The fairground was densely packed with people, but the crowd was unnaturally fluid. All the snack-food stands had short, brisk lines. The toilets were never crowded. Children never got lost.
“I’ll line up someone that we can talk to seriously,” Kevin told them. “When I’ve made the arrangements, I’ll call you.” He turned and limped away.
“I’ll help you,” Oscar said, catching up with him.
Kevin turned on him, his face tight. “Look, am I your security chief, or not?”
“Of course you are.”
“This is a security matter. If you want to help me, go watch your girlfriend. Make sure that nobody steals her this time.”
Oscar was annoyed to find himself persona non grata in Kevin’s private machinations. On the other hand, Kevin’s anxiety made sense—because Oscar was the only man in this crowd of thousands who was wearing a full-scale overclass ensemble of suit, hat, and shoes. Oscar was painfully conspicuous.
He glanced over his shoulder. Greta had already vanished.
He quickly located Pelicanos, and after four increasingly anxious minutes they managed to find Greta. She had somehow wandered into a long campground aisle of tents and tables, which were packed with an astounding plethora of secondhand electronic equipment.
“Why are you wandering off on your own?” he said.
“I didn’t wander! You wandered.” She dipped her fingers through a shallow brass tray full of nonconductive probes.
“We need to stick together, Greta.”
“I guess it’s my little friend here,” she said, touching her earcuff. “I’m not used to it.” She wandered bright-eyed down to the next table, which bore brimming boxes of multicolored patch cables, faceplates, mounting boxes, modular adaptors.
Oscar examined a cardboard box crammed with electrical wares. Most were off-white plastic, but others were nomad work. He picked an electrical faceplate out of the box. It had been punched and molded out of mashed grass. The treated cellulose was light yet rigid, with a crunchy texture, like bad high-fiber breakfast cereal.
Greta was fascinated, and Oscar’s interest was caught despite himself. He hadn’t realized that nomad manufacturing had become so sophisticated. He glanced up and down the long aisle. They were entirely surrounded by the detritus of dead American computer and phone industries, impossibly worthless junk brightly labeled with long-dead commercial promos. “Brand-New In the Box: Strata VIe and XIIe!” There were long-dead business programs no sane human being would ever employ. Stacks of bubblejet cartridges for nonexistent printers. Nonergonomic mice and joysticks, guaranteed to slowly erode one’s wrist tendons…And fantastic amounts of software, its fictional “value” exploded by the lost economic war.
But this was not the strange part. The strange part was that brand-new nomad manufacturers were vigorously infiltrating this jungle of ancient junk. They were creating new, functional objects that were not commercial detritus—they were sinister mimics of commercial detritus, created through new, noncommercial methods. Where there had once been expensive, glossy petrochemicals, there was now chopped straw and paper. Where there had once been employees, there were jobless fanatics with cheap equipment, complex networks, and all the time in the world. Devices once expensive and now commercially worthless were being slowly and creepily replaced by near-identical devices that were similarly noncommercial, and yet brand-new.
A table featuring radio-frequency bugs and taps was doing a bang-up business. A man and woman with towering headdresses and face paint were boldly retailing the whole gamut of the covert-listening industry: bodywires, gooseneck flashlights, wire crimpers, grounding kits, adhesive spongers, dental picks and forceps, and box after box of fingernail-sized audio bugs. Who but nomads, the permanently unemployed, would enjoy the leisure of patiently listening, collating, and trading juicy bits of overheard dialogue? Oscar examined a foam-filled box jammed with hexhead cam wrenches.
“Let’s try this other row,” Greta urged him, eyes bright and hair tousled. “This one’s medical!”
They drifted into a collateral realm of undead commerce. Here, the market tables were crowded with hemostatic forceps, surgical scissors, vascular clamps, resistant heat-sealed plastic gloves from the long-vanished heyday of AIDS. Greta pored, transfixed, over the bone screws, absorption spears, ultracheap South Chinese magnifier spectacles, little poptop canisters of sterile silicone grease.
“I need some cash,” she told him suddenly. “Loan me something.”
“What is with you? You can’t buy this junk. You don’t know where it’s from.”
