Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  “A little adjective trouble there, man, but no problem, I take your point. Either I seize power myself now, and try to run the whole shebang as a secret-police state. Or else I just…I dunno…airmail myself back to Boston. End of the story. It all makes a nice hacker brag, though, right? Kind of a good bar story.”

  “You can’t hold this place together alone, Kevin. People don’t trust you.”

  “Oh, I know that, man. You distribute all the big favors yourself, and you use me as your heavy guy to intimidate people. I know that I was the heavy guy. My dad was the heavy, too. The Founding Fathers are a bunch of dead white males; the guys on Mount Rushmore are all scary Anglo guys now. We’re the heavies. I was used to the role. Hey, I was glad to have the work.”

  “I want you to help me now, Kevin.”

  “Help you what, pal?”

  “To get out of here.”

  “No problem, boss. I’m still Captain Scubbly Bee. Hell, I was working hard on being Colonel Scubbly Bee. I can get you outside this place. Where you want to go?”

  “Baton Rouge. Or wherever Huey is hiding.”

  “Oh ho! Not that I doubt your judgment now, man, but I have a really great countersuggestion. Boston, okay? The good old muddy water! Beacon Hill, Charlestown, Cambridge…You and I, we’re actually neighbors, man. We live on the same street! We could go home together. We could have a real beer, inside a real Boston bar. We could take in a hockey game.”

  “I need to talk to Huey,” Oscar said flatly. “I have a big personal problem with him.”

  __________

  Green Huey had gone into semiretirement. He was doing a lot of ceremonial ribbon-clipping these days. It was a little difficult doing all this public apple-polishing while surrounded by a militant phalanx of Regulator bodyguards, but Huey enjoyed the show. The ex-Governor had always been good for a laugh. He knew how to show the people a good time.

  Oscar and Kevin dressed like derelicts, vanished through the social membrane, and began to stalk the Governor. They traveled by night in the sorriest hotels; they slept in roadside parks in newly purchased military-surplus tents. They burned their IDs and wore straw hats and gum boots and overalls. Kevin passed as Oscar’s minder, a lame guy with a guitar. Oscar passed as Kevin’s somewhat dim-witted cousin, the one who mumbled a lot. Oscar brandished an accordion. Even in a land that had once favored accordion music, they were mostly avoided. It was a frightening thing to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk instruments, who might at any moment burst into song.

  Oscar had finally lost his temper with Huey. He was of two minds about the matter. Oscar was always of two minds about everything now. On the one hand, he wanted to publicly confront the man. And on the other, he simply wanted to murder him. The second concept made a lot of sense to Oscar now, since killing political figures was not uncommon behavior for mentally ruined drifters with nothing left to lose. He and Kevin had serious discussions about the issue. Kevin seemed to waver between pro and con. Oscar was pro and con at the same time.

  Their strategic problem was dizzyingly multiform. Oscar found it extremely hard to stop thinking about it, since he could contemplate so many different aspects of the issue all at once. Killing Huey. Maiming Huey, perhaps breaking Huey’s arms. Reducing him to a wheelchair, that had appealing aspects. Blinding Huey had a certain biblical majesty to it. But how? Long-range sniping was not a pursuit for amateurs who had never handled firearms. Handguns would surely entail almost instant arrest. Poison sounded intriguing, but would require advance planning and extensive resources.

  “You’re NSC, aren’t you?” Kevin told him, as they bagged out in the tent to the sound of crickets, blissfully far from the sinister fog of urban surveillance. “I thought they trained you guys to do awful things with the juice of cigars.”

  “The President doesn’t order assassinations of his domestic political opponents. If he were outed for that, he’d be impeached. That’s totally counterproductive.”

  “Aren’t you one of the President’s agents?”

  It was wise of Kevin to point this out. Oscar recognized that he’d been getting a little tangled in the proliferating vines of his cognitive processes. Next day they stopped at a greasy spoon outside the town of Mamou, and called the NSC from a satellite pay phone.

