"That's really nice of you," Perry said. He'd met a couple people in Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadn't known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work days he'd meet reporters who called themselves fans, but that was just blowing smoke. Now he was meeting people who seemed to really mean it. Not many, thank G.o.d.

"He's just like a puppy," Hilda said, pinching Ernie's cheek. "All enthusiasm."

Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of their hair. "These two are going to help me build the ride," he said. "Hilda's an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic."

"Women's health clinic or something?" Perry asked. He was starting to sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic midwestern girls that he'd seen at five minute intervals since getting off his flight in Madison. He didn't think he'd ever met one like her.

"No," Hilda said. "Metabolic health. Lots of people get the fatkins treatment at p.u.b.erty, either because their fatkins parents talk them into it or because they hate their baby fat."

Perry shook his head. "Come again?"

"You think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? It's h.e.l.l on your digestive system. Not to mention you spend a fortune on food. A lot of people get to college and just switch to high-calorie powdered supplements because they can't afford enough real food to stay healthy, so you've got all these kids sucking down vanilla slurry all day just to keep from starving. We provide counseling and mitigation therapies to kids who want it."

"And when they get out of college -- do they get the treatment again?"

"You can't. The mitigation's permanent. People who take it have to go through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly and exercising."

"Do they get fat?"

She looked away, then down, then back up at him. "Yes, most of them do. How could they not? Everything around them is geared at people who need to eat five times as much as they do. Even the salads all have protein powder mixed in with them. But it is *possible* to eat right. You've never had the treatment, have you?"

Perry shook his head. "Trick metabolism though. I can eat like a hog and not put on an ounce."

Hilda reached out and squeezed his bicep. "Really -- and I suppose that all that lean muscle there is part of your trick metabolism, too?"

She left her hand where it was.

"OK, I do a fair bit of physical labor too. But I'm just saying -- if they get fat again after they reverse the treatment --"

"There are worse things than being fat."

Her hand still hadn't moved. He looked at Ernie, whom he'd a.s.sumed was her boyfriend, to see how he was taking it. Ernie was looking somewhere else, though, across the ratshkeller, at the huge TV that was showing compet.i.tive multiplayer gaming, apparently some kind of championships. It was as confusing as a hundred air-hockey games being played on the same board, with thousands of zipping, jumping, firing ent.i.ties and jump-cuts so fast that Perry couldn't imagine how you'd make sense of it.

The girl's hand was still on his arm, and it was warm. His mouth was dry but more beer would be a bad idea. "How about some water?" he said, in a bit of a croak.

Luke jumped up to get some, and a silence fell over the table. "So this clinic, how'd you fundraise for it?"

"Papercraft," she said. "I have a lot of friends who are into paper-folding and we modded a bunch of patterns. We did really big pieces, too -- bed-frames, sofas, kitchen-tables, chairs --"

"Like actual furniture?"

"Like actual furniture," she said with a solemn nod. "We used huge sheets of paper and treated them with stiffening, waterproofing and fireproofing agents. We did a frat house's outdoor bar and sauna, with a wind-dynamo -- I even made a steam engine."

"You made a steam engine out of paper?" He was agog.

"You mean to say that *you're* surprised by building stuff out of unusual materials?"

Perry laughed. "Point taken."

"We just got a couple hundred students to do some folding in their spare time and then sold it on. Everyone on campus needs bookshelves, so we started with those -- using accordion-folded arched supports under each shelf. We could paint or print designs on them, too, but a lot of people liked them all-white. Then we did chairs, desks, kitchenette sets, placemats -- you name it. I called the designs 'Multiple Origami.'"

Perry sprayed beer out his nose. "That's awesome!" he said, wiping up the mess with a kleenex that she extracted from a folded paper purse. Looking closely, he realized that the white baseball cap she was wearing was also folded out of paper.

She laughed and rummaged some more in her handbag, coming up with a piece of stiff card. Working quickly and nimbly, she gave it a few deft folds along pre-scored lines, and a moment later she was holding a baseball hat that was the twin of the one she was wearing. She leaned over the table and popped it on his head.

Luke came back with the water and set it down between them, pouring out gla.s.ses for everyone.

"Smooth lid," he said, touching the bill of Perry's cap.

"Thanks," Perry said, draining his water and pouring another gla.s.s. "Well, you people certainly have some pretty cool stuff going on here."

"This is a great town," Luke said expansively, as though he had travelled extensively and settled on Madison, Wisconsin as a truly international hotspot. "We're going to build a kick-a.s.s ride."

"You going to make it all out of paper?"

"Some of it, anyway," Luke said. "Hilda wouldn't have it any other way, right?"

"This one's your show, Luke," she said. "I'm just a fundraiser."

"Anyone hungry?" Hilda said. "I want to go eat something that doesn't have unidentified organ-meat mixed in."

"Go on without me," Ernie said. "I got money on this game."

"Homework," Luke said.

Perry had just eaten, and had planned on spending this night in his room catching up on email. "Yeah, I'm starving," he said. He felt like a high-school kid, but in a good way.

They went out for Ukrainian food, which Perry had never had before, but the crepes and the blood sausage were tasty enough. Mostly, though, he was paying attention to Hilda, who was running down her war stories from the Multiple Origami fundraiser. There were funny ones, sad ones, scary ones, triumphant ones.

Every one of her stories reminded him of one of his own. She was an organizer and so was he and they'd been through practically the same s.h.i.t. They drank gallons of coffee afterward, getting chucked out when the restaurant closed and migrating to a cafe on the main drag where they had low tables and sofas, and they never stopped talking.

"You know," Hilda said, stretching and yawning, "it's coming up on four AM."

"No way," he said, but his watch confirmed it. "Christ." He tried to think of a casual way of asking her to sleep with him. For all their talking, they'd hardly touched on romance -- or maybe there'd been romance in every word.

"I'll walk you to your hotel," she said.

"Hey, that's really nice of you," he said. His voice sounded fakey and forced in his ears. All of a sudden, he wasn't tired at all, instead his heart was hammering in his chest and his blood sang in his ears.

There was hardly any talk on the way back to the hotel, just the awareness of her steps and his in time with one another over the cold late-winter streets. No traffic at that hour, and hardly a sound from any of the windows they pa.s.sed. The town was theirs.

At the door to his hotel -- another stack of the ubiquitous capsules, these geared to visiting parents -- they stopped. They were looking at one another like a couple of googly-eyed kids at the end of a date in a sitcom.

"Um, what's your major?" he said.

"Pure math," she said.

"I think I know what that is," he said. It was freezing out on the street. "Theory, right?"