"What can I tell you? We're not PR experts. We're only mere, lowly scientists."

"You've got to give me something, Greta. You can't expect to survive on sheer bureaucratic inertia. You have to make a public case." She thought about it seriously. "Knowledge is inherently pre-cious even if you can't sell it," Greta said. "Even if you can't use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It's cen-tral to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell."

Oscar thought it over. " 'Knowledge will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no knowledge.' You know, there might be something to that. I like the sound of it. That's very contemporary rhetoric."

"The feds have to support us, because if they don't, Huey will! Green Huey understands this place, he knows what we do here. Huey will get us by default."

"I appreciate that point too," Oscar said.

"At least we earn a living out of this mess," Greta said. "You can always call it a job-creation effort. Maybe you could declare us all insane and say that labwork is our group therapy. Maybe you could declare the place a national park!"

"Now you're really brainstorming," Oscar said, pleased. "That's very good."

"What's in this for you?" Greta said suddenly.

"That's a fair question." Oscar smiled winningly. "Let's just say that since meeting you I've been won over."

Greta stared. "Surely you don't expect us to believe that you plan to save our bacon, just because you're flirting with me. Not that I mind all the flirting. But if I'm supposed to vamp my way into saving a multimillion-dollar federal facility, the country's in worse shape than I thought."

Oscar smiled. "I can flirt and work at the same time. I'm learning a lot by this discussion, it's very useful. For instance, the way you stroked your hair behind your left ear when you said, 'Maybe you could declare us all insane and say that labwork is our group therapy.' That was a very beautiful moment-a little spark of personal fire in the middle of a very dry policy discussion. That would have looked lovely on-camera."

She stared at him. "Is that what you think about me? Is that how you look at me? It is, isn't it? You're actually being sincere."

"Of course I am. I need to know you better. I want to under-stand you. I'm learning a lot. You see, I'm from your government, and I'm here to help you."

"Well, I want to know you better. So you're not leaving this lab before I get some blood samples. And I'd like to do some PET-scans and reaction tests."

"See, we do have real commonalities."

"Except I still don't understand why you're doing this."

"I can tell you right now where my loyalties lie," Oscar said. ''I'm a patriot."

She looked at him nonplussed.

"I wasn't born in America. In point of fact, I wasn't even born. But I work for our government because I believe in America. I hap-pen to believe that this is a unique society. We have a unique role in the world." Oscar whacked the lab table with an open hand. "We invented the future!

We built it! And if they could design or market it a little better than we could, then we just invented something else more amazing yet. If it took imagination, we always had that. If it took enterprise, we always had it. If it took daring and even ruthlessness, we had it-we not only built the atomic bomb, we used it! We're not some crowd of pious, sniveling, red-green Europeans trying to make the world safe for boutiques! We're not some swarm of Confucian social engineers who would love to watch the masses chop cotton for the next two millennia! We are a nation of hands-on cosmic me-chanics!"

"And yet we're broke," Greta said.

"Why should I care if you clowns don't make any money? I'm from the government! We print the money. Let's get something straight right now. You people face a stark choice here. You can sit on your hands like prima donnas, and everything you've built will go down the tubes. Or you can stop being afraid, you can stop kneeling. You can get on your feet as a community, you can take some pride in yourselves. You can seize control of your own future, and make this place what you know it ought to be. You can or-ganize."

4.

Oscar was physically safe from assault inside the Col-laboratory's Hot Zone. But harassment by random maniacs had made his life politically impossible. Rumor flashed over the local community as swiftly as fire in a spacecraft. People were avoiding him; he was trouble; he was under a curse. Under these difficult circumstances, Oscar thought it wisest to tactfully absent himself. He de-vised a scheme to cover his retreat.

Oscar took the Bambakias tour bus into the Col-laboratory's vehicle repair shed. He had the bus repainted as a Hazardous Materials emergency response vehicle. This had been Fontenot's suggestion, for the wily ex-fed was a master of disguise. Fontenot pointed out that very few people, even roadblockers, would knowingly interfere with the ominous bulk of a vivid yellow Haz--Mat bus. The local Collaboratory cops were delighted to see Oscar leaving their jurisdiction, so they were only too eager to supply the necessary biohazard paint and decals.

Oscar departed before dawn in the repainted cam-paign bus, easing through an airlock gate without an-nouncement or fanfare. He was fleeing practically alone. He took only an absolutely necessary skeleton retinue: Jimmy de Paulo, his driver; Donna Nunez, his stylist; Lana Rama-chandran, his secretary; and, as cargo, Moira Matarazzo.

