Schismatrix plus by Bruce Sterling Page A

roaches, the Red Consensus would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast-off skin and built-up layers of sweated and exhaled effluvia. Lysine, alanine, methionine, carbamino compounds, lactic acid, sex pheromones: a constant stream of organic vapors poured invisibly, day and night, from the human body. Roaches were a vital part of the spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking up grease. Roaches had haunted spacecraft almost from the beginning, too tough and adaptable to kill. At least now they were well-trained. They were even housebro-ken, obedient to the chemical lures and controls of the Second Representative. Lindsay still hated them, though, and couldn't watch their grisly swarming and free-fall leaps and clattering flights without a deep conviction that he ought to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Dressed, Lindsay meandered in free-fall through the filamented doors between decks. The plasticized doors unraveled into strands as he approached and knitted themselves shut behind him. They were thin but airtight and as tough as steel when pressed. They were Shaper work. Stolen, probably, Lindsay thought.
    He wandered into the control room, drawn by the instrumental music. Most of the crew was there. The President, two Reps, and Justice 3 were watching a Shaper agit-broadcast with strap-on videogoggles.
    The Chief Justice was strapped in beside the waist-high console, monitoring deep-space broadcasts with the ship's drone. The Chief Justice was by far the oldest member of the crew. He never took part in Carnaval. This, his age, and his office made him the crew's impartial arbiter. Lindsay spoke loudly beside the man's earphones. "Any news?"
    "The siege is still on," the Mech said, without any marked satisfaction.
    "The Shapers are holding." He stared emptily at the control boards. "They keep boasting about their victory in the Concatenation."
    Justice 2 came into the control room. "Who wants some ketamine?" Rep 1 took off her videogoggles. "Is it good?"
    "Fresh out of the chromatograph. I just made it myself."
    "The Concatenation was a real power in my day," the Chief Justice said. With his earphones on, he hadn't seen or heard the two women. Something about the broadcast he had monitored had stirred some deep layer of ancient indignation. "In my day the Concatenation was the whole civilized world." Through long habit, the women ignored him, raising their voices. "Well, how much?" Rep 1 said.
    "Forty thousand a gram?" the Judge bargained.
    "Forty thousand? I'll give you twenty."
    "Come on, girl, you charged me twenty thousand just to do my nails." Lindsay listened with half an ear, wondering if he could cut himself in. The FMD still had its own banks, and though its currency was enormously inflated, it was still in circulation as the exclusive legal tender of eleven billionaires. Lindsay, unfortunately, as junior crew member, was already deeply in debt.
    "Mare Serenitatis," the old man said. "The Corporate Republic." He fixed Lindsay suddenly with his ash-gray eyes. "I hear you worked for them." Lindsay was startled. The unwritten taboos of the Red Consensus suppressed discussion of the past. The old Mech's face had brightened with a reckless upwash of memory. Decades of the same expressions had dug deep furrows into his ancient muscle and skin. His face was an idiosyncratic mask.
    "I was only there briefly," Lindsay lied. "I don't know the moondocks well."
    "I was born there."
    Rep 1 cast an alarmed glance in the old man's direction. "All right, forty thousand," she said. The two women left for the lab. The President lifted his videogoggles. He looked sardonically at Lindsay, then deliberately turned up the volume on his headset. The other two, Rep 2 and the grizzled Justice 3, ignored the whole situation.
    "The Republic had a system in my day," the Mech said. "Political families. The Tylers, the Kellands, the Lindsays. Then there was an underclass of refugees we'd taken in, just before the Interdict