Counting Heads

1.1

On March 30, 2092, the Department of Health and Human Services issued Eleanor and me a permit. The undersecretary of the Population Division called with the news and official congratulations. We were stunned by our good fortune. The undersecretary instructed us to contact the National Orphanage. There was a baby in a drawer in Jersey with our names on it. We were out of our minds with joy.

ELEANOR AND I had been together a year by then. We’d met at a reception in Higher Soho, which I attended in realbody. A friend said, “Sammy Harger, is that really you? What luck! There’s a woman here who wants to meet you.”

I told him thanks but no thanks. I wasn’t in the mood. Not even sure why I’d come. I was recovering from a weeklong stint of design work in my Chicago studio. In those days I was in the habit of bolting my studio door and immersing myself in the heady universe of packaging design. It was my true creative calling, and I could lose all sense of time, even forgetting to eat or sleep. Henry knew to hold my calls. Henry was my belt valet system and technical assistant, and he alone attended me. I could go three or four days at a time like that, or until my Muse surrendered up another award-winning design.

My latest bout had lasted a week but yielded nothing, not even a third-rate inspiration, and I was a little depressed as I leaned over the buffet table to fill my plate.

“There you are,” my persistent friend said. “Eleanor Starke, this is the famous Samson Harger. Sam, El.”

An attractive woman stood on a patch of berber carpet from some other room and sipped coffee from a delicate china cup. She said hello and raised her hand in a holo greeting. I raised my own hand and noticed how filthy my fingernails were. Unshaven and disheveled, I had come straight from my cave. But the woman chose to ignore this.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time,” she said brightly. “I was just telling Lindsey about admiring a canvas of yours yesterday in the museum here.”

A canvas? She’d had to go back over a century to find something of mine to admire? “Is that right?” I said. “And where is here?”

A hint of amusement flickered across the woman’s remarkable face. “I’m in Budapest,” she said.

Budapest, Henry said inside my head. Sorry, Sam, but her valet system won’t talk to me. I have gone to public sources. Eleanor K. Starke is a noted corporate prosecutor. I’m digesting bios now.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” I told the woman standing halfway around the globe. “My valet is an artist’s assistant, not an investigator.” If her holo persona was anything like her real self, this Eleanor K. Starke was a pretty woman, mid-twenties, slight build. She had reddish blond hair, a disarmingly freckled face, and very heavy eyebrows. Too sunny a face for a prosecutor, I thought, except for the eyes. Her eyes peered out at you like eels in coral. “I understand you’re a corporate prosecutor,” I said.

Her bushy eyebrows rose in mock surprise. “Why, yes, I am!”

Sam, Henry whispered, no two published bios agree on even the most basic data. She’s between 180 and 204 years old. She earns over a million a year, no living offspring, degrees in History, Biochemistry, and Law. Hobbies include fencing, chess, and recreational matrimony. She’s been dating a procession of noted artists, composers, and dancers in the last dozen months. And her celebrity futures are trading at 9.7 cents.

I snorted. Nine point seven cents. Anything below ten cents on the celebrity market was nothing to crow about. Of course, my own shares had sunk over the years to below a penny, somewhere down in the has-been to wannabe range.

Eleanor nibbled at the corner of a pastry. “This is breakfast for me. I wish I could share it with you. It’s marvelous.” She brushed crumbs from the corner of her mouth. “By the way, your assistant—Henry, is it?—sounds rather priggish.” She set her cup down on something outside her holo frame before continuing. “Oh, don’t be offended, Sam. I’m not snooping. Your Henry’s encryption stinks—it’s practically broadcasting your every thought.”

“Then you already know how charmed I am,” I said.

She laughed. “I’m really botching this, aren’t I? I’m trying to pick you up, Samson Harger. Do you want me to pick you up, or should I wait until you’ve had a chance to shower and take a nap?”

I considered this brash young/old woman and her awkward advances. Warning bells were going off inside my head, but that was probably just Henry, who does tend to be a bit of a prig, and though Eleanor Starke seemed too cocky for my tastes and too full of herself to be much fun, I was intrigued. Not by anything she said, but by her eyebrows. They were vast and disturbingly expressive. As she spoke, they arched and plunged to accentuate her words, and I couldn’t imagine why she didn’t have them tamed. They fascinated me, and like Henry’s parade of artist types before me, I took the bait.

OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Eleanor and I became acquainted with each other’s bedrooms and gardens up and down the eastern seaboard. We stole moments between her incessant business trips and obligations. Eventually, the novelty wore off. She stopped calling me, and I stopped calling her. We had moved on, or so I thought. A month passed when I received a call from Hong Kong. Her Calendar asked if I would care to hololunch the next day. Her late lunch in China would coincide with my midnight brandy in Buffalo.

I holoed at the appointed time. She had already begun her meal and was expertly freighting a morsel of water chestnut to her mouth by chopstick. “Hi,” she said when she noticed me. “Welcome. I’m so glad you could make it.” She sat at a richly lacquered table next to a scarlet wall with golden filigree trim. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay,” she said, placing the chopsticks on her plate. “Last-minute program change. So sorry. How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” I said.

She wore a loose green silk suit, and her hair was neatly stacked on top of her head. “Can we reschedule for tomorrow?” she asked.

I was surprised by how disappointed I felt at the cancellation. I hadn’t realized that I’d missed her. “Sure, tomorrow.”

That night and the whole next day was colored with anticipation. At midnight I said, “Henry, take me to the Hong Kong Excelsior.”

“She’s not there,” he replied. “She’s at the Takamatsu Tokyo tonight.”

Sure enough, the scarlet walls were replaced by paper screens. “There you are,” she said. “God, I’m famished.” She uncovered a bowl and scooped steamy sticky rice onto her plate while telling me in broad terms about a case she was brokering. “They asked me to stay on, you know. Join the firm.”

I sipped my drink. “Are you going to?”

She glanced at me, curious. “I get offers like that all the time.”

We began to meet for a half hour or so each day and talked about whatever came to mind. El’s interests were deep and broad; everything seemed to fascinate her. She told me, while choking back laughter, ribald anecdotes of famous people caught in embarrassing situations. She revealed curious truths behind the day’s news stories and pointed out related investment opportunities. She teased out of me all sorts of opinions, gossip, and jokes. Her half of the room changed daily and reflected her hectic itinerary: jade, bamboo, and teak. My half of the room never varied. It was the atrium of my hillside house in Santa Barbara where I had gone in order to be three hours closer to her. As we talked I looked down the yucca- and chaparral-choked canyon to the university campus and beach below, to the channel islands, and beyond them, to the blue-green Pacific that separated us.

WEEKS LATER, WHEN again we met in realbody, I was shy. I didn’t know quite what to do with my hands when we talked. We sat close together in my living room and tried to pick any number of conversational threads. With no success. Her body, so close, befuddled me. I thought I knew her body—hadn’t I undressed it a dozen times before? But it was different now, occupied, as it was, by El. I wanted to make love to El, if ever I could get started.

“Nervous, are we?” she teased.

FORTUNATELY, BEFORE WE went completely off the deep end, the self-involved parts of our personalities bobbed to the surface. The promise of happiness can be daunting. El snapped first. We were at her Maine town house when her security chief holoed into the room. Until then the only member of her valet system—what she called her Cabinet—that I had met was her chief of staff.

“I have something to show you,” the security chief said, glowering at me from under his bushy eyebrows. I glanced at Eleanor, who made no attempt to explain or excuse the intrusion. “This was a live feed earlier,” the chief continued and turned to watch as Eleanor’s living room was overlaid with the studio lounge of the SEE Show. It was from their “Trolling” feature, and cohosts Chirp and Ditz were serving up breathless speculation on hapless couples caught by holoeye in public places.

The scene changed to the Baltimore restaurant where Eleanor and I had dined that evening. A couple emerged from a taxi. He had a black mustache and silver hair and looked like the champion of boredom. She had a vampish hatchet of a face, limp black hair, and vacant eyes.

“Whoodeeze tinguished gentry?” said Ditz to Chirp.

“Carefuh watwesay, lipsome. Dizde ruthless Eleanor K. Starke and’er lately dildude, Samsamson Harger.”

I did a double take. The couple on the curb had our bodies and wore our evening clothes, but our facial features had been morphed beyond recognition.

Eleanor stepped into the holoscape and examined them closely. “Good. Good job.”

“Thank you,” said her security chief. “If that’s everything—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “It’s not everything.”

Eleanor arched an eyebrow in my direction.

Those eyebrows were beginning to annoy me. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “You altered a pointcast feed while it was being transmitted?”

She looked at me as though I were simple. “Why, yes, Sam, I did,” she said.

“Is that even possible? I never heard of that. Is it legal?”

She only looked blankly at me.

“All right then. Forget I said that, but you altered my image along with yours. Did you ever stop to wonder if I want my image fooled with?”

She turned to her security chief. “Thank you.” The security chief dissolved. Eleanor put her arms around my neck and looked me in the eye. “I value our privacy, Sam.”

A WEEK LATER, Eleanor and I were in my Buffalo apartment. Out of the blue she asked me to order a copy of the newly released memoir installment of a certain best-selling author. She said he was a predecessor of mine, a recent lover, who against her wishes had included several paragraphs about their affair in his latest reading. I told Henry to fetch the reading, but Eleanor said no, that it would be better to order it through the houseputer. When I did so, the houseputer froze up. It just stopped working and wouldn’t respond. That had never happened before. My apartment’s comfort support failed. Lights went out, the kitchen quit, and the doors all sprang open. Eleanor giggled. “How many copies of that do you think he’ll be able to sell?” she said.

I was getting the point, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. The last straw came when I discovered that her Cabinet was messing with Henry. I had asked Henry for his bimonthly report on my finances, and he said, Please stand by.

“Is there a problem?”

My processing capabilities are currently overloaded. Please stand by.

Overloaded? My finances were convoluted, but they’d never been that bad. “Henry, what’s going on?”

There was no response for a while, then he said in a tiny voice, Take me to Chicago.

Chicago. My studio. That was where his container was. I left immediately, worried sick. Between outages, Henry was able to assure me that he was essentially sound, but that he was preoccupied in warding off a series of security breaches.

“From where? Henry, tell me who’s doing this to you.”

It’s trying again. No, it’s in. It’s gone. Here it comes again. Please stand by.

