Distraction

3

Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-scanner over the block, activating the tape. It was close to one in the morning. The wind out of the tall black pines was damp and nasty, but he was working hard and the weather felt bleakly appropriate.

“I’m a cornerstone,” the cinder block announced. “Good for you,” Oscar grunted.

“I’m a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left.” Oscar ignored this demand, and swiftly taped six more blocks. He whipped the scanner across each of them, then pulled the last block aside to get at the next level in the stack.

As he set his gloved hands to it, the last block warned him, “Don’t install me yet. Install that cornerstone first.”

“Sure,” Oscar told it. The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn’t hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape’s thumbnail-sized speak-ers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt.

Bambakias had created this construction system. Like all of the architect’s brainchildren, his system was very functional, yet rife with idiosyncratic grace-notes. Oscar had full confidence in the system, a pragmatic faith won from much hands-on experience. Oscar had la-bored like a mule in many Bambakias construction sites. No one ever won the trust of Alcott Bambakias, or joined his inner circle, without a great deal of merciless grunt work.

Heavy labor was the heart and soul of the Bambakias intellectual salon. W. Alcott Bambakias had quite a number of unorthodox be-liefs, but chief among them was his deep conviction that sycophants and rip-off artists always tired easily. Bambakias, like many members of the modern overclass, was always ready with an openhearted ges-ture, a highly public flinging of golden ducats. His largesse naturally attracted parasites, but he rid himself of “the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots,” as he insisted on calling them, by demanding fre-quent stints of brute physical work. “It’ll be fun,” Bambakias would announce, rolling up his tailored sleeves and grinning fiercely. “We’ll get results.”

Bambakias was no day laborer. He was a wealthy sophisticate, and his wife was a noted art collector. It was for exactly those reasons that the couple took such perverse pleasure in publicly raising blisters, straining tendons, and sweating like hogs. The architect’s ruggedly handsome face would light up with hundred-watt noblesse oblige as he chugged away in his faux blue-collar overalls and back brace. His elegant wife took clear masochistic pleasure in hauling construction equipment, her chiseled features set with the grim commitment of a supermodel pumping iron.

Oscar himself had grown up in Hollywood. He’d never minded the poseur elements in the Bambakias couple. The trademark hat-and-cape ensemble, the hand-tailored couture gowns, the glam-struck Boston charity events — Oscar found this sort of thing reassuringly homey. In any case, the construction system made it all worthwhile. There was no pretense to the system — no question that it worked. Any number could play. It was a system that could find a working role for anyone. It was both a network and a way of life, flowing from its basis in digital communication and design into the rock-hard emer-gent reality of walls and floors. There was a genuine comfort in work-ing within a system like this one, because it always kept its promises, it always brought results.

This Texan hotel, for instance, was an entirely virtual construc-tion, ones and zeros embedded in a set of chips. And yet, the hotel direly wanted to exist. It would become very beautiful, and it was already very smart. It could sweet-talk itself into physical existence from random piles of raw material. It would be a good hotel. It would brighten the neighborhood and enhance the city. It would keep the wind and rain off. People would dwell in it.

Oscar lugged the self-declared cornerstone to the corner of the southern wall. “I belong here,” the cornerstone declared. “Put mortar on me.”

Oscar picked up a trowel. “I’m the tool for the mortar,” the little trowel squeaked cheerfully. Oscar put the trowel to use and slathered up a grainy wedge of thick gray paste. This polymer goo was not actually “mortar,” but it was just as cheap as traditional mortar, and it worked much better, so it had naturally stolen the word from the original substance.

Oscar hefted the cinder block to the top of the hip-high wall.

“To the right,” urged the block. “To the right, to the right, to the right… To the left… Move me backward… Twist me, twist me, twist me … Good! Now scan me.”

Oscar lifted the scanner on its lanyard and played it across the block. The scanner logged and correlated the block’s exact locale, and beeped with satisfaction.

Oscar had been installing blocks for two solid hours. He had simply walked onto the site in the middle of the night, logged on, booted the system, and started off where the krewe had stopped with darkness.

This particular wall could not rise much higher. All too soon it would be time to work on the plumbing. Oscar hated the plumbing, always the most troublesome construction element. Plumbing was a very old technology, not so plug-and-play, never so slick and easy as the flow of computation. Plumbing mistakes were permanent and ugly. When the plumbing’s time had come, the Bambakias construc-tion system would wisely balk. All higher function ceased until people came to terms with the pipes.

Oscar removed his hard hat and pressed his chilly ears with his work-gloved hands. His spine and shoulders told him that he would regret this in the morning. At least it would be a new set of regrets.

Oscar stepped under a paraboloid construction light, to search for the shipping boxes full of plumbing supplies. The nearest light smartly rotated on its tall pole to follow Oscar’s footsteps. Oscar stepped up onto a monster spool of cable for an overview.

The cone of light rose with him and flew across the trampled winter grass. Oscar suddenly caught sight of a stranger, wrapped in a baggy jacket and a woolen hat. The stranger was lurking outside the plastic orange safety fence, standing on the broken sidewalk, under a pine.

Bambakias construction sites always attracted gawkers. But very few construction gawkers would lurk in cold and darkness at one in the morning. Still, even little Buna had a nightlife. Presumably the guy was just drunk.

Oscar cupped his gloved hands to his mouth. “Would you like to help?” This was a standard invitation at any Bambakias site. It was very much part of the game. It was surprising just how many selfless, ener-getic volunteers had been permanently lured into the Bambakias krewe through this gambit.

The stranger stepped awkwardly through a gap in the orange netting, walking into Oscar’s arc-light.

“Welcome to the site of our future hotel! Have you been to our site before?”

Silent shake of the woolly head.

Oscar climbed down from the spool. He retrieved a box of vacuum-wrapped gloves and carried it over. “Try these.”

The stranger — a woman — pulled bare, spidery hands from the pockets of her coat. Oscar, startled, looked up from her fingers to her shadowed face. “Dr. Penninger! Good morning.”

“Mr. Valparaiso.”

Oscar fetched out a pair of ductile extra-large, their floppy plastic fingers studded with grip-dots. He hadn’t expected any company on the site tonight, much less a ranking member of the Collaboratory’s board. He was taken aback to encounter Greta Penninger under these circumstances, but there was no sense in hesitating now. “Please try these gloves on, Doctor… You see that yellow ridge of tape across the knuckles? Those are embedded locators, so our construction sys-tem will always know the position of your hands.”

Dr. Penninger tugged the gloves on, twisting her narrow wrists like a surgeon washing up.

“You’ll need a hard hat, a back brace, and some shoe cap. Knee guards are a good idea, too. I’ll log you into our system now, if that’s all right.”

Searching through the krewe’s piled supplies in the gloom, Oscar dug up a spare hard hat and some velcro-strapped toe-protectors. Greta Penninger strapped on her construction gear without a word.

“That’s good,” Oscar said. He handed her a pencil-shaped hand-scanner on its plastic lanyard. “Now, Doctor, let me acquaint you with our design philosophy here. You see, at heart, our system’s very flexible and simple. The computer always knows the location of every component that’s been tagged and initialized. The system also has complete algorithms for assembling the building from simple compo-nent parts. There are millions of possible ways of getting from start to finish, so it’s just a question of coordinating all the efforts, and always keeping track. Thanks to distributed, parallel, assembly process-ing…”

“Never mind, I get all that. I was watching you.”

“Oh.” Oscar jammed his spiel back into its can. He tipped up his plastic hard-hat brim and looked her over. She wasn’t kidding. “Well, you do the mortar, and I’ll carry blocks. Can you do mortar?”

“I can do mortar.”

Dr. Penninger began carefully lathering goo with the garrulous trowel. The components chattered on cheerfully, Dr. Penninger said nothing at all, and the pace of Oscar’s work more than doubled. Dr. Penninger was really going after it. It was the middle of the night, it was lonely, desolate, windy, and near freezing, and this scientist really meant business. She worked like a horse. Like a demon.

Curiosity got the best of him. “Why did you come here at this time of night?”

Dr. Penninger straightened, her trowel clutched in her dotted glove. “This is my only free time. I’m always in my lab till midnight.”

“I see. Well, I really appreciate your visit. You’re a very good worker. Thanks for the help.”

“You’re welcome.” She glanced at him searchingly across the airy pool of glare. It might have been a piquant glance if he had found her attractive.

“You should visit us in daylight, when we have the full krewe at work. It’s the coordination of elements, the teamwork, that’s the key to distributed instantiation. The structure simply flies up all at once sometimes, as if it were crystallizing. That’s well worth watch-ing.”

