Distraction

10

Oscar now worked for the President of the United States. His new position was enormously helpful in dealing with two thousand naive scientists inside a dome in East Texas. As a practical matter, however, it merely added a new layer of complexity to Oscar’s life.

Oscar swiftly discovered that he was not, in fact, the National Security Council’s official Science Adviser. A routine security check by the White House krewe had swiftly revealed Oscar’s personal background problem. This was a serious hitch, as the President did not currently employ anyone who was a product of outlaw South Amer-ican genetic engineering. Given the circumstances, hiring one seemed a bad precedent.

So, although Oscar had obediently resigned his Sen-ate committee post, he failed to achieve an official post with the National Security Council. He was merely an “informal adviser.” He had no official ranking in the gov-ernment, and did not even receive a paycheck.

Despite the President’s assertion, no “crack U.S. Army personnel” arrived in Buna. It seemed that a Presi-dential order had been issued, but the Army deployment had been indefinitely delayed due to staffing and budget problems. These “staffing and budget problems” were certainly likely enough — they were chronic in the military but the deeper problems were, of course, political. The U.S. Army as an insti-tution was very mulish about being ordered into potential combat against American civilians. The U.S. Army hadn’t been involved in the gruesome and covert helicopter shoot-out on the banks of the Sabine River. The Army wasn’t anxious to take the political heat for trigger-happy spooks from the NSC.

As a sop to propriety, Oscar was told that an NSC lieutenant colonel would soon arrive, with a crack team of very low-profile Marine aviators. But then the lieutenant colonel was also delayed, due to unexpected foreign-policy developments.

An American-owned fast-food multinational had accidentally poisoned a number of Dutch citizens with poorly sterilized hamburger meat. In retaliation, angry Dutch zealots had attacked and torched several restaurants. Given strained Dutch-American relations, this was a serious scandal and close to a casus belli. The President, faced with his first foreign-policy crisis, was blustering and demanding repara-tions and formal apologies. Under these circumstances, military disor-der within the U.S. was not an issue that the Administration cared to emphasize.

These were all disappointments. However, Oscar bore up. He was peeved to be denied a legitimate office, but he wasn’t surprised. He certainly wasn’t under the illusion that the Presidency worked any better than any other aspect of contemporary American government. Besides, there were distinct advantages to his questionable status. De-spite the humiliations, Oscar was now far more powerful than he had ever been before. Oscar had become a spook. Spookhood was doable.

Oscar swiftly made himself a factor with the new powers lurking in the basement below the Oval Office. He studied their dossiers, memorized their names and the office flowcharts, and asserted himself in the organization by humbly demanding favors. They were small, easily granted favors, but they were carefully arranged so that a failure to grant them was sure to provoke a turf war in the White House staff. Consequently, Oscar got his way.

He resolved one nagging problem by obliterating the local police force. He had the Collaboratory’s captive police flown out of Texas in an unmarked cargo helicopter. They were transferred to a federal law enforcement training facility in West Virginia. The Collaboratory’s cops were not fired, much less were they tried for malfeasance and bribe-taking; but the budget of their tiny agency was zeroed-out, and the personnel simply vanished forever into the mazes of federal reas-signment.

This left the Collaboratory with no working budget for a police force. But that was doable. Because at the moment, there were no budgets of any kind at the Collaboratory. Everyone was working for no pay. They were living off barter, back gardens, surplus office equipment, and various forms of left-handed pin money.

The days that followed were the most intense and productive of Oscar’s political life. The lab’s situation was an absolute shambles. Only organizational skill of genius could have retrieved it. Oscar didn’t possess the skill of genius. However, he could successfully re-place genius through the simple expedient of giving up sleep and outworking everyone else.

The first truly serious challenge was to mollify the giant invasion of Moderators. The Moderators had to be dissuaded from wrecking and sacking the facility. Oscar finessed this through the simple gambit of informing the Moderators that they now owned the facility. Obvi-ously, they could wreck the place at will, but if they did so, the life-support systems would collapse, the atmosphere would sour, and all the glamorous and attractive rare animals would die. The Moderators would choke with everyone else, in an uninhabitable glass ghetto. However, if they came to working terms with the aboriginal scientists, the Moderators would possess a giant genetic Eden where they could live outdoors without tents.

Oscar’s argument carried the day. There were naturally a few ugly incidents, in which proles abducted and barbecued some espe-cially tasty animals. But the ghastly stench made it clear that open fires within the dome were counterproductive for everyone. The situation failed to explode. As days passed it began to show definite signs of stabilizing.

A new committee was formed, to negotiate the terms for local coexistence between the scientists and the invading dropouts. It con-sisted of Greta, the board’s division heads, Kevin, Oscar himself, occa-sional consultant members of Oscar’s krewe, and a solemn variety of gurus, sachems, and muckety-mucks from Burningboy’s contingent. This new governing body needed a name. It couldn’t be called the “Strike Committee,” as that term had already been used. It swiftly became known as the “Emergency Committee.”

Oscar regretted this coinage, as he loathed and despised all Emer-gency committees; but the term had one great advantage. It didn’t have to be explained to anyone. The American populace was already used to the spectacle of its political institutions collapsing, to be re-placed by Emergency committees. Having the Collaboratory itself run by an “emergency committee” was an easy matter to understand. It could even be interpreted as a prestigious step upward; it was as if the tiny Collaboratory had collapsed as grandly as the U.S. Congress.

Oscar canceled his public relations poster campaign. The Strike was well and truly over now, and the lab’s new regime required a new graphic look and a fresh media treatment. After a brainstorming ses-sion with his krewe, Oscar decided on the use of loudspeakers. The Emergency Committee’s continuing negotiations would be broadcast live on half a dozen loudspeakers, situated in various public areas within the dome.

This proved a wise design choice. The loudspeakers had a pleas-antly makeshift, grass-rootsy feeling. People could gently drift in and out of the flow of political agitation. The antiquated technology pro-vided a calming, peripheral media environment. People could become just as aware of the continuing crisis as they felt they needed to be.

Thanks to the use of loudspeakers, the Collaboratory personnel and their mongrelized invaders were placed on an equal informational plane. As an additional gambit, tasteful blue plastic “soapboxes” were set up here and there, where especially foolish and irate people could safely vent their discontents. Not only was this a safety valve and a useful check on popular sentiment, but it made the gimcrack Emer-gency Committee seem very adult and responsible by contrast.

This media campaign was especially useful in finessing the severe image problem presented by Captain (once General, once Corporal) Burningboy. In person or on video, the prole leader looked impossi-bly crazed and transgressive. However, he had a deep, fatherly speak-ing voice. Over the loudspeakers, Burningboy radiated the pious jollity of an arsonist Santa Claus.

It was a misconception to imagine that the Moderators were merely violent derelicts. The roads of America boasted a great many sadly desperate people, but the Moderators were not a mob of hobos. The Moderators were no longer even a “gang” or a “tribe.” Basically, the Moderators were best understood as a nongovernmental network organization. The Moderators deliberately dressed and talked like savages, but they didn’t lack sophistication. They were organized along new lines that were deeply orthogonal to those of conventional Amer-ican culture.

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabil-ities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it be-came harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of peo-ple to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave. They gathered to publicly burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered them-selves the only free Americans.

Nomadism had once been the linchpin of human existence; it was settled life that formed the technological novelty. Now technol-ogy had changed its nonexistent mind. Nomads were an entire alter-nate society for whom life by old-fashioned political and economic standards was simply no longer possible.

Or so Oscar reasoned. As a wealthy New Englander, he had never had much political reason to concern himself with proles. They rarely voted. But he had no prejudice against proles as a social group. They were certainly no stranger or more foreign to his sensibilities than scientists were. Now it was clear to him that the proles were a source of real power, and as far as he knew, there was only one Amer-ican politician who had made a deliberate effort to recruit and sustain them. That politician was Green Huey.

Having pacified the Moderators, Oscar’s second order of business was reconciling the Collaboratory’s scientists to their presence. Oscar’s key talking point here was their stark lack of choice in the matter.

The Collaboratory’s scientists had always had firm federal back-ing; they had never required any alternate means of support. Now there was no federal largesse left. That was bad, but the underlying reality was much, much worse. The lab’s bookkeeping had been ruined by a netwar attack. The Collaboratory was not only broke, its inhabitants were fiscally unable even to assess how broke they were. They couldn’t even accurately describe the circumstances under which they might be bailed out.

Morale at the lab had soared on the news that the President had taken notice of their plight. The President had even gone so far as to send a prepared speech for the lab’s Director, which was duly recited by Greta. However, the speech had a very conspicuous omission: money. The press release was basically a long grateful paean to the President’s talent for restoring law and order. Financing the Col-laboratory was not the President’s problem. The Congress was in charge of the nation’s purse strings, and despite frenzied effort, the Congress had still not managed to pass a budget.

For a federal science facility, this was a disaster of epic magni-tude, but for proles, it was business as usual.

