“Yes, Bill?” Ryan said, looking up from a small box of audio tapes, seeming only vaguely curious about Bill’s errand. He was at his desk, sorting through labeled recordings of his speeches and debates. An Acu-Vox recorder was set up beside the box.
Ryan was wearing a caramel-colored, double-breasted suit and a blue tie. Bill wondered how he could function in a buttoned-up suit all day long. “Mr. Ryan—I’ve got to keep the heat evenly circulating in Rapture; I’ve got to keep the pipes from freezing; I’ve got to be able to control water pressure. Part of the engineering of this place. I can’t do it when there’s a big drain, a sudden drop in heat and pressure—and it comes unpredictable-like and no one’ll let me inspect the source of it—”
Ryan set the box aside. “Come to the point. What does this enigmatic monologue refer to?”
“There’s a whole section of Rapture I’m not even allowed in now! Sinclair’s got his own people running it. Place he is calling Persephone. I knew they were building something, but I thought it was a hotel. Only it’s too secretive for that. I can’t be responsible for hydraulic engineering when a whole section of the city is sealed off from me! Seems like it’s been functional for a long time. More than a year… And it’s no hotel.”
Ryan made a small growl of grim amusement in his throat. “Depends on what you mean by hotel! Persephone. Yes… I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that…” Ryan leaned back in his chair, looking at the ceiling as if something were written up there. “Bill… have you heard my debates with Sofia Lamb?”
“Only caught a minute or two. Kind of surprised me, when you debated ’er…”
Ryan smiled ruefully at him. “I took a risk, elevating that malcontent in that way. My instinct was simply to have her arrested as a… a social saboteur. But—I advocate freedom; I don’t wish to be a hypocrite—and I didn’t wish to make her a martyr. So I thought I’d let the people hear the sort of nonsense she spouts when I’m there to refute it! Listen…” He pressed a button on the tape recorder.
Bill heard Ryan’s voice:
Lamb replied,
Bill nodded. It bothered him too, when Ryan seized religious artifacts. He wasn’t religious. But a man ought to be able to believe in whatever he liked…
Ryan hit Fast Forward and then Play. Lamb’s voice again:
Ryan stopped the tape and snorted. “Quite the little extemporaneous speaker, isn’t she? If you parse it, it makes no sense. But its real message can be decoded, Bill—‘reality is consensus… the people are losing faith.’ What is that but a Marxist notion? And this business of claiming I ignore the suffering in Rapture…” He shook his head grimly. “I don’t ignore it—but I must accept it as part of the long, weary march of evolution! The surface world is still with us here—to die to the habit of parasitism comes hard, Bill. And some fall by the wayside in that long, lonely march. I know that full well! But what does
“What’s all that got to do with this Persephone, guv?” Bill asked. He suspected he knew—he’d heard rumors—but he wanted it spelled out.
Ryan looked Bill in the eye—the look was almost one of defiance, though Ryan was boss here. “That’s where Sofia Lamb was taken, not long ago, Bill! And incarcerated.”
“Incarcerated!”
“Yes. You must have noticed her absence from the scene. That glib, sanctimonious woman can make all the speeches she likes to the walls of her cell.”
“But—won’t that make her a martyr?”
