10

Golem Home ... or how gray number two gets to have more fun then he really wants ...

The Rainbow Lounge has a retro name and revo clientele. Once you step past a flickersign that says NO REALFOLK ALLOWED, it feels like you've entered some nightmarish TwenCen sci-fi movie, filled with cavorting mutants and leering androids.

Of course, a lot more than just a warning keeps archies away. True-flesh can't endure the bone-jarring rhythms hammered by a vibrating dance floor. Staccato-strobes hurl juttering lightning arcs that would send organic neurons into conniptions. The atmosphere, clotted with soot from a hundred smoldering ash pipes, could lace your native lungs with lively tumors. The stench -- mildly intoxicating to dittos -- must be filtered before venting to outside air.

Back in one-body days, Saturday night mattered. Now, places like the Rainbow hop around the clock, even on a Tuesday afternoon -- whenever fresh dittos can arrive, baked for harsh pleasure in their owners' kilns, decorated in everything from paisley spirals to moiré patters that turn skin into blurry art. Some come molded as gaudy sex caricatures or sport scary accessories, like razor talons or acid-dripping jaws.

"Would you like a head-check?" The red attendant behind a counter offers me a glowing tag. Next to coatracks stand refrigerated cubbyholes. A tag for cranial storage can help ensure that violent memories will be savored later.

"No thanks," I tell her. And yes, I admit that I used to frequent spots like this. Hey, who gets past their teen years nowadays without sampling depths of hedonism that would shame Nero? Why not, if the only thing you keep are memories? And even that's optional. Nothing that happens to your ditto can harm the real you, right?

That is, if you ignore certain rumors ...

For many, the intensity fix is addictive -- inloading experiences too raucous for mere protoplasm. Especially the unemployed, spending their purple wage to beat back the ennui of modern life.

"Please wait over there, ditMorris. I'll come for you shortly."

Jarred from doorway contemplation, I glance at my guide, another red-hued femdit. Her speech carries through the racket with remarkable clarity. Sonic interference dampers, embedded in the walls, shape a channel for her words to reach my ears. A tech-marvel you can take for granted, when you happen to own the place.

"Pardon? Where should I wait?"

Queen Irene's red golem points again, past the dance floor and beyond the Grudge Pit. This time I see an empty table with a winking RESERVED light.

"Will this take long? I haven't got all day."

That expression has special meaning for a creature like me, self-sentenced to oblivion for the good of my maker. But my guide only shrugs, then heads off through the crowd to inform her sisters that the hired spy has arrived.

Why should I spend my last eighteen hours working for people I don't like, doing a job I don't understand? Why not escape! The street is just meters away.

But if I did escape, where could I go? realAlbert would force me to spend all of my remaining span in quick-court, fighting the maestra's breach-of-contract suit. Anyway, I'm probably being watched right now, targeted by a sighting beam. I can see more copies of the same umber-colored female hurrying about, serving drinks, mopping spills and sweeping bits of broken customers. Several of the reds glance my way. They'll know if I make a break for it.

I head for the table, wading through a maelstrom of noise. Living noise that grabs your body like a cloying lover, hampering every move. I don't like this "music," but the garish dancers do, throwing themselves into frenetic collisions that few could mimic in flesh. Bits of clay fly, as if from a potter's wheel.

Staunch partiers have a saying -- if your ditto makes it home in one piece, you didn't have a good time.

Seating booths line the walls. Others lounge at open tables that project garish holo images -- whirling abstractions, vertigeffigies, or gyrating strippers. Some draw the eye against your will.

Sidling around the mob, I pass through a fringe minimum, where the sonic dampers overlap, canceling everything to a hush, like inside a padded coffin. Stray bits of dialogue converge from all over the club.

" ... so there's this clamber-amble, creeping up my leg? I look down an' see it's wearing Josie's face, grinning at the tip! So I got maybe three secs to decide, did she send it as a poison pet or an apology? Get the pixel?"

" ... the committee finally accepted my thesis, only they slapped a perversion tax, on account of 'sadistic themes'! The nerve. I bet none of those old turds ever read the gospels of deSade!"

" ... uh ... taste this ... d'you think they're watering the benzene?"

Another step, and I'm beyond the quiet fringe minimum, abruptly staggering under a double-reinforced roar. Screams bellow from the Grudge Pit, where swaggering bravos carve each other while other clients tender themselves as prizes to the winners. The latest victor stands over his steaming victim, crossing both wrists with raised weapons that whirl like spinning scythes, throwing enzyme-soaked gore onto cheering bystanders. Bets are paid with glimmering eye-picts, or wads of stained purple bills. Under their garish skin decorations, you can spot which dismembered dittos were bought at a public kiln for twenty welfare dollars.

The winner's triumphant turn brings us eye-to-eye. We lock a gaze briefly and his grin freezes -- in recognition? I don't recall ever seeing his particular pseudoface. The connection lasts but an instant, then he turns back to admiring cheers.

A similar victory might have won him a chiefdom in some olden tribe. Now, well, at least he gets a moment to pretend. Of course, a real pro like my Clara could eat punks like this for breakfast. But she has better things to do right now, two hundred klicks away at the front lines, defending her country.

The RESERVED light goes dark when I sit where I'm expected, wondering how Clara's war is going. Part of me feels sick that I'll never see her again. Though of course I will, as soon as one army or the other wins ... or else when combat breaks up for the traditional weekend truce. realAlbert had better be good to her, or I'll come back from wherever golems go, and haunt the lucky bastard!

"What'll it be?" a waitress asks. A special model, resembling the other Irene-copies, but voluptuous, with big hands for carrying trays.

"Just a Pepsoid. With ice." My grays are self-sufficient, but it's hot in here and an electrolyte boost won't hurt. On Wammaker's expense account.

Turns out that I'm near another sonic fringe. If I lean to one side, I can slip my head into a zone of relative silence, damping out the thudding music and shrieking battle cries, leaving only dribbles of chatter from the booths.

" ... What're you smoking? Izzat buckyball-black? Can I sniff?"

" ... Did you hear they closed the Pithy Pendulum? Health spectors found a zhimmer virus in the filters. Your infected ditto brings it home and WHAM! Next thing, your rig's drooling in a psycho ward ... "

" ... I love that bug-eye look! Are they functional?"

Wordless sounds of ersatz passion also carry. Through haze, I glimpse couples and trios writhing in alcoves. And if your body plan won't fit your partner's, the management rents adapters.

"Hush," I tell the table, which erects a curtain of white noise, quashing the surrounding din. "Give me news from the war front."

"Which war?" a voice buzzes, silicon-based, not clay. Specifics are needed. "Five major matches and ninety-seven minor league events are currently in progress around the globe."

Ah. So who is Clara fighting, this week? I should pay closer attention to the standings. If this were a sports bar, the contest would be on a big screen, twenty-four hours.

"Um, try the combat range nearest town."

"The Jesse Helms International Combat Range lies two hundred and fifty-four kilometers south by southeast. This week, the Helms Range is proud to host a return match between the Pacific Ecological Zone of the United States of America and the Indonesian Reforestation Consortium. At stake are iceberg harvesting rights in the Antarctic -- "

"That's it. How's the PEZ team doing?"

A holo image spreads across the table, zooming toward sunburned mountainy terrain demarcated by sharp boundaries. Outside, beyond a palm-treed resort oasis, lies a protected landscape of desert mesas. Inside: a pocked and tormented patch of Mother Gaia that's been sacrificed for the sake of the rest. A vast cousin of the Rainbow Lounge, where human drives are channeled, with far more at stake.

"Pacifican forces made significant territorial advances during Monday's initial action. Casualties were low. But IRC tribunes assessed a number of penalties that may cancel out these gains ... "

Sparkles flash before me as the POV drops closer to Earth. Sparkles that seem rather gay-looking, till you recognize rocket-artillery barrages and fierce laser strikes. Clara works in a realm of awful killing machines that could wreak horror if they ever spilled beyond the world's combat ranges. I'm torn between zooming toward the front lines or swerving to that tree-lined oasis, at the border. Only --

-- someone barges suddenly through the wispy privacy screen, blocking half the holo image.

"So, it is you." A figure stands before me, tall and snake-skinned. "How convenient."

It's the gladiator I saw just minutes ago in the Grudge Pit, exulting over a steaming victim. He looms closer, purple hands still swathed in wet clay grue, like some brutal potter.

"How'd you get out of the river?" he demands.

All at once, I realize it's the rowdy who blocked my way last night, on Odeon Square! Only that had been his archie back when I was green, trying desperately to escape Beta's yellowdits.

"River?" Let's play innocent. "What makes you think I went swimming? Or that I'd remember you?"

His fighter-ditto isn't made for subtle expressions. The face goes rigid as he realizes what he just gave away. Then he shrugs, deciding not to care what his words reveal.

"You remember me, all right," he growls. "I saw you jump in. And I know you made it back home to dump."

Know? How could he know? Never mind. Modern wisdom says never to be surprised if hidden knowledge leaks. Over the long term, no secret endures.

Let's see if he appreciates sarcasm.

"A golem walking the length of a river! Well, goodness. Anyone who accomplished something like that should be the talk of the town! Maybe you should try jumping in yourself sometime."

The suggestion doesn't sit well.

"I kept your damn arm. Baked it hard. Want it back?"

I can't help smiling as I recall his stunned expression when I left him standing in the plaza gripping my severed wrist. A rare happy memory from a lousy ditto-day.

"Keep it. Make a nice urn."

He scowls. "Stand up."

Instead, I yawn and stretch, both posturing and buying time. Courage is conditional. If this body of mine were made for partying, I just might try to slab and spin this guy, for the hell of it. realAlbert, with plenty to live for, would flee such a mad fool without shame. My options are murkier. I'm gray and an orphan, with no chance of continuity but some puzzles I'd like to solve in my remaining hours. All told, I'd rather management came to shoo him off. Alas, not a single red Irene is in sight.

"I said, get up!" Bully-boy growls, preparing to strike.

"Do I get choice of weapons?" I ask abruptly.

Hesitation. He can't just cut me to bits when I've made it a matter of honor. Duels have rules, y'know. And people are watching.

"Sure. After you." He gestures toward the Grudge Pit, insisting that I lead the way.

I need an out before we get there. There are a few tools in my pocket -- a small cutter and a cyberscope -- but he won't make the same mistake as last night, letting me strike up close, by surprise.

Where the hell are my hosts? If I had any idea they were so lax, I'd have made that break earlier! Hit the street. Maybe head for Pal's. Advise Albert to avoid the maestra in future, like a plague.

We weave past tables, most of them aglow with shimmering bolos, lighting garish faces. No one looks familiar in the young crowd. Anyway, this character is probably part of the in-group. Flexing my knees a bit lower with each step, I think-prep an enzyme rush while slowing the pace, as if suddenly reluctant.

As I hoped, my nemesis plants a beefy hand in my back. Gives a push.

"Go on! The armory's just ahea -- "

I won't chance it against his hyped-up reflexes. Instead of whirling at him from a fake stumble, I leap sideways and up, landing on a nearby table, kicking aside glasses to slip between the projected holos of two female dancers, rubbing their hips in erotic rhythm.

I think he yells, but there's so much noise from upset clients -- they reach for me, so I jump again!

Like a pip, shot from between the gyrating dancers, I fly from that table to another, landing this time amid a swirling maelstrom of jagged virtual scythes, spinning round and round like Death's personal tornado. It's so realistic that I cringe, half expecting to be puréed. But my body passes through the illusion, even as more customers scream outrage and glass crunches underfoot. Hands grab an ankle, so I spin-kick, knocking them off.

Of course the light storm blinds me, too. I can barely glimpse my next target, a table where a gently spinning Earthglobe beckons. I flex --

-- but a sudden force knocks the rickety platform, spoiling my launch. I strike the next table edge-on, rolling in pain amid chairs, kicking feet and broken bottles.

Blows buffet my left side, driving a groan. My tormentor, or an irritated customer? Rather than look, I scuttle like a crab while groping in a pants pocket for my cutter -- too short-range to serve as much of a weapon.

Uh-oh. Boots ahead. Many. He's called friends. They're bending and peering under tables. In moments --

My hand falls on the base of this table, held to the floor by three heavy bolts.

Cut them? Why not? Here goes --

The table wobbles ... tips ...

Grab it. Now surge upward!

They jump back in alarm. It's not much of a weapon, but with the holo still shining I appear to be brandishing more than a bitty cocktail table! Writhing images extend another two meters, like shining snakes. A flail made of burning light.

Just light, yet they cringe. Imprinted with barely altered caveman souls, they can't help seeing a flaming torch. Soon I'm circled by a zone of respect, empty out to the holo's reach. And now, some spectator voices cheer for me.

I spot the punk, with pals, all wearing studded black as if they invented the look. Pathetic.

They clench and snarl. In bare moments, rational evaluation will win out, overcoming cave reflexes. They'll charge through the cool light. But hemmed by onlookers, what can I ...

All at once the tenor of sound shifts. The thundering dance music vanishes. Angry shouts are damped. Past the sucking whistle of my hyper-breathing, an amplified voice penetrates.

"ditMorris, if you please ... "

Swerving again, I feint at the bravos. They retreat, perhaps for the last time as their eyes narrow angrily.

Then, abruptly, they give way -- pushed aside by a band of newcomers, small but forceful, using sound-wands to clear a path. Red females, restoring order to their club.

It's about time.

Backing toward the Grudge Pit, the chief punk gives me a final look, surprisingly passionless, even amused or gratified. The pounding "music" returns. Soon, the Rainbow is back to normal.

One of the Irenes, unapologetic, shakes her ruddy finger.

"ditMorris, kindly put that table down!"

It's hard to comply for a moment. Instinct, you know.

"Please, no more distractions. You're expected. The hive awaits."

The holo display sputters out and I drop my makeshift weapon. That's it? No apology for leaving me at the mercy of idiots?

Oh, stifle the complaint, Albert. It's not like your life was in danger, or anything important.

Jerking her crimson head, my guide beckons me to follow her toward the back of the club, then through a plush curtain. Blessed silence reigns suddenly, as the heavy drape falls behind us. Silence so welcome that I sway. It takes several beats before I can think. Then --

Wait ... I've seen this room before.

During the meeting at Studio Neo, one red-clay Irene had been jacked into a screen showing throngs of umber duplicates, fussing around a single pale figure, supine on a fancy life-maintenance couch. Now, up close, I see the real woman lying amid the bustle, staring blankly while tended by one-third scale duplicates. Fluid drips into her mouth. Mechanical arms massage her limbs. The face, though flaccid and distant, is clearly the template for every red I've seen running about this place. Her shaved head bears a medusa of writhing cables, leading to industrial strength freezers and kilns.

A fresh-baked copy emerges, still glowing from the oven. It stretches for a languorous moment before accepting paper overalls, then stepping away, targeted to do some chore without direction or instruction. Meanwhile, another reenters from the outside world, clearly tottering on depleted cells. Without ceremony, two sisters neatly sever the day-old head, dropping it into a memory transfer coil.

The archie's pale face winces for an instant during inload. The discarded body rolls off for recycling.

Some foresee this as our future, I muse. When you can spin off countless copies to perform any task, your durable organic body will serve one function, as a place to deposit memories and pass them on, a sacred prisoner like the ant queen, while bustling workers carry out life's real activity and savor.

I find the prospect repulsive. But my grandparents thought the same of basic imprinting. The words "golem" and "ditto" were epithets, till we got used to them. Who am I to judge what future generations will think normal?

"ditMorris, welcome."

I turn. The Irene facing me has the skin texture of a high-quality gray, tinted with her trademark umber glaze. Standing near is the other rox I met at Studio Neo, "Vic" Manuel Collins, with the eye-hurting plaid dye job.

"You call this welcome? I'd like to know why you left me out there, to be -- "

Collins lifts a hand. "Questions later. First, let us see to your repairs."

Repairs?

Looking down, I see bad news. Deep gashes in my left side! One leg cut more than halfway through along its length and oozing badly. Hopped-up on action enzymes, I felt little.

Ack, I'm ruined.

"You can repair this?" My chief emotion is numb curiosity.

"Come along," says the nearest Irene. "We'll fix you up in no time."

No time? I ponder in a daze, following. To a ditto, "no time" is a very demanding phrase.

11

Ghosts in the Wind ... as realAlbert does some modern footwork ...

There didn't seem to be much I could do about my missing duplicates. Gray number two was on autonomous mode; he couldn't legally contact me, and the maestra might prevent it even if he wanted to. The greenie had sent a weird declaration of independence, before going off on his own. And there was no sign at all of gray number one, who vanished at Kaolin Manor along with a ghost of Yosil Maharal. The Universal Kilns security staff had taken charge of that mystery, sifting the estate for any sign of both missing dittos. So far to no avail.

I didn't expect them to achieve much. It's easy to smuggle a rox in a box. Millions, cushioned mummylike in CeramWrap, get shunted all over the city each day by truck, courier, or pneumatic tube. And it's even easier getting rid of a dead one -- just flush the remains into a recycler. Without a pellet, one batch of golem slurry is no different than any other.

Anyway, I had investigations to take care of, including one for a client who was willing to pay top rates. Ritu Maharal wanted me to look into the mysterious death of her father. As legal heir, she could now access his records, from credit purchases to calls from his wrist phone. Maharal's movements during time spent working for UK were another matter. But when Ritu asked Vic Aeneas Kaolin for those chronicles, the tycoon assented, grudgingly, to keep her from going public with "wild stories" about her father being murdered.

The permissions came through soon after I finished making an ebony specialist, tuned for total focus on professional skill. That duplicate went right to work, waving its arms and chattering rapidly under the muffled folds of a virtual reality chador, immersed in a world of rapidfire data-globes and zooming images. All logic and focus, the ebony could handle the rest of my caseload for the time being, letting me concentrate on one task -- discovering where Yosil Maharal spent the last few weeks.

