Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [78]
Of course the Investors were profiteers. Their arrival had not brought the millennium humankind had expected. The Investors were not even particularly intelligent. They made up for that with a cast-iron gall and a magpie's lust for shiny loot. They were simply too greedy to become confused. They knew what they wanted, and that was their critical advantage. They had been painted much larger than life. Lindsay had done as much himself, when he and Nora had parlayed their asteroid deathtrap into three months of language lessons and a free ride to the Ring Council. With his instant notoriety as a friend to aliens, Lindsay had done his best to inflate the Investor mystique. He was as guilty of the fraud as anyone. He had even defrauded the Investors. The Investors' name for him was still a rasp and whistle meaning "Artist." Lindsay still had friends among the Investors: or, at least, beings whom he felt sure he could amuse. Investors had a sense of something close to humor, a certain sadistic enjoyment in a sharp deal. That sculpture they had given him, which rested in a place of honor in his home, might well be two frost-eaten chunks of alien dung.
God only knew to what befuddled alien they had sold his own piece of found art. It was only to be expected that a young man like Wells would demand the truth and spread it. Not knowing the consequences of his action, or even caring; simply too young to live a lie. Well, the falsehoods would hold up awhile longer. Despite the new generation bred in the Investor Peace, who struggled to rip aside the veil, not knowing that it was the very canvas on which their world was painted.
Lindsay looked for his wife. She was in her office, closeted with her conspirator's crew of trained diplomats. Colonel-Professor Nora Mavrides cast a large shadow in Goldreich-Tremaine. Sooner or later every diplomat in the capital had drifted into it. She was the best known of her class's loyalists and served as their champion.
Lindsay hid within the comfort of his own mystique. As far as he knew, he was the last survivor of the foreign section. If other non-Shaper diplomats survived, it was not by advertising themselves.
He entered the room briefly for politeness' sake, but as usual their smooth kinesics made him nervous. He left for the smoking room, where two stagedoor hangers-on were being introduced to the modish vice by the cast of Vetterling's Shepherd Moons.
Here Lindsay sank at once into his role as impresario. They believed in what they saw of him: an older man, a bit slow, perhaps, without the fire of genius others had, but generous and with a tang of mystery. With that mystery came glamour; Doctor Abelard Mavrides had set his share of trends. He drifted from one conversation to another: genetic marriage-politics, Ring Security intrigues, city rivalries, academic doctrines, day-shift clashes, artistic cliques—threads all of a single fabric. The sheen of it, the smooth brilliance of its social design, had lulled him into routine. He wondered sometimes about the placidity he felt. How much of it was age, the mellowness of decay? Lindsay was sixty-one.
The wedding party was ending. Actors left to rehearse, seniors crept to their antique warrens, the hordes of children scampered to the creches of their gene-lines. Lindsay and Nora retired at last to their bedroom. Nora was bright-eyed, a little tipsy. She sat on the edge of their bed, unloosing the clasp at the back of her formal dress. She