Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  On the fifth day she found on awakening that it had killed and eaten her four largest and fattest roaches. Filled with a righteous anger she did nothing to blunt, she hunted for it throughout the capsule.

  She did not find it. Instead, after hours of search, she found a mascot-sized cocoon wedged under the toilet.

  It had gone into some sort of hibernation. She forgave it for eating the roaches. They were easy to replace, anyway, and rivals for her affections. In a way it was flattering. But the sharp pang of worry she felt overrode that. She examined the cocoon closely. It was made of overlapping sheets of some brittle translucent substance—dried mucus?—that she could chip easily with her fingernail. The cocoon was not perfectly rounded; there were small vague lumps that might have been its knees and elbows. She took another injection.

  The week it spent in hibernation was a period of acute anxiety for her. She pored over the Investor tapes, but they were far too cryptic for her limited expertise. At least she knew it was not dead, for the cocoon was warm to the touch and the lumps within it sometimes stirred.

  She was asleep when it began to break free of the cocoon. She had set up monitors to warn her, however, and she rushed to it at the first alarm.

  The cocoon was splitting. A rent appeared in the brittle overlapping sheets, and a warm animal reek seeped out into the recycled air.

  Then a paw emerged: a tiny five-fingered paw covered in glittering fur. A second paw poked through, and the two paws gripped the edges of the rent and ripped the cocoon away. It stepped out into the light, kicking the husk aside with a little human shuffle, and it grinned.

  It looked like a little ape, small and soft and glittering. There were tiny human teeth behind the human lips of its grin. It had small soft baby’s feet on the ends of its round springy legs, and it had lost its wings. Its eyes were the color of her eyes. The smooth mammalian skin of its round little face had the faint rosy flush of perfect health.

  It jumped into the air, and she saw the pink of its tongue as it babbled aloud in human syllables.

  It skipped over and embraced her leg. She was frightened, amazed, and profoundly relieved. She petted the soft perfect glittering fur on its hard little nugget of a head.

  “Fuzzy,” she said. “I’m glad. I’m very glad.”

  “Wa wa wa,” it said, mimicking her intonation in its piping child’s voice. Then it skipped back to its cocoon and began to eat it by the double handful, grinning.

  She understood now why the Investors had been so reluctant to offer their mascot. It was a trade item of fantastic value. It was a genetic artifact, able to judge the emotional wants and needs of an alien species and adapt itself to them in a matter of days.

  She began to wonder why the Investors had given it away at all; if they fully understood the capabilities of their pet. Certainly she doubted that they had understood the complex data that had come with it. Very likely, they had acquired the mascot from other Investors, in its reptilian form. It was even possible (the thought chilled her) that it might be older than the entire Investor race.

  She stared at it: at its clear, guileless, trusting eyes. It gripped her fingers with small warm sinewy hands. Unable to resist, she hugged it to her, and it babbled with pleasure. Yes, it could easily have lived for hundreds or thousands of years, spreading its love (or equivalent emotions) among dozens of differing species.

  And who would harm it? Even the most depraved and hardened of her own species had secret weaknesses. She remembered stories of guards in concentration camps who butchered men and women without a qualm, but meticulously fed hungry birds in the winter. Fear bred fear and hatred, but how could anyone feel fear or hatred toward this creature, or resist its brilliant powers?

  It was not intelligent; it didn’t need intelligence. It was sexless as well. An ability to breed would have ruined its value as a trade item. Besides, she doubted that anything so complex could have grown in a womb. Its genes would have to be built, spicule by spicule, in some unimaginable lab.

  Days and weeks reeled by. Its ability to sense her moods was little short of miraculous. When she needed it, it was always there, and when she didn’t it vanished. Sometimes she would hear it chattering to itself as it capered in strange acrobatics or chased and ate roaches. It was never mischievous, and on the odd occasions where it spilled food or upset something, it would unobtrusively clean up after itself. It dropped its small inoffensive fecal pellets into the same recycler she used.

