Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

“I don’t often see you during this day-shift, Mr. Beyer.”

  “I’m slumming,” Beyer said comfortably. Life in Goldreich-Tremaine ran around the clock; the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight, was the loosest and least policed. A Mechanist could mingle during the graveyard shift without attracting stares.

  “Are you enjoying the play, sir?”

  “A triumph. As good as Ryumin, I’d say. This author—Fernand Vetterling—his work is new to me.”

  “He’s a local youngster. One of our best.”

  “Ah. One of your protégés. I appreciate his Détentiste sentiments. We’re having a little soiree at the Embassy later this week. I’d like to meet Mr. Vetterling. To express my admiration.”

  Lindsay smiled evasively. “You’re always welcome at my home, Mr. Beyer. Nora speaks of you often.”

  “How flattering. Colonel-Doctor Mavrides is a charming hostess.” Beyer hid his disappointment, but his kinesics showed signs of impatience.

  Beyer wanted to leave, to touch base with some other social doyen. Lindsay bore him no resentment for it; it was the man’s job.

  Lindsay himself held a rank in Security. He was Captain-Doctor Abelard Mavrides, an instructor in Investor sociology at Goldreich-Tremaine Kosmosity. Even in these days of the Investor Peace, a rank in Security was mandatory for those in the Shaper academic-military complex. Lindsay played the game, as they all did.

  In his role as theatrical manager, Lindsay never alluded to his rank. But Beyer was well aware of it, and only the grease of diplomatic politesse allowed them to be friends.

  Beyer’s light-blue eyes scanned the crowded lobby, and his face stiffened. Lindsay followed the man’s gaze.

  Beyer had spotted someone. Lindsay sized the man up at once: microphone lip bead, ear-clasp audiophones, clothing that lacked finesse. A bodyguard. And not a Shaper: the man’s hair was sleeked back with antiseptic oils, and his face lacked Shaper symmetry.

  Lindsay reached for his video monocle, fitted it to his right eye, and began filming.

  Beyer noticed the gesture and smiled with a hint of sourness. “There are four of them,” he said. “Your production has attracted a man of distinction.”

  “They look like Concatenates,” Lindsay said.

  “A state visit,” Beyer said. “He is here incognito. It’s the head of state from the Mare Serenitatis Republic. Chairman Philip Khouri Constantine.”

  Lindsay turned aside. “I don’t know the gentleman.”

  “He is not a friend of Détente,” Beyer said. “I know him only by reputation. I can’t introduce you.”

  Lindsay moved along the wall, keeping his back to the crowd. “I must visit my office. Will you join me for a smoke?”

  “Lung-smoking?” Beyer said. “I never acquired the habit.”

  “Then you must excuse me.” Lindsay fled.

  “After twenty years,” said Nora Mavrides. She sat before her console, her Security jacket thrown carelessly over her shoulders, a black cape over her amber-colored blouse.

  “What’s possessed him?” Lindsay demanded. “Isn’t the Republic enough for him?”

  Nora thought aloud. “The militants must have brought him here. They need him to back their cause here in the capital. He has prestige. And he’s no Détentiste.”

  “That’s plausible,” Lindsay said, “but only if you turn it around. The militants think Constantine is their pet unplanned, their loyal general, but they don’t know his ambitions. Or his potential. He’s manipulated them.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think he would have recognized me if he had.” Lindsay stuck his spoon moodily into a carton of medicinal yogurt. “My age disguises me.”

  “My heart sank when I saw the film from your monocle. Abelard, these years, they’ve been so good to us. If he knew who you were, he could ruin us.”

  “Not completely.” Lindsay forced himself to eat, grimacing. The yogurt was a special preparation for non-Shapers whose intestines had been rendered antiseptic. It was bitter with digestive enzymes. “Constantine could denounce me. But what if he does? We’d still have the aliens. The Investors don’t give a damn about my genetics, my training…The aliens could be our refuge.”

  “We should attack Constantine. He’s a killer.”

  “We’re not the ones to talk on that score, darling.” Lindsay gripped the carton with his mechanical hand; its thin walls buckled precisely. “I always meant to avoid him if I could. It was something I fell into, a roll of the dice…”

  “Don’t talk that way. As if it were something we can’t help.”

  Lindsay drummed his iron fingers. Even the arm was part of his disguise. The antique prosthetic had once belonged to the Chief Justice, and Lindsay’s affectation of it hinted at great age.

  On the wall of Nora’s office, a huge satellite telephoto of the Saturnian surface crawled slowly, red winds interlacing streams of muddy gold. “We could leave,” Lindsay said. “There are other Council States. Kirkwood Gap’s all right. Cassini-Kluster.”

  “And give up everything we’ve built here?”

  Lindsay watched the screen abstractly. “You’re all I want.”

  “I want that tenure, Abelard. That Colonel-Professorship. If we go, what about the children? What about our Clique? They depend on us.”

  “You’re right. This is our home.”

  “You’re making too much of this,” Nora said. “He’ll return to the Republic soon. If Goldreich-Tremaine weren’t the capital now, he wouldn’t be here.”

  Children laughed in the next room; from her console, Nora turned down the audio. Lindsay said, “There’s a horror between Philip and myself. We know too much about each other.”

  “Don’t be a fatalist, darling. I’m not going to sit with folded hands while some unplanned upstart attacks my husband.”

  Nora left her console and walked across to him. A centrifugal half-gravity tugged at her skirt and sleeve laces. Lindsay pulled her into his lap and ran his human hand across the serpentine curls of her hair. “Let him be, Nora. Otherwise it will come to killing again.”

  She kissed him. “You were alone in the past. Now you’re a match for him. We have our Midnight Clique. We have the Mavrides line, the Investors, my rank in Security. We have our good trust. This life belongs to us.”

  GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 13-4-’37

  Philip Constantine watched his ship’s departure through his video monocle. The monocle pleased him. He liked its stylishness. Constantine took pains to stay abreast of such developments. Fashions were powerful manipulations.

  Especially among the Reshaped. Behind his ship, the Friendship Serene, the Goldreich-Tremaine complex spun in gyroscopic counterclockwork. Constantine studied the city’s image, broadcast to his monocle from a camera mounted on the ship’s hull.

  The orbiting city taught an object lesson in Shaper history.

  Its core was the dark, heavily shielded cylinder that had sheltered the earliest settlers: desperate pioneers, driven to mine the Rings of Saturn despite their sleets of radiation and complex electrical storms. The central core of Goldreich-Tremaine was as dark as a nut, a stubborn acorn that had endured and broken forth at last into fantastic growth. Hubbed spheres wheeled about it, radar installations slid with sleek precision on external tracks, two huge tubed suburbs turned in counterbalanced array on white ceramic stems. And all about the inner complex was a lacy network of habitats in free-fall. Outside the bubbled suburbs—the “subbles”—loomed the immaterial walls of the Bottle.

  The Friendship Serene hit the flaw in the Bottle. Colored static raced across Constantine’s monocle, and Goldreich-Tremaine disappeared. It was visible now only by its absence: a lozenge of dark fog in the white ice-rubble of the Ring. The dark fog was the Bottle itself: a magnetic tokamak field eight kilometers long, shielding the Shaper city-state within a fusion-powered web.

  This far from the sun, solar kilowatts were useless. The Reshaped had their own su
ns, bright fusion cores in every Council State: Goldreich-Tremaine, Dermott-Gold-Murray, Tauri Phase, Kirkwood Gap, Synchronis, Cassini-Kluster, Encke-Kluster, Skimmers Union, Arsenal…Constantine knew them all.

  Ghost acceleration wafted across him as the engines cut in. The Goldreich-Tremaine weather station had cleared them for launch; there was no chance of a crippling ring-lightning strike. Background radiation was light. With the new Shaper drives he faced mere weeks of travel.

  The playwright, Zeuner, entered the cabin and seated himself beside Constantine. “It’s gone,” he said.

  “Homesick already, Carl?” Constantine looked up at the larger man.

  “For Goldreich-Tremaine? Yes. For the people? That’s another matter.”

  “Someday you’ll return in triumph.”

  “Very kind of you to say so, your excellency.” Zeuner ran one fawn-colored glove over his chin. Constantine noted that the Republic’s standard bacteria were already spotting the man’s neck.

  “Forget titles of state,” Constantine said. “In the Ring Council it’s politesse. In the Republic, it smacks of aristocracy. Our local form of bad ideology.”

  “I see, Dr. Constantine. I’ll be more careful in the future.” Zeuner’s clean-shaven face had the anonymous beauty of the Reshaped. He dressed with fussy precision in understated browns and beiges.

