Using the orphidnet to amplify your intelligence was viewed by many as a deviant activity. Kiqqies looked at things so differently from normals. And most kiqqies weren't willing to hold jobs. If you were smart and paid attention to the orphidnet, you could live without money. But quite a few people preferred to hold back from orphidic intelligence-amplification-there was a feeling that once you were a full-on kiqqie, you were no longer your same old self.

"I'm watching a football game, Dot," said Red, paunchy with a lean face. "The halftime show." He was slumped in an armchair, seemingly staring at a wall. The orphidnet was better than TV: everything was on it, live and three-dimensional, seen from whatever viewpoint you chose-and you could see under people's clothes.

"I know what you're up to, Red," said his wife. "You're staring at those cheerleaders' boobies. Or worse." Voyeurism was in fact the number one orphidnet application for the average person.

"Hey, if you're so concerned about my sex life," riposted Red, "why don't you come over here and-"

"Hush, I'm watching our granddaughter nap," said Dot, bending over her knitting with a half-smile, appreciative of Red's sally. "I can keep an orphid-eye on you from here."

"Live and let live," said Red. "Those kiqqies can have our clunker for all I care. Gasoline is gone for good. Solar's won the day, and if those assholes in the Middle East want to kill each other, it's their own business now. Not even the Homesteadies want us back there."

"Then tell the kids to drive the car away right now," said Dot. "Give them the keys and change the title. I'm sick of seeing that poor old car. It makes me sad. I told President Bernard a week ago, as a matter of fact. But I didn't mean for ragged freaks to make our car a crash pad. Three days ago we had some stumblebum in there just out of the Natural Mind rehab, remember? And now we've got these scuzzy kiqqies with their-"

Jayjay pinged Dot through the orphidnet while gnawing the chicken carcass. There was a lot of good meat on the flat underside.

"Hello?" said Dot.

"Hi," said Jayjay, the orphids on his throat registering the vibrations, reconstituting the sound waves, and sending the audio on its way. "This is the kiqqie in your car. Spelled M –A –N ."

"Red, one of them is talking to me! You listen too."

"We'll be glad to take the car off your hands," Jayjay told the old couple, still working on his chicken carcass. "Does it have enough gas to drive away?"

"Maybe a half gallon," said Red. "Whatever the homies haven't siphoned off. You in a hurry?"

"No," said Jayjay. "Not at all."

"So I'll give you the keys and transfer the title when the rain lets up," said Red. "Meanwhile I got a football game to watch."

"And be careful where you put that garbage you're eating," said Dot in a sharp tone. Sonic had just laid half a slice of glistening pizza on the dash so as to accept a lopsided piece of the cake from Thuy. "And no sex in our driveway. You happen to be sitting in a beloved and respectable family vehicle. When our children were small, we-"

Jayjay tuned her out. "Where's that Thai food?" he asked, cracking open his door to toss out the denuded chicken bones.

"All gone," said Kittie. "You got the whole chicken, so that's fair. There's still cake. And bananas. They're plantains, actually. They taste better than they look."

It's nice in this car, thought Jayjay, peeling a plantain. Big soft seats, the air faintly musty, the windows fogged up from their breath, the rain drumming on the roof. The women were cuddled together in back, with Thuy's musky fragrance perfuming the damp air. The car's resident beezies were like fuzzy, friendly ghosts.

"It'd be sweet to road-trip this silver marshmallow south," said Sonic. "San Ho, Cruz, the beach, and then past Los Angeles into Mexico, vato, hanging with la raza and the pyramids. You'd like Mexico, Jayjay; we could go underwater diving. Some kiqqies just invented snap-on gills. Hell, I'd like to see gasoline come back."

"Don't think that way, Sonic," said Kittie. "Gaia's better off without internal combustion. I mean, look at this weather. You've seen the climate simulations in the orphidnet. I'm glad the world's finally switched to electric cars."

"They're still using some oil in Bangalore," said Sonic, flicking Jayjay's lizard earring. "To make piezoplastic for shoons. The beezies are all over that. Do beezies still get into your earring, Jayjay?"

"Sometimes," said Jayjay.

"Jayjay's always had an earring," said Thuy with a fond giggle. "He was wearing a gold hoop the first time he came home from school with me. Helping me with my math homework. My mother saw us kissing and she freaked out. 'He's not Vietnamese, he has an earring, he'll never get a job.' "

"After Orphid Night, I was there for you again," recalled Jayjay. "I saved you from the wikiware." Although most employees didn't have to go into offices anymore, many employers required you to install ShareCrop wikiware on your bodies' orphids-which became, in effect, a bossy virtual monkey on your back. Living free on the street as a kiqqie with Jayjay, Thuy had time to craft her metastory "Waking Up." But then the Big Pig addiction had started dragging her down.

"And I saved her from you," put in Kittie.

"Look, I'm the one who really cares about her," said Jayjay, his voice rising. "I wish we could talk about it, Thuy. Kittie's just playing you for a game, you're a trophy to her, a notch, and down the road you'll-"

"Let's go back to my shoes," interrupted Thuy. She didn't like to hear Kittie and Jayjay argue over her; it made her feel like an object. "There's two beezies living in the piezoplastic. I call them Urim and Thummim after the special stones of sight that Joseph Smith the Mormon used to decipher the writing on those golden plates he found. My feet can see. A couple of times when I almost tripped and fell, Urim and Thummim flexed the shoes to bounce me up."

"Yu Shu's finest," said Kittie, admiring Thuy's feet. "You were lucky to score those when that yuppie jogger had the heart attack, Thuy. Good eye."

"I was the one who bagged the shoes for her," said Jayjay. "Thuy didn't want to touch a corpse."

"Corpse-touching is the kind of thing men are good for," said Kittie. "A social role for the lower caste."

"On the gasoline thing that you mentioned, Kittie," said Sonic, off in his own head as usual. "The techs couldn't have brought electric car technology along so fast if it weren't for the beezies. It's like the beezies actually wanted to help us save our climate. But why should they care? The orphids would be here just the same, even if Earth's surface was ashes and tidal waves with everyone dead."

"Yea unto the breaking of the Seventh Seal," intoned Thuy. She was taping this bit for her metanovel, and "Seventh Seal" sounded good. Apocalyptic, dark, weird, damned. She overlaid the words with some gothic graphics.

"The beezies give a squat because people are like flowers in Earth's garden," said Jayjay. "The best art in the museum. After the beezies emerged in the orphidnet, they started watching us-and we got good to them. They admire our wetware, the wiring of our brains. Especially us kiqqies. Can I have some of that cake, Thuy?"