Distraction - Bruce Sterling [210]
Huey’s supine State Senate swiftly installed an entirely new Governor. She was a spectacular young black woman from New Orleans, a former beauty queen, a woman of such untoward and astonishing lithe beauty (for a state chief executive, at least) that the world’s cameras simply could not keep their lenses off her.
The new Governor’s first act as chief executive was to issue blanket pardons to all members of the former state government, including, first and foremost, Green Huey. Her second act was to formalize Louisiana’s state relationships—“formal and informal”—with the Regulators. The Regulators would henceforth be loyal local members of a statewide CDIA, directly modeled on the federal agency that the wise President in his infinite mercy had imposed on the American Republic. It was pointed out that some Haitian guests of the State of Louisiana were still being held by their federal captors, and the new Governor, being of Haitian extraction herself, asked that they be granted clemency.
An enterprising news team—obviously tipped off—managed to locate and interview some of the Haitian subjects, who had been waiting out the days and hours in their federal medical kraal. The Haitians, having been ripped from their homes and medically probed from stem to stern, naturally expressed a devout wish to return to their swamp compound. It was a very poetic set of pleas, even when crossing the boundaries of translation. But at the end of the day, they were just Haitians, so no one felt much need to pay attention to their wishes. They stayed in their illegal-migrant slammer, while the President waited for the ex-Governor’s next shoe to drop.
On the issue of the Buna National Collaboratory and its frenetic reformers, the President did and said precisely nothing. The President apparently had bigger and better matters on his mind—and this President was in a position to see to it that his interests seized and held the limelight.
With the sudden and stunning end of the War, the mad immigration into Buna slowed to a crawl. Then, it began to reverse itself. People had seen enough. The gawkers, and the fakers, and the most easily distracted trendies, began to realize that a glamorous, noncommercial, intellectual-dissident Greenhouse Society was simply not for everyone. Living there was going to involve a lot of work. The mere fact that money was not involved did not signify that work was not involved; the truth was the exact opposite. This congelation of science and mass economic defection was going to require brutal amounts of dedicated labor, constant selfless effort, much of it by necessity wasted on experiments that washed out, on roads that were better not taken, on intellectually sexy notions that became blinding cul-de-sacs.
Beneath the fluttering party streamers, there was going to be serious science in Buna: “Science” with a new obsessive potency, because it was art pour l’art, science for its own sake. It was science as the chosen pursuit of that small demographic fraction that was entirely consumed by intellectual curiosity. But the hot air of revolutionary fervor would leak from their bubble, and the chill air of reality would leave it somewhat clammy, and unpleasant to the touch.
Work on the newly renamed Normalcy Committee, by its very nature, somehow lacked the brio attendant on Emergency and War. The work had always been exhausting, but the attendees had rarely been bored.
Now Greta and Oscar were discovering brief moments when they could think for themselves. Moments when they could speak, and not for public consumption. Moments when business took the rest of the Committee quorum elsewhere. Moments when they were alone.
Oscar gazed around the empty boardroom. The place looked the way his soul felt: drained, overlit, empty, spattered with official detritus.
“This is it, Greta. The campaign’s finally over. We’ve won. We’re in power. We have to settle down now,