Antibiotics would have cured him, but sooner or later his body
would have to come to terms with its new flora. To pass the
time between spasms, Ryumin entertained him with local anecdotes and gossip. It was a complex and depressing history,
littered with betrayals, small-scale rivalries, and pointless power
games.
The algae farmers were the Zaibatsu's most numerous faction,
glum fanatics, clannish and ignorant, who were rumored to
practice cannibalism. Next came the mathematicians, a proto-Shaper breakaway group that spent most of its time wrapped in
speculation about the nature of infinite sets. The Zaibatsu's
smallest domes were held by a profusion of pirates and privateers: the Hermes Breakaways, the Gray Torus Radicals, the
Grand Megalics, the Soyuz Eclectics, and others, who changed
names and personnel as easily as they cut a throat. They feuded
constantly, but none dared challenge the Nephrine Black
Medicals or the Geisha Bank. Attempts had been made in the
past. There were appalling legends about them.
The people beyond the Wall had their own wildly varying
mythos. They were said to live in a jungle of overgrown pines
and mimosas. They were hideously inbred and afflicted with
double thumbs and congenital deafness.
Others claimed there was nothing remotely human beyond the
Walclass="underline" just a proliferating cluster of software, which had acquired
a sinister autonomy.
It was, of course, possible that the land beyond the Wall had
been secretly invaded and conquered by-aliens. An entire
postindustrial folklore had sprung up around this enthralling
concept, buttressed with ingenious arguments. Everyone expect-
ed aliens sooner or later. It was the modern version of the
Millennium.
Ryumin was patient with him; while Lindsay slept feverishly,
he patrolled the Zaibatsu with his camera robot, looking for
news. Lindsay turned the corner on his illness. He kept down
some soup and a few fried bricks of spiced protein.
One of Ryumin's stacks of equipment began to chime with a
piercingly clear electronic bleeping. Ryumin looked up from
where he sat sorting cassettes. "That's the radar," he said.
"Hand me that headset, will you?"
Lindsay crawled to the radar stack and untangled a set of
Ryumin's adhesive eyephones. Ryumin clamped them to his
temples. "Not much resolution on radar," he said, closing his
eyes. "A crowd has just arrived. Pirates, most likely. They're
milling about on the landing pad."
He squinted, though his eyes were already shut. "Something
very large is moving about with them. They've brought some-
thing huge. I'd better switch to telephoto." He yanked the
headset's cord and its plug snapped free.
"I'm going outside for a look," Lindsay said. "I'm well
enough."
"Wire yourself up first," Ryumin said. "Take that earset and
one of the cameras."
Lindsay attached the auxiliary system and stepped outside the
zippered airlock into the curdled air.
He backed away from Ryumin's dome toward the rim of the
land panel. He turned and trotted to a nearby stile, which led
over the low metal wall, and trained his camera upward.
"That's good," came Ryumin's voice in his ear. "Cut in the
brightness amps, will you? That little button on the right. Yes,
that's better. What do you make of it, Mr. Dze?"
Lindsay squinted through the lens. Far above, at the northern
end of the Zaibatsu's axis, a dozen sundogs were wrestling in
free-fall with a huge silver bag.
"It looks like a tent," Lindsay said. "They're inflating it." The
silver bag wrinkled and tumesced suddenly, revealing itself as a
blunt cylinder. On its side was a large red stencil as wide as a
man was tall. It was a red skull with two crossed lightning bolts.
"Pirates!" Lindsay said.
Ryumin chuckled. "I thought as much."
A sharp gust of wind struck Lindsay. He lost his balance on
the stile and looked behind him suddenly. The glass window
strip formed a long white alley of decay. The hexagonal
metaglass frets were speckled with dark plugs, jackstrawed here
and there with heavy reinforcement struts. Leaks had been
sprayed with airtight coats of thick plastic. Sunlight oozed sullenly through the gaps.
"Are you all right?" Ryumin said.
"Sorry," Lindsay said. He tilted the camera upward again.
The pirates had gotten their foil balloon airborne and had
turned on its pair of small pusher-propellers. As it drifted away
from the landing pad, it jerked once, then surged forward. It
was towing something-an oddly shaped dark lump larger than
a man.
"It's a meteorite," Ryumin told him. "A gift for the people
beyond the Wall. Did you see the dark rocks that stand in the
Sterilized Zone? They're all gifts from pirates. It's become a
tradition."
"Wouldn't it be easier to carry it along the ground?"
"Are you joking? It's death to set foot in the Sterilized Zone."
"I see. So they're forced to drop it from the air. Do you
recognize these pirates?"
"No," Ryumin said. "They're new here. That's why they need
the rock."
"Someone seems to know them," Lindsay said. "Look at that."
He focused the camera to look past the airborne pirates to the
sloping gray-brown surface of the Zaibatsu's third land panel.
Most of this third panel was a bleak expanse of fuzz-choked
mud, with surging coils of yellowish ground fog.
Near the third panel's blasted northern suburbs was a squat,
varicolored dome, built of jigsawed chunks of salvaged ceramic
and plastic. A foreshortened, antlike crowd of sundogs had
emerged from the dome's airlock. They stared upward, their
faces hidden by filter masks. They had dragged out a large
crude machine of metal and plastic, fitted with pinions, levers,
and cables. They jacked the machine upward until one end of it
pointed into the sky.
"What are they doing?" Lindsay said.
"Who knows?" Ryumin said. "That's the Eighth Orbital Army,
or so they call themselves. They've been hermits up till now."
The airship passed overhead, casting blurred shadows onto all
three land panels. One of the sundogs triggered the machine.
A long metal harpoon flicked upward and struck home. Lind-
say saw metal foil rupture in the airship's tail section. The
javelin gleamed crazily as it whirled end over end, its flight
disrupted by the collision and the curve of Coriolis force. The
metal bolt vanished into the filthy trees of a ruined orchard.
The airship was in trouble. Its crew kicked and thrashed in
midair, struggling to force their collapsing balloon away from
the ground attackers. The massive stone they were towing continued its course withweightless, serene inertia. As its towline grew tight, it slowly tore off the airship's tail. With a whoosh of gas, the airship crumpled into a twisted metal rag. The engines fell, tugging the metal foil behind them in a rippling streamer.
The pirates thrashed as if drowning, struggling to stay within
the zone of weightlessness. Their plight was desperate, since the
zone was riddled with slow, sucking downdrafts that could send
fliers tumbling to their deaths.
The rock blundered into the rippling edge of a swollen
cloudbank. The dark mass veered majestically downward, wobbling a bit, and vanished into the mist. Moments later it
reappeared below the cloud, plummeting downward in a vicious
Coriolis arc.
It slammed into the glass and patchwork of the window strip.
Lindsay, following it with his camera, heard the sullen crunch of
impact. Glass and metal grated and burst free in a sucking roar.