Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [2]
Lindsay's wife, Alexandrina, took his arm. She was dressed fashionably, in a long pleated skirt and white medical tunic. Her pale, clear complexion showed health without vitality, as if her skin were a perfectly printed paper replica. Mummified kiss-curls adorned her forehead.
"You said you wouldn't talk politics, James," she cold the older man. She looked up at Lindsay. "You're pale, Abelard. He's upset you."
"Am I pale?" Lindsay said. He drew on his Shaper diplomatic training. Color seeped into his cheeks. He widened the dilation of his pupils and smiled with a gleam of teeth. His uncle stepped back, scowling.
Alexandrina leaned on Lindsay's arm. "I wish you wouldn't do that," she told him. "It frightens me." She was fifty years older than Lindsay and her knees had just been replaced. Her Mechanist teflon kneecaps still bothered her.
Lindsay shifted his bound volume of printout to his left hand. During his house arrest, he had translated the works of Shakespeare into modern circumsolar English. The elders of the Lindsay clan had encouraged him in this. His antiquarian hobbies, they thought, would distract him from plotting against the state.
To reward him, they were allowing him to present the work to the Museum. He had seized on the chance to briefly escape his house arrest. The Museum was a hotbed of subversion. It was full of his friends. Preservationists, they called themselves. A reactionary youth movement, with a romantic attachment to the art and culture of the past. They had made the Museum their political stronghold.
Their world was the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic, a two-hundred-year-old artificial habitat orbiting the Earth's Moon. As one of the oldest of humankind's nation-states in space, it was a place of tradition, with the long habits of a settled culture.
But change had burst in, spreading from newer, stronger worlds in the Asteroid Belt and the Rings of Saturn. The Mechanist and Shaper superpowers had exported their war into this quiet city-state. The strain had split the population into factions: Lindsay's Preservationists against the power of the Radical Old, rebellious plebes against the wealthy aristocracy. Mechanist sympathizers held the edge in the Republic.
The Radical Old held power from within their governing hospitals. These ancient aristocrats, each well over a century old, were patched together with advanced Mechanist hardware, their lives extended with imported prosthetic technology. But the medical expenses were bankrupting the Republic. Their world was already deep in debt to the medical Mech cartels. The Republic would soon be a Mechanist client state.
But the Shapers used their own arsenals of temptation. Years earlier, they had trained and indoctrinated Lindsay and Constantine. Through these two friends, the leaders of their generation, the Shapers exploited the fury of the young, who saw their birthrights stolen for the profit of the Mechanists. Tension had mounted within the Republic until a single gesture could set it off.
Life was the issue. And death would be the proof.
Lindsay's uncle was winded. He touched his wrist monitor and turned down the beating of his heart. "No more stunts," he said. "They're waiting in the Museum." He frowned. "Remember, no speeches. Use the prepared statement." Lindsay stared upward. The bird-painted ultralight went into a power dive.
"No!" Lindsay shouted. He threw his book aside and ran. The ultralight smashed down in the grass outside the ringed stone seats of an open-air amphitheatre.
The aircraft lay crushed, its wings warped in a dainty convulsion of impact. "Vera!" Lindsay shouted.
He tugged her body from the flimsy wreckage. She was still breathing; blood gushed from her mouth and nostrils. Her ribs were broken. She was choking. He tore at the ring-shaped collar