Distraction

5

Without the services of Fontenot to scope out trouble and smooth his way, Oscar found travel difficult. Traffic in Alabama was snarled by manic Christian tent-revival shows, “breathing fresh life into the spirit” with two-hundred-beat-per-minute gospel raves. In Tennessee, Oscar’s progress was stymied by battalions of Mexican migrant workers, battling the raging kudzu hands-on, with pick and shovel. Oscar was enjoying the relative safety of a bogus biohazard bus, but there were circumstances when even this couldn’t help him.

But while Lana, Donna, and Moira grew bored in the bus and often petulant, Oscar was never idle. As long as he had his laptop and a net-link, the world was his oyster. He tended his finances. He memorized the dossiers of his fellow staffers on the Senate Science Committee. He traded mash email with Greta. Greta was particularly good with email. She mostly spoke about her work — work was the core of Greta’s being — but there were entire para-graphs now in which he was actually comprehending what she said.

Political news ran constantly on the bus’s back win-dows. Oscar made a special point of following the many ramifications of Bambakias’s hunger strike.

Developments in the scandal were rapid and profound. By the time Oscar reached the outskirts of Washington, DC, the Louisiana air base had been placed under siege.

The base’s electrical power supply had long since been cut off for lack of payment. The aircraft had no fuel. The desperate federal troops were bartering stolen equipment for food and booze. Desertion was rampant. The air base commander had released a sobbing video confession and had shot himself.

Green Huey had lost patience with the long-festering scandal. He was moving in for the kill. Attacking and seizing a federal air base with his loyal state militia would have been entirely too blatant and straightforward. Instead, the rogue Governor employed proxy guerril-las.

Huey had won the favor of nomad prole groups by providing them with safe havens. He allowed them to squat in Louisiana’s many federally declared contamination zones. These forgotten landscapes were tainted with petrochemical effluent and hormone-warping pesti-cides, and were hence officially unfit for human settlement. The prole hordes had different opinions on that subject.

Proles cheerfully grouped in any locale where conventional au-thority had grown weak. Whenever the net-based proles were not consistently harassed by the authorities, they coalesced and grew am-bitious. Though easily scattered by focused crackdowns, they re-grouped as swiftly as a horde of gnats. With their reaping machines and bio-breweries, they could live off the land at the very base of the food chain. They had no stake in the established order, and they cher-ished a canny street-level knowledge of society’s infrastructural weak-nesses. They made expensive enemies.

Nomad proles didn’t flourish in densely urbanized locales like Massachusetts, where video surveillance and police search engines made them relatively easy to identify and detain. But Green Huey wasn’t from Massachusetts. He was totally indifferent to the standards of behavior there. Louisiana’s ecologically blighted areas were ideal for proles. The disaster zones were also impromptu wildlife sanctuaries, since wild animals found chemical fouling much easier to survive than the presence of human beings. After decades of wild subtropical growth, Louisiana’s toxic dumps were as impenetrable as Sherwood Forest.

Huey’s favorite proles were native Louisianans, displaced by rising seas, hurricane damage, and levee-smashing floods from the rampant Mississippi. Sinking into the depths of their tattered landscape, the Loui-siana hordes had become creatures of an entirely different order from the scattered dissidents of the East Coast. These Louisianans were a power-ful, ambitious, thriving countersociety, with their own clothing, their own customs, their own police, economy, and media. They could rather lord it over the nation’s less-organized dissies, hobos, and leisure unions. They were known as the Regulators.

Jungle war in the swamps of Louisiana gave Huey’s Regulator nomads a Maoist tactical advantage. Now Huey had unleashed his dogs of netwar, and persistent low-intensity hell was breaking loose around the federal air base.

As was sadly common with American political disputes, the best and most accurate news coverage was taking place in the European media. Oscar located a European satellite feed featuring a Louisiana press conference, held by a zealot calling herself “Subcommander Ooney Bebbels of the Regulator Commando.”

The guerrilla leader wore a black ski mask, mud-spattered jeans, and a dashiki. She stalked back and forth before her audience of journos, brandishing a feathered ebony swagger stick and a handheld remote control. Her propaganda conference was taking place in a large inflatable tent.

“Look at that display board,” she urged the massed cameras, the picture of sweet reason in her ski mask. “Do y’all have your own copies of that document yet? Brother Lump-Lump, beam some more government files to those nice French boys in the back! Okay! Ladies and gentlemen, this document I’m displaying is an official federal list of American Air Force bases. You can grab that budget document off the committee server for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Look at the official evidence. That air base you refer to? It don’t even exist.”

A journalist objected. “But, ma’am, we have that air base on live feed right now.”

“Then you gotta know that’s a derelict area. There’s no power, no fuel, no running water, and no food. So that’s no air base. You see any federal aircraft flying around here? The only thing flyin’ here is your press copters. And our private, harmless, sports-hobbyist ul-tralights. So y’all should can that disinformation about any so-called armed siege. That is total media distortion. We’re not armed. We just need shelter. We’re a whole lot of homeless folks, who need a roof over our heads for the winter. That big derelict area behind the barbed wire, that’s ideal for us. So we’re just waiting here outside the gates till we get some human rights.”

“How many nomad troops do you have on the battlefield, ma’am?”

“Not ‘troops,’ people. Nineteen thousand three hundred and twelve of us. So far. We’re real hopeful. Morale is really good. We got folks coming in from all over.”

A British journalist was recognized. “It’s been reported that you have illegal magnetic pulse devices in your guerrilla camps.”

The subcommander shook her ski-masked head impatiently.

“Look, we hate pulse weapons, they strip our laptops. We strictly condemn pulse-blasting. Any pulse attacks coming from our lines will be from provocateurs.”

The British journo, nattily kitted-out in pressed khakis, looked properly skeptical. The British had larger investment holdings in the USA than any other nationality. The Anglo-American special rela-tionship still had deep emotional resonance, especially where the re-turn on investment was concerned. “What about those antipersonnel devices you’ve deployed?”

“Stop calling them that. They’re our perimeter controls. They’re for crowd safety. We got a very big crowd of people around here, so we have to take safety measures. What? Tanglewire? Yeah, of course! Spongey sticks, yeah, we always have spongey sticks. Foam barricades and the tear gas, sure, that’s all over-the-counter stuff, you can buy that anywhere. What? Superglue? Hell yeah, we got a couple tanker trucks of that stuff. Little kids can make superglue.”

A German correspondent took the floor. He had brought an entire media krewe with him, two bench-ranks of veteran Euro hus-tlers bristling with precision optical equipment. The Germans were the richest people on earth. They had the highly annoying habit of always sounding extremely adult and responsible. “Why are you de-stroying the roads?” the German inquired, adjusting his designer sunglasses. “Isn’t that economically counterproductive?”

“Mister, those are condemned roads. They’ve all been condemned by the State Highway Department. Tarmac pollutes the environment. So we’re cleaning up these roads as a public service. Tarmac is petro-leum-based, so we can crack it for fuel. We need the fuel so our little kids don’t freeze to death. Okay?”

Oscar touched his mute and the video windows in the campaign bus fell silent. He called out, “Hey, Jimmy, how are we doing for fuel?”

“We’re still okay, man,” Jimmy said distantly.

Oscar looked at the bunks. Lana, Donna, and Moira were fast asleep. The bus seemed painfully empty now, like a half-eaten tin of sardines. His krewe was dwindling away. He’d been forced to leave most of them in Texas, and he missed them sorely. He missed looking after his people, he missed cheering them up and cheering them on. He missed loading them and pointing them at something vulnerable.

Moira was fiercely determined to quit, and she was bitter about it. Fontenot was out of the picture for good now; he had dumped his phone and laptop in a bayou and moved into his new shack with a boat and fishing tackle. The Bambakias campaign team was the finest thing he had ever built, and now it was history, it was scattering to the winds. This realization inspired Oscar with deep, unreasoning dread.

“What do you make of all this?” he called out to Jimmy.

“Look, I’m driving,” Jimmy said reasonably. “I can’t watch the news and drive.”

Oscar made his way up the aisle to the front of the bus, where he could lower his voice. “I meant the nomads, Jimmy. I know you’ve had experience with them. I just wondered what you make of this development. Regulator guerrillas, strangling a U.S. Air Force base.”

“Everyone else is asleep, so now you have to talk to me, huh?”

“You know I always value your input. You have a unique perspective.”

Jimmy sighed. “Look, man, I don’t do ‘input.’ I just drive the bus. I’m your bus driver. Lemme drive.”

