Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [32]
"That's what haragei's for." The President slapped his own belly. "This is your center of gravity, your center of torque. You meet some enemy in free-fall, and you grapple with him, well, your head is just a stalk, see?
What happens depends on your center of mass. Your haragei. Your actions, the places where you can punch out with hands and feet, form a sphere. And that sphere is centered on your belly. You think of that bubble around you all the time."
"Yes sir," Lindsay said. His attention was total.
"That's number one," the President said. "Now we're gonna talk about number two. Bulkheads. Control of the bulkhead is control of the fight. If I pull my feet up, off this bulkhead, how hard do you think I can hit you?" Lindsay was prudent. "Hard enough to break my nose, sir."
"Okay. But if I have my feet planted, so my own body holds me fast against the recoil, what then?"
"You break my neck. Sir."
"Good thinking, soldier. A man without bracing is a helpless man. If you got nothing else, you use the enemy's own body as bracing. Recoil is the enemy of impact. Impact is damage. Damage is victory. Understand?"
"Recoil is impact's enemy. Impact is damage, damage is victory," Lindsay said immediately. "Sir."
"Very good," the President said. He then reached out, and, with a quick pivoting movement, he broke Lindsay's forearm over his knee with a wet snap.
"That's number three," he said over Lindsay's sudden scream. "Pain."
"Well," said the Second Justice, "I see he showed you the old number three."
"Yes, ma'am," Lindsay said.
The Second Justice slid a needle into his arm. "Forget that," she said kindly. "This isn't the army, this is sick bay. You can just call me Judge Two."
A rubbery numbness spread over the fractured arm. "Thanks, Judge." The Second Justice was an older woman, maybe close to a century. It was hard to tell; her constant abuse of hormone treatments had made her metabolism a patchwork of anomalies. Her jawline was freckled with acne, but her wrists and shins were flaky and varicose-veined.
"You're okay, State, you'll do," she said. She stuck Lindsay's anesthetized arm into the wide rubber orifice of an old-fashioned CAT scanner. Multiple x-rays whirred from its ring, and a pivoting three-D image of Lindsay's arm appeared on the scanner's screen.
"Good clean break, nothin' to it," she said analytically. "We've all had it. You're almost one of us now. Want me to scroll you up while the arm's still numb?"
"What?"
"Tattoos, citizen."
The thought appalled him. "Fine," he said at once. "Go right ahead."
"I knew you were okay from the beginning," she said, nudging him in the ribs. "I'll do you a favor: vein-pop you with some of those anabolic steroids. You'll muscle up in no time; the Prez'll think you're a natural." She pulled gently on his forearm; the sullen grating of jagged bone ends was like something happening at the other end of a telescope.
She pulled a needled tattoo rig from the wall, where it clung by a patch of velcro. "Any preferences?"
"I want some moths," Lindsay said.
The history of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy was a simple one. Fortuna was a major asteroid, over two hundred kilometers across. In the first flush of success, the original miners had declared their independence. As long as the ore held out, they did well. They could buy their way out of political trouble and could pay for life-extension treatments from other more advanced worlds.
But when the ore was gone and Fortuna was a mined-out heap of rubble, they found they had crucially blundered. Their wealth had vanished, and they had failed to pursue technology with the cutthroat desperation of rival cartels. They could not survive on their outmoded expertise or sustain an information economy. Their attempts to do so only hastened their bankruptcy. The defections began. The nation's best and most ambitious personnel were brain-drained away to richer worlds. Fortuna lost its spacecraft, as defectors decamped with anything not nailed down.
The collapse