Distraction

9

The Canton Market had been a Texas tradition since the 1850s. Every weekend before the first Monday of the month, traders, collectors, flea marketeers, and random gawkers gathered from hundreds of miles around for three days of hands-on commercial scrap-and-patchwork. Naturally this ancient and deeply attractive tra-dition had been completely co-opted by prole nomads.

Oscar, Greta, and Kevin found themselves joining a road migration heading northeast toward the makeshift city. In Kevin’s rented junker, they fitted with ease into the traffic: tankers, flatbeds, gypsy buses, winter-wrapped roadside hitchhikers.

In the meantime, Oscar and Greta climbed into the backseat together, to see to one another’s scrapes, welts, and bruises. Greta was still handcuffed, while Oscar’s bro-ken head had barely clotted. They sat together while Kevin munched a take-out sandwich and wiped the fog of breath from his car’s cold windows.

Checking one another’s injuries was a slow and inti-mate process. It involved much tender unbuttoning of shirts, indrawn breaths of hurt surprise, sympathetic tongue-clicking, and the ultragentle dabbing of antiseptic unguents. They’d both taken a serious pounding, in normal circumstances requiring a medical checkup and a couple of days of bed rest. Their heads swam and ached from the knockout gas, a side effect only partly curable by temple rubbing, brow smoothing, and gentle lingering kisses.

Greta was stoic. She forced him to share her personal hangover cure: six aspirin, four acetaminophen, three heaping spoonfuls of white sugar, and forty micrograms of over-the-counter lysergic acid. This melange, she insisted authoritatively, would “pep them up.”

In the late afternoon, they left the crowded highway and darted east on an obscure country dirt road. There they parked and awaited a rendezvous. Within an hour they were joined by Yosh Pelicanos, who was piloting a rental car with his own satellite locator.

Pelicanos was, as always, efficient and resourceful. He had brought them laptops, cash cards, a first-aid kit, two suitcases of clothes, plastic sprayguns, new phones, and last but far from least, a new, yard-long bolt cutter.

Kevin had the most extensive experience with police handcuffs. So he set to work on Greta’s bonds with the bolt cutter, while Oscar changed clothes inside Pelicanos’s spacious and shiny rental car.

“You people look like three zombies. I hope you know what you’re doing,” Pelicanos told him mournfully. “All hell is breaking loose back at the lab.”

“How’s the krewe handling the crisis?” Oscar said, tenderly shaving the hair from the ragged gash above his ear.

“Well, some of us are with the Strike Committee, some are hol-ing up in the hotel. We can still move in and out of the lab, but that won’t last. Word is that they’ll seal the facility soon. The Col-laboratory cops are going to break the Strike. There are Buna city cops and county sheriffs cruising all around our hotel, and Greta’s committee is too scared to leave the Hot Zone… We’ve been sucker-punched, Oscar. Our people are totally confused. Word is out that you’re criminals, you’ve abandoned us. Morale is subterranean.”

“So how’s the float going on our black-propaganda rap?” Oscar said.

“Well, the elopement pitch was very hot. How could a sex angle not be hot? I mean, basically, that’s the outing move that we always expected. They’re circulating photo stills of you and Greta at that dump in Holly Beach.”

“Those Louisiana state troopers had telephotos,” Oscar sighed. “I knew it all along.”

“The sex scandal didn’t break in the straight press yet. I’ve had dozens of calls, but the journos can’t get any confirmation. That’s just a typical sex smear. Nobody in the Collaboratory takes that seriously. Everybody in Buna already knows that you’re having sex with Greta. No, the serious attack was the embezzlement rap. That’s dead seri-ous. Because the lab’s money is really gone.”

“How much did he steal?” Oscar said.

“He stole the works! The lab is bankrupt. It’s bad. It’s worse than bad. It’s beyond mere bankruptcy. It’s total financial wreckage, because all the lab’s budgets and all the records are trashed. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even the backups have been targeted and garbaged. The system can’t even add, it can’t update, it churns out nonsense. It’s a total financial lobotomy.”

“American military infowar viruses,” Oscar said. “Huey’s loot from the Air Force base.”

“Sure, that had to be military,” Pelicanos nodded. “People have brought down national governments with those things. The lab’s computers never had a chance.”

“How long before you can restore functionality?” Oscar said.

“Are you kidding? What am I, a miracle worker?” Pelicanos was genuinely wounded. “I’m just an accountant! I can’t repair the dam-age from a military netwar attack! In fact, I think someone’s been monitoring me, personally. Every file that I’ve accessed in the past two months has been specifically destroyed. I think they’ve even screwed with my own laptop — some kind of black-bag job. I can’t trust my own personal machine anymore. I can’t even trust my off-site records.”

“Fine, Yosh, I take the point, it’s out of your league. So whose league is this in? Who’s going to help us here?”

Pelicanos thought hard about the question. “Well, first, you’d need a huge team of computer-forensics specialists to go over the damaged code line by line … No, forget that. Investigating and describing the damage would take years. It would cost a fortune. Let’s face it, the lab’s books are a write-off, they’re totaled. It would be cheaper to drop the whole system off a cliff and start all over from scratch. ”

“I think I understand,” Oscar said. “Huey permanently trashed the lab’s finances. He’s ruined a federal laboratory with an interstate netwar attack, just to get his krewe off a few corruption hooks. That’s appalling. It’s horrifying. The man has no conscience. Well, at least we know where we stand now.”

Pelicanos sighed. “No, Oscar, it’s much, much worse than that. The Spinoffs people were always Huey’s favorite allies. They knew they were next up on Greta’s chopping block, so last night they re-belled. The Spinoffs gang have launched a counterstrike. They’ve sealed and barricaded the Spinoffs building, and they’re having a round-the-clock shredding orgy. They’re stealing all the data they can get their hands on, and they’re shredding everything else. When they’re done, they’ll all defect to Huey’s brand-new science labs in Louisiana. And they’re trying to convince everyone else to go with them.”

Oscar nodded, absorbing the news. “Okay. That’s vandalism. Obstruction of justice. Theft and destruction of federal records. Com-mercial espionage. All the Spinoffs people should be arrested immedi-ately and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Pelicanos laughed dryly. “As if,” he said.

“This isn’t over,” Oscar said. “Because our kidnapping fell through. We have the tactical initiative again. Huey doesn’t know where we are. At least we’re well out of his reach.”

“So — what’ll it be? Where should we go now? Boston? Wash-ington?”

“Well …” Oscar rubbed his chin. “Huey’s next moves are obvious, right? He’s going to crash the Collaboratory just like he did the Air Force base. Thanks to his infowar attack, there’s no money now. Soon, there will be no supplies, no food … Then he’ll send in a massive crowd of proles to occupy the derelict facility, and it’s all over.”

“That’s how it looks, all right.”

“He’s not superhuman, Yosh. Well, I take that back — I’m pretty sure that Huey is superhuman. But Huey screwed up. If Huey hadn’t screwed up, Greta and I would be languishing in some private prison in a dismal swamp right now.”

Greta’s handcuffs parted, with a ping and snap so loud that Oscar heard it from outside the car. Greta opened the back door of Kevin’s wretched car, and she climbed out, stretching her cramped back and shoulders. While Kevin stowed the bolt cutter in the trunk, Greta came to join them. She approached Pelicanos’s car and looked through the driver’s window, rubbing her sore wrists.

“What’s the game plan?” she said.

“We have the element of surprise,” Oscar said. “And we’ll have to use that for all it’s worth.”

“When can I go back to the lab? I really want to go back to my lab.”

“We’ll go. But when we go, we’ll have to go back very hard. We’ll have to attack the Collaboratory and take it over by force.”

Pelicanos stared at Oscar as if he had lost his mind. Greta rubbed her chilly arms, and looked grave and troubled.

“Now you’re talking!” Kevin announced, punching the air.

“It’s doable,” Oscar said. He opened the car door and stepped into the cold winter wind. “I know it sounds crazy, but think it through. Greta is still the legitimate Director. The Collaboratory’s cops aren’t crack troops, they’re just a bunch of functionaries.”

“You can’t ask the people in the Collaboratory to attack the police,” Greta said. “They just won’t do that. It’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s unethical, it’s unprofessional … and, besides, it’s very danger-ous, isn’t it?”

“Actually, Greta, I’m dead certain that your scientists would love to beat up some cops, but I take your point. It would take us far too long to talk those harmless intellectuals into clobbering anyone. My little krewe of pols aren’t exactly hardened anarchist street-fighters, either. But if we can’t restore order in the lab, right away, today, then your administration is doomed. And your lab is doomed. So we have to risk it. This crisis requires total resolve. We have to physically seize that facility. What we need at this juncture are some tough, revolu-tionary desperados.” Oscar drew a breath. “So let’s drive into this flea market and hire ourselves some goons.”