“Go ahead, drive! I just wondered if… if you thought they were a serious threat.”

“Some are serious… Sure. I mean, just because you’re a no-mad, and you’re on a reputation server with a big trust-rating, and you’re eating grass and home-brewing all kinds of weird bio-stuff… Look, that doesn’t make you anything special.”

“No. ”

“No, but some of ’em are pretty serious guys, because, well, you might bust some homeless loser someday who looks shabby and acts nuts, but it turns out he has heavy-duty netfriends from all over, and bad weird stuff starts happening to you out of thin air… But hell, Oscar, you don’t need me to tell you about that. You know all about power networks.”

“Yeah.”

“You do that kind of stuff yourself, that’s how you got that guy elected. ”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You’re on the road all the time. You’re a nomad yourself, just like they are. You’re a suit-nomad. Most people who meet you — if they don’t know you like we do — they have you figured for a really scary guy, man. You don’t have to worry about your reputation. There might be some nomad netgods who are scarier guys than you are, but not many, believe me. Hell, you’re rich.”

“Money isn’t everything.”

“Oh, come on! Look, I’m not smart enough to talk to you, okay?” Jimmy shrugged irritably. “You should be sleeping right now. Everybody else sleeps.” Jimmy checked a readout and gripped the wheel.

Oscar silently waited him out.

“I can drive eighteen hours a day, when I have to,” Jimmy said at last. “I don’t mind it. Hell, I like it. But I get tired out just watching you, man. Just watching you operate, it wears me all out. I just can’t keep up with you. I’m not in your league. I’m just a normal guy, okay? I don’t want to take over federal science bases. I’m just a work-ing guy from Boston, man. I drive buses.”

Jimmy checked the overhead scanner, and took a breath. “I’m gonna drive this bus back to Boston for you, and I’m gonna turn the bus in; and then I’m all done with you. Okay? I’m gonna take some time off after this. I mean, I want some real, no-kidding time off. I mean some leisure, that’s what I want. I’m gonna drink a lot of beer and go bowling, and then maybe if I’m lucky, then maybe I’ll get laid. But I’m not gonna hang out with politicians anymore.”

“You’d really leave my krewe, Jim?” Oscar said. “Just like that?”

“You hired me to drive this bus, man! Can’t you leave it at that? It’s a job! I don’t do crusades.”

“Don’t be hasty. I’m sure we could find another role for you in the organization.”

“No, man. You don’t have any role for me. Or for any guys like me. Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ’em! You don’t have any use for ’em! You can’t make any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

“A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

“Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff. See, they’re exactly like you are, man. You and your campaign krewe, you’re a lot more organized than those dinosaur feds that are running the Collaboratory. You can take over that place anytime, right? I mean, that’s exactly what you’re going to do! You’re gonna take that place over. Whether they like it or not. You want it, so you’re just gonna take it.”

Oscar said nothing.

“That’s the part I’m gonna miss most, man. Watching you put your moves on people. Like that weird science chick you’re recruiting. Man, that move was totally brilliant. I just didn’t have the heart to leave, before I saw if you’d score with that science chick. But you nailed her, all right. You can do anything you want.” Jimmy laughed. “You’re a genius! But I’m not a genius, okay? I’m just not up for that. It’s too tiring.”

“I see.”

“So stop worrying so much, man. You wanna worry about something, worry about DC. We’re gonna be in DC by morning, and if this bus makes it out of that town in one piece, I’m gonna be a real happy guy.”

Washington, DC, enjoyed a permanent haze of aerial drones. Helicopters were also extremely common, since the authorities had basically surrendered the streets. Large sections of the nation’s capital were permanently impassable. Dissidents and protesters had occupied all public areas, permanently.

Nonviolent noncooperation had reached unheard-of strategic and tactical heights in the American capital. Its functional districts were privatized and guarded by monitors and swarms of private thugs, but huge sections of the city had surrendered to the squatters. The occupying forces came in a great many ideological flavors, and while they had come to an uneasy understanding with the government per se, they violently despised one another. Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, and the area east of Capitol Hill boasted murder rates of almost twentieth-century proportions.

In many neighborhoods of Washington the division of streets and housing had simply dissolved. Entire city blocks had been abandoned to the protesters, who had installed their own plumbing, water sys-tems, and power generators. Streets were permanently barricaded, swathed in camou nets and rain-streaked plastic sheeting.

The most remarkable of Washington’s autonomen were the groups known as “martians.” Frustrated by years of studied nonreaction to their crazy grievances, the martians had resolved to act as if the federal government simply didn’t exist. The martians treated the entire structure of Washington, DC, as raw material.

Their construction techniques had originally been invented by a group of overeager would-be Mars colonizers.

These long-vanished space techies, an ingenious and fanatical group, had invented a wide variety of cheap and simple techniques by which small groups of astronauts might colonize the airless and frozen deserts of the Red Planet. Humanity had never yet reached Mars, but with the final collapse of NASA the Martian colonization plans had become public domain.

These plans fell into the eager hands of fanatical street protesters. They had dug down into the squelchy subsoil of the Potomac riverbed, squeezing water from the soil, compacting it to use as bricks, building an endless series of archways, tunnels, and kivas. The radicals found that even the sorriest patch of Earth was a cornucopia, com-pared to the airless deserts of Mars. Anything that might work on Mars would work a hundred times better in a deserted alley or parking lot.

Now NASA’s ingenuity had borne amazing fruit, and the streets of Washington were lavishly bumped and measled with martian settle-ments. Slums of compacted dirt, all glue and mazy airlocks, climbed straight up the walls of buildings, where they clung like the nests of mud-daubing wasps. There were excavation hills three stories high near Union Station, and even Georgetown was subject to repeated subterranean rumblings.

Most of these martians were Anglos. In fact, sixty percent of Washington’s populace were members of the troubled minority. Local DC government, a world-famous model of urban corruption, was dominated by militant Anglos. The ethnic bosses were busily exercis-ing their traditional genius for fraud, hacking, and white-collar crime scams.

Oscar, though a stranger to Washington, knew better than to enter the city unprepared. He abandoned his krewe inside the bus, which retreated at once to the relative safety of Alexandria. Oscar then walked two blocks on foot, through a protesters’ permanent street market of flowers, medals, bracelets, bumper stickers, flags, cassettes, and Christmas toys.

He arrived at his destination, unmolested and in good order. He then discovered, without much surprise, that the federal office build-ing had fallen into the hands of squatters.

Oscar wandered through the entry hall, passing metal detectors and a cyclops set of facial recognition units. The squat’s concierge was an elderly black man with close-cropped hair and a bow tie. He gave Oscar a clip-on ID bracelet.

The system was now logging Oscar’s presence and his move-ments, along with everything else of relevance inside the building: furniture, appliances, tools, kitchenware, clothes, shoes, pets, and of course all the squatters themselves. The locators were as small as or-ange pips and as rugged as tenpenny nails, so they could invisibly infest any device that anyone found of interest.

This universal tagging made the contents of the building basically theftproof It also made communal property a rather simple proposi-tion. It was never hard to find a tool when the locale, condition, and history of every tool was logged and displayed in real time. It was also very hard for freeloaders to anonymously steal or abuse the common goods. When it worked, this digital socialism was considerably cheaper and more convenient than private property.

However, in order to function, this technology had a major side effect: it turned people’s lives inside out. There were children playing in the building’s halls — in fact, to judge by the disorder, the squatters’ children were living in the halls. The kids were bugged and safety-tagged, surrounded by a smorgasbord of the community’s color-coded and positionally registered kiddie toys.

Oscar picked his way through a dense litter of tricycles and in-flatable animals, then took a crowded elevator up to the third floor. This section of the building reeked powerfully of East Indian cook-ing — curries, papadams, maybe some chicken masala. Probably, to judge by the smell, large flocks of computer-tagged chickens.

The double doors of Room 358 opened trustingly at his touch. Oscar found himself in a sculptor’s studio, a bleak, ill-smelling place reconstructed from a fire-blackened set of office cubicles. The torched federal offices had left eerie remains: a gridwork of blackened floor scars and the dripping stalagmite lumps of dead plastic workstations. The retrofitted office had been reoccupied, however. It now boasted a long makeshift workbench of bolted railway ties, amid piles of automotive scrap metal, flattened epoxy tubes, and stubby welding rods. The concrete floor echoed beneath Oscar’s shoes.

Clearly he was in the wrong room.

