"I never drive without a goal," Oscar told him.

"So, man, do you know where we're going? Where is that?"

"Where's the nearest big camp of Moderators?"

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."