warmed grass, holding his sides. More moths sprang up.
She had done it. It seemed easy now. It was something the two of them had talked about a hundred times, deep into the night
at the Museum or in bed after their adultery. Suicide, the last
protest. An enormous vista of black freedom opened up in
Lindsay's head. He felt a paradoxical sense of vitality. "Darling,
it won't be long. . . ."
His uncle found him kneeling. The older man's face was gray.
"Oh," he said. "This is vile. What have you done?"
Lindsay got dizzily to his feet. "Get away from her."
His uncle stared at the dead woman. "She's dead! You damned
fool, she was only twenty-six!"
Lindsay yanked a long dagger of crudely hammered metal
from his accordioned sleeve. He swept it up and aimed it at his
own chest. "In the name of humanity! And the preservation of
human values! I freely choose to-"
His uncle seized his wrist. They struggled briefly, glaring into
one another's eyes, and Lindsay dropped the knife. His uncle
snatched it out of the grass and slipped it into his lab coat.
"This is illegal," he said. "You'll face weapons charges."
Lindsay laughed shakily. "I'm your prisoner, but you can't stop
me if I choose to die. Now or later, what does it matter?"
"You're a fanatic." His uncle watched him with bitter con-
tempt. "The Shaper schooling holds to the end, doesn't it? Your
training cost the Republic a fortune, and you use it to seduce
and murder."
"She died clean! Better to burn in a rush than live two hundred years as a Mechanist wirehead."
The elder Lindsay stared at the horde of white moths that
swarmed on the dead woman's clothing. "We'll nail you for this
somehow. You and that upstart plebe Constantine."
Lindsay was incredulous. "You stupid Mech bastard! Look at
her! Can't you see that you've killed us already? She was the
best of us! She was our muse."
His uncle frowned. "Where did all these insects come from?"
He bent and brushed the moths aside with wrinkled hands.
Lindsay reached forward suddenly and snatched a filigreed
gold locket from the woman's neck. His uncle grabbed his
sleeve.
"It's mine!" Lindsay shouted. They began to fight in earnest.
His uncle broke Lindsay's clumsy stranglehold and kicked
Lindsay twice in the stomach. Lindsay fell to his knees.
His uncle picked up the locket, wheezing. "You assaulted me,"
he said, scandalized. "You used violence against a fellow citizen." He opened the locket. A thick oil ran out onto his fingers.
"No message?" he said in surprise. He sniffed at his fingers.
"Perfume?"
Lindsay knelt, panting in nausea. His uncle screamed.
White moths were darting at the man, clinging to the oily skin
of his hands. There were dozens of them.
They were attacking him. He screamed again and batted at his
face.
Lindsay rolled over twice, away from his uncle. He knelt in the
grass, shaking. His uncle was down, convulsing like an epileptic.
Lindsay scrambled backward on his hands and knees.
The old man's wrist monitor glared red. He stopped moving.
The white moths crawled over his body for a few moments, then
flew off one by one, vanishing into the grass.
Lindsay lurched to his feet. He looked behind him, across the
meadow. His wife was walking toward them, slowly, through the
grass.
Part One
SUNDOG ZONES
CHAPTER ONE
THE MARE TRANQUILLITATIS PEOPLE'S CIRCUMLUNAR
ZAIBATSU: 27-12-'15
They shipped Lindsay into exile in the cheapest kind of Mechanist drogue. For two days he was blind and deaf, stunned with
drugs, his body packed in a thick matrix of deceleration paste.
Launched from the Republic's cargo arm, the drogue had
drifted with cybernetic precision into the polar orbit of another
circumlunar. There were ten of these worlds, named for the
lunar mares and craters that had provided their raw materials.
They'd been the first nation-states to break off all relations with
the exhausted Earth. For a century their lunar alliance had been
the nexus of civilization, and commercial traffic among these
"Concatenate worlds" had been heavy.
But since those glory days, progress in deeper space had
eclipsed the Concatenation, and the lunar neighborhood had
become a backwater. Their alliance had collapsed, giving way to
peevish seclusion and technical decline. The circumlunars had
fallen from grace, and none had fallen further than the place of
Lindsay's exile.
Cameras watched his arrival. Ejected from the drogue's docking port, he floated naked in the free-fall customs chamber of
the Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu. The
chamber was of dull lunar steel, with strips of ragged epoxy
where paneling had been ripped free. The room had once been
a honeymoon suite, where newlyweds could frolic in free-fall.
Now it was bleakly transformed into a bureaucratic clearing
area.
Lindsay was still drugged from the trip. A drip-feed cable was
plugged into the crook of his right arm, reviving him. Black
adhesive disks, biomonitors, dotted his naked skin. He shared
the room with a camera drone. The free-fall videosystem had
two pairs of piston-driven cybernetic arms.
Lindsay's gray eyes opened blearily. His handsome face, with
its clear pale skin and arched, elegant brows, had the slack look
of stupor. His dark, crimped hair fell to high cheekbones with
traces of three-day-old rouge.
His arms trembled as the stimulants took hold. Then, abruptly,
he was back to himself. His training swept over him in a phys-
ical wave, flooding him so suddenly that his teeth clacked to-
gether in the spasm. His eyes swept the room, glittering with
unnatural alertness. The muscles of his face moved in a way that
no human face should move, and suddenly he was smiling. He
examined himself and smiled into the camera with an easy,
tolerant urbanity.
The air itself seemed to warm with the sudden radiance of his
good-fellowship.
The cable in his arm disengaged itself and snaked back into
the wall. The camera spoke.
"You are Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay? From the Mare
Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic? You are seeking
political asylum? You have no biologically active materials in
your baggage or implanted on your person? You are not carry-
ing explosives or software attack systems? Your intestinal flora
has been sterilized and replaced with Zaibatsu standard microbes?"
"Yes, that's correct," Lindsay said, in the camera's own Japanese. "I have no baggage." He was comfortable with the modern
form of the language: a streamlined trade patois, stripped of its
honorific tenses. Facility with languages had been part of his
training.
"You will soon be released into an area that has been ideologically decriminalized," the camera said. "Before you leave customs, there are certain limits to your activities that must be
understood. Are you familiar with the concept of civil rights?"
Lindsay was cautious. "In what context?"
"The Zaibatsu recognizes one civil right: the right to death.
You may claim your right at any time, under any circumstances.
All you need do is request it. Our audio monitors are spread
throughout the Zaibatsu. If you claim your right, you will be
immediately and painlessly terminated. Do you understand?"
"I understand," Lindsay said.
"Termination is also enforced for certain other behaviors," the
camera said. "If you physically threaten the habitat, you will be