NETFEED/NEWS: Jiun Would Not Want State Funeral, Heirs Claim

(visual: Jiun at Asian Prosperity Zone ceremony)

VO: The heirs of Jiun Bhao, Asia's most influential mogul, say that the state funeral planned for the businessman is inappropriate.

(visual: nephew Jiun Tung at press conference)

JIUN TUNG: "He was a very modest man, the embodiment of Confucian values. He would want what was due to a man of his position, nothing more."

(visual: Jiun meeting group of farmers)

VO: Some observers suggest that the family is being more modest than their late patriarch actually was, and that what they really object to is the state's expectation that the Jiun family pay for part of the massive ceremony. . . ."

Calliope drummed her fingers on the countertop. She was definitely, definitely going to give up caffeine, go for the no-octane varieties. Tomorrow. Or right after that.

Every noise from the other room seemed louder than it was. It was so strange to hear someone else in her apartment. Calliope's mother hated leaving her little house, fearful of crowds and unfamiliar places. Stan hadn't visited in months, mostly because they saw so bloody much of each other at work: even friendly partners didn't want to spend any more time in each other's company than they had to.

Calliope had just decided to pour herself a drink of something counter-effective to coffee—although, as wired as she felt at the moment, it would probably take some kind of morphine derivative to slow her down—when the bedroom door popped open. Elisabetta, the waitress-muse, leaned in the doorway, only a yellow towel covering the completeness of her tattooed glory. She held another towel in her hand and waved it at Calliope. "I took one for my hair, too. All right?"

Detective Sergeant Calliope Skouros could only nod. The towel-clad apparition vanished back into the steamy bedroom. God, the girl was beautiful. Maybe not in the runway-model sense, but strong and just vibrating with youth and life.

Did I look like that once? Did I have that glow, just because of how old I was? Or rather, how old I wasn't?

Stop it, Calliope. You're not that bloody old, you just work too hard. And you eat too much crap. Find a life, like Stan always says. Go to the gym. You've got good bones.

As she mulled over the dubious value of good bones, something her mother had always assured her she had when a younger Calliope was feeling particularly unpretty, Elisabetta appeared again from the bedroom, a towel around her head, the rest of her now dressed in a black knit top and a pair of black 'chutes slashed with insets of glowing white.

"These are so. . . ." She waved at the silky trousers. "I mean, I know they're utterly cutting, but they're so much more comfortable than that latex shit."

"Cutting. . . ?" asked Calliope, knowing even as she did so that she was just confirming her own official middle-agedness.

Elisabetta grinned. "Cutting edge. Meaning old-fashioned. It's just something this friend of mine says." She gave her hair a last rub, then ceremoniously draped the towel over the door handle. Which, Calliope reflected, for someone in her early twenties probably represented "not leaving a mess."

"It was really nice of you to let me use your shower. It's so far back to my place, and the traffic. . . ." She bent for her bag, then straightened up. "Oh, and thanks for the drink, too."

"No problem. I enjoyed it." Calliope considered some further affirmation but could not come up with anything that didn't sound utterly stupid in mental rehearsal. I love your company and I have weird fantasies about you all the time? I'd like to be genetically reengineered to have your babies? I drink three gallons of coffee a day just to watch you walk around dropping salads on peoples' tables, so it was quite nice to have you naked at my place, even in the next room?

"I really want to go to this party. My friend's house-sitting, and the people told her it was okay to have it—they've got this amazing place, with walls, like a castle. And you can have fireworks every night. They're not real, they're just holograms or something, but my friend says it's wonderful." She pushed damp hair out of her eyes and looked at Calliope. "Hey, maybe you'd like to go. You want to?"

Something squeezed at her heart a little bit. "I'd love to." Something else squeezed—her conscience? "But I can't. Not tonight. I have to meet someone." Am I closing a door? she wondered nervously. "My partner. My work partner. About work."

Elisabetta regarded her solemnly for a moment, then returned to the task of rummaging around in her bag. But when she looked up, she wore a smile that was both amused and ever, ever so slightly shy. "Hey, do you like me?"

Calliope carefully leaned back on her chair, just to stop herself drumming her fingers nervously on the tabletop. "Yes, Elisabetta. I do. Of course I do."

