Oscar looked up from his laptop screen. The nine people on the soundstage had suddenly fallen silent. They were looking at him.
The Collaboratory’s Director and his nine functionaries seemed oddly spellbound for a moment. They formed a little Rembrandtesque tableau under their media lighting. Oscar knew all their names—Oscar never forgot names—but for the moment he had mentally labeled the nine local functionaries as “Administrative Support,” “Computing & Communications,” “Contracts & Procurement,” “Financial Services,” “Human Resources,” “Information Genetics,” “Instrumentation,” “Biomedicine,” and last but not least, the ditzy crew-cut thug from “Safety & Security.” They had noticed him and—Oscar realized this suddenly—they were all afraid of him.
They knew that he had the power to do them harm. He had infiltrated their ivory tower and was judging their work. He was very new to them, he owed them nothing at all, and they were all guilty.
The stares of strangers never bothered Oscar. He had grown up in a celebrity childhood. Human attention fed something in Oscar, a deep dark psychic entity that thrived and grew with the feeding. He wasn’t cruel by nature—but he knew that there were moments in the game that required direct and primal acts of intimidation. One of those moments had just arrived. Oscar flicked his gaze upward from his laptop screen and he gave the people on the board his best—his lethal—I Know All look.
The Director flinched. He grappled for his agenda, and moved on to the pressing subject of quality assessment in the technology transfer office.
“Oscar,” Audrey whispered.
Oscar leaned over casually. “Yes?”
“What’s going on? Why is Greta Penninger staring at you like that?”
Oscar glanced back up at the soundstage. He hadn’t noticed that “Instrumentation” was staring at him, and yet she clearly was. All of them had been staring at him, but Greta Penninger hadn’t stopped. Her pale and narrow face had an absent, intent cast, like a woman watching a wasp on a windowpane.
Oscar gazed back solemnly at Dr. Greta Penninger. Their eyes met. Dr. Penninger was chewing meditatively at the end of a pencil, gripping the yellow wood with her blue-knuckled, spidery, surgical fingers. She seemed to look right through him and five miles beyond. After a very long moment, she tucked the pencil in the dark ponytailed hair behind her ear, and returned her limpid gaze to her big paper notepad.
“Greta Penninger,” Oscar said thoughtfully.
“She’s really bored,” Argow offered.
“You think so?”
“Yeah. Because she’s a genuine scientist. She’s famous. This administrative crap is boring her to death. It’s boring me to death, and I don’t even work here.”
Audrey swiftly conjured Greta Penninger’s dossier onto her laptop. “I think she likes you.”
“Why do you say that?” Oscar said.
“She keeps looking your way and twisting her hair on her finger. I think I saw her lick her lips once.”
Oscar laughed quietly.
“Look, I’m not being funny. She’s not married, and you’re the new guy in town. Why shouldn’t she be interested? I know I would be.” Audrey paged a little deeper into her file of oppo data. “She’s only thirty-six, you know. She doesn’t look that bad.”
“She does look bad,” Argow assured her. “Worse than you think.”
“No, she could look okay if she tried. Her face is kind of lopsided, and she doesn’t do her hair,” Audrey noted clinically. “But she’s tall and she’s thin. She could carry clothes. Donna could make her look good.”
“I don’t think Donna wants to work that hard,” Argow objected.
“I have a girlfriend already, thank you,” Oscar said. “But since you’ve got your screen up: what exactly does Dr. Penninger do?”
“She’s a neurologist. A systemic zoo-neurologist. She won a big award once for something called ‘Radioligand Pharmacokinetics.’”
“So she’s still a working researcher?” said Oscar. “How long has she been in administration?”
“I’ll check,” Audrey said readily, tapping keys. “She’s been here in Buna for six years…Six years working inside this place, can you imagine that? No wonder she looks so fidgety…According to this, she’s been the head of the Instrumentation Division for four months.”
“Then she is bored,” Oscar said. “She’s bored by her job. That’s very interesting. Make a note of that, Audrey.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Let’s have her for dinner.”
