Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [72]
Constantine was silent. Mavrides troubled him. Tentacles of the man's influence had spread throughout Goldreich-Tremaine.
And the coincidences went beyond chance. They hinted at deliberate plot. A man who chose to call himself Abelard. An impresario of the theatre. Staging political plays. And his wife was a diplomat.
At least Constantine knew that Abelard Lindsay was dead. His agents in the Zaibatsu had taped Lindsay's death at the hands of the Geisha Bank. Constantine had even spoken to the woman who had had Lindsay killed, a Shaper renegade called Kitsune. He had the whole sorry story: Lindsay's involvement with pirates, his desperate murder of the Geisha Bank's former leader. Lindsay had died horribly.
But why had Constantine's first assassin never reported back from the Zaibatsu? He had not thought the man would turn sundog. Assassins had failsafes implanted; few traitors survived.
For years Constantine had lived in fear of this lost assassin. The elite of Ring Council Security assured him that the assassin was dead. Constantine did not believe them, and had never trusted them again.
For years he had worked his way into the mirrored underworld of Shaper covert action. Assassins and bodyguards—the two were often one and the same, since they specialized in one another's tradecraft—these had become his closest allies.
He knew their subterfuges, their fanatic loyalties. He struggled constantly to win their trust. He sheltered them in his Republic, hiding them from pacifist persecution. He used his prestige freely to further their militarist ends.
Some Shapers still despised him for his unplanned genes; from many others he had won respect. Personal hatreds did not bother him. But it bothered him that he might be cut short before he had measured himself against the world. Before he had satisfied the soaring ambition that had driven him since childhood.
Who knew about Lindsay, the only man who had ever been his friend? When he was young, and weaker, before the armor of distrust had sealed around him, Lindsay had been his intimate. Who let this phantom loose, and to what end?
GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 26-12-'46
Wedding guests surrounded the garden. From his hiding place behind the boughs of a dwarf magnolia, Lindsay saw his wife lightly bounding toward him, in half a gravity. Green fronds brushed at the spreading wings of her headdress. Nora's formal gown was a dense ocher weave beaded in silver, with openwork amber sleeves. "You're all right, darling?" Lindsay said, "My sleeve hems, burn it. I was dancing and popped a whole weave loose."
"I saw you leave. Do you need help?"
"I can get it." Lindsay struggled with the complex interweave. "I'm slow, but I can do it."
"Let me help." She stepped to his side, pulled inlaid knitting needles from her headdress, and tatted his sleeves with a smooth dexterity he could not hope to match. He sighed and tucked his own needles carefully back into his braids. "The Regent is asking about you," she said. "The senior genetics are here."
"Where'd you put them?"
"In the veranda discreet. I had to clear out a raft of kids." She finished the sleeve. "There. Good enough?"
"You're a wonder."
"No kissing, Abelard. You'll smear your makeup. After the party." She smiled. "You look grand."
Lindsay ran his mechanical hand over his coils of gray hair. The steel knuckles glittered with inlaid seed-gems; the wire tendons sparkled with interwoven strands of fiberoptics. He wore a formal Goldreich-Tremaine Kosmosity academic's ruffled overvest, its lapels studded with pins of rank. His kneelongs were a rich coffee-brown.