Work ate the years. Once time had seemed solid to him, dense as lead. Now it flowed through his hands. Lindsay saw that his perception of time was slowly coming to match that of the senior Shapers he’d known in Goldreich-Tremaine. To the truly old, time was as thin as air, a keening and destructive wind that erased their pasts and attacked their memories. Time was accelerating. Nothing could slow it down for him but death. He tasted this truth, and it was bitter as amphetamine.
He returned his attention to the paper; a reassessment of a celebrated Investor scale fragment found among the effects of a failed Mechanist interstellar embassy. Few bits of matter had ever been analyzed so exhaustively. The paper, “Proximo-Distal Gradients in Epidermal Cell Adhesiveness,” came from a Shaper defector in Diotima Cartel.
His desk rang. His visitor had arrived.
The unobtrusive guard systems in Lindsay’s office showed Wells’s characteristic touch. The visitor had been issued a stylish coronet, which had evolved from the much clumsier kill-clamp. A tiny red light, unseen by the guest himself, glowed on the man’s forehead. It denoted the potential impact site for armaments, decently concealed in the ceiling.
“Professor Milosz?” The visitor’s dress was odd. He wore a white formal suit with a ring-shaped open collar and accordioned elbows and knees.
“You’re Dr. Morrissey? From the Concatenation?”
“From the Mare Serenitatis Republic,” the man said. “Dr. Pongpianskul sent me.”
“Pongpianskul is dead,” Lindsay said.
“So they said.” Morrissey nodded. “Killed on Chairman Constantine’s orders. But the doctor had friends in the Republic. So many that he now controls the nation. His title is Warden, and the nation is reborn as the Neotenic Cultural Republic. I am the harbinger of the Revolution.” He hesitated. “Maybe I should let Dr. Pongpianskul tell it.”
Lindsay was stunned. “Perhaps you should.”
The man produced a videotablet and plugged it into his briefcase. He handed Lindsay the tablet, which flickered into life. It showed a face: Pongpianskul’s. Pongpianskul brushed at his braids, disheveling them with leathery, wrinkled hands. “Abelard, how are you?”
“Neville. You’re alive?”
“I’m still a tenant of the flesh, yes. Morrissey’s briefcase is programmed with an interactive expert system. It ought to carry out a decent conversation with you, in my absence.”
Morrissey cleared his throat. “These machines are new to me. I think, though, that I should let the two of you speak privately.”
“That might be best.”
“I’ll wait in the lobby.”
Lindsay watched the man’s retreating back. Morrissey’s clothes amazed him. Lindsay had forgotten that he’d ever dressed like that, in the Republic.
He studied the tablet’s screen. “You look well, Neville.”
“Thank you. Ross arranged my last rejuvenation. By the Cataclysts. The same group that treated you, Mavrides.”
“Treated me? They put me on ice.”
“On ice? That’s odd. The Cataclysts woke me up. I never felt so alive as when I was here in the Republic, pretending to be dead. It’s been a long ten years, Abelard. Eleven, whatever.” Pongpianskul shrugged.
Lindsay Looked at the tablet. The image made no response to the Look, and the charm faded. Lindsay spoke slowly. “So you’ve attacked the Republic? Through the Cataclyst terror networks?”
The tablet smiled Pongpianskul’s smile. “The Cataclysts had their part in it, I admit. You would have appreciated this, Mavrides. I played off the youth element. There was a political group called the Preservationists, dating—oh, forty or fifty years back. Constantine used them to seize power, but they detested the Shapers as much as they did the Mechs. What they wanted, really, was a human life, droll as that might seem. Now there’s a new generation of them, raised under Shaper influence and hating it. But thanks to Shaper breeding policies, the young hold a majority.”
Pongpianskul laughed. “Constantine used the Republic as a storehouse for Shaper militants. He made things here a muddle of subterfuge. When the war heated up, the militants rushed back to the Ring Council and Cataclyst Superbrights hid here instead. Constantine spent too much time in the Rings, and lost touch…The Cataclysts like my notion of a cultural preserve. It’s all down in the new Constitution. My messenger will give you a copy.”