Moira was the first in his krewe to quit. Moira was a media spokesperson by trade; she was sadly visual and verbal. Moira had never quite understood the transcendent pleasures of building hotels by hand. Moira was also deeply repelled by the hermetic world of the Collaboratory, a world whose peculiar inhabitants found her interests irrelevant. Moira had decided to resign and go home to Boston.

Oscar made no real effort to persuade Moira to stay on with his krewe. He'd thought the matter over carefully, and he couldn't accept the risk of keeping her around. Moira had grown fatally bored. He knew he could no longer trust her. Bored people were just too vul-nerable.

Oscar's trip had been designed to achieve his political goals, while simultaneously throwing off pursuit and assault by armed luna-tics. He would circuit, disguised and unannounced, through Louisi-ana, Washington, DC, and back home to Boston in time for Christmas-all the while maintaining constant net-contact with his krewe in Buna. Oscar's first planned stop was Holly Beach, Louisiana. Holly Beach was a seaside collection of rickety stilt housing on the Gulf Coast, a hurricane-wracked region rashly billing itself as "The Cajun Riviera." Fontenot had made arrangements for Oscar's visit, scoping out the little town and renting a beach house under cover ID. Accord-ing to Fontenot, who was waiting there to join them, the ramshackle tourist burg was perfect for clandestine events. Holly Beach was so battered and primitive that it lacked net-wiring of any kind; it lived on cellphones, sat dishes, and methane generators. In rnid-December-it was now December 19-the seaside village was almost deserted. The likelihood of being taped by paparazzi or jumped by insane assassins was very low in Holly Beach.

Oscar had arranged a quiet rendezvous there with Dr. Greta Pen-ninger. After this beach idyll, Oscar would forge on to Washington, where he was overdue for face-time with his fellow staffers on the Senate Science Committee. After making the necessary obeisances to the Hill rats, Oscar would take the tour bus north to Cambridge, and finally deliver it to the Massachusetts Federal Democrat party HQ. Bambakias would donate his campaign bus to the party. The Senator, always a stalwart party financial patron, would at last be free to write off his investment.

Once in Boston, Oscar would renew his ties to the Senator. He would also have a welcome chance to return home and reorder his domestic affairs. Oscar was very worried about his house. Clare had deserted the place and left for Europe, and it wasn't right or safe to have his home sitting empty. Oscar imagined that Moira might house-sit his place while she looked for another job in Boston. Oscar was far from happy about either the house or Moira, but the house and Moira were two of the loosest ends that he had. It struck him as handy to knit them.

Time passed smoothly on the trip's first leg, to southwest Louisi-ana. Oscar had Jimmy turn up the music, and while Moira sulked in her bunk with a romance novel, Oscar, Lana, and Donna passed their time debating the many potentials of Greta Penninger.

Oscar wasn't shy about this subject. There wasn't much sense in that. It was useless to attempt to hide his love affairs from his own krewe. Certainly they had all known about Clare from the beginning. They might not be entirely thrilled about the advent of Greta, but it was spectator sport. And their discussion had a political point. Greta Penninger was the leading dark-horse candidate for the Collaboratory Director's post. Strangely, the Collaboratory scientists seemed oblivious to the stark fact that their Director's post was at risk. The scientists weren't fully cognizant of their own situation, somehow-they would refer to their power structure as "collegial assessment," or maybe the "succession process"-anything but "politics." But it was politics, all right. The Collaboratory seethed with a form of politics that dared not speak its own name.

This was not to say that science itself was politics. Scientific knowledge was profoundly different from political ideology. Science was an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involved falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible re-sults, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge it-self wasn't a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table was a political construct.

But the things people did with science were every bit as political as the things people did with gold. Oscar had devoted many fascinated hours to study of the scientific community and its weirdly orthogonal power structure. The genuine work of science struck him as sadly geekish and tedious, but he was always charmed by an arcane political arrangement. A scientist with many citations and discoveries had political power. He had scholarly repute, he had academic coattails, he had clout. He could dependably make his voice heard within the science community. He could set agendas, staff conference panels, arrange promotions and travel junkets, take consultation work. He could stay comfortably ahead of the research curve by receiving works before their official publication. A scientist on this inside track had no army, police, or slush fund; but in that quiet yet deadly scientific fashion, he was in firm control of his society's basic resources. He could shunt the flow of opportunity at will, among the lesser beings. He was a player.

