Chancellor Abelard Gomez, a vigorous eighty-five-year-old,
had taken over management of the Clique's affairs. His chief
compatriots were Professor Glen Szilard, Queen's Advisor Fidel
Nakamura, and Gomez's current wife, Project Manager Jane
Murray. At the far end of the table sat Chancellor Emeritus
Abelard Lindsay. The old visionary's lined face showed the quizzical smile associated with a heavy dosage of Green Rapture.
Gomez rapped the table, bringing the meeting to order. They
fell silent, except for the loud chattering of the ancient rat on Lindsay's shoulder. "Sorry," Lindsay murmured. He put the rat
in his pocket.
Gomez took control. "Fidel, your report?"
"It's true, Chancellor. The Queen has vanished."
The others groaned. Gomez spoke sharply. "Defected or kidnapped?"
Nakamura wiped his brow. "Wellspring took her; only he can answer that. My fellow Advisors are in uproar. The Coordinator is calling out the dogs. He's even brought the tigers out of mothballs. They want Wellspring for high treason. They won't rest until they have him."
"Or until C-K collapses around them," Gomez said. Gloom
settled over the chamber. "Tigers," Gomez said. "Tigers are
huge machines; they could shred through the walls of this discreet like paper. We mustn't meet again until we have armed ourselves and established secure perimeters."
Szilard spoke up. "Our dogs have this suburb's exits
monitored. I stand ready to carry out loyalty tests. We can purge
the suburb of unfriendly ideologues and make this our bastion
as the Kluster dissolves."
"That's harsh," Jane Murray said.
"It's us or them," Szilard said. "Once the news spreads, the
other factions will be holding kangaroo courts, seizing
strongholds, stripping dissidents of property. Anarchy is coming.
We must defend ourselves."
"What about our allies?" Gomez said.
Nakamura spoke. "According to our Polycarbon Clique con-
tacts, the announcement of Wellspring's coup d'etat will co-
incide with the first asteroid impact on Mars, in the morning of
4-14-'54. . . . C-K will disintegrate within weeks. Most Czarina-
Kluster refugees will flee to Martian orbit. Wellspring holds the
Queen there. He will rule. The new Terraforming-Kluster will
have a much stronger Posthuman ideology."
"The Mechs and Shapers will tear C-K apart," Jane Murray
said. "And our philosophy profits by the destruction. . . : This is
high treason, friends. I feel sick."
"People outlive nations," Lindsay said gently. He was breathing with inhuman regularity: a Mechanist biocuirass managed
his internal organs. "C-K is doomed. No number of dogs or
purges can hold it, without the Queen. We're finished here."
"The Chancellor Emeritus is right," Gomez told them. "Where
will we go? We must decide. Do we join the Polycarbon Clique
around Mars, to live in the Queen's shadow? Or do we make
our move to CircumEuropan orbit and put our own plans into
effect?"
"I say Mars," Nakamura said. "In today's climate
Posthumanism needs all the help it can get. The Cause demands
solidarity."
"Solidarity? Fluidarity, rather," Lindsay said. He sat upright
with an effort. "What's one Queen, more or less? There are
always more aliens. Posthumanism must find its own orbit
someday . . . why not now?"
While the others argued, Gomez looked moodily, through half-
shut eyes, at his old mentor. The remnants of old pain gnawed
at him. Me could not forget his long marriage to Lindsay's
favorite, Vera Constantine. There had been too many shadows
between himself and Vera.
Once they had put the shadows aside. That was when she'd
confessed to Gomez that she had meant to kill Lindsay. Lindsay
had made no move to defend himself, and there had been many
opportunities, but the lime had never quite been right. And
years passed. And convictions faltered and became buried in
routines and practicalities. The day came when she knew she
could not go through with it. She had confessed it to Gomez,
because she trusted him. And they had loved each other.
Gomez led her away from vengeance. She embraced
Posthumanism. Even her clan had been won over. The Con-
stantine clan were now the Lifesiders' pioneers, working around
Europa.
But Gomez himself had not escaped the years. Time had a way of making passion into work. He had what he wanted. He had
his dream. He had to live it and breathe it and do its budget.
And he had lost Vera, for there had been one shadow left.
Vera had never been entirely sane. For years she had quietly
insisted that an alien Presence followed and watched her. It
seemed to come and go with her mood swings; for days she
would be cheerful, convinced that it was "off somewhere"; then
he would find her moody and withdrawn, convinced that it was
back.
Lindsay condoned her illness and claimed to believe her.
Gomez too believed in the Presence: he believed it was the
reflection of his wife's estrangement from reality. It was not for
nothing that she had called it "a mirror-colored thing. . . ."
Something that could not be pinned down, an incarnation of
unverifiable fluidity. . . . When Gomez got to the point where he
himself could feel it, even sense it flickering at the corners of
his vision, he knew things had gone too far. Their divorce had
been amiable, full of cool politeness.
He wondered sometimes if Lindsay had planned it all. Lindsay
knew the trap that was human joy, and the strength that came
from clawing free of it. Scalded by pain, Gomez had won that
strength. . . . Szilard was reeling off facts and figures about the
state of CircumEuropa. The future Lifesiders habitat was being
blown into shape around the Jovian moon, an orbiting froth of
hard-set angles, walls, bubbled topologies.
The flourishing Constantine clan was snaking plumbing
through the walls already and booting up the life-support sys-
tem. But an attempt by the Lifesiders to move there en masse,
in their thousands, would stretch resources to the limit.
Their relations with the gasbag colony on Jupiter were good;
they had the expertise of Vera and her cadre of trainees. But the
Jovian aliens could not protect them from other human factions.
They had no such ambition and no prestige to match that of the
Cicada Queen.
Jane Murray presented things from a Project perspective. The
surface of Europa was the bleakest of prospects: a vacuum
seared wasteland of smooth water ice, so cold that blood and
bone would crack like glass, bathed in deadly Jovian radiation.
Rut there were fissures in that ice, dark streaks thousands of
kilometers long. . . . Tidal cracks. For beneath the moon's crust
was molten ice, a planet-girdling lava ocean of liquid water. The
constant tidal energy of Jupiter, Ganymede, and lo warmed
Europa's ocean to blood heat. Beneath the lacelike web of
fractures, a sterile ocean washed a bed of geothermal rock.
For years the Lifesiders had planned a series of massive disasters for the inorganic. It would start with algae. They had
already bred forms that could survive in the peculiar mix of
salts and sulfurs native to Europan seas. The algae could cluster
around fresh cracks where light seeped through, feasting on the
strands of heavy hydrocarbons bobbing aimlessly within the
sterile sea. Fish would be next; small ones at first, bred from the
half-dozen species of commercial fish mankind had brought into
space. Ocean arthropods such as "crabs" and "shrimp," known