His phone rang. He answered it. “Hello?”

“Is this really you?” It was Greta.

“It’s me all right — live and in person.”

“It’s not a phone-sex line?”

“No. I use that phone-sex service to reroute my private calls. They have tremendous voice traffic on their lines, so it helps a lot against tracing attacks. And if anyone is running traffic analysis, they’ll just assume… Well, never mind the technical details. The point is that we can talk safely together on an unencrypted phone.”

“I guess it’s okay.”

“So, let’s talk, Greta. Tell me how you are. Tell me everything.”

“Are you safe there in Washington?”

Oscar clutched the fabric phone tenderly. It was as if he had her ear cradled in his hand. It now mattered much less to him that he was hopelessly lost and in the wrong building.

“I’m perfectly fine. This is where I make my career, after all.”

“I worry about you, Oscar.” Long pause. “I think … I think maybe I could go to Boston later. There’s a neuro seminar there. Maybe I could block some time in.”

“Excellent! You should come to Boston, by all means. I’ll show you my house.” A slow, sizzling pause.

“That sounds interesting…”

“Do it. It’s what we need. It’s good for us.”

“I have to tell you something important…”

He swiftly examined his battery level and replaced the phone at his ear. “Just go ahead and tell me, Greta.”

“It’s so hard to explain this… It’s just that different now and… I’m all inspired and it’s just…” A lingering silence.

“Go on,” he coaxed. “Get it off your chest.”

Her voice dropped to a confiding whisper. “It’s my amyloid fibrils…”

“It’s what?”

“My fibrils. There are a lot of diverse neural proteins that form amyloid fibrils in vivo. And even though they have unrelated sequences, they all polymerize into fibrils with similar ultrastructure. The conformational folding arrangements have been bothering me. A lot. ”

“Really? That’s a shame.”

“But then I was messing with my GDNF adeno carriers, yesterday, and I grafted a new amyloidogenic variant onto the carrier. I’ve just derived their mass with the electrospray spectrometer. And, Oscar, they’re expressing. And they’re all enzymatically active and they all have the correct, intact disulfide bonds.”

“It’s marvelous when you’re expressing.”

“They’re going to express in vivo! And that’s so much less inva-sive than dumb, old-fashioned gene therapy. That’s been the critical limiting factor, a permanent cheap method of delivery. And if we can do amyloids as well as dopamine and neurotrophic factors… I mean, transfer all those loads congruently into live neural tissue… Well, I don’t have to tell you what that means.”

“No, no,” Oscar said deftly, “depend on it, I’m solid on that issue.”

“It’s just that Bellotti and Hawkins are doing autosomal amy-loidosis, so they’re right on top of this problem. And they’re doing a poster session at the Boston AMAC.”

“Then you should definitely go to Boston,” Oscar said, “there’s no way that some drone like Bellotti should scoop you on this! I’ll put it all in order for you, right away. Never mind trying to swing the travel funding. My krewe can book you right through to Boston. You’ll have time on the plane to assemble your presentation. We’ll get you a suite at the convention hotel and we’ll have all your meals catered, to save you time. You should seize this opportunity, Greta. You never get proper time to think for yourself when you’re riding herd back at the lab.”

She was brightening. “Well…”

The door of Room 358 opened, and a black woman came through, in a creaking motorized wheelchair. She had a shock of dirty gray hair and a load of green plastic trash bags.

“I understand about the work,” Oscar said into the phone, while backing cautiously away from the door. “Boston is totally doable.”

“Hi there!” said the wheelchair woman, waving one hand. Os-car slipped his fingers over the phone’s mouthpiece and nodded po-litely.

The black woman bounded up from her wheelchair, shut it down, and held the door open. Three Anglo men barged into the room, in denim overalls, boots, and battered straw hats. Their hair was dyed blue, their faces were streaked with nomad war paint, and they all wore sunglasses. One of them pushed a mighty wheelbarrow full of wires and flatscreens, and the two others carried large khaki-colored electrical toolboxes.

“You really think that fibrils are hot enough for you to do all that for me?” Greta said plaintively.

“Fibrils are extremely hot.”

The woman with the wheelchair tugged off her fright wig, re-vealing a neat set of cornrows. She then shrugged off her ragged caf-tan. Beneath it she wore a navy blue skirt, a blue vest, a silk blouse, and hose.

Her three technicians began assembling a conference network on the welder-stained workbench.

“I’m Oscar Valparaiso,” Oscar announced loudly. “I’m with the committee.”

“You’re early,” the woman told him. She fetched a power-strip and a new set of shoes from one of her trash bags.

“I enjoy a fresh start.” Oscar returned to his phone. “Okay. Okay. Good. I’m glad it’s working out. Lana and I will see to every-thing. Good-bye.” He crumpled his phone and tucked it in his sleeve.

“So,” he said aloud, “what’s your name?”

“Chris,” the new woman said, carefully straightening a seam. “I’m the committee sysop.” She smiled. “Just the lowly sysop.”

“And is this your krewe?”

“I don’t have a krewe. I’m just a GS-Five. These guys are net subcontractors, they all live here in the squat. See, it’s a little weird about this meeting room… I mean, for years we met in the Dirk-sen Senate Building. But the President’s transition team has requisi-tioned our old offices. So, the Senate Science Committee is kind of between permanent housing assignments right now.”

“I see.”

“They assigned us this room off the federal vacancy server. The trouble is, even though it’s still listed in the server, in reality, this whole building’s been a squat for three years. And we’re not an Emer-gency committee, so we can’t have the building cleared legally. We’re too low in the chain to have anyone evicted.”

“Well, at least it’s a nice big room,” Oscar said winningly.

“That’s true!” She smiled at him.

“And the two of us are here, so that’s a start. Your wheelchair bag-lady getup is extremely good, by the way.”

“Well, it sure helps a lot with the local roadblocks and ID checks.”

“I can see that you’re a true-blue Washingtonian, Chris.”

“That’s me — Southern efficiency and Northern charm.” Chris’s eye wandered and she elbowed one of her helpers aside. “No, that’s the visual outlet! It’s a sixteen-pin, okay? Let me do that!” She turned to a second man. “Get the router out of the bag. A router, and a squeegee. And a divot. Two data divots. No, not that one! Get me the green one.”

Oscar was charmed. “Do you do these metal sculptures, too, Chris?”

“Those are my boyfriend’s. He kind of guards this space for us, because he can leave the premises on short notice.” She glanced up. “It’s like multitasking, see?”

“I love multitasking.” Oscar’s second phone rang. He dragged it out of his vest pocket. “What? Yeah, Lana, book her through to Boston. To the AMAC conference. No, I don’t know what that acronym stands for. Just netsearch it.”

“Where’s the mediator? Get the baffles,” Chris riposted. She was watching him sidelong.

“Register her for the whole conference,” Oscar said, taking a half step closer and raising his voice for effect. “Get Yosh to finesse all that. And get her some catering. She likes Thai food. Burmese? Bur-mese is great, but mind her allergies.”

“Is it running DMAC? There’s a DMAC tower right on Fourteenth. See if they’re up.”

“The DMAC is up,” Oscar cross-posted loudly. “My phone runs on DMAC.” He switched ears. “Lana, book her into the con-vention hotel. Be sure to get air filters. And flowers. Flowers every day.”

“Did you put the compressor on the DNC?” Chris said intently, still watching Oscar with increasing interest. “You can’t load the router without the CMV first. Is that the EDFA? Well, use the packet squeegee.”

“Book her for a day over,” Oscar said. “For two days. Yeah. No. Yeah. Okay. Thanks.” He crushed the phone.

“No, wiggle it,” Chris said. “It’s the cable.”

“It’s always the cable,” Oscar nodded.

The assembled screens flickered to life in a set of test patterns.

“Great,” Chris announced. “We’re up. Where’s the image groomer?”

“Got no groomer,” the contractor grumbled. “You didn’t say bring no groomer.”

“I didn’t know this new guy was gonna be here physically.”

“I can manage without an image groomer,” Oscar broke in. “I’ve brought my own makeup.”

Chris favored him with a precious moment of her full attention.

“You’re very traditional, Mr. Valparaiso.”

“Makeup is a vital part of Mr. Valparaiso’s heritage.” They were on the same wavelength. They were communicating beautifully on a nonverbal level. “Where’s everybody else, Chris? I understood we were meeting physically.”

Chris straightened warily. “Yeah, the sunshine laws do mandate open meetings, but this isn’t a senatorial meeting. It’s just a staff conference. No legislators present.”

