The Regulator’s heavy eyebrows twitched. He looked at Oscar, sizing him up for a bloodletting bowshot to the kidneys. Finally, he spoke. “Nice wristwatch, handsome.”
“Okay,” Oscar breathed. “Let me suggest that we take our friend here and dump him into the Spinoffs building, along with those other Huey scabs. I’m sure they all have a lot of news to catch up on.”
Gazzaniga was scandalized. “What! We can’t send this character in there to rendezvous with those people! He’s very dangerous! He’s a vicious nomad brute!”
Oscar smiled. “So what? We have hundreds of vicious nomad brutes. Forget talking to this guy. We don’t need him. We need to talk seriously to our own nomads. They know everything that he knows, and more. Plus, our friends actually want to defend us. So can we all knuckle down and get serious now? Boys, take the prisoner away.”
__________
After this confrontation, the Emergency negotiations rapidly moved onto much firmer ground: equipment and instrumentation. Here the nomads and scientists found compelling common interests. Their mutual need to eat was especially compelling. Burningboy introduced three of his technical experts. Greta commandeered the time of her best biotech people. The talks plowed on into darkness.
Oscar left the building, changed his clothes to shed any cling-on listening devices, then went into one of the gardens for a quiet rendezvous with Captain Burningboy.
“Man, you’re a sneaky devil,” Burningboy ruminated, methodically chewing on a long handful of dry blue noodles. “The tone of that meeting changed totally when you had that goon brought in. I wonder what they’d have done if he’d told ’em that we caught him two days ago.”
“Oh, we both knew that Regulator was never going to talk,” Oscar said. “I was reserving him for the proper political moment. There’s nothing dishonest about revealing the facts within the proper context. After all, you did capture him, and he is a commando.” They lowered their voices and tiptoed to avoid a dozing lynx. “You see, talking common sense to scientists just doesn’t work. Scientists despise common sense, they think it’s irrational. To get ’em off the dime, you need strong moral pressure, something from outside their expectations. They live with big intellectual walls around them—peer review, passive construction, all this constant use of the third person plural…”
“I’m handing it to you, Oscar—the gambit worked great. But I still don’t see why.”
Oscar paused thoughtfully. He enjoyed his private chats with Burningboy, who was proving to be an appreciative audience. The Texan Moderator was an aging, disheveled outlaw with a long prison record, but he was also a genuine politician, a regional player full of southern-fried insights. Oscar felt a strong need to give the man a collegial briefing.
“It worked because…well, let me give you the big picture here. The really big, philosophical picture. Did you ever wonder why I’ve never moved against Huey’s people inside this lab? Why they’re still inside there, holding the Spinoffs building, barricaded against us? It’s because we’re in a netwar. We’re just like a group of go-stones. To survive in a netwar, a surrounded group needs eyes. It’s all about links, and perception, and the battlespace. We’re surrounded inside this dome—but we’re not entirely surrounded, because there’s a smaller dome of enemies inside our dome. I deliberately threw that Regulator in there with them, so that now, that little subgroup has its own little nomad contingent, just like we do. You see, people instinctively sense this kind of symmetry. It works on them, on an unconscious level. It’s meaningful to them, it changes their worldview. Having enemies inside the dome might seem to weaken us, but the fact that we can tolerate our own core of dissent—that actually strengthens us. Because we’re not totalitarian. We’re not the same substance all the way through. We’re not all brittle. We’re resilient. We have potential space inside.”
“Yes?” Burningboy said skeptically.
“There’s a vital fractal there. It’s all about scaling issues, basically. Here we are, inside these walls. Outside our walls, Green Huey is lurking over us, full of sinister intent. But the President is lurking over Huey—and our new President is, in his own unique way, a rather more sinister person than the Governor of Louisiana. The President runs the USA, a nation that is all wounded and inward-turning now—a little world, surrounded by a bigger world full of people who grew bored with us. They no longer pay America to tell them that we are their future. And then beyond that world…well, I guess it’s Greta’s world. A rational, Einsteinian-Newtonian cosmos. The cosmos of objective, observable facts. And beyond scientific understanding…all those dark phenomena. Metaphysics. Will and idea. History, maybe.”