They abandoned Pelicanos’s perfectly decent car for security rea-sons, and piled together into Kevin’s unlicensed junker. Then they drove on.

Their first challenge was a Moderator roadblock, south of Can-ton. The Texan prole lads manning the roadblock gave them curious stares. Oscar’s hat was askew, barely hiding the bandaged gash in his head. Kevin was unshaven and twitchy. Greta had her arms crossed to hide her chafed wrists. Pelicanos looked like an undertaker.

“Come down from outta state?” the Moderator said. He was a freckle-faced Anglo kid with blue plastic hair, headphones, eight wooden beaded necklaces, a cellphone, and a fringed deerskin jacket. His legs were encased from the knees down in giant mukluks of furry plastic.

“Yo!” Kevin said, offering a wide variety of secret high signs. The Moderator watched Kevin’s antics with bemusement. “Y’all ever been to Texas before?”

“We’ve heard of the Canton flea market,” Kevin assured him.

“It’s famous.”

“Could I have a five-dollar parkin’ fee, please?” The Moderator pocketed his plastic cash and glued a sticker to their windshield. “Y’all just follow the beeps on this sticker, it’ll lead to y’all’s parking lot. Have a good time at the fair!”

They drove slowly into the town. Canton was a normal East Texas burg of modest two- and three-story buildings: groceries, clin-ics, churches, restaurants. The streets were swarming with weirdly dressed foot traffic. The huge crowds of proles seemed extremely well organized; they were serenely ignoring the traffic lights, but they were moving in rhythmic gushes and clumps, filtering through the town in a massive folk dance.

Kevin parked below a spreading pine tree in a winter-browned cow pasture, and they left their vehicle. The sun was shining fitfully, but there was an uneasy northern breeze. They joined a small crowd and walked to the edge of the market.

The sprawling market campground was dominated by the soar-ing plastic spines of homemade cellular towers. Dragonfly flocks of tinkertoy aircraft buzzed the terrain. The biggest shelters were enor-mous polarized circus tents of odd-smelling translucent plastic on tall spindly poles.

Kevin bought four sets of earclips from a blanket vendor. “Here, put these on.”

“Why?” Greta said.

“Trust me, I know my way around a place like this.”

Oscar pinched the clamp onto his left ear. The device emitted a little wordless burbling hum, the sound a contented three-year-old might make. As long as he moved with the crowd, the little murmur simply sat there at his ear, an oddly reassuring presence, like a child’s make-believe friend. However, if he interfered with the crowd flow — if he somehow failed to take a cue — the earcuff grew querulous. Stand in the way long enough, and it would bawl.

Somewhere a system was mapping out the flow of people, and controlling them with these gentle hints. After a few moments Os-car simply forgot about the little murmurs; he was still aware of them, but not consciously. The nonverbal nagging was so childishly insistent that accommodating it became second nature. Soon the four of them were moving to avoid the crowds, well before any ap-proaching crowds could actually appear. Everyone was wearing the earcuffs, so computation was arranging human beings like a breeze blowing butterflies.

The fairground was densely packed with people, but the crowd was unnaturally fluid. All the snack-food stands had short, brisk lines. The toilets were never crowded. Children never got lost.

“I’ll line up someone that we can talk to seriously,” Kevin told them. “When I’ve made the arrangements, I’ll call you.” He turned and limped away.

“I’ll help you,” Oscar said, catching up with him.

Kevin turned on him, his face tight. “Look, am I your security chief, or not?”

“Of course you are.”

“This is a security matter. If you want to help me, go watch your girlfriend. Make sure that nobody steals her this time.”

Oscar was annoyed to find himself persona non grata in Kevin’s private machinations. On the other hand, Kevin’s anxiety made sense-because Oscar was the only man in this crowd of thousands who was wearing a full-scale overclass ensemble of suit, hat, and shoes. Oscar was painfully conspicuous.

He glanced over his shoulder. Greta had already vanished.

He quickly located Pelicanos, and after four increasingly anxious minutes they managed to find Greta. She had somehow wandered into a long campground aisle of tents and tables, which were packed with an astounding plethora of secondhand electronic equipment.

“Why are you wandering off on your own?” he said.

“I didn’t wander! You wandered.” She dipped her fingers through a shallow brass tray full of nonconductive probes.

“We need to stick together, Greta.”

“I guess it’s my little friend here,” she said, touching her earcuff. “I’m not used to it.” She wandered bright-eyed down to the next table, which bore brimming boxes of multicolored patch cables, faceplates, mounting boxes, modular adaptors.

Oscar examined a cardboard box crammed with electrical wares. Most were off-white plastic, but others were nomad work. He picked an electrical faceplate out of the box. It had been punched and molded out of mashed grass. The treated cellulose was light yet rigid, with a crunchy texture, like bad high-fiber breakfast cereal.

Greta was fascinated, and Oscar’s interest was caught despite himself He hadn’t realized that nomad manufacturing had become so sophisticated. He glanced up and down the long aisle. They were entirely surrounded by the detritus of dead American computer and phone industries, impossibly worthless junk brightly labeled with long-dead commercial promos. “Brand-New In the Box: Strata VIe and XIIe!” There were long-dead business programs no sane human being would ever employ. Stacks of bubblejet cartridges for nonexis-tent printers. Nonergonomic mice and joysticks, guaranteed to slowly erode one’s wrist tendons … And fantastic amounts of software, its fictional “value” exploded by the lost economic war.

But this was not the strange part. The strange part was that brand-new nomad manufacturers were vigorously infiltrating this jun-gle of ancient junk. They were creating new, functional objects that were not commercial detritus — they were sinister mimics of commer-cial detritus, created through new, noncommercial methods. Where there had once been expensive, glossy petrochemicals, there was now chopped straw and paper. Where there had once been employees, there were jobless fanatics with cheap equipment, complex networks, and all the time in the world. Devices once expensive and now commercially worthless were being slowly and creepily replaced by near-identical devices that were similarly noncommercial, and yet brand-new.

A table featuring radio-frequency bugs and taps was doing a bang-up business. A man and woman with towering headdresses and face paint were boldly retailing the whole gamut of the covert-listening industry: bodywires, gooseneck flashlights, wire crimpers, grounding kits, adhesive spongers, dental picks and forceps, and box after box of fingernail-sized audio bugs. Who but nomads, the perma-nently unemployed, would enjoy the leisure of patiently listening, col-lating, and trading juicy bits of overheard dialogue? Oscar examined a foam-filled box jammed with hexhead cam wrenches.

“Let’s try this other row,” Greta urged him, eyes bright and hair tousled. “This one’s medical!”

They drifted into a collateral realm of undead commerce. Here, the market tables were crowded with hemostatic forceps, surgical scis-sors, vascular clamps, resistant heat-sealed plastic gloves from the long-vanished heyday of AIDS. Greta pored, transfixed, over the bone screws, absorption spears, ultracheap South Chinese magnifier specta-cles, little poptop canisters of sterile silicone grease.

“I need some cash,” she told him suddenly. “Loan me some-thing. ”

“What is with you? You can’t buy this junk. You don’t know where it’s from.”

“That’s why I want to buy it.” She frowned at him. “Look, I was the head of the Instrumentation Department. If they’re giving away protein sequencers, I really need to know about that.”

She approached the table’s owner, who was sitting at his open laptop and chuckling over homemade cartoons. “Hey, mister. How much for this cytometer?”

The hick looked up from his screen. “Is that what that is?”

“Does it work?”

“I dunno. Kinda makes the right noises when you plug it in.”

Pelicanos appeared. He had bought her a secondhand jacket — a gruesome sporty disaster of indestructible black and purple Gore-Tex.

“Thank you, Yosh,” she said, and slipped into the jacket’s baggy entrails. Once she’d snapped the ghastly thing up to her chin, Greta inunediately became an integral part of the local landscape. She was passing for normal now, just another poverty-stricken bottom-feed female shopper.

“I wish Sandra were here,” Pelicanos said quietly. “Sandra would enjoy this place. If we weren’t in so much trouble, that is.”

Oscar was too preoccupied for junk shopping. He was worried about Kevin. He was struggling to conjure up a contingency plan in case Kevin failed to make a useful contact, or worse yet, if Kevin simply vanished.

