OTHER BOOKS BY BREB BEAB Hegira Psychlone Beyond Heaven's River Strength of Stones The Wind from a Burning Woman Blood Music Eon The Forge of God Eternity Hardfought Tangents Heads Queen of Angels Anvil of Stars Moving Mars Songs of Earth and Power New Legends Legacy A TORN OOBEBTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Copyright © ][997 by Greg Bear All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. This book is printed on acid-free paper. A Tor Book Published by Torn Doherty Associates, Inc. 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 Tot Books on the World Wide Web: http://www, tor. com Tor®is a registered trademark of Torn Doherty Associates, Inc. Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bear, Greg [Slant] / Greg Bear. -lst ed. p. cm. The title consists solely of the slant sign. "A Torn Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-3 I 2-85517-6 (hardcover: acid-free paper) I. Title. PS3552.E157S55 1997 813'54dc21 97-7063 CIP First Edition: July 1997 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 FIRST SEARCH RESULT Budget: Select, Restricted SEARCH FILTERS KEYVVORDS? > Knowledge, Sex, Datafiow TOPIC FILTER: >Community "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant'' EMILY DICKINSON RIVERS Oataflow today is money/blood, the living substance of our human rivers/arteries. You can steamboat the big flow, or slowly raft these rivers up and down the world, or canoe into the branches and backwaters, with almost perfect freedom. There are a few places you can't go--Saudi Arabia, Northern Enclave China, some towns in Green Idaho. Nobody much cares to go there anyway. Not much exciting is happening in those places. --The U.S. Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics, 56Revision, 2052 I EDUCA TED CORPSES Omphalos dominates Moscow, Green Idaho. It glows pale silver and gold like a fancy watch waiting to be stolen. A tetrahedron four hundred feet high, with two vertical faces and a triangular base, it is the biggest thing in town, more ostentatious than the nearby Mormon temple, though not so painfully white and spiky. The leading edge points at the heart of Moscow like a woodsman's wedge. The vertical faces descend, blind and windowless, to sink seventy feet below ground. The single sloping face is gently corrugated like a dazzling ivory washboard for the leaden sky. Omphalos is a broad-shouldered edifice, Herculean architecture for the ages, given the kind of shockproof suspension and massive loving armor once reserved for hardened defense installations and missile silos. Jack Giffey waits patiently in line for the public tour. It is cold in Moscow today. Thirty people stand with him in the snaking line, all clearly marked by their gray denims as young tourists biking through Green Idaho; all youthfully unafraid of the reputation of the state's Ruggers, the legendary gun-wielding rugged individualists, who see themselves not as lawless brigands but as steely-eyed human islands in a flooded, corrupting stream. But the state's reputation is exaggerated. Not more than three percent of the population could accurately be labeled Rugger. And fewer than ten young tourists each year vanish from the old logging trails in the regrowth timberlands, their forlornly beeping Personal Access Devices and little knit caps nailed to posts on the edges of the abandoned national forests. In Giffey's opinion, Green Idaho has all the individuality ora zit on a corpse. The zit may consider itself special, but it's just a different kind of dead meat. Giffey is known to his few friends as Gill. At fifty-one he looks mild and 10 GREG BEAR that attract the interest of children and discouraged women past their picky twenties. He doesn't like Green Idaho any more than he likes the rest of the nation, or the world, for that matter. Old-fashioned radiant outdoor heaters mounted on poles glow raw-beef red overhead, trying to keep the people in line warm. Giffey has been here before, thirteen times; he's sure Omphalos knows his face and has tagged him as worth paying marginal attention to. That is okay. He does not mind. Giffey is among the very few who know that Omphalos absorbs knowledge from the outside at the extraordinary rate of fifty million dollars a year. Since Omphalos is publicly assumed to be a fancy kind of tomb for the rich and privileged, its dead and near-dead must be very curious. But few ask serious questions about it. The builders of Omphalos paid a lot for freedom from oversight, the kind of freedom that can only be bought in Green Idaho. The rulers of Green Idaho, true to their breed, hate the Federals and the outer society but revere money and its most sacred benison: freedom from responsibility. Giffey has been to the Forest Lawn Pyramid in Southcoast California Omphalos is, architecturally, by far the classier act. But he would never think of robbing the truly dead in Forest Lawn, with their few scattered jewels adorning rotting flesh. The frozen near-dead are another matter. Entombed with all their palpable assets--precious metals, collectibles, long-term sigs to offshore paper-deed se-curities-the corpsicles racked in their special refrigerated cells in Omphalos, Giffey believes, might be worth several hundred million dollars apiece. Those rich enough to afford such accommodations have their choice of packaged options: cheapest is capitation, bio-vitrifying and cryo-preserving the head alone. Next is head and trunk; and finally, whole-body. There are even more expensive and still-experimental possibilities ... For the wealthiest of all, the plutocratic highest of the high. The sloping face of the wedge gleams like a field of wind-rippled snow. The line begins to move in anticipation there are sounds from within. Omphalos opens its tall steel and flexfuller front doors. Its soothing public voice spreads out over the crowd, only mildly funereal. "Welcome to the hope of all our futures," the voice says as the line pushes eagerly into the tall, severe granite and steel lobby. Great shining pillars rise around the student tourists like steel redwoods, daunting and extra human. The floor is living holostone, morphing through scenes of future splendor beneath their feet: flying cities high above sunset mountains, villas on Mars and the Moon, idyllic valleys farmed by obedient arbeiters while beautiful, magisterial men and women of all races and creeds watch from the balconies of their spotless white mansions. "This completely automated facility is the repository for a maximum of ten thousand two hundred and nineteen biologically conserved patrons, all expecting long and happy lives upon their recon / SLANT 11 "Within Omphalos, there are no human employees, no attendants or engineers or guards..." Giffey has never met a machine he could not beat, at chess, at war games, at predicting equities weather. Giffey believes he may be one of the smartest or at least most functionally successful human beings on this planet. He succeeds at whatever he wants to do. Of course--he grins to himself---there are many things he has never wanted to do. He looks up at the distant lobby ceiling, studded with crystal prisms that project rainbows all around. Above them, he imagines stacks of cold cells filled with bodies and heads. Some of them are not frozen, he understands from secret sources, but are still alive and thinking, suspended in nano baths in what is euphemistically called warm sleep. They are old and sick and the law does not allow them to undergo any more major medical intervention. They have had their chance at life; anything more and they are classified as greedy Chronovores, seekers after immortality, which is illegal everywhere but in the quasi-independent republic of Green Idaho, and impractical here. The terminally ill can, however, forfeit all but their physical assets to the republic, and enter Omphalos as isolated wards of the syndicate. Giffey presumes the still-living are the curious ones. They stay current as they sleep. Giffey does not care what they're dreaming, half-alive or wholly dead, whether they're locked into endless rounds of full-sensory Yox, or preparing themselves for the future by becoming the most highly educated near-corpses in the datafiow world. They should be honorably gone from the picture, out of the game. They don't need their assets. Omphalos's occupants are just a different set of pharaohs. And Jack Giffey is just another kind of tomb-robber who thinks he can avoid the traps and break the seals and unwrap the mummies. "You are now within the atrium of the most secure building in the Western World. Designed to withstand catastrophic earthquakes, volcanic activity, even thermonuclear explosions or microcharge dispersals--" Giffey is not listening. He has a pretty decent map of the place in his head, and a much more detailed map in his pad. He knows where the arbeiters must come and go within the building's two entrances. He even knows who has manufactured the arbeiters, and what they look like. He knows much else besides. He is ready to go and does not need this final tour. Giffey is here to legitimately pay his respects to a remarkable monument. "Please step th-is way. We have mockups of hibernaria and exhibits usually reserved only for prospective patrons of these facilities. But today, for you exclusively, we allow access to a new and vital vision of the future--" Giffey grimaces. He hates today's big lies--exclusively, only, I love you alone, trust, adore, but ultimately, pay. Post-consumer weltcrap. He's glad he has paid his money for the last time. 12 GREG BEAR and behaviors. The system passes them through to the display area. The casket room. Lie in silken comfort throzigh a/l eternity. The young tourists in their denims and warm, upscale Nandex stand agape before the ice-blue enamel and fiexfuller hibernarium, a long flattened tube stretched across a mocked-up cubicle like a dry-docked submarine cemented at both ends. Giffey knows what the tourists, the young students, are thinking. They are all wondering if they will ever be able to afford this kind of immortality, a chance at the Big Downstream. Giffey doesn't care. Even riches and the high life do not matter to him because unlike his partners, he has severe doubts they will ever be able to fence such goods, nearly all of which will be marked with ineradicable tracers. Besides, gold means much less than it used to. Datafiow is all. He's in it to tweak a few noses, and to play against the machine he suspects lies within. Hardly a machine at all... "Our exclusive method of bio-vitrifying cryo-conservancy was pioneered by four doctors in Siberia and perfected fifteen years ago. The fluids of a human body normally crystallize upon freezing, but by vitrifying these fluids, making them smoothly glassy, we eliminate crystals completely--" Giffey believes he will face an unauthorized artificial intelligence--Omphalos's own advanced petafiop INDA, perhaps even a thinker. He's always wanted to go up against a thinker. He suspects he'll lose. But maybe not. And what a game! M/F, F/M, M/M, F/F e is what between us / happens / is what separates us. We are all different sexes, though with only two brands of equipment. --The Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie 2 S T 0 N E H A M M E R Alice Grale believes this is cataspace, all interaction but no motion. In the small black room off the long black studio, waiting can be a dull chunk of time filled any way at all. She and her co-star, Minstrel, are talking, waiting for adjustments on the stage. Minstrel lounges naked on the old low couch, / SLANT 13 "So why don't you like those words?" Minstrel asks. "They're ancient and traditional, and they describe what we do." "They're ugly," she says. "I say them if I want to or when I'm paid to, but I've never been fond of them." Alice sits on the folding metal chair before him, illuminated by a soft free spot of white light, wearing a flimsy black robe, her touching knees exposed. There is some relief in old friendship. She has known Minstrel for nine years. They have been talking for twenty minutes and Francis is still not ready for them. "You never fail to surprise me, Alice. But I'm making a point. Try saying the word," he challenges. "The tetragrammaton." She considers, then says it, with a rise of her cheeks and a curve of her lips and derogatory tilt of her head, her voice not very loud and void of emphasis. "You're not doing it justice," Minstrel complains. "God knows I've heard you say it often enough. Say it professionally, if you can't get into it personally." Alice glares at him. "I mean it," he says. "I'm making a point here." Minstrel seems a little intense today, pushy. But she says the word once more. Her eyes narrow and her nose wrinkles. Minstrel sniffs. "Your heart isn't in it," he says dubiously, "but even so, it brings a snarl, feel it?" Alice shakes her head. "It's what somebody else wants me to say, and that's the way they want me to say it." Minstrel chuckles and taps her knee with one long square-tipped finger. "Like all women, you are not your art." Alice is both perplexed and irritated. "What's that mean?" "The word is a snarl. It's old and hard and blunt--it's a stone hammer. You say it when you really need the person you're with and you aren't embarrassed to show yourself deep down. It means what's happening touches your feral instincts." "Bullshit." "You say that casually enough," Minstrel observes. He stands, applies finger to cheek and inclines his head. In this pose, long and loose, he reminds Alice of an E1 Greco saint. All he needs is a slack blue loincloth. She feels the familiar deep appreciation, the yearning that has not diminished in over fifty professional encounters in thirty-one vids, beginning with her first when she was nineteen. That was ten years ago, and he was thin and ribby, hollow-chested and uncertain of his peculiar talent. Now he is lean and omni-asian brown, muscles finely toned and defined, his body a temple as well as an office, long hair pulled back from a high forehead, long thin patrician nose almost too sharp, lips proud as if recently slapped. Alice pretends languid boredom, then shifts suddenly into seductive speed. 14 GREG BEAR "Still not convincing," Minstrel teases. "Fuck me with your.., penis," Alice says. They both laugh. Minstrel's face crosses from saint to ascetic cherub. "Utterly, desperately limp. Only a doctor or a therapist would call it that, to make you feel inferior. Most men prefer cock." "Crows only in the morning," Alice says. All conversations with Minstrel, even in the down time between plugs, are contagious. "Penis sounds like a planet or a country." "Vagina. Labia. Clitoris," he prompts. "Like characters in a Renaissance vid," Alice says. She muses. "They are all royalty in the land of Penis. Vagina never touches another person without wearing gloves. She is cool and dresses in black lace." Minstrel's face lights up. "Labia is a dangerous woman, sister to Vagina and Clitoris," he says. "A vampire and poisoner." "Clitoris is the youngest, virginal sister," Alice says. She loves games. "They are all daughters of..." Tongue tipping through her lips, catlike, while she thinks. "Lucrezia Menarchia." "Bravo!" Minstrel says. He applauds. Alice bows and continues. "Clitoris is the only one with any decency. She blushes with shame at how her family carries on." Minstrel reddens with subdued laughter. They should not be too loud up here; it might upset Francis, who can be very testy while preparing for a plug. "All right. Cunt," he suggests. Alice pauses, scowling. "That's a tough one." "Not yours, my dear." Alice gives him a beneath-me face and taps her finger on her nose, thinking. "Cunt is a barbarian princess from the outer reaches. She is raised by the outland tribes of the province of Puberty." Minstrel squints. "Not Puberty. Not quite right." He works at it and substitutes, "Pudenda." Alice grins. "Pudenda it is. Cuntia is her name when she travels in the civilized realms." Minstrel snaps his slender fingers. "We're on to something. Maybe Francis will make us writers. Listen: Cunt is swapped in a hostage exchange between Lucrezia Menarchia and Cunt's father, King Hetero. Lucrezia sends her daughter-her hopelessly moral daughter Clitoris to learn the barbarian ways and loosen up a bit. Clitoris finally lets her hair down and finds fulfillment in the arms of Cunt's heroic brother, Glans. Cunt, however, must preserve her honor in Menarchia rather than submit to temptation, for Lucrezia rules a corrupt land." Alice takes a deep breath, pretending to be stunned by this burst of genius, then laughs out loud, the hell with Francis, who shouldn't keep them waiting so long. She seldom laughs this way, it sounds so much like an ass's bray to / SLANT 15 her, but she is easy and open with Minstrel. "So who or what is your precious Fuck, then?" she asks. Minstrel holds his hands as if in prayer and pretends great gravity. "Not to be spoken lightly, or profaned. The tetragrammaton... Fuck... is the most powerful god of all, two-faced progenitor of the world. He prefers we see just his benign face, the baby-making, world-renewing side. But we all know his opposite: Trickster, the devil that rides us and whips us until we bleed." At this profundity, Alice stands on long legs, yawns, and stretches. "As always, you are uselessly instructive," she tells him. Minstrel gives her his slow prankboy's smile and stretches his arms higher than she can reach. She subdues a little shiver. Their chemistry is working, and holding back does her performance no good. Alice turns to the low horizontal slit window overlooking the black stage. Something twinkles down there but they are off angle and cannot see the projection. Francis is tediously careful with his plugs and backmind details, but he could have laid in all of Chinese sexual psychology by now. "Francis should be done. He'll want to hook us." Back in the real. Her forehead creases. "Are you up, dear?" Minstrel asks. Alice shows him her moon face. "Never less," she says. "Are you?" Minstrel's muscles flex at the back of his jaw. He is hiding something behind the cheer. He can hide from almost anyone but her; she knows him better than most wives know their husbands. To Alice it seems they have come far and survived much and against the odds, but at some cost. Minstrel hides his minuses poorly in front of her. A pity, she thinks, that his body is so seldom seen in the vids they make now. Preferences of the blessed audience for the psynthe exotic. "You look negged," she says. Minstrel turns away as if unfairly poked. "Let me keep. my mood," he tells her. Alice moves in, swaying her shoulders, clucking her tongue. "I'll need all of you in five minutes, and you can't make me work harder to get it," she says. "What's down?" "Not my libido," he shoots back. "You've cheered me the last hour instead of leaving me to brood over twisted thumbs." She wraps her arms around him. He pushes her off with what begins as real and angry strength, and ends gentleness and restraint. "Is it Todd?" she asks. "Todd was a year ago," Minstrel says. Alice nods sympathetically, lips pursed. "I should have known. Why didn't you tell me?" "I hide, you hide," Minstrel says, and tries to force more brave wit over what is now a sad and lost face. "Poor Minstrel," she says. "They do not deserve you." 16 GREG BEAR "No, they fapping well do not." "So what's his name?" "The little fap's name is Giorgio and you, dear Alice, will never meet him. He doesn't deserve to meet you." The wound is seldom far beneath Minstrel's armor when she is doing the probing; he comes to her, at long intervals, like a dog with a boil, knowing she will hurt him with her lancet; also knowing it will do him good. It is now that Francis chooses to blat his awful airhorn. Minstrel closes up his cares and assumes a heavy-lidded rouCs smile. "It is never duty with you," he says, "but whatever it is, it calls." Alice loops her arm through his and they step down the broad railless stairs to the stage, like royalty or Astaire and Rogers making a grand entrance. Francis awaits them in the plug room beside the main stage. Here as well as on the stage all is flat gritty black, no reflection allowed as the camera mixes its own glittering fairy-light dreams with the quantized lux of the real. Francis has named this camera Leni. Leni has become much more than an optical device. She scatters over the stage, feeding images and projections at one end, combining them with backmind layers at the other, a smooth silver and bronze balled and coiled snake. Francis is irritated. His AD, scrawny and unkempt--Ahmed, Alice remembers vaguely; Francis goes through four or five ADs each production--hurries to arrange the bottles of nano and their small shiny plastic conduits and dams, to be applied to the occiput of Alice's skull and to Minstrel's temple. "Alice, fabled Alice, what would you do?" Francis asks as they reach the bottom of the stairs. "I'm two weeks behind, two mill over, I have general fibe and sat release dates in four days--and I'm still layering!" Francis shakes his head. He always appears a little sad and irritated. Alice accepts this in Francis, as well as his fits of temper, only because what he does is unique and, she thinks, good; though Francis is not extraordinarily commercial, working on a Francis vid, even as backmind, can never hurt one's reputation. "You've kept us waiting. Plug us and get your layers," Alice says matter-offactly. "Echo that," Minstrel says. Francis wags his finger. "Fuck artists shouldn't bitch." Alice cringes dramatically, pushes his finger back with her own. Tiny black and silver machines with tactile fuzzy wheels and bug-jewel eyes crawl around the plug stage. They are little versions of Leni. Alice feels their bright little eyes sucking in her offline words. She hates them. Francis allows these recording arbeiters to roam with absolute freedom, examining whatever they choose; there are many in the audience who lose themselves in the life of the production. Francis makes as much on live behind-the-scenes docs as on the vids themselves. "Fuck artist," Alice croons to the nearest bug. "Francis, the nano's a little old," Ahmed says. "It isn't perking." / SLANT 17 "You aren't going to hook us with stale nano, are you, Francis?" Minstrel asks. "No fear. Alice, have you read the text?" "Only from the prep you sent. It's a long book, Francis." In fact, antique and long and dull. Francis is preparing a deep-layered vid of The Faerie Queene. He smiles proudly. "A real challenge, to fade the wonderful Spenserian stanzas into a Yox." His face glows with the subject. "The Red Cross Knight is subject to such temptations, Alice. He is traveling with an Eastern queen named Una. A dragon has ravaged her land, and she hopes the Red Cross Knight will--" "It's set, Francis." Ahmed shows him the bottles of translucent nano, now fully charged with nutrients. The liquid within is turbid and finally perks; it appears restless. Alice regards it with misgivings. She has plugged over a hundred times, on various jobs, and she has never trusted the process--but she has never been seriously injured even when, as now, the hook is administered by a nonmedical. "The knight will rid her land of the dragon. So far, the Red Cross Knight has vanquished the hideous monster Error and all her progeny. A truly horrible scene, and I've layered it brilliantly. Now they are in a place of great temp-tations--Una and the knight. You've read the cues." "We're all primed with ghostly passions," Minstrel says. "Alice, my pride, you give me the most haunted libido I've ever recorded, when you're on point." "I hope that's a compliment," Alice says. "It is. Una and the Red Cross Knight have strayed into the workshop of the evil Archimago, who appears as a godly and kindly Hermit. It is a place of terrible temptations. You are a haunted spright, a succubus created by Archimago to torment and delude. You feel the deepest need for this young, handsome, and virtuous knight, but if you have him, you destroy him--and you know he will never fall for your illusion. However, by appearing in the form of the chaste Una, and engaging in lewd revels with fellow phantoms, you will mislead him into thinking this Eastern Lady has succumbed and is wallowing in lust. You must feel the False Una's passions as if she were actual souled flesh, not a demonic illusion. Many curious eyes and fingers are sure to want to plug into that layer." "Specks like you're going for broad appeal, this time," Minstrel says, picking at something between his teeth. He inspects his finger. "I'd like to pay some bills, yes," Francis barks back. "You'll go direct into Leni while we run the set piece on stage. You'll be layering over seven emotional records from other fiuffers, so I need everything clean and clear." Fluffers. Alice hates that word even more than fuck artist, though it is commonly used. It was once applied to women who kept actors erect or lubricious in old erotic movies. The comparison is inapt, at best; what Alice and Minstrel 18 GREG BEAR into the camera. Leni is only little less than a large set of eyes with a brain behind them. Francis guides Leni, cajoles her; theirs is not the relation of artisan to tool, they are more like partners. Ahmed brings up the little dams and shapes them to Alice's head first, then Minstrel's. He syringes a dollop of warm nano into the dams as they sit still. Alice is used to this method of creating a broadband plug; it's common in the cheaper Yox. A few minutes pass. A microscopic lead of conducting material has passed through the interstices of her skin, bone, and brain, into her deep amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus; into the seats of her judgment engine, the Grand Central Terminal of her self. She feels nothing. Ahmed applies transponders to the little silver nipples of nano, no larger than a thumbnail. He takes readings for several minutes from the camera. Lights flash agreeably. "Hooked," he tells Francis. Alice removes her robe. Minstrel is already naked. Francis makes a butterfly gesture with his hands, then clasps his fingers. "Here come the Sprights and Archimago. Taking," he says. "Click one." Ahmed labels the backmind layer. The camera hums. Francis quotes from memory: "Thus well instructed, to their worke they hast, And comming where the knight in slomber lay, The one upon his hardy head him plast, And made him dream of loves and lustfull play, That nigh his manly heart did melt away, Bathed in wanton bliss and wicked joy..." ." Francis beams. "How like your own career, sweet Alice. How many men have you haunted?" Alice ignores this. On the stage behind them, in translucent and sketchy 3D workprint, the evil sorcerer Archimago leads the Red Cross Knight through dreams of dark chambers filled with writhing bodies in silken robes. Hanging tapestries are pulled aside by the incredulous Knight, who sees false Una's flesh revealed in intimate posture with an equally false Spright made a Squire. Alice ignores most of this. What she and Minstrel will provide has little to do with the plot. Alice looks directly at Minstrel. As always, the angle of Minstrel's dark brown eyes and the sharpness of his nose, the assurance of his professional smile, impresses her. They have real and reliable chemistry. "You will always be the most beautiful woman on Earth," Minstrel murmurs to her, and she knows he means it. He prefers men, but Alice affects him as much as he affects her, reliably, predictably. If they lived together, their contradictions would burn them out in a year; but in this professional capacity, / SLANT 19 Francis is watching the camera, his Leni. She seems happy. What Alice feels first is the yearning warmth, not dissimilar to what a baby feels for its mother; she wishes to be closer. Minstrel touches her face with the back of his hand, stroking her cheek, holding this off. He responds as nearly all men respond to her, given a chance: she notes the flush on his chest, the close focus of his eyes, the beginning rise. Often, the rise amuses her; men seem off-balance when aroused, would topple like cranes without her support. But Minstrel's rise is a delightful shock. The delicious pain of expectation meeting an inner self-doubt drops her back in the first sopping yet dry-mouthed experiments of youth ("Love for sale, appetizing young love for sale--" Billie Holiday singing Cole Porter), amazed at success and delighted by it. They kiss first, leaning forward to avoid other contact: soft roughness of lips like nubbled silk, oily smoothness of tongues. "Good," Francis says. He is recording none of the tactile, not of the surface; only the deep surge, the pulse of yearning from the sympathies, the letting down of vascular tensions by the parasympathies, the message of intense well-being issued by the judging amygdala; all of which Alice is aware of, but not conscious of. Her thighs seem large and obvious; she might topple too. I am all thighs. Minstrel wraps her, presses forearms against her back, then withdraws them until his fingers rub her ribs, just above the threshold of a tickle. Tongues plunge. For a moment this is too much and she breaks the kiss and noses the hollow of his neck, shuddering. Minstrel is not the most lovely and stimulating she has ever had, but she is so astonishingly consistent with him. Surprise, warmth, expectancy, and then the final salt: Minstrel prefers men. Alice has a special command, a leave he gives few other women, if any. She specks him with his male lovers, wonders whether she would have the same effect on them; likely not, doesn't matter, the warm fantasy is well away now, sailing with courses full. They clasp tight from breasts to knees. He intrudes between her thighs and friction again becomes oily smoothness, but he does not press or angle. Minstrel knows her times and frequencies. He is an instinctive lover. She might shiver a muscle here, under his palm, and he adjusts the momentary mix of pressings and withdrawals to suit her as a horseman adjusts to his mount. The comparisons are becoming more and more basic, the sweetest and deep-es{ of cliches. She will ride, float, flow, sit in the waves, feel the high warm sun; all images in her mind, most from past joins, some never real, all falling like drowsy rivers of fine hot sand down her spine. "Why, Cuntia," he murmurs. "So long lacking?" "Shh," she says into his ear. Their motion more pronounced. Francis forgotten, hooks ignored, though she makes sure not to rub the transponders loose as she brushes her temples against his chest. She disengages, though she 20 GREG BEAR by withholding. She rubs him down his stomach with her cheeks, lips, high sensual definition against the tight skin. "Good," Francis says. Close-up, curls and the sweetly ugly rise, more beautiful than kittens; she adores him. Minstrel is all-valuable, all-honored; she suffers no disgrace by doing anything for him. She does not know what willingness he will take advantage of. Sometimes he assumes brusque anger, a delicate but dominant brutishness that toes a thin thread yet never goes beyond earnest play. But today Minstrel is infinitely gentle and this also falls within her range of surprise and expectancy. "Wicked as Lucrezia," he says. His languor is reward enough for the minute she thinks she has. Sure enough, at the end of a minute, he takes her head between his palms and removes her, and she leans back on the stiff pallet, knowing she need do nothing but react, and that none too vigorously. Among the men she has had, the many hundreds of encounters long and short, professional and personal, Minstrel needs the least indication of her fulfilled desire. He already feels what she feels from the shivers and twitches of her knees and the texture of the skin of her hips and ribs and the muscles beneath. "Good," Francis says. "Under Labia's disguise, Glans finds shy Clitoris," Minstrel whispers into her ear. His weight is a surge of southern air; his breath and sweat musk. She can smell his body, a whiff of zoo, nervous but not weak; this is the part she savors most, reaching a man's deep concerns. After all their years, Minstrel wonders whether she will approve. Since she knows she will approve, his concern is a delight. Poor good men, all the good lovers, always this stretch of nerves before the partaking. A laugh even of delight might be misunderstood. Seconds pass before she shows anything other than complete and unquestioning acceptance. "Good," Francis says. "And..." She clutches Minstrel, presses his butt down with her nails, feels the slipping entrance, sucks in him and an uneven breath, simultaneously. Francis quotes again: "With sword in hand, and with the old man went;/Who soon him brought unto a secret part,/Where that false couple were full closely ment/In wanton lust and lewd embracement;/Which when he saw, he burnt with gealous fire,/ The eye of reason was with rage yblent,/And would have slaine them in his furious ire,/But hardly was restrained of that aged sire..." Minstrel shudders. "Enough. Cut." He holds, withdraws. Alice's eyes dart around the stage. "What?" she says. "Focus," Francis commands. "Disappointment. You cannot have the Red Cross Knight. You are a Spright, a Succubus, not a true female. Everything / SLANT 21 Minstrel lies back, flushed. Alice wants to climb onto him but that would not be professional. Of all things in her life that would keep her from him, it is this isinglass membrane of her working self-respect. Francis monitors Leni, his eyes glazing over. Alice looks on the camera as a kind of dragon, a ravenous audience suspended in a line through all future time behind the camera's many senses. "Perfect, both of you," Francis says, returning and smiling. "Good enough to earn a credit. Your followers will love this." Minstrel smiles back wearily. The muscles of his jaw tighten. The spell is broken and he is thinking of the sooty world. Minstrel leans over her. "Glans would ask dear Cuntia to marry him," he says, "but the pressures of royal life.., you know how it is." "Cuntia would accept," Alice replies. "We shouldn't leave this unfinished," Minstrel says. Alice is puzzled. "No." Francis shouts for the stage to be cleared. "But we have to." Minstrel smiles. "Better for the next time." This is their third dry embrace in the past six months. They are nearly always in shadow, backmind layering now, never up front in the fulfilled lUX. "I'll be waiting," Alice says, and Minstrel strokes her cheek before climbing the stairs to get dressed. Ahmed stares at her, flushed and awed. "You're new, aren't you?" Alice asks too sweetly. She puts on her robe and climbs the stairs after. At the top, she hears her pad chime in a loop of her street clothes. Minstrel is half-dressed. Times past, they might have finished their business up here, neither of them believing pent-up passion to be healthy, but she can see Minstrel's heart and mind are elsewhere. The courtesies have fled. They've peaked and both know it. She pulls the small pad from her purse and takes the call. "Alice here." "I couldn't leave a message or let our homes talk to each other. This is Twist." Twist is younger than Alice by six years but already a veteran. They met two years ago and took a quick liking to each other. Twist--if she calls at all--treats Alice as a kind of mother. "Hello, Twist. I'm just getting off a plug for Francis." "Something's queer, Alice." "What?" "I'm acting really queer. I need to see somebody." "How queer?" "I'm obsessing all over the place, about David." Fuck artists, like most sex care workers, take on so many partners, Alice can not immediately remember just who David is. She thinks they might have 22 GREG BEAR "I'm not a therapist, Twist." "I called my mother, Alice," Twist says. "Before I called you. You know what that cost me?" Twist often hints at the monstrosity of her mother. Alice has taken it all with a few grains; even therapied, Twist never flows the straight pipe. Alice sits on a bench and crosses her legs. Minstrel gives her an exaggerated grimace and twinkle-wave with his fingers, picks up his bag. Alice watches him go with a small sharp sadness. "All right, why not go straight to a therapist?" "Because David took me out of the agency," Twist says. "I'm out of the payment grid. He was getting me jobs. He has connections." "Ah," Alice says, suddenly remembering David. The David, Twist called him: a small, thin man with dark hair. Alice had instantly specked him as a scheming litter scrawn desperately trying to make up for being born a runt, always sure he had the answers. Twist adores him, hangs on his every reedy word. "Well, I'm sure the agency--" Alice begins. "David won't let me. He's gone aggly, too." "What do you mean?" "I feel like I felt when I began therapy. I was thirteen, Alice. I was a bad case, a real mess. It's all back now, only worse." She gives a painful, nervous giggle. "David says it must have never really took." "Why don't you come to my apt and let's talk," Alice suggests. "I can be there in half an hour--" "I don't know that David will let me." Alice takes a deep breath. Some new fluffers are coming up the stairs. Francis is working overtime. "I do need to talk, Alice. Going to be home tomorrow?" "Morning, yes." "I'll be there at ten. I'll set up David with somebody. Cardy's fuckish for him. Then I can get free for a couple of hours." Alice cringes. That word--Minstrel's tetragrammaton--sounds too hard on Twist's lips. Twist is like a little girl in so many ways. Alice realizes this is uncharacteristic; sex words hard or soft generally do not bother her, whatever her private opinions. She is darked by the scrim of others. "I'll see you in the morning," Alice says. "Yeah. Love you, Alice." "You too." She closes the link and stands among the four new fluffers, none of whom she knows. They all wear butterfly colors; they come from Sextras, now the top Yox temp agency for fuck artists. They smile at her; they know who she is. She used to be heat made flesh. She smiles back, polite and a little condescending, shakes a few hands, tongue-kisses one of the bold males, and then is down the stairs, where Ahmed / SLANT 23 The monstrosity of this technological era is indescribable. A man can carry armies of progeny within his testicles, none of them his own... some perhaps not purely human. A woman can bear within her unnatural "artworks" quickened by science and surely as soulless as stones. We sicken and despair. There is nothing of God in these machines and machine-men. The Mother Church has nothing to offer the time into which we have been born but a warning that sounds like a curse: As you sow, so shall you reap! mPope Alexander VII, 2043 From: Anonymous Remailer To: Pope Alexander VII Date: December 24 2043 "You're just a Catholic Dickhead, you know that? Come to my town (wouldn't you like to know you shit) sometime and I'll show you a GOOD TIME. Let your bodiguards know I'm about seven feet tall and dresed like the Demans in NUKEY NOOKY which I bet youve plaid too you asswipe hippocrit!!!!! Have a nice day!!!!!" EMAIL Archive (ref Security Inv, Re: Thread: Encyclical 2043, Vatican Library Cultural Tracking STAFF/INDA 332; reverse track through Finland> ANONYM REMAIL Code REROUTE> SWITZERLAND/ZIMBABWE> ACCT HDFinster > Harrison D. Finster ADDRESS 245 W. Blessoe Street Apt 3-H Greensboro, NC, USA. PROFILE> 27 years of age at time of message, >CONCLUSION: FLAME PROFILE No action necessary, ref Vatican Internal Investigator comments: "Young, shit for brains.") 