  These were the only signs it showed of patterns of thought that were more than animal. Once, and only once, it had mimicked her, repeating a sentence letter-perfect. She had been shocked, and it had sensed her reaction immediately. It never tried to parrot her again.

  They slept in the same bed. Sometimes while she slept she would feel its warm nose snuffling lightly along the surface of her skin, as if it could smell her suppressed moods and feelings through the pores. Sometimes it would rub or press with its small firm hands against her neck or spine, and there was always a tightened muscle there that relaxed in gratitude. She never allowed this in the day, but at night, when her discipline was half-dissolved in sleep, there was a conspiracy between them.

  The Investors had been gone over six hundred days. She laughed when she thought of the bargain she was getting.

  The sound of her own laughter no longer startled her. She had even cut back on her dosages of suppressants and inhibitors. Her pet seemed so much happier when she was happy, and when it was at hand her ancient sadness seemed easier to bear. One by one she began to face old pains and traumas, holding her pet close and shedding healing tears into its glittering fur. One by one it licked her tears, tasting the emotional chemicals they contained, smelling her breath and skin, holding her as she was racked with sobbing. There were so many memories. She felt old, horribly old, but at the same time she felt a new sense of wholeness that allowed her to bear it. She had done things in the past—cruel things—and she had never put up with the inconvenience of guilt. She had mashed it instead.

  Now for the first time in decades she felt the vague reawakening of a sense of purpose. She wanted to see people again—dozens of people, hundreds of people, all of whom would admire her, protect her, find her precious, whom she could care for, who would keep her safer than she was with only one companion…

  Her web station entered the most dangerous part of its orbit, where it crossed the plane of the Rings. Here she was busiest, accepting the drifting chunks of raw materials—ice, carbonaceous chondrites, metal ores—that her telepuppet mining robots had discovered and sent her way. There were killers in these Rings: rapacious pirates, paranoid settlers anxious to lash out.

  In her normal orbit, far off the plane of the ecliptic, she was safe. But here there were orders to be broadcasted, energies to be spent, the telltale traces of powerful mass drivers hooked to the captive asteroids she claimed and mined. It was an unavoidable risk. Even the best-designed habitat was not a completely closed system, and hers was big, and old.

  They found her.

  Three ships. She tried bluffing them off at first, sending them a standard interdiction warning routed through a telepuppet beacon. They found the beacon and destroyed it, but that gave her their location and some blurry data through the beacon’s limited sensors.

  Three sleek ships, iridescent capsules half-metal, half-organic, with long ribbed insect-tinted sun-wings thinner than the scum of oil on water. Shaper spacecraft, knobbed with the geodesics of sensors, the spines of magnetic and optical weapons systems, long cargo manipulators folded like the arms of mantises.

  She sat hooked into her own sensors, studying them, taking in a steady trickle of data: range estimation, target probabilities, weapons status. Radar was too risky; she sighted them optically. This was fine for lasers, but her lasers were not her best weapons. She might get one, but the others would be on her. It was better that she stay quiet while they prowled the Rings and she slid silently off the ecliptic.

  But they had f
ound her. She saw them fold their sails and activate their ion engines.

  They were sending radio. She entered it on screen, not wanting the distraction filling her head. A Shaper’s face appeared, one of the Oriental-based gene lines, smooth raven hair held back with jeweled pins, slim black eyebrows arched over dark eyes with the epicanthic fold, pale lips slightly curved in a charismatic smile. A smooth, clean actor’s face with the glittering ageless eyes of a fanatic. “Jade Prime,” she said.

  “Colonel-Doctor Jade Prime,” the Shaper said, fingering a golden insignia of rank in the collar of his black military tunic. “Still calling yourself ‘Spider Rose’ these days, Lydia? Or have you wiped that out of your brain?”

  “Why are you a soldier instead of a corpse?”

  “Times change, Spider. The bright young lights get snuffed out, by your old friends, and those of us with long-range plans are left to settle old debts. You remember old debts, Spider?”

