Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [101]
Lindsay yanked the cord from the tablet. He helped the small office servo pick up the shards of glass.
When he called Morrissey in again, much later, the man was diffident.
"Are you quite through, sir? I've been instructed to erase the tablet."
"It was kind of you to bring it." Lindsay gestured at a chair. "Thank you for waiting so long."
Morrissey wiped the construct's memory and put the tablet in his briefcase. He studied Lindsay's face. "I hope I haven't brought bad news."
"It's astonishing," Lindsay said. "Maybe we should have a drink to celebrate."
A shadow crossed Morrissey's face.
"Forgive me," Lindsay said. "Perhaps I was tactless." He put the bottle away. There was not much left.
"I'm sixty years old," Morrissey said. He sat uncomfortably. "So they ousted me. They were polite about it." He smiled painfully. "I was a Preservationist once. I was eighteen in the first Revolution. It's ironic, isn't it? Now I'm a sundog."
Lindsay said carefully, "I'm not without power here. And not without funds. Dembowska handles many refugees. I can find you room."
"You're very kind." Morrissey's face was stiff. "I worked as a biologist, on the nation's ecological troubles. Dr. Constantine trained me. But I'm afraid I'm very much behind the times."
"That can be remedied."
"I've brought an article for your Journal."
"Ah. You have an interest in Investors, Dr. Morrissey?"
"Yes. I hope my piece meets your standards."
Lindsay forced a smile. "We'll work on it together."
Chapter 7
SHIMMERS UNION COUNCIL STATE: 13-5-'75
He could feel it coming on, creeping across the back of his head in a zone of quivering subepidermal tightness. A fugue state. The scene before him trembled slightly, the crowds below his private box blurring in a frieze of packed heads against dark finery, the rounded stage with actors in costume, dark red, gleaming, a gesture. It slowed—it froze:
Fear ... no, not even that, exactly ... a certain sadness now that the die was cast. The waiting was the hell of it... He had waited sixty years to resume his old contacts, the wirehead Radical Old of the Republic.... Now the wire-head leaders, like him, had worked their way to power in the worlds outside. Sixty years was nothing to a mind on the wires ... time meant nothing
... fugue states. . . . They still remembered him quite well, their friend, Philip Khouri Constantine. . . .
It was he who had sprung them loose, purging the middle-aged aristocrats to finance the wirehead defections.. . . Memories went back; they were data, that was all, just as fresh on reels somewhere as the enemy Margaret Juliano was on her bed of Cataclyst ice... . Even amid fugue the surge of satisfaction was quick and sharp enough to penetrate into consciousness from his back-brain. . .. That unique sense of warmth that came only from the downfall of a rival....
Now, trailing sluggishly behind his racing thoughts, the slow-motion blooming of a light tingle of fear. . . . Nora Everett, the wife of Abelard Mavrides.... She had hurt him seventeen years ago with the coup in the Republic, though he was able to entangle her in charges of treason. . . . The tinpot Republic was of no concern to him now, its willfully ignorant child-citizens flying kites and eating apples under the crazed charlatan gaze of Dr. Pong-pianskul.... No problem there, the future would ignore them, they were living fossils, harmless in themselves....
But the Cataclysts ... the fear was resolving itself now, beginning to flower, its first dim shades of backbrain unease taking on emotional substance now, uncoiling through his consciousness like a drop of ink streaming into a glass of water.... He would see to his emotions later when the fugue was over; now he was struggling to shut his eyes ... focus was lost, dim tear-blur over frozen performers; his eyelids were dropping with nightmare sluggishness, nerve impulses