Distraction - Bruce Sterling [23]
“Then she is bored,” Oscar said. “She’s bored by her job. That’s very interesting. Make a note of that, Audrey.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Let’s have her for dinner.”
Oscar had arranged a bus outing, a picnic for part of his krewe. It helped to maintain the thin fiction of “vacation,” and it got them away from the fog of mechanical surveillance, and best of all, it offered some relief from the psychic oppression of the Collaboratory dome.
They took the campaign bus to a roadside stop near a bedraggled state park called Big Thicket. This Thicket was a surprisingly large area of Texas that had somehow escaped farming and settlement. It didn’t seem entirely right to call the place an “unspoiled wilderness,” since climate change had battered it considerably; but for people from Massachusetts the Texas-sized mess was a pleasing novelty.
The day was overcast and damp, even a little raw, but it was pleasant to encounter weather of any sort. The gusting wind through the Thicket park wasn’t “fresh air” exactly—the air of East Texas was considerably less fresh than the manicured air inside the Collaboratory—but it had a wide-screen smell, the reek of a world that possessed horizons. Besides, the picnickers had Fontenot’s big portable gas stove to keep them warm. Fontenot had just bought the stove, well used, from the proprietor of a Cajun boucherie in Mamou. The stove was made of disassembled oil barrels, heat-scorched tin sheeting, and brassnozzled propane burners. It looked as if it had been welded into shape by Mardi Gras drunks.
It was good to chat and make a few unsupervised phone calls, well outside of the Collaboratory. Bugs were so cheap these days—when cellphones cost less than a six-pack of beer, covert listening devices were as cheap as confetti. But a cheap bug wouldn’t be able to radiate data sixty miles back to Buna. An expensive bug would be caught by Fontenot’s expensive monitors. This meant that everyone could talk.
“So, how’s the new house doing, Jules?”
“Coming along, coming along,” Fontenot said contentedly. “You should come see my place. We’ll take out my brand-new boat. Have us a good old time.”
“I’d enjoy that,” Oscar lied tactfully.
Fontenot dumped chopped basil and onion into his simmering roux, then went after the sizzling mess with a wire whisk. “Y’all mind opening that ice chest?”
Oscar rose from the chest and opened its insulated lid. “What do you need?”
“Those eishters.”
“The what?”
“Aishters.”
“What?”
“He means the oysters,” said Negi Estabrook.
“Right,” said Oscar. He located an iced bag of shellfish.
“You brang that to a rollin’ boil now,” Fontenot advised Negi, in his broadest and most magisterial Cajun drawl. “A little dab more of that pepper sauce. It’ll forgive as it come along.”
“I can make a soup, Jules,” Negi announced tautly. “I have a degree in nutrition.”
“Not a Cajun soup, girl.”
“Cajun is not a difficult cuisine,” said Negi patiently. Negi was sixty years old, and Fontenot was the only member of the krewe who would dare to call her “girl.” “Basically, Cajun is very old-fashioned French peasant cooking. With way too much pepper. And lard. Tons of unhealthy lard.”
Fontenot pulled a face. “Y’all hear that? She does that on purpose just to hurt my feelings.”
Negi laughed. “As if!”
“You know,” Oscar said, “I had a good idea recently.”
“Do tell,” said Fontenot.
“Our dorm situation inside the Collaboratory is clearly untenable. And the town of Buna can’t put us up properly, either. Buna’s never been a proper city: it’s greenhouses, florists, seedy little motels, some run-down light industry. The town just doesn’t have a proper place for us to stay; a place where we could entertain a visiting Senate committee, for instance. So, let’s build our own hotel.”
Fred Dillen, the krewe’s laundryman/janitor, put down his beer. “Our own hotel?”
“Why not? We’ve relaxed in Buna for two whole weeks now. We have our breath back. It’s time for us to reorganize