Distraction - Bruce Sterling [169]
“Oscar!” Bambakias boomed. “Good old Oscar! I think about you every day.”
“That’s good to know, Senator.”
“You’re doing marvelous things over there with the science facility. Marvelous things. I really wish I could help you with that. Maybe we could fly over tomorrow! That would be good. We’d get results.”
Lorena’s voice sounded from off-camera. “There’s a hearing tomorrow, Alcott.”
“Hearings, more hearings. All right. Still, I keep up! I do keep up. I know what’s going on, I really do! Tremendous things you’re doing over there. You’ve got no budget, they tell me. None at all. Fill the place with the unemployed! Genius maneuver! It’s just like you always said, Oscar—push a political contradiction hard enough, it’ll break through to the other side. Then you can rub their noses in it. Great, great tactics.”
Oscar was touched. The Senator was obviously in a manic state, but he was a lot easier to take when he was so ebullient—it was like a funhouse-mirror version of his old charisma.
“You’ve done plenty for us already, Senator. We built a hotel here from your plans. The locals were very impressed by it.”
“Oh, that’s nothing.”
“No, seriously, your design attracted a lot of favorable comment.”
“No, I truly mean that it’s nothing. You should see the plans I used to do, back in college. Giant intelligent geodesics. Huge reactive structures made of membrane and sticks. You could fly ’em in on zeppelins and drop ’em over starving people, in the desert. Did ’em for a U.N. disaster relief competition—back when the U.S. was still in the U.N.”
Oscar blinked. “Disaster relief buildings?”
“They never got built. Much too sophisticated and high tech for starving, backward third worlders, so they said. Bureaucrats! I worked my ass off on that project.” Bambakias laughed. “There’s no money in disaster relief. There’s no market-pull for that. I recast the concept later, as little chairs. No money in the little chairs either. They never appreciated any of that.”
“Actually, Senator, we have one of those little chairs in the Director’s office, here at the lab. It’s provoking a lot of strongly favorable reaction. The locals really love that thing.”
“You don’t say. Too bad that scientists are too broke to buy any upscale furniture.”
“I wonder if you’d still have those disaster plans in your archives somewhere, Alcott. I’d like to see them.”
“See them? Hell, you can have them. The least I can do for you, after everything I’ve put you through.”
“I hope you’ll do that for me, Senator. I’m serious.”
“Sure, have ’em! Take anything you want! Kind of a fire sale on my brain products. You know, if we invade Europe, Oscar, it probably means a nuclear exchange.”
Oscar lowered his voice soothingly. “I really don’t think so, Al.”
“They’re trifling with the grand old USA, these little Dutch creeps. Them and their wooden shoes and tulips. We’re a superpower! We can pulverize them.”
Lorena spoke up. “I think it’s time for your medication, Alcott.”
“I need to know what Oscar really thinks about the war! I’m all in favor of it. I’m a hawk! We’ve been pushed around by these little red-green Euro pipsqueaks long enough. Don’t you think so, Oscar?”
A nurse arrived. “You tell the President my opinion!” the Senator insisted as the nurse led him away. “You tell Two Feathers I’m with him all the way down.”
Lorena moved back into camera range. She looked grim and stricken.
“You have a lot of new krewepeople now, Lorena.”
“Oh. That.” She looked into the camera. “I never got back to you about the Moira situation, did I?”
“Moira? I thought we had that problem straightened out and packed away with mothballs.”
“Oh, Moira was on her best behavior after that jail incident. Until Huey came looking for Moira. Now Moira works for Huey in Baton Rouge.”
“Oh no.”
“It got very bad for the krewe after that. Their morale suffered so much with the Senator’s illness, and once Huey had our former press agent in his own court … well, I guess you can imagine what it’s been like.”
“You’ve lost a lot