Leon Sosik arrived to escort them. Sosik was a portly man in his sixties with prizefighter’s shoulders, red suspenders, a silk tie. Sosik rarely wore a hat, since he proudly sported a fine head of hair — successfully treated male pattern baldness. He looked Oscar up and down. “How are tricks, Oscar?”

“Tricks are lovely. May I introduce Dr. Greta Penninger. Dr. Penninger, this is Leon Sosik, the Senator’s chief of staff.”

“We’ve heard so much about you, Doctor,” said Sosik, gently gripping Greta’s newly manicured fingertips. “I wish we were meet-ing under better circumstances.”

“How is the Senator?” Oscar said.

“Al has been better,” Sosik said. “Al is taking this hard. Al is taking this very hard.”

“Well, he’s eating, isn’t he?”

“Not so you’d notice.”

Oscar was alarmed. “Look, you announced he was eating. The hunger strike is over now. The guy should be wolfing raw horsemeat. Why the hell isn’t he eating?”

“He says his stomach aches. He says… well, he says a lot of things. I gotta warn you, you can’t take everything Al says as gospel right now.” Sosik sighed heavily. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him. His wife says you’re great at that.” Sosik reached absently into his trouser pocket. “Dr. Penninger, do you mind if I debug you? Normally we’d have our new security guy doing this, but he’s still in Washington. ”

“That’s quite all right,” Greta said.

Sosik swept the air around her body like a weary bishop sprin-kling holy water. His device registered nothing in particular.

“Debug me too,” Oscar said. “I insist.”

“It’s a hell of a thing,” Sosik said, pursuing the ritual. “We’ve had Al bugged top to bottom for weeks. His nervous system’s bugged, his bloodstream’s bugged, his stomach is bugged, his colon is bugged. He did public MRI scans, he did PET-scans, he drank tagged apple juice — the inside of his carcass was a goddamn public circus. And when we finally got him off all the monitors, that’s when he goes haywire.”

“The hunger strike got great coverage, Leon. I’m giving you that.”

Sosik put tile scanner away. “Sure, but what is it with that crazy scumbag in Louisiana? How the hell did that ever get on the agenda? Al is an architect! We could have stuck with public-works issues, and done just fine.”

“You let him talk you into the idea,” Oscar said.

“I knew it was a goofy idea! It’s just … Well, for Al it made sense. Al’s the kind of guy who can get away with that kind of thing.”

Sosik led them up a glass-and-plastic elevator. Bambakias had caused the former fifth floor to cease to exist, leaving a cavernous contemporary hangar with exposed water pipes, airducts, and elevator cabling, all tastefully done-over in tangerine, turquoise, peach, and Prussian blue.

Thirty-five people lived within the offices, Bambakias’s profes-sional krewe. It was both a communal residence and a design center. Sosik led them past ergonomic office chairs, platelike kevlar display tables, and twitching heaps of cybernetic Archiblocks. It was cold out-side, so squishy little rivulets of tame steam warmed the bubbled membranes underfoot.

A corner office had been outfitted as a combination media room and medical center. The health monitors were inert now, and lined against a wall, but the screens were alive and silent, flicking methodi-cally over their feeds.

The Senator was lying naked and facedown on a massage table, with a towel across his rump. A krewe masseur was working at his neck and shoulders.

Oscar was shocked. He’d known that the near-total hunger strike had cost Bambakias a lot of weight, but he hadn’t realized what that meant to human flesh. Bambakias seemed to have aged ten years. He was wearing his skin like a jumpsuit.

“Good to see you, Oscar,” Bambakias said.

“May I introduce Dr. Penninger,” Oscar said.

“Not another doctor,” the Senator groaned.

“Dr. Penninger is a federal science researcher.”

“Oh, of course.” Bambakias sat up in bed, vaguely adjusting his towel. His hand was like a damp clump of sticks. “That’s enough, Jackson… Bring my friends a couple of… what have we got? Bring ’em some apple juice.”

“We could use a good lunch,” Oscar said. “I’ve promised Dr. Penninger some of your Boston chowder.”

Bambakias blinked, his eyes sunken and rimmed with discolor.

“My chef’s a little out of practice lately.”

“Out of practice on the special chowder?” Oscar chided. “How can that be? Is he dead?”

Bambakias sighed. “Jackson, see to it that my fat campaign man-ager gets some goddanm chowder.” Bambakias glanced down at his shrunken hands, studied their trembling with deep disinterest. “What were we talking about?”

“Dr. Penninger and I are here to discuss science policy.”

“Of course. Then I’ll get dressed.” Bambakias tottered to his bony feet and fled the room, exiting through a sliding shoji screen. They heard him call out feebly for his image consultant.

A fluted curtain shriveled upward like an eyelid, revealing a lucid gush of winter sunlight through the glass blocks. The corner office was a minor miracle of air and light; even half-empty, the space some-how felt complete and full.

A small furry robot entered the office with a pair of plastic pack-ets in its tubular arms. It placed the packets neatly on the carpet, and left.

The abandoned packages writhed and heaved, with a muted in-ternal symphony of scrunches and springs. Geodesic sticks and cabling flashed like vector graphics beneath the translucent upholstery. The packets suddenly became a pair of armchairs.

Greta opened her new, executive-style purse and touched a tissue to her nose. “You know, the air is very nice in here.”

Bambakias returned in gray silk trousers and undershirt, shad-owed by a silent young woman, her arms laden with shoes, shirt, and suspenders. “Where’s my hat?” he demanded querulously. “Where’s my cape?”

“These are very interesting chairs,” Greta told him. “Tell me about these chairs.”

“Oh, these chairs of mine never caught on,” Bambakias said, jamming one scrawny arm through the ruffled sleeve of his dress shirt. “For some reason, people just don’t trust computation enough to sit on it.”

“I trust computation,” Greta assured him, and sat. The internal spokes and cables adjusted beneath her weight, with a rapid crescendo of tiny guitar-string shrieks. She settled daintily in midair, a queen on a tensile throne of smart chopsticks and spiderweb. Oscar admired responsive tensegrity structures as much as the next man, but he sat in the second chair with considerably less brio.

“An architect gets the credit for design successes,” Bambakias told her. “The failures you can cover with ivy. But weird decor schemes that just don’t work out — well, those you have to keep inside the office.”

A silent group of krewepeople removed the massage table and replaced it with a folding hospital bed. The Senator sat on the bed’s edge, pulling up his gaunt bare feet like a giant seabird.

“I noticed another set of these armchairs on the way in,” Greta said. “But they were solid.”

“Not ‘solid.’ Rigid. Spray-on veneer.”

“ ‘Less is more,’ ” Greta said.

A spark of interest lit the Senator’s sagging face as his dresser saw to his shoes and socks. “What did you say your name was?”

“Greta,” she told him gently.

“And you’re, what, you’re a psychiatrist?”

“That’s close. I’m a neuroscientist.”

“That’s right. You already told me that, didn’t you.”

Greta turned and gave Oscar a look full of grave comprehension and pity: Since her makeover, Greta’s expressions had a new and shocking clarity — her flickering glance struck Oscar to the heart and lodged like a harpoon.

Oscar leaned forward on his thrumming piano-wire seat, and knotted his hands. “Alcott, Lorena tells me you’re a little upset by developments.”