Distraction

2

The scientist wore plaid bermuda shorts, a faded yel-low tank top, flip-flop sandals, and no hat. Oscar was prepared to tolerate their guide’s bare and bony legs, and even his fusty beard. But it was hard to take a man entirely seriously when he lacked a proper hat.

The beast in question was dark green, very fibrous, and hairy. This was a binturong, a mammal once native to Southeast Asia, long since extinct in the wild. This speci-men had been cloned on-site at the Buna National Col-laboratory. They’d grown it inside the altered womb of a domestic cow.

The cloned binturong was hanging from the underside of a park bench, clinging to the wooden slats. It was licking at paint chips, with a narrow, spotted tongue. The binturong was about the size of a well-stuffed golf bag.

“Your specimen is remarkably tame,” said Pelicanos politely, holding his hat in his hand.

The scientist shook his bearded head. “Oh, we never claim that we ‘tame’ animals here at the Collaboratory. He’s been de-feralized. But he’s not what you’d call friendly.”

The binturong detached itself from the bench slats and trundled through the lush grass on its bearlike paws. The beast examined Oscar’s leather shoes, lifted its pointed snout in disgust, and muttered like a maladjusted kettle. At such close and intimate range, the nature of the animal became more apparent to Oscar. A binturong was akin to a weasel. A large, tree-climbing wea-sel. With a hairy, prehensile tail. Also, it stank.

“We seem to be in the market for a binturong,” Oscar said, smiling. “Do you wrap them up in brown paper?”

“If you mean how do we get this sample specimen to your friend the Senator… well, we can do that through channels.”

Oscar arched his brows. “ ‘Channels’?”

“Channels, you know… Senator Dougal had his people han-dling that sort of thing…” Their guide trailed off, suddenly guilty and jittery, as if he’d drunk the last of the office coffee and neglected to change the pot. “Look, I’m just a lab guy, I don’t really know much about that. You should ask the people at Spinoffs.”

Oscar unfolded his laminated pocket map of the Buna National Collaboratory. “And where would ‘Spinoffs’ be?”

The guide tapped helpfully at Oscar’s plastic map. His hands were stained with chemicals and his callused thumb was a nice dull green. “Spinoffs was the building just on your left as you drove in through the main airlock.”

Oscar squinted at the map’s fine print. “The Archer Parr Memo-rial Competitive Enhancement Facility?”

“Yeah, that’s the place. Spinoffs.”

Oscar gazed upward, adjusting the brim of his hat against the Texas sun. A huge nexus of interlocking struts cut the sky overhead, like the exoskeleton of a monster diatom. The distant struts were great solid stony beams, holding greenhouse panes of plastic the size of hockey rinks. The federal lab had been funded, created, and built in an age when recombinant DNA had been considered as dangerous as nuclear power plants. The dome of the Buna National Collaboratory had been designed to survive tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, a saturation bombing. “I’ve never been in a sealed environment so large it required its own map,” Oscar said.

“You get used…,.to it.” Their guide shrugged. “You get used to the people who live in here, and even the cafeteria food… The Col-laboratory gets to be home, if you stay in here long enough.” Their guide scratched at his furry jaw. “Except for East Texas, outside the airlocks there. A lot of people never get used to East Texas.”

“We really appreciate your demoing the local livestock for us,” said Pelicanos. “It was good of you to spare us the time from your busy research schedule.”

The zoologist reached eagerly for his belt phone. “You want me to call back your little minder from Public Relations?”

“No,” said Oscar suavely, “since she was kind enough to pass us on to you, I think we’ll just make our own way around here from now on.”

The scientist brandished his antique and clunky federal-issue phone, which was covered with smudgy green thumbprints. “Do you need a lift to Spinoffs? I could call you a buggy.”

“We’ll stretch our legs a bit,” Pelicanos demurred.

“You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Parkash.” Oscar never forgot a name. There was no particular reason to remember the name of Dr. Averill Parkash, among the BNC’s two thousand federal researchers and their many assorted gofers, hucksters, krewepeople, and other associated hangers-on. Oscar knew, though, that he would soon accu-mulate the names, the faces, and the dossiers of no end of the local personnel. It was worse than a habit. He truly couldn’t help himself.

Their guide sidled backward toward the Animal Management Center, clearly eager to return to his cramped and spotty little office. Oscar waved a dismissal with a cheery smile.

Parkash tried a final yelp. “There’s a pretty good wine bar nearby! Across the road from Flux NMR and Instrumentation!”

“That’s great advice! We appreciate that! Thanks a lot!” Oscar turned on his heel and headed for a nearby wall of trees. Pelicanos quickly followed him.

Soon they were safely lost in the tall cover. Oscar and Pelicanos made their way along a crooked, squelchy, peat-moss path through a cut-and-paste jungle. The Collaboratory boasted huge botanical gar-dens — whole minor forests, really — of rare specimens. The threatened. The endangered. The all-but-technically extinct. Wildlife native to habitats long obliterated by climate change, rising seas, bulldozers, and the urban sprawl of 8.1 billion human beings.

The plants and animals were all clones. Deep in the bedrocked stronghold of the Collaboratory’s National Genome Preservation Center lurked tens of thousands of genetic samples, garnered from around the planet. The precious DNA was neatly racked in gleaming flasks of liquid nitrogen, secured in a bureaucratic maze of endless machine-carved limestone vaults.

It was considered wise to thaw out a few bits from the tissue samples every once in a while, and to use these bits to produce fullgrown organisms. This practice established that the genetic data was still viable. Generally, the resultant living creatures were also nicely photogenic. The clones were a useful public relations asset. Now that biotechnology had left the hermetic realm of the arcane to become standard everyday industries, the Collaboratory’s makeshift zoo was its best political showpiece.

The monster underground vaults were always first on the list for the victims of local tourism, but Oscar had found their Kafkaesque density oppressive. However, he found himself quite enjoying the lo-cal jungle. Genuine wilderness generally bored him, but there was something very modern and appealing about this rational, urbanized, pocket version of nature. The housebroken global greenery coruscated like Christmas trees with drip taps, sap samplers, and hormone squirt-ers. Trees and shrubs basked like drunken tourists in their own private grow lights.

According to their handy pocket maps, Oscar and Pelicanos were now in a mix-and-match jungle bordered by the Animal Engineering Lab, the Atmospheric Chemistry Lab, the Animal Management Cen-ter, and a very elaborate structure that was the Collaboratory’s garbage treatment plant. None of these rambling federal buildings were visible from within the potted forest-except, of course, for the brutal, for-tresslike towers of the Containment Facility. This gigantic Hot Zone was the massive central buttress for the Collaboratory’s dome. Its glazed cylindrical shoulders were always visible inside the dome, gleaming like a mighty acreage of fine china.

The probability of listening devices seemed rather low here in-side the mechanical forest. They could talk in confidence, if they kept moving.

“I thought we’d never lose that geek,” Pelicanos said.

“You have something you need to tell me, Yosh?”

Pelicanos sighed. “I want to know when we’re going home again.”

Oscar smiled. “We just got here. Don’t you like these Texas folks? They sure are mighty friendly.”

“Oscar, you brought twelve people in your entourage. The locals don’t even have the dorm rooms to put us up properly.”

“But I need twelve people. I need all of my krewe. I need to keep my options open here.”

