Crescent City Rhapsody

ARGENTINIAN INTERLUDE 2029

Angelina hardly minded that radio and all that was going bad, except that she couldn’t call Oliveira very often. She therefore had to fall back on writing letters, which she hated because she was not very good at it and it was embarrassing. His letters were filled with close observations of not only his own thoughts and feelings but telling and intelligent interpretations of the actions of those around him, eloquent descriptions of moods, of which he had more than she’d ever suspected, and lovely, detailed word pictures of streets, shops, days, nights, strewn with phrases that shone like pearls. Her own letters were terse, abrupt things pulled out of her by guilt.

“Weather fine. Rode out to the east pasture today. I’m trying to figure out how we are going to power the electric fences. ” Well, she was damned tired. She didn’t have time for all these prettinesses, like him. Still she managed her weekly letter, one page exactly, not one word more. “Soon I’ll be sending these by carrier pigeon,” she wrote him. “They are trying to restore the old steam engine from the museum. But it’s the wrong gauge for the bullet tracks. ”

She stared out the window. Her pen stopped moving. It was raining. Cold rain from the south. Right time of year, of course. Usually by now she was all snugged in for the winter, the warehouses full of hay and feed, vast larder full of supplies for herself and the occasional visitor. Any day now it would change to snow and and the feed wasn’t here yet.

How had Grandfather Paulo done it, so long ago? Well, he hadn’t been fool enough to come before the tracks had been well laid. And now the train had stopped running. For a while they said tomorrow and then they said next week and soon they’d stop saying and the station would be empty. For all she knew, they’d come for her cows and claim them for the state, for an emergency.

Even if she had bought that system to grow beef in stainless-steel containers—revolting thought!—how would she have shipped it from here?

When she looked out the window again, it was snowing.

Prelude to a Somewhat Distant Kiss Artaud and Illian | Prague | 2030

Artaud watched Illian soak up the admiration as he sipped red wine at an opening. He’d managed to procure a huge loft in Prague; it went for gutbucket prices because of the last year’s surge scare. Now only the avant-garde wanted to spent time in Prague.

Illian had elected to wear a shimmering purple bodysuit draped with sheer red fabric, sarilike. It set off her exotic looks well. She’d rimmed her wide dark eyes with kohl. Her pale skin glowed, putting him in mind of a silvery moon.

No one, looking at her, would know how sick she was.

“It’s the end of an era,” murmured the woman next to him. She was heavy, dressed severely in black, with the exception of a yellow scarf around her neck. Her white doughy face was made more lively by the patches of pink she’d applied to her cheeks. Perdita reviewed for an international art bundle.

“End of an era—you mean because of locality,” replied Artaud. And indeed the theme of medievality—glossed and romanticized— seemed a major attention-getter lately, though it certainly didn’t figure in Illian’s work, which was wide and sweeping and connected one somehow instead of isolating. But most everything else in the world seemed to be moving backward in time. It was now more possible to produce what one needed within a small community. Certainly the models he’d seen of some of the first fully designed nanotech cities were self-sufficient. London, Paris, and Beijing were on the verge of major changeovers, and the world was watching nervously.

“I mean because of everything,” Perdita said crossly. “And this work of your protégée reminds me of it too much.” She set an empty glass on a table and set to work on her third—if Artaud’s count was good.

“I guess you could call her my protégée,” he said doubtfully.

“You’ve obviously taught her everything you know,” said Perdita.

Artaud choked on his swallow of wine and tried to make it come out a chuckle. He shook his head while Perdita pounded him on his back. Another swain—Artaud could only think of them as swains— joined the group around Illian. They were too suave by half, all of them. “It’s just her,” he gasped. He didn’t add that all he’d done was try to keep her alive and try to keep his awe under heavy wraps. He didn’t want to limit her with history. Yet he wanted her to have a strong foundation to fall back on. It was a fine line. She absorbed things quickly, though. Often with frightening speed.

He had found her several years ago, selling paintings on the sidewalks of Amsterdam, a girl so young that at first he did not believe that she could be the artist. He was a bitter old man, dying of cancer and uninterested in cures, staying alive only so that his insurance would pay off his granddaughter when he died. A respected art critic for most of his life, Artaud had been stunned by Illian’s work. He took her in. He held on to her, and decided to hold on to life, because she showed him something utterly new, something interesting enough to make living through pain worthwhile.

She made him want to see what would happen next.

“What is this stuff anyway?” Perdita continued, sweeping her glass-holding arm in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc so that wine sloshed wildly. “It moves me on some deep level and yet I can’t really be articulate about it. It irritates the hell out of me—if you really want to know. ‘Moves me on some deep level.’ Right. That oughtta fly. With people her age, anyway.”

“Now, now,” said Artaud. “Let’s not hold her age against her. Despite the fact that it makes me burn with envy.”

Perdita had come to Prague decades ago, an expatriate American eventually holding fast to art’s hem, as had Artaud, rather than creating its fabric, ungracefully coming to terms with her own lack of talent. “Though you could have talent easily enough now, my dear,” said Artaud, horrified to hear himself replying aloud to his own thoughts. Was it the music—loose, and loosening stuff that Illian insisted on, despite his insistence that the visual arts should remain unsullied?

“What?” asked Perdita.

“Nothing,” he lied. “Too much wine. I’m immensely proud, of course, but it’s nothing to do with me, I assure you. You see her age. Do you think she’d follow a word of my advice even if she secretly agreed?”

“Well, I can see that it’s a lot more than mere Hogwash,” said Perdita. Prague was awash with nanotech snifters of talent. Or “Hogwash,” as it was called.

Artaud had long puzzled about talent’s hidden origins. Basic skills were necessary, of course, and could be learned. You had to know the scales, had to train your voice or fingers or eye, had to absorb the basics. But some took flight, their eye on a goal out there in the infrared. Not seen at all until they unraveled its edges and set it concrete into the world, embedded it in matter, filtered it through notes or color or film and left its record as unfinished as they dared. Artaud was a fan of not muddying the colors. First thought best thought. He’d tried to keep Illian always on the breaking cusp. Apparently, he’d succeeded.

What did Hogwash do? It was closely related to endorphins and required biofeedback to induce a certain brain wave pattern. Application exercises washed through the hopefuls in the community constantly. Mostly it had to do with imitating the masters and hoping to train your own brain cells in this fashion.

Artaud could only hope that it would improve the world. It seemed to him that it might make people happier. Some expression of oneself in the arts seemed essential to every human.

But nothing could improve on his happiness, on his pride, at this moment. Not even wishing, as he’d caught himself far too often, that he was younger and Illian older.

But even removing the manifestations of age was possible now. He didn’t really think it was right.

Still, he was doing it. Or having it done.

He was startled and even afraid for an instant when Perdita brushed his cheek and said, “You look younger every day, dear.” Could she read his mind? Were the preparatory treatments showing? They merely helped ready the body for its ordeal. The real work would take months, and he would have to go to Mexico.

“Perdita,” he said, “I was wondering if you would mind looking after Illian for a few months or so. I have to go to New York and you know how long it takes nowadays.”

Perdita looked at him with eyes make-believe wide. “Why, of course, dear. Though I might wonder why you’re not taking Little Miss Genius with you to unleash upon the art world there…”

“She’s not ready,” he said abruptly.

“Of course not,” said Perdita and pinched his cheek rather too painfully. “She needs to stay here in the boonies. You go… arrange some shows. All this is collapsible, of course?” She meant that the pieces were on a sphere which, inserted into a gallery wall-system supplied with the right stuff, reproduced the entire show overnight.

He shook his head. “Every last one of them is simply itself. They weren’t grown. She painted them with oils and turpentine. They have to be hung and set up. She welds too,” he said proudly.

Perdita wrinkled her nose. “Oils! Oh, how smelly. That ghastly solvent stuff. Excuse me, Artaud, but how healthy is that for a young woman?”

Artaud recalled seeing Illian in bleary 3 a.m. darkness, opening his eyes as he lay in bed. In his stubbornly separate bed in their studio; she’d gone through her oedipal stage of wanting him and it had passed quickly and stormily. Her hair tied up in a scarf of silken paint-smeared butterflies, she leaned against a stool, gazing at a painting for a good half hour as he fought sleep. The bar downstairs provided the scene with a dull roaring accompaniment of drunken singing. Tears tracked her face and she attacked the canvas with a flurry of brushstrokes hard as blows. The easel fell backward. The music from downstairs was suddenly overwhelmed as a radio somewhere in the loft blared on. Illian collapsed to the floor. He jumped from bed, saying, “Shit!” And it was two days before she woke.

Her ascension to celebrity had been too swift for him to control. He would have preferred her talent to be tamped and richened by experience. But she did harbor unexpected depths. She had suffered— somehow, somewhere—beyond words, before he had found her, and her bouts of sickness were unbearable for him; frightening. The first time, years ago in Amsterdam, he had taken her to a doctor by ambulance, but she slipped out of the examining room and he found her after hours of frantic search, fevered, in a nearby alley. But not too fevered to fight, frenzied, drawing blood from attendants when he carried her back and she awoke on an examining table. When she recovered at home, she told him simply that she would run away and disappear completely if he ever took her to a doctor again. In a way, he understood. At least, he felt the same way about doctors. After that, he hired private nurses to care for her. He came to dread the times when radio worked. For he quickly realized that those were the times when she was unable to function. Yet afterward it seemed as if she’d moved to new levels; it was as if she only knew the alphabet before her spells, but woke up knowing how to read.

With fame, it seemed that her personality was transformed. At first he was worried, then gratified. She was happy at last. He knew that she was not at her peak, not at all. But she might not live to reach it, so—let her have her day. There was no way he could have prevented it, at any rate, not after he’d promoted her so tirelessly.

“I said, Artaud,” Perdita said crossly. “How healthy?”

“Not very healthy, I suppose,” he said. “But she’s stubborn.” He regretted his decision to leave Illian in Perdita’s hands for a moment. He didn’t want Perdita to know too much, but he was handing her too much on a silver platter.

He knew he was in over his head. How delicious it was, after all these years. His granddaughter hated him for not dropping dead after all, despite his giving her five of his most valuable paintings outright, more than enough to set her up for life if she moved fast. Everyone had to move fast these days. Sell out, cash in. What good were diamonds, for instance, when replication flooded the market with as much precisely arranged hard carbon as was desired? Where would value lie when all was available to kings and paupers alike, spread across a smorgasbord? His patrician background asserted itself when he thought about this. Without an appreciation of beauty, whether created by humans or found in nature, what good was the gift of consciousness?

Perhaps new forms of appreciation were waiting in the wings.

Illian strolled over to one of her pieces, a three-dimensional wire thing that reminded Artaud of a cage. She built cages of toothpicks. They all contained the same odd conjunction of angles, like some kind of giant molecule from one of his childhood chemistry classes gone awry. She left them all around the studio. She fashioned them when she was sick and filled them with butterflies created from all kinds of mediums—metal, tissue paper, clay. They clearly meant something to her, but she could not or would not tell Artaud what that might be.

Illian bent from the waist and tweaked the large cage gently. Its loose center part, a mobile of copper butterflies hanging from a ball bearing joint, swayed and as it did the tempo of the music did so as well, enveloping them in a sweeping rhythm. Artaud feared she would raise her pointed chin and dance, eyes shut, face blissful, as she was wont to do when enveloped in such music. Oh well, they would just think it was part of the work, but not only was it distracting, it was far too private…

But they would probably never see her broken down, in tears, as he so often did. They would never hold her, her thin, long, limbs awkward as those of a fawn, as she sobbed uncontrollably.

Was it just hormones?

She looked up and smiled at him directly, her wide enchanting smile. Without breaking their locked gaze, she straightened and walked toward him and, to his surprise and near-embarrassment, hugged him tightly.

“I am so happy,” she whispered in his ear.

He hugged her briefly, then released her. “Me too. Go talk to your public.”

Afterward, it was hard to shake them. He knew she was tired but she refused to allow him to drive them off, first at the café, where she devoured a huge plate of egg noodles, and afterward as she bought a pink felt hat at a hat stand and they fed the processor an old black fedora from a bin of hats shielded from the rain by a sheet of plastic. “A coat too,” Artaud said, but the young man didn’t even remove the cigarette from his teeth, just jerked his head toward the stand next to him. As Illian sported in her hat, balancing on a brick wall behind some benches and leaping down in a plié, which brought applause, Artaud let them suck 4.7 euros from his card and wrapped a black velvet cape around her shoulders. She looked into his eyes with sudden apology.

“You’re tired,” she said. She was quite as solicitous of him as he was of her, though it was no longer necessary. The seventh or eighth cancer cure had been successful. It had taken four years to work through them and she had nursed him as much as he’d allowed, though he hired people to do things technical or heavy. It had been interesting to observe how irritated this made his granddaughter.

“No,” he said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

“Well, then,” she said and smiled. “I supposed we might have some ice cream.” She looked over her shoulder and back at him. “Shoo!” she said, waving her arm at them. A few of them looked surprised, some of them annoyed. “What, you’ve never seen a woman change her mind? I’m tired now. Thank you for coming. I enjoyed your company. Now GO!”

Muttering among themselves, the half-dozen of them trooped down the rainy, gilded street toward the St. Charles Bridge.

West Coast Cutting Contest Jason | Arizona | 2031

Jason always felt naked when he went down into town, as if layers of himself peeled away with every downturning switchback of the narrow dusty road. As if, when he got down there, everyone would be able to see how different he was. As if those who were after him would be able to find him and take him… wherever they wanted to take him. Some top-secret facility somewhere. The faceless place of his nightmares.

Up on the plateau at nine thousand feet, the three of them had built what could only be called a bunker, backed into a rise in the land, huge south-facing windows made nonreflective, his mom and dad constantly arguing about whether or not they should have an arsenal, more weapons than the three rifles they used for hunting. So far she’d won. When each new crop came in, they’d truck a load back from the farmers’ market; can or dry it. Herbs, chilies, and garlic braids hung from the heavy beams of the kitchen—beams from no forest, beams that had never known roots nor leaves. This distressed his mother, though she could never say exactly why. “It’s never known the joy of life,” she said. “That’s right, and it never knew the pain of death,” his dad would invariably rejoin. “It never felt the saw bite into it.”

The brilliant sun burned him through the roll bars of the Jeep he’d found in a junkyard when he was fifteen and converted to solar. That was one good thing about being out West. It was more sensible to go solar. The majestic roar of the sun, which he sometimes likened to an orchestra or to musics previously unthought of, unheard, was the background of his consciousness now. He’d gotten used to it.

In the East, there was a lot of talk about some new kind of BioCities; apparently Beijing had already converted to some bizarre system using pheromones, and plans were afoot to convert several U.S. cities. They still got newspapers in Dog Leg, tossed off of the shiny new maglev every afternoon. The pheromone plan was to imbed the DNA of a special strain of E. coli with news, pack that in tamperproof pouches, and ship it on the system of magrails that even now was being constructed—NAMS, the North American Maglev System. Nanotech developments made tunnelling swift and danger-free; rails were grown just as swiftly. The news would then be released into the city-wide system to be downloaded at will.

The Dog Leg maglev stop, one of the first because it was a primary east-west route, was one reason they’d chosen to set up their factory here. People could come in by train and pick up the cars they’d manufactured for them, drive them away. They offered a “free” train ticket from anywhere in their ad. Minerals was the other draw. The raw materials they needed to grow things were plentiful hereabouts. His dad had found the optimal place by downloading old sonar maps, locating pockets of minerals for mining corporations back around 2010. Things were cheaper at the source.

In addition to growing the special kind of car Jason had designed and which he had patented, they grew the regular kinds of prefab houses, which they shipped out on train cars, and feng shui houses designed by his mother, complete with furnishings and an initial visit from her to determine the orientation of the house on the site. These clients were incredibly picky, as far as Jason could tell, and often paid for many consultations before they were satisfied. It was by far the most lucrative part of their business.

Jason swerved to avoid a boulder that had fallen in the road, leaving inches to spare on the cliff side. This didn’t bother him in the least, but he figured he ought to come back when he had more time and rig up something to get rid of it. Maybe blast it. His mother would probably get out and walk this stretch till then and she certainly wouldn’t drive it except on a moped.

He reached the blacktop, and then it was another ten miles to Dog Leg. In anticipation of new cheap roads that constantly maintained themselves, most secondary roads were not maintained at all. Despite the rumpled, potholed surface, Jason shifted into fifth and cruised fast, enjoying the tumbleweeds of the flats, the line of mountains to the north, the wind in his hair. Dog Leg, a cluster of low scattered buildings, grew larger.

