Distraction - Bruce Sterling [163]
“Man, you’re a sneaky devil,” Burningboy ruminated, methodically chewing on a long handful of dry blue noodles. “The tone of that meeting changed totally when you had that goon brought in. I wonder what they’d have done if he’d told ’em that we caught him two days ago.”
“Oh, we both knew that Regulator was never going to talk,” Oscar said. “I was reserving him for the proper political moment. There’s nothing dishonest about revealing the facts within the proper context. After all, you did capture him, and he is a commando.” They lowered their voices and tiptoed to avoid a dozing lynx. “You see, talking common sense to scientists just doesn’t work. Scientists despise common sense, they think it’s irrational. To get ’em off the dime, you need strong moral pressure, something from outside their expectations. They live with big intellectual walls around them—peer review, passive construction, all this constant use of the third person plural.…”
“I’m handing it to you, Oscar—the gambit worked great. But I still don’t see why.”
Oscar paused thoughtfully. He enjoyed his private chats with Burningboy, who was proving to be an appreciative audience. The Texan Moderator was an aging, disheveled outlaw with a long prison record, but he was also a genuine politician, a regional player full of southern-fried insights. Oscar felt a strong need to give the man a collegial briefing.
“It worked because … well, let me give you the big picture here. The really big, philosophical picture. Did you ever wonder why I’ve never moved against Huey’s people inside this lab? Why they’re still inside there, holding the Spinoffs building, barricaded against us? It’s because we’re in a netwar. We’re just like a group of go-stones. To survive in a netwar, a surrounded group needs eyes. It’s all about links, and perception, and the battle-space. We’re surrounded inside this dome—but we’re not entirely surrounded, because there’s a smaller dome of enemies inside our dome. I deliberately threw that Regulator in there with them, so that now, that little subgroup has its own little nomad contingent, just like we do. You see, people instinctively sense this kind of symmetry. It works on them, on an unconscious level. It’s meaningful to them, it changes their worldview. Having enemies inside the dome might seem to weaken us, but the fact that we can tolerate our own core of dissent—that actually strengthens us. Because we’re not totalitarian. We’re not the same substance all the way through. We’re not all brittle. We’re resilient. We have potential space inside.”
“Yes?” Burningboy said skeptically.
“There’s a vital fractal there. It’s all about scaling issues, basically. Here we are, inside these walls. Outside our walls, Green Huey is lurking over us, full of sinister intent. But the President is lurking over Huey—and our new President is, in his own unique way, a rather more sinister person than the Governor of Louisiana. The President runs the USA, a nation that is all wounded and inward-turning now—a little world, surrounded by a bigger world full of people who grew bored with us. They no longer pay America to tell them that we are their future. And then beyond that world … well, I guess it’s Greta’s world. A rational, Einsteinian-Newtonian cosmos. The cosmos of objective, observable facts. And beyond scientific understanding … all those dark phenomena. Metaphysics. Will and idea. History, maybe.”
“Do you really believe any of that junk?”
“No, I don’t believe it in the way that I believe that two and two are four. But it’s doable, it’s my working metaphor. What can politicians ever really ‘know’ about anything? History isn’t a laboratory. You never step in the same river twice. But some people have effective political insight, and some just don’t.”
Burningboy nodded slowly. “You really see us from way, way on the outside, don’t you, Oscar?”
“Well, I’ve never been a nomad—at least not yet. And I’ll never be a scientist, either. I can recognize my ignorance, but I can’t be buffaloed by ignorance—I’m in power, I have to act. Knowledge