Distraction - Bruce Sterling [66]
Oscar checked the windows to make sure they were shut and curtained, then stared at her. All unknowing, his feelings about her had undergone a deep and turbulent sea change. His encounter with the Governor had roiled him inside. He was all stirred and clotted now. He was passionate. He felt aggressive and possessive. He was sick with jealousy. “Are you going to sleep in that?”
“Yes. My feet always get so cold at night.”
Oscar shook his head. “You’re not going to sleep in that. And we won’t use the bed. This time, we’ll use the floor.”
She examined the floor. It had a lovely hooked rug. She looked up at him, her face flushed to the ears.
He woke just after dawn. He was asleep on the rug. Greta had stripped the bed and placed the sheet and coverlet over him. She was sitting at the bureau, scribbling in her notebook.
Oscar slowly examined the water-stained ceiling. His kneecaps were rug-burned. His back felt sore. There was a slimy damp spot congealing under his hip. He felt truly at peace with himself for the first time in weeks.
5
Without the services of Fontenot to scope out trouble and smooth his way, Oscar found travel difficult. Traffic in Alabama was snarled by manic Christian tent-revival shows, “breathing fresh life into the spirit” with two-hundred-beat-per-minute gospel raves. In Tennessee, Oscar’s progress was stymied by battalions of Mexican migrant workers, battling the raging kudzu hands-on, with pick and shovel. Oscar was enjoying the relative safety of a bogus biohazard bus, but there were circumstances when even this couldn’t help him.
But while Lana, Donna, and Moira grew bored in the bus and often petulant, Oscar was never idle. As long as he had his laptop and a net-link, the world was his oyster. He tended his finances. He memorized the dossiers of his fellow staffers on the Senate Science Committee. He traded mash email with Greta. Greta was particularly good with email. She mostly spoke about her work—work was the core of Greta’s being—but there were entire paragraphs now in which he was actually comprehending what she said.
Political news ran constantly on the bus’s back windows. Oscar made a special point of following the many ramifications of Bambakias’s hunger strike.
Developments in the scandal were rapid and profound. By the time Oscar reached the outskirts of Washington, DC, the Louisiana air base had been placed under siege.
The base’s electrical power supply had long since been cut off for lack of payment. The aircraft had no fuel. The desperate federal troops were bartering stolen equipment for food and booze. Desertion was rampant. The air base commander had released a sobbing video confession and had shot himself.
Green Huey had lost patience with the long-festering scandal. He was moving in for the kill. Attacking and seizing a federal air base with his loyal state militia would have been entirely too blatant and straightforward. Instead, the rogue Governor employed proxy guerrillas.
Huey had won the favor of nomad prole groups by providing them with safe havens. He allowed them to squat in Louisiana’s many federally declared contamination zones. These forgotten landscapes were tainted with petrochemical effluent and hormone-warping pesticides, and were hence officially unfit for human settlement. The prole hordes had different opinions on that subject.
Proles cheerfully grouped in any locale where conventional authority had grown weak. Whenever the net-based proles were not consistently harassed by the authorities, they coalesced and grew ambitious. Though easily scattered by focused crackdowns, they regrouped as swiftly as a horde of gnats. With their reaping machines and bio-breweries, they could live off the land at the very base of the food chain. They had no stake in the established order, and they cherished a canny street-level knowledge of society’s infrastructural weaknesses. They made expensive enemies.
Nomad proles didn’t flourish in densely urbanized locales like Massachusetts, where video surveillance