Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [23]
Lindsay slept, exhausted, with his head propped against the diplomatic bag. An artificial morning shone through the false glass doors. Kitsune sat in thought, toying quietly with the keys of her synthesizer.
Her proficiency had long since passed the limits of merely technical skill. It had become a communion, an art sprung from dark intuition. Her synthesizer could mimic any instrument and surpass it: rip its sonic profile into naked wave forms and rebuild it on a higher plane of sterilized, abstract purity. Its music had the painful, brittle clarity of faultlessness. Other instruments struggled for that ideal clarity but failed. Their failure gave their sound humanity. The world of humanity was a world of losses, broken hopes, and original sin, a flawed world, yearning always for mercy, empathy, compassion.... It was not her world.
Kitsune's world was the fantastic, seamless realm of high pornography. Lust was ever present, amplified and tireless, broken only by spasms of superhuman intensity. It smothered every other aspect of life as a shriek of feedback might overwhelm an orchestra.
Kitsune was an artificial creature, and accepted her feverish world with a predator's thoughtlessness. Hers was a pure and abstract life, a hot, distorted parody of sainthood.
The surgical assault on her body would have turned a human woman into a blank-eyed erotic animal. But Kitsune was a Shaper, with a Shaper's unnatural resilience and genius. Her narrow world had turned her into something as sharp and slippery as an oiled stiletto.
She had spent eight of her twenty years within the Bank, where she dealt with customers and rivals on terms she thoroughly understood. Still, she knew there was a realm of mental experience, taken for granted by humanity, that was closed to her.
Shame. Pride. Guilt. Love. She felt these emotions as dim shadows, dark reptilian trash burnt to ashes in an instant by searing ecstasy. She was not incapable of human feeling; it was simply too mild for her to notice. It had become a second subconscious, a buried, intuitive layer below her posthuman mode of thought. Her consciousness was an amalgam of coldly pragmatic logic and convulsive pleasure.
Kitsume knew that Lindsay was handicapped by his primitive mode of thought. She felt a kind of pity for him, a compassionate sorrow that she could not recognize or admit to herself. She believed he must be very old, from one of the first generations of Shapers. Their genetic engineering had been limited and they could scarcely be told from original human stock. He must be almost a hundred years old. To be so old, yet look so young, meant that he had chosen sound techniques of life extension. He dated back to an era before Shaperism had reached its full expression. Bacteria still swarmed through his body. Kitsune never told him about the antibiotic pills and supposi-tones she took, or the painful antiseptic showers. She didn't want him to know he was contaminating her. She wanted everything between them to be clean.
She had a cool regard for Lindsay. He was a source of lofty and platonic satisfaction to her. She had the craftsmanlike respect for him that a butcher might have for a sharp steel saw. She took a positive pleasure in using him. She wanted him to last a long time, so she took good care of him and enjoyed giving him what she thought he needed to go on functioning. For Lindsay, her affections were ruinous. He opened his eyes on the tatami mat and reached out at once for the diplomatic bag behind his head. When his fingers closed over the smooth plastic handle, an anxiety circuit shut off in his head, but that first relief only triggered other systems and he came fully awake into a queasy combat alertness.
He saw that he was in Kitsune's chamber. Morning was breaking over the image of the long-dead garden. False daylight slanted into the room, gleaming from inlaid clothes chests and the perspex dome of a fossilized bonsai. Some repressed part of him cried out within him, in meek despair. He ignored