Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  “No,” Constantine said. He looked shaken. “I protest. I came here to fight Abelard Lindsay, not a shattered personality.”

  “That scarcely matters now, does it? This is to the death, Constantine. My humanity would only get in the way.”

  Constantine shrugged. “Then I win, no matter what.”

  Constantine attached the spatial analyzer, fitting its custom-made curves against the back of his skull. Its microprongs slid smoothly into the jacks connected to his right hemisphere. With its use, space would assume a fantastic solidity, movement would show with superhuman clarity. Constantine lifted the helmet and caught a glimpse of his own sleeve. Lindsay saw him hesitate, studying the fabric’s complex interwoven topology. He seemed fascinated. Then he shuddered briefly and slid his head within the helmet.

  Lindsay pressed the first dosage against his wrist and donned his headpiece. He felt the adhesive eye-cusps grip his sockets, then a wash of numbness as local anesthetics took effect and threads of stiffened biogel slid over the eyeballs to penetrate his optic nerves. He heard a faint annihilating ringing as other threads wormed past his eardrums into predetermined chemotactic contact with his neurons.

  They both lay back on their waterbeds, waiting as the helmets’ neck units soaked through predrilled microholes in the seventh cervical vertebra. The microthreads grew their way harmlessly through the myelin casings of the spinal axons in a self-replicating gelatin web.

  Lindsay floated quietly. The PDKL was taking hold. As the spinal cutoff proceeded he felt his body dissolving like wax, each sensory clump of muscle sending a final warm glow of sensation as the neck unit shut it off, a last twinge of humanity too thin to be called pain. The Shatter helped him forget. By rendering everything novel, it was intended to rob everything of novelty. While it broke up preconceptions, it heightened the powers of comprehension so drastically that entire intuitive philosophies boiled up from a single moment of insight.

  It was dark. His mouth tasted of cobwebs. He felt a brief wave of vertigo and terror before the Shatter aborted it, leaving him suddenly stranded in an emotional no-man’s-land where his fear transmuted itself bizarrely into a crushing sense of physical weight.

  He was crouching next to the base of a titanic wall. Before him, dim sheens of radiance gleamed from a colossal arch. Beside it, jutting balustrades of icy stone were shrouded in thin webs of sagging dust-covered cable. He reached out to touch the wall and noted with dulled surprise that his arm had transmuted itself into a pallid claw. The arm was jointed in pale armor. It had two elbows.

  He began crawling up the wall. Gravity accompanied him. Looking out with new perspective he saw that bridges had transformed themselves into curved columns; loops of sagging cable were now vicious, stiffened arcs.

  Everything was old. Something behind his eyes was opening. He could see time lying on the world like a sheen, a frozen blur of movement chopped out of context and painted onto the surface of the cold stone like alien shellac. Walls became floors, balustrades cold barricades. He realized then that he had too many legs. There were legs where his ribs should have been and the crawling feeling in his stomach was a literal crawling: the sensations from his guts were transmuted into the movement of his second pair of limbs.

  He struggled to look at himself. He could not curl forward, but his back arched with fantastic ease and his lidless eyes gazed at armored plates thick with intersegmental fur. A pair of wrinkled organs protruded on stalks from his back: he brushed his muzzle against them and suddenly, dizzyingly, he smelled yellow. He tried to scream, then. He had nothing to scream with.

  He flopped back against the cold rock. Instinct seized him, and he scuttled headlong across acres of porous gritty stone toward the safe darkness of a huge jutting cornice and a racklike checkerboard of rust-eaten bars. Proportion left him as he crouched there, wobbling in a hideous burst of intuition, and he realized that he was tiny, infinitesimal, that the titanic mortared blocks that dwarfed him must themselves be small, so small that…

  He jabbed at the porous stone with a raking flex of his foreclaw. It was solid, solid with a weary durability that had waited out uncaring eons, painted with the feeble dust of huge groaning machinery run past the point of uselessness into an utter exhaustion of grit.

