He cleared his throat and tried to slow down. "Anyway, to get back to the point of my personal history, they had this blue-helmet Danish commando type who had led the raid in Colombia, and he ended up as the expert technical adviser on my dad's movie. This Danish commando and my dad got to be drinking buddies on the set, so when my dad came up with this adoption notion, the Danish guy naturally thought, 'Well, why not one of the kids from my own opera-tion?' and he pulled some strings in Copenhagen. And that's how I ended up in Hollywood."

"Are you really telling me the truth?"

"Yes, I am."

"Could I drive you back to the lab and take a tissue sample?"

"Look, the tissue's just tissue. To hell with my tissue. The truth is a much bigger thing than my tissue. The truth is that people have a prejudice against persons like me. I can take their point, too, frankly. I can run a political campaign and I can get away with that, but I don't think I'd ever actually vote for me. Because I'm not sure that I can really trust me. I'm really different. There are big chunks in my DNA that probably aren't even of human origin."

He spread his hands. "Let me tell you how different I am. I don't sleep. I run a permanent mild fever. I grew up really fast-and not just because I spent my childhood in the L.A. fast lane. I'm twenty-eight now, but most people assume I'm in my mid-thirties. I'm sterile-I'll never have kids of my own-and I've had three bouts of liver cancer. Luckily, that kind of cancer treats pretty easily nowadays, but I'm still on angiogenesis inhibitors, plus growth-factor blockers, and I have to take antitumor maintenance pills three times a month. The other eight kids from that raid-five of them died young of major organ cancers, and the other three . . . well, they're Danes. They are three identical Danish women with-let me just put it this way-with extremely troubled personal lives."

"Are you sure you're not making this up? It's such a compelling story. Do you really have an elevated body-core temperature? Have you ever had a PET-scan done?"

He looked at her meditatively. "You know, you're really taking this very well. I mean, most people who hear this story have to go through a certain shock period. . . ."

"I'm not a medical doctor, and genetic expression isn't really my field. But I'm not shocked by that story. I'm astonished by it, of course, and I'd really like to confirm some details in my lab, but . . . " She considered it, then found the word. "Mostly, I'm very intrigued."

"Really?"

"That was truly a profound abdication of scientific ethics. It vio-lated the Declaration of Helsinki, plus at least eight standards of con-duct with human subjects. You're obviously a very brave and capable man, to have overcome that childhood tragedy, and achieved the suc-cess that you have." Oscar said nothing. Suddenly, his eyes were stinging. He'd seen a wide variety of reactions to his personal background confession. Mostly, reactions from women-because he rarely had to confess it at all, except to women. A business relationship could be begun and concluded without outing himself; a sexual relationship, never. He'd seen a full gamut of reactions. Shock, horror, amusement, sympathy; even a shrug and shake of the head. Indifference. Almost always, the truth gnawed at them over the long term.

But he'd never seen a reaction like Greta Penninger's.

Oscar and his secretary Lana Ramachandran were walking through the garden behind the sloping white walls of the Genetic Fragmenta-tion Clinic. The garden bordered one of the staff housing sections, so there were children around. The constant piercing screams of young children meant that this was a good place to talk privately.

"Stop sending the flowers to her dorm residence," Oscar told her. "She never goes there. Basically, she never sleeps."

"Where should I have them delivered, then?"

"Into her laboratory. That's more or less where she lives. And let's turn up the heat on those bouquets-move off the pansies and zinnias, and right into tuberoses."

Lana was shocked. "Not tuberoses already!"

"Well, you know what I mean. Also, we're going to start feeding her soon. She doesn't eat properly-I can tell that. And later, we'll style her and dress her. But we'll have to work our way up to that."

"How are we even supposed to reach her? Dr. Penninger works inside the Hot Zone," Lana said. "That's a full-scale Code 4 bio-hazard facility. It's got its own airlocks, and the walls are eight feet thick." He shrugged. "Dip the flowers into liquid nitrogen. Get 'em sealed in plastic. Whatever."