But Greta was picking her way along the tables with heartfelt enthusiasm. She’d transcended all her pains and worries. Scratch a scientist, find a hardware junkie.

But no, it was deeper than that. Greta was in her element. Oscar had a brief intuitive flash of what it would mean to be married to Greta. Choosing equipment was part of her work and work was the core of her being. Domestic life with a dedicated scientist would be crammed full of moments like this. He would be dutifully tagging along to keep her company, and she would be investing all her atten-tion into things that he would never understand. Her relationship with the physical world was of an entirely different order from his own. She loved equipment, but she had no taste. It would be hell to furnish a home with a scientist. They’d be arguing over her awful idea of win-dow curtains. He’d be giving in on the issue of cheap and nasty table-ware.

His phone rang. It was Kevin.

Oscar followed instructions, and located the tent where Kevin had found his man. The place was hard to miss. It was an oblong dome of tinted parachute fabric, sheltering a two-man light aircraft, six bicycles, and a host of cots. Hundreds of multicolored strings of chemglow hung from the seams of the tent, dangling to shoulder height. A dozen proles were sitting on soft plastic carpets. To one side, five of them were busily compiling a printed newspaper.

Kevin was sitting and chatting with a man he introduced as “General Burningboy.” Burningboy was in his fifties, with a long salt-and-pepper beard and a filthy cowboy hat. The nomad guru wore elaborately hand-embroidered jeans, a baggy handwoven sweater, and ancient military lace-up boots. There were three parole cuffs on his hairy’ wrists.

“Howdy,” the prole General said. “Welcome to Canton Market. Pull up a floor.”

Oscar and Greta sat on the carpet. Kevin was already sitting there, in his socks, absently massaging his sore feet. Pelicanos was not attending the negotiations. Pelicanos was waiting at a discreet distance. He was their emergency backup man.

“Your friend here just paid me quite a sum, just to buy one hour of my time,” Burningboy remarked. “Some tale he had to tell me, too. But now that I see you two …” He looked thoughtfully at Oscar and Greta. “Yeah, it makes sense. I reckon I’m buying his story. So what can I do y’ all for?”

“We’re in need of assistance,” Oscar said.

“Oh, I knew it had to be somethin’,” the General nodded. “We never get asked for a favor by straight folks till you’re on the ropes. Happens to us all the time — rich idiots, just showin’ up out of the blue. Always got some fancy notion about what we can do for ’em. Some genius scheme that can only be accomplished by the proverbial scum of the earth. Like, maybe we’d like to help ’em grow her-oin… Maybe sell some aluminum siding.”

“It’s not at all like that, General. You’ll understand, once you hear my proposal.”

The General tucked in his boots, cross-legged. “Y’know, this may amaze you, Mr. Valparaiso, but in point of fact, we worthless subhumans are kinda busy with lives of our own! This is Canton First Monday. We’re smack in the middle of a major jamboree here. I’ve gotta worry about serious matters, like… sewage. We got a hun-dred thousand people showin’ up for three days. You comprende?” Burningboy stroked his beard. “You know who you’re talking to here? I’m not a magic elf, pal. I don’t come out of a genie bottle just because you need me. I’m a human being. I got my own problems. They call me ‘General’ now … But once upon a time, I used to be a real-live mayor! I was the elected two-term mayor of Port Mans-field, Texas. Fine little beachfront community — till it washed away.”

An elderly woman in a hairy robe entered the tent. She carefully tied two knots into a dangling cord of chemglow, and left without a word.

The General picked up the thread. “You see, son — and Dr. Pen-ninger” — he nodded at Greta in courtly fashion — “we’re all the he-roes of our own story. You tell me you’ve got a big problem — hell, we’ve all got big problems.”

“Let’s discuss them,” Oscar said.

“I got some excellent career advice for you overachievers. Why don’t you clowns just give up? Just quit! Knock it off, hit the road! Are you enjoyin’ life? Do you have a community? Do you even know what a real community is? Is there any human soul that you poor haunted wretches can really trust? Don’t answer that! ’Cause I already know. You’re a sorry pair of washouts, you two. You look like coyotes ate you and crapped you off a cliff. Now you got some crisis you want me to help you with… Hell, people like you are always gonna have a crisis. You are the crisis. When are you gonna wake up? Your system don’t work. Your economy don’t work. Your politicians don’t work. Nothing you ever do works. You’re over.”

“For the time being,” Oscar said.

“Mister, you’re never gonna get ahead of the game. You’ve had a serious wake-up call here. You’re disappeared, you’re dispossessed. You’ve been blown right off the edge of the earth. Well, you know something? There’s a soft landing down here. Just go ahead and leave! Burn your clothes! Set fire to your damn diploma! Junk all your ID cards! You’re a sickening, pitiful sight, you know that? A nice, charming, talented couple… Listen, it’s not too late for you two to get a life! You’re derelicts right now, but you could be bon vivants, if you knew what life was for.”

Greta spoke up. “But I really need to get back to my lab.”

“I tried,” said Burningboy, flinging up both hands. “See, if you just had the good sense to listen to me, that fine advice of mine would have solved your problems right away. You could be eatin’ mulliga-tawny stew with us tonight, and probably getting laid. But no, don’t mind old Burningboy. I’m much, much older than you, and I’ve seen a lot more of life than you ever have, but what do I know? I’m just some dirt-ignorant fool in funny clothes, who’s gonna get arrested. Because some rich Yankee from outta town needs him to commit some terrible criminal act.”

“General, let me give you the briefing,” said Oscar. He pro-ceeded to do this. Burningboy listened with surprising patience.

“Okay,” Burningboy said at last. “Let’s say that we go in and strong-arm this giant glass dome full of scientists. I gotta admit, that’s a very attractive idea. We’re extremely nice, peaceful people in the Moderators, we’re all love and sunshine. So we might do a thing like that, just to please you. But what’s in it for us?”

“There’s money,” Oscar said.

Burningboy yawned. “Sure, like that’ll help us.”

“The lab is a self-sufficient structure. There’s food and shelter inside,” Greta offered.

“Yeah, sure — as long as it suits you to give it to us. Once that’s done, then it’s the run-along as usual.”

“Let’s be realistic,” Oscar said. “You’re a mob. We need to hire some mob muscle to back up our labor strike. That’s a very traditional gambit, isn’t it? How hard can that be?”

“They’re very small, timid cops,” Greta offered. “They hardly even have guns.”

“Folks, we carry our own food and shelter. What we don’t have is bullet holes in us. Or a bunch of angry feds on our ass.”

Oscar considered his next move. He was dealing with people who had profoundly alien priorities. The Moderators were radical, dissident dropouts — but they were nevertheless people, so of course they could be reached somehow. “I can make you famous,” he said.

Burningboy tipped his hat back. “Oh yeah? How?”

“I can get you major net coverage. I’m a professional and I can spin it. The Collaboratory a very famous place. Dr. Penninger here is a Nobel Prize winner. This is a major political scandal. It’s very dra-matic. It’s part of a major developing story, it ties in with the Bambakias hunger strike, and the Regulator assault on a U.S. Air Force base. You Moderators could get excellent press by restoring order at a troubled federal facility. It would be the very opposite of the dreadful thing that the Regulators did.”

Burningboy reached thoughtfully into his jacket. He removed three small bars of substances resembling colored chalk. He set them onto a small slab of polished Arkansas whetstone, drew a pocketknife, and began chopping the bars into a fine powder.

Then he sighed heavily. “I really hate having my chain pulled just because a hustler like you happens to know that we Mods have it in for the Regulators.”

“Of course I know that, General. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?”

“We love those Regulators like brothers and sisters. We got nothingin common with you. Except that… well, we’re Modera-tors because we use a Moderator network. And the Regulators use a Regulator interface, with Regulator software and Regulator proto-cols. I don’t think that a newbie creep like you understands just how political a problem that is.”

“I understand it,” Kevin said, speaking up for the first time.

“We used to get along with the Regulators. They’re a civilized tribe. But those Cajun goofballs got all puffed up about their genetic skills, and their state support from Green Huey… Started bossin’ other people around, doing talent raids on our top people, and if you ask me, them gumbo yaya voodoo-krewes are way too fond of gas and poison…”

Sensing weakness, Oscar pounced. “General, I’m not asking you to attack the Regulators. I’m only asking you to do what the Regula-tors themselves have done, except for much better motives, and under much better circumstances.”

General Burningboy arranged his chopped powder into straight lines, and dumped them, one by one, into a small jar of yellow grease, He stirred the grease with his forefinger, and rubbed it carefully be-hind his ears.

