stony veins within ESAIRS XII. The walls looked like granite to Lindsay's untrained eye: a grayish-pink rock studded with little
gleams of rock crystal.
"There was quartz here," Paolo said. "Silicon dioxide. We
mined it for oxygen, then Kleo forgot about it. So we drilled this
room ourselves. Right, Fazil?"
Fazil spoke eagerly. "That's right, Mr. Secretary. We used
hand drills and expansion plastic. See where the rock shattered
and came loose? We hid the chunks in the debris for launch, so
that no one knew. We worked for days and saved the biggest
chunk."
"Look," Paolo said. He touched the wall, and the stone wrinkled in his hand and came away. In a broken-out rough cavity
the size of a closet, an oblong boulder floated, kept from falling
by a thread. Paolo snapped the thread and pulled the boulder
out. It moved sluggishly; Fazil helped him stop its inertia.
It was a two-ton sculpture of Paolo's head.
"Very fine work," Lindsay said. "May I?" He ran his fingertips
across the slickly polished cheekbone. The eyes, wide and alert,
cored out for pupils, were as big as his outstretched hands.
There was a faint smile on the enormous lips.
"When they sent us out here, we knew we weren't coming
back," Paolo said. "We'll die here, and why? Not because our
genetics are bad. We're a good line. Mavrides rule." He was
talking faster now, falling into the cadences of Ring Council
slang.
Fazil nodded silently.
"It's just bad percentages. Chance. We were burned by chance
before we were twenty years old. You can't edit out chance.
Some of the gene-line are bound to fall so the rest can live. If it
weren't me and Fazil, it would be our crechemates."
"I understand," Lindsay said.
"We're young and cheap. They throw us into the enemy's teeth so the ink is black not red. But we're alive, me and Fazil.
There's something inside us. We'll never see ten percent of the
life the others back home will see. But we were here. We're
real."
"Living is better," Lindsay said.
"You're a traitor," Paolo said without resentment. "Without a
gene-line you're bloodless, you're just a system."
"There are more important things than living," Fazil said.
"If you had enough time you'd outlive this war," Lindsay said.
Paolo smiled. "This is no war. This is evolution in action. You
think you'll outlive that?"
Lindsay shrugged. "Maybe. What if aliens come?"
Paolo looked at him wide-eyed. "You believe in that? The
aliens?"
"Maybe."
"You're all right," Paolo said.
"How can I help you?" Lindsay said.
"It's the launch ring. We plan to launch this head. An oblique
launch, top velocity, full power, off the plane of the ecliptic.
Maybe somebody sees it someday. Maybe some thing, five hundred million years, no trace of human life, picks it up, my face.
There's no debris off the plane, no collisions, just dead-space
vacuum, perfect. And it's good hard rock. Out this far the sun
could go red giant and barely warm it. It could orbit till white
dwarf stage, maybe till black cinder, till the galaxy bursts or the
Kosmos eats its own tail. My image forever."
"Only first we have to launch it," said Fazil.
"The President won't like it," Lindsay said. "The first treaty we
signed said no more launches for the duration. Maybe later,
when our trust is stronger."
Paolo and Fazil traded glances. Lindsay knew at once that
things were out of hand.
"Look," he said. "You two are talented. You have a lot of time
on your hands since the launch ring's down. You could do
heads of all of us."
"No!" Paolo shouted. "It's between us two, that's it."
"What about you, Fazil? Don't you want one?"
"We're dead," Fazil said. "This took us two years. There was
only time for one. Chance burned us both. One of us had to
give everything for nothing. So we decided. Show him, Paolo."
"He shouldn't look," Paolo said sullenly. "He doesn't under-
stand."
"I want him to know, Paolo." Fazil was stern. "Why I have to
follow, and you get to lead. Show him, Paolo."
Paolo reached under his poncho and pulled out a hinged box
of clear acrylic. There were two stone cubes in it, black cubes
with white dots on their faces. Dice.
Lindsay licked his lips. He had seen this in the Ring Counciclass="underline"
endemic gambling. Not just for money, but for the core of
personality. Secret agreements. Dominance games. Sex. The
struggles within gene-lines, between people who knew with flat
certainty that they were equally matched. The dice were quick
and final.
"I can help you," Lindsay said. "Let's negotiate."
"We're supposed to be on duty," Paolo said. "Monitoring
radio. We're leaving, Mr. Secretary."
"I'll come along," Lindsay said.
The two Shapers resealed the stone lid of their secret work-
shop and scuttled off in the darkness. Lindsay followed as best
he could.
The Shapers had listening dishes dug in all over the asteroid.
The bowl-shaped impact craters were ready-made for their cam-
ouflaged gridworks of copper mesh. All antennae fed into a
central processor, whose delicate semiconductors were sheltered
in a tough acrylic console. Slots in the console held cassettes of
homemade recording tape, constantly spooling on a dozen different heads. Another cutout on the acrylic deck held a flat liquid crystal display for video copy and a hand-lettered key-
board.
The two genetics combed the waveband, flickering through a
spectrum of general-issue cartel broadcasts. Most bands were
cypher-static, anonymous blips of cybernetic datapulse. "Here's
something," Paolo said. "Triangulate it, Fazil."
"It's close," Fazil said. "Oh, it's just the madman."
"What?" Lindsay said. A huge green roach speckled in lustrous violet flew past with a clatter of wings.
"The one who always wears the spacesuit." The two glanced at
one another. Lindsay read their eyes. They were thinking about
the man's stench.
"Is he talking?" Lindsay said. "Put him on, please."
"He always talks," Paolo said. "Sings, mostly. He raves into an
open channel."
"He's in his new spacesuit," Lindsay said urgently. "Put him
on."
He heard Rep 3. " - granulated like my mother's face. And
sorry not to say goodbye to my friend Mars. Sorry for Carnaval,
too. I'm out kilometers, and that hiss. I thought it was a new
friend, trying to talk. But it's not. It's a little hole in my back,
where I glued the tanks in. Tanks work fine, hole works better.
It's me and my two skins, soon both cold."
"Try and raise him!" Lindsay said.
"I told you he keeps the channel open. That unit's two hundred years old if it's a day. He can't hear us when he talks."
"I'm not reeling back in, I'm staying out here." His voice was
fainter. "No air to talk with, and no air to listen. So I'll try and
climb out. Just a zipper. With any luck I can skin out completely." There was a light crackling of static. "Goodbye, Sun.
Goodbye, Stars. Thanks for-"
The words were lost in a rush of decompression. Then the
crackling of static was back. It went on and on.
Lindsay thought it through. He spoke quietly. "Was I your
alibi, Paolo?"
"What?" Paolo was shocked.
"You sabotaged his suit. And then you carefully weren't here
when we could have helped him."
Paolo was pale. "We were never near his suit, I swear!"
"Then why weren't you here at your post?"
"Kleo set me up!" Paolo shouted, "lan walks point, the dice
said so! I'm supposed to be clean!"