Chandler gazed at her a moment, and then the ghost of a smile touched his lips. He inclined his head slightly. "I should know better than to try to bargain with a Castanaveras. I"d like an answer soon."

"You"ll have one."

Jimmy Ramirez looked back and forth between the two of them. "What aboutme?"

Chandler snorted. "You don"t even have your other foot. You"re staying right here."

"I don"tthink so."

Chandler smiled at Jimmy. "I have someone who wants to see you."

- 11 -.

At Phobos CityState, on June 8, 2076, row upon row of s.p.a.ceFarers" Collective ships lined the moonlet"s rocky, uneven surface, an honor guard of some eighty ships lined up beneath the dim, distant Sun; more s.p.a.cecraft than Trent had ever seen together in one place before, or would, he suspected, ever see again.

Belinda Singer, whose skill and wisdom and energy had helped keep the s.p.a.ceFarers" Collective intact for half a century, was dying.

Doctor Rinerson said, "She"s been waiting for you."

Eric Rinerson was a short man with a slight tendency toward fat. Otherwise he was what his name might have implied, a pale Caucasian genotype with blue eyes. He had stood alone with a pair of medbots on the other side of the surface airlock as Trent cycled through into pressure. There were easier accesses to Phobos CityState General Hospital-most of Phobos City itself was pressurized these days-but not for a man who did not wish even his presence on Phobos known.

Trent hated the melodrama of it worse than the inconvenience, but it was a simple truth: when you had five million Credits on your head, a.s.sa.s.sins were everywhere.

Rinerson continued to wait patiently as Trent stripped his p-suit off and hung it on a hook by the airlock entrance. He knew Trent well; he had treated him six years prior, when an eighteen-year-old boy had been delivered into his hands suffering from a broken leg, cracked ribs, a knee that lacked sufficient cartilage to make a decent toothpick; a punctured lung; and residual death pressure damage to the lungs, eyes and ears.

Trent pulled on a pair of magboots, and clicked them to the corridor floor. "She"s been dead in every real sense of the word for nearly two days," Rinerson said as they walked down the corridor together.

"But she wanted to see you before she let go."

The medbot was a small thing whose head came up to Trent"s belly b.u.t.ton. It had three arms and six legs, and it spoke in gentle, simple sentences. "Belinda Singer," said the medbot, standing in front of the door to her hospital room, "is dying."

"I heard," said Trent. "It"s why I"m here."

"You may see her if you do not disturb her," the medbot continued. "She is a very sick patient."

"Dying, you say."

"Very sick," the medbot cautioned.

"Say you understand," Rinerson whispered.

Trent stared at the medbot. "I understand. I will not do anything to disturb her while she dies."

The medbot"s metal head bobbed up and down, a programmed imitation of a human nod. "That will be very good."

The room was larger than Trent had imagined. White glowpaint lit the room brightly, gleamed off the medbots standing next to Belinda"s immersion chamber, off the half dozen pieces of medical equipment Trent recognized and the larger collection that he did not.

Rinerson waited at the door.

Trent moved forward into the brightness. In an abrupt absurd flash of memory, the room on Luna came to him, the room where a dozen Peaceforcers, Vance and Melissa du Bois among them, had watched him walk through a wall. It had been about this size, and lit like this, with this dispa.s.sionate white clarity.

Belinda Singer had undergone what Doctor Rinerson called total systemic failure. She could not speak or breathe or see; her heart had long since ceased pumping. She looked like a potato that had begun to grow, floating in some clear solution that Trent knew was not water, tubes sprouting from her at every orifice. Her arms and her legs were gone, amputated to prevent the spreading of poisons from the tissues in her extremities, the extremities dying from lack of oxygen as her heart failed and the thin tissues of veins and capillaries collapsed. She"d had seven strokes that even the nanoviruses cruising her bloodstream, on the other side of the blood-brain barrier, had been unable to prevent.

No one except Singer herself knew how old she actually was. There were no records of her at all prior to the year 1987. She had been born in an age when it was still possible for records to be lost, for courthouses to burn down, or be burned, and for average men and women to create and sustain new ident.i.ties if they wished.

A thin optic fiber led from the old woman"s hairless skull to a systerm against the wall. It was not an inskin-Belinda could not possibly have survived the surgery required to implant an inskin-but perhaps it was close enough.

He closed his eyes and went Inside.

"When I woke up this morning," said Doctor Death, "I realized that I was completely and totally perfect."

It is midnight on the Boulevard of Dreams.

The streets are empty, and the buildings are burning, blazing, and n.o.body seems to notice. Motorpigs tear up and down the Boulevard on chopped Harleys, screaming insults at one another and watching the buildings glow. Sitting at the curb in front of the Hotel Paradise, in a drop-top metallic blue "67, Mustang with the engine running, are Doctor Death and Trent the Uncatchable.

