Distraction - Bruce Sterling [40]
“I understand.”
“You need to come to terms with this. It’s reality. It’s real, and you have to adjust to it, but at the same time, you can’t let it stop you.”
Oscar said nothing.
“The sky is a different color when you know that you might get shot at. Things taste different. It can get to you, make you wonder if a public life’s worthwhile. But you know, despite stuff like this, this is not an evil or violent society.” Fontenot shrugged. “Really, it isn’t. Not anymore. Back when I was a young agent, America was truly violent then. Huge crime rates, crazy drug gangs, automatic weapons very cheap and easy. Miserable, angry, pitiful people. People with grudges, people with a lot of hate inside. But nowadays, this just isn’t a violent time anymore. It’s just a very weird time. People don’t fight real hard for anything in particular, when they know their whole lives could be turned inside out in a week flat. People’s lives don’t make sense anymore, but most people in America, the poor people especially, they’re a lot happier than they used to be. They might be profoundly lost, like your Senator likes to say, but they’re not all crushed and desperate. They’re just … wandering around. Drifting. Hanging loose. They’re at very loose ends.”
“Maybe.”
“If you lie low awhile, this business will pass right over you. You’ll move on to Boston or Washington, on to other issues, out of Huey’s hair. Automated hit lists are like barbed wire, they’re nasty but they’re very stupid. They don’t even understand what they read. Once you’re yesterday’s news, the machines will just forget you.”
“I don’t intend to become yesterday’s news for quite a while, Jules.”
“Then you’d better learn how famous people go on living.”
Oscar was determined not to have his morale affected by Fontenot’s security alarm. He went back to work on the hotel. The hotel was coming along with the usual fairytale rapidity of a Bambakias structure. The whole krewe was pitching in; they had all been infected by the Bambakias ideology, so they all protested stoutly to one another that they wouldn’t miss the fun of construction for anything.
Strangely enough, the work really did become fun, in its own way; there was a rich sense of schadenfreude in fully sharing the sufferings of others. The system logged the movements of everyone’s hands, cruelly eliminating any easy method of deceiving your friends while you yourself slacked off work. Distributed instantiation was fun in the way that hard-core team sports were fun. Balconies flew up, archways and pillars rose, random jumbles crystallized into spacious sense and reason. It was like lashing your way up a mountainside in cables and crampons, only to notice, all sudden and gratuitous, a fine and lovely view.
There were certain set-piece construction activities guaranteed to attract an admiring crowd: the tightening of tensegrity cables, for instance, that turned a loose skein of blocks into a solidly locked-together parapet, good for the next three hundred years. Bambakias krewes took elaborate pleasure in these theatrical effects. The krewe would vigorously play to the crowd when they were doing the boring stuff, they would ham it up. But during these emergent moments when the system worked serious magic, they would kick back all loose and indifferent, with the heavy-lidded cool of twentieth-century jazz musicians.
Oscar was a political consultant. He made it his business to appreciate a crowd. He felt about a good crowd the way he imagined dirt farmers feeling about a thriving field of watermelons. However, he had a hard time conjuring up his usual warm appreciation when