neck. He was dead, still pulling. She let the ends of the sash slide through her cramped fingers. Paolo twisted slowly in free-fall, his face blackened, his arms locked in place. He seemed to be strangling himself.
A gauntleted hand, drenched in blood, came through the crescent hole at the side of the barricade. There was a muffled
buzzing from within the spacesuit. He was trying to talk.
She rushed to his side. He leaned his head against the outside
of the barricade, shouting within the helmet. "Dead!" he said.
"They're dead!"
"Take off the helmet," she said.
He shrugged his right shoulder within the suit. "My arm!" he
said.
She stuck one hand through the crevice and helped him twist
the helmet off. It popped free with a suck of air and the familiar
reek of his body. There were half-dried scabs of blood under his
nostrils and one in his left ear. He had been decompressed.
Carefully, she ran her hand across his sweating cheek. "We're
alive, aren't we."
"They were going to kill you," he said. "I couldn't let them."
"The same for me." She looked backward at Paolo. "It was like
suicide to kill him. I think I'm dead."
"No. We belong to each other. Say so, Nora."
"Yes, we do," she said, and pressed her face blindly against the
gap between them. He kissed her with the bright salt taste of
blood.
The demolition had been thorough. Kleo had finished the job.
She had crept out in a spacesuit and soaked the inside of the
Red Consensus with sticky contact venom.
But Lindsay had gone there before her. He had leaped the gap
of naked space, decompressing himself, to get one of the
armored spacesuits. He'd caught Kleo in the control room. In
her thin suit she was no match for him; he'd ripped her suit
open and she'd died of the poison.
Even the Family's robot had suffered. The two Reps had
lobotomized it while passing through the decoy room. Operations by the launch ring ran at manic speed, the brain-stripped
robot loading ton after ton of carbon ore into the overstuffed
and belching wetware. A frothing mass of plastic output gushed
into the launch ring, which was itself ruined by the skidding
launch cage. But that was the least of their problems.
The worst was sepsis. The organisms brought from the Zaibatsu
wreaked havoc on the delicate biosystems of ESAIRS XII. Kleo's
garden was a leprous parody five weeks after the slaughter.
The attenuated blossoms of the Shaper garden mildewed and
crumbled at the touch of raw humanity. The vegetation took
strange forms as it suffered and contorted, its stems
corkscrewing in rot-dusted perversions of growth. Lindsay visited it daily, and his very presence hastened the corruption. The
place smelled of the Zaibatsu, and his lungs ached with its
nostalgic stench.
He had brought it with him. No matter how fast he moved, he
dragged behind him a fatal slipstream of the past.
He and Nora would never be free of it. It was not just the
contagion, or his useless arm. Nor the galaxy of rashes that
disfigured Nora for days, crusting her perfect skin and filling
her eyes with flinty stoicism. It dated back to the training they
had shared, the damage done to them. It made them partners,
and Lindsay realized that this was the finest thing that life had
ever offered him.
He thought about death as he watched the Shaper robot at its
task. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, it loaded ore into the distended guts
of the decoy wetware. After the two of them had smothered, this
machine would continue indefinitely in its hyperactive parody
of life. He could have shut it down, but he felt a kinship with it.
Its headlong, blind persistence cheered him somehow. And the
fact that it was pumping tons of frothing plastic into the launch
ring, ruining it, meant that the pirates had won. He could not
bear to rob them of that useless victory.
As the air grew fouler they were forced to retreat, sealing the
tunnels behind them. They stayed near the last operative industrial gardens, shallowly breathing the hay-scented air, making love and trying to heal each other.
With Nora, he reentered Shaper life, with its subtleties, its
allusions, its painful brilliance. And slowly, with him, her
sharpest edges were smoothed. She lost the worst kinks, the
hardest knots, the most insupportable levels of stress.
They turned down the power so that the tunnels grew colder,
retarding the spread of the contagion. At night they clung together for warmth, swaddled in a carpet-sized shroud that Nora
compulsively embroidered.
She would not give up. She had a core of unnatural energy that Lindsay could not match. For days she had worked on repairs
in the radio room, though she knew it was useless.
Shaper Ring Security had stopped broadcasting. Their military
outposts had become embarrassments. Mechanists were evacuating them and repatriating their Shaper crews to the Ring Council with exquisite diplomatic courtesy. There had never been any
war. No one was fighting. The cartels were buying out their
pirate clients and hastily pacifying them.
All this was waiting for them if they could only raise their
voices. But their broadcast equipment was ruined; the circuits
were irreplaceable, and the two of them were not technicians.
Lindsay had accepted death. No one would come for them;
they would assume that the outpost was wiped out. Eventually, he thought, someone would check, but not for years.
One night, after making love, Lindsay stayed up, toying with
the dead pirate's mechanical arm. It fascinated him, and it was a
solace; by dying young, he thought, he had at least escaped this.
His own right arm had lost almost all feeling. The nerves had
deteriorated steadily since the incident with the gun, and his
battle wounds had only hastened it.
"Those damned guns," he said aloud. "Someone will find this
place someday. We ought to tear those fucking guns apart, to
show the world that we had decency. I'd do it but I can't bear to
touch them."
Nora was drowsy. "So what? They don't work."
"Sure, they're disarmed." That had been one of his triumphs.
"But they could be armed again. They're evil, darling. We
should smash them."
"If you care that much . . ." Nora's eyes opened.' "Abelard.
What if we fired one?"
"No," he said at once.
"What if we blew up the Consensus with the particle beam?
Someone would see."
"See what? That we were criminals?"
"In the past it would just be dead pirates. Business as usual.
But now it would be a scandal. Someone would have to come
after us. To see that it never happened again."
"You'd risk this facade of peace that they're showing the
aliens? Just on the chance that someone would rescue us? Fire,
imagine what they'd do to us when they came."
"What? Kill us? We're dead already. I want us to live."
"As criminals? Despised by everyone?"
Nora smiled bitterly. "That's nothing new for me."
"No, Nora. There are limits."
She caressed him. "I understand."
Two nights later he woke in terror as the asteroid shook. Nora
was gone. At first he thought it was a meteor strike, a rare but
terrifying event. He listened for the hiss of blowout, but the
tunnels were still sound.
When he saw Nora's face he realized the truth. "You fired the
gun."
She was shaken. "I cast the Consensus loose before I shot it. I
went out on the surface. There's something weird there,
Abelard. Plastic has been leaking out of the launch ring into