Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [128]
Lindsay had nothing to tell him.
"I know what you're thinking," Gomez said at last. " 'Love has broken his heart; it's an old story. Only time can bring him to a better sense of himself.' That's what you're thinking, isn't it? ... Of course it is." When Gomez spoke again he was calm, meditative. "Now I begin to see. It isn't something that words can capture, is it? It can only be grasped all at once. Someday I'll have it entirely. Someday when these dogs are long gone. Someday when even Melanie Omaha is only a memory to me." He was sad but exalted. "I heard them talking as you made your—uh, gesture. These so-called sophisticates, these proud Cicadas. They may have the jargon, but the wisdom is yours." Gomez was radiant. "Thank you, sir." Lindsay waited until Gomez had left. Then he could not hold it back any longer. He thought he would never stop laughing.
Chapter 10
DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 21-2-'01
Despite her role in its foundation, Kitsune had never visited Czarina-Kluster. Like Wellspring, Kitsune had held great power in C-K's pioneer days; unlike him, she had not released it gracefully. While Wellspring had retreated from day-to-day government and pursued his strategy of rule-by-fashion, Kitsune had blatantly challenged the Queen's Advisors. In the years while Lindsay recuperated, she had had some success. She announced plans to move to C-K, but as years passed she refused to disturb her routines, and her power decayed. It had led to a break, and the destinies of C-K and Dembowska had radically diverged.
Disquieting stories of her transformations had reached Lindsay in C-K. Rumor said she had embraced new technologies, exploiting the laxity that had come with detente. Dembowska was still a member of the Mechanist Union of Cartels but was constantly on the verge of expulsion, tolerated only as a clearinghouse for Ring Council defectors.
Even the Ring Council was appalled by Dembowska's emergent technology of flesh. In the hands of the Zen Serotonists, the Ring Council struggled for stability; as a result, it was falling behind. The cutting edge of genetics technology had been seized by the wild-eyed black surgeons of the cometaries and the Uran-ian rings, mushrooming posthuman clades like the Metropolarity, the Blood Bathers, and the Endosymbiotics. They had discarded humanity like a caul. Disintegrating microfactions surrounded the Schismatrix like a haze of superheated plasma.
The march of science had become a headlong stampede. The Mechanists and Shapers had become like two opposing armies, whose rank and file, scattering into swamps and thickets, ignore the orders of their aging generals. The emergent philosophies of the age—Posthumanism, Zen Serotonin, Galacti-cism—were like signal bonfires lit to attract stragglers. Deserters'
philosophies.
Lindsay's fire burned brightly, and its glow attracted many. They called Lindsay's group the Lifesiders Clique.
Czarina-Kluster's cliques had the power of minor factions in their own right. The cliques formed a shadow government in C-K, a moral parallel to the distracted formal rule of the Queen's Advisors. Clique elites moved behind the scenes, imitating their paragon Wellspring in deliberate webs of self-spun obfus-cation. The forms of power and its realities had been gently disentangled. The social arbiters of the Polycarbon Clique, the Lifesiders, or the Green Camarilla could work wonders with a dropped hint or a lifted eyebrow.
It followed, then, that groups considering defection to C-K consulted the Cicada cliques before formally requesting asylum. Normally this was Well-spring's domain.
In the latest case, however, Wellspring was absent on one of his many recruiting