Distraction

11

After an extensive discussion of their options, Oscar and Captain Scubbly Bee decided to infiltrate Loui-siana by covert means and in deep incognito. Kevin, boldly lying, told the local Emergency Committee that he was leaving for a recruitment drive. Oscar himself would not even officially leave Buna. He was replaced by a body double, a Moderator volunteer who was willing to wear Oscar’s clothing, and to spend a great deal of time in a plush hotel room pretending to type on a laptop.

Their conspiracy swiftly assumed its own momen-tum. To avoid discovery, they decided to airmail them-selves into Louisiana in a pair of ultralight aircraft. These silent and stealthy devices were slow, unpredictable, dan-gerous, painful, and nauseating — basically devoid of crea-ture comforts of any kind. They were, however, more or less undetectable, and immune to roadblocks and shake-downs. Since they were guided by global positioning from Chinese satellites, the aircraft would arrive with pinpoint accuracy right on Fontenot’s doorstep — sooner or later.

Kevin and Oscar next took the deeply melodramatic step of dressing themselves as nomad air bums. They bor-rowed the customary flight suits from a pair of Moderator air jockeys. These snug garments were riveted, fiber-filled cotton duck. They were protective industrial gear, painstakingly tribalized by much hand-stitched embroidery and a richly personal reek of skin unguent. Kevlar gloves, black rubber boots, big furry crash helmets, and shatterproof goggles completed the ensemble.

Oscar gave a few final Method-acting tips to his good-natured body double, and wedged himself into his disguise. He became a crea-ture from an alien civilization. He couldn’t resist the temptation to stroll around downtown Buna in his nomad drag. The result aston-ished him. Oscar was very well known in Buna; his scandalous per-sonal life was common knowledge and the hotel he had built was locally famous. In the flight suit, goggles, and helmet, however, he was entirely ignored. People’s eyes simply slid over him without the fric-tion of a moment’s care. He radiated otherness.

Kevin and Oscar had synchronized their departure for midnight. Oscar arrived late. His wristwatch was malfunctioning. He’d been running a mild fever for days, and the contact heat had caused the watch’s mousebrain works to run fast. Oscar had been forced to reset his watch with its sunlight timer, but he had somehow botched it; his watch was jet-lagged now. He was running late, and it took far more effort than he had expected to climb to the roof of the Collaboratory. He’d never before been on the outside armor of the lab. In the sullen dark of a February night, the structure’s outer boundary was windy and intimidating, a wearying physical trial of endless steps and hand rungs.

Winded and trembling, he finally arrived on the starry roof of the Collaboratory, but the best window of weather opportunity was already gone. Kevin, wisely, had already launched himself. With the help of a bored Moderator ground crew, Oscar strapped into his flimsy craft, and left as soon as he could.

The first hour went rather well. Then he was caught by a Green-house storm front boiling off the sullen Gulf of Mexico. He was blown all the way to Arkansas. Cannily reading thousands of Doppler radars, the smart and horribly cheap little vehicle darted sickeningly up and down through dozens of local thermals and wind shears, stubbornly routing itself toward its destination with the dumb persis-tence of a network packet. Blistered by the chafing of his harness, Oscar fmally passed out, lolling in the aircraft’s grip like a sack of turnips.

The pilot’s lack of consciousness made no difference to the nomad machine. At dawn, Oscar found himself fluttering over the rainy swamp of the Bayou Teche.

The Bayou Teche was a hundred and thirty miles long. This quiet oxbow had once formed the main channel of the Mississippi River, some three thousand years in the past. During one brief and intensely catastrophic twenty-first-century spring, the Bayou Teche, to the alarm and horror of everyone, had once again become the main channel of the Mississippi River. The savage Greenhouse deluge had carried all before it, briskly disposing of floodproof concrete levees, shady, moss-strewn live oaks, glamorous antebellum plantation homes, rust-eaten sugar mills, dead oil rigs, and everything else in its path. The flood had ravaged the cities of Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville, and New Iberia.

The Teche had always been a world of its own, a swampy biome distinct and separate from the Mississippi proper and the rice-growing plains to the west. The destruction of its roads and bridges, and the consequent enormous growth of weedy swamp and marsh, had once again returned the Teche to eerie, sodden quietude. The bayou was now one of the wildest locales in North America — not because it had been conserved from development, but because its development had been obliterated.

On his fluttering way down, Oscar took quick note of Fonte-not’s new surroundings. The ex-fed had chosen to dwell in a scattered backwoods village of metal trailer homes, which were jacked up onto concrete-block columns and surrounded by outhouses and cheap fuel-cell generators. It was a Southern-Gothic slum for freshwater fishermen, a watery maze of wooden docks, lily pads, flat-prowed straw-and-plastic bass boats. In the pink light of early morning, the bayou’s reedy waters were a lush murky green.

Oscar arrived with impressive pinpoint accuracy — right onto the sloping roof of Fontenot’s wooden shack. He swiftly tumbled from the building, falling to earth with an ankle-cracking bang. The now brain-dead aircraft shuddered violently in the morning breeze, tossing Oscar like a bug.

Luckily Fontenot limped quickly from his shack, and helped Os-car subdue his machine. After much cursing and a finger-pinching struggle, they finally had Oscar unbuckled and freed. They managed to fold and spindle the aircraft down to the size of a large canoe.

“So it really is you,” Fontenot told him, puffing with exertion. He solemnly thumped Oscar’s padded shoulder. “Where’d you get that goofy helmet? You really look like hell.”

“Yeah. Have you seen my bodyguard? He was supposed to be here earlier.”

“Come on inside,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was not a man for metal trailer homes. His shack was an authentic wooden one, a bro-ken-backed structure of cedar and board-and-batten, with gray wooden shingles on top, and spiderweb bed monster pilings beneath. The old shack had been dragged to the water’s edge, and reassembled on-site without much professional care. The door squealed and shud-dered off its jamb as it opened. Inside, the crack-shot wooden floors dipped visibly.

Fontenot’s bare wooden parlor had rattan furniture, a large stout hammock, a tiny fuel-cell icebox, and an impressive wall-mounted arsenal of top-of-the-line fishing equipment. Fontenot’s fishing gear was chained to the shack’s back wall, and arranged with obsessive military neatness in locked plywood rifle cabinets. The nearest cabinet boasted a bright menagerie of artificial lures: battery-powered wrig-glers, ultrasonic flashers, spinning spoons, pheromone-leaking jel-lyworms.

“Just a sec,” said Fontenot, thumping and squeaking into a cramped back room. Oscar had time to notice a well-thumbed Bible and an impressive litter of beer empties. Then Fontenot reappeared, hauling Kevin with one hand beneath his armpit. Kevin had been liberally bound and gagged with duct tape.

“You know this character?” Fontenot demanded.

“Yeah. That’s my new bodyguard.”

Fontenot dropped Kevin onto the rattan couch, which cracked loudly under his weight. “Look. I also know this kid. I knew his dad. Dad used to run systems for right-wing militia. Heavily armed white guys, with rigid stares and bad haircuts. If you’re hiring this Hamilton boy as security, you must have lost your mind.”

“I’m not exactly ‘hiring him,’ Jules. Technically speaking, he’s a federal employee. And he’s not just my own personal security. He’s the security for an entire federal installation.”

Fontenot reached into a pocket of his mud-stained overalls, pro-ducing a fisherman’s pocketknife. “I don’t even wanna know. I just don’t care! It’s not my problem anymore.” He sliced through the duct tape and peeled Kevin free, finally ripping the tape from his mouth with a single jerk. “Sorry, kid,” he muttered. “I guess I should have believed you.”

“No problem!” Kevin said gallantly, rubbing his gummy wrists and showing a great deal of eye-white. “Happens all the time!”

’I’m all outta practice at this,” Fontenot said. “It’s the quiet life out here, I’m out of touch. You boys want some breakfast?”

“Excellent idea,” Oscar said. A peaceful communal meal was just what they needed. Behind his pie-eating grin, Kevin was clearly mea-suring Fontenot for a lethal knife thrust to the kidneys.

“Some boudin,” Fontenot asserted, retreating to a meager gas-fired camp stove in the corner. “Some aigs and ershters.” Oscar watched Fontenot thoughtfully as the old man set about his cooking work, weary and chagrined. After a moment, he had it. Fontenot was in physical recovery from being a fed and a cop. The curse of spook work was finally leaving Fontenot, loosing its grip on his flesh like a departing heroin addiction. But with the icy grip of that long disci-pline off his bones, there just wasn’t a lot left to Jules Fontenot. He was a one-legged Louisiana backwoods fisherman, strangely aged be-fore his time.

The cabin filled with the acrid stench of frying pepper sauce. Oscar’s nose, always sensitive now, began to run. He glanced at Kevin, who was sullenly picking shreds of duct tape from his wrists.

“Jules, how’s the fishing in your bayou here?”

“It’s paradise!” Fontenot said. “Those big lunkers really love the drowned subdivisions down in Breaux Bridge. Your lunker, that’s a bottom-feeder that appreciates some structure in the habitat.”

“I don’t think I know that species, ‘lunker.’ ”

“Oh, the local state fish-and-game people built’ em years ago. The floods, and the poisonings and such, wiped out the local game fish. The Teche was getting bad algae blooms, almost as bad as that giant Dead Spot in the Gulf. So, they cobbled together these vacuum-cleaner fish. Big old channel catfish with tilapia genes. Them lunkers get big, bro. Damn big. I mean to say, four hundred pounds with eyes like baseballs. See, lunkers are sterile. Lunkers do nothin’ but eat and grow. While the lab boys were messing with their DNA, they kinda goosed the growth hormones. Now some of those babies are fifteen years old.”

“That seems like a very daring piece of biological engineering.”

“Oh, you don’t know Green Huey. That’s not the half of it. Huey’s a very active boy on environmental issues. Louisiana’s a whole different world now.”

