“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 traiclass="underline" 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. Bodyguards 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.”