Distraction - Bruce Sterling [212]
“Oh, good Lord.”
“Am I making sense to you here?”
“Oscar, how can I stay? I can’t go on like this, I’m all burned out. I did what I had to do, I can’t say that you used me. But something used me. History used me, and it’s using me all up. Even our affair is used up now.”
“We should do the right thing, Greta, we should declare ourselves. Let’s take a stand together. I want you to marry me.”
She put her head in her hands.
“Look, don’t do that. Listen to me. This can be made to work. It’s doable. In fact, it’s a genius move.”
“Oscar, you don’t love me.”
“I love you as much as I will ever love anyone.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “What a brilliant evasion.”
“You’ll never find another man who’s more attentive to your interests. If you find some other man that you want to marry, leave me for him! I’m not afraid of that happening. It’ll never happen.”
“God, you’re such a beautiful talker.”
“It’s not dishonest. I’m being very honest. I’m making an honest woman of you. I’m finally taking a stand, I’m committing myself. Marriage is a great institution. Marriages are great symbolic theater. Especially a state marriage. It was a war romance, and now it’s a peace marriage, and it’s all very normal and sensible. We’ll make it a festival, we’ll invite the whole world. We’ll exchange rings, we’ll throw rice. We’ll put down roots.”
“We don’t have roots. We’re network people. We have aerials.”
“It’s the right and proper thing to do. It’s necessary. In fact, it’s the only real way that the two of us can move on from here.”
“Oscar, we can’t move on. My marrying you can’t stick a whole community together. Making two people legitimate, that doesn’t make their society legitimate. It’s not a legitimate thing. I’m a war leader, and a strike leader—I was Joan of Arc. Nobody ever elected me. I rule by force and clever propaganda. The real powers here are you and your friend Kevin. And Kevin is like any outlaw who takes power: he’s a scary little brute. He brings me big dossiers, he bullies people and spies on them. I’m sick of all that. It’s turning me into a monster. It can’t go on, it’s not right. There’s no future in it.”
“You’ve been thinking a lot about this, haven’t you?”
“You taught me how to think about it. You taught me how to think politically. You’re a good tactician, Oscar, you’re really clever, you know all about people’s kinks and weaknesses, but you don’t know about their integrity and their strength. You’re not a great strategist. You know all the dirty tricks with go-stones in the corner, but you don’t comprehend the whole board.”
“And you do?”
“Some of it. I know the world well enough that I know that my lab is the best place for me.”
“So you’re giving up?”
“No … I’m just quitting while I’m ahead. Something is going to work here. Something of it will last. But it’s not a whole new world. It’s just a new political system. We can’t close it off in an airtight nest, with me as the Termite Queen. I have to quit, I have to leave. Then maybe this thing will shake down, and pack down, and build something solid, from the bottom up.”
“Maybe we’ll do better than that. Maybe I am a great strategist.”
“Sweetheart, you’re not! You’re streetwise, but you’re young, and you’re not very wise. You can’t become King by marrying your pasteboard Queen, someone you created by marching a pawn down the board. You shouldn’t even want to be King. It’s a lousy job. A situation like this doesn’t need another stupid tyrant with a golden crown, it needs … it needs the founder of a civilization, a saint and a prophet, somebody impossibly wise and selfless and generous. Somebody who can make laws out of chaos, and order out of chaos, and justice out of noise, and meaning out of total distraction.”
“My