Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [70]
On the wall of Nora's office, a huge satellite telephoto of the Saturnian surface crawled slowly, red winds interlacing streams of muddy gold.
"We could leave," Lindsay said. "There are other Council States. Kirkwood Gap's all right. Cassini-Kluster."
"And give up everything we've built here?"
Lindsay watched the screen abstractly. "You're all I want."
"I want that tenure, Abelard. That Colonel-Professorship. If we go, what about the children? What about our Clique? They depend on us."
"You're right. This is our home."
"You're making too much of this," Nora said. "He'll return to the Republic soon. If Goldreich-Tremaine weren't the capital now, he wouldn't be here."
Children laughed in the next room; from her console, Nora turned down the audio. Lindsay said, "There's a horror between Philip and myself. We know too much about each other."
"Don't be a fatalist, darling. I'm not going to sit with folded hands while some unplanned upstart attacks my husband."
Nora left her console and walked across to him. A centrifugal half-gravity tugged at her skirt and sleeve laces. Lindsay pulled her into his lap and ran his human hand across the serpentine curls of her hair. "Let him be, Nora. Otherwise it will come to killing again."
She kissed him. "You were alone in the past. Now you're a match for him. We have our Midnight Clique. We have the Mavrides line, the Investors, my rank in Security. We have our good trust. This life belongs to us." GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 13-4-'37
Philip Constantine watched his ship's departure through his video monocle. The monocle pleased him. He liked its stylishness. Constantine took pains to stay abreast of such developments. Fashions were powerful manipulations.
Especially among the Reshaped. Behind his ship, the Friendship Serene, the Goldreich-Tremaine complex spun in gyroscopic counterclockwork. Constantine studied the city's image, broadcast to his monocle from a camera mounted on the ship's hull.
The orbiting city taught an object lesson in Shaper history. Its core was the dark, heavily shielded cylinder that had sheltered the earliest settlers: desperate pioneers, driven to mine the Rings of Saturn despite their sleets of radiation and complex electrical storms. The central core of Goldreich-Tremaine was as dark as a nut, a stubborn acorn that had endured and broken forth at last into fantastic growth. Hubbed spheres wheeled about it, radar installations slid with sleek precision on external tracks, two huge tubed suburbs turned in counterbalanced array on white ceramic stems. And all about the inner complex was a lacy network of habitats in free-fall. Outside the bubbled suburbs—the "subbles"—loomed the immaterial walls of the Bottle.
The Friendship Serene hit the flaw in the Bottle. Colored static raced across Constantine's monocle, and Goldreich-Tremaine disappeared. It was visible now only by its absence: a lozenge of dark fog in the white ice-rubble of the Ring. The dark fog was the Bottle itself: a magnetic tokamak field eight kilometers long, shielding the Shaper city-state within a fusion-powered web.
This far from the sun, solar kilowatts were useless. The Reshaped had their own suns, bright fusion cores in every Council State: Goldreich-Tremaine, Dermott-Gold-Murray, Tauri Phase, Kirkwood Gap, Synchronis, Cassini-Kluster, Encke-KIuster, Skimmers Union, Arsenal.... Constantine knew them all.
Ghost acceleration wafted across him as the engines cut in. The Goldreich-Tremaine weather station had cleared them for launch; there was no chance of a crippling ring-lightning strike. Background radiation was light. With the new Shaper drives he faced mere weeks of travel.
The playwright, Zeuner, entered the cabin and seated himself beside Constantine. "It's gone," he said.
"Homesick already, Carl?" Constantine looked up at the larger man.
"For Goldreich-Tremaine? Yes. For the people? That's another matter."
"Someday you'll return in triumph."
"Very kind of you to say so, your excellency." Zeuner ran one fawn-colored glove over his chin. Constantine