"Reeve! And Sam!" It's Jen, dragging along Angel and their husbands, Chris and El, in her undertow. She looks a little less ebullient than she was yesterday, and I can guess why.

"We didn't do so well," El grunts. He spares me a lingering glance that hits me like a punch in the guts. It's really creepy. I know exactly what he's thinking, just not why he's thinking it. Is it because he thinks I cost him his points or because he's trying to imagine me with no clothes on?

"We could have done worse," says Jen, her words clipped and harsh-sounding. She's strangling her handbag in a death grip.

"On the outside." I take a deep breath. "I'd challenge Fiore if he made a crack like that at me in public."

"But you're not on the outside, darling," Jen points out. She smiles at Sam. "Is she like this at home, or only when she's got an audience?"

I am close, very close, to throwing the contents of my wineglass in her face and demanding satisfaction just to see if she'll crack, but my butterfly mind sees a distraction sneaking furtively past behind her—it's Mick. So instead of doing something stupid I do something downright foolhardy and march right over to him.

"Hello, Mick," I say brightly.

He jumps and glares at me. He's tense, wound up like a spring, positively fizzing. "Yes? What do you want?" he demands.

"Oh, nothing." I smile and inspect his face. "I just wanted to sympathize with you, having a wife who doesn't get up in the morning for Church. That's downright inconvenient. Will I see her here next week?"

"Yes," he grates. He's holding his hands stiffly by his sides, and they're clenched into fists.

"Oh, good! How marvelous. Listen, you don't mind me visiting to see her this afternoon, do you? We've got a lot to talk about, and I thought she'd—"

"No." He glares at me. "You're not seeing the bitch. Not today, or—whenever. Go away. Whore."

I'm not sure what the word means, but I get the general picture. "Okay, I'm going," I say tensely. If I'd had a few more days with the bench press and the weights, things might be difficult: But not right now. Not yet.

I turn and walk back over to Sam. He doesn't say anything when I lean against him, which is just as well because I don't trust myself to be tactful, especially not while we're in public, and I can't escape. My heart's pounding, and I feel sick with suppressed anger and shame. Cass is being treated as a virtual prisoner by her husband. I'm being publicly ridiculed and making enemies just for trying to maintain my sense of identity. This whole polity is rigged to try to make us betray our friends . . . but somewhere out there, people are looking for me with murder in mind. And if I don't keep a low profile, sooner or later they'll find me.

6. Sword

AFTER Church we go home. Sam doesn't have to work on Sunday, so he watches television. I go and explore the garage. It's a flimsy structure off to one side of the house, with a big pair of doors in front. There's a workbench, and the hardware shop zombies have already installed all the stuff I bought yesterday. I spend a while tinkering with the drill press and reading the manual for the arc-welding apparatus. Then I go and work out on the exercise device in the basement, grimly pretending that it's a torture machine for transferring physical stress to the bones of a human victim and that Jen's on the receiving end of it. After I've squished her into a bloody lump the size of a shopping bag, I feel drained but happier and ready to tackle difficult tasks. So I go looking for Sam.

He's in the living room, staring blankly at the TV screen with the volume turned off. I sit down next to him, and he barely notices. "What's wrong?" I ask.

"I'm—" He shakes his head, mute and miserable.

I reach for his hand but he pulls it away. "Is it me?" I ask.

"No."

I reach for his hand again, grab it, and hang on. He doesn't pull away this time, but he seems to be tense.

"What is it, then?"

For a while I think he isn't going to say anything, but then, just as I'm about to try again, he sighs. "It's me."

"It's—what?"

"Me. I shouldn't be here."

"What?" I look around. "In the living room?"

"No, in this polity," he says. Now I get it, it's not anger—it's depression. When he's down, Sam clams up and wallows in it instead of taking it out on his surroundings.

"Explain. Try and convince me." I shuffle closer to him, keeping hold of his hand. "Pretend I'm one of the experimenters, and you're looking to justify an early termination, okay?"

"I'm—" He looks at me oddly. "We're not supposed to talk about who we were before the experiment. It doesn't aid enculturation, and it's probably going to get in the way."

"But I—" I stop. "Okay, how about you tell me," I say slowly. "I won't tell anyone." I look him in the eye. "We're supposed to be a monadic couple. There aren't any negative-sum game plays between couples in this society, are there?"

"I don't know." He sniffs. "You might talk."

"Who to?"

"Your friend Cass."

"Bullshit!" I punch him lightly on the arm. "Look, if I promise I won't tell?"

He looks at me thoughtfully. "Promise."

"Okay, I promise." I pause. "So what's wrong?"

His shoulders are hunched. "I've just come out of memory surgery," he says slowly. "I think that's where Fiore and Yourdon and their crowd found most of us, by the way. A redaction clinic must be a great place to find experimental subjects who're healthy but who've forgotten everything they knew. People who've come adrift from the patterns of life, and who have minimal social connections. People with active close ties don't go in for memory surgery, do they?"

"Not often, I don't think," I say, vaguely disturbed by a recollection of military officers briefing me: trouble in another life, urgent plotting against an evil contingency.

"Not unless they're trying to hide something from themselves."

I manage to fake up an amused laugh for him. "I don't think that's very likely. Do you?"

"I'd . . . well. I'm pretty narrowly channeled emotionally. Narrow, but deep. I had a family. And it all went wrong, for reasons I can't deal with now, reasons I could have done something about, maybe. Or maybe not. Whatever, that's the bare outline of what I remember. The rest is all third-person sketching, reconstructed memory implants to replace whatever it meant to me. Because, I'm not exaggerating, it burned me out. If I hadn't undergone memory redaction, I'd probably have become suicidal. I have a tendency toward reactive depression, and I'd just lost everything that meant anything to me."

I hold his hand, not daring to move, suddenly wondering what kind of emotional time bomb I casually selected over the cheese and wine table half a week ago.

After about a minute, he sighs again. "It's over. They're in the past, and I don't remember it too clearly. I didn't have the full surgery, just enough to add a layer of fuzz so that I could build a new life for myself." He looks at me. "Do you know?"

Know what? I think, feeling panicky. Then I understand what he's asking.

"I had memory surgery, too," I say slowly, "but it wasn't for the first time. And it was thorough. I've—" I swallow. "I had to read an autobiography I wrote for myself." And did I lie when I was writing it? Did that other me tell the truth, or was he spinning a pretty tapestry of lies for the stranger he was due to become in the future? "It said I was mated once, long-term. Three partners, six children, it lasted over a gigasec." I feel shaky as I consider the next part. "I don't remember their faces. Any of them."

In truth I don't remember any of it. It might as well have happened to someone else. According to my autobiography it did. The whole thing ended more than four gigasecs ago—over a hundred and twenty years—and I went through my first memory reset early in the aftermath, and a much more thorough one recently. For more than thirty years those three mates and six children meant more to me than, well, anything. But all they are today is background color to the narrative of my life, like dry briefing documents setting up a prefabricated history for a sleeper agent about to be injected into a foreign polity.