Side trip through Goldsmith’s Country of the Mind.
The bus cruised into Sorrento Valley. Three levels of slaveways on ancient tracks covered sacred transportation ground bought with the treasure of ancient citizens, upper road level topped with curved glass. The slaveways gently curved through hills covered with corporate hanging gardens. Alternating bars of sun and shade from slaveway canopy supports crossed his face.
The gold and white vehicle snaked into the Mind Design bus station and issued his card with a transfer credit. A corporate grounds cab waited patiently for him while he passed ID and took him to the proper building. He stepped out of the cab shielding his eyes against the sun.
He had visited Mind Design Inc only once five years before in the IPR glory days. MDI technicians and programmers had swarmed around him smiling, some in white skinform others in time honored denim, shaking hands talking about work on this agent work on that as if they knew what a natural agent was and how powerful. Maybe they do now, Martin allowed, but not then. Even he had barely begun to understand the power and perplexity of natural mental agent integration into routines subroutines and personalities.
MDI had been his negative his research’s negative that is: building from below rather than probing from above.
Now Martin Burke was a nonentity who needed Carol Neuman’s clearance to get on the grounds. If he attracted any attention it was cursory Who was that face? Did I know that face once? Years ago maybe before loss of status legal difficulties expulsion disgrace by association.
He hunched his shoulders.
Building thirty one rose on broad aluminum inverted pyramid feet above an open courtyard, early teens architecture imitating mid twentieth. Wide and low rising only three stories above the courtyard with two narrow trilons on the north end supporting a weave of optic fibers that leaked spinning galaxies even in midmorning sun. Showplace. Prominence and respect. Style and cleanliness.
MDI was prosperous indeed. Inside, pale gold walls trimmed with red drapes that rippled like bas relief flags in still air, vids moving across the fabric internal projection or weaving light mod, paintings faces all very This and Now.
Martin felt faint envy. This was the lobby to a common lab building. MDI shipped designs to arbeiter and thinker manufacturers around the world and that meant huge resources.
A tall slender androgyne arbeiter with skin the match of the walls, a convolved hairmock the shade of the red drapes and a vertical face dividing eyeline clear and bright as the outdoor sun stood behind a white marble top desk and greeted him in a beautiful synthetic voice. “Carol Neuman please,” he said.
“You are Martin Burke?” the arbeiter asked. He nodded, averting from the vertical crystal eyeline. “She is paged.”
“Thank you.” Offhandedly looking around without wanting to see. Not even at its peak did IPR rate this power show. But that was fine; brains not backing; to the swiftest went the race not the gaudiest.
Carol came down a sculptured stone staircase in pale blue skinform. Deer moves cat walk as he remembered though hipheavier now. Eyes unconcerned professional light smile brown hair in short close waves bouncing back from compression beneath scalpglove in her right hand. He always heard Sibelius strings and drums when seeing her, brownhaired blueeyed Norse tall goddesslike unconcerned but a treasure to the right unlocker of passions. It was still in her this ability to make him think bad LitVid. He returned her smile.
“Feeling better this morning?” she asked.
“Rested. Thinking it out.”
“Good. Welcome to my place of work. We can find a quiet room and talk.”
“Am I going to get any explanations?”
“Such as there are.”
He nodded and followed her back up the stairs. “This is an open lab,” she said. “For public display. I work in the back. I heard about your meeting. It must have been quite a shock.”
“I call it Fausting,” he said.
Carol smiled genuinely now. “Good word.” She touched her lips with finger. “Quiet room. All the Raphkind eyes and ears are out. Management very liberal. Trust your temps, trust the agencies. Corporations coddle the chosen now.”
“As it should be.”
There was yet this between them, that after the fruit laden horseshit and tears and years they could walk in stride and talk easily. The trap so easy to fall into was that they might have been family, acted as if they had been raised as close almost as brother and sister. Martin Burke could feel his agape/eros routines building castles and filling them with simulations of long domesticity, imagining her when she’s eighty and he’s eighty five still together.
They walked down a clean fresh calved berg blue hall punctuated with cloisonne vases on white pillars. Carol asked a door to open and it obliged, revealing a long conference room. The lights slowly rose, illuminating brown velvet flocked walls and nano wood furniture, comfortable mover and shaker decor.
“Impressive,” he said.
“Flaunt it,” she said, pulling a seat out for him. “You’ve met Lascal and Albigoni.” She sat across from him, skinform tracing her lines but concealing details.
“For lunch yesterday. First good meal I’ve eaten in some time.”
She nodded but did not follow that byway. “They Fausted you.”
“They did.”
“You’re going to bite?”
He paused, gritting teeth behind pursed lips, then raising his eyebrows and looking at her from an angle, cautious. “Yes.”
“Betty-Ann was a lovely girl,” Carol said. “I don’t know if she was as brilliant as her father, but she was a prime soul.” Carol used soul as poetic code for an integrated mentality all levels linked. “She wanted to be a poet and a mother. She wanted her children to look at their world through a poet’s eyes. She was eighteen. I was therapying her for some gene-based subroutine screwups that prevented easeful sexuality. Nothing that would have prevented her rising to any agency’s top list, if she had wanted to ignore her father’s connections.” Carol leaned forward and fixed him with a blue stare that was not humanly angry but gave him insight into Olympian rage. “She idolized Emanuel Goldsmith.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No. You’ve never met him, either.”
“No.”
Carol leaned back and cupped right elbow in left hand. “Albigoni somehow knew that I had worked for you. He knew that my name would mean something to you. But I told him you had to hear it from his own lips. He had Lascal call you because Lascal is very sharp at judging prospects. He sounded you out before you met.”
“Amazing resources.”
“The man can do what he says, Martin. No tricks. Albigoni can put you back into IPR fully funded and with a clean slate. He can rewrite small history and clear your reputation. He doesn’t do that sort of thing as a habit but he knows how and he has the means.”
“Sounds Orwellian.”
“Albigoni isn’t federal and has no aspirations to politics. He doesn’t want to grind a jackboot into humanity’s face. He’d rather make them smart and stable and happy. Smart stable happy people rent his books and LitVids.”
“Like Emanuel Goldsmith.”
“Goldsmith was untherapied,” Carol said. “A privileged natural. More power to the argument that only therapied are truly human.”
Martin grimaced. “I hope you don’t believe that,” he said.
She shrugged. “Vested interest I suppose. If he had been therapied he would not have killed. But you can’t force therapy on him—Albigoni doesn’t want that. We satisfy a bereaved gentleman’s passionate whim. We don’t hurt Goldsmith; perhaps we find a way to cure him.”