“That’s why I want to buy it.” She frowned at him. “Look, I was the head of the Instrumentation Department. If they’re giving away protein sequencers, I really need to know about that.”
She approached the table’s owner, who was sitting at his open laptop and chuckling over homemade cartoons. “Hey, mister. How much for this cytometer?”
The hick looked up from his screen. “Is that what that is?”
“Does it work?”
“I dunno. Kinda makes the right noises when you plug it in.”
Pelicanos appeared. He had bought her a secondhand jacket—a gruesome sporty disaster of indestructible black and purple Gore-Tex.
“Thank you, Yosh,” she said, and slipped into the jacket’s baggy entrails. Once she’d snapped the ghastly thing up to her chin, Greta immediately became an integral part of the local landscape. She was passing for normal now, just another poverty-stricken bottom-feed female shopper.
“I wish Sandra were here,” Pelicanos said quietly. “Sandra would enjoy this place. If we weren’t in so much trouble, that is.”
Oscar was too preoccupied for junk shopping. He was worried about Kevin. He was struggling to conjure up a contingency plan in case Kevin failed to make a useful contact, or worse yet, if Kevin simply vanished.
But Greta was picking her way along the tables with heartfelt enthusiasm. She’d transcended all her pains and worries. Scratch a scientist, find a hardware junkie.
But no, it was deeper than that. Greta was in her element. Oscar had a brief intuitive flash of what it would mean to be married to Greta. Choosing equipment was part of her work and work was the core of her being. Domestic life with a dedicated scientist would be crammed full of moments like this. He would be dutifully tagging along to keep her company, and she would be investing all her attention into things that he would never understand. Her relationship with the physical world was of an entirely different order from his own. She loved equipment, but she had no taste. It would be hell to furnish a home with a scientist. They’d be arguing over her awful idea of window curtains. He’d be giving in on the issue of cheap and nasty tableware.
His phone rang. It was Kevin.
Oscar followed instructions, and located the tent where Kevin had found his man. The place was hard to miss. It was an oblong dome of tinted parachute fabric, sheltering a two-man light aircraft, six bicycles, and a host of cots. Hundreds of multicolored strings of chemglow hung from the seams of the tent, dangling to shoulder height. A dozen proles were sitting on soft plastic carpets. To one side, five of them were busily compiling a printed newspaper.
Kevin was sitting and chatting with a man he introduced as “General Burningboy.” Burningboy was in his fifties, with a long salt-and-pepper beard and a filthy cowboy hat. The nomad guru wore elaborately hand-embroidered jeans, a baggy handwoven sweater, and ancient military lace-up boots. There were three parole cuffs on his hairy wrists.
“Howdy,” the prole General said. “Welcome to Canton Market. Pull up a floor.”
Oscar and Greta sat on the carpet. Kevin was already sitting there, in his socks, absently massaging his sore feet. Pelicanos was not attending the negotiations. Pelicanos was waiting at a discreet distance. He was their emergency backup man.
“Your friend here just paid me quite a sum, just to buy one hour of my time,” Burningboy remarked. “Some tale he had to tell me, too. But now that I see
you two…” He looked thoughtfully at Oscar and Greta. “Yeah, it makes sense. I reckon I’m buying his story. So what can I do y’all for?”
“We’re in need of assistance,” Oscar said.
“Oh, I knew it had to be somethin’,” the General nodded. “We never get asked for a favor by straight folks till you’re on the ropes. Happens to us all the time—rich idiots, just showin’ up out of the blue. Always got some fancy notion about what we can do for ’em. Some genius scheme that can only be accomplished by the proverbial scum of the earth. Like, maybe we’d like to help ’em grow heroin…Maybe sell some aluminum siding.”
“It’s not at all like that, General. You’ll understand, once you hear my proposal.”
