Resurrection, Inc.

25

Danal dropped through the disembodied blackness, flailing his arms. He could see nothing, but he sensed the tumble of the other two bodies as they all fell together.

With a jolting abruptness, strands of nylon rope knocked the breath out of Danal’s lungs, and he lurched wildly up and down until he finally came to rest on a wide net strung from above. He struggled and turned around, looking in the direction his mind remembered as “up.”

About fifteen feet above, he could see a blurry green square of prismatic light, like the back side of an illusion. As Danal’s eyes adjusted to the shadows, he could discern the supporting ropes stretching upward from the net, fastened to three overhanging girders.

Nothing made sense. He found himself intact, not a cloud of atoms scattered apart by the disintegrator field. He drew a deep breath, tasted a salty and musty tang in the air. He heard a faint rushing noise down below… and could even make out occasional snatches of conversation somewhere out in the darkness.

Beside him, the Enforcer managed to get to his knees on the wobbly net, apparently nonplussed. Danal tensed, ready to fight back if the Enforcer drew one of his weapons, but the armored man pulled off his helmet instead.

Stunned, Danal saw that his head was pale and bald—a Servant.

The nurse/tech shook herself, then let out a long sigh. “Well, we’re in for it now.”

In the grip of confused astonishment, Danal could not respond.

The Enforcer/Servant ignored him as he crawled to the edge of the swaying net, hindered by his stiff armor. He reached a rope ladder with which he hoisted himself onto a narrow wooden platform above. “You were a good plant, Laina. But it had to end sometime.” He turned to Danal and smiled with a calm expression and tangible personal warmth. “I’m Rolf. Welcome.”

The nurse/tech—Laina—reached for the rope ladder as the Enforcer/Servant disappeared into the darkness. The white skirt rode up on her thick legs, exposing darkened panty hose that made cadaverous skin look like normal flesh. Danal remained motionless, squatting on the gently swinging net. Baffled, he looked at the square of greenish light high above.

“But… we’re still here! We fell through the disintegrator—”

“Maintenance opening.”

“It was one of the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches! I watched us fall through.”

“Maintenance opening.”

“What’s going on—please?”

Laina heard the plaintive desperation in his voice and paused to give him an explanation. As he listened, Danal began to chink the gaping holes in the mysteries, though questions continued to pour around the edges.

“This is the Bay Area Metroplex, remember?” Laina began, “When have you ever seen the Bay in all your life? All you find is Metroplex, buildings and roadways and office plazas. Years and years ago our dear sprawling city butted up against the ocean and spread out over the water, where the builders could still sink pilings to hit bedrock.” She spread her arms to indicate the shadowy forest of pilings. “This was all oceanfront property!

“In the beginning, they left maintenance openings so workers could go down to check the conditions of the pilings, to inspect the support beams. But that’s all been forgotten now that we’ve got Net-programmed repair-rats to do the routine maintenance. However, that still leaves the maintenance openings up on top. Some crazy city planner covered them with patches of holographic grass. Maybe they thought it would look pretty or something.”

She smiled and raised her painted eyebrows; her thick lipstick looked wet in the dusty light. “Holographic grass. Oh, people must have seen some clod fall right through the illusion—hence, a ‘deadly disintegrator blanket.’ But it’s been a long time now, and we make sure The Net doesn’t give out any real information about the maintenance openings. I doubt even the human bigwigs know the truth.”

She stood on the narrow platform and placed her hands on her hips. The wig covering Laina’s smooth scalp sat cockeyed in front of her eyes, knocked loose by the long fall. “Well, are you just going to gawk at me or do you want me to show you around? Gregor probably wants to know what’s going on.”

Danal worked his way over to the rope ladder, twice losing his balance on the lurching net. He could see only darkness below like a bottomless open mouth. Somewhere beneath him, he heard the soft rush of waves curling around countless pilings and girders.

“So who’s this Gregor you keep talking about?”

The nurse/tech offered her hand to help him up. The grip felt cool but strong. “He’s our fearless leader.”

With a Servant’s precise control Laina led him along a narrow walkway, a wooden board barely ten centimeters wide. Danal recognized similar walkways extending from place to place, level to level, and interconnected by rope or metal ladders and occasional platforms.

“After curfew sometimes we use the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches to get up there. But most of the time we choose less dramatic means—we found several openings and passages into the lower levels of buildings, once we knew where to look.”

“After curfew?” Danal sounded surprised.

“Sure, why not?”

“Not worried about the Enforcers?”

She made a wry expression. “It’s not difficult to be smarter than a bunch of bored Enforcers.”

Intermittent bright lights hung from various supports and girders; cords dangled like snakes in the rich shadows, tapping into the intricate power conduits of the Metroplex. The dangling lights ahead looked like a pattern of stars over the dark water. Large crates forming a stockpile of food and hardware hung in nets suspended from crossbeams and looming over the walkways.

Laina quickly worked her way down two rope ladders, bringing him closer to where he could hear the rippling ocean. Then Danal began to see people, other Servants dressed in a hodgepodge of clothing, some in gray jumpsuits; mostly, though, they wore bright and vibrant colors. All of them moved with a purposeful semblance of normal life, without the mechanical apathy of ordinary Servants.

“Are those all… Wakers?” Danal asked.

“You bet.” Many of the others stirred, watching his arrival. Some smiled; some looked worried.

The Wakers’ network of hammocks, platforms, suspended lights and ropes made a virtual world of its own. Some of the Wakers lay back under the harsh lights, sunning themselves, apparently working on their melanin to regain some skin color, though the clear synBlood would never let them have the ruddy appearance of life.

Near his ear Danal heard a clicking and scuttling noise. He looked up to see a pair of articulated mechanical repair-rats making their painstaking rounds—tediously maintaining things, checking conduits and wires, fixing structural damage. Tiny scanner lights endlessly swept over their field of view, correlating the picture with a master plan fed to them by a remote Net link. The repair-rats each carried a bevy of tiny tools and synthesizing equipment to repair any deviations they detected.

Laina noticed the repair-rat and swore under her breath. Danal realized the mechanical drones had been dismantling one of the hanging sunlamp fixtures. She reached up to deactivate both repair-rats and switched them back on after moving them to a different crossbeam. “There, it’ll take them days to get reoriented.” She clucked her tongue. “We basically ignore the damned things, except they always try to undo the intentional changes we’ve made down here. It’s a constant battle.”

Danal found the problem to be delightfully normal.

Gregor waited for them in a semi-private area. Low to the uneasy water, where several pilings clumped together and blocked him off from sight, the leader of the Wakers reclined on a wide hammock. A sturdy plank platform had been attached to the pilings and supported by ropes from above, forming a firm floor. Several sunlamps beat down with a harsh yellow glow. Stripped to the waist, Gregor lay back, sunning himself and reading a thin hardcover book, Frankenstein.

The nurse/tech led Danal along the narrow, creaking walkways and climbed down into the leader’s area. Gregor placed a bookmark on his page and snapped the volume shut as he sat up. The hammock swayed as Gregor gripped its edges.

“You’d better tell me what happened, Laina,” Gregor said before she could speak. The leader of the Wakers was a large man with high cheekbones, a heavy jaw, and distant brown eyes. Dark circles around his eyes made him look deeply concerned—not angry, but heavily burdened.

Laina kept her control and beamed at the leader, though her voice had a petulant tone. “It’s your orders to assist other awakened Servants at all costs. But wait until you hear who this is.”

She introduced Danal. He responded uneasily, still not at peace with all he had learned, too much too fast. But he and the nurse/tech managed to tell his story. He had hoped the pain would die away with another retelling—the wounds still ran as deep, but they did seem a little more bearable now.

When they had finished, Gregor appeared impressed. He pursed his lips. “Vincent Van Ryman? And an imposter. Knowledge is a powerful thing, Danal, and you’ve just greatly increased our power.” He stroked his chin and regarded the three support pilings with a distant gaze.

Danal was baffled, and honored in a strange way, but before he could ask Gregor to explain himself, he heard someone else approaching, running recklessly down the narrow boards.

With a thump, another Waker landed on Gregor’s platform, panting. Danal saw him to be a young boy with grayish freckled skin that looked splotched and diseased with his Servant pallor. Agitated, the boy gave Laina and Danal only a cursory glance, and then spoke to Gregor. He wore part of a disguise, some flesh-colored makeup that had been smeared, and a reddish wig tucked under his arm.

“We’ve lost Monica!” he burst out. With time-slowed clarity Danal saw Gregor stiffen and sit like a statue, afraid. The boy continued. “At Resurrection, Inc.! After we managed to get Rodney Quick’s body free, some Enforcers came around and interrogated the Servants.” The boy swallowed, then continued. “She—she terminated herself so she couldn’t answer them.”

Gregor hung his head. “Not Monica…” he mumbled. The boy Waker stood waiting, looking at the leader, then at Danal and the nurse/tech. But Danal had focused on a different comment. “Rodney Quick?” He could hardly believe what he had heard. “That—that’s the technician, the one I killed! What were you doing with his body?”

“We had business with him.” Gregor scowled, but used the question as a crutch to lift himself up from his grief. The leader looked at him with a hard, cold stare.

“We are the Cremators.”

26

After curfew, at high tide, all of the Wakers gathered down by the water level. Danal sat in awe, counting forty-five Wakers—forty-five other Servants who had regained their memories. Just like him.

Smoky torches hung in metal racks on the sides of the pilings; a black feathering of old soot streamed up the concrete. Danal could smell smoke from creosote and burning wood, mingling with the sour odor of the sluggish sea. The reflected torchlight looked like fireworks cast upon the water.

“Come on, this is something you must see,” Gregor had told him. “It’s our most sacred gathering.”

Danal hesitated, uneasy. “Are you sure I should?”

Gregor’s fixed gaze seemed filled with understanding. “You’re one of us now. Everything we do is open to you.”

Danal squatted on the platform nearest the water, withdrawn from the other Wakers, still confused, numb. Laina sat near him, wearing a bulky Servant jumpsuit instead of her nurse/tech outfit. The other Wakers respected Danal’s wish for privacy.

Three Wakers swam in the water, naked, exuberant in the cold sea. The water would clutch at them when the tide turned and began to march back out to the unseen ocean, but for now they enjoyed the freedom. Danal saw their carefree attitude, but he recalled too clearly—like pounding heartbeats in his head—the death of Julia, the betrayal by Nathans, his own murder during the High Sabbat….

“Cremators?” he had asked Gregor, astonished. “But… why? Why do you do it?” He sat for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“To keep others from coming back. To stop them returning from death, as we did. We can’t destroy Resurrection, Inc., and I would not, in good conscience, try to. But someone has to offer the living this crucial choice, whether to risk becoming Servants, whether to risk remembering.”

Danal was unable to choose among the many things he did not understand. “But how? How did I awaken? How did you get your memories back?”

Gregor shrugged. “It’s in the resurrection process. The bacteria in the final purging stage have a habit of mutating. We’re doing some of our own analyses, but we’re restricted by our limited manpower, you know, and because we have to be so damned careful when using other facilities. Apparently, a more potent strain of the purging bacteria can loosen some of the roadblocks to your old memories, the ones that are mercifully sealed away by death. Through one mechanism or another, all of us Wakers have regained our pasts, and our own thoughts and personalities.

“From your story, Danal, I suspect that Francois Nathans intentionally set you up, created the conditions for you to get your memory back. You should be able to figure out his reasons better than I can. But you claim Nathans is dead anyway, so the why of it all doesn’t really matter.”