Never mind what cyber marketeers say about their fancy autonomous search programs. Data-sifting is an art. We may live in a "transparent" society, but the window glass is frosted and foggy in countless places. Peering through those patches can take skill.

I started by setting up a digital avatar -- a simple software representation of myself -- and launching it through the publicam network. Though less intelligent or flexible than a creature with a Standing Wave, it carried some of my expertise combined with a relentless drive to hunt down any images that Yosil may have left while traveling on city streets. Ritu gave me about sixty solid sightings to start with -- places he was confirmed to have been at exact times. The avatar zoomed in on those space-and-time coordinates, then tried to follow the scientist as he moved from one recorded scene to the next. Gradually, a map began to fill in, detailing his movements during the months before he died.

Often, that kind of search is enough, all by itself. Few people have a knack for evading the publicam mesh.

Alas, Maharal must have been one of them. Indeed, he proved wily at escaping from view, almost at will. My avatar's search left a chart with many gaping holes, some lasting a week or more!

Ritu's pockets were deep and she wanted answers fast. So I put out bids for sightings by privately owned lenses, which are far more numerous than public cameras. Restaurant security scanners, window-ledge lurkers, newsbugs, amateur sociologists, even nature lovers and urban sporting clubs -- anyone whose sensors might have spotted Yosil when he was out of publicam range. Since Ritu owned her father's copyright now, there wasn't even a voyeur tax. Low bids poured in. I let the avatar haggle and choose enough pix to fill in Yosil's trail.

Meanwhile, I focused on the scene of his death.

Outside the city, it's like another world. A primitive realm of immense areas where vision is blurry, even nonexistent ... unless you happen to be there in person, using your own eyes.

Adult: If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

A modern child: It depends. Let me check if any of the local cams had sonic or vibrational pickups.

Cute. But in fact, most places on Earth still aren't covered by any close-in cams at all! It's a lot easier to disappear in the countryside, beyond any sign of habitation.

Unfortunately, that's where Maharal spent his last hours, and possibly days.

I started with police images of the crash site, offering stunning holographic detail out to a diameter of two hundred meters surrounding Maharal's wrecked vehicle -- a big Chevford Huntsman with an extravagant methane engine. It lay crumpled and half-burned at the bottom of a ravine. The river was dry this time of year, but giant granite boulders testified to the smoothing effects of a torrent that scoured the streambed during some winters.

The desert, I thought, glumly. Why did it have to be the damn desert?

Overhead, spanning the gully, stood the highway viaduct where Maharal's vehicle began its fatal plummet, the guardrail a twisted snake of shredded metal. I spent some time nosing around the scene, shifting and interpolating from one hovering copcam to the next. While emergency vehicles came and went, muscular dittos heaved at the wreck -- sometimes with fancy tools, but then dropping them to use raw strength -- striving to free the dead scientist's corpse.

The road made a sharp turn just before reaching this lonely site. Skid marks intersected the maimed guardrail ... as if the driver had realized his peril suddenly, though too late. This, combined with results from Maharal's autopsy, convinced authorities that he must have simply dozed off at the wheel.

The tragedy never would have happened if he used the car's auto-navigation system. Why would someone drive at night, in an unlit desert, with all safety features cut out?

Well, I answered my own question, robot-piloting leaves a trace. You don't use autonav when you're worried about being followed. Maharal's gray ditto had admitted that the good doctor spent his last days oscillating in and out of paranoia. This supported the story.

Reversing the flow of time, I watched emergency vehicles converge backward and then disperse again, one by one, till just a solitary camview was available ... a speckly image from the first sheriff's cruiser to arrive on the scene. When I tried ratcheting still earlier, the fatal patch of desert not only went dark, it vanished from memory, like a blind spot you couldn't even look at. It appeared only on maps. An abstraction. For all anyone knew for sure, it did not even exist during the time in question.

Farm country would've been better. Agriculturalists use a lot of cameras to monitor crops. Anything irregular, like a stranger, might show up. But the hectare in question featured just a simple EPA toxicity detector, vigilant against illegal dumping. The nearest real lens was more than five klicks away -- a habitat scanner programmed to count migrating desert tortoises and such.

Still, I didn't give up. There are ten thousand commercial and private spy-sats orbiting this planet, and even more robot aircraft cruising the high stratosphere, serving as phone relays and newscams. One of them might have been focused on this obscure place when the accident happened, recording a handy image of Maharal's headlights, swerving and then spinning as the car plunged to its doom.

I checked ... and there was no such luck. All the high-resolution lenses were busy elsewhere that night, zooming onto busier sites. Tech-pundits keep promising we'll have WorldOmniscient viewing in a few years, with close-ups of the whole Earth available to everyone, all the time. But right now, that's just sci-fi stuff.

My best bet was to try a little trick of my own, using the coarse data from a micro-climate orbiter. Not a true camera, the weathersat is assigned to track wind gusts across the southwest, using Doppler radar.

Traffic stirs the air, especially in open countryside. Long ago I figured out that you can trace the passage of a single vehicle, if conditions are right. And if you're lucky.

Using special processing software, I massaged the weathersat's recorded scan of the area near the viaduct, moments before the crash. Looking for very small patterns, I prodded and palped the Doppler elements till they were grainy, fluctuating at the edge of chaos.

At first, it looked like nothing more than a storm of multicolored noise. Then I began picking out patterns.

There!

It looked like a trail of mini-cyclones, spinning along both sides of the desert road -- a ghostly wake, barely perceptible against a background of noise-washed pixels. Pushing the clock slowly backward from the time of the crash, I followed that spectral trace as it writhed southward along the road, vanishing and then reappearing like a phantom snake, moving at the pace of a speeding car.

This might work, I thought, so long as Maharal didn't pass any other traffic ... and assuming the air stayed quiet all that lonely night.

Almost any outside disturbance could erase the wraithlike spoor.

Comparing distance and time scales, I could tell one thing about Maharal's condition that night as he sped toward his tryst with death -- the Universal Kilns scientist sure must have had a bee up his shorts! He topped over a hundred and twenty klicks along most of that curvy road. The guy was just asking for trouble.

Could someone have been following him? Chasing? The trail of cyclonic disturbance was too ragged and smeared to tell if it was made by one vehicle or two.

I asked Nell to keep following the faint pattern as far back in time as she could.

"Acknowledged," my house computer answered, almost sounding human. "If you aren't too busy, there are some other matters that have come up while you were immersed in work. Your colleague Malachai Montmorillin called several more times. I put him off, per your instructions."

I felt a little guilty. Poor Pal. "I'll make it up to him tonight. Orders stand."

"Very well. I have also received a pneumatic shipment from Universal Kilns. Five new ditto blanks."

"Put them away. And please stop bothering me with trivia."

Nell went silent. I could see on one monitor that she was concentrating on following Maharal's desert track. So I turned away to check on the cyber-avatar that I had unleashed in the city cam-web.

The results looked gratifying!

Purchased images and camera-posse reports were pouring in, providing a picture of where Yosil Maharal had spent much of the last few months, at least when he was in town. I skim-sampled the resulting movie at high speed, tailing the late researcher as he moved from one eyeview to the next ... shopping in a fashionable arcade, for instance, or visiting his hygienist for a routine oral-symbiont upgrade. The mesh of spottings still amounted to only a couple of hours a day, on average. But after all, Maharal spent most of his time working in the lab at Universal Kilns, or at home.

Except for those mysterious trips to the countryside, that is. It was essential to forge a link between his city trail and those cryptic sojourns out of town.

Still, I felt content with progress so far. If the city mesh kept filling in at this rate, I should have something worthwhile to report to Ritu.

A sharp twinge brought my hand to my right temple. One byproduct of all this work was a growing headache. Real neurons can only take so much holovideo input. Anyway, it was time I got up to relieve my bladder.

Stopping at the chemsynth unit on my way back, I ordered a tension potion -- something to ease the knot in my neck, but without any thought-dulling endorphins. I took the frothy concoction back to the study ... only to find someone in my place! Somebody built like me, but with longer fingers and a disdainful expression that I seldom wear. At least I hope I don't.

The glossy, emulated skin was the color of deep space. Agile hands danced over my controller-array.

"What are you doing?" I demanded. The ditto had its own cubbyhole.

"Tidying up this mess while waiting for you to come out of the john. Your search avatar thinks that it's tracked down most of Maharal's missing in-town movements."

I glanced at the screen. "Yeah? Eighty-seven percent coverage ain't bad ... for the time Maharal wasn't at home or the lab. What are you getting at?"

Again, a sardonic smile.

"Oh, nothing, maybe. Except that some of these so-called sightings may not be Dr. Yosil Maharal at all."

I gave the ditto a hollow look, which only invited more disdain.

"Care to make a wager, Boss-me? I'll bet my inload that Maharal's got you fooled. In fact, he's been tricking everybody for a very long time."

12

Leggo My Echo ... or how a green frankie seeks enlightenment ...

Out of politeness, I waited till the crippled purple preacher finished her sermon before I stood up to leave the Ephemerals. Unfortunately, the sweetly inspirational tone was marred by an altercation that broke out in the vestibule as I made my way outside. A man whose skin tone verged egregiously between golem-beige and human-brown shouted while waving a placard covered with in flowing, cursive script:

You all miss the point.

There's a next step a'coming ...

Angry congregants milled, trying to nudge the interloper through an exit without shoving -- on the offchance that he might be real. The uncertainty fostered by his ambiguous coloration was augmented by sunglasses, along with flaming red hair and a beard that could either be fake or genuine. The fellow was committing half a dozen misdemeanors just by looking this way -- like some kind of ditto-human crossbreed -- an effect he must have been aiming for.

"You're all a bunch of daisies!" he cried, as a dozen or so Ephemerals crowded him toward a side door. "Colored on the outside, but dull as flesh within! Don't you know it takes blood to pull off a revolution? The protoplasm elite will never give way to the New Race without violence. They'll cling to domination till they're wiped off the face of the Earth! Only then can we progress to the next level!"

I had to admit, standing there, that sometimes you just gotta admire the passion of the truly insane -- a passion that bulls right past all sense or reason. I mean, was he really suggesting that dittos can exist, somehow, independently of organic originals who were woman-born? How was that even remotely logical? The variety of inventive ideas -- and ideologies -- that people can come up with never ceases to amaze me, especially when they're stoked by the ultimate drug, self-righteousness.

Turning and departing by the front door, I descended wide stone steps to the street with the fanatic's words still ringing in my ears.

"Get ready!" the crackpot yelled in a fervid voice that seemed to cling, even as I walked away.

"A new age is coming for the ditsenfranchised ... if you prepare!"

Nobody wanted to talk about the waiter who caused a brief uproar last night, at La Tour Vanadium.

When I arrived, most of the restaurant staff -- contract specialdits from busboys to maître d' -- were darting about wordlessly, clearing away lunch and setting tables for the early dinner crowd. A few customers lingered while twin chartreuse waiters hovered nearby. Gym bags lay at the archies' feet. A nice chardonnay can be just the thing after exercise, soaking warm neurons with a happy glow.

Optimists predict that someday a real body may last as many decades as a ditto has hours. Well, far be it from me to begrudge this.

Wearing cheap paper overalls from a vending machine, and still feeling throbs in my back from that hasty patch-up at the Ephemerals, I knew I wouldn't impress the manager. One copper-colored eye narrowed behind a monocle-spex, scanning to verify my blurry copy of Albert Morris's investigator license. He'd know in seconds if my maker had disowned me.

Would Albert do that, just because I refused to clean his toilets? Could I already be on the hit list of some pervo hunt club? Worse, he might declare me a danger to society. A police exterminator could be swooping down, right now, like an avenging hawk ...

I was betting my life on Albert's softheartedness, unable to renounce his first frankie.

The manager flipped up his monocle, handing back the smudged ID. "As I told your house computer, there is nothing to investigate. You can't seriously be interested in yesterday's little accident! Since when is it a felony to spill some drinks and break a little glass? We obtained waivers from every customer, offering free meals in recompense."

"Generous, but -- "

"Is someone reneging? Is that why you're here? We can call an online jury to watch recordings. Any reasonable panel -- "

"Please. I'm not here to plant a grudge lien. I just want the waiter."

"There's nothing to extort. He was covered by our insurance, until we terminated his contract."

"So he was fired. Did he work here long?"

"Two years. This morning he had the nerve to claim that last night's incident wasn't his fault. His ditto never made it home, so it must have been hijacked and replaced by an imposter!" The manager sniffed disdain. But if I had hackles, they'd have risen.

"Give me contact info and I won't bother you again."

He glared. It would be simple to snub a utility green. But what if Albert himself followed up?

"Oh ... all right." His monocular flipped down as he signaled commands. Then, with a dismissive grunt, he turned away.

Damn. Instead of speaking or writing the name, he sent an info-blip to Nell! I could phone her for it, but then maybe I'd have to talk to Albert, like a teen crawling back to Dad. Double-damn. Heading for the exit, I wondered about this obsession to solve one minor riddle before I expire. The matter seemed unimportant. Why worry about it?

I stopped in the doorway, my cheap green senses adjusting to daylight, when something caught my eye. Literally. Like a gnat darting nearby, it came buzzing near my face. I swatted, deterring the pesky thing briefly. Then it came back.

Premature ditto decay can attract scavengers, and there was plenty of damaged pseudoflesh hanging off my back. I swiped at it again. It tumbled -- then streaked right at me, diving with uncanny speed!

I fell back against a wall, clutching my eye. Worse than the pain were the explosions of color! Skyrocket flashes converged, forming shapes. Forming letters:

No time

Take a cab to Fairfax Park

Pal

13

Doing Their Ditto Work ... or how Tuesday's second gray starts getting paranoid ...

Unconsciousness can be disturbing to a realperson.

For a ditto, it's like death. And wakening is akin to being born again.

Where am I?

A sideways glance tells me I'm still in Irene's hive. Across a wide chamber, I glimpse the huge pale figure of her archetype body -- the queen -- tended by more than a dozen reddish mini-copies. Full-sized versions come and go swiftly on errands. Not one says a word. No one has to.

In bleary contemplation, I envision an atom's core and its surrounding fog of virtual particles. Irene-duplicates keep emanating from the maroon-colored mass to perform missions for the hive. Others -- aged and experienced -- spiral in bearing the modern nectar: knowledge to accumulate and share with more copies. And at the center, a realperson whose role it is to absorb and redistribute that knowledge, using imitation bodies to do everything else.

I've got to admit, Irene is impressive. Her self is very large.

Come on, Albert, focus.

How long was I out? Feels like moments. They were going to repair me ... fix the awful damage inflicted by those angry gladiators in the Rainbow Lounge.

Did it work? There's no pain, but that means nothing.

Arms and hands all seem to work. Clasping my side now ... my leg.

In place of gaping wounds, I feel lumpy ridges, like hard scar tissue. Beneath, large areas feel numb, senseless. But all limbs flex and stretch satisfactorily. Splendid work, for a quick splice and patch job.

But then, if anyone would have advanced repair technology, you'd expect it to be Queen Irene.

Sitting up, I find I'm clothed in generous gray cloth.

"How do you feel?"

It's the high-quality Irene -- dyed from a gray blank -- standing alongside her associate, the male golem with plaid skin. Vic Collins.

"Surprisingly good. What time is it?"

"Almost two-thirty."

"Huh. That didn't take long."

"We've automated the repair process considerably. Without much help from Universal Kilns, I might add."

"So you suspect them of suppressing this technology, too?"

"As you can imagine, the company prefers that people buy lots of new blanks. Of course, fixing damaged dittos would be economical, ecological, merciful -- "

"Does this relate to your other concern? A breakthrough in extending ditto lifespans."

Vic Collins nods. "They are linked. You can hardly expect UK to be eager about sharing technologies that undercut their market. But the law says they must patent and publish advances or else lose them."

Hence the eagerness of this small consortium to do a little quasi-legal espionage. If they can get the goods on a suppressed or hoarded technology, the Whistle-blower Prize could be substantial. Up to thirty percent of the resulting patents. In this case, it could make them tycoons. I'm tempted to pursue the topic, but time can press when your remaining span on Earth is measured in hours. Unlike Irene, I have no rig to return home to. Not if I keep the deal we've made.

"Speaking of UK," I prompt.

"Yes, we should be going, if you feel ready."

I hop off the table. Except for the unpleasant feeling of numbness under my scars, things appear to be okay. "Did you get the stuff?"

"We gathered the supplies and information you require in order to penetrate Universal Kilns."

"Not penetrate. I agreed to scout for you, in a strictly legal manner."

"Forgive my poor choice of words. Please come this way."

There's no pain. Still, I limp a bit while following Irene and Collins out the rear of the Rainbow Building. A silent ocher driver waits in the sheltered alley, holding the door of a van with opaque windows. I pause, wanting to get a few matters clear before entering.

"You still haven't explained exactly what I'll be looking for."

"We'll brief you along the way. There are important matters we hope you'll uncover with your renowned investigative prowess."

"I'll do my best" -- then I reiterate for the spool recorder inside me -- "within the law."

"Naturally, ditMorris. We would not ask you to do anything illegal."

Right, I think, trying to penetrate his gaze. But it's futile. Eyes made of clay aren't windows to the soul. It's still a matter of debate whether there's any "soul" inside of creatures like us at all.

Entering the van, I find the fourth member of our party, smiling with a celebrated mixture of distance and seductiveness, crossing snow white legs that glisten with their own luster beneath sheer, extravagant silk.

"Greetings, Mr. Morris," murmurs the voluptuous pleasure-ditto.

"Maestra," I reply, wondering.

