stock. Factions competed wildly for their favor. And uncooperative worlds soon learned how easily they could be outflanked and rendered obsolete.
Trade flourished in the new Investor Peace. Open warfare became vulgar, replaced by the polite covertness of rampant industrial espionage. With each new year, a golden age seemed just out of reach. And the years passed, and passed.
GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 3-4-’37
The crowd pleased Lindsay. People filled the air around him: colored jackets with a froth of lace, legs in patterned stockings with sleek five-toed foot-gloves. The air in the theatre lobby reeked of Shaper perfumes.
Lindsay lounged against one patterned velvet wall, his jacketed elbow hooked through a mooring-loop. He dressed in the cutting edge of fashion: sea-green brocade jacket, green satin kneelongs, stockings pinstriped in yellow. His feet were elegantly gloved for free-fall. A gold-chained video monocle gleamed in his waistcoat.
Braids interlaced with yellow cord bound his long, graying hair.
Lindsay was fifty-one. Among the Shapers he passed for one much older—some genetic from the dawn of Shaper history. There were many such in Goldreich-Tremaine, one of the oldest Shaper city-states in the Rings of Saturn.
A Mechanist emerged into the lobby from the theatre. He wore a ribbed one-piece suit in tasteful mahogany brown. He noticed Lindsay and kicked off from the doorway, floating toward him.
Lindsay reached out in friendly fashion and stopped the man’s momentum. Beneath his sleeve, Lindsay’s prosthetic right arm whined slightly with the movement. “Good evening, Mr. Beyer.”
The handsome Mechanist nodded and took a mooring-loop. “Good evening, Dr. Mavrides. Always a pleasure.”
Beyer was with the Ceres Legation. He was Undersecretary for Cultural Affairs, a colorless title meant to camouflage his affiliation with Mech intelligence.
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