Distraction - Bruce Sterling [91]
Leon Sosik arrived to escort them. Sosik was a portly man in his sixties with prizefighter’s shoulders, red suspenders, a silk tie. Sosik rarely wore a hat, since he proudly sported a fine head of hair—successfully treated male pattern baldness. He looked Oscar up and down. “How are tricks, Oscar?”
“Tricks are lovely. May I introduce Dr. Greta Penninger. Dr. Penninger, this is Leon Sosik, the Senator’s chief of staff.”
“We’ve heard so much about you, Doctor,” said Sosik, gently gripping Greta’s newly manicured fingertips. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances.”
“How is the Senator?” Oscar said.
“Al has been better,” Sosik said. “Al is taking this hard. Al is taking this very hard.”
“Well, he’s eating, isn’t he?”
“Not so you’d notice.”
Oscar was alarmed. “Look, you announced he was eating. The hunger strike is over now. The guy should be wolfing raw horsemeat. Why the hell isn’t he eating?”
“He says his stomach aches. He says … well, he says a lot of things. I gotta warn you, you can’t take everything Al says as gospel right now.” Sosik sighed heavily. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him. His wife says you’re great at that.” Sosik reached absently into his trouser pocket. “Dr. Penninger, do you mind if I debug you? Normally we’d have our new security guy doing this, but he’s still in Washington.”
“That’s quite all right,” Greta said.
Sosik swept the air around her body like a weary bishop sprinkling holy water. His device registered nothing in particular.
“Debug me too,” Oscar said. “I insist.”
“It’s a hell of a thing,” Sosik said, pursuing the ritual. “We’ve had Al bugged top to bottom for weeks. His nervous system’s bugged, his bloodstream’s bugged, his stomach is bugged, his colon is bugged. He did public MRI scans, he did PET-scans, he drank tagged apple juice—the inside of his carcass was a goddamn public circus. And when we finally got him off all the monitors, that’s when he goes haywire.”
“The hunger strike got great coverage, Leon. I’m giving you that.”
Sosik put the scanner away. “Sure, but what is it with that crazy scumbag in Louisiana? How the hell did that ever get on the agenda? Al is an architect! We could have stuck with public-works issues, and done just fine.”
“You let him talk you into the idea,” Oscar said.
“I knew it was a goofy idea! It’s just … Well, for Al it made sense. Al’s the kind of guy who can get away with that kind of thing.”
Sosik led them up a glass-and-plastic elevator. Bambakias had caused the former fifth floor to cease to exist, leaving a cavernous contemporary hangar with exposed water pipes, airducts, and elevator cabling, all tastefully done-over in tangerine, turquoise, peach, and Prussian blue.
Thirty-five people lived within the offices, Bambakias’s professional krewe. It was both a communal residence and a design center. Sosik led them past ergonomic office chairs, platelike kevlar display tables, and twitching heaps of cybernetic Archiblocks. It was cold outside, so squishy little rivulets of tame steam warmed the bubbled membranes underfoot.
A corner office had been outfitted as a combination media room and medical center. The health monitors were inert now, and lined against a wall, but the screens were alive and silent, flicking methodically over their feeds.
The Senator was lying naked and facedown on a massage table, with a towel across his rump. A krewe masseur was working at his neck and shoulders.
Oscar was shocked. He’d known that the near-total