Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [36]
"It was well done," he said as the hypo sank into his arm through the hollow eye of a skull. "But wait till I've finished muscling for the rest, all right, citizen?"
"Sweet dreams," she said.
At night, the Republic was truest to itself. The Preservationists preferred the night, when watchful older eyes were closed in sleep. Truths hidden in daylight revealed themselves in blazing nightlights. The solar energy of the power panels was the Republic's currency. Only the wealthiest could squander financial power.
To his right, at the world cylinder's north end, light poured from the hospitals. In their clinics around the cylinder's axis, the frail bones of the Radical Old rested easily, almost in free-fall. Gouts of light spilled from distant windows and landing pads, a smeared and bogus Milky Way of wealth. Suddenly Lindsay, looking up, was behind those windows. It was his Great-Grandfather's suite. The old Mechanist floated in a matrix of life-support tubes, his eye sockets wired to a video input, in a sterile suite flooded with oxygen.
"Grandfather, I'm leaving," Lindsay said. The old man raised one hand, so crippled with arthritis that its swollen knuckles bulged, and rippled, and suddenly burst into a hissing net of needle-tipped tubes. They whipped into Lindsay, clinging, piercing, sucking. Lindsay opened his mouth to screamThe lights were far away. He was walking across the fretted glass window-pane. He emerged onto the Agricultural panel.
A faint smell of curdling rot came with the wind. He was near the Sours. Lindsay's shoes hissed through genetically altered wiregrass at the swamp's margins. Grasshoppers creaked in the undergrowth, and a chitinous thing the size of a rat scurried away from him. Philip Constantine had the rot under siege.
The wind gusted. Constantine's tent flapped loudly in the darkness. By the tent's doorflaps, two globes on stakes shone with yellow bioluminescence. Constantine's sprawling tent dominated the wiregrass borderlands, with the Sours to its north and the fertile grainfields shielded behind it. The no-man's land, where he battled the contagion, clicked and rustled with newly minted vermin from his labs.
From within, he heard Constantine's voice, choked with sobs.
"Philip!" he said. He went inside.
Constantine sat at a wooden bench before a long metal lab bureau, cluttered with Shaper glassware. Racks of specimen cases stood like bookshelves, loaded with insects under study. Globes on slender, flexible supports cast a murky yellow light.
Constantine seemed smaller than ever, his boyish shoulders hunched beneath his lab jacket. His round eyes were bloodshot and his hair was disheveled.
"Vera's burned," Constantine said. He trembled silently and put his face into his gloved hands. Lindsay sat on the bench beside him and threw his long, bony arm over Constantine's back.
They were sitting together as they had sat so often, so long ago. Side by side as usual, joking together in their half-secret argot of Ring Council slang, passing a spiked inhaler back and forth. They laughed together, the quiet laughter of shared conspiracy. They were young, and breaking all the rules, and after a few long whiffs from the inhaler they were brighter than anyone human had a right to be.
Constantine laughed happily, and his mouth was full of blood. Lindsay came awake with a start, opened his eyes, and saw the sick bay of the Red Consensus. He closed his eyes and slept again at once.
Lindsay's cheeks were wet with tears. He was not sure how long they had been sitting together, sobbing. It seemed a long time. "Can we talk freely here, Philip?"
"They don't need police spies here," Constantine said bitterly.