She touched her gloved hand to her chin and examined the block wall. “Shouldn’t we do some plumbing now?”

Oscar was surprised. “How long have you been watching me?” Her shoulders lifted briefly within the baggy jacket. “The plumbing is obvious.” Oscar realized that he had disappointed her. She had hoped that he was smarter than that.

“Time for a break,” he announced. Oscar knew that he lacked the searingly high IQ of Greta Penninger. He’d examined her career stats-of course-and Dr. Greta Penninger had always been a compul-sive, overachieving, first-in-her-class techie swot. Still, there was more than one kind of smarts in the world. He felt quite sure he could distract her if he simply kept changing the subject.

He walked inside the jagged circuit of raw cinder-block walls, where a fire burned in an old iron barrel under a spread of plastic awning. His back hurt like a toothache. He had really overdone it. “Cajun beef jerky? The krewe really dotes on this stuff.”

“Sure. Why not.”

Oscar handed over a strip of lethally spiced meat, and ripped into another blackened chunk with his teeth. He waved one hand. “The site looks very chaotic now, but try to imagine this all assembled and complete. ”

“Yes, I can visualize that… I never realized your hotel was going to be so elegant. I thought it was prefabricated.”

“Oh, it is prefabricated. But the plans are always adjusted by the system to fit the exact specifics of the site. So the final structure is always an original. That pile of cantilevers there, those will go over the porte cochere… The patio will be here where we’re standing, and just beyond that entrance loggia is the pergola… Those long dual wings have the guest rooms and the diner, while the upper floor has our library, the various balconies, and the conservatory.” Oscar smiled. “So, when we’re all finished, I hope you’ll visit us here. Rent a suite. Stay awhile. Have a nice dinner.”

“I doubt I can afford that.” Clouded and moody.

What on earth was the woman up to? In the blue-lit gloom, Dr. Penninger’s wide-set, chocolate-drop eyes seemed to be two different sizes… but surely that was just some weird illusion, something about her unplucked brows, and the visible tension wrinkling her eyelids. She had a big squarish chin, a protruding, oddly dimpled, and elaborate upper lip. No lipstick. Small, slanted, nibbling teeth. A long, cartilaginous neck, and the look of a woman who had not witnessed real sunlight in six years. She looked really and genuinely peculiar, a sui generis personage. A close examination didn’t make the woman any less odd. It made her more so.

“But you’ll be my personal guest,” he told her. “Because I’m inviting you now.”

That worked. Something clicked over in Dr. Penninger’s wool-hatted head. Suddenly he had her entire and focused attention. “Why did you send me those flowers?”

“Buna’s a city for flowers. After sitting through those committee meetings, I knew you must need a bouquet.” Red poppies, parsley, and mistletoe — he presumed she knew the flower code. Perhaps she was so hopelessly detached from mainstream society that she couldn’t even read a flower code. Well, if she didn’t, no great harm done. It had been a very witty message, but maybe it was just as well if it were lost on her.

“Why do you send me those mail notes with all those ques-tions?” Dr. Penninger persisted gamely.

Oscar put aside his peppered stub of jerky and spread his gloved hands. “I needed some answers. I’ve been studying you, during those long board meetings. I’ve really come to appreciate you. You’re the only member of that board who can stick to the point.”

She examined the dead grass at her feet. “They’re really incredi-bly boring meetings, aren’t they?”

“Well, yes, they are.” He smiled gamely. “Present company ex-cepted.”

“They’re bad meetings. They’re really bad. They’re awful. I hate administration. I hate everything about it.” She looked up, her odd face congealing with distaste. “I sit there listening to them drone, and I can feel my life just ticking away.”

“Mmmhmm!” Oscar deftly poured two cups from a battered cooler. “Here, let’s enjoy this sports-performance pseudo-lemon con-coction.” He dragged a folded tarp near to the fire barrel, careful not to scorch himself. He sat.

Dr. Penninger collapsed heedlessly to earth in a sharp sprawl of kneecaps. “I can’t even think properly anymore. They don’t let me think. I try to stay alert during those meetings, but it’s just impossible. They won’t let me get anything accomplished.” She sipped cautiously at the yellow swill in her biodegradable cup, then put the cup on the grass. “Lord knows I’ve tried.”

“Why did they put you into administration in the first place?”

“Oh,” she groaned, “a slot opened up on the board. The guy running Instrumentation had to resign, after Senator Dougal cracked up … The board asked for me by name because of the Nobel award nonsense, and the neuro krewe told me I should take the post. We do need the labware. They nickel and dime us to death on equip-ment, they just don’t understand our requirements. They don’t even want to understand us.”

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve noticed that the bookkeeping at the Collaboratory is not in standard federal formats. There seem to have been some irregularities in supply.”

“Oh, that’s not the half of it,” she said.

“No?”

“No.”

Oscar leaned forward slowly on his folded tarp. “What is the half of it?”

“I just can’t tell you,” she said, morosely hugging her shins. “Be-cause I don’t know why you want to know that. Or what you’d do about it, if you knew.”

“All right,” Oscar said, sitting back deliberately. “That answer makes sense. You’re being very cautious and proper. I’m sure I’d feel much the same about it, if I were in your position.” He stood up.

The plumbing pipes were made of a laminated polyvinyl the color of dried kelp. They had been computed and built in Boston to specifically fit this structure, and they were of a Chinese-jigsaw com-plexity that only a dedicated subroutine could fully understand.

“You have real talent with the mortar, but this plumbing is seri-ous work,” Oscar said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you gave up and left now.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I don’t have to hit the lab until seven AM.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“No, I just don’t sleep much. Maybe three hours a night.”

“How odd. I never sleep much, either.” He knelt at the side of the plumbing case. She alertly handed him a nearby pair of snips, slapping them into his gloved hand, handle first.

“Thank you.” He snapped through three black plastic packing bands. “I’m glad you came here tonight. I was rather wasting my time working alone on a group project like this. But it’s therapeutic for me. He pried up the lid of the case and threw it aside. “You see, I’ve always had a rather difficult professional life.”

“That’s not what your record shows.” She was hugging her jacketed arms. The wool hat had slipped down on her forehead.

“Oh, I suppose you’ve run some searches on me, then.”

“I’m very inquisitive.” She paused.

“That’s all right, everybody does that sort of thing nowadays. I’ve been a celebrity since I was a little kid. I’m well documented, I’m used to it.” He smiled sourly. “Though you can’t get the full flavor of my delightful personality from some casual scan of the net.”

“If I were casual about this, I wouldn’t be here now.”

Oscar looked up in surprise. She stared back boldly. She’d done all this on purpose. She had her own agenda. She’d plotted it all out on graph paper, beforehand.

“Do you know why I’m out here in the middle of the night tonight, Dr. Penninger? It’s because my girlfriend just left me.”

She pondered this. Wheels spun in her head so quickly that he could almost hear them sizzle. “Really,” she said slowly. “That’s a shame.”

“She’s left our house in Boston, she’s walked out on me. She’s gone to Holland.”

Her brows rose under the rim of the woolly hat. “Your girlfriend has defected to the Dutch?”

“No, not defected! She left on assignment, she’s a political jour-nalist. But she’s gone anyway.” He gazed at the elaborate nest of convoluted plumbing. “It’s been a blow, it’s really upset me.”

The sight of all that joinery and tubing, complex and gleaming in its tatty plastic straw, filled Oscar with a sudden evil rush of authen-tic Sartrean nausea. He climbed to his feet. “You know something? It was all my fault. I can admit that. I neglected her. We had two sepa-rate careers… She was fine on that East Coast glitterati circuit; we made a good couple while we had some common interests…” He stopped and gauged her reaction. “Should I be burdening you with any of this?”

“Why not? I can understand that. Sometimes these things just don’t work out. Romance in the sciences… ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’ ” She shook her head.

“I know that you’re not married. You’re not seeing anyone?”

“Nothing steady. I’m a workaholic.”

Oscar found this encouraging news. He felt instinctive camarade-rie for any ambitious obsessive. “Tell me something, Greta. Do I seem like a frightening person to you?” He touched his chest. “Am I scary? Be frank.”

“You really want me to be frank?”

“Yes.”

“People always tell me that I’m much too frank.”

“Go ahead, I can take it.”

She lifted her chin. “Yes, you’re very scary. People are extremely suspicious of you. No one knows what you really want from us, or what you’re doing in our lab. We all expect the very worst.”

He nodded sagely. “You see, that’s a perception problem. I do turn up for your board meetings, and I’ve brought a little entourage with me, so rumors start. But in reality, I shouldn’t be scary — because I’m just not very significant. I’m only a Senate staffer.”

