Distraction

12

The u.s. Navy arrived off the shores of the Nether-lands. The War had reached a point of crisis. In or-der to have something to do, the American armada announced a naval blockade of shipping in the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Since large sections of those cities were already underwater, this was not a crushing economic threat.

Still, there seemed very little else that the Navy could do. They hadn’t brought any land troops or tanks with which they could physically invade Holland. The battle-ships had long-range naval guns, with which they might easily devastate major cities, but it seemed unthinkable that the United States would physically blast civilians in a na-tion offering no organized military resistance.

So, after enormous fanfare and intense press cover-age, the hot War with Holland was revealing its rickety underpinnings as a phony war. The President had whipped the nation into frenzy, and strengthened his own hand, and ended the Emergency. He had made his pet proles into a nationwide dandruff of cellular-toting minia-ture Robespierres. That was an impressive series of ac-complishments, more than anyone had dared to hope for. Now the smart money had it that the War would soon be folded up and put away.

The smart money took the unlikely personage of Alcott Bambakias. The junior Senator from Massachusetts had chosen this moment to make a long-expected tour of the Buna National Col-laboratory.

The Senator was much improved mentally. The rainbow of neu-ral treatments had finally reached an area of his emotional spectrum where Bambakias could lodge and take a stand. He was quite simply a different man now. The Senator was heavier, wearier, vastly more cynical. He described his current mental state as “realistic.” He was making all his quorum calls, and most of his committee assignments. He made far fewer speeches these days, picked far fewer dramatic fights, spent far more time closeted with lobbyists.

Oscar took it upon himself to give the Senator and Mrs. Bambakias a personal tour of the works in Buna. They took an ar-mored limousine. With the Dutch War stalling visibly, it seemed somewhat less likely that Huey would launch any paint bombs.

However, this had not stopped the construction frenzy in Buna. On the contrary, it had liberated them from any pretense that they were sheltering themselves from gas. With thousands of people con-tinuing to pour in, with guaranteed free food, free shelter, and all the network data they could eat, the city was tautly inflated with boom-town atmosphere. One group of zealots was constructing a giant plastic structure roughly the size and shape of the Eiffel Tower, which they had dubbed the “Beacon of Cosmic Truth.” Other hobbyists had taken smart geodesics and airtight skins to a logical extreme, and were building aerostats. These were giant self-expanding airtight bubbles, and if they could get the piezoelectric musculature within the tubing to work properly, the things would engorge themselves to the point where they could literally leave the surface of the earth.

Oscar couldn’t fully contain his enthusiasm for these marvels, and he sensed that Bambakias and Lorena could use some cheering up. Bambakias looked much better — he was clearly lucid now, perhaps even cured — but stress had taken a permanent toll on Lorena. She’d put on weight, she’d sagged, she looked preserved rather than put-together. In her husband’s company she offered Oscar mostly bright monosyllables.

Bambakias was doing all the talking, but it wasn’t his usual bright and tumbling rhetoric.

“The hotel was good,” he said. “You did very well with the hotel. Considering all the local limitations.”

“Oh, we enjoy the hotel. I still sleep there most nights. But it doesn’t begin to compare to the scale of what’s been done to the town.”

“They’re not doing it right,” Bambakias said.

“Well, they’re amateurs.”

“No, they’re worse than amateurs. They’re not following code. They’re not using certified and tested materials. All these tents and pylons, in untested combinations-a lot of them are going to col-lapse. ”

“Yes, surely, Senator — but it only took them a few days to put them up! If they go bust, they’ll just build more.”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to take personal responsibility for this. I sent you those plans, but I never expected them to be executed. Once I abandon my intellectual property to all and sundry, I can’t be expected to be responsible for other people’s exploitation of it. ”

“Of course not, Senator! These were Emergency conditions, War conditions… you know, there is an upside to this. This isn’t permanent structure, and it isn’t in classic form, but it’s remarkably popular.”

Bambakias brightened a little. “Really.”

“The people who are living under these things… they’re not architecture critics. A lot of them are people who haven’t had much shelter of any kind for many years. They’re really impressed to see nomad architecture pushed to these mind-boggling extremes.”

“That isn’t ‘nomad architecture.’ It’s ultrascale emergency re-lief.”

“That’s an interesting distinction, Alcott, but let me just put it this way: it’s nomad architecture now.”

“I think you’d better listen to him, darling,” Lorena put in faintly. “Oscar always has very good instincts about these things.”

“Oh yes, instincts,” Bambakias said. “Instincts are wonderful. You can live off instincts, as long as you don’t plan to live very long. How long do you expect all this to last, Oscar?”

“ ‘This’?” Oscar said delicately.

“Whatever it is that you’ve created here. What is it, exactly? Is it a political movement? Maybe it’s just one big street party. It certainly isn’t a town.”

“Well… it’s a little difficult to say exactly where all this will go…”

“Maybe you should have thought that through a bit more thor-oughly,” Bambakias said. It clearly irked the man to have to discuss the matter, but he was taking it as a painful duty. “You know, I’m a ranking member of the Senate Science Committee. It’s going to be a little difficult explaining these developments to my colleagues back in Washington.”

“Oh, I miss that Science Committee every day,” Oscar lied.

“You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific commu-nity. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed — there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world’s biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn’t go away — it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these no-mads and dissidents. Suddenly they could organize in powerful new ways, and now, finally, with the President taking their side… who knows? Do you see my parallel here, Oscar? Does it make sense to you?”

Oscar was increasingly uncomfortable. “Well, I never said what happened here was entirely without precedent. The great secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

“You stole these ideas from Huey. You stole Huey’s clothes, didn’t you?”

“Time-honored tactic, Alcott!”

“Oscar, Huey is a dictator. He’s a man on horseback. Do I un-derstand this ‘prestige economy’ business? It seems to run entirely on instinct. They spend all their time doing each other little volunteer community services. And they rank each other for it. Eventually somebody pops out of the mix and becomes a tribal big shot. Then they’re required to do what he says.”

“Well… it’s complicated. But yes, that’s the basics.”

“They really just don’t fit in the rest of American society. Not at all. ”

“It was designed that way.”

“I mean they don’t have any way to properly deal with the rest of society. They don’t even have proper ways to deal with each other. They have no rule of law. There’s no Constitution. There’s no legal redress. There’s no Bill of Rights. They don’t have any way to deal with the rest of us, except through evasion, or intimidation. When one network meets another that’s set up along different lines, they feud. They kill each other.”

“Sometimes. ”

“Now you’ve made these people aware of their mutual interest with the scientific research community. Another group of people who basically live outside the state, outside of economics. One wants free-dom of inquiry, and the other wants freedom from physical want, and neither of them has any sense of responsibility to the rest of us. In fact, the rest of us have given up expecting anything from them. We no longer hope that science will give us utopia, or even a real improve-ment. Science just adds more factor to the mix, and makes everything more unstable. We’ve given up on our dispossessed, too. We have no illusion that we can employ them, or keep them docile with more bio-bread, or more cyber-circuses. And now you’ve brought these two groups together and they’ve become a real coalition.”

“I’m with you, Senator. I’m following the argument.”

“What now, Oscar? What are they going to do now? What be-comes of the rest of us?”

“Hell, I don’t know!” Oscar shouted. “I just saw Huey doing it, that’s all. We were in a feud with Huey — you pushed me into the feud with Huey! The lab was broke, it was halfway in his pocket already, and he was just going to rack them up. They would just… be-come his creatures. I didn’t want them to be his creatures.”

“What’s the difference? If they’re still creatures.”

“The difference? Between me and Green Huey? Okay! At last a question I can answer! The difference between me and Huey is that whatever Huey does is always about Huey. It’s always about Huey first and foremost, and it’s always about the greater glory of Huey. But the things that I do will never, ever be about me. They aren’t allowed to be about me.”

“Because of the way you were born.”

“Alcott, it’s worse than that. I wasn’t even born at all.”

Lorena spoke up. “I think you two boys should stop all this. You’re going in circles. Why don’t we get something to eat?”

“I don’t mean to wound his feelings,” Bambakias said reason-ably. “I’m just looking at the structure critically, and I’m pointing out that there’s nothing holding it up.”

Lorena folded her arms. “Why pick on Oscar, for heaven’s sake? The President sent a newspaper-boat navy across the Atlantic, and there was nothing holding that up either. The War will be over in Washington soon. It can’t go on, it’s a stage show. Then the War will be over here too. They’ll just fold all this up, and we’ll find some other distraction. That’s the way life is now. Stop fussing about it.”

Bambakias paused thoughtfully. “You’re right, dear. I’m sorry. I was getting all worked up.”

“We’re supposed to be on vacation here. You should save some energy for the hearings. I want some chowder, Alcott. I want some etouffee.”

“She’s so good to me,” Bambakias told Oscar. Suddenly he smiled. “I haven’t gotten so worked up in ages! That really felt good.”

“Oscar always cheers you up,” Lorena told him. “He’s the best at that. You should be good to him.”

The Senator and his wife wanted Louisiana cuisine. That was a legiti-mate request. They took a fleet of limos, and the Senator’s large krewe, and their media coverage, and the Senator’s numerous body-guards, and the entire caravan drove to a famous restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. They took a great deal of pleasure in this, because it was an excellent restaurant, and they were certain that Huey would quickly learn of their raid.

They ate well and tipped lavishly, and it would have been a lovely meal, except that the Senator was on his mood stabilizers, so he no longer drank. The Senator’s wife drank rather too much. They also brought along the new senatorial press secretary in the krewe; and the new press secretary was Clare Emerson.

Then the caravan returned ceremoniously to the hotel in Buna, and the bodyguards drew great, quiet sighs of relief. The Senator and his wife retired, and the bodyguards set up their night patrols, and the media krewe went out looking for trouble and action at some Moder-ator orgy under some enormous dewy tent. Oscar, who had ex-hausted himself avoiding Clare, found himself maneuvered into a situation where he and his former girlfriend had to have a sociable nightcap together. Just to show that there were no hard feelings. Though the feelings were extremely hard.

So Clare had a glass of hotel Chablis, and Oscar, who didn’t drink, had a club soda. They sat at a small wooden table while music played, and they were forced to talk privately.

“So, Clare. Tell me all about Holland. That must have been fas-cinating.”

“It was, at first.” She was so good-looking. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was. He’d even forgotten that he’d once made it a habit to court beautiful women. As a member of the Bambakias krewe and a press player in Washington, Clare was far better put-together than she had ever been as a newbie Boston political journo. Clare was still young. He’d forgotten what it meant to date young, beautiful, bril-liantly dressed women. He’d never gotten over her. He hadn’t given himself enough time. He’d just shelved the issue and sought out a distraction.

Her lips were still moving. He forced himself to pay attention to her words. She was saying something about finding her cultural roots as an Anglo. Europe was full of Yankee defectors and emigres, bitter, aging white men who clustered in beer cellars and moaned that their country was being run by a crazy redskin. Europe hadn’t been all romance for Clare. The part of Europe that was drowning fastest didn’t have much romance for anyone.

“Oh, but a war correspondent, though. That seems like such a career opportunity.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she said. “You enjoy tortur-ing me.”

“What?” He was shocked.

“Didn’t Lorena tell you all about my little Dutch misadven-tures?”

“Lorena doesn’t tell me about her krewe activities. I’m not in the Bambakias circle anymore. I scarcely have a krewe of my own, these days.”

