Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [3]
Little white moths were flying up from the long grass. They milled about as if drawn by the blood.
Lindsay brushed a moth from her face and pressed his lips to hers. The pulse stopped in her throat. She was dead.
"Vera," he groaned. "Sweetheart, you're burned... ." A wave of grief and exultation hit him. He fell into the sun-warmed grass, holding his sides. More moths sprang up.
She had done it. It seemed easy now. It was something the two of them had talked about a hundred times, deep into the night at the Museum or in bed after their adultery. Suicide, the last protest. An enormous vista of black freedom opened up in Lindsay's head. He felt a paradoxical sense of vitality.
"Darling, it won't be long. . .."
His uncle found him kneeling. The older man's face was gray.
"Oh," he said. "This is vile. What have you done?" Lindsay got dizzily to his feet. "Get away from her." His uncle stared at the dead woman. "She's dead! You damned fool, she was only twenty-six!"
Lindsay yanked a long dagger of crudely hammered metal from his accordioned sleeve. He swept it up and aimed it at his own chest. "In the name of humanity! And the preservation of human values! I freely choose to—" His uncle seized his wrist. They struggled briefly, glaring into one another's eyes, and Lindsay dropped the knife. His uncle snatched it out of the grass and slipped it into his lab coat. "This is illegal," he said.
"You'll face weapons charges."
Lindsay laughed shakily. "I'm your prisoner, but you can't stop me if I choose to die. Now or later, what does it matter?"
"You're a fanatic." His uncle watched him with bitter contempt. "The Shaper schooling holds to the end, doesn't it? Your training cost the Republic a fortune, and you use it to seduce and murder."
"She died clean! Better to burn in a rush than live two hundred years as a Mechanist wirehead."
The elder Lindsay stared at the horde of white moths that swarmed on the dead woman's clothing. "We'll nail you for this somehow. You and that upstart plebe Constantine."
Lindsay was incredulous. "You stupid Mech bastard! Look at her! Can't you see that you've killed us already? She was the best of us! She was our muse."
His uncle frowned. "Where did all these insects come from?" He bent and brushed the moths aside with wrinkled hands.
Lindsay reached forward suddenly and snatched a filigreed gold locket from the woman's neck. His uncle grabbed his sleeve.
"It's mine!" Lindsay shouted. They began to fight in earnest. His uncle broke Lindsay's clumsy stranglehold and kicked Lindsay twice in the stomach. Lindsay fell to his knees.
His uncle picked up the locket, wheezing. "You assaulted me," he said, scandalized. "You used violence against a fellow citizen." He opened the locket. A thick oil ran out onto his fingers.
"No message?" he said in surprise. He sniffed at his fingers. "Perfume?" Lindsay knelt, panting in nausea. His uncle screamed.
White moths were darting at the man, clinging to the oily skin of his hands. There were dozens of them.
They were attacking him. He screamed again and batted at his face. Lindsay rolled over twice, away from his uncle. He knelt in the grass, shaking. His uncle was down, convulsing like an epileptic. Lindsay scrambled backward on his hands and knees.
The old man's wrist monitor glared red. He stopped moving. The white moths crawled over his body for a few moments, then flew off one by one, vanishing into the grass.
Lindsay lurched to his feet. He looked behind him, across the meadow. His wife was walking toward them, slowly, through the grass.
Part 1
Sundog Zones
Chapter 1
THE MARE TRANQULLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR ZAIBATSU: 27-12-'15
They shipped Lindsay into exile in the cheapest kind of Mechanist drogue. For two days he was blind and deaf, stunned with drugs, his body packed in a thick matrix of deceleration paste.
Launched from the Republic's cargo arm, the drogue had drifted with