“I’ve been to Senate hearings. And I’ve heard about others. Sen-ate hearings can be pretty rough.”

He edged closer to her. “All right — sure, there might be some hard questions asked in Washington someday. But it won’t be me ask-ing those questions. I just write briefing papers.”

She was entirely unconvinced. “What about that big Air Force scandal in Louisiana? Didn’t you have a lot to do with all that?”

“What, that? That’s just politics! People claim that I influence the Senator-elect — but the influence goes all the other way, really. Until I met Alcott Bambakias, I was just a city council activist. The Senator’s the man with the ideas and the message. I was just his cam-paign technician.”

“Hmmm. I know a lot of technicians. I don’t know many tech-nicians who are multimillionaires, like you are.”

“Oh, well, that … Yes, I’m well-to-do, but compared to what my father made in his heyday, or the Senator’s fortune … I do have money, but I wouldn’t call that serious money. I know people with serious money, and I’m just not in their league.” Oscar hefted a long green tube from the packing case, examined its crooks and angles mournfully, and set it back down. “The wind’s picking up … I don’t have the heart for this anymore. I think I’ll walk back to the dome. Maybe somebody’s still up in the dorm. We’ll play some poker.”

“I have a car,” she said.

“Really. ”

“You get a car, when you’re on the Collaboratory board. So I drove here. I can give you a ride back to the lab.”

“That would be lovely. Just let me stow the gear and shut down the system.” He took off his hard hat and kneepads. He shed his padded construction jacket, and stood there hatless in a long-sleeved shirt; the cold wind ripped into the damp at his armpits. When he was done, he set the alarms and they left the site together.

He stopped at the sidewalk… “Wait a moment.”

“What is it?”

“We seem to be chatting along pretty well here. But your car may be bugged.”

She brushed her windblown hair back, skeptically. “Why would anyone bug me?”

“Because it’s so cheap and easy. So tell me something just now, before we get into your car. Tell me something very frankly. Do you know about my personal background problem?”

“Your background? I know that your father was a movie star…”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that matter up. Really, I’m being completely impossible tonight. It was really good of you to visit the site tonight, but I’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. I shouldn’t bother you with any of this. You’re on the board of direc-tors, and I’m a federal official… Listen, if our personal circum-stances were different… And if either of us really had time for our personal problems…”

She stood there shivering. She was tall and thin and no longer used to real weather; she had worked hard in the dark and cold, and she was freezing. The night wind rose harshly and tore at his sleeves. He felt strangely drawn to her now. She was too tall, she was too thin, she had bad clothes, an odd face, and poor posture, she was eight years older than he was. They had nothing in common as people, any rela-tionship they might establish was clearly doomed from the outset. Re-lating to her was like coaxing some rare animal on the other side of a woven-wire fence. Maybe that was why he felt such a compelling urge to touch her. “Doctor, I appreciate your company tonight, but I think you’d better go on ahead in your car now. We’ll be in touch later about the board meetings. I still have a lot to learn.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to just drive off alone after that. Now I have to know. Get in the car.”

She opened the door and they jammed themselves together. It was a meager little car, a Collaboratory car, and naturally it had no heater. Their chilling breath began to smear the windows.

“I really don’t think you want to know about this. It’s a rather strange story. It’s bad. Worse than you expect.”

She adjusted her woolen hat, and blew on her bare fingers. “They never put heaters in these things. Because you’re never sup-posed to drive them outside the dome. It’ll warm up in a minute. Why don’t you just tell me whatever you think you can tell me. Then I’ll decide if I want to know more.”

“All right.” He hesitated. “Well, to begin with, I’m an adopted child. Logan Valparaiso was not my biological father.”

“No?”

“No, he didn’t adopt me until I was almost three. You see, at the time, Logan was working on an international thriller movie about evil adoption farms. Adoption mills. They were a big scandal during that period. The full scale of the hormone pesticide disasters was becoming common knowledge. There were major male-infertility problems. So, the adoption market really boomed. Infertility clinics too, obviously. The demand-pull was suddenly huge, so a lot of unsavory people, quacks, exploiters, health-fad people, they all rushed in to exploit it…”

“I can remember that time.”

“Suddenly there was a lot of offshore baby-farming, embryo-farming. People were taking extreme measures. It made a pretty good topic for an action film. So, my dad cast himself as a vigilante law-and-order guerrilla. He played the role of a two-fisted Chicano abortion-clinic bomber, who gets turned by the feds, and becomes a secret-agent embryo-farm demolisher…”

Whenever he told this story, he could hear his voice shift into a hateful, high-pitched whine. And it was happening now, even as the car’s windows began to steam. He was sliding helplessly from his stan-dard fast-talk into something much more extreme, a kind of chronic gabbling jabber. He would really have to watch that. He was watching it, he was watching it as well as he could, but he just couldn’t help himself “I don’t mean to go on and on about the movie, but I did have to watch that film about four hundred times as a kid… Plus all the rushes and the outtakes… Anyway, Logan was Method acting deep into the role, and he and wife number three had a solid relationship at the time, as Logan’s marriages went, that is. So he decided that as a kind of combination personal-growth move and film-related publicity stunt, he was going to adopt a real victim child from a real embryo mill.”

She listened silently.

“Well, that kid was me. My original egg cell was product sold on the infertility black market, and it ended up in a Colombian embryo mill. It was a mafia operation, so they were buying or stealing human eggs, fertilizing them, and offering them at a black-market rate for implantation. But there were quality problems. With resultant health problems for the female buyers. Not to mention the lawsuits and eth-ics hassles if somebody ratted them out. So the crooks started develop-ing the product inside hired wombs, for a somewhat more standard, post-birth adoption … But that business plan didn’t work out ei-ther. The rent-a-womb thing was just too slow a process, and they had too many local women involved who might rat them out, or shake them down, or get upset about surrendering the product after term. So then they decided they would try to grow the embryos to term in vitro. They got a bunch of support vats together, but they weren’t very good at it, because by this point, they’d already lost most of their working capital. Still, they got their hands on enough mammal-cloning data to give the artificial-womb thing a serious try with hu-man beings. So I was never actually born, per se.”

“I see.” She straightened in her seat, placed her hands on the steering wheel, and drew a breath. “Please do go on, this is truly enormously interesting.”

“Well, they were trying to sell me and their other products, but the overhead was just too high, and their failure rate was huge, and worse yet the market crashed when it turned out there was a cheaper medical workaround for sperm damage. Once they had the testicular syndrome fixed, it kicked the bottom right out of the baby market. So I was less than a year old when somebody ratted them out to the world health people, and then the blue-helmet brigade busted in from Europe and shut the whole place down. They confiscated all of us. I ended up in Denmark. Those are my earliest memories, this little orphanage in Denmark… An orphanage and health clinic.”

He had forced himself to tell this story many times, far more times than he had ever wanted to tell it to anyone. He had a prepared spiel of sorts, but he had never fully steeled himself to the dread it caused him to talk about it, the paralyzing stage fright. “Most of the product just didn’t make it. They’d really screwed with us trying to get us tank-worthy. I had a full genetic scan done in Copenhagen, and it turned out that they’d simply lopped off most of the introns from the zygote DNA. See, they somehow figured that if they could prune away some junk DNA from the human genome, then the product would be hardier in the tank and would run more efficiently… Their lab guys were all med-school dropouts, or downsizees from bankrupt HMOs. Also, they spent a lot of time high on synthetic cocaine, which was always the standard collateral industry with South American genetic black-marketeering…”

He cleared his throat and tried to slow down. “Anyway, to get back to the point of my personal history, they had this blue-helmet Danish commando type who had led the raid in Colombia, and he ended up as the expert technical adviser on my dad’s movie. This Danish commando and my dad got to be drinking buddies on the set, so when my dad came up with this adoption notion, the Danish guy naturally thought, ‘Well, why not one of the kids from my own operation?’ and he pulled some strings in Copenhagen. And that’s how I ended up in Hollywood.”

“Are you really telling me the truth?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Could I drive you back to the lab and take a tissue sample?”

“Look, the tissue’s just tissue. To hell with my tissue. The truth is a much bigger thing than my tissue. The truth is that people have a prejudice against persons like me. I can take their point, too, frankly. I can run a political campaign and I can get away with that, but I don’t think I’d ever actually vote for me. Because I’m not sure that I can really trust me. I’m really different. There are big chunks in my DNA that probably aren’t even of human origin.”

