know our power now. And we've discovered our differences."
Me wiped his eyes with a round disk of filter paper.
"I lied to them," Lindsay said. "I said my uncle died of hear
failure. The inquest said as much. I let them think so, so that I
could shield you. You killed him, Philip. But it was me you;
meant to kill. Only my uncle stumbled into the trap."
"Vera and I discussed it," Constantine said. "She thought you
would fail, that you wouldn't carry out the pact. She knew your
weaknesses. I knew them. I bred those moths for stings and
poison. The Revolution needs its weapons. I gave her the
pheromones to drive them into frenzy. She took them gladly."
"You didn't trust me," Lindsay said.
"And you're not dead."
Lindsay said nothing.
"Look at this!" Constantine peeled off one of his lab gloves.
Beneath it his olive skin was shedding like a reptile's. "It's a
virus," he said. "It's immortality. A Shaper kind, from the cells
themselves, not those Mech prosthetics. I'm committed, cousin."
He picked at an elastic shred of skin. "Vera chose you, not me.
I'm going to live forever, and to hell with you and your cant
about humanities. Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There
are no more souls. Only states of mind. If you think you can
deny that, then here." He handed Lindsay a dissection scalpel.
"Prove yourself. Prove your words weren't empty. Prove you're
better dead and human."
The knife was in Lindsay's hand. He stared at the flesh of his
wrist. He stared at Constantine's throat. He raised the knife over
his head, poised it, and screamed aloud.
The sound woke him, and he found himself in sick bay,
drenched in sweat, while the Second Judge, her eyes heavy with
intoxicants, ran one veiny hand along the inside of his thigh.
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 20-11-'16
The Third Representative, or Rep 3 as he was commonly called,
was a stocky, perpetually grinning young man with a scarred
nose and short, brush-cut sandy hair.
Like many EVA experts, he was a space fanatic and spent most of his time outside the ship, towed on long kilometers of line.
Stars talked to him, and the Sun was his friend. He always wore
his spacesuit, even inside the craft, and the whiff of long-
fermented body odor came through its open helmet collar with
eye-watering pungency.
"I'm gonna send out the drone," he said to Lindsay as they ate
together in the control room. "You can hook up to it from in
here. It's almost like being Outside."
Lindsay put aside his empty canister of green paste. The drone
was an ancient planetary probe, found in long-forgotten orbit by
some long-forgotten crew, but its telescopes and microwave an-
tennae were still useful, and it could broadcast as well. Hundreds of klicks out on its fiber-optic cable, the unmanned drone
could pick up deep-space broadcasts and mislead enemy radar
with electronic countermeasures. "Sure, citizen," Lindsay said.
"What the hell."
Rep 3 nodded eagerly. "It'll be beautiful, State. Your brain'll
spread out so-fast-so-thin be like a second skin for you."
"I won't take any drugs," Lindsay said guardedly.
"You can't take drugs," Rep 3 said. "If you take drugs the Sun
won't talk to you." He picked a pair of strap-on videogoggles
from the console and adjusted them over Lindsay's head. With-
in the goggles, a tiny video system projected images directly
onto the eyeballs. The drone was shut down at the moment;
Lindsay saw only an array of cryptic blue alphanumeric
readouts across the bottom of his vision. There was no sense of
a screen. "So far so good," he said.
He heard a series of keyboard clicks as Rep 3 activated the
drone. Then the whole ship shook gently as the robot probe cast
off. Lindsay heard his guide strap on another pair of showphones, and then, through the drone's cameras, he saw the outside of the Consensus for the first time.
It was pitiful how shabby and makeshift it looked. The old
engines had been ripped off the stern and replaced with a
jury-rigged attack tunnel, a long, flexible, accordioned tube with
the jagged teeth of a converted mining drill at its end. A new
engine, one of the old-fashioned Shaper electromagnetic SEPS
types, had been welded on at the end of four long stanchions.
The globular engine was a microwave hazard and was kept as
far as possible from the crew's quarters. Foil-wrapped control
cables snaked up the stanchions, which had been clumsily
bolted to the stern deck.
Beside the stanchions crouched the inert hulk of a mining
robot. Seeing it waiting there, powered down, Lindsay realized
what a powerful weapon it was; its gaping, razor-sharp claws
could rip a ship like tinfoil.
Another mechanism clung to the hulclass="underline" a parasite rocket. The
old corrugated hull, painted an ugly shade of off-green, bore
scrapes and scratches from the little rocket's magnetic feet.
Being mobile, the parasite handled all the retrorocket work.
The third deck, with its life-support system, was an untidy
mashed tangle of fat ventilation and hydraulics tubes, some so
old that their insulation had burst and hung in puffy free-fall
streamers. "Don't worry, we don't use those," Rep 3 said conversationally.
The four jointed solar panels spread laterally from the fourth
deck, a gleaming cross of black silicon cut by copper gridwork.
The nasty muzzle of the particle beam gun was just visible
around the curve of the hull.
"Little star nation under the Sun's eye," the Rep said. He
swung the drone around so that, briefly, Lindsay saw the drone's
own tether line. Then its cameras focused on the rigging of the
spacecraft's solar sail. In the bow was a storage chamber of
accordioned fabric, but it was empty now; the nineteen tons of
metallic film were spread for light pressure in a silver arc two
kilometers across. The camera zoomed in and Lindsay saw as
the sail expanded that it too was old: creased a bit here and
there, and peppered with micrometeor holes.
"Prez says, next time, if we can afford it, we get a monolayer
sprayer, stencil a big mother-burner skull and crossed lightnings
on the outside of that," the Rep offered.
"Good idea," Lindsay said. He was off steroids now, and
feeling a lot more tolerant.
"I'll take it out," the Rep said. Lindsay heard more clicks, and
suddenly the drone unreeled its way into deep space at frighten-
ing speed. In seconds, the Red Consensus shrank to thimble-size
beside the tabletop smear of its sail. Lindsay was seized with a
gut-wrenching vertigo and clutched blindly at the console. He
closed his eyes tightly within the goggles, then opened them
onto the cosmic panorama of deep space.
"Milky Way," the Rep said. An enormous arc of white spread
itself across half of reality. Lindsay lost control of perspective:
he felt for a moment that the billion white pinpoints of the
galactic ridge were pressing pitilessly down onto his eyeballs. He
closed his eyes again, deeply thankful that he was not actually
out there.
"That's where the aliens will come from," the Rep informed him.
Lindsay opened his eyes. It was just a bubble, he told himself,
with white specks spattered on it: a bubble with himself at its
center-there, now he had it stabilized. "What aliens?"
"The aliens, State." The Rep was genuinely puzzled. "You
know they're out there."
"Sure," Lindsay said.
"Wanna watch the Sun a while? Maybe it'll tell us something."