Fontenot brought them breakfast: oyster omelets and eerie sau-sages made of congealed rice. The food was impossibly hot — far be-yond merely spicy. He’d slathered on pepper as if it were the staff of life.

“That lunker business was an emergency measure. But it worked real good. Emergency all over. This bayou would be a sewer other-wise, but now, the bass are corning back. They’re working on the water hyacinth, they’ve brought back some black bear and even cou-gar. It’s not ever gonna be natural, but it’s gonua be real doable. You boys want some more coffee?”

“Thanks,” Oscar said. He’d thoughtfully poured his first chic-ory-tainted cup through a gaping crack in the floorboards. “I have to confess, Jules, I’ve been worried about you, living here alone in the heart of Huey country. I was afraid that he might have found you here, and harassed you. For political reasons, you know, because of your time with the Senator.”

“Oh, that. Yeah,” Fontenot said, chewing steadily. “I got a cou-ple of those little state militia punks comin’ round to ‘debrief’ me. I showed ’em my federal-issue Heckler and Koch, and told ’em I’d empty a clip on their sorry punk asses if I ever saw ’em near my property again. That pretty much took care o’ that.”

“Well then,” Oscar said, tactfully disturbing his omelet with a fork.

“Y’know what I think?” said Fontenot. Fontenot had never been so garrulous before, but it was clear to Oscar that, in his retirement, the old man was desperately lonely. “People are dilferent nowadays. They buffalo way too easy, they lost their starch somehow. It has something to do with that sperm-count crash, all those pesticide hor-mone poisonings. You get these combinations of pollutants, all these yuppie flus and allergies…”

Oscar and Kevin exchanged a quick glance. They had no idea what the old man was talking about.

“Americans don’t live off the land anymore. They don’t know what we’ve done to our great outdoors. They don’t know how pretty it used to be around here, before they paved it all over and poisoned it. A million wildflowers and all kinda little plants and bugs that had been living here a jillion years… Man, when I was a kid you could still fish for marlin. Marlin! People these days don’t even know what a marlin was.”

The door opened, without a knock. A middle-aged black woman appeared, toting a net bag full of canned goods. She wore rubber sandals, a huge cotton skirt, a tropical-flowered blouse. Her head was wrapped in a kerchief. She barged into Fontenot’s home, took sudden note of Kevin and Oscar, and began chattering in Creole French.

“This is Clotile,” Fontenot said. “She’s my housekeeper.” He stood up and began sheepishly gathering dead beer cans, while talking in halting French.

Clotile gave Kevin and Oscar a resentful, dismissive glance, then began to lecture her limping boss.

“This was your security guy?” Kevin hissed at Oscar. “This bro-ken-down old hick?”

“Yes. He was really good at it, too.” Oscar was fascinated by the interplay of Fontenot and Clotile. They were engaged in a racial, economic, gender minuet whose context was a closed book to him. Clearly, Clotile was one of the most important people in Fontenot’s life now. Fontenot really admired her; there was something about her that he deeply desired, and could never have again. Clotile felt sorry for him, and was willing to work for him, but she would never accept him. They were close enough to talk together, even joke with each other, but there was some tragic element in their relationship that would never, ever be put right. It was a poignant mini-drama, as distant to Oscar as a Kabuki play.

Oscar sensed that Fontenot’s credibility had been seriously dam-aged by their presence as his houseguests. Oscar examined his embroi-dered sleeves, his discarded gloves, his hairy flight helmet. An intense little moment of culture shock shot through him.

What a very strange world he was living in. What strange people: Kevin, Fontenot, Clotile — and himself, in his dashingly filthy disguise. Here they were, eating breakfast and cleaning house, while at the rim of their moral universe, the game had changed entirely. Pieces swam from center to periphery, periphery to center — pieces flew right off the board. He’d eaten so many breakfasts with Fontenot, in the past life, back in Boston. Every day a working breakfast, watching news clips, planning campaign strategy, choosing the cantaloupe. All light-years behind him now.

Clotile forged forth sturdily and snatched the plates away from Kevin and Oscar. “I hate to be underfoot here when your house-keeper’s so busy,” Oscar said mildly. “Maybe we should have a little stroll outside, and discuss the reason for our trip here.”

“Good idea,” said Fontenot. “Sure. You boys come on out.”

They followed Fontenot out his squeaking front door and down the warped wooden steps. “They’re such good people here,” Fonte-not insisted, glancing warily back over his shoulder. “They’re so real.”

“I’m glad you’re on good terms with your neighbors.”

Fontenot nodded solemnly. “I go to Mass. The local folks got a little church up the way. I read the Good Book these days… Never had time for it before, but I want the things that matter now. The real things.”

Oscar said nothing. He was not religious, but he’d always been impressed by judeo-Christianiry’s long political track record. “Tell us about this Haitian enclave, Jules.”

“Tell you? Hell, telling you’s no use. We’ll just go there. We’ll take my huvvy.”

Fontenot’s hovercraft was sitting below his house. The amphibi-ous saucer had been an ambitious purchase, with indestructible plastic skirts and a powerful alcohol engine. It reeked of fish guts, and its stout and shiny hull was copiously littered with scales. Once emptied of its fisherman’s litter, it could seat three, though Kevin had to squeeze in.

The overloaded huvvy scraped and banged its way down to the bayou. Then it sloshed across the lily pads, burping and gargling.

“A huvvy’s good for bayou fishing,” Fontenot pronounced. “You need a shallow-draft boat in the Teche, what with all these snags, and old smashed cars, and such. The good folks around here kinda make fun of my big fancy huvvy, but I can really get around.”

“I understand these Haitians are very religious people.”

“Oh yeah,” nodded Fontenot. “They had a minister, back in the old country, doing his Moses free-the-people thing. So of course the regime had the guy shot. Then they did some terrible things to his followers that really upset Amnesty International. But… basi-cally… who cares? You know? They’re Haitians!”

Fontenot lifted both his hands from the hovercraft’s wheel. “How can anybody care about Haiti? Islands all over the world are drowning. They’re all going under water, they’ve all got big sea-level problems. But Huey… well, Huey takes it real personal when charismatic leaders get shot. Huey’s into the French diaspora. He tried twisting the arm of the State Department, but they got too many emergencies all their own. So one day, Huey just sent a big fleet of shrimp boats to Haiti, and picked them all up.”

“How did he arrange their visas?”

“He never bothered. See, you gotta think the way Huey thinks. Huey’s always got two, three, four things going on at once. He put ’em in a shelter. Salt mines. Louisiana’s got these huge underground salt mines. Underground mineral deposits twice the size of Mount Everest. They were dug out for a hundred years. They got huge vaults down there, caves as big as suburbs, with thousand-foot ceilings. Nowadays, nobody mines salt anymore. Salt’s cheaper than dirt now, because of seawater distilleries. So there’s no more market for Louisi-ana salt. Just another dead industry here, like oil. We dug it all up and sold it, and all we got left is nothing. Giant airtight caverns full of nothing, way down deep in the crust of the earth. Well, what use are they now? Well, one big use. Because you can’t see nothing. There’s no satellite surveillance for giant underground caves. Huey hid that Haitian cult in one of those giant mines for a couple of years. He was workin’ on ’em in secret, with all his other hot underground projects. Like the giant catfish, and the fuel yeast, and the coelacanths…”

Kevin spoke up. “ ‘Coelacanths’?”

“Living fossil fish from Madagascar, son. Older than dinosaurs. They got genetics like fish from another planet. Real primitive and hardy. You nick off chunks from the deep past, and you splice it in the middle of next week — that’s Huey’s recipe for the gumbo future.”

Oscar wiped spray from his waterproof flight suit. “So he’s done this strange thing to the Haitians as some kind of pilot project.”

“Yeah. And you know what? Huey’s right.”

“He is?”

“Yep. Huey’s awful wrong about the little things, but he’s so right about the big picture, that the rest of it just don’t matter. You see, Louisiana really is the future. Someday soon, the whole world is gonna be just like Louisiana. Because the seas are rising, and Louisiana is a giant swamp. The world of the future is a big, hot, Greenhouse swamp. Full of half-educated, half-breed people, who don’t speak En-glish, and didn’t forget to have children. Plus, they are totally thrilled about biotechnology. That’s what tomorrow’s world is gonna look like — not just America, mind you, the whole world. Hot, humid, old, crooked, half-forgotten, kind of rotten. The leaders are corrupt, ev-erybody’s on the take. It’s bad, really bad, even worse than it sounds.”

Fontenot suddenly grinned. “But you know what? It’s doable, it’s livable! The fishing’s good! The food is great! The women are good-lookin’, and the music really swings!”

They struggled for two hours to reach the refugee encampment.

The hovercraft bulled its way through reedbeds, scraped over spits of saw grass and sticky black mud. The Haitian camp had been cannily established on an island reachable only by aircraft — or by a very deter-mined amphibious boat.

They skirted up onto the solid earth, and left their hovercraft, and walked through knee-high weeds.

Oscar had imagined the worst: klieg lights, watchtowers, barbed wire, and vicious dogs. But the Haitian emigre village was not an armed camp. The place was basically an ashram, a little handmade religious retreat. It was a modest, quiet, rural settlement of neatly whitewashed log houses.

The village was a sizable compound for six or seven hundred people, many of them children. The village had no electricity, no plumbing, no satellite dishes, no roads, no cars, no telephones, and no aircraft. It was silent except for the twittering of birds, the occasional clonk of a churn or an ax, and the distant, keening sound of hymns.

No one was hurrying, but everyone seemed to have something to do. These people were engaged in an ancient peasant round of pre-industrial agriculture. They were literally living off the land — not by chewing up the landscape and transmuting it in sludge tanks, but by gardening it with hand tools. These were strange, rnuseumlike activi-ties. Oscar had read about them in books and seen them in docu-mentaries, but he’d never witnessed them performed in real life. Genuinely archaic pursuits, like blacksmithing and yarn-spinning.

