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

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

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

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

Clearly he was in the wrong room.

His phone rang. He answered it. "Hello?"

"Is this really you?" It was Greta.

"It's me all right-live and in person."

"It's not a phone-sex line?"

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

"I guess it's okay."

"So, let's talk, Greta. Tell me how you are. Tell me everything."

"Are you safe there in Washington?"

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

''I'm perfectly fine. This is where I make my career, after all."

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

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

"That sounds interesting. . . ."

"Do it. It's what we need. It's good for us."

"I have to tell you something important . . . "

He swiftly examined his battery level and replaced the phone at his ear.

"Just go ahead and tell me, Greta."

"It's so hard to explain this . . . . It's just that different now and . . . I'm all inspired and it's just. . ." A lingering silence.

"Go on," he coaxed. "Get it off your chest." Her voice dropped to a confiding whisper. "It's my amyloid fi-brils. . . ."

"It's what?"

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

"Really? That's a shame."

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

"It's marvelous when you're expressing."

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

"No, no," Oscar said deftly, "depend on it, I'm solid on that issue."

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

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

She was brightening. "Well . . ."

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

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

"Hi there!" said the wheelchair woman, waving one hand. Os-car slipped his fingers over the phone's mouthpiece and nodded po-litely. The black woman bounded up from her wheelchair, shut it down, and held the door open. Three Anglo men barged into the room, in denim overalls, boots, and battered straw hats. Their hair was dyed blue, their faces were streaked with nomad war paint, and they all wore sunglasses. One of them pushed a mighty wheelbarrow full of wires and flatscreens, and the two others carried large khaki-colored electrical toolboxes.

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

"Fibrils are extremely hot."

The woman with the wheelchair tugged off her fright wig, re-vealing a neat set of cornrows. She then shrugged off her ragged caf-tan. Beneath it she wore a navy blue skirt, a blue vest, a silk blouse, and hose. Her three technicians began assembling a conference network on the welder-stained workbench.

''I'm Oscar Valparaiso," Oscar announced loudly. ''I'm with the committee."

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

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

"So," he said aloud, "what's your name?"

"Chris," the new woman said, carefully straightening a seam. ''I'm the committee sysop." She smiled. "Just the lowly sysop."

"And is this your krewe?"

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

"I see."

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

"Well, at least it's a nice big room," Oscar said winningly.

"That's true!" She smiled at him.

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

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

"I can see that you're a true-blue Washingtonian, Chris."

"That's me-Southern efficiency and Northern charm." Chris's eye wandered and she elbowed one of her helpers aside. "No, that's the visual outlet! It's a sixteen-pin, okay? Let me do that!" She turned to a second man.

"Get the router out of the bag. A router, and a squeegee. And a divot. Two data divots. No, not that one! Get me the green one."

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

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

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

"Where's the mediator? Get the baffles," Chris riposted. She was watching him sidelong.

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

"Is it running DMAC? There's a DMAC tower right on Four-teenth. See if they're up."

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

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

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

"No, wiggle it," Chris said. "It's the cable."

"It's always the cable," Oscar nodded. .

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

"Great," Chris announced. "We're up. Where's the image groomer?"

"Got no groomer," the contractor grumbled. "You didn't say bring no groomer."

"I didn't know this new guy was gonna be here physically."

"I can manage without an image groomer," Oscar broke in. "I've brought my own makeup."

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

"You're very traditional, Mr. Valparaiso."

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

Chris straightened warily. "Yeah, the sunshine laws do mandate open meetings, but this isn't a senatorial meeting. It's just a staff con-ference. No legislators present."

"I thought the staff conferences were also physical meetings."

"This is more of an informal on-line conferral, actually." Oscar offered her a calculated frown. "My event announcement specifically stated that this is a face-to-face staff conference."

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

"I understand perfectly that it's not your fault, Chris. But if it's just a conferral, we're not being serious here. We won't get re-sults. "

"You can get results at a conferral."

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

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

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

"My trip was lovely."

"Where's your krewe?" Nakamura gazed around the fire-blackened vault. "No support staff?"

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

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

Oscar felt very flattered to be offered such a blatant lie. "I'd have been delighted, sir."

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

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

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

"These are difficult times, sir."

"All the more reason to assure some stability during the new Administration's transition period."

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

Nakamura nodded reflexively, then frowned. For a moment, Os-car thought he had overdone it. Nakamura had twenty years of re-corded public appearances in the federal files. Oscar had taken the trouble to have the man's speech patterns analyzed, ranked, and sorted. Nakamura was especially fond of the terms "prudence" and "continuity," with "helpful" and "a firm hand" on strong upward trends lately. Verbally mimicking Nakamura was a cheap net-trick, but like most such tricks, it usually worked. Eight more people came through the doors. These were com-mittee staffers Namuth and Mulnier, with their joint entourage of six krewepeople, who had brought pizza, coffee, and falafel. The aroma of fast food filled the dank, rust-smelling room with a cheering scent of human survival. Nakamura gratefully sampled a pita sandwich. The senior staffer seemed more relaxed now that the gruesome squat had filled with familiar faces.

"Namuth and Mulnier are all right," he murmured. "Staffers who take the pains to attend a mere conferral face-to--face . . . they do tend to be all right."

"Tell me, sir-is this just a conferral, or is it a conference per se?" Nakamura looked pained as he chewed and swallowed. "Well, of course an actual conference would have the legislators in attendance. Or at least their leading office krewe staff, their chiefs of staff, for instance. And of course there are committee meetings, and then subcommittee and committee hearings, generally with sworn witnesses and full cover-age . . . . However, in the modern legislative trend, the drafting of legislation and the budget preparation have fallen to the staff commit-tees. Actual senatorial hearings have become highly mediated events, very formal. It follows that we staffers must have our own conferences. And then, behind those formal scenes, we do find it procedurally necessary to have these conferrals." Nakamura examined his collapsing sandwich and tucked in a wad of sprouts with one fingertip. "We called this event a 'confer-ence,' because that's necessary in order to get the personnel chits and travel rebates. And we do get better security service. This entire build-ing, as you must have noticed, is sadly insecure."

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

Nakamura accepted this remark with a graceful nod.