Ascendancies (62 page)

“If they rioted in their
own
towns,
that
would be pointless,” Sardelle said. “Here at the Wende, they can smash each other, and everything else, and tomorrow they will be perfectly safe at home in their own world.”

“Oh, I get it,” Eddy said. “That makes a lot of sense.”

A passing blonde woman in a Muslim hijab slapped a button onto Eddy's sleeve. “Will your lawyer talk to God?” the button demanded aloud, repeatedly, in English. Eddy plucked the device off and stamped on it.

The Cultural Critic was holding court in a safehouse in Stadtmitte. The safehouse was an anonymous twentieth-century four-storey dump, flanked by some nicely retrofitted nineteenth-century townhouses. A graffiti gang had hit the block during the night, repainting the street-surface with a sprawling polychrome mural, all big grinning green kittycats, fractal spirals, and leaping priapic pink pigs. “Hot Spurt!” one of the pigs suggested eagerly; Eddy skirted its word balloon as they approached the door.

The door bore a small brass plaque reading “E.I.S.—Elektronisches Invasionsabwehr-Systems GmbH.” There was an inscribed corporate logo that appeared to be a melting ice-cube.

Sardelle spoke in German to the door video; it opened, and they entered a hall full of pale, drawn adults in suits, armed with fire-extinguishers. Despite their air of nervous resolution and apparent willingness to fight hand-to-hand, Eddy took them for career academics: modestly dressed, ties and scarves slightly askew, odd cheek-tattoos, distracted gazes, too serious. The place smelled bad, like stale cottage-cheese and bookshelf dust. The dirtsmudged walls were festooned with schematics and wiring diagrams, amid a bursting mess of tower-stacked scrawl-labeled cartons—disk archives of some kind. The ceiling and floorboards were festooned with taped-down powercables and fiber-optic network wiring.

“Hi, everybody!” Eddy said. “How's it going?” The building's defenders looked at him, noted his jumpsuit costume, and reacted with relieved indifference. They began talking in French, obviously resuming some briefly postponed and intensely important discussion.

“Hello,” said a German in his thirties, rising to his feet. He had long, thinning, greasy hair and a hollow-cheeked, mushroom-pale face. He wore secretarial half-spex; and behind them he had the shiftiest eyes Eddy had ever seen, eyes that darted, and gloated, and slid around the room. He worked his way through the defenders, and smiled at Eddy, vaguely. “I am your host. Welcome, friend.” He extended a hand.

Eddy shook it. He glanced sidelong at Sardelle. Sardelle had gone as stiff as a board and had jammed her gloved hands in her trenchcoat pockets.

“So,” Eddy gabbled, snatching his hand back, “thanks a lot for having us over!”

“You'll be wanting to see my famous friend the Cultural Critic,” said their host, with a cadaverous smile. “He is upstairs. This is my place. I own it.” He gazed around himself, brimming with satisfaction. “It's my Library, you see. I have the honor of hosting the great man for the Wende. He appreciates my work. Unlike so many others.” Their host dug into the pocket of his baggy slacks. Eddy, instinctively expecting a drawn knife, was vaguely surprised to see his host hand over an old-fashioned, dogeared business card. Eddy glanced at it. “How are you, Herr Schreck?”

“Life is very exciting today,” said Schreck with a smirk. He touched his spex and examined Eddy's online bio. “A young American visitor. How charming.”

“I'm from NAFTA,” Eddy corrected.

“And a civil libertarian. Liberty is the only word that still excites me,” Schreck said, with itchy urgency. “I need many more American intimates. Do make use of me. And all my digital services. That card of mine—do call those network addresses and tell your friends. The more, the happier.” He turned to Sardelle.
“Kaffee, fraulein? Zigaretten?”

Sardelle shook her head minimally.

“It's good she's here,” Schreck told Eddy. “She can help us to fight. You go upstairs. The great man is waiting for visitors.”

“I'm going up with him,” Sardelle said.

“Stay here,” Schreck urged. “The security threat is to the Library, not to him.”

“I'm a bodyguard,” Sardelle said frostily. “I guard the body. I don't guard data-havens.”

Schreck frowned. “Well, more fool you, then.”

