They crossed the Texas border in the clammy thick of the night. The krewe was glutted with hot baked shrimp and batter-fried alligator tail, topped with seemingly endless rounds of blendered hurricanes and flaming brandied coffees. The food at the Cajun casinos was epic in scope. They even boasted a convenient special rate for tour buses.

It had been a very good idea to stop and eat. Oscar could sense that the mood of his miniature public had shifted radically. The krewe had really enjoyed themselves. They'd been repeatedly informed that they were in the state of Louisiana, but now they could feel that fact in their richly clotted bloodstreams.

This wasn't Boston anymore. This was no longer the sordid tag end of the Massachusetts campaign. They were living in an interreg-num, and maybe, somehow, if you only believed, in the start of some-thing better. Oscar could not feel bad about his life. It was not a normal life and it never had been, but it offered very interesting chal-lenges. He was rising to the next challenge. How bad could life be? At least they were all well fed. Except for hardworking Jimmy the driver, who was paid specifi-cally not to drink himself senseless, Oscar was the last person awake inside the bus. Oscar was almost always the last to sleep, as well as the first to wake. Oscar rarely slept at all. Since the age of six, he had customarily slept for about three hours a night.

As a small child, he would simply lay silently in darkness during those long extra hours of consciousness, quietly plotting how to man-age the mad vagaries of his adoptive Hollywood parents. Surviving the Valparaiso household's maelstrom of money, drugs, and celebrity had required a lot of concentrated foresight.

In his later life, Oscar had put his night-owl hours to further good use: first, the Harvard MBA. Then the biotechnology start-up, where he'd picked up his long-time accountant and finance man, Yosh Pelicanos, and also his faithful scheduler/receptionist, Lana Ramachandran. He'd kept the two of them on through the cash-out of his first company, and on through the thriving days of venture capital on Route 128. Business strongly suited Oscar's talents and proclivities, but he had nevertheless moved on swiftly, into political party activism. A successful and innovative Boston city council campaign had brought him to the attention of Alcott Bambakias. The U.S. Senate campaign then followed. Politics had become the new career. The challenge. The cause.

So Oscar was awake in darkness, and working. He generally ended each day with a diary annotation, a summary of the options taken and important operational events. Tonight, he wrapped up his careful annotations of the audiotape with the Air Force highway ban-dits. He shipped the file to Alcott Bambakias, encrypted and denoted "personal and confidential." There was no way to know if this snippet of the modern chaos in Louisiana would capture his patron's mercurial attention. But it was necessary to keep up a steady flow of news and counsel across the net. To be out of the Senator's sight might be very useful in some ways, but to drift out of his mind would be a profes-sional blunder.

Oscar composed and sent a friendly net-note to his girlfriend, Clare, who was living in his house in Boston. He studied and updated his personnel flies. He examined and totaled the day's expenditures. He composed his daily diary entries. He took comfort in the strength of his routines. He had met many passing setbacks, but he had yet to meet a challenge that could conclusively defeat him.

He shut his laptop with a sense of satisfaction, and prepared him-self for sleep. He twitched, he thrashed. Finally he sat up, and opened his laptop again.

He studied the Worcester riot video for the fifiy-second time. 2 The scientist wore plaid bermuda shorts, a faded yel-low tank top, flip-flop sandals, and no hat. Oscar was prepared to tolerate their guide's bare and bony legs, and even his fusty beard. But it was hard to take a man entirely seriously when he lacked a proper hat.

The beast in question was dark green, very fibrous, and hairy. This was a binturong, a mammal once native to Southeast Asia, long since extinct in the wild. This speci-men had been cloned on-site at the Buna National Col-laboratory. They'd grown it inside the altered womb of a domestic cow. The cloned binturong was hanging from the under-side of a park bench, clinging to the wooden slats. It was licking at paint chips, with a narrow, spotted tongue. The binturong was about the size of a well-stuffed golf bag.

"Your specimen is remarkably tame," said Pelicanos politely, holding his hat in his hand.

The scientist shook his bearded head. "Oh, we never claim that we 'tame'

animals here at the Collaboratory. He's been de-feralized. But he's not what you'd call friendly."

The binturong detached itself from the bench slats and trundled through the lush grass on its bearlike paws. The beast examined Oscar's leather shoes, lifted its pointed snout in disgust, and muttered like a maladjusted kettle. At such close and intimate range, the nature of the animal became more apparent to Oscar. A binturong was akin to a weasel. A large, tree-climbing wea-sel. With a hairy, prehensile tail. Also, it stank.