  It took quite some time for Oscar’s immediate superior to answer a random pay-phone call on a deeply insecure line from the heart of Cajun country. When he came on, he was livid. Oscar announced that he had been poisoned, was non compos mentis, had suffered a complete mental breakdown, could no longer be considered responsible for his actions, was no longer fit for public service, and was therefore resigning from his post, immediately. His superior ordered him to fly to Washington for a thorough medical assessment. Oscar told him that this was not on his agenda as a newly private citizen. His superior told Oscar that he would be arrested. Oscar pointed out that he was currently in the center of the state of Louisiana, where the locals were profoundly unfriendly to federal agents. He hung up. It had been a lot to say. His tongue felt sore.

  Kevin was getting into the swing of things. He suggested that it might be a good idea to similarly break all ties with Senator Bambakias. They went out for a leisurely brunch of red beans and rice, and returned to find the original pay phone swarming with Regulator goons in fast pickup trucks. They tried to earn a little money with their guitar and accordion, and they were told to get lost.

  They hitchhiked from Mamou to Eunice, and made another pay-phone call, this time to the Senator’s office in Washington. The Senator was no longer in Washington. Bambakias had gone on a fact-finding mission to the newly conquered Netherlands. In fact, the entire Senate Foreign Relations Committee had set up shop in The Hague, in a vacated Dutch government building. Oscar apologized, and was about to hang up, when the Senator himself came on the line. He’d been paged from across the Atlantic, and he had woken from a sound sleep, but he was anxious to talk.

  “Oscar, I’m so glad you called. Don’t hang up! We’ve heard all about the event. Lorena and I are just sick about it. We’re going to pin this thing on Huey. I know that it means outing me on the Moira debacle, but I’m willing to face the music there. Huey can’t go on savaging people like this, it’s atrocious. We can’t live in a country like that. We have to take a stand.”

  “That’s very good of you, Senator. Courageous principled apologize it was all my fault anyway.”

  “Oscar, listen to me carefully. The Haitians have survived this thing, and so can you. Neurologists around the world are working on this problem. They’re very angry about what was done to Dr. Penninger, it’s a personal affront to them and their profession. We want to fly you into Den Haag, and try some treatments here. They have excellent hospitals here in Holland. In fact, their whole infrastructure is marvelous. Roadblocks absolutely unheard-of. These government facilities here are top-notch. The Foreign Relations Committee is getting more work done here in Den Haag than they have in a year in Washington. You have resources, Oscar. There’s hope. Your friends want to help you.”

  “Senator, even if you do help Greta, I’m a special case. I have a unique genetic background, and neural Colombian conventional medical useless.”

  “That’s not true! You’ve forgotten that there are three Danish women here in Europe who are basically sisters of yours. They’ve heard about your troubles, and they want to help you. I’ve just met them, and I’ve talked to them personally. Now I think that I understand you better than I ever have before. Tell him, Lorena.”

  The Senator’s wife took the phone. “Oscar, listen to Alcott. He’s talking perfect sense to you. I met those women too. You’re the pick of the litter there, that’s very obvious; but they do want to help you anyway. They’re sincere about it, and so are we. You’re very important to us. You stood by Alcott and me in our darkest days, and now it’s our turn, that’s all. Please let us help you.”

  “Lorena, I’m not insane. Huey’s been like this for at
least two years, and Huey’s not insane either. It’s just a profoundly different mode of cognition. Sometimes I have a little trouble getting issues to clarify, that’s all.”

  Lorena’s voice went distant suddenly. “Talk him down, Alcott! He’s using real English now!”

  Bambakias came on, in his richest and most intent baritone. “Oscar, you are a professional. You’re a player. Players don’t get angry. They just get even. You have no business wandering around in Louisiana, with an Anglo terrorist hacker who has a police record. That is just not a player’s move. We’re going to nail Huey for this; it’ll take a while, but we’ll pin him down. Huey made a fatal error—he poisoned a member of the President’s NSC. I don’t care if Huey’s got a skull full of turbochargers and afterburners. Insulting Two Feathers by gassing one of his staff was a very stupid move. The President is a very hard man—and most directly to my point, he’s proved himself a far better politician than the ex-Governor of a small Southern state.”

