"Oscar, we can't move on. My marrying you can't stick a whole community together. Making two people legitimate, that doesn't make their society legitimate. It's not a legitimate thing. I'm a war leader, and a strike leader-I was Joan of Arc. Nobody ever elected me. I rule by force and clever propaganda. The real powers here are you and your friend Kevin. And Kevin is like any outlaw who takes power: he's a scary little brute. He brings me big dossiers, he bullies people and spies on them. I'm sick of all that. It's turning me into a monster. It can't go on, it's not right. There's no future in it."

"You've been thinking a lot about this, haven't you?"

"You taught me how to think about it. You taught me how to think politically. You're a good tactician, Oscar, you're really clever, you know all about people's kinks and weaknesses, but you don't know about their integrity and their strength. You're not a great strat-egist. You know all the dirty tricks with go-stones in the corner, but you don't comprehend the whole board."

"And you do?"

"Some of it. I know the world well enough that I know that my lab is the best place for me."

"So you're giving up?"

"No ... I'm just quitting while I'm ahead. Something is going to work here. Something of it will last. But it's not a whole new world. It's just a new political system. We can't close it off in an airtight nest, with me as the Termite Queen. I have to quit, I have to leave. Then maybe this thing will shake down, and pack down, and build something solid, from the bottom up."

"Maybe we'll do better than that. Maybe I am a great strategist."

"Sweetheart, you're not! You're streetwise, but you're young, and you're not very wise. You can't become King by marrying your pasteboard Queen, someone you created by marching a pawn down the board. You shouldn't even want to be King. It's a lousy job. A situation like this doesn't need another stupid tyrant with a golden crown, it needs . . . it needs the founder of a civilization, a saint and a prophet, somebody impossibly wise and selfless and generous. Some-body who can make laws out of chaos, and order out of chaos, and justice out of noise, and meaning out of total distraction."

"My God, Greta. I've never heard you talk like this before." She blinked. "I don't think I ever even thought like this before."

"What you're saying is completely true. It's the hard cold truth, and it's bad, it's impossibly bad, it's worse than I ever imagined, but you know, I'm glad that I know it now. I always like to know what I'm facing. I refuse to admit defeat here. I refuse to pack up my tent. I don't want to leave you, I can't bear it. You're the only woman who ever really understood me."

"I'm sorry that I understand you well enough to tell you what you just can't do."

"Greta, don't give up on me. Don't dump me. I'm having a genu-ine breakthrough here, I'm on the edge of something really huge. You're right about the dictatorship problem, it's a dirt-real, basic, po-litical challenge. We've worked ourselves to the bone now, we're all burned out, we're all bogged down in the little things. Daily tactics won't do it for us anymore, but abandoning it to its own devices is a cop-out. We need to create something that is huge and permanent, we need a higher truth. No, not higher, deeper, we need a floor of granite. No more sand castles, no more improvising. We need genius. And you're a genius."

"Yes, but not that kind."

"But you and I, we could do it together! If we only had some time to really concentrate, if we could just talk together like this. Listen. You have totally convinced me: you're wiser than I am, you're more realistic, I'm with you all the way. We'll leave this place. We'll run off together. Forget the big state marriage and the rings and the rice. We'll go to . . . well, not some island, they're all drowning now. . . . We'll go to Maine. We'll stay there a month, two months, we'll stay a year. We'll drop off the net, we'll use pens and candlelight. We'll really, seriously concentrate, without any distractions at all. We'll write a Constitution."

"What? Let the President do that."

"That guy? He's just more of the same! He's a socialist, he's gonna make us sane and practical, just like Europe. This place isn't Europe! America is what people created when they were sick to death of Europe! Normalcy for America-it isn't keeping your nose clean and counting your carbon dioxide. Normalcy for America is technolog-ical change. Sure, the process ran away with us for a little while, the rest of the world pulled a fast one on us, they cheated us, they want the world to be Rembrandt canvases and rice paddies until the last trump of doom, but we're off our sickbed now. A massive rate of change is normalcy for America. What we need is planned change-Progress. We need Progress!"

"Oscar, your face is getting really red." She reached out. He jerked his wrist back. "Stop trying to feel my pulse. You know I hate it when you do that. Listen to me carefully, I'm making perfect specimen sense lab-table really love me. I'm doing this all for you, Greta. I'm totally serious, we can do it tomorrow morning. A long sabbatical together in Maine, at some lovely romantic cabin. I'll have Lana rent us one, she knows all about it."

