“It was all invented here,” Oscar said. “This is all Collaboratory equipment. You’ve just never seen it repackaged and repurposed.”
Gazzaniga put the spike down. Then he picked up a dented tin egg. “Now this thing here — see, this is the sort of thing you associate with nomad technology. Scrap metal, all crimped together, obviously homemade … So what is this thing?” He shook it near his ear. “It rattles.”
“It’s a piss bomb,” Burningboy told him.
“What?”
“See those holes in the side? That’s the timer. It’s genetically engineered corn kernels. Once they’re in hot water, the seeds swell up. They rupture a membrane inside, and then the charge ignites.”
Oscar examined one of the crude arson bombs. It had been cre-ated by hand: by a craftsman with a hole punch, a ball peen hammer, and an enormous store of focused resentment. The bomb was a dumb and pig-simple incendiary device with no moving parts, but it could easily incinerate a building. The seeds of genetically engineered maize were dirt-cheap and totally consistent. Corn like that was so uniform in its properties that it could even be used as a timepiece. It was a bad, bad gizmo. It was bad enough as a work of military technology. As a work of primitive art, the piss bomb was stunningly effective. Oscar could feel sincere contempt and hatred radiating from it as he held it in his hand.
The prisoner now arrived, handcuffed, and with an escort of four Moderators. The prisoner wore a full-length hunter’s suit of gray and brown bark-and-leaf camou, including a billed cap. His lace-up boots were clogged with red mud. He had a square nose, large hairy ears, heavy brows, black shiny eyes. He was a squat and heavy man in his thirties, with hands like callused bear paws. He’d suffered a swollen scrape along his unshaven jaw and had a massive bruise on his neck.
“What happened to him? Why is he injured?” Greta said.
“He fell off his bicycle,” Burningboy offered flatly.
The prisoner was silent. It was immediately and embarrassingly obvious to all concerned that he was not going to tell them a thing. He stood solidly in the midst of their boardroom, reeking of wood-smoke and sweat, radiating complete contempt for them, everything they stood for, and everything they knew. Oscar examined the Regulator with deep professional interest. This man was astoundingly out of place. It was as if a rock-hard cypress log had been hauled from the bat-haunted depths of the swamp and dumped on the carpet before them.
“You really think you’re a tough customer, don’t you?” Kevin said shrilly.
The Regulator signally failed to notice him.
“We can nuke you talk,” Kevin growled. “Wait’ll I load up my anarchy philes on improvising interrogation! We’ll do hideous and gruesome things to you! With wire, and matchsticks, and like that.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Oscar said politely. “Do you speak English? Parlez-vous franзais?”
No response at all.
“We’re not going to torture you, sir. We are civilized people here. We just want you to tell us why you were exploring our neigh-borhood with all these surveillance and arson devices. We’re willing to be very reasonable about this. If you’ll tell us what you were doing and who told you to do it, we’ll let you go home.”
No answer.
“Sir, I recognize that you’re loyal to your cause, whatever it is, but you are captured, you know. You don’t have to remain entirely mute under circumstances like this. It’s considered entirely ethical to give your name, your number, and your network address. If you did that for us, we could tell your friends — your wife, your children — that you’re alive and safe.”
No answer. Oscar sighed patiently. “Okay, you’re not going to talk. I can see that I’m tiring you. So if you’ll just indicate that you’re not deaf…”
The Regulator’s heavy eyebrows twitched. He looked at Oscar, sizing him up for a bloodletting bowshot to the kidneys. Finally, he spoke. “Nice wristwatch, handsome.”
“Okay,” Oscar breathed. “Let me suggest that we take our friend here and dump him into the Spinoffs building, along with those other Huey scabs. I’m sure they all have a lot of news to catch up on.”
Gazzaniga was scandalized. “What! We can’t send this character in there to rendezvous with those people! He’s very dangerous! He’s a vicious nomad brute!”
Oscar smiled. “So what? We have hundreds of vicious nomad brutes. Forget talking to this guy. We don’t need him. We need to talk seriously to our own nomads. They know everything that he knows, and more. Plus, our friends actually want to defend us. So can we all knuckle down and get serious now? Boys, take the prisoner away.”
After this confrontation, the Emergency negotiations rapidly moved onto much firmer ground: equipment and instrumentation. Here the nomads and scientists found compelling common interests. Their mu-tual need to eat was especially compelling. Burningboy introduced three of his technical experts. Greta commandeered the time of her best biotech people. The talks plowed on into darkness.
Oscar left the building, changed his clothes to shed any cling-on listening devices, then went into one of the gardens for a quiet ren-dezvous with Captain Burningboy.
“Man, you’re a sneaky devil,” Burningboy ruminated, methodi-cally chewing on a long handful of dry blue noodles. “The tone of that meeting changed totally when you had that goon brought in. I wonder what they’d have done if he’d told ’em that we caught him two days ago.”
“Oh, we both knew that Regulator was never going to talk,” Oscar said. “I was reserving him for the proper political moment. There’s nothing dishonest about revealing the facts within the proper context. After all, you did capture him, and he is a commando.” They lowered their voices and tiptoed to avoid a dozing lynx. “You see, talking common sense to scientists just doesn’t work. Scientists despise common sense, they think it’s irrational. To get ’em off the dime, you need strong moral pressure, something from outside their expecta-tions. They live with big intellectual walls around them — peer review, passive construction, all this constant use of the third person plu-ral…”
“I’m handing it to you, Oscar-the gambit worked great. But I still don’t see why.”
Oscar paused thoughtfully. He enjoyed his private chats with Burningboy, who was proving to be an appreciative audience. The Texan Moderator was an aging, disheveled outlaw with a long prison record, but he was also a genuine politician, a regional player full of southern-fried insights. Oscar felt a strong need to give the man a collegial briefing.
“It worked because… well, let me give you the big picture here. The really big, philosophical picture. Did you ever wonder why I’ve never moved against Huey’s people inside this lab? Why they’re still inside there, holding the Spinoffs building, barricaded against us? It’s because we’re in a netwar. We’re just like a group of go-stones. To survive in a netwar, a surrounded group needs eyes. It’s all about links, and perception, and the battlespace. We’re surrounded inside this dome — but we’re not entirely surrounded, because there’s a smaller dome of enemies inside our dome. I deliberately threw that Regulator in there with them, so that now, that little subgroup has its own little nomad contingent, just like we do. You see, people instinctively sense this kind of symmetry. It works on them, on an unconscious level. It’s meaningful to them, it changes their worldview. Having enemies in-side the dome might seem to weaken us, but the fact that we can tolerate our own core of dissent — that actually strengthens us. Because we’re not totalitarian. We’re not the same substance all the way through. We’re not all brittle. We’re resilient. We have potential space inside. ”
“Yes?” Burningboy said skeptically.