His secretary groaned. "Oscar, what is it with you? Have you lost your mind? You can't really be making a play for that woman. I know your type really well by now, and she's definitely not your type. In fact, I've asked around some-and Dr. Penninger is not anybody's type. You're gonna do yourself an injury."

"Okay, maybe I have a sudden aberrant sweet tooth." Lana was genuinely pained. She wanted the best for him. She was quite humorless, but she was very efficient. "You shouldn't act like this. It's just not smart. She's on the board of directors, she's someone who's officially in charge around here. And you're a staffer for her Senate oversight committee. That's a definite conflict of inter-est. "

"I don't care."

Lana was in despair. "You're always doing this. Why? I can't believe you got away with shacking up with that journalist. She was covering the campaign! Somebody could have maqe a huge ethics stink about that. And before that, there was that Crazy architecture girl . . . and before that, there was that worthless Boston city man-agement girl. . . . You can't keep getting away with this, cutting things close this way. It's like some kind of compulsion."

"Look, Lana, you knew my romantic life was a problem as soon as you met me. I do have ethics. I draw the line at having an affair with anyone in my own krewe. All right? That would be bad, that would be workplace harassment, it's like incest. But here I am, and what's past is past. Greta Penninger has made her career here, she's someone who really understands this facility. Plus, she's very bored, and I know that I can get to her. So we have commonalities. I think we can help each other out."

"I give up! I'll never figure out men. You don't even know what you want, do you? You wouldn't know what to do with happiness if it was standing right in front of you, begging you to notice." Lana had gone too far now. Oscar assembled and aimed a scowl at her.

"Look, Lana, when you find me some happiness that you know will really suit me-me, in particular-then write me a memo about it. All right? In the meantime, can you get off the dime with the flowers effort?"

"All right, I'll try," she said. "I'll do my best." Lana was angry with him now, so she stalked off into the gardens. He couldn't help that. Lana would come around. Lana always did. Dealing with him took her mind off her own troubles. Oscar strolled on, whistling a bit, examining the fretted dome of the sky, an evil winter skein of gray scudding harmlessly above the sweet federal bubble of warm and fra-grant air. He tossed his hat in his hand, catching it by its sharp and perfect brim. Life was definitely looking up for him. He skirted a blooming mass of rare azaleas in order to miss a drowsing antelope.

He'd chosen these Collaboratory gardens as his confidential of-fices lately. He'd given up using the Bambakias tour bus, since the bus seemed to attract so many determined bugging efforts. They would have to return the bus to Boston soon, anyway. That seemed just as well-high time, really. There was no use in remaining dependent on loaned equipment. Scratch the old bus, inhabit the brand-new hotel. Just keep the krewe together, keep up the core competencies. Keep the herd moving. It was progress, it was doable.

Fontenot emerged from the flowering brush and discovered him. To Oscar's mild surprise, Fontenot was exactly on schedule. Appar-ently the roadblock situation was easing in Louisiana.

The security man was wearing a straw hat, vest, jeans, and black gum boots. Fontenot had been getting a lot of sun lately. He looked more pleased with himself than Oscar had ever seen him.

They shook hands, checked by habit for tails and eavesdroppers, and fell into pace together.

"You're getting a lot of credit for this Air Force base debacle," Fontenot told him. "Somehow, it's staying news. If the pressure keeps building, something's bound to crack."

"Oh, giving me the credit for that is all Sosik's idea. It's a fallback position for the Senator. If the situation blows a valve, then the experienced chief of staff can always make a fall guy out of the rash young campaign adviser."

Fontenot looked at him skeptically. "Well, I didn't see 'em twist-ing your arm when you did those two major interviews. . . . I don't know how you found the time to get so fully briefed on power black-outs and Louisiana politics."

"Power blackouts are a very interesting topic. The Boston media are important. I'm very sentimental about the Boston media." Oscar laced his hands behind his back. "I admit, it wasn't tactful to publicly call Louisiana 'the Weird Sister of American States.' But it's a truism." Fontenot couldn't be bothered to deny this. "Oscar, I've been pretty busy getting my new house set up properly. But proper security isn't a part-time job. You're still paying me a salary, but I've been letting you down."

