A light aircraft flew overhead. Its tiny engine puttered energeti-cally, like fingernails tapping a snare drum. The aircraft seemed appall-ingly flimsy. With its eerie, computer-designed lifting surfaces, it resembled a child's paper toy: something made with pinking shears, popsicle sticks, and tape. The wing edges trailed off into feathery rib-bons and long tattered kite tails. It seemed to be staying aloft through sheer force of will.

Then three similar aircraft appeared, skidding and puttering just above the treetops. They flew like fishing lures tempting a trout. Their pilots were gloved and goggled and bulky, so wrapped in their padding that they resembled human bales of burlap.

One of the pilots detached himself from formation, settled down like a falling leaf, and gently circled the roadside bus. It was like being buzzed by a hay bale. Everyone looked up from their food and waved politely. The pilot waved back, mimicked eating with one gauntlet, and headed east.

"Airborne nomads," Fontenot said, squinting. "They're heading east," Oscar noted.

"Green Huey's very tight with the leisure unions." Fontenot shoved his bowl aside, rose deliberately, and went into the bus to see to his machines. He had the face he wore when he meant business.

Oscar's krewe returned to their food. They ate silently now and with more purpose. No one had to remark on the obvious: that there would soon be more nomads arriving.

Fontenot emerged from the bus, where he had been checking road reports. "We may have to move soon," Fontenot said. "The Regulators have been rallying at the Alabama-Coushatta reservation, and their rally is coming through now. These local proles, they aren't tame."

"Well, we're strangers here too, you know," Negi said. Negi had spent time on the road, back in the old days when homeless people didn't have cellphones and laptops.

Two nomad scouts arrived ten minutes later, in a motorcycle and sidecar. They were dressed for winter. They wore wraparound kilts, striped ponchos, and huge coarse cloaks beautifully embroidered with old twentieth-century corporate logos. Their skin gleamed with a thick layer of wind-resistant, insulating grease. They had dipped their legs up to mid-calf in a plastic bootlike substance with the look and sheen of vinyl. The scouts pulled over, dismounted, and walked over. They were silent and proud, and carrying cellular videocams. The driver was chewing on a large square chunk of artificial food, like a green butter stick of compressed alfalfa.

Oscar beckoned them over. It transpired that these nomads were not, in fact, the legendary Regulators. These were Texan road drifters, far less advanced in their peculiar ways than the proles of Louisiana. These people spoke only Spanish. Oscar's childhood Spanish was worse than rusty, and Donna Nunez wasn't around, but Rebecca Pataki had a smattering. The nomads politely complimented them on their bus. They offered square sticks of veggie greenery. Oscar and Rebecca politely declined the nomad silage and counteroffered some oyster gumbo. The nomads carefully gulped down the last of the hot stew, comment-ing at length on the flavor. As the animal fats hit their bloodstreams, they became less suspicious. They inquired nonchalantly about the possible availability of scrap metal: nails, metal, copper? Corky Shoeki, who was the camp majordomo and recycling expert, obliged with some empty cans from the bus.

Oscar was deeply bothered by their nomad laptops. They were using nonstandard keyboards, boards where QWERTYUIOP had been junked and the letters redesigned for efficient typing. The wretches didn't even type like normal people. Somehow this bothered him far more than the fact that these particular nomads were Mexican illegals.

Moving as if they had all the time in the world, because they did, the two men drove off. Suddenly there was very little traffic on the highway. People had gotten wind of the oncoming movement of the Regulator horde, and were already avoiding the roads. Two police cars passed, lights flashing silently. The nomad tribes weren't afraid of local police. There were far too many of them to safely arrest, and in any case, the proles had their own police.

The first fringe of the Regulator convoy arrived. Plastic trucks and buses cruising by at maybe thirty miles an hour, sipping fuel and saving wear on their engines. Then came the core of the operation, the nomad technical base. Flatbed trucks and tankers, loaded with harvesting equipment, pillers, crushers, welders, rollers, fermenting pans, pipes, and valves. They lived on grass, they lived off roadside weeds and cultured yeast. Women wearing skirts, shawls, veils. Swarms of young children, their vibrant little bodies saturated with mul-ticolored beads and handmade quillwork.

Oscar was entranced by the spectacle. These weren't the low-key dropouts of the Northeast, people who managed on cheap food and public assistance. These were people who had rallied in a horde and marched right off the map. They had tired of a system that offered them nothing, so they had simply invented their own.