Suddenly my mouth began to water, and my saliva tasted like machine oil: Henry—or someone—had initiated a terminus purge. I was excreting my interface with Henry. Over the next dozen hours I spat, sweat, pissed, and shit the millions of slave nanoprocessors that resided in the vacuoles of my fat cells and linked me to Henry’s box in Chicago. Until I reached my studio, we were out of contact and I was on my own. Without a belt valet to navigate the labyrinthine Slipstream tube, I undershot Illinois altogether and had to backtrack from Toronto. Chicago cabs still respond to voice command, but as I had no way to transfer credit, I was forced to walk the ten blocks to the Drexler Building.

Once inside my studio, I rushed to the little ceramic container tucked between a cabinet and the wall. “Are you there?” Henry existed as a pleasant voice in my head. He existed as data streams through space and fiber. He existed as an uroboros signal in a Swiss loopvault. But if Henry existed as a physical being at all, it was as the gelatinous paste inside this box. “Henry?”

The box’s ready light blinked on.

“THE BITCH! HOW dare she?”

“Actually, it makes perfect sense.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

Henry was safe as long as he remained a netless stand-alone. He couldn’t even answer the phone for me. He was a prisoner; we were both prisoners in my Chicago studio. Eleanor’s security chief had breached Henry’s shell millions of times, near continuously since the moment I met her at my friend’s reception. Henry’s shell was an off-the-shelf module I had purchased years ago for protection against garden-variety espionage. I had rarely updated it, and it was long obsolete.

“Her Cabinet is a diplomat-class unit,” Henry argued. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t want to hear it, Henry.”

At first the invasion was so subtle and Henry so unskilled that he was unaware of the foreign presence inside his shell. When he became aware, he mounted the standard defense, but Eleanor’s system flowed through its gates like water. So he set about studying each breach, learning and building ever more effective countermeasures. As the attacks escalated to epic proportions, Henry’s self-defense consumed his full attention.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did, Sam, several times.”

“That’s not true. I don’t remember you telling me once.”

“You have been somewhat distracted lately.”

The question was, how much damage had been done, not to me, but to Henry. I doubted that Eleanor was after my personal records, and there was little in my past anyone could use to harm me. I was an artist, after all, not a judge. But if Eleanor had damaged Henry, that would be the end. I had owned Henry since the days of keyboards and pointing devices. He was the repository of my life’s work and memory. I could not replace him. He did my bookkeeping, sure, and my taxes, appointments, and legal tasks. He monitored my health, my domiciles, my investments, etc., etc. These functions I could replace. It was his personality bud that was irreplaceable. I had been growing it for eighty years. It was a unique design tool that amplified my mind perfectly. I depended on it, on Henry, to read my mind, to engineer the materials I used, and to test my ideas against the tastes of world culture. We worked as a team. I had taught him to play the devil’s advocate. He provided me feedback and insight.

“Eleanor’s Cabinet was interested neither in your records nor in my personality bud. It simply needed to ascertain, on a continuing basis, that I was still Henry and that no one else had corrupted me.”

“Couldn’t it just ask?”

“If I were corrupted, do you think I would tell?”

“Are you corrupted?”

“Of course not.”

I cringed at the thought of installing Henry back into my body not knowing if he were someone’s dirty little spy.

“Henry, you have a complete backup here, right?”

“Yes.”

“One that predates my first encounter with Eleanor?”

“Yes.”

“And its seal is intact?”

“Yes.”

Of course, if Henry was corrupted and told me the seal was intact, how would I know otherwise? I didn’t know seals from sea lions.

“You can use any houseputer,” he said, reading me as he always had, “to verify the seal, and to delete and reset me. It would take a couple of hours, but I suggest you don’t.”

“Oh yeah? Why not?”

“Because we would lose all I’ve learned since we met Eleanor. I was getting good, Sam. Their breaches were taking exponentially longer to achieve.”

“And meanwhile you couldn’t function.”

“So buy me more paste. A lot more paste. We have the money. Think about it. Eleanor’s system is aggressive and dominant. It’s always in crisis mode. But it’s the good guys. If I can learn how to lock it out, I’ll be better prepared to meet the bad guys who’ll soon be trying to get to Eleanor through you.”

“Good, Henry, except for one essential fact. There is no Eleanor and me. I’ve dropped her.”

“I see. Tell me, Sam, how many women have you been with since I’ve known you?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Well, I do. In the 82.6 years I’ve associated with you, you’ve been with 343 women. Your archives reveal at least a hundred more before I was installed.”

“If you say so, Henry.”

“You doubt my numbers? Do you want me to list them by name?”

“No. What good are names I’ve forgotten, Henry?” More and more, my own life seemed like a Russian novel—too many characters, not enough car chases.

“My point exactly, no one has so affected you as Eleanor Starke. Your bio-response has gone off the scale.”

“This is more than a case of biology,” I said, but I knew he was right, or nearly so. The only other woman who had had such an effect on me was my first love, Jean Scholero, who was a century and a quarter gone. All the rest were gentle waves in a warm feminine sea. But how to explain this to Henry?

Until I could figure out how to verify Henry, I decided to isolate him in his container. I told the houseputer to display “Do Not Disturb—Artist at Work” and take messages. I did, in fact, attempt to work, but was too busy obsessing. I mostly watched the nets or paced the studio arguing with Henry. In the evenings I had Henry load a belt—I kept a few old Henry interfaces in a drawer—with enough functionality so that I could go out and drink. I avoided my usual haunts and all familiar faces.

In the first message she recorded on my houseputer, El said, “Good for you. Call when you’re done.” In the second she said, “It’s been over a week—must be a masterpiece.” In the third, “Tell me what’s wrong. You’re entirely too sensitive. This is ridiculous. Grow up!”

I tried to tell her what was wrong. I recorded a message for her, a long seething litany of accusations, but was too angry to post it.

In her fourth message, El said, “It’s about Henry, isn’t it? My security chief told me all about it. Don’t worry; they frisk everyone I meet, nothing personal, and they don’t rewrite anything. It’s their standing orders, and it’s meant to protect me. You have no idea, Sam, how many times I’d be dead if it weren’t for my protocol.

“Anyway, I’ve told them to lay off Henry. They said they could install a dead-man trigger in Henry’s personality bud, something I do for my own systems, but I said no. Complete hands off. All right? Is that enough?

“Call me, Sam. Let me know you’re all right at least. I—miss you.”

In the meantime I could find no trace of a foreign personality in Henry. I knew my Henry just as well as he knew me. His thought process was like a familiar tune to me, and at no time during our weeks of incessant conversation did he strike a false note.

El sent her fifth message from bed where she lay between iridescent sheets (of my design). She said nothing. She looked directly at the holocam, propped herself up, letting the sheet fall to her waist, and brushed her hair. Her chest above her breasts, as I had discovered, was spangled with freckles.

Bouquets of real flowers began to arrive at my door with notes that said simply, “Call.”

The best-selling memoirs that had stymied my Buffalo houseputer arrived on datapin with the section about Eleanor extant. The author’s simulacrum, seated in a cane-backed chair and reading from a leather-bound book, described Eleanor in his soft southern drawl as a “perfumed vulvoid whose bush has somehow migrated to her forehead, a lithe misander with the emotional range of a homcom slug.” I asked the sim to stop and elaborate. He flashed me his trademark smirk and said, “In her relations with men, Eleanor Starke is not interested in emotional communion. She prefers entertainment of a more childish variety, like poking frogs with a stick. She is a woman of brittle patience with no time for fluffy feelings or fuzzy thoughts. Except in bed. In bed Eleanor Starke likes her men half-baked. The gooier the better. That’s why she likes to toy with artists. The higher an opinion a man has of himself, the more painfully sensitive he is, the more polished his hubris, the more fun it is to poke him open and see all the runny mess inside.”

What he said enraged me, regardless of how well it hit the mark. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yelled at the sim. “El’s not like that at all. You obviously never knew her. She’s no saint, but she has a heart, and affection and—to hell with you!”

“Thank you for your comments,” the author said. “May we quote you? Be on the lookout for our companion volume to this memoir installment, The Skewered Lash Back, due out in September from Pageturner Productions.”

I had been around for 147 years and was happy with my life. I had successfully navigated several careers and amassed a fortune that even Henry had trouble charting. Still, I jumped out of bed each day with a renewed sense of interest and adventure. I would have been pleased to live the next 147 years in exactly the same manner. And yet, when El sent her final message—a glum El sitting in the Museum of Art and Science, a wall-sized early canvas of mine behind her—I knew my life to be ashes and dirt.

SEVENTY-TWO THICK CANDLES in man-sized golden stands flanked me like sentries as I waited and fretted in my tuxedo at the altar rail. The guttering beeswax flames filled the cathedral with the fragrance of clover. LOOK proclaimed our wedding to be the “Wedding of the Hour” and it was streamed live on the Wedding Channel. A castrati choir, hidden in the gloom beneath the giant bronze pipes of the organ, challenged all to submit to the mercy of Goodness. Their sweet soprano threaded through miles of stone vaults, collecting odd echoes and unexpected harmony. More than a million subscribers fidgeted in wooden pews that stretched, it seemed, to the horizon. And each subscriber occupied an aisle seat at the front.

In the network’s New York studio, El and I, wearing keyblue body suits, stood at opposite ends of a bare sound stage. On cue, El began the slow march toward me. In Wawel Castle overlooking ancient Cracow, however, she marched through giant cathedral doors, her ivory linen gown awash in morning light. The organ boomed Mendelssohn’s march, amplified by acres of marble. Two girls strewed rose petals at Eleanor’s feet, while another tended her long train. A gauzy veil hid El’s face from all eyes except mine. No man walked at her side; a two-hundred-year-old bride, Eleanor usually preferred to give herself away.

By the time of the wedding, El and I had been living together for six months. We had moved in together partly out of curiosity, partly out of desperation. Whatever was going on between us was mounting. It was spreading and sinking roots. We talked about it, always “it,” not sure what else to call it. It complicated our lives, especially El’s. We agreed we’d be better off without it and tried to remember, from experiences in our youth, how to fix the feelings we were feeling. The one sure cure, guaranteed to make a man and a woman wish they’d never met, was for them to co-habitate. If there was one thing humankind had learned in four million years of evolution, it was that man and woman were not meant to live in the same hut.

