Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [190]
I laughed incredulously. "For me, that's suicide. Go back to the Council? I might as well open my throat."
"Be at ease," the Modem soothed. "I'll have the medi-mechs work you over and graft on one of our shells. One Lobster is very much like another. You'll be perfectly safe, under the skin."
I was shocked. "Become a Mech?"
"You don't have to stay one," Wellspring said. "It's a simple procedure. A few nerve grafts, some anal surgery, a tracheotomy. . . You lose on taste and touch, but the other senses are vastly expanded."
"Yes," said the Modem. "And you can step alone into naked space, and laugh."
"Right!" said Wellspring. "More Shapers should wear Mech technics. It's like your lichens, Hans. Become a symbiosis for a while. It'll broaden your horizons."
I said, "You don't do ... anything cranial, do you?"
"No," said the Modem offhandedly. "Or, at least, we don't have to. Your brain's your own."
I thought. "Can you do it in"—I looked at Wellspring's forearm—"thirty-eight hours?"
"If we hurry," the Modem said. He detached himself from the table. I followed him.
The Crowned Pawn was under way. My skin clung magnetically to a ship's girder as we accelerated. I had my vision set for normal wavelengths as I watched Czarina-Kluster receding.
Tears stung the fresh tracks of hair-thin wires along my deadened eyeballs. C-K wheeled slowly, like a galaxy in a jeweled web. Here and there along the network, flares pulsed as suburbs began the tedious and tragic work of cutting themselves loose. C-K was in the grip of terror. I longed for the warm vitality of my Clique. I was no Lobster. They were alien. They were solipsistic pinpoints in the galactic night, their humanity a forgotten pulp behind black armor.
The Crowned Pawn was like a ship turned inside out. It centered around a core of massive magnetic engines, fed by drones from a chunk of reaction mass. Outside these engines was a skeletal metal framework where Lobsters clung like cysts or skimmed along on induced magnetic fields. There were cupolas here and there on the skeleton where the Lobsters hooked into fluidic computers or sheltered themselves from solar storms and ring-system electrofluxes. They never ate. They never drank. Sex involved a clever
cyber-stimulation through cranial plugs. Every five years or so they "molted" and had their skins scraped clean of the stinking accumulation of mutated bacteria that scummed them over in the stagnant warmth.
They knew no fear. Agoraphobia was a condition easily crushed with drugs. They were self-contained and anarchical. Their greatest pleasure was to sit along a girder and open their amplified senses to the depths of space, watching stars past the limits of ultraviolet and infrared, or staring into the flocculate crawling plaque of the surface of the sun, or just sitting and soaking in watts of solar energy through their skins while they listened with wired ears to the warbling of Van Allen belts and the musical tick of pulsars. There was nothing evil about them, but they were not human. As distant and icy as cornets, they were creatures of the vacuum, bored with the outmoded paradigms of blood and bone. I saw within them the first stirrings of the Fifth Prigoginic Leap—that postulated Fifth Level of Complexity as far beyond intelligence as intelligence is from amoebic life, or life from inert matter. They frightened me. Their bland indifference to human limitations gave them the sinister charisma of saints.
The Modem came skimming along a girder and latched himself soundlessly beside me. I turned my ears on and heard his voice above the radio hiss of the engines. "You have a call, Landau. From C-K. Follow me." I flexed my feet and skimmed along the rail behind him. We entered the radiation lock of an iron cupola, leaving it open, since the Lobsters disliked closed spaces.
Before me, on a screen, was the tear-streaked face of Valery Korstad.
"Valery!" I said.
"Is that you, Hans?"
"Yes. Yes, darling.