“I thought the staff conferences were also physical meetings.”

“This is more of an informal on-line conferral, actually.”

Oscar offered her a calculated frown. “My event announcement specifically stated that this is a face-to-face staff conference.”

“Well, during the transition period we have to make procedural allowances … Look, I know this sounds goofy. But the staff hates going into squats like this. They called this a ‘conference,’ so they could get the hours logged and the conference perks. But really, it’s just a conferral.” She smiled meekly. “I’m just the sysop, you know. This isn’t my fault.”

“I understand perfectly that it’s not your fault, Chris. But if it’s just a conferral, we’re not being serious here. We won’t get results. ”

“You can get results at a conferral.”

“But I don’t want a conferral. If we’re going to shoptalk off-the-record, we could do it over dry martinis.”

The door opened. Three men and a woman came in. “Here’s Mr. Nakamura,” Chris said with relief, “I’m sure he can help you.” She retreated behind her machinery.

Nakamura stopped and read his secretary’s screen for forty sec-onds, establishing Oscar’s ID and dossier. He then moved forward briskly, hand outstretched. “Good to meet you again, Oscar! How was your trip from Texas?”

“My trip was lovely.”

“Where’s your krewe?” Nakamura gazed around the fire-blackened vault. “No support staff?”

“I have a secure tour bus. So I left my krewe on board there, and had them drop me off.”

Nakamura glanced at his two bodyguards, who were scoping the room for bugs with small handheld sniffers. “A secure tour bus. I wish you’d called me. I could have hitched a ride with you, and spared myself hiring these goons.”

Oscar felt very flattered to be offered such a blatant lie. “I’d have been delighted, sir.”

“I’m old-fashioned,” Nakamura declared. “Congress pays me, so I like to show up for duty.” Nakamura was the Science Committee’s longest-serving staffer. Nakamura had survived an astonishing number of purges, scandals, senatorial shake-ups-even repeated depredations and head-hunting raids from the Emergency committees.

Nakamura was a Right Tradition Bloc man, from the Economic Freedom Party. The EcFreeds pulled a twelve percent voter share, putting them well ahead of their bloc’s junior partners, the Christian Democratic Union and the antifeminist Ladies’ Party. Oscar consid-ered the EcFreeds to be profoundly mistaken politically, but at least they were consistent in their errors. The EcFreeds were players.

Nakamura touched Oscar’s jacket shoulder, a tender little act of political palpation. “I’m eager to hear your report on the Buna Col-laboratory, Oscar. I’m sure you’ve been busy there.”

“These are difficult times, sir.”

“All the more reason to assure some stability during the new Administration’s transition period.”

“I fully concur,” Oscar riposted at once. “Continuity, and a firm hand in the lab’s administration, would be extremely helpful now. Prudence. Nothing hasty.”

Nakamura nodded reflexively, then frowned. For a moment, Os-car thought he had overdone it. Nakamura had twenty years of re-corded public appearances in the federal files. Oscar had taken the trouble to have the man’s speech patterns analyzed, ranked, and sorted. Nakamura was especially fond of the terms “prudence” and “continuity,” with “helpful” and “a firm hand” on strong upward trends lately. Verbally mimicking Nakamura was a cheap net-trick, but like most such tricks, it usually worked.

Eight more people came through the doors. These were com-mittee staffers Namuth and Mulnier, with their joint entourage of six krewepeople, who had brought pizza, coffee, and falafel. The aroma of fast food filled the dank, rust-smelling room with a cheering scent of human survival.

Nakamura gratefully sampled a pita sandwich. The senior staffer seemed more relaxed now that the gruesome squat had filled with familiar faces. “Namuth and Mulnier are all right,” he murmured. “Staffers who take the pains to attend a mere conferral face-to-face… they do tend to be all right.”

“Tell me, sir — is this just a conferral, or is it a conference per se?”

Nakamura looked pained as he chewed and swallowed. “Well, of course an actual conference would have the legislators in attendance. Or at least their leading office krewe staff, their chiefs of staff, for instance. And of course there are committee meetings, and then subcommittee and committee hearings, generally with sworn witnesses and full cover-age… However, in the modern legislative trend, the drafting of legislation and the budget preparation have fallen to the staff commit-tees. Actual senatorial hearings have become highly mediated events, very formal. It follows that we staffers must have our own conferences. And then, behind those formal scenes, we do find it procedurally necessary to have these conferrals.”

Nakamura examined his collapsing sandwich and tucked in a wad of sprouts with one fingertip. “We called this event a ‘conference,’ because that’s necessary in order to get the personnel chits and travel rebates. And we do get better security service. This entire build-ing, as you must have noticed, is sadly insecure.”

Oscar, once certain that Nakamura’s lips had stopped moving, leaned gently forward. “I know that we can’t hold truly formal hear-ings until the Senate convenes. As a novice junior staffer, I’m not eager to take on that challenge until I’m much better briefed. Frankly, I look to you for some helpful guidance and continuity there.”

Nakamura accepted this remark with a graceful nod.

“I’ve been on the ground at the Collaboratory, sampling opin-ion… Since Senator Dougal’s mishaps, the rumor mills there have been grinding overtime. Morale is shaky.”

“ ‘Shaky’?”

“The situation might stabilize, I think, if they received some reassuring gestures from Washington.”

Nakamura eyed his other colleagues. Namuth and Mulnier were swilling iced coffees, tapping lackadaisically at screens, and pay-ing them no real attention. This did not surprise Oscar, who had written off both Namuth and Mulnier after closely studying their dos-siers.

Nakamura was made of sterner stuff. “What do you plan to pro-pose?”

“I think some expression of confidence in the current Director is in order. A statement of support from this Senate committee — that might work wonders for him.”

Nakamura put his sandwich aside. “Well, we can’t do that.”

“Why not? We need to take action. The Director’s authority is visibly slipping. If the situation gets out of hand, the lab will be para-lyzed.”

Nakamura’s face grew clouded. “Young man, you never worked with Senator Dougal. I did. The idea of our giving some blanket endorsement now to one of his krewe flunkies… especially first thing in a new Administration … No, I don’t think so.”

“You said that you wanted continuity in the situation.”

“I didn’t say that we should provide that continuity.”

“Well, then,” Oscar said, slipping with feigned disappointment into his prepared position, “maybe my notion should be scaled back. Let me ask your advice. Director Felzian has a difficult situation. What exactly can we do for the man? Without Dougal’s sponsorship, his situation is dangerous. He might be denounced. He might be formally investigated. He might even be indicted.”

“Indicted?” Nakamura rolled his eyes. “Not in Texas, surely!”

“He could be indicted in Louisiana. So many rare animals have vanished into the collector’s market… They make such photo-genic evidence, rare animals… The Governor of Louisiana is a highly interested party. The state courts there are completely in his pockets. This really isn’t a time to show division and weakness at a federal lab.”

“Young man, you’ve never met Governor Huguelet — ”

“Oh yes, sir, I have. I had dinner with him last week.”

Nakamura’s face fell. “You did.”

“He’s a very hard presence to miss in that corner of the world. He made his intentions very clear to me.”

Nakamura sighed. “Well, Huey wouldn’t dare.”

“Why would he draw the line at subverting a federal lab, when he’s already besieging an air base?”

Nakamura’s brow wrinkled in silent distress.

Oscar lowered his voice yet further. “Huey has always backed genetic and cognitive R D. That lab has exactly what he wants and needs. It has the talent, the data, and the samples. Besides, Huey was a major force in creating that lab in the first place. He has allies all through the old guard there. His course of action is obvious.”

“But he was always such a great backer of the federal presence there. It’s not like we’ve forgotten the Collaboratory. We haven’t misplaced it. We’re not like those morons on the Emergency com-mittee.”

Oscar let the silence stretch. Then he shrugged. “Am I being unreasonable here? I’m trying to propose the smallest action we can take to maintain the status quo. Is it the sense of this committee that we are unhappy with the status quo?”

“No, of course not. Well … some are. Some aren’t.”

Oscar showed a proper skepticism. “I hope you understand that this is my very first assignment with this committee. I don’t care to go out on a limb today.”

“No.”

“I don’t grandstand in these matters. I’m a team player.”

“Of course.”

