"Tell Mom-Faye all about it," I said, taking him gleefully by the arm.

"Tell Mom-Faye my lips are sealed," he replied, detaching himself pointedly. "Whatever goes on between people is either private or universal. I shall not divulge the private, and you can download the universal yourself."

By which I suppose he meant picking up some Oolom/human porn-chips. No need, Chappalar-boy, no need. I’d seen enough of those in my dissolute past to know the basic interspecies geometries. What I wanted now were pure vicarious specifics.

But no matter how I wheedled, Chappalar refused to give blow-by-bump details of the night before. Truth to tell, he didn’t speak much at all. He was too busy smiling, bouncing, soaking up the feel of the thaw. I could guess how his mind was fluttering with the inevitable morning-after speculations. Does she really… What if she… Should I… How soon can we…

"You’re so cute," I told him.

Maybe he didn’t hear — he kept closing his ear-lids tight as if he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, then opening them wide as if he wanted to embrace every sound in the world.

Christ, he made me want to fall fresh in love myself. Good weather for it too. I broke into a jog to keep up with his bounce.

The pump station formed one wall of the Cabot Park petting zoo — three stories high (the wall), fifty meters long, covered with a glossy mosaic of a woodland that had never existed. By some rare magic, this forest combined Earth cedars, Divian sugar-saps, and Demoth raspfeather palms. (Truth to tell, I’d never seen a real Earth tree outside VR; just a few potted saplings at the NatHist Museum in Pistolet. No Demoth government would be daft enough to endanger the local ecology, letting people plant alien trees out in the open.)

The petting zoo had the same kind of contrived cross-mix as the trees in the mosaic. From Earth, donkeys and sheep; from the Divian homeworld, domesticated orts (chicken-sized pterodactyls, given to annoying squawks but gentle with children); and from Demoth itself, fuzz-worms and leaners. (Fuzzworms resemble rolls of frayed brown carpet — boring to look at, but furry-soft to pet. Leaners are herd animals, like morose short-legged goats with the hides of armadillos. In the wild, they like to rest by leaning against rocks and trees; in the zoo, they flop themselves against the legs of visitors, gravely staring up into your face with a wrinkled, "You don’t mind, do you?" expression.)

As Chappalar and I crossed the zoo grounds, two leaners followed us… one clearly hoping we’d brought sponge-corn from the concession stand, the other a robot chaperoning the first. Every real creature in Cabot Park had a look-alike robot companion, programmed to make sure normal animal behavior didn’t become too much of a nuisance. If, for example, the leaner chose me as its resting post, all well and good (apart from mud stains and leaner smell on my parka); but if the beast went for Chappalar, the robot would cut in like Dads at a dance party, standing sentry between Chappalar and the leaner till the animal went elsewhere.

Here’s the thing: an adult Homo sap could hold the leaner’s weight easily. Chappalar, though, would be knocked ass over teakettle and possibly crushed. Leaners never got it through their dumpy heads that even though Ooloms looked tall and strong, they were actually breakably light. Ergo the need for robot lifeguards — otherwise, the League of Peoples would ask why we let potentially dangerous animals get rough on our sentient citizens.

The League had very strict rules against putting sentients at needless risk. Either you followed those rules, or you got declared non-sentient yourself.

You didn’t want that. The League also had very strict rules for dealing with dangerous non-sentient creatures.

The door to the pump-station building was locked. Routine safety precaution? Or was some paranoid someone truly worried about saboteurs tampering with the city water supply? No. Most likely the staff locked the door for fear some leaner might rest against it and accidentally push it open. Before long, the plant would be full of orts and donkeys, not to mention sheep drowning themselves in the filtration vats. Who wants woolly water?

The mosaicked wall had an intercom screen embedded beside the door; I could easily call someone to let us in. But what would Chappalar think? We’d agreed on an unannounced visit… not an all-out catch-them-with-their-pants-down raid, but still we didn’t want to give the staff time to prepare a show. ("Oh yes, Ms. Proctor ma’am, we surely need all the cash you can funnel our way.")

I glanced at Chappalar. He’d taken his cue from the leaners and propped himself back-against the building’s wall. A creamy dreamy expression settled on his face as he started to turn pointillist, color-matching the teeny mosaic tiles of gloss-fired clay. The perfect picture of a man in reverie over his new girlfriend… not at all waiting to see if I was too wimp-gutless to use my link-seed.

Closing my eyes, I reluctantly reached out to the world-soul: my first deliberate brain-to-byte contact with the collective machine intelligence that permeated every digital circuit on Demoth… including the axonal vines through my brain and whatever computerized locking device kept the pump-station door closed. Faye Smallwood of the Vigil, I thought, silently projecting the words toward the door. Please grant me entrance. (The same formal way I used to speak to my wrist-implant… which, by the by, had got removed during mushor, to avoid radio interference between it and my link-seed. Since then, my wrist had felt so indecent-naked, I’d taken to wearing a rack of cheap bracelets.)

My Open sesame signal traveled like radio fizz out through my link-seed and into the closest datasphere receiver cell, then shunted through a slew of relays to the world-soul core. My identity got verified; likewise the identity of the lock I wanted to open. (The Vigil could pop locks in public buildings, but not private residences.) In less than a second, the door gave a soft click. I pulled it open and offered Chappalar a weak smile… mostly sick relief my head hadn’t exploded.

Without losing his dreamy expression, Chappalar said, "Next time before you open a door, tap into any available security cameras to see what’s on the other side. On my first scrutiny, I nearly got impaled by a forklift that happened to be passing. The door was locked specifically to prevent such accidents." He smiled and gestured toward the entranceway. "After you."

No forklifts inside… just a fiddly-dick locker room where workers stored their street clothes. Some of the staff had hung private trinkets on their lockers — a photo of someone’s family, a wire-painted miniature of the Blessed Mother Mary, the green-on-gray insignia of Bonaventure’s premier boat-racing team — but overall, the room had a spartan feel, whitewashed concrete, sucked dry of personality.

"Is there a city ordinance against dressing up your work area?" I asked Chappalar.

"Pump stations have to meet sanitation standards," he replied. "Some plant managers interpret those standards more rigorously than others."

"You know the manager then?"

"I know everyone who works for the city. You will too."

I’d already memorized the names of plant staff, and downloaded their files from the civic databanks. (Not through my link-seed. Through the one hard-copy feedbox in the Vigil offices.) The manager of Pump Station 3 was Elizabeth Tupper, age sixty-two, employed by the city works since humans took over Bonaventure. No complaints registered against her from above or below: she’d never screwed up badly enough for higher-ups to notice, and never harassed her subordinates to the point where they lodged an official protest.

You could say the same for almost every bureaucrat in town. I wished the employment records would say things like, "Plodding but competent," or "Goat-wanking control freak." Too bad they didn’t let me make up the checkboxes on performance-review forms.