Distraction - Bruce Sterling [214]
“She said it was your gift. Because it smells of roses.” She patted the box, and then looked up in pain and bewilderment, and a dawning and terrible knowledge. “Oh, sweetheart, I thought you knew. I thought you knew everything.”
The Collaboratory was, by design, equipped to deal with biological contamination. They had to shut down the entire Administration building. The gas from the booby-trapped air filter was of particularly ingenious design, micronized particles the size and shape of ragweed pollen. The particles stuck to the nasal tract like a painless snort of cocaine, whereupon their contents leaked through the blood-brain barrier, and did mysterious and witchy things.
Oscar and Greta, having wearily crammed themselves into decontamination suits, were carried red-faced and stumbling to the Hot Zone’s clinic. There they were ritually scrubbed down, and subjected to gingerly examination. The good news was immediate: they were not dying. The bad news took longer to arrive. Their blood pressure was up, their faces were congested, their gait and posture were affected, they were suffering odd speech disabilities. Their PET-scans were exhibiting highly abnormal loci of cognitive processing, two wandering hot blobs where a normal human being would have just one. The primal rhythm of their brain waves had a distinct backbeat.
Oscar had been slowly and gently poisoned as he was making the speech of his life. This foul realization sent him into a towering animal rage. This reaction revealed yet another remarkable quality of his poisoned brain. He could literally think of two things at once; but it stretched him so thin that he had very little impulse control.
A nurse suggested a sedative. Oscar cordially agreed that he was feeling a bit hyperactive, and accented this by screaming personal insults and repeatedly kicking the wall. This behavior produced a sedative in short order. Dual unconsciousness resulted.
By noon, Oscar was conscious again, feeling sluggish yet simultaneously hair-trigger. He paid a visit to Greta, in her separate decontamination cell. Greta had passed a quiet night. She was now sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, legs folded, hands in her lap, staring straight into space. She didn’t speak, she didn’t even see him. She was wide-awake and indescribably, internally busy.
A nurse stood guard for him, while Oscar stared at her with bittersweet mélange. Bitter; sweet; bitter / sweet: bittersweet. She was exalted, silent, full of carnivorous insight: Greta had never looked more like herself. It would have been a profanation to touch her.
Accompanied by his nurse, Oscar tottered back to his cell. He wondered how the effect felt for Greta. It seemed to hit people differently. Maybe there were as many ways to think doubly as there were to think singly.
When he closed his eyes, Oscar could actually feel the sensation, somatically. It was as if his overtight skull had a pair of bladders stuffed inside, liquid and squashy, like a pair of nested yin-yangs. One focus of attention was somehow in “the front” and the other in “the back,” and when the one to the front revolved into direct consciousness, the other slipped behind it. And the blobs had little living eyes inside them. Eyes that held the nascent core of other streams of consciousness. Like living icons, awaiting a mental touch to launch into full awareness.
Kevin stepped into the cell. Oscar heard him limping, was fully aware of his presence; it took a strange little moment to realize that he should take the trouble to open his eyes and look.
“Thank God you’re here!” he blurted.
“That’s what I like,” Kevin said, blinking. “Enthusiasm.”
With an effort, Oscar said nothing. He could restrain his urge to blurt his thoughts aloud, if he really put his mind to it. All he had to do was press his tongue against the roof of