He drove down the alley in back of their factory and parked, as was his habit, two doors down. He climbed the rusted fire escape of the building next door and looked down into the parking lot, which was empty. He climbed down and unlocked the back door and stepped inside, touched on the bank of biolights in the ceiling.

He walked over and checked the first of his three tanks, where a neon-green car grew. He opened the hood of the control panel and touched a few pads; readouts echoed back in bright crisp colors on his screen. He lost himself in creation. It was not a job to him— not yet.

The Long Neck Saloon was crowded on Thursday night; not only was it a game night but TV was working. A rare coincidence nowadays.

Jason was rooting for the Astros, for no particular reason. It was just more interesting when he rooted for someone. He was on his third Bud, hunkered at the end of the bar, the physics textbook he’d brought to pass the time lying open, forgotten. He stayed over in town once or twice a week and generally ate at the Long Neck and had a few beers; read or studied, following a curriculum set up by his parents years ago, to the twangs of country music on the jukebox. The game was an unexpected bonus.

Although the times when broadcasting worked still sometimes made him nauseous, headachy, cranky, or just plain caused him to fall to the ground gripped in a cold sweat while the world whirled around him, he’d learned that if a television was in the room and if he focused on the picture, he could sometimes stay steady. And tonight he wanted to. He cheered with the rest of the room and pounded on the bar with a fist. Drinking seemed to help too. He signaled for another Bud.

The screen went black. A general groan arose, spiked by deep curses and the sound of a bottle smashing. The room went silent for a remarkable moment as everyone stared at the screen, hoping the picture would return.

Then most everyone rose and started shuffling out of the bar. There were a lot of general good nights. Jason put his money on the bar and moved to a booth. The generator had kicked in, but Brenda went around lighting the kerosene lanterns at each table. Jason thanked her, ordered some soup, and opened his book to the place he had been. But for a long time, he did not look at the book.

This was his sacred time.

He did not always hear tones now. At times the things he saw became sharper; became more deeply tinged with hue; displayed geometric relationships he’d never before noticed, held together with spaces and lines and depth of field. At times like these, he understood how one might be called to be an artist. His field of vision seemed to demand replication in one way or another and he tended to sketch at these times on whatever might be available. A line of mountains; a table scattered with dinner’s debris of dirty dishes and half-devoured foodstuffs; the folds of fabric heaped on an unmade bed; a Western highway stretching to infinity. He rarely kept the results, although his mother always did if she found them. For him, the satisfaction—the compulsion—lay in the act of sketching, not in the finished product.

At other times, sounds seemed to be precisely organized. The soughing of wind in the high pines; the pitch and hum of traffic in a big city; the rustle of pages as his father read the newspaper. Music was an unbearable delight, especially Bach, where relationships leaped out like crystal into the air.

Tonight it was needling tones and a wide swath of low warm sounds suggesting to Jason the aurora borealis, which he’d never actually seen. The beer blur vanished and he leaned over his book, relaxing into the satisfaction of hard information.

He was on a page of problems. He got out a notebook and prepared to do some figuring.

But to his amazement, his mind leaped to the answer of the first problem immediately. He held it in his mind for a moment, doubting and not doubting, then turned to the back of the book.

He was correct.

He turned back and looked at the problems.

These were not simple challenges. He had fully expected to solve perhaps one in the next hour. Perhaps none. Yet he worked his way down the page with as much ease as if the problems were asking his age or his hair color. There was an odd, insistent clarity about the workings of the universe. The laws of physics were bare and visible, with his steadily accumulated background of quantum mechanics and all of its bizarre spinoffs. The matter of his surroundings—the scarred wooden tables and floor, the plastic napkin holder, the aluminum spoon Brenda plunked down next to the steaming mug of soup—fairly screamed with obvious relationships and revelations so powerfully that he caught his breath and stared, as perplexed as if he were William Blake suddenly observing the divine lineaments of London.

He stood, pulled on his jacket and hat, and stepped outside. His breath puffed in the cold desert air.

The two-lane road widened into a short comb of parking spaces as it passed through Dog Leg. No one thought it important to provide backup power for the single streetlight, so the luxury of total darkness was his.

The heavens were as ordered as the interior of the Long Arm Saloon. He was ordered thusly within and connected with them. He been created from the dust of the universe. It was all so simple. Pathways to infinity were everywhere—within each atom, and outward forever, clear as a map that he might sketch.

He remembered, now, feeling like this as a child, as if he could extend his arms like ever-popular Superman and fly like an arrow into the heart of it all.

The music he heard, and saw, was so sweet, so compelling, that it brought tears to his eyes. If Gregorian chants ordered the soul, this universe chant was ordering his mind so that it meshed with and understood everything. The cold asphalt road beneath his feet led to Los Angeles. The star road that signaled from afar led to…

Where?

Then the sounds vanished. The sky was just the sky, rich with stars. The Long Arm Saloon and Myer’s Kwik-Mart and his own nanotech manufacturing warehouse across the street, where he was experiencing the first whispers of successfully earning a living, were immutably and dully themselves and nothing more.

He was beckoned nowhere except back inside the Long Arm Saloon, because it was warm, and out here it was freezing cold.

The next day around lunch time something caught his vision. Through the one-way glass at the front of his factory, he watched a small bland car reverse and back into the parking lot. He knew it was some sort of official car. No one else would drive such a plain vehicle, not in this age of molecular splendor where color was a matter of changing the programming of your car’s surface using the control panel on the steering wheel.

A man and a woman stepped out. The man wore a suit, the woman a dress suit and high heels. They looked up at his sign—musical sun manufacturing—said something to each other, and walked up to the door.

He could pretend he wasn’t here. But they’d be back.

He went over and answered the knock on the door.

The woman said, “Hello. We’re from the FBI.”

“Got any ID?” Jason asked. They showed him cards and badges. Big deal.

“Are you Jason Peabody?” asked the woman.

“No.”

“When will he be in?” asked the man.

“Won’t,” said Jason.

“But our sources show that he holds the patent on at least one component of the cars you produce.”

Shit. But he’d known that was stupid. He was just so proud of it.

And it seemed so obscure. He shrugged. “Could be. I wouldn’t know. Your records are out of date. I bought this factory a year and a half ago. Check in Phoenix. The state should have everything in order by now.” He frowned. “I think whoever owned it before me might have done a little fancy bookkeeping. So far it’s not turning the profit that the real estate agent claimed he got out of it.” He held out his hand. “Name’s Ned. Ned Holdman.”

The woman shook his hand with a doubtful grasp. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Well, Mr. Holdman, any idea where Mr. Peabody might be?”

Jason shook his head. “Couldn’t say. I think he was probably kind of shifty, you know? In a hurry to move on. A drifter.” He cleared his throat, ready to either burst out laughing or devolve into hysterical shakes; he didn’t know which.

“Mind if we take a look around?” asked the man.

Jason shrugged. “Help yourself.” He’d gone through everything meticulously, wiped out any trace of his old identity. He hadn’t expected them to zero in on him this soon, though.

He pretended to busy himself at his tanks while they poked around, rifled through his computer, pulled open his file drawers. He marveled at his calm hands. That meditation stuff of his mom’s really did come in handy sometimes. The agents didn’t speak, but their mouths were compressed and they looked angry.

He looked a lot different than his last known picture, taken when he was twelve, a group photo at a school he’d attended for six months. His mom dyed his hair black in that town. Now his hair was carrot-colored and curly, as was his full beard. He wore two small earrings high on his right ear. He was strong and fit; he spent his free time hiking in the mountains. And thinking. Yearning, as he hiked, for something—what? he’d ask himself in exasperation. True love? A calling in life? Freedom? A more typical life? But it seemed as if the whole world was becoming undone now.

He was startled when the woman tapped him on the shoulder. “We’re finished,” she said. “Sorry to bother you. Here’s my card. If you hear from Peabody, please get in touch with us immediately. It’s very important.”

He put the card in his pocket. “Will do. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. I’d like to get hold of him myself. It’s taken me months to straighten out the mess here. What did he do, anyway? Some kind of embezzler?”

“No, he…” began the man. The woman quickly said, “That’s classified. We have to go now.”

After they drove off, he dropped down onto a folding chair and started to shake violently. “Why?” he whispered, head in his hands. “Why?”

It was quite possible that they hadn’t swallowed his story and that they’d be back with a warrant for his blood. “Shit,” he said, rising and stuffing his hands in his pocket.

He really loved his little factory. He loved inventing. He loved creating a template for something and seeing it grow, ironing out the flaws. It was so damned much fun. And it was so easy. Just dump it back into the vat, change the program, and have another go. There were more sophisticated programs than the ones he used, much more expensive ones. Programs that operated on a different level, which didn’t allow the elementary mistakes he made to occur. But he preferred to learn. He wanted to be the one designing the programs. Once he was at that level, he could sell them. Until then, he needed the hands-on aspect of his factory. And it was quite fine to make his own money for a change and help his parents out.

He closed his eyes. He saw a bald head, white hair flaring outward in a wild fringe. He saw a weathered, wrinkled face. His heart pounded.

There were real problems with changing one’s appearance so radically. A lot of the problems were as yet unknown. But it was not as if you could backtrack. Was he willing to trade his youthful face for one that was old?

Could he perhaps just shave his head, or strip the color from his hair? Maybe that would work. Maybe. He looked too much the same age as Jason Peabody, fugitive.

But what could he do about his blood? His strange blood. A new type. Type XX.

He couldn’t take any chances.

He went around to the stations and started the downloading process. He rummaged around on a shelf and found a box of spheres and loaded one into each station. I’m not running, he told himself. I’m just making backups. He wouldn’t run. He was tired of it. He had lived in more towns, attended more schools, and played with more kids than he could remember. Any time a teacher or neighbor showed the slightest interest in him, they ran. Until they got here, which was nowhere. It had seemed safe here. This would really upset his parents. They’d give up the bunker they’d spent years building in a flash and move on. Same old story. But what would those agents think if they came back and he was gone? They’d be hot on the trail again. Maybe he could make this new identity stick.

As he worked, afternoon light fell in golden shafts through high windows. He thought about L.A. He’d heard that there were places there where you could be biologically altered, deeply altered, no questions asked. No records kept.

Could there possibly be some kind of obscuring marker placed in his blood? Would it take away the music of the sun? What price would he have to pay?

Or… could there be another alternative?

He began to get excited. He stopped stock-still between stations. The evening chill was setting in.

What if he died? What if they found the body? That would put an end to their pursuit.

He started moving again. He collected the finished backups. He left one set and a coded message for his dad, one of many they’d devised. This one said, basically: i had to cut out. i’m safe for now. wait for me. if you have to leave, we’ll meet at the appointed rendezvous. i’ll be back when i can. Uncoded, he wrote: had to head up to salt lake city for some supplies. keep the orders rolling. be back soon. He patted his pocket. As always, he carried an astounding amount of cash. You never knew when this sort of thing might happen. He put the other set of backups in his pocket.

He stuck his head out the back door, saw no one, locked up. No one hassled him as he started his Jeep.

He backed out and continued down the alley, past the back of his factory. He turned onto Main Street. To his left, his homeward side, the Long Arm Saloon threw the only lights in town onto the road. The supermarket closed at dusk.

He reached into the back and rummaged around with one hand, pulled out a jacket and put it on. He looked toward home and sighed. Quit stalling, he told himself.

He pulled the wheel to the right and roared west. Out of town quickly, within a minute. Then out across the desert. Toward L.A.

The stars sang as he drove, a wild, whistling, many-voiced composition he heard whenever he held in the clutch and shifted.

He would never see his father again.

He was not prepared for L.A.

For one thing, it was huge. His head throbbed as he wondered exactly where to begin. He’d popped up his tent just off a logging road about 2 a.m. after he was well into the mountains and slept fitfully. He really should have had something to eat. He promised himself he’d stop at the next place, but he just kept driving. Toward the high towers on the narrow littoral plain at the foot of the mountains. He finally stopped, unlocked his storage bin, and got out his navigation system. It was just maps; the gps was out today. It usually was. So he had to travel in the old-fashioned way, without voice promptings, stealing glances at the map to try and figure out where he was and where to turn.

When he got into the city’s edge, he was overwhelmed by the brilliance and constant shifting visage of signage, more aggressive than he’d ever seen. He was in a seedy strip-joint section of town. Near-naked women effervesced, seemingly out of thin air, for a second or two of lewd dance before he moved through the beam’s foci. He crossed some border and was in a neighborhood of coffee shops. He parked and retraced his route and walked into the Anatomy Club. He stood in the doorway to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. A few men lounged on stools at the bar. A spotlight shone on a woman sliding up and down a pole, varying her motions by languidly swaying every once in awhile.

Jason sat at the bar. “Whatever you got on draft,” he said to the bartender. “And a cheese sandwich.”

“Alls we got is egg salad.” The bartender jerked a thumb at a clear refrigerator door. Inside huddled a few sorry-looking cellophane-wrapped specimens.

“Fine,” said Jason. He slid a rather large bill onto the bar. “Keep it open.” He’d spent more than one night in the Long Arm Saloon in the past few months, drinking beer and dodging the occasional knife fight. Alcohol balanced nicely with his mother’s hallucinogenic mushroom regime; the peyote made him so damned sick that he’d eased off in the past year or two.

As he sipped his second beer, he asked the bartender, “She real?”

The guy snorted. “You kidding? It was kind of a tossup between fighting the union or buying her. Both were expensive. But she don’t whine and she don’t ask for raises and we can change her any which way we want. Anatomically correct too—if you know what I mean.” He winked at Jason. Jason’s stomach turned. He grinned back, hoping it looked authentic. His only girlfriend had been left behind three moves back. Jason thought of her often. He hoped she didn’t hate him.

“Where you get her?” She’s not real, he told himself. These constructs had no history, no consciousness, no brain. They were grown to resemble humans right down to the last cell, but they never woke up. They were part of a new—and horrible—slave trade, the crux of an ongoing legal battle, and were a completely underground creation.

The man frowned at him. “Why you want to know? You some kind of snitch?”

Jason tried his grin again, hoping it was convincing. “I just—you know.” He lowered his voice and beckoned the guy closer. “My brother runs a prostitute ring in San Diego. He sent me up here to try and dodge the heat. You know, they keep a close eye out down there.” Jason hoped that years of watching miles of videos was giving him a boost here. He felt wildly improvisational. He hoped he didn’t sound that way.

“What’s in it for me, I recommend someone?” asked the bartender.

“Two hundred.”

The man slapped the bar in disgust. “Excuse me, I got work to do.”

“Well, then, you name a price. We’re not made of money. You’re the first place I’ve stopped in. I might get a better deal down the strip. Who knows?”

The man shrugged. “Six.”

“Four,” said Jason, fanning the money out on the bar.

The man shrugged, reached under the bar, flipped a card out, and grabbed the money. “Keep the card,” he said.

Jason drove over to the beach. It was sunset, and the sun looked as if it were dissolving into the ocean. He found a spot, parked his car, and walked along the concrete, watching smooth sets of orange-tipped waves roll in. Out in the surf, people in jetsuits frolicked, body-surfing. Jason zipped his jacket. It was early spring; still cool. He missed his parents.

As he strolled north, the streetlights came on and the surf turned to a white surging line defining a dark sea. The jetsurfers became iridescent; they surfed by ear, by sensing the surge, by being familiar with local conditions. It was dangerous. Their cometlike lights, though, were part of the local attraction. People sat on the balconies of the low-rise hotels facing the boardwalk, bundled up, drinking and laughing. Loud music issued from bars and gradually the strip became seedier. Jason started checking street signs. Finally he turned up a side street and from that onto another.

He was on a block of small apartment buildings mixed with motel signs. He found his address and rang the bell. A light came on, blinding him; he threw up his arm. A voice boomed from the intercom: “What you want?”

He reached into his pocket, found the card, and held it up for the camera.

“Ernie sent me.”

“Ernie who?”

“Ernie at the Anatomy Club under the five.”

A woman’s voice came on. “So?”

“So I have some business.”

“What else you got?”

“Money.”

“Cash?”

Jason nodded.

The door opened.

He stepped into a world at odds with the street. The door swung shut behind him and in the gentle glow of whole-wall aquariums, curving in free-form, two burly men stepped up and frisked him. He had expected this; in fact, he was surprised at being let in so easily.