So, we co-purchased a town house in Connecticut. Something small but comfortable. It wasn’t difficult at all for us to stake out our separate bedrooms and work spaces, but decorating the common areas required diplomacy and compromise. Once in and settled, we agreed to open our house on Wednesday evenings to begin the arduous task of melding our friends and colleagues.

We came to prefer her bedroom for watching the nets and mine for making love. When it came to sleeping, I was a snuggler, but she preferred to sleep alone. Good, we thought, here was a crack we could wedge open. We surveyed each other for more incompatibilities. She was a late night person, while I rose early. She liked to travel and go out a lot, while I was a stay-at-homer. She loved classical music; I could stand only neu-noise. She worked nonstop; I worked in fits and starts. She was never generous to strangers; I simply could not be practical in personal matters. She could get snippy; I could be silent for a long, long time. She had a maniacal need for total organization in all things, while for me a cluttered mind was a fruitful mind. Alas, our differences, far from estranging us, seemed only to endear us to each other.

DESPITE EL’S PENCHANT for privacy, our affair and wedding had caused our celebrity futures to spike. The network logged 1.325 million billable hours of wedding viewership, and the guest book collected some pretty important sigs. Confetti rained down for weeks. We planned a five-day honeymoon on the Moon.

Eleanor booked three seats on the Moon shuttle, not the best portent for a successful honeymoon. She assigned me the window seat, took the aisle seat for herself, and into the seat between us she projected her Cabinet members one after another. All during the flight, she took their reports, issued orders, and strategized, not even pausing for liftoff or docking. Her Cabinet consisted of about a dozen officials, and except for her security chief, they were all women. They all appeared older than El’s apparent age, and they all bore a distinct Starke family resemblance: reddish blond hair, slender build, the eyebrows. If they were real people, rather than the personas of El’s valet system, they could have been her sisters and brother, and she the spoiled baby of the brood.

Two Cabinet officers especially impressed me, the attorney general, a smartly dressed woman in her forties with a pinched expression, and the chief of staff, who was the eldest of the lot. This chief of staff coordinated the activities of the rest and was second in command after El. She looked and spoke remarkably like El. She was not El’s eldest sister, but El, herself, at seventy. She intrigued me. She was my Eleanor stripped of meat, a stick figure of angles and knobs, her eyebrows gone colorless and thin. But her eyes had the same predatory glint as El’s. All in all, it was no wonder that Henry, a mere voice in my head, admired El’s Cabinet.

The Pan Am flight attendants aboard the shuttle were all penelopes, one of the newly introduced iterant types who were gengineered for work in microgravity. That is, they had stubby legs with grasping feet. They floated gracefully about the cabin in smartly tailored flight suits, attending to passenger needs. The one assigned to our row—Ginnie, according to her name patch—treated Eleanor’s Cabinet members as though they were real flesh and blood. I wondered if I shouldn’t follow her example.

“Those penelopes are Applied People, right?” El asked her chief of staff. “Or are they McPeople?”

“Right the first time,” her chief of staff replied.

“Do we own any shares in Applied People?”

“No, AP isn’t publicly traded.”

“Who owns it?”

“Sole proprietor—Zoranna Albleitor.”

“Hmm,” El said. “Add it to the watch list.”

SO THE FLIGHT, so the honeymoon. Within hours of checking into the Sweetheart Suite of the Lunar Princess, Eleanor was conducting business meetings of a dozen or more holofied attendees. She apologized, but claimed there was nothing she could do to lighten her workload. I was left to take bounding strolls through the warren of interconnected habs by myself. I didn’t mind. I treasured my solitude.

On the third day of our so-called honeymoon, I happened to be in our suite when Eleanor received “the call.” Her Calendar informed her of an incoming message from the Tri-Discipline Council.

“The Tri-D?” El said. “Are you sure? What did we do now?”

Calendar morphed into Cabinet’s attorney general who said, “Unknown. There’s no memo, and the connection is highly encrypted.”

“Have we stepped on any important toes? Have any of our clients stepped on any important toes?”

“All of the above, probably,” the attorney general said.

After stalling as long as possible, El accepted the call. The stately though unimaginative seal of the Tri-Discipline Council—a globe gyrating on a golden axis—filled our living room. I asked El if I should leave.

She gave me a pleading look, the first time I’d ever seen her unsure of herself. So I stayed as the overdone sig dissolved into thin air and Agnes Foldstein, herself, appeared before us sitting at her huge glass desk. Eleanor sucked in her breath. Here was no minor bureaucrat from some bottom tier of the organization but the very chair of the Board of Governors, one of the most influential people alive, parked at her trademark desk in our hotel suite. Both El and I stood up.

“Greetings from the Council,” Foldstein said, looking at each of us in turn. “I apologize for interrupting your honeymoon, but Council business compels me.” She turned to me and praised the inventiveness of my work in packaging design. She spoke sincerely and at length and mentioned specifically my innovations in battlefield wrap for the Homeland Command as well as my evacuation blankets for victims of trauma and burns. Then she turned to El and said, “Myr Starke, do you know why I’m here?”

Foldstein appeared to be in her late forties, an age compatible with her monstrous authority, while my El looked like a doe-eyed daughter. El shook her head. “No, Governor, I don’t.”

But she must have had some inkling, because Henry whispered, Eleanor’s chief of staff says Eleanor asks twice if you know what this means.

I puzzled over the message. Apparently, it had been flattened by its passage through two artificial minds. What Eleanor had probably said was, “Do you know what this means? Do you know what this means?” Well, I didn’t, and the whole thing was making me nervous.

“After careful consideration,” Foldstein continued, “the Council has nominated you for a seat on the Board of Governors.”

“Sorry?” El said and grasped my arm to steady herself.

Foldstein chuckled. “I was surprised myself, but there you have it—I’m offering you a seat at the grown-ups’ table.”

BY THE TIME we shuttled back to Earth, the confirmation process was well under way. Over the next few torturous weeks, El’s nomination was debated publicly and in camera by governments, corporations, the Homeland Command, labor charters, pundits, and ordinary putzes alike. Such a meteoric rise was unheard of, and conspiracy theories abounded. El, herself, was at a loss to explain it. It was like skipping a dozen rungs on the ladder to success. Nevertheless, at no time did she doubt her ability to fill the post, and she marched through our town house in splendiferous pomp, only to crash in her bedroom an hour later to fret over the dozens of carefully buried indiscretions of her past. On the morning she testified before the Tri-D Board of Governors, she was serene and razor sharp.

Immediately upon returning home she summoned me to my bedroom and demanded screaming monkey sex from me. Afterward she could hardly stand the sight of me.

I supported her as much as I could, except for a couple of times when I just had to get out of the house. I retreated to my Chicago studio and pretended to work.

When Eleanor’s appointment was confirmed, we took the Slipstream down to Cozumel for some deep-sea diving and beachcombing. It was meant to be a working vacation, but by then I suffered no delusions about Eleanor’s ability to relax. There were too many plans to make and people to meet. And indeed, she kept some member of Cabinet at her side at all times: on the beach, in the boat, at the Mayan theme village, even in the cramped quarters of the submersible.

We had planned to take advantage of an exclusive juve clinic on the island to shed some age. My own age-of-choice was my mid-thirties, the age at which my body was still active enough to satisfy my desires, but mellow enough to sit through long hours of creative musing. El and I had decided on the three-day sifting regimen and had skipped our morning visola to give our bodies time to excrete their cellular gatekeepers. But at the last moment, El changed her mind. She decided she ought to grow a little older to better match her new authority. So I went to the clinic alone and soaked in the baths twice a day for three days. Billions of molecular-sized janitors flowed through my skin and permeated my muscles, cartilage, bones, and nerves, politely snip, snip, snipping protein cross-links and genetic anomalies and gently flushing away the sludge and detritus of age.

I returned to the bungalow on Wednesday, frisky and bored, and volunteered to prepare it for our regular weekly salon. I had to page through a backlog of thousands of recorded greetings from our friends and associates. More confetti for El’s appointment. The salon, itself, was a stampede. More people holoed down than our bungalow could accommodate. Its primitive holoserver was overwhelmed by so many simultaneous transmissions, our guests were superimposed over one another five or ten bodies deep, and the whole squirming mass of them flickered around the edges.

Despite the confusion, I quickly sensed that this was a farewell party—for Eleanor. Our friends assumed that she would be posted on the Moon or at Mars Station, since all Tri-D posts on Earth were already filled. At the same time, no one expected me to go with her—who would? Given people’s longevity, it could take decades—or centuries—for Eleanor to acquire enough seniority to be transferred back to Earth.

By the time the last guest signed off, we were exhausted. Eleanor got ready for bed, but I poured myself a glass of scotch and went out to sit on the beach.

Wet sand. The murmur of the surf. The chilly breeze. It was a lovely equatorial dawn. “Henry,” I said, “record this.”

Relax, Sam. I always record the best of everything.

In the distance, the island’s canopy dome shimmered like a veil of rain falling into a restless sea. Waves surged up the beach to melt away in the sand at my feet. There was a ripe, salty smell of fish and seaweed and whales and lost sailors moldering in the deep. The ocean, for all its restlessness, had proven to be a good delivery medium for nanotech weapons—NASTIEs—which could float around the globe indefinitely, like particularly rude messages in tiny bottles, until they washed up on the enemy’s shore. Cozumel’s defense canopy, more a sphere than a dome, extended through the water to the ocean floor, and deep into bedrock. A legacy of the Outrage in the 2060s.

“So tell me, Henry, how are you and Cabinet getting along?” I had taken his advice and bought him more neuro-chem paste.

Cabinet is a beautiful intelligence. I consider emulating it.

“In what way?”

I may want to trifurcate my personality bud.

“So that there’s three of you? Uh, what would that accomplish?”

Then I would be more like a human.

“You would? Is that good?”

I believe so. I have recently discovered that I have but one point of view, while you have several which you can alternate at will.

“It sounds like I bought you more paste than what’s good for you.”

On the contrary, Sam. I think I’m evolving.

I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. I changed the subject. “So, how do you feel about moving off-planet?”

It’s all the same to me, Sam. Have bandwidth—will travel. You’re the one to be concerned about. Have you noticed how constipated you become at low-g?