  “Senator, I’m listening. I think there’s something to what you say.”

  Bambakias exhaled slowly. “Thank God.”

  “I hadn’t really thought much about Holland before. I mean, that Holland has so much potential. I mean, we own Holland now, basically, don’t we?”

  “Yes, that’s right. You see, Holland is the new Louisiana. Louisiana is yesterday’s news! You and I were right to get involved in Louisiana earlier, there was a serious difficulty there—but as a rogue state, Louisiana is a sideshow now. It’s the Dutch who are the real future. They’re a serious, well-organized, businesslike nation, people who are taking methodical, sensible steps about the climate and environment. Believe it or not, they’re ahead of the United States in a lot of areas—especially banking. Louisiana is over the top. They’re not serious. They’re visionary crawdad-eating psychos. We need serious political organization now, a return to normalcy. Huey is yesterday’s man, he’s out of the loop. He’s a fast-talking loon who throws technological innovation here and there—as if randomly spewing a bunch of half-baked ideas can increase the sum of human happiness. That’s sheer demagoguery, it’s craziness. We need common sense and political stability and sensible, workable policies. That’s what government is for.”

  Oscar swirled this extraordinary statement over in his mind. He felt thoughts and memories sifting like a soft kaleidoscope. “You’re really different now, aren’t you, Alcott?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean this regimen you’ve been through. It’s completely changed you as a person. You’re realistic now. You’re sensible and prudent. You’re boring.”

  “Oscar, I’m sure that you have some kind of interesting insight there, but this isn’t the time for chatter. We need to stick to the point. Tell me that you’ll come to Den Haag and join us. Lorena and I, we feel that we’re your family—we’re in lieu of your family, at a time like this. You can come here to Holland, and take your place in our krewe, and we’ll set you all straight. That’s a promise.”

  “All right, Senator, you’ve convinced me. You’ve never gone back on your word to me, and I’m very touched by that pledge. I can see I’ve been impulsive. I can’t go off half-cocked. I need to think these things all the way through.”

  “That’s great. I knew I could make you see sense, I knew I could cheer you up. And now, I think we’ve talked too long on this phone. I’m afraid this line isn’t secure.”

  Oscar turned to Kevin. “The Senator says this phone isn’t secure.”

  Kevin shrugged. “Well, it’s a random phone, man. It’s a big state. Huey can’t be tapping every last one of ’em.”

  Two hours later they were arrested on a roadside by Louisiana state police.

  __________

  Green Huey was at a cultural event in Lafayette. He and part of his corps of semilegal good old boys were whooping it up on a hotel balcony, overlooking the folk festival. There was a monster fandango taking place, in near silence. At least a thousand people were engaged in a kaleidoscopic square dance. They were all wearing headphones with positional monitors, and some code within the silent music was directing their crowd flow. They seemed free and controlled at the same time, regimented but spontaneous, bacchanalian but exquisitely channeled.

  “Y’know, I really dote on these grass-roots folk events,” Huey said, leaning on the curvilinear iron of the hotel’s balcony rail. “You Yankee boys are young and spry, you ought to give it a chance sometime.”

  “I don’t dance,” Kevin said.

  “Pity about the big sore feet on the Moderator here,” Huey said, squinting in the sunlight and adjusting his new straw hat. “I dunno why you brought ol’ Limpy Boy along anyhow. He’s no player.”

  “I was propping the player up,” Kevin said. “I was wiping the drool off his chin.”

  Oscar and Kevin were wearing white plastic prison overalls. Their hands were neatly cuffed behind their backs. They’d been dragged onto the balcony in full sight of the crowd below, and the people seemed completely unperturbed to see them. Perhaps Huey spent large amounts of his retirement time chatting with handcuffed prisoners.

  “I was thinking you’d call first,” said Huey, turning to Oscar. “I thought we had an understanding there—that you’d always call me up and clear the air when we had one of our little contretemps.”

  “Oh, we were hoping for a personal audience, Governor. We just got a little distracted.”

  “The guitar and the accordion gambit, that was especially good. You actually play the accordion, Oscar? Diatonic scales, and all that?”