Then he waited, blinking. “Okay,” he said at last. “I’m putting my personal honor on the line here, on the say-so of total strangers, but what the hell. They call me ‘General’ because of my many hard won years of cumulative trust ratings, but the cares of office hang kinda heavy on my hands right now, quite frankly. I might as well destroy everything I’ve built in one fell swoop. So, I’m gonna do you three rich creep palookas a very, very big favor. I’m going to loan you five platoons.”

“Fifty Moderator toughs?” Kevin said eagerly.

“Yep. Five platoons, fifty people. Of course, I’m not sayin’ our troops can hold that lab against a federal counterassault, but there’s no question they can take it.”

“Do these men have the discipline that it takes to maintain civil order in that facility?” Oscar said.

“They’re not men, pal. They’re teenage girls. We used to send in our young men when we wanted to get tough, but hey, young men are extremely tough guys. Young men kill people. We’re a well-established alternative society, we can’t afford to be perceived as murdering marauders. These girls keep a cooler head about urban sabotage. Plus, underage women tend to get a much lighter criminal sentencing when they get caught.”

“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, General, but I’m not sure you grasp the seriousness of our situation.”

“No,” Greta said. “Teenage girls are perfect.”

“Then I reckon I’ll be introducing you to some of our chaperone field commanders. And you can talk about tactics and armament.”

Oscar rode back to Buna in a phony church bus, crammed with three platoons of Moderator nomad soldiers. He might have ridden with Kevin, but he was anxious to study the troops.

It was almost impossible to look at girls between fourteen and seventeen and envision them as a paramilitary task force that could physically defeat police. But in a society infested with surveillance, militias had to take strange forms. These girls were almost invisible because they were so improbable.

The girls were very fit and quiet, with the posture of gymnasts, and they traveled in packs. Their platoons were split into operational groups of five, coordinated by elderly women. These little-old-lady platoon sergeants looked about as harmless and inoffensive as it was possible for human beings to look.

They all looked harmless because they dressed the part, deliber-ately. The nomad crones had given up their usual eldritch leather-and-plastic road gear. They now wore little hats, orthopedic shoes, and badly fitting floral prints. The young soldiers painstakingly ob-scured their tattoos with skin-colored sticks of wax. They had styled and combed their hair. They wore bright, up-tempo jackets and pat-terned leggings, presumably shoplifted from malls in some gated com-munity. The Moderator army resembled a girl’s hockey team on a hunt for chocolate milk shakes.

Once the buses and their soldiery had successfully made it through the eastern airlock gate, the assault on the Collaboratory was a foregone conclusion. Oscar watched in numb astonishment as the first platoon ambushed and destroyed a police car.

Two cops in a car were guarding one of the airlocks into the Hot Zone, where Greta’s Strike Committee was sullenly awaiting eviction. Without warning, the youngest of the five girls clapped her hands to the sides of her head, and emitted an ear-shattering scream. The po-lice, galvanized with surprise, left their car at once and rushed over to give the girl aid. They fell into an invisible rat’s nest of tripwires, which lashed their booted legs together with a stink of plastic. The moment they hit the ground, two other girls coolly shot them with sprayguns, pasting them firmly to the earth.

A second platoon of girls united and turned the tiny police truck onto its roof, and web-shot its video monitors and instrument panels.

At his own insistence, Kevin personally led the assault on the police station. Kevin’s contribution consisted of fast-talking with the female desk sergeant as thirty young women walked into the building, chatting and giggling. Smiling cops who trustingly emerged to find out what was going on were webbed at point-blank range. Gagged, blinded, and unable to breathe, they were easy prey for trained squads who seized their wrists, kicked their ankles, and knocked them to the floor with stunning force. They were then swiftly cuffed.

The Moderators had seized a federal facility in forty minutes flat.

A force of fifty girls was overkill. By six-thirty the coup was a fait accompli.

Still, there had been one tactical misstep. The lab’s security di-rector was not at his work, and not at his home, where a platoon had been sent to arrest him. There was no one at home but his greatly surprised wife and two children.

It turned out that the security chief was in a beer bar with his mistress, drunk. Teenage girls couldn’t enter a bar without attracting attention. They tried luring him out; but, confused by bad lighting, they attacked and tackled the wrong man. The chief escaped appre-hension.

Two hours later the chief was rediscovered, sealed into an im-promptu riot vehicle in the basement of the Occupational Safety building. He was frantically brandishing a cellphone and a combat shotgun.

Oscar went in to negotiate with him.

Oscar stood before the rubber bumper of the squat decontamina-tion vehicle. He waved cheerfully through the armored window, showing his empty hands, and called the police chief on one of the Collaboratory’s standard phones.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the chief demanded. His name, Oscar recalled flawlessly, was Mitchell S. Karnes.

“Sorry, Chief Karnes, it was an emergency. The situation’s un-der control now. No one is going to be hurt.”

“I’m the one who handles emergencies,” said the chief.

“You and your men were the emergency. Since Director Pen-ninger was abducted yesterday, I’m afraid you and your team have forfeited her trust. However, the lab is now back in the hands of its properly constituted authorities. So you and your staff will be relieved of duty and placed under detention until we can restore the situation to normalcy.”

“What on earth are you talking about? You can’t fire me. You don’t have the authority.”

“Well, Chief, I’m very aware of that. But that doesn’t change the facts of our situation. Just look at us. I’m standing out here, trying to be reasonable, while you’re holed up in an armored vehicle with a shotgun, all by yourself. We’re both adults, let’s be sensible men here. The crisis is over. Put the gun down and come on out.”

Karnes blinked. He’d been drinking heavily earlier in the day, and the full gravity of his situation hadn’t entirely registered on him. “Look, what you’re saying is completely crazy. A labor strike is one thing. Computer viruses are one thing. Netwar is one thing, even. But this is an armed coup. You can’t get away with attacking police of-ficers. You’ll be arrested. Everybody you know will get arrested.”

“Mitch, I’m with you on this issue. In fact, I’m way ahead of you. I stand ready to surrender myself to the properly constituted authorities, just as soon as we can figure out who they are. They’ll show up sooner or later; this will all shake out in the long run. But in the meantime, Mitch, act normal, okay? All your colleagues are down in detention. We’ve got the crisis handled now. This is doable. We’re having the place catered tonight, there’s doughnuts, coffee, and free beer. We’re playing pinochle together and swapping war stories. We’re planning to set up conjugal visits.”

“Oscar, you can’t arrest me. It’s against the law.”

“Mitch, just relax. You play ball with Dr. Penninger, probably we can work something out! Sure, I guess you can stand on principle, if you want to get all stiff-necked about it. But if you sit in that truck with a loaded shotgun all night, what on earth will that get you? It’s not going to change a thing. It’s over. Come on out.”

Karnes left the truck. Oscar produced a pair of handcuffs, looked at the plastic straps, shrugged, put them back in his pocket. “We really don’t need this, do we? We’re grown-ups. Let’s just go.”

Karnes fell into step with him. They left the basement, and walked out together beneath the dome. There were winter stars be-yond the glass. “I never liked you,” Karnes said. “I never trusted you. But somehow, you always seem like such a reasonable guy.”

“I am a reasonable guy.” Oscar clapped the policeman on the back of his flak jacket. “I know things seem a little disordered now, Chief: but I still believe in the law. I just have to find out where the order is.”

After seeing the former police chief safely incarcerated, Oscar con-ferred with Kevin and Greta in the commandeered police station. The nomad girls had changed from their dainty infiltration gear into cloth-ing much more their style: webbing belts, batons, and cut-down com-bat fatigues. “So, did you get our internal publicity statemnt released?”

“Of course,” Kevin said. “I called up every phone in the lab at once, and Greta went on live. Your statement was a good pitch, Oscar. It sounded really…” He paused. “Soothing.”

“Soothing is good. We’ll have new posters up by morning, de-claring the Strike over. People need these symbolic breathers. ‘The Strike Is Over.’ A declaration like that takes a lot of the heat off” All enthusiasm, Kevin pitched from the chief’s leather chair and crawled on his hands and knees to a floor-level cabinet. It was crammed with telecom equipment, a dust-clotted forest of colored fiber optics. “Really neat old phone system here! It’s riddled with taps, but it’s one of a kind; it has a zillion cool old-fashioned features that nobody ever used.”

“Why is it so dirty and neglected?” Oscar said.

“Oh, I had to turn these boards backward to get at the wiring.

I’ve never had such total control over a switching station. A couple of weeks down here, and I’ll have this place ticking like a clock.” Kevin stood up, wiping clotted grime from his fingers. “I think I’d better put on one of these local cop uniforms now. Does anybody mind if I wear a cop uniform from now on?”