Pelicanos grunted in surprise as a spined and cloven-hoofed beast — some kind of tapir, maybe? — scampered across their path. Rare beasts from aardwolves to zebu had the general run of the Col-laboratory. They were commonly sighted ambling harmlessly through the streets and gardens, like dope-stricken sacred cows.

“You arranged a few extras after the campaign,” Pelicanos said. “Well, Bambakias can certainly afford that, and they appreciate the gesture. But political campaigners are temp workers by nature. You just don’t need them anymore. You can’t need twelve people to put together a Senate committee report.”

“But they’re useful! Don’t you enjoy their services? We have a bus, a driver, our own security, we even have a masseuse! We’re living in high style. Besides, they might as well be washed up here in Won-derland as washed up anywhere else.”

“Those aren’t real answers.”

Oscar looked at him. “This isn’t like you, Yosh… You’re missing Sandra.”

“Yeah,” Pelicanos admitted. “I miss my wife.”

Oscar waved his hand airily. “So, then take a three-day weekend. Fly back to Beantown. You deserve that, we can afford it. Go see Sandra. See how she is.”

“All right. I guess I’ll do that. I’ll fly out and see Sandra.” And Pelicanos cheered up. Oscar saw his spirits lift; it came across the man in a little visible wave. Strange business, but Pelicanos had just become happy. Despite the stark fact that his wife was in a mental institution, and had been there for nine years.

Pelicanos was an excellent organizer, a fine accountant, a bookkeeper of near genius, and yet his personal life was an abysmal tragedy. Oscar found this intensely interesting. It appealed to the deepest ele-ment in Oscar, his ravenous curiosity about human beings and the tactics and strategies by which they could be coaxed and compelled to behave. Yosh Pelicanos made his way through his life seemingly just like any other man, and yet he always carried this secret half-ton bur-den on his shoulders. Pelicanos truly knew the meaning of devotion and loyalty.

Oscar himself had no particular acquaintance with either devo-tion or loyalty, but he’d trained himself to recognize these qualities in others. It was no accident that Pelicanos was Oscar’s oldest and lon-gest-lasting employee.

Pelicanos lowered his voice. “But before I go, Oscar, I need you to do me a little favor. I need you to tell me what you’re up to. Level with me.”

“You know that I always level with you, Yosh.”

“Well, try it one more time.”

“Very well.” Oscar walked beneath a tall green arch of pink-flowered pinnate fronds. “You see: here’s our situation. I enjoy poli-tics. The game seems to suit me.”

“That’s not news, boss.”

“You and I, we just ran our second political campaign, and we got our man elected Senator. That’s a big accomplishment. A federal Senate seat is the political big time, by anybody’s standard.”

“Yes it is. And?”

“And for all our pains, we’re back in the political wilderness again.” Oscar knocked a reeking branch from his jacket shoulder. “You think Mrs. Bambakias really wants some goddamn rare animal? I get a voice call at six in the morning, from the new chief of staff He tells me the Senator’s wife is very interested in my current assignment, and she would like to have her own exotic pet animal, please. But she doesn’t call me — and Bambakias doesn’t call me — Leon Sosik calls me.”

“Right.”

“The guy is sandbagging me.”

Pelicanos nodded sagely. “Look, Sosik knows full well that you want his job.”

“Yeah. He knows that. So he’s checking on me, to make sure I’m really out here doing my time in Backwater, Texas. And then he has the nerve to give me this little errand, to boot. It’s a no-lose proposition for Sosik. If I refuse him a favor, I’m being a jerk. If I blow it or get in trouble, then he runs me down for that. And if I succeed, then he takes my credit.”

“Sosik knows infighting. He’s spent years on the Hill. Sosik’s a professional. ”

“Yes, he is. And in his book, we’re just beginners. But we’re going to win this one anyway. You know how? It’s going to be just like the campaign was. “First, we’re going to lowball expectations, be-cause nobody will really believe that we have a serious chance here. But then we’re going to succeed on such a level — we’re going to exceed expectations to such a huge extent — we’re gonna bring so much firepower onto this campaign that we just blow the opposition away.”

Pelicanos smiled. “That’s you all over, Oscar.”

Oscar lifted one finger. “Here’s the plan. We find the major players here, and we find out what they want, and we cut deals. We get our people excited, and we get their people confused. And in the end, we just out-organize anyone who tries to stop us. We just out-work them, and we swarm on them from angles they would never expect, and we never, ever stop, and we just beat them into the ground!”

“Sounds like a big job.”

“Yes, it is, but I’ve brought enough people for a big job. They’ve proved they can work together politically. They’re creative, they’re clever, and every last one of them owes me a lot of favors. So you think I can get away with this?”

“You’re asking me?” Pelicanos said, spreading his hands. “Hell, Oscar, I’m always game. You know that.” And he permitted himself a merry little laugh.

The Collaboratory’s aging dorms offered sadly grim hospitality. Dorm space was in high demand, because the federal lab hosted end-less numbers of scholastic gypsies, contractors on the make, and vari-ous exotic species of para-scientific bureaucrats. The dorms were flimsy two-story structures, with common baths and common kitch-ens. The rooms had basic-brown federal pasteboard furniture, some scrappy little sheets and towels. The dorm’s card-swipe doorlocks ran off Collaboratory ID cards. Presumably, these smart cards and smart doorlocks compiled automatic dossiers of everyone’s daily ins and outs, for the benefit of the local security creeps.

There was no weather under the great lozenge-shaped dome. The entire gigantic structure was basically a monster intensive-care ward, all mobile shutters and glaring lights and vast air-sucking zeolite filters, with a constant thrum of deeply buried generators. The Col-laboratory’s biotech labs were constructed like forts. The personal residences, by stark contrast, lacked serious walls, roofs, or insulation. The flimsy dorms were small, tightly packed, and noisy.

So, for the sake of peace and quiet, Donna Nunez was doing her mending and darning on the wooden benches outside the Occupa-tional Safety building. Donna had brought her sewing basket and a selection of the krewe’s clothing. Oscar had brought along his laptop. He disliked working inside his dorm room, since he felt instinctive certainty that the place was bugged.

The Occupational Safety edifice was one of nine buildings on the central ring road circling the shiny china ramparts of the Hot Zone. The Hot Zone was surrounded by large pie-wedge plots of experimental gene-spliced crops: saltwater-sucking sorghum, and ram-paging rice, plus a few genetically bastardized blueberries. The circular fields were themselves surrounded by a little two-lane road. This ring road was the major traffic artery within the Collaboratory dome, so it was an excellent place to sit and observe the quaint customs of the locals.

“I really don’t mind a bit about those stinking, lousy dorm rooms,” Donna remarked sweetly. “It feels and smells so lovely under this big dome. We could live outside the buildings if we wanted. We could just wander around naked, like the animals.”

Donna reached out and patted an animal on the head. Oscar gave the creature a long look. The specimen stared back at him fearlessly, its bulging black eyes as blankly suggestive as a Ouija board. The de-feralization process, a spin-off of the Collaboratory’s flourishing neural research, had left all the local animals in some strangely altered state of liquid detachment.

This particular specimen looked as eager and healthy as a model on a cereal box; its tusks were caries-free, its spiky fur seemed moussed. Nevertheless, Oscar felt a very strong intuition that the ani-mal would take enormous pleasure in killing and eating him. This was the animal’s primary impulse in their brief relationship. Somehow, it had lost the will to follow through.

