Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [99]
"You're sure?" Lindsay said, stricken.
"That's what my databanks tell me. Who knows when they'll return?"
"It doesn't matter," Lindsay said. "I can wait."
"Twenty years? Thirty?"
"Whatever it takes," Lindsay said, though the thought suffocated him.
"By then Carnassus will be useless. I'll need a new front. And what could be better than an Investor Queen? It's a risk worth taking. You'll work on it for me. You and Wells."
"Of course, Kitsune."
"You'll have the support you need. But don't squander a kilowatt of it trying to save that woman."
"I'll try to think only of the future."
"Carnassus and I will need a safehouse. That will be your priority."
"Depend on it," said Lindsay. 'Carnassus and I,' he thought. DEMBOWSHA CARTEL: 14-2-'58
Lindsay studied the latest papers from the peer review committee. He paged through the data expertly, devouring the abstracts, screen-scanning through paragraphs, highlighting the worst excesses of technical jargon. He worked with driven efficiency.
The credit went to Wells. Wells had placed him in the department chairmanship at the Kosmosity; Wells had put the editorship of the Journal of Exoarchosaurian Studies into his hands.
Routine had seized Lindsay. He welcomed the distractions of administration and research, which robbed him of the leisure necessary for pain. Within his office in the Crevasse, in an exurb of the newly completed Kosmosity, he wheeled in his low-grav swivel chair, chasing rumors, coaxing, bribing, trading information. Already the Journal was the largest unclassified databank on the Investors, and its restricted files mushroomed with speculation and espionage. Lindsay was at its core, working with the stamina of youth and the patience of age.
In the five years since Lindsay's arrival in Dembowska, he had watched Wells move from strength to strength. In the absence of a state ideology, the influence of Wells and his Carbon Clique spread throughout the colony, encompassing art, the media, and academic life.
Ambition was an endemic vice among Wells and his group. Lindsay had joined the Clique without much enthusiasm. With proximity, though, he had picked up their plans as if they were local bacteria. And their fashions as well: his hair was slickly brilliantined and his mustache was nicked for a paste-on microphone lip bead. He wore video-control rings on the wrinkled fingers of his left hand.
Work ate the years. Once time had seemed solid to him, dense as lead. Now it flowed through his hands. Lindsay saw that his perception of time was slowly coming to match that of the senior Shapers he'd known in Goldreich-Tremaine. To the truly old, time was as thin as air, a keening and destructive wind that erased their pasts and attacked their memories. Time was accelerating. Nothing could slow it down for him but death. He tasted this truth, and it was bitter as amphetamine.
He returned his attention to the paper; a reassessment of a celebrated Investor scale fragment found among the effects of a failed Mechanist interstellar embassy. Few bits of matter had ever been analyzed so exhaustively. The paper, "Proximo-Distal Gradients in Epidermal Cell Adhesiveness," came from a Shaper defector in Diotima Cartel. His desk rang. His visitor had arrived.
The unobtrusive guard systems in Lindsay's office showed Wells's characteristic touch. The visitor had been issued a stylish coronet, which had evolved from the much clumsier kill-clamp. A tiny red light, unseen by the guest himself, glowed on the man's forehead. It denoted the potential impact site for armaments, decently concealed in the ceiling.
"Professor Milosz?" The visitor's dress was odd. He wore a white formal suit with a ring-shaped open collar and accordioned elbows and knees.
"You're Dr. Morrissey? From the Concatenation?"
"From the Mare Serenitatis Republic," the man said. "Dr. Pongpianskul sent me."
"Pongpianskul is dead," Lindsay said.
"So they said." Morrissey nodded. "Killed on Chairman Constantine's orders. But the doctor had friends in the Republic. So many that he now controls