“Why do you want to do that?” Oscar said.

“Well, those nomad girls have uniforms. I’m now your chief of security, right? How am I supposed to control our troops, if I don’t have my own uniform? With some kind of really cool cop hat.”

Oscar shook his head. “That’s a moot point, Kevin. Now that they’ve conquered the lab for us, we really need to usher those little witches out of here just as soon as possible.”

Kevin and Greta exchanged glances. “We were just discussing that issue.”

“They’re really good, these girls,” Greta said. “We won the lab back, but nobody got killed. It’s always very good when there’s a coup d’ etat and nobody gets killed.”

Kevin nodded eagerly. “We still need our troops, Oscar. We have a gang of dangerous Huey contras who are holed up in the Spinoffs building. We have to break them right where they stand! So we’ll have to use heavy nonlethals-spongey whips, peppergas, ultrasonic bull-horns… Man, it’s gonna be juicy.” Kevin rubbed his hands to-gether.

“Greta, don’t listen to him. We can’t risk serious injury to those people. We’re in full command of the lab now, so we need to behave responsibly. If we have trouble from Huey’s loyalists, we’ll behave like normal authorities do. We’ll just glue their doors shut, cut their phone and computer lines, and starve them out. Overreaction would be a serious mistake. From now on, we have to worry about how this plays in Washington.”

Greta’s long face went bleak. “Oh, to hell with Washington! They never do anything useful. They can’t protect us here. I’m sick of them and their double-talk.”

“Wait a minute!” Oscar said, wounded. “I’m from Washington. I’ve been useful.”

“Well, you’re the one exception.” She rubbed her skinned wrists angrily. “After what happened to me today, I know what I’m up against. I don’t have any more illusions. We can’t trust anyone but ourselves. Kevin and I are going to seize the airlocks and seal this entire facility. Oscar, I want you to resign. You’d better resign before the people in Washington fire you.” She began jabbing her spidery fingers at him. “No, before they arrest you. Or indict you. Or im-peach you. Or kidnap you. Or just plain kill you.”

He gazed at her in alarm. She was losing it. The skin of her cheeks and forehead had the taut look of a freshly peeled onion. “Greta, let’s go for a little walk in the fresh air, shall we? You’re overwrought. We need to discuss our situation sensibly.”

“No more talking. I’m through being played for a sucker. I won’t be gassed and handcuffed again, unless they come in here with tanks.”

“Darling, nobody uses ‘tanks.’ Tanks are very twentieth century. The authorities don’t have to use violent armed force. The world is past that phase as a civilization. If they want to pry us out of here, they’ll just …’

Oscar fell silent suddenly. He hadn’t really considered the op-tions from the point of view of the authorities. The options for the authorities didn’t seem very promising. Greta Penninger — and her allies — had just seized an armored biological laboratory. The place was blast-resistant and riddled with underground catacombs. There were hundreds of highly photogenic rare species inside, forming a combination mobile food source and corps of potential hostages. The facility had its own water supply, its own power supply, even its own atmosphere. Financial threats and embargoes were meaning-less, because the financial systems had already been ruined by netwar viruses.

The place was sewn up tight. Greta’s pocket revolutionaries had seized the means of information. They had commandeered the means of production. They had a loyal and aroused populace in a state of profound distrust for the outside world. They had conquered a mighty fortress.

Greta returned her attention to Kevin. “When can we junk these lousy prole phones and get our regular system back?”

Kevin was all helpfulness. “Well, I’ll have to make sure it’s fully secure first… How many programmers can you give me?”

“I’ll run a personnel search for telecom talent. Can you find me my own office here in the police station? I may be spending a lot of time in here.”

Kevin grinned gamely. “Hey, you’re the boss, Dr. Penninger!”

“I need some time off,” Oscar realized. “Maybe a nice long nap. It’s really been a trying day.” They cordially ignored him. They were busy with their own agenda. He left the police station.

As he tottered through the darkened gardens toward the looming bulk of the Hot Zone, weariness overcame him with an evil metabolic rush. His day’s experiences suddenly struck him as being totally in-sane. He’d been abducted, gassed, bombed; he’d traveled hundreds of miles in cheerless, battered vehicles; he’d concluded an unsavory alliance with a powerful gang of social outcasts; he’d been libeled, accused of embezzlement and criminal flight across state bound-aries… He’d arrested a group of police; he’d talked an armed fugitive into surrendering… And now his sometime lover and his dangerously unbalanced security director were uniting to plot behind his back.

It was bad. Impossibly bad. But it still wasn’t the worst. Because tomorrow was yet another day. Tomorrow, he would have to launch into a massive public-relations offensive that would somehow justify his actions.

He realized suddenly that he wasn’t going to make it. It was overwhelming. It was just too much. He’d reached a condition of psychic overload. He was black, blue, and green with wounds and bruises; he was hungry, tired, overstressed, and traumatized; his ner-vous system was singing with stale adrenaline. Yet in his heart of hearts, he felt good about the day’s events.

He’d outdone himself.

True, he’d suffered the elemental blunder of being kidnapped. But after that, he had handled every situation, every developing crisis, with astonishing aplomb and unbroken success. Every move had been the proper move at the proper moment, every option had been an inspired choice. It was just that there were too many of them. He was like an ice-skater performing an endless series of triple axels. Some-thing was going to snap.

He felt a sudden need for shelter. Physical shelter. Locked doors, and a long silence.

Returning to the hotel was out of the question. There would be people there, questions, trouble. The Hot Zone, then.

He trudged to a Hot Zone airlock, now manned by a pair of elderly nomad sergeants, up on the night shift. The camou-clad gran-nies were amusing themselves, doing cat’s-cradle string-games with homemade yoyos of chemically soaked sponge. Oscar walked by the women with a ragged salute, and entered the empty halls of the Hot Zone.

He searched for a place to hide. An obscure equipment closet would be ideal. There was just one more little matter, before he re-laxed and came fully apart at the seams. He needed to have his laptop. That was a deeply comforting thought to Oscar: retreating into a locked closet with a laptop to hold. It was an instinctive reaction to unbearable crisis; it was something he had been doing since the age of six.

He had left a spare laptop in Greta’s lab. He crept into the place. The former Strike headquarters, once sterile and pristine, bore the scars of political backroom maneuvers — it was filthy now, full of scat-tered papers, half-eaten food, memos, bottles, junk. The whole room stank of panic. Oscar found his laptop, half buried below a stack of tapes and catalogs. He pulled it out, tucked it under his arm. Thank God.

His phone rang. He answered it by reflex. “Yes?”

“Am I lucky! Got the Soap Salesman first try! How’s it goin’, Soapy? Everything under control?”

It was Green Huey. Oscar’s heart skipped a beat as he snapped to full attention. “Yes, thank you, Governor.”

How on earth was Huey inside the lab’s phones? Kevin had as-sured him that their encryption was uncrackable.

“I hope you don’t mind a late cold-call, mon ami.”

Oscar sat slowly on the laboratory floor, bracing his back on a metal cabinet. “By no means, Your Excellency. We live to serve.”

“That’s mighty good of you, Soapy! Lemme tell you where I am right now. I’m riding in a goddamn helicopter above the Sabine River, and I’m lookin’ at a goddamn air strike.”

“You don’t say, sir.”

“I DO SAY!” Huey screamed. “Those sons of bitches blew my people away! Black helicopters with missiles and automatic weapons, murdering American civilians on the ground! It was a goddamn mas-sacre!”

“Were there many casualties, Governor? I mean, besides that un-fortunate French submarine?”

“HELL YES there were casualties!” Huey screeched. “How could there not be casualties? Woods on both sides of the river were crawlin’ with Regulators. Total operational dysfunction! Too many spooks spoil the broth! A total screwup! Goddammit, I never ordered those pencilnecks to dump you and the Genius Girl inside some god-damn fake ambulance!”

“No, Your Excellency?”

“Hell no! They were supposed to wait patiently and catch you when you were sneaking out of the lab together on a hot date. In that context, an abduction woulda made sense. The problem with nomads is mighty poor impulse control. Not what I wanted, boy, not on my agenda! I just had something that I needed to show ya, that’s all. Right now, you and me and the ladylove coulda been puttin’ our feet up, with parasols in our drinks. We’re supposed to be havin’ a scientific summit over here, we’re supposed to be ironing out all our difficul-ties.”