  He could smell the age of it, even feel it as a kind of pressure, a kind of dread. It was massive, unyielding, and he thought suddenly of water. Water moving at high speed was as hard as steel. His mind rocketed off, then, and he thought of the identity of speed and substance, the kinetic energy of atoms giving form to hard stone, stone which was empty space. It was all abstract structure, ageless form, level after level, emptiness permeated by disturbances of emptiness, waves, quanta. He became aware of fine detail within the stone, the surface suddenly no more than frozen smoke, a hard fog petrified by captive eons. Below the surface a finer level, detail on obsessive detail in an ever-recessive web…

  He was attacked. The enemy was on him. He felt a sudden ghastly rending as claws tore into him from above, the alien pain garbled in translation, cramming his brain with black nausea and dread. He flopped in death-stricken convulsion, his face slid apart in a nightmare extrusion of razored mandibles, and he caught a leg and sheared it off at the joint; he smelled hot hunger and pain and the bright hot radiance of his own juices bursting, and then the cold, the seeping, the bright spark fading to become one with the old stone and the age and the dark…

  The exterior microphones of his helmet caught Constantine’s voice and fed it through his nerves. “Abelard.”

  Lindsay’s throat was full of rust. “I hear you.”

  “You’re alive?”

  The nerve block in his neck half dissolved and he felt his own body, as insubstantial as warm gas. He groped for the strip of dermadisks beside his hand: the perforated plastic felt as thin as ribbon. He peeled off another disk with his fingers and pressed it raggedly against the base of his thumb. “We must try again.”

  “What did you see, Abelard? I must know.”

  “Halls. Walls. Dark stones.”

  “And gulfs? Black gulfs of nothing, bigger than God?”

  “I can’t talk.” The other dose was hitting him, language was collapsing, a tangle of irrelevant assumptions shattered by sudden doubt, wads of grammar mashed beneath the impact of the drug. “Again.”

  He was back. He could feel the enemy now, sense his presence as a weak distant tingling. The light was clearer, gigantic radiant washes seeping through masses of stone so rotten with age that they were thin as cloth. Fastidiously, he ran his foreclaws through the polyps around his mouth, cleansing them of damp grime. He felt a sense of hunger so overwhelming that the scales equalized, and he realized that the urge to live and kill was as huge as the vaults around him.

  He found the enemy crouched within a cul-de-sac between a harsh decaying bridge and its supporting beams. He smelled the fear.

  The enemy’s position was wrong. The enemy clung to the wall in a false perspective, perceiving the endless horizon as a shattering abyss. The gulf below was an eternal one, a chaos of walls, chambers, landings, self-replicating, built from nothing, a terrifying ramification of infinity.

  He attacked, biting deep into the back plates, the taste of hot ooze driving him into frenzy. The enemy slashed back, digging, pushing, pale claws scraping the rock. His jaws ripped free from the enemy’s back. The enemy struggled to push him away, to shove him backward into the horizon. For a moment he was gripped by the enemy’s own perspective. He knew suddenly that if he fell he would fall forever. Into the abyss, plunging into his own terror and defeat, endlessly, through the self-spinning labyrinth, mind frozen in boundless anguish, a maze of unending experience, unending fright, implacable walls, halls, steps, ramps, crypts, vaults, passages, always icy, always out of reach.

  He skidded back. The enemy was desperate, scrabbling convulsively, galvanized with pain. His own claws were slipping. The stone was rejecting him, becoming slicker. Suddenly the breakthrough came, an
d he saw the world for what it was. His claws slid in, then, with phantom ease, stone slipping aside like smoke.

  Then he was anchored. The enemy pushed at him helplessly, uselessly. He tasted the sudden gush of despair as the enemy turned to flee.

  He ran him down at once, caught him, and rended him. A miasma of dust and terror burst from the enemy’s flesh. He ripped him free from the wall, held him out in an orgasm of hatred and victory—and flung him into the gulf.

  Chapter 8

  THE NEOTENIC CULTURAL REPUBLIC: 17-6-’91

  The dreams were pleasant, dreams of warmth and light, an animal’s life, an eternal present.

  Consciousness returned in tingling pain, like blood seeping into a leg long numbed. He struggled to unify himself, to assume the burden of being Lindsay again, and the pain of it made him claw the grass, spattering his naked skin with dirt.

