Distraction - Bruce Sterling [78]
“Yes, Lorena,” the house system said.
“Would you send down the screen, please.”
“Yes, Lorena, right away.”
“I can’t employ a full-service krewe in this little place,” Lorena apologized. “So I had to install automation. It’s just a baby system now, so it’s still very fresh and stupid. There’s no such thing as a truly smart house, no matter how much you train them.”
A walnut television cabinet came walking down the carpeted stairs.
“That’s a lovely cabinet,” Oscar said. “I’ve never seen responsive furniture done in a Federal Period idiom.”
The television trundled down the stairs and paused, assessing the layout of the room. After a meditative moment, two curve-legged chairs flexed themselves like wooden spiders, and shuffled out of its way. Lorena’s couch did a little tango and sidestep. The tea trolley rolled aside with a jingle. The television sidled up before the two of them, and presented itself for convenient viewing.
“My goodness, they’re all responsive,” Oscar said. “I could have sworn those were wooden legs.”
“They are wooden. Well … they’re flex-treated lignin.” Lorena shrugged. “Period furniture is all well and good, you know, but I draw the line at living like a barbarian.” She lifted one arm in its striped silk sleeve and a gilt-edged remote control leaped from the wall and flew into her hand. She tossed it to him. “Will you drive for me? Find us some decent coverage. I’ve never been much good at that.”
“Call Sosik again, and ask what he’s watching.”
“Oh. Of course.” She smiled wanly. “Never surf when you have a pilot.”
Huey’s rapid-response PR team was already on the job. A Louisiana environmental safety administrator was supplying the official account of the “disaster.” According to him, safety procedures at the “derelict air base” had fallen into abeyance. A small fire had broken out, and it had ruptured a military stockpile of nonlethal crowd-control aerosols. These were panic-inducing disorients. Nontoxic and odorless, they were just the trick for clearing the streets of third-world cities. Cut to a med tent with young Air Force people shivering and babbling in the grip of paranoiac aerosols. Homespun local people were giving them cots, and blankets, and tranquilizers. The pathetic federal personnel were clearly getting the best of care.
Oscar sipped his coffee. “Unbelievable.”
Lorena spoke around a hasty mouthful of tea cake. “I take it this spiel has no connection to reality-on-the-ground.”
“Oh, there must be some connection. Huey’s clever enough to arrange all that. He’s had agents inside the base, someone to set that fire and dose the base with its own weapons. This was sabotage. Huey was impatient, so he’s gone and poisoned them.”
“He’s deliberately gassed federal troops.”
“Well, yes, but we’ll never find his fingerprints.”
“I can understand people who stab you in the back,” Lorena said, gulping a chocolate strawberry. “What I can’t understand is people so crazy that they stab you right in the front. This is medieval.”
They watched with care, tagging along remotely as Sosik changed his news feeds. The Europeans had some splendid aerial footage of proles invading the base, their heads swathed in ski masks. The Regulators seemed strangely undisturbed by the aerosols.
The nomads were wasting no time. They were ushering in an endless parade of trucks—big retrofitted oil-industry tankers, by the looks of them. They were loading them up, by hand, in coordinated labor gangs. The proles were looting the air base with the decentralized efficiency of ants consuming a dead shrew.
“Let me make a little prediction for you,” Oscar said. “Tomorrow, the Governor pretends to be very alarmed by all this. He sends in his state troops to ‘restore order.’ His militia will nail the place down for him—after the proles have stripped it all. When Washington asks what happened to the military assets, they’ll be long gone, and it’s all somebody else’s fault.”
“Why is Huey doing this crazy thing?”
“For him, it makes sense. He wanted that air base for the pork. For the local