It was all about neatly tended little garden plots, swarming com-post heaps, night soil in stinking wooden buckets. The locals had a lot of chickens. The chickens were all genetically identical. The birds were all the very same chicken, reissued in various growth stages. They also had multiple copies of a standard-issue goat. This was a hardy, bearded devil-eyed creature, a Nietzschean superman among goats, and there were herds of it. They had big spiraling vines of snap beans, monster corn, big hairy okra, monster yellow gourds, rock-hard bamboo, a little sugarcane. Some of the locals were fishermen. Sometime back, they had successfully landed a frightening leathery creature, now a skeletal mass of wrist-thick fish bones. The skeleton sported baleen plates the size of a car grille.

The communards wore homespun clothes. The men had crude straw hats, collarless buttoned vests, drawstring trousers. The women wore ankle-length shifts, white aprons, and big trailing sunbonnets.

They were perfectly friendly, but distant. It seemed that no one could be much bothered with visitors. They were all intensely preoc-cupied with their daily affairs. However, a small crowd of curious children formed and began trailing the three of them, mimicking them behind their backs, and giggling at them.

“I don’t get this,” Kevin said. “I thought this was some kind of concentration camp. These folks are doing just fine here.”

Fontenot nodded grudgingly. “Yeah, it was meant to be attrac-tive. It’s a Green, sustainable farm project. You bump people’s produc-tivity up with improved crops and animals — but no fuel combustion, no more carbon dioxide. Maybe someday they go back to Haiti and teach everybody to live this way.”

“That wouldn’t work,” Oscar said.

“Why not?” said Kevin.

“Because the Dutch have been trying that for years. Everybody in the advanced world thinks they can reinvent peasant life and keep tribal people ignorant and happy. Appropriate-tech just doesn’t work. Because peasant life is boring.”

“Yeah,” Fontenot said. “That’s exactly what tipped me off, too. They oughta be jamming around us asking for cash and transistor radios, just like any peasant always does for a tourist from the USA. But they can’t even be bothered to look at us. So, listen. You hear that kinda muttering sound?”

“You mean those hymns?” Oscar said.

“Oh, they sing hymns all right. But mostly, they pray. All the adults pray, men and women. They all pray, all the time. I mean to say, all the time, Oscar.”

Fontenot paused. “Y’know, outside people do make it over here every once in a while. Hunters, fishermen… I heard some stories. They all think these folks are just real religious, you know, weird voodoo Haitians. But that ain’t it. See, I was Secret Service. I spent years of my life searching through crowds, looking for crazy people. We’re real big on psychoanalysis in my old line of work. That’s why I know for a fact that there’s something really wrong in the heads of these people. It isn’t psychosis. It’s not drugs, either. Religion’s got something to do with it — but it’s not just religion. Something has been done to them.”

“Neural something,” Oscar said.

“Yeah. They know they’re different, too. They know that some-thing happened to them, down in that salt mine. But they think it was a holy revelation. The spirit flew into their heads — they call it the ‘second-born spirit,’ or ‘the born-again spirit.“’ Fontenot removed his hat and wiped his brow. “When I first found this place, I spent most of a day here, talking to this one old guy — Papa Christophe, that’s his name. Kinda their leader, or at least their spokesman. This guy is a local biggie, because this guy has really got a case of whatever-it-is. See, the spirit didn’t take on ’em all quite the same. The kids don’t have it at all. They’re just normal kids. Most of the grown-ups are just kind of muttery and sparkly-eyed. But then they’ve got these apostles, like Christophe. The houngans. The wise ones.”

Oscar and Kevin conferred briefly. Kevin was very spooked by Fontenot’s story. He really disliked being surrounded by illegal alien black people in the middle of an impenetrable swamp. Visions of boil-ing iron cannibal pots were dancing in Kevin’s head. Anglos… they’d never gotten over the sensation of becoming a racial minority.

Oscar was adamant, however. Having come this far, nothing would do for him but to interview Papa Christophe. Fontenot finally located the man, hard at work in a whitewashed cabin at the edge of town.

Papa Christophe was an elderly man with a long-healed machete slash in his head. His wrinkled skin and bent posture suggested a lifetime of vitamin deficiency. He looked a hundred years old, and was probably sixty.

Papa Christophe gave them a toothless grin. He was sitting on a three-legged stool on the hard dirt floor of the cabin. He had a wooden maul, a, pig-iron chisel, and a half-formed wooden statue. He was deftly peeling slivers of brown cypress wood. His statue was a saint, or a martyr; a slender, Modigliani-like woman, with a serene and stylized face, her hands pressed together in prayer. Her lower legs were wrapped in climbing flames.

Oscar was instantly impressed. “Hey! Primitive art! This guy’s pretty good! Would he sell me that thing?”

“Choke it back a little,” Kevin muttered. “Put your wallet away.”

The cabin’s single room was warm and steamy, because the building had a crude homemade still inside it. Presumably, a distillery hadn’t been present in the village’s original game plan, but the Hai-tians were ingenious folk, and they had their own agenda. The still had been riveted together out of dredged-up automobile parts. By the smell of it, it was cooking cane molasses down into a head-bending rum. The shelves along the wall were full of cast-off glass bottles, dredged from the detritus of the bayou. Half the bottles were full of yellow alcohol, and plugged with cloth and clay.

Fontenot and the old man were groping at French, with their widely disparate dialects. Fed with Christophe’s cast-off chips of cypress wood, the still was cooking right along. Rum dripped down a bent iron tube into the glass bottle, ticking like a water clock. Papa Christophe was friendly enough. He was chatting, and tapping his chisel, and chopping, and muttering a little to himself, all in that same, even, water-clock rhythm.

“I asked him. about the statue,” Fontenot explained. “He says it’s for the church. He carves saints for the good Lord, because the good Lord is always with him.”

“Even in a distillery?” Kevin said.

“Wine is a sacrament,” Fontenot said stiffly. Papa Christophe picked up a pointed charcoal stick, examined his wooden saint, and drew on her a bit. He had a set of carving tools spread beside him, on a greased leather cloth: an awl, a homemade saw, a shaving hook, a hand-powered bow-drill. They were crude implements, but the old man clearly knew what he was doing.

They’d left their ragtag of curious children outside the cabin door, but one of the smaller kids plucked up his courage and peered inside. Papa Christophe looked up, grinned toothlessly, and uttered some solemn Creole pronunciamento. The boy came in and sat obe-diently on the earthen floor.

“What was that about?” Oscar said.

“I believe he just said, ‘The monkey raised her children before there were avocados,’ ” Fontenot offered.

“What?”

“It’s a proverb.”

The little kid was thrilled to be allowed into the old man’s work-shop. Papa Christophe chopped a bit more, directing kindly remarks to the child. The rum dripped rhythmically into its pop bottle, which was almost full.

Fontenot pointed to the child, and essayed a suggestion in French. Papa Christophe chuckled indulgently. “D’abord vous guettй poux-de-bois manger bouteille, accrochez vos calabasses,” he said.

“Something about bugs eating the bottles,” Fontenot hazarded.

“Do bugs eat his bottles?” Kevin said.

Christophe hunched over and examined his charcoal outline. He was deeply engrossed by his statue. For his own part, the little boy was fascinated by the sharp carving tools.

The kid made a sudden grab for a rag-coated saw blade. Without a moment’s hesitation, the old man reached behind himself and unerr-ingly caught the child by his groping wrist.

Papa Christophe then stood up, lifted the boy out of harm’s way, and caught him up one-handed in the crook of his right arm. At the very same instant, he took two steps straight backward, reached out blindly and left-handed, and snagged an empty bottle from its shelf on the wall.

He then swung around in place, and deftly snatched up the brimming bottle from the coil of the still. He replaced the bottle with the empty one — all the while chatting to the little boy in friendly admonition. Somehow, Christophe had precisely timed all these ac-tions, so that he caught the trickling rum between drips.

The old man then sauntered back to his work stool and sat down, catching the child on his skinny leg. He lifted the rum bottle left-handed, sampled it thoughtfully, and offered Fontenot a com-ment.

Kevin rubbed his eyes. “What did he just do? Was he dancing a jig backward? He can’t do that.”

“What did he say?” Oscar asked Fontenot.

“I couldn’t catch it,” Fontenot said. “I was too busy watching him move. That was really strange.” He addressed Papa Christophe in French.

Christophe sighed patiently. He fetched up a flat piece of planed pine board and his charcoal stick. The old man had a surprisingly fine and fluid handwriting, as if he’d been taught by nuns. He wrote, “Quand la montagne brule, tout le monde le sait; quand le coeur brule, qui le sait?” He wrote the sentence blindly, while he turned his head aside, and spoke pleasantly to the child on his knee.

Fontenot examined the charcoal inscription on the pine board. “’When the volcano catches fire, everybody knows. But when the heart catches fire, who knows it?’ ”

“That’s an interesting sentiment,” Kevin said.

Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “I find it especially interesting that our friend here can write down this ancient folk wisdom while he talks aloud to that child at the very same time.”

“He’s ambidextrous,” Kevin said.

“Nope.”

“He’s just really fast,” Fontenot said. “It’s like sleight of hand.”

“Nope. Wrong again.” Oscar cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, could we go out for a private conference please? I think it’s time for us to move along to our boat.”

They took Oscar at his word. Fontenot made his cordial good-byes. They left the old man’s cabin, then limped their way silently out of the village, full of broad uneasy smiles for the inhabitants. Oscar wondered at the fate that had stuck him with two different generations of lame men.

Finally they were out of earshot. “So what’s the deal?” Kevin said.

“The deal is this: that old man was thinking of two things at once.”

“What do you mean?” Kevin said.

