Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [66]
The attenuated blossoms of the Shaper garden mildewed and crumbled at the touch of raw humanity. The vegetation took strange forms as it suffered and contorted, its stems corkscrewing in rot-dusted perversions of growth. Lindsay visited it daily, and his very presence hastened the corruption. The place smelled of the Zaibatsu, and his lungs ached with its nostalgic stench. He had brought it with him. No matter how fast he moved, he dragged behind him a fatal slipstream of the past.
He and Nora would never be free of it. It was not just the contagion, or his useless arm. Nor the galaxy of rashes that disfigured Nora for days, crusting her perfect skin and filling her eyes with flinty stoicism. It dated back to the training they had shared, the damage done to them. It made them partners, and Lindsay realized that this was the finest thing that life had ever offered him.
He thought about death as he watched the Shaper robot at its task. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, it loaded ore into the distended guts of the decoy wetware. After the two of them had smothered, this machine would continue indefinitely in its hyperactive parody of life. He could have shut it down, but he felt a kinship with it. Its headlong, blind persistence cheered him somehow. And the fact that it was pumping tons of frothing plastic into the launch ring, ruining it, meant that the pirates had won. He could not bear to rob them of that useless victory.
As the air grew fouler they were forced to retreat, sealing the tunnels behind them. They stayed near the last operative industrial gardens, shallowly breathing the hay-scented air, making love and trying to heal each other. With Nora, he reentered Shaper life, with its subtleties, its allusions, its painful brilliance. And slowly, with him, her sharpest edges were smoothed. She lost the worst kinks, the hardest knots, the most insupportable levels of stress.
They turned down the power so that the tunnels grew colder, retarding the spread of the contagion. At night they clung together for warmth, swaddled in a carpet-sized shroud that Nora compulsively embroidered. She would not give up. She had a core of unnatural energy that Lindsay could not match. For days she had worked on repairs in the radio room, though she knew it was useless.
Shaper Ring Security had stopped broadcasting. Their military outposts had become embarrassments. Mechanists were evacuating them and repatriating their Shaper crews to the Ring Council with exquisite diplomatic courtesy. There had never been any war. No one was fighting. The cartels were buying out their pirate clients and hastily pacifying them.
All this was waiting for them if they could only raise their voices. But their broadcast equipment was ruined; the circuits were irreplaceable, and the two of them were not technicians.
Lindsay had accepted death. No one would come for them; they would assume that the outpost was wiped out. Eventually, he thought, someone would check, but not for years.
One night, after making love, Lindsay stayed up, toying with the dead pirate's mechanical arm. It fascinated him, and it was a solace; by dying young, he thought, he had at least escaped this. His own right arm had lost almost all feeling. The nerves had deteriorated steadily since the incident with the gun, and his battle wounds had only hastened it.
"Those damned guns," he said aloud. "Someone will find this place someday. We ought to tear those fucking guns apart, to show the world that we had decency. I'd do it but I can't bear to touch them." Nora was drowsy. "So what? They don't work."
"Sure, they're disarmed." That had been one of his triumphs. "But they could be armed again. They're evil, darling. We should smash them."
"If you care that much ..." Nora's eyes opened. "Abelard. What if we fired one?"
"No," he said at once.
"What if we blew up the Consensus with the particle beam? Someone would see."
"See what? That we were criminals?"
"In the past it would just be dead pirates. Business as usual. But now it would be a scandal.