The wall was transparent and looked out at the great metropolis beyond. No one had ever imposed any kind of architectural uniformity on the city, and the result was a skyline of fabulous extravagance. There were obelisks, pagodas, and minarets. Columns supported arches, arches supported domes, domes supported cupolas. Towers brandished horns, bartizans, mooring masts, and carved stone pinnacles with crockets. Triumphal arches crowned boulevards, and so did torii. There were stoas, cloisters, and pergolas. An enormous wheel carried entire apartments high into the sky before lowering them gently to earth, and stopped in its rotation only when someone wanted to get on or off. A brace of towers circled each other as they rose, a pair of helixes frozen in a dance.
Buildings were made of stone, of metal, of marble, of glass, of diamond, of carbon fiber. Domes were plated with gold, with bronze, with light-absorbent fuligin, and in one case with the teeth of human children.
Connecting the towers were arching metal bridges, transparent tubes, or cars hung from cables. Swirling between the structures were bright spots of color, people in lightweight gliders rising on the updrafts that surrounded the tallest buildings. Below, people moved in carriages, in gondolas, in cars that moved along tracks.
A huge billboard scrolled an advert for something called Larry's Life.
Aristide, hands in his pockets, viewed the prodigality of Myriad City and said,
"The city alive with noise and light,
The flame of youth ablaze.
And I, in my stillness, content to be old."
"That's the Pablo I remember." Daljit, seated at her desk, looked up from her work. "Why are you Aristide these days?" she asked. "Why aren't you Pablo any longer?"
"There are too many Pablos. I am bored with Pablos."
She smiled. "I thought you were content to be old."
"I can't help being old," he said, gruffly. "Pablo I can do something about."
"Wielding a sword in some barbarian world isn't exactly the stuff of old age."
He turned from the window, took his hands from his pockets. He wore a pale shirt, pale trousers, and a dark spider-silk jacket in a style twenty years out of date.
"The swordsmanship was incidental," he said. "I was actually doing scholarship."
"Of what?"
"The implied spaces." He walked to look over her shoulder, at the spectra glowing on her display. "Anything?" he asked.
"Nothing yet."
The room was long, with two conventional doors that swung open on hinges. The walls and ceiling were tuned to a neutral color so as not to provide distraction. Long tables with polished surfaces held a broad assortment of machines and small robots, most of them inactive. There was a smell of heat, of ozone.
Aristide contemplated his companion. Daljit seemed compact as opposed to small, and gave the impression of having a highly organized, responsive body that didn't require size or reach for its effects. She had expressive brown eyes beneath level brows, and a mole on one cheek that provided a pleasing asymmetry. She wore a silver bracelet with a bangle and numerous rings, which indicated that she was aware of the grace of her long hands and fingers. She wore a white high-collared tunic, knee-breeches, and silk stockings with clocks.
She and Aristide were old friends, and spoke with the ease of a long acquaintance. Though they'd kept in touch he hadn't seen her in person in sixty years, at which time she had been tall and bosomy and crowned by hair of a brilliant henna-red shade.
She rested her chin on her fist as she looked at him. "What are the implied spaces, exactly?"
He considered for a moment. "If we turn to the window," he said, and illustrated the point by turning, "we observe the Dome of Parnassus."
She turned. "We do. It wants cleaning."
"The dome, you will observe, is supported by four arches, one at each cardinal point."
"Yes."
"Presumably the architect knew that the dome had to be supported by something, and arches were as meet for the purpose as anything else. But his decision had consequences. If you stand beneath the dome, you'll see that there are blank triangular spaces beneath the dome and between the arches. These are called 'squinches,' believe it or not."
Daljit smiled at him. "I'm delighted to know there are things called squinches, whether you invented the term or not."
He bowed to her, then looked out at the dome again. "The point is, the architect didn't say to himself, 'I think I'll put up four squinches.' What he said is, 'I want a dome, and the dome needs to be supported, so I'll support it with arches.' The squinches were an accident implied by the architect's other decisions. They were implied."
"Ah." She straightened and took her chin off her fist. "You study squinches."
"And other accidents of architecture, yes." He turned to her, put a hand down on its reflection in the polished onyx surface of her desk.
