Chapter 17
Apparently, galactic centres of power and influence had a reasonably good density of falafel vendors. Arianne couldn’t see an ‘open’ sign, but then again most of the façade had been blown apart. She could see a group of people cowering in the back of the kitchen. She walked up to one of the tables, which still had blooms of paper full of falafel sandwiches and skinny chips.
“Is anyone going to finish this?” she called to the terror-stricken group.
She shrugged and stuffed a chip into her mouth. Chips were good.
“Arianne?”
There was a head above the counter calling her name. Apparently, she had left all of her perceptual affordances in a different solar system, because it took her a long time to recognise her old study-mate from Io.
“Richard?” she said, through a mouthful of fried space potato.
“You’re alright!” he said, stepping towards her. “Are the Persisters shut down?”
“Not exactly – they’re working just fine.”
“But – they’ve stopped moving. How did you do that?”
“Well, they’re built to be researchers, so they need funding. I released an application form for massive grants.”
“Ah ha!” said Richard, “an application form so complex it fried their brains?”
“Nah, it only had one question.”
Arianne cleared her throat and struck a dramatic pose
“What uniquely qualifies you for this grant?”
She took another chip. Richard had not moved a muscle, so Arianne explained.
“Everyone was trying to make themselves special, but the synchronisation network was trying to keep them the same. It went into overdrive, and the social relativity mechanism kicked in and slowed everyone down until they weren’t moving anymore. I expect Holt and the security services will tidy up.”
Richard’s face collapsed in relief.
“I'm just glad you’re ok.” he said.
For a second, Arianne saw the young scamp in the eyes of the old man before her. But his smile faltered.
“Richard”
“Hmm?”
“Usually, when people are told wildly improbable things outside their understanding, they say things like ‘huh?’ or ‘what?’ or ‘I’m sorry I don’t know anything about an insane cyborg plan’”
“Um ...”
“You knew about the Persisters – why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried – I gave you the Persister tag - but they were watching me, I couldn’t do anything”
Some memory was trying to get Arianne’s attention, what was she missing?
“You could have stopped me from going.” Arianne said
“I’m sorry Arianne – if I’d known …”
Arianne was sure that she was overlooking some small detail – some loose end.
“So why are you on the hub, Richard?”
Richard fumbled with his hands. Ah yes, now she remembered: there was a serial murderer targeting researchers of cultural evolution. And absolutely none of it had been resolved by the whole Persister thing. Arianne desperately tried to gather the pieces in her head: someone was trying to kill cultural evolutionists, but they were trying to build Persisters to replace the CAFCA empire. Obviously, CAFCA wanted to stop this, so that gave them a motive. But wasn’t it CAFCA that had hired Professor Golden and Professor Sura and all the others in the first place? Maybe to expose them, so they could be picked off? But then why had they hired Arianne to investigate the murders?
“Did you know that Sura was being targeted?”
“Well – I …”
Suddenly, a deep, drawling voice came from behind Arianne.
“Don’t be so modest, Richard,”
Arianne span around. Sitting at one of the tables, calmly picking his way through a large chicken shawarma, was the linguistics magnate Vastion La Quana. Arianne blinked hard. What was La Quana doing here? How did he know Richard? Was that tzatziki on his chin?
“After all” La Quana continued “you came up with so many of the ideas.”
Arianne XXXXX
“Ideas for what?”
“For the scenarios, of course.”
Arianne turned back to Richard. His face had paled so that he looked much older, but his expression was that of a small boy distraught with shame.
“The murders?” said Arainne, “It was you?”
“No! I just came up with -”
“Professor Golden? You had her killed?” Arianne half-whispered the final word.
Richard’s face slid into a scowl.
“How could you understand?” he spat “You weren’t around – you don’t know what it’s like now.”
“What does that mean?”
La Quana spoke again, drawing all eyes and ears towards him with a soft, deep voice.
“You don’t realise, Arianne – most don’t. Small funding is disappearing– galactic credits are being sucked up by bigger and bigger grants. It’s all going to the hard sciences. Funding for cultural evolution and linguistics is drying up. In public, of course, I say that our field is blossoming, but it’ll all be gone in a few centuries. What we needed was a way of influencing the people who make the decisions.”
“So you were terrorising the fundies?”
“Oh no – the funding councils? They give the go-ahead, but they’re really just obeying the people who are really in charge.”
La Quana made a knowing face and brought his finger up like a conductor’s batton, a gesture borrowed from the crescendo of a keynote lecture, just before the prestigious explanation. It was so practiced that hardly anyone noticed that he had knocked over a cup of blue shlushy.
“No, I’m talking about the public.”
La Quana’s hand span and opened.
“They drive demand. If something’s popular, it’ll get funded. The actual merit of any project counts for very little – what the fundies care about is whether it’ll please the public, become a hot topic, whether it’s fashionable. Just think about all the evolutionary psychology work on sex and attraction. If CAFCA just funded projects that were actually useful to the galactic community, like space elevators and nano-technology, there would be an uproar. CAFCA wouldn’t last a year.”
Arianne’s eyes widened in horror.
“You mean … the study of cultural evolution isn’t sexy?”
“I know, it’s difficult for us to understand” La Quana said, “but the average person has no interest whatsoever in how language works. What it needs is a sense of mystery and intrigue. People needed to feel drawn to it, like a good - ”
“Murder mystery?” said Arianne.
“I was going to say hyper-niche satirical space opera, but yes. Our plan was to raise the field of cultural evolution in people’s consciousness. To give it an edge, to make it dangerous and exciting.”
Finally, La Quana wiped the sauce from his chin and looked up, thoughtfully.
“Hmm” he said, “I’ve just realised that cultural evolution may be the one field where you can be doing research while applying for funding.”
Richard hastily made a note on his terminal.
“But now” La Quana continued, “you’ve uncovered an even better story for people to tell their grandchildren around the plasmafire. I am impressed. That’s why I’m talking to you, Doctor Arianne. I’m thinking of recommending your limitless potential to … my employers. I’m sure we can work together to ensure that people start telling the right story.”
Arianne suddenly got angry. Despite all that she’d been through, none of it had felt personal – no-one was targeting her, she had just been in the wrong place in several of the wrong times. She hadn’t been thinking beyond the present moment, even if the present moment had been months long in some cases. She had just been able to react. But now someone was talking about the future – her future. One that was supposed to have particular aims, purposes and objectives.
r /> “Look, G-man,” she said, “I rank converting humanity into undying cyborgs quite a long way above a few murders in the whole scheme of evilness, but ...”
She finished the sentence with a flare of hands. She turned away from them and started walking towards the door. She just wanted to get away from this place, now. To have time to think, to absorb everything that had happened. To have a sit down.
“I’m quite confident that we’ll be able to find you a post-doc.”
At the sound of that tiny word, Arianne felt her heart actually skip a beat. She stopped in the doorway. Behind her, La Quana was continuing in his deep baritone.
“After all, I have a new Gravitation grant, and the new department isn’t going to terraform itself.”
Working on a Gravitation project?
“You’ve proved yourself to be a decisive person” said La Quana “So I don’t expect you’ll have any trouble deciding what to do.”
Arianne stared straight ahead into the dusty street. Her left eye didn’t even twitch a little.
Karen Arianne will return in Space Funding Crisis II: Transister
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