Distraction

4

Oscar was physically safe from assault inside the Col-laboratory’s Hot Zone. But harassment by random maniacs had made his life politically impossible. Rumor flashed over the local community as swiftly as fire in a spacecraft. People were avoiding him; he was trouble; he was under a curse. Under these difficult circumstances, Oscar thought it wisest to tactfully absent himself. He de-vised a scheme to cover his retreat.

Oscar took the Bambakias tour bus into the Col-laboratory’s vehicle repair shed. He had the bus repainted as a Hazardous Materials emergency response vehicle. This had been Fontenot’s suggestion, for the wily ex-fed was a master of disguise. Fontenot pointed out that very few people, even roadblockers, would knowingly interfere with the ominous bulk of a vivid yellow Haz-Mat bus. The local Collaboratory cops were delighted to see Oscar leaving their jurisdiction, so they were only too eager to supply the necessary biohazard paint and decals.

Oscar departed before dawn in the repainted cam-paign bus, easing through an airlock gate without an-nouncement or fanfare. He was fleeing practically alone. He took only an absolutely necessary skeleton retinue: Jimmy de Paulo, his driver; Donna Nunez, his stylist; Lana Rama-chandran, his secretary; and, as cargo, Moira Matarazzo.

Moira was the first in his krewe to quit. Moira was a media spokesperson by trade; she was sadly visual and verbal. Moira had never quite understood the transcendent pleasures of building hotels by hand. Moira was also deeply repelled by the hermetic world of the Collaboratory, a world whose peculiar inhabitants found her interests irrelevant. Moira had decided to resign and go home to Boston.

Oscar made no real effort to persuade Moira to stay on with his krewe. He’d thought the matter over carefully, and he couldn’t accept the risk of keeping her around. Moira had grown fatally bored. He knew he could no longer trust her. Bored people were just too vul-nerable.

Oscar’s trip had been designed to achieve his political goals, while simultaneously throwing off pursuit and assault by armed luna-tics. He would circuit, disguised and unannounced, through Louisi-ana, Washington, DC, and back home to Boston in time for Christmas — all the while maintaining constant net-contact with his krewe in Buna.

Oscar’s first planned stop was Holly Beach, Louisiana. Holly Beach was a seaside collection of rickety stilt housing on the Gulf Coast, a hurricane-wracked region rashly billing itself as “The Cajun Riviera.” Fontenot had made arrangements for Oscar’s visit, scoping out the little town and renting a beach house under cover ID. Accord-ing to Fontenot, who was waiting there to join them, the ramshackle tourist burg was perfect for clandestine events. Holly Beach was so battered and primitive that it lacked net-wiring of any kind; it lived on cellphones, sat dishes, and methane generators. In rnid-December — it was now December 19 — the seaside village was almost deserted. The likelihood of being taped by paparazzi or jumped by insane assassins was very low in Holly Beach.

Oscar had arranged a quiet rendezvous there with Dr. Greta Pen-ninger.

After this beach idyll, Oscar would forge on to Washington, where he was overdue for face-time with his fellow staffers on the Senate Science Committee. After making the necessary obeisances to the Hill rats, Oscar would take the tour bus north to Cambridge, and finally deliver it to the Massachusetts Federal Democrat party HQ. Bambakias would donate his campaign bus to the party. The Senator, always a stalwart party financial patron, would at last be free to write off his investment.

Once in Boston, Oscar would renew his ties to the Senator. He would also have a welcome chance to return home and reorder his domestic affairs. Oscar was very worried about his house. Clare had deserted the place and left for Europe, and it wasn’t right or safe to have his home sitting empty. Oscar imagined that Moira might house-sit his place while she looked for another job in Boston. Oscar was far from happy about either the house or Moira, but the house and Moira were two of the loosest ends that he had. It struck him as handy to knit them.

Time passed smoothly on the trip’s first leg, to southwest Louisi-ana. Oscar had Jimmy turn up the music, and while Moira sulked in her bunk with a romance novel, Oscar, Lana, and Donna passed their time debating the many potentials of Greta Penninger.

Oscar wasn’t shy about this subject. There wasn’t much sense in that. It was useless to attempt to hide his love affairs from his own krewe. Certainly they had all known about Clare from the beginning. They might not be entirely thrilled about the advent of Greta, but it was spectator sport.

And their discussion had a political point. Greta Penninger was the leading dark-horse candidate for the Collaboratory Director’s post. Strangely, the Collaboratory scientists seemed oblivious to the stark fact that their Director’s post was at risk. The scientists weren’t fully cognizant of their own situation, somehow — they would refer to their power structure as “collegial assessment,” or maybe the “succession process” — anything but “politics.” But it was politics, all right. The Collaboratory seethed with a form of politics that dared not speak its own name.

This was not to say that science itself was politics. Scientific knowledge was profoundly different from political ideology. Science was an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involved falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible re-sults, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge it-self wasn’t a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table was a political construct.

But the things people did with science were every bit as political as the things people did with gold. Oscar had devoted many fascinated hours to study of the scientific community and its weirdly orthogonal power structure. The genuine work of science struck him as sadly geekish and tedious, but he was always charmed by an arcane political arrangement.

A scientist with many citations and discoveries had political power. He had scholarly repute, he had academic coattails, he had clout. He could dependably make his voice heard within the science community. He could set agendas, staff conference panels, arrange promotions and travel junkets, take consultation work. He could stay comfortably ahead of the research curve by receiving works before their official publication. A scientist on this inside track had no army, police, or slush fund; but in that quiet yet deadly scientific fashion, he was in firm control of his society’s basic resources. He could shunt the flow of opportunity at will, among the lesser beings. He was a player.

Money per se was of secondary importance in science. Scientists who relied too openly on hunting earmarked funds or kissing up for major grants acquired a taint, like politicians slyly playing the race card.

This was clearly a workable system. It was very old, and it had many quirks. Those quirks could be exploited. And the Collaboratory had never enjoyed the prolonged attentions of a crack team of political campaigners.

The current Director, Dr. Arno Felzian, was in hopeless straits. Felzian had once enjoyed a modestly successful career in genetic re-search, but he had won his exalted post in the Collaboratory through assiduous attention to Senator Dougal’s commands. Puppet regimes might thrive as long as the empire held out, but once the alien oppres-sors were gone, their local allies would soon be despised as collabora-tors. Senator Dougal, the Collaboratory’s longtime patron and official puppetmaster, had gone down in flames. Felzian, abandoned, no longer knew what to do with himself He was a jumpy, twitching yes-man with no one left to say yes to.

Dumping the current Director was a natural first step. But this would make little sense without a solid succession plan. In the little world of the Collaboratory, the Director’s departure would create a power vacuum hard enough to suck up everything not nailed down. Who would take the Director’s place? The senior members of the board were natural candidates for promotion, but they were payoff-tainted timeservers, just like their Director. At least, they could easily be portrayed that way by anyone willing to work at the job.

Oscar and his krewe advisers agreed that there was one central fracture line in the current power structure: Greta Penninger. She was on the board already, which gave her legitimacy, and a power base of sorts. And she had an untapped constituency — the Collaboratory’s ac-tual scientists. These were the long-oppressed working researchers, who did their best to generate authentic lab results while cordially ignoring the real world. The scientists had been cowering in the woodwork for years, while official corruption slowly ate away at their morale, their honor, and their livelihood. But if there was to be any chance of genuine reform inside the Collaboratory, it would have to come from the scientists themselves.

Oscar was optimistic. He was a Federal Democrat, a reform party with a reform agenda, and he felt that reform could work. As a class, the scientists were untouched and untapped; they oozed raw political potential. They were a very strange lot, but there were far more of these people inside the Collaboratory than he would ever have guessed. There were swarms of them. It was as if science had sucked up everyone on the planet who was too bright to be practical. Their selfless dedication to their work was truly a marvel to him.

