Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [24]
He sat up and saw Kitsune at the keyboards. "Good morning," he said.
"Hello, darling. Did you sleep well?"
Lindsay considered. Some antiseptic she used had scorched his tongue. His back was bruised where her Shaper-strengthened fingers had dug in carelessly. His throat had an ominous rawness—he had spent too much time without a mask in the open air. "I feel fine," he said, smiling. He opened the complex lock of his diplomatic bag.
He slipped on his finger rings and stepped into his hakama trousers.
"Do you want something to eat?" she said.
"Not before my shot."
"Then help me plug in the front," she said.
Lindsay repressed a shudder. He hated the yarite's withered, waxlike, cy-borged body, and Kitsune knew it. She forced him to help her with it because it was a measure of her control.
Lindsay understood this and wanted to help her; he wanted to repay her, in a way she understood, for the pleasure she had given him. But something in him revolted at it. When his training faltered, as it did between shots, repressed emotions rose and he was aware of the terrible sadness of their affair. He felt a kind of pity for her, a compassionate sorrow that he would never insult her by admitting. There were things he had wanted to give her: simple companionship, simple trust and regard. Simple irrelevance. Kitsune hauled the yarite out of its biomonitored cradle beneath the floorboards. In some ways the thing had passed the limits of the clinically dead; sometimes they had to slam it into operation like push-starting a balky engine.
Its maintenance technology was the same type that supported the Mechanist cyborgs of the Radical Old and the Mech cartels. Filters and monitors clogged the thing's bloodstream; the internal glands and organs were under computer control. Implants sat on its heart and liver, prodding them with electrodes and hormones. The old woman's autonomous nervous system had long since collapsed and shut down.
Kitsune examined a readout and shook her head. "The acid levels are rising as fast as our stocks, darling. The plugs are degrading its brain. It's very old. Held together with wires and patchwork."
She sat it up on a floor mat and spooned vitaminized pap into its mouth.
"You should seize control on your own," he said. He inserted a dripping plug into a duct on the yarite's veiny forearm.
"I'd like that," she said. "But I have a problem getting rid of this one. The sockets on its head will be hard to explain away. I could cover them with skin grafts, but that won't fool an autopsy.... The staff expect this thing to live forever. They've spent enough on it. They'll want to know why it died."
The yarite moved its tongue convulsively and dribbled out its paste. Kitsune hissed in annoyance. "Slap its face," she said. Lindsay ran a hand through his sleep-matted hair. "Not this early," he said,, half pleading.
Kitsune said nothing, merely straightened her back and shoulders and set her face in a prim mask. Lindsay was defeated at once. He jerked his hand back and swung it across the thing's face in a vicious open-handed slap. A spot of color showed in its leathery cheek.
"Show me its eyes," she said. Lindsay grabbed the thing's gaunt cheeks between his thumb and fingers and twisted its head so that it met Kitsune's eyes. With revulsion, he recognized a dim flicker of debased awareness in its face.
Kitsune took his hand away and lightly kissed his palm. "That's my good darling," she said. She slipped the spoon between the thing's slack lips. THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 21-4-'16
The Fortuna pirates floated like red-and-silver paper cutouts against the interior walls of the Kabuki Bubble. The air was loud with the angry spitting of welders, the whine of rotary sanders, the wheeze of the air filters.
Lindsay's