Money per se was of secondary importance in science. Scientists who relied too openly on hunting earmarked funds or kissing up for major grants acquired a taint, like politicians slyly playing the race card. This was clearly a workable system. It was very old, and it had many quirks. Those quirks could be exploited. And the Collaboratory had never enjoyed the prolonged attentions of a crack team of political campaigners. The current Director, Dr. Arno Felzian, was in hopeless straits. Felzian had once enjoyed a modestly successful career in genetic re-search, but he had won his exalted post in the Collaboratory through assiduous attention to Senator Dougal's commands. Puppet regimes might thrive as long as the empire held out, but once the alien oppres-sors were gone, their local allies would soon be despised as collabora-tors. Senator Dougal, the Collaboratory's longtime patron and official puppetmaster, had gone down in flames. Felzian, abandoned, no longer knew what to do with himself He was a jumpy, twitching yes-man with no one left to say yes to. Dumping the current Director was a natural first step. But this would make little sense without a solid succession plan. In the little world of the Collaboratory, the Director's departure would create a power vacuum hard enough to suck up everything not nailed down. Who would take the Director's place? The senior members of the board were natural candidates for promotion, but they were payoff-tainted timeservers, just like their Director. At least, they could easily be portrayed that way by anyone willing to work at the job.

Oscar and his krewe advisers agreed that there was one central fracture line in the current power structure: Greta Penninger. She was on the board already, which gave her legitimacy, and a power base of sorts. And she had an untapped constituency-the Collaboratory's ac-tual scientists. These were the long-oppressed working researchers, who did their best to generate authentic lab results while cordially ignoring the real world. The scientists had been cowering in the woodwork for years, while official corruption slowly ate away at their morale, their honor, and their livelihood. But if there was to be any chance of genuine reform inside the Collaboratory, it would have to come from the scientists themselves.

Oscar was optimistic. He was a Federal Democrat, a reform party with a reform agenda, and he felt that reform could work. As a class, the scientists were untouched and untapped; they oozed raw political potential. They were a very strange lot, but there were far more of these people inside the Collaboratory than he would ever have guessed. There were swarms of them. It was as if science had sucked up everyone on the planet who was too bright to be practical. Their selfless dedication to their work was truly a marvel to him.

Oscar had swiftly recovered from his initial wonder and astonish-ment. After a month of close study, Oscar realized that the situation made perfect sense. There wasn't enough money in the world to pay merely normal people to work as hard as scientists worked. Without this vitalizing element of cranky idealism from a demographic fringe group, the scientific enterprise would have collapsed centuries ago.

He'd expected federal scientists to behave more or less like other federal bureaucrats. Instead he'd discovered a lost world, a high-tech Easter Island where a race of gentle misfits created huge and slightly pointless intellectual statuary.

Greta Penninger was one of these little people, the Col-laboratory's high-IQ head-in-the-clouds proletariat. Unfortunately, she talked and dressed just like one of them, too. However, Greta had real promise. There was basically nothing wrong with the woman that couldn't be set straight with a total makeover, power dressing, im-proved debate skills, an issue, an agenda, some talking points, and a clever set of offstage handlers. Such was the mature consensus of Oscar's krewe. As they dis-cussed their situation, Oscar, Lana, and Donna were also playing poker. Poker was truly Oscar's game. He rarely failed to lose at poker. It never seemed to occur to his opponents that since he was quite wealthy he could lose money with impunity. Oscar would deliberately play just well enough to put up a fight. Then he would overreach himself, lose crushingly, and feign deep distress. The others would delightedly rake up their winnings and look at him with Olympian pity. They'd be so pleased with themselves, and so thoroughly con-vinced of his touching lack of cleverness and deceit, that they would forgive him anything.

"There's just one problem though," Donna said, expertly shuffling the deck.

"What's that?" said Lana, munching a pistachio.

"The campaign manager should never sleep with the candidate."

"She's not really a candidate," Lana said.

''I'm not really sleeping with her," Oscar offered.

"He will, though," Donna said wisely.

"Deal," Oscar insisted.

Donna dealt the cards. "Maybe it's all right. It's just a fling. He can't stay there, and she can't ever leave. So it's Romeo and Juliet without that ugly bother of dying."

