Sorry about the boots." He sat and pulled them off carefully,
masking his shudder at the sensual warmth of the fleshy arm-
chair. "Where are you?"
"All around you. I have eyes and ears everywhere."
"Where's your body?"
"I had it scrapped."
Lindsay was sweating. After four weeks in the Dembowska
chill, the heated air was stifling. "You knew it was me?"
"You're the only one I cared to keep who ever left me, darling.
I wasn't likely to forget."
"You've done well, Kitsune," Lindsay said, masking his terror
under a sudden onrush of half-forgotten discipline. "Thank you
for killing the antibiotic."
"It was easy," she said. "I pretended he was you." She hesitated. "The Geisha Bank believed your deception. It was
thoughtful of you to take the yarite's head."
"I wanted to make you a parting gift," Lindsay said carefully,
"of absolute power." He looked at the sleek masses of flesh.
There was no face anywhere. From the walls and floors came
the syncopated muffled thumping of half a dozen hearts.
"Were you upset because I wanted power more than you?"
His mind raced. "You've gained in wisdom since those days.
Yes, I admit it. The day would have come when you chose
between me and your ambitions. And I knew which one you'd
choose. Was I wrong to leave?"
There was silence for a moment; then several of the mouths in
the room laughed. "You could make anything plausible, darling.
That was your gift. No, I've had many favorites since then. You
were a good weapon, but I've had others. I forgive you."
"Thank you, Kitsune."
"You may consider yourself no longer under arrest."
"You're very generous."
"Now, what's this craziness about the Investors? Don't you know how the System depends on them now? Any faction that
crosses the Investors might as well cut their own throats."
"I had in mind something more subtle. I thought we might persuade them to cross themselves."
"Meaning?"
"Blackmail."
Some of the mouths laughed uneasily. "In what form, darling?"
"Sexual perversion."
The eyes swiveled up on their organic mounting. Lindsay saw
the wideness of their pupils, his first kinesic clue, and knew he
had struck home. "You have the evidence?"
"I'd hand it over at once," Lindsay said, "but this clamp
constrains me."
"Take it off. I've neutralized it."
Lindsay unbuckled the kill-clamp and set it gently on the
chair's quivering arm. He walked toward the bed in his socks.
He produced the videomonocle from within his shirt.
Dark eyes opened within the headboard. A pair of sleek arms
emerged through soft furred slots. An arm took the monocle
and placed it over one eye. Lindsay said, "I've set it to the
beginning of the sequence."
"But that's not the beginning of the tape."
"The first part is-"
"Yes," she said icily. "I see. Your wife?"
"Yes."
"No matter. If she'd come with you, things might have been
different. But now she's crossed Constantine."
"You know him?"
"Of course. He crowded the Zaibatsu with the victims of his
purge. The Shapers are proud, in the Ring Council. They'll
never believe an unplanned can match them scheme for scheme.
Your wife is a dead woman."
"There might be-"
"Forget it. You had your years of peace. The next are his. Ah."
She hesitated. "This was taken aboard an Investor starship? The
one that brought you here?"
"Yes. I filmed it myself."
"Ahh." The moan was purely sensual. One of the room's huge
hearts was under the bed; its pulse had speeded. "It's their
queen, their captain. Oh, these Investor women and their harem
rule, what a pleasure it is to have beaten one. The filthy crea-
ture. Oh, what a joy you are, Lin Dze, Mavrides, Milosz."
Lindsay said, "My name is Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay."
"I know. Constantine told me. And I convinced him you were
dead."
"Thank you, Kitsune."
"What do names mean to us? They call me the Chief of Police.
The control is what matters, darling, not the front. You fooled
the Shapers in the Ring Council. The Mechanists were my prey.
I moved to the Cartels. I watched, I waited. Then one day I
found Carnassus. The last survivor of his mission."
She laughed lightly, the high-pitched skipping laugh he once
had known so well. "The Mechs sent out their best. But they
were too strong, too stiff, too brittle. The strangeness of it broke
them, and the isolation. Carnassus had to kill the other two, and
he still wakes up screaming because of it. Yes, even in this
room. His company was bankrupted. I bought him, and all his
strange booty, from the wreckage."
"In the Rings they say he rules here."
"Of course they do; that's what I told them. Carnassus belongs to me. My surgeons have been at him. There's not a neuron in him that pleasure hasn't blasted. Life is simple for him, a
constant dream of flesh."
Lindsay looked about the room. "And you're his favorite."
"Would I tolerate anything else, darling?"
"You don't mind that other wives practice Zen Serotonin?"
"I don't care what they think or claim they think. They obey
me. I'm not concerned with ideology. What concerns me is the
future."
"Oh?"
"The day will come when we've squeezed everything we can
out of Carnassus. And cryonic products will lose their novelty as
the technology spreads."
"That might take years."
"It all takes years," she said. "And it's a question of years. The
ship you arrived on has left circumsolar space."
"You're sure?" Lindsay said, stricken.
"That's what my databanks tell me. Who knows when they'll
return?"
"It doesn't matter," Lindsay said. "I can wait."
"Twenty years? Thirty?"
"Whatever it takes," Lindsay said, though the thought suffocated him.
"By then Carnassus will be useless. I'll need a new front. And
what could be belter than an Investor Oueen? It's a risk worth
taking. You'll work on it for me. You and Wells."
"Of course, Kitsune."
"You'll have the support you need. But don't squander a
kilowatt of it trying to save that woman."
"I'll try to think only of the future."
"Carnassus and I will need a safehouse. That will be your
priority."
"Depend on it," said Lindsay, Carnassus and I,'he thought.
DEMBOWSKA CARTEL: 14-2-'58
Lindsay studied the latest papers from the peer review commit-
tee. He paged through the data expertly, devouring the abstracts,
screen-scanning through paragraphs, highlighting the worst ex-
cesses of technical jargon. He worked with driven efficiency.
The credit went to Wells. Wells had placed him in the department chairmanship at the Kosmosity; Wells had put the editorship of the Journal of Exoarchosaurian Studies into his hands.
Routine had seized Lindsay. He welcomed the distractions of
administration and research, which robbed him of the leisure
necessary for pain. Within his office in the Crevasse, in an exurb
of the newly completed Kosmosity, he wheeled in his low-grav
swivel chair, chasing rumors, coaxing, bribing, trading information. Already the Journal was the largest unclassified databank
on the Investors, and its restricted files mushroomed with speculation and espionage. Lindsay was at its core, working with the stamina of youth and the patience of age.
In the five years since Lindsay's arrival in Dembowska, he had
watched Wells move from strength to strength. In the absence of
a state ideology, the influence of Wells and his Carbon Clique