Bruce Sterling - Distraction

He then swung around in place, and deftly snatched up the brimming bottle from the coil of the still. He replaced the bottle with the empty one — all the while chatting to the little boy in friendly admonition. Somehow, Christophe had precisely timed all these ac-tions, so that he caught the trickling rum between drips.

The old man then sauntered back to his work stool and sat down, catching the child on his skinny leg. He lifted the rum bottle left-handed, sampled it thoughtfully, and offered Fontenot a com-ment.

Kevin rubbed his eyes. “What did he just do? Was he dancing a jig backward? He can’t do that.”

“What did he say?” Oscar asked Fontenot.

“I couldn’t catch it,” Fontenot said. “I was too busy watching him move. That was really strange.” He addressed Papa Christophe in French.

Christophe sighed patiently. He fetched up a flat piece of planed pine board and his charcoal stick. The old man had a surprisingly fine and fluid handwriting, as if he’d been taught by nuns. He wrote, “ Quand la montagne brule, tout le monde le sait; quand le coeur brule, qui le sait?” He wrote the sentence blindly, while he turned his head aside, and spoke pleasantly to the child on his knee.

Fontenot examined the charcoal inscription on the pine board. “’When the volcano catches fire, everybody knows. But when the heart catches fire, who knows it?’ ”

“That’s an interesting sentiment,” Kevin said.

Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “I find it especially interesting that our friend here can write down this ancient folk wisdom while he talks aloud to that child at the very same time.”

“He’s ambidextrous,” Kevin said.

“Nope.”

“He’s just really fast,” Fontenot said. “It’s like sleight of hand.”

“Nope. Wrong again.” Oscar cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, could we go out for a private conference please? I think it’s time for us to move along to our boat.”

They took Oscar at his word. Fontenot made his cordial good-byes. They left the old man’s cabin, then limped their way silently out of the village, full of broad uneasy smiles for the inhabitants. Oscar wondered at the fate that had stuck him with two different generations of lame men.

Finally they were out of earshot. “So what’s the deal?” Kevin said.

“The deal is this: that old man was thinking of two things at once.”

“What do you mean?” Kevin said.

“I mean that it’s a neural hack. He was fully aware of two differ-ent events at the same moment. He didn’t let that little kid hurt him-self, because he was thinking about that kid every second. And even though he was carefully working that hammer and chisel, he wouldn’t let that bottle overflow. He was listening to the bottle while he was wood carving. He didn’t even have to look at the bottle to realize it was full. I think he was counting the drops.”

“So it’s like he’s got two brains,” Kevin said slowly.

“No, he only has one brain. But he’s got two windows open on the screen behind his eyes.”

“He’s multitasking, but with his own brain.”

“Yeah. That’s it. Exactly.”

“How do you know that?” Fontenot asked, squinting skeptically.

“My girlfriend won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neural basis of attention,” Oscar said. “Supposedly, that’s years away from any practical application. Supposedly. Right? This is Green Huey at work here. I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop for quite a while.”

“How can you prove that a man is concentrating on two things at once?” Fontenot said. “How do you prove he’s thinking at all?”

“It’s difficult. But it’s doable. Because that’s what they’re doing, all right. That’s why they’re never bored here. It’s because they pray. They pray all the time — and I wouldn’t be surprised if all that prayer wasn’t serving some other purpose, too. I think it’s some kind of relay between two separate streams of consciousness. You tell God what you’re thinking every minute — and that’s how you know it yourself. That’s what Christophe was trying to tell us with the song-and-dance about the ‘fiery heart.’ ”

“So it’s like he’s got two souls,” Fontenot said slowly.

“Sure,” Oscar said. “If that’s the word you want to use. I sure wish Greta were here with her lab equipment, so we could nail this down.” He shook his head regretfully. “That State of Emergency at the Buna lab has seriously stepped on our downtime together.”

They’d now arrived at the hovercraft, but Fontenot showed no sign of leaving. His artificial leg was troubling him. He sat down on the hull of the hovercraft and removed his hat, breathing heavily. Kevin clambered over the back and sat inside the huvvy, propping up his aching feet. A pair of herons flew nearby, and something large and oily surfaced near a clump of tangled reeds.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Fontenot confessed. He stared at Oscar, as if the revelation were all his fault. “I don’t know what to make of you anymore. Your girlfriend won the Nobel Prize. A hacker is your security man. And you dropped on the roof of my house without a word of warning, dressed like a flying ape.”

“Yeah. Of course.” Oscar paused. “See, it all makes sense, if you get there step by step.”

“Look, don’t tell me any more,” Fontenot said. “I’m in way too deep already. I don’t want to play your game. I want to go home, and live here, and die here. If you tell me any more of this, I’m gonna have to take it to the President.”

“I’ve got you covered on that issue,” Oscar told him. “I work for the President. I’m with the National Security Council.”

Fontenot was astonished. “You’re in the Administration now? You work for the NSC?”

“Jules, stop acting so surprised at every single thing I say. You’re starting to hurt my feelings. Why do you think I came here? How do you think I end up in situations like this? Who else could do this properly? I’m the only guy in the world who would walk into a neural voodoo cult in the middle of nowhere, and immediately figure out exactly what was going on.”

Fontenot rubbed his stubbled chin. “So… Okay! I guess I’m with you. So, Mr. Super Expert Know-it-all, tell me something. Are we really going to have a war with Holland?”

“Yes. We are. And if I can get out of this damn swamp in one piece, and brief the President on my findings here, we’re probably going to have a war with Louisiana.”

“Oh my God.” Fontenot groaned aloud. “It’s beyond bad. It’s the worst. It’s the very worst. I knew I should have kept my mouth shut. I knew I shouldn’t have outed this thing.”

“No, it was the right thing to do. Huey’s a great man, and he’s a visionary, but Huey is around the bend. He’s not just your standard southern-fried good-old-boy megalomaniac anymore. Now I know the full truth. These Haitians? They were just his proof of concept. Huey’s done something weird to himself. Something very dark and neural.”

“And you have to tell the President about that.”

“Yes, I do. Because our President is not like that. The President is not insane. He’s just a hard-as-nails, ambitious, strong-arm politi-cian, who is going to bring law and order to this two-horse country, even if it means setting fire to half of Europe.”

Fontenot considered this subject at length. Finally he turned to Kevin. “Hey, Hamilton.”

“Yes sir?” Kevin said, startled.

“Don’t let them kill this guy.”

“I didn’t want the job!” Kevin protested. “He didn’t tell me how bad it was. Honest! You want the bodyguard job back? Take the damn job. ”

“No,” Fontenot said, with finality. They climbed into the little boat, three men in a tub, and headed out into the bayou again.