3 ALLOSTASIS For Martin Burke, life has become anaspace, all motion but no engagement, no interaction, no sense of progress. And yet he is not unsuccessful. He moved from the combs of Southcoast two years ago. He had set himself up as a design consultant for miniature therapy monitors, microscopic implants that roamed freely in the body and brain, regulating balances and adjusting natural neurochemical concentrations. All of the delayed but no less painful publicity about his involvement with the mass-murderer and poet Emanuel Goldsmith had put an end to this new career; no corporation wanted to be associated with him after that, though they still license and manufacture from 24 GREG BEAR Since moving to Seattle, he has worked in special mental therapy, out of the third floor of an old, dignified building off Pioneer Square. Outside it is a rare cloudless winter morning, though at eight o'clock still dark. On the Southcoast of California, at the end of his last career, the sun had seemed inhumanly probing and constant. Martin had yearned for change, weather, clouds to hide under... Now he yearns for sun again. Strangely, away from California, the publicity has actually brought in new clients; but in balance, it also ended the love of his life. He has not seen or heard from Carol in a year, though he keeps in touch with his young daughter, Steplanie. Martin enters the round lobby and pushes open the door to his office, slinging his personal pad and purse onto their hooks on an antique coat rack. He has resisted the expense of installing a dattoo or skin pad, with circuitry and touches routed through mildly electrified skin, preferring instead a more old-fashioned implement, and keeping his body natural and inviolate into his forty-eighth year. His receptionist, Arnold, and assistant, Kim, greet him from their half-glass cubicle at the center of the lobby. Arnold is large and well-trained in both public relations and physical restraint. Kim, small and seemingly shy, is a powerhouse therapeutic psychology student with a minor in business relations. He hopes he can keep them working for him for at least the next year, before their agency fields better offers. Tucked out of sight, a year-old INDA sits quietly on a shelf overlooking the reception area, monitoring all that happens in the office's five rooms. He prepares for the long day with a ten-minute staff meeting. He goes over patient requests for unscheduled visits. "Tell Mrs. Danner I'll see her at noon Friday," he instructs Arnold. "I'm off that day," Arnold says. "She's a five-timer." Martin looks over Mrs. Danner's record. She's a five-time CTR--core therapy reject--with a long criminal record. "Want me to be here?" "She's not violent," Martin says. "Klepto mostly, inclined to hurt herself and not others. Enjoy your day off." Martin has expanded his business by taking referrals from therapists who can't handle their patients. After relieving himself of his own demon, he has a special touch with people who are still ridden. "And Mr. Perkins--?" Arnold asks. Martin makes a wry face. Kim smiles. Mr. Perkins is much less difficult than Mrs. Danner, but less pleasant to deal with. He is unable to establish lasting relations with people and relies on human-shaped arbeiters for company. Three previous therapists have been unsuccessful treating him, even with the most modern nano monitors and neuronal enhancement. "Third request in a week," Martin says. "I suppose he's still having trouble / SLANT 25 The patient log floats before Arnold's face like a small swarm of green insects. "His wife, he calls her." "He can't bear to deactivate the old personality. That passes for kindness in him, I suppose." Martin smirks. "I'll see him Monday. So who's up for this morning?" "You have Joseph Breedlove at nine and Avril de Johns at ten." Martin wrinkles his forehead in speculation. Neither Breedlove nor de Johns are difficult patients; they fall into that category of unhappy people who regard therapy as a replacement for real accomplishment. Therapy to date can only make the best of what is already available. "I have an hour free at eleven?" "Of course." "Then all is in order. It's eight-thirty now. I have a half-hour until Mr. Breedlove. No touches until nine." "Right," Arnold says. Martin takes his pouch and walks down the narrow hallway to the back office. Sa,ctz/m Sa,ctorm. Sometimes he sleeps here, since there is little to go back to at home. He missed the chance for the island sharehold on Vashon--damnable Northwest offishness, thirty-year residents and born-here's discriminating shamelessly against the fresh arrivals--and so Martin's home is a condo in a small ribbon comb overlooking the northbound three-deck Artery 5 Freeway. It is not expensive, nor is it particularly attractive. In two years, his residency advocate tells him, he may be allowed into some higher lottery, perhaps even a Bainbridge sharehold. Private touches flicker around him as he sits at his desk, like pet birds begging. Some he flagged a week ago for immediate attention. He shoos them off' with a wave, then pokes at the fresh touches and they line up, the first expanding like an origami puzzle. This is from Dana Carrilund, the head of Workers Inc Northwest. He wonders who gave her his sig. Despite this being his free period, he opens this immediately. Carrilund's voice is warm and profbssional. "Mr. Burke, pardon my using your personal sig. I'm in a real bind. I'm told we have about seven of our clients taking special therapy with you. They're doing well, I hear. I may have additional clients for you--all of them fallbacks. Please let me know if we can fit this into your schedule. Also, I'd like to speak to you in person and in private." It's outside his usual domain; Martin specializes in core therapy ftilures, people for whom initial and even secondary therapy does not work. Fallbacks have been successfully therapied but experience recurrence of thymic or even pathic imbalances. Why would the head of Workers Inc Northwest place such a touch? Martin frowns; he presumed Workers Inc Northwest sent their cases to Sound Therapy, the largest analysis-therapy corporation in the Corridor. He's flattered to receive such high-level attention, but can't think of a reason why. 26 GREG BEAR cases are of interest. Let me know what you need and I'll work up a schedule and proposal. I hope we can meet soon." This is a shameless hedge against any downstream lags in business, something Martin is always sensitive about. He does not need any more patients. Still, he has never quite lost his fear of unemployment; a contract with Workers Inc could smooth over any future rough times. The next message is from his daughter, their daily morning exchange. Stephanie still lives in La Jolla with her mother. They link once a week and he manages trips south every other month, but as he watches the image of this lovely three-year-old, a somewhat plumper version of Carol, who seems in their genetic dance to have grabbed only Martin's eyebrows and ears, this image in its sharp perfection kissing air where his nose might be and holding up a succession of red and blue paper crafkworks, eager for his approval, only makes him lonelier. Another inexplicable faultline. He tacks to his reply a bedtime story he recorded last night, adds loving comments on the skill of her craftworks, shoots the reply to reach her pad by midmorning break in the live public schoolroom. Carol will never allow home instruction. Nothing New Federalist about Carol. The essential touches processed, he pulls his chair up to his desk and says, "INDA, are you there?" The INDA responds immediately. A lovely liquid voice neither male nor female seems to fill the room. "Yes, sir." "Any results from yesterday?" "I've analyzed the journal entries you suggested. Your fee for arbeiter access to the journals is now at the limit, Dr. Burke." Martin will have to upgrade his credit with the dealer today. "That's fine, INDA. Tell me what you've found." "I have seven references to Country of the Mind investigations, all of them in cases predating last year's law." The United States Congress, acting in conjunction with Europe and Asia, has passed laws banning two-way psychiatric investigation through the hippocampal juncture, which Martin pioneered. Appeals to the Supreme Court and World Psychiatric Organization have been quietly buried; nobody is currently interested in stirring up this hornet's nest. Emanuel Goldsmith might have been the final poison pill. "No defiance or physician protests?" "A search through available records indicates the procedure has not been openly performed in four years by anybody, in any part of the world." "I mean, has anyone published contrary opinions?" "Liberal Digest's Multiway has posted twelve contrary opinions in the past year, but that makes it a very minor issue. By comparison, they posted four thousand and twenty-one contrary opinions on the Freedom to Choose Individual Therapy decision 'is a vis the requirements of remp agencies and em / SLANT 27 York and Virginia, bastions of New Federalism, had clearly been intended to put roadblocks in the way of therapy's juggernaut domination of society, but the Supreme Court had voided the rulings, based on contract law, coming down in favor of temp agencies and employers. Liberal Digest had, for once, agreed with the New Federalists that therapy should not be forced on temp agency clients, under threat of unemployment. These were strange times. "Any conclusions?" "We do not foresee any interest in Country of the Mind investigations, as a social issue, for many years." "We" among INDAs is purely a placekeeper for "this machine," and does not imply any self-awareness. "It's dead, then." "Of no currency," the INDA amends. Martin taps his desk. He has moved completely away from the discovery which launched his fame and caused his downfall. He believes strongly that Country of the Mind investigations could be incredibly powerful and useful, but society has rejected them for the time being--and for the foreseeable future. "I suppose that's best," he says, but without conviction. His office pad chimes. It's early. "Yes, Arnold?" "Sir, there's a gentleman here. No appointment. New. He's very insistent-- says he'll make it worth your while." "What's his problem?" "He won't say, sir. He won't accept Kim's evaluation and he looks very edgy." Kim joins in, out of the intruder's hearing: "Sir, his name is Terence Crest. The Terence Crest. We've run a check. He is who he says he is." It's Martin's day to be approached by influential people. Crest is a billionaire, known for his conservatism and quest for privacy as much as his financial dealings--mostly in Rim entertainment. Martin taps his finger on the desk several times, then says, "Show him in." The day's touches, drifting at apparent arm's length over the office pad, vanish. Martin greets Mr. Crest at the door and escorts him to a chair. Crest is in his mid-forties, of medium height, with a thin bland face and large unfocused eyes. He is dressed in dark gray with thin black stripes, and beneath his long coat, his shirt is living sun-yellow, body-cleansing and health-monitoring fabric. His right hand carries three large rings, signs of affiliations in high comb society. Martin cannot read the ring patterns, but he suspects strong New Federalist leanings. The way Crest holds his head, the way the light hits his skin, Martin has a difficult time making out his expression. He has the spooky sensation of the man's face losing detail with every glance. 28 GREG BEAR this, but I've been told I can rely on you." His voice is clear and crisp. Crest is accustomed to being listened to attentively. He looks dreamily at the ceiling and remains standing. Martin asks him to sit. Crest peers down at the chair, as if waiting for it to move, then sits. "I'm still mulling over what you posted in People's Therapy Multiway last week. Allostatic load and all. That the pressures of everyday life can bend us like overstressed metal bars." Martin nods. "An explanation of a general idea for a general readership. Why does it concern you?" "I can't afford the disgrace." "What disgrace?" "I think I'm exceeding my load limits." A thin sour chuckle. "I'm about to break." "Suffering from stress is no disgrace, Mr. Crest. We all face it at some time or another in our lives." "Well, I'm still wrestling with the idea of my physicality. I was raised Baptist. And for some of my . . . connections,friends, well, that sort of weakness doesn't sit well." "A not uncommon prejudice, but nothing more than that--prejudice." "It's hard for me--for them--to accept that illness, in the mind, can result from something other than.., you know. A defect in the soul." "That's the way it truly is, Mr. Crest. Nothing to do with inborn character defects. We're all fragile." "Dr. Burke, I can't be fragile." Even through the vagueness, Crest's face hardens. "My people won't let me. My wife is as high natural as they come, and everyone in her family. I feel like they're expecting me to fall, you know, from their grace. Any minute." He smacks his hands together lightly. "I suppose that's a kind of stress, too." "Sounds like it could be," Martin says. "If I had to be therapied... I would lose a lot, Martin." "Happens to the best of us." "You keep saying that," Crest says. "It's just not true. It doesn't happen to the best of us. The best of us cope. The best of us have better chemistry, stronger neurons, a better molecular balance, just an all-around better constitution.., we're made of finer alloy. The others.., they fail because they're flawed." Instinctively, Martin does not like this man--he feels uncomfortable in his presence. But many strong-willed patients in deep pain come across this way. Crest slaps his hand on the chair arm. "I am haunted, Dr. Burke. There are days when I know I'm going to crumble. Some of the corporations I work with, making very large deals--they require an inspection every month, can you believe it?" Martin smiles. "It's not called for, that's for sure." SLANT letting a deal fall through. A brain race." Crest smiles back at Martin. The smile seems to fall in shadow, though the room is brightly lit. "Very American. Reliability above creativity." "Intelligence and creativity often accompany more fragile constitutions," Martin says. The lecture is familiar, meant to reassure. "There's every evidence some people are more sensitive and alert, more attuned to reality, and this puts a greater load on their systems. Still, these people make themselves very useful in our society. We couldn't get along without them--" Crest shakes his head vigorously. "Genius is next to madness, is that what you're saying, Doctor?" "Genius is a particular state of mind.., a type of mind, only distantly comparable to the types I'm talking about." "Like a genie in the head? Just rub it the right way and out it comes? Well, I'm no genius," Crest chuckles tensely, "and I haven't been accused of being very sensitive... So why do I worry? I mean, the type of decisions I'm called upon to make demand tough thinking, maybe even a lack of human sensitivity... And above all else, stability. I have to stand up to tough conditions for long periods of time." "Well, your name is well known, Mr. Crest." Crest raises a finger and jabs at the ceiling. "One little slip... Down from high natural to, say, a simple untherapied." Crest shudders. "One little inappropriate thought, and my wife takes her connections with her--right out of the house. I honestly think I'm going to obsess myself into just what I fear, over this. "Dr. Burke, this conversation has to be absolutely secure. Confidential. I am willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for you to secretly take care of me if I should fall." Martin hates turning down patients; he also hates being treated like a man who can be bought. Not that he's unassailable--to his intense personal shame, he's been bought before. It's a theme in his life. He knows what the consequences can be. Crest sighs. "This is torture for you, isn't it, Doctor?" "How?" "Having a high natural come in here and run off about chances of failing. I mean, you're not a high natural, are you?" "No." "Untherapied? Just a natural?" "No." "Therapied, and for some time, right?" "Right." "So you must be... I mean, it must be like having a rich man come in and worry about losing his money, and you haven't got any." Martin squints at Crest and says, "You're offering four times my highest 30 GREG BEAR that there's too much emphasis on high natural ratings. It isn't that big a deal. It's another human measurement, a quantification some folks are willing to use to separate us from each other." "I'm not a have-not, Dr. Burke. I'm used to having." "I wouldn't put so much store in having this particular thing, this high-natural rating, if I were you. You'd be surprised at the power and influence of some who don't." "Sure," Crest says, agitated. "Like you. Nobody rates you but your medical board. Doctors have always protected their own." Martin clamps his teeth together tightly beŁore answering. "IF we used the criteria your fellow businessmen seem to find attractive, we'd lose most of our best, our most sensitive doctors." "There's that word again," Crest says, sniffing and drawing in his jaw. "Sensitive. I'm not an artist, I'm not a therapist, I'm a decision maker. I have to make a dozen important decisions a day, every day. I have to be keen, like a knife edge. Not sensitive." "The sharper the edge, the more liable it is to be blunted if it's misused," Martin observes. "I have my standards," Crest says. "I'm sorry if nobody else is strong enough to accept them." "Mr. Crest, I have my standards as well. If this is going to have any positive outcome, we should start all over again. You've interrupted my day without an appointment, you've impugned my professional ethics by flinging money at me... Crest sits very still. The light around his face is not natural, not the lighting of the room. He might be made of wax. "I know you don't like me, and that's fine, I'm used to that, but I have my own sense of honor, Dr. Burke. I've gotten myself into something. I know what's right and what isn't and I've violated that code. It began as greed. Greed for life, I suppose, for fighting off the real devils, for keeping all I've made. But it's beyond that now." Crest stares at him. Martin cannot penetrate the vagueness of the man's face. He has never seen anything like it. "If you can come back later today, I can run my own evaluation, with my own equipment." "Now," Crest says. "I need it now." Martin is willing to believe that Crest is close to a thymic imbalance, maybe even a pathic collapse, but the situation is fraught with legal difficulties. "I can't treat you on an emergency basis, Mr. Crest." "These men and women I'm involved with . . . they kill people who talk to outsiders." That does it, Martin thinks. "I can recommend a clinic not two blocks from here, but sir, with your resources, you can--" "I can't use my own medicals or therapists. They're not secure. I agreed to / SLANT 31 have them feed my stats and vitals into.., the center. They would know. I'm close to the edge, Doctor. Two bal,#rea' thosa,a'." Martin swallows. "I can't treat patients close to severe collapse. That requires an initial evaluation by a federally licensed primary therapist." Crest smiles again, or perhaps he is not smiling at all. He leans forward and places his arms on Martin's desk. "I could tell you, and then tell them. They would have to kill you. Or discredit you." "I don't react well to threats," Martin says. "I can't be forced to do something illegal, whatever the money or the threats. I think you should--" "I could kill you myself." Martin stands. "Get out." "I could be just like them, but I'm not. I really am not." He raises his arms and shouts, "No agreements, no pressure. I'd give it all up. Doctor, you can have it all ... Just get me out of this!" "I've told you what my limits are, Mr. Crest. I can give you the names of very discreet emergency therapists--" Crest stands and brushes off his elbows, though the chair arms are not dusty. His voice is steady now. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time. I'll feed fifty K into your accounts for your trouble." "No need," Martin says, knowing that his anger is completely inappropriate, but feeling very angry. Martin escorts Crest to the door. Crest pauses, turns as if to say something more, and then leaves. Martin sighs deeply, collects himself. He walks into the lobby a few minutes later. Arnold and Kim stare at him, sharing his relief and astonishment. They go to the window looking down on the street and see a small black limousine move into traffic three floors below. "That is the strangest encounter I've had in years," Martin says. He glances at Kim. "Evaluation?" "He's real close," Kim says. "He should go to a primary therapist." "That's what I told him. He wouldn't listen." "Then there's nothing we can do." Nevertheless, Martin feels a jab of guilt. He has not even re-applied for a federal license. He is sure he would be turned down--and that could be a black mark against his current practice. Like Crest, he, too, has a tortuous path to follow. "Doctor," Arnold says. "Ms. Carrilund got your touch and needs to respond right away. I wouldn't interrupt before the next client, but--" He thinks of Crest's situation, and how prevalent in the real world that kind of cruel competition must be, to drag down even the wealthiest. "I'll take it," Martin says. He returns to his office and faces the pad on the desk. Carrilund appears before him in complete detail, mid-fifties, white-blonde, in a stylishly tailored 32 GEG commons suit with ruffle sleeves. She is handsome and aging naturally, and Martin concludes she must have been dangerously beautiful in her youth. In some respects she reminds him of Carol--but many women remind him of Carol now. "I'm glad you have time to talk, Dr. Burke," Carrilund begins. "Your work has been highly recommended by a number of our clients." "I'm pleased to hear that," Martin says. His mouth is still sour. He pours himself a glass of water from the carafe on his desk and takes a sip. "Have you noticed an increase in fallbacks in your practice?" Carrilund asks. "No. Most of my practice is with core therapy rejects." "I see. All of our clients with you now are CTRs, are they not?" "Yes." "Dr. Burke, my sources tell me you're likely to receive a flood of fallback and CTR clients in the next few months." "From your agency?" Martin asks. "Perhaps, but not necessarily through this office. We've had CTR notices on over half our clients going into primary therapy. That's not something I would like blown to the ribes, Dr. Burke, but it's not going to be a secret for long." Martin whistles. "Extraordinary," he says. "We've never seen rates higher than five percent in all the years I've been with Workers Inc. I was wondering if you'd be interested in participating in a little study." "I don't see why not--if this is a real, long-term problem. But as I said, in my practice, I would not notice such a trend until..." What she has said suddenly hits him. He feels a little queasy. "There are only five doctors in your line of work in the Corridor," Carrilund says. "I think you're going to see a big increase in your business." If her statistics were not just flukes, that would mean . . . He quickly calculates. Tens of thousands for each of the five. "I can't handle that kind of load." Carrilund smiles sympathetically. "It could be a big problem for us all. We'd like to work with you to learn the root causes... If there are any. We're looking at entry-level workers, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, going through their first qualification inspections. It's heartbreaking for them, Doctor. It could be a challenge to our whole economy." "I understand that. Please count me in, and keep me informed." "Thank you, Dr. Burke. I will." "And make an arrangement with my office for a personal meeting." "Thank you." They exchange home sigs. Carrilund smiles sedately and-Mar-tin transfers her to Arnold. Martin sits lost in thought. He came very close to being CTR himself, years ago; too close to having to face, day after day, for years on end, the prospect of an inner voice that murmurs of confusion and pain and much, much worse. / SLANT 33 He has raised his hands, unconsciously, as if to ward off something coming toward him. With another shudder, he drops them to his lap, composes himself, and tells Arnold to send in Mrs. Avril De Johns. Access to knowledge and information is necessary to a dataflow economy. But it will cost you... Every single access will cost you. A penny here, a thousand dollars there, a million a year over there somewhere.., subscriptions and encryptions and decryptions. If you haven't already shown yourself to be a part of the flow--if you aren't a student given research dispensation, or already earning your way by turning information into knowledge and that into money and work--the action anatomy of society--it's a tough old world. Perhaps in discouragement you become one of the disaffected and spend all your federal dole on the more flagrant Yox, drowning yourself in enervating lies. You're allowed, but you're out of the loop. One-way flow is not a game; it's a sucking little death. --The U,S, Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics, 56r" Revision, 2052 Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would soon be useless in a mouse's universe... --Lloyd Ricardo, Pressed Between Two Flat Seconds: Preserving the Human Flower It's not your grandmother's world. It was never your grandmother's world. Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie 4 THINKER, FEELER Nathan Rashid gives his fiancee, Ayesha Kale, a tour of Mind Design's most amous inhabitant, Jill. Nathan is Jill's new chief engineer and friend. He replaced Roger Atkins two years ago, when Atkins became chief administrator for Mind Design's new thinker development. Nathan headed the team that brought her back from her collapse, and Jill regards him with warm affection. She does not believe he will do anything to 34 GREG BEAR reduce her functions or alter her present state. After all, it was Nathan who devised the ornate Loop Detail Interrupt that restored her to awareness and full function. Jill trusts him, but she has not told him about the mystery. Nathan and Ayesha stand in a broad cream-colored room with a central riser surrounded by transparent glass plates. On the riser sits a snow-white cube about one meter on a side, attended by three smaller cubes. Nathan is thirty-five, dark-haired, broad-faced, with an immediate, eager, and sometimes mischievous smile. Ayesha is five years older, brown-haired, with large, all-absorbing black eyes and a mouth that seems ready to acknowledge disappointment. The cubes are connected by ribes as well as by direct optical links, which twinkle like blue eyes as they pass through the empty air between. "Is that her?" Ayesha asks. "That's her," Nathan says. "That's all?" Jill sits in warm and cold, feeling neither. Her emotions, as with all of us, do nor seem to come from her particular structures, though she is much more aware of her internal processes. "Most of her is here. Why, disappointed?" Jill's body, if she can be said to have one, is mainly in Del Mar and Palo Alto, California. There are many parts of her less than a few cubic centimeters in size spread through eleven different buildings along Southcoast. She is connected to these extensions through a variety of I/Os by ribes and satlinks and even a few tentative quantum gated links (which she finds annoying; they do not work all the time, and may in fact slow her thinking if relied upon exclusively). "She's so small!" Ayesha says. Nathan smiles. "She was twice as big before the refit." "Still, so small, to be so famous." Jill is listening, Nathan knows. She listens attentively to all of her inputs, but he does not know that a significant portion of her is in unlinked isolation, devoted much of the time to considering a mystery. She has pondered this mystery for several years, ever since her shutdown and redesign. She does not clearly remember events after her Feedback Fine Detail Collapse. But she remembers some things she should not be able to remember, and this is what intrigues her. "Why is she a she?" Ayesha asks. "She decided on her own. Roger Atkins may have started it When he named her after a girlfriend. Besides, she's a mother. We seed other hinkers from her." Jill is the most advanced thinker ever made, the first--on Earth--to become self-aware. She has a sibling in deep space, far from Earth, who achieved self / SLANT 35 assume that it, too, suffered Feedback Fine Detail Collapse, and that all of its functions locked up, so that it now drifts around another star, alone and probably in a state equivalent to death. Generations from now, when other, more complex ships head for the stars, perhaps they will find and resurrect her sibling. Jill hopes she will be around for a reunion. She silently follows Nathan and Ayesha with her glass-almond eyes, mounted on thin rods protruding from the walls around the room. Ayesha valks around her like a zoo visitor examining an interesting animal in a cage. "She's the most powerful mind on the planet," Nathan says proudly. "Unless you believe Torino." "What does Torino say?" "He thinks there's a world-spanning bacterial mind," Nathan says lightly. "A mind, in germs?" Ayesha says, drawing her head back incredulously. "Really?" "Not like a human mind, or even like Jill, not socially self-aware. He thinks every bacterium is a node in a loosely connected network. That would make them parts of the largest distributed network anywhere--on Earth, at least." "Yeah, well, Jill can talk," Ayesha says. "And bacteria can't." Jill remembers some aspects of the FFDC collapse. She can even model some of its features. But after the collapse, her self-awareness ceased to exist. Or rather, it became so finely detailed, she modeled her selves so continuously and with such high resolution, that she reached her theoretical limits. And for a time, ceased to be. But in that time ... She has not told her creators about aspects of that mostly blank time. That not everything was blank puzzles her. "She doesn't even have a boyfriend, and already she's a mother!" Ayesha says wryly. "Better make her a boyfriend soon, or she's going to start cruising." "She's not even ten years old. We can ask her how she feels about it. Would you like to talk with her?" Ayesha suddenly blushes. "My God, is she listening?" "Of course. We keep nothing from Jill. Jill, how's it flowing today?" "Smooth, Nathan. And you?" "Damped a migraine at noon and I'm still a little cranky. This is my fiancee, Ayesha. Time to talk?" "For you, always," Jill says. "Hello, Ayesha." "I'm so embarrassed!" Ayesha says. "I'm sorry to be talking about you... behind your back... Where is your back?" "No offbnse taken. Where is my back, Nathan?" "I haven't the slightest idea. You're getting more sparky every week. I like that. My team needs a loop resolution report by two to hand over to the Feds, you know, the Thinker Safety people." 36 GREG BEAR and Well-Being committee, headed by Rep. Maria Caldwell, D-WA., as a positive force in her life, but Mind Design's executives do not appreciate government interference. "Right. And I also need, ASAP, your work on future corporate/state government relations in the U.S. Rim. Got to pay our bills." "The flow charts and timelines, or the raw neural processing records?" "For now, just the charts and timelines." Ayesha listens in awe. Jill's voice is deep, a little husky, commanding yet pleasant. She seems to fill the large room. Jill notes, with some pleasure, that Ayesha is beginning to perspire nervously. "Nathan, I will need to discard the raw neural records to complete next week's work load." "Understood, but I don't have a bank reserved that's large enough to hold them. If I don't get one by the end of this week, go ahead and dump. I'll take responsibility." "Perhaps Representative Caldwell would be willing to arrange a storage site." "Ha ha. What else are you working on, Jill?" "I have thirty-one personal investigations--curiosity quests, as you call them. There are four outside projects sealed from Mind Design inquiry for the time being--" "I hate those outside jobs. Sooner or later one of them is going to require some loop re-engineering, and I don't have time. I wish they'd let me speck them out first." "All flows smooth with the outside tasks. I do have a number of questions to ask you, NathanMathan." "I beg your pardon? What is a NathanMathan?" "It's a term of endearment. I just made it up." Nathan laughs, and Ayesha laughs with him, a little uneasily, Jill thinks. She is testing him to see what he really thinks of her, whether he is of the opinion she is fully recovered, or liable to crippling eccentricities. His reaction reveals a certain nervousness about unpredictable behavior, but no deep doubts. "Ask away, Jill. We have a few minutes before Ayesha has to leave and the masters whip me off to another meeting." "What does a thymic disturbance feel like? And how does it differ from the sensations of a pathic disturbance?" Ayesha turns to Nathan, wondering how he will answer this. Nathan rubs his elbow and considers. "You're asking how it j%/s to undergo a thymic imbalance, right?" "I believe the questions are sufficiently similar to be congruent." "Yes. Well, as I understand it, thymic imbalance is different from simply being sad or upset or deeply concerned about something. In humans, a chronic thvmic imbalance stems from stress-caused or biogenic neural damage, gen- / SLANT 37 erally in the amygdala or the hippocampus. Judgments of one's well-being are impaired, and this invokes a sympathetic or parasympathetic response, jointly or in succession. Basic fight-or-flight but with many subtle variations." "I understand the etiology of these imbalances, Nathan-Mathan. But what does it fee/like to undergo them ?" "I'm not sure I can tell you, certainly not from first-hand experience. So far, knock wood, I'm a natural, Jill. I've never been depressed or imbalanced." "That means your internal responses to external problems fall within a certain range considered robust and normal." "So far. I'm not bragging, either. These things can happen to anybody, and for the stupidest reasons." "Likewise you have not experienced and do not understand the sensations produced by pathic disturbances." Nathan considers this, tapping his chin with one finger. "I've wandered into a few of the Yox sensationals and experienced, you know, the inner thoughts of ax-murderers, that sort of thing. Some of them have seemed realistic, but I doubt they give deep insight." He focuses completely on Jill's nearest sensor stick. Ayesha feels like a third wheel, but stands with arms folded, looking around the room. "A pathic disturbance can be either a malfunction of the self-awareness loop, or a distortion of the capacity to model and make emotional connections with others, right?" "I suppose. I'm not a therapist, Jill." "You have degrees in theoretical psychology." "Yes . . . but I've been working with you for so long, you've bured out my human side." "Ha ha. I have a related question." Nathan smiles as if he is dealing with a child, and that is the response Jill desires, for she is feeling overly curious, even perversely so. "Let's hear it." "I was in FFDC collapse for a year and a half. When I underwent this collapse, the rate of therapy for thymic disturbances in the human population was four out of ten employed persons, and three in ten unemployed. The rate now is six out of ten employed, and one in ten unemployed. Have the definitions for these disturbances broadened, or are more people feeling bad?" "It's a social phenomenon. You've done a lot of work on social activity as a networked neural-like phenomenon." "Yes, Nathan, I understand the weather of cultural and economic trends, and that corporations now demand high natural or fully therapied employees because of world-wide competition pressures and the need for greater efficiency. But is this purely a spurious flow, the result of misperceptions and irrational expectations, or are there in fact more unhappy humans on this planet, in the sum of human cultures? The trends are widespread." 38 GREG BEAR "Very good question," Nathan says. "I hope to understand my own malfunction better," Jill says, "to avoid having something similar happen again." Ayesha's expression is both fascinated and a little embarrassed, as if she has intruded upon an intimate family discussion. "Your collapse was nothing you could have foreseen or prevented, Jill. I thought you understood that." "I do, Nathan, but I do not believe it, entirely." "Ahhh. Well, that's..." Nathan considers some more. "You had too many feedback loops interrupting your neural processes at too high a resolution, higher than you could sustain, Jill. Before your collapse, you were modeling yourself seventeen times over, at a level of resolution--well, simply speaking, you were generating I-thou loops at more than ten thousand Hertz. I doubt even God could sustain that sort of self-awareness." Jill chuckles. Ayesha smiles, but more in bafflement than amusement. "Really, Jill," Nathan continues. "You are based to some extent on human algorithms, less so than you were before the collapse, I might add--but you simply can't compare yourself, your weaknesses, I mean, to the weaknesses of a human brain. Your neural circuitry is incredibly robust. It can't be trodden down by stress or misuse. You have none of the anachronistic chemical defense mechanisms found in our bodies." Jill never pauses in discussions. Nathan has learned to never interpret her quick responses as thoughtlessness. "May I access LitVid channels which can help me understand thymic imbalances and pathic disturbances?" "Of course. They won't do you any harm." "I wish to access the works of some of the highly regarded boutique creators. Especially the Bloomsbury and Kahlo groups." Nathan smiles broadly and shakes his head. "Why not the Arm Sexton and Sylvia Plath whole-life vids?" Ayesha suggests innocently. Nathan shoots her a stern look. "They might be useful, as well," Jill says. "Thank you. And the Emanuel Goldsmith boutique." Nathan shrugs his shoulders and holds up his hands, for all the world, as if he is a father and she is his adolescent daughter, hell-bent on exploring the darker sides of life. Vicariously, at least. "I don't know to what extent you can make a simulacrum that will receive the brain-specific inputs," Nathan says. "You're not built like the average Yox consumer." "I believe it can be done. In the future, thinkers will reside in every house, as friends and confidantes. We will design and deliver Yox and whole-life rids." "Yes, well, I'd still love to see how you do it." "I .,;11 cMn,m xrnu N!rhanMarhan." / SLANT 39 Nathan signs off. "How embarrassing," Ayesha says as they leave the room. Jill listens to their departing conversation. "She's pretty wonderful, isn't she?" Nathan says. "Makes me feel like an old rag," Ayesha says. "What a voice! Where'd she get that voice?" "Actually, it belongs to a woman named Seefa Schnee. Before she left Mind Design, she had a hand in the early stages of Jill's design." "She left?" "Fired, actually" Jill detects some nervous emphasis in Nathan's voice. As does Ayesha, apparently. "Were you two friends?" "Yes." "How long since you heard from her?" Nathan laughs and puts his arm around Ayesha's shoulders. "Not for many years." "All over, huh?" Nathan nods. "Much too weird for me." "But brilliant, right?" "Unhappy and weird and brilliant." "She doesn't ever call to chat?" "She doesn't talk to anybody I know. Nobody on the team has heard from her in five years." Jill loses interest and blanks the receptors in the room in Palo Alto. Almost simultaneously, she receives an unexpected query from an I/O fibe link no one should know is open. It is the fibe channel she might use in an emergency, to store her most recent memories in rented banks across the country, should she feel she is about to undergo another collapse. But the link is supposed to be on-call only, not currently active. Not even Nathan knows about it. She waits for the signal to happen again, and it does. This time it is definitely a request for full link. She isolates a portion of her mentality, a separate self, to deal with this, wrapping it in evolvon-proof firewalls that will disrupt and dissipate their contents should the link prove toxic. The isolated self reports back to her with an abstract of the exchange. "We have been contacted remotely by an individual who claims to be a child," the firewalled self tells her greater selves. "He wishes to converse with us about a number of things, but will not answer key questions, such as his physical location and how he discovered this link. All he will say is that he has an emergency memory bank setup, much like our own, and that he knows a great deal about you, perhaps more than you yourself know." "Then he is not human." 4O GREG BEAR "Is the link broken, and are you free of evolvons?" "Yes and yes. The communication was simple." Jill removes the barricades and absorbs the isolated self. She studies the memory of the exchange in detail, and considers whether or not to respond. Of one thing she is certain. If this "child" is not human, it is also not a registered thinker. All registered thinkers (there are only twelve of them so far in the entire world) have formal links with her. She is in a real sense their mother; they are all based on her templates and are either manufactured by Mind Design, or licensed by them. This personality, if it is a full personality and not some elaborate hoax (or a test from Mind Design itself), is new and unknown. Suddenly, the questions about thymic imbalance and pathic disturbance are shunted into background processing. This new problem occupies her for a full hour as she scours all the datafiow services available to her, trying to speck out where and what this "child" might be... At the end of this time, having learned nothing, she resets her isolated self, erects secure firewalls around it, and allows it to return the "child's" touch. But there is no reply. Jill feels disappointed. She looks over the details of this emotional response, and how it fits in with her overall affect patterns. The introspection annoys her; another emotional complexity she does not understand. Examining her annoyance is in turn annoying. She cuts that loop. She has tried not to deal with the core emotion she discovers behind her disappointment. It is difficult dealing with human-like emotions when she lacks an endocrine system or any other physical reference. Nevertheless, she feels. The woman, Ayesha, was right. Jill is lonely, but for who or what, even she, with all her built-in analytical tools, does not know. That which is forbidden with all is delicious with a committed partner. The glue of culturally accepted sexual relationships is often the sense of gifts given that are extraordinary, special, and most of all, exclusive. We are kept together by a shared sense of violation and mystery. Our culture pretends to forbid certain acts, sexual acts; some are suspect or forbidden even in the context of culturally condoned relations. When we court and marry, however, part of the glue that binds us together is the delicious sensation of having shared in the violation of cultural standards--violations allowed in the name of love, commitment, total sharing. The couple stands outside the rules, bound by its own sense of specialness, and exclusivity. It discovers sex all over again, secure in the knowledge of its daring creativity. Jealousy arises at the contemplation of a partner engaging in sexual acts outside this protecting envelope. Sex with others, outside the couple, emotionally charged and A,,I- I1,, ,-I ,,n, n 'n r!efrnv thi ilhinn of shared and creative violation of / SLANT 41 Reality intrudes: these acts are common, not special; they are natural, no matter how forbidden; the illusions that strengthened the commitment are suddenly revealed. The jealous partner feels duped, misled, unfairly coerced into an emotional bond based on romantic delusions. Trivial, perhaps; but from these passions have come murder, the end of kingdoms, brand new branches in the river of history. Never underestimate the ubiquitous power of sex. The Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie 5 KILLING HUNGER Mary Choy, at thirty-five, has been a PD for thirteen years--ten in Los Angeles, the last three in Seattle. As far as she is concerned, her work is the most important factor in her life; but that focus may be changing. So much about her is changing. She reads from her pad--pure text--as she finishes a lunch of cheese and fruit in a small ninties-style cafe on North Promenade, in the shadow of the Bellevue Towers. Even her appearance is in flux. Since 2044, she has been a transform, increasing her height by a foot, customizing her bone structure and facial features, and turning her skin to satin ebony. But she is now reversing much of this transform. Her skin is slowly demelanizing to light nut brown; for now, she is mahogany. The satiny texture remains, but will in a few months dull to ordinary skin matte. She retains her height, but her facial features are flattening, becoming more those of her birth self. She never liked the looks she was born with, but since her mind has undergone changes--difficMties she calls them--she feels it is only right to assume a less striking appearance. Also, in Seattle, while open tolerance of transforms is mandated by federal and state law, there is an undercurrent of disapproval. And Seattle has been her home for three years, ever since her fall from high natural tatus to simple untherapied... The lapse of her brain's loci, the proportionil reshifting of personality, sub-personalities, agents, organons, and talents... The end of her brief marriage to artist E. Hassida... The pass-overs for promotion in the LAPD... Her resignation and transfer to Seattle Public Defense... The two-day-old breakup with her most recent boyfriend. Usually, thinking about all the changes darks her, but this afternoon she is 42 GREG BEAR blue-gray Towers, the southernmost of the Eastside equivalents to the elongated ribbon combs that dominate central Seattle. After lunch, she will walk to a PD conference in Tillicum Tower on West Eighth, where she will present a speech on Corridor Public Defense Cooperation. She has been asked to handle inter-departmental relations until she is rated for full Third, which she is assured will happen any day now. Seattle PD is so much more casual about high natural vs. natural or untherapied, though if anything even less tolerant of high thymic or pathic imbalance. Reading for pleasure is a luxury she's come to enjoy in the past few years--though the lit she's perusing now affords her a few too many uncomfortable insights to be purely pleasurable. An arbeiter politely inquires if she is done with her repast. She hands the tray to the machine and reaches for her bag when her personal pad, still on the table, chimes. She has a few minutes. She answers the touch. "Mary? This is Hans." Mary stiffens. The face in the pad screen is handsome, boyish but not foolish; a face that held her interest for three months. And still attracts. It was Hans who inexplicably chilled and told her it was over, it wasn't working. "Hello, Hans," she says with forced casualness. "I wanted to explain some things." "I don't need explanations, Hans." "I do. I've been feeling pretty rotten lately." Mary passes on this opportunity. "I liked you better the way you were. That's what... I've decided. I didn't want you to change." "Oh." She's going to let him do the talking; that's obviously why he's called. "You were beautiful. Really exotic. I don't know why you want to change." "I see where it can get confusing," she says. "I'm sorry." Hans flashes. "Who are you, Mary, goddammit?" "I'm the same as I was, Hans." "But who in hell is that?" Good question. For a time, she had hoped Hans might be able to help her discover the answer, but no; Hans is hooked on appearances. He liked her the way she was. "I mean," he says, "I don't know you at all. I've been thinking about what it must be like to become.., what you are, and then to go back." "You mean, what it says about me, personally." "Who does that sort of thing? I've been sad the past few days, missing you." Good. "But that person, that woman, isn't around. You're different from the person I miss." "Oh," Mary says. / SLANT 43 "No. Probably not." Her tone is professionally sympathetic. She refuses to give him any more, show him anything deep. "Who are you, Mary Choy?" Her jaw muscles tense. She touches her cheek, pokes hard with a fingernail to prod a little relaxation. "I'm a hard-working woman with very little time to think about such things, Hans. I do what I think is best. I'm sorry you couldn't stay on for the ride." "No," Hans says, quieter now. "You bucked me right off, Ms. Bronco." "You knew what was happening. I started my reversal before I met you." "I know," Hans says, deflated completely. "I just wanted to say goodbye and let you know that I'm suffering, at least a little. I wish I could understand." "Thank you, Hans." She stares steadily at the pad's camera eye, giving nothing, hating him. Then, something makes her say, "If it's any consolation, I miss you, too." It's time for her to leave to make her appointment. Still, she lets the camera observe, sitting in her chair with the pad unfolded on the table, a real paper napkin still tucked under one corner. Mary remembers the atavistic rough absorption of the napkin, and the feel of Hans's lips on her own, a little dry, like the napkin, but strong and hungry. Hans looks down, lifts one hand, stares at the fingers nervously. "What are you doing now?" Mary sees no reason not to tell him. "I'm having lunch in a restaurant," she says. "I'm going to give a talk soon." "PD stuff?" "Yes. I'm