“Thank you.”
“Things haven’t gone well with the rest of the Midnight Clique…It’s been too long since we’ve talked. I tracked you down through your ex-wife.”
“Alexandrina?”
“What?” The programmed system was confused; the persona flickered for a second’s fraction. “It took some doing. Nora’s under close surveillance.”
“Just a moment.” Lindsay rose from his chair and poured himself a drink. A cascade of memories from the Republic had rushed through him, and he’d thought automatically of his first wife, Alexandrina Tyler. But of course she was not in the Republic. She had been a victim of Constantine’s purge, shipped out to the Zaibatsu.
He returned to the screen. It said, “Ross left for the cometaries when G-T crumbled. Fetzko has faded. Vetterling’s in Skimmers Union, sucking up to the fascists. Ice assassins took Margaret Juliano. She’s still awaiting the thaw. I have power here, Mavrides. But that can’t make up for what we lost.”
“How is Nora?” Lindsay said.
The false Pongpianskul looked grave. “She fights Constantine where he’s strongest. If it weren’t for her my coup here would have failed; she distracted him…I’d hoped I could lure her here, and you as well. She was always so good to us. Our premier hostess.”
“She wouldn’t come?”
“She has remarried.”
The slotted glass broke in Lindsay’s iron hand. Blobs of liqueur drifted toward the floor.
“For political reasons,” the screen continued. “She needs every ally she can find. Having you join me would have been difficult in any case. No one over sixty is allowed in the Neotenic Cultural Republic. Except for myself and my officers.”
Lindsay yanked the cord from the tablet. He helped the small office servo pick up the shards of glass.
When he called Morrissey in again, much later, the man was diffident. “Are you quite through, sir? I’ve been instructed to erase the tablet.”
“It was kind of you to bring it.” Lindsay gestured at a chair. “Thank you for waiting so long.”
Morrissey wiped the construct’s memory and put the tablet in his briefcase. He studied Lindsay’s face. “I hope I haven’t brought bad news.”
“It’s astonishing,” Lindsay said. “Maybe we should have a drink to celebrate.”
A shadow crossed Morrissey’s face.
“Forgive me,” Lindsay said. “Perhaps I was tactless.” He put the bottle away. There was not much left.
“I’m sixty years old,” Morrissey said. He sat uncomfortably. “So they ousted me. They were polite about it.” He smiled painfully. “I was a Preservationist once. I was eighteen in the first Revolution. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Now I’m a sundog.”
Lindsay said carefully, “I’m not without power here. And not without funds. Dembowska handles many refugees. I can find you room.”
“You’re very kind.” Morrissey’s face was stiff. “I worked as a biologist, on the nation’s ecological troubles. Dr. Constantine trained me. But I’m afraid I’m very much behind the times.”
“That can be remedied.”
“I’ve brought an article for your Journal.”
“Ah. You have an interest in Investors, Dr. Morrissey?”
“Yes. I hope my piece meets your standards.”
Lindsay forced a smile. “We’ll work on it together.”