Sardelle followed Eddy up the dusty, flower-carpeted stairs. Upstairs to the right was an antique twentieth-century office-door in blond oak and frosted glass. Sardelle knocked; someone called out in French.

She opened the door. Inside the office were two long workbenches covered with elderly desktop computers. The windows were barred and curtained.

The Cultural Critic, wearing spex and a pair of datagloves, sat in a bright pool of sunlight-yellow glare from a trackmounted overhead light. He was pecking daintily with his gloved fingertips at a wafer-thin datascreen of woven cloth.

As Sardelle and Eddy stepped into the office, the Critic wrapped up his screen in a scroll, removed his spex, and unplugged his gloves. He had dark pepper-and-salt tousled hair, a dark wool tie, and a long maroon scarf draped over a beautifully cut ivory jacket.

“You would be Mr. Dertouzas from CAPCLUG,” he said.

“Exactly. How are you, sir?”

“Very well.” He examined Eddy briefly. “I assume his clothing was your idea, Frederika.”

Sardelle nodded once, with a sour look. Eddy smiled at her, delighted to learn her real name.

“Have a seat,” the Critic offered. He poured himself more coffee. “I'd offer you a cup of this, but it's been…adjusted.”

“I brought you your book,” Eddy said. He sat, and opened the bag, and offered the item in question.

“Splendid.” The Critic reached into his pocket and, to Eddy's surprise, pulled a knife. The Critic opened its blade with one thumbnail. The shining blade was sawtoothed in a fractal fashion; even its serrations had tiny serrated serrations. It was a jack-knife the length of a finger, with a razor-sharp edge on it as long as a man's arm.

Under the knife's irresistible ripping caress, the tough cover of the book parted with a discreet shredding of cloth. The Critic reached into the slit and plucked out a thin, gleaming storage disk. He set the book down. “Did you read this?”

“That disk?” Eddy ad-libbed. “I assumed it was encrypted.”

“You assumed correctly, but I meant the book.”

“I think it lost something in translation,” Eddy said.

The Critic raised his brows. He had dark, heavy brows with a pronounced frown-line between them, over sunken, gray-green eyes. “You have read Canetti in the original, Mr. Dertouzas?”

“I meant the translation between centuries,” Eddy said, and laughed. “What I read left me “with nothing but questions.…Can you answer them for me, sir?”

The Critic shrugged and turned to a nearby terminal. It was a scholar's workstation, the least dilapidated of the machines in the office. He touched four keys in order; a carousel whirled and spat out a disk. The Critic handed it to Eddy. “You'll find your answers here, to whatever extent I can give them,” he said. “My Complete Works. Please take this disk. Reproduce it, give it to whomever you like, as long as you accredit it. The standard scholarly procedure. I'm sure you know the etiquette.”

“Thank you very much,” Eddy said with dignity, tucking the disk into his bag. “Of course I own your works already, but I'm glad of a fully up-to-date edition.”

“I'm told that a copy of my Complete Works will get you a cup of coffee at any café in Europe,” the Critic mused, slotting the encrypted disk and rapidly tapping keys. “Apparently digital commodification is not entirely a spent force, even in literature.…” He examined the screen. “Oh, this is lovely. I knew I would need this data again. And I certainly didn't want it in my house.” He smiled.

“What are you going to do with that data?” Eddy said.

“Do you really not know?” the Critic said. “And you from CAPCLUG, a group of such carnivorous curiosity? Well, that's also a strategy, I suppose.” He tapped more keys, then leaned back and opened a pack of zigarettes.

“What strategy?”

“New elements, new functions, new solutions—I don't know what ‘culture' is, but I know exactly what I'm doing.” The Critic drew slowly on a zigarette, his brows knotting.

“And what's that, exactly?”

“You mean, what is the underlying concept?” He waved the zigarette. “I have no ‘concept.' The struggle here must not be reduced to a single simple idea. I am building a structure that must not, cannot, be reduced to a single simple idea. I am building a structure that perhaps
suggests
a concept.…If I did more, the system itself would become stronger than the surrounding culture.…Any system of rational analysis must live within the strong blind body of mass humanity, Mr. Dertouzas. If we learned anything from the twentieth century, we learned that much, at least.” The Critic sighed, a fragrant medicinal mist. “I fight windmills, sir. It's a duty.…You often are hurt, but at the same time you become unbelievably happy, because you see that you have both friends and enemies, and that you are capable of fertilizing society with contradictory attitudes.”

