Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [83]
The Mechanist defector, Sigmund Fetzko, had "faded." These days, those calling his residence received only ingenious delays and temporizing from his household's expert system. Fetzko's image lived; the man himself was dead, and too polite to admit it.
Neville Pongpianskul was dead, assassinated in the Republic at Constan-tine's order.
Chancellor-General Margaret Juliano had simply vanished. Some enemy of her own had finished her. This still puzzled Constantine; on the day of her disappearance he had received a large crate, anonymously. Cautiously opened by bodyguards, it had revealed a block of ice with her name elegantly chiseled on its surface: Margaret Juliano, on ice. She had not been seen since. Colonel-Professor Nora Mavrides had drastically overplayed her hand. Her husband, the false Lindsay, had disappeared, and she had accused Constantine of kidnapping him. When her husband returned again, with a wild tale about Super-bright renegades and black market clinics, she was disgraced. Constantine was still not sure what had happened. The most likely explanation was that Nora Mavrides had been double-crossed by her burnt-out little cadre of diplomats. Probably they had seen what was coming and set up their one-time protectress, hoping that the new Skimmers Union regime would thank them for it. If so, they were grossly mistaken.
Constantine looked about the cavernous station, adjusting his videoshades for closeups. Amid the fretting Shapers in their overelaborate finery was a growing minority of others. An imported cargo of sundogs. Here and there shabbily clad ideological derelicts, their faces wreathed in smiles, were comparing lace-sleeved garments to their torsos or lurking with predatory nonchalance beside evacuees lightening their luggage.
"Vermin," Constantine said. The sight depressed him. "Gentlemen, it's time we moved on."
The guards led him across the chained-off entry to a private ramp padded in velcro. Constantine's clingtight boots crunched and shredded across the fabric.
He floated down the free-fall embarkation tube to the airlock of the Friendship Serene. Once inside he took his favorite acceleration chair and plugged in on video to enjoy the takeoff.
Within the port's skeletal gantryways, the smaller ships queued up for embarkation tubes, dwarfed by the stylized bulk of an Investor starship. Constantine craned his neck, causing the hull cameras of the Friendship Serene to swivel in slaved obedience. "Is that Investor ship still here?" he said aloud. He smiled. "Do you suppose they're hunting bargains?" He lifted his videoshades. Within the ship's cabin his guards clustered around an overhead tank, huffing tranquilizer gas from breathing masks. One looked up, red-eyed. "May we go into suspension now, sir?" Constantine nodded sourly. Since the war had started up again, his guards had lost all sense of humor.
AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 22-9-'53
Nora looked up at her husband, who sprawled above her in a towering chair. His face was hidden by a dark beard and opaque wraparound sunshades. His hair was close-cropped and he wore a Mech jumpsuit. His old, scarred diplomatic bag rested on the scratchy plush of the deck. He was taking it with him. He meant to defect.
The heavy gravity of the Investor ship weighed on both of them like iron. "Stop pacing, Nora," he said. "You'll only exhaust yourself."
"I'll rest later," she said. Tension knotted her neck and shoulders.
"Rest now. Take the other chair. If you'll close your eyes, sleep a little ... in almost no time—"
"I'm not going with you." She pulled off her own sunshades and rubbed the bridge of her nose. The light in the cabin was the light Investors favored: a searing blaze of blue-white radiance, drenched in ultraviolet. She hated that light. Somehow she had always resented the Investors for robbing her Family's deaths of meaning. And the