“No there isn’t. The proles are worse even than the Left Progressives. They have funny slang, and funny clothes, and laptops, and bio-tech, 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 atten-tion 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 pay-ing 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 Massachu-setts 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 Mod-erators, 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 infrastruc-ture. 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 under-ground 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 alter-native 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 wall 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 theoreti-cally 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’etat. 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,” Peli-canos 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 or-ganizing an antiwar coalition, and he’s asked me to be treasurer.”
“No kidding? Treasurer, huh? That’s a pretty good post for you.”
“The pacifist tradition is big in Massachusetts. It’s multipartisan and cuts across the blocs. Besides, it has to be done. The President is really serious. He’s not bluffing. He really wants a war. He’ll send gunboats across the Atlantic. He’s bullying that tiny country, just so he can strengthen his own hand domestically.”
“You really believe that, Yosh? That’s really your assessment?”
“Oscar, you’re all out of touch. You’re in here all night, every night, slaving away on this minutiae about the tiny differences be-tween nomad tribes. You’re pulling all the backstage strings inside this little glass bubble. But you’re losing sight of national reality. Yes, Presi-dent Two Feathers is on the warpath! He wants a declaration of war from the Congress! He wants martial law! He wants a war budget that’s under his own command. He wants the Emergency committees overridden and abolished overnight. He’ll be a virtual dictator.”
It instantly occurred to Oscar that if the President could achieve even half of those laudable goals, the loss of Holland would be a very small price to pay. But he bit back this response. “Yosh, I work for this President. He’s my boss, he’s my Commander in Chief. If you really feel that way about him and his agenda, then our situation as colleagues is untenable.”
Pelicanos looked wretched. “Well, that’s why I came here.”