Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [35]
"The Republic had a system in my day," the Mech said. "Political families. The Tylers, the Kellands, the Lindsays. Then there was an underclass of refugees we'd taken in, just before the Interdict with Earth. The plebes, we called them. They were the last ones to get off the planet, just before things fell apart. So they had nothing. We had the kilowatts in our pockets, and the big mansions. And they had the little plastic slums."
"You were an aristocrat?" Lindsay said. He couldn't restrain his fatalistic interest.
"Apples," the Mech said sadly. The word was heavy with nostalgia. "Ever had an apple? They're a kind of vegetable growth."
"I think so."
"Birds. Parks. Grass. Clouds. Trees." The Mech's right arm, a prosthetic job, whirred softly as he whacked a roach from the console with one wire-tendoned finger. "I knew it would come to trouble, this business with the plebes.... I even wrote a play about it once."
"A play? For the theatre? What was it called?"
Vague surprise showed in the old man's eyes. "The Conflagration."
"You're Evan James Tyler Kelland," Lindsay blurted. "I—ah ... I saw your play. In the archives." Evan Kelland was Lindsay's own great-granduncle. An obscure radical, his play of social protest had been lost for years until Lindsay, hunting for weapons, had found it in the Museum. Lindsay had staged the play's revival to annoy the Radical Old. The men who had exiled Kelland were still in power, sustained by Mech technologies after a hundred years. When the time was right they had exiled Lindsay too.
Now they were in the cartels, he remembered suddenly. Constantine, the descendant of plebes, had cut a deal with the wireheads. And the aristocracy had paid at last, as Kelland had prophesied. Lindsay, and Evan Kelland, had only paid early.
"You happened to see my play," Kelland said. Suspicion turned the lines in his face to deep crevasses. He looked away, his ash-gray eyes full of pain and obscure humiliation. "You shouldn't have presumed."
"I'm sorry," Lindsay said. He looked with new dread at his old kinsman's mechanical arm. "We won't speak of this again."
"That would be best." Kelland turned up his earphones and seemed to lose the grip on his fury. His eyes grew mild and colorless. Lindsay looked at the others, deliberately blind behind their videogoggles. None of this had happened.
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 27-10-'16
"Sleep troubles, citizen?" said the Second Judge. "Those steroids getting under your skin, stepping on your dream time? I can fix it." She smiled, showing three ancient, discolored teeth amid a rack of gleaming porcelain.
"I'd appreciate it," Lindsay said, struggling for politeness. The steroids had covered his long arms with ropes of muscle, healed the constellation of bruises from constant jujutsu drills, and filled him with hot flashes of aggressive fury. But they robbed him of sleep, leaving only feverish catnaps.
As he watched the Fortuna medic through red-rimmed eyes, he was reminded of his ex-wife. Alexandrina Lindsay had had just that same china-doll precision of movement, the same parchmentlike skin, the same telltale age wrinkles on the knuckles. His wife had been eighty years old. And, watching the Judge, Lindsay felt stifled by secondhand sexual attraction.
"This'U do it," Judge Two said, drawing up a hypo of muddy fluid from a plastic-topped vial. "Some REM promoter, serotonin agonists, muscle relaxant, and just a taste of mnemonics to pry loose troublesome memories. Use it all the time myself; it's fabulous. While you're out, I'll scroll up the other arm."
"Not just yet," Lindsay said through gritted teeth. "I haven't decided what I want on it yet."
The Second Judge put away her tattoo rig with a moue of disappointment. She seemed to live, eat, and breathe needles, Lindsay thought. "Don't you like my work?" she said.
Lindsay examined his right