“Down, Sam.” Hecould speak to the bot. It just couldn’t answer. Sam chimed. He walked onto the lift area and rode it down to the front door.

Outside, in the Close, the lawyer’s gardenias wafted heavy perfume to his senses. He nodded to the otherside neighbor tending her roses, a nice lady with not a clue what he did for a living or why a healthy young man left his apartment only in the tag end of the day. She was retired, but spent much of her time writing for a culinary society.

The occasional polite nod was the only regular interaction he had with her or his other close neighbors, whose dossiers he had read, and he had rather not know them better. The PO liked it that way. And he did his own part for anonymity, having nothing in common with the lawyer or the retired lady or, God knew, the rest of the honest citizens in the complex. He didn’t look hostile or odd.He didn’t bring home suspicious visitors. He didn’t attract police, play loud music, wear his hair in spikes, or set off fire alarms. He was, in fact, relatively faceless in this pricey neighborhood of people who had, occasionally, children with problems; who occasionally threw big parties, who occasionally had noisy divorces and shouting matches on the doorstep, bothering everyone—as he bothered no one. He was Procyon, just Procyon, as the Fashionables chose to be, just Procyon, whose job nobody actually knew, or ventured to ask, and who, they might think, probably did his work by computer, since he wasn’t a Stylist, but lived like one. He only went out in the evenings. But few people besides the lady with the roses were home during the day to think about that. It was a neighborhood adequately respectable and not too worried about the character of anyone with the credit to be living here, which was, he was sure, why the PO decided this was the ideal place to install one of its protected talents.

Just off Grozny was his own ideal place to live, too, and he’d picked it off a very short list of PO-owned properties—close enough to the action, but not in it, so he could walk out of the Close and right onto this fashionable end of Grozny Street. The location was a dream for a young man who came out of a day’s isolation hungry for life.

He let the general traffic and the muted noise of voices ease the accumulated tension behind his eyes. He could call any of his friends, if the common tap in his head didn’t have its output channel permanently blocked. Anywhere he walked, he could get still get music on the common tap, he could get art, he could get talk; but he declined them all, cherishing the silence and privacy inside his skull. If he was like anyone else on the street, he could be tapped in, all the time, and some who only skimmed life certainly lived that way, moving constantly to their own music, talking to their personal taps, checking with a spouse about a grocery order or making an assignation with a lover, never alone in their heads, never—he suspected— thinkingany long, deep thoughts in their lives. Himself, he useda tap all day long for a living, and now that he was off-line, the very last thing he wanted was abstract shapes dancing in his eyes or the latest band blasting its relentless rhythms into his chair-weary bones. He wasn’t thinking deep thoughts eitherat the moment. He just wanted to walk along in internal silence and let his brain float neutral for a while…

Well, give or take the burden of the dreaded anniversary gift, ink still surviving on his hand. The question was whether to make the gift personal, something he could really enjoy giving, or just give up, get something with a high price tag and be done with it.

But a personal kind of place that would also courier the item to his parents’ door—that considerably shortened the list.

He was tired of fighting his parents’ taste. There were greater problems in the universe, and the parentals he was convinced wouldn’t remember next month what gift he’d gotten them this year or last, as long as it didn’t scare them or offend them. And he wanted peace in the family. He opted for the sure thing.

Down Grozny to 12th, and up 12th to Lebeau—Glitter Street, the Trend called it, containing most of the conservative shops, frontages that competed in crystal, glass, gold, jewelry, and utterly useless knickknacks for people with far too much money. It catered to Earthers, particularly, who liked shopping on the chancy edge of the Trend—or to those who imitated Earther taste, which, he admitted sadly to himself, pretty well described his mother. He’d long since given up trying to impress his father with what he picked, and as far as impressing his mother, it wasn’t so much the gift that mattered, it was the package, it was the label. It was his parents’ thirtieth anniversary, and if his father was a cipher to him, he at least figured how to please his mother—and thatwould please his father.

It was all on him, as well. His sister certainly wasn’t going to acknowledge the parental occasion. But he kept relations with the family well polished not only because it was the right thing to do but because it was the sensible thing to do. They were dull, but they were solid as core rock, and depend on it, if things ever went wrong in his life, he’d have family, imperfect and unpleasant, but family, loyal as you could ask. They had their virtues. And maybe, if he ever totally misjudged the universe and messed up his personal life, he’d have someone he could query about his own biases, or at least analyze theirs from a mature perspective—he was old enough now to see them as people, just people, like other people. He’d had his stint at rebellion. Now he tried compliance, top tobottom. He decided he’d give up trying to get them nice things, arty things, real art, from live people who’d admit they’d made whatever-it-was. It’s a pot, had been his father’s most telling judgment, when he’d tried to explain last year’s gift. His mother had put flowers in it.

So this anniversary, after the fiasco of the last one, he learned. He went straight into Caprice, picked out a completely useless hand-cut crystal egg in Caprice’s signature style, such a piece of uninspired commercialism that his sister would have thrown up. He paid the extravagant price on his own credit and ordered it delivered to Ms. Margarita Nilssen and Mr. Jerry Stafford Sr., of 309 Coventry Close, D1088, before 0815h on the 15th of May.

That was tomorrow morning, before he even got out of bed.

The clerk offered the optional gold-embossed 5.95c gift card. He signed it With love, Jeremy & Arden,which was fifty percent a lie and a bit of wicked humor. His sister would be outraged.

So, there, he’d done it. He smiled nicely at the salesman, who hadn’t had to work at all hard for his commission, and walked back out onto the street, free, unburdened now, and taking his own sweet time.

Best he could do. It wasn’t a pot. A former Freethinker rebel had paid good money for a hand-cut Caprice egg, and the station still turned on its axis and spun about the planet it guarded. Was that a sign of advancing maturity?

All-important point, he’d bought that expensive, logo-bearing card, and signed it with his own hand, the personal touch. It would arrive in its envelope of crisp cream vellum, as fancy as if it were going to the governor’s wife, and stand beside the egg on a conspicuous shelf for at least a month. As long as his mother was in a good mood, everybody was happy—and if the parentals were both happy enough, maybe he could claim he’d drawn overtime at work and skin out of the gruesome family dinner of overcooked meat, overdone vegetables, and his mother’s special fruit salad.

God, he really hoped he could finagle his way out of that dinner. He detested his cousins. He wasn’t fond of the uncles and aunts. Most of all, he didn’t want to stand smiling through the usual battery of questions before hors d’oeuvres…Have you seen Arden,dear? Well, yes, Aunt Faye, he had, but he’d have to say no, he hadn’t, or the next deadly question was Where?