I'm getting impatient. "Are you going to lay me down on this bed and have sex with me after you finish lecturing me to death?"

He turns a funny color. "If we both still want to."

If we both still want to. Well, I guess you just have to work with what you've got. "I'm all ears," I say.

He shudders. "Don't say that."

"Well it's"—not literally —"true. Sort of."

"Where were you when the war broke out?" he asks.

Oops. I didn't expect him to ask that. Revealing that kind of thing would be a big no-no under normal circumstances—a breach of operational security that could allow an opponent to work out exactly who you are and thereby figure out all sorts of useful things about you, enough to endanger you operationally, because virtually everything you ever did in public is stored in a database somewhere. But—we're in the guts of a MASucker, and if I'm not mistaken, there's only one data channel in or out, and Sam isn't part of the cabal, and I reckon the current risk of our being eavesdropped on is low. Nor are these normal circumstances.

"I was aboard a MASucker, interviewing the crew," I admit. "We were cut off for more than a gig after the net went down." Sam makes a thoughtful noise. "Your turn," I prompt, trying to change the subject.

"I was an auditor." Sam is silent again. "That's why they drafted me."

"They?"

"The Solipsist Nation: Third Unforgivable Thoughtcrime Battalion, to be precise. They were doing a search and sweep for unsecured memory temples through the disconnected segment I was stranded in, less than a hundred kilosecs after Curious Yellow cut loose. I'd already been censored and compromised, and they just grabbed me and added me to their distributed denial of consciousness array. I spent the next couple of megs scrambling graveyards beyond retrieval, then they got around to actually in-processing me and assigned me to erasing archive trails."

Ugh. And I thought what I did in the Linebarger Cats was ugly? I must shiver or give some other cue because Sam pulls away from me slightly. "What clades did the Solipsist Nation align with?" I ask, trying to distract him.

"What clades?" He shakes his head. "It was us against everyone, Reeve. You think anybody in their right minds would ally themselves with an aggressively solipsistic borganism?"

"But you"—I force myself to lean closer as I ask; he's tense and unhappy—"you were just a component, weren't you?"

He shakes his head. "I had some degree of autonomy, by the time the war ended the Nation had taken to investing us with a modicum of free will. I was . . . well. Before the war, I looked pretty much the way you do right now. The Nation upgraded me, turned me into a combat ogre—and put me on occupation duty. You know what they called us? Rape machines. If you want to break someone's will to resist, you can go via the brain, but if the netlink's been fried by EMP, you have to get physical. They gave us penises with backward-facing spines, you know that? We did . . . terrible things. Eventually we were overrun—my segment was overrun—by a consortium of enemies, and they offlined us and when I woke up I was back to being me again, but a me with memories and a large chunk of the Nation wedged in my head. I spent half a meg in my cell disbelieving in the walls and floor before I realized that they had to exist for the same reason I had to exist. And while I was part of the Nation I did things." Deep breath. "Things that left me ashamed to be human. Or male."

"Yeah, but." I stall. "You weren't yourself. Right?"

"I wish I could believe that." He sounds forlorn. "I wouldn't do that kind of thing now, but then—I remember believing in what I was doing. That was part of why I did the ice ghoul thing, I didn't want to be part of a species that could dream something like the Solipsist Nation into existence. I wanted—we wanted—to think every thought in the human phase-space. Do you know what it's like to be hungry and always eating and never full? Solipsist Nation wrecked memory temples out of spite because they contained thoughts we hadn't originated. And I contributed to that. I enthusiastically optimized the processes. I did it because I wanted to." He takes a deep breath. "I killed people, Reeve. I killed people permanently."

"Then we're not so different."

"You?" He stares. "But you said you'd . . ."

"I started the war on a MASucker; I didn't stay there." I take a deep breath, because I don't think I can dodge this one. "I volunteered. Joined the Linebarger Cats, combat operations. Spent nearly a gigasec being an armored regiment. Ended up in Psyops."

"Well." His voice is shaky. "I didn't expect that ."

"What proportion of the people here do you think fought in the wars?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"People who were there don't want to remember it. Almost as soon as we'd got a local cease-fire established, people were slinking off to the surgeon-confessors."

"Yes." He pauses. "But Reeve, I'm a monster. There are things in my head—even after excision—that I don't like to visit. You don't want to get too close to me."

"Sam." I shift toward him. "I'm . . . There are things I tried to bury, too. I could say the same. Do you care?"

"What, about what you did?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Well, then." It's my turn to sound shaky. "What I said earlier stands. A bargain, and you agreed to it, hmm?"

He shrinks away. "I didn't know."

I swallow to try and clear my dry mouth. "I don't mean right now," I say. To my surprise, I mean it. "But I still want you, just as soon as you get used to the idea that I want you and I'm still me. You don't have to project your hatred of what you were forced to do onto me. And besides, I didn't see any barbs on your cock the other night."

"But you've changed too much!" He bursts out, like an iced-over air valve finally cutting loose. "Since Dr. Hanta saw you. Before that, you were you : You were moody and thoughtful, you were cynical, you were funny—I don't have the words for it. Whatever she did, it's changed you , Reeve. You'd refuse to do something just because it was expected of you; now you're trying to make me fuck you! Do you really want to get trapped in YFH for the foreseeable future? Trapped and pregnant, too?"

I think about it for a moment. "What's the problem?" Hanta is a more than conscientious doctor, and I'm confident I can survive a pregnancy—after all, every female mammal in my family tree did it before me, didn't they? How bad can it be?

"Reeve." Now he's looking at me as if I've morphed into battle-form, sprouting spikes and guns and armor before his eyes. I giggle. It's like he's seen a ghost! "What have they done to you?"

"Offered me a way out of having been a monster." I lean toward him hopefully. "Give me a kiss?"

DESPITE my best planning, we do not make love in the end.

In fact, when I finish the cleaning up and come to bed, Sam gets up and, with sleepy dignity, insists he's sleeping alone.

I am so angry and frustrated that I could cry. My problem is easily defined—it's the solution that eludes me. It's not that I've changed a lot, but—with or without Hanta's prompting—I've decided to take some time out of struggling, and the outward manifestation looks like a huge switch. Sam simply hasn't caught up with me yet. It's very disturbing to be around someone who seems to have inverted all their values and beliefs, and I know if it was Sam who'd been in hospital and come home glassy-eyed and different, I'd be incredibly upset. But I wish he wouldn't project his anxiety onto me—I'm all right, in fact I'm better than I've been at any time since I first woke up in the custody of the surgeon-confessors.

Yes, there's a problem here: Fiore and Yourdon are doing something very dubious with a serialized copy of Curious Yellow, they've figured out a way to defeat the security patch in everyone's implants; and they seem to be researching how to use social control rules installed via CY to create an emergent dictatorship. But—and this is the important question—why should I care? Haven't I been through enough already? I don't have to let myself be tortured by my own memories; I've already nearly killed myself trying to do what Sanni and the others in Security Cell Blue wanted. I've done my duty, and failed. And now . . .