“You have a sweet face,” said the woman, who came around a curve. She was tiny, perhaps five feet tall, and severely thin. She looked like a child. Her long black hair was curly. She wore jeans and a plaid shirt. “Come in,” she said. “You want some girls? Going into competition with Ernie?”

Next to him black mollies drifted upward; a small shark glided with a jerk of his tail into a cave; lionfish sported their manes of poison, all amid an undersea jungle of plants and waving fan coral. “This must cost a fortune,” he said.

She beckoned. “Come to my conference room.”

He followed her through an arch into a small plain room with cushions on the floor. The entire bland room was layered with sound-absorbing foam. Several cameras ostentatiously rotated, making sure he knew he was being watched.

“Sit.” She tossed a cushion toward him and sat on the floor. “Now,” she said, “tell me. I hope it’s interesting. I’m really tired of those girls.” The foam swallowed her words instantly, creating an eerie muffling effect. Jason noticed that he couldn’t even hear the stars and was disturbed, almost panicked, for an instant. He couldn’t remember such silence…

He took a deep breath, sat on the cushion, and crossed his legs. His mouth went dry. “I… I want me,” he said.

“Oho!” The woman chuckled. Her face was pale and freckled. “Yes, certainly, that would come in handy. The mind leaps at the possibilities. I’ve been waiting for this.” She crossed her legs Indian-style, her motions lithe. A curtain of hair fell across one eye and she looped it behind her ear, leaned forward, grinning with almost unholy glee. “Yeah. I love it.”

“But it has to be identical to me,” he said. “Cellularly identical.”

“Ah. I see.” She nodded many times, almost as if she were in some sort of hypnotic state.

“Can you do it?” he asked.

Her eyes, blue, fringed heavily with long black eyelashes, opened wide for a moment, as if she’d been awakened from sleep. “Sorry,” she said. “Sure. I trained at Trans-Bio Corporation. You know, the beef people. You gotta get the cells just right. For the flavor. It’ll cost, though.” She smiled. “I’ll have to order some new equipment.”

“And I watch the whole process,” he continued, “and we destroy all the records—templates, samples, everything.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “Sure. You’re the customer. We aim to please.”

“And no questions asked.”

“Absolutely,” she said. He thought he saw a gleam of interest in her eyes.

“What… what do those women at Ernie’s think?” he blurted out. “What do they feel?”

“Ah!” Her grin returned. “A man with a conscience!”

“Really,” he said.

“Think? Feel? Well… what is your name—no, excuse me, what am I to call you?” she asked.

“Jason.” It would be easiest.

“Jason, their brains are an amalgam of mammal characteristics. They have a bit of loyalty. They have good motor control, as you may have noticed. They know to eat when hungry; they have, of course, fine brain stem function. Their memories are rudimentary. I provide Ernie with a training template to teach them their moves. That’s what he gets to play with. He sits in a VR booth downtown for a few hours and drools over his ladies and what he’s going to make them do, perfects their dances. They are highly visual and imitative. When they’re new, they go into skinsuits of material that flexes and hardens according to directions from the program. It’s cool stuff. The motions organize their brains.”

“Don’t they ever get smart?” asked Jason.

“Not so far,” she said seriously, “but of course they’re all pretty young. Their chromosomes are not normal either. Nothing about them is normal, Jason. Every avenue to intelligence has been foiled. They are limited flesh. Very limited. As for emotion—no. They have no fear, no love, no happiness. They have”—she paused, and he hoped he heard bleakness as she finished in a rush—“no spirit.”

Jason heard the echo of his mother’s voice, deeply sad that the beams of their ceiling had never felt spirit. He bumbled to his feet, blinking back tears. “I don’t know—” Someone will die, he was thinking, and I can’t do this after all, not such a bright idea…

She grabbed his hand. “Come with me. Let me show you something.” After all she had just said, the sheer cynicism of it, Jason was amazed at how young her face looked, like the face of his ten-year-old playmate in some town whose name he couldn’t remember. “Here,” she said, so gently that the sound of it was almost swallowed by the foam, pulled him upright, and pressed a part of the wall.

A door slid open, revealing a spiral of narrow metal stairs.

He followed her upward three stories, he judged, though the stairs were never interrupted by a landing. The cylinder through which they climbed was also foamed, and their footsteps made no sound.

They emerged into a huge room with a vaulted ceiling. There was clear glass all around. Suddenly his mind filled with sound again, and he felt tremendously comforted.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

He stared down across two blocks of rooftops to the ocean, where the white path of the moon heaved with the waves. Whirring machinery pulled part of the roof back.

“No one can see in. I don’t know why I’m showing you this.” She bustled around, clapping on lights. A futon, its covers in disarray, had been pulled onto a balcony. The walls were crammed with books and about five computers—or at least a dozen screens—connected to who knows what, with a welter of wires running between various gobs of intelligent plastic. Oriental rugs lay over tile. Vines and a profusion of orchids hung from the beams; huge cacti grew in pots. He counted five cats, saw another dart across a low cluttered table, and stopped counting.

“Come on, come over here,” she said with something like glee in her boylike voice. She unbuttoned her plaid shirt. She wore a neon pink tank top under it, and her shirt billowed out behind her like the cape of some comic book madwoman. Jason, tired and homesick, felt completely disoriented now. He wished he’d eaten. But he followed her over to the darkest corner of the room, and after she clapped a few times, a dome lit.

It was a hemisphere about six feet in diameter. He recognized it at once. It was one of the very latest luminous computers. “Come closer,” she whispered. “Wow. You never know.” She sat on a low stool, rested her chin in both hands, and stared.

He did too. For lying in golden state was a beautiful perfect woman, her eyelids shut, a pleasant smile on her face. “Is she—” he began, but quicker than he could see, the woman reached out and touched the side of the dome and the body changed to many small bodies, a hundred, five hundred, and then a city began to grow within the dome.

He watched, astonished. “Is it a hologram?”

“Kind of,” she said.

It was like looking down from the air at… there was the ocean… “L.A.?” he asked.

She nodded and tapped on the shell again, evidently in some kind of code, for the woman appeared again.

Jason’s heart beat hard as the dome woman opened her eyes and stared straight into his. Her mouth moved. The dome said, “What?”

Then she lazily smiled, closed her eyes again, turned on her side, pillowed her head on her hands, and pulled her legs up. Her breasts receded, her pubic hair disappeared, and then she was clothed in a white nightgown and lay on a maple bed. In a bedroom. Jason saw it from the side, as if a wall was cut away, and the scene became smaller, part of a house, and a woman walked down a hallway and opened the door and peered in and her face was just large enough for Jason to see a smile on it before she was absorbed again into a subdivision and the subdivision into the surrounding countryside on one side, the city on the other, and then with another tap a man walked through pools of light in the evening…

“You try it now,” said the woman at his side.

“What?”

“Tap, hug… it responds to touch.”

He flicked it with a finger and a new scene jumped to life. A girl smiled out at him, straight into his eyes. She twirled, her dress standing out, and laughed, and a boy walked into the room and they picked up some crayons and started drawing on the walls, laughing. They were writing some kind of complex mathematical formula, but he had no idea whether it made any sense. Like cartoon word balloons, the numbers sprouted blank white spaces and then in each space something appeared… a blender, a journey fast through a green yew-smothered lane, an Arab marketplace…

She whispered in his ear.

He was startled; he’d forgotten all about her. He nodded and they watched for hours. At least it seemed like hours. Finally she touched his face. “I’m tired. Want to go to sleep?” She walked out to the futon, pulling off her jeans, her underwear. She was so tiny. Her black hair covered her entire back. He followed her as if sleepwalking and lay down next to her on the futon fully dressed, closed his eyes, and fell into wild, restless visions, half-nightmare, half-dream.

He woke to her face next to his at dawn. She was staring right into his eyes. He saw a tiny black spot in one blue iris.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I—” he said, trying to get his bearings, “I—no questions—”

“I have a million,” she said, reaching down to unbuckle his belt. “And you’re damned well going to answer every one.”

Abbie opened her mail over coffee at a low wooden table at which she sat on the floor. “There’s hourly mail delivery service in L.A.,” she told Jason as she slit open the first envelope. “You and I will take care of our business after I see if there are any priority items here.” She grinned slightly and pushed an intercom button. “Do we have a James Dean on file?”

“I think so” came the answer.

“When you find it, Ace needs one.” She went through the rest of her mail quickly and stacked it neatly in a box marked pending and weighted it with one of the many rocks sitting on the table. This was a smooth river rock, gray strata revealed edge-on in striated swirls.

“There,” she said. “Nothing else that can’t wait.” She closed her eyes for several seconds; Jason noticed that her eyelashes were long and that her skin was smooth and pale beneath the freckles, with faint pink coloring over her cheeks. He had not seen her breasts, only felt them this morning as she pressed against him urgently; he remembered her body in a flash: well muscled and lithe, her mouth warm and open against his.

She opened her eyes. She looked at him with no expression for a moment.

“Now,” she said. “You.” She reached across a table and pulled a small erg toward her. The screen lit when she touched it. “Let me show you something,” she said. “This is you.”

Screens of data appeared on the screen in bewildering succession. After the fifth or sixth, Jason said, his voice shaking, “How did you get all this?”

“From you.”

“How—”

“A mosquito?” she said. “A few skin cells? Semen? It doesn’t matter.” She looped her hair behind her ears with an impatience he was beginning to recognize was habitual. “Stop running your paranoid programs. I’m not after you, kid. This is strictly my information. If we were going to do business, I wanted to get started. I have a lot cooking and not all that many burners. Although you never did mention how you were going to pay me.”

“I—” Jason’s hand went to his pants pocket.

“No, stop,” she said with a wave of her hand. Her fingers, he noticed, were beautifully long and graceful as they moved on her small keyboard. She brought up a DNA helix. “There’s something very unusual here,” she said.

Jason’s heart thudded in his chest. He wanted to get up and run out the door, up the beach, jump into his Jeep, and drive it into the ground to get back to his parents. Back to their safe haven in the mountains. He hadn’t counted on this kind of intense analysis, though he wasn’t sure why. He thought he could just go, order up this… this Frankensteinian thing, and be done with it. It would never know anything. It would only be meat, shaped like him down to the final iota. But… she knew. The whole world knew he was a freak. He could never escape. He could only submit, turn himself in…

“Calm down! she ordered, her reedy voice irritated. ”Let’s cut to the chase here. I know exactly who and what you are. And I know this because I’m the same!”

Her last three words stunned Jason. “What do you mean?”

“Are you an idiot? I mean that my DNA has this same anomaly. The same one yours shows. The one that makes the men in black track you. I don’t know how I can be any damned clearer.” She glared at him and tears stood in her eyes.

The sky was intensely blue, Jason noticed, in a dizzy, distant way. There was not a cloud in it. The sea was kind of a navy blue, a dark blue. He’d been up and down the coast before; his nomadic life had ensured a lot of traveling. But he’d never seen the crystal clarity of a sky, a sea, like this. Gulls’ raucous laughs mixed with the roar of surf, the shrieks of children, the bass beat of music playing somewhere. The salt air filled his nose and bathed his brain with something so deep he’d always reckoned it ancestral memory.

“So,” he finally managed, his voice husky, “how can you stay here? Don’t they want to take you—” Despite himself, his mind was flooded with the ideas she’d practically commanded him to forsake. Instead— Trust me. Such an idea was alien to his very core. Somehow he’d ended up in the very place he’d been trying to avoid—

“JASON!” She was standing, shouting at him. “Stop it! You’re safe here. No one can find you. No one can find me.”

“Why not? What’s your secret?” He was standing too and shouting. “I’m so sick and tired of it!”

Then she was holding him and he was shaking, horribly embarrassed but unable to stop, and her arms were tight around him. So tight. “Relax,” she said. “Just relax.” She walked him back to her futon and drew a curtain around it and, incredibly, in a moment he was making love again for the second time that morning, lost in a barrage of sensations that merged into an overwhelming emotion of feeling at home. Feeling at home. He’d never felt this way, he realized. She would protect him. It sounded ridiculous that a skinny young woman could protect him, but he felt that it was true. She knew him. She really knew him.

He was alone no more. He could stop running.

So why didn’t he believe it?

Jason discovered immediately that one of Abbie’s affectations was tableware. She had a small portable manufacturer dedicated to dishes.

Naked, she crouched at a screen she kept on the floor for no reason he could discern other than sheer lack of organization and sketched a teapot and small round teacups, which took about fifteen minutes to assemble. Light fell softly through skylights, making her pale skin luminescent. Water was boiling on a gas burner installed in a long low marble countertop when she took her creations from the assembler, holding them in a towel as they were hot. She looked at the pot critically. “I don’t think I’ll save this one. The spout’s too long.”

“I like the color,” he felt obliged to add, feeling awkward. He had pulled on his shorts.

“No need to be polite,” she said. She whisked in powdered green tea. “Um, sorry. I’m sure you’re hungry. I am. I have some…” She opened a small gas refrigerator and frowned. “Well, I have some cold rice cakes. And some miso dipping sauce. Not too old. I mean, I could heat them up if you wanted—”

“No, that’s fine,” he said, clumsily opening cupboards until he found some plates, and pulled four chopsticks from a vase on the counter.

She brought along the sauce; tired slices of ginger and garlic floated in a cold broth of soy sauce, vinegar, and sugar.

“Do you feel settled down now?” she asked, smiling into his eyes. Hers held a hint of irony.

“Oh. Yes,” he said, still flustered. His sexual experience was rather limited. Hers, apparently, was not.

“Then,” she said, dipping a chunk of rice cake into the sauce and chewing it, “I’ll get started here. I’m sorry I startled you so badly. I was just very excited. This has never, ever happened before.”

“What?” The wonder in her eyes warmed him. He realized that he wanted to hear that she had never felt so terrific about a man, that she was falling in love for the first time.

But no.

“I’ve never met anyone like myself before. I knew there were more. But without this kind of corroboration it begins to seem like a fairy tale after a while.”

It took a moment to sink in. Jason had imagined that he was quite unique, even though one of his mother’s friends had inflamed them with talk of a virus from space and altered DNA, things that seemed as far removed from reality as talk of vortexes and psychic powers. He felt a pang of disappointment. He dreaded what she might say.

But he had to ask.

“How are we different?”

“You don’t know.”

“I really have no idea.”

She looked surprised. “Well, for starters, we have a very high concentration of biogenic magnetite in all of our cells and especially in our brain and in our magnetoreceptors.” She touched her nose. “Here.”

“What makes you think we have magnetoreceptors at all?”

“Oh, come on. That was proven years ago. All vertebrates have them. Even a lot of bacteria orient to magnetic information. Anyway, the nerve that takes the information back to the brain is very, very thick. At least fifty times the normal size as most humans. The resulting sensitivity to magnetic stimuli is what causes the frequent nausea, but as we have grown, we have adapted. Some people theorize that this has some relationship to the process that triggers seizures in epileptics. You’ve read about Dostoevski, for example, right? How he experienced moments of powerful clarity just before a seizure? Well, I think that this is what happens to us and it has to do with electromagnetism. But it’s more controlled. More manipulated.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Well, I’ve heard—”

“No,” Jason said. “I mean evidence. Someone like you wouldn’t believe this stuff unless there was evidence.”

She looked pensive. “It’s only fourth-hand. Fifth-hand. Stories that people smuggled out of the facilities—about the research—”

“Gossip. It doesn’t matter to me anyway. I don’t want to be part of some group. I’m just myself. I want to be normal. I want to be useful. I want to be accepted by society, not hunted by society.” It sounded childish as it came out, but he realized that it was how he had felt for years and that he wanted quite badly to stop his ears against anything Abbie might say.

She seemed amused by his outburst. “It isn’t society that’s hunting us, Jason. It’s what they used to call a black op in the government. I believe that they split off from any semblance of sanctioned operation years ago—but that might not be entirely true. Someone is paying their salary. They’re fanatics. Twisted. And powerful. Power feeds on itself. They have places around the world where they stick probes in the brains of people like us. Section our brains, even.”

“So how are you safe?”

“I have the dope on them. I threatened to make it public. I told them—one of their operants—that if I die or if anything happens to me, others have this information and they will make it public. Simple blackmail.” Her eyes were disingenuous; her grin contrastingly wicked.

