Distraction - Bruce Sterling [43]
Oscar was met by Greta’s krewe majordomo, Dr. Albert Gazzaniga. Gazzaniga was the exemplar of what Oscar had come to recognize as “the Collaboratory look,” intense and yet strangely diffuse, like a racquetball player in Lotusland. Gazzaniga spent his working life in clean-room gear, and relaxed outside in rotting sneakers and khaki shorts. Gazzaniga had an eager, honest, backpack-wearing look about him. He was one of the few people in the Collaboratory who identified himself as a Federal Democrat. Most politically active Collaboratory people tended to be tedious, fuzzy Left Tradition Bloc types, party members of the Social Democrats or the Communists. It was rare to find one with enough grit and energy to take a solidly Reformist stance.
“So, what’s become of Dr. Penninger?”
“Oh, you mustn’t be offended, but she’s running a procedure now. She’ll be here when she’s good and done. Believe me, when Greta wants to concentrate, it’s always best to let her be.”
“That’s all right. I quite understand.”
“It’s not that she doesn’t take you seriously, you know. She’s very sympathetic to your situation. We’ve had troubles of our own with extremists. Animal rights people, vivisection nuts.… I know we scientists lead very sheltered lives compared to you politicians, but we’re not entirely out-of-it here.”
“I would never think that, Albert.”
“I feel personally very sorry that you should be subject to this kind of harassment. It’s an honor to help you, really.”
Oscar nodded. “I appreciate that sentiment. It’s good of you to take me in. I’ll try not to get in the way of your labwork.”
Dr. Gazzaniga led him down an aisle past seven bunny-suited workers probing at their jello dishes. “I hope you don’t have the impression that Greta’s lab is a biohazard zone. We never work on anything hot in this lab. We wear this clean-gear strictly to protect our cultures from contamination.”
“I see.”
Gazzaniga shrugged beneath his lint-free labcoat. “That whole gene-technology scare tactic—the giant towers, the catacombs, the airlocks, the huge sealed dome—I guess that made a lot of political sense in the old days, but it was always a naive idea basically, and now it’s very old-fashioned. Except for a few classified military apps, the Collaboratory gave up on survivable bugs ages ago. There’s nothing growing inside the Hot Zone that could hurt you. Genetic engineering is a very stable field of practice now, it’s fifty years old. In terms of bugs, we use only thermo extremophiles. Germs native to volcanic environments. Very efficient, high metabolism, and good industrial turnover, and of course they’re very safe. Their metabolism doesn’t function at all, under 90° C. They live off sulfur and hydrogen, which you’d never find inside any human bloodstream. Plus, all our stocks are double knockouts. So even if you literally bathed in those bugs—well, you might well get scalded, but you’d never risk infection or genetic bleed-over.”
“That sounds very reassuring.”
“Greta’s a professional. She’s a stickler for good lab procedure. No, more than that—the lab is where she really shines personally. She’s very strong in neurocomputational math, don’t get me wrong there—but Greta’s one of the great hands-on lab fiends. She can do stuff with STM probes like nobody else in the world. And if we could just get her hands on some decent thixotropic centrifuges instead of this Stone Age rotor crap, we’d be really kicking ass in here.”
Gazzaniga was on a roll now. He was visibly trembling with passionate commitment. “In publishable papers per man-hour, this is the most productive lab in Buna. We’ve got the talent, and Greta’s lab krewe is second to none. If we could only get proper resources, there’s no telling what we could accomplish here. Neuroscience is really breaking open right now, the same way genetics did forty years ago, or computers forty years before that. The sky’s the limit, really.”
“What is it, exactly, that you’re doing in here?”
“Well,