“Sure,” Oscar said. “If that’s the word you want to use. I sure wish Greta were here with her lab equipment, so we could nail this down.” He shook his head regretfully. “That State of Emergency at the Buna lab has seriously stepped on our downtime together.”
They’d now arrived at the hovercraft, but Fontenot showed no sign of leaving. His artificial leg was troubling him. He sat down on the hull of the hovercraft and removed his hat, breathing heavily. Kevin clambered over the back and sat inside the huvvy, propping up his aching feet. A pair of herons flew nearby, and something large and oily surfaced near a clump of tangled reeds.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Fontenot confessed. He stared at Oscar, as if the revelation were all his fault. “I don’t know what to make of you anymore. Your girlfriend won the Nobel Prize. A hacker is your security man. And you dropped on the roof of my house without a word of warning, dressed like a flying ape.”
“Yeah. Of course.” Oscar paused. “See, it all makes sense, if you get there step by step.”
“Look, don’t tell me any more,” Fontenot said. “I’m in way too deep already. I don’t want to play your game. I want to go home, and live here, and die here. If you tell me any more of this, I’m gonna have to take it to the President.”
“I’ve got you covered on that issue,” Oscar told him. “I work for the President. I’m with the National Security Council.”
Fontenot was astonished. “You’re in the Administration now? You work for the NSC?”
“Jules, stop acting so surprised at every single thing I say. You’re starting to hurt my feelings. Why do you think I came here? How do you think I end up in situations like this? Who else could do this properly? I’m the only guy in the world who would walk into a neural voodoo cult in the middle of nowhere, and immediately figure out exactly what was going on.”
Fontenot rubbed his stubbled chin. “So…Okay! I guess I’m with you. So, Mr. Super Expert Know-it-all, tell me something. Are we really going to have a war with Holland?”
“Yes. We are. And if I can get out of this damn swamp in one piece, and brief the President on my findings here, we’re probably going to have a war with Louisiana.”
“Oh my God.” Fontenot groaned aloud. “It’s beyond bad. It’s the worst. It’s the very worst. I knew I should have kept my mouth shut. I knew I shouldn’t have outed this thing.”
“No, it was the right thing to do. Huey’s a great man, and he’s a visionary, but Huey is around the bend. He’s not just your standard southern-fried good-old-boy megalomaniac anymore. Now I know the full truth. These Haitians? They were just his proof of concept. Huey’s done something weird to himself. Something very dark and neural.”
“And you have to tell the President about that.”
“Yes, I do. Because our President is not like that. The President is not insane. He’s just a hard-as-nails, ambitious, strong-arm politician, who is going to bring law and order to this two-horse country, even if it means setting fire to half of Europe.”
Fontenot considered this subject at length. Finally he turned to Kevin. “Hey, Hamilton.”
“Yes sir?” Kevin said, startled.
“Don’t let them kill this guy.”
“I didn’t want the job!” Kevin protested. “He didn’t tell me how bad it was. Honest! You want the bodyguard job back? Take the damn job.”
“No,” Fontenot said, with finality. They climbed into the little boat, three men in a tub, and headed out into the bayou again.
“He did some great things for us,” Fontenot said. “Of course, everything he ever did was always about Huey first. Huey was always item number one on the Huey agenda, everybody knew that. But he did good things for the people. He gave ’em good breaks that they hadn’t had in a hundred years. It’s still the future.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said, “Huey’s got his own new order—but it isn’t new, and it isn’t order. Huey’s a funny guy. He can crack a joke and pound the ol’ podium, he’ll buy everybody a drink and make public fun of himself. But he’s got it all: total control over the legislature and the judiciary. A brownshirt militia on the rampage. His own private media network—his own economy, even. A blood-and-soil ideology. Secret retreats full of vengeance weapons. Huey kidnaps people. He abducts whole little populations, and makes them disappear. I suppose he does it all for the best of reasons, but the ends don’t matter when you’re using means like that. And now, he’s dosed himself with some off-the-wall treatment that makes people permanently schizoid! He can’t possibly get better after this. He can only get worse and worse.”
