Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [118]
"You wolfed down those apples, seeds, stems, and all," Juliano told him.
"It was a wonder."
"You're home, Alexa," Lindsay said. It was what she had wanted. He was glad for her.
"This was the Tyler house," Alexandrina said. 'The left wing and the grounds are for the clinic; that's Margaret's work. I'm the Curator. I run the rest. I've gathered up all the mementos of our old way of life—all that was spared by Constantine's reeducation squads." She helped him pull the spacesuit-collared formal jacket over his head. "Come on, I'll show you." Juliano kicked off her boots and stood in her rumpled socks. "I'll come along. I want to judge his reactions."
The main ballroom had become an exhibit hall, with glass-fronted displays and portraits of early clan founders. An antique pedal-driven ultralight aircraft hung from the ceiling. Five Shapers marveled over a case full of crude assembly tools from the circumlunar's construction. The Shapers'
chic low-gravity clothing sagged grotesquely in the Republic's centrifugal spin. Alexandrina took his arm and whispered, "The floor looks nice, doesn't it? I refinished it myself. We don't allow robots here." Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan's founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer's face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically.
"It's a joke!" he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.
Alexandrina glanced anxiously at the bemused Shapers. "Maybe this was too early for him, Margaret."
Juliano laughed. "He's right. It is a joke. Ask the Cataclysts." She took Lindsay's arm. "Come on, Abelard. We'll go outside."
"It's a joke," Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the words gushed free. "This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no idea. How could they? They were dead before they had a chance to see! What's five years to us, what's ten, a hundred—"
"You're babbling, dear." Juliano walked him down the hall and through the mortared stone archway into dappled sunlight and grass. "Watch where you step," she said. "We have other patients. Not housebroken." Beside the high moss-crusted walls a nude young woman was tearing single-mindedly at the grass, pausing to suck grime from her fingers.
Lindsay was horrified. He seemed to taste the grit on his own tongue.
"We'll go outside the grounds," Margaret said. "Pongpianskul won't mind."
"He's letting you stay here, is he? That woman's a Shaper. A Cataclyst?
He owed a debt to the Cataclysts. You're taking care of them for him."
"Try not to talk too much, dear. You might hurt something." She opened the iron gateway. "They like it here, the Cataclysts. Something about the view."
"Oh, my God," Lindsay said.
The Republic had run wild. The overarching trees on the Museum grounds had hid the full panorama from him. Now it loomed over and around him in its full five-kilometer range, a stunning expanse of ridged and tangled green, three long panels glowing in triple-crossed shafts of mirror-reflected sunlight. He'd forgotten how bright the sun was in circumlunar space.
"The trees," he gasped. "My God, look at them!"
"They've been growing ever since you left," Juliano said. "Come with me. I want to show you another project."
Lindsay looked up through reflex toward his own former home. Seen from above, the sprawling mansion grounds bordered what had once been a lively tangle of cheap low-class restaurants. Those were in decline, and the Lindsay home was in ruin. He could see yawning holes in the red-tiled roofs of fused lunar slate. The private landing