Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  The American people would just have to get over the fact that software no longer had any economic value. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, but it was a fait accompli. In many ways, Oscar had to give the Chinese credit for their cleverness in making all English-language intellectual property available on their nets at no charge. The Chinese hadn’t even needed to leave their own borders in order to kick the blocks out from under the American economy.

  In some ways, this brutal collision with Chinese analog reality could be seen as a blessing. As far as Oscar had it figured, America hadn’t really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World’s Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people’s military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character really wasn’t suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World’s Movie Star. The world’s tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world’s acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.

  Oscar turned on the brown ribbed sands of the beach and began retracing his steps. He was enjoying being out of touch like this; he’d abandoned his laptop back in the krewe bus, he’d even left all the phones out of his sleeves and pockets. He felt that he should do this more often. It was important for a professional political operative to step back periodically, to take the time necessary to put his thoughts and intuitions into order and perspective. Oscar rarely created these vital little moments for himself—he’d somehow dimly intuited that he’d have plenty of time to develop his personal philosophy if he ever ended up behind bars. But he was giving himself some time for thought now, in this forgotten world of sand and wind and waves and chilly sunlight, and he could feel that it was doing him a lot of good.

  An internal pressure had been building. He’d learned a great deal in the past thirty days, devouring whole reams of alien data in order to get up to speed, but hadn’t yet put it into an organized perspective. His data-stuffed head had become a disassembled mass of jumbled blocks. He was keyed up, tense, distracted, getting a little snappish.

  Maybe it was just that long drought between women.

  They were expecting Greta before noon. Negi had prepared a lovely seafood lunch for her. But Greta was late. The krewe ate lavishly inside the bus, popping corks and keeping up appearances, even joking about the no-show. But when Oscar left them, his mood had grown much darker.

  He went into the beach house to wait for Greta, but the rooms that had once seemed louche yet charming now revealed themselves to him as merely sordid. Why was he fooling himself, taking such pains to imitate a love nest? Genuine love nests were places full of real meaning for lovers, full of things conveying some authentic emotional resonance. Little things, silly mementos maybe, a feather, a seashell, a garter, framed photos, a ring. Not these hired curtains, that hired bedspread, that set of fatally new antiseptic toothbrushes.

  He sat on the creaking brass bed and gazed about the room, and the world turned inside out for him suddenly. He had been prepared to be charming and witty, he had been so looking forward to it, but she was not coming. She had wised up. She was too smart to come. He was alone in this small ugly building, marinating in his own juices.

  A slow hour passed, and he was glad she hadn’t come. He was glad for himself of course, because it had been stupid to imagine a liaison with that woman, but he was also glad for her. He didn’t feel crushed by her rejection, but he could see himself more realistically now. He was a predator, he was seductive and cold. He was a creature of trembling web lines and shiny bright chitinous surfaces. Wise gray moth, to stay inside her home.

  His course seemed very clear now. He would go back to Washington, file a committee report, and stay there at his proper job. No one would really expect much from his very first Senate assignment. He had more than enough material for a devastating exposé of the Collaboratory’s internal workings. If that wasn’t in the cards, he could play up the Collaboratory’s positive aspects: the profound effect of biotech spinoffs on the regional economy, for instance. He could trumpet the futuristic glamour of the next big federal breakthrough: high-tech industrial neuroscience. Whatever they wanted to hear.

  He could become a career Hill rat, a policy wonk. They were a large and thriving tribe. He could invest ever more elaborate amounts of energy on ever more arcane and tiresome subjects. He’d never run another political campaign, and he’d certainly never win political power in his own right, but if he didn’t burn out as a policy cog, he might well flourish. There might be something pleasant at the end, maybe a cabinet post, a guest professorship somewhere in his final declining days…

  He left the beach house, unable to bear himself. The door was open in the tour bus, but he couldn’t face his krewe. He went to Holly Beach’s single grocery store, a cheerfully ramshackle place, its floors unpainted and its raftered ceiling hung with old fishing nets. It had an entire towering wall of shiny floor-to-ceiling booze. Souvenir fishing hats. Fish line and plastic lures. Desiccated alligator heads, eerie knickknacks carved from Spanish moss and coconut. Tatty, half-bootlegged music cassettes—he found it intensely annoying that Dutch music was so popular now. How on earth could a drowning country with a miniscule, aging population have better pop music than the United States?

  He picked up a pair of cheap beach sandals, a deeply unnecessary impulse buy. There was a dark-haired teenage girl waiting behind the counter, a Louisiana local. She was bored and lonely in the cold and quiet grocery, and she gave him a dazzling smile, a hello-handsome-stranger smile. She was wearing a bad nubby sweater and a flowered shift of cheap gene-spliced cotton, but she was good-tempered and pretty. Sexual fantasy, crushed and derailed by the day’s disappointments, flashed back into life, on a strange parallel track. Yes, young woman of the bayous, I am indeed a handsome stranger. I am clever, rich, and powerful. Trust me, I can take you far away from all this. I can open your eyes to the great wide world, carry you away to gilded corridors of luxury and power. I can dress you, I can teach you, remold you to my will, I can transform you utterly. All you have to do for me is…There was nothing she could do for him. His interest faded.