__________
Oscar had arranged a bus outing, a picnic for part of his krewe. It helped to maintain the thin fiction of “vacation,” and it got them away from the fog of mechanical surveillance, and best of all, it offered some relief from the psychic oppression of the Collaboratory dome.
They took the campaign bus to a roadside stop near a bedraggled state park called Big Thicket. This Thicket was a surprisingly large area of Texas that had somehow escaped farming and settlement. It didn’t seem entirely right to call the place an “unspoiled wilderness,” since climate change had battered it considerably; but for people from Massachusetts the Texas-sized mess was a pleasing novelty.
The day was overcast and damp, even a little raw, but it was pleasant to encounter weather of any sort. The gusting wind through the Thicket park wasn’t “fresh air” exactly—the air of East Texas was considerably less fresh than the manicured air inside the Collaboratory—but it had a wide-screen smell, the reek of a world that possessed horizons. Besides, the picnickers had Fontenot’s big portable gas stove to keep them warm. Fontenot had just bought the stove, well used, from the proprietor of a Cajun boucherie in Mamou. The stove was made of disassembled oil barrels, heat-scorched tin sheeting, and brass-nozzled propane burners. It looked as if it had been welded into shape by Mardi Gras drunks.
It was good to chat and make a few unsupervised phone calls, well outside of the Collaboratory. Bugs were so cheap these days—when cellphones cost less than a six-pack of beer, covert listening devices were as cheap as confetti. But a cheap bug wouldn’t be able to radiate data sixty miles back to Buna. An expensive bug would be caught by Fontenot’s expensive monitors. This meant that everyone could talk.
“So, how’s the new house doing, Jules?”
“Coming along, coming along,” Fontenot said contentedly. “You should come see my place. We’ll take out my brand-new boat. Have us a good old time.”
“I’d enjoy that,” Oscar lied tactfully.
Fontenot dumped chopped basil and onion into his simmering roux, then went after the sizzling mess with a wire whisk. “Y’all mind opening that ice chest?”
Oscar rose from the chest and opened its insulated lid. “What do you need?”
“Those eishters.”
“The what?”
“Aishters.”
“What?”
“He means the oysters,” said Negi Estabrook.
“Right,” said Oscar. He located an iced bag of shellfish.
“You brang that to a rollin’ boil now,” Fontenot advised Negi, in his broadest and most magisterial Cajun drawl. “A little dab more of that pepper sauce. It’ll forgive as it come along.”
“I can make a soup, Jules,” Negi announced tautly. “I have a degree in nutrition.”
“Not a Cajun soup, girl.”
“Cajun is not a difficult cuisine,” said Negi patiently. Negi was sixty years old, and Fontenot was the only member of the krewe who would dare to call her “girl.” “Basically, Cajun is very old-fashioned French peasant cooking. With way too much pepper. And lard. Tons of unhealthy lard.”
Fontenot pulled a face. “Y’all hear that? She does that on purpose just to hurt my feelings.”
Negi laughed. “As if!”
“You know,” Oscar said, “I had a good idea recently.”
“Do tell,” said Fontenot.
“Our dorm situation inside the Collaboratory is clearly untenable. And the town of Buna can’
t put us up properly, either. Buna’s never been a proper city: it’s greenhouses, florists, seedy little motels, some run-down light industry. The town just doesn’t have a proper place for us to stay; a place where we could entertain a visiting Senate committee, for instance. So, let’s build our own hotel.”
Fred Dillen, the krewe’s laundryman/janitor, put down his beer. “Our own hotel?”
“Why not? We’ve relaxed in Buna for two whole weeks now. We have our breath back. It’s time for us to reorganize and really make our mark around here. We can create a hotel. That’s definitely within our means and abilities. After all, that was always our best campaign tactic. The other candidates would throw rallies and photo ops, and try to work the media. But Alcott Bambakias could bring a campaign crowd together and assemble permanent housing.”
“You mean we build a hotel for profit?” Fred said.
“Well, for our own convenience mostly, but yes, for profit, of course. We can get the design plans and software from Bambakias’s firm. We can certainly build the structure ourselves, and best of all, we actually have the skills it requires to successfully run a hotel. A traveling political campaign is basically a mobile hotel, when you think about it. But in this case, we stay in one place, while the crowds will come to us. And then they pay us.”
