Distraction - Bruce Sterling [181]
Kevin and Oscar next took the deeply melodramatic step of dressing themselves as nomad air bums. They borrowed the customary flight suits from a pair of Moderator air jockeys. These snug garments were riveted, fiber-filled cotton duck. They were protective industrial gear, painstakingly tribalized by much hand-stitched embroidery and a richly personal reek of skin unguent. Kevlar gloves, black rubber boots, big furry crash helmets, and shatterproof goggles completed the ensemble.
Oscar gave a few final Method-acting tips to his good-natured body double, and wedged himself into his disguise. He became a creature from an alien civilization. He couldn’t resist the temptation to stroll around downtown Buna in his nomad drag. The result astonished him. Oscar was very well known in Buna; his scandalous personal life was common knowledge and the hotel he had built was locally famous. In the flight suit, goggles, and helmet, however, he was entirely ignored. People’s eyes simply slid over him without the friction of a moment’s care. He radiated otherness.
Kevin and Oscar had synchronized their departure for midnight. Oscar arrived late. His wristwatch was malfunctioning. He’d been running a mild fever for days, and the contact heat had caused the watch’s mousebrain works to run fast. Oscar had been forced to reset his watch with its sunlight timer, but he had somehow botched it; his watch was jet-lagged now. He was running late, and it took far more effort than he had expected to climb to the roof of the Collaboratory. He’d never before been on the outside armor of the lab. In the sullen dark of a February night, the structure’s outer boundary was windy and intimidating, a wearying physical trial of endless steps and hand rungs.
Winded and trembling, he finally arrived on the starry roof of the Collaboratory, but the best window of weather opportunity was already gone. Kevin, wisely, had already launched himself. With the help of a bored Moderator ground crew, Oscar strapped into his flimsy craft, and left as soon as he could.
The first hour went rather well. Then he was caught by a Greenhouse storm front boiling off the sullen Gulf of Mexico. He was blown all the way to Arkansas. Cannily reading thousands of Doppler radars, the smart and horribly cheap little vehicle darted sickeningly up and down through dozens of local thermals and wind shears, stubbornly routing itself toward its destination with the dumb persistence of a network packet. Blistered by the chafing of his harness, Oscar finally passed out, lolling in the aircraft’s grip like a sack of turnips.
The pilot’s lack of consciousness made no difference to the nomad machine. At dawn, Oscar found himself fluttering over the rainy swamp of the Bayou Teche.
The Bayou Teche was a hundred and thirty miles long. This quiet oxbow had once formed the main channel of the Mississippi River, some three thousand years in the past. During one brief and intensely catastrophic twenty-first-century spring, the Bayou Teche, to the alarm and horror of everyone, had once again become the main channel of the Mississippi River. The savage Greenhouse deluge had carried all before it, briskly disposing of floodproof concrete levees, shady, moss-strewn live oaks, glamorous antebellum plantation homes, rust-eaten sugar mills, dead oil rigs, and everything else in its path. The flood had ravaged the cities of Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville, and New Iberia.
The Teche had always been a world of its own, a swampy biome distinct and separate from the Mississippi proper and the rice-growing plains to the west. The destruction of its roads and bridges, and the consequent enormous growth of weedy swamp and marsh, had once again returned the Teche to eerie, sodden quietude. The bayou was now one of the wildest locales in North America—not because it had been conserved from development, but because its development had been obliterated.
On his fluttering way down, Oscar took quick note of Fontenot’s new