Oscar ignored her. "You're shy, Lana." Lana threw in half a Euro. The krewe always played poker with European cash. There was American cash around, flimsy plastic stuff, but most people wouldn't take American cash anymore. It was hard to take American cash seri-ously when it was no longer convertible outside U.S. borders. Besides, all the bigger bills were bugged.

Corky, Fred, Rebecca Pataki, and Fontenot were already waiting in Holly Beach. Backed by the krewe with their on-line catalogs, they had made a touching effort with the rented beach house. They'd had ninety-six hours to put the wretched place in order. From the out-side it was unchanged: a ramshackle mess of creaking stairs, tarry wooden stilts, salt-eaten slatted porches. A flat-roofed yellow cheesebox.

Inside, though, the desolate wooden shack now featured hooked rugs, tasteful curtains, cozy oil-flow heaters, real pillows, and flowered sheets. There was a cloud of little road amenities: shower caps, soap, towels, roses, bathrobes, house slippers. It wouldn't have fooled Lorena Bambakias, but his krewe still had the skills; they'd pried the place loose from squalor. Oscar climbed into the bed and slept for five hours, a long time for him. He woke feeling refreshed and full of pleasantly untapped potential. At dawn he ate an apple from the tiny fridge and went for a long walk on the beach.

It was gusty and cold, but the sun was rising over the steel-gray Gulf of Mexico and casting the world into wintry clarity. This local beach wasn't much to brag about. Since the ocean had risen two feet in the past fifty years, the rippled brown shoreline had a gimcrack, unhappy look. The original site of the Holly Beach settlement was now many meters out to sea. The relocated buildings had been moved upslope into a former cow pasture, leaving a network of old cracked pavement diving forlornly into the surf Needless to say, many such structures on the rim of the conti-nent had not been so fortunate. It was a common matter to find boardwalks, large chunks of piering, even entire homes washing up onto American beaches. Oscar strolled past a glittering shoal of smashed aluminum. The plethora of drift junk filled him with a pleasant melancholy. Every beach he'd ever known had boasted its share of rusted bicycles, water-logged couches, picturesque sand-etched medical waste. In his opin-ion, zealots like the Dutch complained far too much about the inconveniences of rising seas. Like all Europeans, the Dutch were stuck in the past, unable to come to pragmatic, workable terms with new global realities.

Unfortunately, many of the same charges could be leveled at his own United States. Oscar brooded over his ambiguous feelings as he carefully skirted the foamy surf in his polished shoes. Oscar genuinely considered himself an American patriot. Deep in his cold and silent heart of hearts, he was as devoted to the American polity as his profes-sion and his colleagues would allow him to be. Oscar genuinely re-spected and savored the archaic courtliness of the United States Senate. The Senate's gentlemen's-club aspect strongly appealed to him. Those leisurely debates, the cloakrooms, the rules of order, that personalized, pre-industrial sense of dignity and gravitas. . . . It seemed to him that a perfect world would have worked much like the U.S. Senate. A solid realm of ancient flags and dark wood paneling, where responsible, intelligent debate could take place within a fortress of shared values. Oscar recognized the United States Senate as a strong and graceful structure built to last by political architects committed to their work. It was a system that he would have been delighted to exploit, under better circumstances.

But Oscar was a child of his own time, and he knew he didn't have that luxury. He knew it was his duty to confront and master modern political reality. Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierar-chies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the indus-trial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and successfully legitimize. There were sixteen major political parties now, divided into war-ring blocs and ceaseless internecine purges, defections, and counterpurges. There were privately owned cities with millions of "clients" where the standard rule of law was cordially ignored. There were price-fixing mafias, money laundries, outlaw stock markets. There were black, gray, and green superbarter nets. There were health maintenance organizations staffed by crazed organ-sharing cliques, where advanced medical techniques were in the grip of any quack able to download a surgery program. Wiretapping net-militias flour-ished, freed of any physical locale. There were breakaway counties in the American West where whole towns had sold out to tribes of no-mads, and simply dropped off the map.

There were town meetings in New England with more compu-tational power than the entire U.S. government had once possessed. Congressional staffs exploded into independent fiefdoms. The execu-tive branch bogged down in endless turf wars in an acronym soup of agencies, everyone of them exquisitely informed and eager to net-work, and hence completely unable to set a realistic agenda and con-centrate on its own duties. The nation was poll-crazy, with cynical manipulation at an all-time toxic high-the least little things produced tooth-gritting single-issue coalitions and blizzards of automated law-suits. The net-addled tax code, having lost all connection to fiscal reality, was routinely evaded by electronic commerce and wearily en-dured by the citizenry.