So — as Oscar explained to the Emergency Committee — it was a question of symbiosis. And symbiosis was doable. Having boldly cut its ties to the conventional rules of political reality, the Collaboratory’s new hybrid population could float indefinitely within their glass bub-ble. They had no money, but they had warmth, power, air, food, shelter; they could all mind the business of living. They could wait out the turbulence beyond their borders, and since they were also ignoring federal oversight, they could all concentrate on their favorite pet proj-ects. They could get some genuine scientific work accomplished, for once. This was a formidable achievement, a Shangri-la almost, and it was there within their grasp. All they had to do was come to terms with their own contradictions.

There was a long silence after Oscar’s presentation. The Emer-gency Committee gazed at him in utter wonderment. At the moment, the Committee’s quorum consisted of Greta, her chief confidant and backer Albert Gazzaniga, Oscar himself, Yosh Pelicanos, Captain Burningboy, and a representative Moderator thug — a kid named Ombahway Tuddy Flagboy.

“Oscar, you’re amazing,” Greta said. “You have such talent for making impossible things sound plausible.”

“What’s so impossible about it?”

“Everything. This is a federal facility! These Moderator people invaded it by force. They’re occupying it. They are here illegally. We can’t aid and abet that! Once the President sends in troops, we’ll all be outed for collaboration. We’ll be arrested. We’ll be fired. No, it’s worse than that. We’ll be purged.”

“That never happened in Louisiana,” Oscar said. “Why should it happen here?”

Gazzaniga spoke up. “That’s because Congress and the Emer-gency committees never really wanted that air base in Louisiana in the first place. They never cared enough about it to take action.”

“They don’t care about you, either,” Oscar assured him. “It’s true that the President expressed an interest, but hey, it’s been a long week now. A week is forever during a military crisis. There aren’t any federal troops here. Because there isn’t any military crisis here. The President’s military crisis is in Holland, not East Texas. He’s not going to deploy troops domestically when the Dutch Cold War is heating up. If we had better sense, we’d realize that the Moderators are our troops. They’re better than federal troops. Real troops can’t feed us.”

“We can’t afford thousands of nonpaying guests,” Pelicanos said.

“Yosh, just forget the red ink for a minute. We don’t have to ‘afford them.’ They are affording us. They can feed and clothe us, and all we have to do is share our shelter and give them a political cover. That’s the real beauty of this Emergency, you see? We can go on here indefinitely! This is the apotheosis of the Strike. During the Strike, we were all refusing to do anything except work on science. Now that we have an Emergency, the scientists can continue their science, while the Moderators will assume the role of a supportive, sympathetic, civil population. We’ll just ignore everyone else! Everything that annoyed us in the past simply falls off our radar. All those senseless commercial demands, and governmental oversight, and the crooked contrac-tors… they’re all just gone. They no longer have any relevance.”

“But nomads don’t understand science,” Gazzaniga said. “Why would they support scientists, when they could just loot the place and leave?”

“Hey,” said Burningboy. “I can understand science, fella! Wernher von Braun! Perfect example. Dr. von Braun lucked into a big ugly swarm of the surplus flesh, just like you have! They’re heading for Dachau anyway if he don’t use ’em, so he might as well grind some use out of ’em, assembling his V-2 engines.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Gazzaniga demanded. “Why does he always talk like that?”

“That’s what science is!” Burningboy said. “I can define it. Science is about proving a mathematical relationship between phenome-non A and phenomenon B. Was that so hard? You really think that’s beyond my mental grasp? I’ll tell you something way beyond your mental grasp, son — surviving in prison. You fair-haired folks might have, like, a bruising collision with nonquantum reality if somebody drove a handmade shiv right through your physics book.”

“This just isn’t going to work,” Greta said. “We don’t even speak the same language. We have nothing in common.” She pointed dramatically. “Just look at that laptop he’s carrying! It’s made out oj straw.”

“Why am I the only one who sees the obvious here?” Oscar said. “You people have amazing commonalities. Look at all that no-mad equipment — those leaf grinders, and digesters, and catalytic cracking units. They’re using biotechnology. And computer networks, too. They live off those things, for heaven’s sake.”

Greta’s face hardened. “Yes but … not scientifically.”

“But they live exactly like you live — by their reputations. You are America’s two most profoundly noncommercial societies. Your socie-ties are both based on reputation, respect, and prestige.”

Gazzaniga frowned. “What is this, a sociology class? Sociology’s not a hard science.”

“But it’s true! You scientists want to become the Most Fre-quently Cited and win all the honors and awards. While Moderators, like the Captain here, want to be streetwise netgod gurus. As a further plus, neither of you have any idea how to dress! Furthermore, even though you are both directly responsible for the catastrophe that our society is undergoing, you are both incredibly adept at casting your-selves as permanent, misunderstood victims. You both whine and moan endlessly about how nobody else is cool enough or smart enough to understand you. And you both never clean up your own messes. And you both never take responsibility for yourselves. And that’s why you’re both treated like children by the people who actu-ally run this country!”

They stared at him, appalled.

“I am talking sense to you here,” Oscar insisted, his voice rising to an angry buzz. “I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess. It is no use my soft-pedaling the truth to you. You are in a crisis. This is a crux. You have both severed your lifelines to the rest of society. You need to overcome your stupid prejudice, and unite as a powerful coalition. And if you could only do this, the world would be yours!”

Oscar leaned forward. Inspiration blazed within him like Platonic daylight. “We can survive this Emergency. We could even prevail. We could grow. If we handled it right, this could catch on!”

“All right,” Greta said. “Calm down. I have one question. They’re nomads, aren’t they? What happens after they leave us?”

“You think that we’ll run away,” Burningboy said.

Greta looked at him, sad at having given offense. “Don’t you always run away? I thought that was how you people survived.”

“No, you’re the gutless ones!” Burningboy shouted. “You’re sup-posed to be intellectuals! You’re supposed to be our visionaries! You’re supposed to be giving people a grasp of the truth, something to look up to, the power, the knowledge, higher reality. But what are you people really? You’re not titans of intellect. You’re a bunch of cheap geeks, in funny clothes that your mom bought you. You’re just an-other crowd of sniveling hangers-on who are dying for a government handout. You’re whining to me about how dirty morons like us can’t appreciate you — well, what the hell have you done for us lately? What do you want out of life, besides a chance to hang out in your lab and look down on the rest of us? Quit being such a pack of sorry weasels — do something big, you losers! Take a chance, for Christ’s sake. Act like you matter!”

“He’s really lost it,” Gazzaniga said, goggling in wounded amazement. “This guy has no grasp of real life.”

Flagboy’s phone rang. He spoke briefly, then handed the phone to his leader.

Burningboy listened. “I gotta go,” he announced abruptly. “There’s been a new development. The boys have brought in a prisoner.”

“What?” Kevin demanded. As the new police chief, Kevin was instantly suspicious. “We already agreed that you have no authority to take prisoners.”

Burningboy wrinkled his large and fleshy nose. “They captured him in the piney woods east of town, Mr. Police Chief, sir. Several kilometers outside your jurisdiction.”

“So then’s he’s a Regulator,” Oscar said. “He’s a spy.”

Burningboy put his notes and laptop in order, and nodded at Oscar reluctantly. “Yup.”

“What are you going to do to this captured person?” Greta said.

Burningboy shrugged, his face grim.

“I think this Committee needs to see the prisoner,” Oscar said.

“Oscar’s right,” said Kevin sternly. “Burningboy, I can’t have you manhandling suspects inside this facility, just on your own recog-nizance. Let’s interrogate him ourselves!”

“What are we, the Star Chamber?” Gazzaniga said, aghast. “We can’t start interrogating people!”

Kevin sneered. “Okay, fine! Albert, you’re excused. Go out for an ice cream cone. In the meantime, us grown-ups need to confront this terrorist guerrilla.”

Greta declared a five-minute break. Alerted by the live coverage over the loudspeakers, several more Committee members showed up. The break stretched into half an hour. The meeting was considerably enlivened by an impromptu demonstration of the prisoner’s captured possessions.

The apprehended Regulator had been posing as a poacher. He had a pulley-festooned compound bow that would have baffled Wil-liam Tell. The bow’s graphite arrows contained self-rifling gyroscopic fletching and global-positioning-system locator units. The scout also owned boot-spike crampons and a climber’s lap-belt, ideal for exten-sive lurking in the tops of trees. He carried a ceramic bowie knife.

These deadly gizmos might have passed muster on a standard hunter, but the other evidence cinched the case against him: he had a hammer and a pack of sabotage tree-spikes. Tree-spikes, which ruined saw blades, were common enough for radical Greens; but these spikes contained audio bugs and cellphone repeaters. They could be hammered deep into trees, and they would stay there forever, and they would listen, and they would even take phone calls. They had bizarre little pores in them so that they could drink sap for their bat-teries.

The Committee passed the devices from hand to hand, studying them with grave attention, much as if they captured saboteurs every day. Producing a pocket multitool, Gazzaniga managed to pry one of the spikes open. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This thing’s got a mito-chondrial battery.”

“Nobody has mitochondrial batteries,” objected the new head of the Instrumentation division. “We don’t even have mitochondrial batteries, and the damned things were invented here.”

