Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“You shouldn’t let them destroy my lab, Oscar. I know the place never lived up to its hype, but it’s a very special place, it shouldn’t be destroyed. ”

“That’s an easy thing to say. It might even be doable. But how hard are you willing to fight for what you want? What will you give? What will you sacrifice?”

Her phone rang again. She answered it. “It’s your friend again,” she said, “he wants us to go to some place called Buzzy’s. He’s called ahead for us.”

“My friend is really a very fine man.”

They drove into the town of Cameron, and they found the restaurant. Buzzy’s was a music spot of some pretension, it was open late and the tourist crowd was good. The band was playing classical string quartets. Typical Anglo ethnic music. It was amazing how many Anglos had gone into the booming classical music scene. Anglos seemed to have some innate talent for rigid, linear music that less troubled ethnic groups couldn’t match.

Fontenot had phoned them in a reservation as Mr. and Mrs. Garcia. They got a decent table not far from the kitchen, and a healthy distance from the bar, where a group of Texan tourists in evening dress were loudly drinking themselves stupid amid the brass and the mir-rors. There were cloth napkins, decent silverware, attentive waiters, menus in English and French. It was cozy, and became cozier yet when Fontenot himself arrived and took a table near the door. It felt very warm and relaxing to have a bodyguard awake, sober, and check-ing all the arrivals.

“I need seafood,” Oscar announced, studying his menu. “Lob-ster would be nice. Haven’t had a decent lobster since I left Boston.”

“Йcrevisse,” Greta said.

“What’s that?”

“Top of page two. A famous local specialty, you should try it.”

“Sounds great.” He signaled a waiter and ordered. Greta asked for chicken salad.

Greta began to spin the narrow stem of her wineglass, which he had filled with mineral water in order to forestall more gin. “Oscar, how are we going to work this? I mean us.”

“Oh, our liaison is technically unethical, but it doesn’t quite count when you’re unethical away from the action. You’ll be going back to your work, and I’m going to the East Coast. But I’ll be back later, and we can arrange something discreet.”

“That’s how this works, in your circles?”

“When it works… It’s accepted. Like, say, the President and his mistress.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Leonard Two Feathers has a mistress?”

“No, no, not him! I mean the old guy, the man who’s still officially President. He had this girlfriend — Pamela something, you don’t need to know her last name… She’ll wait till he’s safely out of office. Then she’ll license the tell-all book, the fragrance, the lin-gerie, the various ancillary rights… It’s her cash-out money.”

“What does the First Lady think of all that?”

“I imagine she thinks what First Ladies always think. She thought she’d be an instant co-President, and then she had to watch for four long years while the Emergency committees staked her guy out in public and pithed him like a frog. That’s the real tragedy of it. You know, I had no use for that guy as a politician, but I still hated watching that process. The old guy looked okay when he took office. He was eighty-two years old, but hey, everybody in the Party of American Unity is old, the whole Right Progressive Bloc has a very aged demographic… The job just broke him, that’s all. It just snapped his poor old bones right there in public. I guess they could have outed him on the thousand-year-old girlfriend issue, but with all the truly serious troubles the President had, trashing his sex life was overkill.”

“I never knew about any of that.”

“People know. Somebody always knows. The man’s krewe al-ways knows. The Secret Service knows. That doesn’t mean you can get people to make a public issue of it. Nets are really peculiar. They’re never smooth and uniform, they’re always lumpy. There are probably creeps somewhere who have surveillance video of the Presi-dent with Pamela. Maybe they’re swapping it around, trading it for paparazzi shots of Hollywood stars. It doesn’t matter. My dad the movie star, he used to get outed all the time, but they were always such’ silly things — he got outed once for punching some guy at a polo club, but he never got outed for playing footsie with mobsters. Crazy people with time on their hands can learn a lot of weird things on the net. But they’re still crazy people, no matter how much they learn. They’re not players, so they just don’t count.”

“And I’m not a player, so I just don’t count.”

“Don’t take it badly. None of your people ever counted. Senator Dougal, he was your player. Your player is gone now, so you have nothing left on the game board. That’s political reality.”

“I see.”

“You can vote, you know. You’re a citizen. You have one vote. That’s important.”

“Right.” They laughed.

They had consomme. Then the waiter brought the main dish. “Smells wonderful,” Oscar said. “Got a lobster bib? Claw cracker? Hammer, maybe?” He had a closer look at the dish. “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with my lobster?”

“That’s your йcrevisse.” “What is it, exactly?”

“Crayfish. Crawdad. A freshwater lobster.”

“What’s with these claws? The tail’s all wrong.”

“It’s domestic. Natural crawdads are only three inches long. They stitched its genetics. That’s a local specialty.”

Oscar stared at the boiled crustacean in its bed of yellow rice. His dinner was a giant genetic mutant. Its proportions seemed profoundly wrong to him. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. Certainly he’d eaten his share of genetically altered crops: corncobs half the size of his arm, UltraPlump zucchinis, tasty mottled brocco-cauliflowers, seedless apples, seedless everything, really… But here was an en-tire gene-warped animal boiled alive and delivered in one piece. It looked fantastic, utterly unreal. It was like a lobster-shaped child’s balloon.

“Smells delicious,” he said. Greta’s phone rang.

“Look, can’t we eat in peace?” Oscar said.

She swallowed a forkful of vinegar-gleaming chicken salad. “I’ll shut my phone off,” she said.

Oscar prodded experimentally at one of the crawdad’s many anciliary legs. The boiled limb snapped off as cleanly as a twig, revealing a white wedge of flesh.

“Don’t be shy,” she told him, “this is Louisiana, okay? Just stick the head right in your mouth and suck the juice out.”

The music from the band stopped suddenly, in mid-quartet. Os-car looked up. The doorway was full of cops.

They were Louisiana state troopers, men in flat-brimmed hats with headphones and holstered capture guns. They were filtering into the restaurant. Oscar looked hastily for Fontenot and saw the security man discreetly punching at his phone, with a look of annoyance.

“Sorry,” Oscar said, “may I borrow your phone a minute?”

He turned Greta’s phone back on and engaged in the surpris-ingly complex procedure of reinstalling its presence in the Louisiana net. The cops had permeated through the now-hushed crowd, and had blocked all the exits. There were cops in the bar, a cop with the maitre d’, cops quietly vanishing into the kitchen, two pairs of cops going upstairs. Cops with laptops, cops with video. Three cops were having a private conference with the manager.

Then came the thudding racket of a helicopter, landing outside. When the rotors shut off, the entire crowd found themselves suddenly shouting. The sudden silence afterward was deeply impressive.

Two mountainous bodyguards in civilian dress entered the res-taurant, followed immediately by a short, red-faced man in house shoes and purple pajamas.