Neal Stephenson - Interface

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Finally, a clue here. Robert J. Coover was a very rich man. A billionaire. The building in which Dr. Radhakrishnan was standing was the Coover Biotech Pavilion; Coover had had it thrown together a couple of years ago when he decided that biotechnology was the wave of the future.

It made sense, in a way. This Elton State thing had just been a fishing expedition, a stratagem to attract promising talent. Now that Dr. Radhakrishnan's project with the baboons had succeeded so brilliantly, Coover understood that it was time to pull away and get serious about forging ahead. And Dr. Radhakrishnan was ready to do some forging.

It was 9:30 a.m., one of the few times of day when he and his brother in Delhi might be awake simultaneously. In Delhi, the opposite side of the world from Elton, it was 10:00 p.m. and Arun would probably be watching the news on his television set.

Dialing India was always an adventure. He got through eventually and reached his brother at his home in one of the pleasant colonies on the outskirts of the metropolis, where government officials lived with their air conditioners. As he had anticipated, the English language version of the news was running in the background. The sound quality on the phone was very bad and Arun had to run over and turn the television down in order for them to get through the obligatory several minutes of family-related small talk.

"Me? Oh, I'm fine, everything is going well enough," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I heard some - some rumors about a new development in the city and I wanted to ask you if you knew anything about them."

"What sort of rumors?"

"Has anything been happening lately with the Ashok Cinema?"

A silence. Then, "Ha!" Arun sounded satisfied, vindicated. "So news of this heinous crime has even reached Elton, New Mexico!"

"Only the most tenuous reports, I can assure you." Dr. Radhakrishnan did not want to put his brother off by explaining to him that if a hydrogen bomb were dropped in the middle of Connaught Circus, it probably wouldn't show up in the American media unless American journalists were killed.

"I knew it would come out eventually. Little brother, it is corruption and CIA intrigues. Pure and simple. That's the only explanation."

"Are they planning to do something to the theater?"

Arun laughed bitterly. "Let me catch you up on events. The Ashok Theatre does not exist anymore, as of yesterday!"

"No!"

"I kid you not."

"I knew it was decrepit but-"

"It is more decrepit now. They have smashed it to the ground.

Within twenty-four hours the site was picked clean by a million harijans. The came from every quarter of the city, like piranhas, descended on the rubble before the dust had settled, and carried away every piece of the building. Why, my secretary says that today they had earth-moving equipment there, digging a basement!"

"But... who is 'they' in this case?"

"Guess."

"I can't."

"Maclntrye Engineering. The right hand of the CIA!"

Like many Indian politicians of a certain age, Arun liked to find the CIA everywhere. Gangadhar, having spent some time in the States and gotten an idea of the way that large American institutions actually operated, had his doubts. He had come to realize that MacIntyre Engineering would be a far more fearsome multi-national corporation if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States Government.

"Since when are you such a cinema bluff anyway?" Gangadhar asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Why is this such a heinous crime? The Ashok Theatre was a dump. It was high time for it to be torn down anyway."

Arun sighed at his brother's naivete. "It is not so much what they did as the way they did it," he said.

"How was that?"

"They swaggered. They came into town like pirates. Little brother, it was like the old days, when the Brits or the Yanks would charge in and do as they pleased."

"But Arun, we are a sovereign country. How could they-"

"A sovereign country run by men." Arun sighed. "Corruptible men."

"They bribed their way in?"

"Gangadhar, do you have any idea how long it would normally take to obtain all the permits to raze a theater and begin con­struction of a new structure?"

"Weeks?"

"Months. Years, Maclntyre did it in days. They only got here a week ago. The telephone lines were smoking, Gangadhar, so many of their people were phoning in from the States, calling all the right officials, sending round limousines to take them out to lunch. I have never seen anything like it."

Someone was rapping on the frame of Dr. Radhakrishnan's door. He looked up to see yet another delivery person from GODS carrying a package. This one was the size of an orange crate.

"Just a moment, I have to sign for something," he said. He beckoned the courier into his office, signed his name on the notebook computer with a nonchalant flourish, and waved him out. He withdrew a penknife from his desk drawer and began to cut the fiberglass tape that held the top of the box in place. It was a thick-walled styrofoam sarcophagus.

"Do you have any idea what sort of structure they intend to build?" Dr. Radhakrishnan continued.

"If they had gone through the normal channels, I would, but the ink is hardly dry on the blueprints, the workers themselves probably don't even know what they are building. The pace of the construction is frantic. They have actually purchased a local cement factory for their own private use! Gangadhar, everyone says that America had gone downhill, but you would never believe it if you could come here and see this. The only parallel I can think of is the Manhattan Project."

"Did I ever tell you about the time I went to the Taj Mahal?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said, suddenly, on a whim.

"I don't know. Why?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan had gotten the lid off the styrofoam box. The walls were three inches thick. The interior was filled with a swirling fog of dry ice. He waved his hand over it to dissipate the cryogenic mist. In the middle of the container, neatly packed between large chunks of dry ice, was a small rack made of clear plastic, about the size of a cigarette case. It was made to hold several narrow glass tubes. At the moment, it held two of them.

"I was standing there looking at some of the inlay work on the north wall of the structure. Magnificent stuff. And this group of Americans was there. Had come all the way around the world to see the Taj Mahal. It was beastly hot, must have been forty-five degrees. They were all dirty and tired and as usual there were pickpockets all over the place. And one of them said, 'Hell, we should just build one of these things. In Arizona or somewhere.'

"You're kidding."

"Not at all. He thought that they would just raise some money and replicate the Taj. And all the other Americans just nodded as though that were a perfectly reasonable idea."

"It's unbelievable."

Dr. Radhakrishnan had opened the little case now, taking care not to burn his hands with the intense cold, and removed the two narrow glass tubes. Each one was mostly empty except for a small dark wad of material near one end. He raised them up toward the light.

"They have no values of any kind," he said. "Nothing means anything to them. The Taj is just a construction project, a particular manipulation of assets. And whatever they're doing on the Ashok Theatre site is more of the same."

He saw a glint of red and realized that the dark wads must be tissue samples of some kind, which had presumably leaked a bit of blood against the glass walls of the tubes before they had frozen. He stepped over toward his window to allow the winter sunlight to illuminate them a little better.

Arun's voice sounded far away. "Maybe they're building a Taj in Delhi so they don't have to take the bus all the way to Agra," he joked.

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