Oscar had swiftly recovered from his initial wonder and astonish-ment. After a month of close study, Oscar realized that the situation made perfect sense. There wasn’t enough money in the world to pay merely normal people to work as hard as scientists worked. Without this vitalizing element of cranky idealism from a demographic fringe group, the scientific enterprise would have collapsed centuries ago.

He’d expected federal scientists to behave more or less like other federal bureaucrats. Instead he’d discovered a lost world, a high-tech Easter Island where a race of gentle misfits created huge and slightly pointless intellectual statuary.

Greta Penninger was one of these little people, the Col-laboratory’s high-IQ head-in-the-clouds proletariat. Unfortunately, she talked and dressed just like one of them, too. However, Greta had real promise. There was basically nothing wrong with the woman that couldn’t be set straight with a total makeover, power dressing, im-proved debate skills, an issue, an agenda, some talking points, and a clever set of offstage handlers.

Such was the mature consensus of Oscar’s krewe. As they dis-cussed their situation, Oscar, Lana, and Donna were also playing poker. Poker was truly Oscar’s game. He rarely failed to lose at poker. It never seemed to occur to his opponents that since he was quite wealthy he could lose money with impunity. Oscar would deliberately play just well enough to put up a fight. Then he would overreach himself, lose crushingly, and feign deep distress. The others would delightedly rake up their winnings and look at him with Olympian pity. They’d be so pleased with themselves, and so thoroughly con-vinced of his touching lack of cleverness and deceit, that they would forgive him anything.

“There’s just one problem though,” Donna said, expertly shuffling the deck.

“What’s that?” said Lana, munching a pistachio.

“The campaign manager should never sleep with the candidate.”

“She’s not really a candidate,” Lana said.

“I’m not really sleeping with her,” Oscar offered.

“He will, though,” Donna said wisely.

“Deal,” Oscar insisted.

Donna dealt the cards. “Maybe it’s all right. It’s just a fling. He can’t stay there, and she can’t ever leave. So it’s Romeo and Juliet without that ugly bother of dying.”

Oscar ignored her. “You’re shy, Lana.” Lana threw in half a Euro. The krewe always played poker with European cash. There was American cash around, flimsy plastic stuff, but most people wouldn’t take American cash anymore. It was hard to take American cash seri-ously when it was no longer convertible outside U.S. borders. Besides, all the bigger bills were bugged.

Corky, Fred, Rebecca Pataki, and Fontenot were already waiting in Holly Beach. Backed by the krewe with their on-line catalogs, they had made a touching effort with the rented beach house. They’d had ninety-six hours to put the wretched place in order. From the out-side it was unchanged: a ramshackle mess of creaking stairs, tarry wooden stilts, salt-eaten slatted porches. A flat-roofed yellow cheesebox.

Inside, though, the desolate wooden shack now featured hooked rugs, tasteful curtains, cozy oil-flow heaters, real pillows, and flowered sheets. There was a cloud of little road amenities: shower caps, soap, towels, roses, bathrobes, house slippers. It wouldn’t have fooled Lorena Bambakias, but his krewe still had the skills; they’d pried the place loose from squalor.

Oscar climbed into the bed and slept for five hours, a long time for him. He woke feeling refreshed and full of pleasantly untapped potential. At dawn he ate an apple from the tiny fridge and went for a long walk on the beach.

It was gusty and cold, but the sun was rising over the steel-gray Gulf of Mexico and casting the world into wintry clarity. This local beach wasn’t much to brag about. Since the ocean had risen two feet in the past fifty years, the rippled brown shoreline had a gimcrack, unhappy look. The original site of the Holly Beach settlement was now many meters out to sea. The relocated buildings had been moved upslope into a former cow pasture, leaving a network of old cracked pavement diving forlornly into the surf.

Needless to say, many such structures on the rim of the conti-nent had not been so fortunate. It was a common matter to find boardwalks, large chunks of piering, even entire homes washing up onto American beaches.

Oscar strolled past a glittering shoal of smashed aluminum. The plethora of drift junk filled him with a pleasant melancholy. Every beach he’d ever known had boasted its share of rusted bicycles, water-logged couches, picturesque sand-etched medical waste. In his opin-ion, zealots like the Dutch complained far too much about the inconveniences of rising seas. Like all Europeans, the Dutch were stuck in the past, unable to come to pragmatic, workable terms with new global realities.

Unfortunately, many of the same charges could be leveled at his own United States. Oscar brooded over his ambiguous feelings as he carefully skirted the foamy surf in his polished shoes. Oscar genuinely considered himself an American patriot. Deep in his cold and silent heart of hearts, he was as devoted to the American polity as his profes-sion and his colleagues would allow him to be. Oscar genuinely re-spected and savored the archaic courtliness of the United States Senate. The Senate’s gentlemen’s-club aspect strongly appealed to him. Those leisurely debates, the cloakrooms, the rules of order, that personalized, pre-industrial sense of dignity and gravitas… It seemed to him that a perfect world would have worked much like the U.S. Senate. A solid realm of ancient flags and dark wood paneling, where responsible, intelligent debate could take place within a fortress of shared values. Oscar recognized the United States Senate as a strong and graceful structure built to last by political architects committed to their work. It was a system that he would have been delighted to exploit, under better circumstances.

But Oscar was a child of his own time, and he knew he didn’t have that luxury. He knew it was his duty to confront and master modern political reality. Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierar-chies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the indus-trial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and successfully legitimize.

There were sixteen major political parties now, divided into war-ring blocs and ceaseless internecine purges, defections, and counterpurges. There were privately owned cities with millions of “clients” where the standard rule of law was cordially ignored. There were price-fixing mafias, money laundries, outlaw stock markets. There were black, gray, and green superbarter nets. There were health maintenance organizations staffed by crazed organ-sharing cliques, where advanced medical techniques were in the grip of any quack able to download a surgery program. Wiretapping net-militias flour-ished, freed of any physical locale. There were breakaway counties in the American West where whole towns had sold out to tribes of no-mads, and simply dropped off the map.

There were town meetings in New England with more compu-tational power than the entire U.S. government had once possessed. Congressional staffs exploded into independent fiefdoms. The execu-tive branch bogged down in endless turf wars in an acronym soup of agencies, everyone of them exquisitely informed and eager to net-work, and hence completely unable to set a realistic agenda and con-centrate on its own duties. The nation was poll-crazy, with cynical manipulation at an all-time toxic high — the least little things produced tooth-gritting single-issue coalitions and blizzards of automated lawsuits. The net-addled tax code, having lost all connection to fiscal reality, was routinely evaded by electronic commerce and wearily en-dured by the citizenry.

With domestic consensus fragmenting, the lost economic war with China had allowed the Emergency congressional committees to create havoc of an entirely higher order. With the official declaration of Emergency, Congress had signed over its birthright to a superstruc-ture of supposedly faster-moving executive committees. This desperate act had merely layered another operating system on top of the old one. The country now had two national governments, the original, halting, never-quite-superseded legal government, and the spasmodic, increas-ingly shrill declarations of the State-of-Emergency cliques.

Oscar had his own private reservations about certain policies of the Federal Democrats, but he felt that his party’s programs were basi-cally sound. First, the Emergency committees had to be reined in and dismantled. They had no real constitutional legitimacy; they had no direct mandate from the voters; they violated basic principles of sepa-ration of powers; they were not properly accountable; and worst of all, they had all been swiftly riddled with corruption. The Emergency committees were simply failing to govern successfully. They were sometimes rather popular, thanks to their assiduous cultivation of sin-gle-issue groups, but the longer the Emergency lasted, the closer they came to a slow-motion coup and outright usurpation of the Republic.

With the committees defanged and the State of Emergency re-pealed, it would be time to reform the state-federal relationship. De-centralization of powers had simply gone too far. A policy once meant to be fluid and responsive had turned into blinding, boiling confusion. It would be necessary to have a constitutional convention and abolish the outdated, merely territorial approach to citizen representation. There would have to be a new fourth branch of government made up of nongeographical nets.