"If that bothers you, why not put in a little work on the hotel site for us?

It's a big hit locally. These Buna people love us for it."

"No, listen. Since we'll s-I thought I'd run some full-scale secu-rity scans for you, across the board. And I've got some results for you. You have a security problem."

"Yes?"

"You've offended the Governor of Louisiana."

Oscar shook his head rapidly. "Look, the hunger strike isn't about Governor Huguelet. Huguelet has never been the issue. The issue is the starving air base and the federal Emergency committees. We've scarcely said a word in public about Green Huey."

"The Senator hasn't. But you sure have. Repeatedly." Oscar shrugged. "Okay, obviously we haven't much use for the Governor. The guy's a crooked demagogue. But we're not pushing that. As far as the scandal goes, if anything, we're Huey's tactical allies at the moment."

"Don't be naive. Green Huey doesn't think the way you guys think. He's not some go-along get-along pol, who makes tactical deals with the opposition. Huey is always the center of Huey's universe. So you're for him, or you're agin him."

"Why would Huey make unnecessary enemies? That's just not smart politics."

"Huey does make enemies. He enjoys it. It's part of his game. It always has been. Huey's a smart pol all right, but he can be a one-man goon squad. He learned that when he worked in Texas for Senator Dougal." Oscar frowned. "Look, Dougal's out of the picture now. He's finished, history. If Dougal wasn't in the dry-out clinic, he'd probably be in jail." Fontenot glanced around them with reflexive suspicion. "You shouldn't talk like an attack ad when you're standing inside a place that Dougal built. This lab was always Dougal's favorite project. And as for Huey, he used to work in here. You're walking in Huey's foot-steps. When he was the Senator's chief of staff, he twisted arms around here hard enough to break a few."

"They built this place all right, but they built it crooked."

"Other politicians are crooked too, and they don't build a god-damn thing. East Texas and SouthLouisiana-they finally got their heads together and cut a big piece of the pie for themselves. But things have always run crooked in this part of the country, always. They wouldn't know what to do with clean government. Old Dougal fell down pretty hard in the long run, but that's just Texas. Texas is ornery, Texans like to chew their good old boys up a little bit before they bury them. But Huey learned plenty from Dougal, and he doesn't make Dougal's mistakes. Huey is the Governor of Louisiana now, he's the big cheese, the boss, the kahuna. Huey's got himself two handpicked federal Senators, just to shine his shoes. You're badmouthing Huey up in Boston-but Huey is sitting just over yonder in Baton Rouge. And you're getting in Huey's face."

"All right. I take the point. Go on."

"Oscar, I've seen you do some very clever things with nets, you're a young guy and you grew up using them. But you haven't seen everything that I've seen, so let me spell this out for you nice and careful." They turned around a riotous bougainvillea. Fontenot assembled his thoughts. "Okay. Let's imagine you're a net-based bad guy, netwar militia maybe. And you have a search engine, and it keeps track of all the public mentions of your idol, Governor Etienne-Gaspard Huguelet. Every once in a while, someone appears in public life who cramps the style of your boy. So the offender's name is noticed, and it's logged, and it's assigned a cumulative rating. After someone's name reaches a certain level of annoyance, your program triggers automatic responses." Fontenot adjusted his straw hat. "The response is to send out automatic messages, urging people to kill this guy."

Oscar laughed. "That's a new one. That's really crazy."

"Well, yeah. Craziness is the linchpin of the whole deal. You see, there have always been a lot of extremists, paranoiacs, and antisocial losers, all very active on the nets. . . . In the Secret Service, we found out a long time ago that the nets are a major intelligence asset for us. Demented, violent people tend to leave some kind of hint, or track, or signal, well before they strike. We compiled a hell of a lot of psychological profiles over the years, and we discovered some com-monalities. So, if you know the evidence to look for, you can actually sniff some of these guys out, just from the nature of their net activi-ties. "

"Sure. User profiles. Demographic analysis. Stochastic indexing. Do it all the time."