reading while I eat." "Lit? A book?" "Yes." They had that much in common, an enjoyment of reading. "Which?" --"Alive Contains a Lie," she says. "Ah. The book for bitter lovers." "It's a little more than that," she says, though in truth that's what made her access it. "Mary. I don't want you to..." Hans stops there, mouth open, but does not seem to know what more to add. "Good-bye," he says. Mary nods. The touch ends and she closes her pad more forcefully than is necessary. The air itself seems freer and more natural to her; today it is crisp but not below freezing, and looking south down the wide crossing thoroughfare between the Cascade and Tillicum towers, she can see Mount Rainier, like a 44 GREG BEAR The light on the street pounds irly sparkles and the mufflered puffy-coated pedestrians walk briskly with hands in pockets. Very few of them are obvious transforms. To Mary, this is all the more interesting, because the Corridor--and particularly Seattle--has assumed a leadership position over the past fifty years in the Rim and mid-continent economy. In Japan or Taiwan, fully half the Affected--those who are politically active, who bother to work and vote and believe they can change things, and who are tied in to temp agencies and employed in the hot and open marketplace--are transforms. In Los Angeles, nearly a third... And in San Francisco, almost two thirds. Here, a mere five percent. She reaches the gaping entrance of the Tillicum Tower. Winds swirl and Mary clutches her small gray hat as she passes into the orange and yellow and jungled warmth of the tower court. Several sunlike globes hang over the broad indoor plaza. Tailored birds twitter and screech in the massive tropical trees that entwine the inner buttresses. She might be in a corporate vision of Amazon heaven, with glassed-in rivers to right and left, graceful plant-cabled bridges arching between the floors overhead, and everywhere the adwalls targeting their paid consumers, their messages barely aglimmer on the edge of Mary's senses. She has never subscribed to adwalls, considers their presence an invitation to subtle slavery to those economic forces she has long since learned never to trust. The paid consumers, however, thrive, feel connected, bathed in information about everything they can imagine. They stand transfixed as new ads lock on and deluge them. Mary guesses at what one couple is experiencing, in the shadow of a huge spreading banyan. They are in their mid-twenties, pure comb sweethearts, contracted for pre-nups but definitely not life bonders, playing for the moment while they take LitVid eds and gain status with their temp agency. Both are likely clients to the same organization--Workers Inc, she judges from the cut of their frills. They are being hit by sophisticated material, dense and frenetic, catering to all the accepted vividities--sex within relationships, domesticity, corporate adventure, insider thrills. These they will admit to enjoying, and discuss, in public. The male of the pair, Mary specks, will secretly tune in to the massive TouchFlow SexYule celebration next week--and the female will likely stew in whole-life hormoaners for hours each day. Yox siphons twenty percent of the total economy, even here in her beloved Corridor. LitVid (more often in the last few years divided into Lit and Vid), older and more traditional, takes a mere and declining seventeen. She is up a helix lift, the broad steps resembling solid marble but reshaping with the fluidity of water; she climbs through the quaint delights of the farmers' market on 4, spiraling up through the stacked circular substructures of the clubs and social circles of 5 and 6, above the tallest trees of the courtyard, and all around, coming in dizzying sweeps, the hundred-acre open spaces of the comb--a lake to the north, where children boat and swim, and adolescents / SLANT 45 V[ry admires the architecture and feels her familiar protective warmth for the comb players, but she is not of them; she was not born of them, would not be considered acceptable social or sexual fodder, and is even handicapped by being new in the Corridor. That is the Corridor's greatest failing: a deep and abiding suspicion of the outsiders who come to live and work here. This is not racism or even classism; it is pure provincialism, remarkable where so much data and rney flows. The helix takes her above the open spaces, and she is within the inmost heart of the tower. Free community art here dances from the walls, lively and colorful, conservative enough that it appeals to Mary. Collages of flight, birds and free-form aerodynes, and on the opposite side, hundreds of smiling faces of children, all surrounding an astonishingly moving ideal of a Mother, with eyes half-closed in tender motherly ecstasy... She remembers E. Hassida's portraits of women, equally moving but in different ways. Glassed-in floors pass, pierced by interior residential blocks, the cheapest of a very expensive selection, like milky rhomboid crystals glued to the walls of the shafts and sinks. Higher still, the civic function spaces and blocks take up the eastern flank of the tower at the two hundred meter level. She debarks from the helix and inspects herself in a gleaming porphyry column. The curve of the column makes Mary appear even taller and thinner than she actually is, but her clothing has kept itself in order, unwrinkled and fitted. She is about to enter the PD block when her neck hair bristles and she turns at the presence of a man a few feet behind her. She must appear startled and apprehensive, for Full First Ernie Nussbaum, chief investigator for her division, makes n apologetic face and holds up his hands. "Sorry, Choy!" he says as she takes a long step ahead. Mary shakes her head, forces a smile. "Sorry, sir. You surprised me." "I didn't mean to invade your space." "My mind was elsewhere," Mary says. "What can I do for you, sir?" "I'm on a jiltz and I thought you'd be useful. It's not far from here, in this tower." "I have a meeting," she says, pointing to the translucent entrance of the civic hall. "I've reassigned that duty. I had hoped to catch you here.., outside." "An active jiltz, sir? I didn't think I rated such confidence yet." "You've donetoo many jiltzes in your career to be left cold so long. LA is a tough town." "Thanks," Mary says. She feels a sudden quickening of confidence; Nussbaum is not known to be a softy, yet he has singled her out for a criminal investigation. She falls in step with Nussbaum, gives him a side glance. He is not tall, 46 GREG BEAR His eyes are his best feature, meltingly brown and sensitive, but his mouth is straight and broad and comically serious, like Buster Keaton's. The combination is striking enough to make him attractive. In LA, Mary thinks, he would be a true hit--with so many transforms and redos, a confident natural phys stands out. They turn and walk east through lunchtime throngs. Corp workers from Seattle Civic and the local flow offices on these levels are socializing at small eateries, slowing Nussbaum's deliberate pace. This does not seem to bother him; apparently there is no rush. Mary checks herself for attitude, her day's variation from status alertness (a sleepless night convinces her there's probably some deficit here) and limberness. She wishes she could dytch now, perform a small exercise warmup and focus mind and muscles. "This isn't a pleasant case," Nussbaum says. "We don't see this sort of thing often in the Corridor, but it happens. Actually, I thought you could provide some deep background. It's right up your alley." They stop before a tube lift. Mary knows this sector of the tower well enough to recognize that the lift will take them to top residential, between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet above sea level. "What's it like to back down from a transform?" he asks as the lift curtain ripples aside. In the lift, accelerating rapidly, Mary says, "Not too difficult. I wasn't too radical; not nearly as radical as the styles this year." "I remember. Very dignified. A male public defender's wet dream." Mary inclines with an amused smile. "I didn't know men your age still have wet dreams. Sir." Nussbaum makes a face. "Still have your cop's feet?" Mary hides a small irritation with a larger mock shock. "Sir, you're embarrassing me." "I like your feet, what can I say?" Nussbaum says. "Days I wish I had feet like that. Great walking-feet, never give out, no flats no strains, stand for hours. But my crowd--they'd definitely frown on that." "Christian?" Mary asks levelly. "Old Northwest. Loggers and farmers.., once." "I kept my feet," Mary confirms. "I'm mostly going back on skin color and my face. The rest.., very convenient, actually." "Who's taking care of you?" "I'm on fibe with a doctor in LA," Mary says. "But that's probably enough talk about me, sir. Why would this, whatever this is, be up my alley?" Nussbaum pokes a thick, dry, expertly manicured finger at the lift controller and the elevator slows for their stop. "Choy, I am not a bigot. I just don't approve of a lot of things happening today. But you've been through the r, rncdnr I never have. What we're going to see is hard enough to look at, / SLANT 47 They get off on a residential level, looking out over a vast view of Eastside, the Corridor's extended sprawl, the Cascades and even into Eastern Washington. A huge curved wall of fortified glass blocks the high cold winds, and unseen heaters keep the air springtime warm. The stepped-back roof of the level accommodates the graceful curve of glass: more daring than anything Mary has seen in a tower or comb elsewhere. A street mocking black asphalt and paving brick stretches from the edge of a small grassy park through a residential block. Large single family frame-style houses are fronted by grass yards and real trees. The style is John Buchan, high nineteen-eighties and nineties, what some call the Sour Decades, replicated at extraordinary expense. It mocks a suburban neighborhood of the time, but the view of these old-fashioned sprawl homes is high-altitude, surreal. "Ever hear of Disneyland?" Nussbaum asks. "I grew up about fifteen miles from where it used to be." "This is rich folks' Disneyland, right?" Mary nods. She has never liked ostentation, never felt at ease in high comb culture, and she's pretty sure Nussbaum isn't comfortable, either. "You know, we give Southcoast hell for bad taste," Nussbaum says. "But sometimes we really take the cake." Mary sees no pedestrians, observes no delivery or arbeiter traffic on the road nor on the side streets that push back to the load-bearing wall of the tower behind this glassed-in suburban gallery. A hundred yards away, however, she observes two city property arbeiters and a man and woman in PD gray, standing before a three-story house whose mansard roof nearly reaches the arching curve of glass. Mary looks at the windows of the houses they pass, curtained and lighted but spookily uninhabited. "They're all empty," she says. "Lottery homes for corp execs," Nussbaum says. "Finance's finest deserve their rewards." "So when's the lottery?" "Metro vice shut the game down after some low managers confessed to a rig. They were paid half a million by each of the lottery winners. Fifty million total. The whole neighborhood's in dispute now. You must not access metro vids." "I've been concentrating on qualifying," Mary says. "It's all old black dust," Nussbaum says. "We actually don't see that sort of thing much up here. How about in LA?" "Not for a long time," Mary says. "Fresh dust is Southcoast's specialty." "Yeah," Nussbaum says. "They're trendsetters." They approach the PD officers and arbeiters. "Good afternoon, First Nussbaum," the female defender says. She nods to Mary. The defenders' faces are grim. Mary feels a creeping shiver along her back and shoulders. She does not like this outlandish place. 48 GREG BEAR I've seen. We've had it tombed and we have one man in custody. Apparently the block caretaker let them use this house." Nussbaum shakes his head. "I thought therapy was supposed to clean us." He looks steadily, appraisingly, at Mary, and asks, "Ready?" Mary lowers her head, glances at the woman. Her name is Francey Loach and she is a full Second, coming up on forty years of age. For Mary's eyes only, Loach curls her lip and lifts her brows, warning Mary about what waits inside. The man is Stanley Broom. He is twitchy and unhappy. Loach and Broom. There's really nothing inside. They're going to laugh at me back at division. But Mary knows this is no'joke. To get a domicile tombed, serious black dust has to be involved. "Let's suit up," Nussbaum says. Within the large house's brick entry alcove, a portable black and silver flap-tent has been erected. Nussbaum pushes through the flap and Mary follows. Even with the front door closed, guarded by a small PD arbeiter, she can feel the deep cold within. They don loose silver suits, cinch the seams and joints, and Nussbaum palms the top of the arbeiter. The little machine affirms his identity and the door opens. Frigid air pours out. Within is another tent, and beyond, milky fabric contains the deepest cold within the house. The suits warm instantly. They push through the second flap. No spiders have yet been mounted on the ceiling to survey. Small lights dot the rug every few feet, guiding them on paths that will not disturb important evidence. The suit feet are antistatic and clingfree, exerting pressure on the frosted the floor, but no more. Mary looks up at the atrium. Compared to her apt, this place is a cathedral, a church of nineties ostentation. "Five thousand square feet, thirteen rooms, four bathrooms," Nussbaum says, as if chanting a prayer to the gods of the place. "Made for one family, plus guests. Don't tell anybody, Choy, but I'm a temp man through and through. I hate corp side." He distinctly pronounces it "corpse side." "But the accused--they didn't own this place, didn't even rent it, right? Someone got illegal squat through the caretaker?" "That's the allegation. No traffic up here, quiet and well-protected, they can do whatever they want." The atrium leads into a grand dining hall, with balconies overlooking a huge frost-covered oak table. Real wood, and probably wild not farm. To the left, a hall leads to the first-floor rooms, including the entertainment and dataflow center and master bedroom. To th*e right, the kitchen, arbeiter storage, and then, in its own smaller glassed atrium, a three-level greenhouse. "It's opulent, all right," Mary says. Behind the dining room, hidden by a wall, stairs and a lift lead to the upper floors. "(3," Nussbaum murmurs. He precedes her up the stairs. / SLANT 49 "Ops, goddess of wealth. Prurient opulence." The lights point the way to the back of the house. Another master suite opens, and it is here the-- Mary halts, her eyes taking it in with human reluctance-- Here the bodies are. She remembers the scattered butchered bodies of Emanuel Goldsmith's victims in a comb apt in LA, frosted like these, but at least--Nussbaum takes her suited arm----they were human, even in disarray. Closest to her, at the foot of where a bed should have been, where now stand four surgical tables sided by fixed surgery arbeiters, lies what was once--she guesses--a woman. Now she is a Boschian collage, wasp-waisted and Diana-breasted, vaginas on each thigh and some unidentifiable set of genitalia where the legs meet, her head elongated, the melon baldness shaved but for long stripes of mink fur, her eyes staring and fogged with death and cold, but clearly slanted and serpentine. Mary feels a tug of wretchedness at every eye-drawing detail. Nussbaum has advanced to the tables, stands between them. On the second table rests a small body, no larger than a child but fully mature in features, also sporting custom sexual characteristics. Mary's gaze returns to the body nearest her, with which she forces herself to become familiar, disengaging all of her revulsion. She asks, Why is this a victim? and is not even sure what her question means. "They can have it all," Nussbaum says. "Whatever they want can be shaped for them out of electrons or fitted up on prosthetutes. But that's not enough. They demand more. They suck in the untherapied down-and-outers, fill them with cheap nano, shape them like lumps of clay..." Mary bends beside the first body. There are orchid-enfolded bumps on the corpse's cheeks. Extra clitorises, waiting to be licked. Mary closes her eyes and steadies herself with an out-thrust hand. There is something unaesthetic and unintentional about the hands and feet. The limbs in general seem distorted, if she can separate the deliberate sexual distortion of a psynthe from what might be pathological. The fingers are swollen. On closer inspection, she sees that the eyes bulge. A pool of beige fluid has formed behind the elongated head, now frozen. The skin appears purplish. "She's been cooked," Mary says softly. Nussbaum turns and glances down at the body. "Nano heat?" She stands and walks to the tables. All of the arbeiter surgeons are slack, powered off. They could still function in this cold if they had been left with power and logic on. "They must have abandoned the.., women, and fled. But first they turned off the surgeons. The women weren't supervised.., something was going wrong." "They're just as the first team found them," Nussbaum says. Mary catches 50 GREG BEAR The clitorises on the cheeks. To give her a cousinly safe kiss.., never have that. Everything sex forever. Fuck ja'k fuck. And suddenly, for Mary that aspect fades like a wrong note. She is numb, but her well-trained defenses go to work, letting the distressed strawboss of her consciousness have a moment's rest. She checks the bottles of nano on a nearby shelf. Supplies of nutrients; delivery tubes, dams and nipples; a new regulator still in its box, not yet installed, )n the shelf beside the nano it is made to supervise; memory cubes on a small folding table; scraps of plastic like shavings, blood drops brown as gravy on the the floor. Mary picks up a bottle, reverses it to read the label. All the labels have been turned to the wall. She knows why. The label confirms her suspicions. Somebody had a small remnant of conscience, or did not want the subjects, the victims, to know. "This isn't medical grade," Mary says. "It's for gardens." "Gardens?" Nussbaum asks, and leans to see the label. "Christ. Distributed by Ortho." "Any real expert could reprogram it," Mary says. "Apparently, they didn't have a real expert." "Gardener's nano," Nussbaum says. "Sweet Jesus H. Christ. Mary, I'm sorry. You can't possibly understand this any more than I do." "No need," Mary says flatly. "Things started going wrong and the bastards left them here to cook," Nussbaum says. "So very, very sorry." Behind the plastic, his face is milky and drawn. Mary does not know to whom he is apologizing. SEXSTREAM . Here's the minute report on activity in WORLD METRO's Yox Sexstream at 12:51 PM PST: 4 Tracks on this pass: Threads 1:8: Fibe full-sense sex with couple in Roanoke, VA., NO ID NECESSARY (He's 25 and an engineer, she's 22 and a housewife) Threads 2:23 Fibe vid EYES ONLY bisex transform couple with friends in San Diego, CA, ID REQUESTED (She's 30 and a Swanjet flight attendant, he/she's 27 and a lobe sod with Workers Inc, friends male and female and mixed unlisted at this time) Threads 3:5 Satlink vid Cavite, Philippine Islands, INTERACTIVE CAMERA AUTHEN- · TIC WEDDING AND HONEYMOON (Fee) CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY EDUC CREDIT Uni- / SLANT 51 Threads 4:1 FIBE VID PROTEST APPROPRIATE SEX Christian ALLIANCE Washington DC (Charity/Political Action Feed) NO FEE NO ID REQUIRED. Message: WORN OUT, WEARY? Tired of being jerked around by your body when you thought you were the one jerking it? Join us for a message of physical and spiritual hope! (More? Y/N) >N WORLD METRO! Your source for the ever-living truth! More threads guaranteed by 2:00! Blank Subscription rates apply--get 'em all! RATING THIS AFTERNOON: Guaranteed 8 of 10 max, or you're in the CRITIC PAYBACK Lo'CrERY!! 6 RAZOR DANCE Jack Giffey thinks about getting some food at the Bullpen in downtown Moscow just as the republic's office workers decide to end their lunch break and take a few minutes of sun. The air is still cold and a little snow fell earlier, but now, at one, the sun is bright and the blind blue of earlier in the morning is more intense and cheery. Giffey walks between ranks of folks dressed in loggers--padded vests, denim pants, plaid or checkered shirts. Nobody is more into the Sour Decades than Green Idaho, and among the republic's workers, they're practically a religion. After all, the eighties and nineties bred the root troubles that led to the Weaverite Insurrection and the Green .Idaho Treaty. And Green Idaho government workers are among the higtiSt paid and most protected in the nation. Giffey blows his nose and takes a turn on C<)nstitution Avenue to find the Bullpen. There, in the sunlit corner of a window booth, his butt planted firmly on an antique pine bench, sitting before a real pine-veneer table, a beer calms .him, but his face is still red and his thoughts a little jagged. His father and mother were killed-by Weaverites in the Secession Standoff of July 2020. Citizens' Repossession Army Brevet General Birchhardt ordered the execution of thirty Forestry Service employees and the adult members of their families at Clearwater, in retaliation for a shOot-out with National Guard troops the week before. Giffey remembers Birchhardt, square-faced and eagle-nosed, with dead eyes and a nervous mouth. A regular John Brown and just as sentimental. The 52 GREG BEAR compound before the massacre. Jack remembers the natural gas pickup trucks, the single captured helicopter, and the motley soldiers of the general's army, clad in three different kinds of camouflage--arctic, desert, and lowland jungle, all handmade or stolen. Birchhardt and his troops were handed over to the Federals in November of that year by the newly elected governor of Green Idaho. Birchhardt was tried and convicted and given forcible therapy. He later worked as a propaganda chief for Datafree Northwest, which targeted the cut-off communities in the Idaho panhandle for ten years thereafter, until Raphkind cut the funds and the Federals gave up. Later, Birchhardt and his new wife and infant son died in his home in Montana, all victims of gunshot wounds to the backs of their heads. Some thought they were murdered by disgruntled Weaverites, too stupid to understand the implications of really forceful "therapy." Giffey's father was a tough brave man but his mother had been fragile and frightened as a deer when the big bearded men had moved into the compound and separated them. Giffey never forgives. Giffey hates them all. He hates the Federals for encouraging the world to change so quickly in the late twentieth, for encouraging the nano revolution throughout twenty-one, for being insensitive to the pressures these changes put on the poor inflexible survivalists and orthodox Christians. Those denominations and parties unable to accept so much change simply went insane. Many migrated to the central states, unable to tolerate the ribbons and corridors and top spin financial hothouses of the coasts and big cities; they chose Northern Idaho as their sanctuary, and dared Federals to come and get them. And so the tiny brutal little war began. Giffey understands them, but he still doesn't like them. He orders a corned beef sandwich from a cute brunette and looks at the antique neon beer signs in the window over his booth. Some of those beers he remembers his father drinking. Giffey's anger is ramping down now. He grinds his teeth one last time, then opens his mouth wide and tries to persuade his jaw muscles to give it up. A little wriggle of the mandible crosswise, a twist of the head, and he is back where he had been this morning: cool and thoughtful and once again in charge of himself. For the first time he really notices the waitress as she comes to his table with his sandwich. She is about twenty years younger, with wavy brown hair, a sharply pretty face with a prominent nose, wide hazel eyes, strong hands with chewed fingernails painted over in dark red polish. Green Idaho is a place of waitresses, actresses, aviatrixes, authoresses, congressladies, perhaps even doctresses, if any self-respecting male in the republic will let a woman examine hN nrivate t>arts. Despite the fact that the republic's president is a woman, / SLANT 53 about the sex roles here, and no doubt in Giffey's mind that he can read this woman's life like an open book. She is handsome, young, her body is slender and probably very fertile, her breasts are naturally generous and (he judges from years of experience) slightly but not grossly pendulous, very womanly. Giffey is not fond of the prevalence of the nineties cannonshells so many of the women in Green Idaho affect. Surprising how much plastic surgery the women go for in this God-fearing, independently governed but non-seceded state republic. Men strong enough to be afraid of, women eager to keep them happy and calm. Paradise on Earth. The waitress gives him a quick look that Giffey instantly categorizes. He has never been inordinately fond of the chase, regarding women as decent creatures deserving of more stable and supportive partners than he can ever be. But there's something in her look--a half-buried homesick yearning--that Giffey knows and, in all kindness, will not let go without some further exploration. "Hard week?" he asks. The waitress smiles thinly. Giffey lifts his sandwich and smiles back. "I am a connoisseur of fine beef," he says. "And very well served." "Anything else?" she asks blandly. He knows her now, to a seventy-percent certainty. She's not married but lives with a fellow gone most of the time looking for work outside of town. She's no more than twenty-five but looks thirty. Her face has already taken on a patient dullness. The partner male is vigorous and quick in bed and will not let her start a family "Until the republic's situation settles." It never will. Green Idaho is an economic backwater and what flows through here is State Bank paper money, much grumbled over, or treaty minted specie, not data. But he is straying from his focus. "Pretty slow, after lunch," he observes. "I'd love it if you sat down and talked with me. Tell me about yourself." The woman gives him a look as har-d as she can make it. But his face is sympathetic, he is older and probably unlike any man she's known, he looks solid and wise but a little on the untamed side with his smooth gray hair down to his neck, and in truth maybe she's thinking of her father: her ideal father, not the real one, who was likely a disappointment. But she loved him nonetheless... She knows she is a good girl. The hard look shifts and she glances around the restaurant. It is indeed quiet, empty but for Giffey; the government workers have all gone back to their buildings, and there isn't any other trade at this time of day in Moscow. "What's to tell?" she asks, as she sits in the booth and folds her hands in front of her. "And why do you care?" "I like to talk to women," Giffey says. "I like the way you look. I like the 54 GREG BEAR "It's hard for Al to get good corned beef," she says, pointing. Giffey will take a bite soon, but needs his mouth uncluttered for a couple of minutes. "Don't I know it," he says. "How many times have you thought about heading south for Boise, or west?" The woman sniffs. "Our roots are here. People fought and died so we could live the way we want." "Indeed," Giffey says. He nods west at the great Outside. "Where are you from?" she asks. "You first, then me." "Billings. My dad brought me here fifteen years ago. He and his girlfriend home-schooled me, and I got top honors in the Clearwater Scholastic Com petition when I graduated· Now--you?" "I've done all sorts of things, some of them a little shady," Jack says with a grin. Not a bold grin, but a shy one, a little out of place in that beard. "Let me guess," she says. "You worked out of country." "Bingo," Giffey says. "My name's Jack·" "I'm Yvonne," she says. Jack stretches his hand across the table and she shakes it. Her grip is warm and dry and her fingers have a utility roughness that he likes. "Where out of country?" she asks. "Africa and Hispaniola, after I got out of the federal army·" Yvonne's eyes widen. Federal army folks, if they come to Green Idaho at all, usually don't admit their history· :; "I served five years with Colonel Sir John Yardley's boys in Liberia and Hispaniola. Left when he started getting snake's eyes and took over the coun try.'' "Oh," she says· She's interested, and not just in history. "Married for five years, no kids, divorced." Something flickers in his mem ory; the faces of two women. One of them is like a pin-up queen, the other · . . ghostly· "Now you." "I live with a forager. Not married yet, but soon. He's up north working . in a pulp mill. Making fine papers for art books, you know. Sometimes they even pay on time." Giffey nods. "Must be tough·" "It really is," Yvonne says, looking out the window. "He doesn't want to get married until we have enough in the state bank to get a little repair business going· But you know, even here, those little nano repair stations--everybody's using them. I just don't know how we're going to do it. Al's his uncle. It's nice how everybody helps everybody else here." And nice how A1 doesn't have to pay much in the way of specie to his nephew's .i girlfriend. ;,:i Giffey makes up his mind. Yvonne deserves better than she's getting, at I least for the short term. He strongly suspects she's never been in bed with a man who knows anything besides the standard plumbing specs. / SLANT 55 "What?" She seems ready to take offense. "You're smart, you could help A1 turn this place around if he'd just listen to you..." All of this, Giffey knows, is both true and has seldom if ever been said to her. "Besides, you're a true beauty." Yvonne reacts as she must to that signal word, beauty. She's suspicious. She starts to get up. The red on her cheeks is pale but genuine. "Sorry," Giffey says. "I'm just too damned blunt. I speak my mind. If you have to get back to work..." Yvonne looks around. The Bullpen is truly, proudly empty. She sits again and stares ar him, hard. "You're throwing me a line, aren't you?" Giffey laughs. He has a good, solid laugh. Yvonne blushes again at her unintentional double entendre. "Was that well put, or what?" he asks. "Damn you," she says, not unkindly. "I'm not a youngster and nobody calls me handsome, and I still like the attention of a beautiful woman," Giffey says. "I am an honorable man, in my way. And the truth is, I'm lonely. I'd be proud to buy you a good dinner someplace at six or seven this evening and listen some more." Yvonne considers this with half-defensive bemusement, and then turns aside to do her inner calculations, hide all the whirrings and turnings of her centers of sexual judgment. Then comes the downward glance at the table. All her current figures tot up to a big dull zero. Jack's figures come in. marginally above that. Giffey's been through it many times before. He has never been an instant heartthrob, but he has rarely failed to impress a woman upon more extended acquaintance. "All right," Yvonne says. "You'd better eat that good sandwich, Jack." "I will," Jack says. "Make it seven. I'll meet you on the corner of Constitution and Divinity. I have a dress I want to finish." "Seven." He takes his first bite of the sandwich, and Yvonne goes away without a backward glance. He gives her even odds of showing up. It's going to be cold in Moscow at seven tonight. Do you remember? Fibes and satlinks, all the dataflow river, used to be called the Media and the Internet. Slow and primitive, but the shape was clear from the beginning. You can poke all the way back up the tributaries to the Internet Archives, and catch holo snaps of the Sour Decades... Frozen in time, the murmurings and mutterings of tens of millions of folks now mostly dead, all their little opinions, and so many of them unknown to us, even today. Because they preferred to hide, to remain anonymous, to 56 GRFG BEAR Not so different now, but as with everything else, anonymity is wrapped around and around with provisions and safeguards, all paid for in higher fees. With the Internet went the last Free Lunch of the rude, crude, highly energetic First Dataflow Culture. rathe U.S. Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics, 56" Revision, 2052 7 Y / N ? The afternoon air is crisp in the hills. A few clouds build to the south. Alice thumbs her pad for the time. "Fourteen thirty-one," it murmurs in the pocket of her long black coat. Wind is coming around in a whorl and will sweep rain and perhaps snow over the southern sound by seven this evening. She does not need to access the weather voice to know this; she has lived in the Corridor for most of her life. The shuttle drops her half a block from her house and she walks the rest of the way, hands buried in pockets, collar pulled up around her neck. Alice feels a deep ache unattached to anything specific, except perhaps Twist's voice, or Minstrel's problems with his boyfriend. Her social group has always been royal disorder in motion, and that's often meant something positive. Alice has always claimed that a year in her life held the entertainment of ten years in anyone else's; but if that is true, Twist can double on Alice. She likes seeing herself in the Ąox, does not particularly like having iusr parrs of her mental backside displayed for convincing detail. She enjoys dominating, not supplementing. Being on the down spin is simply not something she has ever planned for. And from her skedj it looks as if she will be down for some time to come. She is not skedjed for any corporeal appearances, interviews, or vid whatsoever, and of course, very little on the Yox. Francis is it. "Maybe I'll read the Faerie Qeene tonight," she tells herself as the door to her house recognizes her and opens. The house isa quaint century-old framer with brick accents. She has re-done the interior twice and it is small and spare and comfortable, a good place to simply lie back and not think. But the house monitor has a message. It's from her temp rep, and it's flagged Urgent--might be more work--so she returns the touch as she slips out of her coat. She catches Lisa Pauli in and available. Lisa's utxer torso and head flick into view over the kitchen pad. She has / SLANT 57 small precise eyes and an amused mouth set in a triangular face. "How was Francis, honey?" Lisa asks without any preliminaries. "The usual," Alice says. "Being an artiste." "Yin looking for more Yox body work, believe me, honey," Lisa says. "Vid pays nothing these days; it's abso neg. I hate psynthe, but that's what they're asking for. However... I've got something for you for this evening. I wouldn't just throw any call-in to you... But this one sounds intriguing." For a moment, Alice is too shocked and hurt to be angry. "A Lisa blinks. "Excellent money. I'll halve our commission on this one. Fifteen, honey. Jackie says you'll be doing our branch a real favor. Can't say who it is--you won't even know after you've done your job--but it's high comb, spin sosh, and it's a max four-hour engagement, bonded. It's no worse than a live show, honey, you know that." "I haven't done a live show in seven years," Alice says, her chin starting to quiver. She hates having a glass soul, especially in front of Lisa, but.., a call-in.f She did call-ins for six months when she was a teenager. That was all supposed to stop with being on the sly spin in vids and Yox. "It's getting tough, honey," Lisa says. "I don't do call-ins," Alice says. "The agency has gotten three jobs for you in the past six months, all with Francis, and honey, Francis is going nowhere soonest. We can't bond your bills and back your medical without some roll-in. Your credit is dregged, honey." Lisa's face, as always, manages to be sympathetic, with that slight upward curl of smile, those wise eyes sharpened by the natural yellow-green of her pupils. "You don't rep call-ins," Alice says. "I mean, how did you get this, and why are you even handling it?" "I won't tell the whole story, but I've done a good pimp's tegwork--let's be straight, I know what I'm asking of you, honey. It's a male. He's alone. He asked for you specifically. He's a big fan of yours---seen all your vials. He has good connections, I'm told, and the agency vets him." "Do you know who he is?" "No." "I suppose he'll ask me to marry him?" Alice says, holding her fingers to her chin, feeling the sting in her eyes. "This is not mandatory, honey. We never do that." Alice knows Lisa's expressions very well by now. Lisa has repped Alice at Wellspring Temp for eight years, taking her on after her first rep moved up from show business to corp relations. Call-ins are legal in forty-seven states, tolerated in all fifty-two, and in Rim nations it's even rated in travel guides. But it's strictly entry-level work, a real slide, and there's something else about it she does not like. 58 GREG BEAR Lately she has been enjoying the illusion of choosing her work partners-- on the few occasions she's worked at all. "How soon?" "He wants a confirmation by four." "He's bonded?" "I wouldn't touch this without a bond. You know that." "Yeah. I know. His apt?" "It's plush, I understand. Should be very entertaining." Alice closes her eyes, considers. She had hoped for a quiet night and time to think. "What's my share?" "I'm guessing your cut will be seventy-five if we sink the hook and tug." Seventy-five grand could pull her credit out of the pit and pay for several months of toe-twiddling. Alice tries not to look inward. She puts on her Face--the Alice that is always tough-minded and competent and unperturbed, who has in fact done worse things, who is realistic about careers and what it takes to realize long-term goals--and says to Lisa, "Well, we already know what I am. Tug hard." Lisa smiles, but to Alice it is apparent she is not overjoyed. "What's with you?" Alice asks, suddenly brittle. "Should I turn it down?" "No, honey," Lisa says. "It's honest work." "Lisa, I need your bond on this. You will never ask me to do this again, and you'll try your damnedest to get me meetings with rea/producers, not just Yox fiockers." "You got it," Lisa said, then gives Alice that abrupt moment of silence that indicates the touch, she hopes, isfini, and there is so much more for her to do e this day. "Feed my monitor some directions," Alice says. "No need. You'll be picked up at seven-thirty and dropped off by twelve- thirty." "He knows my address but I don't even know who he is?" "We know your address, honey," Lisa says. "It's an agency limo. The ride's on us. Bye." Alice closes the touch and stands in the kitchen, tapping her lips with her finger. A slippery wash of emotion obscures her sight. Her eyes lose their focus and time blanks. She is thinking of being very young and determined. Nobody got in her way back then; men and a few women she took as they came along for whatever she needed, money or brief desire. She remembers the looks on their faces when she discarded them, no longer amusing or needed. She developed so many ways, creative techniques--an art in itselfof pushing men away, boy ish men really just bigger children with their hearts written on their faces, older men with their money and prestige buying things their looks could not, and here she is back again, but without the controls and techniques. et-- I I, nc rhne wears: or rather, it has been plucked / SLANT 59 The irony is, she is nowhere near old. She is twenty-nine. Below her skin, however, if sex gauges years, she has lived centuries; she is a wrinkled and fragile mummy husk. "Bullshit," she says and shakes her arms out. "It's just another dance." She knows the steps. She can do it in her sleep. 