“Are you saying that Nathans knew how to awaken Servants all along? Does he know about your people?”

“No, you’re jumping to conclusions. Other batches of the purging solution have mutated, and other Servants have indeed awakened, but anyone—including Nathans—would think these were just isolated instances. Any Servant would be disoriented and confused after getting the memories back—you remember it yourself. The first thing a newly awakened Servant does is to seek help in the obvious way, from humans. Most of these spontaneous Wakers are spotted, and summarily deactivated at Resurrection, Inc.

“But does anyone suspect our presence? Not at all. We wouldn’t survive an hour if anyone did, especially Nathans. You know how he hated the Cremators.”

Danal pondered this, and Gregor continued, “Have you ever heard of a story called R.U.R.? Rossum’s Universal Robots?” Danal shook his head. “It’s a rather obscure play today, but important when it first appeared in the year 1921. It was written by a Czechoslovakian named Karel Capek, and he first introduced the world to the term ‘robot.’ Derived from a Czech word meaning ‘involuntary service.’ Now, Rossum’s robots weren’t ratcheting mechanical monstrosities with blinking lights and buzzing voices—they were organic, humanlike servants to do all forms of tedious and unpleasant manual labor. Sound familiar? Rossum’s robots eventually awakened to their condition and took over the world, destroying all mankind.”

Gregor let out a long sigh. “I certainly have no intention to parallel that, although I do use the false name of Rossum Capek when I put on my disguise and go out to meet prospective clients for the Cremators.”

“Like Rodney Quick,” Danal muttered.

“Yes, like him.”

Now, down by water level, the Wakers were quiet, expecting something. Gregor sat among them, merely one of the group—Danal could not tell from appearances that he was their leader.

One of the Wakers, the burly man who had previously posed as an Enforcer, came up to Gregor. “All the repair-rats are out of the vicinity. They won’t set off any fire alarms.”

Gregor nodded. He looked at his own chronometer and consulted the hardcopy of a tide table. He folded the table and thrust it into his pocket, then nodded to the swimmers. They dove under the water and swam together between the clustered pilings into a deep blanket of shadows.

Danal watched with a kind of dread as he saw something emerge, floating on the water, pushed and pulled by the three Waker swimmers. It was a raft of some kind, scattered with wood shavings, kindling, paper, and broken logs. The sweet chemical smell of a volatile hydrocarbon drifted to his nostrils.

As the raft came into the full light, Danal saw the body of Rodney Quick laid out upon the piled wood debris. He cringed and felt the nurse/tech’s hand on his shoulder. He tried to leave, but Laina held him back.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“You, of all people, should see this,” Laina countered.

The technician’s body had been washed and clothed in a clean white robe. Surrounding the unlit pyre lay flower petals and brightly-colored ornaments. The Wakers swam harder, bringing the bier close to the gathered crowd. Gregor stood up and swept his gaze over the Wakers, speaking formal words in a baritone voice:

“This man bore the name of Rodney Quick. That cannot be taken from him, though he is gone now.”

“He’s gone now,” the Wakers echoed.

“He will remain wherever he is now, the World of Light, and nothing will ever bring him back.”

The other Wakers muttered appreciatively.

“We are the Cremators. We preserve the soul by destroying the flesh.”

“Preserve the soul by destroying the flesh.”

Other people took torches from their holders and tossed them to the three swimmers. Treading water, the Wakers caught the torches and simultaneously set alight the bier containing Rodney Quick’s body. As the flames caught on the naphtha-soaked kindling, the three swimmers went to the side of the raft and pushed, swimming furiously, until the pyre began to drift away. Gregor had timed it perfectly, for the outgoing tide drew the raft with it.

The other Wakers began to moan a somber yet somehow joyous chant. Gregor stood tall and took a deep breath, and then quoted poetry in a kind of eulogy. “This man bore the name of William Shakespeare. He was a great and literate man, and is remembered long after his death. He wrote,

Gregor recited the lines from memory, in a rich and serious voice. The other Wakers sat enthralled, listening. The leader paused and then intoned again:

“In another place, another play, William Shakespeare said,

Danal felt a deep, stabbing sadness and guilt, but also wonder at the proceedings.

Gregor drew a long breath, as if exhausted, and then spoke a final time as the gathered Cremators waited, watching Rodney’s pyre drift away, burning bright.

“This man bore the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was a poet and a revolutionary. He wrote a poem of a traveler coming upon a ruined statue alone in an empty and deserted wasteland:

Gregor closed his eyes. “After Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned during a storm, his friend Lord Byron built a pyre for him on the beach. While the villagers watched, Byron swam back out to his own yacht, turning to gaze at the flickering beacon as the growing fire freed the soul of Percy Bysshe Shelley and turned his body to ash.”

Above, the Cremators had set filters and traps to capture any smoke before it could waft upward and be seen rising through the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches, though so late after curfew no one should have noticed anyway. The dripping Waker swimmers pulled themselves back up onto one of the platforms. The receding tide carried the still-burning pyre along with it, and Danal could see the flickering light drifting farther and farther from him. By morning the ashes of Rodney Quick would be dispersed far out to sea.

Danal wished he could get rid of his memories, his guilt so easily.

Gregor made a motion of dismissal, and the gathered Wakers stood up, beginning to move away. “Thank you all,” Gregor said.

Danal came up to the leader as the other Wakers began to leave. As if anticipating his question, Gregor said quietly, “All this ritual and ceremony means nothing. But it makes us feel honored, and content with ourselves.”

Danal frowned, puzzled, and noticed a thin woman approaching Gregor, looking frightened. The leader smiled warmly at her. “Yes, Shannah. Come and meet our new companion. His Servant name is Danal.”

She looked distractedly at Danal and then back to Gregor. She was extremely gaunt, and dark rings of sleepless anxiety encircled her eyes. Unlike all the other Wakers in their world below, Shannah still wore a long fluffy blond wig to cover her Servant baldness.

“I’ve decided, Gregor… I’m going back,” she whispered.

“Ah, no, Shannah.” He shook his head slowly. “Please don’t.”

“I’ve thought about it so much, Gregor. I’ve made up my mind.”

“You know I don’t approve. We have to survive until we know more. I don’t want to lose you.”

Shannah’s eyes glistened. “But I keep remembering the tunnel, the bright light, the chimes. The peace. It’s calling me, Gregor. I have to go back to whatever’s there.”

The leader regarded her in silence for a long moment and then finally came to a personal acceptance of her reasons. Danal watched carefully, trying to understand.

“When?” Gregor asked.

Shannah swallowed. “It better be now. I’m ready.”

Gregor put fingers to his lips and gave a shrill, birdlike whistle. The departing Wakers stopped to listen.

“I wish you’d reconsider this, Shannah.”

She didn’t answer him.

Gregor spoke aloud to the gathered Wakers once more. “Shannah has chosen to make her return journey now. We must all bear witness.”

The other Wakers reacted with surprise and sadness. The skeletal woman stretched out on her back, listening to the whisper of the sea. Danal could still smell the acrid smoke from Rodney Quick’s disappearing pyre. Shannah brushed her palms across her slick gray jumpsuit.

“Candles?” she whispered. “I like candles. Can you light some?”

“Of course, Shannah.” Gregor smiled at her, trying to deface his grief. The freckle-faced boy Waker rapidly climbed up a rope ladder and returned a few moments later with a handful of thin yellow candles. Shannah sat up and watched as they surrounded her with the candles.

One by one Gregor lit the wicks. Shannah stared fixedly at the flame nearest to her shoulder. Her breathing grew faster and faster and at last she lay back, closing her eyes and letting a peaceful sigh pass through her lips.

“Say my epitaph, Gregor. I want to hear it.”

Gregor closed his eyes as if searching for something appropriate. Shannah whispered impatiently, “Hurry.”

The leader looked up. “This man bore the name of Edgar Allan Poe. He was a troubled soul who died young, grieving for lost love, but he left behind many true and somber words, such as these:

And, perhaps best of all:

Shannah rested the back of her head on the watermarked plank. Her lips drifted into a smile of ecstasy. “Thank you, Gregor.” She straightened her fluffy blond wig, and then let out a long, low breath. Her face fell slack as she stopped her synHeart and shut down the microprocessor in her head.

Gregor and the other Wakers let out a keening hum and looked up. With rapidly shifting glances they searched the air, gazing higher and higher to the invisible girders and pilings above, as if watching for Shannah’s departing soul.

27

Fear made Jones stumble like a drunken man. The two Elite Guard flanked him and briskly ushered him to a lift shaft. He followed mechanically, dazed. He wanted to hide, or apologize to someone, or demand answers, but the two Guards marched in silence as if daring him to speak. What did I do? he wanted to shout, but the halls were empty, silent, and none of the other Enforcers would do more than put eyes to the spyholes in their rooms.

The lift doors closed like a guillotine as the three men began to rise upward. Jones immediately grew claustrophobic. Still only half dressed, he felt his sweat turn cold in the air.

They emerged at the roof-level parking bay. In the black early hours of morning an eerie silence clung to the sleeping Metroplex. Without a word the two Elite Guards urged him across the poured-stone of the parking bay. Jones felt the implacable hardness of their armor and saw the determined set of their shoulders.

He thought of Fitzgerald Helms for a moment and felt a bottomless sadness. Helms had to die before Jones could get into the Guild—and now his career would end like this. What would Helms have thought?

The Guards had let him throw a robe over his shoulders, but Jones still carried his white Enforcer boots in his hands. They marched with muffled footsteps to a private hovercar that had been painted a dark flat blue to be invisible against the night sky.

For a moment Jones thought they were going to lock him in a segregation chamber in back, but instead they made him sit close between them in the main cabin. As the craft rose into the air and banked sideways, Jones looked down at the Enforcers’ dormitory he had called home for two years, thinking it might be the last time he’d ever see it.

Probably, if the Elite Guard were involved, something terrible was going to happen to him.

Jones swallowed so hard he felt his Adam’s apple plunge down and up again in his throat. He had no chance. Nothing would help. Maybe he could reason with them. “I still don’t understand.” His voice had a thin, whining quality to it. “Why can’t you tell me—”

“No,” one of the Elite Guard said brusquely. The other Guard continued to pilot the hovercar, paying no attention. As they soared onward, Jones looked down at the lights of the intricate but deserted arteries of the Metroplex. For a moment he was struck by the fact that of all those people cowering down there, no one would miss him. He had made no real friends—Jones had festered with the death of his comrade Helms even after two years, and it was his own damned fault. That’s right—wasn’t one supposed to wax philosophical while being led to an execution? He was out of uniform—would they just jettison him here, high above the Metroplex? Or would they dress him up as a gang member, someone supposedly killed in the violent after dark street battles?

The hovercar homed in on the mirrored monolith of the Enforcers Guild main headquarters. Jones’s stomach tightened and his breath came in shallower snatches as they neared the tower.

The hovercar cruised to the private landing dock reserved for the Guild’s highest management personnel. Jones managed to tug on his boots, at least, but his uneasiness grew. His brain churned over and over, trying to comprehend what he had done that was so terrible to warrant such special punishment. He had lost the Servant. He had started a riot, but that wasn’t his fault. He had discarded his armor—he had made major mistakes, certainly… but by the book, by his Enforcer training, hadn’t he done what he was supposed to do? What was he supposed to do now?

