Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [151]
"Yes," Lindsay said. His heart was hammering in his chest. His robot nurse reached for him with a needle-load of soothing chemicals; he turned it off, then laughed and stretched. "It's all very much something."
"I had a fine time here," the Presence said. "It's quite a place you have here, around this little sun."
"Thank you."
"Hey, the thanks are all yours, citizen. But there are other places waiting." The Presence hesitated. "You want to come along?"
"Yes!"
"Then hold me."
He stretched his arms out toward it. It came over him in a silver wave. Stellar cold, a melting, a release.
And all things were fresh and new.
He saw his clothes floating within the hallway. His arms drifted out of the sleeves, prosthetics trailing leashes of expensive circuitry. Atop its clean white ladder of vertebrae, his empty skull sank grinning into the collar of his coat.
An Investor appeared at the end of the hall, bounding along in free-fall. Re-flexively, Lindsay smeared himself out of sight against the wall. The Investor's frill lifted; it pawed with magpie attraction through the tangle of bones, stuffing items of interest into a swollen bag.
"They're always around to pick up the pieces," the Presence commented.
"They're useful to us. You'll see."
Lindsay perceived his new self. "I don't have any hands," he said.
"You won't need 'em." The Presence laughed. "C'mon, we'll follow him. They'll be going someplace soon."
They trailed the Investor down the hall. "Where?" Lindsay said.
"It doesn't matter. Somewhere wonderful."
Shaper/Mechanist Stories
Swarm
"I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage," the alien said.
Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. "I regret it also, ensign," he said in the alien's own hissing language. "Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely."
"But that was only information," the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. "We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait." The alien lifted the long ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.
"No doubt you are right," Afriel said, despising him. "We humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us." Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.
"You have not done badly," the alien said magnanimously. "You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit."
"Things are different now," Afriel said. "We'll make you rich."
"Indeed," the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. "Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our starflight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research."
Afriel was annoyed. As a member of the Reshaped faction, he did not appreciate the reference to the rival Mechanists. "Don't put too much stock in mere technical expertise," he said. "Consider the aptitude for languages we Shapers have. It makes our faction a much better trading partner. To a Mechanist, all Investors look alike."
The alien hesitated. Afriel smiled. He had appealed to the alien's personal ambition with his last statement, and the hint had been taken. That was where the Mechanists always erred. They tried to treat all Investors consistently, using the same programmed routines each