Her eyes widened. "What? Tomorrow? Lana? Wilderness? We can't just abandon romantic Clare Lana Ramachandran little Kama Sutra girl." Oscar stared. "What did you say?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that about Lana. Lana can't help how she feels about you. But I'm not sorry I said it about Clare. You were having drinks with her! Kevin told me."

Oscar was stunned. "How did we get onto this subject?" An angry flush rose up Greta's neck. "I always think about it-I just never say it out loud! Clare, and Lana, and the Senator's wife, and Moira, all these painted pointed glamour women with their claws . . ."

"Greta, stop that. Trust me! I'm asking you to marry me. Moira! Get it through your head. This is for real, this is permanent and solid. Tell me once and for all, will you marry Moira?"

"What? Moira's one of your krewewomen, isn't she? She came over to make amends."

"But Moira works for Hueyl When did you see Moira?"

"Moira came to my office. She brought me a brand-new air filter. She was very nice."

Oscar stared in mounting horror at the air filter at his elbow. He was so used to them now. They were everywhere, and so innocuous. They were cleansing Trojan fog horse biowar gas miasma. "Oh, Greta. How could you take a gift from that woman?"

"She said it was your gift. Because it smells of roses." She patted the box, and then looked up in pain and bewilderment, and a dawn-ing and terrible knowledge. "Oh, sweetheart, I thought you knew. I thought you knew everything."

The Collaboratory was, by design, equipped to deal with biological contamination. They had to shut down the entire Administration building. The gas from the booby-trapped air filter was of particularly ingenious design, micronized particles the size and shape of ragweed pollen. The particles stuck to the nasal tract like a painless snort of cocaine, whereupon their contents leaked through the blood-brain barrier, and did mysterious and witchy things.

Oscar and Greta, having wearily crammed themselves into de-contamination suits, were carried red-faced and stumbling to the Hot Zone's clinic. There they were ritually scrubbed down, and subjected to gingerly examination. The good news was immediate: they were not dying. The bad news took longer to arrive. Their blood pressure was up, their faces were congested, their gait and posture were af-fected, they were suffering odd speech disabilities. Their PET-scans were exhibiting highly abnormal loci of cognitive processing, two wandering hot blobs where a normal human being would have just one. The primal rhythm of their brain waves had a distinct backbeat.

Oscar had been slowly and gently poisoned as he was making the speech of his life. This foul realization sent him into a towering animal rage. This reaction revealed yet another remarkable quality of his poisoned brain. He could literally think of two things at once; but it stretched him so thin that he had very little impulse control.

A nurse suggested a sedative. Oscar cordially agreed that he was feeling a bit hyperactive, and accented this by screaming personal in-sults and repeatedly kicking the wall. This behavior produced a seda-tive in short order. Dual unconsciousness resulted.

By noon, Oscar was conscious again, feeling sluggish yet simulta-neously hair-trigger. He paid a visit to Greta, in her separate decon-tamination cell. Greta had passed a quiet night. She was now sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, legs folded, hands in her lap, staring straight into space. She didn't speak, she didn't even see him. She was wide-awake and indescribably, internally busy.

A nurse stood guard for him, while Oscar stared at her with bittersweet melange. Bitter; sweet; bitter / sweet: bittersweet. She was exalted, silent, full of carnivorous insight: Greta had never looked more like herself It would have been a profanation to touch her.

Accompanied by his nurse, Oscar tottered back to his cell. He wondered how the effect felt for Greta. It seemed to hit people differ-ently. Maybe there were as many ways to think doubly as there were to think singly. When he closed his eyes, Oscar could actually feel the sensation, somatically. It was as if his overtight skull had a pair of bladders stuffed inside, liquid and squashy, like a pair of nested yin-yangs. One focus of attention was somehow in "the front" and the other in "the back," and when the one to the front revolved into direct consciousnes, the other slipped behind it. And the blobs had little living eyes inside them. Eyes that held the nascent core of other streams of conscious-ness. Like living icons, awaiting a mental touch to launch into full awareness.

Kevin stepped into the cell. Oscar heard him limping, was fully aware of his presence; it took a strange little moment to realize that he should take the trouble to open his eyes and look.

"Thank God you're here!" he blurted.

"That's what I like," Kevin said, blinking. "Enthusiasm." With an effort, Oscar said nothing. He could restrain his urge to blurt his thoughts aloud, if he really put his mind to it. All he had to do was press his tongue against the roof of his mouth, clench his teeth, and breathe rhythmically through his nose.

"You don't look so bad," Kevin said analytically. "Your color's a little high, and you're holding your neck like a giraffe on speed, but you don't look crazy."

"I'm not crazy. Just different."

