Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [28]
The lights went up. Dancers came onstage. The Bubble rang with howls of enthusiasm. Lindsay fled along the Bubble's walls through a nest of legs tucked through footloops and arms clutching handholds. He reached the anterior airlock.
He hired one of the aircraft moored outside the lock and flew at once to the Geisha Bank.
The place was almost deserted, but his credit card got him in. The enormous guards recognized him and bowed. Lindsay hesitated, then realized he had nothing to say. What could he tell them? "Kill me, next time you see me?" To catch birds with a mirror was the ideal snare.
The yarite's network of beads would protect him. Kitsune had taught him how to work the beads from within. Even if the assassin avoided the traps, he could be struck down from within by high voltage or sharp flechettes. Lindsay walked the pattern flawlessly and burst into the yarite's quarters. He opened a videoscreen, flicked it on, and loaded the tape. It was a face from his past: the face of his best friend, the man who had tried to kill him, Philip Khouri Constantine.
"Hello, cousin," Constantine said.
The term was aristocratic slang in the Republic. But Constantine was a plebe. And Lindsay had never heard him put such hatred into the word.
"I take the liberty of contacting you in exile." Constantine looked drunk. He was speaking a little too precisely. The ring-shaped collar of his antique suit showed sweat on the olive skin of his throat. "Some of my Shaper friends share my interest in your career. They don't call these agents assassins. The Shapers call them 'antibiotics.'
"They've been operating here. The opposition is much less troublesome with so many dead from 'natural causes.' My old trick with the moths looks juvenile now. Very brash and risky.
"Still, the insects worked well enough, out here in the moondocks.... Time flies, cousin. Five months have changed things.
"The Mechanist siege is failing. When the Shapers are trapped and squeezed, they ooze out under pressure. They can't be beaten. We used to tell each other that, when we were boys, remember, Abelard? When our future seemed so bright we almost blinded each other, sometimes. Back before we knew what a bloodstain was....
"This Republic needs the Shapers. The colony's rotting. They can't survive without the biosciences. Everyone knows it, even the Radical Old.
"We never really talked to those old wireheads, cousin. You wouldn't let me; you hated them too much. And now I know why you were afraid to face them. They're tainted, Abelard, like you are. In a way, they're your mirror image. By now you know what a shock it is to see one." Constantine grinned and smoothed his wavy hair with a small, deft hand.
"But I talked to them, I came to terms. . . . There's been a coup here, Abelard. The Advisory Council is dissolved. Power belongs to the Executive Board for National Survival. That's me, and a few of our Preservationist friends. Vera's death changed everything, as we knew it would. Now we have our martyr. Now we're full of steel and fury.
"The Radical Old are leaving. Emigrating to the Mech cartels, where they belong. The aristocrats will have to pay the costs for it.
"There are others coming your way, cousin. The whole mob of broken-down aristos: Lindsays, Tylers, Kellands, Morrisseys. Political exiles. Your wife is with them. They're squeezed dry between their Shaper children and their Mechanist grandparents, and thrown out like garbage. They're all yours.
"I want you to mop up after me, tie up my loose ends. If you won't accept that, then go back to my messenger. He'll settle you." Constantine grinned, showing small, even teeth. "Except for death, you can't escape the game. You and Vera both knew that. And now I'm king, you're pawn." Lindsay shut off the tape.
He was ruined. The Kabuki Bubble had assumed a grotesque solidity; it was his own ambitions that had burst.
He was trapped. He would be unmasked by the Republic's refugees. His glittering deceptions would fly apart to leave him naked and exposed. Kitsune