Chapter 7
SKIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 13-5-’75
He could feel it coming on, creeping across the back of his head in a zone of quivering subepidermal tightness. A fugue state. The scene before him trembled slightly, the crowds belo
w his private box blurring in a frieze of packed heads against dark finery, the rounded stage with actors in costume, dark red, gleaming, a gesture. It slowed—it froze:
Fear…no, not even that, exactly…a certain sadness now that the die was cast. The waiting was the hell of it…He had waited sixty years to resume his old contacts, the wirehead Radical Old of the Republic…Now the wirehead leaders, like him, had worked their way to power in the worlds outside. Sixty years was nothing to a mind on the wires…time meant nothing…fugue states…They still remembered him quite well, their friend, Philip Khouri Constantine…
It was he who had sprung them loose, purging the middle-aged aristocrats to finance the wirehead defections…Memories went back; they were data, that was all, just as fresh on reels somewhere as the enemy Margaret Juliano was on her bed of Cataclyst ice…Even amid fugue the surge of satisfaction was quick and sharp enough to penetrate into consciousness from his backbrain…That unique sense of warmth that came only from the downfall of a rival…
Now, trailing sluggishly behind his racing thoughts, the slow-motion blooming of a light tingle of fear…Nora Everett, the wife of Abelard Mavrides…She had hurt him seventeen years ago with the coup in the Republic, though he was able to entangle her in charges of treason…The tinpot Republic was of no concern to him now, its willfully ignorant child-citizens flying kites and eating apples under the crazed charlatan gaze of Dr. Pongpianskul…No problem there, the future would ignore them, they were living fossils, harmless in themselves…
But the Cataclysts…the fear was resolving itself now, beginning to flower, its first dim shades of backbrain unease taking on emotional substance now, uncoiling through his consciousness like a drop of ink streaming into a glass of water…He would see to his emotions later when the fugue was over; now he was struggling to shut his eyes…focus was lost, dim tear-blur over frozen performers; his eyelids were dropping with nightmare sluggishness, nerve impulses confused by the racing fugue-consciousness…The Cataclysts, though…They took it all as an enormous joke, enjoyed hiding in the Republic disguised as plebes and farmers, the huge panorama interior of the cylindrical world as weird to them as a trace dose of their favorite drug, PDKL-95…The Cataclyst mind-set fed on correspondences and poetic justice, a trip to the human past in the Neotenic Republic the inverse of an ice assassination, with its one-way ticket to the future…
The fugue was about to break. He felt a strange cracking sensation of psychic upheaval, mental crust giving way before the upsurge. In the last microseconds of fugue an eidetic flash seized him, surveyor photos from the surface of Titan, red volcanic shelves of heavy hydrocarbon split by ammonia lava, bursting from the depths…from Titan, far below their orbit, prime wall-decor in Skimmers Union…
Gone. Constantine leaned forward in his box seat, clearing his throat. Delayed fear swept over him; he pushed it brusquely away, had a light sniff of acetaminophen to avert migraine. He glanced at his wristwatch through damp lashes. Four seconds of fugue.
He wiped his eyes, became aware of his wife sitting beside him, her finely chiseled Shaper face a study in surprise. Was she aware that he had been sitting rapt for four seconds with his eyes showing only a rim of white? No. She thought he was touched by the play, was startled to see this excess of emotion in her iron-hard husband. Constantine favored her with a smile. Her color heightened; she leaned forward in her seat, her jeweled hands in her lap, studying the play alertly. Later she would try to discuss it with him. Natalie Constantine was young and bright, the scion of a military gene-line. She had grown used to his demands.
Not like his first wife, the treasonous bitch…He had left the old aristocrat in the Republic, having nurtured her vicious streak patiently until his own coup allowed him to turn it against her peers. Now rumor said she was Pongpianskul’s lover, won over by fraudulent Shaper charm and degraded senile intimacy. No matter, no matter. Long years had taken the sting from it; tonight’s stroke, if it came, was more important than any circumlunar moondock.
His nine-year-old daughter, Vera, leaned in her seat to whisper to Natalie. Constantine gazed at the child he had built. Half her genetics were Vera Kelland’s, drawn from skin flakes he had taken before the woman’s suicide. For years he had treasured the stolen genes, and when the time was ripe he had brought them to flower in this child. She was his favorite, the first of his progeny. When he thought how his own failure might doom her, he felt the fear again, sharper than before, because it was not for himself.
An extravagant gesture from the stage caught his attention, a brief flurry of stilted action as the deranged Superbright villain clutched his head and fell. Constantine surreptitiously scratched his ankle with the sole of his foot-glove. Over the years his skin virus had improved, limited to dry outbreaks of shingles at his extremities.
The play was one of Zeuner’s, and it bored him. Skimmers Union had caught the habit from Goldreich-Tremaine, bolstered by dramatists fleeing the crippled ex-capital. But the modern theatre was lifeless. Fernand Vetterling, for instance, author of The White Periapsis and The Technical Advisor, languished in sullen silence with his disgraced Mavrides wife. Other artists with Détentiste leanings now paid for their indiscretion with fines or house arrest. Some had defected, others had “gone undertime” to join the Cataclyst action brigades in the graveyard dayshifts.