He spread his hands. “Let me tell you how different I am. I don’t sleep. I run a permanent mild fever. I grew up really fast — and not just because I spent my childhood in the L.A. fast lane. I’m twenty-eight now, but most people assume I’m in my mid-thirties. I’m sterile — I’ll never have kids of my own — and I’ve had three bouts of liver cancer. Luckily, that kind of cancer treats pretty easily nowadays, but I’m still on angiogenesis inhibitors, plus growth-factor blockers, and I have to take antitumor maintenance pills three times a month. The other eight kids from that raid — five of them died young of major organ cancers, and the other three… well, they’re Danes. They are three identical Danish women with — let me just put it this way — with extremely troubled personal lives.”

“Are you sure you’re not making this up? It’s such a compelling story. Do you really have an elevated body-core temperature? Have you ever had a PET-scan done?”

He looked at her meditatively. “You know, you’re really taking this very well. I mean, most people who hear this story have to go through a certain shock period…”

“I’m not a medical doctor, and genetic expression isn’t really my field. But I’m not shocked by that story. I’m astonished by it, of course, and I’d really like to confirm some details in my lab, but…” She considered it, then found the word. “Mostly, I’m very intrigued.”

“Really?”

“That was truly a profound abdication of scientific ethics. It vio-lated the Declaration of Helsinki, plus at least eight standards of con-duct with human subjects. You’re obviously a very brave and capable man, to have overcome that childhood tragedy, and achieved the suc-cess that you have.”

Oscar said nothing. Suddenly, his eyes were stinging. He’d seen a wide variety of reactions to his personal background confession. Mostly, reactions from women — because he rarely had to confess it at all, except to women. A business relationship could be begun and concluded without outing himself; a sexual relationship, never. He’d seen a full gamut of reactions. Shock, horror, amusement, sympathy; even a shrug and shake of the head. Indifference. Almost always, the truth gnawed at them over the long term.

But he’d never seen a reaction like Greta Penninger’s.

Oscar and his secretary Lana Ramachandran were walking through the garden behind the sloping white walls of the Genetic Fragmenta-tion Clinic. The garden bordered one of the staff housing sections, so there were children around. The constant piercing screams of young children meant that this was a good place to talk privately.

“Stop sending the flowers to her dorm residence,” Oscar told her. “She never goes there. Basically, she never sleeps.”

“Where should I have them delivered, then?”

“Into her laboratory. That’s more or less where she lives. And let’s turn up the heat on those bouquets — move off the pansies and zinnias, and right into tuberoses.”

Lana was shocked. “Not tuberoses already!”

“Well, you know what I mean. Also, we’re going to start feeding her soon. She doesn’t eat properly — I can tell that. And later, we’ll style her and dress her. But we’ll have to work our way up to that.”

“How are we even supposed to reach her? Dr. Penninger works inside the Hot Zone,” Lana said. “That’s a full-scale Code 4 bio-hazard facility. It’s got its own airlocks, and the walls are eight feet thick.”

He shrugged. “Dip the flowers into liquid nitrogen. Get ’em sealed in plastic. Whatever.”

His secretary groaned. “Oscar, what is it with you? Have you lost your mind? You can’t really be making a play for that woman. I know your type really well by now, and she’s definitely not your type. In fact, I’ve asked around some — and Dr. Penninger is not anybody’s type. You’re gonna do yourself an injury.”

“Okay, maybe I have a sudden aberrant sweet tooth.”

Lana was genuinely pained. She wanted the best for him. She was quite humorless, but she was very efficient. “You shouldn’t act like this. It’s just not smart. She’s on the board of directors, she’s someone who’s officially in charge around here. And you’re a staffer for her Senate oversight committee. That’s a definite conflict of inter-est. ”

“I don’t care.”

Lana was in despair. “You’re always doing this. Why? I can’t believe you got away with shacking up with that journalist. She was covering the campaign! Somebody could have maqe a huge ethics stink about that. And before that, there was that Crazy architecture girl… and before that, there was that worthless Boston city man-agement girl… You can’t keep getting away with this, cutting things close this way. It’s like some kind of compulsion.”

“Look, Lana, you knew my romantic life was a problem as soon as you met me. I do have ethics. I draw the line at having an affair with anyone in my own krewe. All right? That would be bad, that would be workplace harassment, it’s like incest. But here I am, and what’s past is past. Greta Penninger has made her career here, she’s someone who really understands this facility. Plus, she’s very bored, and I know that I can get to her. So we have commonalities. I think we can help each other out.”

“I give up! I’ll never figure out men. You don’t even know what you want, do you? You wouldn’t know what to do with happiness if it was standing right in front of you, begging you to notice.”

Lana had gone too far now. Oscar assembled and aimed a scowl at her. “Look, Lana, when you find me some happiness that you know will really suit me — me, in particular — then write me a memo about it. All right? In the meantime, can you get off the dime with the flowers effort?”

“All right, I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll do my best.” Lana was angry with him now, so she stalked off into the gardens. He couldn’t help that. Lana would come around. Lana always did. Dealing with him took her mind off her own troubles. Oscar strolled on, whistling a bit, examining the fretted dome of the sky, an evil winter skein of gray scudding harmlessly above the sweet federal bubble of warm and fra-grant air. He tossed his hat in his hand, catching it by its sharp and perfect brim. Life was definitely looking up for him. He skirted a blooming mass of rare azaleas in order to miss a drowsing antelope.

He’d chosen these Collaboratory gardens as his confidential of-fices lately. He’d given up using the Bambakias tour bus, since the bus seemed to attract so many determined bugging efforts. They would have to return the bus to Boston soon, anyway. That seemed just as well — high time, really. There was no use in remaining dependent on loaned equipment. Scratch the old bus, inhabit the brand-new hotel. Just keep the krewe together, keep up the core competencies. Keep the herd moving. It was progress, it was doable.

Fontenot emerged from the flowering brush and discovered him. To Oscar’s mild surprise, Fontenot was exactly on schedule. Apparently the roadblock situation was easing in Louisiana.

The security man was wearing a straw hat, vest, jeans, and black gum boots. Fontenot had been getting a lot of sun lately. He looked more pleased with himself than Oscar had ever seen him.

They shook hands, checked by habit for tails and eavesdroppers, and fell into pace together.

“You’re getting a lot of credit for this Air Force base debacle,” Fontenot told him. “Somehow, it’s staying news. If the pressure keeps building, something’s bound to crack.”

“Oh, giving me the credit for that is all Sosik’s idea. It’s a fallback position for the Senator. If the situation blows a valve, then the experienced chief of staff can always make a fall guy out of the rash young campaign adviser.”

Fontenot looked at him skeptically. “Well, I didn’t see ’em twist-ing your arm when you did those two major interviews… I don’t know how you found the time to get so fully briefed on power black-outs and Louisiana politics.”

“Power blackouts are a very interesting topic. The Boston media are important. I’m very sentimental about the Boston media.” Oscar laced his hands behind his back. “I admit, it wasn’t tactful to publicly call Louisiana ‘the Weird Sister of American States.’ But it’s a truism.”

Fontenot couldn’t be bothered to deny this. “Oscar, I’ve been pretty busy getting my new house set up properly. But proper security isn’t a part-time job. You’re still paying me a salary, but I’ve been letting you down.”

“If that bothers you, why not put in a little work on the hotel site for us? It’s a big hit locally. These Buna people love us for it.”

“No, listen. Since we’ll s — I thought I’d run some full-scale secu-rity scans for you, across the board. And I’ve got some results for you. You have a security problem.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve offended the Governor of Louisiana.”

Oscar shook his head rapidly. “Look, the hunger strike isn’t about Governor Huguelet. Huguelet has never been the issue. The issue is the starving air base and the federal Emergency committees. We’ve scarcely said a word in public about Green Huey.”

“The Senator hasn’t. But you sure have. Repeatedly.”

Oscar shrugged. “Okay, obviously we haven’t much use for the Governor. The guy’s a crooked demagogue. But we’re not pushing that. As far as the scandal goes, if anything, we’re Huey’s tactical allies at the moment.”

“Don’t be naive. Green Huey doesn’t think the way you guys think. He’s not some go-along get-along pol, who makes tactical deals with the opposition. Huey is always the center of Huey’s universe. So you’re for him, or you’re agin him.”

“Why would Huey make unnecessary enemies? That’s just not smart politics.”

“Huey does make enemies. He enjoys it. It’s part of his game. It always has been. Huey’s a smart pol all right, but he can be a one-man goon squad. He learned that when he worked in Texas for Senator Dougal.”

Oscar frowned. “Look, Dougal’s out of the picture now. He’s finished, history. If Dougal wasn’t in the dry-out clinic, he’d probably be in jail.”