“I mean that it’s a neural hack. He was fully aware of two differ-ent events at the same moment. He didn’t let that little kid hurt him-self, because he was thinking about that kid every second. And even though he was carefully working that hammer and chisel, he wouldn’t let that bottle overflow. He was listening to the bottle while he was wood carving. He didn’t even have to look at the bottle to realize it was full. I think he was counting the drops.”

“So it’s like he’s got two brains,” Kevin said slowly.

“No, he only has one brain. But he’s got two windows open on the screen behind his eyes.”

“He’s multitasking, but with his own brain.”

“Yeah. That’s it. Exactly.”

“How do you know that?” Fontenot asked, squinting skeptically.

“My girlfriend won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neural basis of attention,” Oscar said. “Supposedly, that’s years away from any practical application. Supposedly. Right? This is Green Huey at work here. I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop for quite a while.”

“How can you prove that a man is concentrating on two things at once?” Fontenot said. “How do you prove he’s thinking at all?”

“It’s difficult. But it’s doable. Because that’s what they’re doing, all right. That’s why they’re never bored here. It’s because they pray. They pray all the time — and I wouldn’t be surprised if all that prayer wasn’t serving some other purpose, too. I think it’s some kind of relay between two separate streams of consciousness. You tell God what you’re thinking every minute — and that’s how you know it yourself. That’s what Christophe was trying to tell us with the song-and-dance about the ‘fiery heart.’ ”

“So it’s like he’s got two souls,” Fontenot said slowly.

“Sure,” Oscar said. “If that’s the word you want to use. I sure wish Greta were here with her lab equipment, so we could nail this down.” He shook his head regretfully. “That State of Emergency at the Buna lab has seriously stepped on our downtime together.”

They’d now arrived at the hovercraft, but Fontenot showed no sign of leaving. His artificial leg was troubling him. He sat down on the hull of the hovercraft and removed his hat, breathing heavily. Kevin clambered over the back and sat inside the huvvy, propping up his aching feet. A pair of herons flew nearby, and something large and oily surfaced near a clump of tangled reeds.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Fontenot confessed. He stared at Oscar, as if the revelation were all his fault. “I don’t know what to make of you anymore. Your girlfriend won the Nobel Prize. A hacker is your security man. And you dropped on the roof of my house without a word of warning, dressed like a flying ape.”

“Yeah. Of course.” Oscar paused. “See, it all makes sense, if you get there step by step.”

“Look, don’t tell me any more,” Fontenot said. “I’m in way too deep already. I don’t want to play your game. I want to go home, and live here, and die here. If you tell me any more of this, I’m gonna have to take it to the President.”

“I’ve got you covered on that issue,” Oscar told him. “I work for the President. I’m with the National Security Council.”

Fontenot was astonished. “You’re in the Administration now? You work for the NSC?”

“Jules, stop acting so surprised at every single thing I say. You’re starting to hurt my feelings. Why do you think I came here? How do you think I end up in situations like this? Who else could do this properly? I’m the only guy in the world who would walk into a neural voodoo cult in the middle of nowhere, and immediately figure out exactly what was going on.”

Fontenot rubbed his stubbled chin. “So… Okay! I guess I’m with you. So, Mr. Super Expert Know-it-all, tell me something. Are we really going to have a war with Holland?”

“Yes. We are. And if I can get out of this damn swamp in one piece, and brief the President on my findings here, we’re probably going to have a war with Louisiana.”

“Oh my God.” Fontenot groaned aloud. “It’s beyond bad. It’s the worst. It’s the very worst. I knew I should have kept my mouth shut. I knew I shouldn’t have outed this thing.”

“No, it was the right thing to do. Huey’s a great man, and he’s a visionary, but Huey is around the bend. He’s not just your standard southern-fried good-old-boy megalomaniac anymore. Now I know the full truth. These Haitians? They were just his proof of concept. Huey’s done something weird to himself. Something very dark and neural.”

“And you have to tell the President about that.”

“Yes, I do. Because our President is not like that. The President is not insane. He’s just a hard-as-nails, ambitious, strong-arm politi-cian, who is going to bring law and order to this two-horse country, even if it means setting fire to half of Europe.”

Fontenot considered this subject at length. Finally he turned to Kevin. “Hey, Hamilton.”

“Yes sir?” Kevin said, startled.

“Don’t let them kill this guy.”

“I didn’t want the job!” Kevin protested. “He didn’t tell me how bad it was. Honest! You want the bodyguard job back? Take the damn job. ”

“No,” Fontenot said, with finality. They climbed into the little boat, three men in a tub, and headed out into the bayou again.

“He did some great things for us,” Fontenot said. “Of course, everything he ever did was always about Huey first. Huey was always item number one on the Huey agenda, everybody knew that. But he did good things for the people. He gave ’em good breaks that they hadn’t had in a hundred years. It’s still the future.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said, “Huey’s got his own new order — but it isn’t new, and it isn’t order. Huey’s a funny guy. He can crack a joke and pound the ol’ podium, he’ll buy everybody a drink and make public fun of himself But he’s got it all: total control over the legislature and the judiciary. A brownshirt militia on the rampage. His own private media network — his own economy, even. A blood-and-soil ideology. Secret retreats full of vengeance weapons. Huey kidnaps people. He abducts whole little populations, and makes them disappear. I suppose he does it all for the best of reasons, but the ends don’t matter when you’re using means like that. And now, he’s dosed himself with some off-the-wall treatment that makes people permanently schizoid! He can’t possibly get better after this. He can only get worse and worse.”

Fontenot sighed. “Let me ask one favor. Don’t tell anybody that I led you to this. I don’t want any press. I don’t want my poor neigh-bors knowin’ that I sold old Huey out. This is my home. I want to die here.”

Kevin spoke up. “You keep saying that this place is the future. Why do you want to die, old man?”

Fontenot looked at him with baggy-eyed tolerance. “Kid, every-body goes to the future to die. That’s where the job gets done.”

Oscar shook his head. “Don’t feel guilty. You don’t owe Huey any loyalty.”

“We all owe him, dammit. He saved us. He saved the state. We owe him for the mosquitoes, if nothing else.”

“Mosquitoes? What mosquitoes?”

“There aren’t any. And we’re in the middle of a swamp. And we don’t get bit. And you didn’t even notice, did you? I sure as hell notice.”

“Well, what happened to the mosquitoes?”

“Before Huey came along, the mosquitoes were kicking our ass.

Mosquitoes love the Greenhouse future. When it got hotter and wet-ter, they came in tidal waves. Carrying malaria, dengue fever, enceph-alitis… After the big Mississippi floods, mosquitoes boiled out of every ditch in the state. It was a major health emergency, people were dyin’. And Huey had just been sworn in. He just wouldn’t have it, he said, ‘Take action, get rid of ’em.’ He sent out the fogger trucks. Not insecticide, not that poison gas like before — DDT and toxins. That screwed up everything — not doable, everybody knows that. But Huey figured it out — he didn’t gas the bugs, he gassed the people. With airborne antibodies. They’re like breathable vaccinations. The people of Louisiana are toxic to mosquitoes now. Our blood literally kills them. If a mosquito bites a Cajun, that mosquito dies on the spot.”

“Neat hack!” Kevin enthused. “But that wouldn’t kill all the mosquitoes, would it?”

“No, but the diseases vanished right away. Because disease couldn’t spread from person to person anymore. And the skeeters are going, too. See, Huey’s gassing the livestock, wild animals, he’s gas-sing everything that breathes. Because it works! Those bloodsuckers used to kill the people in job lots. For thousands of years they were a biblical plague around here. But Green Huey nailed ’em for good.”

The hovercraft puttered on. The three of them fell thoughtfully silent.

“What’s that bug on your arm, then?” Kevin said at last. “Dang!” Fontenot swatted it. “Must have blown in from Missis-sippi!”

Oscar knew that his new allegations were extremely grave. Properly handled, this scandal would finish Huey. Handled badly, it could fin-ish Oscar in short order. It might even finish the President.

Oscar composed what he considered the finest memo of his ca-reer. He had the memo passed to the President — hopefully, for his eyes only. Oscar was unhappy at bypassing his superiors to the top of the chain of command, but he was anxious to avoid any further deba-cles from the paramilitary zealots of the NSC. Their killer helicopter attack during his kidnapping had probably saved his life, but true pro-fessionals simply didn’t behave that way.

Oscar appealed to the President. He was calm, factual, rational, well organized. He pinpointed the locale of the Haitian camp, and recommended that human intelligence be sent in. Someone discreet, harmless-looking. A female agent would be a good choice. Someone who could thoroughly tape the place, and take blood samples.

For three days, Oscar followed his memo with a barrage of anx-ious demands and queries of the NSC higher-ups. Had the President seen his memo? It was of the greatest importance. It was critical.

There was no answer.

In the meantime, serious difficulties pressed at the Collaboratory. Morale was cracking among the civilian support staff. None of them were being paid anymore. None of the support staff enjoyed the pres-tige and glamour of the scientists, who were rapidly accustoming themselves to being followed by worshipful krewes of hairy-eyed Moderators. The civilian staff were miffed. The Collaboratory’s medi-cal staff were especially upset. They could get good-paying jobs else-where — and they could scarcely be expected to run a decent, ethical medical facility without a steady flow of capital and up-to-date sup-plies.

There was continued and intensifying Moderator/Regulator feuding in the Sabine River valley. Scouting patrols by rival nomad youth gangs were degenerating into bushwhackings and lynchings. The situation was increasingly volatile, especially since the sheriffs of Jasper and Newton counties had been forced to resign their posts. The good-old-boy Texan sheriffs had been outed on outrageous bribery scandals. Someone had compiled extensive dossiers on their long-time complicity in bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution — all those illicit delights that could be outlawed, but never made unpopular.

