first Revolution. It's ironic, isn't it? Now I'm a sundog."
Lindsay said carefully, "I'm not without power here. And not
without funds. Dembowska handles many refugees. I can find
you room."
"You're very kind." Morrissey's face was stiff. "I worked as a
biologist, on the nation's ecological troubles. Dr. Constantine
trained me. But I'm afraid I'm very much behind the times."
"That can be remedied."
"I've brought an article for your Journal."
"Ah. You have an interest in Investors, Dr. Morrissey?"
"Yes. I hope my piece meets your standards."
Lindsay forced a smile. "We'll work on it together."
SKIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 13-5-'75
He could feel it coining on, creeping across the back of his head
in a zone of quivering subepidermal tightness. A fugue state.
The scene before him trembled slightly, the crowds below his
private box blurring in a frieze of packed heads against dark
finery, the rounded stage with actors in costume, dark red,
gleaming, a gesture. It slowed -it froze:
Fear ... no, not even that, exactly ... a certain sadness now
that the die was cast. The waiting was the hell of it ... He had
waited sixty years to resume his old contacts, the wirehead
Radical Old of the Republic. . . . Now the wirehead leaders, like
him, had worked their way to power in the worlds outside. Sixty
years was nothing to a mind on the wires . . . time meant nothing ... fugue states. . . . They still remembered him quite well,
their friend, Philip Khouri Constantine. . . .
It was he who had sprung them loose, purging the middle-aged aristocrats to finance the wirehead defections. . . . Memories
went back; they were data, that was all, just as fresh on reels
somewhere as the enemy Margaret Juliano was on her bed of
Cataclyst ice. . . . Even amid fugue the surge of satisfaction was
quick and sharp enough to penetrate into consciousness from
his backbrain. .. . That unique sense of warmth that came only
from the downfall of a rival. . . .
Now, trailing sluggishly behind his racing thoughts, the slow-
motion blooming of a light tingle of fear. . . . Nora Everett, the
wife of Abelard Mavrides. . . . She had hurt him seventeen years
ago with the coup in the Republic, though he was able to
entangle her in charges of treason. . . . The tinpot Republic was
of no concern to him now, its willfully ignorant child-citizens
flying kites and eating apples under the crazed charlatan gaze of
Dr. Pongpianskul. ... No problem there, the future would ig-
nore them, they were living fossils, harmless in themselves. . . .
But the Cataclysts . . . the fear was resolving itself now, beginning to flower, its first dim shades of backbrain unease taking
on emotional substance now, uncoiling through his conscious-
ness like a drop of ink streaming into a glass of water. . . . He
would see to his emotions later when the fugue was over; now
he was struggling to shut his eyes . . . focus was lost, dim tear-
blur over frozen performers; his eyelids were dropping with
nightmare sluggishness, nerve impulses confused by the racing
fugue-consciousness. . . . The Cataclysts, though. . . . They took
it all as an enormous joke, enjoyed hiding in the Republic
disguised as plebes and farmers, the huge panorama interior of
the cylindrical world as weird to them as a trace dose of their
favorite drug, PDKL-95. . . . The Cataclyst mind-set fed on correspondences and poetic justice, a trip to the human past in the
Neotenic Republic the inverse of an ice assassination, with its
one-way ticket to the future. . . .
The fugue was about to break. He felt a strange cracking
sensation of psychic upheaval, mental crust giving way before
the upsurge. In the last microseconds of fugue an eidetic flash
seized him, surveyor photos from the surface of Titan, red
volcanic shelves of heavy hydrocarbon split by ammonia lava,
bursting from the depths . . . from Titan, far below their orbit,
prime wall-decor in Skimmers Union. . . .
Gone. Constantine leaned forward in his box seat, clearing his
throat. Delayed fear swept over him; he pushed it brusquely
away, had a light sniff of acetaminophen to avert migraine. He
glanced at his wristwatch through damp lashes. Four seconds of
fugue.
He wiped his eyes, became aware of his wife sitting beside him, her finely chiseled Shaper face a study in surprise. Was she
aware that he had been sitting rapt for four seconds with his
eyes showing only a rim of white? No. She thought he was
touched by the play, was startled to see this excess of emotion in
her iron-hard husband. Constantine favored her with a smile.
Her color heightened; she leaned forward in her seat, her jeweled hands in her lap, studying the play alertly. Later she would
try to discuss it with him. Natalie Constantine was young and
bright, the scion of a military gene-line. She had grown used to
his demands.
Not like his first wife, the treasonous bitch. . . . He had left the
old aristocrat in the Republic, having nurtured her vicious
streak patiently until his own coup allowed him to turn it
against her peers. Now rumor said she was Pongpianskul's lover,
won over by fraudulent Shaper charm and degraded senile
intimacy. No matter, no matter. Long years had taken the sting
from it; tonight's stroke, if it came, was more important than
any circumlunar moondock.
His nine-year-old daughter, Vera, leaned in her seat to whisper to Natalie. Constantine gazed at the child he had built. Half her genetics were Vera Kelland's, drawn from skin flakes he had
taken before the woman's suicide. For years he had treasured
the stolen genes, and when the time was ripe he had brought
them to flower in this child. She was his favorite, the first of his
progeny. When he thought how his own failure might doom her,
he felt the fear again, sharper than before, because it was not for
himself.
An extravagant gesture from the stage caught his attention, a
brief flurry of stilted action as the deranged Superbright villain
clutched his head and fell. Constantine surreptitiously scratched
his ankle with the sole of his foot-glove. Over the years his skin
virus had improved, limited to dry outbreaks of shingles at his
extremities.
The play was one of Zeuner's, and it bored him. Skimmers
Union had caught the habit from Goldreich-Tremaine, bolstered
by dramatists fleeing the crippled ex-capital. But the modern
theatre was lifeless. Fernand Vetterling, for instance, author of
The White Periapsis and The Technical Advisor, languished in
sullen silence with his disgraced Mavrides wife. Other artists
with Detentiste leanings now paid for their indiscretion with
fines or house arrest. Some had defected, others had "gone
undertime" to join the Cataclyst action brigades in the graveyard
dayshifts.
But the Cataclysts were losing cohesion, becoming mere terror-
ists. Their Superbright elite was under severe attack. The pogrom on the Superbrights was increasingly thorough as hysteria mounted. Their promoters and educators were now political nonpersons, many having fallen to the twisted vengeance of the Superbrights themselves.
The Superbrights were too brilliant for community; they de-
manded the world-shattering anarchy of supermen. That could
not be tolerated. And Constantine had served that intolerance.
Life had never looked better for him: high office, his own
Constantine gene line, a free hand for anti-Mech adventurism,
and his own barbed nets poised for disloyalty.
And tonight he had risked it all. Would his news ever come?