But the Cataclysts were losing cohesion, becoming mere terrorists. Their Superbright elite was under severe attack. The pogrom on the Superbrights was increasingly thorough as hysteria mounted. Their promoters and educators were now political nonpersons, many having fallen to the twisted vengeance of the Superbrights themselves.
The Superbrights were too brilliant for community; they demanded the world-shattering anarchy of supermen. That could not be tolerated. And Constantine had served that intolerance. Life had never looked better for him: high office, his own Constantine gene-line, a free hand for anti-Mech adventurism, and his own barbed nets poised for disloyalty.
And tonight he had risked it all. Would his news ever come? How would he hear it? From his bodyguards, through the earpiece? Through the stolen Mech implants in his own brain, that opened internal channels to the thin data-whispers of the wireheads? Or—
Something was happening. The banner-waving choreography on the curved stage disintegrated in sudden confusion, the colored corporate logos and gene-line insignia slowing and tangling. The dancers fell back in chaos in response to shouted orders. Someone was floating to the edge of the podium. It was the wretched Charles Vetterling, his aged face bloated with triumph and a lackey’s self-importance.
This was it. Vetterling was shouting. The play’s leading man gave him a throat mike. Vetterling’s voice roared suddenly in thudding feedback.
“…of the War! Mech markets are in panic! The asteroid Nysa has declared for the Ring Council! I repeat, the Nysa Cartel has abandoned the Mechanist Union! They have asked for admittance as a Ring Council Treaty State! The Council is meeting…” His words were drowned in the roar from the audience, the clatter of buckles as they unstrapped from their seats and rose in confusion. Vetterling struggled with the mike. Patches of his words broke the din. “…capitulation…through banks in Skimmers Union…industrial…new victory!”
It started among the actors. The leading man was pointing above the heads of the audience at Constantine’s box, shouting fiercely at the rest of the cast. One of the women began applauding. Then it spread. The whole cast was applauding, their faces alight. Vetterling heard them behind him, turned to look. He grasped things at once, and a stiff smile spread over his face. He pointed dramatically. “Constantine!” he shouted. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Chancellor-General!”
Constantine rose to his feet, gripping the iron banister behind the transparent shield. When they saw him the crowd exploded, a free-fall maelstrom of shouts and applause. They knew it was his triumph. The joy of it overwhelmed them, the brief bright release from the dark tension of the War. If he’d failed, they would have hounded him
to death with the same passion. But that dark knowledge had been blasted by victory. Because he’d won, now the risk he’d run only sharpened his delight.
He turned to his wife. Her eyes brimmed over with tears of pride. Slowly, not leaving the banister, he extended his hand to her. When their fingers touched he read her face. He saw the truth there. From this night on his dominion over her was total.
She took her place beside him. Vera tugged his sleeve, her eyes wide. He lifted her up, cradling her in his left arm. His lips touched her ear. “Remember this,” he whispered fiercely.
The anarchic shouts died down as another rhythm spread. It was the rhythm of applause, the long, cadenced, ritual applause that followed every session of the Ring Council itself, ageless, solemn, overwhelming applause, applause that brooked no dissent. The music of power. Constantine raised his wife’s hand above their heads and closed his eyes.
It was the happiest moment of his life.
DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 15-5-’75
Lindsay was playing keyboards for the sake of his new arm. It was much more advanced than his old one, and the fine discrimination of its nerve signals confused him. As he ran through the composition, one of Kitsune’s, he felt each key click down with a brief muddled sensation of sharp heat.
He rested, rubbing his hands together. A pins-and-needles tingling ran up the wires. The new hand was densely honeycombed with fingertip sensors. They were much more responsive than his old arm’s feedback pads.
The change had jarred him. He looked about his desolate apartment. In twenty-two years it had never been anything more to him than a place to camp. The apartment’s fashions, its ribbed wallpaper and skeletal chairs, were two decades out of date. Only the security systems, Wells’s latest, had any touch of the mode.
Lindsay himself had gone stale. At ninety, grooves marked his eyes and mouth from decades of habitual expression. His hair and beard were sprinkled with gray.
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