Fontenot glanced around them with reflexive suspicion. “You shouldn’t talk like an attack ad when you’re standing inside a place that Dougal built. This lab was always Dougal’s favorite project. And as for Huey, he used to work in here. You’re walking in Huey’s footsteps. When he was the Senator’s chief of staff, he twisted arms around here hard enough to break a few.”

“They built this place all right, but they built it crooked.”

“Other politicians are crooked too, and they don’t build a goddamn thing. East Texas and SouthLouisiana — they finally got their heads together and cut a big piece of the pie for themselves. But things have always run crooked in this part of the country, always. They wouldn’t know what to do with clean government. Old Dougal fell down pretty hard in the long run, but that’s just Texas. Texas is ornery, Texans like to chew their good old boys up a little bit before they bury them. But Huey learned plenty from Dougal, and he doesn’t make Dougal’s mistakes. Huey is the Governor of Louisiana now, he’s the big cheese, the boss, the kahuna. Huey’s got himself two handpicked federal Senators, just to shine his shoes. You’re bad mouthing Huey up in Boston — but Huey is sitting just over yonder in Baton Rouge. And you’re getting in Huey’s face.”

“All right. I take the point. Go on.”

“Oscar, I’ve seen you do some very clever things with nets, you’re a young guy and you grew up using them. But you haven’t seen everything that I’ve seen, so let me spell this out for you nice and careful.”

They turned around a riotous bougainvillea. Fontenot assembled his thoughts. “Okay. Let’s imagine you’re a net-based bad guy, netwar militia maybe. And you have a search engine, and it keeps track of all the public mentions of your idol, Governor Etienne-Gaspard Huguelet. Every once in a while, someone appears in public life who cramps the style of your boy. So the offender’s name is noticed, and it’s logged, and it’s assigned a cumulative rating. After someone’s name reaches a certain level of annoyance, your program triggers automatic responses.” Fontenot adjusted his straw hat. “The response is to send out automatic messages, urging people to kill this guy.”

Oscar laughed. “That’s a new one. That’s really crazy.”

“Well, yeah. Craziness is the linchpin of the whole deal. You see, there have always been a lot of extremists, paranoiacs, and antisocial losers, all very active on the nets… In the Secret Service, we found out a long time ago that the nets are a major intelligence asset for us. Demented, violent people tend to leave some kind of hint, or track, or signal, well before they strike. We compiled a hell of a lot of psychological profiles over the years, and we discovered some com-monalities. So, if you know the evidence to look for, you can actually sniff some of these guys out, just from the nature of their net activi-ties. ”

“Sure. User profiles. Demographic analysis. Stochastic indexing. Do it all the time.”

“We built those profile sniffers quite a while back, and they turned out pretty useful. But then the State Department made the mistake of kinda lending that software to some undependable al-lies…” Fontenot stopped short as a spotted jaguarundi emerged from under a bush, stretched, yawned, and ambled past them. “The problem came when our profile sniffers fell into the wrong hands … See, there’s a different application for that protective software. Bad people can use it to compile large mailing lists of dan-gerous lunatics. Finding the crazies with net analysis, that’s the easy part. Convincing them to take action, that part is a little harder. But if you’ve got ten or twelve thousand of them, you’ve got a lotta fish, and somebody’s bound to bite. If you can somehow put it into their heads that some particular guy deserves to be attacked, that guy might very well come to harm.”

“So you’re saying that Governor Huguelet has put me on an enemies list?”

“No, not Huey. Not personally. He ain’t that dumb. I’m saying that somebody, somewhere, built some software years ago that auto-matically puts Green Huey’s enemies onto hit lists.”

Oscar removed his hat and carefully adjusted his hair. “I’m rather surprised I haven’t heard about this practice.”

“We Secret Service people don’t like it publicized. We do what we can to fight back-we wiped out a whole nest of those evil things during Third Panama… but we can’t monitor every offshore netserver in the world. About the best we can do is to monitor our own informants. We always check ’em, to see if they’re getting email urging them to kill somebody. So have a look at this printout.”

They found a graceful wooden garden bench. A small child in a pinafore was sitting on it, patiently petting an exotic stoat, but she didn’t seem to mind adult company. Oscar silently read through the text, twice, carefully.

The text was nowhere near so sinister and sophisticated as he had somehow imagined it. In fact, the text was crude and banal. He found it deeply embarrassing to discover his own name inserted into a mur-derous rant so blatant and so badly composed. He nodded, slipped the paper back to Fontenot. The two of them smiled, tipped their hats to the little girl, and went back to walking.

“It’s pathetic!” Oscar said, once they were out of earshot. “That’s spam from a junk mailbot. I’ve seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can’t even punctuate!”

“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”

Oscar thought this over. “How many of those messages were mailed out, do you suppose?”

“Maybe a couple of thousand? The USSS protective-interest files list over three hundred thousand people. A clever program wouldn’t hit up every possible lunatic every single time, of course.”

“Of course.” Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “And what about Bambakias? Is he in danger too?”

“I briefed the Senator about this situation. They’ll step up his security in Cambridge and Washington. But I figure you’re in much more trouble than he is. You’re closer, you’re louder, and you’re a lot easier.”

“Hmmm … I see. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Jules. You’re making very good sense, as always. So what would you advise?”

“I advise better security. The commonsense things. Break up your daily routine. Go to places where you can’t be expected. Keep a safe house ready, in case of trouble. Watch out for strangers, for any-body who might be stalking you, or workin’ up the nerve. Avoid crowds whenever possible. And you do need a bodyguard.”

“I don’t have time for all that, though. There’s too much work for me here.”

Fontenot sighed. “That’s exactly what people always tell us… Oscar, I was in the Secret Service for twenty-two years. It’s a career, we have a real job of work. You don’t hear a lot in public about the Secret Service, but the Secret Service is a very busy outfit. They shut down the old CIA, they broke up the FBI years ago, but the USSS has been around almost two hundred years now. We never go away. Because the threat never goes away. People in public life get death threats. They get ’em all the time. I’ve seen hundreds of death threats. They’re very common things for famous people. I never saw a real-life attempted assassination, though. Spent my whole career care-fully watchin’ and waitin’ for one, and it never, ever happened. Until one fine day, that car bomb happened. Then I lost my leg.”

“I understand.”

“You need to come to terms with this. It’s reality. It’s real, and you have to adjust to it, but at the same time, you can’t let it stop you.”

Oscar said nothing.

“The sky is a different color when you know that you might get shot at. Things taste different. It can get to you, make you wonder if a public life’s worthwhile. But you know, despite stuff like this, this is not an evil or violent society.” Fontenot shrugged. “Really, it isn’t. Not anymore. Back when I was a young agent, America was truly violent then. Huge crime rates, crazy drug gangs, automatic weapons very cheap and easy. Miserable, angry, pitiful people. People with grudges, people with a lot of hate inside. But nowadays, this just isn’t a violent time anymore. It’s just a very weird time. People don’t fight real hard for anything in particular, when they know their whole lives could be turned inside out in a week flat. People’s lives don’t make sense anymore, but most people in America, the poor people espe-cially, they’re a lot happier than they used to be. They might be pro-foundly lost, like your Senator likes to say, but they’re not all crushed and desperate. They’re just… wandering around. Drifting. Hang-ing loose. They’re at very loose ends.”

“Maybe.”

“If you lie low awhile, this business will pass right over you. You’ll move on to Boston or Washington, on to other issues, out of Huey’s hair. Automated hit lists are like barbed wire, they’re nasty but they’re very stupid. They don’t even understand what they read. Once you’re yesterday’s news, the machines will just forget you.”

“I don’t intend to become yesterday’s news for quite a while, Jules.”

“Then you’d better learn how famous people go on living.”

Oscar was determined not to have his morale affected by Fontenot’s security alarm. He went back to work on the hotel. The hotel was coming along with the usual fairy-tale rapidity of a Bambakias structure. The whole krewe was pitching in; they had all been in-fected by the Bambakias ideology, so they all protested stoutly to one another that they wouldn’t miss the fun of construction for any-thing.

Strangely enough, the work really did become fun, in its own way; there was a rich sense of schadenfreude in fully sharing the suf-ferings of others. The system logged the movements of everyone’s hands, cruelly eliminating any easy method of deceiving your friends while you yourself slacked off work. Distributed instantiation was fun in the way that hard-core team sports were fun. Balconies flew up, archways and pillars rose, random jumbles crystallized into spacious sense and reason. It was like lashing your way up a mountainside in cables and crampons, only to notice, all sudden and gratuitous, a fine and lovely view.