“Then I want you to explain to me how a telephone runs on wet jelly,” Gazzaniga said. “You know something? These spikes sure look a lot like our vegetation monitors.”

“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.

“There’s a vital fractal there. It’s all about scaling issues, basically. Here we are, inside these walls. Outside our walls, Green Huey is lurking over us, full of sinister intent. But the President is lurking over Huey — and our new President is, in his own unique way, a rather more sinister person than the Governor of Louisiana. The President runs the USA, a nation that is all wounded and inward-turning now — a little world, surrounded by a bigger world full of people who grew bored with us. They no longer pay America to tell them that we are their future. And then beyond that world… well, I guess it’s Greta’s world. A rational, Einsteinian-Newtonian cosmos. The cos-mos of objective, observable facts. And beyond scientific understand-ing… all those dark phenomena. Metaphysics. Will and idea. History, maybe.”

“Do you really believe any of that junk?”

“No, I don’t believe it in the way that I believe that two and two are four. But it’s doable, it’s my working metaphor. What can politi-cians ever really ‘know’ about anything? History isn’t a laboratory. You never step in the same river twice. But some people have effective political insight, and some just don’t.”

Burningboy nodded slowly. “You really see us from way, way on the outside, don’t you, Oscar?”

“Well, I’ve never been a nomad — at least not yet. And I’ll never be a scientist, either. I can recognize my ignorance, but I can’t be buffaloed by ignorance — I’m in power, I have to act. Knowledge is just knowledge. But the control of knowledge — that’s politics.”

“That wasn’t the kind of ‘outsiderness’ I had in mind.”

“Oh.” Oscar realized the truth. “You mean my personal back-ground problem.”

“Yup. ”

“You mean I have advantages because I’m outside the entire human race.”

Burningboy nodded. “I couldn’t help but notice that. Has it always been that way for you?”

“Yeah. It has. Pretty much.”

“Are you the future, man?”

“No. I wouldn’t count on that. I have too many pieces missing.”

Oscar knew that the situation had stabilized when a roaring sex scan-dal broke out. A teenage soldier accused a middle-aged scientist of indecently fondling her. This incident caused frantic uproar.

Oscar found the scandal a very cheering development. It meant that the conflict between the Collaboratory’s two populations had broken through to a symbolic, psychosexual, politically meaningless level. The public fight was now about deep resentments and psychic starvations that would never, ever be cured, and were therefore basi-cally irrelevant. But the noise was very useful, because it meant that enormous quiet progress could now be made on every other front. The public psychodrama consumed vast amounts of attention, while the Collaboratory’s truly serious problems had become background noise. The real problems were left in the hands of people who cared enough about them to do constructive things.

Oscar took the opportunity to learn how to use a Moderator laptop. He had been given one, and he rightly recognized this gesture as a high tribal honor. The Moderator device had a flexible green shell of plasticized straw. It weighed about as much as a bag of popcorn. And its keyboard, instead of the time-honored QWERTYUIOP, boasted a sleek, sensible, and deeply sinister DHIATENSOR.

Oscar had been assured many times that the venerable QWERTYUIOP keyboard design would never, ever be replaced. Supposedly, this was due to a phenomenon called “technological lock-in.” QWERTYUIOP was a horribly bad design for a key-board — in fact, QWERTYUIOP was deliberately designed to hamper typists — but the effort required to learn it was so crushing that people would never sacrifice it. It was like English spelling, or American standard measurements, or the ludicrous design of toilets; it was very bad, but it was a social fact of nature. QWERTYUIOP’s universality made it impossible for alternatives to arise and spread.

Or so he had always been told. And yet, here was the impossible alternative, sitting on the table before him: DHIATENSOR. It was sensible. It was efficient. It worked much better than QWERTYUIOP.

Pelicanos entered the hotel room. “Still up?”

“Sure. ”

“What are you working on?”

“Greta’s press releases. And I’ve got to talk to Bambakias soon, I’ve been neglecting the Senator. So I’m making some notes, and I’m learning how to type properly, for the very first time in my life.” Oscar paused. He was eager to brief Pelicanos on the fascinating social differences he had discovered between the Regulators and the Moder-ators. To the undiscerning eye, the shabby and truculent proles could not be distinguished with an electron microscope — all their real and genuinely striking differences were inherent in the architecture of their network software.

An epic struggle had been taking place in the invisible fields of the networks. Virtual tribes and communities had been trying literally thousands of different configurations, winnowing them out, giving them their all, watching them die…

“Oscar, we need to talk seriously.”

“Great.” Oscar pushed the laptop aside. “Level with me.”

“Oscar, you’re getting too wrapped up here. All the negotiations with the Emergency Committee, all the time you spend dickering with those NSC people who won’t give you the time of day… we need a reality check.”

“Okay. Fine.”

“Have you been outside the lab lately? The sky is full of ‘delivery aircraft’ that never deliver anything to anyone. There are cops and roadblocks all over East Texas.”

“Yeah, we’re generating a lot of sustained outside interest. We’re a big pop hit. Journalists love the mix here, it’s very provocative.”

“I agree with you that it’s interesting. But that has nothing to do with our agenda. This situation was never in the plans. We were sup-posed to be helping Bambakias with the Senate Science Committee. The campaign krewe are supposed to be here on vacation. You were never supposed to become a spook who works part-time for the Presi-dent, while you take over federal facilities with the help of gangsters.”

“Hmm. You’re absolutely right about that, Yosh. That was not plannable. But it was doable.”

Pelicanos sat down and knotted his hands. “You know what your problem is? Every time you lose sight of your objective, you redouble your efforts.”

“I’ve never lost sight of the objective! The objective is to reform American scientific research.”

“Oscar, I’ve thought this over. I really hate this situation. For one thing, I don’t much like the President. I’m a Federal Democrat. I wasn’t joking when we were doing all that hard work for Bambakias and the Reform Bloc. I don’t want to work for this President. I don’t agree with the man’s policies. He’s a Communist; for heaven’s sake.”

“The President is not a Communist. He’s a billionaire timber baron with a background in the reservation casino business.”

“Well, the Communists are in his Left Tradition Bloc. I just don’t trust him. I don’t like his speeches. I don’t like him picking fights with the Dutch when we ought to be putting our own domestic affairs in order. He’s just not our kind of politician. He’s cruel, and sneaky, and duplicitous, and aggressive.”

Oscar smiled. “At least he doesn’t sleep on the job, like the old guy did.”

“Better King Log than King Stork, pal.”

“Yosh, I know you’re not a leftist, but you have to agree that the Left Tradition Bloc is a lot better than those total lunatics in the Left Progressives.”

“That doesn’t help! Bambakias would have trusted you implic-itly — the President won’t even give you a real post. He’s never sent us anything but empty promises. He’s left you exposed, he’s hanging you out to dry. So, in the meantime, we’re relying on these Moderators. And there’s just no future in a gangster protection racket.”

“Sure there is.”

“No there isn’t. The proles are worse even than the Left Progressives. They have funny slang, and funny clothes, and laptops, and bio-tech, so they’re colorful, but they’re still a mafia. This good old boy, Captain Burningboy … he’s sucking up to you, but he’s not what you think he is. You think he’s a charming old coot who’s a diamond in the rough, the kind of guy you could fit inside your krewe. He’s not. He’s an ultraradical cultist, and he definitely has his own agenda.”

Oscar nodded. “I know that.”

“And then there’s Kevin. You haven’t been paying enough atten-tion to Kevin. You have put a bandit in charge of the police here. The kid is like a pocket Mussolini now. He’s into the phones, he’s in the computers, he’s in the security videos, the place is saturated with his bugs. Now he’s got a pack of tattletale snoop informants, some weird-sister gang of little old nomad ladies on the net in a trailer park, somewhere in the blazing wreckage of Wyoming … The kid is off the rails. It just isn’t healthy.”

“But Kevin’s from Boston, like we are,” Oscar said. “Intense surveillance yields low rates of street violence. Kevin’s getting the job done for us, and he never balks when we bend the rules. He was a really good personnel choice.”

“Oscar, you’re obsessed. Forget the nifty-keen social concepts and all the big-picture blather. Get down to brass tacks, get down to reality. Kevin works here because you’re paying his salary. You’re pay-ing the salaries of all your krewe, and your krewe are the people who are really running this place. Nobody else has any salaries — all they do is eat prole food and work in their labs. I’m your accountant, and I’m telling you: you can’t afford this much longer. You can’t pay people enough to create a revolution.”

“There’s no way to pay people enough to do that.”

“You’re not being fair to your krewe. Your krewe are Massachu-setts campaign workers, not miracle workers. You never explained to them that they had to become a revolutionary junta. This place has no real financial support. You don’t even have a salary yourself. You don’t even have an official post in the government. The Collaboratory is running off your capital.”

“Yosh, there’s always more funding. What’s really interesting is governing without it! Managing on pure prestige. Consider the Mod-erators, for instance. They actually have a functional, prestige-based economy. It’s all been worked out in fantastic detail; for instance, they have a rotating Australian electronic ballot system…”

“Oscar, have you been sleeping at all? Do you eat properly? Do you know what you’re doing here anymore?”

