Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [107]
Constantine felt a quiver of familiar tension across the back of his head. He touched the plug there and reached in his pocket for the inhaler. No use going into fugue when the boy was starting to babble, at the point of breaking. "Go on," he said.
"The great things you claim you've done are all facades and frauds. You've never built anything of your own. You're small, Constantine. Very small. I know a man who could hide ten of you under his thumbnail."
"Who?" Constantine said. "Your friend Vetterling?"
"Poor Fernand, your victim? Yes, of course he's a thousand times your size, but that's hardly fair, is it? You never had an atom of artistic talent. No, I mean in your own skill. Politics. Espionage."
"Some Cataclyst, then." Constantine was bored.
"No. Abelard Lindsay."
It hit him then. A lightning stroke of migraine raced across his left frontal lobe. The surface of the tank came toward him in slow motion as he fell, a frozen icescape of dull metallic glitter, and he struggled to get his hands up, nerve impulses locked in a high-speed fugue that seemed to last a month. When he came to, his cheek pressed against the cold metal, Mavrides was still babbling. "... the whole story from Nora. While you were here holding treason trials for artists, Lindsay was scoring the biggest coup in history. An Investor defector.... He has an Investor defector, a starship Queen. In the palm of his hand."
Constantine cleared his throat. "I heard that news. Mech propaganda. It's a farce."
Mavrides laughed hysterically. "You're burned! You're a fucking footnote. Lindsay led the revolution in your nation while you were still swatting bugs in the germs and muck and plotting to seize his credit. You're microscopic! I shouldn't have bothered to kill you, but I've never had any luck."
"Lindsay's dead. He's been dead sixty years."
"Sure, plebe. That's what he wanted you to think." The laughter from the speakers was metallic, drawn straight from the nerve. "I lived in his house, fool. He loved me."
Constantine opened the tank. He twisted the timer on the vial and dropped it into the water, then slammed the tank shut. He turned and walked away. As he reached the doorway he heard a sudden frenzied splashing as the toxin hit.
CZARINA-HLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 3-1-'84
The long bright line of welded radiance was the cleanest thing he had ever seen. Lindsay floated in an observation bubble, watching construction robots crawl in vacuum. The Mechanist engines had the long sharp noses of weevils, their white-hot welding tips casting long shadows across the blackened hull of the Czarina's Palace.
They were building a full-sized replica of an Investor starship, a starship without engines, a hulk that would never move under its own power. And black, with no trace of the gaudy arabesques and inlays of a true Investor craft. The other Investors had insisted on it: condemned their pervert Queen to this dark and mocking prison.
After years of research, Lindsay had pieced out the truth about the Commander's crime.
Queens intromitted their eggs into the womblike pouches of their males. The males fertilized the eggs and brought them to term within the pouch. The neuter Ensigns controlled ovulation through a complex hormonal pseudo-copulation.
The criminal Queen had killed her Ensign in a fit of passion and set up a common male in his place. But without a true Ensign, the cycles of her sexuality had become distorted. Lindsay's evidence showed her destroying one of her malformed eggs. To an Investor, it was worse than perversion, worse even than murder: it was bad for business.
Lindsay had presented his evidence in a way that pierced to the core of Investor ethics. Embarrassment was not an emotion native to Investors. They had been stunned. But Lindsay was quick with his remedy: exile. Behind it was the implied threat to spread the evidence, to play out the details of the scandal to every Investor ship and every human faction.
It was bad enough that a select group of wealthy Queens and Ensigns had been apprised of the