Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [142]
"You mean they use only the visible spectrum?" Now Pilot himself was stunned.
They studied the landscape below: knots of dense scrubland, shining in the false black-and-white of infrared. The wilderness was striped occasionally by half-obscured dark streaks. "Tectonic faults?" Vera said.
"Roads," Lindsay said. He explained about low-friction surfaces for ground travel in gravity. They had not seen any cities as yet, though there had been suggestive patches here and there where the rioting vegetation seemed thinner.
Pilot took them lower. They pored over the growth at high magnification.
"Weeds," Lindsay concluded. "Since the disaster all ecological stability has collapsed. . .. Adventitious species have moved in. This was probably all cropland once."
"It's ugly," Vera said.
"Systems in collapse often are."
"High-energy flux ahead," Pilot said. The spacecraft dipped and hovered over a ridge.
Wildfire swept the hillside, whole kilometers of orange glow in the darkness. Roaring updrafts flung up flakes of glowing ash, reverse cascades of stripped-off leaves and branches. Behind the wall of fire were the twisted, glowing skeletons of weeds grown large as trees, their smoldering trunks thick bundles of woody filaments. They said nothing, stirred to the core by the wonder of it. "Sundog plants," Lindsay said at last.
"What?"
"The weeds are like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They move in anywhere where systems break down. After this disaster the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive...."
"More weeds," Vera concluded.
"Yes." They left the fire behind and cruised past the foothills. Lindsay tapped one of the algae frames and ate a mouthful of green paste.
"Aircraft," Pilot said.
For a moment Lindsay thought he was seeing a mutant gasbag, some bizarre example of parallel evolution. Then he realized it was a flying machine: some kind of blimp or zeppelin. Long seamed ridges of sewn balloon skin supported a skeletal gondola. A thin skein of flexible solar-power disks dotted the craft's skin, dappling over its back, fading to a white underbelly. Long mooring lines trailed from its nose, like drooping antennae. They approached cautiously and saw its mooring-ground: a city. A gridwork of streets split a checkerboard of white stone shelters. The houses were marshaled around a looming central core: a four-sided masonry pyramid. The zeppelin was moored to the pyramid's apex. The whole city was hemmed in by a high rectangular wall; outside, agriculture fields glowed a ghastly white, manured with ashes.
A ceremony was progressing. A pyre blazed at the masonry plaza at the pyramid's foot. The city's population was drawn up in ranks. They numbered less than two thousand. Their clothing was bleached by the infrared glow of their body heat. "What is it?" said Vera. "Why don't they move?"
"A funeral, I think," Lindsay said.
"What's the pyramid, then? A mausoleum? An indoctrination center?"
"Both, maybe. ... Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum has an information line, the only one in the village. Whoever lives there holds all links to the outside world." Lindsay thought suddenly of the domed stronghold of the Nephrine Black Medicals in the circumlunar Zaibatsu. He hadn't thought of it for years, but he remembered the psychic atmosphere within it, the sense of paranoid isolation, of fanaticism slowly drifting past the limits through lack of variety. A world gone stale. "Stability," he said. "The Terrans wanted stability, that's why they set up the Interdict. They didn't want technology to break them into pieces, as it's done to us. They blamed technology for the disasters. The war plagues, the carbon dioxide that melted the ice caps.... They can't forget their dead."
"Surely the whole world isn't like this," Vera said.
"It has to be. Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of change. Change that can't be tolerated."
"But they have telephones. Aircraft."
"Enforcement technology," Lindsay said.
On their way to the Pacific they saw two more settlements, separated