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Two hours later they were arrested on a roadside by Louisiana state police.

Green Huey was at a cultural event in Lafayette. He and part of his corps of semilegal good old boys were whooping it up on a hotel balcony, overlooking the folk festival. There was a monster fandango taking place, in near silence. At least a thousand people were engaged in a kaleidoscopic square dance. They were all wearing headphones with positional monitors, and some code within the silent music was directing their crowd flow. They seemed free and controlled at the same time, regimented but spontaneous, bacchanalian but exquisitely channeled.

“Y’know, I really dote on these grass-roots folk events,” Huey said, leaning on the curvilinear iron of the hotel’s balcony rail. “You Yankee boys are young and spry, you ought to give it a chance sometime.”

“I don’t dance,” Kevin said.

“Pity about the big sore feet on the Moderator here,” Huey said, squinting in the sunlight and adjusting his new straw hat. “I dunno why you brought ol’ Limpy Boy along anyhow. He’s no player.”

“I was propping the player up,” Kevin said. “I was wiping the drool off his chin.”

Oscar and Kevin were wearing white plastic prison overalls. Their hands were neatly cuffed behind their backs. They’d been dragged onto the balcony in full sight of the crowd below, and the people seemed completely unperturbed to see them. Perhaps Huey spent large amounts of his retirement time chatting with handcuffed prisoners.

“I was thinking you’d call first,” said Huey, turning to Oscar. “I thought we had an understanding there—that you’d always call me up and clear the air when we had one of our little contretemps.”

“Oh, we were hoping for a personal audience, Governor. We just got a little distracted.”

“The guitar and the accordion gambit, that was especially good. You actually play the accordion, Oscar? Diatonic scales, and all that?”

“I’m just a beginner,” Oscar said.

“Oh, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to play music now. Dead easy. Play while you sing. Play while you dance. Hell, play while you dictate financial notes to a spreadsheet.”

“Cutting his hands free would be a good start,” Kevin suggested.

“They must have some awful soft jails up in Massachusetts, to have Limpy Boy here crackin’ wise so much. I mean, just ’cause we had you two boys stripped, and scrubbed, and checked under fingernails, and had a nice long look up every orifice that opens, and some that don’t.… That don’t mean I’m gonna cut the hands loose on the Hacker Ninja Boy here. He might have a blowgun up his finger bones, or sumpin’. You know there’s been five attempts on my life in the past two weeks? All these Moderator jaspers gunnin’ for ol’ Huey … they all wanna be Colonel This or Brevet General That; I dunno, it sure gets tiresome.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t stand here in the open air, then,” Oscar said. “There have been a lot of people anxious to kill me, too, and it would be a shame to see you catch a stray bullet.”

“That’s why I got all these guards, son! They’re not as bright as you are, but they’re a lot more loyal. You know something, Soap Boy? I like you. I enjoy these homemade scientific efforts that don’t work out commercially, but just refuse to stay down. I took a serious interest in you; I even got skin samples. Hell, I got a square yard of your skin, livin’ down there in a salt mine. Got enough of your skin to stretch on a dang drumhead. You’re quite a specimen, you are. You’re a real gumbo thing—little o’ this, little o’ that. There are chunks of you that are upside down, stretched all backward, duplicated … and no introns, that’s the cool part. I didn’t know a man could even live without introns.”

“I couldn’t recommend it, Governor. It has some technical drawbacks.”

“Oh, I know you’re a little frail, Brainy Boy. I was tryin’ to take it easy on you. Ran a lot of medical tests on that DNA of yours. Didn’t want to hurt you or nothin’.” Huey squinted. “You’re with me here, aren