Oscar narrowed his burning, grainy eyes. “But the abduction team had a mishap on the road. They arrived late for the rendezvous. Your reception committee became anxious. When a federal SWAT team arrived unexpectedly, a violent encounter ensued.”

Huey was silent.

Oscar felt his voice rising to a high, rapid-fire gabble. “Gover-nor, I hope you’ll believe me when I say I regret this event even more than you do. I can understand that it would have been of considerable political advantage to you if your agents could have ap-prehended us during a scandalous rendezvous. We’d have had very little recourse then, and it would have been a very effective gambit on your part. But let’s face facts. You can’t simply physically abduct a lab director and a federal official. That’s not how the game is played. Commando adventures are politically foolish. They rarely work out in real life.”

“Huh! Well, you seem to have managed a commando attack pretty well, bubba.”

“Governor, when I arrived here two months ago, comman-deering this lab by force of arms was the furthest thing from my mind. But given the circumstances, I had no other choice. Now just look at our situation. It’s critically overburdened with extraneous factors. It’s no longer simply a question of you, and me, and Senator Bambakias, and the scientists on Strike, and your loyal fifth column inside the lab. That was a very complex situation! But now we have federal SWAT teams, semicompetent Regulator goons, armed teenage girls, software attacks, libelous black-propaganda operations… It’s all spinning to-tally out of control!” Oscar’s throat constricted in a shriek. He yanked the phone from his face.

Then he deliberately placed the phone against his ear again, as if it were the muzzle of a revolver. “This is going to cost me my Senate career. I suppose it’s petty of me to mention that, but I enjoyed that work. I regret that. Personally.”

“Son, it’s all right. Calm down. I know what a promising Senate career can mean to a young man like you. That’s exactly how I got into politics myself, don’t you see? I was Senate chief of staff for Dou-gal of Texas when we built that lab in the first place.”

“Governor, why have we come to this? Why are you trying so hard to outsmart me? We’re both very smooth operators. We’re out-smarting ourselves out of all sense and reason. Why didn’t you just call me in for a private conference? I would have gone to see you. I would have negotiated. I’d have been happy to.”

“No you wouldn’t. Your Senator wouldn’t have stood for that kind of mischief.”

“I wouldn’t have told him about it. I would have gone to meet you anyway. You’re a major player. I have to talk to the players, or I’ll never accomplish anything.”

“Then the poor bastard really is through,” Huey sighed. “You really don’t care a hang about ol’ Bambakias, you’re runnin’ around behind his back. Poor old Bombast Boy… I never had no thin’ against him; hell, I love Yankee egghead liberals who can’t park their bicycles straight! Why on God’s green earth did he ever get on my case about some pissant base-finance hassle? I cain’t put up with that! I cain’t have some freshman Senator yankin’ my chain when he’s got no grip on reality. A hunger strike, for Christ’s sake — hell, I didn’t starve him! He’s rich, he could afford a lunch tab. He’s got no common sense at all! You’re a smart boy, you musta known all o’ that.”

“I knew that he was an idealist.”

“Why’d you even pick on him?”

“He was the only one who was willing to hire me to run a Senate campaign,” Oscar said.

Huey grunted. “Well! Okay then! Now it’s makin’ sense to me. I mighta known it was you all along, because you’re a boy who’s got some starch and fiber. But why the hell did you wind him up and send him after me? Who are you, anyhow? What the hell are you doin’ inside my favorite science lab? You don’t even know what they’re up to in there. You don’t even know what they’re worth!”

“I have my suspicions,” Oscar said. “They’ve got something cru-cially important to you here, and it’s worth plenty.”

“Look, I need that lab. I need those people. Sure, they’ve got something very special going on. I wouldn’t fuss so much, otherwise. I was gonna demonstrate the app for y’all. It would have changed everything.”

“Governor, don’t try to mystify me. I already know what you were planning for us. Greta and I would have vanished into some offshore salt mine, where you and your industrial spies have been developing neural technology. It’s a big neural breakthrough that’s got you so anxious, and it has something to do with mind control. It’s just like the animals in here. We would have turned into well-mannered zombies. We’d have become your de-feralized pets, and we would have agreed to anything you said. That’s your ultimate network attack: subverting the human nervous system.”

Huey barked with astonished laughter. “What? Who do you take me for, Mao Zedong? I don’t need any brainwashed robots! I need smart people, all the smart people I can get! You just don’t understand!”

“So what am I missing, exactly?”

“You’re missing me, boy, me! I love my state! I love my people! Sure, you despise Louisiana, Mr. Harvard Business Boy — it’s corrupt, it’s too hot, it’s half under water, it’s dirt poor, it’s poisoned with years of pesticides and pollution, it’s all outta gas and oil for you Yankees to burn in the winter. Half its people speak the wrong goddamn lan-guage, but goddamn you, people are still real here! My people got soul, they’ve got spirit, they’re authentic real-live people! We’re not like the rest of the USA, where people are too sick and shocked and tired and spied-on even to fight for a decent future.”

Huey coughed loudly and resumed bellowing into the phone.

“They call me a ‘rogue Governor’ — well, what else can I be? All them ‘Emergency committees’ — they’re totally illegal, oppressive, and un-constitutional! Look at this new President! He’s a trigger-happy killer — and that’s the very best man you got! That man wants me driven out of my own statehouse — hell, the President would like to kill me! I’m under constant threats to my life now! I watch the skies every minute so’s I don’t get fried like a fritter by goddamn X-ray lasers! And you — you think that I wanna lobotomize Nobel Prize win-ners! Are you as nuts as your boss? My God Almighty, why would I do that? Where is that supposed to get me?”

“Governor, if you’d told me these things earlier, I think we could have come to an understanding.”

“Why the hell am I supposed to tell you a damn thing? You don’t rank! You don’t count! Am I supposed to drop my pants to every pipsqueak Senate staffer in America? You are a political nightmare, kid — a player with no history and no power base, who comes totally out of left field! If it weren’t for you, everything would have been perfect! The air base would have gone broke. The science lab would have gone broke. All the people would have left nice and peaceable. I woulda picked ’em all up for a song.”

Kevin arrived in the laboratory. He was wearing an ill-fitting cop’s uniform, and he looked as if his feet ached badly. “Just a moment, Governor,” Oscar said. He put his hand over the mouth-piece. “Kevin, how’d you find me in here?”

“There are location trackers in those phones.”

Oscar throttled the phone with his fist. “You never told me that. ”

“You didn’t need to know.” Kevin frowned. “Oscar, pay atten-tion, man. We have to go to the media center, right away. The Presi-dent of the United States is on the line.”

“Oh.” Oscar removed his hand from the phone’s mouthpiece.

“Excuse me, Governor. I can’t continue our discussion now — I have to field a call from the President.”

“Now?” Huey yelled. “Doesn’t anybody sleep anymore?”

“Good-bye, Governor. I appreciate your call.”

“Wait! Wait. Before you do something stupid, I want you to know that you can still come and talk to me. Before everything gets out of hand… next time, let’s talk it out first.”

“It’s good to know that we have that option, Your Excellency.”

“Kid, listen! One last thing! As Governor of Louisiana, I strongly favor genetic industries. I got no problem at all with your personal background problem!”

Oscar hung up. His nerves were buzzing like a shattered electrical transformer. His eyes burned and the bare walls seemed to pitch. He threw an arm over Kevin’s shoulder. “How are your feet, Kevin?”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m really dizzy.” He snorted. His heart was pounding.

“Must be allergies,” Kevin said. “Everybody gets allergies when they work in the Hot Zone. Kind of an occupational hazard.”

Kevin’s blather was light-years away. “Uh, why do you say that, Kevin?”

“Understanding workplace hazards is a basic mandate for the se-curity professional, man.”

The event affecting Oscar didn’t feel like allergy. It felt like an undiagnosed concussion. Maybe some evil side effect of military knockout gas. Maybe an oncoming case of bad flu. It was bad. Very bad. He wondered if he was going to survive it. His heart gave a sudden lurch and began beating fast and lightly in his rib cage, like a trapped moth. He stumbled and almost fell.

“I think I need a doctor.”

“Sure, man, later. Just as soon as you talk to the President.” Oscar blinked repeatedly. His eyes were swimming with tears. “I can’t even see.”

“Take some antihistamines. Listen, man — you can’t blow it now, because this is the President! Get it? This is the big casino. If you don’t chill him out about this Sabine River shootout, I’m done for. I’ll be doing a bad-whitey terrorist rap, right next to my dad. And you, you personally, and Dr. Penninger too, you’re both gonna go down in major flames. Okay? You have got to handle this.”

