Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [98]
"Thank you, Kitsune."
"You may consider yourself no longer under arrest."
"You're very generous."
"Now, what's this craziness about the Investors? Don't you know how the System depends on them now? Any faction that crosses the Investors might as well cut their own throats."
"I had in mind something more subtle. I thought we might persuade them to cross themselves."
"Meaning?"
"Blackmail."
Some of the mouths laughed uneasily. "In what form, darling?"
"Sexual perversion."
The eyes swiveled up on their organic mounting. Lindsay saw the wideness of their pupils, his first kinesic clue, and knew he had struck home. "You have the evidence?"
"I'd hand it over at once," Lindsay said, "but this clamp constrains me."
"Take it off. I've neutralized it."
Lindsay unbuckled the kill-clamp and set it gently on the chair's quivering arm. He walked toward the bed in his socks. He produced the videomonocle from within his shirt.
Dark eyes opened within the headboard. A pair of sleek arms emerged through soft furred slots. An arm took the monocle and placed it over one eye. Lindsay said, "I've set it to the beginning of the sequence."
"But that's not the beginning of the tape."
"The first part is—"
"Yes," she said icily. "I see. Your wife?"
"Yes."
"No matter. If she'd come with you, things might have been different. But now she's crossed Constantine."
"You know him?"
"Of course. He crowded the Zaibatsu with the victims of his purge. The Shapers are proud, in the Ring Council. They'll never believe an unplanned can match them scheme for scheme. Your wife is a dead woman."
"There might be—"
"Forget it. You had your years of peace. The next are his. Ah." She hesitated. "This was taken aboard an Investor starship? The one that brought you here?"
"Yes. I filmed it myself."
"Ahh." The moan was purely sensual. One of the room's huge hearts was under the bed; its pulse had speeded. "It's their queen, their captain. Oh, these Investor women and their harem rule, what a pleasure it is to have beaten one. The filthy creature. Oh, what a joy you are, Lin Dze, Mavrides, Milosz."
Lindsay said, "My name is Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay."
"I know. Constantine told me. And I convinced him you were dead."
"Thank you, Kitsune."
"What do names mean to us? They call me the Chief of Police. The control is what matters, darling, not the front. You fooled the Shapers in the Ring Council. The Mechanists were my prey. I moved to the Cartels. I watched, I waited. Then one day I found Carnassus. The last survivor of his mission." She laughed lightly, the high-pitched skipping laugh he once had known so well. "The Mechs sent out their best. But they were too strong, too stiff, too brittle. The strangeness of it broke them, and the isolation. Carnassus had to kill the other two, and he still wakes up screaming because of it. Yes, even in this room. His company was bankrupted. I bought him, and all his strange booty, from the wreckage."
"In the Rings they say he rules here."
"Of course they do; that's what I told them. Carnassus belongs to me. My surgeons have been at him. There's not a neuron in him that pleasure hasn't blasted. Life is simple for him, a constant dream of flesh." Lindsay looked about the room. "And you're his favorite."
"Would I tolerate anything else, darling?"
"You don't mind that other wives practice Zen Serotonin?"
"I don't care what they think or claim they think. They obey me. I'm not concerned with ideology. What concerns me is the future."
"Oh?"
"The day will come when we've squeezed everything we can out of Carnassus. And cryonic products will lose their novelty as the technology spreads."
"That might take years."
"It all takes years," she said. "And it's a question of years. The ship you arrived on has left