Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  “You’d know that, being NSC, wouldn’t you?”

  A chill like dry ice wafted between them. Oscar almost sensed a swirl of congealing fog.

  Clare leaned back in her chair. “It smells funny in Buna. Doesn’t it? All these tents and gas shelters. That big dome smells weird. It’s like they never change their underwear.”

  “This isn’t Boston, it’s the Gulf Coast. You think it smells funny inside here, you should walk around outside for a while.”

  “Too many mosquitoes.”

  Oscar laughed.

  Clare frowned. “You don’t have to know what happened to me in Holland. I just got in too deep, that’s all. I got away from there, and I was lucky to get away, that’s my big story. I’m lucky Lorena has such a big heart.”

  “Clare…it’s just a shame. War is a hard game and even a toy war has casualties. I wouldn’t have wished that on you for anything.”

  “You told me that. You warned me about it. Remember? And I told you that I was a grown-up. We were working in this dinky little Boston election where the guy had seven-percent approvals. We were like kids in a sandbox. I thought it was so upscale and important, and it all seems so innocent now. And here you’ve done this incredible thing and I…well, I work for the Senator now. So I guess that’s all right.”

  “It’s the breaks.”

  “Oscar, why aren’t you more of a scoundrel? I’m all burned out on men. And you’re like this slimy pol who always gets his way, and I thought I’d be all burned out on you, but when I saw you tonight…well, it all came back to me.”

  “What came back?”

  “You and me. That you’re this cute guy who was always sweet and polite to me, and gave me his house pass and taught me about funny old modern art. My old flame. The dream boyfriend. I really miss you. I even miss the satin sheets and your skin temperature.”

  “Clare, why are you telling me this? You know I’m involved with another woman now. For heaven’s sake, everyone in the world knows I’m involved with Greta Penninger.”

  “Oscar, you can’t be serious about that. Her? She’s a rebound type. No, she’s not even that. Oscar—don’t you get it? People make jokes about you and her. She’s funny-looking. She’s old. She has a big nose and no ass. She can’t be any fun. I mean, not like the kind of fun we used to have.”

  He conjured up a smile. “You’re really jealous! Shame on you.”

  “Why would you go for her? She just had something that you wanted.”

  “Clare, even though you’re a journalist, I really don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “I’m saying wicked things because I’m sad, and I’m jealous, and I’m lonely, and I’m sorry. And I’m getting really drunk. And you dumped me. For her.”

  “I didn’t dump you. You dumped me, because I was out of town, and you wouldn’t fly down and join me, and you decided that it was a better career move to go live with our country’s worst enemies.”

  “Oh, well, that’s better,” Clare said, and wrinkled her nose at him, and grinned a little. “I guess I’m getting through to you, finally.”

  “I did my level best to make it work out for us, but you wouldn’t let me do it.”

  “Well, it’s too late now.”

  “Of course it’s too late.”

  She looked at her watch. “And it’s getting pretty late tonight, too.”

  Oscar glanced at his mousebrain watch. The thing had just dampened his wrist with liquid waste, and it was nowhere near the correct time. It was sometime around midnight. “You’d better sleep this off, if you’re going to make the Senator’s flight back to Washington.”

  “Oscar, I have a better idea. Stop toying with me. Let’s just do it. This is my only night here, this is our big chance. Take me upstairs, let’s go to bed.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m not too drunk to know what I’m doing. I’m just drunk enough to be a lot of fun. You’ve been looking at me all night. You know I can’t stand it when you look at me with those big brown puppy-dog eyes.”

  “There’s no future in that.” He was weakening.

  “Who cares about the future? It’s about old times. Come on, it’s practically just as bad, just ’cause you want it so much.”

  “It’s not just as bad. It’s worse to do it. It’s the worst of all. When the volcano burns, everyone knows it, but when the heart is in flames, who knows it?”

  She blinked. “Huh?”

  Oscar sighed. “I just don’t believe you, Clare. I’m a smooth talker and I know how to please, but as a male specimen, I’m just not that overwhelming. If I were, you’d have never left me in the first place.”

  “Look, I already said I was sorry. Don’t rub it in. I can show you how sorry I am.”

  “Who sent you here, really? Are there bugs in your purse? Are you wearing a wire right now? You got turned, didn’t you? They turned you, in The Hague. You’re a foreign agent. You’re a spy.”

  Clare went very pale. “What is this? Have you cracked up? All this paranoia! You’re talking like the Senator at his worst!”

  “What am I, a useful idiot? There’s a war on! Mata Hari was Dutch, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You think they’d let me work for a Senator, if I was a Dutch spy? You don’t know what Washington’s like these days. You don’t know a damn thing about anything.”

  Oscar said nothing. He watched her with lethal care.

  Clare gathered the rags of her dignity. “You really insulted me. I’m really hurt. I have a good mind to just get up and leave you. Why don’t you call me a cab?”

  “Then it’s the President, isn’t it?”

  Her face went stiff.