She sipped at her wine. “Krewes are pitiful. They’re disgusting. People will do anything for a little security nowadays. Even sell them-selves into servitude. Any rich person can scare up their own loyal gang, just for the asking. It’s feudalism. But we’re so wrecked as a country that we can’t even make feudalism work.”

“I thought you liked Lorena. You always gave her such good spin.”

“Oh, I loved her as copy. But as my boss… well, what am I saying? Lorena’s great to me. She took me on when I was down, she made me a little player. She never outed me on the Dutch thing. I have a classy job in Washington, I have nice clothes and a car.”

“All right. I’ll bite. Tell me what happened in Holland.”

“I have bad habits,” Clare said, staring at the tablecloth. “I got this impression that I could sleep my way into good stories. Well, it worked great in Boston! But Den Haag is not Boston. The Dutch aren’t like Americans. They can still concentrate. And their backs are against the wall.” She twisted a lock of hair.

“I’m sorry to hear that you met with a setback. I hope you don’t think I’m angry with you because our affair ended badly.”

“You are angry with me, Oscar. You’re furious. You resent me and you hate me, but you’re just such a player that you would never, ever show that to me. You’d dump me if you had to, and you did dump me, but at least you couldn’t be bothered to crucify me. I made a real mistake, thinking that all politicians were like you.”

Oscar said nothing. She was going to spill it all very soon. More words wouldn’t make it come any faster.

“I got a hot lead on a scandal. I mean a major Cold War scandal, huge, big. All I had to do was wheedle it out of this Dutch sub-minister of something-or-other. And he was gonna come across for me. Because he was a Cold War spook, and he knew that I knew that he was a spook, and I was a journalist, which is halfway to spookiness, really. And he was hot for me. But that was okay, because, you know, if you put your mind to it, you can get these things out of men. It’s a mentor thing. They’re like your uncle, or maybe your professor, and you don’t know the ropes, and they’re going to teach you the ropes. And all you have to do is let them tie you up with the ropes just a little.” She had another sip.

“Clare, why would I be judgmental about that? These things happen. It’s reality.”

“You know, we don’t understand that here in America. We don’t get it that we’re the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of climate politics. We’re so out of sync that we still measure in pounds and inches. We think it’s funny that we’re having a War with a bunch of little people with tulips and wooden shoes. We’re like spoiled chil-dren. We’re like big fat teenage pop stars cruising around in our two-ton pink Cadillac blasting our stereo and throwing our beer empties everywhere. We don’t get it that there are serious, civilized people who spend their time in downtown Amsterdam watching hookers in public sex cages in a city saturated with dope, and the sex doesn’t touch them, and the dope doesn’t touch them, because they are very determined, and they are very cold.”

“Are they cold people, the Dutch?”

“Cold and wet. And getting wetter. All the time.”

“They tell me the Navy is considering knocking some holes in their dikes with artillery blasts.”

“You’d know that, being NSC, wouldn’t you?”

A chill like dry ice wafted between them. Oscar almost sensed a swirl of congealing fog.

Clare leaned back in her chair. “It smells funny in Buna. Doesn’t it? All these tents and gas shelters. That big dome smells weird. It’s like they never change their underwear.”

“This isn’t Boston, it’s the Gulf Coast. You think it smells funny inside here, you should walk around outside for a while.”

“Too many mosquitoes.”

Oscar laughed.

Clare frowned. “You don’t have to know what happened to me in Holland. I just got in too deep, that’s all. I got away from there, and I was lucky to get away, that’s my big story. I’m lucky Lorena has such a big heart.”

“Clare… it’s just a shame. War is a hard game and even a toy war has casualties. I wouldn’t have wished that on you for anything.”

“You told me that. You warned me about it. Remember? And I told you that I was a grown-up. We were working in this dinky little Boston election where the guy had seven-percent approvals. We were like kids in a sandbox. I thought it was so upscale and important, and it all seems so innocent now. And here you’ve done this incredible thing and I … well, I work for the Senator now. So I guess that’s all right.”

“It’s the breaks.”

“Oscar, why aren’t you more of a scoundrel? I’m all burned out on men. And you’re like this slimy pol who always gets his way, and I thought I’d be all burned out on you, but when I saw you to-night… well, it all came back to me.”

“What came back?”

“You and me. That you’re this cute guy who was always sweet and polite to me, and gave me his house pass and taught me about funny old modern art. My old flame. The dream boyfriend. I really miss you. I even miss the satin sheets and your skin temperature.”

“Clare, why are you telling me this? You know I’m involved with another woman now. For heaven’s sake, everyone in the world knows I’m involved with Greta Penninger.”

“Oscar, you can’t be serious about that. Her? She’s a rebound type. No, she’s not even that. Oscar — don’t you get it? People make jokes about you and her. She’s funny-looking. She’s old. She has a big nose and no ass. She can’t be any fun. I mean, not like the kind of fun we used to have.”

He conjured up a smile. “You’re really jealous! Shame on you.”

“Why would you go for her? She just had something that you wanted.”

“Clare, even though you’re a journalist, I really don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“I’m saying wicked things because I’m sad, and I’m jealous, and I’m lonely, and I’m sorry. And I’m getting really drunk. And you dumped me. For her.”

“I didn’t dump you. You dumped me, because I was out of town, and you wouldn’t fly down and join me, and you decided that it was a better career move to go live with our country’s worst enemies.”

“Oh, well, that’s better,” Clare said, and wrinkled her nose at him, and grinned a little. “I guess I’m getting through to you, finally.”

“I did my level best to make it work out for us, but you wouldn’t let me do it.”

“Well, it’s too late now.”

“Of course it’s too late.”

She looked at her watch. “And it’s getting pretty late tonight, too. ”

Oscar glanced at his mousebrain watch. The thing had just dampened his wrist with liquid waste, and it was nowhere near the correct time. It was sometime around midnight. “You’d better sleep this off, if you’re going to make the Senator’s flight back to Washing-ton.”

“Oscar, I have a better idea. Stop toying with me. Let’s just do it. This is my only night here, this is our big chance. Take me upstairs, let’s go to bed.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not too drunk to know what I’m doing. I’m just drunk enough to be a lot of fun. You’ve been looking at me all night. You know I can’t stand it when you look at me with those big brown puppy-dog eyes.”

“There’s no future in that.” He was weakening.

“Who cares about the future? It’s about old times. Come on, it’s practically just as bad, just ’cause you want it so much.”

“It’s not just as bad. It’s worse to do it. It’s the worst of all. When the volcano burns, everyone knows it, but when the heart is in flames, who knows it?”

She blinked. “Huh?”

Oscar sighed. “I just don’t believe you, Clare. I’m a smooth talker and I know how to please, but as a male specimen, I’m just not that overwhelming. If I were, you’d have never left me in the first place.”

“Look, I already said I was sorry. Don’t rub it in. I can show you how sorry I am.”

“Who sent you here, really? Are there bugs in your purse? Are you wearing a wire right now? You got turned, didn’t you? They turned you, in The Hague. You’re a foreign agent. You’re a spy.”

Clare went very pale. “What is this? Have you cracked up? All this paranoia! You’re talking like the Senator at his worst!”

“What am I, a useful idiot? There’s a war on! Mata Hari was Dutch, for Christ’s sake.”

“You think they’d let me work for a Senator, if I was a Dutch spy? You don’t know what Washington’s like these days. You don’t know a damn thing about anything.”

Oscar said nothing. He watched her with lethal care.

Clare gathered the rags of her dignity. “You really insulted me. I’m really hurt. I have a good mind to just get up and leave you. Why don’t you call me a cab?”

“Then it’s the President, isn’t it?” Her face went stiff.

“It is the President,” he said with finality. “It’s me and Greta Penninger. The situation’s a little out of hand down here. It’d be better for domestic tranquillity if the girlfriend and I came to a sudden parting of our ways. Then it would all work out. That would put a nice healthy dent in the local morale. The Moderators would slide right into his private espionage network, and the scientist would go back to her lab, and the slimy pol who can’t keep his hands off women would be outed to everybody as just another slimy pol.”

Clare lifted a napkin and wiped her eyes.

“You go back and tell your agent-runner that I don’t work for the President because he’s a nice guy. I work for him because the country was up on blocks, and he got the country moving. I’m loyal to him because I’m loyal to the country, and it’s going to take more than a nightingale to push me off the playing board. Even if it’s a very pretty nightingale that I used to care about.”

“That’s enough, I’m leaving. Good night, Oscar.”

“Good-bye.”

Bambakias left Texas the next morning with all his krewe, including Clare. Oscar was not outed. No recorded tapes of the conversation showed up. There were no blaring net-flashes about his tete-a-tete with a former girlfriend. Two days passed.

Then there was big news on the War front.

The Dutch were giving up.

The Dutch Prime Minister made a public statement. She was small and bitter and gray. She said that it was hopeless for an unarmed country like the Netherlands to resist the armed might of the world’s last military superpower. She said that it was impossible for her people to face the environmental catastrophe of having the country’s dikes bombarded. She said that America’s ruthless ultimatum had broken her country’s will to resist.

She said that the Netherlands was surrendering unconditionally. She said that the country was declaring itself an open country, that her tiny military would lay down its arms, that they would accept the troops of the occupier. She said that she and her cabinet had just signed documents of surrender, and the Dutch government would voluntarily dissolve itself at midnight. She proclaimed that the War was over, and that the Americans had won, and she called on the American people to remember their long tradition of magnanimity toward defeated opponents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Normalcy manifesto was a rather astonishing twenty-eight point document. It stole the clothes of so many of America’s splin-tered political parties that they were left quite stunned. The President’s national plan for action bore only the slightest resemblance to that of his party platform, or that of his supposed core constituency in the Left Tradition Bloc. The President’s idea of Normalcy had something in it to flabbergast everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the sudden and stunning end of the War, the mad immi-gration into Buna slowed to a crawl. Then, it began to reverse itself. People had seen enough. The gawkers, and the fakers, and the most easily distracted trendies, began to realize that a glamorous, noncom-mercial, intellectual-dissident Greenhouse Society was simply not for everyone. Living there was going to involve a lot of work. The mere fact that money was not involved did not signify that work was not involved; the truth was the exact opposite. This congelation of science and mass economic defection was going to require brutal amounts of dedicated labor, constant selfless effort, much of it by necessity wasted on experiments that washed out, on roads that were better not taken, on intellectually sexy notions that became blinding cul-de-sacs.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me that. To tell me that I’m finally off the hook. No more Joan of Arc”

“I painted you as Joan of Arc because that’s the kind of image that a candidate needs when she’s leading a heroic crusade. You’re not Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc was a fifteen-year-old female military genius who heard voices in her head. You don’t have voices in your head. All that noise you had to listen to all this time, that wasn’t the crying of angels, that was a very gifted and clever public relations campaign. Joan of Arc got burned at the stake. She was toast. I didn’t set this up so that you would be toast. I don’t want you to be toast, Greta. Toast isn’t worth it.”

“So what do you want from me, Oscar? You want a Joan of Arc who somehow gets away with it all. A schizoid peasant girl who suc-cessfully builds a grand castle, and becomes, what, a French duchess? A peasant duchess in beautiful brocade robes.”

“And with a prince, too. Okay?”

“What prince really wants or needs Joan of Arc? I mean — for the long term.”

“Well, the obvious candidate would have been Gilles de Rais-but that guy clearly lost his perspective. Never mind that; historical analogy only carries us so far. I’m talking about you and me now. We’re at the end of the road. This is finally it. Now we have to take a stand. We have to settle.”