  He left the grocery with his purchased sandals in a paper bag, and began walking the sandy streets of Holly Beach. There was something so naively crass and seedy about the town that it had a strange decadent charm, a kind of driftwood Gothic. He could imagine Holly Beach as queerly interesting in the summer: straw-hatted families chatting in Acadian French, tattooed guys firing up their barbecue smokers, offshore oil workers on holiday, dredging up something leathery and boneless in a seine. A spotted dog was following him, sniffing at his heels. It was very odd to encounter a dog after weeks in an environment infested with kinkajous and caribou. Maybe it was finally time for him to break down and acquire his own personal exotic animal. That would be very fashionable, a nice memento of his stay. His own personal genetic toy. Something very quick and carnivorous. Something with big dark spots.

  He came across the oldest house in town. The shack was so old that it had never been moved; it had been sitting in the same place for decades as the seas rose. The shack had once been a long and lonely distance from the beach, though now it was quite near the water. The building looked queerly haphazard, as if it had been banged together over a set of weekends by somebody’s brother-in-law.

  Storms, sand, and pitiless Southern sun had stripped off a weary succession of cheap layered paints, but the shack was still inhabited. It wasn’t rented, either. Someone was living in it full-time. There was a dented postbox and a sandblasted mesh sat-dish on the metal roof, trailing a severed cable. There were three wooden steps up to the rust-hinged door, steps thick and grained and splintery, half buried in damp sand, with a lintel of sandblasted wood that might have been sixty years old and looked six hundred.

  In the winter light of
late afternoon there was a look to that smoky woodgrain that enchanted him. Ancient brown nail holes. White seagull droppings. He had a strong intuition that someone very old was living here. Old, blind, feeble, no one left to love them, family gone away now, story all over.

  He placed his bare palm tenderly against the sun-warmed wood. Awareness flowed up his arm, and he tasted a sudden premonition of his own death. It would be exactly like this moment: alone and sere. Broken steps too tall for him to ever climb again. Mortality’s swift scythe would slash clean through him and leave nothing but empty clothes.

  Shaken, he walked quickly back to the rented beach house. Greta was waiting there. She was wearing a hooded gray jacket and carrying a carpetbag.

  Oscar hurried up. “Hi! Sorry! Did you catch me out?”

  “I just got here. There were roadblocks. I couldn’t call ahead.”

  “That’s all right! Come on upstairs, it’s warm.”

  He ushered her up the stairs and into the beach house. Once inside, she looked about herself skeptically. “It’s hot in here.”

  “I’m so glad you’ve come.” He was appallingly glad to see her. So much so that he felt close to tears. He retreated into the hideous kitchenette and quickly poured himself a glass of rusty tap water. He sipped it, and steadied himself. “Can I get you something?”

  “I just wanted…” Greta sighed and sat down unerringly in the room’s ugliest piece of furniture, a ghastly thirdhand fabric armchair. “Never mind.”

  “You missed lunch. Can I take your coat?”

  “I didn’t want to come at all. But I want to be honest…”

  Oscar sat on the rug near the heater, and pulled off one shoe. “I can see you’re upset.” He pulled off the other shoe and crossed his legs on the rug. “That’s all right, I understand that perfectly. It was a long trip, it’s difficult, our situation’s very difficult. I’m just glad that you’ve come, that’s all. I’m happy to see you. Very happy. I’m touched.”

  She said nothing, but looked warily attentive.

  “Greta, you know that I’m fond of you. Don’t you? I mean that. We have a rapport, you and I. I don’t quite know why, but I want to know. I want you to be glad that you came here. We’re alone at last, that’s a rare privilege for us, isn’t it? Let’s talk it out, let’s put it all on the table now, let’s be good friends.”

  She was wearing perfume. She had brought an overnight bag. She was clearly having an attack of cold feet, but the underlying indicators looked solid.

  “I want to understand you, Greta. I can understand, you know. I think I do understand you a little. You’re a very bright woman, much brighter than most people, but you have insight, you’re sensitive. You’ve done great things with your life, great accomplishments, but there’s no one on your side. I know that’s the truth. And it’s sad. I could be on your side, if you’d let me.” He lowered his voice. “I can’t make any conventional promises, because we’re just not conventional people. But the two of us could be great friends. We could even be lovers. Why can’t we? The odds are against us, but that doesn’t make it hopeless.”

  It was very quiet. He should have thought to put on some music.

  “I think that you need someone. You need someone who can understand your interests, someone to be your champion. People don’t appreciate you for what you are. People are using you for their own small-minded little ends. You’re very brave and dedicated, but you have to break out of your shell, you can’t go on retreating and being polite, you can’t go on accommodating those goons, they’ll drive you crazy, they’re not fit to touch the hem of your shoe. Your gown. The, what the hell, your lab coat.” He paused and drew a shaky breath. “Look, just tell me what you need.”