Fontenot sighed. “Let me ask one favor. Don’t tell anybody that I led you to this. I don’t want any press. I don’t want my poor neighbors knowin’ that I sold old Huey out. This is my home. I want to die here.”
Kevin spoke up. “You keep saying that this place is the future. Why do you want to die, old man?”
Fontenot looked at him with baggy-eyed tolerance. “Kid, everybody goes to the future to die. That’s where the job gets done.”
Oscar shook his head. “Don’t feel guilty. You don’t owe Huey any loyalty.”
“We all owe him, dammit. He saved us. He saved the state. We owe him for the mosquitoes, if nothing else.”
“Mosquitoes? What mosquitoes?”
“There aren’t any. And we’re in the middle of a swamp. And we don’t get bit. And you didn’t even notice, did you? I sure as hell notice.”
“Well, what happened to the mosquitoes?”
“Before Huey came along, the mosquitoes were kicking our ass. Mosquitoes love the Greenhouse future. When it got hotter and wetter, they came in tidal waves. Carrying malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis…After the big Mississippi floods, mosquitoes boiled out of every ditch in the state. It was a major health emergency, people were dyin’. And Huey had just been sworn in. He just wouldn’t have it, he said, ‘Take action, get rid of ’em.’ He sent out the fogger trucks. Not insecticide, not that poison gas like before—DDT and toxins. That screwed up everything—not doable, everybody knows that. But Huey figured it out—he didn’t gas the bugs, he gassed the people. With airborne antibodies. They’re like breathable vaccinations. The people of Louisiana are toxic to mosquitoes now. Our blood literally kills them. If a mosquito bites a Cajun, that mosquito dies on the spot.”
“Neat hack!” Kevin enthused. “But that wouldn’t kill all the mosquitoes, would it?”
“No, but the diseases vanished right away. Because disease couldn’t spread from person to person anymore. And the skeeters are going, too. See, Huey’s gassing the livestock, wild animals, he’s gassing everything that breathes. Because it works! Those bloodsuckers used to kill the people in job lots. For thousands of years they were a biblical plague around here. But Green Huey nailed ’em for good.”
The hovercraft puttered on. The three of them fell thoughtfully silent.
“What’s that bug on your arm, then?” Kevin said at last.
“Dang!” Fontenot swatted it. “Must have blown in from Mississippi!”
__________
Oscar knew that his new allegations were extremely grave. Properly handled, this scandal would finish Huey. Handled badly, it could finish Oscar in short order. It might even finish the President.
Oscar composed what he considered the finest memo of his career. He had the memo passed to the President—hopefully, for his eyes only. Oscar was unhappy at bypassing his superiors to the top of the chain of command, but he was anxious to avoid any further debacles from the paramilitary zealots of the NSC. Their killer helicopter attack during his kidnapping had probably saved his life, but true professionals simply didn’t behave that way.
Oscar appealed to the President. He was calm, factual, rational, well organized. He pinpointed the locale of the Haitian camp, and recommended that human intelligence be sent in. Someone discreet, harmless-looking. A female agent would be a good choice. Someone who could thoroughly tape the place, and take blood samples.
For three days, Oscar followed his memo with a barrage of anxious demands and queries of the NSC higher-ups. Had the President seen his memo? It was of the greatest importance. It was critical.
There was no answer.
In the meantime, serious difficulties pressed at the Collaboratory. Morale was cracking among the civilian support staff. None of them were being paid anymore. None of the support staff enjoyed the prestige and glamour of the scientists, who were rapidly accustoming themselves to being followed by worshipful krewes of hairy-eyed Moderators. The civilian staff were miffed. The Collaboratory’s medical staff were especially upset. They could get good-paying jobs elsewhere—and they could scarcely be expected to run a decent, ethical medical facility without a steady flow of capital and up-to-date supplies.