“Yes, I do know. It’s not what we planned to do at first, but it’s what has to be done. I am stealing Huey’s clothes.”

“You’re in a personal feud with the Governor of Louisiana.”

“No. That’s not it. The truth is that I’m conducting a broad-scale struggle with the greatest political visionary in contemporary America. And Huey is years ahead of me. He’s been cultivating his nomads for years now, winning their loyalty, building their infrastruc-ture. He’s set it up so that homeless drifters are the most technically advanced group in his state. He’s made himself the leader of an under-ground mass movement, and he’s promising to share the knowledge and make every man a wizard. And they worship him for that, because the whole structure of their network economy has been regulated that way, surreptitiously and deliberately. It’s corruption on a fantastic scale — it’s an enterprise so far off the books that it isn’t even ‘corruption’ anymore. He has created a new alternative society, with an alter-native power structure, that is all predicated on him: Green Huey, the Swamp King. I’m working here as fast and as hard as I can, because Huey has already proved to me that this works — in fact, it works so well that it’s dangerous. America is on the ropes, and Green Huey is a smiling totalitarian who’s creating a neural dictatorship!”

“Oscar, do you realize how crazy that sounds? Do you know how pale you look when you talk like that?”

“I’m leveling with you here. You know I always level with you, Yosh.”

“Okay, you’re leveling with me. But I can’t do that. I can’t live that way. I don’t believe in it. I’m sorry.”

Oscar stared at him.

“I’ve hit the wall with you, Oscar. I want some real food, I want a real roof over my head. I can’t close my eyes and jump blind and take that kind of risk. I have a dependent. My wife needs me, she needs looking after. But you — you don’t need me anymore. Because I’m an accountant! You’re setting up a situation here where I have no function. No role. No job. There’s nothing to account.”

“You know something? That had never occurred to me. But wait; there’s bound to be some kind of income transfer. There’s scrap cash around, we’re going to need bits of equipment and such…”

“You’re establishing a strange, tiny, alien regime here. It’s not a market society. It’s a cult society. It’s all based on people looking deep into each other’s eyes and giving each other back rubs. It’s theoreti-cally interesting, but when it fails and falls apart, it’ll all become camps and purges just like the Communist Era. If you’re determined to do that, Oscar, I can’t save you. Nobody can save you. I don’t want to be with you when the house of cards comes down. Because you will be going to prison. At best.”

Oscar smiled wanly. “So, you don’t think the ‘congenital insanity’ plea will get me off?”

“It’s not a joke. What about your krewe, Oscar? What about the rest of us? You’re a great campaign manager: you really have a gift. But this is not an election campaign. It’s not even a strike or a protest anymore. This is a little coup d’etat. You’re like a militia guru in a secessionist compound here. Even if the krewepeople agree to stay with you, how can you put them at that kind of risk? You never asked them, Oscar. They never got a vote.”

Oscar sat up straight. “Yosh, you’re right. That’s a sound analysis. I just can’t do that to my krewepeople; it’s unethical, it’s bad practice. I’ll have to lay it on the line to them. If they leave me, that’s just a sacrifice I’ll have to accept.”

“I have a job offer in Boston from the Governor’s office,” Peli-canos said.

“The Governor? Come on! He’s a worn-out windbag from the Forward, America Party.”

“Forward, America is a Reformist party. The Governor is or-ganizing an antiwar coalition, and he’s asked me to be treasurer.”

“No kidding? Treasurer, huh? That’s a pretty good post for you.”

“The pacifist tradition is big in Massachusetts. It’s multipartisan and cuts across the blocs. Besides, it has to be done. The President is really serious. He’s not bluffing. He really wants a war. He’ll send gunboats across the Atlantic. He’s bullying that tiny country, just so he can strengthen his own hand domestically.”

“You really believe that, Yosh? That’s really your assessment?”

“Oscar, you’re all out of touch. You’re in here all night, every night, slaving away on this minutiae about the tiny differences be-tween nomad tribes. You’re pulling all the backstage strings inside this little glass bubble. But you’re losing sight of national reality. Yes, Presi-dent Two Feathers is on the warpath! He wants a declaration of war from the Congress! He wants martial law! He wants a war budget that’s under his own command. He wants the Emergency committees overridden and abolished overnight. He’ll be a virtual dictator.”

It instantly occurred to Oscar that if the President could achieve even half of those laudable goals, the loss of Holland would be a very small price to pay. But he bit back this response. “Yosh, I work for this President. He’s my boss, he’s my Commander in Chief. If you really feel that way about him and his agenda, then our situation as colleagues is untenable.”

Pelicanos looked wretched. “Well, that’s why I came here.”

“I’m glad you came. You’re my best and oldest friend, my most trusted confidant. But personal feelings can’t override a political dif-ference of that magnitude. If you’re telling the truth, then we really have come to a parting of the ways. You’re going to have to go back to Boston and take that treasury job.”

“I hate to do it, Oscar. I know it’s your hour of need. And your private fortune needs attention too; you’ve got to watch those invest-ments. There’s a lot of market turbulence ahead.”

“There’s always market turbulence. I can manage turbulence. I just regret losing you. You’ve been with me every step of the way.”

“Thus far and no farther, pal.”

“Maybe if they convict me in Boston, you could put in a good word with your friend the Governor on the clemency issue.”

“I’ll send mail,” Yosh said. He wiped at his eyes. “I have to clean out my desk now.”

Oscar was deeply shaken by the defection of Pelicanos. Given the circumstances, there had been no way to finesse it. It was sad but necessary, like his own forced defection from the Bambakias camp when he had moved to the President’s NSC. There were certain issues that simply could not be straddled. A clever operative could dance on two stools at once, but standing on seven or eight was just beyond capacity.

It had been some time since Oscar had spoken to Bambakias. He’d kept up with the man’s net coverage. The mad Senator’s per-sonal popularity was higher than ever. He’d gained all his original weight back; maybe a little more. His krewe handlers wheeled him out in public; they even dared to propel him onto the Senate floor. But the fire was out. His life was all ribbon cuttings and teleprompters now.

Using his newly installed NSC satphone, Oscar arranged a video conference to Washington. Bambakias had a new scheduler, a woman Oscar had never seen before. Oscar managed to get half an hour pen-ciled in.

When the call finally went through he found himself confronting Lorena Bambakias.

Lorena looked good. Lorena, being Lorena, could never look less than good. But on the screen before him, she seemed brittle and crispy. Lorena had known suffering.

His heart shrank within him at the sight of her. He was surprised to realize how sincerely he had missed her. He’d always been on tiptoe around Lorena, highly aware of her brimming reservoirs of feminine menace; but he’d forgotten how truly fond he was of her, how much she represented to him of the life he had abandoned. Dear old Lorena: wealthy, sophisticated, amoral, and refined — his kind of woman, really; a creature of the overclass, a classic high-maintenance girl, a woman who was really put together. Seeing Lorena like this — all abraded in her sorrow — gave him a pang. She was like a beautiful pair of scissors that had been used to shear through barbed wire.

“It’s good of you to call, Oscar,” Lorena told him. “You never call us enough.”

“That’s sweet of you. How have things been? Tell me really.”

“Oh, it’s a day at a time. A day at a time, that’s all. The doctors tell me there’s a lot of progress.”

“Really?”

“Oh, it’s amazing what millions of dollars can do in the Arneri-can health-care system. Up at the high end of the market, they can do all kinds of strange neural things now. He’s cheerful.”

“Really. ”

“He’s very cheerful. He’s stable. He’s lucid, even, most of the time.”

“Lorena, did I ever tell you how incredibly sorry I am about all this?”

She smiled. “Good old Oscar. I’m used to it now, you know? I’m dealing with it. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible — maybe it isn’t possible — but it’s doable. You know what really bothers me, though? It isn’t all the sympathy notes, or the media coverage, or the fan clubs, or any of that… It’s those evil fools who somehow believe that mental illness is a glamorous, romantic thing. They think that going mad is some kind of spiritual adventure. It isn’t. Not a bit of it. It’s horrible. It’s banal. I’m dealing with someone who has be-come banal. My darling husband, who was the least banal man I ever met. He was so multifaceted and wonderful and full of imagination; he was just so energetic and clever and charming. Now he’s like a big child. He’s like a not very bright child who can be deceived and managed, but not reasoned with.”

“You’re very brave. I admire you very much for saying that.”

Lorena began weeping. She massaged her eyes with her beauti-fully kept fingertips. “Now I’m crying but… Well, you don’t mind that, do you? You’re one of the people who really knew what we were like, back then.”

“I don’t mind.”

Lorena looked up after a while, her brittle face composed and bright. “Well, you haven’t told me how you are doing.”

“Me, Lorena? Couldn’t be better! Getting amazing things ac-complished over here. Unbelievable developments, all completely fas-cinating. ”

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she said. “You look tired.”

“I’ve had a little trouble with my new allergies. I’m fine as long as I stay around air filters.”

“How is your new job with the President? It must be exciting to be in the NSC when there’s almost a war on.”

