switching a tape.
"Again you astonish me," the camera said in Russian. "You
pique my curiosity. You understand that term, 'pique'? It's not
common to trade Russian. Please follow the robot. My place
isn't far. Try to breathe shallowly."
Ryumin's place was a small inflated dome of gray-green plastic
near the smeared and broken glass of one window panel. Lindsay unzipped the fabric airlock and stepped inside.
The pure air within provoked a fit of coughing. The tent was
small, ten strides across. A tangle of cables littered the floor,
connecting stacks of battered video equipment to a frayed storage battery propped on ceramic roof tiles. A central support
pole, wreathed in wire, supported an air filter, a lightbulb, and
the roots of an antenna complex.
Ryumin was sitting cross-legged on a tatami mat with his hands
on a portable joystick. "Let me take care of the robot first," he
said. "I'll be with you in a moment."
Ryumin's broad face had a vaguely Asiatic cast, but his
thinning hair was blond. Age spots marked his cheeks. His
knuckles had the heavy wrinkles common to the very old.
Something was wrong with his bones. His wrists were too thin
for his stocky body, and his skull looked strangely delicate. Two
black adhesive disks clung to his temples, trailing thin cords
down his back and into the jungle of wires.
Ryumin's eyes were closed. He reached out blindly and tapped
a switch beside his knee. He peeled the disks from his temples
and opened his eyes. They were bright blue.
"Is it bright enough in here?" he said.
Lindsay glanced at the bulb overhead. "I think so."
Ryumin tapped his temple. "Chip grafts along the optic
nerves," he said. "I suffer a little from video burn. I have
trouble seeing anything not on scan lines."
"You're a Mechanist."
"Does it show?" Ryumin asked, ironically.
"How old are you?"
"A hundred and forty. No, a hundred and forty-two." He
smiled. "Don't be alarmed."
"I'm not prejudiced," Lindsay said falsely. He felt confusion,
and, with that, his training seeped away. He remembered the
Ring Council and the long, hated sessions of anti-Mech indoctrination. The sense of rebellion recalled him to himself.
He stepped over a tangle of wires and set his diplomatic bag on a low table beside a plastic-wrapped block of synthetic tofu.
"Please understand me, Mr. Ryumin. If this is blackmail, you've
misjudged me. I won't cooperate. If you mean me harm, then do
it. Kill me now."
"I wouldn't say that too loudly," Ryumin cautioned. "The
spyplanes can burn you down where you stand, right through
that tent wall."
Lindsay flinched.
Ryumin grinned bleakly. "I've seen it happen before. Besides,
if we're to murder each other, then you should be killing me. I
run the risks here, since I have something to lose. You're only a
fast-talking sundog." He wrapped up the cord of his joystick.
"We could babble reassurances till the sun expands and never
convince each other. Either we trust each other or we don't."
"I'll trust you," Lindsay decided. He kicked off his mud-
smeared shoes.
Ryumin rose slowly to his feet. He bent to pick up Lindsay's
shoes, and his spine popped loudly. "I'll put these in the micro-
wave," he said. "When you live here, you must never trust the
mud."
"I'll remember," Lindsay said. His brain was swimming in
mnemonic chemicals. The drugs had plunged him into a kind of
epiphany in which every tangled wire and pack of tape seemed
of vital importance. "Burn them if you want," he said. He
opened his new bag and pulled out an elegant cream-colored
medical jacket.
"These are good shoes," Ryumin said. "They're worth three or
four minutes, at least."
Lindsay stripped off his coveralls. A pair of injection bruises
mottled his right buttock.
Ryumin squinted. "I see you didn't escape unscathed."
Lindsay pulled out a pair of creased white trousers.
"Vasopressin," he said.
"Vasopressin," Ryumin mused. "I thought you had a Shaper
look about you. Where are you from, Mr. Dze? And how old
are you?"
"Three hours old," Lindsay said. "Mr. Dze has no past."
Ryumin looked away. "I can't blame a Shaper for trying to
hide his past. The System swarms with your enemies." He
peered at Lindsay. "I can guess you were a diplomat."
"What makes you think so?"
"Your success with the Black Medicals. Your skill is impressive.
Besides, diplomats often turn sundog." Ryumin studied
him. "The Ring Council had a secret training program for diplomats of a special type. The failure rate was high. Half the alumni were rebels and defectors." Lindsay zipped up his shirt.
"Is that what happened to you?"
"Something of the sort."
"How fascinating. I've met many borderline posthumans in my
day, but never one of you. Is it true that they enforced an entire
second state of consciousness? Is it true that when you're fully
operational, you yourself don't know if you're speaking the
truth? That they used psychodrugs to destroy your capacity for
sincerity?"
"Sincerity," Lindsay said. "That's a slippery concept."
Ryumin hesitated. "Are you aware that your class is being
stalked by Shaper assassins?"
"No," Lindsay said sourly. So it had come to this, he thought.
All those years, while the spinal crabs burned knowledge into
every nerve. The indoctrinations, under drugs and brain taps.
He'd gone to the Republic when he was sixteen, and for ten
years the psychotechs had poured training into him. He'd re-
turned to the Republic like a primed bomb, ready to serve any
purpose. But his skills provoked panic fear there and utter
distrust from those in power. And now the Shapers themselves
were hunting him. "Thank you for telling me," he said.
"I wouldn't worry," Ryumin said. "The Shapers are under
siege. They have bigger concerns than the fate of a few
sundogs." He smiled. "If you really took that treatment, then
you must be less than forty years old."
"I'm thirty. You're a cagey old bastard, Ryumin."
Ryumin took Lindsay's well-cooked shoes out of the micro-
wave, studied them, and slipped them on his own bare feet.
"How many languages do you speak?"
"Four, normally. With memory enhancement I can manage
seven. And I know the standard Shaper programming language."
"I speak four myself," Ryumin said. "But then, I don't clutter
my mind with their written forms."
"You don't read at all?"
"My machines can do that for me."
"Then you're blind to mankind's whole cultural heritage."
Ryumin looked surprised. "Strange talk for a Shaper. You're
an antiquarian, eh? Want to break the Interdict with Earth,
study the so-called humanities, that sort of thing? That explains
why you used the theatrical gambit. I had to use my lexicon to
find out what a 'play' was. An astonishing custom. Are you
really going through with it?"
"Yes. And the Black Medicals will finance it for me."
"I see. The Geisha Bank won't care for that. Loans and finance
are their turf."
Lindsay sat on the floor beside a nest of wires. He plucked the
Black Medicals pin from his collar and twirled it in his fingers.
"Tell me about them."
"The Geishas are whores and financiers. You must have noticed that your credit card is registered in hours."
"Yes."
"Those are hours of sexual service. The Mechanists and Shapers use kilowatts as currency. But the System's criminal element