Schismatrix plus by Bruce Sterling

vault, being scrubbed by impassive bathboys. It was the first real bath the pirates had had in months. Their scrawny bodies were knobbed with muscle from constant practice in free-fall jujutsu. Their sweating skins were bright with fearsome tattoos and septic rashes.
    Lindsay did not join them. He stepped into a paneled dressing room and handed over his Nephrine Medicals uniform to be cleaned and pressed. He slipped into a soft brown kimono. A low-ranking male geisha in kimono and obi approached him. "Your pleasure, sir?"
    "I'd like a word with the yarite, please."
    The geisha looked at him with well-bred skepticism. "One moment. I will ask if our chief executive officer is prepared to accept guests." He vanished. After half an hour a blonde female geisha in business suit and obi appeared. "Mr. Dze? This way, please."
    He followed her to an elevator guarded by two men armed with electrode-studded clubs. The guards were giants; his head barely came to their elbows. Their long, stony faces were acromegalic: swollen jaws, clifflike jutting cheekbones. They had been treated with hormonal growth factors. The elevator surged up three floors and opened.
    Lindsay faced a thick network of brightly colored beads. Thousands of dangling, beaded wires hung from floor to ceiling. Any movement would disturb them.
    "Take my hand," the banker said. Lindsay shuffled behind her, thrashing and clattering. "Step carefully," she said. "There are traps." Lindsay closed his eyes and followed. His guide stopped; a hidden door opened in a mirrored wall. Lindsay stepped through it, into the yarite's private chamber.
    The floor was of ancient wood, waxed to a dark gleam. There were flat square cushions underfoot, in patterns of printed bamboo. In the long wall to Lindsay's left, glass double-doors showed a sunlit wooden balcony and a splendid garden, where crooked pines and tall japonicas arched over curving paths of raked white pebbles. The air in the room smelled of evergreen. He was gazing on this world before its rot, an image of the past, projected on false doors that could never open.
    The yarite was sitting cross-legged on a cushion. She was a wizened old Mech with a tight-drawn mouth and hooded, reptilian eyes. Her wrinkled head was encased in a helmetlike lacquered wig, skewered with pins. She wore an angular flowered kimono supported by starch and struts. There was room in it for three of her.
    A second woman knelt silently with her back to the right-hand wall, facing the garden's image. Lindsay knew at once that she was a Shaper. Her startling beauty alone was proof, but she had that strange, intangible air of charisma that spread from the Reshaped like a magnetic field. She was of mixed Asiatic-African gene stock: her eyes were tilted, but her skin was dark. Her hair was long and faintly kinked. She knelt before a rack of white keyboards with an air of meek devotion.
    The yarite spoke without moving her head. "Your duties, Kitsune." The girl's hands darted over the keyboards and the air was filled with the tones of that most ancient of Japanese instruments: the synthesizer. Lindsay knelt on a cushion, facing the old woman. A tea tray rolled to his side and poured hot water into a cup with a chaste tinkling sound. It dipped a rotary tea whisk into the cup.
    "Your pirate friends," the old woman said, "are about to bankrupt you."
    "It's only money," Lindsay said.
    "It is our sweat and sexuality. Did you think it would please us to squander it?"
    "I needed your attention," Lindsay said. His training had seized him at once, but he was still afraid of the girl. He hadn't known he would be facing a Shaper. And there was something drastically wrong with the old woman's ki-nesics. It looked like drugs or Mechanist nerve alteration.
    "You came here dressed as a Nephrine Black Medical," the old woman said.
    "Our attention was guaranteed. You have it. We are listening." With Ryumin's help, Lindsay had expanded his plans. The Geisha Bank had the power to