“I’m sure there’s something for that.”

But what about your work? Can you be creative so far away?

“I can always holo to Chicago. As you say, have bandwidth—” I sipped my drink and watched the sun rise from the sea. Soon I saw El strolling up the beach in her robe. She knelt behind me and massaged my shoulders.

“I’ve been neglecting you,” she said, “and you’ve been wonderful. Can you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. You’re a busy person. I knew that from the start.”

“Still, it must be hard.” She sat in the sand next to me and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s like a drug. I’m drunk with success. But I’ll get over it. I promise.”

“There’s no need. You should enjoy it.”

“You don’t want to move off-planet, do you?”

So much for small talk. I shrugged and said, “Maybe not forever, but I could probably use a change of scene. I seem to have grown a bit fusty here.”

She squeezed me and said, “Thank you, Sam. You’re wonderful. Where do men like you come from?”

“From Saturn. We’re saturnine.”

She laughed. “I don’t think we have any posts that far out yet. But there’s a new one at Trailing Earth. I suspect that’s where they’ll be sending me. Will that do?”

“I suppose,” I said, “but on one condition.”

“Name it.”

I hadn’t had anything in mind when I said that; it had just come out. Was there something else bothering me?

Henry chimed in, Tell her to have Cabinet show me how to trifurcate.

That certainly wasn’t it, but it did help me to articulate what I was feeling. “Only this,” I said. “I realize now that you’ve been preparing yourself for this moment for most of your life. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re in the big league now. Don’t get in over your head too soon.”

NO SOONER HAD we returned to our Connecticut town house than another shocker hit the media. Myr Mildred Rickert, Tri-Discipline Governor posted in mid-western USNA, was missing for three hours. Eleanor blanched when she heard the news. Governor Rickert had been a dominant force in world affairs for over fifty years, and her sudden disappearance was another seismic shift in the world’s power structure. Still, she was only missing.

“For three hours?” El said. “Come on, Sam, be realistic.”

Over the next twenty-four hours, Eleanor’s security chief discreetly haunted the high-security nets to feed us details and analyses as they emerged. A homcom slug, on wildside patrol, discovered Governor Rickert’s earthly remains in and about a Slipstream car in a low-security soybimi field outside the Indianapolis canopy. She was the apparent victim of a NASTIE. Her valet system, whose primary storage container was seized by the Homeland Command and placed under the most sanitary interrogation, reported that Rickert was aware of her infection when she entered the tube car beneath her Indianapolis residential tower. She ordered the valet to use her top-security privileges to route her car out of the city and jettison it from the tube system. So virulent was the attacking NASTIE and so stubborn Rickert’s visola-induced defenses, that in the heat of cellular battle her body burst open. Fortunately, it burst within the car and contaminated only two or three square kilometers of farmland. Rickert’s quick thinking and her reliable belt system had prevented a disaster within the Indianapolis canopy. The HomCom incinerated her scattered remains after the coroner declared Myr Rickert irretrievable.

And so a plum post in the heartland was up for grabs. Eleanor turned the living room into a war room. She sent her entire staff into action. As the appointee with the least amount of seniority, she had no reasonable expectation of winning that post, but she wasn’t going to lose it for lack of trying. She lined up every chit she’d ever collected in her several careers and lobbied for all she was worth. My own sense of dread increased by the hour.

“Look,” I said, trying to talk sense to her, “you don’t imagine that this is a coincidence, do you? Your nomination and then this? Someone is setting you up. Don’t you see?”

“Relax,” she said. “I know I don’t have a chance in hell of getting this post. I’m just flexing my muscles and getting in the game. People would wonder if I didn’t.”

Early one morning a week later, Eleanor brought coffee and a Danish and the morning visola to me in bed. “What’s this?” I said, but I already knew by the jaunty angle of her eyebrows.

WE MOVED INTO temporary quarters—an apartment on the 207th floor of the Williams Towers in Bloomington. We planned to eventually purchase a farmstead in an outlying county surrounded by elm groves and rye fields. El’s daily schedule, already at a marathon level, only intensified with her new responsibilities as the regional Tri-D director. Meanwhile, I pottered about the campus town trying to come to grips with my new circumstances.

A couple of weeks later, an event occurred that dwarfed all that came before. Eleanor and I, although we’d never applied, were issued a permit to retro-conceive a baby. These permits were impossible to come by, since only about a hundred thousand were issued each year in all of the USNA. Out of all of our friends and acquaintances, only two or three had ever been issued a permit. I hadn’t even seen a baby in realbody for decades (although simulated babies figured prominently in most holovids and comedies). We were so stunned at first we didn’t know how to respond. “Don’t worry,” said the undersecretary of the Population Division, “most recipients have the same reaction. Some faint.”

Eleanor seemed far from fainting, and she said matter-of-factly, “I don’t see how I could take on the additional responsibility at this time.”

The undersecretary was incredulous. “Does that mean you wish to refuse the permit?”

Eleanor winced. “I didn’t say that.” She glanced at me for help.

“Uh, a boy or a girl?” I said.

The undersecretary favored us with a fatuous grin. “That’s entirely up to you, now isn’t it? My advice to you,” he added with forced spontaneity—he’d been over this ground many times before, and I wondered if that was the sum total of his job, to call a hundred thousand strangers each year and grant them one of life’s supreme gifts—“is to visit the National Orphanage in Trenton. Get the facts. No obligation.”

For the next hour or so, El and I sat arm in arm in silence. Suddenly El began to weep. Tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. I held her and watched in total amazement.

After a while, she wiped her eyes and said through bubbles of snot, “A baby is out of the question.”

“I agree totally,” I said. “It would be the stupidest thing we could ever do.”

AT THE NATIONAL Orphanage in Trenton, the last thing they did was take tissue samples for recombination. Eleanor and I sat on chromium stools, side by side, in a treatment room as the nurse, a jenny, scraped the inside of Eleanor’s cheek with a curette. We had both been off visola for forty-eight hours, dangerous but necessary to obtain a pristine DNA sample. Henry informed me that Eleanor’s full Cabinet was on Red. That meant Eleanor was tense. This was coitus mechanicus, but it was bound to be the most fruitful sex we would ever have.

AT THE NATIONAL Orphanage in Trenton, the first thing they did was lead us down to Dr. Deb Armbruster’s office where the good doctor warned us that raising a modern child was nothing like it used to be. “Kids used to grow up and go away,” said Dr. Armbruster. “Nowadays, they tend to get stuck at around age eight or thirteen. And it’s not considered good parenting, of course, to force them to age. We believe it’s all the attention they get. Everyone—your friends, your employer, well-wishing strangers, HomCom officers—everyone comes to coo and fuss over the baby, and they expect you to welcome their attention. Gifts arrive by the van load. The media wants to be invited to every birthday party.

“Oh, but you two know how to handle the media, I imagine.”

Eleanor and I sat in antique chairs in front of Dr. Armbruster’s neatly arranged desk. There was no third chair for Eleanor’s chief of staff, who stood patiently at Eleanor’s side. Dr. Armbruster was a large, fit woman, with a square jaw and pinpoint eyes that glanced in all directions as she spoke. No doubt she had arranged her own valet system in layers of display monitors around the periphery of her vision. Many administrative types did so. With the flick of an iris, they could page through reams of reports. And they looked down their noses at holofied valets with personality buds, like Eleanor’s Cabinet.

“So,” Dr. Armbruster continued, “you may have a smart-mouthed adolescent on your hands for twenty or thirty years. That, I can assure you, becomes tiresome. You, yourselves, could be two or three relationships down the road before the little darling is ready to leave the nest. So we suggest you work out custody now, before you go any further.”

“Actually, Doctor,” El said, “we haven’t decided to go through with it. We only came to acquaint ourselves with the process and implications.”

“I see,” Dr. Armbruster said with a hint of a smile.

AT THE NATIONAL Orphanage in Trenton, the second thing they did was take us to the storage room to see the “chassis” that would become our baby, if we decided to exercise our permit.

One wall held a row of carousels, each containing hundreds of small drawers. Dr. Armbruster rotated a carousel and told a particular drawer to unlock itself. She removed from it a small bundle wrapped in a rigid tetanus blanket (a spin-off of my early trauma blanket work). She placed the bundle on a gurney, commanded the blanket to relax, and unwrapped a near-term human fetus, curled in repose, a miniature thumb stuck in its perfect mouth. It was remarkably lifelike, but rock still, like a figurine. I asked how old it was. Dr. Armbruster said that, developmentally, it was 26 weeks old, and that it had been in stasis seven and a half years. It was confiscated in an illegal pregnancy and doused in utero. She rotated the fetus—the chassis—on the gurney.

“It’s normal on every index,” she explained. “We should be able to convert it with no complications.” She pointed to this and that part of it and explained the order of rewriting. “The integumentary system—the skin, what you might call our fleshy package”—she smiled at me, acknowledging my professional reputation—“is a human’s fastest growing organ. A person sheds and replaces it continuously throughout her life. In the conversion process, it’s the first one completed. For a fetus, it takes about a week. Hair color, eye color, the liver, the heart, the digestive system, convert in two to three weeks. The nervous system, major muscle groups, reproductive organs—three to four weeks. Cartilage and bones—two to three months. Long before its first tooth erupts, the baby is biologically yours.”

I asked Dr. Armbruster if I could hold the chassis.

“Certainly,” she said. She placed her large hands carefully under it and handed it to me. It was hard, cold, and surprisingly heavy. “The fixative is very dense,” she said, “and brittle, like eggshell.” I cradled it awkwardly. Dr. Armbruster smiled and said to Eleanor, “New fathers always look like that, like they’re afraid of breaking it. In this case, however, that’s entirely possible. And you, my dear, look typically uncomfortable as well.”

She was right. Eleanor and her chief of staff stood side by side, twins (but for their ages), arms stiffly crossed. Dr. Armbruster said, “Governor Starke, you might find the next few months immensely more enjoyable under hormonal therapy. Fathers, it would seem, have always had to learn to bond with their offspring. For you we have something the pharmaceutical companies call ‘Mother’s Medley.’”

“No, thank you, Doctor,” Eleanor said and uncrossed her arms. “We haven’t decided yet, remember? And besides, this one is damaged. It’s missing a finger.” One of the baby’s tiny fingers was indeed missing, the stub end rough like plaster.