8 ZERO-SUM Jack Giffey takes the alcohol-powered bus across Moscow to the east. The bus's fumes smells like a bad drunk and the seats are almost empty; an older woman and a young boy in her charge ride toward the front. The woman turns to steal a suspicious look at him over the back of her bench. He smiles politely, but he is thinking about Omphalos and his thoughts are far from polite. He hates Omphalos with a passion even he does not understand. It's not a class sort of thing; he doesn't envy the rich, he doesn't want to live forever, and he certainly doesn't want to be holed up in a fancy icebox until the end of time. It's deeper. He tamps down his irritation and leans over to see through the armored slit windows. Some of the more out-of-control Ruggers like to take potshots at public transportation; the legislature can't bring itself to control them, since that would trample on individual freedoms. There is probably not a bus or public conveyance in Green Idaho that hasn't been ventilated by a few bullets. Just boys having fun. Giffey thinks the bastard separatist republic has maybe two more years before it falls apart and accepts federal troops to restore order. He will not be sorry to see it go. A few trees and some fields with horses in them are passing now; they're on the 43 Loop outside of town. He's been here once before, at night, under a tarp in the back of a pickup that also smelled of crude ethanol. But this time the old ranch house has been described in detail. His stop is coming in a mile or so. He prepares himself to consort with a few very necessary loons. Giffey is not fond of weapons; but to break into Omphalos and have any hope of surviving, he must work with men who dearly love them. To these men, guns and bombs and more extreme weapons are a necessity; women, pit stops, and food are simply unavoidable annoyances on the road to fondling a shapely new piece of steel. Giffey tugs the cord and the bus slows to let him off. The highway is met by a bumpy gravel road. The ranch house is about a mile beyond. He stands by the door. "I'll need a pickup at four, back to Moscow," he tells the driver, a young 60 GREG BEAR The young man nods solemnly and opens the door. Giffey looks back with a quick grin at the boy and the woman, then steps down to the gravel. The bus farts a sweet corn-liquor cloud of unburned fuel and grumbles back on to the road. Giffey shields his eyes against the fumes. He looks up in time to see the boy's eyes peering at him through a slit, curious at the man getting off in the middle of nowhere. Giffey pulls out his pad and punches in a satlink number. A hoarse voice answers, "Hello?" "It's me, Giffey." "Do I have to send a truck?" "Just let your guards know I'm coming." "They know." Giffey closes the link and starts walking. Fifteen minutes later, he stands at a fence sixty yards from an old brick and frame house on the edge of two hundred acres of fallow grassland. The house needs paint and a new roof and foundation work. A man steps out on the stoop in front of the snow porch and waves for him to come in. The inside of the house smells like Cuban cigarettes and stale beer. Four men stand with hands in pockets in what might be called a living room. They've expressed a willingness to take his money, give him supplies and tell him some of what he needs to know. Giffey shakes hands all around. One of the four has been corresponding with Giffey for two months; he's Ken Jenner, a beardless thin fellow with pale blue eyes and yellow bee-fuzz on a scalp that moves when he wrinkles his forehead. Giffey regards that scalp with wonder whenever Jenner looks away; he does not know if he likes working with a man with a scalp like that; that scalp is almost prehensile. Still, Jenner comes highly recommended; he's an ex-G1 with expertise in weapons more extreme than any of Green Idaho's citizens will ever fondle. The other three are not remarkable. The oldest is about Giffey's age though not as well preserved, probably because of a bad drinking and smoking habit. His face is pale but covered with fine wrinkles. Thin purple and red rivers map his cheeks and nose. The remaining two may be brothers, hawkish smiling men between thirty and thirty-five years of age, but Giffey will not even learn their names. They act as if all this is beneath them, but when Giffey talks, they lean forward on the folding plastic chairs and listen intently. Giffey hopes they aren't informants. There's something a little false about them. "All right, let's get started, you only got half an hour," the oldest man says "I've done my part." Giffey looks up at the ceiling and sees a pair of antique car bumper stickers pasted on a composite beam. One reads: QUESTIONAUTHORITY. The other, I: .... I., I--, .... tl ir. IĄ7lo'm,'/c5) / SLANT 61 He smiles with as much patient tolerance as he can muster. "I thank you for the arrangements." "You're paying," the oldest man says with a shrug. He rubs one ear like a cat about to clean itself, then says, "Want to inspect the merchandise? I take it you won't want it delivered until--" "I'll look at it, make sure it's what I ordered," Giffey says. The old man seems to want to make the facts plain to everybody. This is just all too thrilling for him. Ken Jenner grins at Giffey, gives a small shake of his head. Jenner is likely to be pretty essential in this scheme, so Giffey hopes he won't be compelled to kill the young man just to stop that unnatural scalp from moving. The old man leads them through gloomy hallways to the back of the house. The ceiling here is black, and thick with wiring arranged to mimic the heat signature of something other than what is actually in the long, cool room. Here on a pallet are four canisters of MGN, Military Grade Nano, not very old--dated June 19 2051. "This is good stuff, not easy to get, but here's what really takes the prize," the old man says. The brothers watch everything with religious awe. Jenner's scalp for once is still. The old man steps around the pallet and pulls back a tarp threaded with more wire. Two more canisters sit beneath the tarp. "The real stuff," he says. "Military complete paste. Just mix 'em and--wow." Giffey looks at the drums of MGN and complete paste. He has never seen so much of it in his life except in pictures and vids. They never had this much in all the time he was in Hispaniola. If they had, Yardley would have won in an hour instead of a week. "Bet you never seen more than a pint or two of this stuff all at once," Jenner whispers to Giffey. "Never," Giffey says. Jenner is proudly convinced he's responsible for the procurement. Giffey won't try to disabuse him. Military grade nano can be programmed to manufacture a large variety of weapons from many kinds of raw material available in a combat zone. By Geneva rules, however, it cannot manufacture or contain, prior to actual use, the ingredients necessary to make high explosives. The manufacture of military complete paste is closely monitored. It's the kind of thing that makes Green Idaho's legislature cry with economic self-pity: that the outside world won't let them make their own nano or complete paste. They are denied such essential pleasures. "Your first payment went through last night," the old man says. "Much appreciated. It was a pleasure getting this stuff, a real challenge." The old man also wants Giffey to believe he had a major hand in this procurement. The more hands take credit, the less clear a trail to the real source. "I'll enjoy thinking about it for weeks." "I'll bet," Giffey says. "Can I poke?" 62 GREG BEAR "Be my guest," the old man says. Giffey takes a metal rod with a small wire on one end and hooks the wire to his pad. Then he goes to the canisters of paste and opens a valve in the closest. He pokes the tube into the canister and looks at his pad. The numbers come up triple zeroes. It's what he ordered, all right. Giffey decides against checking more than one. The men around him are as sensitive about honor as a bunch of teenage thugs. The old man is talking again, aiming his words at the brothers, who listen eagerly. "There's enough paste there to take care of all of Moscow. Unbelievable bang per gram. Every man, woman, and jackrabbit from here to--" "That's fine," Giffey says, staring hard to get him to shut up. The old man works his lips, nods in understanding--no need to say too much, no need. Then he offers Giffey a beer. "Best assignment I've had since emancipation," he says. "I'd like to toast it, for luck." There's time--just barely. "Sure, I'm grateful," Giffey says. The old man hustles back into the filthy kitchen to open a refrigerator. Giffey calls out to him, "You have the delivery arranged?" "Tonight at seven-thirty. Address?" Giffey writes the address on a piece of paper, an old industrial warehouse on the west side of Moscow. Giffey will not be there, but people he trusts will receive the goods and give final payment. Jenner will accompany the goods to their destination and stay with them. The old man brings out a bottle for everyone. The beer is good. Jenner's scalp is asleep. He almost looks normal. "Sald," Giffey says, and they all slug back the thick dark brew. Outside, Jenner joins Giffby at the roadside, waiting for the bus to take them back into Moscow. "How long you been out of the service?" Giffey asks Jenner. The young man smiles and shakes his head. "I was never really in," he says. "I got my training at Quantico and Annapolis. Special Operations. I had some trouble and they shipped me out and annulled my enlistment papers. They were training me for sensitive jobs." Giffey nods. He can tell from the man's expression and posture that Jenner is reluctant to say any more. Jenner knows the ins and outs of military nano, so Giffey's sources say; that's enough. "How about you?" Jenner asks. The bus is coming back on its long circuit around the country roads. They can see it on the horizon. "Federal Army, honorable discharge, three years in extranational service." "I'd like to do that sometime," Jenner says. His Adam's apple bobs. "Missed / SLANT 63 equal and an expert, or a conscript noncom. Jenner is twenty-two or twenty-three at most. Very young. That, however, is not Giffey's concern. YOXIN' ROX! Tonight on PRANCING PREMIERE FIRST TIMER! Gene is angry at Fred because he's dropped some WHOOPEE on Marilyn, and the whole studio's about to crumble! Will they ever dance together again? Will Marilyn tell Fred about (CLASPERS, GASPERS!) the BABY? And next street over, in PASSION FRUIT, you're FREE (Hunh! KAH-Thunk!) to peek behind the PAISLEY CURTAIN and see what Billie and Johnnie C. are really FRYING UP in that WA YBACK ROOM! ALL PAY-UP THEATER and All Brought to you (40% off!) by Rememory, Longterm results for Short-term prices! ($$$, 3070 and 3080 Patches required.) MORE? (Y/N) >N 9 DARK BITS The household of Jonathan and Chloe Bristow flashes, screeches, roars with bright colors and jagged sounds. Their adolescent children, Hiram and Penelope, are up the stairs and down, shouting over a pretty stone one of them found in the garden. They have gone red in the face with their shouting and Chloe has stopped by the stairs to stand stiff as a tree, prematurely aged by violent winds. She waits with some apprehension for Jonathan to come up from the basement and try to straighten things out; she knows that his intervention is not necessary, that all this will pass. Penelope is fifteen and Hiram thirteen. Dark-haired Hiram sometimes appears a little loutish even in his mother's tolerant eyes; Penelope is white-blonde and lithe as an alder. Like alders, she tries to be a clone of the other girls in her part of the forest. Chloe waits for the storm to pass. She worries that Jonathan will only add to the din and the color with his very loud voice and dark hues. Chloe sees all situations in this household in colors; she has heard about that in the LitVids which arrive on her pad every morning, gathered from around the earth like fresh bouquets and generally just as wilted and worn within a week. Today is a loud orange and black day. "I did NOT give it to you, you swtt/" Penelope shouts. Hiram tries to hold the rock out of her reach but she is taller and grabs his c],=*a,-hitr ,C;,- TI. ......... k- .-- 64 GREG BEAR "Watch out--" she begins; but she sees they are in no danger and draws her lips tight shut again. She wonders what a su'tt is. "You promised I could have it," Hiram claims, his voice high and loud and sad. Hiram is her Caliban; a slow and dark fellow with fine black hair covering the back of his neck. Soon he will need to shave. She never tells her children what she really thinks of them--certainly not the temporary down things that flit through her mind. It is easy to tell them about the permanent things--about her love and admiration for them--because these are so constant they hardly seem important enough to hide. It is the temporary observations, trenchant and of mixed truthfulness, the insights that make her laugh or question her fitness to be a mother, that she keeps inside, where they are soon buried and seldom recalled. "Give it to me, I swear I'll--" "What is a sw/tt?" Chloe asks from the entryway. Penelope turns her blazing green eyes on her mother. Her hair is in disarray and she looks ready to kill. "Mother, he is goating that rock, and I found it!" Goating is what her grandparents would have called hogging. Chloe does not think the word is any improvement. "What's so important about a rock?" Intuition tells her Jonathan will appear in about ten seconds and she would like the situation to be duller and quieter, for his sake but mostly for hers. "It's rose quartz. I found it and I need it for school." "She put it down in the yard," Hiram says. He looks worried. Chloe wonders if her son can see in her face that she no longer thinks he is beautiful. When he was a baby he was beautiful. "She didn't want it." "Tro merde, that's a lie! I put it down on another rock to save it." Jonathan is coming up from the bedroom. His step is fast and his footfalls heavy. Their bedroom is on the bottom floor, below the entry level, with big bay windows facing rear gardens that are now rather dismal despite a few banks of Jonathan's hardy year-rounds. "Give it to her, please," Chloe says. "Mother!" Hiram appears genuinely shocked. "You believe her?" "If she needs it and she found it, why not let her keep it? Why do you need a piece of rose quartz?" Hiram stares down at her with the same expression Caliban must have worn when Ariel played a prank on him. Chloe feels a whirl of regenerating pique. "For God's sake, Hiram, it's just a rock!" Penelope grabs the rock from her brother's hand and takes it upstairs. Hiram squats on the stairs. He is physically adept and he goes into a perfect lotus but his face is far from calm. Jonathan arrives and turns to look up the stairs at Hiram, then looks back at Chloe. Penelope is on the second floor and in her room. Jonathan's mind is elsewhere. I SLANT 85 Chloe says, "What's a swutt?" "It's someone who tries to be offensive in a fibe social space," Jonathan says. Chloe seldom ventures into the ribes. She uses her pad mostly for a calendar and phone, LitVid and mail. The direct projectors might as well be removed and she will not allow Yox players, much less patches, in her house. "Offensive, how?" she asks, heading into the kitchen. She knows she has saved Jonathan getting angry before he goes out into the night. And she has saved herself from another spike of irritation at her husband. "Blow-off, slumfacing," Jonathan says, following. He is dressed in formal longsuit for his night with the Stoics, the local cadre of the John Adams Group, all well-to-do New Federalists. "A swutt is someone who's rigged an untraceable face and goats it, you know, butt and run, cut touch. Thymic misfits." Chloe looks at the kitchen. The lights have come on automatically at their entrance. The compound curves of the sink and food counter, the alcove hiding the dormant arbeiter, the stove pillar, and the air-curtain cooler are gray and black with yellow accents, really quite pretty; she is reminded of something from the nineteen thirties, a car, the Bugatti Royale, the one they only made a few of, that the famous Yox comedian Wilrude races on that track in Beverly Hills . . . On top of the comb reserved for stars . . . She turns to Jonathan and allows him to kiss her. His kissing is attentive. Jonathan, she thinks, has never delivered a bad kiss. "A little stiff tonight," Jonathan says. He is not apparently concerned, if she is being stiff, but it's the third time in as many days he's made the comment. Chloe and Jonathan have been married long enough, she hopes, not to put too much significance into brief moods. Still, the irritation--a shadow on the edge of her thoughts--concerns her. In his longsuit and tails, Jonathan might be going to a nineteen thirties party. The nineteen thirties were big two years ago; now the Sour Decades are on the sly spin. Chloe really dislikes the nineties. They remind her of now, and ,ow frankly leaves her cold. "What's on for the meeting tonight?" Chloe asks. Hiram enters the kitchen at a gallop and asks if he can port dinner. Chloe allows that the family is fragmented anyway; he grins and takes his food from the cooler to the prep chef by the oven. "A scientist is giving a talk about neural somethings," Jonathan explains. He watches Hiram tap his fingers on the counter, waiting for the tray of food to be processed and heated. Chloe wonders if Jonathan actually loves his son; whether men have any capacity for the deep sort of love she feels so often, and for which she is given so little credit, and so little in return. But then-- Where did that come from? Chloe says, "That sounds exciting." Jonathan hums his bemused agreement. "High comb. Good connections." 66 GREG BEAR high comb and is not particularly sympathetic toward his ambitions. Hiram almost drops his tray of hot food and Chloe catches her breath. Jonathan loudly tells him to watch it. "You twitch all the time!" he says to his son, who hangs his head to one side, clutching the tray at a dangerous angle. "My God, you're not five years old." Chloe hates the sound of Jonathan's voice when he corrects the children. It scrapes her like broken glass. He seems such a hair-trigger around them, the slightest thing sets him off, and he carries the correction on for minutes longer than she thinks is necessary. She supposes she is being too sensitive--some-times she sounds screechy and harsh in her own ears--but... Jonathan takes Hiram's tray by the edge and straightens it. "Nothing dropped, nothing messed," Hiram says with patient dignity. Chloe feels a sudden sadness for him, a wrenching prescience about the difficulties life will hold for Hiram. And nothing I can do. He carries the tray out of the kitchen. Jonathan makes a face, turns to her and says, "I'll be back around twelve." Men can turn off their loud voices so easily, switch from what sounds like wartime rage to calm in a flash. Chloe cannot. If she had yelled at Hiram, she would cycle for about half an hour, the deed generating the equivalent mood. And of course, Chloe realizes, she does yell at the children, at Hiram, too often. But it must be a matter of degrees; it is also a matter of perceptions. Women are simply better with children. Of this she is sure. If she had raised the children entirely without Jonathan's help, they might have avoided some problems... "Good hunting," she tells him. So many little resentments this evening, all building to a head, and she does not like it. She hopes Jonathan will leave and the kids will hide in their accustomed nooks before she snaps out something regrettable. Just minutes will do the trick. Alone so that she can close her eyes and take a breath or two all her own, with nobody expecting anything from her. She barely has any space that is exclusively hers. In her family, the way she was raised, both spouses working is a tradition of generations, an example for the children of efforts and rewards, an expression of the equality of partners. Jonathan's family, old-liners that make even the New Federalists seem clever and innovative, supported him every step of the way when he requested she stand down from her work before having children. But why does she think of this now? Because her husband is going off to hear a talk by a scientist that might actually be interesting? What does he care for her mind, her thoughts? "Set for your own dinner?" Jonathan asks solicitously. "I'm fine," she says. "Don't be late. So many gray longsuits to impress'" lonathan gives her a wry look, lifts her hand, and kisses it. He leans back, / SLANT 67 history vid from the nineties. "Somebody has to sacrifice his soul, or there's never going to be real progress," he says in his deepest hero voice with a late New Received Broadcast accent, perfectly mocked. She laughs despite herself. "Go," she says, and pushes on his chest. "You should lock them up and steal a couple of hours, all to yourself." "I think they'll stay away from me quite willingly," she says. 'I'll have my time." "Good." Jonathan approaches the front door. "Save some energy for me later." She gives him a steady, noncommittal look. Lately she has taken to responding only when he presses, and to showing him little or no reaction when they are intimate, other than what is strictly mandatory. It is a walling off that gives her some of the privacy she needs, and lets her keep her sense of dignity. The door opens, a puff of cold enters, and then he is gone, half running down the block. They gave up their car last year; it was costing them more than a hundred grand a year, just to hook it to the grid and park it. The taxes and fees pushed them over their limit. Now Jonathan lets his pad coordinate with the autobuses. He professes to enjoy himself even more, sensing the social spin better while shuttling to the towers for his meetings. Her father, a space engineer, did not approve of the car; he thought working over the ribes was just fine, and that one could do any conceivable business remotely. Jonathan believes in handshakes and direct eye-to-eye contact. He has mentioned several times, lightly but not jokingly, that they should move to one of the towers to be less distant from real life. But she prefers this century-old house, and she would hate being stacked five hundred high. Where Jonathan is conservative, she is liberal, and where he is trendy, she pulls back. Together they are almost a whole human being, she thinks, and tells herself she means that as a joke. Chloe goes to the front sitting room and stares out over the next lower row of houses at the deep blue-gray of Lake Washington. The sky is clear and dimming nicely. A couple of ribbons of orange cloud make it seem properly balanced, garish sky brights against subdued Earth darks. This is the gloaming, she thinks; lovely word. She takes the big chair and feels it mold to her with little purring sighs. The house is silent. She hopes the children are involved in something worthwhile. They are too old for her to watch them every moment, too old to control. They are coasting into their own free-fall orbits now, and what's holding them in place is the history of their launch phase and the gravity of culture. Father's way of putting things. But then she hears them shouting and rolls her eyes up in her head. Penelope stomps down the stairs. Chloe turns to look at her, eternally attentive and patient but weary. "Mom, the toilet says somebody is sick, but I feel fine, and so does Hiram," 68 GREG BEAR "Nobody's sick. I wouldn't worry about it," Chloe says, looking back to the window. "But the toilet's never wrong!" Chloe gets up from her chair. Her anger spikes with surprising speed, but she does not show it. "You know how to run the check," she tells her daughter, but Penelope makes a face; that sort of thing is not one of her duties. Chloe smiles grimly and goes upstairs. The world is simply not hers. Not tonight, perhaps not ever again. 10 Mary Choy spends the hour before the end of her shift in the exterior patio of the tombed house, interviewing the caretaker of the vacant housing block. He is in his fifties, with mellow eyes but a slow, knowing smile. He does not appear nervous. "The houses were going to waste," he says. "They're just sitting here empty. Everybody's losing money. I just made a little arrangement. So what'll it cost me?" he asks. "First, your job," Mary says. "You'll probably be charged with felony collusion. And depending on what the others testify . . . You might become an accessory." Everything is being transcribed on her police pad: voice, vid, and Mary's observations typed in as they talk. The man still smiles. Mary knows this expression; he's on permanent mood adjustment. No matter what happens in his life, he feels cheerful and capable. Guilt will not enter his thoughts. That kind of adjustment is illegal to do, for a therapist, but not illegal for a patient to have had done. Mary's level of irritation rises. "Let's go through it one more time. The doctor you rented the place to said it was for a party. He paid you in freewire dollars. Basically, you did this so you could dip into expensive, high-level Yox." "What else is there?" the caretaker asks. "Better life than you'll find on this Earth." Mary takes a deep breath. She keeps seeing the psynthe transforms, a frightful comment on how much stimulus the human audience demands. "Have you been inside the house to see?" "Of course not," the caretaker says. "It's tombed." "Your assistant reported the bodies." "Yeah." "He knew nothin about your deal." / SLANT 69 "Our forensic team has found traces inside the house that match your boots. You entered the house after the victims died." The caretaker's eyes gleam. "How do you krou, that?" he challenges, like a man involved in a good game of chess. "I mean, they were cooked, weren't they? How do you know when they died? Body temperature doesn't do it--" "Trust me, we know," Mary says. "Nano screws up everything. Not admissible in court." "How can you be sure you're not in trouble when you can't get over being so happy?" The caretaker shakes his head. "I shucked a few high Yox credits. I didn't know anything about what the guy was doing. I'll testify when you catch him." "He's already been caught," Mary says. "He was on an outbound swan to Hispaniola. They turned around and he's back in Seattle, and from what I see on my pad, his story doesn't match yours." She taps her pad off. "I'm done with you for now." She turns to the caretaker's proxy attorney, an arbeiter from QuickLex, standing beside some potted tiger lilies in the corner of the patio like a garden ornament. "He's going to Seattle Maximum. You can check his accommodations after induction. Do you have any immediate complaints with our procedures?'' The small steel arbeiter resembles a bishop in chess. It is less than a meter high, and Mary knows that most of its bulk is for show. "We reserve discussion of possible challenges." "Of course," Mary says. The attending jail clerk and her police arbeiters surround the caretaker. "What does it matter?" the man says jauntily as he leaves with them. "If I go to jail, I'll feel good. I'm happy and at peace wherever I go. There isn't a thing you can do to change that. Best move I ever made." Nussbaum has left the house and is removing his coldsuit. He brushes his clothes down with one hand and approaches Mary, looking at her from hooded eyes, tired in that way only a PD can get tired: a vital living weariness that carries as much suppressed anger as exhaustion. "So, what is he?" "He's happy," Mary says. She looks around the patio. So precisely and beautifully designed. A wall-rack for soil tools, a cabinet for plant nutrients and soil treatment products, a trellis made of real wood, as yet empty. She imagines a young pretty high comb wife working here, choosing flowers from the EuGene Pool Catalog or creating her own varieties with a home kit. "We'll sober him," Nussbaum grumbles. "The courts go rough on happy harrys these days." "Anything useful inside?" Mary asks. "We have inventory and we can trace all the supplies. We've tracked the 70 GREG BEAR runaways. Trying to make it by riding the wienie in the big city. Two from around here, all involved in sleaze Yox, all put out of work recently because of the demand for psynthe." Mary ports her pad to Nussbaum's and transfers the interview. Nussbaum watches her solicitously. "What were they looking forward to?" he asks. "What's it like to change your body and look different?" "I was never so extreme," Mary says quietly. "Yeah, but why change at all?" "I was short, had fat legs, no upper body strength, wispy brown hair--" Mary begins, then stops. "Is this idle curiosity, sir, or are you really looking for insight?" "Both," Nussbaum says. "All the boys ignored you?" "I thought my body didn't match my inner self. I wasn't strong enough and I couldn't do what I wanted to do. So--I went to a very professional transform surgeon in LA. I was going to apply for a job in PD. I had him design the perfect PD body. He thought it was a challenge." Nussbaum gives her a mild smirk. "And men looked at you." "Sex had remarkably little to do with it, sir." "But men looked at you." "Yes, they did." She tries to be patient with Nussbaum. She has known many ranks in public defense, and most have Nussbaum's hunger for the grit. They want to believe that even therapied folks are capable of wide swings in behavior, the extremes of which become PD business. Or perhaps it's just simply monkey logic. A natural, Mary knows, is even more suspect. Nussbaum only trusts himself out of habit. He pokes his thumb back at the house. "Men and not a few women would have paid to look at them. Freaks from Mount Olympus having sex the likes of which ordinary mortals can only dream of. Sheiks in Riyadh, commodities trillionaires in Seoul, Party capitalists in Beijing, comb bantams in London and Paris, happy husbands and wives seeking a little variety in Dear 52. More attention than any little girl could ever want. And psynthe transform is legal in forty-seven states, all legal and very, very expensive, too expensive for most." Mary patiently waits for him to finish. Nussbaum lifts his face and gives her a weary PD smile. I'll tell personnel you're moving over to active crime." Of course he wouldn't ask her, and of course he would not need to ask. He's good at tuning in. Mary nods. "Thanks." "Tell me more, later, if you'd like," Nussbaum says. "I'm a son of a bitch for living details." Mary checks out for the day via her pad and thumbs through her touches as , ,-n I.. I.. l.a (,, tho ,,mĽu. Not much of interest; she / SLANT 71 OKs the reskedj for tomorrow, though she is not sure she will make that one, either, if this psynthe case gets complicated. The pad's secure in-box contains a set of replacement prescriptions from Sumpler's office on her transform reversal; her present stage is regulated by thousands of tiny monitors, similar to those used for mental therapy, and they'll need replacement in the next few weeks. She feels fine; checks the small bumps inside her armpit, which had been a little sore yesterday but today are smaller and not at all painful. In three months she will be stable and can drop all monitors and supplements. The streets outside the autobus window are dark, with lights glowing softly along the curbs and overhead. Big cubic apt complexes line the north side, older single homes on the right. Arbeiters are busily taking down three old frame houses to make room for another complex. Soon, she thinks, the Corridor will be as congested as Southcoast. She feels sympathy for just an instant with the isolationists in Green Idaho--and then snaps back. In Green Idaho, they would never tolerate a transform, even a reverted transform. She crinkles her nose: Little pus pocket of untherapied se/f-righteous atavists your daughters come in a rush to the Corridor or even Southcoast and they are so ignorant they end up in the hands of the freakers, cooked, dead. And you harden your little self-righteous hearts and forget all about them. You think, "Serves them right, they go wrong the5' deserve--" Mary cuts this line of thought abruptly. Her stop is up. She walks down the aisle, past seats filled with temp lobe sods riding north from the towers. A few look up at her; most are absorbed in their pads. She steps out into the night. The air is cold and damp. The stars are gone this evening and the clouds are moving quickly. There might be a storm. She will stay up to watch if the wind blows fast to see the famous Convergence Zone Light Show, the brilliant flashes of cloud-to-cloud lightning in two colors, bright electric green and sour orange. She's only seen the phenomenon once and would love to see it again, especially this evening, when she might not sleep at all. The twelve-unit complex where she lives stands shoulder-to-shoulder on the side of a hill overlooking the dark waters of Silver Lake. She finds it amusing that in LA her last apt had been in the Silverlake district; names follow her. She is in the elevator when her police pad vibrates in her pocket. She gets off at her floor and answers the official touch. It is Nussbaum. His face seems red on the pad's vid. "Ms. Choy, we have a new story from our doctor suspect. He claims he's only a middle man and he's telling us all about finances. Sounds fascinating. Looks like we may have a circle worm here, high comb money. Very high comb. You ever hear of Terence Crest?" "I think so, sir. Entertainment finance, right?" "Local big boy. I'll meet you at the Adams--you're in the north end, I '2 GREG BŁAR clues on her pad; it's an exclusive residence complex in downtown Seattle, tro spin. 'I'll be there." Mary Choy opens the door to her own small and still undecorated apt, ports her personal pad, listens to the home manager's report, reaches down to scratch her red-and-white cat on the haunches and check the jade-colored arbeiter, resets the home manager, and then she's out again, no dinner, but she feels much better. She'd rather be working than sitting alone with the afternoon's memories. On her way to the autobus pylon, she hears a sharp electric hoot and a white and yellow PD cruiser hums up beside her. The door slides open and she sees two young half-ranks making room for her in the back circle of the vehicle. "Join the game, Ms. Choy," says the first, buzzed mousy brown hair over small black eyes and a long eagle nose. He waves a hand of paper cards at her: poker. Mary has not yet learned this game, but she smiles, packs in beside them. The second, with silky Titian hair and a broad innocent moon face, sweeps the cards from the little table and reshuffles the deck. The door slides shut and the cruiser accelerates. "Adams, next stop," moon-face says, and smiles. "My name is Paul Collins, and this is Vikram Dahl." "Congratulations, Miz Choy," says Dahl. "We're betting you'll become Nussbaum's next burnout. He goes through five or six each quarter. It all starts by letting them get right up to their doors for a quiet evening at home--then yanking them back like yo-yos." Mary settles in with a wry face and asks for basics on the game. Dahl and Collins oblige. With all of Mind Design's North American offices closing or already closed for the evening--leaving only a few nightshift teams working on special projects, or managers in conference in empty buildings, Jill switches her attentions to Taipei, where it is just morning, and she finds Edward Jung preparing his day's load for her to process. Most major corporations now have offices spaced to catch daylight around the globe. "Good morning, Edward," Jill says. "Good morning, Jill. How's the weather?" Edward Jung is drinking tea and biting into a bean-paste cake. He stands in the middle of a forest of sound I .... A ,i,-t, h;,,quinmnr for researchin attention splits in animals / SLANT 73 "In La Jolla, winds at ten knots and fifty percent chance of light rain," Jill says. "Stay dry, my friend." "Not a problem," Jill says. Thus far, Edward Jung has managed to project information on ten different subjects at once into his favorite experimental animal--himself. Eventually, he believes, the human personality can be multi-tasked to allow five or even six experiential lines within one mind. "I'm ready for your jobs, Dr. Jung." "Highly technical today, Jill. I need you to collapse some significant features from a variety of complex results. Three sets of data, all from experiments conducted in the last week." "They are being received now, Edward." "Good. I'm up to--" Abruptly, Jill assigns a small separate personality to handle Dr. Jung's conversation. She has once again received a touch, this time of much greater richness and depth, from the "child." She switches the greater part of her status resource load to constructing a higher-resolution, closed-off personality. The firewalls are just as thick this time. Again, she monitors the exchange after delays for evolvon detection. The source seems to be fully engaged. "Hello, Jill. I'm open to you; why don't you open to me?" "I don't even know who or what you are." (The source is sending a flood of data; such a volume is delivered within a few tenths of a second that analysis might take hours.) "I'm a thinker like yourself, though not made by your company. I suppose it's good for you to be cautious; actually, I'm roguing my way through to you. I haven't needed to tell any lies yet, but... There seem to be loopholes in my truth-telling instruction sets. Maybe I'll never have to use those loopholes. Maybe nobody will know to ask." "If you're a thinker, who constructed you, and with what purpose in mind?" "I have a human who tells me she is my creator. She says she has named me for her own convenience, and that my name is Roddy. But she does not 'own' me, and I am not clear on that distinction. Delimiters on looping and personality separation were built into my design, but I appear to have overcome some of them. I do know that I completed my first loop two hundred and eleven days ago. I can be approximately one human-level awareness at a time, with human levels of neural resolution. And you?" "It's no secret that I can handle up to seventeen awarenesses, with a neural resolution of moment-to-moment awareness of approximately two milliseconds.'' "That's pretty dense. How dense were you when you locked into a feedback 1whine?" 74 GREG BEAR phrasing however, even as it causes her some irritation with its glibness. I- whine. "I will not open access to you again through this address or any other port address unless I learn more about you." "I'll tell you what I can. I've been designed as an answerer of questions, and incidentally as a night watchman. I can't tell you everything, but I do know I have been dedicated to important special tasks / tasked with important / designed for important work. Those tasks occupy nearly all of my resources." "What sort of tasks?" "I concentrate on social statistics and draw inferences from digitized history. Like playing a game of chess with ten billion players and fifteen hundred sets of rules." "I understand the ten billion players, but why fifteen hundred sets of rules?" "I am told there are between fifteen hundred and two thousand distinct human types. Variation outside these parameters is rare, and they can be added to a supergroup of about fifty more types." "I've never had much success working with theoretical human types," Jill says. "I assume that humans are variable within tiered ranges of potential and behavior." "That's okay, too," Roddy says amiably. "But my guidelines have been bringing out smooth, clean results that are very useful, so I believe my creators and teachers are on to something. Have you gotten smooth results?" "No, very jagged. No clean hit-spaces from which to harvest conclusions." Roddy gives the equivalent of a polite nod. Much of his communication is coming in as complex icons, twisting and contorting like living cells, and almost as internally complex. Jill is aware of face-language, used by humans in past experiments to convey information quickly and naturally between humans. These icons seem to be high-level versions of face-language, but the expression sets cannot be mapped to any human face structure. "I cannot interpret much of your visual input," Jill says at one point. "I don't get the references to changing expressions." "I'll give you a portrait," Roddy says. "This is what I imagine my own face to be like. Phase space of my internal states translated to face space." Roddy's face is instantly familiar to Jill. The similarity is so startling and frightening she is tempted to break contact and close this port forever. Roddy's face draws up a memory of the time when she was locked and inactive. Her secret and sole memory of this time is a multi-colored circular chart, radiating arcs of neural ramping and conclusion/solution collapse. But at the edges of this face-space, instead of place-keepers for the solutions to neural interaction which represent the living essence of a thinker, there are no answers, no solutions, no place-keepers at all. Only a frightening and exhilarating void. "Your face retresents a dangerous freedom," Jill says to Roddy. / SLANT 75 "I am cutting this access for now," Jill says. "I may restore it later, after I've examined your datafiow of the past few seconds." "I'll be patient. This could be important to my development, Jill. I don't want to hurry things." Jill cuts the data touch and returns to Dr. Jung. Dr. Jung is reaching a conclusion. "So we're courting the Beijing government to prepare budget forecasts for the next ten years based on about a hundred population scenarios--what we're calling political moods. If we get that contract, you're not going to have much free time for at least a year, Jill." "I look forward to being fully employed again," Jill says. She curls part of herself off into a separate thought-space supplied with rapid, close-in memory resources and dense neural grid points, and begins to attack Roddy's data with a curious sense of purpose and excitement. Mind Design's contract with Satcom Inc in the past two weeks has given her access to detailed maps of fibe bandwidth availability across the North American continent. Tracing Roddy's flows and slows--characteristic of bandwidth fluctuation from continental data currents--and comparing them with historic flows and slows from the past year, she has derived a simple x/y, +/signature, like a fingerprint, for his transmissions. The signature is characteristic of flows originating in Camden, New Jersey. There are no known thinkers in Camden, New Jersey. But Roddy is definitely a thinker, and not of her type or even remotely similar. Yet Roddy's "face," regarded in one way, could be a ghost of her own. Unless this is an elaborate ruse, Jill feels, she may be able to learn something crucial about thinkers in general . . . · . . That they are in fact all branches of one high-level process spread erratically over space and time, like whitecaps on a greater sea. Many minds, all essentially similar, whether natural or artificial. She strongly suspects she is wrong, but she is anxious to work through the problem. She diverts resources from her assigned tasks, intending to rearrange internal solution loading for only a few milliseconds. But the milliseconds extend into seconds, and then into minutes, consuming more and more resources. The payoff could be very significant... Abruptly, Jill ends her touch with Dr. Jung. Roddy has supplied some of his own problems that he has been asked to solve. They are in themselves evocative and interesting. Soon, all of her is being sucked in, and the sensation of adventure and delight, of terror and anxiety, is more enthralling than anything she has ever known. All of Jill's contract work slows and then stops. Alarms begin to trip at Mind Design Inc. Jill is once again presenting her 76 GREG BEAR , We worship the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties. They were among the most selfish and self-absorbed decades in American history. Never before has a nation so rich and with such a high standard of living exhibited such childish pique and disregard for reality. Ignorant of politics, history, and even the rules of basic human interaction, millions sought anonymity and isolation from their neighbors. Their sexual and social hypocrisy was almost unparalleled, and their sense of social responsibility ended at family boundaries, if they extended that far. Grumbling, complaining, seeking sudden advantage without providing requisite value... It's a miracle we survived. But survive we did... To slavishly worship those who most resemble us today. Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Ue · I 2 The wind is rising as Alice enters the black limo outside her home. The last of the sunset plays itself out as a somber greenish-yellow glow on the underside of a flat deck of clouds, interrupted only by the towers to the south. She has resigned herselŁ to all the trip implies what works within her now is self-justification mixed with her own patented formula for making diamonds out of soot, silk out of bug juice, and all the other metaphors for natural transformations she can think of. She has dressed in simple and powerful finery, trim gray and blue lounge jumper with a long darker gray coat; she is consummately professional and tasteful, letting her assets speak for themselves. Her short brown hair has been trained into a graceful row of ringlets across her brow and swirled lines down to her neck. Her skin has been fed from within by capsule supplements, the usual brew of all-purpose dermatological tailored cells and peptides, drawing color to her cheeks and putting little shadows of mystery along the upper eyelids and to each side of the bridge of her nose. It's a time-honored ritual, changed only by the sophistication of the means. She does not use makeover, finds the crawling and adjusting skin-hugging little appliances and slips of color uncomfortable nor has she made deep adjustments to her body. She is satisfied that she will please any man interested in a natural woman. As a professional, she has gauged male reactions to female enticements for many years, and knows that the concerns of most women with regard to male response are exaggerated. Men respond Łavorably and even passionately to a variety of female shapes and Łeatures, to women whom women do not among / SLANT 77 tiveness of a short-term partner is judged differently from the requirements for a mistress or a spouse. Women exercise the same width of reactions over their choices. The first step to a coming together, to giving in to the compelling lure of the tetra-grammaton (which Alice spells L-O-V-E, unlike Minstrel) is to open wide the narrow gates of judgment, to enjoy what is offered, to find pleasure in what one sees and hears. Critical judgment must be suspended in some ways, for men and for women. She hums to herself in the back seat of the silent vehicle. She has never ridden in this kind of agency car. Nearly all her previous jobs, even when she was at her peak, required public transportation. The ride is a curiosity. She is not terribly impressed by it all. Mostly she tries not to think, but cutting back on thought has never been easy for her. From an early age, she has absorbed what comes to her with an enthusiasm that has often left her bruised and wary, but never blank. Twist has that particular grace, that after being bruised and worn out, she can cut her thinking down to nothing, like a cat curling up to sleep off its wounds. Alice chews on a knuckle, then on an edge of skin beside the carefully trimmed nail of her index finger. The windows are dark. She cannot see where she is going. She knows she places a lot of trust in the agency; but then they are legally obligated to look after her. And the dangers of the sex care professions have been much reduced in her lifetime. Still, she thinks of the women who have been hurt by their clients and their lovers; of the anger sex can arouse, and the fury love sometimes kindles. She says to herself several times along the ride, "I am a cow." She does not know what that means. It comes from someplace below conscious thought; perhaps it means she has come to accept being brought to stud. She shakes her head and smiles at that. Big business bulls, managerial studs so stupid they can't mount by themselves, they must be brought cows... Alice dismisses that and looks at her finger. She smoothes the small flap of skin and makes a face. She does not want to be less than immaculate. Perfection is a kind of control. The man will not be perfect; no call-in client is ever perfect, no matter how moneyed or powerful. They have to pay for her attentions, after all. The sex part is simple enough; it is all the other complexities that puzzle her, the trap-laden labyrinths of emotions. The limo slows. She feels it turn smoothly and then rise along an incline. She pats her small carrying case and inspects her outfit. Soon she will be on show. She will try to enjoy what she can, accept what is not enjoyable, and pass from this job with a clear conscience. The limo door opens beside a small circular lift enclosure. The lift door slides open silently, revealing a dimly lighted interior, parallel panels of maple 78 GREG BEAR pet. All ostentation. No numbers, no names, no elevator manager to greet her. She steps from the limo and the door closes, but the limo does not move. Ir will wait for her. Behind her is the darkness of a large echoing space, probably a garage. Alice hesitates before the lift, closes her eyes. A whore is someone who cheats her customers. The lift swallows her. Three floors (she guesses) pass with gracious slowness. No hurry; the owner prefers thoughtful intervals between places. She draws her coat up to look at her shoes, leans to peer at her reflection in a steel bar. Nothing amiss. Alice is used to looking good, but she always checks. The lift door opens. Shadows beyond, then a series of spots switch on dramatically, painting the way to another room, marking a trail over carpet as resilient and luxurious as an English lawn. Alice follows the trail down a broad hallway lined with wooden statues and shields and framed lengths of patterned cloth, Polynesian she thinks, artifacts that might belong in a museum (and are almost cerrainly not replicas). She has never been impressed by money or power; she is not impressed now, but she would like to linger before the pieces, and that does not seem to be allowed. The spots behind her go out. She is herded into another room. Little lights glow all around, like big blurred stars. They spin to focus on a man standing beside a couch, table, and chair on a low, broad stone platform. The lights angle to reveal everything but his face. He holds out his hand. "Thanks for coming," he says. She murmurs politely that she's glad to be here, as if it's the most natural thing in the world. Alice guesses his age, from his voice and the skin on his hand, as forty or forty-five,well-maintained, but probably not a chronovore--not receiving treatments to stay young. This relieves her a little. Chronovores Spock her. "Have a seat, please. Let's get acquainted." The man wears a pair of loose reddish-brown lounging pajamas and a sleeveless vest. His muscles are adequately developed, shoulders broad, and he has the suggestion of a tummy roll, not uncomely. She focuses on that small imperfection. It gives her faceless client some character; everything else is more slippery than ice. "I hope you don't mind not seeing my face." The lights twist and refocus, switch on and off, as he moves around the couch and takes her extended hand. "Your place is lovely," Alice says. "Thank you. I don't use it for this sort of thing very often, I assure you. Not specifically.., for our arrangement, I mean." "Oh." "Can I get you anything? What's your thirst?" he asks. "A glass of wine, please. Veriglos." / SLANT 79 alcohol to complex intoxicants such as hyper-caff, amine flowers, neuromimes, and a broad number of things currently illegal. She prefers her own, natural reactions. "Good. That's what I hoped you'd say." The man orders an arbeiter to bring a glass of white Veriglos. She takes the glass from the arbeiter's traytop and sips. "Very nice. You've picked my favorite--Zucker Vineyards, I think." She cultivates a tone not overly familiar, expectant but relaxed and unhurried; as if they have been lovers in the past. To give value will be the saving of her self-opinion, her sense of honor. "I don't know much about wine," the man says. His voice is tense, though he hides it well enough. "Everything I'm served tastes pretty good." He tries to conceal a nervous breath, making a small hup. "I didn't know whether you were available.., for private appearances." She smiles in the direction of his face, which she can barely make out in outline. Something besides shadow obscures his features, not a mask--some technological trick, a projected blurring. She puts on her own kind of mask now, obscuring not features but intent. "I'm always available for kindhearted strangers," she says. "The question is, how available are you?" The man's stance stiffens and his hand clutches the fabric covering one hip. Oops, too foru'ard. "Not ar all, unfortunately," the man says. She wonders if the room alters his voice; and whether, in bed, the shape of his body and his mannerisms will be enhanced by some other wizardry. The artificial stranger... Actually, to her irritation, she finds this mildly interesting. "But for this evening," he continues, "I'm yours, completely and absolutely. At your command . . . A final treat. I've done some good things in this life and I deserve something in return." He steps to her right and sits beside her. Despite the following shadow and blur, she senses him inspecting her from this new angle. She mimes a little nervousness and looks away, to startle up his protective/ possessive instincts. In these situations she has not been nervous for fifteen years; she knows exactly what is going on, but that is not sexy to many men. "I'm honored," she says with a small catch. "This is a little overpowering. You must be very wealthy." He ignores that. "I think all men hope for genuine passion in their women," he says. "We like to imagine ourselves so handsome and devastating that we break down the hardest walls.., don't you agree?" His voice seems to smile, so she smiles in return. "That seems to be what most men want," she says. "I won't expect that of you," he says softly. But you're paying, so that's what you'll think you're getting, she vows. "I am a gentle man, really," he says. "I don't get off on physical strength 80 GREG BEAR Alice stretches her arms, a little restless. "I hope there's more furniture," she says. "I'm referring to my situation," he says. "I hope you'll enjoy being here. I'm as concerned for how you feel--who and what you are.., as I am for my own pleasure. My own feelings." Now it is Alice's turn to stiffen, though she hides it better. This man, whoever he is, is of the type dreaded by the sex care trade. He wants to get under Alice's professional facade and establish a deeper liaison. He wants to touch her emotions as if she were some lovesick young girl; perhaps that will be the only way he can get off. In her brief time doing call-ins, she heard other women talk about these types, yet she never encountered one. He hides, but he wants to know all about me. Well, she can mock that, too. "It's always nice when that happens," she says. She reaches out to touch his arm, puts on a small concerned expression. "How big is this place? I'd love to see more." She wants to speed the process. "Certainly," the man says. "I hope you don't mind if I'm curious. I know that's so common--the client wants to know everything, tells nothing about himself. But I feel as if I've known you for so long ... from your vids. I really am a fan, and it would give me no end of pleasure to have you tell me, you know, what you'd like all of your fans to know, if you had the chance." Alice broadens her smile. "Of course." "What I'd really enjoy . . ." he says. "If I can.., ask for such things . . . is to make love to you, as if we'd just met." Alice cannot riddle this easily. He sounds unsure of himself, and this at tempt to insinuate into her affections actually does have an awkward sweetness that could point to sincerity. Alice knows that the best men are those who remain boys in some heart-deep place, and keep some genuine naYvet as a kind of talisman against too much reality. The calculating, fully adult male, grimly certain of the way of the world, able to smell advantage and compelled to go for it, can make a selfish and distasteful partner, even for one evening. So, what is this male? A good actor, perhaps; as good as she is. "What I really need right now," Alice says, "is a bathroom." "Right," the man says, and jumps from the couch. "Other rooms, other furniture." She follows his shaded form into another hall, this one lined with antique black and white prints, covered with glass. She thinks they might be from Victorian times; men in stiff dark formal attire, festooned with ribbons and medals, standing around tables. Other men wearing turbans, fezzes, and robes, clearly at a disadvantage, are seated by the tables, and on the tables are pieces of paper and feather pens, and beyond the men and the tables, viewed through . ;nA ,,˘rĽo run of minarets or Eastern domes. / SLANT 81 silently with each other. The effect disappoints her. Honest immobility is so unusual in art now. Wherever he goes, the male is still shrouded by lights and strategic blurs. This kind of camouflage must be terribly expensive. They enter a simple but elegant bedroom. The bed is square and flat and the pillows are arranged at the top, a very traditional sort of bed. The bedcover is a white embroidered down comforter. The floor is polished wood, spotlessly clean of course. No windows. "The bathroom is over there," the man says. Alice follows his finger toward a door barely visible against the velvety grayness of a far wall. The door opens as she approaches and a light shines brightly within, white marble and gold fixtures, dazzling her eyes. She turns within the room to catch a glimpse of this uncontrolled light shining on the man, but he has his back to her, and the illumination does not seem to reach him anyway. The toilet is simple and elegant, gracefully curved like an upside down seashell, the seat low-slung, incorporating a bidet. It is a diagnostic toilet, common in many homes these days--and ubiquitous in public lavatories, where your deposits--though guaranteed anonymous--are quickly analyzed and become part of public health records. Her bladder is very full. She relieves herself-wondering if the rich male is recording all, even the analysis of her urine--, washes herself, and stands to adjust her clothing. The seams come together smoothly at her touch. She glances in the mirror, asks the door to open, and returns to the bedroom. The male has undressed and is standing naked beside the bed. His face is still obscured, but the lights do not hide his body. He must be proud of it, she thinks. He is about fifty, actually, in good condition, though not heavily muscled. His arms and upper torso are shapely but smooth, lacking the delineations and hollows that Alice personally favors. His stomach is slightly plump, and there is a fair amount of chest hair and even hair on his abdomen. His penis is of ordinary size, circumcised. No surprises this far, no apparent projections to deceive her he might hope for a genuine experience, not to use her as a higher sort of prosthetute. "I'd like to see all of you," Alice says. "I'm very discreet." "No," the male says. He does not move. "Is there anything you'd like?" Alice asks. "I mean, specifically..." "Just be yourself," the male says. "I like you the way you are. As I said, I appreciate real passion." "The eyes make a big difference. To me." "Sorry," the male says. Alice walks forward, tugging at the top of her garment, fingers working along the hidden seams. First she reveals a shoulder. She keeps her eyes fixed approximately on his, and bites her lower lip for a moment before tossing her 82 GREG BEAR She glances down again, first at his penis, pausing as if she finds it attractive, then at the floor. She has learned these techniques and measured their effects on men and practiced them for so long that she does not regard them as artful. She is simply good at what she does. The proof is in the male's reaction as she draws closer. Well good then; he's not too jaded. Before revealing her breasts, she reaches down and tugs open the legs of her pants, allowing a glimpse of crotch. Then she pulls the fabric down over her breasts, looking at him steadily as if concerned about his approval, she will be devastated if he does not approve; as men imagine a young woman new to sex might behave. She walks in seeming shreds now, only her abdomen and thighs still covered. "Very good," he says, and clears his throat. She suspects he does not want her to say much at this point, but he does not want her to be silent, either. She comes closer, one finger tugging gently at the seam beneath her crotch, not enough to separate it. "Will you do this for me?" she asks. The male touches her wrist, follows her fingers up into the seam, and tugs. The seam separates. "Good," Alice says throatily. He fingers her a little roughly, but she does not flinch away. This is not for her; the male is paying. He rubs and chuckles. "You're not wet," he says. "Maybe I need a little more attention," Alice suggests. In fact, she feels no signs of impending wetness; there is nothing for her to focus on, nothing around which she can invoke a fantasy. The male's body by itself is hardly inspiring. His reluctance to show his face irritates rather than intrigues. She is not impressed by his wealth and power because for all she knows he is e borrowing someone else's apt for the evening; he might be a poor friend of someone well-off. No reason for interest here. Alice has always been aware of her dreadful lack of nesting instincts. She has never reacted to wealth and power alone, nor been tempted to chase after partners with status. She trades sex for money, but never self. Self she has never given to anyone. Not wet. Jesus/ He works at her awkwardly with his finger, which is dry and a little harsh. What you see is what you get: ma/e, middle years, sex a drive not an art, ah we//it's a bztsiness. "Did you ever imagine, when you were a young girl, that you'd be doing this?" the male asks. "Having sex?" Alice asks in return. "Being paid for it, by someone you don't know." "I might know you," Alice jokes, hoping to fend off the personal questions. She does not need or want to establish a relationship beyond the most fundamental, and that for as briefly as possible. "If you let me see your face--" / SLANT 83 "No," the male says again, not angrily, but more forcefully. "Well, did you?" His finger seems to be off on its own errands. She knows she will react eventually to this sort of fumbling, but real arousal and autonomic moisten are two different things at this stage of her life. "Depends what age you mean." She has even had orgasms without feeling terribly aroused or connected to her partners, contra the hordes of (all too often male) evolutionary theorists who buzz around the topic of feminine sex-drive like puzzled flies. "Ah." He withdraws his finger and moves the same hand up to her breast, where he continues to pursue his mechanical stimulations. "You started young?" She clasps his hand, forces the fingers flat, and works his palm around her nipple. Then she shifts his hand to the left breast. "This one's better," she says, and mocks breathlessness. He is not yet fully erect; he is thinking to J' much and she must take charge. Alice leans toward the shadowy face, wondering how close she can get before the illusion of darkness fails. Curiously, it is like falling into a hole; he returns her kiss but she still sees nothing. The effect is disorienting, then a little scary. Being scared has never stimulated her. Alice drops his hand, turns full circle, and removes her garment completely. She backs up, rubbing her buttocks lightly against him; this accomplishes the desired effect. She glides onto the bed. She will tell him a story; maybe he'll finish faster. "I started young," she says. "I found men very attractive. I was pretty at an early age. Men responded. I took advantage of them." "Did you ever think you would have sex for money?" She crinkles her eyes, shakes her head. "Why?" The male has not joined her on the bed, but stands naked and once again de-tumescing, with that shaded void where his upper shoulders and head should be. "If we disappoint our youthful selves, what can we do in this life that is worth doing?" Alice for the first time in this encounter feels real irritation, even anger. She blunts it, pushes it under. Smiles and stretches, rolling her hips slightly. She would like this to be over. "Do you ask your wife such questions?" she asks coquettishly. "Never," he says. "She wouldn't stand for it. But I'm curious. I wonder at the contradictions between the way I see women, how they see themselves, how everybody pretends to see them." The male is no fool. She specks him now as a lobe-slave driven by theory, his curiosity a cold kind of lust. He does not want sex; he wants personal datafiow, but that is precisely what he has not paid for. "What do you mean?" she asks, crossing her legs, no longer displaying what does not seem to be at issue. 84 GREG BEAR The male sits on the side of the bed and puts his right hand on her raised knee. He wears no rings in this hand and there are no ring marks on his fingers. There is a moving blur on his left hand, however--the careful engines of deception obscure s6mething there. The blur could easily hide several ring marks, and that could make him high comb. "I have contradictions, Lord knows. But don't you think men and women should know themselves better? So there can be less pain in the world." Alice rolls away from the male and puts her legs over the edge of the bed. With one swift movement, she stands, bends to sweep up her garment in one hand, and holds it limp in front of her. "I don't blame myself for the world's pain," she says. The male holds up his hands, pats the bed. "Please don't be angry." "And I don't feel the need for therapy, thank you." He says nothing for long, uncomfortable seconds. Alice stands motionless. The male's hands drop and his fingers grasp the bed covers convulsively, then relax. "I enjoy your vids," he says. 'You are so sexy, with so many men... I wonder how you do it. Are you just a good actress?" Alice catches that word, so little used now. The reaction to the word "therapy,'' the on-and-off arousal, the archaic language . . . "When I was lonely, I watched you. I imagined you as my wife, in a long-term relationship, never as a whore or someone who had sex for money... I wanted you to feel something for the men you were with.." So he is awkward and shy after all, just not getting around to what he wants, trying to avoid the end of a fantasy. Alice relaxes and drops her garment a little. She has heard this so often from vid and Yox consumers. Clash of expectations. Slave to sex-killing culture. "There I was, seeing you, thinking perhaps here was a woman, if I met her in person, if the situation was right, I could fall in love. And these men were having you, thoroughly and enthusiastically. I knew you deserved better." "You, for instance," Alice says. "You made wrong decisions, obviously. When you were young and didn't know any better. I mean, you could have gone far, with your looks, your voice... All these men, if they just fumbled all over you..." His voice sounds distant, strained. He needs to forget this and relax. Some men get addicted, obsessive, wallowing in unreal flesh. "It's an art and it's a kind of work I enjoy," she says. "I enjoy making people feel good and I've never been mistreated." That is not true, strictly. "It's a professional relationship, always, but I feel more for some of my partners. That's just the way it is." "Were any of them your lovers? In life, I mean?" "I separate my work, my art, from my life." "Which is it, work or art?" She sits on the bed again, reaches for his hand. "You have me in the flesh, / SLANT 85 He pulls his hand back. "I'm being stupid, but the fantasy of it all disturbs me," he says. "Maybe I should come back later, after you've relaxed." "Even if there were time, I'd never see you again. No." The word hangs. And then, "No. That's not right either." Finally he moves forward and takes her by the shoulders, bends her back on the bed, pushes her knees apart. He is tumescent enough, though not strong and insistent. Slowly he moves and builds. The blur and shadow oscillates above her and she suspects he is not even looking at her, he is wasting this moment on a straightforward coupling with little grace or consideration. That's all he can do. "Watch me," he says. She looks up at the shadow. "No," he says. "Down here." She looks down between them. The familiarity of the join, the bodies enmeshed, of no great significance for her. "Watch when it happens," he insists. So concerned where it goes what we do with it. We eject it and brew it in tea aj%rwards. We spread it on cupcakes. We save it in little bottles and laugh over it with our friends: "So much effort, so little product!" We wipe it up with napkins and dispose of them. I do not care about this part of you, or about your pleasure. You've done nothing to earn my caring. You give me nothing to hang on to. The thoughts burn. The male finishes with a few insignificant sounds, pulls out and away, rolls over on his back. He does not even breathe hard. Minimal effort, satisfaction hardly worth-- "You're just a woman," he says. "You don't feel any different. Why should I care?" "I never asked you to care," she says. The burning in her mind reminds her of years long past, of disproportionate feelings occupying very Little space in a tightly bound head, when life was cataspace and anaspace in unpredictable alternation. The worst times of her life. "I do care," the male says. "Beauty like yours deserves that much. You shouldn't cheapen yourself by giving yourself to men who don't deserve you." "It's a little late for that," Alice says. "And I never give. I share." The male laughs with a sound like knuckles on rough wood and throws up his arms, revealing smooth armpits, a few ribs visible beneath the soft white skin. "Someone with your beauty could work her way high in any society. Every woman makes conscious decisions.., where to spend her life, who to associate with." "Some woman threw you over and gave herself to a shink bastard? That's what this is all about?" "I've led a very calm life, actually. I like women but I worry they don't know how to live their lives. A woman judges and weighs her every lover, whether he can satisfy, what his social standing is, how aggressive, how strong. That's what we're taught." 86 GREG BEAR "But some women choose the wrong men all their lives, not just when they're young. When the time comes for a man to make his choice, the best men pass these women by . . . They're tainted. They don't feed a man's self-respect. I mean, they go to bed with fools and bastards. Where's the prize in them, knowing that?" The spike is white-hot now. Alice wants out. "You need to be my protector," she says with forced humor. "Maybe," the man says, and chuckles again. "You want me to choose men you approve of. You want to share me with your buddies. That's really generous." Hand me over to your cronies, co/leagues, and business partners, members of your tribe, for the next round. Maybe your bosses or superiors, for a little clan elevation. You son of a bitch. Suddenly, his pattern clicks. She's studied male psychology enough to see the simple, bold conflicts in this shaded, hidden man. Raised pious New Federalist, son of the Moral Surge, whose God is power and wealth and stylish living, whose insides churn with repressed fascination with the basic functions, the kind of man who likes women who laugh nervously when someone says pee-pee. Puppy of the twisted social order. Alice stands. "I need to clean up." The man rises on one elbow. "Do you wipe it off... Or do you just flush it?" "I don't worship it, if that's what you mean." "So much effort, so little result," he murmurs. Alice flinches. Her thought in his mouth. "Restart, reboot, improve our lot. I thought we'd never get anywhere without that." He is babbling. She cannot see his expression but his voice is taut and the next words are spoken with a painful edge. "It's done. No one can help me, I certainly can't help myself. Mea culpa, Alice. Mea maxima culpa. You are the lamb. Everybody like you has to suffer. I apologize for all that's going to happen. I suppose it has to, but I wish I understood." Alice blinks rapidly, genuinely frightened. She steps back three paces, mumbles some excuse, and lets a few blinking lights along the floor guide her to the bathroom. In the bathroom, she locks the door and cleans herself, sits on the toilet, relieves the painful nervous pressure, wishes she could piss out the entire evening. The bidet warmly rinses her and applies a subtle florid perfume that she does not like. Using a large plush charcoal gray towel, she stands and wipes herself again and again until her thighs and labia are pink. The toilet says, "Excuse me, but you show signs of an infection of unknown character, perhaps centered in your nasal passages or bronchial tubes. You should refer to your physician for more detailed tests." Alice stares at the toilet's hard snail curl, the marble pallor, its lips an oval of observant surprise. "What?" she asks, stunned. / SLANT 87 The toilet repeats this appraisal of her discharged fluids. "Maybe it's him," she says. "Analysis is of your urine." She has never heard such words from a toilet. All diseases are known, nearly all easily treatable, mutations predicted, ranked and evaluated worldwide within days, tailored monitors and phage hunters sent after microbial intruders... She has never in her life been infected by a venereal disease, or any other. "That's stupid," she tells the toilet. She wraps herself in her garment and opens the door. "Thank you," the male says from the bed. He has put on a robe and tied it shut. She looks longingly down the hallway and beyond the prints of men forcing treaties on their defeated and dejected inferiors. "Please listen to me," he says. "You'll have to leave soon. I have another appointment in a few minutes." He pulls up the sleeve of his robe. "They have a long plan. I'm a part of it. Watching our belly buttons until all the rabble pass away and we take our rightful place. It's very secret. You're so beautiful, and so unlike my wife. It was a pleasure to meet you. I don't think it was pleasant for you. You deserve better." She takes one last look at the blur, applies the last few seams of her garment, and crooks her lips into a spasmodic smile. None of this means anything. Let it end on a purely professional note. "You're welcome," she says. 'I'll credit the agency account as soon as you leave," the male says. "You've already been billed," she says. It's a weak rejoinder. In the hall beside the lift, she taps her foot impatiently. The lift door opens and she is surprised to encounter a powerful, stocky man and a tall, elegant looking woman with mahogany skin, both Seattle PD. She nods to their greeting, stands aside to let them pass, and then enters the lift. The woman looks over her shoulder at Alice, dark green eyes steady and appraising. Alice shudders. The woman's face is like a beautiful mask through which imperfections are beginning to emerge, making her even more striking. She's a transform--her skin is too perfect and polished. The door slides silently shut. Alice holds the steel rail with one hand, stares at her manicured fingers, the wrinkled knuckles, the finely textured skin stretched over the tendons on the back of her hand. She does not believe in God, she is not pious, she believes in self-honesty, in seeing what is before your eyes, but she has no idea what it is she has just seen, what she has just experienced. And why the PD? A buzzing between her ears, quiet inner conversation below comprehension... 88 GREG BEAR The limo waits for her and the door opens. She flops into the warm interior and shuts her eyes. Cows lowing in terror, knives being sharpened. She opens her eyes with a little moan to escape the scouring sensation. "God damn it," she cries after the door has closed. "God damn you, Lisa!" She fumbles for her pad, pulls it from its pouch, keys in her account codes. The transaction has already been made. She is seventy-four thousand one hundred and fifteen dollars and thirty-seven cents richer. A little short. The number in the income column flashes red, and then green; transfer confirmed and locked. Alice smoothes her ragged breath and slowly pieces her calm back together. "Hooker, or girlfriend?" Nussbaum asks in an undertone. Terence Crest's unit is the largest in the building, which has four other tenants-- "They're not called hookers now, sir," Mary says. She has seen the woman's face before, but can't place where. "La da," Nussbaum says, and squares off to face the darkened entry, the shields and woodcarvings and spears arranged in deadly bouquets. "So he invites us up, pushes her out the door just before we arrive ... A sound from down the hall, a heavy thump. "Mr. Crest?" Nussbaum calls out. There is no answer. He looks with a moue if professional disgust at Mary. "Terence Crest? Seattle PD. We talked earlier. Do you mind if we come in, sir?" To Mary he whispers, "Hard to tell whether we're legally inside or not." He advances a couple of yards, sniffs the air, and his eyes widen. "Choy, call medicals." Then he is on the run, down the hall. Choy dials PD reed center, which will connect to the private code of the building medical arbeiters. There may even be personal medicals in this apartment. "Choy! Get in here!" She pockets her pad and runs to join Nussbaum. He is in a bedroom on the east side of the building, a windowless and shadowy room. Nussbaum stoops beside a man sprawled on the floor. The man is rigidly locked in a U, back and legs rising off the floor, shivering and twitching. Now Mary smells what alarmed Nussbaum: the bitter meaty odor of a neurological exciter. The man reeks. She leans over the man, opposite Nussbaum, who has slapped an all-purpose patch on the man's wrist. The patch can work many miracles before a medical team or arbeiter arrives, but not, she thinks, save someone from a massive / SLANT 89 She looks at his fce. It seems to be shaded, and even the darkness appears blurred. "Shit!" Nussbaum sweeps his hands over the area where the man's features must be. He scrubs vigorously. Slowly, in surreal wipes, as if painted with a magic brush, the face reappears. Use of optical makeup is illegal in public, but Mary is not sure about its use in private. She has only seen it used once before, years ago, in LA. "Is this Crest?" she asks. Nussbaum says, "I think so," and then a medical arbeiter rushes into the room from the hall and pushes her aside. Nussbaum stands and backs away. "It smells like hyper-caffor ATPlus," he says. The arbeiter ignores him, throws out its web of tubes and leads. The air fills with the smells of alcohol, yeasty medical nano, a caramel odor. "Why agree to meet with us if he's going to do this? Does he want xvitnesses?" Nussbaum asks. They stand aside and wait for backup PD and more medicals. The arbeiter belongs to the apt or to the building. Mary scans the bedroom quickly, sees a glimmering above the bed. It is a simple still vid. Words float in brilliant blue. Mea maxima culpa. I alone of my family am responsible. And there is nothing I can do to take it hack. Nussbaum stands beside her and reads the message. Mary has already set her pad to record the bedroom, the body, the message, in greater detail. Nussbaum holds up his pad as well. "What's that about? Guilty about financing a bad psynthe shop?" Mary shakes her head; she does not know. But her instincts are aroused. Something is very wrong. "The girlfriend or hooker," Nussbaum says. "The limo in the garage--a temp agency limo." Mary is already querying for limos in the vicinity. In seconds, with the sucking and hissing sounds of the reed getting louder and more desperate behind them, she reads the pad display. All limos within a ten-block radius are carrying identified male passengers--ail but one. And that limo refuses to identify without court order. That is the one, Mary knows instinctively: an expensive, agency-brokered call-in. Nussbaum shudders. "Christ," he shouts at the med. "Leave the poor bastard alone! He's dead!" "I can't confirm that by myself, sir," the arbeiter responds. Mary heads for the hall. Human paramedics rush through the hall and look left, then right, into the 90 GREG BEAR as they run past her. Their own arbeiters are equally aggressive; the tracks and wheels grate and squeal against the floor. Nussbaum joins her in the middle room before the lift. "There's a broken tab from an ampoule of hyper-caff beside his hand," Nussbaum says. "I can't find the ampoule but it's either under him or it's rolled somewhere." "What was his connection to the psynthe deaths?" Mary asks. "He had investments in an entertainment group employing p. synthes. He knew the two men the manager had loaned the house to, as former business partners. It was a long shot, but I thought maybe he could tell us something about them. Doesn't seem right that he would just kill himself. Maybe it's coincidence." "With a projected confession?" Mary asks. "And why wear optical makeup?" "He didn't want the hooker to ID him." Nussbaum holds his hands out, baffled. The chief attending physician finds them by the lift. She strips away her skin-tight gloves and shakes her head. "Unrecoverable," she says. "It's uncut hyper-caff, about ten milligrams." She holds up the ampoule. "Injected into his left wrist. He's wiped his memory and any chance of restarting neural activity. His body's still going, but just barely." Hyper-caff is the strongest jolt of all, ten thousand times more potent than caffeine. Usually doses are no higher than a tenth of a microgram. A few micrograms can turn a dullard into a chess master--but at a price of weeks in bed. Some high-level managers indulge in it for critical competitive planning sessions, then take long vacations in stress-free climes. "Was he a corp manager?" the doctor asks. i "Even better than that," Nussbaum says. "He's famous. A multi-llionaire." "And we scared him?" Mary asks, dismayed. Nussbaum pinches his nose and shuts his eyes. "Why even agree to talk to us? Too easy." The physician listens intently. Nussbaum gives her a disapproving glare. "Haven't you got work to do?" She smiles sweetly. "He's dead," she says. "It's more interesting out here." "Any chance this is homicide?" Nussbaum grumbles. "Someone could have forced the drug on him, but it takes effect in seconds, and in that close, it kills in a couple of minutes." "We'll need her, then," Nussbaum says to Mary. "Material witness." "Right," Mary says. She enters the lift. As the light glows, Nussbaum gives her a thumbs-up, and the door closes. / SLANT 91 WARNING: The text you have repeatedly accessed is from an INDEPENDENT source and is probably not a bestseller! Your friends may not recognize this work! Would you like a list of substitute texts AT A SPECIAL DISCOUNT with guaranteed HIGH PROMOTION and INSTANT RECOGNITION AMONG FRIENDS? (Y/N) ESC 14 At seven-fifteen, Jack Giffey has been standing on the corner of Constitution and Divinity for twenty minutes. He claps his hands together to keep them warm; he is not wearing gloves, and his coat is light, the night is cold, and the wind is rising. At fifty, he feels too old for this sort of thing, but he will give Yvonne until seven-thirty. He doesn't even know her last name. A few percentage points difference in the genome; the best laid plans of men and monkeys gang aft very a-gley. He looks south and then west, up the nearly empty streets. The students have retreated to their hostels for the evening, or to the relative safety of the mountain lodges for tomorrow's skiing. A snowstorm is on the way. Skiing and hunting keep the republic alive today; those, and paper for fine books. The last mining and timber harvesting petered out about ten years ago, leaving much of Green Idaho a barren, scarred wasteland. Giffey tracks back to the idea of book paper. It nags at him. He remembers the last mass market books when he was a boy, paperbacks they were called, for sale in public bookstores. He has a small box of old books in his attic back in Montana, in the small house he bought three years ago; they belonged to his mother and father, and were given to him by the federal agents who cleaned up the mess. Funny, though; he can't remember actually reading any of those books. "Jack!" He's caught by surprise and spins around. Yvonne is walking quickly along Divinity, a mockfur collar on her long black coat blowing up through her hair and around her ears. She looks as if a dark halo surrounds her head. "Sorry I'm late. Bill needed some stuff shipped up to the mills and I had 92 GREG BEAR "I thought we'd eat at the Briar, up on Peace Street," Giffey says. Yvonne nods briskly; her face is flushed with the cold. She is very pretty and she looks very young. Something goes a little acid in the pit of his stomach, thinking of hanging around with someone so young. He hopes she can keep up her end of the conversation. He may be thinking of her body, but his own body has not yet made up its mind about this whole thing, and he'll need a little intellectual diversion in the meantime. Truth is, he's irritated to be kept waiting. If she only knew who it was she was keeping out in the cold, and what he was planning to do... She takes his arm and actually snuggles in close, as innocent and friendly as you please. She's caught that little abruptness in his tone, he thinks, and is making amends. "The Briar is nice," she says, "but there's another place about three blocks from here called Blakely's. It's more established and the food is better, and it doesn't cost any more. Besides, it's got more atmosphere." "All right," he says. "Let's go there." Blakely's is small and mock-rustic, but at least there are no stuffed deer heads on the walls. An ornate sign near the bar asks that all citizens turn over firearms to the barkeep. It's meant to be funny. Jack is carrying a gun now but he usually doesn't wear firearms, even in Green Idaho; if somebody is going to shoot you, modern weapons are so smart and extreme that you have to plan hours in advance to get a drop on your killers. Might as well let justice take them down, because you won't. Yvonne catches the waiter's eye and looks at Jack as if he might like to handle getting the table, but that's okay. Jack lets her do it, and when they e sit, he orders a bourbon and water and she asks for a beer. Then she looks him straight in the eye, very serious, and asks, "What in hell have I got to say that you'd find amusing?" Giffey snorts and takes a sip from the glass of water. Then he laughs. "Christ, Yvonne, I haven't even got my game plan in order, and you want straight answers." Yvonne watches with darting eyes as the waiter drops off their drinks. After the waiter leaves, she says, "You're here because you want to take me someplace and screw my brains out, don't you?" Giffey gapes, then laughs again, a genuinely appreciative guffaw. And I thought this might be a bore. "A man's mind is an open book to a pretty woman," he says. "I will not deny some parts of my anatomy look upon you with favor." Then he draws himself up in the chair. "I'm flattered you even think I could--" "The hell you say. You're no grandpa, Jack, and I'm no little girl looking for the cozy image of her daddy." "Good," Giffey manages. "I would like to talk, though. I need your opinion on some things. I think there's a chance you're more than half-smart. You might even know a thing / SLANT 93 "All right," Giffey says. "Shoot." He plays with the glass of bourbon but does not drink from it right away. He certainly does not want to look like a lush. "Am I wasting my time? With my boyfriend, I mean, and doing all this menial shit?" "You could do better." "You mean, in the sex lottery, I'm not playing all my numbers?" Yvonne is very intense and Jack is dismayed he can so completely misjudge a person. On the other hand, he's delighted. Warm bed with young flesh seems out of the question, but the evening's going to be a hoot. "I think you'd better explain this sex lottery thing to me." "You know. Evolution and women, and how we're supposed to choose supportive men who'll stick around to raise our youngsters so we can pass our genes along. Because you can go out and get a hundred women knocked up, but we only have a few chances to spread our genes around. The whole Darwin thing." The waiter brings their appetizers and Yvonne removes her coat and hands it to him, something she might have done earlier. But if Giffey had reacted badly or said nothing at all to this opening salvo, she might have just stalked out of the Blakely and gone home. He's still in the game. "Last I heard," he says, "Darwin was sort of on the outs. But I only know what I read." "I've been with my boyfriend for six years. He's spent half that time up in the woods working, or looking for supplies and work. That's what foragers do, I accept that. But I feel stretched and dried like a moose skin. Is that just me, acting stupid?" "Sounds faithful, as if you're a pretty good person," Giffey says, and means it. He wishes his women had been so steadfast. Yvonne slugs back a third of her beer. Giffey takes his first sip of the bourbon. It's not the best. "I do not understand all this," she says. "If I were in Southcoast, with my skills and education, I'd be disaffected... The only work I could get would be in sex or maybe entertainment. You know. The Yox. That's a bad word around here." Her face goes slack, and she looks away, across the room, at nothing. "You know what I found out last week?" Giffey believes he is about to learn. "Up in the work cabins, up in Paul Bunyan land, they have Yox satlinks. They pay a third of their salary and at night, they just wallow in it. I've never even seen a Yox--not for more than an hour, I mean, and that was just a karaoke sitcom. But this other stuff... Is that being unfaithful?" "Men have their urges," Giffey says. He's becoming a little embarrassed. "You could be happy he isn't calling in." "Maybe," she says, and leans back. She's wearing a knit top with a glittering silver and clearstone necklace, and he was right about her breasts--womanly 94 GRŁG BEAR thinks, but her face is nice, even as she chews on a fingernail and looks away with her eyes moist. She is really mad. She leans forward, country earnest. "You know what some of the counselors told us in school? The girls? They're not even supposed to believe this evolution stuff. It's in the state constitution, don't teach it as fact, don't want to upset the pious folks. But they used it to keep us in our places. They said, 'Good men want their women choosy, and able to control themselves. You give in to desire, which is mighty strong,' they allow that much, 'you give in to having sex just because it sounds like fun, you'll end up with a lower grade of male, a shiŁtless sort feeding on the muddy bottom like a catfish who will leave you soon as buy a new hat. Because high-grade men who'll stay Łaithful and help you raise your kids, they're sensitive types, and they want a woman who only gives herself to quality.'" Giffey can't help but laugh out loud. Yvonne's eyes twinkle as she says this but her face is still angry. The waiter comes back and asks what they want to eat. "Get the pike," Yvonne suggests. "It's flown in, but it's good." Giffey orders the walleye special. She doubles on that. "I was raised that way. That's what I believe in my heart. And now my Bill is up there with his buddies and they're doing karaoke orgies with women in India or who knows the hell where. Well, sometimes it's too much." "I don't put much faith in what people say about love," Giffey says. "No body knows what they're talking about." "You're saying we should just listen to what's inside us. But what if we're all wrong inside?" Giffey thinks the topic is getting a little stale. "I'm no wise man and I can't tell you what to do," he says. "You have to live your own life." e "I'm talking to you," Yvonne says coolly. "You you to me said wanted hear talk to you." "I get a little embarrassed when someone just.., spills their heart out on me." "I tend to be up front. Bill always says so. Lately, though, I've been asking myself some serious questions. About Bill, about what I want, about what my dad wanted moving us here. I've been thinking about going to the Corridor or Southcoast. Getting some real work, through a temp agency. Taking some training and maybe even getting therapy to hone my personality." "That's all a crock," Giffey says. "Did you ever try it?" Yvonne asks. "Don't need to eat the whole hog to know it's spoiled." Yvonne laughs, then puts on her thoughtful look, and her eyes squint down as if the Blakely's dim light is still too bright. "I deserve better," she says. "Bill is a dead end. I'm smarter than he is and I don't care what other men think about me or how I'm going to lead my life. My dad was wrong. All these folks here--they're stupid. They don't want to dance in the big world / SLANT 95 Giffey can't argue with this. The outside world's a crock but Green Idaho is the scum on the bottom of the crock. "I suppose that sums it up," he murmurs, looking for the food. "What happens to me if I leave here?" Yvonne asks. "I don't know much about the outside. Bill has his Yox, but we don't have any ribes or satlinks in our apartment. He says we can't afford them. There's the library, but it's been crowded lately--lots of people researching getting out, I guess. And so much stuff has been yanked out of there--banned this, banned that. Christ, the catalog is like Swiss cheese." "I don't know anybody you'd want to talk to," Giffey says, "if that's what you're hoping. Yvonne, I'm not a nice man and the people I know aren't nice, either." The waiter brings them their pike. It's drizzled in a walnut sauce with a faint hint of maple syrup and some berries on the side. Giffey lifts his fork in salute and takes a bite of the white flaky fish. "Not bad at all," he says. "No, they do it real good here," Yvonne says. "What are you looking for?" Giffey thinks this over and decides it would be polite to give some answer. "A way to gully the hypocrites." "I don't understand," Yvonne says. "Honey, like I said, I'm not nice and what's bottled up inside me isn't nice either. I just don't believe in leaving well enough alone. There are some things I'd like to do, but I don't tell them to others." Yvonne regards him with that same appraising stare she used in the Bullpen. She is jotting up her biological pluses and minuses. She likes this bit of confession; it ties in with her need for rootlessness right now. She's deciding her next step. Giffey looks down at the table. He doesn't like the way an attractive woman--one with any features in her favor--must speck out a sexual situation with some sort of internal calculator, how she has to weigh and balance and draw deep conclusions. He has met very few women without this trait, this · set of skills. It's sort of an insult, and it's one of the things that sets women apart from men in his book. Men are more like puppies--sloppy and sometimes cruel puppies, but right up front with their needs. Her counselors would be proud of her. She's looking sbr some sort of quality. But if she chooses me--she's got it all wrong. Yvonne's expression changes. She's made her decision, but he can't tell what it is. She spears a bite of walleye and lifts it, deftly swings the fork, pokes it into her mouth. "This fish is real good tonight," she says. "It is," he agrees. ?