  Chaos roared around him: reality in its rawest form, a buzzing, blinding confusion. He sprawled on his back in the grass, gasping. Above him the world swam into focus: green light, white light, a brown framework of branches. Solidity returned to the world. He saw a living spray of branching leaves and twigs: a form of such fantastic beauty that he was overwhelmed with awe. He heaved himself over and slithered toward the tree’s rough trunk, hauling his naked flesh through the sleek grass. He threw his arms around the tree and pressed his bearded cheek against the bark.

  Ecstasy seized him. He pressed his face against the tree, sobbing in frenzy, torn with deep visionary rapture. As his mind coalesced he burned with insight, a smoldering oneness with this living being. Helpless joy pervaded him as he joined its serene integration.

  When he called for help, two young Shapers wearing hospital whites answered his broken cries. Taking his arms, they helped him stagger across the lawn through the arched stone doorway of the clinic.

  Lindsay was afflicted by language. His thoughts were clear, but the words wouldn’t come. He recognized the building. It was the mansion of the Tyler clan. He was back in the Republic. He wanted to speak to the orderlies, ask them how he had returned, but his brain couldn’t shuffle his vocabulary into order. The words waited agonizingly on the tip of his tongue, just past his reach.

  They took him down an entry hall crowded with blueprints and glass-topped exhibits. The left wing of the mansion, with its suite of bedrooms, had been stripped down to the polished wood and filled with medicinal equipment. Lindsay stared helplessly into the face of the man on his left. He had the smooth grace of a Shaper and the riveting eyes of a Superbright.

  “You are—” Lindsay burst out suddenly.

  “Relax, friend. You’re safe. The doctor’s on her way.” Smiling, he draped Lindsay in a broad-sleeved hospital gown, tying it behind him in an easy flurry of knots. They seated him under an overhead cerebral scanner. The second orderly handed him an inhaler.

  “Whiff up on this, cousin. It’s tagged glucose. Radioactive. For the scanner.” The Superbright whacked the curved white dome of the machine affectionately. “We’ve got to look you over. I mean right down to the core.”

  Lindsay sniffed obediently at the inhaler. It smelled sweet. The scanner whirred down its upright track-stand to settle around the top of his head.

  A woman entered the room. She carried a wooden instrument case and wore a loose medical tunic, short skirt, and muddied plastic boots. “Has he spoken?” she said.

  Lindsay recognized her gene-line. “Juliano,” he said with difficulty.

  She smiled at him. She opened her wooden case with a squeak of antique hinges. “Yes, Abelard,” she said. She gave him a Look.

  “Margaret Juliano,” Lindsay said. He could not interpret the Look, and the inability filled him with a sudden reviving trickle of energy and fear. “The Cataclysts, Margaret. They put you on ice.”

  “That’s right.” She reached inside the case and produced a dark candy in a little creased paper tray. “Have a chocolate?”

  Lindsay’s mouth flooded with saliva. “Please,” he said reflexively. She popped the candy into his mouth. It was cloyingly sweet. He chewed it reluctantly.

  “Scarper,” Juliano told the two technicians. “I’ll handle this.” The two Superbrights left, grinning.

  Lindsay swallowed.

  “Another?” she said.

  “Never much canned—never much cared for candy,” Lindsay said.

  “That’s a good sign,” she said, closing the box. She examined the scanner’s screen and pulled a light-pen from the cluster of loose blonde hair at her ear. “Those chocolates were the center of your life for the last five years.”

  The shock was bad, but he had known it was coming. His throat felt dry. “Five years?”

  “You’re lucky to have any you left,” she said. “It’s been a long treatment: restoring a brain altered by heavy dosage of PDKL Ninety-five. Complicated by changes in your spatial perception, caused by the Arena artifact. It’s been a real challenge. Expensive, too.” She studied the screen, nibbling the end of her light-pen. “But that’s all right. Your friend Wellspring footed the bills.”

  She had changed so much that it dizzied him. It was hard to reconcile the disciplined pacifist of the Midnight Clique, Margaret Juliano of Goldreich-Tremaine, with this calm, careless woman with grass stains on her knees and loose, dirty hair.

