Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [181]
I said offhandedly, "I've heard talk that she's not happy. It seems these rumors spread, and they raise her Percentage for a while and panel a new room with jewels, and then the rumors fade."
"That's true.... She and our sweet Valery are two of a kind where these dark moods are concerned. It's clear, though, that the Comptroller was left no choice but suicide. And that means disaster is stirring at the heart of C-K."
"It's only rumors," I said. "The Queen is the heart of C-K, and who knows what's going on in that huge head of hers?"
"Wellspring would know," Arkadya said intently.
"But he's not an Adviser," I said. "As far as the Queen's inner circle is concerned, he's little better than a pirate."
"Tell me what you saw in Topaz Discreet."
"You'll have to allow me some time," I said. "It's rather painful." I wondered what I should tell her, and what she was willing to believe. The silence began to stretch.
I put on a tape of Terran sea sounds. The room began to surge ominously with the roar of alien surf.
"I wasn't ready for it," I said. "In my creche we were taught to guard our feelings from childhood. I know how the Clique feels about distance. But that kind of raw intimacy, from a woman I really scarcely know—especially under that night's circumstances—it wounded me." I looked searchingly into Arkadya's face, longing to reach through her to Valery. "Once it was over, we were further apart than ever."
Arkadya tilted her head to the side and winced. "Who composed this?"
"What? You mean the music? It's a background tape—sea sounds from Earth. It's a couple of centuries old."
She looked at me oddly. "You're really absorbed by the whole planetary thing, aren't you? 'Sea sounds.' "
"Mars will have seas someday. That's what our whole Project is about, isn't it?"
She looked disturbed. "Sure ... We're working at it, Hans, but that doesn't mean we have to live there. I mean, that's centuries from now, isn't it? Even if we're still alive, we'll be different people by then. Just think of being trapped down a gravity well. I'd choke to death." I said quietly, "I don't think of it as being for the purposes of settlement. It's a clearer, more ideal activity. The instigation by Fourth-Level cognitive agents of a Third-Level Prigoginic Leap. Bringing life itself into being on the naked bedrock of space-time...." But she was shaking her head and backpedaling toward the door. "I'm sorry, Hans, but those sounds, they're just . . . getting into my blood somehow...." She shook herself, shuddering, and the filigree beads woven into her blonde hair clattered loudly. "I can't bear it."
"I'll turn it off."
But she was already leaving. "Goodbye, goodbye . . . We'll meet again soon."
She was gone. I was left to steep in my own isolation, while the roaring surf gnawed and mumbled at its shore.
One of Kulagin's servos met me at his door and took my hat. Kulagin was seated at a workplace in a screened-off corner of his marigold-reeking domicile, watching stock quotations scroll down a display screen. He was dictating orders into a microphone on his forearm gauntlet. When the servo announced me he unplugged the jack from his gauntlet and stood, shaking my hand with both of his. "Welcome, friend, welcome."
"I hope I haven't come at a bad time."
"No, not at all. Do you play the Market?"
"Not seriously," I said. "Later, maybe, when the royalties from Eisho Zai-batsu pile up."
"You must allow me to guide your eyes, then. A good Posthumanist should have a wide range of interests. Take that chair, if you would." I sat beside Kulagin as he sat before the console and plugged in. Kulagin was a Mechanist, but he kept himself rigorously antiseptic. I liked him.
He said, "Odd how these financial institutions tend to drift from their original purpose. In a way, the Market itself has made a sort of Prigoginic Leap. On its face, it's a commercial tool, but it's become a game of conventions and confidences. We Cicadas eat, breathe, and sleep rumors,