Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [108]
The Queen never knew what had betrayed her. The approach to her had been even more subtle, stretching Lindsay's talents to the utmost. A timely gift of jewels had helped, distracting her with that overwhelming avidity that was the very breath of life to Investors. Business had been poor on her ship, with its debased crew and wretched eunuch Ensign.
Lindsay came armed with charts from Wells, statistics predicting the wealth to be wrung from a city-state independent of faction. Their exponential curves rose to a clean rake-off of breathtaking riches. He told her that he knew nothing of her disgrace; only that her own species was eager to condemn her. With a large enough hoard, he hinted, she might buy her way back into their good graces.
Patiently, fluently, he helped her see that this was her best chance. What could she accomplish alone, without crew, without Ensign? Why not accept the industrious aid of the small polite strangers? The social instincts of the tiny gregarious mammals drove them to consider her their Queen, in truth, and themselves her subjects. Already a Board of Advisors awaited her whims, each one fluent in Investor and begging leave to heap her with wealth. Greed would only have taken her so far. It was fear that broke her to his will: fear of the small soft-skinned alien with dark plastic over his pulpy eyes and his answers for everything. He seemed to know her own people better than she did herself.
The announcement had come a week later, and with it a sudden hemorrhage of capital to the newborn place of exile. They called the Queen "Czarina," a nickname given by Ryumin. And her city was Czarina-Kluster: in four months already a boom town, accreting out of nothing on the inner edge of the Belt. The Czarina-Kluster People's Corporate Republic had leaped into sudden concrete existence out of raw potential, in what Wells called a "Prigoginic leap," a "mergence into a higher level of complexity." Now the Board of Advisors was deluged with business, comlines frantic with would-be defectors maneuvering for asylum and a fresh start. The presence of an Investor cast an enormous shadow, a wall of prestige that no Mechanist or Shaper dared to challenge.
Makeshift squatter's digs crowded the Queen's raw Palace: nets of tough Shaper bubble suburbs, "subbles"; sleazy pirate craft copulating in a daisy-chain of accordioned attack tunnels; rough blown-out honeycombs of Mechanist nickel-iron, towed into place; limpetlike construction huts clinging to the skeletal girders of an urban complex scarcely off the drawing board. This city would be a metropolis, a circumsolar free port, the ultimate sundog zone. He had brought it into being. But it was not for him.
"A sight to stir the blood, friend." Lindsay looked to his right. The man once called Wells had arrived in the observation bubble. In the weeks of preparation Wells had vanished into a carefully prepared false identity. He was now Wellspring, two hundred years old, born on Earth, a man of mystery, a maneu-verer par excellence, a visionary, even a prophet. Nothing less would do. A coup this size demanded legendry. It demanded fraud. Lindsay nodded. "Things progress."
"This is where the real work starts. I'm not too happy with that Board of Advisors. They seem a bit too stiff, too Mechanist. Some of them have ambition. They'll have to be watched."
"Of course."
"You wouldn't consider the job? The Coordinator's post is open for you. You're the man for it."
"I like the shadows, Wellspring. A role your size is too close to the footlights for me."
Wellspring hesitated. "I have trouble enough with the philosophy. The myth may be too much for me. I need you and your shadows." Lindsay looked away, watching two construction robots follow a seam to meet in a white-hot kiss of their welding-beaks. "My wife is dead," he said.
"Alexandrina? I'm sorry. This is a shock."
Lindsay winced. "No, not her. Nora. Nora Mavrides. Nora Everett."
"Ah," Wellspring said. "When did