Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  Curiosity got the best of him. “Why did you come here at this time of night?”

  Dr. Penninger straightened, her trowel clutched in her dotted glove. “This is my only free time. I’m always in my lab till midnight.”

  “I see. Well, I really appreciate your visit. You’re a very good worker. Thanks for the help.”

  “You’re welcome.” She glanced at him searchingly across the airy pool of glare. It might have been a piquant glance if he had found her attractive.

  “You should visit us in daylight, when we have the full krewe at work. It’s the coordination of elements, the teamwork, that’s the key to distributed instantiation. The structure simply flies up all at once sometimes, as if it were crystallizing. That’s well worth watching.”

  She touched her gloved hand to her chin and examined the block wall. “Shouldn’t we do some plumbing now?”

  Oscar was surprised. “How long have you been watching me?”

  Her shoulders lifted briefly within the baggy jacket. “The plumbing is obvious.” Oscar realized that he had disappointed her. She had hoped that he was smarter than that.

  “Time for a break,” he announced. Oscar knew that he lacked the searingly high IQ of Greta Penninger. He’d examined her career stats—of course—and Dr. Greta Penninger had always been a compulsive, overachieving, first-in-her-class techie swot. Still, there was more than one kind of smarts in the world. He felt quite sure he could distract her if he simply kept changing the subject.

  He walked inside the jagged circuit of raw cinder-block walls, where a fire burned in an old iron barrel under a spread of plastic awning. His back hurt like a toothache. He had really overdone it. “Cajun beef jerky? The krewe really dotes on this stuff.”

  “Sure. Why not.”

  Oscar handed over a strip of lethally spiced meat, and ripped into another blackened chunk with his teeth. He waved one hand. “The site looks very chaotic now, but try to imagine this all assembled and complete.”

  “Yes, I can visualize that…I never realized your hotel was going to be so elegant. I thought it was prefabricated.”

  “Oh, it is prefabricated. But the plans are always adjusted by the system to fit the exact specifics of the site. So the final structure is always an original. That pile of cantilevers there, those will go over the porte cochere…The patio will be here where we’re standing, and just beyond that entrance loggia is the pergola…Those long dual wings have the guest rooms and the diner, while the upper floor has our library, the various balconies, and the conservatory.” Oscar smiled. “So, when we’re all finished, I hope you’ll visit us here. Rent a suite. Stay awhile. Have a nice dinner.”

  “I doubt I can afford that.” Clouded and moody.

  What on earth was the woman up to? In the blue-lit gloom, Dr. Penninger’s wide-set, chocolate-drop eyes seemed to be two different sizes…but surely that was just some weird illusion, something about her unplucked brows, and the visible tension wrinkling her eyelids. She had a big squarish chin, a protruding, oddly dimpled, and elaborate upper lip. No lipstick. Small, slanted, nibbling teeth. A long, cartilaginous neck, and the look of a woman who had not witnessed real sunlight in six years. She looked really and genuinely peculiar, a sui generis personage. A close examination didn’t make the woman any less odd. It made her more so.

  “But you’ll be my personal guest,” he told her. “Because I’m inviting you now.”

  That worked. Something clicked over in Dr. Penninger’s wool-hatted head. Suddenly he had her entire and focused attention. “Why did you send me those flowers?”

  “Buna’s a city for flowers. After sitting through those committee meetings, I knew you must need a bouquet.” Red poppies, parsley, and mistletoe—he presumed she knew the flower code. Perhaps she was so hopelessly detached from mainstream society that she couldn’t even read a flower code. Well, if she didn’t, no great harm done. It had been a very witty message, but maybe it was just as well if it were lost on her.

  “Why do you send me those mail notes with all those questions?” Dr. Penninger persisted gamely.

  Oscar put aside his peppered stub of jerky and spread his gloved hands. “I needed some answers. I’ve been studying you, during those long board meetings. I’ve really come to appreciate you. You’re the only member of that board who can stick to the point.”