“Do you happen to know the name of this creature?” Oscar asked her.

Donna carefully stroked the animal’s long, wrinkled snout. It grunted in ecstasy and extruded a horrid gray tongue. “Maybe it’s a pig?”

“That’s not a pig.”

“Well, whatever it is, I think it likes me. It’s been following me around all morning. It’s cute, isn’t it? It’s ugly, but it’s cute-ugly…The animals here never hurt anyone. They did something weird to them. To their brains or something.”

“Oh yes.” Oscar tapped a key. In rapidity and silence, his laptop collated a huge series of Collaboratory purchase orders with five years’ worth of public-domain Texas arrest records. The results looked very intriguing.

“Are you going to get an exotic animal for Mrs. Bambakias?”

“After the weekend. Pelicanos is back in Boston,…Fontenot is out house hunting with Bob and Audrey … Right now, I’m just try-ing to get some of the local records in order.” Oscar shrugged.

“I liked her, you know? Mrs. Bambakias? I liked dressing her for the campaign. She was really elegant, and nice to me. I thought she might take me to Washington. But I just don’t fit in there.”

“Why not?” Oscar deftly twitched a fingertip and activated a search engine, which sought out a state-federal coordination center in Baton Rouge, and retrieved the records of recent pardons and grants of clemency issued by the Governor of Louisiana.

“Well… I’m too old, you know? I worked for a bank for twenty years. I didn’t start tailoring until after the hyperinflation.”

Oscar tagged four hits for further investigation. “I think you’re selling yourself short. I never heard Mrs. Bambakias mention your age. ”

Donna shook her graying head ruefully. “Young women nowadays, they’re much better at the new economy. They’re really trained for personal image services. They like being in a krewe; they like dressing the principal and doing her hair and her shoes. They make a real career of service work. Lorena Bambakias will want to entertain. She’ll need people who can dress her for Washington, for the Georgetown crowd.”

“But you dress us. Look at the way we dress compared to these local people.”

“You don’t understand,” Donna said patiently. “These scientists dress like slobs, because they can get away with that.”

Oscar examined a passing local, riding a bike with his shirt hang-ing out. He wore no socks and tattered shoes. No hat. His hair was dreadful. Noone could possibly dress that badly by accident.

“I take your point,” Oscar said.

Donna was in a confessional mood. Oscar had sensed this. He generally made it a point to appear in the lives of his entourage whenever they were confessing. “Life is so ironic,” Donna sighed, ironi-cally. “I used to hate it when my mother taught me how to sew. I went off to college, I never imagined I’d hand-make clothes as an image consultant. When I was young, nobody wanted handmade tailoring. My ex-husband would have laughed his head off if I’d made him a suit.”

“How is your ex-husband, Donna?”

“He still thinks real people work nine-to-five jobs. He’s an idiot.” She paused. “Also, he’s fired, and he’s broke.”

Men and women in white decontamination suits had appeared amid the genetically upgraded crops. They were wielding shiny alumi-num spray-wands, gleaming chromium shears, high-tech titanium hoes.

“I love it inside here,” Donna said. “The Senator was so sweet to dump us in here. It’s so much nicer than I thought it would be. The air smells so unusual, have you noticed that? I could live in a place like this, if there weren’t so many slobs in cutoffs.”

Oscar hotlinked back to the minutes of the Senate Science and Technology Committee for 2029. These sixteen-year-old volumes of committee minutes had the works on the original founding of the Buna National Collaboratory. Oscar felt quite sure that no one had closely examined these archives for ages. They were chock-full of hid-den pay dirt. “It was a hard-fought campaign. It’s right to relax for a while. You certainly deserve it,”

“Yeah, the campaign wore me out, but it was worth it. We really worked well together; we were well organized. You know, I love po-litical work. I’m an American female in the fifty-to-seventy demo-graphic, so life never made any sense to me. Nothing ever turned out the way I was taught to expect. Ever since the economy crashed and the nets ate up everything… But inside politics, it all feels so dif-ferent. I’m not just a straw in the wind. I really felt like I was changing the world, for once. Instead of the world changing me.”

Oscar bent a kindly gaze upon her. “You did a good job, Donna. You’re an asset. When you’re in close quarters like we were, under so much stress and pressure, it’s good to have a member of the team who’s so even-tempered, so levelheaded. Philosophical, even.” He smiled winningly.

“Why are you being so good to me, Oscar? Aren’t you about to fire me now?”

“Not at all! I want you to stay on with us. At least another month. I know that isn’t much to promise you, since a woman of your talents could easily find some more permanent position. But Fontenot will be staying on with us.”

“He will?” She blinked. “Why?”

“And of course Pelicanos and Lana Ramachandran and I will be plugging away … So there will be work for you here. Not like the campaign was, of course, nothing so intense or hectic, but proper image is still very important to us. Even here. Maybe especially here.”

“I might stay on with you awhile,” Donna said serenely, “but I wasn’t born yesterday. So you’d better tell me something better than that. ”

Oscar slapped his laptop shut, and stood up. “Donna, you’re right. We should talk seriously. Let’s go for a little stroll.”

Donna quickly closed her sewing basket and got to her feet.

She’d come to know Oscar’s basic routines, and was pleased to be out with him on one of his confidential walking conferences. Oscar was touched to see her being so streetwise — she kept glancing alertly over her shoulder, as if expecting to find them trailed by sinister operatives in black trench coats.

“You see, it’s like this,” Oscar told her soberly. “We won that election, and we won it walking away. But Alcott Bambakias is still a newcomer, a political outsider. Even after he’s sworn into office, he still won’t have much clout or credibility. He’s just the junior Senator from Massachusetts. He has to pick and choose the issues where he can make a difference.”

“Well, of course.”

“He’s an architect, a large-scale builder with a very innovative practice. So science and technology issues are naturals for him.” Oscar paused judiciously. “And, of course, urban development. But hous-ing’s not our problem at the moment.”

“This place is our problem.”

Oscar nodded. “Exactly. Donna, I know that working in a giant, airtight, gene-splicing lab might seem pretty mundane. Obviously this isn’t a plum Senate assignment, compared to the Dutch Cold War or those catastrophes out in the Rockies. But this is still a major federal installation. When this place started, it worked pretty well: a lot of basic advances in biotechnology, some good jump starts for American industry, especially next door in Louisiana. But those glory days were years ago, and now this place is a pork-barrel bonanza. Kickbacks, payoffs, sweetheart deals … I hardly know where to start.”

She looked pleased. “It sounds like you’ve already started.”

“Well… Officially, I’m here to work for the Senate Science Committee. I no longer have any formal ties to Bambakias. But the Senator has arranged that, deliberately. He knows that this place re-quires a serious shaking-up. So, our agenda here is to provide him with what he needs for a real reform effort. We’re laying the groundwork for his first legislative success.”

“I see.”

Oscar took her elbow politely as they sidestepped a passing okapi. “I’m not saying that the work will be easy. It could get ugly. There are a lot of vested interests here. Hidden agendas. Much more here than meets the eye. But if this were easy work, everybody would do it. Not people with our talents.”

“I’ll stay on.”

“Good! I’m glad.”

“I’m glad that you’re leveling with me, Oscar. And you know? I think I need to tell you this, right now. Your personal background problem — I just want you to know, that whole business never both-ered me. Not for one minute. I mean, I just thought the issue through, and then I put it right out of my mind.”