It didn’t take genius to understand that civil order in East Texas was being deliberately undermined by Green Huey. Texas state gov-ernment should have risen to this challenge, but Texas state govern-ment was well known for its lack of genius. The state held endless hearings on the shocking problem of endemic police corruption — apparently hoping that the riots would subside if fed enough paper-work.

The biggest wild card on the state border was the provocative presence of European and Asian news crews. America’s hot war with the gallant, minuscule Dutch had made America hot copy again. Sav-age confrontations between armed criminal gangs had always been an activity that endeared America to its fans around the world. Dutch journalists had been banned in the USA — but French and German ones were everywhere, especially in Louisiana. The British were kind enough to suggest that the French were secretly arming Huey’s Regu-lator gangs.

The prestige-maddened hotheads in the Regulators were thrilled to receive worldwide net coverage. Young Regulator goons lived for reputations and respect, since they had so little else. The military crisis was distorting the odd underpinnings of the Regulator attention-economy. Violent hotheads were vaulting through the ranks by their daring attacks on Moderators.

The Moderators, in Oscar’s judgment, were a cannier and more ductile lot. Their networks were better designed and organized; the Moderators were cooler, less visible, far less confrontational. Still, it didn’t take much pushing to render them murderous.

On the fourth day after sending his memo, Oscar received a curt message from the President. Two Feathers indicated, in a couple of lines, that Oscar’s memo had been read and understood. Oscar was directly ordered not to speak further on the topic to anyone.

Forty-eight hours passed, and the scandal broke wide open. A squadron of U.S. helicopters had flown by night into the heart of Louisiana, where they rendezvoused in an obscure swamp village. Two of them promptly collided and crashed, crushing the homes of the sleeping natives, charring and killing innocent women and children. Undetermined numbers of the locals had been scandalously kidnapped by the abduction-crazed feds. Four federal spooks had been killed in the crash. Their bodies were paraded before Huey’s European cam-eras, their zippy black flight suits top-heavy with aging cyber-gear.

This bizarre allegation simply hung there, misfiring, for another forty-eight hours. There was no formal reaction from the Administra-tion. They simply declined comment on the issue, as if the demagogic raving of the Governor of Louisiana was too clownish for words. Pub-lic attention focused instead on the U.S. Navy, whose Atlantic armada was being launched against the Dutch in an archaic ritual of wind-snapping Old Glories. The gallant old warcraft wallowed out to sea from their half-drowned military dry docks. All eyes were on the War now — or at least, they were supposed to be.

Outside America, it was obvious to anyone, even the perennially suspicious Chinese, that a naval attack on the Dutch was an absurd and ridiculous gesture. It was the subject of amused lampoons in Europe. Only the Dutch seemed sincerely upset.

But the effect within America was profound. The nation was at War. Roused from its fatal lethargy by the cheering prospect of doing some serious harm, the Congress had actually declared a War. The result was instant, intense civil discord. Outflanked by the state of War, most of the Emergency committees promised to go quietly. A few defied the Congress and the President, risking arrest. In the mean-while, antiwar networks congealed and raged in the streets. They were sincerely disgusted to see the Constitution perverted, and the nation dishonored, for domestic political advantage.

Twenty-four more feverish hours of War ticked by. Then, the Administration accused the Governor of Louisiana of conducting un-ethical medical experiments on illegal aliens. This news arrived in the very midst of the martial fife-playing and drumbeating. It was a shock-ing distraction. But it was serious — bad, very bad, unbelievably bad. The surgeon general and the cabinet head of Health Services were wheeled out in public, burdened with grim looks, medical evidence, and terrifying cranial flip charts.

The PR attack on Huey was badly handled, amateurish, graceless even. But it was lethal. Huey had laughed off many other scandals, sidestepped them, passed the buck, silenced his critics, suborned them. But this scandal was beyond the pale. It was all about invisible, help-less, rootless people, deliberately driven out of their minds as an indus-trial process. That was just a little too close to home for most Americans. They couldn’t live with that.

When his phone rang, Oscar was, for once, entirely ready. “You little SCUMBAG!” Huey screamed. “You evil Yankee narc! Those people were perfectly happy! It was heaven on earth! And the feds came in the dark and kidnapped them! They burned them alive!”

“Good evening, Governor! I take it you’ve seen tonight’s Ad-ministration briefing.”

“You’re FINISHED, you jumped-up little creep! I’m gonna make you sorry you were ever cloned! I made promises to those peo-ple, they were under my care. You outed them! I know it was you. Admit it!”

“Governor, of course I admit it. Let’s be adults here. That news was bound to come out, whether I leaked it or not. You can’t run two years of secret neural experiments on hundreds of human subjects and not have leaks. Scientists talk to each other. Even your pet scientists. Even nonpedigreed chicken-fried scientists who live down in salt mines doing gruesome things to foreigners. Scientists communicate their findings, that’s just the way scientists are. So of course your pet goons in the salt mines leaked word to other neuroscientists. And of course I got wind of it. And of course I told the President. I work for the President.” He cleared his throat. “Mind you, I didn’t design that presentation tonight. If I had, it would have looked more profes-sional.”

He wondered if Huey would swallow this boldly prepared lie.

He’d done his best to make it sound plausible. He’d done it in order to shield Fontenot, his real source. Maybe the deception would work. In any case it would surely distract and irritate Huey and his state-supported neuro quacks.

“You can’t believe that racist poppycock they’re handing out about my Haitians. Those folks aren’t monsters! They’re just very devout people with some strange drug practices. Blowfish zombie poi-sons, and all that.”

“Governor, you’re making me cry. Am I ten years old? Are you afraid I’m taping this? If you’re not going to talk to me seriously, you might as well hang up.”

“Oh no,” Huey grunted. “You and I go back a little too far for that. I can always talk to you, Soap Boy.”

“Good. I’m glad that our previous understanding still holds. Let’s try to avoid cross-purposes, this time.”

“At least I know that you can talk to the President. That son of a bitch won’t return my calls! Me — the most senior Governor in Amer-ica! I know that dumb bastard, I met him at Governors’ conferences. Hell, I did him a whole lot of favors. I taught him everything he knows about proles and how you deal with ’em. ‘Moderators’ — what the hell is all that about? He’s killing my people! He’s kidnapping my people. You tell the President that he’s crossed the wrong man. I’m not puttin’ up with the strong-arm from the Featherweight. He got eighteen percent of the popular vote! You tell him that! You tell him Huey don’t forget these things.”

“Governor, I’ll be glad to convey your sentiments to the Presi-dent, but may I make a reasonable suggestion first? Shut up. You are finished. The President has you cornered. This thing you did with the Haitians was totally unconscionable! You’ve shot your own feet off in public.”

“So I should have left them on their drowning island to be tor-tured to death.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you should have done. Leave them alone. You don’t own people just because you helped them survive. You want to blow people’s minds by giving weird dope to uninformed experimental subjects? Go back to the 1960s and join the CIA! You’re not God, Huey! You’re just a damn Governor! You went way, way too far! And you can’t wiggle out of this one, because your fingerprints are all over it-your brain prints are all over it!”

Huey laughed. “You just watch me and see.”

“They’re gonna demand that you go in for a PET-scan next, Huey. Then, they’re going to find the dual synchronized waves of chemical gradients, and the shifting electrical patterns through the corpus callosum, and all that other boring neural crap that you and I are the only politicians in the world who have learned to pronounce properly! They’re gonna out you as a bolt-in-the-neck monster. Peo-ple are gonna Frankenstein you! You’re gonna be barbecued by a torch-wielding mob. You’re not just gonna be politically embarrassed by this. You’re gonna get killed.”

“I know all that,” Huey said quietly. “Let ’em do their worst.”

Oscar sighed. “Etienne — can I call you that? I feel that we know and understand one another so much better these days… Etienne, please don’t make people kill you. That can happen very easily, and it’s just not worth it. Listen to me. I sympathize with you. I take a deep, lasting, personal and professional interest in politicians who hap-pen to be monsters. Believe me, it doesn’t get any better after this part. After this part, it just gets worse and worse.”

“You know that I’m going to out you big-time for this, don’t you? ‘Colombian Clone Freak in Seaside Love Nest with Nobel Scientist.’ ”

“Etienne, I’m not just a Colombian clone freak. I am also a professional campaign adviser. Let me give you some very sincere campaign advice, right now. Give up. Go away. Just get yourself some cash out of the slush fund, and get your lovely wife if she really wants to come along, and go into exile. Go into self-imposed exile. You know? Leave the country. It happens. It’s traditional. It’s a legitimate political maneuver.”

“I’m not gonna run away. Huey don’t do that.”

“Of course ‘Huey do that,’ dammit! Go aboard a nice French submarine — I know you got a dozen of ’em lurking offshore. Have ’em take you to a nice villa, on Elba, or St. Helena or something. Take a few pet bodyguards. It’s doable! You eat well, you write the mem-oirs, you’re tanned, rested, and ready. Maybe… maybe even, someday… if somehow things get much, much worse here in America… maybe you’ll even look good. It sounds insane, but I’m not sure I can even judge anymore. Maybe, someday, deliberately im-posing schizoid states of mind on unsuspecting human beings will become politically fashionable. But it sure as hell isn’t now. Read to-morrow’s opinion polls. You’re toast.”

“Kid, I’m Huey. You’re toast. I can destroy you, and your un-grateful bitch girlfriend, and your entire research facility, which, in point of fact, is, and always will be, my research facility.”

“I’m sure you can try that, Governor, but why waste the energy? It’s pointless to destroy us now. It’s too late for that. I really thought you had a better feel for these things.”

“Son, you still don’t get it. I don’t need any ‘feel’ for it. I can do all that in my spare time — while I pat my head and rub my belly.” Huey hung up.