Greta closed her eyes, drew a few deep breaths. The room was silent except for the subtle hiss of the air filter. Stress made her aller-gies worse; she carried her air filters around like handbags now. “So, at the end, this is all about you and me.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No it isn’t. Let me tell you all about you and me. When I first saw you, I was totally skeptical. I wasn’t looking for any trouble. But you just kept making these little passes at me. And I thought: what is he doing? He’s a political operative. I have nothing this guy wants. I’m just wasting my life on this board, trying to get proper equipment. I wasn’t even managing to accomplish that. But then it occurred to me, this remote speculation: this guy is actually hot for me. He thinks I’m sexy. He wants to sleep with me. It really is that simple.”

She took a breath. “And I thought: that is really a bad idea. But what’s the worst that can happen to me? They find me in bed with this character, and I’ll get a scolding and they’ll throw me off the board. Wonderful! Then I can go back to my lab! And besides: look at him! He’s young, he’s handsome, he writes funny notes, he sends big bouquets. And there’s something so different about him.”

She looked at him. Oscar was not missing a word. He felt he’d been waiting for this all his life.

“I fell in love with you, Oscar. I know that’s true, because you’re the only man that I ever felt jealous about. I never had that kind of emotional luxury before. I love you, and I marvel at you as my favor-ite specimen. I really love you for what you truly are, all the way down, all the way through. And we had a lovely fling. I took the plunge and I wasn’t afraid to do it, because when it’s all said and done, you have one huge, final, saving grace. Because you’re temporary. You’re not my destiny. You’re not my prince. You’re just a visitor in my life, a traveling salesman.”

Oscar nodded. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Really?”

“It’s totally true. I’ve always been temporary. I can give advice, I can run campaigns, I can come and go. I can have brief affairs, but I can’t make anything stick! My foster dad picked me up on an impulse. Dad had four wives and a zillion girlfriends: every woman in my childhood rushed by me on fast forward. I have a permanent fever. I have to reinvent myself every morning. I built a business, but I sold it. I built a house, but it’s empty. I built a hotel, but I can’t run it. I built a coalition here, I built a whole new society, I built a city to house it in with a lighthouse beacon, and loudspeakers blaring and pennants waving, but I still don’t get to stay. I’m its founding father, I’m the prince, but I still don’t belong. I just don’t get to stay.”

“Oh, good Lord.”

“Am I making sense to you here?”

“Oscar, how can I stay? I can’t go on like this, I’m all burned out. I did what I had to do, I can’t say that you used me. But something used me. History used me, and it’s using me all up. Even our affair is used up now.”

“We should do the right thing, Greta, we should declare our-selves. Let’s take a stand together. I want you to marry me.”

She put her head in her hands.

“Look, don’t do that. Listen to me. This can be made to work. It’s doable. In fact, it’s a genius move.”

“Oscar, you don’t love me.”

“I love you as much as I will ever love anyone.”

She stared at him in astonishment. “What a brilliant evasion.”

“You’ll never find another man who’s more attentive to your interests. If you find some other man that you want to marry, leave me for him! I’m not afraid of that happening. It’ll never happen.”

“God, you’re such a beautiful talker.”

“It’s not dishonest. I’m being very honest. I’m making an honest woman of you. I’m finally taking a stand, I’m committing myself. Marriage is a great institution. Marriages are great symbolic theater. Especially a state marriage. It was a war romance, and now it’s a peace marriage, and it’s all very normal and sensible. We’ll make it a festival, we’ll invite the whole world. We’ll exchange rings, we’ll throw rice. We’ll put down roots.”

“We don’t have roots. We’re network people. We have aerials.”

“It’s the right and proper thing to do. It’s necessary. In fact, it’s the only real way that the two of us can move on from here.”

“Oscar, we can’t move on. My marrying you can’t stick a whole community together. Making two people legitimate, that doesn’t make their society legitimate. It’s not a legitimate thing. I’m a war leader, and a strike leader — I was Joan of Arc. Nobody ever elected me. I rule by force and clever propaganda. The real powers here are you and your friend Kevin. And Kevin is like any outlaw who takes power: he’s a scary little brute. He brings me big dossiers, he bullies people and spies on them. I’m sick of all that. It’s turning me into a monster. It can’t go on, it’s not right. There’s no future in it.”

“You’ve been thinking a lot about this, haven’t you?”

“You taught me how to think about it. You taught me how to think politically. You’re a good tactician, Oscar, you’re really clever, you know all about people’s kinks and weaknesses, but you don’t know about their integrity and their strength. You’re not a great strat-egist. You know all the dirty tricks with go-stones in the corner, but you don’t comprehend the whole board.”

“And you do?”

“Some of it. I know the world well enough that I know that my lab is the best place for me.”

“So you’re giving up?”

“No … I’m just quitting while I’m ahead. Something is going to work here. Something of it will last. But it’s not a whole new world. It’s just a new political system. We can’t close it off in an airtight nest, with me as the Termite Queen. I have to quit, I have to leave. Then maybe this thing will shake down, and pack down, and build something solid, from the bottom up.”

“Maybe we’ll do better than that. Maybe I am a great strategist.”

“Sweetheart, you’re not! You’re streetwise, but you’re young, and you’re not very wise. You can’t become King by marrying your pasteboard Queen, someone you created by marching a pawn down the board. You shouldn’t even want to be King. It’s a lousy job. A situation like this doesn’t need another stupid tyrant with a golden crown, it needs… it needs the founder of a civilization, a saint and a prophet, somebody impossibly wise and selfless and generous. Some-body who can make laws out of chaos, and order out of chaos, and justice out of noise, and meaning out of total distraction.”

“My God, Greta. I’ve never heard you talk like this before.”

She blinked. “I don’t think I ever even thought like this before.”

“What you’re saying is completely true. It’s the hard cold truth, and it’s bad, it’s impossibly bad, it’s worse than I ever imagined, but you know, I’m glad that I know it now. I always like to know what I’m facing. I refuse to admit defeat here. I refuse to pack up my tent. I don’t want to leave you, I can’t bear it. You’re the only woman who ever really understood me.”

“I’m sorry that I understand you well enough to tell you what you just can’t do.”

“Greta, don’t give up on me. Don’t dump me. I’m having a genu-ine breakthrough here, I’m on the edge of something really huge. You’re right about the dictatorship problem, it’s a dirt-real, basic, po-litical challenge. We’ve worked ourselves to the bone now, we’re all burned out, we’re all bogged down in the little things. Daily tactics won’t do it for us anymore, but abandoning it to its own devices is a cop-out. We need to create something that is huge and permanent, we need a higher truth. No, not higher, deeper, we need a floor of granite. No more sand castles, no more improvising. We need genius. And you’re a genius.”

“Yes, but not that kind.”

“But you and I, we could do it together! If we only had some time to really concentrate, if we could just talk together like this. Listen. You have totally convinced me: you’re wiser than I am, you’re more realistic, I’m with you all the way. We’ll leave this place. We’ll run off together. Forget the big state marriage and the rings and the rice. We’ll go to… well, not some island, they’re all drowning now… We’ll go to Maine. We’ll stay there a month, two months, we’ll stay a year. We’ll drop off the net, we’ll use pens and candlelight. We’ll really, seriously concentrate, without any distractions at all. We’ll write a Constitution.”

“What? Let the President do that.”

“That guy? He’s just more of the same! He’s a socialist, he’s gonna make us sane and practical, just like Europe. This place isn’t Europe! America is what people created when they were sick to death of Europe! Normalcy for America — it isn’t keeping your nose clean and counting your carbon dioxide. Normalcy for America is technolog-ical change. Sure, the process ran away with us for a little while, the rest of the world pulled a fast one on us, they cheated us, they want the world to be Rembrandt canvases and rice paddies until the last trump of doom, but we’re off our sickbed now. A massive rate of change is normalcy for America. What we need is planned change — Progress. We need Progress!”

“Oscar, your face is getting really red.” She reached out.

He jerked his wrist back. “Stop trying to feel my pulse. You know I hate it when you do that. Listen to me carefully, I’m making perfect specimen sense lab-table really love me. I’m doing this all for you, Greta. I’m totally serious, we can do it tomorrow morning. A long sabbatical together in Maine, at some lovely romantic cabin. I’ll have Lana rent us one, she knows all about it.”

Her eyes widened. “What? Tomorrow? Lana? Wilderness? We can’t just abandon romantic Clare Lana Ramachandran little Kama Sutra girl.”

Oscar stared. “What did you say?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that about Lana. Lana can’t help how she feels about you. But I’m not sorry I said it about Clare. You were having drinks with her! Kevin told me.”

Oscar was stunned. “How did we get onto this subject?”

An angry flush rose up Greta’s neck. “I always think about it — I just never say it out loud! Clare, and Lana, and the Senator’s wife, and Moira, all these painted pointed glamour women with their claws…”

“Greta, stop that. Trust me! I’m asking you to marry me. Moira! Get it through your head. This is for real, this is permanent and solid. Tell me once and for all, will you marry Moira?”

“What? Moira’s one of your krewewomen, isn’t she? She came over to make amends.”

“But Moira works for Hueyl When did you see Moira?”

“Moira came to my office. She brought me a brand-new air filter. She was very nice.”

Oscar stared in mounting horror at the air filter at his elbow. He was so used to them now. They were everywhere, and so innocuous. They were cleansing Trojan fog horse biowar gas miasma. “Oh, Greta. How could you take a gift from that woman?”

“She said it was your gift. Because it smells of roses.” She patted the box, and then looked up in pain and bewilderment, and a dawn-ing and terrible knowledge. “Oh, sweetheart, I thought you knew. I thought you knew everything.”

The Collaboratory was, by design, equipped to deal with biological contamination. They had to shut down the entire Administration building. The gas from the booby-trapped air filter was of particularly ingenious design, micronized particles the size and shape of ragweed pollen. The particles stuck to the nasal tract like a painless snort of cocaine, whereupon their contents leaked through the blood-brain barrier, and did mysterious and witchy things.

Oscar and Greta, having wearily crammed themselves into de-contamination suits, were carried red-faced and stumbling to the Hot Zone’s clinic. There they were ritually scrubbed down, and subjected to gingerly examination. The good news was immediate: they were not dying. The bad news took longer to arrive. Their blood pressure was up, their faces were congested, their gait and posture were af-fected, they were suffering odd speech disabilities. Their PET-scans were exhibiting highly abnormal loci of cognitive processing, two wandering hot blobs where a normal human being would have just one. The primal rhythm of their brain waves had a distinct backbeat.

Oscar had been slowly and gently poisoned as he was making the speech of his life. This foul realization sent him into a towering animal rage. This reaction revealed yet another remarkable quality of his poisoned brain. He could literally think of two things at once; but it stretched him so thin that he had very little impulse control.

A nurse suggested a sedative. Oscar cordially agreed that he was feeling a bit hyperactive, and accented this by screaming personal in-sults and repeatedly kicking the wall. This behavior produced a seda-tive in short order. Dual unconsciousness resulted.

By noon, Oscar was conscious again, feeling sluggish yet simulta-neously hair-trigger. He paid a visit to Greta, in her separate decon-tamination cell. Greta had passed a quiet night. She was now sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, legs folded, hands in her lap, staring straight into space. She didn’t speak, she didn’t even see him. She was wide-awake and indescribably, internally busy.