  Constantine tucked the monocle into his copper-threaded velvet waistcoat. Beneath his embroidered linen jacket, his back had begun to sweat. The skin of his back was peeling where the rejuvenation virus ate at aging cells. For twenty years the infestation had wandered over his body, the first reward for his loyalty to the Shaper cause. Where the virus had worked, his olive skin had a child’s smoothness.

  Zeuner examined the cabin walls. The heavy insulation was stitched with pointillistic tapestries depicting the Republic. Orchards spread under bright clouds, sunlight fell with cathedral-like solemnity across golden wheatfields, ultralight aircraft dipped over stone-walled mansions with red-tiled roofs. The vistas were as clean as a travel brochure’s. Zeuner said, “What’s it really like, your Republic?”

  “A backwater,” Constantine said. “An antique. Before our Revolution, the Republic was rotting. Not just socially. Physically. An ecosystem that large needs total genetic control. But the builders didn’t care about the long run. In the long run they were all dead.”

  Constantine steepled his fingers. “Now we inherit their mess. The Concatenation exiled its visionaries. Their genetics theorists, for instance, who formed the Ring Council. The Concatenates were squeamish. Now they have lost all power. They are client states.”

  “You think we’ll win, doctor? The Shapers?”

  “Yes.” Constantine gave the man one of his rare smiles. “Because we understand what this struggle is about. Life. I don’t mean that the Mechs will be annihilated. They may totter on for whole centuries. But they will be cut off. They’ll be cybernetic, not living flesh. That’s a dead end, because there’s no will behind it. No imperatives. Only programming. No imagination.”

  The playwright nodded. “Sound ideology. Not like what you hear in Goldreich-Tremaine these days. Détentiste slogans. Unity in diversity, where all the factions form one vast Schismatrix. Humankind reuniting when faced by aliens.”

  Constantine shifted in his chair, surreptitiously rubbing his back against the cushion. “I’ve heard that rhetoric. On the stage. This producer you were mentioning—”

  “Mavrides?” Zeuner was eager. “They’re a powerful clan. Goldreich-Tremaine, Jastrow Station, Kirkwood Gap. They’ve never had a genetic on the Council itself, but they share genes with the Garzas and the Drapers and the Vetterlings. The Vetterlings have authority.”

  “This man is a Mavrides by marriage, you said. A nongenetic.”

  “A eunique, you mean? Yes. He’s not allowed to contribute his genes to the line.” Zeuner was pleased to tell this bit of scandal. “He’s also an Investor pet. And a cepheid.”

  “Cepheid? You mean he has a rank in Security?”

  “He’s Captain-Doctor Abelard Mavrides, C.-Ph.D. It’s a low rank for one so old. He was a sundog once, a cometary miner, they say. He met the aliens on the rim of the System, wormed his way into their good graces somehow…They’d been here only a few months when they brought Mavrides and his wife into Goldreich-Tremaine in one of their starships. Since then he’s moved from success to success. Corporations hire him as a go-between with the aliens. He teaches Investor studies and speaks their language fluently. He’s wealthy enough to keep his past obscure.”

  “Old-line Shapers guard their privacy closely.”

  Zeuner brooded. “He’s my enemy. He blighted my career.”

  Constantine thought it through. He knew more about Mavrides than Zeuner did. He had recruited Zeuner deliberately, knowing that Mavrides must have enemies, and that finding them was easier than creating them.

  Zeuner was frustrated. His first play had failed; the second was never produced. He was not privy to the behind-the-scenes machinations of Mavrides and his Midnight Clique. Zeuner was harshly anti-Mechanist; his gene-line had suffered cruelly in the War. The Détentistes rejected him.

  So Constantine had charmed him. He had lured Zeuner to the Republic with promises of the theatrical archives, a living tradition of drama that Zeuner could study and exploit. The Shaper was grateful, and because of that gratitude he was Constantine’s pawn.

  Constantine was silent. Mavrides troubled him. Tentacles of the man’s influence had spread throughout Goldreich-Tremaine.

  And the coincidences went beyond chance. They hinted at deliberate plot.

  A man who chose to call himself Abelard. An impresario of the theatre. Staging political plays. And his wife was a diplomat.