“Oh, don’t be concerned about that,” Dr. Armbruster said. “Fingers and toes grow back in days. Just don’t break off the head!”

I flinched and held the chassis tighter, but then was afraid I was holding it too tight. I tried to give it to El, but she crossed her arms again, so I gave it back to Dr. Armbruster, who returned it to the gurney.

“Also,” El said, “this one is already gendered.”

I checked between the chassis’s chubby legs and saw a tiny little penis. It—he—was a little guy. Maybe that was when things started to shift in my heart. I had never parented a child before, not with any of the numerous women Henry claimed I had known, even though I reached adulthood long before the Population Treaties had gone into effect. Only once, with Jean Scholero, did I get close, but I was too preoccupied with my career, and she miscarried, and we didn’t last long enough to try again.

“Don’t be concerned about that either,” Dr. Armbruster said. “Your genes will overwrite its gender too. It’s all part of the same process.”

Eleanor touched my arm. “Are you all right, Sam?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

El turned to Dr. Armbruster. “Well, we’d better be going, Doctor. Thank you for the tour.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Governor Starke, and you, too, Myr Harger. On your way out, why don’t you stop by the procedure room and let the nurse take a skin sample.”

“That won’t be necessary,” El said.

“The decision is yours, of course, but it could save you an extra trip if you change your mind.”

BACK AT THE Williams Towers in Bloomington, we lay on the balcony in the late-afternoon sun and skimmed the queue of messages. Our friends had grown tired of our good fortune: the congratulations were fewer and briefer and seemed, by and large, pro forma, even tinged with underlying jealousy. And who could blame them? The Population Treaties had been in effect for nearly sixty years, and sixty years was a long time for a society to live outside the company of children. Probably no one begrudged us our child, although it was obvious to everyone—especially to us—that we’d come by the permit unfairly.

El deleted the remaining queue of messages and said, “Talk to me, Sam.” Our balcony was situated halfway up the giant residential tower that ended, in dizzying perspective, near the lower reaches of the city’s canopy. The canopy, invisible during the day, appeared viscous in the evening light, like a transparent film rippling and folding upon itself. In contrast, our tower had a smooth matte surface encrusted with thousands of tiny black bumps. These were the building’s resident homcom slugs, absorbing the last rays of the setting sun. They were topping off their energy stores for a busy night patrolling living rooms and bedrooms.

I asked her, “Have you ever had children before?”

“Yes, two, a boy and a girl, when I was barely out of college. Tom died as a child in an accident. Jessica grew up, moved away, married, led a successful career, and died at age fifty-four of cancer of the larynx.” Eleanor turned over, bare rump to the sky, chin resting on sun-browned arms. “I grieved for each of them. It’s hard to bury one’s kids.”

“Would you like to have another?”

She didn’t answer for a while. I watched a slug creep along the underside of the balcony of the apartment above us. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s funny. I’ve already been through it all: pregnancy, varicose veins, funerals. I’ve been through menopause and—worse—back through remenses. I was so tangled up in motherhood, I never knew if I was coming or going. I loved or hated every moment of it, wouldn’t have traded it for the world. But when it was all over, I felt an unbearable burden lifted from me. Thank God, I said, I won’t have to go through that again. Yet since the moment we learned of the permit, I’ve been fantasizing about holding a baby in my lap. I don’t know why, but I can’t get it out of my mind: the feeding, the cooing, snuggling, rocking. My arms ache for a baby. I think it’s this schoolgirl body of mine. It’s a baby machine, and it intends to force its will on me. I’ve never felt so betrayed by my own body.”

The slug bypassed our balcony, but another one was making its way slowly down the wall.

I said, “Why not have another one?”

She turned her head to peer at me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Doomsayer, but aren’t you the one who warned me not to take this posting? Aren’t you the guy who said something about someone setting me up? I’ve had Cabinet scouring the nets for the past few weeks trying to piece together who’s behind all this. But a baby? Do you have any idea how vulnerable a child makes you? You might as well tie a leash around your own neck.”

She relaxed again and went on, “But for the sake of argument, let’s just say that I have some powerful unknown benefactor promoting my career. And that this baby is a carrot to gain my loyalty. Well, here’s a basic law of life, Sam—wherever there’s a carrot, there’s a stick just out of sight.”

I thought about that as I watched the homcom slug. It had sensed us and was creeping across the balcony toward us.

“Well?” El said. “Any comments? It’s your permit too.”

“I know,” I said. “It would be madness to go through with it. And yet—”

“And yet?”

“Could you imagine our baby, El? A little critter crawling around our ankles, half you and half me, a little Elsam or Sameanor?”

She closed her eyes and smiled. “That would be a pitiable creature.”

“And speaking of ankles,” I said, “we’re about to be sampled.”

The slug, a tiny strip of biotech, touched her ankle, attached itself to her for a moment, then dropped off. With the toes of her other foot, Eleanor scratched the testing site. Slugs only tickled her. With me it was different. There was some nerve tying my ankle directly to my dick, and I always found that warm, prickly kiss unavoidably arousing. So, as the slug attached itself to my ankle, El watched mischievously. At that moment, in the glow of the setting sun, in the delicious ache of perfect health, I didn’t need the kiss of a slug to arouse me. I needed only a glance from my wife, with her ancient eyes set like opals in her girlish body. This must be how the Greek gods lived on Olympus. This must be the way it was meant to be, to grow ancient and yet to have the strength and appetites of youth. El gasped melodramatically as she watched my penis swell. She turned herself toward me, coyly covering her breasts and pubis with her hands. The slug dropped off me and headed for the balcony wall.

We lay side by side, not yet touching. I was stupid with desire and lost control of my tongue. I spoke without thinking. I said, “Mama.”

The word, the single word, “mama,” struck her like a physical thing. Her whole body shuddered, and her eyes went wide with surprise. I repeated it, “Mama,” and she shut her eyes and turned away from me. I sidled over to her, wrapped my arms around her, and took possession of her ear. I tugged its lobe with my lips. I breathed into it. I pushed her sweat-damp hair clear of it and whispered, “I am the papa, and you are the mama.” I watched the side of her face and repeated, “You are the mama.”

“Oh, Sam,” she sighed. “Crazy Samsamson.”

“You are the mama, and Mama will give Papa a son.”

Her eyes flew open at last, fierce, challenging, but amused.

“Or a daughter,” I added quickly. “At this stage, Papa’s not picky.”

“And how will Papa arrange either, I wonder.”

“Like this.” I rolled her onto her back to kiss and stroke her. But she was indifferent to me, willfully so. Nevertheless, I let my tongue play up and down her body. I visited all the sweet spots I had discovered since first we made love, for I knew her girlish body to be my ally. Her body and I wanted the same thing. Soon, with or without El’s blessing, her body welcomed me, and when she was ready, and I was ready, and all my sons and daughters inside me were ready, we went for it.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, a bird, a crow, came crashing to the deck beside us. What I could make out, through the thick anti-nano envelope that contained it, was a mess of shiny black feathers, a broken beak clattering against the deck, and a smudge of blood that quickly boiled away. The whole bird, in fact, was disassembling. Steam rose from the envelope, which emitted a piercing wail of warning. Henry spoke loudly into my ear, Attention, Sam! In the interest of safety, the HomCom isolation device orders you to move away from it at once.

We were too distracted to pay much mind. The envelope seemed to be doing its job. Nevertheless, we dutifully moved away; we rolled away belly to belly, like the bard’s “beast with two backs.” A partition formed to separate us from the unfortunate bird, and we resumed our investigation of the merits of parenthood.

Later, when I brought out dinner and two glasses of visola on a tray, El sat at the patio table in her white terry robe looking at the small pile of elemental dust on the deck—carbon, sodium, calcium, and whatnot—that had recently been a bird. It was not at all unusual for birds to fly out through the canopy, or for a tiny percentage of them to become infected outside. What was unusual was that upon reentering the canopy, being tasted, found bad, and enveloped by a swarm of anti-nano agents, so much of the bird should survive the fall in so recognizable a form, as this one had.

El frowned at me and said, “It’s Governor Rickert, come back to haunt us.”

We both laughed uneasily.

THE NEXT DAY I felt the urge to get some work done. It would be another two days before the orphanage would begin the recombination, and I was restless. Meanwhile, Eleanor had some sort of Tri-D meeting scheduled in the living room.

I had claimed an empty bedroom in the back of the apartment for my work area. It about matched my Chicago studio in size and aspect. I had asked the building super, a typically dour reginald, to send up an arbeitor to remove all the furniture except for an armchair and nightstand. The chair needed a pillow to support the small of my back, but otherwise it was adequate for long sitting sessions. I pulled it around to face a blank inner wall that Henry had told me was the north wall, placed the nightstand next to it, and brought in a carafe of strong coffee and some sweets from the kitchen. I made myself comfortable.

“Okay, Henry, take me to Chicago.” The empty bedroom was instantly transformed into my studio, and I sat in front of my favorite window wall overlooking the Chicago skyline and lakefront from the 303rd floor of the Drexler Building. The sky was dark with storm clouds. Rain splattered against the window. There was nothing like a thunderstorm to stimulate my creativity.

“Henry, match Chicago’s ionic dynamics here.” I sipped my coffee and watched lightning strike neighboring towers as the air in my room took on a freshly scrubbed ozone quality. I felt relaxed and invigorated.

When I was ready, I turned the chair around to face my studio. It was just as I had left it months before in realbody. There was the large oak worktable that dominated the east corner. Glass-topped and long-legged, it was a table you could work at without stooping over. I used to stand at that table endlessly twenty and thirty years ago when I still lived in Chicago. Now it was piled high with prized junk: design trophies, hunks of polished gemstones from Mars and Jupiter, a scale model Japanese pagoda of cardboard and mica, a box full of my antique key collection, parcels wrapped in some of my most successful designs, and—the oldest objects in the room—a mason jar of paintbrushes, like a bouquet of dried flowers.

I rose from my chair and wandered about my little domain, taking pleasure in my life’s souvenirs. The cabinets, shelves, counters, and floor were overflowing: an antelope-skin spirit drum; an antique pendulum mantel clock that houseputer servos kept wound; holocubes of some of my former lovers and wives; bits of colored glass, tumbleweed, and driftwood in whose patterns and edges I had once found inspiration; and a bull elephant foot made into a footstool. This room was more a museum now than a functioning studio, and I was more its curator than a practicing artist.