He learned that Abbie had grown up a pampered only child— much like himself, except that her parents were quite wealthy and had access to more information because of government ties. Abbie thought that the car crash they died in when she was sixteen was no accident, and she had found all the information they had gathered— the type of hearsay evidence that Abbie was handing him—in their safety deposit box after they died. Jason gathered that Abbie was a lot more savvy than he had been at that age, and with the help of a trusted uncle, she had continued her parents’ plan, the plan that had protected her all these years.

But when he proposed that he use the same umbrella, she demurred, saying that it would put her in danger anew.

Only much later did he realize that simple hubris had been her reason.

He was running along a beach, heart pounding. His feet slipped in the soft sand. They were after him. It was dark. There was a bonfire ahead. It was very far away. A small flicker of light. His only goal. There was no moon. He was so alone.

The man who looked like him was after him. And the woman. They were shouting. They thought he was stupid. Maybe he was. But he knew certain things.

His foot struck a sharp stick and he stumbled for a moment. He wanted to stop crying, but he couldn’t. They wanted to kill him. He knew that. He wasn’t very old. He knew that. And now he was supposed to die. He had never done anything wrong. He had only wandered out the door one day and stumbled down the street and onto the beach. He wandered through the mobs of people there, amazed. He sat next to families and learned to talk. He repeated everything he heard. He ate garbage. He was very happy. The world was very big. He swam in the ocean. He loved the taste of the salt water. He loved the smell of the salt air. He played with children. He tried to find children, small children, who would talk to him. They helped him and corrected him and never treated him as if he was stupid. He liked playing with them a lot. Sometimes parents shouted at him and took their children away. But he didn’t mind being alone.

And then they found him. The man who looked like him and the woman. They pretended they liked him and took him home and fed him and gave him a bed, even though he said he liked sleeping on the beach better. They had looked surprised when he said that. They looked surprised every time he said or did anything. Then he heard them arguing about him. They were easy to hear because they shouted. They thought he didn’t understand. Or maybe they didn’t care. The woman said they had to kill him. The man said no.

That was when he had run down those winding stairs, pounded on the locked door, then picked up a metal chair and smashed out a window. He’d run down to the beach. He hoped to find a policeman. One little girl had told him that if he was ever in trouble he should tell a policeman. But he saw none. It was getting dark and the beach was empty. He looked behind him and there they were on the boardwalk, and then they were running down the stairs, and so he started running too and he had not thought too much about which way to run and now there was nothing but ocean and sand and no people.

His breath was ragged and short. He didn’t think the man could catch him because they both ran just as fast as each other. He thought the woman couldn’t catch him but maybe she was faster. He didn’t know.

He did not want to die. He had to run—faster, faster. He heard a pop behind him. That was the gun. He heard another. The woman, the man, shouting. He had to get to the light. The people there would save him.

There were more pops behind him and more shouting, but it sounded farther away than before.

He ran on into the night. Maybe that wasn’t a fire up ahead. But it was something.

Jason’s legs were on automatic, pushing into the soft sand, and the air he gulped seemed as hot as fire. He was almost there. He pushed harder, and leaped, praying he wouldn’t miss.

He caught the running figure ahead of him around the waist. They both went down with a hard thump. She rolled to one side and hit him on his temple with the gun. The blow stunned and angered him and he managed to wrench the gun from her hand and toss it away into the darkness.

“It’s not too late,” she gasped. “It’s not too late, Jason. He’s up ahead there. If you won’t do it, I will.” She wiggled out from under him and started running around, patting the sand for the gun. “Damn, it’s dark.”

Jason rolled onto his back and lay spread-eagle on the cold sand. He let the roar of the surf drown her curses. He had found that it blessedly drowned all other sounds too. A fog had rolled in and all seemed muffled. The light that, presumably, his double had been running to had vanished.

Abbie returned after some minutes and squatted next to him. “I hope you’re happy,” she said.

“He’s not me,” said Jason. “He’s a person. He’s a baby.”

“He’s going to go to a clinic at some point or the police will pick him up and then they’ll come and get him and know that he’s not you. Furthermore, it’s possible that he may have an awful life.”

“Maybe,” said Jason. “I don’t care. I don’t want to kill someone else to protect myself. It’s that simple.”

“You knew what you were doing,” said Abbie.

“Wrong,” said Jason, sitting up and hugging himself. It got cold fast on the beach after the sun went down. “By the time you explained to me what these people—”

“They’re not people,” said Abbie.

“What these creations of yours really are—which is people, Abbie, you’ve got to face it—he was already started.”

“He could have been aborted. I told you. I do it all the time. Somebody cancels an order, I keep their deposit, but do you think I want to create another mouth to feed?”

“I suppose,” said Jason. “You’re right. It’s my fault. Maybe I was curious. I thought you said that these people were unable to learn. He seemed to be learning pretty fast.”

“For one thing,” said Abbie, “he’s you. And for another thing, when I create, say, a stripper or an ex-President who’s going to be somebody’s house servant, I only create the exterior. They’re all the same inside.”

“How?” asked Jason. “How do you know they’re all the same inside?”

She didn’t answer.

“How do you know, Abbie?” asked Jason, starting to get angry. It was curious, this anger stuff. He’d seen his parents disagree, even argue, but he seemed to have been utterly protected from the emotion up to now. But with Abbie he felt powerless. She did what she did, she thought what she thought, and he seemed to have no effect on her at all.

“Abbie!” he shouted, leaning toward her as she sat crosslegged on the sand, taking her shoulders tightly in his hands. For a few seconds, she seemed curiously limp. Then she shook free, jumped to her feet, and stood over him.

“Because I make sure that their brains don’t have the biochemistry for learning, idiot!” she yelled at him. Then to his amazement, she started screaming into the night, flapping her arms. “This is the first time I’ve made an exact copy. It was stupid of me. But it was what you wanted. They’re not clones. They’re creations. Like mice! Like squirrels! Like dogs, maybe. But not like people! Do you understand now? My clients don’t want to raise children. My clients want slaves. That’s what I give them. Like draft horses. Like sled dogs. Except with hands, a Michaelangelo ass, a famous face. That last is where the real art comes in. And they have to be preassembly; everybody now has his or her face copyrighted or trademarked. But you know what? I never get an order to replicate a lost loved one. Never. Except once, and I talked her out of it. It wouldn’t work. I just make replicants. Shells. They’re assembled quickly. That’s not how real growth occurs.” She had gradually calmed. Her voice was low and hoarse. “You act as though I have no conscience. It’s not true.”

“But they feel, Abbie,” said Jason, close to tears. “They feel. Dogs feel. These people do too. It’s the first thing humans do.”

“Not these creatures,” she said. “They’re dull as posts.”

“Oh, Abbie,” said Jason finally. “I’m so sorry.”

They were both silent. He stood and dusted off his jeans. He walked back the way they had come—slowly.

He didn’t ask Abbie to come. She didn’t follow.

Two Intervals of Overwhelming Distance Zeb | Bridge of Lions, Washington, D.C. | 2034

There had been so many days, Zeb thought, during his anguished meander away from S Street—anywhere away from S Street. He did not know or care where he walked. Because he had spent so many pleasant mornings in Ellie Pio’s small venerable apartment on S Street, hashing over his ideas, giving her his notebooks for safekeeping. Though it was nestled among embassies, Ellie did not seem to notice that her place was slightly shabby compared with the façades of her neighbors. And she was too busy to care about housekeeping details. The small red and white can of McCormicks cinnamon was usually sticky when Zeb picked it up from the white-painted kitchen table to sprinkle cinnamon on the instant oatmeal she always forced on him, as if it were some kind of tonic. Inside the kitchen cabinets was an unorganized maze of crockery, much of it cracked and dating back to Ellie’s grandmother, the original owner of the apartment, and Ellie herself was sixty. But she always had fresh flowers in the kitchen window; they gave forth light on even the dimmest of Washington winter mornings.

Compared to the kitchen, her front room was startlingly stately, rich with mahogany antiques and a grand piano, papered with art deco wallpaper up to the foot-wide cornices. Ellie inhabited that room with easy grace and kept it beautifully in memory of her partner, a literature professor at Catholic University who had died fifteen years earlier, a woman whose vast library still occupied one room.

This morning he had gone to her apartment to find it locked. He went next door to ask what day it was, fearing he must have forgotten. “Ellie asked me for coffee—”

The neighbor, a heavy sallow man who talked to Zeb through the crack in his chained door, blinked. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she died last week.” He explained that the police had come—and some other people too—asking him questions. He hadn’t liked this much. “My parents came here from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It seemed a lot like what they had to put up with. That’s why I’m telling you—they were asking about someone that seems a lot like you. And also about that other man who used to come see her all the time.”

“What man?”

“How should I know? Not special-looking. If I were you, I’d get out of town.”

“How did she die?”

The man shrugged. “They didn’t say. Heart attack, they implied. With people like that, who knows? Now go before somebody else who likes the police more than I do sees you.” He shut the door. Zeb heard the lock turn.

Zeb didn’t believe him. He didn’t believe that anyone killed Ellie. That was ridiculous.

But she was still dead. He stumbled down the stairs and turned right.

It was drizzling. Zeb trudged along, his head gradually collecting moisture until it ran in rivulets down his neck. He was heading toward Georgetown in general. Town houses gave way to a block of tony shops and restaurants, then a short greensward curving around toward an impressive bridge, flanked by stone lions.

Zeb stopped and stared up at the lions. What public sensibility had produced them? They were magnificent, a statement of power and pride. He supposed that lions were extinct now. But maybe not. He’d also heard, dimly and distantly, that vast changes were taking place in the world because of the work of the Gaians, an underground terrorist movement that used nanotech in many illegal ways to restore wilderness. They could dissolve the infrastructure with metal-corroding nanotech. Cut down on the human population by putting sterility drugs in the water. So that the Earth could breathe again.

Yes, the Earth. Possibly a part of an interstellar community only now evolved enough to forge links. Except that there were some people here—powerful people, apparently—who wanted no part of it. Zeb’s grief over Ellie was joined by frustration. He might as well be trying to teach evolution in Tennessee in the 1920s, or in Mississippi in the 1980s. Information was being held in thrall—but by whom? Perhaps it would have been best to join Craig’s shadowy group on that winter’s day so long ago. Maybe everything would have gone differently. Some days were clear for him. He could see across the demented valleys he had mistaken for illumination. Perhaps there never had been a right path, a right decision, for him. He had thought this way would prove more honest, more useful. Instead, it had only caused heartache. His work was vast but unfinished—and impossible to keep in his head all at once. He had left many notebooks at Ellie’s, he remembered suddenly, and his printouts. He wondered if someone had them now. It was not entirely lost; he had condensed many of his speculations after arriving at them and transferred them to new notebooks and he had one thick bound book, blank, into which he transcribed what he felt was the beginnings of a new school of intergalactic physics and the possible basis for a form of alien intelligence.

He had that, but he might as well be a radio signal flashing through space—abstract and utterly alone.

He walked onto the bridge and looked down into the river as an astounding variety of vehicles steamed, cranked, combusted, and cycled behind him.

He was quickly mesmerized by the flow and swirl of Rock Creek about thirty feet below. At how the water followed inevitable paths which, at its present speed, it had no power to change. A stick rushed downriver, kayaking over slick rocks, and was caught in an eddy just below him. It slowly gyrated and each time almost escaped into the stream again, but at the apex of each swirl, it was drawn back into the slow pointless circle.

He watched the stick, his anxiety growing. The stick was like humanity, crippled by politics, by governments. It was time for all of them to join the current. To venture out. To see what was really there. Again he thought of the technological power of the visitors. How much they must know! How much they could share! So far they had not blasted the world to cinders nor filled it with aliens, at least not visibly.

Zeb trudged back to the greensward and found three rocks about the size of bread loaves, all he could carry in one trip. He made a few such trips and created a small cairn of rocks on the sidewalk next to the concrete wall of the bridge.

He lifted one over his head and heaved it over the wall. A sizable splash arose, so distant that he could not hear it. But he missed. The stick still eddied, stuck in its cycle. He tried again, working up a good sweat.

He had worked his way down to the last few rocks when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Without lowering the rock, he turned his head and saw a park policeman.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“That stick. See that stick down there? It’s stuck.” Zeb threw the rock he was holding down into the creek. It smashed off some other rocks and sank into the main current. He bent to pick up one of the last rocks. “I have to get it free. It has to be able to go down the river.”

“I can’t let you do that,” said the officer.

“I have to,” panted Zeb and let fly his next to last rock. Missed again. He bent to pick up another one.

“Then I’m going to have to give you a ticket,” said the officer. Zeb didn’t reply. The officer grabbed at his arm and Zeb shrugged him off, lifted the final rock to his shoulder.

“Didn’t you hear me? I’m going to arrest you if you don’t stop.”

They engaged in a scuffle, the officer grunting, Zeb fiercely holding on to his rock. He managed to give it an unaimed heave.

Zeb’s stone hit a large flat rock, skidded across it, and splashed into the eddy where the stick was trapped. A wave washed the stick from the eddy. It was free.

Zeb leaned over the bridge, watching his stick slip and swirl over rocks. Without heeding traffic, he shook loose from the officer’s grip and crossed four lanes, barely hearing the screech of brakes. “Look!” he yelled. “Look! I did it!” He watched till it was out of sight, rounding a bend beneath a canopy of bare trees.

He was poised to run when he saw a woman walking toward him with two collies on leashes. One was a tricolor, black gold and white, like Zephyr. Another was a merle, silvery blue, like Pleiades.

As they approached, he was washed by memories. Sally. His old life, so distant, so lost, so settled. Why had he given it up? And Annie. Yes, Annie. He hadn’t dared risk seeing her again. Ruin her life like he’d ruined Sally’s.

He leaned against the pedestal of one of the lions, overcome, as the dogs approached. He knelt and pulled their heads toward him, and they happily accepted his embrace, nudging forward even as their owner tried to pull them away. “Hey, you scumbag! Leave my dogs alone!”

The officer pounded up behind Zeb. “Come on, fella. You need help.”

Zeb disagreed violently.

All the way to the hospital, in the cold steel of handcuffs, he exulted. I will vindicate you, Ellie. I will.

He emerged from the hospital the next morning unsullied by their drugs. As always, he’d managed to convince them he was rational and sane and cited his constitutional rights. They’d had no choice but to release him.

As he stepped out into the street, the rush of pale gray sky and traffic confused him. Loud people passed him on the sidewalk, talking to one another, laughing, and an ambulance pulled away from the hospital entrance. For an instant, he wondered why he had been taken to the hospital this time.

Then he remembered Ellie.

And then he remembered his work.

It was all he had.

Kyoto Sandman Kita | Japan | 2037

Kita splashed through slush on Tokyo’s streets at dawn. The sky was like fine old pewter, heavy, with a slight sheen, infusing the air with the hollow hush of snow poised for the imperceptible shift of release. Her heels were not made for messy weather, but she’d felt she’d had to wear them. And the long train ride from Kyoto! Why so necessary? Why not meet Hugo there? But she did appreciate the danger. And the difference. Kyoto was the opposite of brash new Tokyo in spirit as well as kanji order. Tokyo/Kyoto; braced against each other, material vs. spiritual.

This was reflected by the fact that the BioCity conversion of Tokyo was progressing in cautious stages, while the same conversion was outlawed in Kyoto, city of ancient temples. Much of Tokyo had been infiltrated by a vast information web with extensive hypertext capabilities, analogous to that of the now-dysfunctional World Wide Web, except that it was local. Kita admired the glow of the soft permeable surface of a sign she passed, accomplished by the use of genetically engineered bacteria. The sign gave the reader the location of several nearby receptor booths wherein they could gain the biological sense necessary to access the deep information banks Tokyo was even now compiling. The charge cited on-screen, more than a year’s salary for her, helped pay her salary. Dento, Inc., in conjunction with the Japanese government and their various nanotechnology research foundations, had helped develop the setup. When she had returned to Japan to work for Dento, she hadn’t had an inkling of where her work might lead. This accomplishment—the design of a wholly new communication system in a very short time—demonstrated how much people could accomplish when information was shared. It also showed how much such endeavors had been damaged by the interruption of broadcasting. Without a dependable Internet, telephone system, transportation, and broadcasting, all available when the disparate elements of this project had been researched and developed, it was doubtful if such a feat could be re-created. Which had been the point—get it done before complete darkness falls. Assemble it. Make it work. Fill in the blanks. They had all been living under great stress; Kita had taken no holidays in several years.

Not that this promised to be one. Her jitters increased with each step. Why was she doing this?

