Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  “We really appreciate your demo-ing the local livestock for us,” said Pelicanos. “It was good of you to spare us the time from your busy research schedule.”

  The zoologist reached eagerly for his belt phone. “You want me to call back your little minder from Public Relations?”

  “No,” said Oscar suavely, “since she was kind enough to pass us on to you, I think we’ll just make our own way around here from now on.”

  The scientist brandished his antique and clunky federal-issue phone, which was covered with smudgy green thumbprints. “Do you need a lift to Spinoffs? I could call you a buggy.”

  “We’ll stretch our legs a bit,” Pelicanos demurred.

  “You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Parkash.” Oscar never forgot a name. There was no particular reason to remember the name of Dr. Averill Parkash, among the BNC’s two thousand federal researchers and their many assorted gofers, hucksters, krewepeople, and other associated hangers-on. Oscar knew, though, that he would soon accumulate the names, the faces, and the dossiers of no end of the local personnel. It was worse than a habit. He truly couldn’t help himself.

  Their guide sidled backward toward the Animal Management Center, clearly eager to return to his cramped and spotty little office. Oscar waved a dismissal with a cheery smile.

  Parkash tried a final yelp. “There’s a pretty good wine bar nearby! Across the road from Flux NMR and Instrumentation!”

  “That’s great advice! We appreciate that! Thanks a lot!” Oscar turned on his heel and headed for a nearby wall of trees. Pelicanos quickly followed him.

  Soon they were safely lost in the tall cover. Oscar and Pelicanos made their way along a crooked, squelchy, peat-moss path through a cut-and-paste jungle. The Collaboratory boasted huge botanical gardens—whole minor forests, really—of rare specimens. The threatened. The endangered. The all-but-technically extinct. Wildlife native to habitats long obliterated by climate change, rising seas, bulldozers, and the urban sprawl of 8.1 billion human beings.

  The plants and animals were all clones. Deep in the bedrocked stronghold of the Collaboratory’s National Genome Preservation Center lurked tens of thousands of genetic samples, garnered from around the planet. The precious DNA was neatly racked in gleaming flasks of liquid nitrogen, secured in a bureaucratic maze of endless machine-carved limestone vaults.

  It was considered wise to thaw out a few bits from the tissue samples every once in a while, and to use these bits to produce full-grown organisms. This practice established that the genetic data was still viable. Generally, the resultant living creatures were also nicely photogenic. The clones were a useful public relations asset. Now that biotechnology had left the hermetic realm of the arcane to become standard everyday industries, the Collaboratory’s makeshift zoo was its best political showpiece.

  The monster underground vaults were always first on the list for the victims of local tourism, but Oscar had found their Kafkaesque density oppressive. However, he found himself quite enjoying the local jungle. Genuine wilderness generally bored him, but there was something very modern and appealing about this rational, urbanized, pocket version of nature. The housebroken global greenery coruscated like Christmas trees with drip taps, sap samplers, and hormone squirters. Trees and shrubs basked like drunken tourists in their own private growlights.

  According to their handy pocket maps, Oscar and Pelicanos were now in a mix-and-match jungle bordered by the Animal Engineering Lab, the Atmospheric Chemistry Lab, the Animal Management Center, and a very elaborate structure that was the Collaboratory’s garbage treatment plant. None of these rambling federal buildings were visible from within the potted forest—except, of course, for the brutal, fortresslike towers of the Containment Facility. This gigantic Hot Zone was the massive central buttress for the Collaboratory’s dome. Its glazed cylindrical shoulders were always visible inside the dome, gleaming like a mighty acreage of fine china.

  The probability of listening devices seemed rather low here inside the mechanical forest. They could talk in confidence, if they kept moving.

  “I thought we’d never lose that geek,” Pelicanos said.

  “You have something you need to tell me, Yosh?”

  Pelicanos sighed. “I want to know when we’re going home again.”

  Oscar smiled. “We just got here. Don’t you like these Texas folks? They sure are mighty friendly.”

  “Oscar, you brought twelve people in your entourage. The locals don’t even have the dorm rooms to put us up properly.”

