techniques is notorious. You're a living demonstration of the
power of detente. You seize advantage wherever you find it but
deny it to anyone else."
Constantine smiled. "I'm no Shaper. I'm their guardian. It's
been my fate, and I've accepted it. I've been alone all my life,
except for you and Vera. We were fools then."
"I was the fool," Lindsay said. "I killed Vera for nothing. You
killed her to prove your own power."
"The price was bitter, but the proof was worth it. I've made
amends since then." He drained his goblet and stretched out his arm.
Vera Kelland took the cup. Around her neck she wore the
gold filigree locket she had worn in the crash, the locket that
was meant to guarantee his death.
Lindsay was dumbstruck. He had not seen the girl's face when
her back was turned.
She did not meet his eyes.
Lindsay stared at her in icy fascination. The resemblance was
strong but not perfect. The girl turned and left. Lindsay forced
the words. "She's not a full clone."
"Of course not, Vera Kelland was unplanned."
"You used her genetics."
"Do I hear envy, cousin? Are you claiming her cells loved you
and not me?" Constantine laughed.
Lindsay tore his gaze from the woman. Her grace and beauty
wounded him. He felt shell-shocked, panicky. "What will hap-
pen to her, when you die here?"
Constantine smiled quietly. "Why not mull that over, while we
fight?"
"I'll make you a pledge," Lindsay said. "I swear that if I win
I'll spare your congenetics in the years to come."
"My people are loyal to the Ring Council. Your Czarina-
Kluster rabble are their enemies. They're bound to come in
conflict."
"Surely that will be grim enough without our adding to it."
"You're naive, Abelard. Czarina-Kluster must fall."
Lindsay looked aside, studying Constantine's group. "They
don't look stupid, Philip. I wonder if they won't rejoice at your
death. They might be swept away in the general celebration."
"Idle speculation always bores me," Constantine said.
Lindsay glared. "Then it's time we put the matter to the
proof."
Heavy curtains were spread over one of the huge alien tables,
falling to the floor. Beneath the table's sheltering expanse the
blazing light was dimmer, and a pair of supportive waterbeds
were brought in to combat Investor gravity.
The Arena itself was tiny, a fist-sized dodecahedron, its triangular sides so glossily black that they shimmered with faint
pastels. Wire trailed from metal-bound sockets in two opposing
poles of the structure. The wires led to two goggle-equipped
helmets with flexible neck extensions. The helmets had the
blunt utilitarian look of Mechanist manufacture.
Constantine won the toss and took the right-hand helmet. He
produced a flat curved lozenge of beige plastic from his gold-
threaded coat and hooked an elastic strap to its anchor loops.
"A spatial analyzer," he explained. "One of my routines.
Permitted?"
"Yes." Lindsay pulled a flesh-colored strip of dotted adhesive
disks from his breast pocket. "PDKL Ninety-five," he said. "In
doses of two hundred micrograms."
Constantine stared. " 'Shatter.' From the Cataclysts?"
"No," Lindsay said. "This was part of the stock of Michael
Carnassus. It's original Mechanist issue, for the embassies.
Interested?"
"No," Constantine said. He looked shaken. "I protest. I came
here to fight Abelard Lindsay, not a shattered personality."
"That scarcely matters now, does it? This is to the death,
Constantine. My humanity would only get in the way."
Constantine shrugged. "Then I win, no matter what."
Constantine attached the spatial analyzer, fitting its custom-
made curves against the back of his skull. Its microprongs slid
smoothly into the jacks connected to his right hemisphere. With
its use, space would assume a fantastic solidity, movement
would show with superhuman clarity. Constantine lifted the
helmet and caught a glimpse of his own sleeve. Lindsay saw him
hesitate, studying the fabric's complex interwoven topology. He
seemed fascinated. Then he shuddered briefly and slid his head
within the helmet.
Lindsay pressed the first dosage against his wrist and donned
his headpiece. He felt the adhesive eye-cusps grip his sockets,
then a wash of numbness as local anesthetics took effect and
threads of stiffened biogel slid over the eyeballs to penetrate his
optic nerves. He heard a faint annihilating ringing as other
threads wormed past his eardrums into predetermined
chemotactic contact with his neurons.
They both lay back on their waterbeds, waiting as the helmets'
neck units soaked through predrilled microholes in the seventh
cervical vertebra. The microthreads grew their way harmlessly
through the myclin casings of the spinal axons in a self-
replicating gelatin web.
Lindsay floated quietly. The PDKL was taking hold. As the
spinal cutoff proceeded he felt his body dissolving like wax,
each sensory clump of muscle sending a final warm glow of
sensation as the neck unit shut it off, a last twinge of humanity
too thin to be called pain. The Shatter helped him forget. By
rendering everything novel, it was intended to rob everything of
novelty. While it broke up preconceptions, it heightened the
powers of comprehension so drastically that entire intuitive
philosophies boiled up from a single moment of insight.
It was dark. His mouth tasted of cobwebs. He felt a brief wave
of vertigo and terror before the Shatter aborted it, leaving him
suddenly stranded in an emotional no-man's-land where his fear
transmuted itself bizarrely into a crushing sense of physical
weight.
He was crouching next to the base of a titanic wall. Before him, dim sheens of radiance gleamed from a colossal arch. Beside it,
jutting balustrades of icy stone were shrouded in thin webs of
sagging dust-covered cable. He reached out to touch the wall
and noted with dulled surprise that his arm had transmuted
itself into a pallid claw. The arm was jointed in pale armor. It
had two elbows.
He began crawling up the wall. Gravity accompanied him.
Looking out with new perspective he saw that bridges had
transformed themselves into curved columns; loops of sagging
cable were now vicious, stiffened arcs.
Everything was old. Something behind his eyes was opening.
He could see time lying on the world like a sheen, a frozen blur
of movement chopped out of context and painted onto the
surface of the cold stone like alien shellac. Walls became floors,
balustrades cold barricades. He realized then that he had too
many legs. There were legs where his ribs should have been and
the crawling feeling in his stomach was a literal crawling: the
sensations from his guts were transmuted into the movement of
his second pair of limbs.
He struggled to look at himself. He could not curl forward, but
his back arched with fantastic ease and his lidless eyes gazed at
armored plates thick with intersegmental fur. A pair of wrinkled
organs protruded on stalks from his back: he brushed his muzzle against them and suddenly, dizzyingly, he smelted yellow. He
tried to scream, then. He had nothing to scream with.
He flopped back against the cold rock. Instinct seized him, and
he scuttled headlong across acres of porous gritty stone toward
the safe darkness of a huge jutting cornice and a racklike
checkerboard of rust eaten bars. Proportion left him as he
crouched there, wobbling in a hideous burst of intuition, and he