Why would Gineen Wammaker dispatch a top-of-the-line pearl model to accompany us? A simple gray should suffice, to hear my report. Or why send a rox at all? Any useful information can be sent by Web.

My grays carry a good semblance of normal male reaction sets. So her art affects me -- both attracting and repelling at once, beckoning some of the more sick-hostile corners of sexuality. Her famed, perversely alluring specialty.

Like any decent adult, I can quash such reactions. (Especially by thinking about honest, self-respecting Clara.) Surely Wammaker knows this, so the aim can't be to influence me.

So why is she here? Especially as a pearl ... a creature of profuse sensuality ... unless this mission represents another chance for her to enjoy some depraved bliss?

My worries, already verging on paranoia, bloom anew.

"Let's go," she tells the driver. Gineen clearly doesn't mind that I stare. Perhaps she even knows what I'm thinking.

I'm wishing that I had a better class of clientele.

14

Under False Colors ... or how realAlbert gets duped again ...

"What are you saying?" I asked the jetto. "That my web sightings may not be Maharal?"

With finger flicks and winked signals, my ebony duplicate fetched data and put moving pictures onscreen. I watched a collage of recordings made weeks ago as Yosil Maharal strolled down an avenue filled with pedestrians and gyrocyclists. One of those fashionable display arcades where you can sample a myriad products, select features you like, and have made-to-order items delivered by courier-ditto before you get home.

From a distance, Maharal appeared to enjoy a window-shopping stroll, sauntering through one boutique after another. A district like this one has more cameras than a typical street, letting Nell's software avatar sew an almost gap-free retrospective mosaic as our target moved from one lens view to another, with time stamps glowing in a low corner.

"Did you notice anything happen, just now?" the ebony asked.

"What's to notice?" I twitched, feeling awkward under that unblinking gaze, knowing what contempt I tend to feel toward my real self, whenever I'm black.

He clicked his tongue. The onscreen image froze and raster-scanned. Enhancing cells zoomed toward where Maharal had joined a small crowd, watching a street performer weave sculptures out of smoke-gel. The fragile artifacts grew and blossomed like delicate apparitions, lifted and shaped by the puffs of air exhaled from the virtuoso's pursed lips. When a child clapped her hands, reverberations made the creation shudder and bow toward her, before rising again as the artist breathed new layers.

Working with similar skill, my golem specialist swiftly crafted a composite image from three cameras, scattered around the plaza. Maharal's picture grew more grainy as we zoomed in on his face. The UK scientist was smiling. All seemed normal, till I felt a creepy suspicion.

"Zoom closer," I said, with misgivings. "The skin texture ... by God, it's not real!"

"I see it now," Nell commented. "Note the subject's forehead. The pellet dimple has been concealed under makeup."

I slumped. We were looking at a ditto.

"Hm," the ebony commented. "It appears that our good doctor committed a nine-point misdemeanor. Those flesh tones are human-brown. Shade ninety-four X, to be exact. Definitely illegal for duplicates to wear in public."

This was unlike Kaolin's weak ploy, when he phoned me earlier. His archetype guise had been amateurish and quasi-legal since he was at home at the time. But Maharal, in his developing paranoia, must have felt it worth risking a stiff fine in order to drop out of the city-village without a trace.

I glanced at the time stamp. Twelve minutes since the last time Maharal passed near a hi-res publicam, allowing a good reality check. He must have made the switch during that interval. But exactly when? The collage was awfully tight. "Please backtrack, Nell. Show the most biggest coverage gap since fourteen-thirty-six."

From the plaza, Maharal's ghost image began scurrying in reverse till he vanished into a shop offering fine utility coats for men. My avatar did a quick negotiation with the store's internal security system ... which refused to share any images because of a quaint privacy policy. Nothing would budge the stubborn program, not even Maharal's death certificate and Ritu's permission slip. I might have to go talk to the manager in person.

"How long was he in there?" I asked.

"A little over two minutes."

More than enough time for Maharal to trade places with a waiting ditto. But it was a risky move. Despite the lens-detecting scanners they sell nowadays, you can never absolutely guarantee you're not being watched. Even inside a buried oil drum. (I know, from personal experience.) Still, Maharal must have felt pretty confident.

Now I must assign a new software avatar to do a careful backscan and find out when the ditto entered the store. It must have come in disguise, then spent hours in there, crouched behind coatracks or something. After the switch, realMaharal would have waited a while, changing carefully into another disguise before reemerging, positive that his decoy had derailed any normal search routines.

I've pulled the same ruse myself, many times.

"He may have the shopowner's complicity," my ebony specialist pointed out. "The ditto could arrive in a shipping crate and realMaharal might depart the same way."

I sighed over the drudgery ahead, inspecting and analyzing countless images.

"Don't sweat it. I'll handle the sift from my cubicle," the specialist assured me. "I've already got our other cases under control. Besides, I think you'll want to look at what your other search uncovered at the crash site."

He got up and moved toward the little niche where I recall spending many happy hours -- a cramped cubbyhole that I find comfortably cozy whenever I'm ebony, tuned to want nothing more than the pure joy of professional skill. Watching my copy go, I felt a little envious ... and grateful to both Maharal and Kaolin for helping invent dittotech.

It's a terrific boon, if you have a marketable skill.

The ebony was right. Investigation of the crash site had reached a new plateau.

Onscreen, my display depicted a vast swathe of desert southeast of town -- a strange realm where trustworthy realtime images were as sparse as drinkable water and where it took sophisticated trickery to sift the trail of a moving car. Following my instructions, Nell had traced a ghostly spoor of whirling cyclones back through the night, moving earlier and ever farther from Maharal's death rendezvous. The overlay showed a dotted line weaving toward a range of low mountains near the Mexican border, not far from the International Combat Arena. Once inside those hills, I knew the trail of mini-tornados must vanish amid a whirl of canyon turbulence.

But I'd seen enough to feel an eerie chill. I knew this country.

"Urraca Mesa," I whispered.

Nell spoke up.

"What did you say?"

I shook my head.

"Dial up Ritu Maharal," I ordered. "We need to talk."

15

Copycats ... in which a Frankenstein monster learns why he shouldn't exist ...

Fortunately, my greenie expense allowance was still active -- Albert hadn't disowned me yet -- so I was able to hire a micro-cab from Odeon Square, weaving across Realtown on a single gyro-wheel with two cramped seats. Swift it may have been, but the trip was also excruciating as the driver kept going on and on about the war.

Apparently, the battle in the desert had begun going sour for our side. The cabbie blamed this on bad leadership, illustrating his point by calling up recent action highlights in a viewbubble that enveloped me, trapped on the rear saddle, amid scenes of violent carnage by bomb and shell, by cutter beam and hand-to-hand dismemberment, all lovingly collated by this avid aficionado.

Albert had learned plenty from Clara over the years, enough to know this armchair general's opinions weren't worth spit. The guy had a taxi franchise with eleven yellow and black-checkered duplicates driving hacks, presumably all yapping at cornered customers. How did he keep a high enough satisfaction index to merit so many cabs?

Speed was the answer. I had to give him that. Arrival offered me the day's greatest surge of pleasure. I paid the cabbie and escaped into the cement maze of Fairfax Park.

Big Al doesn't like the place. No greenery. Too much space was given over to concrete ramps, spirals, and jutting slabs, back when real kids might spend every spare moment of lifespan careening on stunt bikes, skateboards, and flare skooters, risking broken necks for sheer excitement. That is, till new pastimes lured them away, leaving behind a maze of metal-reinforced walls and towers like forsaken battlements, some of them three stories high, too costly to demolish.

Pallie loves the place. All that buried rebar acts like a partial Faraday Cage, blocking radio transmissions, thwarting spy-gnats and eavesbugs, while the hot concrete surface blinds visual and IR sensors. Nor is he above bouts of nostalgia, shooting the old slopes in his latest, souped-up wheelchair, popping rims and sliders, hollering and teetering while catheters and IV tubes whip around him like war pennants. Some kicks have to be experienced in flesh, I guess. Even flesh as harshly wounded as his.

Albert kind of puts up with Pal -- partly out of guilt. Feels he might have tried harder to dissuade the guy from going out that night when ambushers jumped him, roasting half his body and leaving the rest for dead. But honestly, how do you "dissuade" a thrill-addict mercenary who'd stroll into a blatant trap, just asking to get his balls shot off? Hell, I'm more cautious in clay than Pal is in person.

I found him waiting under the shadow of "Mom's Fright," the biggest skooter ramp -- with a swoop chute so sheer it makes you sick just looking at it. He had company. Two men. Real men, who eyed each other warily, separated by Pal's biotronic wheelchair.

It felt awk being the sole ditto, and the feeling got worse when one of them -- a brawny blond -- gave me the look, staring through me like I wasn't there.

The other one smiled, friendly. Tall and a bit skinny, he struck me as somehow familiar.

"Hey, green, where's your soul?" Pal jibed, raising a burly fist.

I punched it. "Same place as your feet. Still, we both get around."

"We do. How'd you like that message wasp I sent? Cool, eh?"

"Kind of cyber-retro, don't you think? Lot of effort for a simple come-hither. Hurt like hell when it pierced my eye."

"Omelettes," he said, apologizing backhandedly. "So, I hear you cut yourself loose!"

"Shrug. How much good to Albert is an Albert who's not Al?"

"Cute. I didn't figure Sober Morris could make a frankie. Anyway, some of my best friends are mutants, real and otherwise."

"Sign of a true pervert. Do you know if Al's planning to disown me?"

"Nah. Too soft. He did post a credit limit, though. You can charge two hundred, no more."

"That much? I didn't clean a single toilet. Is he angry?"

"Can't tell. He cut me off. Got other probs. Seems he lost both of this morning's grays."

"Ouch. I heard about the first, but ... damn. Number two had the Turkomen. That was a good scooter." I pondered this a second. No wonder my AWOL raised so little dust. "Two grays gone. Huh. Coincidence? Happenstance?"

Pallie scratched a scar, running from his shaggy black hair to a stubbled chin.

"Thinking no. Reason I sent the wasp."

The big blond grunted. "Will you cut this useless chatter? Just ask the vile thing if it remembers us."

Vile thing? I tried to meet the fellow's eye. He refused contact.

Pal chuckled. "This is Mr. James Gadarene. He thinks you might recognize him. Do?"

I looked the man up and down. "No recollection ... sir." Adding some formality might be a good idea.

Both strangers grunted, as if half-expecting this. I hurried on.

"Of course that's no guarantee. Albert himself forgets faces. Even some guys he knew in college. Depends how long ago we met. Anyway, I'm a frank -- "

"This memory would be less than twenty hours old," Gadarene interrupted without actually looking at me. "Late last night, one of your grays rang my doorbell, flashed some private eye credentials and demanded an urgent meeting. The ruckus even woke some of my colleagues in our compound next door. I agreed -- reluctantly -- to meet the gray, alone. But in private the damned thing only paced around, blathering nonsense that I couldn't even begin to comprehend. Finally, my assistant came in from the next room with news. The gray wore a static generator. It was deliberately jamming my interview recorder!"

"So you have no chronicle of the meeting?"

"Nothing useful. That's when I got fed up and tossed the cursed thing out."

"I ... don't recall anything remotely like that. Which means the real Albert Morris doesn't either. Or he didn't, as of ten this morn. Before that, all of our dittos have been accounted for, stretching back at least a month. Every one brought home a complete inload ... though some were pretty banged up." I winced, recalling last night's awful trek under the river. "Heck, I don't even know what 'offices' you're talking about."

"Mr. Gadarene heads an organization called Defenders of Life," Pallie explained.

At once I grasped the fellow's hostility. His group fiercely opposes dittotech on purely moral grounds -- a stance requiring great tenacity nowadays, when realfolks live surrounded and outnumbered by countless creatures of servile clay. If one of Albert's copies had behaved in the manner just described, it would be an act of towering rudeness and deliberate provocation.

From Gadarene's bitter expression, I guessed a special ire toward me. As a frankie I had declared independence, professing to be a free, self-motivated life form ... though a pseudobeing with few rights and fewer prospects. At least other dittos could be viewed as extensions or appendages of some real person. But I'd seem the worst kind of insult toward heavenly authority. A soul-less construct who dares to say I am.

At a best guess, I'd wager his people never donate to the Temple of the Ephemerals.

"Same thing happened to us, early this morning," the other fellow said -- the tall man who looked vaguely familiar.

"I think I do recognize you," I mused. "Yes ... the greenie I ran into, picketing at Moonlight Beach. Its face copied yours."

From his wry smile, I could tell the man already knew about my encounter with his cheap demonstrator-ditto. The green may have already inloaded. Or perhaps it phoned home to report my resemblance to their wee-hours visitor.

"Mr. Farshid Lum," said Pal, finishing introductions.

"Friends of the Unreal?" I guessed. The biggest organization of mancies I'd heard of.

"Tolerance Unlimited," he corrected with a frown. "The FOTU manifesto doesn't go far enough in demanding emancipation for synthetic beings. We think short-lived people are just as real as anyone else who thinks and feels."

That drew a snort from the blond. And yet, despite a philosophical chasm that gaped between them, I sensed common purpose. For now.

"You say a Morris copy also barged into your place -- "

" -- ranted for a while and then left, yeah," Pallie inserted. "Only this time we got some clear images through the static. It was one of your brodits, or sure looked like one."

He handed me a flat pix. Though blurry, it resembled Albert, as close as any gray takes after its rig.

"Appearances can be faked. So can credentials. The static indicates that someone didn't want too close an inspection -- "

"I agree," interrupted Gadarene. "Moreover, when we phoned Mr. Morris this morning for an explanation, his house computer -- "

" -- Nell -- "

" -- dismissed the whole event as impossible, since you didn't have any duplicates active at the time we were being harassed. The house refused even to wake Albert Morris for comment."

"Curious," I comment.

"In fact, your rig has both of our groups listed as crank organizations," said Lum, with a wry expression, as if he wore the moniker with pride. "Since the house filtered and refused my queries, I went to the public Albert Morris net profile, looking for one of his friends. Someone who would talk to us."

"Me," Pal said. "I'm not bothered by cranks. I like 'em!"

"Likes attract," I muttered, winning brief but angry eye contact from Gadarene.

"Yeah, well, my cup ranneth over when I got two queries, from groups that normally despise each other. Smelling a rat, I tried calling Al, but he brushed me off. Too busy for an old Pal, today. So I went snooping for someone else who might shed light on the matter ... and found you."

"Me? I already said, these stories don't fit anything I remember."

"And I believe you. But do you have any ideas? What comes to mind?"

"Why ask me? I'm just a green, not exactly equipped for analytical thought."

"Oh, but you won't let that stop you!" Pallie laughed.

I frowned at him, knowing he was right. I couldn't refuse to poke away at this, even if I'm made of the cheap stuff.

I turned to Gadarene and Lum.

"Looking at it from your point of view, several possibilities arise."

I held up one finger. "First, I might be standing here lying. Al could have some valid reason for wanting to poke two irate public advocacy groups in the eye, stir them up, then claim it wasn't him that done it."

"Please," Pallie shook his head. "It's the sort of thing I might try. But Albert's about as much fun as a judge."

For some reason, the insult made me smile. Yeah, poor Sober Albert.

"Well, then, maybe someone's trying to set him up."

Once upon a time, crime and prosecution revolved around establishing or demolishing alibis. If you could prove that you were somewhere else at the time of a crime, it meant you didn't do it. Simple as that.

The alibi excuse started vanishing back in the cyber age, a time when countless big and little heists redistributed cash by the billions while perpetrators hunched over remote computer screens slurping caffeine, dispatching electronic minions to rob in supposed anonymity. For a while, it looked as if society would bleed a death of a myriad cuts ... till accountability was restored and most of the surviving cyberfarts either went to jail or grew up.

Today, the whereabouts of your protoplasmic self hardly matters. Culpability is a matter of opportunity and will. Effective alibis are hard to come by.

"Interesting you should come up with that idea," Pallie commented. "The same thing occurred to me as I watched this morning's raid on Beta's hideout -- that was good work, by the way. I saw Albert meet Ritu Maharal ... and later heard about her father's death. But what really got me going is the maestra."

"Gineen Wammaker? What about her?"

"Well, for one thing, I know that Al's second gray dropped out to do a closed-cognito job for her."

I hesitated. It wouldn't be kosher for me to confirm that such a contract existed. I owed Albert some loyalty, since he hadn't made me an outlaw. The sap.

"All right, both women asked Al to send a gray over. And both grays vanished. So? It's probably a coincidence. Anyway, those grays were baked and imprinted hours after mystery dittos barged in to bother you two gentlemen. What's the connection?"

"That puzzled me, too. So I called Wammaker."

"How I envy you. And what did the Ice Princess say?"

"That she never asked for a Morris-ditto! At least, not since the Beta job was finished. In fact, she told me that Detective Morris is far too rude to be a suitable retainer in future, and furthermore that -- "

"Can we get on with this?"

James Gadarene evidently didn't like discussing the maestra of Studio Neo, whose perverse specialties went out of their way to tweak oldtime morality. The blond shifted his bulk irritably, and a bit ominously. He struck me as the sort who sometimes dismembers dittos -- willingly paying fines -- for the sheer pleasure of punishing evil with his bare hands.

"All right," Pal continued cheerfully. "So I figured I'd find out what I could about your second gray. See if Wammaker's lying. It meant accessing the camera-web and doing some path tracing."

"You?" I chuckled at the idea of Pallie carefully assigning search-avatars and sifting a gazillion intermeshed images. "You never had the patience."

He shook his head ruefully.

"Naw, I'm just an old-fashioned action figure. Still, I know a few graying digital mavens who owe me favors. All they had to do was track a series of sub-myob traffic infractions when the gray drove from your house to the mall. Once inside, the ditto was in view by publicams, much of the time. It parked its scooter and took the escalator ... but never actually reached Wammaker's."