A portly, middle-aged man wearing a ponytail and a loud sports jacket is standing in front of the Hotel Paradise"s entrance, screaming at the top of his lungs at a tall, incredibly gorgeous heavy-metal musician.

"Do you haveany idea how lucky you are? You"re in Heaven-now-but you f.u.c.k up like this again and I"m sending you back to the h.e.l.l where I found you-toNew York," he shrieks, "where they made you ride the subway s!"

It"s all too tedious, and Doctor Death has heard it too many times before. Doctor Death is somewhere in her late twenties, with long black hair, wearing a black leather miniskirt and a black leather vest, black calf-high boots and a white silk bra. She tunes it out, staring through her mirrored silver sungla.s.ses at the burning Boulevard of Dreams, the Motorpigs, and the news crews who are filming it all for Channel Two Action News. The burning buildings are reflected in Doctor Death"s sungla.s.ses, movie miniatures in reverse. "Totally perfect," says Doctor Death softly. "Except that I was still going to die. I was perfect and I was going to die. I felt-"

"f.u.c.ked over by the Karma G.o.ds."

Doctor Death begins rolling a joint with great care, looking down into her lap. "Exactly. So I went driving. At sunrise. Kick the stereo in, blow the speakers right off the doors.Loud music, Hendrix, Van Halen, stuff with properly handled guitars. I hit one-twenty in the mist going down Pacific Coast Highway."

Trent nods. "Truly, a perfect moment."

Doctor Death gestures at the joint, sitting like a sacrifice on the altar of her lap. "And this is a perfect joint. Want a hit?"

"Sure."

Doctor Death hands him the joint and Trent lights it, tokes once and hands it back. Doctor Death takes one mighty hit, sucking the joint halfway down with one monstrous toke, and tosses it out the window.

She puts the Mustang into first, still holding the clutch down, holding her breath, revving the engine until the sound becomes one immense shriek of power. She screams, marijuana smoke obscuring her face, "I hate this G.o.dless culture!" and then pops the clutch, and the Mustang screams away from the curb in a cloud of rubber smoke.

They zoom westward down the Boulevard of Dreams, toward the ocean, weaving in and out among the gangs of Motorpigs.

Doctor Death has to raise her voice to be heard. "Before I dropped out of high school I had a history instructor who tried to tell us what a great tragedy it was that the Greeks got conquered by the Romans.

Because the Greeks were so much more civilized, they wereartists." Doctor Death turns to her right, stares at Trent, not watching the road, and says intensely, "f.u.c.k art. The Romans builtroads. They were the first ones. They didn"t build roads to service the empire; theyhad an empire because they built roads, leveled and graded, laid gravel and then stone atop the gravel. And the roads made it possible for people to go places, to meet other people and other kinds of people. It fostered the exchange of information and the development of personal freedom."

Trent smiles. "Belinda, information is overrated."

Doctor Death nods. "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not understanding. Understanding is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty and beauty is not love and love is not music. Music is thebest."

"Whose is that?"

"Um. Frank Zappa."

Trent shakes his head. "Never heard of him."

"I always wanted to be a musician," Doctor Death says suddenly. "It"s all I ever really wanted. But I can"t sing."

"b.u.mmer." There is a pause, a fragrant, burning-building, smoke-filled sort of a pause. A fifteen-story high-rise is crumbling off to their right, and the sight is spectacular. "Let"s go," says Trent, "and drive down the freeways at unreasonable speeds."

"Deal." Doctor Death whips off down a side street, onto a freeway ramp, and then onto the freeway itself. "I was up in San Francisco once," Doctor Death says broodingly, "and they had a double looping reverse overpa.s.s U-turn freeway onramp. I"ve been sick with jealousy ever since."

They weave in and out of traffic, zooming down the freeway at unreasonable speeds, the wind whipping Doctor Death"s long black hair back away from her. She has to shout to be heard above the sound of the wind. "Did I tell you that when I woke up this morning I realized that I was completely and totally perfect?"

"You did," Trent says.

Doctor Death nods, says in an entirely different voice, "I thought so."

Fade to black.

"Where are we?"

They stood on a cement pathway, next to a small stone wall at the edge of a long drop, looking out over a huge city Trent did not recognize. An observatory loomed up into the sky beside them.

"Griffith Park," Doctor Death said. "Los Angeles. It"s 1984. The "84 Olympics have just ended." She paused, staring out over the glittering sea of light. "I am twenty-eight years old. Three years older than you are now. I don"t have a driver"s license or a social security card. I don"t have a bank account. My fingerprints are on file nowhere in the world. I have never been arrested. Everyone calls me Doctor Death; I haven"t used the name I was born with in so long I"ve nearly forgotten what it was." A cool breeze rose, brought the scent of growing things nearby, overlaying the distant stink of burned hydrocarbons. "Fifteen years from now, in 1999, a man named Camber, dressed all in black, is going to come to me and offer me a job. When he takes his sungla.s.ses off I will see that his eyes have no internal structure, and no color; they are darker than the sungla.s.ses that conceal them. And we will stand here together looking out over Los Angeles-because it is a sight he wants to see, the view from the Griffith Park observatory, of Los Angeles before the Quake." She turned to face Trent, and said softly, "He will tell me something I will not believe. He tells me other things-that I will be powerful, and wealthy, and respected; that I will die at a great age, and be mourned by many. That everything I have ever desired in my life, I will accomplish.

