Distraction - Bruce Sterling [172]
Oscar nevertheless made his best professional effort.
“Colonel, sir, those flooded woods in the Sabine River valley are tougher than you might expect. We’re not just talking swamps here—we’re basically talking permanent disaster areas. There’s been a lot of severe flooding in the Sabine since the rain patterns changed, and a lot of the local farmland has gone back to wilderness. That’s not the forest primeval out there. Those are deserted, toxic locales of no economic value, where all the decent lumber is long gone and there are poisonous weeds and bushes half the size of trees. It would be a mistake to underestimate those Regulators when they’re on their native ground. Those Cajun nomads are not just native hunters and fishers and swamp dwellers; they’re also very big on sylvan audio surveillance.”
It was, of course, of no use. The lieutenant colonel, and his men, and his impressionable, airborne war correspondents, left on dawn patrol the next morning. Not a single one of them was ever seen again.
Three days after this silent debacle, Captain Burningboy announced his own departure. He was now “General” Burningboy again, and having successfully retrieved his reputation, he felt it was time for him to leave.
Kevin threw a block party for the General, on the grounds of the police station. Greta and Oscar attended in full dress and, for the first time ever, as a public couple. They had of course been kidnapped as a couple, and rescued as a couple, so their appearance made perfect sense. It was also a boost for morale.
In point of sad fact, Greta and Oscar had very little to say to or do with one another at Burningboy’s farewell party. They were both hopelessly preoccupied with the exigencies of power. Besides, Kevin’s party featured a massive banquet of genuine food. After days on nomad biotech rations, the scientists and proles flung themselves on it like wolverines.
Oscar was pained to see Burningboy abandoning him. It seemed so unnecessary. Burningboy, who had been drinking heavily, took Oscar aside and explained his motives in pitiless detail. It all had to do with social network structure.
“We used to handle these things the way the Regulators do,” Burningboy confided. “Promote the best, and segregate the rest. But they ended up with an aristocracy—the Sun Lords, the Nobles, the Respected, and down at the very bottom, all the lousy newbies. In the Moderators, we use balloting. So we have turnaround; people can spend their reputations, and lose them, and earn them back. Besides—and this is the killer point here—our technique prevents decapitation attacks. See, the feds are always after ‘the criminal kingpins.’ They always want ‘the top guy in the outfit,’ the so-called mastermind.”
“I’ll really miss these briefings of yours,” Oscar said. It had been a long time since he had appeared in public with his full regalia of spats, cummerbund, and proper hat. He felt a million miles away from Burningboy, as if he were receiving signals from a distant planet.
“Look, Oscar, after thirty years of American imperial information warfare, everybody in the goddamn world understands counterinsurgency and political subversion. We all know how to do it now, we all know how to wreck the dominant paradigm. We’re geniuses at screwing with ourselves and deconstructing all our institutions. We don’t have a single institution left that works.” Burningboy paused. “Am I getting too radical here? Am I scaring you?”
“No. It’s the truth.”
“Well, that’s why I’m going to jail now. We Moderators have a kinda pet state magistrate out in New Mexico. He’s willing to put me away on a completely irrelevant charge. So I’ll be spending two or three years in a minimum security state facility. I think that once they’ve got me nice and safe in the slammer, I may be able