Oscar gently touched Nakamura’s arm. “I hope you don’t think I’m enjoying my isolation from this committee. I could have been here on the Hill, at the center of the action, instead of being marooned for six weeks inside some airtight dome. I’m going to make my interim report today, but if I’m sent back to Texas without a committee con-sensus and some coherent course of action, I’m going to take that very amiss. Is that unreasonable of me?”

“No. It’s not unreasonable. I do appreciate your situation. Be-lieve it or not, I was also a young staffer once.”

“Sir, this is not going to be a pretty report. Especially the finan-cial attachments. The troubles there could spin right out of control. They might even be fatal troubles. It may be that our cheapest and easiest course of action is to shut down that lab, and let Green Huey cherry-pick the wreckage.”

Nakamura winced.

Oscar bored in. “But that’s not my decision. And it’s certainly not my responsibility. If my report today gets leaked, and something breaks loose, I don’t want any spin from this committee suggesting that I myself have some kind of personal agenda. Or that Senator Bambakias has any untoward intentions in this matter. I’ve made a good-faith, objective effort here. I consider it my job to layout the facts for the committee. But if something breaks loose, I don’t want to be hung out to dry.”

Oscar raised one forestalling hand, palm out. “Not that I’m sug-gesting any malice on the part of my fellow staffers! I’m just remarking on an obvious organizational truism — that it’s always easiest to hang the new boy.”

“Yes, it is,” Nakamura told him. “You’ve read the situation very well. But in point of fact, you’re not the only new boy on this com-mittee.”

“No?”

“No. There are three new Senators on the Science Committee, and they’ve all brought in krewepeople. And the two other new boys have yet to show up physically for one single goddamn conferral. They’re logging in from the penthouse decks in Arlington, where they’re busy kissing ass.”

Oscar frowned. “That is not professional behavior.”

“They’re not professionals. You can’t depend on them. You can depend on me, and you can depend on Mulnier. Well, Mulnier’s not the man he was ten years ago — but if you’re straight with me, and if you mean well, and if you’re giving a hundred percent for this com-mittee, well, you’re covered. You are covered, and you have my word on that.”

“That’s all I ask.” Oscar half stepped back. “I’m glad we’ve reached an understanding.”

Nakamura glanced at his watch. “And before we get started today — I want you to know, Oscar, your personal background problem is not at issue here. As long as I’m chairing this committee, I will not have that matter brought up.”

The Bambakias town house was on New Jersey Avenue, just south of Capitol Hill. Oscar arrived just as a media krewe was leaving. New Jersey Avenue was a very well monitored area. Civil disturbances were rare in this neighborhood, and its urban infrastructure was still sound. The house itself was a historic structure, well over two hundred years old. The house was too small for the Bambakias couple and their extensive krewe, but Lorena Bambakias was an interior designer in a crowded world. She had set herself to make allowances.

As a campaign professional, Oscar made it a firm principle never to cross the person who slept with the candidate. The candidate’s spouse was by necessity a major campaign player. Lorena was a player to the bone, but she was manageable, usually. She was manageable as long as her advice was always heeded with unfeigned attention and a straight face, and as long as she knew that she held big cards. Anyone who knew about Oscar’s personal background problem always as-sumed that they possessed a killer trump against him. This was all right. He had never placed Lorena in any situation where she would feel the need to play killer trumps.

The hunger strike had made Lorena’s eyes luminous, and her olive skin was so tight and smooth that it seemed almost laminated. Lorena was not an aristocrat — she was, in point of fact, the daughter of a Cambridge health-food chain-store executive — but the gauntness, and the expert video makeup, gave her the heightened, otherworldly glow of a Gainsborough portrait.

Weak with fasting, she was lounging on a scroll-armed couch of yellow silk.

“It’s good of you to take the time to visit me, Oscar,” Lorena told him, stirring languidly. “We rarely have the chance to really talk, you and I.”

“This place looks marvelous,” Oscar told her. “I can’t wait to see it when you’re done.”

“Oh, it’s just my work,” Lorena told him. “I wish I could say that this was exciting — but it’s just another damn design gig. I really miss the campaign.”

“Do you? That’s sweet of you.”

“It was so exciting to be with the people. At least we ate well then. Now… well, now, we plan to entertain. We’ll be the Sena-tor and Madam Senator, and we’ll be living in this sorry dump for six long years, and we plan to cut a swath through high society.” She gazed about her drawing room, gazing at her newly peach-colored walls with the pensive look of an auto mechanic. “My own tastes run toward Transcendental Contemporary, but I’m doing this place en-tirely in Federal Period. A lot of Hepplewhite… black wal-nut… secretary bookcases, and shield back side chairs… There was some good material in that period, if you stay away from all that tacky neoclassical.”

“Very good choice.”

“I need a feeling here that’s responsible, and yet fully responsive. Very restrained, very American Republic, but nothing kitschy or co-lonial. Very Boston, you see? — but not too Boston. Not all identity politics, not all Paul Revere. With an ensemble like this, something has to give. You have to make sacrifices. You can’t have everything at once. Elegance is restraint.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m going to have to give up my binturong.”

“Oh no,” Oscar said, “not Stickley the binturong.”

“I know you took a lot of trouble to obtain Stickley for me, and he really is a lovely conversation piece. But I just don’t have room to showcase a rare animal here in Washington. An openwork terrarium, that would have been lovely, and I had such nice ideas for the schema. But an animal clone just clashes. He does. He’s not in period. He’s a distraction.”

“Well, that’s doable,” Oscar said judiciously. “I don’t think anyone has ever returned an animal to the Collaboratory. That would be a nice gesture.”

“I might do a small clone. A bat, or a mole, or such… Not that I don’t enjoy Stickley. He’s very well behaved. But you know? There’s something weird about him.”

“It’s that neural implant they give them at the Collaboratory,” Oscar said. “It’s all about aggression, eating, and defecation. If you control those three behaviors, you can live in peace with wild animals. Luckily, that deep neural structure is very similar across a wide range of mammals.”

“Including humans, I imagine.”

“Well, of course.” Oscar’s phone rang. He politely turned it off without answering it.

“The neural control of eating certainly has advanced a lot,” Lorena said. “I’m on appetite controllants right now. They’re very neural. ”

“Neural is a hot technology now.”

“Yes. Neural sounds very attractive.”

She was telling him that she knew about Greta. Well, of course Lorena would know about Greta. Except that Lorena had also known all about Clare. Because Clare had given Lorena Bambakias some very nice press coverage. So Lorena was rather in Clare’s corner. But surely Lorena must see sense there. After all, Clare had left him…

Lorena’s own phone rang. She answered it at once. “Yes? What? Oh dear. Oh dear. And how is Alcott taking the news? Oh, poor dear. Oh, this is very sad. You’re quite sure? Really? All right. Thank you very much.” Lorena paused. “Would you like to talk to Oscar Valpa-raiso about this? He happens to be here for tea. No? Very well, then.” She hung up.

“That was Leon Sosik, our chief of staff,” she announced, slip-ping the phone into her wide-cut sleeve. “There’s been a major de-velopment in our hunger strike.”

“Oh?”

“It’s the air base. A fire has broken out. There’s some kind of toxic spill there. They’re having the whole base evacuated.”

Oscar sat up in his lyre-backed mahogany chair. “ ‘Evacuated,’ is that the story?”

“The federal troops are leaving. They’re running for their lives. So of course those horrid little prole people are pouring in after them, they’re swarming right over the fences.” Lorena sighed. “That means that it’s over. It’s ending right now. It’s finally over.” She swung out her legs, sat up on her couch, and put one slender wrist to her forehead. “Thank God.”

Oscar ran his hand over his newly coiffed hair. “Good Lord, what next?”

“Are you kidding? Christ, I’m going to eat.” Lorena rang a bell on her tea trolley. A krewe member arrived — a new person, someone Oscar had never seen before. “Elma, bring me some tea cake. No, bring me some petit fours, and some chocolate strawberries. Bring me… oh, what’s the use, bring me a jumbo roast beef sandwich.” She looked up. “Would you like something, Oscar?”

“I could do with a black coffee and some media coverage.”

“Good idea.” She raised her voice. “System?”

“Yes, Lorena,” the house system said.

“Would you send down the screen, please.”

“Yes, Lorena, right away.”

“I can’t employ a full-service krewe in this little place,” Lorena apologized. “So I had to install automation. It’s just a baby system now, so it’s still very fresh and stupid. There’s no such thing as a truly smart house, no matter how much you train them.”

A walnut television cabinet came walking down the carpeted stairs.

“That’s a lovely cabinet,” Oscar said. “I’ve never seen responsive furniture done in a Federal Period idiom.”