“What enemies do you mean?” Eddy said.

“Here. Today. Another data-burning. It was necessary to stage a formal resistance.”

“This is an evil place,” Sardelle—or rather Frederika—burst out. “I had no idea this was today's safehouse. This is anything but safe. Jean-Arthur, you must leave this place at once. You could be killed here!”

“An evil place? Certainly. But there is so much megabytage devoted to works on goodness, and on doing good—so very little coherent intellectual treatment of the true nature of evil and being evil.…Of malice and stupidity and acts of cruelty and darkness.…” The Critic sighed. “Actually, once you're allowed through the encryption that Herr Schreck so wisely imposes on his holdings, you'll find the data here rather banal. The manuals for committing crime are farfetched and badly written. The schematics for bombs, listening devices, drug labs, and so forth, are poorly designed and probably unworkable. The pornography is juvenile and overtly anti-erotic. The invasions of privacy are of interest only to voyeurs. Evil is banal—by no means so scarlet as one's instinctive dread would paint it. It's like the sex-life of one's parents—a primal and forbidden topic, and yet, with objectivity, basically integral to their human nature—and of course to your own.”

“Who's planning to burn this place?” Eddy said.

“A rival of mine. He calls himself the Moral Referee.”

“Oh yeah, I've heard of him!” Eddy said. “He's here in Düsseldorf, too? Jesus.”

“He is a charlatan,” the Critic sniffed. “Something of an ayatollah figure. A popular demagogue.…” He glanced at Eddy. “Yes, yes—of course people do say much the same of me, Mr. Dertouzas, and I'm perfectly aware of that. But I have two doctorates, you know. The Referee is a self-appointed digital Savonarola. Not a scholar at all. An autodidactic philosopher. At best an artist.”

“Aren't you an artist?”

“That's the danger.…” The Critic nodded. “Once I was only a teacher, then suddenly I felt a sense of mission.… I began to understand which works are strongest, which are only decorative.…” The Critic looked suddenly restless, and puffed at his zigarette again. “In Europe there is too much couture, too little culture. In Europe everything is colored by discourse. There is too much knowledge and too much fear to overthrow that knowledge.…In NAFTA you are too naively postmodern to suffer from this syndrome.… And the Sphere, the Sphere, they are orthogonal to both our concerns.…The South, of course, is the planet's last reservoir of authentic humanity, despite every ontological atrocity committed there.…”

“I'm not following you,” Eddy said.

“Take that disk with you. Don't lose it,” the Critic said somberly. “I have certain obligations, that's all. I must know why I made certain choices, and be able to defend them, and I must defend them, or risk losing everything.…Those choices are already made. I've drawn a line here, established a position. It's my Wende today, you know! My lovely Wende.…Through cusp-points like this one, I can make things different for the whole of society.” He smiled. “Not better, necessarily—but different, certainly.…”

“People are coming,” Frederika announced suddenly, standing bolt upright and gesturing at the air. “A lot of people marching in the streets outside…there's going to be trouble.”

“I knew he would react the moment that data left this building,” the Critic said, nodding. “Let trouble come! I will not move!”

“God damn you, I'm being paid to see that you survive!” Frederika said. “The Referee's people burn data-havens. They've done it before, and they'll do it again. Let's get out of here while there's still time!”

“We're all ugly and evil,” the Critic announced calmly, settling deeply into his chair and steepling his fingers. “Bad knowledge is still legitimate self-knowledge. Don't pretend otherwise.”

“That's no reason to fight them hand-to-hand here in Düsseldorf! We're not tactically prepared to defend this building! Let them burn it! What's one more stupid outlaw and his rat nest full of garbage?”

The Critic looked at her with pity. “It's not the access that matters. It's the principle.”

“Bullseye!” Eddy shouted, recognizing a CAPCLUG slogan.

Frederika, biting her lip, leaned over a tabletop and began typing invisibly on a virtual keyboard. “If you call your professional backup,” the Critic told her, “they'll only be hurt. This is not really your fight, my dear; you're not committed.”

“Fuck you and your politics; if you burn up in here we don't get our bonuses,” Frederika shouted.