Distraction - Bruce Sterling [201]
Then two more paint bombs arrived. These were better-aimed. They hit the Collaboratory dead on—it was a large target—and splattered the glass sky with black muck. The dome’s interior light became dim and scary, the temperature dropped, the plants and animals suffered, and the people were grim and enraged. Confronted with this direct insult, their will to resist stiffened drastically. It was personal now—they could see the evil slur against them, hovering above their heads.
All debate stopped. There was no longer time for talk, and the decision was a fait accompli. Everyone simply began contributing everything they could all at the same time. They dropped all other efforts. When projects overlapped or interfered, they simply tore the little one down and built the more ambitious one. The town of Buna as people had previously known it simply ceased to exist. The dome metastasized; it sent out giant filmy buttresses on Daliesque walking stilts. The greenhouses of Buna linked together spontaneously into endless ramparts and tunnels. City blocks transmuted overnight into gleaming fields of plastic soap bubbles. Airtight brick crypts and bomb shelters sprang up everywhere, like measles.
Huey chose this moment to launch a well-documented outing attack on Oscar and Greta. There was no denying it this time. It was sordid and painful, but Huey’s timing could not have been worse. In a time of peace, it would have been politically disastrous to learn that a Machiavellian campaign adviser (of dubious genetic heritage) had fiendishly installed his girlfriend as the quasi-dictator of a federal science facility, while she paid him off with sexual favors in a Louisiana beach house.
In Washington, the news caused some alarm; pundits issued some obligatory tut-tutting; elderly male scientists were interviewed, who declared that it was truly a shame to see a woman sleep her way to the top. But in Buna, the War was on. The revelation, which was no revelation to anyone in Buna, was a war romance. All was instantly forgiven. Oscar and Greta were practically pitched into each other’s arms by the sheer pressure of public goodwill.
Ancient social boundaries snapped under the strain of war. Wartime affairs broke out like chicken pox: scientists, Moderator women, dashing European journalists, chicken-fried Buna locals, even the military was having sex. It was just too much to ask of human beings that they work shoulder to shoulder and cheek by jowl under the constant expectation of a mind-crushing gas attack while, somehow, avoiding sex with strangers.
Besides, their leaders were doing it. It was happening. It was a suddenly public declaration of their society’s unsuspected potency. Of course they were breaking the rules; that was what every sane person was doing, that was what the effort was all about. Of course the lab’s Director was having hot sex with the genetically warped politician. She was their painted Joan of Arc, the armored bride of the science wars.
People even made jokes about it. The jokes were loyally relayed to Oscar by Fred Dillen, one of his last remaining krewe members, who had been trained to understand that political jokes were valuable.
Fred presented him with a Greta-and-Oscar political joke.
“See, Greta and Oscar have sneaked off to Louisiana to have sex in the middle of a swamp. So they hire a bass boat and they paddle way out in the middle of nowhere where there aren’t any spies or bugs. So they’re getting it on inside the boat, but Oscar gets overexcited, and he falls in the water. And he doesn’t come back up.
“So Greta paddles back alone, and tries to get some help from some swamp Cajuns, but there’s just no sign of Oscar. So she waits for a whole week, and finally the Cajuns come over to see her again. ‘Well, Dr. Penninger, we got some good news and we got some bad news.’
“ ‘Give me the bad news first.’
“ ‘Well, we found your boyfriend the genetic freak, but we’re afraid