"Say you're a die-hard romantic who wants to design a pre-technological universe full of color and adventure. Say you want high, craggy mountains, because they're beautiful and wild and inspiring and also because you can hide lots of orcs in them. Say you also want a mountain loch to reflect your beautiful high-Gothic castle, and a fertile plain to provide lots of foodstuffs that you can tax out of your peasants—many of whom are brain-clones of yourself, by the way, with a lot of the higher education removed, and inhabiting various specially grown bodies of varying styles and genders."
"You know," said Daljit, "I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the medieval scholars and the Compulsive Anachronists, or whatever they were called, discovered that they couldn't afford their own universe without financial aid from the fantasy gamers, and that their tidy little re-creation was now going to be full of trolls and dinosaurs."
Aristide grinned. "Perhaps you're underestimating the percentage of medievalists who play fantasy games."
"Perhaps."
"But in any case, the fertile valley has to be adjacent to the ocean, because the river's got to go somewhere, and in the meantime you've got this mountain range with its romantic tarn over here . . . so what goes in between?"
She looked at him. "You're going to tell me it's a squinch."
"Bingo. By the time you've got all your computations done and dumped all the energy into inflating a wormhole from the quantum foam . . ." Aristide made little rubbing gestures with his fingers, as if he were sprinkling alchemical powders into an alembic. " . . . and you've stabilized the wormhole gate with negative-mass matter, then inflated a soupçon of electrons and protons into a pocket universe complete with a flaming gas ball in the center . . . Once you've got your misty mountain range and your moisty river valley, what goes between the mountain range and river valley is implied by the architecture, and is in fact a high desert plain, like the Gobi, only far less attractive . . ."
A whirring began as one of the machines in the room turned on its fans. Daljit looked briefly at her displays, then turned to Aristide again.
"So you study this desert?"
"I study what adapts to the desert. The desert wasn't intended, so whatever lives there wasn't intended to live there, either. It's all strayed in from another ecosystem and adapted to the desert, and it's adapting with surprising speed."
"And what lives there?"
He gave a private little smile. "Ants and spiders, mostly."
The mole on her cheek twitched. "Your chosen field seems less than enthralling."
"The sword-swinging bandits provided all the excitement necessary."
She gave him an appraising look. "So you really fought bandits with your sword? And murderous priests devoted to human sacrifice?"
Aristide reached to touch Tecmessa, which was at present carried in a long, flat case, and which leaned against Daljit's desk.
"I cheated," he said. "And in any case, the certainty of reincarnation devalues heroism as well as tragedy."
"But still. It's not the same as pressing a button and killing them at a distance, is it?"
"No." His expression was grim. "Though I didn't actually kill any human beings—just the priests, who I imagine were constructs."
The last cry hovers in air, he thought,
The creature dies, never having properly lived.
In the palm of my hand, through a yard of steel
I feel the last throbs of the wasted heart.
It had been disturbingly personal, and wakened memories that he had rather remained a-slumber.
But still, it hadn't been anything nearly as bad as the Control-Alt-Delete War. You were always terrified then, terrified every time you saw someone sick, every time you heard a sneeze or a cough. Every time you sensed sickness in your own blood you had to wonder if it was the Seraphim or a common cold that had ahold of you.
You would wait for your friends or loved ones to go into a coma, and then you knew they would have to die. Because you knew that if they woke up, they would not be themselves anymore, they would be pod people.
Sometimes, when the authorities were overwhelmed or sick themselves or out of reach, you had to kill the sick yourself. No matter how much you loved them.
Strangulation was best, because that way there was no blood that might contaminate you, or at any rate not much. But however you did it, you would have to go into quarantine, to wait in a little room with a bed and water and canned food, and if you shivered while you waited, or felt a prickle of sweat on your forehead, you would sit in silent cringing agony and wonder if it was the first touch of the Seraphim.
Aristide turned away from Daljit, faced the nearest wall. He didn't want her to see the memory in his face.
There was no point in frightening her. If something like the Seraphim was happening now, she would be frightened soon enough.
"I understand that the priests were constructs," Daljit said, "but why were they made so conspicuous? You'd think they'd want to hide among the population."
