“ ‘Well, it’s not all bad; when we dredged him up outta the mud, we came up with two big gunnysacks of big blue crabs!’
“ ‘Well, at least you found his poor body… Where have you put my boyfriend?’
“ ‘Well, beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but we never done so good on the crabs before, so we figured we’d leave him down there just one more day!’ ”
That was a pretty good political joke for such a small commu-nity — especially when its subtext was analyzed. Like most political jokes, it was all about displaced aggression, and it was the aggression against him that was being fed to the crabs here. The joke was popu-lar, and it was a signifier. And the punch line was very clear: he was going to get away with it. People didn’t fear or hate him the way they feared and hated Huey. He was both a politician and a monster, and yet people, in an odd and marginal way, had come to sympathize with him.
Oscar had reached the peak of his public reputation. Proof of this came when the President was asked about the sex scandal — and about Oscar’s role within the NSC. Here was the President’s main chance to drop him overboard and silently feed him to the swamp crabs; but the President chose otherwise. The President pointed out — properly enough — that a man couldn’t be expected to do anything about the fact that he was the illegal product of a South American mafia genetics lab. The President said that it smelled of hypocrisy to hold such a man to persnickety standards of sexual correctness — especially when other public figures had deliberately chosen to warp their own brain tissue. The President further declared that he himself was “a human being.” And that, “as a human being,” when he saw lovers persecuted, the spectacle “stuck in my craw.”
The press conference then returned to the hotter issue of the Dutch War, but the President’s aside went over very well. Certain demographic segments were becoming alarmed with the President’s relentless strong-arm tactics and his feral pursuit of domestic oppo-nents. This sudden revelation of a sentimental softer side was an excel-lent tactical play.
Oscar had reached a great career moment. The President had publicly played the Oscar card. In thinking the matter over, Oscar knew what this meant. It meant that he was burned. He had had his moment in this poker round, he had thumped down like a minor trump on the green baize. If played again, he would be dog-eared. Time to shuffle back into the pack.
So: thus high, but no higher. The lethal subtext of the Presi-dent’s statement had made that clear to him. He was useful, he was even cute; but on some profound level, he was not trusted. He would never become a pillar of the American state.
Within Buna, Oscar had less and less of a role. He had been an agitator, and instigator, and a gray eminence, but he could never be king. Greta could leverage her own fame now. She had issued a public appeal for aid and assistance, and like a boozy cry to “come to Montmartre,” the cry brought a tidal wave of national response. Bombs or no bombs, Huey or no Huey, President or no President, Buna was going to become a Greenhouse metropolis. The place was an intellectual magnet for every species of dreamer, faker, failed grad student, techie washout, downsized burnout; every guru, costumed geek, ditzy theorist, and bug collector; every microscope peerer, model-rocket builder, and gnarly simulationist; every code-dazed hacker, architectural designer; everyone, in short, who had ever been downgraded, denied, and excluded by their society’s sick demand that their wondrous ideas should make commercial sense.
With all this yeast gathered in one place, the very earth would rise. Some who arrived were enemies. Arsonists burned the city’s greenbelt; the sappy pines blew up like Roman candles and a ghastly pall of smoke polluted Texas for miles downwind. But when those flames died, the new society moved onto the blackened acres and consumed them utterly. In the grinding hoppers of the bio-hackers, trees digested more easily when partially cooked. The ash contained vital minerals. A scorched and blackened forest was a naturaI phoenix nest for the world’s first genuine Greenhouse society.
12
The u.s. Navy arrived off the shores of the Nether-lands. The War had reached a point of crisis. In or-der to have something to do, the American armada announced a naval blockade of shipping in the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Since large sections of those cities were already underwater, this was not a crushing economic threat.
Still, there seemed very little else that the Navy could do. They hadn’t brought any land troops or tanks with which they could physically invade Holland. The battle-ships had long-range naval guns, with which they might easily devastate major cities, but it seemed unthinkable that the United States would physically blast civilians in a na-tion offering no organized military resistance.
So, after enormous fanfare and intense press cover-age, the hot War with Holland was revealing its rickety underpinnings as a phony war. The President had whipped the nation into frenzy, and strengthened his own hand, and ended the Emergency. He had made his pet proles into a nationwide dandruff of cellular-toting minia-ture Robespierres. That was an impressive series of ac-complishments, more than anyone had dared to hope for. Now the smart money had it that the War would soon be folded up and put away.
The smart money took the unlikely personage of Alcott Bambakias. The junior Senator from Massachusetts had chosen this moment to make a long-expected tour of the Buna National Col-laboratory.
The Senator was much improved mentally. The rainbow of neu-ral treatments had finally reached an area of his emotional spectrum where Bambakias could lodge and take a stand. He was quite simply a different man now. The Senator was heavier, wearier, vastly more cynical. He described his current mental state as “realistic.” He was making all his quorum calls, and most of his committee assignments. He made far fewer speeches these days, picked far fewer dramatic fights, spent far more time closeted with lobbyists.
Oscar took it upon himself to give the Senator and Mrs. Bambakias a personal tour of the works in Buna. They took an ar-mored limousine. With the Dutch War stalling visibly, it seemed somewhat less likely that Huey would launch any paint bombs.
However, this had not stopped the construction frenzy in Buna. On the contrary, it had liberated them from any pretense that they were sheltering themselves from gas. With thousands of people con-tinuing to pour in, with guaranteed free food, free shelter, and all the network data they could eat, the city was tautly inflated with boom-town atmosphere. One group of zealots was constructing a giant plastic structure roughly the size and shape of the Eiffel Tower, which they had dubbed the “Beacon of Cosmic Truth.” Other hobbyists had taken smart geodesics and airtight skins to a logical extreme, and were building aerostats. These were giant self-expanding airtight bubbles, and if they could get the piezoelectric musculature within the tubing to work properly, the things would engorge themselves to the point where they could literally leave the surface of the earth.
Oscar couldn’t fully contain his enthusiasm for these marvels, and he sensed that Bambakias and Lorena could use some cheering up. Bambakias looked much better — he was clearly lucid now, perhaps even cured — but stress had taken a permanent toll on Lorena. She’d put on weight, she’d sagged, she looked preserved rather than put-together. In her husband’s company she offered Oscar mostly bright monosyllables.
Bambakias was doing all the talking, but it wasn’t his usual bright and tumbling rhetoric.
“The hotel was good,” he said. “You did very well with the hotel. Considering all the local limitations.”
“Oh, we enjoy the hotel. I still sleep there most nights. But it doesn’t begin to compare to the scale of what’s been done to the town.”
“They’re not doing it right,” Bambakias said.