Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [117]
'preeked,' Abelard. My preconceptions shattered. The world didn't need me, and everything I'd thought was important was gone. My life was totally futile. And totally free."
"Free," Lindsay said, tasting the word. "Constantine," he said suddenly.
"My enemy."
"He's dead, so to speak," Margaret Juliano said, "but it's a question of definition. I have the scans on his condition from his congenetics. The damage is very severe. He fell into a protracted fugue state and suffered an accelerated consciousness that must have lasted for subjective centuries. His consciousness could not maintain itself on the data it received from the Arena device. It lasted so long that his personality was abraded away. Speaking metaphorically, he forgot himself to pieces."
"They told you that? His siblings?"
"Times have changed, Abelard. Detente is back. The Constantine gene-line is in trouble, and we paid them well for the information. Skimmers Union lost the capitalship. Jastrow Station is the capital now, and it's full of Zen Seroton-ists. They hate excitement."
The news thrilled Lindsay. "Five years," he said. He stood up in agitation. "Well, what's five years to me?" He tried to pace about the room, swinging dizzily. The left-right hemispheric confusion made him clumsy. He drew himself up and tried to get a grip on his kinesics.
He failed.
He turned on Juliano. "My training. My kinesics." She nodded. "Yes. When we went in we noticed the remnants of it. Early Shaper psychotechnic conditioning. Very clumsy by modern standards. It interfered with your recovery. So, over the years, we chased it down and extinguished it bit by bit."
"You mean it's gone?"
"Oh, yes. We had enough cerebral dichotomy to deal with without your training giving you dual modes of thought. 'Hypocrisy as a second state of consciousness' and all that." She sniffed. "It was a bad idea to begin with." Lindsay sagged back into the scanning chair. "But all my life.... And now you took it away. With feck—" He closed his eyes, struggled for the word.
"With technology."
She took another candy. "So what?" she said indistinctly, munching.
"Technology put it there in the first place. You have your self back. What more do you want?"
Alexandrina Tyler came through the open doorway with a swish of heavy fabric. She wore the finery of her girlhood: a puffed, floor-length skirt and a stiff cream-colored jacket with embroidered input jacks and a round neck-circling collar. She looked at the floor. "Margaret," she said. "Your feet."
Juliano looked absently at the dried mud flaking from her boots. "Oh, dear. Sorry."
The sudden juxtaposition of the two women filled Lindsay with vertigo. A confused wash of tainted deja vu bubbled up from some drugged cerebral recess, and for a moment he thought he would pass out. When he revived he could feel that he had improved, as if some paralyzing sludge had trickled out of his head, leaving light and space. "Alexandrina," he said, feeling feebler yet somehow more real. "You've been time? All this here?"
"Abelard," she said, surprised. "You're talking."
"Trying to."
"I heard you were better," she said. "So I brought you clothes. From the Museum wardrobe." She showed him a plastic-wrapped suit, an antique. "You see?
This is actually one of your own suits from seventy-five years ago. One of the looters saved it when the Lindsay Mansion was sacked. Try it on, dear." Lindsay touched the suit's stiff, age-worn fabric. "A museum piece," he said.
"Well, of course."
Margaret Juliano Looked at Alexandrina. "Maybe he'd be more comfortable dressed as an orderly. He could fade into the background. Take on local color."
"No," Lindsay said. "All right. I'll wear it."
"Alexandrina's been looking forward to this," Juliano confided as he struggled into the suit's trousers, ramming his bare feet past the wire-stiffened accordioned knees. "Every day she's come to feed you Tyler apples."
"I brought you here after the duel," Alexandrina said. "Our marriage expired, but I run the Museum now. I have a post here." She