"Except for the adventurers and anthropologists who come through the Womb," Aristide said, "the people of Midgarth are stranded in the pre-technological world their ancestors built. They're superstitious, and the priests were designed to be terrifying examples of the power of their god." He felt moisture on his palms and wiped them on his jacket, where the intelligent spider silk began the business of decomposing sweat.
"One of the bandits we captured was a sincere convert, I think. He led us to the priests' lair firm in the belief that we'd all be sacrificed alive."
The nearest machine gave a chiming sound. Daljit turned to her displays.
Her even brows knit as she looked at the display. Aristide turned and looked over her shoulder. She gave the display instructions and viewed the data from another angle. Then she sighed and threw herself back in her chair.
"I've examined your object with chemical sniffers," she said, "with microimagery, with ultrasound, with microwaves, with spectrometry and x-rays and with lasers, and all I can tell you is that the damned thing is ordinary terra-cotta. I can give you the precise amount of trace minerals in its makeup, but it doesn't look unusual."
"Untraceable?"
"I can do some further correlation, see if there's a particular combination of minerals here that only occurs in one tiny part of the multiverse. But we don't know every tiny part of the multiverse, so the odds may not be on our side."
Aristide frowned, and touched with a foreknuckle the corner of his mouth where until recently he had worn his mustache. He walked to one of the machines, opened a door, and withdrew one of the clay balls he had brought through the Womb of the World. A shriveled bit of sinew was still attached to it, the remains of the cord that had tied it to the priest.
"The organic component?" he asked.
"Has unfortunately deteriorated. You can't expect much after three months' ride across a pre-technological landscape. There's no clear indication from what remains how the object was controlled."
She raised her arms over her head and stretched, then rose from her chair. "I know a good organic chemist," she added, "who might spot something I've missed."
Aristide rolled the terra-cotta ball in the palm of his hand. "Won't be necessary. The wormhole collapsed as soon as the connection with the operator was removed—some kind of fail-safe mechanism." He dropped the clay ball into a clear plastic specimen bag and put it in the pocket of his jacket.
"I think the skulls and hands will give us more information," Daljit said. "Bone tells many more tales than withered flesh." She sighed, walked to him, touched his arm. "And I may yet find something in the other two objects."
He drew two more bags from his pockets and looked at them.
"I agree we should examine them," he said. "But you can automate the whole process, yes?—there's no reason why we should wait here while your machines go through their motions. May I give you dinner?"
"You may." Daljit was pleased by the offer.
She put each of the samples into different machines, then gave them instructions, and instructed as well a small desktop robot that would shift the samples from one machine to the next. Aristide walked to Daljit's desk and picked up Tecmessa, swinging its case over his shoulder on its strap. He picked up Daljit's soft spider-silk jacket from the rack behind her desk and offered it to her as she approached. She turned, backed herself into the jacket, and smoothed the lapels as he placed it over her shoulders.
"Has there been some advance in wormhole science since I was last paying attention?" he asked as she led him to the door.
"Not that I know of."
"So it still requires a vast amount of energy and a prodigious amount of calculation to produce a successful Einstein-Rosen bridge."
The door sprang open at her approach. She paused in the doorway and turned to him. "Yes. As I understand it."
Aristide was grim. "That reduces the count suspects to a manageable number. The problem is that they are all enormously powerful." Again he stroked the ghost of his mustache with a knuckle. "Use of that much energy and that much computer time should be traceable, in theory. But to detect it might require someone of Bitsy's intelligence."
She was amused. "Do you still have that horrible cat?"
"Yes," said Bitsy. "He does."
Daljit gave a start and raised a hand to her throat. Bitsy jumped onto Daljit's desk and settled on her haunches before the display.
"I didn't know you were here," Daljit said weakly.
"I lurk," said the cat.
There was a moment of silence in which Aristide managed not to laugh out loud.
Daljit cleared her throat. "I'm sorry for what I said," she said.
Bitsy's green eyes were fixed on the display. "As the avatar," she said, "of a vast array of quantum parallel processors orbiting the sun as part of an as-yet-incomplete matrioshka array, I'm rather above taking offense at that sort of thing."
There was another pause.
"Thank you," said Daljit finally.
"But if Aristide wants to have sex with you," the cat added, "I'm not helping."
Daljit looked in silent surprise at the cat, and then at Aristide.
