He grabbed it and stuck it in a little transparent pouch made of spirit gum to keep it from being magically influenced.

"Remarkable," Nigel Cholmondeley said. "One seldom sees artifacts returning with participants in a virtuous reality experience."

"Officially, this is not and cannot be evidence," Kawaguchi said. "Its trail of provenance is severely tainted; any judge to whom it was presented would throw it out of court, and very likely the case with it. Unofficially, I shall convey it to the lab and find out what our forensics people make of it."

"Let me know, please," I said. If I'd snatched it first, I'd have taken it straight to Michael Manstein - assuming, of course, that Kawaguchi and half a dozen big constables with clubs hadn't started working out on me to make me give it back. Since they might have done just that, constables being demons for evidence, maybe it was for the best Kawaguchi got it instead of me.

Brother Vahan dipped his head to Madame Ruth and then to Cholmondeley. "Let me apologize to both of you for my previous doubts as to the nature of virtuous reality," he said; he was, as usual, nothing if not gracious. "I can see that it will become a valuable tool in thaumaturgic research."

"Thanks right back atcha for thinkin' fast and breakin' the circle." Madame Ruth sounded like herself again, too. Too bad. "That can be the tricky part, gettin' back here where we belong."

Nigel Cholmondeley put it more piously: "Mankind was ever reluctant to leave the Garden."

"So I thought," the abbot agreed. "But then I remembered I had no true right there, burdened as I was by the weight of Original Sin. After that, recalling my body to action in this actual world was easier."

The channeler and the medium looked at each other.

"Let's talk about that some more. Brother Vahan, if you don't mind," Cholmondeley said. The extraction technique you describe might well be incorporated into one of the helmets' ritual subroutines if we are able to isolate the symbolic essence of your thought sequence."

"It could make you a nice piece of change, and us, too,"

Madame Ruth said. "Like you said, virtuous reality is the coming thing, and if you was to get a piece of it-° "Wealth means nothing to me," Brother Vahan said. I've heard a lot of people say that; he was one of the handful who made me believe it "As may be," Nigel Cholmondeley said, which meant he had his doubts, too. He also had a hook: "No matter how frugal you personally may be, have you not got a monastery to rebuild?" Brother Vahan stared at him.

I watched the hook snag the fish. The abbot said, "Let us discuss it, then, for the greater glory of God."

"Let's eat somethin' while we talk," Madame Ruth said, which struck me as more honest than let's do lunch and most of the other ways people try to combine business and food.

Despite my sausage, I was hungry, too, but not as hungry as I thought I'd be. When I asked my watch what time it was, I found out to my amazement that I'd been in the world of virtuous reality for only about five minutes. It had seemed like a couple of hours while I was there. Oneiromancers say dreams are like that: a lot of things going on but compressed very tightly in terms of time. Judy keeps up on the ins and outs of theoretical thaumaturgy better than I do; I made a note to ask her how virtuous reality simulated the dream effect.

I didn't have lunch with Brother Vahan and the medium and channeler; enough things were going on at the office that I wanted to put in as much time as I could there, trying to claw my way through the piles of junk on my desk. I wouldn't starve before dinner. So I went south through the pass into Westwood a little faster than a constable armed with a tracking demon would have approved of. Fortunately, I didn't spot any black-and-white carpets all the way back down St. James' Freeway.

After a good trip on the freeway, I got stuck in regular flyway traffic on the way back to the Confederal Building. I peered around the carpets ahead of me, trying to figure out what had gone wrong this time."

The fellow on the rug next to me leaned over and called, There's a demon stration up there at the comer."

Up there at the comer, of course, was where I was trying to go. I growled. "So what if there's a demonstration? There's a demonstration at that comer about three days a week."

Then what he'd said really sank in. "A demon stration?" I didn't want to believe I'd heard that.

But he nodded. I wondered if I ought to turn my carpet around and get out of there as fast as the sylphs would take me. No wonder there was a traffic jam, if demons were out protesting Confederal policy. I hoped the building would survive. There'd be SWAT teams and God only knows what all else up there, trying to keep the irate Powers from turning the place into an inferno.

My sense of duty got the better of my sense of selfpreservation. I kept going toward the Confederal Building. It took a while for me to inch close enough to find out what was going on. I'd been wrong in my first guess: the Powers at the demon stration weren't apt to turn violent, and they didn't need constabulary thaumaturges to hold them at bay. But as soon as I saw them, I understood why they stopped traffic. You see, they were all succubi.

Actually, that's not quite true. Some of them were incubi, and some of them - well, I'm not quite certain whose fancy some of them catered to, but whosever it was, I'm sure they met it.

As for me, I barely noticed those others. I was busy watching the succubi. I couldn't help myself. Some of the pictures up on losefs wall were pretty spectacular, but pictures don't begin to convey the essence of what succubi are all about. When you see them in the quasi-flesh, you can't help but think they're the creatures men were really designed to mate with; they make women look like clumsy makeshifts.

Phyllis Kaminsky, bless her heart, was down there arguing with some of them, trying to convince (hem to give up and go away. Phyllis is a nice-looking gal, several years younger than I am and in better shape, too. The company she was keeping made her seem a poorly jointed wooden puppet turned out on a lathe by somebody who didn't know how to run a lathe very well.

One little devil with a blue dress on happened to catch my eye. The promise on her face, the way she ran an impossibly moist tongue over unbelievably sweet, unbelievably red lips, the sinuousness (and you can turn that into a pun or not, just as you please - it works either way) of her hip action - put 'em all together and it's a minor miracle I didn't run into the carpet in front of me.

One of the reasons I didn't was that the gal flying that carpet wasn't exactly where she was supposed to be, either: instead of keeping her eye on the carpet in front of her, she'd been gaping at an incubus who was taller, darker, and handsomer than he had any business being.

When you think about it, you shouldn't be surprised our sexual demons are so strong. They've been evolving right along with us for as long as we've been human, proof of which is how strongly they manifest themselves on This Side.

They're used to coming Across; they've been doing it for millions of years. (You have a dirty mind, do you know that? Filtering out all the double entendres that come naturally [you see, there you go again] when discussing succubi is more trouble than it's worth.) Unlike the Medvamp protesters, the succubi and incubi didn't cany signs or chant slogans. They just paraded, they were their own best message.

By then I'd got dose enough to hear Phyllis as well as see her. She was saying, "-but the existence you lead degrades both you and mankind. Don't you see that sexual exploitation is wrong and damaging to the soul?"

"If this were a Muslim country, we'd be honored, not hunted," a succubus retorted. Though irate herself, she made PhyUis sound shriD and screechy by comparison: her voice brought to the ear the taste of Erse Creme liqueur. She went on, "We have no souls to worry about; we exist for pleasure. And since you humans endlessly prate about free will, surely you'll admit you can choose us or avoid us as you see fit."