Distraction - Bruce Sterling [185]
Fontenot lifted both his hands from the hovercraft’s wheel. “How can anybody care about Haiti? Islands all over the world are drowning. They’re all going under water, they’ve all got big sea-level problems. But Huey … well, Huey takes it real personal when charismatic leaders get shot. Huey’s into the French diaspora. He tried twisting the arm of the State Department, but they got too many emergencies all their own. So one day, Huey just sent a big fleet of shrimp boats to Haiti, and picked them all up.”
“How did he arrange their visas?”
“He never bothered. See, you gotta think the way Huey thinks. Huey’s always got two, three, four things going on at once. He put ’em in a shelter. Salt mines. Louisiana’s got these huge underground salt mines. Underground mineral deposits twice the size of Mount Everest. They were dug out for a hundred years. They got huge vaults down there, caves as big as suburbs, with thousand-foot ceilings. Nowadays, nobody mines salt anymore. Salt’s cheaper than dirt now, because of seawater distilleries. So there’s no more market for Louisiana salt. Just another dead industry here, like oil. We dug it all up and sold it, and all we got left is nothing. Giant airtight caverns full of nothing, way down deep in the crust of the earth. Well, what use are they now? Well, one big use. Because you can’t see nothing. There’s no satellite surveillance for giant underground caves. Huey hid that Haitian cult in one of those giant mines for a couple of years. He was workin’ on ’em in secret, with all his other hot underground projects. Like the giant catfish, and the fuel yeast, and the coelacanths …”
Kevin spoke up. “ ‘Coelacanths’?”
“Living fossil fish from Madagascar, son. Older than dinosaurs. They got genetics like fish from another planet. Real primitive and hardy. You nick off chunks from the deep past, and you splice it in the middle of next week—that’s Huey’s recipe for the gumbo future.”
Oscar wiped spray from his waterproof flight suit. “So he’s done this strange thing to the Haitians as some kind of pilot project.”
“Yeah. And you know what? Huey’s right.”
“He is?”
“Yep. Huey’s awful wrong about the little things, but he’s so right about the big picture, that the rest of it just don’t matter. You see, Louisiana really is the future. Someday soon, the whole world is gonna be just like Louisiana. Because the seas are rising, and Louisiana is a giant swamp. The world of the future is a big, hot, Greenhouse swamp. Full of half-educated, half-breed people, who don’t speak English, and didn’t forget to have children. Plus, they are totally thrilled about biotechnology. That’s what tomorrow’s world is gonna look like—not just America, mind you, the whole world. Hot, humid, old, crooked, half-forgotten, kind of rotten. The leaders are corrupt, everybody’s on the take. It’s bad, really bad, even worse than it sounds.”
Fontenot suddenly grinned. “But you know what? It’s doable, it’s livable! The fishing’s good! The food is great! The women are good-lookin’, and the music really swings!”
They struggled for two hours to reach the refugee encampment. The hovercraft bulled its way through reed-beds, scraped over spits of saw grass and sticky black mud. The Haitian camp had been cannily established on an island reachable only by aircraft—or by a very determined amphibious boat.
They skirted up onto the solid earth, and left their hovercraft, and walked through knee-high weeds.
Oscar had imagined the worst: klieg lights, watch-towers, barbed wire, and vicious dogs. But the Haitian émigré village was not an armed camp. The place was basically an ashram, a little handmade religious retreat. It was a modest, quiet, rural settlement of neatly whitewashed log houses.
The village was a sizable compound for six or seven hundred people, many of them children. The village had no electricity, no plumbing, no satellite dishes, no roads, no cars, no telephones, and no aircraft. It was silent