With these major acts of reform, the stage would finally be set to attack the nation’s real problems. This had to be done without malice, without frenzy, and without repellent attacks of partisan histrionics. Oscar felt that this could be done. It looked bad… it looked very bad… to the outside observer, it looked well nigh hopeless. Yet the American polity still had great reserves of creativity — if the coun-try could be rallied and led in the right direction. Yes, it was true that the nation was broke, but other countries had seen their currencies annihilated and their major industries rendered irrelevant. This condi-tion was humiliating, but it was temporary, it was survivable. When you came down to it, America’s abject defeat in economic warfare was a very mild business compared to, say, twentieth-century carpet bombing and armed invasion.

The American people would just have to get over the fact that software no longer had any economic value. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, but it was a fait accompli. In many ways, Oscar had to give the Chinese credit for their cleverness in making all English-language in-tellectual property available on their nets at no charge. The Chinese hadn’t even needed to leave their own borders in order to kick the blocks out from under the American economy.

In some ways, this brutal collision with Chinese analog reality could be seen as a blessing. As far as Oscar had it figured, America hadn’t really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World’s Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people’s military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character really wasn’t suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World’s Movie Star. The world’s tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world’s acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of so-cially responsible centurions.

Oscar turned on the brown ribbed sands of the beach and began retracing his steps. He was enjoying being out of touch like this; he’d abandoned his laptop back in the krewe bus, he’d even left all the phones out of his sleeves and pockets. He felt that he should do this more often. It was important for a professional political operative to step back periodically, to take the time necessary to put his thoughts and intuitions into order and perspective. Oscar rarely created these vital little moments for himself — he’d somehow dimly intuited that he’d have plenty of time to develop his personal philosophy if he ever ended up behind bars. But he was giving himself some time for thought now, in this forgotten world of sand and wind and waves and chilly sunlight, and he could feel that it was doing him a lot of good.

An internal pressure had been building. He’d learned a great deal in the past thirty days, devouring whole reams of alien data in order to get up to speed, but hadn’t yet put it into an organized perspective. His data-stuffed head had become a disassembled mass of jumbled blocks. He was keyed up, tense, distracted, getting a little snappish.

Maybe it was just that long drought between women.

They were expecting Greta before noon. Negi had prepared a lovely seafood lunch for her. But Greta was late. The krewe ate lav-ishly inside the bus, popping corks and keeping up appearances, even joking about the no-show. But when Oscar left them, his mood had grown much darker.

He went into the beach house to wait for Greta, but the rooms that had once seemed louche yet charming now revealed themselves to him as merely sordid. Why was he fooling himself, taking such pains to imitate a love nest? Genuine love nests were places full of real meaning for lovers, full of things conveying some authentic emotional resonance. Little things, silly mementos maybe, a feather, a seashell, a garter, framed photos, a ring. Not these hired curtains, that hired bedspread, that set of fatally new antiseptic toothbrushes.

He sat on the creaking brass bed and gazed about the room, and the world turned inside out for him suddenly. He had been prepared to be charming and witty, he had been so looking forward to it, but she was not coming. She had wised up. She was too smart to come. He was alone in this small ugly building, marinating in his own juices.

A slow hour passed, and he was glad she hadn’t come. He was glad for himself of course, because it had been stupid to imagine a liaison with that woman, but he was also glad for her. He didn’t feel crushed by her rejection, but he could see himself more realistically now. He was a predator, he was seductive and cold. He was a creature of trembling web lines and shiny bright chitinous surfaces. Wise gray moth, to stay inside her home.

His course seemed very clear now. He would go back to Wash-ington, file a committee report, and stay there at his proper job. No one would really expect much from his very first Senate assignment. He had more than enough material for a devastating expose of the Collaboratory’s internal workings. If that wasn’t in the cards, he could play up the Collaboratory’s positive aspects: the profound effect of biotech spinoffs on the regional economy, for instance. He could trumpet the futuristic glamour of the next big federal breakthrough: high-tech industrial neuroscience. Whatever they wanted to hear.

He could become a career Hill rat, a policy wonk. They were a large and thriving tribe. He could invest ever more elaborate amounts of energy on ever more arcane and tiresome subjects. He’d never run another political campaign, and he’d certainly never win political power in his own right, but if he didn’t burn out as a policy cog, he might well flourish. There might be something pleasant at the end, maybe a cabinet post, a guest professorship somewhere in his final declining days…

He left the beach house, unable to bear himself The door was open in the tour bus, but he couldn’t face his krewe. He went to Holly Beach’s single grocery store, a cheerfully ramshackle place, its floors unpainted and its raftered ceiling hung with old fishing nets. It had an entire towering wall of shiny floor-to-ceiling booze. Souvenir fishing hats. Fish line and plastic lures. Desiccated alligator heads, eerie knickknacks carved from Spanish moss and coconut. Tatty, half-bootlegged music cassettes — he found it intensely annoying that Dutch music was so popular now. How on earth could a drowning country with a miniscule, aging population have better pop music than the United States?

He picked up a pair of cheap beach sandals, a deeply unnecessary impulse buy. There was a dark-haired teenage girl waiting behind the counter, a Louisiana local. She was bored and lonely in the cold and quiet grocery, and she gave him a dazzling smile, a hello-handsome-stranger smile. She was wearing a bad nubby sweater and a flowered shift of cheap gene-spliced cotton, but she was good-tempered and pretty. Sexual fantasy, crushed and derailed by the day’s disappoint-ments, flashed back into life, on a strange parallel track. Yes, young woman of the bayous, I am indeed a handsome stranger. I am clever, rich, and powerful. Trust me, I can take you far away from all this. I can open your eyes to the great wide world, carry you away to gilded corridors of luxury and power. I can dress you, I can teach you, remold you to my will, I can transform you utterly. All you have to do for me is… There was nothing she could do for him. His interest faded.

He left the grocery with his purchased sandals in a paper bag, and began walking the sandy streets of Holly Beach. There was something so naively crass and seedy about the town that it had a strange deca-dent charm, a kind of driftwood Gothic. He could imagine Holly Beach as queerly interesting in the summer: straw-hatted families chatting in Acadian French, tattooed guys firing up their barbecue smokers, offshore oil workers on holiday, dredging up something leathery and boneless in a seine. A spotted dog was following him, sniffing at his heels. It was very odd to encounter a dog after weeks in an environment infested with kinkajous and caribou. Maybe it was finally time for him to break down and acquire his own personal exotic animal. That would be very fashionable, a nice memento of his stay. His own personal genetic toy. Something very quick and carniv-orous. Something with big dark spots.

He came across the oldest house in town. The shack was so old that it had never been moved; it had been sitting in the same place for decades as the seas rose. The shack had once been a long and lonely distance from the beach, though now it was quite near the water. The building looked queerly haphazard, as if it had been banged together over a set of weekends by somebody’s brother-in-law.

Storms, sand, and pitiless Southern sun had stripped off a weary succession of cheap layered paints, but the shack was still inhabited. It wasn’t rented, either. Someone was living in it full-time. There was a dented postbox and a sandblasted mesh sat-dish on the metal roof, trailing a severed cable. There were three wooden steps up to the rust-hinged door, steps thick and grained and splintery, half buried in damp sand, with a lintel of sandblasted wood that might have been sixty years old and looked six hundred.

In the winter light of late afternoon there was a look to that smoky woodgrain that enchanted him. Ancient brown nail holes. White seagull droppings. He had a strong intuition that someone very old was living here. Old, blind, feeble, no one left to love them, family gone away now, story all over.

He placed his bare palm tenderly against the sun-warmed wood. Awareness flowed up his arm, and he tasted a sudden premonition of his own death. It would be exactly like this moment: alone and sere. Broken steps too tall for him to ever climb again. Mortality’s swift scythe would slash clean through him and leave nothing but empty clothes.