As a favor to an old school friend—a favor spiked with curiosity as to why she had been remembered. And irritation too, because of the sense of secrecy pervading the atmosphere at Dento. She felt that her contribution to the project entitled her to a wider range of information concerning its broad applications.

Fat snowflakes drifted downward. Across the street were windows full of plastic examples of what the nanotech programs they sold inside could build. Retro neon flickered in an approximation of a molecular robot arm enlarged a million times. She jammed her hands deeper into her pockets; wished she’d worn thick tights instead of sheer panty hose. A few salarygirls on bikes whizzed past as a signal changed, wearing zipsuits over their office clothes.

What did she remember about Marie? A slight residue of admiration was the extent of it. They had shared several virtual classes, although they hadn’t known it until they were brought together for a seminar, along with other university students actually living in Chicago.

The wind gusted and wet snow stung her face. Kita spotted her destination, a twenty-four-hour okinomiyake grill. Plastic piles of noodles topped with various fish, meats, or vegetables were displayed in the window. No neon, no holograms. This must be a district that lost power during the shutdowns that often took place during a Pulse. Tokyo, like most cities now, depended on solar photoelectric alternatives that didn’t draw juice from far-off turbines that might be destroyed during a Pulse; networked systems in which each node functioned independently, yet could loan power to another node if necessary.

But it would only be a few more months until Tokyo converted completely to a BioCity system. The last stages would happen within hours. It just took time to set things up. And there were possible avenues of nanotech application that could change matter in a frighteningly swift manner; these were being explored, Kita vaguely knew, in venues designed to convert entire cities in a matter of days. The key would be a protein-folding breakthrough, coupled with enzyme advances that would allow DNA inserted within emptied E. coli cells to rapidly transform anything they came in contact with. The problem was to control these transformations very finely.

For all she knew, such systems were all ready to go. That was part of what irritated her about Dento. It seemed that everything was being decided by a smaller and smaller cadre of people, often political appointees who knew nothing about possible ramifications, who only cared about seeming to be in control of that which might prove to be as uncontrollable as an earthquake or the effects of a nuclear meltdown.

She opened the door to the café. Each booth held a low table with a griddle, and gas-flame sconces lined the walls. A young woman gestured toward the tables, all empty. Kita checked her watch. She was ten minutes late, and he was later. She didn’t like this.

She’d read somewhere a long time ago that you had to have a screw loose to be a spy. She had thought that she might, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she would leave. Soon she could be back in Kyoto. Or maybe she could spend the day at the Ueno while her mental and physical borders sublimed into the slow mists and mountains of past centuries…

“Ms. Narasake?”

She turned and looked down at a man with a large head and brown skin.

He was impeccably dressed. A wonderful homburg perched on his head, and he removed it with a flourish and bowed. “Sorry I’m late.” His green eyes were sincere and worried. “I had to ask directions and the man smiled and pointed the wrong way.”

Kita smiled. “You are—”

“Hugo,” he said. “Sorry.” And he did have an odd accent, though it didn’t seem exactly French. As she followed him to a table, she warned herself not to let down her guard. Any friend of Marie’s had to be pretty damned sharp. Now she remembered seeing him in Chicago, tagging along.

The middle of the table was a gas griddle. “So what is this stuff?” Hugo held his hands over the griddle to warm them.

“Okinomiyake. Noodles and cabbage cooked on the grill with eggs broken over them. You add whatever you want and put sauce on the top.” She was actually surprised by how handsome he was. His head was too large for his body, certainly, but within itself it had a sort of harmony and integrity. She liked and trusted him and thought herself stupid.

He slipped off his overcoat and let it lie behind him on the cushion. He wore a dark suit and a tie with a string of subtle jeweled threads woven into the silk. There were diamonds—a large diamond ring on one hand and a diamond stickpin in his tie, both in ornate gold settings. Kita was sure they were old, not the cheap new diamonds available everywhere now. She was glad she’d worn her heels. He unbuttoned his jacket and was wearing a vest beneath it. He seemed utterly relaxed.

The waitress turned some music on, ancient American rock’n’roll. A young man came in and brushed snow off his hair, took off a black leather jacket. His T-shirt read elephant coke wanders. He slid into a booth, signaled for tea, and lit a cigarette. Just the type of kid she’d have fallen for when she was a teenager. She frowned. Why was she thinking this way?

In five minutes, she had hot, strong coffee, and the waitress had brought bowls of eggs, vegetables, and black cod for them to grill with the cabbage and noodles sizzling in a big pile between them. Using her chopsticks, Kita deftly pushed the foods around for the minute or so it took them to cook, then divided the hot food into two portions. “You eat it off the griddle,” she said and saw that he handled chopsticks as if born to them.

It was snowing in earnest now. More people had come in. The music and conversation around them were sufficient mask for what they said—if anyone understood spoken English.

Hugo laid out Marie’s thoughts in a low precise voice and with each sip of coffee, Kita had the increasing sense that she was speeding away from the past, toward a crevasse that would break cleanly and finally into a future strikingly different from all that had come before.

“We believe that the company you work for has developed something that is unique and somewhat dangerous. And that you understand some of its key points and have access to the rest.”

Kita was disconcerted. “How in the world would Marie know what Dento has developed?”

“You don’t trust me.”

“I don’t even know what you want.”

He leaned back, rearranging his legs beneath the table. His lopsided grin was that of a small boy. “Many years ago, Marie developed various data-viewing programs. They organized information. They framed it; they interpreted data the way our brains interpret the raw information of the cosmos. Even with the Silence, she has ways of collecting such information. But the velocity of collection has slowed down in the past few years. Anyway, she followed your progress closely for quite a few years.”

The raw information of the cosmos? It sounded like bad poetry, yet when he said it, Marie became aware of the materials in which she was clothed, the way her skin interpreted them, furnished words like “rough.” “silky.” “tight”—and with that wanted to loosen her belt. She was here, somewhere in space. Surrounded by matter, made of matter, yet able to think about things distant, abstract, in another time, or even impossible. That was all, really. It was all a matter of organization and of first having a nexus, a point of view, a lens.

“So Marie discovered something about my company that I don’t know?”

“If that’s how you want to put it, yes.”

She cleared her throat. “Does she know what’s happening to broadcasting?”

Hugo looked at her in the same direct, unemotional manner. “Possibly.”

She blinked. “That’s preposterous.”

“Do you always believe what you’re told?” Hugo’s smile was mocking.

“Hardly ever.”

“Yet you believe that the broadcasting problem—the Silence, everything—is all a great mystery to everyone, including governments, right?”

“Well…”

“We’re digressing, though. I really can’t tell you any more at this point. But I haven’t told you enough to convince you to trust us.” He regarded her thoughtfully. “Maybe we shouldn’t get you involved. Maybe there’s another way.”

“Another way to do what?” Kita heard her own voice—sharp, quick, just like her mother’s—and wished she wasn’t so jittery, so quick to go into nervous overdrive. “You are going to have to make yourself more clear. What are these tremendous plans? I took a day off work, came all the way here from Kyoto—”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to alienate you. Maybe I’m not the best person to do this. I’m—” He gestured at himself.

“What does that matter? I mean—” She took in his physical details more carefully. His hands were small and twisted. His thumbs jutted out at an unusual angle. His head seemed ponderous; oddly large. “It’s true that you’re different. But it’s something you could change if you wanted to. Surely you could afford it.”

“Maybe I chose this.” He smiled. “Maybe I used to be tall and thin. I have this theory. I think that one’s consciousness, one’s being, is intimately connected with one’s physical body. And I’m used to my own way of feeling like myself.”

An introspective man. “How did you meet Marie?” Let him talk. It would diffuse her nervousness and allow her to think more clearly.

“At school. One day a couple of the older boys took me out back and were letting me know how they felt about little people in a rather physical way. Marie came around the corner and they said something like ‘Go away, little girl,’ only not as politely. Instead, she joined in. Started kicking their butts. I guess it surprised them as much as anything; she was only ten, but of course she’d had a lot of martial arts training by then. Her grandmère was a tough old bird. She wanted Marie to be ready for anything. We both had black eyes the next day. From then on, we were buddies. Her grandmère took her out of that school and Marie insisted that I come with her. Nobody objected. I’d lived in foster homes all my life.”

“She bought you,” said Kita.

“She loved me. Instantly. She’s like that. Everything sudden. Intense. Now she plans to save the world.”

“From what?” asked Kita.

“From itself.” He stood, clapped on his hat, and pulled on his overcoat. “Want to help?”

Kita looked around at the café. Just an ordinary day. She wondered how many customers were quite as aware of the fragility of their world as she was. Most people seemed content to let those “in charge” take up the slack—ration the electricity, think about what to do. Maybe there was a deep frozen fear at the core of everyone, a controlled hysteria.

And Hugo frightened her in the way the pheromone bar had a few years back. A way that made it seem necessary to pay close attention.

Maybe it took a shock or a new conjunction of events to realize that one ought to be frightened.

Maybe she couldn’t afford to hide in her lab any longer.

“Would you like to see more of Tokyo?” she asked.

Hugo looked down at her heels. “In those shoes?”

She ordered some warm boots at a stall set up beneath the massive legs of an earthquake-proof high-rise. Snow swirled in wind-driven forays beneath the thirty-foot-high platform. The stalls huddled in the middle behind a shared barrier of wind-bowed plastic did a brisk business in hot drinks, and as usual there were several nan carts, all plugged into the same loose junction box. Stealing electricity, no doubt. The vendors had loaded programs for scarves, hats, boots, and the like; on a rainy day, they’d be churning out umbrellas. The sign on one stall said swift and precise manufacture of artificial things in English.

Kita agreed to sacrifice her shoes in exchange, since she didn’t want to carry them. The vendor quickly weighed them and handed them back for her to wear until the boots were ready. She had to pay a hefty fee for the convenience, and if there had been a shoe store somewhere in the next few blocks, she would have gone there instead. These product franchises were extremely expensive. The much-vaunted nanotech promise of “Free goods for everyone” had so far not materialized. Those who developed such programs owned them, had put a lot of money into research and development, and were not about to give them away for free. But once the city converted, these vendors would be competing with booths contained in the very architecture of the city and owned by the owners of the buildings. Each city had to work out its own business arrangements. Some leaned toward capitalism, some toward socialism. Unfortunately, despotism was a pretty clear option too.

Hugo hunched on a concrete bench next to Kita as they waited for her boots to grow. “Damned cold,” he growled.

Kita shrugged. “No worse than Chicago.”

“Chicago was no picnic either.”

“Is this a good time to tell me what Marie wants?”

Hugo’s voice was close to her ear, low and a bit rough. Flakes melted onto his shoulders, releasing a woolly scent that mingled with his own rather interesting smell. She did not realize that what he was going to say would change her world in the time it took for him to say a few stunning words: “Marie believes that the company you work for has developed a Universal Assembler.”

Beyond Hugo’s face, so close to hers that she saw the deeply etched lines that surrounded his mouth; saw that his eyelids tended to fall at half-mast; saw his breath puff in steaming coils—beyond all that were stubby concrete towers that receded into shadow, poised on the verge of change, veiled by sifting snow that seemed to glow with a radiance suggesting a light source other than the sun; bright, but cold.

“No.” She looked away from him.

“I’m afraid so.”

She had only heard rumors about the development of the Universal Assembler. Theoretically, it was a tiny lab, easily contained in a space taken up by an old-fashioned computer diskette. Within this lab were directions for assembling any form of matter via the interface of a computer.

Or, by the same token, using the same information, disassembling anything.

Earliest speculation about the creation of such a device generally included powerful self-destructing mechanisms should anyone attempt to open it and thus liberate the destructive protein processes contained therein. For with such a device, one could quickly unmake a square block, a city.

Or the world. Stuff—and more than stuff—might wash through the world unstoppable, a wild growth would probably evolve in completely unexpected and possibly dangerous ways, unlimited even by human imagination. There would be strange weapons, mind plagues, bizarrely transformed humans, and perhaps even the terminal gray goo Drexler had warned about decades ago, wherein the world would be turned to one undifferentiated soup of matter in short order.

After a minute, she spoke. “This is what you want me to get? I don’t think it’s possible.”

Hugo shook his head. “We don’t think so either. The Universal Assembler is military. Tightly guarded. It has been developed under the auspices of a defense treaty negotiated about ten years ago. Ostensibly so that when terrorists developed such an assembler, governments would have experts who understood how they worked and how to possibly stop their spread. Actually, we want something more innocuous, more positive. But I wanted you to know why we have this sense of urgency.”

“So—what is it? Why am I sitting here on a cold concrete bench in Tokyo?”

Hugo’s slight grin was maddening. “We understand that you’ve done extensive work on the prototype for the new BioCities, like the system presently coming to fruition in Tokyo. We think that you have developed many of the processes yourself and that you know as much about BioCities as anyone else in the world.”

“Really!”

“No reason to be modest. You know it’s true. A lot of money from governments and private investors has gone into Dento the past two decades. Dento has a lot of labs around the world, and not all of them even know that they’re connected with Dento. All of that research information has been fed back into Dento and into what you have been working on. It’s still classified, of course—if only for economic reasons. But most of the security effort at Dento has gone into protecting the Universal Assembler. All we want is the entire unabridged prototype.”

“Oh, is that all!” She laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You must think I’m an idiot! Why would I do this for anyone? I’d probably be killed.” Kita jumped up and briskly marched toward the vendor, who was signaling her. Her right heel caught in a crack and she slipped and fell. Hugo braced his short legs apart and reached down a hand. She glared at him, took his hand, and allowed him to boost her up. Her silly stockings were torn. One knee and both palms were bleeding.

“Doma,” she muttered. “Thank you.”

His eyes glinted with irritating merriment. “Any time.”

Kita didn’t want to accept his offer of a supporting arm, but she’d loosened the heel of her shoe and couldn’t walk without leaning on Hugo. She reached the cart, practically threw the shoes at the poor vendor, and slid her legs into the warm comforting boots while holding to the cart. Her palms stung and she jammed her hands into her pockets. “Now what?”

They walked a short distance from the cart. Hugo said, “I realize that I need to convince you of the importance of this endeavor. The BioCity program is being sold to U.S. cities, but it is modified so that the government has complete access at all times—”

“What?”

“Yes, they claim that it’s for national security reasons. They say that they have the right to eavesdrop on anyone at any time because of the possible extraterrestrial threat. Or whatever. Marie doesn’t think that’s right. Neither do I. It’s just a license to snoop, which is a license to control people. More important, she doesn’t think that in the long run the natural goals of humanity have an opportunity to be well served in such a politically charged atmosphere. People need to be free to disclose information in their own way, in their own time, or to be able to choose not to. She is creating a floating city in the Caribbean—Crescent City—that she envisions as a model environment for creative and scientific work. Very important scientific work. We might be able to solve the mystery of the Pulses rather than be at their mercy. We might be able to use nanotech to its fullest advantage without destroying the world.”

“Imagine! That’s what I thought I was doing already. But what do you mean about the Pulses?” Caught up for so many years in the rush to create new systems of communicating, Kita had become isolated, inured to speculation and rumor. The Silence was like weather—something that affected her but was beyond her control.

“We can talk about that later. Do you have complete freedom to access information about what others at Dento are working on?”

“No.”

“And you are not allowed to let others know what you are doing either.”

“That’s right. But I’ve been so busy—there really hasn’t been anyone or any party that I wished to share with anyway. It seemed to be enough to be working on this team. It was fine with me to let Dento decide what to do with it. Until lately.”

“And now?”

“I need time to think about this.”

“Can we go somewhere in the meantime?” Hugo fished a small flat from his inside shirt pocket and looked at it. From the darting of his eyes, Kita saw that he had the implants that allowed him to give commands to computer screens through eye movements. Apparently, he felt sufficiently comfortable with some bodily modifications. She wondered if he had an expensive universal, which could be constantly upgraded to include any new access patterns so that he could read anyone’s records, or just a local, which initialized him for one operating system. The first would certainly be handy for a spy.

“Here,” he said and handed it to her. “Where is this?”

It was in Japanese. Now it was her turn to smile.

She walked over to a map vendor, purchased a Tokyo map for the price of an apple, entered the address on Hugo’s screen, and told the map to search. Years ago, it would have included a global positioning chip, but those were useful so rarely that they were no longer a part of such maps. Instead, she entered their location and the map displayed three alternative routes.

“I could have done that,” he complained when she handed it back to him.

“You thought I might just know where it is? In a city with millions of people? We’re lucky. It’s only about five stops away.”

She was relieved to find sitting room on the train. “What kind of shop is this?”