"No, I mean do you like me?" The smile was still shy, but challenging, too. Calliope was not entirely sure she wasn't being teased or mocked in some way. "Are you . . . are you interested in me?"

Further obfuscation was not going to work, although it was tempting. Calliope realized that after almost a decade and a half of police work, after sitting in interrogation rooms facing rapists and robbers and murderous psychopaths, she couldn't think of a thing to say. After what seemed like half an hour, but was probably three seconds, she cleared her throat.

"Yes." That was as much as she could manage.

"Hmmm." Elisabetta nodded, then slung her bag over her shoulder. She still seemed to be enjoying some secret joke. "I'll have to think about that." As she reached the door, she turned, her smile wide now. "Got to fly—see you later!"

Calliope sat in her chair for a long minute after the door whooshed closed, unmoving, as stunned as if she had been hit by a car. Her heart was hammering, although nothing had really changed.

What the hell am I supposed to do now?

"Technically," Stan Chan said after a short silence, "this should be the portion of the conversation where you ask me, 'and how was the big meeting, Stan?' I mean, now that we've spent twenty minutes or so talking about some waitress I don't remember."

"Oh, Jesus, Stan, I'm sorry." She stared at the bowl of cocktail crispies, then defiantly took another handful. "I really am. I haven't forgotten about it. It's just . . . I've been out of circulation a long time, what with one thing and another. I forgot how much like shooting some weird drug it is. Does she like me, should I care, what does that little thing mean. . . ? Damn, see, I'm doing it again. Tell me about what happened, please. I'm getting sick of listening to myself, anyway."

"That's why you and I make such good partners. We agree on so many things."

"Die, China-boy."

"You'll never take me down, you goat-chasing lemon."

"I'm glad we've got that straightened out."

Stan nodded happily, then sobered. "I'm afraid that's going to be the highlight of the evening."

"So they didn't go for it," One of the reasons she had been wasting time with waitress-trivia had been a bad feeling about Stan's meeting with the department brass.

"Not only didn't they go for it, they pretty much made it clear that they thought a couple of garden-variety homicide dicks should keep their noses out of things they couldn't understand."

"Meaning the Real Killer case."

"Yep."

"Did you ask them about the Sang-Real thing I was thinking about? The whole King Arthur and the Grail idea?"

"Yes, and they informed me that they'd thought of it themselves a long time ago, and had beaten it into the dust. Looked up Arthurian scholars, checked the seating lists for Parzival in case the guy's a closet Wagner nut, every angle they could think of. I have to admit, it sounds like they were pretty thorough."

"So basically, then, the answer was 'piss off.' "

"That sums it up pretty well, Skouros. They already decided once that Merapanui wasn't anything to do with their serial killer. And the captain was there, too—did I mention that? She thinks it's a lot more likely that minor villain Buncie got his dates wrong than he saw Johnny Dread alive after his check-out certificate, and she's also beginning to wonder why we're putting so much time into this case, since it's five years old and—in your own words when they gave it to us, Skouros—'as dead as good manners' " He shrugged.

"The captain. . . ." Calliope leaned forward, thoughts of Elisabetta's shoulders shining with water drops vanishing quickly as she realized what Stan was trying to tell her. "Oh, God. Does that mean. . . ?"

Stan nodded. " 'Fraid so. She basically said we should wrap it up and put it away. She asked me if we'd found any actual evidence that our Johnny was still among the living, and I had to admit we hadn't."

"But . . . damn." Calliope slumped. There wasn't any, of course, not hard evidence, not the kind you could even take to a prosecutor. She felt like she had been hit in the stomach with a club. The whole thing was a structure built on guesswork—the kind of paranoid fantasy that kept thousands of net nodes busy. But she knew it wasn't pure fantasy—that the hunches were built on something. And Stan knew it, too. "Didn't you argue?"

"Of course I did." For a moment he showed a flash of genuine hurt. "What do you take me for, Skouros? But she pointed out that while we were devoting so much time to this five-year-old case, people were getting murdered in new and original ways all the time, and the department is understaffed as it is. It was hard to argue with her."

"Yeah. I'm sorry, Stan. You were the one who had to listen to it." She scowled and picked a piece of ice out of her drink, rubbing it along the table so it left a trail of moisture. "It's probably just as well I wasn't there. I probably would have screamed at her."

"Well, did you put the afternoon to some other good use? Besides inviting people over to use your shower?"

She winced. That hurt—despite all the unpaid overtime she had put in lately, she had fretted over leaving half an hour early just to catch the end of Elisabetta's shift at Bondi Baby. "I didn't just spend the entire day trying to get laid, Chan, honestly. But if they're going to pull us off Merapanui, there's not much point talking about what I found, because it isn't much."

"Not pull—pulled."

"You mean . . . we're off it?"

"We're reassigned as of 1800 hours today." Stan did not often show real emotion, but his quicksilver features turned leaden. "It's over, Calliope. Sorry, but the captain made it very clear. Merapanui goes back in the 'do not resuscitate' file and Monday morning we go back to work on the latest street-beast bashings and alley slashings." He grinned bleakly. "We would have solved it, partner. We just ran out of time."

"Shit." Calliope was not going to cry, even in front of Stan, but the wave of frustration and anger that washed through her definitely made her eyes smart. She slammed the piece of ice down on the tabletop; it squirted from her fingers and caromed off a napkin holder onto the floor. "Shit."

There wasn't much else to say.

It was always strange, this sensation of intrusion. She thought of it as being somehow very male, which probably explained why most hackers and crackers were men. Burglars, too. And explorers. And rapists, of course.

Which did not really explain where she herself fit in, but it was hard to deny the wired-up pleasure Dulcie always felt when she found her way into someone else's system.

Her system was chewing up machine language, but it was slow going; not only did the J Corporation have all the usual state-of-the-art security gear, but the really important stuff she wanted was also buried under a tremendous amount of VR code. This made breaking into the vaults of the J Corporation even more like burglary than the usual foray: information could actually be seen as old-fashioned paper files in cabinets, the different sections of the massive system as rooms in some near-endless office building. Not that Dulcie bothered with any of these real-world imitations, but she could tell that if she wanted to, a few adjustments would set the whole thing unrolling in front of her like a game, virtual representations of gates and vault doors, steely-eyed security guards, and all kinds of things. Was it just that in fifty years of living entirely online Felix Jongleur had found time to add a human-friendly facade to everything? Or was something more complicated at work?

Maybe he's like Dread, she thought. A bit of an illiterate when it comes to technology, but still wants to be able to access everything because he doesn't really trust anybody but himself. That would certainly make sense if the stories about his immense age were true, since Jongleur would have been an old man already by the time the Information Era had begun.

She filed these questions about Jongleur away for possible later use, but the idea had set off a few interesting sparks. Could something like that be the key to unlock Dread's own hidden storage? Some obvious thing that a technophile like Dulcie Anwin wouldn't normally consider—something that might not even occur to her? Several days had passed since she had stumbled across her employer's hiding place, but it still nagged her thoughts.

Not now, she told herself. There's work to do here, with Jongleur's files. And I sure don't want Dread scorched at me.

Not only that, she realized—she wanted to impress him. Something in Dread's self-confidence and self-involvement pulled up a corresponding need in her, a need to prove herself.

Well, even if he's the toughest, coldest son of a bitch in the world, he couldn't get into the J Corporation files by himself. But I can. And I will.

She did, eventually, but it took almost twenty-four hours.

As it turned out, none of the passwords or other bits of Grail network information that Dread had passed along to her proved much use at all. She was thrown back on old-fashioned methods and was glad she had come prepared. But even with the best gear that money and shady connections could provide, there was still a great deal of waiting. She left the building several times to take walks—trips she kept short, despite her need for fresh air and sunshine, because the neighborhood made her nervous—and curled up once for a couple of hours of uneasy sleep, which was punctuated by a dream of long hospital corridors, in the dream she was searching for a little animal of some kind that had been lost, but the corridors were starkly white and empty and the search seemed endless.

When her customized Krypton gearstripper finally gave her the hole she needed, she jumped up, clapped her hands, and whooped, riding an electrifying surge of adrenaline—but the elation did not last long. The actual truth of breaking into the J Corporation's information system was in some way worse than the grim hospital dream. At least there she had been searching for something, however hard to find; now, with the break-in accomplished, she was forced to confront the ridiculous complexity of the task before her.

Dread, with the nonchalance of someone who didn't understand what he was asking, had told her he wanted anything of interest about the Grail network, but especially anything pertaining to the Otherland operating system. At the same time, he had made it very clear that he didn't want her examining the data too closely herself—a stricture which had made her snort loudly while listening to his original message.

Right, she had thought. Like they're just going to label all their file material to facilitate easier industrial theft. "Don't bother to read this: trust us, it's important."

Now that the exhilaration of cracking the system was gone, the weight of the actual task depressed her. She had no idea how she'd ever find the things Dread wanted. The amount of information that lay before her was staggering, the accumulated institutional knowledge of one of the world's larger multinational corporations. And the Grail network information might not even be included—it was an important secret, after all, wasn't it? At the very least, it certainly wasn't going to be helpfully labeled.

Almost two hours of browsing the system indexes confirmed her fears. She sighed, disconnected, and got up to rip open another coffee pack. There had to be a way to narrow things down.

It came to her as the cup was still bubbling. It wasn't the J Corporation she really wanted—it was Jongleur's own personal system. None of the Otherland information, or at least very little of it, would need to be available to J Corporation employees, since the bulk of the network administration seemed to be handled by Robert Wells' Telemorphix, and even though Jongleur owned the J Corporation completely, it was still a quasi-public entity and presumably available to government audits. Jongleur couldn't have bribed everyone, could he? She thought the chances were very strong that someone who lived nearly his entire existence online would have his own separate system containing all the most important information, and certainly anything as vital to him as the secrets of the Grail network. The question was, how to find Felix Jongleur's personal system.

The solution, when it came, pleased her sense of irony and confirmed her earlier hunch: Jongleur's own eccentricities would give her the tools to defeat his security.

Jongleur's peculiar use of the VR interface slowed down her initial experiments, but since they were going to be the key to her success, she felt no urge to complain. She put her best analysis gear to work on the places where use of the clumsy, humanizing interface seemed most counterintuitive, guessing that these would be the most likely spots to find Jongleur's own connections to the J Corporation system. The gear did its job. Within an hour the links began to turn up—conduits for information to be siphoned out of the corporate system on a regular basis, data pipelines custom-tailored for Jongleur's own idiosyncratic use. Dulcie felt a buzz of pride. Dread might have his weird little tricks that he would not share or explain—he was clearly using something out of the ordinary to have breached the Otherland security so easily—but she had tricks of her own.

I'm good, damn it. I'm good at this. I'm one of the best.

As her gear tracked the smaller, capillary links to larger links, pursuing their mazelike course through rerouters and firewalls, her excitement continued to rise. This was what it was all about. This was better than anything—better than money, better than sex. When the larger links converged into a single broadband data tap, she was so excited she had to get up and take another walk just to pump some of the nervous energy out of her system so she wouldn't explode. As she paced along the slick, shiny streets in the wake of one of the city's unmanned cleaning trucks, she felt her heart racing as though she had just finished a marathon. All by herself, she was making a billion-credit incursion. If this had been her own play, this would be what others in her business called a retirement strike—she would never have had to work again.

She came back to the loft to find that the tracking gear had located its quarry and finished its work: she was spiked into Jongleur's personal system. There was still work to be done, of course. If it had been a true cold call, Dulcie would have needed weeks just to get into the simplest and least important levels, but now the passwords and other bits and pieces Dread had picked up enabled her to start nibbling away like a mouse in the wall-wiring. It still wasn't easy—the security mechanisms behind the ancient mogul's virtual playground were tough, smart, and adaptive—but because Dread's information was like having a fifth column inside the besieged system, the hardest part was now finished.

A management specialist would be in heaven here, she thought as she surveyed what now lay spread before her. You could spend days—weeks!—just tracking the custodial staff in that big tower of his. And look at this! Personal security—it's an entire subsection. He's got a damned army out there on his island. Just the quartermaster's requisitions take up ten times the storage I have in my entire system!

Even the most flawless spike-and-siphon had a time limit, of course, and even as she rode the crest of her triumph, Dulcie was keenly aware that things could go south very quickly.

Dread says Jongleur's out of contact, somehow—but someone must be in charge. You don't just leave a multi-trillion dollar enterprise empty like a laundromat while you step out for a few days. Good God, if J Corporation missed their payroll, the Slate of Louisiana would collapse.

