Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [67]
"You'd risk this facade of peace that they're showing the aliens? Just on the chance that someone would rescue us? Fire, imagine what they'd do to us when they came."
"What? Kill us? We're dead already. I want us to live."
"As criminals? Despised by everyone?"
Nora smiled bitterly. "That's nothing new for me."
"No, Nora. There are limits."
She caressed him. "I understand."
Two nights later he woke in terror as the asteroid shook. Nora was gone. At first he thought it was a meteor strike, a rare but terrifying event. He listened for the hiss of blowout, but the tunnels were still sound. When he saw Nora's face he realized the truth. "You fired the gun." She was shaken. "I cast the Consensus loose before I shot it. I went out on the surface. There's something weird there, Abelard. Plastic has been leaking oat of the launch ring into space."
"I don't want to hear about it."
"I had to do it. For us. Forgive me, darling. I swear I'll never deceive you again."
He brooded. "You think they'll come?"
"It's a chance. I wanted a chance for us." She was distracted. "Tons of plastic. Squeezing out like paste. Like a huge worm."
"An accident," Lindsay said. "We'll have to tell them that it was an accident."
"I'll destroy the gun now." She looked at him guiltily.
"What's done is done." He smiled sadly and reached toward her. "Let it wait."
ESAIRS XII: 17-7-'17
Somewhere in his dreams Lindsay heard a repeated pounding. As always, Nora woke first and was instantly alert. "Noise, Abelard." Lindsay woke painfully, his eyelids gummy. "What is it? A blowout?" She slipped out of the sheets, launching herself off his hip with one bare foot. She hit the lights. "Get up, darling. Whatever it is, we're meeting it head on."
It was not the way Lindsay would have preferred to meet death but he was willing to go along with her. He pulled on drawstring pants and a poncho.
"There's no breeze," she said as he struggled with a complex Shaper knot. "It's not decompression."
"Then it's a rescue! The Mechs!"
They hurried through darkened tunnels to the airlock.
One of their rescuers—he must have been a courageous one—had managed to force his vast bulk through the airlock and into the loading room. He was picking fussily at the huge birdlike toes of his spacesuit as Lindsay peered out of the access tunnel, squinting and shielding his eyes. The alien had a powerful searchlight mounted on the nasal bridge of his cavernous spacesuit helmet. The light gushing from it was as vivid as a welding torch: harsh and electric blue, heavily tinged with ultraviolet. The spacesuit was brown and gray, dotted with input sockets and accordion-ribbed around the alien's joints.
The light swept across them and Lindsay squinted, averting his face.
"You may call me the Ensign," the alien said in trade English. He politely aligned himself with their vertical axis, stretching overhead to finger-walk along the wall.
Lindsay put his hand on Nora's forearm. "I'm Abelard," he said. "This is Nora."
"How do you do? We want to discuss this property." The alien reached into a side pocket and pulled out a wad of tissue. He shook it out with a quick bird-like motion, and it became a television. He put the screen against the wall. Lindsay, watching carefully, saw that the television had no scan lines. The image was formed in millions of tiny colored hexagons. The image was esairs xii. Bursting from the launch ring's exit hole was an extruded tube of foamed plastic almost half a kilometer long. There was a rough knob at the tip of the wormlike coil. Lindsay realized with instantly smothered shock that it was Paolo's stone head, neatly framed in the flowerlike wreckage of the launch cage. The entire mass had been smoothly embedded in the decoy complex's leakage of plastic, then squeezed out under pressure into a coiling helical arc.
"I see," Lindsay said.
"Are you the artist?"
"Yes," Lindsay said. He pointed at the screen. "Notice the subtle shading effect where our recent blast darkened the sculpture."