Part 15 (1/2)
”True.”
”But he was very imaginative.”
They stopped at Sax's apartment and changed clothes, then went up to the top of the mesa, to get breakfast at Antonio's. Sax was still thinking about their discussion. ”The problem is that people with a hypertrophied regard for wealth and power achieve positions that give them these gifts in excess, and then they find that they're as much slaves to them as masters. And then they become dissatisfied and bitter.”
”Like Frank, you mean.”
”Yes. So the powerful almost always seem to have a dysfunctional aspect to them. Everything from cynicism to full-blown destructiveness. They're not happy.”
”But they are powerful.”
”Yes. And thus our problem. Human affairs”- Sax paused to eat one of the rolls just brought to their table; he was famished-”you know, they ought to be run according to principles of systems ecology.”
Desmond laughed out loud, hastily grabbing up a napkin to clean off his chin. He laughed so hard that people at other tables looked over at them, worrying Sax somewhat. ”What a concept!” he cried, and started to laugh again. ”Ah ha ha! Oh, my Saxifrage! Scientific management, eh?”
”Well, why not?” Sax said mulishly. ”I mean, the principles governing the behavior of the dominant species in a stable ecosystem are fairly straightforward, as I recall. I'll bet a council of ecologists could construct a program that would result in a stable benign society!”
”If only you ran the world!” Desmond cried, and started laughing again. He put his face right down on the table and howled.
”Not just me.”
”No, I am joking.” He composed himself. ”You know Vlad and Marina have been working on their eco-economics for years now. They have even had me using it in the trade between the underground colonies.”
”I didn't know that,” Sax said, surprised.
Desmond shook his head. ”You have to pay more attention, Sax. In the south we have lived by eco-economics for years now.”
”I'll have to look into that.”
”Yes.” Desmond grinned widely, on the verge of cracking up yet again. ”You have a lot to learn.”
Their orders arrived, with a carafe of orange juice, and Desmond poured their gla.s.ses full. He clinked his gla.s.s against Sax's, offered a toast: ”Welcome to the revolution!”
Desmond left for the south, having extracted a promise that Sax would pilfer what he could from Biotique for Hiroko. ”I've got to go meet Nirgal.” He gave Sax a hug and was gone.
A month or so pa.s.sed, during which Sax thought about all he had learned from Desmond and the videos, sifting through it slowly, getting more and more disturbed as he did. His sleep was still broken nearly every night by hours of wakefulness.
Then one morning after one of these restless, fruitless bouts of insomnia, Sax got a call on his wristpad. It was Phyllis, in town for meetings, and she wanted to get together for dinner.
Sax agreed, with his surprise and Stephen's enthusiasm. He met her that evening, at Antonio's. They kissed in the European style, and were led to one of the corner tables, overlooking the city. There they ate a meal that Sax scarcely noticed, talking inconsequentially about the latest events in Sheffield and Biotique.
After cheesecake they lingered over brandies. Sax was in no hurry to leave, as he was not sure what Phyllis had in mind for afterward. She had given no clear sign, and she seemed in no hurry either.
Now she leaned back in her chair, and regarded him cheerfully. ”It really is you, isn't it.”
Sax tilted his head to indicate his incomprehension.
Phyllis laughed. ”It's hard to believe, really. You were never like this in the old days, Sax Russell. I wouldn't have guessed in a hundred years that you would be such a lover.”
Sax squinted uncomfortably and looked around. ”I would hope that says more about you than me,” he said with Stephen's insouciance. The nearby tables were all empty, and the waiters were leaving them alone. The restaurant would close in a half hour or so.
Phyllis laughed again, but her eyes had a hard look to them, and suddenly Sax saw that she was angry. Embarra.s.sed, no doubt, at being fooled by a man she had known for some eighty years. And angry that he had decided to fool her. And why not? It showed a very fundamental lack of trust, after all, especially from someone who was sleeping with you. The bad faith of his behavior at Arena was coming back to him with a vengeance, making him quite queasy. But what to do about it?
He recalled that moment in the elevator when she had kissed him, when he had been similarly nonplussed. Taken aback first by her nonrecognition, and now by her recognition. It had a certain symmetry. And both times he had gone along with it.
”Don't you have anything more to say?” Phyllis demanded.
He spread his hands. ”What makes you think this?”
Again she laughed angrily, then regarded him with lips tight. ”It's so easy to see it now,” she said. ”They just gave you a nose and a chin, I suppose. But the eyes are the same, and the head shape. It's funny what you remember and what you forget.”
”That's true.”
Actually it was not a matter of forgetting, but of being unable to recollect. Sax suspected the memories were still there, in storage.
”I can't really remember your old face,” Phyllis said. ”To me you were always in a lab with your nose pressing a screen. You might as well have worn a white lab coat, that's the way I see you in my memories. A kind of giant lab rat.” Now her eyes were glittering. ”But somewhere along the line you managed to learn to imitate human behavior pretty well, didn't you? Well enough to fool an old friend who liked the way you looked.”
”We are not old friends.”
”No,” she snapped. ”I guess we're not. You and your old friends tried to kill me. And they did kill thousands of other people, and destroyed most of this planet. And obviously they're still out there, or else you wouldn't be here, would you. In fact they must be pretty widespread, because when I ran a DNA check on your sperm, the official TA records had you as Stephen Lindholm. That put me off the trail for a while. But there was something about you that made me wonder. When we fell in that creva.s.se. That did it- it reminded me of something that happened when we were in Antarctica. You and Tatiana Durova and I were up on Nussbaum Riegel when Tatiana tripped and sprained her ankle, and it got windy and late and they had to helicopter us back down to the base, and while we were waiting, you found some kind of rock lichen...”
Sax shook his head, truly surprised. ”I don't remember that.” And he didn't. The year of training and evaluation in Antarctica's dry valleys had been intense, but now the entire year was a dim blur to him, and that incident would not come back at all; it was hard to believe it had happened. He couldn't even remember what poor Tatiana Durova had looked like.
Absorbed in his thoughts, and in a concerted push for his memories of that year, he missed a bit of what Phyllis was saying, but then he caught ”...checked again with one of my old copies of my AI's memory, and there you were.”
”Your AI's memory units may be degrading,” he said absently. ”They're finding that the circuitry tends to get scrambled by cosmic radiation if it isn't reinforced from time to time.”
She ignored that weak sally. ”The point is, people who can change Transitional Authority records like that are still worth watching out for. I'm afraid I can't just let this pa.s.s. Even if I wanted to.”
”What do you mean?”
”I'm not sure. It depends what you do. You could just tell me where you were hiding, and who with, and what's going on. You just showed up at Biotique a year ago, after all. Where were you before that?”
”On Earth.”
Her smile had a bad twist to it. ”If that's the course you take, I'll be forced to ask for help from some of my a.s.sociates. There are security people in Kasei Vallis who will be able to refresh your memory.”
”Come on.”
”I don't mean that metaphorically. They won't beat the information out of you or anything like that. It's more a matter of extraction. They put you under, stimulate the hippocampus and the amygdala, and ask questions. People simply answer.”