Bruce Sterling - Distraction

His heart wa pounding. He took a few deep breaths. He was past being frantic now. He was leveling out; he was cruising on a higher plane; he was exalted. “Darling, I’m going on a secret mission. I think it may be the crux of all our problems, but I may never come back. This may be the last private moment that we ever have together. I know I’ve upset you. I know I haven’t been everything you ex-pected. I may never see you again, but I’m leaving you with such a full and happy heart. I want to remember you looking like this, always. You are so special and dear to me that I can’t express it. You’re just such a brilliant, radiant creature.”

She put her hand to her forehead. “Oh my God. I just don’t know what to do with myself when you’re like this … You’re just so persuasive! Oh, well, never mind, come on with me, take your clothes off There’s plenty of room for us up here on the lab table.”

After an extensive discussion of their options, Oscar and Captain Scubbly Bee decided to infiltrate Loui-siana by covert means and in deep incognito. Kevin, boldly lying, told the local Emergency Committee that he was leaving for a recruitment drive. Oscar himself would not even officially leave Buna. He was replaced by a body double, a Moderator volunteer who was willing to wear Oscar’s clothing, and to spend a great deal of time in a plush hotel room pretending to type on a laptop.

Their conspiracy swiftly assumed its own momen-tum. To avoid discovery, they decided to airmail them-selves into Louisiana in a pair of ultralight aircraft. These silent and stealthy devices were slow, unpredictable, dan-gerous, painful, and nauseating — basically devoid of crea-ture comforts of any kind. They were, however, more or less undetectable, and immune to roadblocks and shake-downs. Since they were guided by global positioning from Chinese satellites, the aircraft would arrive with pinpoint accuracy right on Fontenot’s doorstep — sooner or later.

Kevin and Oscar next took the deeply melodramatic step of dressing themselves as nomad air bums. They bor-rowed the customary flight suits from a pair of Moderator air jockeys. These snug garments were riveted, fiber-filled cotton duck. They were protective industrial gear, painstakingly tribalized by much hand-stitched embroidery and a richly personal reek of skin unguent. Kevlar gloves, black rubber boots, big furry crash helmets, and shatterproof goggles completed the ensemble.

Oscar gave a few final Method-acting tips to his good-natured body double, and wedged himself into his disguise. He became a crea-ture from an alien civilization. He couldn’t resist the temptation to stroll around downtown Buna in his nomad drag. The result aston-ished him. Oscar was very well known in Buna; his scandalous per-sonal life was common knowledge and the hotel he had built was locally famous. In the flight suit, goggles, and helmet, however, he was entirely ignored. People’s eyes simply slid over him without the fric-tion of a moment’s care. He radiated otherness.

Kevin and Oscar had synchronized their departure for midnight. Oscar arrived late. His wristwatch was malfunctioning. He’d been running a mild fever for days, and the contact heat had caused the watch’s mousebrain works to run fast. Oscar had been forced to reset his watch with its sunlight timer, but he had somehow botched it; his watch was jet-lagged now. He was running late, and it took far more effort than he had expected to climb to the roof of the Collaboratory. He’d never before been on the outside armor of the lab. In the sullen dark of a February night, the structure’s outer boundary was windy and intimidating, a wearying physical trial of endless steps and hand rungs.

Winded and trembling, he finally arrived on the starry roof of the Collaboratory, but the best window of weather opportunity was already gone. Kevin, wisely, had already launched himself. With the help of a bored Moderator ground crew, Oscar strapped into his flimsy craft, and left as soon as he could.

The first hour went rather well. Then he was caught by a Green-house storm front boiling off the sullen Gulf of Mexico. He was blown all the way to Arkansas. Cannily reading thousands of Doppler radars, the smart and horribly cheap little vehicle darted sickeningly up and down through dozens of local thermals and wind shears, stubbornly routing itself toward its destination with the dumb persis-tence of a network packet. Blistered by the chafing of his harness, Oscar fmally passed out, lolling in the aircraft’s grip like a sack of turnips.

The pilot’s lack of consciousness made no difference to the nomad machine. At dawn, Oscar found himself fluttering over the rainy swamp of the Bayou Teche.

The Bayou Teche was a hundred and thirty miles long. This quiet oxbow had once formed the main channel of the Mississippi River, some three thousand years in the past. During one brief and intensely catastrophic twenty-first-century spring, the Bayou Teche, to the alarm and horror of everyone, had once again become the main channel of the Mississippi River. The savage Greenhouse deluge had carried all before it, briskly disposing of floodproof concrete levees, shady, moss-strewn live oaks, glamorous antebellum plantation homes, rust-eaten sugar mills, dead oil rigs, and everything else in its path. The flood had ravaged the cities of Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville, and New Iberia.

The Teche had always been a world of its own, a swampy biome distinct and separate from the Mississippi proper and the rice-growing plains to the west. The destruction of its roads and bridges, and the consequent enormous growth of weedy swamp and marsh, had once again returned the Teche to eerie, sodden quietude. The bayou was now one of the wildest locales in North America — not because it had been conserved from development, but because its development had been obliterated.

On his fluttering way down, Oscar took quick note of Fonte-not’s new surroundings. The ex-fed had chosen to dwell in a scattered backwoods village of metal trailer homes, which were jacked up onto concrete-block columns and surrounded by outhouses and cheap fuel-cell generators. It was a Southern-Gothic slum for freshwater fishermen, a watery maze of wooden docks, lily pads, flat-prowed straw-and-plastic bass boats. In the pink light of early morning, the bayou’s reedy waters were a lush murky green.

Oscar arrived with impressive pinpoint accuracy — right onto the sloping roof of Fontenot’s wooden shack. He swiftly tumbled from the building, falling to earth with an ankle-cracking bang. The now brain-dead aircraft shuddered violently in the morning breeze, tossing Oscar like a bug.

Luckily Fontenot limped quickly from his shack, and helped Os-car subdue his machine. After much cursing and a finger-pinching struggle, they finally had Oscar unbuckled and freed. They managed to fold and spindle the aircraft down to the size of a large canoe.

“So it really is you,” Fontenot told him, puffing with exertion. He solemnly thumped Oscar’s padded shoulder. “Where’d you get that goofy helmet? You really look like hell.”

“Yeah. Have you seen my bodyguard? He was supposed to be here earlier.”

“Come on inside,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was not a man for metal trailer homes. His shack was an authentic wooden one, a bro-ken-backed structure of cedar and board-and-batten, with gray wooden shingles on top, and spiderweb bed monster pilings beneath. The old shack had been dragged to the water’s edge, and reassembled on-site without much professional care. The door squealed and shud-dered off its jamb as it opened. Inside, the crack-shot wooden floors dipped visibly.

Fontenot’s bare wooden parlor had rattan furniture, a large stout hammock, a tiny fuel-cell icebox, and an impressive wall-mounted arsenal of top-of-the-line fishing equipment. Fontenot’s fishing gear was chained to the shack’s back wall, and arranged with obsessive military neatness in locked plywood rifle cabinets. The nearest cabinet boasted a bright menagerie of artificial lures: battery-powered wrig-glers, ultrasonic flashers, spinning spoons, pheromone-leaking jel-lyworms.