The General tucked in his boots, cross-legged. “Y’know, this may amaze you, Mr. Valparaiso, but in point of fact, we worthless subhumans are kinda busy with lives of our own! This is Canton First Monday. We’re smack in the middle of a major jamboree here. I’ve gotta worry about serious matters, like…sewage. We got a hundred thousand people showin’ up for three days. You comprende?” Burningboy stroked his beard. “You know who you’re talking to here? I’m not a magic elf, pal. I don’t come out of a genie bottle just because you need me. I’m a human being. I got my own problems. They call me ‘General’ now…But once upon a time, I used to be a real-live mayor! I was the elected two-term mayor of Port Mansfield, Texas. Fine little beachfront community—till it washed away.”
An elderly woman in a hairy robe entered the tent. She carefully tied two knots into a dangling cord of chemglow, and left without a word.
The General picked up the thread. “You see, son—and Dr. Penninger”—he nodded at Greta in courtly fashion—“we’re all the heroes of our own story. You tell me you’ve got a big problem—hell, we’ve all got big problems.”
“Let’s discuss them,” Oscar said.
“I got some excellent career advice for you over-achievers. Why don’t you clowns just give up? Just quit! Knock it off, hit the road! Are you enjoyin’ life? Do you have a community? Do you even know what a real community is? Is there any human soul that you poor haunted wretches can really trust? Don’t answer that! ’Cause I already know. You’re a sorry pair of washouts, you two. You look like coyotes ate you and crapped you off a cliff. Now you got some crisis you want me to help you with…Hell, people like you are always gonna have a crisis. You are the crisis. When are you gonna wake up? Your system don’t work. Your economy don’t work. Your politicians don’t work. Nothing you ever do works. You’re over.”
“For the time being,” Oscar said.
“Mister, you’re never gonna get ahead of the game. You’ve had a serious wake-up call here. You’re disappeared, you’re dispossessed. You’ve been blown right off the edge of the earth. Well, you know something? There’s a soft landing down here. Just go ahead and leave! Burn your clothes! Set fire to your damn diploma! Junk all your ID cards! You’re a sickening, pitiful sight, you know that? A nice, charming, talented couple…Listen, it’s not too late for you two to get a life! You’re derelicts right now, but you could be bon vivants, if you knew what life was for.”
Greta spoke up. “But I really need to get back to my lab.”
“I tried,” said Burningboy, flinging up both hands. “See, if you just had the good sense to listen to me, that fine advice of mine would have solved your problems right away. You could be eatin’ mulligatawny stew with us tonight, and probably getting laid. But no, don’t mind old Burningboy. I’m much, much older than you, and I’ve seen a lot more of life than you ever have, but what do I know? I’m just some dirt-ignorant fool in funny clothes, who’s gonna get arrested. Because some rich Yankee from outta town needs him to commit some terrible criminal act.”
“General, let me give you the briefing,” said Oscar. He proceeded to do this. Burningboy listened with surprising patience.
“Okay,” Burningboy said at last. “Let’s say that we go in and strong-arm this giant glass dome full of scientists. I gotta admit, that’s a very attractive idea. We’re extremely nice, peaceful people in the Moderators, we’re all love and sunshine. So we might do a thing like that, just to please you. But what’s in it for us?”
“There’s money,” Oscar said.
Burningboy yawned. “Sure, like that’ll help us.”
“The lab is a self-sufficient structure. There’s food and shelter inside,” Greta offered.
“Yeah, sure—as long as it suits you to give it to us. Once that’s done, then it’s the run-along as usual.”
“Let’s be realistic,” Oscar said. “You’re a mob. We need to hire some mob muscle to back up our labor strike. That’s a very traditional gambit, isn’t it? How hard can that be?”
“They’re very small, timid cops,” Greta offered. “They hardly even have guns.”
“Folks, we carry our own food and shelter. What we don’t have is bullet holes in us. Or a bunch of angry feds on our ass.”
Oscar considered his next move. He was dealing with people who had profoundly alien priorities. The Moderators were radical, dissident dropouts—but they were nevertheless people, so of course they could be reached somehow. “I can make you famous,” he said.
Burningboy tipped his hat back. “Oh yeah? How?”