"We seem to be in the market for a binturong," Oscar said, smiling. "Do you wrap them up in brown paper?"

"If you mean how do we get this sample specimen to your friend the Senator . . . well, we can do that through channels."

Oscar arched his brows. " 'Channels'?"

"Channels, you know . . . Senator Dougal had his people han-dling that sort of thing . . . " Their guide trailed off, suddenly guilty and jittery, as if he'd drunk the last of the office coffee and neglected to change the pot.

"Look, I'm just a lab guy, I don't really know much about that. You should ask the people at Spinoffs."

Oscar unfolded his laminated pocket map of the Buna National Collaboratory. "And where would 'Spinoffs' be?"

The guide tapped helpfully at Oscar's plastic map. His hands were stained with chemicals and his callused thumb was a nice dull green.

"Spinoffs was the building just on your left as you drove in through the main airlock."

Oscar squinted at the map's fine print. "The Archer Parr Memo-rial Competitive Enhancement Facility?"

"Yeah, that's the place. Spinoffs."

Oscar gazed upward, adjusting the brim of his hat against the Texas sun. A huge nexus of interlocking struts cut the sky overhead, like the exoskeleton of a monster diatom. The distant struts were great solid stony beams, holding greenhouse panes of plastic the size of hockey rinks. The federal lab had been funded, created, and built in an age when recombinant DNA had been considered as dangerous as nuclear power plants. The dome of the Buna National Collaboratory had been designed to survive tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, a saturation bombing. "I've never been in a sealed environment so large it required its own map," Oscar said.

"You get used..,.to it." Their guide shrugged. "You get used to the people who live in here, and even the cafeteria food. . . . The Col-laboratory gets to be home, if you stay in here long enough." Their guide scratched at his furry jaw. "Except for East Texas, outside the airlocks there. A lot of people never get used to East Texas."

"We really appreciate your demoing the local livestock for us," said Pelicanos. "It was good of you to spare us the time from your busy research schedule."

The zoologist reached eagerly for his belt phone. "You want me to call back your little minder from Public Relations?"

"No," said Oscar suavely, "since she was kind enough to pass us on to you, I think we'll just make our own way around here from now on." The scientist brandished his antique and clunky federal-issue phone, which was covered with smudgy green thumbprints. "Do you need a lift to Spinoffs? I could call you a buggy."

"We'll stretch our legs a bit," Pelicanos demurred.

"You've been very helpful, Dr. Parkash." Oscar never forgot a name. There was no particular reason to remember the name of Dr. Averill Parkash, among the BNC's two thousand federal researchers and their many assorted gofers, hucksters, krewepeople, and other as-sociated hangers-on. Oscar knew, though, that he would soon accu-mulate the names, the faces, and the dossiers of no end of the local personnel. It was worse than a habit. He truly couldn't help himself.

Their guide sidled backward toward the Animal Management Center, clearly eager to return to his cramped and spotty little office. Oscar waved a dismissal with a cheery smile.

Parkash tried a final yelp. "There's a pretty good wine bar nearby! Across the road from Flux NMR and Instrumentation!"

"That's great advice! We appreciate that! Thanks a lot!" Oscar turned on his heel and headed for a nearby wall of trees. Pelicanos quickly followed him.

Soon they were safely lost in the tall cover. Oscar and Pelicanos made their way along a crooked, squelchy, peat-moss path through a cut-and-paste jungle. The Collaboratory boasted huge botanical gar-dens-whole minor forests, really-of rare specimens. The threatened. The endangered. The all-but-technically extinct. Wildlife native to habitats long obliterated by climate change, rising seas, bulldozers, and the urban sprawl of 8.1 billion human beings.

The plants and animals were all clones. Deep in the bedrocked stronghold of the Collaboratory's National Genome Preservation Center lurked tens of thousands of genetic samples, garnered from around the planet. The precious DNA was neatly racked in gleaming flasks of liquid nitrogen, secured in a bureaucratic maze of endless machine-carved limestone vaults.

