Distraction - Bruce Sterling [166]
“Yosh, there’s always more funding. What’s really interesting is governing without it! Managing on pure prestige. Consider the Moderators, for instance. They actually have a functional, prestige-based economy. It’s all been worked out in fantastic detail; for instance, they have a rotating Australian electronic ballot system.…”
“Oscar, have you been sleeping at all? Do you eat properly? Do you know what you’re doing here anymore?”
“Yes, I do know. It’s not what we planned to do at first, but it’s what has to be done. I am stealing Huey’s clothes.”
“You’re in a personal feud with the Governor of Louisiana.”
“No. That’s not it. The truth is that I’m conducting a broad-scale struggle with the greatest political visionary in contemporary America. And Huey is years ahead of me. He’s been cultivating his nomads for years now, winning their loyalty, building their infrastructure. He’s set it up so that homeless drifters are the most technically advanced group in his state. He’s made himself the leader of an underground mass movement, and he’s promising to share the knowledge and make every man a wizard. And they worship him for that, because the whole structure of their network economy has been regulated that way, surreptitiously and deliberately. It’s corruption on a fantastic scale—it’s an enterprise so far off the books that it isn’t even ‘corruption’ anymore. He has created a new alternative society, with an alternative power structure, that is all predicated on him: Green Huey, the Swamp King. I’m working here as fast and as hard as I can, because Huey has already proved to me that this works—in fact, it works so well that it’s dangerous. America is on the ropes, and Green Huey is a smiling totalitarian who’s creating a neural dictatorship!”
“Oscar, do you realize how crazy that sounds? Do you know how pale you look when you talk like that?”
“I’m leveling with you here. You know I always level with you, Yosh.”
“Okay, you’re leveling with me. But I can’t do that. I can’t live that way. I don’t believe in it. I’m sorry.”
Oscar stared at him.
“I’ve hit the wall with you, Oscar. I want some real food, I want a real roof over my head. I can’t close my eyes and jump blind and take that kind of risk. I have a dependent. My wife needs me, she needs looking after. But you—you don’t need me anymore. Because I’m an accountant! You’re setting up a situation here where I have no function. No role. No job. There’s nothing to account.”
“You know something? That had never occurred to me. But wait; there’s bound to be some kind of income transfer. There’s scrap cash around, we’re going to need bits of equipment and such.…”
“You’re establishing a strange, tiny, alien regime here. It’s not a market society. It’s a cult society. It’s all based on people looking deep into each other’s eyes and giving each other back rubs. It’s theoretically interesting, but when it fails and falls apart, it’ll all become camps and purges just like the Communist Era. If you’re determined to do that, Oscar, I can’t save you. Nobody can save you. I don’t want to be with you when the house of cards comes down. Because you will be going to prison. At best.”
Oscar smiled wanly. “So, you don’t think the ‘congenital insanity’ plea will get me off?”
“It’s not a joke. What about your krewe, Oscar? What about the rest of us? You’re a great campaign manager: you really have a gift. But this is not an election campaign. It’s not even a strike or a protest anymore. This is a little coup d’état. You’re like a militia guru in a secessionist compound here. Even if the krewepeople agree to stay with you, how can you put them at that kind of risk? You never asked them, Oscar. They never got a vote.”
Oscar sat up straight. “Yosh, you’re right. That’s a sound analysis. I just can’t do that