Distraction - Bruce Sterling [62]
Greta began to spin the narrow stem of her wineglass, which he had filled with mineral water in order to forestall more gin. “Oscar, how are we going to work this? I mean us.”
“Oh, our liaison is technically unethical, but it doesn’t quite count when you’re unethical away from the action. You’ll be going back to your work, and I’m going to the East Coast. But I’ll be back later, and we can arrange something discreet.”
“That’s how this works, in your circles?”
“When it works.… It’s accepted. Like, say, the President and his mistress.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Leonard Two Feathers has a mistress?”
“No, no, not him! I mean the old guy, the man who’s still officially President. He had this girlfriend—Pamela something, you don’t need to know her last name.… She’ll wait till he’s safely out of office. Then she’ll license the tell-all book, the fragrance, the lingerie, the various ancillary rights.… It’s her cash-out money.”
“What does the First Lady think of all that?”
“I imagine she thinks what First Ladies always think. She thought she’d be an instant co-President, and then she had to watch for four long years while the Emergency committees staked her guy out in public and pithed him like a frog. That’s the real tragedy of it. You know, I had no use for that guy as a politician, but I still hated watching that process. The old guy looked okay when he took office. He was eighty-two years old, but hey, everybody in the Party of American Unity is old, the whole Right Progressive Bloc has a very aged demographic.… The job just broke him, that’s all. It just snapped his poor old bones right there in public. I guess they could have outed him on the thousand-year-old girlfriend issue, but with all the truly serious troubles the President had, trashing his sex life was overkill.”
“I never knew about any of that.”
“People know. Somebody always knows. The man’s krewe always knows. The Secret Service knows. That doesn’t mean you can get people to make a public issue of it. Nets are really peculiar. They’re never smooth and uniform, they’re always lumpy. There are probably creeps somewhere who have surveillance video of the President with Pamela. Maybe they’re swapping it around, trading it for paparazzi shots of Hollywood stars. It doesn’t matter. My dad the movie star, he used to get outed all the time, but they were always such silly things—he got outed once for punching some guy at a polo club, but he never got outed for playing footsie with mobsters. Crazy people with time on their hands can learn a lot of weird things on the net. But they’re still crazy people, no matter how much they learn. They’re not players, so they just don’t count.”
“And I’m not a player, so I just don’t count.”
“Don’t take it badly. None of your people ever counted. Senator Dougal, he was your player. Your player is gone now, so you have nothing left on the game board. That’s political reality.”
“I see.”
“You can vote, you know. You’re a citizen. You have one vote. That’s important.”
“Right.”
They laughed.
They had consommé. Then the waiter brought the main dish.
“Smells wonderful,” Oscar said. “Got a lobster bib? Claw cracker? Hammer, maybe?” He had a closer look at the dish. “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with my lobster?”
“That’s your écrevisse.”
“What is it, exactly?”
“Crayfish. Crawdad. A freshwater lobster.”
“What’s with these claws? The tail’s all wrong.”
“It’s domestic. Natural crawdads are only three inches long. They stitched its genetics. That’s a local specialty.”
Oscar stared at the boiled crustacean in its bed of yellow rice. His dinner was a giant genetic mutant. Its proportions seemed profoundly wrong to him. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. Certainly he’d eaten his share of genetically altered crops: corncobs half the size of his arm, UltraPlump zucchinis, tasty mottled brocco-cauliflowers, seedless apples, seedless everything, really.… But here was an entire gene-warped animal boiled alive and delivered in one piece. It looked fantastic, utterly unreal. It was like a lobster-shaped child