Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“That’s all right, everybody does that sort of thing nowadays. I’ve been a celebrity since I was a little kid. I’m well documented, I’m used to it.” He smiled sourly. “Though you can’t get the full flavor of my delightful personality from some casual scan of the net.”

“If I were casual about this, I wouldn’t be here now.”

Oscar looked up in surprise. She stared back boldly. She’d done all this on purpose. She had her own agenda. She’d plotted it all out on graph paper, beforehand.

“Do you know why I’m out here in the middle of the night tonight, Dr. Penninger? It’s because my girlfriend just left me.”

She pondered this. Wheels spun in her head so quickly that he could almost hear them sizzle. “Really,” she said slowly. “That’s a shame.”

“She’s left our house in Boston, she’s walked out on me. She’s gone to Holland.”

Her brows rose under the rim of the woolly hat. “Your girlfriend has defected to the Dutch?”

“No, not defected! She left on assignment, she’s a political jour-nalist. But she’s gone anyway.” He gazed at the elaborate nest of convoluted plumbing. “It’s been a blow, it’s really upset me.”

The sight of all that joinery and tubing, complex and gleaming in its tatty plastic straw, filled Oscar with a sudden evil rush of authen-tic Sartrean nausea. He climbed to his feet. “You know something? It was all my fault. I can admit that. I neglected her. We had two sepa-rate careers… She was fine on that East Coast glitterati circuit; we made a good couple while we had some common interests…” He stopped and gauged her reaction. “Should I be burdening you with any of this?”

“Why not? I can understand that. Sometimes these things just don’t work out. Romance in the sciences… ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’ ” She shook her head.

“I know that you’re not married. You’re not seeing anyone?”

“Nothing steady. I’m a workaholic.”

Oscar found this encouraging news. He felt instinctive camarade-rie for any ambitious obsessive. “Tell me something, Greta. Do I seem like a frightening person to you?” He touched his chest. “Am I scary? Be frank.”

“You really want me to be frank?”

“Yes.”

“People always tell me that I’m much too frank.”

“Go ahead, I can take it.”

She lifted her chin. “Yes, you’re very scary. People are extremely suspicious of you. No one knows what you really want from us, or what you’re doing in our lab. We all expect the very worst.”

He nodded sagely. “You see, that’s a perception problem. I do turn up for your board meetings, and I’ve brought a little entourage with me, so rumors start. But in reality, I shouldn’t be scary — because I’m just not very significant. I’m only a Senate staffer.”

“I’ve been to Senate hearings. And I’ve heard about others. Sen-ate hearings can be pretty rough.”

He edged closer to her. “All right — sure, there might be some hard questions asked in Washington someday. But it won’t be me ask-ing those questions. I just write briefing papers.”

She was entirely unconvinced. “What about that big Air Force scandal in Louisiana? Didn’t you have a lot to do with all that?”

“What, that? That’s just politics! People claim that I influence the Senator-elect — but the influence goes all the other way, really. Until I met Alcott Bambakias, I was just a city council activist. The Senator’s the man with the ideas and the message. I was just his cam-paign technician.”

“Hmmm. I know a lot of technicians. I don’t know many tech-nicians who are multimillionaires, like you are.”

“Oh, well, that … Yes, I’m well-to-do, but compared to what my father made in his heyday, or the Senator’s fortune … I do have money, but I wouldn’t call that serious money. I know people with serious money, and I’m just not in their league.” Oscar hefted a long green tube from the packing case, examined its crooks and angles mournfully, and set it back down. “The wind’s picking up … I don’t have the heart for this anymore. I think I’ll walk back to the dome. Maybe somebody’s still up in the dorm. We’ll play some poker.”

“I have a car,” she said.

“Really. ”

“You get a car, when you’re on the Collaboratory board. So I drove here. I can give you a ride back to the lab.”

“That would be lovely. Just let me stow the gear and shut down the system.” He took off his hard hat and kneepads. He shed his padded construction jacket, and stood there hatless in a long-sleeved shirt; the cold wind ripped into the damp at his armpits. When he was done, he set the alarms and they left the site together.

He stopped at the sidewalk… “Wait a moment.”

“What is it?”

“We seem to be chatting along pretty well here. But your car may be bugged.”

She brushed her windblown hair back, skeptically. “Why would anyone bug me?”

“Because it’s so cheap and easy. So tell me something just now, before we get into your car. Tell me something very frankly. Do you know about my personal background problem?”

“Your background? I know that your father was a movie star…”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that matter up. Really, I’m being completely impossible tonight. It was really good of you to visit the site tonight, but I’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. I shouldn’t bother you with any of this. You’re on the board of direc-tors, and I’m a federal official… Listen, if our personal circum-stances were different… And if either of us really had time for our personal problems…”

She stood there shivering. She was tall and thin and no longer used to real weather; she had worked hard in the dark and cold, and she was freezing. The night wind rose harshly and tore at his sleeves. He felt strangely drawn to her now. She was too tall, she was too thin, she had bad clothes, an odd face, and poor posture, she was eight years older than he was. They had nothing in common as people, any rela-tionship they might establish was clearly doomed from the outset. Re-lating to her was like coaxing some rare animal on the other side of a woven-wire fence. Maybe that was why he felt such a compelling urge to touch her. “Doctor, I appreciate your company tonight, but I think you’d better go on ahead in your car now. We’ll be in touch later about the board meetings. I still have a lot to learn.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to just drive off alone after that. Now I have to know. Get in the car.”

She opened the door and they jammed themselves together. It was a meager little car, a Collaboratory car, and naturally it had no heater. Their chilling breath began to smear the windows.

“I really don’t think you want to know about this. It’s a rather strange story. It’s bad. Worse than you expect.”

She adjusted her woolen hat, and blew on her bare fingers. “They never put heaters in these things. Because you’re never sup-posed to drive them outside the dome. It’ll warm up in a minute. Why don’t you just tell me whatever you think you can tell me. Then I’ll decide if I want to know more.”

“All right.” He hesitated. “Well, to begin with, I’m an adopted child. Logan Valparaiso was not my biological father.”

“No?”

“No, he didn’t adopt me until I was almost three. You see, at the time, Logan was working on an international thriller movie about evil adoption farms. Adoption mills. They were a big scandal during that period. The full scale of the hormone pesticide disasters was becoming common knowledge. There were major male-infertility problems. So, the adoption market really boomed. Infertility clinics too, obviously. The demand-pull was suddenly huge, so a lot of unsavory people, quacks, exploiters, health-fad people, they all rushed in to exploit it…”