Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  With all this yeast gathered in one place, the very earth would rise. Some who arrived were enemies. Arsonists burned the city’s greenbelt; the sappy pines blew up like Roman candles and a ghastly pall of smoke polluted Texas for miles downwind. But when those flames died, the new society moved onto the blackened acres and consumed them utterly. In the grinding hoppers of the bio-hackers, trees digested more easily when partially cooked. The ash contained vital minerals. A scorched and blackened forest was a natural phoenix nest for the world’s first genuine Greenhouse society.

  The U.S. Navy arrived off the shores of the Netherlands. The War had reached a point of crisis. In order to have something to do, the American armada announced a naval blockade of shipping in the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Since large sections of those cities were already underwater, this was not a crushing economic threat.

  Still, there seemed very little else that the Navy could do. They hadn’t brought any land troops or tanks with which they could physically invade Holland. The battleships had long-range naval guns, with which they might easily devastate major cities, but it seemed unthinkable that the United States would physically blast civilians in a nation offering no organized military resistance.

  So, after enormous fanfare and intense press coverage, the hot War with Holland was revealing its rickety underpinnings as a phony war. The President had whipped the nation into frenzy, and strengthened his own hand, and ended the Emergency. He had made his pet proles into a nationwide dandruff of cellular-toting miniature Robespierres. That was an impressive series of accomplishments, more than anyone had dared to hope for. Now the smart money had it that the War would soon be folded up and put away.

  The smart money took the unlikely personage of Alcott Bambakias. The junior Senator from Massachusetts had chosen this moment to make a long-expected tour of the Buna National Collaboratory.

  The Senator was much improved mentally. The rainbow of neural treatments had finally reached an area of his emotional spectrum where Bambakias could lodge and take a stand. He was quite simply a different man now. The Senator was heavier, wearier, vastly more cynical. He described his current mental state as “realistic.” He was making all his quorum calls, and most of his committee assignments. He made far fewer speeches these days, picked far fewer dramatic fights, spent far more time closeted with lobbyists.

  Oscar took it upon himself to give the Senator and Mrs. Bambakias a personal tour of the works in Buna. They took an armored limousine. With the Dutch War stalling visibly, it seemed somewhat less likely that Huey would launch any paint bombs.

  However, this had not stopped the construction frenzy in Buna. On the contrary, it had liberated them from any pretense that they were sheltering themselves from gas. With thousands of people continuing to pour in, with guaranteed free food, free shelter, and all the network data they could eat, the city was tautly inflated with boom-town atmosphere. One group of zealots was constructing a giant plastic structure roughly the size and shape of the Eiffel Tower, which they had dubbed the “Beacon of Cosmic Truth.” Other hobbyists had taken smart geodesics and airtight skins to a logical extreme, and were building aerostats. These were giant self-expanding airtight bubbles, and if they could get the piezoelectric musculature within the tubing to work properly, the things would engorge themselves to the point where they could literally leave the surface of the earth.

  Oscar couldn’t fully contain his enthusiasm for these marvels, and he sensed that Bambakias and Lorena could use some cheering up. Bambakias looked much better—he was clearly lucid now, perhaps even cured—but stress had taken a permanent toll on Lorena. She’d put on weight, she’d sagged, she looked preserved rather than put-together. In her husband’s company she offered Oscar mostly bright monosyllables.

  Bambakias was doing all the talking, but it wasn’t his usual bright and tumbling rhetoric.

  “The hotel was good,” he said. “You did very well with the hotel. Considering all the local limitations.”

  “Oh, we enjoy the hotel. I still sleep there most nights. But it doesn’t begin to compare to the scale of what’s been done to the town.”

  “They’re not doing it right,” Bambakias said.

  “Well, they’re amateurs.”

  “No, they’re worse than amateurs. They’re not following code. They’re not using certified and tested materials. All these tents and pylons, in untested combinations—a lot of them are going to collapse.”

  “Yes, surely, Senator—but it only took them a few days to put them up! If they go bust, they’ll just build more.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to take personal responsibility for this. I sent you those plans, but I never expected them to be executed. Once I abandon my intellectual property to all and sundry, I can’t be expected to be responsible for other people’s exploitation of it.”

  “Of course not, Senator! These were Emergency conditions, War conditions…you know, there is an upside to this. This isn’t permanent structure, and it isn’t in classic form, but it’s remarkably popular.”

  Bambakias brightened a little. “Really.”

  “The people who are living under these things…they’re not architecture critics. A lot of them are people who haven’t had much shelter of any kind for many years. They’re really impressed to see nomad architecture pushed to these mind-boggling extremes.”

  “That isn’t ‘nomad architecture.’ It’s ultrascale emergency relief.”

  “That’s an interesting distinction, Alcott, but let me just put it this way: it’s nomad architecture now.”

  “I think you’d better listen to him, darling,” Lorena put in faintly. “Oscar always has very good instincts about these things.”

  “Oh yes, instincts,” Bambakias said. “Instincts are wonderful. You can live off instincts, as long as you don’t plan to live very long. How long do you expect all this to last, Oscar?”

