Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [104]
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.
He was improving at the keyboards. He had attacked the problem of music with his usual inhuman steadiness. For years he had worked hard enough to kill himself, but modern biomonitoring technique saw each breakdown coming and averted it months ahead of time. The bed took care of that, feeding him subterranean flashes of intense and blurry dream that left him each morning blank and empty with perfect mental health.
Eighteen years had passed since his wife's remarriage. The pain of it had never fully hit him. He'd known her present husband briefly in the Council: Graham Everett, a colorless Detentiste with powerful clan connections. Nora used Everett's influence to parry the attacks of militants. It was sad: Lindsay didn't remember the man well enough to hate him. Warnings cut short his playing. Someone had arrived at his entry hall. The scanners there assured him that the visitor, a woman, bore only harmless Mechanist implants: plaque-scraping arterial microbots, old-fashioned teflon kneecaps, plastic knuckles, a porous drug duct in the crook of the left elbow. Much of her hair was artificial, implanted strands of shining optical fibers. He had his household servo escort the woman in. She had the strange complexion common to many older Mechanist women, smooth unblemished skin like a perfectly form-fitted paper mask. Her red hair was shot through with copper highlights from the fiberoptics. She wore a sleeveless gray suit, furred vest, and elbow-length white thermal gloves. "Auditor Milosz?" She had a Concatenate accent. He ushered her to the couch. She sat gracefully, her movements honed to precision by age. "Yes, madam. What may I do for you?"
"Forgive me for intruding, Auditor. My name is Tyler. I'm a clerk with Limonov Cryonics. But my business here is personal. I've come to ask your help. I've heard of your friendship with Neville Pongpianskul."
"You're Alexandrina Tyler," Lindsay realized aloud. "From Mare Serenita-tis. The Republic."
She looked surprised and lifted her thin, arched brows. "You already know my case, Auditor?"
"You"—Lindsay sat down in the stirruped chair—"would like a drink, perhaps?" She was his first wife. From some deeply buried level of reflex he felt the stirrings of a long-dead persona, the brittle layer of false kinesics he had put between them in their marriage. Alexandrina Tyler, his wife, his mother's cousin.
"No, thank you," she said. She adjusted the fabric over her knees. She'd always had trouble with her knees; she'd had the teflon put in in the Republic.
Her familiar gesture brought it all back to him: the marriage politics of the Republic's aristocrats. She had been fifty years his senior, their marriage a stifling net of strained politeness and grim rebellion. Lindsay was ninety now, older than she had been at their marriage. With a flood of new perspective, he could taste the long-forgotten pain that he had caused her.
"I was born in the Republic," she said. "I lost my citizenship in the Shaper purges, almost fifty years ago. I loved the Republic, Auditor. I've never forgotten it. ... I came from one of the privileged familes, but I thought, perhaps now, since the new regime there has settled, surely that's all a dead issue?"
"You were Abelard Lindsay's wife."
Her eyes widened. "So you do know my case. You know I've applied to emigrate? I had no response from the Pongpianskul government. I've come to ask for your help, Auditor. I'm not a member of your Carbon Clique, but I know their power. You have influence that works around the laws."
"Life must have been difficult for you, madam. Thrown out without resources into the Schismatrix."
She blinked, china-white lids falling over her eyes like paper shutters.
"Things were not so bad once I'd reached the cartels. But