“One of them already did, thanks to you,” Madoc pointed out.

“So tell me what’s going on. Maybe I can help you—but I can only do that if you let me in.”

“I already let you in,” Madoc muttered. “When I opened the door, I didn’t know all this was going to blow up, or . . . well, given that it hasblown up and that I didlet you in . . . Damon’s original name was Helier. His father was Conrad Helier.”

Diana thought about that for a full minute. “The Conrad Helier who invented the artificial womb?” she said eventually. “The one who made it possible for us all to be born? The man who saved the human race from extinction?”

“The very same. Except that he didn’t exactly inventthe artificial womb—he just perfected it. It isn’t as if the sterility transformers would have put an end to the human race if Helier hadn’t been around. One way or another, we’d all have been born. Given the urgency of the demand, someone else was bound to have come up with the answer within a matter of months. Some say that Helier was just the guy who beat the others in the race to the patent office, like Bell with the telephone. A guy named Surinder Nahal reckoned that he should have been there first, and I dare say he wasn’t the only one.”

“But Conrad Helier didget there first,” said Diana, who was far from slow when it came to certain kinds of calculation. “Which means that he must have got rich as well as famous. Damon is his biological son—and knowsthat he’s his biological son.”

“That’s right,” said Madoc shortly—although he knew that it was useless to try to stop now.

“And he’s yourfriend,” Diana went on inexorably. “Just like that poor kid lying in the hospital. And he’s stillyour friend, even though he doesn’t even doctor tapes for you anymore.”

“I dohave friends!” Madoc protested. “ Realfriends. People who know they’ll always be let in if they come knocking on my door.”

The barbed comment didn’t bother her at all. “You’ve already started digging, haven’t you?” she said. “You must have been high as a kite when he askedyou to do it. You think there’s a game to be won here—a richgame.”

“You don’t know me at all, do you?” Madoc retorted bitterly. “You think I’m just a hustler, incapable of genuine loyalty—but you’re wrong. Damon knows me better than that.”

“Damon doesn’t even know what day it is if there isn’t someone there to remind him,” she sneered. “Without me, he’s just an innocent abroad. If I’d only known that he was about to get into trouble. . . .”

If you’d only known that he had millions stashed away, Madoc thought—but he didn’t dare say it aloud, and he knew that it would have been unfair. The fact that Diana hadn’tknown, and still felt bad about the split, proved that she loved him for himself, not his fortune. The fortune just added insult to injury.

“Damon knows I can be trusted,” Madoc said. “He’s known me a long time. He told me who he really was way back at the beginning. It never affected our friendship. I’ve always respected his privacy and his wishes. I never expected anything like this to come up, but now that it has I intend to play it straight. I’ll do everything I can to find out what Damon wants to know, and I would have done the best I could even if he hadn’t put up the money. So would the Old Lady, who isn’t mad and isn’t a cow. You don’t understand this, Di. Just let me get on with it in my own way, will you?”

“I’ve known you longer than Damon has,” she pointed out. “I probably know you better than you know yourself. I want to help. I’m entitled to help. I still have Damon’s best interests at heart, you know. Just because he’s a pigheaded fool who’s impossible to live with, it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

Before Madoc had a chance to respond to this catalogue of half-truths the car came to an abrupt stop. When he looked around he saw that all the emergency lights in the street had come on, and that they were all blazing red. They were only a couple of hundred meters from home, and the foul-up wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to sort out—a quarter of an hour if the crash was a reallybig one—but it somehow seemed like the very last straw.

“Oh shit,” Madoc groaned, with feeling, “not again.”

“It’s probably friends of yours,” Diana opined, not needing sarcasm to ram home the irony of it. “Maybe even fans.”

Eight

S

ilas Arnett dreamed that he was in a lab somewhere: a strange, dilapidated place full of obsolete equipment. He was hunched over a screen, squinting at meaningless data which scrolled by too fast to allow his eyes to keep up. He was working under pressure, desperately thirsty, with a head full of cotton wool, wishing that he were able to concentrate, and wishing also that he could remember what problem he had been put here to solve and why it was so urgent. . . .

At first, when he realized that he was dreaming, he was relieved.

He was relieved because he felt that he could relax, because the problem—whatever it was—was unreal.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. The consciousness into which he descended by slow degrees was a more complex web of discomforts and restraints than the dream he had fled.

His internal technology was dulling all the nastiest sensations, but there was an awkward tangibility about its anesthetic efforts, as if the nanomachines were working under undue pressure with inadequate reserves of strength and ingenuity. He wondered whether it might be his IT that had been keeping him unconscious—there was only so much the most benevolent nanotech could do without suppressing awareness itself—and why, if so, it had released him to wakefulness now. If the nanomachines had done their work properly, he ought to have been feeling far better than he was and he ought to have been lying down in a comfortable bed.

Without opening his eyes he attempted to take census of the bad news.

His wrists and ankles were pinned by two pairs of plastic sheaths, each at least three centimeters broad, which clasped him more tightly when he struggled against them. There was another sheath lightly gripping the head of his prick and some kind of catheter stuck up his backside. He was in a sitting position but his head wasn’t lolling to one side: it was held upright by some device which gently but firmly enfolded his entire skull.

There was light beyond his closed eyelids, but he knew that the device clasping his head had to be a VE hood. When he opened his eyes he would not be looking out upon the world, but into a counterfeit space synthesized from bits of digitized film and computer-generated images.

He supposed that he ought to be grateful that he wasn’t dead, but no such gratitude could extricate itself as yet from the morass of his unease and anxiety.

He put out his tongue to test the limits of the thing enclosing his head, and found—as he had half expected—a pair of teats. He tested the left-hand one with his lips, then seized it in his teeth and teased cold liquid out of it. The thirst afflicting him in his dream had been real, and the orange-flavored juice, slightly syrupy with dissolved glucose, was very welcome.

When he finally consented to open his eyes Silas found himself looking out upon a courtroom. It was an impressionistic image, a mere cartoon rather than a sophisticated product of mimetic videosynthesis. The twelve jurors who were positioned to his left were barely sketched in, and the prosecuting attorney whose position was to the right had little more in the way of features than they did. Directly in front of him was a black-robed judge whose image was more detailed, although he didn’t look any more real. The judge’s face had simply been more carefully drawn, presumably in order to allow for more effective animation.