  “‘This’?” Oscar said delicately.

  “Whatever it is that you’ve created here. What is it, exactly? Is it a political movement? Maybe it’s just one big street party. It certainly isn’t a town.”

  “Well…it’s a little difficult to say exactly where all this will go…”

  “Maybe you should have thought that through a bit more thoroughly,” Bambakias said. It clearly irked the man to have to discuss the matter, but he was taking it as a painful duty. “You know, I’m a ranking member of the Senate Science Committee. It’s going to be a little difficult explaining these developments to my colleagues back in Washington.”

  “Oh, I miss that Science Committee every day,” Oscar lied.

  “You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific community. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed—there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world’s biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn’t go away—it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these nomads and dissidents. Suddenly they could organize in powerful new ways, and now, finally, with the President taking their side…who knows? Do you see my parallel here, Oscar? Does it make sense to you?”

  Oscar was increasingly uncomfortable. “Well, I never said what happened here was entirely without precedent. The great secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

  “You stole these ideas from Huey. You stole Huey’s clothes, didn’t you?”

  “Time-honored tactic, Alcott!”

  “Oscar, Huey is a dictator. He’s a man on horseback. Do I understand this ‘prestige economy’ business? It seems to run entirely on instinct. They spend all their time doing each other little volunteer community services. And they rank each other for it. Eventually somebody pops out of the mix and becomes a tribal big shot. Then they’re required to do what he says.”

 
; “Well…it’s complicated. But yes, that’s the basics.”

  “They really just don’t fit in the rest of American society. Not at all.”

  “It was designed that way.”

  “I mean they don’t have any way to properly deal with the rest of society. They don’t even have proper ways to deal with each other. They have no rule of law. There’s no Constitution. There’s no legal redress. There’s no Bill of Rights. They don’t have any way to deal with the rest of us, except through evasion, or intimidation. When one network meets another that’s set up along different lines, they feud. They kill each other.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Now you’ve made these people aware of their mutual interest with the scientific research community. Another group of people who basically live outside the state, outside of economics. One wants freedom of inquiry, and the other wants freedom from physical want, and neither of them has any sense of responsibility to the rest of us. In fact, the rest of us have given up expecting anything from them. We no longer hope that science will give us Utopia, or even a real improvement. Science just adds more factors to the mix, and makes everything more unstable. We’ve given up on our dispossessed, too. We have no illusion that we can employ them, or keep them docile with more bio-bread, or more cyber-circuses. And now you’ve brought these two groups together and they’ve become a real coalition.”

  “I’m with you, Senator. I’m following the argument.”

  “What now, Oscar? What are they going to do now? What becomes of the rest of us?”

  “Hell, I don’t know!” Oscar shouted. “I just saw Huey doing it, that’s all. We were in a feud with Huey—you pushed me into the feud with Huey! The lab was broke, it was halfway in his pocket already, and he was just going to rack them up. They would just…become his creatures. I didn’t want them to be his creatures.”

  “What’s the difference? If they’re still creatures.”

  “The difference? Between me and Green Huey? Okay! At last a question I can answer! The difference between me and Huey is that whatever Huey does is always about Huey. It’s always about Huey first and foremost, and it’s always about the greater glory of Huey. But the things that I do will never, ever be about me. They aren’t allowed to be about me.”

  “Because of the way you were born.”

  “Alcott, it’s worse than that. I wasn’t even born at all.”

  Lorena spoke up. “I think you two boys should stop all this. You’re going in circles. Why don’t we get something to eat?”

  “I don’t mean to wound his feelings,” Bambakias said reasonably. “I’m just looking at the structure critically, and I’m pointing out that there’s nothing holding it up.”

  Lorena folded her arms. “Why pick on Oscar, for heaven’s sake? The President sent a newspaper-boat navy across the Atlantic, and there was nothing holding that up either. The War will be over in Washington soon. It can’t go on, it’s a stage show. Then the War will be over here too. They’ll just fold all this up, and we’ll find some other distraction. That’s the way life is now. Stop fussing about it.”

  Bambakias paused thoughtfully. “You’re right, dear. I’m sorry. I was getting all worked up.”

  “We’re supposed to be on vacation here. You should save some energy for the hearings. I want some chowder, Alcott. I want some étouffée.”

  “She’s so good to me,” Bambakias told Oscar. Suddenly he smiled. “I haven’t gotten so worked up in ages! That really felt good.”

  “Oscar always cheers you up,” Lorena told him. “He’s the best at that. You should be good to him.”

  __________

  The Senator and his wife wanted Louisiana cuisine. That was a legitimate request. They took a fleet of limos, and the Senator’s large krewe, and their media coverage, and the Senator’s numerous bodyguards, and the entire caravan drove to a famous restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. They took a great deal of pleasure in this, because it was an excellent restaurant, and they were certain that Huey would quickly learn of their raid.

