Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“My goodness, they’re all responsive,” Oscar said. “I could have sworn those were wooden legs.”

“They are wooden. Well… they’re flex-treated lignin.” Lorena shrugged. “Period furniture is all well and good, you know, but I draw the line at living like a barbarian.” She lifted one arm in its striped silk sleeve and a gilt-edged remote control leaped from the wall and flew into her hand. She tossed it to him. “Will you drive for me? Find us some decent coverage. I’ve never been much good at that.”

“Call Sosik again, and ask what he’s watching.”

“Oh. Of course.” She smiled wanly. “Never surf when you have a pilot.”

Huey’s rapid-response PR team was already on the job. A Loui-siana environmental safety administrator was supplying the official ac-count of the “disaster.” According to him, safety procedures at the “derelict air base” had fallen into abeyance. A small fire had broken out, and it had ruptured a military stockpile of nonlethal crowd-control aerosols. These were panic-inducing disorients. Nontoxic and odorless, they were just the trick for clearing the streets of third-world cities. Cut to a med tent with young Air Force people shivering and babbling in the grip of paranoiac aerosols. Homespun local people were giving them cots, and blankets, and tranquilizers. The pathetic federal personnel were clearly getting the best of care.

Oscar sipped his coffee. “Unbelievable.”

Lorena spoke around a hasty mouthful of tea cake. “I take it this spiel has no connection to reality-on-the-ground.”

“Oh, there must be some connection. Huey’s clever enough to arrange all that. He’s had agents inside the base, someone to set that fire and dose the base with its own weapons. This was sabotage. Huey was impatient, so he’s gone and poisoned them.”

“He’s deliberately gassed federal troops.”

“Well, yes, but we’ll never find his fingerprints.”

“I can understand people who stab you in the back,” Lorena said, gulping a chocolate strawberry. “What I can’t understand is peo-ple so crazy that they stab you right in the front. This is medieval.”

They watched with care, tagging along remotely as Sosik changed his news feeds. The Europeans had some splendid aerial foot-age of proles invading the base, their heads swathed in ski masks. The Regulators seemed strangely undisturbed by the aerosols.

The nomads were wasting no time. They were ushering in an endless parade of trucks — big retrofitted oil-industry tankers, by the looks of them. They were loading them up, by hand, in coordinated labor gangs. The proles were looting the air base with the decentral-ized efficiency of ants consuming a dead shrew.

“Let me make a little prediction for you,” Oscar said. “Tomor-row, the Governor pretends to be very alarmed by all this. He sends in his state troops to ‘restore order.’ His militia will nail the place down for him — after the proles have stripped it all. When Washington asks what happened to the military assets, they’ll be long gone, and it’s all somebody else’s fault.”

“Why is Huey doing this crazy thing?”

“For him, it makes sense. He wanted that air base for the pork. For the local job creation, for the federal funding. But the Emergency budget people wrote off his funding. They pulled a fast one on him and screwed him out of it. Huey can’t abide disrespect, so he decided to escalate. First, those highway robberies. Then, the power cutoffs. Then the proxy siege. He’s methodically turned up the heat, step by step. But he still didn’t get his way, so now, he just appropriates the whole air base.”

“But it’s not like his dirty proles can run a federal air base. His whole little state militia can’t run a federal air base.”

“That’s true, but now he has the data. Advanced avionics, chips, software, the orders of battle and such… That’s a military asset of the first order. If the feds push him again, he can push back with whole new sets of options.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Believe me, he’s thought this all through. That’s the way he is.” A roast beef sandwich arrived, with mustard, a garnish, and creamed potatoes. Lorena smiled politely as her aproned krewe girl retreated toward the kitchen. She picked off a plank of crustless rye bread, examined it, and set it back down, fingers trembling. “Alcott is going to hate this. We tried so hard to stop this from happening.”

“I know you did.”

“We just couldn’t make them pay enough attention. We pulled the biggest publicity stunt we could manage, short of rallying the party and besieging that place ourselves. Huey just moves too fast for us. Alcott’s not even sworn in yet! And even after his inauguration, we’ll still have the Emergency committees to deal with. Not to men-tion the partisan opposition. And besides, the federal government is just plain broke… It’s bad, Oscar. It’s really bad.”

“I’ll be going up to Boston tomorrow. We’ll think of something new. The hunger strike’s over now, but I was never really pleased with that gambit. Don’t worry. Just concentrate on getting your strength back. This game isn’t over by a long chalk.”

She looked at him gratefully. He watched more coverage as she tore into the sandwich.

Finally she put the plate aside, and leaned back on the yellow couch, her eyes glistening. “How was your first committee meeting, Oscar? I never asked. Were you brilliant?”

“Oh, heavens no. They hate it when you’re brilliant. Brilliance only makes them mulish. I just recited my facts and figures until they got very bored and logged off. By then, my chairman had all their voting proxies. So I asked him for a mile, and he gave me a hundred yards. But a hundred yards was all that I wanted in the first place. So my meeting was really successful. I have a much freer hand now.”

She laughed. “You’re so bad!”

“It’s no use being brilliant, unless it improves the situation. The Senator pulled a very brilliant stunt with this hunger strike, but now, Alcott should learn to be dull. Romantic people are brilliant, artists are brilliant. Politicians know when it’s useful to be dull.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sure you’re right. You’ll be good with Alcott, won’t you? You understand him. You could always talk sense to him. You can cheer him up when he’s down.”

“You’re not down, are you, Lorena?”

“No, I’m not down, I’m coked to the gills on diet pills. But Alcott’s not like me. He’s very serious. He gets depressed. I can’t be with him right now. And he gets so silly about sex when he’s de-pressed.”

Oscar was silently attentive.

“Leon Sosik was silly to let Alcott talk him into a hunger strike. Alcott has a thousand ideas, but a better chief of staff would kill his silly ones. And, Oscar, if you take that little tart Moira back to Boston when I’m not around, you’ll be very silly, too.”

Oscar knew the city of Boston very well indeed, having meticulously canvassed every voting district for the city council races. Boston was sane, civilized, and commonsensical, compared to other American cit-ies. Boston had so much to recommend it. A fully functional financial district. Green, quiet, showpiece parks. Real and serious museums, stocked and maintained by people with a sense of cultural continuity. Several centuries’ worth of attractive public statuary. Living, commer-cial theater. Restaurants with dress codes. Real neighborhoods with real neighborhood bars.

Of course Boston had its less happy areas: the Combat Zone, the half-drowned waterfront… but being home, however briefly, gave Oscar a vital sense of grace. He had never missed the maelstrom of Los Angeles, and as for sorry old Washington, it combined the dullness of Brussels with the mania of Mexico City. East Texas, of course, was utterly absurd. The thought of ever going back there gave him a genu-ine pang.