The pilot powered down the hovercar’s engines and disengaged the door. At the top of the tower the wind whistled around the walls, bearing an oppressive dampness with an oncoming spring storm. His white armored boots stood out garishly against his dark skin, his black skin-pants. He cautiously emerged from the hovercar and then nearly tripped down a set of access stairs as the second Elite Guard hurried him along. His legs were shaking.

At the bottom of the stairs they reached a sealed doorway The first Guard typed in a long and complex access code; a silent moment passed, then answering flickers of light came from the screen by the door. The Guard entered a responding password, and with an ominous, cobralike hiss, the door slid open into the highest levels of Guild headquarters.

“In you go.” Blindly, without thinking, Jones stumbled forward. Darkness clung everywhere, and he blinked his wide eyes, trying to see. He realized after he had gone several steps that the two blue-armored Elite guard remained motionless outside the door on the steps. Would they kill him here? Why had they even brought him this far?

Jones looked around himself in a vast penthouse office that covered an entire quad rant of the building’s top floor. The air stuck in his throat; gooseflesh crawled up his arms. From the towering vantage of the headquarters he could see the lights of the Metroplex strung out.

Warm light glowed from an aquarium covered with a wooden tabletop, as if it were some odd sort of furniture. He could hear the bubbling of the tank and see the colorful forms of the fish trapped inside their glass cage as they pointlessly went back and forth, bumping up against the unseen walls….

Behind a huge semicircular clonewood desk, Jones finally saw a darkened figure waiting for him.

“Former Enforcer Jones,” a biting voice spoke from the shadows, “you’ve caused me a great deal of trouble today.”

Jones cringed and froze. He didn’t dare turn around, but he thought sure he could sense the two Guards each drawing a projectile weapon, aiming at him—

With a melodramatic twist the figure behind the desk brought up the lights from rosy banks around the rim of the room. Jones concentrated on the man at the desk, puzzled; he had black and oily hair that looked oddly out-of-place slicked back behind his ears. Then Jones recognized the man’s face after all.

Francois Nathans.

“I planned everything so carefully. It was so intricate. Too complex, I guess. Plenty of spots where a stupid mistake could drastically alter the outcome. I didn’t count on you acting like you did.”

Nathans shook his head and made a distasteful noise. “Hell, I can’t do anything about it now. I can grill you, reprimand you, shout my lungs out at you, Jones—it might make me feel good for the moment, but Danal is still dead. My only chance to see if it would work—thank you, Jones, for making me feel so helpless!”

Jones swallowed again at the man’s bitterness and finally found his voice. Would it help to be submissive? Would anything help him now?

“What are you going to—” He paused, then suddenly bridled at the audacity of this man, the head of Resurrection, Inc. “Hey, wait a minute! I’m a Guild member. You have no right to threaten me like that. You might run your own company, but you have no right to be here, at Guild headquarters!”

He was appalled at his own outburst, but he realized nothing he said or did would change things. Jones had never felt a particular pride in or allegiance to the Guild, but it did have its own sort of honor, its own code. As questions piled up one after another in his mind, he turned to the two Elite Guard for support. But his voice simply did not carry the confidence or tone of authority to make them pay attention. One of the Guards held an electronic sweeping device, scanning the outer stairway. The second Guard stood at attention as the first stepped outside, still scanning, and closed the door. The second sealed it tightly from the inside. “All clear, sir.”

Nathans folded his hands behind the large desk and smiled petulantly. “And just who do you think runs the Guild, Mr. Jones?”

Jones stopped as a lump of ice snowballed in his stomach. “I… have no idea.”

Nathans smiled. “Well, now I think you do.”

Jones consciously closed his mouth. “May I please sit down?”

“By all means.” Nathans turned up the lights another notch. His smile held many different undertones, and it looked almost artificial.

Jones suddenly wondered if Nathans might be taking his revenge. Maybe it made Nathans feel satisfied if he could rub Jones’s face in a secret he would have no opportunity to divulge.

“Oh, I was behind the Guild when it started, years before I conceived of Resurrection, Incorporated. I hope you like stories, Mr. Jones? Good. You see, I decided that private security forces might be more effective and more motivated for maintaining law and order than any state-run, unionized police system. I won’t bother you with the details, but it turned out I was absolutely right.

“Working behind the scenes, I slowly managed to consolidate all the private security systems and conformance-assurance personnel into the Enforcers Guild. Collectively, the Guild edged out the cumbersome state-run police departments.”

Nathans’s voice carried a nostalgic tone. Restlessly he stood up from his desk and walked over to stare out the darkened windows. He pressed his face close to the glass; the lights from the room stretched his reflection into odd forms.

“It was all so easy that, frankly, I was a bit suspicious. So I decided to push a little harder, to see just how much we could get away with. But if it didn’t work, you see, if it backfired—I knew heads would roll. That’s why I kept my own involvement secret, at first. Fame and notoriety are the most useless forms of success mankind has yet invented.”

Nathans interlocked his fingers behind his slick black hairpiece and turned to face Jones again. “We put Enforcers all over the place. Their presence was unmistakeable. Escorting people to make them feel important. We even had them guarding things like statues and fountains and KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches—” He cringed for a moment, and then continued.

“But the crime rate dropped. Incredibly. We had to make up new laws just to give all the Enforcers something to do. We started street tension of our own, simulated gang wars after curfew so the people would keep thinking they needed us. We even made up the bloody curfew!” Nathans shook his head. “And the poor bastards bought it—hook, line, and sinker!”

Jones sat stiffly in the chair, sweating. Everything he had followed, all the training, the patrols—the ethics for which Fitgerald Helms had been killed—all because Nathans wanted to play power games. He kept his mouth shut, but Nathans must have been able to interpret the sickening distaste on his face.

The man slapped both palms on the mahogany-attribute desk. “Don’t you see! I didn’t do it! You think this is a police state? No! Because the people allowed it to happen. They didn’t do a damn thing to stop it, because they convinced themselves it was a Good Idea! There’s simply no excuse for apathy like that. I hoped that by pushing and pushing, it would finally spark their social consciousness, get someone involved. Our society has to change by itself, of its own choice, not have change forced upon it.”

He let out a long and heavy sigh. “Sometimes I’d like nothing more than to be caught at my own tricks. Even if they threw me out, at least that would prove people are paying attention out there! I thought this would be an electric shock to stimulate our stagnant culture. Teach them a lesson, so that they never get caught sleeping again.”

He cracked his knuckles and looked at Jones.

“So far, though, I’m deeply disappointed. All they’re interested in is the path of least resistance, letting me do whatever I want, no matter how much damage it causes.” Nathans spoke through gritted teeth and pounded his fists on the table for emphasis, then stopped and lowered his voice. “Sorry for the outburst. I’m having a particularly unpleasant day.”

Jones sat rubbing his temples and asked haltingly, with his eyes closed, “But if you’re Francois Nathans, the Resurrection man, I don’t… how can you possibly be running Guild headquarters? Resurrection, Inc. hates the Guild.”

“Ah.” Nathans briskly rubbed his palms together and then stopped himself, embarrassed. “That’s a perfect example of creating a perceived need for the Enforcers Guild. You see, if I set it up that Resurrection hates Enforcers, but it still needs Enforcers for protection, then that gives the Guild an incredible legitimacy, doesn’t it? Call it clout. Then other corporations won’t hesitate to engage the services of Enforcers, if even Resurrection, Inc. has to.”

Jones let the convoluted logic sink in until it finally made an appalling kind of sense. And when it all made sense, he began to grasp just how much Nathans had told him—far too much. The terror came yammering at his ears again.

Should he try to run? While Nathans had his attention elsewhere? Could he get past the two Elite Guards, take the hovercar, and fly off—go somewhere? Someplace outside the Metroplex? He’d never been outside before.

His heart pounded from just considering the idea. Sweat prickled on his forehead, and he knew it was going to trickle into his eyes at any moment. Jones tensed, felt his muscles tightening up, knotting.

The sweat dropped into the corner of his eye like a tear, and everything drained out of him in an instant. No. He’d never make it past the two Elite Guards. After all the incredible Enforcer training Jones had endured, honing his body, his reflexes, these two blue armored Guards had been through ten times more, and would be that much faster, better.

Jones swallowed. It was a waste of time to put it off any longer. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? For telling me all this.”

Shocked, Nathans stared back at the black man. “Let me tell you one very important thing, Mr. Jones. I value my life very much, and I certainly don’t look forward to dying. Life is what allows me to accomplish things—life is our one chance at everything. Consequently, I respect life, yours or anyone else’s. I don’t believe any crap about a ‘fate worse than death’ because, as the cliché says, while there’s life there’s hope. I do not kill, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. And I do not plan to kill you.”

“Then why are you telling me all this? I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t ask.”

Nathans’s response came back at him like an electric shock. “Because you are the newest member of the Elite Guard, Mr. Jones. Welcome to the Club.”

Jones blinked in astonishment. He felt yanked in a completely different direction, leaving him disoriented. “But what if I don’t—”

“You have nothing to lose, Jones. Come log on, see for yourself.”

Haltingly Jones went to the large semicircular desk and bent closely over the Net terminal. He punched in his logon name and his password and got to the first-level menu. “Now what?”

“Check your user status. It’ll take the Net accounting people a month or so to delete your old password.”

Bafffled, Jones requested a biographical update. His fingers shook, and he made several errors before finally entering the right command. He stared as the pixels formed themselves into his own obituary.

Jones saw the date and continued to stare, unable to move. Nathans blanked the screen. “It’s a trick,” Jones whispered.

“Yes, and a very good one. But you can try it on any terminal in the Metroplex. Once The Net’s been fooled, you may as well be dead anyway. Welcome to the Elite Guard.”

His head spinning, Jones walked back to the chair and sat down, almost missing the cushion. He didn’t have the capacity for anger in him—he still didn’t quite grasp what had happened.

“Mind you, Jones, this is a singular honor. Very few people are chosen for this. Congratulations.”

Jones wondered if he should feel proud of himself. He had never dreamed of becoming an Elite Guard. A slow, tentative feeling of amazement began to replace his sick terror. An Elite Guard? Had he done a good job after all?

“Does that mean you captured the rebel Servant, then? The one who caused all this? The one I was trying to chase?”

Nathans soured and turned his back angrily, looking out the wide windows. Jones saw the man’s back stiffen as he kept clenching his hands. “No. He escaped. He is dead.”

“I thought you wanted him alive.”

“I did! But he somehow got the help of a nurse/tech—they both killed themselves by jumping into a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch. They even took another Enforcer with them! In full view of dozens of people! Now there aren’t even any damned atoms of him left!” Nathans abruptly stopped shouting. “I had a lot at stake with that Servant, and now it’s all gone.”

But Jones frowned, distracted, and pursed his lips as he sat back in the chair. The Servant had jumped into a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch? This bothered him, nagged him even after everything else that had happened.

Nathans saw the expression and stopped abruptly. “What is it, Jones?”

The black man looked up, afraid again. “Nothing,” he mumbled.

Nathans rose to his feet and strode closer. His eyes looked at Jones intensely. “You look like you just thought of something.” His voice became warm and smooth. “I’m your superior now, Jones. I’m interested in any fresh ideas you have. Show me I didn’t choose wrong to pick you for the Elite Guard.”

Jones’s head spun, and he reluctantly answered in a low voice. “You probably don’t remember the reason I was sent to be an escort at Resurrection, Inc., Mr. Nathans. In my previous assignment I was trying to stop another rebel Servant”—he looked carefully at Nathans—“and she escaped by jumping into a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch, too. As if she knew something about it the rest of us don’t know.”

