She looked at him. Oscar was not missing a word. He felt he’d been waiting for this all his life.
“I fell in love with you, Oscar. I know that’s true, because you’re the only man that I ever felt jealous about. I never had that kind of emotional luxury before. I love you, and I marvel at you as my favorite specimen. I really love you for what you truly are, all the way down, all the way through. And we had a lovely fling. I took the plunge and I wasn’t afraid to do it, because when it’s all said and done, you have one huge, final, saving grace. Because you’re temporary. You’re not my destiny. You’re not my prince. You’re just a visitor in my life, a traveling salesman.”
Oscar nodded. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Really?”
“It’s totally true. I’ve always been temporary. I can give advice, I can run campaigns, I can come and go. I can have brief affairs, but I can’t make anything stick! My foster dad picked me up on an impulse. Dad had four wives and a zillion girlfriends: every woman in my childhood rushed by me on fast forward. I have a permanent fever. I have to reinvent myself every morning. I built a business, but I sold it. I built a house, but it’s empty. I built a hotel, but I can’t run it. I built a coalition here, I built a whole new society, I built a city to house it in with a lighthouse beacon, and loudspeakers blaring and pennants waving, but I still don’t get to stay. I’m its founding father, I’m the prince, but I still don’t belong. I just don’t get to stay.”
“Oh, good Lord.”
“Am I making sense to you here?”
“Oscar, how can I stay? I can’t go on like this, I’m all burned out. I did what I had to do, I can’t say that you used me. But something used me. History used me, and it’s using me all up. Even our affair is used up now.”
“We should do the right thing, Greta, we should declare ourselves. Let’s take a stand together. I want you to marry me.”
She put her head in her hands.
“Look, don’t do that. Listen to me. This can be made to work. It’s doable. In fact, it’s a genius move.”
“Oscar, you don’t love me.”
“I love you as much as I will ever love anyone.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “What a brilliant evasion.”
“You’ll never find another man who’s more attentive to your interests. If you find some other man that you want to marry, leave me for him! I’m not afraid of that happening. It’ll never happen.”
“God, you’re such a beautiful talker.”
“It’s not dishonest. I’m being very honest. I’m making an honest woman of you. I’m finally taking a stand, I’m committing myself. Marriage is a great institution. Marriages are great symbolic theater. Especially a state marriage. It was a war romance, and now it’s a peace marriage, and it’s all very normal and sensible. We’ll make it a festival, we’ll invite the whole world. We’ll exchange rings, we’ll throw rice. We’ll put down roots.”
“We don’t have roots. We’re network people. We have aerials.”
“It’s the right and proper thing to do. It’s necessary. In fact, it’s the only real way that the two of us can move on from here.”
“Oscar, we can’t move on. My marrying you can’t stick a whole community together. Making two people legitimate, that doesn’t make their society legitimate. It’s not a legitimate thing. I’m a war leader, and a strike leader—I was Joan of Arc. Nobody ever elected me. I rule by force and clever propaganda. The real powers here are you and your friend Kevin. And Kevin is like any outlaw who takes power: he’s a scary little brute. He brings me big dossiers, he bullies people and spies on them. I’m sick of all that. It’s turning me into a monster. It can’t go on, it’s not right. There’s no future in it.”
“You’ve been thinking a lot about this, haven’t you?”
“You taught me how to think about it. You taught me how to think politically. You’re a good tactician, Oscar, you’re really clever, you know all about people’s kinks and weaknesses, but you don’t know about their integrity and their strength. You’re not a great strategist. You know all the dirty tricks with go-stones in the corner, but you don’t comprehend the whole board.”
“And you do?”
“Some of it. I know the world well enough that I know that my lab is the best place for me.”
“So you’re giving up?”
“No…I’m just quitting while I’m ahead. Something is going to work here. Something of it will last. But it’s not a whole new world. It’s just a new political system. We can’t close it off in an airtight nest, with me as the Termite Queen. I have to quit, I have to leave. Then maybe this thing will shake down, and pack down, and build something solid, from the bottom up.”
