Too Like the Lightning (56 page)

Guildbreaker:
“
Dominus
is really worried about you. The others may not see the difference, but I can tell.”

Seneschal:
“Well? Do they turn applications down?”

Guildbreaker:
“The Utopians? No, never, I had Aldrin check.”

Seneschal:
“You don't see it, do you?”

Guildbreaker:
“I do see it. There's someone
Dominus
thinks would want to be a Utopian but isn't, so they wondered if their application was rejected. I'll act on it. But you need to come back and tell us what's happening. What have you been doing for the last three days?”

Seneschal:
“Seconds before that question, He'd asked Aldrin how long until the next Mars launch. Here's your hint: I heard
notre Maître
ask Cato Weeksbooth the same thing earlier that day, how long until the next Mars launch, and He got just as accurate an answer. Then He asked Weeksbooth how long the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' had been Humanist and the blessed little coward didn't know.”

Guildbreaker:
“Cato Weeksbooth?”

Seneschal:
“I'll leave it to you. I've found richer hunting.”

Guildbreaker:
“Dominic, what—”

Call ended 11:13 UT 03/26/2454

*   *   *

From the notes of Martin Guildbreaker:

At 14:22 UT on 03/26/2454 I arrived at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry to interview Dr. Cato Weeksbooth. I did not give prior notice, so that Dr. Weeksbooth would not have time to consult the other members of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' before accepting. I was directed to wait for Dr. Weeksbooth in their office, and found it remarkable that a volunteer should have their own office.

The office contained tanks with fish, mice, frogs, crickets, and a very large ant colony, and was decorated with pictures of famous scientists and photographs of Dr. Weeksbooth with children at science fairs and locations of scientific interest. Notable were five framed handwritten paper letters from former students thanking Dr. Weeksbooth for inspiring them to pursue careers in science—three of the five mentioned receiving significant prizes. In each case the letter was framed so as to be partly covered by a photograph of the author as a child. I scanned the letters and determined two peculiarities. First, in all five cases the photographs had been carefully positioned to obscure points in the letter where the author mentioned having joined the Utopian Hive. Second, my scanner confirmed that the stains on all five letters were tears.

Many people value gut instinct, but in my experience gut reactions make it more difficult to objectively pursue an investigation. I could not shake the sense of murder which I had picked up from hearing Tsuneo Sugiyama describe the suicide by car crash of their grandchild's fiancé, and I could feel myself looking for murder as I worked, and reading it into evidence whether it was there or not. To counteract this tendency, I decided to begin with the question least directly related to murder, that is, the question of Dr. Cato Weeksbooth. This may seem a strange starting place, but much of life consists in repeating actions which are consistently effective, even if the mechanism is not clear. The
Porphyrogene
rarely judges it necessary to help me with my work, and, when they do, the aid is often in the form of such a seemingly tangential question, which inevitably leads me to the end I seek.

Cato Weeksbooth is thirty-five years old, one hundred and seventy-three centimeters tall, of recognizable Chinese descent, with dark brown eyes and wild, wiry hair clearly styled after Einstein. Dr. Weeksbooth wore a mad scientist costume, with an archaic white laboratory coat over blue hospital scrubs, and Humanist boots of Griffincloth which showed the internal anatomy of the feet. Only three strat insignia were visible: two pins on the lapel of the lab coat indicating membership in the Friends of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and the Ten Plus Moon Club, and a pair of rubber lab gloves tied into a knot at the belt, which is the insignia of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry Junior Scientist Squad. Dr. Weeksbooth seemed agitated, and spent much of the interview performing maintenance on the tanks of animals around the room, in a clear effort to avoid eye contact. I commenced formal interview at 14:47 UT:

Guildbreaker:
“Thank you for seeing me today, Dr. Weeksbooth.”

Weeksbooth:
“Can this be fast? I have a thing to do. A meeting. I have a meeting to do, to go to, to run. I have to run a meeting, so I can't stay long for whatever this is. Why do you want to talk to me anyway? I never saw the stupid Seven-Ten list, it's nothing to do with me. I'm very busy. Can't you leave me alone?”

Guildbreaker:
“This will be quick, Dr. Weeksbooth, I just need to get some information about the habits of the house, so I can tell when the thief is most likely to have entered. How much of your time would you say you spend at home?”

Weeksbooth:
“Most of it. I do work there, you know.”

Guildbreaker:
“How many hours a week are you at home?”

Weeksbooth:
“I don't know. Lots. I'm always there, usually, always usually, unless I'm here.”

Guildbreaker:
“Do you spend a lot of time here at the museum?”

Weeksbooth:
“I guess.”

Guildbreaker:
“How many hours a week?”

Weeksbooth:
“It depends. Maybe twenty. No, more than that, thirty. Forty, maybe forty.”

Guildbreaker:
“How long have you been volunteering here?”

Weeksbooth:
“Since I was fifteen.”

Guildbreaker:
“That's a long time. You must enjoy it.”

Weeksbooth:
“Yes.”

Guildbreaker:
“What made you start?”

Weeksbooth:
“Kids aren't learning science right these days! The teachers teach it like it's just supposed to be useful, like, here, learn this geometry so you can design a building, here, learn this chemistry so you can make a plastic bag. Of course kids don't like it! No kid comes home from school and says, ‘I want to make plastic bags when I grow up!' We already have plastic bags, and comfy chairs, and flying cars, we've had them for centuries, and they aren't getting better because they work already so no one's interested in replacing them, just making them cheaper, or with more games. That isn't science! Science is figuring out where the universe is going! Science is noticing that the ants crawling up the picnic table like your sandwich better than your ba'sib's and asking, ‘Why?' Not ‘How is this useful?' not ‘Can I make this into a plastic bag?' but ‘Why?'”