  At least Constantine knew that Abelard Lindsay was dead. His agents in the Zaibatsu had taped Lindsay’s death at the hands of the Geisha Bank. Constantine had even spoken to the woman who had had Lindsay killed, a Shaper renegade called Kitsune. He had the whole sorry story: Lindsay’s involvement with pirates, his desperate murder of the Geisha Bank’s former leader. Lindsay had died horribly.

  But why had Constantine’s first assassin never reported back from the Zaibatsu? He had not thought the man would turn sundog. Assassins had failsafes implanted; few traitors survived.

  For years Constantine had lived in fear of this lost assassin. The elite of Ring Council Security assured him that the assassin was dead. Constantine did not believe them, and had never trusted them again.

  For years he had worked his way into the mirrored underworld of Shaper covert action. Assassins and bodyguards—the two were often one and the same, since they specialized in one another’s tradecraft—these had become his closest allies.

  He knew their subterfuges, their fanatic loyalties. He struggled constantly to win their trust. He sheltered them in his Republic, hiding them from pacifist persecution. He used his prestige freely to further their militarist ends.

  Some Shapers still despised him for his unplanned genes; from many others he had won respect. Personal hatreds did not bother him. But it bothered him that he might be cut short before he had measured himself against the world. Before he had satisfied the soaring ambition that had driven him since childhood.

  Who knew about Lindsay, the only man who had ever been his friend? When he was young, and weaker, before the armor of distrust had sealed around him, Lindsay had been his intimate. Who let this phantom loose, and to what end?

  GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 26-12-’46

  Wedding guests surrounded the garden. From his hiding place behind the boughs of a dwarf magnolia, Lindsay saw his wife lightly bounding toward him, in half a gravity. Green fronds brushed at the spreading wings of her headdress. Nora’s formal gown was a dense ocher weave beaded in silver, with openwork amber sleeves. “You’re all right, darling?”

  Lindsay said, “My sleeve hems, burn it. I was dancing and popped a whole weave loose.”

  “I saw you leave. Do you
need help?”

  “I can get it.” Lindsay struggled with the complex interweave. “I’m slow, but I can do it.”

  “Let me help.” She stepped to his side, pulled inlaid knitting needles from her headdress, and tatted his sleeves with a smooth dexterity he could not hope to match. He sighed and tucked his own needles carefully back into his braids. “The Regent is asking about you,” she said. “The senior genetics are here.”

  “Where’d you put them?”

  “In the veranda discreet. I had to clear out a raft of kids.” She finished the sleeve. “There. Good enough?”

  “You’re a wonder.”

  “No kissing, Abelard. You’ll smear your makeup. After the party.” She smiled. “You look grand.”

  Lindsay ran his mechanical hand over his coils of gray hair. The steel knuckles glittered with inlaid seed-gems; the wire tendons sparkled with interwoven strands of fiberoptics. He wore a formal Goldreich-Tremaine Kosmosity academic’s ruffled overvest, its lapels studded with pins of rank. His kneelongs were a rich coffee-brown. Brown stockings relieved the dignity of his outfit with a hint of iridescence. “I danced with the bride,” he said. “I think I surprised them a bit.”

  “I heard the shouts, dear.” She smiled and took his arm, placing her hand on his sleeve above the steel of his artificial ulna. They left the garden.

  On the patio outside, the bride and groom were dancing on the ceiling, heads downward. Their feet darted nimbly in and out of the dance rig, a broad complex of padded footloops for use in light gravity. Lindsay watched the bride, feeling a rush of happiness close to pain.

  Kleo Mavrides. The young bride was the dead woman’s clone, sharing her name and her genes. There were times when Lindsay felt that behind the merry eyes of the younger Kleo there lurked an older spirit, as a sound might still vibrate in the glass of a crystal just after it had ceased to ring. He had done what he could. Since her production, the younger Kleo had been his special care. He and Nora found satisfaction in these amends. It was more than penance. They had taken too many pains to call it simply recompense. It was love.

  The groom danced powerfully; he had the bearlike build of all the Vetterling genetics. Fernand Vetterling was a gifted man, a standout even in a society of genius. Lindsay had known the man for twenty years, as playwright, architect, and Clique member. Vetterling’s creative energy still filled Lindsay with a kind of awe, even subdued fear. How long would the marriage last, he wondered, between Kleo and her fleet graces and the sober Vetterling, with his mind like a sharp steel ax? It was a marriage of state as well as a love match. Much capital had been invested in it, economic and genetic.