Distraction - Bruce Sterling [58]
“This bed’s very rickety,” she said politely. “It really squeaks.”
“I should have bought a new one.”
“You can’t buy an entire new bed just for one night.”
“I can’t help the one night; I leave for Washington tomorrow.”
She levered herself up in the shiny sheets. Her china-white shoulders had a fine network of little blue veins. “What are you going to tell them in Washington?”
“What do you want me to tell them in Washington?”
“Tell them the truth.”
“You always tell me that you want the truth, Greta. But do you know what it means when you get it?”
“Of course I want the truth. I always want the truth. No matter what.”
“All right, then I’ll give you some truth.” He laced his hands behind his head, drew a breath, and stared at the ceiling. “Your laboratory was built by a politician who was deeply corrupt. Texas lost the space program when it shut down. They never quite made the big time in digital. So they tried very hard to move into biotech. But East Texas was the stupidest place in the world to build a genetics lab. They could have built it in Stanford, they could have built it in Raleigh, they could have built it on Route 128. But Dougal convinced them to build it miles from nowhere, in the deep piney woods. He used the worst kind of Luddite panic tactics. He convinced Congress to fund a giant airtight biohazard dome, with every possible fail-safe device, just so he could line the pockets of a big gang of military contractors who’d fallen off their gravy train and needed the federal contracts. And the locals loved him for that. They voted him in again and again, even though they had no idea what biotechnology was or what it really meant. The people of East Texas were simply too backward to build a genetic industry base, even with a massive pork-barrel jump start. So all the spin-offs moved over the state border, and they ended up in the pockets of Dougal’s very best pal and disciple, a ruthless demagogue from Cajun country. Green Huey is a populist of the worst sort. He really thinks that genetic engineering belongs by right in the hands of semiliterate swamp-dwellers.”
He glanced at her. She was listening.
“So Huey deliberately—and this took a weird kind of genius, I’ll admit this—he deliberately boiled down your lab’s best research discoveries into plug-and-play recipes that any twelve-year-old child could use. He took over a bunch of defunct Louisiana oil refineries, and he turned those dead refineries into giant bubbling cauldrons of genetic voodoo. Huey declared all of Louisiana a free-fire zone for unlicensed DNA gumbo. And you know something? Louisianans are extremely good at the work. They took to gene-splicing like muskrats to water. They have a real native gift for the industry. They love it! They love Huey for giving it to them. Huey gave them a new future, and they made him a king. Now he’s power-mad, he basically rules the state by decree. Nobody dares to question him.”
She had gone very pale.
“The Texans never voted Dougal out of office. Texans would never do that. They don’t care how much he stole, he’s their patron, the alcalde, the godfather, he stole it all for Texas, so that’s good enough for them. No, the damn guy just drank himself stupid. He kept boozing till he blew out his liver, and couldn’t make a quorum call anymore. So now Dougal’s finally out of the picture for good. So do you know what that means to you?”
“What?” she said flatly.
“It means your party’s almost over. It costs a fortune to run that giant cucumber-frame, much more than the place is really worth to anybody, and the country is broke. If you’re going to do genetic research nowadays, you can do it very cheaply, in very simple buildings. In somebody else’s constituency.”
“But there’s