“I can get you major net coverage. I’m a professional and I can spin it. The Collaboratory a very famous place. Dr. Penninger here is a Nobel Prize winner. This is a major political scandal. It’s very dramatic. It’s part of a major developing story, it ties in with the Bambakias hunger strike, and the Regulator assault on a U.S. Air Force base. You Moderators could get excellent press by restoring order at a troubled federal facility. It would be the very opposite of the dreadful thing that the Regulators did.”
Burningboy reached thoughtfully into his jacket. He removed three small bars of substances resembling colored chalk. He set them onto a small slab of polished Arkansas whetstone, drew a pocketknife, and began chopping the bars into a fine powder.
Then he sighed heavily. “I really hate having my chain pulled just because a hustler like you happens to know that we Mods have it in for the Regulators.”
“Of course I know that, General. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?”
“We love those Regulators like brothers and sisters. We got nothing in common with you. Except that…well, we’re Moderators because we use a Moderator network. And the Regulators use a Regulator interface, with Regulator software and Regulator protocols. I don’t think that a newbie creep like you understands just how political a problem that is.”
“I understand it,” Kevin said, speaking up for the first time.
“We used to get along with the Regulators. They’re a civilized tribe. But those Cajun goofballs got all puffed up about their genetic skills, and their state support from Green Huey…Started bossin’ other people around, doing talent raids on our top people, and if you ask me, them gumbo yaya voodoo-krewes are way too fond of gas and poison…”
Sensing weakness, Oscar pounced. “General, I’m not asking you to attack the Regulators. I’m only asking you to do what the Regulators themselves have done, except for much better motives, and under much better circumstances.”
General Burningboy arranged his chopped powder into straight lines, and dumped them, one by one, into a small jar of yellow grease. He stirred the grease with his forefinger, and rubbed it carefully behind his ears.
Then he waited, blinking. “Okay,” he said at last. “I’m putting my personal honor on the line here, on the say-so of total strangers, but what the hell. They call me ‘General’ because of my many hard-won years of cumulative trust ratings, but the cares of office hang kinda heavy on my hands right now, quite frankly. I might as well destroy everything I’ve built in one fell swoop. So, I’m gonna do you three rich creep palookas a very, very big favor. I’m going to loan you five platoons.”
“Fifty Moderator toughs?” Kevin said eagerly.
“Yep. Five platoons, fifty people. Of cours
e, I’m not sayin’ our troops can hold that lab against a federal counterassault, but there’s no question they can take it.”
“Do these men have the discipline that it takes to maintain civil order in that facility?” Oscar said.
“They’re not men, pal. They’re teenage girls. We used to send in our young men when we wanted to get tough, but hey, young men are extremely tough guys. Young men kill people. We’re a well-established alternative society, we can’t afford to be perceived as murdering marauders. These girls keep a cooler head about urban sabotage. Plus, underage women tend to get a much lighter criminal sentencing when they get caught.”
“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, General, but I’m not sure you grasp the seriousness of our situation.”
“No,” Greta said. “Teenage girls are perfect.”
“Then I reckon I’ll be introducing you to some of our chaperone field commanders. And you can talk about tactics and armament.”
__________
Oscar rode back to Buna in a phony church bus, crammed with three platoons of Moderator nomad soldiers. He might have ridden with Kevin, but he was anxious to study the troops.
It was almost impossible to look at girls between fourteen and seventeen and envision them as a paramilitary task force that could physically defeat police. But in a society infested with surveillance, militias had to take strange forms. These girls were almost invisible because they were so improbable.
The girls were very fit and quiet, with the posture of gymnasts, and they traveled in packs. Their platoons were split into operational groups of five, coordinated by elderly women. These little-old-lady platoon sergeants looked about as harmless and inoffensive as it was possible for human beings to look.
They all looked harmless because they dressed the part, deliberately. The nomad crones had given up their usual eldritch leather-and-plastic road gear. They now wore little hats, orthopedic shoes, and badly fitting floral prints. The young soldiers painstakingly obscured their tattoos with skin-colored sticks of wax. They had styled and combed their hair. They wore bright, up-tempo jackets and patterned leggings, presumably shoplifted from malls in some gated community. The Moderator army resembled a girl’s hockey team on a hunt for chocolate milk shakes.
Distraction Page 33
