Bruce Sterling - Distraction

The probability of listening devices seemed rather low here in-side the mechanical forest. They could talk in confidence, if they kept moving.

“I thought we’d never lose that geek,” Pelicanos said.

“You have something you need to tell me, Yosh?”

Pelicanos sighed. “I want to know when we’re going home again.”

Oscar smiled. “We just got here. Don’t you like these Texas folks? They sure are mighty friendly.”

“Oscar, you brought twelve people in your entourage. The locals don’t even have the dorm rooms to put us up properly.”

“But I need twelve people. I need all of my krewe. I need to keep my options open here.”

Pelicanos grunted in surprise as a spined and cloven-hoofed beast — some kind of tapir, maybe? — scampered across their path. Rare beasts from aardwolves to zebu had the general run of the Col-laboratory. They were commonly sighted ambling harmlessly through the streets and gardens, like dope-stricken sacred cows.

“You arranged a few extras after the campaign,” Pelicanos said. “Well, Bambakias can certainly afford that, and they appreciate the gesture. But political campaigners are temp workers by nature. You just don’t need them anymore. You can’t need twelve people to put together a Senate committee report.”

“But they’re useful! Don’t you enjoy their services? We have a bus, a driver, our own security, we even have a masseuse! We’re living in high style. Besides, they might as well be washed up here in Won-derland as washed up anywhere else.”

“Those aren’t real answers.”

Oscar looked at him. “This isn’t like you, Yosh… You’re missing Sandra.”

“Yeah,” Pelicanos admitted. “I miss my wife.”

Oscar waved his hand airily. “So, then take a three-day weekend. Fly back to Beantown. You deserve that, we can afford it. Go see Sandra. See how she is.”

“All right. I guess I’ll do that. I’ll fly out and see Sandra.” And Pelicanos cheered up. Oscar saw his spirits lift; it came across the man in a little visible wave. Strange business, but Pelicanos had just become happy. Despite the stark fact that his wife was in a mental institution, and had been there for nine years.

Pelicanos was an excellent organizer, a fine accountant, a bookkeeper of near genius, and yet his personal life was an abysmal tragedy. Oscar found this intensely interesting. It appealed to the deepest ele-ment in Oscar, his ravenous curiosity about human beings and the tactics and strategies by which they could be coaxed and compelled to behave. Yosh Pelicanos made his way through his life seemingly just like any other man, and yet he always carried this secret half-ton bur-den on his shoulders. Pelicanos truly knew the meaning of devotion and loyalty.

Oscar himself had no particular acquaintance with either devo-tion or loyalty, but he’d trained himself to recognize these qualities in others. It was no accident that Pelicanos was Oscar’s oldest and lon-gest-lasting employee.

Pelicanos lowered his voice. “But before I go, Oscar, I need you to do me a little favor. I need you to tell me what you’re up to. Level with me.”

“You know that I always level with you, Yosh.”

“Well, try it one more time.”

“Very well.” Oscar walked beneath a tall green arch of pink-flowered pinnate fronds. “You see: here’s our situation. I enjoy poli-tics. The game seems to suit me.”

“That’s not news, boss.”

“You and I, we just ran our second political campaign, and we got our man elected Senator. That’s a big accomplishment. A federal Senate seat is the political big time, by anybody’s standard.”

“Yes it is. And?”

“And for all our pains, we’re back in the political wilderness again.” Oscar knocked a reeking branch from his jacket shoulder. “You think Mrs. Bambakias really wants some goddamn rare animal? I get a voice call at six in the morning, from the new chief of staff He tells me the Senator’s wife is very interested in my current assignment, and she would like to have her own exotic pet animal, please. But she doesn’t call me — and Bambakias doesn’t call me — Leon Sosik calls me.”

“Right.”

“The guy is sandbagging me.”

Pelicanos nodded sagely. “Look, Sosik knows full well that you want his job.”

“Yeah. He knows that. So he’s checking on me, to make sure I’m really out here doing my time in Backwater, Texas. And then he has the nerve to give me this little errand, to boot. It’s a no-lose proposition for Sosik. If I refuse him a favor, I’m being a jerk. If I blow it or get in trouble, then he runs me down for that. And if I succeed, then he takes my credit.”

“Sosik knows infighting. He’s spent years on the Hill. Sosik’s a professional. ”

“Yes, he is. And in his book, we’re just beginners. But we’re going to win this one anyway. You know how? It’s going to be just like the campaign was. “First, we’re going to lowball expectations, be-cause nobody will really believe that we have a serious chance here. But then we’re going to succeed on such a level — we’re going to exceed expectations to such a huge extent — we’re gonna bring so much firepower onto this campaign that we just blow the opposition away.”

Pelicanos smiled. “That’s you all over, Oscar.”

Oscar lifted one finger. “Here’s the plan. We find the major players here, and we find out what they want, and we cut deals. We get our people excited, and we get their people confused. And in the end, we just out-organize anyone who tries to stop us. We just out-work them, and we swarm on them from angles they would never expect, and we never, ever stop, and we just beat them into the ground!”

“Sounds like a big job.”

“Yes, it is, but I’ve brought enough people for a big job. They’ve proved they can work together politically. They’re creative, they’re clever, and every last one of them owes me a lot of favors. So you think I can get away with this?”

“You’re asking me?” Pelicanos said, spreading his hands. “Hell, Oscar, I’m always game. You know that.” And he permitted himself a merry little laugh.

The Collaboratory’s aging dorms offered sadly grim hospitality. Dorm space was in high demand, because the federal lab hosted end-less numbers of scholastic gypsies, contractors on the make, and vari-ous exotic species of para-scientific bureaucrats. The dorms were flimsy two-story structures, with common baths and common kitch-ens. The rooms had basic-brown federal pasteboard furniture, some scrappy little sheets and towels. The dorm’s card-swipe doorlocks ran off Collaboratory ID cards. Presumably, these smart cards and smart doorlocks compiled automatic dossiers of everyone’s daily ins and outs, for the benefit of the local security creeps.

There was no weather under the great lozenge-shaped dome. The entire gigantic structure was basically a monster intensive-care ward, all mobile shutters and glaring lights and vast air-sucking zeolite filters, with a constant thrum of deeply buried generators. The Col-laboratory’s biotech labs were constructed like forts. The personal residences, by stark contrast, lacked serious walls, roofs, or insulation. The flimsy dorms were small, tightly packed, and noisy.

So, for the sake of peace and quiet, Donna Nunez was doing her mending and darning on the wooden benches outside the Occupa-tional Safety building. Donna had brought her sewing basket and a selection of the krewe’s clothing. Oscar had brought along his laptop. He disliked working inside his dorm room, since he felt instinctive certainty that the place was bugged.

The Occupational Safety edifice was one of nine buildings on the central ring road circling the shiny china ramparts of the Hot Zone. The Hot Zone was surrounded by large pie-wedge plots of experimental gene-spliced crops: saltwater-sucking sorghum, and ram-paging rice, plus a few genetically bastardized blueberries. The circular fields were themselves surrounded by a little two-lane road. This ring road was the major traffic artery within the Collaboratory dome, so it was an excellent place to sit and observe the quaint customs of the locals.