“Do you really believe any of that junk?”
“No, I don’t believe it in the way that I believe that two and two are four. But it’s doable, it’s my working metaphor. What can politicians ever really ‘know’ about anything? History isn’t a laboratory. You never step in the same river twice. But some people have effective political insight, and some just don’t.”
Burningboy nodded slowly. “You really see us from way, way on the outside, don’t you, Oscar?”
“Well, I’ve never been a nomad—at least not yet. And I’ll never be a scientist, either. I can recognize my ignorance, but I can’t be buffaloed by ignorance—I’m in power, I have to act. Knowledge is just knowledge. But the control of knowledge—that’s politics.”
“That wasn’t the kind of ‘outsiderness’ I had in mind.”
“Oh.” Oscar realized the truth. “You mean my personal background problem.”
“Yup.”
“You mean I have advantages because I’m outside the entire human race.”
Burningboy nodded. “I couldn’t help but notice that. Has it always been that way for you?”
“Yeah. It has. Pretty much.”
“Are you the future, man?”
“No. I wouldn’t count on that. I have too many pieces missing.”
__________
Oscar knew that the situation had stabilized when a roaring sex scandal broke out. A teenage soldier accused a middle-aged scientist of indecently fondling her. This incident caused frantic uproar.
Oscar found the scandal a very cheering development. It meant that the conflict between the Collaboratory’s two populations had broken through to a symbolic, psychosexual, politically meaningless level. The public fight was now about deep resentments and psychic starvations that would never, ever be cured, and were therefore basically irrelevant. But the noise was very useful, because it meant that enormous quiet progress could now be made on every other front. The public psychodrama consumed vast amounts of attention, while the Collaboratory’s truly serious problems had become background noise. The real problems were left in the hands of people who cared enough about them to do constructive things.
Oscar took the opportunity to learn how to use a Moderator laptop. He had been given one, and he rightly recognized this gesture as a high tribal honor. The Moderator device had a flexible green shell of plasticized straw. It weighed about as much as a bag of popcorn. And its keyboard, instead of the time-honored QWERTYUIOP, boasted a sleek, sensible, and deeply sinister DHIATENSOR.
Oscar had been assured many times that the venerable QWERTYUIOP keyboard design would never, ever be replaced. Supposedly, this was due to a phenomenon called “technological lock-in.” QWERTYUIOP was a horribly bad design for a keyboard—in fact, QWERTYUIOP was deliberately designed to hamper typists—but the effort required to learn it was so crushing that people would never sacrifice it. It was like English spelling, or American standard measurements, or the ludicrous design of toilets; it was very bad, but it was a social fact of nature. QWERTYUIOP’s universality made it impossible for alternatives to arise and spread.
Or so he had always been told. And yet, here was the impossible alternative, sitting on the table before him: DHIATENSOR. It was sensible. It was efficient. It worked much better than QWERTYUIOP.
Pelicanos entered the hot
el room. “Still up?”
“Sure.”
“What are you working on?”
“Greta’s press releases. And I’ve got to talk to Bambakias soon, I’ve been neglecting the Senator. So I’m making some notes, and I’m learning how to type properly, for the very first time in my life.” Oscar paused. He was eager to brief Pelicanos on the fascinating social differences he had discovered between the Regulators and the Moderators. To the undiscerning eye, the shabby and truculent proles could not be distinguished with an electron microscope—all their real and genuinely striking differences were inherent in the architecture of their network software.
An epic struggle had been taking place in the invisible fields of the networks. Virtual tribes and communities had been trying literally thousands of different configurations, winnowing them out, giving them their all, watching them die…
“Oscar, we need to talk seriously.”
“Great.” Oscar pushed the laptop aside. “Level with me.”