Shaken, he walked quickly back to the rented beach house. Greta was waiting there. She was wearing a hooded gray jacket and carrying a carpetbag.

Oscar hurried up. “Hi! Sorry! Did you catch me out?”

“I just got here. There were roadblocks. I couldn’t call ahead.”

“That’s all right! Come on upstairs, it’s warm.”

He ushered her up the stairs and into the beach house. Once inside, she looked about herself skeptically. “It’s hot in here.”

“I’m so glad you’ve come.” He was appallingly glad to see her. So much so that he felt close to tears. He retreated into the hideous kitchenette and quickly poured himself a glass of rusty tap water. He sipped it, and steadied himself. “Can I get you something?”

“I just wanted …” Greta sighed and sat down unerringly in the room’s ugliest piece of furniture, a ghastly thirdhand fabric arm-chair. “Never mind.”

“You missed lunch. Can I take your coat?”

“I didn’t want to come at all. But I want to be honest…”

Oscar sat on the rug near the heater, and pulled off one shoe. “I can see you’re upset.” He pulled off the other shoe and crossed his legs on the rug. “That’s all right, I understand that perfectly. It was a long trip, it’s difficult, our situation’s very difficult. I’m just glad that you’ve come, that’s all. I’m happy to see you. Very happy. I’m touched.”

She said nothing, but looked warily attentive.

“Greta, you know that I’m fond of you. Don’t you? I mean that. We have a rapport, you and I. I don’t quite know why, but I want to know. I want you to be glad that you came here. We’re alone at last, that’s a rare privilege for us, isn’t it? Let’s talk it out, let’s put it all on the table now, let’s be good friends.”

She was wearing perfume. She had brought an overnight bag. She was clearly having an attack of cold feet, but the underlying in-dicators looked solid.

“I want to understand you, Greta. I can understand, you know. I think I do understand you a little. You’re a very bright woman, much brighter than most people, but you have insight, you’re sensitive. You’ve done great things with your life, great accomplishments, but there’s no one on your side. I know that’s the truth. And it’s sad. I could be on your side, if you’d let me.” He lowered his voice. “I can’t make any conventional promises, because we’re just not conventional people. But the two of us could be great friends. We could even be lovers. Why can’t we? The odds are against us, but that doesn’t make it hopeless.”

It was very quiet. He should have thought to put on some music. “I think that you need someone. You need someone who can understand your interests, someone to be your champion. People don’t appreciate you for what you are. People are using you for their own small-minded little ends. You’re very brave and dedicated, but you have to break out of your shell, you can’t go on retreating and being polite, you can’t go on accommodating those goons, they’ll drive you crazy, they’re not fit to touch the hem of your shoe. Your gown. The, what the hell, your lab coat.” He paused and drew a shaky breath. “Look, just tell me what you need.”

“I was wrong about you,” she said. “I thought you were going to grab me.”

“No, of course I’m not going to grab you.” He smiled.

“Stop smiling. You think I’m very innocent, don’t you. I’m not innocent. Listen to me. I have a body, I have hormones, I have a limbic system. I’m a sexual person. Look, I’ve been sitting up there under those cameras bored to death, restless, going crazy, and then you show up. You show up, and you’re coming on to me.”

She stood up. “I’ll tell you what I need, since you want to know so badly. I need a guy who’s kind of cold-blooded and disposable, who won’t kick up a big fuss. He has to want me in this completely shallow, obvious way. But you’re not the kind of guy I want, are you. Not really.”

There was a ringing silence.

“I should have found some way to tell you all that, before you came down here, and took all this trouble. I almost didn’t come at all, but…” She sat back down wearily. “Well, it was more honest to be here face-to-face, and have it all out, all at once.”

Oscar cleared his throat. “Do you know the game of go? Go-bang? Wei-chi, in Chinese.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

Oscar got up and fetched his travel set. “Senator Bambakias taught me how to play go. It’s a core metaphor for his krewe, it’s how we think. So if you want to mix with modern politicians and accom-plish something, then you need to learn this game right away.”

“You’re really a strange man.”

He opened and set out the square-lined board, with its two cups of black and white stones. “Sit down on the rug here with me, Greta. We’re going to have this out right now, Eastern style.”

She sat down cross-legged near the oil heater. “I don’t gamble.”

“Go isn’t a gambling game. Let me take your jacket now. Good. This isn’t chess, either. This isn’t a Western-style, mechanized, head-to-head battle. Those just don’t happen anymore. Go is all about net-works and territories. You play the net — you place your stones where the lines cross. You can capture the stones if you totally surround them, but killing them is just a collateral effect. You don’t want to kill the stones, that’s not the point. You want the blankness. You want the empty spaces in the net.”

“I want the potential.”

“Exactly. ”

“When the game ends, the player with the most potential wins.”

“You have played go before.”

“No, I haven’t. But that much is obvious.”

“You’ll play black,” he said. He set a group of black stones on the board, crisply clicking them down. “Now I’ll demo the game a bit, before we start. You place your stones down like this, one at a time. The groups of stones gain strength from their links, from the network that they form. And the groups have to have eyes, blank eyes inside the network. That’s a crucial point.” He placed a blocking chain of white stones around the black group. “A single eye isn’t enough, because I could blind that eye with one move, and capture your whole group. I could surround the whole group, drop into the middle, blind your eye, and just remove the whole group, like this. But with two eyes — like this? — the group becomes a permanent fea-ture on the board. It lives forever.”

“Even if you totally surround me.”

“Exactly. ”

She hunched her shoulders and stared at the board. “I can see why your friend likes this game.”

“Yes, it’s very architectural… All right, we’ll try a practice game.” He swept the board clean of stones. “You’re the beginner, so you get nine free stones on these nine crucial spots.”

“That’s a lot of free stones.”

“That’s not a problem, because I’m going to beat you anyway.” He clicked down his first white stone with two fingertips.

They played for a while. “Atari,” he repeated.

“You can stop saying that word now, I can see that my group’s in check.”

“It’s just a customary courtesy.”

They played more. Oscar was starting to sweat. He stood up and turned down the heaters.

He sat down again. All the tension had left their situation. The two of them were totally rapt. “You’re going to beat me,” she an-nounced, “You know all those foul little tricks in the corners.”

“Yes, I do.”

She looked up and met his eyes. “But I can learn those little tricks, and then you’re going to have a hard time with me.”

“I can appreciate a hard time. A hard time is good to find.” He beat her by thirty points. “You’re learning fast. Let’s try a serious game.”

“Don’t clear the board yet,” she said. She studied her defeat with deep appreciation. “These patterns are so elegant.”

“Yes. And they’re always different. Every game has its own char-acter. ”

“These stones are a lot like neurons.”

He smiled at her.

They started a second game. Oscar was very serious about go. He played poker for social reasons, but he never threw a game of go. He was too good at it. He was a gifted player, clever, patient, and profoundly deceptive, but Greta’s game play was all over the map. She was making beginner’s mistakes, but she never repeated them, and her mental grasp of the game was incredibly strong.

He beat her by nineteen points, but only because he was ruthless. “This is a really good game,” she said. “It’s so contemporary.”

“It’s three thousand years old.”

“Really?” She stood up and stretched, her kneecaps cracking loudly. “That calls for a drink.”

“Go ahead.”

She found her carpetbag and retrieved a square bottle of blue Dutch gin.

Oscar went to the kitchen and fetched two brand-new bistro glasses from their sanitary wrap. “You want some orange juice with that stuff?”

“No thank you.”

He poured himself an orange juice and brought her an empty glass. He watched in vague astonishment as she decanted three fingers of straight gin, with a chemist’s painstaking care.

“Some ice? We do have ice.”

“That’s all right.”

“Look, Greta, you can’t drink straight gin. That’s the road to blue ruin.”