"Look among your colleagues," Aristide said to Bitsy, "for traces of the energy necessary to create those wormhole gates, and for the calculation, too."
The cat was nonchalant. "Already on it, Pops."
"And be careful. The guilty party will be on the lookout for anyone trying to find them."
"I'll be slick as butter," Bitsy promised.
Daljit and Aristide stepped through the doorway, and the door closed silently behind them. The corridor outside the laboratory was carpeted in soft green mosses that absorbed the sound of their footsteps.
"That animal of yours is scary," Daljit said.
"I find she settles a lot of arguments before they get started."
"'Speak softly and carry an omniscient feline?'"
"Quite," he said, and took her arm.
They sat before a plate of oysters. After months of dried fruit and chunks of mutton skewered over a dung fire, Aristide had developed a vast appetite for fresh seafood.
"So how," Daljit asked, "does the cat help you to have sex?"
Daljit had deliberately waited until an oyster was already sliding down his tongue, and Aristide managed only barely to keep from snorting shellfish out his nose.
"Bitsy confines herself to introductions," he said, after clearing his throat. "An animal twining itself around another's legs provides an opening for conversation."
"And how does the avatar of an awesomely intelligent AI feel about being used for the tawdry purposes of seduction?"
Aristide was offended. "Madame," he said, "I am never tawdry. As you should know."
She considered him. "True," she said. "You're not."
They sat on a cream-colored boat that grazed on the waters near the metropolis and gave diners a view of the city's miraculous profile. Above their heads, visible through a transparent canopy, the sun was on the verge of its daily miracle.
They looked up as the sun—a more advanced model than that of Midgarth—began to flicker and fade. Shadows flew rapidly across its disk. And then the photosphere settled into a stable state, and photons were no longer able to escape. The sun went black—but surrounding the black disk was the corona, still glowing with heat, its swirls and columns a cosmic echo of the city's skyline.
The corona would fade over the next seven-point-nine-one hours, after which the sun's photosphere would grow chaotic again, and the sun blaze out to light a new day.
"How long has it been," Daljit asked, "since you were last in Myriad City?"
Aristide's gaze continued upward.
"I pass through from time to time," he said. "When I'm not traveling, I keep a little cabin on Tremaine Island."
"Where's that?"
"Past Mehmet's Lagoon. I hire a boatman to take me in and out."
She raised her eyebrows. "And you're alone out there? In that remote area?"
He shrugged, then looked down to dabble horseradish on a blue point. "It's enough for Aristide. And besides, it's an implied space. No one intended to put an island there. If I ever get bored, I can go out and contemplate the pollywogs and butterflies."
"When you and I lived together," she said, "you cultivated a certain seigneurial grandeur. Fresh flowers every morning, genuine paintings on the walls rather than videos of paintings. Green lawns, and deference from the neighbors."
Aristide contemplated the thick viridian essence of his cocktail as it brewed in its crystal glass.
"I grew tired," he said. "Not of my surroundings, but of all that was necessary to maintain them. Now if I want something, I'll rent, and let someone else do the work." He looked up. "But you'd be surprised how well I've adapted to simplicity. My cabin has a stone floor that I laid myself, out of rock that I carried to the site in a barrow. And when I took my stroll through Midgarth, I carried a rug rolled up in my pack, and that was my bed."
She smiled. "I'll wager it was a nice rug."
"It was. Two hundred thousand double knots per square meter, or something like that. But still it was a rug, not a down mattress." He began to stroke the place where his mustache had been, caught himself, and lowered his hand.
"Midgarth was something of a relief. A place that's completely unwired, where I can't be monitored by anyone with access to the net."
"Are there still people who do that?"
"A surprising number. Bitsy keeps me informed of the total—and also turns off cameras here and there, so I can have a little privacy." He frowned. "She turned off all the public cameras between your lab and the pier, so that we won't be observed and there won't be speculation about what this dinner might mean for our future. But it's possible one of our fellow diners might be recording us, and in that case Bitsy can do nothing."
She gave him a sympathetic look. "You used to hate those people. You were quite the campaigner for privacy rights."
He shrugged. "I still hate them. It's just that I've decided the fight is unwinnable, and now I just go to places—like Tremaine Island—where I can't be monitored."