"No?"

"Instead, it got waylaid by the maestra's assistant -- at least that's who it looked like, barely visible under a skulkhood. Together they went two floors down to a rented storefront ... and disappeared."

"So? Maybe Gineen wanted to meet some distance from her regular clients. Especially if the matter's sensitive."

"Could be. Or ... what if someone else wants to use Albert's gray, while making everyone think Gineen hired it?"

I tried to wrap my head around the idea.

"You mean someone faked Gineen's initial call to Albert this morning, then arranged it so lots of cams would see the gray approach Wammaker's ... But then" -- I shook my head -- "it'd take lots of skilled fakery. A false Gineen to make the call. Then a fake assistant."

"And fake Alberts, sent earlier to bother these good citizens." Pallie nodded toward both Gadarene and Lum.

The bigger man groaned. "None of this made any sense when you explained it to me an hour ago, and it sure hasn't gotten any better. Some of us have just one life, you know. You'd better put all this together soon."

"I've been trying," Pal answered, a bit miffed. "Actually, this kind of deductive stuff is more Albert's kind of thing. What d'you think, Greenie?"

I scratched my head. Purely out of habit, since there are no follicles or parasites on my porcelain pate.

"All right. Let's say all these charades were meant for different audiences. Take those dittos who invaded your premises last night ... they didn't talk about anything significant, you say?"

"Just blather, as far as I could tell."

"But they took pains to keep the blather from being recorded. So you can't prove it was nonsense, can you?"

"What d'you mean? What else could it have been?"

"It might look as if you were conspiring together."

"Con ... conspiring?"

"Look at it from an outsider's point of view, Mr. Gadarene. They see a gray enter your establishment, then leave -- hastily and furtively -- an hour or so later. One might conclude that you discussed matters of substance. This could all have been arranged in order to establish a plausible link between your group and Albert Morris."

"Then the same thing happens at my place," said Lum.

"And at Studio Neo. Only this time the gray is real but the visit is faked," Pal prompted. "Was that also for public consumption?"

"Partly," I nodded. "But I'll bet chief audience for that bit of theater was the gray itself. Recall that it went on detached mode right after the meeting, yes? It must be convinced, even now, that it's working for the real maestra. She's not the most likable person -- "

Gadarene snorted loudly.

" -- but she's a businesswoman of substance, with high credibility at fulfilling contracts and staying in the letter of the law. The gray might despise and distrust her. But he'd take an interesting case for a good fee."

"Let me get this straight," offered Farshid Lum. "You think someone pretended to be Wammaker in order to sign your gray up for a task -- "

"A task that might be a cover for something Al would never agree to," Pal suggested.

" -- and that bit of theater earlier, at Tolerance Unlimited -- "

" -- and the Defenders," Gadarene cut in, "was designed to make it seem we are involved in whatever diabolical ... " He groaned. "I'm still confused. We're not getting any closer!"

"Oh yes we are." Pal looked at me. "You have an idea, don't you, my green friend?"

Unfortunately, I did.

"Look, I'm not designed for this. I'm not a brainy ebony or a high-class gray. Anything I offer will just be conjecture."

Lum waved away my demurral. "I've looked up your profile, Mr. Morris. Your reputation for creating fine analytic selves can't be matched. Please, continue."

I might have complained right then that I'm not one of Albert's "selves." But it would be moot.

"Look, we still don't have much data," I began. "But if this chain of wild deductions can stand, I'll guess a few things.

"One: the person or group behind it all has sophisticated dittoing abilities, especially the art of giving a golem a face it's not supposed to have. Since that's illegal, we're already in dangerous territory.

"Two: there's apparently some need to enlist willing participation by one of Albert's grays. Appearances won't do. The gray must be convinced to give genuine effort -- providing some skill that Al's known to be good at. The mission has to appear legal ... or at least worthwhile and not too heinous ... for the gray to cooperate."

"Yes, go on," Pal prompted.

"Three: there's a multipronged effort to assign blame for whatever's going to happen. Guilt-by-association. Fake calls from the maestra. An apparent meeting at Studio Neo ... "

"And us," Lum commented, abruptly serious. "The charade of waking me at night was meant to look like a sneaky conference of conspirators. But why me? And why pull the same stunt on Mr. Gadarene's group of misguided spirits?"

Pal chuckled loud enough to drown out the blond's growl. "But that's the beauty of it! On the surface, it seems your two groups could never get together. You seem at opposite poles. Ironically, that makes a conspiracy seem almost workable."

When they stared at him, Pal spread his burly hands wide, making the wheelchair roll.

"Think! Is there somebody you both hate? Some person, group, or organization that both groups despise. So deeply, you might plausibly join forces?"

I watched both men struggle with the concept. Accustomed to demonizing each other, they clearly found it hard to conceive that they shared any common interest.

I knew the answer already, and felt chilled down to my clay substrate. But I didn't prompt them.

They'd get it in a minute or two.

16

Send In the Clones ... as Tuesday's gray number two employs his art ...

Continuing realtime recitation. Time to enter the Funnel. It's one of my favorite parts of this job. Getting a chance to prove that I can fool a world that's filled with eyes.

"We arranged for the items you requested."

The red-hued Irene-golem hands me a plain satchel. I inspect the contents. Everything's there.

"You sent a lens sniffer ahead, along the route I described?"

"We did, per your instructions. The sniffer verified surveillance gaps in the places you predicted. Current details are noted." She hands me a data-plaque.

"Current? As of when?"

"About an hour ago, while you were being repaired."

"Hm."

An hour can be eternity. But I'm optimistic while scanning the map with its glowing icons and overlapping cones of vision. Yes, the city swarms with eyes, the way a jungle fills with insects. Coverage gaps are precious in my line of work. Today's most difficult hurdle will be to cover my tracks long before I reach Universal Kilns. I'll need several changing sites along the way -- shadow gaps that are just big enough to allow a quick shift in appearance without being noticed -- preferably near locales with lots of dittos coming and going.

Irene might have faith in her sniffers -- programmed to spot the telltale reflective glint of a glass camera lens -- but even the best military scanners can't detect every pinhole spex that may lurk in some crevice or tree trunk. Any number of pin-spies might have been installed since I last used this Funnel route. Fortunately, most of those have low resolution. They'll miss a truly artful transformation.

I have mixed feelings about revealing this path -- one of Albert's recent favorites -- to Gineen and her cohorts. True, nearly every Funnel has limited useful lifespan, as countless amateurs keep finding and rendering them useless. And my pay for this job makes the sacrifice worthwhile. Still, I'd be happier if I had days to prepare, with multiple dittos working in tandem. Everything would be more secure.

Don't sweat it. I offered no guarantees on such a rush job, and Albert gets fifty percent for just trying. Worst case, they are the ones risking exposure.

And yet, my mind spins with potential failure modes. One is coming up ahead.

We slow beneath a highway overpass, coming to rest behind an identical van that quickly accelerates away, resuming our former course and speed, leaving us parked in its place. The driver -- briefly glimpsed -- is another inherently loyal Irene-golem. The old car-switcheroo, first used more than a hundred years ago, but lately modified with reconfigurable chassis and chameleon stretchyskin so this van will look quite different when Gineen and her gang depart again.

Scanning the concrete walls that support the overpass, I spy just one trafficam, its lens recently covered with bird droppings. The real stuff, in case there's later analysis.

So far, so good. Still, I'm unhappy, feeling slovenly and unprofessional. These measures may fool publicams and voyeurs -- possibly even private snoops hired by Universal Kilns. But it takes more than a few tricks to dupe real cops. This will work only if our little adventure stays shy of outright illegality.

"You'll get out here, wait exactly eight minutes, then proceed to that grove," Vic Collins explains, pointing one of his plaid-dyed fingers toward a copse of geniformed licorice-drop trees. "We control, or have taken out, all of the cameras between here and there."

"You sure about that?" Lack of preparation time requires a brute force approach that I'd rather have supervised myself.

He nods.

"Unless any sky-eyes are retargeted in the next few minutes. Within the grove, you'll make your first change, ditch the bag, along with the clothes you're wearing, and emerge as a utility orange-dit. We'll send a dog in later, to pick up the satchel."

"Be sure that you do. If I'm traced back to the grove, a savvy examiner will guess this car-switching dodge."

"Then you mustn't let anyone trace you back to the grove," Vic Collins concludes. "We are counting on your skill."

Oh, brother.

"The bus station is key. I'll do a dodge and weave there, through the ditto crowds. Are more supplies waiting in the locker I specified?"

"You'll find another bag containing a change of clothes and skin dye." Collins holds up a hand, guessing my next question. "And yes, the dye is a gray variant -- perfectly legal. We can say myob to the cops."

"Myob is as myob does," I retort. "If I so much as suspect I'm involved in anything higher than a Class Six misdemeanor, I'll drop out. No matter how big a liability bond you posted."

"Relax, ditMorris," Irene soothes. "We have no fear of the law. Our sole aim in this subterfuge is to keep UK from linking us -- "

" -- or suspecting today's little reconnaissance, yes. They could make things unpleasant, even if we're legal."

"These precautions are for your rig's protection as much as ours, ditMorris. With what you learn today, we can narrow down our suspicions and follow up by slapping specific datapoenas on Universal Kilns, under the tech-disclosure laws. The beauty of it is that they'll never have a reason to ever link you to our lawsuit."

It makes sense. That is, assuming I don't choose to tell Aeneas Kaolin all about this, just as soon as I pass inside Universal Kilns!

Sure, I'd forfeit my bond and lose most of Albert's hard-won credibility points, but there'd be compensations. Maybe he would make me a subject of his ditto life-extension experiments. I could have more than another twelve hours, maybe lots more!

Huh. Now where did that thought come from? It was almost ... well, frankie ... confusing the more important "I" with the trivial i that's thinking these thoughts.

How bizarre!

Anyway, why daydream about doing things that I'll never do. Or cheap posterities that I'll never win?

"And after the bus station?" Vic Collins prompts.

"I'll catch the 330 dino to Riverside Drive and UK headquarters. Head straight for the employee entrance, wave my ID, and hope their security AI is as lax as you expect. Again, if you're wrong about that, if they ask any inconvenient questions, I'll just turn around and leave."

"We understand," the red ditto says with a nod. "But we're confident they'll let you in."

Irene and company somehow know that Ritu Maharal hired one of Albert's grays. One that went missing a few hours ago. Still, the guards at UK may just wave me through, assuming I'm on business for a major stockholder. The trick may work at the outer portal, where hundreds of realfolks and dittos pass each hour. Hell, gaggles of tourists line up there for excursion passes, forming guided groups to view the factory where their disposable bodies are made.

But Wammaker and her pals expect me to breeze through several more checkpoints, each more secure than the last, blithely peering about as I plunge deeper, on the lookout for tech-hints without ever once actually committing fraud or telling a clearcut lie!

(Did Vic Collins also arrange for a security lapse in advance? Some inside bribery to lubricate things? He seems the kind who might know how, with his furtive-yet-superior manner. It's a good thing I have all our conversations taped, on the recorder I'm subvocalizing into right now.)

And they did pay in advance. Crypto-cash, encoded to one of Albert's accounts. All I need do is try. Put in a modest effort. A seventy-five percent fee just for getting inside.

Still, I wish they'd just let me drive my scooter to Universal, instead of going through this rigmarole. Amateurs. The rest of my "life" was devoted to them. Doing my professional best to make this ditzy, half-ass spy job work.

But what if their suspicions are right, and I help prove it?

If Universal Kilns is deliberately suppressing major improvements in dittotech, the news could be big. Albert's reputation might skyrocket.

And I'll have made him a new enemy. One of Earth's biggest corporations.

17

Graying Gracefully ... realAl decides on an expedition, a companion, and a disguise ...

Ritu Maharal appeared reluctant to accompany me on a last-minute trip to the desert. But how could she refuse? Hardly any of the reasons that her mother might have used -- from modesty to a hectic schedule -- have any bearing nowadays.

"It's quite a distance along twisty roads," she said, clearly looking for an out. "There could be delays. If we're gone more than a day, how will we get home?"

I had a ready answer.

"If it looks like we're about to expire, we can stop at a ditimart and get our heads frozen."

"Have you ever shipped your head from a ditimart?" Onscreen, her oval face gave a pursed frown. "The ditsicle can take days to arrive, and it's never as fresh as the ads claim."

"We won't have to ship. I'll copy another gray and stash it in the car, to thaw if time runs short. That way I can finish scouting around some more, and still bring the heads back in a cooler."

At least, that's what I told Ritu. In fact, I had other plans. Plans she didn't have to know about.

NOHB. None of her business.

"You're sure this is important?" she asked, shaking her gleaming black locks a bit petulantly. I wondered; was this major UK stockholder quibbling over the cost of a golem?

"You tell me whether it is, Ritu. You say you want your father's death solved, yet you never bothered to tell me that your family owned a cabin by the border, just a hundred clicks from the crash site."

She winced. "I should have mentioned it. But honestly, I thought Dad got rid of the place ages ago, before I was sixteen. Do you think it might relate to his ... accident?"

"In my experience, nothing can be dismissed early in an investigation. So please, gather any data you can find regarding that property. And before you imprint, do spend a little time thinking about your childhood trips to the cabin, so your gray won't have trouble remembering."

I often do that -- ask the client to think hard about a subject before they send a golem to be questioned. For some reason, most people fail to imprint their Standing Wave completely. The sloppy-copy effect -- a kind of swiss cheese amnesia when the ditto tries to access older memories. It never happens to me. My grays even recall some things that I can't in real form. I wonder why.

Hesitating another moment, Ritu finally agreed with a jerky nod.

"Very well. If you think it's important."

"I'm hopeful it may help break the case."

She drummed elegant, long fingertips on the desk in front of her screen. "I'm at Universal Kilns right now. Going through some paperwork to keep busy ... though Aeneas has given me an indefinite leave of absence."

None of that was relevant to my current needs, not on any practical level. Yet I realized, suddenly, that I'd been insensitive. After all, this was about the recent death of her father.

"Yeah, well, I know it's a hard time for you. Tell me, did they ever find -- " I paused, but there were no better words. "Did they find Dr. Maharal's ghost?"

"No." Ritu stared past the monitor, looking stricken and a bit confused. Her full lips quivered. "There's been no sign of the ditto. Aeneas is quite upset about it. He thinks your missing gray might have something to do with the disappearance."

More likely the other way around, I thought, recalling the lengths Yosil Maharal took, back when he was alive, trying to drop out of sight. Top theory at the moment? My gray must have caught Maharal's ghost sneaking off. Pursuing, I must have carelessly fallen for a trap.

I do that sometimes -- underestimate the quarry. Nobody's perfect ... and you can get lazy when such mistakes are never permlethal. It kind of makes you marvel at those detectives of olden times, who confronted and confounded remorseless evil while equipped with just one life. Now those guys really had it.

So gray number one may be a puddle of dissolved slurry right now, sinking into the grass somewhere on Aeneas Kaolin's mansion grounds. And by now Maharal's ghost could be ... what? Whiling away its last hour or so in seclusion somewhere? Maybe spending it with a hired Wammaker copy, for all I knew.

Or else, more likely, executing some final chore for its enigmatic maker. Something deep, complex, and possibly nefarious. I couldn't shake a creepy feeling about that.

"I'm willing to send another gray to the estate, and help in the search," I offered.

"That may not be a good idea right now," Ritu answered, dubious. "Aeneas wants his own people handling that end. But you and I can still investigate other matters. In fact, this desert trip may be useful, after all. When do we start?"

Wondering at her change in tone, I nodded.

"Well, you could make a copy there at UK -- "

"I'd rather do it at home ... and pack a few things. Also, there may be some pictures of the cabin in my scrapbook."

"That could help."

Ritu worked her mouth. "Are you sure this can't wait till morning?"

In fact, waiting might be wise. And yet, I felt a growing sense of urgency. A need to get on with the part of my plan that Ritu Maharal didn't have any reason to know about.

"I'll swing by and pick you up by six. That way, we can cross the desert at night and reach mesa country around dawn."

Ritu shrugged, appearing resigned.

"Okay. Here's my address -- "

"No." I shook my head. "We'll meet at your father's place instead. I've been meaning to give it a look-over. We can do that before heading out."

I had to pack quickly. The Volvo has an expandable compartment in back, custom-designed to haul up to three imprinted golem blanks in a vac-pac, or just one with a ready-bake kilnette. There's even room leftover to haul some forensic supplies. I had already prepared a gray ditsicle for the trunk. That left enough time for a makeover.

I stripped down, stepped into the shower, and asked Nell to gray me.

"First protect your eyes," she reminded.

"Oh, yeah." I grabbed a container off the shelf and popped out a fresh pair of dark, full-orb contact lenses. I hadn't done this for a while, so they stung a bit going in.

"Ready."

A tingling sensation began creeping upward, starting with my toes.

"Spread your legs and lift your arms," Nell said.

I complied, feeling a bit creepy as she played a resonance laser over my skin, burning off hairs and dead skin cells in a zillion microscopic protein explosions, closer than a razor could shave. Air jets blew away ash and dross, followed by ion-focused droplets of a special solution, to both seal and nurture my pores during the hours they'll spend cut off from air.

Next came the paint job, quick-staining with my own secret formula. In minutes -- lacking only some touch-ups with ditspackle -- I could pass for a high-class golem. Except under very close inspection. I held off inserting the mouthpiece for a while yet. It can be a bit uncomfortable.