Oscar opened his mouth. It was true; he was on the National Security Council, and there was a war in the works, and despite his tangential status and his deep disinterest in foreign affairs, he knew a great deal about the coming war. He knew that the President planned to send out a flotilla of clapped-out battleships across the Atlantic, without any air cover. He knew that the President was utterly deter-mined to provoke his token war, whether the Congress could be talked into declaring one or not. He knew that in a world of precisely targeted cheap missiles and infinite numbers of disposable drone air-craft, the rust-bucket American fleet was a fleet of sitting ducks.

He also knew that he would lose his job and perhaps even face espionage charges if he revealed this to a Senator’s wife on an NSC satphone. Oscar closed his mouth.

“I’m just a science adviser,” he said at last. “The Senator must know a great deal more about this than I do.”

“Would you like to talk to him?”

“That would be great.”

Lorena left. Oscar opened his nomad laptop, examined the screen for a moment, shut it again.

The Senator arrived on-camera. He was wearing pajamas and a blue velvet lounge robe. His face looked plump, polished, and strangely shapeless, as if the personality behind had lost its grip on the facial muscles.

“Oscar!” Bambakias boomed. “Good old Oscar! I think about you every day.”

“That’s good to know, Senator.”

“You’re doing marvelous things over there with the science facil-ity. Marvelous things. I really wish I could help you with that. Maybe we could fly over tomorrow! That would be good. We’d get results.”

Lorena’s voice sounded from off-camera. “There’s a hearing to-morrow, Alcott.”

“Hearings, more hearings. All right. Still, I keep up! I do keep up. I know what’s going on, I really do! Tremendous things you’re doing over there. You’ve got no budget, they tell me. None at all. Fill the place with the unemployed! Genius maneuver! It’s just like you always said, Oscar — push a political contradiction hard enough, it’ll break through to the other side. Then you can rub their noses in it. Great, great tactics.”

Oscar was touched. The Senator was obviously in a manic state, but he was a lot easier to take when he was so ebullient — it was like a funhouse-mirror version of his old charisma.

“You’ve done plenty for us already, Senator. We built a hotel here from your plans. The locals were very impressed by it.”

“Oh, that’s nothing.”

“No, seriously, your design attracted a lot of favorable com-ment.”

“No, I truly mean that it’s nothing. You should see the plans I used to do, back in college. Giant intelligent geodesics. Huge reactive structures made of membrane and sticks. You could fly ’em in on zeppelins and drop ’em over starving people, in the desert. Did ’em for a U.N. disaster relief competition — back when the U.S. was still in the U.N.”

Oscar blinked. “Disaster relief buildings?”

“They never got built. Much too sophisticated and high tech for starving, backward third worlders, so they said. Bureaucrats! I worked my ass off on that project.” Bambakias laughed. “There’s no money in disaster relief. There’s no market-pull for that. I recast the concept later, as little chairs. No money in the little chairs either. They never appreciated any of that.”

“Actually, Senator, we have one of those little chairs in the Di-rector’s office, here at the lab. It’s provoking a lot of strongly favorable reaction. The locals really love that thing.”

“You don’t say. Too bad that scientists are too broke to buy any upscale furniture.”

“I wonder if you’d still have those disaster plans in your archives somewhere, Alcott. I’d like to see them.”

“See them? Hell, you can have them. The least I can do for you, after everything I’ve put you through.”

“I hope you’ll do that for me, Senator. I’m serious.”

“Sure, have ’em! Take anything you want! Kind of a fire sale on my brain products. You know, if we invade Europe, Oscar, it probably means a nuclear exchange.”

Oscar lowered his voice soothingly. “I really don’t think so, Al.” “They’re trifling with the grand old USA, these little Dutch creeps. Them and their wooden shoes and tulips. We’re a superpower! We can pulverize them.”

Lorena spoke up. “I think it’s time for your medication, Alcott.”

“I need to know what Oscar really thinks about the war! I’m all in favor of it. I’m a hawk! We’ve been pushed around by these little red-green Euro pipsqueaks long enough. Don’t you think so, Oscar?”

A nurse arrived. “You tell the President my opinion!” the Sena-tor insisted as the nurse led him away. “You tell Two Feathers I’m with him all the way down.”

Lorena moved back into camera range. She looked grim and stricken.

“You have a lot of new krewepeople now, Lorena.”

“Oh. That.” She looked into the camera. “I never got back to you about the Moira situation, did I?”

“Moira? I thought we had that problem straightened out and packed away with mothballs.”

“Oh, Moira was on her best behavior after that jail incident. Until Huey came looking for Moira. Now Moira works for Huey in Baton Rouge.”

“Oh no.”

“It got very bad for the krewe after that. Their morale suffered so much with the Senator’s illness, and once Huey had our former press agent in his own court … well, I guess you can imagine what it’s been like.”

“You’ve lost a lot of people?”

“Well, we just hire new ones, that’s all.” She looked up. “Maybe someday you can come back to us.”

“That would be good. The reelection campaign, maybe.”

“That should be a real challenge… You’re so good with him. You were always so good with him. That silly business with his old architecture plans. It really touched him, he was very lucid for a minute there. He was just like his old self with you.”

“I’m not just humoring him, Lorena. I really want those disaster relief plans. I want you to make sure that they’re sent to me here. I think I can use them.”

“Oscar, what are you really doing over there? It seems like a very strange thing. I don’t think it’s in the interests of the Federal Demo-crats. It’s not a sensible reform, it’s not like what we had in mind.”

“That’s true — it’s certainly not what we had in mind.”

“It’s that Penninger woman, isn’t it? She’s just not right for you. She’s not your type. You know that Moira knows all about you and Greta Penninger, don’t you? Huey knows too.”

“I know that. I’m looking after that. Although it’s challenging work.”

“You look so pale. You should have stayed with Clare Emerson. She’s an Anglo girl, but she was sweet-tempered and good for you. You always looked happy when you were with her.”

“Clare is in Holland.”

“Clare is coming back. What with the war, and all.”

“Lorena …” He sighed. “You play ball with a lot of journal-ists. So do I, all right? I used to sleep with Clare, but Clare is a journalist, first and last and always. Just because she gives you softball coverage doesn’t mean that she’s good for me. Don’t send Clare over here. I mean it. Send me the old architecture plans that Alcott did, when he was a wild design student who had never made any money. I can really use those. Do not send Clare.”

“I don’t want to see you destroyed by ambition, Oscar. I’ve seen what that means now and it’s bad, it’s worse than you imagine. It’s terrible. I just want to see you happy.”

“I can’t afford to be that kind of happy right now.”

Suddenly she laughed. “All right. You’re all right. I’m all right too. We’re going to survive all this. Someday, we’re going to be okay. I still believe that, don’t you? Don’t fret too much. Be good to your-self. All right?”

“All right.”

She hung up. Oscar stood up and stretched. She had just been kidding about Clare. She was just teasing him a little. He’d broken her out of her unhappiness for a little moment; Lorena was still a player, she liked to imagine he was her krewe and she was looking out for him. He’d managed to give her a little moment of diversion. It had been a good idea to make the phone call. He had done a kindly thing for old friends.

Oscar began the liquidation of his fortune. Without Pelicanos to manage his accounts and investments, the time demands were impossi-ble. And, on some deep level, he knew the money was a liability now. He was encouraging thousands of people to abandon conventional economics and adopt a profoundly alien way of life, while he himself remained safely armored. Huey had already made a few barbed com-ments along that line; the fact that Huey was a multimillionaire him-self never hampered his sarcastic public outbursts.

Besides, Oscar wasn’t throwing the money away. He was going to devote it all to the cause of science — until there was no money left.

The resignation and departure of Pelicanos had a profound effect on his krewe. As majordomo, Pelicanos had been a linchpin of the krewe, always the voice of reason when Oscar himself became a little too intense.

Oscar assembled his krewe at the hotel to clear the air and lay matters on the line. Point along the way: he was doubling everyone’s salary. The krewe should consider it hazard pay. They were plunging into unknown territory, at steep odds. But if they won, it would be the grandest political success they had ever seen. He finished his pep talk with a flourish.

Resignations followed immediately. They took departure pay and left his service. Audrey Avizienis left; she was his opposition re-searcher, she was far too skeptical and mean-spirited to stay on under such dubious, half-baked circumstances. Bob Argow also quit. He was a systems administrator, and he made his grievances clear: pushy com-puter-security nonsense from Kevin Hamilton, and hordes of would-be netgods in the Moderators who created code the way they made clothes: handmade, lopsided, and a stitch at a time. Negi Estabrook left as well. There was no point in cooking for such a diminished krewe, and besides, the cuisine of road proles was basically laboratory rat chow. Rebecca Pataki also left. She felt out of place and half-abandoned, and she was homesick for Boston.

This left Oscar with just four diehard hangers-on. Fred Dillen the janitor, Corky Shoeki his roadie and new majordomo, and his secretary and scheduler, Lana Ramachandran. Plus, his image consul-tant, Donna Nunez, who sensibly declared that she was staying on because in terms of its image, the Collaboratory was just getting inter-esting. Very well, he thought grimly; he was down to four people, he would just start over. Besides, he still had Kevin. There were plenty of useful people walking around loose within the Collaboratory. And he worked for the President.