“Vodka gives me headaches. Tequila tastes nasty.” She placed her pointed upper lip on the rim of her bistro glass and had a long meditative sip. Then she shuddered. “Yum! You don’t drink at all, do you?”

“No. And you should take it a little easier. Straight gin kills neurons by the handful.”

“I kill neurons for a living, Oscar. Let’s play.”

They had a third game. The booze had melted something inside her head and she was playing hard. He fought as if his life depended on it. He was barely holding his own.

“Nine free stones are way too many for you,” he said. “We should cut you back to six.”

“You’re going to win again, aren’t you?”

“Maybe twenty points.”

“Fifteen. But we don’t have to finish this one now.”

“No.” He was holding a white stone between two fingertips. “We don’t have to finish.”

He reached out across the board. He touched his two fingers to the underside of her chin very gently. She looked up in surprise, and he drew a caress along the line of her jaw. Then he leaned in slowly, until their lips met.

A throwaway kiss. Barely there, like eiderdown. He slipped his hand to the nape of her neck and leaned in seriously. The bright taste of gin parched his tongue.

“Let’s get in bed,” he said.

“That really isn’t smart.”

“I know it isn’t, but let’s do it anyway.”

They levered themselves from the floor. They crossed the room and climbed into the square brass bed.

It was the worst sex he had ever had. It was halting, jittery, analytical sex. Sex devoid of any warm animal rapport. All the sim-ple, liberating pleasure of the act was somehow discounted in advance, while postcoital remorse and regret loomed by their bedside like a pair of drooling voyeurs. They didn’t so much finish it, as negotiate a way to stop.

“This bed’s very rickety,” she said politely. “It really squeaks.”

“I should have bought a new one.”

“You can’t buy an entire new bed just for one night.”

“I can’t help the one night; I leave for Washington tomorrow.”

She levered herself up in the shiny sheets. Her china-white shoulders had a fine network of little blue veins. “What are you going to tell them in Washington?”

“What do you want me to tell them in Washington?”

“Tell them the truth.”

“You always tell me that you want the truth, Greta. But do you know what it means when you get it?”

“Of course I want the truth. I always want the truth. No matter what.”

“All right, then I’ll give you some truth.” He laced his hands behind his head, drew a breath, and stared at the ceiling. “Your labo-ratory was built by a politician who was deeply corrupt. Texas lost the space program when it shut down. They never quite made the big time in digital. So they tried very hard to move into biotech. But East Texas was the stupidest place in the world to build a genetics lab. They could have built it in Stanford, they could have built it in Raleigh, they could have built it on Route 128. But Dougal convinced them to build it miles from nowhere, in the deep piney woods. He used the worst kind of Luddite panic tactics. He convinced Congress to fund a giant airtight biohazard dome, with every possible fail-safe device, just so he could line the pockets of a big gang of military contractors who’d fallen off their gravy train and needed the federal contracts. And the locals loved him for that. They voted him in again and again, even though they had no idea what biotechnology was or what it really meant. The people of East Texas were simply too backward to build a genetic industry base, even with a massive pork-barrel jump start. So all the spin-offs moved over the state border, and they ended up in the pockets of Dougal’s very best pal and disciple, a ruthless demagogue from Cajun country. Green Huey is a populist of the worst sort. He really thinks that genetic engineering belongs by right in the hands of semiliterate swamp-dwellers.”

He glanced at her. She was listening.

“So Huey deliberately — and this took a weird kind of genius, I’ll admit this — he deliberately boiled down your lab’s best research dis-coveries into plug-and-play recipes that any twelve-year-old child could use. He took over a bunch of defunct Louisiana oil refineries, and he turned those dead refineries into giant bubbling cauldrons of genetic voodoo. Huey declared all of Louisiana a free-fire zone for unlicensed DNA gumbo. And you know something? Louisianans are extremely good at the work. They took to gene-splicing like muskrats to water. They have a real native gift for the industry. They love it! They love Huey for giving it to them. Huey gave them a new future, and they made him a king. Now he’s power-mad, he basically rules the state by decree. Nobody dares to question him.”

She had gone very pale.

“The Texans never voted Dougal out of office. Texans would never do that. They don’t care how much he stole, he’s their patron, the alcalde, the godfather, he stole it all for Texas, so that’s good enough for them. No, the damn guy just drank himself stupid. He kept boozing till he blew out his liver, and couldn’t make a quorum call anymore. So now Dougal’s finally out of the picture for good. So do you know what that means to you?”

“What?” she said flatly.

“It means your party’s almost over. It costs a fortune to run that giant cucumber-frame, much more than the place is really worth to anybody, and the country is broke. If you’re going to do genetic research nowadays, you can do it very cheaply, in very simple build-ings. In somebody else’s constituency.”

“But there’s the animals,” she said. “The genetic facilities.”

“That’s the truly tragic part. You can’t save an endangered spe-cies by cloning animals. I admit, it’s better than having them com-pletely exterminated and lost forever. But they’re curios now, they walk around looking pretty, they’ve become collector’s items for the ultra-rich. A living species isn’t just the DNA code, it’s the whole spread of genetic variety in a big wild population, plus their learned behaviors, and their prey and their predators, all inside a natural envi-ronment. But there aren’t any natural environments anymore. Because the climate has changed.”

He sat up, the bedsprings crunching loudly. “The climate’s in flux now. You can’t shelter whole envirorunents under airtight domes. Only two kinds of plants really thrive in today’s world: genetically altered crops, and really fast-moving weeds. So our world is all bam-boo and kudzu now, it has nothing to do with the endangered fox-glove lady’s slipper and its precious niche on some forgotten mountain. Politically, we hate admitting this to ourselves, because it means admitting the full extent of our horrible crimes against nature, but that’s ecological reality now. That’s the truth you asked me for. That is reality. Paying tons of money to preserve bits of Humpty Dumpty’s shell is strictly a pious gesture.”

“And that’s what you’re going to tell your Senators.”

“No, no, I never said that.” Oscar sighed. “I just wanted to tell you the truth.”

“What do you want to tell your Senators?”

“What do I want? I want you. I want you to be on my side. I want to reform your situation, and I want you to help me and counsel me.”

“I have my own krewe, thank you.”

“No, you don’t have anything. You have a very expensive facility that is on a short-term loan. And you’re dealing with people in Wash-ington who can misplace an air base and laugh about it. No, when I look at your game from your position, I see that you have two realistic options. Number one, get out now, before the purge. Take another post, academia maybe, even Europe. If you angle it right, you can probably take some of your favorite grad students and bottle-washers with you.”

She scowled. “What’s option number two?”

“Take power. A preemptive strike. Just take the place over, and root out everyone of those crooked sons of bitches. Come clean about everything, get ahead of the curve, and blow the place wide open.” Oscar levered himself up on one elbow. “If you leak it at just the right time, through just the right sources, and in just the right order, with just the right spin, you can get rid of the featherbedders and save most of the people who are doing actual research. That’s a very risky gambit, and it probably won’t succeed, and it will make you stacks of bitter enemies for life. But there is one saving grace there: if you’re turning the place upside down yourself, Congress will be so amazed that they won’t get around to shutting you down. If you get good press, and if they like your style, they might even back you.”

She sank back, crushed, against the pillow. “Look, I just want to work in my lab.”

“That’s not an option.”

“It’s very important work.”

“I know it is, but that’s just not an option.”

“You don’t really believe in anything, do you?”

“Yes I do,” he said passionately. “I believe that smart people working together can make a difference in this world. I know you’re very smart, and if we work together, then maybe I can help you. If you’re not with me, then you’re on your own.”

“I’m not helpless. I have friends and colleagues who trust me.”

“Well, that’s lovely. You can all be helpless together.”

“No, it’s not lovely. Because you’re sleeping with me. And you’re telling me you’re going to destroy everything I work for.”

