Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [93]
The life went out of him.
Gregorian struggled up out of the chair. He touched Korda’s cheek. It was cool, inert. The man he had been speaking with had been nothing more than a mannequin, a surrogate shaped in Korda’s form so that only he could employ it. The device was built into the desk. It didn’t even have any legs.
“He had a meeting,” Vasli explained.
“An agent!” The insult made Gregorian’s voice sharp. “He wasn’t even here in person. He sent an agent!”
“What did you expect? He didn’t shake hands—what else could he have been?”
Gregorian looked at him.
Silently Vasli extended his hand. With only a tremble of hesitation, Gregorian took it. The signet ring his clone-father had sent him along with the new offworld clothing whispered permanent agent unique in his otic nerve. “This is your first time offplanet, I take it.”
Withdrawing his hand, Gregorian said, “Deneb. Your people are building a shell about Deneb, aren’t they?”
“A toroidal shell, yes. Not a full sphere but a slice from a sphere; it varies only a degree or two from the ecliptic.” As Vasli spoke, the macroartifact materialized in the air between them. For a second he thought Vasli was employing a pocket projector, and then he realized it was an effect of the runaway visualization caused by the feverdancers. “To warm the outer planets. We do not have your natural resources, you see, no sungrazers, no Midworlds. With the one exception, our planets are naturally inhospitable. So we have taken apart an ice world to create a reflective belt.”
The image swelled, so that he saw the flattened spindle forms of the individual worldlets, saw their interwoven orbits laid out and diagrammed, and the network of traffic-control stations running through its infrastructure. “Surely that’s not enough to make the outer planets habitable.”
“No, it’s only part of the engine. We’re also rekindling their cores, and imploding a moon here and there to create gateways into our sun’s chromosphere.” Small orbital suns burst into existence about the outer worlds. The ice belt redoubled in brightness where the planets passed near.
The sight dazzled and enraged Gregorian. He shivered with emotion. “That’s what we should be doing! We have the knowledge, we have the power—all we lack is the will to seize control, to make ourselves as powerful as gods!”
“My people are not exactly gods,” the artificial man said dryly. “A project this large kicks up wars in its wake. Millions have died. A far greater number have been displaced, relocated, forced out of lives they were happy in. While I myself feel it is justified, honesty compels me to admit that most of your own people would not agree. We have given up much that your culture yet retains.”
“Everyone dies—the rearrangement of when is a matter of only statistical interest.” In his mind he saw all the Prosperan system, and it seemed a paltry thing, a nugget, an ungerminated seed. “Had I the power, I’d begin demolishing worlds today. I’d take Miranda apart with my bare hands.” He felt the blood rushing through his veins, plumping his cock, the ecstatic rush of possibility through his brain. “I’d tear the stars themselves apart, and in their place build something worth seeing.”
Mouths opened one by one in the wall, closed in unison, and disappeared. More feverdancing. He wiped sweat from his forehead as white spears fell through the ceiling and noiselessly pierced the floor. The room was intolerably stuffy.
He yawned, and for an instant his eyes opened and he stared across a dying campfire at Gregorian. The magician’s head nodded, but he went on talking. Then he was back in Laputa and had missed part of the magician’s story.
“Vasli. You know Korda well, I imagine. He’s capable of murder, isn’t he? He’d kill a man if that man got in his way.”
That white mask scrutinized him. “He can be ruthless. As who would know better than you?”
“Tell me