Merlion Park at the mouth of the Singapore River. The thing was thirty feet high, a genuinely monstrous hybrid.

East and West like cats and fishes-never the twain shall meet. Until some bright soul had simply chopped the fish's head off and stuck the lion's on: And there you had it:

Singapore.

Now there were four million of them and they had the biggest goddamn skyscrapers in the world.

Suvendra, sitting next to Laura in the bleachers, offered her a paper bag of banana chips. Laura took a handful and knocked back more lemon squash.. The stadium hawkers were selling the best fast food she'd ever eaten.

Back across the field there was another practiced flurry. A

big grinning face this time, flash-card pixels too big and crude, like bad computer graphics.

"It is the specimen they are showing," Suvendra said helpfully. Tiny little Malay woman in her fifties, with oily hair in a chignon and frail; protuberant ears. Wearing a yellow sundress, tennis hat, and a Rizome neck scarf. Next to her a beefy Eurasian man chewed sunflower seeds and care- fully spat the hulls into a small plastic trash bag.

"The what?" Laura said.

"Spaceman. Their cosmonaut."

"Oh, right." So that was Singapore's astronaut, grinning from his space helmet. It looked like a severed head stuck in a television.

A roar from the western twilight. Laura cringed. Six matte- black pterodactyls buzzed the stadium. Nasty-looking things.

Combat jets from the Singapore . Air Force, the precision flyers, Chrome Angels or whatever they called themselves.

The jets spat corkscrewed plumes of orange smoke from their canted wing tips. The crowd jumped gleefully to their feet, whooping and brandishing their programs.

The Boys and Girls Brigades poured onto the soccer field, in red-and-white T-shirts and little billed caps. They assumed formation, twirling long, ribbony streamers from broomsticks.

Antiseptic marching school kids, of every race and creed, though you wouldn't guess it to look at them.

"They are very well trained, isn't it?" Suvendra said.

"Yeah,

A video scoreboard towered at the eastern end of the field.

It showed a live feed of the televised coverage from the

Singapore Broadcasting Service. The screen flashed a closeup from within the stadium's celebrity box. The local bigwigs, watching the kids with that beaming, sentimental look that politicos reserved for voters' children.

Laura studied them. The guy in the linen suit was S. P.

Jeyaratnam, Singapore's communications czar. A spiky- eyebrowed Tamil with the vaguely unctuous look of a sacred

Thuggee strangler. Jeyaratnam was formerly a journalist, now chief hatchet man for the People's Innovation Party. He had a talent for invective. Laura hadn't liked tangling with him.

Singapore's prime minister noticed the camera. He tipped his goldbridged sunglasses down his nose and peered at the lens. He winked.

The crowd elbowed each other and squirmed with delight.

Chuckling amiably, the P.M. murmured to the woman beside him, a young Chinese actress with high-piled hair and a gold chiton. The girl laughed with practiced charisma. The

P.M. flicked back the smooth, dark wing of hair across his forehead. Gleam of strong, young teeth.

The video board left the celebs and switched to the plung- ing, bootclad legs of a majorette.

The kids left the stadium to fond applause, and two long lines of military police marched in. White chin-strapped hel- mets, white Sam Browne belts, pressed khakis, spit-polished boots. The soldiers faced the stands and began a complex rifle drill. Snappy over-the-shoulder_ high toss, in a precisely timed cascade.

"Kim looks good today," Suvendra said. Everybody in

Singapore called the prime minister by his first name. His name was Kim Swee Lok-or Lok Kim Swee, to his fellow ethnic Chinese.

"Mmm," Laura said.

"You are quiet this evening." Suvendra put a butterfly touch on Laura's forearm. "Still tired from testimony, isn't it?

"He reminds me of my husband," Laura blurted.

Suvendra smiled. "He's a good-looking bloke, your husband."

Laura felt a tingle of unease. She'd flown around the world with such bruising speed-the culture shock had odd side effects. Some pattern-seeking side of her brain had gone into overdrive. She'd seen Singapore store clerks with the faces of pop stars, and street cops who looked like presidents. Even

Suvendra herself reminded Laura somehow of Grace Web- ster, her mother-in-law. No physical resemblance, but the vibe was there. Laura had always gotten on very well with Grace.

Kim's practiced appeal made Laura feel truly peculiar. His influence over this little city-state had a personal intimacy that was almost erotic. It was as if Singapore had married him.

His People's Innovation Party had annihilated the opposition parties at the ballot box. Democratically, legally-but the

Republic of Singapore was now essentially a one-party state.

The whole little republic, with its swarming traffic and cheerful, disciplined populace, was now in the hands of a thirty-two-year-old visionary genius. Since his election to

Parliament at twenty-three, Kim Lok had reformed the civil service, masterminded a vast urban development scheme, and revitalized the army. And while carrying on a series of highly public love affairs, he had somehow managed to pick up advanced degrees in engineering and political science. His rise to power had been unstoppable, buoyed by a strange mix of menace and playboy appeal.

The soldiers finished with a flourish, then snapped to atten- tion, saluting. The crowd rose to sing the national anthem: a ringing ditty called "Count On Me, Singapore." Thousands of smiling, neatly dressed Chinese and Malays and Tamils- all singing in English.

The crowd resumed their bleacher seats with that loud, peculiar rustle emitted by tons of moving human flesh. They smelled of sassafras and suntan oil and snow cones. Suvendra lifted her binoculars, scanning the bulletproof glass of the celebrity box. "Now comes the big speech," she told Laura.

"He may start with the space launch, but shall end with the

Grenada crisis, as usual. You could be taking the measure of this fellow."

"Right." Laura clicked on her little tape deck.

They turned and stared expectantly at the video screen.

The prime minister rose, carelessly tucking his shades into his suit pocket. He gripped the edge of the podium with both hands, leaning forward, chin tilted, shoulders tense.

A tight, attentive silence seized the crowd. The woman next to Laura, a Chinese matron in stretch pants and straw hat, clamped her knees together nervously and jammed her hands in her lap. The guy eating sunflower seeds set his bag between his feet.

Closeup. The prime minister's head and shoulders loomed thirty feet high on the video board. A silkily amplified voice, smooth and intimate, rang from the elaborate P.A. system.

"My dear fellow citizens," Kim said.

Suvendra whispered hastily. "This shall be major, eh, definitely!" Sunflower Seeds hissed for silence.

"In the days of our grandparents," Kim intoned, "Ameri- cans visited the moon. At this moment, an antique space station from the Socialist Bloc still circles our Earth.

"Yet until today, the greatest -adventure of humanity has languished. The power brokers outside our borders are no longer interested in new frontiers. The globalists have stifled these ideals. Their clumsy, ancient space rockets still mimic the nuclear missiles with which they once threatened the planet.

"--`But ladies and gentlemen-fellow citizens-today I can stand before you and tell you that the world did not reckon with the vision of Singapore!"

(Frantic applause. The prime minister waited, smiling. He lifted a hand. Silence.)