The charges were probably truer than she thought, but Damon didn’t see any need to be ashamed of the changes he’d made. The whole point about the world inside a VE hood, backed up by the full panoply of smartsuit-induced tactile sensation, was that it was betterthan the real world: brighter, cleaner, and more controllable. Earth wasn’t hell anymore, thanks to the New Reproductive System and the wonders of internal technology, but it wasn’t heaven either, in spite of the claims and delusions of the New Utopians. Heaven was something a man could only hope to find on the otherside of experience, in the virtuous world of virtual imagery.

The brutal truth of the matter, Damon thought, was that everything of Diana Caisson that he actually needed really wasprogrammed into her template. The absence from his life of her changeable, complaining, untrustworthy, knife-throwing, flesh-and-blood self wouldn’t leave a yawning gap. Once, it might have done—but not anymore. She had begun to irritate him as much as he irritated her, and he hadn’t her gift of translating irritation into erotic stimulation.

“You’re right,” he told her, trying to make it sound as if he were admitting defeat. “I’ve changed. So have you. That’s okay. We’re authentically young; we’re supposed to change. We’re supposed to become different people, to try out all the personalities of which we’re capable. The time for constancy is a long way ahead of us yet.”

He wondered, as he said it, whether it was true. Were his newly perfected habits merely a phase in an evolutionary process rather than a permanent capitulation to the demands of social conformity? Was he just taking a rest from the kind of hyped-up sensation-seeking existence he’d led while he was running with Madoc Tamlin’s gang, rather than turning into one of the meek whose alleged destiny was to inherit the earth? Time would doubtless tell.

“I want the templates back,” Diana said sharply. “All of them. I’m going, and I’m taking my virtual shadow with me.”

“You can’t do that,” Damon retorted, knowing that he had to put on the appearance of a fight before he eventually gave in, lest it be too obvious that all he had to do was remold her simulacrum by working back from the modified echoes which he had built into half a dozen different commercial tapes of various kinds. While he only required her image, he could always get her back.

“I’m doing it,” she told him firmly. “You’re going to have to start that slimy sideshow from scratch, whether you pay for a ready-made template or rent some whore who’ll let you build a new one on your own.”

“If I’d known that it had come to this,” he said with calculated provocativeness, “I wouldn’t have had to struggle upstairs with three boxes of groceries.”

From there, it was only a few more steps to a renewal of the armed struggle, but Damon managed to keep the carving knife out of it. His aim—as always—was to win with the minimum of fuss. He made her work hard to dispel her bad feeling in pain and physical stress, but she got there in the end, without having to bruise her knuckles too badly, or cut her palms to pieces, or even make her throat sore by screaming too much abuse.

Afterwards, while Diana was still slightly stoned by virtue of the anesthetic effect of her internal technology, Damon helped her to pack up her things.

There wasn’t that much to collect up; Diana had never been much of a magpie. She was a doer, not a maker, and it was easy enough for Damon to see, in retrospect, that it was the doer in him that she had valued, not the maker. Unfortunately, he had had enough of doing, at least for the time being; his only hunger now was for making.

When the time came to divide the personal items that might have been reckoned joint property Damon gave way on every point of dispute, until the time arrived when Diana realized that he was purging his life of everything that was associated with her—at which point she began insisting that he keep certain things to remember her by. After that, he began insisting that shekept her fair share of things, precisely because he didn’t want to be surrounded by things that were, in principle, half hers. In all probability, it was not until then that the reality of the situation really came home to her—but it was too late for her to scrub out the fight and start again in the hope of rebuilding the broken bridge.

The possessions Diana was prevailed upon to take with her filled up the trunk she’d brought when she moved in plus the three boxes Damon had used to transport the groceries and a couple of black-plastic waste sacks. Even though there were two of them to do the work, there was far too much of it not to pose a logistical problem when the time came to take them down to her car. They had to jam the elevator door open in order to load the stuff inside, and they had to compound that misdemeanor with another when they had to tell an old man who stopped the elevator on the eleventh that there wasn’t room to fit him in and that he’d have to wait. The elevator gave them hell about thatone, but neither of them was in a fit state to care.

When they had packed the stuff away in the trunk and rear-seat space of her car, Damon tried to bid her a polite good-bye, but Diana wasn’t having any of it. She just scowled at him and told him it was his loss.

As he watched her drive off, muted pangs of regret and remorse disturbed Damon’s sense of relief, but not profoundly. When he walked back to the elevator his step was reasonably light. When it came down again the man from the eleventh floor stepped out, scowling at him almost as nastily as Diana, but Damon met the scowl with a serene smile. Although his past sins had not been forgotten, the elevator never said a word as it bore him upward; it was not permitted to harbor grudges. By the time it released him he was perfectly calm, looking forward to an interval of solitude, a pause for reflection.

Unfortunately, he saw as soon as the elevator doors opened that he wasn’t about to get the chance. There were two men waiting patiently outside his apartment door, and even though they weren’t wearing uniforms he had experience enough of their kind to know immediately that they were cops.

Three

D

amon knew that it couldn’t be a trivial matter. Cops didn’t make house calls to conduct routine interviews. In all probability they’d soon be conducting all their interrogations in suitably tricked-out VEs; if the LAPD contract ever came up for tender he’d go for it like a shot. For the time being, though, the hardened pros who had been in the job for fifty years and more were sticking hard to the theory that meeting a man eye-to-eye made it just a little more difficult for their suspects to tell convincing lies.

One of the waiting men was tall and black, the other short and Japanese. Cops always seemed to work in ill-matched pairs, observing some mysterious sense of propriety carried over from the most ancient movies to the most recent VE dramas, but these two didn’t seem to be in dogged pursuit of the cliché. Damon knew even before the short man held out a smartcard for his inspection that they were big-league players, not humble LAPD.

The hologram portrait of Inspector Hiru Yamanaka was blurred but recognizable. Although Damon had never seen an Interpol ID before he was prepared to assume that it was authentic; he handed it back without even switching it through his beltpack.

“This is Sergeant Rolfe,” said Yamanaka, obviously assuming that once his own identity had been established his word was authority enough to establish the ID of his companion.