“Maybe we’ll do better than that. Maybe I am a great strategist.”
“Sweetheart, you’re not! You’re streetwise, but you’re young, and you’re not very wise. You can’t become King by marrying your pasteboard Queen, someone you created by marching a pawn down the board. You shouldn’t even want to be King. It’s a lousy job. A situation like this doesn’t need another stupid tyrant with a golden crown, it needs…it needs the founder of a civilization, a saint and a prophet, somebody impossibly wise and selfless and generous. Somebody who can make laws out of chaos, and order out of chaos, and justice out of noise, and meaning out of total distraction.”
“My God, Greta. I’ve never heard you talk like this before.”
She blinked. “I don’t think I ever even thought like this before.”
“What you’re saying is completely true. It’s the hard cold truth, and it’s bad, it’s impossibly bad, it’s worse than I ever imagined, but you know, I’m glad that I know it now. I always like to know what I’m facing. I refuse to admit defeat here. I refuse to pack up my tent. I don’t want to leave you, I can’t bear it. You’re the only woman who ever really understood me.”
“I’m sorry that I understand you well enough to tell you what you just can’t do.”
“Greta, don’t give up on me. Don’t dump me. I’m having a genuine breakthrough here, I’m on the edge of something really huge. You’re right about the dictatorship problem, it’s a dirt-real, basic, political challenge. We’ve worked ourselves to the bone now, we’re all burned out, we’re all bogged down in the little things. Daily tactics won’t do it for us anymore, but abandoning it to its own devices is a cop-out. We need to create something that is huge and permanent, we need a higher truth. No, not higher, deeper, we need a floor of granite. No more sand castles, no more improvising. We need genius. And you’re a genius.”
“Yes, but not that kind.”
“But you and I, we could do it together! If we only had some time to really concentrate, if we could just talk together like this. Listen. You have totally convinced me: you’re wiser than I am, you’re more realistic, I’m with you all the way. We’ll leave this place. We’ll run off together. Forget the big state marriage and the rings and the rice. We’ll go to…well, not some island, they’re all drowning now…We’ll go to Maine. We’ll stay there a month, two months, we’ll stay a year. We’ll drop off the net, we’ll use pens and candlelight. We’ll really, seriously concentrate, without any distractions at all. We’ll write a Constitution.”
“What? Let the President do that.”
“That guy? He’s just more of the same! He’s a socialist, he’s gonna make us sane and practical, just like Europe. This place isn’t Europe! America is what people created when they were sick to death of Europe! Normalcy for America—it isn’t keeping your nose clean and counting your carbon dioxide. Normalcy for America is technological change. Sure, the process ran away with us for a little while, the rest of the world pulled a fast one on us, they cheated us, they want the world to be Rembrandt canvases and rice paddies until the last trump of doom, but we’re off our sickbed now. A massive rate of change is normalcy for America. What we need is planned change—Progress. We need Progress!”
“Oscar, your face is g
etting really red.” She reached out.
He jerked his wrist back. “Stop trying to feel my pulse. You know I hate it when you do that. Listen to me carefully, I’m making perfect specimen sense lab-table really love me. I’m doing this all for you, Greta. I’m totally serious, we can do it tomorrow morning. A long sabbatical together in Maine, at some lovely romantic cabin. I’ll have Lana rent us one, she knows all about it.”
Her eyes widened. “What? Tomorrow? Lana? Wilderness? We can’t just abandon romantic Clare Lana Ramachandran little Kama Sutra girl.”
Oscar stared. “What did you say?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that about Lana. Lana can’t help how she feels about you. But I’m not sorry I said it about Clare. You were having drinks with her! Kevin told me.”
Oscar was stunned. “How did we get onto this subject?”
An angry flush rose up Greta’s neck. “I always think about it—I just never say it out loud! Clare, and Lana, and the Senator’s wife, and Moira, all these painted pointed glamour women with their claws…”
“Greta, stop that. Trust me! I’m asking you to marry me. Moira! Get it through your head. This is for real, this is permanent and solid. Tell me once and for all, will you marry Moira?”
