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The President looked well. Lyle had noticed that the President of NAFTA always looked well, it seemed to be a professional requirement. The big political cheeses in Europe always looked somber and intellectual, and the Sphere people always looked humble and dedicated, and the South people always looked angry and fanatical, but the NAFTA prez always looked like he’d just done a few laps in a pool and had a brisk rubdown. His large, glossy, bluffly cheerful face was discreetly stenciled with tattoos: both cheeks, a chorus line of tats on his forehead above both eyebrows, plus a few extra logos on his rocklike chin. A President’s face was the ultimate billboard for major backers and interest groups.

“Does he think we have all day?” the text demanded. “What’s with this dead air time? Can’t anyone properly arrange a media event these days? You call this public access? You call this informing the electorate? If we’d known the infobahn would come to this, we’d have never built the thing!”

The President meandered amiably to a podium covered with ceremonial microphones. Lyle had noticed that politicians always used a big healthy cluster of traditional big fat microphones, even though nowadays you could build working microphones the size of a grain of rice.

“Hey, howy’all?” asked the President, grinning.

The crowd chorused back at him, with ragged enthusiasm.

“Let these fine folks up a bit closer,” the President ordered suddenly, waving airily at his phalanx of bodyguards. “Y’all come on up closer, everybody! Sit right on the ground, we’re all just folks here today.” The President smiled benignly as the sweating, straw-hatted summer crowd hustled up to join him, scarcely believing their luck.

“Marietta and I just had a heck of a fine lunch down in Opelousas,” commented the President, patting his flat, muscular belly. He deserted the fiction of his official podium to energetically press the Louisianan flesh. As he moved from hand to grasping hand, his every word was picked up infallibly by an invisible mike, probably implanted in one of his molars. “We had dirty rice, red beans — were they hot! — and crawdads big enough to body-slam a Maine lobster!” He chuckled. “What a sight them mudbugs were! Can y’all believe that?”

The President’s guards were unobtrusively but methodically working the crowd with portable detectors and sophisticated spex equipment. They didn’t look very concerned by the President’s supposed change in routine.

“I see he’s gonna run with the usual genetics malarkey,” commented the subtitle.

“Y’all have got a perfect right to be mighty proud of the agriculture in this state,” intoned the President. “Y’all’s agro-science know-how is second to none! Sure, I know there’s a few pointy-headed Luddites up in the snowbelt, who say they prefer their crawdads dinky.”

Everyone laughed.

“Folks, I got nothin’ against that attitude. If some jasper wants to spend his hard-earned money buyin’ and peelin’ and shuckin’ those little dinky ones, that’s all right by me and Marietta. Ain’t that right, honey?”

The First Lady smiled and waved one power-gloved hand.

“But folks, you and I both know that those whiners who waste our time complaining about ‘natural food’ have never sucked a mudbug head in their lives! ‘Natural,’ my left elbow! Who are they tryin’ to kid? Just ’cause you’re country, don’t mean you can’t hack DNA!”

“He’s been working really hard on the regional accents,” commented the text. “Not bad for a guy from Minnesota. But look at that sloppy, incompetent camera work! Doesn’t anybody care anymore? What on earth is happening to our standards?”

By lunchtime, Lyle had the final coat down on the enameling job. He ate a bowl of triticale mush and chewed up a mineral-rich handful of iodized sponge.

Then he settled down in front of the wallscreen to work on the inertia brake. Lyle knew there was big money in the inertia brake — for somebody, somewhere, sometime. The device smelled like the future.

Lyle tucked a jeweler’s loupe in one eye and toyed methodically with the brake. He loved the way the