He heard Nathans’s sharp intake of breath. The other man turned toward him, and Jones could see his eyes glistening with surprise and fascination. “That’s… very… interesting.”

28

Danal jumped down from the thin crosswalk, perfectly coordinated, and landed with barely a sound on Gregor’s enclosed platform. Under the harsh light of the sunlamps the leader looked up, rubbing his fingers along the pages of his book. He slid a yarn bookmark in place and snapped the cover shut.

Gregor waited in silence, holding his squarish chin between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. Danal finally spoke in an abrupt burst of words. “I’ve spent the last day with your Wakers—”

“Your Wakers, too,” Gregor interrupted smoothly.

“The Wakers.” Danal paused, considering a tactful way to proceed. He saw a pile of neatly folded clothing in the corner, as well as an assortment of hats, wigs, false facial hair, and various flesh-colored creams and pigments. “I’m impressed with the organization, the brotherhood, you’ve put together. The Wakers seem to be a very close-knit group.”

“They are.”

“But—” He paused, troubled. Waiting, Gregor drifted back and forth on the hammock and motioned for his guest to sit. Danal squatted on his heels. “But what are you… doing? You’re all living from day to day down here, but it’s just hiding. You have the power to take some action. Why don’t you flex your muscles?” Danal focused his gaze on the leader’s face. “You strike me as too conscientious a man to sit back and do nothing.”

Gregor let out a long sigh, and Danal watched him. “I’m glad you think that way. We should be doing more than just sitting around and patting ourselves on the back. But we just don’t know enough. I’m wrestling with ambivalence—that’s the main snag.”

“Ambivalence? How can you possibly be ambivalent?”

“Think about it. We are Servants who have regained our memories. Now, do all Servants have the same potential to awaken, like we did? Or are they really just mindless machines, just another use for a discarded body like Resurrection, Inc. would have us believe? Are Wakers a fluke in the resurrection process?”

Danal gave no indication of whether he agreed or disagreed. Off in the shadowy distance someone was singing a low melody in a foreign-sounding language.

“That’s not what I believe,” Gregor continued. “And mind you, this is only my intuition. We’re too small a group to be a valid statistical sample. But I suspect all Servants do have the potential for reawakening those old memories. If they want to.”

Gregor folded his hands and bent closer to Danal. “What do you remember in between? Between life and death and life again?”

“Nothing,” Danal said, wondering why Gregor had changed the subject. He sifted through his memories, but the answer remained the same. “It’s just a blank. I told Laina, like a smooth, hard barrier.”

Gregor smiled. “Then let me show you how to penetrate it.”

From a wooden crate underneath his hammock he removed three candles and set them on the floor of the platform. He lit each one, then dropped the still burning match over the side. It fell down into the dark water far below.

“I believe the resurrection process snatched me away from a world of light, from a greater place—Heaven, for lack of a better word.” Gregor spoke in a quiet voice, tinged with a respectful awe. “I can’t remember exact details, though I do occasionally get glimpses—like my first flashbacks, only more maddening because these are visions of a higher reality, not just a past that fits into the world I can see around me.”

Gregor reached up, switching off the sunlamp with his fingertips. “Now, sit in a comfortable position.”

Danal hunkered down and adjusted his feet. He ignored the rough boards against his legs.

“It’s impossible to describe. Language has no analogies for what you experienced. It goes beyond explaining. But you’ll know what I mean—you’ve already lived through it, and died through it.”

Gregor took him through the motions, telling him to speed up his microprocessor, to shut out an outside influences, to concentrate on the hard boundary between his two lives.

“It’ll take time, because you’ve got to convince your subconscious that you’re really willing to face what you remember. But you have to keep pounding on the door, until it opens.”

Danal closed his eyes.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The microprocessor sped up his mind, slowed down the universe. He focused everything inward, centering on the moment of his death. The last memory. The protective shell that cut him off from anything beyond, making his thoughts slip off its hard surface.

Danal went through the stages of forced relaxation, meditation. Without concern he realized he had begun to feel numb all over, but he refused to relent his pressure on the barrier.

Death had hidden something more from him, something much more significant even than all his other flashbacks. He had so far uncovered only the tip of the iceberg. He hoped he could cope with the rest of it, if he could manage to dredge it to the surface.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Then he began to experience a pleasant rising sensation, a detachment, and ever so slowly a separation that led to an otherworldly ambiance. It was definitely unlike a dream.

And finally the black wall began to dissolve in front of him.

The pain—that came first. The blade of the arthame dagger bursting through his skin, sliding across his sternum, then stabbing deep into his chest cavity; he felt a rip as the tip broke through the pericardium and then cut deeply into the muscle of his heart. Vincent Van Ryman’s every nerve was dipped in hot oil, sending excruciatingly detailed information to his failing brain, but now he viewed it all through a distorted lens.

Then silence, a fresh, clean silence. Danal let himself experience the wonder and the awe of the impressions, unable to put even shadows of words to them. The absolute quiet felt brilliant, clean and sharp. And then slowly swelling from the background he noticed a muffled tonal mixture, a noise like a musical buzzing, bells and chimes.

No sense of touch, warmth or cold… he began to detect motion, though he could not pinpoint exactly what was moving—without sensory organs, all movement became dizzy and distorted. He was pulled along a dark tunnel, spinning upward, dragged by a force he could not understand into a pitch-black catacomb.

With an inaudible pop, he suddenly emerged outside his body, floating up near the ceiling of the sacrificial grotto, stopped by the papier mache stalactites. He looked down at the bloodbath, at himself slain on the altar—but the dead man below no longer even looked like him because of the surface-cloning.

On the heels of that thought came a rapid-fire burst of Vincent Van Ryman’s life, all his memories exploding outward at once. The visual images were vivid and instantaneous, with no definite sequence, but they all made sense to him.

The memory images blurred together, smeared out into a glow that grew brighter and brighter. Around him, Danal began to perceive other spirits, bright colored lights—his escorts.

His thoughts floated in a euphoric, untroubled sea of utter contentment. Ushered by the other spirits, tantalized by the beckoning light ahead, he moved toward a borderland which may or may not have had a physical substance. Danal had almost reached a destination, an arrival.

Then suddenly the black barrier of forbidden memory clamped down on him again. Everything stopped abruptly. Danal tried, needed to break through, but the wall remained firm, impenetrable no matter how much he pounded on it….

“That was deeper than most Wakers are willing to look their first time,” Gregor said after Danal had described his experience. The leader had not moved, or even seemed to blink an eye. “But they always hit a wall somewhere.”

Danal placed both hands flat against the platform to steady himself. In the past few seconds his entire perception of reality had been skewed. In an undefinable way Danal began to wonder if his other concerns were less significant. “But what’s beyond that last barrier?”

“No one’s ever been able to breach it,” Gregor said, defeated. “And that leads me to my biggest question—is there anything more? Or have we seen all there is?”

Danal frowned and said nothing. Gregor seemed impatient. “You don’t see the problem, do you? What were all those memories? Were they just buried in my dead brain somewhere, or were they carried back here with my… soul, if you want to call it that? Is there really a difference between the body and the soul? We have to find the answer to that question—it has such staggering implications!”

More confused than ever, Danal shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“Look, if they are just stale memories buried in my resurrected mind and nothing more, then… who am l? Am I—with a capital letter—just some leftover impressions embedded in this old temporal lobe”—he tapped his forehead—“that didn’t come out in the wash? Is my own soul really back in this body now, or am I just a better machine, one that can access a few old memories from the real Gregor, who is now dead and gone? And how the hell can I tell the difference?”

Deeply upset, Gregor answered his own question. “Of course there’s a way. If I can indeed remember my death, my out-of-body experiences, actually getting into the world of light—if I can remember the whole thing without a gap, from death all the way through to the sudden moment of resurrection again, then it obviously can’t be just some buried memories, can it? The real Gregor wouldn’t have left such visions in his dead brain, because Gregor’s body never experienced those things.”

Danal frowned. “But isn’t what—what I saw close enough? The tunnel, the light, the life flashbacks, the other spirits? How could all that be left in my physical brain if l was dead already?”

“No. Put yourself in the role of a pure skeptic, Danal. And I am, at heart, a skeptic.” Gregor sighed, as if he had been through all this before. “The tunnel, the light, the out-of-body sensations, the chimes and bells—you were dying. Your brain was literally giving up the ghost. Who knows what kind of distorted perceptions you might have experienced? Your nerves giving spasmodic impulses, firing at random, making you think you saw lights, heard sounds, sensed presences. And the flashbacks of your life—couldn’t those have been a colossal memory dump of your brain at the last second? Flinging open all the mental doorways that kept your thoughts neatly organized?”

Gregor shook his head, still deep in thought. “Oh, sure it seems farfetched, but it is a possible rational explanation. Occam’s Razor isn’t sharp enough for me—I have to be absolutely sure. I need to have a continuous memory.”

The leader closed his eyes. “I spend hours and hours alone, meditating, trying to reach the center of my experience. We Wakers don’t really know what to do. Which stand should we take? Should we stop Resurrection, Incorporated? Or should we help them to make certain the resurrection process never produces another Waker?

“Should we voluntarily kill ourselves to go back—like Shannah—if these Heaven flashbacks are indeed the real thing? Or should we instead try to awaken all other Servants?

“No, after my own mental anguish—and the other Wakers seem to be of the same opinion—I can’t condone trying to awaken other Servants on purpose. They’re at peace now, and their souls are… are where they should be, wherever that is.”

Danal was cowed by his death visions, trapped by a new perspective. “Then, maybe the Wakers can’t do anything right now.”

“But we have! Don’t forget, Danal, we’re the Cremators. It’s the least we could do, the most conscionable alternative that would still let us make a difference. I conceived of the Cremators to eliminate the possibility of people returning as Servants against their wishes. If, after death, we do go on to something else, don’t you think it’s a terrible crime to take someone away from that? As the Cremators, we give them the option of their own choosing.”

Danal frowned, puzzled. “If you think that other world is a better, brighter place, or if you think we have some sort of destiny there, then why don’t you just tell all the Wakers just to shut themselves down? Like Shannah? It doesn’t make sense that you tried to stop her.”

Uneasy, Gregor did not answer for a long time. “I won’t ask anyone to return to death, not until I’m positive of the outcome. Just a minute ago, I raised the possibility that I might not be the real Gregor. So, if I kill myself, what will happen to me?” He vehemently tapped his chest. “What about this unique person, The Waker-Who-Thinks-He-ls-Gregor? I don’t want to destroy my individual identity forever, even if it is just a recycled life.”

One of the candles sputtered and blew out from a stray draft. Gregor stood up and stretched. Danal felt his feet cramping and got up from his cross-legged position on the hard wood.

“It’s food for thought. But remember, Danal, I don’t lead these people. They generally look to me for advice, and they generally listen to what I say, but I’m no leader. I don’t want to be. We Wakers have been down here for four years now, and I suspect we’ll be discovered sooner or later, no matter how careful we are. I can only hope I solve my moral dilemma by then. Otherwise I won’t be able to advise the rest of them what to do.”

He spread his hands, looking helpless. “For now, the only thing we can do is… just survive.”

29

The doors closed in the simulation chamber, and Jones turned around, staring at the smooth, colorless walls. Once the projector started, he could imagine that he was surrounded by reality. Jones shook himself, loosening up. He felt his muscles, sensed his reactions coiled and waiting to spring. If he didn’t think about it too much, the Elite Guard training was exhilarating. He already knew the ordeals ahead of him would be a dozen times tougher than his original Enforcer training.