It was considered wise to thaw out a few bits from the tissue samples every once in a while, and to use these bits to produce full-grown organisms. This practice established that the genetic data was still viable. Generally, the resultant living creatures were also nicely photogenic. The clones were a useful public relations asset. Now that biotechnology had left the hermetic realm of the arcane to become standard everyday industries, the Collaboratory's makeshift zoo was its best political showpiece. The monster underground vaults were always first on the list for the victims of local tourism, but Oscar had found their Kafkaesque density oppressive. However, he found himself quite enjoying the lo-cal jungle. Genuine wilderness generally bored him, but there was something very modern and appealing about this rational, urbanized, pocket version of nature. The housebroken global greenery coruscated like Christmas trees with drip taps, sap samplers, and hormone squirt-ers. Trees and shrubs basked like drunken tourists in their own private grow lights. According to their handy pocket maps, Oscar and Pelicanos were now in a mix-and-match jungle bordered by the Animal Engineering Lab, the Atmospheric Chemistry Lab, the Animal Management Cen-ter, and a very elaborate structure that was the Collaboratory's garbage treatment plant. None of these rambling federal buildings were visible from within the potted forest-except, of course, for the brutal, for-tresslike towers of the Containment Facility. This gigantic Hot Zone was the massive central buttress for the Collaboratory's dome. Its glazed cylindrical shoulders were always visible inside the dome, gleaming like a mighty acreage of fine china.

The probability of listening devices seemed rather low here in-side the mechanical forest. They could talk in confidence, if they kept moving.

"I thought we'd never lose that geek," Pelicanos said.

"You have something you need to tell me, Yosh?"

Pelicanos sighed. "I want to know when we're going home again." Oscar smiled. "We just got here. Don't you like these Texas folks? They sure are mighty friendly."

"Oscar, you brought twelve people in your entourage. The locals don't even have the dorm rooms to put us up properly."

"But I need twelve people. I need all of my krewe. I need to keep my options open here."

Pelicanos grunted in surprise as a spined and cloven-hoofed beast-some kind of tapir, maybe?-scampered across their path. Rare beasts from aardwolves to zebu had the general run of the Col-laboratory. They were commonly sighted ambling harmlessly through the streets and gardens, like dope-stricken sacred cows.

"You arranged a few extras after the campaign," Pelicanos said. "Well, Bambakias can certainly afford that, and they appreciate the gesture. But political campaigners are temp workers by nature. You just don't need them anymore. You can't need twelve people to put together a Senate committee report."

"But they're useful! Don't you enjoy their services? We have a bus, a driver, our own security, we even have a masseuse! We're living in high style. Besides, they might as well be washed up here in Won-derland as washed up anywhere else."

"Those aren't real answers."

Oscar looked at him. "This isn't like you, Yosh. . . . You're missing Sandra."

"Yeah," Pelicanos admitted. "I miss my wife." Oscar waved his hand airily. "So, then take a three-day weekend. Fly back to Beantown. You deserve that, we can afford it. Go see Sandra. See how she is."

"All right. I guess I'll do that. I'll fly out and see Sandra." And Pelicanos cheered up. Oscar saw his spirits lift; it came across the man in a little visible wave. Strange business, but Pelicanos had just become happy. Despite the stark fact that his wife was in a mental institution, and had been there for nine years.

Pelicanos was an excellent organizer, a fine accountant, a book-keeper of near genius, and yet his personal life was an abysmal tragedy. Oscar found this intensely interesting. It appealed to the deepest ele-ment in Oscar, his ravenous curiosity about human beings and the tactics and strategies by which they could be coaxed and compelled to behave. Yosh Pelicanos made his way through his life seemingly just like any other man, and yet he always carried this secret half-ton bur-den on his shoulders. Pelicanos truly knew the meaning of devotion and loyalty.

Oscar himself had no particular acquaintance with either devo-tion or loyalty, but he'd trained himself to recognize these qualities in others. It was no accident that Pelicanos was Oscar's oldest and lon-gest-lasting employee.

Pelicanos lowered his voice. "But before I go, Oscar, I need you to do me a little favor. I need you to tell me what you're up to. Level with me."

"You know that I always level with you, Yosh."

"Well, try it one more time."

"Very well." Oscar walked beneath a tall green arch of pink-flowered pinnate fronds. "You see: here's our situation. I enjoy poli-tics. The game seems to suit me."

"That's not news, boss."

"You and I, we just ran our second political campaign, and we got our man elected Senator. That's a big accomplishment. A federal Senate seat is the political big time, by anybody's standard."