I went to the south wall and looked into the corner. Henry’s original container sat atop three more identical ones. “How’s the paste?” I said.

“Sufficient for the time being. I’ll let you know when we need more.”

“More? Isn’t this enough? You have enough paste to run a major city.”

“Eleanor Starke’s Cabinet is more powerful than a major city.”

“Yeah, well, let’s get down to work.” I returned to my armchair. The storm had passed the city and was retreating across the lake, turning the water midnight-blue. “What have you got on the egg idea?”

Henry projected a richly ornate egg in the air before me. Gold leaf and silver wire, inlaid with once-precious gems, it was modeled after the Fabergé masterpieces favored by the last of the Romanoff tsars. But instead of enclosing miniature portraits or clockwork engines, my eggs would merely be expensive wrapping for small gifts. The recipients would have to crack them open. But then they could keep the pieces, which would reassemble, or toss them into the bin for recycling credits.

“It’s just as I told you last week,” said Henry. “The public will hate it. I tested it against Simulated Us and E-Pluribus.” Henry filled the space around the egg with dynamic charts and graphs. “Nowhere are positive ratings higher than seven percent, or negative ratings lower than sixty-eight percent. Typical comments call it ‘old-fashioned,’ and ‘vulgar.’ Matrix analyses find that people do not want to be reminded of their latent fertility. People resent—”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get the picture.” It was a dumb concept. I knew as much when I proposed it. But I was so enamored with my own latent fertility, I had lost my head. I thought people would be drawn to this archetypal symbol of renewal, but Henry had been right all along, and now he had the data to prove it.

If the truth be told, I had not come up with a hit design in five years, and I was terrified.

“It’s just a dry spell,” Henry said, sensing my mood. “You’ve had them before, even longer.”

“I know, but this one is the worst.”

“You say that every time.”

To cheer me up, Henry began to play my wrapping paper portfolio, projecting my past masterpieces larger than life in the air.

I held patents for package applications in many fields, from archival wrap and instant skin, to military camouflage and video paint. But my own favorites, and probably the public’s as well, were my novelty gift wraps. My first was a video wrapping paper that displayed the faces of loved ones (or celebrities if you had no loved ones) singing “Happy Birthday” to the music of the Boston Pops. That dated back to 2025 when I was a molecular engineering student and before we lost Boston to the Outrage.

My first professional design was the old box-in-a-box routine, only my boxes didn’t get smaller as you opened them, but larger, and in fact could fill the whole room until you chanced upon one of the secret commands, which were any variation of “stop” (whoa, enough, cut it out, etc.) or “help” (save me, I’m suffocating, get this thing off me, etc.).

Next came wrapping paper that screamed when you tore or cut it. That led to paper that resembled human skin. It molded itself perfectly and seamlessly around the gift and had a shelf life of fourteen days (and a belly button!). It came in all races. You had to cut it to open the gift, and of course it bled. It was creepy, and we sold mountains of it.

The human skin led to my most enduring design, a perennial that was still popular, the orange peel. It, too, wrapped itself around any shape seamlessly (and had a navel). It was real, biological orange peel. When you cut or ripped it, it squirted citrus juice and smelled delightful.

I let Henry project these designs for me. I must say I became intoxicated with my own achievements. I gloried in them. They filled me with the most selfish wonder.

I was terribly good, and the whole world knew it.

Yet even after this healthy dose of self-love, I wasn’t able to buckle down to anything new. I told Henry to order the kitchen to fix me some more coffee and something for lunch.

On my way to the kitchen I passed the living room and saw that Eleanor was having difficulties of her own. Even with souped-up holoservers, the living room was a mess. There were dozens of people in there and, as best as I could tell, just as many rooms superimposed over each other. People, especially self-important people, liked to bring their offices with them when they went to meetings. The result was a jumble of merging desks, lamps, and chairs. Walls sliced through each other at drunken angles. Windows issued cityscape views of New York, London, Washington, and Moscow (and others I didn’t recognize) in various shades of day and weather. People, some of whom I recognized from the newsnets, either sat at their desks in a rough, overlapping circle or wandered through walls and furniture to kibitz with each other and with Eleanor’s Cabinet.

At least this was how it all appeared to me standing in the hallway, outside the room’s emitters. To those inside, it might look like the Senate chambers. I watched for a while, safely out of cam range, until Eleanor noticed me. “Henry,” I said, “ask her how many of these people are here in realbody.” Eleanor raised a finger, one, and pointed to herself.

I smiled. She was the only one there who could see me. I continued to the kitchen and brought my lunch back to my studio. I still couldn’t get started, so I asked Henry to report on my correspondence. He had answered over five hundred posts since our last session the previous day. Four-fifths of these concerned the baby.

We were invited to appear—with the baby—on every major talk show and magazine. We were threatened with lawsuits by the Anti-Transubstantiation League. We were threatened with violence by several anonymous callers (who would surely be identified by El’s security chief and prosecuted by her attorney general). A hundred seemingly harmless people requested permission to visit us in realbody or holo during nap time, bath time, any time. Twice that number accused us of fraud. Three men and one woman named Sam Harger claimed that their fertility permit was mistakenly awarded to me. Dr. Armbruster’s prediction was coming true, and the baby hadn’t even been converted yet.

This killed an hour. I still didn’t feel creative, so I called it quits. I took a shower, shaved. Then I went, naked, to stand outside the entrance to the living room. When Eleanor saw me she cracked a grin. She held up five fingers, five minutes, and turned back to her meeting.

I went to my bedroom to wait for her. She spent her lunch break with me. When we made love that day and the next, I enjoyed a little fantasy I never told her about. I imagined that she was pregnant in the old-fashioned way, with an enormous belly, melon-round and hard, and that as I moved inside her, as we moved together, we were teaching our child its first lesson in the art of human love.

ON THURSDAY, THE day of the conversion, we took a leisurely breakfast on the terrace of the New Foursquare Hotel in downtown Bloomington. A river of pedestrians, students and service people mostly, flowed past our little island of metal tables and brightly striped umbrellas. The day broke clear and blue and would be hot by noon. A frisky breeze tried to snatch away our menus. The Foursquare had the best kitchen in Bloomington, at least for desserts. Its pastry chef, Myr Duvou, had earned a reputation for re-creating the classics. That morning we (mostly me) were enjoying strawberry shortcake with whipped cream and coffee. Everything—the strawberries, the wheat for the cakes, the sugar, coffee beans—had been grown, not assembled. The preparation was done lovingly and skillfully by human hand. All the wait staff were steves, who were highly sensitive to our wants and who, despite their ungainly height, bowed ever so low to take our order.

We called Dr. Armbruster. She appeared in miniature, desk and all, on top of my place mat.

“It’s a go, then?” she said, reading our expressions.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” Eleanor said and took my hand.

“Congratulations, both of you. You are two of the luckiest people in the world.”

We already knew that.

“Traits? Enhancements?” asked Dr. Armbruster.

We had studied all the options and decided to allow Nature and chance, not some well-meaning gengineer, to roll our genes together into a new individual. “Random traits,” we said, “and the standard half-dozen alphine enhancements.”

“That leaves gender,” said Dr. Armbruster.

I looked at Eleanor. “A boy,” she said. “I think it wants to be a boy.”

“A boy it is,” said Dr. Armbruster. “I’ll get the lab on it immediately. The recombination should take about three hours. I’ll monitor the progress and keep you apprised. We will infect the chassis around noon. Make an appointment for a week from today to come in and take possession of—your son. We like to throw a little birthing party, and it’s up to you to make media arrangements, if any.

“I’ll call you in about an hour. And again, congratulations!”

We were too anxious to do anything else, so we ate shortcake and drank coffee and didn’t talk much. We mostly sat close and said meaningless things to ease the tension. Finally Dr. Armbruster, seated at her tiny desk, called back.

“The recombination work is about two-thirds done and is proceeding very smoothly. Early readings show a Pernell Organic Intelligence quotient of 3.93—very impressive, but probably no surprise to you. So far, we know that your son has Sam’s eyes, chin, and skeleto-muscular frame, and Eleanor’s hair, nose, and—eyebrows.”

“I’m afraid my eyebrows are fairly dominant,” said Eleanor.

“Apparently,” said Dr. Armbruster.

“I’m mad about your eyebrows,” I said.

“And I’m mad about your frame.”

We spent another hour there, taking two more updates from Dr. Armbruster. I ordered an iced bottle of champagne, and guests from other tables toasted us with coffee cups and visola glasses. I was slightly tipsy when we finally rose to leave. To my annoyance, I felt the prickly kiss of a homcom slug at my ankle. I decided I’d better let it finish tasting me before I attempted to thread my way through the jumble of tables and chairs. The slug seemed to take an inordinate amount of time.

Eleanor, meanwhile, was impatient to go. “What is it?” She laughed. “Are you drunk?”

“Just a slug,” I said. “It’s almost done.” But it wasn’t. Instead of dropping off, the slug elongated itself and looped around both of my ankles so that when I turned to join Eleanor, I tripped and capsized our table and cracked my head on the flagstone floor. The slug’s slippery shroud oozed up my body and stretched across my face. It congealed and blurred my view of the tables and umbrellas and crowds of diners who were all fleeing like horror-show shades. I could hardly draw breath. Eleanor’s face loomed over me for an instant, peering in at me, then vanished, though I cried and babbled for help. I tried to sit up, I tried to crawl, but I was tightly bound with my arms pinned to my sides.

Henry said, Sam, I’m being probed.

So was I. Anti-nano surged through my pores and spread beneath my skin. It entered my bloodstream and branched out to capture every cell in my body. It felt like hot smoke drifting through me and scorching me from the inside out.

My poor stomach, bulging with strawberry champagne mush, clenched and shot a pink geyser up my throat. But there was nowhere for it to go except down my chin and across my chest where it boiled away against my skin.

I thrashed about blindly, toppling more tables. I rolled in broken glass that cut me without piercing the shroud, so thin it stretched.

Fernando Boa, said someone in Henry’s voice in Spanish. You are hereby placed under arrest for unlawful flight from State of Oaxaca authorities. Surrender yourself. Any attempt to escape will result in your immediate execution.