"They're still watching you." Daljit seemed bemused. "After all this time."
Aristide smiled thinly. "Behind that comment, I can't help but sense the question: They still think you matter?"
Daljit looked at her graceful hands. "That wasn't what I meant. Really."
He decided that the better part of self-knowledge required that he not pursue this particular topic any further.
"One of the aspects of the surveillance that I most detest," he said, "is that the consciousness that someone is watching turns me into a performer. I'm not an entertainer, and I don't want to be one. I'm not here to please the fans, I'm here to do serious work."
She shook her head. "Oh my," she said. "You really are of a very different generation from mine."
"I've lived a space of time that spans Mohammed and Einstein. I was nearly seventy before I got my second body. I've earned my every prejudice the hard way."
Daljit smiled. "I won't disagree. But you might try looking at Larry's Life for the contrary view."
"Let me guess. He's recorded his own life in amazing detail, and edited it down into episodes that are watched by millions."
"Yes. But somehow he's made it fascinating."
Aristide sighed. "How old is he?"
"A hundred and—thirty-something, I think."
"Let him grow another thousand years, and maybe he'll have something worthwhile to say."
There was a moment's silence.
"I'm barely seven hundred myself," Daljit said finally.
"Ah." He glanced out the window, at the fabulous cityscape. "That wasn't what I meant. Really."
She smiled at the echo of her own words. "I remember having to remind myself that you were old."
"And forgetful. I've forgotten most of those centuries, you know."
She looked at him. "Have you forgotten me?"
He returned her look. "When I saw you last, you were an Amazon."
She laughed. "I've been a lot of people since then!"
"Such as?"
"I was a solli-glider in Momrath. I had wings, feathers, and eyes as big as my fists."
"That sounds delightful."
Delicately, he breathed in an oyster off its shell.
"I had a hard time leaving that incarnation," she said. "But the opportunity came for the job at the Institute, so I came here." She looked out at the audacious horizon, the pinnacles and domes and the swirling motes between them. "It's a place of such high energies. I accomplish things here. And if I want to fly again, all I have to do is strap on a pair of wings."
"What sorts of things do you accomplish?"
"Designing plants and animals for all the pockets. And for the settlements in other star systems."
He sipped his cocktail. "Do you also design people?"
She shook her head. "For that, I need more seniority."
The waitron arrived, a hairy-legged faun with horns, livery, and a powdered wig. Aristide looked at Daljit.
"Shall we order dinner? Or would you like another drink?"
"Let's eat."
They ordered. Aristide continued his exploration of the seafood menu; Daljit chose the wine. The faun trotted away on cloven hooves, and Daljit looked after him.
"I spent a few years as a boy," she said. "After I left you, and before Momrath."
Aristide regarded her. "How was it?"
"Overrated."
He nodded. "So I've always thought."
"And the penis is less accurate than I'd imagined."
"You could have got one that's better engineered. Most men do, I believe."
She looked at him with honest curiosity. "Have you?"
"I am improved all-round," Aristide said. "Faster reflexes, glial cells Einstein would envy, a pulmonary system like unto a god. High arches, strong teeth, eyes that can see in dim light, an epidermis of uncommon durability . . ."
"That would be a yes, I take it?"
He finished his drink. "When all's said and done, who would take an organ—any organ—that's substandard, provided you had a choice?"
"I chose one that was supposed to be dead average. I wanted to give the standard model craft a test-drive before taking out the souped-up version."
"That was probably wise." He viewed her. "And yet, here you are. No wings, no penis, no red hair, and a rather charming mole."
She smiled, and drew her index finger down her jaw, as if to reassure herself of her current shape.
"I miss the wings," she said. "But perhaps I, like you, am choosing simplicity."
He nodded. "Perhaps so."
"And you? Have you ever been anything but male?"
He made an equivocal gesture. "The options weren't so readily available when I was young," he said, "at least not without surgery and other inconveniences. By the time reincarnation became common, I had grown set in my personality—and my identity seemed to work for everyone, so I never had reason to change." He offered her a lean smile. "Though I recently received a download from one of the Pablos—the one who went to Tau Ceti. He claimed to have invented a new gender, and was very enthusiastic."
"Have you loaded the experience?"