It seemed unlikely that anybody would be doing anything ambitious with the telephones in the children’s playground. So Fontenot had arranged for Oscar to take the Senator’s voice call there. Oscar watched a ragged pack of scientists’ children screaming like apes on the jungle gym.

Fontenot carefully hooked a Secret Service-approved encryptor to the wallphone’s candy-colored mouthpiece.

“You’ll notice a time lag,” Fontenot warned Oscar. “They’re doing traffic analysis countermeasures back in Boston.”

“What about the locals? Are they a monitoring threat?”

“Have you been to the police offices here?”

“Not yet, no.”

“I have. Maybe ten years ago they were still taking security seri-ously. Now you could knock this place over with a broomstick.” Fontenot hung the brightly colored handset in its plastic cradle, then turned and studied the capering children. Like their parents, they were bareheaded and shaggy and wore geekish, ill-fitting clothes. “Nice-looking kids.”

“Mmmrnh. ”

“Never had the proper time for little ones …” Fontenot’s hooded eyes were full of obscure distress.

The phone rang. Oscar answered it at once. “Yes?”

“Oscar. ”

Oscar straightened a little. “Yes, Senator.”

“Good to hear from you,” Bambakias announced. “Good to hear your voice. I sent you a few files a while ago, but that’s never the same, is it.”

“No, sir.”

“I want to thank you for bringing that Louisiana matter to my attention. Those tapes you sent.” Bambakias’s resonant voice glided upward into its podium pitch. “That roadblock. The Air Force. Amazing, Oscar. Outrageous!”

“Yes sir.”

“It’s a complete scandal! It beggars belief! Those are citizens serving in the uniform of the United States! Our own armed forces!” Bambakias drew a swift breath, and grew yet more intense and sono-rous. “How on earth can we expect to command the loyalties of the men and women who are sworn to defend our country, when we cynically use them as pawns in a cheap, sordid power struggle? We’ve literally abandoned them to starve to death, freezing in the dark!”

Fontenot had joined the children at the teeter-totter. Fontenot had shed his vest and hat and was cordially helping a squirming three-year-old onto the end of the board. “Senator, nobody starves nowa-days. With food as cheap as it is, that’s almost impossible. And they’re not likely to freeze here in the Deep South, either.”

“You’re evading my point. That base has no funding. It’s lost its legal standing. If you believe the Emergency budget committee, that Air Force base no longer even exists! They’ve simply been written out of the record. They’ve been turned into political nonpersons by a stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen!”

“Well, that’s certainly true.”

“Oscar, there is a major issue here. America’s had her ups and downs, nobody denies that, but we’re still a great power. No great power can treat its soldiers this way. I can’t recognize any extenuating circumstances for this. It’s absurd, it’s rank folly. What if this behavior spreads? Do we want the Army, the Navy, and the Marines shaking down the citizens — the voters — just so they can scratch up enough cash to live? That’s mutiny! It’s open banditry! It’s close to treason!”

Oscar turned from the shrieking children and cradled the phone at his ear. Oscar knew full well that roadblocks were a very common business. On any particular day, hordes of people blocked roads and streets all over the USA. Roadblocking was no longer considered “highway robbery,” it had become a generally tolerated form of civil disobedience. Roadblocking was just a real-world analog for the native troubles that had always existed on information highways: jamming, spamming, and denial of service. To have the Air Force getting into the act was just a somewhat exotic extension of a very common prac-tice.

But on the other hand, Bambakias’s rhetoric clearly had merit. It sounded very strong and punchy. It was clear, it was quotable. It was a bit far-fetched, but it was very patriotic. One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.

“Senator, there’s a great deal to what you say.”

“Thank you,” Bambakias said. “Of course, there’s nothing much we can do about this scandal, legislatively speaking. Since I’m not yet officially in office and won’t be sworn in until mid-January.”

“No?”

“No. So, I believe a moral gesture is necessary.”

“Aha.”

“At least — at the very least — I can demonstrate personal solidarity with the plight of our soldiers.”

“Yes?”

“Tomorrow morning, I’m holding a net conference here in Cambridge. Lorena and I are declaring a hunger strike. Until the United States Congress agrees to feed our men and women in uni-form, my wife and I will go hungry as well.”

“A hunger strike?” Oscar said. “That’s a very radical move for an elected federal official.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to lead any hunger strikes after I take office,” Bambakias said reasonably. He lowered his voice. “Listen, we think this is doable. We’ve discussed it at the Washington office and the Cambridge HQ. Lorena says that we’re both fat as hogs from six months of those campaign dinners. If this gambit is going to work at all, it might very well work right now.”

“Is it” — Oscar chose his words — “is it fully consonant with the dignity of the office?”

“Look, I never promised the voters dignity. I promised them results. Washington’s lost its grip, and everything they try just makes it worse. If I don’t seize the initiative from these sons of bitches on the Emergency committees, then I might as well declare myself a decora-tive bookend. That’s not why I wanted the job.”

“Yes sir,” Oscar said. “I know that.”

“There is a fallback option… If a hunger strike doesn’t get results, then we can start a convoy and lead our own rescue mission. We’ll ride down to Louisiana and feed that air base ourselves.”

“You mean,” Oscar said, “something like our campaign con-struction rallies.”

“Yes, except nationwide this time. Put the word out through the party apparatus and the net, organize our activists, and rally in Louisi-ana. Nationwide, Oscar. Rapid construction teams, disaster relief peo-ple, the grass-roots charities, pickets, marchers, full coverage. The works.”

“I like that,” Oscar said. “I like it a lot. It’s visionary.”

“I knew you’d appreciate that aspect. So you think it’s a credible fallback threat?”

“Oh yes,” Oscar said at once. “Sure. They know you can afford to do it. Of course a giant protest march is credible. A pro-military protest, that sounds great. But I do have a word of advice, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Naturally. ”

“The hunger strike is very dangerous. Dramatic moral gestures are very strong meat. They really bring out the sharks.”

“I realize that, and I’m not afraid of it.”

“Let me put it this way, Senator. You and your wife had better really starve.”

“That’s all right,” Bambakias said. “That’s doable. We’ve been hungry for years.”

Like most elements of modern American government, the Buna Na-tional Collaboratory was run by a committee. The source of local authority was a ten-person board, chaired by the Collaboratory’s Di-rector, Dr. Arno Felzian. The members of the board were the heads of the Collaboratory’s nine administrative divisions.

Sunshine laws required the board’s weekly meetings to take place publicly. The modern legal meaning of “public” meant camera cover-age on a net-accessible address. The older tradition of a public meet-ing still held true in Buna, though. Collaboratory workers often showed up in person for board meetings, especially if they expected to see some personal ox gored.

Oscar had chosen to physically attend all of the Collaboratory board meetings. He had no plans to formally announce himself, or to take any part in the committee’s business. He was attending strictly in order to be seen. To make sure that his ominous presence fully regis-tered, he brought with him his net administrator, Bob Argow, and his oppo researcher, Audrey Avizienis.

The board’s public studio was on the second floor of the Col-laboratory’s media center, across an open-air flywalk from the central administration building. The studio had been designed for public meetings back in 2030, with slanted racks of seats, decent acoustics, and nicely placed camera coverage.