"But he will not tell me the nature of the job he wishes to offer me, and the predictions-" Doctor Death shook her head. "I"d visited psychics before. And he was very good, telling my fortune, but I didn"t believe him."

Trent studied Doctor Death"s still features. "You were so beautiful."

Doctor Death shrugged. "This is just my memory of how I looked, and I"m an egotistical old woman...

The last thing he said to me, Trent, was, "You will never speak of this to anyone." And until now I have not. I"m not sure why."

Trent thought that the sky to the east had lightened just a touch. "Belinda, I came from Ceres to be with you, because I was told you wanted to speak to me before you died. I will listen to anything you want to say."

"You"re going to be old someday, Trent. You do know that."

Trent said slowly, "I"ve felt old most of my life, Belinda. When I was very young, I was already old.

They call me the Uncatchable, and some of them think I walked through a wall, and some ofthem think I"m"-He shook his head-"something else. But when I was very young I already knew I could die. That some day Iwould die."

Doctor Death took off her sungla.s.ses, stowed them in a pocket on her vest. "The awareness of mortality is a very powerful thing." It wasn"t Trent"s imagination; the sunwas rising, a pale gray band of light backlighting the skysc.r.a.pers in downtown Los Angeles. "I never thought about death. I knew it would come, someday, but I never thought about it. I was never afraid of it, and I"m not afraid now. I did everything I was put in the world to do, Trent. Every last thing. Except one."

Trent waited.

"Four thousand years ago," said Belinda Singer quietly, "the Jews envisioned a G.o.d who was just, omnipotent, and all-knowing; the source of all things. Not of the universe, not equal to the universe, but the source from which the universe came. Ethical monotheism was a powerful concept, and one that led, quite directly, to the very concept of science, to the idea that the world was knowable, governed by a set of laws and rules that the mind could decipher and understand. Some scientists, with a religious bent, said that the laws of nature were merely the thoughts of the Creator.

"A grand image," Belinda Singer said, in a voice softer than a whisper. "I was raised to believe in it.

There is only one problem with it, which is that it is untrue."

The sky to the east lightened swiftly, and the blackness around Trent and the young Belinda Singer began to resolve itself into a park, high on a hill, wreathed in mist and early morning fog.

"We are an insignificant life-form in a small solar system at the edge of an unimportant galaxy. A bubble of order and reason floating in the midst of a vast Chaos. A tiny aberration that has been allowed to continue only because those powerful enough to destroy us have had other and greater concerns.

"This is the thing," said Belinda Singer, "that Camber Tremodian told me, on that day in 1999: that there is no order to the universe, and no reason, and no cause. We are alone and outnumbered-"

Her eyes met his. In the first light of morning, in an imaginary world sixty-nine years before his birth and instants before her death, Belinda Singer said to Trent the Uncatchable "-and the universe is a far more dangerous place than anyone has ever told you."

Fade to white.

Trent"s eyes were shut for just an instant.

When he opened them again, Belinda Singer was dead.

- 12 -.

Denice arose early, dressed in a pair of shorts and a soft cotton shirt.

She took the bounce tube down to the gym.

The gym was still set up. She and Robert had been using it often enough that they had ceased stowing the gym when done with it; the hour"s wait before the gym was available, while it spun up to one gee, was inconvenient.

She worked in silence.

The gym lacked a sound system, an oversight that had surprised Denice at first, until Robert pointed out that the gym had been designed for Chandler"s use, and that Chandler, who had seventy years prior been a professional musician, did not dance, and did not consider music background noise for his exercise.

Meditation first.

The image flickered into her consciousness, and out again, a Flame, on an empty black plain. It was gone before she was certain she had seen it; time vanished as she struggled to recover the image of the Flame, and failed. More time pa.s.sed as she accepted the failure, worked toward quiet and calm.

Stretching exercises.

Work upward: feet, ankles, calves and thighs. b.u.t.tocks, waist, the groin muscles. Hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders.

Neck muscles.

Again, in reverse.

Tai Chi Chuan. Traditionally, one began the form facing north. Denice picked a direction, closed her eyes, and began moving through the form in slow motion. Risinghands, step forward left foot, shoulder strike left shoulder, right, right foot forward to seven star- The movement vanished into nothingness. She moved without knowing it, as slowly as her body would allow her, through the ancient patterns. Muscles did the work they had been taught, the slow contractions and releases. She was not aware of the world, of her place within it, of herself or her body; she knew nothing except the progression of the form.

When she finished her pulse had elevated to nearly fifty beats a minute.

She moved out of the form and into dance.