“A toy store.” He didn’t offer any more information.

When they emerged from the underground, the wind struck her full in the face, whipping her hair around, and she pulled up her collar.

Could she believe Hugo?

She followed him while he read the map, trying to concentrate on the stunning information he’d dropped on her. If it was true, what was her responsibility? The concept of a single personality, the concept of dependable matter, the framework of the world as everyone knew it might end tomorrow. If Hugo was to be believed.

If Hugo was being honest with her and if there actually was something she could do, did she have a choice? What did she really know about Dento—their morals, their values, their goals? Who was Dento, really? She was chagrined at how little she’d examined such things over the years. The joy of working fully on her ideas had sated her completely. Funny how time could slip past when one was working hard. Funny how so many things could be ignored. And it had begun in college, she realized. Right after her father disappeared, she embraced work, as if, by doing something that might be pleasing to him with intense fervor, she might call him back from his alternate life. Or from death…

“Here it is,” Hugo said, startling her.

The storefront display was colorful and intense. Constantly changing shapes were lit from within, using some very recent sugar breakthrough that caused photons to be released as certain cells divided. The colors were spellbinding in their intensity as they mutated. A cat, looking almost alive, coalesced in one corner. It stepped carefully through the mayhem, sat and licked one paw, then dissolved. A small forest grew, the trees about two feet high, and beneath them Japanese knights in medieval armor battled. In the background was Himage Castle, small but precisely detailed, and Kita shivered, fascinated, recalling a childhood visit when she’d seen the slots for pouring boiling oil onto the enemy. Castles had appeared almost spontaneously worldwide, it seemed, at one point in history, one point in economic time.

Now they were on the threshold of another such breakpoint.

“It’s a foam shop,” Hugo said.

The interior was dark, so that each bright display shone like diamonds on black velvet. The atmosphere was hushed, though foams had sound capability.

They gazed at a foam of planets; within a clear cube, the solar system went through its cycles.

“Go on, try it,” urged Hugo, seeing her gazing raptly at the display.

“Oh, I’m too old for this,” she said.

“I’m not.”

He opened the small lacquered box labeled celestial wonders. “Something simple. The Milky Way, and keep the cube shape.”

He picked up a small pink wafer with those words on it and stuck it on the side of the foam.

The planets began to dissolve. Gradually the gel cube filled with tiny brilliant stars.

Kita squatted and touched one. A voice named the star. She noticed that the information was hypertexted, and that by touching the screen, she could access other screens. She pinched the foam with both hands and pulled it so that it flattened and the surface enlarged, and the latest information about Venus appeared.

“May I help you?” she heard in Japanese.

Kita twisted around and saw a man in a lovely kimono standing in the dim light, his face in the shadow. He bowed.

Hugo said, “I don’t see any price tags.”

Kita began to translate, but the man replied in English.

“Just ask.”

“How ’bout this baby?”

It was two weeks’ salary for Kita. “Rather a lot for a toy, isn’t it?”

“I’ll take it,” Hugo told the clerk. “Do you gift-wrap? Green paper?”

“Of course, sir. Are you sure you don’t want to look at others?” He looked at Hugo intently, as if suddenly remembering something.

“No. I’m in a hurry. This’ll do.”

The man bowed, took the foam, and left them.

Hugo said, “Marie has a daughter. She asked me to bring her a present from this shop. She could have ordered it sent, but it’s so much nicer to bring it personally, don’t you think? And maybe faster.”

“How old is she?”

“Nineteen, maybe?”

“Isn’t she a little old for this?”

“There’s a lot of information in this. She’s kind of an amateur astronomer. Think I can smoke in here?”

“I don’t think anyone would ask you to stop.”

He lit a cigarette and she watched his profile, lit by foamlight, as he completed the transaction. She got the impression that Marie’s child was also Hugo’s. But he hadn’t spoken of her in that way. No, she was Marie’s girl.

His eyes were thoughtful, faraway, as the clerk did the quick retina scan, then looked at Hugo appraisingly. Must be some unusual information there. But… people always looked thoughtful, unfocused, during a scan. Kita decided that “thoughtful” might be some kind of unfounded characteristic she was attributing to him. Some kind of tragic history that didn’t exist. Still, she found herself wondering if he was married.

This shocked, surprised, and then rather pleased her, all in quick succession. Except—she was completely uninterested in men. Had been for most of her adult life. Particularly men who were interested in her work. Not that she cared for women either. Not that she even thought about such things anymore, for the most part, she realized grumpily. She stared out the window while the foam was prepared for travel.

Hugo touched her shoulder gently and she jumped. Despite her coat, his touch seemed to flow into her body. Amazing. But he was rather like Jack, those many years ago, wasn’t he? Interested in what she knew. Interested in what she could do for him. And for Marie. She steeled herself and stood. His green eyes reminded her of the sea at Okinawa. Tropical; intense.

So what?

“Sorry that took so long,” he said.

“What’s this really about?”

Hugo looked back at the clerk, who was watching them from the shadows. “It would be best if we discuss it later. What can we do today? While you’re thinking.”

She looked out at the snow. Memories from a happy childhood interval flooded her. “I’d like to go to a ryokan” popped out. She stopped, a little embarrassed.

“A hotel?” asked Hugo, his eyes amused and interested—but not, she thought, in a personal way. Just interested.

“Not really. It’s just that snow always reminds me of when we were kids. We spent a month in the mountains every winter, either at my grandmother’s cabin or at a little lodge, living the traditional Japanese way.” She pretended to shiver. “You know, no heat. The way it is now, again.” She laughed. She’d worked hard to teach herself to laugh instead of giggle.

“It sounds like something only very rich people could do.” He opened the door for her and they stepped outside.

The cold wind took her breath away for a second. “We weren’t very rich,” she said. “My parents arranged their work so that they could do that. We lived all over the world. They were travel writers.”

“Unusual,” said Hugo. They hurried toward the underground entrance and down the wet concrete stairs.

“They were artists,” she said. “Really. My mother is an internationally known poet, and my father was a photographer. They did travel work to make money.”

They had retraced their steps to the train station. “You know, I’d like to visit the Ueno. It’s the national museum.” She couldn’t remember when she had last been there, but it seemed so soothing and familiar to her at this point. Visions of Japan that spanned centuries. Mountains and rivers without end. “It too is at its best on snowy days. A lot of pictures of snowy mountains.”

“You’re very enthusiastic about snow,” said Hugo. “I remember it only as a rotten inconvenience. I’ve done my best to stay out of the way of snow for most of my life.”

“You’re a barbarian, then,” she said.

“I live to be educated.”

“I’ll bet you do. Here’s our train.” She wondered, during the brief ride, why she was even considering this. The train rumbled forward and plunged into a tunnel.

“For the good of humanity,” said Hugo, watching her intently from his facing seat.

“What?” She looked up, startled, and saw her own reflection in the dark glass.

“You look as though you’re wondering why you’re doing this.”

“I’m Japanese. You can’t figure out what I’m thinking by looking at my face.”

He smiled. “You’re not as inscrutable as you think, Kita. While you’re thinking about it, let me add that this is extremely dangerous. It’s even possible that you might be killed. Although I believe that the odds are well against it. I just want you to know.”

“But how would I do it?”

Hugo tapped the pocket in which he carried the gift-wrapped foam. “Maybe these kinds of things seem more important when you have a child.”

Kita threw politeness to the wind. “So she is your child.”

“Not genetically. But I created her. I’m completely responsible for her.”

And that afternoon, while looking at masterpieces of snowy mountains, icy streams, cloud mountains and real mountains, Hugo told her the story.

Kita felt some edge in him crumbling as he spoke. Some edge, some wall, she didn’t know how to say it in English. But he was upset about this. He had been for years, she saw. It was a strange story. She felt that he’d told this story to no one. That Marie knew all of it, and yet she held the same amount of pain, the same amount of joy, as he did, and that none of the joy or pain could empty out of one and into the other. “Marie’s child is her floating city,” he said. “I didn’t realize that it would turn out that way. It upsets her that she doesn’t love Kalina as she thinks she ought to.”

Kita was not entirely happy that she seemed to be the one, so suddenly, that he thought could absorb these strong feelings of his. It made her feel rather like a counselor or even a tissue he might blow his nose on. He might as well be talking to anyone, she thought, as he rattled on into the afternoon while they sat drinking green tea in the Ueno cafeteria and then as they boarded the shinkansen to Kyoto.

For somehow, during the afternoon, she’d agreed to help, as Hugo so melodramatically put it, “save the world.”

At least, she hoped it would turn out that way. It seemed only marginally possible. The future had always seemed a bit farther down the road, a little closer to the horizon than where she stood.

Until today.

That evening, while they hurtled toward Kyoto in plush first-class seats paid for by Marie, the air suddenly became rich with sound, and the screens on their seatbacks lit, overriding the off command. For a moment, the screens flickered with images constantly broadcast so that whenever it was possible information would be exchanged. The programming local to the train, which many were watching, was submerged. The train filled with polite, muffled exclamations.

The Japanese rail system was the most advanced in the world. Many countries could not afford new systems and the old fell into disrepair as economies spiraled downward. The trains of most countries did not have windows made of materials that would manifest images, as Hugo’s did now, of a bar of radio frequencies. Hugo tapped ins english and the speaker said, “… the International News Service reports that the famine in Kenya has worsened. Since…”

Then their screens were dark once more.

They were dark the rest of the trip.

Kita and Hugo, sated with train-purchased bentos and overpriced sake, did not speak much after disembarking in Kyoto. They walked up the narrow, twisting streets through falling snow. Old-fashioned, dependable gas lights illuminated centuries-old eel shops and the smooth, unrevealing gates of hidden temples. There was nothing slick and modern about Kyoto. Kita loved the city, for its age balanced the work of her mind, where she lived in realms powerfully new. Before settling here, she’d traveled quite a bit, doing graduate work in Paris, trekking around Europe and Asia. The fear in the back of her mind was the same as everyone else’s fear—This may soon vanish. Until now it had been hard to know exactly in what way or why the world would vanish, since there were so many unknowns: the parameters of the Silence, whether or not the race to develop a functioning nanotech would make it under the wire of some unseen finish line, whether or not what some pundits were calling the Information War would escalate. Whether it was not, perhaps, too late for the planet to survive at all beneath its weight of rapacious humans.

Kita was unsettled by the fact that she now had a better handle on the problem and the possible time frame.

Her apartment was on the fourth floor of a small elegant building. “There was never an elevator here,” Kita said as they climbed a broad stairway. “Just as well. I’d probably have to move out if this was a more sophisticated building. Keeping the power running for elevators and alarm and security systems makes them so expensive that a lot of skyscrapers in Osaka are going bankrupt.”

They stepped inside Kita’s apartment.

“Cozy,” observed Hugo.

“Adequate,” she countered.

“A bit warmer than the street.”

“It’s the floor. Steam heat piped through. Leave your shoes here.” She gladly dropped her heavy bag, took off her newly manufactured boots, and set them neatly in the alcove. “Here are some slippers for you. I think they’ll fit. Want something to drink?”

Hugo was examining a wall of framed photographs, her father’s. “Tea? These are interesting. I like the one of clouds. It reminds me of his Number 47. In the Himalayan Folio.”

“The picture of my sister is my favorite,” Kita said, putting water on to boil and dropping a handful of green leaves into a brown teapot with a stylized running horse etched into the side. “It’s in the center.”

“She doesn’t look like you.”

“No, she’s much prettier.” Kita brought the teapot and two cups to the low table. Next to them, a window overlooked a spare courtyard garden, its single stone sculpture snow-covered and faintly washed with lamplight through which large flakes swirled.

“I don’t think so,” said Hugo. They settled onto the cushions. “This is quite comfortable.”

“I hope so. It’s where you’re sleeping tonight.”

“Wonderful view,” said Hugo, smiling and pouring the tea. It steamed, releasing a delicate fragrance. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small packet, which he put on the table.

It was brightly wrapped in sleek green paper.

Hugo’s face was very grave. Kita restrained an impulse to reach over and touch his hand.

“My nephew will love it.” She got up and slipped it into the briefcase she would take to work in the morning. “There are towels in the bathroom. Make yourself at home. There’s a nice place to eat breakfast on the corner—we passed it when we came in. I’ll try and get off work early tomorrow and we’ll do some sight-seeing.” She picked up her tea and went into the only other room in the apartment and shut the rice paper door.

The room was small, only two mats, with barely room for her wardrobe, her futon, and a low black table holding a small battery lamp, a pile of books as well as a universal book, rolled into a scroll, and a half-full bottle of water. The universal contained just about everything in print and could be updated at a local shop a few blocks away. In New Tokyo, it would be possible to update it practically anywhere.

She bent and switched on the lamp and undressed, carefully hanging her clothing in a wardrobe of sweet-smelling wood from the mountains of New Zealand, one of her few possessions. She didn’t care much for owning things, unlike her sister, who’d filled a sprawling house in the American way. Kita lived as her parents had lived. Ready to enter the world without looking back—if need be. Or leave it, on a sudden whim…

She hesitated for a moment, standing nude in the center of the room, the chill air defining her. She heard Hugo get up in the next room and—what? Was he pouring more tea? She stood for a moment, indecisive, then laughed at herself silently. What made her think he would want her, anyway? He had some sort of complicated relationship with Marie. She still wasn’t sure what it was. But she wasn’t going to get mixed up in it. She liked her life as it was. Simple. Direct.

“Cowardly” was the next word that popped into her mind and then “dull,” but she decided to ignore them.

She snuggled beneath her comforter and switched off the lamp; opened the shade. Light from the other room still spilled into the snowy courtyard. She lay awake for a long time, watching snow fall. She had done so, alone, on many nights, watching the world created by humans become magically transformed by nature.

And waking to find that cold rain had washed it away.

She rose and opened the door.

He was still sitting at the table, wearing his coat, sipping tea, and writing on a slate, absorbed.

“Hugo?”

He looked up and smiled. He didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see her standing in the doorway, wearing nothing. That comforted her. Then it irritated her.

He carefully set the cup on the table and rose, a helpless look on his face.

She went to him then and embraced him. He was only about four inches shorter than she, and she leaned over as he tilted his head back. His kiss was deep and strong. “Kita?” he whispered as she pulled him into the bedroom, as she pulled off his coat, his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. “Are you sure?”

She laughed. “Don’t I seem sure?”

Omato, the young guard at Dento, Inc., pulled the brightly wrapped package from her briefcase the next morning when she arrived at work. She sipped a can of hot coffee, willing her hand not to shake.

He looked up at her. “What is this?”

She took a big swig of coffee. “Oh. I thought I took that out. It’s a foam. A present for my nephew.”

“The oldest?” asked Omato, putting it back.

“Well, they’ll probably end up sharing it. I should have gotten two, but they’re so expensive.”

Omato beeped her in.

She had a meeting first thing. They were doing a design package for some officials from the Export Ministry and she had a demonstration prepared.

As she spoke, she marveled at how cool her voice sounded. No one would have imagined that she was preparing to betray her Japanese family.

“This is a computer-generated holographic model of how a human-analogous limbic system is implanted in the bee analogs of the BioCities,” she said. “This creates motivation for them to carry out the tasks assigned to them. A BioCity is a complex biological entity—yes, a question?”

“What is to prevent the entire contents of a human mind or personality from being implanted in such a bee analog?”

“Actually, nothing,” Kita replied. “In fact, some models show that it is entirely feasible, given the architecture of the bee analog. Groundbreaking cryonics work in the past several decades has illuminated crucial aspects of the cellular basis of memory and personality.” She did not say that such a model had actually been created. That was one of the many secrets that she always took for granted—secrets that now hedged her thoughts like an unwanted fortress. It was quite probable that some militant group would attempt to destroy a lab that had done such work. One theory was that embedding human emotional imperatives within the beelike creatures would make them easier to control.

She finished, bowed, and during the other presentations, she considered Hugo’s sparely rendered visions of what the rest of the world was like, news that was filtered here in Japan and everywhere; news she’d been too lazy or too preoccupied to seek out.

The lights came on. She found that she was looking at a man with a strangely familiar profile. She tried to think, despite her nervousness. It seemed important.

Jack? Yes, it was the man from several years back, who had tried to get her to spy for him…

He turned as he stood and she saw his face for an instant before the others in the room obscured him from her view. It was him, though his hair was short and blond now, rather than brown. His company was doing business with Dento. There was nothing to be nervous about.

