Donna carefully stroked the animal’s long, wrinkled snout. It grunted in ecstasy and extruded a horrid gray tongue. “Maybe it’s a pig?”
“That’s not a pig.”
“Well, whatever it is, I think it likes me. It’s been following me around all morning. It’s cute, isn’t it? It’s ugly, but it’s cute-ugly…The animals here never hurt anyone. They did something weird to them. To their brains or something.”
“Oh yes.” Oscar tapped a key. In rapidity and silence, his laptop collated a huge series of Collaboratory purchase orders with five years’ worth of public-domain Texas arrest records. The results looked very intriguing.
“Are you going to get an exotic animal for Mrs. Bambakias?”
“After the weekend. Pelicanos is back in Boston,…Fontenot is out house hunting with Bob and Audrey … Right now, I’m just try-ing to get some of the local records in order.” Oscar shrugged.
“I liked her, you know? Mrs. Bambakias? I liked dressing her for the campaign. She was really elegant, and nice to me. I thought she might take me to Washington. But I just don’t fit in there.”
“Why not?” Oscar deftly twitched a fingertip and activated a search engine, which sought out a state-federal coordination center in Baton Rouge, and retrieved the records of recent pardons and grants of clemency issued by the Governor of Louisiana.
“Well… I’m too old, you know? I worked for a bank for twenty years. I didn’t start tailoring until after the hyperinflation.”
Oscar tagged four hits for further investigation. “I think you’re selling yourself short. I never heard Mrs. Bambakias mention your age. ”
Donna shook her graying head ruefully. “Young women nowadays, they’re much better at the new economy. They’re really trained for personal image services. They like being in a krewe; they like dressing the principal and doing her hair and her shoes. They make a real career of service work. Lorena Bambakias will want to entertain. She’ll need people who can dress her for Washington, for the Georgetown crowd.”
“But you dress us. Look at the way we dress compared to these local people.”
“You don’t understand,” Donna said patiently. “These scientists dress like slobs, because they can get away with that.”
Oscar examined a passing local, riding a bike with his shirt hang-ing out. He wore no socks and tattered shoes. No hat. His hair was dreadful. Noone could possibly dress that badly by accident.
“I take your point,” Oscar said.
Donna was in a confessional mood. Oscar had sensed this. He generally made it a point to appear in the lives of his entourage whenever they were confessing. “Life is so ironic,” Donna sighed, ironi-cally. “I used to hate it when my mother taught me how to sew. I went off to college, I never imagined I’d hand-make clothes as an image consultant. When I was young, nobody wanted handmade tailoring. My ex-husband would have laughed his head off if I’d made him a suit.”
“How is your ex-husband, Donna?”
“He still thinks real people work nine-to-five jobs. He’s an idiot.” She paused. “Also, he’s fired, and he’s broke.”
Men and women in white decontamination suits had appeared amid the genetically upgraded crops. They were wielding shiny alumi-num spray-wands, gleaming chromium shears, high-tech titanium hoes.
“I love it inside here,” Donna said. “The Senator was so sweet to dump us in here. It’s so much nicer than I thought it would be. The air smells so unusual, have you noticed that? I could live in a place like this, if there weren’t so many slobs in cutoffs.”
Oscar hotlinked back to the minutes of the Senate Science and Technology Committee for 2029. These sixteen-year-old volumes of committee minutes had the works on the original founding of the Buna National Collaboratory. Oscar felt quite sure that no one had closely examined these archives for ages. They were chock-full of hid-den pay dirt. “It was a hard-fought campaign. It’s right to relax for a while. You certainly deserve it,”
“Yeah, the campaign wore me out, but it was worth it. We really worked well together; we were well organized. You know, I love po-litical work. I’m an American female in the fifty-to-seventy demo-graphic, so life never made any sense to me. Nothing ever turned out the way I was taught to expect. Ever since the economy crashed and the nets ate up everything… But inside politics, it all feels so dif-ferent. I’m not just a straw in the wind. I really felt like I was changing the world, for once. Instead of the world changing me.”
Oscar bent a kindly gaze upon her. “You did a good job, Donna. You’re an asset. When you’re in close quarters like we were, under so much stress and pressure, it’s good to have a member of the team who’s so even-tempered, so levelheaded. Philosophical, even.” He smiled winningly.
“Why are you being so good to me, Oscar? Aren’t you about to fire me now?”
“Not at all! I want you to stay on with us. At least another month. I know that isn’t much to promise you, since a woman of your talents could easily find some more permanent position. But Fontenot will be staying on with us.”
“He will?” She blinked. “Why?”
“And of course Pelicanos and Lana Ramachandran and I will be plugging away … So there will be work for you here. Not like the campaign was, of course, nothing so intense or hectic, but proper image is still very important to us. Even here. Maybe especially here.”
“I might stay on with you awhile,” Donna said serenely, “but I wasn’t born yesterday. So you’d better tell me something better than that. ”
Oscar slapped his laptop shut, and stood up. “Donna, you’re right. We should talk seriously. Let’s go for a little stroll.”
Donna quickly closed her sewing basket and got to her feet.
She’d come to know Oscar’s basic routines, and was pleased to be out with him on one of his confidential walking conferences. Oscar was touched to see her being so streetwise — she kept glancing alertly over her shoulder, as if expecting to find them trailed by sinister operatives in black trench coats.
“You see, it’s like this,” Oscar told her soberly. “We won that election, and we won it walking away. But Alcott Bambakias is still a newcomer, a political outsider. Even after he’s sworn into office, he still won’t have much clout or credibility. He’s just the junior Senator from Massachusetts. He has to pick and choose the issues where he can make a difference.”
“Well, of course.”
“He’s an architect, a large-scale builder with a very innovative practice. So science and technology issues are naturals for him.” Oscar paused judiciously. “And, of course, urban development. But hous-ing’s not our problem at the moment.”
“This place is our problem.”
Oscar nodded. “Exactly. Donna, I know that working in a giant, airtight, gene-splicing lab might seem pretty mundane. Obviously this isn’t a plum Senate assignment, compared to the Dutch Cold War or those catastrophes out in the Rockies. But this is still a major federal installation. When this place started, it worked pretty welclass="underline" a lot of basic advances in biotechnology, some good jump starts for American industry, especially next door in Louisiana. But those glory days were years ago, and now this place is a pork-barrel bonanza. Kickbacks, payoffs, sweetheart deals … I hardly know where to start.”
She looked pleased. “It sounds like you’ve already started.”
“Well… Officially, I’m here to work for the Senate Science Committee. I no longer have any formal ties to Bambakias. But the Senator has arranged that, deliberately. He knows that this place re-quires a serious shaking-up. So, our agenda here is to provide him with what he needs for a real reform effort. We’re laying the groundwork for his first legislative success.”
“I see.”
Oscar took her elbow politely as they sidestepped a passing okapi. “I’m not saying that the work will be easy. It could get ugly. There are a lot of vested interests here. Hidden agendas. Much more here than meets the eye. But if this were easy work, everybody would do it. Not people with our talents.”