A nurse stood guard for him, while Oscar stared at her with bittersweet melange. Bitter; sweet; bitter / sweet: bittersweet. She was exalted, silent, full of carnivorous insight: Greta had never looked more like herself It would have been a profanation to touch her.

Accompanied by his nurse, Oscar tottered back to his cell. He wondered how the effect felt for Greta. It seemed to hit people differ-ently. Maybe there were as many ways to think doubly as there were to think singly.

When he closed his eyes, Oscar could actually feel the sensation, somatically. It was as if his overtight skull had a pair of bladders stuffed inside, liquid and squashy, like a pair of nested yin-yangs. One focus of attention was somehow in “the front” and the other in “the back,” and when the one to the front revolved into direct consciousnes, the other slipped behind it. And the blobs had little living eyes inside them. Eyes that held the nascent core of other streams of conscious-ness. Like living icons, awaiting a mental touch to launch into full awareness.

Kevin stepped into the cell. Oscar heard him limping, was fully aware of his presence; it took a strange little moment to realize that he should take the trouble to open his eyes and look.

“Thank God you’re here!” he blurted.

“That’s what I like,” Kevin said, blinking. “Enthusiasm.”

With an effort, Oscar said nothing. He could restrain his urge to blurt his thoughts aloud, if he really put his mind to it. All he had to do was press his tongue against the roof of his mouth, clench his teeth, and breathe rhythmically through his nose.

“You don’t look so bad,” Kevin said analytically. “Your color’s a little high, and you’re holding your neck like a giraffe on speed, but you don’t look crazy.”

“I’m not crazy. Just different.”

“Uh-huh.” Kevin took a disinfected metal chair and eased his aching feet. “So, uhm, sorry about the security screwup, man.”

“These things happen.”

“Yeah. See, it was all those Boston people from the old Bambakias krewe: that was the problem. The Senator’s wife… she went way out of her way to tell me I was supposed to let it slide with the press secretary. You and this press babe being the former romantic item, and all that. Great, I thought, better really bury this one; but then, in comes this Moira Matarazzo woman who was the Senator’s former pres secretary… See, I just lost track. That’s all. Just plain couldn’t keep up with it all. All these Boston krewepeople, and for-mer krewepeople, and krewepeople of the former krewepeople; look, nobody could keep track of that crap. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m your krewepeople anymore.”

“I get the picture, Kevin. That’s a by-product of what’s basically a semifeudal, semilegal, distributable-deniable, net-centered seg-mented polycephalous influence sociality process.”

Kevin waited politely for Oscar’s lips to stop moving. “For what it’s worth, I’ve got Moira’s movements tracked. Into the dome, into the Administration building, out of the dome… I’m practically sure that she didn’t leave any of those tasty little time bombs for the rest of us.”

“Huey.”

Kevin laughed. “Well, of course it was Huey.”

“It just seems so pointless and small of him to do this to us now. After the war’s over, after he’s out of office. When I was getting ready to leave all this.”

“So you really meant it about leaving us, then.”

“What?”

“I overheard. I forgot to mention that I ran the tapes of the poisoning incident. That romantic discussion that you and Dr. Pen-ninger were having as you were being gassed.”

“You have that conference room bugged?”

“Hey, pal, I’m not brain-damaged. Of course I have the confer-ence room bugged. Not that I have time to listen to every damn room that I bug around here … But hey, when there’s a terrorist biowar incident taking place in one, you bet I run the tapes back and listen. I do pay attention, Oscar. I’m a quick study. I make a pretty good cop, really. ”

“Never said you weren’t a good cop, you big-mouthed incom-petent.”

“Holy cow, there it is again … Did you know that you actu-ally have two different voices when you say contradictory stuff like that? I need to run a stress analysis there, I bet that could screw up vocal IDs.” Kevin leaned back in his chair and put a sock-clad foot on Oscar’s bed. Kevin was taking developments rather easily, Oscar thought. Then again, Kevin had witnessed this phenomenon among the Haitians. He’d had time to get used to the concept.

“Sure I’ve had time to get used to the concept,” Kevin said. “It’s obvious. You mutter things aloud to yourself, just so you know what you’re thinking. I recognize the syndrome, man. Big deal! I got used to your other personal background problem… Oscar, haven’t we always been on good terms?”

“Yeah. ”

“I have to tell you, it really hurt my feelings when Dr. Penninger said I was a ‘scary little brute.’ That I ‘bullied people’ and ‘spied on them.’ And you didn’t stick up for me, man. You didn’t tell her a thing. ”

“I was proposing marriage to her.”

“Women,” Kevin grunted. “I dunno what it is with women. They’re just not rational. They’re creepy little Mata Hari sexpots car-rying poison gas bombs… Or maybe they’re like Dr. Penninger down the hall, the Rigid Ice-Queen of Eternal Light and Truth… I just can’t understand what it takes to please that woman! I mean, system-crackers like me, we have everything in common with scientists. It’s all about hidden knowledge, and how you find it, and who gets to know it, and who gets the rep for finding out. That’s all there is to science. I loved working for her, I thought she was really getting it. I bent absolutely double for that woman, I did anything she ever asked me — I did favors for her that she never even knew she got. I looked up to her, dammit! And what do I get for all my loyal service? I scare her. She wants to purge me.”

Oscar nodded. “Get used to the idea. This is a clean sweep. Huey took us out. It’s decapitation. I can barely talk now. I can barely walk. And Greta, she’s in some kind of wide-awake schizoid catatonia hebephrenia trance nonverbal…”

“A little adjective trouble there, man, but no problem, I take your point. Either I seize power myself now, and try to run the whole shebang as a secret-police state. Or else I just… I dunno… airmail myself back to Boston. End of the story. It all makes a nice hacker brag, though, right? Kind of a good bar story.”

“You can’t hold this place together alone, Kevin. People don’t trust you.”

“Oh, I know that, man. You distribute all the big favors yourself, and you use me as your heavy guy to intimidate people. I know that I was the heavy guy. My dad was the heavy, too. The Founding Fathers are a bunch of dead white males; the guys on Mount Rushmore are all scary Anglo guys now. We’re the heavies. I was used to the role. Hey, I was glad to have the work.”

“I want you to help me now, Kevin.”

“Help you what, pal?”

“To get out of here.”

“No problem, boss. I’m still Captain Scubbly Bee. Hell, I was working hard on being Colonel Scubbly Bee. I can get you outside this place. Where you want to go?”

“Baton Rouge. Or wherever Huey is hiding.”

“Oh ho! Not that I doubt your judgment now, man, but I have a really great countersuggestion. Boston, okay? The good old muddy water! Beacon Hill, Charlestown, Cambridge… You and I, we’re actually neighbors, man. We live on the same street! We could go home together. We could have a real beer, inside a real Boston bar. We could take in a hockey game.”

“I need to talk to Huey,” Oscar said flatly. “I have a big personal problem with him.”

Green Huey had gone into semiretirement. He was doing a lot of ceremonial ribbon-clipping these days. It was a little difficult doing all this public apple-polishing while surrounded by a militant phalanx of Regulator bodyguards, but Huey enjoyed the show. The ex-Governor had always been good for a laugh. He knew how to show the people a good time.

Oscar and Kevin dressed like derelicts, vanished through the so-cial membrane, and began to stalk the Governor. They traveled by night in the sorriest hotels; they slept in roadside parks in newly pur-chased military-surplus tents. They burned their IDs and wore straw hats and gum boots and overalls. Kevin passed as Oscar’s minder, a lame guy with a guitar. Oscar passed as Kevin’s somewhat dim-witted cousin, the one who mumbled a lot. Oscar brandished an accordion. Even in a land that had once favored accordion music, they were mostly avoided. It was a frightening thing to see two mentally incom-petent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk instruments, who might at any moment burst into song.

Oscar had finally lost his temper with Huey. He was of two minds about the matter. Oscar was always of two minds about every-thing now. On the one hand, he wanted to publicly confront the man. And on the other, he simply wanted to murder him. The second concept made a lot of sense to Oscar now, since killing political fig-ures. was not uncommon behavior for mentally ruined drifters with nothing left to lose. He and Kevin had serious discussions about the issue. Kevin seemed to waver between pro and con. Oscar was pro and con at the same time.

Their strategic problem was dizzyingly multiform. Oscar found it extremely hard to stop thinking about it, since he could contemplate so many different aspects of the issue all at once. Killing Huey. Maiming Huey, perhaps breaking Huey’s arms. Reducing him to a wheel-chair, that had appealing aspects. Blinding Huey had a certain biblical majesty to it. But how? Long-range sniping was not a pursuit for amateurs who had never handled firearms. Handguns would surely entail almost instant arrest. Poison sounded intriguing, but would re-quire advance planning and extensive resources.

“You’re NSC, aren’t you?” Kevin told him, as they bagged out in the tent to the sound of crickets, blissfully far from the sinister fog of urban surveillance. “I thought they trained you guys to do awful things with the juice of cigars.”

“The President doesn’t order assassinations of his domestic politi-cal opponents. If he were outed for that, he’d be impeached. That’s totally counterproductive.”

“Aren’t you one of the President’s agents?”

It was wise of Kevin to point this out. Oscar recognized that he’d been getting a little tangled in the proliferating vines of his cognitive processes. Next day they stopped at a greasy spoon outside the town of Mamou, and called the NSC from a satellite pay phone.

It took quite some time for Oscar’s immediate superior to an-swer a random pay-phone call on a deeply insecure line from the heart of Cajun country. When he came on, he was livid. Oscar announced that he had been poisoned, was non compos mentis, had suffered a complete mental breakdown, could no longer be considered responsi-ble for his actions, was no longer fit for public service, and was there-fore resigning from his post, immediately. His superior ordered him to fly to Washington for a thorough medical assessment. Oscar told him that this was not on his agenda as a newly private citizen. His superior told Oscar that he would be arrested. Oscar pointed out that he was currently in the center of the state of Louisiana, where the locals were profoundly unfriendly to federal agents. He hung up. It had been a lot to say. His tongue felt sore.

Kevin was getting into the swing of things. He suggested that it might be a good idea to similarly break all ties with Senator Bambakias. They went out for a leisurely brunch of red beans and rice, and returned to find the original pay phone swarming with Reg-ulator goons in fast pickup trucks. They tried to earn a little money with their guitar and accordion, and they were told to get lost.

They hitchhiked from Mamou to Eunice, and made another pay-phone call, this time to the Senator’s office in Washington. The Senator was no longer in Washington. Barnbakias had gone on a fact-finding mission to the newly conquered Netherlands. In fact, the en-tire Senate Foreign Relations Committee had set up shop in The Hague, in a vacated Dutch government building. Oscar apologized, and was about to hang up, when the Senator himself came on the line. He’d been paged from across the Atlantic, and he had woken from a sound sleep, but he was anxious to talk.

“Oscar, I’m so glad you called. Don’t hang up! We’ve heard all about the event. Lorena and I are just sick about it. We’re going to pin this thing on Huey. I know that it means outing me on the Moira debacle, but I’m willing to face the music there. Huey can’t go on savaging people like this, it’s atrocious. We can’t live in a country like that. We have to take a stand.”

“That’s very good of you, Senator. Courageous principled apol-ogize it was all my fault anyway.”

