“Any advice?” the boy asked eagerly.

Damon was tempted to say: Forget it. Get out now. Make the money some other way. He didn’t, because he knew that he had no right to say any such thing. He hadn’t even needed the money. “Don’t try to look good,” he said, instead. “Remember that we aren’t making a straightforward recording that will give a floater the illusion that he’s going through your moves. We’re just making a template—raw material. You just concentrate on looking after yourself—leave it to the doctor to please the audience.”

“Shit, Damon!” Madoc complained. “Don’t tell the kid he doesn’t have to give us any help at all. He’s just trying to go easy on you, Lenny, with it being your first time and all. Sure, play-acting doesn’t do it—it reeks of fake—but you have to show us something. You have to show us that you have talent. If you want to be good at this, you have to go all the way. . . but you have to look after the wiring. No record at all is far worse than a bad one.”

The boy nodded respectfully in Damon’s direction before turning to face his opponent. The gesture brought it home to Damon that he still had a big reputation on the streets. He might be out of circulation, but his tapes weren’t; his past was going to be around for a long time. But that, in a sense, was why he was here. Aspects of his past that seemed even more remote than his fighting days were still capable of tormenting him, still capable of involvinghim.

“Just remember,” Madoc Tamlin said as he pushed the boy forward, “it’s a small price to pay for taking one more step toward immortality.”

Like the Eliminators, street slang always spoke of immortalityrather than emortality—which, strictly speaking, was all that even the very best internal technology could ever hope to provide. Not that anyone expected current technology to guarantee them more than a hundred and fifty years—but in a hundred and fifty years’ time, current technology would be way out of date. Those who got the very best out of today’s IT would still be around to get the benefit of tomorrow’s—and might, if all went well, eventually arrive at the golden day when all the processes of aging could be arrested in perpetuity.

According to the ads, today’s young people were solidly set on an escalator that might take them all the way to absolute immunity to aging and disease. As the older generation—who had already aged too badly to be brought back permanently from the brink—gradually died off, the younger would inherit the earth in perpetuity. Not that anyone believed the ads implicitly, of course—ads were just ads, when all was said and done.

Five

D

amon watched the two fighters square up. Their kit wasmore than a little cumbersome, but very few artificial organics were as delicate as the real thing and you couldn’t get template precision with thinner webs. As the two moved together, though, he deliberately looked away at the ruined buildings to either side of the street.

His eye was caught by one of the items of graffiti sketched in luminous paint on a smoke-blackened fragment of wall. It read: Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. It was an antique, so old that Madoc must have found it in a history book. In fact, he could imagine Madoc chuckling with glee when he discovered it, immediately appropriating it as part of the backcloth for his dramatic productions. No child of today, however dangerously he or she might want to live, would ever have come up with such a ridiculous slogan—although there were plenty of centenarians who might like to believe it of them.

Centenarians loved to see themselves as the survivors of the Second Deluge. Those who had made no effective contribution to the world’s survival were worse than those who had, swelling with absurd pride at the thought that they had endured the worst trial by ordeal that nature had ever devised and proved their worth. Such people could not imagine that anyone who came after them could possibly value the earth, or life itself, as much as they did—nor could they imagine that anyone who came after them could be as worthy of lifeas they were, let alone of immortality. No one knew for sure, but Damon’s suspicion was that a hundred out of every hundred-and-one Eliminator Operators were in their dotage.

He wondered what the neighborhood must have been like in the bad old days of the early twenty-first century, and what angry words might have been scrawled on the walls by boys and girls who really were condemned to die young. Throughout that century this neighborhood would have been crowded out with the unemployable and the insupportable: one of countless concentration-city powder kegs waiting for a revolutionary spark which had never come, thanks to the two plague wars—the first allegedly launched by the rich against the poor and the second by the poor against the rich. In the short term, of course, the rich had won both of them; it had taken the Crisis to restore a measure of equality and fraternity in the face of disaster. Now the Crisis was over and the New Utopia was here—but the neighborhood was still derelict, still host to darkness and to violence, still beyond the reach of supposedly universal civilization.

When the fight began in earnest, Damon couldn’t help looking back. He couldn’t refuse to watch, so he contented himself with trying to follow every nuance with a scrupulously clinical eye. The other watchers—whose sole raison d’être was to whip the combatants into a frenzy—weighed in with the customary verve and fury, howling out their support for one boy or the other.

Amazingly, Lenny Garon managed to stick Brady in the gut while the experienced fighter was arrogantly playing a teasing game of cat and mouse with him—which made Brady understandably furious. It was immediately clear to Damon that the older boy wasn’t going to settle for some token belly wound as a reprisal; he wanted copious bloodshed. That would be more than okay by Madoc Tamlin, so long as the cuts didn’t do too much damage to the recorders. Lenny Garon would suffer more than he had anticipated, perhaps more than he had thought possible, and for far longer—but it probably wouldn’t put him off. In all probability, he would be all the more enthusiastic to work his way up to something reallyheavy, in order to pay for the nanotech that would make him as good as new and keep him that way no matter what injuries his frail flesh might sustain.

Madoc had, of course, taken note of Damon’s reluctance to join in the loud exhortations of the crowd. “Don’t get all stiff on me, Damon,” he said. “You may be in the Big World now, but you’re still too young to get rigor mortis. Are you worried about splitting with Diana? She’s at my place now, but it isn’t permanent. I could help fix things up if you want me to.” Damon took the inference that Madoc had found Diana’s sudden reintroduction into his life burdensome.

“Interpol paid a call on me yesterday,” Damon told him, thinking that it was time to get down to business. No one was likely to be listening to them while the fight was on. “Silas Arnett has been snatched by persons unknown. They seem to think that I might be a target too.”

Madoc put on a show of astonishment. “I can’t believe that,” he said. “Eliminators only go after the older generation—and they use bombs and bullets. They’re all loners, and losers too. If they had any real organization they’d have been busted long ago. A snatch takes planning—not their style at all. What’s it got to do with you, anyhow? I thought you didn’t talk to your family.”

“I don’t, but it isSilas—the nearly human one. I don’t suppose you know anything at all about a particular loner who calls himself Operator one-oh-one? He’s said to be local.”