  “I was wrong about you,” she said. “I thought you were going to grab me.”

  “No, of course I’m not going to grab you.” He smiled.

  “Stop smiling. You think I’m very innocent, don’t you. I’m not innocent. Listen to me. I have a body, I have hormones, I have a limbic system. I’m a sexual person. Look, I’ve been sitting up there under those cameras bored to death, restless, going crazy, and then you show up. You show up, and you’re coming on to me.”

  She stood up. “I’ll tell you what I need, since you want to know so badly. I need a guy who’s kind of cold-blooded and disposable, who won’t kick up a big fuss. He has to want me in this completely shallow, obvious way. But you’re not the kind of guy I want, are you. Not really.”

  There was a ringing silence.

  “I should have found some way to tell you all that, before you came down here, and took all this trouble. I almost didn’t come at all, but…” She sat back down wearily. “Well, it was more honest to be here face-to-face, and have it all out, all at once.”

  Oscar cleared his throat. “Do you know the game of go? Go-bang? Wei-chi, in Chinese.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  Oscar got up and fetched his travel set. “Senator Bambakias taught me how to play go. It’s a core metaphor for his krewe, it’s how we think. So if you want to mix with modern politicians and accomplish something, then you need to learn this game right away.”

  “You’re really a strange man.”

  He opened and set out the square-lined board, with its two cups of black and white stones. “Sit down on the rug here with me, Greta. We’re going to have this out right now, Eastern style.”

  She sat down cross-legged near the oil heater. “I don’t gamble.”

  “Go isn’t a gambling game. Let me take your jacket now. Good. This isn’t chess, either. This isn’t a Western-style, mechanized, head-to-head battle. Those just don’t happen anymore. Go is all about networks and territories. You play the net—you place your stones where the lines cross. You can capture the stones if you totally surround them, but killing them is just a collateral effect. You don’t want to kill the stones, that’s not the point. You want the blankness. You want the empty spaces in the net.”

  “I want the potential.”

  “Exactly.”

  “When the game ends, the player with the most potential wins.”

  “You have played go before.”

  “No, I haven’t. But that much is obvious.”

  “You’ll play black,” he said. He set a group of black stones on the board, crisply clicking them down. “Now I’ll demo the game a bit, before we start. You place your stones down like this, one at a time. The groups of stones gain strength from their links, from the network that they form. And the groups have to have eyes, blank eyes inside the network. That’s a crucial point.” He placed a blocking chain of white stones around the black group. “A single eye isn’t enough, because I could blind that eye with one move, and capture your whole group. I could surround the whole group, drop into the middle, blind your eye, and just remove the whole group, like this. But with two eyes—like this?—the group becomes a permanent feature on the board. It lives forever.”

  “Even if you totally surround me.”

  “Exactly.”

  She hunched her shoulders and stared at the board. “I can see why your friend likes this game.”

  “Yes, it’s very architectural…All right, we’ll try a practice game.” He swept the board clean of stones. “You’re the beginner, so you get nine free stones on these nine crucial spots.”

  “That’s a lot of free stones.”

  “That’s not a problem, because I’m going to beat you anyway.” He clicked down his first white stone with two fingertips.

  They played for a while. “Atari,” he repeated.

  “You can stop saying that word now, I can see that my group’s in check.”

  “It’s just a customary courtesy.”

  They played more. Oscar was starting to sweat. He stood up and turned down the heaters.

  He sat down again. All the tension had left their situation. The two of them were totally rapt. “You’re going to beat me,” she announced. “You know all those foul little tricks in the corners.
”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She looked up and met his eyes. “But I can learn those little tricks, and then you’re going to have a hard time with me.”

  “I can appreciate a hard time. A hard time is good to find.”

  He beat her by thirty points. “You’re learning fast. Let’s try a serious game.”

  “Don’t clear the board yet,” she said. She studied her defeat with deep appreciation. “These patterns are so elegant.”

  “Yes. And they’re always different. Every game has its own character.”

  “These stones are a lot like neurons.”

  He smiled at her.

  They started a second game. Oscar was very serious about go. He played poker for social reasons, but he never threw a game of go. He was too good at it. He was a gifted player, clever, patient, and profoundly deceptive, but Greta’s game play was all over the map. She was making beginner’s mistakes, but she never repeated them, and her mental grasp of the game was incredibly strong.

  He beat her by nineteen points, but only because he was ruthless.

  “This is a really good game,” she said. “It’s so contemporary.”

  “It’s three thousand years old.”

  “Really?” She stood up and stretched, her kneecaps cracking loudly. “That calls for a drink.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She found her carpetbag and retrieved a square bottle of blue Dutch gin.

  Oscar went to the kitchen and fetched two brand-new bistro glasses from their sanitary wrap. “You want some orange juice with that stuff?”

  “No thank you.”

  He poured himself an orange juice and brought her an empty glass. He watched in vague astonishment as she decanted three fingers of straight gin, with a chemist’s painstaking care.

  “Some ice? We do have ice.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Look, Greta, you can’t drink straight gin. That’s the road to blue ruin.”