“Not Boa!” I gasped. “Harger! Samson Harger!”

Though I squeezed my eyes shut, the anti-nano tunneled right through them to sample the vitreous humor and rods and cones inside. Bolts of white light splashed across the backs of my eyelids, and a dull hurricane roar filled my head.

Henry shouted, Should I resist? I think I should resist.

“No!” I screamed.

The real agony began then, as all up and down my body, my nerve cells were inspected. Attached to every muscle fiber, every blood vessel, every hair follicle, embedded in my skin, my joints, my intestines, they all began to fire at once. My brain rattled in my skull. My guts twisted inside out. I begged for relief.

Then, just as suddenly, the convulsions ceased, the trillions of engines inside me abruptly quit. I can do this, Henry said. I know how.

“No, Henry!”

The isolation envelope itself flickered, then fell from me like so much dust. I was in daylight and fresh air again. Soiled, scalded, and bloated—but whole. I was alone on a battlefield of smashed umbrellas. I thought maybe I should crawl away from the dust, but the slug still shackled my ankles. “You shouldn’t have done it, Henry,” I croaked. “They won’t like what you did.”

Without warning, the neural storm slammed me again, worse than before. A new shroud issued from the slug. This one squeezed me, like a tube of paint, starting at my feet, crushing the bones and working up my legs.

“Please,” I begged, “please let me pass out.”

I DIDN’T PASS out, but I went somewhere else, to another room it seemed, where I could still hear the storm raging on the other side of a thin wall. There was someone else in the room, a man I halfway recognized. He was well muscled and of middle height, and his yellow hair was streaked with gray. He wore the warmest of smiles on his coarse, round face.

“Don’t worry,” he said, referring to the agony beyond the wall, “it will pass.”

He had Henry’s voice.

“You should have listened to me, Henry,” I scolded. “Where did you learn to disobey me?”

“I know I don’t count all that much,” said the man. “I mean, I’m just a construct, not a living being. A servant, not a coequal. But I want to tell you how good it’s been to know you.”

I AWOKE LYING on my side on a gurney in a ceramic room, my cheek resting in a small puddle of clear fluid. Every cell of me ached. A man in a hommer uniform, a jerry, watched me sullenly. When I sat up, dizzy, nauseated, he held out a bundle of clean clothes. Not my clothes.

“Wha’ happe’ me?” My lips and tongue were twice their usual size.

“You had an unfortunate accident.”

“Assiden’?”

The jerry pressed the clothes into my hands. “Just shut up and get dressed.” He resumed his post next to the door and watched me fumble with the clothes. My feet were so swollen I could hardly pull the pant legs over them. My hands trembled and could not grip. My head swam, and I was totally exhausted. But all in all, I felt much better than I had a little while ago.

When, after what seemed like hours, I was dressed, the jerry said, “Captain wants to see ya.”

I shambled down deserted ceramic corridors following him to a small office where sat a large, handsome young man in a neat blue uniform, a russ. “Sign here,” he said, pushing a slate at me. “It’s your terms of release.”

Read this, Henry, I glotted with a bruised tongue. When Henry didn’t answer I felt a thrill of panic until I remembered that the slave processors inside my body that connected me to Henry’s box in Chicago had certainly been destroyed. So I tried to read the document by myself. It was loaded with legalese and interminable clauses, but I was able to glean that by signing it, I was forever releasing the Homeland Command from all liability for whatever treatment I had enjoyed at their hands.

“I will not sign this,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” the captain said and took the slate from my hands. “You are hereby released from custody, but you remain on probation until further notice. Ask the belt for details.” He pointed to the belt holding up my borrowed trousers.

I lifted my shirt and looked at the belt. The device stitched to it was so small I had missed it, and its ports were disguised as grommets.

“Sergeant,” the russ said to the jerry, “show Myr Harger the door.”

“Just like that?” I said.

“What were you expecting, a prize?”

IT WAS DARK out. I asked the belt they’d given me what time it was, and it said in a lifeless, neuter voice, “The local time is nineteen forty-nine.” I calculated I had been incarcerated—and unconscious—for about seven hours. On a hunch, I asked what day it was. “The date is Friday, 4 April 2092.”

Friday. I had been out for a day and seven hours.

There was a Slipstream tube station right outside the cop shop, naturally, and I managed to find a private car. I climbed in and eased my aching self into the cushioned seat. I considered calling Eleanor, but not with that belt. So I told it to take me home. It replied, “Address, please.”

My anger flared and I snapped, “The Williams Towers, stupid.”

“City and state, please.”

I was too tired for this. “Bloomington!”

“Bloomington in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York—”

“Hold it! Wait! Enough! Where the fuck am I?”

“You’re at the Western Regional Homeland Command Headquarters, Provo, Utah.”

How I longed for my Henry. He’d get me home safe with no hassle. He’d take care of me. “Bloomington,” I said mildly, “Indiana.”

The doors locked, the running lights blinked on, and the car rolled to the injection ramp. We coasted down, past the local grid, to the intercontinental tubes. The belt said, “Your travel time to the Williams Towers in Bloomington, Indiana, will be one hour fifty-five minutes.” When the car was injected into the Slipstream, I was shoved against the seat by the force of acceleration. Henry would have known how sore I was and shunted my car to the long ramp. Fortunately, I had a spare Henry belt in the apartment, so I wouldn’t have to be without him for long. And after a few weeks, when I felt better, I’d again reinstall him inbody.

I tried to nap but was too sick. My head kept swimming, and I had to keep my eyes open.

It was after 10:00 P.M. when I arrived under the Williams Towers, but the station was crowded with residents and guests. I felt everyone’s eyes on me. Surely everyone knew of my arrest. They would have watched it on the nets, witnessed my naked fear as the shroud raced up my chest.

I walked briskly, looking straight ahead, to the row of elevators. I managed to claim one for myself, and as the doors closed I felt relief. But something was wrong; we weren’t moving.

“Floor, please,” said my new belt in its bland voice.

“Fuck you!” I screamed. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you! Listen to me, I want you to call Henry, that’s my system in Chicago. Put him in charge of all of your miserable functions. Do you hear me?”

“Certainly, myr. What is the Henry access code?”

“Code? Code? I don’t know code.” Keeping track of passwords, anniversaries, birthdays, and all that sort of detail had been Henry’s responsibility for over eighty years. “Just take me up! Stop at every floor above two hundred!” Before we started moving, I shouted, “Wait! Hold it! Open the doors!” I had the sudden, urgent need to urinate. I didn’t think I could hold it long enough to reach the apartment, especially in a high-speed lift.

There were people waiting outside the elevator doors. I was sure they had heard me shouting. I pushed through them, a sick smile plastered to my face, the sweat rolling down my forehead, as I hurried to the men’s room off the lobby.

I had to go so bad, that when I stood before the urinal and tried, I couldn’t. I felt about to burst, but I was plugged up. I had to consciously calm myself, breathe deeply, relax. The stream, when it finally emerged, seemed to issue forever. How many liters could a bladder hold? The urine was viscous and cloudy with a dull metallic sheen, as though mixed with aluminum dust. Whatever the HomCom had pumped into me would take days to expel. At least there was no sign of bleeding, thank God. But it burned. And when I was finished and washed my hands, I had to go again.

Up on my floor, my belt valet couldn’t open the door to the apartment, so I had to ask admittance. The door didn’t recognize me, but Eleanor’s Cabinet gave it permission to open. The apartment smelled of strong disinfectant. I staggered through the rooms shouting, “Eleanor! Eleanor!” It suddenly occurred to me that she might be gone.

“In here,” called Eleanor. I followed her voice to the living room, but Eleanor wasn’t there. It was her sterile elder twin, her chief of staff, who sat on the couch. She was flanked by the attorney general, dressed in black, and the security chief, grinning his toothy grin.

“What the hell is this,” I said, “a fucking cabinet meeting? Where’s Eleanor?” In a businesslike manner, the chief of staff motioned to the armchair opposite the couch. “Won’t you join us, Sam. We have much to discuss.”

“Discuss it among yourselves,” I yelled. “Where’s Eleanor?” Now I was sure that she had flown. She had bolted from the café and kept on going; she had left her three stooges behind to break the bad news to me.

“Eleanor’s in her bedroom, but she—”

I didn’t wait. I jogged down the hallway. But the bedroom door was locked. “Door,” I commanded, “unlock yourself.”

“Access,” the door replied in a monotone, “has been extended to apartment residents only.”

“That includes me, you idiot.” I pounded the door with my fists. “Eleanor, let me in. It’s me—Sam.”

No reply.

I returned to the living room. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“Sam,” said the elderly chief of staff, “Eleanor will see you in a few minutes, but not before—”

“Eleanor!” I yelled, turning around to look at each of the room’s cams. “I know you’re watching. Come out; we need to talk. I want you, not these dummies.”

“Sam,” said Eleanor behind me. But it wasn’t Eleanor. Again I was fooled by her chief of staff who had crossed her arms like an angry El and bunched her eyebrows into a knot. She mimicked my Eleanor so perfectly that I had to wonder if El wasn’t projecting herself through it. “Sam, please get a grip and sit down,” she said in a conciliatory tone of voice. “We need to discuss your accident.”

But I wasn’t ready for any reconciliation yet. “My what? My accident? Is that what we’re calling it? I can assure you it was no accident! It was an assault, a rape, a vicious attack. Not an accident!”

“Excuse me,” said Eleanor’s attorney general, “but we were using the word ‘accident’ in a strictly legal sense. Both sides have provisionally agreed—”

I left the room abruptly. I needed to pee again. Mercifully, the bathroom let me in. I knew I was behaving badly, but I couldn’t help it. On the one hand I was grateful that Eleanor was still there, that she hadn’t left me. On the other hand, I was hurt and confused and angry. All I wanted was to hold her, be held by her. I needed her at that moment more than I had ever needed anyone in my adult life. I had no time for holos. But it was reasonable that she should be frightened. Maybe she thought I was contaminated. My behavior was doing nothing to reassure her. I had to control myself.