“Man,” Fred said. “What a weird inside-out way to think…”
“I think it’s doable. You can all play the same roles that you did during the campaign. Negi, you can run the kitchen. Fred, you can handle the laundry and the rooms. Corky does guest relations and works the front desk. Rebecca does physical security and the occasional massage. Everybody pitches in, and if we need them, we can take on some temp gofers locally. And we make money.”
“How much money?”
“Oh, the top end of the market should be pretty generous. I’ve seen millionaire contractors inside the Collaboratory, crammed in right next door to postdocs and grad students. That’s just not natural.”
“Not nowadays,” Negi admitted.
“It’s a good market window. Yosh will put together our finance package. Lana will deal with local zoning and the Buna city authorities. We’ll front it all through a Boston corporation to sidestep any conflict-of-interest hassles. And when we’re done here, we just sell the hotel. In the meantime, we have a decent place to live and a revenue stream.”
“You know,” said Ando “Corky” Shoeki, “I saw that done ten times. I helped to do it, even. But I still can’t get used to the concept. I mean, that big crowds of unskilled people can construct permanent housing.”
“I agree, distributed instantiation still has some shock value. It’s made Bambakias very rich, but it’s still a novelty down here. I like the idea of doing that work in East Texas. It’ll show these local yokels what we’re made of.”
“Y’know,” Fred said slowly, “I’m trying really hard, but I can’t think of any good reason not to do what Oscar says.”
“You’re all clever people,” Oscar said. “Find me some reason why it can’t be done.” He ducked back into the bus, to let them argue about it. Spelling it all out for them in black and white would only spoil their fun.
He hung his hat inside the bus. “So, Moira,” he said, “how’s the cause célèbre coming?”
“Oh, it’s great,” said Moira, spinning in her chair. Moira had been looking much better since the Senator’s hunger strike had started. Moira’s soul waxed and waned with the tides of media exposure. “The Senator’s positives are through the roof. Seventy percent, seventy-five. And the rest is real mushy, mostly undecideds!”
“Phenomenal.”
“Putting Alcott’s blood sugar levels onto the net—that was brilliant. People are logging on around the clock just to watch him starve! Lorena, too. Lorena has massive female positives. She’s been on ten glamour sites since Wednesday. They love her bread and water diet, they just can’t get enough of her!”
“How about the situation on the ground? The Emergency committees, have they done anything useful about that Air Force base yet?”
“Oh,” Moira said, “I haven’t quite gotten around to that part…I, uh, thought Audrey was gonna handle that.”
Oscar grunted. “Okay.”
Moira touched her fingertips to her powdered chin. “Alcott…he’s just so special. I’ve seen him give so many speeches, but that stand-up he just did with the hospital pajamas and the apple juice…It was just ninety seconds, but it was drama, it’s real confrontation, it’s just pure gold. The standard site coverage wasn’t so hot at first, but the chat swaps and the downloads have been huge. Alcott’s coming up way behind ideological lines. He never used to get positives out of the Right Tradition Bloc, but even they are coming around now. You know, if Wyoming weren’t on fire right now, I really think this would be the political story. For this week, anyway.”
“How is that Wyoming thing shaping up, by the way?”
“Oh, the fire’s a lot worse now. The President’s there.”
“The old guy, or Two Feathers?”
“Two Feathers of course. Nobody cares about the old guy anymore, he’s finished, he’s just the duck now. I know Two Feathers hasn’t been sworn in yet, but people depreciate the post-election hang-time. People want in ahead of the curve.”
“Right,” said Oscar shortly. She was telling him the obvious.
“Oscar…” Moira looked at him with naked appeal. “Should I ask him to take me to Washington?”
Oscar silently spread his hands.
“He needs me. He’ll need someone to speak for him.”
“That’s not my decision, Moira. You need to take it up with his chief of staff.”
“Can you put in a good word for me with Leon Sosik? Sosik seems to like you so much.”
“Let me get back to you on that,” Oscar said.
The bus door banged open. Norman-the-Intern stuck his tousled head inside and yelled, “We’re eating!”
