Distraction - Bruce Sterling [186]
No one was hurrying, but everyone seemed to have something to do. These people were engaged in an ancient peasant round of pre-industrial agriculture. They were literally living off the land—not by chewing up the landscape and transmuting it in sludge tanks, but by gardening it with hand tools. These were strange, museumlike activities. Oscar had read about them in books and seen them in documentaries, but he’d never witnessed them performed in real life. Genuinely archaic pursuits, like blacksmithing and yarn-spinning.
It was all about neatly tended little garden plots, swarming compost heaps, night soil in stinking wooden buckets. The locals had a lot of chickens. The chickens were all genetically identical. The birds were all the very same chicken, reissued in various growth stages. They also had multiple copies of a standard-issue goat. This was a hardy, bearded devil-eyed creature, a Nietzschean superman among goats, and there were herds of it. They had big spiraling vines of snap beans, monster corn, big hairy okra, monster yellow gourds, rock-hard bamboo, a little sugarcane. Some of the locals were fishermen. Sometime back, they had successfully landed a frightening leathery creature, now a skeletal mass of wrist-thick fish bones. The skeleton sported baleen plates the size of a car grille.
The communards wore homespun clothes. The men had crude straw hats, collarless buttoned vests, drawstring trousers. The women wore ankle-length shifts, white aprons, and big trailing sunbonnets.
They were perfectly friendly, but distant. It seemed that no one could be much bothered with visitors. They were all intensely preoccupied with their daily affairs. However, a small crowd of curious children formed and began trailing the three of them, mimicking them behind their backs, and giggling at them.
“I don’t get this,” Kevin said. “I thought this was some kind of concentration camp. These folks are doing just fine here.”
Fontenot nodded grudgingly. “Yeah, it was meant to be attractive. It’s a Green, sustainable farm project. You bump people’s productivity up with improved crops and animals—but no fuel combustion, no more carbon dioxide. Maybe someday they go back to Haiti and teach everybody to live this way.”
“That wouldn’t work,” Oscar said.
“Why not?” said Kevin.
“Because the Dutch have been trying that for years. Everybody in the advanced world thinks they can reinvent peasant life and keep tribal people ignorant and happy. Appropriate-tech just doesn’t work. Because peasant life is boring.”
“Yeah,” Fontenot said. “That’s exactly what tipped me off, too. They oughta be jamming around us asking for cash and transistor radios, just like any peasant always does for a tourist from the USA. But they can’t even be bothered to look at us. So, listen. You hear that kinda muttering sound?”
“You mean those hymns?” Oscar said.
“Oh, they sing hymns all right. But mostly, they pray. All the adults pray, men and women. They all pray, all the time. I mean to say, all the time, Oscar.”
Fontenot paused. “Y’know, outside people do make it over here every once in a while. Hunters, fishermen … I heard some stories. They all think these folks are just real religious, you know, weird voodoo Haitians. But that ain’t it. See, I was Secret Service. I spent years of my life searching through crowds, looking for crazy people. We’re real big on psychoanalysis in my old line of work. That’s why I know for a fact that there’s something really wrong in the heads of these people. It isn’t psychosis. It’s not drugs, either. Religion’s got something to do with it—but it’s not just religion. Something has been done to them.”
“Neural something,” Oscar said.
“Yeah. They know they’re different, too. They know that something happened to them, down in that salt mine. But they think it was a holy revelation. The spirit flew into their heads—they call it the ‘second-born spirit,’ or ‘the born-again spirit.” ’ Fontenot removed his hat