“Look, it’s the truth! Would it be better if I slept with you and didn’t tell you what was going on? Because the possibility distinctly occurred to me. But I don’t have the heart.”

“You have the wrong person for this. I hate administration. I can’t take power. I’m no good at it.”

“Greta, look at me. I could make you good at it. Don’t you understand that? I run political campaigns, I’m an expert. That’s my job.”

“What a horrible thing to say.”

“We could do it, all right. Especially if you weighed in with us, if you’d let us advise you and help you. My krewe and I, we took an architect who had five percent approval ratings and we made him Senator from Massachusetts. Your sad little fishbowl has never seen people like us.”

“Well…” She sighed. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“Good. You do that. I’ll be gone for a while. Washington, Bos-ton… Give the subject some serious thought.” His stomach rum-bled. “After all that ranting, I’m not a bit sleepy. Are you sleepy?”

“God, no.”

“I’m starving. Let’s go get something to eat. You brought a car, right?”

“It’s a junker car. Internal combustion.”

“It’ll get us into a real town. I’ll take you out tonight. We’ll go out somewhere, we’ll paint the town together.”

“Are you nuts? You can’t do that. Crazy people are trying to kill you.”

He waved a hand. “Oh, who cares? We can’t live that way. What’s the use? Anyway, the risk is minimal here. It would take a major-league intelligence operation to track us down here in this dump. I’m much safer at some random restaurant than I’ll be in Wash-ington or Boston. This is our only night together. Let’s be brave. Let’s find the nerve to be happy.”

They dressed, left the beach house, got into the car. Greta started it with a metal key. The engine growled in ugly piston-popping fashion. Then Greta’s phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Oscar said.

She ignored him. “Yes?” She paused, then handed it over. “It’s for you.”

It was Fontenot. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Are you still awake? We’re going out for dinner.”

“Of course I’m awake! I was up as soon as you left the safe house. You can’t leave Holly Beach, Oscar.”

“Look, it’s the middle of the night, nobody knows we’re here, we’re in a rented car with no history, and we’re picking a town at random.”

“You want to eat? We’ll bring you in some food. What if you get pulled over by a parish sheriff? They’ll punch you into the state police net. You think that’ll be a fun experience for a Yankee who’s crossed Green Huey? Think otherwise, pal.”

“Should that happen, I’ll lodge a complaint with the American embassy.”

“Very funny. Stop being stupid, okay? I finessed the Holly Beach thing for you, and that wasn’t easy. If you depart from the itinerary, I can’t be responsible.”

“Keep driving,” Oscar told Greta. “Jules, I appreciate your pro-fessionalism, I really do, but we need to do this, and there’s no time to argue about it.”

“All right,” Fontenot groaned. “Take the highway east and I’ll get back to you.”

Oscar hung up and gave Greta her phone. “Did you ever have a bodyguard?” he said.

She nodded. “Once. After the Nobel announcement. It was me and Danny Yearwood. After the big news broke, Danny started getting all these threats from the animal rights people … Nobody ever threatened me about it, and that was so typical. They just went after Danny. We shared the Nobel, but I was the one doing all the labwork… We had some security during the press coverage, but the stalkers just waited them out. Later they jumped poor Danny out-side his hotel and broke both his arms.”

“Really. ”

“I always figured it was the fetal-tissue people who were the real anti-science crazies. The righters mostly just broke into labs and stole animals. ”

She peered carefully into the moving pool of headlights, grasping the wheel with her narrow hands. “Danny was so good about the credit. He put my name first on the paper — it was my hypothesis, I did the labwork, so that was very ethical, but he was just such an angel about it. He just fought for me and fought for me, he never let them overlook me. He gave me every credit that he could, and then they stalked him and beat him up, and they completely ignored me. His wife really hated my guts.”

“How is Dr. Yearwood, these days? How could I get in touch with him?”

“Oh, he’s out. He left science, he’s in banking now.”

“You’re kidding. Banking? He won the Nobel Prize for rnedicine.”

“Oh, the Nobel doesn’t count so much, since those Swedish bribery scandals… A lot of people said that was why we got the Prize in the first place, a woman still in her twenties, they were trying some kind of clean-slate approach. I don’t care, I just enjoy the labwork. I like framing the hypothesis. I like the procedures, I like proper form. I like the rigor, the integrity. I like publishing, seeing it all there in black and white, all very tight and straight. It’s knowledge then. It’s forever.”

“You really love your work, Greta. I respect that.”

“It’s very hard. If you get famous, they just won’t let you work anymore. They bump you up in the hierarchy, they promote you out of the lab, there’s a million stupid distractions. Then it’s not about science anymore. It’s all about feeding your postdoc’s children. The whole modern system of science is just a shadow of what it was in the Golden Age — the First Cold War. But…” She sighed. “I don’t know. I did all right personally. Other people have had it so much worse.”

“Such as?”

“There was this woman once. Rita Levi-Montalcini. You know about her?”

“I’ll know if you tell me.”

“She was another Nobelist. She was Jewish, in the 1930s, in Italy. A neuro-embryologist. The Fascists were trying to round her up, and she was hiding in this village in a shack. She made dissection tools out of wire and she got these hen’s eggs … She had no money, and she couldn’t show her face, and the government was literally try-ing to kill her, but she got her lab results anyway, major results… She survived the war and she got away. She ran to America, and they gave her a really great lab job, and she ended up as this ninety-year-old famous world-class neuro person. She’s exactly what it’s all about, Rita was.”

“You want me to drive a little now?”

“I’m sorry that I’m crying.”

“That’s all right. Just pull over.”

They stepped out in the darkness and switched positions in the car. He drove off with a loud crunch of roadside oyster shells. It had been a long time since he’d done any of his own driving. He tried to pay a lot of attention, as he was anxious not to kill them. Things were becoming so interesting. The sex had been a debacle, but sex was only part of it anyway. He was getting through to her now. Getting through was what counted.

“You shouldn’t let them destroy my lab, Oscar. I know the place never lived up to its hype, but it’s a very special place, it shouldn’t be destroyed. ”

“That’s an easy thing to say. It might even be doable. But how hard are you willing to fight for what you want? What will you give? What will you sacrifice?”

Her phone rang again. She answered it. “It’s your friend again,” she said, “he wants us to go to some place called Buzzy’s. He’s called ahead for us.”

“My friend is really a very fine man.”

They drove into the town of Cameron, and they found the restaurant. Buzzy’s was a music spot of some pretension, it was open late and the tourist crowd was good. The band was playing classical string quartets. Typical Anglo ethnic music. It was amazing how many Anglos had gone into the booming classical music scene. Anglos seemed to have some innate talent for rigid, linear music that less troubled ethnic groups couldn’t match.

Fontenot had phoned them in a reservation as Mr. and Mrs. Garcia. They got a decent table not far from the kitchen, and a healthy distance from the bar, where a group of Texan tourists in evening dress were loudly drinking themselves stupid amid the brass and the mir-rors. There were cloth napkins, decent silverware, attentive waiters, menus in English and French. It was cozy, and became cozier yet when Fontenot himself arrived and took a table near the door. It felt very warm and relaxing to have a bodyguard awake, sober, and check-ing all the arrivals.

“I need seafood,” Oscar announced, studying his menu. “Lob-ster would be nice. Haven’t had a decent lobster since I left Boston.”

“Йcrevisse,” Greta said.

“What’s that?”

“Top of page two. A famous local specialty, you should try it.”

“Sounds great.” He signaled a waiter and ordered. Greta asked for chicken salad.

Greta began to spin the narrow stem of her wineglass, which he had filled with mineral water in order to forestall more gin. “Oscar, how are we going to work this? I mean us.”

“Oh, our liaison is technically unethical, but it doesn’t quite count when you’re unethical away from the action. You’ll be going back to your work, and I’m going to the East Coast. But I’ll be back later, and we can arrange something discreet.”