  “I’m just a beginner,” Oscar said.

  “Oh, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to play music now. Dead easy. Play while you sing. Play while you dance. Hell, play while you dictate financial notes to a spreadsheet.”

  “Cutting his hands free would be a good start,” Kevin suggested.

  “They must have some awful soft jails up in Massachusetts, to have Limpy Boy here crackin’ wise so much. I mean, just ’cause we had you two boys stripped, and scrubbed, and checked under fingernails, and had a nice long look up every orifice that opens, and some that don’t…That don’t mean I’m gonna cut the hands loose on the Hacker Ninja Boy here. He might have a blowgun up his finger bones, or sumpin’. You know there’s been five attempts on my life in the past two weeks? All these Moderator jaspers gunnin’ for ol’ Huey…they all wanna be Colonel This or Brevet General That; I dunno, it sure gets tiresome.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t stand here in the open air, then,” Oscar said. “There have been a lot of people anxious to kill me, too, and it would be a shame to see you catch a stray bullet.”

  “That’s why I got all these guards, son! They’re not as bright as you are, but they’re a lot more loyal. You know something, Soap Boy? I like you. I enjoy these homemade scientific efforts that don’t work out commercially, but just refuse to stay down. I took a serious interest in you; I even got skin samples. Hell, I got a square yard of your skin, livin’ down there in a salt mine. Got enough of your skin to stretch on a dang drumhead. You’re quite a specimen, you are. You’re a real gumbo thing—little o’ this, little o’ that. There are chunks of you that are upside down, stretched all backward, duplicated…and no introns, that’s the cool part. I didn’t know a man could even live without introns.”

  “I couldn’t recommend it, Governor. It has some technical drawbacks.”

  “Oh, I know you’re a little frail, Brainy Boy. I was tryin’ to take it easy on you. Ran a lot of medical tests on that DNA of yours. Didn’t want to hurt you or nothin’.” Huey squinted. “You’re with me here, aren’t ya? You’re not all confused or anything.”

  “No, Governor. I can follow you. I’m really concentrating.”

  “You don’t think I’m funnin’ you about your DNA, do you? I mean, just ’cause I’m a coonass, that don’t mean I can’t hack DNA, bubba.”

  “Just as long as you don’t try cloning him as an army,” Kevin said.

 
“Got my own army, thanks.” Huey raised one arm of his linen jacket and patted his bulky armpit. “Man needs a whole dang army just to stay alive these days, sad to say.” He turned to Oscar. “That’s the problem with these pesky Moderators. They’re prole gangs all right, your basic army-of-the-night. All day long, it was power-to-the-people this, and revolutionary justice that. Really mountin’ up, though, y’know? Getting somewhere serious. Finally we get a chance to make our own rules and give the common man a real break.”

  Huey snorted. “Then all of a sudden along comes a new President, who deigns to take a little royal notice of ’em. Throws ’em a dog biscuit, maybe even two. They’re fallin’ all over themselves, they’re salutin’ his socks, they’re salutin’ his shorts. They’re killin’ their own brothers for the Man. Makes you sick.”

  “The Man is a player. He’s got talent, Huey.”

  “What the hell! The man’s a Dutch agent! He sold out the country to a foreign power! You don’t think the Dutch gave up that easy, do ya? Without one single shot being fired? This is the Dutch we’re talking about! When they get invaded, they flood their own country and die in the ditches with big pointy sticks in their hands. They gave up easy because they planned that whole damn gambit from the get-go.”

  “That’s an interesting theory, Governor.”

  “You should talk to the French about this theory sometime. They’re real big on theory, the French. The French know the score. We entertain ’em, they think Americans are natural clowns, they think our worst comedians are funny. But they’re scared of the Dutch. That’s the problem with modern America. We pulled up our borders, we’re all parochial now. We don’t know what’s goin’ on. Hell, we used to lead the whole world in science…lead ’em in everything. Country like France gets along great without science. They just munch some more fine cheese and read more Racine. But you take America without science, you got one giant Nebraska. You got guys living in teepees. Well, at least the teepee boys still want somethin’. Give them the science. Let them work it out.”