Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [14]
The people beyond the Wall had their own wildly varying mythos. They were said to live in a jungle of overgrown pines and mimosas. They were hideously inbred and afflicted with double thumbs and congenital deafness. Others claimed there was nothing remotely human beyond the Wall: just a proliferating cluster of software, which had acquired a sinister autonomy. It was, of course, possible that the land beyond the Wall had been secretly invaded and conquered by—aliens. An entire postindustrial folklore had sprung up around this enthralling concept, buttressed with ingenious arguments. Everyone expected aliens sooner or later. It was the modern version of the Millennium.
Ryumin was patient with him; while Lindsay slept feverishly, he patrolled the Zaibatsu with his camera robot, looking for news. Lindsay turned the corner on his illness. He kept down some soup and a few fried bricks of spiced protein.
One of Ryumin's stacks of equipment began to chime with a piercingly clear electronic bleeping. Ryumin looked up from where he sat sorting cassettes. 'That's the radar," he said. "Hand me that headset, will you?" Lindsay crawled to the radar stack and untangled a set of Ryumin's adhesive eyephones. Ryumin clamped them to his temples. "Not much resolution on radar," he said, closing his eyes. "A crowd has just arrived. Pirates, most likely. They're milling about on the landing pad."
He squinted, though his eyes were already shut. "Something very large is moving about with them. They've brought something huge. I'd better switch to telephoto." He yanked the headset's cord and its plug snapped free.
"I'm going outside for a look," Lindsay said. "I'm well enough."
"Wire yourself up first," Ryumin said. "Take that earset and one of the cameras."
Lindsay attached the auxiliary system and stepped outside the zippered airlock into the curdled air.
He backed away from Ryumin's dome toward the rim of the land panel. He turned and trotted to a nearby stile, which led over the low metal wall, and trained his camera upward.
"That's good," came Ryumin's voice in his ear. "Cut in the brightness amps, will you? That little button on the right. Yes, that's better. What do you make of it, Mr. Dze?"
Lindsay squinted through the lens. Far above, at the northern end of the Zai-batsu's axis, a dozen sundogs were wrestling in free-fall with a huge silver bag.
"It looks like a tent," Lindsay said. "They're inflating it." The silver bag wrinkled and tumesced suddenly, revealing itself as a blunt cylinder. On its side was a large red stencil as wide as a man was tall. It was a red skull with two crossed lightning bolts.
"Pirates!" Lindsay said.
Ryumin chuckled. "I thought as much."
A sharp gust of wind struck Lindsay. He lost his balance on the stile and looked behind him suddenly. The glass window strip formed a long white alley of decay. The hexagonal metaglass frets were speckled with dark plugs, jack-strawed here and there with heavy reinforcement struts. Leaks had been sprayed with airtight coats of thick plastic. Sunlight oozed sullenly through the gaps.
"Are you all right?" Ryumin said.
"Sorry," Lindsay said. He tilted the camera upward again. The pirates had gotten their foil balloon airborne and had turned on its pair of small pusher-propellers. As it drifted away from the landing pad, it jerked once, then surged forward. It was towing something—an oddly shaped dark lump larger than a man.
"It's a meteorite," Ryumin told him. "A gift for the people beyond the Wall. Did you see the dark rocks that stand in the Sterilized Zone? They're all gifts from pirates. It's become a tradition."
"Wouldn't it be easier to carry it along the ground?"
"Are you joking? It's death to set foot in the Sterilized Zone."
"I see. So they're forced to drop it from the air. Do you recognize