"Uh-huh." Kevin took a disinfected metal chair and eased his aching feet.

"So, uhm, sorry about the security screwup, man."

"These things happen."

"Yeah. See, it was all those Boston people from the old Bambakias krewe: that was the problem. The Senator's wife . . . she went way out of her way to tell me I was supposed to let it slide with the press secretary. You and this press babe being the former romantic item, and all that. Great, I thought, better really bury this one; but then, in comes this Moira Matarazzo woman who was the Senator's former pres secretary. . . . See, I just lost track. That's all. Just plain couldn't keep up with it all. All these Boston krewepeople, and for-mer krewepeople, and krewepeople of the former krewepeople; look, nobody could keep track of that crap. Hell, I don't even know if I'm your krewepeople anymore."

"I get the picture, Kevin. That's a by-product of what's basically a semifeudal, semilegal, distributable-deniable, net-centered seg-mented polycephalous influence sociality process."

Kevin waited politely for Oscar's lips to stop moving. "For what it's worth, I've got Moira's movements tracked. Into the dome, into the Administration building, out of the dome . . . I'm practically sure that she didn't leave any of those tasty little time bombs for the rest of us."

"Huey."

Kevin laughed. "Well, of course it was Huey."

"It just seems so pointless and small of him to do this to us now. After the war's over, after he's out of office. When I was getting ready to leave all this."

"So you really meant it about leaving us, then."

"What?"

"I overheard. I forgot to mention that I ran the tapes of the poisoning incident. That romantic discussion that you and Dr. Pen-ninger were having as you were being gassed."

"You have that conference room bugged?"

"Hey, pal, I'm not brain-damaged. Of course I have the confer-ence room bugged. Not that I have time to listen to every damn room that I bug around here .... But hey, when there's a terrorist biowar incident taking place in one, you bet I run the tapes back and listen. I do pay attention, Oscar. I'm a quick study. I make a pretty good cop, really. "

"Never said you weren't a good cop, you big-mouthed incom-petent."

"Holy cow, there it is again .... Did you know that you actu-ally have two different voices when you say contradictory stuff like that? I need to run a stress analysis there, I bet that could screw up vocal IDs." Kevin leaned back in his chair and put a sock-clad foot on Oscar's bed. Kevin was taking developments rather easily, Oscar thought. Then again, Kevin had witnessed this phenomenon among the Haitians. He'd had time to get used to the concept.

"Sure I've had time to get used to the concept," Kevin said. "It's obvious. You mutter things aloud to yourself, just so you know what you're thinking. I recognize the syndrome, man. Big deal! I got used to your other personal background problem. . . . Oscar, haven't we always been on good terms?"

"Yeah. "

"I have to tell you, it really hurt my feelings when Dr. Penninger said I was a 'scary little brute.' That I 'bullied people' and 'spied on them.' And you didn't stick up for me, man. You didn't tell her a thing. "

"I was proposing marriage to her."

"Women," Kevin grunted. "I dunno what it is with women. They're just not rational. They're creepy little Mata Hari sexpots car-rying poison gas bombs. . . . Or maybe they're like Dr. Penninger down the hall, the Rigid Ice-Queen of Eternal Light and Truth. . . . I just can't understand what it takes to please that woman! I mean, system-crackers like me, we have everything in common with scientists. It's all about hidden knowledge, and how you find it, and who gets to know it, and who gets the rep for finding out. That's all there is to science. I loved working for her, I thought she was really getting it. I bent absolutely double for that woman, I did anything she ever asked me-I did favors for her that she never even knew she got. I looked up to her, dammit! And what do I get for all my loyal service? I scare her. She wants to purge me."

Oscar nodded. "Get used to the idea. This is a clean sweep. Huey took us out. It's decapitation. I can barely talk now. I can barely walk. And Greta, she's in some kind of wide-awake schizoid catatonia hebephrenia trance nonverbal. . . ."

"A little adjective trouble there, man, but no problem, I take your point. Either I seize power myself now, and try to run the whole shebang as a secret-police state. Or else I just . . . I dunno . . . airmail myself back to Boston. End of the story. It all makes a nice hacker brag, though, right?

Kind of a good bar story."

"You can't hold this place together alone, Kevin. People don't trust you."

"Oh, I know that, man. You distribute all the big favors yourself, and you use me as your heavy guy to intimidate people. I know that I was the heavy guy. My dad was the heavy, too. The Founding Fathers are a bunch of dead white males; the guys on Mount Rushmore are all scary Anglo guys now. We're the heavies. I was used to the role. Hey, I was glad to have the work."

"I want you to help me now, Kevin."