Now the dogs of War were unleashed on the psychic landscape of America, and even as rather small dogs, with blunt, symbolic teeth, they provoked political havoc. No one had expected this of the Presi-dent. An eccentric billionaire Native American — for a country ex-hausted by identity crisis and splintered politics, Two Feathers had seemed a colorful sideshow, an Oh-Might-As-Well candidate whose bluster might keep up morale. Even Oscar had expected little of him; the governorship of Colorado had never given Two Feathers much chance to shine. Once in the national saddle, however, Two Feathers was rapidly proving himself to be a phenomenon. He was clearly one of those transitional American Presidents, those larger-than-life figures who set a stamp on their era and made life horribly dangerous and interesting.

Unfortunately for Green Huey, the American political landscape had room for only one eccentrically dressed, carpet-chewing, authori-tarian state Governor. Two Feathers had beaten Huey to the White House. Worse yet, he correctly recognized Huey as an intolerable threat that could not be co-opted. He was resolved to crush Huey.

A war of words broke out between the President and the rogue Governor. Huey accused the President of provocative spy overflights. This was true, for the sky over Louisiana was black with surveillance aircraft — feds, proles, military, Europeans, Asians, private networks, anyone who could launch an autonomous kite with a camera on board.

The President counteraccused the Governor of treacherous col-laboration with foreign powers during wartime. This was also true, though so far the premier effect of the Dutch War had been to saturate America with curious European tourists. The Europeans hadn’t seen anyone declare a War in absolute ages. It was fun to be a foreign national in a country at War, especially a country that sold bugging devices out of brimming baskets at flea markets. Suddenly everyone was his own international spy.

The President then upped the ante. He sternly demanded the swift return of all the federal weaponry stolen from the ransacked Louisiana Air Force base. He threatened unnamed, severe reprisals.

The Air Force weapons were, needless to say, not forthcoming. Instead, the Governor accused the President of plotting martial law and a coup d’etat.

Huey’s Senators launched a marathon procedural war within the U.S. Senate, with double-barreled filibusters. The President de-manded impeachment proceedings against the two Louisiana Senators. He also announced criminal investigations of all of Louisiana’s Repre-sentatives.

Huey called for the President to be impeached by Congress, and for antiwar activists to take to the streets in a general strike and para-lyze the country.

Faced with the prospect of a general strike, the President counterannounced his unilateral creation of a new, all-volunteer, civil defense force, the “Civil Defense Intelligence Agency.” On paper, this seemed a very strange organization — a national debating club of so-called “civil activists,” loyal only to the President. The CDIA had no budget, and its head was an aging, much-decorated war hero, who happened to live in Colorado. He happened to know the President personally. He happened to be a very high-ranking Moderator.

A closer analysis showed that the “Civil Defense Intelligence Agency” was the Moderators. The CDIA was a gigantic prole gang with the direct backing of the nation’s chief executive. At this point, a Rubicon was crossed. This stroke made it obvious that the Governor of Colorado had been cultivating his own prole forces for years. Huey had used his Regulator proles as a deniable proxy force, but the Presi-dent was boldly bringing his own private mafia into the open, and brandishing it like a club. The President was a day late and perhaps a dollar short, but he had a great advantage. He was the President.

Now, for the first time, the President began to look genuinely powerful, even dangerous. This was a classic political coalition: it had worked in medieval France. It was the long-forgotten bottom of the heap, allied with the formerly feeble top, to scare the hell out of the arrogant and divisive middle.

The President’s first deployment of his semilegal forces was against the now-illegal Emergency committees. This was a stroke of brilliance, because the Emergency committees were universally de-tested, and even more feared than the proles. Besides, the Emergency committees had lost all their legal backing, and were already on the ropes. Attacking a newly illegal force with a newly legitimized, for-merly illegal force struck the American public very favorably. The maneuver had a nice unspoken symmetry to it. It was a player’s move. The President’s ratings went up sharply. He was accomplishing some-thing tangible, where nothing had been accomplished in years.

The new CDIA, for its own part, revealed some impressive new tactics. The CDIA lacked the legal power to arrest anyone, so they pursued Emergency committee members with nonviolent “body pickets.” These were armbanded bursars who methodically stalked committee members for twenty-four hours a day. This tactic was not difficult for a prole group. “Body picketing” was basically an intelli-gence stakeout, shadowing; but it was not surreptitious. It was totally open and obvious, and like all paparazzi work, it was extremely an-noying to its victims.

The proles took to this job like ducks to water. They had always been organized much like intelligence agencies — small, distributed, surreptitious networks, living on the fringes of society through shared passwords and persistent scrounging. But as a national goon squad, ordered from above, the prole networks suddenly coalesced into a rigid, crystalline substance. For the President’s enemies, they became a human prison of constant surveillance.

Or so it seemed. It was still too early to tell whether the Presi-dent’s CDIA would have any staying power as a New Model Army. But the mere threat of its deployment sent a shock wave through the system. A new era was clearly at hand. America’s Emergency was truly and finally over. The War was on.

Oscar followed these developments with great professional care, and reacted to catch the popular tide. He had Greta formally declare the Emergency over at the Collaboratory. There was no more Emer-gency. From now on, it was Wartime.

“Why are you doing this to us?” Greta demanded, in yet another bone-grinding late-night committee session. “What possible differ-ence does it make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world.”

“But it’s all semantic! We’re all the same people. I’m still the lab Director, God help me. And we still have the Emergency Committee as the only people who can run this mess.”

“From now on, we’re the War Committee.”

“It’s just symbolic!”

“No it isn’t.” Oscar sighed. “I’ll explain it to you, very simply. The President has seized power in a time of crisis. He bypassed the Constitution, he undercut the Congress, he annihilated the Emer-gency committees. He did that by recruiting large gangs of organized social outcasts, who derive their new legitimacy strictly from him, and are loyal to him personally.”

“Yes, Oscar, we know all that. We’re not blind. And I’m very unhappy about what the President did. I certainly don’t see why we have to imitate his radical, bully-boy tactics.”

“Greta, the President is imitating us. That is exactly what we did, right here. The President is doing it because you and I got away with doing it! You’re very popular because you did that, you’re famous. People think it’s exciting to seize power with prole gangs, and to throw all the rascals out. It’s a very slick move.”

Greta was very troubled. “Oh… Oh my God.”

“I admit, this isn’t great news for American democracy. In fact, it’s bad news. It’s terrible news. It might even be catastrophic news. But it’s wonderful news for the lab. This news means that we’re all much, much less likely to get arrested or indicted for what we’ve done here. You see? We’re going to get away with it. It’s a wonderful political gift from our chief protector and patron — the President. We’re home free! All we have to do from now on is change our shirt whenever the President changes his shirt. From now on, we have protective color-ation. We’re no longer crazy radicals, on strike at a federal lab. We’re loyal citizens who are fully and mindfully engaged in the grand exper-iment of our President’s new social order. So from now on, that’s why we’re the War Committee.”

“But we can’t be the War Committee. We don’t have our own war.”

“Oh yes, we do.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Just wait.”

Two days later the President sent federal troops to Buna. The U.S. Army was finally responding to his orders, despite their deep institutional distaste for coercive violence against American citizens. Unfor-tunately, these soldiers were a marching battalion of Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict specialists.

The American military, at the historical tag end of traditional armed conflict, knew that they had entered an era where the pen truly was mightier than the sword. The sword just wasn’t much use in an epoch when battlefronts no longer existed and a standing army could be torn to shreds by cheap unmanned machinery.

So, the U.S. m.ilitary had downgraded their swords and upgraded their pens. The President’s U.S. Army Seventy-sixth Infowar and So-cial Adjudication Battalion were basically social workers. They wore crisp white uniforms, and concentrated on language skills, disaster re-lief measures, stress counseling, light police work, and first aid. Half of them were women, none of them had firearms, and, as a final fillip, they had been ordered into action without any federal funding. In fact, they were already four months behind on their salaries. They’d had to sell their armored personnel carriers just to make ends meet.

The Collaboratory was now seriously overcrowded. Poaching and eating the rare animals became a commonplace misdemeanor. With a battalion of five hundred mooching soldier/psychoanalysts, plus their camp-follower media coverage, the long-suffering Col-laboratory was seriously overloaded. The interior of the dome began to fog over with human breath.

To keep the newcomers usefully occupied, Oscar deputized the Infowar Battalion to psychologically besiege Huey’s loyalists, who were still stubbornly on strike, holed up in the Spinoffs building. They did this with a will. But the Collaboratory was beginning to resemble a giant subway.

The ideal solution was to build more shelter. The Moderators, in uneasy symbiosis with the feds, set up tents on the Collaboratory’s spare ground outside the dome. Oscar would have liked to build an-nexes to the Collaboratory. Bambakias’s emergency design plans sug-gested some quite astonishing methods by which this might be done. The materials were available. Manpower was in generous supply. The will to do it was present.

But there was no money. The Collaboratory was surrounded by the city of Buna, and its privately owned real estate. The city of Buna was still on friendly terms with the lab, even proud of them for having won so much publicity lately. But the lab couldn’t commandeer the city by force of arms. Besides, all of Buna’s available rental shelter had already been taken, on exorbitant terms, by European and Asian me-dia crews, and nongovernmental civil-rights and peace organizations.

So they were stymied. It always boiled down to money. They just didn’t have any. They had proved that the business of science could run on sheer charisma for a while, a life powered by sheer sense of wonder, like some endless pledge drive. But people were still peo-ple; they ran out of charisma, and the sense of wonder ate its young. The need for money was always serious, and always there.

Tempers frayed. Despite the utter harmlessness of the federal SO/ LIC troops, Huey correctly took their presence on the border of Lou-isiana as a menacing provocation. He unleashed a barrage of hysterical propaganda, including the bizarre, and documented, allegation that the President was a long-time Dutch agent. As Governor, and as a timber businessman, the President had had extensive dealings with the Dutch, during happier times. Huey’s oppo-research people had com-piled painstaking dossiers to this effect.