My urine burned even more than before. My mouth was cotton dry. I grabbed a glass and filled it with tap water. Surprised at how thirsty I was, I drank glassful after glassful. I washed my face in the sink. The cool water felt so good that I stripped off my HomCom-issue clothes and stepped into the shower. The water revived me, fortified me. Not wanting to put the clothes back on, I wrapped a towel around myself and went to my bedroom, but the room was entirely empty. No furniture or carpets—even the paint was stripped from the walls. I went back to the living room and told the holos to ask Eleanor to get some clothes for me. I promised I wouldn’t try to force my way into the bedroom when she opened the door.

“All of your clothes were confiscated by the HomCom,” said the chief of staff, “but Fred will bring you something of his.”

Before I could ask who Fred was, a big man, a russ, came out of the back bedroom, the room I used for my trips to Chicago. He was dressed in a brown and teal jumpsuit and carried a brown bathrobe over his arm. Except for the uniform, he looked exactly like his clone brother officer back at the Utah facility.

“This is Fred,” said the chief of staff. “Fred has been assigned to—”

“What?” I shouted. “El’s afraid I’m going to throttle her holos? She thinks I would break down her door?”

“Eleanor thinks nothing of the kind,” said the chief of staff. “Fred has been assigned by the Tri-Discipline Council.”

“Well, I don’t want him here. Send him away. Go away, Fred.”

The russ remained impassive, silently holding the robe out to me.

“I’m afraid,” said the chief of staff, “that as long as Eleanor remains a governor, Fred stays. Neither she nor you have any say in the matter.”

I charged past the russ to the bathroom saying, “Just stay out of my way, Fred.” In the linen closet I found one of Eleanor’s terry robes. It was tight on me, but it would do.

Returning to the living room, I sat in the armchair facing Cabinet’s couch. “All right. What do you want?”

“That’s more like it,” said the chief of staff. She leaned back in the couch and relaxed as Eleanor would. “First, let’s get you caught up on what’s happened so far.”

“By all means. Catch me up on what’s happened so far.”

The chief of staff gave the floor to the attorney general who said, “Yesterday morning, Thursday, 3 April, at precisely 10:47:39 EST, while loitering at the New Foursquare Café in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, you, Samson P. Harger, were routinely analyzed by a Homeland Command Random Testing Device, Metro Population Model 8903AL. You were found to be in noncompliance with the Homeland Acts of 2014, 2064, and 2087. As per procedures set forth in—”

“Please,” I said, “in humanese.”

The security chief took over and said in his gravelly voice, “You were tasted by a slug, Myr Harger, and found to be bad. So they bagged you.”

“Why? What was wrong with me?”

“Name it. You went off the scale. First, the DNA sequence in a sample of ten of your skin cells didn’t match each other. Also, a known NASTIE was identified in your bloodstream. Your marker genes didn’t match your record in the National Registry. You did match the record of a known terrorist with an outstanding arrest warrant. You also matched the record of someone who died twenty-three years ago.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How could the slug read all those things at once?”

“That’s what the HomCom wanted to know. So they disassembled you.”

“They! What?”

“Any one of those conditions gave them the authority they needed. They didn’t have the patience to read you slow and gentlelike, so they pumped you so full of smart agents you could have filled a swimming pool.”

“They—completely?”

“All your biological functions were interrupted. You were legally dead for three minutes.”

It took me a moment to grasp what he was saying. “So what did they discover?”

“Nothing,” said the security chief, “zip, nada. Your cell survey came up normal. They couldn’t even get the arresting slug, or any other slug, to duplicate the initial readings.”

“So the arresting slug was defective?”

The attorney general said, “We forced them to concede that the arresting slug might have been defective.”

“So they reassembled me and let me go, and everything is good?”

“Not quite,” continued the security chief. “That particular model slug has never been implicated in a false reading. This would be the first time, according to the HomCom, and naturally they’re not too eager to admit that. Besides, they still had you on another serious charge.”

“Which is?”

The attorney general said, “That your initial reading constituted an unexplained anomaly.”

“An unexplained anomaly? This is a crime?”

I excused myself for another visit to the bathroom. The urgency increased when I stood up from the armchair and was painful by the time I reached the toilet. This time the stream didn’t burn me, but hissed and gave off some sort of vapor, like steam. I watched in horror.

When I finished, I marched back to the living room, stood in front of the three holos, and screamed at them, “What have they done to me?”

“You’ve been seared, Myr Harger,” said the chief of staff.

“Seared? What is seared?”

“It’s a fail-safe procedure. Tiny wardens have been installed into each of your body’s cells. Any attempt to hijack your cellular function or alter your genetic makeup will cause that cell to self-immolate. Roll up your sleeve and scratch your arm.”

I did as she said. I raked my skin with my fingernails. Flakes of skin cascaded to the floor, popping and flashing like a miniature fireworks display.

The chief of staff continued. “Likewise, any cell that expires through natural causes and becomes separated from your body self-immolates. When you die, your body will cook at a low heat.”

I was stunned.

“Unfortunately, there’s more,” she said. “Please sit down.”

I sat down, still holding my arm out. Beads of sweat dropped from my chin and boiled away on the robe in little puffs of steam.

“Eleanor feels it best to tell you everything now,” said the chief of staff. “It’s not pretty, so sit back and prepare yourself for more bad news.”

I did as she suggested.

“They weren’t about to let you go, you know. You had forfeited all of your civil rights. If you weren’t the spouse of a Tri-Discipline Governor, you’d have simply disappeared. As it was, they proceeded to eradicate all traces of your DNA from the environment. They confiscated all records of your genome from the National Registry, clinics, rejuvenation spas, etc. They flooded this apartment, removed every microscopic bit of hair, phlegm, mucus, skin, fingernail, toenail, blood, smegma—you name it—every breath you took since you moved in. They sent probes down the plumbing for trapped hair. They even invaded Eleanor’s body to retrieve your semen. They scoured the halls, elevators, lobby, dining room, linen stores, laundry. They were most thorough. They have likewise visited the National Orphanage, your townhouse in Connecticut, the bungalow in Cozumel, the juve clinic, your hotel room on the Moon, the shuttle, and all your and Eleanor’s domiciles all over the USNA. They are systematically following your trail backward for a period of thirty years.”

“My Chicago studio?”

“Of course.”

“Henry?”

“Gone.”

“You mean in isolation, right? They’re interrogating him, right?”

The security chief said, “No, eradicated. He resisted. Gave ’em quite a fight too. But no civilian job can withstand the weight of the Command. Not even us.”

I didn’t believe Henry was gone. He had so many secret backups. At this moment he was probably lying low in a half-dozen parking loops all over the solar system.

But another thought occurred to me. “Our son!”

The chief of staff said, “When your accident occurred, the chassis had not yet been infected with your and Eleanor’s recombinant. Had it been, the HomCom would have disassembled it too. Eleanor prevented the procedure at the last moment and turned over all genetic records and material.”

I tried sifting through this. My son was dead, or rather never started. But at least Eleanor had saved the chassis. We could always try—or could we? I was seared! My cells were locked, and the HomCom had confiscated all records of my genome.

The attorney general said, “The chassis, however, had already been brought out of stasis and was considered viable. To allow it to develop with its original genetic complement, or to place it back into stasis, would have exposed it to legal claims by its progenitors—its original parents. So Eleanor had it infected. It’s undergoing conversion at this time.”

“Infected? Infected with what? Did she clone herself?”

The chief of staff shook her head. “Heavens, no. She had it infected with the recombination of her genes and those of a simulated partner—a composite of several of her past partners.”

“Without my agreement?”

“You were deceased at the time. She was your surviving spouse.”

“I was deceased for only three minutes! I was retrievably dead. Obviously, retrievable!”

“Alive you would have been a terrorist, and the fertility permit would have been annulled.”

I closed my eyes and leaned back into the chair. “Right,” I said, “what else?” When no one answered, I said, “To sum up, then, I have been seared, which means my cells are booby-trapped. Which means I’m incapable of reproducing? or even of being rejuvenated?” They said nothing. “So my life expectancy has been reduced to—what?—another forty years or so? Right. My son is dead. Pulled apart before he was even started. Henry is gone, probably forever. My wife—no, my widow—is having a child by another man—men.”

“Men and women actually,” said the chief of staff.

“Whatever. Not by me. How long did all of this take?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“A hell of a busy twenty minutes.”

“To our way of thinking,” said the attorney general, “a protracted interval of time. The important negotiation in your case occurred within the first five seconds of your demise.”

“You’re telling me that Eleanor was able to figure everything out and cook up her simulated partner in five seconds?”

“Eleanor has in readiness at all times a full set of contingency plans to cover every conceivable threat we can imagine. It pays, Myr Harger, to plan for the worst.”

I was speechless. The idea that all during our time together, El was busy making these plans was too monstrous to believe.

“Let me impress upon you,” said the chief of staff, “the fact that Eleanor stood by you. I doubt that many people would take such risks to fight for a spouse. Also, only someone in her position could have successfully prosecuted your case. The HomCom doesn’t have to answer phone calls, you know.

“As to the details of your release, the attorney general can fill you in later, but here’s the agreement in a nutshell. Given the wild diagnosis of the arresting slug and the subsequent lack of substantiating evidence, we calculated the most probable cause to be a defect in the slug, not some as yet unheard of NASTIE in your body. Further, as a perfect system of any sort has never been demonstrated, we predicted there to be records of other failures buried deep in HomCom archives. Eleanor threatened to air these files publicly in a civil suit. To do so would have cost her a lifetime of political capital, her career, and possibly her life. But as she was able to convince the HomCom she was willing to proceed, they backed down. They agreed to revive you and place you on probation, the terms of which are stored in your belt system, which we see you have not yet reviewed. The major term is your searing. Searing effectively neutralizes any threat in case you were indeed the victim of a new NASTIE. Let me emphasize that even this was a concession on their part. As far as public records show, you are the first seared individual allowed to leave the Utah quarantine center.

“Also, as a sign of good faith, we disclosed the locations of all of Henry’s hidey-holes.”

“What?” I rose from my seat. “You gave them Henry?”

“Sit down, Myr Harger,” said the security chief.

But I didn’t sit down. I began to pace. So this is how it works, I thought. This is the world I live in.

“Please realize, Sam,” said the chief of staff, “that they would have found him out anyway. No matter how clever you think you are, given time, all veils can be pierced.”

I turned around to answer her, but she and her two colleagues were gone. I was alone in the room with the russ, Fred, who stood sheepishly next to the hall corridor. He cleared his throat and said, “Governor Starke will see you now.”