There were certain set-piece construction activities guaranteed to attract an admiring crowd: the tightening of tensegrity cables, for in-stance, that turned a loose skein of blocks into a solidly locked-together parapet, good for the next three hundred years. Bambakias krewes took elaborate pleasure in these theatrical effects. The krewe would vigorously play to the crowd when they were doing the boring stuff, they would ham it up. But during these emergent moments when the system worked serious magic, they would kick back all loose and indifferent, with the heavy-lidded cool of twentieth-century jazz musicians.

Oscar was a political consultant. He made it his business to ap-preciate a crowd. He felt about a good crowd the way he imagined dirt farmers feeling about a thriving field of watermelons. However, he had a hard time conjuring up his usual warm appreciation when one of the watermelons might have come there to shoot him.

Of course he was familiar with security; during the campaign, everyone had known that there might be incidents, that the candidate might be hurt. The candidate was mixing with The People, and some few of The People were just naturally evil or insane. There had indeed been a few bad moments on the Massachusetts campaign trail: nasty hecklers, nutty protesters, vomiting drunks, pickpockets, fainting spells, shoving matches. The unpleasant business that made good cam-paign security the functional equivalent of seat belts or fire extinguish-ers. Security was an empty trouble and expense, ninety-nine times in a hundred. On the hundredth instance you were very glad you had been so sensible.

The modern rich always maintained their private security. Bodyguards were basic staff for the overclass, just like majordomos, cooks, secretaries, sysadmins, and image consultants. A well-organized per-sonal krewe, including proper security, was simply expected of mod-ern wealthy people; without a krewe, no one would take you seriously. All of this made perfect sense.

And yet none of it had much to do with the stark notion of having one’s flesh pierced by a bullet.

It wasn’t the idea of dying that bothered him. Oscar could easily imagine dying. It was the ugly sense of meaningless disruption that repelled him. His game board kicked over by a psychotic loner, a rule-breaker who couldn’t even comprehend the stakes.

Defeat in the game, he could understand. Oscar could easily imagine himself, for instance, swept up in a major political scandal. Crapped out. Busted. Cast into the wilderness. Broken from the ranks. Disgraced. Shunned, forgotten. A nonperson. A political hulk. Oscar could very well imagine that eventuality. It definitely gave the game a spice. After all, if victory was guaranteed, that wouldn’t be victory at all.

But he didn’t want to be shot. So Oscar gave up working on the building project. It was a sad sacrifice, because he truly enjoyed the process, and the many glorious opportunities it offered for shattering the preconceptions of backward East Texans. But it tired him to envi-sion the eager and curious crowds as a miasma of enemies. Where were the crosshairs centered? Constant morbid speculation on the sub-ject of murder was enough to convince Oscar that he himself would have made an excellent assassin — clever, patient, disciplined, resolute, and sleepless. This painful discovery rather harmed his self-image.

He warned his krewe of the developments. Heartwarmingly, they seemed far more worried about his safety than he was himself.

He retreated back inside the Collaboratory, where he knew he was much more secure. In the event of any violent crime, Col-laboratory security would flip a switch on their Escaped Animal Vec-tor alarms, and every orifice in the dome would lock as tight as a bank vault.

Oscar was much safer under glass — but he could feel himself curtailed, under pressure, his life delimited by unseen hands. However, he still had one major field of counterattack. Oscar dived aggressively into his laptop. He, Pelicanos, Bob Argow, and Audrey Avizienis had all been collaborating on the chams of evidence.

Senator Dougal and his Texan/Cajun mafia of pork-devouring good old boys had been very dutiful at first. Their relatively modest graft vanished at once, slipping methodically over Texas state lines into the vast money laundries of the Louisiana casinos. The funds oozed back later as generous campaign contributions and unexplained second homes in the names of wives and nephews.

But the years had gone on, and the country’s financial situation had become stormy and chaotic. With hyperinflation raging and ma-jor industries vanishing like pricked balloons, it was hard to keep up pretenses. Covering their tracks had become boring and tiresome. The Senator’s patronage of the Collaboratory was staunch and tireless, and the long-honored causes of advancing science and sheltering endan-gered species still gave most Americans a warm, generous, deeply uncritical feeling. The Collaboratory’s work struggled on — while the rot crept on in its shadow, spreading into parts scams, bid rigging, a minor galaxy of kickbacks and hush money. There was featherbedding on jobs, with small-time political allies slotted into dull yet lucrative posts, such as parking and plumbing and laundry. Embezzlement was like alcoholism. It was very hard to step back, and if no one ever called you out on it, then the little red veins began to show.

Oscar felt he was making excellent progress. His options for ac-tion were multiplying steadily.

Then the first homicidal lunatic attacked.

With this occurrence, Oscar was approached by Collaboratory security. Security took the form of a middle-aged female officer, who belonged to a tiny federal police agency known as the “Buna National Collaboratory Security Authority.” This woman informed Oscar that a man had just arrived from Muskogee, Oklahoma, banging fruitlessly at the southern airlock and brandishing a foil-wrapped cardboard box that he insisted was a “Super Reflexo-Grenade.”

Oscar visited the suspect in his cell. His would-be assassin was disheveled and wretched, utterly lost, with the awful cosmic disloca-tion of the seriously mentally ill. Oscar felt a sudden unexpected pang of terrible pity. It was very clear to him that this man had no focused malice. The poor wretch had simply been hammered into his clumsy evildoing through a ceaseless wicked pelting of deceptive net-based spam. Oscar found himself so shocked by this that he blurted out his instinctive wish that the man might be set free.

The local cops were wisely having none of that, however. They had called the Secret Service office in Austin. Special agents would be arriving presently to thoroughly interrogate Mr. Spencer, and dis-creetly take him elsewhere.

The very next day, another lethal crank showed up. This gen-tleman, Mr. Bell, was cleverer. He had attempted to hide himself in-side a truck shipment of electrical transformers. The truck driver had noticed the lunatic darting out from beneath a tarp, and had called security. A frantic chase ensued, and the stowaway was finally found burrowing desperately into a tussock of rare marsh grass, still gamely clutching a homemade black-powder pistol.

The advent of the third man, Mr. Anderson, was the worst by far. When caught lurking inside a dumpster, Anderson screamed loudly about flying saucers and the fate of the Confederacy, while slashing at his arms with a razor. This bloodshed was very shocking, and it made Oscar’s position difficult.

It was clear that he needed a safe house. And the safest area inside the Collaboratory was, of course, the Hot Zone.

The interior of the Hot Zone was rather less impressive than its towering china-white shell. The Zone was a very odd environment, since every item inside the structure had been designed to withstand high-pressure cleansing with superheated steam. The interior decor consisted of poreless plastics, acid-resistant white ceramic benchtops, bent-tubing metal chairs, and grainy nonslip floors. The Hot Zone was simultaneously deeply strange and profoundly mundane. After all, it wasn’t a fairyland or a spacecraft, it was simply a set of facilities where people carried out certain highly specific activities under closely defined and extremely clean circumstances. People had been working in the place for fifteen years.

Inside the dressing room-cum-airlock, Oscar was required to shed his street clothes. He outfitted himself in a disposable paper labcoat, gloves, a bouffant cap, a mask, and sockless ankle-wrapping clean-room booties. Greta Penninger, swiftly appointing herself his unofficial hostess, sent a male lab gofer to take him in hand.

Dr. Penninger possessed a large suite of laboratory offices within a brightly lit warren known as Neurocomputational Studies. A plastic door identified her as GRETA V. PENNINGER, PRINCIPAL INVESTlGATOR, and behind that door was a brightly lit surgical theater. Yards of white tabletop. Safety treading. Drying racks. Safety film. Detergents. Bal-ances, fume hoods, graduated beakers. Hand pipettes. Centrifuges. Chromatographs. And a great many square white devices of utterly unknown function.

Oscar was met by Greta’s krewe majordomo, Dr. Albert Gaz-zaniga. Gazzaniga was the exemplar of what Oscar had come to recog-nize as “the Collaboratory look,” intense and yet strangely diffuse, like a racquetball player in Lotusland. Gazzaniga spent his working life in clean-room gear, and relaxed outside in rotting sneakers and khaki shorts. Gazzaniga had an eager, honest, backpack-wearing look about him. He was one of the few people in the Collaboratory who identi-fied himself as a Federal Democrat. Most politically active Col-laboratory people tended to be tedious, fuzzy Left Tradition Bloc types, party members of the Social Democrats or the Communists. It was rare to find one with enough grit and energy to take a solidly Reformist stance.

“So, what’s become of Dr. Penninger?”

“Oh, you mustn’t be offended, but she’s running a procedure now. She’ll be here when she’s good and done. Believe me, when Greta wants to concentrate, it’s always best to let her be.”