“What? Moira’s one of your krewewomen, isn’t she? She came over to make amends.”
“But Moira works for Huey! When did you see Moira?”
“Moira came to my office. She brought me a brand-new air filter. She was very nice.”
Oscar stared in mounting horror at the air filter at his elbow. He was so used to them now. They were everywhere, and so innocuous. They were cleansing Trojan fog horse biowar gas miasma. “Oh, Greta. How could you take a gift from that woman?”
“She said it was your gift. Because it smells of roses.” She patted the box, and then looked up in pain and bewilderment, and a dawning and terrible knowledge. “Oh, sweetheart, I thought you knew. I thought you knew everything.”
__________
The Collaboratory was, by design, equipped to deal with biological contamination. They had to shut down the entire Administration building. The gas from the booby-trapped air filter was of particularly ingenious design, micronized particles the size and shape of ragweed pollen. The particles stuck to the nasal tract like a painless snort of cocaine, whereupon their contents leaked through the blood-brain barrier, and did mysterious and witchy things.
Oscar and Greta, having wearily crammed themselves into decontamination suits, were carried red-faced and stumbling to the Hot Zone’s clinic. There they were ritually scrubbed down, and subjected to gingerly examination. The good news was immediate: they were not dying. The bad news took longer to arrive. Their blood pressure was up, their faces were congested, their gait and posture were affected, they were suffering odd speech disabilities. Their PET-scans were exhibiting highly abnormal loci of cognitive processing, two wandering hot blobs where a normal human being would have just one. The primal rhythm of their brain waves had a distinct backbeat.
Oscar had been slowly and gently poisoned as he was making the speech of his life. This foul realization sent him into a towering animal rage. This reaction revealed yet another remarkable quality of his poisoned brain. He could literally think of two things at once; but it stretched him so thin that he had very little impulse control.
A nurse suggested a sedative. Oscar cordially agreed that he was feeling a bit hyperactive, and accented this by screaming personal insults and repeatedly kicking the wall. This behavior produced a sedative in short order. Dual unconsciousness resulted.
By noon, Oscar was conscious again, feeling sluggish yet simultaneously hair-trigger. He paid a visit to Greta, in her separate decontamination cell. Greta had passed a quiet night. She was now sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, legs folded, hands in her lap, staring straight into space. She didn’t speak, she didn’t even see him. She was wide-awake and indescribably, internally busy.
A nurse stood guard for him, while Oscar stared at her with bittersweet mélange. Bitter; sweet; bitter / sweet: bittersweet. She was exalted, silent, full of carnivorous insight: Greta had never looked more like herself. It would have been a profanation to touch her.
Accompanied by his nurse, Oscar tottered back to his cell. He wondered how the effect felt for Greta. It seemed to hit people differently. Maybe there were as many ways to think doubly as there were to think singly.
When he closed his eyes, Oscar could actually feel the sensation, somatically. It was as if his overtight skull had a pair of bladders stuffed inside, liquid and squashy, like a pair of nested yin-yangs. One focus of attention was somehow in “the front” and the other in “the back,” and when the one to the front revolved into direct consciousness, the other slipped behind it. And the blobs had little living eyes inside them. Eyes that held the nascent core of other streams of consciousness. Like living icons, awaiting a mental touch to launch into full awareness.
Kevin stepped into the cell. Oscar heard him limping, was fully aware of his presence; it took a strange little moment to realize that he should take the trouble to open his eyes and look.
“Thank God you’re here!” he blurted.
“That’s what I like,” Kevin said, blinking. “Enthusiasm.”
With an effort, Oscar said nothing. He could restrain his urge to blurt his thoughts aloud, if he really put his mind to it. All he had to do was press his tongue against the roof of his mouth, clench his teeth, and breathe rhythmically through his nose.
“You don’t look so bad,” Kevin said analytically. “Your color’s a little high, and you’re holding your neck like a giraffe on speed, but you don’t look crazy.”