He would ask the NSC for help.

Two days later, help arrived from the National Security Council. The President’s personal spooks had at last sent military reinforcements to the Collaboratory. Military aid took the form of a young Air Force lieutenant colonel from Colorado. He was the very man who had been on the graveyard shift when Oscar had been abducted, and when Kevin had made his frantic phone call. In fact, it was he who had ordered Oscar’s armed rescue effort.

The lieutenant colonel was erect, spit-polished, steely-eyed. He wore a full uniform with scarlet beret. He had brought three vehi-cles with him to Texas. The first contained a squadron of rapid-deployment ground troops, soldiers wearing combat gear of such astonishing weight and complexity that they seemed scarcely able to walk. The second and third trucks contained the lieutenant colonel’s media coverage.

The lieutenant enjoyed a glorious circuit of the Collaboratory, ostensibly to check it out for security purposes, but mostly in order to exhibit himself to the awestruck locals. Oscar tried to make himself useful. He introduced the lieutenant colonel to his local security ex-perts: Kevin, and Captain Burningboy.

During the briefing, Kevin said little — Kevin seemed rather em-barrassed. Burningboy proved most forthcoming. The Moderator cap-tain launched into a detailed and terrifying recitation of the Collaboratory’s strategic plight. Buna was a mere twenty kilometers from the highly porous border with Louisiana. The murky swamps of the Sabine River valley were swarming with vengeful Regulators. Though the armed helicopter attack against the Regulator comman-dos had never become official news, the assault had provoked them to fury.

The threat to Buna was immediate and serious. The Regulators had swarms of airborne drones surveilling the facility around the clock. Huey had given up his plans to co-opt the facility. He wanted it abandoned, ruined, destroyed. The Regulators were more than will-ing to carry out Huey’s aims. They were lethally furious that the Collaboratory was hosting Moderators.

This briefing enthralled the lieutenant colonel. Sickened by his desk job and embarrassed by the sordid cover-up of his glorious at-tack, the man was visibly itching for a fight. He had come fully pre-pared. His all-volunteer squad of forest ninjas were lugging whole arsenals of professional gear: body armor, silenced sniper rifles, human body-odor sniffers, mine-proofed boot soles, night-fighting video hel-mets, even ultraspecial, freeze-dried, self-heating, long-range patrol ra-tions.

The lieutenant colonel, having debriefed the locals on the ground, announced that it was time for a reconnaissance in force, out in the swamps. His media crew would not be neglected; their helicop-ters would serve as his comlink and impromptu air backup.

Oscar had some acquaintance with the lieutenant colonel through his NSC connections. Having finally met the man in person, he swiftly realized that the colonel was a clear and present danger to himself and every human being within firing range. He was young, zealous, and as dumb as a bag of hammers; he was an atavistic creature from the blood-soaked depths of the twentieth century.

Oscar nevertheless made his best professional effort.

“Colonel, sir, those flooded woods in the Sabine River valley are tougher than you might expect. We’re not just talking swamps here — we’re basically talking permanent disaster areas. There’s been a lot of severe flooding in the Sabine since the rain patterns changed, and a lot of the local farmland has gone back to wilderness. That’s not the forest primeval out there. Those are deserted, toxic locales of no eco-nomic value, where all the decent lumber is long gone and there are poisonous weeds and bushes half the size of trees. It would be a mis-take to underestimate those Regulators when they’re on their native ground. Those Cajun nomads are not just native hunters and fishers and swamp dwellers; they’re also very big on sylvan audio surveil-lance.”

It was, of course, of no use. The lieutenant colonel, and his men, and his impressionable, airborne war correspondents, left on dawn patrol the next morning. Not a single one of them was ever seen again.

Three days after this silent debacle, Captain Burningboy announced his own departure. He was now “General” Burningboy again, and having successfully retrieved his reputation, he felt it was time for him to leave.

Kevin threw a block party for the General, on the grounds of the police station. Greta and Oscar attended in full dress and, for the first time ever, as a public couple. They had of course been kidnapped as a couple, and rescued as a couple, so their appearance made perfect sense. It was also a boost for morale.

In point of sad fact, Greta and Oscar had very little to say to or do with one another at Burningboy’s farewell party. They were both hopelessly preoccupied with the exigencies of power. Besides, Kevin’s party featured a massive banquet of genuine food. After days on no-mad biotech rations, the scientists and proles flung themselves on it like wolverines.

Oscar was pained to see Burningboy abandoning him. It seemed so unnecessary. Burningboy, who had been drinking heavily, took Oscar aside and explained his motives in pitiless detail. It all had to do with social network structure.

“We used to handle these things the way the Regulators do,” Burningboy confided. “Promote the best, and segregate the rest. But they ended up with an aristocracy — the Sun Lords, the Nobles, the Respected, and down at the very bottom, all the lousy newbies. In the Moderators, we use balloting. So we have turnaround; people can spend their reputations, and lose them, and earn them back. Besides — and this is the killer point here — our technique prevents decapitation attacks. See, the feds are always after ‘the criminal kingpins.’ They always want ‘the top guy in the outfit,’ the so-called mastermind.”

“I’ll really miss these briefings of yours,” Oscar said. It had been a long time since he had appeared in public with his full regalia of spats, cummerbund, and proper hat. He felt a million miles away from Burningboy, as if he were receiving signals from a distant planet.

“Look, Oscar, after thirty years of American imperial informa-tion warfare, everybody in the goddamn world understands counter-insurgency and political subversion. We all know how to do it now, we all know how to wreck the dominant paradigm. We’re geniuses at screwing with ourselves and deconstructing all our institutions. We don’t have a single institution left that works.” Burningboy paused. “Am I getting too radical here? Am I scaring you?”

“No. It’s the truth.”

“Well, that’s why I’m going to jail now. We Moderators have a kinda pet state magistrate out in New Mexico. He’s willing to put me away on a completely irrelevant charge. So I’ll be spending two or three years in a minimum security state facility. I think that once they’ve got me nice and safe in the slammer, I may be able to survive this thing you’ve done here.”

“You’re not telling me that you’re actually going to prison, Burningboy. ”

“You should try it, amigo. It’s the ultimate invisible American population. Prisons have everything that interests you. People with a lot of spare time. Weird economics, based on drugs and homemade tattoos. There’s a lot of time to think seriously. You really do regret your old mistakes inside a penitentiary.” Burningboy had an impossi-bly remote look now. Oscar was losing him; it was as if he were bound on a flower-decked Valkyrie ship for the shores of Avalon. “Besides, some of those poor evil bastards are so far gone that they actually have bad teeth. I can practice dentistry again, when I’m in stir. Did I ever tell you I used to be a dentist? That was before the caries vaccine came in and destroyed my profession.”

Oscar had forgotten that Burningboy had once been a dentist. The man had earned a medical degree. Oscar was alarmed by this, not merely because the annihilation of the noble profession of dentistry was a stark barometer of America’s social damage. It bothered him because he was forgetting important things about important people. Was he too old now, at twenty-nine? Was he losing his grip? Had he taken on too much? Maybe it was the way Burningboy dressed and talked. He was a dropout, a prole, a marginal. It was just impossible to take him seriously for more than a few instants.

“I have no regrets,” Burningboy said, emptying his cocktail glass with a flourish. “I led my people into a lot of trouble here. That wasn’t my idea — it was your damned idea — but they wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t given it my big say-so. If you change hundreds of people’s lives, you ought to pay a stiff price for that. Just to, you know, keep everybody from tryin’ it. So I’m doing the honorable thing here. My people understand about prison.”

“That is the honorable thing, isn’t it? Doing time. Paying dues.”

“That’s right. I led the charge, and now I step aside. At least I won’t end up like Green Huey.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that Huey can’t put it down, son. He can’t put down the cross and take off the crown of thorns. He can’t mosey off the stage and go sit quietly in the corner. He’s the red-hot self-declared super-savior of the meek and downtrodden, and you can’t pull a stunt like that in America without somebody shooting you. That’s just the kind of thing we do in this country. Huey looks a mile high right now, but he’s made out of meat. Sornebody’s gonna kill Huey. The lone nut sniper, a crowd of spooks outside the motorcade …” He shot Oscar a sudden opaque look. “I just hope he doesn’t get offed by somebody that I personally know.”

“It would be very regrettable if the Governor came to harm.”

“Yeah, right.”

Oscar cleared his throat. “If you’re leaving us, General, who’s going to be in command here?”

“You are. You’ve always been in command here. Don’t you get that yet? You need to wake up a little, son.”

“Look, I don’t give any orders. I just talk to the relevant parties.”

Burningboy snorted.

“Okay, then let me rephrase my question. Who do I talk to, when I need to talk to the Moderators?”

“All right.” Burningboy shrugged. “I’ll introduce you to my anointed successor.”

Burningboy led him inside the police station. From behind the locked door of the chiefs office came a loud series of groans. Burn-ingboy produced a swipecard from inside his medicine bag, and opened the door. Kevin had his bare feet up on his desk. He was receiving dual foot rubs from a pair of nomad women. He was very drunk, and wearing a silly party hat.

