"Shut up, Paolo." Fazil grabbed his arm.
Paolo tried to stare him down, then turned to Lindsay. "It's
Kleo and lan. They hate my luck - " Fazil shook him.
Paolo slapped him hard across the face. Fazil cried out and
threw his arms around Paolo, holding him close.
Paolo looked stricken. "I was upset," he said. "I lied about
Kleo; she loves all of us. It was an accident. An accident."
Lindsay left. He scrambled headlong down the tunnels, passing
more wetware and a greenhouse where a blower gusted the
smell of fresh-cut hay.
He entered a cavern where grow-lights shone dusky red
through a gas-permeable membrane. Nora's room branched off
from the cavern, blocked by the wheezing bulk of her private air
blower. Lindsay squeezed past it on the exhale and slapped the
lights.
Violet arabesques covered the room's round walls. Nora was
sleeping.
Her arms, her legs, were gripped in wire. Braces circled her
wrists and elbows, ankles and knees. Black myoelectrodes stud-
ded the muscle groups beneath her naked skin. The arms, the
legs, moved quietly, in unison, side, side, forward, back. A long
carapace knobbed her back, above the branching nerve clumps
of her spine.
It was a diplomatic training device. A spinal crab. Memory
flashed behind Lindsay's eyes and he went berserk. He jumped
off the wall and rocketed toward her. Her eyes snapped open
blearily as he shouted in fury.
He seized her neck and jerked it forward, digging his nails into
the rubbery rim where the spinal crab met her skin. He tore at
it savagely. Part of it ripped free. The skin shone red beneath it,
slick with sweat. Lindsay grabbed the left-arm cable and
snapped it loose. He pulled harder; she wheezed as a strap dug
in under her ribs.
The crab was peeling away. Its underside was ghastly, a
hundred-footed mass of damp translucent tubes, pored with
hair-thin wires. Lindsay ripped again. A cable nexus stretched
and snapped, extruding colored wires.
He braced his feet against her back and pulled. She gagged and clawed at the strap's buckle; the belt whipped loose, and Lind-
say had the whole thing. With its programming disrupted, it
flopped and curled like a live thing. Lindsay whirled it by the
straps and slammed it into the wall with all his strength. The
interlapping segments of its back split open, their brittle plastic
crackling. He whiplashed it into the stone. Brown lubricant
oozed, then spattered into free-fall drops as he smashed it again.
He crushed it underfoot, tore at the strap until it gave way. Its
guts showed beneath the plates: lozenge-shaped biochips nested
in multicolored fiberoptics.
Me slammed it again, more slowly. The fury was leaving him.
He felt cold. His right arm trembled uncontrollably.
Nora was against the wall, gripping a clothes rack. The sudden
loss of nerve programming left her shaking with palsy.
"Where's the other one?" Lindsay demanded. "The one for
your face?"
Her teeth chattered. "I didn't bring it," she said.
Lindsay kicked the crab away. "How long, Nora? How long
have you been under that thing?"
"I wear it every night."
"Every night! My God!"
"I have to be the best," she said, shaking. She fumbled a
poncho from the rack and ducked her head through the collar.
"But the pain," Lindsay said. "The way it burns!"
Nora smoothed the bright fabric from her shoulders to hips.
"You're one of them," she said. "The early classmates. The
failures. The defectors."
"What was your class?" Lindsay said.
"Fifth. The last one."
"I was first," Lindsay said. "The foreign section."
"Then you're not even a Shaper."
"I'm a Concatenate."
"You're all supposed to be dead." She peeled the crab's
broken braces from her knees and ankles. "I should kill you.
You attacked me. You're a traitor."
"When I smashed that thing I felt real freedom." He rubbed
his arm absently, marveling. He'd truly lost control. Rebellion
had overwhelmed him. For a moment, sincere human fury had
burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine
rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, than
he'd been for years.
"Your kind ruined it for the rest of us," Nora said. "We
diplomats should be on top, coordinating things, making peace.
But they shut down the whole program. We're undependable,
they said. A bad ideology."
"They want us dead," Lindsay said. "That's why you were
drafted."
"I wasn't drafted. I volunteered." She tied the poncho's last
hip-lace. "I'll have a hero's welcome if I make it back. That's
the only chance I'll ever have at power in the Rings."
"There are other powerful places."
"None that count."
"Rep Three is dead," Lindsay told her. "Why did you kill
him?"
"Three reasons," she said. They were past pretense. "It was
easy. It helps our odds against you. And third, he was crazy.
Worse even than the rest of your crew. Too unpredictable. And
too dangerous to let live."
"He was harmless," Lindsay said. "Not like the two of us." His
eyes filled with tears.
"If you had my control you wouldn't weep. Not if they tore
your heart out."
"They already have," Lindsay said. "And yours as well."
"Abelard," she said, "he was a pirate."
"And the rest?"
"You think they'd weep over us?"
"No," Lindsay said. "And not much, even over their own. It's
vengeance they'll want. How would you feel if lan disappears
tomorrow? And two months from now you find his bones in the
sludge drain of some fermenter? Or, better yet, if your nerves
are so well steeled, what about yourself? How would power taste
to you if you were retching bloody foam outside some airlock?"
"It's in your hands," she said. "I've told you the truth, as we
agreed between us. It's up to you to control your faction."
"I won't be put in this position," Lindsay said. "I thought we
had an understanding."
She pointed at the oozing wreckage of her spinal crab. "You
didn't ask my permission to attack me. You saw something you
couldn't bear, and you destroyed it. We did the same."
"I want to talk to Kleo," he said.
She looked hurt. "That's against our understanding. You talk
through me."
"This is murder, Nora. I have to see her."
Nora sighed. "She's in her garden. You'll have to put on a
suit."
"Mine's in the Consensus."
"We'll use one of lan's, then. Come on." She led him back
into the glowing cavern, then down a long fissured-out mining
vein to lan Mavrides's room.
The spacesuit maker and graphic artist was awake and work-
ing. He had refused to put his decontamination suit aside and
wore it constantly, a one-man sterile environment.
lan was point man for the Mavrides Family, a focus for threats
and resentment. Paolo had blurted as much, but Lindsay knew
it already.
(lacking pp 102-103)
him forward, and put his thumb Jeep into her mouth. She held
it there, then released him. "Tell me what you felt."
"It was warm," Lindsay said. "Wet. And uncomfortably intimate."
"That's what sex is like on suppressants," she said. "We have
love in the Family, but not erotics. We're soldiers."
"You're chemically castrated, then?"
"You're prejudiced," she said. "You haven't lived it. That's
why the orgy you propose is out of the question."
"Carnaval isn't an orgy," Lindsay said. "It's a ceremony. It's
trust, it's communion. It holds the group together. Like animals