“Oscar, you’re getting too wrapped up here. All the negotiations with the Emergency Committee, all the time you spend dickering with those NSC people who won’t give you the time of day…we need a reality check.”
“Okay. Fine.”
“Have you been outside the lab lately? The sky is full of ‘delivery aircraft’ that never deliver anything to anyone. There are cops and roadblocks all over East Texas.”
“Yeah, we’re generating a lot of sustained outside interest. We’re a big pop hit. Journalists love the mix here, it’s very provocative.”
“I agree with you that it’s interesting. But that has nothing to do with our agenda. This situation was never in the plans. We were supposed to be helping Bambakias with the Senate Science Committee. The campaign krewe are supposed to be here on vacation. You were never supposed to become a spook who works part-time for the President, while you take over federal facilities with the help of gangsters.”
“Hmm. You’re absolutely right about that, Yosh. That was not plannable. But it was doable.”
Pelicanos sat down and knotted his hands. “You know what your problem is? Every time you lose sight of your objective, you redouble your efforts.”
“I’ve never lost sight of the objective! The objective is to reform American scientific research.”
“Oscar, I’ve thought this over. I really hate this situation. For one thing, I don’t much like the President. I’m a Federal Democrat. I wasn’t joking when we were doing all that hard work for Bambakias and the Reform Bloc. I don’t want to work for this President. I don’t agree with the man’s policies. He’s a Communist, for heaven’s sake.”
“The President is not a Communist. He’s a billionaire timber baron with a background in the reservation casino business.”
“Well, the Communists are in his Left Tradition Bloc. I just don’t trust him. I don’t like his speeches. I don’t like him picking fights with the Dutch when we ought to be putting our own domestic affairs in order. He’s just not our kind of politician. He’s cruel, and sneaky, and duplicitous, and aggressive.”
Oscar smiled. “At least he doesn’t sleep on the job, like the old guy did.”
“Better King Log than King Stork, pal.”
“Yosh, I know you’re not a leftist, but you have to agree that the Left Tradition Bloc is a lot better than those total lunatics in the Left Progressives.”
“That doesn’t help! Bambakias would have trusted you implicitly—the President won’t even give you a real post. He’s never sent us anything but empty promises. He’s left you exposed, he’s hanging you out to dry. So, in the meantime, we’re relying on these Moderators. And there’s just no future in a gangster protection racket.”
“Sure there is.”
“No there isn’t. The proles are worse even than the Left Progressives. They have funny slang, and funny clothes, and laptops, and biotech, so they’re colorful, but they’re still a mafia. This good old boy, Captain Burningboy…he’s sucking up to you, but he’s not what you think he is. You think he’s a charming old coot who’s a diamond in the rough, the kind of guy you could fit inside your krewe. He’s not. He’s an ultraradical cultist, and he definitely has his own agenda.”
Oscar nodded. “I know that.”
“And then there’s Kevin. You haven’t been paying enough attention to Kevin. You have put a bandit in charge of the police here. The kid is like a pocket Mussolini now. He’s into the phones, he’s in the computers, he’s in the security videos, the place is saturated with his bugs. Now he’s got a pack of tattletale snoop informants, some weird-sister gang of little old nomad ladies on the net in a trailer park, somewhere in the blazing wreckage of Wyoming…The kid is off the rails. It just isn’t healthy.”
“But Kevin’s from Boston, like we are,” Oscar said. “Intense surveillance yields low rates of street violence. Kevin’s getting the job done for us, and he never balks when we bend the rules. He was a really good personnel choice.”
“Oscar, you’re obsessed. Forget the nifty-keen social concepts and all the big-picture blather. Get down to brass tacks, get down to reality. Kevin works here because you’re paying his salary. You’re paying the salaries of all your krewe, and your krewe are the people who are really running this place. Nobody else has any salaries—all they do is eat prole food and work in their labs. I’m your accountant, and I’m telling you: you can’t afford this much longer. You can’t pay people enough to create a revolution.”
“There’s no way to pay people enough to do that.”
