Bruce Sterling - Distraction

Ancient social boundaries snapped under the strain of war. Wartime affairs broke out like chicken pox: scientists, Moderator women, dashing European journalists, chicken-fried Buna locals, even the mil-itary was having sex. It was just too much to ask of human beings that they work shoulder to shoulder and cheek by jowl under the constant expectation of a mind-crushing gas attack while, somehow, avoiding sex with strangers.

Besides, their leaders were doing it. It was happening. It was a suddenly public declaration of their society’s unsuspected potency. Of course they were breaking the rules; that was what every sane person was doing, that was what the effort was all about. Of course the lab’s Director was having hot sex with the genetically warped politician. She was their painted Joan of Arc, the armored bride of the science wars.

People even made jokes about it. The jokes were loyally relayed to Oscar by Fred Dillen, one of his last remaining krewe members, who had been trained to understand that political jokes were valuable.

Fred presented him with a Greta-and-Oscar political joke.

“See, Greta and Oscar have sneaked off to Louisiana to have sex in the middle of a swamp. So they hire a bass boat and they paddle way out in the middle of nowhere where there aren’t any spies or bugs. So they’re getting it on inside the boat, but Oscar gets overexcited, and he falls in the water. And he doesn’t come back up.

“So Greta paddles back alone, and tries to get some help from some swamp Cajuns, but there’s just no sign of Oscar. So she waits for a whole week, and finally the Cajuns come over to see her again. ‘Well, Dr. Pen-ninger, we got some good news and we got some bad news.’

“ ‘Give me the bad news first.’

“ ‘Well, we found your boyfriend the genetic freak, but we’re afraid he drowned.’

“ ‘Oh, that’s bad news. That’s terribly bad news. It’s awful. It’s the very worst.’

“ ‘Well, it’s not all bad; when we dredged him up outta the mud, we came up with two big gunnysacks of big blue crabs!’

“ ‘Well, at least you found his poor body… Where have you put my boyfriend?’

“ ‘Well, beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but we never done so good on the crabs before, so we figured we’d leave him down there just one more day!’ ”

That was a pretty good political joke for such a small commu-nity — especially when its subtext was analyzed. Like most political jokes, it was all about displaced aggression, and it was the aggression against him that was being fed to the crabs here. The joke was popu-lar, and it was a signifier. And the punch line was very clear: he was going to get away with it. People didn’t fear or hate him the way they feared and hated Huey. He was both a politician and a monster, and yet people, in an odd and marginal way, had come to sympathize with him.

Oscar had reached the peak of his public reputation. Proof of this came when the President was asked about the sex scandal — and about Oscar’s role within the NSC. Here was the President’s main chance to drop him overboard and silently feed him to the swamp crabs; but the President chose otherwise. The President pointed out — properly enough — that a man couldn’t be expected to do anything about the fact that he was the illegal product of a South American mafia genetics lab. The President said that it smelled of hypocrisy to hold such a man to persnickety standards of sexual correctness — especially when other public figures had deliberately chosen to warp their own brain tissue. The President further declared that he himself was “a human being.” And that, “as a human being,” when he saw lovers persecuted, the spectacle “stuck in my craw.”

The press conference then returned to the hotter issue of the Dutch War, but the President’s aside went over very well. Certain demographic segments were becoming alarmed with the President’s relentless strong-arm tactics and his feral pursuit of domestic oppo-nents. This sudden revelation of a sentimental softer side was an excel-lent tactical play.

Oscar had reached a great career moment. The President had publicly played the Oscar card. In thinking the matter over, Oscar knew what this meant. It meant that he was burned. He had had his moment in this poker round, he had thumped down like a minor trump on the green baize. If played again, he would be dog-eared. Time to shuffle back into the pack.

So: thus high, but no higher. The lethal subtext of the Presi-dent’s statement had made that clear to him. He was useful, he was even cute; but on some profound level, he was not trusted. He would never become a pillar of the American state.

Within Buna, Oscar had less and less of a role. He had been an agitator, and instigator, and a gray eminence, but he could never be king. Greta could leverage her own fame now. She had issued a public appeal for aid and assistance, and like a boozy cry to “come to Montmartre,” the cry brought a tidal wave of national response. Bombs or no bombs, Huey or no Huey, President or no President, Buna was going to become a Greenhouse metropolis. The place was an intellectual magnet for every species of dreamer, faker, failed grad student, techie washout, downsized burnout; every guru, costumed geek, ditzy theorist, and bug collector; every microscope peerer, model-rocket builder, and gnarly simulationist; every code-dazed hacker, architectural designer; everyone, in short, who had ever been downgraded, denied, and excluded by their society’s sick demand that their wondrous ideas should make commercial sense.

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 naturaI phoenix nest for the world’s first genuine Greenhouse society.

The u.s. Navy arrived off the shores of the Nether-lands. The War had reached a point of crisis. In or-der 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 battle-ships 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 na-tion offering no organized military resistance.

So, after enormous fanfare and intense press cover-age, 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 minia-ture Robespierres. That was an impressive series of ac-complishments, 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 Col-laboratory.

The Senator was much improved mentally. The rainbow of neu-ral 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.