He ran a gloved finger down his blue armor, stiff and new, with a half-circle scarlet arm-ring that signified the lowest rank of the Elite Guard. The armor had been polished, but it remained dark and neutral, invisible in the night, impressive by day. Ominous-looking spines stuck up from his shoulder plates, and other gadgets implanted on his helmet made him appear alien, frightening, powerful.

As always, Jones accepted his situation, his place, but in the Elite Guard he forced himself to use a little more optimism. Fitzgerald Helms would have been proud of him, so proud he would not have needed to say anything—Helms and Jones had enough rapport to dispense with all that. The two young friends had once looked on the Enforcers with a kind of superstitious awe, and the confidence of the Elite Guard made them seem like walking gods.

He didn’t feel overly sad to leave his old life behind. Nathans had seen to it that all of Jones’s possessions were smuggled away and returned to him. And Jones did not resent the opportunity for a fresh start, a new beginning, with all the prestige the Guild could hammer into him. It seemed for the best.

Nathans had explained it all to him. “Tell me, Jones, have you ever seen an old Enforcer? Think about it—anyone who’s been on patrol for more than, say, five years?”

Jones shook his head. Simply by the way he moved and talked, Nathans demanded complete attention. “That’s right, there aren’t any.” Nathans smiled; his eyes sparkled. “It’s another part of our philosophy. You see, if Enforcers were to survive a long time, grow old, and comfortably retire, what would the public think? That Enforcers have a safe, padded job? Tsk, tsk.

“No, after you’ve been an Enforcer a few years, we look for ways to transfer you out. Some really do die, of course. The less competent ones go into management. But others, the talented ones whose deep psychological profiles show them to be completely trustworthy—they’re allowed into the Elite Guard. You’re one of the special few, Jones.”

Special. Jones felt a strange sensation, a confidence, a feeling of importance—he had never been treated this way before. Nathans had taken a special liking to him, observing some of his training, even chatting with him on a friendly level.

He heard a clicking sound as the invisible projectors behind the wall screens began the simulation. Off in a control room, someone was watching how he prepared himself, how well he reacted to the imaginary situation. He had to beat his previous score. Jones took a deep breath and shoved all his cluttered thoughts aside and focused only on the simulation. Nothing else mattered, did it?

Holographic images jumped out at him from all sides of the simulator chamber. The neutral, rounded walls vanished into a normal street scene with all the details, convincing Jones that he stood outside again, patrolling the area around Resurrection, Inc. Up near the ceiling a null score glowed in thin green numbers. But It wouldn’t stay zero for long—he’d see to that, all right.

Jones tensed, made ready to reach for his weapons—all deactivated for the exercise—but then forced himself to relax. Too much tension would reduce his accuracy and drop his score. He looked at the illusory scene, trying to identify the target, the place from which the trouble would erupt. This was always the hardest part of the challenge.

Two children, laughing and yelling, ran past him from out of nowhere. Jones jumped and nearly fired at them, then caught himself as they disappeared into the crowd. Sweat broke out on his forehead. False alarm. If he had really been on patrol, might he have just gunned down two kids? Worse, had the observers noticed his reaction?

Up near the ceiling, the glowing green score dropped by ten points, and he resented that fact more than the possibility of slaughtering the children. Would Nathans be disappointed in him? He didn’t want to let the man down.

Nathans had assigned Jones to watch over the first investigation team studying the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches. The man arranged for him to engage the services of a Net database jockey or, if he got desperate enough, even one of the Guild’s precious Interfaces. With his own Net access suddenly boosted from fourth to seventh level, Jones could search through the more detailed databases previously denied him, but he had never been terribly proficient with The Net. He took it as a challenge now, to prove his worth as an Elite Guard. He wanted to come up with a rational answer for the existence of the disintegrator patches, and Nathans wanted to find out what had happened to his runaway Servant Danal.

Jones cursed himself for letting such thoughts distract him, especially now. A disturbance grew in the holographic crowd, but though he turned right and left, Jones could not identify its source. Then in the distance he saw a Servant running. Other people in the crowd turned, focused on the Servant, and drew toward him, blocking him off.

Jones froze, wondering if this could be a recurring nightmare. Nathans had probably chosen the simulation with a specific reason in mind. But Jones would not let the man down.

Purposefully, Jones drew his weapons, a scatter-stun in one hand and a rapid-fire projectile gun in the other. He knew the scatter-stun would be no good unless the Servant came closer, but Jones hoped to dispatch him before then.

He raised his projectile weapon, pointed it at the running gray-clad figure. The Servant looked up at him, gaping—then Jones fired without hesitation. If he did not delay, his score would correspondingly increase. As he pulled the trigger, though, he noticed the holographic palm trees fluttering like tattered brooms. The computer would throw in factors such as simulated wind and the distortion of the walls.

The projectile missed, striking one of the pedestrians reaching out to grab the Servant. Jones heard his score change, and he raised to fire again before he looked up.

To his surprise, the score had increased by twenty points, even after accidentally hitting the pedestrian. He shot again, and this time he struck the Servant in the shoulder. The Servant spun, injured, trying to reorient himself. Jones released another projectile and began to move his feet as if running toward the Servant.

The computer automatically adjusted the illusory view. The victim fell twitching on the sidewalk as the other people pressed close.

A second Servant appeared, running from the opposite side of the simulator. The crowd suddenly turned, but half of them clustered around Jones, angry because of the slaughtered pedestrian.

Jones turned his scatter-stun toward the approaching mob and mowed down anyone blocking his shot at the second Servant. He watched his score increase again. With a clear shot, he fired once more, paralyzing the renegade Servant’s arm. The Servant dropped the metallic equipment she carried and continued to run frantically.

A third shot, and this time the Servant pitched forward, still trying to move, but with her hips paralyzed. Jones let fly with three exploding projectiles.

His score had soared up to a new high point. He had beaten his previous mark! The computer lingered on the images of all the dead, innocent pedestrians who had gotten in his way. Innocent? Jones relived his own nightmare visions of groping, clawing, tearing hands of the mob trying to destroy him as Danal fled into the distance. Innocents? Any of these pedestrians could become murderous, an instigator of a mob.

Jones swept the scatter-stun around him in an arc, leveling the approaching crowds until the weapon’s charge sputtered to a halt. The other pedestrians stopped, their mob mentality quelled by his show of force.

Jones breathed out a long and heavy sigh and surveyed the people, wondering if the simulation was over. The timer crept toward the finish. But then he noticed that six other Servants had shambled out of the alleys, out of the doorways; they stood looking at him mindlessly.

Experimentally Jones raised his pocket bazooka and shot one of them. They were just simulations, after all. A burst of points appeared on his score. Puzzled, Jones fired again. Two more of the Servants fell, broken into large pieces of torn flesh that oozed clear synthetic blood. Again, Jones received a significant bonus of points.

Is that what they wanted him to do? Was Nathans training him to fire at Servants? Jones lowered the weapon, resisting the obvious ploy. What sense did that make? What purpose did it serve?

He looked at the fallen Servants. Two more had come to take their places, and the other three Servants began to shuffle away, going about their jobs. Did Nathans want him to shoot all those Servants? Jones’s score beckoned, begging him to add more points.

Actually, Servants had been at the core of Jones’s troubles all along. The more he considered the possibility, the more valid the conclusion became.

Jones had almost lost his life in the riot after the rebel Servant Danal escaped, and because of that, Jones was officially dead (although he had been promoted after all, so that didn’t count). Danal. A Servant.

And Julia? He had gambled at happiness when he’d bought her, but she met his kindness, his love, his devotion, with utter and complete apathy, without a spark of humanity. Julia was a Servant, but surely with the care he had taken she could have shown something? Hadn’t Danal worn that wild look in his eyes? Why couldn’t Julia have had that? Why couldn’t she have returned his attentions? Julia. A Servant.

And back in his curfew-patrol days, what about the other Servant, the female who had stolen equipment and tried to escape? Because of her, Jones had been taken from tolerable night patrol duties and reassigned, reprimanded.

Servants.

And the hatred and unrest from the jobless blues, out of work because of Servants—wasn’t that what had caused the death of his friend, Fitzgerald Helms?

That wound struck him deeply. Servants.

He retaliated, lifting his pocket bazooka again and firing at the holographic crowd with an accuracy born of anger and misguided revenge. All five remaining Servants fell in rapid succession. Shaking, Jones slammed the empty weapon into its armor socket as the time ran out.

The scene froze on the walls, but still he saw the images of blasted Servants scattered about on the streets. He relaxed. He doubted he’d ever beat this score. A blinking light appeared in front of his eyes.

30

Apply the flesh tone liberally to face and neck—don’t forget the ears. Cover the arms up to the elbow. Reddish-pink stain adds color to the lips. Bite down on the dye bubble to flood the inside of the mouth with red color, and then rinse thoroughly to keep the teeth clean. Eyelashes, eyebrows. Touch up with blush and darker tones to add realism, to add human flaws. Hairpiece or some other covering for the head.

Incognito. Almost like a living, breathing person again.

Danal waited on a park bench, looking up at the tall buildings around him. The hard metal slats of the bench were cool against his leather jacket and patched pants. Discreetly he kept his hands buried in his pockets. A leather skullcap hugged his head with flaps over his ears, making him look like an old aeroplane flyer.

Danal knew exactly what the Cremator client would look like; he was confident the man would be on time.

The client appeared out of a side street, lost and uncertain—a middle-aged man dressed in a perfect business suit, a thin stylish tie studded with reflecting sequins. His hair was carefully cut at just the right length; instead of contact lenses, he wore decorative spectacles with a tiny chronometer implanted in one lens. Under his arm he carried a large, colorfully wrapped box topped with a pink bow.

“Is that for me?” Danal stood up and intercepted him.

The man stopped abruptly and stared at him, sizing him up. “No,” he mumbled, trying to remember the right phrase, “it’s for John.”

“Okay. I’ll give it to his wife, then,” Danal answered easily.

Relieved, the client handed the box to the disguised Servant, then fled down the street without looking back. He tried to hide himself in the crowd, but there weren’t enough people on the sidewalk to do so. Danal watched him for a moment, calmly amused, and then sat back down on the bench.

He didn’t need to inspect the box to know that it contained packaged chemical supplies, two books for Gregor, analytical tools, and some rope-wire—all things the Wakers needed.

Danal considered the box and the client with a detached apathy. After Gregor had shown him how to access his death memories, Danal’s perception of reality had shifted radically. Over the past week he had come to accept his situation with an easy passivity. His other concerns, his leftover anger—no, Vincent Van Ryman’s anger—at his betrayal and at the death of Julia, all of that seemed distant now and inconsequential.

Below in the dark, listening to the ghostly whispers of the ocean and the creaking timbers around him, Danal spent much of his time meditating. Legs crossed, he sometimes sat with Gregor, sometimes alone, journeying deep within himself, confronting the wall, the Heaven flashbacks. It all came back to him with never-ending wonder and awe—the pain, the tunnel, the chimes, the lights, the escort spirits… over and over again.

But still he could not breach the last barrier.

The universe had stopped being clear-cut and understandable for him, and everything held its own facet of the cosmic mystery. For the benefit of the Wakers in general, he helped with the Cremators’ activities. As Laina and Gregor had both predicted, Danal now considered himself one of the Wakers. But none of it really mattered to him. He lived from day to day, in no particular hurry to make major decisions.