“Oscar, listen to me carefully. The Haitians have survived this thing, and so can you. Neurologists around the world are working on this problem. They’re very angry about what was done to Dr. Pen-ninger, it’s a personal affront to them and their profession. We want to fly you into Den Haag, and try some treatments here. They have excellent hospitals here in Holland. In fact, their whole infrastructure is marvelous. Roadblocks absolutely unheard-of These government facilities here are top-notch. The Foreign Relations Committee is get-ting more work done here in Den Haag than they have in a year in Washington. You have resources, Oscar. There’s hope. Your friends want to help you.”

“Senator, even if you do help Greta, I’m a special case. I have a unique genetic background, and neural Colombian conventional medical useless.”

“That’s not true! You’ve forgotten that there are three Danish women here in Europe who are basically sisters of yours. They’ve heard about your troubles, and they want to help you. I’ve just met them, and I’ve talked to them personally. Now I think that I under-stand you better than I ever have before. Tell him, Lorena.”

The Senator’s wife took the phone. “Oscar, listen to Alcott.

He’s talking perfect sense to you. I met those women too. You’re the pick of the litter there, that’s very obvious; but they do want to help you anyway. They’re sincere about it, and so are we. You’re very important to us. You stood by Alcott and me in our darkest days, and now it’s our turn, that’s all. Please let us help you.”

“Lorena, I’m not insane. Huey’s been like this for at least two years, and Huey’s not insane either. It’s just a profoundly different mode of cognition. Sometimes I have a little trouble getting issues to clarify, that’s all.”

Lorena’s voice went distant suddenly. “Talk him down, Alcott! He’s using real English now!”

Bambakias came on, in his richest and most intent baritone.

“Oscar, you are a professional. You’re a player. Players don’t get an-gry. They just get even. You have no business wandering around in Louisiana, with an Anglo terrorist hacker who has a police record. That is just not a player’s move. We’re going to nail Huey for this; it’ll take a while, but we’ll pin him down. Huey made a fatal error — he poisoned a member of the President’s NSC. I don’t care if Huey’s got a skull full of turbochargers and afterburners. Insulting Two Feathers by gassing one of his staff was a very stupid move. The President is a very hard man — and most directly to my point, he’s proved himself a far better politician than the ex-Governor of a small Southern state.”

“Senator, I’m listening. I think there’s something to what you say. ”

Bambakias exhaled slowly. “Thank God.”

“I hadn’t really thought much about Holland before. I mean, that Holland has so much potential. I mean, we own Holland now, basically, don’t we?”

“Yes, that’s right. You see, Holland is the new Louisiana. Louisi-ana is yesterday’s news! You and I were right to get involved in Louisi-ana earlier, there was a serious difficulty there — but as a rogue state, Louisiana is a sideshow now. It’s the Dutch who are the real future. They’re a serious, well-organized, businesslike nation, people who are taking methodical, sensible steps about the climate and environment. Believe it or not, they’re ahead of the United States in a lot of areas — especially banking. Louisiana is over the top. They’re not serious. They’re visionary crawdad-eating psychos. We need serious political organization now, a return to normalcy. Huey is yesterday’s man, he’s out of the loop. He’s a fast-talking loon who throws technological innovation here and there — as if randomly spewing a bunch of half-baked ideas can increase the sum of human happiness. That’s sheer demagoguery, it’s craziness. We need common sense and political stability and sensible, workable policies. That’s what government is for.”

Oscar swirled this extraordinary statement over in his mind. He felt thoughts and memories sifting like a soft kaleidoscope. “You’re really different now, aren’t you, Alcott?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean this regimen you’ve been through. It’s completely changed you as a person. You’re realistic now. You’re sensible and prudent. You’re boring.”

“Oscar, I’m sure that you have some kind of interesting insight there, but this isn’t the time for chatter. We need to stick to the point. Tell me that you’ll come to Den Haag and join us. Lorena and I, we feel that we’re your family — we’re in lieu of your family, at a time like this. You can come here to Holland, and take your place in our krewe, and we’ll set you all straight. That’s a promise.”

“All right, Senator, you’ve convinced me. You’ve never gone back on your word to me, and I’m very touched by that pledge. I can see I’ve been impulsive. I can’t go off half-cocked. I need to think these things all the way through.”

“That’s great. I knew I could make you see sense, I knew I could cheer you up. And now, I think we’ve talked too long on this phone. I’m afraid this line isn’t secure.”

Oscar turned to Kevin. “The Senator says this phone isn’t se-cure. ”

Kevin shrugged. “Well, it’s a random phone, man. It’s a big state. Huey can’t be tapping every last one of ’em.”

Two hours later they were arrested on a roadside by Louisiana state police.

Green Huey was at a cultural event in Lafayette. He and part of his corps of semilegal good old boys were whooping it up on a hotel balcony, overlooking the folk festival. There was a monster fandango taking place, in near silence. At least a thousand people were engaged in a kaleidoscopic square dance. They were all wearing headphones with positional monitors, and some code within the silent music was directing their crowd flow. They seemed free and controlled at the same time, regimented but spontaneous, bacchanalian but exquisitely channeled.

“Y’know, I really dote on these grass-roots folk events,” Huey said, leaning on the curvilinear iron of the hotel’s balcony rail. “You Yankee boys are young and spry, you ought to give it a chance some-time. ”

“I don’t dance,” Kevin said.

“Pity about the big sore feet on the Moderator here,” Huey said, squinting in the sunlight and adjusting his new straw hat. “I dunno why you brought ol’ Limpy Boy along anyhow. He’s no player.”

“I was propping the player up,” Kevin said. “I was wiping the drool off his chin.”

Oscar and Kevin were wearing white plastic prison overalls. Their hands were neatly cuffed behind their backs. They’d been dragged onto the balcony in full sight of the crowd below, and the people seemed completely unperturbed to see’ them. Perhaps Huey spent large amounts of his retirement time chatting with handcuffed prisoners.

“I was thinking you’d call first,” said Huey, turning to Oscar. “I thought we had an understanding there — that you’d always call me up and clear the air when we had one of our little contretemps.”

“Oh, we were hoping for a personal audience, Governor. We just got a little distracted.”

“The guitar and the accordion gambit, that was especially good. You actually play the accordion, Oscar? Diatonic scales, and all that?”

“I’m just a beginner,” Oscar said.

“Oh, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to play music now. Dead easy. Play while you sing. Play while you dance. Hell, play while you dictate financial notes to a spreadsheet.”

“Cutting his hands free would be a good start,” Kevin suggested.

“They must have some awful soft jails up in Massachusetts, to have Limpy Boy here crackin’ wise so much. I mean, just ’cause we had you two boys stripped, and scrubbed, and checked under finger-nails, and had a nice long look up every orifice that opens, and some that don’t… That don’t mean I’m gonna cut the hands loose on the Hacker Ninja Boy here. He might have a blowgun up his finger bones, or sumpin’. You know there’s been five attempts on my life in the past two weeks? All these Moderator jaspers gunnin’ for ol’ Huey… they all wanna be Colonel This or Brevet General That; I dunno, it sure gets tiresome.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t stand here in the open air, then,” Oscar said. “There have been a lot of people anxious to kill me, too, and it would be a shame to see you catch a stray bullet.”

“That’s why I got all these guards, son! They’re not as bright as you are, but they’re a lot more loyal. You know something, Soap Boy? I like you. I enjoy these homemade scientific efforts that don’t work out commercially, but just refuse to stay down. I took a serious inter-est in you; I even got skin samples. Hell, I got a square yard of your skin, livin’ down there in a salt mine. Got enough of your skin to stretch on a dang drumhead. You’re quite a specimen, you are. You’re a real gumbo thing — little o’ this, little o’ that. There are chunks of you that are upside down, stretched all backward, duplicated… and no introns, that’s the cool part. I didn’t know a man could even live without introns.”

“I couldn’t recommend it, Governor. It has some technical drawbacks.”

“Oh, I know you’re a little frail, Brainy Boy. I was tryin’ to take it easy on you. Ran a lot of medical tests on that DNA of yours. Didn’t want to hurt you or nothin’.” Huey squinted. “You’re with me here, aren’t ya? You’re not all confused or anything.”

“No, Governor. I can follow you. I’m really concentrating.”

“You don’t think I’m funnin’ you about your DNA, do you? I mean, just ’cause I’m a coonass, that don’t mean I can’t hack DNA, bubba. ”

“Just as long as you don’t try cloning him as an army,” Kevin said.

“Got my own army, thanks.” Huey raised one arm of his linen jacket and patted his bulky armpit. “Man needs a whole dang army just to stay alive these days, sad to say.” He turned to Oscar. “That’s the problem with these pesky Moderators. They’re prole gangs all right, your basic army-of-the-night. All day long, it was power-to-the-people this, and revolutionary justice that. Really mountin’ up, though, y’know? Getting somewhere serious. Finally we get a chance to make our own rules and give the common man a real break.”

Huey snorted. “Then all of a sudden along comes a new Presi-dent, who deigns to take a little royal notice of ’em. Throws ’em a dog biscuit, maybe even two. They’re fallin’ all over themselves, they’re salutin’ his socks, they’re salutin’ his shorts. They’re killin’ their own brothers for the Man. Makes you sick.”

“The Man is a player. He’s got talent, Huey.”

“What the hell! The man’s a Dutch agent! He sold out the country to a foreign power! You don’t think the Dutch gave up that easy, do ya? Without one single shot being fired? This is the Dutch we’re talking about! When they get invaded, they flood their own country and die in the ditches with big pointy sticks in their hands. They gave up easy because they planned that whole damn gambit from the get-go.”

“That’s an interesting theory, Governor.”

“You should talk to the French about this theory sometime. They’re real big on theory, the French. The French know the score. We entertain ’em, they think Americans are natural clowns, they think our worst comedians are funny. But they’re scared of the Dutch. That’s the problem with modern America. We pulled up our borders, we’re all parochial now. We don’t know what’s goin’ on. Hell, we used to lead the whole world in science… lead ’em in everything. Country like France gets along great without science. They just munch some more fine cheese and read more Racine. But you take America without science, you got one giant Nebraska. You got guys living in teepees. Well, at least the teepee boys still want somethin’. Give them the science. Let them work it out.”

“That’s an even more interesting theory.”

“Oh, well, yeah. You BELIEVE ME on that one,” the Governor boomed. “You stole my damn clothes, you sorry kid! You stole my science facility. You stole my data. There was just one damn thing left that you didn’t know about, one damn important thing you didn’t know how to steal! So that’s what I gave to ya.”

“I see.”

“You can’t say that Huey ain’t generous. You outed me on ev-erything you possibly could. Chased me up and down in the press. Sicced a Senator on me. Turned the President against me. You’re a busy guy. But you know something? You don’t have any SPIRIT, boy! You don’t have any SOUL! You don’t BELIEVE! There’s not one fresh idea in your pointy head. You’re like a dang otter raidin’ a beaver’s nest, you’re like this streamlined thing that kills and eats the beaver’s children. Well, I got big news for you, Soapy. You’re a genu-ine beaver now.”

“Governor, this is truly fascinating. You say you’ve studied me; well, I’ve studied you. I learned a lot. You’re a man of tremendous energy and talent. What I don’t understand is why you carry out your aims in such absurd, tacky, uncivilized ways.”