"Help you what, pal?"

"To get out of here."

"No problem, boss. I'm still Captain Scubbly Bee. Hell, I was working hard on being Colonel Scubbly Bee. I can get you outside this place. Where you want to go?"

"Baton Rouge. Or wherever Huey is hiding."

"Oh ho! Not that I doubt your judgment now, man, but I have a really great countersuggestion. Boston, okay? The good old muddy water! Beacon Hill, Charlestown, Cambridge. . . . You and I, we're actually neighbors, man. We live on the same street! We could go home together. We could have a real beer, inside a real Boston bar. We could take in a hockey game."

"I need to talk to Huey," Oscar said flatly. "I have a big personal problem with him."

Green Huey had gone into semiretirement. He was doing a lot of ceremonial ribbon-clipping these days. It was a little difficult doing all this public apple-polishing while surrounded by a militant phalanx of Regulator bodyguards, but Huey enjoyed the show. The ex-Governor had always been good for a laugh. He knew how to show the people a good time. Oscar and Kevin dressed like derelicts, vanished through the so-cial membrane, and began to stalk the Governor. They traveled by night in the sorriest hotels; they slept in roadside parks in newly pur-chased military-surplus tents. They burned their IDs and wore straw hats and gum boots and overalls. Kevin passed as Oscar's minder, a lame guy with a guitar. Oscar passed as Kevin's somewhat dim-witted cousin, the one who mumbled a lot. Oscar brandished an accordion. Even in a land that had once favored accordion music, they were mostly avoided. It was a frightening thing to see two mentally incom-petent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk instruments, who might at any moment burst into song.

Oscar had finally lost his temper with Huey. He was of two minds about the matter. Oscar was always of two minds about every-thing now. On the one hand, he wanted to publicly confront the man. And on the other, he simply wanted to murder him. The second concept made a lot of sense to Oscar now, since killing political fig-ures. was not uncommon behavior for mentally ruined drifters with nothing left to lose. He and Kevin had serious discussions about the issue. Kevin seemed to waver between pro and con. Oscar was pro and con at the same time.

Their strategic problem was dizzyingly multiform. Oscar found it extremely hard to stop thinking about it, since he could contemplate so many different aspects of the issue all at once. Killing Huey. Maiming Huey, perhaps breaking Huey's arms. Reducing him to a wheel-chair, that had appealing aspects. Blinding Huey had a certain biblical majesty to it. But how? Long-range sniping was not a pursuit for amateurs who had never handled firearms. Handguns would surely entail almost instant arrest. Poison sounded intriguing, but would re-quire advance planning and extensive resources.

"You're NSC, aren't you?" Kevin told him, as they bagged out in the tent to the sound of crickets, blissfully far from the sinister fog of urban surveillance. "I thought they trained you guys to do awful things with the juice of cigars."

"The President doesn't order assassinations of his domestic politi-cal opponents. If he were outed for that, he'd be impeached. That's totally counterproductive."

"Aren't you one of the President's agents?" It was wise of Kevin to point this out. Oscar recognized that he'd been getting a little tangled in the proliferating vines of his cognitive processes. Next day they stopped at a greasy spoon outside the town of Mamou, and called the NSC from a satellite pay phone.

It took quite some time for Oscar's immediate superior to an-swer a random pay-phone call on a deeply insecure line from the heart of Cajun country. When he came on, he was livid. Oscar announced that he had been poisoned, was non compos mentis, had suffered a complete mental breakdown, could no longer be considered responsi-ble for his actions, was no longer fit for public service, and was there-fore resigning from his post, immediately. His superior ordered him to fly to Washington for a thorough medical assessment. Oscar told him that this was not on his agenda as a newly private citizen. His superior told Oscar that he would be arrested. Oscar pointed out that he was currently in the center of the state of Louisiana, where the locals were profoundly unfriendly to federal agents. He hung up. It had been a lot to say. His tongue felt sore.

Kevin was getting into the swing of things. He suggested that it might be a good idea to similarly break all ties with Senator Bambakias. They went out for a leisurely brunch of red beans and rice, and returned to find the original pay phone swarming with Reg-ulator goons in fast pickup trucks. They tried to earn a little money with their guitar and accordion, and they were told to get lost.

They hitchhiked from Mamou to Eunice, and made another pay-phone call, this time to the Senator's office in Washington. The Senator was no longer in Washington. Barnbakias had gone on a fact--finding mission to the newly conquered Netherlands. In fact, the en-tire Senate Foreign Relations Committee had set up shop in The Hague, in a vacated Dutch government building. Oscar apologized, and was about to hang up, when the Senator himself came on the line. He'd been paged from across the Atlantic, and he had woken from a sound sleep, but he was anxious to talk.

