return they outfitted the emptied shell for a furtive attempt to
break the Interdict with Earth.
The Interdict had never applied to the gasbags. They had
insisted on exploring the entire solar system, and had granted
equal rights to the pioneers in Fomalhaut. Their surveying craft
had often studied the Earth. They made no attempt to contact
the local primitives. They had satisfied themselves that the plan-
et was harmless and had returned in utter disinterest.
With his two companions, Lindsay had assumed his ultimate
disguise. Me was passing himself off as an alien, in an attempt to
deceive the entire Schismatrix.
Excitement and triumph had stripped decades from Lindsay.
He had turned up his chest cuirass so that his heart could labor
in time with his feelings. The forearm monitor embedded in his
arm glowed amber with adrenaline.
The spacecraft skipped above the bloated South Atlantic and
sank deep within the atmosphere at the twilight line. Deceleration pressed Lindsay into the straps of his skeletal chair.
The Lobsters had clone a quick, primitive job. The three-man
crew was crammed into a ribbed lozenge four meters across. It
held two air-frames, a recycler, and three acceleration couches,
of black elastic webbing over iron frames epoxied to the floor.
The rest of the craft was taken up by engines and a garagelike
specimen hold. In the hold crouched a surveyor robot, one of
the Europan submarine probes.
The dead astronaut's former orifices had been stripped of
tissue and outfitted with cameras and scanning systems. The
specimen hold had a hatchway installed, but there was no room
for an airlock in the crew's compartment. The three of them
had been welded in.
Pilot hadn't liked it. Pilot could be trusted, though. He cared
nothing for Europa or their plans, but he relished the chance to
count coup on the ancestral gravity well. He had been everywhere, from the turbulent fringes of the solar corona to the cometary Oort Cloud at the edge of circumsolar space. He was not human, but for the time being he was one of them. The scanners began to clear. Deceleration faded into the heavy tug of Earth gravity. Lindsay slumped in his seat, wheezing as the cuirass pumped his lungs. "Look what this muck is doing to the stars," Pilot complained melodiously.
Vera reached beside her chair and unfolded her tight-packed
accordioned screens. She straightened the videoboard with a
pop and smoothed out the creases. "Look, Abelard. There's so
much air above us that it's binning the stars. Think how much
air. It's fantastic."
Lindsay stirred himself and examined the view from the aft
camera. Behind them, a wall of thunderheads towered to the
limits of the troposphere. Black roots furred with rain rose to
white anvil heads glowing in the last of twilight. This was one
outstretched arm of the storm zone of permanent tempests that
girdled the planet's equator.
He expanded the aft view to fill the whole videoboard. What
he saw awed him. "Look aft at the storm clouds," he said.
"Huge streaks of fire are leaping out of them. What could be
burning?"
"Chunks of vegetation?" Vera said.
"Wait. No. It's lightning," Lindsay said. "As in the old phrase,
'thunder and lightning.'" He stared in utter fascination.
"Lightning bolts are supposed to be red, with jagged edges,"
Vera said. "These are like thin white branches."
"The disaster must have changed their form," Lindsay said.
The storm vanished over the horizon. "Coastline coming up,"
Pilot said.
Sunset fell; they switched to infrareds. "This is part of America," Lindsay concluded. "It was called Mexico, or possibly
Texico. The coastline looked different before the ice caps melted. I don't recognize any of this."
Pilot struggled with the controls. Vera said, "We're going faster
than the movement of sound in this atmosphere. Slow down.
Pilot."
"Muck," Pilot complained. "Do you really want to see this?
What if the locals see us?"
"They're primitives, they don't have infrareds," Vera said.
"You mean they use only the visible spectrum?" Now Pilot
himself was stunned.
They studied the landscape below: knots of dense scrubland,
shining in the false black-and-white of infrared. The wilderness
was striped occasionally by half-obscured dark streaks.
"Tectonic faults?" Vera said.
"Roads," Lindsay said. He explained about low-friction surfaces for ground travel in gravity. They had not seen any cities
as yet, though there had been suggestive patches here and there
where the rioting vegetation seemed thinner.
Pilot took them lower. They pored over the growth at high
magnification. "Weeds," Lindsay concluded. "Since the disaster
all ecological stability has collapsed. . . . Adventitious species
have moved in. This was probably all cropland once."
"It's ugly," Vera said.
"Systems in collapse often are."
"High-energy flux ahead," Pilot said. The spacecraft dipped
and hovered over a ridge.
Wildfire swept the hillsides, whole kilometers of orange glow
in the darkness. Roaring updrafts flung up flakes of glowing ash,
reverse cascades of stripped-off leaves and branches. Behind the
wall of fire were the twisted, glowing skeletons of weeds grown
large as trees, their smoldering trunks thick bundles of woody
filaments. They said nothing, stirred to the core by the wonder
of it. "Sundog plants," Lindsay said at last.
"What?"
"The weeds arc like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They
move in anywhere where systems break down. After this disaster
the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive. . . ."
"More weeds," Vera concluded.
"Yes." They left the fire behind and cruised past the foothills.
Lindsay tapped one of the algae frames and ate a mouthful of
green paste.
"Aircraft," Pilot said.
For a moment Lindsay thought he was seeing a mutant gasbag, some bizarre example of parallel evolution. Then he realized it was a flying machine: some kind of blimp or zeppelin. Long
seamed ridges of sewn balloon skin supported a skeletal gondola. A thin skein of flexible solar-power disks dotted the craft's skin, dappling over its back, fading to a white underbelly. Long
mooring lines trailed from its nose, like drooping antennae.
They approached cautiously and saw its mooring-ground: a
city.
A gridwork of streets split a checkerboard of white stone
shelters. The houses were marshaled around a looming central
core: a four-sided masonry pyramid. The zeppelin was moored
to the pyramid's apex. The whole city was hemmed in by a high
rectangular wall; outside, agriculture fields glowed a ghastly
white, manured with ashes.
A ceremony was progressing. A pyre blazed at the masonry
plaza at the pyramid's foot. The city's population was drawn up
in ranks. They numbered less than two thousand. Their clothing
was bleached by the infrared glow of their body heat. "What is
it?" said Vera. "Why don't they move?"
"A funeral, I think," Lindsay said.
"What's the pyramid, then? A mausoleum? An indoctrination
center?"
"Both, maybe. . . . Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum has an information line, the only one in the village.
Whoever lives there holds all links to the outside world." Lindsay thought suddenly of the domed stronghold of the Nephrine
Black Medicals in the circumlunar Zaibatsu. He hadn't thought
of it for years, but he remembered the psychic atmosphere
within it, the sense of paranoid isolation, of fanaticism slowly
drifting past the limits through lack of variety. A world gone