Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [41]
"I fired it myself last week," the President said, "so I know the Zaibatsu security didn't booby-trap the bastard. Some of the Mech cartels will do that. Pick you up with frontier craft four thousand klicks out, shut down your weaponry, then put a delay chip in the wiring—you pull the trigger, chip vaporizes, nerve gas.... It makes no difference. You pull that trigger in combat you're dead anyway, ninety-nine percent. The Shapers we're attacking have Armageddon stuff too. We gotta have anything they have. We gotta do anything they can do. That's nuclear war, soldier; otherwise, we can't talk together.... Now, fire."
"Fire!" cried Lindsay. There was nothing. The gun was silent.
"Something's wrong," Lindsay said.
"Gun down?"
"No, it's my arm. My arm." He pulled backward. "I can't get it off the pistol grip. The muscles have knotted."
"They what?" the President said. He gripped Lindsay's forearm. The muscles stood out like cables, cramped in paralytic rigor.
"Oh, God," Lindsay said, a well-practiced edge of hysteria in his voice.
"I can't feel your hand. Squeeze my arm."
The President crushed his forearm with bruising force. "Nothing," Lindsay said. He had filled his arm with anesthetic in the spacesuit. The cramping was a diplomatic trick. It was not an easy one. He hadn't meant to get his fingers caught around the grip.
The President dug his calloused fingertips into the outside groove of Lindsay's elbow. Even past the anesthetic, pain knifed through the crushed nerves. His hand jumped slightly, releasing the grip. "I felt that, just a little," he said calmly. There was something he could do with pain, if the vasopressin would help him remember.. . . There. The pain transformed itself, lost its color, became something nastily close to pleasure.
"I could try it left-handed," Lindsay said gamely. "Of course, if that arm goes too, then—"
"What the hell's wrong with you, State?" The President dug his thumb cruelly into the complex of nerves in Lindsay's wrist. Lindsay felt the agony as a cool black sheet draped across his brain. He almost lost consciousness; his eyes fluttered and he smiled faintly.
"It must be some Shaper thing," he said. "Neural programming. They fixed it so that I could never do this." He swallowed hard. "It's like it's not my arm." Sweat beaded on his forehead. He was so wired on vasopressin that he could feel each muscle in his face as a separate entity, just like they taught at the Academy.
"I can't accept this," the President told him. "If you can't pull the trigger then you can't be one of us."
"It might be possible to rig up some kind of mechanical thing," Lindsay said adroitly. "Some kind of piston-powered glove I could fit over it. I'm willing, sir. It's this that's not." He lifted the arm, stiffly, from the shoulder, then slammed it down on the hard-edged ridge of the gun. He hit it again. "I can't feel it." Skin peeled from the muscle. Bright microglobes of blood leaped up to float in midair. The arm stayed rigid. A flat amoebalike ripple of blood oozed from the long scrape.
"We can't try an arm for treason," the President said. Lindsay shrugged one-sidedly. "I'm doing my best, sir." He knew that he would never pull that trigger. He thought they might kill him for it, though he hoped to escape that. Life was important, but not so crucial as the trigger.
"We'll see what Judge Two says," the President said. Lindsay was willing. This much had gone according to plan. Judge Two was asleep in sick bay. She came awake with a start, her eyes wild. She saw the blood, then stared at the President. "Burn it, you've hurt him again."
"Not me," said the President, with a flicker of confusion and guilt. The President explained while Judge 2 examined the arm and bandaged it. "Might be psychosomatic."