"Yes it is. And?"

"And for all our pains, we're back in the political wilderness again." Oscar knocked a reeking branch from his jacket shoulder. "You think Mrs. Bambakias really wants some goddamn rare animal? I get a voice call at six in the morning, from the new chief of staff He tells me the Senator's wife is very interested in my current assignment, and she would like to have her own exotic pet animal, please. But she doesn't call me-and Bambakias doesn't call me-Leon Sosik calls me."

"Right."

"The guy is sandbagging me."

Pelicanos nodded sagely. "Look, Sosik knows full well that you want his job."

"Yeah. He knows that. So he's checking on me, to make sure I'm really out here doing my time in Backwater, Texas. And then he has the nerve to give me this little errand, to boot. It's a no-lose proposition for Sosik. If I refuse him a favor, I'm being a jerk. If I blow it or get in trouble, then he runs me down for that. And if I succeed, then he takes my credit."

"Sosik knows infighting. He's spent years on the Hill. Sosik's a professional. "

"Yes, he is. And in his book, we're just beginners. But we're going to win this one anyway. You know how? It's going to be just like the campaign was. "First, we're going to lowball expectations, be-cause nobody will really believe that we have a serious chance here. But then we're going to succeed on such a level-we're going to exceed expectations to such a huge extent-we're gonna bring so much firepower onto this campaign that we just blow the opposition away."

Pelicanos smiled. "That's you all over, Oscar."

Oscar lifted one finger. "Here's the plan. We find the major players here, and we find out what they want, and we cut deals. We get our people excited, and we get their people confused. And in the end, we just out-organize anyone who tries to stop us. We just out--work them, and we swarm on them from angles they would never expect, and we never, ever stop, and we just beat them into the ground!"

"Sounds like a big job."

"Yes, it is, but I've brought enough people for a big job. They've proved they can work together politically. They're creative, they're clever, and every last one of them owes me a lot of favors. So you think I can get away with this?"

"You're asking me?" Pelicanos said, spreading his hands. "Hell, Oscar, I'm always game. You know that." And he permitted himself a merry little laugh.

The Collaboratory's aging dorms offered sadly grim hospitality. Dorm space was in high demand, because the federal lab hosted end-less numbers of scholastic gypsies, contractors on the make, and vari-ous exotic species of para-scientific bureaucrats. The dorms were flimsy two-story structures, with common baths and common kitch-ens. The rooms had basic-brown federal pasteboard furniture, some scrappy little sheets and towels. The dorm's card-swipe doorlocks ran off Collaboratory ID cards. Presumably, these smart cards and smart doorlocks compiled automatic dossiers of everyone's daily ins and outs, for the benefit of the local security creeps. There was no weather under the great lozenge-shaped dome. The entire gigantic structure was basically a monster intensive-care ward, all mobile shutters and glaring lights and vast air-sucking zeolite filters, with a constant thrum of deeply buried generators. The Col-laboratory's biotech labs were constructed like forts. The personal residences, by stark contrast, lacked serious walls, roofs, or insulation. The flimsy dorms were small, tightly packed, and noisy.

So, for the sake of peace and quiet, Donna Nunez was doing her mending and darning on the wooden benches outside the Occupa-tional Safety building. Donna had brought her sewing basket and a selection of the krewe's clothing. Oscar had brought along his laptop. He disliked working inside his dorm room, since he felt instinctive certainty that the place was bugged.

The Occupational Safety edifice was one of nine buildings on the central ring road circling the shiny china ramparts of the Hot Zone. The Hot Zone was surrounded by large pie-wedge plots of experimental gene-spliced crops: saltwater-sucking sorghum, and ram-paging rice, plus a few genetically bastardized blueberries. The circular fields were themselves surrounded by a little two-lane road. This ring road was the major traffic artery within the Collaboratory dome, so it was an excellent place to sit and observe the quaint customs of the locals.

"I really don't mind a bit about those stinking, lousy dorm rooms," Donna remarked sweetly. "It feels and smells so lovely under this big dome. We could live outside the buildings if we wanted. We could just wander around naked, like the animals."

Donna reached out and patted an animal on the head. Oscar gave the creature a long look. The specimen stared back at him fearlessly, its bulging black eyes as blankly suggestive as a Ouija board. The de-feralization process, a spin-off of the Collaboratory's flourishing neural research, had left all the local animals in some strangely altered state of liquid detachment.