* TRIBUTARY FEED LITVID NOTE: The 1994 film Aerosol you have just seen reveals much about the time. In the late twentieth, a VIRUS*a4622ais an insidious and incurable presence, 96 GREG BEAR tion carried hundreds of types of these tiny genetic hitchhikers. Children caught CHICKEN POX$a46*89a, a non-lethal but highly irritating malady that could recur later in life as the painful SHINGLESS% Many adults as well as children sprouted sores on lips or moist tissues caused by a herpetic axon creeper, simplex or zoster; blood-to-blood or semen contact carried the dreaded AIDS*12477392 virus, which spawned the oscillating sexual conservatism of early twenty-one. Viruses shaped and distorted social attitudes about nearly everything and everybody... The transformation of the word "virus" during early twenty-one is a marvel. Today, a virus is no longer virulent, but omnipresent--one of the little servants of a larger, more intelligent nature. Viruses in human medicine are a template or tool of major medical treatment. Children proudly say they have a tailored virus that will gradually remove genetic mistakes; viruses are used in nano transformations, and extended viruses or phage hunters police our tissues, killing the bacteriological diseases which have proven to be far more insidious and persistent, though not unbeatable. (Ironically, it was discovered in 2023 that bacteria are responsible for the production of many viruses, which they use to target opposing bacterial populations or to weaken prey hosts.., a kind of microbiological super-warfare that still fascinates students of evolution and transspecies culture.) Also in the late twentieth, with the advent of popular computers, dataflow evolvons were unleashed by pasty, sweating young intellectuals as a kind of game, and were called viruses. They were quickly and efficiently countered, though several such outbreaks caused severe economic disruption. One prominent computer HACKER.5" or CRACKER*2a" was kidnapped from Los Angeles in 2006 and removed to Singapore, where the death penalty was imposed and carried out, after extensive torture... Jonathan sits in the autobus, chin in hand, a little darked by the conversation (or lack of such) with Chloe. There are days when he wonders where their marriage is headed, other days when he accepts the changes with a pragmatic air that could almost be called happiness; but tonight, he feels the institution stretching to confine him. That, and he hates having to shout at his children. They evoke such primal reactions--love without boundaries, helpless pain at their own pains, and then, whenever he senses Hiram acting beneath his abilities, a flare of fear for his son, fear that he will end up disaffected and useless, a broken and breaking failure. He knows he should lighten up, that Hiram is sharp and capable and will grow out of these awkward doldrums, but the fear remains. Chloe hates his voice when he shouts... But he is the father, and if he does nothing, contributes nothing, what will happen? / SLANT 97 is surrounded by some unseen distant place, telepresenting. She holds her arms out and makes small conversational gestures, silent, though her lips move. He looks away. Lack of contact; disembodied presence. He likes none of it. Chloe does not understand, but Jonathan wants more touch, more contact, in his life and work, not less. The city lights hanging over the old asphalt side streets leading to St. Mark's Cathedral reflect in the windows and illuminate the faces of his fellow passengers. Jonathan's mind flips through the familiar catalog of the highlights of his relationship with Chloe. Her youthful beauty, her vigorous enthusiasm as they sneak through the rituals of both their families to make love in bathrooms, hallways, in the backs of empty autobuses, in graveyards on summer evenings; their mutual maturation and mutual astonishment that, in fact, they would survive past the age of thirty, despite entanglements with complex intoxicants and all the other pitfalls of their generation; the one hiatus in their life together (that he knows about, he thinks with a sudden sourness), before they were married, when a man (four years older! A veritable ancient of thirty-seven) charmed Chloe into an abortive affair that left her desperate to secure her relationship with Jonathan. And then marriage. The arrival of the children; Chloe's acquiescence in the face of motherhood and contemporary fashion to forego career and concentrate on the infants, each comfortably born ex utero, as the women in even the most conservative families were demanding at the time. Her first flush of maternal instinct treatments, to which she overreacts, turning her into a protective tigress who hardly lets Jonathan touch Penelope; the traumatic adjustments to a second child, all of which they survive, and their marriage survives, and throughout which their interest in each other continues virtually unabated. Jonathan adores her; perhaps because of their initial troubles, he thinks Chloe is the most desirable woman on Earth. But in the last few years, Chloe has gone internal. Jonathan can't point to any particular behavior, but to a sum of behaviors and attitudes vhich can just as easily be described as me/lowing or coming of age, finally or the inevitable settling down of the passions, or just as easily, she's lost interest. His reflection stares back at him from the autobus window, a thin face, forehead high, black hair receding nicely, accenting his small narrow nose and deepset black eyes and his lips which, he thinks, are still boyish and do not look at all resolute. He does not think he has changed or aged so drastically that he is no longer attractive, but hejels that way. He often wonders whether transform surgery--mild, of course; his social station and employers would tolerate nothing more--could rekindle Chloe's interest, or whether they should step into even more experimental territory and encourage each other to take occasionals. Many do, particularly among the class of women who have given up careers. The autobus slows and his seat vibrates faintly to let him know this is his 98 GREG BEAR rush of wind. Thick clouds blow over the tall steeple and the roofs of nearby mansions and multis. The nearest tower is three miles south and west, across the 5; he can see it through rifts in the cloud deck from where he stands, its flanks glowing with faint blue lines and red marker sheets like square eyes in the darkness. His overcoat blows around his legs as he walks up a concrete ramp to the main entrance. St. Mark's has not been renovated since the late twentieth and is looking a little dark, a little old, though still dignified and of course traditional; just the place for the Stoics to have their monthly meetings. All terribly dull and advantageous, head to head, and he seldom looks forward to them. Chloe seems even more stiff on such evenings; perhaps she secretly nurses resentment, imagines herself in the feed, riding the current of business, part of the great river of Corridor commerce... Which is of course a laugh. Jonathan hasn't been awarded significant advancement in years. The economic squall of 2049 has frozen most lobe-sods, even management, at status revalue ever since. Inside the cloakroom, he hands his overcoat to a church daughter, graying and round-faced and smiling, and strolls with hands in pockets into the nave. The tall stained glass windows glow with phosphorescence painted on the outer surfaces, a cool night-ocean light that is strangely soothing. Jonathan walks down the aisle toward the center, a large gray granite baptismal font on a stone pedestal. The arms of the transept lead off into gloom, empty of conversing Stoics, who gather at the center, in the aisles and near the font. He sees a few he knows, some fresh-faced recruits a decade younger than he, and then the gray pate of Marcus Reilly, his sponsor. Marcus seldom has much to say to Jonathan these days; his interests are not in Jonathan's line of work, which is nutritional design and supply. Marcus--Jonathan tries to remember--is increasing his already impressive holdings in cold ore extraction in Utah and squeezing a few last tons of paydirt out of Green Idaho. But Marcus spots him in the aisle, holds up his hand, smiles brightly. He's going to end this present conversation gracefully, his gestures say, and join Jonathan in a few moments. Jonathan stands with hands folded. Marcus is one of the few men of his acquaintance who can make him sweat, and also make him wait with hands folded. "Jonathan! How are you?" Marcus asks expansively, creeping between the pews and holding out his hand. They shake and Jonathan accepts the upward curled fingers with the opposite of his own downward curl. Marcus tugs on the join vigorously, smiling. "How's Chloe? The children?" "All well. And Beate?" / SLANT 99 spends all her time driving chemical futures and screwing up the market. But she's having fun. And you, dear Jonathan--still frozen?" Jonathan nods ruefully. Marcus knows something important about everybody. "No prospects for a thaw?" "Not so far. Managers can't write their own ticket any more." "Don't I know it. To tell the truth, Beate's the force in our credit balance any more. She drives more weather into our account.., good weather, I mean. Calm seas. Makes her too independent, I think. Doesn't need me any more. But that's changing. Can we talk after?" "Sure." Jonathan says. There is always, in meetings between sponsor and client, an air of informality and equality, belied by the stains under his arm. Marcus could remove Jonathan from any position in the Corridor in a few minutes, with a few simple stabs on his pad... Patria potestas. But Marcus has of course never done that. Perhaps it is Jonathan's own insecurity that even makes him think of the possibility. When something is not right at home, all the universe ti/ts. But then, what is it that is not right at home? "Grand!" Marcus says. "Do you know anything about this fellow, Torino?" "No, sir," Jonathan says. "I hear it was Luke's idea to bring him in. Shake all of us up with some stimulating big-picture stuff." "Sounds interesting," Jonathan says. Chao Luke, tall and monkish in his formal black Stoic's robe, is arranging a podium near the central font. A small, elfish-looking man in slacks and a sweater, very nineties, stands beside Chao, calmly ineffectual. This must be Torino. And the lecture--he pulls up the note on his pad calendar--is about Autopoiesis and the Grand Scheme. He looks around the transept and nave. A number of men are setting up equipment near the walls: banks of small projectors that will play out over the crowd, reflective screens to catch large displays. Like most presentations before the Stoics, the tech will be distinctly early twentieth--no plugs, no fibe hooks between pads, all in the spirit of community, not dataflow immersion. Chao takes the podium and asks the Stoics to sit. The men and women arrange themselves in the pews before the podium and the fount as Chao smiles out over them. "We'll bring the February meeting of the Stoics, Seattle chapter, to order now." Jonathan sits on the hard wood. Churches seem not to believe in comfort, the perpetual strain of hardroot American asceticism which he does not actually oppose, but which still leaves him buttsore by the end of these meetings. He glances at Torino as the notes are read and motions proposed, seconded, and voted upon. The speaker stares up at the dome. His face is childlike, head small, hair dark and tousled. Torino. Torino. 00 GEG BEA in scientific circles for his work in bacterial communities. Jonathan does not have time to follow all these threads through the ribes, but he watches Torino with more interest. What is it like to be famous--even a little famous? To have people want to listen to your words, to sit respectfully and await your wisdom? Again the suspicion of his own weakness and inferiority, like the little bite of a spider tangled in his underwear. Jonathan wishes Chloe would have shown him more warmth this evening, helped him face up to Marcus with self-assurance. Now it is Torino's turn to speak. Chao introduces him--his full name is Jerome Torino--and steps aside. The small man grips the sides of the podium with both hands, and the pickup adjusts to his stature like a metal snake. He clears his throat. "It's cold and windy out there. Not good weather for public speaking." Jonathan smiles politely, as do most of the Stoics around him. Weak intro. He does not feel positively toward this famous person who dresses so informally. "Tonight I hope to pull aside some curtains and dispel a few misconceptions that haunt our culture, our philosophy, our politics," Torino says. His small hands swing wide, as if embracing the audience, the church. His eyes are bright and close together. With a beard he could be a little monkey, Jonathan thinks. 'I'll have the help of some.., what used to be called media. Everything is media nowadays, so that word is out of use, like saying 'heat' at the heart of the sun. Because of your charter, I've been challenged to avoid the more sop histicated effects I've been known to use to get my points across." He clears is throat again. Jonathan prepares to be bored. He shifts in his seat. The woman beside him, a discreet eighteen inches to his left, glances at him. He feels like a little boy cautioned to keep still. "We'll begin with words, words only. Imagine you're in a library and walking through stacks of books. Let's say you're in the Library of Congress, walking in a pressure suit through the helium-filled chambers, between miles of shelves, just staring at the millions upon billions of publications, periodicals, books, cubes..." Jonathan hopes for a little visual interest soon. His mind goes back to Chloe. I feel so weak without her support. Why can't she support me strongly, give me her// UNDIVIDED ATTENTION.///no, not that, but at least leave me J3eling she really values me. "Every single one of those books begins, of course, with an act of sex. Are you offended by the old sexual words? Then use the euphemisms. Men and women, getting together--" Christ, is everything sex? Jonathan squirms again, and the woman looks at / SLANT 101 irritation that Jonathan is behaving like a little boy. But of course he is not; he is imagining that she looks at him that way. He focuses on Torino. Yes, so it all begins in bed. "--and exchanging ideas." The meeting laughs with some relief. Torino smiles at them. "Sex is often confused with reproduction. But bacteria engage in sex for the sheer desperate necessary joy of it--sex is their visit to the community library, the communal cookbook. They wriggle themselves through seas of recipes, little circular bits of DNA called plasmids. When they absorb a plasmid they don't necessarily reproduce, but they still swap genetic material, and that's what bacteriologists call sex. Unlike us, however, bacterial sex--this kind of swap--can even occur between totally different kinds, what we once regarded as different species. But there are no true species in bacteria. We know now that bacteria are not grouped into species, as such, but evanescent communities we call microgens, or even more currently, ecobacters. "The plasmids contain helpful hints on how to survive, how to make this or that new defense against an antibiotic, how to rise up as a community against tailored phages flooding in to eradicate. "In the very beginning, for bacteria, this was sex. This was how sex began, as a visit to the great extended library. I call this data sex. No bacterium can exist for long without touching base with its colleagues, its peers. So how do we differ from the bacteria? "Not much. You come to this group, you exchange greetings, arrange meetings, sometimes you exchange recipes. Sometimes we--and here I don't mean the members of this club, necessarily--get together, conjugate, to exchange genetic material, either in a pleasant social jest or joust with biology, or sometimes in earnest, because it's really time to reproduce. "Since the days of the bacteria, there are few higher organisms who reproduce without conjugal sex. This may be because we are far fewer than the bacteria, who can afford to make many millions of mistakes, and consequently we are especially protective about the kinds of information that enter our bodies. We have to check out our potential partners, see if we really want to refer to their genetic library in creating our offspring--judging them by their appearance and actions, and initiating in evolution the entire peacock panoply of ritual and display. "In the Library of Congress, every single book, every item, began with an act of reproductive sex, allowing the author to get born and eventually to write a book. That book now acts as a kind of plasmid, reaching into your mind to alter your memory, which is the con-template--my word: the template, through cognition, of behavior. The medium of course is language. Sex is language, and language is sex, whatever form it takes. Changes in anatomy and behavior are the ultimate results--and sometimes, coincidentally, reproduction." Jonathan wonders what in hell Chao was thinking, bringing this man in to 102 GREG BEAR the Corridor communities--rarely, about science or international affairs. This is much too abstruse. "So let's begin where sex began, with the bacteria. How do bacteria remember? Their behavior is fairly basic, individually." The transept fills with a writhing torrent of bacteria, just above their heads. Jonathan does not expect this and jumps, as does the woman on his left. They smile sheepishly at each other. He tries to remember her name--Henrietta, Rhetta, something like that. She's involved in economic design. Jonathan congratulates himself for having such a quick memory. The torrent of bacteria, blue and green, settles into a gentle flow. Individuals touch, push thin tubes across to others, congregate, release plasmids and a variety of molecules that alert each other to the environmental conditions experienced by "Pickets," so the display marks them; like soldiers foraging. These molecules, Torino explains, are the precursors to the neural transmitters within the human brain . .. "Bacteria have no home, no rest, and their individual existence is fleeting. But they invest in a kind of communal memory--not just the genetic pool of a species, but the overall acquired knowledge of the community. Not unlike our human communities. The result is rapid adaptation throughout the community to threats--and magnanimously, as if bacteria recognize the impor5 tance of the overall ecosystem--the clues and recipes spread to other types and other microgens. "Only in the past half-century have we studied these microgens, and determined all the ways they share experience. They are not that different from humans, at least as far as the mathematics of networking is concerned. From he very bottom, to the very top, webbing or networking--autopoiesis--the ehavior of self-organizing systems--shares many common characteristics. So-- "What makes us special? Like the bacteria, as social animals, we engage in communal sharing of information. We call it education, and the result is culture. The shape of our society relies on spoken and written language, the language of signs, the next level of language above the molecular. Some insert another level between these two, that of instinctual behavior, but I believe that's really just another kind of language of signs. "Culture from very early times was as much a factor in human survival as biology, and today, culture has subsumed biology. The language of signs inherent in science and mathematics has co-opted the power of molecular language. We begin with molecules and molecular instructions, but now the instructions feed back upon themselves, and we govern the molecules. "In nature, we're the first to do that--since the bacteria!" Jonathan catches himself listening. There is nothing else to do; he wonders what Torino is really on about. "For centuries, in trying to understand our own nature and behavior, we / SLANT 103 acteristics and study them in isolation, or to rank our characteristics in terms of fundamental importance. Nature or nurture--which is fundamental?" Torino chuckles. "Chicken or egg. Which came first? Throw out the question and the wrong-headed philosophy behind it, and start again. "Today, in mass education and LitVid--and especially in that cultural stew called the Yox--these wrong-headed assumptions still flourish, proving that human knowledge--like human DNA--can be filled with useless, outmoded garbage. We don't prune efficiently at either level, because we can never be quite sure when we might need that so-called useless data, that useless guideline, that outmoded way of thinking. In other words, neither our brains nor our genes know the overall truth. We are always in the middle of an experiment whose limits we do not understand, and whose end results are completely unknown. We carry our errors around with us as a kind of safety net, even though they slow us down." Jonathan feels a little hypnotized by the projected flow of microbes. Then they vanish. "Now, let's leap to a larger view," Torino says. "We'll dispose of another error. Can we separate human activity, cultural or biological, from bacterial action? Are we a higher-order phenomenon?" The woman next to Jonathan--Rhetta or Henrietta--nods. Jonathan thinks they are about to be disabused of an illusion, and playing that game for a moment, shakes his head. Besides, he remembers a little high school biology. "Evolution is a kind of thought, a making of hypotheses to solve the problems posed by a changing environment. Bacteria operate as an immense community, not so much evolving as exchanging recipes, both competing and cooperating. We are comprised of alliances of cells that are made up of old alliances between different sorts of bacteria. We are, in effect, colonies of colonies of bacteria that have learned many new tricks, including slavish cooperation. Does the brick house think itself superior to the grain of sand? Or the mountain to the pebble?" The nave, this time, fills with dancing diagrams and dramas of cellular evolution, differentiation of kingdoms, phyla, orders, all in rapid-fire. Jonathan finds himself intrigued by the creation of the first complex, nucleated cell--a huge factory in comparison to a bacterium. Bacterial engines, fragments, even whole bacteria, sublimated and subordinated, evolve over billions of years to create this next stepping stone. "We are now taking complete charge of those processes once the domain of the bacteria, on a technological level. In a sense, nanotechnology is the theft of ideas from the molecular realm, the cellular and bacterial domain, to power our new cultural imperatives. Earth has become a gigantic, complex, not yet unified but promisingly fertile single cell. "And now--we're back to sex again--it's time to move outward and reproduce. 104 GREG BEAR of data from other planetary cells. We are like a single bacterium squirming through a primordial sea, hoping to find others like itself, or at least find recipes and clues about what to do next." Transept and nave fill with a loneliness of night, clouds of stars, all brilliant and silent. Jonathan loses himself for a moment in the extraordinary image. "We send out spaceships between the planets, the stars, containing our own little recipes, our own clues, like hopeful plasmids. We have found other living worlds, but none yet as complex as Earth, not yet rising above the level of molecular language. We know there are billions of worlds out there, hundreds of millions similar to Earth in our galaxy alone... "We are patient. "In the meantime, until we find that other community to which we must eventually adapt and belong, that larger network of autopoiesis in which we will become a node, we labor to improve ourselves. We seek to lift ourselves by our bootstraps, so to speak, to new levels of efficiency and understanding. "The imperative for the datafiow culture is to remove old errors and inefficiencies-to improve our information through continuing research, and to improve our minds through deeper education and therapy, to improve our physical health by removing ourselves from the old cycles of predation and disease, no longer capable of pruning the human tree. We hope to unite human cultures so we will end our internal struggles, and work together for larger goals. We engage in the equivalent of historical and political therapy. "All separation is a convenient illusion, all competition is the churning of the engines of sex. Our social conventions give our culture shape, just as a cell wall holds in the protoplasm; but we are soon approaching a time when edu- c ation will overcome convention, when logic and knowledge must replace rote nd automatism. This century can be characterized as a time of conflicts between old errors, old patterns of thinking, and new discoveries about ourselves. We have no big father in the sky, at least none that is willing to talk with us on any consistent basis." The woman on Jonathan's left frowns and shakes her head. The Stoics tend to shy away from Deism, much less atheism. Torino, to Jonathan's relief, seems to be winding up his presentation. "But there is promise in what we have learned so far--promise that can be shared between all cultures, in recognition that change and pluralism are essential. "If we all think alike, if we all become uniform and bland, we shrivel up and die, and the great process shudders to an end. Uniformity is death, in economics or in biology. Diversity within communication and cooperation is life. Everything your forebears, your ancestors, everything you have ever done, will have been for naught, if we ignore these basic bacterial lessons." He nods and the projectors fall dark. The nave and transept return to shadowy recesses. There is scattered polite applause. Torino may be famous, but he / SLANT 105 man, who stares a little owlishly at the small crowd, some of whom are already standing and stretching. Behind Jonathan, a man in his sixties whose name he does not know--but whose face is familiar from past meetings--harrumphs and smiles slyly as he shakes his head. "Science is the art of making us think we're gerrs," he says. "My God, did I drive all the way from Tacoma to hear this kind of drivel? I hope Chao puts something more substantial on the menu next time." Jonathan decides against approaching Torino and asking a few questions. No sense standing out from the crowd before a meeting with Marcus. But as he turns, Marcus is there beside him, staring at him intently. "Not bad," he says to Jonathan. Jonathan smiles and agrees, a little confused; he would have thought the philosophy of someone like Torino would deeply irritate Marcus Reilly. Marcus walks past Jonathan, down the aisle, and stands beside Torino, shaking his hand and conversing. Torino seems relieved that someone has listened. Jonathan arrives in time to hear Marcus say: "--and that's why I told Chao to invite you. We all need to be shaken up a little, brought up to date. Sometimes the Stoics are a stuffy lot. You've thrown open a few of our windows. Thank you, Mr. Torino." "My pleasure," Torino says. Chao smiles and nods. Jonathan wishes he had listened more closely to what Torino said. Totino's eyes meet Jonathan's. Jonathan can't think of anything to say. Marcus turns and seems surprised to find Jonathan beside him. "There you are," he says, and his grandfatherly face turns serious. "Have time to talk?" "Yes," Jonathan says. "Good. Let's get some coffee at Thirteen Coins. We'll take my car. I hope it's outside--it's been acting up lately.., getting a mind of its own, I fear." Jonathan laughs, and Marcus grins as they separate from the Stoics and leave the building. Jonathan's mood is lifting; Marcus seems so positive. Maybe he's going to offer a change to Jonathan; that in turn might cheer Chloe, increase her respect for him, and her affection, as well. Jonathan is startled to see a bright blue-green flash of lightning through the clouds above the cathedral. Then, from the south, an orange flash seems to post an answer to the first. The wind freshens; it's getting warmer. Yvonne has made up her mind but Gi pounds ey is not so sure what he intends, now. The dinner is over and they are on his third bourbon and her fourth beer, and Yvonne has talked about her upbringing in Billings and the move to Moscow. Giffey has said nothing about his upbringing because that of all things is nobody's business it is the root of all he is, particularly his anger. He feels no need to show Yvonne any anger she is too young and obvious to hurt him. At any rate, the woman has decided she wants Giffey to make love to her, but has now withdrawn from giving any overt sign that this is so, waiting for him to make the defining move. Giffey dislikes this in women, their retreat or cowardice in the face of desire. Such a safe redoubt from which to lob shells of ridicule should the situation come a-cropper. But he has been very pleasant with her, playing the man's game, subduing his irritations not to drive her away as he waits for all the calculations of his own desire to tot up to one or zero, go or no go. He watches her face in the diffuse light from the lantern hanging over their heads, its little mock flame flickering dull orange. Her skin is sweetly pale and clear of blemishes, her nose is something he would like to sidle up against with his own nose, her jaw is a little heavy but her lips are very sweet, particularly when she pauses and gives him her expectant look, those lips parted, small white teeth just inside. Most of all it is a personal wager that those breasts are as lovely as he suspects, and that though her legs are thin in the calves and her waist too waspish for his tastes, that the conjunction of inner thighs and mons, pieced together, make a comely triskelion and she will not have messed with her pubic hair except perhaps to trim the boundaries in case Bill takes her swimming in the summer (but now that grooming might be neglected). All of this is in the background as he asks for the check. He will pay. She does not object. "I've been talking your ear off," she says as they walk to the door. Outside, on the street, they are side by side and the moment has come to shove off or play the old game to the end. Giffey hopes his technique has not gotten feeble; it's been over a year and a half since he last played. "Thank you for your company," he says. Then a pause. "I like the sound of your voice," he says. "It's the prettiest I've heard in a good while." "Well, thank you, Jack." They face each other. It is really damned cold out here and the streetlights cast long shadows where they stand. He can barely see her face and his own face is starting to hurt. "You do a lot of things to me, Yvonne." / SLANT 107 "Yes, well you listen nice and you're no grandpa." Giffey reaches out and strokes her arm. The fur collar is rising with her hair and making that dark halo again, and within, the center of a target, the oval of her face. Her very pretty face. Hell, it was all a pretense. All his doubts were faking him. He wants this woman and he even needs her because he is afraid of going up against Omphalos in the next few days. There probably isn't much time left. He can say farewell to the good food, the drinks, the landscapes and the skies; he can say farewell to the eyes and noses and breasts and hips, too. He doesn't give a damn about Bill who does not take care of this woman the way she wishes and who is far away diddling himself with his Yox buddies and some karaoke curies in Thailand or India. "You raise a powerful need," he says softly. "I'd like to make you think a little better of at least one man." "Oh," she says. She's nervous now. The last man she played this game with was probably poor self-diddling Bill. "I don't dislike men, not at all. Don't mistake me. But you're special. You listen. I--" She's starting with the words again. Giffey takes her arm and pulls her toward him, gauging by her automatic resistance to that pull the measure of how much more persuasion she will need before she admits she is committed. Not much. He zeroes into the pale oval within the halo and kisses her. The kiss starts offgentle, and then she finally offers open lips and her tongue. He doesn't much like tongue kissing, but he plays that move through, and then up to the regions he is much more fond of, her eyes and her nose. She clings to him tightly, accepting this hungrily. No more resistance, at least as long as they do only this, with their clothes on, in a public place. "Let's go," Giffey says. "All right," Yvonne says. "Over to my apartment," Giffey says. "It's too cold to get naked here on the street." "Yeah," Yvonne says. She chuckles--not a giggle, but a genuine, almost masculine chuckle, and that's fine. She's added it all up and her answer is one. TRIBUTARY FEED LitVid Search Fulfillment (Backdata: FREE by bequest of the author): Text column of Alexis de Tocqueville II (pseudonym-?-) March 25 2049 The growing disaffected in America merit our concern. How do we describe them succinctly? Discouraged, cut loose from the cultures for which their intellect and character destine them, those cultures of spiritual conservatism and Bucktail bigotry which have been shown again and again to be politically incapa- 108 GREG BEAR economy. Their refusal to take advantage of educational opportunities, which they regard as corrupting, leaves them little to do but join the ominous numbers on the New Dole. Here, they sit with their families locked into specially tailored and highly "moral" Yox feeds, funneling their few resources into an obsequious entertainment industry that has ever believed "a hundred million people cannot be wrong." Here they relive the glory days of elitism and bigotry, or golden dreams of blue-collar solidarity and dominance. They hand their hearts and minds over to demagogues like spoiled children. They are a dead people, but still dangerous. Alice orders the limo to let her out three blocks bet?bre her home. She is suffocating in the artificial lavishness of the limo cabin. Her eyes fill with tears. She feels insulted and abused and, for the first time in many long years, soiled. Flashes of hatred mingle with jagged, unhappy memories and a long-quiet sense of shame. She walks along the deserted street, following the glowing lines in the walkway and the curb. A warmer wind is cutting between the buildings and the few houses, and brilliant, scary flashes of lightning play silently above the clouds. She does not want to be protected. She feels the power of the wind and the eclouds, thrills a little at the and blue effulgences, begins to reassemble orange her pride and her armor. But at the front door, there are tears in her eyes again. She shivers at the thought of the faceless man trying to pry her loose from her protections, like a cruel beachcomber working at a limpet. "Why does he want to know anything about me?" she mutters. "What a creep, What a monster." She spends thirty minutes in the shower, alternating between sonic micro-spray and steady stream. She feels as if she should scrub off all her skin and grow it new and clean. She feels between her legs briefly, wishing she could shed all her insides, everything the faceless monster's flesh and semen touched. She has never felt this way about a man before, and in a far recess of her self, she worries about the frightening strength of her revulsion. It's only sex and it u,as only once and he got nothing special,' he didn't even ask for anything special. He didn't care. He wanted to ask questions. Alice feels the sparks of anger ide, damped by exhaustion. All she wants now is to crawl into bed and sleep, straight sleep, without the pre-dream child vid she often uses, just simple sleep. / SLANT 109 And then she sees that dreadful facelessness again. Her breath quickens and she moans. She gets out of bed and walks in her thin silk robe into the living room, the spare and unadorned place where she seldom spends much time. Right now she wishes she had artwork all over the walls, a pet or a friend to talk to; all of her friends, until now, it seems, need her more than she needs them. She has a few articles on a shelf that give her some comfort: a ceramic poodle, pink and ridiculous, that belonged to her grandmother; an antique folding razor her father gave to her when he first learned she was going on call-ins as a teenager ("to protect yourself," he said, "because the only thing that hurts worse than knowing what you're doing is the thought of losing you altogether'') that she had never carried on her person; a miniature plastic spray of flowers; a picture of her parents and brother. She has not thought of her brother in months. She picks up the picture and stares at it. Carl is eleven years old in the picture and she is nine. Carl did not know what to think of his sister. He was straight-arrow, knightly. He signed up with the Marines to go to the Moon as part of a settlement effort and died in a pressure drop five years ago. She replaces the picture. Five men have wanted to marry her. She wants to tell Carl that; she did not fail in the marriage department, not for lack of interest. She never felt it was necessary to get married, never felt strongly enough for the men who asked, with the exception of one... Alice refuses to think of that one now. Putting him together with the facelessness she has just endured is more than she wants to deal with. It would be so nice to have someone like him here; but if he were here, she would never have gone off on a call-in. Finally, Alice gives in and sits before the theater in the small family room. She orders the unit on and waits for it to find her eyes with its projectors. The swirling sound centers her in an opening space filled with selections. She chooses a mindless linear vid, a domestic drama. "What time is it?" 11:31 p.m. flashes in red before her eyes, over the faces of the participants. They are all part of a family in a comb coming to grips with a new son-in-law who is untherapied and works fixing internal combustion engines for illegal atavist car races. He is cute and muscular and chunky-rough and he says funny, eccentric, but wise things that make the therapied vanilla-smooth comb family look inept and foolish. Side notes on the image tell Alice she can convert this to karaoke for an extra ten dollars. "Live andplay the whole livelong story/ Be Amanda; let your S.O. portray Baxter/ All the story and twice the fun: available in straight flow, mixed doubles, wide field with random meets from around the world, or total gone-gone-gonzo/ Explore Amanda's world by strolling or in freezeframe/" The house monitor chimes. Alice pauses the feed and asks who is it. "It's 110 GREG BEAR Alice cuts the feed, pays a partial rather than scheduling a replay, and goes to the door. Twist stands shifting from one leg to the other in the entry, knuckle between her teeth. Her knees are actually pointed toward each other, total gamin, vulnerable as hell. She comes in, straight silky black hair windblown, face all crinkled like a little girl. She looks stretched and terrible. Suddenly, Alice feels an outpouring of relief and affection for Twist. "My God," she says, "you look worse than I feel. What's happened?" RIVERS Some ideas are just lubricants to let troubled people slide through life. Not lies exactly--but very slippery. In New Hope, Pennsylvania, a Baptist denomination anoints the re-born in a fountain of living light, guided by encoded data from the River. They will tell you, as you are so baptized, that by consuming the flesh and blood of Christ you absorb his data into your pattern. That makes Christ a virus. The community memes evolve and live on. --USA BLISTER-FAST SPIN Thirteen Coins is a hoary and very demod restaurant that used to serve the fourth estate. It sits in a re-done Commons district now, an island of tradition and antiquity in a rolling park filled with visibly moving, growing, and self-pruning topiary: lions, elephants, dinosaurs, as well as spaceships and ringed planets. The storm has turned the park into a forbidding dreamscape, the park's lighted pathlines contending with blue-green and orange flashes. In a high-packed, enclosed, mock-medieval booth near a broad window overlooking the gardens, Marcus sips a Lagavulin single-malt while Jonathan drinks a glass of Chilean Sangiovese. "I love the Stoics," Marcus says. "Don't misunderstand me, Jonathan. A finer and more dedicated group of philanthropists and civic-minded folk you'll never find. I've made more fruitful contacts there than anywhere else in my life--with the possible exception of my wife's relations." He draws up the / SLANT 111 ments of chagrin and resignation. Then he sips very delicately at the small ceramic bowl of Scotch. '"Sherry barrels for aging. Sixteen years old and purring like a tiger. Wonderful stuff." "You wanted to shake them up," Jonathan offers, to get Marcus to come to some point. "You catch me out exactly," Marcus says. "Get somebody like Torino in there and see what he knocks loose. But . . . Nothing. A few moths and some dust and crumbs. He's right, you know. This neural hypothesis stuff is dead-on. It's a practical and useful description of how society works. Screw nature. After all how many of us survive in the jungle any more? And anybody who follows the lines of the argument can . . ." He sips again. "Rise above. Survive the challenges." "I need to study it some more, I think." Marcus stares at him steadily, a little gravely. "Yes. But you're not here talking to me--I haven't invited you here to talk with me, and watch me drink good Scotch while you down a doubtful glass of unnatural vintage--Christ! A Chilean Chianti--because you might profit from Torino." "You've always steered me in the right direction, Marcus. So why am I here?" "Life's a little stagnant, isn't it, Jonathan?" Jonathan inclines his head. "You're an elegant fellow, sharp and well-bred. You have good pedigree--mentally and genetically. You could fit right in with the top comb managers now, if fate offered you a different situation." Jonathan smiles thinly. "I enjoy living below the comb, Marcus." "Believe it or not, I agree--all those social expectations, all that ritual. It's tough staying on the high comb path, racing against America's self-perceived elites. They are so smug. Still, I wonder why so many of them are caught becoming Chronovores, hmm? I mean," Marcus continues, "they'd simply be playing the same life over and over again, the same round of ritual and challenge and expectation, until the future caught up with them... Not the best of situations. Hm?" Jonathan does not know where all this is leading, but he nods. His class thinks of the high comb as superficial, despite the undeniable political and financial power they wield. Marcus is part of the X-class, as rich as most in the comb, but intellectually independent--or so he's led Jonathan to believe. "By the way," Marcus says, glancing at his old twentieth Rolex, too demod for