Kevin and Oscar had synchronized their departure for midnight. Oscar arrived late. His wristwatch was malfunctioning. He’d been running a mild fever for days, and the contact heat had caused the watch’s mousebrain works to run fast. Oscar had been forced to reset his watch with its sunlight timer, but he had somehow botched it; his watch was jet-lagged now. He was running late, and it took far more effort than he had expected to climb to the roof of the Collaboratory. He’d never before been on the outside armor of the lab. In the sullen dark of a February night, the structure’s outer boundary was windy and intimidating, a wearying physical trial of endless steps and hand rungs.
Winded and trembling, he finally arrived on the starry roof of the Collaboratory, but the best window of weather opportunity was already gone. Kevin, wisely, had already launched himself. With the help of a bored Moderator ground crew, Oscar strapped into his flimsy craft, and left as soon as he could.
The first hour went rather well. Then he was caught by a Green-house storm front boiling off the sullen Gulf of Mexico. He was blown all the way to Arkansas. Cannily reading thousands of Doppler radars, the smart and horribly cheap little vehicle darted sickeningly up and down through dozens of local thermals and wind shears, stubbornly routing itself toward its destination with the dumb persis-tence of a network packet. Blistered by the chafing of his harness, Oscar fmally passed out, lolling in the aircraft’s grip like a sack of turnips.
The pilot’s lack of consciousness made no difference to the nomad machine. At dawn, Oscar found himself fluttering over the rainy swamp of the Bayou Teche.
The Bayou Teche was a hundred and thirty miles long. This quiet oxbow had once formed the main channel of the Mississippi River, some three thousand years in the past. During one brief and intensely catastrophic twenty-first-century spring, the Bayou Teche, to the alarm and horror of everyone, had once again become the main channel of the Mississippi River. The savage Greenhouse deluge had carried all before it, briskly disposing of floodproof concrete levees, shady, moss-strewn live oaks, glamorous antebellum plantation homes, rust-eaten sugar mills, dead oil rigs, and everything else in its path. The flood had ravaged the cities of Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville, and New Iberia.
The Teche had always been a world of its own, a swampy biome distinct and separate from the Mississippi proper and the rice-growing plains to the west. The destruction of its roads and bridges, and the consequent enormous growth of weedy swamp and marsh, had once again returned the Teche to eerie, sodden quietude. The bayou was now one of the wildest locales in North America — not because it had been conserved from development, but because its development had been obliterated.
On his fluttering way down, Oscar took quick note of Fonte-not’s new surroundings. The ex-fed had chosen to dwell in a scattered backwoods village of metal trailer homes, which were jacked up onto concrete-block columns and surrounded by outhouses and cheap fuel-cell generators. It was a Southern-Gothic slum for freshwater fishermen, a watery maze of wooden docks, lily pads, flat-prowed straw-and-plastic bass boats. In the pink light of early morning, the bayou’s reedy waters were a lush murky green.
Oscar arrived with impressive pinpoint accuracy — right onto the sloping roof of Fontenot’s wooden shack. He swiftly tumbled from the building, falling to earth with an ankle-cracking bang. The now brain-dead aircraft shuddered violently in the morning breeze, tossing Oscar like a bug.
Luckily Fontenot limped quickly from his shack, and helped Os-car subdue his machine. After much cursing and a finger-pinching struggle, they finally had Oscar unbuckled and freed. They managed to fold and spindle the aircraft down to the size of a large canoe.
“So it really is you,” Fontenot told him, puffing with exertion. He solemnly thumped Oscar’s padded shoulder. “Where’d you get that goofy helmet? You really look like hell.”
“Yeah. Have you seen my bodyguard? He was supposed to be here earlier.”
“Come on inside,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was not a man for metal trailer homes. His shack was an authentic wooden one, a bro-ken-backed structure of cedar and board-and-batten, with gray wooden shingles on top, and spiderweb bed monster pilings beneath. The old shack had been dragged to the water’s edge, and reassembled on-site without much professional care. The door squealed and shud-dered off its jamb as it opened. Inside, the crack-shot wooden floors dipped visibly.
Fontenot’s bare wooden parlor had rattan furniture, a large stout hammock, a tiny fuel-cell icebox, and an impressive wall-mounted arsenal of top-of-the-line fishing equipment. Fontenot’s fishing gear was chained to the shack’s back wall, and arranged with obsessive military neatness in locked plywood rifle cabinets. The nearest cabinet boasted a bright menagerie of artificial lures: battery-powered wrig-glers, ultrasonic flashers, spinning spoons, pheromone-leaking jel-lyworms.
“Just a sec,” said Fontenot, thumping and squeaking into a cramped back room. Oscar had time to notice a well-thumbed Bible and an impressive litter of beer empties. Then Fontenot reappeared, hauling Kevin with one hand beneath his armpit. Kevin had been liberally bound and gagged with duct tape.
“You know this character?” Fontenot demanded.
“Yeah. That’s my new bodyguard.”
Fontenot dropped Kevin onto the rattan couch, which cracked loudly under his weight. “Look. I also know this kid. I knew his dad. Dad used to run systems for right-wing militia. Heavily armed white guys, with rigid stares and bad haircuts. If you’re hiring this Hamilton boy as security, you must have lost your mind.”
“I’m not exactly ‘hiring him,’ Jules. Technically speaking, he’s a federal employee. And he’s not just my own personal security. He’s the security for an entire federal installation.”
Fontenot reached into a pocket of his mud-stained overalls, pro-ducing a fisherman’s pocketknife. “I don’t even wanna know. I just don’t care! It’s not my problem anymore.” He sliced through the duct tape and peeled Kevin free, finally ripping the tape from his mouth with a single jerk. “Sorry, kid,” he muttered. “I guess I should have believed you.”
“No problem!” Kevin said gallantly, rubbing his gummy wrists and showing a great deal of eye-white. “Happens all the time!”
’I’m all outta practice at this,” Fontenot said. “It’s the quiet life out here, I’m out of touch. You boys want some breakfast?”
“Excellent idea,” Oscar said. A peaceful communal meal was just what they needed. Behind his pie-eating grin, Kevin was clearly mea-suring Fontenot for a lethal knife thrust to the kidneys.
“Some boudin,” Fontenot asserted, retreating to a meager gas-fired camp stove in the corner. “Some aigs and ershters.” Oscar watched Fontenot thoughtfully as the old man set about his cooking work, weary and chagrined. After a moment, he had it. Fontenot was in physical recovery from being a fed and a cop. The curse of spook work was finally leaving Fontenot, loosing its grip on his flesh like a departing heroin addiction. But with the icy grip of that long disci-pline off his bones, there just wasn’t a lot left to Jules Fontenot. He was a one-legged Louisiana backwoods fisherman, strangely aged be-fore his time.
The cabin filled with the acrid stench of frying pepper sauce. Oscar’s nose, always sensitive now, began to run. He glanced at Kevin, who was sullenly picking shreds of duct tape from his wrists.
“Jules, how’s the fishing in your bayou here?”
“It’s paradise!” Fontenot said. “Those big lunkers really love the drowned subdivisions down in Breaux Bridge. Your lunker, that’s a bottom-feeder that appreciates some structure in the habitat.”