This particular specimen looked as eager and healthy as a model on a cereal box; its tusks were caries-free, its spiky fur seemed moussed. Nevertheless, Oscar felt a very strong intuition that the ani-mal would take enormous pleasure in killing and eating him. This was the animal's primary impulse in their brief relationship. Somehow, it had lost the will to follow through.

"Do you happen to know the name of this creature?" Oscar asked her. Donna carefully stroked the animal's long, wrinkled snout. It grunted in ecstasy and extruded a horrid gray tongue. "Maybe it's a pig?"

"That's not a pig."

"Well, whatever it is, I think it likes me. It's been following me around all morning. It's cute, isn't it? It's ugly, but it's cute-ugly. . . .The animals here never hurt anyone. They did something weird to them. To their brains or something."

"Oh yes." Oscar tapped a key. In rapidity and silence, his laptop collated a huge series of Collaboratory purchase orders with five years' worth of public-domain Texas arrest records. The results looked very intriguing.

"Are you going to get an exotic animal for Mrs. Bambakias?"

"After the weekend. Pelicanos is back in Boston,...Fontenot is out house hunting with Bob and Audrey .... Right now, I'm just try-ing to get some of the local records in order." Oscar shrugged.

"I liked her, you know? Mrs. Bambakias? I liked dressing her for the campaign. She was really elegant, and nice to me. I thought she might take me to Washington. But I just don't fit in there."

"Why not?" Oscar deftly twitched a fingertip and activated a search engine, which sought out a state-federal coordination center in Baton Rouge, and retrieved the records of recent pardons and grants of clemency issued by the Governor of Louisiana.

"Well . . . I'm too old, you know? I worked for a bank for twenty years. I didn't start tailoring until after the hyperinflation." Oscar tagged four hits for further investigation. "I think you're selling yourself short. I never heard Mrs. Bambakias mention your age. " Donna shook her graying head ruefully. "Young women nowa-days, they're much better at the new economy. They're really trained for personal image services. They like being in a krewe; they like dressing the principal and doing her hair and her shoes. They make a real career of service work. Lorena Bambakias will want to entertain. She'll need people who can dress her for Washington, for the George-town crowd."

"But you dress us. Look at the way we dress compared to these local people."

"You don't understand," Donna said patiently. "These scientists dress like slobs, because they can get away with that."

Oscar examined a passing local, riding a bike with his shirt hang-ing out. He wore no socks and tattered shoes. No hat. His hair was dreadful. Noone could possibly dress that badly by accident.

"I take your point," Oscar said.

Donna was in a confessional mood. Oscar had sensed this. He generally made it a point to appear in the lives of his entourage whenever they were confessing. "Life is so ironic," Donna sighed, ironi-cally. "I used to hate it when my mother taught me how to sew. I went off to college, I never imagined I'd hand-make clothes as an image consultant. When I was young, nobody wanted handmade tai-loring. My ex-husband would have laughed his head off if I'd made him a suit."

"How is your ex-husband, Donna?"

"He still thinks real people work nine-to-five jobs. He's an id-iot." She paused. "Also, he's fired, and he's broke."

Men and women in white decontamination suits had appeared amid the genetically upgraded crops. They were wielding shiny alumi-num spray-wands, gleaming chromium shears, high-tech titanium hoes.

"I love it inside here," Donna said. "The Senator was so sweet to dump us in here. It's so much nicer than I thought it would be. The air smells so unusual, have you noticed that? I could live in a place like this, if there weren't so many slobs in cutoffs."

Oscar hotlinked back to the minutes of the Senate Science and Technology Committee for 2029. These sixteen-year-old volumes of committee minutes had the works on the original founding of the Buna National Collaboratory. Oscar felt quite sure that no one had closely examined these archives for ages. They were chock-full of hid-den pay dirt.

"It was a hard-fought campaign. It's right to relax for a while. You certainly deserve it,"

"Yeah, the campaign wore me out, but it was worth it. We really worked well together; we were well organized. You know, I love po-litical work. I'm an American female in the fifty-to-seventy demo-graphic, so life never made any sense to me. Nothing ever turned out the way I was taught to expect. Ever since the economy crashed and the nets ate up everything . . . But inside politics, it all feels so dif-ferent. I'm not just a straw in the wind. I really felt like I was changing the world, for once. Instead of the world changing me."