The television trundled down the stairs and paused, assessing the layout of the room. After a meditative moment, two curve-legged chairs flexed themselves like wooden spiders, and shuffled out of its way. Lorena’s couch did a little tango and sidestep. The tea trolley rolled aside with a jingle. The television sidled up before the two of them, and presented itself for convenient viewing.

“My goodness, they’re all responsive,” Oscar said. “I could have sworn those were wooden legs.”

“They are wooden. Well… they’re flex-treated lignin.” Lorena shrugged. “Period furniture is all well and good, you know, but I draw the line at living like a barbarian.” She lifted one arm in its striped silk sleeve and a gilt-edged remote control leaped from the wall and flew into her hand. She tossed it to him. “Will you drive for me? Find us some decent coverage. I’ve never been much good at that.”

“Call Sosik again, and ask what he’s watching.”

“Oh. Of course.” She smiled wanly. “Never surf when you have a pilot.”

Huey’s rapid-response PR team was already on the job. A Loui-siana environmental safety administrator was supplying the official ac-count of the “disaster.” According to him, safety procedures at the “derelict air base” had fallen into abeyance. A small fire had broken out, and it had ruptured a military stockpile of nonlethal crowd-control aerosols. These were panic-inducing disorients. Nontoxic and odorless, they were just the trick for clearing the streets of third-world cities. Cut to a med tent with young Air Force people shivering and babbling in the grip of paranoiac aerosols. Homespun local people were giving them cots, and blankets, and tranquilizers. The pathetic federal personnel were clearly getting the best of care.

Oscar sipped his coffee. “Unbelievable.”

Lorena spoke around a hasty mouthful of tea cake. “I take it this spiel has no connection to reality-on-the-ground.”

“Oh, there must be some connection. Huey’s clever enough to arrange all that. He’s had agents inside the base, someone to set that fire and dose the base with its own weapons. This was sabotage. Huey was impatient, so he’s gone and poisoned them.”

“He’s deliberately gassed federal troops.”

“Well, yes, but we’ll never find his fingerprints.”

“I can understand people who stab you in the back,” Lorena said, gulping a chocolate strawberry. “What I can’t understand is peo-ple so crazy that they stab you right in the front. This is medieval.”

They watched with care, tagging along remotely as Sosik changed his news feeds. The Europeans had some splendid aerial foot-age of proles invading the base, their heads swathed in ski masks. The Regulators seemed strangely undisturbed by the aerosols.

The nomads were wasting no time. They were ushering in an endless parade of trucks — big retrofitted oil-industry tankers, by the looks of them. They were loading them up, by hand, in coordinated labor gangs. The proles were looting the air base with the decentral-ized efficiency of ants consuming a dead shrew.

“Let me make a little prediction for you,” Oscar said. “Tomor-row, the Governor pretends to be very alarmed by all this. He sends in his state troops to ‘restore order.’ His militia will nail the place down for him — after the proles have stripped it all. When Washington asks what happened to the military assets, they’ll be long gone, and it’s all somebody else’s fault.”

“Why is Huey doing this crazy thing?”

“For him, it makes sense. He wanted that air base for the pork. For the local job creation, for the federal funding. But the Emergency budget people wrote off his funding. They pulled a fast one on him and screwed him out of it. Huey can’t abide disrespect, so he decided to escalate. First, those highway robberies. Then, the power cutoffs. Then the proxy siege. He’s methodically turned up the heat, step by step. But he still didn’t get his way, so now, he just appropriates the whole air base.”

“But it’s not like his dirty proles can run a federal air base. His whole little state militia can’t run a federal air base.”

“That’s true, but now he has the data. Advanced avionics, chips, software, the orders of battle and such… That’s a military asset of the first order. If the feds push him again, he can push back with whole new sets of options.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Believe me, he’s thought this all through. That’s the way he is.” A roast beef sandwich arrived, with mustard, a garnish, and creamed potatoes. Lorena smiled politely as her aproned krewe girl retreated toward the kitchen. She picked off a plank of crustless rye bread, examined it, and set it back down, fingers trembling. “Alcott is going to hate this. We tried so hard to stop this from happening.”

“I know you did.”

“We just couldn’t make them pay enough attention. We pulled the biggest publicity stunt we could manage, short of rallying the party and besieging that place ourselves. Huey just moves too fast for us. Alcott’s not even sworn in yet! And even after his inauguration, we’ll still have the Emergency committees to deal with. Not to men-tion the partisan opposition. And besides, the federal government is just plain broke… It’s bad, Oscar. It’s really bad.”

“I’ll be going up to Boston tomorrow. We’ll think of something new. The hunger strike’s over now, but I was never really pleased with that gambit. Don’t worry. Just concentrate on getting your strength back. This game isn’t over by a long chalk.”

She looked at him gratefully. He watched more coverage as she tore into the sandwich.

Finally she put the plate aside, and leaned back on the yellow couch, her eyes glistening. “How was your first committee meeting, Oscar? I never asked. Were you brilliant?”

“Oh, heavens no. They hate it when you’re brilliant. Brilliance only makes them mulish. I just recited my facts and figures until they got very bored and logged off. By then, my chairman had all their voting proxies. So I asked him for a mile, and he gave me a hundred yards. But a hundred yards was all that I wanted in the first place. So my meeting was really successful. I have a much freer hand now.”

She laughed. “You’re so bad!”

“It’s no use being brilliant, unless it improves the situation. The Senator pulled a very brilliant stunt with this hunger strike, but now, Alcott should learn to be dull. Romantic people are brilliant, artists are brilliant. Politicians know when it’s useful to be dull.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sure you’re right. You’ll be good with Alcott, won’t you? You understand him. You could always talk sense to him. You can cheer him up when he’s down.”

“You’re not down, are you, Lorena?”

“No, I’m not down, I’m coked to the gills on diet pills. But Alcott’s not like me. He’s very serious. He gets depressed. I can’t be with him right now. And he gets so silly about sex when he’s de-pressed.”

Oscar was silently attentive.

“Leon Sosik was silly to let Alcott talk him into a hunger strike. Alcott has a thousand ideas, but a better chief of staff would kill his silly ones. And, Oscar, if you take that little tart Moira back to Boston when I’m not around, you’ll be very silly, too.”

Oscar knew the city of Boston very well indeed, having meticulously canvassed every voting district for the city council races. Boston was sane, civilized, and commonsensical, compared to other American cit-ies. Boston had so much to recommend it. A fully functional financial district. Green, quiet, showpiece parks. Real and serious museums, stocked and maintained by people with a sense of cultural continuity. Several centuries’ worth of attractive public statuary. Living, commer-cial theater. Restaurants with dress codes. Real neighborhoods with real neighborhood bars.

Of course Boston had its less happy areas: the Combat Zone, the half-drowned waterfront… but being home, however briefly, gave Oscar a vital sense of grace. He had never missed the maelstrom of Los Angeles, and as for sorry old Washington, it combined the dullness of Brussels with the mania of Mexico City. East Texas, of course, was utterly absurd. The thought of ever going back there gave him a genu-ine pang.

“I’m going to miss that campaign bus,” Oscar said. “It’s pared me back, to lose that asset. It’s like losing a whole group of go stones. ”

“Can’t you buy your own bus?” Moira said, adjusting her photo-genic coat collar with newly lacquered nails.

“Sure, I could afford a campaign bus, if they built them out of concrete blocks with unskilled labor,” Oscar said. “But so far, that never happens. And now I’ve lost good old Jimmy, too.”

“Some big loss that is. Jimmy’s a loser. A no-neck geek from the Southside… the world’s got a billion Jimmies.”

“Yes, that’s why Jimmy was important to me.”

Moira jammed her bare hands in her jacket and sniffed at the freezing air. “I’ve spent too much time with you, Oscar. I had to live inside your pockets for months. I can’t understand why I still let you make me feel guilty.”

Oscar was not going to let her provoke him. They had dropped off the bus at FedDem headquarters, and they were taking a peaceful winter stroll to his town house in the Back Bay, and he was enjoying himself “I’m not telling you to feel guilty. Am I judgmental? I was very supportive, I always looked after you. Didn’t I? I never said a word about you and Bambakias.”

“Yes you did! You kept lifting your big black eyebrows at me.” Oscar lifted his eyebrows, caught himself doing it, put the eye-brows back in place. He hated confrontations. They always brought out the worst in him. “Look, this isn’t my fault. He hired you, not me. I was just trying to let you know — tactfully — that you were pull-ing a stunt that was bound to arc out as destructive. You had to realize that.”