  “It is the President,” he said with finality. “It’s me and Greta Penninger. The situation’s a little out of hand down here. It’d be better for domestic tranquility if the girlfriend and I came to a sudden parting of our ways. Then it would all work out. That would put a nice healthy dent in the local morale. The Moderators would slide right into his private espionage network, and the scientist would go back to her lab, and the slimy pol who can’t keep his hands off women would be outed to everybody as just another slimy pol.”

  Clare lifted a napkin and wiped her eyes.

  “You go back and tell your agent-runner that I don’t work for the President because he’s a nice guy. I work for him because the country was up on blocks, and he got the country moving. I’m loyal to him because I’m loyal to the country, and it’s going to take more than a nightingale to push me off the playing board. Even if it’s a very pretty nightingale that I used to care about.”

  “That’s enough, I’m leaving. Good night, Oscar.”

  “Good-bye.”

  __________

  Bambakias left Texas the next morning with all his krewe, including Clare. Oscar was not outed. No recorded tapes of the conversation showed up. There were no blaring net-flashes about his tête-à-tête with a former girlfriend. Two days passed.

  Then there was big news on the War front.

  The Dutch were giving up.

  The Dutch Prime Minister made a public statement. She was small and bitter and gray. She said that it was hopeless for an unarmed country like the Netherlands to resist the armed might of the world’s last military superpower. She said that it was impossible for her people to face the environmental catastrophe of having the country’s dikes bombarded. She said that America’s ruthless ultimatum had broken her country’s will to resist.

  She said that the Netherlands was surrendering unconditionally. She said that the country was declaring itself an open country, that her tiny military would lay down its arms, that they would accept the troops of the occupier. She said that she and her cabinet had just signed documents of surrender, and the Dutch government would voluntarily dissolve itself at midnight. She proclaimed that the War was over, and that the Americans had won, and she called on the American people to remember their long tradition of magnanimity toward defeated opponents
.

  The speech took eight minutes. And the War was over.

  __________

  For a strange historical instant, the United States went mad with joy, but the madness subsided with remarkably few casualties. Their long trials had made the American public peculiarly resilient. No more than eight hours passed before the first net pundits began to explain why total victory had been inevitable.

  Total victory had its merits. There was no resisting the overwhelming prestige of a hero President. His favorables shot into the high nineties and hung there as if nailed to a mast.

  The President was not caught napping by this development. He wasted no time: scarcely an hour; scarcely a picosecond.

  He commandeered domestic airlines by executive order. There were swarms of American troops in every Dutch airport by morning. The Yankee soldiery, dazed and jet-lagged, were met by a courteous and chastened Dutch populace, waving homemade American flags. The President declared the War over—barely bothering to have a docile Congress certify this—and declared the arrival of a new American era. This epoch was to be henceforth known as the Return to Normalcy.

  Like a sorcerer slamming swords through a barrel, the President began to bloodlessly reshape the American body politic.

  The Normalcy manifesto was a rather astonishing twenty-eight point document. It stole the clothes of so many of America’s splintered political parties that they were left quite stunned. The President’s national plan for action bore only the slightest resemblance to that of his party platform, or that of his supposed core constituency in the Left Tradition Bloc. The President’s idea of Normalcy had something in it to flabbergast everyone.

  The dollar would be sharply devalued and made an open global currency again. A general amnesty would free from parole anyone whose crimes could be considered remotely political. A new tax structure would soak the ultra-rich and come down brutally on carbon-dioxide production. Derelict and underused buildings would be nationalized en masse, then turned over to anyone willing to homestead them. Derelict cities and ghost towns—and there were many such, especially in the West—would be scraped clean from the face of the earth and replanted in fast-growing trees. Roadblocking was henceforth to be considered an act of piracy and to be punished without mercy by roving gangs of the CDIA, who, since they were all former roadblockers of the most avid temperament, could be expected to know just how to put an end to the practice.

  A constitutional amendment was offered to create a new fourth branch of government for American citizens whose “primary residences were virtual networks.” America’s eight hundred and seven federal police agencies would be streamlined into four. There was a comprehensive reform plan for the astoundingly victorious American military.

  There was also a new national health plan, more or less on a sensible Canadian model. This would never work. It had been put there deliberately, so that the President’s domestic opposition could enjoy the pleasure of destroying something.

  __________

  The President’s fait accompli was not to be resisted—least of all by the state of Louisiana. Recognizing the hurricane power of this turn of events, Green Huey bent with the wind.

  Huey resigned his office as Governor. He begged the people’s forgiveness and shed hot tears on-camera, expressing deep regret for his past excesses, and promising a brand-new, hundred-percent, federally approved Normalcy Cooperation Policy. His lieutenant governor also resigned, but he was not missed, as he had always been the most colorless of Huey’s stooges.

  Huey’s supine State Senate swiftly installed an entirely new Governor. She was a spectacular young black woman from New Orleans, a former beauty queen, a woman of such untoward and astonishing lithe beauty (for a state chief executive, at least) that the world’s cameras simply could not keep their lenses off her.

  The new Governor’s first act as chief executive was to issue blanket pardons to all members of the former state government, including, first and foremost, Green Huey. Her second act was to formalize Louisiana’s state relationships—“formal and informal”—with the Regulators. The Regulators would henceforth be loyal local members of a statewide CDIA, directly modeled on the federal agency that the wise President in his infinite mercy had imposed on the American Republic. It was pointed out that some Haitian guests of the State of Louisiana were still being held by their federal captors, and the new Governor, being of Haitian extraction herself, asked that they be granted clemency.