With domestic consensus fragmenting, the lost economic war with China had allowed the Emergency congressional committees to create havoc of an entirely higher order. With the official declaration of Emergency, Congress had signed over its birthright to a superstruc-ture of supposedly faster-moving executive committees. This desperate act had merely layered another operating system on top of the old one. The country now had two national governments, the original, halting, never-quite-superseded legal government, and the spasmodic, increas-ingly shrill declarations of the State-of-Emergency cliques.

Oscar had his own private reservations about certain policies of the Federal Democrats, but he felt that his party's programs were basi-cally sound. First, the Emergency committees had to be reined in and dismantled. They had no real constitutional legitimacy; they had no direct mandate from the voters; they violated basic principles of sepa-ration of powers; they were not properly accountable; and worst of all, they had all been swiftly riddled with corruption. The Emergency committees were simply failing to govern successfully. They were sometimes rather popular, thanks to their assiduous cultivation of sin-gle-issue groups, but the longer the Emergency lasted, the closer they came to a slow-motion coup and outright usurpation of the Republic.

With the committees defanged and the State of Emergency re-pealed, it would be time to reform the state-federal relationship. De-centralization of powers had simply gone too far. A policy once meant to be fluid and responsive had turned into blinding, boiling confusion. It would be necessary to have a constitutional convention and abolish the outdated, merely territorial approach to citizen representation. There would have to be a new fourth branch of government made up of nongeographical nets. With these major acts of reform, the stage would finally be set to attack the nation's real problems. This had to be done without malice, without frenzy, and without repellent attacks of partisan histrionics. Oscar felt that this could be done. It looked bad . . . it looked very bad . . . to the outside observer, it looked well nigh hopeless. Yet the American polity still had great reserves of creativity-if the coun-try could be rallied and led in the right direction. Yes, it was true that the nation was broke, but other countries had seen their currencies annihilated and their major industries rendered irrelevant. This condi-tion was humiliating, but it was temporary, it was survivable. When you came down to it, America's abject defeat in economic warfare was a very mild business compared to, say, twentieth-century carpet bombing and armed invasion.

The American people would just have to get over the fact that software no longer had any economic value. It wasn't fair, it wasn't just, but it was a fait accompli. In many ways, Oscar had to give the Chinese credit for their cleverness in making all English-language in-tellectual property available on their nets at no charge. The Chinese hadn't even needed to leave their own borders in order to kick the blocks out from under the American economy. In some ways, this brutal collision with Chinese analog reality could be seen as a blessing. As far as Oscar had it figured, America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character really wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of so-cially responsible centurions.

Oscar turned on the brown ribbed sands of the beach and began retracing his steps. He was enjoying being out of touch like this; he'd abandoned his laptop back in the krewe bus, he'd even left all the phones out of his sleeves and pockets. He felt that he should do this more often. It was important for a professional political operative to step back periodically, to take the time necessary to put his thoughts and intuitions into order and perspective. Oscar rarely created these vital little moments for himself-he'd somehow dimly intuited that he'd have plenty of time to develop his personal philosophy if he ever ended up behind bars. But he was giving himself some time for thought now, in this forgotten world of sand and wind and waves and chilly sunlight, and he could feel that it was doing him a lot of good. An internal pressure had been building. He'd learned a great deal in the past thirty days, devouring whole reams of alien data in order to get up to speed, but hadn't yet put it into an organized perspective. His data-stuffed head had become a disassembled mass of jumbled blocks. He was keyed up, tense, distracted, getting a little snappish.

Maybe it was just that long drought between women.

They were expecting Greta before noon. Negi had prepared a lovely seafood lunch for her. But Greta was late. The krewe ate lav-ishly inside the bus, popping corks and keeping up appearances, even joking about the no-show. But when Oscar left them, his mood had grown much darker. He went into the beach house to wait for Greta, but the rooms that had once seemed louche yet charming now revealed themselves to him as merely sordid. Why was he fooling himself, taking such pains to imitate a love nest? Genuine love nests were places full of real meaning for lovers, full of things conveying some authentic emotional resonance. Little things, silly mementos maybe, a feather, a seashell, a garter, framed photos, a ring. Not these hired curtains, that hired bedspread, that set of fatally new antiseptic toothbrushes.