  “But I need twelve people. I need all of my krewe. I need to keep my options open here.”

  Pelicanos grunted in surprise as a spined and cloven-hoofed beast—some kind of tapir, maybe?—scampered across their path. Rare beasts from aardwolves to zebu had the general run of the Collaboratory. They were commonly sighted ambling harmlessly through the streets and gardens, like dope-stricken sacred cows.

  “You arranged a few extras after the campaign,” Pelicanos said. “Well, Bambakias can certainly afford that, and they appreciate the gesture. But political campaigners are temp workers by nature. You just don’t need them anymore. You can’t need twelve people to put together a Senate committee report.”

  “But they’re useful! Don’t you enjoy their services? We have a bus, a driver, our own security, we even have a masseuse! We’re living in high style. Besides, they might as well be washed up here in Wonderland as washed up anywhere else.”

  “Those aren’t real answers.”

  Oscar looked at him. “This isn’t like you, Yosh…You’re missing Sandra.”

  “Yeah,” Pelicanos admitted. “I miss my wife.”

  Oscar waved his hand airily. “So, then take a three-day weekend. Fly back to Beantown. You deserve that, we can afford it. Go see Sandra. See how she is.”

  “All right. I guess I’ll do that. I’ll fly out and see Sandra.” And Pelicanos cheered up. Oscar saw his spirits lift; it came across the man in a little visible wave. Strange business, but Pelicanos had just become happy. Despite the stark fact that his wife was in a mental institution, and had been there for nine years.

  Pelicanos was an excellent organizer, a fine accountant, a bookkeeper of near genius, and yet his personal life was an abysmal tragedy. Oscar found this intensely interesting. It appealed to the deepest element in Oscar, his ravenous curiosity about human beings and the tactics and strategies by which they could be coaxed and compelled to behave. Yosh Pelicanos made his way through his life seemingly just like any other man, and yet he always carried this secret half-ton burden on his shoulders. Pelicanos truly knew the meaning of devotion and loyalty.

  Oscar himself had no particular acquaintance with either devotion or loyalty, but he’d trained himself to recognize these qualities in others. It was no accident that Pelicanos was Oscar’s oldest and longest-lasting employee.

  Pelicanos lowered his voice. “But before I go, Oscar, I need you to do me a little favor. I need you to tell me what you’re up to. Level with me.”

  “You know that I always level with you, Yosh.”

  “Well, try it one more time.”

  “Very well.” Oscar walked beneath a tall green arch of pink-flowered pinnate fronds. “You see: here’s our situation. I enjoy politics. The game seems to suit me.”

  “That’s not news, boss.”

  “You and I, we just ran our second political campaign, and we got our man elected Senator. That’s a big accomplishment. A federal Senate seat is the political big time, by anybody’s standard.”

  “Yes it is. And?”

  “And for all our pains, we’re back in the political wilderness again.” Oscar knocked a reeking branch from his jacket shoulder. “You think Mrs. Bambakias really wants some goddamn rare animal? I get a voice call at six in the morning, from the new chief of staff. He tells me the Senator’s wife is very interested in my current assignment, and she would like to have her own exotic pet animal, please. But she doesn’t call me—and Bambakias doesn’t call m
e—Leon Sosik calls me.”

  “Right.”

  “The guy is sandbagging me.”

  Pelicanos nodded sagely. “Look, Sosik knows full well that you want his job.”

  “Yeah. He knows that. So he’s checking on me, to make sure I’m really out here doing my time in Backwater, Texas. And then he has the nerve to give me this little errand, to boot. It’s a no-lose proposition for Sosik. If I refuse him a favor, I’m being a jerk. If I blow it or get in trouble, then he runs me down for that. And if I succeed, then he takes my credit.”

  “Sosik knows infighting. He’s spent years on the Hill. Sosik’s a professional.”

  “Yes, he is. And in his book, we’re just beginners. But we’re going to win this one anyway. You know how? It’s going to be just like the campaign was. First, we’re going to lowball expectations, because nobody will really believe that we have a serious chance here. But then we’re going to succeed on such a level—we’re going to exceed expectations to such a huge extent—we’re gonna bring so much firepower onto this campaign that we just blow the opposition away.”