The procedure's not exactly illegal -- not like disguising a golem to look real in public. But it's highly discouraged. Someone could shoot me dead when I'm like this, and get off with a mere fine. Small wonder it's not done very much. Ironically, that's why a gifted amateur like Yosil Maharal nearly pulled off an inverted version of the same ruse a few weeks ago. Studying those recorded images, my ebony specialist had been lucky to spot certain telltale discrepancies in skin texture. Discrepancies I carefully eliminated there in my dressing room.

Of course I could mention another difference between me and Ritu's late father.

When he tried this subterfuge, it was aimed at concealing some dark secret. But my reasons were simpler.

I was doing it for love.

Well, it felt that way at the time. Ebony-me even complained about the impulsiveness of my decision to go on this trip in person.

"You're acting on emotion. Clara left an ivory in her fridge. That should slake your animal drives till the weekend when she returns."

"An ivory's not the same. Anyway, Maharal's cabin happens to be near the battlefield! I can't pass up this opportunity to drop by and surprise her."

"Then send your own ivory. There's no need to go in person."

I didn't answer. The ebony was just being snippy. He knew that Clara and I can take or leave casual dittosex, even with occasional outsiders, because it doesn't matter. No more than a passing fantasy.

Because it's no real substitute for the real thing. Not to us.

"This isn't a productive use of time," said my hyperlogical doppelganger, trying a different tack while I tossed some clothes in a bag.

"That's what I have you for," I retorted. "Be productive! Can I assume our other cases are in hand?"

"They are." The glossy black version of me nodded. "But what happens when I expire, less than eighteen hours from now?"

"Stick your head in the icer, of course. I imprinted another jet, along with a gray and a green, in case you need 'em to take over."

Ebony-me sighed, as usual regarding my real self as childish and irresponsible.

"None of the new dittos will have my recent memories. Continuity will be broken."

"Then thaw your replacement an hour early and update him."

"With words? You know how inefficient -- "

"Nell will help. Anyway, I should be back before Wednesday's ebony fades. Then I'll inload his memories, and yours, from the freezer."

"So you say now. But you've been distracted before and let brains spoil in the fridge. Anyway, suppose you get killed wearing that foolish disguise?"

Long fingers, the color of space, reached out to pinch my faux-gray skin.

"I'll take every precaution not to let that happen," I promised, pulling away and avoiding those dark eyes. It's tough lying to yourself, especially when you're standing right in front of you.

"Be sure and do that," ebony muttered. "I'll make a lousy ghost."

Heading to Maharal's place, I shut off the Volvo's hypercautious autopilot and drove manually. Weaving through traffic helped ease my nerves ... though some green peditstrians yelled obscenely when I swerved past. All right, I could drive better. Blame my disguise for influencing me subconsciously. Or it could have been the war news.

" ... recent battlefield reversals and heavy casualties have pushed retreating PEZ-USA forces into a pocket, with their backs against the Cordillera del Muerte Mountains. Although the position seems strong for defensive tactics, oddsmakers have already begun offering early buyouts of final outcome wagers, assuming the battle to be lost.

"If so, and if the disputed icebergs go to Indonesia, this debacle will cast doubt on President Bickson's plan for staying off the SouthWestern Eco-Toxic Aquifer Plume.

"Faced with SWETAP-related backlash from voters, congressional leaders have already started gathering e-signatures for a demarchy petition, demanding that Bickson offer terms and cut PEZ losses before their armed force is completely annihilated.

"But a Glasshouse spokesgolem ruled out that option, insisting that hope remains for victory on the battlefield. 'It's all or nothing,' the Bicksondit said. 'When it comes to fighting SWETAP, half a berg is the same as none at all.' "

Cursing, I told the radio to shut up. Instead, I asked Nell for a reminder-summary of Yosil Maharal's personal background.

Despite having twelve whole hours to research, she hadn't been able to dig up much about his childhood before arriving as a refugee from one of those nasty little ethnic wars they used to have over in South Asia, after the turn of the century.

Adopted by distant relatives, the shy boy thrived on schoolwork, showing little interest in social affairs. Later, as a budding scientist, Yosil ignored the fashionable but doomed cyber and nanotech fads, zeroing instead on the virgin field of neuro-ceramics. After Jefty Annonas cracked the mysterious floating wonder of the Soul Standing Wave -- more intricate than any genome -- Maharal joined a start-up company led by the greatest Vic of our time, Aeneas Kaolin.

He never married. Maharal's gene-merging and nurturing agreement with Ritu's mother originally featured some twisty responsibility diagrams, at one point including a gay couple, an estate management bank, and an heirless cousin. But all of those adjunct- and demi-parents cashed out several years before Mom died in a copter crash, when Ritu was twelve.

Yikes. And now Daddy's punched his clock, too. Life ain't fair. Poor kid.

I felt a little guilty, pushing her to take this trip. But I had a hunch about this "cabin" of her father's, and Ritu's help may be vital. Anyway, if her gray found the journey traumatic, realRitu could just toss away the head without inloading. No memory, no foul.

Our ancestors, who suffered far more than we do, never had that option.

A black, all-terrain limousine stood out front of the address Ritu gave me. I sent a scan of the plates to Nell, who replied that it belonged to Universal Kilns.

So. Good of Kaolin to lend her a limo, I thought. But then, it's not every day you lose a close friend and your assistant loses a father.

I parked my battered car behind the gleaming Yugo and headed for the house -- a larger-than-average veridian home, without much yard but covered by slanting solarium panes to trap each ray of sunlight, dark plates for photovoltaic energy and green for drip-treating household waste. There were enough of the gleaming sewage cells to serve an active family, but just a few had active algae cultures. In fact, most looked completely unused.

A bachelor pad, then. And the bachelor spent long periods away from home.

I mounted fourteen steps, passing between decorative loquots that deserved better care. Pausing next to the poor things, I felt tempted to pull out my cutter and prune some crossing branches. After all, I was early.

Then I noticed the front door stood ajar.

Well, I was expected. Still, there was some ambiguity. As a licensed private detective and a quasi-agent of the civil posse, I couldn't just walk in. By law, I had to announce myself.

"Ritu? It's me, Albert." I left out the grammatically correct ditto modifier, though I came disguised as a golem. Most people are sloppy about it, anyway.

The atrium floor was speckled from an active-element mosaic skylight, shifting random colors and playing bright-dark tricks on the eye. Ahead, stairs climbed around two landings before reaching the upper story. Glancing left, I saw an open-plan sitting room, furnished in a rather fogeyish cyberpunk style.

A faint clatter -- more like a hurried rustle -- came from my right, beyond a set of double doors, carved wood with frosted panels. No lights shone within that room, but a shadow could be made out, moving furtively on the other side.

A murmur ... a few words that I couldn't hear at all well, sounded like " ... now where would Betty have hidden ... "

Creepiness prickled my spine. I touched one of the doors. The glass was both rough and cool -- perfect sensations that reminded me of the chief thing that I must not forget:

You're real. So be careful.

As if I needed prompting! Fey suspicions thrummed my Standing Wave, coursing back and forth between the only organic heart and brain I'll ever have. As a ditto, I might go barging into the next room, just to see what's what. But as an organic heir of paranoid cavemen, I settled for giving one door a shove, then staying well back from the threshold as it swung open.

I spoke louder. "Hello, Ritu?"

Inside lay Yosil Maharal's home office, featuring a desk and bookshelf covered with old-fashioned papertomes and lasersheet folios. One shelf of a display case held awards and honors. Others displayed strange trophies -- like an array of mounted hands, ranging widely in size and coloration. Some were sliced open to show metal parts, relics of a time when dittoclay had to be slathered over robot frames, when clanking duplicates were techno-playthings for the rich, at once both crude and awe-inspiring, enabling just an elite to divide their lives and be in two places at the same time.

An era when dittos were called "deputies," and those who could afford them seemed ordained to have much bigger lives than the rest of humankind. Before Aeneas Kaolin gave self-copying to the masses.

It was quite a display. But right then my chief concern lay in the part of the room I couldn't see, far from the window, steeped in shadows.

"Lights on," I tried from the doorway. But the house computer was voice-keyed, barring unknown guests from even courtesy control. Yosil was some host.

I could try transmitting the command through Nell, asserting my investigation contract with Maharal's daughter and heir. But the chain of handshakes and probate haggles could take minutes, distracting me the whole time.

No doubt a conventional light switch lay just yonder, within easy reach ... and reach of some lurker-in-the-dark, armed with any weapon my eager imagination could provide.

Was I being paranoid? Fine.

"Ritu, if that's you, just tell me to come in ... or to wait outside."

I heard a soft sound, within. Not breathing, but another rustle. I felt tension beyond the door. Something like coiled energy.

"Is that you, ditAlbert?"

The voice came from upstairs, behind me. Ritu, calling down, without a hint of guile.

"Yeah! It's me," I answered without turning. "Did you ... do you have other company?"

Through the frosted glass, I spied another shudder. This time a straightening, perhaps signaling resignation. I backed away several steps across the atrium, giving leeway to whatever might emerge.

I also eyed escape paths, just in case.

"What did you say?" Ritu shouted again from above. "I didn't expect you for an hour. Can you wait?"

A silhouette crossed the closed half of the glazed double door. Tall, angular ... and gray -- it drew closer.

For an instant, I thought I had it! A furtive gray, in this house? Who else could it be but the ghost? Maharal's ghost! The one that didn't want to spend its last moments in a lab, being dissected for trace memories. It would be a shambling wraith by now, persisting by sheer will power, burning its final reserve of élan vital before melting away.

I readied to pounce, demanding answers. Like what happened to my own ditto! The one I sent to the mansion this morn --

-- then blinked in surprise. The figure that emerged wasn't Maharal's ghost. Not even gray, strictly speaking.

A gleaming platinum stepped under the speckled light. The golem-sigil on its brow shone like a jewel.

"Vic Kaolin," I said.

"Yes," the ditto nodded, covering its agitation with pugnacity. "And who might you be? What business do you have in this house?"

Surprised, I raised a spackled eyebrow.

"Why, the job you hired me to do, sir."

That wasn't strictly true. I wanted to probe this ditto's level of ignorance. His glossy expression froze, transforming rapidly from pugnacious to guarded.

"Ah ... yes. Albert. It's good to see you again."

Despite its lame effort at a recovery, this was clearly a different ditKaolin than the one I met early this morning, as dawn broke over the shattered windows of the Teller Building. Nor did it share any recent memories with the one who phoned me at home around noon, hectoring me while I imprinted the ebony. This one didn't remember me at all.

Well, in itself, that meant little. It could have been imprinted hours before all that. But then, why pretend to know me? Why not just admit ignorance? He could send a query to his rig. Get an update from the real Kaolin.

Here's a life lesson -- don't embarrass the mighty. Let 'em save face. Always give them an out.

I pointed into the home office of Yosil Maharal. "Did you find anything useful?"

The guarded expression deepened. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you're here for the same reason I am, right? Looking for clues. Something to explain why your friend kept skipping town, evading the all-seeing World Eye for weeks at a stretch. And especially what he was doing last night, racing across the desert, careening over highway viaducts."

Before he could answer, Ritu called down again.

"Albert? Who are you talking to?" ditKaolin's dark eyes met mine. Following my adage, I gave him that out.

"I met a shiny new Aeneas, coming up the walk!" I shouted up the stairs. "We entered together."

The platinum ditto nodded. Acknowledging a debt. He would have preferred going unnoticed, but my cover story would do.

"Oh Aeneas, I wish you wouldn't hover so! I'm all right, really." She sounded exasperated. "But as long as you're here, would you show Albert around?"

"Of course, dear," ditKaolin answered, gazing briefly upstairs. "Take your time."

When he faced me again, there was no trace of agitation, or pugnacity. Only serene calm.

"What were we discussing?" he asked.

Crum! I thought. You'd think a rich bastard could order up ditto blanks that concentrate better.

Aloud, I prompted, "Clues, sir."

"Ah, yes. Clues. I looked for some, but -- " The platinum head shook, left and right. "Maybe a professional like you can do better."

Despite everything, Kaolin is only guessing that I'm a ditective, I thought. Why doesn't he just ask?

"After you." I gestured politely, insisting he reenter the office ahead of me.

He turned, spoke a command, and light filled the room. So Maharal must have given voice authorization to his boss. Or else --

I felt another vague suspicion simmer in the part of my skull where I chain that crazy but creative beast, paranoia. Keeping the ditto in sight, never turning completely away from him, I looked over a display case while tapping cipher-code with my teeth.

Nell. Verify Kaolin sent this dit. Confirm it's legit.

She acknowledged the work order, flashing in my left eye. But even with my priority as the real guy, this query could take time, leaving me wondering about a possibility.

Dr. Maharal had been an expert in duplication tech, and a gifted hobbyist at the arcane art of disguise. He also seemed blithe about mere inconveniences like the law. With his Universal Kilns access, he could borrow all sorts of templates ... including possibly that of Aeneas Kaolin.

So, could this platinum be another Maharal ghost, masquerading as the Vic?

But that didn't make sense. realMaharal's corpse had been cold for nearly a day, but the platinum looked much newer. No way this could be Ritu's daddit, in disguise.

Well, organic imagination doesn't have to make sense, I recalled. Nor must paranoia be reasonable. It's a beast who barks at nothing ... till the day it's right.

There was a simple way to verify the platinum's identity. As a real person, I could turn and demand its pellet ... at the cost of revealing my own costume ruse. I chose against it. Nell should answer soon, anyway. So I fixed my attention on Maharal's home.

The office showed signs of recent amateur tampering. Table legs were shoved out of old carpet impressions. The contents of book and display cases had all shifted, disturbing dust layers as someone groped all over, perhaps looking for hidden panels.

I learned a lot just by glancing at the lasersheet folios. They were barely touched, so Kaolin must not have been looking for purloined data or software.

Then what?

And why was he trying to search all by himself? He has security people. He can hire forensic experts or even rent a downtime police unit.

At first I thought the problem might be Ritu, standing up to her boss and barring Kaolin access to her father's home. That could explain today's furtive entry -- trying to search the place without alerting her -- which implied some need to keep her in the dark.

Except that Ritu's easygoing attitude just moments ago, giving us both leave to look around, didn't fit the image of a rift between Kaolin and Maharal's daughter. At least not an obvious one.

Glancing at the Vic, I saw he had regained his famed, sphinxlike composure. Dark eyes tracked me, perhaps still annoyed that I had found him here. Yet he appeared willing to make the best of things. Supervising an expert hireling at work, that was more his style.

There were pictures on the walls, both inside the office and in the hall beyond. A fraction showed Yosil posing with people I didn't recognize -- I used my archaic but serviceable eye-implant to take iris-snaps of some, for Nell to identify. But most of the framed images showed a younger Ritu at various events like graduation, a swimming competition, riding a horse, and so on.

Maybe I should have given the place a major workover -- a chemsift for substances on the International Danger List would take just minutes with a good scanner. But whatever Maharal was up to, I suspected that it wouldn't show in obvious ways.

An inertial transect might be more revealing. Strolling from room to room, I opened closets and cupboards, peering into each one long enough to freeze a complete perspective-set, transmitting each one to Nell, and then moving to the next. She wouldn't need color, just multiple angles and position stamps, down to half a centimeter, using surveying principles George Washington would have understood. Any secret chambers or compartments should appear in the resulting geodesic.

Kaolin expressed approval. But again, if he wanted this kind of work done, why not hire a whole survey team and do a thorough job?

Perhaps the matter was so sensitive, he could only trust his own duplicates.

If so, my presence must be cause for mixed feelings. I had stopped working for Kaolin when Yosil Maharal's body was found crumpled in his car -- when the case switched from suspected kidnapping of a valued employee to a daughter's vague misgivings about murder.

I made a mental note to ask Ritu about her father's relationship with the UK chief. If it was murder, I could imagine scenarios putting the Vic on a shortlist of suspects.

Take what happened to Maharal's ghost -- and my gray -- a few hours ago. Might Kaolin have arranged for them both to vanish on his estate? Maybe the gray sniffed too close to some dire truth. Maybe the ghost had good reason to flee.

Soon the first-floor transect was complete. Nell's preliminary analysis showed no secret chambers. At least nothing bigger than a breadslice. But she did cite one anomaly.

Two photographs were missing. They had been hanging near the bottom of the staircase when I first arrived. Now, my home computer reported they were gone! Their shadows still showed up by infrared, a bit cooler than the surrounding wall.

I turned in search of Vic Kaolin ... and spotted him emerging from the lavatory. Plumbing sounds gurgled in the background. He just disposed of something by flushing it away! The platinum ditto looked back at me, a portrait of innocence, and I cursed under my breath.

If I had come as an ebony specialist, tuned and equipped for close forensic site analysis, I might have watched him with one eye literally in the back of my head. Now, there seemed little I could do about it. Quizzing Kaolin would only alienate him without explaining the photos.

Better to wait, I decided. Let him think I didn't notice. Maybe ask Ritu about the pictures later.

I went out to my Volvo, opened the trunk, and fetched a thumper with seismic pickups. Lugging the equipment back up the steps, I planted detectors all around the house. In moments I would know if there were secret chambers underground. Unlikely, but worth checking out.

While waiting for the data to come in, I poked around the recycling unit out back, with its separate slots for metals, plastics, mulchable organics, and electronics. And clay. The bins should all have been empty, since Yosil Maharal spent the last few weeks away from home. But the telltales showed some mass in the golem-disposal unit. Enough for one full-size humanoid form.

I opened the access panel -- only to witness a dim gray figure sag before the sudden onslaught of air, rapidly finishing its collapse to slurry.

Smell can be a powerful sense. From vapors wafting off the slumping mass, I could tell much. It died well before expiration ... and no more than an hour ago. Acting quickly, I reached inside to grope through where the skull had been, feeling through dissolving fibrous matter till I snagged a small, hard object. The ID pellet. Later, in private, I might give it a quick scan and find out if this meant anything ... or if a neighbor had simply deposited an excess ditto in the Maharal Dumpster to avoid recycling fees.