  She examined the dead grass at her feet. “They’re really incredibly boring meetings, aren’t they?”

  “Well, yes, they are.” He smiled gamely. “Present company excepted.”

  “They’re bad meetings. They’re really bad. They’re awful. I hate administration. I hate everything about it.” She looked up, her odd face congealing with distaste. “I sit there listening to them drone, and I can feel my life just ticking away.”

  “Mmmhmm!” Oscar deftly poured two cups from a battered cooler. “Here, let’s enjoy this sports-performance pseudo-lemon concoction.” He dragged a folded tarp near to the fire barrel, careful not to scorch himself. He sat.

  Dr. Penninger collapsed heedlessly to earth in a sharp sprawl of kneecaps. “I can’t even think properly anymore. They don’t let me think. I try to stay alert during those meetings, but it’s just impossible. They won’t let me get anything accomplished.” She sipped cautiously at the yellow swill in her biodegradable cup, then put the cup on the grass. “Lord knows I’ve tried.”

  “Why did they put you into administration in the first place?”

  “Oh,” she groaned, “a slot opened up on the board. The guy running Instrumentation had to resign, after Senator Dougal cracked up…The board asked for me by name because of the Nobel award nonsense, and the neuro krewe told me I should take the post. We do need the labware. They nickel and dime us to death on equipment, they just don’t understand our requirements. They don’t even want to understand us.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve noticed that the bookkeeping at the Collaboratory is not in standard federal formats. There seem to have been some irregularities in supply.”

  “Oh, that’s not the half of it,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Oscar leaned forward slowly on his folded tarp. “What is the half of it?”

  “I just can’t tell you,” she said, morosely hugging her shins. “Because I don’t know why you want to know that. Or what you’d do about it, if you knew.”

  “All right,” Oscar said, sitting back deliberately. “That answer makes sense. You’re being very cautious and proper. I’m sure I’d feel much the same about it, if I were in your position.” He stood up.

  The plumbing pipes were made of a laminated polyvinyl the color of dried kelp. They had been computed and built in Boston to specifically fit this structure, and they were of a Chinese-jigsaw complexity that only a dedicated subroutine could fully understand.

  “You have real talent with the mortar, but this plumbing is serious work,” Oscar said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you gave up and left now.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I don’t have to hit the lab until seven AM.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “No, I just don’t sleep much. Maybe three hours a night.”

  “How odd. I never sleep much, either.” He knelt at the side of the plumbing case. She alertly handed him a nearby pair of snips, slapping them into his gloved hand, handle first.

  “Thank you.” He snapped through three black plastic packing bands. “I’m glad you came here tonight. I was rather wasting my time working alone on a group project like this. But it’s therapeutic for me.” He pried up the lid of the case and threw it aside. “You see, I’ve always had a rather difficult professional life.”

  “That’s not what your record shows.” She was hugging her jacketed arms. The wool hat had slipped down on her forehead.

  “Oh, I suppose you’ve run some searches on me, then.”

  “I’m very inquisitive.” She paused.

  “That’s all right, everybody does
that sort of thing nowadays. I’ve been a celebrity since I was a little kid. I’m well documented, I’m used to it.” He smiled sourly. “Though you can’t get the full flavor of my delightful personality from some casual scan of the net.”

  “If I were casual about this, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  Oscar looked up in surprise. She stared back boldly. She’d done all this on purpose. She had her own agenda. She’d plotted it all out on graph paper, beforehand.

  “Do you know why I’m out here in the middle of the night tonight, Dr. Penninger? It’s because my girlfriend just left me.”

  She pondered this. Wheels spun in her head so quickly that he could almost hear them sizzle. “Really,” she said slowly. “That’s a shame.”

  “She’s left our house in Boston, she’s walked out on me. She’s gone to Holland.”

  Her brows rose under the rim of the woolly hat. “Your girlfriend has defected to the Dutch?”

