"Don't you ever get cabin fever in this dump?"
"We are all well — ah, le reclusion," he said, tardy to catch her idiom, nodding when he did. "We suffer, each in his way."
"But you all take the same prescription."
"In a general way." Quickly he added, "For me it is not so bad; I have you twice a month, ma petite." He nearly strangled on that diminutive term under the circumstances, but knew she liked to hear it.
At last Chabrier reached the utmost depth of the lab and passed through the chuffing armored doors.
Here was no receptionist, but a room with couches. Eve never got used to the jungle of potted greenery there, so many levels under the desert floor, fed with synthetic light and nutrients and even with subtle variations in the air-conditioning currents. Her arm laid on his, Eve swept into Chabrier's rooms to claim the chaise. "Compliments of Boren Mills," she smirked as always, handing him a package labeled PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM. It contained enough drugs to pacify Chabrier's minions for two weeks.
Chabrier tossed it aside as though it were not the most important single facet of his existence; offered her a drink. She accepted, noting the tiniest of tremors in his hands, choosing to think it was her humming sexuality and not something else that provoked it.
"So how goes the scale-up?" She was only making small talk. For Eve, the synthesizer was only an abstract notion, an iffy means to power. Her specialty, media, was power. She could not fathom the logic by which Mills had let his early media expertise run to seed while he chased this technological enigma — and by proxy! She had never managed much interest in synthesizers of any size until one of her spaced-out discussions with Chabrier, two months before.
The scale-up program, Chabrier admitted with the shrug of a much thinner man, was still in Phase Two.
Phase One, design analysis of the unit Mills had committed murder to obtain, had been complete for over a year. Phase Three, if it ever arrived, would be a big unit, one for which Mills would cheerfully kill millions. But Phase Two was that crucial interval between analysis and synthesis, without which Phase Three could not begin.
Some philosophers of science virtually ignored this transition phase because, bluntly, it eluded them. Mills revealed his partial understanding — and mistrust — of it by calling it 'interphase brainstorming'. Marengo Chabrier understood the creative process better; it was he who termed it the 'gestation' phase.
An organism recapitulates the development of its race, as a human fetus will reveal gill slits in its early growth. But the organism does more, when it mutates beyond. The change is made real, not merely potential, during gestation. A plan gestates; ideas gestate; earth-shaking social movements gestate — sometimes useful mutations, oftener not.
Marengo Chabrier understood that few mutations become dominant, that ideas are rarely more than the sums of their parts. He also understood that IEE's chief exec was demanding a useful, dominant mutation tailored to fit. More worrisome still, Chabrier understood that short-term success, measured in these terms, was damned unlikely. It was a remnant of intellectual honesty that made him use the term 'gestation', for it promised nothing beyond recapitulation.
Most worrisome of all, Chabrier knew that Mills was very unlikely to let a lab full of addicts flush various expensive shits through their systems forever.
One way or another, the synthesizer scale-up program would be terminated someday and, like as not, Mills would reveal it with a handful of permanent personnel terminations. Slow poisons in the drugs? That was why Chabrier had them chemically analyzed before he dispensed them to his lab staff. He would, in any case, dispense them — though his friendship with Sun and Ming would make that act painful. But Chabrier himself would then turn to his clean stash, and would either escape or plead for his life.
He knew he had no hope of crossing the San Rafael desert without help. That was why he hoped to infatuate this great sow, Eve Simpson. And if sexual bonds alone were tenuous, he might further ensure her help by making her party to a deception that would drive a wedge between the woman and Boren Mills. C'est le premier pas qui coute, he knew; that first step which required so much resolve. But Chabrier had taken that step two months before, and Eve had cavorted like a Disney hippo at the idea. It had been her own idea, in fact, to disguise the thing as an outsized amulet — for she owned a jewel large enough, unique enough, to account for its size and whatever security precautions she might arrange.
As Chabrier was bemoaning his most recent failures to scale up the Chinese synthesizer, Eve cut in. "Well then, how about our little scale down?" Her face was alight with mischief.
He paused, switching mental tracks. "It functions," he said.
"Omigod, does it? I mean — what won't it make? How much at a time? What do I feed it? Any batteries to change? Give, goddammit!"
His last shred of suspicion — that she was baiting him on behalf of Mills — evaporated with her outburst.
He winked, walked to his safe, spent his own good time opening it, and withdrew a folded kerchief. With a flourish, he shook something from its folds, dangled it from a chain of brushed stainless steel. Eve's mouth was a small 'o' as she tracked its pendulum swing.
"It looks naked," she said. "Can you put the Ember in the thingummy now?"
"The bezel? Yes, if you have it with you."
She ripped open her bag, tore its inner lining, and pulled out a tiny velour bag. The Ember of Venus slid into her palm; and now it was Chabrier's turn to gawk.
The automated Venus sampler craft had found no true life on Venus. Mineral and gas samples, scooped up for physical return to Earth orbit, had mostly confirmed earlier data. The surface temperature of the shrouded planet was, after all, nearly five hundred degrees Celsius.
But one mineral specimen, taken from an arroyo at the lip of Venus's Ishtar highlands, became wedged at one side of the container which was to maintain Venus-normal temperature during the long voyage back.
The specimen gradually cooled in space and was quickly discovered by the sampler recovery team. The exact mechanism by which a mineral specimen became the Ember of Venus was still argued in learned journals, but its existence was unarguable fact.
Almost a centimeter thick after slices had been taken from it, the Ember was an ovoid the breadth of a hen's egg. It was under great internal stress. Despite the most careful progress of the diamond saw, one chip had flown from the side of the jewel.
Otherwise it was perfect, its surface smooth as a soap bubble but with voluptuous prominences on its face. The Ember of Venus compared to an Aussie fire opal as the opal compared to a gallstone. It had been presented to Eve by the CEO of LockLever as inducement for certain favorable media reports in 1998, when her body was merely lush and not yet obese. Eve had performed those services while passing sensitive data on to LockLever's competitor, Mills — which assured her position at IEE.
Thus Eve's possession of the Ember was irregular, but not illegal. She had often thought of wearing it.
Now, to decoy attention from the device it covered, it would find employment at Eve's throat.
"Incroyable," Chabrier whispered. "May I?" He took the stone between thumb and middle finger, intending to check its fit into the bezel he had prepared, but paused again as if thunderstruck. The translucent flickering depth of the gem seemed bottomless; iridescent hues of every color intersected, shifted, moved as if impelled by some viscous liquid.