"You're really a strange man."

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

She sat down cross-legged near the oil heater. "I don't gamble."

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

"I want the potential."

"Exactly. "

"When the game ends, the player with the most potential wins."

"You have played go before."

"No, I haven't. But that much is obvious."

"You'll play black," he said. He set a group of black stones on the board, crisply clicking them down. "Now I'll demo the game a bit, before we start. You place your stones down like this, one at a time. The groups of stones gain strength from their links, from the network that they form. And the groups have to have eyes, blank eyes inside the network. That's a crucial point." He placed a blocking chain of white stones around the black group.

"A single eye isn't enough, because I could blind that eye with one move, and capture your whole group. I could surround the whole group, drop into the middle, blind your eye, and just remove the whole group, like this. But with two eyes-like this?-the group becomes a permanent fea-ture on the board. It lives forever."

"Even if you totally surround me."

"Exactly. "

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

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

"That's a lot of free stones."

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

They played for a while. " Atari, " he repeated.

"You can stop saying that word now, I can see that my group's in check."

"It's just a customary courtesy."

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

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

"Yes, I do."

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

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

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

"Yes. And they're always different. Every game has its own char-acter. "

"These stones are a lot like neurons."

He smiled at her.

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

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

"It's three thousand years old."

"Really?" She stood up and stretched, her kneecaps cracking loudly.

"That calls for a drink."

"Go ahead."

She found her carpetbag and retrieved a square bottle of blue Dutch gin. Oscar went to the kitchen and fetched two brand-new bistro glasses from their sanitary wrap. "You want some orange juice with that stuff?"

"No thank you."

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

"Some ice? We do have ice."

"That's all right."

"Look, Greta, you can't drink straight gin. That's the road to blue ruin."

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

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

"I kill neurons for a living, Oscar. Let's play."

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

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

"You're going to win again, aren't you?"

"Maybe twenty points."

"Fifteen. But we don't have to finish this one now."

"No." He was holding a white stone between two fingertips. "We don't have to finish."

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

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

"Let's get in bed," he said.

"That really isn't smart."

"I know it isn't, but let's do it anyway."

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

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

"This bed's very rickety," she said politely. "It really squeaks."

"I should have bought a new one."

"You can't buy an entire new bed just for one night."

"I can't help the one night; I leave for Washington tomorrow." She levered herself up in the shiny sheets. Her china-white shoulders had a fine network of little blue veins. "What are you going to tell them in Washington?"

"What do you want me to tell them in Washington?"

"Tell them the truth."

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

"Of course I want the truth. I always want the truth. No matter what."

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

He glanced at her. She was listening.

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

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

"What?" she said flatly.

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

"But there's the animals," she said. "The genetic facilities."

"That's the truly tragic part. You can't save an endangered spe-cies by cloning animals. I admit, it's better than having them com-pletely exterminated and lost forever. But they're curios now, they walk around looking pretty, they've become collector's items for the ultra-rich. A living species isn't just the DNA code, it's the whole spread of genetic variety in a big wild population, plus their learned behaviors, and their prey and their predators, all inside a natural envi-ronment. But there aren't any natural environments anymore. Because the climate has changed." He sat up, the bedsprings crunching loudly. "The climate's in flux now. You can't shelter whole envirorunents under airtight domes. Only two kinds of plants really thrive in today's world: genetically altered crops, and really fast-moving weeds. So our world is all bam-boo and kudzu now, it has nothing to do with the endangered fox-glove lady's slipper and its precious niche on some forgotten mountain. Politically, we hate admitting this to ourselves, because it means admitting the full extent of our horrible crimes against nature, but that's ecological reality now. That's the truth you asked me for. That is reality. Paying tons of money to preserve bits of Humpty Dumpty's shell is strictly a pious gesture."

"And that's what you're going to tell your Senators."

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

"What do you want to tell your Senators?"

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

"I have my own krewe, thank you."

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

She scowled. "What's option number two?"

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

"That's not an option."

"It's very important work."

"I know it is, but that's just not an option."

"You don't really believe in anything, do you?"

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

"I'm not helpless. I have friends and colleagues who trust me."

"Well, that's lovely. You can all be helpless together."

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

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

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

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

"What a horrible thing to say."

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

"Well . . . " She sighed. "I'll have to think about it."

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

"God, no."

''I'm starving. Let's go get something to eat. You brought a car, right?"

"It's a junker car. Internal combustion."

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