could wring a decent profit from the species. Seen from an
Investor's viewpoint, their actions were straightforward.
Lindsay opened the canister. A spool of iron-gray tape nestled
inside, with ten centimeters of off-white leader. Lindsay put the
lid aside-the thin metal was heavy as lead in the Investor
gravity-and then froze.
The tape rustled in its box. The leader end flicked upward,
twisting, and the whole length of it began to uncoil. It rose,
whipping and rippling, faint sheens of random color coiling
along its length. Within seconds it had formed an open cloud of
bright ribbon, supporting itself on a stiff, half-flattened
latticework.
Lindsay, still kneeling and moving only his eyes, watched cautiously. The white end-piece was the tape creature's head, he
realized. The head moved on a long craned loop, scanning the
room for movement.
The tape creature stirred restlessly, stretching itself in a loose-
looped open mass of rolling corkscrews. At its loosest, it was a
bloated, giddy yarnball as tall as a man, its stiffened support-
loops thinly hissing across the floor.
He'd thought it was machinery at first. Dangerous machinery,
because the edges of the warping tape were as thin as razors.
But there was an unplanned, organic ease to its coiling.
He had not yet moved. It didn't seem able to see him.
He shook his head sharply, and the heavy sunshades on his
forehead flew across the room. The tape's head darted after
them at once.
The mimicry started from the tail. The tape shrank, crumpling
like packing tissue, sketching the sunshades' form in tightly
crinkled ribbon. Before it had quite completed the job, the tape
seemed to lose interest. It hesitated, watching the inert
sunglasses, then fell apart in a loose, whipping mass.
Briefly it mimicked Lindsay's crouching form, looping itself
into a gappy man-sized sculpture of rustling tape. Its tinted
ribbon quickly matched the rust-on-black tinge of his coveralls.
Then the tape head looked elsewhere and it flew to pieces, its
colors racing fretfully.
It flickered as Lindsay watched. Its white head scanned slowly,
almost surreptitiously. It flashed muddy brown, the color of
Investor hide. Slowly, a memory, either biological or cybernetic,
took hold of it. It began to bunch and crumple into a new form.
The image of a small Investor took shape. Lindsay was thrilled.
No human being had ever seen an infant Investor, and they
were supposedly very rare. But soon Lindsay could tell from the
proportions that the tape was modeling an adult female. The
tape was too small to form a full-scale replica, but the accuracy
of the knee-high model astonished him. Tiny blisters on the
ribbon reproduced the hard, pebbly skin of the skull and neck;
the tiny eyes, two tinted bumps, seemed full of expression.
Lindsay felt a chill. He recognized the individual. And the
expression was one of dull animal pain.
The tape was mimicking the Investor Commander. She was
gasping, her barrel-like ribs heaving. She squatted awkwardly,
one clawed hand spread across each upthrust knee. The mouth
opened in spasms, showing poorly mimicked peg teeth and the
hollow paper-thin walls of the model's head.
The ship's Commander was sick. No one had ever seen an
Investor ill. The strangeness of it, Lindsay thought, must have
stuck in the tape's memory. This opportunity was not to be
missed. With glacial slowness Lindsay unsnapped his coverall
and exposed the video monocle on its chain. He began filming.
The scaled belly tightened and two edges of tape opened at the base of the model's heavy tail. A rounded white mass with the
gleam of dampness appeared, a lightly wrapped oblong of tape:
an egg.
It was a slow process, a painful one. The egg was leathery; the contractions of the oviduct were compressing it. At last it was
free, though still connected to the tape's parent body by a
transparent length of ribbon. The Investor captain's image
turned, shuffling, then bent to examine the egg with a sick, rapt
intensity. Slowly her huge hand stretched out, scratched the egg,
sniffed the fingers. Her frill began to rise stiffly, engorged with
blood. Her arms trembled.
She attacked her egg. She bit savagely into the narrow end,
shearing into the leathery shell with the badly mimicked teeth.
Yellow ribbon showed, a cheeselike yolk.
She feasted, the taped arms flushing yellow with slime. The
frill jutted behind her head, stiff with fury. The furtive nastiness
of her crime was unmistakable; it crossed the barrier of species
easily. As easily as wealth.
Lindsay put his monocle away. The tape, attracted by the
movement, unlaced its head and lifted it blankly. Lindsay waved
his arms at it and the model fell into tangles. He stood up and
began to shuffle back and forth in the heavy gravity. It watched
him, coiling and flickering.
DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 10-10-'53
Lindsay lurched clown the entry ramp, his scuffed foot-gloves
skidding. After the blaze aboard the starship the disembarkation
mall seemed murky, subaqueous. Dizziness seized him. He
might have managed free-fall, but the Dembowska asteroid's
feeble gravity made his stomach lurch.
The lobby was sprinkled with travelers from the other Mechanist cartels. He'd never seen so many Mechs in one place, and
despite himself the sight alarmed him. Ahead, luggage and pas-
sengers entered the scanning racks of customs. Beyond them
loomed the glass fronts of the Dembowska duty-free shops.
Lindsay shuddered suddenly. He had never felt air so cold. An
icy draft seeped through his thin coveralls and the flexible fabric
of his foot-gloves. His breath was steaming. Dazed, he headed
for the customs.
A young woman waited just before it, poised easily on one
booted foot. She wore dark tights and a fur-collared jacket.
"Captain-Doctor?" she said.
Lindsay stopped with difficulty, gripping the carpet with his
toes.
"The bag, please?" Lindsay handed her his ancient diplomatic
bag, crammed with data lifted from Kosmosity files. She took
his arm in a friendly fashion, leading him through an unmarked
door past the customs scanners. "I'm Policewife Greta Beatty.
Your liaison." They went down a flight of stairs to an office. She
handed the bag to a woman in uniform and accepted a stamped
envelope in return.
She led him out onto a lower floor of the duty-free mall,
prying open the envelope with her lacquered nails. "This holds
your new papers," she said. She handed him a credit card. "You
are now Auditor Andrew Beta Milosz. Welcome to Dembowska
Cartel."
"Thank you, Policewife."
"Greta will do. May I call you Andrew?"
"Call me Beta," Lindsay said. "Who picked the name?"
"His parents. Andrew Milosz died recently, in Bettina Cartel.
But you won't find his death in the records; his next of kin sold
his identity to the Dembowska Harem Police. All identifying
marks in his records have been erased and replaced with yours.
Officially, he emigrated here." She smiled. "I'm here to help
you over the transition. To keep you happy."
"I'm freezing," Lindsay said.
"We'll see to that at once." She led him past the frosted glass
into one of the duty-free shops, a clothier's. When they
reemerged Lindsay wore new coveralls, of thicker quilted fabric
with inset vertical puckers at wrists and ankles. The tasteful
charcoal gray matched his new fur-lined velcro boots. Gloves