“Oh, great!” said Moira, leaping from her chair. “Weird Cajun seafood, good good good!”
Oscar put on his hat and jacket and followed her outside. With a flourish, Fontenot was spooning great ladles of swimming brown murk. Oscar brought up the end of the line. He accepted a quilt-paper bowl and a biodegradable spoon.
Oscar gazed at his hot oily gumbo and thought mournfully of Bambakias. The Cambridge PR team had certainly done a thorough job surveilling the fasting Senator: blood pressure, heartbeat, temperature, calorie consumption, borborygmus, bile production—there was no possible doubt about the raw authenticity of his hunger strike. The man’s entire corpus had become public domain. Whenever Bambakias had a sip of his famine apple juice, a forest of monitors twitched and heaved across the country.
Oscar followed them to a picnic table and sat down next to Negi. He examined his brimming spoon. He had seriously considered not eating this evening. That would be a very decent gesture. Well, let someone else make it.
“Angioplasty in a bowl,” Negi said blissfully.
Oscar sipped from his spoon. “Well worth dying for,” he nodded.
“I’m so old,” Negi mourned, blowing on her soup. “Back when I had tatts and piercings, people got on your case if you ate fats and drank yourself stupid. Of course, that was before they found out the full awful truth about pseudo-estrogen poisoning.”
“Well,” Oscar said companionably, “at least those massive pesticide disasters got us off the hook with that diet and exercise nonsense.”
“Pass the bread, Norman,” Rebecca said. “Is that real butter? Real old-fashioned tub butter? Wow!”
A light aircraft flew overhead. Its tiny engine puttered energetically, like fingernails tapping a snare drum. The aircraft seemed appallingly flimsy. With its eerie, computer-designed lifting surfaces, it resembled a child’s paper toy: something made with pinking shears, popsicle sticks, and tape. The wing edges trailed off into feathery ribbons and long tattered kite tails. It seemed to be staying aloft through sheer force of will.
&nb
sp; Then three similar aircraft appeared, skidding and puttering just above the treetops. They flew like fishing lures tempting a trout. Their pilots were gloved and goggled and bulky, so wrapped in their padding that they resembled human bales of burlap.
One of the pilots detached himself from formation, settled down like a falling leaf, and gently circled the roadside bus. It was like being buzzed by a hay bale. Everyone looked up from their food and waved politely. The pilot waved back, mimicked eating with one gauntlet, and headed east.
“Airborne nomads,” Fontenot said, squinting.
“They’re heading east,” Oscar noted.
“Green Huey’s very tight with the leisure unions.” Fontenot shoved his bowl aside, rose deliberately, and went into the bus to see to his machines. He had the face he wore when he meant business.
Oscar’s krewe returned to their food. They ate silently now and with more purpose. No one had to remark on the obvious: that there would soon be more nomads arriving.
Fontenot emerged from the bus, where he had been checking road reports. “We may have to move soon,” Fontenot said. “The Regulators have been rallying at the Alabama-Coushatta reservation, and their rally is coming through now. These local proles, they aren’t tame.”
“Well, we’re strangers here too, you know,” Negi said. Negi had spent time on the road, back in the old days when homeless people didn’t have cellphones and laptops.
Two nomad scouts arrived ten minutes later, in a motorcycle and sidecar. They were dressed for winter. They wore wraparound kilts, striped ponchos, and huge coarse cloaks beautifully embroidered with old twentieth-century corporate logos. Their skin gleamed with a thick layer of wind-resistant, insulating grease. They had dipped their legs up to mid-calf in a plastic bootlike substance with the look and sheen of vinyl.
The scouts pulled over, dismounted, and walked over. They were silent and proud, and carrying cellular videocams. The driver was chewing on a large square chunk of artificial food, like a green butter stick of compressed alfalfa.
Oscar beckoned them over. It transpired that these nomads were not, in fact, the legendary Regulators. These were Texan road drifters, far less advanced in their peculiar ways than the proles of Louisiana. These people spoke only Spanish. Oscar’s childhood Spanish was worse than rusty, and Donna Nunez wasn’t around, but Rebecca Pataki had a smattering.
Distraction Page 6