“Right,” Oscar said, straightening his back. Kevin was absolutely correct. This moment was the crux of his career. The President was waiting. Failure at this point was unthinkable. And he was having a heart fibrillation.

Kevin led him through the Hot Zone airlock. Then he pulled a monster beltphone and called a cab, and a fleet of twelve empty cabs arrived at once. Kevin picked one, and it took them to the media center. Up an elevator. Kevin led him to the green room, where Oscar scrubbed his head in the sink. He was coming apart. There were scarlet hives on his chest and throat. His hands were palsied. His skin was taut and prickly. But still, somehow, a gush of cold water on the nape of his neck brought him to snakelike alertness.

“Is there a comb?” Oscar asked.

“You won’t need a comb,” Kevin said. “The President’s calling on a head-mounted display.”

“What?” Oscar said. “Virtual reality? You’re kidding! That stuff never works.”

“They had VR installed in all the federal labs. Some high-bandwidth initiative from a million years ago. There’s a VR set in the White House basement.”

“And do you really know how to run this gizmo?”

“Hell no! I had to roust up half the lab just to find somebody who could boot it. Now there’s a huge crowd sitting in there. They all know it’s the President calling. You know how long it’s been since a President took any notice of this place?”

Oscar fought for breath, staring in the mirror, willing his heart to slow. Then he walked into the studio, where they produced a casque like a deep-sea diver’s helmet. They bolted it over his head.

The President was enjoying a stroll through amber waves of grain below the purple majesty of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Oscar, after a moment’s disorientation, recognized the backdrop as one of Two Feathers’s campaign ads. Apparently this was the best virtual backdrop that the new White House staff could produce on short notice.

Leonard Two Feathers was a creature in stark contrast to a gener-ation of prettified American politicians. The President had huge flat cheekbones, a great prow of a nose, a bank-vault slit of a mouth. Long black-and-gray hair streamed down his shoulders, which were clad in his trademark fringed buckskin jacket. The President’s black, canny eyes seemed as wide apart as a hammerhead shark’s.

“Mr. Valparaiso?” the President said.

“Yes? Good evening, Mr. President.”

The President gazed at him silently. Apparently, to the Presi-dent’s eye, Oscar was a disembodied face floating somewhere at shoul-der level.

“How is the situation at your facility? You and the Director, Dr. Penninger — are you safe and well?”

“So far so good, sir. We’ve sealed the premises. We suffered a severe netwar attack that trashed our financial systems, so we’ve had to cut most of our phone and computer lines. We still have internal problems with a group of malcontents who are occupying a building here. But our situation seems stable at this hour.”

The President considered this. He was buying the story. It wasn’t making him happy. “Tell me something, young man. What have you gotten me into? Why did it take a French submarine and three hun-dred Cajun guerrillas to kidnap you and some neurologist?”

“Governor Huguelet wanted to see us. He wants this facility, Mr. President. He has a great deal of irregular manpower. He has more manpower than he can properly control.”

“Well, he can’t have that facility.”

“No sir?”

“No, he can’t have it — and neither can you. Because it belongs to the country, dammit! What the hell are you up to? You can’t hire Moderator militia and overpower a federal lab! That is not in your job description! You are a campaign organizer who has a patronage job. You are not Davy Crockett!”

“Mr. President, I completely concur. But we had no other realis-tic option. Green Huey is a clear and present danger. He’s in league with a foreign power. He completely dominates his own state, and now he’s launching paramilitary adventures over state borders. What else could I do? My security staffer informed your national security office as soon as he could. In the meantime, I took what steps I could.”

“What is your party affiliation?” the President said.

“I’m a Federal Democrat, sir.”

The President pondered this. The President’s party was the So-cial Patriotic Movement, the “Soc-Pats.” The Soc-Pats were the lead-ing faction in the Left Tradition Bloc, which also included the Social Democrats, the Communist Party, Power to the People, Working America, and the ancient and shriveled Democratic Party. The Left Tradition Bloc had been suffering less ideological disarray than usual, lately. They had been able — barely — to seize the American Presi-dency.

“That would mean Senator Bambakias of Massachusetts?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you ever see in him?”

“I liked him. He has imagination and he’s not corrupt.”

“Well,” the President said, “I am not a mentally ill Senator. I happen to be your President. I am your newly sworn-in President, and I have naive, new-hire staffers who are easily fooled by fast-talking hustlers with family links to white-supremacist gangsters. Now, thanks to you, I am also a President who has had the misfortune to kill and wound several dozen people. Some of them were foreign spies. But most of them were our fellow citizens.” Despite his expressed regret, the President looked quite ready to kill again.

“Mr. Valparaiso, I want you to listen to me carefully. I have about four more weeks — maybe three weeks — of political capital to expend. Then the honeymoon is over, and my office will be broken on the rack. I will have to face all the lawsuits, constitutional chal-lenges, palace revolutions, outings, banking scandals, and Emergency machinations that have screwed every American President in the past twenty years. I want to survive all that. But I have no money, because the country is broke. I can’t trust the Congress. I certainly can’t trust the Emergency committees. I can’t trust my own party apparatus. I’m the nation’s Commander in Chief, but I can’t even trust the armed forces. That leaves me with one source of direct Presidential power. My spooks.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“My spooks are gung ho! They just shot up a bunch of people in the dark of night, but at least they’re not politicians, so at least they do what they’re told. And since they’re spooks, they don’t officially exist. So the things they do don’t officially happen. So if all the relevant parties keep their mouths shut, I might not have to account for this bloody debacle last night on the Louisiana border. Are you following me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want you to resign your Senate post, first thing tomorrow. You cannot pull a stunt like the one you just pulled and call yourself a congressional staffer. Forget the Senate, and forget your poor friend the Senator. You are a pirate. The only way you can survive this situation is if you join my National Security staff. So, that’s what you’ll have to do. From now on, you’ll be working for your President. You will be reporting to me. Your new title will be — NSC Science Adviser.”

“I understand, sir. If I may say so, that’s a very good situational analysis.” There was no question that he would take the job. It would mean pruning himself away from the Bambakias inner circle; it would also mean abandoning months of painstaking backstage work in the Senate Science Committee. That was like losing two lobes of his brain in an instant. But of course he would drop everything to work for the President. Because it meant an instant leap to a much higher pinnacle of power — a pinnacle where options bloomed all around him like edelweiss. “Thank you for your offer, Mr. President. I’m honored. I accept with pleasure.”

“You have been a cowboy. That was bad. Very bad. However, from now on, you are my cowboy. And just to make sure there are no more of these untoward incidents, I’m sending in a paratroop regi-ment of crack U.S. Army personnel to secure the lab’s perimeter. You can expect them by seventeen hundred hours, tomorrow.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“My staff will be sending along a prepared statement for your Director to read to the cameras. That’ll establish who’s who and what’s what, from now on. Now these are your marching orders, direct from your Commander in Chief. You keep that place out of the hands of Governor Huguelet. You will keep the data away from him, you will keep the personnel away from him, you will keep that place sewn up completely, until I understand just why that little man is so desperate to have it. If you succeed, I’ll bring you into the White House. Fail, and we’ll both go down in flames. But you will go down first, and hardest, and hottest, because I will be landing on top of you. Are we clear?”

“Perfectly clear, Mr. President.”

“Welcome to the glamorous world of the executive branch.” The President vanished. The amber waves continued on, serenely.

With persistent effort, they pried Oscar’s head out of the virtuality rig. He found himself the center of the transfixed attention of two hundred people.

“Well?” Kevin demanded, brandishing a leftover microphone.

“What did he say?”

“He hired me,” Oscar announced. “I’m on the National Secu-rity staff.”

Kevin’s eyes widened. “Really?”

Oscar nodded. “The President is backing us! He’s sending troops here to protect us!”

A ragged cheer broke out. The crowd was overjoyed. There was a pronounced hysteric edge to their reaction: farce, tragedy, triumph; they were punch-drunk. It was all they could do to jostle each other and yak into their phones.

Kevin shut off the microphone and tossed it aside. “Did he say anything about me?” Kevin asked anxiously. “I mean, about my wak-ing him up last night, and all that?”

“Yes he did, Kevin. He mentioned you specifically.”

Kevin turned to the person nearest at hand, who happened to be Lana Ramachandran. Lana had been rousted from a shower and had rushed to the media center in her dressing gown and slippers. “The President noticed me!” Kevin told her loudly, rising to his full height with a look of ennobled astonishment. “He talked about me! I really count for something! I matter to the President.”

“God, you are hopeless!” Lana told him, gritting her teeth.

