Distraction - Bruce Sterling [4]
Oscar possessed goals, a mission, options, tactics, and a future. The other campaign staffers lacked all these things. Oscar knew this. He knew all of these people only too well. During the past eighteen months, Oscar had recruited them, assembled them, paid them, managed them, flattered and cajoled them, welded them into a working unit. He’d rented their office space, overlooked their expense accounts, given them job titles, managed their access to the candidate, even mediated over substance-abuse problems and romantic entanglements. Finally, he’d led them all to victory.
Oscar was still a locus of power, so his krewe was instinctively migrating in his wake. They were “on vacation,” professional political operatives hoping for something to turn up. But the esprit de corps in Oscar’s entourage had all the tensile strength of a fortune cookie.
Oscar fetched his oxblood-leather shoulder satchel and, after mature consideration, tucked in a small non-lethal spraygun. Yosh Pelicanos, Oscar’s majordomo and bagman, passed him a fat debit card. Pelicanos was visibly tired, and still somewhat hungover from the prolonged celebration, but he was up and alert. As Oscar’s official second-in-command, Pelicanos always made it a point to be publicly counted on.
“I’ll go with you,” Pelicanos muttered, hunting for his hat. “Let me get properly dressed.”
“You stay, Yosh,” Oscar told him quietly. “We’re a long way from home. You keep an eye peeled back here.”
“I’ll get a coffee.” Pelicanos yawned, and reflexively clicked on a satellite news feed, erasing a bus window in a gush of networked data. He began hunting for his shoes.
“I’ll go with you!” Norman insisted brightly. “C’mon, Oscar, let me go!” Norman-the-Intern was the campaign’s last remaining gofer. The busy Bambakias campaign had once boasted a full three dozen interns, but all of the campaign’s other unpaid volunteers had stayed behind in Boston. Norman-the-Intern, however, an MIT college lad, had stuck around like a burr, laboring fanatically and absorbing inhuman levels of abuse. The campaign krewe had brought Norman along with them “on vacation,” more through habit than through any conscious decision.
The door opened with a harsh pneumatic pop. Oscar and Norman stepped outside their bus for the first time in four states. After hundreds of hours inside their vehicle, stepping onto earth was like decamping onto another planet. Oscar noted with vague surprise that the highway’s patchy shoulders were paved with tons of crunchy oyster shells.
The tall roadside ditchweed was wind-flattened and brownish green. The wind came from the east, bearing the reek of distant sulphur—a bioindustrial reek. A stink like a monster gene-spliced brewery: like rabid bread yeasts eating new-mowed grass. A white V of departing egrets stenciled the cloudy sky overhead. It was late November 2044, and southwest Louisiana was making halfhearted preparations for winter. Clearly this wasn’t the kind of winter that anyone from Massachusetts would recognize.
Norman alertly fetched a motorbike from the rack on the back of the bus. The bikes were designed and sold in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and were covered with union labels, antilitigation safety warnings, and software Cheatsheet stickers. It was very typical of Bambakias to buy motor bicycles with more onboard smarts than a transcontinental airliner.
Norman hooked up the sidecar, and checked the battery. “No hotdogging,” Oscar warned him, clambering into the sidecar and placing his hat in his lap. They tugged on dainty foam helmets, then pulled onto the highway behind a passing electric flatbed.
Norman, as always, drove like a maniac. Norman was young. He had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering