The Linebarger Cats emerged from the coalition with significant assets. To my surprise I received a credit balance that with careful management might mean I never need to work again—at least for a few gigasecs. It seems that warfare pays, if you're on the winning side and manage not to misplace your mind in the process.

When I left MilSpace (a convoluted process involving numerous anonymous remixer networks and one-way censorship gates to strip me of my military modules before my reintegration into civil society), I had myself reassembled as a louche young man in the Cognitive Republic of Lichtenstein. There's a lot to be said for being louche, especially after you've spent several hundred megaseconds with no genitals.

Lichtenstein is a vivid and cynical colony of artistic satirists, so sophisticated they've almost circled back into primitivism. By convention we use visual field filters that limn everything in dark strokes, filling our bodies with color. Life aspires toward a state of machinima. It's a strange way to be, but familiar and comfortable after the unsleeping hyperspectral awareness of a tankie. So I hang around in the galleries and salons of Lichtenstein, exchanging witty repartee and tall stories with the other habitués, and in my copious free time I pay frequent trips to the bathhouses and floataria. I make a point of never sleeping with the same person twice in the same body, although I discover that even such anonymous abandon doesn't protect me from my lovers' tears: It seems half the population have lost someone and are wandering, searching the world over.

My life is outwardly directionless for the first four or five megs. In private I work on something that might eventually turn out to be a memoir of the war—an old-fashioned serialized text provocatively promoting a single viewpoint, without any pretense at objectivity—while in public I live on my savings. DeMob gave me a reasonably secure cover identity as a playboy remittance man from a primogeniture polity, sent to while away his youth in less hidebound (and politically loaded) biomes, and it's not hard to keep up appearances. But deep down, the insignificance and lack of meaning of such a life chafes; I want to be doing something, and while the project I've been working on under Sanni's auspices for the past couple of years fits the bill, it is, perforce, anonymous. If I make a mark, it will be by my deeds, not my name. And so, as my debauch intensifies, I slip into a kind of melancholic haze.

Then one morning I am awakened by a brassy flare of trumpets from the bedside orrery, which announces that I have a visitor.

I realize who and where I am—and that I am desperately sick—at the exact moment that Dr. Hanta presses a small, freezing cold brass disk against the bare skin between my breasts. "Ow!"

"Breathe slowly," she orders, not unkindly, then blinks like a sleepy owl from behind her thick-lensed glasses: "Ah, back in the realm of the conscious, are we?"

By way of an answer I go into a hoarse coughing fit, my muscles locking in spasms that leave my ribs aching. Hanta recoils slightly, removing the stethoscope. "I see," she says. "I'll just wait a moment—glass of water?"

I realize she's jacked the back of my bed up as the coughing subsides. "Yes. Please." I'm shivery and weak but not freezing anymore. She holds out a glass, and I manage to accept it without spilling anything, although my hand shakes alarmingly. "What's wrong with me?"

"That's what I'm here to find out." Hanta is a petite female, shorter than I am, her skin a shade darker, although not the aubergine-tinted brown of Fiore. Her short hair is dusted with the silver spoor of impending senescence, and there are laugh-lines around her face. She wears an odd white overcoat buttoned up the front and carries the arcane totems of her profession, the caduceus and stethoscope—the bell of the latter she rubs upon my chest. She looks friendly and open and trustworthy, the antithesis of her two clerical colleagues: but beauty is not truth, and some gut instinct tells me never to let my guard down in her presence. "How long have you been febrile?"

"Febrile?"

"Hot and cold. Chills, shivers, alternating with too hot. Night sweats, anything like that."

"Oh, about—" I feel my forehead wrinkling. "What day is it? How long have I been in here?"

"You've been here six hours," Dr. Hanta says patiently. "You were brought in around midafternoon."

I shiver convulsively. My skin is icy. "Since an hour or two before then."

"The Reverend Doctor Fiore tells me you were climbing." Her tone is neutral, professional, with no note of censure.

I swallow. "Since then."

"You're a lucky lady." Hanta smiles enigmatically and moves her stethoscope to the ball of my left shoulder, pulling open my hospital gown to get at it. "I'm sorry, I'll be quick. Hmm." She stares into the stethoscope's eye crystal and frowns. "It's a long time since I've seen that . . . sorry." She straightens up. "It's not safe to climb around in the walls here; some of the neighboring biomes aren't biomorphically integrated. There are replicators in the mass fraction reserve cells that will eat anything based on a nucleotide chassis that doesn't broadcast a contact inhibition signal, and you're not equipped for that."

I swallow again—my mouth is unnaturally dry. "What?"

"Somehow or other you've managed to get yourself infected with a strain of pestis mechaniculorum . You're feverish because your immune system is still just about containing it. It's a good thing for you that we found you before mechanotic cytolysis set in . . . Anyway, I'll fix you up just as soon as I finish sequencing it."

"Um." I shudder again. "Oh, okay."

" ‘Okay' indeed. Do I have to tell you not to go climbing around inside the walls again?" I shake my head, almost embarrassed by my own fear of discovery. "Good." She pats me on the shoulder. "At least if you're going to do it again, come to me first, please? No more unfortunate accidents." She carefully disconnects the stethoscope and wraps it around her caduceus. It makes soft clicking noises as it fuses with the staff. "Now I'll just run you off a little antirobotic, and you'll be up and about in no time."

Dr. Hanta hitches up her coat, then perches on a stool next to my bed. "Isn't this a bit out of character?" I ask her, throwing caution to the winds. I suspect if I asked Fiore or Yourdon that question, they'd bite my head off, but Hanta seems more approachable, if not more trustworthy.

"We all make mistakes." It's that smile again: It's slightly fey and very sincere, as if she's laughing at a joke that I'd laugh along with, if I only knew what it was. "You leave worrying about the integrity of the experiment to me, dear." She waves a dismissive hand. "Of course you worry about it when the priests' backs are turned. Of course people try to game the system—it's only to be expected. Probably some people don't even want to be here. Maybe they changed their minds after signing the waiver. All I can say is, we'll do our best to make sure they're not unhappy with the outcome." She raises an eyebrow at me speculatively. "It's not easy to run an experiment on this scale, and we make mistakes, what else can I say? Some of us make more mistakes than others." And now she pulls an expression of mild distaste, which seems to say it all. She's inviting my agreement, and I find myself nodding along despite my better judgment.

"But those mistakes . . ." I stop, unsure if I should continue.

"Yes?" She leans forward.

"How's Cass?" I force myself to ask.

Dr. Hanta's face, which up until now has been open and friendly, closes like a trapdoor. "Why do you ask?"

I lick my lips again. "I need something to drink." She slides off her stool and paces round my bed, pours what's left of the water jug into my cup, and hands it to me without a word. I swallow. "One of Fiore's little mistakes, I suppose." I aim to say it lightly, but it comes out dripping with sarcasm.