“That is not true. I know that you count! I take you with com-plete seriousness, Captain Scubbly Bee.”
Kevin sighed. “Just make a little room for me in the back of your campaign bus, all right? That’s all I ask.”
“I need to talk to Greta about this development. She’s my neural science expert.”
“Right. No problem. Just a second.” Kevin stood up and limped barefoot to a desktop computer. He typed in parameters. A schematic map of the Collaboratory appeared. He studied it. “Okay. You’ll find Dr. Penninger in her supersecret lab in the fourth floor of the Human Resources division.”
“What? Greta’s supposed to be here at the party.”
“Dr. Penninger hates parties. She bores real easily. Didn’t you know that? I like doing favors for Dr. Penninger. Dr. Penninger’s not like most women — you can talk to her seriously about stuff that mat-ters. She needed a safe house in case of attacks, so I built her a cute little secret lab over in Human Resources. She fired all those clowns anyway, so there’s plenty of room now.”
“How do you know where she is at this very moment?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I’m Security, and she’s the lab’s Di-rector. I always know where the Director is.”
After considerable ceremonial pressing of the flesh, Oscar left the party to find Greta. Thanks to Kevin’s explicit surveillance, this wasn’t difficult.
Kevin and his prole gangs had assembled a hole-in-the-wall workspace for Greta. Oscar punched in a four-digit code, and the door opened. The room was dark, and he saw Greta crouched over her dissecting microscope, its lights the only illumination. Both her eyes were pressed to the binocular mounts and both her hands were encased in step-down AFM dissection gloves. She had thrown a lab coat over her glamorous party gear. The room was as bare as a monk’s cell, and Greta was utterly intent: silently and methodically tearing away at some tiny fabric of the universe.
“It’s me,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. She looked up, nodded, and returned her attention to the lenses.
“Why did you leave the party?”
“Why shouldn’t I? You weren’t paying any attention to me.” Oscar was surprised, even mildly thrilled, to see Greta being coy.
“We’re in the Emergency Committee. You see me for hours and hours every day.”
“We’re never together. You’ve lost interest in me. You’re neglect-ing me.”
Oscar paused. He was certainly interested now. It occurred to hirn suddenly that he deeply enjoyed this part of a relationship. Women always seemed more interesting to him as objects of negotia-tion than they were as lovers or partners. This was a sinister self-revelation. He felt very contrite about it.
“Greta, I don’t like to admit it, but you’re right. Now that ev-eryone knows we’re lovers, we never have time for ourselves. We were together in a public situation tonight, and I tactlessly deserted you. I admit that. I regret it. I’m going to make it up to you.”
“Listen to yourself It’s like you’re addressing a committee. We’re just two politicians now. You talk to me like a diplomat. I have to read speeches from the President that are full of lies. I don’t get to work at anything that interests me. I spend my whole life in an endless political crisis. I hate administration. God, I feel so guilty.”
“Why? It’s important work. Someone has to do it. You’re good at it! People respect you.”
“I never felt this guilty when we were off in beach hotels having sleazy, half-violent sex. It wasn’t the center of my life or anything, but it was really interesting. A good-looking, charming guy with hun-dred-and-one-degree core body heat, that’s pretty fascinating. A lot more interesting than watching all my research die on the vine.”
“Oh no, not you too,” Oscar said. “Don’t tell me you’re turning on me now when I’ve put so much effort into this. So many people have left me now. They just don’t believe it can work.”
She looked at him with sudden pity. “Poor Oscar. You’ve got it all backward. That’s not why I feel guilty. I’m guilty because I know it’s going to work. Talking with those Moderators for so long … I really understand it now. Science truly is going to change. It’ll still be ‘Science.’ It’ll have the same intellectual structure, but its political structure will be completely different. Instead of being poorly paid government workers, we’ll be avant-garde dissident intellectuals for the dispossessed. And that will work for us. Because we can get a better deal from them now than we can from the government. The proles are not so new; they’re just like big, hairy, bad-smelling college students. We can deal with people like that. We do it all the time.”
He brightened. “Are you sure?”
“It’ll be like a new academia, with some krewe feudal elements. It’ll be a lot like the Dark Ages, when universities were little legal territories all their own, and scholars carried maces and wore little square hats, and whenever the university was crossed, they sent huge packs of students into the streets to tear everything up, until they got their way. Except it’s not the Dark Ages right now. It’s the Loud Ages, it’s the Age of Noise. We’ve destroyed our society with how much we know, and how quickly and randomly we can move it around. We live in the Age of Noise, and this is how we learn to be the scientists of the Age of Noise. We don’t get to be government functionaries who can have all the money we want just because we give the government a lot of military-industrial knowledge. That’s all over now. From now on we’re going to be like other creative intellec-tuals. We’re going to be like artists or violin-makers, with our little krewes of fans who pay attention and support us.”
“Wonderful, Greta. It sounds great!”
“We’ll do cute, attractive, sexy science, with small amounts of equipment. That’s what science has to be in America now. We can’t do it the European way, where there’s all kinds of moral fretting and worrying about what technology will do to people; there’s no fun in that, it’s just not American. We’ll be like Orville Wright in the bicycle shed from now on. It won’t be easier for us. It’ll be harder for us. But we’ll have our freedom. Our American freedom. It’s a vote of confi-dence in the human imagination.”
“You are a politician, Greta! You’ve had a big breakthrough here. I’m with you all the way.” He felt so proud.
“Sure — it might be wonderful, if it were somebody else doing this. I hate doing this to science. I’m deeply sorry that I’m doing it. But I’m on the cutting edge, and I just don’t have any choice.”
“What would you rather be doing?”
“What?” she demanded. “I’d rather be finishing my paper on inhibition of acetylcholine release in the hippocampus. It’s all I ever wanted to do! I live and dream that someday this horrible mess will all be finished, and somehow, somebody will let me do what I want.”
“I know that’s what you want. I really understand that now. I know what it means, too, Greta: it means I’ve failed you.”
“No. Yes. Well, it doesn’t matter. The big picture is going to work.”
“I don’t see how.”
“I can show you.” She found her purse and left the room. A light came on. He heard water running. It occurred to Oscar that he had entirely forgotten the original subject of his visit. Huey. Huey, and his purported refugee camp full of Haitians. He was absolutely sure that Huey, obsessed with Cognition as the Next Big Thing, had done something ecstatic and dreadful. He knew it had something to do with Greta’s neural work. Hellishly, Greta herself had absolutely no interest in the practical implications of the things she did. She couldn’t bear the strangling intellectual constraints involved in having to care. She couldn’t abide the foul and endless political and moral implica-tions of the pure pursuit of knowledge. They bored her beyond all reason. They just weren’t science. There was nothing scientific about them. The reactions of society no longer made any sense. Innovation had burned out the brakes. What could become of scientists in a world like that? What the hell was to be done with them?