The krewe cleaned up their picnic. Fontenot set to work, finding a route back to the Collaboratory that would avoid the migrating swarm. Fontenot would escort them there, towing his battered Cajun stove behind his electric hummer. Even when engulfed by a horde of Regulators, they should be safe enough, locked in the metal shell of their campaign bus. Though the situation was unlikely, they would probably simply blend in. Oscar's phone suddenly emitted a personal ring. "Oh, Oscar," Rebecca teased him. "There's that sparky phone again."

"I've been expecting this call," said Oscar. "Excuse me." He stepped around the back of the bus as the others continued to pack.

It was his girlfriend, Clare, back in Boston. "How are you, Os-car?"

"Fine. It's going pretty well down here, all things considered. Very interesting. How's life at the homestead? I miss you."

"Your house is fine," Clare said. Too quickly.

A hairline fracture shot through him. Don't get anxious, he thought. Don't think too fast. This isn't one of the other ones, this is Clare. This is Clare, this is doable.

Oscar wanted direly to confront the source of trouble. That would be very stupid. Work around it. Let her open up first. Be funny, be charming. Make some light conversation. Find a neutral topic. For the life of him, he couldn't think of one.

"We've been having a picnic," he blurted.

"That sounds lovely. I wish I were there."

"I wish you were, too," he said. Inspiration struck him. "How about it?

Can you fly down? We have some plans here, you'd be interested. "

"I can't go to Texas now."

"You've heard about the Louisiana air base situation, right? The Senator's hunger strike. I've got very good sources here. It's a solid story, you could fly down, you could cover the local angle."

"I think your friend Sosik's got that story sewn up already," Clare said.

''I'm not doing Boston politics. Not anymore."

"What?" He was stunned. "Why not?"

"The net's reassigned me. They want me to go to Holland."

"Holland? What did you tell them?"

"Oscar, I'm a political journalist. How could I not do The Hague? It's the Cold War, it's a dream gig. This is a big break for me, my biggest career break ever."

"Well, how long is your assignment overseas?"

"Well, that depends on how well I do at the job."

Oscar's brain began to hum. "I can appreciate that. Of course you want to do well. But still . . . the diplomatic situation . . . the Dutch are so provocative. They're very radical."

"Of course they're radical, Oscar. Their country is drowning. We'd be extremists too, if most of America was below sea level. The Dutch have got so much to lose, they've really got their backs against the dikes. That's why they're so interesting now."

"You don't even speak Dutch."

"They all speak English there, you know."

"The Dutch are militant. They're dangerous. They make crazy demands from Americans, they really resent us."

"I'm a reporter, Oscar. I'm not supposed to scare easily."

"So you're really going to do it," Oscar concluded leadenly. "You're going to leave me, aren't you?"

"I don't want to put it that way .... "

Oscar gazed emptily at the back of the bus. The blank shell of the bus suddenly struck him as an alien and horrible thing. It had stolen him from his home and the woman in his bedroom. The cam-paign bus had kidnapped him. He turned his back on the bus and began walking with his phone, randomly, toward the tangled Texan woods. "No," he said. "I know. It's the work. It's our careers. I did it first. I took on a big job, and I left you. Didn't I? I left you alone, and I'm still gone. I'm far away, and I don't know when I'll come back."

"Well," she said, "you said it, not me. But that's very true."

"So I really have no business finding fault with you. If I did, I'd be a hypocrite, wouldn't I? We both knew this might happen. It was never a commitment."

"Tha t' s right."

"It was a relationship."

"I liked the relationship."

"It was good, wasn't it? It was very good, for what it was." Clare sighed. "No, Oscar, I can't let you say that. Don't say that, it wouldn't be fair. It was better than good. It was great, it was totally ideal. I mean, you were such a great source for me. You never tried to spin my stories, and you hardly ever lied. You let me live in your house. You introduced me to all your rich and influential friends. You supported my career. You never yelled at me. You were a real gen-tleman. Brilliant. A dream boyfriend."

"You're being so sweet." He could feel himself hemorrhage.

''I'm really sorry that I was never able to . . . you know. . . quite get over your personal background thing."

"No," Oscar said bitterly, ''I'm very used to that."

"It's just-it's just one of those permanent tragedies. Like, you know, my own troubled minority background."

Oscar sighed. "Clare, I don't think anybody really holds it against you that you're a white Anglo-Saxon."

