Burningboy left the office, throwing his arms over the willing shoulders of the two nomad women. Oscar sat down. “I hope you didn’t destroy your voter registration, too.”
“As if absentee voting in Boston is somehow gonna help us down here.”
“He’s really put you in direct charge over his own people inside the facility?”
Kevin yawned. “Y’know, when this party is over, I’m gonna have a serious talk with you, man. In the meantime, you need to eat something. Maybe even have a drink. After all, you’re the guy who’s paying for all this.”
“I won’t take much of your valuable party time, Captain Bee. This is just a friendly krewe-style chat.”
“If we’re going to be all friendly, then you’d better call me ‘Scubbly.’ ” Kevin pulled his socks over his reddened, liniment-reeking feet, with a theatrical series of winces. “You’ve just got to know why he did that, don’t you? You’ve got to be on top of developments, you can’t even wait till morning to learn. Well, it’s because he’s setting me up, that’s why. He’s getting off the hot seat, and he’s putting me right on it. See, he thinks the Regulators are gonna cross the border and come after us with everything they have. Because that’s what he wants, that’s his agenda. The Regulators will stomp this place, and then the Regulators will catch a truly massive counterreaction from the feds.”
“That seems like a far-fetched gambit, doesn’t it?”
“But that’s the way he set this up, man. He didn’t come here because he wanted to help your little pet scientists. You’re too straight, you just don’t understand these guys’ priorities. They gave up on you a long, long time ago. They don’t expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don’t even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather. It’s something you just endure.”
“You’re wrong, Kevin — I understand all of that perfectly.”
“When they want to take action, they take actions that matter to them. The other proles, that’s who matters. They’re like tribes who are wandering through an enormous hostile desert made of your laws and money. But the Moderators hate the Regulators. The Regulators are strong and scary now. They’ve got a state Governor as their big secret Grand Dragon Pooh-bah. They overwhelmed an Air Force base. The Moderators… all they own is a few dozen ghost towns and national parks.”
Oscar nodded encouragement.
“Then you came along. All of a sudden there was a chance to take over this place. It’s a federal science facility, a much better facility than a pork-barrel Air Force base. It has big prestige. Grabbing it is an intolerable insult to Regulator prestige, because their main man Huey built this place, and he thinks he owns it by right. He’s nuts about green genetic gumbo and weird cognition crap. So that’s why Burn-ingboy helped you. And that’s why he’s getting out now, while the getting is good. He set a trap for the other side, and to his eyes, we’re just poisoned bait.”
“How do you know all this?”
Kevin opened a desk drawer. He removed a large and highly illegal revolver, and a bottle of whiskey. He sipped from the whiskey and then began placing hinge-lid cigar boxes on the polished face of his desk. “Because I heard him say so, man. Look at these things, would you?”
Kevin flipped open the first cigar box. It was full of pinned audio bugs, with neat handwritten labels. “You know how hard it is to fully debug a facility? It’s technically impossible, that’s how hard. There aren’t any working ‘sweeps’ or ‘monitors’ for bugs — that’s all crap! Any decent bug basically can’t be detected, except by a physical search. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I round up big gangs of Mod-erators with nothing better to do, and we go over every conceivable surface with fine-tooth combs. These bugs are like pubic crabs, they’re a goddamn social disease. I’ve found bugs in here that go back four-teen and fifteen years. I made a special collection! Just look!”
“Very impressive.”
Kevin flipped his cigar box shut and pointed at it solemnly. “You know what that is? It’s evil, that’s what it is. It’s bad, it’s just plain evil of us to do this to ourselves. We have no decency as a people and a nation, Oscar. We went too far with this technology, we lost our self-respect. Because this is media, man. It’s evil, prying, spying media. But we want it and use it anyway, because we think we’ve got to be informed. We’re compelled to pay total attention to everything. Even things we have no goddamn right or business paying any attention to.”
Oscar said nothing. He wasn’t about to stop Kevin while he was in a confessional mood.
“So I got rid of everybody else’s bugs. And I installed my own. Because I’m finally the hacker who became the superuser. I didn’t just crack the computers here. I’ve cracked this whole environment. I can access anything that goes on in here, anytime that I want. I’m a cop. But I’m more than a cop. I mean, being a cop would be traditional — a white Anglo guy imposing his idea of order on the restless natives, hell, every city in America was just like that once. And man, I was thrilled to do it. I loved myself, I thought I was magic. It’s just amaz-ingly interesting, like watching other people having sex. But you know, if you do that sixty or seventy times, it gets old. It just does.”
“Does it really?”
“Oh yeah. And it has a price. I haven’t gotten laid since I met you! I don’t dare! Because I’m the Secret Master Policeman. I scare the crap out of any decent woman. Indecent women have their own agenda when they have sex with the secret police. And besides, I just don’t have any time for my own needs! The Super Master Inquisitor is way too busy with everybody else’s. I’ve got to run word scans on all my verbal tapes. Every time there’s an incident somewhere I’ve got to peel the videos back. I got bugs with their batteries running down, people are findin’ ’em and stepping on them. There’s goblins lurking in the woods. There’s spooks flying overhead. There’s drunks, lost children, petty thieves. There’s fire safety and car accidents. And every last one of those things is my problem. All of it. All of it!”
“Kevin, you’re not planning to leave me, are you?”
“Leave you? Man, I was born for this. I got my every wish. It’s just that it’s turning me into a monster. That’s all.”
“Kevin, you don’t look all that bad to me. Things aren’t that bad here. This isn’t chaos. The situation’s holding.”
“Sure, I’m keeping order for you. But it’s not law and order, Oscar. There’s order, but there is no law. We let things get out of control. We let it get all emergent and unpredictable. We let it fall back to ad hoc. I’m keeping order here because I’m a secret tyrant. I’ve got everything but legitimacy. I’m a spy and a usurper, and I have no rules. I have no brakes. I have no honor.”
“There isn’t anyplace for me to get you any of that.”
“You’re a politician, Oscar. But you gotta be something better than just that. You have got to be a statesman. You’ve got to find some way to make me some honor.”
A phone rang in the office. Kevin groaned, picked up a laptop, and ran a trace with a function key. “Nobody is supposed to have this number,” he complained.
“I thought you had all of that taken care of by now.”
“Typical politician’s remark. What I got is a series of cutouts, dummies, and firewalls, and you would not believe the netwar attacks those things are soaking up.” He examined the tracing report on his laptop. “What the hell is this thing?” He answered the phone. “Yes?”
He paused and listened intently for forty-five seconds. Oscar took the opportunity to examine Kevin’s office. It was the least likely police office he had ever seen. Girlie pinups, dead coffee cups, ritual masks disemboweled telecom hardware driven into the walls with tenpenny nails …