Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [138]
"People outlive nations," Lindsay said gently. He was breathing with inhuman regularity: a Mechanist biocuirass managed his internal organs. "C-K
is doomed. No number of dogs or purges can hold it, without the Queen. We're finished here."
"The Chancellor Emeritus is right," Gomez told them. "Where will we go?
We must decide. Do we join the Polycarbon Clique around Mars, to live in the Queen's shadow? Or do we make our move to CircumEuropan orbit and put our own plans into effect?"
"I say Mars," Nakamura said. "In today's climate Posthumanism needs all the help it can get. The Cause demands solidarity."
"Solidarity? Fluidarity, rather," Lindsay said. He sat upright with an effort. "What's one Queen, more or less? There are always more aliens. Posthumanism must find its own orbit someday ... why not now?" While the others argued, Gomez looked moodily, through half-shut eyes, at his old mentor. The remnants of old pain gnawed at him. He could not forget his long marriage to Lindsay's favorite, Vera Constantine. There had been too many shadows between himself and Vera.
Once they had put the shadows aside. That was when she'd confessed to Gomez that she had meant to kill Lindsay. Lindsay had made no move to defend himself, and there had been many opportunities, but the time had never quite been right. And years passed. And convictions faltered and became buried in routines and practicalities. The day came when she knew she could not go through with it. She had confessed it to Gomez, because she trusted him. And they had loved each other.
Gomez led her away from vengeance. She embraced Posthumanism. Even her clan had been won over. The Constantine clan were now the Lifesiders'
pioneers, working around Europa.
But Gomez himself had not escaped the years. Time had a way of making passion into work. He had what he wanted. He had his dream. He had to live it and breathe it and do its budget. And he had lost Vera, for there had been one shadow left.
Vera had never been entirely sane. For years she had quietly insisted that an alien Presence followed and watched her. It seemed to come and go with her mood swings; for days she would be cheerful, convinced that it was "off somewhere"; then he would find her moody and withdrawn, convinced that it was back.
Lindsay condoned her illness and claimed to believe her. Gomez too believed in the Presence: he believed it was the reflection of his wife's estrangement from reality. It was not for nothing that she had called it "a mirror-colored thing...." Something that could not be pinned down, an incarnation of unverifi-able fluidity.... When Gomez got to the point where he himself could feel it, even sense it flickering at the corners of his vision, he knew things had gone too far. Their divorce had been amiable, full of cool politeness.
He wondered sometimes if Lindsay had planned it all. Lindsay knew the trap that was human joy, and the strength that came from clawing free of it. Scalded by pain, Gomez had won that strength.... Szilard was reeling off facts and figures about the state of CircumEuropa. The future Lifesiders habitat was being blown into shape around the Jovian moon, an orbiting froth of hard-set angles, walls, bubbled topologies.
The flourishing Constantine clan was snaking plumbing through the walls already and booting up the life-support system. But an attempt by the Lifesiders to move there en masse, in their thousands, would stretch resources to the limit.
Their relations with the gasbag colony on Jupiter were good; they had the expertise of Vera and her cadre of trainees. But the Jovian aliens could not protect them from other human factions. They had no such ambition and no prestige to match that of the Cicada Queen.
Jane Murray presented things from a Project perspective. The surface of Europa was the bleakest of prospects: a vacuum-seared wasteland of smooth water ice, so cold that blood and bone would crack