Wiping my hand on a towelette, I sauntered back to verify the seismic readings. Sure enough, they showed no hidden chambers. I don't know why I bother. Maybe the romantic spirit in me keeps hoping for the catacombs of Treasure Island, something beyond the normal run of city-cam traces, chasing down copyright violators and dallying spouses. At least that was Clara's diagnosis. Somewhere deep under Albert Morris lay the soul of Tom Sawyer.

My heart beat faster when I thought of her, and the direction I'd be driving in just a little while. Maybe, after a hard day's work in the desert, after Ritu's ditto expired, I might swing by the battle range and surprise --

That was when I sensed a change. Something missing. A presence, like a shadow, now gone.

The silent, lurking presence of ditAeneas Kaolin.

I looked for the limo and saw only blank space at the curb. The limo was gone.

Perhaps the golem left in order to avoid Ritu's gray, who could be heard now puttering around downstairs. But that didn't make any sense, did it?

Nothing did.

In moments, Ritu's gray emerged from the house, carrying a small valise, and locked the door behind her. "I'm ready," she announced in a somewhat aloof tone, though short of outright unfriendly. In her case, if any character trait clearly bridged the gap from original to copy, it was the sense of tension I had picked up earlier. An edgy guardedness that kept one at a distance while somehow augmenting her severe beauty.

I hurried to collect my thumpers and other hardware, throwing them into the trunk atop the portakiln. Soon we were heading southeast through a shrouding twilight. Toward the desert, where mysteries still prowl and nature can rip away all civilized masks, revealing the stark struggle life has always been.

18

Orange You Glad? ... as Frankie is red his rites ...

It's not that Pallie can't make dittos. He's actually quite gifted, with a flexible self-image that can propel almost any golem-shape, from quadruped to ornithrope to centipede. That rare ability to imprint non-human forms might have let him be an astronaut, ocean prospector, even a bus driver. But Pal's dittos can't deal with inaction, amplifying his core restlessness. A ditective should stay patient and focused -- say during a long stakeout -- but his copies can't. With great intelligence and imagination, they'll rationalize any excuse to transform inertia into motion.

It's why he went in person that night, three years ago, to a rendezvous with treacherous men. Pal's way of being cautious, I suppose.

So we had to lug his real self along with us in Lum's van. Pal's wheelchair slid in back as the mancie leader hopped into the pilot seat. Then, with a devilish grin, Lum offered me shotgun position -- a blatant dig at Gadarene, who rumbled ominously. Wanting no trouble between the two reluctant allies, I stepped aside for the big conservative, adding a respectful bow. Anyway, I'd rather ride with Pal, wedged in back between the van's hull and a battered portakiln.

The oven felt warm when I sat on it. Someone was cooking. Lacking a sense of smell, I couldn't tell whom.

We set off, merging with traffic. The optically active cerametal hull sensed the direction of my gaze from millisecond to millisecond, automatically transforming a narrow patch from opaque to transparent wherever I happened to be looking, slewing this micro-window about to match my wandering cone of attention. Anyone standing outside the van might see four small dim circles jiggering about, like tiny manic spotlights, one for each occupant, revealing little to outsiders. But to each of us inside, the van appeared made of glass.

Lum caught a nav beam, which sensed four passengers -- three of them real -- and granted carpool priority, speeding us along. North, toward the hi-tech district, following my hunch about where to find trouble. Funny how Lum and Gadarene were ready to trust a frankie's instincts. As if I knew what I was talking about.

Fluids dripped through IV tubing and diagnostic lights winked as I checked Pallie's medconsole. The unit was pissed off at him for using stimulants, back when he showed off for us at the abandoned scooter park.

"Just like old times, eh?" he said, giving me a wink. "You, Clara, and me, tackling the forces of evil together. Brains, beauty, and physique."

"Well, that describes Clara. What about you and me?"

He chuckled, flexing a sinewy forearm. "Oh, I wasn't bad at muscle stuff. But mostly I provided color. Sadly lacking in the modern world."

"Hey, aren't I green?"

"Aye, and a lovely faux-viridian shade you are, Gumby. But that's not what I mean."

I knew exactly what he meant: the color our grandparents supposedly had, back in the zesty twentieth and early twenty-first, when people took risks every day that few moderns would think of facing with their precious trueflesh. It's strange how much more priceless life can feel, when you have more of it to grasp.

Me? I had sixteen or so hours left. Not much time for ambition or long-range plans. Might as well spend it all.

I turned to Gadarene, whose attention focused toward a World Eye portal on his lap. "Any luck tracing the gray?"

The big man scowled. "My people have put out a hue and cry. We're offering top bids for a pix-trace, but the trail's blank. Nothing since the gray was last seen, at Studio Neo."

"There won't be," I said. "Albert knows how to vanish when he wants to."

Gadarene flushed. "Then contact your rig. Have him recall the ditto!"

The organo-chauvinist leader appeared frantic. I didn't want to provoke him. "Sir, we've gone over this. That gray is on autonomous mode. It won't communicate with realAlbert, because that could constitute violation of contract. If the gray is being deceived by experts, they'll take measures to ensure it stays deceived."

"I bet the first thing they did to the gray was disable the recall feature in its pellet," Pallie said, and I added, "They'll put e-sniffers on Al's house. Nell will catch on eventually, but it can work for a span. So we can't contact Morris directly. If the conspirators notice, they may spook or change plans."

Gadarene muttered, "I still can't figure it out. What plans?"

"To make us look bad," said Lum, dropping his normally sunny mien. "Both your group and mine. We're being set up as patsies.

"I'll bet Universal Kilns is behind this," Lum continued. "If they can convince the world we're terrorists, they may get a demarchy writ to eliminate the pickets and demonstrations. No more disclosure lawsuits and net harassment from groups opposing their immoral policies."

"You mean they'd sabotage themselves, to blame us?"

"Why not? If the stunt generates public sympathy, all the better! It might even throw off those anti-monopoly bills that keep coming up, trying to reverse the Big Deregulation."

Pal chuckled again.

"What's so funny?" Gadarene snapped.

"Oh, I was just thinking about how innocent you both sound, right now. Are you practicing for the cameras?"

"What do you mean?" Lum asked.

"I mean that you non-violent protestors have been up to your own skulduggery, I bet. Some flashy way to demonstrate your disapproval of Universal Kilns. Moralists can always justify going outside the law when it suits their sense of righteous timing."

Gadarene frowned sullenly at Pal. Lum said, "That's different."

"Is it? Never mind. I'm not interested in canned rationalizations. Just tell me how far along your preparations have come."

"I don't see why -- "

"Because you're playing out of your league, gentlemen!" I cut in, a bit too loud for a respectful green. But I had caught Pal's drift and it made sense. "Professionals are at work today, hatching a scheme that's been long arranging. Right now it doesn't matter if the secret mastermind is Universal Kilns, or some enemy of theirs. Whatever they're planning to do in the next few hours, they've set you fellows up to take the blame."

"But maybe we can help, if you come clean," Pallie offered. "Don't tell me you haven't dreamed and schemed about striking a blow against UK. Tell us, right now, if you've done more than dream! Have you been up to something that could be used against you? Something that could pin you to a crime?"

Both men glared at Pal and me -- and sideways at each other. I could almost taste their mutual distrust. Their internal struggle for a way out.

Gadarene spoke first; perhaps he was more accustomed to bitter confession.

"We've ... been digging a tunnel."

Lum stared at his longtime adversary. "You have? Well, imagine that."

He blinked a few times, then shrugged with a wry chuckle. "We've got one, too."

The triple domes of Universal Kilns HQ shimmered, set afire on their western flanks by a late afternoon sun. I couldn't help thinking of three giant pearls, planted atop a busy anthill, since those grassy slopes sheltered an even larger industrial plant underground. But with its coat of greenery, the factory looked more like a college campus, placid and unthreatening, rimmed by a deceptively innocent-looking hedge.

To modern citizens, the site was legendary, even Promethean. A cornucopia spilling forth treasures -- hardly a cause of ire. But not everyone felt that way. Outside the main gate, beyond a screen of trees, lay a camping ground that was staked out years ago under the Open Dissent Act, when Aeneas Kaolin first moved his corporate headquarters here. Each maverick or radical group with a grievance had its own patch -- a cluster of canopies and expando-vans -- to marshal demonstrations.

Why keep agitating over a cause that's long-lost? Because cheap dittos make it easy ... an irony that most radicals were much too sober to notice.

ARTIFICIAL PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE

So proclaimed the largest banner, identifying Lum's community of tolerance zealots, though smaller signs marked passionate subsects, each with an agenda weirder than the next. I mean, sure, I'd rather not have to bow to Gadarene, just because I'm green. But I'm a frankie. For anyone else, isn't it just a matter of taking turns? Sometimes grasshopper, sometimes ant. Even after my time at the Ephemerals, I still found it hard to grasp what kind of society these people had in mind.

Still, they came from a tradition that had saved the world. The tolerance-and-inclusion reflex was strong for good reasons -- because it took centuries of pain to acquire. Confused or not, these folk stood on high moral ground.

Not far away, another sign broadcast shining holo letters, expressing a more clearcut demand:

SHARE THE PATENTS!

The "open source" movement wanted all of UK's technologies and trade secrets released to the public, so every garage hobbyist might experiment with new dittoing techniques and wild golem variants, promising a burst of total creativity. Some envision an age when you'll imprint your Soul Standing Wave into everything around you -- your car, your toaster, the walls of your house. Hey, why not each other? To enthusiasts out there -- eager, overeducated, and bored -- every boundary of self and other was spurious. A small step from being several places at once to being everywhere, all of the time.

Those techno-transcendentalists stayed away from yet another encampment where the denizens had a different complaint altogether -- that the world already has too many people in it, without doubling or tripling Earth's population each day with fresh swarms of temporary consumers. Wearing green robes of the Church of Gaia, they wanted humanity pared way down, not exponentiated. Dittos may not eat or excrete, but they use resources in other ways.

Grunting with delight, Pal nudged my arm and pointed.

A single figure could be seen pacing just outside the big encampment, picketing the picketers!

SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS IS AN ADDICTIVE DISEASE, GET A LIFE! chided the placard carried by a creature with extremely long, shaggy arms and a head like a jackal's. Perhaps the ditto's appearance was some kind of arty, satirical statement. If so, I didn't get it.

Some people -- most people -- have way too much time on their hands, I thought.

Once, years ago, this site swarmed with a more pragmatic and far angrier breed of protester. Labor unions, upset over a convulsed job market, stirred up Luddite movements across the globe. Riots surged. Factories burned. Golem-workers were lynched. Governments teetered ...

... till overnight, passions ebbed. How do you suppress a technology that lets people do all the things they want to do, all at the same time?

As our van passed into the compound, I glimpsed a final placard, carried by a bearded man who beamed happily as he paced, even though everyone else seemed to avoid him, even with their eyes. His message -- in a fine, flowing cursive calligraphy -- was one I saw just an hour or two earlier:

You all miss the point.

There's a next step a'coming ...

Gadarene's bunch bivouacked to one side, separated from the other groups by a gulf of mutual hostility. Instead of sending cheap dittos to this site each day, his followers were real people. Every one of them.

As we pulled up, a dozen or so men and women emerged from big trailers, accompanied by gaggles of youngsters. Their clothing had that look -- colorful but inexpensive -- evidently purchased on the purple welfare wage.

I've met abstainers before, but never in such numbers. So I couldn't help staring. Here were people who refused to copy themselves. Ever. It felt like gazing at creatures of another age, when fate cruelly forced all men to live cramped lives. Only these folks lived that way deliberately!

On seeing Lum step from the van, members of the flock grumbled threateningly. But Gadarene silenced them with a curt headshake. Instead, he bid two strong youths to hoist Pal from the back. Others hauled the portakiln as we followed him into the biggest trailer.

"I am still not sure I should show you this," he groused. "It is the work of years."

Pal stifled a yawn. "Take your time. We've got days and days to decide."

Sarcasm can be effective. Still, I often wondered how my friend managed to live this long.

"How do we know it isn't already too late?" Lum asked.

"Best guess, the enemy won't act till nightfall," I replied. "If it's a bomb, they'll want to maximize the flashy visual effects, while minimizing real human casualties."

"Why?"

"Killing archies tends to really piss folks off," Pal said. "Property crimes are different. Deregulated. Anyway, conspiracies tend to unravel when you get down to mass murder. Henchmen turn whistle-blower. No, they'll wait till second shift, with only dittos at work, to produce lots of gaudy dismemberments without criminal culpability.

"Which means there may still be time to act," Pal concluded, "if you quit stalling and show us what you've got."

Gadarene still squirmed. "Why not ask Lum first? He's got a tunnel, too."

"I'll be using that one." Pal nodded. "But Mr. Lum's passage is too small for Albert here ... I mean Frankie. Your tunnel has to be bigger, eh, Gadarene? Human size."

The big conservative shrugged, giving in at last.

"We dug by hand. It took years."

"How did you evade seismic detection?" I asked.

"With an active lining. Any sonic or ground wave that hits one side of the sheath is re-radiated on the other. We used a quadrupole grinder at the digging surface, canceling noise beyond a few meters."

"Clever," I said. "And how close are you to breaking through?"

Gadarene looked away, avoiding my eyes. He mumbled in a voice almost too low to hear, "We made it ... a couple of years ago."

Pallie guffawed. "Well, that takes it! Such passion, digging like moles to reach the hated enemy. Then nothing! What happened? Lost your nerve?"

If looks could kill ... But Pal had already survived worse.

"We couldn't agree on which action would be ... suitable."

I found myself kind of sympathizing. It's one thing to labor with a vague/distant goal of punishing the wicked. It's another to actually do it in ways that edify the world, attract public support, while keeping your precious realhide out of prison. The Gaia Liberation folks learned this the hard way, during their long war against the gene-techs.

"Was that your problem, too?" I asked Lum.

The mancie leader shook his head. "Our shaft took a twisty route, so we just broke through. Anyway, our aims are different. We aim to liberate slaves, not to sabotage their birthplace."

Pal shrugged. "Well, that explains why it's happening right now. You both have leaks or spies. Or your digging was detected after all. Either way, someone knows. They'll use your tunnel shafts to deflect blame for what's about to happen. Last night's charade -- sending fake Morrisdits to visit you -- was just frosting on the cake you're being cooked in."

I didn't add that Albert, my maker, appeared targeted for the worst baking of all.

Unhappy silence reigned, till Lum spoke up.

"I'm confused. Don't you two hope to use our tunnels, to get inside and look for the missing gray?"

"We do."

"But if the enemy already knows about the tunnels, won't there be traps waiting for you?"

Pal's sanguine grin is the most infectious I know. He can really convince you that he knows what he's doing. "Trust me," he said, turning both palms up. "You're in good hands."

His ditto radiated the same air of confident aplomb ten minutes later, as I stared down a narrow hole in the ground, contemplating how quickly my short existence could end in such a place.

"Don't sweat it, Frank," the mini-golem said in a piping voice, perfectly imitating Pal's blithe speech rhythms. "I'll take point-position. Just follow my glossy butt."

The creature looked like an oversized ferret, with a stretched, semi-human head. But the strangest part was its fur, all glistening, with tiny bulges that moved all over the place, like it was infested with parasites or something.

"What if there is a trap in there?"

"Oh, I give odds there will be," Little Pallie answered. "Let me worry about that. I'm ready for anything!"

This, from someone whose dittos almost never made it home in one piece. I wished realPal were still present, so I could chew him out one last time. But he went over to the Emancipators' camp with his portakiln, preparing to dispatch yet more hisselves down their twisty, specialized tunnel -- one cleverly designed to resemble a network of harmless animal holes worming semi-randomly toward the giant industrial complex. Providence is kind to the half-mad, I guess. Pallie could happily dispatch a dozen or more kamikaze dittos, each of them thrilled to take part in a suicide mission. It was all good fun to him-and-them.

If my body had been built for any decent pleasure, I would have turned around and sought it out, right then and there, leaving that place behind. Or maybe not.

"Come on, Gumby," the pseudoferret told me with a toothy grin. "Don't go into a funk on me. Anyway, you're committed now. Where else can you go in that color?"

I glanced down at my arms, now dyed -- like the rest of me -- in a hue widely known as UK Orange. An in-house shade, trademarked by Aeneas Kaolin long ago. If this caper didn't work, copyright violation would be the least of my worries.

Well, at least I'm not green anymore.

"Tally-ho!" squalled Pal's diminutive ditto. "Nobody lives forever!"

With that cheery motto, the Paldit squirmed around and dived into the hole.

No, I thought in reply. Not forever. But a few more hours would be nice.

I cross-checked the friction rollers on my wrists, elbows, hips, knees, and toes. Then I knelt to slip inside. Without looking back, I sensed the hulking, nervous figure of James Gadarene, hovering nearby, watching.

Then something happened that actually moved me, in a strange way. I was already a couple of meters into the awful passage when I heard the big zealot utter some kind of benediction.

Maybe I wasn't supposed to hear it. Still, unless I'm mistaken, Gadarene actually asked his God to go with me.

In all the time I've walked this Earth, it's one of the nicest things I've heard anybody say.

19

Fakery's Bakery ... in which gray number two gets a second wind ...

Tuesday afternoon fades and a vast industrial complex prepares to change shifts. The entry/exit portal throngs with moving bipeds, all of them human in one fashion or another.

In olden times, the whole population of a factory -- thousands of workers -- would swing into motion at the blowing of a whistle, half of them heading home, tired from eight or ten -- or even twelve -- hours work, while equal numbers shuffled in for their turn at the machines, transforming sweat and skill and irreplaceable human lifespan into the wealth of nations.