  “No, not defected! She left on assignment, she’s a political journalist. But she’s gone anyway.” He gazed at the elaborate nest of convoluted plumbing. “It’s been a blow, it’s really upset me.”

  The sight of all that joinery and tubing, complex and gleaming in its tatty plastic straw, filled Oscar with a sudden evil rush of authentic Sartrean nausea. He climbed to his feet. “You know something? It was all my fault. I can admit that. I neglected her. We had two separate careers…She was fine on that East Coast glitterati circuit; we made a good couple while we had some common interests…” He stopped and gauged her reaction. “Should I be burdening you with any of this?”

  “Why not? I can understand that. Sometimes these things just don’t work out. Romance in the sciences…‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’” She shook her head.

  “I know that you’re not married. You’re not seeing anyone?”

  “Nothing steady. I’m a workaholic.”

  Oscar found this encouraging news. He felt instinctive camaraderie for any ambitious obsessive. “Tell me something, Greta. Do I seem like a frightening person to you?” He touched his chest. “Am I scary? Be frank.”

  “You really want me to be frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “People always tell me that I’m much too frank.”

  “Go ahead, I can take it.”

  She lifted her chin. “Yes, you’re very scary. People are extremely suspicious of you. No one knows what you really want from us, or what you’re doing in our lab. We all expect the very worst.”

  He nodded sagely. “You see, that’s a perception problem. I do turn up for your board meetings, and I’ve brought a little entourage with me, so rumors start. But in reality, I shouldn’t be scary—because I’m just not very significant. I’m only a Senate staffer.”

  “I’ve been to Senate hearings. And I’ve heard about others. Senate hearings can be pretty rough.”

  He edged closer to her. “All right—sure, there might be some hard questions asked in Washington someday. But it won’t be me asking those questions. I just write briefing papers.”

  She was entirely unconvinced. “What about that big Air Force scandal in Louisiana? Didn’t you have a lot to do with all that?”

  “What, that? That’s just politics! People claim that I influence the Senator-elect—but the influence goes all the other way, really. Until I met Alcott Bambakias, I was just a city council activist. The Senator’s the man with the ideas and the message. I was just his campaign technician.”

  “Hmmm. I know a lot of technicians. I don’t know many technicians who are multimillionaires, like you are.”

  “Oh, well, that…Yes, I’m well-to-do, but compared to what my father made in his heyday, or the Senator’s fortune…I do have money, but I wouldn’t call that serious money. I know people with serious money, and I’m just not in their league.” Oscar hefted a long green tube from the packing case, examined its crooks and angles mournfully, and set it back down. “The wind’s picking up…I don’t have the heart for this anymore. I think I’ll walk back to the dome. Maybe somebody’s still up in the dorm. We’ll play some poker.”

  “I have a car,” she said.

  “Really.”

  “You get a car, when you’re on the Collaboratory board. So I drove here. I can give you a ride back to the lab.”

  “That would be lovely. Just let me stow the gear and shut down the system.” He took off his hard hat and kneepads. He shed his padded construction jacket, and stood there hatless in a long-sleeved shirt; the cold wind ripped into the damp at his armpits. When he was done, he set the alarms and they left the site together.

  He stopped at the sidewalk. “Wait a moment.”

  “What is it?”

  “We seem to be chatting along pretty well here. But your car may be bugged.”

  She brushed her windblown hair back, skeptically. “Why would anyone bug me?”

  “Because it’s so cheap and easy. So tell me something just now, before we get into your car. Tell me something very frankly. Do you know about my personal background problem?”