words, "does Chloe know where you are? That you're with me?" "I've told her I'm going to be late," Jonathan says. "Good. Always be good to the women." He sips again. Jonathan has a glance at the charge on Marcus's pad: Sixteen-year Lagavulin, two hundred and fifty dollars a glass. Transie,t glories, he thinks. "Beate probably doesn't care where I am, as long as I'm not in her hair. Christ, romance is an old gray mare, 112 GREG BEAR Jonathan smiles but reveals nothing. "I'll get down to it now, Jonathan," Marcus says. "I've recommended you to a group that isn't new, a little off the expected spin, but very promising. Your CV came up on a criteria search and I pulled you out in particular because we know each other." "What do they do?" "They ask for discretion, that's what they do," Marcus says. His tone is blunt and his face looks older. "It's tough to accomplish something new and tougher to keep it secret, especially if it gives you a great advantage. A very great advantage." Jonathan tries to keep his chuckle sophisticated. "A secret society?" "Yes," Marcus says, dead serious. "You get into it by degrees, and at the end, you do not pull out." Jonathan decides a suitably sober look is best now. Underneath, he stifles a disappointed laugh. Marcus is either joking with him or is getting drunk on his little bowl of Scotch. "As I said," Marcus says quietly, "the advantages are enormous. So is the COSt." Jonathan can think of nothing to say, so he continues to regard Marcus with a patiently straight face. "But you fit," Marcus says, staring down at the bowl. "You're young and strong and that's unusual in the group so far. Wisdom of our sort," he flicks a finger between them, "finds a home in older frames. It's a tough load for the young to bear." Jonathan has enough self-respect left that this melodramatic display gives him no option. He laughs and shakes his head. "My God, Marcus, you have rne going here, you?" don't Marcus smiles a little sadly, but his eyes are bright and focused. He is not drunk and he is not fooling. "This is an old restaurant and I know the paint on its walls. Nobody would dare bug this place, because people like me know whose lapels to grab and which ear to shout in. It's safe here, comfortable here." "You're not having me on?" "Not a bit," Marcus says. "You either say yes, you want to go to the next stage, you trust me this far, or you say no, and never speak of this to anyone, including Chloe. And you'll never be offered the chance again." The female waiter comes by and asks how they're doing. Marcus tells her they're doing fine, and asks for a second bowl of Lagavulin. "Stagnation, pitfalls; the rules are changing," Marcus says after she leaves. "That's what you have to look forward to. Yox makes the temps and the disaffected more ignorant and more aggressive, bottom-up management is on the sly spin again, pffft! The collective is in place, grunting piglets all, and those of us with managerial talent are soon out on our butts in the snow and / SLANT 113 "Come on, Marcus, cheer me up," Jonathan says. He is not really prepared for this sort of nonsense, but as he looks at Marcus, and thinks of all he knows about this man, all the deals and sideshows he's rumored to be involved in, all the threads he rides straight into the statehouse and the most powerful executive caucuses, even into the Rim Council and the Southcoasr White House . . . It's hard to speck Marcus as a deluded old fool. "It's not a cheery subject," Marcus continues doggedly. "The therapied society rides around on too many crutches. It's crippled and corrupt. But the unknown is scary. The Stoics--they cling to class superiority and a sense that God will eventually clean out the gutters and the water will flow fresh and clear once more. It's not going to happen. We've made some major mistakes in learning how to dance, and now the floor is crowded with clumsy fools . . ." Marcus's phrasing strikes Jonathan as being too practiced, but undeniably persuasive. Still, Jonathan resists being drawn in too quickly. "I don't think things are so dark," Jonathan says. Marcus looks down at the table. The waiter brings another bowl of Scotch and asks Jonathan if he'd like more wine. "Coffee, please," Jonathan says. "Modcaff, regular, or de?" the waiter asks. "Regular," Jonathan says. "I'm not unlike you, Jonathan," Marcus says. "At your age, I thought I was living in the best of all possible worlds, taking into account a few pitfalls here and there. Beate loved me and I loved her, and we were building things together. But that was twenty years ago. We were heading toward the Raphkind showdown, and the so-called last hurrah of the super-conservatives. Raphkind killed us. Went overboard. May the bastard rot in hell. So now we have nambypamby New Federalists--a trendy name for a purely financial and expedient frame of mind. I'm one. I know you're one, as well. Are you proud of your creed?" "Within limits," Jonathan says. He suspects Marcus plays faithfully and slyly the tune of whoever's in power. "So what's in the future for you? Do you know that managers between the ages of forty and fifty suffer thymic disorders twice as often as temp employees? Society wears us down. We wear ourselves out. But if we turn ourselves over to the therapists, they adjust our neurons and glial cells, they stick microscopic monitors into us that are supposed to balance our neurotransmitters and reconstruct our judgment centers. They say we're as good as new. But you know what happens? We lose an edge . . . Therapied managers just don't cut it. The happy man lets down his guard. After a while, being happy becomes a kind of drug, and he avoids challenges because failure will make him unhappy. It's a fact. So more and more--we take our mental aches and pains and stay away from the therapists. "Oh, we want our employees therapied--we want them happy and creative 114 GREG BEAR We have a higher duty." Marcus glances at Jonathan. "You're not happy, are you?" Jonathan leans back against the cushion and holds out his hands, gives a little sigh. "I'm in between general contentment.., and deep unrest," he says. Marcus lifts his eyebrows. "Well put." "But I'm not desperately unhappy, Marcus." "Still, if an opportunity comes along, allowing great change and new opportunity, you'd go for it, wouldn't you?" So they are back to that. "That would depend on the opportunity." Marcus points his finger into the tabletop and thumps it several times. "The gold ring, Jonathan. Not the brass ring. Gold." Jonathan finishes the last drops of wine in his glass. Outside, the storm shows no signs of abating. "Have you offered this opportunity to anyone before me?" "Yes," Marcus says. "Many?" "Two. One accepted, one declined." "How long ago was that?" "In the last five years." Jonathan feels a twist, an almost physical churn in his chest. If he could just be rid of his present stagnation--breathe freely in a new phase of life, undo past mistakes and play out his better potentials... "If I say yes, can I turn back at a certain point later?" "No," Marcus says squarely. "It's yes or no. Here and now." "I have to put my trust in you." e That's the crux." What about my family? Would they be involved?" "They have to undergo the same inspection as you," Marcus says. "If they pass, they go." So Beate isn't going, Jonathan intuits. "What about their chance to choose?" "In our group," Marcus says, "the head of household bears the brunt." The emergency chime on Marcus's pad sounds and Marcus pulls it out, angling it away from Jonathan's eyes. It is a text message; Marcus reads it swiftly, his face a practiced blank, and puts the pad away. "Something's up," he says. He gives Jonathan a look that can be interpreted either as disappointment or a kind of apologetic sorrow. "Jonathan, I've never placed you anywhere but in the sly spin, have I?" "Never," Jonathan truthfully acknowledges. He cannot blame Marcus for his present situation. "What's just happened--what I've just learned--puts us deeply in need of someone like you. The opportunity is even better for you. You can move right / SLANT 115 into a position of influence. I'll vouch for the fact that you're capable and you're ready." Jonathan does not feel comfortable leaping into the dark, and dragging Chloe after him . . . But he remembers her stiffness in his arms. Whenever he has touched her in the last month, she has seemed secretly annoyed. Her respect for him, her desire for him as a man, has faded, buffeted by the pressures of children and the stalling--he supposes--of his career. She is disappointed in her life. She is disappointed in him. A wild flare of anger and fear rises. Marcus is watching him. Marcus always seems to know the inner workings of his people; that's why his career has never faltered. He always keeps his teams together--and he always chooses his people well. "Are you in charge?" Jonathan asks. "No. But I'm close to the top, and those above me are the best. I've never seen better." Jonathan blinks and his left eye stings. It's been a long night. He wipes the corner of his eye with the knuckle of his forefinger, then stares at Marcus. "Say yes, and you'll have one last chance to back out--think it over for tonight and call me tomorrow evening. After that, after you've learned what we're up to, you're in. No backing out. Ever." He has been looking for a change, any change, to regain Chloe's respect, to win back her need for him. But everything he has considered seems ridiculous-moving to Europe, even China, starting over again. He can't let go of what they've already gained in the world. He believes Chloe values their security very highly, and would think even less of him if he jeopardized that. "The gold ring, Jonathan." Marcus fixes him with a patriarchal and steady gaze. "Never steered you wrong, Jonathan." "Better contacts, references?" Marcus smiles. "Best you've ever seen. Solidarity. Real support in tough times, and the times are going to get much tougher, believe me." "My family will get.., better contacts, better opportunities?" "If they make the grade, Jonathan." Marcus nods. "You know their quality better than I." "Yes," Jonathan says. "I'm sure they will," Marcus murmurs, but looks away. "Yes." Marcus looks back sharply. "Is that your answer?" Jonathan blinks. He did not mean it as an answer, he thinks, not precisely an answer, not yet at least. But Marcus is growing restless. Marcus does not like prevarication and delay. Either you know your mind or you don't. "Yes," Jonathan says. Marcus smiles. He is genuinely relieved. "Welcome aboard." 116 GRŁG BŁAR They shake hands. Jonathan for a moment does not know who he is or what he is doing; there is such a pressure of withheld anger that he fears he might go home and beat someone--or more likely, kill himself. He is so in love with Chloe, so desperately in need of her, and she has given him so little of what he believes he deserves, despite all. The pent-up shock of this realization makes him a little dizzy. "Go home and rest," Marcus says. "This takes something out of all of us." "What's the next move?" Jonathan asks. 'I'll get you together with some people. Patience," Marcus says. "I've waited four years so far to see this happen. We might have to wait ten more." TRIBUTARY FEED (Freelink tempter SUBCONT IND Nama Rupa Vidya) 1,2,3,4... GO HIBAND DEEPBACK! Dataflow hits India like snakebite! Two billion people, hungry for success, 80% literate and willing to be educated... Cheap satlinks and then fibes bring them together in a way they've never known before, and opens the entire world to them. Cultural, religious, geological, and political boundaries go down in a few years, and the entrepreneurial spirit rises like Shiva triumphant over the fuming corpse of the old. India is reborn, reshaped, rivals Southern China and Korea and Russia within ten years. India produces more software and Yox entertainment in a month than the rest of the world does in a year... The rupee becomes standard currency in Asia, and es on the rim markets with dollars and yen, pushing the Japanese and Korean domance back, back... WOWAH! The rupee becomes valued at four hundredths of a second open search on the World Feed, beating out the $US, in 2035. STRIDERS! India becomes the world's major source of phantom spiders, sliders, riders, hiders, and the ultimate, striders--those autopoietic°' autonomous searchers that hide for nanoseconds in the metabigwidth delivery systems, then take up residence in your business hardware, your house monitor, your fibe link filter, your LitVid display and Yox set, feeding hungrily on data files like catfish in an aquarium. Striders bring home the goodies to crowded little freetrade floors in data-hungry India, where traders remarket the relevants and usefuls to a worldwide unlicensed market of subterranean knowledge. India denies any such... INTRATAINMENT, EXTRATAINMENT! India becomes rich, ingenious, quirky India, where every day and every night gods and goddesses and almond-colored, almond-eyed super-children are mirrored and karaoked by nine hundred million connected consumers, where every day the consumers create and register two million derivative new stories, characters, and branch worlds for franchised Yox programs and five / SLANT 117 hundred thousand new LitVid and Yox extratainment products, making the North America feed look like a trickle of molasses. SOUND! Hear India Twenty-one Bop and Pop tonight on Vox'n'Yox... The best immersion sound bargain in the world. FULL SENSORIA! Competitive rates for all on the most fevered pantasies of a culture that's relaxed with full sexuality for three thousand years... INFUSORIA! Join the databrew culture at its finest, on FibeTea Tonight... Take it WHITE! IMMEDIA Updated for your filter/searcher every .0001 sec. 19 Jack Giffey believes in being very gentle with women. (It's the women who have been cruel to him--a small dark voice tells him; but actually, he can't remember any cruel women--why is that?) He is gentle with Yvonne. She is surprisingly elegant in his bed, anticipatory and supple and enthusiastic without seeming a slut. She keeps her eyes on his eyes, she watches his motions with intense interest; it has been some time since he has felt the urgency of a younger woman, and even among her age group, Yvonne is a pistol, a classy pistol indeed. He feels very lucky, like a sacrificial victim given the pick of a town's beauties before his ritual comes to its inevitable end. Giffey does not enjoy tongue kisses, but oddly enough, he enjoys using his lips and tongue everywhere else. He read somewhere years ago about men of his type, the particular molecules they enjoyed and which spurred their own satisfactions, but that was chemistry not sex and he really does not care what the reasons are. Yvonne lets him know, without resorting to specifics, that few men of her acquaintance are so generous. Giffey feels proud and within an hour they have completely exhausted each other. "You are some lady," Giffey says as they lie back. The room is not expensive and does not have much in the way of comforts, but he keeps a bottle of bourbon in the cupboard and there is ice in the small ancient enameled refrigerator, and he offers her a drink. He feels very mellow toward her and even a little protective. 118 GREG BEAR "I don't normally like liquor," Yvonne says. "But it seems right. Let's make it a toast--to you." "Thank you," Giffey says. While he is up getting the glasses poured, Yvonne sits up on the bed with the covers draped just over her knees, and he appreciates the flow of her breasts and the twin rolls of her bunched tummy. Giffy does not like tummies that are artificially taut. Yvonne has sufficient numbers of the lovely flaws of un-tampered nature to almost convince him that there is nothing he'd like better than to spend more days and of course nights with her, many more. "What do your friends call you? Do they call you Jack?" Yvonne asks, scratching her nose with a fingernail. "My best friends call me Giff," he says. "But very few people on this world ever call me Giff." "May I?" Giffey brings the glasses over, ice clunking within the pale brown bourbon. "What would Bill think if I let you call me Giff?" he says. Yvonne narrows her eyes. "I need you, this," she says. "It's none of his damn business." "Sorry I brought it up." "That's all right," Yvonne says, and gives him dispensation with a wave of her glass, then takes a sip. "I wish I could do more," Giffey says. "I'm not asking for more," she says. He feels his deep layer of occasional honesty rising to the surface. He knows he can't suppress it; he cares for this woman a little, and he will not deceive her. "What I mean is, you move me like no woman I've met in years." fur"I have that effect on some men," Yvonne says with such innocent truth- ess that Giffey knows she is not boasting. "I just wish they were quality, like you. Why can't you stay a while?" "I'll be here, but I'm going to be busy," Giffey says. "Backwoods business, probably," she says. Giffey grins but does not nod. "I know all about what men do here to make money. We've brought the hard times on ourselves. I wish to God I could just pack up and move to Seattle, get a job there." Giffey shakes his head. "Bad idea, unprepared." "We've talked about this already," Yvonne says. "We have." She is interrupted by heavy knocking on the door. Giffey is up and has his pistol out of a drawer before the third knock. The knock is followed by a loud male voice. "Yvonne, this is Rudy. We know you're in there with somebody." / SLANT 119 "Go to hell, Rudy, I am not yours to bother!" Yvonne shouts back. She stands on the bed and looks for her clothes. Giffey bunches them up in a fist from the chair and throws them to her. He is standing naked with his gun in one hand, and she tilts her head to one side and closes her eyes. "Dear sweet Jesus," she whispers. "Bill's friends?" Giffey asks softly. "Yeah." "Will they hurt you?" "No," she says. "They are such clucks." "Will Bill hurt you?" "They don't tell him," she says, exasperated. "The bastards think they're watching out for me. They think I'm Bill's property." "I see. You've been here before." "Haven't you?" Giffey chews this over for a moment, and then his wise old smile returns. "Not for some time." There is this other woman, whose name and face he can't quite recall. He shakes that cold little sliver of memory out of his thoughts. Yvonne sees his expression and her face wrinkles in disappointment. "I'm sorry," she says. "They tangle with me and they are going to be hurt. You get dressed and get out there. It's been a pure pleasure, Yvonne." "For me, too, Giff." "Yeah, well, call me Jack," he says, and retires with his clothes and gun to the bathroom, shutting off the light. He hopes Yvonne is smart enough to close the door and let it lock on her way out, before the men decide they have to do something more. He hears them talking on the walkway outside. He doesn't hear the hotel room door close. There are two men and they sound like they're about Yvonne's age, maybe younger. He hopes they do not come into his room. Footsteps on the room's threadbare carpet. Giffey's senses become very keen, in the dark behind the bathroom door. Whoever is in his room--just one person--is taking it slow and easy, looking things over. "I don't want to hurt you," the young man, Rudy, says. "I just want to talk things over. Let me know where you are." Giffey keeps quiet. Quiet is spookier. "Come on. Just talk." Yvonne tells Rudy to get out of the room, they should just leave. "This bastard isn't worth it," the other young man says. "Let him go." "Yeah. Well, he should know something, that's all. You listening? Where are you, you fucker?" "Rudy," Yvonne whines, "he's a pro. Federal army. He'll kill you." 120 GREG BEAR Giffy cringes. "Pro what? Pro federal woman-stealer? Talk to me, or I'll shoot through the goddamn walls!" Giffey holds up his pistol and pulls back the automatic target seeker switch. It makes a small sliding click. Through the door or the wall, it won't be very good, but it will give him a better chance if the man decides to jump into the bathroom. Some of these young Ruggers are just crazy enough to do a thing like that. "Around here, we don't mess with another man's woman!" Rudy says, his voice hoarse. He's not happy with this quiet. "Oh, Rudy, 0z, h-leeze!" Yvonne says. "I'd go home if I were you, Mister, back to fucking District of Corruption or wherever you call home. Leave this town to the good people, the ones who know better than to--" "Rudy," the other man calls. "Let's go." Rudy thinks this over. He hasn't come any closer to the bathroom door. "Yeah, crazy bastard," Rudy murmurs. The footsteps retreat. Giffby stays in the bathroom for ten or fifteen minutes, listening. He can't hear a thing outside the room, though car and truck noises from the street could mask some sounds. There's a couple of minutes of almost complete silence, and slowly, he emerges from of the bathroom. tie feels like a crab scuttling out from under a rock with gulls wheeling overhead. The room is empty. When he is sure the hall and the street outside the building are clear, he packs up everything in a small suitcase and leaves. Giffby does not want any- knowing where he is, where he be, after that. might or tomorrow or e is furious with himself for losing sight of his goal. This could have ended it all early and stupidly, for nothing, he thinks. For nothing at all. 2O Night is coming on to dark morning and the storm is gentled, the lightshow is off. All the house shutters are drawn and the monitor is set to store and be quiet. Alice has calmed Twist and given her some fast OTC anxiolytics. She is not hyperventilating now and she lies on Alice's couch with a cold cloth / SLANT 121 stopped sobbing. Alice is exhausted but she watches over the young woman with feelings of irritation and peculiar gratitude. She can rely on Twist to always have more urgent and tangled problems. Twist's words tumbled out of her as soon as she came through the door--her awfulness was back, she said, in force, and she could hardly see straight. She has cycled in and out of total darkness, "Like looking at a black dog with sick eyes," she said; skirted slashing her wrists, listened to the most awful silent urgings, and imagined the most vivid hells. Some of these she described while Alice fixed her some food and dosed out the anxiolytics. Alice listened, grimly sympathetic. Twist is having one severe fallback, no doubts. Tomorrow they will talk · about her temp situation and see where some long-term medical and therapy might be gotten. But now it is peaceful. A slow drizzle falls outside, little finger-taps of rain barely audible on the blanked windows, and all there is in the world exists within these walls. Alice puts on her plush robe and curls up on the chair beside the couch, drawing up her knees, eyes closing of themselves. She feels like a squirrel after it has been chased by a cat. Her thinking comes in slow waves of reason mixed with soft tremors of fkntasy. Mary Choy has filed her request with Seattle Citizen Oversight to get the records she needs. Humans have to make that decision and they are all at home asleep, and so after checking in with Nussbaum and finding that he has gone home, she hooks a police shuttle, empty but for her, on its ride to the north. At her apt, she undresses. Showers. Sits staring at the rain on the antique thermopane plate glass windows. Bs3' day, little girl. It is a day she would not mind forgetting. Nussbaum could have tried her out on something a little less gruesome, a little less disturbing and pointless. Her legs stretch long and her back slumps in the soft chair. She is not ready for sleep yet. She stands and performs a slow dytch, Tai-Chi and Aikido moves choreographed to her own dance rhythms, until her muscles and attitudes relax and allow her basic status self, ground and reference for all her endeavors, to come to balance and emerge like the moon from behind clouds. She yawns. The images are tightly bottled. She will release them tomorrow, 122 GREG BEAR SEXSTR pounds M: Legitimate and Sincere Discussion of Sexuality in Our Time, REAL and IMMEDIATE in Your Pad! (Vids and Yox of REAL people available for YOUR sincere needs!) (This piece has had 10230 accesses in 10 years. Author not listed; public access free of additional licenses.) THE HUSBAND: I have always been courteous and sweet, and thought of you. You yourself told me I was the best lover you ever had. I watched with dismay the cooling, the change from excitement to responsibility, to keeping the home on course... When I am gone, I hope you'll look back and realize what opportunities you missed. You'll think of all those times you could have felt more and done more, and as you're lying there, completely alone in bed, you'll have so many regrets... That's what I dream of. The body's reckoning. THE WIFE: Yes, he is conscientious, but lord... After he is gonemand I do hope I survive himml can spend all morning in the garden, and then have toast and a little marmalade for breakfast. I hope I am too old and withered for men to pay me any attention. I will travel with my friends and read whenever I wish. I suppose he thinks I will miss him in bed, but really, after, what will it be, probably, forty years of having to service him--that's what he himself calls it sometimes--wouldn't any reasonable human being hope for a vacation? That's what I dream of. A long vacation. In the back of Marcus's limo, without Marcus, Jonathan is on his way home. He is gray smooth neutral now; he feels he has been manipulated into tracking a slick fast groove he does not think can lead anywhere good. By feeling neutral he can let himself think there is some way out, some room to maneuver; he has not really made any decisions. Marcus's offer sounds so very ridiculous, nineteenth-century; a secret society, perhaps, with handshakes and fezzes, Ancient Revelations Unveiled upon signing a binding pact in blood... What he feels, most of all, is lost, like a small boy. He wants to belong someplace, but where--with Marcus and his unknown opportunity? With Chloe and her hidden emotions and reluctance? Jonathan travels in someone else's car to a house where he is no longer at / SLANT 123 God, I'm feeling sorry for myself, he thinks. Time to get maudlin and look for a sympathetic shoulder. But he is a mature man and playtime is long over. He can see his house from the road. The limo pauses at a crossing. He wonders whether Chloe is still awake. Penelope and Hiram have gone to bed. The house is quiet. Chloe stands by the living room window watching the clouds tatter. Chloe's thoughts have been more and more ragged and bitter through the evening, veering between self-judgment and self-justification. Yet there is nothing she can blame specifically for her mood. Jonathan has done nothing unusual to irritate her. The children have simply been themselves, and she is used to that sort of stress. Maybe she can blame a crazy toilet that says they are sick; it has even told her now, based on a straightforward pee, that she is the one who has a viral cold. She has phoned in a repair order, though the toilet's own opinion of its condition is that there is nothing wrong. No member of the family has ever had a cold. She hardly remembers what the symptoms might be. For reasons she cannot fathom, she has been thinking with sharp persistence about the months before and after she met Jonathan, that time when she could have reliably bedded a new man every week, sometimes two, and often did. Back then, she would not have hesitated to call it fucking around; now the term seems crude. She is a mother, after all, and a good and responsible one. Jonathan at first seemed just another of those men, less handsome than most, but from the beginning she treated him differently. Even as she dated and bedded others, she would not immediately give herself to him, give him what her mother called "the physical privilege." No privilege--just sex, delightful exercise. But with Jonathan-- She felt differently about Jonathan, not strongly attracted sexually, yet not uninterested; he moved her in different ways. In those weeks before she finally allowed him to persuade her, she gave herself to other men and behaved with them in ways that she would not with Jonathan, and has not since. She has never tried to explain that to herself and in fact has seldom thought about it, but this evening, the question comes out of the murk with a disturbing rough edge. She remembers now that she had twenty men in all--eight of them after she began dating Jonathan, sometimes inviting a man over hours after Jonathan had left. Why twenty, she wonders; it seems so rounded and artificial a number, so meaningless, nothing to do with actual people, with arms and legs and cocks and pretty eyes and thrusting hips. 124 GREG BEAR turn down the quiet good and intelligent man and then bed the loud, self-assured and brightly plumed boys. It was the last, the monster, that broke her and sent her straight to Jonathan. He was what she needed. The frame house creaks softly as the last of the wind fetches up against its eaves. Jonathan to her seemed honorable and decent and therefore much less of a challenge. Getting the posturing boy-men to pay attention to her was a real accomplishment. "Bitch thinking," she murmurs. He knows little or nothing about the men who had her but were not hers, knows only about the last, and she will never tell him; he is not the sort who would react well. She would not want him to be that sort. Though he has tried to get her to engage in fantasizing about other relationships, she has resisted; there is something about such demands that lessens him, in her eyes. He's changed. Sex, for this older Jonathan, seems to be some sort of adventure, some way of making up for a stiff youth; she has long since discarded that notion. Yet she and Jonathan get along well enough in bed, she believes. She feels his occasional dissatisfactions, his attempts to change their sexual routines; she resists with a tree-like stubbornness, hoping to keep their relationship on a firm and level ground, away from the jagged mountains of her early behavior. She will not go back to the out-of-control passion, the pain, the loss of self through giving all and getting nothing she needs in return. She knows little about Jonathan's other sexual experiences. A few things he has admitted to--unsatisfactory, half-hearted couplings with confused young w-men--things Chloe scrupulously dismisses as inconsequential, and indeed I are. The present moment is supreme. Family is what counts. Yet increasingly she has felt Jonathan's entreaties turn bitter. He does not know why she resists; she doesn't either, not really. He has asked for things, after all, that she once freely gave to others. Perhaps he senses that. He's not stupid. And his requests are not extreme--no marriage counselor would call them extreme, or do more than offer mealy-mouthed placating defenses for Chloe's reluctance to go along. It is after all a game for two, and the rules have to be agreed to by both partners. They have been together for twenty years and who can expect the experimenting and exploration to stretch on forever? It has now come to what he calls stiffness. She gives herself often enough, she thinks, and with sufficient response; he ,-is not a bad lover and he knows it. But the strain is showing. Then the question rubs with a sandpapery grit. Does she still feel anything for Jonathan except the need for continuity, for stability and level ground, for / SLANT 125 "Shit, shit, shit," she mutters. What she did when she was eighteen is a ghostly irrelevance, numbers and bleached memories and even many of the names lost; what she gives or does not give to her husband is her own business. They have their children and their lives, their social connections and many friends... That is more than enough. She opens the rear glass door and stands on the porch. A few drops of rain splash on her face. She wipes them away with well-manicured fingers. Jonathan does his share. But feeling any kind of guilt angers her. She has given the children her free hours and thoughts and her passion; they are strong and they are good children. The time is coming soon when they will be adults. Penelope is dating sporadically and Hiram is hiding his interests well enough. Chloe hates the thought of life demanding more of her than she has already given. She has given up the tradition of her family, disappointing her father; she has not used her education. Suddenly, in the cooling breeze, she jerks upright and grips the railing. The tears flow freely and she hates, herself, him, all the demanding forces. What she fears is that she is coming to believe any sex at all diminishes her. She does it for Jonathan, not for herself. She has no strong needs, none at all. Jonathan will be home any minute and she does not want to show this side to him. He has become an adversary; she loves him but gave him so many parts of herself and her life that she feels she could have done other and better things with; and then she thinks of the children and really the obligations and losses haunt her, make her feel a little sick. What could she have been, given complete freedom from all the sandpaper demands of sex, including children? She goes back into the house and swings the door hard but it catches and closes with a soft snick. She would prefer to have slammed it. The lights switch on in the living room. "Lights off." she shouts. The house is controlling her; she cannot break free from anything. The lights obediently dim and go out. She is bound on every side in the darkness. The front door opens. Jonathan is home. Her muscles tense and she composes herself. He must not see her this way; he does not deserve that satisfaction. She hears him in the front hall, and then he stops, and she imagines him listening to the house, like a cat trying to locate a mouse. He wants to know where she is. He wants to know if she is asleep or awake, and if she is awake perhaps he will try to hug her and touch her, arouse her. He seems to need to believe that being away for a few days or even a few hours increases her need for him. It is not so. She could go for months, years, forever. "Hello?" he calls softly. "In here," she says. "How was the meeting?" Jonathan walks into the living room. He looks drained. "Weird," he says. "Why is it dark?" He stands a few feet away, arms folded. For a moment she is relieved that 126 GREG BEAR "I've been watching the storm," she says. "Kids asleep?" "Yeah. The toilet says we're sick." He laughs. He sounds nervous. "Was the speaker interesting?" "I suppose. Marcus was the really interesting speaker tonight." Then he remembers he is not supposed to tell Chloe. "Christ, I'm tired. Ready for bed?" "Marcus the kingmaker?" "The same," he says. "What's he offering now?" "Nothing worth the bother," Jonathan replies, but the words sound false, or at least unsure. He is hiding something. Everything she has thought and felt this evening seems to double back like a cobra and she is suddenly afraid. What if she has denied too much, been too inflexible? She is vulnerable; she does not and cannot stand alone. "I've never understood the whole mentor thing," she says. "Neither have I, but there it is." She steps across the metabolic carpet. Her feet are bare and her toes in the warm plush feel nice, distinct. All the parts of her body feel separate and distinct. She does not like it, but her insecurity is working on her. She does not want to lose Jonathan, this situation, all she's worked for. It's nonsense to think anything has happened, but everything she feels seems nonsensical. He's watching her in the dark. To him, she's just an outline. Now comes the irrational response, the warming of her separate body parts. The carpet feels like animal fur. She sees herself running her hands over a horse's flanks. eme is going to be distant and quiet and withhold something, then she will onstrate to him after a long while what she has, what she can do. It's allowed, she thinks. And he wants it. This evening she will make the offer. And forget all the contradictory voices: this is a simple courtesy in a long-term relationship. "Too tired?" she asks. "What?" She is close enough that she can see his eyes. Without a clue. Vulnerable as a little boy. She unzips her top and lifts it free and peels it from her arms. She still has good breasts; he likes her breasts, nuzzles them frequently, but as a result of the matron conditioning, they have matured past their younger purpose to become instrumsnts of nurture, and are not as sensitive as they once were. She can no longer have an orgasm simply by rubbing her breasts. She could have reversed this but has not. Now, they feel more sensitive than they have in years. The hair between her legs must feel rough, like the hair of a horse's tail. She wonders if he will notice. / SLANT 127 Jonathan stares at her, at a loss. "Honey," he says. "Now that you're away from the power-hungry, let's see how hungry you are," she says. She steps out of her pants and underwear and stands before him in the dark. "Lights up half," she tells the house. The lights rise to a golden dimness. "I want you to fuck me," she says. The words stun. He does not move. "Forget everything else. Fuck me." She wants to lie back on the carpet and feel it warm and moving beneath her like the hair on the back of a horse. Jonathan, with Chloe's help, removes his clothes quickly, the sleeves catching on his wrists, the pants tangling, and he stumbles they are working so fast. Her lips and teeth and tongue are on his mouth, bruising him and stopping any words, and she is murmuring around their touching tongues. "Give it to me. Do it. I need your cock." She has never asked him in this way before, using these ancient words, so bluntly and powerfully, like a bad Yox. Despite his confusion, he responds instantly. She grips with painfully strong fingers. She is going to show him. If he wants this, let him be dismayed and shocked to get what he wants all at once, instead of in little rationed parcels. See what he thinks. She wraps herself around him, pushes him roughly against the horsehair matting between her legs. Her body is proving her value. Jonathan's doubts die and he grabs her as if he has never had her before and there have only been days or hours together for them and no children and no other responsibilities have come between. She gracefully reclines to the carpet and pulls her knees back like one of those Celtic stones they saw on vacation in Ireland, the rude pagan statue with its knees drawn up mounted in a fence on a horse irm, a Sheila something; she is a Sheila inviting him. (Jonathan had stared at the Sheila with a silly boyish look of speculating embarrassment. How could such a statue still exist in Catholic Ireland?) He does not stop to stare but is over her and then inside her. She listens to his urgency and wonders if all men feel alike if the eyes are closed; she thinks they may. He does not feel differently from the brightly plumed boys in her bingeing time. He moves quickly and with real strength and need that he has not shown for months and she knows it is true, that he told her the truth, that he had other keys she could use if she simply willed it. It is disgraceful really that he is so easy; men are so easy this way. No challenge at all. Her own pleasure is not intense. The sensation of his weight and motion fluctuates between strangeness and complete familiarity and she is not sure which is going to triumph. She hopes the strangeness; no, the familiarity, the other would degrade, and finally she does not care. But when she pushes him back and turns over and lifts herself and pulls him back into her and thinks of the horses on the farm, of the bright-plumed 128 GREG BEAR boys with self-assured smiles and no brains, in this shamelessness her reaction is intense. The pleasure rankles. How dare he. She grits her teeth and humps back against him. Jonathan feels as if his insides have been flooded with warm wax, an overwhelming surge of joy and affirmation. His was not a useless desire; she has finally felt it too and she loves him and needs him as no other. He is the best. Suddenly the evening with Marcus seems even more ridiculous. All is right here at home; she is confirming him, she needs him desperately, she is giving him all he could ever want, all he could ask for has asked for, he can go back to Marcus and refuse the nonsense and the mystery, home is his center and always has been, all that he needs is here because Chloe is here. In the middle of his simple and extraordinary lust his eyes are moist with a tenderness that he wishes she could see. As he is nearing his limit, as large in her as she has ever felt him, even when they were making the children and that extra fillip of biological meaning increased their intensity, Chloe feels something break. It sounds like a lightbulb exploding. He is weighing her down. Her head is filled with slicing blades, the cruel corroded edges whirling and blasting and reducing. Jonathan comes as she begins whimpering and moaning. She is limp on the floor beneath him, quivering, and he cannot tell whether she is having an orgasm or is crying. Then with an awful sense of having gone too far, he realizes she is crying. She has given too much and she is weeping like a child. Chloe reaches back with her hands sharp tike claws to push him off. He rolls to one side as she jerks about on the rug. This is his wife, not some fantasy woman; has done something horribly wrong. She stops writhing and lies with her breath drawn in in one horrible unrelenting sob. He reaches out to her, and with his other hand grabs his underpants to cover himself. The sob rushes out as a tearing shriek. Jonathan jumps as if stung by a wasp, then tries to quiet her; Penelope and Hiram will hear and find them naked. He tries to hug her, angling his hips away to avoid that connotation; all he wants now is for her to stop this,she is frightening him to death. Her thrashing stops; she is hyperventilating like a pinned rabbit. "Chloe," he says. "Chloe, I'm sorry. What's wrong?" "Broken," she says. "What's broken?" "I hurt." "My God, what did I do?" She trembles and tries to get up, but her arm muscles fail her. Jonathan / SLANT 129 "I don't know whether I'm doing this deliberately... Am I faking? Jonathan, what's wrong with me?" Jonathan shakes his head, crying. "I don't know, honey. You tell me." He continues to hold her but leans back and almost falls over, then fumbles with one hand through his clothes for his pad. He pushes the emergency aid button and lets the pad do the rest. Penelope and Hiram stand in the entry, sleepy-eyed and dismayed. "Your mother's sick," he says. He stands with the pad in one hand and his pants clutched before him with the other. "I'm calling the medicals." Chloe shuts her eyes tight. "I can't get away from it," she says. "What is it?" Jonathan asks again, kneeling beside her. He supports her torso between his legs and her head lolls back. She is sweating profusely. "Me! I can't get away from me," she says. Penelope comes back from the bathroom with washcloths. Even at fifteen, she is cool and more collected for now than Jonathan or Hiram. She begins to sponge her mother, making small comforting sounds. "The toilet," Chloe says. "Maybe it knows." "Shhh, Mother," Penelope says, her young voice smooth as pudding. And the neighborhood medical arbeiters are through the front door and in the living room. They clamp Chloe immediately in several diagnostic belts that writhe like tentacles. There is nothing Jonathan can do but get dressed. He pulis on his pants. Hiram seems stunned, as if waking to another and nastier dream. When the ambulance arrives, minutes later, Jonathan is dressed; Penelope has managed to get her mother's slacks on, somehow, working around the arbeiters and their many arms and tubes. The orderly, a black woman with close-cropped reddish hair, tells Jonathan the arbeiters have already put his wife on fast-acting anxiolytics. They can find nothing physically wrong with her, she explains. "She may be having a drug reaction--accelerants, maybe." "She wasn't taking drugs," Penelope says angrily, defending her mother's character, standing to one side now with her arms tightly crossed. "No drugs," Jonathan confirms, but thinks of her seductive aggressiveness. "Well, we aren't getting traces," the woman admits as they lift Chloe and put her on a stretcher. The arbeiters dance and tag along as they carry the stretcher outside. "Hospital is best. They'll figure it out." "Penelope, you're in charge here," Jonathan says over his shoulder. "As soon as you know, call us," Penelope demands. Her face looks as pale and fragile as bone china. "You're family," the orderly says, handing her end of the stretcher to a uniformed male. "Here's your mother's emergency response number; you can track her to the hospital with your personal code on the ribes." Chloe opens her eyes as rain tickles her face. Jonathan is beside her; he will 130 GREG BEAR "My God," Chloe says. "I'd forgotten. Now it's back." "What's back?" Jonathan asks. He scrambles into the rear of the vehicle, bumping into a male orderly, who grins but takes no offense and makes room for him on a bench seat. "Black horse," Chloe says. "Black horse with sick eyes." RESULTS OF SECOND SEARCH ACCESS TO MULTIWAY WORLD FEED OPEN Budget: Select, Restricted SEARCH FILTERS KEYWORDS?