"No." There was silence, and then he said, "Tau Ceti is a more extreme environment than Sol. More extreme adaptations are required."
"That sounds like an excuse," she said. "If the other Pablo liked it that much, maybe you should have immersed yourself."
"Perhaps." His tone was skeptical. "Remember what I said about the consciousness of an audience turning everything into performance? How more so than with sex, knowing it's intended for someone else to experience? It runs clean up against my taste, and besides, I know I'm a bad actor." Then he laughed. "And on top of that I like women, Daljit! I always have!"
"So do I!" said the faun as he trotted up with a pair of glasses and a bottle of wine. "I like all of them! All the time!" He looked at Daljit with bright eyes. "Want my number, sugar?"
Daljit declined with laughter. The waitron feigned disappointment and opened the bottle. The wine was a mellow honey color, with the scent of sunshine and citrus. The faun waited for approval, then left them to their pleasure. They savored the wine and the last of the oysters in silence, as the sun's corona slowly faded and Myriad City became a blaze of light along the port side of the craft. Other than the cooling corona, the sky overhead was black—the handful of lights visible now the sun was gone were the few settlements on the far side of the universe.
The world of Topaz held only six billion people, all on a surface area of 26x109 square kilometers, over 52,000 times that of Earth. It was barely inhabited at all. Most of the land masses, and almost all the oceans, were unexplored. Topaz was a fairly new pocket universe, having been created only four hundred years earlier, and though the inhabitants were reproducing quickly, and not dying at all, it would take millennia to occupy all the niches available for modified humanity.
Humanity had over a hundred billion descendants on various pockets, far more than could have ever existed on Earth. Billions more lived on nearby star systems. Earth itself was in the process of a millennium-long reset after many millennia of abuse, and at present had only a few hundred thousand inhabitants, just enough to restart the species should something go terribly wrong with the wormhole worlds.
Daljit lowered her glass. "Why Aristide?" she asked. "That's what I can't work out."
He looked at her over the rim of his glass. The brilliant shoreline glittered in his eyes like the missing stars.
"Do you regret," he said, "staying behind?"
She tilted her head and considered this. "You mean, do I regret not getting blown up? No."
"The Big Belch was regrettable, yes. But I meant—"
"What you really mean is, Do you regret remaining in the Sol system? Because if you didn't, at least a bit, you wouldn't have asked the question."
"Touché," he said. His look was bleak.
She looked at him. "Do you regret being the Pablo who stayed behind?"
"The others—aside from the one who got toasted—are living interesting lives. Terraforming, building new settlements, new platforms, new universes."
"New genders. Don't forget Tau Ceti."
He nodded. "I'm the Pablo who stayed behind. To coordinate things, supposedly, though they don't actually need me for that. But—though my avatars are leading interesting lives—it seems to me that they aren't getting any closer to answering any fundamental questions."
She smiled. "The Existential Crisis."
"Indeed."
"Do you think you can find fundamental answers by transforming yourself into a swordsman and exploring the implied spaces?"
"If I haven't found any existential answers," he said deliberately, "I've certainly found an existential threat."
There was a moment's silence. "Touché, yourself," she said.
He smiled, sighed, and decided to lighten the mood.
"The implied spaces intrigue me. As a metaphor, if nothing else."
She smiled, and was as willing, for the sake of digestion at least, to avoid discussing the darkness on the near horizon.
"And you explore squinches with your cat and your sword," she said. "I can't help but think that's romantic."
"I'm glad you think so," he said, "but catalogs of ants and spiders don't seem very romantic when I'm working on them."
"The romance lies in the sword, I think."
He glanced at Tecmessa in its case, leaning against the boat's smooth paneled walls, then turned back to her.
"Remember when I said that I'm still being monitored by lots of people?" he said. "Every so often, one of them wants to kill me. It's irrational, because all they can do is kill the time since my last backup, but then assassins were never known for the lucid quality of their thought."
"You could have got a gun," she pointed out. "Or a taser. Or a magic wand, or a Ring of Power. But instead you got a broadsword."
"Guns and tasers are good for only one thing. A sword is more flexible. When I was off in Midgarth, I managed to take a couple prisoners with Tecmessa. If I'd had a gun I would have had to shoot them—and in any case, guns won't work in Midgarth. The rules of the universe won't permit it." He paused, as Daljit's face had brightened with delight.