“Yeah, I knew it.”

“Well, you had to know it! A campaign spokeswoman, having sex with a married Senator. How on earth could that work out?”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly sex…” Moira winced. “And he wasn’t a Senator then, either! When I hooked up with Alcott, he was a long-shot candidate with five percent approval. His staff people were a bunch of weird losers, and his manager was just a young start-up guy who’d never run a federal campaign. It was a hopeless cause. But I signed on with him anyway. I just really liked him, that’s all. He charmed me into it. I just thought he was this naive, brilliant, charm-ing guy. He has a good heart. He really does. He’s much too good a person to be a goddamn Senator.”

“So he was supposed to lose the race, is that it?”

“Yeah. He was supposed to lose, and then that bitch would have dumped him. And I guess I figured that, somehow, I would be there waiting.” Moira shuddered. “Look, I love him, all right? I fell in love with him. I worked really hard for him. I gave him my all. I just never realized that it would play out like this.”

“I’m very sorry,” Oscar said. “It really is all my fault, after all. I never quite made it clear to you that I actually intended to put the guy into federal office.”

Moira fell silent as they forded through the pedestrian crowd on Commercial Avenue. The trees were stark and leafless, but the Christ-mas shoppers were hard at it, all hats and jackets and snow boots in a mess of glittering lights.

Finally she spoke again. “This is a side of you that people don’t get to see much, isn’t it. Under that suit and the hairstyle, you’re a mean, sarcastic bastard.”

“Moira, I have always been entirely straight with you. Right up and down. I couldn’t have been any straighter. You’re the one who’s leaving. You’re not leaving him. You never had him. You’re never going to get him. He doesn’t belong to you. It’s me that you’re leav-ing. You’re leaving my krewe. You’re defecting.”

“What are you, a country? Get over yourself! I’m not ‘defecting.’” Moira stared at him, eyes blazing. “Let me go! Let me be a normal human being! This is like a sickness with you, this controlling thing. You need help.”

“Stop trying to provoke me. You’re being childish.”

They turned the corner onto Marlborough Street. This was his home street, it was where he lived. Time to try a fresh angle. “Look, Moira, I’m truly sorry about your feelings for the Senator. Campaigns are very intense, they make people do crazy things sometimes. But the campaign’s long behind us now, and you need to reassess your position. You and I, we’ve been good friends, we ran a great campaign together, and we shouldn’t become enemies. Be reason-able.”

“I’m not reasonable. I’m in love.”

“Think about it. I know that you’re out of my krewe, I accept that, but I can still make things easy for you. I offered to let you stay at my own house, rent-free. Wasn’t that the act of a friend? If you’re worried about a job, we can work out something with the local Fed-Dems. You can take a party post during the off-season. When the next campaign comes around, hey, you were the spokesperson for Barnbakias! You’ll have a big rep next time, you’ll have some clout. All you have to do is keep your skirt on.”

“I really hate you for that.”

“Look, you don’t mean that.”

“Yes, I do. You’re disgusting. You’ve gone too far this time. I really hate you.”

“I’m telling you this for your own good! Look, she knows. You want to make enemies, well, you’ve made a big one. The wronged woman is on to you.”

“So what? I know that she knows.”

“She’s a Senator’s wife now, and she’s on to you. If you cross her again, she’ll crush you like a bug!”

Moira barked with laughter. “What’s she supposed to do? Shoot me?’

Oscar sighed. “She’ll out you on the college lesbian thing.”

Moira gaped in wounded astonishment. “What is this, the twen-tieth century? Nobody gives a damn about that!”

“She’ll leak it. She’ll leak it with major-league spin. Nobody leaks like Lorena. She’ll kiss up to the Capitol press at some overclass cotillion, and they’ll out you like a vampire in daylight.”

“Oh yeah? Well, I’m a press liaison, and if she outs me, I’ll out you. I’ll out you and your genius creep girlfriend!” She jabbed at him with a red-nailed finger. “Ha! You can’t threaten me, you manipula-tive scumbag. I don’t even care what happens to me! But I can kick over your applecart, that’s for sure. You’re not even human! You don’t even have a birthday! I’ll leak you and that creep ugly scientist, and when I’m done, she’ll day the rue she… oh hell… she’ll rue the day she ever met you.”

“This is pathetic,” Oscar said. “You’ve really lost it!”

“I’m strong.” Moira lifted her chin. “My love has made me strong.”

“What the hell are you carrying on about, anyway? You haven’t even been near the guy in six weeks.”

Her eyes brimmed with triumphant tears. “We trade email!”

Oscar groaned. “So that’s it. Well, we’ll soon put a stop to that. You’re completely irrational! I can’t have you blackmailing me, just so that you can ruin the career of the man that I put into office. It’s unconscionable! To hell with you! Do your worst.”

“I’ll do it! I will! I’ll wipe you out.”

Oscar stopped short on the sidewalk. She stamped onward, then turned on her heel, her eyes wild.

“This is my house,” Oscar pointed out.

“Oh.”

“Look, why don’t you come inside? Let’s have a cup of coffee. I know it hurts to have a bad love affair. You can get over that. Just concentrate on something else.”

“What do you think I am, a wax dummy?” She shoved him. “You creep.”

There was a loud banging noise from across the street. Oscar ignored it. He had one last pitch here, and he thought it would work. If he could get her inside the house with him, she’d sit down and cry. If she cried, she’d confess everything. She’d pass her crisis. She’d get over it.

Another loud bang. A big chip of brick flew from his arched doorway. “Oh hell!” he complained. “Look at my house!”

Another bang. “Ouch,” Moira remarked. Her purse had spun off her shoulder. She picked it up and looked at it. A hole had been punched through it. She turned and stared across the street. “He shot me!” she realized aloud. “He shot me in the purse!”

A gray-haired old man with a metal walker was standing across the street. He was firing at them with a handgun. He was extremely visible now, because the local streetlights, attracted by the highly ille-gal sound of firearms, had all swiveled on their metal necks and framed him in a torrent of glare.

Two batlike police drones detached themselves from a utility pole. They swooped at him like sonic cutouts of black construction paper, and as they passed him, he fell.

Oscar opened his door. He jumped through, lunged back out, caught Moira’s wrist, and dragged her inside. He slammed the door behind them.

“Are you hurt?” he asked her.

“He shot my purse!”

She was trembling violently. Oscar looked her over carefully.

Tights, skirt, hat, jacket. No holes, no blood anywhere.

Moira’s knees buckled suddenly and she slumped to the floor.

The street beyond the door suddenly filled with the sound of sirens.

Oscar hung his hat with care and sat down companionably, hooking his elbows over his knees. It was great to be in his own house; it was cold and dusty, but it smelled like his house, it was comforting. “It’s okay, it’s over now,” he said. “This is a very secure street. Those police drones have got him. Let me turn on my house system, and we’ll have a look outside.”

Moira had gone green.

“Moira, it’s okay now. I’m sure they’ve caught him. Don’t worry, I’ll stay here with you.”

No answer. She was utterly terrified. There was a little bubble of spit on her lower lip.

“I’m truly sorry about this,” he said. “It’s that netwar harassment again. See, it’s just like it was at the Collaboratory. I should have known that one of those lunatics would be staking out my home address. If I’d had Fontenot with me, this would never have hap-pened.”

Moira toppled backward, hitting the wainscoting with a thump. Oscar reached out and tapped his solid front door with his knuckles. “Bulletproof,” he explained. “We’re perfectly safe now, it’s fine. I need a new security director, that’s all. I should have hired one right away. I misplaced my priorities. Sorry…”

“They tried to kill me…”

“No, Moira, not you. Me. Never you, okay? Just me.”

“I feel sick!” she wailed. “I’m gonna faint!”

“I’ll get you something. Brandy? Some antacid?”

There was a loud, repeated knock on the door. Moira shrank back, losing a shoe. “Oh my God! Don’t! Don’t open it!”

Oscar flicked on his doorbug. A lozenge of exterior video flashed on, showing a flashing police bicycle and a female Boston police of-ficer in badge, helmet, and blue woolen jacket. Oscar thumbed the intercom. “May I help you, Officer?”

The cop examined the glowing screen of her notepad. “Is this Mr. Valparaiso?”

“Yes it is, Officer.”

“Open your door, please. Police.”

“May I see some ID, please?”

