Bruce Sterling - Crystal Express

"I was at the head of my class," said the spook, smiling guilelessly. He didn't remember anything about the Amsterdam case. It had all slicked aside, erased by the Veil. The spook looked placidly at a Japanese kakemono wall hanging.

"We here at Replicon don't often enlist the help of your zaibatsery apparat," the chief said. "But our cartel has been allotted a very special operation by the Synthesis coordinating board. Although you're not a member of the Synthesis, your advanced zaibatsery training is crucial to the mission's success."

The spook smiled blandly, waving the toe of his decorated shoe. Talk of loyalties and ideologies bored him. He cared very little about the Synthesis and its ambitious efforts to unite the planet under one cybernetic-economic web.

Even his feelings about his native zaibatseries were not so much "patriotism" as the sort of warm regard that a worm feels for the core of an apple. He waited for the man to come to the point, knowing that his earring computer could replay the conversation if he missed anything.

The chief toyed with an electronic stylus, leaning back in his chair. "It hasn't been easy for us," he said, "facing the ferment of the postindustrial years, watching a relentless brain drain into the orbital factories, while overpopulation and pollution wrecked the planet. Now we find we can't even put the pieces back together without help from your orbiters. You can appreciate our position, I hope."

"Perfectly," said the spook. Using his zaibatsery training and the advantages of the Veil, it wasn't hard at all to put on the man's skin and see through his eyes. He didn't like it much, but it wasn't difficult.

"Things are settling down now, since most of the craziest groups have killed themselves off or emigrated into space. The Earth cannot afford the cultural variety you have in your orbiting city- states. Earth must unite its remaining resources under the Synthesis aegis. The conventional wars are over for good and all. What we face now is a war of states of mind."

The chief began doodling absently with the light pen on a convenient videoscreen. "It's one thing to deal with criminal groups, like the Gill Pirates, and another entirely to confront those, ah, cults and sects who refuse outright to join the Synthesis. Since the population diebacks of the 2000s, large sections of the undeveloped world have gone to seed.... This is especially true of Central America, south of the People's Republic of Mexico. It's there that we face a dissident cult calling itself the Maya Resurgence. We Synthetics are confronting a cultural mind-set, what your apparat, Eugene, would call a paradigm, that is directly opposed to everything that unites the Synthesis. If we can stop this group before it can solidify, all will be well. But if their influence continues to spread, it may provoke militancy among the Synthesis. And if we are forced to resort to arms, our own fragile concordance will come apart at the seams. We can't afford to remilitarize, Eugene. We can't afford those suspicions. We need everything we have left to continue to fight ecological disaster. The seas are still rising."

The spook nodded. "You want me to destabilize them. Make their paradigm untenable. Provoke the kind of cognitive dissonance that will cause them to crumble from within."

"Yes," the chief said. "You are a proven agent. Tear them apart."

The spook said delicately, "If I find it necessary to use interdicted weapons...?"

The chief paled, but set his teeth and said bravely, "Replicon must not be implicated."

It took four days for the small solar-powered zeppelin to float and whir its way from the dikes of Washington, D.C., to the bloated Gulf of Honduras. The spook rode alone, on a sealed flight. He spent most of the trip in a semiparalyzed state, with the constant whisper of his computer taking the place of conscious thought.

At last the zep's programming brought it to a grayish waterlogged section of wave-lapped tropical forest near the dock of New Belize. The spook had himself lowered by cable to a firm patch by the churned-up earth of the docks. He waved cheerily to the crew of a three-masted schooner, who had been disturbed from their afternoon siesta by his almost silent arrival.

It was good to see people again. Four days with only his fragmentary self for company had left the spook antsy and hungry for companionship.

It was suffocatingly hot. Wooden crates of bananas were ripening odoriferously on the dock.

New Belize was a sad little town. Its progenitor, Old Belize, was underwater somewhere miles out in the Caribbean, and New Belize had been hastily cobbled together from leftovers. The center of the town was one of the prefabricated geodomes the Synthesis used for headquarters in its corporate concessions. The rest of the town, even the church, clung to the dome's rim like the huts of villagers around a medieval fortress. When and if the seas rose farther, the dome would move easily, and the native structures would drown with the rest.

Except for its dogs and flies, the town slept. The spook picked his way through the mud to a bumpy street of corduroyed driftwood. An Amerindian woman in a filthy shawl watched him from her butcher's stall beside one of the dome's airlocks. She brushed flies from a suspended pig's carcass with a palm-leaf fan, and as his eyes locked with hers he felt a paradigmatic flash of her numb misery and ignorance, like stepping on an electric eel. It was weird and intense and new, and her stupefied pain meant absolutely nothing to him except for its novelty; in fact, he could barely stop himself from leaping over her dirty counter and embracing her. He wanted to slide his hands up under her long cotton blouse and slip his tongue into her wrinkled mouth; he wanted to get right under her skin and peel it off like a snake's.... Wow! He shook himself and went in through the airlock.

Inside, it smelled of the Synthesis, compressed and tangy like the air in a diving bell. It was not a large dome, but not a lot of room was needed for the modern management of information.

The dome's lower floor was loosely divided into working offices with the usual keyboards, voice decoders, translators, videoscreens, and com channels for satellites and electric mail. The personnel ate and slept upstairs. In this particular station, most of them were Japanese.

The spook mopped sweat from his forehead and asked a secretary in Japanese where he might find Dr. Emilio Flores.

Flores ran a semi-independent health clinic that had slipped suspiciously from Synthetic control. The spook was forced to take a seat in the doctor's waiting room, where he played antique videogames on a battered old display screen.

Flores had an endless clientele of the lame, halt, diseased, and rotting. These Belizeans seemed bewildered by the dome and moved tentatively, as if afraid that they might break the walls or floor. The spook found them intensely interesting. He studied their infirmities -- mostly skin diseases, fevers, and parasitic infestations, with a sprinkling of septic wounds and fractures - - with an analytic eye. He had never before seen people so sick. He tried to charm them with his expertise on the videogames, but they preferred to murmur to one another in English patois or sit huddled and shivering in the air conditioning.

At last the spook was allowed to see the doctor. Flores was a short, balding Hispanic, wearing a physician's traditional white business suit. He looked the spook up and down. "Oh," he said. "Now your illness, young man, is one I have seen before. You want to travel. Into the interior."

"Yes," the spook said. "To Tikal."

"Have a seat." They sat down. Behind Flores's chair a nuclear magnetic resonator sat ticking and blinking to itself. "Let me guess," the doctor said, steepling his fingers. "The world seems like a dead end to you, young man. You couldn't make the grade or get the training to migrate to the zaibatseries. And you can't bear wasting your life cleaning up a world your ancestors ruined. You dread a life under the thumb of huge cartels and corporations that starve your soul to fill their pockets. You long for a simpler life. A life of the spirit."