Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [48]
But he also knew that with each day that passed, with each minor concession and agreement, another frail layer of shellac was laid over the open break between them. Day by day a new status quo struggled to form, a frail detente supported by nothing but habit. It was not much, but it was all he had: the hope that, with time, the facade of peace would take on substance. ESAIRS XII: 3-2-'17
"Hey, Secretary of State."
Lindsay woke. In the ghostlike gravity of the asteroid he had settled imperceptibly to the bottom of his cavern. They called his dugout "the Embassy." With the passage of the Integration Act, Lindsay had moved into the rock, with the rest of the FMD.
Paolo had spoken. Fazil was with him. The two young men wore embroidered ponchos and stiff plastic crowns holding floating manes of shoulder-length hair.
The skin bacteria had hit them badly. Every day they looked worse. Paolo's neck was so badly inflamed that his throat looked cut. Fazil's left ear was infected; he carried his head tilted to one side.
"We want to show you something," Paolo said. "Can you come with us, Mr. Secretary? Quietly?" His voice was gentle, his hazel eyes so clear and guileless that Lindsay knew at once that he was up to something. Would they kill him? Not yet. Lindsay laced on a poncho and struggled with the complex knots of his sandals. "I'm at your disposal," he said. They floated into the corridor. The corridors between dugouts were no more than long wormholes, a meter across. The Mavrides clansmen propelled themselves along with a quick side-to-side lizardlike skittering. Lindsay was slower. His injured arm was bad today, and his hand felt like a club. They glided silently through the soft yellow light of one of the fermenting rooms. The blunt, nippled ends of three wetware bags jutted into the room. They were stuffed like a string of sausages into stone tunnels. Each tunnel held a series of bags, united by filters, each bag passing its output to the next. The last bag had a spinneret running, a memory-plastic engine, clacking slowly. A hollow tube of flawless clear acrylic coiled in free-fall, reeking as it dried.
They entered another black tunnel. The tunnels were all identical, all perfectly smooth. There was no need for lighting. Any genius could easily memorize the nexus.
To his left Lindsay heard the slow clack-rasp, clask-rasp of a tunneling hoop. The hoops were handmade, their teeth hand-set in plastic, and they each sounded slightly different. They helped him navigate. They could gnaw two meters a day through the softer rock. In two years they had gnawed over twenty thousand tons of ore.
When the ore was processed, the tailings were shot into space. Everything launched away left a hole behind it. A hole ten kilometers long, pitch black, and as knotted as snarled fishline, beaded with living caverns, greenhouses, wetware rooms, and private hideyholes.
They took a turn Lindsay had never used before. Lindsay heard the grating sound of a stone plug hauled away.
They went a short distance, squirming past the flaccid bulk of a deactivated air blower. As Lindsay crawled past it in the darkness, the blower came to life with a gasp.
"This is our secret place," Paolo said. "Mine and Fazil's." His voice echoed in the darkness.
Something fizzed loudly with a leaping of white-hot sparks. Startled, Lindsay braced to fight. Paolo was holding a short white stick with flame gnawing at one end. "A candle," he said.
"Kindle?" said Lindsay. "Yes, I see."
"We play with