"I wrote it for him," Lindsay said. He knew he had to treat this
woman carefully. She made him nervous. Her sinuous movements, the ominous perfection of her features, and the sharp, somehow overattentive intensity of her gaze all told him that she was Reshaped.
"You Shaper types," she said. "You're slick as glass."
"Are we?" he said.
"I'm no Shaper," she said. "Look at these teeth." She opened
her mouth and showed a crooked overlapping incisor and ca-
nine. "See? Bad teeth, bad genetics."
Lindsay was skeptical. "You had that done yourself."
"I was born," she insisted. "Not decanted."
Lindsay rubbed a fading combat training bruise on his high
cheekbone. It was hot and close in the box. He could smell her.
"I was a ransom," the girl admitted. "A fertilized ovum, but a
Fortuna citizen brought me to term." She shrugged. "I did do
the teeth, it's true."
"You're a rogue Shaper, then," Lindsay said. "They're rare.
Ever had your quotient done?"
"My IQ? No. I can't read," she said proudly. "But I'm Rep
One, the majority whip in the House. And I'm married to?
Senator One."
"Really? He never mentioned it."
The young Shaper adjusted her black headband. Beneath it,
her red-blonde hair was long and done up with bright pink
alligator clips. "We did it for tax reasons. I'd throw you a juice
otherwise, maybe. You're looking good, State." She drifted closer. "Better now that the arm's healed up." She ran one fingertip
along the tattooed skin of his wrist.
"There's always Carnaval," Lindsay said.
"Carnaval don't count," she said. "You can't tell it's me,
tripped out on aphrodisiacs."
"There's three months left till rendezvous," Lindsay said.
"That gives me three more chances to guess."
"You been in Carnaval," she said. "You know what it's like,
shot up on 'disiacs. After that, you ain't you, citizen. You're just
wall-to-wall meat."
"I might surprise you," Lindsay said. They locked eyes.
"If you do I'll kill you, State. Adultery's a crime."
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 13-10-'16
One of the shipboard roaches woke Lindsay by nibbling his
eyelashes. With a start of disgust, Lindsay punched it and it
scuttled away.
Lindsay slept naked except for his groin cup. All the men wore
them; they prevented the testicles from floating and chafing in
free-fall. He shook another roach out of his red-and-silver
jumpsuit, where it feasted on flakes of dead skin.
He got into his clothes and looked about the gym room. Two
of the Senators were still asleep, their velcro-soled shoes stuck
to the walls, their tattooed bodies curled fetally. A roach was
sipping sweat from the female senator's neck.
If it weren't for the roaches, the Red Consensus would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast-off skin and built-up
layers of sweated and exhaled effluvia. Lysine, alanine,
methionine, carbamino compounds, lactic acid, sex pheromones:
a constant stream of organic vapors poured invisibly, day and
night, from the human body. Roaches were a vital part of the
spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking up.
grease.
Roaches had haunted spacecraft almost from the beginning,
too tough and adaptable to kill. At least now they were well-
trained. They were even housebroken, obedient to the chemical
lures and controls of the Second Representative. Lindsay still
hated them, though, and couldn't watch their grisly swarming
and free-fall leaps and clattering flights without a deep conviction that he ought to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Dressed, Lindsay meandered in free-fall through the
filamented doors between docks. The plasticized doors unraveled into strands as he approached and knitted themselves shut
behind him. They were thin but airtight and as tough as steel
when pressed. They were Shaper work. Stolen, probably, Lindsay thought.
He wandered into the control room, drawn by the instrumental
music. Most of the crew was there. The President, two Reps,
and Justice 3 were watching a Shaper agit-broadcast with strap-
on videogoggles.
The Chief Justice was strapped in beside the waist-high con-
sole, monitoring deep-space broadcasts with the ship's drone.
The Chief Justice was by far the oldest member of the crew. He
never took part in Carnaval. This, his age, and his office made
him the crew's impartial arbiter.
Lindsay spoke loudly beside the man's earphones. "Any
news?"
"The siege is still on," the Mech said, without any marked
satisfaction. "The Shapers are holding." He stared emptily at the
control boards. "They keep boasting about their victory in the
Concatenation."
Justice 2 came into the control room. "Who wants some
ketamine?"
Rep 1 took off her videogoggles. "Is it good?"
"Fresh out of the chromatograph. I just made it myself."
"The Concatenation was a real power in my day," the Chief
Justice said. With his earphones on, he hadn't seen or heard the
two women. Something about the broadcast he had monitored
had stirred some deep layer of ancient indignation. "In my day
the Concatenation was the whole civilized world."
Through long habit, the women ignored him, raising their
voices. "Well, how much?" Rep 1 said.
"Forty thousand a gram?" the Judge bargained.
"Forty thousand? I'll give you twenty."
"Come on, girl, you charged me twenty thousand just to do my nails."
Lindsay listened with half an ear, wondering if he could cut
himself in. The EMD still had its own banks, and though its
currency was enormously inflated, it was still in circulation as
the exclusive legal tender of eleven billionaires. Lindsay, unfortunately, as junior crew member, was already deeply in debt.
"Mare Serenitatis," the old man said. "The Corporate Republic." He fixed Lindsay suddenly with his ash-gray eyes. "I hear
you worked for them."
Lindsay was startled. The unwritten taboos of the Red Consensus suppressed discussion of the past. The old Mech's face had
brightened with a reckless upwash of memory. Decades of the
same expressions had dug deep furrows into his ancient muscle
and skin. His face was an idiosyncratic mask.
"I was only there briefly," Lindsay lied. "I don't know the
moondocks well."
"I was born there."
Rep 1 cast an alarmed glance in the old man's direction. "All
right, forty thousand," she said. The two women left for the lab.
The President lifted his videogoggles. He looked sardonically at
Lindsay, then deliberately turned up the volume on his headset.
The other two, Rep 2 and the grizzled Justice 3, ignored the
whole situation.
"The Republic had a system in my day," the Mech said.
"Political families. The Tylers, the Kellands, the Lindsays. Then
there was an underclass of refugees we'd taken in, just before
the Interdict with Earth. The plebes, we called them. They were
the last ones to get off the planet, just before things fell apart.
So they had nothing. We had the kilowatts in our pockets, and
the big mansions. And they had the little plastic slums."
"You were an aristocrat?" Lindsay said. He couldn't restrain
his fatalistic interest.
"Apples," the Mech said sadly. The word was heavy with
nostalgia. "Ever had an apple? They're a kind of vegetable
growth."
"I think so."
"Birds. Parks. Grass. Clouds. Trees." The Mech's right arm, a
prosthetic job, whirred softly as he whacked a roach from the
console with one wire-tendoned finger. "I knew it would come