There was continued and intensifying Moderator/Regulator feuding in the Sabine River valley. Scouting patrols by rival nomad youth gangs were degenerating into bushwhackings and lynchings. The situation was increasingly volatile, especially since the sheriffs of Jasper and Newton counties had been forced to resign their posts. The good-old-boy Texan sheriffs had been outed on outrageous bribery scandals. Someone had compiled extensive dossiers on their long-time complicity in bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution—all those illicit delights that could be outlawed, but never made unpopular.
It didn’t take genius to understand that civil order in East Texas was being deliberately undermined by Green Huey. Texas state government should have risen to this challenge, but Texas state government was well known for its lack of genius. The state held endless hearings on the shocking problem of endemic police corruption—apparently hoping that the riots would subside if fed enough paperwork.
The biggest wild card on the state border was the provocative presence of European and Asian news crews. America’s hot war with the gallant, minuscule Dutch had made America hot copy again. Savage confrontations between armed criminal gangs had always been an activity that endeared America to its fans around the world. Dutch journalists had been banned in the USA—but French and German ones were everywhere, especially in Louisiana. The British were kind enough to suggest that the French were secretly arming Huey’s Regulator gangs.
The prestige-maddened hotheads in the Regulators were thrilled to receive worldwide net coverage. Young Regulator goons lived for reputations and respect, since they had so little else. The military crisis was distorting the odd underpinnings of the Regulator attention-economy. Violent hotheads were vaulting through the ranks by their daring attacks on Moderators.
The Moderators, in Oscar’s judgment, were a cannier and more ductile lot. Their networks were better designed and organized; the Moderators were cooler, less visible, far less confrontational. Still, it didn’t take much pushing to render them murderous.
On the fourth day after sending his memo, Oscar received a curt message from the President. Two Feathers indicated, in a couple of lines, that Oscar’s memo had been read and understood. Oscar was directly ordered not to speak further on the topic to anyone.
Forty-eight hours passed, and the scandal broke wide open. A squadron of U.S. helicopters had flown by night into the heart of Louisiana, where they rendezvoused in an obscure swamp village. Two of them promptly collided and crashed, crushing the homes of the sleeping natives, charring and killing innocent women and children. Undetermined numbers of the locals had been scandalously kidnapped by the abduction-crazed feds. Four federal spooks had been killed in the crash. Their bodies were paraded before Huey’s European cameras, their zippy black flight suits top-heavy with aging cyber-gear.
This bizarre allegation simply hung there, misfiring, for another forty-eight hours. There was no formal reaction from the Administration. They simply declined comment on the issue, as if the demagogic raving of the Governor of Louisiana was too clownish for words. Public attention focused instead on the U.S. Navy, whose Atlantic armada was being launched against the Dutch in an archaic ritual of wind-snapping Old Glories. The gallant old warcraft wallowed out to sea from their half-drowned military dry docks. All eyes were on the War now—or at least, they were supposed to be.
Outside America, it was obvious to anyone, even the perennially suspicious Chinese, that a naval attack on the Dutch was an absurd and ridiculous gesture. It was the subject of amused lampoons in Europe. Only the Dutch seemed sincerely upset.
But the effect within America was profound. The nation was at War. Roused from its fatal lethargy by the cheering prospect of doing some serious harm, the Congress had actually declared a War. The result was instant, intense civil discord. Outflanked by the state of War, most of the Emergency committees promised to go quietly. A few defied the Congress and the President, risking arrest. In the meanwhile, antiwar networks congealed and raged in the streets. They were sincerely disgusted to see the Constitution perverted, and the nation dishonored, for domestic political advantage.
Twenty-four more feverish hours of War ticked by. Then, the Administration accused the Governor of Louisiana of conducting unethical medical experiments on illegal aliens. This news arrived in the very midst of the martial fife-playing and drumbeating. It was a shocking distraction. But it was serious—bad, very bad, unbelievably bad. The surgeon general and the cabinet head of Health Services were wheeled out in public, burdened with grim looks, medical evidence, and terrifying cranial flip charts.