“Son, that one’s dead easy. It’s because I’m a dirt-poor, dirt-ignorant hick from a drowning swamp! Nothin’ came easy for us twenty-first-century hicks. Nothing is elegant here. They took all our oil, they cut our timber, they gillnetted our fish, they poisoned the earth, they turned the Mississippi into a giant sewer that killed the Gulf for five hundred miles around. Then hurricanes started comin’ and the seas rose up to get us! What the hell did you expect from us, when you were up in Boston polishing the silver? We Cajuns need a future just like anybody else. We been here four hundred years! And we didn’t forget to have children, like the Cabots and the Lodges did. If you had a workin’ brain in your head, you’d have blown off that sorry architect and come down here to work for me.”

“I didn’t like your methods.”

“Hell, you used enough of ’em. You used damn near every one. Hell, I ain’t particular about any methods. You got a better method for me, spit it out! Let’s talk it over.”

“Hey, Huey,” Kevin said. “What about me? I have methods too.”

“You’re last year’s news, Mr. Whitey. You’re the hired help now, you’re lucky to have a damn job. Lemme talk to the Genetic Wonder here. We’re talking cognition now. This is for grown-ups.”

“Hey, Huey!” Kevin insisted. “My methods still work. I outed you on the Haitians. I figured that one out, I flew people over your border.”

Huey’s brow wrinkled in distaste. “My point is,” Huey said to Oscar, “we’re in the same boat now. If I’d just kept hold of that Collaboratory, I could have spread a new cognition on a massive scale. In fact, I’m still gonna do that — I’m gonna make the people of this state the smartest, most capable, most creative people on God’s green earth. You put a serious crimp in my production facilities — but hell, that’s all history now. Now you’ve got no real choice but to help ol’ Huey. Because you been hanging on to power by the skin of your teeth, cadgin’ favors, hiding your past. Now you’re a freak twice over. But! If you come on over to Huey now — and if you bring along your loving girlfriend, who’s the source of all this goodness in the first place, and is in the same boat as you — then you get a brand-new lease on life. In fact, the sky’s your limit.”

“First I’d have to get my temper back, Etienne.”

“Oh, pshaw! Real players don’t get angry. Why get all ticked off at me? I actually accept you. I love your goddamn background problem. See, I finally got you all fIgured out. If America settles down and gets all normal, then you’re on the outside for good. You’re always gonna have your nose pressed up against the glass, watchin’ other folks drink the champagne. Nothing you do will last. You’ll be a sideshow and a shadow, and you’ll stay one till you die. But, son, if you get a big head start in the coming revolution of the human mind, you can goddamn have Massachusetts. I’ll give it to ya.”

“Hey, Huey! Yo! Were you always this crazy, or did the dope do it?”

Huey ignored Kevin’s interruption, though his scowl grew deeper. “I know you can attack me for this. Sure, go ahead and do it. Tell everybody what a freak you are now. Tell everybody that your Senator’s former lover — and Moira’s now in France, by the way — took revenge on you, for the dirty trick that you pulled to cover his sorry ass. Step out in public like the fire-eatin’ boy, and nicely set fire to yourself. Or else, just see sense and come on board with me! You’ll be doin’ just exactly what you did before. But instead of just fast-talkin’ people into a new way of life — hell, words never stick any-how — you can blast ’em into it. When you do that to ’em, they don’t go back, son. Just like you’re never going back.”

“Why would I make thousands of people into sideshow freaks? Why should everyone be as unhappy as I am?”

“Nothin’ unhappy about it! The science really works! It works just great!”

“Hey, Huey! Give it up, dude! I know this guy. You’ll never make him happy! He doesn’t know what the word means! You can’t get away with this, man — you’ve made him twice as bad!”

Huey had lost patience. He gestured absently for his bodyguards.

A pair of pistol-toting goons emerged from the gilded shadows of the elegant room behind the balcony. Kevin fell silent.

“Get his hands free,” Huey told the bodyguard. “Get him a coat and hat. He’s a player. We’re talking seriously now.”

The bodyguard freed Oscar’s hands. Oscar began rubbing his wrists. The bodyguard threw someone’s dark jacket over Oscar’s prison coveralls.

Huey sidled a little closer. “Oscar, let’s talk turkey now. This thing is a great gift. Sure, it’s a little tough on you at first, like ridin’ a bicycle. It’s multitasking, that’s its very nature. I’m not saying it’s per-fect. Nothing technical is ever perfect. It’s a very real-world thing. It speeds up your heartbeat — has to speed up the chip a little. And it is multitasking, so you do get certain operations that kinda hang… And others that pop up suddenly… And every once in a while, you get two streams of thought going that get kinda stuck; so you freeze there, and you have to drop your working memory. But you just give the old head a good hard shake, and you boot right back up again.”

“I see.”

“See, I’m really leveling with you here. This isn’t snake oil, this is the McCoy. Sure, you have some language problems, and you do tend to mutter sometimes. But, son … you’re twice the man you were! You can think in two languages at once! If you work at it, you can do amazing things with both your hands. And the best of all, boy — is when you get two good trains of thought going, and they start switch-ing passengers. That’s what intuition is all about — when you know things, but you don’t know how you know. That’s all done in the preconscious mind — it’s thought that you don’t know you’re thinking. But when you’re really bearing down, and you’re thinking two things at once — ideas bleed over. They mix. They flavor each other. They cook down real rich and fine. That’s inspiration. It’s the finest mental sensation you’ll ever have. The only problem with that is — sometimes those ideas are so confounded great, you have a little problem with impulse control.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that little impulse problem.”

“Well, son, most people hide their light under a bushel and they never act on impulse. That’s why they end up buried in un-marked graves. A real player’s got initiative, he’s a man of action. But sure, I admit it: the impulse thing is a bug. That’s why a major player needs good counselors. And if you don’t have a top-of-the-line, raccoon-tailed political adviser, maybe you can make yourself one.”

“Heeeey!” Kevin screeched. He had given up on Huey; he had suddenly turned his attention to the crowd below. “Hey, people! Your Governor’s gone nuts! He uses poison and he’s gonna turn you into crazy zombies!”

The bodyguards seized Kevin’s pinioned arms and began to pummel him.

“They’re torturing me!” Kevin screamed in anguish. “The cops are torturing me!”

Huey turned. “Goddammit, Boozoo, don’t punch him in public like that! Haul him inside first. And, Zach, stop using your damn fists every time. Use your sap. That’s what it’s for.”

Despite his bound arms, Kevin wasn’t going quietly. He spun in place, began hopping up and down. His howls were of little use, for the crowd below was rapt inside the embrace of their headphones. But not all of them were dancing, and some were looking up.

Boozoo pulled a sap from within his clothing. Kevin aimed a clumsy kick. Boozoo half stepped back, tripped over the foot of a second guard, tangled suddenly in the spindly legs of a white iron balcony chair. He tumbled backward, landing with a crash. The sec-ond bodyguard tried to leap forward, tangled with the struggling Boozoo, and fell to his knees with a squawk.

“Aw hell,” Huey grumbled. He swiftly reached into his own jacket, removed a chromed automatic pistol, and absently emptied a shot into Kevin. Struck high in the chest and with his hands still bound, Kevin catapulted backward, smashed into the railing, and tum-bled to the earth below.

Deeply surprised, Huey walked to the railing, craned his head, and stared down. The pistol still gleamed in his grip. The crowd be-low him saw the gun, and billowed away in fear.

“Uh-oh,” the Governor blurted.

“I still don’t know what to do with him,” the President said. “He murdered a man in broad daylight in front of a thousand people, but he still has his adherents. I’d love to jail him, but Jesus. We’ve put so many people through the prison system that they’re a major demo-graphic group.”

Oscar and the President of the United States were having a stroll through the White House garden. The Rose Garden, like the White House itself, was swept for bugs with regularity. It didn’t help much. But it helped some. It was doable, if they kept moving.

“He always lacked a sense of decency, Mr. President. Everyone knows Huey went too far, even in Louisiana. They’ll wait until he’s dead before they name some bridges after him.”

“What do you think of Washington now, Oscar? It’s a different city now, don’t you agree?”

“I have to admit, Mr. President: it bothers me to see foreign troops stationed in the capital of the United States.”

“I agree with you there. But that solved the problem. People burrowing into the streets, barricading whole neighborhoods… no major government can survive in a capital like that. I can’t order American troops to pursue these people with the rigor it requires to break decentered network gangs. But the Dutch will clean the streets if it takes ten years. They’ll tough it out.”

“It is a different city now, sir. Much tidier.”

“You could live here, couldn’t you? If the salary were right? If the White House krewe looked after you.”

“Yes, sir; I like to think that I could live anywhere that duty called.”

“Well, it isn’t Louisiana, at least.”

“Actually, Mr. President, I’m very fond of Louisiana. I still keep up with developments there. It’s a bellwether state in many, many ways. I had some very fulfilling moments in Louisiana. I’ve come to think of it as my second home.”

“Really. ”

“You see, the Dutch got so hard and desperate when the seas came up. I think Louisiana is on to something. I’m starting to think there’s a lot to be said for simply lying down in the ooze.”

The President stared. “Not that you yourself plan to do a lot of oozing. ”

“Only on occasion, sir.”

“In an earlier discussion, Oscar, I told you that if you followed orders at the Collaboratory I’d find a post for you in the White House. There have been some interesting developments in your career since then, but none that give me any reason to doubt your ability. This is not an Administration for bigotry — or for scandal — and now that we have some grasp of constitutional coherency again, I’m going to cut the spook-and-cowboy business back to a dull roar. I’m actually governing this country now — even if I sometimes have to employ Dutch troops — and when I leave the Oval Office, I intend to leave a country that is sane, responsive, decent, and well behaved. And I think I have a role for you in that effort. Would you care to hear about it?”

“By all means, sir.”

“As you’re well aware, we still have sixteen goddamn political parties in this country! And I don’t intend to face reelection with a pipsqueak party like the Soc-Pats behind me. We need a massive shake-out and total political reconsolidation. We need to shatter all these calcified partisan lines and establish a workable, practical, sensible, bipolar sys-tem. It’s going to be Normalcy versus everything else.”

“I see, sir. Much like the old days. So are you left-wing, or right-wing?”

“I’m down-wing, Oscar. I have my feet on the ground, and I know where I stand. Everyone else can be up-wing. They can all be up in the air, scattering crazy, high-tech, birdbrained ideas, and the ones that fall to ground without shattering, those will belong to me.”

“Mr. President, I congratulate you on that formulation. You have a window of opportunity here where you can try anything that you please, and that formulation sounds doable.”

“You think so? Good. This is your role. You will be a White House congressional liaison to interface with the current party struc-ture. You’ll shake the radicals and crazies out, and agglomerate them into the up-wing.”

“I’m not down-wing, sir?”

“Oscar, there is no down-wing without the up-wing. It doesn’t work unless I mold my own opposition. The up-wing is crucially important to the game plan. The up-wing has to be brilliant. It has to be genuinely glamorous. It has to be visionary, and it has to almost make sense. And it has to never, ever quite work out in real life.”

“I see.”

“I’m particularly concerned about that prole/scientist coalition. Those people have the bit between their teeth. They are already shak-ing down industries by threatening to research them. They’re the only truly novel and vigorous movement on the political landscape right now. They cannot possibly be inside my camp. I can’t buy them off. I can’t sweet-talk them. They’re inherently radical, because they’re our century’s version of the main motive force that transformed Western society during the past six centuries. To destroy them would be crimi-nal, it would lobotomize the country. But to give them their head is insane.”