"We built those profile sniffers quite a while back, and they turned out pretty useful. But then the State Department made the mistake of kinda lending that software to some undependable al-lies. . . ." Fontenot stopped short as a spotted jaguarundi emerged from under a bush, stretched, yawned, and ambled past them. ''The problem came when our profile sniffers fell into the wrong hands .... See, there's a different application for that protective software. Bad people can use it to compile large mailing lists of dan-gerous lunatics. Finding the crazies with net analysis, that's the easy part. Convincing them to take action, that part is a little harder. But if you've got ten or twelve thousand of them, you've got a lotta fish, and somebody's bound to bite. If you can somehow put it into their heads that some particular guy deserves to be attacked, that guy might very well come to harm."

"So you're saying that Governor Huguelet has put me on an enemies list?"

"No, not Huey. Not personally. He ain't that dumb. I'm saying that somebody, somewhere, built some software years ago that auto-matically puts Green Huey's enemies onto hit lists."

Oscar removed his hat and carefully adjusted his hair. ''I'm rather surprised I haven't heard about this practice."

"We Secret Service people don't like it publicized. We do what we can to fight back-we wiped out a whole nest of those evil things during Third Panama . . . but we can't monitor every offshore netserver in the world. About the best we can do is to monitor our own informants. We always check 'em, to see if they're getting email urging them to kill somebody. So have a look at this printout."

They found a graceful wooden garden bench. A small child in a pinafore was sitting on it, patiently petting an exotic stoat, but she didn't seem to mind adult company. Oscar silently read through the text, twice, carefully. The text was nowhere near so sinister and sophisticated as he had somehow imagined it. In fact, the text was crude and banal. He found it deeply embarrassing to discover his own name inserted into a mur-derous rant so blatant and so badly composed. He nodded, slipped the paper back to Fontenot. The two of them smiled, tipped their hats to the little girl, and went back to walking.

"It's pathetic!" Oscar said, once they were out of earshot. "That's spam from a junk mailbot. I've seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can't even punctuate!"

"Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings."

Oscar thought this over. "How many of those messages were mailed out, do you suppose?"

"Maybe a couple of thousand? The USSS protective-interest files list over three hundred thousand people. A clever program wouldn't hit up every possible lunatic every single time, of course."

"Of course." Oscar nodded thoughtfully. "And what about Bambakias?

Is he in danger too?"

"I briefed the Senator about this situation. They'll step up his security in Cambridge and Washington. But I figure you're in much more trouble than he is. You're closer, you're louder, and you're a lot easier."

"Hmmm .. I see. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Jules. You're making very good sense, as always. So what would you advise?"

"I advise better security. The commonsense things. Break up your daily routine. Go to places where you can't be expected. Keep a safe house ready, in case of trouble. Watch out for strangers, for any-body who might be stalking you, or workin' up the nerve. Avoid crowds whenever possible. And you do need a bodyguard."

"I don't have time for all that, though. There's too much work for me here."

Fontenot sighed. "That's exactly what people always tell us . . . . Oscar, I was in the Secret Service for twenty-two years. It's a career, we have a real job of work. You don't hear a lot in public about the Secret Service, but the Secret Service is a very busy outfit. They shut down the old CIA, they broke up the FBI years ago, but the USSS has been around almost two hundred years now. We never go away. Because the threat never goes away. People in public life get death threats. They get 'em all the time. I've seen hundreds of death threats. They're very common things for famous people. I never saw a real-life attempted assassination, though. Spent my whole career care-fully watchin' and waitin' for one, and it never, ever happened. Until one fine day, that car bomb happened. Then I lost my leg."

"I understand."

"You need to come to terms with this. It's reality. It's real, and you have to adjust to it, but at the same time, you can't let it stop you." Oscar said nothing.