"Oscar, I'm so glad you called. Don't hang up! We've heard all about the event. Lorena and I are just sick about it. We're going to pin this thing on Huey. I know that it means outing me on the Moira debacle, but I'm willing to face the music there. Huey can't go on savaging people like this, it's atrocious. We can't live in a country like that. We have to take a stand."

"That's very good of you, Senator. Courageous principled apol-ogize it was all my fault anyway."

"Oscar, listen to me carefully. The Haitians have survived this thing, and so can you. Neurologists around the world are working on this problem. They're very angry about what was done to Dr. Pen-ninger, it's a personal affront to them and their profession. We want to fly you into Den Haag, and try some treatments here. They have excellent hospitals here in Holland. In fact, their whole infrastructure is marvelous. Roadblocks absolutely unheard-of These government facilities here are top-notch. The Foreign Relations Committee is get-ting more work done here in Den Haag than they have in a year in Washington. You have resources, Oscar. There's hope. Your friends want to help you."

"Senator, even if you do help Greta, I'm a special case. I have a unique genetic background, and neural Colombian conventional medical useless."

"That's not true! You've forgotten that there are three Danish women here in Europe who are basically sisters of yours. They've heard about your troubles, and they want to help you. I've just met them, and I've talked to them personally. Now I think that I under-stand you better than I ever have before. Tell him, Lorena."

The Senator's wife took the phone. "Oscar, listen to Alcott. He's talking perfect sense to you. I met those women too. You're the pick of the litter there, that's very obvious; but they do want to help you anyway. They're sincere about it, and so are we. You're very important to us. You stood by Alcott and me in our darkest days, and now it's our turn, that's all. Please let us help you."

"Lorena, I'm not insane. Huey's been like this for at least two years, and Huey's not insane either. It's just a profoundly different mode of cognition. Sometimes I have a little trouble getting issues to clarify, that's all." Lorena's voice went distant suddenly. "Talk him down, Alcott! He's using real English now!"

Bambakias came on, in his richest and most intent baritone.

"Oscar, you are a professional. You're a player. Players don't get an-gry. They just get even. You have no business wandering around in Louisiana, with an Anglo terrorist hacker who has a police record. That is just not a player's move. We're going to nail Huey for this; it'll take a while, but we'll pin him down. Huey made a fatal error-he poisoned a member of the President's NSC. I don't care if Huey's got a skull full of turbochargers and afterburners. Insulting Two Feathers by gassing one of his staff was a very stupid move. The President is a very hard man-and most directly to my point, he's proved himself a far better politician than the ex-Governor of a small Southern state."

"Senator, I'm listening. I think there's something to what you say. " Bambakias exhaled slowly. "Thank God."

"I hadn't really thought much about Holland before. I mean, that Holland has so much potential. I mean, we own Holland now, basically, don't we?"

"Yes, that's right. You see, Holland is the new Louisiana. Louisi-ana is yesterday's news! You and I were right to get involved in Louisi-ana earlier, there was a serious difficulty there-but as a rogue state, Louisiana is a sideshow now. It's the Dutch who are the real future. They're a serious, well-organized, businesslike nation, people who are taking methodical, sensible steps about the climate and environment. Believe it or not, they're ahead of the United States in a lot of areas--especially banking. Louisiana is over the top. They're not serious. They're visionary crawdad-eating psychos. We need serious political organization now, a return to normalcy. Huey is yesterday's man, he's out of the loop. He's a fast-talking loon who throws technological innovation here and there-as if randomly spewing a bunch of half-baked ideas can increase the sum of human happiness. That's sheer demagoguery, it's craziness. We need common sense and political stability and sensible, workable policies. That's what government is for." Oscar swirled this extraordinary statement over in his mind. He felt thoughts and memories sifting like a soft kaleidoscope. "You're really different now, aren't you, Alcott?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I mean this regimen you've been through. It's completely changed you as a person. You're realistic now. You're sensible and prudent. You're boring."

"Oscar, I'm sure that you have some kind of interesting insight there, but this isn't the time for chatter. We need to stick to the point. Tell me that you'll come to Den Haag and join us. Lorena and I, we feel that we're your family-we're in lieu of your family, at a time like this. You can come here to Holland, and take your place in our krewe, and we'll set you all straight. That's a promise."

"All right, Senator, you've convinced me. You've never gone back on your word to me, and I'm very touched by that pledge. I can see I've been impulsive. I can't go off half-cocked. I need to think these things all the way through."