Contemplating the corporate immensity spread before her, the thought of Dread's own hidden files plucked at her like a beggar's hand. How much is he hiding from me, anyway? How much can I trust him? I'm putting my life on the line doing this—what if he's wrong? What if his boss is onto him already?

Looking over Jongleur's empire, she had no doubt that at least one thing Dread had already told her was true: if they wanted to, Jongleur and his associates could make her vanish so quickly and thoroughly that Dulcinea Anwin might as well not have existed.

Only my mom will even notice. And she'll get over it.

In a way, she quickly realized. Dread had been right and she had been wrong. It was possible to copy information without surveying it first. In fact, it was imperative. There were so many thousands of files that seemed like they might have something to do with Dread's rather broad mandate, she could only designate whole blocks for duplication and send the data shooting down the high-speed links to the storage space Dread had given her—memory he had partitioned off for her from the Grail Network, because nothing she or Dread had access to would have given her anywhere near enough room.

In her mind's eye, Dulcie saw herself on one of those net game shows—what was that one, Loot?—throwing things into bags as fast as she could, stumbling over the objects of her own greed because they were too many and she was only one person.

She worked all night, and did not realize how much coffee she had consumed until she pulled the data-spike and collapsed onto her bed. Her entire nervous system seemed made of sparking, short-circuited electrical wires; she spent three teeth-grinding hours lying on her back until sleep came to her at last.

If she dreamed of lost animals or hospitals this time, she did not remember when she woke. The sleep just passed seemed like an impossibly long stretch of blackness, the attack on Jongleur's system weeks old, but after she had checked on Dread in his coma bed and made her way out into the gray day in search of some kind of meal that didn't come out of a wave-pak, she realized she had slept only ten hours, which wasn't too bad.

Nah, you're getting old, Anwin, she told herself. Used to be you would have slept for two hours tops, then been up taking the data apart.

Feeling much more substantial after the ingestion of a couple of rosella bud muffins, a fruit salad, and more coffee, she wandered back to the loft, hooked up her 'can and got into the Jongleur downloads. She had a perverse desire to wake up Dread, roust him out of his machine, and show him what she'd accomplished.

What is that—daddy stuff? She was disgusted with herself. "Look, I'm a good girl, see what I did for you?"

She was an hour into the preliminary investigation, and had found several of the codewords that designated Grail-related files, allowing her to pull a large number of them directly out of the mix and into the "relevant" pile without having to examine them, when she came across an anomalous object. It was a VR file, or at least it had VR code attached to it, but it also had some strange encrypted link embedded in it as well. It was in among a grouping of much more mundane files having to do with what she was loosely calling Jongleur's personal estate—powers of attorney, links to various legal firms and accounting operations, instructions to J Corporation management. She had spent time on the estate data hoping that it might contain some information on maintaining the Grail network in case of an emergency, reasoning that someone as old as Jongleur would want to make sure his pride and joy was kept running properly if he was temporarily disabled. She hadn't found anything—the material seemed quite ordinary, the kind of thing any powerful, wealthy person would have to ease the transition during illness or at death—so the odd file stuck out even more.

It was labeled "Ushabti," a word or name Dulcie didn't recognize, but she guessed from what Dread had told her about the old man's obsessions that it might be Egyptian. It had been created three years earlier and did not seem to have been added to or changed since. She triggered a quick search through her own system, and was given the information that ushabti was indeed an ancient Egyptian word, signifying a kind of tomb-statue. There was more detail available, but a quick glance turned up nothing relevant. Dulcie frowned and opened the file itself.

A dark-eyed man appeared before her so swiftly that she flinched. He was perhaps in his sixties, a tiny smile on his lined face, his white hair neat. The viewpoint drew back to show that he sat behind a desk in an old-fashioned office, something that might have belonged in a nineteenth-century embassy, teak furniture and heavy drapes on the windows.

My God, she thought. That's Jongleur. But this file is only a few years old, and he can't have looked like that in a hundred years.

Which meant nothing in VR, of course. What the hell difference when this was done—this is a guy who appears as some Egyptian god most of the time. . . .

The old man before her nodded his head once, then spoke, the voice public-school English with a tiny hint of something else, something more foreign, beneath.