  Pelicanos smiled. “That’s you all over, Oscar.”

  Oscar lifted one finger. “Here’s the plan. We find the major players here, and we find out what they want, and we cut deals. We get our people excited, and we get their people confused. And in the end, we just out-organize anyone who tries to stop us. We just outwork them, and we swarm on them from angles they would never expect, and we never, ever stop, and we just beat them into the ground!”

  “Sounds like a big job.”

  “Yes, it is, but I’ve brought enough people for a big job. They’ve proved they can work together politically. They’re creative, they’re clever, and every last one of them owes me a lot of favors. So you think I can get away with this?”

  “You’re asking me?” Pelicanos said, spreading his hands. “Hell, Oscar, I’m always game. You know that.” And he permitted himself a merry little laugh.

  __________

  The Collaboratory’s aging dorms offered sadly grim hospitality. Dorm space was in high demand, because the federal lab hosted endless numbers of scholastic gypsies, contractors on the make, and various exotic species of para-scientific bureaucrats. The dorms were flimsy two-story structures, with common baths and common kitchens. The rooms had basic-brown federal pasteboard furniture, some scrappy little sheets and towels. The dorm’s card-swipe doorlocks ran off Collaboratory ID cards. Presumably, these smart cards and smart doorlocks compiled automatic dossiers of everyone’s daily ins and outs, for the benefit of the local security creeps.

  There was no weather under the great lozenge-shaped dome. The entire gigantic structure was basically a monster intensive-care ward, all mobile shutters and glaring lights and vast air-sucking zeolite filters, with a constant thrum of deeply buried generators. The Collaboratory’s biotech labs were constructed like forts. The personal residences, by stark contrast, lacked serious walls, roofs, or insulation. The flimsy dorms were small, tightly packed, and noisy.

  So, for the sake of peace and quiet, Donna Nunez was doing her mending and darning on the wooden benches outside the Occupational Safety building. Donna had brought her sewing basket and a selection of the krewe’s clothing. Oscar had brought along his laptop. He disliked working inside his dorm room, since he felt instinctive certainty that the place was bugged.

  The Occupational Safety edifice was one of nine buildings on the central ring road circling the shiny china ramparts of the Hot Zone. The Hot Zone was surrounded by large pie-wedge plots of experimental gene-spliced crops: saltwater-sucking sorghum, and rampaging rice, plus a few genetically bastardized blueberries. The circular fields were themselves surrounded by a little two-lane road. This ring road was the major traffic artery within the Collaboratory dome, so it was an excellent place to sit and observe the quaint customs of the locals.

  “I really don’t mind a bit about those stinking, lousy dorm rooms,” Donna remarked sweetly. “It feels and smells so lovely under this big dome. We could live outside the buildings if we wanted. We could just wander around naked, like the animals.”

  Donna reached out and patted an animal on the head. Oscar gave the creature a long look. The specimen stared back at him fearlessly, its bulging black eyes as blankly suggestive as a Ouija board. The de-feralization process, a spin-off of the Collaboratory’s flourishing neural research, had left all the local animals in some strangely altered state of liquid detachment.

  This particular specimen looked as eager and healthy as a model on a cereal box; its tusks were caries-free, its spiky fur seemed moussed. Nevertheless, Oscar felt a very strong intuition that the animal would take enormous pleasure in killing and eating him. This was the animal’s primary impulse in their brief relationship. Somehow, it had lost the will to follow through.

  “Do you happen to know the name of this creature?” Oscar asked her.

  Donna carefully stroked the animal’s long, wrinkled snout. It grunted in ecstasy and extruded a horrid gray tongue. “Maybe it’s a pig?”

  “That’s not a pig.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I think it likes me. It’s been following me around all morning. It’s cute, isn’t it? It’s ugly, but it’s cute-ugly…The animals here never hurt anyone. They did something weird to them. To their brains or something.”