He spent many hours reviewing his old memories, dwelling—not morbidly, but with a different kind of fascination—on Death, the events leading up to his own death; how he had sacrificed his dying father; how he had reflexively killed Nathans in the lower levels of Resurrection, Inc.; how Nathans had murdered Julia—and that, in turn, brought him back to thinking about his own death again.

He viewed his former life as Vincent Van Ryman with greater and greater detachment, as if it were someone else—and indeed it was someone else, since that person had been on the other side of death. Vincent’s problems were no longer Danal’s problems….

The Servant picked up the gift-wrapped box and strolled casually down the pedestrian walk. He would wander around for an hour or two just to make sure no one was watching. Besides, he felt like taking a long walk. He had used extra care to apply his disguise, and he enjoyed the freedom a normal appearance gave him. When he grew tired, Danal would find one of the other access openings to down below.

He didn’t mind killing time. He enjoyed every moment of everything now that all existence seemed basically the same.

As he passed an unoccupied public Net booth, Danal suddenly felt an amused fascination for his old identity as Vincent Van Ryman, a wave of nostalgia. Earlier, he had stared at the looming Van Ryman mansion for long moments before moving on. The Intruder Defense Systems effectively kept him away, even if he had wanted to approach it.

Now, as he stared at the empty booth, Danal realized that The Net still thought Vincent Van Ryman was alive, since the imposter had stolen his entire identity. And Danal still remembered his old password.

Curiosity tugged at him, and he stepped inside the booth, propping the gift-wrapped box up against the wall and closing the privacy screen. He entered “VINCENT VAN RYMAN” at the prompt and punched in his tenth-level password. The Net willingly accepted the logon and waited.

He stared at the upper menu and, after a slight pause, went into his own electronic mail for a glimpse at the imposter’s activities. Still only mildly interested, Danal ignored most of the mundane business messages and neo-Satanist concerns.

But then he saw one message that made him stop cold. It was passworded, but Danal easily remembered his own receive-mail passwords. According to the status line, the message had been sent by Francois Nathans only two days before….

Nathans turned to show his face and smiled thinly at Danal. “Welcome, Sacrificial Lamb.” He made the neo-Satanist sign of the broken cross.

Danal entered his mail password and read the message.

Nathans lay on his face in a puddle of blood—

Francois Nathans must be dead. Danal had killed him.

A long scarlet smear emblazoned the gray Servant jumpsuit.

Just who was the victim after all?

Danal scanned the message as his eyes widened. One of the false eyelashes flaked off.

Danal stared at the message and read it over again. Nathans’s surrogate? Who had Danal really murdered? Surrogate?

Remembering his old skills, Danal quickly checked the Net periodicals and the news databases for the day he had supposedly committed the murder. The death of someone like Francois Nathans would certainly have appeared in all the current-events listings.

But he searched and found mention of Nathans only in reference to Resurrection, Inc., where the riot had taken place. In growing amazement and disbelief Danal checked Nathans’s Net activity, and found that the man had used the system every day for the past two weeks.

Nathans was not dead.

Danal had been tricked. Once again.

As it all came crashing down upon him, he fell abruptly back into his own existence. Like nails being hammered into a coffin: trusting Nathans as a philosophical brother, having grand schemes for bettering the world; Julia, who had tempered his zealous obsession with love and perspective, losing it all when the trapdoor of treachery made everything drop out from under his feet.

It woke him up like a slap in the face, and Danal gripped the gift-wrapped box tightly enough to wrinkle the colored paper. His jaws ached from clenched teeth. Part of his determination for revenge returned, but it clashed with his newfound empathy of life and death. Wasn’t all this behind him now? But what Nathans had done—The conflicting emotions forced his goal sideways and changed it.

Danal thought of his ordeal, his death, his life, his love, and with a bright fire of determination he reached a firm decision.

Yes, he would find Julia again.

31

Net conduits like twisted metal straws stretched upward into the main city. Using stolen alloy-chewers, the Wakers had breached the conduit coverings and tapped in their own wires, sending jury-rigged connections down to a row of mismatched terminals, some taken from decommissioned public Net booths, others from standard home units. The glow from the screens penetrated the shadows: amber, green, and gray.

Two Wakers sat at the keyboards. Rolf, who had masqueraded as an Enforcer, stared glassy-eyed and motionless, gripping the sides of the terminal as if wrestling with something. The other was the young freckle-faced Waker whose pale, translucent skin now looked splotched with darker marks of discoloration.

As Danal came up to them, the boy stared at him with awe. Danal regarded the boy for a moment, then smiled. “I’m Danal,” he said, leaving the end of his sentence hanging, like a question.

“I know,” the freckle-faced Waker said, then remembered to add, “My name’s Rikki.”

Rikki looked to have been about twelve or thirteen at his death, but lines of concentration around his eyes made him look much older. He had been through death and back and would never be a boy again, no matter how many of his memories returned.

“Gregor said I could come here to see what you’re doing,” Danal offered. He had something more important in mind, but he would approach that delicately.

Rikki snapped out of his amazement and blinked. “Of course! Well, here are… our terminals, and Rolf is in guardian mode right now. My shift is about to begin. These other terminals are for doing the usual Net stuff, if you need to.”

Rolf didn’t flinch, not even as Rikki said his name. “Guardian mode?” Danal asked.

“He’s linked up to The Net, watching all the input and output channels. See, we have to divert queries, keep track of anyone who seems too interested in the Cremators or the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches, anything that might get us into trouble.” Rikki stopped himself and seemed flustered. “I’m not telling this all in the right order.

“See, with our microprocessors we can tap directly into The Net, just like an Interface. Rolf and I, and other Waker volunteers, are like Guardian Angels for the Wakers. When we… link up, we can restring databases, divert informational queries, things like that. No one suspects. Not even the real Guardian Angels, and we have to be very careful about that. The people have an incredible blind spot about The Net—they trust it too much. They don’t even think about the information they find there. And since The Net tells them the grass patches are really deadly disintegrators, they just plain don’t look for contrary evidence, though there’s plenty of it if they’d open their eyes.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t take much to think faster than they do.”

Danal indicated the jury-rigged terminals. “But how do you tap into The Net? With a stolen password?”

Rikki looked at him, puzzled and surprised. “Well, a lot of us still have our own passwords from before. See, it takes so long for Net Accounting to reassign out-of-date passwords, many of us still use ours. We can use chromosomal match, retina scans, or other ways to prove our identity, even if the records say we’re dead. Once a password works, we share it among ourselves.”

“Enforcers can kill you for sharing passwords!” Danal said automatically.

“We’ve done plenty of other things the Enforcers wouldn’t like. Besides, we’re all in this together. ‘Bound by a common tie that runs deeper than simple human trust.’ Gregor says that.” Rikki hesitated, eager and expectant, looking at Danal out of the corner of his eye. He found his voice again. “What are you going to do for all of us, Danal? We’re really anxious to know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re…” Rikki looked around, then spoke more bravely, “Gregor sits around thinking all the time. I mean, he really is worried, but I bet you’re willing to do something, instead of just sitting here. Now, nobody’s ready to be a better leader than Gregor, but some of us are getting tired of just waiting.

“See, we were all nobodies—even Gregor, he was just a librarian, a historian, and no one missed him when he died. But you’re so famous. Vincent Van Ryman! Now we’ve finally got someone who might make a difference!”

Danal pursed his lips. “It doesn’t matter if I’m famous or not. Why don’t you all just come forward? All Wakers. You’d get enough publicity to make your point, tell your story. Anybody coming back from death is enough to force people to pay attention.”

Rikki shook his head vigorously. “We can’t just come forward. Watch this.” A grin crossed the boyish face, then he spoke in a sharp tone. “Danal, Command: Slap your face!”

Involuntarily Danal’s left arm jerked up and he struck himself flat across the cheek. His eyes flew open in shock, but he could not stop his reaction.

“Sorry,” Rikki said, “but anyone can do that to us. Any time. With just a simple word or two, they could shut us all up forever. If we go public now, we would have to roll over and do whatever anyone Commands us. Those aren’t very good terms for rejoining society, do you think? We’re still Servants, Danal, no matter what all we remember. We’ve been trying to deprogram ourselves, to get rid of the Command phrase, but it doesn’t do any good. It’s tangled up too deep with the microprocessor that keeps us alive.”

Danal’s face stung from the slap, and he frowned. “Have you told anybody? I mean, real people?”

“No,” Rikki answered.

“How about your own family? Did you have a family? Have you gotten in touch with them?”

“No!” Rikki cut him off. “Yes, I had a family. I had a younger sister, and a mom, and a dad. Both of my parents worked. When I died, I think it was some kind of… accident. Out in the streets people were throwing bottles, stones, cans. We were trying to run to get inside a… a café, I think, and something hit me in the throat. It hurt, and I blacked out.” He rubbed his neck, where a twisted scar showed what had apparently been his death wound. “And then I was a Servant. Boy, was I surprised.”

Rikki made a sarcastic little grin, but then his eyes looked wistful and distant. “My dad had just taught me how to play chess. I wasn’t very good, but I understood it, and it was an adult game. It was interesting because we used a real board, and pieces you moved one at a time with your hand. The game seemed so much more real than the computer versions of chess. I think this is the way they used to play it a long time ago.” Then he bit his lip and looked back at Danal. “No, I haven’t told them I’ve awakened. It would be like killing myself all over again.”

Danal looked at him helplessly. “But what do you expect me to do?”

Rikki was shocked that he would even ask the question. “You’re important enough—with your scandal, with Francois Nathans and the imposter, we can get public interest long enough to tell our stories. It’ll distract them before someone, say, from Resurrection, can use the Command phrase and silence us all.”

“Nathans is still alive,” Danal said, clipping his words short.

“Yeah, we found that out yesterday. We were going to let you know.”

Danal saw his chance and did not hesitate. “I need you to do something for me. And then maybe I can help you.”

Rolf sat up from his terminal and blinked, dazed. Upon seeing the other two Wakers, Rolf snapped himself back to his surroundings. He nodded, and Danal returned his greeting.

“I’ll be going in. Just a second,” Rikki said.

“Don’t wait too long.” Rolf seemed cursorily confident in Rikki’s abilities. “I found no queries this time.”

“There usually aren’t,” the boy Waker mumbled.

As if in a conspiracy between themselves, neither Danal nor Rikki spoke again until the other Waker had walked briskly away along the narrow wooden catwalks.

“Shouldn’t you go in? Watch The Net?” Danal asked.

Rikki brushed the question aside as if it didn’t matter and whispered to Danal in eager fascination, “What are you going to do? How can I help?”

“I need to find someone.”

“Who is it? Is this part of a plan? I knew you’d do something to help us!”

Danal frowned, but considered the question. “Well, I think it’ll solve some of the questions Gregor’s worried about. Then maybe he’ll do something. But at the moment, this is for me alone.” Danal swallowed, uneasy, but forced himself to push ahead. “Her name is—was Julia. I… loved her.”

Rikki’s eyes lit up. “You mean the Julia?”

“You know?”

“Yes, we all know the story! This is Julia, the one—the one Nathans killed.”

Danal stared at the terminals, wishing that he could do everything himself without having to open up to someone else’s questions.

“Yes. He said he wiped her from The Net, and then he brought her back. As a Servant. I saw her on the streets—that was what finally brought all my memories back.” Danal fell silent, and Rikki waited for him to continue. “But of course she couldn’t recognize me, not with the surface-cloning of my face. I don’t look like me anymore. But I know she’s out there, and I have to find her.”

