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

" 'Shaky'?"

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

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

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

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

Nakamura put his sandwich aside. "Well, we can't do that."

"Why not? We need to take action. The Director's authority is visibly slipping. If the situation gets out of hand, the lab will be para-lyzed." Nakamura's face grew clouded. "Young man, you never worked with Senator Dougal. I did. The idea of our giving some blanket endorsement now to one of his krewe flunkies . . . especially first thing in a new Administration ... No, I don't think so."

"You said that you wanted continuity in the situation."

"I didn't say that we should provide that continuity."

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

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

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

"Young man, you've never met Governor Huguelet-"

"Oh yes, sir, I have. I had dinner with him last week." Nakamura's face fell. "You did."

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

Nakamura sighed. "Well, Huey wouldn't dare."

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

Nakamura's brow wrinkled in silent distress.

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

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

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

"No, of course not. Well ... some are. Some aren't." Oscar showed a proper skepticism. "I hope you understand that this is my very first assignment with this committee. I don't care to go out on a limb today."

"No."

"I don't grandstand in these matters. I'm a team player."

"Of course."

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

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

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

Nakamura winced.

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

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

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

"No?"

"No. There are three new Senators on the Science Committee, and they've all brought in krewepeople. And the two other new boys have yet to show up physically for one single goddamn conferral. They're logging in from the penthouse decks in Arlington, where they're busy kissing ass." Oscar frowned. "That is not professional behavior."

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

"That's all I ask." Oscar half stepped back. ''I'm glad we've reached an understanding."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you? That's sweet of you."

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

"Very good choice."

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

"Yes, of course."

"I'm going to have to give up my binturong."

"Oh no," Oscar said, "not Stickley the binturong."

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

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

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

"It's that neural implant they give them at the Collaboratory," Oscar said.

"It's all about aggression, eating, and defecation. If you control those three behaviors, you can live in peace with wild animals. Luckily, that deep neural structure is very similar across a wide range of mammals."

"Including humans, I imagine."

"Well, of course." Oscar's phone rang. He politely turned it off without answering it.

"The neural control of eating certainly has advanced a lot," Lorena said.

''I'm on appetite controllants right now. They're very neural. "

"Neural is a hot technology now."

"Yes. Neural sounds very attractive."

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

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

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

"Oh?"

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

Oscar sat up in his lyre-backed mahogany chair. " 'Evacuated,' is that the story?"

"The federal troops are leaving. They're running for their lives. So of course those horrid little prole people are pouring in after them, they're swarming right over the fences." Lorena sighed. "That means that it's over. It's ending right now. It's finally over." She swung out her legs, sat up on her couch, and put one slender wrist to her fore-head. "Thank God." Oscar ran his hand over his newly coiffed hair. "Good Lord, what next?"

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

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

"Good idea." She raised her voice. "System?"

"Yes, Lorena," the house system said.

"Would you send down the screen, please."

"Yes, Lorena, right away."

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

A walnut television cabinet came walking down the carpeted stairs.

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

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

"My goodness, they're all responsive," Oscar said. "I could have sworn those were wooden legs."

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

"Call Sosik again, and ask what he's watching."

"Oh. Of course." She smiled wanly. "Never surf when you have a pilot." Huey's rapid-response PR team was already on the job. A Loui-siana environmental safety administrator was supplying the official ac-count of the "disaster." According to him, safety procedures at the "derelict air base" had fallen into abeyance. A small fire had broken out, and it had ruptured a military stockpile of nonlethal crowd-control aerosols. These were panic-inducing disorients. Nontoxic and odorless, they were just the trick for clearing the streets of third-world cities. Cut to a med tent with young Air Force people shivering and babbling in the grip of paranoiac aerosols. Homespun local people were giving them cots, and blankets, and tranquilizers. The pathetic federal personnel were clearly getting the best of care.

Oscar sipped his coffee. "Unbelievable."

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

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

"He's deliberately gassed federal troops."

"Well, yes, but we'll never find his fingerprints."

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

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

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

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

"Why is Huey doing this crazy thing?"

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

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

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

"Oh. I see."

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