He sat on the creaking brass bed and gazed about the room, and the world turned inside out for him suddenly. He had been prepared to be charming and witty, he had been so looking forward to it, but she was not coming. She had wised up. She was too smart to come. He was alone in this small ugly building, marinating in his own juices.

A slow hour passed, and he was glad she hadn't come. He was glad for himself of course, because it had been stupid to imagine a liaison with that woman, but he was also glad for her. He didn't feel crushed by her rejection, but he could see himself more realistically now. He was a predator, he was seductive and cold. He was a creature of trembling web lines and shiny bright chitinous surfaces. Wise gray moth, to stay inside her home. His course seemed very clear now. He would go back to Wash-ington, file a committee report, and stay there at his proper job. No one would really expect much from his very first Senate assignment. He had more than enough material for a devastating expose of the Collaboratory's internal workings. If that wasn't in the cards, he could play up the Collaboratory's positive aspects: the profound effect of biotech spinoffs on the regional economy, for instance. He could trumpet the futuristic glamour of the next big federal breakthrough: high-tech industrial neuroscience. Whatever they wanted to hear.

He could become a career Hill rat, a policy wonk. They were a large and thriving tribe. He could invest ever more elaborate amounts of energy on ever more arcane and tiresome subjects. He'd never run another political campaign, and he'd certainly never win political power in his own right, but if he didn't burn out as a policy cog, he might well flourish. There might be something pleasant at the end, maybe a cabinet post, a guest professorship somewhere in his final declining days. . . .

He left the beach house, unable to bear himself The door was open in the tour bus, but he couldn't face his krewe. He went to Holly Beach's single grocery store, a cheerfully ramshackle place, its floors unpainted and its raftered ceiling hung with old fishing nets. It had an entire towering wall of shiny floor-to-ceiling booze. Souvenir fishing hats. Fish line and plastic lures. Desiccated alligator heads, eerie knickknacks carved from Spanish moss and coconut. Tatty, half-bootlegged music cassettes-he found it intensely annoying that Dutch music was so popular now. How on earth could a drowning country with a miniscule, aging population have better pop music than the United States?

He picked up a pair of cheap beach sandals, a deeply unnecessary impulse buy. There was a dark-haired teenage girl waiting behind the counter, a Louisiana local. She was bored and lonely in the cold and quiet grocery, and she gave him a dazzling smile, a hello-handsome-stranger smile. She was wearing a bad nubby sweater and a flowered shift of cheap gene-spliced cotton, but she was good-tempered and pretty. Sexual fantasy, crushed and derailed by the day's disappoint-ments, flashed back into life, on a strange parallel track. Yes, young woman of the bayous, I am indeed a handsome stranger. I am clever, rich, and powerful. Trust me, I can take you far away from all this. I can open your eyes to the great wide world, carry you away to gilded corridors of luxury and power. I can dress you, I can teach you, remold you to my will, I can transform you utterly. All you have to do for me is . . . There was nothing she could do for him. His interest faded.

He left the grocery with his purchased sandals in a paper bag, and began walking the sandy streets of Holly Beach. There was something so naively crass and seedy about the town that it had a strange deca-dent charm, a kind of driftwood Gothic. He could imagine Holly Beach as queerly interesting in the summer: straw-hatted families chatting in Acadian French, tattooed guys firing up their barbecue smokers, offshore oil workers on holiday, dredging up something leathery and boneless in a seine. A spotted dog was following him, sniffing at his heels. It was very odd to encounter a dog after weeks in an environment infested with kinkajous and caribou. Maybe it was finally time for him to break down and acquire his own personal exotic animal. That would be very fashionable, a nice memento of his stay. His own personal genetic toy. Something very quick and carniv-orous. Something with big dark spots.

He came across the oldest house in town. The shack was so old that it had never been moved; it had been sitting in the same place for decades as the seas rose. The shack had once been a long and lonely distance from the beach, though now it was quite near the water. The building looked queerly haphazard, as if it had been banged together over a set of weekends by somebody's brother-in-law.

Storms, sand, and pitiless Southern sun had stripped off a weary succession of cheap layered paints, but the shack was still inhabited. It wasn't rented, either. Someone was living in it full-time. There was a dented postbox and a sandblasted mesh sat-dish on the metal roof, trailing a severed cable. There were three wooden steps up to the rust-hinged door, steps thick and grained and splintery, half buried in damp sand, with a lintel of sandblasted wood that might have been sixty years old and looked six hundred.