Danal was afraid to have Julia back, but he had no choice but to locate her. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to track her down, if Nathans has deleted everything about her from The Net.”

With a glint in his eye Rikki said, “Nothing is ever really gone.”

“Can you do it?”

The young Waker shrugged and drew a deep breath, considering. “It’ll take a lot of time, and I’m on assignment here as a guardian. See, we don’t really have the manpower to watch The Net more carefully, so I can’t let everyone down. If I track down Julia for you, I’d have to put aside those duties.” He looked uncertain but anxious to help.

“Well, how often do you really need to divert a database search? How many queries do you get when you sit there in a trance for hours and hours?”

Rikki absently scratched the side of the keyboard. “Not very many. I could—yes, I will try to find Julia for you.” He took it as a personal challenge.

“Should I get someone else? Or you can do it when you’re not on guardian duty.”

“No. I want to do this.” Rikki lowered his eyes, then spoke more quietly. “But don’t let Gregor know about this. He won’t approve, I’m sure of it.”

“What’s there to approve?”

“Reliving your past.”

Trying to avoid Rikki’s gaze, Danal glanced up at one of the fuzzy green patches of holographic grass far above. Actual sunlight filtered through the image. Before he could look back to Rikki again, a transparent plastic beverage bottle, nearly empty, fell through the hologram, bouncing and pinging on the girders.

“Listen, and I’ll tell you everything about her.”

Then Danal spilled the story, all he could remember, every facet of Julia’s personality, every eccentricity, every unusual detail. Rikki sat back, transfixed, absorbing it, not needing to write anything down. Danal told how he had once communicated with her under the identity of Randolph Carter through electronic mail; he described where she had lived, what she had done. He tunneled backward to find every offshoot of information that Rikki might be able to use.

Danal described her physically in intimate detail. He described her business dealings, described all the things they had done together. Nathans had probably set up a cumulative Delete program, a virus function to track down and destroy all interconnected paths of the person Julia. But Danal hoped feverishly that some line of information had not connected with the others.

Taking a different tack, he described when she would have been killed, which implied the time frame for her resurrection. He carefully described everything he could recall of the Guildsman who had been escorting her down the street when he’d seen her recently—the indigo-dyed lines of crow’s-feet around his eyes, the square-cut graying hair.

Rikki’s eyes were bright but distant, already contemplating ways to attack the problem. “I’ll do what I can. I might have to give up a couple days of guardian duty. But I’ll find her.”

“Don’t jeopardize the Wakers for me,” Danal cautioned and continued, to himself, “I need to see her again, either to bring her back or to say goodbye.”

Danal sat alone down by the edge of the water while the structures holding up the Metroplex loomed above him like a cosmic cathedral. Listlessly, he ate a handful of vegetables grown in a hydroponic garden the Wakers tended under a long bank of sunlamps. Three days he had sat in an agitated patience, avoiding Rikki, letting the young Waker work in peace.

Now someone slipped up to him quietly, startling Danal in his distraction. He turned and saw Rikki clad in a tight-fitting Servant jumpsuit; the boy Waker would never grow, and his twelve-year-old Servant body would remain locked in its appearance of youth.

Danal swallowed his mouthful so quickly that he nearly choked. “Shouldn’t you be on guardian duty?”

Danal knew, before the freckle-faced Waker said anything, but still the response sent his synHeart pounding.

“I found her!”

A whirlwind of rose-tinted images flooded past his mind’s eye—the first meeting in the cafeteria, the hovercopter trip to Point Reyes, making love on the beach, tearing down the stone gargoyles, drinking iced tea in the sauna.

Julia.

“Now what are you going to do?” Rikki said.

Danal stood up and grasped the rope ladder leading upward, more to steady himself than to go anywhere.

“I’m going to go take her back.”

32

“Are you commanding me not to do this?” Danal challenged Gregor. They had not called an actual gathering, but Rikki had made certain that a good many Wakers—mostly the impatient ones—came forward to watch.

Taken by surprise, Gregor looked uncomfortable and awkward, but Danal pressed him before he could respond. “Remember when you said you weren’t really a leader here, that we can follow your advice as we see fit? Were you just kidding, or what? All the time you wrestle with your morals and your questions, but your questions aren’t any more valid than mine!”

“That’s not what I said, Danal. I want you to think about what you’re going to do. Is it wise? Answer that yourself.” His eyes were wide and dark. Gregor folded his hands clumsily together, as if he didn’t know what to do with them.

Danal tried to be more compassionate. He didn’t like acting a showman in front of a crowd, but he needed to clear the air between Gregor and himself before he could do anything else. “I have to know, Gregor. If she’s there, or if she’s gone forever. I have to find her again.”

The leader mumbled under his breath. “It’s no secret what you intend to do afterwards.”

Rikki interrupted, and the other Wakers stood by the boy, eager, expectant. “Gregor, we’ve got to start answering all those questions about… us. No one’s going to give away the answers. We don’t get a prize for just standing around.”

In the pause that followed, Danal bent closer to Gregor. From above, the sounds of creaking and settling emanated from the girders and pilings. “Francois Nathans murdered her, Gregor,” he said, feeling pain. “I may have changed a great deal because of you, but I still need to know whether to hate him or not.”

Gregor looked defeated, and Danal was the only one who saw his slight nod. “Just remember Danal, we’re not the same anymore. She won’t be the same, not after what we’ve experienced. Even if Julia remembers her past, things can never be as they were.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to be satisfied with the way they are,” he whispered in reply.

“I’m Guildsman Drex, you blasted thing!” he shouted at the doorway voice-receiver. “Drex! I live here. Do a voiceprint check. How the hell was I supposed to know a glitch would change my own password?”

Reluctantly, it seemed, The Net allowed him to enter, and as he scramble-sealed the entrance, Drex considered himself safe and protected in his own rooms, mercifully away from the pressures of the Guild for another day. Tension headaches and gastric disorders—fringe benefits of a management-level salary.

The work ran over and over again in his mind, muddled together in columns of names and numbers. Instant statistics, keeping track of the locations and assignments of over a hundred Enforcers, making sure that his section of the Metroplex was given its quota of protection. Drex would not last as Guildsman very long if his sector showed either a particularly bad crime month or a notably clean tally. Deviate from the norm? Never!

Meetings that went on and on with plenty of rhetoric, ‘etting goals,’ ‘initiating studies,’ ‘interfacing’ with all his counterparts. It devoured his time and kept him from answering the long queue of electronic-mail memos waiting for him. Though he remained endlessly busy, Drex never seemed to get anything accomplished—always so many little things that made him scurry back and forth, talking to people, keeping this person happy, meeting that person’s demands.

But in the comforting womb of his private suite, Drex was on his own time now. He wished he could lift the job from his shoulders and store it away in a closet someplace.

He increased the wall illumination slowly; he liked the warm dimness, and he didn’t think he’d be doing any reading anyway.

The Servant sat where he had left her in the morning. “Ah, Julia! Aren’t you going to welcome me home?”

“Yes, Master Drex,” she answered in a flat voice and stood up stiffly. “Welcome home.”

Julia rarely wore any clothing at all when he was home alone with her. He preferred it that way. But he realized that sometime during the day she had independently donned her gray Servant jumpsuit, as if with a last vestige of instinct. It bothered him, but he couldn’t figure out why.

Sighing, Drex went into his sleeping area and activated the floor. The heaters began to work, and the crosslinked polymer strands altered their structure, slowly turning the hard, rubbery floor into a soft and pliant cushion on which he and Julia would sleep. Drex stepped out onto the sleepfloor, and his feet sank into the pleasantly warm floor substance. “Come here, Julia.”

He had already eaten from a machine at the Guild headquarters, but now he wanted to relax, to loosen up, to burn off some of his restless energy. Drex began to unfasten his clothes. He didn’t think he had the patience to give Julia detailed step-by-step instructions now. That had proved awkwardly funny in the past, but tonight he wanted just some quick sex and then a long sleep. Drex barked at the walls to dim the lights further, and his suite began to feel more homelike, more comfortable.

Julia shuffled toward him and almost lost her balance as she stepped onto the soft sleepfloor. Drex sat down casually and propped himself up on one elbow. As he smiled at her, the indigo-dyed crow’s-feet clenched together around his eyes.

A series of muffled melodious tones interrupted him as The Net spontaneously unscrambled his door code. The entrance to his suite whisked open by itself.

Drex sat up sharply, puzzlement outweighing his fear. Silhouetted in the reddish glow from his walls, four figures stood in the entryway and, in unison, they walked into his rooms.

“How did you get in here! Who are you?” Drex tried to struggle to his feet, but the soft floor did not cooperate. He shouted for the lights to come on fully; the illumination dazzled him, but didn’t seem to bother the four intruders. He blinked and tried to wave the brightness away so he could see again.

“We’ve come for your Servant,” one of them said.

Taken aback at the ridiculous idea, Drex scowled. “Well, you can’t have her! What are you talking about?”

His eyes grew accustomed to the light, and immediately he noticed something odd about the intruders. Two of them marched purposefully forward toward Julia, then gently took her by the arm. “Come with us, Julia.”

Outnumbered and afraid, Drex could do nothing but stand helpless.

Then he recognized the pale dead skin of the intruders, their hairless faces, smears of makeup, their bald scalps imperfectly hidden by caps and hats, as if they had been in a rush to throw on disguises. A numbing horror grew in him. Servants? Impossible! But the more he stared at their eyes, their faces, their actions, the more certain he became. It couldn’t be possible. Servants did not act as vigilantes to free their own kind. It was absurd.

“Command: Release her!” he shouted in an authoritative tone.

As if they had grasped a hot iron, the two Servants escorting Julia jerked back their hands and stood paralyzed. With some amount of self-satisfaction Drex watched their faces fall.

Then, before he could think of something else to say, before his lips could shift themselves into a smile, one of the other Servants launched himself at Drex with dizzying speed. The Guildsman couldn’t move his eyes fast enough as the intruder flew forward to clap his hand across Drex’s mouth, stifling further words. The force of the Servant’s hand crushed his lips against his teeth, smashing his gums. A crunching pop and a nauseating pain told Drex that two front teeth had broken free of their sockets. He tasted a mouthful of blood. He tried not to whimper.

Drex collapsed to his knees as the Servant released him. “Not another word from you,” he said coldly, “or I’ll pluck out your vocal cords!”

Blood dribbled from between Drex’s bruised lips. His skin crawled at the dry, cold touch of the Servant’s dead flesh. His eyes were bright with infuriated and helpless tears; his body shook as he fought back sobs.

Without looking at Drex again, the leader of the Servants went over to Julia and lovingly, it seemed, ran his pallid fingers along her cheek. The male Servant’s face shone with childlike awe. “Julia…”

The four intruders hurried her out the door. She followed them without resisting. They even had the maddening courtesy to close his door and scramble-seal it behind them.

Now Drex’s tears of rage burst forth, and he spat out blood and teeth. Squatting, he pounded on the floor, but its soft, warm texture absorbed the blows and tried to comfort him.

33

Blank slate.

Julia gazed at him, not moving, as if someone had awkwardly positioned a rag doll. Danal stared back, trying to lock eyes with her, until he finally looked away. His fists clenched. Damn, it had to work! He shook his head, ignoring exhaustion, and stood up, realizing how sore and stiff his knees had become. He wanted a drink of water; his throat felt dry.

