size. One of my favorites." She touched buttons and the video
raced across the ominous landscape, pulling to a stop by the
root of a gigantic scaled spar. "Sec those domes?"
"Yes."
"Those are bacteria. This is a Mechanist, you see."
"You?"
She smiled. "This is often the hardest part for a Shaper. You
can't stay sterile here; we depend on these little creatures. We
don't have your internal alterations. We don't want them. You'll
have to crawl like the rest of us." She look his left hand. Her
hand was warm and faintly moist. "This is contamination. Is it
so bad?"
"No."
"Better to get it over with all at once. Do you agree?"
He nodded. She put her hand on the back of his neck and
kissed him warmly, her mouth open. Lindsay touched his flannel sleeve to his lips. "That was more than a medical action," he
said.
She pulled the knotted towel from his head and tossed it to the household servo. "Nights are cold in Dembowska. A bed is
warmer with two."
"I have a wife."
"Monogamy? How quaint." She smiled sympathetically. "Face
facts, Bela. Defection broke your contract with the Mavrides
gene-line. You're a nonperson now. Except to us."
Lindsay brooded. An image surged up within him: Nora, curled alone in their bed, her eyes wide, her mind racing as her
enemies closed in. He shook his head.
Calmly, Greta smoothed his hair. "If you tried a little, you'd
recover your appetite. Still, it's wise not to rush things."
She showed the polite disappointment that a hostess might
show to a guest who refused dessert. He felt tired. Despite his
renewed youth he ached from the Investor gravity.
"I'll show you the bedroom." It was lined in dark fur. The
bed's canopy was an overhead videoceiling. The massive head-
board was equipped with the latest in slumber technology. He
recognized an encephalogram, monitoring jacks for artificial
body parts, fluorographs for midnight blood fractionation.
He climbed into the bed, kicking off his mukluks. The sheets
rippled, swaddling over him. "Sleep well," Greta said, leaving.
Something touched the top of his head; above him the canopy
flickered gently into life, sketching out brain rhythms. The
waves were complex and annotated cryptically. One of the wave
functions was outlined in roseate pink. As he looked at it,
relaxing, it began to grow. He intuited suddenly what went on
inside his mind to make it larger. He gave in to it and was
suddenly asleep.
When he woke next morning Greta was sleeping peacefully
beside him, an alarm tiara clamped to her forehead, tied in to
the house security. He climbed out of bed. His skin itched
ferociously. His tongue felt furred. He was beginning to crawl.
DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 24-10-'53
"I never thought I'd see you this way, Fyodor." On Greta's
parlor wall across the room from Lindsay, Ryumin's video-
manicured face glowed with bogus health. It was a good replica,
but to Lindsay's trained eye it was clearly computer-generated;
its perfection was frightening. The lips moved accurately with
Ryumin's words, but its little idiosyncracies of movement were
eerily off-key. "How long have you been a wirehead?"
"Ten years or so. Time alters under the wires. You know, I
can't remember offhand where I left my brain. Someplace un-
likely, I'm sure." Ryumin smiled. "It must be in Dembowska
Cartel, or there'd be a transmission lag."
"I want to talk privately. How many people do you suppose
are listening in on us?"
"Just the police," Ryumin assured him. "You're in a Harem
safehouse; their calls are routed directly through the Chief's
databanks. In Dembowska this is as private as it gets. Especially
for someone whose past is as dubious as yours, Mr. Dze."
Lindsay dabbed at his nose with a kerchief. The new bacteria
had hit his sinuses badly; they had already been weakened by
the Investors' ozone-charged air. "Things were different in the
Zaibatsu. When we were face to face."
"The wires bring changes," Ryumin said. "It all becomes a
matter of input, you see. Systems. Data. We tend toward solipsism; it comes with the territory. Please don't resent it if I doubt you." "How long have you been in Dembowska?"
"Since the Peace began to crumble. I needed a haven. This is
the best available."
"So your travels are over, old man?"
"Yes and no, Mr. Dze. With the loss of mobility comes extension of the senses. If I want I can switch out to a probe in
Mercurian orbit. Or in the winds of Jupiter. I often do, in fact.
Suddenly I'm there, just as fully as I'm ever anywhere these
days. The mind isn't what you think, Mr. Dze. When you grip it
with wires, it tends to flow. Data seem to bubble up from some
deep layer of the mind. This is not exactly living, but it has advantages."
"You've given up Kabuki Intrasolar?"
"With the war heating up, the theatre's glory days are over for
a while. The Network takes up most of my time."
"Journalism?"
"Yes. We wireheads-or, rather, Senior Mechanists, to give us
a name not tainted by Shaper propaganda -we have our own
modes of dataflow. News networks. At its most intense it approaches telepathy. I'm the local stringer for Ceres Datacom
Network. I hold citizenship in it, though legally speaking it's
sometimes more convenient to be treated as wholly owned depreciable hardware. Our life is information -even money is
information. Our money and our life are one and the same."
The Mechanist's synthesized voice was calm, detached, but
Lindsay felt alarm. "Are you in danger, old man? Is it some-
thing I can help?"
"My boy," Ryumin said, "there's a whole world behind this
screen. The lines have blurred so much that mere matters of life
and death have to take a back seat. There are those among us
whose brains broke down years ago: they totter along on invest-
ments and programmed routines. If the fleshies knew, they'd
declare them legally dead. But we're not telling." He smiled.
"Think of us as angels, Mr. Dze. Spirits on the wires. Sometimes it's easier that way."
"I'm a stranger here. I'd hoped you could help me, as you did
once. I need advice. I need your wisdom."
Ryumin sighed precisely. "I knew a Dze once when we were
both rogues. I trusted him; I admired his daring. We were men
together. That's no longer the case."
Lindsay blew his nose. With a shudder of deep loathing he
handed the soiled kerchief to the household servo. "I would
have dared anything then. I was ready to die, but I didn't. I kept
looking. And I found someone. I had a wife, and there was no
pretense between us. We were happy together."
"I'm glad for you, Mr. Dze."
"When danger crowded in on us I broke and ran. Now after
almost forty years I'm a sundog again."
"Forty years is a human lifetime, Mr. Dze. Don't force yourself
to be human. A time comes when you have to give that up."
Lindsay looked at his prosthetic arm, flexed the fingers slowly.
"I still love her. It was the war that parted us. If there were
peace again - "
"Those are Detentiste sentiments. They're out of fashion."
"Have you given up hope, Ryumin?"
"I'm loo old for passion," Ryumin said. "Don't ask me to take
risks. Leave me to my data streams, Mr. Dze, or whoever you
are. I'm what I am. There's no going back, no starting over.
That's a game for those who still have flesh. Those who can
heal."
"I'm sorry," Lindsay said, "but I need allies. Knowledge is
power, and I know things others don't. I mean to fight. Not