Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [102]
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 Pongpi-anskul'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 Kel-land'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. Con-stantine 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 While Periapsis and The Technical Advisor, languished in sullen silence with his disgraced Mavrides wife. Other artists with Detentiste 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