"The sky is a different color when you know that you might get shot at. Things taste different. It can get to you, make you wonder if a public life's worthwhile. But you know, despite stuff like this, this is not an evil or violent society." Fontenot shrugged. "Really, it isn't. Not anymore. Back when I was a young agent, America was truly violent then. Huge crime rates, crazy drug gangs, automatic weapons very cheap and easy. Miserable, angry, pitiful people. People with grudges, people with a lot of hate inside. But nowadays, this just isn't a violent time anymore. It's just a very weird time. People don't fight real hard for anything in particular, when they know their whole lives could be turned inside out in a week flat. People's lives don't make sense anymore, but most people in America, the poor people espe-cially, they're a lot happier than they used to be. They might be pro-foundly lost, like your Senator likes to say, but they're not all crushed and desperate. They're just . . . wandering around. Drifting. Hang-ing loose. They're at very loose ends."

"Maybe."

"If you lie low awhile, this business will pass right over you. You'll move on to Boston or Washington, on to other issues, out of Huey's hair. Automated hit lists are like barbed wire, they're nasty but they're very stupid. They don't even understand what they read. Once you're yesterday's news, the machines will just forget you."

"I don't intend to become yesterday's news for quite a while, Jules."

"Then you'd better learn how famous people go on living."

Oscar was determined not to have his morale affected by Fontenot's security alarm. He went back to work on the hotel. The hotel was coming along with the usual fairy-tale rapidity of a Bambakias structure. The whole krewe was pitching in; they had all been in-fected by the Bambakias ideology, so they all protested stoutly to one another that they wouldn't miss the fun of construction for any-thing.

Strangely enough, the work really did become fun, in its own way; there was a rich sense of schadenfreude in fully sharing the suf-ferings of others. The system logged the movements of everyone's hands, cruelly eliminating any easy method of deceiving your friends while you yourself slacked off work. Distributed instantiation was fun in the way that hard-core team sports were fun. Balconies flew up, archways and pillars rose, random jumbles crystallized into spacious sense and reason. It was like lashing your way up a mountainside in cables and crampons, only to notice, all sudden and gratuitous, a fine and lovely view.

There were certain set-piece construction activities guaranteed to attract an admiring crowd: the tightening of tensegrity cables, for in-stance, that turned a loose skein of blocks into a solidly locked-together parapet, good for the next three hundred years. Bambakias krewes took elaborate pleasure in these theatrical effects. The krewe would vigorously play to the crowd when they were doing the boring stuff, they would ham it up. But during these emergent moments when the system worked serious magic, they would kick back all loose and indifferent, with the heavy-lidded cool of twentieth-century jazz musicians.

Oscar was a political consultant. He made it his business to ap-preciate a crowd. He felt about a good crowd the way he imagined dirt farmers feeling about a thriving field of watermelons. However, he had a hard time conjuring up his usual warm appreciation when one of the watermelons might have come there to shoot him.

Of course he was familiar with security; during the campaign, everyone had known that there might be incidents, that the candidate might be hurt. The candidate was mixing with The People, and some few of The People were just naturally evil or insane. There had indeed been a few bad moments on the Massachusetts campaign trail: nasty hecklers, nutty protesters, vomiting drunks, pickpockets, fainting spells, shoving matches. The unpleasant business that made good cam-paign security the functional equivalent of seat belts or fire extinguish-ers. Security was an empty trouble and expense, ninety-nine times in a hundred. On the hundredth instance you were very glad you had been so sensible.

The modern rich always maintained their private security. Body-guards were basic staff for the overclass, just like majordomos, cooks, secretaries, sysadmins, and image consultants. A well-organized per-sonal krewe, including proper security, was simply expected of mod-ern wealthy people; without a krewe, no one would take you seriously. All of this made perfect sense.

And yet none of it had much to do with the stark notion of having one's flesh pierced by a bullet.

It wasn't the idea of dying that bothered him. Oscar could easily imagine dying. It was the ugly sense of meaningless disruption that repelled him. His game board kicked over by a psychotic loner, a rule-breaker who couldn't even comprehend the stakes.

Defeat in the game, he could understand. Oscar could easily imagine himself, for instance, swept up in a major political scandal. Crapped out. Busted. Cast into the wilderness. Broken from the ranks. Disgraced. Shunned, forgotten. A nonperson. A political hulk. Oscar could very well imagine that eventuality. It definitely gave the game a spice. After all, if victory was guaranteed, that wouldn't be victory at all.

