Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [52]
"If you had my control you wouldn't weep. Not if they tore your heart out."
"They already have," Lindsay said. "And yours as well."
"Abelard," she said, "he was a pirate."
"And the rest?"
"You think they'd weep over us?"
"No," Lindsay said. "And not much, even over their own. It's vengeance they'll want. How would you feel if Ian disappears tomorrow? And two months from now you find his bones in the sludge drain of some fermenter? Or, better yet, if your nerves are so well steeled, what about yourself? How would power taste to you if you were retching bloody foam outside some airlock?"
"It's in your hands," she said. "I've told you the truth, as we agreed between us. It's up to you to control your faction."
"I won't be put in this position," Lindsay said. "I thought we had an understanding."
She pointed at the oozing wreckage of her spinal crab. "You didn't ask my permission to attack me. You saw something you couldn't bear, and you destroyed it. We did the same."
"I want to talk to Kleo," he said.
She looked hurt. "That's against our understanding. You talk through me."
"This is murder, Nora. I have to see her."
Nora sighed. "She's in her garden. You'll have to put on a suit."
"Mine's in the Consensus."
"We'll use one of Ian's, then. Come on." She led him back into the glowing cavern, then down a long fissured-out mining vein to Ian Mavrides's room.
The spacesuit maker and graphic artist was awake and working. He had refused to put his decontamination suit aside and wore it constantly, a one-man sterile environment.
Ian was point man for the Mavrides Family, a focus for threats and resentment. Paolo had blurted as much, but Lindsay knew it already. The round walls of Ian's dugout were neatly stenciled in gridwork. For weeks he'd been decorating it with an elaborate geometric mosaic of interlocking L-shapes. With the passage of time the shapes were smaller, more tightly packed, crammed together in obsessive, crawling rigor. Its intricacy was claustrophobic, smothering; the tiny squares seemed to writhe and flicker. When they entered, Ian whirled, putting his hand to one bulky sleeve-pocket. "It's us," Nora said.
Behind the faceplate, Ian's eyes were wild. "Oh," he said. "Get burned."
"Save it for the others," Lindsay said. "I'd be more impressed if you got some sleep, Ian."
"Sure," said Ian. "So you could come in here and pull my suit off. And contaminate me."
Nora said, "We need a suit, Ian. State is going to the garden."
"Fuck him! He's not stinking up one of my suits! He can sew his own, like Rep Three did."
"You're clever with suits, Ian." Lindsay wondered if Ian had been the one to murder Rep Three. They had probably rolled dice for the privilege. He pulled a suit from the rack. "If you take your suit off, I might not put this on. What do you say? I'll roll you."
Ian pressed an oxygen balloon against the intake nozzle of his suit.
"Don't test your luck. Cripple."
Kleo lived in the largest greenhouse. It was ornamental; it grew more slowly than the wormholed industrial gardens, where vegetation rioted under grow-lights in pure carbon dioxide. The room was oblong, and its long walls had the ribbed look of a seashell. Brilliant light poured from fluorescent tubes along each ridge.
The soil was mine tailings, held by dampness and a fine plastic mesh. Like the Shapers themselves, the plants were altered to live without bacteria. They were flowers, mostly: roses, daisies, buttercups the size of fists. Kleo's bed was of roofed-in wickerwork, grown from curved bamboo. She was awake, working on an embroidery hoop. Her skin was darker than the others'—the grow-lights had tanned her. She wore a sleeveless white blouse cinched at the waist, hanging in multiple thin folds. Her legs and feet were bare. There was an embroidered logo of rank above her heart.
"Hello, dear," she said.
"Kleo." Nora floated into the wickerwork structure and lightly kissed Kleo's cheek. "At his insistence, I—"
Kleo nodded once. "I hope you'll make this brief," she told Lindsay. "My garden is not