In the winter light of late afternoon there was a look to that smoky woodgrain that enchanted him. Ancient brown nail holes. White seagull droppings. He had a strong intuition that someone very old was living here. Old, blind, feeble, no one left to love them, family gone away now, story all over.

He placed his bare palm tenderly against the sun-warmed wood. Awareness flowed up his arm, and he tasted a sudden premonition of his own death. It would be exactly like this moment: alone and sere. Broken steps too tall for him to ever climb again. Mortality's swift scythe would slash clean through him and leave nothing but empty clothes. Shaken, he walked quickly back to the rented beach house. Greta was waiting there. She was wearing a hooded gray jacket and carrying a carpetbag.

Oscar hurried up. "Hi! Sorry! Did you catch me out?"

"I just got here. There were roadblocks. I couldn't call ahead."

"That's all right! Come on upstairs, it's warm."

He ushered her up the stairs and into the beach house. Once inside, she looked about herself skeptically. "It's hot in here."

"I'm so glad you've come." He was appallingly glad to see her. So much so that he felt close to tears. He retreated into the hideous kitchenette and quickly poured himself a glass of rusty tap water. He sipped it, and steadied himself. "Can I get you something?"

"I just wanted ... " Greta sighed and sat down unerringly in the room's ugliest piece of furniture, a ghastly thirdhand fabric arm-chair. "Never mind."

"You missed lunch. Can I take your coat?"

"I didn't want to come at all. But I want to be honest . . . . " Oscar sat on the rug near the heater, and pulled off one shoe. "I can see you're upset." He pulled off the other shoe and crossed his legs on the rug.

"That's all right, I understand that perfectly. It was a long trip, it's difficult, our situation's very difficult. I'm just glad that you've come, that's all. I'm happy to see you. Very happy. I'm touched."

She said nothing, but looked warily attentive.

"Greta, you know that I'm fond of you. Don't you? I mean that. We have a rapport, you and I. I don't quite know why, but I want to know. I want you to be glad that you came here. We're alone at last, that's a rare privilege for us, isn't it? Let's talk it out, let's put it all on the table now, let's be good friends."

She was wearing perfume. She had brought an overnight bag. She was clearly having an attack of cold feet, but the underlying in-dicators looked solid.

"I want to understand you, Greta. I can understand, you know. I think I do understand you a little. You're a very bright woman, much brighter than most people, but you have insight, you're sensitive. You've done great things with your life, great accomplishments, but there's no one on your side. I know that's the truth. And it's sad. I could be on your side, if you'd let me." He lowered his voice. "I can't make any conventional promises, because we're just not conventional people. But the two of us could be great friends. We could even be lovers. Why can't we? The odds are against us, but that doesn't make it hopeless."

It was very quiet. He should have thought to put on some music. "I think that you need someone. You need someone who can understand your interests, someone to be your champion. People don't appreciate you for what you are. People are using you for their own small-minded little ends. You're very brave and dedicated, but you have to break out of your shell, you can't go on retreating and being polite, you can't go on accommodating those goons, they'll drive you crazy, they're not fit to touch the hem of your shoe. Your gown. The, what the hell, your lab coat." He paused and drew a shaky breath. "Look, just tell me what you need."

"I was wrong about you," she said. "I thought you were going to grab me."

"No, of course I'm not going to grab you." He smiled.

"Stop smiling. You think I'm very innocent, don't you. I'm not innocent. Listen to me. I have a body, I have hormones, I have a limbic system. I'm a sexual person. Look, I've been sitting up there under those cameras bored to death, restless, going crazy, and then you show up. You show up, and you're coming on to me."

She stood up. "I'll tell you what I need, since you want to know so badly. I need a guy who's kind of cold-blooded and disposable, who won't kick up a big fuss. He has to want me in this completely shallow, obvious way. But you're not the kind of guy I want, are you. Not really." There was a ringing silence.

"I should have found some way to tell you all that, before you came down here, and took all this trouble. I almost didn't come at all, but . . . " She sat back down wearily. "Well, it was more honest to be here face-to-face, and have it all out, all at once."

Oscar cleared his throat. "Do you know the game of go? Go-bang?

Wei-chi, in Chinese."

"I've heard of it."

Oscar got up and fetched his travel set. "Senator Bambakias taught me how to play go. It's a core metaphor for his krewe, it's how we think. So if you want to mix with modern politicians and accom-plish something, then you need to learn this game right away."