“How could you do this to poor Oscar?”

“Do what?”

“Look at him, stupid! He’s covered with hives!”

“Those aren’t hives,” Kevin corrected, staring at Oscar analyti-cally. “It’s more like heat rash or something.”

“What is this huge bloody lump on his head? You’re supposed to be his bodyguard, you dumb bastard! You’re killing him! He’s only flesh and blood!”

“No he’s not,” Kevin said, wounded. His phone rang. He an-swered it. “Yes?” He listened, and his face fell.

“That big stupid cop-dressing faker,” Lana growled. “Oscar, what’s wrong with you? Say something to me. Let me feel your pulse.” She seized his wrist. “My God! Your skin’s so hot!”

The front of Lana’s dressing gown fell open. Oscar examined a semicircle of puckered brown nipple. The hair stood up on his neck. He suffered a sudden, violent, crazy surge of sexual arousal. He was out of control. “I need to lie down,” he said.

Lana looked at him, biting her lip. Her doelike eyes brimmed with tears. “Why can’t they tell when you’re coming apart? Poor Oscar! Nobody even cares.”

“Maybe a little ice water,” he muttered.

Lana found his hat and set it gently on his head. “I’ll get you out of here.”

“Oscar!” Kevin shouted. “The south gate is open! The lab is being invaded! There are hundreds of nomads!”

Oscar responded instantly, with whip crack precision. “Are they Regulators or Moderators?” But the emerging words were gibberish. His tongue had suddenly swollen inside his head. His tongue was bloated and huge. It was as if his mouth had two tongues in it.

“What’ll we do?” Kevin demanded.

“Just get away from him! Let him be!” Lana shrieked. “Some-body help me with him! He needs help.”

Once checked into the Collaboratory clinic, Oscar got the reaction he always received from medical personnel: grave puzzlement and po-lite distress. He was exhibiting many symptoms of illness, but he couldn’t be properly diagnosed, because his metabolism simply wasn’t entirely human. His temperature was soaring, his heart was racing, his skin was erupting, his blood pressure was off the scale. Given his unique medical background, there was no obvious course of treat-ment.

Nevertheless, a proper head bandage, an ice pack, and a few hours of silence did him a lot of good. He finally drifted into a healing sleep. He woke at noon, feeling weary, sore, and shaken, but back in control. He sat up in his hospital bed, sipping tomato juice and exam-ining news on his laptop. Kevin had abandoned him. Lana had insisted that the rest of the krewe leave him alone.

At one o’clock Oscar had an impromptu gaggle of visitors. Four hairy, booted nomads burst into his private room. The first was General Burningboy. His three young toughs looked impossibly sinister — war-painted, glowering, muscular.

The General had brought him a large bouquet. Holly, yellow daffodils, and mistletoe. The floral symbolism was painfully obvious.

“Howdy,” said Burningboy, appropriating a vase and dumping its previous contents. “Heard you were feelin’ poorly, so me and my boys dropped by to cheer you up.”

Oscar gazed thoughtfully at the invaders. He was glad to see them. It improved his morale to be back on the job so quickly. “That’s very good of you, General. Do have a seat.”

Burningboy sat on the foot of the clinic bed, which squealed alarmingly under his weight. His three followers, ignoring the room’s two chairs, crouched sullenly on the floor. The oldest one set his back firmly against the door.

“Not ‘General.’ Corporal. I’m Corporal Burningboy now.”

“Why the demotion, Corporal?”

“Simple matter, really. I used up all my network trust and credi-bility when I ordered fifty girls into this facility. Those young women have fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters — boyfriends, even. I put those little darlings into harm’s way, just on my own recognizance. And, well, that pretty much burned out all my credibility. Years of effort, right down the drain! Now, I’m just some little jasper.”

Oscar nodded. “I take it this has something to do with reputa-tion servers and your nomad networks of trust.”

“Yup. You got it.”

“It seems absurd that you should be demoted, when your paramilitary operation was such a signal success.”

“Well now …” Burningboy squinted. “I might recoup some of my lost prestige — if it could be shown that we Moderators were der-ivin’ some benfjit from all this risky activity.”

“Aha.”

“So far, we haven’t gotten a dang thing outta any of this, except a sleepless night for the worried families of our valiant warriors.”

“Corporal, you are right. I completely concur with your analysis. Your help was invaluable, and as yet, we’ve done nothing for you in return. I acknowledge that debt. I am a man of my word. You were there for us when we needed you. I want to see you happy, Corporal Burningboy. Just tell me what you want.”

Burningboy, all beard-grizzled smiles, turned to one of his com-panions. “Did you hear that? Beautiful speech, wasn’t it? Didya get all that down on tape?”

“Affirmative,” the nomad thug growled.

Burningboy returned his attention to Oscar. “I seem to recall a lot of pretty promises about how we Moderators were going to get a lovely press spin out of this, and how we were going to be knights and paladins of federal law and order, and all about how we were going to embarrass our old rivals the Regulators… And not that I doubt your sworn word for a minute, Mr. Presidential Science Adviser, sir, but I just figured that with four hundred Moderators in-house, that would be… how do I put this?”

“You said it was an incentive,” offered thug number two. “That’s the very word. ‘Incentive.’ ”

“Very well,” Oscar said. “The facility is in your hands. Your troops took it over last night; and now you’ve occupied it with hundreds of squatters. That wasn’t a part of our original agreement, but I can understand your motives. I hope you can also understand mine. I talked to the President of the United States last night. He told me he’s sending in troops.”

“He did, eh?”

“Yes. He promised that a crack brigade of armed paratroops would be flying in this very evening, actually. You might want to take that matter under advisement.”

“Man, that’s Two Feathers all over,” Burningboy sighed. “I’m not sayin’ that old Geronimo actually lied to you or anything, but he’s kind of famous for that gambit. We Moderators go back pretty far in Colorado, and back when Two Feathers was Governor, he was always sayin’ he’d roust out the National Guard and restore so-called law and order… Sometimes he actually did it, enough to keep you off balance. But just ’cause Two Feathers is wearin’ his war paint, that don’t guarantee any war.”

“So you’re alleging that the President won’t send troops?”

“No. I’m just sayin’ that we don’t plan to leave until these so-called troops show up. In fact, we probably won’t leave, even after they show up. I’m not sure you grasp this situation, you being from Massa-chusetts and all. But we Moderators have had some dealings with the Governor of Colorado. In fact, he owes us some favors.”

“That’s an interesting allegation, Corporal.”

“We nomads tend to stick around in times and places where nobody else can survive. That makes us pretty useful sometimes. Espe-cially given that Wyoming was on fire recently, and all that.”

“I see.” Oscar paused. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, sir, I hate to badger a man when he’s feeling poorly. But frankly, you’re the only man I can tell these things to. You seem to be pretty much all there is around here. I mean, we just got a very firm lecture from your so-called Director. The woman just don’t listen. She has no idea how people live! We were explainin’ to her that we hold all the cards now, and she’s totally at our mercy and so on, but she’s just not buyin’ any of it. She just waits for my lips to stop movin’, and then she launches into this nutty rant about intellectual freedom and the advancement of knowledge and Christ only knows what else … She’s really weird. She’s just a weird-actin’, weird-looking, weird, witchy woman. Then we tried talkin’ to your so-called chief of police… What is it with that guy?”

“What do you mean, Corporal?”

Burningboy became uneasy, but he was determined to see the matter through. “It’s not that I have anything against Anglos! I mean, sure there are good, decent, law-abiding Anglo people. But — you know — look at the statistics! Anglos have white-collar crime rates right off the scale. And talk about violent-man, white people are the most violent ethnic group in America. All those cross burnings, and militia bombings, and gun-nut guys… the poor bastards just can’t get a grip.”

Oscar considered this. It always offended him. to hear his fellow Americans discussing the vagaries of “white people.” There was sim-ply no such thing as “white people.” That stereotype was an artificial construct, like the ridiculous term “Hispanic.” In all the rest of the world, a Peruvian was a Peruvian and a Brazilian was a Brazilian — it was only in America that people somehow became this multilingual, multinational entity called a “Hispanic.” Oscar himself passed for a “Hispanic” most of the time, though his own ethnic background was best described as “Not of Human Origin.”

“You need to get to know my friend Kevin,” he said. “Kevin’s a diamond in the rough.”

“Okay. Sure. I like a man who sticks up for his friends,” Burn-ingboy said. “But that’s the real reason we’re here now, Oscar. You’re the only man in this place who can talk sense to us. You’re the only one who even knows what’s going on.”