“I’m not crazy. Just different.”
“Uh-huh.” Kevin took a disinfected metal chair and eased his aching feet. “So, uhm, sorry about the security screwup, man.”
“These things happen.”
“Yeah. See, it was all those Boston people from the old Bambakias krewe: that was the problem. The Senator’s wife…she went way out of her way to tell me I was supposed to let it slide with the press secretary. You and this press babe being the former romantic item, and all that. Great, I thought, better really bury this one; but then, in comes this Moira Matarazzo woman who was the Senator’s former press secretary…See, I just lost track. That’s all. Just plain couldn’t keep up with it all. All these Boston krewepeople, and former krewepeople, and krewepeople of the former krewepeople; look, nobody could keep track of that crap. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m your krewepeople anymore.”
“I get the picture, Kevin. That’s a by-product of what’s basically a semifeudal, semilegal, distributable-deniable, net-centered segmented polycephalous influence sociality process.”
Kevin waited politely for Oscar’s lips to stop moving. “For what it’s worth, I’ve got Moira’s movements tracked. Into the dome, into the Administration building, out of the dome…I’m practically sure that she didn’t leave any of those tasty little time bombs for the rest of us.”
“Huey.”
Kevin laughed. “Well, of course it was Huey.”
“It just seems so pointless and small of him to do this to us now. After the war’s over, after he’s out of office. When I was getting ready to leave all this.”
“So you really meant it about leaving us, then.”
“What?”
“I overheard. I forgot to mention that I ran the tapes of the poisoning incident. That romantic discussion that you and Dr. Penninger were having as you were being gassed.”
“You have that conference room bugged?”
“Hey, pal, I’m not brain-damaged. Of course I have the conference room bugged. Not that I have time to listen to every damn room that I bug around here…But hey, when there’s a terrorist biowar incident taking place in one, you bet I run the tapes back and listen. I do pay attention, Oscar. I’m a quick study. I make a pretty good cop, really.”
“Never said you weren’t a good cop, you
big-mouthed incompetent.”
“Holy cow, there it is again…Did you know that you actually have two different voices when you say contradictory stuff like that? I need to run a stress analysis there, I bet that could screw up vocal IDs.” Kevin leaned back in his chair and put a sock-clad foot on Oscar’s bed. Kevin was taking developments rather easily, Oscar thought. Then again, Kevin had witnessed this phenomenon among the Haitians. He’d had time to get used to the concept.
“Sure I’ve had time to get used to the concept,” Kevin said. “It’s obvious. You mutter things aloud to yourself, just so you know what you’re thinking. I recognize the syndrome, man. Big deal! I got used to your other personal background problem…Oscar, haven’t we always been on good terms?”
“Yeah.”
“I have to tell you, it really hurt my feelings when Dr. Penninger said I was a ‘scary little brute.’ That I ‘bullied people’ and ‘spied on them.’ And you didn’t stick up for me, man. You didn’t tell her a thing.”
“I was proposing marriage to her.”
“Women,” Kevin grunted. “I dunno what it is with women. They’re just not rational. They’re creepy little Mata Hari sexpots carrying poison gas bombs…Or maybe they’re like Dr. Penninger down the hall, the Rigid Ice-Queen of Eternal Light and Truth…I just can’t understand what it takes to please that woman! I mean, system-crackers like me, we have everything in common with scientists. It’s all about hidden knowledge, and how you find it, and who gets to know it, and who gets the rep for finding out. That’s all there is to science. I loved working for her, I thought she was really getting it. I bent absolutely double for that woman, I did anything she ever asked me—I did favors for her that she never even knew she got. I looked up to her, dammit! And what do I get for all my loyal service? I scare her. She wants to purge me.”
Oscar nodded. “Get used to the idea. This is a clean sweep. Huey took us out. It’s decapitation. I can barely talk now. I can barely walk. And Greta, she’s in some kind of wide-awake schizoid catatonia hebephrenia trance nonverbal…”
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