  “You think you’re going to survive this meeting, don’t you, Prime?” She felt the muscles of her face knotting with a ferocious hatred she had no time to kill. “Three ships manned with your own clones. How long have you holed up in that rock of yours, like a maggot in an apple? Cloning and cloning. When was the last time a woman let you touch her?”

  His eternal smile twisted into a leer with bright teeth behind it. “It’s no use, Spider. You’ve already killed thirty-seven of me, and I just keep coming back, don’t I? You pathetic old bitch, what the hell is a maggot, anyway? Something like that mutant on your shoulder?”

  She hadn’t even known the pet was there, and her heart was stabbed with fear for it. “You’ve come too close!”

  “Fire, then! Shoot me, you germy old cretin! Fire!”

  “You’re not him!” she said suddenly. “You’re not the First Jade! Hah! He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  The clone’s face twisted with rage. Lasers flared, and three of her habitats melted into slag and clouds of metallic plasma. A last searing pulse of intolerable brightness flashed in her brain from three melting telescopes.

  She cut loose with a chugging volley of magnetically accelerated iron slugs. At four hundred miles per second they riddled the first ship and left it gushing air and brittle clouds of freezing water.

  Two ships fired. They used weapons she had never seen before, and they crushed two habitats like a pair of giant fists. The web lurched with the impact, its equilibrium gone. She knew instantly which weapons systems were left, and she returned fire with metal-jacketed pellets of ammonia ice. They punched through the semiorganic sides of a second Shaper craft. The tiny holes sealed instantly, but the crew was finished; the ammonia vaporized inside, releasing instantly lethal nerve toxins.

  The last ship had one chance in three to get her command center. Two hundred years of luck ran out for Spider Rose. Static stung her hands from the controls. Every light in the habitat went out, and her computer underwent a total crash. She screamed and waited for death.

  Death did not come.

  Her mouth gushed with the bile of nausea. She opened the drawer in the darkness and filled her brain with liquid tranquillity. Breathing hard, she sat back in her console chair, her panic mashed. “Electromagnetic pulse,” she said. “Stripped everything I had.”

  The pet warbled a few syllables. “He would have finished us by now if he could,” she told her pet. “The defenses must have come through from the other habitats when the mainframe crashed.”

  She felt a thump as the pet jumped into her lap, shivering with terror. She hugged it absently, rubbing its slender neck. “Let’s see,” she said into the darkness. “The ice toxins are down, I had them overridden from here.” She pulled the useless plug from her neck and plucked her robe away from her damp ribs. “It was the spray, then. A nice, thick cloud of hot ionized metallic copper. Blew every sensor he had. He’s riding blind in a metallic coffin. Just like us.”

  She laughed. “Except Old Rose has a trick left, baby. The Investors. They’ll be looking for me. There’s nobody left to look for him. And I still have my rock.”

  She sat silently, and her artificial calmness allowed her to think the unthinkable. The pet stirred uneasily, sniffing at her skin. It had calmed a little under her caresses, and she didn’t want it to suffer.

  She put her free hand over its mouth and twisted its neck till it broke. The centrifugal gravity had kept her strong, and it had no time to struggle. A final tremor shook its limbs as she held it up in the darkness, feeling for a heartbeat. Her fingertips felt the last pulse behind its frail ribs.

  “Not enough oxygen,” she said. Mashed emotions tried to stir, and failed. She had plenty of suppressor left. “The carpet algae will keep the air clean a few weeks, but it dies without light. And I can’t eat it. Not enough food, baby. The gardens are gone, and even if they hadn’t been blasted, I couldn’t get food in here. Can’t run the robots. Can’t even open the airlocks. If I live long enough, they’ll come and pry me out. I have to improve my chances. It’s the sensible thing. When I’m like this I can only do the sensible thing.”

  When the roaches—or at least all those she could trap in the darkness—were gone, she fasted for a long dark time. Then she ate her pet’s undecayed flesh, half hoping even in her numbness that it would poison her.

  When she first saw the searing blue light of the Investors glaring through the shattered airlock, she crawled back on bony hands and knees, shielding her eyes.