But he didn't want to be shot. So Oscar gave up working on the building project. It was a sad sacrifice, because he truly enjoyed the process, and the many glorious opportunities it offered for shattering the preconceptions of backward East Texans. But it tired him to envi-sion the eager and curious crowds as a miasma of enemies. Where were the crosshairs centered?

Constant morbid speculation on the sub-ject of murder was enough to convince Oscar that he himself would have made an excellent assassin-clever, patient, disciplined, resolute, and sleepless. This painful discovery rather harmed his self-image.

He warned his krewe of the developments. Heartwarmingly, they seemed far more worried about his safety than he was himself He retreated back inside the Collaboratory, where he knew he was much more secure. In the event of any violent crime, Col-laboratory security would flip a switch on their Escaped Animal Vec-tor alarms, and every orifice in the dome would lock as tight as a bank vault.

Oscar was much safer under glass-but he could feel himself curtailed, under pressure, his life delimited by unseen hands. However, he still had one major field of counterattack. Oscar dived aggressively into his laptop. He, Pelicanos, Bob Argow, and Audrey Avizienis had all been collaborating on the chams of evidence.

Senator Dougal and his Texan/Cajun mafia of pork-devouring good old boys had been very dutiful at first. Their relatively modest graft vanished at once, slipping methodically over Texas state lines into the vast money laundries of the Louisiana casinos. The funds oozed back later as generous campaign contributions and unexplained second homes in the names of wives and nephews.

But the years had gone on, and the country's financial situation had become stormy and chaotic. With hyperinflation raging and ma-jor industries vanishing like pricked balloons, it was hard to keep up pretenses. Covering their tracks had become boring and tiresome. The Senator's patronage of the Collaboratory was staunch and tireless, and the long-honored causes of advancing science and sheltering endan-gered species still gave most Americans a warm, generous, deeply uncritical feeling. The Collaboratory's work struggled on-while the rot crept on in its shadow, spreading into parts scams, bid rigging, a minor galaxy of kickbacks and hush money. There was featherbedding on jobs, with small-time political allies slotted into dull yet lucrative posts, such as parking and plumbing and laundry. Embezzlement was like alcoholism. It was very hard to step back, and if no one ever called you out on it, then the little red veins began to show.

Oscar felt he was making excellent progress. His options for ac-tion were multiplying steadily.

Then the first homicidal lunatic attacked.

With this occurrence, Oscar was approached by Collaboratory security. Security took the form of a middle-aged female officer, who belonged to a tiny federal police agency known as the "Buna National Collaboratory Security Authority." This woman informed Oscar that a man had just arrived from Muskogee, Oklahoma, banging fruitlessly at the southern airlock and brandishing a foil-wrapped cardboard box that he insisted was a "Super Reflexo-Grenade."

Oscar visited the suspect in his cell. His would-be assassin was disheveled and wretched, utterly lost, with the awful cosmic disloca-tion of the seriously mentally ill. Oscar felt a sudden unexpected pang of terrible pity. It was very clear to him that this man had no focused malice. The poor wretch had simply been hammered into his clumsy evildoing through a ceaseless wicked pelting of deceptive net-based spam. Oscar found himself so shocked by this that he blurted out his instinctive wish that the man might be set free.

The local cops were wisely having none of that, however. They had called the Secret Service office in Austin. Special agents would be arriving presently to thoroughly interrogate Mr. Spencer, and dis-creetly take him elsewhere.

The very next day, another lethal crank showed up. This gen-tleman, Mr. Bell, was cleverer. He had attempted to hide himself in-side a truck shipment of electrical transformers. The truck driver had noticed the lunatic darting out from beneath a tarp, and had called security. A frantic chase ensued, and the stowaway was finally found burrowing desperately into a tussock of rare marsh grass, still gamely clutching a homemade black-powder pistol.

The advent of the third man, Mr. Anderson, was the worst by far. When caught lurking inside a dumpster, Anderson screamed loudly about flying saucers and the fate of the Confederacy, while slashing at his arms with a razor. This bloodshed was very shocking, and it made Oscar's position difficult.