  “Oh yes.” Oscar tapped a key. In rapidity and silence, his laptop collated a huge series of Collaboratory purchase orders with five years’ worth of public-domain Texas arrest records. The results looked very intriguing.

  “Are you going to get an exotic animal for Mrs. Bambakias?”

  “After the weekend. Pelicanos is back in Boston, Fontenot is out house hunting with Bob and Audrey…Right now, I’m just trying to get some of the local records in order.” Oscar shrugged.

  “I liked her, you know? Mrs. Bambakias? I liked dressing her for the campaign. She was really elegant, and nice to me. I thought she might take me to Washington. But I just don’t fit in there.”

  “Why not?” Oscar deftly twitched a fingertip and activated a search engine, which sought out a state-federal coordination center in Baton Rouge, and retrieved the records of recent pardons and grants of clemency issued by the Governor of Louisiana.

  “Well…I’m too old, you know? I worked for a bank for twenty years. I didn’t start tailoring until after the hyperinflation.”

  Oscar tagged four hits for further investigation. “I think you’re selling yourself short. I never heard Mrs. Bambakias mention your age.”

  Donna shook her graying head ruefully. “Young women nowadays, they’re much better at the new economy. They’re really trained for personal image services. They like being in a krewe; they like dressing the principal and doing her hair and her shoes. They make a real career of service work. Lorena Bambakias will want to entertain. She’ll need people who can dress her for Washington, for the Georgetown crowd.”

  “But you dress us. Look at the way we dress compared to these local people.”

  “You don’t understand,” Donna said patiently. “These scientists dress like slobs, because they can get away with that.”

  Oscar examined a passing local, riding a bike with his shirt hanging out. He wore no socks and tattered shoes. No hat. His hair was dreadful. No one could possibly dress that badly by accident.

  “I take your point,” Oscar said.

  Donna was in a confessional mood. Oscar had sensed this. He generally made it a point to appear in the lives of his entourage whenever they were confessing. “Life is so ironic,” Donna sighed, ironically. “I used to hate it when my mother taught me how to sew. I went off to college, I never imagined I’d hand-make clothes as an image consultant. When I was young, nobody wanted handmade tailoring. My ex-husband would have laughed his head off if I’d made him a suit.”

  “How is your ex-husband, Donna?”

  “He still thinks real people work nine-to-five jobs. He’s an idiot.” She paused. “Also, he’s fired, and
he’s broke.”

  Men and women in white decontamination suits had appeared amid the genetically upgraded crops. They were wielding shiny aluminum spray-wands, gleaming chromium shears, high-tech titanium hoes.

  “I love it inside here,” Donna said. “The Senator was so sweet to dump us in here. It’s so much nicer than I thought it would be. The air smells so unusual, have you noticed that? I could live in a place like this, if there weren’t so many slobs in cutoffs.”

  Oscar hotlinked back to the minutes of the Senate Science and Technology Committee for 2029. These sixteen-year-old volumes of committee minutes had the works on the original founding of the Buna National Collaboratory. Oscar felt quite sure that no one had closely examined these archives for ages. They were chock-full of hidden pay dirt. “It was a hard-fought campaign. It’s right to relax for a while. You certainly deserve it.”

  “Yeah, the campaign wore me out, but it was worth it. We really worked well together; we were well organized. You know, I love political work. I’m an American female in the fifty-to-seventy demographic, so life never made any sense to me. Nothing ever turned out the way I was taught to expect. Ever since the economy crashed and the nets ate up everything…But inside politics, it all feels so different. I’m not just a straw in the wind. I really felt like I was changing the world, for once. Instead of the world changing me.”

  Oscar bent a kindly gaze upon her. “You did a good job, Donna. You’re an asset. When you’re in close quarters like we were, under so much stress and pressure, it’s good to have a member of the team who’s so even-tempered, so levelheaded. Philosophical, even.” He smiled winningly.

  “Why are you being so good to me, Oscar? Aren’t you about to fire me now?”

  “Not at all! I want you to stay on with us. At least another month. I know that isn’t much to promise you, since a woman of your talents could easily find some more permanent position. But Fontenot will be staying on with us.”