  The Investor crewman wore a spacesuit to protect himself from bacteria. She was glad he couldn’t smell the reek of her pitch-black crypt. He spoke to her in the fluting language of the Investors, but her translator was dead.

  She thought then for a moment that they would abandon her, leave her there starved and blinded and half-bald in her webs of shed fiber-hair. But they took her aboard, drenching her with stinging antiseptics, scorching her skin with bacterial ultraviolet rays.

  They had the jewel, but that much she already knew. What they wanted—(this was difficult)—what they wanted to know was what had happened to their mascot. It was hard to understand their gestures and their pidgin scraps of human language. She had done something bad to herself, she knew that. Overdoses in the dark. Struggling in the darkness with a great black beetle of fear that broke the frail meshes of her spider’s web. She felt very bad. There was something wrong inside of her. Her malnourished belly was as tight as a drum, and her lungs felt crushed. Her bones felt wrong. Tears wouldn’t come.

  They kept at her. She wanted to die. She wanted their love and understanding. She wanted—

  Her throat was full. She couldn’t talk. Her head tilted back, and her eyes shrank in the searing blaze of the overhead lights. She heard painless cracking noises as her jaws unhinged.

  Her breathing stopped. It came as a relief. Antiperistalsis throbbed in her gullet, and her mouth filled with fluid.

  A living whiteness oozed from her lips and nostrils. Her skin tingled at its touch, and it flowed over her eyeballs, sealing and soothing them. A great coolness and lassitude soaked into her as wave after wave of translucent liquid swaddled her, gushing over her skin, coating her body. She relaxed, filled with a sensual, sleepy gratitude. She was not hungry. She had plenty of excess mass.

  In eight days she broke from the brittle sheets of her cocoon and fluttered out on scaly wings, eager for the leash.

  Cicada Queen

  It began the night the Queen called off her dogs. I’d been under the dogs for two years, ever since my defection.

  My initiation, and my freedom from the dogs, were celebrated at the home of Arvin Kulagin. Kulagin, a wealthy Mechanist, had a large domestic-industrial complex on the outer perimeter of a midsized cylindrical suburb.

  Kulagin met me at his door and handed me a gold inhaler. The party was already roaring. The Polycarbon Clique always turned out in force for an initiation.

  As usual, my entrance was marked by a subtle freezing up. It was the dogs’ fault. Voices were raised to a certain histrio
nic pitch, people handled their inhalers and drinks with a slightly more studied elegance, and every smile turned my way was bright enough for a team of security experts.

  Kulagin smiled glassily. “Landau, it’s a pleasure. Welcome. I see you’ve brought the Queen’s Percentage.” He looked pointedly at the box on my hip.

  “Yes,” I said. A man under the dogs had no secrets. I had been working off and on for two years on the Queen’s gift, and the dogs had taped everything. They were still taping everything. Czarina-Kluster Security had designed them for that. For two years they’d taped every moment of my life and everything and everyone around me.

  “Perhaps the Clique can have a look,” Kulagin said. “Once we’ve whipped these dogs.” He winked into the armored camera face of the watchdog, then looked at his timepiece. “Just an hour till you’re out from under. Then we’ll have some fun.” He waved me on into the room. “If you need anything, use the servos.”

  Kulagin’s place was spacious and elegant, decorated classically and settled by gigantic suspended marigolds. His suburb was called the Froth and was the Clique’s favorite neighborhood. Kulagin, living at the suburb’s perimeter, profited by the Froth’s lazy spin and had a simulated tenth of a gravity. His walls were striped to provide a vertical referent, and he had enough space to affect such luxuries as “couches,” “tables,” “chairs,” and other forms of gravity-oriented furniture. The ceiling was studded with hooks, from which were suspended a dozen of his favorite marigolds, huge round explosions of reeking greenery with blossoms the size of my head.

  I walked into the room and stood behind a couch, which partially hid the two offensive dogs. I signaled one of Kulagin’s spidery servos and took a squeezebulb of liquor to cut the speedy intensity of the inhaler’s phenethylamine.