“How did he arrange their visas?”
“He never bothered. See, you gotta think the way Huey thinks. Huey’s always got two, three, four things going on at once. He put ’em in a shelter. Salt mines. Louisiana’s got these huge underground salt mines. Underground mineral deposits twice the size of Mount Everest. They were dug out for a hundred years. They got huge vaults down there, caves as big as suburbs, with thousand-foot ceilings. Nowadays, nobody mines salt anymore. Salt’s cheaper than dirt now, because of seawater distilleries. So there’s no more market for Louisi-ana salt. Just another dead industry here, like oil. We dug it all up and sold it, and all we got left is nothing. Giant airtight caverns full of nothing, way down deep in the crust of the earth. Well, what use are they now? Well, one big use. Because you can’t see nothing. There’s no satellite surveillance for giant underground caves. Huey hid that Haitian cult in one of those giant mines for a couple of years. He was workin’ on ’em in secret, with all his other hot underground projects. Like the giant catfish, and the fuel yeast, and the coelacanths…”
Kevin spoke up. “ ‘Coelacanths’?”
“Living fossil fish from Madagascar, son. Older than dinosaurs. They got genetics like fish from another planet. Real primitive and hardy. You nick off chunks from the deep past, and you splice it in the middle of next week — that’s Huey’s recipe for the gumbo future.”
Oscar wiped spray from his waterproof flight suit. “So he’s done this strange thing to the Haitians as some kind of pilot project.”
“Yeah. And you know what? Huey’s right.”
“He is?”
“Yep. Huey’s awful wrong about the little things, but he’s so right about the big picture, that the rest of it just don’t matter. You see, Louisiana really is the future. Someday soon, the whole world is gonna be just like Louisiana. Because the seas are rising, and Louisiana is a giant swamp. The world of the future is a big, hot, Greenhouse swamp. Full of half-educated, half-breed people, who don’t speak En-glish, and didn’t forget to have children. Plus, they are totally thrilled about biotechnology. That’s what tomorrow’s world is gonna look like — not just America, mind you, the whole world. Hot, humid, old, crooked, half-forgotten, kind of rotten. The leaders are corrupt, ev-erybody’s on the take. It’s bad, really bad, even worse than it sounds.”
Fontenot suddenly grinned. “But you know what? It’s doable, it’s livable! The fishing’s good! The food is great! The women are good-lookin’, and the music really swings!”
They struggled for two hours to reach the refugee encampment.
The hovercraft bulled its way through reedbeds, scraped over spits of saw grass and sticky black mud. The Haitian camp had been cannily established on an island reachable only by aircraft — or by a very deter-mined amphibious boat.
They skirted up onto the solid earth, and left their hovercraft, and walked through knee-high weeds.
Oscar had imagined the worst: klieg lights, watchtowers, barbed wire, and vicious dogs. But the Haitian emigre village was not an armed camp. The place was basically an ashram, a little handmade religious retreat. It was a modest, quiet, rural settlement of neatly whitewashed log houses.
The village was a sizable compound for six or seven hundred people, many of them children. The village had no electricity, no plumbing, no satellite dishes, no roads, no cars, no telephones, and no aircraft. It was silent except for the twittering of birds, the occasional clonk of a churn or an ax, and the distant, keening sound of hymns.
No one was hurrying, but everyone seemed to have something to do. These people were engaged in an ancient peasant round of pre-industrial agriculture. They were literally living off the land — not by chewing up the landscape and transmuting it in sludge tanks, but by gardening it with hand tools. These were strange, rnuseumlike activi-ties. Oscar had read about them in books and seen them in docu-mentaries, but he’d never witnessed them performed in real life. Genuinely archaic pursuits, like blacksmithing and yarn-spinning.
It was all about neatly tended little garden plots, swarming com-post heaps, night soil in stinking wooden buckets. The locals had a lot of chickens. The chickens were all genetically identical. The birds were all the very same chicken, reissued in various growth stages. They also had multiple copies of a standard-issue goat. This was a hardy, bearded devil-eyed creature, a Nietzschean superman among goats, and there were herds of it. They had big spiraling vines of snap beans, monster corn, big hairy okra, monster yellow gourds, rock-hard bamboo, a little sugarcane. Some of the locals were fishermen. Sometime back, they had successfully landed a frightening leathery creature, now a skeletal mass of wrist-thick fish bones. The skeleton sported baleen plates the size of a car grille.
The communards wore homespun clothes. The men had crude straw hats, collarless buttoned vests, drawstring trousers. The women wore ankle-length shifts, white aprons, and big trailing sunbonnets.
They were perfectly friendly, but distant. It seemed that no one could be much bothered with visitors. They were all intensely preoc-cupied with their daily affairs. However, a small crowd of curious children formed and began trailing the three of them, mimicking them behind their backs, and giggling at them.
“I don’t get this,” Kevin said. “I thought this was some kind of concentration camp. These folks are doing just fine here.”
Fontenot nodded grudgingly. “Yeah, it was meant to be attrac-tive. It’s a Green, sustainable farm project. You bump people’s produc-tivity up with improved crops and animals — but no fuel combustion, no more carbon dioxide. Maybe someday they go back to Haiti and teach everybody to live this way.”
“That wouldn’t work,” Oscar said.
“Why not?” said Kevin.
“Because the Dutch have been trying that for years. Everybody in the advanced world thinks they can reinvent peasant life and keep tribal people ignorant and happy. Appropriate-tech just doesn’t work. Because peasant life is boring.”
“Yeah,” Fontenot said. “That’s exactly what tipped me off, too. They oughta be jamming around us asking for cash and transistor radios, just like any peasant always does for a tourist from the USA. But they can’t even be bothered to look at us. So, listen. You hear that kinda muttering sound?”
“You mean those hymns?” Oscar said.
“Oh, they sing hymns all right. But mostly, they pray. All the adults pray, men and women. They all pray, all the time. I mean to say, all the time, Oscar.”
Fontenot paused. “Y’know, outside people do make it over here every once in a while. Hunters, fishermen… I heard some stories. They all think these folks are just real religious, you know, weird voodoo Haitians. But that ain’t it. See, I was Secret Service. I spent years of my life searching through crowds, looking for crazy people. We’re real big on psychoanalysis in my old line of work. That’s why I know for a fact that there’s something really wrong in the heads of these people. It isn’t psychosis. It’s not drugs, either. Religion’s got something to do with it — but it’s not just religion. Something has been done to them.”
“Neural something,” Oscar said.
“Yeah. They know they’re different, too. They know that some-thing happened to them, down in that salt mine. But they think it was a holy revelation. The spirit flew into their heads — they call it the ‘second-born spirit,’ or ‘the born-again spirit.“’ Fontenot removed his hat and wiped his brow. “When I first found this place, I spent most of a day here, talking to this one old guy — Papa Christophe, that’s his name. Kinda their leader, or at least their spokesman. This guy is a local biggie, because this guy has really got a case of whatever-it-is. See, the spirit didn’t take on ’em all quite the same. The kids don’t have it at all. They’re just normal kids. Most of the grown-ups are just kind of muttery and sparkly-eyed. But then they’ve got these apostles, like Christophe. The houngans. The wise ones.”