Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  Lindsay lurched forward abruptly and slammed his iron fist into the table. “We must act now! This is the moment of crux, when a single act can crystallize our future. We have our choice: routines or miracles. Demand the miraculous!”

  Gomez was stunned. “It’s Europa, then, Chancellor?” he said. “Wellspring’s plans seem safer.”

  “Safer?” Lindsay laughed. “Czarina-Kluster seemed safe. But the Cause moved on, and the Queen moved with it, when Wellspring took her. The abstract dream will flourish, but the tangible city will fall. Those who can’t dream will die with it. The discreets will be thick with the blood of suicides. Wellspring himself may be killed. Mech agents will annex whole suburbs, Shapers will absorb whole banks and industries. The routines that seemed so solid here will melt like tears…If we embrace them, we melt with them.”

  “Then what must we do?”

  “Wellspring is not the only one whose crimes are secret and ambitious. And he’s not the last to vanish.”

  “You’re leaving us, Chancellor?”

  “You must handle distress and disaster yourselves. I’m past any use in that capacity.”

  The others looked stricken. Gomez rallied himself. “The Chancellor Emeritus is right,” he said. “I was about to suggest something similar. Our enemies will focus attacks on the Clique’s Arbiter; it might be best if he were hidden.”

  The others protested automatically; Lindsay overruled them. “There can’t always be Queens and Wellsprings. You must trust in your own strength. I trust in it.”

  “Where will you go, Chancellor?”

  “Where I’m least expected.” He smiled. “This isn’t my first crisis. I’ve seen many. And when they hit, I always ran. I’ve preached to you for years, asked you to dedicate your lives…And always I knew that this moment would come. I never knew what I would do when the dream faced its crisis. Would I sundog it as I always have, or would I commit myself? The moment’s here. I must defy my past, just as you must. I know how to get you your miracle. And I swear to you, I will.”

  A sudden dread struck Gomez. He had not seen such resolution in Lindsay for years. It occurred to him suddenly that Lindsay meant to die. He did not know Lindsay’s plans, but he realized now that they would be the crux of the old man’s life. It would be like him to exit at the climax, to fade into the shadows while some unknown glory still shone. “Chancellor,” he said, “when may we expect your return?”

  “Before I die, we’ll be Europa’s angels. And I’ll see you in Paradise.” Lindsay cycled open the sealed door of the discreet; outside, the free-fall corridors were a burst of sudden crowd noise. The door thunked shut. He was gone. Thick silence fell.

  The old man’s absence left a hollowness behind. The others sat silently, savoring the sense of loss. They looked at one another. Then, as one, they looked to Gomez. The moment passed; the uneasiness dissolved. Gomez smiled. “Well,” he said. “It’s miracles, then.”

  Lindsay’s rat leaped spryly onto the table. “He’s left it behind,” Jane Murray said. She stroked its fur, and it chittered loudly.

  “The rat will come to order,” Gomez said. He rapped the table, and they set to work.

  Chapter 11

  CIRCUMTERRAN ORBIT: 14-4-’54

  Three of them waited within the spacecraft: Lindsay, Vera Constantine, and their Lobster navigator, who was known simply as Pilot.

  “Final approach,” Pilot said. His beautiful synthesized voice emerged from a vocoder unit hooked to his throat.

  Strapped in before his control board, the Lobster was a chunk of shadow. He was sealed within a matte-black permanent spacesuit, knobbed with lumps of internal machinery and dotted with shiny gold input jacks. Lobsters were creatures of the vacuum, faceless posthumans, their eyes and ears wired to sensors woven through the suits. Pilot never ate. He never drank. The routines of his body were subsumed within the life-supporting rhythms of his suit.

  Pilot did not like being within this spacecraft; Lobsters had a horror of enclosed spaces. Pilot, though, had put up with the discomfort for the thrill of the crime.

  Now that they were dropping from orbit, the drugged calm of weeks of travel had broken. Lindsay had never seen Vera so animated. Her open delight filled him with pleasure.