She jumped up, left the room, hurried to her cubicle, and realized that she was drenched in sweat. She patted her forehead with a tissue and took a few deep breaths. “Marie believes that information should be free,” Hugo had told her. No, that wasn’t it exactly, was it? “Information wants to be free.” As if information was an animal in the zoo, captured from wild savannas of human thought and imprisoned within the bars of industry. Rather than industry generating it all in the first place, providing the all-important capital.

She did little nothing things, fiddling around. She went to look at her bees. People would think something was wrong if she didn’t look at them. She pretended to closely examine some bees they had been feeding with a special mix of hormones and examined her assistant’s training plan. The bees were trained before they were pulverized. This had something to do with hivewide recognition of a new visual pattern and the evaluation of their pheromonal pattern compared to that of the control group. She added voiceprint approval to the notepad waved in front of her.

Then it was lunchtime. The lab she needed to get into would be deserted. She reached into her briefcase and palmed Hugo’s package, stood, and slipped it into her pocket in one motion. She picked up a box of bentos she’d bought at the corner, as usual. But with extra, for her friend in the lab.

As she walked, balancing the bento box in her left hand, she reached into her pocket and pulled back the self-sealing flaps of Hugo’s package with her right hand and eased the foam from its colorful wrap. She walked through a clear tunnel that crossed over the street. The snow had ceased during the night, but the sky was still cloudy, and the sea, half a mile away, was steel-gray. Her badge opened the door. She looked around. “Nisawa? You here? I brought you lunch. I should have called…”

She pretended to look through the cubbies and shrugged. “Oh well.” She settled on a stool at the lab table Hugo had specified. She took off her jacket and pushed it up next to the interface mode used to transfer biological information—casually, she hoped. Her hand still under the jacket, she slipped the rectangular foam from the pocket and pressed it into the slot that automatically activated the transfer.

It fit perfectly. Hugo had said it would take fifty-seven seconds to transfer the information. He claimed that someone had it all set up.

Lucky for him that she was so predictable. But there was no time for regrets now. There was no going back.

With an eye on her watch, she fished out a bento and took a bite. She pretended to choke and coughed loudly when fifty-three seconds passed, muffling the ping with which the transaction was acknowledged.

Still coughing, she used her fingertips to release the foam, squeezed it in her hand as if, she thought wildly, she wanted to choke it to death, swept her jacket toward her, and put the flattened foam in her pants pocket. Sniffing, her eyes watering, she grabbed the box of bentos and hurried from the lab, carefully shutting the door behind her.

Anika, the guard for this wing, was hurrying down the hall toward her. Kita rushed to the water fountain and started to drink, deliberately inhaling some water, which set off a quite genuine round of coughing.

“Are you all right?” asked Anika, pounding Kita on the back. She pulled some tissues from her pocket.

Kita blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said, gasping. She pointed at the box of rice rolls. “Went down the wrong way.”

“What were you doing in there?” asked Anika, frowning. “This was just upgraded to top clearance. They’re changing the locks this afternoon.”

Kita had a second to feel astounded. Hugo had cut things pretty close. “I’m sorry. I thought Nisawa and I had a lunch date. I must have gotten the day wrong. Tell her I dropped by, okay? She’ll be sorry. I brought her favorite. Smoked eel and avocado. Well, I’d better get back.”

Kita hurried back across the glass bridge, heart thumping. Information wants to be free, hell. This was her last experiment in espionage. She wasn’t cut out for this at all. On her way back, she slipped the foam back into the packet and folded the edges back together. In her cubicle, she blew her nose loudly and shrugged into her coat; bent over and put the package back into her briefcase. She buttoned her coat, put on her hat.

At the front checkthrough, Omato went through her briefcase and pockets so slowly that Kita was sure he could hear her heart pound. “Leaving early?”

“I think I’m getting sick,” she said. She resisted looking behind her. She prayed that his console wouldn’t beep with a message to apprehend her. This was probably espionage. After all, the government was involved. Damn Hugo!

“You do look like it,” he said. “Rest, then.”

A quiet solar tram was just passing; she caught it and perched on the edge of a seat next to the door. She was trembling. The driver looked at her in the mirror. No, of course he wasn’t. She was imagining things.

She made herself walk casually up the street to her building. She unlocked the door. Hugo, as precisely dressed as yesterday, sat at the table writing in little boxes with a pencil. Ah yes. Acrostics. How soothing for him, while she—

He looked up. She opened her mouth; he shook his head briefly. She just stared at him, enraged.

“Hello,” he said. “I haven’t eaten yet. Want to go out to lunch? I didn’t know how to work that thingamabob on the counter.”

“That’s a rice steamer. Very high-tech. You need certification to use it. Come on, then.”

She put on tall, scarred leather boots she’d had made in London years ago. They were much more comforting than her new ones. She was breathing deeply, regularly, deliberately. She transferred the foam to a tote bag and snapped the top shut. The plan was that she was to give it to someone at some point. Hugo had not been clear about that. She was just supposed to trust him. Like an idiot. Maybe, she thought, I should just take it back, confess…

“You’ll hyperventilate,” Hugo told her as they descended to the streets. “Are you all right?”

“No,” she said. “Go left. This is Teapot Lane.”

They climbed the steep street on foot. Kita’s legs soon ached, but she did not stop. “Where are we going to eat?” asked Hugo more than once, puffing along behind her. Was it cruel to make him climb so quickly? She hoped so. They passed through the gate of a large temple. She took a sip of cold water from the dipper just past the gate and Hugo imitated her, lifting his eyebrows in a question she didn’t want to acknowledge. People milled around on the cobblestones. A wide wooden platform extended over a broad tree-filled valley in which small scattered temples could be glimpsed.

“Did you get it?” Hugo asked, an edge of desperation in his voice.

“This is Kiyomizu-Dara Temple,” said Kita, holding on to the railing and staring out over the valley. The scene was very dear to her. “I come up here about once a month. They say that when someone has an important decision to make, it is like jumping off this balcony.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Hugo in a quiet voice. “Is there any particular reason you came up here just now?”

She said nothing.

He put his arm around her waist. “Did something go wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

He looked down, across the sweep of the trees. “Maybe you’ve already jumped.”

“Maybe. Come on. Let’s eat.”

“But—”

“I thought you wanted to eat.”

In a small steamy café, she ordered miso soup and black cod for them both. She felt his eyes on her face as she ate slowly and carefully. She sighed and looked up. “I’m sorry—”

“No need to apologize,” he said, his face concerned. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

“No doubt Marie is not quite so sensitive,” she said.

Hugo smiled. “Good guess.”

Kita pushed back her half-eaten meal. “I’m full.”

“Kita—”

“I have it,” she said sharply.

“Relax, then,” he said.

“I can’t.”

Hugo glanced at his watch. “How about a visit to the Temple of the Golden Pavilion.”

“Then what?”

“Then we meet someone. Is the temple close?”

“About five minutes by cab.” The Kiyomizu-Dara Temple had not helped. Maybe this one would. Maybe nothing would.

She felt as terrible as she had the day her father disappeared.

Multicolored koi swam slowly in the frigid water of the kinkakuji, the mirror-pond, as they crossed the bridge to the low classic pavilion. Even though the sun did not shine, the temple still seemed to glow. She began to talk, her words coming in nervous spurts, as if she just had to talk about something, anything except what she had just done.

“Everything in Japan is like an idea.” She kept her voice level, analytical. As if she was safe in a hall, giving a lecture. “An idea clothed in matter. Replaced many, many times. This was completely burned in the 1950s and was completely restored. The temple we were at before—it’s been there a thousand years. I sometimes imagine that nanotech will be that way. An idea constantly restored by repair nanotech. Or an idea living within a small piece of matter for years, maybe centuries, and then finding the ideal situation for reproducing itself. But what will we reproduce? Temples or weapons?”

Hugo faced her on the bridge. He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them gently. “You’ve done a very good thing today, Kita.”

“How do I know? For all I know, you’re making weapons like that.”

“You’re upset.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re worried about what might happen now. Talk to me, Kita. Did something go wrong?”

She shrugged and he dropped his hands. “A guard saw me coming out of the lab.”

“Oh,” he said and looked thoughtful. “But that’s not unusual, is it?” He met her glare easily. “I told you we know a lot.”

“No, but the security clearance has changed.”

“But the locks don’t change until tomorrow,” he said gently.

She shook her head. “This afternoon.”

He frowned. “You should have told me sooner.”

Kita tried to control her tears but failed. She felt like screaming at him but couldn’t. That would be rude.

He held her tightly. Like a lover. His quiet energy flowed into her most strangely. She’d never felt like this before. Not really. Of course, he probably did all the time. She lowered her face and began to kiss him. I’m mad, she thought.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s best that you don’t go home. In fact, maybe it’s best if we leave Kyoto. Now. I was waiting for a contact, but…”

She sighed. She stepped back from him. He wouldn’t let go of her hand, though she tried to tug it from his grasp. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I am,” said Hugo. “I thought I had everything taken care of. The guard should not have been there. I’m sorry. There’s a good deal of money in your account now.”

She stared at him. “But I didn’t—”

“I know you didn’t do it for the money. That would have been the first question most people asked. You did it just because an old friend asked and because you remember things about her.”

“And because of you. I trust you. It’s very strange, isn’t it?”

“Cause for celebration, I think.” He looked past her. “Two women are walking up the path toward us. They look very determined. I think something has gone wrong with my contact situation. Is there a back door to this temple?”

Kita could never remember what happened next very well. Hugo turned and pulled a gun, but the women had theirs out already. Hugo fired a shot that made Kita’s ears ring, pushing her aside at the same time so that she sprawled into some bushes. One of the women fell and the other crouched behind a rock. Hugo yanked Kita back by the arm toward a path that snaked off through a formal garden. Then he crumpled forward. Blood blossomed on the shoulder of his coat. His gun fell from his hand.

Kita picked up the gun—the first one she had ever held—and aimed its unfamiliar weight vaguely in the direction of the rock where the other woman hid.

Then someone grabbed her wrist and wrenched the gun from her hand; she turned and saw a bald monk wearing heavy black glasses and a black robe. He quickly ejected the automatic’s cartridge, which clattered onto the concrete and bounced into the mirror-pond with a tiny splash, startling the koi so that they darted away. He motioned to Kita to follow him into the garden. Kita looked back and saw a group of a dozen monks converging on the woman behind the rock, shouting. Some wielded heavy-looking sticks.

Kita followed the three monks who were carrying Hugo. They ran awkwardly downhill through the winter garden until they crashed through a hedge to a crowded road lined with small shops; pedestrians turned in surprise. One of the monks ran into the road in front of a taxi, which screeched to a halt. “Get out,” he yelled at the driver. “Now!”

The driver argued, but the monk pulled him out and flung him onto the street, where he sprawled with a look of amazement on his face. “Get in,” one monk told Kita, holding open the driver’s door.

“But—” She realized that she had dropped the bag with the foam in it somewhere.

“Get in!”

The other monks pushed Hugo into the backseat, leaning in one door and pulling from the other, grunting and ripping his coat collar. Then they slammed the doors. The one next to Kita yelled, “Go!”

Kita looked in the mirror and saw Hugo, the front of his coat bloody. He caught her eyes and his lips moved slightly. “Drive,” he whispered hoarsely.

“I have to—”

Hugo hoisted himself up and hollered, “Now! Now get the hell out of Kyoto!”

Kita stepped on the gas. The crowd fell back. She was soon careening through the streets, down this alley, up this street, always heading outward. Hugo held on to the seat back for a few blocks, swaying, then slumped back onto the seat.

It was evening and then it was dark. She was driving through a pine forest on an old bumpy road at wild speed. She had been driving for over an hour. She didn’t remember how she had gotten out of Kyoto. Hugo was still breathing.

The road passed into farm country and entered the foothills. The land steepened to mountains. It was snowing again—hard. She slid around corners on snowy roads lined with pines. She did not slow down. She coasted, shifted, fishtailed, held to the road by her grandmother’s ghost. She almost missed the turnoff. There was no sign. The narrow driveway cut through thick hemlocks heavy with snow as in some ancient print and continued for almost a mile until she began to fear that she’d taken the wrong turn.

By the headlights, she saw the old cottage. She almost skidded into it, but the taxi slowly crushed its right headlight against a huge rock and came to a halt.

She opened the car door and smelled snow, breathed in silence pattered by dry flakes sifting like crystal through the woods, heard the roar of the falls in the gorge below the house.

She clumped onto the wooden porch, half-hidden by drifting snow, kicked open the door, found the matches on the wall with her fingers, lit the candle that always stood in the center of the table. Yes. She knew it all from memory. She knew it blind.

The fire was laid. Her grandmother, then her father, had always kept it ready. And someone was doing so now. One of many cousins. Her fingers were steady as she held the match to the paper.

The fire caught and flared, playing off of jars of beans, rice, noodles, pickles, and whisky bottles lined up like soldiers on wooden shelves on the other side of the firepit. She went outside, rolled Hugo out of the car, dragged him in by his armpits, and lay him in front of the fire. She was trembling when she was finished. Though she regularly worked out in the Dento gym, she’d never actually felt very strong. She sank to the floor and started laughing. She stood and started priming the pump in the sink. It creaked. It needed oil. But muddy water spewed forth, and it gradually cleared. She laughed harder.

“What’s so funny?” whispered Hugo.

“I dropped my bag. The bag with the foam in it.”

“You’ll just have to come to New Orleans and do it all again,” he gasped, his words nearly incoherent. He said something in French that she didn’t understand.

“Shut up.” She collected water in a jug and poured it into the cauldron hanging over the fire. Most likely full of dead bugs. “Isn’t that what Americans say? So rude. Shut up while I undress you.” She knelt next to Hugo.

“Mmm.”

“You might die!” she said, and it came out more irritated than sad.

“I sincerely hope not,” he said. “Kita—”

Then he passed out.

The next morning Kita slipped out the door into a world in which she always saw the stylized beauty of classical Japanese painting. Pine trees laden with snow, their long branches perfect curves, tilted on the edge of a steep drop-off. Below, in a gully, a series of waterfalls sounded, distant and soothing, the music of her childhood. If she squinted, she might be able to think herself back in time and see a wide-coated solitary fisherman crossing a narrow wooden bridge high in a gorge surrounded by round-topped cliffs. If she really tried, she could be that fisherman, and her mind would fill with telegraphic poems.

But now the incongruous taxi, its nose crushed against a massive rock, kept her firmly in the present.

She was frightened. Hugo was seriously injured. He had tossed and mumbled all night, dripping wet with fever. The bullet had gone in at his shoulder and out at his back. She had no idea what this might mean. The cabin had but rudimentary first aid, which she had administered. Antibiotic powder on the wound. Opiates for pain. But what about lost blood? What about fluids? What about the delicate balances monitored so carefully in hospitals? He’d had a brief seizure during the night; she had been surprised at her ability to seem so calm and soothing when within she was screaming hysterically.

He awakened briefly in the morning and she gave him miso soup thickened with dried vegetables and dried shrimp from jars on the shelf and heaped him with blankets. This seemed to give him enough energy to forbid her to take him anywhere and to impress upon her the danger of letting anyone know where they were. Anyone. If he did die, a concept he seemed to find irritatingly amusing, she was to head for New Orleans. He mumbled something about a backup Hugo, laughed, coughed, and grimaced. “Ridiculous,” he said, his eyes shut.

Now he was sleeping. Sleeping and clammy. His lips were blue. She did not know much about the coloring of other races, but she was sure his lips should not be blue. She left a note. No doubt they were looking for the taxi—and for her.

But she had to go. If she could just get to a pharmacy, she could buy a range of nanotech products that would encourage quick healing and simple monitoring devices that came in the form of patches. She couldn’t help him at all by staying.

She got into the taxi and flipped the on switch. The charge readout lit. If she was lucky, the owner had complied with the law and this vehicle was sprayed with the expensive fuel cells that used a form of photosynthesis to get power from the sun. Unfortunately, sunlight was in short supply during Japanese winters. The readout showed that she had only fifteen miles of charge.

That might get her to the nearest train station. She put the car into reverse. The tires slipped, then slowly caught on the debris beneath the snow. She turned onto the long driveway and stopped for a moment, looked for the control for the hologram generator that covered the seats in a doily pattern. The latest thing in taxis. Real doilies, pressed beneath sheets of heavy clear plastic as in the olden days, were passé. She found the switch, turned it off, and registered an extra two miles. She did not turn on the heat. She was warmly dressed in the heat-generating clothes that were kept at the cabin. They were rather old-fashioned-looking, much thicker than newer generations, but they worked.

