"That can be arranged, I'm sure," Nora said.
"Trade you some relaxant for it. I have lots."
"Thank you," Nora said. She was doing well. Lindsay felt
obscurely proud of her.
She unzipped her spacesuit and stepped out of it. Below it she
wore a triangular over-the-shoulders poncho, geometrically embroidered in white and ice blue. The poncho's tapering ends
were laced across her hips, leaving her legs bare except for
lace-up velcro sandals.
The pirates had tactfully given up their red-and-silver skeleton
jumpsuits. Instead they wore dun-brown Zaibatsu coveralls.
They looked like savages.
"I could do with one of these," said Rep 3. He held the
accordioned arm of his ancient spacesuit next to the thin plastic
of hers. "How you breathe in that sucker?"
"It's not for deep space. We just fill it with pure oxygen and
breathe as long as we can. Ten minutes."
"I could hook tanks to one. More spacey, citizen-to-be. The
Sun would like it."
"We could teach you to sew one. It's an art worth knowing."
She smiled at Rep 3, and Lindsay shuddered inwardly. He knew
how the sweaty reek of the Rep's suit must turn her stomach.
He drifted between the two of them, unobtrusively nudging
Rep 3 to one side. And, for the first time, he touched Nora
Mavrides. He put his hand gently on the soft blue and white
shoulder of her poncho. The muscle beneath his hand was as
stiff as wire.
She smiled again, quickly. "I'm sure the others will find this
ship fascinating. We came here in a drogue. Our cargo was
nine-tenths ice, for the wetware tanks. We were in paste, close
to dead. We had our robot and our pocket tokamak. The rest
was bits and pieces. Wire, a handful of microchips, some salt
and trace minerals. The rest's genetics, Eggs, seeds, bacteria. We
came here naked, to save launch weight. Everything else we've
done with our hands, friends. Flesh against rock. Flesh wins, if
it's smart enough."
Lindsay nodded. She had not mentioned their electromagnetic
pulse weapon. No one talked about the guns.
She struggled to charm the pirates, but her pride stung them.
The pride of the Family was justified. They'd bootstrapped
themselves into prosperity with bacterial wetware from gelatin
capsules no bigger than pinheads. They had mastered plastics;
they conjured them out of the rock. Their artifacts were as
cheap as life itself.
They had grown themselves into the rock; wormed their way in with softbodied relentless persistence. ESAIRS was riddled with
tunnels; their sharp-toothed tunneling hoops ran around the
clock. They had air blowers rigged from vinyl sacks and ribs of
memory plastic. The ribs breathed. They were wired to the
tokamak fusion plant, and a small change in voltage made them
bend and flex, bend and flex, sucking in air with a pop of plastic
lung and an animal wheeze of exhalation. It was the sound of
life inside the rock, the rasp of the hoops, the blowers breathing, the sullen gurgling of the fermenters.
They had plants. Not just algae and protein goo but flowers:
roses, phlox, daisies-or plants that had known those names
before their DNA had felt the scalpel. Celery, lettuce, dwarf
corn, spinach, alfalfa. Bamboo: with fine wire and merciless
patience they could warp bamboo into complex pipes and bot-
tles. Eggs: they even had chickens, or things that had once been
chickens before Shaper gene-splicers turned them into free-fall
protein tools.
They were powerful, subtle, and filled with desperate hatred.
Lindsay knew that they were waiting for their chance, weighing
odds, calculating. They would attack to kill if they could, but
only when they could maximize the chance of their own survival.
But he also knew that with each day that passed, with each
minor concession and agreement, another frail layer of shellac
was laid over the open break between them. Day by day a new
status quo struggled to form, a frail detente supported by nothing but habit. It was not much, but it was all he had: the hope
that, with time, the facade of peace would take on substance.
ESAIRS XII: 3-2-'17
"Hey. Secretary of State."
Lindsay woke. In the ghostlike gravity of the asteroid he had
settled imperceptibly to the bottom of his cavern. They called
his dugout "the Embassy." With the passage of the Integration
Act, Lindsay had moved into the rock, with the rest of the FMD.
Paolo had spoken. Fazil was with him. The two young men
wore embroidered ponchos and stiff plastic crowns holding
floating manes of shoulder-length hair.
The skin bacteria had hit them badly. Every day they looked
worse. Paolo's neck was so badly inflamed that his throat looked
cut. Fazil's left ear was infected; he carried his head tilted to
one side.
"We want to show you something," Paolo said. "Can you come
with us, Mr. Secretary? Quietly?" His voice was gentle, his hazel
eyes so clear and guileless that Lindsay knew at once that he
was up to something. Would they kill him? Not yet. Lindsay
laced on a poncho and struggled with the complex knots of his
sandals. "I'm at your disposal," he said.
They floated into the corridor. The corridors between dugouts
were o more than long wormholes, a meter across. The Mavrides clansmen propelled themselves along with a quick
side-to-side lizardlike skittering. Lindsay was slower. His injured
arm was bad today, and his hand felt like a club.
They glided silently through the soft yellow light of one of the
fermenting rooms. The blunt, nippled ends of three wetware
bags jutted into the room. They were stuffed like a string of
sausages into stone tunnels. Each tunnel held a series of bags,
united by filters, each bag passing its output to the next. The last
bag had a spinneret running, a memory-plastic engine, clacking
slowly. A hollow tube of flawless clear acrylic coiled in free-fall,
reeking as it dried.
They entered another black tunnel. The tunnels were all identical, all perfectly smooth. There was no need for lighting. Any
genius could easily memorize the nexus.
To his left Lindsay heard the slow clack-rasp, clack-rasp of a
tunneling hoop. The hoops were handmade, their teeth hand-set
in plastic, and they each sounded slightly different. They helped
him navigate. They could gnaw two meters a day through the
softer rock. In two years they had gnawed over twenty thousand
tons of ore.
When the ore was processed, the tailings were shot into space.
Everything launched away left a hole behind it. A hole ten
kilometers long, pitch black, and as knotted as snarled fishline,
beaded with living caverns, greenhouses, wetware rooms, and
private hideyholes.
They took a turn Lindsay had never used before. Lindsay heard the grating sound of a stone plug hauled away.
They went a short distance, squirming past the flaccid bulk of
a deactivated air blower. As Lindsay crawled past it in the
darkness, the blower came to life with a gasp.
"This is our secret place," Paolo said. "Mine and Fazil's." His
voice echoed in the darkness.
Something fizzed loudly with a leaping of white-hot sparks.
Startled, Lindsay braced to fight. Paolo was holding a short
white stick with flame gnawing at one end. "A candle," he said.
"Kindle?" said Lindsay. "Yes, I see."
"We play with fire," Paolo said. "Fazil and I."
They were in a workshop cavern, dug into one of the large