  And she had reason for gladness. The Presence was gone. She had not felt it since the three of them had been sealed within the spacecraft. They’d come so far since then that she believed she had escaped it for good. She found as much happiness in this relief as in the fulfillment of their long conspiracy.

  Lindsay was happy for her. He had never had true proof of the objective existence of the Presence, but he had agreed to believe in it for her. And similarly, she had never doubted him. It was a contract and a trust between them. He knew she might have killed him, but that trust had saved his life. Long years since then had only strengthened it.

  “Looks good,” the Lobster sang. The spacecraft began to buck as it hit the entrance window of the Earth’s atmosphere. The Lobster emitted a burst of static, then said, “Air. I hate air. I hate it already.”

  “Steady,” Lindsay said. He tightened the straps of his chair and unfolded his videoscreens.

  They were coming in over the continent once known as Africa. Its outlines had been radically changed by the rising seas: archipelagos of drowned hills trailed clouds above a soup of weed-choked ocean. Along the dark shore, rivers poured gray topsoil into water streaked red with algal blooms.

  The white-hot flare of entry heat obscured his vision, flickering over the diamond-hard hull lens of the forward scanner. Lindsay leaned back in his seat.

  It was an odd ship, an uncomfortable one, not of human manufacture. The egg-shaped hull had the off-white sheen of stabilized metallic hydrogen, built only by gasbags. Its naked interior floor and ceiling bore the rounded, scalloped segmentation marks of its former pilot, a gasbag grub. The spacefaring grub had been packed within the hull as tightly as expanding dough.

  One of the gasbags had alluded to the astronaut’s death in a “conversation” with Vera Constantine. With its keen sensitivity to magnetic flux, the unlucky grub had perceived a solar flare whose shape and substance it found somehow blasphemous. It had expired in despair.

  Lindsay had been looking for just such a chance. When Vera told him of the accident, Lindsay acted at once. He recruited the Lobsters through their business contact in Czarina-Kluster, a Lobster they called “the Modem.”

  A complex deal was worked out, in utter secrecy, with the anarchic Lobsters. One of their lacy, airless spacecraft used Vera’s coordinates to track down the dead grub. Lindsay allowed them to dissect it and appropriate its alien engines. In return they outfitted the emptied shell for a furtive attempt to break the Interdict with Earth.

  The Interdict had never applied to the gasbags. They had insisted on exploring the entire solar system, and had granted equal rights to the pioneers in Fomalhaut. Their surveying craft had often studied the Earth. They made no attempt to contact the local primitives. They had satisfied themselves that the planet was harmless and had returned in utter disinterest.

  With his two companions, Lindsay had assumed his ultimate disguise. He was passing himself off as an alien, in an attempt to deceive the entire Schismatrix.

  Excitement and triumph had stripped decades from Lindsay. He had turned up his chest cuirass so that his heart could labor in time with his feelings. The forearm monitor embedded in his arm glowed amber with adrenaline.

  The spacecraft skipped above the bloated South Atlantic and sank deep within the atmosphere at the twilight line. Deceleration pressed Lindsay into the straps of his skeletal chair.

  The Lobsters had done a quick, primitive job. The three-man crew was crammed into a ribbed lozenge four meters across. It held two air-frames, a recycler, and three acceleration couches, of black elastic webbing over iron frames epoxied to the floor. The rest of the craft was taken up by engines and a garage-like specimen hold. In the hold crouched a surveyor robot, one of t
he Europan submarine probes.

  The dead astronaut’s former orifices had been stripped of tissue and outfitted with cameras and scanning systems. The specimen hold had a hatchway installed, but there was no room for an airlock in the crew’s compartment. The three of them had been welded in.

  Pilot hadn’t liked it. Pilot could be trusted, though. He cared nothing for Europa or their plans, but he relished the chance to count coup on the ancestral gravity well. He had been everywhere, from the turbulent fringes of the solar corona to the cometary Oort Cloud at the edge of circumsolar space. He was not human, but for the time being he was one of them.

