“That’s not my decision, Moira. You need to take it up with his chief of staff”
“Can you put in a good word for me with Leon Sosik? Sosik seems to like you so much.”
“Let me get back to you on that,” Oscar said.
The bus door banged open. Norman-the-Intern stuck his tou-sled head inside and yelled, “We’re eating!”
“Oh, great!” said Moira, leaping from her chair. “Weird Cajun seafood, good good good!”
Oscar put on his hat and jacket and followed her outside. With a flourish, Fontenot was spooning great ladles of swimming brown murk. Oscar brought up the end of the line. He accepted a quilt-paper bowl and a biodegradable spoon.
Oscar gazed at his hot oily gumbo and thought mournfully of Bambakias. The Cambridge PR team had certainly done a thorough job surveilling the fasting Senator: blood pressure, heartbeat, tempera-ture, calorie consumption, borborygmus, bile production — there was no possible doubt about the raw authenticity of his hunger strike. The man’s entire corpus had become public domain. Whenever Bambakias had a sip of his famine apple juice, a forest of monitors twitched and heaved across the country.
Oscar followed them to a picnic table and sat down next to Negi. He examined his brimming spoon. He had seriously considered not eating this evening. That would be a very decent gesture. Well, let someone else make it.
“Angioplasty in a bowl,” Negi said blissfully.
Oscar sipped from his spoon. “Well worth dying for,” he nodded.
“I’m so old,” Negi mourned, blowing on her soup. “Back when I had tatts and piercings, people got on your case if you ate fats and drank yourself stupid. Of course, that was before they found out the full awful truth about pseudo-estrogen poisoning.”
“Well,” Oscar said companionably, “at least those massive pesti-cide disasters got us off the hook with that diet and exercise non-sense. ”
“Pass the bread, Norman,” Rebecca said. “Is that real butter? Real old-fashioned tub butter? Wow!”
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 metaclass="underline" 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.”