Bruce Sterling - Distraction

Fontenot shook his head. “I’m not in the market for a major crisis. I’ve been looking forward to retirement. I’m gonna fish, I’m gonna hunt a little. I’m gonna get myself a shack in the bayou that has a stove and a fryin’ pan, and no goddamn nets or telephones, ever, ever again.”

“I can make it worth your while,” Oscar coaxed. “Just a month, all right? Four weeks till the Christmas holidays. You’re still on salary, as long as you’re with us. I can double that if I have to. Another month’s pay.”

Fontenot wiped rain from his hat brim. “You can do that?”

“Well, not directly, not from the campaign funds, but Pelicanos can handle it for us. He’s a wizard at that sort of thing. Two months’ salary for one month’s work. And at Boston rates, too. That might swing the earnest money on your standard bayou shack.”

Fontenot was weakening. “Well, you’ll have to let me think that over.”

“You can have weekends.”

“Really?”

“Three-day weekends. Since you’re looking for a place to live.”

Fontenot sighed. “Well…”

“Audrey and Bob wouldn’t mind doing some real-estate scan-ning for you. They’re world-class oppo research people, and they’re just killing time out here. So why should you get taken in a house deal? They can scare you up a dream home, and even a decent real-estate agent.”

“Damn. I never thought of that angle. That’s true, though. That could be worth a lot to me. It’d save me a lot of trouble. All right, I’ll do it.”

They shook hands.

They had reached their vehicles. There was no sign of Norman-the-Intern, however. Fontenot stood up on the dented hood of his hummer, his prosthetic leg squeaking with the effort, and finally spot-ted Norman with his binoculars.

Norman was talking with some Air Force personnel. They were clustered together under the sloping roof of a concrete picnic table, next to a wooden walkway that led into the cypress-haunted depths of the Sabine River swamp. “Should I fetch him for you?” Fontenot said.

“I’ll get him,” Oscar said. “I brought him. You can call Pelicanos back at the bus, and brief the krewe on the situation.”

Young people were a distinct minority in contemporary Amer-ica. Like most minorities, they tended to fraternize. Norman was young enough to be of military age. He was leaning against a graffiti-etched picnic roof support and haranguing the soldiers insis-tently.

“… radar-transparent flying drones with X-ray lasers!” Nor-man concluded decisively.

“Well, maybe we have those, and maybe we don’t,” drawled a young man in blue.

“Look, it’s common knowledge you have them. It’s like those satellites that read license plates from orbit — they’re yesterday’s news, you’ve had ’em for a zillion years. So my point is: given that technical capacity, why don’t you just take care of this Governor of Louisiana? Spot his motorcade with drone telephotos, and follow him around. When you see him wander out of the car a little ways, you just zap him.”

A young woman spoke up. “ ‘Zap’ Governor Huguelet?”

“I don’t mean kill him. That would be too obvious. I mean vaporize him. Just evaporate the guy! Shoes, suit, the works! They’d think he’s like… you know… off in some hotel chewing the feet of some hooker.”

It took the Air Force people some time to evaluate this proposal. The concept was clearly irritating them. “You can’t evaporate a whole human body with an airborne X-ray laser.”

“You could if it was tunable.”

“Tunable free-electron lasers aren’t radar-transparent. Besides, their power demand is out the roof”

“Well, you could collate four or five separate aircraft into one overlapping fire zone. Besides, who needs clunky old free electrons when there are quantum-pitting bandgaps? Bandgaps are plenty tun-able. ”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Oscar said. “Norman, we’re needed back at the bus now.”

The Air Force girl stared at Oscar, slowly taking him in, from perfect hat to shiny shoes. “Who’s the suit?”

“He’s… well, he’s with the U.S. Senate.” Norman smiled cheerily. “Really good friend of mine.”

Oscar put a gentle hand on Norman’s shoulder. “We need to move along, Norman. We’ve just made a group reservation at a great Cajun restaurant.”

Norman tagged along obediently. “Will they let me drink there?”

“Laissez les bon temps rouler, ” Oscar said.

“Those were nice kids,” Norman announced. “I mean, road-blockers and all, but basically, they’re just really nice American kids.”

“They’re American military personnel who are engaging in highway robbery.”

“Yeah. That’s true. It’s bad. It’s really too bad. Y’know? They’re stuck in the military, so they just don’t think politically.”

They crossed the Texas border in the clammy thick of the night. The krewe was glutted with hot baked shrimp and batter-fried alligator tail, topped with seemingly endless rounds of blendered hurricanes and flaming brandied coffees. The food at the Cajun casinos was epic in scope. They even boasted a convenient special rate for tour buses.

It had been a very good idea to stop and eat. Oscar could sense that the mood of his miniature public had shifted radically. The krewe had really enjoyed themselves. They’d been repeatedly informed that they were in the state of Louisiana, but now they could feel that fact in their richly clotted bloodstreams.

This wasn’t Boston anymore. This was no longer the sordid tag end of the Massachusetts campaign. They were living in an interreg-num, and maybe, somehow, if you only believed, in the start of something better. Oscar could not feel bad about his life. It was not a normal life and it never had been, but it offered very interesting chal-lenges. He was rising to the next challenge. How bad could life be? At least they were all well fed.

Except for hardworking Jimmy the driver, who was paid specifi-cally not to drink himself senseless, Oscar was the last person awake inside the bus. Oscar was almost always the last to sleep, as well as the first to wake. Oscar rarely slept at all. Since the age of six, he had customarily slept for about three hours a night.

As a small child, he would simply lay silently in darkness during those long extra hours of consciousness, quietly plotting how to man-age the mad vagaries of his adoptive Hollywood parents. Surviving the Valparaiso household’s maelstrom of money, drugs, and celebrity had required a lot of concentrated foresight.

In his later life, Oscar had put his night-owl hours to further good use: first, the Harvard MBA. Then the biotechnology start-up, where he’d picked up his long-time accountant and finance man, Yosh Pelicanos, and also his faithful scheduler/receptionist, Lana Ramachandran. He’d kept the two of them on through the cash-out of his first company, and on through the thriving days of venture capital on Route 128. Business strongly suited Oscar’s talents and proclivities, but he had nevertheless moved on swiftly, into political party activism. A successful and innovative Boston city council campaign had brought him to the attention of Alcott Bambakias. The U.S. Senate campaign then followed. Politics had become the new career. The challenge. The cause.

So Oscar was awake in darkness, and working. He generally ended each day with a diary annotation, a summary of the options taken and important operational events. Tonight, he wrapped up his careful annotations of the audiotape with the Air Force highway ban-dits. He shipped the file to Alcott Bambakias, encrypted and denoted “personal and confidential.” There was no way to know if this snippet of the modern chaos in Louisiana would capture his patron’s mercurial attention. But it was necessary to keep up a steady flow of news and counsel across the net. To be out of the Senator’s sight might be very useful in some ways, but to drift out of his mind would be a profes-sional blunder.