Bruce Sterling - Distraction

Clotile forged forth sturdily and snatched the plates away from Kevin and Oscar. “I hate to be underfoot here when your house-keeper’s so busy,” Oscar said mildly. “Maybe we should have a little stroll outside, and discuss the reason for our trip here.”

“Good idea,” said Fontenot. “Sure. You boys come on out.”

They followed Fontenot out his squeaking front door and down the warped wooden steps. “They’re such good people here,” Fonte-not insisted, glancing warily back over his shoulder. “They’re so real.”

“I’m glad you’re on good terms with your neighbors.”

Fontenot nodded solemnly. “I go to Mass. The local folks got a little church up the way. I read the Good Book these days… Never had time for it before, but I want the things that matter now. The real things.”

Oscar said nothing. He was not religious, but he’d always been impressed by judeo-Christianiry’s long political track record. “Tell us about this Haitian enclave, Jules.”

“Tell you? Hell, telling you’s no use. We’ll just go there. We’ll take my huvvy.”

Fontenot’s hovercraft was sitting below his house. The amphibi-ous saucer had been an ambitious purchase, with indestructible plastic skirts and a powerful alcohol engine. It reeked of fish guts, and its stout and shiny hull was copiously littered with scales. Once emptied of its fisherman’s litter, it could seat three, though Kevin had to squeeze in.

The overloaded huvvy scraped and banged its way down to the bayou. Then it sloshed across the lily pads, burping and gargling.

“A huvvy’s good for bayou fishing,” Fontenot pronounced. “You need a shallow-draft boat in the Teche, what with all these snags, and old smashed cars, and such. The good folks around here kinda make fun of my big fancy huvvy, but I can really get around.”

“I understand these Haitians are very religious people.”

“Oh yeah,” nodded Fontenot. “They had a minister, back in the old country, doing his Moses free-the-people thing. So of course the regime had the guy shot. Then they did some terrible things to his followers that really upset Amnesty International. But… basi-cally… who cares? You know? They’re Haitians!”

Fontenot lifted both his hands from the hovercraft’s wheel. “How can anybody care about Haiti? Islands all over the world are drowning. They’re all going under water, they’ve all got big sea-level problems. But Huey… well, Huey takes it real personal when charismatic leaders get shot. Huey’s into the French diaspora. He tried twisting the arm of the State Department, but they got too many emergencies all their own. So one day, Huey just sent a big fleet of shrimp boats to Haiti, and picked them all up.”

“How did he arrange their visas?”

“He never bothered. See, you gotta think the way Huey thinks. Huey’s always got two, three, four things going on at once. He put ’em in a shelter. Salt mines. Louisiana’s got these huge underground salt mines. Underground mineral deposits twice the size of Mount Everest. They were dug out for a hundred years. They got huge vaults down there, caves as big as suburbs, with thousand-foot ceilings. Nowadays, nobody mines salt anymore. Salt’s cheaper than dirt now, because of seawater distilleries. So there’s no more market for Louisi-ana salt. Just another dead industry here, like oil. We dug it all up and sold it, and all we got left is nothing. Giant airtight caverns full of nothing, way down deep in the crust of the earth. Well, what use are they now? Well, one big use. Because you can’t see nothing. There’s no satellite surveillance for giant underground caves. Huey hid that Haitian cult in one of those giant mines for a couple of years. He was workin’ on ’em in secret, with all his other hot underground projects. Like the giant catfish, and the fuel yeast, and the coelacanths…”

Kevin spoke up. “ ‘Coelacanths’?”

“Living fossil fish from Madagascar, son. Older than dinosaurs. They got genetics like fish from another planet. Real primitive and hardy. You nick off chunks from the deep past, and you splice it in the middle of next week — that’s Huey’s recipe for the gumbo future.”

Oscar wiped spray from his waterproof flight suit. “So he’s done this strange thing to the Haitians as some kind of pilot project.”

“Yeah. And you know what? Huey’s right.”

“He is?”

“Yep. Huey’s awful wrong about the little things, but he’s so right about the big picture, that the rest of it just don’t matter. You see, Louisiana really is the future. Someday soon, the whole world is gonna be just like Louisiana. Because the seas are rising, and Louisiana is a giant swamp. The world of the future is a big, hot, Greenhouse swamp. Full of half-educated, half-breed people, who don’t speak En-glish, and didn’t forget to have children. Plus, they are totally thrilled about biotechnology. That’s what tomorrow’s world is gonna look like — not just America, mind you, the whole world. Hot, humid, old, crooked, half-forgotten, kind of rotten. The leaders are corrupt, ev-erybody’s on the take. It’s bad, really bad, even worse than it sounds.”

Fontenot suddenly grinned. “But you know what? It’s doable, it’s livable! The fishing’s good! The food is great! The women are good-lookin’, and the music really swings!”

They struggled for two hours to reach the refugee encampment.

The hovercraft bulled its way through reedbeds, scraped over spits of saw grass and sticky black mud. The Haitian camp had been cannily established on an island reachable only by aircraft — or by a very deter-mined amphibious boat.

They skirted up onto the solid earth, and left their hovercraft, and walked through knee-high weeds.

Oscar had imagined the worst: klieg lights, watchtowers, barbed wire, and vicious dogs. But the Haitian emigre village was not an armed camp. The place was basically an ashram, a little handmade religious retreat. It was a modest, quiet, rural settlement of neatly whitewashed log houses.

The village was a sizable compound for six or seven hundred people, many of them children. The village had no electricity, no plumbing, no satellite dishes, no roads, no cars, no telephones, and no aircraft. It was silent except for the twittering of birds, the occasional clonk of a churn or an ax, and the distant, keening sound of hymns.

No one was hurrying, but everyone seemed to have something to do. These people were engaged in an ancient peasant round of pre-industrial agriculture. They were literally living off the land — not by chewing up the landscape and transmuting it in sludge tanks, but by gardening it with hand tools. These were strange, rnuseumlike activi-ties. Oscar had read about them in books and seen them in docu-mentaries, but he’d never witnessed them performed in real life. Genuinely archaic pursuits, like blacksmithing and yarn-spinning.

It was all about neatly tended little garden plots, swarming com-post heaps, night soil in stinking wooden buckets. The locals had a lot of chickens. The chickens were all genetically identical. The birds were all the very same chicken, reissued in various growth stages. They also had multiple copies of a standard-issue goat. This was a hardy, bearded devil-eyed creature, a Nietzschean superman among goats, and there were herds of it. They had big spiraling vines of snap beans, monster corn, big hairy okra, monster yellow gourds, rock-hard bamboo, a little sugarcane. Some of the locals were fishermen. Sometime back, they had successfully landed a frightening leathery creature, now a skeletal mass of wrist-thick fish bones. The skeleton sported baleen plates the size of a car grille.

The communards wore homespun clothes. The men had crude straw hats, collarless buttoned vests, drawstring trousers. The women wore ankle-length shifts, white aprons, and big trailing sunbonnets.