  They ate well and tipped lavishly, and it would have been a lovely meal, except that the Senator was on his mood stabilizers, so he no longer drank. The Senator’s wife drank rather too much. They also brought along the new senatorial press secretary in the krewe; and the new press secretary was Clare Emerson.

  Then the caravan returned ceremoniously to the hotel in Buna, and the bodyguards drew great, quiet sighs of relief. The Senator and his wife retired, and the bodyguards set up their night patrols, and the media krewe went out looking for trouble and action at some Moderator orgy under some enormous dewy tent. Oscar, who had exhausted himself avoiding Clare, found himself maneuvered into a situation where he and his former girlfriend had to have a sociable nightcap together. Just to show that there were no hard feelings. Though the feelings were extremely hard.

  So Clare had a glass of hotel Chablis, and Oscar, who didn’t drink, had a club soda. They sat at a small wooden table while music played, and they were forced to talk privately.

  “So, Clare. Tell me all about Holland. That must have been fascinating.”

  “It was, at first.” She was so good-looking. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was. He’d even forgotten that he’d once made it a habit to court beautiful women. As a member of the Bambakias krewe and a press player in Washington, Clare was far better put-together than she had ever been as a newbie Boston political journo. Clare was still young. He’d forgotten what it meant to date young, beautiful, brilliantly dressed women. He’d never gotten over her. He hadn’t given himself enough time. He’d just shelved the issue and sought out a distraction.

  Her lips were still moving. He forced himself to pay attention to her words. She was saying something about finding her cultural roots as an Anglo. Europe was full of Yankee defectors and émigrés, bitter, aging white men who clustered in beer cellars and moaned that their country was being run by a crazy redskin. Europe hadn’t been all romance for Clare. The part of Europe that was drowning fastest didn’t have much romance for anyone.

  “Oh, but a war correspondent, though. That seems like such a career opportunity.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she said. “You enjoy torturing me.”

  “What?” He was shocked.

  “Didn’t Lorena tell you all about my little Dutch misadventures?”

  “Lorena doesn’t tell me about her krewe activities. I’m not in the Bambakias circle anymore. I scarcely have a krewe of my own, these days.”

  She sipped at her wine. “Krewes are pitiful. They’re disgusting. People will do anything for a little security nowadays. Even sell themselves into servitude. Any rich person can scare up their own loyal gang, just for the asking. It’s feudalism. But we’re so wrecked as a country that we can’t even make feudalism work.”

  “I thought you liked Lorena. You always gave her such good spin.”

  “Oh, I loved her as copy. But as my boss…well, what am I saying? Lorena’s great to me. She took me on when I was down, she made me a little player. She never outed me on the Dutch thing. I have a classy job in Washington, I have nice clothes and a car.”

  “All right. I’ll bite. Tell me what happened in Holland.”

  “I have bad habits,” Clare said, staring at the tablecloth. “I got this impression that I could sleep my way into good stories. Well, it worked great in Boston! But Den Haag is not Boston. The Dutch aren’t like Americans. They can still concentrate. And their backs are against the wall.” She twisted a lock of hair.

  “I’m sorry to hear that you met with a setback. I hope you don’t think I’m angry with you because our affair ended badly.”

  “You are angry with me, Oscar. You’re furious. You resent me and you hate me, but you’re just such a player that you would never, ever show that to me. You’d dump me if you had to, and you did dump me, but at least you couldn’t be bothered to crucify me. I made a real mistake, thinking that all politicians were like you.”

>   Oscar said nothing. She was going to spill it all very soon. More words wouldn’t make it come any faster.

  “I got a hot lead on a scandal. I mean a major Cold War scandal, huge, big. All I had to do was wheedle it out of this Dutch subminister of something-or-other. And he was gonna come across for me. Because he was a Cold War spook, and he knew that I knew that he was a spook, and I was a journalist, which is halfway to spookiness, really. And he was hot for me. But that was okay, because, you know, if you put your mind to it, you can get these things out of men. It’s a mentor thing. They’re like your uncle, or maybe your professor, and you don’t know the ropes, and they’re going to teach you the ropes. And all you have to do is let them tie you up with the ropes just a little.” She had another sip.

  “Clare, why would I be judgmental about that? These things happen. It’s reality.”

  “You know, we don’t understand that here in America. We don’t get it that we’re the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of climate politics. We’re so out of sync that we still measure in pounds and inches. We think it’s funny that we’re having a War with a bunch of little people with tulips and wooden shoes. We’re like spoiled children. We’re like big fat teenage pop stars cruising around in our two-ton pink Cadillac blasting our stereo and throwing our beer empties everywhere. We don’t get it that there are serious, civilized people who spend their time in downtown Amsterdam watching hookers in public sex cages in a city saturated with dope, and the sex doesn’t touch them, and the dope doesn’t touch them, because they are very determined, and they are very cold.”

  “Are they cold people, the Dutch?”

  “Cold and wet. And getting wetter. All the time.”

  “They tell me the Navy is considering knocking some holes in their dikes with artillery blasts.”