  The scanners began to clear. Deceleration faded into the heavy tug of Earth gravity. Lindsay slumped in his seat, wheezing as the cuirass pumped his lungs. “Look what this muck is doing to the stars,” Pilot complained melodiously.

  Vera reached beside her chair and unfolded her tight-packed accordioned screens. She straightened the videoboard with a pop and smoothed out the creases. “Look, Abelard. There’s so much air above us that it’s blurring the stars. Think how much air. It’s fantastic.”

  Lindsay stirred himself and examined the view from the aft camera. Behind them, a wall of thunderheads towered to the limits of the troposphere. Black roots furred with rain rose to white anvil heads glowing in the last of twilight. This was one outstretched arm of the storm zone of permanent tempests that girdled the planet’s equator.

  He expanded the aft view to fill the whole videoboard. What he saw awed him. “Look aft at the storm clouds,” he said. “Huge streaks of fire are leaping out of them. What could be burning?”

  “Chunks of vegetation?” Vera said.

  “Wait. No. It’s lightning,” Lindsay said. “As in the old phrase, ‘thunder and lightning.’” He stared in utter fascination.

  “Lightning bolts are supposed to be red, with jagged edges,” Vera said. “These are like thin white branches.”

  “The disaster must have changed their form,” Lindsay said.

  The storm vanished over the horizon. “Coastline coming up,” Pilot said.

  Sunset fell; they switched to infrareds. “This is part of America,” Lindsay concluded. “It was called Mexico, or possibly Texico. The coastline looked different before the ice caps melted. I don’t recognize any of this.”

  Pilot struggled with the controls. Vera said, “We’re going faster than the movement of sound in this atmosphere. Slow down, Pilot.”

  “Muck,” Pilot complained. “Do you really want to see this? What if the locals see us?”

  “They’re primitives, they don’t have infrareds,” Vera said.

  “You mean they use only the visible spectrum?” Now Pilot himself was stunned.

  They studied the landscape below: knots of dense scrubland, shining in the false black-and-white of infrared. The wilderness was striped occasionally by half-obscured dark streaks. “Tectonic faults?” Vera said.

  “Roads,” Lindsay said. He explained about low-friction surfaces for ground travel in gravity. They had not seen any cities as yet, though there had been suggestive patches here and there where the rioting vegetation seemed thinner.

  Pilot took them lower. They pored over the growth at high magnification. “Weeds,” Lindsay concluded. “Since the disaster all ecological stability has collapsed…Adventitious species have moved in. This was probably all cropland once.”

  “It’s ugly,” Vera said.

  “Systems in collapse often are.”

  “High-energy flux ahead,” Pilot said. The spacecraft dipped and hovered over a ridge.

  Wildfire swept the hillside, whole kilometers of orange glow in the darkness. Roaring updrafts flung up flakes of glowing ash, reverse cascades of stripped-off leaves and branches. Behind the wall of fire were the twisted, glowing skeletons of weeds grown large as trees, their smoldering trunks thick bundles of woody filaments. They said nothing, stirred to the core by the wonder of it. “Sundog plants,” Lindsay said at last.

  “What?”

  “The weeds are like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They move in anywhere where systems break down. After this disaster the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive…”

  “More weeds,” Vera concluded.

  “Yes.” They left the fire behind and cruised past the foothills. Lindsay tapped one of the algae frames and ate a mouthful of green paste.

  “Aircraft,” Pilot said.

  For a moment Lindsay thought he was seeing a mutant gasbag, some bizarre example of parallel evolution. Then he realized it was a flying machine: some kind of blimp or zeppelin. Long seamed ridges of sewn balloon skin supported a skeletal gondola. A thin skein of flexible solar-power disks dotted the craft’s skin, dappling over its back, fading to a white underbelly. Long mooring lines trailed from its nose, like drooping antennae.

  They approached cautiously and saw its mooring-ground: a city.

  A gridwork of streets split a checkerboard of white stone shelters. The houses were marshaled around a looming central core: a four-sided masonry pyramid. The zeppelin was moored to the pyramid’s apex. The whole city was hemmed in by a high rectangular wall; outside, agriculture fields glowed a ghastly white, manured with ashes.