“That’s how this works, in your circles?”

“When it works… It’s accepted. Like, say, the President and his mistress.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Leonard Two Feathers has a mistress?”

“No, no, not him! I mean the old guy, the man who’s still officially President. He had this girlfriend — Pamela something, you don’t need to know her last name… She’ll wait till he’s safely out of office. Then she’ll license the tell-all book, the fragrance, the lin-gerie, the various ancillary rights… It’s her cash-out money.”

“What does the First Lady think of all that?”

“I imagine she thinks what First Ladies always think. She thought she’d be an instant co-President, and then she had to watch for four long years while the Emergency committees staked her guy out in public and pithed him like a frog. That’s the real tragedy of it. You know, I had no use for that guy as a politician, but I still hated watching that process. The old guy looked okay when he took office. He was eighty-two years old, but hey, everybody in the Party of American Unity is old, the whole Right Progressive Bloc has a very aged demographic… The job just broke him, that’s all. It just snapped his poor old bones right there in public. I guess they could have outed him on the thousand-year-old girlfriend issue, but with all the truly serious troubles the President had, trashing his sex life was overkill.”

“I never knew about any of that.”

“People know. Somebody always knows. The man’s krewe al-ways knows. The Secret Service knows. That doesn’t mean you can get people to make a public issue of it. Nets are really peculiar. They’re never smooth and uniform, they’re always lumpy. There are probably creeps somewhere who have surveillance video of the Presi-dent with Pamela. Maybe they’re swapping it around, trading it for paparazzi shots of Hollywood stars. It doesn’t matter. My dad the movie star, he used to get outed all the time, but they were always such’ silly things — he got outed once for punching some guy at a polo club, but he never got outed for playing footsie with mobsters. Crazy people with time on their hands can learn a lot of weird things on the net. But they’re still crazy people, no matter how much they learn. They’re not players, so they just don’t count.”

“And I’m not a player, so I just don’t count.”

“Don’t take it badly. None of your people ever counted. Senator Dougal, he was your player. Your player is gone now, so you have nothing left on the game board. That’s political reality.”

“I see.”

“You can vote, you know. You’re a citizen. You have one vote. That’s important.”

“Right.” They laughed.

They had consomme. Then the waiter brought the main dish. “Smells wonderful,” Oscar said. “Got a lobster bib? Claw cracker? Hammer, maybe?” He had a closer look at the dish. “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with my lobster?”

“That’s your йcrevisse.” “What is it, exactly?”

“Crayfish. Crawdad. A freshwater lobster.”

“What’s with these claws? The tail’s all wrong.”

“It’s domestic. Natural crawdads are only three inches long. They stitched its genetics. That’s a local specialty.”

Oscar stared at the boiled crustacean in its bed of yellow rice. His dinner was a giant genetic mutant. Its proportions seemed profoundly wrong to him. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. Certainly he’d eaten his share of genetically altered crops: corncobs half the size of his arm, UltraPlump zucchinis, tasty mottled brocco-cauliflowers, seedless apples, seedless everything, really… But here was an en-tire gene-warped animal boiled alive and delivered in one piece. It looked fantastic, utterly unreal. It was like a lobster-shaped child’s balloon.

“Smells delicious,” he said. Greta’s phone rang.

“Look, can’t we eat in peace?” Oscar said.

She swallowed a forkful of vinegar-gleaming chicken salad. “I’ll shut my phone off,” she said.

Oscar prodded experimentally at one of the crawdad’s many anciliary legs. The boiled limb snapped off as cleanly as a twig, revealing a white wedge of flesh.

“Don’t be shy,” she told him, “this is Louisiana, okay? Just stick the head right in your mouth and suck the juice out.”

The music from the band stopped suddenly, in mid-quartet. Os-car looked up. The doorway was full of cops.

They were Louisiana state troopers, men in flat-brimmed hats with headphones and holstered capture guns. They were filtering into the restaurant. Oscar looked hastily for Fontenot and saw the security man discreetly punching at his phone, with a look of annoyance.

“Sorry,” Oscar said, “may I borrow your phone a minute?”

He turned Greta’s phone back on and engaged in the surpris-ingly complex procedure of reinstalling its presence in the Louisiana net. The cops had permeated through the now-hushed crowd, and had blocked all the exits. There were cops in the bar, a cop with the maitre d’, cops quietly vanishing into the kitchen, two pairs of cops going upstairs. Cops with laptops, cops with video. Three cops were having a private conference with the manager.

Then came the thudding racket of a helicopter, landing outside. When the rotors shut off, the entire crowd found themselves suddenly shouting. The sudden silence afterward was deeply impressive.

Two mountainous bodyguards in civilian dress entered the res-taurant, followed immediately by a short, red-faced man in house shoes and purple pajamas.

The red-faced man bustled headlong into the restaurant, his furry house slippers slithering across the tiles. “HEY, Y’ALL!” he shouted, his voice booming like a kettledrum. “It’s ME!” He waved both arms, pajamas flying open to reveal a hairy belly. “Sorry for the mess! Offi-cial business! Y’ all relax! Ever’thing under control.”

“Hello, Governor!” someone shouted. “Hey, Huey!” yelled an-other diner, as if it were something he’d been longing to say all his life. The diners were all grinning suddenly, exchanging happy glances, skidding their chairs back, their faces alight. They were in luck. Life and color had entered their drab little lives.

“See what the boys in the back room’ll have!” screeched the Governor. “We’re gonna look after you folks real good tonight! Din-ner’s on me, everybody! All righty? Boozoo, you see to that! Right away.”

“Yessir,” said Boozoo, who was one of the bodyguards.

“Gimme a COFFEE!” boomed Huey. He was short, but he had shoulders like a linebacker. “Gimme a double coffee! It’s late, so put a shot of something in it. Gimme a demitasse. Hell, gimme a whole goddamn tasse. Somebody gonna get me two tasses? Do I have to wait all night? Goddamn, it smells good in here! You folks having a good time yet?”

There was a ragged yell of public approval.

“Y’all don’t mind me now,” screamed Huey, casually hitching his pajama bottoms. “Couldn’t get myself a decent meal in Baton Rouge, had to fly down here to take the edge off. Gotta take a big meeting tonight.” He strode unerringly into the depths of the restau-rant, approaching Oscar’s table like a battleship. He stopped short, looming suddenly before them, hands twitching, forehead dotted with sweat. “Clifton, gimme a chair.”

“Yessir,” said the remaining bodyguard. Clifton yanked a chair from a nearby table like a man picking up a breadstick, and deftly slid it beneath his boss’s rump.

Suddenly the three of them were sitting face-to-face. At close range the Governor’s head was like a full moon, swollen, glowing, and lightly cratered. “Hello, Etienne,” Greta said.

“Hallo, petite!” To Oscar’s intense annoyance, the two of them began speaking in rapid, idiomatic French.

Oscar glanced over to catch Fontenot’s eye. There was a two-volume lesson in good sense in Fontenot’s level gaze. Oscar looked away.

A waiter arrived on the trot with coffee, a tall glass, whipped cream, a shot of bourbon. “I’m starvin’,” Huey announced, in a new and much less public voice. “Nice mudbug you got there, son.”

Oscar nodded.

“I dote on mudbugs,” Huey said. “Gimme some butter dip.” He pulled his pajama sleeves up, reached out with nutcracker hands, and wrenched the tail from the carapace with a loud bursting of gristle and meat. He flexed the tail, everting a chunk of white steaming flesh. “C’ est bon, son!” He stuffed it into his mouth, set his teeth, and tore. “That GOOD or what! Gonna BODY-SLAM them Boston lobsters! Bring me a menu. My Yankee friend the Soap Salesman here, he’s gotta order hisself somethin’. Tell the chef to put some hair on his chest.”

