Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [140]
The old man's absence left a hollowness behind. The others sat silently, savoring the sense of loss. They looked at one another. Then, as one, they looked to Gomez. The moment passed; the uneasiness dissolved. Gomez smiled.
"Well," he said. "It's miracles, then." Lindsay's rat leaped spryly onto the table. "He's left it behind," Jane Murray said. She stroked its fur, and it chittered loudly.
"The rat will come to order," Gomez said. He rapped the table, and they set to work.
Chapter 11
CIRCUMTERRAN ORBIT: 14-4-'54
Three of them waited within the spacecraft: Lindsay, Vera Constantine, and their Lobster navigator, who was known simply as Pilot.
"Final approach," Pilot said. His beautiful synthesized voice emerged from a vocoder unit hooked to his throat.
Strapped in before his control board, the Lobster was a chunk of shadow. He was sealed within a matte-black permanent spacesuit, knobbed with lumps of internal machinery and dotted with shiny gold input jacks. Lobsters were creatures of the vacuum, faceless posthumans, their eyes and ears wired to sensors woven through the suits. Pilot never ate. He never drank. The routines of his body were subsumed within the life-supporting rhythms of his suit. Pilot did not like being within this spacecraft; Lobsters had a horror of enclosed spaces. Pilot, though, had put up with the discomfort for the thrill of the crime.
Now that they were dropping from orbit, the drugged calm of weeks of travel had broken. Lindsay had never seen Vera so animated. Her open delight filled him with pleasure.
And she had reason for gladness. The Presence was gone. She had not felt it since the three of them had been sealed within the spacecraft. They'd come so far since then that she believed she had escaped it for good. She found as much happiness in this relief as in the fulfillment of their long conspiracy. Lindsay was happy for her. He had never had true proof of the objective existence of the Presence, but he had agreed to believe in it for her. And similarly, she had never doubted him. It was a contract and a trust between them. He knew she might have killed him, but that trust had saved his life. Long years since then had only strengthened it.
"Looks good," the Lobster sang. The spacecraft began to buck as it hit the entrance window of the Earth's atmosphere. The Lobster emitted a burst of static, then said, "Air. I hate air. I hate it already."
"Steady," Lindsay said. He tightened the straps of his chair and unfolded his videoscreens.
They were coming in over the continent once known as Africa. Its outlines had been radically changed by the rising seas: archipelagos of drowned hills trailed clouds above a soup of weed-choked ocean. Along the dark shore, rivers poured gray topsoil into water streaked red with algal blooms. The white-hot flare of entry heat obscured his vision, flickering over the diamond-hard hull lens of the forward scanner. Lindsay leaned back in his seat.
It was an odd ship, an uncomfortable one, not of human manufacture. The egg-shaped hull had the off-white sheen of stabilized metallic hydrogen, built only by gasbags. Its naked interior floor and ceiling bore the rounded, scalloped segmentation marks of its former pilot, a gasbag grub. The spacefaring grub had been packed within the hull as tightly as expanding dough.
One of the gasbags had alluded to the astronaut's death in a
"conversation" with Vera Constantine. With its keen sensitivity to magnetic flux, the unlucky grub had perceived a solar flare whose shape and substance it found somehow blasphemous. It had expired in despair.
Lindsay had been looking for just such a chance. When Vera told him of the accident, Lindsay acted at once. He recruited the Lobsters through their business contact in Czarina-Kluster, a Lobster they called "the Modem." A complex deal was worked out, in utter secrecy, with the anarchic Lobsters. One of their lacy, airless