Distraction - Bruce Sterling [200]
Huey denied all knowledge of any missiles in Louisiana. He stoutly denied that he had anything to do with black paint. He made fun of the ridiculous antics of the war-crazed populace—which didn’t require much effort—and suggested that it proved that the federal government had lost its grip. Huey’s two Senators had both been purged from the Senate, which was behaving with more purpose than it had managed to show for years; but this allowed Huey to wash his hands of Washington entirely.
Huey’s mood darkened drastically after his own bomb attack. One of Huey’s trusted henchmen had planted an explosive briefcase inside the statehouse. Huey’s left arm was broken in the explosion, and two of his state senators were killed. This was not the first conspiracy against Huey’s life; it was far from the first attempt to kill him. But it was the closest to success.
Naturally the President was suspected. Oscar very much doubted that the President would have stooped to a tactic so archaic and crude. The failed assassination actually strengthened Huey’s hand—and his hand came down hard on Louisianans, and on the Regulator hierarchy in particular. It was of course Louisianans who had the greatest reason to kill their leader, who in pursuit of his own ambitions had placed their state in a hopeless struggle against the entire Union. The Regulators in particular—Huey’s favorite fall guys—had a grim future ahead of them, if and when they faced federal vengeance. Regulators from outside Louisiana—and there were many such—were sensing which way the wind blew, and were signing up in droves for the quasi-legitimacy of the President’s CDIA. Huey had been good to the proles, he had made them a force to be reckoned with—but even proles understood power politics. Why go down in flames with a Governor, when you could rise to the heights with a President?
The missile attack had one profound and lasting consequence. It jarred the Collaboratory from its sense of helplessness. It was now quite obvious to everyone that the War was truly on. The black paint had been the first shot, and the likelihood was quite strong that the city of Buna would in fact be gassed. The prospect of choking in a silent black fog while surrounded by neighbors turned into maniacs—this prospect had clarified people’s minds quite wonderfully.
The Collaboratory was airtight. It was safe from gas; but it couldn’t hold everyone.
The obvious answer was to launch an architectural sortie. The fortress should be extended over the entire city.
Construction plans were immediately dusted off. Money and rights-of-way were suddenly no problem. Locals, wanderers, soldiers, scientists, Moderators, men, women, and children, they were one and all simply drafted into the effort.
All these factions had different ideas of how to tackle the problem. The gypsy Moderators understood big-top tents and teepees. The people of Buna were very big on their bio-agricultural greenhouses. The SO/LIC soldiers, who were trained in environmental disaster response, were experts at sandbags, quonset huts, soup kitchens, latrines, and potable water supplies. For their own part, the techies of the Collaboratory flew into a strange furor over the plans of Alcott Bambakias. The scientists were long-used to the security of their armored dome, but it had never occurred to them that the rigid substance of their shelter might become cheap, smart, and infinitely distensible networks. This was architecture as airtight ephemera: structure like a dewy spiderweb: smart, hypersensitive, always calculating, always on the move. There seemed to be no limit to the scale of it. The dome could become a living fluid, a kind of decentered, membranous amoeba.
It would have seemed sensible to weigh the alternatives carefully, hold safety hearings, have competitive bids submitted, and then, finally, engage in a major building project. The mayor