to trouble, this business with the plebes. ... I even wrote a play
about it once."
"A play? For the theatre? What was it called?"
Vague surprise showed in the old man's eyes. "The Conflagration."
"You're Evan James Tyler Kelland," Lindsay blurted.
"I-ah ... I saw your play. In the archives." Evan Kelland was
Lindsay's own great-granduncle. An obscure radical, his play of
social protest had been lost for years until Lindsay, hunting for
weapons, had found it in the Museum. Lindsay had staged the
play's revival to annoy the Radical Old. The men who had
exiled Kelland were still in power, sustained by Mech technologies after a hundred years. When the time was right they had
exiled Lindsay too.
Now they were in the cartels, he remembered suddenly. Constantine, the descendant of plebes, had cut a deal with the
wireheads. And the aristocracy had paid at last, as Kelland had
prophesied. Lindsay, and Evan Kelland, had only paid early.
"You happened to see my play," Kelland said. Suspicion
turned the lines in his face to deep crevasses. He looked away,
his ash-gray eyes full of pain and obscure humiliation. "You
shouldn't have presumed."
"I'm sorry," Lindsay said. He looked with new dread at his old
kinsman's mechanical arm. "We won't speak of this again."
"That would be best." Kelland turned up his earphones and
seemed to lose the grip on his fury. His eyes grew mild and
colorless. Lindsay looked at the others, deliberately blind be-
hind their videogoggles. None of this had happened.
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 27-10-'16
"Sleep troubles, citizen?" said the Second Judge. "Those
steroids getting under your skin, stepping on your dream lime? I
can fix it." She smiled, showing three ancient, discolored teeth
amid a rack of gleaming porcelain.
"I'd appreciate it," Lindsay said, struggling for politeness. The
steroids had covered his long arms with ropes of muscle, healed
the constellation of bruises from constant jujutsu drills, and
filled him with hot flashes of aggressive fury. But they robbed
him of sleep, leaving only feverish catnaps.
As he watched the Fortuna medic through red-rimmed eyes,
he was reminded of his ex-wife. Alexandrina Lindsay had had
just that same china-doll precision of movement, the same
parchmentlike skin, the same telltale age wrinkles on the
knuckles. His wife had been eighty years old. And, watching the
Judge, Lindsay fell stifled by secondhand sexual attraction.
"This'll do it," Judge Two said, drawing up a hypo of muddy
fluid from a plastic-topped vial. "Some REM promoter,
serotonin agonists, muscle relaxant, and just a taste of mnemonics to pry loose troublesome memories. Use it all the time
myself; it's fabulous. While you're out, I'll scroll up the other
arm."
"Not just yet," Lindsay said through gritted teeth. "I haven't
decided what I want on it yet."
The Second Judge put away her tattoo rig with a moue of
disappointment. She seemed to live, eat, and breathe needles,
Lindsay thought. "Don't you like my work?" she said.
Lindsay examined his right arm. The bone had knitted well,
but he'd put on so much muscle that the designs were distorted:
coax-cable snakes with television eyes, white death's-heads with
flat solar-panel wings, knives wreathed in lightning, and every-
where, fluttering along and between them, a horde of white
moths. The skin of his arm from wrist to bicep was so laden
with ink that it felt cold to the touch and no longer sweated.
"It was well done," he said as the hypo sank into his arm
through the hollow eye of a skull. "But wait till I've finished
muscling for the rest, all right, citizen?"
"Sweet dreams," she said.
At night, the Republic was truest to itself. The Preservationists
preferred the night, when watchful older eyes were closed in
sleep.
Truths hidden in daylight revealed themselves in blazing night-
lights. The solar energy of the power panels was the Republic's
currency. Only the wealthiest could squander financial power.
To his right, at the world cylinder's north end, light poured
from the hospitals. In their clinics around the cylinder's axis,
the frail bones of the Radical Old rested easily, almost in
free-fall. Gouts of light spilled from distant windows and landing pads, a smeared and bogus Milky Way of wealth.
Suddenly Lindsay, looking up, was behind those windows. It
was his Great-Grandfather's suite. The old Mechanist floated in
a matrix of life-support tubes, his eye sockets wired to a video
input, in a sterile suite flooded with oxygen.
"Grandfather, I'm leaving," Lindsay said. The old man raised
one hand, so crippled with arthritis that its swollen knuckles
bulged, and rippled, and suddenly burst into a hissing net of
needle-tipped tubes. They whipped into Lindsay, clinging, piercing, sucking. Lindsay opened his mouth to scream-
The lights were far away. He was walking across the fretted
glass windowpane. He emerged onto the Agricultural panel.
A faint smell of curdling rot came with the wind. He was near
the Sours.
Lindsay's shoes hissed through genetically altered wiregrass at
the swamp's margins. Grasshoppers creaked in the undergrowth,
and a chitinous thing the size of a rat scurried away from him.
Philip Constantine had the rot under siege.
The wind gusted. Constantine's tent flapped loudly in the
darkness. By the tent's doorflaps, two globes on stakes shone
yellow bioluminescence.
Constantine's sprawling lent dominated the wiregrass border-
lands, with the Sours to its north and the fertile grainfields
shielded behind it. The no-man's land, where he battled the
contagion, clicked and rustled with newly minted vermin from
his labs. From within, he heard Constantine's voice, choked with sobs.
"Philip!" he said. He went inside.
Constantine sat at a wooden bench before a long metal lab
bureau, cluttered with Shaper glassware. Racks of specimen
cases stood like bookshelves, loaded with insects under study.
Globes on slender, flexible supports cast a murky yellow light.
Constantine seemed smaller than ever, his boyish shoulders
hunched beneath his lab jacket. His round eyes were bloodshot
and his hair was disheveled.
"Vera's burned," Constantine said. He trembled silently and
put his face into his gloved hands. Lindsay sat on the bench
beside him and threw his long, bony arm over Constantine's
back.
They were sitting together as they had sat so often, so long ago. Side by side as usual, joking together in their half-secret argot of Ring Council slang, passing a spiked inhaler back and forth.
They laughed together, the quiet laughter of shared conspiracy.
They were young, and breaking all the rules, and after a few
long whiffs from the inhaler they were brighter than anyone
human had a right to be.
Constantine laughed happily, and his mouth was full of blood.
Lindsay came awake with a start, opened his eyes, and saw the
sick bay of the Red Consensus. He closed his eyes and slept
again at once.
Lindsay's cheeks were wet with tears. He was not sure how
long they had been sitting together, sobbing. It seemed a long
time. "Can we talk freely here, Philip?"
"They don't need police spies here," Constantine said bitterly.
"That's why we have wives."
"I'm sorry for what's come between us, Philip."
"Vera's dead," Constantine said. He closed his eyes. "You and
I did this. We engineered her death. We share that guilt. We