Free Schismatrix plus by Bruce Sterling Page B

numbered over a thousand. The Bubble could not have held them, except in free-fall. There were light opera-box frameworks for the Bank elite, and a jackstraw complex of padded bracing wires where the audience clung like roosting sparrows.
    Most floated freely. The crowd formed a percolating mass of loose concentric spheres. Broad tunnels had opened spontaneously in the mass of bodies, following the complex kinesics of crowd flow. There was a constant excited murmur in a flurry of differing argots.
    The play began. Lindsay watched the crowd. Brief shoving matches broke out during the first fanfare, but by the time the dialogue started the crowd had settled. Lindsay was thankful for that. He missed his usual bodyguard of Fortuna pirates.
    The pirates had finished their obligations to him and were busy preparing their ship for departure. Lindsay, though, felt safe in his anonymity. If the play failed disastrously, he would simply be one sundog among others. If it went well, he could change in time to accept the applause. In the first abduction scene, pirates kidnapped the young and beautiful weapons genius, played by one of Kitsune's best. The audience screamed in delight at the puffs of artificial smoke and bright free-fall gushes of fake blood.
    Lexicon computers throughout the Bubble translated the script into a dozen tongues and dialects. It seemed unlikely that this polyglot crowd could grasp the dialogue. To Lindsay it sounded like naive mush, mangled by mistranslation. But they listened raptly.
    After an hour, the first three acts were over. A long intermission followed, in which the central stage was darkened. Rude claques had formed spontaneously for the cast members, as pirate groups shouted for their own. Lindsay's nose stung. The air inside the Bubble had been supercharged with oxygen, to give the crowd a hyperventilated elan. Despite himself, Lindsay too felt elation. The hoarse shouts of enthusiasm were contagious. The situation was moving with its own dynamics. It was out of his hands. Lindsay drifted toward the Bubble's walls, where some enterprising oxygen farmers had set up a concessions stand.
    The farmers, clinging awkwardly to footloops on the Bubble's frame, were doing a brisk business. They sold their own native delicacies: anonymous green patties fried up crisp, and white blobby cubes on a stick, piping hot from the microwave. Kabuki Intrasolar took a cut, since the food stands were Lindsay's idea. The farmers paid happily in Kabuki stock.
    Lindsay had been careful with the stock. He had meant at first to inflate it past all measure and thereby ruin the Black Medicals. But the miraculous power of paper money had seduced him. He had waited too long, and the Black Medicals had sold their stock to outside investors, at an irresistible profit.
    Now the Black Medicals were safe from him—and grateful. They sincerely respected him and nagged him constantly for further tips on the market. Everyone was happy. He foresaw a long run for the play. After that, Lindsay thought, there would be other schemes, bigger and better ones. This aimless sundog world was perfect for him. It only asked that he never stop, never look back, never look farther forward than the next swindle. Kitsune would see to that. He glanced at her opera box and saw her floating with carnivorous meekness behind the Bank's senior officers, her dupes. She would not allow him any doubts or regrets. He felt obscurely glad for it. With her limitless ambition to drive him, he could avoid his own conflicts.
    They had the world in their pocket. But below his giddy sense of triumph a faint persistent pain roiled through him. He knew that Kitsune was simply and purely relentless. But Lindsay had a fault line through him, an aching seam where his training met his other self. Now, at his finest moment, when he wanted to relax and feel an honest joy, it came up tainted. All around him the crowd was exulting. Yet something within him made him shrink from