Distraction

The speech took eight minutes. And the War was over.

For a strange historical instant, the United States went mad with joy, but the madness subsided with remarkably few casualties. Their long trials had made the American public peculiarly resilient. No more than eight hours passed before the first net pundits began to explain why total victory had been inevitable.

Total victory had its merits. There was no resisting the over-whelming prestige of a hero President. His favorables shot into the high nineties and hung there as if nailed to a mast.

The President was not caught napping by this development. He wasted no time: scarcely an hour; scarcely a picosecond.

He commandeered domestic airlines by executive order. There were swarms of American troops in every Dutch airport by morning. The Yankee soldiery, dazed and jet-lagged, were met by a courteous and chastened Dutch populace, waving homemade American flags. The President declared the War over — barely bothering to have a doc-ile Congress certify this — and declared the arrival of a new American era. This epoch was to be henceforth known as the Return to Nor-malcy.

Like a sorcerer slamming swords through a barrel, the President began to bloodlessly reshape the American body politic.

The Normalcy manifesto was a rather astonishing twenty-eight point document. It stole the clothes of so many of America’s splin-tered political parties that they were left quite stu

The dollar would be sharply devalued and made an open global currency again. A general amnesty would free from parole anyone whose crimes could be considered remotely political. A new tax struc-ture would soak the ultra-rich and come down brutally on carbon-dioxide production. Derelict and underused buildings would be nationalized en masse, then turned over to anyone willing to home-stead them. Derelict cities and ghost towns — and there were many such, especially in the West — would be scraped clean from the face of the earth and replanted in fast-growing trees. Roadblocking was henceforth to be considered an act of piracy and to be punished with-out mercy by roving gangs of the CDIA, who, since they were all former roadblockers of the most avid temperament, could be expected to know just how to put an end to the practice.

A constitutional amendment was offered to create a new fourth branch of government for American citizens whose “primary resi-dences were virtual networks.” America’s eight hundred and seven federal police agencies would be streamlined into four. There was a comprehensive reform plan for the astoundingly victorious American military.

There was also a new national health plan, more or less on a sensible Canadian model. This would never work. It had been put there deliberately, so that the President’s domestic opposition could enjoy the pleasure of destroying something.

The President’s fait accompli was not to be resisted — least of all by the state of Louisiana. Recognizing the hurricane power of this turn of events, Green Huey bent with the wind.

Huey resigned his office as Governor. He begged the people’s forgiveness and shed hot tears on-camera, expressing deep regret for his past excesses, and promising a brand-new, hundred-percent, feder-ally approved Normalcy Cooperation Policy. His lieutenant governor also resigned, but he was not missed, as he had always been the most colorless of Huey’s stooges.

Huey’s supine State Senate swiftly installed an entirely new Gov-ernor. She was a spectacular young black woman from New Orleans, a former beauty queen, a woman of such untoward and astonishing lithe beauty (for a state chief executive, at least) that the world’s cam-eras simply could not keep their lenses off her.

The new Governor’s first act as chief executive was to issue blan-ket pardons to all members of the former state government, including, first and foremost, Green Huey. Her second act was to formalize Lou-isiana’s state relationships — “formal and informal” — with the Regula-tors. The Regulators would henceforth be loyal local members of a statewide CDIA, directly modeled on the federal agency that the wise President in his infinite mercy had imposed on the American Repub-lic. It was pointed out that some Haitian guests of the State of Louisi-ana were still being held by their federal captors, and the new Governor, being of Haitian extraction herself, asked that they be granted clemency.

An enterprising news team — obviously tipped off — managed to locate and interview some of the Haitian subjects, who had been wait-ing out the days and hours in their federal medical kraal. The Haitians, having been ripped from their homes and medically probed from stem to stern, naturally expressed a devout wish to return to their swamp compound. It was a very poetic set of pleas, even when crossing the boundaries of translation. But at the end of the day, they were just Haitians, so no one felt much need to pay attention to their wishes. They stayed in their illegal-migrant slammer, while the President waited for the ex-Governor’s next shoe to drop.

On the issue of the Buna National Collaboratory and its frenetic reformers, the President did and said precisely nothing. The President apparently had bigger and better matters on his mind-and this Presi-dent was in a position to see to it that his interests seized and held the limelight.

With the sudden and stu

Beneath the fluttering party streamers, there was going to be serious science in Buna: “Science” with a new obsessive potency, because it was art pour l’art, science for its own sake. It was science as the chosen pursuit of that small demographic fraction that was entirely consumed by intellectual curiosity. But the hot air of revolutionary fervor would leak from their bubble, and the chill air of reality would leave it somewhat clammy, and unpleasant to the touch.

Work on the newly renamed Normalcy Committee, by its very nature, somehow lacked the brio attendant on Emergency and War. The work had always been exhausting, but the attendees had rarely been bored.

Now Greta and Oscar were discovering brief moments when they could think for themselves. Moments when they could speak, and not for public consumption. Moments when business took the rest of the Committee quorum elsewhere. Moments when they were alone.

Oscar gazed around the empty boardroom. The place looked the way his soul felt: drained, overlit, empty, spattered with official detri-tus.

“This is it, Greta. The campaign’s finally over. We’ve won. We’re in power. We have to settle down now, we have to learn to govern. We’re not the rebels anymore, because we can’t lead any strikes and marches against ourselves. We can’t even rebel against the President: he’s benignly ignoring us in a classically passive-aggressive fashion, he’s giving us rope. He’s going to see if we make it, or if we hang ourselves. We’ve got to deal with reality now. We have to con-solidate.”