“That’s all right. I quite understand.”

“It’s not that she doesn’t take you seriously, you know. She’s very sympathetic to your situation. We’ve had troubles of our own with extremists. Animal rights people, vivisection nuts… I know we scientists lead very sheltered lives compared to you politicians, but we’re not entirely out-of-it here.”

“I would never think that, Albert.”

“I feel personally very sorry that you should be subject to this kind of harassment. It’s an honor to help you, really.”

Oscar nodded. “I appreciate, that sentiment. It’s good of you to take me in. I’ll try not to get in the way of your labwork.”

Dr. Gazzaniga led him down an aisle past seven bunny-suited workers probing at their jello dishes. “I hope you don’t have the im-pression that Greta’s lab is a biohazard zone. We never work on any-thing hot in this lab. We wear this clean-gear strictly to protect our cultures from contamination.”

“I see.”

Gazzaniga shrugged beneath his lint-free labcoat. “That whole gene-technology scare tactic — the giant towers, the catacombs, the airlocks, the huge sealed dome — I guess that made a lot of political sense in the old days, but it was always a naive idea basically, and now it’s very old-fashioned. Except for a few classified military apps, the Collaboratory gave up on survivable bugs ages ago. There’s nothing growing inside the Hot Zone that could hurt you. Genetic engineer-ing is a very stable field of practice now, it’s fifty years old. In terms of bugs, we use only thermo extremophiles. Germs native to volcanic environments. Very efficient, high metabolism, and good industrial turnover, and of course they’re very safe. Their metabolism doesn’t function at all, under 90° C. They live off sulfur and hydrogen, which you’d never find inside any human bloodstream. Plus, all our stocks are double knockouts. So even if you literally bathed in those bugs — well, you might well get scalded, but you’d never risk infection or genetic bleed-over.”

“That sounds very reassuring.”

“Greta’s a professional. She’s a stickler for good lab procedure. No, more than that — the lab is where she really shines personally. She’s very strong in neurocomputational math, don’t get me wrong there — but Greta’s one of the great hands-on lab fiends. She can do stuff with STM probes like nobody else in the world. And if we could just get her hands on some decent thixotropic centrifuges instead of this Stone Age rotor crap, we’d be really kicking ass in here.”

Gazzaniga was on a roll now. He was visibly trembling with passionate commitment. “In publishable papers per man-hour, this is the most productive lab in Buna. We’ve got the talent, and Greta’s lab krewe is second to none. If we could only get proper resources, there’s no telling what we could accomplish here. Neuroscience is really breaking open right now, the same way genetics did forty years ago, or computers forty years before that. The sky’s the limit, really.”

“What is it, exactly, that you’re doing in here?”

“Well, in layman’s terms…”

“Never mind that, Albert. Just tell me about your work.”

“Well, basically, we’re still following up her Nobel Prize results. That was all about glial neurochemical gradients evoking attentional modulation. It was the biggest neurocognitive breakthrough in years, so there’s a lot of open field for us to run in now. Karen there is working on phasic modulation and spiking frequency. Yung-Nien is our token cognition wizard in the krewe, she does stochastic resonance and rate-response modeling. And Serge over yonder is your basic receptor-mechanic, he’s working on dendritic transformer up-takes. The rest of these people are basically postdoc support staff, but you never know, when you work with Greta Penninger. This is a world-famous lab. It’s a magnet. It’s got the right stuff. By the time she’s fifty or sixty, even her junior co-authors will be running neuro labs. ”

“And what is Dr. Penninger working on?”

“Well, you can ask her that yourself!” Greta had arrived. Gaz-zaniga tactfully absented himself.

Oscar apologized for having interrupted her work.

“No, that’s all right,” Greta said serenely. “I’m going to make the time for you. I think it’s worth it.”

“That’s very broad-minded of you.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

Oscar gazed about her laboratory. “It’s odd that we should meet inside a place like this… I can tell that this locale suits you per-fectly, but for me, this has such a strong personal resonance… Can we talk privately here?”

“My lab is not bugged. Every surface in here is sterilized twice a week. Nothing as large as a listening device could possibly survive in here.” She noticed his skeptical reaction, and changed her mind. She reached out and turned a switch on a homogenizer, which began to make a comforting racket.

Oscar felt much better. They were still in plain sight, but at least the noise would drown audio eavesdropping. “Do you know how I define ‘politics,’ Greta?”

She looked at him. “I know that politics means a lot of trouble for scientists.”

“Politics is the art of reconciling human aspirations.”

She considered this. “Okay. So?”

“Greta, I need you to level with me. I need to find some reason-able people who can testify in the upcoming Senate hearing. The standard talking heads from senior management just won’t do anymore. I need people with some street-level awareness of what’s really going on at this facility.”

“Why ask me? Why don’t you ask Cyril Morello or Warren Titche? Those guys have tons of time for political activism.”

Oscar was already very aware of Morello and Titche. They were two of Collaboratory’s grass-roots community leaders, though as yet they were quite unaware of that fact. Cyril Morello was the assistant head of the Human Resources Department, a man who through his consistently self-defeating, anti-careerist actions had won the trust of the Collaboratory rank and file. Warren Titche was the lab’s vociferous token radical, a ragged-elbowed zealot who fought for bike racks and cafeteria menus as if failure meant nuclear holo-caust.

“I’m not asking you for a list of specific gripes. I have a long list of those already. What I need is, well, how shall I put this… The spin, the big picture. The pitch. The Message. You see, the new Con-gress has three brand-new Senators on the Science Committee. They lack the in-depth experience of the Committee’s very, very long-serving former chairman, Senator Dougal of Texas. It’s really an en-tirely new game in Washington now.”

Greta glanced surreptitiously at her watch. “Do you really think this is going to help anything?”

“I’ll cut to the chase. Let me put a simple question to you. Let’s assume you have absolute power over federal science policy, and can have anything you please. Give me the blue-sky version. What do you want?”

“Oh! Well!” She was interested now. “Well, I guess… I’d want American science to be just like it was in the Golden Age. That would be in the Communist Period, during Cold War One. You see, back in those days, if you had a strong proposal, and you were ready to work, you could almost always swing decent, long-term federal fund-ing. ”

“As opposed to the nightmare you have now,” Oscar prompted. “Endless paperwork, bad accounting, senseless ethics hassles…”

Greta nodded reflexively. “It’s hard to believe how far we’ve fallen. Science funding used to be allocated by peer review from within the science community. It wasn’t doled out by Congress in pork-barrel grants for domestic political advantage. Nowadays, scien-tists spend forty percent of their working time mooching around for funds. Life in science was very direct, in the good old days. The very same person who swung the grant would do her own benchwork and write up her own results. Science was a handicraft, really. You’d have scientific papers written by three, four co-authors-never huge krewes of sixty or eighty, like we’ve got now.”

“So it’s economics, basically,” Oscar coaxed.

She leaned forward tautly. “No, it’s much deeper than that. Twentieth-century science had an entirely different arrangement. There was understanding between the government and the science community. It was a frontier mentality. Those were the gold-rush days. National Science Foundation. NIH. NASA. ARPA … And the science agencies held up their end of the deal. Miracle drugs, plastics, whole new industries… people literally flew to the moon!”

Oscar nodded. “Producing miracles,” he said. “That sounds like a steady line of work.”

“Sure, there was job security back then,” Greta said. “Tenure was nice, in particular. Have you ever heard of that old term ‘tenure’?”

“No,” Oscar said.

“It was all too good to last,” Greta said. “National government controlled the budgets, but scientific knowledge is global. Take the Internet — that was a specialized science network at first, but it ex-ploded. Now tribesmen in the Serengeti can log on directly over Chi-nese satellites.”

“So the Golden Age stopped when the First Cold War ended?” Oscar said.

She nodded. “Once we’d won, Congress wanted to redesign American science for national competitiveness, for global economic warfare. But that never suited us at all. We never had a chance.”

“Why not?” Oscar said.

“Well, basic research gets you two economic benefits: intellectual property and patents. To recoup the investment in R D, you need a gentlemen’s agreement that inventors get exclusive rights to their own discoveries. But the Chinese never liked ‘intellectual property.’ We never stopped pressuring them about the issue, and finally a major trade war broke out, and the Chinese just called our bluff. They made all English-language intellectual property freely available on their satel-lite networks to anybody in the world. They gave away our store for nothing, and it bankrupted us. So now, thanks to the Chinese, basic science has lost its economic underpinnings. We have to live on pure prestige now, and that’s a very thin way to live.”

“China bashing’s out of style this year,” Oscar said. “How about bashing the Dutch?”

