"An aerosol toxin, is it? How rash."
"There are more important things than living, plebe."
"What a quaint insult. I see you've researched my past. Haven't heard the like in years. Next you'll be saying I'm unplanned."
"No need. Your wife tells us that much."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Natalie Constantine, your wife. Hver hear of her? She doesn't
take neglect easily. She's become the prime whore of Skimmers
Union."
"How distressing."
"How do you think I planned to enter your house? Your wife's
a slut. She begs me for it."
Constantine laughed. "You'd like me to strike you, wouldn't
you? The pain would give you something to hold on to. No, you
should have stayed in Goldreich-Tremaine, young man. In those
empty halls and broken-down offices. I'm afraid you've begun
to bore me."
"Let me tell you what I regret, before you go. I regret that I set my sights so low. I've had time to think, recently." Hollow
laughter. "I fell for your image, your propaganda line. The Nysa
asteroid, for instance. It seemed so grand at first. The Ring
Council didn't know that Nysa Cartel was a dumping ground for
burnt-out wireheads from the moondocks. You were still sucking up to aristocrats from the Republic. With all your rank you're still a cheap informer, Constantine. And a fucking lackey."
Constantine felt a quiver of familiar tension across the back of
his head. He touched the plug there and reached in his pocket
for the inhaler. No use going into fugue when the boy was
starling to babble, at the point of breaking. "Go on," he said.
"The great things you claim you've done are all facades and
frauds. You've never built anything of your own. You're small,
Constantine. Very small. I know a man who could hide ten of
you under his thumbnail."
"Who?" Constantine said. "Your friend Vetterling?"
"Poor Fernand, your victim? Yes, of course he's a thousand
times your size, but that's hardly fair, is it? You never had an
atom of artistic talent. No, I mean in your own skill. Politics.
Espionage."
"Some Cataclyst, then." Constantine was bored.
"No. Abelard Lindsay."
It hit him then. A lightning stroke of migraine raced across his
left frontal lobe. The surface of the tank came toward him in
slow motion as he fell, a frozen icescape of dull metallic glitter,
and he struggled to get his hands up, nerve impulses locked in a
high-speed fugue that seemed to last a month. When he came
to, his cheek pressed against the cold metal, Mavrides was still
babbling. ". . . the whole story from Nora. While you were here
holding treason trials for artists, Lindsay was scoring the biggest
coup in history. An Investor defector. ... He has an Investor
defector, a starship Queen. In the palm of his hand."
Constantine cleared his throat. "I heard that news. Mech pro-
paganda. It's a farce."
Mavrides laughed hysterically. "You're burned! You're a
fucking footnote. Lindsay led the revolution in your nation
while you were still swatting bugs in the germs and muck and
plotting to seize his credit. You're microscopic! I shouldn't have
bothered to kill you, but I've never had any luck."
"Lindsay's dead. He's been dead sixty years."
"Sure, plebe. That's what he wanted you to think." The laughter from the speakers was metallic, drawn straight from the
nerve. "I lived in his house, fool. He loved me."
Constantine opened the tank. He twisted the timer on the vial
and dropped it into the water, then slammed the tank shut. He
turned and walked away. As he reached the doorway he heard a
sudden frenzied splashing as the toxin hit.
CZARINA-KLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 3-1-'84
The long bright line of welded radiance was the cleanest thing
he had ever seen. Lindsay floated in an observation bubble,
watching construction robots crawl in vacuum. The Mechanist
engines had the long sharp noses of weevils, their white-hot
welding tips casting long shadows across the blackened hull of
the Czarina's Palace.
They were building a full-sized replica of an Investor starship,
a starship without engines, a hulk that would never move under
its own power. And black, with no trace of the gaudy arabesques
and inlays of a true Investor craft. The other Investors had
insisted on it: condemned their pervert Queen to this dark and
mocking prison.
After years of research, Lindsay had pieced out the truth about
the Commander's crime.
Queens intromitted their eggs into the womblike pouches of
their males. The males fertilized the eggs and brought them to
term within the pouch. The neuter Ensigns controlled ovulation
through a complex hormonal pseudo-copulation.
The criminal Queen had killed her Ensign in a fit of passion
and set up a common male in his place. But without a true
Ensign, the cycles of her sexuality had become distorted. Lindsay's evidence showed her destroying one of her malformed eggs. To an Investor, it was worse than perversion, worse even than murder: it was bad for business.
Lindsay had presented his evidence in a way that pierced to
the core of Investor ethics. Embarrassment was not an emotion
native to Investors. They had been stunned. But Lindsay was
quick with his remedy: exile. Behind it was the implied threat to
spread the evidence, to play out the details of the scandal to
every Investor ship and every human faction.
It was bad enough that a select group of wealthy Queens and
Ensigns had been apprised of the shocking news. That the
impressionable males should learn of it was unthinkable. A
bargain was struck.
The Queen never knew what had betrayed her. The approach
to her had been even more subtle, stretching Lindsay's talents to
the utmost. A timely gift of jewels had helped, distracting her
with that overwhelming avidity that was the very breath of life to
Investors. Business had been poor on her ship, with its debased
crew and wretched eunuch Ensign.
Lindsay came armed with charts from Wells, statistics predicting the wealth to be wrung from a city-state independent of
faction. Their exponential curves rose to a clean rake-off of
breathtaking riches. He told her that he knew nothing of her
disgrace; only that her own species was eager to condemn her.
With a large enough hoard, he hinted, she might buy her way
back into their good graces.
Patiently, fluently, he helped her see that this was her best
chance. What could she accomplish alone, without crew, with-
out Ensign? Why not accept the industrious aid of the small
polite strangers? The social instincts of the tiny gregarious
mammals drove them to consider her their Queen, in truth, and
themselves her subjects. Already a Board of Advisors awaited
her whims, each one fluent in Investor and begging leave to
heap her with wealth.
Greed would only have taken her so far. It was fear that broke
her to his wilclass="underline" fear of the small soft-skinned alien with dark
plastic over his pulpy eyes and his answers for everything. He
seemed to know her own people better than she did herself.
The announcement had come a week later, and with it a
sudden hemorrhage of capital to the newborn place of exile.
They called the Queen "Czarina," a nickname given by Ryumin.
And her city was Czarina-Kluster: in four months already a
boom town, accreting out of nothing on the inner edge of the
Belt. The Czarina-Kluster People's Corporate Republic had
leaped into sudden concrete existence out of raw potential, in
what Wells called a "Prigoginic leap," a "mergence into a higher