"Your sword has a name!" Daljit exclaimed. "That's wonderful!"
Aristide blinked. "If you say so."
"That's the mark of a romantic. Next thing, you'll be wearing a mask and a cape."
"Maintaining the secret identity as a millionaire playboy would be a problem," Aristide said. "I'm afraid it would be too exhausting."
She just looked at him. "Millionaire playboy?" she asked.
"Bruce Wayne," he said.
"Who?"
He was thunderstruck.
"You don't know Batman?" he said.
She looked at him blankly. "I guess not," he said.
He felt an obscure sense of betrayal.
"I lived with you for a dozen years!" he said.
"Fourteen. But what's this Batman got to do with it?"
"Nothing," he sighed. "Apparently."
They returned to the laboratory to find Bitsy still sitting before Daljit's display.
"Terra-cotta, through and through," Bitsy reported. "Trace elements show that all three balls were made from the same type of clay." Her tail gave an irritated little switch. "And I'm sure you'll be delighted to know that the origin of the clay is unknown. It could have come from any pocket with unexplored clay deposits, which could be any of them."
"Thank you for your efforts," Aristide said. He set Tecmessa's case against the long table, then picked up the remaining samples, wrapped them, and returned them to his pocket.
Daljit returned to her seat and peered at the display over the silhouette of the cat that squatted before it.
"I should check your work," she said. "But I suppose it would be futile."
Bitsy rose to her feet and stretched.
"Reproducing the results of another researcher is the hallmark of the scientific method," she said. "I'll leave you to it." She jumped onto the floor and rubbed herself against Aristide's legs.
There was a chime from Daljit's pocket. She took a small card out of the pocket, and looked at its display.
"Put it on the wall," she said.
One of the neutral-colored walls brightened to show a tall, imposing woman standing behind her desk. The image was life-sized. Her skull had grown a kind of exoskeletal helmet that overshadowed her eyes—her many eyes, of different sizes, which waved on stalks, alongside other sensory organs of less obvious purpose. Her hands had an extra digit on which cilia waved, for fine manipulation under the supervision of her magnifying eyes.
It looked as if she had a large, pale crab perched on her head.
From the shoulders down she was a standard woman, if powerfully built. As she talked she walked back and forth behind her desk while her hands made chopping gestures.
"Fedora," Daljit said, "thank you for working late."
"Daljit," she said. "I've had a chance to examine one of the three heads you passed on to me, and I'm going to have to inform the police. I've found evidence of a crime."
Daljit smiled, still a little under the influence of the wine.
"Beyond the decapitation, you mean?"
Fedora wasn't amused. "The brain structures were badly decomposed, but they were clearly unusual. I got the DNA from the skull and sequenced it, and it's plain the deceased was created as a pod person. I checked the register and saw that it wasn't one of the few remaining types of legal pod people, so I'll be calling the police as soon as I finish talking to you."
Aristide stepped forward and cleared his throat. "Madam," he said.
A pair of Fedora's eyes turned toward him as she paced, while the rest remained focused on Daljit.
"Yes?" she said.
"May I suggest you not inform the police just yet? I—"
The pair of eyes shifted back to Daljit.
"Who is this person?" she asked.
Daljit blinked. "This—" she hesitated. "This is the man who . . . collected . . . the heads."
"I see." All Fedora's eyes turned to Aristide. "Sir," she said, "I am absolutely required to inform the authorities when an unlicensed pod person is discovered. There are no exceptions."
"I wasn't going to suggest that you break the law," Aristide said. "I was just going to suggest that you be careful which authority you report to. Because—"
"I'm afraid you don't understand the seriousness of this," Fedora said. "This is a grave security matter. The last time we had wholesale pod person creation it started the Control-Alt-Delete War."
"I know, madam. I was there."
She seemed a little surprised. "Well then," she said. "You certainly understand the gravity of this crime."
"Yes," Daljit said. "But Fedora, I don't think you quite understand who you're talking to."
"I don't?" She stiffened, and her sensory complex turned to Pablo. "Who are you then?"
"This," said Daljit, "is Pablo Monagas Pérez."
Fedora's eyes seemed to waver and lose focus.
"Oh," she said.