The PR attack on Huey was badly handled, amateurish, graceless even. But it was lethal. Huey had laughed off many other scandals, sidestepped them, passed the buck, silenced his critics, suborned them. But this scandal was beyond the pale. It was all about invisible, helpless, rootless people, deliberately driven out of their minds as an industrial process. That was just a little too close to home for most Americans. They couldn’t live with that.
When his phone rang, Oscar was, for once, entirely ready.
“You little SCUMBAG!” Huey screamed. “You evil Yankee narc! Those people were perfectly happy! It was heaven on earth! And the feds came in the dark and kidnapped them! They burned them alive!”
“Good evening, Governor! I take it you’ve seen tonight’s Administration briefing.”
“You’re FINISHED, you jumped-up little creep! I’m gonna make you sorry you were ever cloned! I made promises to those people, they were under my care. You outed them! I know it was you. Admit it!”
“Governor, of course I admit it. Let’s be adults here. That news was bound to come out, whether I leaked it or not. You can’t run two years of secret neural experiments on hundreds of human subjects and not have leaks. Scientists talk to each other. Even your pet scientists. Even nonpedigreed chicken-fried scientists who live down in salt mines doing gruesome things to foreigners. Scientists communicate their findings, that’s just the way scientists are. So of course your pet goons in the salt mines leaked word to other neuroscientists. And of course I got wind of it. And of course I told the President. I work for the President.” He cleared his throat. “Mind you, I didn’t design that presentation tonight. If I had, it would have looked more professional.”
He wondered if Huey would swallow this boldly prepared lie. He’d done his best to make it sound plausible. He’d done it in order to shield Fontenot, his real source. Maybe the deception would work. In any case it would surely distract and irritate Huey and his state-supported neuro quacks.
“You can’t believe that racist poppycock they’re handing out about my Haitians. Those folks aren’t monsters! They’re just very devout people with some strange drug practices. Blowfish zombie poisons, and all that.”
“Governor, you’re making me cry. Am I ten years old? Are you afraid I’m taping this? If you’re not going to talk to me seriously, you might as well hang up.”
“Oh no,” Huey grunted. “You and I go back a little too far for that. I can always talk to you, Soap Boy.”
“Good. I’m glad that our previous understanding still holds. Let’s try to avoid cross-purposes, this time.”
“At least I know t
hat you can talk to the President. That son of a bitch won’t return my calls! Me—the most senior Governor in America! I know that dumb bastard, I met him at Governors’ conferences. Hell, I did him a whole lot of favors. I taught him everything he knows about proles and how you deal with ’em. ‘Moderators’—what the hell is all that about? He’s killing my people! He’s kidnapping my people. You tell the President that he’s crossed the wrong man. I’m not puttin’ up with the strong-arm from the Featherweight. He got eighteen percent of the popular vote! You tell him that! You tell him Huey don’t forget these things.”
“Governor, I’ll be glad to convey your sentiments to the President, but may I make a reasonable suggestion first? Shut up. You are finished. The President has you cornered. This thing you did with the Haitians was totally unconscionable! You’ve shot your own feet off in public.”
“So I should have left them on their drowning island to be tortured to death.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what you should have done. Leave them alone. You don’t own people just because you helped them survive. You want to blow people’s minds by giving weird dope to uninformed experimental subjects? Go back to the 1960s and join the CIA! You’re not God, Huey! You’re just a damn Governor! You went way, way too far! And you can’t wiggle out of this one, because your fingerprints are all over it—your brain prints are all over it!”
Huey laughed. “You just watch me and see.”
“They’re gonna demand that you go in for a PET-scan next, Huey. Then, they’re going to find the dual synchronized waves of chemical gradients, and the shifting electrical patterns through the corpus callosum, and all that other boring neural crap that you and I are the only politicians in the world who have learned to pronounce properly! They’re gonna out you as a bolt-in-the-neck monster. People are gonna Frankenstein you! You’re gonna be barbecued by a torch-wielding mob. You’re not just gonna be politically embarrassed by this. You’re gonna get killed.”
“I know all that,” Huey said quietly. “Let ’em do their worst.”
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