Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [6]
Without bacteria, the soil was a lifeless heap of imported lunar dust. With them, it was a constant mutational hazard.
The Republic struggled to control its Sours. In the Zaibatsu, the souring had become epidemic. Mutant fungi had spread like oil slicks, forming a mycelial crust beneath the surface of the soil. This gummy crust repelled water, choking trees and grass. Dead vegetation was attacked by rot. The soil grew dry, the air grew damp, and mildew blossomed on dying fields and orchards, gray pinheads swarming into blotches of corruption, furred like lichen. ...
When matters reached this stage, only desperate efforts could restore the world. It would have to be evacuated, all its air decompressed into space, and the entire inner surface charred clean in vacuum, then reseeded from scratch. The expense was crippling. Colonies faced with this had suffered breakaways and mass defections, in which thousands fled to frontiers of deeper space. With the passage of time, these refugees had formed their own societies. They joined the Mechanist cartels of the Asteroid Belt, or the Shaper Ring Council, orbiting Saturn.
In the case of the People's Zaibatsu, most of the population had gone, but a stubborn minority refused defeat.
Lindsay understood. There was a grandeur in this morose and rotting desolation.
Slow whirlwinds tore at the gummy soil, spilling long tendrils of rotten grit into the twilit air. The glass sunlight panels were coated with filth, a gluey amalgam of dust and mildew. The long panels had blown out in places; they were shored up with strut-braced makeshift plugs.
It was cold. With the glass so filthy, so cracked, with daylight reduced to a smeared twilight, they would have to run the place around the clock simply to keep it from freezing. Night was too dangerous; it couldn't be risked. Night was not allowed.
Lindsay scrabbled weightlessly along the landing deck. The aircraft were moored to the scratched metal with suction cups. There were a dozen man-powered models, in bad repair, and a few battered electrics. He checked the struts of an ancient electric whose fabric wings were stenciled with a Japanese carp design. Mud-smeared skids equipped it for gravity landings. Lindsay floated into the skeletal saddle, fitting his cloth-and-plastic shoes into the stirrups.
He pulled his credit card from one of the coverall's chest pockets. The gold-trimmed black plastic had a red LED readout displaying credit hours. He fed it into a slot and the tiny engine hummed into life.
He cast off and caught a downdraft until he felt the tug of gravity. He oriented himself with the ground below.
To his left, the sunlight panel had been cleaned in patches. A cadre of lumpy robots were scraping and mopping the fretted glass. Lindsay nosed the ultralight down for a closer look. The robots were bipedal; they were crudely designed. Lindsay realized suddenly that they were human beings in suits and gas masks.
Columns of sunlight from the clean glass pierced the murk like searchlights. He flew into one, twisted, and rode its updraft. The light fell upon the opposite land panel. Near its center a cluster of storage tanks dotted the land. The tanks brimmed with oozing green brew: algae. The last agriculture left in the Zaibatsu was an oxygen farm. He swooped lower over the tanks. Gratefully, he breathed the enriched air. His aircraft's shadow flitted over a jungle of refinery pipes. As he looked down, he saw a second shadow behind him. Lindsay wheeled abruptly to his right.
The shadow followed his movement with cybernetic precision. Lindsay pulled his craft into a steep climb and twisted in the seat to look behind him.
When he finally spotted his pursuer, he was shocked to see it so close. Its splattered camouflage of dun and gray hid it perfectly against the interior sky of ruined land panels. It was a surveillance craft, a remotely controlled