“All right, ladies,” Kevin gurgled. “That’ll be enough for now. Thank you so much. Really.”

“Your metatarsals are really trashed,” said the first masseuse, with dignity.

“Can we mark off a whole hour?” said the second. “Oh, go ahead!” Kevin said royally. “Who’s to know?”

“This is my successor,” said Burningboy. “Our new security honcho. Captain Scubbly Bee.”

“That’s just great,” Oscar said. “That’s good news. Incredible. It’s so wonderful I scarcely know what to say.”

Kevin swung his oily feet from the desk. “I enlisted, man. I signed up with the mob. I’m a made guy, I’m a Moderator now.”

“I understood that much,” Oscar told him. “New alias and ev-erything. ‘Scubbly Bee,’ am I right? What is that? Not ‘Stubbly’?”

“No, Scubbly. Scubbly Bee.” Kevin pointed to a nearby shred-der. “I just trashed all my official ID. I can’t tell you how great that felt. This is the best party I ever had.”

“What’s the significance of ‘Scubbly Bee’? It must mean some-thing of drastic importance in order to sound so silly.”

Kevin grinned. “That’s for me to know and you to find out, chump.”

Burningboy shook Kevin’s hand. “I’ll be going soon,” he said. “You keep your nose clean, all right, Captain? This is the last time I want to see you so drunk.”

“I’m not all that drunk,” Kevin lied. “It’s mostly that intoxicat-ing endorphin rush from my feet.”

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 …

“It’s for you,” Kevin announced at last, and handed Oscar the phone.

Their caller was Jules Fontenot. Fontenot was angry. He’d been unable to reach Oscar through any conventional phone. He had finally been reduced to calling the Collaboratory’s police headquarters through a Secret Service office in Baton Rouge. The runaround had irritated him greatly.

“I apologize for the local communications systems, Jules. There’s been a lot of change here since you left us. It’s good to hear from you, though. I appreciate your persistence. What can I do for you?”

“You still mad at Green Huey?” Fontenot rasped.

“I was never ‘mad’ at Huey. Professionals don’t get mad. I was dealing with him.”

“Oscar, I’m retired. I want to stay retired. I didn’t ever want to make a call like this again. But I had to.”

What was wrong with the man? It was Fontenot, all right, but his native accent had thickened drastically. It was as if the man were speaking through a digital “Cajun Dialect” vocoder. “To meck a caw lak diss …”

“Jules, you know that I always respect your advice. Your leaving the business hasn’t changed that for me. Tell me what’s troubling you.”

“Haitian refugees. You get me? A camp for Haitians.”

“Did you just say ‘Haitians’? Do you mean black, Francophone people from the Caribbean?”

“That’s right! Church people from Haiti. Huey gave ’em politi-cal asylum. Built a little model village for ’em, in the backwoods. They’re living way back in mah swamps now.”

“I’m with you, Jules. Disaster evacuations, Haitian refugees, charity housing, French language, that’s all very Huey. So what is the problem?”

“Well, it’s somethin’, It’s not just that they’re foreigners. Reli-gious foreigners. Black, voodoo, religious, refugee foreigners who speak Creole. It’s something lots weirder than that. Huey’s done something strange to those people. Drugs, I think. Genetics maybe. They are acting weird. Really weird.”

“Jules, forgive me, but I have to make sure that I have this straight.” Oscar lifted his hand silently and began gesturing frantically at Kevin-Get This On Tape. Open Your Laptop. Take Notes! “Jules, are you telling me that the Governor of Louisiana is using Haitian refugees as human guinea pigs for behavioral experiments?”

“I wouldn’t swear to that in a court of law — because I cain’t get anyone to come out here and look! Nobody’s complaining about it, that’s the problem. They’re the happiest goddamn Haitians in the whole world.”

“It must be neural, then. Some kind of mood-altering treat-ment.”

“Maybe. But it’s not like any kind of dope I ever saw or heard tell of. I just don’t have the words to properly describe this situation. I just don’t have the words.”

“And you want me to come and see it with you.”

“I’m not saying that, Oscar. I’m just saying… well, the parish police are crooked, the state militia is crooked, the Secret Service won’t listen to me anymore, and nobody even cares. They’re Haitians, from a barren, drowning island, and nobody cares. Not a damn soul cares. ”

“Oh, believe me, I care, Jules. Trust me on that one.”

“It’s more than I can stand, that’s all. I can’t sleep nights, thinkin’ about it.”

“Rest easy. You have done the right and proper thing. I am definitely going to take steps. Is there a way that I can contact you? Safely, confidentially?”

“Nope. Not anymore. I threw all my phones away.”

“How can I pursue this matter, then?”

“I’m retired! Hell, Oscar, don’t let anybody know that I outed this thing! I live here now. I love this place. I wanna die here.”

“Now, Jules, you know that’s not right. This is a very serious matter. You’re either a player, or you’re not a player. You can’t teeter along on the edge like this.”

“Okay. I’m not a player.” The phone went dead.

Oscar turned to Kevin. “Were you following the gist of that?”

“Who was that guy? Is he nuts?”

“That’s my former krewe security chief, Jules Fontenot. He ran security for the Bambakias campaign. He happens to be a Cajun. He retired just before I met you, and he’s been out in the bayou, fishing, ever since.”

“And now he’s calling you up with some cock-and-bull story about a scandal, and he’s trying to lure you into the backwoods of Louisiana?”

“That’s right. And I’m going.”

“Hold on, cowboy. Think about this. What’s more likely? That Huey is running weird atrocity camps in the bayou, or that your for-mer friend the Cajun has just been turned against you? This is a trap, man. So they can kidnap you just like they tried before. They’re gonna curb-stomp you and feed you to the alligators.”

“Kevin, I appreciate that hypothesis. That’s good, street-smart, bodyguard-style thinking. But let me give you the political angle on this. I know Fontenot. He was a Secret Service special agent. I trusted that man with my life — and with the Senator’s life, the life of the whole krewe. Maybe he’s plotting to kidnap and murder me now. But if Huey can turn Jules Fontenot into a murderous traitor, then Arner-ica as we know it has ceased to exist. It would mean that we’re doomed.”

“So you’re going into Louisiana to investigate these things he told you about.”

“Of course I am. The only question is, how and under what circumstances. I’m going to have to give this project some serious thought.”

“Okay, I’m going with you, then.”

Oscar narrowed his eyes. “Why do you say that?”

“A lot of reasons. I’m supposed to be your bodyguard. I’m in your krewe. You pay me. I’m the successor of this Fontenot guy that you’re so impossibly respectful of. But mostly — it’s because I’m so sick and tired of you always being four steps ahead of me.” Kevin slapped his desk. “Look at me, man. I’m a very smart, clever, sneaky guy. I’m a hacker. And I’m good at it! I’m such a net-dot-legend that I can take over federal science labs. I slot right into the Moderators. I even hang out with NSC agents. But no matter what I do, you always do some-thing crazier. You’re always ahead of me. I’m a technician, and you’re a politician, and you’re always outthinking me. You don’t even take me seriously.”

“That is not true. I know that you count! I take you with com-plete seriousness, Captain Scubbly Bee.”

Kevin sighed. “Just make a little room for me in the back of your campaign bus, all right? That’s all I ask.”

“I need to talk to Greta about this development. She’s my neural science expert.”

“Right. No problem. Just a second.” Kevin stood up and limped barefoot to a desktop computer. He typed in parameters. A schematic map of the Collaboratory appeared. He studied it. “Okay. You’ll find Dr. Penninger in her supersecret lab in the fourth floor of the Human Resources division.”

“What? Greta’s supposed to be here at the party.”

“Dr. Penninger hates parties. She bores real easily. Didn’t you know that? I like doing favors for Dr. Penninger. Dr. Penninger’s not like most women — you can talk to her seriously about stuff that mat-ters. She needed a safe house in case of attacks, so I built her a cute little secret lab over in Human Resources. She fired all those clowns anyway, so there’s plenty of room now.”

“How do you know where she is at this very moment?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. I’m Security, and she’s the lab’s Di-rector. I always know where the Director is.”

After considerable ceremonial pressing of the flesh, Oscar left the party to find Greta. Thanks to Kevin’s explicit surveillance, this wasn’t difficult.

Kevin and his prole gangs had assembled a hole-in-the-wall workspace for Greta. Oscar punched in a four-digit code, and the door opened. The room was dark, and he saw Greta crouched over her dissecting microscope, its lights the only illumination. Both her eyes were pressed to the binocular mounts and both her hands were encased in step-down AFM dissection gloves. She had thrown a lab coat over her glamorous party gear. The room was as bare as a monk’s cell, and Greta was utterly intent: silently and methodically tearing away at some tiny fabric of the universe.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She looked up, nodded, and returned her attention to the lenses.

“Why did you leave the party?”

“Why shouldn’t I? You weren’t paying any attention to me.” Oscar was surprised, even mildly thrilled, to see Greta being coy.

“We’re in the Emergency Committee. You see me for hours and hours every day.”

“We’re never together. You’ve lost interest in me. You’re neglect-ing me.”