The officer complied with a holographic ID card. It identified her as Sergeant Mary Elizabeth O’Reilly.

Oscar opened the door, which bumped against Moira’s kneecap. Moira flinched violently and scrambled to her feet, fists clenched.

“Please come in, Sergeant O’Reilly. Thank you for being so quick in your response.”

“I was in the neighborhood,” the policewoman said, stepping inside. She twisted her helmeted head, methodically scanning the en-trance hall with video. “Are there injuries?”

“No.”

“The system has tracked those projectiles. They seem to have been aimed at you. I took the liberty of backrunning the nearest re-cordings. You and this female were involved in a dispute.”

“Actually, that’s not the case. I’m a federal Senate employee, and this was an attempted political assassination.” Oscar gestured at Moira. “Our so-called dispute was strictly a private matter.”

“Would you show me some identification, please.”

“Certainly. ” Oscar reached for his wallet.

“No, not you, Mr. Valparaiso. I mean this nonresident white female.”

Moira pawed by reflex at her purse. “He shot my purse…”

Oscar tried some gentle coaxing. “But your ID’s still in there, isn’t it? This is a legal request from a public safety officer. You do need to show her some ID.”

Moira stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “You’re completely insane. You’re completely insane!”

Oscar turned to the cop. “I can vouch for her, Officer. Her name’s Moira Matarazzo, she’s my guest.”

“You can’t act like this!” Moira screeched. She shoved him sud-denly, pushing at his shoulder. “He tried to kill you!”

“Well, he missed.”

Moira swung up her purse, two-handed, and walloped him. “Be scared, stupid! Be scared, like me! Act normal!”

“Don’t do that,” the cop commanded. “Stop hitting him.”

“Are you nude out of ice? You can’t act like this! Nobody thinks that fast!” She whacked him with the purse again. Oscar ducked back, raising his arms to shield his face.

“Stop that,” said the cop, in a level no-nonsense tone. “Stop hitting him.”

“She’s hysterical,” Oscar gasped. He ducked another swing. The cop pulled her spraygun and fired. There was a hiss of high-speed mist. Moira’s eyelids flicked upward like electric shutters. She collapsed to the floor.

“She was really in a state,” Oscar said, rubbing his elbow. “You have to allow her some leeway.”

“Mr. Valparaiso, I understand that sentiment,” Officer O’Reilly said. “But I’m on live helmetcam. She disobeyed two direct orders to stop battering you. That is not acceptable. City policy is very strict regarding domestic disputes. If we have to take action to break up a physical quarrel, the offending party is gonna spend the night in the cooler. You understand me, sir? That’s city policy. No ifs, ands, or buts. She’s under arrest.”

“She’d just been shot at. She was very upset.”

“I’m very aware of that fact, but you’ll have to take that up with Special Weapons and Tactics. I’m with the bicycle patrol.” She paused. “Don’t worry, SWAT is on their way right now. They’re very rapid-response when it comes to firearm incidents.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Oscar said. “Please don’t think I was being ungrateful. It was very brave of you to charge headlong into a shootout. That’s a very commendable action.”

Officer O’Reilly smiled briefly. “Oh, the drones had the perp down as soon as the shots were triangulated. He’s in custody already.”

“Excellent work.”

The officer gazed at him thoughtfully. “Are you really sure you’re all right?”

“Why do you say that?” He paused. “Oh. Yes, of course. Yes, I’m very upset by all this. It’s the fourth attempt on my life in the past three weeks. I need to make my situation clear to the local authorities — but I got into town just an hour ago. I lost track of time.”

Moira stirred on the floor and moaned faintly.

“Would you like a hand loading her into the paddy wagon?”

“That’s all right, Mr. Valparaiso. I think we can manage.”

The police downtown were very polite to him. Polite, but unyield-ing. Once Oscar had successfully repeated his story for the third time, he relaxed.

He had been in a little mental fugue state. Not for the first time, of course — they’d been happening to him since childhood. Nothing life-threatening, but it wasn’t the kind of response that formed the human standard.

Oscar sometimes liked to imagine that he was brilliant under pressure, but that was a pretense. He wasn’t brilliant. He was just extremely fast. He wasn’t a genius. He just burned more brightly, his internal chip-cycle ran a little faster. Now, with the fugue fading, he felt shaky — even with a solemn police promise of extra surveillance and bike patrols.

His assailant — a victim of senile paranoia — had almost managed to shoot him. But Oscar couldn’t seem to connect. The facts weren’t registering. He was numbed.

He went upstairs to his third-floor office. He unlocked his desk and retrieved his super-special crisis notebook. Also, a vintage Water-man pen. At times like this it always helped him to make a list. Not on a screen. With his own hands. He placed the journal down on his Eero Saarinen desktop, and began to write:

A. Become Bambakias chiif of staff.

B. Reform Collaboratory. Internal coup. Purge. Remove entire old guard. Cut budget drastically, reform finances. Note: with luck a success here will obviate any need for second committee assignment.

C. Huey. Is deal possible? Consider full range of countermeasures.

D. Augment personal krewe. Stop desertions. Note: Buna hotel must clear profit. Note: engage new security director at once. Must be trusted implicitly.

E. Return bus to FedDems, must pay for new paint job.

F. Greta. More sex, less email. Note: Boston Visit Imminent!!! Fly krewe members in for conference support, prepare total makeover. Note: use ALL extra days, insist on this. Note: prepare groundwork within Buna while she is OUT of lab — feigned illness gambit. PS I think I love her.

G. Need house-sitter.

H. Return stupid animal to Buna, arrange good cover story. Note: avoid corruption entanglements.

I. I really must stay alive and not be shot thru netwar harassment. Note: this issue needs much higher ranking.

J.Who the hell sent that demolition mob to the bank in Worcester? Note: rational game strategy not possible when pieces are invisible, intangible, or immaterial.

K. Emergency committees must go. They were basic source of Bambakias/Huguelet contretemps. American political situation basically impossible when constitutional authority flouted by irresponsible usurpers. Note: even chief of staff position is fatally subject to their caprice.

L. Sen. Bambakias — hunger strike physical state depression?

Oscar gazed at his list. He had already used up half the alphabet, and he could feel the very air around him swarming with the unforeseen. It was all just too much. It was chaos, madness, a writhing nest of eels.

It was just too complex. It was utterly unmanageable. Unless… unless somehow the process was automated. With more specific goals. Some reengineering. Critical path analysis. Decentral-ization. Co-optation. Thinking outside the box. But then there were so many other people. They all depended on him. He had to deputize…

He was stymied. He was surrounded. He was through, finished, crushed. There was no possibility of coherent accomplishment. Nothing was ever going to move.

He had to do something. Just one thing. Get one single thing accomplished, put one issue finally away.

He picked up the desk phone. Lorena’s secretary fielded the call. He fought his way through.

“I’m sorry, Oscar,” Lorena told him, “I have Alcott on another line. Can I call you back?”

“This won’t take long. It’s important.”

“Yes?”

“There’s news. Moira is in jail, here in Boston. I tried to reason with her about the situation. She lost control, she got violent. There happened to be a policeman handy, luckily for me. The Boston cops have nailed Moira on a domestic battery charge.”

“Good Lord, Oscar.”

“I don’t plan to press charges against her, but I don’t want to tell her that. I want you to handle it now. It’s time for you to take over. Moira’s in the slammer, I’m playing the angry heavy, and you’re her forgiving guardian angel. You see? You’re going to smooth it all over for her, keep it all quiet. That’s how we have to play it with her, because that’s how it’s going to work.”

“Are you kidding? Let her rot!”

“No, I’m not kidding. I’m handing you a permanent solution here. Think about it.”

A long and thoughtful silence. “Yes, you’re right, of course. That is the best way to handle it.”

“I’m glad that you see it my way.”

“I’ll have to grit my teeth a little, but it’s worth it.” A meditative pause. “You’re really amazing.”

“Just part of the job, ma’am.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No. Wait. Yes. Tell me something. Does my voice sound all right to you?”

“For an encrypted line, this is a great connection.”

“No, I mean, I’m not talking really fast? Not, like, a high-pitched squeal?”

Lorena lowered her voice to a croon. “No, Oscar, you sound great. You are completely wonderful. You are handsome and charm-ing, you are completely dependable, you are Mr. Realpolitik. I trust you completely. You have never, ever failed me, and if I had owned that goddamn lab in Colombia I would have cloned a dozen of you. You are the best in the whole wide world.”