willing to repeat his errors: his, and Vera's. "You're too young
for absolutes. For God's sake, no pure gestures. Give it fifty
years first. Give it a hundred! You have all the time you want!"
"We don't think the way they want us to," the girl said. "And
they'll kill us for it. But not until we've pried the worldskull
open and put our needles in."
"Wait," Lindsay said. "Maybe the Peace is doomed. But you
can save yourselves. You're clever. You can - "
"Life's a joke, friend. Death's the punch line." She raised her
hand and vanished.
Lindsay gasped. "What have you - ?" He stopped suddenly. His own voice sounded odd to him. The room's acoustics seemed
different. The machines, however, were producing the same
quiet hums and subdued beeps.
He approached the machines. "Hello? Young girl. Let's talk
first. Believe me, I can understand." His voice had changed; it
had lost the subtle raspincss of age. He touched his throat
left-handed. His chin had a heavy growth of beard. Shocked, he
tugged at it. It was his own hair.
He floated closer to the machines, touched one. It rustled
beneath his hand. He seized it in a fury; it crumpled at once,
showing a flimsy lathwork of cellulose and plastic. He tore into
the next machine. Another mockup. In the center of the complex was a child's tape recorder, humming and beeping faithfully. He snatched it up left-handed and was suddenly aware of his left arm: a lingering soreness in the muscle.
He tore off his shirt and jacket. His stomach was taut, flat; the
graying hair on his chest had been painstakingly depilated.
Again he felt his face. He had never worn a beard, but it felt
like two weeks' growth, at least.
The girl must have drugged him on the spot. Then someone
had given him a cell-wash, reversed catabolism, reset the
Hayflick limit on his skin and major organs, at the same time
exercising his unconscious body to restore muscle tone. Then,
when all was done, replaced him in the same position and
somehow restored him to instant awareness.
Delayed shock struck him; the world seemed to shimmer.
Compared to this, almost anything was easier to doubt: his
name, his business here, his life. They left me the beard as a
calendar, he thought dazedly. Unless that too was fraud.
He took a deep breath. His lungs felt tight, stretched. They had stripped them of the tar from smoking.
"Oh God," he said aloud. "Nora." By now she would be past
panic: she would be full of reckless hatred for whoever had
taken him. He hurried at once to the bubble's exit.
The grapelike cluster of cheap inflatables was hooked to an
interurban tube-road. He floated at once down the lacquered
corridor and emerged through a filament doorway into the
swollen transparent nexus of crossroads. Below was Goldreich-
Tremaine, with its Besetzny and Patterson Wheels spinning in
slow majesty; with the moleculelike links and knobs of other
suburbs shining purple, gold, and green, surrounding the city
like beaded yarn. At least he was still in G-T. He headed at
once for home.
GOLDREICH-TREMAINE COUNCIL STATE: 18-9-'53
The chaos repulsed Constantine. Evacuations were untidy affairs. The docking port was littered with trash: clothing, ship
schedules, inhaler wrappers, propaganda leaflets. Baggage limits
were growing stricter by the hour. Not far away four Shapers
were pulling items from their overweight luggage and spitefully
smashing them against the walls and mooring-benches.
Long lines waited at the interaction terminals. The overloaded
terminals were charging by the second. Some of the refugees
were finding that it cost more money to sell their faltering
stocks than the stocks themselves were worth.
A synthetic voice on the address system announced the next
flight to Skimmers Union. Instant pandemonium swept the port.
Constantine smiled. His own craft, the Friendship Serene, had
that destination. Unlike the others, his berth was secure. Not
simply in the ship but in the new capital as well.
Goldreich-Tremaine had overreached itself. It had leaned too
heavily on the mystique of its capitalship. When that was gone,
seized by militants in a rival city, G-T's web of credit had
nothing to sustain it.
He liked Skimmers Union. It floated in circumtitanian orbit,
above the bloody glimmer of the clouds of Titan. In Skimmers
Union the source of the city's wealth was always reassuringly
close: the inexhaustible mass of rich organics that choked the
Titanian sky. Fusion-powered dredges punched through its at-
mosphere, sweeping up organics by the hundreds of tons. Methane, ethane, acetylene, cyanogen: a planetary feedstock for the
Union's polymer factories.
Passengers were disembarking; a handful compared to those
leaving, and not a savory handful. A group in baggy uniforms
floated past customs. Sundogs, clearly, and not even Shaper
sundogs: their skins shone with antiseptic oils.
Constantine's bodyguards murmured to one another in his
earpiece, sizing up the latest arrivals. The four guards were
unhappy with Constantine's reluctance to leave. Constantine's
many local enemies were close to desperation as Goldreich-
Tremaine's banks neared collapse. The guards were keyed to a
fever pitch.
But Constantine lingered. He had defeated the Shapers on
their own ground, and the pleasure of it was intense. He lived
for moments like this one. He was perhaps the only calm man
in a crowd of close to two thousand. Never had he felt so utterly
in control.
His enemies had been crippled by their underestimation. They
had taken his measure and erred completely. Constantine him-
self did not know that measure; that was the pang that drove
him on.
He considered his enemies, one by one. The militants had
chosen him to attack the Midnight Clique, and his success had
been thorough and impressive. Regent Charles Vetterling had
been the first to fall. Vetterling fancied himself a survivor.
Encouraged by Carl Zeuner, he had thrown in his lot with the
militants. The power of the Midnight Clique was broken from
within. It splintered into warring camps. Those who held their
ground were denounced by others more desperate.
The Mechanist defector, Sigmund Fetzko, had "faded." These
clays, those calling his residence received only ingenious delays
and temporizing from his household's expert system. Fetzko's
image lived; the man himself was dead, and too polite to admit it.
Neville Pongpianskul was dead, assassinated in the Republic at
Constantine's order.
Chancellor-General Margaret Juliano had simply vanished.
Some enemy of her own had finished her. This still puzzled
Constantine; on the day of her disappearance he had received a
large crate, anonymously. Cautiously opened by bodyguards, it
had revealed a block of ice with her name elegantly chiseled on
its surface: Margaret Juliano, on ice. She had not been seen
since.
Colonel-Professor Nora Mavrides had drastically overplayed
her hand. Her husband, the false Lindsay, had disappeared, and
she had accused Constantine of kidnapping him. When her
husband returned again, with a wild tale about Superbright
renegades and black market clinics, she was disgraced.
Constantine was still not sure what had happened. The most
likely explanation was that Nora Mavrides had been double-
crossed by her burnt-out little cadre of diplomats. Probably they
had seen what was coming and set up their one-time protectress,