Guildbreaker:
“I meant, why did you start volunteering at that age specifically?”

Weeksbooth:
“Oh. My doctor made me.”

Guildbreaker:
“Your doctor?”

Weeksbooth:
“Doctor Balin. Ember Balin. My psychiatrist.”

Guildbreaker:
“Why did Doctor Balin want you to start volunteering?”

Weeksbooth:
“Because I tried to kill myself. Look, this has nothing to do with the Seven-Ten list. If you want a list of what hours I've been at the museum you can ask the staff assistant. Can I go now?”

Guildbreaker:
“What's your meeting?”

Weeksbooth:
“What?”

Guildbreaker:
“The meeting you have to go run, what is it?”

Weeksbooth:
“It's a Junior Scientist Squad meeting.”

Guildbreaker:
“What's that?”

Weeksbooth:
“A science club for kids.”

Guildbreaker:
“What sorts of things does the club do?”

Weeksbooth:
“We have club meetings twice a week, and I give special tours and demonstrations in the museum, and we have a reading group, and a lab where the kids do lab experiments, I supervise but they pick the projects and do everything themselves, and they also do solo research projects and present them at our annual science fair—it's getting famous now, the Director of Worldlab came last year—and field trips, we do field trips, to labs, and research bases, and geological sites, and nature preserves, whatever the kids request, and up the elevators, and Luna City, that's their favorite, every year, Luna City.”

Guildbreaker:
“How many times have you been to the Moon?”

Weeksbooth:
“Nineteen times now. This year will be my twentieth.”

Guildbreaker:
“That must be expensive. Don't the Utopians make you pay the full cost of the trip after the second time?”

Weeksbooth:
“They subsidize me because I take the kids. We have a special package where we get to stop at the ISSC, too. Do you realize seventy percent of kids today haven't been to the Moon by the time they head off to a Campus? Thirteen percent of people never go at all, even with the subsidies! You know if you still haven't gone by the time you turn sixty they invite you go for free, and thirteen percent still never do!”

Guildbreaker:
“It sounds like a great club.”

Weeksbooth:
“It is. It's popular, too, we have sixty-one members this year, that's a record. Of course, usually only about thirty come to each meeting, but twenty is still a lot! And I get more at the lectures, and they record the lectures now too and distribute them free. The Museum Director told me they're being used in more than a hundred classrooms.”

Guildbreaker:
“I watched one as a sample before coming.”

Weeksbooth:
“Which one?”

Guildbreaker:
“The history of vaccination. You're a very passionate lecturer. You made me tear up at one point.”

Weeksbooth:
“It's the material, not me. An achievement like that would move you to tears if it were written in bad verse on the back of a napkin. That is, if you've any scientific passion left in you. Some people don't.”

Guildbreaker:
“I don't think it was just the material, you're a very good speaker. You've also written some books?”

Weeksbooth:
“No one took it seriously. They say I'm trying to teach science like it's poetry, well, science is poetry, and anyone who doesn't see that is dead inside!”

Guildbreaker:
“You're referring to your guidebook for science teachers,
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
?”

Weeksbooth:
“Yes. You were thinking of something else?”

Guildbreaker:
“
The Horizoners.
”

Weeksbooth:
“Oh, that. Everyone made a big deal about that because Thiz got Orland Vives to make it into a movie. It was just a fun little story I wrote for the kids to circulate among their friends. Did you read it?”

Guildbreaker:
“No, but I…”

Weeksbooth:
“You watched the movie?”

Guildbreaker:
“Yes.”

Weeksbooth:
“Everybody watched the movie.”

Guildbreaker:
“Did you like the movie?”

Weeksbooth:
“It was okay.”

Guildbreaker:
“Only okay?”

Weeksbooth:
“They changed too much.”

Guildbreaker:
“I heard they cut one of the story lines, is that right? Originally there were four groups of kids trying to build ships to go around the world including a Nineteenth-Century group as well as the ancient ones, the ones in 1495, and the contemporary ones?”

Weeksbooth:
“Cutting a group was okay, they only had two hours, they couldn't fit all four. The problem was they made Taylor Harrow into a Utopian.”

Guildbreaker:
“That's the leader of the contemporary set?”

Weeksbooth:
“They said it was unrealistic for a kid to think that way and not be a Utopian, but that was the whole point! Anybody can have a sense of scientific curiosity, not just Utopians. The movie version reinforces the stereotype instead of breaking it.”

Guildbreaker:
“You wanted to break it?”

Weeksbooth:
“Of course. They said it was innovative making a movie with a Utopian as a central character instead of having them be some kind of mystical teacher or a techie or a supervillain, they said it would humanize the Utopians, like that last Canner movie did, what was it called?”

Guildbreaker:
“
Apollo's River.
”

Weeksbooth:
“Right, but that wasn't what I meant at all.”

Guildbreaker:
“You were going for an ‘If Taylor Harrow can do it why can't I' type of thing?”

Weeksbooth:
“Exactly. In the movie the message is that the Utopians have dibs on science the way the Humanists do on sports, and the other Hives all say, ‘We don't need to do any exploring, leave it to the Utopians.' Everybody talks about the Mars project as if only Utopians are ever going to set foot there, while the majority is content to sit around with their plastic bags and comfy chairs. Is that the future you want?”

Guildbreaker:
“So you're trying to get kids who aren't Utopians to be interested in science and exploration?”

Weeksbooth:
“Exactly. That's why my persona is mad scientist, it's a pre-Hive character so anyone can imagine themself as a mad scientist without associating it with Utopians.”

Guildbreaker:
“Is it working?”

Weeksbooth:
“What?”