replaced the Fortuna State Seal in his diplomatic bag. "It truly
eases my mind to know that the FMD will handle security."
"Hey, it's a pleasure," said the President. "Any dip of ours
who needs it can depend on an escort twenty-four hours a day.
Especially when you're going to the Geisha Bank, if you get my
meaning."
"Have this resolution copied and spread through the
Zaibatsu," Lindsay said. "It ought to be good for a ten-point
stock advance." He looked at the President seriously. "But don't
get greedy. When it reaches a hundred and fifty, start selling
out, slowly. And have your ship ready for a quick getaway."
The President winked. "Don't worry. We haven't been sitting
on our hands. We're lining up a class assignment from a Mech
cartel. A bodyguard gig ain't bad, but a nation gets restless.
When the Red Consensus is shipshape again, then our time has
come to kill and eat."
THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR
ZAIBATSU: 13-3-'16
Lindsay slept, exhausted, with his head propped against the
diplomatic hag. An artificial morning shone through the false
glass doors. Kitsune sat in thought, toying quietly with the keys
of her synthesizer.
Her proficiency had long since passed the limits of merely
technical skill. It had become a communion, an art sprung from
dark intuition. Her synthesizer could mimic any instrument and
surpass it: rip its sonic profile into naked wave forms and
rebuild it on a higher plane of sterilized, abstract purity. Its
music had the painful, brittle clarity of faultlessness.
Other instruments struggled for that ideal clarity but failed.
Their failure gave their sound humanity. The world of humanity
was a world of losses, broken hopes, and original sin, a flawed
world, yearning always for mercy, empathy, compassion. ... It
was not her world.
Kitsune's world was the fantastic, seamless realm of high pornography. Lust was ever present, amplified and tireless, broken
only by spasms of superhuman intensity. It smothered every
other aspect of life as a shriek of feedback might overwhelm an
orchestra.
Kitsune was an artificial creature, and accepted her feverish
world with a predator's thoughtlessness. Hers was a pure and
abstract life, a hot, distorted parody of sainthood.
The surgical assault on her body would have turned a human
woman into a blank-eyed erotic animal. But Kitsune was a
Shaper, with a Shaper's unnatural resilience and genius. Her
narrow world had turned her into something as sharp and
slippery as an oiled stiletto.
She had spent eight of her twenty years within the Bank, where she dealt with customers and rivals on terms she thoroughly
understood. Still, she knew there was a realm of mental experience, taken for granted by humanity, that was closed to her.
Shame. Pride. Guilt. Love. She felt these emotions as dim
shadows, dark reptilian trash burnt to ashes in an instant by
searing ecstasy. She was not incapable of human feeling; it was
simply too mild for her to notice. It had become a second
subconscious, a buried, intuitive layer below her posthuman
mode of thought. Her consciousness was an amalgam of coldly
pragmatic logic and convulsive pleasure.
Kitsune knew that Lindsay was handicapped by his primitive
mode of thought. She felt a kind of pity for him, a compassionate sorrow that she could not recognize or admit to herself.
She believed he must be very old, from one of the first generations of Shapers. Their genetic engineering had been limited
and they could scarcely be told from original human stock.
He must be almost a hundred years old. To be so old, yet look
so young, meant that he had chosen sound techniques of life
extension. He dated back to an era before Shaperism had
reached its full expression. Bacteria still swarmed through his
body. Kitsune never told him about the antibiotic pills and
suppositories she took, or the painful antiseptic showers. She
didn't want him to know he was contaminating her. She wanted
everything between them to be clean.
She had a cool regard for Lindsay. He was a source of lofty
and platonic satisfaction to her. She had the craftsmanlike respect for him that a butcher might have for a sharp steel saw.
She took a positive pleasure in using him. She wanted him to
last a long time, so she took good care of him and enjoyed
giving him what she thought he needed to go on functioning.
For Lindsay, her affections were ruinous. He opened his eyes
on the tatami mat and reached out at once for the diplomatic
bag behind his head. When his fingers closed over the smooth
plastic handle, an anxiety circuit shut off in his head, but that
first relief only triggered other systems and he came fully awake
into a queasy combat alertness.
He saw that he was in Kitsune's chamber. Morning was breaking over the image of the long-dead garden. False daylight
slanted into the room, gleaming from inlaid clothes chests and
the perspex dome of a fossilized bonsai. Some repressed part of
him cried out within him, in meek despair. He ignored it. His
new diet of drugs had brought the Shaper schooling back in full
force and he was in no mood to tolerate his own weaknesses. He
was full of that mix of steel-trap irritability and slow gloating
patience that placed him at the keenest edges of perception and
reaction.
He sat up and saw Kitsune at the keyboards. "Good morning,"
he said.
"Hello, darling. Did you sleep well?"
Lindsay considered. Some antiseptic she used had scorched histongue. His back was bruised where her Shaper-strengthened
fingers had dug in carelessly. His throat had an ominous
rawness-he had spent too much time without a mask in the
open air. "I feel fine," he said, smiling. He opened the complex
lock of his diplomatic bag.
He slipped on his finger rings and stepped into his hakama trousers.
"Do you want something to eat?" she said.
"Not before my shot."
"Then help me plug in the front," she said.
Lindsay repressed a shudder. He hated the yarite's withered,
waxlike, cyborged body, and Kitsune knew it. She forced him to
help her with it because it was a measure of her control.
Lindsay understood this and wanted to help her; he wanted to
repay her, in a way she understood, for the pleasure she had
given him.
But something in him revolted at it. When his training faltered,
as it did between shots, repressed emotions rose and he was
aware of the terrible sadness of their affair. He felt a kind of
pity for her, a compassionate sorrow that he would never insult
her by admitting. There were things he had wanted to give her:
simple companionship, simple trust and regard.
Simple irrelevance. Kitsune hauled the yarite out of its
biomonitored cradle beneath the floorboards. In some ways the
thing had passed the limits of the clinically dead; sometimes
they had to slam it into operation like push-starting a balky
engine.
Its maintenance technology was the same type that supported
the Mechanist cyborgs of the Radical Old and the Mech cartels.
Filters and monitors clogged the thing's bloodstream; the inter-
nal glands and organs were under computer control. Implants
sat on its heart and liver, prodding them with electrodes and
hormones. The old woman's autonomous nervous system had
long since collapsed and shut down.
Kitsune examined a readout and shook her head. "The acid
levels are rising as fast as our stocks, darling. The plugs are