Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [37]
"I'm sorry for what's come between us, Philip."
"Vera's dead," Constantine said. He closed his eyes. "You and I did this. We engineered her death. We share that guilt. We know our power now. And we've discovered our differences." He wiped his eyes with a round disk of filter paper.
"I lied to them," Lindsay said. "I said my uncle died of heart failure. The inquest said as much. I let them think so, so that I could shield you. You killed him, Philip. But it was me you meant to kill. Only my uncle stumbled into the trap."
"Vera and I discussed it," Constantine said. "She thought you would fail, that you wouldn't carry out the pact. She knew your weaknesses. I knew them. I bred those moths for stings and poison. The Revolution needs its weapons. I gave her the pheromones to drive them into frenzy. She took them gladly."
"You didn't trust me," Lindsay said.
"And you're not dead."
Lindsay said nothing.
"Look at this!" Constantine peeled off one of his lab gloves. Beneath it his olive skin was shedding like a reptile's. "It's a virus," he said. "It's immortality. A Shaper kind, from the cells themselves, not those Mech prosthetics. I'm committed, cousin."
He picked at an elastic shred of skin. "Vera chose you, not me. I'm going to live forever, and to hell with you and your cant about humanities. Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind. If you think you can deny that, then here." He handed Lindsay a dissection scalpel. "Prove yourself. Prove your words weren't empty. Prove you're better dead and human."
The knife was in Lindsay's hand. He stared at the flesh of his wrist. He stared at Constantine's throat. He raised the knife over his head, poised it, and screamed aloud.
The sound woke him, and he found himself in sick bay, drenched in sweat, while the Second Judge, her eyes heavy with intoxicants, ran one veiny hand along the inside of his thigh.
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 20-11-'16
The Third Representative, or Rep 3 as he was commonly called, was a stocky, perpetually grinning young man with a scarred nose and short, brush-cut sandy hair.
Like many EVA experts, he was a space fanatic and spent most of his time outside the ship, towed on long kilometers of line. Stars talked to him, and the Sun was his friend. He always wore his spacesuit, even inside the craft, and the whiff of long-fermented body odor came through its open helmet collar with eye-watering pungency.
"I'm gonna send out the drone," he said to Lindsay as they ate together in the control room. "You can hook up to it from in here. It's almost like being Outside."
Lindsay put aside his empty canister of green paste. The drone was an ancient planetary probe, found in long-forgotten orbit by some long-forgotten crew, but its telescopes and microwave antennae were still useful, and it could broadcast as well. Hundreds of klicks out on its fiber-optic cable, the unmanned drone could pick up deep-space broadcasts and mislead enemy radar with electronic countermeasures. "Sure, citizen," Lindsay said. "What the hell."
Rep 3 nodded eagerly. "It'll be beautiful, State. Your brain'll spread out so-fast-so-thin be like a second skin for you."
"I won't take any drugs," Lindsay said guardedly.
"You can't take drugs," Rep 3 said. "If you take drugs the Sun won't talk to you." He picked a pair of strap-on videogoggles from the console and adjusted them over Lindsay's head. Within the goggles, a tiny video system projected images directly onto the eyeballs. The drone was shut down at the moment; Lindsay saw only an array of cryptic blue alphanumeric readouts across the bottom of his vision. There was no sense of a screen. "So far so good," he said.
He heard a series of keyboard clicks as Rep 3 activated the drone. Then the whole ship shook gently as the robot probe cast off. Lindsay heard his guide strap on another pair of showphones, and then, through the drone's cameras, he saw the outside of the Consensus for the first time. It was pitiful how shabby and makeshift it looked. The old engines