But the Collaboratory’s local government had had a checkered history. The net-center had been looted and partially burned during the lab’s violent internal brawls of 2031. The damaged studio had naturally been somewhat neglected during the ensuing federal witch-hunts and the economic warfare scandals. It had crawled some dis-tance back toward respectable order and repair in 2037, when the Collaboratory had shored up its perennially crisis-stricken finances. Repair contractors had papered over the burn marks and spruced the place up somewhat. The place was a miniature jungle of attractive potted plants.

The board’s stage was fully functional, with sound baffles, over-head lighting, standard federal-issue table and chairs. The automatic cameras were in order. The board members were gamely plowing through the week’s agenda. The issue currently at hand was replacing the ailing plumbing system in one of the Collaboratory cafeterias. The head of the Contracts Procurements Division had the floor. He was mournfully reading a list of repair charges from a spreadsheet.

“I can’t believe it’s this bad,” Argow muttered.

Oscar deftly adjusted the screen of his laptop. “Bob, there’s something I need to show you.”

“This is just so impossibly awful.” Argow was ignoring him.

“Before I came here, I never really understood the damage we’ve done. The human race, I mean. The terrible harm we’ve done to our planet. Once you really think about it, it’s absolutely horrifying. Do you realize how many species have been killed off in the past fifty years? It’s just a total, epic catastrophe.”

Audrey leaned in over Oscar’s shoulder. “You promised you’d stop drinking, Bob.”

“I’m sober as a judge, you little shrew! While you’ve been sitting in the dorm with your nose in your screen, I’ve been touring the gardens here. With the giraffes. And the golden marmosets. All wiped out in a holocaust! We’ve poisoned the ocean, we’ve burned down and plowed the jungles, and we even screwed up the weather. All for the sake of modern life, right? Eight billion psychotic media-freaks!”

“Well,” sniffed Audrey, “you’re a fine one to talk on that score.” Argow flinched theatrically. “That’s right! Rub it in! Look, I know full well that I’m part of the problem. I’ve wasted my life run-ning networks, while the planet was destroyed all around me. Well, so have you, Audrey. We’re both guilty, but the difference is that I can recognize the truth now. The truth has really touched me. It’s touched me in here.” Argow pounded his bulky chest.

Audrey’s grainy voice grew silkier. “Well, I wouldn’t fret too much, Bob. You’re not good enough at your work to be any real menace.’

“Take it easy, Audrey,” Oscar said mildly.

Audrey Avizienis was a professional opposition researcher. Once roused, her critical faculties were lethal. “Look, we all came down here, and I’m doing my damn job. But laughing boy here is being a big, holier-than-thou, depressive bringdown. What, he thinks I can’t appreciate nature just because I spend a lot of time on the net? I know plenty about the birds and the bees, and the butterflies, and the cab-bages, and all the rest of that stuff”

“What I know,” Argow muttered, “is that the planet is coming apart, and we’re sitting in this stupid building with these hopeless bureaucratic morons dithering on and on about their sewage prob-lems.”

“Bob,” Oscar said calmly, “you’re missing something.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s every bit as bad as you say. It’s worse than you say. Much worse. But this is the biggest bio-research center in the world. These people in front of us — these are the people who are in charge of this place. So you’re at the front lines now. You’re guilty all right, but you’re nowhere near as guilty as you will be, if you don’t shape up. Because we are in power and you are the responsible party now.”

“Oh,” Argow said.

“So get a grip.” Oscar flipped back his laptop screen. “Now, take a look at this. You too, Audrey. You’re systems professionals, and I need your input here.”

Argow examined Oscar’s laptop screen, his owlish eyes glowing.

A lime-green plane with lumpy reddish mountains. “Uhm… yeah, I’ve seen those before. That’s a, uhm …”

“It’s an algorithmic landscape,” Audrey said intently. “A visual-ization map.”

“I just received this program from Leon Sosik,” Oscar said.

“This is Sosik’s simulation map for current public issues. These moun-tains and valleys, they’re supposed to model current political trends. Press coverage, the feedback from constituents, the movement of lob-bying funds, dozens’ of factors that Sosik fed into his simulator… But now watch this. See, I’m moving these close-up crosshairs … See that big yellow amoeba sitting on that purple blur? That is the current public position of Senator-elect Alcott Bambakias.”

“What,” Argow said skeptically, “he’s way down that slope?”

“No he’s not, not anymore. He’s actually moving up the slope…” Oscar double-clicked. “See, this huge khaki mountain range represents military affairs … Now I’ll kick the simulation back a week, and run it back up to the Bambakias press conference this morning… See the way he kind of oozes up to the issue, and then suddenly jets across the landscape?”

“Wow!” Audrey said. “I’ve always loved old-fashioned hotshot computer graphics.”

“It’s garbage,” Argow grumbled. “Just because you have a cute simulation doesn’t mean you’re actually connecting to political reality. Or to any kind of reality.”

“Okay, so it’s not real. I know it’s not real, that’s obvious. But what if it works?”

“Well,” Argow mused, “even that doesn’t help much. It’s just like stock-market analysis. Even if you get some technique that does work, that’s strictly temporary. Pretty soon everyone else gets the same analytical tools, and then your advantage disappears. You’re right back where you started. Except for one thing. From then on, every-thing becomes much, much more complicated.”

“Thanks for that technical insight, Bob. I’ll try to keep that in mind.” Oscar paused. “Audrey, why do you suppose Leon Sosik sent me this program?”

“I guess he appreciates the way you airmailed him that bin-turong,” Audrey said.

“Maybe he thought you’d be impressed by this,” Argow said. “Or maybe he’s so old and out-of-it that he really thinks this stuff is new.”

Oscar looked up from his laptop screen. The nine people on the soundstage had suddenly fallen silent. They were looking at him.

The Collaboratory’s Director and his nine functionaries seemed oddly spellbound for a moment. They formed a little Rem-brandtesque tableau under their media lighting. Oscar knew all their names — Oscar never forgot names — but for the moment he had men-tally labeled the nine local functionaries as “Administrative Support,” “Computing Communications,” “Contracts Procurement,” “Fi-nancial Services,” “Human Resources,” “Information Genetics,” “Instrumentation,” “Biomedicine,” and last but not least, the ditzy crew-cut thug from “Safety Security.” They had noticed him and — Oscar realized this suddenly — they were all afraid of him.

They knew that he had the power to do them harm. He had infiltrated their ivory tower and was judging their work. He was very new to them, he owed them nothing at all, and they were all guilty.

The stares of strangers never bothered Oscar. He had grown up in a celebrity childhood. Human attention fed something in Oscar, a deep dark psychic entity that thrived and grew with the feeding. He wasn’t cruel by nature — but he knew that there were moments in the game that required direct and primal acts of intimidation. One of those moments had just arrived. Oscar flicked his gaze upward from his laptop screen and he gave the people on the board his best — his lethal — I Know All look.

The Director flinched. He grappled for his agenda, and moved on to the pressing subject of quality assessment in the technology transfer office.

“Oscar,” Audrey whispered. Oscar leaned over casually. “Yes?”

“What’s going on? Why is Greta Penninger staring at you like that?”

Oscar glanced back up at the soundstage. He hadn’t noticed that “Instrumentation” was staring at him, and yet she clearly was. All of them had been staring at him, but Greta Penninger hadn’t stopped. Her pale and narrow face had an absent, intent cast, like a woman watching a wasp on a windowpane.