The President drew a deep breath. “Because the spin-offs of their research built American capitalism, wrecked American capitalism, made the seas rise, poisoned the topsoil, wrecked the ozone layer, scattered radioactivity, filled the skies with contrails and the land with concrete, caused a population boom, caused a reproductive collapse, set Wyoming on fire… no, it’s even worse than that. It’s much, much worse. Now they’ve got our brains laid out like a virgin New World, and every last human being is a backward, undeveloped Indian. Someone has to deal seriously with these people. I suspect that you are just the man.”

“I think I understand you, sir.”

“They don’t have any grasp of political reality, but they’re going to blow the doors off the human condition unless something is done with them. I’m thinking: something subtle. Something attractive. Something glamorous, something that would make them behave less like Dr. Frankenstein and more like artists do. Modern poetry, that would be excellent. Costs very little, causes intense excitement in very small groups, has absolutely no social effect. So, I’m thinking mathe-matics. Nothing practical, just something totally arcane and abstract.”

“You can’t trust abstract mathematics, sir; it always turns out to be practical.”

“Computer simulation, then. Extremely, extremely time-consum-ing, complex, and detailed simulations that never do any harm to reality.”

“I think that’s a lot more likely to produce your intended result, sir, but frankly, no one in the sciences takes cybernetics seriously any-more. That line of research is all mined out, it’s intellectually dowdy. Even bio-studies and genetics have been mostly metabolized by now. It’s all about cognition now, sir. That’s the last thing left to them.”

“You must have suffered from that. Maybe you can convince them to try something much more pretty. With more sheer wonder in it. ”

“Mr. President, there is one issue here. Aren’t you asking me to infiltrate them and betray them?”

“Oscar, I’m asking you to be a politician. It’s not our business to blow the damn doors off the human condition. That’s not in our job description. The job is to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquil-lity, and promote the general welfare. A job we politicians signally failed to do. You know something? It’s not a pretty thing to watch a nation go crazy. But it happens. To great countries sometimes, the greatest peoples on earth. Japan, Germany, Russia, China… and we Americans have just had a bad, bad spin in the barrel. We’re still very groggy. We were lucky. It could be the fire next time.”

“Sir, don’t you think the scientific community — such as it is — should be told all this? They’re citizens too, aren’t they? They’re rather bright people, if a little narrowly focused. I don’t really think that deceiving them is a tactic that can prosper in the longer term.”

“We’re all dead in the longer term, Oscar.”

“Mr. President, this really is a dream job that you’re offering me. I recognize its importance, I’m very impressed by your trust. I even think I might have the ability to do it. But before I engage in some-thing that is this — what can I call it? So Benthamite/Machiavellian — I need you to tell me something. I need you to level with me on one issue. Are you in the pay of the Dutch?”

“The Dutch never paid me a thing.”

“But there was an arrangement, wasn’t there?”

“In a manner of speaking … I’d have to take you out to Col-orado. I’d have to show you the timber. You know, ever since we Native Americans got into the drug and casino businesses, we’ve been buying back little bits of this great country of ours. Mostly the cheap ones, the parts too ruined for any commercial use. If you leave them alone long enough, seven generations, sometimes they come back a little. But they’ll never come back the same way. Extinction is perma-nent. A futuristic swamp full of homemade monsters really isn’t the same as a native wetlands. We really did kill the buffalo, and the native flowers, and the native grasses, and the primeval forests, and we did it for a cheap buck, and it’s gone forever. And that’s bad. It’s very bad. It’s worse than we can ever repay. It’s like a hideous war crime. It haunts America like genocide haunts Germany, like slavery haunts the South. We turned our brother creatures into toys. And the Dutch are right about that. All the people whose homes are drowning are dead right, morally right, ethically right, physically right. Yes, we Ameri-cans spewed more greenhouse gas than anyone else in the world. We are the single biggest problem. So yes, I intend to implement some Dutch policies in this country. Not every last one of them, the ones that I think make most sense. And that change would never, ever happen by them conquering us. It could only happen by us conquer-ing them.”

“Then you are a Dutch agent.”

“Oscar, we own them. They surrendered. We’re a large and slowly drowning country that defeated a small and quickly drowning country. That’s reality, it’s the world, it’s what we live in.”

“Mr. President, I agree with you. I’m glad that I know the truth now. It’s a shattering truth that just destroyed every ambition I have ever had, but I’m glad that I know the truth. It’s the highest value I have, as the person that I am, and I won’t surrender it. I don’t want your job.”

“Well, you’ll never work in this town again, son. I’ll have to fix it that way.”

“I know that, Mr. President. Thank you for your courtesy.”

The Mississippi River had cut New Orleans in half, but if anything, the flooding had added to the city’s raffish charm. The spectral isola-tion of the French Quarter was only intensified by its becoming an island; there was an almost Venetian quality to it, intensified by the gondolas.

The official parades down Canal Street were well policed, but it was very loud on Bourbon Street, where spontaneous crowds ac-creted, with no raison d’ etre other than entertaining one another.

Greta stepped away from the green and peeling window shutters. “It’s so good to be here,” she said.

Oscar enjoyed the Mardi Gras crowds. He felt at ease as the only sober being in a huge, jostling mess of flat-footed drunks. Among them, but never quite of them. It was the story of his life. “You know, I could have gotten us onto one of those parade floats. Throwing out beads and bangles and free software: That looked like fun.”

“Noblesse oblige,” she murmured.

“It’s a local krewe thing. Very old, very New Orleans. The local debs booked up all their dance cards in the 1850s, but they tell me that cadging a float ride is doable. If you know who to know.”

“Maybe next year,” she told him. A subtle rap came at the door’s mahogany paneling. Hotel staffers in white jackets and boutonnieres arrived with a rattling sandalwood pushcart. Oysters, shrimp, iced champagne. Greta left for the bedroom to change for dinner. The locals silently busied themselves at the linen table, lighting the candela-brum, opening the bottle, brimming the glasses. Oscar patiently es-corted them back to the hall. Then he clicked off the light.

Greta returned and examined the candelabrum. She was dressed in deep brown antebellum lace and a feathered vizard. The mask really worked for him. He loved the mask. Even in the thickest sprawl of Mardi Gras she would be a striking creature.

“Chocolate truffles?” she said eagerly.

“I didn’t forget. Later.” Oscar lifted his champagne flute, ad-mired the golden bubbles, set it back down.

“You still don’t drink, do you?”

“You go ahead. I’ll just admire it. With half an eye.”

“I’ll just have a sip,” she said, licking her long upper lip below the feathered edge of the mask. “I have this little problem with im-pulse control…”

“Why let that slow you down? This is Mardi Gras.”

She sat. They dabbed a bit at their shrimp cocktails. There were deadly little crystal plates of horseradish. “Did I tell you that I had a cellular cleansing done?”

“You’re kidding.”

“I resented it, you know. That I hadn’t chosen to do it to myself. And then, there was the blood pressure, the stroke risk. So, I had my brain tissue cleaned out.”

“How was it? Tell me.”

“It all felt very normal. Very fiat. Like living in black and white. I had to go back again, I don’t care anymore, I just had to.” She put her long pale hands on the tabletop. “What about you? Can you stop?”

“I don’t want to stop it. It works for me.”

“It’s bad for you.”

“No, I love bicamerality. That’s what I really like about our little gift and affliction. All those other troubles, humanity’s stinking little prejudices, the race thing, the ethnic thing … It’s not that they disappear, you know. That’s too much to hope for. They never disap-pear, but the new problems screw them up so much that the old problems lose center stage. Besides, now I can multitask. I really can do two things at once. I’m much more effective. I can run a business full-time while I work full-time for legalization.”

“So you’re nuking money again.”

“Yes, it’s a thing I tend to do.” Oscar sighed. “It’s the basic American way. It’s my only real path to legitimacy. With serious money, I can finance candidates, run court challenges, set up founda-tions. It’s no use wandering around the margins with our bears and tambourines, dancing for pennies. Cognition will become an industry soon. A massive, earthshaking, new American industry. Someday, the biggest ever.”

“You’re going to turn my science into an industry? When it’s illegal now, when people think it’s crazy just to mess with it? How is that supposed to happen?”

“You can’t stop me from doing it,” Oscar told her, lowering his voice. “No one can stop me. It will come on very slowly, very gently, so quietly that you hardly feel it at first. Just a gentle lifting of the veil. Very tender, very subtle. I’ll be taking it away from the realm of ab-stract knowledge, and bringing it into a real and dirty world of sweat and heat. It won’t be ugly or sordid, it’ll seem lovely and inevitable. People will want it, they’ll long for it. They’ll finally cry out for it. And at the end, Greta, I’ll possess it totally.”

A long silence. She shivered violently in her chair, and the feath-ered mask dipped. She couldn’t seem to meet his eyes. She lifted a silver oyster fork, probed at the quiescent gray blob on her plate, and set the fork back down. Then she looked up, searchingly. “You look older.”

“I know I do.” He smiled. “Shall I put my mask on?”

“Is it all right to worry about you? Because I do.”

“It’s all right to worry, but not during Mardi Gras.” He laughed. “You want to worry? Worry about people who get in my way.” He swallowed an oyster.

Another long silence. He was used to her silences now. They came in flavors; Greta had all kinds of silences. “At least they let me work in the lab now,” she murmured. “There’s not much danger they’ll ever put me in power again. I wish I were better at my work, that’s all. It’s the only thing I regret. I just wish I had more time and that I were better.”

“But you’re the best that there is.”

“I’m getting old, I can feel it. I can feel the need leaving me, that devouring gift. I just wish that I were better, Oscar, that’s all. They tell me I’m a genius but I’m always, always full of discontent. I can’t do anything about that.”

“That must be hard. Would you like me to get you a private lab, Greta? There would be less overhead, you could run it for yourself. It might help.”

“No thank you.”

“I could build a nice place for you. Someplace we both like. Where you can concentrate. Oregon, maybe.”

“I know that you could build an institute, but I’m never going to live in your pocket.”

“You’re so proud,” he said mournfully. “It could be doable. I could marry you.”

She shook her masked head. “We’re not going to marry.”

“If you gave me just a week, once a quarter. That’s not much to ask. Four weeks a year.”

“We couldn’t stand each other for four whole weeks a year. Because we’re driven souls. You don’t have the time for a real mar-riage, and neither do I. Even if we did, even if it worked, you’d only want more.”

“Well, yes. That’s true. Of course I would want more.”

“I’ll tell you how it would work, because I’ve seen it work. You could be the faculty wife, Oscar. I’ll still put in my eighty-hour weeks, but you can look after me, if I’m ever around. Maybe we could adopt. I’ll never have any time for your kids either, but I’d feel guilty enough to get them Christmas presents. You could look after the house, and the money, and maybe the fame, and you could cook for us, and who knows. Probably you would live a lot longer.”

“You think that sounds bad to me,” he said. “It doesn’t sound bad. It sounds very authentic. The problem is, it’s impossible. I can’t keep a family together. I can’t settle down. I’ve never seen it done. I wouldn’t know how to sit still. I’ve had affairs with three different women since last August. I used to line my women up one at a time. I can’t manage that anymore. Now I multiplex them. Giving you a ring and a bridal veil, that wouldn’t change me. I realize that now, I have to admit it. It’s beyond me, I can’t control it.”

“I despise your other women,” she said. “But then, I think of how they must feel, if they ever learn about me. At least that’s some comfort.”

He winced.

“You haven’t ever made me happy. You’ve just made me compli-cated. I’m very complicated now. I’ve become the kind of woman who flies to Mardi Gras to meet her lover.”

“Is that so bad?”

