Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [96]
"My wife's a stubborn woman. Like you, she has ideals. Only peace can reunite us. And there's only one source of peace in our world. That's the Investors."
Wells laughed shortly. "Still the same line, Captain-Doctor?" Suddenly he spoke in halting Investor. "The value of your argument has depreciated."
"They have their weaknesses, Wells." His voice rose. "Do you think I'm any less desperate than the Cataclysts? Ask your friend Ryumin if I know weakness when I see it, or if I lack the will to exploit it. The Investor Peace: yes, I had a hand in that. It gave me what I wanted. I was a whole man. You can't know what that meant to me—" He broke off, sweating even in the cold.
Wells looked shocked. Lindsay realized suddenly that his outburst had broken every diplomatic rule. The thought filled him with savage satisfaction.
"You know the truth, Wells. We've been Investor pawns for years. It's time we turned the chessboard around."
"You mean to attack the Investors?" Wells said.
"What else, fool? What choice do we have?"
A woman's voice came from the base of the lamp. "Abelard Mavrides, you are under arrest."
* * *
The elevator car hissed shut behind him. False gravity hit as they accelerated upward. "Put your hands against the wall, please," Greta said politely. "Move your feet backward."
Lindsay complied, saying nothing. The old-fashioned elevator clacked noisily on rails up the vertical wall of the Dembowska Crevasse. Two kilometers passed. Greta sighed. "You must have done something drastic."
"That's not your worry," Lindsay said.
"To go by the book, I ought to cut the cables on your iron arm. But I'll let it go. This is my fault too, I think. If I'd made you feel more at home you wouldn't have been so fanatic."
"No weapons in my arm," Lindsay said. "Surely you examined it while I slept."
"I don't understand this hard suspicion, Bela. Have I mistreated you somehow?"
"Tell me about Zen Serotonin, Greta."
She straightened slightly. "I'm not ashamed of belonging to the Nonmove-ment. I would have told you, but we don't proselytize. We win over by exam-pie."
"Very laudable, I'm sure."
She frowned. "In your case I should have made an exception. I'm sorry for your pain. I knew pain once." Lindsay said nothing. "I was born on Themis," she said. "I knew some Cataclysts there, one of the Mechanist factions. They were ice assassins. The military found one of their cryocells, where they were enlightening one of my teachers with a one-way ticket to the future. I didn't wait for arrest. I ran to Dembowska.
"When I got here the Harem drafted me. I found out I had to whore to Car-nassus. I didn't take to it. But then I found Zen Serotonin."
"Seretonin's a brain chemical," Lindsay said.
"It's a philosophy," she said. "The Shapers, the Mechanists—those aren't philosophies, they're technologies made into politics. The technologies are at the core of it. Science tore the human race to bits. When anarchy hit, people struggled for community. The politicians chose enemies so that they could bind their followers with hate and terror. Community isn't enough when a thousand new ways of life beckon from every circuit and test tube. Without hatred there is no Ring Council, no Union of Cartels. No conformity without the whip."
"Life moves in clades," Lindsay murmured.
"That's Wells with his mishmash of physics and ethics. What we need is nonmovement, calmness, clarity." She stretched out her left arm. "This monitor drip-feeds into my arm. Fear means nothing to me. With this, there's nothing I can't face and analyze. With Zen Serotonin you see life in the light of reason. People turn to us, especially in crisis. Every day the Nonmovement wins more adherents."
Lindsay thought of the brainwaves he had seen in his safehouse bed.
"You're in a permanent alpha state, then."
"Of course."
"Do you ever dream?"
"We have our vision. We can see the new technologies that disrupt human life. We throw ourselves into those currents. Perhaps each one of us is no more