"And so we meet, my son. Something we could never do while I was alive. I am anxious to tell you everything, and then you will understand why your life has been ordered in the way it has. But first you must tell me your name. Your true name, as it has been given to you, then we may proceed to the more prosaic forms of verifying identity."

My son? Dulcie sat without a thought of anything to say. She had clearly triggered the first half of some kind of dual-encryption, and now Jongleur—or his recorded sim, or his ghost, or whatever the hell this was—was waiting for the other half of the key.

"I wait for your true name," the old man said, a bit more of an edge in his voice. His eyes were quite mesmerizing, Dulcie thought as she waited helplessly—"commanding" is what they would have been called in a romance, although there was little romantic about this flinty old monarch. If he had looked anything like that in real life, it was easy to understand how he had built himself an empire.

"Your true name," the pseudo-Jongleur said for the third time. A moment later he was gone. The file had closed itself.

Dulcie rubbed her hand against her forehead and felt a film of sweat. She dropped out of the system. It was definitely time to take a break.

An hour later she sat staring at the Ushabti file. She was unwilling to open it again, or even examine it too closely, because things like this often had a built in number of attempts they would allow before simply self-destructing.

A search of available information on Jongleur had done nothing to illuminate the mystery. Not only had his actual sons and daughters died a century ago, but according to the best sources she could find there was nothing like a direct line of succession. All of his living relatives—the oldest still generations younger than Jongleur himself—were descendants of his cousins. He was not known to be close to any of them, nor did any of them have a role in the J Corporation.

As carefully as a specialist handling an unexploded bomb, Dulcie picked the Ushabti file out from the midst of the estate information and moved it onto her private system, then went back to work sorting files.

Dread could hide things? Dread wanted to keep secrets from her? Well, Dulcie could keep secrets of her own.

"Lets have another one," Dread decided. "This is interesting."

He waved his hand and a dark-haired, muscular man shuffled forward into the glare of torches and fell to his knees. His linen robes showed signs of having been costly once, but they were singed and torn, and his black wig sat askew.

"What's your name?" Dread asked him.

"Seneb, O Lord."

"And what do you do?" Dread turned to the woman beside him. "Kind of funny, isn't it? Like a game show."

"I . . . I am a m–m–merchant, O Great House." He was so terrified he could hardly speak.

"Tell me . . . hmmm. What did you have for breakfast this morning?"

Seneb paused, fearful of a wrong answer. "I . . . I had nothing, Lord. I have not eaten in two days."

Dread waved a huge, pitch-black hand. "The last time you had brekkie, then, mate. What did you have?"

"Bread, Lord. And a little beer." The man wrinkled his forehead, thinking desperately. "And a duck egg! Yes, a duck egg."

"See?" Dread grinned at his female guest, his red jackal tongue lolling. It was much more entertaining to do these kinds of things with a real human audience. "Every one different." He pointed to the priest he had been interrogating only moments before beginning on the merchant. "And what do you think of this bloke, eh? Is he a good man?"

Seneb looked at the cowering priest, again unsure of the answer that was wanted. "He is a priest of Osiris, Lord. All the priests of Osiris are good men . . . are they not?"

"Well, since Osiris has stepped out for a while. . . ." Dread smirked. "I suppose we'll have to leave that question unanswered. But how about if I asked you to fight with him? To kill him if you can?"

Seneb, for all his beefy size, was trembling. That might have been in part because the jackal-headed god on the throne before him was twice human height. "If the great Lord wishes it," he said at last, "then I must do it."

Dread laughed. "See? Some of them can't wait to pitch into one of the priests. Some of the others think it's sacrilege and won't do it to save their own lives. It's bloody marvelous."

His guest looked at him uncomprehendingly.

"Don't you see?" Dread asked. "You can't predict anything here! God—no pun intended—but this is an impressive situation. They all are." He turned to Seneb. "If you kill him, I'll let you live."

Seneb stared shamefacedly at the priest, hesitating.

"What are you waiting for?"

"And . . . and my family?"

"You want to kill your family, too?" Dread barked a laugh. "Ah, I see, you want to know if I'll spare your family. Cheers. Why not?"