  “Your background? I know that your father was a movie star…”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that matter up. Really, I’m being completely impossible tonight. It was really good of you to visit the site tonight, but I’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. I shouldn’t bother you with any of this. You’re on the board of directors, and I’m a federal official…Listen, if our personal circumstances were different…And if either of us really had time for our personal problems…”

  She stood there shivering. She was tall and thin and no longer used to real weather; she had worked hard in the dark and cold, and she was freezing. The night wind rose harshly and tore at his sleeves. He felt strangely drawn to her now. She was too tall, she was too thin, she had bad clothes, an odd face, and poor posture, she was eight years older than he was. They had nothing in common as people, any relationship they might establish was clearly doomed from the outset. Relating to her was like coaxing some rare animal on the other side of a woven-wire fence. Maybe that was why he felt such a compelling urge to touch her. “Doctor, I appreciate your company tonight, but I think you’d better go on ahead in your car now. We’ll be in touch later about the board meetings. I still have a lot to learn.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to just drive off alone after that. Now I have to know. Get in the car.”

  She opened the door and they jammed themselves together. It was a meager little car, a Collaboratory car, and naturally it had no heater. Their chilling breath began to smear the windows.

  “I really don’t think you want to know about this. It’s a rather strange story. It’s bad. Worse than you expect.”

  She adjusted her woolen hat, and blew on her bare fingers. “They never put heaters in these things. Because you’re never supposed to drive them outside the dome. It’ll warm up in a minute. Why don’t you just tell me whatever you think you can tell me. Then I’ll decide if I want to know more.”

  “All right.” He hesitated. “Well, to begin with, I’m an adopted child. Logan Valparaiso was not my biological father.”

  “No?”

  “No, he didn’t adopt me until I was almost three. You see, at the time, Logan was working on an international thriller movie about evil adoption farms. Adoption mills. They were a big scandal during that period. The full scale of the hormone pesticide disasters was becoming common knowledge. There were major male-infertility problems. So, the adoption market really boomed. Infertility clinics too, obviously. The demand-pull was suddenly huge, so a lot of unsavory people, quacks, exploiters, health-fad people, they all rushed in to exploit it…”

  “I can remember that time.”

  “Suddenly there was a lot of offshore baby-farming, embryo-farming. People were taking extreme measures. It made a pretty good topic for an action film. So, my dad cast himself as a vigilante law-and-order guerrilla. He played the role of a two-fisted Chicano abortion-clinic bomber, who gets turne
d by the feds, and becomes a secret-agent embryo-farm demolisher…”

  Whenever he told this story, he could hear his voice shift into a hateful, high-pitched whine. And it was happening now, even as the car’s windows began to steam. He was sliding helplessly from his standard fast-talk into something much more extreme, a kind of chronic gabbling jabber. He would really have to watch that. He was watching it, he was watching it as well as he could, but he just couldn’t help himself. “I don’t mean to go on and on about the movie, but I did have to watch that film about four hundred times as a kid…Plus all the rushes and the outtakes…Anyway, Logan was Method acting deep into the role, and he and wife number three had a solid relationship at the time, as Logan’s marriages went, that is. So he decided that as a kind of combination personal-growth move and film-related publicity stunt, he was going to adopt a real victim child from a real embryo mill.”

  She listened silently.

  “Well, that kid was me. My original egg cell was a product sold on the infertility black market, and it ended up in a Colombian embryo mill. It was a mafia operation, so they were buying or stealing human eggs, fertilizing them, and offering them at a black-market rate for implantation. But there were quality problems. With resultant health problems for the female buyers. Not to mention the lawsuits and ethics hassles if somebody ratted them out. So the crooks started developing the product inside hired wombs, for a somewhat more standard, post-birth adoption…But that business plan didn’t work out either. The rent-a-womb thing was just too slow a process, and they had too many local women involved who might rat them out, or shake them down, or get upset about surrendering the product after term. So then they decided they would try to grow the embryos to term in vitro. They got a bunch of support vats together, but they weren’t very good at it, because by this point, they’d already lost most of their working capital. Still, they got their hands on enough mammal-cloning data to give the artificial-womb thing a serious try with human beings. So I was never actually born, per se.”