"No, life is hard in a racial minority. It just is. I mean, you of all people ought to have some feeling for what that really means. I know you can't help the way you were born, but still ... I mean, that's one of the real reasons I want to do this Dutch assignment. There's been so much white flight from America back into Europe. . . . My people are there, you know? My roots are there. I think it might help me, somehow."

Oscar was finding it hard to breathe.

"I feel bad about this, sweetheart, like I've really let you down."

"No, this is better," Oscar said. "It hurts a lot, but it hurts less than dragging it on and keeping up a false pretense. Let's part as friends."

"I might be back, you know. You don't have to be all hasty like that. You don't have to turn on a dime. Because it's just me, your pal Clare, you know? It's not like an executive decision."

"Let's have a clean break," he said firmly. "It's best for us. For both of us."

"All right. If you're sure, then I guess I understand. Good-bye, Oscar."

"It's over, Clare. Good-bye." He hung up. Then he threw the phone into the trees.

"Nothing works," he told the red dirt and gray sky. "I can't ever make anything work!"

3.

Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-scanner over the block, activating the tape. It was close to one in the morning. The wind out of the tall black pines was damp and nasty, but he was working hard and the weather felt bleakly appropriate.

"I'm a cornerstone," the cinder block announced. "Good for you," Oscar grunted.

''I'm a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left." Oscar ignored this demand, and swiftly taped six more blocks. He whipped the scanner across each of them, then pulled the last block aside to get at the next level in the stack.

As he set his gloved hands to it, the last block warned him, "Don't install me yet. Install that cornerstone first."

"Sure," Oscar told it. The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn't hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape's thumbnail-sized speak-ers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt. Bambakias had created this construction system. Like all of the architect's brainchildren, his system was very functional, yet rife with idiosyncratic grace-notes. Oscar had full confidence in the system, a pragmatic faith won from much hands-on experience. Oscar had la-bored like a mule in many Bambakias construction sites. No one ever won the trust of Alcott Bambakias, or joined his inner circle, without a great deal of merciless grunt work.

Heavy labor was the heart and soul of the Bambakias intellectual salon. W. Alcott Bambakias had quite a number of unorthodox be-liefs, but chief among them was his deep conviction that sycophants and rip-off artists always tired easily. Bambakias, like many members of the modern overclass, was always ready with an openhearted ges-ture, a highly public flinging of golden ducats. His largesse naturally attracted parasites, but he rid himself of "the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots," as he insisted on calling them, by demanding fre-quent stints of brute physical work. "It'll be fun," Bambakias would announce, rolling up his tailored sleeves and grinning fiercely. "We'll get results."

Bambakias was no day laborer. He was a wealthy sophisticate, and his wife was a noted art collector. It was for exactly those reasons that the couple took such perverse pleasure in publicly raising blisters, straining tendons, and sweating like hogs. The architect's ruggedly handsome face would light up with hundred-watt noblesse oblige as he chugged away in his faux blue-collar overalls and back brace. His elegant wife took clear masochistic pleasure in hauling construction equipment, her chiseled features set with the grim commitment of a supermodel pumping iron. Oscar himself had grown up in Hollywood. He'd never minded the poseur elements in the Bambakias couple. The trademark hat-and-cape ensemble, the hand-tailored couture gowns, the glam-struck Boston charity events-Oscar found this sort of thing reassuringly homey. In any case, the construction system made it all worthwhile. There was no pretense to the system-no question that it worked. Any number could play. It was a system that could find a working role for anyone. It was both a network and a way of life, flowing from its basis in digital communication and design into the rock-hard emer-gent reality of walls and floors. There was a genuine comfort in work-ing within a system like this one, because it always kept its promises, it always brought results.

This Texan hotel, for instance, was an entirely virtual construc-tion, ones and zeros embedded in a set of chips. And yet, the hotel direly wanted to exist. It would become very beautiful, and it was already very smart. It could sweet-talk itself into physical existence from random piles of raw material. It would be a good hotel. It would brighten the neighborhood and enhance the city. It would keep the wind and rain off. People would dwell in it. Oscar lugged the self-declared cornerstone to the corner of the southern wall. "I belong here," the cornerstone declared. "Put mortar on me." Oscar picked up a trowel. ''I'm the tool for the mortar," the little trowel squeaked cheerfully. Oscar put the trowel to use and slathered up a grainy wedge of thick gray paste. This polymer goo was not actually "mortar," but it was just as cheap as traditional mortar, and it worked much better, so it had naturally stolen the word from the original substance.

Oscar hefted the cinder block to the top of the hip-high wall.