Their table was now densely crowded with waiters. They were materializing through the ranks of state cops, bringing water, cream, napkins, butter, hot bread, panniers of curdled sauce. They were thrilled to serve, jostling each other for the honor. One offered Oscar a fresh menu.

“Get this boy a jambalaya,” Huey commanded, waving the menu away with a flick of his dense red fingers. “Get him two shrimp jam-balayas. Big ol’ shrimp. We need some jumbo shrimp here, the Child Star looks mighty peaked. Girl, you gotta eat something more than them salads. Woman can’t live on chicken salad. Tell me somethiri’. You. Oscar. Man’s gotta eat, don’t he?”

“Yes, Governor,” Oscar said.

“This boy of yours ain’t eatin’!” Huey crushed the crawdad’s boiled red claw between his pinching thumbs. “Mr. Bombast. Mr. Architecture Boy. I cain’t have a thing like that on my conscience! Thinkin’ of him, and his pretty wife, just wasting away up north there on goddamn apple juice. It’s got me so I cain’t sleep nights!”

“I’m sorry to hear that you’re troubled, Your Excellency.”

“You tell your boy to stop frettin’ so much. You don’t see me neglectin’ life and limb because the common man can’t get a decent break up in Boston. We get Yankees like y’all down here all the time. They get a taste of the sweet life, and they forget all about your goddamn muddy water. Hungry Boy needs to lighten up.”

“He’ll eat when those soldiers eat, sir.”

Huey stared at him, chewing deliberately. “Well, you can tell him from me — you tell him tonight — that I’m gonna solve his little problem. I get his point. Point taken. He can put down his goddamn cameras and the apple juice, because I’m gonna do him a favor. I am taking proactive executive measures to resolve the gentleman’s infrastructural contretemps.”

“I’ll see to it that the Senator gets your message, sir.”

“You think I’m kidding, Mr. Valparaiso? You think I’m funning with you tonight?”

“I would never think that, Your Excellency.”

“That’s good. That’s real good. You know something? I loved your dad’s movies.” Huey turned to gaze over his shoulder. “WHAT’S WITH THE BAND?” he bellowed. “Are they DRUNK? Put the band on!”

The musicians rapidly reassembled and began playing a minuet. The Governor slurped a demitasse, then returned his attention to the monster crayfish and lit into it savagely. He snapped and devoured both claws, and then sucked hot spiced juice from its head with every appearance of satisfaction.

The waiters began laying out fresh platters of Cajun delicacies. Oscar examined the steaming feast. He had rarely felt less like eating.

“What about you now, darlin’?” Huey demanded sud-denly. “You’re not saying much tonight.”

Greta shook her head.

“You gotta know what the Soap Boy here is up to, right? Dougal is out, the FedDems are in, it’s s’posed to be somebody else’s pork now. What do you think? Nice little lab up on Route 128? Some kind of promise, I guess.”

“He doesn’t make many promises,” Greta murmured.

“He better not, because he can’t promise Boston beans. I got two boys in the Senate who can sit on his Senator’s neck from here to Sunday. I built that goddamn laboratory! Me! I know what it’s worth. Up in Baton Rouge, we just put a new bill through the Ways and Means Committee. A big expansion for ‘Bio Bayou.’ Maybe my lab ain’t as big as yours, but it don’t need to be big, if you don’t have to feed every pork-eatin’ lawn jockey in the fifty states. I know the goddamn difference between neuroscience and them sons of bitches who are cataloging grasshoppers. You know I can tell the difference, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know, Etienne.”

“It’s a cryin’ shame, you fillin’ out them federal grants in quintu-plicate. A woman like you needs a free hand! Let’s just say that you fancy workin’ on… blocking the uptake of methylspiropedirol in extrastriatal dopamine receptors. Might sound kinda funny to the layman, but that’s all the difference between sanity and total schizophre-nia. I defy you to find a single elected federal official who can even pronounce them words! But that’s the coming thing. Digital… biological… and now cognitive. Plain as the nose on my brain. You think we’re gonna sit here in Acadiana, as the only nonnative people in America ever subjected to forced ethnic cleansing, and watch a bunch of POINTY-HEADED FAT CATS tryin’ to OUT-THINK US? Out-goddamn-THINK us? In a pig’s eye, sister!”

“I don’t do cognition, Etienne. I’m just a neural tech.”

“You won the Nobel for establishing the glial basis of attention, and you’re claiming you don’t do cognition?”

“I do neurons and glial cells. I do neurochemical wave propaga-tion. But I don’t do consciousness. That’s not a term of art. It’s meta-physics.”

“You’re a mile deep, darlin’. But you’re an inch wide. It ain’t metaphysics when it’s sitting on a table in front of you with an apple in its mouth. Look, we known each other a long time. You know old Huey, don’t you? You’re a friend of Huey’s, you can have anything you want. Anything you want!”

“I just want to work in my lab.”

“You got it! Send me the specs! What do you want, airtight? We got sulfur and salt mines a mile down, holes bigger than downtown Baton Rouge. Do whatever the hell you want down there! Seal the doors behind you. Science, the endless frontier, darlin’! Can’t ask for better than that! Never sign an impact statement again! Just get your results and publish, that’s all I’m askin’! Just get your results and pub-lish.”

Oscar and Greta returned to the beach house at four in the morning. They watched from the deck railings as the headlights of their six-car state police escort turned and faded into darkness.

The krewe, alerted by Fontenot, had been carefully guarding the beach house. It had not been entered or searched. That seemed like a small comfort. “I can’t believe that people came up to him and kissed his hands,” Oscar said.

“There were only three of them.”

“They kissed his hands! They were weeping, and kissing his hands!”

“He’s made a lot of difference to the local people,” Greta said, yawning. “He’s given them hope.” She stepped into the bathroom with her overnight bag, and shut the door.

Oscar went into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator door. His hands were shaking. Huey hadn’t cracked him. Oscar hadn’t lost his temper or his nerve; but he was appalled at the speed of the man’s reaction and the swift price he’d had to pay for taking foolish risks in Huey’s sphere of influence. He found an apple in the fridge and picked it up absently. Then he went in and sat in the hideous armchair. He stood up again, immediately. “He had that place packed with armed goons, and those people were kissing his hands!”

“The Governor needs bodyguards, he lives a very dangerous life,” Greta said from behind the bathroom door. “Oscar, why did he call you the ‘Soap Salesman’?”

“Oh, that. That was my first company. A biotech app. We made emulsifiers for dishwashing liquid. People don’t think these things through, you know. They think biotech should be fancy and elaborate. But soap is a major consumer item. You get a five percent processing edge in a commodity market like soap, and the buyout guys will beat your doors down…” His words trailed off. She was brushing her teeth, she wasn’t listening.

She came out in a white flannel nightgown. It was ankle-length and had a little pastel bow at the neck. She opened her overnight bag and pulled out a compact air filter.

“Allergies?” Oscar said.

“Yes. The air outside the dome… well, outside air always smells funny to me.” She plugged in her filter. It emitted a powerful hum.

Oscar checked the windows to make sure they were shut and curtained, then stared at her. All unknowing, his feelings about her had undergone a deep and turbulent sea change. His encounter with the Governor had roiled him inside. He was all stirred and clotted now. He was passionate. He felt aggressive and possessive. He was sick with jealousy. “Are you going to sleep in that?”

“Yes. My feet always get so cold at night.”

Oscar shook his head. “You’re not going to sleep in that. And we won’t use the bed. This time, we’ll use the floor.”

She examined the floor. It had a lovely hooked rug. She looked up at him, her face flushed to the ears.

He woke just after dawn. He was asleep on the rug. Greta had stripped the bed and placed the sheet and coverlet over him. She was sitting at the bureau, scribbling in her notebook.

Oscar slowly examined the water-stained ceiling. His kneecaps were rug-burned. His back felt sore. There was a slimy damp spot congealing under his hip. He felt truly at peace with himself for the first time in weeks.