Distraction - Bruce Sterling [119]
“French pop music?”
“Multichannel broadcasts off unmanned aerial drones. It’s the Cajun Francophone card.”
“Come on. Even Huey can’t seriously believe that anybody listens to French pop music.”
“The French believe it. They can smell Yankee blood in the water. It’s your basic culture-war gambit. The French have always loved French-language confrontations. Now they can turn up their amps till we pull every burger joint out of Paris.”
“Leon, calm down. You’re a professional. You can’t let him get you rattled like this.”
“He does have me rattled, damn it. The son of a bitch just doesn’t play by the rules! He does two contradictory things at once, and he screws us coming and going. It’s like he’s got two brains!”
“Get a grip,” Oscar said. “It’s a minor provocation. What are we supposed to do about this so-called problem? Declare war on France?”
“Well …” Sosik said. He lowered his voice. “I know this sounds strange. But listen. A declaration of war would dissolve the Emergency committees by immediate fiat.”
“What!” Oscar shouted. “Are you crazy? We can’t invade France! France is a major industrial democracy! What are we, Nazis? That’s totally out of the question!”
Oscar looked up. He confronted a looming crowd of astonished scientists. They’d left their own discussion and had gathered on the far side of the lab bench, where they were straining to overhear him.
“Listen, Oscar,” Sosik continued tinnily, “nobody’s suggesting that we actually fight a war. But the concept is getting a pretty good float in DC. A declaration of war is a manual override of the federal system. As a domestic maneuver, a foreign war could be a real trump card. France is much too much, I agree with that—hell, the French still have nuclear power! But we could declare war on Holland. Holland’s a tiny, unarmed country, a bunch of radical pipsqueaks. So we throw a proper scare into the Dutch, the phony war lasts a week or so, and then the President declares victory. The Emergency is over. Then, once the dust settles, we have a fully functional Congress again.”
Oscar removed the phone from his ear, stared at it with distaste, and replaced it at his ear. “Look, I gotta get back to you later, Leon. I have some serious work to accomplish here.”
“The Senator’s very big on this idea, Oscar. He really thinks it could fly. It’s visionary.”
Oscar hung up. “They’re playing French pop music in Louisiana,” he told his impromptu audience.
Albert Gazzaniga scratched his head. “Big deal! So what?”
The crux of the matter was, of course, the money. It had always been the money. Money was the mother’s milk of politics. And although scientific politics were several steps removed from conventional politics, money was the milk of science, too.
All strikes were, at the bottom line, struggles over economic power. All strikers made a bold declaration that they were willing to outstarve their employers, and if they backed it up with enough bad press and moral pressure, they were sometimes right.
So it was lovely to declare that Greta and her cadre were ready and eager to do science for nothing, asking for nothing, and refusing to supply anything but the results they themselves found of scientific interest. It was a holy crusade. But even a holy crusade needed a revenue stream.
So Oscar, Yosh, and the omnipresent Kevin found an empty corner in the hotel kitchen to discuss finances.
“We could hit up Bambakias for a couple of million, just to tide us over,” Pelicanos said. “There’s no question he’s got the funds.”
“Forget it,” Oscar said. “The Senate’s a billionaire’s club, but if they start running the country right out of their own pockets, that’s feudalism. Feudalism is not