Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [87]
Lindsay, still kneeling and moving only his eyes, watched cautiously. The white end-piece was the tape creature's head, he realized. The head moved on a long craned loop, scanning the room for movement.
The tape creature stirred restlessly, stretching itself in a loose-looped open mass of rolling corkscrews. At its loosest, it was a bloated, giddy yarnball as tall as a man, its stiffened support-loops thinly hissing across the floor.
He'd thought it was machinery at first. Dangerous machinery, because the edges of the warping tape were as thin as razors. But there was an unplanned, organic ease to its coiling.
He had not yet moved. It didn't seem able to see him.
He shook his head sharply, and the heavy sunshades on his forehead flew across the room. The tape's head darted after them at once. The mimicry started from the tail. The tape shrank, crumpling like packing tissue, sketching the sunshades' form in tightly crinkled ribbon. Before it had quite completed the job, the tape seemed to lose interest. It hesitated, watching the inert sunglasses, then fell apart in a loose, whipping mass.
Briefly it mimicked Lindsay's crouching form, looping itself into a gappy man-sized sculpture of rustling tape. Its tinted ribbon quickly matched the rust-on-black tinge of his coveralls. Then the tape head looked elsewhere and it flew to pieces, its colors racing fretfully.
It flickered as Lindsay watched. Its white head scanned slowly, almost surreptitiously. It flashed muddy brown, the color of Investor hide. Slowly, a memory, either biological or cybernetic, took hold of it. It began to bunch and crumple into a new form.
The image of a small Investor took shape. Lindsay was thrilled. No human being had ever seen an infant Investor, and they were supposedly very rare. But soon Lindsay could tell from the proportions that the tape was modeling an adult female. The tape was too small to form a full-scale replica, but the accuracy of the knee-high model astonished him. Tiny blisters on the ribbon reproduced the hard, pebbly skin of the skull and neck; the tiny eyes, two tinted bumps, seemed full of expression.
Lindsay felt a chill. He recognized the individual. And the expression was one of dull animal pain.
The tape was mimicking the Investor Commander. She was gasping, her barrel-like ribs heaving. She squatted awkwardly, one clawed hand spread across each upthrust knee. The mouth opened in spasms, showing poorly mimicked peg teeth and the hollow paper-thin walls of the model's head. The ship's Commander was sick. No one had ever seen an Investor ill. The strangeness of it, Lindsay thought, must have stuck in the tape's memory. This opportunity was not to be missed. With glacial slowness Lindsay unsnapped his coverall and exposed the video monocle on its chain. He began filming. The scaled belly tightened and two edges of tape opened at the base of the model's heavy tail. A rounded white mass with the gleam of dampness appeared, a tightly wrapped oblong of tape: an egg.
It was a slow process, a painful one. The egg was leathery; the contractions of the oviduct were compressing it. At last it was free, though still connected to the tape's parent body by a transparent length of ribbon. The Investor captain's image turned, shuffling, then bent to examine the egg with a sick, rapt intensity. Slowly, her huge hand stretched out, scratched the egg, sniffed the fingers. Her frill began to rise stiffly, engorged with blood. Her arms trembled.
She attacked her egg. She bit savagely into the narrow end, shearing into the leathery shell with the badly mimicked