It didn’t matter. Only a schizoid with a case of bicameral con-sciousness could seriously contend that the President was a Dutch agent, when the President had just declared War on Holland. When the U.S. Navy was steaming for Amsterdam. When the Dutch were screaming for help, and getting none.

This spy allegation not only went nowhere, it convinced many former fence-sitters that Huey had utterly lost his mind. Huey was dangerous, and had to be pried from public office at all costs. And yet Huey held on, publicly drilling his state militia, conducting purges of his faltering police, swearing vengeance on a world of hypocrites and liars.

Oscar and Greta had reached the end of their rope. They began to argue seriously and publicly. They had had tiffs before, spats before, little misunderstandings; but after so many hours, days, weeks of diffi-cult administration work, they began to have bruising public combats over the future of the lab, over the meaning of their effort.

The end of the Emergency and the beginning of the War neces-sitated the creation of yet another media environment. Oscar shut down the public loudspeakers that monitored Emergency Committee discussions. Wartime was about loose lips sinking ships, about blood, sweat, toil, and tears. It was time to stop propagandizing the people of the Collaboratory. They already knew where they stood and what was at stake. Now they had to defend what they had built; they should be in the trenches with shovels, they should be singing marching songs.

And yet they could do no such thing. They could only wait. The situation was out of their hands. They were no longer masters of their own destiny, they no longer held the initiative. The real struggle was taking place in Washington, in The Hague, in a flotilla of Navy ships somberly crossing the storm-tossed Atlantic, about as slowly as was physically possible. The nation was at War.

No sooner had they resigned themselves to their own irrelevance than the situation took a lethal head spin. The leader of the CDIA arrived in Buna. He was a Moderator from Colorado named Field Marshal Munchy Menlo. Munchy Menlo’s original name was Gutier-rez; in his distant youth, he had been involved in some nasty anti-insurgency shoot-’em-ups in Colombia and Peru. Munchy Menlo had become something of a lost soul in civilian life; he’d had drinking problems, he had failed at running a grocery. Eventually he’d drifted off the edge of the earth into Moderator life, where he had done very well for himself.

Field Marshal Menlo — he boldly insisted on retaining his “road name” — was a creature of a different military order than any Oscar had met before. He was plainspoken, bearded, and reticent, modest in his manner. He radiated a certain magnetism peculiar to men who had personally killed a lot of people.

With the outbreak of War, Oscar himself had had a promotion; he was now an actual, official member of the National Security Council. He had his own hologram ID card, and his own NSC letter-head proclaiming him to be a “Deputy Adviser, Sci-Tech Issues.” Oscar was naturally the local liaison for Field Marshal Menlo. When the man arrived from Washington — on a lone motorcycle, and with-out any escort — Oscar introduced him to the War Committee.

Menlo explained that he had come on a quiet, personal recon-naissance. The new CDIA was considering a military attack across the Louisiana border.

The Collaboratory’s War Committee met in full to hear Menlo out. Thre were fifteen people listening, including Greta, Oscar, Kevin, Albert Gazzaniga, all the Collaboratory’s various department heads, along with six Moderator sachems. The Moderators were de-lighted at this news. At last, and with federal government backing, they were going to give the Regulators the sound, bloody stomping they deserved! Everyone else, of course, was appalled.

Oscar spoke up. “Field Marshal while I can appreciate the mer-its of a raid on Louisiana — a lightning raid… a limited, surgical raid — I really can’t see that a military attack on our fellow Americans gains us anything. Huey still has a grip on the levers of power in his state, but he’s weakening. His credibility is in tatters. It’s just a matter of time before internal dissent drives him out.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” said the Field Marshal.

Gazzaniga winced. “I hate to think what the global media would make of American soldiers shedding American blood. That’s ghastly. Why, it’s civil war, basically.”

“It would make us look like barbarians,” Greta said. “Economic embargo. Moral pressure. Net subversion, informa-tion warfare. That’s how you handle a problem like this,” Gazzaniga said with finality.

“I see,” said the Field Marshal. “Well, let me bring up one small, additional matter. The President is very concerned about the missing armaments from that Air Force base.”

They nodded. “They’ve been missing quite a while,” Oscar said. “That scarcely seems like an urgent issue.”

“It’s not widely known — and of course, this news isn’t to leave this room — but there was a battery of specialized, short-range, sur-face-to-surface missiles in that Air Force base.”

“Missiles,” Greta repeated thoughtfully.

“Aerial reconnaissance indicates that the missile battery is hidden in the Sabine River valley. We have some very good human intelli-gence that suggests that those missiles have been loaded with aerosol warheads. ”

“Gas warheads?” Gazzaniga said.

“They were designed for deploying gas,” Menlo said. “Non-lethal, crowd-control aerosols. Luckily, their range is quite short. Only fifty miles.”

“I see,” said Oscar.

“Well,” said Gazzaniga, “they’re nonlethal missiles and they have a short range, right? So what’s the big deal?”

“You people here in Buna are the only federal facility within fifty miles of those missiles.”

No one said anything.

“Tell me how those missiles work,” Greta said at last.

“Well, it’s a nice design,” Menlo offered. “They’re stealth mis-siles, mostly plastic, and they vaporize in midair in a silent burst dis-persion. Their payload is a fog: gelatin-coated microspheres. The psychotropic agent is inside the spheres, and the spheres will only melt in the environment of human lungs. After a few hours in the open air, all the microdust cooks down, and the payload becomes inert. But any human being who’s been breathing in that area will absorb the payload.”

“So they’re like a short-term, airborne vaccination,” Oscar said.

“Yes. Pretty much. That’s well put. I think you’ve got the picture there. ”

“What kind of insane person builds things like that?” Greta said in annoyance.

“Well, U.S. military biowar engineers. Quite a few of them used to work at this facility, before we lost the economic war.” Field Mar-shal Menlo sighed. “As far as I know, that technology has never been used.”

“He’s going to bomb us with those things,” Oscar announced. “How do you know that?”

“Because he’s hired those biowar technicians. He must have picked ’em all up for a song, years ago. He’s stuffed ’em down a salt mine somewhere. Psychotropic gas — that’s just what he used against the Air Force base. And airborne vaccinations, he used that to kill mosquitoes. It all fits in. It’s his modus operandi.”

“We agree with that assessment,” Menlo said. “The President asked him to give those gas weapons back. No go. So, he must mean to use them.”

“What’s the nature of this substance in the micro spheres?” Greta said.

“Well, psycho tropics seem likeliest. If they hit a place the size of Buna, you could have the whole town basically insane for forty-eight hours. But those microbeads could hold a lot of different airborne agents. Pretty much anything, really.”

“And there’s a battery of these missiles pointed at us, right now?”

Menlo nodded. “Just one battery. Twenty warheads.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Gazzaniga announced, “if there was a lim-itd, surgical raid… not by U.S. troops officially, but let’s say, by some competent combat veterans disguised as irregular Modera-tors…”

“Completely different matter,” said a department head.

“Exactly.”

“Actually defuses the crisis. Increases the general security.”

“Just what I was thinking.”

“How long before you can attack, Marshal Menlo?”

“Seventy-two hours,” the Field Marshal said.

But Huey had bombed them within forty-eight.

The first missile overshot the Collaboratory dome and landed in the western edge of Buna. A section of the city the size of four football fields was soaked with caustic black goo. The arrival of the bio-missile and its explosion were completely silent. It took until three in the morning for a partying German film crew in a local bed-and-breakfast to notice that the town’s streets, roofs, and windows were covered with a finely powdered black tar.

The reaction was mass hysteria. The captive Haitians in Washing-ton, DC, had been getting a lot of press lately. The attack of gas psychosis in the Air Force base had not been forgotten, either. The news from the Collaboratory’s War Committee had, of course, imme-diately leaked to the public — not officially, but as rumor. Confronted with this black manifestation of their darkest fears, the people of Buna lost their minds. Fits of itching, burning, fainting, and convulsions were reported. Many of the afflicted claimed to have bicameral con-sciousness, or second sight, or even telepathy.

A courageous Collaboratory krewe donned emergency respirator gear and rushed to the site of the gas attack. They gathered samples and returned — barely able to make it through the panicked crowds at the Collaboratory’s airlocks, townsfolk desperate for the safety of the airtight lab. There were ugly incidents at the gates, where families found themselves separated in the crowds, where women held their children up in the air and begged for safety and mercy.

By ten AM, a lab study of the black tar had revealed that it was paint. It was a black, nontoxic, nonremovable caustic polymer, in a fog of gelatin beads. There was no psychotropic agent at all. The insanity of the townsfolk had been entirely a case of mass suggestion. The missile was just a silent paint balloon, a darkly humorous warning shot.

The CDIA’s raid across Louisiana’s border was canceled, because the missile battery had been moved. Worse yet, twenty new dummy missile batteries had suddenly appeared in its place: on farms, in towns, roaming on shrimp trucks, all over Louisiana.

Despite the fact that scientific analysis had proved that the missile was paint, a large proportion of the population simply refused to be-lieve it. The state and federal governments officially announced that it was paint; so did the city council, but people simply refused to accept this. People were paranoid and terrified — but many seemed weirdly elated by the incident.

In the days that followed, a thriving gray market sprang up for samples of the paint, which were swiftly distributed all over the coun-try, sold to the gullible in little plastic-topped vials. Hundreds of peo-ple spontaneously arrived in Buna, anxious to scrape up paint and sniff it. A large number of miracle cures were attributed to use of this substance. People wrote open letters to the Governor of Louisiana, begging him to bomb their own cities with the “liberation gas.”

Huey denied all knowledge of any missiles in Louisiana. He stoutly denied that he had anything to do with black paint. He made fun of the ridiculous antics of the war-crazed populace — which didn’t require much effort — and suggested that it proved that the federal government had lost its grip. Huey’s two Senators had both been purged from the Senate, which was behaving with more purpose than it had managed to show for years; but this allowed Huey to wash his hands of Washington entirely.