The other Wakers left them undisturbed at the water level. “Don’t you remember anything?” he begged. With the harsh sunlamps shining down on Julia from far above, Danal pictured himself as an evil interrogator in a room. Turning his back, Danal avoided looking at this caricature of Julia—it hurt him too much. Julia had gone away and left only this puppet behind.

“I remember everything I have been told,” she answered.

Danal jumped, then frowned at himself. “I mean about your first life, with Vincent Van Ryman?”

Her voice had a numb, prerecorded quality to it. “No. I don’t remember anything.”

Danal took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and continued.

Dangling cords swayed from above as he pulled a high-resolution terminal toward him—the kind intended for home use, much like the one his father Stromgaard had long ago used to play electronic games. Danal called up the protocol of images he had compiled.

“Look at these again, Julia. I want you to give it your full attention.” It was the sixth time he had shown them to her, but he gritted his teeth and forced himself to keep trying. “I’ve already explained why I need you to remember. You’re a real person named Julia who was killed and brought back to life. I want you to find those memories. I did it—I know you can.”

The grayness of the screen dissolved into a view of the isolated oceanside of Point Reyes, not exactly the spot he and Julia had once visited, but the closest file image he could find. “We went there, you and me. It was your first time in a hovercopter.” Vivid memories flooded into his own mind, so bright, so clear; his eyes took on a faraway look, and he smiled.

The scene changed to a full-detail image of Vincent Van Ryman’s face, lifted from one of the Net periodicals. “That was me. This was you.”

The next image showed a graphically massaged photo of Julia; Rikki had processed a new image of the Servant Julia, adding hair, expression, life, to make her look as she had once been, with high cheekbones and pointed chin, pretty features, bright eyes ready to disagree or to laugh, depending on her mood.

Next came the inverted star-in-pentagram logo. Summary files lifted from the current-events databases, describing how Vincent Van Ryman had challenged the neo-Satanists. “Do you remember these? The neo-Satanists? What we did together?”

“No.”

With Rikki’s sophisticated Net skills, they had been able to recreate on screen the white-light hologram of the beach, which had rested above the mantel in the Van Ryman mansion. “Do you remember this picture?”

“No.”

Danal searched for the slightest hesitation in her voice, the slightest hint of doubt or uncertainty, but found nothing.

“We made love on the beach.”

He fell silent and swallowed. His throat felt thick, as if it contained a despairing sob waiting to be released. His synHeart was heavy enough to have been molded out of lead. Danal reached out tentatively with his hand, extending his fingertips. He traced a line from her eye, brushing down her cheek, wiping away an imaginary tear. How he wished she would shed a tear! Her skin remained dry and cool, her body temperature carefully regulated.

Danal reached out with his other hand, cupping her chin. He ran his fingers down her cheeks, over her lips. She lifted her head up with his gentle pressure, but her eyes remained empty. Danal found himself breathing rapidly, deeply. A smear of tears covered his eyes.

“Oh, Julia…” he said softly. His lips moved, but no words came out. “I’m so sorry.”

He raised her chin a fraction more, then bent forward to kiss her on the lips. The kiss was cold, and Julia did not participate. Danal turned away, hanging his head and trembling.

He heard a jingling, sloshing sound and looked up to see Laina making her way down the rope ladder. Ice cubes tinkled against the sides of a pitcher she carried.

“I brought you two something cold to drink,” she said brightly, but then looked at Danal, lowering her voice. “Were you ready for it?”

He sighed. “Yes, let’s try it.” He turned to Julia. “Do you like iced tea?”

“Whatever you wish.”

Danal restrained himself from making a frustrated outburst. Laina removed two tall glasses from pockets in her gray apron. He poured Julia a glass and handed it to her; she accepted it but did not drink.

“We used to drink iced tea. Especially in the sauna. On the day we tore down all the gargoyles.”

He paused after each phrase, listening and watching. Laina observed the two of them for a few moments and then left without making a sound.

Nothing.

Danal stood out in the open air; the light rain spattered against his thick layers of flesh-tone makeup. He had been impatient before, careless, the night they’d gone to recover Julia. Drex usually worked late, and Danal had not wanted to take the time for more than quick disguises. He’d been eager to go from Gregor after their argument, eager to get it over with, but even the clod Guildsman had seen through their disguises—it almost cost him, and all of the Wakers, everything.

Listlessly he held an umbrella, but paid little attention to whether it blocked the raindrops or not. Beside him Julia stood in her gray jumpsuit, soaking wet but uncaring. Danal drew his red-checked jacket closer around him.

Somehow the Gothic Van Ryman mansion looked right with black clouds looming behind it. The cockeyed weathervane spun one way and then the other, ignoring the direction of the breeze. Runnels of rain trickled off the wings and fangs of the gargoyles lurking in the eaves. The black wrought-iron fence looked like a line of spear points barring their way. Danal stared at the house himself with helpless anger still gnawing at him. Someone claiming to be Vincent Van Ryman relaxed inside, enjoying a stolen life.

Tiny flashes of light blinked in a half-dome around the house as raindrops struck the deadly field of the Intruder Defense Systems—the protection systems he had installed primarily for Julia’s safety… for all the good they had done. A strong ozone smell hung in the air.

“Just look at it a while longer,” he said hoarsely. “Please.”

Danal had taken her to the same cafeteria where they’d first met. They sat in the same red plastic booth; they drank their coffee, listened to the clatter of dishes on the conveyor belt. Danal even tried to start the same conversations. Julia lifted her cup and swallowed the hot coffee, staring ahead. People began to look sideways at him, and Danal realized that he shouldn’t have brought a Servant into the cafeteria. He didn’t want to call attention to himself. They left.

Other people walked blithely past the Van Ryman mansion in the rain. “April showers bring May flowers,” Danal said to Julia; she did not respond.

They could not stay much longer—the imposter could be watching him through the video monitors. Did he even suspect Danal was still alive? Danal had fallen through a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch—would the imposter be worried at all anymore? Would he think he had gotten off, successful and free? Or might he recognize a disguised Danal and a Servant Julia loitering in front of his mansion?

Danal reminded himself that the imposter was “Joey”—a man disguised as a Servant, along with his partner Zia—whom Vincent and Julia had welcomed into their home. Danal found it ironic, now that he was a real Servant disguising himself as a man.

His last hope lay in showing her the looming mansion. Julia obediently stared at it in the rain, looking up at the gables and windows. Water ran down her bald scalp, beading on her pallid skin. She blinked rainwater out of her eyes and continued to look.

“Well?” Danal finally lost his patience. “Does this seem familiar to you? At all?”

“No,” Julia answered with flat but brutal honesty.

“It’s no use,” Danal said quietly.

Laina looked at him, understanding, but with a scowl. “You’re giving up hope, then?” She refilled his glass with the last of the iced tea, but now it tasted bitter.

“Her memories are dead and buried. They’re completely gone, wiped clean.” Danal hung his head. He could no longer even look at the walking husk of Julia. He had sent her with Gregor through the levels of the underground world where she would be occupied with menial tasks such as keeping the persistent repair-rats from undoing the constructions of the Wakers.

Laina reached up and patted him on the shoulder. He looked at her and realized that she had dressed in her white nurse/tech uniform. She wore it for her own comfort, since it no longer did her any good in the medical center, but she wore none of the excessive makeup, letting her bland Servant face stand on its own.

“You know, if it helps any, we’ve done quite a bit of research for ourselves. Rodney Quick got us more than a liter of a mutated batch of the final resurrection solution—that helped a lot. Apparently, the mutated solution weakens the barriers holding our memories back. But it takes something else, repeated shocks to our memories to break them open. You’re giving Julia the shocks all right, but if the barriers were never loosened in the first place…. Well, there’s nothing you can do about it. The mutated solution is really the key, and her resurrection was probably routine.”

Danal’s jaw muscles tightened, masking a sea of inner turmoil. He sat up to look Laina straight in the eye, and she seemed startled by the expression on his face. “I can’t kid myself any longer.” His voice came out sharp and cold. “And now I don’t have any reason in the world to forgive Nathans.”

Danal leaned back on his hammock and stared into the swallowing darkness. Laina looked as if she wanted to say something to him, but maintained her silence. He didn’t look at her. His burning anger seemed to feed on itself, leaving him motionless.

From below, Danal heard the gentle creaking of cross-beams as someone climbed up to where he and Laina sat together.

“Careful, now.” Gregor’s voice came from under them, then the leader hauled himself up to the main platform. The Servant Julia mechanically followed him up the ladder; as her hands appeared at the topmost rung, Gregor bent to help her up. Gregor dwarfed the silent Servant woman, but she seemed barely aware of his presence. Though Danal had begun to lose patience, Gregor still treated Julia with full courtesy and respect.

“Gregor, I’ve decided to stop trying,” Danal sighed, as if confessing. “I’ve done everything I can think of, but still Julia’s memories won’t come back.”

“For that, I’m glad,” Gregor said carefully, watching Danal and not wanting to start an argument, respecting the other’s decision. “I’m not sure it would be a kindness to give her memories back, to pull her away from… wherever she is.”

Danal closed his eyes for a moment. He once again ran through the visions of his death experience, rapidly now—the chimes, the tunnel, the light, the familiar welcoming presences around him. He was suddenly struck by something he had not realized before. While he could no longer remember the identities of those other gathered spirits, his escorts, he was convinced that Julia—the real Julia—had not been there. This perplexed him, for surely she would have come to welcome him into death?

Breathless, young Rikki dropped to the platform from above with a loud thump, too agitated to use the ropes. His face lit up when he found Danal. “I’ve found her! Again! There’s another Julia!”

Danal lurched off the hammock and landed on the balls of his feet. “What?”

“It’s hard to explain, but I’ve found another Julia!”

Gregor interrupted, keeping a serious expression on his face. “How could you have found someone else? You’re supposed to be on guardian duty.”

“Oh, I gave up some of my time for the searches,” he answered curtly and turned his attention back to Danal.

But Gregor raised his voice. “And put us all in jeopardy? All Wakers?”

“It was only for a little while. Nothing happened.”

Danal stopped any further argument with his own impatience. “What are you talking about, Rikki?” He looked at the Servant Julia who stood motionless beside them.

The boy Waker shrugged. “My search routines kept churning away, deeper and deeper into The Net. See, after we had located her”—he indicated the Servant Julia—“I forgot about the routines. I didn’t think they’d come up with anything different—that’s for sure.

“But I found someone else, hidden really deep. She seems to have only the faintest hint of a correlation with this Julia, or your Julia. But it’s real. I can’t tell you anything more, but she is alive. Not a Servant.”

“Where is she?” Danal whispered.

“Tough security. In a quarantined hospital complex, held in absolute isolation. It’s almost as if they don’t want anybody to see she’s there, you know?”

Danal focused his eyes off in the distance, feeling hope again. With his double-think mentality, it would be just like Nathans to have created a decoy Julia, this Servant, made to look like the real Julia through surface-cloning, just as the imposter had taken Danal’s own place as Vincent Van Ryman. What if the real Julia was still alive, locked away someplace, a final card for Nathans to play?

What if Julia was still alive?

His breath came in short bursts. “I have to know.” He looked around at all the faces, pleading. “But how am I going to get in, if he’s got tight security all around?”

After a moment of silence Laina chuckled a bit. “Piece of cake.” She straightened the skirt of her white nurse/tech outfit. “After all, it’s just another medical center.”