Oscar gazed back solemnly at Dr. Greta Penninger. Their eyes met. Dr. Penninger was chewing meditatively at the end of a pencil, gripping the yellow wood with her blue-knuckled, spidery, surgical fingers. She seemed to look right through him and five miles beyond. After a very long moment, she tucked the pencil in the dark pony tailed hair behind her ear, and returned her limpid gaze to her big paper notepad.

“Greta Penninger,” Oscar said thoughtfully.

“She’s really bored,” Argow offered.

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Because she’s a genuine scientist. She’s famous. This ad-ministrative crap is boring her to death. It’s boring me to death, and I don’t even work here.”

Audrey swiftly conjured Greta Penninger’s dossier onto her laptop. “I think she likes you.”

“Why do you say that?” Oscar said.

“She keeps looking your way and twisting her hair on her finger. I think I saw her lick her lips once.”

Oscar laughed quietly.

“Look, I’m not being funny. She’s not married, and you’re the new guy in town. Why shouldn’t she be interested? I know I would be.” Audrey paged a little deeper into her file of oppo data. “She’s only thirty-six, you know. She doesn’t look that bad.”

“She does look bad,” Argow assured her. “Worse than you think.”

“No, she could look okay if she tried. Her face is kind of lop-sided, and she doesn’t do her hair,” Audrey noted clinically. “But she’s tall and she’s thin. She could carry clothes. Donna could make her look good.”

“I don’t think Donna wants to work that hard,” Argow ob-jected.

“I have a girlfriend already, thank you,” Oscar said. “But since you’ve got your screen up: what exactly does Dr. Penninger do?”

“She’s a neurologist. A systemic zoo-neurologist. She won a big award once for something called ‘Radioligand Pharmacokinetics.’ ”

“So she’s still a working researcher?” said Oscar. “How long has she been in administration?”

“I’ll check,” Audrey said readily, tapping keys. “She’s been here in Buna for six years… Six years working inside this place, can you imagine that? No wonder she looks so fidgety … According to this, she’s been the head of the Instrumentation Division for four months.”

“Then she is bored,” Oscar said. “She’s bored by her job. That’s very interesting. Make a note of that, Audrey.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Let’s have her for dinner.”

Oscar had arranged a bus outing, a picnic for part of his krewe. It helped to maintain the thin fiction of “vacation,” and it got them away from the fog of mechanical surveillance, and best of all, it offered some relief from the psychic oppression of the Collaboratory dome.

They took the campaign bus to a roadside stop near a bedraggled state park called Big Thicket. This Thicket was a surprisingly large area of Texas that had somehow escaped farming and settlement. It didn’t seem entirely right to call the place an “unspoiled wilderness,” since climate change had battered it considerably; but for people from Massachusetts the Texas-sized mess was a pleasing novelty.

The day was overcast and damp, even a little raw, but it was pleasant to encounter weather of any sort. The gusting wind through the Thicket park wasn’t “fresh air” exactly — the air of East Texas was considerably less fresh than the manicured air inside the Col-laboratory — but it had a wide-screen smell, the reek of a world that possessed horizons. Besides, the picnickers had Fontenot’s big portable gas stove to keep them warm. Fontenot had just bought the stove, well used, from the proprietor of a Cajun boucherie in Mamou. The stove was made of disassembled oil barrels, heat-scorched tin sheeting, and brass-nozzled propane burners. It looked as if it had been welded into shape by Mardi Gras drunks.

It was good to chat and make a few unsupervised phone calls, well outside of the Collaboratory. Bugs were so cheap these days — when cellphones cost less than a six-pack of beer, covert listening devices were as cheap as confetti. But a cheap bug wouldn’t be able to radiate data sixty miles back to Buna. An expensive bug would be caught by Fontenot’s expensive monitors. This meant that everyone could talk.

“So, how’s the new house doing, Jules?”

“Coming along, coming along,” Fontenot said contentedly. “You should come see my place. We’ll take out my brand-new boat. Have us a good old time.”

“I’d enjoy that,” Oscar lied tactfully.

Fontenot dumped chopped basil and onion into his simmering roux, then went after the sizzling mess with a wire whisk. “Y’all mind opening that ice chest?”

Oscar rose from the chest and opened its insulated lid. “What do you need?”

“Those eishters.”

“The what?”

“Aishters. ”

“What?”

“He means the oysters,” said Negi Estabrook.

“Right,” said Oscar. He located an iced bag of shellfish.

“You brang that to a rollin’ boil now,” Fontenot advised Negi, in his broadest and most magisterial Cajun drawl. “A little dab more of that pepper sauce. It’ll forgive as it come along.”

“I can make a soup, Jules,” Negi announced tautly. “I have a degree in nutrition.”

“Not a Cajun soup, girl.”

“Cajun is not a difficult cuisine,” said Negi patiently. Negi was sixty years old, and Fontenot was the only member of the krewe who would dare to call her “girl.” “Basically, Cajun is very old-fashioned French peasant cooking. With way too much pepper. And lard. Tons of unhealthy lard.”

Fontenot pulled a face. “Y’all hear that? She does that on pur-pose just to hurt my feelings.”

Negi laughed. “As if!”

“You know,” Oscar said, “I had a good idea recently.”

“Do tell,” said Fontenot.

“Our dorm situation inside the Collaboratory is clearly untena-ble. And the town of Buna can’t put us up properly, either. Buna’s never been a proper city: it’s greenhouses, florists, seedy little motels, some run-down light industry. The town just doesn’t have a proper place for us to stay; a place where we could entertain a visiting Senate committee, for instance. So, let’s build our own hotel.”

Fred Dillen, the krewe’s laundryman/janitor, put down his beer.

“Our own hotel?”

“Why not? We’ve relaxed in Buna for two whole weeks now. We have our breath back. It’s time for us to reorganize and really make our mark around here. We can create a hotel. That’s definitely within our means and abilities. After all, that was always our best campaign tactic. The other candidates would throw rallies and photo ops, and try to work the media. But Alcott Bambakias could bring a campaign crowd together and assemble permanent housing.”

“You mean we build a hotel for profit?” Fred said.

“Well, for our own convenience mostly, but yes, for profit, of course. We can get the design plans and software from Barnbakias’s firm. We can certainly build the structure ourselves, and best of all, we actually have the skills it requires to successfully run a hotel. A traveling political campaign is basically a mobile hotel, when you think about it. But in this case, we stay in one place, while the crowds will come to us. And then they pay us.”

“Man,” Fred said. “What a weird inside-out way to think …”

“I think it’s doable. You can all play the same roles that you did during the campaign. Negi, you can run the kitchen. Fred, you can handle the laundry and the rooms. Corky does guest relations and works the front desk. Rebecca does physical security and the occa-sional massage. Everybody pitches in, and if we need them, we can take on some temp gofers locally. And we make money.”

“How much money?”

“Oh, the top end of the market should be pretty generous. I’ve seen millionaire contractors inside the Collaboratory, crammed in right next door to postdocs and grad students. That’s just not natu-ral. ”

“Not nowadays,” Negi admitted.

“It’s a good market window. Yosh will put together our finance package. Lana will deal with local zoning and the Buna city authori-ties. We’ll front it all through a Boston corporation to sidestep any conflict-of-interest hassles. And when we’re done here, we just sell the hotel. In the meantime, we have a decent place to live and a revenue stream.”