  “Don’t try to talk too much at first,” she said. “Your right hemisphere is handling language functions through the commissure. We can expect neologisms, poverty of speech, a private idiolect…don’t be alarmed.” She circled something on the display screen and pressed a control key: cross-sections of his brain shuffled past in bright false-color blues and oranges.

  “How many people in this room?” she said.

  “You and I,” Lindsay said.

  “No sense of someone behind you, to your left?”

  Lindsay twisted to look, scraping his forehead painfully on an inner node of the scanner. “No.”

  “Good. The commissure approach was the right one, then. In split-brain cases we sometimes get a fragmentation of consciousness, a ghost image overlooking the perceptual self. Let me know if you feel anything of the sort.”

  “No. But outside I felt—” He wanted to tell her about the moment when waking had come suddenly, his long epiphanic insight into self and life. The vision still blazed within him, but the vocabulary was completely beyond him. He knew suddenly that he would never be able to tell anyone the full truth. It was not something that words could hold.

  “Don’t struggle,” she said. “Let it come easily. There’s plenty of time.”

  “My arm,” Lindsay said suddenly. He realized with confusion that his right arm, the metal one, had turned to flesh. He raised the left one. It was metal. Horror overloaded him. He had turned inside out!

  “Careful,” she said. “You may have some trouble with space perceptions, left and right. It’s an artifact of the commissural dominance. And you’ve had a new rejuvenation. We’ve done a lot of work on you in the past five years. Just to mark time.”

  The careless ease of it stunned him. “Are you God?” Lindsay said.

  She shrugged. “There’ve been breakthroughs, Abelard. A lot has changed. Socially, politically, medically—all the same thing nowadays, I know, but think of it as spontaneous self-organization, a social Prigoginic Leap to a new level of complexity—”

  “Oh, no,” Lindsay said.

  She tapped the scanner, and it whirred upward off his head. She sat before him in an antique wooden office chair, curling one leg beneath her. “Sure you don’t want a chocolate?”

  “No!”

  “I’ll have one, then.” She pulled a candy from the case and bit into it, chewing happily. “They’re good.” She spoke unaffectedly, her mouth full. “This is one of the good times, Abelard. It’s why they thawed me out, I think.”

  “You changed.”

  “Ice assassination does that. They were right, the Cataclysts. Right to put me out. I was calcifying. One moment I was floating through t
he math hall at the Kosmosity, printouts in my hand, on my way to the office, mind full of little problems, worries, schedules…I was dizzy for a moment. I looked around, and everything was gone. Deserted. Trashed. The printouts were crumbling in my hands, clothes full of dust, Goldreich-Tremaine in ruins, computers down, classes all gone…The world leaped thirty years in a moment; it was total Cataclysm. For three days I chased down news, trying to find our Clique, learning I was history, and then it came over me in a wave. I ‘preeked,’ Abelard. My preconceptions shattered. The world didn’t need me, and everything I’d thought was important was gone. My life was totally futile. And totally free.”

  “Free,” Lindsay said, tasting the word. “Constantine,” he said suddenly. “My enemy.”

  “He’s dead, so to speak,” Margaret Juliano said, “but it’s a question of definition. I have the scans on his condition from his congenetics. The damage is very severe. He fell into a protracted fugue state and suffered an accelerated consciousness that must have lasted for subjective centuries. His consciousness could not maintain itself on the data it received from the Arena device. It lasted so long that his personality was abraded away. Speaking metaphorically, he forgot himself to pieces.”

  “They told you that? His siblings?”

  “Times have changed, Abelard. Détente is back. The Constantine gene-line is in trouble, and we paid them well for the information. Skimmers Union lost the capitalship. Jastrow Station is the capital now, and it’s full of Zen Serotonists. They hate excitement.”

  The news thrilled Lindsay. “Five years,” he said. He stood up in agitation. “Well, what’s five years to me?” He tried to pace about the room, swinging dizzily. The left-right hemispheric confusion made him clumsy. He drew himself up and tried to get a grip on his kinesics.

  He failed.

  He turned on Juliano. “My training. My kinesics.”

  She nodded. “Yes. When we went in we noticed the remnants of it. Early Shaper psychotechnic conditioning. Very clumsy by modern standards. It interfered with your recovery. So, over the years, we chased it down and extinguished it bit by bit.”