Oscar paused. He was certainly interested now. It occurred to hirn suddenly that he deeply enjoyed this part of a relationship. Women always seemed more interesting to him as objects of negotia-tion than they were as lovers or partners. This was a sinister self-revelation. He felt very contrite about it.

“Greta, I don’t like to admit it, but you’re right. Now that ev-eryone knows we’re lovers, we never have time for ourselves. We were together in a public situation tonight, and I tactlessly deserted you. I admit that. I regret it. I’m going to make it up to you.”

“Listen to yourself It’s like you’re addressing a committee. We’re just two politicians now. You talk to me like a diplomat. I have to read speeches from the President that are full of lies. I don’t get to work at anything that interests me. I spend my whole life in an endless political crisis. I hate administration. God, I feel so guilty.”

“Why? It’s important work. Someone has to do it. You’re good at it! People respect you.”

“I never felt this guilty when we were off in beach hotels having sleazy, half-violent sex. It wasn’t the center of my life or anything, but it was really interesting. A good-looking, charming guy with hun-dred-and-one-degree core body heat, that’s pretty fascinating. A lot more interesting than watching all my research die on the vine.”

“Oh no, not you too,” Oscar said. “Don’t tell me you’re turning on me now when I’ve put so much effort into this. So many people have left me now. They just don’t believe it can work.”

She looked at him with sudden pity. “Poor Oscar. You’ve got it all backward. That’s not why I feel guilty. I’m guilty because I know it’s going to work. Talking with those Moderators for so long … I really understand it now. Science truly is going to change. It’ll still be ‘Science.’ It’ll have the same intellectual structure, but its political structure will be completely different. Instead of being poorly paid government workers, we’ll be avant-garde dissident intellectuals for the dispossessed. And that will work for us. Because we can get a better deal from them now than we can from the government. The proles are not so new; they’re just like big, hairy, bad-smelling college students. We can deal with people like that. We do it all the time.”

He brightened. “Are you sure?”

“It’ll be like a new academia, with some krewe feudal elements. It’ll be a lot like the Dark Ages, when universities were little legal territories all their own, and scholars carried maces and wore little square hats, and whenever the university was crossed, they sent huge packs of students into the streets to tear everything up, until they got their way. Except it’s not the Dark Ages right now. It’s the Loud Ages, it’s the Age of Noise. We’ve destroyed our society with how much we know, and how quickly and randomly we can move it around. We live in the Age of Noise, and this is how we learn to be the scientists of the Age of Noise. We don’t get to be government functionaries who can have all the money we want just because we give the government a lot of military-industrial knowledge. That’s all over now. From now on we’re going to be like other creative intellec-tuals. We’re going to be like artists or violin-makers, with our little krewes of fans who pay attention and support us.”

“Wonderful, Greta. It sounds great!”

“We’ll do cute, attractive, sexy science, with small amounts of equipment. That’s what science has to be in America now. We can’t do it the European way, where there’s all kinds of moral fretting and worrying about what technology will do to people; there’s no fun in that, it’s just not American. We’ll be like Orville Wright in the bicycle shed from now on. It won’t be easier for us. It’ll be harder for us. But we’ll have our freedom. Our American freedom. It’s a vote of confi-dence in the human imagination.”

“You are a politician, Greta! You’ve had a big breakthrough here. I’m with you all the way.” He felt so proud.

“Sure — it might be wonderful, if it were somebody else doing this. I hate doing this to science. I’m deeply sorry that I’m doing it. But I’m on the cutting edge, and I just don’t have any choice.”

“What would you rather be doing?”

“What?” she demanded. “I’d rather be finishing my paper on inhibition of acetylcholine release in the hippocampus. It’s all I ever wanted to do! I live and dream that someday this horrible mess will all be finished, and somehow, somebody will let me do what I want.”

“I know that’s what you want. I really understand that now. I know what it means, too, Greta: it means I’ve failed you.”

“No. Yes. Well, it doesn’t matter. The big picture is going to work.”

“I don’t see how.”

“I can show you.” She found her purse and left the room. A light came on. He heard water running. It occurred to Oscar that he had entirely forgotten the original subject of his visit. Huey. Huey, and his purported refugee camp full of Haitians. He was absolutely sure that Huey, obsessed with Cognition as the Next Big Thing, had done something ecstatic and dreadful. He knew it had something to do with Greta’s neural work. Hellishly, Greta herself had absolutely no interest in the practical implications of the things she did. She couldn’t bear the strangling intellectual constraints involved in having to care. She couldn’t abide the foul and endless political and moral implica-tions of the pure pursuit of knowledge. They bored her beyond all reason. They just weren’t science. There was nothing scientific about them. The reactions of society no longer made any sense. Innovation had burned out the brakes. What could become of scientists in a world like that? What the hell was to be done with them?

She entered the room. She’d given herself a rapid little makeover at the bathroom sink. Her eyes were lined in jagged black, her cheeks streaked in colored war paint.

He was stunned.

“I didn’t invent this myself,” she said defensively. “Your image consultant did it for me — for the party tonight. I was going to wear it to the party for you, but it was just too ridiculous. So I scraped it all off at the last minute.”

“Oh, that was a big mistake,” he said, and laughed in astonish-ment. “That is beautiful. That is truly hot. That is beyond amazing. It is so transgressive. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

“You’re seeing a thirty-six-year-old Jewish woman who’s made up like a crazy derelict.”

“Oh no. The fact that it’s Greta Penninger, that’s what makes it work. That it’s a Nobel Prize-winning federal lab Director who is still in her hose and a lab coat, and she’s outed herself as an urban guer-rilla.” He bit his lip. “Turn around for me. Show me.”

She spread her hands and whirled in place. She had a junk-jewelry headdress of linked beads clipped in the back of her head. “You like this, don’t you? I guess it’s not that bad. I don’t look any weirder than the President does, do I?”

“Greta…” He cleared his throat. “You don’t understand how well that works. That really works for me. I’m getting all hot and bothered. ”

She gazed at him in surprise. “Huh. My mother always said a good makeover would get a guy’s attention.”

“Take the lab coat off. In fact, take your blouse off.”

“Wait a minute. Put your hands down.”

“You know how long it’s been? Absolutely forever. I can’t even remember the last time.”

“Okay! Later! In a bed! And when your face isn’t that color.” He put his hand to his cheek. His skin was blazing. Surprised, he touched his ears. His ears were so hot they felt stir-fried. “Wow,” he muttered. “I’m all overcome.”

“It’s just makeup.”

“No it isn’t. Now I know why Donna wanted to stay around here — now I know why Donna said that things were just getting in-teresting. That woman is a little genius. You can’t claim that’s just skin-deep. That’s a lie, it’s like saying that a vow of chastity and a nun’s veil are just some words and some black cloth. Sure, it’s just a symbol, but it puts you in a whole different moral universe. I’m hav-ing a major brain wave here.”

“No, Oscar. I think you’re having some kind of fit.”

“This is going to work. This is huge. We’ve been thinking way too small. We’ve got to break out of the box. We’re going to carry the war right to the enemy. Listen. I need to go to Louisiana.”

“What? Why?”

“We’ll both go there together. We’re great whenever we’re there. Louisiana really works for us. We’ll go on a triumphal tour of the state. We will throw Huey and the Regulators totally on the de-fensive. We’ll go in a fleet of limos, with maximum media coverage. We’ll hire campaign buses, we’ll do a campaign tour. We’ll get sound trucks and copters. We will saturate the whole state. It’ll be totally romantic. We’ll give scandalous, teasing interviews. You’ll become a sexy science pop star. We’ll do pinups of you, T-shirts, bumper stick-ers, your own fragrance and lingerie. We’ll build little Collaboratories wherever we go. I’ve got all kinds of astounding plans from Bambakias that we can put to use right away. We’ll lead a people’s march on Baton Rouge. We’ll picket the statehouse. We’ll beard Huey right in his den. We’ll nail him down and erase him.”

“Oscar, you’re having a fit. You’re ranting.”

“I am? Really?”

“We can’t go to Louisiana. It’s too dangerous. We can’t leave the Collaboratory now. We’re having an Emergency here. People are afraid, they’re deserting us every day.”

“Get more people.”

“We can attract all the Moderators we want, but there’s no room for them here.”

“Build extensions onto the lab. Take over the town of Buna.”

“Oscar, you scare me when you’re like this.”

He lowered his voice. “Do I?”

“A little.” Her face was flushed beneath the war paint.

His heart wa pounding. He took a few deep breaths. He was past being frantic now. He was leveling out; he was cruising on a higher plane; he was exalted. “Darling, I’m going on a secret mission. I think it may be the crux of all our problems, but I may never come back. This may be the last private moment that we ever have together. I know I’ve upset you. I know I haven’t been everything you ex-pected. I may never see you again, but I’m leaving you with such a full and happy heart. I want to remember you looking like this, always. You are so special and dear to me that I can’t express it. You’re just such a brilliant, radiant creature.”

She put her hand to her forehead. “Oh my God. I just don’t know what to do with myself when you’re like this … You’re just so persuasive! Oh, well, never mind, come on with me, take your clothes off There’s plenty of room for us up here on the lab table.”