“Two years, precisely.”

“Yes, sir, not precisely, but close to two.”

“Two years, three months, five days.”

“That could be right.” God, now it was his life under the microscope. He’d gotten cocky for a moment, and wished now he hadn’t.

“I understand Marak himself chooses his contacts. And he chose you. Why choose an absolute novice, do you suppose?”

“That falls under the job classification, sir, and again, I can’t say, even if I knew, which I can’t say I do.”

The machine rolled close to him, the simulacrum maintained at eye level. “So tell me about yourself, if that’s more comfortable. A Freethinker, so I hear.”

Truthers, he reminded himself, and tried to keep his bodily reaction down. “A teenage curiosity. I quit them after a few meetings. They’re fools.”

“And Brazis accepted you, with such a background.”

“A teenaged notion I rejected. The department put me through all sorts of truthers, and I cleared.”

“Did your sister make that personal decision, too?”

His heart rate spiked. He couldn’t help it. “She has nothing to do with Freethinkers. They’re not in her social circle. I’m frankly amazed, sir, amazed and a little offended that you’ve researched my family.”

“She visited you last night. A sisterly visit?”

“That falls under personal, sir.”

“But she did.”

“It’s my parents’ anniversary. There’s a family dispute in progress. About a crystal egg.”

“I know when you’re lying. I know when you’re evading me. I know far more overall than you might expect. Tell me—an element of personal curiosity—why Procyon? Why that particular name?”

“I just liked the sound of it.”

“Sirius would have been more ambitious.”

The greater dog star, Procyon being the lesser, the follower. “Procyon suits me, sir. I never have been an ambitious sort.”

“And you live very expensively on the Trend, a young man in such a responsible position, exposed to all sorts of questionable elements that come and go in that district.”

“Inthe Trend, sir, that’s the term. I live in the fashionable district. You can tell by my clothing that I’m not inthe Trend. And I haven’t talked to anyone about what I do. Even my sister has no idea what my job is.”

“Come, come, Procyon. I’ve come all this way to talk to you. Specifically to talk to you.”

“To me, personally, sir, I doubt it. Maybe to the person you think I am, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t exist.”

The face smiled benevolently. “Clever young man…very quick-witted for your years. I say I know who and what you are. A Freethinker. Ah, pardon me: a former Freethinker. Marak’s personal contact. And what more?”

“A former Freethinker. That’s all. Long past. Dead issue.”

“You say you have no more contact with those people. Yet your sister lives quite intimately with them.”

“No one actually inthe Trend is a Freethinker, sir, that’s absolutely contradictory in terms. The Trend is everything the Freethinkers despise, and I assure you, my sister wouldn’t touch them with tongs.”

“No? I could have possibly mistaken this notion. Inform me how this is.”

“I haveinformed you, sir. The Freethinkers are yesterday’s items. Last year. They’re not well-thought-of these days in the Trend. They’ve blown whatever cachet they used to have.”

“I thought time never changed in this place.”

“The Trend changes constantly, sir, it changes by the hour. You’ve affected it yourself. Believe me, gold and blue will be all the fashion for weeks after you’re here. Then those colors will turn utterly déclassé, just that fast, and my sister will probably change her personal color scheme. Everything passes.”

“You speak a dead language. Your education, your culture replicate the past, endlessly—Concord in every respect is a living museum. But I forget. An Outsider’s personal genetic information is as fickle as his fashion, dare I say? Without change yourselves, does Concord not perpetually traffic in change…to Orb, to Arc, to Apex?”

“Concord trades licit change. Not illicits.”

“Do you like being modified?”

“It’s useful. It’s convenient. I’d do it twice.”

“And you don’t mind being contaminated?”

“I’m not contaminated. They don’t pass on.”

“Enlighten me. I’m told nanoceles can pass quite easily.”

“A mod isn’t a nanocele. I’m sure you’re aware of that distinction, sir.”

“No, no, go on. I’m sure you’re going to tell me any moment that you’re as human as I am, and that what makes you part of the Project is an ordinary modification.”

He confronted a monster, blue and gold and fuming with a cold he could feel, challenging hishumanity. “About the Project, not a word, sir. But we’re all human, if we’re not stupid, and if we don’t play with illicits. Which no one sane ever does, and those that do end up in hospital to have it cleaned out of them. I promise you, you could set any Concorder down on Earth and your geneticists could never pick us out of a crowd.”

“Not true. Concorders are genetically unique.”

“Only statistically, sir. Only statistically. Scatter us all across space, and you couldn’t pick us out.”

“You know that for a fact, do you?”

“It’s what I understand to be true, sir.”

“And the Freethinkers? Where do they fit in your statistical theory of the universe?”

“The same as the rest of us, if they’re not fool enough to take illicits. Some do. Some have. Some are dead. But there’s never been a runaway that I’ve seen, just some bad personal outcomes.”

“Freethinkers. Free thinkers. What do they think freely about, young Procyon?”

“Is that a question, sir?”

“It’s a question. What did you hear them talking about?”

“Supposedly about issues. Dislike of regulations. Opposition to surveillance. Freethinkers supposedly think for themselves. But they keep electing fools to run them.”

“Tell me, what attracted you to them in the first place—back in this forgotten past—if they’re such absolute fools?”

“I was sixteen, easily impressed. I didn’t know what they were when I walked in. I thought they were, like you said, really free thinkers. They aren’t. They don’t like certain ideas. Like a job. Like doing anything constructive about a problem. They just sit and talk. I’ve no respect left for them.”

“What did you want them to talk about? What great change would you make in the universe, if you ran things?”

“Not in the universe. Much more modest than that, sir.”

“What great plan did you have?”

“Oh, I’d like more libraries. Better free schools. I’d like more free clinics. Better maintenance for the people spinward of Blunt. Then I found out someone actually has to pay for all that happening. So I vote for station improvements whenever there’s a referendum, and I pay my taxes fair and square so what I vote for gets funded. That’s what I do for civilization. It’s slow, but it’s more than they’re doing.”

“Relaxation of import restrictions. How do you feel about that one?”

The eternal Earther worry. “Tax on books and news? No. No tax on creators. No tax on food.”

“You’re not a free-tax advocate, are you?”

“No. I said I pay my taxes. I believe in taxes.” God, he hadn’t argued that particular politics since he wasa Freethinker. It wasn’t comfortable ground anymore.

“Illicits do exist here, you say, in the tax-free underbelly of the economy.”

He feared he was sweating. He knew his pulse had jumped. “You should ask the police. I don’t know about things like that.”

“But you live down there. Personally, financially, you can get anything you want.”

“I have no idea if I could, but I’m not fool enough to want any illicits.”

“What would a fool do, if he did want any?”

“Oh, go shopping among the freelancers, if you want to die young. You can see a few fools walking around on Blunt. Too many lethals. Unintended results. People with common sense don’t take just anything they can buy on the street.”