“Yes, it’s bad. I feel so much more pain now. But, I feel so much more awake.”

“Do you think we have a future, Greta?”

“I’m not the future. There’s another woman out there tonight, and she’s all dressed up and she’s very drunk. Tonight she’s going to have sex with her guy, and when she ought to be smart, she’ll just say ‘oh, the hell with it.’ She’ll get pregnant at Mardi Gras. She’s the future. I’m not the future, I’ve never been the future. I’m not even the truth. I’m just the facts.”

“I must be human after all,” Oscar said, “because I only get the facts in little bits.”

“We won’t ever marry, but someday we’ll be past this. Then I could walk with you on the beach. Feel something for you, just as a person, in some quieter, simpler way. If I have anything to give like that, it will be at the very end of my life. When I’m old, when the ambition fades away.”

Oscar rose and went to the glass doors. It was a very bitter thing to tell him, because he felt quite sure that she would in fact be doing that thing, in her old age. Wisdom and communion. But she would be doing it with someone else. Never with her lover. With a worship-ful grad student, maybe a biographer. Never with him. He stepped outside, shot his cuffs, and leaned out on the opulent grille of the balcony.

A large organized group was methodically working their way down Bourbon Street, under the blue and white banner of an extinct multinational bank. The revelers, grim and unsmiling, were neatly dressed in sober three-piece tailored suits and polished shoes. Most groups of this sort would throw cheap beads at the crowds, but the proles had cut all suppositions short: they were simply throwing away wads of cash.

“Look at these characters,” Oscar called out.

Greta joined him. “I see they’re in their holiday gear.”

A five-dollar bill attached to a fishing weight came flying up from street level, and bounced from Oscar’s shoulder. He picked it up. It was genuine money, all right. “They really shouldn’t be allowed to do this sort of thing. It could cause a riot.”

“Don’t be grumpy. I feel better now, it’s all right. Let’s go and break the bed now.”

She lured him into the bedroom. The damp air sang with erotic tension. “Shall I keep the mask on?”

He took his jacket off. “Oh yes. The mask is definitely you.” He set to work on her in a particularly levelheaded and elaborate fashion. During their long separation he had had enough time to imagine this meeting. He had formed a multilevel erotic schemata with a number of variable subroutines. The sheets were soaked with sweat and the veins were standing out on her neck;. With a strangled cry she tore the mask from her eyes, tumbled out of bed with a thump, and hurried out of the room.

He followed her in alarm. She was digging desperately in her purse. She came up with a pencil stub.

“What’s …” he began gently.

“Shhh!” She began scribbling frantically at the back leaf of a New Orleans travel guide. Oscar found a cotton bathrobe, put it over her shoulders, found his pants, sipped half a bottle of cold mineral water. When his temples stopped throbbing he returned to the bal-cony.

There were extraordinary scenes down on Bourbon Street. Their balcony, divided into segments, stretched the length of the little hotel and there were four women and three other men on it. There was a bizarre interplay between the people up on the balconies and the crowds at street level.

Women were showing their breasts to crowds of strangers, in exchange for plastic beads. Men were hoarsely yelling for the spectacle and throwing the beads as bribes. Women in the streets would display themselves to the men on the balconies, and the women on the balco-nies would display themselves to men on the streets. There was no groping, no come-ons; cameras would flash and gaudy necklaces would fly, but there was a ritual noli-me-tangere atmosphere to these exchanges. They were strangely old and quaint, like an elbow-link in a square dance.

A pretty redhead in the balcony across the way was tormenting her crowd of admirers. She would kiss her boyfriend, a grinning drunk in a devil suit, and then lean out with an enormous dangling swath of gold, green, and purple beads around her neck, and she’d teasingly pluck at the hem of her blouse. The men below her were booing lustily, and chanting their demands in unison.

After torturing them to a frenzy, she slung the beads over her shoulder and bared her torso. It was worth the wait. Slowly the stranger deliberately caressed her own nipple. Oscar felt as if he had been fish-hooked.

He went back into the hotel room. Greta had leaned away from her scribbling. Her face was pale and thoughtful now.

“What was all that?” he said.

“A strange thing.” She put her pencil down. “I was thinking. I can think about neurology while I have sex now.”

“Really?”

“Well, it’s more like dreaming about neurology. You had me all excited, and I was right on the edge… you know how you can sort of hang there where it’s wonderful, right on the edge? And I was thinking hard about wave propagation in glial cells. Then suddenly it came to me, that the standard calcium-wave astrocyte story is all wrong, there’s a better method to describe that depolarization, and I almost had that idea, I almost had it, I almost had it, and I just got stuck there. I got stuck there on the edge. I couldn’t get loose and I couldn’t quite come and the pleasure kept building up. My head started roaring, I was almost blacking out. And then it came all over me, in a tremendous rush. So I had to jump out of bed to write it down.”

He stepped to the table. “So what does it look like?” “Oh” — she shoved the paper away — “it’s just another idea. I mean, now that I can see it down on paper, there’s really no way that a glial syncytium can behave like that. It’s a clever notion but it’s not consistent with the tracer studies.” She sighed. “It sure felt good though. When it happened. My God, did that ever feel good.”

“You’re not going to do that every time, though.”

“No. I just don’t have that many good ideas.” She looked up, her lips still swollen from the grip of his teeth. “Don’t you think of something else, too?”

“Well, yes.”

“What?”

He drew a little nearer. “Other things that I can do with you.” They climbed back into bed. This time, she did black out. He didn’t notice her deep slide from consciousness, because her body was still moving rhythmically, but her eyes had rolled up in her head. When she began to speak to him, he blacked out at once.

“Are you with me?” she whispered blindly.

“Yes, I’m here,” he said, struggling to speak through his body’s gasping. They had merged now, together, from areas of cognition so low and so blind to conscious awareness that they were barely able to manifest themselves. But they had chosen a good moment to take the mind’s central stage. Their sweating bodies began to slow, to melt together gently into deep relaxation. It was all very easy now, a vast moonlit Pacific of sexuality, washing some distant shore. They could breathe together.

When they woke, it was ten PM. Streetlights crept through the blinds to stripe the ceiling. Greta stirred and yawned, prodded his bare ankle with her foot. “It’s sweet to have these little naps, after.”

“We seem to be making a habit of passing out.”

“I think dreaming is good for us.” She pulled herself out of bed.

“Shower …” Her voice faded as she padded off. “Oh, they have a bidet! That’s great.”

He followed her in. “We’ll wash now. We’ll get dressed,” he told her cheerfully. Lovemaking was behind them now, always tensely awaited but maybe just a little bit of a burden, in retrospect. Still, he felt good about it. They were all purged, the tension had sung out of them; they were having fun together. “We’ll put on our masks, we’ll go out and have some coffee. I’ll take your picture in the street, it’ll be fun.”

“Good plan.” She examined her smashed hairdo in the mirror, and grimaced. “One martini too many …”

“You look great. I feel good, I feel so happy now.”

“Me too.” She stepped into the shower and set it to hiss.

“It’s a holiday,” he said absently. “We’ll just have our little holi-day now, we’ll live for the moment, we’ll be just like real people.”

When they were dressed, they stepped onto the balcony. The balcony was crowded now, with many friendly strangers. As Greta appeared, she was instantly greeted from the streets below with howls of male demand.

Greta’s eyes grew wide with shock behind her feathered mask.

“Good Lord,” she said. “I always knew that’s what men want from you, but to have them just standing there, publicly yelling it… I can’t believe this.”

“You can show yourself off if you like. They’ll give you beads for it.”

She thought about it. “I might just do it if you went down into the street, and yelled up at me.”

“That’s a distinct possibility. Let me get my camera first.”

She smiled wickedly. “You’ll have to throw me my beads, though, mister. And they’ll have to be very nice ones.”

“I enjoy a challenge,” Oscar said.

A string of green-and-gold beads flew up to strike at Greta. She batted at the necklace, tried to catch it, missed. In the street below them, a tall middle-aged man with a mustache below his mask was jumping up and down, and bellowing at her. He was waving both arms frantically, as if trying to signal an airliner.

“Look at that clown,” Oscar said, grinning. “He’s really smitten.”

“He’s got a girlfriend already,” Greta said.

The man and his smiling girlfriend fought their way valiantly through the passing crowd, until they had wedged themselves directly below the balcony.

“Dr. Penninger!” the man shouted. “Hey, show us your brain!”

“Oh, hell, that’s torn it,” Oscar said angrily. “They’re paparazzi.”

“Hey, Oscar!” the man shouted lustily. He pulled off his mask. “Look, look!”

“Do you know that man?” Greta said.

“No…” Oscar stared suddenly. “Hey! I do! It’s Yosh! It’s Yosh Pelicanos.” He leaned over the balcony, doubling over to shout down. “Yosh! Hi!”

“Look here!” Yosh shouted giddily, pointing to the masked and costumed brunette at his side. “Look, it’s Sandra!”

“What is he talking about?” Greta said.

“That’s his wife,” Oscar marveled. “It’s his wife, Sandra.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Sandra! Hello! Good to meet you!”

“I’m all better!” Sandra shrilled. “I’m so much better now.”

“That’s great!” Oscar yelled. “That’s marvelous! Come on up, Yosh! Come up and have a drink with us!”

“No time!” Pelicanos shouted. His wife was being swept away by the pressure of passersby. Pelicanos caught her hand and shielded her for a moment. Sandra seemed a little unsure of herself in the crowd; not too surprising, considering her nine years in a mental hospital.

“We have to go make love now,” Sandra shouted, with a shy and radiant smile.

“God bless you, Dr. Penninger!” Pelicanos shouted, waving his mask and retreating. “You’re a great genius! Thank you for being alive! Thank you for being you!”

“Who were those people?” Greta demanded. “Why did you in-vite them up?”

“That was my majordomo. And his wife. His wife was a schizophrenic.”

“That was his wife?” She paused. “Oh, well, then it must have been NCR-40 autoimmune syndrome. Attention therapy deals with that really well now. She’ll be just fine.”

“Then he’ll be fine, too.”

“He looked all right, once he calmed down. Kind of good-looking, even.”

“I almost didn’t recognize him. I’d never seen him happy before.” Oscar paused. “You made him happy.”

“Well, maybe I get the credit.” She smiled. “I didn’t mean to make him happy. Science gets the credit for things science never meant to do. Science isn’t a better effort just because it sometimes helps humanity. But on the other hand, that must mean that science isn’t really any worse for causing mankind harm.”

“I’m not sure I follow you there. That’s not political thinking.” She had a long sip of champagne. The men in the street were still yelling for her attention, but she regally ignored them. “Look at me,” she told him suddenly. She smoothed her feathered mask against her face with her long fingers. Within the owlish cowl of brown feathers, her eyes moved suddenly, in two different directions.

Oscar jumped. “Wow! How’d you do that?”

“I can do it now. I practiced. I can even see two things at once. Watch me.” Her eyes rolled in their white sockets, like a chameleon’s.

“Good God! You did that just by thinking about it?”

“It’s the life of the mind.”

“I can’t believe it. No, look at me again. Use both your eyes. Now use one eye. Good Lord, that’s the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen in a human face. The hair’s standing up on my neck. Do it for me again, sweetheart. My God! I’ve got to get a camera.”

“You’re not scared? I never showed anyone else.”

“Of course I’m scared! I’m petrified. It’s wonderful. Why am I the only guy in the world who knows how sexy that is?” He laughed delightedly. “You blew my mind! Come and kiss me.”