Today's flow is gentler. A few hundred archie employees, many of them wearing exercise clothes, chat amiably as they leave, heading for scooters and bikes, while a more numerous and colorful host of paper-clad dittos arrives by dinobuses, trooping in the opposite direction.

Some elderly dittos are also departing, homeward bound to inload a day's memories. But most stay, working on till it's time to slip into the recycling vat -- armies of bright orange drones, laboring with focus and without resentment, because some other self will enjoy fat wages and stock options. It can be kind of spooky if you stop and really think about it. No wonder I never had a factory job. Wrong personality for it. Way wrong.

Even the golem entrance is decorated in eye-soothing tones, with sensoresonant music playing in the background as I wait in line to sign in. There's also a faint vibration, coming through the bottoms of my feet. Somewhere lower down, beneath the grass-covered slopes, giant machines are mixing pre-energized clay, threading it with patented fibers tuned to vibrate at the ultra-complex rhythms of a plucked soul, then kneading and molding it all into dolls that will rise, walk, and talk like real people.

Like me.

Should this feel like coming home? My present, pre-animated body was made here, mere days ago, before being shipped to Albert's storage cooler. If today's snooping expedition takes me down to that factory realm, will I recognize my mother?

Oh, quit it, Al.

I'm me, whether gray or brown. Grasshopper or ant. The only practical difference is how polite I've got to be.

That ... and expendability. In a sense, I'm freer when I'm gray. I can take risks.

Like the one I'm about to face in moments, when I try to sign in. Will UK security be as lax as the maestra predicts?

I almost hope not. If I'm stopped -- or even if the guards ask inconvenient questions -- I'll just turn around and leave! Apologize to Gineen and her pals. Send my half-fee home to Nell and spend the rest of my life doing ... what? Forbidden by contract from inloading memories, or even seeing my rig again, I guess I'd find some other way to pass time. Maybe take in a play. Or stand on a street corner entertaining parents and kids with sleight-of-hand tricks. I haven't done that in a while.

Or maybe I'll visit Pal. Find out what he was so excited about this morning.

All right, I admit it. I'd be disappointed to come so far, and just get turned away. My demilife is targeted now. I have a mission, a purpose, to help my clients find out if Universal Kilns is violating the disclosure law. That seems a worthwhile goal, and well paid.

Approaching the entry kiosk, I find I'm actually nervous, hoping this will work.

Honestly? It was fun for couple of hours -- scurrying through outdoor and indoor crowds, ducking through cramped niches, doing quick dye jobs and rapid clothing changes, vanishing and reappearing to fool the omnipresent cameras. In fact, it was today's highlight so far. Doing something you're good at -- what else can make you feel more genuinely human?

All right, it's my turn. Here goes.

The big yellow golem on duty at the entry kiosk wears an expression of such ennui, I wonder if it's feigned. Even a ditto tuned for vigilance can get bored, I guess. But maybe he's been bribed. Wammaker and Collins never told me the details, hence my unease ...

A beam reaches out to stroke the pellet on my brow. The guard glances at me, then at a screen. His jaw twitches, opening a bit to subvocalize a brief comment, inaudible to me but not to the infrasonic pickup embedded in his throat.

Two items spit from a slot in the kiosk, a small visitor's badge and a slip of paper -- a map featuring green arrows, suggesting where I should go. The arrows point up, toward the executive suites, where a different Albert Morris copy had an appointment, hours ago. That me never showed up, but the failure isn't any of my business. My interests lie elsewhere.

I mutter reflexive thanks to the guard -- unneeded politeness that betrays both my upbringing and my age -- then I head for the down escalator.

Whose fault is it if the Universal Kilns mainframe gets two of us mixed up, confusing this me with a completely different me?

Normally, at this point in a mission, I'd try to report in. Find a public phone jack -- I see one right across the lobby -- and dump an encrypted copy of the report I've been dictating almost nonstop since this morning. Let Nell know where I am. Let Albert in on what's been done.

But that's contractually forbidden this time. Gineen Wammaker doesn't even want me to call her. Nothing that might be traced to Studio Neo or her strange comrades. One result is a thwarted feeling as I crave to spill the contents of my built-in recorder, like a penitent's impulse to confess.

Well, add it to all the other irritating traits of this oddball mission. I'm riding the down escalator now, dropping into a huge anthill complex underneath the glittering corporate domes, worrying about the next phase -- looking for clues that Vic Aeneas Kaolin is illegally withholding scientific breakthroughs.

All right, let's suppose -- as the maestra and Queen Irene suspect -- that Universal Kilns has solved a nagging problem of our age, how to transmit the Standing Wave of human consciousness across distances greater than a meter. Will there be clues or signs that a layman like me might recognize? Pairs of giant antennas, facing each other across a cavernous chamber? Hyperconducting terahertz cables, thick as a tree trunk, linking a human original to the distant lump of clay she plans to animate?

Or might UK executives already have perfected the technology? Could they be using it right now, in secret, to "beam" copies of themselves all over the planet?

How about the other breakthroughs that Wammaker and Irene and Collins suspect? Ditto life extension? Ditto-to-ditto copying? Modern wish-fantasies, but what if they're about to come true?

My employers want me to seek evidence, but the other half of my job is just as urgent ... do nothing illegal. Whatever I happen to glimpse by wandering around can be blamed on poor UK security. But I won't pick any locks for Gineen and her friends.

I could lose my license.

Damn. Something's been bugging me all afternoon. Like an itch that won't localize. Normally I'd follow the intuition, but there's so much that's unconventional about this job -- the non-disclosure contract, the ban on inloading -- plus the fact that I'm working for the maestra, which I swore I'd never do again. Add that violent episode back at the Rainbow Lounge and now this tightrope act, trying to a spy on a major corporation without breaking laws. Any of that would make a guy feel creepy.

So it's strangely easy to dismiss my uneasy feelings. Attribute them to this assortment of known irritations ... not something even worse, glimmering on the edge of awareness ...

Here's were I should get off. First sublevel. RESEARCH DIVISION, it says in bright letters over a friendly, campuslike entry portal. Beyond another simple security kiosk I glimpse high-class gray and black dittos -- even some high-sensory whites -- moving about with lively animation, frenetically busy and apparently enjoying it. Scientists and techies generally love copying, since it lets them run experiments around the clock. Like creating whole armies of yourself to raid Nature's storehouse, day and night, grabbing every grain of data while your real brain stays well rested for theorizing.

Irene said it should be easy to get past security here, too. Yosil Maharal was head of Research and an Albert gray was hired to investigate the poor man's death, so these folks should expect a visit. Heck, even if they turn me away, I can peer around from the entrance --

Now what are you doing?

Crum, I didn't get off!

I stayed on the moving way, letting it carry me right past the entry portal, downward past Sublevel One, heading deeper underground!

This isn't according to plan ...

But it kind of makes sense, right? I think I see what unconscious impulse made me keep going. Won't the Research Department have its own back routes to the deeper caverns, where large-scale experiments can run? Techies hate security, so those back routes will be less formal, less guarded than the central shaft. In fact, I'll bet there are no guard-kiosks below at all. Anyway, my cover story will seem more plausible if I wander in through the industrial plant, having gotten "lost" somewhere along the way.

Sounds good. But does it explain why my legs locked moments ago, preventing me from getting off? Dammit. Dittotech would be a whole lot more convenient and rational if soul-copying didn't require dragging your whole subconscious along, every time.

More basement levels rise slowly past while I grapple with the question. A wide portal labeled TESTING offers a glimpse into a kind of hell -- warrens of experimental chambers where new golem models undergo torturous ordeals, like crash dummies of old, but aware, able to report the effects of every mangling or indignity. And none of the deliberate mutilations can be called immoral, since you'll find eager volunteers for anything nowadays.

Yay, diversity.

Still riding the down escalator, I find that I'm rubbing my side -- the long bulge of numb scar tissue covering that wound I got during the fight at the Rainbow Lounge. There's no pain, yet I find it increasingly bothersome. Is the irritation psychoceramic?

I buy grays that are hyper-tuned for concentration, compelled to recite and analyze while roving in the field. Beyond that, all of them partake in Al's quirky subconscious -- the part of me that worries, correlates, then worries more. Looking back, it now seems awfully strange how that fellow zeroed in on me at Irene's club ... coincidentally the same punk that Monday's green ran into last night, on Odeon Square, before taking that walk under the river.

And strange that Queen Irene -- eager to see me and with many selves to spare -- left me waiting in that violent club, where trouble found me.

Was it meant to find me?

I've dropped down to the first industrial level. Sprawling around me now, huge stainless steel tanks array into the distance like regiments of stout, shining giants.

The air fills with pungent, earthy aromas of peptide-soaked clay. Only a fraction comes from new material. The rest gets recycled, delivered every day in great slurry tubes from collection points all over the city -- a frothy pureé that only hours ago made up individual humanoid beings, walking and talking, pursuing ambitions and countless distinctive yearnings. Now their physical substance reunites, blending together again in these tanks ... the ultimate democratic commingling.

Mixing paddles stir as sparkling powders rain into the concoction, seeding nano-coalescent sites that will grow into rox cells, pre-energized for one frenetic day of mayfly activity. My limbs twitch. I can't help picturing the entropy steadily seeping into my own cells as they rapidly use up the élan vital they absorbed in these same tanks.

In a few hours that depletion will lead to the pang. A wish to return, like some ageing salmon, to the one who imprinted me. For inloading, a ditto's only chance at an afterlife, before this body rejoins the everlasting river of recycled clay.

Only there will be no inloading this time. No continuity. Not for me.

The floor rises past me, leading to another subterranean level, bigger and noisier than the last. Those big tanks that I saw -- now overhead -- funnel their frothy brews to titanic, hissing machines that groan and turn relentlessly. Robot tractors shove huge spools along ceiling tracks, delivering acres of finely woven mesh that shimmers in ways that no natural eye can bear to look upon -- the diffraction spectrum of raw soul-stuff. Or the nearest approximation devised by science.

Mesh and prepared clay merge under enormous rotary presses, kneading and forming a pasty union, squeezing out surplus liquid, then popping yet another doughy humanoid shape onto rolling conveyors. On and on they come, pre-dyed to signify cost and built-in abilities. Some roll onward for custom feature installation. Other basic models, state-subsidized, are so cheap that even the poor can afford to replicate, living larger lives than their ancestors could have imagined. Across the globe, similar factories replenish half the ongoing human population, dispatching short-term bodies to a billion home coolers, copiers, and kilns.

A miracle stops being remarkable when you give it to everybody.

Watching titanic presses spit out ditto blanks -- hundreds per minute -- I'm hit by an absurdity.

Irene and Gineen say I should look for hidden industrial breakthroughs here at Universal Kilns. But that can't be the real reason they sent me!

Think, Albert. UK has competitors. Tetragram Limited. Megillar-Ahima'az of Yemen. Fabrique Chelm. Companies who licensed Aeneas Kaolin's original patents, till they expired. Wouldn't they care about hidden innovations, more than the maestra and her friends? With greater resources, they could find out dozens of ways ... like offering top jobs to UK employees. How could Universal Kilns hope to conceal ground-breaking discoveries like those Vic Collins spoke about?

Yes, evil thrives on secrecy. It's what drives Albert on. Expose villainy. Find truth. Yadda. But is that what I'm doing, now? Hell, nobody can run a really big conspiracy, nowadays, when whistle-blower prizes tempt your henchmen with cash and celebrity status. Countless smalltime scams still flourish, keeping me in business. But could anyone hide secrets as major as my employers described?

Why would anyone bother?

Suddenly, it's plain what all their talk about "hidden breakthroughs" was about. They were appealing to my vanity! Distracting me with hints of exciting new technology. With intellectual puzzles. And with their grating, obnoxious personalities. All manner of irritating digressions, so my general unease could be explained by excitement, or nerves, or personal dislike.

The floor rises past me again, bringing a new layer of the factory to view. At first it looks like more of the same vast assembly line, but these presses are more specialized. Blue police models flop limply onto a conveyor belt, pre-equipped with Peace Talons and loudspeakers. Another grunting unit pops out oversize designs, big-muscled and armor-skinned, dyed in military blur-camouflage. They remind me of Clara, off fighting her war in the desert.

That's an ache I must quash. She'll never concern you again, dittoboy. Concentrate on your own problems. Like why did the maestra and her friends hire you?

Not to penetrate Universal Kilns, clearly. That was pathetically easy. (Albert should offer Aeneas Kaolin a spec proposal to upgrade security here!) Wammaker and company didn't have to pay a guy like me triple fees just to come and have a look around. Collins and Irene could have sent anyone. They could have come themselves.

No, I already did the hard part -- the part they hired me for -- before ever reaching the front gate. Dodging all the public cameras out there, changing my appearance a dozen times, skillfully muddying my trail so no one would connect me to my employers.

Could they have a reason, much bigger than the one they gave me?

Glancing at the nearest wall, I spot a recorder-cam. An absorber, the cheapest kind, laying one quickscan frame into a polymer cube every few seconds till it's full and needs replacing monthly. I must've passed a hundred since arriving. And they read my ID pellet at the entry kiosk. So, there's been a record from the moment I arrived. If anyone cares to check, they'll know an Albert Morris gray wandered around. But UK can't complain if I stay legal. So long as all I do is get "lost" and look around.

But what if I do something bad? Maybe without meaning to ...

Damn! What is this thing?

A small bug -- like some kind of gnat -- flutters before me. It dodges a swat, darting toward my face. I can't afford distractions, so I use a surge-energy burst to grab the thing, midair, crumpling it in my hand.

Where was I? Wondering if Gineen and the others had some hidden plan. Like maybe for something else to happen while I'm in Universal Kilns? The moving way takes me down to another level where yet more machines rumble. Again, I'm rubbing my injury ... now wondering if the glassy bulge in my side may contain more than scar tissue.

Could that be why the thug-gladiator attacked me, in the Rainbow Lounge? No coincidence, perhaps it was all arranged ... to make me willing to accept a blank interval during "repairs," when actually --

Another damned bug flutters before me, then makes a kamikaze dive for my face!

Another muscle surge and it crackles in my hand. Can't let pests distract me. What I need is some way to check these crazy suspicions.

Hopping off the moving way, I jog alongside a conveyor belt hauling assorted fresh industrial dittos. Gangly window washers, long-armed fruitpickers, sleek aqua farmers, and burly construction helpers, all made for jobs where mechanization is too inflexible or costly, as inert as dolls, lacking any human spirit to drive them. I may find what I need just ahead, where these specialized blanks get wrapped in cocoons of fluffy-hard airgel CeramWrap for shipment.

There! A worker in UK orange stands near the conveyor, watching a vidboard covered with flashing symbols. Quality Control, says a logo stamped in his broad back. Striding forward, I wear a friendly grin while swatting yet another of those pesky, irritating gnat things. (A local industrial infestation?)

"Hello there!"

"Can I help you, sir?" he inquires, puzzled. The few grays who come down here wear UK badges.

"I'm afraid I may be lost. Is this the Research Department?"

A chuckle. "Man, you are lost! But all you have to do is get back on the way and -- "

"Say, that's a nifty diagnostic station you've got there," I interrupt, trying to stay casual. "Mind if I use it on myself for a sec?"

The tech's puzzlement turns wary. "It's for company business."

"Come on. It won't cost anything but electricity."

His imitation brows purse. "I need it whenever the system detects a flawed blank."

"Which happens how often?" Waving off a persistent gnat, I notice that the orange guy isn't afflicted by the buzzing things.

"Maybe once an hour, but -- "

"This'll take a minute. Come on. I'll put in a good word for you upstairs."

Implication? That I'm a VIP visitor. Show me courtesy and I'll add points to his file. Shame on me for fibbing.

"Well ... " he decided. "Ever used a type-eight Xaminator? I better work the controls. Stand over there. What're we lookin' for?"

Stepping up to a fluorescent screen, I lift my tunic showing the big scar. He stares.

"Well, look at that." Turning curious, the tech starts readying a scan. Only now I'm distracted by two of the cursed gnat things.

What the hell are they, and why are they picking on me?

With uncanny coordination, they dive at the same instant, one for each eye. My right hand snags one, but the other feints, swerves, then streaks for my ear!

Damn, it hurts, burrowing inside!

"Give me a few secs," the orange guy says, fiddling controls. "I'm used to inspecting raw blanks. Got to cancel interference from your imprinted soul-field."

Slapping the side of my head ... I stop when a voice abruptly explodes from within, booming like a wakened god.

"Hi, Albert. Calm down. It's me. Pal."

"P-Pal?"

Stunned, I lower my hand. Can the bug hear me when I speak aloud? "But what -- "

"You're in big trouble, dittolad. But I've got your location. I'm heading there now, with one of your greens. We'll get you out of this mess."

"What mess?" I demand. "Do you know what's going on?"

"I'll explain shortly. Just don't do anything!"

The tech glances up from his station.

"Did you say something? We're almost ready here."

"I'm just getting a diagnostic scan," I tell the bug in my ear. "Right here by one of the assembly -- "

"Don't do that!" Pal's voice bellows. "Whatever you're carrying may be primed to go off when you pass a security scanner."

"But I already passed through one, at the main entrance -- "

"Then a second scan may be the activation signal."

Abruptly, it makes sense. If Gineen and Irene planted something deadly in me, they'd maximize damage by delaying ignition, either with a timer or by setting it to go off when I pass a second scan, somewhere deep inside ... say upon entering the research wing, which I almost did just minutes ago.

"Stop!" I cry -- as the technician pulls a switch.

... things ... happening very fast ...

... apply surge energy ... shift subjective time ... trade lifespan for rapid thoughts.

Darting aside to escape the beam, I can already tell it's too late. The scan-tingle hits me. The bulge in my side reacts. I brace for an explosion.