Huey’s mood darkened drastically after his own bomb attack.

One of Huey’s trusted henchmen had planted an explosive briefcase inside the statehouse. Huey’s left arm was broken in the explosion, and two of his state senators were killed. This was not the first con-spiracy against Huey’s life; it was far from the first attempt to kill him. But it was the closest to success.

Naturally the President was suspected. Oscar very much doubted that the President would have stooped to a tactic so archaic and crude. The failed assassination actually strengthened Huey’s hand — and his hand came down hard on Louisianans, and on the Regulator hierarchy in particular. It was of course Louisianans who had the greatest reason to kill their leader, who in pursuit of his own ambitions had placed their state in a hopeless struggle against the entire Union. The Regu-lators in particular — Huey’s favorite fall guys — had a grim future ahead of them, if and when they faced federal vengeance. Regulators from outside Louisiana — and there were many such — were sensing which way the wind blew, and were signing up in droves for the quasi-legitimacy of the President’s CDIA. Huey had been good to the proles, he had made them a force to be reckoned with — but even proles understood power politics. Why go down in flames with a Governor, when you could rise to the heights with a President?

The missile attack had one profound and lasting consequence. It jarred the Collaboratory from its sense of helplessness. It was now quite obvious to everyone that the War was truly on. The black paint had been the first shot, and the likelihood was quite strong that the city of Buna would in fact be gassed. The prospect of choking in a silent black fog while surrounded by neighbors turned into maniacs — this prospect had clarified people’s minds quite wonderfully.

The Collaboratory was airtight. It was safe from gas; but it couldn’t hold everyone.

The obvious answer was to launch an architectural sortie. The fortress should be extended over the entire city.

Construction plans were immediately dusted off. Money and rights-of-way were suddenly no problem. Locals, wanderers, soldiers, scientists, Moderators, men, women, and children, they were one and all simply drafted into the effort.

All these factions had different ideas of how to tackle the prob-lem. The gypsy Moderators understood big-top tents and teepees. The people of Buna were very big on their bio-agricultural green-houses. The SO/LIC soldiers, who were trained in environmental disaster response, were experts at sandbags, quonset huts, soup kitch-ens, latrines, and potable water supplies. For their own part, the tech-ies of the Collaboratory flew into a strange furor over the plans of Alcott Bambakias. The scientists were long-used to the security of their armored dome, but it had never occurred to them that the rigid substance of their shelter might become cheap, smart, and infinitely distensible networks. This was architecture as airtight ephemera: struc-ture like a dewy spiderweb: smart, hypersensitive, always calculating, always on the move. There seemed to be no limit to the scale of it. The dome could become a living fluid, a kind of decentered, mem-branous amoeba.

It would have seemed sensible to weigh the alternatives carefully, hold safety hearings, have competitive bids submitted, and then, fi-nally, engage in a major building project. The mayor of Buna, a well-meaning middle-aged woman who had made a bundle in the greenhouse-flower industry, made a genuine effort to “assert control.”

Then two more paint bombs arrived. These were better-aimed.

They hit the Collaboratory dead on — it was a large target — and splat-tered the glass sky with black muck. The dome’s interior light became dim and scary, the temperature dropped, the plants and animals suf-fered, and the people were grim and enraged. Confronted with this direct insult, their will to resist stiffened drastically. It was personal now — they could see the evil slur against them, hovering above their heads.

All debate stopped. There was no longer time for talk, and the decision was a fait accompli. Everyone simply began contributing ev-erything they could all at the same time. They dropped all other ef-forts. When projects overlapped or interfered, they simply tore the little one down and built the more ambitious one. The town of Buna as people had previously known it simply ceased to exist. The dome metastasized; it sent out giant filmy buttresses on Daliesque walking stilts. The greenhouses of Buna linked together spontaneously into endless ramparts and tunnels. City blocks transmuted overnight into gleaming fields of plastic soap bubbles. Airtight brick crypts and bomb shelters sprang up everywhere, like measles.

Huey chose this moment to launch a well-documented outing attack on Oscar and Greta. There was no denying it this time. It was sordid and painful, but Huey’s timing could not have been worse. In a time of peace, it would have been politically disastrous to learn that a Machiavellian campaign adviser (of dubious genetic heritage) had fiendishly installed his girlfriend as the quasi-dictator of a federal sci-ence facility, while she paid him off with sexual favors in a Louisiana beach house.

In Washington, the news caused some alarm; pundits issued some obligatory tut-tutting; elderly male scientists were interviewed, who declared that it was truly a shame to see a woman sleep her way to the top. But in Buna, the War was on. The revelation, which was no revelation to anyone in Buna, was a war romance. All was instantly forgiven. Oscar and Greta were practically pitched into each other’s arms by the sheer pressure of public goodwill.

Ancient social boundaries snapped under the strain of war. Wartime affairs broke out like chicken pox: scientists, Moderator women, dashing European journalists, chicken-fried Buna locals, even the mil-itary was having sex. It was just too much to ask of human beings that they work shoulder to shoulder and cheek by jowl under the constant expectation of a mind-crushing gas attack while, somehow, avoiding sex with strangers.

Besides, their leaders were doing it. It was happening. It was a suddenly public declaration of their society’s unsuspected potency. Of course they were breaking the rules; that was what every sane person was doing, that was what the effort was all about. Of course the lab’s Director was having hot sex with the genetically warped politician. She was their painted Joan of Arc, the armored bride of the science wars.

People even made jokes about it. The jokes were loyally relayed to Oscar by Fred Dillen, one of his last remaining krewe members, who had been trained to understand that political jokes were valuable.

Fred presented him with a Greta-and-Oscar political joke.

“See, Greta and Oscar have sneaked off to Louisiana to have sex in the middle of a swamp. So they hire a bass boat and they paddle way out in the middle of nowhere where there aren’t any spies or bugs. So they’re getting it on inside the boat, but Oscar gets overexcited, and he falls in the water. And he doesn’t come back up.

“So Greta paddles back alone, and tries to get some help from some swamp Cajuns, but there’s just no sign of Oscar. So she waits for a whole week, and finally the Cajuns come over to see her again. ‘Well, Dr. Pen-ninger, we got some good news and we got some bad news.’

“ ‘Give me the bad news first.’

“ ‘Well, we found your boyfriend the genetic freak, but we’re afraid he drowned.’

“ ‘Oh, that’s bad news. That’s terribly bad news. It’s awful. It’s the very worst.’

“ ‘Well, it’s not all bad; when we dredged him up outta the mud, we came up with two big gunnysacks of big blue crabs!’

“ ‘Well, at least you found his poor body… Where have you put my boyfriend?’

“ ‘Well, beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but we never done so good on the crabs before, so we figured we’d leave him down there just one more day!’ ”

That was a pretty good political joke for such a small commu-nity — especially when its subtext was analyzed. Like most political jokes, it was all about displaced aggression, and it was the aggression against him that was being fed to the crabs here. The joke was popu-lar, and it was a signifier. And the punch line was very clear: he was going to get away with it. People didn’t fear or hate him the way they feared and hated Huey. He was both a politician and a monster, and yet people, in an odd and marginal way, had come to sympathize with him.

Oscar had reached the peak of his public reputation. Proof of this came when the President was asked about the sex scandal — and about Oscar’s role within the NSC. Here was the President’s main chance to drop him overboard and silently feed him to the swamp crabs; but the President chose otherwise. The President pointed out — properly enough — that a man couldn’t be expected to do anything about the fact that he was the illegal product of a South American mafia genetics lab. The President said that it smelled of hypocrisy to hold such a man to persnickety standards of sexual correctness — especially when other public figures had deliberately chosen to warp their own brain tissue. The President further declared that he himself was “a human being.” And that, “as a human being,” when he saw lovers persecuted, the spectacle “stuck in my craw.”

The press conference then returned to the hotter issue of the Dutch War, but the President’s aside went over very well. Certain demographic segments were becoming alarmed with the President’s relentless strong-arm tactics and his feral pursuit of domestic oppo-nents. This sudden revelation of a sentimental softer side was an excel-lent tactical play.

Oscar had reached a great career moment. The President had publicly played the Oscar card. In thinking the matter over, Oscar knew what this meant. It meant that he was burned. He had had his moment in this poker round, he had thumped down like a minor trump on the green baize. If played again, he would be dog-eared. Time to shuffle back into the pack.

So: thus high, but no higher. The lethal subtext of the Presi-dent’s statement had made that clear to him. He was useful, he was even cute; but on some profound level, he was not trusted. He would never become a pillar of the American state.

Within Buna, Oscar had less and less of a role. He had been an agitator, and instigator, and a gray eminence, but he could never be king. Greta could leverage her own fame now. She had issued a public appeal for aid and assistance, and like a boozy cry to “come to Montmartre,” the cry brought a tidal wave of national response. Bombs or no bombs, Huey or no Huey, President or no President, Buna was going to become a Greenhouse metropolis. The place was an intellectual magnet for every species of dreamer, faker, failed grad student, techie washout, downsized burnout; every guru, costumed geek, ditzy theorist, and bug collector; every microscope peerer, model-rocket builder, and gnarly simulationist; every code-dazed hacker, architectural designer; everyone, in short, who had ever been downgraded, denied, and excluded by their society’s sick demand that their wondrous ideas should make commercial sense.

With all this yeast gathered in one place, the very earth would rise. Some who arrived were enemies. Arsonists burned the city’s greenbelt; the sappy pines blew up like Roman candles and a ghastly pall of smoke polluted Texas for miles downwind. But when those flames died, the new society moved onto the blackened acres and consumed them utterly. In the grinding hoppers of the bio-hackers, trees digested more easily when partially cooked. The ash contained vital minerals. A scorched and blackened forest was a naturaI phoenix nest for the world’s first genuine Greenhouse society.