As the merchant Seneb raised his hands and lurched toward the priest, an older, frailer man who now moaned in fear. Dread shook his head in continued wonderment. It really was quite stunning. He remembered the Renie woman and others commenting on it, but with the total access he now enjoyed, the unshackled freedom to bend the network's simulated humans into any shape pain and power could contrive, it was even more clear: the individuality of these constructs was something unprecedented, each with its own little internal universe of hopes and prejudices and memories.

He could almost see why someone like Jongleur thought he could spend an eternity in this place. Not that he could imagine such a thing himself, at least not in the immediate future. Dread had nearly exhausted most of the obvious ways of enjoying himself, and although he definitely planned to take advantage of the Grail network's immortality options, he was not ready to give up the pleasures of real as opposed to virtual flesh. Not yet.

Still, there was fun to be had.

"Come on, admit it—you're rooting for one of them."

The woman beside him shut her mouth in a firm line. Dread smiled. This was much more fun than anything he could do with Dulcie, to whom he was still forced to show a friendly face. After all, there was still so much more he needed her for. He had a lot to learn about the Grail network, but now that he had confirmed the Old Man's continuing absence—Jongleur's private line had gone dead, and if he still was somewhere in the Grail system, he was as marooned as any of Dread's former companions had been—he needed her to find a way into Jongleur's personal files. He badly wanted information about the operating system, and also about things that mattered outside the small, hermetic world of the Otherland system.

With the Old Man's money and power, Dread thought happily, I can be a god in the real world, too. I can play these kind of tricks with real people. Industrial accidents. Biochemical releases, A few small wars when the mood strikes me. And then I'll have the Grail network to keep me alive.

Astonishing vistas had opened up. Control of the Otherland system, which had seemed like the be-all and end-all, might only be the beginning.

John Wulgaru, he thought to himself. Little Johnny Dread. King of the world.

The merchant Seneb fought clumsily, but the aged priest was no match. His mostly toothless mouth sagged open as the younger man seized him and cracked his head against the polished stone of the temple floor, over and over.

Dread's female guest had closed her eyes. He smiled. If she thought that would solve the problem, she might be interested to find out how easily her eyelids could be removed. He turned to his other guest, who was just beginning to groan his way back to consciousness.

"A little bored?" Dread waved his silver staff and the merchant and priest melted screaming into puddles on the marble. The crowd of watchers shrieked too. Dread was intrigued; he had expected them all to be numbed to pain and death by now. "Well, then perhaps it's time to get on with our own business."

"You can torture me as much as you want," the woman said. "Even if you really were the Devil, I'd have nothing for you but the back of my hand."

"Oh, come now." Dread leaned over until his great muzzle touched her cheek and his nose pressed wetly on her ear. He licked the side of her face and wondered idly what it would feel like to take her head off in one bite. Would knowing it was a real person make it different? He had tried it enough times with this simworld's virtual inhabitants. "Let's play a game . . . what was your name? Ah, right, Bonnie Mae. Let's play a game, Bonnie Mae. Every time you tell me something useful about the Circle, or about some friends of mine I know you met, that's worth an hour without pain. Play your cards right, you could have a couple of nice days' vacation here in sunny Egypt."

"I'll tell you nothing. Get thee behind me, Satan."

"Yes, well, I'm sure you'd keep your mouth shut like a good little martyr, no matter what I did to you, Little Red Riding Hood. At least at first. But let's not waste time." He turned and reached a massive hand toward the other prisoner. The ends of Dread's stark black fingers began to glow an incandescent red. "But how long can you stay quiet if it's your little Indian friend here that's taking the punishment?" He leered at his male captive. "Wishing you had made it out of this simulation before I took over, aren't you?" He closed his long fingers on the man's leg. Flesh sizzled and steamed. The prisoner's shrieks made even the numbed crowd moan and fall to the floor.

"No!" the woman screamed. "Stop it, you devil! Stop it!"

"But that's just the point, sweetness." Dread lifted his smoking fingers in a gesture of mock helplessness. "It's not up to me to stop it—it's up to you."

"Don't . . . don't tell him anything, Mrs. Simpkins!" Nandi Paradivash was shivering with agony, but struggling to remain upright. "I am no less bound than you. My life is nothing. My pain is nothing."

"Oh, on the contrary," said Dread. "It's quite a bit. And if she won't talk to save you, I think you will when I start on her." He grinned, displaying a line of teeth like an ivory chess set. "Because I do even better work on women."