little talk with Pongpianskul. All right,cousin?"
The hoy nodded slowly. "Thanks, old Cicada. You're one of us."
Pongpianskul's office was a paper wasteland. Musty cloth-bound hooks of Concatenate law were heaped beside his wooden desk; schedules and production graphs were pinned up at random on the room's ancient paneling. A tortoiseshell cat yawned in one corner
and sharpened its claws in the carpet. Lindsay, whose experience
with cats was limited, watched it guardedly.
Pongpianskul wore a suit similar to Lindsay's but newer and
obviously hand-stitched. He had lost hair since his days in
Goldreich-Tremaine, and light gleamed dully on the dusky skin of
his scalp. Me swept a sheaf of records from the desk and paper-
clipped them with skinny, wrinkled fingers.
"Papers," he muttered. "Trying to take everything off computers these days. Don't trust 'em. You use computers and there's always some Mech ready to step in with new software. Thin edge of the wedge, Mavrides. Lindsay, I mean."
"Lindsay is better."
"You must admit it's hard keeping track of you. It was a fine scam you pulled, passing yourself off as a senior genetic in the Rings." He Looked at Lindsay. Lindsay caught part of the Look. The experience of age made up somewhat for his loss of kinesic training.
Pongpianskul said, "How long has it been since we last talked?"
"Hmm. What year is this?"
Pongpianskul frowned. "No matter. You were in Dembowska
then, anyway. Things aren't so bad here under Neotenic aegis, eh,
Mavrides, you admit? Gone a bit to rack and ruin, but all the better
for the tourist trade; those Ring Council types eat it up with a spoon.
Tell the truth, we had logo into the old Lindsay mansion and bash it
about a bit, make it more romantic. Had some mice installed. You
know mice? Bred 'em back to the wild state from lab specimens.
You know their eyes weren't pink in the wild? Funny look in those
eyes, reminds me of a wife of mine."
Pongpianskul opened one of the drawers in his cavernous desk
and tossed in his sheaf of clipped papers. He pulled out a crumbling
wad of graphs and started. "What's this? Should have been done
weeks ago. No matter. Where were we? Oh, yes, wives. I married
Alexandrina, by the way. Alexa's a fine Preservationist. Couldn't
risk her slipping away."
"You did well," Lindsay said. His marriage contract had expired; her new marriage was a sound political move. It did not occur to him to feel jealousy; that had not been in the contract. He was glad that she had secured her position.
"Can't have too many wives, it's what life's all about. Take
Georgiana for instance, Constantine's first wife. Talked her into a
trace of Shatter, no more than twenty mikes, I swear, and it
improved her disposition no end. Now she's as sweet as the day is
long." He looked at Lindsay seriously. "Can't have too many
oldsters around, though. Disturbs the ideology. Bad enough with
those pesky Cataclysts and their posthuman schemes. Keep 'em
behind wire, in quarantine. Even then kids keep sneaking in."
"It's kind of you to allow them here."
"I need the foreign exchange. C-K finances their research. But
they won't amount to much. Those Superbrights can't concentrate
on anything for long." He snorted, then snatched up a bill of lading.
"I need the money. Look at these carbon-dioxide imports. It's the
damn trees, gobbling it up." He sighed. "I need those trees, though.
Their mass helps with the orbital dynamics. These circumlunar
orbits are hell."
"I'm glad matters are in good hands."
Pongpianskul smiled sadly. "I suppose. Things never work out the way you plan them. Good thing, though, or the Mechs would have
taken over long ago." The cat jumped into Pongpianskul's lap, and
he scratched its chin. The animal emitted a rumbling sound that
Lindsay found oddly soothing. "This is my cat, Saturn," the old
Shaper said. "Say hello to Lindsay, Saturn."The cat ignored him.
"I had no idea you liked animals."
"Couldn't stand him at first. Hair just pours off the little beast.
Gets into everything. Dirty as a hog, too. liver seen a hog, by the
way? I had a few imported. Incredible creatures, the tourists just
marvel."
"I must have a look before I leave."
"Animals in the air these days. Not literally, I mean, though we did have some trouble with loose hogs running off to the free-fall zone. No, I mean this biomorality from Czarina-Kluster. Another
Cataclyst fad."
"You think so?"
"Well," the Warden mused, "maybe not. You start trifling with
ecology and it's hard to find a place to stop. I've had a slip of this
cat's skin shipped off to the Ring Council. Have to clone off a whole
gene-line of them. Because of the mice, you know. Little vermin are
over running everything."
"A planet might be better," Lindsay said. "More space."
"I don't hold with messing with gravity wells," Pongpianskul said.
"It's just more room for error. Don't tell me you've fallen for that,
Mavrides."
"The world needs dreams," Lindsay said.
"You're not going to start on about levels of complexity, I hope."
Lindsay smiled. "No."
"Good. When you came in here unwashed and with no shoes on, I concluded the worst."
"They say the hogs and I had a lot in common," Lindsay said.
Pongpianskul stared, then laughed. "Haw. Haw. Glad to see you're
not standing on your dignity. Too much dignity cripples a man.
Fanatics never laugh. I hope you can still laugh when you're
breaking worlds to the leash."
"Surely someone will get a good chuckle out of it."
"Well, you'll need your humor, friend. Because these things never work out as you plan. Reality's a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams. . . . You know what I wanted here, don't you? A preserve for humanity and the human way of life, that's
what. Instead I've ended up with a huge stage set full of tourist shills
and Cataclyst fry-brains."
"It was worth a try," Lindsay said.
"That's it, break an old man's heart," Pongpianskul said. "A
consoling lie wouldn't have hurt."
"Sorry," Lindsay said. "I've lost the skill."
"Better get it back in a hurry, then. It's still a wide wicked
Schismatrix out there, detente or no detente." Pongpianskul
brooded. "Those fools in Czarina-Kluster. Selling out to aliens.
What's to become of the world? I hear some idiot wants to sell
Jupiter."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Yes, sell it off to some group of intelligent gasbags. A scandal, isn't it? Some people will do anything to suck up to aliens. Oh, sorry, no offense." He Looked at Lindsay and saw that he was not
insulted. "It won't come to anything. Alien embassies never do.
Luckily, aliens all seem to have a lot more sense than we do, with
the possible exception of the Investors. Investors, indeed. Just a
bunch of interstellar pests and nosey-parkers. . . . If aliens show up
in force I swear I'll put the whole Republic under the tightest
quarantine this side of a Ring Council session. I'll wait till society
disintegrates totally. I'll be faded by then, but the locals can move
out to pick up the pieces. They'll see then that there was sense in my
little game preserve after all."
"I see. Hedging humanity's bets. You were always a clever gambler, Neville."
The Shaper was pleased. He sneezed loudly, and the startled cat leaped from his lap across the desk, clawing papers. Sorry, he
said "Bacteria and cat hairs, never got used to them.
"I have a favor to ask," Lindsay said. "I'm leaving for Czarina-
Kluster and would like to take one of the locals with me
"Someone 'dying into the world?' You always handled that well in Dembowska. Certainly."