“You know,” said Ando “Corky” Shoeki, “I saw that done ten times. I helped to do it, even. But I still can’t get used to the concept. I mean, that big crowds of unskilled people can construct permanent housing.”

“I agree, distributed instantiation still has some shock value. It’s made Bambakias very rich, but it’s still a novelty down here. I like the idea of doing that work in East Texas. It’ll show these local yokels what we’re made of”

“Y’know,” Fred said slowly, “I’m trying really hard, but I can’t think of any good reason not to do what Oscar says.”

“You’re all clever people,” Oscar said. “Find me some reason why it can’t be done.” He ducked back into the bus, to let them argue about it. Spelling it all out for them in black and white would only spoil their fun.

He hung his hat inside the bus. “So, Moira,” he said, “how’s the cause cйlиbre coming?”

“Oh, it’s great,” said Moira, spinning in her chair. Moira had been looking much better since the Senator’s hunger strike had started. Moira’s soul waxed and waned with the tides of media expo-sure. “The Senator’s positives are through the roof Seventy percent, seventy-five. And the rest is real mushy, mostly undecideds!”

“Phenomenal.”

“Putting Alcott’s blood sugar levels onto the net — that was bril-liant. People are logging on around the clock just to watch him starve! Lorena, too. Lorena has massive female positives. She’s been on ten glamour sites since Wednesday. They love her bread and water diet, they just can’t get enough of her!”

“How about the situation on the ground? The Emergency com-mittees, have they done anything useful about that Air Force base yet?”

“Oh,” Moira said, “I haven’t quite gotten around to that part… I, uh, thought Audrey was gonna handle that.”

Oscar grunted. “Okay.”

Moira touched her fingertips to her powdered chin. “Al-cott … he’s just so special. I’ve seen him give so many speeches, but that stand-up he just did with the hospital pajamas and the apple juice … It was just ninety seconds, but it was drama, it’s real con-frontation, it’s just pure gold. The standard site coverage wasn’t so hot at first, but the chat swaps and the downloads have been huge. Alcott’s coming up way behind ideological lines. He never used to get positives out of the Right Tradition Bloc, but even they are coming around now. You know, if Wyoming weren’t on fire right now, I really think this would be the political story. For this week, anyway.”

“How is that Wyoming thing shaping up, by the way?”

“Oh, the fire’s a lot worse now. The President’s there.”

“The old guy, or Two Feathers?”

“Two Feathers of course. Nobody cares about the old guy anymore, he’s finished, he’s just the duck now. I know Two Feathers hasn’t been sworn in yet, but people depreciate the post-election hang-time. People want in ahead of the curve.”

“Right,” said Oscar shortly. She was telling him the obvious.

“Oscar …” Moira looked at him with naked appeal. “Should I ask him to take me to Washington?”

Oscar silently spread his hands.

“He needs me. He’ll need someone to speak for him.”

“That’s not my decision, Moira. You need to take it up with his chief of staff”

“Can you put in a good word for me with Leon Sosik? Sosik seems to like you so much.”

“Let me get back to you on that,” Oscar said.

The bus door banged open. Norman-the-Intern stuck his tou-sled head inside and yelled, “We’re eating!”

“Oh, great!” said Moira, leaping from her chair. “Weird Cajun seafood, good good good!”

Oscar put on his hat and jacket and followed her outside. With a flourish, Fontenot was spooning great ladles of swimming brown murk. Oscar brought up the end of the line. He accepted a quilt-paper bowl and a biodegradable spoon.

Oscar gazed at his hot oily gumbo and thought mournfully of Bambakias. The Cambridge PR team had certainly done a thorough job surveilling the fasting Senator: blood pressure, heartbeat, tempera-ture, calorie consumption, borborygmus, bile production — there was no possible doubt about the raw authenticity of his hunger strike. The man’s entire corpus had become public domain. Whenever Bambakias had a sip of his famine apple juice, a forest of monitors twitched and heaved across the country.

Oscar followed them to a picnic table and sat down next to Negi. He examined his brimming spoon. He had seriously considered not eating this evening. That would be a very decent gesture. Well, let someone else make it.

“Angioplasty in a bowl,” Negi said blissfully.

Oscar sipped from his spoon. “Well worth dying for,” he nodded.

“I’m so old,” Negi mourned, blowing on her soup. “Back when I had tatts and piercings, people got on your case if you ate fats and drank yourself stupid. Of course, that was before they found out the full awful truth about pseudo-estrogen poisoning.”

“Well,” Oscar said companionably, “at least those massive pesti-cide disasters got us off the hook with that diet and exercise non-sense. ”

“Pass the bread, Norman,” Rebecca said. “Is that real butter? Real old-fashioned tub butter? Wow!”

A light aircraft flew overhead. Its tiny engine puttered energeti-cally, like fingernails tapping a snare drum. The aircraft seemed appall-ingly flimsy. With its eerie, computer-designed lifting surfaces, it resembled a child’s paper toy: something made with pinking shears, popsicle sticks, and tape. The wing edges trailed off into feathery rib-bons and long tattered kite tails. It seemed to be staying aloft through sheer force of will.

Then three similar aircraft appeared, skidding and puttering just above the treetops. They flew like fishing lures tempting a trout. Their pilots were gloved and goggled and bulky, so wrapped in their padding that they resembled human bales of burlap.

One of the pilots detached himself from formation, settled down like a falling leaf, and gently circled the roadside bus. It was like being buzzed by a hay bale. Everyone looked up from their food and waved politely. The pilot waved back, mimicked eating with one gauntlet, and headed east.

“Airborne nomads,” Fontenot said, squinting. “They’re heading east,” Oscar noted.

“Green Huey’s very tight with the leisure unions.” Fontenot shoved his bowl aside, rose deliberately, and went into the bus to see to his machines. He had the face he wore when he meant business.

Oscar’s krewe returned to their food. They ate silently now and with more purpose. No one had to remark on the obvious: that there would soon be more nomads arriving.

Fontenot emerged from the bus, where he had been checking road reports. “We may have to move soon,” Fontenot said. “The Regulators have been rallying at the Alabama-Coushatta reservation, and their rally is coming through now. These local proles, they aren’t tame.”

“Well, we’re strangers here too, you know,” Negi said. Negi had spent time on the road, back in the old days when homeless people didn’t have cellphones and laptops.

Two nomad scouts arrived ten minutes later, in a motorcycle and sidecar. They were dressed for winter. They wore wraparound kilts, striped ponchos, and huge coarse cloaks beautifully embroidered with old twentieth-century corporate logos. Their skin gleamed with a thick layer of wind-resistant, insulating grease. They had dipped their legs up to mid-calf in a plastic bootlike substance with the look and sheen of vinyl.

The scouts pulled over, dismounted, and walked over. They were silent and proud, and carrying cellular videocams. The driver was chewing on a large square chunk of artificial food, like a green butter stick of compressed alfalfa.

Oscar beckoned them over. It transpired that these nomads were not, in fact, the legendary Regulators. These were Texan road drifters, far less advanced in their peculiar ways than the proles of Louisiana. These people spoke only Spanish. Oscar’s childhood Spanish was worse than rusty, and Donna Nunez wasn’t around, but Rebecca Pataki had a smattering.