  A ceremony was progressing. A pyre blazed at the masonry plaza at the pyramid’s foot. The city’s population was drawn up in ranks. They numbered less than two thousand. Their clothing was bleached by the infrared glow of their body heat. “What is it?” said Vera. “Why don’t they move?”

  “A funeral, I think,” Lindsay said.

  “What’s the pyramid, then? A mausoleum? An indoctrination center?”

  “Both, maybe…Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum has an information line, the only one in the village. Whoever lives there holds all links to the outside world.” Lindsay thought suddenly of the domed stronghold of the Nephrine Black Medicals in the circumlunar Zaibatsu. He hadn’t thought of it for years, but he remembered the psychic atmosphere within it, the sense of paranoid isolation, of fanaticism slowly drifting past the limits through lack of variety. A world gone stale. “Stability,” he said. “The Terrans wanted stability, that’s why they set up the Interdict. They didn’t want technology to break them into pieces, as it’s done to us. They blamed technology for the disasters. The war plagues, the carbon dioxide that melted the ice caps…They can’t forget their dead.”

  “Surely the whole world isn’t like this,” Vera said.

  “It has to be. Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of change. Change that can’t be tolerated.”

  “But they have telephones. Aircraft.”

  “Enforcement technology,” Lindsay said.

  On their way to the Pacific they saw two more settlements, separated by miles of festering wilderness. The cities were as identical as circuit chips. They crouched unnaturally on the landscape; they could have been stamped out from some hydraulic press and dropped from the air.

  Pilot pointed out more of the bloated aircraft. Their full significance became clear to Lindsay. The flying machines were like plague vectors, carrying the ideological virus of some calcifying cultural disease. The pyramids towered in the heart of every city, enormous, dwarfing all hope, the strangling monuments of the legions of the dead.

  Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

  They slipped beneath the ocean south of the rocky island chain of Baja California. Pilot opened the hatchway, flooding the cargo hold with water, and they began at once to sink.

  They were in search of the world’s largest single ecosystem, the only biome man had never touched.

  The surface waters had not escaped. Over the drowned lands of the continental margins, rafts of rotting moss and algae, the ocean’s equivalents of weeds, festered in choking profusion. But
the abyssal depths were undisturbed. In the crushing blackness of the abyss, larger in area than all the continents combined, conditions scarcely varied from pole to pole. The denizens of this vast realm were poorly known. No human being had ever invented a way to wring advantage from them.

  But in the Schismatrix, man’s successors were more clever. The resemblance of this realm to the dark oceans of Europa had not escaped Lindsay. For decades he had searched the ancient databanks for scraps of knowledge. The surviving records of abyssal life were almost useless, dating back to the dawn of biology. But even these crude hints lured Lindsay with their potential for sudden miracle. Europa too had the gloominess, the depths. And the vast drowned ranges of volcanic rifts, oozing geothermal energy.

  The abyss had oases. It had always had them. The knowledge had lit a slow, subterranean fire in his imagination. Life: untouched, primeval life, swarmed in boiling splendor at the fiery edges of the Earth’s tectonic plates.

  An entire ecosystem, older than mankind, clustered there in all its miraculous richness. Life that could be seized, that could be Europa’s.

  At first he had rejected the idea. The Interdict was sacred: as old as the unspoken guilt of ancestral spacefarers, who had deserted Earth as disaster loomed. In their desertion, they had robbed the planet of the very expertise that might have saved it. Over centuries of life in space, that guilt had sunk into a darkened region of cultural awareness, surfacing only as caricature, as ritual denial and deliberate ignorance.

  The parting had come with hatred: with those in space condemned as antihuman thieves, and Earth’s emergency government denounced as fascist barbarism. Hatred made things easier: easier for those in space to shrug off all responsibility, easier for Earth to starve its myriad cultures down to a single gray regime of penance and pointless stability.

  But life moved in clades. Lindsay knew it as a fact. A successful species always burst into a joyous wave of daughter species, of hopeful monsters that rendered their ancestors obsolete. Denying change meant denying life.