"Say, you're right!" the technician says. "There is something inside, but -- where are you going?"

Running now. A blur of surge action.

It's not a simple bomb, or I'd be a billion flaming pieces now. But something's churning within me and I don't like it a bit.

Pal's bug writhes in my ear.

"Head for the loading dock!" it shouts. "We'll meet you there."

Ahead, beyond giant machines ship-wrapping ditto blanks in airgel cocoons, I glimpse truck headlights moving through the lowering night. Picturing the anthill mound of UK HQ, I dare hope -- If I can just get outside, will that foil the maestra's plan? Outdoor explosions do less harm.

But it's not a bomb. I sense fizzing heat. The scan set off complex chemical reactions. Programmed synthesis, perhaps manufacturing a tailored nanoparasite or destroyer prion. Running outside might spare UK only to put the city in peril!

Pal shouts in my ear to turn left. So I do.

I can feel the wall cameras, their passive eyes recording. No time to stop and shout my innocence -- I didn't know! Only actions can speak for Albert Morris now. To keep him out of jail, I kick in my reserves.

Ahead, the loading docks. Gel-wrapped ditto blanks slide into pneumatic tubes, departing for distant customers with a sucking whoosh. Giant forklifts -- huffing and puffing -- haul larger models onto trucks.

"Over here!"

The yell echoes, both in my ear and across the loading bay. I spy a version of myself, dyed UK Orange, bearing a weasel-like creature on his shoulder. Both dittos bear wounds, still smoking from recent combat.

"Are we glad to see you!" shouts the four-legged mini-Pal. "We had to fight our way inside this place, past some nasty -- Hey!"

No time to stop and compare notes. Running by, I share a split-second glance with my other self and recognize this morning's greenie. Looks like I found something more interesting to do today than clean toilets. Good for you, Green.

The churning in my gut is nearing some climax, feeding my crude golem-organs to a chemical frenzy. Some hell is about to burst. I need something massive to contain it.

Shall I dive into the packaging machine? No. Airgel won't do.

So I choose a nearby forklift instead, grunting and farting as it burns extra fuel loading big crates onto a truck. Its diplodocus-head turns, resembling the human who imprinted it.

"What can I do for you?" the low voice rumbles, till I dash under its legs. "Hey, buddy, what're you -- "

Below the tail, a repellent exhaust spills high-octane fumes, a quivering moist enzyme flatulence from the hardworking clay body. Ignoring all instinct, I plunge both arms between pseudoflesh lips, forcing the waste-sphincter apart in order to ...

... in order to climb within.

The forklift bellows. I sympathize but hold on as he jumps and swerves, trying to shake me out of the worst place I've ever been.

To the best of my knowledge, that is. Some of my other dits may have seen worse. The ones who never made it home ... though somehow I doubt it.

Worming my way deeper, I hope my built-in recorder survives. Maybe this final act of sacrifice will free Albert from blame. It's a good thing he won't inload any of this. I'd be traumatized for good.

The poor forklift writhes. Pulses of foul gas try to blow me out. But I hold on, punching and grabbing fierce handholds. One big contortion culminates in lancing agony as my right foot comes off! Bitten by the frantic golem.

I can't blame him, but it only drives me deeper, holding my breath against the stench, using a final burst of emergency élan to climb the sickening cloaca, trying for its heavy center.

Meanwhile, I'm being consumed from within. Used as feedstock for some awful reaction as the fulminating contents of my midriff prepare to erupt.

Am I deep enough? Will the huge clay body contain whatever-it-is?

Man, what a day I've --

20

Too Much Reality ... as realAlbert learns you can't go home again ...

Suburbia.

Man, what a wasteland.

Half an hour from Ritu Maharal's place, taking the east ribbonway out of town, we got snagged by a guide beam that took over the Volvo, slaving its engine, rolling us along at a "maxyficient" crawl through a zone of high-density traffic. Cyclists sped past us for much of the way, given priority by computers that prudishly favor real human muscle power over mere dittos in a car.

Beyond and below the ribbonway, a series of 'burbs flowed by, each one garish in its own colorful architectural vogue -- from gingerbread castles to Twentieth-Century Kitsch. Village rivalry helps distract people from two generations of high unemployment, so locals and their dittos toil like maniacs to create lavish showpieces, often focusing on an ethnic theme -- the hometown pride of some immigrant community that long ago dropped in to join a cultural bouillabaisse.

Some liken Skyroad Ten's elevated carbonite ribbon to some exponentiated version of It's a Small World, stretching for more than a hundred kilometers. Globalization never ended human cultural diversity, but it did transform ethnicity into another hobby. Another way for people to find value in themselves, when only the genuinely talented can get authentic jobs. Hey, everyone knows it's phony, like the purple wage. But it beats the alternatives -- like boredom, poverty, and realwar.

I felt relieved when we finally made it past the final city greenbelt, plunging into the natural, bone-dry air of actual countryside. Ritu's gray didn't talk much. She must have been in a mood when she imprinted. Hardly surprising, with her father's corpse not even cool yet. Anyway, this trip hadn't been her idea.

To make conversation, I asked her about Vic Aeneas Kaolin.

Ritu had known the tycoon ever since her father joined Universal Kilns, twenty-six years ago. As a girl she used to see the mogul often, until he went hermit, one of the first aristos to stop meeting people in the flesh. Even close friends hadn't seen the man in person for a decade. Nor did most people care. Why should it matter? The Vic still kept appointments, attended parties, even played golf. And those platinum dittos of his were so good they might as well be real.

Ritu, too, must use her UK connections to get high-quality blanks. Even in the dim light, I could tell her gray was supple, realistic, and well textured. Well, after all, I had asked her to send a first-rate copy to help in my investigation.

"I'm not sure which pictures you're talking about," she answered, when I enquired about the missing photos in her father's house -- the ones that Kaolin's ditto stole from the wall. Ritu shrugged. "You know how it is. Familiar things become part of the background."

"Still, I appreciate your effort to recall."

She closed her eyelids, covering the uniform blue of her golem-orbs. "I think ... there may have been a picture of Aeneas and his family, when he was young. Another showed him and my father standing before their first non-humanoid model ... one of those long-arm fruitpickers, if I recall right." Ritu shook her head. "Sorry. My original may be more help. You can have your rig ask her."

"Maybe." I nodded. No need to let on that the Albert Morris original was sitting right next to her. "Can you tell me how Kaolin and your father were getting along recently? Especially just before Yosil disappeared."

"Getting along? They were always great friends and collaborators. Aeneas gave Dad plenty of leeway for his idiosyncratic behavior and long disappearances, and a permanent waiver from the lie-detector sessions the rest of us take, twice a year."

"Twice a year? That must be unpleasant."

Ritu shrugged. "Part of the New Fealty System. Usually they just ask, 'Are you keeping some big secret that might harm the company?' Basic security, without getting nosy, and the screenings apply equally to all levels in the company."

"To all levels?"

"Well," Ritu's graydit acquiesced, "I can't recall anyone insisting that Aeneas himself come take a scan in person."

"Out of fear?"

"Courtesy! He's a good employer. If Aeneas doesn't want to meet other people in the flesh, why should anybody in the UK family choose to question his reasons?"

Why indeed? I pondered. No reason ... except old-fashioned flaming curiosity! Clearly, it's another case of personality matching your career path. Folks like me just aren't cut out for this new world of fealty oaths and big industrial "families."

We lapsed into silence after that and I didn't mind. In fact, I needed an excuse to shut down ... that is, pretend to go into dormant mode. The car would drive itself toward the distant mesa where her father's cabin lay. During those hours, I ought to get some good old organic sleep.

Fortunately, Ritu herself supplied a justification. "I gave this ditto some net research to do during the drive. Would you mind if I proceed now?"

On her lap lay a chador portable workstation, doubtless very sophisticated, with an opaque hood that could be tossed over the head, shoulders, and arms.

"Fine," I said.

"Do you want a privacy screen, in addition to the chador?"

She nodded, repaying me with the same appealing smile that I saw when we first met. "I hope you don't mind."

Some people think courtesy is wasted on dittos, but I never understood their reasoning. I sure appreciate it when I'm clay, or when I'm pretending to be. Anyway, her needs coincided with my own.

"Sure. I'll set the screen for six hours. We should be getting close to the cabin about then, with dawn coming up."

"Thank you ... Albert." Her smile took on higher wattage, making me flush. I didn't want it to show, so with no more ceremony than a friendly nod, I touched the PS button between our seats, releasing a sheet of nanothreads from overhead, creating a black curtain that quickly solidified into a palpable barrier, separating the car's occupants. I stared at it for a minute, briefly forgetting the real reason why I had impulsively decided to take this trip in person. Then I remembered.

Clara. Oh yeah.

I pulled a sleeping cap out of my valise, laying it over my temples. With its help, a few hours should do just fine.

Ideally, ditRitu would never know.

The interrupt call yanked me out of a dream. A true meat-nightmare in which an army of dark figures struggled across a blasted moonscape, too sere to support any life. Yet there I stood, rooted in place like a dying tree, unable to move as towering metallic forms stomped all around me, flourishing blood-drenched claws.

One part of me clenched in terror, wholly subsumed in the mirage. Meanwhile, a more detached portion stood back, as we sometimes do in dreams, abstractly recognizing the scene from a sci-fi holofilm that scared me spitless, back when I was seven. One of the few deliberately cruel things my sister ever did to me, when we were young, was to play that creepy thing for me late one night, despite a "Toxic for Preteens" warning label.

I woke, floundering in the brief disorientation that comes from getting torn out of REM sleep, wondering where I was and how I got there.

"Wha -- ?" The induction cap fell off as I sat up, heart pounding.

Glancing left, I saw a moonlit desert landscape flowing gently past as the Volvo cruised a two-lane highway, without another vehicle insight. Spiky Joshua trees cast eerie shadows across the dry realm of rattlesnakes, scorpions, and maybe a few hardy tortoises. To my right, the privacy screen stood intact, swallowing light and sound. Fortunately. It kept Ritu from witnessing my undignified and undittolike wakening.

"Well? Are you up?"

The voice -- low and directional -- came from the car's control panel. A homunculus stared at me with a face like my own, only glossy black, wearing an expression that fell just short of insolent disdain.

"Uh, right." I rubbed my eyes. "What time izzit?"

"Twenty-three forty-six."

So. About three and a half hours since I curled up for a nap. This had better be important.

"What's up?" I croaked with a dry mouth.

"Urgent matters."

Behind the ebony duplicate I saw my home workroom. Every screen was lit, several tuned to news outlets.

"There's been an accident at Universal Kilns. Looks like industrial sabotage. Someone set off a prion-catalyst bomb."

"A ... what?"

"A cloud of organic replicators designed to spread and permeate the facility, ruining every synthetic soul-mesh in the place."

Blinking in surprise, I must have stared like an idiot.

"Why would anyone -- "

"Why isn't our chief concern right now," my jet golem interrupted, sharply and typically. "It appears that two of our own duplicates were inside UK headquarters at the time. 'Behaving suspiciously' is the phrase I sifted out of a police decrypt. They're arranging warrants right now to come over and seize our records."

I couldn't believe it.

"Two of them? Two of our dits?"

"Plus a couple of Pal's."

"P-Pal? But ... I haven't even spoken to him in ... there must be some mistake."

"Perhaps. But I have a bad feeling about this. Both logic and intuition suggest that we're being set up. I suggest you drop present concerns and return at once."

Appalled and mystified, I could only agree. This had much higher priority than nosing around Yosil Maharal's old cabin -- or my other impulsive aims for this trip.

"I'm turning around," I said, reaching for the controls. "At top speed I should reach home in about -- "

The jetto cut me off abruptly, raising a glossy hand.

"I'm picking up Citywatch -- a realtime alert. Unauthorized pyrotechnics, five klicks east of here ... "

A dreadful pause, then --

"A missile launch. The spectrum matches an Avengerator Six. They're tracking ... "

Dark eyes met mine.

"It's coming here. ETA ten seconds."

I stammered: "B-but ... "

With ineffable calm, ebony fingers danced. "I'm spilling everything to external cache twelve. You concentrate on saving our hide. Then find out who did this and get the bas -- "

Like a doomed mirror, my dark reflection abruptly shattered into millions of glittering shards that swirled briefly in front of me. Then, one by one, they rapidly winked out till only a faint stir of air remained.

The Volvo spoke up with the dull voice tones of silicon.

"YOU ASKED TO BE TOLD OF ANY NEWS EVENTS EXCEEDING PRIORITY LEVEL FIVE THAT AFFECT YOUR HOME NEIGHBORHOOD. I AM PICKING UP FLASH REPORTS OF A LEVEL NINE EMERGENCY ON YOUR BLOCK, CENTERED AT YOUR ADDRESS."

How I envied our ancestors, who were sometimes spared bad tidings for a few hours or days, back in technologically benighted eras when news traveled much slower than light and was channeled through journalists or bureaucrats. I didn't really want to see. I barely managed to choke out:

"Show me."

A series of holo images erupted, showing instanews from half a dozen publicams and private voyeur-floaters, programmed to zoom like vultures toward anything unusual, selling their feeds directly to the Net. In this case, the attractive novelty was a conflagration. A house -- my house -- burning wildly and with such heat that a flame funnel had already formed, tipping any unwary cams that fluttered too close.

Stunned, I worked for a while on pure reflex, paying top rates for pan-spectral composites till a clear picture converged out of darkness and flames.

"Damn," I muttered, hating whoever had done this. "They burned my garden, too."

I took the car offbeam and turned around, gunning it back toward the city. If I drove at thirty above the speed limit, I figured I could purge all the micro-fines with a public necessity plea. You know, rushing home to help authorities clear up this mess. Anyway, an act of good faith might help convince someone to listen when I proclaim my innocence.

Innocent of what? I still had no clear picture of what happened at Universal Kilns.

Two copies of me ... and several of Pallie. But which copies? The one that disappeared at Kaolin Manor, presumably. And the gray that cut off communication after accepting a closed contract? Whatever job it took, things must have gone sour in a big way.

News began filtering out of UK headquarters. A prion bomb had gone off, but preliminary reports were optimistic. Employees jabbered among themselves about an exceptional stroke of luck. The affected area was small because a brave forklift operator sat on the saboteur at the last moment, quenching the explosion with its huge golembody, limiting the poison's dispersal.

Great, I thought. But what does it all have to do with me?

I got no answer on Pallie's phone, or via our secret drop box. Not one of the four dittos I had made Tuesday replied to my ultra-urgent pellet flash. I could only account for one of them -- the loyal jetto who stayed at his post, striving until hell plummeted into his lap, converting his damp clay body into drifting ceramic flakes.

I glanced at the privacy screen -- the curtain separating me from the car's passenger cell. Should I dissolve it and inform Ritu's gray? But surely, as a senior UK employee, she must have already received an alert about something amiss at her company. Or was her project so narrowly focused that she banished all distractions, like news?

Maybe she did know, and preferred to keep the curtain up. Rumors, spreading across the Net, already named me as a likely suspect in the sabotage at Universal Kilns. I debated whether to dissolve the privacy screen from this side and try to explain. Practice my innocent plea, before trying it on the police ...

Just then a pair of sharp glints caught my eye. Headlights. Reluctantly, I ratcheted down the Volvo's hell-bent speed ... then brought it down some more. Something struck me as wrong about the lights. Their position on the road was odd. Maybe the highway swung a bit to the right, up ahead ...

Only it didn't seem about to. I kept edging rightward, instinctively planning to pass the headlights on that side, but unexpectedly the road drifted the other way, slightly left! Tapping the brake, I slackened speed some more, hoping to consult the nav computer.

The other car was close!

Expecting to finally avoid him on the right, I nearly plowed into the other fellow before comprehending the situation in an instant. The imbecile had pulled onto the shoulder on my side, pointing his high beams at oncoming traffic! Only a last-second left swerve took me back onto the road, missing the fool by inches!

The swerve turned into a spin, tires squealing and smoking as the world reeled. I had time to regret a life spent blithely ignoring basic traffic safety rules. No wonder Clara insisted on doing the driving, whenever we went somewhere together. My wonderful, fierce Clara ... and no ghost of mine to console her.

I envisioned ending up like Yosil Maharal, crumpled at the bottom of a ditch ... till the whirling spin finally ended with the Volvo squat and safe, sitting in the middle of the two-lane highway, shining its twin beams back at the idiot who almost caused a wreck.

A dark figure stepped from the other car, hard to picture amid the glare. I was about to get out too, and have some choice words with the fellow. Then I saw that he carried something long and heavy. Shading my eyes against the dazzle, I watched him raise the bulky, tubelike thing to his shoulder.

"Pulp!" I cursed, slamming into second gear and pounding the accelerator. Instinct urged me to turn the wheel, frantically swerving to flee whatever weapon he was bringing to bear! Only Albert's forebrain knew better.

Clara explained it to me long ago -- a basic military principle.

Sometimes your only hope is to scream defiance, charge ahead; and hope for the best.

Evidently. The tactic sure surprised my attacker, who leaped back, colliding with the hood of his car before trying to steady his aim. I howled, shoving my right foot to the floor, spurring the Volvo's engine to an emergency-power roar.

In that split instant, amid the glare of two converging sets of headlights, I knew several things at once.

Good lord, it's Aeneas Kaolin!

And -- he's going to get his shot off before I reach him.

And -- no matter what weapon he's got, I'll still have the satisfaction of turning his sorry clay ass into pottery shards.

That offered small comfort as a bolt of horrid lightning spewed from Kaolin's gun, enveloping my car in fireworks. Pain followed right behind.

Still, through the blinding coruscation I got to see the platinum ditto throw both arms up, venting a last-instant wail of spontaneous despair.