"To the right," urged the block. "To the right, to the right, to the right. . .

. To the left. . . . Move me backward. . . . Twist me, twist me, twist me .... Good! Now scan me."

Oscar lifted the scanner on its lanyard and played it across the block. The scanner logged and correlated the block's exact locale, and beeped with satisfaction.

Oscar had been installing blocks for two solid hours. He had simply walked onto the site in the middle of the night, logged on, booted the system, and started off where the krewe had stopped with darkness. This particular wall could not rise much higher. All too soon it would be time to work on the plumbing. Oscar hated the plumbing, always the most troublesome construction element. Plumbing was a very old technology, not so plug-and-play, never so slick and easy as the flow of computation. Plumbing mistakes were permanent and ugly. When the plumbing's time had come, the Bambakias construc-tion system would wisely balk. All higher function ceased until people came to terms with the pipes.

Oscar removed his hard hat and pressed his chilly ears with his work-gloved hands. His spine and shoulders told him that he would regret this in the morning. At least it would be a new set of regrets. Oscar stepped under a paraboloid construction light, to search for the shipping boxes full of plumbing supplies. The nearest light smartly rotated on its tall pole to follow Oscar's footsteps. Oscar stepped up onto a monster spool of cable for an overview.

The cone of light rose with him and flew across the trampled winter grass. Oscar suddenly caught sight of a stranger, wrapped in a baggy jacket and a woolen hat. The stranger was lurking outside the plastic orange safety fence, standing on the broken sidewalk, under a pine.

Bambakias construction sites always attracted gawkers. But very few construction gawkers would lurk in cold and darkness at one in the morning. Still, even little Buna had a nightlife. Presumably the guy was just drunk.

Oscar cupped his gloved hands to his mouth. "Would you like to help?" This was a standard invitation at any Bambakias site. It was very much part of the game. It was surprising just how many selfless, ener-getic volunteers had been permanently lured into the Bambakias krewe through this gambit. The stranger stepped awkwardly through a gap in the orange netting, walking into Oscar's arc-light.

"Welcome to the site of our future hotel! Have you been to our site before?"

Silent shake of the woolly head.

Oscar climbed down from the spool. He retrieved a box of vacuum-wrapped gloves and carried it over. "Try these." The stranger-a woman-pulled bare, spidery hands from the pockets of her coat. Oscar, startled, looked up from her fingers to her shadowed face.

"Dr. Penninger! Good morning."

"Mr. Valparaiso."

Oscar fetched out a pair of ductile extra-large, their floppy plastic fingers studded with grip-dots. He hadn't expected any company on the site tonight, much less a ranking member of the Collaboratory's board. He was taken aback to encounter Greta Penninger under these circumstances, but there was no sense in hesitating now. "Please try these gloves on, Doctor. . .

. You see that yellow ridge of tape across the knuckles? Those are embedded locators, so our construction sys-tem will always know the position of your hands."

Dr. Penninger tugged the gloves on, twisting her narrow wrists like a surgeon washing up.

"You'll need a hard hat, a back brace, and some shoe cap. Knee guards are a good idea, too. I'll log you into our system now, if that's all right." Searching through the krewe's piled supplies in the gloom, Oscar dug up a spare hard hat and some velcro-strapped toe-protectors. Greta Penninger strapped on her construction gear without a word.

"That's good," Oscar said. He handed her a pencil-shaped hand-scanner on its plastic lanyard. "Now, Doctor, let me acquaint you with our design philosophy here. You see, at heart, our system's very flexible and simple. The computer always knows the location of every component that's been tagged and initialized. The system also has complete algorithms for assembling the building from simple compo-nent parts. There are millions of possible ways of getting from start to finish, so it's just a question of coordinating all the efforts, and always keeping track. Thanks to distributed, parallel, assembly process-ing. . ."

"Never mind, I get all that. I was watching you."

"Oh." Oscar jammed his spiel back into its can. He tipped up his plastic hard-hat brim and looked her over. She wasn't kidding. "Well, you do the mortar, and I'll carry blocks. Can you do mortar?"

"I can do mortar."

Dr. Penninger began carefully lathering goo with the garrulous trowel. The components chattered on cheerfully, Dr. Penninger said nothing at all, and the pace of Oscar's work more than doubled. Dr. Penninger was really going after it. It was the middle of the night, it was lonely, desolate, windy, and near freezing, and this scientist really meant business. She worked like a horse. Like a demon.