Distraction - Bruce Sterling [141]
But this was not the strange part. The strange part was that brand-new nomad manufacturers were vigorously infiltrating this jungle of ancient junk. They were creating new, functional objects that were not commercial detritus—they were sinister mimics of commercial detritus, created through new, noncommercial methods. Where there had once been expensive, glossy petrochemicals, there was now chopped straw and paper. Where there had once been employees, there were jobless fanatics with cheap equipment, complex networks, and all the time in the world. Devices once expensive and now commercially worthless were being slowly and creepily replaced by near-identical devices that were similarly noncommercial, and yet brand-new.
A table featuring radio-frequency bugs and taps was doing a bang-up business. A man and woman with towering headdresses and face paint were boldly retailing the whole gamut of the covert-listening industry: bodywires, gooseneck flashlights, wire crimpers, grounding kits, adhesive spongers, dental picks and forceps, and box after box of fingernail-sized audio bugs. Who but nomads, the permanently unemployed, would enjoy the leisure of patiently listening, collating, and trading juicy bits of overheard dialogue? Oscar examined a foam-filled box jammed with hexhead cam wrenches.
“Let’s try this other row,” Greta urged him, eyes bright and hair tousled. “This one’s medical!”
They drifted into a collateral realm of undead commerce. Here, the market tables were crowded with hemostatic forceps, surgical scissors, vascular clamps, resistant heat-sealed plastic gloves from the long-vanished heyday of AIDS. Greta pored, transfixed, over the bone screws, absorption spears, ultracheap South Chinese magnifier spectacles, little poptop canisters of sterile silicone grease.
“I need some cash,” she told him suddenly. “Loan me something.”
“What is with you? You can’t buy this junk. You don’t know where it’s from.”
“That’s why I want to buy it.” She frowned at him. “Look, I was the head of the Instrumentation Department. If they’re giving away protein sequencers, I really need to know about that.”
She approached the table’s owner, who was sitting at his open laptop and chuckling over homemade cartoons. “Hey, mister. How much for this cytometer?”
The hick looked up from his screen. “Is that what that is?”
“Does it work?”
“I dunno. Kinda makes the right noises when you plug it in.”
Pelicanos appeared. He had bought her a secondhand jacket—a gruesome sporty disaster of indestructible black and purple Gore-Tex.
“Thank you, Yosh,” she said, and slipped into the jacket’s baggy entrails. Once she’d snapped the ghastly thing up to her chin, Greta immediately became an integral part of the local landscape. She was passing for normal now, just another poverty-stricken bottom-feed female shopper.
“I wish Sandra were here,” Pelicanos said quietly. “Sandra would enjoy this place. If we weren’t in so much trouble, that is.”
Oscar was too preoccupied for junk shopping. He was worried about Kevin. He was struggling to conjure up a contingency plan in case Kevin failed to make a useful contact, or worse yet, if Kevin simply vanished.
But Greta was picking her way along the tables with heartfelt enthusiasm. She’d transcended all her pains and worries. Scratch a scientist, find a hardware junkie.
But no, it was deeper than that. Greta was in her element. Oscar had a brief intuitive flash of what it would mean to be married to Greta. Choosing equipment was part of her work and work was the core of her being. Domestic life with a dedicated scientist would be crammed full of moments like this. He would be dutifully tagging along to keep her company, and she would be investing all her attention into things that he would never understand. Her relationship with the physical world was of an entirely different order from his own. She loved equipment, but she had no taste. It would be hell to furnish a home with a scientist.