“Yeah, Dutch appropriate-technology… The Dutch have been going to every island, every seashore, every low-lying area in the world, making billions building dikes. They’ve built an alliance against us of islands and low-lying states, they get in our face in every interna-tional arena… They want to reshape global scientific research for purposes of ecological survival. They don’t want to waste time and money on things like neutrinos or spacecraft. The Dutch are very troublesome.”

“Cold War Two isn’t on the agenda of the Senate Science Com-mittee,” Oscar said. “But it certainly could be, if we could build a national security case.”

“Why would that help?” Greta shrugged. “Bright people will make huge sacrifices, if you’ll just let them work on the things that really interest them. But if you have to spend your life grinding out results for the military, you’re just another cubicle monkey.”

“This is good!” Oscar said. “This is just what I was hoping for — a frank and open exchange of views.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You want me to be really frank, Oscar?”

“Try me.”

“What did the Golden Age get us? The public couldn’t handle the miracles. We had an Atomic Age, but that was dangerous and poisonous. Then we had a Space Age, but that burned out in short order. Next we had an Information Age, but it turned out that the real killer apps for computer networks are social disruption and soft-ware piracy. Just lately, American science led the Biotech Age, but it turned out the killer app there was making free food for nomads! And now we’ve got a Cognition Age waiting.”

“And what will that bring us — your brand-new Cognition Age?”

“Nobody knows. If we knew what the outcome would be in advance, then it wouldn’t be basic research.”

Oscar blinked. “Let me get this straight. You’re dedicating your life to neural research, but you can’t tell us what it will do to us?”

“I can’t know. There’s no way to judge. Society is too complex a phenomenon, even science is too complex. We’ve just learned so in-credibly much in the past hundred years… Knowledge gets frag-mented and ultraspecialized, scientists know more and more about less and less… You can’t make informed decisions about the social results of scientific advances. We scientists don’t even really know what we know anymore.”

“That’s pretty frank, all right. You’re frankly abandoning the field, and leaving science policy decisions to the random guesses of bureaucrats.”

“Random guesses don’t work either.”

Oscar rubbed his chin. “That sounds bad. Really bad. It sounds hopeless.”

“Then maybe I’m painting too dark a picture. There’s a lot of life in science — we’ve made some major historic discoveries, even in the past ten years.”

“Name some for me,” Oscar said.

“Well, we now know that eighty percent of the earth’s biomass is subterranean. ”

Oscar shrugged. “Okay.”

“We know there’s bacterial life in interstellar space,” Greta said. “You have to admit that was big.”

“Sure. ”

“There have been huge medical advances in this century. We’ve defeated most cancers. We cured AIDS. We can treat pseudo-estrogen damage,” Greta said. “We have one-shot cures for cocaine and heroin addiction.”

“Too bad about alcoholism, though.”

“We can regenerate damaged nerves. We’ve got lab rats smarter than dogs now.”

“Oh, and of course there’s cosmological torque,” Oscar said. They both laughed. It seemed impossible that they could have overlooked cosmological torque, even for an instant.

“Let me switch perspectives,” Oscar said. “Tell me about the Collaboratory. What’s your core competency here in Buna — what does this facility do for America that is unique and irreplaceable?”

“Well, there’s our genetic archives, of course. That’s what we’re world-famous for.”

“Hmmm,” Oscar said. “I recognize that gathering all those spec-imens from all around the world was very difficult and expensive. But with modern techniques, couldn’t you duplicate those genes and store them almost anywhere?”

“But this is the logical place for them. We have the genetic safety vaults. And the giant safety dome.”

“Do you really need a safety dome? Genetic engineering is safe and simple nowadays.”

“Well, sure, but if America ever needs a Class IV biowar facility, we’ve got one right here.” Greta stopped. “And we have first-class agricultural facilities. A lot of crop research goes on here. Overclass people still eat crops. They love our rare animals, too.”

“Rich people eat natural crops,” Oscar said.

“Our biotech research has built whole new industries,” Greta insisted. “Look at what we’ve done to transform Louisiana.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Do you think I should emphasize that in the Senate hearings?”

Greta looked glum.

Oscar nodded. “Let me level with you, Greta, just like you did with me. Let me tell you about the reception you might expect in today’s Congress. The country’s broke, and your administrative costs are through the roof You have well over two thousand people on the federal payroll here. You don’t generate any revenue yourselves — out-side of winning the favor of passing celebrities with nice gifts of fluffy rare animals. You have no major military or national security interests. The biotech revolution is a long-established fact now, it’s not cutting edge anymore, it’s become a standard industry. So what have you done for us lately?”

“We’re protecting and securing the planet’s natural heritage,” Greta said. “We’re conservationists.”

“Come on. You’re genetic engineers, you have nothing to do with ‘nature.’ ”

“Senator Dougal never seemed to mind a steady flow of federal funds into Texas. We always have state support from the Texas delega-tion. ”

“Dougal is history,” Oscar said. “You know how many cyclo-trons the U.S. used to have?”

“ ‘Cyclotrons’?” Greta said.

“Particle accelerator, a kind of primitive, giant klystron,” Oscar said. “They were huge, expensive, prestigious federal laboratories, and they’re all long gone. I’d like to fight for this place, but we need compelling reasons. We need sound bites that the layman can under-stand. ”

“What can I tell you? We’re not PR experts. We’re only mere, lowly scientists.”

“You’ve got to give me something, Greta. You can’t expect to survive on sheer bureaucratic inertia. You have to make a public case.”

She thought about it seriously. “Knowledge is inherently pre-cious even if you can’t sell it,” Greta said. “Even if you can’t use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It’s cen-tral to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell.”

Oscar thought it over. “ ‘Knowledge will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no knowledge.’ You know, there might be something to that. I like the sound of it. That’s very contemporary rhetoric.”

“The feds have to support us, because if they don’t, Huey will! Green Huey understands this place, he knows what we do here. Huey will get us by default.”

“I appreciate that point too,” Oscar said.

“At least we earn a living out of this mess,” Greta said. “You can always call it a job-creation effort. Maybe you could declare us all insane and say that labwork is our group therapy. Maybe you could declare the place a national park!”

“Now you’re really brainstorming,” Oscar said, pleased. “That’s very good.”

“What’s in this for you?” Greta said suddenly.

“That’s a fair question.” Oscar smiled winningly. “Let’s just say that since meeting you I’ve been won over.”

Greta stared. “Surely you don’t expect us to believe that you plan to save our bacon, just because you’re flirting with me. Not that I mind all the flirting. But if I’m supposed to vamp my way into saving a multimillion-dollar federal facility, the country’s in worse shape than I thought.”

Oscar smiled. “I can flirt and work at the same time. I’m learning a lot by this discussion, it’s very useful. For instance, the way you stroked your hair behind your left ear when you said, ‘Maybe you could declare us all insane and say that labwork is our group therapy.’ That was a very beautiful moment — a little spark of personal fire in the middle of a very dry policy discussion. That would have looked lovely on-camera.”

She stared at him. “Is that what you think about me? Is that how you look at me? It is, isn’t it? You’re actually being sincere.”

“Of course I am. I need to know you better. I want to under-stand you. I’m learning a lot. You see, I’m from your government, and I’m here to help you.”

“Well, I want to know you better. So you’re not leaving this lab before I get some blood samples. And I’d like to do some PET-scans and reaction tests.”

“See, we do have real commonalities.”

“Except I still don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“I can tell you right now where my loyalties lie,” Oscar said. “I’m a patriot.”

She looked at him nonplussed.

“I wasn’t born in America. In point of fact, I wasn’t even born. But I work for our government because I believe in America. I hap-pen to believe that this is a unique society. We have a unique role in the world.”

Oscar whacked the lab table with an open hand. “We invented the future! We built it! And if they could design or market it a little better than we could, then we just invented something else more amazing yet. If it took imagination, we always had that. If it took enterprise, we always had it. If it took daring and even ruthlessness, we had it — we not only built the atomic bomb, we used it! We’re not some crowd of pious, sniveling, red-green Europeans trying to make the world safe for boutiques! We’re not some swarm of Confucian social engineers who would love to watch the masses chop cotton for the next two millennia! We are a nation of hands-on cosmic me-chanics!”

“And yet we’re broke,” Greta said.

“Why should I care if you clowns don’t make any money? I’m from the government! We print the money. Let’s get something straight right now. You people face a stark choice here. You can sit on your hands like prima donnas, and everything you’ve built will go down the tubes. Or you can stop being afraid, you can stop kneeling. You can get on your feet as a community, you can take some pride in yourselves. You can seize control of your own future, and make this place what you know it ought to be. You can or-ganize.”