Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [94]
"Have you given up hope, Ryumin?"
"I'm too old for passion," Ryumin said. "Don't ask me to take risks. Leave me to my data streams, Mr. Dze, or whoever you are. I'm what I am. There's no going back, no starting over. That's a game for those who still have flesh. Those who can heal."
"I'm sorry," Lindsay said, "but I need allies. Knowledge is power, and I know things others don't. I mean to fight. Not against my enemies. Against the circumstances. Against history. I want my wife back, Ryumin. My Shaper wife. I want her back free and clear, without the shadows on her. If you won't help me, who will?"
Ryumin hesitated. "I have a friend," he said at last. "His name is Wells."
DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 31-10-'53
Before the advent of humankind, the Asteroid Belt had arranged itself through the physics of rubble. Fragments were distributed in powers of ten. For every asteroid there were ten others a third its size, from Ceres at a thousand kilometers down to the literal trillions of uncharted boulders following spacetime potentials at relative speeds of five kilometers per second.
Dembowska was of the third rank, two hundred kilometers across. Like other circumsolar bodies, it had paid its homage to the laws of chance. In the time of the dinosaurs, something large had hit Dembowska. The visitor was there and gone in a split second, leaving chunks of its impact-melted pyroxene embedded in the crust as it flew apart in gouts of fire. At the point of impact, Dembowska's silicate matrix had shattered, opening a ragged vertical crevasse twenty kilometers down to the asteroid's nickel-iron core. Now most of the core was gone, devoured by ever-hungry industry. Dembowska Cartel lived within the crevasse, long plazas dropping level after level into the fading gravity, the gradient shifting until what were formerly walls became floors, until walls and floors vanished altogether into the closest thing to free-fall. At the crevasse's base the world expanded into an enormous cavernous dugout, Dembowska's hollow heart, where generations of mining drones had gnawed at the metal and the ores that held it. The hole was too large for air. They treated it as space. Within the free-fall vacuum at the asteroid's core were the new heavy industries: the cryonics factories, where hints and memories teased from the blasted mind of Michael Carnas-sus were translated into a steady rise of Dembowska Cartel stock on the market monitors of a hundred worlds.
Trade secrets were secure within Dembowska's bowels, snug beneath kilometers of rock. Life had forced itself like putty into the fracture in this minor planet: dug out its inert heart and filled it with engines. Seen from the industrial core, the bottom of the crevasse was the top layer of the outside world. Here Wells had his offices; where twenty-four-hour crews of his employees monitored the datapulses of the Union of Cartels, under the quasinational aegis of Ceres Datacom Network.
The offices were walled in velcro and video, the glowing walls with their ceaseless murmur of news acting as work partitions. Bits of hard copy were vel-cro-clipped underfoot and overhead; reporters in headsets spoke over audiolines or tapped energetically at keyboards. They looked young; there was a calculated extravagance in their dress. Over the mumble of narrative, the smooth rattle of printouts, the whir of booted datatapes, came faint background music: the brittle keening of synthesizers. The cold air smelled of roses.
A secretary announced them. His hair crisped out from under a loose Mech beret. Its puffiness suggested possible cranial taps. He wore a patriotic lapel tag, showing the wide-eyed face of Michael Carnassus. Wells's office was more secure than the rest. His videowalls formed a surging mosaic of headlines, interlocking rectangles of data that could be frozen and expanded at will. He wore quilted coveralls with Shaper lace at the throat; the gray fabric was overprinted with stylized eurypteroids in darker gray. His stylish gloves were overlaid with circuit-laden