Distraction - Bruce Sterling [137]
“Well,” she said, “I’m the lab’s Director, and I’m lying down in your backseat, wearing handcuffs. I don’t see anyone else volunteering to help me.”
“I could do it for you, Dr. Penninger, I swear I could. I could take that whole place over, if there were more than three of us. But as it is …” He shrugged. “Well, I guess we just drive around at random, makin’ phone calls.”
“I never drive without a goal,” Oscar told him.
“So, man, do you know where we’re going? Where is that?”
“Where’s the nearest big camp of Moderators?”
9
The Canton Market had been a Texas tradition since the 1850s. Every weekend before the first Monday of the month, traders, collectors, flea marketeers, and random gawkers gathered from hundreds of miles around for three days of hands-on commercial scrap-and-patchwork. Naturally this ancient and deeply attractive tradition had been completely co-opted by prole nomads.
Oscar, Greta, and Kevin found themselves joining a road migration heading northeast toward the makeshift city. In Kevin’s rented junker, they fitted with ease into the traffic: tankers, flatbeds, gypsy buses, winter-wrapped roadside hitchhikers.
In the meantime, Oscar and Greta climbed into the backseat together, to see to one another’s scrapes, welts, and bruises. Greta was still handcuffed, while Oscar’s broken head had barely clotted. They sat together while Kevin munched a take-out sandwich and wiped the fog of breath from his car’s cold windows.
Checking one another’s injuries was a slow and intimate process. It involved much tender unbuttoning of shirts, indrawn breaths of hurt surprise, sympathetic tongue-clicking, and the ultragentle dabbing of antiseptic unguents. They’d both taken a serious pounding, in normal circumstances requiring a medical checkup and a couple of days of bed rest. Their heads swam and ached from the knockout gas, a side effect only partly curable by temple rubbing, brow smoothing, and gentle lingering kisses.
Greta was stoic. She forced him to share her personal hangover cure: six aspirin, four acetaminophen, three heaping spoonfuls of white sugar, and forty micrograms of over-the-counter lysergic acid. This mélange, she insisted authoritatively, would “pep them up.”
In the late afternoon, they left the crowded highway and darted east on an obscure country dirt road. There they parked and awaited a rendezvous. Within an hour they were joined by Yosh Pelicanos, who was piloting a rental car with his own satellite locator.
Pelicanos was, as always, efficient and resourceful. He had brought them laptops, cash cards, a first-aid kit, two suitcases of clothes, plastic sprayguns, new phones, and last but far from least, a new, yard-long bolt cutter.
Kevin had the most extensive experience with police handcuffs. So he set to work on Greta’s bonds with the bolt cutter, while Oscar changed clothes inside Pelicanos’s spacious and shiny rental car.
“You people look like three zombies. I hope you know what you’re doing,” Pelicanos told him mournfully. “All hell is breaking loose back at the lab.”
“How’s the krewe handling the crisis?” Oscar said, tenderly shaving the hair from the ragged gash above his ear.
“Well, some of us are with the Strike Committee, some are holing up in the hotel. We can still move in and out of the lab, but that won’t last. Word is that they’ll seal the facility soon. The Collaboratory cops are going to break the Strike. There are Buna city cops and county sheriffs cruising all around our hotel, and Greta’s committee is too scared to leave the Hot Zone.… We’ve been sucker-punched, Oscar. Our people are totally confused. Word is out that you’re criminals, you’ve abandoned us. Morale is subterranean.”
“So how’s the float going on our black-propaganda rap?” Oscar said.
“Well, the elopement pitch was very hot. How could a sex angle not be hot? I mean, basically, that’s the outing move that we always