claque of followers. A young Shaper in a fuzz-elbowed academic
jacket was burying his elegant face in the floating red-blonde
curls of a tigerish young woman. She tilted her head back,
laughing in delight, and Lindsay saw, half eclipsed behind her,
the stricken face of Abelard Gomez. There were two surveil-
lance dogs with Gomez, crouched on the wall behind him, their
metal ribs gleaming, their glassy camera faces taping up his life.
Pity struck Lindsay, and a sadness for the transient nature of
eternal human verities.
Wellspring plunged into impassioned argument, sweeping aside Navarre's wry comments in a torrent of rhetoric. Wellspring
waxed eloquent about asteroids; chunks of ice the size of cities,
to be dropped in searing arcs onto the surface of Mars, blasting
out damp oases in a crust-ripping megatonnage. Creeks would
appear at first, then lakes, as steam and volatiles peeled into the
starved air and the polar ice caps dissolved into vaporized
carbon dioxide. Crater oases would be manned by teams of
scientists, biosculpting whole ecosystems into being. For the first
time, humanity would be bigger than life: a living world would
owe its existence to humankind, and not vice versa. Wellspring
saw it as a moral obligation, a repayment of debt. The cost was
irrelevant. Money was symbolic. Life was the real.
Navarre broke in. "But it's the human element that must
defeat you. Where's the appeal to greed? That's where you
erred before. You could have run Czarina-Kluster. Instead you
let your control slip, and now the Queen's Advisors, those
Mechanist"-Navarre stopped short, noticing the dogs accom-
panying Gomez-"gentlemen, are running things with their cus-
tomary efficiency. But politics aside, this nonsense is ruining
C-K's ability to do decent science! Real research, that is; the
kind that brings new patents to armor C-K against its enemies.
Terraforming squanders our resources, while Mech and Shaper
militants scheme relentlessly against us. Yes, I admit your
dreams are pretty. Yes, they even serve a social use as a rela-
tively harmless state ideology. But in the end they'll collapse
and take C-K with them."
Wellspring's eyes glittered. "You're overworked, Yevgeny. You
need a new perspective. Take ten years off, and see if time
won't change your mind."
Navarre flushed angrily. He turned to Lindsay. "You see?
Cataclysm! That remark meant ice assassination, you heard him
allude to it! Come, Milosz, surely you can't hold with these
boondoggles!"
Lindsay said nothing. There had been a time when he might
have twisted the conversation to his advantage. But now his skill
was gone. And he no longer wanted it.
Words were useless. Me had grown impatient with words. They could no longer hold him. Suddenly he knew he had to step outside the rules. He floated out of his chair and began stripping off his clothes.
Navarre left at once, insulted and flustered. Lindsay's clothes
drifted off in free-fall, his jacket and trousers pinwheeling slowly
over other tables. The customers ducked, laughing. Soon he was
naked. The crowd's nervous laughter died down into puzzled
unease. They moved away from Gomez's dogs and muttered
together in disconcerted awe.
Lindsay ignored them. He folded his legs in midair and gazed
at the wall. Wellspring's students deserted the bar, mumbling
excuses and glancing back over their shoulders. Even Wellspring
was nonplused. When Wellspring left he took the last of the
crowd with him.
Lindsay was left alone with the bar servo, young Gomez, and
his dogs.
Gomez edged closer. "Czarina-Kluster isn't like I'd thought it
was, in the Republic."
Lindsay meditated on the landscape.
"They put these dogs on me. Because supposedly I might be
dangerous. You don't mind the dogs, do you? . . . No, I see that
you don't." Gomez sighed tremulously. "After three months, the
others still keep me at arm's length. They won't initiate me into
their Clique. You saw the girl, didn't you? Melanie Omaha, Dr.
Omaha from the Kosmosity? Fire, she's fantastic, isn't she? But
she doesn't care for men under the dogs; who would, knowing
Security's watching? I'd give my right arm for ten minutes in a
discreet with her. Oh, sorry." He looked in embarrassment at
Lindsay's mechanical arm.
Gomez wiped red streaks of facepaint from his cheeks. "You
remember me telling you about Abelard Lindsay? Well, rumor
says you're him. And I think I believe it. You are Lindsay.
You're him."
Lindsay drew a deeper breath.
"I understand," Gomez said. "You're telling me that it doesn't
matter. The only thing that matters is the Cause. But listen to
this!" He pulled a notebook from inside his willow-printed coat.
He read loudly, desperately. " 'A dissipative self-organizing sys-
tem evolves along a coherent sequence of space-time structures.
We may distinguish between four different dimensional frame-
works: autopoiesis, ontogeny, phylogeny, anagenesis.'" He
crumpled the paper in anguish. "And this is from my poetry
class!"
There was a moment's silence. Then Gomez burst out: "Maybe
it's the secret of life! But if it is, can we bear it? Can we meet
the goals we set ourselves? Over centuries? What about the
simple things? How can I find any joy in a single day when the
specters of these centuries loom over me. . . . It's all too huge,
yes, even you . . . You! You, who brought me here. Why didn't
you tell me you were Wellspring's friend? Was it modesty? But
you're Lindsay! Lindsay himself! I didn't believe it at first.
When I decided it was true, it terrified me. Like hearing your
own shadow speak to you."
Gomez hesitated. "All these years you've hidden. But you're
coming into the Schismatrix openly now, aren't you? You've
come out to do greatness, to dazzle the world. . . . It's frighten-
ing to see you in the open. Like seeing the bones of mathemat-
ics under the flesh of the world. But even if the principles are
true, then what about the flesh? We are the flesh! What about
the flesh?"
Lindsay had nothing to tell him.
"I know what you're thinking," Gomez said at last. " 'Love has
broken his heart; it's an old story. Only time can bring him to a
better sense of himself.' That's what you're thinking, isn't it? ...
Of course it is."
When Gomez spoke again he was cairn, meditative. "Now I
begin to see. It isn't something that words can capture, is it? It
can only be grasped all at once. Someday I'll have it entirely.
Someday when these dogs are long gone. Someday when even
Melanie Omaha is only a memory to me." He was sad but
exalted. "I heard them talking as you made your-uh, gesture.
These so-called sophisticates, these proud Cicadas. They may
have the jargon, but the wisdom is yours." Gomez was radiant.
"Thank you, sir."
Lindsay waited until Gomez had left. Then he could not hold
it back any longer. He thought he would never stop laughing.
CHAPTER TEN
DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 21-2-'01
Despite her role in its foundation, Kitsune had never visited
Czarina-Kluster. Like Wellspring, Kitsune had held great power
in C-K's pioneer days; unlike him, she had not released it
gracefully. While Wellspring had retreated from day-to-day gov-
ernment and pursued his strategy of rule-by-fashion, Kitsune
had blatantly challenged the Queen's Advisors.
In the years while Lindsay recuperated, she had had some