  An enterprising news team—obviously tipped off—managed to locate and interview some of the Haitian subjects, who had been waiting out the days and hours in their federal medical kraal. The Haitians, having been ripped from their homes and medically probed from stem to stern, naturally expressed a devout wish to return to their swamp compound. It was a very poetic set of pleas, even when crossing the boundaries of translation. But at the end of the day, they were just Haitians, so no one felt much need to pay attention to their wishes. They stayed in their illegal-migrant slammer, while the President waited for the ex-Governor’s next shoe to drop.

  __________

  On the issue of the Buna National Collaboratory and its frenetic reformers, the President did and said precisely nothing. The President apparently had bigger and better matters on his mind—and this President was in a position to see to it that his interests seized and held the limelight.

  With the sudden and stunning end of the War, the mad immigration into Buna slowed to a crawl. Then, it began to reverse itself. People had seen enough. The gawkers, and the fakers, and the most easily distracted trendies, began to realize that a glamorous, noncommercial, intellectual-dissident Greenhouse Society was simply not for everyone. Living there was going to involve a lot of work. The mere fact that money was not involved did not signify that work was not involved; the truth was the exact opposite. This congelation of science and mass economic defection was going to require brutal amounts of dedicated labor, constant selfless effort, much of it by necessity wasted on experiments that washed out, on roads that were better not taken, on intellectually sexy notions that became blinding cul-de-sacs.

  Beneath the fluttering party streamers, there was going to be serious science in Buna: “Science” with a new obsessive potency, because it was art pour l’art, science for its own sake. It was science as the chosen pursuit of that small demographic fraction that was entirely consumed by intellectual curiosity. But the hot air of revolutionary fervor would leak from their bubble, and the chill air of reality would leave it somewhat clammy, and unpleasant to the touch.

  Work on the newly renamed Normalcy Committee, by its very nature, somehow lacked the brio attendant on Emergency and War. The work had always been exhausting, but the attendees had rarely been bored.

  Now Greta and Oscar were discovering brief moments when they could think for themselves. Moments when they could speak, and not for public consumption. Moments when business took the rest of the Committee quorum elsewhere. Moments when they were alone.

  Oscar gazed around the empty boardroom. The place looked the way his soul felt: drained, overlit, empty, spattered with official detritus.

  “This is it, Greta. The campaign’s finally over. We’ve won. We’re in power. We have to settle down now, we have to learn to govern. We’re not the rebels anymore, because we can’t lead any strikes and marches against ourselves. We can’t even rebel against the President: he’s benignly ignoring us in a classically passive-aggressive fashion, he’s giving us rope. He’s going to see if we make it, or if we hang ourselves. We’ve got to deal with reality now. We have to consolidate.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me that. To tell me that I’m finally off the hook. No more Joan of Arc.”

  “I painted you as Joan of Arc because that’s the kind of image that a candidate needs when she’s leading a heroic crusade. You’re not Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc was a fifteen-year-old female military genius who heard voices in her head. You don’t have voices in your head. All that noise you had to listen
to all this time, that wasn’t the crying of angels, that was a very gifted and clever public relations campaign. Joan of Arc got burned at the stake. She was toast. I didn’t set this up so that you would be toast. I don’t want you to be toast, Greta. Toast isn’t worth it.”

  “So what do you want from me, Oscar? You want a Joan of Arc who somehow gets away with it all. A schizoid peasant girl who successfully builds a grand castle, and becomes, what, a French duchess? A peasant duchess in beautiful brocade robes.”

  “And with a prince, too. Okay?”

  “What prince really wants or needs Joan of Arc? I mean—for the long term.”

  “Well, the obvious candidate would have been Gilles de Rais—but that guy clearly lost his perspective. Never mind that; historical analogy only carries us so far. I’m talking about you and me now. We’re at the end of the road. This is finally it. Now we have to take a stand. We have to settle.”

  Greta closed her eyes, drew a few deep breaths. The room was silent except for the subtle hiss of the air filter. Stress made her allergies worse; she carried her air filters around like handbags now. “So, at the end, this is all about you and me.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No it isn’t. Let me tell you all about you and me. When I first saw you, I was totally skeptical. I wasn’t looking for any trouble. But you just kept making these little passes at me. And I thought: what is he doing? He’s a political operative. I have nothing this guy wants. I’m just wasting my life on this board, trying to get proper equipment. I wasn’t even managing to accomplish that. But then it occurred to me, this remote speculation: this guy is actually hot for me. He thinks I’m sexy. He wants to sleep with me. It really is that simple.”

  She took a breath. “And I thought: that is really a bad idea. But what’s the worst that can happen to me? They find me in bed with this character, and I’ll get a scolding and they’ll throw me off the board. Wonderful! Then I can go back to my lab! And besides: look at him! He’s young, he’s handsome, he writes funny notes, he sends big bouquets. And there’s something so different about him.”