The icy drive down the ridge did not bother her. She was expert in driving in such conditions. She watched the long sloping lines of the ridges descend around her, the wash of dark leafless trees in a curve within a nearby hollow, passed an ice waterfall that clung to a cliff. She drove through a small farming village and hoped no one would mark her; smoke rose from chimneys and she imagined rosy-cheeked children inside eating chunky stews thick with homemade noodles, as she had done so often when a child.

She hesitated before turning onto the main road, but it was eerily free of traffic. Probably the storm; the roads were icy. She drove as fast as she dared. She passed a few strip malls and then hushed Kyoto asserted its power and extinguished them; all had to be old within a certain perimeter. Though to the west and north, the towers of the massive Osaka metropolis flourished, steel-gray, the buildings gradually diminished as they neared Kyoto. Kita rubbed her eyes to get the black specks out of the coastal sky; they appeared to be bouncing in the air. She’d gotten little sleep.

She lost power only about two miles from the maglev’s last stop. The taxi coasted to a halt as she pulled it to the side of the road. Though she was within ten miles of the city, there was still no traffic, which was very unsettling.

She pulled open the neck of her thermal suit as she hiked. She finally got to the turnoff to the train terminal and thankfully felt the coins in her pocket; she intended to get some noodles and a can of coffee from a machine.

When she looked up and really saw the terminal, she stopped suddenly, her heart pounding hard.

Narrow lines of neonlike light coursed round the bulbous entrance node. There were many vehicles in the lot; that seemed normal. But no one was going in or out.

A surge.

It had to be.

She looked again at the black specks. They were Bees.

Nanotech Bees.

Immature, of course. But in Osaka, she recalled, they had been cold-stored at the ready against the time when the decision to convert was made. Except that as of yesterday afternoon there had been no decision, for she would have known about it. After a decision was made, the projected conversion time, taken in very gradual steps, was six months.

This was an accident.

For the past ten years, the possibility of a surge had hovered beneath the conscious level of all of those working on this project. Many thought it impossible. But she didn’t. Nanotechnology had the potential to be the atomic bomb of the new millennium.

Standing on the rise, beginning to feel the chill of her sudden inactivity, she was the lone witness to a change so vast that it left her without emotional touchstones. It had come with the suddenness of a snowstorm, apparently; had precipitated out of particular and precise conditions.

She squinted once again at the specks on the horizon. She wished for binoculars. With a sudden sense of urgency, she dashed for the train station escalator and ran down stairs still moving, though they serviced no one. The schedule lights were on and counting down. At the appointed time, a hundred and thirty-two seconds later, the train arrived. The doors opened. Kita looked inside at the lighted, empty seats. For a second, she wondered if she ought to go. But only for a second.

This was her life’s work. She squeezed through the doors as they slid shut.

The train welcomed her in words some Apiary Project committee had developed, people she had never seen but who had been part of the interlocking circles she’d moved among for even longer than she’d been in Kyoto, since back in Copenhagen. She bent over, hugging herself, her chest squeezed so tightly that it was painful. Her raw, hoarse sobs echoed in the empty car.

“It’s all wrong,” she shouted. She pounded an indifferent window with a fist, feeling distant pain from yesterday’s scrapes. Then she sat—quiet, afraid, and utterly alone—as the train silkily accelerated.

The main Kyoto station was crowded; for a heartbreaking moment, Kita was able to think that she’d been imagining things.

But she knew that one of many alternative programs had apparently been put into effect, accidentally or on purpose. She did not even know the protocol that was to be used to decide whether or not to convert a city to the nanotech metapheromone communications system she’d been working on for so long. She worked on technical rather than social problems.

She was dizzy with fear as she stepped off the train. In one version of the city, one of thousands that they had been blending and balancing for what seemed ages, she might be attacked as a foreigner. That had been a very easy element to include; identification and attack of outsiders was one of the basic pheromone functions of bees. Yet the statistical possibility that Kyoto was now that type of city was exceedingly small, and as two business-suited men passed her without a glance or a move toward her, she regained her ability to breathe. She leaned against a post, wondering what to do. She ought not to have come at all, of course. She saw one of the businessmen sink onto a bench and hold his head in his hands. A movie poster on the wall near the exit escalator began to slowly morph into an information terminal. She walked toward it. She could not touch it; she didn’t even want to be near it. But perhaps it might give her a clue.

A woman in a black dress stood in front of it, staring.

“Kanitchiwa,” said Kita. The woman appeared not to hear her. This proved nothing. “Touch the green bar at the top,” Kita suggested. The woman reached out her hand without hesitation and touched it. This was a powerful clue in and of itself, apparent lack of volition, if Kita was not imagining it. “Now touch the blue dot where it says ‘Access Functions.’ ”

A group of people was now crowded around the poster. After two more directions, the specification screen scrolled past slowly. Kita did not have to look at it for more than a few seconds. She knew that this was a tragedy of untold proportions and that she was fairly safe.

She took the escalator to the street. As she walked, she searched for and saw clues that confirmed her fears.

Brightly colored lines were inching their way up buildings like plants in a fast-growing jungle. She moved briskly, but her heart was lifeless. She was looking at her past and seeing a future that she was not a part of.

People sat leaning against buildings here and there, which was the hardest to see. They were not begging. Their brains were changing.

They were adapting to the new city.

That which had changed them was a molecular metaprogram, a weapon that was designed to be used to take over an enemy’s city and program the inhabitants to accept whatever ideology might be convenient. The window during which it was initially virulent was tiny; once it entered the matter of a city and the populace, it operated quickly and became self-contained so that the conquerors could enter without fear of falling prey to their own weapons. But perhaps if there had been no perpetrator, there would be no such effect. After all, she didn’t think that they had gotten to the stage of developing a menu of ideologies. That would be incredibly complex.

She passed what had been the window of a large store, unusually large for Kyoto. Instead of minimalist furniture, the window was now full of…

Hexagons. The end of the system that had apparently chosen this place in which to manifest, butting up against the window. Within the hexagons were shimmering membranes, nothing more.

Kita was completely aghast. The membranes were cryogenic sheets, capable of transforming humans into Bees. Bees were necessary to the Kyoto system. And they had not been stored.

They had to be created. Out of available bodies.

She must have run for a mile without seeing where she was going, flowing through crowds that parted with complete docility for her passage. She had to help them. She had to help them. Only she was left to help them…

She stopped in front of Dento’s main entrance.

She was soaked in sweat. She peered through the tasteful glass doors with their kanji-etched name. She punched in her code and the door slid open.

What was she doing here? She barely knew. What could she do to help?

She walked briskly through the empty corridors. The event must have begun yesterday evening. Or maybe…

Yesterday afternoon? Perhaps the foam she’d stolen…

For a moment, her heart filled with dark heavy anger. It was her fault. She had probably downloaded prototypes that contained the seeds of events that were unimaginable.

But no. No. Calm yourself, Kita. She leaned against a cool wall, jumped back despite knowing that it could not infiltrate her, else her very boots could be a conduit…

No, the foam had not done this. It hadn’t contained the seeds itself, only the information leading to them. But the timing could not be a coincidence. Perhaps whoever had done this had hoped to catch her in this surge. And prevent the contents of the foam from leaving Kyoto. If that was so, she would have to take everything she possibly could with her.

She hurried toward the central laboratory. But as she walked, she thought she heard footsteps.

She turned and saw no one. Heard nothing.

She continued and thought she heard another sound.

Jumpy. Whoever was here was as affected as those in the streets

She hurried onward. Just another turn. There. She punched in her code with trembling fingers, thinking, Of course, that’s how they would know.

She leaned against the closed door, considering.

A maze of counters filled the huge room, and cabinets hung from the ceiling above. Desk-level surfaces were interspersed among the higher counters, and the latest generation of DNA computers was linked throughout the lab.

Kita kicked some stools aside on her way to her cabinet and punched in her code. The door slid open.

The refrigerated interior had small fans that whirred away condensation. She saw what she was looking for. A sheet of RNA medium. One square inch could hold the information of an entire library. She removed it and the door slid shut.

Again she thought she heard a sound but again saw no one. She stepped to a cool flat surface different from the rest of the countertop, about a foot wide, and at her touch it began to glow green. Once again she punched in her code on a keypad that manifested at the table’s edge, which sensed her presence. It then gave her a circle of symbols and she did not hesitate. She entered alpha through omega. apiary. configure to #38.

It was a backup emergency system, a prototype for possible eventual marketing. They’d never tested it on humans, only on computer-generated models of humans.

The foam idea had been good. If it had worked, she would have been able to come back to her job with no one the wiser. And surely this was suicidal.

But in a way it appealed to her. Step into the future you’ve created, Kita. It’s the least you can do. All these people have and they didn’t even have a choice. Her colleagues at Dento, the woman who had served them yesterday on Teapot Lane, the taxi driver pulled roughly from his vehicle. All were wiped clean.

A blue light glowed at her elbow; the matter of the table had reformed and was ready to transfer. She carefully laid the sheet in a slight glowing indentation about half an inch square. The RNA sheet immediately turned green. The process was working.

She looked around for the crystal console, which would save the same information in laser-accessible form. It would probably take at least an hour to do so, however. But she might have time. If she did have time, it would be infinitely better. Crystals, however, were made by techs and she wasn’t as familiar with their storage location as she was with the RNA system, which she’d been working on. She wandered through a few rows of lab tables.

There it was—a row of semicircular indentations. She knelt and opened the cupboard below. She pulled out a box of blanks, set one in the indentation, and once again called up a keypad.

“Ms.—Narasake?”

She whirled. It was Anika, the guard.

“Kanitchiwa,” Kita said, forcing the welcome through a tight throat.

Anika nodded slightly. “Kanitchiwa.”

Relieved when Anika just stood there, Kita pushed on the button that would start saving the information. The crystal sphere glowed as it whirled. She walked back over to the RNA sheet. It was brilliant gold. Almost finished. Once she swallowed it, all the information she’d developed related to BioCities presently lodged in the Dento databanks would transfer to her junk DNA.

She just wasn’t entirely sure how she would get it back out again.

If Hugo had proposed this to her, she wouldn’t have listened for a second. Now here she was, doing it of her own free will. She looked back at Anika, who was standing straight, her straight black hair covered by her guard cap, just watching her. Perhaps she would not know that Kita had not been changed. Why should she? How could she?

Still, she made Kita nervous.

Kita looked back over at the laser sphere a counter away. There was no way that she could stick around until that was finished. It was time to leave. She peeled the RNA medium from the programming space. It was slippery and gellish, yet solid to her touch. It would not last long; it was very unstable.

“I feel very strange,” said Anika suddenly, her voice jerky. “I remember coming to work this morning. I remember not knowing why. No one else was here. My console told me to watch training videos and I did. Something terrible has happened and I am not sure what it is. But I do know that you aren’t supposed to come into this lab. You were here yesterday when you were not supposed to be. I remember that too. And I remember”—a fleeting frown creased her forehead—“I remember my console telling me that there was an emergency and that I had to do something—” Another frown. “Something I learned to do in training. I’m not… I’m not sure why I have forgotten everything.” She moved toward Kita, skirting a lab table. Then she stopped. “It would be nice if we could go to the movies, wouldn’t it? I haven’t been to the movies in a long time.” Her face was filled with longing, like the face of a young girl.

Kita thought of her sister. She could not bear this sadness. She couldn’t. “Yes,” she said. “That really would be nice.” She looked closely at Anika’s face. She seemed to be developing a rash across her cheeks…

Receptors? But they should only be on her hands. She moved toward Anika. “Maybe I can help you.”

Anika felt her face with both hands. “It feels funny,” she said, her voice choked. “I…” Then she looked down at her hands, at the patches of tissue rising up in pink regular ovals on her palms. “What’s this?”

She looked up at Kita, black eyes filled with fury. “It’s you! You did this! You and everyone in this place. My mother this morning… my mother… oh!” She struggled to pull out her tranquilizing gun.

Kita took one last longing look at the laser sphere and began to run.

She stuck the gel in her mouth and swallowed as she heard the pop of a tranquilizing gun. She dodged wildly and felt nothing; realized she would have to put her code into the door in order to get out, doubled back and ran right at Anika, who stared at her wide-eyed. As she ran, she stretched out her arm and swept an armful of lab glass into the air; it smashed through the air in a wild scattering of light. Kita turned back, put her code into the door, slipped out just before Anika got there. As a guard, Anika automatically overrode the code, but it didn’t matter. Kita was through the door and running very fast now.

A block from the office, around a corner, Kita found a row of solar bikes. She jumped on one and while she did not exactly speed away, these being sluggish, at least it was faster and easier than running. Her hands trembled on the control bar; she felt sick and told herself it was just her imagination. She decided that she had to be crazy, then she decided that she wasn’t. What else could she have done? She began to pedal to feed the generator; the bike moved a bit more quickly. There were people everywhere, but no one seemed to be disturbed by her presence.

She looked behind her as she gained the more rural roads and thought, You could have stayed and tried to fix it.

She stopped then and turned the bike around, straddling it. She had been to Beijing two years ago and helped set up their conversion. She had seen the system in operation before. But this was different. Without an army or at least a plan, Kita could do nothing. She wouldn’t survive long in there. She had panicked, certainly. But she was lucky to have gotten out without being changed herself. It would take months of study by highly adept committees to determine what needed to be done to help Kyoto.

The fact that the entire contents of the Apiary Project system was now being lodged within the junk spaces of her DNA via specially engineered messenger RNA did not make her feel better either.

Then something to the east caught her eye. Her heart began to pound.

A few miles away, against gray afternoon sky, the road was filled with dark advancing shapes. Soldiers. Tanks.

She retreated a quarter mile, turned onto a side road, branched again onto another, hoping that the soldiers were only on the main road. They had to be some kind of international force. She’d heard that some kind of complex treaty arrangement was now allowing forces to enter countries to attempt to contain nanotech accidents. Or to do as their commanders pleased.

She continued on. She had no choice. She had to get back to Hugo. As the minutes passed, she encountered a few vehicles going the other way, but they seemed to be civilian. After half an hour, she relaxed. She was well out in the country. It was late afternoon. She was starving. She would have to ride steadily to get back to the cabin before dark.

That is, if this bike would make it that far. She wasn’t sure how long she could pedal uphill if the charge ran out.

As the bike labored up the ridge road, snow began to fall.

Two weeks later, Kita stepped into the Tokyo foam shop. It was evening. She left the door open, looked around cautiously. There were no customers.

Outside, Tokyo’s conversion was in disarray. Soldiers from the International Federation of Nanotech Conventions paced the street. Kita stepped back onto the rainy street and opened the car door.

She bent to help Hugo out. His face was ashen and covered with sweat.

Halfway across the sidewalk, the man from whom they had gotten the foam reached them. He helped her get Hugo inside; the man shut and locked the door; opaqued the window.

“What happened?” he asked. “You shouldn’t have come here. It’s dangerous.”

“Hugo said that you have the facilities here to heal him. He has a gunshot wound. He wouldn’t let me take him to a hospital. He said that you are part of some… organization.”

The man frowned. “He should have said nothing about that.”

“Oh, I suppose he should just die!” flared Kita.

“Do you have the necessary programs?” the man asked Hugo. He shook Hugo a bit. Hugo groaned.

“Stop!” said Kita. “He has some kind of… I don’t know, regeneration, resurrection, something like that. A program. It’s embedded somewhere in his body. He hasn’t been too coherent. He thought you could help.”

The man nodded. “Yes. Let’s take him into the back. He looks pretty bad. We’ve not done this many times. But we’ll do our best.”

Two hours later, two technicians arrived with a truckload of equipment that they carried into the back with many grunts. Hugo lay on a futon set in an alcove in the living quarters at the back of the shop.

As equipment was set up, after some discussion, the shop owner apparently decided to trust Kita. Seeing as how, Kita thought with irritation, she seemed to know so damned much about Kyoto.

He had her sit at a table in the tiny kitchen and offered her a cup of bancha tea. She inhaled the woody scent gratefully and took a sip. Then he handed her a scrolled screen. She shook it sharply with her wrist and it unfurled to the size of a sheet of paper and snapped flat; lit with sharp colors. On it was a picture of the international terrorist suspected of stealing the Universal Assembler from Kyoto and setting off what was now being called the Kyoto Plague in an attempt to divert attention.

“Do you know him?”

“I’ve seen him before.”

It was Jack.