“Well, they’re amateurs.”
“No, they’re worse than amateurs. They’re not following code. They’re not using certified and tested materials. All these tents and pylons, in untested combinations-a lot of them are going to col-lapse. ”
“Yes, surely, Senator — but it only took them a few days to put them up! If they go bust, they’ll just build more.”
“I hope you’re not expecting me to take personal responsibility for this. I sent you those plans, but I never expected them to be executed. Once I abandon my intellectual property to all and sundry, I can’t be expected to be responsible for other people’s exploitation of it. ”
“Of course not, Senator! These were Emergency conditions, War conditions… you know, there is an upside to this. This isn’t permanent structure, and it isn’t in classic form, but it’s remarkably popular.”
Bambakias brightened a little. “Really.”
“The people who are living under these things… they’re not architecture critics. A lot of them are people who haven’t had much shelter of any kind for many years. They’re really impressed to see nomad architecture pushed to these mind-boggling extremes.”
“That isn’t ‘nomad architecture.’ It’s ultrascale emergency re-lief.”
“That’s an interesting distinction, Alcott, but let me just put it this way: it’s nomad architecture now.”
“I think you’d better listen to him, darling,” Lorena put in faintly. “Oscar always has very good instincts about these things.”
“Oh yes, instincts,” Bambakias said. “Instincts are wonderful. You can live off instincts, as long as you don’t plan to live very long. How long do you expect all this to last, Oscar?”
“ ‘This’?” Oscar said delicately.
“Whatever it is that you’ve created here. What is it, exactly? Is it a political movement? Maybe it’s just one big street party. It certainly isn’t a town.”
“Well… it’s a little difficult to say exactly where all this will go…”
“Maybe you should have thought that through a bit more thor-oughly,” Bambakias said. It clearly irked the man to have to discuss the matter, but he was taking it as a painful duty. “You know, I’m a ranking member of the Senate Science Committee. It’s going to be a little difficult explaining these developments to my colleagues back in Washington.”
“Oh, I miss that Science Committee every day,” Oscar lied.
“You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific commu-nity. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed — there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world’s biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn’t go away — it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these no-mads and dissidents. Suddenly they could organize in powerful new ways, and now, finally, with the President taking their side… who knows? Do you see my parallel here, Oscar? Does it make sense to you?”
Oscar was increasingly uncomfortable. “Well, I never said what happened here was entirely without precedent. The great secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
“You stole these ideas from Huey. You stole Huey’s clothes, didn’t you?”
“Time-honored tactic, Alcott!”
“Oscar, Huey is a dictator. He’s a man on horseback. Do I un-derstand this ‘prestige economy’ business? It seems to run entirely on instinct. They spend all their time doing each other little volunteer community services. And they rank each other for it. Eventually somebody pops out of the mix and becomes a tribal big shot. Then they’re required to do what he says.”
“Well… it’s complicated. But yes, that’s the basics.”
“They really just don’t fit in the rest of American society. Not at all. ”
“It was designed that way.”
“I mean they don’t have any way to properly deal with the rest of society. They don’t even have proper ways to deal with each other. They have no rule of law. There’s no Constitution. There’s no legal redress. There’s no Bill of Rights. They don’t have any way to deal with the rest of us, except through evasion, or intimidation. When one network meets another that’s set up along different lines, they feud. They kill each other.”
“Sometimes. ”
“Now you’ve made these people aware of their mutual interest with the scientific research community. Another group of people who basically live outside the state, outside of economics. One wants free-dom of inquiry, and the other wants freedom from physical want, and neither of them has any sense of responsibility to the rest of us. In fact, the rest of us have given up expecting anything from them. We no longer hope that science will give us utopia, or even a real improve-ment. Science just adds more factor to the mix, and makes everything more unstable. We’ve given up on our dispossessed, too. We have no illusion that we can employ them, or keep them docile with more bio-bread, or more cyber-circuses. And now you’ve brought these two groups together and they’ve become a real coalition.”
“I’m with you, Senator. I’m following the argument.”
“What now, Oscar? What are they going to do now? What be-comes of the rest of us?”
“Hell, I don’t know!” Oscar shouted. “I just saw Huey doing it, that’s all. We were in a feud with Huey — you pushed me into the feud with Huey! The lab was broke, it was halfway in his pocket already, and he was just going to rack them up. They would just… be-come his creatures. I didn’t want them to be his creatures.”
“What’s the difference? If they’re still creatures.”
“The difference? Between me and Green Huey? Okay! At last a question I can answer! The difference between me and Huey is that whatever Huey does is always about Huey. It’s always about Huey first and foremost, and it’s always about the greater glory of Huey. But the things that I do will never, ever be about me. They aren’t allowed to be about me.”
“Because of the way you were born.”
“Alcott, it’s worse than that. I wasn’t even born at all.”
Lorena spoke up. “I think you two boys should stop all this. You’re going in circles. Why don’t we get something to eat?”
“I don’t mean to wound his feelings,” Bambakias said reason-ably. “I’m just looking at the structure critically, and I’m pointing out that there’s nothing holding it up.”
Lorena folded her arms. “Why pick on Oscar, for heaven’s sake? The President sent a newspaper-boat navy across the Atlantic, and there was nothing holding that up either. The War will be over in Washington soon. It can’t go on, it’s a stage show. Then the War will be over here too. They’ll just fold all this up, and we’ll find some other distraction. That’s the way life is now. Stop fussing about it.”
Bambakias paused thoughtfully. “You’re right, dear. I’m sorry. I was getting all worked up.”
“We’re supposed to be on vacation here. You should save some energy for the hearings. I want some chowder, Alcott. I want some etouffee.”
“She’s so good to me,” Bambakias told Oscar. Suddenly he smiled. “I haven’t gotten so worked up in ages! That really felt good.”
“Oscar always cheers you up,” Lorena told him. “He’s the best at that. You should be good to him.”
The Senator and his wife wanted Louisiana cuisine. That was a legiti-mate request. They took a fleet of limos, and the Senator’s large krewe, and their media coverage, and the Senator’s numerous body-guards, and the entire caravan drove to a famous restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. They took a great deal of pleasure in this, because it was an excellent restaurant, and they were certain that Huey would quickly learn of their raid.