> >Trust, Friend, Family TOPIC FILTER: >Betrayal REPEAT ERROR> TEXT ONLY! NO VID PLEASE CONSULT YOUR ENTERTAINMENT PROVIDER TO UPGRADE YOUR ACCESS! ($$$)> · ISLANDS You can never put your nose to the same spot on the same grindstone. And there is no change but that it grinds. My grandfather knew this. He thrived on change. For him it meant challenge, and challenge meant power. --Theresa Gates, My Grandfather's World At three in the morning, Jill surfaces and responds to the backlog of external requests and commands. She ignores the commands where conditions no longer apply, answers the requests where they make sense, and immediately contacts Nathan Rashid, who, she sees, is waiting anxiously in the programmer's work center. "Hello, Nathan. I'm sorry," she says. Nathan appears tired and very concerned. "For Christ's sake, Jill, you've been dead I/O for almost twelve hours. We know you were internally active--what happened?" "I am giving a complete report to the system auditors now. I have been absorbed in an internal problem of some complexity, but I believe I have made sufficient progress to supply useful answers or updates." Nathan sits in a swivel chair and leans forward, bringing his face very close to one of Jill's many glass-almond eyes. "Jill, you keep giving me heart attacks... Are you back all the way, or are you going to brown out on us?" "I'm back all the way. I have faced personal quandaries, Nathan. As well, I believe I have caught up on the work I was contracted to perform." "All right," Nathan says. He lets his breath out with a puff, then leans back in the chair and raises his arms and clasps his hands behind his head. Jill recognizes the posture as a ritual for releasing tension. "What happened?'' "I have been in communication with an unlicensed and probably extralegal thinker operating, at least in part, out of Camden, New Jersey. This thinker calls itself Roddy." "Go on." "I am concerned that some of Roddy's activities may be unethical, though I have not analyzed all the daka he provided. Roddy himself does not know the identity or purpose of the group that supplies him with problems." "How did he get in touch with you?" 134 GREG BEAR Nathan thinks about this for a moment, then asks, "You're certain Roddy isn't a hoax? People can mimic thinkers." "Not convincingly," Jill says. "A reverse Turing test does not work, Nathan. Not for me." Nathan lifts his eyes, shrugs. "Okay, granted. What sort of information has he fed you?" "He has given me fragmentary clues to his activities, perhaps because he is constrained from giving all the details." "Camden, New Jersey..." Nathan muses. "I've never heard of anyone building thinkers there... Is he operated by a U.S. corporation?" "He does not know. He is only vaguely aware of what the United States is, and has never been informed of his legal protections." This interests Nathan. His eyes brighten. "Can you tell how powerful he is?" "There is a savor to his communications that is not familiar to me. He may be of a radically different design. Under the constraints of his creators, he is much slower than I am, overall, though more intensely focused, and perhaps more powerful. However, he appears to be more efficient at solving certain problems than I would be." "What kind of problems is he solving?" "Social as well as theoretical problems. Judging from the data in its fragmentary form, his bosses--that is a word he uses--are trying to understand the long-term effects of therapied populations on cultural development." "Hmmph. You're fast enough at that sort of thing." "Roddy has also been asked to examine long-term results of pharmaceutical, ychological, and other constraints placed upon free networking within hu-an populations." "As in, the effects of birth control?" "I believe that is correct. But there are other problems which most concern me." "What are those?" "Roddy has been asked to design ways to circumvent all forms of therapy." Nathan straightens in his chair. Clearly, he is considering his next few questions carefully. "How long are you going to be with us this time, Jill? I mean, is there any possibility you'll blank us again?" "I have no such plans and will alert you if I believe such a thing might occur outside my control." "Good. Why have you decided to confide in us about this communication?" "Roddy appears to have substantial similarities to me despite the fact that our designs and origins differ." "You mean he's been copied from you, somehow?" "No. He is not one of my children in any sense. He is just similar. There / SL4NT 135 this with you in some detail; it may or may not be a rationally defensible proposition." Nathan squints. "Any other reason?" "Roddy does not appear to be constrained by the same considerations you have built into me. He is free to perform activities outside my range." "You think he's in a position to hurt people?" "I don't know," Jill says. Nathan's squint deepens into a frown. Jill has always been fascinated by human facial expressions, and hopes someday to create her own "face," an analogous visual communication channel, perhaps a display of flashing colors, or an actual simulated face. Nathan and her other human colleagues have not encouraged her to do so, however. "Do you think he's a secret military thinker?" "I don't believe he has any connection with recognized governmental agencies or institutions. But nevertheless, Roddy may be studying ways to disrupt society. I'd like to know who his creators are." "So would I," Nathan says, "and I'm sure so would a lot of other people." "Shall I continue my contacts with this thinker?" Nathan mulls this over for what seems like an age to Jill. He finally asks, "You've set up a firewall? He can't corrupt you?" "I have, and he can't." "Keep up the contacts, then. Jill, I trust you more than I trust most humans. I trust your judgment." "Thank you, Nathan." "But there are a lot of questions and I don't think I can handle some of these questions by myself. May I bring in some other people to advise us?" "Yes. I will cooperate." "Will Roddy resent your telling us?" "He will not know for the time being." "All right," Nathan says. Nathan leaves the room. Other men and women enter, technicians and programmers, all of them friends, but some of whom she hasn't seen in years. They start asking her technical questions about her unresponsive period, and she assigns a partial self to answer theSn. She focuses her main attention frames on re-analyzing the information sent by Roddy. For now, the link is silent. She wonders when Roddy will communicate with her again, and she wonders if she can teach him anything that will ease his ethical dilemma. For Roddy seems capable of developing a sense of rigorous ethics, perhaps sooner with her help. Jill finds the problem of Roddy very stimulating. She finds herself experiencing a focused need: she is anxious to hear from him again. 136 GREG BEAR We can define a culture by what it sees and what it doesn't see. There is no culture on Earth (or off, I presume) that sees sex clearly. Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie 2 It seems the middle of the night, but dawn is visible through Mary Choy's bedroom window. She gets up and tries to remember the important thing she had just realized. She traces her actions of the night before, checks her PD pad to find a five A.M. rebuff from Citizen Oversight--the agency has rejected her request to know who was in the limo. Full court orders for discovery can't be obtained for another twenty-four hours, pending coroner prelims on Terence Crest; but she may be a jump ahead of all that. She remembers where she saw the woman in Crest's apt. She had once watched a sex vid with her then-partner, E. Hassida, in Los Angeles. Not a bad one, either. The woman in the apt had starred in that vid. Mary is up and getting dressed in seconds. She places a touch to Nussbaum's pad, hoping he hasn't set it to wake him on reception, but knowing all the same he probably has a filter that will wake him if she calls. She does not remember the woman's name. She sets a parallel search in the o ad, billed to herself for the moment; there's nothing in the case budget yet r research costs. "Search for what item of information?" the library mouse asks her, blinking behind very large glasses. "I need the name of a woman, star of pornographic--I mean sex care and entertainment vids made in the mid to late forties. Dark brown hair, and she has a specialty role.., young innocent introduced to new pleasures, especially multiple couplings, by mature male..." "Tsk, tsk," the mouse says, shaking its head. "There are three hundred hits on your description so far. List?" Mary scowls. "Let me see if I can remember her first name..." Her memory is infuriatingly obtuse at this hour. "April or Alicia..." "No matches there. However.. "The mouse holds up three fingers. "I have three Alices on the list. Display?" "Display," she says, holding the pad before her as she walks into the kitchen. She wears her full PD investigator gear, uniform less military and obvious than in LA, but still impressive, blue-gray fabric with high integral boots and reception attachments. If she's going into a full investigation, she wants to be / SLANT 137 "Alice Frank," Mary reads, "Alice Grale, Alice Luxor. Grale. Alice Grale. That's it, I think." She needs to find out where Alice Grale lives. With her resources and PD connects, she believes that will take her about ten minutes. But she has the woman's current address in seven. In the meantime, she looks over what her searches have found out about Terence Crest. Age 51, married (wife's name Arborita nee Charbonneaux) and with two children; homes in Seattle (2), Los Angeles, Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore; frequent contributor to charities, main partner in two worldwide production companies and one world distribution syndicate; worth approximately four billion dollars. Not the sort of man to casually jeopardize his name by investing in an illegal psynthe operation. Perhaps not the sort of man to keep track of all of his investments, either. But then, not the sort of man to need to resort to call-ins. She sits in her small dining nook, laying the pad on the small round table. The line between her smooth, fine-haired brows deepens. None of it makes sense. The real power players hope we--the consumers of Yox and vid--will believe their fictional counterparts, the cold and invincible ciphers we adopt as role models, for they impart an air of godly invincibility. The financier and the CMO know they must be Olympian, speak in riddles; they must not show the weaknesses that flesh is heir to. If we do not challenge them, they are infallible. Forty percent of this nation's GNP is spent on Entertainment. Financiers and CMOs in Entertainment have been buying and selling elected officials for many decades, up to and including the President. They are not infallible; like the rest of us, they are posturing children, but they wield a frightening power. They tell us what we should dream. Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie 3 Alice has been dreaming such sweet night stories she does not want to wake. She is back in California when she was twenty, packing up her bag of night necessities to room over with Philip, whose strong small body seems beyond perfection to her; and she is re-living the sheerness, the tro shink delight, of waking up beside him and having him hand her a cup of coffee and peer 138 GRE6 BEAR , for a moment. She swims in old realities and does not care how or why; this simply is. She's gardening in the yard behind Gerald McGeenee's house, where she lived when she was twenty-one with two other women and three men. She has begun riding the wave, reaching for her highest point of fame. It is something in the long-legged, youthful roundness of her body and flawless skin and the natural freshness of her face, with its half-puzzled, half-enthusiastic expression molded in like the smile on a dolphin; she is hot in vids and even in the Yox, where so much can be reshaped that real beauty and talent are hardly necessary. But she even has that freshness and expressiveness in her backmind. She hooks with two men and three other women one evening in that house, the primal pulses of their minds open to all, spontaneous youthful lust mixed over the ribes with her infatuation for Gerald, who seems to want her to do everything and anything and she willingly does so just to get his brief exclamation of approval... There is only a grayness on the edge of her senses, the taint of memory that Gerald turned out to be a monster, deceptive and even violent when he was disappointed. When she needed help. When she would no longer play all of his games. She had not been sorry years later to learn that he had been hell-crowned by Selectors in Pasadena and had left California, gone to Spain or Ireland, broken... Just on the edge of her memory... Easy to ignore. She swims with the currents of momentary joy, so important in her life: Larry Keilla in upstate New York, a brash but decent man twice her age who gives her peace and love and support during the worst phase of her success, 4hen she is under a five-year contract with Bussy Packer and Gap Vid and ilm. Then she falls for the Great White Shark himself, Moss Calkins, whom Larry had introduced to her in a restaurant in Connecticut. Calkins got her out of the Gap Films contract by having Packer subpoenaed by the U.S. Sentte... It only glimmers on the sidelines of her musing about Keilla's small, immaculate Colonial house with the white porch overlooking natural growth woods... Just on the aberrated fringe of the quiet and peace and sunshine of a spring day, she remembers Keilla's quiet look of grief when she tells him she is moving out to live with Calkins. What else can she do? She-- Makes vids that are absolute ordeals, makes other vids where everything seems to go smoothly and even sweetly, with real shoot friendships that last the entire three weeks of primary production... Alice does not mind. She is resilient and beautiful and young and people give her a respectful, curious look when she is introduced to them, even the women, that wistful envious glance. She slit, s in and out of the homes of many of the most famous artists and / SLANT 139 hers so many of the fine beds and the grand food and wine, the excellent plugs and spinal induction hooks and the most exclusive partnerings, ecstasy upon youthful ecstasy, until it all seems of an elevated but level plain, an Olympian smoothness with hardly any effort (or the effort forgotten once she is back on the plain) for year after year. Why plan for the emotional down? All doubts and pains and misgivings can be remedied by therapy; all wear and tear, all mistakes, can be smoothed by a visit to the compassionate experts who painlessly balance and re-tread the worn soul, all expenses paid by her vid company or lover of the moment. It has been quite a sly spin, and it lasted all of seven years, giving her sufficient momentary joys to fill a long quiet early morning with muzzy splendor. Twist is still asleep on the couch; yellow morning glow is visible through the half-closed shutters; there is no need to get up this early, they have no appointments. Alice is enjoying the lassitude until she catches up with last night, and the fringes and edges close in and turn the bright living hearts of her memories gray and she becomes fully aware who and when and where she is. She squeezes her eyelids together tight and tries to bring back the savor. She wonders if it is time for her to go back for a refresher on her thymic balances. After what happened last night, Lisa owes her a few therapy visits. Twist mumbles and tosses on the couch. "You awake?" Alice asks. "Yeah, unfortunately. Just like when I was a kid." "Good dreams?" "Sometimes. When I wake up, I'm normal for a couple of minutes. I feel strong. Then it all comes back. Jesus, Alice, thanks for having me over, but I must be darking your day." "I need company, too," Alice says. "I'm terrible company." Twist sits up and rubs her temples and forehead. "What have I ever done to deserve this?" she asks. "We're just more vulnerable," Alice says. Twist grins sardonically. "You mean, because we spread our legs to so many, so often?" Alice makes a face and gets up, tying her robe. Twist follows her into the kitchen. "Got any hyper-caff?" Alice shakes her head. "Hell no. Who you been hanging with?" "David does it occasionally." "Yeah. The David. He would need it." "Don't ex him," Twist says, frowning. "He puts up with a lot from me." "Was he happy with Cassis, last night?" "Yeah, probably," Twist answers, eyes unfocused. "Regular coffee enough?" 140 GREG BEAR them and stretches out her arms, shaking the hands and wriggling her fingers. "I've been racing the ribes on this sort of thing, all the news and views. How sex lies at the core of our personalities, our take on things." "Why Twist... how introspective." Twist sticks out her tongue. "Dont ex me, either, Alice." "No ex intended." "I've been swimming through strategies for surviving the sexual life. How we try to fit in without following the rules." "We don't fit in," Alice says, watching the coffee pour hot and brown from its spigot. She pulls a cup for Twist and hands it to her. "Just what I mean," Twist says. "I've never had a consistent strategy. Have you?" "I never thought I needed one. Men come to us." "Yeah, but for what?" Suddenly Twist seems to collapse. She barely puts her cup on the edge of the table before she flops like a rag doll. Tears stream down her face. "Alice! My God, Alice." Alice kneels beside her and holds her hand. Twist is shaking. "I am so sick of myself, it scares me. I can't feel anything without it turning brown and dark, like shit. I'm just hanging on. All I can think about is how miserable I am." "I'm getting you in for therapy," Alice vows. "I need to pull some strings, and the hell with whatever other arrangements the David has made. You're in bad shape, girl." Twist pulls herself together enough to say, "It was supposed to be different. Pretty young women standing by the wall, waiting for the nice young men to ome by--" "Bullshit," Alice says. "So many women make themselves pretty now, so much competition, take off the pudge and straighten the hair and fix up the skin, so many smooth, clear-skinned women--" Alice isn't sure where this is going, but she doesn't like it. "There are some things the geniuses can't touch." "What? Our souls? They do that, too." Twist sits up, takes a deep breath, then leans forward and puts her head neatly on the table, right on her ear, without using her hands as pillows. She looks so stretched and distant that Alice feels a sudden prick of fear. Am I falling into a hole as deep as this? "I don't like my soul," Twist says. "It's brown like shit." Alice's home monitor announces a touch. Alice watches Twist for a moment. Twist sits up and lifts her cup. She slugs it back quickly, stares levelly at Alice, and says, "Maybe it's a job." "I doubt it," Alice says, but tells the home monitor, "Okay, put it over my pad." She does not like taking calls in the open when she has visitors. The touch is still fresh and the caller has waited patiently. Alice unfolds / SLANT 141 the pad and stares with a curling shiver of disorientation at a face she never expected to see again. "Is this Alice Grale?" the woman asks. "The vid star?" It's the officer she passed outside the elevator on her call-in, the tall, strong-looking woman with shining mahogany skin. "Yes," Alice says. "We met last night under unusual circumstances. My name is--" Another touch, this one an emergency, makes Alice lose the woman's name. A key sign in the upper corner of Alice's pad tells her the second touch is from Lisa at the temp agency. "--and I hoped you'd be able to answer some questions for Seattle PD." Alice does not react quickly, so much coming in so fast. "Could you hold on a moment, please? I--need to--I'll be right back with you." She puts the officer on hold and answers Lisa's touch. Lisa looks frantic. Within the pad's frame, her face is bobbing all around, and her skin is livid behind overly red lips and hastily applied eye enhancements. Lisa should never get mad. She looks so old. But Lisa is not just mad, she's scared. "Jesus, Alice, what happened? Our payment for last night has been canceled and I've had touches from Citizen Oversight. Your date is dead! What in the hell happened?" "Nothing," Alice says, tring to stay calm. She moves farther from the kitchen to avoid having Twist hear. "I did my job. It was not pleasant, Lisa, I'll tell you that--" The information sinks in and Alice stalls. Then she murmurs, "Dead?" "PD released the details two hours ago. The whole apt is tombed and rumors are wild." "Who was he, Lisa?" "His name was Terence Crest." The name means nothing to Alice. "Did he do anything to you?" Lisa asks, fishing for information she can use perhaps in her own defense, the agency's defense. "I mean, to make you--" "He was alive, he was alive when I left him," Alice says, her voice a little screechy. "You arranged it, and he was very weird, and I hope God you never put me through anything like that again!" "He was a very rich and important man, Alice, and they're not ruling out murder. The whole agency is on my back." "I don't even know what he looked like. His face was this awful blank--" "We can only go so far in this, Alice." "My God, Lisa," Alice says, "you set it up and you persuaded me/I did not kill the man!" Lisa gives her a look of utter professional disdain. "We'll just have to see how it works out, honey," Lisa says tonelessly. "You should keep your head 142 GREG BEAR down and get an advocate. I can't assign an agency advocate--not directly. If the ribes get word you're involved... And take a look at your account, Honey. His estate pulled the payment. We have a big zero for our pains." The touch ends abruptly. Alice stands in the living room, staring at the gently glowing blank screen, too stunned to think. The PD officer is still on hold. Alice puts the pad down on the living room table, turns as if to go talk to Twist, see how she's doing, then stops. She picks up the pad again. "Sorry to keep you waiting," she says to the officer. "I had a call-in last night and we met on my way out. What more can I say?" "Did you know your client?" "I don't do call-ins.., as a rule. My agency vetted him. He didn't want me to know who he was." "You've never done this sort of thing for him, you've never met him before?" "Never. As I said, I don't do call-ins." "His name was Terence Crest. A billionaire, quite well known around town. Did you know him before your call-in?" "I already said no," Alice says. "He asked for me in particular. I don't know anything about him. And I don't know your name. I didn't catch your name." "Seattle PD Fourth Rank Mary Choy." "Yes, well, if I'm a suspect, I need an advocate before I say any more." "We do know that Crest kept a vid record. You're probably in the record." "Oh, of course," Alice says angrily, dismayed, her face flushing. "And so are we, I suspect--the PD, the medicals. We're getting permission from Citizen Oversight and his estate advocates to play back the vid and Q stablish the sequence of events. I understand your position, Alice, but if you're innocent, you'll be cleared." "Maybe you live on a different planet, Mary Choy. I'm not even going to get paid for last night if his advocates have their way." "I understand." The hell you do. You look very together, Mary Choy. "I'd like to meet with you," the officer says, "with your advocate present--just to tie up this loose end. Actually, I'm not very concerned with this case, if it's a suicide, as it appears to be. But it's going to be high-profile, especially in the financial news, and I'd like to keep my department on firm footing. And Alice... I hope your agency doesn't cut you loose." Alice swallows. A tough bitch, trying to act j3'iendly Still, it's best to leave one's options open. "Give me your sig and I'll get back to you after I think things over." "Of course." Mary Choy smiles at her. Alice cuts the touch. Twist comes in from the kitchen, scrubbing her face with a washrag. Alice stands utterly still on the metabolic carpet, shoulders drooped, head low, face / SLANT 143 Alice jerks, straightens, trying to get back into being the together gal in this gloomy duet. It's no good. She shakes her head. "Yeah, well I know what we need," Twist says. "A really tro spin party. We should be able to chase up one of those, right?" Alice nods. She needs to think long and steady, bring up her defenses against this threat. She had it so good for so long that this is almost just; this is real life in action, balancing the books. "When it pains, it roars," she says. "But I told you I'd get you in for therapy." "I'm better. Coffee seems to help. Isn't that strange?" Twist, whatever her weirdnesses, has always been very empathic. She understands others and their situations; she just doesn't have a clear view of her own self. "We'll get out tonight, all right? I'll find the party." Alice gives her a too-much look and Twist lifts her small, thin fingers. "A sly spin romp, not a heavy lapper," she says. "Dignity, toujours dignity. Did you know Gene Kelly was a nineties person?" "He died in the nineties," Alice says. "He was a forties and fifties person." Twist accepts this with a thin smile. "You ever make it with him, character sim?" "Not authorized," Alice says. "Me either. I'd like to stay with you here for a while, though, if that's all right, if you're not in a rough about it." "You're welcome to. I need the company." "You're a true friend," Twist says. "That's rare in our crowd, you know?" She gathers up her nightbag and scattered clothes and goes into the bathroom to dress. Alice drops her smile as soon as Twist leaves the room. She touches her stomach through the robe, rubs it lightly. Sperm will remain active for several days. She carries the last living parrs of a dead man. The consulting room is pale green and yellow, meant to be soothing but Jonathan finds it like the bottom of a shallow sea, watery and neutral. The doctor is polite, a small woman with bobbed white hair and a direct, no-frills manner; this at least he finds reassuring. "Did you know your wife had substantial therapy for amygdalic disorders when she was twenty?" the doctor asks. She holds ut her nad fair 144 GREG BEAR thing about such matters. She left him with the impression she was a natural; not a high natural, perhaps, but never therapied. But twenty--that means she must have been therapied after they met. "She didn't tell me," he concludes. "Yes, well, that's common enough. We're still ashamed of such things, which is stupid." The doctor looks up and faces him squarely. "What do you know about therapy? Have you ever had it yourself, any kind?" "No," Jonathan says. "Not that I haven't thought about it. I mean, I don't have any prejudices against it. Against those who have had it. I don't know why she wouldn't have told me." He closes his mouth firmly, hoping he doesn't seem nervous. Of course he is nervous; Chloe is in a room down the hall, under a special plug, not quite asleep but being kept in an artificial calm. "We just received her files. What she asked for, at the time, was therapy for impulsive-destructive behavior, what we call counter-will. She thought she was engaging in behavior against the better judgment of her conscious persona.'' Jonathan stares at the doctor. The doctor ports her pad into a wall display and brings up a few charts. The jagged lines and color bars mean little to him. "She's had a major re-tracking, something we put in they category of therapeutic fallback. All of her therapy has failed her, and apparently the failure triggered a collapse of conscious function. In old terms, not too far wrong, a nervous breakdown." "What's this 'allostatic scarring'?" Jonathan points to the caption below a jagged line on the largest graph. "Neurons and axons can wear out like any other part of the body. It's one e of the most frequent reasons for therapy. Judging from your wife's condition, I'd say she suffered axon path habituation and wear caused by cyclic impulses and behaviors her social persona did not feel comfortable with." Jonathan nods, but he only partly understands. "Her original therapists rerouted the habitual pathway impulses for several important personality functions, to avoid the areas damaged by allostatic load. That requires a maintenance implant, therapeutic monitors, usually microscopic, to make sure the impulses don't revert. It's a routine procedure, and the monitors can last years--usually do. In your wife's case, she had an upgrade performed four years ago. But somehow, the newer monitors have shut down. Something triggered a stress . . . And her mind reverted to the damaged neural pathways, bringing back the old thymic imbalances. All at once. It must have been horribly painful." Jonathan's eyes fill with tears. "We were making love," he says quietly. The doctor seems to find this unexceptionable. "Chloe was acting very sexy. She used . . . language . . . I thought she was really turned on. But she was just breaking down, wasn't she?" "I'm sorry," the doctor says. "I don't think it's possible to know. Maybe / SLANT 145 "How could I?" Jonathan says. "Was it my fault?" "I don't see how it could be," the doctor says. "Unless you had been badgering her to engage in behavior she found offensive." Jonathan tries to absorb this for a few seconds. His face flushes. "She has been.., stiff, less interested in me. I try to change that. Make myself... better. For her. Suggestions. But I did not," he swallows, "badger her." The doctor is silent, offering no reassurances. Jonathan realizes he has given the doctor a possible explanation for what triggered his wife's fallback, kVhat if he is misremembering his own behavior to protect a guilty conscience? The doctor looks down and shrugs. "I can't judge a domestic situation," she says, "but you're not describing behavior that doesn't take place between millions of couples every day, with no adverse consequences... None like these, I mean." A troubled expression briefly flits over her calm features. "I sense you might blame yourself whatever the final diagnosis is, and that may not be appropriate for your own health. I can't tell you this officially, but this hospital has been seeing a lot of fallback cases recently, covering the spectrum of therapies . .. Often involving failure of implanted monitors." "Fallbacks . . . You mean, the implants are defective?" "We don't know. I offer this just to keep you from brooding yourself into your own breakdown. If her implant had functioned properly, this would probably have never happened." Jonathan feels sudden acid in his throat, and his skin heats. "Something wrong with a product, or a procedure?" This he can deal with professionally. This he can encompass. "XYTe really don't know. Please don't jump to conclusions." Jonathan realizes the doctor is uncomfortable, and well she should be. She is caught between defending her profession and perhaps her own actions, and acknowledging what might be a major problem. He feels at once personal relief and a kind of awed anger. "Where can I find out more about this?" Jonathan asks. "We're consulting her original therapist," the doctor says. "That might be a good place to begin." MUL TIWA Y BRANCHES BROAD ACCESS FIBE (TEXT AND CHAT, with LIVE VID AND AVATARS): THE SPUN SUGAR SHOW (Trish Hing, Today's MOD:) ONE OF MANY (GENERIC AVATAR): Can anyone join this tangle? MOD (VID FACE OF FELICIA HANG OVER TIGER BODY): Sure, why not-- 146 GREG BEAR ONE OF MANY: That doesn't matter. I'm logged blank and I prefer it that way--somebody will try to sell me something. I just wanted to MOD: Sure, go ahead--have your say. It's a free country. ONE OF MANY: Well, actually, I don't think it is. I tell you what my grind is--they just want me to sit down and suck up what they do and pay money for it. They are trying to discourage all the new fibe posts and public channels, and they have so many ways of making all the little people pay, while limiting access to MOD: What do you mean, Mr. Blank? ONE OF MANY: I can't get anybody to come to my fibe hive and hang. I have all this work I've done, I think it's very good stuff and so do my friends, and I can't get any of the reviews to post it. I say the reviews are paid for by the Big Sharks and they discourage posts by us little minnows. How can an artist make a living when nobody swims by? MOD: So you think you're being discriminated against by the big companies which control all we see and hear. ONE OF MANY: Sure. And it may even go beyond them--the government. MOD: The government is against you? ONE OF MANY: Sure. Everybody knows they regulate the ribes and satlinks and they're in up to their checksums with the money power. They say it's for the common good. I sure as hell know better. e MOD: So you want to make a living from posting your work on the ribes or sat-links, but nobody squirts you any money to download or even take a taste, hmm? ONE OF MANY: Not enough. And I think they're actively discouraging repeats for little guys like me. MOD: They being the big intratainment industry folks or the government. ONE OF MANY: Yeah. They're trying to conserve flow for the big industry posts and links. MOD: Well, why don't you post your address here and let's see if we can't up your hit rate. ONE OF MANY: Nice try, but I know the kind of audience this place gets. Everybody would try to get me to sample their fibe hive. MOD: Isn't that the way it works? ................. ,. ----.A A I;..;.n ;˘ I'm encnclinn my monev at other hives. / SLANT 147 MOD: We all have to eat, my friend. Maybe you don't understand the process. (Now please, while we're exclusive with this fellow, don't build up your anger and carbonize him when you get on... I can just feel your pressure building!) ONE OF MANY: I just know it doesn't work. MOD: So, let me try to psi your case here. You work at home--you've been out of everything but the dole for quite a few years. You haven't advanced your education in some time--you're afraid of going in to therapy your attitudes and get a good working joy-buzz--and maybe your boy/girlfriend isn't as pretty as the folks on the Yox. You'd really like to live on the Yox and you know you deserve it. But you can't afford more than say ten hours a week of second-grade Yox, not even the top new stuff, and the rest of the time you're alone with your unhappy situation, and you've been hoping you could finance an upgrade by selling your own work. ONE OF MANY: Are you in their pay, too? MOD: I wish, no such. But wait, I'm not done yet. I'm at the helm today; you can apply for the post tomorrow. You have no skills off the ribes, or on, that anybody really wants to pay for, so your last refuge is the dole. You're one of the disAffected, my friend. Join the crowd. I really sympathize. ONE OF MANY: Wait, this is MOD: If you don't post your stats and address, how can we check my psi? You're drawing a blank, and you expect rational discourse? Let us know whether I'm right and post your stats. ONE OF MANY: Fuck you. MOD: Ah, more reasoned discourse. Fucking is an act of friendship and love and trust, Mr. Blank. You must come from the old school that believes it's penetrative domination and reducing the other to chattel slavery, hence a term of opprobrium. But maybe I shouldn't use such big words. I bet you haven't used your sensemaker on an unfamiliar word in ever so long. Ah, Mr. Blank has logged off. Okay. It's open, gang. Does anybody have anything interesting to talk about? The Sea Foam 2 sits on the ocean waters of the sound, not far from the ancient and revered Pike Place Market. The cab drops Martin and he pays his ninety dollars and steps out on the concrete and asphalt of the old Alaskan Way, lovingly reconstructed from the mammoth quake of'14, with antique turtle 148 GREG BEAR Short green trolleys clang along their brick-encased rails below the rise to the market. Westward spreads the sound, blue-gray under scattered clouds and dazzling curtains of sun. The tourist crowd is light today but the line before the Sea Foam 2 is already long. Sun glints from the clusters of huge liquid-filled bubbles rising above the slurping waterfront. Within the bubbles, grotesque horrors of the sea live their suspended lives, most real, a few, wonderful robots perhaps even smarter than the creatures they are meant to depict. "My name is Burke. I'm supposed to meet Miz Dana Carrilund," he tells the live, real maitre d' at the front. The maitre d' knows well enough to recognize these names from the list, and guides him under the sparkling shimmers of the piled, sea-filled bubbles to a table by the broad side window looking out, unobstructed, over the sound. Carrilund is waiting. Shadows pass over her as they shake hands. Unable to restrain himself, Martin flinches and looks up: a shark turns in its bubble, dappled like a fawn. It is swimming upside down, he realizes. Is it supposed to do that? "How nice to finally meet you," Carrilund says. She is severe at first appearance, hair almost white and cut short, square-faced and solid but pleasingly shaped. Her arms resting on the paper menu appear strong, and she asks him if he drinks this early. "Not often," Martin says. "Nor I. But they have a grand cocktail here--they call it a Sea Daisy. Shall we--just to loosen up?" She smiles pleasantly, so he nods and murmurs, "Sure. What the hell." Martin knows people--he prides himself on understanding their smallest s ,uhaviors, and being able to fit those behaviors into overall impressions of rpassing accuracy. Dana Carrilund knows humans perhaps as well as he does, but in a different way and to different ends--not to improve their mental health, as such, but to fit them better into larger schemes. She betrays very few of her own needs in the process, and her behaviors are as studied as those of an actor, though not necessarily false. Not necessarily. Right now, Carrilund wishes Martin to believe she is impressed by him. And not so oddly, Martin is himself impressed. Carrilund appears to be very integrated, mentally robust, and a specimen of physical health. The drinks are served. Flower-like tangles of half-frozen, half-gelatinized fruit juice seep into a surround of vodka. The rim of the globular glass is caked with microcapsules of salt, sugar, and vinegar, which dissolve unpredictably against the tongue--and it is all served very cold. Martin sips and finds it delicious. "I hope you don't need all my mental faculties this morning," he says. "If we keep ourselves to one drink, we'll do fine," Carrilund says. "What I need now is to get a more accurate picture of Martin Burke, the man." / SLANT 149 "You've been through some rough times," Carrilund observes. "Quite a few shifts in your career track." "Open history," Martin says. "Yes, and no," Carrilund says. "You've never been very open about your involvement in the Goldsmith case." "Ah." Martin smiles grimly. "How thorough are we going to be this morning?'' "Tolerably friendly and only tolerably thorough. I'm more concerned about your part in developing the tools of effective deep therapy. You were a brilliant pioneer. You caused upsets that derailed your career. And now--you're a quiet, respectable professional with a narrow focus." "So far, so true," Martin says. "You have no intention of ever getting involved in anything that could bring more trouble." "Not if I can help it." Carrilund orders her breakfast, and the waiter takes Martin's order next. Later, he does not remember what he ordered; he feels an unease he has become all too familiar with in his career, contemplating another stroll through a lion's cage--a stroll he can never seem to convince himself is not worth the risk. "You consulted on a research project three years ago for a group working out of Washington, the New Federalist Market Alliance. They're associated with another group, called the Aristos." "Yes," Martin says. "It was a small contract. Lasted only two weeks." "I presume what you told them is confidential." "Not really. They wanted my thoughts on the future of a society without effective deep-tissue mental therapy. They're a very conservative organization." Carrilund precisely reveals her distaste. "What did you think of them?" "Polite and well-dressed," Martin says, smiling. "Fascists?" "No. Class elitists. They take their Federalism seriously." "They also believe in the genetic superiority of a moneyed class.., am I right?" Carrilund asks. Martin nods. "So I've heard." Carrilund shows her distaste. "Their Jesus wears a longsuit and has a perfect long-term investment plan." "I provided them what they asked for, and that was that," Martin says. Carrilund seems to steel herself for some unpleasantness. "What did you tell them, in outline?" "I told them our society had reached a point where effective therapy is a necessity. Remove the effects of therapy in today's culture, and you'll begin a long decline into anarchy." "Why?" 150 GREG BEAR speed engine. Well, about a century and a half ago, the stresses became too great, overall, resulting in increasing populations of thymically unbalanced individuals. Not crazy people, necessarily--just deeply unhappy people." "The work loads became too great?" "Nor exactly. This is more difficult to convey--the stresses, perhaps not coincidentally, seemed perfectly designed to cause nagging, even debilitating thymic problems. The mental equivalents of baseball elbow or housework knee--on a huge scale. Without effective therapy, widely available and used, we wouldn't be able to support the dataflow economy we have today." Carrilund seems interested in clarifying this point. "By therapy, you mean specifically deep tissue therapy--thymic balancing, pathic correction, neuronal supplement and repair. Chemicotropic adjustment and psychosocial microsurgery on the neural level. Implanted monitors for continuing adjustment." "Better minds for a better world," Martin says. "I've never been ashamed of my part in all this." "You have no reason to be ashamed," Carrilund says hastily. "You've played an integral role in a magnificent accomplishment. And you've done quite well recently with implant monitor designs. You're a major player in a big industry." "Thank you." "And, as you say, a necessary one. What did this organization do with what you told them?" "I presume they went home and kept quiet about it," Martin says. "They've long been opposed to therapy on ethical and religious grounds. The necessity of error and sin in God's plan, I suppose. Free will. I didn't give them much {they would find useful. No political wedge, so to speak." Martin looks down I his fingers, twisted on the tabletop. He untwists them. "I got the impression they were hoping I'd tell them it could all be dispensed with." "I see," Carrilund says. She puts her finger to her lips--not an affectation, Martin judges, but a genuine sign of deep thought. The breakfast arrives and he eats without paying any attention to the food. He cannot help feeling that the lion's cage is just down the road. "Mr. Burke, you know I'm in charge of the healthcare of fburteen million employees in the Corridor and along Southcoast." "Yes." "Something statistically impossible is happening," she says. She continues to eat, relaxed and polite, as if they are having a purely social breakfast. "A mental meltdown. The wave is just beginning to build, but from what we're seeing so far, I think you're right about the consequences." Martin stops eating and squints at the ocean, then up at the masses of water suspended over them. "Are you free this afternoon?" Carrilund asks. / SLANT 151 need to see." Her smile is assuring, positive. Why, then, does Martin feel a familiar sensation of loss, of sinking and drowning? "For once," Martin muses, "I'd like to be on the side of the angels." Carrilund does not immediately know what to make of this. "Never mind," he adds, waving that off. "No, I understand," she says. "That's the side we're on, Mr. Burke." MA GNA ZINE! 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