The nomads politely complimented them on their bus. They offered square sticks of veggie greenery. Oscar and Rebecca politely declined the nomad silage and counteroffered some oyster gumbo. The nomads carefully gulped down the last of the hot stew, comment-ing at length on the flavor. As the animal fats hit their bloodstreams, they became less suspicious. They inquired nonchalantly about the possible availability of scrap metal: nails, metal, copper? Corky Shoeki, who was the camp majordomo and recycling expert, obliged with some empty cans from the bus.

Oscar was deeply bothered by their nomad laptops. They were using nonstandard keyboards, boards where QWERTYUIOP had been junked and the letters redesigned for efficient typing. The wretches didn’t even type like normal people. Somehow this bothered him far more than the fact that these particular nomads were Mexican illegals.

Moving as if they had all the time in the world, because they did, the two men drove off. Suddenly there was very little traffic on the highway. People had gotten wind of the oncoming movement of the Regulator horde, and were already avoiding the roads. Two police cars passed, lights flashing silently. The nomad tribes weren’t afraid of local police. There were far too many of them to safely arrest, and in any case, the proles had their own police.

The first fringe of the Regulator convoy arrived. Plastic trucks and buses cruising by at maybe thirty miles an hour, sipping fuel and saving wear on their engines. Then came the core of the operation, the nomad technical base. Flatbed trucks and tankers, loaded with harvesting equipment, pillers, crushers, welders, rollers, fermenting pans, pipes, and valves. They lived on grass, they lived off roadside weeds and cultured yeast. Women wearing skirts, shawls, veils. Swarms of young children, their vibrant little bodies saturated with mul-ticolored beads and handmade quillwork.

Oscar was entranced by the spectacle. These weren’t the low-key dropouts of the Northeast, people who managed on cheap food and public assistance. These were people who had rallied in a horde and marched right off the map. They had tired of a system that offered them nothing, so they had simply invented their own.

The krewe cleaned up their picnic. Fontenot set to work, finding a route back to the Collaboratory that would avoid the migrating swarm. Fontenot would escort them there, towing his battered Cajun stove behind his electric hummer. Even when engulfed by a horde of Regulators, they should be safe enough, locked in the metal shell of their campaign bus. Though the situation was unlikely, they would probably simply blend in.

Oscar’s phone suddenly emitted a personal ring. “Oh, Oscar,” Rebecca teased him. “There’s that sparky phone again.”

“I’ve been expecting this call,” said Oscar. “Excuse me.” He stepped around the back of the bus as the others continued to pack.

It was his girlfriend, Clare, back in Boston. “How are you, Os-car?”

“Fine. It’s going pretty well down here, all things considered. Very interesting. How’s life at the homestead? I miss you.”

“Your house is fine,” Clare said. Too quickly.

A hairline fracture shot through him. Don’t get anxious, he thought. Don’t think too fast. This isn’t one of the other ones, this is Clare. This is Clare, this is doable.

Oscar wanted direly to confront the source of trouble. That would be very stupid. Work around it. Let her open up first. Be funny, be charming. Make some light conversation. Find a neutral topic. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of one.

“We’ve been having a picnic,” he blurted.

“That sounds lovely. I wish I were there.”

“I wish you were, too,” he said. Inspiration struck him. “How about it? Can you fly down? We have some plans here, you’d be interested. ”

“I can’t go to Texas now.”

“You’ve heard about the Louisiana air base situation, right? The Senator’s hunger strike. I’ve got very good sources here. It’s a solid story, you could fly down, you could cover the local angle.”

“I think your friend Sosik’s got that story sewn up already,” Clare said. “I’m not doing Boston politics. Not anymore.”

“What?” He was stunned. “Why not?”

“The net’s reassigned me. They want me to go to Holland.”

“Holland? What did you tell them?”

“Oscar, I’m a political journalist. How could I not do The Hague? It’s the Cold War, it’s a dream gig. This is a big break for me, my biggest career break ever.”

“Well, how long is your assignment overseas?”

“Well, that depends on how well I do at the job.”

Oscar’s brain began to hum. “I can appreciate that. Of course you want to do well. But still… the diplomatic situation… the Dutch are so provocative. They’re very radical.”

“Of course they’re radical, Oscar. Their country is drowning. We’d be extremists too, if most of America was below sea level. The Dutch have got so much to lose, they’ve really got their backs against the dikes. That’s why they’re so interesting now.”

“You don’t even speak Dutch.”

“They all speak English there, you know.”

“The Dutch are militant. They’re dangerous. They make crazy demands from Americans, they really resent us.”

“I’m a reporter, Oscar. I’m not supposed to scare easily.”

“So you’re really going to do it,” Oscar concluded leadenly. “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to put it that way …”

Oscar gazed emptily at the back of the bus. The blank shell of the bus suddenly struck him as an alien and horrible thing. It had stolen him from his home and the woman in his bedroom. The cam-paign bus had kidnapped him. He turned his back on the bus and began walking with his phone, randomly, toward the tangled Texan woods. “No,” he said. “I know. It’s the work. It’s our careers. I did it first. I took on a big job, and I left you. Didn’t I? I left you alone, and I’m still gone. I’m far away, and I don’t know when I’ll come back.”

“Well,” she said, “you said it, not me. But that’s very true.”

“So I really have no business finding fault with you. If I did, I’d be a hypocrite, wouldn’t I? We both knew this might happen. It was never a commitment.”

“Tha t’ s right.”

“It was a relationship.”

“I liked the relationship.”

“It was good, wasn’t it? It was very good, for what it was.”

Clare sighed. “No, Oscar, I can’t let you say that. Don’t say that, it wouldn’t be fair. It was better than good. It was great, it was totally ideal. I mean, you were such a great source for me. You never tried to spin my stories, and you hardly ever lied. You let me live in your house. You introduced me to all your rich and influential friends. You supported my career. You never yelled at me. You were a real gen-tleman. Brilliant. A dream boyfriend.”

“You’re being so sweet.” He could feel himself hemorrhage.

“I’m really sorry that I was never able to… you know… quite get over your personal background thing.”

“No,” Oscar said bitterly, “I’m very used to that.”

“It’s just — it’s just one of those permanent tragedies. Like, you know, my own troubled minority background.”

Oscar sighed. “Clare, I don’t think anybody really holds it against you that you’re a white Anglo-Saxon.”

“No, life is hard in a racial minority. It just is. I mean, you of all people ought to have some feeling for what that really means. I know you can’t help the way you were born, but still … I mean, that’s one of the real reasons I want to do this Dutch assignment. There’s been so much white flight from America back into Europe… My people are there, you know? My roots are there. I think it might help me, somehow.”

Oscar was finding it hard to breathe.

“I feel bad about this, sweetheart, like I’ve really let you down.”

“No, this is better,” Oscar said. “It hurts a lot, but it hurts less than dragging it on and keeping up a false pretense. Let’s part as friends.”

“I might be back, you know. You don’t have to be all hasty like that. You don’t have to turn on a dime. Because it’s just me, your pal Clare, you know? It’s not like an executive decision.”

“Let’s have a clean break,” he said firmly. “It’s best for us. For both of us.”

“All right. If you’re sure, then I guess I understand. Good-bye, Oscar.”

“It’s over, Clare. Good-bye.” He hung up. Then he threw the phone into the trees.

“Nothing works,” he told the red dirt and gray sky. “I can’t ever make anything work!”