Distraction - Bruce Sterling [104]
Pelicanos snorted. “Stop talking like Bambakias. That highbrow net-jive gets you nowhere with me.”
“But it works! If the feds somehow fail us, we’ve got leaks in at the Texas comptroller’s office. The Buna city council loves us! I know they’re not worth much politically, but hey, we’ve paid more attention to them in the past six weeks than the Collaboratory has paid them in fifteen years.”
“So you’re keeping all your options open.”
“Exactly.”
“You always say that you hate doing that.”
“What? I never said that. You’re just being morose. I feel very upbeat about this, Yosh—we’ve had a few little setbacks, but taking this assignment was a wise decision. It’s been a broadening professional experience.”
They paused to let a yak cross the road. “You know what I really like about this campaign?” Oscar said. “It’s so tiny. Two thousand political illiterates, sealed inside a dome. We have complete voter profiles and interest-group dossiers on every single person in the Collaboratory! It’s so sealed off and detached—politically speaking, there’s something perfect and magical about a setup like this.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”
“I’m determined to enjoy this, Yosh. We might be crushed here, or we might soar to glory, but we’ll never have the chance to do something quite like this again.”
A supply truck lumbered past them, laden with mutant seedlings. “You know something?” Pelicanos said. “I’ve been so busy playing the angles that I never got the chance to understand what they actually do in here.”
“I think you understand it a lot better than they do.”
“Not their finances, I mean the actual science. I can understand commercial biotech well enough—we were in that business together, in Boston. But the real cutting edge here, those brain people, the cognition people … I know I’m missing something important there.”
“Yeah? Personally, I’ve been trying to get up to speed on ‘amyloid fibrils.’ Greta really dotes on those things.”
“It’s not just that their field is technically difficult to grasp. It is, but I also have a feeling they’re hiding something.”
“Sure. That’s science in its decadence. They can’t patent or copyright their findings anymore, so sometimes they try for trade secrets.” Oscar laughed. “As if that could really work nowadays.”
“Maybe there’s something going on in this place that could help Sandra.”
Oscar was touched. His friend’s dark mood was clear to him now, it had opened up before him like an origami trick. “Where there’s life, there’s hope, Yosh.”
“If I had more time to figure it out, if there weren’t so many distractions.… Everything is hats and rabbits now. Nothing’s predictable, nothing makes sense anymore, it’s all rockets and potholes. There’s no foundation left in our society. There’s no place left for us to take a stand. There’s a very dark momentum going, Oscar. Sometimes I really think the country’s going mad.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, just look at us. I mean, look what we’ve been dealing with.” Pelicanos hunched his head and began counting off on his fingers. “My wife is a schizophrenic. Bambakias has major depression. Poor Moira finally cracked in public, and pitched a fit. Dougal is an alcoholic. Green Huey is a megalomaniac. And those sick lunatics trying to kill you—there was an endless supply of those people.”
Oscar walked on silently.
“Am I reading too much into this? Or is there a genuine trend here?”
“I’d call it a groundswell,” Oscar said thoughtfully. “That accounts for those sky-high poll ratings ever since Bambakias’s breakdown. He’s a classic political charismatic. So even his personal negatives boost his political positives. People just sense his authenticity, they recognize that he’s truly a man of our time. He represents the American people. He’s a born leader.”
“Does he have it together to take action for us in Washington?”
“Well, he’s still a name for us to conjure with.… But practically speaking, no. I’ve got good backchannel from