“You’re not being fair to your krewe. Your krewe are Massachusetts campaign workers, not miracle workers. You never explained to them that they had to become a revolutionary junta. This place has no real financial support. You don’t even have a salary yourself. You don’t even have an official post in the government. The Collaboratory is running off your capital.”
“Yosh, there’s always more funding. What’s really interesting is governing without it! Managing on pure prestige. Consider the Moderators, for instance. They actually have a functional, prestige-based economy. It’s all been worked out in fantastic detail; for instance, they have a rotating Australian electronic ballot system…”
“Oscar, have you been sleeping at all? Do you eat properly? Do you know what you’re doing here anymore?”
“Yes, I do know. It’s not what we planned to do at first, but it’s what has to be done. I am stealing Huey’s clothes.”
“You’re in a personal feud with the Governor of Louisiana.”
“No. That’s not it. The truth is that I’m conducting a broad-scale struggle with the greatest political visionary in contemporary America. And Huey is years ahead of me. He’s been cultivating his nomads for years now, winning their loyalty, building their infrastructure. He’s set it up so that homeless drifters are the most technically advanced group in his state. He’s made himself the leader of an underground mass movement, and he’s promising to share the knowledge and make every man a wizard. And they worship him for that, because the whole structure of their network economy has been regulated that way, surreptitiously and deliberately. It’s corruption on a fantastic scale—it’s an enterprise so far off the books that it isn’t even ‘corruption’ anymore. He has created a new alternative society, with an alternative power structure, that is all predicated on him: Green Huey, the Swamp King. I’m working here as fast and as hard as I can, because Huey has already proved to me that this works—in fact, it works so well that it’s dangerous. America is on the ropes, and Green Huey is a smiling totalitarian who’s creating a neural dictatorship!”
“Oscar, do you realize how crazy that sounds? Do you know how pale you look when you talk like that?”
“I’m leveling with you here. You know I always level with you, Yosh.”
“Okay, you’re leveling with me. But I can’t do that. I can’t live that way. I don’t believe in it. I’m sorry.”
Oscar stared at him.
“I’ve hit the wa
ll with you, Oscar. I want some real food, I want a real roof over my head. I can’t close my eyes and jump blind and take that kind of risk. I have a dependent. My wife needs me, she needs looking after. But you—you don’t need me anymore. Because I’m an accountant! You’re setting up a situation here where I have no function. No role. No job. There’s nothing to account.”
“You know something? That had never occurred to me. But wait; there’s bound to be some kind of income transfer. There’s scrap cash around, we’re going to need bits of equipment and such…”
“You’re establishing a strange, tiny, alien regime here. It’s not a market society. It’s a cult society. It’s all based on people looking deep into each other’s eyes and giving each other back rubs. It’s theoretically interesting, but when it fails and falls apart, it’ll all become camps and purges just like the Communist Era. If you’re determined to do that, Oscar, I can’t save you. Nobody can save you. I don’t want to be with you when the house of cards comes down. Because you will be going to prison. At best.”
Oscar smiled wanly. “So, you don’t think the ‘congenital insanity’ plea will get me off?”
“It’s not a joke. What about your krewe, Oscar? What about the rest of us? You’re a great campaign manager: you really have a gift. But this is not an election campaign. It’s not even a strike or a protest anymore. This is a little coup d’état. You’re like a militia guru in a secessionist compound here. Even if the krewepeople agree to stay with you, how can you put them at that kind of risk? You never asked them, Oscar. They never got a vote.”
Oscar sat up straight. “Yosh, you’re right. That’s a sound analysis. I just can’t do that to my krewepeople; it’s unethical, it’s bad practice. I’ll have to lay it on the line to them. If they leave me, that’s just a sacrifice I’ll have to accept.”
“I have a job offer in Boston from the Governor’s office,” Pelicanos said.
“The Governor? Come on! He’s a worn-out windbag from the Forward, America Party.”
“Forward, America is a Reformist party. The Governor is organizing an antiwar coalition, and he’s asked me to be treasurer.”
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