That was pretty fair, if I was honest.
“Also that you’re a giant whore. Although they say that part with respect.”
That checked out as well. Although in my defense most voiders were giant whores. You had to make your own fun in the deep skies and fucking anything that moved was an all-time classic with an extremely low barrier to entry. “And this is supposed to make me abandon my loyalties and join you?”
“This is supposed to pass the time.” He gave me a challenging look. “Let me guess, we’ve just reached the part where you start musing about how passing the time is all any of us are doing. Or how we’re all prisoners in our own way. Or how though some of us are behind bars we’re all connected by the universal brotherhood of man.”
“I might,” I replied, determined that he wouldn’t make me second-guess myself. “It’d pass the time if nothing else.”
Wolfram sat back in his cell, his hands folded behind his head as a flesh-and-bone pillow. “Go on then.”
“We’re all prisoners in our own way,” I said to him, only slightly sardonically.
“Because of, like, the system, man,” he replied.
I bit my lip. I wasn’t used to beingengagedwith like this and I wasn’t sure I liked it. “Saying something in a mocking voice doesn’t make it less true. All of us are circumscribed in one way or another.”
He scoffed. “Is that it? That’s all you can say?Who ain’t a slave? Thus the universal thump is passed around?It’s just words and you know it.”
Nevertheless, she persisted. “At least your prison is one you earned. Some of us are born to ours.”
“And some have ours thrust upon us?”
The whole don’t-let-him-get-to-me plan was failing hard. “Now you’re talking like Marsh.”
“Your man Marsh makes a lot of sense.”
“Like shit he does.”
And as though I’d failed some unexplained test, Wolfram gave me a derisive laugh. “That the best you can do?”
“You want me to rebut the arguments of a man who says the Leviathans are speaking to him in his dreams?”
Wolfram’s tone was getting increasingly withering. “Can’t you? It should be easy, shouldn’t it? For somebody with your intellectual pedigree. They say you were once a schoolmistress.”
I was beginning to sense traps everywhere, and the part of me that always wanted to run, or to hide, or to throw myself onto the winds and be spread in droplets over ten thousand square miles was getting a powerful urge to retreat. “It was a church school. I didn’t need to know much outside the catechism.”
“Which catechism?” he asked. And then before I could answer went on, “No, let me guess. Liberty, perhaps? You seemed keen to tell me that my imprisonment was my own fault. Except no”—he was smiling now, a hunter’s smile—“because whateversect you were raised in you don’t sound like youbelieveit anymore. If you ever did.Prosperitythat was your dogma. All is worth what it sells for and the rich are holy.”
I didn’t flinch, but he reacted as if I had.
“Ah yes, there we have it. I should have known. Bad philosophers are one of Pluto’s biggest exports.”
“If you’re insulting me for a reason,” I told him, “just tell me what it is. I’m getting bored with this.”
“I’m hoping you’ll get frustrated enough that you’ll offer to blow me through the bars to shut me up.”
That was a particularly painful observation because I’ll be honest, I’d considered it. And it made me very uncomfortable to realize how easily this man had worked that out. How transparent it was that sex and suicide were my two default responses to bad situations. “If I wanted to shut you up, I’d be putting something inyourmouth.”
“I bite.”
“So do I.”
He fixed me with that penetrating gaze of his. “No, you don’t. You’re too much a coward.”
“Try me.”
He rose then and walked calmly towards the bars. “Shall I tell you another sense I get from you?”
