Distraction - Bruce Sterling [202]
“ ‘Oh, that’s bad news. That’s terribly bad news. It’s awful. It’s the very worst.’
“ ‘Well, it’s not all bad; when we dredged him up outta the mud, we came up with two big gunnysacks of big blue crabs!’
“ ‘Well, at least you found his poor body.… Where have you put my boyfriend?’
“ ‘Well, beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but we never done so good on the crabs before, so we figured we’d leave him down there just one more day!’ ”
That was a pretty good political joke for such a small community—especially when its subtext was analyzed. Like most political jokes, it was all about displaced aggression, and it was the aggression against him that was being fed to the crabs here. The joke was popular, and it was a signifier. And the punch line was very clear: he was going to get away with it. People didn’t fear or hate him the way they feared and hated Huey. He was both a politician and a monster, and yet people, in an odd and marginal way, had come to sympathize with him.
Oscar had reached the peak of his public reputation. Proof of this came when the President was asked about the sex scandal—and about Oscar’s role within the NSC. Here was the President’s main chance to drop him overboard and silently feed him to the swamp crabs; but the President chose otherwise. The President pointed out—properly enough—that a man couldn’t be expected to do anything about the fact that he was the illegal product of a South American mafia genetics lab. The President said that it smelled of hypocrisy to hold such a man to persnickety standards of sexual correctness—especially when other public figures had deliberately chosen to warp their own brain tissue. The President further declared that he himself was “a human being.” And that, “as a human being,” when he saw lovers persecuted, the spectacle “stuck in my craw.”
The press conference then returned to the hotter issue of the Dutch War, but the President’s aside went over very well. Certain demographic segments were becoming alarmed with the President’s relentless strong-arm tactics and his feral pursuit of domestic opponents. This sudden revelation of a sentimental softer side was an excellent tactical play.
Oscar had reached a great career moment. The President had publicly played the Oscar card. In thinking the matter over, Oscar knew what this meant. It meant that he was burned. He had had his moment in this poker round, he had thumped down like a minor trump on the green baize. If played again, he would be dog-eared. Time to shuffle back into the pack.
So: thus high, but no higher. The lethal subtext of the President’s statement had made that clear to him. He was useful, he was even cute; but on some profound level, he was not trusted. He would never become a pillar of the American state.
Within Buna, Oscar had less and less of a role. He had been an agitator, and instigator, and a gray eminence, but he could never be king. Greta could leverage her own fame now. She had issued a public appeal for aid and assistance, and like a boozy cry to “come to Montmartre,” the cry brought a tidal wave of national response. Bombs or no bombs, Huey or no Huey, President or no President, Buna was going to become a Greenhouse metropolis. The place was an intellectual magnet for every species of dreamer, faker, failed grad student, techie washout, downsized burnout; every guru, costumed geek, ditzy theorist, and bug collector; every microscope peerer, model-rocket builder, and gnarly simulationist; every code-dazed hacker, architectural designer; everyone, in short, who had ever been downgraded, denied, and excluded by their society’s sick demand that their wondrous ideas should make commercial sense.
With all this yeast gathered in one place, the very earth would rise. Some who arrived were enemies. Arsonists burned the city’s greenbelt; the sappy pines blew up like Roman candles and a ghastly pall of smoke polluted Texas for miles downwind. But when those flames died, the new society moved onto the blackened acres and consumed them utterly. In the grinding hoppers of the biohackers,